The Global Entrepreneurship Conference (GEC) in Riyadh witnessed, in its second day, agreements and launches with a total value of SR28.9 billion ($7.71 billion), designed to support entrepreneurship in various fields. The conference, organized by the Small and Medium Enterprises General Authority "Monsha'at" in cooperation with the Global Entrepreneurship Network, continued under the slogan "We Reinvent, We Renew", as it witnessed the signing of more than 21 agreements and the launch of many investment initiatives, reported Saudi Press Agency (SPA). Monshaat signed a memorandum of understanding with Amazon to enable local companies to sell their products to millions of customers across the Kingdom on the Amazon Saudi Arabia store. As part of the MoU, Amazon will support small and medium enterprises with the logistical capabilities, tools, and programs that Amazon provides to sellers. The launches included the announcement of the Small and Medium Enterprises Bank, the approved budget for financing the small and medium enterprises sector, which amounted to SR12 billion ($3.2 billion), and Monshaat signed a cooperation agreement with Al Rajhi Bank, worth SR2 billion (more than $533 million), to launch programs and innovative financing products. The Arab National Bank signed several cooperation agreements, including an agreement to launch innovative financing programs and products, with a value of more than SR1 billion (over $293 million), and launching a credit card product for small and medium enterprises with an amount of up to SR50 million ($13 million). The Ministry of Investment also announced a set of investments and licensing for many international companies to enter the Saudi market with investments estimated at SR3.51 billion (more than $936 million). During the conference's second day, a total value of innovative financing banking programs, amounting to more than SR7.3 billion ($2 billion) for the next five years was announced. The Saudi National Bank signed a cooperation agreement for a product of innovative financing programs and products worth SR1 billion (more than $266 million) and another cooperation agreement to support the innovation program worth SR2.7 million ($720 thousand), and Bank Albilad signed an agreement with Monshaat to provide innovative financing programs and products worth nearly SR2 billion ($520 million). Thiqa company signed a joint cooperation agreement with Monsha'at to provide services to small and medium enterprises, while the Saudi Organization for Auditors and Accountants signed an agreement to raise awareness and provide professional guidance in the field of accounting and auditing, and to launch the "Etkal" platform. The second day also witnessed the signing of an MoU between the Ministry of Investment and the Saudi Authority for Data and Artificial Intelligence, with the aim of empowering entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises. The Saudi Tourism Authority signed an agreement with Monsha'at to cooperate in a number of initiatives that support establishments in the tourism field. The Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Fund for Development also signed a cooperation agreement with the aim of launching a business accelerator in the Eastern Province, and providing training programs and workshops through the Monshaat Academy. CALEDONIA A Racine man has been accused of assaulting a man and causing two injuries in a hit-and-run. Ricky M. Steil, 35, of the 2600 block of Iris Court, was charged with two felony counts of hit and run causing injury, felony counts of burglary of a building or dwelling, strangulation and suffocation and substantial battery, two misdemeanor counts of bail jumping and a misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct. According to criminal complaints: First incident At 6:30 a.m. on June 8, 2019, officers were sent to the 4400 block of Meadow Drive for a reported assault. Upon arrival, officers observed a man with blood on his head and sweatshirt. He had a laceration on his head that required four staples to close. The laceration was a result of being struck on the head with a tire iron. The man said he lives at the residence with his ex-girlfriend and her parents. During the evening of June 7, his ex-girlfriend was video-calling a man and complaining that he was not paying rent to her dad. The man later sent a message saying that he needed to be out of the home by tomorrow, and he and Steil would come over. At 6:15 a.m. the following day, the man said he was in the living room when another man and Steil entered and began to punch and kick him. Steil put him in a headlock and he struggled to breathe. He was able to break free but was attacked again. Steil put the man in a second headlock as the other man grabbed a tire iron and hit him in the head twice. The two left the residence when a woman came in and shouted What the (expletive) is going on!? A warrant for Steils arrest was issued, but he didnt make his initial appearance until Tuesday. Second incident At 6:20 p.m. on Feb. 19, an officer was sent to the intersection of Highway 31 and Four Mile Road for a two-vehicle accident. Upon arrival, the officer saw two vehicles with substantial damage. One of the drivers said she was having severe chest, arm and back pain from the accident. She said that she was approaching Four Mile Road when a vehicle disregarded her right of way and collided with her. She was transported to the hospital for her injuries. In making contact with the other vehicle, the drivers seat was empty and the passenger had to be extricated from her seat. She said that Steil was the driver and that he ran away because he had outstanding warrants. She was also transported to the hospital for her injuries. Steil was given $3,500 in cash bonds in Racine County Circuit Court on Tuesday. A preliminary hearing is set for April 6 at the Racine County Law Enforcement Center, 717 Wisconsin Ave., online court records show. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 RACINE The local man charged with threatening to kill cops while live on Facebook will do a year in the Racine County Jail. Dajuan M. Jones, 27, was sentenced for making terrorist threats. Racine County Circuit Court Judge Robert Repischak withheld the sentence and gave Jones a three-year term of probation. However, one of the terms of the probation is that he do a year in county. After three months have been served, the defendant may leave the jail temporarily to work or care for his children. Jones described himself as a stay-at-home father. The Department of Corrections recommended probation on the charge, but the judge felt that would unduly depreciate the seriousness of the crime. For Repischak, it wasnt so much what happened as what could have happened to a person running around town threatening cops, holding what looked like a real firearm but was only a pellet gun. Think in 2020 how many cities burned because somebody got shot by the police, something happened, and then people go out and riot and burn down their neighborhoods, Repischak said. He added: I thank God you didnt get stopped by the police when you were out driving around acting like a fool because theres no doubt in my mind that you would have pulled a gun on them, and youd be dead, and Racine would still be burning. Case history The Racine Police Department began an investigation in October 2020 after viewing video from a Facebook live feed in which Jones said: Want to see a cop get killed today? I dont care. Im drunk. According to police, someone had shared a video of Jones holding a gun and stating he had an AK-47. Police, upon reviewing the video, reported that Jones had said: When Im done, a couple cops gonna be hurting. Officers reported they were informed Jones had pointed a gun at someone and was in his car, parked in front of the Racine County Courthouse, 717 Wisconsin Ave., before saying he was going to the Police Department. An officer was also dispatched to an address on the 700 block of Center Street, the same block where the Racine Police Department is located. However, officers said they found Jones at a different location, where he was found sleeping on the couch and had what was believed to be a crack pipe. Jones The defendant has consistently said he does not remember the night in question, as he was intoxicated. In the pre-sentence report, Jones was quoted as saying he was very upset about the death of black people at the hands of the police in 2020. In court, Jones said since he has been out of jail, he has been a stay-at-home dad and has learned quite a bit about his kids and himself. I didnt realize how much my kids looked up to me as their dad, he said. I always thought of myself as a big mess-up. Jones asked for a second chance and apologized for his actions. As part of his probation, Jones was ordered to complete drug and alcohol counseling as well as mental health counselling. Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. KENOSHA The trial of the Caledonia man accused of firing of a shot into the air during the August 2020 unrest in Downtown Kenosha has been postponed until summer. Jury selection for the trial of Joshua Ziminski was scheduled to start Monday morning but was rescheduled for June 21 because Ziminskis defense attorney, Michael Barth, was reportedly tied up in another case. Ziminiski made a brief appearance in Judge Bruce Schroeders court Monday in an orange jumpsuit. Schroeder presided virtually. Ziminiski, 37, is being held on $14,000 cash bond in Kenosha County Jail. His bond was increased from $1,000 earlier this year by Schroeder after Ziminiski allegedly threatened and intimidated a witness at court as jury selection was first set to begin in January. Ziminski is charged with felony arson and misdemeanors of obstructing an officer and disorderly conduct with a deadly weapon. According to the criminal complaint, Ziminski and his wife, Kelly Ziminski, participated in protests and riots in downtown Kenosha which occurred in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake by a Kenosha Police officer. Ziminski was charged with disorderly conduct after authorities used a previous booking photograph to identify him as the man who fired what he allegedly called a warning shot into the air on Aug. 25, 2020, just before Illinois teenager Kyle Rittenhouse, who was in the same area, shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum. Rittenhouse was found not guilty in November in that shooting death, along with the shooting death of Anthony Huber and for injuring Gaige Grosskreutz during riots that night in Downtown Kenosha. Rittenhouse said he acted in self-defense. Police investigating the shootings identified Ziminski and observed that he was holding a black handgun, according to reports. At one point, in a video Ziminski was seen pointing the gun to the sky, and the police observed a muzzle flash and heard a gunshot at the same time. The Ziminskis were then seen leaving the area. The felony arson charge was filed after a video on Kelly Ziminskis phone showed Joshua Ziminski tossing a match into a dumpster, then asking the crowd for lighter fluid to help the fire spread, according to the criminal complaint. Joshua Ziminski then pushed the dumpster onto Sheridan Road as police vehicles were moving toward him. His wife was seen on video adding flammable material to the fire, the complaint states. Kelly Ziminski pleaded guilty last April to a misdemeanor count of obstructing and a civil forfeiture charge of failing to comply with an emergency order. The prosecution has subpoenaed her for her husbands case and she was in court Monday morning. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 WATERFORD Voters in the April 5 local elections in the Village of Waterford will become the latest in Racine County to experience electronic poll books in place of the old paper voter registries. The new technology, called Badger Books, aim to allow Waterfords estimated 3,600 voters to move more quickly from check-in at their polling place to casting their ballot. The electronic equipment available at each polling place will save election workers from sifting through pages of records. Badger Books use a voters photo ID to verify their registration electronically. The actual process of voting will not change ballots will still be completed on paper by hand and will still be inserted manually into voter tabulation machines. Just as a voter would sign the paper poll book to get a tally slip in order to get a ballot, the voter will sign the Badger Book, the village said in announcing the change. The only difference is that all of this will be done electronically. Badger Books were developed by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, and they come fully loaded with voter registration rolls compiled through WisVote, the statewide election management system. They do not operate on the internet, so they are not susceptible to online hacking or interference, according to WEC. In addition to checking in voters, the devices can assist in counting absentee ballots, registering new voters and maintaining voter counts. Racine and Caledonia both have used Badger Books at polling places since 2020. Caledonia Village Clerk Joslyn Hoeffert said the new technology has improved efficiency in managing the communitys estimated 24,000 voters, with three Badger Books at each of the six polling places. Theyre sincerely a wonderful tool, Hoeffert said. Caledonia allocated $21,000 to purchase Badger Books from the state in 2020. Racine allocated $80,000 in 2020 and recommended another $80,000 for 2021. The devices are purchased from the state election commission. According to state officials, 90 municipalities in Wisconsin are using Badger Books to manage a combined 735,000 registered voters. Waterford officials said they spent $12,286 to bring the new technology into local polling places this spring. Badger Books will make their debut in Waterford during April 5 elections to decide contested races for village board and school board as well as a $19 million referendum for Waterford High School. Officials said voters likely will not notice much of a difference with Badger Books. The process of voting will still begin with voters showing their photo ID to a poll worker, who then will use a Badger Book rather than a paper registry to verify that the voter is eligible to cast a ballot in Waterford. Rather than signing their names to a paper record, voters will sign an electronic screen. The upgrade should keep the process moving more quickly and should mean less time waiting in line for voters to get their ballots. There also typically is no reason to divide voters into different waiting lines, because the Badger Books all use the same registered voter rolls. They are connected to a server through a router within each polling place that allows the books to talk to each other, the village said. They communicate only with each other. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. KANSASVILLE People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the pro-veganism animal rights organization, has released a video March 22 of live day-old ducklings being dropped into a macerator and killed at a Kansasville duck hatchery. The practice is legal and is actually encouraged by regulators. But it is among the commonplace actions of which the grocery-shopping public is often unaware. The March 22 report is part of an ongoing series of investigations PETA has undertaken to expose what it alleges constitutes false advertising from companies that claim to humanely treat animals. PETA is accusing the operator of the Kansasville facility, Maple Leaf Farms, of misleading advertising. Maple Leafs promotional materials include phrases like humanely raised and free to roam, but do not mention the routine killing of newborn ducklings; the words macerator and maceration and macerate do not appear on its website. According to a spokesperson from Maple Leaf, the ducks being killed had a health defect. That health defect was not specified. Claim and counterclaim According to PETA: Theres no question that grinding up animals while theyre conscious is painful and cruel. But most state laws specifically exempt what are considered standard agricultural practices. And throwing ducklings and baby chickens into these machines is part and parcel of the poultry industry. These claims are disputed by Maple Leaf Farms and veterinary groups. In a statement issued to The Journal Times, Maple Leaf Farms says it follows the approved methods of humane euthanasia throughout operations including hatcheries from the nonprofit American Veterinary Medical Association. According to AVMA, Physical methods that destroy or render nonfunctional the brain regions responsible for cortical integration e.g., gunshot, captive bolt, cerebral electrocution, blunt force trauma, maceration produce instantaneous unconsciousness. AVMA describes maceration as the a use of a specially designed mechanical apparatus having rotating blades or projections, causes immediate fragmentation and death of poultry up to 72 hours old and embryonated eggs. AVMA says that macerators for euthanasia of chicks, poults (baby turkeys), and pipped eggs indicates that death by maceration in poultry up to 72 hours old occurs immediately with minimal pain and distress. Maple Leaf Farms statement continued: Some birds are sick or unhealthy when they hatch and are unable to survive. Trained staff carefully inspects hatches to identify and humanely euthanize these birds to prevent unnecessary pain and suffering. Maple Leaf Farms operations undergo annual audits by a third-party Professional Animal Auditor Certification Organization auditor each year to ensure we are adhering to approved standards. Our company routinely explores peer-reviewed scientific studies and works with animal scientists and veterinarians to evaluate and implement best practices with animal care and handling, worker safety and sustainability as our focus. Meat industry Indiana-based Maple Leaf Farms is the largest producer of duck meat in the U.S. According to the Department of Agriculture, 27 million ducks are slaughtered annually for meat in the U.S. Maple Leaf Farms reports it produces 15 million ducks for meat a year across North America. Update: The reason the ducks were being euthanized has been clarified since this story was originally published. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. SALEM LAKES Turnout gear and other life-saving equipment from fire departments in Kenosha County and beyond is heading to Ukraine thanks to a drive organized by Salem Lakes firefighter Art Stypula, who was born in Poland. Weve got a ton of stuff that is going to Ukraine to assist with the firefighting efforts over there, Stypula said, adding departments from as far north as Oak Creek and as far south as Chicago provided donations. We have between 40 and 50 sets of turnout gear, weve got helmets, hand tools, pike poles axes, fire suits, and self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA). Many of the jackets are still emblazoned with the names of the firefighters who wore them. They are going to be saving lives in two countries, Stupula said. Thats pretty cool stuff. Much of the gear is beyond its certified life under National Fire Protection Association standards, but can be used elsewhere. Family in Poland Stypula, a Westosha-Central High School graduate who moved to the United States at age 5, said he still has family in Poland. My family is a couple hours from there and my nieces and nephews are helping out in all kinds of ways; helping refugees, he said. I thought to myself, what can I do and then it just kind of dawned on me we have all this equipment we can no longer use. He pitched the idea to Salem Lakes Fire Chief Jim LejCar, who invited Stypula to the area fire chiefs meeting last Thursday. Salem Lakes has always had a spirit of giving back to the community, said Fire Chief Jim LejCar. It just so happens the community is farther away this time. Stypula also connected with Lt. Mark Drew of the East Clifton Fire Department in New Jersey, who has been organizing an equipment drive there. He is the one the one who started all the efforts on the East Coast, so I piggybacked with him, Stypula said. Loaded up Monday The equipment collected locally was loaded Monday into a semi-trailer provided through the Help Heroes of Ukraine organization and will be combined with equipment collected by Drew. It will be shipped to Poland at no cost by Meest international delivery service, where it will be retrieved by volunteers from Ukraine. Our load is going on a 747 freighter Thursday to Warsaw, Poland, and will be distributed right to the firefighters, Stypula said. Fire and rescue departments from Oak Creek, Paris, Bristol, Wind Lake, Wheatland and Kansasville had contributed gear by noon Monday. The Paris Fire and Rescue Department is honored to be able to participate in the donations of fire and rescue equipment to the Ukraine, said Assistant Chief Colin Hennessey, of the town of Paris department. The timing couldnt have been better as we have just received all new SCBA air packs for the department, allowing us to donate around 15 air packs along with face masks and spare bottles. Paris also contributed used helmets, boots, fire coats, fire pants and backboards. This was a rewarding experience for me and my family, Hennessey said. My wife and kids helped me and Capt. Brent Shaufler sort through and pack up the used equipment. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. A veteran board chair facing child porn charges resigned from his post Monday amid repeated calls for his resignation from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers administration and Republican gubernatorial candidate Kevin Nicholson. Prosecutors in Milwaukee charged Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs Board Chair Curtis Schmitt Jr. on Jan. 23 with three felony counts of possession of child pornography. Schmitt, whom Evers appointed in 2019 and the Senate unanimously approved, has pleaded not guilty. According to a criminal complaint, investigators discovered two photos and a video of child pornography had been uploaded to a Dropbox account associated with Schmitts email in December. Schmitt told police that he was addicted to adult pornography and sometimes received and downloaded child pornography. In a letter to Evers on Monday, Schmitt said, It has been an honor to serve on the Board of Veterans Affairs for the past three years. Please let this letter serve as my official resignation, according to a copy Evers spokesperson Britt Cudaback provided to the Wisconsin State Journal. The day after Schmitt was charged in January, an attorney for Evers asked him to do that which is in the best interest of the Board of Veterans Affairs by immediately resigning your unpaid, part-time, citizen-appointment position. He didnt respond, Cudaback said. On Monday morning, Nicholson sent Evers a letter to jump-start the removal process after Schmitt ignored calls to resign. Nicholson laid blame on Evers for not removing Schmitt sooner. Because the Senate confirmed Schmitt, Evers could not simply rescind his appointment. Instead, a taxpayer Nicholson in this instance had to file a complaint to trigger a process through which Evers can remove Schmitt for inefficiency, neglect of duty, official misconduct or malfeasance in office. In his letter sent Monday, Nicholson said Evers dishonored the reputation of the Wisconsin Board of Veterans Affairs and displayed an incomprehensible lack of leadership by refusing to be more proactive in removing Schmitt. After Schmitts resignation, Nicholson said, Schmitt Jr. should have been removed from the Wisconsin Board of Veterans Affairs months ago. Im glad that hes finally resigned, but it should have never come to this. A judge last month bound Schmitt over for trial. Hes due back in court Tuesday for a scheduling conference. The veterans board works with the WDVA secretary to shape benefit programs for Wisconsin veterans by adopting administrative rules. It also approves resolutions and recommendations from state veterans organizations. The nine members serve four-year terms with no pay. Nicholson is facing Republican gubernatorial candidates former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and Rep. Timothy Ramthun, R-Campbellsport, in a contest to oust Evers. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 MILWAUKEE Autopsies were expected to be done Monday on the bodies of three men found fatally shot in a Milwaukee apartment building. Police continue to investigate and say no arrests have been made in Sundays homicides. The Milwaukee County Medical Examiners Office has identified the victims as 39-year-old Tyaries McKinney, 52-year-old Clarence Harris and 26-year-old Anthony Thompson. The medical examiners reports say Harris and Thompson lived at the apartment where the three bodies were found. Antonio Tate said the youngest victim was one of his best friends. I know his mom. I know his brothers, Tate told WITI-TV. Im hurt over this, you know? My heart crushed. Tate tried to find the words to express his shock and heartache after his friend and the two others were fatally shot. I lost a granddad to gun violence, said Tate. I lost an uncle to gun violence. I almost lost my life to gun violence, and I just lost one of my best friends to gun violence. It dont ever stop. Violence never stops in Milwaukee. Acting Mayor Cavalier Johnson spoke with grieving family members at the scene Sunday and called on the community to step up and prevent another family from feeling their pain. Theyre crying. Theyre mourning, said Johnson. Theyre hurt because somebody that they cared about it is in that building behind me, and theyre dead and we shouldnt have that in this community. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 At a time the GCC logistics industry is evolving rapidly and is expected to grow by 4.3% between 2020 and 2025, the third edition of the Smart Logistics Challenge series was held at Expo 2020 Dubai. In support of UAE-based startups in the logistics industry, the series was hosted by UPS together with the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and DP World. UPS started with two bicycles and a $100 loan. That entrepreneurial spirit is still alive in UPS today. As a company, we are passionate about small businesses and being a strategic and trusted partner for them. The smart logistics challenge is a great example of this, as it brings together the best logistics technology startups in the country, giving them the opportunity to potentially pilot their solutions with UPS, DP World or Siemens, said Jean-Francois Condamine, UPS President for Indian Subcontinent, Middle East, Africa. Game-changing solutions Seven UAE-based startups presented their game-changing solutions in response to industry challenges, including real-time visibility, reliability and predictability, last-mile efficiency, compliance, and others. Solutions ranged across the logistics value chain and incorporated artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, warehousing, forwarding, and last-mile delivery. AR Engineering was declared the winner of the challenge and will be fast-tracked to a proof-of-concept (POC) discussion with UPS, DP World or Siemens. The UAE-based startup deploys interactive Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) & Mixed Reality (MR) Technologies to enhance training and operational processes in the logistics industry, among others. Solving complex problems We are very thankful to have been given this opportunity to present our solutions. To have the judges recognise the value and potential of our solutions is an honour. As a team we are passionate about solving complex problems in the logistics industry by combining both Digital Twins & Extended Reality Technologies together. Winning this Smart Logistics Challenge is a proud moment for the entire team. We look forward to further accelerating the growth of our business in the days to come, tapping into the expertise of global leaders such as UPS, DP World and Siemens, said Akram Amir, Founder & CEO - AR Engineering. Natalia Sycheva, Sr Manager of Special Projects and Entrepreneurship at Dubai Chamber of Commerce said the adoption of smart solutions in logistics is key to supporting the sectors growth and development. Innovative solutions She highlighted the important role that startups are playing in bringing innovative solutions to the market and enhancing its competitiveness on a global level, adding that the competition supports the Chambers efforts to engage the startup community across various sectors and encourage their contribution to Dubais economy. Abdulla bin Damithan, CEO & Managing Director of DP World UAE and Jafza commented: Recent supply chain disruptions have led to greater demand from our customers for new solutions to ensure cargo delivery and transparency. Imagination is key to meeting this. The Smart Logistics Challenge is a chance for the brightest logistics technology startups in the UAE to showcase their solutions to the evolving challenges of our industry.-- TradeArabia News Service 1. Yes. Raising the bar for future developments will boost the citys housing market. 2. Yes. It will help in newer areas, but more needs to be done to change Killeens image. 3. No. The new standards will just slow down homebuilding and drive away developers. 4.No. The ordinance will do little more than drive up the price of new homes in the city. 5. Unsure. Its hard to say what the effect will be until they have been in place for a while. Vote View Results Saudi Arabia is presenting itself at the Annual Investment Meeting (AIM) 2022 as a future-forward nation, an investment hub, with a progressive economy making it a perfect landscape for start-ups. This goes in line with Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 that underscores that the socio-economic transformation is vital to the commendable growth across potential areas, offering investors a plethora of new prospects for corporate growth and success. KSA had a dedicated investment stand in the Municipal Sector called 'Furas'. This kiosk reciprocates the attractive incentives that Saudi Arabia offers to stimulate investment with the potential to diversify and increase the kingdom's competitiveness to enable investment. Investment hub Special incentives and assistance is offered to foreign-affiliated enterprises and multinational companies intending to open offices in the kingdom. This only further cements Saudi Arabia's role as an investment hub as it endeavours to encourage convergence, facilitate knowledge transfer, and accelerate the development of the nation's skills and competencies. Saudi's authority for Industrial Cities and Technological Zones also has a separate stand in AIM 2022 being held in Dubai from March 29 to 31. Modon has been involved in the development and monitoring of industrial areas and integrated infrastructure since its inception in 2001. It now manages 36 current and planned industrial cities around the kingdom, as well as private industrial cities and complexes. It has managed to increase the size of developed industrial sites to over 200 million. These towns oversee 6,587 industrial and investment contracts and over 4000 factories, employing 517,242 men and women, including 185,840 Saudi men and 16,825 Saudi women. Well-defined strategy Modon follows a well-defined strategy to make use of all the advantages of public-private partnerships. It effectively recruited prominent worldwide industrial enterprises and foreign investments that bring value to the Saudi industrial sector by offering several incentives in industrial cities. Modon has made significant headway in its internal collaborations, attracting about SR370 billion ($98.6 billion) in funding. Amid the ongoing global industrial transformation, Modon devised several mechanisms to encourage small and medium-sized businesses, entrepreneurs, and significant local corporations to participate in the kingdom's industrial development, thereby assisting in achieving Vision 2030's industry-dependent economic diversification goals.-- TradeArabia News Service KEARNEY - Four Wisconsin residents are in the Buffalo County Jail after being arrested on suspicion of delivering marijuana near Kearney. Around 2:18 p.m. Monday Kearney Police Department officers stopped a 2021 Jeep two miles west of Kearney on Interstate 80 for following too closely. When officers contacted the four adults inside they noticed suspcious activity, and an open container of alcohol, a KPD news release said. Officers established probable cause to search the Jeep, and found several duffle bags containing 64lbs of suspected marijuana and THC products in the Jeep, the release said. All four occupants of the Jeep, Nicolas Esparaza, Rudy Vibbert, Tania Perez and Courtney Svara all from Wisconsin, were arrested on suspicion of felony possession of marijuana with intent to deliver, and no drug tax stamp, said the release. They are currently being held at the Buffalo County Jail awaiting a court hearing. Buffalo County Sheriffs Office also assisted during the investigation. The Grand Island man who was taken hostage over the weekend by Tyler Manka says his captor held a screwdriver to his throat and threatened to kill him. The 60-year-old man, who asked that his name not be used, was held captive in his apartment at 192 Stoeger Drive for 12 hours. Manka, 27, had escaped from Hall County Department of Corrections personnel while being treated at CHI Health St. Francis Medical Center. The resident of the apartment said Manka came to his door at 10:07 p.m. Friday. After arriving, Manka forced the man into his bedroom. During the course of the night, Manka threatened him several times, he said. As the night progressed, Manka calmed down, he said. He even offered him a couple of pills to help with a leg problem. The Grand Island Police Departments tactical response team, negotiators and additional officers gathered outside the house, as did members of the Hall County Sheriffs Department and the Nebraska State Patrol. A news release from GIPD referred to tenuous hours of negotiations. At about 6 a.m. Saturday, tactical operations were turned over to the Nebraska State Patrol SWAT team due to the length of the incident while negotiations continued, the release says. As Manka barricaded the hostage and himself inside the mans bedroom, law enforcement personnel entered the front of the apartment. The State Patrol SWAT team rescued the hostage safely and arrested Manka. The hostage said the standoff ended at 10:39 a.m. Before he was rescued, the man saw an armored vehicle in his backyard. At the same time the rescuers entered the bedroom, six or eight explosive devices detonated, the hostage said. A State Patrol spokesman said those devices are called flashbangs. Earlier Friday, Manka had been the defendant in a jury trial at the Hall County Courthouse. The jury returned with a verdict at about 8 p.m. Friday, Grand Island Police Capt. Jim Duering said. After the verdict, members of the Hall County Department of Corrections staff took Manka to St. Francis to have him treated for a medical incident, Duering said. While at the hospital, Manka escaped from two Hall County corrections officers. Manka ran eastbound from the north side of the hospital, Duering said. He headed for the Regency Retirement Residence at 803 Alpha St. At that point, two heroic citizens stepped in to help, Duering said. One of them was an emergency room doctor who saw a man in a jail uniform running. The other one was a concerned citizen who was driving by and stopped to help. The two citizens tried to trap Manka in a Regency foyer by pinning the door shut, which demonstrated pretty good thinking by both subjects, Duering said. Unfortunately, Manka was able to break the other door and run through the Regency. He exited through the east door and wound up at 192 Stoeger Drive. Manka told the 60-year-old man he chose that address because the man had left the light on. Manka arrived at the apartment bleeding from his arm, the hostage said. As negotiations went on through the night between Manka, Grand Island Police and State Patrol representatives, officers brought Manka and the hostage food from McDonalds. But the food was never eaten, the hostage said. In order to clear space, law enforcement officers threw some of his furniture outside, the hostage said. They also left wires hanging loose from a light fixture in his kitchen. His front door was being repaired Monday, and the apartment still smelled of smoke. On Monday, Hall County Corrections Director Todd Bahensky said the slip-up by the corrections officers was a personnel matter. Im thankful that nobody got seriously hurt, Bahensky said, adding that he appreciated the job law enforcement did. In the news release, Grand Island Police expressed thanks for the cooperation of surrounding agencies, and a peaceful resolution to this incident. It really was a team effort, Duering said. Manka was arrested for burglary, kidnapping, escape, making terroristic threats and use of a weapon to commit a felony. Police were still investigating the incident on Monday, Duering said. OMAHA -- The states Vietnam War veterans are ready to turn the first shovel of dirt on a monument to the thousands of Nebraskans who served there, and the 396 who never came back. Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, who served in Vietnam, will headline a groundbreaking ceremony at 2 p.m. Tuesday in Papillion for the new Nebraska Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Gov. Pete Ricketts is also among the scheduled speakers. The event is taking place on March 29, established by Congress five years ago as National Vietnam Veterans Day. The ceremony is open to the public and will also be livestreamed on the City of Papillions Facebook page. The memorial will occupy 2 acres adjacent to the SumTur Amphitheater south of Nebraska 370 on 108th Street. It will include a restored UH-1 Huey helicopter with a rescue display, 11 obelisks listing historical events from individual years of the Vietnam War, an array of flagpoles, benches and green space. A V-shaped wall of black granite will list the names of the 396 Nebraskans killed in the war. The Nebraska Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation also is developing an educational program aimed at elementary, middle and high school students. It will make use of the groups website, NVVMF.org. The memorial is expected to cost $5.65 million about $2 million more than was estimated in 2019, said Lisa Jorgenson, the foundations vice president. Much of the increase is due to delays and supply chain problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. About half the money has been raised, she said. Jorgenson said the foundation hopes to complete the park in time for a ribbon-cutting ceremony March 29, 2023, the 50th anniversary of the date the last U.S. combat troops left South Vietnam. The country fell to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong insurgent armies two years later. This memorial was put together, driven and instigated by the Vietnam veterans themselves, said John Hilgert, director of the Nebraska Department of Veterans Affairs. These soldiers that served in Southeast Asia they didnt have that welcome-home event. I hope this provides that welcome. Iowa Western Community College students are restoring a Vietnam-era helicopter that will serve as a key piece of a new memorial in Papillion. The UH-1 Huey, owned by the Nebraska Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation, will be placed on permanent display at the planned Nebraska Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park. The park is just south of SumTur Amphitheater and about 3 miles from Omaha National Cemetery. The park will feature a granite wall engraved with the names of the 396 Nebraskans who died in the Vietnam War, as well as the chopper and 11 granite obelisks, said Tom Brown, president of the foundation. Vietnam veteran George Abbott, secretary-treasurer of the foundation, said he was excited about the chopper being restored for use in the park. It is a key piece of this memorial to the 396 Nebraskans who died in this conflict, he said. Part of the memorial was always going to be a helicopter, Brown said. We were just going to keep looking until we found one. Brown was transported on Hueys while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. His unit provided support to ground troops by replenishing food, bandages, ammunition and other supplies. Hueys also served as gunships during the war. Abbott, one of at least 10 veterans who have helped with the restoration project, remembered seeing Hueys from his vantage point as a gunnery officer on a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. We witnessed these Huey workhorses carrying troops and supplies in and out of strategic battle zones and provided gunfire support to these troops, he said. As it turned out, the helicopter for the memorial had to travel a long way before it could be prepared for its final resting place in Papillion. I had put a request in our veterans magazine (The VVA Veteran) that we were looking for one, Brown said. One of the gentlemen in Vermont happened to read it. They were good enough they donated the chopper to us. The offer from Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 116 in Bennington, Vermont, came with the stipulation that the Nebraska group take responsibility for having the helicopter transported. Chapter 116 held the helicopter for almost two years while the Nebraska organization raised funds for the move. About $5,000 later, the chopper was loaded onto a flatbed truck and transported from Bennington, Vermont, to Bennington, Nebraska. It was after the bird had landed that Iowa Western became involved. I was approached by J.R. Richardson from Bellevue University, said Dylan Driscoll, chair of Iowa Westerns Aviation Maintenance Technology program. They were looking for a place to house the chopper while they worked on it. Were really excited about being part of this and having the veterans come in and talk to the students thats been really big, too, he said. Bellevue University, which has a strong Veterans Affairs program, has facilitated the project by lining up people to fill different roles, Driscoll said. It has a lot of Vietnam history behind it, which makes it that much more interesting, he said. The Huey arrived at Iowa Western on May 15 on a flatbed trailer. Two forklifts were used to unload it. The technical work didnt start until last fall, but a few students hung around as the spring semester wrapped up and helped clean it out. It had been sitting in a field in Vermont, and it was rough, he said. It was dirty and in a bunch of pieces. Inside, the floor was covered with sand and dirt. Aviation student Jacob Jones said he even cleaned birds nests out of it. Driscoll said about a dozen students have helped with the restoration process, which still is underway. A lot of what weve done is remove components we dont need to get rid of the weight, said Josh Wadhams, another student. Part of our job is going to be beautification. The surface of the chopper had spots with rust and corrosion that had to be removed. The group is trying to find a shade of paint to cover the bare spots that will match the weathered look of the original so it looks authentic, he said. Wadhams served in the U.S. Air Force from 2001-07, then worked for the Air Force as a private contractor for 11 years. Aidan Brown, another student, has been grinding off rust and corrosion and removing wires. Most of the engine is out, the transmissions out, most of the hydraulics are out, he said. Theres some cabling left. One of the challenges of the project is finding parts for the 53-year-old aircraft. It was missing a ton of parts that we needed even for static display, Driscoll said. Still needed are rotor blades, linkages and counterweights, as well as a few smaller parts. Another puzzle is how to restore the tail boom, which was sawed off instead of being removed by unscrewing the four bolts that held it in place. Its been kind of a long process and an educational process for all those involved, Brown said. When the Huey is in place, New Century Art Guild of Elk Horn, Iowa, will add several granite figurines to the display, Driscoll said. There are a lot of Hueys around the U.S., but Ive never seen one with statuary like that so, to me, thats going to set it apart a little bit, he said. Construction of the structures in the park is expected to begin in early April, with opening scheduled for March 29, 2023. A public involvement meeting has been scheduled to preview upcoming construction activities along Hwy. 35 between De Soto and Genoa. The meeting will be held Thursday, March 31, from 5 to 6 p.m. at the De Soto Community Center, 53 Crawford St., De Soto. The meeting will provide an overview of construction activities, work schedule and traffic impacts. Area residents, businesses and the general public are invited to attend. Construction is scheduled to begin April 4 to resurface 11.8 miles of Hwy. 35. The project will also replace 21 pipe culverts, one box culvert, and rehabilitate two bridge structures. Completion of the $10.1 million project is expected in August. Hwy. 35 will be closed to through traffic and detoured between Hwy. 82 in De Soto and Hwy. 56 in Genoa. The highway will remain open to local traffic. For more information on this or other WisDOT construction projects: Follow us on Twitter: @WisDOTSouthwest Motorists are reminded that using handheld cell phones in Wisconsin work zones is illegal. Motorists should slow down, be patient and pay attention to their surroundings in all work zones. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The Board of LeaderEthics-Wisconsin has announced that Jill Billings and Brian Rude are the recipients of the 2022 LeaderEthics Award. Each year, the group recognizes current or former elected officials who exemplify ethical leadership in practice are truthful, transparent with public information, unifiers and committed to serving their entire constituency. Billings has been an exemplary role model for bipartisan effectiveness and the principles of ethical leadership. The following excerpts were taken from her nomination: "In her role as representative for the 95th Assembly District, Jill is honest and truthful, welcoming the media for comments and interviews about proposals, policies, and legislation that affect the welfare of her constituents. She adheres to an open door policy for everyone who comes to the Capitol, regardless of their party or positions. Frequently invited to share her thoughts and experiences at meetings back in her district, Jill also reaches out to connect with her community via newsletters, e-mails, social media, fulfilling open-records requests, and knocking on doors to both gather input and provide information." Billings has served in the Legislature for the past decade as a member of the minority party. She has established a reputation for honesty and integrity, truthfulness and transparency, when meeting with stakeholders and legislators across the political spectrum. As a result, she has been one of few Democratic members to see bills passed every session. Rude was recognized for statesmanship. He is widely respected for fairness and actions in the best interests of the community. The following excerpt is from the nomination: "Brian Rude was a state representative from 1983-85 and state senator from 1985 to 2001. In 1997 he was elected to be the President of the Senate and served in that role until 2001. He established a reputation for being honest and truthful and as a result was reelected to these positions until he retired from elected office in 2001. Additionally, he was consistently transparent in his dealings with colleagues and with the voters of the 32nd State Senate district. His representative style and the reasons he was reelected without substantial opposition reflected in his ability to represent his entire constituency. His district was consistently rated a toss up district and this is reflected in voting pattern of voters in this district voting for both Democrats and Republicans throughout his years in office. His selection by Dairyland Power to be their public relations vice president is an indication of his reputation of being able to work with "the other" political party's representatives, and reflects his reputation for ethical political leadership. He has demonstrated the courage of his convictions in support of policy positions, regardless of his party's stated position on these issues. His record of integrity and support of American democracy is reflected in his widely acknowledged reputation for ethical leadership. He is, arguably, the most widely respected former politician in the La Crosse area." Board Chair Brandon Harris stated that the LeaderEthics-Wisconsin board is proud to acknowledge their contributions. We have two outstanding role models for ethical leadership. Lee Rasch, executive director, points out that although the legislative careers of Billings and Rude did not overlap, they both conveyed a sincere commitment to service throughout their careers, to their constituents and the state. "Our political process will be in a much better position with more people like Jill Billings and Brian Rude," he said. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 During a Jan. 24 traffic stop on Interstate 90, police recovered 11.2 pounds of methamphetamine, the most ever seized during a single drug bust in La Crosse County. The record didnt last long. On Feb. 19, police recovered 15 pounds of methamphetamine after arresting a suspect in the parking lot of a La Crosse hotel. The two record-breaking drug busts didnt surprise La Crosse County Sheriff Jeff Wolf. It didnt catch anyone off guard, Wolf said. It was just a matter of time. The two massive drug busts confirm the changing nature of methamphetamine distribution and addiction. Once produced under extremely hazardous conditions in local makeshift labs, its now a more industrialized process. When we first saw methamphetamine, it was a lot of homemade products that people could make in meth labs, Wolf said. Because we did a good job on the labs and shut them down, it just pushed the issue to a different source ... primarily Mexico, but there are others. Methamphetamine is commonly sold in crystal or powder form. It can be injected, smoked, snorted or taken orally. Unlike heroin, which is a depressant, methamphetamine is a powerful stimulant that triggers heightened emotions, including anxiety, paranoia and aggression. The behaviors pose unique challenges to law enforcement, emergency responders, hospital emergency room personnel and family members. La Crosse Police Department Lt. Linnea Miller said most of the methamphetamine that winds up in La Crosse comes from large labs in Mexico that can produce up to 100 pounds of the drug in eight hours. The industrialized version delivers a more intense and dependable level of intoxication. Police normally encounter a person who does not have the ability to stand still or stop moving, Miller said. Most of the time their speech or thought pattern is erratic, making it difficult to understand them. Users are usually extremely paranoid. La Crosse County Sheriffs Office drug investigator Rob Walensky said its not unusual to trace methamphetamine to child neglect or weapons use. One of the biggest things is just the irrational behavior, Walensky. You see people, in some cases, who havent slept in three days. Wolf said personnel in the La Crosse County Jail must deal with inmates undergoing methamphetamine withdrawal. Its tough when they go through the withdrawal, Wolf said. We have to monitor them and make sure theyre safe. All of these things have an impact on the jail. Health impacts Methamphetamine also takes a toll on the user. Dr. Chris Eberlein, emergency medical physician at Gundersen Health System, said the drug triggers a sharp rise in blood pressure, which has a negative long-term cardiovascular impact. Users also suffer loss of teeth, insomnia and scabs caused by persistent scratching. Eberlein said the cardiovascular effects are difficult to reverse, even if the user manages to stop. It does so much damage to the circulatory system, he said. Eberlein said researchers are less certain about long-term brain damage. The jury is still out about the brains ability to recover and remodel, he said. According to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, there were 822 methamphetamine overdose deaths in Wisconsin from 2014-2020, compared to 6,005 opioid deaths. However, Eberlein said the methamphetamine numbers dont count premature deaths due to long-term use, such as a stroke or heart attack. Miller said methamphetamine sells in La Crosse for about $600 an ounce, which puts the street value of the recent busts in La Crosse at nearly $300,000. She said most addicts finance their addiction through theft. This most commonly starts by using all their own money before taking advantage of family members, Miller said. Eventually property crimes, including retail thefts, are done to support the drug of choice. Some dealers will trade meth for expensive items. I have even found lists of items drug dealers wanted their buyers to steal for them. Wolf said its more difficult for law enforcement to trace drug deals since fewer of them of involve cash. The mobility of the entire drug world has changed, Wolf said. Its a combination of social media, the internet and cell phones they all have multiple cell phones. Walensky added, You dont have meet up to hand somebody a couple of hundred dollars anymore. There is no medication approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of methamphetamine use disorder. Eberlein said behavioral therapy is the only treatment available. Ive heard from users that its the most difficult drug to treat, Eberlein said. We have more tools in our toolbox for opioid addiction. Wolf described drug addiction in La Crosse County as a major public health issue and said its one that the public needs to take seriously. Drugs is a public health crisis in the county, he said. We deal with this every day. There needs to be a community focus on what the true problem is, and thats drugs and substance abuse issues. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Republican and West Salem native Ryan Huebsch announced Tuesday his candidacy for Wisconsins 94th Assembly District in the upcoming midterm election. Huebsch, who is a former legislative aide to Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said in his announcement he hopes to bolster the voice of western Wisconsin and was critical of the partisanship that has taken over the Capitol. Wisconsin, like much of the nation, is struggling under the poor decisions of our leaders in both Madison and in Washington, Huebsch said in a statement. He continued, From our unaffordable economy, to our childrens education, from health care for our families to the way our elections are run, partisan arguing has replaced working together. Spending more of our tax money seems to be the only solution offered. We deserve and expect better. I intend to bring fresh energy and common-sense ideas from Western Wisconsin to Madison. The 94th District was formerly represented by Huebschs dad, Mike Huebsch, who served from 1995-2011 with a stint as Speaker of the Assembly from 2007-08. The district has since been held by Rep. Steve Doyle, D-Onalaska. I am proud of my roots, but Ive seen during my time working in the state Capitol how Western Wisconsin communities and our Coulee Region point of view has been forgotten when critical decisions are being made, Huebsch said. We have a rare opportunity to change the direction of our state and nation, he said. I want our people and our voice to be at the forefront of these essential reforms. Huebsch graduated from UW-La Crosse in 2018 and has also worked as a legislative aide to Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Green Bay. Love 0 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Like all effective satire, the Onions headline had a ring of truth: Putin Pleased as Plot to Ruin Russian Economy, Destroy International Standing Goes Exactly to Plan. A month after Russia invaded Ukraine, the satirical publication founded as a weekly newspaper in Madison in 1988 has been willing to Go There, to look for humor in the most searing of stories even as it unfolds. The satirical site has identified Russian President Vladimir Putins college major as aggression, showed a coastal resort in Ukraine with extremely affordable rates right now and said the United Nations is escalating its response to the invasion from warnings to stern warnings. Too soon? Too bad. Finding comedy in the Ukraine situation serves several functions, says Chad Nackers, editor in chief of The Onion. It is a powerful tool for exposing the folly and absurdity and human cruelty, as well as providing some release from a stressful state of affairs and an endless cycle of misery. Laughter, he says, can fill the hole created by a sense of hopelessness. The war hasnt been ignored elsewhere in comedy. Late-night television has used Ukraine for familiar or tangential punch lines Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump or the quality of Papa Johns pizza. Stephen Colbert suggested the United States add a T-shirt cannon to the weapons it sends to the Ukraine. After President Joe Biden called Putin a war criminal, Jimmy Kimmel suggested stupid-head was next. True to the Onions nature as a brand sprung from the Midwest, theres a whiff of gentility to its Ukraine humor. None of its sarcasm touches upon the human victims of the war. Its list of the wars potential outcomes ranged from a lot of really bad speculative historical fiction to the Mets win the World Series. A map of Ukraine identifies the only decent taco place in the whole damn country. A mock slide show on Putins rise to power shows a pregnant woman with the caption, Putins parents decide to try for an evil megalomaniac. Under another picture of a gravestone, the caption reads: Opponent for student council treasurer suffers mysterious organ failure. The Onions decision not to ignore a thorny topic recalls one of its most impactful moments, when its print issue two weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks helped break a comedy barrier, says Sophia McClennen, a Penn State University professor and author of the upcoming book, Trump Was a Joke: How Satire Made Sense of a President Who Didnt. That issues cover pictured President George W. Bush under the headline, U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever it is Were at War With. Storied history Those were more influential days at the Onion, which stopped printing editions in 2013 and now exists as a website with traffic directed through social media posts. It has a great deal more competition online now and in late-night television comedy, which grew more satirical in the wake of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. Theres a rich history of satirical publications like Mad magazine and National Lampoon places where the news of the day collides with the potential for laughter that can reduce its heaviness. Spy magazine burned brightly and briefly in the 1980s. Private Eye and Punch were popular English magazines. Notoriously, the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was the target of a terrorist attack in 2015. The Onion sometimes looks to be merely entertaining instead of satirical, says James Caron, author of Satire as the Comic Public Sphere. Its just kind of silly at times, Caron says. Yet it still has the capacity to hit a target squarely. In the wake of several mass shootings in the United States over the past decade, the Onion repeated essentially the same article, changing only a few details, under the headline, No Way to Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. Its just this endless loop of horror, Nackers says. The way the Onion matched the repetitiveness with its stories really struck a nerve with people. It hit it in a way that is respectful. It feels like theres a really strong point being made, but ... it doesnt feel like youre exploiting people. The Onion, now based in Chicago, has a staff of 20 people. It has gone through a handful of corporate overseers. The current owner, Great Hill Partners, purchased the Onion from the communications company Univision in 2019. Nackers started in 1997 as a photographer, earning $10 a photo. He began contributing jokes, became a writer and now runs the place. He watched the satire grow more serious after 9/11, as the worlds insanity kind of caught up with what used to be insane satirical premises. The focus tends to toggle between dark humor and the more frivolous as dictated by the times. Truth-teller One thing that we can kind of do, because we have a lot of editorial freedom, is that we are basically a truth-teller, Nackers says. We kind of get to the core of things and expose the real truth by using satire, making a joke, but showing things how they really are. During the past month, the Onion ran a mock fact check on Ukraine. To the statement that Russia claimed Ukraine is harboring biological weapons, the Onion said fabricating allegations about enemies holding biological weapons is Americas job. CLAIM: Rudy Giuliani is a valued Russian asset acting against Ukraine in service of the Kremlin, the Onion wrote. REALITY: Rudy Giuliani has not been of value to anyone for years. Occasionally, someone will think some of the Onions fake news is actually true, like when a Chinese newspaper reprinted the Onions declaration of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as the sexiest man of the year adding its own slide show. When those things happen, its a fun day at the office, says Jordan LaFlure, senior managing editor. The story of the Onion is how little weve changed, LaFlure said. We have a voice that endures across changing political climates. Its just a matter of deciding what is the best arrow in our quiver to fire at a particular target. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 FedEx Corporation has announced that its founder, chairman and CEO Frederick W. Smith will be stepping back from the CEO role effective June 1 and it will be taken over by Raj Subramaniam, the President and Chief Operating Officer, at Fedex. Smith, 77, started FedEx in 1973, delivering small parcels and documents more quickly than the post office could, reported CNBC. Over the next half-century, he oversaw the growth of a company that combined air and ground service and became something of an economic bellwether because of its service to other companies. FedEx has changed the world by connecting people and possibilities for the last 50 years, stated the report citing a statement from Smith. Lauding Subramaniams ability to guide the company. Smith said he will focus on global issues including sustainability, innovation, and public policy. Subramaniam, 56 has been with FedEx since 1991, holding assorted senior management and marketing positions across Asia and the US. In 2003, he was appointed Regional President for FedEx Express - the air delivery service and largest business line - in Canada, and subsequently moved to FedEx Services, the support group for the other FedEx companies, as Head of Global Marketing. He then returned to FedEx Express as President and CEO in January 2019, and in March of that same year became President and CEO of FedEx Corporation, the holding company. Subramaniam, who has been named CEO-elect with immediate effect, will move into the new position on June 1, taking over the reins of the package-shipping company from the man who pioneered express delivery almost 50 years ago. Smith said that for the past several years he had recommended to FedEx directors that if he died or became disabled they should name Subramaniam CEO and appoint an independent chairman, stated media reports. On Monday, the board appointed a current director, Brad Martin, as vice chairman and Smiths designated successor as chairman. Subramaniams promotion was long expected, stated the report. Less than a month ago, the company named Smiths son, Richard W Smith, as the next head of its express division. The 77-year-old founder has been saying for at least two years that hes nearing the end of his long tenure, it added. Taylor Swift is being honoured with an honorary doctorate. The I Bet You Think About Me hitmaker will be given her Doctor of Fine Arts when she addresses the graduating classes at the ceremony to mark her many achievements - such as three number one albums in a calendar year - along with historian Jill Lepore and other academics. The 32-year-old songwriting superstar has already left her mark on the Manhattan-based college when journalist Brittany Spanos kicked off her program in January that seeks to to deconstruct both the appeal and aversions to Taylor Swift through close readings of her music and public discourse as it relates to her own growth as an artist and a celebrity. Through readings, lectures and more, the class delves into analyses of the culture and politics of teen girlhood in pop music, fandom, media studies, whiteness and power as it relates to her image and the images of those who have both preceded and succeeded her. Well also consider topics like copyright and ownership, American nationalism and the ongoing impact of social media on the pop music industry. Brittany - who works at music magazine Rolling Stone - labelled herself as a super fan of Taylor. Teaching a course at Clive Davis has been a dream of mine since I attended NYU. I took several of the Topics in Recorded Music courses in the program while an undergrad and they were foundational to my work as a music journalist. Ive been covering Taylor Swift since I began my writing career a decade ago and have been a super fan of hers for even longer. Its such an honor to be able to share my Swiftie expertise with a sharp group of students. The ceremony - which will take place on 18 May - will be the universitys first in-person graduation since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and are thrilled to be back at Yankee Stadium. Andrew Hamilton, the president of NYU said: I cannot overstate how thrilled I am to be coming together in person with graduates, parents, faculty, and honorees for NYUs Commencement. Since 2019, we have been deprived of Commencements festive, communal joy, and its absence has been keenly felt. Few groups of graduates are more deserving of a celebration than these classes: their pursuit of their studies disrupted, isolated by a daunting pandemic, these classes2022, 2021, and 2020have distinguished themselves with their grit, grace, and forbearance. We reconvene at Yankee Stadium with a renewed sense of appreciation for the act of celebrating together in person, a recognition of our graduates enormous achievements, and a respect for their character and perseverance. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Originally published on celebretainment.com, part of the TownNews Content Exchange. Dubai has a leading position to roll out an autonomous drive system and change the landscape of smart mobility, said experts at the World Government Summit 2022 being held in Dubai. Speakers of the sessions stressed that the future of cities depends on gathering the talents and experts from around the world into one major platform such as WSG to embrace their abilities to have positive results and innovate rapidly and develop ideas to be implanted to ensure a smart future. During a session about The future of movements: policies and innovation, Jeff Bleich, the Chief Legal Officer of Cruise, the majority-owned autonomous vehicle subsidiary of General Motors, said that with Dubai as our first international partner, we can innovate new cities system and the future of smart mobility. Speakers emphasized the importance of policy being agile and clear to meet the safety and security principles of the future. The public-Private partnership will be essential in ensuring that mobility is safe and secure in the coming decade. Innovation key to smart systems Bleich emphasized that rapid digital technology requires proactive practices from governments to enhance the capabilities of their leaders to manage it and adapt to smart technology. Dubais Road and Transport Authority (RTA) announced a partnership with Cruise in April 2021 aims to make fully autonomous taxis available to the public in Dubai by 2023 and 4,000s autonomous vehicles (AVs) in use by 2030. "Development and smart devices will be essential work systems around the world and all governments will have to involve this positive transformation. We as Cruises Origin AV working on solutions for some challenges such as; the lack of a visible steering wheel or brakes feature which does not currently meet RTAs standards in vehicles," remarked Bleich. At the session, teenage German cybersecurity specialist, David Colombo, spilled the beans on how he hacked Tesla. "Everything will be digital in the future, from cars to homes. Cybersecurity is important as well as the transformation to a smart world to protect the rights of companies and save their data." Colombo who shot to fame for hacking 25 Tesla vehicles after successfully cracking a vulnerability in third-party software of the super electric car. "As we embrace digital solutions, we become more vulnerable, AVs will be controlled by digital technology so cybersecurity is going to be a key challenge to create a secure future," he added.-TradeArabia News Service As the people of Rio de Janeiro sheltered at home last year during Brazil's COVID-19 outbreak, a police official found something unusual about a local internet service. The internet was suddenly unavailable across one poor neighborhood. Detective Gabriel Ferrando later found that armed men had chased away a technician from internet service provider TIM SA. A new internet provider had claimed the area. It was a company that officials believe has ties to drug dealers and arms sellers. It also is believed to have links to Brazils criminal organization, the Red Command. Those living in the area could get internet from the new company or do without it. TIM later released a statement asking the countrys law enforcement to protect established internet companies. Ferrando continued to investigate and, in a report after months of work, he asked government lawyers to take action. But, so far, officials have done nothing. Reuters continued the investigation and found that internet service in many neighborhoods in Brazils major cities has been taken over by suspected criminals. They reportedly are not afraid to use threats and violence to control internet service. Now, tens of thousands of Brazilians have poor-quality internet service that makes millions of dollars for suspected criminals. Customers report they sometimes face someone at their door with a demand for the monthly payment. There's "pressure to pay on the day that they choose with no delay," said one customer, who did not want his name used. In 2020, Brazilian households with an internet connection grew by more than 12 percentage points to 83 percent. That is the most recent information available from Cetic.br, an information technology organization. But criminals, also called pirates, are stealing equipment from real providers to create their internet services. Feninfra, an industry group, said robbery and destruction of telecommunications equipment rose 34 percent in 2020 from 2019. That is equal to about $194 million in yearly losses. Brazil has criminal groups that control water and electricity services, but now they are entering the business of technology. This is how they do it. First, they steal or damage equipment belonging to traditional internet service providers. When repair teams arrive, they are chased away by armed men who warn them not to come back. These so-called no-go areas have increased by 300 percent since 2019. Without competition, the criminals can charge a lot of money for poor-quality service. Often, the criminals will get help from a corrupt worker at one of the big internet companies, said Rio de Janeiro state prosecutor Antonio Pessanha. In one recent case, an employee of internet provider Claro, offered to sell company equipment to organized criminals, Pessanha said. His office recorded the criminals telephone discussions by getting a court order. In the Morro da Formiga neighborhood, detective Ferrando said he began receiving information in the first half of 2021. It was from people who said internet services had stopped working. The company that controlled the area, JPConnect, was established in 2019. Reuters examined its public documents. Those records show that until late last year JPConnect was part-owned by Paulo Cesar Souza dos Santos Jr. Officials said he is a member of Red Command. In January, police officers searched JPConnect's headquarters in Morro da Formiga. Ferrando said they found stolen equipment belonging to large technology companies. Marcos Ferrari is the head of the Brazilian telecommunications trade association Conexis. He said the industry in Brazil faces robbery, destruction of property, and threats to employees. Officials must "inhibit this type of criminal action," Ferrari said. In Rio de Janeiro there are several other internet providers under investigation for links to criminals, officials said. The provider Net&Com was raided by police in March 2021. Police have publicly stated that they are investigating the firm. They suspect it is paying criminals with the Red Command to help them take over internet services in poor neighborhoods throughout the Rio de Janeiro area. Pessanha, the state prosecutor, said the investigation continues. "The new gold for the criminal underworld," he said, "is the internet." Im Susan Shand. The Reuters News Agency reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for Learning English. __________________________________________________________________ Words in This Story technician n. a person whose job relates to the practical use of machines or science in industry, medicine customer n. someone who buys goods or services from a business household n. the people in a family or other group that are living together in one house inhibit v. to keep (someone) from doing what he or she wants to do We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section, and visit our Facebook page. Sweet Home is set to receive more than $30 million in federal funds to bring its aging wastewater treatment plant in line with federal law. The city's current system dates back to the 1940s, and the construction of a new wastewater treatment plant is slated to start soon. The city has been cited by Oregon Department of Environmental Quality a number of times over the years for violating the federal Clean Water Act. U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, whose district includes Sweet Home and Linn County, announced on Monday, March 28 that the city of Sweet Home will receive the $30.06 million to help the plant comply with the federal law. "Clean water is a basic, human right," DeFazio said in a statement. "I'm proud to help secure funding to enhance water infrastructure and better health in our community." Sweet Home was cited for various violations of the Clean Water Act on Oct. 13, 1998, based on a state Department of Human Services letter. The city received two administrative orders and multiple extensions to comply with the law, which it finally did on Dec. 2, 2009. Sweet Home was under orders to develop a plan to upsize and improve its wastewater treatment plant. A plan was drawn up in 2015, and the city has spent years finding a contractor and budgeting for the project. Built in the 1940s, the Sweet Home wastewater treatment plant has been upgraded several times in its history. It's needed dozens of renovations to better serve the city of 10,000 people and meet air quality regulations. In 2020, the Sweet Home City Council voted to stop outsourcing and bring overplant operations in-house to save taxpayers some $176,000 per year. The costs of the wastewater plant's major renovations totaled $28.2 million in 2019, millions of which would have come from state grants and city coffers. Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Corvallis Gazette-Times. According to Sweet Home Public Works Director Greg Springman, the plant has struggled with managing excess capacity during rainy seasons. He said the federal funds allow the city to avoid taking out a loan and burdening taxpayers. "It's not just about we're going to fix this. We're going to build this new plant that we've been designing for three years, and it's going be paid for, and the customers don't have to pay for" it, Springman said. Springman said the city plans on breaking ground as soon as late July or early August. Portland-based Murraysmith & Associates Inc. has the contract. The new money comes from the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Water State Revolving Fund program, a federal-state partnership offering low-cost financing to communities for water projects. Tim Gruver covers the city of Albany and Linn County. He can be contacted at 541-812-6114 or Tim.Gruver@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter via @T_TimeForce. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 LEXINGTON Traffic was diverted away from the Jackson St. overpass briefly during Monday afternoon due to a two car accident took place. At 3:26 p.m., the Lexington Volunteer Fire Department was dispatched to the intersection of Maple St. and Plum Creek Parkway, the south base of the Jackson St. overpass, due to the report of a two car accident. Priority Medical Transport also responded to the scene. On scene, a silver Chevy four door car was facing east with damage to its left front wheel, a red Hyundai Elantra was facing south with light front end damage. The driver of the Hyundai was transported by Priority Medical Transport to the Lexington Regional Health Center for undisclosed injuries. Due to the accident blocking traffic to the overpass, Lexington police officers briefly diverted traffic while the vehicles were moved. Randy and Brians Towing had to tow away the Chevy, while the Hyundai could be driven off scene. The overpass was opened by 3:40 p.m. The LVFD was assisted on scene by the Priority Medical Transport, the Lexington Police Department, and Randy and Brians towing. World governments must act in a spirit of unity and depend on collaboration to solve global problems such as climate change, trade and economic disruption. This is according to Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of World Economic Forum, during a keynote speech on the opening day of the World Government Summit (WGS2022) in Dubai. Speaking in the Dubai Exhibition Centre at the Expo 2020 Dubai site during a session entitled Our World Today, Why Government Must Act Now?, Schwab acknowledged that the government role is important in improving the impact of the world activities on global energy systems such as; food systems and supply chains. A great reset Schwab, who called policymakers for a great reset during the pandemic, and for understanding their responsibility to work in collaborative ways and bring multilateral solutions for immediate challenges to manage and long-term global challenges through this global platform to build our future. Schwab added: The impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution accelerates global change in a much more comprehensive and faster way than previous industrial revolutions. Despite all the challenges, we have to uphold the responsibility we have towards the next generation through collaborations on a national and a global level. Our futures are intrinsically connected and that requires collaborative responses. Schwab called on governments to adopt new technologies as well as develop the necessary ethical frameworks around those new technologies to ensure embracing human life and the society-oriented systems. WGS 2022 brings together government leaders, ministers, senior officials, decision-, policymakers and specialists across economic, social, technological and financial sectors from around the world between March 29 and 30, 2022 to share experiences, knowledge and ideas that contribute to promoting development and prosperity around the world to forge new models of agile governance.-- TradeArabia News Service One of two suspects accused in the Jan. 8 gunshot death of Ernest Knox has been ordered to remain in the La Crosse County Jail on a $500,000 cash bond. La Crosse County Circuit Court Judge Ramona Gonzalez ordered the bond for Karvel Freeman, 35, Madison, during an initial appearance Monday. Freeman and Nelson D. Brown, 25, Rockford, Illinois, have been charged with first-degree intentional homicide and second-degree recklessly endangering safety. Brown also faces charges of felon in possession of a firearm and felony bail jumping. Prosecutors allege that Freeman gave a signal to Brown to shoot Knox during a party on the 700 block of Rose Street. La Crosse County assistant District Attorney Nick Passe requested the $500,000 bail. The defendant is facing life in prison and has a strong incentive to flee, Passe said. He described Freeman as a danger to the community. He said Knox was murdered over perceived disrespect about one or two small things at a birthday party. Freeman was taken into custody March 9 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His attorney, Eric Pangborn, said Freemans arrest in Tennessee wasnt a case of his client fleeing arrest. He said Freeman was a resident of Tennessee prior to moving to Madison and returned to Tennessee with his family only after receiving threats for his alleged involvement in the homicide. Pangborn said Freeman was aware from media reports that he was wanted as a suspect and contacted Pangborn March 7 to schedule a March 14 meeting. Pangborn said $5,000-10,000 is the most Freemans family can raise for his bail. Gonzalez set a preliminary hearing for April 5 and said the issue of bail could be re-argued then. Brown remains at large. He is considered armed and dangerous, and police are warning citizens not to approach or attempt to contact him. Anyone with information is asked to call the La Crosse Police Department at 608-782-7575. Tips can be anonymously provided to La Crosse Area Crime Stoppers at 608-784-TIPS (8477) or online at lacrossecrimestoppers.com. Citizens can also download the Crime Stoppers App P3 to submit a tip via cell phone. Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. KENOSHA The trial of the Caledonia man accused of firing of a shot into the air during the August 2020 unrest in Downtown Kenosha has been postponed until summer. Jury selection for the trial of Joshua Ziminski was scheduled to start Monday morning but was rescheduled for June 21 because Ziminskis defense attorney, Michael Barth, was reportedly tied up in another case. Ziminiski made a brief appearance in Judge Bruce Schroeders court Monday in an orange jumpsuit. Schroeder presided virtually. Ziminiski, 37, is being held on $14,000 cash bond in Kenosha County Jail. His bond was increased from $1,000 earlier this year by Schroeder after Ziminiski allegedly threatened and intimidated a witness at court as jury selection was first set to begin in January. Ziminski is charged with felony arson and misdemeanors of obstructing an officer and disorderly conduct with a deadly weapon. According to the criminal complaint, Ziminski and his wife, Kelly Ziminski, participated in protests and riots in downtown Kenosha which occurred in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake by a Kenosha Police officer. Ziminski was charged with disorderly conduct after authorities used a previous booking photograph to identify him as the man who fired what he allegedly called a warning shot into the air on Aug. 25, 2020, just before Illinois teenager Kyle Rittenhouse, who was in the same area, shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum. Rittenhouse was found not guilty in November in that shooting death, along with the shooting death of Anthony Huber and for injuring Gaige Grosskreutz during riots that night in Downtown Kenosha. Rittenhouse said he acted in self-defense. Police investigating the shootings identified Ziminski and observed that he was holding a black handgun, according to reports. At one point, in a video Ziminski was seen pointing the gun to the sky, and the police observed a muzzle flash and heard a gunshot at the same time. The Ziminskis were then seen leaving the area. The felony arson charge was filed after a video on Kelly Ziminskis phone showed Joshua Ziminski tossing a match into a dumpster, then asking the crowd for lighter fluid to help the fire spread, according to the criminal complaint. Joshua Ziminski then pushed the dumpster onto Sheridan Road as police vehicles were moving toward him. His wife was seen on video adding flammable material to the fire, the complaint states. Kelly Ziminski pleaded guilty last April to a misdemeanor count of obstructing and a civil forfeiture charge of failing to comply with an emergency order. The prosecution has subpoenaed her for her husbands case and she was in court Monday morning. A developer is proposing to raze a small church, a former Italian deli, two houses and Buckinghams Bar and Grill a historic building for a 10-story structure with housing, commercial space and parking on the 800 block of Regent Street. CRG Acquisition of Chicago would remove all buildings on a rectangular strip of land immediately south of UW-Madisons 21 North Park Street office building, which opened in 2006, between North Park Street and the East Campus Mall. Concepts for a similar project at the same site were offered almost a year ago, but a new submission to the city has limited information and its unclear who beyond CRG is involved with the current proposal. A CRG representative could not be reached for comment. The early concepts show apartments, commercial space at the corner of Regent and Park streets and other amenities on the first floor, underground parking for 62 vehicles, and bike parking. There would be an additional resident amenity and deck on the ninth floor. The redevelopment site includes Faith Community Bible Church, 826 Regent St., a one-story structure built in 1971 and renovated in 1996; a former location of Frabonis Italian Specialties and Delicatessen, 822 Regent St., which closed after 47 years in 2018 and consolidated with its store in Monona; rental houses at 816 and 818 Regent St.; and Buckinghams, 802 Regent St., a building constructed in 1923 and renovated in 2000. The Buckinghams building, originally the Ben DiSalvo and Sons Grocery Store, is one of the few remaining structures in the historic Greenbush neighborhood connected with its once-bustling Italian population. Many of the surrounding buildings were razed amid national urban renewal efforts in the 1960s. The structure is identified in the Downtown Historic Preservation Plan as a potential landmark. The Plan Commission must approve any demolitions while development plans must go through a committee review process. The proposed project recognizes the need to create a sense of enclosure and urban space in order to strengthen the business corridor along Regent Street as well as acting as an entrance to the campus from the south, a submission to the city says. CRG is scheduled to make an informational presentation to the citys Urban Design Commission at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. Immigrant heritage The substantial brick building at 802 Regent St. was constructed by Ben and Frances DiSalvo, who lived on the second floor and used the first floor for a grocery and food importing business, according to records. This living arrangement was called living above the shop and had been practiced in Europe for centuries prior to its introduction in America. DiSalvos Imported Foods soon became a Greenbush institution. After DiSalvo retired in 1945 the store continued to be run by his sons until Tom DiSalvo retired in 1984. DiSalvos branched out into related areas as business warranted and the store later added a bakery, a meat market, and a liquor department. They also built a one-story annex next door in the same style as the store that was used for years as DiSalvos Spaghetti House, but the annex burned down in the early 1960s. At one time there were five Italian grocery stores on Regent Street and this is the only one that remains, city preservation planner Heather Bailey said. In the nearly 25 years since the Downtown Preservation Plan was adopted, there has been no move to designate 802 Regent St. as a landmark, she said. Italian immigrant heritage in Madison is another underrepresented story that we need to find ways to commemorate, share, celebrate, and remember, she said. I think that it is a regrettable loss and I hope for public interest in being proactive to tell those stories and reinvest in those spaces well before they are marked for redevelopment. Ald. Julianna Bennett, 8th District, who represents the site, declined comment until neighborhood steering committees are done and the project is before Planning Division staff. The proposal is just the latest in a series of projects in the campus area offering high-density market-rate student housing, said Ald. Mike Verveer, 4th District, which abuts East Campus Mall. I think the location makes a lot of sense, he said. Its just a matter of time before these properties are redeveloped. But the fate of the historic building merits discussion, he said. The developers are going to have to figure out a way to acknowledge the DiSalvo store, he said. Design highlights The proposed design provides a four-story base along Park and Regent streets and East Campus Drive clad in a reddish brick, according to CRGs submission. A series of piers and columns at the ground floor create an anchor for the structure while storefront windows provide active retail spaces along the street and amenities that serve residents. Floors five through eight step back from the base and are clad in three different materials, which help define the entry along Regent Street. Floors nine and ten step back from the middle grouping of floors to create an attic quality, according to the proposal. In initial conversations with the neighborhood and UW-Madison, concerns were raised about the affordability of housing units and traffic, Verveer said. Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the description of the building just to the north of the proposed development. It is UW-Madisons 21 North Park Street office building. Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Jazeera Airways shareholders have approved the Board of Directors recommendation to distribute 32% in cash dividend, the equivalent of KD7 million ($22.9 million) for the year ended December 31, 2021. The company held its Annual General Meeting (AGM) virtually today (March 27) from its headquarters in Jazeera City, Kuwait. The dividend announcement comes after two years during which dividends were suspended because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Jazeera has returned a total of KD91 million in cash to shareholders since 2013, the equivalent of over four times its paid-up capital. Jazeera Chairman, Marwan Boodai, said: Jazeera Airways has once again showcased the success of its business model in adapting in times of crisis, safeguarding its cash position and shareholders rights. The airline grabbed new opportunities that were presented during the pandemic, enabling it to expand its services, generate revenue from new sources, and return to profitability in record time. Today, Jazeera is a success story for the Kuwaiti private sector as well as the regional and global aviation sector. The airline continues to provide reliable services to its customers, delivered by an experienced team, adds value to its shareholders and contributes to the local economy. Jazeera Airways returned to profitability for the year 2021, a period which continued to be affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and restrictions on travel, reporting a net profit of KD7.1 million for the year, up 126.8% from the previous year. The earnings were supported by an increase of 48.2% in the number of passengers flown, which reached 1.0 million, while load factors increased by 3.9% to 66.8% and yield increased by 28.6% to KD73.9. Operating revenue for 2021 stood at KD80.4 million, up 94.3%, and operating profit increased by 152.2% to KD10.8 million. 2022 outlook and milestones With its return to profitability, Jazeera is headed to continued growth, expanding its network with new routes that offer direct flights from Kuwait to tourist destinations as well as underserved destinations that cater to a latent demand of customers living in the Middle East by connecting them between their country of residence and home country. The network expansion is supported by a new order of 28 aircraft placed with Airbus. Jazeera will be taking delivery of A320neo and A321neo models to serve short and medium-haul routes. The company is also expanding its infrastructure and facilities to offer supporting aviation services. Jazeera has already achieved a new milestone in that direction as an Approved Training Organization certified by Kuwaits Directorate for Civil Aviation, enabling the airline to conduct training programs for pilots and cabin crews from its headquarters in the State of Kuwait. Boodai concluded: We are excited for our future planned developments. We look forward to expanding to new destinations where we see strong and revenue-generating opportunities, while also remaining prudent against the uncertainties of recent geopolitical developments. - TradeArabia News Service A statewide organization that aims to raise awareness about health literacy will host a vaccine community outreach event Monday to help ensure that the public has access to reliable and accurate information about COVID shots. Wisconsin Health Literacy is hosting the free pre-summit affair in-person from 12:30 to 6 p.m. on April 4 at The Edgewater in Downtown Madison. Following that event is the Wisconsin Health Literacy Summit, which is also taking place at the hotel, located on 1001 Wisconsin Place, on April 5-6. Proof of full COVID-19 vaccination is required to attend both events. Attendees, according to an event flyer, must show a printed or digital copy of their shot card at registration. The pre-summit is slated to open with speaker Abdul El-Sayed, who served as the executive director of the Detroit Health Department in Michigan, as well as a health officer for the city of Detroit until he resigned to run for governor. An epidemiologist and host of podcast America Dissected, El-Sayed will reflect on his experiences in his various roles. There will also be a Best and Promising Practices Panel of speakers, as well as training sessions for health, digital and science literacy. Planning for the pre-summit comes after the states Department of Health Services in April 2021 announced $6.2 million in grants that were awarded to organizations across Wisconsin in order to promote equity in the statewide COVID-19 vaccine program. Many of those organizations will meet and network at the Monday event. There are people that have digital, language, and cultural barriers who havent had the same access to information and to making appointments that other residents have, said Margaret Marcou, Vaccine Community Outreach program project manager at Wisconsin Health Literacy, in a statement. Marcou, as well as four Vaccine Community Outreach program regional specialists, are reaching out to all areas of the state to answer peoples questions about the COVID shot. They are working with community-based organizations, tribal governments and other nonprofits to do so. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The mother of a West High School junior wants her daughter, who has Down syndrome, to complete her senior year and graduate with her class, while the district is citing policy that says the soon-to-be 19-year-old is too old. Billings School District 2 policy 2050 states that schools don't have to enroll students who have reached age 19 on or before Sept. 10 of the school year in question. Montana House Bill 233 was amended last summer to offer funding allowing school districts to extend high school education for special-needs students up to age 21. But according to SD2 Superintendent Greg Upham, the new law still allows for local school districts to stick to their own policies if they choose. Jana Pennington is the mother of Emily, who has participated on West High's cheer squad and has worked at the family's boutique, The Banyan Tree. Jana Pennington has appealed the district's decision and mounted a social media campaign to persuade the school board to reconsider the ruling. By Friday evening, the campaign had generated more than 150 emails to the board supporting Emily being able to attend her senior year. Upham on Friday spoke cautiously because of confidentiality concerns. He did say the board has not reviewed the matter specifically, although board members are aware of the Pennington family's concerns. In February of this year, Pennington wrote to Upham and the board. My daughter Emily will turn 19 on July 11, 2022, approximately nine weeks before the deadline keeping her from attending her senior year and not completing the high school education she is entitled to, Pennington wrote. Pennington and Randy Russell, the district's K-12 executive director, then corresponded several times over email. Russell told Pennington in November that Superintendent Upham forwarded me an email he received regarding your daughter aging out. Following the meeting with me on or about Oct. 28, I gathered more information regarding the situation from your daughters IEPs [individualized education plan], engaged with staff on this topic, and consulted with legal counsel. Then, citing the district's policy, Russell added that the school district has been firm and consistent in its position. Pennington said Emily was heldback in kindergarten, which she does not regret, even though she knew about the law at the time. At some point in the next 12 years before she graduates, Im sure there will be legislature introduced so Emily will have a remedy to graduate, she said, recalling her thought process at the time. In her letter to the district, Pennington listed several major surgeries that delayed Emilys education, with most of them occurring during her early years of development. We are major advocates of having our daughter be mainstreamed into regular education classes, not only for educational purposes but also for social development reasons, which for Emily is especially critical, she wrote. On Jan. 21, there was another email conversation about the appeal process. Russell informed Pennington that the next step would be to submit a written request to Upham that the board could hear as an agenda item. Policy 1420 outlines the process once a superintendent receives it. Were following what we thought was the policy procedure to get onto the agenda, and we werent getting anywhere, Pennington said. The Gazette only received emails from Pennington, rather than all of the emails that were sent back and forth. (Emily) loves the students, teachers, and faculty that she gets to spend time with each day, Pennington wrote, adding that you will find her at every sporting event cheering on her fellow student body members to victory. In an online document Pennington complied, she outlines how she has researched Montana state law, spoken with program directors at the Office of Public Instruction as well as multiple state legislators, sought legal counsel, made public comments at school board meetings, and met with the principal and district administrators. During the last board meeting, she was surprised to see her concern did not appear on the agenda. She communicated with trustee Zack Terakedis and anticipated the board reviewing the policy. He addressed the matter in an email to other board members Feb. 24. As a parent, planning is a big part of successful families, Terakedis wrote. I would like to know our anticipated plan for this request and when and if we are going to see it on an agenda. Terakedis was unable to be reached as of press time, but Pennington said she didnt hear back from him after that. No matter what one may think about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, efforts now underway to block certain members of Congress from running for reelection are without merit. Several voters have filed a challenge in North Carolina to the candidacy of Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn, seeking to have him disqualified from the ballot. A similar lawsuit has been filed in Wisconsin against Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Oshkosh, Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Minocqua, and Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, claiming they are no longer qualified to seek reelection under the 14th Amendment because they participated in an insurrection on Jan. 6, including by supporting objections to the certification of certain electoral votes. It is noteworthy that not a single protester arrested for criminal trespass, assaulting police officers and other actions at the Capitol has been charged under 18 U.S.C. 2383, which makes it a crime to engage in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States. Additionally, no member of Congress has been arrested, charged or indicted for any actions taken on Jan. 6. Yet the challengers are claiming that these members of Congress are disqualified from holding office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. Section 3 was aimed at the former Confederacy and said no one could be a member of Congress or hold any federal office who had previously held such a position if they engaged in insurrection or rebellion. But Section 3 also had a unique provision not found in any other amendment to the Constitution. It gave Congress the power by a vote of two-thirds of each House to remove this disqualification. Congress did exactly that in two amnesty bills: one in 1872 that kept a limited number of disqualifications for certain members of Congress and the military, and a second in 1898 that got rid of those remaining disqualifications. The plain language of these acts permanently removed the insurrection disqualification in Section 3 from the 14th Amendment. Additionally, Article I of the Constitution lists the three qualifications required to be a representative and senator (age, citizenship and residency). In 1995, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, the U.S. Supreme Court said that no state can impose any additional qualifications on any candidate running for Congress. That would certainly include candidates being forced to prove their innocence regarding any claims that they were somehow involved in the events of Jan. 6. The Supreme Court also said that a state cannot dress up an additional qualification as a ballot access measure, since that is an indirect attempt to accomplish what the Constitution prohibits [the state] from accomplishing directly. Any attempts by officials or courts to refuse to allow a candidates name to be listed on the ballot because of his or her alleged participation in insurrection clearly fail this test. Finally, attempts to disqualify candidates because they objected to the certification of certain electoral votes in the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 have no legal merit. The objections and the subsequent votes on the objections were done in full compliance with the process outlined in the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The Electoral Count Act provides that an objection can be filed jointly by a senator and a representative and, on such an objection being made, the joint session for the counting of electoral votes is temporarily suspended while Congress debates and votes on the objection. If the objection is voted down, the counting resumes, which is exactly what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. The effort to have members of Congress barred from having their names on ballots based on claims that they participated in an insurrection on Jan. 6 or objected to electoral votes should fail. Congress permanently eliminated the insurrection disqualification in the 14th Amendment in amnesty acts that are still in force today, and the objections to the electoral votes were filed in accordance with federal law. All of these efforts and threats are a desperate attempt to gain political advantage through unconstitutional actions. They are a waste of time and resources and should be dismissed as such. Hans von Spakovsky is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former Justice Department lawyer: heritage.org. He is the co-author of Our Broken Election: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote. TWIN FALLS Two teachers at South Hills Middle School were surprised Monday with a grant award to help supply free books to students. Nina Carrieri and Whitney Moses were each awarded a $750 grant by the Idaho CapEd Foundation, a nonprofit run by CapEd Credit Union. The award presentation came at a surprise meeting at the school. Accepting her award, Moses, school librarian, said the grants would contribute to the efforts South Hills has made to engage students in reading. Weve done a great job this year stepping up more time for independent reading, and doing a lot of things in our school to promote a great reading culture, she said. And this is one more step towards that to get kids excited about reading. Principal Sarah Praegitzer accepted the check on behalf of Carrieri, who was not present. The two teachers applied for the grants after Carrieri hatched an idea to bring in a book vending machine, as well as books to stock it with. Students can earn tokens to buy books through the schools positive reinforcement program. The machine should be in place for next school year. Our school already has in place a program for rewarding students for positive behavior, and so we thought this would dovetail nicely with that, Moses said. When they exhibit positive behavior, then they will get a token they can use to redeem books in the vending machine. It will be a very colorful, very visible way to get kids excited about reading. South Hills has a goal of helping students advance one grade level in reading each year. To help make this possible, each day starts with silent reading time. Another way to improve literacy levels, Moses said, was to offer a broad range of reading materials. As a school librarian, one of the things I know is how critical student choice is in getting students excited to read a book, Moses said. The vending machine will be stocked with a broad range of genres. Moses said the most popular thing in the school is graphic novels, but it will also be stocked with fantasy, science fiction and historical fiction. One of the things we want is for students to build their own personal book libraries at home so that they have print-rich environment, that they have access to books at all times, even during the summer, she said. So thats one of the reasons why its so important for us to actually give books to students to just keep. Tyler Harris, from the CapEd Foundation, said the month of March had the largest number of grant applicants they have had this year. Every once in a blue moon well have different teachers at the same school win, Harris said. Our board of directors saw both of these projects and voted highest on those. CapEd Foundation has distributed 12 awards around the state this month. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Idaho Gov. Brad Little on Monday vetoed a bill backed by Senate Republicans that would block most private businesses from requiring COVID-19 vaccines for a year. Little in a veto letter wrote that the legislation significantly expands government overreach into the private sector. I have been consistent in stating my belief that businesses should be left to make decisions about the management of their operations and employees with limited interference from the government, he wrote. The proposal comes after repeated attempts by the Idaho Legislature to prevent businesses from requiring vaccines during the coronavirus pandemic. Top Senate Republicans backed the latest proposal, Senate Bill 1381. Senate President Pro Tem Chuck Winder, R-Boise, who sponsored the bill, said its the most difficult legislation hes sponsored in his six terms. It seeks to thread the needle between employee and employer interests, Winder said during a floor debate earlier this month. The bill prohibits employers from requiring their employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. It allows exceptions for health care businesses, including assisted living and nursing home businesses, employers who require travel to foreign countries with COVID-19 vaccine mandates, and businesses required by the federal government to impose the mandate. The bill also establishes that business patrons, including concert attendees, could not be denied entry based on COVID-19 vaccine status. Little lauded his own conservative policies during the pandemic. I kept Idaho open while other states were on lockdown, never issued any mask or vaccine mandates and banned vaccine passports, he wrote. I am committed to working through the rule of law to keep Idaho the strongest state in the nation. The Legislature has constitutional authority to override a veto both chambers recessed for five days last week so they could address a veto, after this years session effectively ended Friday. Two-thirds of lawmakers present in each chamber must vote to override a veto. The Senate would need to secure 24 votes if all members are present. The House would need 47 votes. When the bill passed the Legislature, 24 senators and 45 House members supported it. TWIN FALLS Idaho has seen the second-highest decrease in union workers since 1964, statistics show, surpassed only by Utah. The number of union members in Idaho continues to decline. In 1964, more than 24% of Idahoans were part of unions, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2021, however, that number dropped to 4.7%, according to recently released statistics from the bureau. Nationwide, union members accounted for 10.3% of employed wage and salary workers in 2021. Traditionally, Idaho employers have opposed union activity. Local union organizers want to change long-held stereotypes about the pros and cons of union membership. Education and misinformation are one possible reason for Idahos low numbers, said Dan Green, an organizer for the local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. As an organizer, Ive walked into places and had my card thrown to the floor, called all kinds of names. You name it, Green said. It can be a mix, maybe that guy 15 years ago had a bad experience with an organizer, (or) maybe his dad did. In the 1980s, some union leaders used questionable tactics to encourage workers to join, he said. There were also allegations that unions were corrupt or connected to organized crime. The misconceptions that go along with it include that we are lazy, Green said, that we are entitled, we dont work as hard as the next guy, we cant be fired, all these things that people think. Unions work by organizing members of a trade to use their collective power to have a voice in the workplace, he said. Members have access to higher pay, better benefits, pensions, higher quality healthcare and protection from termination. My life took a very positive turn when I joined the union, Green said. It was security, especially in construction where we work ourselves out of work. Although it is difficult to compare earnings between non-union and union workers, its estimated union workers make at least 25% more than their non-union counterparts, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Also, the idea that union members cant be fired is false, he said. Idaho is a work at will state, according to the Idaho Department of Labor, meaning employers can terminate individuals without notice and without cause. Union members can also be terminated but there needs to be a cause. Another significant part of Greens job is explaining what a pension is. A 401(k) retirement plan is funded by employee contributions and sometimes matching payments from employers. With a pension plan, employers fund and guarantee a specific retirement benefit for each employee. If you go to the mall, go downtown, ask people how a pension works, they dont know, he said. And then a fair percentage of the people I explain it to kinda look at me like, Yeah, no. That cant be right. No one is sending me a check till the day I die. Come on man, whats the hook. Another factor that prevents people from joining is the cost of dues. Workers attitudes have changed over the past few decades, said Bonang Seoela, a regional economist with the state Labor Department. People are not willing to pay the dues to become union members but choose to negotiate their salary themselves instead. For the electrical workers union, dues start at $20 a month, plus 1% to 2% of gross wages for utility members. Journeyman wiremen pay $43 a month. Green said he thinks the dues are worth it for the benefits, but he understands there are good non-union jobs with great employers. Full family health care is another benefit, he said. Ive got five kids. With ours, its a $400 deductible per person or $1,200 per family. Thats a big deal. Kids break their arms. They break their legs. We all rode motorcycles the kids raced. All of that stuff. A lot of people are paying anywhere from $50 to $180 a week out of their own paycheck for health insurance that isnt even close to as good. Brendan Van Sickle has been a member of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union for seven years. Van Sickle, who works for Amalgamated Sugar Co., told the Times-News the local union has more than 200 members. After working for a little bit and understanding what the union is doing for me and what its been fighting for, I got involved, he said. He hopes unions get bigger and non-union workers continue to push to be unionized. More people involved helps make workers voices stronger. Although dues are a drawback for some people, he thinks there is another answer for low numbers across the state. I think the biggest is a lack of knowledge and a lack of understanding what we are capable of, he said. All we can do is try to educate and get the community involved to understand that if you can strengthen everybody, then its better in the long run. His yearly raise guaranteed by the union is worth paying $36 a month in dues. In fact, his raises over the past seven years have paid for his dues, he said. Not only that, its a brotherhood and a sisterhood. Love 0 Funny 3 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The body found Feb. 27 on Smith Lake Road has now been identified as that of Ricardo Gonzalez-Rodriguez. Gonzalez-Rodriguez was 53 years old and an undocumented immigrant who had recently come to the Martinsville area, according to a press release from the City of Martinsville. The identity was determined through medical records, DNA and the assistance of the Department of Homeland Security. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner from the Department of Health in Roanoke has determined the death to be accidental in nature. The body was reported to police by someone walking along Smith Lake Road on that Saturday evening. The police department is trying to contact family members in other states and in Mexico, the release states. Anyone with information about Ricardo Gonzalez-Rodriguez is asked t contact Sgt. Richard Ratcliffe at the Martinsville Police Department, 403-5331. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Three more houses have been added to the City of Martinsvilles Rental Inspection Program. The Rental Inspection Program passed in 2019 by City Council allows the city to investigate problem rental properties and is complaint-driven, said City Attorney and Assistant City Manager Eric Monday during the councils March 22 meeting. A number of properties were on its inaugural list. City Council voted to add to the list: 706 Spruce St., which Henry County GIS records list as owned by Dennis Fleet Wilson of Charlottesville; 203 Greyson St., listed by GIS as owned by James Westmoreland of Collinsville; and 818 Starling Ave., owned by William Bennett of Martinsville, according to GIS records. Only the house on Starling Avenue is presently occupied. The list is to protect the public health, welfare and safety of the occupants of each individual dwelling, Monday said, and properties that make the list are both blighted and in the process of deteriorating. Building Official & Zoning Administrator Kris Bridges gave a report on the properties: The house on Greyson Street is vacant without utilities, and repairs are pending receipt of materials. The owner plans to sell the house, Bridges said. Numerous complaints from the neighborhood for an extended period of time were made about the house, which is now condemned, he said. Mayor Kathy Lawson said she had received a call from the owner who was very adamant he had no intentions of ever putting a renter back in this property. It was not a good experience at that location with that particular tenant. Lawson also read a letter from someone who wants to sell a house nearby but is concerned that the horrid condition of 203 Greyson Street will bring down the value of the house she is trying to sell. Monday said city inspectors responded to all of the complaints, and the complainants, and one in particular could have been instrumental in doing something more did not wish to testify in court, and there is a witness as to how far we can go with these if we do not have cooperative witnesses to assist us. The city received a blast of complaints about 706 Spruce St. which was rented through a local agency which was not aware of the situation at the house, including vermin infestation, Bridges said. The rental agency got the property cleaned up, he said. When the City cleans up around bad properties, it charges a $200 administrative fee in addition to a minimum fee for mobilization of public works for a truck and crew, and charges are made by the amount of trash removed. Bills have ranged between $250 and $500, Bridges estimated. Regarding the house on Starling Avenue, The property owner hasnt done himself any favors by painting half of the side wall that is very visible, said Bridges. The upper story still its old green color, and jagged portions of the lower part white. The faded smiley face is still visible on the chimney. The house had a lot of trash which was cleaned up, but the city posted another warning last week because there was more trash, plus broken windows, Bridges said. It goes through a cycle, Bridges said. This is definitely one, along with the last one, that is primarily a tenant-driven problem, not necessarily a landlord-driven problem. Council member Danny Turner mentioned a house on the corner of Starling Avenue and Hairston Street. That house was put on the program in 2019, Monday said, and is condemned and vacated, Lawson and Monday said. During a public hearing portion of the meeting, Gina Ashbrook of Martinsville said her agency looks after the Spruce Street house. She said she does not think the city cleaned that property, because her company paid a lot of money to have it cleaned, and one of her workers was stopped an unidentified city worker in a city truck who would not let her worker enter the property without a HazMat suit. He made note of a particular condition inside the house, and Id love to know when somebody trespassed into the house without having the right to gain entry, she said. The owner of the house is spending a lot of money to get that house ready to sell it, she said. Keith Owens of Martinsville asked about the Rental Re-Inspection Program. Lawson said any property on that list has to be re-inspected before being rented out to any new tenant. Other properties on the Rental Inspection List are: Owned by Bennett Properties Inc: 433 Clearview Drive, last inspected Jan. 7 best its looked in years 912 Barrows Mill Road, last inspected Oct. 22, OK for rental Owned by William and Karen Bennett: 641 Stultz Road, occupied, not current in rent 214 Greyson St., last inspected May 11, OK for rental 216 Greyson St., last inspected April 20, OK for rental 232 Greyson St., occupied, not current in rent 112 Gravely St., last inspection Feb. 25, OK for rent 114 Gravely St., last inspection Sept. 27, OK for rental Owned by William W. Bennett: 120 Crescent St, last inspection Nov. 20, OK for rental 906 Spruce St., last inspected Feb. 10, OK for rental 319 Starling Ave., Condemned, vacant, work in progress; utilities off Feb. 14 1115 Chatham Heights Road, due for inspection April 30 714 Jefferson St., vacant, condemned, boarded 102 Moss St., #1 vacant, #2 services on; posted for trash. 1005 Adele St., posted for trash Owned by Affordable Christian Housing: 104 Massey St., new ownership Thurman G. Gravely Jr. and Naomi Skinner Gravely: 1139 Wray St., new ownership Jill Hairston: 721 W. Fayette St., OK for rental The session on the Rental Inspection Program took the third part of a 3 1/2 hour March 22 City Council meeting which also addressed suggested uses of American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 funding and saw the issuance of several proclamations. Before the meeting ended, Council members and staff took turns to make miscellaneous comments. Reversion The Supreme Court of Virginia has only very recently appointed a three-judge panel for the contested reversion with Henry County, Monday said. None of the judges are from the local area. The City of Martinsville is moving to have consolidated Henry Countys two lawsuits saying the Memorandum of Understanding and Voluntary Settlement Agreement are essentially worthless and cannot be enforced in any way. We are moving to have that case consolidated in front of the three-judge panel, under the position that the three-judge panel has the authority to rule on all matters related to reversion. I would anticipate that there would be some rulings from the three-judge panel coming relatively quickly, he said. Time capsule A time capsule in the old BB&T bank building on East Church Street originally Piedmont Trust Bank, which put the time capsule will be opened at 11 a.m. April 1, following specific instructions on the stone tablet marking the time capsule, Towarnicki said. Well have a little fun with that capsule opening, he said. We would like to reach out to any former Piedmont Trust Bank employees that may have been around at that time and certainly invite them to come and be part of that, he said. Other matters Council Member Chad Martin, who had participated in the meeting remotely, said, I wasnt going to comment on this before, but, um, I feel it necessary. There are certain things that have been said about this Council that is said that we have not been transparent, that we have not been open. It really speaks to the fact that people have not done their research. People have not really realized how much we have done over what this state has asked us to do to be transparent. Meaningful community engagement really speaks to what we do and over and abounds the work that we do to make sure that citizens are being heard. A lot of people dont know what we get paid, and Ill say it over and over again: We only get paid $400 a month to serve. We are only in this for the citizens of Martinsville. Council Member Jennifer Bowles announced Autism Awareness Day, hosted by Michael Venable, from 1-4 p.m. Saturday at Jack Dalton Park. Bowles said she attended the Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Breakfast with Lawson, where an Entrepreneurship Award was given to Wayne Draper of TAD Space and Right Now. American Legion Homer Dillard Post 78 received a community award. The breakfast was hosted by the local chapter of Omega Phi Psi. Mayor Kathy Lawson, also a member of the Exchange Club, said flags will be displayed today for Veterans Memorial Day. The flags will be taken down at night, and then all 164 flags will be brought to Roselawn Burial Park, where the club, along with CASA and FOCUS will display them throughout April to call attention to child abuse. It is a beautiful sight to see those flags waving in the wind, she said. Hazardous Waste Day is April 23 at the Bassett Warehouse. Neighborhood meetings will resume, Lawson announced, with the first one April 25 in the Southside area. A Memorial Day service will be held at noon May 30 at Roselawn Burial Park with retired army sergeant Shawn Morrison as speaker. One of the questions in a poll about uptown addressed rentable scooters, such as are in use in Roanoke and Danville, Lawson said. Cindy Edgerton had written a letter supporting allowing shared scooters uptown. Monday said he is researching about scooters, including what to be done with them when they are not in use, and how they are registered. Eighty percent of survey respondents favored having scooters uptown, said City Manager Leon Towarnicki. Another question on the survey was whether or not parking uptown should be monitored, Lawson said. She recommended the city paint lines to separate parking areas from the street so parked vehicles stay out of the road. Pearson said uptown employees should not take the spots meant for customers. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Justice Stevens reads the fine print Before law school, Id never been on a cruise. Though David Foster Wallaces famous journalistic argument against cruising had dampened my interest, first-year civil procedure utterly demolished it thanks to Carnival Cruise Lines vs. Shute, 499 U.S. 585 (1991). First, some legal context. (Along with my usual proviso: though I am a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, and please do not take anything in this piece as legal advice.) Suppose a passenger boards a cruise at a port in the United States. The boat then sails from one destination to another, often among multiple countries, through international waters. This raises two questions: what law applies to the boat and people on it, and where can they bring a legal claim if needed? For the boat itself, there is a long and boring answer pertaining to the maritime law of the country where the ship is flagged. In the same way that businesses often incorporate in Delaware due to its comparatively lenient rules, cruise ships tend to be registered under foreign flags to avoid expensive US laws (e.g., little things like taxation, wage & labor regulations, worker safety, etc.) If youve ever wondered why there arent more cruise ships touring the Hawaiian islandsor why a west-coast US cruise always includes a stop in Mexico or Canadaits because under US federal law, a ship that only visits US ports must itself be flagged in the US. This is so economically impractical that there is only one ship so flagged. But for the passengers, the answer is simple: the ticket is a contract, and these provisions are part of the contract terms. The choice of law provision determines which jurisdictions laws apply; the choice of forum provision determines where cases can be heard. And the two may have nothing to do with one another. For instance, the current Carnival terms adopt the federal maritime law of the United States and specify that all claims must be brought in federal court in MiamiDade County, Florida (where Carnival is headquartered, naturally). Bringing us to Carnival Cruise Lines vs. Shute. Eulala Shute was a resident of Washington state. During her Carnival cruise, she suffered injuries when she slipped on a deck mat while sailing in international waters off the Mexican coast. Contrary to the choice-of-forum provision in her ticketprinted, of course, in tiny type on the backShute filed an injury claim against Carnival in Washington. The court granted summary judgment in favor of Carnival because Shutes ticket contract required her to file her claim in Miami, and she had not. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit reversed. It found that requiring Shute to litigate in Miami was unreasonably inconvenient, so the choice-of-forum provision was invalid. Corporate America squealed in agony. The Ninth Circuit decision wouldve had the precedential effect of forbidding many existing and future choice-of-forum provisions within the Ninth Circuit, which covers about 20% of the US population. Thus the decision was appealed to the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court reversed again, restoring the judgment in favor of Carnival. The majority opinion gave more weight to the fact that Shute voluntarily agreed to the choice-of-forum provision. Though the provision made litigation less convenient for her, her inconvenience was offset by other foreseeable benefits. For instance, by consolidating litigation in one place, Carnival could handle injury claims at lower cost, thereby allowing it to reduce ticket prices. (Today, Carnival remains famous for its cheap fares and infamous for its ship disasters.) Justice John Paul Stevens, however, was not persuaded. He filed a dissent. What was his leading objection? The typography of the ticket: The [majority opinion] prefaces its legal analysis with a factual statement that implies that a purchaser of a Carnival Cruise Lines passenger ticket is fully and fairly notified about the existence of the choice of forum clause only the most meticulous passenger is likely to become aware of the forum-selection provision. I have therefore appended to this opinion a facsimile of the relevant text, using the type size that actually appears in the ticket itself. And so we arrive at one of the greatest flexes ever by an Article III judge. If you visit a law library, get volume 499 of the United States Reports from the shelf, and open to the last page of the opinion, you will find the reproduction of the Carnival ticketactual size, accurately foldedthat has since been glued into every copy by order of Justice Stevens. Was this necessary to make the point? No. Was it arguably a snippy and expensive gesture for a dissent? Perhaps. Nevertheless, I salute Justice Stevens for his empathetic cri de coeur against the lawyerly abuse of fine print. The Egyptian government has signed an agreement with France for manufacturing and supply of 55 air-conditioned rail carriages for the First Line of Cairo Metro for 776.9 million, the Arab country said in a statement according to Arab Finance. Alstom also per the contract will also ensure the maintenance over eight years, supply of equipment to maintenance workshops. The Egyptian government will contribute 58.4 million to the deal and will pay the loan over 40 years including a 15-year grace period and 25-year payment plan with an interest of 0.0092%. The Cairo Metros sixth line will start from Al-Khosous to New Maadi. It will span over 35 kilometers and include 27 stations. Qatar Fund for Development and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have launched a $200-million initiative to help hundreds of African farmers battle climate change, Doha News reports. Dubbed Nanmo, or growing together in Arabic, it was announced during the 20th edition of the Doha Forum in Qatar, where world leaders, diplomats, and activists all gathered under one roof to discuss prominent global issues, with the threats of climate change high on the agenda. The initiative will explore and invest in three main pillars: adaptation, access, and growth. The fund will be used to invest in climate-adaptive agricultural tools and technologies to develop strong food systems and markets to help small-scale producers and their communities across Africa. The initiative will also explore four main key areas to strengthen economies in sub-Saharan Africa, including equity, enterprise, agriculture, and access to technologies, financial tools, and emerging best practices as a driver of productivity, nutrition, and climate adaptation. Faced with growing tensions with President Salva Kiir, his vice president Riek Machar is trying to get help from East African countries gathered in the Igad bloc and in particular from the northern neighbor, Sudan. Khartoum is indeed one of the guarantors of the South Sudanese peace agreement, signed in 2018 after five years of civil war. On Saturday, March 26, in response to the deteriorating security situation, as Mr. Machar put it, he wrote a letter to the president of Sudans Transitional Council, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. He called for urgent intervention by the guarantors of the peace agreement. The past week has seen a rise in tensions in South Sudan, with Riek Machars withdrawal from the oversight of the security aspects of the peace agreement, and reported fighting in Upper Nile State. It is a helpless plea for help from Riek Machar to General al-Burhan. In February 2020, Machar reluctantly agreed to return to Juba without his army. A unified force of government and rebel troops was planned. But since then, the unification has not taken place. In his letter, Riek Machar asks that the unified forces finally be created. The vice president also denounced the systematic attacks on his bases by the government army. According to him, these attacks are increasing and are evidence of the deterioration underway, a cause for serious concern today, he wrote. We urgently request, Machar continued, the intervention of Igad and other international partners to convince President Salva Kiir not to plunge this country back into war. The official is calling for the demilitarization of the countrys main cities and a halt to attacks on the cantonment and training sites of opposition soldiers. On Monday, March 28, security forces were deployed near the presidential palace, and Riek Machar, the vice president, denounced the encirclement of his residence during the night from Sunday to Monday. Even though the encirclement was lifted early in the morning, tensions have risen. Riek Machar accuses Salva Kiir of having initiated a series of attacks against the oppositions bases. The president reiterated the need for sustained dialogue. He did not mention the fighting of the past few days, although he did refer to incidents along the way. The president urged the South Sudanese not to panic because, he said, the implementation of the agreement is on the right track. Emphasizing the importance of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, President Salva Kiir affirmed his intention to shed light on the atrocities committed during the civil war. He also ordered the National Security to declassify all information in its possession concerning the genesis of the conflict. It is now possible to enter Ghana freely, without restrictions. The country reopened its land and sea borders on Monday, March 28, which had been closed for two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This is a relief for traders, especially those located near the borders with Togo and Cote dIvoire. Sylvestre Salakope, a clothing seller, has just resumed his activities. I buy products in Togo and sell them here in Ghana. For two years, I couldnt cross the border, everything was closed. I estimate that I lost almost 1 million cedis, or 100,000 euros. I hope now that my business and commercial activities will resume and that life will start again as before. But the merchant nuances, things may not be simple. The problem is that the length of the closure has caused customers to change their habits. People who buy in Accra are now turning to suppliers in Dubai and neighboring countries and it will be hard for me and other traders to get them to come back. The other problem is that even though Ghana has opened its borders, Togo is still closed to travelers, says Sylvestre Salakop. The leader of Burkina Fasos former ruling party was released after being arrested in the morning, three days after he criticized the conditions of the house arrest of former President Roch Marc Christian Kabore, who was overthrown last January. Alassane Bala Sakande was finally allowed to return home, without prosecution, after spending the day at the gendarmerie, said the Peoples Movement for Progress (MPP) in a statement. He was arrested at his home early in the morning of Sunday, March 27, by elements of the gendarmerie, said his lawyers Antoinette Ouedraogo and Dieudonne Willy. According to the MPP, he was accused of having organized a press conference that would constitute an overflowing political activism of the party. On March 24, Mr. Sakande, president of the National Assembly at the time of the coup, called for the immediate release of Mr. Kabore, who has been under house arrest since the January 24 putsch, saying it had the appearance of detention. If there are restrictions on the movements and activities of political parties, it would be appropriate for this to be made known to everyone, the MPP said on Monday. Vaccination against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) during pregnancy is not associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes, according to a study published online March 24 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Maria C. Magnus, Ph.D., from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo, and colleagues conducted a registry-based retrospective cohort study involving 157,521 singleton pregnancies ending after 22 gestational weeks in Sweden (from Jan. 1, 2021, until Jan. 12, 2022) and Norway (from Jan. 1, 2021, to Jan. 15, 2022) to examine the risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes after vaccination against SARS-CoV-2. Of the participants, 18 percent were vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 while pregnant (12.9 percent with BNT162b2, 4.8 percent with mRNA-1273, and 0.3 percent with AZD1222). The researchers found that vaccination occurred during the first, second, and third trimester for 0.7, 8.3, and 9.1 percent of individuals delivering, respectively. There was no significant association for vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 with an increased risk for preterm birth (adjusted hazard ratio, 0.86; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.91 to 1.05), stillbirth (adjusted hazard ratio, 0.86; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.63 to 1.17), small for gestational age (adjusted odds ratio, 0.97; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.90 to 1.04), low Apgar score (adjusted odds ratio, 0.97; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.87 to 1.08), or neonatal care admission (adjusted odds ratio, 0.97; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.86 to 1.10). "Vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 during pregnancy, compared with no SARS-CoV-2 vaccination during pregnancy, was not significantly associated with an increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes," the authors write. One author disclosed financial ties to Pfizer. Explore further COVID-19 vaccination safe during pregnancy Copyright 2021 HealthDay. All rights reserved. For adults undergoing fracture fixation, conditionally essential amino acid (CEAA) supplementation is associated with a reduction in postoperative complications, according to a study published online March 14 in the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. Nathan R. Hendrickson, M.D., from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and colleagues conducted a prospective, randomized controlled trial (RCT) to examine the impact of CEAA supplementation on complications and skeletal muscle mass among adults after operative fixation of acute fractures. Four hundred adults were enrolled and randomly assigned to either standard nutrition or CEAA (200 participants to each). The researchers found that overall complications were significantly lower for the CEAA group versus the control group (30.5 versus 43.8 percent; adjusted relative risk, 0.71). At six weeks, fat-free mass (FFM) decreased significantly in control subjects (0.9 kg) and was maintained in CEAA subjects (0.33 kg). At subsequent time points, this difference in FFM was not observed. "Our results suggest that this inexpensive, low-risk intervention has considerable potential to improve outcomes after fracture fixation," the authors write. "This study will serve as the foundation for multicenter RCTs that are designed to assess the impact of CEAA nutrition supplementation in reducing complications and loss of functional muscle mass in high-risk populations." Explore further Can combined exercise and nutritional intervention improve muscle mass and function? More information: Nathan R. Hendrickson et al, Conditionally Essential Amino Acid Supplementation Reduces Postoperative Complications and Muscle Wasting After Fracture Fixation, Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (2022). Journal information: Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery Nathan R. Hendrickson et al, Conditionally Essential Amino Acid Supplementation Reduces Postoperative Complications and Muscle Wasting After Fracture Fixation,(2022). DOI: 10.2106/JBJS.21.01014 Copyright 2021 HealthDay. All rights reserved. Plot of anxiety survey scores (based on the six-item short form of the state scale of the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI Y-6), scored ranging from 6 to 24, with higher scores indicating higher anxiety) among participants in the guided observation, independent observation, and control groups. Credit: Supportive Care in Cancer (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s00520-021-06747-z The simple distraction of looking at art and discussing it helped bring calm to a group of patients at the Wilmot Cancer Instituteand also provided moments of Zen for the medical student who led the study. The daughter of an artist and former fashion designer, Emily Gore, a fourth-year student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, was looking for a research project that would marry her love of art with medicine. The results of her randomized clinical trial are reported in the journal Supportive Care in Cancer, showing that anxiety was significantly lower among patients who viewed art at the bedside. Gore recognized the isolation of hospitalized cancer patients, having to cope with visitor restrictions due to COVID-19 and the immunosuppression that puts them at great risk for infection. She and her mentor, Susan Dodge-Peters Daiss, M.A., M.Div., senior associate in Health Humanities and Bioethics at the UR Medical Center, who has a background in chaplaincy and museum education, curated dozens of art images online, ranging from landscapes to paintings of flowers, angels, and animals. The images were loaded onto an iPad, which was protected by a plastic sleeve to avoid transmission of germs. Their art therapy library included images from the UR's Memorial Art Gallery, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and other galleries from around the world. Their study included 73 patients; the objective was to compare anxiety levels between trial participants and a control group that did not view the art. Easing boredom and loneliness Pictures of animals were Melissa Ogletree's favorites. "I joke that I spend half my time on puppy TikTok because it makes me smile," said the 41-year-old Fairport woman. "Seeing the art really brightened my day." Cancer struck Ogletree suddenly and unexpectedly in February of 2021. She had not been feeling well for a few weeks with fever, headaches, exhaustion and ear-ringing. A telehealth doctor initially suspected COVIDbut when her own doctor insisted on blood tests and the results came back, he called Ogletree at 10 p.m. on a Thursday and told her to rush to the Emergency Department. "I'm a single mom of a son who was 13 at the time," she recalled. "I tried not to panic, packed my bag, and called my Dad. It was a long night. I had multiple blood transfusions and was transferred to Wilmot's sixth floor." The diagnosis was acute lymphocytic leukemia, placing her in and out of the hospital during much of the year. "During hospital stays it's very easy to get lonely and bored," Ogletree said. "Being a social person, that was the hardest part. The world outside keeps going and you are in the hospital, isolated. The pictures helped, and provided a distraction." In addition to Gore's art therapy study, Ogletree also participated in a clinical trial evaluating a leukemia medication that's more targeted than chemotherapy. "I'm pro-clinical trial and a big believer in science," Ogletree said, noting that her oncologists and the oncology nurses were "phenomenal" about answering questions and sharing resources. Ogletree is a two-time cancer survivor, having had thyroid cancer seven years ago. Although she is still undergoing out-patient treatment for leukemia, her latest biopsies are clean and she is working on rebuilding her immune system. Making a difference Gore's art project evolved from an existing program offered by chaplaincy services at Strong Memorial Hospital. It has been used in palliative care and on rehabilitation units at the medical center. Gore expanded it and tailored the program for patients who were admitted to Wilmot, some of whom were receiving treatment from Wilmot's Blood & Marrow Transplant and Cellular Therapies specialty unit. Many of them told Gore: "Thank you so much for doing this; I needed it,'" she said. The impromptu discussions with patients while viewing art were Gore's favorite part of the study. One patient allowed the art to transport her to a childhood home in Europe, and to muse about recent vacations. She and Gore discovered a shared affinity for the Finger Lakes. Many of the patients enjoyed landscapes that reminded them of the beauty of upstate New York. The images sparked a variety of emotions. One patient preferred soft-stroke pictures with blues and greens because anything with red was reminiscent of blood draws. Another appreciated the opportunity to ponder the meaning of the art, the study noted. "When I first started this project, I was just a second-year student and still learning how to talk to patients," Gore said. "But I was able to make a difference, and the patients really enjoyed what I offered to them. It was exciting and incredibly meaningful to bring all of my interests together in this wayduring the stress of medical school." More information: Emily Gore et al, The therapeutic potential of bedside art observation in hematologic cancer inpatients: a randomized controlled pilot study, Supportive Care in Cancer (2022). Journal information: Supportive Care in Cancer Emily Gore et al, The therapeutic potential of bedside art observation in hematologic cancer inpatients: a randomized controlled pilot study,(2022). DOI: 10.1007/s00520-021-06747-z Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Chronic low back pain (CLBP) is associated with reductions in brain volume in areas involved in pain processing, reports a study in Pain, the official publication of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). "These findings suggest that CLBP is related to lower brain volumes of pain-related regions not only in clinical patients with severe pain but also in the general population," according to the report by Mao Shibata, MD, Ph.D., and colleagues of Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan. Brain atrophy in pain-related regions seems specific to CLBP. As part of an ongoing Japanese study of disease risk factors (the Hisayama Study), the researchers analyzed brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from 1,106 participants aged 65 years or older. On a study questionnaire, 17.1% of participants reported having CLBP, defined as low back pain present for 3 months or longer. The remaining participants reported no chronic pain or chronic pain in areas other than the low back. Older adults with CLBP had lower education levels, higher rates of high blood pressure and depression symptoms, and lower rates of regular exercise. In analyzing the MRI scans, the researchers focused on 10 brain areas with evidence of involvement in pain processing. The presence of CLBP was linked to reduced brain volume (atrophy) in 4 of the 10 areasthe ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and amygdalacompared to participants with no chronic pain. In addition, a "significant cluster" (the left superior frontal gyrus) with reduced brain volume was identified in a relatively large sample size by using the QDEC (the Query, Design, Estimate, Contrast interface) approach, a method that did not prespecify brain region of interest. The patterns remained significant after adjustment for a wide range of sociodemographic, health, and lifestyle factors. For older adults with chronic pain in other areas, regional brain volumes in pain-related areas were no different compared to subjects with no chronic pain. Among participants with CLBP, those with more severe pain had lower brain volumes in pain-related areas, suggesting a "dose-response" effect. Some of the affected areas differed by age groupi.e., participants aged 65 to 74 years versus those aged 75 years or older. Chronic low back pain is a very common problem and the leading cause of years lived with disability. Yet approximately 90% of patients with CLBP cannot identify any clear specific cause or origin of their pain. A growing body of evidence suggests that CLBP is associated with lower brain volumes in pain-related brain areas. The new study adds new evidence of atrophy in pain-related brain areas in a large population-based sample, with varying degrees of CLBP severity or other types of chronic pain. The researchers emphasize that the study participants had not necessarily sought any treatment for CLBP. That's a new finding, as most previous studies have focused on patients receiving care for severe chronic pain. The researchers acknowledge some key limitations of their study: it cannot show any cause-and-effect relationship and cannot account for unmeasured factors, such as pain medication use, that might affect brain volumes. Dr. Shibata and colleagues conclude, "Further investigations are needed to clarify the mechanism underlying the association between CLBP and regional brain atrophy." Explore further Higher TENS dose may ease low back pain in older adults More information: Masako Asada et al, Association between chronic low back pain and regional brain atrophy in a Japanese older population: the Hisayama Study, Pain (2022). Journal information: Pain Masako Asada et al, Association between chronic low back pain and regional brain atrophy in a Japanese older population: the Hisayama Study,(2022). DOI: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002612 A graphic of a police officer on the scene of a cardiac arrest. Credit: Jake Dwyer, Michigan Medicine In a cardiac arrest, everything comes down to how quickly you "get on the chest." Every minute CPR is not initiated or an automated external defibrillator, or AED, is not utilized, the chance of survival decreases by 7-10%. A new study finds that survival rates increase when first responders in police and fire departments intervene in out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. However, the paper published in Resuscitation suggests these non-medical first responders are likely underutilized as lifesaving resources. Researchers from Michigan Medicine analyzed more than 25,000 cardiac arrest incidents in the state from 2014 to 2019. They found that police and fire first responders initiated CPR in 31.8% of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, and police accounted for AED use in 6.1% of incidents. Those interventions were associated with significantly higher chances of survival and hospital discharge with good neurological outcomes. "It is clear that these non-medical first responders play a critical role in time saved to chest compressions," said Mahshid Abir, M.D., M.Sc., senior author of the paper and an emergency physician at University of Michigan Health, Michigan Medicine. "In fact, in communities that were the highest performing in the state as far as survival is concerned, those responders work closely with emergency medical services to cross-train and debrief after incidents. When these agencies see their role as not just preventing crime or stopping fires, but also saving lives, it improves the overall chain of survival for cardiac events." The likelihood of the return of a sustained heart rhythm for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest didn't change significantly when CPR or defibrillation was initiated by an EMS provider versus a non-medical first responder. However, the survival rate for initiation by non-medical first responders was significantly higher. In fact, for patients who had CPR initiated by non-medical first responders, the odds of survival were 1.25 times higher. Similarly, patients who had an AED applied by police were 1.4 times more likely to survive. "Our findings reinforce what we know: whoever can start CPR and utilize an AED first is the best person to do it," said Rama Salhi, M.D., M.H.S., M.Sc., lead author of the paper and national clinical scholar at the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. "Sometimes, that's bystanders, but for a large percentage who have unwitnessed cardiac arrests, police and fire are on the scene first. Current evidence suggests this may be in upwards of 50% of cardiac arrest calls. In a disease where seconds and minutes matter, this can be lifechanging." Non-medical first responders can treat cardiac arrest similar to overdose, Abir says. When they receive an overdose call, law enforcement officials will often administer naloxone, or Narcan, which can reverse overdose and save lives. "If we make it mission-oriented to begin with, because you want to get buy-in from folks, we can give them the training to optimize giving chest compressions," said Abir, who is also an associate professor of emergency medicine at University of Michigan Medical School. "Some people are just not comfortable doing this, so training them in these applications, including AEDs, and purchasing them for first responder vehicles would save more lives in the most effective way." The research team recognizes that in some communities where there may be fractured or complicated relationships with law enforcement, people might not be comfortable with anything other than an ambulance arriving on scene. "All of these responders can make a huge difference in the survival of a person's loved one, so we need to educate the communities around when and for what to call 9-1-1, and also who shows up and why they need to open the door," Abir said. "If we take this extra step to educate around the emergency response system overall, it will help improve the relationships and outcomes." Michigan Medicine has partnered with first responders in Washtenaw and Livingston counties to create the Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Learning Community, which works to improve survival rates through awareness and implementation of lifesaving interventions in the region. The learning community has several work groups focused on AED accessibility, community engagement and more. "Ultimately the goal is to think creatively about how to get care to our patients in the least amount of time," said Salhi, an emergency physician at U-M Health. "This means empowering all members of our community to get involved and save someone's life." Explore further If you witness a cardiac arrest, your actions could save a life More information: Rama A. Salhi et al, The association of fire or police first responder initiated interventions with out of hospital cardiac arrest survival, Resuscitation (2022). Rama A. Salhi et al, The association of fire or police first responder initiated interventions with out of hospital cardiac arrest survival,(2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.resuscitation.2022.02.026 Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain EU health ministers on Tuesday said they wanted to better coordinate scattered national policies on giving out fourth doses of the COVID vaccine and asked the Brussels executive to come up with a plan next week. "Today we see states that have opened the fourth dose to over 75-year-olds, others to over 80 years, as is the case of France, while the Netherlands is at over 60 years," said Olivier Veran, the health minister for France which currently hold the bloc's presidency. "Others have not yet started, so it creates legitimate questions," Veran told reporters. Veran said that the ministers asked the European Commission to coordinate with the 27 member states, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) towards a common position. "The COVID 19 pandemic is of course still with us. Vaccination is as important today as it was a few months ago," said EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides. "Unfortunately, we are seeing vaccinations plateauing, at the same time as restrictions are being lifted and this is understandable" she said. Kyriakides said there are still more than 100 million unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated people in Europe. "Vaccination remains our best tool in combating the pandemic and we must be prepared for the autumn and winter months," she added. Explore further EU warily sees 'stabilization' of COVID wave 2022 AFP A medical staff member prepares a Pfizer vaccine during a COVID-19 vaccination campaign in Pamplona, northern Spain, on March 16, 2021. The European Medicines Agency said it has begun an accelerated review process for an experimental coronavirus vaccine booster made by the Spanish company Hipra. In a statement on Tuesday, the EU medicines regulator said its evaluation is based on preliminary data from laboratory studies and research in adults that compared Hipra's booster shot to the vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech. Credit: AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos, File The European Union's drug regulator said Tuesday it has begun an accelerated review process for an experimental coronavirus vaccine booster made by the Spanish company Hipra. The European Medicines Agency said in a statement that its evaluation is based on preliminary data from laboratory studies and research in adults that compared Hipra's booster shot to the vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech. It said early results suggest the immune response achieved with Hipra "may be effective" against COVID-19, including the hugely infectious omicron variant. Hipra is a protein-based vaccine and is made using similar technology as the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine, which was authorized by the EMA and other agencies in December. It contains two versions of the coronavirus' spike protein that were made in a lab, which are intended to prompt an immune response when a person is immunized. Hipra is intended to be a booster shot in people who have been fully vaccinated with a messenger RNA vaccine or a vector-based vaccine, like the ones made by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. Until now, Hipra has mainly focused on making vaccines for animals. Scientists believe using different types of vaccines can increase the body's immune response and numerous countries have adopted a "mix-and-match" strategy for COVID-19 vaccination. Hipra has reportedly sold tens of millions of its vaccine to Vietnam and has estimated it could make about 600 million doses this year. Explore further Spain approves human trials of homegrown virus vaccine 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday that it has approved a second booster shot of the Pfizer and Moderna coronavirus vaccines for people 50 and older. The agency also authorized a second booster for Americans 12 and older who are immune-compromised, such as those who have undergone solid organ transplants. The additional shot can be given at least four months after a first booster for both groups. "Current evidence suggests some waning of protection over time against serious outcomes from COVID-19 in older and immunocompromised individuals. Based on an analysis of emerging data, a second booster dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine could help increase protection levels for these higher-risk individuals," Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in an agency news release announcing the approval. "Additionally, the data show that an initial booster dose is critical in helping to protect all adults from the potentially severe outcomes of COVID-19. So, those who have not received their initial booster dose are strongly encouraged to do so," Marks said. Once the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decides exactly who should get the extra shot, it will become available immediately to those Americans. The CDC is expected to say that people in the age group may get a fourth shot, instead of recommending it, and to highlight vulnerable populations within that age group who should get the shot, the Washington Post reported. Some federal health officials strongly support second boosters, while others are skeptical, but they came to the decision to offer the shots in case infections surge again before the fall, The New York Times reported. Officials also said that people of all ages, including anyone who gets a booster this spring, should get another shot in the fall. If a major wave of COVID-19 surfaces in the next few months, a second booster dose for older Americans could save thousands of lives and prevent tens of thousands of hospitalizations. But if there is no significant surge until the fall, second boosters could waste vaccine doses, increase vaccine fatigue and raise questions about the federal government's strategy, according to the Times. Public health experts said they are finding it harder and harder to advise their patients on whether they should get yet another shot. "I've been getting multiple inquiries from lay friends over the past few days: 'What does this mean, and what should I do?'" John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, told the Post. "I find it increasingly difficult to tell friends what they should do. It's becoming really problematic." The primary benefit of a fourth shot is thought to be protection against severe illness, and that risk can vary dramatically among people 50 and older. A plethora of factorsunderlying health conditions, age and time since last booster dose or infectionall play a role in what a person should consider when weighing a second booster. Meanwhile, another surge of coronavirus cases in Europe is being driven by the highly contagious Omicron subvariant BA.2. It's now responsible for just over a third of cases in the United States, but federal health officials have said they don't expect it to fuel a large jump in cases. To date, one in 75 Americans aged 65 or older has died of COVID-19, accounting for three-fourths of U.S. deaths from the virus, CDC data show. More than 33 million (over two-thirds) of people in that age group have a first booster and would be eligible for a second, the Times said. Opinions about second boosters for older adults vary in the wider scientific community. "I am not persuaded there is substantial waning of protection against severe disease after the third dose," Dr. Philip Krause, a former senior regulator at the FDA, told the Times. But while healthy younger people with one booster are protected at the moment, older people "should probably start receiving fourth shots now," Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and medical professor at the University of California, San Francisco, told the newspaper. The fact that officials approved, but didn't recommend, a second booster could frustrate the public, according to Dr. Judith Aberg, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. Approving a second booster without meetings of the FDA and CDC advisory panelsas happened with the first boosters could draw criticism, another expert suggested. "This is a complex decision that involves a pretty deep dive, and I think it would really benefit from public discussion," Dr. Jesse Goodman, a former chief scientist at the FDA, told the Times. "I would not want to see an advisory committee skipped on this." While no advisory panel meetings on second boosters are planned, the FDA has scheduled a meeting of its advisory committee on April 6 to discuss the administration's overall future vaccine strategy. Explore further Biden administration to offer 2nd COVID boosters to those 50 and older More information: Visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more on Visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more on boosters 2022 HealthDay. All rights reserved. Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Researchers from SafeConsume conducted a study in four European countries (Portugal, France, England, Hungary) interviewing 156 11- to 18-year olds about their food hygiene education, attitudes towards foodborne illness and their existing food safety behaviors. Although students seemed to have good knowledge of personal hygiene rules such as handwashing, they were not clear about risks, causes or consequences relating to foodborne illness. Students in Hungary, England and Portugal even believed foodborne illness was expected, and for some, an acceptable part of life. Many of those who experienced illness associated this with food eaten outside of the home, however, food cooked at home is not intrinsically safer, and anecdotal experiences of becoming ill after eating food from outside the home may not always be accurate as incubation periods from foodborne pathogens vary. Across all countries, family environment had the greatest influence on the skills, knowledge and behavior of the students and was a major factor in whether they followed hygiene practices; one student in England stated: "Yeah, I'd rinse it off [raw chicken] before I chop it . . .because my mum told me to." These findings suggest that poor hygiene behaviors can be perpetuated due to generational transfer of skills. The fact that many students interviewed only had practical experience in their own kitchens at home may contextualize these results, schools in France and Portugal offer kitchen space only in vocational schools, in contrast to schools in England and Hungary. Students in England were also more likely than any other country to take up work experience in a kitchen, which was found to result in strict adherence to food safety behavior, although generally more so at work than at home. The research aimed to make recommendations to help the development of educational resources to address existing issues regarding food hygiene in a format that would be engaging to young people. Results suggest these groups are accessing cooking resources largely online, and resources that bridge the gap between education and domestic and social situations could be beneficial for driving practical development of better food safety behaviors. This should come alongside development of engaging educational resources, although for optimum uptake in educational settings food hygiene should be embedded further into the national curriculum. More information: Rowshonara Syeda et al, Young People's Views on Food Hygiene and Food Safety: A Multicentre Qualitative Study, Education Sciences (2021). Rowshonara Syeda et al, Young People's Views on Food Hygiene and Food Safety: A Multicentre Qualitative Study,(2021). DOI: 10.3390/educsci11060261 Provided by Nofima Oregon will no longer require terminally ill patients to be residents of the state to use its law allowing physician aid in dying. A lawsuit that challenged the residency requirement as unconstitutional was settled Monday, with the Oregon Health Authority and the Oregon Medical Board agreeing to stop enforcing the requirement and to ask the Legislature to remove it from the law that was first enacted in 1997, the Associated Press reported. "This requirement was both discriminatory and profoundly unfair to dying patients at the most critical time of their life," Kevin Diaz, an attorney with Compassion & Choices, the national advocacy group that sued over Oregon's requirement, told the AP. Compassion & Choices sued on behalf of Dr. Nicholas Gideonse, a Portland family practice physician and associate professor of family medicine at Oregon Health and Science University who couldn't write terminal prescriptions for patients who lived just across the Columbia River in Washington state. While Washington has a similar law, it can be hard to find providers who will do it in the southwestern part of the state, where many hospital beds are in religiously affiliated health care systems that prohibit it, according to the AP. "Any restriction on medical aid in dying that doesn't serve a specific medical purpose is difficult," Gideonse told the AP. "In no other way is my practice restricted to Oregon residents, whether that's delivering babies in the past or other care that I provide." A group called National Right to Life opposes physician-assisted death, and spokeswoman Laura Echevarria said that without a residency requirement, Oregon risked becoming the nation's "assisted suicide tourism capital," the AP reported. But that's unlikely, according to Diaz. He pointed out that Oregon's law has a number of safeguards, including a requirement that physicians determine whether patients are mentally capable, and that it's extremely difficult for terminally ill patients to make long trips to another state, and that many people want to die near home with their loved ones by their side, the AP reported. "There's no tourism going on," Diaz said. Over 2,100 people have died after ingesting terminal drugs under the law since it took effect, according to data published last month by the Oregon Health Authority. California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont, Washington state and Washington, D.C., have approved similar laws, all with residency requirements. Montana's Supreme Court has ruled that state law does not prohibit medical aid in dying. Explore further New Jersey court ruling lets assisted suicide go ahead More information: Visit Death With Dignity for more on Visit Death With Dignity for more on medical aid in dying 2022 HealthDay. All rights reserved. Cumulative years of life lost (YLLs) to COVID-19 per 1000 for all ages. Calculated with population and life expectancy data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 and COVID-19 mortality data from INED. Credit: Journal of Global Health (2022). https://jogh.org/2022/jogh-12-05007 A comparative study of premature deaths to COVID-19 has shown that of 20 countries, the oldest citizens in England and Wales had the highest rate. The study by University of Manchester epidemiologists, published in the Journal of Global Health reveals 5.78% of the over-90s were lost to the disease. In Sweden the figure was 3.82%, Italy 3.18%, Germany 2.46% and France 2.08%. In the Netherlands, the figure for the over 95s was 3.87%. A substantial increase in deaths in care homes in England and Wales in the first three months of the pandemicestimated by other researchers at 79%is likely to have contributed to the figure, the team argues. Other studies have also shown that fatality in UK care homes was 270300 times worse than Australia, which has a similar health care system, demographics and care home settingsimplying that the different approach to COVID-19 measures, particularly at the start of the pandemic, could be a contributory factor to this high death rate. In terms of overall COVID-19 deaths per 1,000 people, South Korea had the lowest at 0.04, but England and Wales again had the highest at 2.39. The study also showed in some countries, the relatively young had high rates of years of lives lost (YLL)- a measure of premature death. YLL calculations take into account the remaining life expectancy that someone would have been expected to achieve had they not died at that age. In the United States the figure was 9 YLL per 1,000 people in the under 50s, higher than the other 19 countries in the study. Moldova (8.49 per 1,000), Romania (7.2 per 1,000) and the Ukraine (5.72 per 1,000)the only 3 countries in the study classified as low or middle incomehad the next largest YLL in the under 50s. The study was carried out by extracting population statistics and cumulative COVID-19 death data from the National Institute for Demographic Studies' Demography of COVID-19 Deaths database. Greg Williams, who led the study said: "It is widely acknowledged that the risk of mortality from COVID-19 increases with age, with the highest death rates amongst older age groups. "As a novel disease, it is reasonable to suggest that deaths from COVID-19 occur earlier than would otherwise have happened, even for the older populations. "But most mortality measures use an upper endpoint for defining when a death is premature, such as 70 or 75 years of age. "We argue there is a considerable burden of premature mortality within much older age groups who have died as a result of COVID-19 too, particularly in England and Wales when compared against the other countries in our study. "Due to the different ways countries record and collect their data, the figure in the paper looks at the over 90s whereas other countries don't have this age category. However, when we lowered the age category to 75 and 80 years and over, England and Wales still had the highest deaths as a proportion of that population. "For 80 years and over, this was 2.86% of the population, with Italy the next closest with 1.75%, and for 75 years and older, this was 2.09% with Belgium the next highest at 1.94% of the population. "That implies the difference in approaches to lockdown and other measures could have been a contributory factor to the higher death rate in these age groups. "Whatever your age and wherever you live, your life should be valued. The approach of this study values all life equally wherever you are from. It's important for decision makers to compare what is happening locally with other places around the world to ensure they are not inadvertently accepting inequalities felt locally." Professor Arpana Verma, a co-author of the paper, said: "This approach towards understanding COVID-19 mortality provides an alternative narrative to recognize how different countries have coped with the reality of the pandemic. "This compares what actually happened with how they were expected to cope through approaches such as the Global Health Security Index, which found in 2019 that the United States and the United Kingdom were the two most prepared countries for an epidemic or pandemic." More information: Greg Williams et al, Years of life lost to COVID-19 in 20 countries, Journal of Global Health (2022). Greg Williams et al, Years of life lost to COVID-19 in 20 countries,(2022). jogh.org/2022/jogh-12-05007 Credit: CC0 Public Domain Researchers from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have found that dysfunction in an important cell subtype in the brain's neuronal network contribute to chronic symptoms in the neurodevelopmental disorder Dravet syndrome. The findings were published today in the journal Cell Reports. Dravet syndrome is a form of genetic epilepsy that is characterized by seizures that begin in the first year of life, along with differences in childhood development and features of autism spectrum disorder. Children with Dravet syndrome are also at an increased chance of early death, making proper diagnosis and treatment of the disorder critical. More than 90% of children with Dravet syndrome have a pathogenic, or disease-causing, variant in the SCN1A gene, which makes the protein Nav1.1, a sodium channel that is important for the activity of seizure-suppressing cells called interneurons and, in particular, a subtype of interneuron called the parvalbumin interneuron. "Dravet syndrome affects 1 in 14,000 children in the world and has a profound impact on children and their families," said Ethan Goldberg, MD, Ph.D., a pediatric neurologist and Director of the Epilepsy Neurogenetics Initiative (ENGIN) at CHOP and lead author of the study. "We can model Dravet syndrome in the laboratory to understand precisely how the loss of SCN1A produces the clinical features characteristic of the disease to drive development of novel therapies, and, one day, a cure." Prior work from the Goldberg lab showed that abnormal electrical activity of these parvalbumin neurons in a preclinical experimental model of Dravet syndrome was only transient, with these neurons recovering normal activity in the chronic phase of the disorder. This created a conundrum for the research community: why do patients with Dravet syndrome continue to have seizures, cognitive impairment, and features of autism spectrum disorder? In this study, the researchers developed a method to assess parvalbumin interneuron function at two different points in time. Early disease severity is caused by abnormalities in parvalbumin interneuron electrical activity, which allows neurons to send a message to neighboring neurons. However, chronic dysfunction was due instead to impaired synaptic transmission; while parvalbumin interneurons recovered the ability to generate electrical activity, this activity did not spread down the nerve or "axon" to the synapse to inhibit of other neurons, which is required for seizure suppression. While more work is needed to translate this research into direct human applications, the researchers note that SCN1A may be a viable therapeutic target for Dravet syndrome patients, particularly if there are ways to increase its expression in the axon to overcome impaired signaling and synaptic transmission. "A prediction of our work is that the success of therapies under development may depend on the ability to increase expression of Nav1.1 at the parvalbumin interneuron axon," Goldberg said. Explore further Research boosts case for new gene therapy to treat severe form of epilepsy More information: Developmentally-regulated impairment of parvalbumin interneuron synaptic transmission in an experimental model of Dravet syndrome, Cell Reports (2022). Journal information: Cell Reports Developmentally-regulated impairment of parvalbumin interneuron synaptic transmission in an experimental model of Dravet syndrome,(2022). Atherosclerosis is a condition affecting the cardiovascular system. If atherosclerosis occurs in the coronary arteries (which supply the heart) the result may be angina pectoris, or in worse cases a heart attack. Credit: Wikipedia/CC BY 3.0 A study published in the journal eBiomedicine identifies new biomarkers that predict the presence of subclinical atherosclerosis. The study was carried out by scientists from the Spanish cardiovascular research network (CIBERCV) working at the CNIC and the Instituto de Investigacion Sanitaria-Fundacion Jimenez Diaz-Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (IIS-FJD-UAM), in partnership with other institutions. "Atherosclerosis is a leading cause of cardiovascular disease, which is one of the major health problems in the world and places an enormous burden on health care systems. It is therefore a major goal to identify the disease in its earliest phases, so that interventions can halt its progression before it reaches an advanced stage," said study coordinator Jesus Vazquez, lead investigator of the CIBERCV and head of the Cardiovascular Proteomics laboratory at the CNIC. Early prevention is the best approach to combatting the cardiovascular disease pandemic. Atherosclerosis has a long preclinical phase and is usually diagnosed only at advanced stages, often after a cardiovascular event. The use of noninvasive imaging techniques to detect atherosclerosis allows a more precise stratification of risk than is possible with conventional methods, and current clinical guidelines recommend the use of imaging techniques to assess individual risk in combination with scales based on traditional risk factors, especially in individuals at low-to-moderate risk according to these scales. Nevertheless, cardiovascular imaging techniques are not universally available, and the extent of atherosclerosis varies substantially between individuals in the same traditional risk category. There is therefore much interest in developing alternative rapid and noninvasive methods to estimate atherosclerosis burden. Plasma biomarkers that track subclinical atherosclerosis, like the ones described in the eBiomedicine study, provide a way to sidestep the limitations of imaging approaches and to improve the prediction of cardiovascular risk. The PESA CNIC-SANTANDER study The new study is part of the PESA CNIC-SANTANDER study (Progression and Early detection of Subclinical Atherosclerosis), a large-scale project run in partnership between the CNIC and Santander Bank. PESA analyzes the development of atherosclerotic plaques in an asymptomatic population of bank employees who were aged between 40 and 54 years when the study began. The PESA results clearly demonstrate that atherosclerosis is prevalent in the general population, firmly establishing the value of early detection. In the new study, the research team analyzed a collection of 880 blood plasma samples obtained from PESA study participants. The samples were examined by proteomic techniques with the aim of identifying circulating biomarkers of atherosclerosis in its early, asymptomatic phase. From an initial panel of candidate biomarkers detected in this analysis, the team selected three proteins for validation in a collection of more than 3000 plasma samples from the ILERVAS cohort. These samples were screened using rapid and widely available techniques through a partnership with Binding Site Ltd. and Hospital Quironsalud Madrid. Summarizing the findings, Jose Luis Martin Ventura, a CIBERCV scientist at the IIS-FJD-UAM and one of the study coordinators, said "the main contribution of this study is the development of a biomarker panel that can identify the presence of atherosclerosis in healthy, asymptomatic people, including individuals with none of the classical cardiovascular risk factors." Study first author and CNIC scientist Estefania Nunez affirmed that "the biomarkers can be measured in blood samples using standard methods that are widely available in hospitals and clinical analysis laboratories." "The CNIC group has broad experience is the use of proteomic techniques for the massive analysis of samples from patients with different cardiovascular conditions, and we have worked for several years with our colleagues at IIS-FJD on the identification and validation of cardiovascular biomarkers," explained Jesus Vazquez. Several studies have shown that the detection of coronary calcification or carotid plaques with noninvasive imaging techniques improves the prediction and reclassification of risk compared with conventional risk factors. However, these imaging techniques have their limitations. "Imaging techniques allow the efficient detection of atherosclerosis, but these methods are costly and require highly trained personnel and specialized apparatus, which are not available in some regions and countries," said Vazquez. "Traditionally, the risk of developing cardiovascular disease has been assessed from a set of factors like smoking, body weight, and high blood pressure. However, many people with none of these risk factors develop atherosclerotic plaques, and this has driven interest in the early detection of the disease. The new discovery offers an alternative method for detecting the presence of atherosclerosis that is both fast and easily available," explained Martin Ventura. This is the largest study to date to explore the association between plasma protein concentrations and subclinical atherosclerosis using high-performance unbiased quantitative proteomics. The study demonstrates the potential of proteomics linked to mass-spectrometry for the discovery of human disease biomarkers. Explore further How bone marrow contributes to the development of atherosclerosis More information: Estefania Nunez et al, Unbiased plasma proteomics discovery of biomarkers for improved detection of subclinical atherosclerosis, eBioMedicine (2022). Journal information: EBioMedicine Estefania Nunez et al, Unbiased plasma proteomics discovery of biomarkers for improved detection of subclinical atherosclerosis,(2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.ebiom.2022.103874 Provided by Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III (F.S.P.) Radiation therapy is one of the pillars of cancer treatment. However, many countries lack the appropriate infrastructure, compromising access to cancer care. Credit: National Cancer Institute/ Unsplash Radiation therapy, or radiotherapy, is one of the pillars of curative oncology and plays a key role in providing better outcomes for patients with some of the most common cancers, like prostate or breast cancers. In high-income countries, over a half of all cancer patients receive radiation therapy to cure or control the disease, and sometimes for palliative care. However, many developing countries still face radiotherapy equipment shortages that compromise access to even basic or standard cancer care. In a study led by Queen's and University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), researchers developed a new tool to help set priorities for radiotherapy infrastructure building: an index that combines information on linear accelerators (LINACs)the primary technology used in radiation therapydistribution, cancer incidence, and the distance patients need to travel to access radiotherapy services. A pilot analysis was conducted using data from the public health system in Brazil. Results, published in The Lancet Oncology show that all Brazilian states have insufficient numbers of LINACs. "There is a national LINAC shortage: Brazil has 121 percent less than the required radiotherapy capacity," highlights Fabio Ynoe de Moraes, oncologist and assistant professor in Queen's Health Sciences, who led the study. Although the situation is worse in Brazil's poorer regions, like Midwest, North, and Northeast, even states with stronger healthcare infrastructure face equipment shortages. Dr. Moraes was surprised to realize that only 30 percent of cancer patients in the Sao Paulo state, the wealthiest in Brazil, are receiving radiation therapy. "Literature suggests that 5060 percent of patients should receive radiotherapy during their cancer journey," he says. Another concerning result is that, because some states have little to no available equipment, patients often must travel long distances to access therapy. For instance, the data show some patients in Amazonas needed to travel an average of 3,841 kilometers to Sao Paulo to receive treatment. The team hopes the analysis can assist in public health planning, prioritizing regions with the most need for radiotherapy infrastructure. "Connecting to decision makers and high-level politicians is our end goal now in Brazil, but we know how challenging it can be. We started by engaging some key stakeholders, like the Brazilian societies supporting oncology and NGOs, and distributing our results via our social media networks," says Dr. Moraes. In addition to advocating for better cancer care in Brazil, Dr. Moraes and his colleagues also plan to use the same index to evaluate radiation therapy infrastructure in other countries, including Canada and the US. "The problems of access and distribution of LINACS are not unique to Brazil," Dr. Moraes states, noting that even higher-income countries face challenges regarding equality in cancer care. Even in these nation access to LINACs, he believes, is usually uneven and tends to benefit wealthier patients. In Canada, we see patients needing to travel hundreds of kilometers to reach a cancer care center, and treatments can be limited by patients' ability to access transportation or financial constraints. "If you consider that a standard radiotherapy treatment encompasses five to 35 visits to a cancer center, it will translate to thousands of kilometers traveled, and also expenses on gas, hotel, food, and parking," warns Dr. Moraes. Accessing appropriate infrastructure, while fundamental for cancer care, is not all, and countries face additional challenges in guaranteeing long-term sustainability of radiation facilities, including training human resources, doing overtime maintenance and, when needed, upgrades. Regulatory, technical, and societal investments are also needed to expand access to radiation therapy, including, for instance, safety regulations, power supply chains, and meeting parking and road needs. Dr. Moraes hopes that the new tool can be used to inform decisions regarding cancer care access worldwide. "We believe that the LS index can have a substantial impact on public health planning and investment not only in Brazil, but globally," he says. Explore further Optimizing balance of treatments in prostate cancer More information: Gustavo A Viani et al, Prioritising locations for radiotherapy equipment in Brazil: a cross-sectional, population-based study and development of a LINAC shortage index, The Lancet Oncology (2022). Journal information: Lancet Oncology Gustavo A Viani et al, Prioritising locations for radiotherapy equipment in Brazil: a cross-sectional, population-based study and development of a LINAC shortage index,(2022). DOI: 10.1016/S1470-2045(22)00123-1 Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A tool used by GPs to help identify seriously unwell children may not accurately detect or exclude acute illness, according to an evaluation using data from UK general practice. The study, led by Cardiff University, assessed data from more than 6,700 cases and concluded the widely used National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Traffic Light system "cannot be relied upon" and is "unsuitable" for use as a clinical decision tool. The findings are published in the British Journal of General Practice. Lead author Amy Clark, a final-year medical student at Cardiff University, said: "Our study found the tool on its own cannot identify, with sufficient accuracy, those children who have a serious illness, nor those who can safely be managed at home. An accurate primary care tool is vital to help GPs make the right decision to ensure unwell children receive the care they need, while avoiding unnecessary hospital admissions. "Further research is now needed to update or replace this tool. The need has become even more pressing during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially following the relaxation of restrictions which has led to an increase in respiratory illness among young children and high demand for emergency care, despite many not being seriously ill." Children account for around 40% of the average GP's workload, with under-fives being seen on average six times per year. More than two million children under five attend hospital emergency departments every year. To help GPs assess children, NICE created the Traffic Light tool which groups symptoms into green, amber, or red, corresponding to low (manage at home), intermediate (can be referred to hospital or sent home with advice), or high risk of serious illness (refer urgently to hospital). The tool, used to assess unwell children under-five, has been in use for 15 years. Previous studies have evaluated its use in children already in hospitals, but this is the first study to assess its accuracy using data from children consulting in UK general practice. The researchers linked data from GPs and hospital admissions for 6,703 children in England and Wales to assess whether their traffic light category matched the severity of their illness. The primary outcome of interest was a hospital-diagnosed serious illness within seven days of visiting the GP. They found: Around 32% (2,116) of children were categorized as redbut only 0.5% (10) of these had a serious illness requiring hospitalization; The majority of children were categorized as amberabout 63% (4,204) and only 6% (383) were labeled green; The tool's red category had a sensitivity (the ability of the tool to correctly identify children admitted to hospital with serious illness) of 58.8% and specificity (the ability of the tool to correctly identify children without hospital admission with serious illness) of 68.5%; Combining the red and amber categories improved the sensitivity to 100% (however did reduce specificity to just 5.7%); Overall, the incidence of serious illness in children presenting to general practice is low, at just 0.3%. "Our research suggests that if GPs had followed the NICE Traffic Light tool, they would have referred a third of all children (those categorized as 'red') urgently to hospital, despite most of these children having a mild self-limiting illness," said Ms. Clark. "Using 'red' or 'amber' as the threshold would ensure that no seriously ill children were missed, but at the cost of referring a substantial number of children to hospital." Dr. Kathryn Hughes, co-author on the study and senior clinical lecturer at Cardiff University's School of Medicine, said: "It was really surprising to us that this tool has never been validated in UK general practice, despite being recommended by guidelines since 2007. Accurate assessment in general practice is also vital to ensure secondary care services can function effectively." Ms. Clark added: "We believe our results are important not just for GPs, but also trainees and students who are often taught this assessment system during their training. A new, more accurate, system could help junior healthcare professionals gain confidence assessing unwell children." Explore further New digital tool could help youth experiencing mental health crises receive better hospital care More information: Accuracy of the NICE Traffic Light system for detecting serious illness in acutely unwell children presenting to general practice: a retrospective cohort study British Journal of General Practice. DOI: Journal information: British Journal of General Practice Accuracy of the NICE Traffic Light system for detecting serious illness in acutely unwell children presenting to general practice: a retrospective cohort study. DOI: doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2021.0633 The next time you feel aches or soreness, you might consider skipping the pain reliever and reaching instead for an old photo. Nostalgia -- that sentimental feeling of longing for the past -- can reduce pain perception, according to new research published in the journal JNeurosci. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Liaoning Normal University asked study participants to rate their level of pain from heat stimulation while looking at pictures that were nostalgic -- depicting old cartoons, childhood games or retro candy -- compared with more modern pictures. During the tasks, an MRI machine also scanned the 34 participants. Researchers found that observing pictures that triggered childhood memories was linked to participants reporting weaker feelings of pain. "By managing their discomfort, rather than eliminating or reducing the (unpleasant) stimuli, people can use nostalgia to reframe their painful experiences," Joe Yazhuo Kong, one of the study authors, said in an email. "Nostalgia is a predominately positive emotion that people easily perceive in their lives," said Kong, a research group leader at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Lab for Integrative NeuroImaging of Pain. "For instance, people can feel happy and peaceful when browsing their pictures grouped with family or friends." Previous studies have also demonstrated the psychological and emotional benefits of nostalgia. One study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology showed that nostalgia -- triggered by a writing task -- decreased the perception of pain intensity among people suffering from chronic pain. Further research found that people had an increased pain tolerance following thoughts of nostalgia, according to Cathy Cox, an associate professor of psychology at Texas Christian University. "It's cool to find more and more research bridging the overlap between these psychological and emotional constructs that we're studying, and these biological and behavioral responses," said Cox, a psychologist with a focus on nostalgia. She was not affiliated with the study. Given that it's both rare and expensive to use MRI scans for psychology research, according to Cox, not much was known about the underlying biological mechanisms for those positive effects of nostalgia. "During this process of nostalgia-induced pain relief, the thalamus plays a crucial role," Kong told CNN. The thalamus, often described as the relay station of the brain, is responsible for passing along sensory information and motor signals to the cerebral cortex. The new study showed that the thalamus integrates that "nostalgia information" and triggers a pain response that is more controlled. Viewing nostalgic photos also decreased activity in two pain-related areas of the brain. And it's not just old photos that can lead to positive responses due to nostalgia -- music, movies or certain stories can also trigger these. So can odors, such as perfume, or the taste of certain foods, such as candy from childhood or cookies that remind someone of home. All these nostalgia triggers could prove to be useful in the future for providing cheap, easily accessible pain management tools to people. Cox and Julie Swets, a doctoral candidate at Texas Christian University, are also working on research about how nostalgia can be used as a resource to manage conflict in romantic relationships and increase satisfaction between partners. But Swets cautioned that using nostalgia for pain relief might not be a blanket solution for everyone. Previous studies highlight that nostalgia is a personal emotional experience that varies in terms of frequency and intensity. "What nostalgia is is this feeling of connectedness with other people," Swets said, noting that the cues in many studies are designed to make people think of good times with family and friends. "So, people who are a little more avoidant of intimacy with other people, or more likely to prefer distance over close relationships ... those people don't reap the same benefits of nostalgia." As with other positive psychology interventions, such as practicing mindfulness or gratitude, the impacts can depend on the person. The researchers involved in the new JNeurosci study also have plans to use different age groups in future research and to look into the impacts of more personal nostalgic cues rather than generic nostalgia ones such as old music and movies. "We expect a much stronger pain-relieving effect if participants observe personal scenarios, whatever visual or nonvisual cues," Kong told CNN. The-CNN-Wire & 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved. You must be logged in to react. Click any reaction to login. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The Legislature could do more to support creation and preservation of affordable housing in Montana, three experts told the Interim Local Government Committee earlier this month. The measures they recommended included supporting Tax Increment Financing districts and giving mobile-home residents more opportunity to purchase their properties. Andrea Davis, the chairperson of the Montana Housing Coalition and the executive director of the affordable housing nonprofit Homeword in Missoula, told the committee that state lawmakers need to support legislation that helps those with the lowest incomes. Theres a growing affordability crisis, Davis said. I read about it every day. Its been a growing issue for years and decades in the state and its clearly boiling over. I was shocked to find out that Kalispells median home price has surpassed that of Missoulas. She noted that theres been double digit growth of home prices every year during the pandemic in most parts of Montana. Were kind of on a collision course with a number of issues, Davis said. Theres more people moving here. Theres higher materials prices and labor costs. Every sector of our economy is impacted by this. Davis said that because the town of Lewistown has a Tax Increment Financing district, Homeword was able to work with the city to build 16 permanently affordable homes in a historic building. Those types of projects are difficult without the use of TIF funding, she noted. Two similar projects have been built in Billings, and Homeword has used TIF funding for affordable housing projects in Missoula. Tax Increment Financing is a tool that allows developers to use the property taxes generated by their own new projects, rather than having those taxes go to general taxing jurisdictions. The money can be used for things that benefit the public, such as deconstruction of aging buildings or infrastructure improvements. David Fine, the economic development program manager for the city of Bozeman, said the state needs to allow local governments to utilize TIF as well. Tax Increment Financing allows cities to improve infrastructure to construct workforce housing, he said. It provides a true source of leverage. Fine said Bozeman has utilized TIF to construct 93 affordable housing units recently. Davis also called for legislators to allow community land trusts to be more easily built and financed. Preserving existing mobile homes should also be a big priority, Davis said, as they are the only affordable option for many people with the lowest incomes. She recommended an expansion of the state law that allows capital-gains savings of 100% for owners of mobile home parks who sell the property to the residents. That would create more resident-owned communities, Davis said. She also called for legislation that would force owners of mobile home parks to give the residents an exclusive 45-day period to make a fair-market offer before other buyers could get in on the action. As it stands today, people that live in manufactured-home parks dont have the opportunity to compete with some really pretty heavy outside investors that are eyeing what they call that high asset class, Davis said. Thats why manufactured-home parks continue to be picked up and the prices of those lot rents and utility increases continue to go up and in some cases get doubled. In Missoula this winter, a manufactured trailer village was purchased by an out-of-state buyer who immediately raised lot rents and told some residents they'd have to move. Davis said the term mobile home is a euphemism. They are truly meant to stay where they are, she said. This is an affordable way to preserve homeownership. Davis also called for the state to create workforce housing tax credits. A bill last session, HB 397, did exactly that and passed the Legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Greg Gianforte. Gianforte vetoed the bill for several reasons, one of which was that the Montana credits would be tied directly to the level of available federal housing credits, meaning Gianforte thought there would be an unanticipated risk to the programs fiscal stability. Davis said making the state housing credit a fixed number, rather than tying it to the federal level, is a relatively simple fix. Rep. Dave Fern, a Democrat from Whitefish, said he expects a number of bills to emerge in the coming years to tweak or change Tax Increment Financing law in Montana. "What we can all agree on is it's a great idea," he said. "And I think sometimes there's an expanse of ideas on what is the appropriate way to use TIF." You must be logged in to react. Click any reaction to login. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 3 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. BOISE, Idaho Idaho Gov. Brad Little has vetoed legislation that would make it illegal for most businesses to require the coronavirus vaccine. "I am vetoing this legislation because I am a lifelong advocate of limited government," Little wrote in his transmittal letter on Monday, saying the bill "significantly expands government overreach into the private sector." Several states have passed laws either requiring vaccines for certain employees or barring government agencies from issuing vaccine mandates. But broader bans against business vaccine requirements are rarer. Last year, Montana became the first state in the nation to ban most businesses from requiring vaccines as a condition of employment. That law, like the one proposed in Idaho, cited "discrimination" as the reason. Montana's law was challenged in federal court, however. Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that coronavirus vaccine requirements could remain in effect for health care workers whose employers accept Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, at least as long as a related interim federal rule remains in place. Idaho's bill, dubbed the "Coronavirus Pause Act," would have subjected public and private employers to a misdemeanor charge punishable by a $1,000 fine if they require vaccines as a condition of employment or service. It includes exemptions for situations involving federal law, existing employee-employer contracts, and businesses that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding. "I have been consistent in stating my belief that businesses should be left to make decisions about the management of their operations and employees with limited interference from the government," Little wrote. "For the same reason, I sued to stop President Joe Biden's vaccine mandates three times, successfully challenging his unprecedented government overreach into the lives of American workers and the decisions of free businesses." Late last week the Idaho House and Senate both adjourned until Thursday, giving them time to wait out any vetoes from Little. At the time, Republican Senate President Pro-Tem Chuck Winder cited the Coronavirus Pause Act as one of the bills the lawmakers were watching. "It's difficult to override a veto," Winder said late Friday night. "But we think that's the only way we can do it, if we hang around for five days." The Coronavirus Pause Act passed both chambers with large margins, but not a veto-proof margin in the House. Proponents said it would prevent businesses from discriminating against those who don't want to or cannot be vaccinated. But opponents said the measure allows discrimination against people who are vaccinated and doesn't protect vulnerable people. The bill would have even applied to families that hire in-home workers, but it would have expired in April of 2023 one year after the termination of all state emergency declarations related to coronavirus. Love 1 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The countys plans to demolish a long-vacant, crumbling building in Uptown Butte have expanded to include two adjacent buildings on East Park Street that have served as the Butte-Rescue Missions thrift store. That will increase the tab to taxpayers, at least in the short-run, but county officials say its the safe, logical way to go. Butte-Silver Bow officials say it would have cost up to $150,000 just to stabilize a shared wall between the now county-owned vacant building at 135 E. Park Street and the thrift store so demolition of the vacant structure could proceed. But a structural engineer also inspected the thrift store buildings and determined they, too, were unstable and unsafe and needed repairs would cost well over $200,000. Under a new plan, the county would pay the Mission $38,572 for the thrift store property and up to $12,000 in relocation expenses, then tear all three buildings down. The tab for demolition hasnt been set but its likely to cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars. The countys Urban Revitalization Agency agreed Tuesday to provide the payments to the Mission but the overall plan including the expanded demolition must also get a nod from the Council of Commissioners. The council is likely to consider it next week. Both thrift store buildings were built before 1911 and the Mission has owned them for the past 20 years. The building at 135 E. Park was privately owned but the county deemed it dangerous and acquired it in a settlement in 2020 so it could be torn down. J.P. Gallagher, Butte-Silver Bows chief executive, said the Mission didnt neglect the thrift store buildings but others had in prior years. There are lots of other buildings in Uptown Butte that end up in the governments lap due to neglect, he said. We become the bad guy because we have to do something about it, he said. That makes it tough. No one in government wants to lose more historic Uptown buildings. We want to keep them if at all possible, but that doesnt mean at all costs because sometimes theyre not recoverable. URA board members said the nonprofit Mission provides needed services to the homeless and hungry and does great work. That and safety and cost factors justified the property purchase, they said. I think this has to happen but I dont want to see it as being a precedent for this board, said longtime member Bob Worley. The Mission was in a tough spot, Gallagher said, because they were trying to keep the doors open to the homeless shelter on Platinum Street. The new plan, he said, was the right thing for the community. The URA oversees Buttes Uptown tax-increment district. It captures property taxes from new developments in the district and the board reinvests the revenue in the same area, but the money still comes from property taxpayers. Mission officials said they were grateful for the countys support in the dilemma and are suspending thrift store operations for now. They are looking for alternate locations but said nothing has been decided about any future thrift store. The store provides some monetary support for overall Mission operations but is not a huge source of income, Mission officials said. But it serves other purposes, too, including sales training for those trying to overcome homelessness. We will continue to provide food, shelter and cold-weather clothing, including blankets, for anyone in need at our campus location on Platinum Street, said Mission Executive Director Brayton Erickson. The way we receive donations may change but our mission will remain the same as we care for this community. Silver Bow Properties owned the building at 135 E. Park Street before the county deemed it dangerous several years ago. The roof and second floor had collapsed among other things. After more than 18 months passed, the county reached a settlement agreement with Silver Bow Properties in the fall of 2020. Under the deal, Silver Bow Properties gave ownership of the building to the county and agreed to pay $25,000 toward demolition costs. The costs could run $50,000 to $60,000 but county officials said without the settlement, the matter could drag out months longer and a dangerous building would still be standing. Gallagher said Tuesday that Silver Bow Properties had paid the $25,000. Prep work for demolition began in February 2021 and it offered a closer look at a merged or meshed wall with one of the thrift store buildings. More analysis on it was needed so demolition was halted. Structural engineers with Stahly Engineering ultimately determined the buildings shared a wall and it would cost $150,000 to stabilize it so demolition of 135 E. Park could continue. To determine whether that made sense, the engineers did an analysis of the thrift store buildings. That, according to a summary given to URA board members, showed the buildings were unstable and in need of extensive structural repairs that would well exceed $200,000. The county has been working with the Mission, including Erickson and Mission Board President Bill McGladdery, on how to proceed. When they first came back and said, Well, its going to be $150,000 to build this wall, we just sat there and said, You know, as taxpayers and as individuals, we have a hard time seeing the county expend those types of funds, McGladdery told URA board members Tuesday. The bottom line, officials said, is that shoring up the wall would not fix the serious structural problems in the thrift buildings. URA board Chairman Dale Mahugh said Butte-Silver Bow and Uptown Butte could benefit from the plan in the end if the county finds new uses or developers for the site. It is a desirable area and a situation where there is probably a much higher and better use going forward with new construction, but at the same time, Butte-Silver Bow can actually monitor and control what the face of that new building will look like so its a good fit, he said. The URA spends much of its money on projects that restore buildings, but board member Bob Brown said this was a justified exception. That was in part due to the great work the Mission does, he said. You people deserve a lot of praise for what youve done, he said. Theres not any joy in this but I think its the wisest course. Love 5 Funny 0 Wow 2 Sad 8 Angry 11 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. An online fundraiser for the family of a Livingston man killed in an apparent bear mauling on March 24 has raised more than $81,000 in two days. Craig Clouatre, 40, was found dead on Friday by Park County Search and Rescue near the Six Mile Creek drainage in Paradise Valley. The searchers were called out on Thursday by Clouatres friend, Hans Friedmann, who reported Clouatre missing when he didnt meet at their vehicle at the agreed time and had not phoned or radioed in. The two were reportedly hunting for shed elk antlers in the Absaroka Mountains when the incident occurred. Clouatre is survived locally by his wife, Jamie, and four children. Jamie wrote a thank you note on the GoFundMe page, saying she didnt have many words really right now but I appreciate every one of the sentiments and memories of the most amazing person I have ever known, my husband. More than 750 people had contributed to the fund to help the family. The contribution goal is $85,000. Authorities have not tried to track down the animal because it does not appear to have been a predatory attack, Morgan Jacobsen, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks Region 3 communication and education program manager said on Monday. Five members of FWP's staff helped investigate the incident. "We can't confirm if it was a grizzly or a black bear," Jacobsen said. "There was not enough evidence to confirm it without a doubt." It will take several weeks for state wildlife officials to confirm whether a grizzly was responsible through testing of animal hairs found at the site, Jacobsen added. "No bear was seen during any part of the investigation," he said. There's no indication Clouatre used bear spray or a firearm in self-defense, Jacobsen said. The mauling occurred south of the Dome Mountain Wildlife Management Area and southeast of Daily Lake on Forest Service land. A fund has also been set up locally for the family at American Bank in Livingston, established by family friend Bev Dawson. The fund is meant to help defray living and education expenses for the children and to help pay the familys mortgage. In addition to the devastating loss of Craig, the Clouatre family lost their home to fire two years ago, have rebuilt and are recently back in the home with a newly increased mortgage, an email from Joanne Gardner Lowell said. Park County is full of such compassionate and giving people, Dawson said in the email. Were establishing this fund to give people a place to give what they can, which will make a real difference for this wonderful family. Compassionate Neighbors, Craig Clouatre Family is being administered by Dawson and Compassionate Neighbors, a human services support group in Livingston. The fund takes no fee and transfers all donations directly to the family. The IRS allows gifts of up to $16,000 per year with no tax liability. American Bank of Montana is located at 120 N. 2nd, Livingston, MT 59047. Phone 406-222-2265. Checks or cash will be accepted. The fund is not set up to take online donations. Please mark donations Compassionate Neighbors, Craig Clouatre Family. The support in this community is incredible and I know it comes from Craig ... who he was, a joy, a truly kind, good, GOOD man, Jamie wrote. Thank you all for everything! We all lost something and the world is a hell of a lot dimmer. Clouatre is the first victim of a grizzly bear mauling this year in Montana. Last year, two people were killed in grizzly maulings, one a cyclist who was camping in Ovando and the other a West Yellowstone guide fishing along the Madison River. A Massachusetts native, Clouatre reportedly moved to Montana 20 years ago. Bichler wrote on the agencys Facebook page that in speaking to Jamie, she told him that She and the family understand that Craig loved to be in wild places and was well aware of the risks involved with that. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 1 Angry 0 MUSCATINE Volunteer firefighters are an important asset to every city, especially small towns and they need to have the same skills as full-time firefighters. Recently, the Muscatine Fire Department did its part to ensure area volunteers have the skills they need to succeed. Volunteer firefighters from Fruitland, Buffalo, Montpelier and Blue Grass spent the weekend at Muscatines Station 2 in order to complete their Firefighter 1 requirements. The volunteer firefighters learned strategies on handling hazardous materials during potential hazmat emergencies. After a 16-hour training day, volunteers put their knowledge to the test, all while gaining hands-on experience. According to Muscatine Fire Mechanic and Fire Inspector Jason Verschoore, who led the class with Firefighter Craig Chelf, this hazmat course is part of a 160-hour Firefighter 1 curriculum that all firefighters must pass regardless of whether they are full-time or volunteer. Normally, (these firefighters) wouldnt get these hands-on skills without a hazmat team to provide it, so weve been providing it the past two years, Verschoore said. Verschoore believes the volunteers enjoyed themselves during the class and appreciated the opportunity to work with the equipment in-person instead of simply reading about it. They were able to actually get into the hazmat suits and do some of the stuff that probably theyll never see again in their career, he said. It was all stuff that they normally wouldnt do, but the State of Iowa requires that all firefighters are trained to the level of Firefighter 1, which is your entry level firefighter. Because they still have to have that training, this opportunity allows them to get that and be ready to respond to various incidents in their own districts. While skills learned through training is the most important part, the bonding that occurs during the long training days is also valuable. Being able to prepare volunteers for certification exams in April is meaningful to Verschoore. We provide hazmat training to five different counties within eastern Iowa, and thats part of our agreement to provide training to the responders in those areas at the operations level, he said. Its great because it gets everyone out there and kind of builds that comradery and takes away the perspective of career firefighters versus volunteer firefighters. It shows that were all here for the same reason and the same goal of protecting our communities. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. MUSCATINE Marc Hines is the new CEO at Crossroads Inc. When asked about how he was feeling about this latest career opportunity, Hines said that he was feeling lots of things, including excitement and humility. Ive been working with individuals with disabilities for 16 years, and certainly at the start of that career I really didnt have eyes on any sort of executive position, Hines said. As time went on, maybe that dream crystallized a little more, but its still a little bit surreal. That said, theres plenty of real work and real issues that need attention, and this place has a great foundation. Hines previously worked at Systems Unlimited, where he served as a direct support professional, a department manager and a department director. He also spent five years at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics assisting the intellectual disability-mental illness program as an associate director of community outreach and advocacy. Hines said he didn't intend on a career helping those with disabilities, but realized he gained enjoyment, meaning and fulfillment through this work. The last five years at the hospital was a great learning experience, but I always knew I wanted to be back in the world of providing community support, he said. The timing worked out really nicely (for this job). I thought that I had built up enough experience and that I might be qualified to do this. So I took a shot, and after the first couple rounds of interviews it switched from just wanting to get back into community support to specifically wanting to work for this agency. Prior experience, passion for helping clients achieve their greatest potential, along with strong strategic leadership made the decision to hire (Hines) as the new CEO easy," Crossroads Board President Darren Williams said. "The Crossroads Board is very excited about (Hines) and the future that lies ahead. Hines will work with the Muscatine Welfare Association and the Muscatine Center for Social Action (MCSA) as part of a collaboration with Muscatine Vision 2020. Its been a great start for him and I think our senior team is all very excited about both his experience and our next phase in growth in moving forward, Megan Francis, marketing and communications director for Muscatine Vision 20/20 said. I think the fact that he started on the front lines and moved his way up gives him an understanding of both challenges and opportunities at every level. With the staffing crisis thats happening right now, having that experience and understanding really helps him relate to everyone that makes this organization work. In the short-term, I want to get to know the people that we serve, the staff that we employ and the community that were in, Hines said. Long-term, I want to be the best provider of services in Muscatine, but Id also like to be in the same conversation with the best providers in the state, and that will come with focusing on developing our staff and paying attention to all the little details of what goes into caring for people well. Love 3 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Frontier Iowas most prominent Black citizen. Thats the first mention of Alexander Clark in the book I recommend to any adult serious about studying his life and times. "Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier," by Robert Dykstra (Harvard University Press 1993). Iowa a bright radical star? Wow. Who said that? General Ulysses Grant, presidential candidate, November 1868. If you dont know the reference, I invite you to learn. I will look closer at the Iowa of 1868 in a future column. As these little columns are expanding out of a one-time effort for Black History Month, I beg readers to notice that I am the farthest thing from an academically trained historian. Local or community historian is a label I reluctantly accept only when I cant avoid it. So please let me insist on amateur status, observing that Ive learned just enough to realize how very little I know. In this regard, discovering Dykstra has been life changing. No exaggeration. His story-telling is a marvel; his grasp of big themes and tiny nuances, the methodology and the rigor and the relevance to social and political landscape today. Wow. If you care about how our settler forebears shaped the demography of present-day Iowa, find Dykstra. March is Womens History Month. We are able to learn so much about the men in the tale but so little of their mothers, wives, sisters, daughters. My study of Dykstra didnt prepare me to wonder, and I confess I gave it little thought during my first years helping Kent Sissel with Alexander Clark projects. The second book I recommend for serious learners is by Leslie Schwalm at the University of Iowa, "Emancipations Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest" (University of North Carolina Press 2009). From the UI website: Professor Schwalm is a historian of gender and race in the nineteenth-century U.S., and her research focuses on slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation. She holds a joint appointment with the Department of Gender, Womens, and Sexuality Studies and with History. I heard her speak at Muscatines Musser Public Library in February 2008. The announced topic: Emancipating Iowa: Lincoln's Proclamation and Black Freedom in the Upper Midwest. I love listening to real historians. I love reading their books and articles. I went in ready to hear our Alexander Clark story lauded and my grasp of it affirmed. Sitting together, Kent and I were keen to learn. As always, we were ready to offer additions and corrections, too. (Its what we dowhat we still do today. Another of those stories for another time.) Perhaps we felt ready for our heros minor role in the lectures broad sweep, but Schwalms female-centered treatment of the topic shut our mouths. What about the women, she asked? We can only conjecture because the historical record tells so little, she said. From Emancipations Diaspora: Born in the early 1820s in western Virginia, a slave of Jacob Ankrom, Catherineor Cade, as she was called by her ownerswas given as a wedding present (along with hogs, sheep, cows, and bedding) to Ankrom's daughter, Rachel. Catherine would have been very young at the time, perhaps three years old, and she appears to have been one of three slaves held by Ankromthe other two, adults, may have been her parents. When her new mistress married Patrick Cheadle, she moved to Morgan County, Ohio, and took the toddler Catherine with her, most likely severing Catherine's own family ties. In Ohio, Catherine's status is not evident from the historical record; the Ohio constitution outlawed slavery in 1803, but the state soon severely circumscribed African Americans with Black laws, and as late as 1830 the federal census still recorded slaves (six in number) in the supposedly free state. The most suggestive piece of information we have about Catherines status is a manumission record that was not legally signed until after Catherine and the Cheadles had left Ohio. Catherine accompanied the couple when they migrated to lowa sometime before 1842, but it was not until 1851 that Patrick Cheadle drafted Catherine's manumission papers, and it would be another six years before Rachel, his wife, would add her signature. By this time, Catherine had married, established her own household, and started a family in Muscatine; she had become politically active, joining with other African Americans in petitioning the state legislature to revoke Iowa's Black codes. The record of Catherine's status is inconclusive, though she clearly sought documentation of her freedomperhaps in the aftermath of her 1848 action to protect a fugitive slave from capture in Muscatineand that documentation was given by her former mistress only reluctantly. We finally meet husband Alexander 10 pages later. They married at Iowa City. She is listed among the founding members of Bethel A.M.E. in 1849. The Clark monument in Greenwood Cemetery bears her name. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Three members of the Muscatine Community College chapter of Business Professionals of America attended the State Leadership Conference in Des Moines, Feb. 20-21. These students joined other Iowa post-secondary students in competitive events, general sessions, and recognition and awards presentations. At the conference, all of the MCC students qualified for participation in the National Leadership Conference to be held in Dallas, Texas this May. The competitive events individual results are as follows: Quyen Do 1st Place Advanced College Accounting 2nd Place Digital Marketing Concepts 3rd Place Personal Financial Management 3rd Place Digital Communication & Design Concepts 3rd Place Management/Marketing/Human Resources 5th Place Project Management Concepts Lindsey Hunter 4th Place Computer Network Technology 5th Place Device Configuration & Troubleshooting Ricardo Pena 1st Place Business Law and Ethics 1st Place Banking and Finance 3rd Place Interview Skills 5th Place Computer Network Technology 6th Place Financial Math & Analysis The BPA chapter from MCC also received a Quality Chapter Award. This recognition is given to chapters that uphold high standards and have incorporated community service, professional development, opportunities to attend BPA conferences, and fundraising (for themselves and others) into their programs. Ricardo Pena, a first-year BPA student, received an Outstanding BPA Member award for his dedication to the MCC BPA. The students attended business meetings, listened to campaign speeches, participated in the campaign rally and caucuses, and voted in a general election. Through many activities, the students discovered new insights into the individual contributions that members make to the overall effectiveness of a team. Students commented that it was a great experience, and they look forward to attending Nationals. Business Professionals of America is a national organization and premier CTSO (Career and Technical Student Organization) for students pursuing careers in business management, office administration, information technology, accounting, and other related career fields. The organizations activities and programs complement classroom instruction and provide preparation of a world-class workforce through the advancement of leadership, citizenship, and academic and technological skills. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The Mara Phones management buyout team has claimed it has secured an investor that can help save the companys South African factory and the jobs of its employees. Two of the factorys main funders Standard Bank and the Industrial Development Corporation initially put the factory up for auction in early February. That came after the R1.5-billion facility fell short of expectations, with a lack of uptake of Mara smartphones and Covid-19 lockdown regulations putting a damper on operations. The auction was put on hold pending the outcome of a business rescue process that started on 25 February 2022. The business rescue practitioner has promised their plan will be published by no later than 6 May 2022, by which time it will be clear whether the factory will revive operations or be sold off. Sylvester Taku, who previously served as Mara Phones managing director in South Africa, has explained a buyout management team that he now heads has secured an investor that will ensure the business is adequately capitalised. Taku asserts that there is affinity in the market for affordable smart devices in South Africa that can also be exported to other African countries. The fact that we have secured the partnership of a tier-one raw material supplier will significantly improve margins and provide us with the capability of always having a broad range of devices with the latest specifications, Taku explained. We have the support of our channel partners and the support from the government in creating an enabling environment for locally manufactured smart devices. Taku said there were changes in the pipeline for the company, but he would only divulge these if the relaunch under the buyout team gets the go-ahead under the BRP plan and from the lenders. There will be an exciting marketing campaign amongst other activities planned to get the brand out there, he stated, without providing further details. The team will have to confront allegations from factory workers regarding serious labour violations. These include women not being allowed to wear bras, staff only permitted to have lunch in designated areas if the food was vegetarian, failure to pay full salaries, and income tax deductions not being paid to Sars. We believe that compliance with all laws and regulations are bare necessities. We intend to go further and ensure that all employees are content and proud to be part of the organisation, Taku stated. He told MyBroadband he had been struggling with his own finances due to Maras decline because he was not paid his salary for more than a year. It has been a stressful time, with most employees looking at me to save the company and their jobs, Taku said. He feels a sense of responsibility for the companys fate, with many families of the roughly 200 factory workers depending on its continued existence. The support of stakeholders, advisors, friends and family, and having the end goal of ensuring that the original vision of South Africa taking its place as a manufacturer of smart devices in the 4IR era, keeps one committed and motivated, he added. Taku wants to ensure that the legacy of Mara Phones in South Africa is not another failure in the attempt to participate in advanced electronics manufacturing in South Africa. Mirror Trading Internationals liquidators have quietly scheduled a meeting of creditors for 09:00 on Friday, 1 April 2022. No notice of the meeting was posted to the liquidators website or to a public Telegram channel where members of the scheme follow developments in the case. The liquidators only appear to have given notice of the meeting in the Government Gazette. The notice is buried on page 235 of Gazette No. 46022, published on 11 March 2022. According to the notice, the meeting will be held at the Master of the High Courts office in Cape Town with proof of claims on the agenda. It is unclear whether the meeting will be streamed online, as past meetings have been, or whether there will be a recording. Mirror Trading International (MTI) was a bitcoin-based network marketing scam claiming to offer automated trading services initially in forex and later in cryptocurrency derivatives. Chainalysis named MTI the biggest cryptocurrency scam of 2020. MyBroadband exposed the inner workings of MTI in September 2020 thanks to a data leak from a group calling itself Anonymous ZA. The scheme collapsed at the end of 2020 after CEO and founder Johann Steynberg vanished, apparently while travelling in Brazil. Steynberg was arrested in Brazil on 29 December 2021 a year after he disappeared when he allegedly presented fake identification to law enforcement officers. Court documents last estimated that 29,421.03379 bitcoin flowed through MTI nearly R21 billion at current exchange rates. A source with knowledge of the case told MyBroadband that a subsequent analysis revealed that over 46,000 bitcoin (R32.8 billion) passed through the scheme. The liquidators reclaimed 1,281 bitcoin in early 2021 from Belize-based brokerage FXChoice with the help of South Africas Financial Sector Conduct Authority. They immediately liquidated the cryptocurrency upon returning it to South Africa, receiving around R1.1 billion. This is not the first time MTIs liquidators have surprised creditors with an unexpected manoeuvre. In November 2021, the liquidators rejected all claims at the first meeting of creditors. According to the liquidators, this was to avoid wasting time debating bad claims and having creditors foot the legal bills for days of worthless debate. During the second meeting of creditors on 4 February, the liquidators supported the Master of the Courts decision to only recognise one claim that of the sequestrated estate of one of Steynbergs companies. This allowed the liquidators to pass their resolutions, effectively granting themselves a blank cheque, while voting down the proposed resolutions of 50% shareholder Clynton Marks. Marks had proposed that a committee of former members be established to oversee the liquidators decisions. The liquidators said this wouldve been a bad idea, as it would only have served to slow the liquidation down. On 3 March, at a court hearing to have MTI declared an unlawful scheme, the liquidators made a deal with a controversial group called GetaQuid, represented by JC Kriel. Under the terms of the deal, the liquidators agreed to pay victims an initial dividend. While no amount was specified, MyBroadband heard from several people in court that the liquidators would pay an initial amount of 20c in the rand. However, the deal is only valid if the court declares MTI a pyramid scheme. Therefore, those who want to take the deal must withdraw any opposition to the liquidators application. 1.1 billion reasons to be suspicious As a result of these surprise moves, there is mistrust between some creditors and the liquidators. It should be noted that the liquidators are facing a hostile and well-resourced subset of former MTI members who stand to lose money if it is declared a pyramid scheme. However, some creditors are also concerned that the clandestine actions by the liquidators will give them sweeping powers, allowing them to enrich themselves while leaving victims with nothing. MyBroadband contacted MTIs liquidators for comment, but they did not respond by the time of publication. Update (30 March) Feedback from the liquidators In response to MyBroadbands questions, the liquidators said the following legal procedures need to be explained: The referred meeting entails attesting to the legality of claims already in possession of the liquidators. Such a meeting is one of many to follow where claims received by the liquidators will be considered. The liquidators continually receive claims that they must submit to the Master at a special meeting designed for the sole purpose to submit further claims. Due to the volume and nature of the claims submitted, the Master will probably reprocess the claims. The legal process is followed in terms of which the liquidators will, after the meeting has been closed, consider and accept the claims (if the said claim is correct). During the meeting, claims will be considered and nothing else. Since it is the sole purpose of the meeting to consider claims, no other matter will be dealt with during the meeting. If any creditor personally wishes to have his/her claim verified at such meeting, he/she is welcome to do so, but the Master will consider the claim together with all the other claims submitted. The liquidators contend that they did announce this meeting to creditors other than through the Government Gazette. At the second meeting of creditors, it was announced that various further meetings would be held with the sole purpose of validating claims, they said. The sole purpose of the meeting is to present the claims to the Master for consideration no discussion will take place. For this reason, the meeting will not be streamed and there wont be a recording, the liquidators said. Update (1 April) Meeting postponed Master of the High Court Zukile Mabusela was unable to preside over the meeting today on Friday to unforeseen circumstances. The meeting was postponed until 8 April 2022. Now read: Mirror Trading International victims get offered payout Author Robert Louis Stevenson is being honored with a pair of events this week: Stevenson Poetry Night and a hike at RLS State Park. Local guide Ken Stanton will lead a hike to the cabin where Stevenson and his wife, Fanny, spent their honeymoon at RLS State Park at 11 a.m. Friday, April 22. Register at stevensonmuseum.org. Join the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum at the St. Helena Public Library in celebrating the art of the spoken word at Stevenson Poetry Night at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, April 21. Part of Arts Council Napa Valleys Arts in April program, the evening will feature several works by Robert Louis Stevenson and offer the opportunity for other poets to recite favorite works and/or perform original pieces. Attendees will also be treated to a reading by Napa County Poet Laureate Marianne Lyon. All members of the public are invited to listen, perform, and share in this globally appreciated form of art. For those who would like to ensure a performance slot, please sign up online by April 17 at https://stevensonmuseum.org/events/programs/. Light refreshments will be provided. To ensure a safe and fun event, participants and audience members are asked to please comply with all health and safety measures in place. Nimbus Arts is inviting people to paint sunflowers as part of a "Spring Into Hope" public art project supporting relief efforts in Ukraine. Nimbus Arts regularly invites the community to make art at its St. Helena studio. On Tuesday Nimbus Executive Director Jamie Graff welcomed about 20 participants, ranking in age from 2 to 77, to paint sunflowers, the national flower of Ukraine. Soft Brazillian music filled the light, airy studio while participants painted and chatted. Parents and youngsters had a chance to spend two hours making art for a purpose that weighs heavily on their hearts. Bringing people together in a nurturing activity during stressful times is very healing, Graff said. Tuesday's workshop was the first of three chances to participate, followed by Thursday, March 31, from 5 to 7 p.m. and Saturday, April 2, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The Spring Into Hope" community art activity and installation will create roughly 100 cheerful sunflower paintings that will be exhibited in downtown St. Helena. We invite our community to join us by signing up for one of our free open studio events to paint a sunflower portrait, and to share our wishes of hope for those enduring so much challenge around the world. All ages are welcome, Graff said. Those who are unable to join on the specified days and times may stop by the studio any time to pick up a ready-made painting kit to take home and use at their convenience. Finished paintings are due back at Nimbus on Monday, April 4. The activity will provide a means for the community to come together in support of relief efforts in Ukraine. Patrons, friends, and colleagues interested in making a direct donation may do so through the Voices of Children Foundation (www.voices.ua/en) or People in Need (www.peopleinneed.net). Wednesday, March 23 1849 Report of a suspicious suitcase on the sidewalk near Lyman Park. 2149 Police responded to a second-hand report of a family disturbance on Nemo Court. 2239 Report of a reckless driver near Main/Grayson. Thursday, March 24 0913 An officer cited someone during a traffic stop on Sulphur Springs Avenue. 1255 An officer taught DARE classes to fifth-graders. 1729 A chihuahua was reported missing from the June/Hunt area. 1748 A caller found a dog on Allyn Avenue that looked neglected. 1920 Police responded to a disturbance on Stralla Court. 2027 An officer cited someone during a traffic stop on Highway 29. 2032 Report of a reckless driver swerving, brake-checking, and moving at erratic speeds on Main Street. 2112 During a traffic stop near Main/Mitchell, police arrested a 60-year-old Naperville, Illinois man on suspicion of DUI. 2151 Police helped the sheriffs office respond to a reported burglary in progress on Sunnyside Road in Deer Park. Friday, March 25 0828 An officer cited someone during a traffic stop near Madrona/Oak. 0838 Medical aid for a student possibly having a seizure near Main/Grayson. 1213 A caller said a dog almost bit her 2-year-old daughter at Crane Park. 1319 Medical aid for a possible stroke victim on Hunt Avenue. 1506 An abandoned vehicle was towed from Pine Street. 1521 A caller believed that a sign on the levee trail had been posted illegally. The sign referred to minimum wage, workers rights and human trafficking. The matter was referred to code enforcement. 1721 An officer cited someone during a traffic stop near College/Pope. 1849 A driver reportedly hit a parked car on Main Street and then got out and took off on foot. Officers found the 38-year-old Calistoga man and arrested him on suspicion of hit-and-run, DUI and driving without a license. 1923 While police were responding to the hit-and-run, a vehicle flew past the patrol car above the speed and over double yellows. An officer pulled over the vehicle and cited the driver. 1930 A caller said her father was approached my men who asked for money. He gave them some but they pushed him to give more. In exchange they gave him a gold ring and a gold chain. The caller brought the jewelry to the police out of suspicion that it might be stolen. Police took a report. Saturday, March 26 0909 An officer cited someone during a traffic stop near Main/Alexander. Sunday, March 27 0731 Police took a report on a matter involving a juvenile. 0847 An officer cited someone during a traffic stop on Main Street. 0904 An officer cited someone after conducting a vehicle check on El Bonita Avenue. 1009 Report of a loose manhole cover on the sidewalk in the 1300 block of Main Street. Someone reportedly stepped on the cover and it flipped up, almost causing the person to fall in. Public Works will check on it. 1049 An officer cited someone during a traffic stop on Adams Street. 1135 An officer cited someone during a traffic stop on Main Street. 1206 An officer issued a parking citation on Main Street. 1255 Non-injury lift assist on Olive Avenue. 1944 An officer cited someone during a traffic stop on Main Street. 2006 A vehicle was seen passing multiple vehicles in the center turn lane of Main Street near Grayson Avenue. 2101 A small white dog was found near Highway 29 and Lodi Lane. St. Helena police held it until Animal Control arrived. 2240 Medical aid for a teenager who passed out on Brown Street. Monday, March 28 0524 Report of a solo-vehicle rollover accident near Sanitarium/Deer Park. The CHP was notified. 0751 Someone cut a lock and stole a bike from Spring Street. A different bike was left behind. Police took a report. 0858 Report of an abandoned van and trailer near Adams/Library. 1156 An officer cited someone during a traffic stop at Pope/Peppertree. 1227 Report of a car accident on Silverado Trail, outside the city limits. 1400 Gas had possibly been siphoned from a vehicle on Arrowhead Drive. 1402 Two vehicles near a Main Street tasting room were burglarized in a smash-and-grab. Miscellaneous bags and purses were stolen. Police took a report. 1927 A vehicle with expired tags was towed from McCorkle Avenue. 1944 Report of loud music at the cemetery, possibly coming from a vehicle. An officer contacted the person responsible. Tuesday, March 29 0445 An officer cited someone for speeding on Main Street. California has sent more than 14 million at-home COVID tests to schools this month for use by students and staff, according to a weekend news release from the governor's office. The deployment means there should be enough tests for all of the roughly 7.2 million students in public and private schools. The state said it allocated tests based on the total number of students and staff in each county. Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help. Subscribe today! Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Napa Valley Register. It coincides with many students and faculty recently returning from or heading into their spring break. The effort is a part of Gov. Gavin Newsom's SMARTER plan the state's approach to the current stage of the pandemic to minimize the virus' spread. "California is focused on keeping schools open and students safe, and we're not letting our guard down," Newsom said in a statement. Nearly two years after the first pandemic shutdown, California also lifted the mask mandate in schools March 12 but still strongly recommends masking in the classroom. In addition to the tests, the state also noted it has distributed 40.6 million KN95, N95 and surgical masks to schools since the return from winter break and 1 billion personal protective equipment units such as masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. According to a PR published by Naval Group on March 24, 2022, Greece and Naval Group signed the contracts for three defense and intervention frigates, plus one optional, and their in-service support. Two FDI HN (Hellenic Navy) will be delivered in 2025 and the third one in 2026. Follow Navy Recognition on Google News at this link Artist rendering of future FDI HN frigate, in the centre (Picture source: Naval Group) In accordance with the defense agreement signed last October between Greece and France, the Hellenic authorities have signed two contracts with Naval Group for the supply of three Defence and Intervention Frigates (FDI HN), plus one optional, as well as their in-service support. The contracts include as well the supply of MU90 torpedoes and CANTO countermeasures. The contracts were signed in Athens by Vice-Admiral (rtd) Aristeidis Alexopoulos, and Pierre Eric Pommellet, Chairman and CEO of Naval Group, in the presence of the Greek Minister of Defence, Nikolaos Panagiotopoulos, and the French Minister of the Armed Forces, Florence Parly. The FDI HN will quickly and sustainably enhance the capabilities of the Hellenic Navy's surface fleet as they will be delivered in a very short timeframe, starting in 2025 for the first two units and in 2026 for the third one. The FDI HN features high-level capabilities in all warfare domains: anti-ship, anti-air, antisubmarine and special forces projection. Its air and surface defenses are ensured by the most modern sensors, including the Thales Sea Fire, the first all-digital multifunction radar with an active antenna and fixed panels. The FDI HN is equipped with a unique integrated mast that brings together all the airborne sensors, enabling permanent 360 surveillance. As the first frigate on the market to be natively protected against cyber threats, the FDI HN is equipped with two data centers hosting almost all of the ship's applications. She will have a length of 122 m, a beam of 17.7 m, and a displacement of 4,460 tons. The ship will have a crew of 110 people as well as an aircrew detachment of approximately 15 people. She will also have a flight deck and one hangar to accommodate one unmanned VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) aircraft or one NH-90 naval helicopter. Armenia FM Mirzoyan, US Senator Menendez stress inadmissibility of provoking tension by Azerbaijan Oil rises in price Bishkek reports that Uzbekistan border guards shoot, kill 3 Kyrgyzstan citizens at border Azerbaijani military convoy throws Armenian taxi into gorge in Artsakh (PHOTOS) Armenia FM in US, meets with International Republican Institute Eurasia regional director US Strategic Command chief warns of deterrence crisis against Russia, China Armenia ex-Prosecutor General, Investigative Committee former chief to remain in custody Newspaper: Armenia President reacts to oppositions struggle Mississippi becomes last US state to recognize Armenian Genocide Resistance Movement rally ends: Citizens remain on France Square Erdogan and Macron discuss Turkey-France relations and Ukraine CNBC: Elon Musk to become interim CEO of Twitter Saghatelyan: Tomorrow from 12:00 we will completely paralyze Yerevan from four directions Finland ready to cut off gas supplies from Russia Resistance Movement marchers return to France Square NEWS.am digest: Large scale protests continue in Yerevan, people forcibly arrested Greece accuses Turkey of stoking tensions in Aegean Sea Resistance Movement rally starts in central Yerevan US Embassy in Havana resumes issuing visas to Cubans Bloomberg: UK and Japan will help Asian countries reduce dependence on Russian oil Dollar, euro gain considerable value in Armenia FLYONE ARMENIA cancels Yerevan flights to, from Lyon, Paris until June 10 Annual inflation in Turkey reaches 69.97% in April Armenia population as of January 1 announced Poland builds 50 kilometers of fence on border with Belarus Azerbaijan promises Europe gas in the hope of loyalty to Baku's crimes Australia allocates $1.4 billion to modernize its Navy Peskov says events unrolling in Armenia are countrys internal affair Grigoryan: Discussions on setting up Armenia-Azerbaijan commission may be completed in near future Red Cross: No Azerbaijani detainees in Armenia Armenia official: Peace agreement with Azerbaijan also means solution to Karabakh issue Armen Grigoryan: There is need to get answers to questions in order to organize Armenia, Azerbaijan leaders meeting Security Council chief: Baku's statements on Armenia territories belonging to Azerbaijan do not contribute to peace Armenia official comments on Azerbaijan president's words about 'Zangezur corridor' Armen Grigoryan: Armenia and Azerbaijan could exchange enclaves FT: Erdogan used mediation between Russia and Ukraine Person dies after being hospitalized from one of tents at France Square in Yerevan Armenia to get 22.6M loan from International Bank for Reconstruction and Development Armenia ruling force MP: Oppositions goal is not saving Karabakh but changing of power President says Artsakh continues to maintain its vision for future, toward independence Oppositions uncrowded marches show lack of public support, says Armenia ruling force lawmaker Trade in Armenia increased by about $80 million, PM says Scuffle breaks out during civil disobedience march in Yerevan, police attempt to apprehend opposition MP Pashinyan to Bennett: I am hopeful that Armenian-Israeli relations will flourish in near future Armenia ruling power legislator: This opposition has always run away from truth Civil disobedience motorcade being held in Yerevan EU to ban Russians from buying European real estate US defense industry facing problems due to supply of weapons to Ukraine Armenia FM holds discussion at Atlantic Council, speaks about process of normalization of relations with Turkey Newspaper: Armenia opposition MPs to lose their parliamentary mandates? Newspaper: Artsakh President says we would not have had so many casualties if war had started half year later Civil disobedience march kicks off in downtown Yerevan Civil disobedience actions resume in Yerevan Blinken tests positive for Covid Denmark, Finland support European Commission proposal on Russian oil sanctions Bulgaria to seek exemption from EU proposed Russian oil embargo Biden says he is ready for additional sanctions against Russia Switzerland braces for serious power shortage Uruguay freezes ambassador appointment to Ankara after Cavusoglu's gesture Czech Republic to seek exemption from proposed EU embargo on Russian oil imports Charles Michel on the likelihood of Moldova's EU membership Resistance Movement actions to resume tomorrow early morning Elon Musk is invited to UK Parliament for buying Twitter Disobedience march reaches France Square, rally starts US crude oil shipments to Europe hit highest level in April NEWS.am digest: Large-scale protests being held in Armenia to demand PMs resignation Armenia Defense Minister meets with Georgian PM UK bans imposes sanctions on 63 individuals and organizations in Russia EU plan to completely ban Russian crude oil threatens Hungary's energy security EU interested in expanding energy cooperation with Azerbaijan Germany: Gradual EU ban on Russian oil imports could lead to 'supply disruptions' Opposition demonstration reaches government residences Aliyev insists so-called Zangezur corridor 'is already a reality' Slovakia seeks exemption from EU oil embargo for three years Defense Ministers of Armenia and Georgia sign cooperation program for 2022 Romanian President approves entry of Stryker Brigade and US fighter squadron into country Dollar goes up, euro also rises in Armenia EU studying possibility of providing military assistance to Moldova Public demand for Nikol Pashinyan's resignation Opposition supporters move toward Armenian parliament building EU envoys can not agree on Russian oil Armenia Security Council chief briefs Georgia PM on Karabakh conflict settlement process Armenia deputy police chief says law enforcement has right detain MPs Large-scale opposition rally starts in central Yerevan Many teenagers in New Zealand are illiterate AFP: EU proposes to impose sanctions on Patriarch Kirill Arestovich says Israel could supply Ukraine with weapons Azerbaijan used in Karabakh war Parliament speaker threatens Armenian opposition, clergy Armenia opposition MP: Ex-President Serzh Sargsyan will not hold office in new government Beijing closes over 60 subway stations due to COVID-19 outbreak Bayramov, Roquefeuil discuss Azerbaijan-Armenia relations normalization process Armenia FM meets with US National Democratic Institute president Armenia ruling force MP: Opposition will not achieve its goal Armenia 2nd president Robert Kocharyans son blocking road with citizens in Yerevan Oklahoma bans almost all abortions Number of children in Japan falls to record low Karabakh President meets with of Free Homeland-UCA parliamentary faction members Armenian judge waves Artsakh flag at Ironman Triathlon (PHOTOS) There is still lot to do in 'October 27' case, says Armenia Prosecutor General Ambassador Wiktorin to finance minister: EU ready to continue providing assistance to Armenia government By Zhu Wei and Liang Huiwen A visitor takes a photo of the exhibition area of China Shipbuilding Trading Co., Ltd. at the DSA 2022 on March 28. (Photo by Zhu Wei/Xinhua) KUALA LUMPUR, March 29 -- The 17th edition of Defense Service Asia Exhibition and Conference (DSA 2022) kicked off in Kuala Lumpur on March 28. Aerospace Long March International Trading Co., Ltd., China Shipbuilding Trading Co., Ltd., CETC International Trading Co., Ltd., Poly Technology Co., Ltd. and other Chinese enterprises participated in the four-day-long exhibition. The theme this year is "Advancing into a New Era of Defense and Security". Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at the opening ceremony that the ASEAN region is now facing more diverse threats which require closer cooperation among countries in the region. Holding this defense exhibition is conductive to promoting the implementation of relevant policies and action plans, he added. Started in 1988, the DSA has become one of the important defense exhibitions in the region and the world. It is normally held every two years, and this year's defense exhibition is held four years later after the cancelation due to the pandemic in 2020. So far it has attracted 1,170 enterprises from more than 50 countries and regions. Malaysia will also hold a series of security and defense forums and exchange activities during the exhibition. Visitors exchange ideas at the booth of CETC International Trading Co., Ltd, DSA 2022, on March 28. (Photo by Zhu Wei/Xinhua) A visitor tries a weapon at the DSA 2022 on March 28. (Photo by Chong Voon Chung/Xinhua) Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein (2nd, left) and Minister of Home Affairs Hamzah Zainudin (2nd, right) attend the opening ceremony at the DSA 2022 on March 28. (Photo by Zhu Wei/Xinhua) YEREVAN. A delegation led by president Alen Simonyan of the Republic of Armenia National Assembly (RA NA) on Tuesday took part in the meetingin Almaty, Kazakhstandedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Interparliamentary Assembly of Member Nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States (IPA CIS), the NA informed. The speakers of parliaments of the CIS member countries read the messages of the heads of their states. The RA NA President presented the congratulatory message by RA Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The message particularly reads: During the past years the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly has become a functioning platform of cooperation of the legislative bodies of the participant states. I am sure that we can jointly solve the items on the agenda of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, relying on the best traditions of the parliamentarism, to find effective solutions of such important problems, as the protection of the citizens constitutional rights and freedoms, the statehood, the cooperation between the wings of the power and the formation of the civil society. The Republic of Armenia gives special importance to the persistent development of the inter-parliamentary cooperation. We are sure that the enrichment of the considerable experience of the multi-lateral cooperation within the framework of the IPA CIS from now on will also promote the effective activity of the legislative bodies of our countries, as well as the development of cooperation, in general, between our states. YEREVAN. At the solemn eventin Almaty, Kazakhstandedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Interparliamentary Assembly of Member Nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States (IPA CIS), president Alen Simonyan of the Republic of Armenia National Assembly (RA NA) congratulated the CIS delegates on the occasion of the jubilee year, the NA informed Armenian News-NEWS.am. In his address at the event, NA President mainly touched upon the CIS inter-parliamentary cooperation functioning in the inter-state and multi-national format. He noted that the CIS promoted the maintenance and strengthening of the political, social-economic, humanitarian relations, had contribution to the further development of the statehood building of our countries on the post-Soviet area. Alen Simonyan has underlined that due to joint efforts of the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly for three decades, model law-making activity base has been created which regulates different spheres. He has assured that Armenia always acted in favor of raising the role of the IPA CIS on the international arena, strengthening the cooperation of the structure with the international, regional organizations and counterparts. Speaking about the role of the parliamentary diplomacy and opportunities, the Speaker of Parliament highlighted it especially in the issues of peace and security. Drawing the attendees attention to the current situation of the Nagorno-Karabakh (NK), Alen Simonyan particularly referred to the invasion of the Azerbaijani armed forces on March 24 to Parukh village of the NK Askeran region being in the responsibility zone of the Russian peacekeeping military group, by that grossly violating the 9 November 2020 trilateral statement. The Head of parliament noted that the use of the weapon and the unmanned aviation once again resulted in human losses, and there are wounded. We expect that the peacekeeping military group of the Russian Federation in Nagorno-Karabakh will undertake practical steps for the settlement of the situation and preventing new victims and military actions, and return the Azerbaijani forces to the positions of March 23, he noted. According to the Head of Parliament, the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh is very tense. He stressed that such actions together with the sharp escalation of the security situation in the world could lead to a new escalation in the region. Alen Simonyan has noted that Armenia highly appreciates the targeted statement of the RF Ministry of Defense, which, however, was opposed by the Azerbaijan side. The NA President informed the counterparts that the post-war humanitarian and other issues has not been resolved yet, emphasizing the issue of Armenian prisoners of war and hostages, the number of which, according to the data confirmed by Azerbaijan, is 38. Alen Simonyan stated that the issues of the preservation of the Armenian historical, cultural and spiritual heritage in the territories under the control of the Azerbaijani armed forces are crucial. The guarantee of the rights and freedoms of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh and the issue of the status of the Nagorno-Karabakh are fundamental and major. We have stated many times that the conflict is not a matter of territory, but of the right. In this context, we consider important the full implementation of the trilateral statement adopted by the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia and the Presidents of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Azerbaijan on 9 November 2020, as well as the trilateral statement adopted in Sochi on 26 November 2021. As before, Armenia attaches importance to normal relations with neighboring countries. We are ready for a dialogue, which should lead to the establishment of lasting peace in the region and therefore, reaffirming the previously formulated position, we offer Azerbaijan to immediately start negotiations on signing a peace treaty, the RA NA President said in the final part of his speech. The Armenian pianist Nareh Arghamanyan has been creating headlines in the music world ever since her early childhood, being hailed as a prodigy from a young age, and winning more than 18 international awards and prizes, including First Prizes at the 1997 Chopin piano competition, the 2005 Josef Dichler Piano Competition in Vienna and the 2007 Piano Campus International Competition in France. Making history at the age of 15 by becoming the youngest-ever student to enrol in the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Arghamanyan cemented herself in the minds of the general public when she walked away with the First Prize, as well as all the Special Prizes at the Montreal International Musical Competition in 2008 at the age of 18, thus marking her as the youngest winner in the competitions history. Since then, Arghamanyan has moved from strength to strength, winning over audiences in renowned concert halls all around the world, including the Musikverein Vienna, Lincoln Center, Wigmore Hall, Philharmonie Berlin, Konzerthaus Vienna, Philadelphia Kimmel Center, Petronas Hall Kuala Lumpur, Osaka Concert Hall, to name a few. Over the course of her career, Arghamanyan has collaborated with some of the most distinguished orchestras and ensembles in the music world, such as the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Radio-Symphony Orchestra Frankfurt, Berlin Radio-Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg and Monte-Carlo, Toho Orchestra Japan, and the Bern Symphony Orchestra, amongst many others. Recent highlights have included her debut with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Santa Rosa symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestre symphonique de la Monnaie, as well as a USA tour with the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, and a European tour with the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra. Since 2016 Nareh has been selected as the artist-in-residence in Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel under the supervision of Louis Lortie and Avedis Kouyoumdjian. She is currently a professor at the Wiener Musikakademie in the keyboard department. We met up with Arghamanyan to look back on her storied career, her experience as an Armenian pianist abroad, and the upcoming events that she has on her horizon. These past couple of years have been particularly challenging for people all over the world due to the coronavirus pandemic, and the music industry has been no exception. How have you managed to rise up to the challenges which Covid-19 has thrown at us, and do you think there is anything that the industry can learn from this experience? Well theyve been a very different two years, certainly! Like everyone else really, lots of things have been disrupted and changed, many of them at the last minute, which has made it very difficult to plan anything. As musicians it is in the nature of our work to travel around a lot and for a while Covid made that completely impossible which was a big blow, and even when things started opening up again you never knew for certain if a festival or concert would go ahead until you were actually doing it because there were so many last-minute cancellations and rescheduling of dates due to different restrictions in different countries. I myself have been quite lucky to be honest, because although things slowed down, I managed to keep myself busy with one or two events every month, and I actually didnt mind having some more free time to spend at home and with my family at first because Ive been running from concert to festival to competition all my life, so a bit of free time was nice! For many other musicians though, especially those who were just starting out in their careers, I know its been very bad in some cases and I feel that we need to make sure as an industry to create as many opportunities as possible for them to help them get their plans and their goals back on track as quickly as possible. With regard to the music world, perhaps the biggest lesson we can learn is to be a bit more flexible. This world is one which plans in terms of years, with everything being planned a long time in advance and not much room for flexibility. Covid has forced us to change in that sense because things sometimes need to be amended months or even weeks in advance which used to be unthought of. Its not an ideal situation of course, but perhaps retaining a bit more flexibility than before wouldnt be a bad idea either. You have, as you said, been deeply involved in the music world all your life, from a very young age. Has that forced you to miss out on certain things as you grew up or did you always manage to reach a level of compromise? Compromise is always key, definitely. Music has been my life for as long as I can remember, and of course that means I had perhaps a different upbringing to other people just like any professional in any other industry really. And it was never something which was forced upon me which is the most important thing. I may have had less free time than others for instance, because I needed to practice, but I always enjoyed playing, it was never a punishment or something I had to be ordered to do. And while some things are different, music also opened up possibilities and opportunities that many people would dream to have to travel, to meet new, interesting people from all over the world it broadens your mind and helps you grow in a very different way. So yes, its a question of compromise and balance which is crucial especially in those early years when youre trying to have as normal a life as possible while still pursuing music religiously, but at the same time I feel that for everything you may miss out on, so to speak, music will give you back tenfold at the end of the day. As a former child prodigy yourself, who has managed to transform your early potential into a professional career, what advice would you give young aspiring musicians today? I think the most important thing is to be certain that this something that you want to pursue professionally because sometimes when youre very talented at something it seems like the obvious choice but you have to love it as well, enough to keep on doing it for years and to be aware of the sacrifices and they hard work and effort you will need to put in, although as I said I think its ultimately all worth it. Music is a wonderful career, but it is not always an easy one, especially when one is still starting out and working to become established. Another thing which I see a lot, even with my own students, is that some young musicians find themselves obsessing too much about competitions as if they are an end in themselves. I myself am a laureate of over 20 international piano competitions, and theyre very important of course winning the Montreal International Musical Competition when I was 18 was crucial for my career and really helped to get me where I am but they are not the be all and end all. Even if you win a competition this is just the beginning, and you need to have an eye on what comes next, which can be almost as tough because you have to depart from the established framework of the competition and start trying to forge your own path and career. Speaking of your career, youve performed at some of the most celebrated concert halls in the world with renowned orchestras and conductors from all around the globe. If you were to look back at some of the highlights of the past years, which moments would spring to mind? I feel very honoured because as you said there have been many truly beautiful moments over the years. Winning the Montreal Competition will always be high in my list of happy memories, and I will never forget making my debuts in places like the Musikverein or the Lincoln Center, for instance. Some of the most treasured events though, are those where Ive had the chance to spread the music and culture of my native Armenia abroad. I always try to perform music by Armenian composers and collaborate with Armenian musicians whenever I get the chance, to help show the world the talent that Armenia has to offer, and these moments are extra special because Im not just performing beautiful music but Im broadcasting my countrys culture. In 2018 for example, I was approached by Konstantin Ishkhanov, the President of the European Foundation for Support of Culture (EUFSC), who invited me to take part in a festival which he was organising in Malta completely dedicated to Armenian culture. I got to perform with other Armenian musicians and present works by Tigran Mansurian and Aram Khachaturian and others, and there were exhibitions and screenings by Armenian filmmakers as well; it was really beautiful to see my countrys culture celebrated in such a way in a different land. Of course Ive done many concerts in Armenia itself as well which are also special to me. One of the most recent ones was at the Armenia International Music Festival, which is also organised by Konstantin Ishkhanov, along with the ASSO, which was also very nice to do. So there have been many wonderful events, but I think the ones where I get to express my own heritage tend to stand out very sharply. As a professional performer whos also a professor at the Wiener Musikakademie in Vienna, how difficult, if at all, do you find it to balance out the two worlds? Do they intrude on each other at times, and is there one which you prefer over the other? In terms of preference, I wouldnt think so no. They both offer wonderful things in different ways. In many ways actually I find that they complement each other very well because the things I do and learn sometimes when Im performing, I can then tell my students about which works well. I find that having both these facets in my life helps keep things interesting because teaching can be extremely rewarding but at the same time I feel its important for me to keep in touch with my performing roots and theres a special incomparable feeling you get when you go on stage. Doing both also allows me to look at things with a dual perspective which is very beneficial I think, especially when Im judging piano competitions. These can be tricky thing sometimes; I remember back in 2019 before Covid came I was invited by Konstantin Ishkhanov and collaborated with the EUFSC to organise the Classic on Danube International Music Festival and Piano Competition in Vienna, and it was so important for me to be able to look at it as both performer and educator. I was the head of the jury board for the competition we held there, which was a preliminary round for the 14 Ways to Dubai series so it was quite an important one, and being able to assess the participants from both perspectives was a very good thing I felt. Im going to be heading back to that competition this year actually, for the 2022 edition in April, and Im really looking forward to seeing what this years group of participants have to offer. One last question, looking to the future, is there anything on the horizon that youre particularly looking forward to? Weve all learnt to be cautious about being too excited about things during Covid unfortunately because they have a habit of changing very quickly so you never know, but if as I truly hope, everything remains on track I have an upcoming tour with the Bergisch Symphony Orchestra in Germany this April which Im very much looking forward to because its been a while since I toured. Theres other stuff planned throughout the year of course, but thats the closest and biggest one for now. Indo-Pacific Illustration: Liu Rui/GT Indo-Pacific Illustration: Liu Rui/GT The US and the Philippines kicked off their 12-day "shoulder-to-shoulder" joint exercises across the Luzon island on Monday, involving nearly 9,000 troops. This year's exercise is "one of the largest-ever iterations," the US Embassy in the Philippines said in a news release. In this regard, the US side is particularly excited. Maj. Gen. Jay Bargeron, 3rd Marine Division Commanding General, said the drills will "strengthen our response capabilities and readiness for real-world challenges." Western media said the exercises will "show off the two countries' strong defense ties in the face of growing Chinese assertiveness." But it was also noted that the Philippine side only emphasized the bilateral security relationship with the US before the exercise started. It is in stark contrast to the US' high-profile manner. This joint military exercise, which was announced long ago by the US and dubbed the "largest-ever" in history, has greater political significance than a military one. Before the pandemic, about 8,000 soldiers participated in the exercise in 2018. The figure was 7,500 in 2019. The number this year, 9,000, is thus not a breakthrough. It is however the first time in many years that the number of US military personnel (5,100) exceeds that of the Philippines (3,800). This mirrors US eagerness to stage a "big show" to make itself look good. The reason behind it is easy to understand. The US attempts to realize what Kurt Campbell, the US National Security Council's coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs said: The US will keep its focus on the Indo-Pacific despite the Ukraine crisis. Yet as the situation in Ukraine has been stuck in a stalemate and the energy of the US is inevitably distracted by it, Washington can realize its so-called "focus" on the Indo-Pacific region through provoking controversial topics and launching joint military exercises, moves that are provocative at relative low cost. Washington is so good at such moves to fan the flame. From the "Asia-Pacific rebalancing strategy" under the Obama administration, to the "Indo-Pacific strategy" under the Trump and Biden administrations, Southeast Asia has been seen as a strategic pivot for the US to play geopolitics. But Washington simply does not understand the logic of development here. ASEAN countries have a larger population than the EU, but most of them have a weak economic base and face urgent development tasks, while some of them have not yet escaped from the turmoil. Their thirst for peace and development is overwhelming, which is highly compatible with China's attitude, but the opposite of the path the US takes. On the same day that the US-Philippine military exercises began, China announced that at the invitation of Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the foreign ministers of the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar will each visit China between March 31 and April 3. Meanwhile, the US-ASEAN special summit, scheduled for March 28 in Washington, has been postponed indefinitely, with the White House unilaterally announcing the date and then changing the date proposed by ASEAN leaders again and again. It is not difficult to see who respects ASEAN countries, and who is using Southeast Asian countries as pawns. Since Ukraine crisis broke out, there are some voices of reflection in the Philippines. They argue that the country needs to avoid the fate of Ukraine, reject Washington's warmongering, and avoid at all costs becoming a "proxy" or a pawn of any major power to encircle another one. The recent situation in Ukraine is a warning to the rest of the world that the security of one country cannot be guaranteed at the expense of undermining security of others, and that regional security cannot be guaranteed by strengthening or even expanding military blocs. Asian countries are not willing to repeat the troubles Washington made in Europe. Peace and stability in Asia are hard-earned and cannot be sabotaged by extraterritorial countries. Washington wants to forcefully peddle its old security concept in Asia, dumping "Cold War garbage" into the Pacific Ocean, even trying to create an "Indo-Pacific version of NATO." In the end, its dream will be crushed by the hard rocks of the Pacific Ocean. YEREVAN. Tuesdays Yerevan court hearing on the criminal case against second President Robert Kocharyan and former deputy prime minister Armen Gevorgyanwho is now an MP of the opposition Armenia Faction in the National Assembly of Armeniawas pushed back for two week. Defense lawyer Hovhannes Khudoyan told the court that his client, ex-president Robert Kocharyan, could not come to court today due to illness. Subsequently, Khudoyan submitted a respective statement and a notification, stating that if the court deems it necessary to publicize its text, it should do so behind closed doors. The court, however, did not insist that the content be made public. As per Khudoyan, according to preliminary information, the second president will need respective medical treatment for about 10 days. Presiding Judge Anna Danibekyan, in turn, informed that she will attend training courses next week, and therefore she set the next court session for April 12. The Human Rights Defender (Ombudsperson) of Armenia, Kristinne Grigoryan, on Tuesday hosted a delegation headed by Director-General Kathryne Bomberger of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), the Human Rights Defender's Office informed Armenian News-NEWS.am. Welcoming the representatives of the ICMP, Grigoryan presented the constitutional mandate of the Human Rights Defender of Armenia and the directions of the activities of the institution. Kristinne Grigoryan presented to the ICMP representatives the direction of the work conducted by the institution of the Defender with the families of the missing persons. The Defender underlined that the protection of the rights of both missing persons and the relatives of prisoners of war and civilian captives is in the center of his daily attention both in Armenia and in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). In her turn, Bomberger presented the work experience of 25 years of the ICMP, which is aimed at assisting states to study the cases of missing persons in the post-war period, providing legal assistance to their families, as well as to establishing appropriate investigative mechanisms and institutional structures. Armenias ombudsperson specifically underlined the importance of the need to develop comprehensive legislation regulating the issues of missing persons, as well as the need to create a capable and robust institution system. During the meeting, the interlocutors stressed the importance of involving the relatives of the missing personsin both the development of legislation and mechanisms. Concluding the meeting, the participants agreed on specific areas of further cooperation. By Liu Heran and Zuo Shang Some western countries have joined the scramble in the Asia Pacific as the region becomes a hotspot in global economy and geopolitical competition, with the UK and France, two countries far out in Europe, making constant moves in the region and issuing their Indo-Pacific Strategy successively. From February to March, the two countries, both representatives of the West, took turns in hosting the Asia Pacific Cooperation Forum and the high-level consultation on the Indo-Pacific, but as both are keen to secure interests for themselves, competition is unavoidable, and in more than one area. Competition for geopolitical dividends. As the only EU member that has territory in Asia Pacific, France is more pragmatic when handling geopolitical rivalry. It carefully avoids picking sides between major powers and hopes to secure and cement other EU members recognition of its leading position in the union. The UK, which has a special relationship with the US, is happily staying under its umbrella of containment strategy, willingly becoming a part of the military alliance forged by the US, Japan and Australia, and pursuing its geopolitical goals onboard Americas bandwagon. The structural divergences between Britain and Frances Asian-Pacific geo-strategy will inevitably lead to their contention in the geopolitical game, explicit or implicit. Competition for partners. According to the documents they released, both Britain and France are trying to lure India to be their partner for its important geographical location connecting the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. Given the Indian governments opportunistic tradition, it is bound to strike a balance between the two European countries, which will then compete to provide public goods more to New Delhis taste. In the meantime, Australias betrayal of the arms deal and alliance also prompted France to strengthen the relation with Indonesia, whose encounter with Australia, stemming from wrong self-positioning and security dilemma also gave a nudge to the UK-France contention. Competition for arms market. The greed for economic gains motivates western countries to engage in Asian-Pacific affairs, and selling weapons and equipment and operating logistics systems are obviously more lucrative than working on digital governance and green energies. Roy-Chaudhury, an expert from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a British institute, said point-blank that a comprehensive strategic partnership would be impossible between India and the UK but for defense cooperation. At the same time, France, with independent national defense industry, has long lined its pocket in this market. The growing collisions and clashes in the already complicated landscape of Asia Pacific will propel its countries to pour money into national defense and security, and neither London nor Paris will pull punches when trying to seize a share of this huge market. Yet, whether they intend to take a free ride or lead the pack, their rosy plans for the Asia Pacific region will be hard to come through. On the one hand, the US is the most important reason why Britain and Frances Asian Pacific policies may prove ineffective. The US, leveraging its position of strength, has been weaving an Indo-Pacific security net that essentially aims at preventing any military conflict and keeping the current confrontation from escalating, while the regional allies can eat into its competitors pockets and consequently maximize Americas interests. There is really not much room for London and Paris to maneuver as they have to follow Washingtons lead at every move. On the other hand, the menu provided by Britain and France isnt necessarily that tempting. Security aside, the two countries also hope to cooperate with Asian Pacific countries in economic, social and environmental sectors, but the standards and systems they promote are far ahead of local realities and make cooperation less feasible. Take the France-proposed personal data security for example. Many island states on the Pacific Ocean havent even established a sound communications system yet, how are they supposed to build a database to cope with external challenges? As a result, their cooperation with France would only lead to the transfer of digital sovereignty. Besides, how western countries approach regional infrastructure construction with donation plus high-interest financing or donation plus sovereign cession will also likely repel the locals. (The authors are from Academy of China Open Economy Studies, University of International Business and Economics) STEPANAKERT. Speaker Artur Tovmasyan of the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) National Assembly (NA) on Tuesday convened an extended working consultation, the Artsakh NA informed Armenian News-NEWS.am. At the meeting the head of the NA presented the agenda points of the 5th session of the NA of the 7th convocation and the regular sitting of the NA. The package of the draft laws: "On Amending the Constitution of the Artsakh Republic", "On Making Amendments to the Law On State Awards and Honorary Titles of the Artsakh Republic", "On Making Amendments to the Law On National Security Bodies", On Making Amendments and Addenda to the Law On Compulsory Enforcement", On Making Amendments and Addenda to the Law On State Pensions and Amendments to the Law On Military Service and Status of Servicemen were put on the agenda. He MPs statements are also included in the agenda. At the end of the consultation, Artur Tovmasyan announced that the next regular sitting of the Artsakh National Assembly will be convened on Wednesday. Iranian Energy Minister Ali-Akbar Mehrabian and Armenian Prime Ministers adviser Artashes Tumanyan held a meeting in Tehran on Monday to stress the necessity of expanding cooperation between the two countries in the field of energy, Mehr reported. During the meeting, Mehrabian described the bilateral ties between Tehran and Yerevan as privileged" and said that those ties need to further expand. The Iranian energy minister also stressed the need to prepare the condition for the meeting between the president of Iran and the prime minister of Armenia. He further pointed to the vast capabilities of Iranian companies active in the field of technical and engineering services and the scope of activities of these companies around the world, as well as construction and repair of power plants, construction of hydropower plants and other areas, and suggested bilateral meetings to introduce capabilities and cooperation capacities of the two countries with the participation of the economic agents from both sides. Both sides in the meeting also stressed the need to coordinate the holding of the 17th Iran-Armenia Cooperation Summit hosted by the Armenian side on May 10 and 13, and described the summit as important for the development of relations between the two countries in the area of energy. The adviser to the prime minister of Armenia, for his part, mentioned the important issues of bilateral cooperation, and discussed constructive decisions for the development of trade and economic cooperation, as well as cooperation in the field of energy with the Iranian chief of the joint cooperation commission. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of Azerbaijan has responded to the proposal of the Security Council of Armenia to immediately start peace talks. When it comes to the negotiations on a comprehensive peace agreement between the two countries, we would like to recall that first of all, the Azerbaijani side has proposed to sign a peace agreement with Armenia at the highest level a year ago, and a month ago voiced specific principles on which the agreement should be based. If the Armenian side considers the agreement issue as a serious step, not as another public awareness campaign, then it is time to take concrete steps. We would like to repeat that Azerbaijan is ready for this from its side," the Azerbaijani MFA noted, in particular, in its respective commentary, APA reported. Written proposals from Ukraine imply a rejection of the desire to return Crimea and Sevastopol by military means, Russian presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky said, RIA Novosti reported. "In order to implement the non-bloc, non-nuclear status, a list of guarantor states guaranteeing Ukraine's security is given next. Security guarantees do not apply to the territory of Crimea and Sevastopol, that is, Ukraine renounces the desire to return Crimea, Sevastopol by military means and declares that it is possible only through negotiations. Of course, this does not correspond to our position in any way, but Ukraine has formulated its approach," Medinsky said. He noted that security guarantees for Ukraine do not apply to the part of Ukraine that it calls separate areas of Donetsk and Luhansk. "Ukraine refuses to join military alliances, the placement of foreign military bases, contingents, military exercises on the territory of Ukraine without the consent of guarantor states, including Russia," he said, adding that Kiev's proposals include a list of future countries - guarantors of Ukraine's security. According to him, Kiev's proposals involve declaring Ukraine a permanently neutral state under international legal guarantees. "For its part, Russia does not object to Ukraine's aspirations to join the European Union," Medinsky said. Ukraine asks that the final decision on the treaty with Russia be formalized at a meeting of heads of state, he said. Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan, who is in Tbilisi on a working visit, met with Georgian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Davit Zalkaliani, the Foreign Ministry's press service reported. The sides noted with satisfaction that this year is the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Armenia and Georgia, and discussed in detail issues related to the wide agenda of Armenian-Georgian friendly interaction, expressing readiness to make efforts for consistent development of cooperation at bilateral and multilateral levels, strengthening political dialogue between Armenia and Georgia. The Ministers touched upon the intensification of economic relations, the opportunities for increasing trade turnover between the two countries and the prospects for cooperation in the sphere of transport communications. A range of issues related to regional and international security were discussed. Ararat Mirzoyan touched upon the invasion of Azerbaijani armed forces units in the village of Parukh in Nagorno-Karabakh, the consistent psychological pressure on the peaceful population of Artsakh and the actions aimed at creating a humanitarian crisis. The necessity of returning the Azerbaijani units to their initial positions as of 23 March and full compliance with the ceasefire adopted by the trilateral statement of 9 November 2020 was highlighted. Ararat Mirzoyan also presented the Armenian side's position on starting negotiations on a peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan, highlighting in this context the mediating role of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs. The sides attached importance to the efforts undertaken toward the de-escalation of the situation and the establishment of stability in the region. The Armenian Minister of Foreign Affairs presented his counterpart the normalization process without preconditions between Armenia and Turkey. Moscow will actively promote the conclusion of a peace treaty between Yerevan and Baku, said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova. Moscow's position in connection with the recent events in the zone of responsibility of Russian peacekeepers in Karabakh is reflected in the statement of the Foreign Ministry dated March 26. We urged the parties to ensure strict adherence to the top-level tripartite agreements of November 9, 2020 on a complete ceasefire in the Karabakh conflict zone. The Ministry of Defense of Russia and the command of the Russian peacekeeping contingent are taking vigorous actions to de-escalate the situation, while the peacekeepers act strictly in accordance with the provisions of the above-mentioned statement of the leaders of the three countries. Through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, we are in constant contact with representatives of Yerevan and Baku, and up-to-date information on the operational situation on the ground is published daily in the bulletins of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. We continue to make efforts to normalize relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan based on the existing agreements of the leaders of the three countries, including on the delimitation and demarcation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and unblocking economic and transport ties in the region. We will actively contribute to the conclusion of a peace treaty between Yerevan and Baku, she said. Japan will ban the supply of precious metals to Russia, especially gold, the Finance Ministry said, Reuters reports. The ban on the import of precious metals into Russia reflects the determination of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to impose additional sanctions against the country, promised last week at a meeting of leaders of the G7 (G7). From April 5, Japan will ban the export of precious metals such as gold, as well as other items including luxury cars, jewelry, cosmetics and liquor. Japan's action came after the United States and the UK took steps to reduce gold transactions in Russia. Gold exports to Russia will require prior approval from Japan's finance minister as the new rule comes into effect April 5, government officials said. The latest ban comes in addition to restricting the export of high-tech goods to Russia, including semiconductors, censors and communications equipment. Japan has also frozen the assets of more than 100 Russian individuals and entities and is considering extending financial regulation to Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges. Armenian News - NEWS.am presents the daily digest of top news as of 29.03.22: Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met on Tuesday in Istanbul, for their first face-to-face talks in two weeks. Air-raid sirens sounded across Ukraine before dawn on Tuesday as Ukrainian and Russian negotiators prepared to meet in Turkey for face-to-face talks, with Kyiv seeking a ceasefire without compromising on territory or sovereignty. Meanwhile, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich who has Ukrainian roots had a conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogano ahead of Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul. It is noted that Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was also present. Amid the talks between the delegations, Russias foreign minister also says direct talks between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Vladimir Putin, something the Ukrainian leader has regularly demanded, would be counterproductive for now. The situation in Ukraine remains highly tense. The United Nations human rights office said 1,119 civilians had been killed and 1,790 wounded since war started. Nearly 5,000 people, including about 210 children, have been killed in besieged Mariupol, a spokesman for its mayor said. As Russian president Vladimir Putin announced last week that Russia will demand unfriendly countries pay for natural gas only in Russian currency from now on, he instructed the countrys central bank to work out a procedure for natural gas buyers to acquire rubles in Russia. However, the Group of Seven major economies have agreed to reject Moscows demand to pay for Russian natural gas exports in rubles, the German energy minister said Monday. Robert Habeck said that payment in ruble is not acceptable and we will urge the companies affected not to follow Putins demand. Economists said Putins demand came to try to support the ruble, which has collapsed against other currencies as Western countries responded with far-reaching sanctions on Moscow. But some analysts expressed doubt that it would work. The Russian central bank, the government and Gazprom , which accounts for 40 percent of European gas imports, should present their proposals for rouble gas payments to President Vladimir Putin by March 31. However. Azerbaijani troops continue to remain at the same bases on Karaglukh hill, adjacent to Parukh village. The armed forces of Artsakh continue to take additional measures to strengthen their defensive positions and restrain the adversary. Work is ongoing with the Russian peacekeeping command staff to prevent possible provocations by Azerbaijan and to withdraw the Azerbaijani armed forces to their initial positions. The Russian MFA has already redirected to Baku issue of removal of Azerbaijan troops in Artsakh. On March 26, the Russian defense ministry had announced that Azerbaijani troops had entered the area of responsibility of the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh. On Sunday evening, however, the Russian defense ministry had announced that Azerbaijan had withdrawn its troops from Parukh village in Artsakh. But later, the Azerbaijani defense ministry had announced that its armed forces did not withdraw from the settlement. In the meantime, the Security Council of Armenia discussed the security situation around Nagorno-Karabakh and invited Baku to immediately begin talks on a comprehensive peace agreement. The Russian side does not rule out that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may raise the issue of aggravation of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh during the meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian delegations, which have arrived in Istanbul for talks, a Russian source told TASS. The source noted that Erdogan may try to discuss this issue with the Russian side. However, he added: Frankly, I do not think there will be enough time for that during the talks. A government watchdog earlier reported documenting over $164,000,000 in U.S. military aid to Azerbaijan flat-lines U.S. aid to Armenia at just over $24 million and fails to include any specific dollar amount for U.S. assistance to Artsakh. Similar to his budget request for FY2022, the Presidents FY2023 budget includes $23,405,000 in foreign aid and $600,000 in military assistance to Armenia. Azerbaijan has disrupted the supply of natural gas from Armenia for the second time in two weeks, leaving the people of Artsakh without heating in subzero temperatures. The pipeline was first damaged on March 8, depriving nearly 120,000 residents of heating and hot water and forcing schools and medical centers to close. While residents have been left without heating, Artsakh has been submerged in subzero temperatures and unusually heavy snowfall. Parts of Artsakh have been blanketed in up to three feet of snow, resulting in road closures. Artsakhs MFA has accused Azerbaijan of committing humanitarian terrorism. The Armenian MFA also condemned the Azerbaijani leadership and its outrageous policy of systemic violence against the Armenians of Artsakh. It accused Azerbaijan of also preventing the entry of international humanitarian organizations into Artsakh, creating a humanitarian crisis Will Smith has issued an apology to Chris Rock, the Academy and viewers after slapping the comedian on stage at the 94th Academy Awards. The Oscars took a tense turn after the slap. But Smith later won the best actor Oscar for his role in King Richard. The fallout from Sundays show continued on Monday as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences condemned Smiths onstage assault and said it would launch an inquiry. On Monday, he issued a stronger apology and account of his actions, writing on Instagram that he reacted emotionally to Rocks joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who has been open about her alopecia-related hair loss. The energy ministers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, key members of OPEC+, have said the organization should not get involved in politics, Reuters reports. Asked if OPEC+ has a moral responsibility for kicking out Russia, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said politics is left at the door during OPEC meetings. "If we don't do that we would not have dealt with so many countries at different times. It could have been with Iraq at one point, it could have been with Iran at one point." OPEC+ is under increasing pressure to increase oil production after Russia, the largest producer in the OPEC+ group, launched a special operation into Ukraine on February 24, and Western countries responded with sanctions that limited Russian oil exports. Both Prince Abdulaziz and UAE energy minister Suhail al-Mazrouei said the focus was on balancing crude oil markets and satisfying consumers. "We have one mission and only one mission which is stabilizing the market. So we cannot be politicizing, or bringing politics to the organization having that debate ... our aim is to calm the market," said Mazrouei. "If we are asking anyone to leave, then we are raising the prices, then we are doing something that is against what consumers want." Prince Abdulaziz said that Russia produces about 10% of the oil consumed in the world. OPEC+ is likely to stick to plans for a modest increase in oil production in May, several sources said. If the security of oil supplies is threatened, the global economy will suffer. That security is now a priority, and some countries are forgetting the availability of energy, Mazrouei said, adding that while the United States is a "very important partner for all of us," the group needed to be pragmatic. "We need their understanding that what were doing is to the benefit of the consumers, to the benefit of the United States and to the benefit of the consumers worldwide." Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Our Coastal Infrastructure Resilience Research summer program will offer cutting-edge research opportunities to talented and motivated undergraduates, with a focus on recruiting students from historically underrepresented groups, said Ali Ghahremaninezhad, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering (CAE). Miami is at the epicenter of global issues like sea level rise and hurricane preparedness, so this is a prime location for students to witness the importance of science and engineering on coastal communities' infrastructure, added Ghahremaninezhad, who is the principal investigator for the three-year $431,333 awardthe College of Engineerings first NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates grant. Co-principal investigator, James Giancaspro, Ph.D., CAE associate professor and graduate program director, said the first cohort of 10 or more undergraduates will begin in summer 2023. Applications will be accepted later this year from college students in South Florida, Puerto Rico, and beyond. Our primary goal is to expand the pipeline of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) professionals, he said. We hope the students will eventually matriculate into graduate programs and ultimately contribute to breakthroughs in coastal science and engineering. Giancaspro said the collaborative multidisciplinary program will be open to undergraduates with interests in engineering, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and the natural and marine sciences. Faculty members from the Universitys College of Arts & Sciences, College of Architecture, Miller School of Medicine, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, as well as the College of Engineering will be involved in the program. The Coastal Infrastructure Resilience Research program will include laboratory experiences, such as examining the roles of self-healing concrete and composite materials in enhancing coastal resiliency, Ghahremaninezhad said. Students will also learn about the regions artificial coral reefs, flooding risk, smart sensing, beach environmental biosafety and other issues facing our coastal communities. Students will also take part in a variety of field experiences, such as meeting local government officials and visits to the Rosenstiel Schools marine campus. We will have guest speakers, professional development seminars, and hands-on workshops, with little time spent in a traditional classroom, Giancaspro said. Instead, they will be out in the coastal communities networking with professionals and learning firsthand about climate-related challenges and resiliency initiatives already underway in our region. Ghahremaninezhad emphasized and acknowledged the critical role of the following faculty members with a complementary range of expertise, who will be involved in and contribute to the success of this exciting grant: Prannoy Suraneni, Esber Andiroglu, Marc Knecht, Luis Ruiz Pestana, Helena Solo-Gabriele, Antonio Nanni, Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos, Sakhrat Khizroev, Qingda Yang, Ramin Moghaddass, Brian Haus, and Diego Lirman. Scarcity of labor, shifting consumer priorities, corporate social responsibility, and preparing for scalable growth are just a few of the top concerns facing society on a global scale. The short answer for all of them uncovered in this years University of Miami Real Estate Impact Conference was simple - the time has come to stop relying on decades-old solutions and start building the real estate industry of the future. For this, the 10th annual event, participants and attendees gathered on campus at the Donna E. Shalala Student Center on Friday, February 25th, hosted by the School of Architecture and Miami Herbert Business School and the School of Law. Presenters included several of the worlds top thought leaders in real estate development, construction, technology, hospitality, government, and finance, who discussed Miami Momentum: Building the Global, Entrepreneurial, Tech-Friendly City, and the dramatic shift currently underway as Miami enters the next chapter in its evolution to a major world capital. While the city itself has been experiencing many years of steady growth, rapid changes have been taking place lately, pushed in part by the pandemic, but also through new perspectives in terms of tech business, hospitality, culture, and an environment ripe for strategic real estate investment and development. This years speakers offered perceptive observations into all of these situations, what the future may yet hold, and what the professionals of today and tomorrow must do to capitalize on the opportunities ahead. As an institution of higher learning, our foremost directive is to serve as a conduit for knowledge, and to inspire our students, faculty, alumni, and greater community to apply those skills and insights in meaningful ways, said Lynn Hackney, Principal for Community Three as she helped kick off the event. Her remarks were echoed by Charles C. Bohl, PhD, Professor and Director for the School of Architectures Master of Real Estate Development + Urbanism Program. The University of Miami has become an interdisciplinary powerhouse offering programs in every field connected to the real estate industry under one roof, he said. We operate as partners, not silos, in providing rich, interdisciplinary experiences for our students that mirror the real world relationships between disciplines and professions. Our students and alumni are the problem solvers and industry leaders who will play pivotal roles in shaping resilient, livable and affordable communities for decades to come The distinguished panelists each took that sentiment further, adding the perspectives gained over dozens of years of hands-on work in their respective fields. Meaningful Place Making Entrepreneurship, and its growing connection to diversity, culture, and community building were highlighted as important movements impacting all industries by Sheila Johnson, the dynamic founder and CEO of Salamander Hotels and Resorts, and co-founder of BET, and Laurie Silvers, Co-CEO, Hollywood.com, Chair, UM Board of Trustees. Johnson explained that the brands that are succeeding today, including her own, are doing so as a result of being inclusive and authentic to the people and stories of a place. As examples, she cited her numerous successes in Middleburg, VA - a quaint horse-country town that Johnson has transformed into a must-see cultural destination by founding the Middleburg Film Festival, and the Family Reunion Food & Wine Festival, in addition to an equestrian-themed Salamander Resort & Spa. The film festival has become one of the most influential film events for up-and-coming filmmakers and future Academy Award winners. Family Reunion is an annual celebration of the Black and Brown culinary traditions that are ingrained into the local culture. Together, the two events serve to carve out a path for Middleburgs growth while also preserving and honoring its past, a balance Johnson said is vital in developing destinations with significance. She then shared how this same concept of inclusiveness and authenticity drew her to her latest project, a Salamander Resorts partnership with The Aspen Institute in Aspen, CO. As one of the worlds key thought leaders in how the world can create a fair and just society for all, The Aspen Institutes mission aligns perfectly with what Johnson has seen as the emerging trend in forward-thinking hospitality development. As people continue to look for experiences that enrich and benefit their lives, the old paradigm of rigidly controlling the brand narrative, she said, was fading. We have to start recognizing what I call the double-bottom-line. If you help your community, it comes back to you. Thats how we need to move forward. For Miami, where rich cultural diversity has long been a key component of the citys dynamic, Johnsons words serve as valuable guideposts for future development of the resort and hospitality economy. Rising to Meet Development Demand Adding another dimension to the conversation regarding the evolution that must take place if cities like Miami are to achieve their global destinies, Jason Ballard, Co-Founder & CEO of Icon; Eric Feder, President of LENx; ; Amit Haller, CEO of Veev; and Kenneth A. Smuts, President of Renco, USA delved into the rapidly emerging field of alternative building technologies. From 3-D printed full-scale livable homes, to composite materials that assemble on site in days, to completely integrated smart walls that bring plug-and-play simplicity to plumbing and electrical construction, the panel not only revealed a world of exciting possibilities for real estate, but also underscored the critical need for the industry to adopt these new technologies and others like them. In a world where materials like lumber are skyrocketing, and labor costs keep accelerating, the same old story just doesnt cut it, shared Smuts. The panelists agreed that while nearly every other industry in modern society has evolved to incorporate technologies, real estate construction has lagged far behind. In a global economy that is making things faster and more affordable every single day, buildings are taking longer, costing more, and providing less quality to end users, Haller observed. It shouldnt be that way, and it doesnt have to be. The panel then detailed the difference between what is happening in real estate today vs. what could happen as soon as tomorrow. Ballard showed video of Icons revolutionary construction-scale 3-D printing robot. ICONs technology has already been successful in building 100 Bjark-Ingels-designed homes in 60 days in Austin, TX - making them not only some of the most high-profile properties in the area, but also some of the most affordable within their market. The dramatic reduction in labor costs is also a key benefit offered by Renco, whose plug-and-play molded composite blocks were used to build 100 market-rate apartments in West Palm Beach and 200 multi-story structures in the Middle East in a matter of a couple of weeks, without cranes or heavy equipment, and with only a handful of workers, none of whom were specialized construction trades. Veevs innovative wall systems are pre-manufactured with electrical and plumbing already integrated. On-site, the wall panels assemble to each other with simple connections, again eliminating the need for typical construction trades. Across all three technologies, the materials are mold-free, waterproof, termite-proof, and are made from renewable and even recycled sources. Developers with an eye towards value and profitability will need to look outside the box. Ballard stated. This has to change. We all need to demand it, architects, builders, designers, and even homeowners. Miami saw growth of 2.1% in just one year, making it one the #6 fastest-growing regions in the entire country. To continue that pace, faster, smarter, and more resilient development options must be embraced. Miami as the New Global Epicenter The global real estate panel brought together three panelists who shared their direct knowledge of diverse international markets and the rapid innovation and adaptations they are seeing in response to the opportunities and trends accelerated by the pandemic around the world. Bernardo Fort-Brescia, Principal of Arquitectonica, Sonny Kalsi, Co-CEO of BentallGreenOak, and Marcelo Kingston, Managing Partner of Multiplan spoke about Miamis contemporary emergence as a global destination that resonates with post-pandemic live-work lifestyle preferences, particularly for tech and venture capital businesses and workers. The three all agreed that many countries and cities havent faced such rapid widespread change to the patterns of how and where we live, work and shop since WWII. Wherever there is an imbalance in the market between industrial, residential, and commercial development, cities are feeling those gaps very acutely, offered Kalsi. Kingston also highlighted that political stability continues to figure strongly in where companies and people decide to go. As for Miami, Fort-Brescia noted the evolutionary waves the city has experienced over the past four decades and the persistence of skeptics who have doubted the citys advancement. He noted that the building blocks of a global city have been nurtured over many years and set the stage for the dramatic transformation of Miami through the pandemic including: favorable taxes and a business-friendly regulatory context; an international atmosphere made possible by a diverse culture, and; a flourishing tropical urbanism of cities and neighborhoods that have been created by sophisticated developers and architects and appeal to tech, venture capital and entrepreneurial companies and workers. Fort-Brescia proudly stated, Nothing compares, no place Ive described, is as amazing as whats happening in Miami.The future here is bright! Maintaining Momentum The closing keynote conversation took up the topic of how to sustain and build on Miamis forward progress as a global, entrepreneurial, tech-friendly city. The discussion began with a question posed by Arnaud Karsenti, Managing Principal of 13th Floor Investments of just how far can Miami really grow? Sandeep Mathrani, CEO of WeWork, and Francis X. Suarez, Mayor of the City of Miami, answered by examining current facts, and interpreting what those figures mean for future projections. The City of Miami is enjoying low unemployment at 1.4%. Were the #1 city in Florida for pandemic recovery, and in the top three in the nation, said Suarez. Miami has also been ranked #1 in happiest and healthiest residents. These are solid platforms from which to pursue monumental global-scale expansion. Suarez, who is a Miami native, recalled how quickly Miami went from the unofficial capital of Latin America to what people now call The Capital of Capital because of the large number of start-ups, companies looking to level-up, venture capital firms, and investors who come to Miami. Growth is the ultimate goal of every person in charge, or, at least it should be, said Mathrani. Supply and demand are never stagnant, but they have to remain sensibly balanced to attract growth, otherwise people and companies will go elsewhere. Suarez then shared that the city is seeing an influx of investment at unprecedented levels, and city leaderships primary goal right now is to make sure that growth can continue. Miami has the ability to grow 10 times over if we do this smart and we do it scalable. In saying yes to new opportunities, we must also be sure were saying yes to the greater good of the people of Miami, not just now but for generations to come. The UM Real Estate Impact Conference 2022 was made possible through the support of more than 100 sponsors, including presenting sponsors, Douglas Elliman Real Estate, the Kislak Family Foundation, and Witkoff. See photo album. Called the "Mother of the Everglades," Marjory Stoneman Douglas's legacy of protecting the watery region still lives on today. An environmentalist, activist, and feminest, Douglas is perhaps best known for her best-selling book, "The Everglades: River of Grass," which was first published in 1947. Seventy-five years later, the University of Miami is honoring the tireless and groundbreaking efforts her book made to enlighten the public of the importance of preserving the fragile ecosystem. "The book helped galvanize support for the park and appreciation of the Everglades, introducing readers to its unique history and ecosystem," said Robin Bachin, assistant provost for civic and community engagement. "The book also has served as a reminder of the constant need to support Everglades' conservation asindustry and development continued to encroach upon its lands," she added, noting that Douglas's book as published one month before the dedication of Everglades National Park. In celebration of the 75th anniversary of the books publication, the Office of Civic and Community Engagement at the University of Miami is inviting the University community to celebrate this milestone during National Everglades Day on the Rock Plaza on April 7, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. In an effort to honor her activism as well, the office is teaming up with the Center for the Humanities for a panel discussion highlighting Stonemans accomplishments on April 19 in the Kislak Center at Richter Library. Douglas was a pioneer in many areas, not just in Everglades conservation but also in promoting womens suffrage, racial justice, and social equity, pointed out Bachin, who will participate in the discussion. She was a tireless advocate for the causes she believed in and worked to promote them well into her later years, founding Friends of the Everglades, for example, when she was 79 years old. Among the events being featured during the Universitys Earth Month, the Office of Sustainability, along with the Student Government Environment and Conservation Organization (ECO) Agency , invite students, staff and faculty members, alumni, and community members for an exciting series of events that will explore our role in accelerating solutions to combat our greatest threatclimate changeand to encourage everyone to do their part. This is the first time we will do a series of programming the entire month of April to introduce students to different perspectives, said Gustavo Eduardo Tovar, chair of the ECO Agency. Our hope is that Earth Month will give students an opportunity to feel connected to sustainability and all its efforts in a non-discouraging way. Teddy Lhoutellier, director of sustainability, wants everyone to know that there is something for everyone among the programs that are being offered. There are a lot of different events including conferences, plantings, concerts, service days, community outreach happenings, sporting events, and even award ceremonies, listed Lhoutellier. On April 22, the community is invited to the traditional Hug the Lake event from 11:20 to 11:45 a.m. that will be followed by the presentation of the Roberta Bosey Fulbright Foote Award, which recognizes a member of the University community who has made a meaningful and lasting contribution to the beauty, humanity, and future of the campus. For alumni, family, and friends of the U who also want to participate in Earth Month events, the annual Canes Day of Service will be held on April 23 at Virginia Key Outdoor Center, where volunteers can participate in the shoreline or coastal cleanup and invasive plant removal. They can then attend an interactive lunch and learn, hosted by the Miami Canes Community, where the impactful efforts of coral reef restoration will be addressed by researchers from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. As Earth Month celebrations begin, the University is proud to tout the fact that it has earned a STARS Gold certification rating for the second year in a row in recognition of its sustainability achievements from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). STARS, the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System, measures and encourages sustainability in all aspects of higher education. Participants report achievements in five overall areas: academics, engagement, operations, planning and administration, and innovation and leadership. The institution is very proud to have achieved a STARS rating for our sustainability accomplishments once again, said Jessica Brumley, vice president for facilities operations and planning. We are working hard to ensure our sustainability efforts grow so our ranking may continue to improve through the STARS program. Natalia Jimenez Sierra, vice-chair external of ECO Agency, hopes everyone will participate in the exciting events being held during April. To me, Earth Month is a unique opportunity to explore, learn, and experience the intersectionality of environmentalism, including waste diversion, social justice, sustainable purchasing, and more, she explained. We are all connected by the fact that we live on Earth. By participating in Earth Month, you join the effort to protect the environment as we become educated consumers who learn how to make an impact on the world around us. Get more information on the Universitys Earth Month and view a full list of events. The Lowe Art Museum is taking the community back to the 1980sa decade defined as an incubator for a new wave of Cuban American art. The latest exhibition, Radical Conventions: Cuban American Art from the 1980s, on view until June 12, explores the impact that Cuban American art made during this period when Cuban exiles settled all over the United States, and specifically in Miami. This exhibition looks at a particular historical momentthe 1980sand sets the work of several generations of Cuban-born artists living and working in the U.S. against the social and political landscape that defined that period, explained Elizabeth Cerejido, Esperanza Bravo de Varona Chair of the Cuban Heritage Collection. She added that the exhibit showcases the work from artists, expressing in their own way, the wide-ranging issues of this pivotal decade, which included HIV/AIDS, identity politics, culture wars, postmodernism, the Mariel boat lift, and Reagan-era conservatism. What you will experience is a real plurality of voices exploring issues, both personal and political, and responding to these broader socio-economic, political, and cultural trends, said Jill Deupi, director of the Lowe Art Museum. Its fascinating to see how a diverse group of artists respond in very different ways to some of the most urgent topics of the time. One of the significant aspects of this exhibition is that this is the first major collaboration between the Lowe Art Museum and the Cuban Heritage Collection. This collaboration gives us the opportunity to tell a different story and to showcase the work of artists who have not received their due attention, explained Cerejido. The exhibition challenges assumptions not only about what Cuban American art is, but who should represent it. The work chosen by the curator, Cerejido, reflect the variety of identities that these artists personified. A majority of the artists in this exhibition identify or identified as gay. Many died from AIDS-related complications, drew inspiration from Afro-Cuban religious practices, and were politically and socially liberalchallenging the notion of Cuban Americans being largely conservative, Catholic, and straight, Cerejido said. Most of the artists were born in Cuba, came [to the U.S.] as young adults, and were educated and trained as artists in the U.S. Others came through the Mariel boat lift, and a select few were trained in Cuba. The exhibition was inspired by a larger program that the Cuban Heritage Collection organized in 2020, titled El efecto Mariel: Before, During, and After, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the boat lift. The idea was not to focus solely on Mariel artists, but rather Mariel would provide the opportunity, the entry point, from which to widen our focus and examine the artistic production of Cuban artists living and working in the U.S. during that pivotal decade, said Cerejido. Deupi said that she believes that the exhibit offers something for everyone. It's a really engaging exhibition with a variety of mediums. The range of stories that are being told on these museum walls is truly incredible, she said. Radical Conventions: Cuban American Art from the 1980s is presented in collaboration with the Cuban Heritage Collection of the University of Miami Libraries. The exhibition is made possible because of generous support by the Knight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jorge M. Perez Family Foundation, Funding Arts Network, American Alliance of Museums, Florida Department of State Division of Arts & Culture, Miami-Dade County, the City of Coral Gables, The Cowles Charitable Trust, and The Arnold and August Newman Foundation. It is one of the remaining challenges for weather and climate modelers: understanding how variations in cloud spatial patterns affect weather patterns over time. Now, a University of Miami atmospheric scientist is part of a multiyear NASA-led field campaign that is using synchronized aircraft flights to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding the evolution of clouds during cold-air outbreaksfrom thick, overcast to fluffy, cotton ball-like cumulus clouds. Sampling during cold-air outbreaks is one of the key elements of this project. Were examining how low-altitude clouds change in form as cold air advects offshore, said Paquita Zuidema, a professor at the Universitys Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, who is an investigator on the Aerosol Cloud meTeorology Interactions oVer the western ATlantic Experiment, or ACTIVATE. Models often underrepresent the streets of shallow clouds and the often-dramatic change from more overcast to more broken clouds, she explained. A critical uncertainty comes about because even in below-freezing temperatures, most of the composition of a cloud is typically liquid, Zuidema added. If, how, and when, the liquid becomes ice, and what that does to the cloud field organization remains a leading research question. We see similar cloud evolutions in fully liquid clouds at warmer temperatures, but have less of an idea of what to expect when ice can also be present. Knowing how much of a cloud is made up of liquid and how much is made up of snow and ice is a driving question for both weather and climate modeling. For the past two years, ACTIVATE researchers have deployed aboard two aircraft out of NASAs Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, flying over the western North Atlantic Ocean to collect critical data on the atmospheric structure, aerosol, and cloud physics not available through any other means. The two, small planes are both relatively slow-flying, allowing them to increase their sampling time and remain coordinated with each other, Zuidema said. The aircraft fly in synchronized fashion. While one plane flies through the clouds to take atmospheric readings, the second cruises directly above, gathering remote-sensing measurements and releasing probes that record crucial vertical structure readings. The western North Atlantic is an ideal location for the study because of its proximity to cloud transitions. Of further interest is that the continental air advects with a wide range of aerosol loadings, primarily from the industrial pollution of the East Coast. This can then mix in with much cleaner air coming from aloft and with the sea spray aerosols off of the ocean. So, there is a range of complexities to consider, Zuidema said. Data collected by the two NASA aircraft is downloaded to a web server, giving Zuidema and Rosenstiel School assistant scientist Seethala Chellappan the opportunity to analyze how cloud microphysical characteristics relate to the larger environment. We published an initial paper that looked at how effective reanalysis datathat is, data provided by models after they have assimilated satellite measurementscaptured changes in the atmospheric temperature, humidity, and wind vertical profiles as air moved over the Gulf Stream, Zuidema revealed. In that study, published in the September 8, 2021, online issue of AGUGeophysical Research Letters, Zuidema and her team found that reanalysis data are adequate for the purpose of initializing higher-resolution modeling of cold-air outbreak clouds. The project, she said, has the potential to provide atmospheric scientists with decades worth of important information on the processes that dictate the life cycle of clouds, from their formation and maintenance to their eventual dissipation. ACTIVATE research flights will continue through September, augmenting data from previous missions. The University of Arizona is the lead academic institution on the project, which is one of five NASA Earth Venture Suborbital campaigns investigating little-understood aspects of our planets system processes. The study is yet another example of Zuidemas continued work in the exploration of clouds. Her research focuses on the relationship of warm, shallow clouds to the large-scale environment, with an emphasis on the connection to radiation. She served as principal investigator of the five-year NASA-funded ORACLES (ObseRvations of Aerosols above CLouds and their intEractionS) project, studying how biomass burning aerosol particles produced by fires in Southern Africa impact climate. Born in the Netherlands, Zuidema grew up speaking Dutch. She was just 4 when her father, a cultural anthropologist, moved her family to Peru for an academic teaching position. She earned a Bachelor of Science in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and later, a Ph.D. in atmospheric and ocean sciences from the University of Colorado-Boulder. She became fascinated with clouds as a graduate student, writing a thesis on a satellite characterization project that involved low, shallow clouds. I absolutely love looking at clouds, she said, and wondering why they are. According to the BSF's South Bengal Frontier, around 10.15 am on Monday, the alert troopers of the Border Out Post Tilasan, apprehended a person who had crossed the international boundary into Indian territory. The apprehended Bangladeshi national was identified as Mohammad Mukdesh, 65, of Shyampur village under Bangabari Police Station of Gumstapur district of Bangladesh, the officials said. "During interrogation of the apprehended Bangladeshi national, it was found that the Bangladeshi national had inadvertently entered India... Therefore, that person has been handed over to the BGB on humanitarian grounds due to the mutual cooperation and goodwill of the border guarding forces of both the countries," the South Bengal Frontier said. Commanding Officer of the BSF's 44 Battalion H.S. Bedi said that their personnel are keeping a close watch on illegal infiltration along the International Border as well as people crossing the border. The apprehended Bangladeshi national had no prior criminal history or any record of crossing the border illegally and hence was handed back to BGB on humanitarian grounds, he added. --IANS ams/vd ( 217 Words) 2022-03-29-20:40:04 (IANS) New Delhi [India], March 29 (ANI/PR Newswire): The Israel Embassy in India in association with designer Sahil Kochhar, the European Union and Khushii curated a very special show to celebrate women coming together for social change supported by Radisson Blu. It was truly a night to remember and a befitting tribute to the ongoing celebration of 30 years of India and Israel friendship. "Amidi" - boundless, beautiful and majestic, was the most apt way to describe these women who walked the ramp today and complimenting their beauty was a gorgeous capsule collection created by celebrated fashion designer, Sahil Kochhar. Also, present on the occasion was the Minister of External Affairs and Culture for India Meenakshi Lekhi to encourage and support the initiative. Speaking on the occasion, H.E. Ambassador Naor Gilon said, "Women and their power to drive social change needs to be celebrated across the different strata of society that they come from. Empowering a woman is equal to empowering a family. With this beautiful fashion showcase and this incredible group of powerful women coming from different fabrics of society, Amidi has been able to stitch together a beautiful narrative for social change through fashion." Ambassador of the European Union to India, Ugo Astuto said, "Women and girls are key agents of development and change. Achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls is vital to building fair, inclusive, prosperous, and peaceful societies everywhere. Investing in women's economic empowerment is not only the right thing to do as a matter of justice and fairness, but it is also the smart economic choice to make." But this was not a standard showcase; the ramp was transformed to serve as a platform to bring together women from very different walks of life and allow some incredibly talented women from Khushii to be able to tell their inspiring stories. Taking centre stage were nine women who with the help of local NGO Khushii, despite their personal setbacks and challenges, have shown a unique determination to become successful and independent. These women are now helping others in their community to become successful and independent as well. Together with them were diplomats from embassies as well as members of the European Union Delegation, walking alongside and applauding their spirit and strength. Working together on the show has given the young women a great sense of empowerment and the funds raised will further help in empowering and skill-building of more girls from across communities. Talking about the collection, designer Sahil Kochhar said, "I am very happy to come together with the Embassy of Israel for this very special initiative. This collection is personal and unique to me. It is a tribute to womanhood in all its forms coming together to celebrate these very special girls. I hope these young girls feel their very best while walking down the ramp as the stars that they really are." The Ambassador of the Kingdom of Belgium kindly hosted the event at his residence designed by celebrated Indian artist Satish Gujral, the perfect backdrop for this event. Riya Kumari is one of three siblings and is from Azadpur, Delhi. Currently, she is completing her second year from IGNOU. She aspires to be an independent woman who takes care of her family. She is studying towards becoming a nurse. Hailing from Mukund, Bihar, 23-year-old Ruchi is highly passionate about stitching her own clothes or even suits for others and has trained herself in the art for the last 6 years. Through the constant love and support of her family, Ruchi imparts her knowledge to three students under her wing and hopes to pursue more opportunities in the stitching industry. Laadli is altruistic in nature. Determined to be able to help others as much as she can while thinking about herself the least, Laadli is a hard-working, sincere child. She has completed a GDA course and is interested in improving her skills in the field of design. Babita, a 29-year-old woman, first discovered the Khushii NGO while working in an anganwadi. After her marriage, she encountered several problems. She was encouraged to pursue a GDA course. After completing it, she is now interested in working in either the field of nursing or any other field where she can help others. She says she will always want to stay associated with Khushii. Nisha is interested in the field of tailoring and stitching. She completed a course for the same at Khushii and is looking to gain experience in this industry so that she can explore her interests as well as guide others. Poonam is curious about everything new that she comes across and is eager to learn more about it. She also took a tailoring course at Khushii to learn more about it. Manu is currently pursuing an MA from IGNOU. She has also completed a GDA course and is interested in being an independent, working woman so that she can support her mother, the way she supported her. Kritika has just completed the twelfth grade and has taken an interest in stitching. She is a quick learner and aspires to be an independent working woman. The Embassy of Israel in India is dedicated to promoting bilateral relations between the two countries in all areas based on the shared values, interests and challenges Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1775547/VIPs.jpg Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1775546/Amidi.jpg This story is provided by PRNewswire. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PR Newswire) They have not only shattered the glass ceiling but brought about innovation through their path-breaking ideas creating a positive change in the business ecosystem of India. BW Businessworld WESA endeavours to acknowledge and appreciate women leaders who are paving the path not only for themselves, but others as well. The summit and awards ceremony will be conducted phygitally on March 29, 2022 at The Hyatt Regency, Bhikaji Cama Place, New Delhi from 2:00-7:00 PM with Keynote Address by Suchitra Ella, Co-founder & Jt. MD, Bharat Biotech International. A full day virtual summit will follow on March 30, 2022. WESA will showcase aspirational stories & life lessons of the participants. The platform serves as a melting pot for marquee industry veterans, founders, and investors alike. In addition, it is an insightful initiative for upcoming women entrepreneurs, PR agencies, incubators, and accelerators, among others. This year the categories included Real Estate and Proptech, Education and Education Tech Emerging Women Entrepreneur Award, Woman Entrepreneur of the Year, Social Woman Entrepreneur Award, Fintech Women Entrepreneur Award, Food Tech Woman Entrepreneur, Technology Women Entrepreneur Award, Ecommerce Tech Women Entrepreneur Award, Fashion and Lifestyle Women Entrepreneur Award, Startup Women Entrepreneur Award, Young Women Entrepreneur Award, Creative Woman Entrepreneur Award, Arts And Culture Women Entrepreneur Award, Health, Wellness and Healthtech Women Entrepreneur Award. This year saw multiple applications, and after careful examination by a jury comprising of eminent industry leaders: Jury Chair - Meena Ganesh, Co-founder, MD & Chairperson, Portea Medical. Jury Members included Padmaja Ruparel, Co-founder & President of Indian Angel Network (IAN), Dr. Ananta Singh Raghuvanshi, Founder President-Elect, Naredco Mahi, Dr. Dhruv Nath Director - Lead Angels Network, Earlier Senior Vice President, NIIT, and Professor, MDI, Gurgaon, Co-author, "Funding Your Start-up: And Other Nightmares", Paulomi Dhawan, Strategic Advisor on perception image management, media, marketing, brand communications, Sukirti Gupta, Founder, Sipping Thoughts LIV, Atul Hegde co-founded Rainmaker Ventures. After many rounds of discussion and deliberation we were able to narrow down to 16 names who will be celebrated during the Awards Ceremony. To attend, register here: bwevents.co.in/bw/wea-2022/registration.html. This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir) New Delhi [India], March 29 (ANI/NewsVoir): From transformative digital technologies such as Fintech, SaaS, IoT, AI, machine learning, virtual reality, and blockchain to gaming, Indian startups are critical to India's growth story. Celebrating India's entrepreneurial spirit and the country's burgeoning startup ecosystem, the 29th Convergence India and the 7th Smart Cities India Expo 2022 - India's largest technology and infrastructure events - concluded Day 3 on a high note. The Hon'ble Minister, Information Technology, Govt. of Bihar, Jibesh Kumar said, "Bihar will be a leading state in the field of IT in the country in the next 10 years. He said that Bihar is giving emphasis on making investor friendly policy. Our policy is designed keeping in mind the convenience of the investors." At the Startup Pavilion, the three-day event brought together founders and startup enthusiasts from across the country. The event - which was curated for creators and innovators to share their projects, knowledge, passions, and insights - served as an excellent networking opportunity and a gathering place for aspiring entrepreneurs developing cutting-edge technologies for the future. The three-day event was a resounding success, with an overwhelming response from guests and visitors to the exhibit of the Department of Information Technology, Government of Bihar. The Government of Bihar's Department of Information Technology participated in the event as a state partner. The participation was motivated by the Department's twin objectives: a) To facilitate departmental IT enablement and online delivery of services, benefits, and subsidies; and b) To stimulate investment and employment in the state's information technology sector. The Department of Information Technology, Bihar's stall at the 29th Convergence India Expo received an overwhelming response from visiting dignitaries including Shri A. Navaneethakrishnan, Chairman, Committee on Government Assurances, Rajya Sabha (RS), Kunal Kumar IAS, Joint Secretary and Mission Director, Government of India's Smart Cities Mission, Amit Kumar IAS, Chief Executive Officer, Ranchi Smart City Corporation Limited, and Athar Aamir Khan IAS, Commissioner of Srinagar Municipal Corporation & CEO, Srinagar Smart City Ltd. Anshul Gupta IAS, CEO Ujjain Smart City, President, CISCO India, Daisy Chittilapilly, to name a few. The distinguished guests lauded and congratulated the Department of Information Technology, Bihar, for their commitment and dedication to establishing Bihar as the East India's next investment destination. Stall 4.73, which was assigned to the Department of Information Technology, Government of Bihar, received a positive response and compliments not only from visitors but also from co-participants for being one of the best stalls, putting on an excellent show, and showcasing the state of Bihar's IT revolution. The IT Department stall visually demonstrated Bihar's vision of Good Governance and how e-Governance has also created new opportunities for investors to come and invest in Bihar's IT sector, as Bihar is emerging as an investment destination in the east. Additionally, it demonstrated how Bihar's 2017 Startup Policy and Industrial Investment Promotion Policy will pave the way for investors and entrepreneurs to establish profitable and sustainable businesses in the state. Day 3 of 29th Convergence India Expo was marked by presence of esteemed delegates from the Government of India and the Hon'ble Minister of Information Technology, Govt. of Bihar also visited the IT Bihar's stall. In a press conference with the media he expressed his optimism & confidence that the state of Bihar will prove to be a fruitful Investment Destination for IT giants. On the third day of the exhibition, the Hon'ble Minister for the Department of Information Technology, Government of Bihar, Shri Jibesh Kumar, graced the event as a Chief Guest. He discussed Bihar's vision of e-Governance and good governance in his valedictory address at the closing ceremony, as well as how e-Governance has created new opportunities for investors to invest in Bihar's IT sector. Concerning startups and ideas, Jibesh Kumar stated that Bihar will be the first state to implement the Vidya Udyami Yojana, which will reward individuals who bring innovative business ideas. Students and individuals working on their idea prior to startup will be supported in all aspects of the scheme, including financial assistance from the government. He asserted that Bihar has experienced a sea change in terms of law and order, electricity, water, and infrastructure. This is why investors are beginning to recognise Bihar's potential. The state is receiving massive investment proposals. Bihar received a proposal for an investment of more than 30 thousand crore rupees last year. When people talk about Smart Cities today, our Hon'ble Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is working on Smart Villages. Today, work is being done in every village of the state to improve roads, water, electricity, and other basic needs. "Bihar embarks to a new journey of technological revolution and has shown tremendous growth on IT Front & Good Governance. The initiatives of e-governance and creation of investment opportunities in the state has been phenomenal even during the Corona Pandemic," said Shri Jibesh Kumar, Hon'ble Minister for the Department of Information Technology, Govt. of Bihar. This year's edition also featured a 'Startup Pitch' competition, supported by Incubation Centre, IIT Patna, across various sectors including Internet of Things (IoT), Automation, Mechatronics, Robotics, Medical Electronics, Industry 4.0, Smart Cities and other related ESDM. Troncart Solutions Pvt. Ltd. emerged as the winner in the unique Startup Pitch competition who was awarded a cash prize of 1 Lakh. The two runners up were Riod logic Pvt. Ltd. and Thinkraw Pvt. Ltd. The Smart City India (SCI) Awards concluded the 29th Convergence India and the 7th Smart Cities India Expo 2022. The award ceremony was graced by Chief Guest Shri Jibesh Kumar, Hon'ble Minister for the Department of Information Technology and the Department of Labour Resources, Government of Bihar. Jibesh Kumar cognates the organiser for successfully organised the event and he said, "India's information technology and information technology-enabled services (IT-ITES) industry has the potential to be a driving force in harnessing new technologies, affecting all sectors including agriculture, health, education, manufacturing, and others, and thus creating significant employment and entrepreneurial opportunities in the country. India has emerged as the world's digital capabilities hub, with approximately 75% of global digital talent residing in the country." This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir) Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], March 29 (ANI/NewsVoir): IDFC FIRST Bank today announced scholarships for meritorious students of Mumbai's leading institution, NMIMS' School of Mathematics, Applied Statistics & Analytics (SOMASA). The scholarship is open to first-year data science and analytics students at SVKM's NMIMS (SOMASA). The grant will cover students' annual fees in the first year of their respective program. The awardees will also get an opportunity to intern at IDFC FIRST Bank. They will be paid a stipend, with the possibility of a pre-placement employment offer to work with the Bank's Data Science & Analytics team, based on their performance during the internship. The internship will be for two months and may be extended for an additional four months. B Madhivanan, Chief Operating Officer, IDFC FIRST Bank, said, "We are committed to building and supporting talent in data science and analytics, a dynamic and high-demand field. The scholarship program also ties in well with two of the three pillars of our Bank's business philosophy i.e. being digital and a force for social-good. The announcement of the scholarship at NMIMS, one of India's leading universities, is just the beginning. Going forward, we hope to expand this initiative and enable more students to blaze new trails in their academic and professional pursuits." Dr Ramesh Bhat, Vice-chancellor, SVKM's NMIMS, said, "I thank and congratulate IDFC FIRST Bank for initiating this scholarship program for the meritorious students of NMIMS School of Mathematics, Applied Statistics & Analytics. The scholarship program is one of the excellent initiatives that will benefit students pursuing their education in data analytics at NMIMS. The partnership with IDFC comes at a very appropriate time, which will help us train students for preparing project work, internships, and the final placements. We have recently undergone a restructuring of our school and departments, which has led to the creation of the School of Mathematics, Applied Statistics & Analytics. The new school will be under the leadership of Dr Sushil Kulkarni, who has recently joined us as the Dean, and we are sure that he would take the school to the new heights." The selection of students for the IDFC FIRST Bank Meritorious Student Scholarship will be based on their first-semester examination results, followed by personal interviews. Equal weightage will be given to academic excellence and the Bank's internal evaluation in the selection process. IDFC FIRST Bank has awarded 1028 scholarships to students enrolled in B-schools with a family income of less than Rs. 6 lakh per annum. With a legacy of 41 years, SVKM's NMIMS has grown to be not only one of the top-10 B-schools in India but also emerged as a multi-disciplinary, multi-campus University at Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Indore, Shirpur, Dhule, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chandigarh and seventeen constituent schools that include Management, Family Business, Engineering, Pharmacy, Architecture, Commerce, Economics, Law, Science, Liberal Arts, Design, Performing Arts, Mathematical Science, Agricultural Science, Hospitality Management, Branding & Advertising and Distance Learning. NMIMS has eleven Centres of Excellence as well at the University. The consistent academic quality, research focus, faculty from top national and global institutes and strong industry linkages at NMIMS have placed it amongst the nation's prime centres of educational excellence and research today. It has taken major initiatives in terms of programs, curriculum development, international linkages, placements and students' development. Today, the University is a globalized centre of learning, providing its students a balanced exposure to the industry's research, academics, and practical aspects. IDFC FIRST Bank's vision is to build a world class bank in India, guided by ethics, powered by technology, and to be a force for social good. Though the Bank is a recent entrant to the banking system in India, IDFC FIRST Bank was the first universal bank to introduce monthly interest credits to customers on savings accounts, low dynamic APR and lifetime free credit cards, intuitive and personalized mobile app, digital savings and lending solutions, contemporary wealth management, digital cash management solutions, unique multi-purpose fleet card and Fastag solutions, a cutting- edge corporate banking portal and other such unique industry-first features. The Bank has a balance sheet of Rs. 1,74,232 crore, and has provided over 30 million loans in its history. It serves customers in over 60,000 villages, cities and towns across the length and breadth of the country. In a short time, the Bank has expanded to 599 branches, 201 asset service centres, 727 ATMs and 620 rural business correspondent centres across the country, and is incrementally growing digitally. The Bank enjoys the trust of millions of customers and its deposits have grown at a CAGR of 84 per cent during the three years since merger. For more information, please visit: : www.idfcfirstbank.com Established in 1981, NMIMS is today recognized as a globally reputed university with strong industry linkages. It offers multiple disciplines across 8 campuses that consist of 17 specialized schools, more than 17000-plus full-time students, and about 800-plus full-time faculty members, 10 faculty members with Fulbright Scholarship and Humboldt International Scholarship for post-doctoral researchers. It is known for its consistent academic quality and research-focused approach towards holistic education. SVKM's NMIMS has been granted Category-I Deemed University status by Graded Autonomy Regulation 2018 by MHRD/UGC and NMIMS Mumbai Campus is NAAC accredited with a CGPA of 3.59. For more information, please visit: nmims.edu. This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir) Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], March 29 (ANI/NewsVoir): HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company, a leading private general insurer and a digital-first company leads the way in customer loyalty with the launch of the VAULT program, an industry-first digital customer engagement and rewards program. HDFC ERGO is committed towards enhancing customer experience and making them feel valued. Staying true to this commitment, the Company has taken advantage of the Regulatory Sandbox by IRDAI, in the form of VAULT, an experiment to test a new idea. Under this program, the insurer will incentivize its Optima Restore health insurance customers by way of reward points for performing certain activities like staying insured under the policy for more than two years, holding two active HDFC ERGO retail policies, interacting digitally, using the cashless network of healthcare providers, etc. These reward points, equivalent to cash, can be redeemed against a wide range of wellness offers like pharmacy vouchers, doctor consultations, etc; or can be used for social causes or buying insurance products. Speaking about the launch of VAULT, Ravi Vishwanath, President - Accident & Health Business, HDFC ERGO General Insurance said, "Innovation is the key to all that we do at HDFC ERGO. The Regulatory Sandbox gives us the impetus we need to innovate and introduce new and unique offerings for our customers. We believe that with VAULT, the relationship with our policyholders will go beyond the traditional transactional mode and help us provide more value to them. While it will pave the way to deeper engagement, it will facilitate reaching out to many new such customers who are keen to associate with an insurer who nurtures and values its customers' loyalty." HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company is a joint venture between HDFC Ltd. and ERGO International AG; the primary insurance entity of the Munich RE Group of Germany. HDFC ERGO is one of India's largest non-life insurance company in the private sector. A digital-first company, transforming into an AI-first company, HDFC ERGO is a leader in implementing technology to offer consumers the best-in-class service experience. The company has created a stream of innovative & new products as well as services using technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Processing Language (NLP), Robotics and IBM Watson. HDFC ERGO offers a range of general insurance products and has a completely digital sales process with ~93% of retail policies issued digitally. The self-help tech platform developed by HDFC ERGO has empowered the customers to avail 58% of the services virtually in a self-help mode on a 24x7 basis with ~40% of the customer requested services digitally. The Company offers a complete range of General Insurance products including Health, Motor, Home, Agriculture, Travel, Credit, Cyber and Personal Accident in the retail space along with Property, Marine, Engineering, Marine Cargo, Group Health and Liability Insurance in the corporate space. Be it unique insurance products, integrated customer service models, top-in-class claim processes or a host of technologically innovative solutions, HDFC ERGO has been able to delight its customers at every touch-point and milestone to ensure consumers are serviced in real-time. Please log on to www.hdfcergo.com for more information on HDFC ERGO and the products and services offered by the company. This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir) Surat (Gujarat) [India], March 29 (ANI/PNN): The Uka Tarsadia University invited Viral Desai, popularly known as 'Greenman' as the chief guest at the 9th Convocation for conferring degrees on the students of Commerce and Management faculties. Desai gave an encouraging address to a large crowd of commerce and management students at the Uka Tarsadia University's auditorium, emphasizing the importance of a degree and education, as well as the spirit of environmental protection, in shaping India's future. Desai challenged the graduates to make significant contributions to environmental conservation and become 'Paryavaran Senani'. Talking with the media, Desai said, 'Education is not just a degree of the paper, but it is also a process that expands a person's capabilities and expertise that goes through the procedure.' The one thing that I am pleased about the Uka Tarsadia University is that it leads in imparting Degrees, but it is also at the forefront in teaching Values and Concerns to its students. This university education has given fresh hope when the country requires professionals and environmentally conscious individuals.' The 9th convocation of the Uka Tarsadia University was attended by Dr NC Shah, Dr Dinesh Shah, and Dr Krunal Patel. This story is provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PNN) Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], March 29 (ANI/Bloomingdale): SKOODLE, the flagship brand of Stone Sapphire India Limited and a leading stationery and art material manufacturer in India has recently been honoured as the Prestigious Rising Brands of Asia 2021-22 at the Global Business Symposium 2022. Organized by Herald Global and ERTC Media at Goa Marriott Resort & Spa on March 27, SKOODLE reigned the nominations in the Stationery and Toys Category as the young and promising brand to look out for. The event witnessed massive participation from significant dignitaries like Saimik Sen, Editor-in-Chief, Herald Global, Pramod Sawant, Chief Minister of Goa, Shripad Yesso Naik, Honorable Minister of State for Tourism & Ports, India and eminent leaders like Namrata Ulman, Deepali Naik, Churchill Alemao and Sagun Velip, who are all achievers in their respective industries. Prestigious Brands of Asia 2021-22 is a listing of remarkable brands who have redefined the benchmarks in their respective fields through their legacy and sustainability in the market. The list involves the most renowned as well as fastest-growing brands that have authenticated their objectives to create the future by embracing a combination of their advanced products or services and have contributed to transforming the economy. SKOODLE, a notably young Indian brand, with a remarkable penetration in art craft and recently toys, was acknowledged for its diligent efforts dedicated into indigenous manufacturing and development of wide product range despite the pandemic, supporting India's intrinsic growth story against global tide. Its iconic product, 100 per cent recycled paper pencils, and BIS-certified toys from classic board games to playing dough and clay has struck a strong connect with the Indian Parents. Recognised also in past for its sustainable school supplies, Skoodle has maintained its promise to source ethically, be respectful to our planet, and most importantly commit Fun quotient to their little partners, children. The brand was appreciated for having steadily placed the consumer at the centre of all their thoughts, through its initiatives. Sandeep Saxena, Vice President Business Development received the Marketing Meister Award for playing a significant role in shaping the brand through his industry insights and meaningful marketing leadership. Honourees who graced the event with their industry expertise along with SKOODLE include stellar dignitaries like Avon Cycles, MyFitness, EaseMyTrip, Engine Brand Mustard Oil, Infinity Learn by Sri Chaitanya, Stahl, AMO Electric Bikes and AKV Wall Putty, amongst many other renowned names. Representing SKOODLE, Sandeep Saxena says "Being told you are appreciated is the most encouraging things one can hear having put endless & tireless work by all teams. This achievement is a noteworthy milestone for Skoodle as it firmly endorses the faith shown by our channel partners and consumers alike. SKOODLE has always strived to stay ahead of the curve. Being awarded as the Prestigious Rising Brands of Asia 2021-22 and being recognized as a Marketing Meister, strongly reinforces our belief that we are on the right path and the race has just begun." Adnan Chara, Head Trade Marketing added "Skoodle is all about kids. Skoodle kick-started its relationship with kids with we launching our stationery portfolio just 4 years back and I am proud to state that we are the fastest growing brand in this market. Skoodle started talking to kids in one more colourful language (including licensed products from Disney, Marvel, Peppa, Paw Patrol, Barbie etc) as we launched toys 2 years back. The hallmark of true professionalism of the teams backing up the brand is that today no toy shop can consider itself complete till it has Skoodle toys on its shelves. What is an incredible feat is that a business that started as a 100 per cent import-based business model, based on Mr. Modi's vision is today a 100 per cent Make In India business! What we fully comprehend is that we have the world's largest kid's population for us to serve and as long as this remains true, and we keep doing honest and innovative work, we will remain in business." This story is provided by Bloomingdale. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/Bloomingdale) New Delhi [India], March 29 (ANI/ATK): Over 85 per cent of all packaged foods in India include artificial additives, which are chemicals intended to improve and enhance the taste, appearance, and shelf life of the foods. These chemicals hidden behind unpronounceable names and cryptic numbers are linked to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and even ADHD. Utilizing this opportunity, many brands have popped up with the motto of promoting and delivering natural and healthy food. However, there was a major drawback with many of these firms failing to deliver palatable foods; thereby causing traction from gaining mass acceptance. People really wanted to stock up on healthy food and snacks but didn't find them appealing to their taste buds. And for a period, "healthy snack" became synonymous with bad taste. If you are willing to buy sugar free, or a natural snack, you better be ready to encounter its bland taste. This scenario, therefore, calls for a competent firm capable enough to bridge the demand for natural and healthy foods while meeting the needs of the taste buds. With a deep understanding of food science and a customer-centric approach, McGill Foods' Eatopia is one brand that fills this void with absolute competency and ease. According to the CEO & Director of McGill Foods - Jacob George, "Eatopia has prioritized consumer's insights and has taken care to fit products into a consumer's day-to-day lifestyle. Understanding food science, leveraging the market, deep level penetration of food science & technology, exploring opportunities within food science, connecting with the consumers, trying to be a part of their lifestyle has helped Eatopia stay on par with the standards set by the industry." Since its inception, Eatopia has strived to deliver healthy products that are developed using ingredients from natural sources. "Eatopia has been established with an aim to be a superhub for all health needs. The brand aims to become an integral part of a consumer's healthy lifestyle. Eatopia's objective is to positively impact lives through clean-green food made with all-natural ingredients with zero chemical additives.," mentions Sachin Eapen, Co-Director, McGill foods. This story is provided by ATK. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/ATK) Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh) [India], March 29 (ANI/NewsVoir): Jagran Lakecity University today announced the dates for the next round of entrance exam for admissions to undergraduate and postgraduate programmes for academic year 2022-2023. Jagran Lakecity University Entrance Tests (JLUET) attracts thousands of students from around the country who appear for the aptitude test and personal interviews for various disciplines. Jagran Lakecity University Entrance Test or JLUET 2022 is a qualifier exam for admissions to many UG and PG programmes offered by award winning central India's global university JLU. The upcoming round of JLUET for admission to undergraduate & postgraduate programmes is scheduled for March 31st, 2022. JLU along with JLUET also accepts all national entrance examination scores like CLAT, CAT, MAT, and other national level entrance exams. JLU seeks to assemble an extraordinary and diverse class of undergraduate and postgraduate students by conducting a global entrance tests in rolling mode before the start of a new academic year. JLUET process values academic excellence, but never reduces applicants to any one factor, such as grades or test scores. Decisions to admit an applicant are made by diverse admissions panels across JLU Faculty & disciplines based on knowledge, aptitude and an expansive view of excellence. The entrance test is completed in two phases. The initial online exam assesses the aptitude level and subject knowledge, followed by a Group Discussion or Personal Interaction to evaluate the student's communication skills and overall purpose and ability. Students can register for JLUET to get admission for 50+ UGC approved degree programs at www.jlu.edu.in/jluet JLUET 2022 is a multiple-choice, 90-minute exam that covers the syllabus of the qualifying examination like Class XII for UG and graduation for PG, in addition to aptitude tests including Logical Reasoning, General Awareness, General English, along with a few program-specific questions. Entrance for all Design programmes like UX/UI, Visual Communication, PI & portfolio presentations are also advised. JLU also allows students to take a career assessment test powered by Mindler, Career Launcher and various student support organisations along with its career counselling services to help them choose the right career path in life. There has been a steady increase in applicants across all disciplines and programmes. Since 2019, the share of the JLU admitted programmes that is pan India & international has grown significantly. Prof Sandeep Shastri, Vice-Chancellor Jagran, Lakecity University said, "Jagran Lakecity University is an equal opportunity higher education Institution. We look at each applicant as an individual, and hold each applicant's unique background and experiences, alongside grades and test scores, to find applicants of exceptional ability and character, who can help create a campus community that is diverse on multiple dimensions, including on academic and extracurricular interests and life experiences. We encourage existing students and fresh applicants take advantage of all that JLU offers and contribute to the learning and social environment for their classmates, university and the city. Factors such as life experiences, overcoming adversity, or specific talents are particularly important in deciding who will be offered admission." Scholarships at JLU Jagran Lakecity University, offers Rs. 2.5 Cr. towards Freeships and Scholarship under the various categories like Shri Hari Mohan Gupta Freeships, JLU Excellence Scholarship for Academics, JLU Excellence Scholarship for Sports, Shri Gurudev Gupta Media Scholarship and JLU Defence Service Scholarship. More details on scholarships are available on university's website www.jlu.edu.in. Students qualified after the entrance exam are eligible for admission to more than 56-plus specialized degree programmes and can also avail up to 100 per cent scholarships based on their scores in the exam. Career Development Centre at Jagran Lakecity University A professionally run Career Development Centre (CDC) team at JLU supports the students in their quest for an exciting professional career after graduation. The CDC collaborates with multiple stakeholders - Students, Corporates, and Groups within JLU to facilitate students to evolve in their careers with introspection and self-discovery. The CDC office offers a wide range of activities including but not limited to Career Counselling, Corporate Connect sessions for networking opportunities, Employability Training through Centre for Professional Studies which is enhanced through the usage. Over Jagran Lakecity University has an inspiring and commendable placement record over the years. Students have been successfully placed across various industrial verticals including the top MNCs and Financial Institutions. The placement record is achieved through a dedicated placements team which strives hard to bring the best companies and offers on campus. Apart from being offered lucrative and strong packages, the students are also giving challenging profiles within these well-known and sought after companies of the platform "X-Billion". The admission & scholarship journey at JLU is a simple 5 step process which is available in a user friendly online platform, from registration, entrance exam, expert counselling, GD/PI, and enrolment. JLU Admission team handholds students in making a well-informed choice to pursue their career dreams at the world-class central India's global university. This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir) New Delhi [India], March 29 (ANI/NewsVoir): Underscoring the significance of engaging with grassroots communities to effectively tackle the impacts of climate change, government representatives and experts taking part in the inception workshop for the GEF Seventh Operational Phase of Small Grants Programme in India (SGP - OP7) in New Delhi on Tuesday, emphasised the need to 'think globally and act locally' to ring in transformative change. The SGP - OP7 that aims to bring together stakeholders from non-governmental, community-based and civil society organisations is being implemented by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) under the guidance of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). It proposes to enable communities and organizations to take collective action for socio-ecological resilience and sustainable livelihoods in three key landscapes of India. Delivering the keynote address Neelesh Kumar Sah, Joint Secretary, MoEF&CC said, "To make effective changes on the ground it is important to get the State governments on board." Mr. Sah pointed out that the small grants programme can play a vital role in realising the goal of 'thinking globally and acting locally' and that projects under it must be designed to impact livelihoods positively. Placing the small grants programme in perspective, Dr Vibha Dhawan, Director General, TERI, said it is an effective way to involve stakeholders on the ground. "Small programmes bring organisations with diversity on board and show us what is needed at the grassroots. Their participation is essential to address the global problems of climate change and resource depletion," she said. Ashish Chaturvedi, Head, Environment and Energy, UNDP, India, too emphasised the significance of this project in tackling climate change and bringing about transformative changes. "Small steps and community-led action are equally important if not more, when it comes to transformative change, as compared to large flagship initiatives," Chaturvedi added. Highlighting the long legacy of the small grants programme in India, he said over 400 of them have been implemented across the country so far. The SGP-OP7 aims to provide financial and technical support to local communities, community-based and civil society organizations, mostly in poor and often remote areas, for initiatives that conserve and restore the environment while enhancing people's livelihoods and wellbeing. Highlighting the challenges faced by local communities in the event of climate change, Anusha Sharma, Project Officer, NRM and Biodiversity, UNDP India, emphasised the need for strategies for local action. "Local communities are at the heart of climate action. They need technical capacity, financial support and, on occasions, support from the government," Sharma noted. Explaining the framework of the SGP-OP7, Manish Kumar Pandey, SGP National Coordinator, said the project will focus on the thematic areas of biodiversity, land degradation, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. It will be implemented in the highlands of the Northeast, the central semi-arid region of India and the Indian coastal regions. "The target is to restore 10,000 hectares of land by the end of five years of the project period. The project aims to work towards improved practices for the benefit of biodiversity in the marine habitat - 600 hectares at the end of five years." The inception workshop is aimed at building awareness on the project objectives, thematic areas, selected landscapes, and information regarding the grant disbursal procedure. Giving a broad framework of the governance structure of the OP-7 of the Small Grants Programme, Ms. Tabinda Bashir, Project Associate, Climate Change and Resilience, UNDP India said, "This is a unique programme that keeps the civil society at the centre and all grants will be approved by the national steering committee that upholds utmost transparency." Aprajita Mukherjee, Gender Focal Point, UNDP CO, underlined the special gender action plan which will be part of the SGP-OP7. "In a fast-paced project there is a possibility of gender slipping through the cracks. The gender action plan is the standard to be mindful of the gender angle. It reminds us that we need to be aware of the differential impacts of climate change on gender," Ms. Mukherjee added. Making a suggestion to include the third gender into the special gender action plan, Sonamani Haobam, Deputy Secretary, MoEF&CC, underscored the significance of small steps to achieve the larger sustainability goals. "It is important to go back to the stage where humans engaged with nature for sustainable consumption and production. We had begun to manipulate nature and we are now at its mercy," Mr Haobam said. The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) is an independent, multi-dimensional research organization, with capabilities in policy research, technology development, and implementation. Headquartered in New Delhi, TERI has regional centres and campuses in Gurugram, Bengaluru, Guwahati, Mumbai, Panaji, and Nainital, supported by a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, sociologists, economists, engineers, administrative professional and state-of-the-art infrastructure. On the ground in about 170 countries and territories, UNDP works to eradicate poverty while protecting the planet. We help countries develop strong policies, skills, partnerships and institutions so they can sustain their progress. UNDP has worked in India since 1951 in almost all areas of human development, from systems and institutional strengthening to inclusive growth and sustainable livelihoods, as well as sustainable energy, environment and resilience. UNDP's programmes continue to fully integrate a global vision for catalytic change with India's national priorities. With over 30 projects on the ground in almost every state, today UNDP India works to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by transforming traditional models to do development differently. This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir) New Delhi [India], March 29 (ANI/India PR Distribution): India Internet Engineering Society (IIESoc) & Industry Network Technology Council (INTC) will be organizing the 5th iteration of Connections as a joint India-US fully online event on April 2-8, 2022. The first Connections event was held in Bangalore in 2017 with a subsequent one also in Bangalore in 2018. The third Connections event was held in Kolkata in 2019 before we went fully online in 2020 because of the pandemic. This iteration will also be fully online, free, and generously sponsored by the Internet Society, APNIC Foundation, Juniper Networks & Cisco Systems. Connections is an annual event to get protocol developers, enterprises, academicians, and network operators together on the same platform to discuss the latest problems facing the internet and the solutions relevant to them. The event includes discussions on network deployments, operations, and the design of networks and protocols. The aim is also to educate and prepare new members for Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) involvement from underserved geographies and constituencies. This aligns well with the IIESoc's mission which is focused on bridging the gap between India and the internet standards whereas the INTC's mission is focused on the impact of internet standards and technologies in the traditional "Brick-n-Mortar" Enterprise networks. We have a great line of speakers such as Bob Hinden (co-inventor of IPv6), Dr Paul Vixie (Internet Hall of Fame inductee), Adrian Farrel (GMPLS and PCE pioneer), Geoff Huston (Chief Scientist), etc. The aim of the event is also to bring in diverse voices from all stakeholders in the Internet Community. The event focuses on technology trends in IPv6 Extension headers, IoT, DNS, the latest trends in networking as well as problems that might be keeping our speakers up at night! This time we are also focusing beyond IETF and discussing other standards developing organizations (SDOs) with a focus on private 5G networks, performance testing for Wi-Fi, and Broadband Forum User Services Platform (USP). The esteemed speakers include service providers such as Satish Jamadagni (Reliance Jio) and Barbara Stark (ex-AT&T). From the network equipment vendor side we have Ron Bonica (Juniper), Dr Pascal Thubert (Cisco), and Dr Dirk Trossen (Huawei). We have a panel on IoT with special representations from Indian startups founders such as Ravishankar G Shiroor (Stellapps), Rahul Jadhav (Accuknox), and Sundar Ramakrishnan (Pinaka Aerospace). From the academic side, Georgios Z. Papadopoulos (IMT Atlantique), Carsten Bormann (TZI), and Lincoln Lavoie (University of New Hampshire) will bring in their expertise! Not to miss out on Martin Thomson (Mozilla), Jason Walls (QA Cafe), Nalini Elkins (Inside Products), Shwetha Bhandari (ThoughtSpot), etc who will be bringing their unique perspective and expertise. There is also a pre-Event focused on learning about IETF and listening directly from the long-term IETFers on Saturday April 2. Find all the details and register at our website - https://www.connections.iiesoc.in/ Dhruv Dhody, President IIESoc Nalini Elkins, President INTC The India Internet Engineering Society (IIESoc) is a non-profit that brings together different stakeholders from the computer networking community across industry, academia, service providers, and government. IIESoc exists to further the adoption of IETF standards and increase awareness and participation in the IETF process from the subcontinent. IIESoc has been organizing an annual pre-IETF event in India called Connections and regular meetups called RFCsWeLove. INTC is a nonprofit membership organization that brings enterprises, academia, and government organizations together to promote education and collaboration on current and evolving Internet Standards in a vendor-neutral environment. INTC hosts webinars on technical topics which are free to all. This story is provided by India PR Distribution. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/India PR Distribution) The Association of National Exchanges Members of India (ANMI) on Tuesday urged the government to extend the timeline for seeding Permanent Account Number (PAN) with Aadhaar, which ends on March 31, by another six months. In a letter to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), ANMI requested the market regulator not to suspend accounts of those investors whose PAN is not linked with Aadhaar. As per the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) notification dated September 17, 2021, if the PAN is not linked to Aadhaar by March 31, 2022, the PAN of such persons shall become inoperative immediately after the said date. In a letter addressed to SEBI's whole-time member Ananta Barua, ANMI noted that as per the Exchange and Depository circulars on Aadhar seeding with PAN, in case the PAN is not seeded with Aadhaar before the date specified by the Government, it will not be considered as a valid PAN. Accordingly, with effect from the said date in case PAN and Aadhar are not linked, new as well as existing clients of intermediaries will not be able to place fresh trade or square off existing positions, and also their Demat accounts will have to be suspended. "Please note that the PAN-Aadhaar linking is an ongoing activity and the intermediaries have kept the clients informed on the necessity and importance to complete the linking. However, you would understand that this is a client-dependent activity and the client is required to independently complete the linking on the Income Tax website," ANMI said. (ANI) He was charged with disorderly conduct and harassment following an incident in a karaoke bar in Honolulu, Hawaii. As per police, Miller "became agitated while patrons at the bar began singing karaoke." Miller then reportedly "began yelling obscenities and at one point grabbed the microphone from a 23-year-old woman singing karaoke." Later, he was let out on bail, Deadline reported. Also, Hawaii Police Department issued a statement on social media regarding the incident. The police stated that Miller's bail was set at USD 500. Miller has not commented on the issue yet. (ANI) Taking to Twitter, Heder thanked people for showering her and her film 'CODA' with love. "I'm stunned. Woke up this morning and realized this wasn't all a dream. Love to @TheAcademy and everyone who watched CODA and felt moved and told their friends to watch it and made this moment happen for us. I'm so grateful and happy. #CODAfilm @AppleTVPlus," she tweeted. Adapted from the 2014 French-language film 'La Famille Belier', 'CODA' follows the Rossis, a blue-collar fishing family in Gloucester, Massachusetts, as their hearing daughter (played by Emilia Jones), who also acts as the family interpreter, is considering college. 'CODA' is an acronym for 'children of deaf adults'. It's the first Oscar for Heder, who also directed the Apple TV Plus film. (ANI) Bollywood actor Vaani Kapoor, who portrayed the role of a transgender woman in 'Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui', said that the movie helped in breaking the notion that she is fit to play only glamorous roles. Stating that 'Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui' has helped her career immensely, Vaani said that the film gave her a perfect platform to showcase the actor she's capable of being. "I want to do everything and I'm ready to take any risk on-screen to constantly prove to myself and others that I choose not to be limited as an artist," Vaani added. She said that since the release of 'Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui', she has been getting diverse offers and that's hugely gratifying for her. The actor said, "I think pre 'Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui' people only thought that I could play a certain kind of role but post the film's release; the offers at hand are extremely diverse. I needed a film like CKA to become my calling card and I'm delighted with the response." "This is really encouraging for an actor like me because I don't want to do the same type of roles on screen. I want to explore and excel and be remembered for being an actor who could do anything on screen. I hope I get more offers that test me as a performer. I'm ready for it," continued Vaani. Directed by Abhishek Kapoor, 'Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui' revolves around a cross-functional athlete (Ayushmann Khurrana), who falls in love with a Zumba trainer (Vaani) at his gym. Their love story takes a turn when he realises that she's a transgender woman. The movie, which came out on December 10, was produced by Bhushan Kumar's T-Series in collaboration with Pragya Kapoor's Guy In the Sky Pictures. Meanwhile, Vaani will next be seen opposite Ranbir Kapoor in the action drama 'Shamshera'. Directed by Karan Malhotra of 'Agneepath' fame, the film is set to release in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu on July 22, 2022, worldwide. (ANI) According to The Hollywood Reporter, Lincoln Center Theater has revealed details for a new production inspired by the world of Lerner and Loewe's 'Camelot' and under the tutelage of artistic director Andre Bishop, writer Sorkin and director Bartlett Sher. With previews set to begin at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater on November 3, the opening night has been slated for December 8. The casting and design team are expected to be announced at a later date. In announcing the project today, Lincoln Center Theater described the musical as "a new version of the classic tale" and said it will be "reimagined for the 21st century." Sorkin has written a book based on the original work by Alan Jay Lerner, who adapted the musical from 'The Once and Future King' by T.H. White. This creative change might mean that Lancelot and Queen Guinevere will be doing a lot more walking and talking than they did in the original 1960 production or the 1967 film version. As per The Hollywood Reporter, this upcoming musical marks a reunion for 'To Kill a Mockingbird' duo Sorkin and Sher, who last teamed to make that 2018 production a smashing success. (ANI) The Supreme Court on Monday sought response from the Director General of Health Services (DGHS) on petitions filed by various groups of doctors seeking participation in mop-up round of NEET-PG 2021-22 counselling. Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, representing some petitioners, submitted before a bench headed by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud that after the second round of counselling, his clients were allotted the seats and later, the DGHS issued two notices to bring into the pool some seats which were not available to them. He said that hundreds of seats were added to the pool and as a result, people not on merit, were given seats, which were not available to his clients. A counsel, representing another set of students, pointed at the trend of blocking of seats, due to which there were over 6,000 seats in mop-up round. Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati, representing the DGHS, however, said that the court should not allow any fresh registration in the stray round and added that only 150 new seats were added. She said there were only two options available that either the seats be allowed to remain vacant or added in the mop-up round. The bench, also comprising Justice Surya Kant, asked Bhati to file a reply on the petitions filed by the doctors. Bhati contended that this is for the first time the authorities have added new seats in the mop-up round, and emphasised on the need for doctors amid Covid. Senior advocate Sanjay Hegde, representing another set of petitioners, submitted that people who were much lower in rank than his clients will get a better disciplines. The bench noted that staying the process of counselling will be a very extreme step. "If we cancel the seats, then we will have to cancel all the admissions, which would further delay the whole process...". A group of petitioners contended that after round one of the counselling, they joined a discipline, but were not allowed to upgrade in round two. They sought permission to appear in the mop-up round. --IANS ss/vd ( 356 Words) 2022-03-28-22:42:05 (IANS) Andhra Pradesh's opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) on Monday demanded financial emergency in the state in the wake of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India's observation of a Rs 48,000 crore financial irregularity. TDP politburo member and former Finance Minister Y. Ramakrishnudu said that no other state in India is facing the kind of financial crisis Andhra Pradesh is facing and demanded that the Centre should act before the crisis deepens further. Blaming the corruption by YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) government for the current crisis, he claimed that CAG has made this clear in its report. He also sought a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into the corruption and irregularities indulged in by Jagan Mohan Reddy-led government during last three years. A day after Finance Minister Buggana Rajendranath rubbished the corruption charges made by the TDP, Ramakrishnudu said he had not made any baseless allegations as he had referred to the points raised by the CAG in its report. The TDP leader said the Finance Minister criticised him as the government stood exposed. He asked why the minister failed to respond to the CAG's observation. Ramakrishnudu said the counter-attack by the minister was to divert attention from bypassing Comprehensive Financial Management System (CFMS), treasury code violations, improper ratifications in the name of special bills, and GO 80 issued to pass illegal bills. He wondered how the government could allow backend transactions while bypassing CFMS, and said releasing Rs 48,284.32 crore in the name of special bills is nothing but treasury code violations Rajendranath had claimed in a statement on Sunday that as the CFMS was not institutionalised properly, book adjustment transactions were shown as special bills. He also stated that the total sum was not real expenditure and only a book adjustment transaction by the end of last fiscal.In the CFMS, there are bill payment heads pertaining to various departments, but there is no special bills head. To identify the book adjustment transactions in the CFMS, 'special bills' term is mentioned. He blamed the chaotic and erratic creation of the CFMS during the previous TDP regime for the confusion. The Finance Minister said that as the Treasury Department officials have no access to make book adjustment transactions in the CFMS at present, the Finance Department had authorised the CFMS CEO to exercise the power. He claimed that the entire process is held as per the guidelines of Finance and Treasury departments. The minister also revealed that the Finance Secretary wrote a detailed letter in response to queries raised by the CAG explaining the same. Prior to the CFMS, treasury officials used to do book adjustment transactions manually at the end of the financial year. However, after rolling out the CFMS, the same power was given to the CFMS CEO and the same was conveyed to CAG by the Finance Secretary in writing, he clarified. When no cash transactions took place in the whole process, where was the scope for corruption, he asked. --IANS ms/vd ( 508 Words) 2022-03-28-21:22:04 (IANS) Five people got injured after a fire broke out at Patel Building near Mumbadevi temple on Monday evening, said Mumbai Fire Brigade. The injured have been admitted to the hospital, added the fire brigade. (ANI) Delhi Environment Minister Gopal Rai has ordered Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) to probe the incident and submit the report in the next 24 hours. Earlier on Monday afternoon, about six fire tenders rushed to the spot to douse out the fire. (ANI) He has been credited with over 40 innovations that assist small and marginal farmers across India. "I am a common farmer but the Indian government has honored me with the Padma Shri award for the research I have done on the machines used in agriculture in the last 35 years," said Padma Shri awardee Abdul Khader Nadakattin. "I want to dedicate this to all the farmers in the country," he added. (ANI) He was responding to questions from mediapersons soon after attending the new government's first Cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Pramod Sawant. "Because of the rising international crude oil (prices), they are bound to rise. Are you not aware that Russia and Ukraine are at war," Godinho, a former Transport Minister, said when asked to comment on fuel prices, which saw the price of petrol cross the Rs 100 barrier on Monday. "Is it the local government that has increased the prices? The whole world is bearing the brunt of price rise," Godinho said --IANS maya/arm ( 131 Words) 2022-03-28-22:52:01 (IANS) The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has taken cognisance of the speech by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal regarding the proposed plan for street children who are being rescued by it, and has requested the Delhi government to provide information about the kids who are rescued from the streets and put at the child care institutions. Kejriwal had posted a video message regarding the proposed plan for street kids and their rehabilitation. The NCPCR said that it conducted four meetings with the Delhi government, but it didn't inform the commission about this. "In the said speech, it has been stated that the children who are living on the streets are not being dealt with in a humanitarian way, and are rescued from streets and being placed in child care institutions (CCI). The children who are placed in the child care institutions are then running away from there due to lack of adequate facilities," read the letter written by NCRPC to the Delhi government. The NCPCR said that keeping in view the serious issue of street children, which is also being monitored by the Supreme Court, it is concerned about the issues being highlighted for children staying on the streets and the child care institutions in Delhi. "We have conducted four monthly meetings with all the states in the past five months and the Department of Women and Child Development, Delhi government, did not informed about this problem in CCIs in any of the meetings. "The NCPCR would like your good offices to provide reasons for not informing about this serious issue of children running away from CCIs in Delhi in the monthly review meetings that are being taken by NCPCR with all the states," it said. The NCPCR has sought information pertaining to the status of street children in Delhi at the earliest. --IANS atk/arm ( 325 Words) 2022-03-28-23:18:04 (IANS) The decision by the administration of Arunachal Pradesh's Namsai district to undertake data update of the population of Chakma and Hajong tribals residing in the Chongkham circle has led to widespread protests from the Arunachal Pradesh Chakma Students' Union (APCSU). The tribal communities on Monday announced to boycott the proposed population data updating process. Namsai's Extra Assistant Commissioner (EAC) Rani Perme, in an order, a copy of which is available with IANS, has asked all "Gaonburas" (village head) to assemble all Chakmas and Hajongs under their respective jurisdictions to facilitate the updating of their population data. However, the APCSU, in a statement, condemned the illegal census of only the Chakmas and Hajongs tribals in Namsai from Monday in pursuant to a circular of March 24, saying that this is the EAC's second attempt to conduct the illegal census of only the Chakmas and Hajongs, which, according to them, amounts to "racial profiling". Last month, the EAC first directed the "Gaonburas" of the Chakma villages under the Chongkham Circle to conduct the census, they said. "When the effort failed, the EAC summoned Gaonbura Sushil Chakma and 10 other Chakma individuals for a survey of Chakmas and Hajongs tribals residing under Chongkam circle on February 23. In the meeting, the Chakma participants were allegedly intimidated and asked to cooperate with the survey without fail," the statement said. The APCSU said that the EAC circular violates the order of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) issued on January 24. APCSU President Rup Singh Chakma said that the NHRC had called for action taken reports from the Union Home Secretary and the Arunachal Pradesh Chief Secretary. The NHRC also directed to ensure that human rights of the Chakmas and Hajongs are protected. "As citizens of India, the Chakmas and Hajongs of Arunachal Pradesh will not participate in any such illegal census of only the Chakmas and Hajongs," he added There are about 65,000 Chakma and Hajong people in the state, out of which about 4,500 are migrants from between 1964 to 1969, while the rest are the descendants and citizens by birth under the Citizenship Act of 1955. --IANS sc/vd ( 368 Words) 2022-03-28-23:28:02 (IANS) Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu on Monday said that historians should be committed to truth and called for an 'objective re-evaluation of Indian history through fact-based research, said a press release by Vice President's Secretariat. Stressing the need for greater academic rigour in historical research, he cautioned against "selective or incomplete accounts of Indian history," said a press release. He said that retelling historical facts through an ideological viewpoint will provide a distorted view, as was done under colonial rule. Instead, he urged historians to strengthen 'scientific writing of history with the help of specialized bodies like the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). The Vice President was participating in the valedictory function of the Golden Jubilee year of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), organized by the Ministry of Culture. He also inaugurated an exhibition on 'Freedom Struggle of India' by ICHR on the occasion. Naidu also called for greater research on unsung Indian heroes of the freedom struggle, many of whom were 'limited to mere footnotes in history books'. As part of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, he said, their individual stories must be documented to reveal their 'pain, struggle and the great pride with which they fought for the motherland. 'Untold history must be told', he said. Even on popular heroes, Shri Naidu suggested that historical research must delve deeper into different aspects of their personalities in a more comprehensive manner. He stressed the need for studying tribal and peasant revolts in various parts of the country in greater detail to understand the 'unflinching courage of the ordinary masses who fought the British without any organizational backing'. Naidu observed that there are many people who fought in different parts of the country against the British, and that all of them are 'national heroes' 'It is our duty--our highest patriotic mission to remember the supreme sacrifices made by our freedom fighters and their noble struggle to wrest independence from colonial rulers', Shri Naidu observed. Naidu called upon state governments to organize regular visits to important historical places for children. He suggested that school textbooks must cover stories of freedom fighters' lives in an interesting and engaging way. 'It is my conviction that the lives of our historical figures must be a source of inspiration for the next generations', he said. The Vice President complimented ICHR for completing 50 years in historical research and for "persevering to fill important gaps in Indian history". He appealed to people, particularly youngsters, to visit the exhibitions being put up by ICHR in various parts of the country to better understand the great struggle to attain Swaraj for India. He also called upon Parliamentarians to visit the exhibition and know the contributions of freedom fighters and appreciate the efforts of ICHR. Dharmendra Pradhan, Union Minister of Education & Minister of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Raghuvendra Tanwar, Chairman, ICHR, Arvind P. Jamkhedkar former Chairman, ICHR, Kumar Ratnam, Member Secretary, ICHR and other dignitaries were present during the event. (ANI) Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Roopa Ganguly on Monday alleged that the Trinamool Congress-led West Bengal State government is not ready for discussions on Birbhum violence in the state assembly. She claimed that the BJP MLA Manoj Tigga had been severely injured following a clash between MLAs of the BJP and Trinamool Congress Party. Earlier on Monday, West Bengal Assembly witnessed a ruckus after the MLAs of the ruling Trinamool Congress and BJP came to blows over the Birbhum violence case. Five Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLAs including the Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari were suspended from the West Bengal Assembly on Monday following a clash with TMC MLAs on the floor of the House over Birbhum violence. The other BJP MLAs who have been suspended include Manoj Tigga, Shankar Ghosh, Narahari Mahato and Dipak Barman. The MLAs were suspended until further notice. The BJP MLAs further held a protest march outside the Assembly. "The same situation of the Rampurhat incident created by Anarul Hussain was seen inside by TMC MLAs and their police. We will march against this at 2 pm today. I will write my complaint to the Speaker demanding action as per the rules. We need the Centre's intervention," Suvendu Adhikari had told ANI. "The Opposition demanded discussion over law and order on the last day at least but the government declined. They brought Kolkata police personnel in civil dress to clash with 8-10 of our MLAs," he had added. As many as eight people were killed in the Rampurhat area of West Bengal's Birbhum on Tuesday after a mob allegedly set houses on fire following the killing of TMC leader Bhadu Sheikh. The case is now being probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). (ANI) Mehta was shot on Monday by criminals in Danapur. The criminals fired five bullets at Mehta including one bullet in the chest and another on the head. Mehta was currently serving as Vice-President of Nagar Parishad Danapur. Mehta was close to JDU vice president Upendra Kushwaha. Following the murder, Kushwaha immediately rushed to the victim's house. "it's is a very unfortunate incident and the government will take action against whoever is responsible for this incident," told the mediapersons in Patna. Deepak Mehta contested the 2020 assembly elections from Danapur on a Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) ticket, which later merged with JDU. (ANI) The farmers informed the forest department officials about the incident and tried to reconcile the leopard cup with its mother. "We safely reunited a 10-day old leopard cub with its mother. We found the leopard cub in a sugarcane field. The farmers working in the field informed us about the matter and they themselves tried to reunite them," Umesh Waware, Deputy Conservator of Forests told ANI. After getting the information, Dindori Forest Reserve officials installed CCTV cameras with the help of the Eco-Echo Foundation to capture the reunion of the mother and her child. Further, Umesh Waware said, "We installed trap cameras with the help of the Eco-Echo Foundation and the cub was reunited successfully. The footage showed the moment mother carrying her leopard cup in the morning." (ANI) Police informed that the event took place to welcome the chairman of Congress' Minority Department Imran Pratapgarhi. "A case registered against Maharashtra ministers Aslam Shaikh and Varsha Gaikwad at Bandra Police Station in Mumbai after they were seen brandishing swords at a public event to welcome the chairman of Congress' Minority Department Imran Pratapgarhi," police said. A case was registered against the ministers under Arms Act. (ANI) Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Monday said that the Muslim community is in majority in the state and cannot be considered a minority in the northeastern state anymore, adding that Hindus are in minority in several districts. "When Hindu is not a majority in the state you can declare them as a minority. But I would like to request that when the Hindu community is not a majority in the district, in that district, Hindus should also be declared a minority. There are many districts in Assam where Hindus are hopelessly in minority. Some of them even have less than 5,000 Hindus," the Chief Minister told mediapersons here. "Muslim community is the majority and is the largest community in Assam. This is not just my opinion. It is the statistics. Statistically, Muslims are the largest community in Assam," added Sarma. Earlier Assam Chief Minister called for a review of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and said a fresh exercise should be done in this regard. "We had said earlier also that the old NRC should be reviewed and done afresh. Our discussion with the All Assam Students' Union (AASU) is going on. We want the NRC to be done again in the state," he siad. The updated list of NRC was published in August 2019 and over 19.06 lakh people out of 3.3 crore applicants were left out of the list. (ANI) Delhi Police Special Cell has arrested two members of an alleged international narcotic drugs cartel and recovered ten kilograms of heroin worth over Rs 40 crore. According to Jasmeet Singh, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) Delhi Police Special Cell, the recovered heroin was smuggled into India from Myanmar via Manipur. "A car having a secret cavity to conceal and transport drugs has also been recovered," he said. The two accused have been identified as Nazir alias Nazim and Dinesh Singh. "A case under the appropriate sections of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act was registered at PS Special Cell," said Singh. According to Singh, on March 24, 2022, specific information was received by Special Cell that two members of this cartel, both residents of Uttar Pradesh, had collected a big consignment of heroin from Jharkhand, and would come at T point Delhi Meerut Expressway near ISBT Sarai Kale Khan to deliver the supply of contraband to one of their contacts. As per the police, during interrogation, the arrested drug suppliers have revealed that they are members of a big international narcotic drug cartel. "Both have disclosed to have been indulging in drug supplying in Delhi NCR and parts of UP for last five years. They have further stated that they had procured recovered heroin from a person of district Chattra, Jharkhand and they had to deliver six kgs heroin to a person in Delhi and the remaining four kgs to a person in Gazipur, Uttar Pradesh," they said. They further revealed that their supplier of heroin has links in Myanmar and Manipur. "Most of the heroin brought in Manipur from Myanmar is sent to adjoining states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh and contraband is further transported in other parts of the country including Delhi," Singh said. "During the investigation of this case, it has been revealed that heroin is also manufactured from illicitly cultivated opium in naxalite affected areas of Jharkhand and militancy affected areas of Manipur. Arrested drug traffickers have further disclosed that they also used to procure heroin from Jharkhand-based drug manufacturers cum suppliers," Singh added. (ANI) A new study led by the University of Cambridge has found that girls and boys might be more vulnerable to the negative effects of social media use at different times during their adolescence. The study was published in the journal, 'Nature Communications'. Scientists found that girls have experienced a negative link between social media use and life satisfaction when they are 11-13 years old and boys when they are 14-15 years old. Increased social media use again predicted lower life satisfaction at the age of 19 years. At other times the link was not statistically significant. In just over a decade, social media has fundamentally changed how we spend our time, share information about ourselves, and talk to others. This has led to widespread concern about its potential negative impact, both on individuals and on the wider society. Yet, even after years of research, there is still considerable uncertainty about how social media use relates to wellbeing. A team of scientists including psychologists, neuroscientists and modellers analysed two UK datasets comprising some 84,000 individuals between the ages of 10 and 80 years old. These included longitudinal data - that is, data that tracks individuals over a period of time - on 17,400 young people aged 10-21 years old. The researchers are from the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. The team looked for a connection between estimated social media use and reported life satisfaction and found key periods of adolescence where social media use was associated with a decrease in life satisfaction 12 months later. In the opposite direction, the researchers also found that teens who have lower than average life satisfaction use more social media one year later. In girls, social media use between the ages of 11 and 13 years was associated with a decrease in life satisfaction one year later, whereas in boys this occurred between the ages of 14 and 15 years. The differences suggest that sensitivity to social media use might be linked to developmental changes, possible changes in the structure of the brain, or to puberty, which occurs later in boys than in girls. This requires further research. In both females and males, social media use at the age of 19 years was again associated with a decrease in life satisfaction a year later. At this age, say the researchers, it is possible that social changes - such as leaving home or starting work - may make us particularly vulnerable. At other times, the link between social media use and life satisfaction one year later was not statistically significant. Decreases in life satisfaction also predicted increases in social media use one year later; however, this does not change across age and or differences between the sexes. Dr Amy Orben a group leader at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, who led the study, said, "The link between social media use and mental wellbeing is clearly very complex. Changes within our bodies, such as brain development and puberty, and in our social circumstances appear to make us vulnerable at particular times of our lives." Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Cambridge and a co-author of the study, said, "It's not possible to pinpoint the precise processes that underlie this vulnerability. Adolescence is a time of cognitive, biological and social change, all of which are intertwined, making it difficult to disentangle one factor from another. For example, it is not yet clear what might be due to developmental changes in hormones or the brain and what might be down to how an individual interacts with their peers." Dr Orben added, "With our findings, rather than debating whether or not the link exists, we can now focus on the periods of our adolescence where we now know we might be most at risk and use this as a springboard to explore some of the really interesting questions." Further complicating the relationship is the fact - previously reported and confirmed by today's findings - that not only can social media use negatively impact wellbeing, but that the reverse is also true and lower life satisfaction can drive increased social media use. The researchers were keen to point out that, while their findings have shown that population-level is a link between social media use and poorer wellbeing, it is not yet possible to predict which individuals are most at risk. Professor Rogier Kievit, Professor of Developmental Neuroscience at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, said, "Our statistical modelling examines averages. This means not every young person is going to experience a negative impact on their well-being from social media use. For some, it will often have a positive impact. Some might use social media to connect with friends or cope with a certain problem or because they don't have anyone to talk to about a particular problem or how they feel - for these individuals, social media can provide valuable support." Professor Andrew Przybylski, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford said, "To pinpoint which individuals might be influenced by social media, more research is needed that combines objective behavioural data with biological and cognitive measurements of development. We, therefore, call on social media companies and other online platforms to do more to share their data with independent scientists, and, if they are unwilling, for governments to show they are serious about tackling online harm by introducing legislation to compel these companies to be more open." (ANI) Ahead of the byelections for the Asansol Lok Sabha seat, a video of the ruling Trinamool Congress MLA Narendra Nath Chakraborty has gone viral in which he is seen openly threatening the supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the viral video, the TMC MLA from Pandaveshwar is purportedly seen openly threatening the BJP supporters. During a meeting with the party workers in Pandeshwar's Haripur, Chakraborty is asking the TMC workers to intimidate the BJP supporters. In the video, he is seen instructing the TMC workers to intimidate the BJP supporters so that they do not go to the polling booths. Meanwhile, the BJP slammed the TMC MLA for his attempts to threaten the BJP workers. Former Mayor of Asansol and the BJP leader Jitendra Tiwari said that Chakraborty has understood that the defeat of the TMC is certain in the Lok Sabha bypoll if free and fair elections are held. "He (Chakraborty) is a disciple of Anubrata Mandal who may go to jail after a few days. The way he is issuing threats to the BJP supporters, it seems he will accompany Mondal soon in the jail." added Tiwari. Asansol is all set to witness a high-octane electoral battle with actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha taking on the BJP's Agnimitra Paul in the ensuing Lok Sabha bypolls. The Asansol Lok Sabha seat fell vacant after Babul Supriyo, a two-time BJP MP, quit the party in October last year to join the TMC. The voting will be held on April 12 while the results will be declared on April 16. (ANI) The Sri Lankan Navy has apprehended four Rameswaram-based fishermen in Ramanathapuram district and their one boat on Tuesday early in the morning. 523 mechanised boats went out to the sea while fishing near Delft Island on Monday. "The Sri Lankan navy arrived in the area at night and captured the fishermen and their one boat, from where they were taken to Mylatty harbour for further interrogations with the Sri Lankan Navy," said Q branch police. The fishermen arrested have been identified as R.Harikrishnan (49), S.Vignesh (26), P. Chinnamunian (55) and V. Murugan (31), and the captured boat was owned by Vinod. The arrest of the fishermen took place when the Indian External Affairs Minister, Dr S. Jaishankar visited Sri Lanka IOC, the local subsidiary of India's oil major, Indian Oil Corporation to take stock of the island nation's fuel supply situation amid India's support during its severe economic crisis. (ANI) The 48-hour 'Bharat Bandh' called by different trade unions to protest against government policies continued for the second day in several states on Tuesday. A joint forum of central trade unions had given a call for a nationwide strike on March 28 and March 29. The demands of the trade unions include scrapping of the labour codes, rollback of privatisation in any form, scrapping of the National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP), increased allocation of wages under MNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act), and regularisation of contract workers among others. This is the first such strike after the BJP won the Assembly elections in four of five states. In Tamil Nadu, various trade unions, including the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-led trade union Labour Progressive Federation (LPF), participated in the nationwide strike. In Kerala, shops remained closed in Thiruvananthapuram. The government of Kerala yesterday said that following Kerala High Court's orders disciplinary proceedings will be initiated against those employees who abstain from work by participating in the strike. The court had observed that it is illegal that state government employees are participating in the strike. In Karnataka's Kalaburagi, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and other Left organisations held protests against the government policies. The strike has also triggered a political slugfest. Slamming the BJP-led Centre, Rajasthan Minister Pratap Singh Khachariyawas in Jaipur called the "party a follower of Ravana and not Ram". "After polls, the BJP increased petrol and diesel prices. They're 'Ravan Bhakts' not 'Ram Bhakts'. They should distribute coupons for petrol, diesel on the lines of their ministers distributing movie tickets for 'The Kashmir Files'," he said. Speaking to ANI yesterday, Baidya said that the government has not done anything since 2014 except privatisation. "Air India to Airports, everything is being privatised. What is the meaning of Parliament, MPs, and Ministers when the government will not do anything for the public?... The trade union strike was very necessary for common people. We are supporting the strike. As long as BJP will keep pushing its own free will, we will keep protesting," Baidya said. Parliament proceedings are also being affected by the Opposition protests due to the fuel price hike. Congress MP Shaktisinh Gohil today gave a suspension of business notice under Rule 267 in Rajya Sabha to discuss the two-day nationwide strike. Likewise, Congress chief whip Kodikunnil Suresh gave an adjournment motion in Lok Sabha to discuss 'the all-India strike called by the joint council of various trade unions. Yesterday, Rajya Sabha MPs from the Left and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) parties staged a protest inside the Parliament premises against the government in support of the Bandh. The MPs held the protest at the Gandhi statue when the Rajya Sabha was adjourned till noon due to disruption in proceedings by the opposition parties over rising prices of petroleum products and trade union protests. The MPs also marched towards the Vijay Chowk from the Gandhi statue to protest against government policies. The central trade unions that are part of this joint forum are the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS), Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), All India United Trade Union Centre (AIUTUC), Trade Union Coordination Centre (TUCC), Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU), Labour Progressive Federation (LPF), and United Trade Union Congress (UTUC). However, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) has kept its distance from the strike. (ANI) The interrogation is underway at Aluva Police Club in the presence of ADG, Crime Branch S Sreejith. On Monday, the interrogation went on for seven hours. Earlier, the Kerala High Court directed the probe team to conclude the investigation into the case by April 15. Actor Dileep is the eighth accused in the 2017 actress assault case. The case pertains that an actress who worked in Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu films was allegedly abducted and molested inside her car by a group of men who had forced their way into the vehicle on the night of February 17, 2017. (ANI) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said that poverty is eliminated with the empowerment of the people while aligning their strength with good governance. The Prime Minister virtually addressed the 'Grih Pravesham' of about 5.21 lakh beneficiaries of Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Gramin in Madhya Pradesh on Tuesday. "When a hardworking government and the aspirations of the common man join hands, then growth and progress always remain limitless. Poverty is eliminated when poor people get empowered while their strength is aligned with good governance," said PM Modi. He also said that today almost 5.21 lakh families of Madhya Pradesh have got the 'pucca houses' which will "primarily empower the women of the state" and also "unlock a world of opportunities for the poor". "This scheme is a step toward the empowerment of the poor and gives them hope for a bright future filled with possibilities. The 5.21 lakh homes also signify empowerment of women in Madhya Pradesh," PM Modi said. Further, the Prime Minister said that the campaign to give a pucca house to the poor is not just a government scheme. "It is a commitment to give hope to the poor," said PM Modi. "It is the first step to give courage to the poor to come out of poverty. When poor people have a roof over their head, they can focus on educating their children," he said adding that despite the COVID pandemic, the government has ensured that the construction of 'pucca houses' continues without any hindrance. Highlighting the key features of the houses given under the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Gramin scheme, PM Modi said, "These houses are special because they include amenities like gas connection under Ujjwala Yojna, LED bulb connection under Ujala Yojna, toilets under Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and water supply under the Har Ghar Jal Yojna." The function also witnessed traditional celebrations with conch, lamp, flowers and rangoli organised in the new houses built under the scheme in Madhya Pradesh. (ANI) The administration took punitive action saying that a "non-Hindu" cannot perform inside the Koodalmanikyam temple premises. Speaking to ANI, Shashi Tharoor said, "I understand some restrictions in some temples about access to sanctum santorum. But this is a dance performance with other dancers inside the temple premises. Shocked that the temple is not allowing this." "I believe that it serves our society ill and also damages the perception of our religion in the eyes of others," the Congress leader added. (ANI) The Sri Lankan Navy has apprehended four Rameswaram-based fishermen in Ramanathapuram district and impounded their boat. The action on the part of the Sri Lankan Navy came in the wake of 523 mechanised boats going to the sea for fishing near Delft Island on Monday. "The Sri Lankan Navy arrived in the area at night and captured the fishermen and their one boat, from where they were taken to Mylatty harbour for further interrogations," said Q branch police, one of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) wings of Tamil Nadu Police. The fishermen arrested have been identified as R.Harikrishnan (49), S.Vignesh (26), P. Chinnamunian (55) and V. Murugan (31), and the captured boat was owned by Vinod. As per the Q branch police, earlier on Thursday (24 March 2022) Sri Lankan Navy had apprehended 16 fishermen and impounded their two boats from Rameswaram and Mandapam in Tamil Nadu. On February 12 as well, the Sri Lankan Navy had apprehended 12 Rameswaram-based fishermen and impounded their two fishing boats after they had gone fishing across the border in Palk Bay. Earlier Minister of State in the Ministry of External Affairs V Muraleedharan, in a written reply in Lok Sabha on February 4, 2022, said Indian fishermen are arrested from time to time by the Sri Lankan authorities for allegedly crossing the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) and fishing in Sri Lankan waters. "As per the available information, 74 and 159 Indian fishermen were arrested by the Sri Lankan Navy in 2020 and 2021 respectively," he stated. Muraleedharan further informed that following the 2+2 initiative in November 2016, when the Foreign and Fisheries Ministers of the two countries met in New Delhi, a bilateral Joint Working Group (JWG) mechanism and meeting of the Ministers for Fisheries of the two countries was institutionalized to address the fishermen issues with Sri Lanka. (ANI) Single Bench of Justice N Nagaresh dismissed the pleas which argued that the notification regarding land acquisition is not legal. The court accepted the state government's contention that the Central Government's notification was not required for land acquisition as SilverLine was not a special project of the Railways. The pleas also sought direction to stop the survey procedures and stone layings for land acquisition. The 529-km SilverLine railway project will link Thiruvananthapuram in the south to Kasaragod in north Kerala, covering 11 districts through 11 stations. The journey between two stations is expected to take four hours, whereas it currently takes 12 hours. The project is also being opposed by Congress-led UDF, which has been alleging that the project is "unscientific and impractical" and will put a huge financial burden on the state. (ANI) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday reiterated the Bharatiya Janata Party's commitment to empowering women and said that under the PM Awas Yojana, women also have ownership rights to two crore houses. During a virtual address at the 'Grih Pravesham' of about 5.21 lakh beneficiaries of Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Gramin in Madhya Pradesh, PM Modi said, "Women too have the ownership rights of around two crore houses built under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana." "This right has strengthened the participation of women in making other financial decisions in the household. This is a matter of case study in big universities across the world," he added. The Prime Minister also said that to solve the problems faced by women, the Centre has taken the initiative to provide water to every household. "Be it the BJP government in the Centre, or BJP government in the states, walking with the mantra of 'Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas' all of them are working to empower the poor," PM Modi said. Talking of Centre's 'Har Ghar Jal Yojna', PM Modi said that over six crore families across India have been supplied clean drinking water. "We are very close to supplying water through a pipeline to 50 lakh rural families in Madhya Pradesh in comparison to 13 lakh families before," he added. Taking a sweep at Congress, PM Modi said that some political parties raised a lot of slogans to eliminate poverty but did not do enough to empower the poor. "I believe when the poor get empowered, it gives them the courage to fight poverty. When efforts of an honest government come together with that of an empowered poor, poverty loses," he said. (ANI) A Delhi Sessions Court has ordered the release of a person who was sent to judicial custody by a Mahila court for non-payment of maintenance to his estranged wife under the Domestic Violence Act. The Sessions Court observed, 'while passing the orders, courts cannot forget or ignore the purpose of "adjudication". The order fails to meet the test of 'Adjudication' and is not a speaking order. The same deserves to be set aside. Additional Session Judge Ravinder Bedi at Karkardooma Court observed, "Having gone through the impugned order, I am satisfied that there is no indication on the application of mind by the learned metropolitan magistrate (MM). Though no detailed reasons are required at the interim stage, there must be sufficient indication on the application of mind by the Magistrate to the facts constituting elements while deciding ad-interim relief of maintenance." The Sessions Court set aside the Mahila court order and remanded back the matter for disposal of the application seeking maintenance. The counsel for the husband submitted to deposit Rs 1 lakh in the Bank Account of the respondent. The Sessions Court said, "On such deposition in the account of the wife, the appellant be released instantaneously from custody. He shall file an undertaking or an indemnity bond of Rs. 25000 before the court of Metropolitan Magistrate concerned for his regular appearance in trial court proceedings." The court has directed to decide on the application preferably within a period of one month. Both parties are directed to appear before the trial court on April 7, 2022. The appellant had challenged the order of the Mahila court of 11 March 2022. Advocate Amit Kumar, counsel for the appellant, had argued that the appellant has been put in general prison instead of civil detention and the mandatory procedural requirements under the provision of the Civil Procedure Code (CPC) for civil detention were not looked upon by the trial court. He had also submitted that the impugned order is not passed on the application of the complainant seeking such arrest. It is not clear as to which of the order of the learned trial court was violated by the appellant. The interim application seeking maintenance on behalf of the complainant is still pending disposal and instead of disposing of the same, the learned Magistrate chose to pass an ad interim order. On the other hand Advocate Sidhant, Counsel for the respondent, had submitted that the appellant was not making any payment to his client. Two execution petitions are filed for recovery of pending arrears, which are to the tune of approx. Rs 2.5 Lakhs. He, however, admitted that the application seeking interim relief on behalf of the wife is still pending adjudication before the trial court and only an ad-interim order has been passed. (ANI) Uttar Pradesh Government told the Supreme Court that the state has taken all efforts to protect the witnesses and families of victims of the Lakhimpur Kheri incident. Uttar Pradesh government said that all the witnesses are also regularly contacted by the police for appraisal of their security conditions. The submission of the Uttar Pradesh government came in an affidavit as a reply to the petition seeking to cancel the bail of Ashish Mishra, the son of Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Ajay Mishra Teni. The state government told the Supreme Court that it had opposed the bail plea of Ashish Mishra in the Allahabad High Court and the submission of the petition that the state did not effectively oppose the bail application of the accused Ashish Mishra is completely untrue. "That at the very outset, the Answering Respondent (Uttar Pradesh) takes exception to the averments in the SLP to the effect that State did not effectively oppose the Bail Application of the Accused Respondent No 1 (Ashish Mishra). The same is completely untrue, as is also borne out from a perusal of the Impugned Order itself...." read the affidavit. The affidavit also stated that the same clearly demonstrates that Ashish Mishra's bail application was vehemently opposed by the State in the Allahabad High Court and any averments to the contrary in the special leave petition (SLP) are completely false and merits to be rejected. Uttar Pradesh Government further said that as per the Allahabad High Court's order of February 10, 2022, the limitation period against the same is still running, and the decision to file SLP against the same is pending consideration before the relevant authorities. The government also said that the investigation revealed that the altercation between a witness and the opposite party took place over the throwing of Gulal. Earlier, it was alleged that one witness was attacked by some miscreants. The alleged attackers threatened the witness that Mishra is out on bail and the ruling party had also won the election and they would see to him. According to the affidavit, all the witnesses are also regularly contacted by the police for appraisal of their security conditions. "The witnesses were interviewed telephonically most recently on March 20 2022 and expressed satisfaction with the security provided to them and were informed that if they required any help in relation to their security, they should immediately contact the Superintendent of Police of their respective districts and would receive prompt assistance," UP government assured in the affidavit. Earlier, the Supreme Court had issued notice to Uttar Pradesh Govt and others on plea seeking to cancel bail to Ashish Mishra. On the last hearing advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the petitioner, said that one of the prime protected witnesses was brutally attacked, a few days after bail was granted to Ashish Mishra. Family members of the victims of the Lakhimpur Kheri incident have moved Supreme Court challenging the Allahabad High Court order, which granted bail to Ashish Mishra. In the Special Leave Petition, family members of the deceased have challenged the Allahabad High Court order dated February 10 2022, wherein Ashish Mishra was granted regular bail. The petitioner said that Allahabad HC's order is unsustainable in law. They also said that they have approached the apex court as the State of Uttar Pradesh has failed to prefer any appeal against the impugned order. Ashish Mishra was released from jail in February followed by Allahabad High Court granting him bail. Eight people, including four farmers, had died in violence on October 3, 2020, in Lakhimpur Kheri. (ANI) Assam and Meghalaya governments on Tuesday signed a historic agreement here in the national capital to resolve their 50-year-old pending boundary difference. The agreement was signed by the Chief Ministers of Assam and Meghalaya in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah at the office of the Ministry of Home Affairs. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and his Meghalaya counterpart Conrad K Sangma signed the agreement in the presence of the chief secretaries of both the states as well as other officials of these states and the officials of MHA. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between Assam and Meghalaya two months after a draft resolution was submitted by the Chief Ministers of both states to Shah on January 31 for examination and consideration by the MHA. The governments of Assam and Meghalaya had come up with a draft resolution to resolve their border disputes in six of the 12 "areas of difference" along the 884-km boundary. According to the proposed recommendations for the 36.79 square km of land, Assam will keep 18.51 square km and give the remaining 18.28 square km to Meghalaya. The agreement between Assam and Meghalaya is significant as the boundary dispute between the two states has been pending for a very long time. The long-standing land dispute was sparked in 1972 when Meghalaya was carved out of Assam. The border issues came as a result of different readings of the demarcation of boundaries in the initial agreement for the new state's creation. (ANI) Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Tuesday called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the national capital and apprised him of the various development projects and welfare schemes being implemented in Assam. "Called on Adarniya Pradhan Mantri Narendra Modi in New Delhi and apprised him of the various development projects and welfare schemes being implemented in Assam. Also sought his blessings and guidance for further accelerating the pace of growth in our State," Sarma said in a tweet. Assam Chief Minister is in Delhi to sign an agreement with the Meghalaya government to resolve their 50-year-old pending boundary differences. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and his Meghalaya counterpart Conrad K Sangma would sign the agreement in the presence of chief secretaries of both the states as well as other officials of these states and the officials of MHA. Officials in the Ministry of Home Affairs told ANI that the agreement will be signed by the Chief Ministers of Assam and Meghalaya in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah at around 3.30 pm in the office of the MHA. The long-standing land dispute was sparked in 1972 when Meghalaya was carved out of Assam. The border issues came about as a result of different readings of the demarcation of boundaries in the initial agreement for the new state's creation. (ANI) The people who live near the Ghazipur landfill, which is has been burning since Monday noon, are facing difficulty in breathing as smoke has engulfed the entire area. "At around 1:00 am on Monday we saw dense smoke coming out of the dump yard. I live nearby, we are facing difficulty in breathing as the entire area has been engulfed in dense smoke since yesterday," said Vasudev. Vasudev also said that many fire engines can be seen at the landfill, but there is no relief yet in terms of smoke in the area. Fazia Ahmed, a mechanic working in the area, said that yesterday when the fire broke out it was almost impossible for them to breathe. "The situation has improved a bit but yet toxic smoke is still making breathing difficult," said Ahmed. Meanwhile, Delhi Environment Minister Gopal Rai on Monday ordered an inquiry into the fire. "Disaster Management team is working on the spot to douse the fire. This type of incident has happened earlier too. The reason is negligence. However, a detailed report on the current incident has been asked from Delhi Pollution Control Committee," said Rai. The government on Monday ordered the agency to probe the fire and submit the report within 24 hours. A First Information Report has also been registered under the Indian Penal Code's Sections 278 (making atmosphere noxious to health), 285 (negligent conduct with respect to fire or combustible matter), and 336 (act endangering life or personal safety of others) against unknown people. A fire broke out at a dumping yard in East Delhi's Ghazipur landfill on Monday afternoon. (ANI) The board won the award under the 'Institution/RWA/Religious Organisation category.' The board chief of the shrine thanked the members of the shine and showed his gratitude for receiving the award. "Honoured to receive the award from Hon'ble President, Appreciable hard work done by Shrine Board employees and grateful for guidance from Honourable LG," tweeted Ramesh Kumar, CEO Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board. President, Ram Nath Kovind felicitated the winners of the 3rd National Water Awards at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi where he also launched the Jal Shakti Abhiyan: Catch the Rain campaign 2022 during the event. States Of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu secured the first, second and third prizes respectively in the 'Best State Category'. The first National Water Award was launched by the Jal Shakti Ministry in 2018. National Water Awards have provided a good opportunity to start-ups as well as leading organizations to engage and deliberate with senior policymakers on how to adopt the best water resources management practices in India.(ANI) In a major capability boost for the indigenous LCA Tejas combat aircraft, the Indian Air Force is equipping them with American Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits which would help them target enemy positions with pinpoint accuracy. The Indian Air Force had recently signed a contract for the JDAM kits which help air to ground bombs to attack their targets with precision at distances of over 80 kms, government sources told ANI here. The first fleet to be equipped with these JDAMs would be that of the Light Combat Aircraft Tejas which is going to be one of the mainstays of the force in the future, the sources said. The capability would give a further edge to the homegrown aircraft over the adversary aircraft as they would be able to destroy targets from standoff distances, they said. The Indian Air Force had recently equipped the Tejas with the French-origin Hammer air to ground stand-off missile along with the indigenous Astra indigenous air to air missiles. Indian armed forces have extensively utilised the delegated financial powers granted to them in different phases by the government to equip themselves with the necessary weaponry to handle any conflict or aggression by enemies on both sides. The Indian Air Force is strongly supporting the indigenous LCA Tejas fighter aircraft programme by adding more and more capabilities to the aircraft. The IAF has already operationalised two of its squadrons in the initial operational clearance and final operational clearance versions while a contract has been signed for the 83 Mark1As set to be delivered a couple of years from now. The IAF has also its eyes set on the LCA Mark 2 and the AMCA being developed by the DRDO for it. (ANI) New Delhi [India], March 29 (ANI) Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma on Tuesday said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah gave the necessary push to resolve the long-pending border dispute between Assam and Meghalaya. "There has been a lot of push from Prime Minister and Home Minister that they would like to see that these differences (Assam-Meghalaya border issue) are resolved because if India and Bangladesh can resolve the border issues then why can't the states also. This is the stand they took," said Sangma. The Meghalaya CM further said that the process to resolve the dispute has been going on for several years. "It is a process and the process has been going on for a long time. Everybody has done their part, contributed in their own way. The push was given in last few years by the Centre and both state governments," he said. Assam and Meghalaya governments on Tuesday signed a historic agreement here in the national capital to resolve their 50-year-old pending boundary differences. Terming the agreement a result of teamwork, Sangma said, "I am thankful to Amit Shah and Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma because they went the extra mile. It's only because of overall teamwork that was there, we were able to resolve or at least come to some kind of a resolution in the first 6 areas of differences out of the 12." CM said that everyone wants border disputes to be resolved and this agreement will bring much-needed peace to the area. "Issue of border dispute/differences has been there for the last 50 yrs. We're celebrating the Golden Jubilee of our state this year and even after 50 years, this issue has remained. So, there's a large section of society that wants a resolution to this, including the leadership," said Sangma "I think it is a very important resolution and it will lead to a lot of peace in the border areas," he added. The agreement was signed by the Chief Ministers of Assam and Meghalaya in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah at the office of the Ministry of Home Affairs. The governments of Assam and Meghalaya had come up with a draft resolution to resolve their border disputes in six of the 12 "areas of difference" along the 884-km boundary. According to the proposed recommendations for the 36.79 square km of land, Assam will keep 18.51 square km and give the remaining 18.28 square km to Meghalaya. The long-standing land dispute was sparked in 1972 when Meghalaya was carved out of Assam. The border issues came as a result of different readings of the demarcation of boundaries in the initial agreement for the new state's creation. (ANI) She cleared her stance on students and the facilities provided to the young minds under her leadership. "Over 20 thousand students of West Bengal have been provided credit cards for their educational expenses upto Rs 10 lakh, we are in the process of adding more students to the list gradually," said the West Bengal CM. While stating about the increment in daily wages of the tea labourers in Darjeeling, she said "Chaa Sundari Scheme' has been launched in the state, under which 3,80,000 families will be provided homes. Tea labourers used to get Rs 67 as daily wage before TMC came to power, now they are paid Rs 202 daily wage".(ANI) The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MPs from West Bengal were to meet PM Modi over breakfast on Wednesday morning, as per the earlier schedule at the 7 Lok Kalyan Marg, the official residence of the PM. The MPs will now meet PM Modi on Thursday, which is March 31. PM Modi often meets MPs of different states during the Parliament session. PM Modi talks more on non-political issues in these meetings, mostly about motivating MPs to do more.Recently, PM Modi interacted with MPs of Bihar and Jharkhand. (ANI) A massive fire broke out in the forest area of Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan's Alwar district, said a forest official on Tuesday. Indian Air Force (IAF) choppers have been deployed to douse the blaze. The IAF said that it has deployed two Mi 17 V5 helicopters to undertake Bambi Bucket operations and the fire fighting operations are underway since early morning today. "At the behest of Alwar District administration to help control spread of fire over large areas of Sariska Tiger Reserve, IAF has deployed two Mi 17 V5 helicopters to undertake Bambi Bucket operations. Fire Fighting Operations are underway since early morning today," said the IAF. Sudarshan Sharma, Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) of Alwar said that nine square km of area is up in the flames as of now. "We were informed about the fire two days ago. We took the help of locals to control the fire. 9 square km of area is up in the flames as of now. We are trying to restrict the fire so that it doesn't engulf the valley. Damage will be ascertained once the fire is doused," said Sharma. "As the fire was massive, efforts of locals weren't enough. So we intimated the fire department in Jaipur. They deployed 2 choppers from Delhi to douse the fire. Areas having high tiger and rural people's population are our priority," said Sunita Pankaj, Additional District Magistrate (ADM) of Alwar. Further details are awaited. (ANI) Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Tuesday said after signing the agreement on the boundary dispute that he will work towards making the Northeast region a growth engine in the country. "It is a historic day for all of us. When I first became the Chief Minister, the Home Minister said to resolve all the differences with regard to the border and Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants the northeast should become the growth engine of the country. Home Minister advised me that you are the Chief Minister of Assam and it is your responsibility to find a solution for the issue. As per his advice, we started talking and we succeeded in finding a solution to the issue," said the Assam Chief Minister. He further said that in the next six-seven months, we aim to resolve the issue of the remaining disputed sites. "After this MoU, in the next six-seven months, we aim to resolve the issue of the remaining disputed sites. We will work towards making the Northeast region a growth engine in the country," Sarma said. Sarma said that the initial discussions have started with the Chief Ministers of Mizoram and Nagaland to solve the border disputes with them. "Union Home Minister also requested to resolve the border disputes between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. I had a meeting with AP CM where we formed a road map to settle 122 disputed points. Initial discussions have started with the CMs of Mizoram and Nagaland," he added. "In 1970s, Meghalaya was carved out from Assam, but in the State Reorganisation Bill, Congress could have resolved this... Both states kept fighting internally resulting in casualties. We're working on Peace, Heritage & Development (PHD) model for Northeast's development," said the Assam CM The initiation of resolution of 50 years old border dispute between Assam and Meghalaya has been done today. This historic milestone could only be achieved because of the continuous effort of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and HM Amit Shah, said Himanta Biswa Sarma. Assam and Meghalaya governments on Tuesday signed a historic agreement here in the national capital to resolve their 50-year-old pending boundary differences. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between Assam and Meghalaya two months after a draft resolution was submitted by the Chief Ministers of both states to Shah on January 31 for examination and consideration by the MHA. The governments of Assam and Meghalaya had come up with a draft resolution to resolve their border disputes in six of the 12 "areas of difference" along the 884-km boundary. (ANI) Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma on Tuesday said several issues including insurgency in the area have been taken into consideration while coming to an agreement with Assam to resolve the border dispute. "Political issues including insurgency and other issues related to North-East have been given due importance (while coming to an agreement with Assam over border dispute areas)," said Sangma. Sangma said that even the opinion of the general public was taken into consideration before coming to an agreement with Assam. "Earlier we only used to focus on historical facts and maps but this time even the opinion of the public has been taken into consideration. We asked the people in the area what they want and then on their feedback we went ahead with the talks," he said. The CM further informed that the final demarcation of borders will be done after a survey is conducted in the area by the central authority Survey of India. "Out of 12 areas of difference, we have come to an agreement with Assam on six areas. Further, a survey will be done by Survey of India with both states' involvement, and when that's done, actual demarcation will take place," said Sangma. Assam and Meghalaya governments on Tuesday signed a historic agreement here in the national capital to resolve their 50-year-old pending boundary differences. The agreement was signed by the Chief Ministers of Assam and Meghalaya in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah at the office of the Ministry of Home Affairs. The governments of Assam and Meghalaya had come up with a draft resolution to resolve their border disputes in six of the 12 "areas of difference" along the 884-km boundary. According to the proposed recommendations for the 36.79 square km of land, Assam will keep 18.51 square km and give the remaining 18.28 square km to Meghalaya. The long-standing land dispute was sparked in 1972 when Meghalaya was carved out of Assam. The border issues came as a result of different readings of the demarcation of boundaries in the initial agreement for the new state's creation. (ANI) Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Tuesday denied receiving any letter from West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who wrote to all Opposition leaders and chief ministers calling for a united fight against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled Centre. He said that his party's priority is the development and welfare of Odisha. "I haven't received a letter let. We stand for the development and welfare of our state. That's what our party stands for," said Patnaik when asked about Banerjee's letter to Opposition leaders and CMs of non-BJP ruled states for an anti-BJP Opposition front. Earlier in the day, Banerjee wrote to all Opposition leaders and chief ministers calling for a united fight against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled Centre. She alleged that the BJP repeatedly attacked the federal structure of the country. "I am writing to you to express deep concern over direct attacks on this country's institutional democracy by the ruling BJP. Central agencies such as the ED, CBI, Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) and the Income Tax Department are being used to target, harass and corner political opponents across the country for vendetta. During the recently concluded Winter Session, Parliament bulldozed through the Delhi Special Police (Amendment) Bill 2021 as well as the CVC (Amendment) Bill 2021, in the midst of an opposition walkout. These laws enable the Centre to extend the tenure of the directors of ED and CBI up to five years in blatant violation of a previous Supreme Court judgment," Banerjee stated in her letter. The Odisha Chief Minister had visited the Parliament earlier today to meet the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) MPs and several other leaders. Patnaik is on a three-day tour of the national capital. Speaking to media persons in the Parliament, the five-time Odisha Chief Minister said, "So far there has been no proposal or discussion on a Presidential candidate for the upcoming presidential polls." Asked if the Opposition will put up a consensus candidate, he said, "I have neither thought anything about it nor do I have any proposal so far." The BJD has nine MPs in Rajya Sabha and 11 MPs in the Lok Sabha. The regional party carries a lot of political significance when it comes to the passage of crucial bills and also the elections for key Constitutional posts. The BJD is often seen as a fence player and extended its support to the BJP-led NDA government. (ANI) At the same time, the Crime Branch continued its interrogation of actor Dileep, who is accused in the case. The Kerala High Court directed the probe team to conclude the investigation into the case by April 15. Earlier in November, Balachandra Kumar has levelled a series of allegations against Dileep in connection to the case. He had shared audio recordings which led to new conspiracies in the case against actor Dileep. Further, Dileep was accused of conspiring with others to murder police officials who have been investigating the actor assault case. The actress, who has worked in Tamil and Telugu films, was allegedly abducted and molested inside her car by a group of men, who had forced their way into the vehicle on the night of February 17, 2017. (ANI) The event organised by 'All JK Youth Society' was held in a government girl's school in Srinagar, where over 500 girls attended the program. The girls were made aware of how drugs enter the Kashmir valley and then reach the youth through a chain. They were also told about the disadvantages and harmful effects of drugs. The program also threw light on the impact of drugs on the abusers. All JK Youth Society's vice president Yana Mir addressed the gathering and guided the youth about measures to be taken in order to save the valley from losing its entire generation to drug abuse and subsequent other vices like militancy or crime. The girls responded very positively and looked keen to make a difference. The event was attended by Sanjay Saraf, National General Secretary RLGP, Shoaib Dar of Apni Party, Agha Syed Abbas Rizvi President JK People's Justice Front, Activists Sahil Bashir Bhat, Aijaz Kashani and Javid Beigh, Principal GGHS and Area Corporator Shaheena Bhat. (ANI) Chief Ministers of Assam and Meghalaya on Tuesday signed a historic agreement for the settlement of inter-state border dispute in presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The Home Minister said it is "a historic day" for a dispute-free northeast and noted that in a short span of time, 6 out of 12 issues have been settled between Assam and Meghalaya and about 70 per cent of the border between the two states has become dispute-free. He said during the last three years, the union government has signed several agreements for ending extremism and for lasting peace in the northeastern states. The Home Minister said PM Modi has made several efforts for the peace process, development, prosperity and promotion of the cultural heritage of the northeast, which "we all have witnessed, since 2014, when he became the Prime Minister". Looking at the journey from 2019 to 2022, there have seen many big achievements in establishing peace in the North East - NLFT agreement in August 2019, the Bru-Reang agreement on January 16, 2020, the Bodo agreement on January 27, 2020, the Karbi-Anglong agreement on September 4, 2021, and today's Assam-Meghalaya border agreement. Assam Chief Minister Hemant Biswa Sarma and his Meghalaya counterpart Conrad Sangma expressed gratitude to PM Modi and Amit Shah for solving this decades-long problem. Noting that development of the Northeast is not possible unless disputes between states are resolved and armed groups surrender, the Home Minister said that efforts should be made in the year of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav to realize Prime Minister Narendra Modi's dream of a peaceful and prosperous northeast. PM Modi has described the northeast as "Ashtalakshmi". The Home Minister said that with the efforts of the government, the North East Region (NER) will not only be a part of the national mainstream but will also be the driving force in national development. He said the Modi government has taken several initiatives including a narcotics-free, flood-free and infiltration-free North East and both the Centre and northeastern states are progressing in a time-bound manner on all these fronts. Noting that another 50-year-old dispute is going to be resolved with today's agreement, he said that from 2019 to 2022, more than 6,900 armed cadres have surrendered and more than 4,800 weapons have been surrendered to the administration. The Home Minister said NLFT (SD) agreement was signed in August, 2019 to bring the extremists in the mainstream of society in Tripura which contributed greatly in making Tripura a peaceful state. A landmark agreement was signed on January 16, 2020, to solve the 23-year-old Bru-Reang refugee crisis forever. Under this, more than 37,000 tribals who were leading a difficult life, are now living a life of dignity today. Amit Shah said that the Bodo Accord signed on January 27, 2020 resolved the 50-year-old Bodo issue while maintaining the original form of Assam. The Assam Government and the Government of India have fulfilled 95 per cent of the terms of this agreement and today Bodoland is known as a peaceful region and is on the path of development. The Karbi-Anglong Agreement was signed on September 4, 2021 to resolve the long-standing dispute in the Karbi regions of Assam. Under this, more than 1,000 armed cadres surrendered and joined the mainstream. He thanked the Chief Ministers and officials of both the states on behalf of PM Modi and the central government. Amit Shah said he is confident that the strong political will shown by the Chief Ministers of Assam and Meghalaya, "we will make the North East dispute-free through discussions with all the states". A Home Ministry release said it has been the consistent approach of the central government that inter-state boundary issues can be resolved only with the cooperation of the state governments concerned. It said the central government acts as a facilitator for amicable settlement of the boundary issue in the spirit of mutual cooperation and understanding. The release said that the agreement will benefit people living in the area and ensure long-lasting peace and boost development. "This agreement exemplifies cooperative federalism and will provide a roadmap for resolution of other boundary disputes between states," the release said. (ANI) The Army Chief is scheduled to review the deployment of Indian Army formations in Western and Northern borders while they are transitioning from winter to summer posturing. Senior Army, Navy and Air force officers will be attending a series of discussions focused on reviewing the current international and regional environment with a view to progressively increase their own capabilities through force level optimisation, technology adoption, induction of Force Multipliers while modernising and improving infrastructure. Operational readiness of troops and equipment to match strategy and tactics will also be reviewed to respond to the emerging threats and challenges. (ANI) The Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday filed a complaint against Trinamool Congress MLA Narendra Nath Chakraborty for allegedly threatening supporters of the BJP ahead of the Asansol Lok Sabha bypoll. A video has gone viral where Chakraborty is asking the TMC workers to intimidate the BJP supporters to not come out of their houses on the day of polls, as it would be assumed that they are voting for the BJP. "TMC's Narendra Nath Chakraborty (in a viral video) openly said that he will not take responsibility for anyone's life if people go to vote for LS bypolls in Asansol and that he'll assume that such people voted for BJP. Election Commission assured us to action against him," said West Bengal BJP chief Sukanta Majumdar. BJP in its letter to Election Commission has claimed that it is a direct open threat by Pandabeswar MLA Chakraborty. Pandabeswar assembly falls under the Asansol Lok Sabha constituency. BJP in its letter to Election Commission also mentioned the criminal record of Chakraborty and the proximity of Haripur (Where the alleged threat was made) to Rampurhat (where recently violence took place). "The present threat was made in Haripur which is a mere 90 km away from Rampurhat in District Birbhum which has been the epicentre of attention across the nation after nine women and children were burnt alive inside their homes on March 21, 2022," reads the letter. The BJP through its letter has sought an FIR against TMC MLA under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Representation of the People Act. The BJP has also demanded that Chakraborty should be arrested immediately and sent out of the Asansol Lok Sabha constituency till the polls take place. Asansol is all set to witness a high-octane electoral battle with actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha taking on the BJP's Agnimitra Paul. The Asansol Lok Sabha seat fell vacant after Babul Supriyo, a two-time BJP MP, quit the party in October last year to join the TMC. The voting will be held on April 12 while the results will be declared on April 16. (ANI) After the video of Trinamool Congress MLA Narendra Nath Chakraborty went viral in which he is seen openly threatening supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), BJP national vice president Dilip Ghosh on Tuesday said that Mamata Banerjee has been surrounded on all sides, her leaders are mired in corruption, and violence is rife in Bengal. "Mamta Banerjee is surrounded on all sides, her leaders are engulfed in corruption and violence is rife in Bengal. Such incidents do not happen in a civilized society. After this, if people go to the court and the court orders a CBI inquiry, then whose fault is it? Your people will loot and kill. No one will get justice. Your police do not even register FIR and that is why people go to court under compulsion," Ghosh told ANI. Naturally, the court does not trust the Mamta government. If such incidents happen, the case is handed over to the CBI for investigation. Where is the conspiracy in this? What is the fault of the BJP?" Ghosh said. The BJP leader alleged that there has been no development in the state and the Mamata Banerjee government has no money. "You shed blood in the state. People have given you the majority. The government did not last even one year and they have no money. There is no development in the state. Mamta Banerjee has failed in all ways and to distract people she is doing all this," he said. He said that in the 2019 elections, Banerjee had given a call in Bengal, "Modi Hatao Desh Bachao" but this has benefited the BJP in other states and people chose Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "Even in the recently concluded elections, Mamata Banerjee went to protest but nothing happened. Today, no one is ready to stand with Mamata Banerjee, but she is helpless. That's why she raises the same issue again and again and opposes BJP," said Ghosh. Talking about the viral video, Ghosh said that they will go to Election Commission for a peaceful and fair election. "In a place where election has been announced, the entire administration is in the hands of the Election Commission. If there is an MLA, a leader makes such a statement, then how far will the fair elections be held? Keeping all these things in mind, we will place all the facts before the Election Commission. Will also present the video to the commission," he said. "Today we will request that elections should be fair and peaceful. Legal action should be taken against such people otherwise elections will never be fair in Bengal," said the BJP leader. Ghosh said that Naren Chakraborty and TMC leaders like him constantly give statements like this to create an atmosphere of fear and win elections. "There is a by-election in Asansol and their MLAs is trying to win by spreading fear. Their only job is to forcibly win elections and remain in power," he added. Ahead of the byelections for the Asansol Lok Sabha seat, a video of the ruling TMC MLA Narendra Nath Chakraborty has gone viral in which he is seen openly threatening the supporters of the BJP. In the viral video, the TMC MLA from Pandaveshwar is purportedly seen openly threatening the BJP supporters. (ANI) The TDP chief lauded the Telugu diaspora for taking an active part in Janmabhoomi's rural development works for the construction of the motherland. Naidu said that in its long journey, the TDP had weathered and overcame many obstacles. "NTR sowed a strong foundation for the party's pro-poor welfare agenda. He ushered in bold reforms by cancelling the Patel-Patwari system to remove suppression and introduced mandalika system for reaching out to people. The Rs 2 kg rice scheme stood as an ideal model for food security for the whole country," said Naidu. Naidu also asserted that in the united Andhra Pradesh, the TDP laid the foundation for a vibrant knowledge economy by developing infrastructure projects in IT and other sectors. Earlier, in a tweet, Naidu asserted that the TDP would always stand for development, welfare and equal distribution of power among all sections. The TDP would go down in history as the only political party that had passed on the benefits of reforms to the village level. (ANI) Karnataka Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister KS Eshwarappa on Tuesday quashed the allegations by a contractor that he demanded 40 per cent commission and said that he has filed a defamation case against him. "I am appalled at the reaction of Congress MPs over a baseless allegation made by Santosh K Patil claiming 40 per cent commission for a Rs 4 crore work undertaken by him in Hindalga Belgaum District," he said in a press statement. Eshwarappa said that Santosh Patil himself has said he has not received any official order from the department. "Trusting his unfounded allegation about the amount paid by him is unfortunate. A member of Parliament reacts to it with not even a shred of evidence to justify the same," he added. The Karnataka Minister said that the Congress which has vast experience in governance is aware of the procedure followed to undertake the work. Eshwarappa said that the Additional Chief Secretary of Rural Development and Panchayat Raj has issued a clarification stating that no work order is issued as the work has not been sanctioned and the question of making payment for the alleged work doesn't arise. "The desperation of the Congress party to make wild allegations over fabricated and motivated charges is clearly exposed. It is to my utter dismay Congress party is in its zeal to accuse BJP government in Karnataka is resting on a motivated charge by a person who himself has confessed to having indulged its questionable activities," he added. He further said that he had filed a defamation case against Santosh K Patil over his attempt to defame him."I have on 10/03/2022 filed a defamation case against Santosh K Patil over his attempt to defame me. I have also attested to the clarification letter issued by Principal Secretary to this effect which is self-explanatory and dispels all the baseless allegations made. I hope good sense will prevail upon Congress leaders and would focus more on energising their party which is in a moribund state," he said. Patil had written a letter to the Union Minister alleging that Eshwarappa was demanding a commission for releasing his payment of Rs 4 crores for completed road work even after a year of completion of the work. (ANI) Union Minister G Kishan Reddy on Tuesday slammed Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for his statement which accused the BJP and Telangana government of politicizing the issue of paddy procurement in the state. "Rahul Gandhi knows nothing about rice (paddy) procurement. He should first understand the issue, the respective role of centre and state in rice procurement," said Reddy. Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday tweeted that the "Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government at the Centre and Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) in the state are playing politics over the hard work of farmers, ignoring their moral duty to procure paddy." "Both the governments should stop creating problems for farmers through their anti-farmer policies and procure every grain grown by farmers," tweeted Gandhi. The Congress party will continue to fight till the last grain of paddy in Telangana is procured by the government, he said. Targeting Gandhi, Reddy said the Centre has increased the procurement from Telangana manifold since 2014. "Centre spent Rs 26,600 cr in paddy procurement this year and is ready to spend even Rs 30,000 crores. The centre will procure as much as paddy Telangana wants to sell under the ambit of the already signed agreement," said Reddy. The Chief Minister of Telangana K Chandrashekar Rao had demanded that the Centre should buy the entire Yasangi crop produced in the state on the lines of procurement in Punjab and Haryana. He had said that a protest will be held in Delhi on April 2 against the Central government over the issue. Last year, a delegation of Ministers from the State had even met union Ministers to make a clear announcement on paddy procurement, including the quantity. However, there has been no amicable solution obtained to the problem yet. (ANI) According to GSM Arena, reports suggest that users in Finland have received the coveted update to the latest version of Google's mobile operating system. Labelled V2.300, the new build seems to be rolling out over the air already in some parts of Europe at least. Upon installation, the Nokia XR20 will run Android 12 with the March 2022 security patch level, which is still current for a few more days. GSM Arena suggests that this might be a staged rollout, so it could take days (or even weeks) for the notification to pop up on all Nokia XR20 units out there in the wild. (ANI) Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Tuesday said that the signing of the inter-state agreement between Assam and Meghalaya to resolve the pending border dispute is a "historic day for the northeast" and congratulated the two chief ministers. "Today is a historic day for the northeast. Since 2014, PM Modi has made numerous efforts for the development and promotion of the cultural heritage of the northeast region. Today, I congratulate Assam CM and Meghalaya CM and their teams on the signing of the agreement to resolve their boundary dispute," the Home Minister said. The Home Minister said that he is assured that in the coming days GDP of the northeastern states will increase and there will be peace, prosperity and development. He said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has continuously worked for the welfare of the people of the northeast. Amit Shah said that looking at the journey from 2019 to 2022, there have been many big achievements in establishing peace in the northeast. "First of all, in 2019, there was an NLFT agreement. The Bru Reang Agreement was signed on January 16, which benefited more than 34,000 people. Then on January 27, 2020, the historic Bodo Accord was signed. We ended the 50-year-old problem by creating the original form of the state without disturbing the Assam model," he said. The Home Minister said that the Karbi Amlang agreement was signed in 2021 and an agreement had been reached today. Amit Shah said that he had gone to Meghalaya in July last year and met all the chief ministers of the northeast region. "We are continuously moving forward on the path of resolving the border dispute. Today, a 50-year-old pending boundary dispute between Assam and Meghalaya has been resolved. Six out of 12 points of the dispute have been resolved, which comprises nearly 70 per cent of the boundary. The remaining six points will be resolved at the earliest," the minister said. Assam and Meghalaya governments on Tuesday signed a historic agreement here in the national capital to resolve their 50-year-old pending border dispute. The agreement was signed between Assam and Meghalaya two months after a draft resolution was submitted by the chief ministers of the two states to Amit Shah on January 31 for examination and consideration by the MHA. The governments of Assam and Meghalaya had come up with a draft resolution to resolve their border disputes in six of the 12 "areas of difference" along the boundary. (ANI) Crime Branch of Kerala Police interrogated Malayalam actor Dileep for nine and a half hours on Tuesday in the 2017 actress assault case. Dileep, who is the eighth accused, was interrogated for seven hours on Monday. The Crime Branch also interrogated Malayalam film director Balachandra Kumar, who is the witness in this case on Tuesday. Crime Branch Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) S Sreejith confirmed that they interrogated Dileep and Balachandra Kumar together on Tuesday. The Crime Branch ADGP said, "The interrogation of Dileep is over now. He will be called later if further clarification is required. Important people will not be questioned tomorrow. Dileep will be questioned again if necessary." Balachandra Kumar, film director and witness said, "I can not disclose the facts that are part of the investigation. They said they would call me again. I think things will go to the steps of questioning Dileep and me together. The police have various evidence that people are unaware of. I believe the investigation can be completed on time." Earlier in November, Balachandra Kumar had leveled a series of allegations against Dileep in connection to the case. He had shared audio recordings which led to new conspiracies in the case against actor Dileep. Further, Dileep was accused of conspiring with others to murder police officials who have been investigating the actor assault case. The actress, who worked in Tamil and Telugu films, was allegedly abducted and molested inside her car by a group of men, who had forced their way into the vehicle on the night of February 17, 2017. (ANI) "I guarantee to make Punjabi University free from debt so as to regain its pristine glory as a seat of higher learning in northern India," said Mann. He said providing a world-class education to students of the state was Punjab government's priority. With an aim to provide ample opportunities for the youth in the state, Mann said, "All pending issues of school and college teachers would be resolved soon. Our youth will get enough opportunities to exhibit their capacities and capabilities in the state so that they could become ideal citizens of society." The Chief Minister was addressing an event at Punjabi University on Tuesday. The students and the staff members lauded the CM's declarations. (ANI) Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Tuesday said that the state government is committed to make Uttarakhand the number one state in the country by 2025. An official statement from the Chief Minister's Office (CMO) stated that for the financial year 2022-23, there will be a need for withdrawal of funds from the Consolidated Fund of the state, under this, according to the provisions mentioned in Article 206 of the Constitution, a four-month vote on account has been presented in the House mainly for the withdrawal of committed items. He said that the state government is committed to fulfilling the promises and resolutions made to the people of the state along with the resolutions of the Governor's address. Dhami said, "The decision has been taken by the state cabinet regarding uniform civil code in the state. We have promised to provide three gas cylinders free of cost to the poor mothers and sisters of the state, besides fulfilling all the promises we have made to the public regarding employment generation, etc. They will be fulfilled with a choiceless resolution." "In the near future, we will come up with a full budget, in which according to the hopes and aspirations of the people, and the suggestions of the people will also get their due. It will be our endeavor to fulfill the trust that the people of the state have placed on us," he added. The Chief Minister said that the Prime Minister has given a target to make Uttarakhand the number one state of the country by 2025, when Uttarakhand will turn 25, for this guidance and cooperation of all is needed. He also expected everyone to be cooperative in building a prosperous and self-reliant Uttarakhand. Dhami also expressed his gratitude to PM Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh for the approval of the Sainik School in Bhauwala, Dehradun. The CM added that "Sainya Dham Uttarakhand" has made an unprecedented contribution to the security of the nation. (ANI) The Supreme Court on Tuesday told the project proponent to not continue with construction activities in connection with Rs 2,000 crore extension of the commercial Karwar port in Karnataka. After hearing arguments in the matter on the plea filed by a fishermen association, a bench headed by Chief Justice N.V. Ramana issued notice to the Karnataka government and others.e Senior advocate Devadatt Kamat and advocate Amit Pai, representing the petitioner, questioned the validity of the high court judgment passed on July 29, 2021, declining to entertain the association's plea against the project. Senior advocate Maninder Singh, representing DVP Infra Projects Private Ltd, contended before the top court that halting the construction activity would escalate the costs. However, the bench replied that beaches and environment can't be destroyed, and also made an oral observation against carrying out further construction activities. The plea contended that Karwar is an ecologically sensitive area, therefore, the environmental clearance given to the 2nd stage expansion of the commercial Karwar port by the state level authority is bad in law. "For the said expansion, only the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change could have given prior environmental clearance upon the recommendation of the Expert Advisor Committee (EAC)," added the plea. It further contended that it is also a Critically Vulnerable Coastal Area (CVCA). Counsel representing the petitioner insisted that there should be status quo on the project and pointed out that construction commenced based on environmental clearance (EC) granted from state-level authorities on January 23, 2019. The plea contended that this EC was in contravention of the Environment Impact Assessment notification of September 14, 2006. The plea claimed the high court did not pay heed to the livelihood of the fisherfolk, which would be adversely impacted by the project and added that Karwar is notified as a "ecologically sensitive areas" as per 2011 and 2019 notifications. The plea contended that the project of the 2nd Stage Expansion of the Karwar Commercial Port has the impact of directly and adversely impacting the right of the people to enjoy the beach. --IANS ss/vd A ( 362 Words) 2022-03-29-19:02:02 (IANS) Assam and Meghalaya on Tuesday signed an accord to resolve the 50-year-old boundary dispute when Chief Ministers Himanta Biswa Sarma and Conrad Sangma signed an agreement in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, the chief secretaries of the two states and other officials of the Home Ministry. Describing as the historic day for the northeast, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said that this will usher in a new era of peace, harmony and progress in both the states. This accord paved the way for resolving the interstate boundary disputes at six places out of 12 which comprise 70 per cent of the boundary, he added. "In 2019, there was an agreement between the armed groups in Tripura. The Bru Reang Agreement, signed on January 16, 2020, which benefited over 34,000 people. The historic Bodo Accord was signed on January 27, 2020, ending the 50-year-old problem without disturbing Assam's geographical entity format and without disturbing its original character. Then, the Karbi Anglong agreement was reached in September, 2021 and today this agreement and about 70 per cent of the border between the two States has become dispute-free," Shah further said. He said the development of the northeast is not possible unless disputes between states are resolved and armed groups do not surrender. He thanked the Chief Ministers and officials of both the states on behalf of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Central Government. Speaking about the pact, Meghalaya CM Conrad Sangma said: "Of the 12 areas of difference, we have come to an agreement with Assam on six areas. Further, a survey will be done by the Survey of India with both states' involvement, and when that's done, the actual demarcation will take place." The Assam and Meghalaya governments had come up with a draft resolution to resolve the border disputes in six of 12 regions along their state boundaries. Assam and Meghalaya share 885 km long border. The agreement aims to resolve differences in six "areas of differences", that comprise nearly 70 per cent of the total boundary. --IANS ams/skp/ ( 355 Words) 2022-03-29-19:34:03 (IANS) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday held a meeting with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MPs from Gujarat to discuss the party's strategy for the year-end assembly polls. All Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha MPs from Gujarat attended the meeting held at the Prime Minister's official residence in the national capital. BJP chief JP Nadda, Home Minister and Lok Sabha member from Gujarat Amit Shah, BJP national general secretary (organisation) BL Santhosh and Union Minister Pralhad Joshi were also present in the meeting. Sources said the Prime Minister asked the MPs to reach out to the people with the government development and welfare measures. "PM Modi told all the MPs present in the meeting to tell people about the public welfare schemes of the Central government to each and every village of Gujarat. The party has decided to contest the election on a development agenda," sources said. It was learnt that MPs were told to use social media to explain to the people about the government's work. "We are asked to make a short video and share it with each voter through WhatsApp group. The video will tell about the work of the Union and the state government. The MPs will also be asked to highlight their own work for their parliamentary constituency," a BJP MP said. This was the second meeting of the BJP MPs from Gujarat with Prime Minister Modi in a week. On March 24, Modi had met BJP MPs from Gujarat. In the last meeting, the Prime Minister asked the BJP MPs about their work in the parliamentary constituency and discussed issues related to the state. "PM Modi asked about the work we are doing in our area and advised us to work for the people," an MP from Gujarat had said after the meeting held last week. --IANS ssb/pgh ( 319 Words) 2022-03-29-19:50:02 (IANS) Yusuf Khan, a resident of Pir Gali in Indore, said he was inspired by the Prime Minister and had his photo in the house. Yusuf Khan said he was being pressurised to vacate the house by his landlords Yakub Mansoori, Sultan Mansoori, Sharif Mansoori. "I respect the Prime Minister a lot and follow his speeches. His picture is in my house. They (the landlords) asked me to remove it and threatened they will beat me and force me to vacate the house," he said. Khan said he is aligned with "Sangh's ideology" and reads relevant articles. Referring to the complaint, Additional DCP Manisha Pathak Soni said that every citizen has the right to freedom of expression and no one can prevent Yusuf Khan from placing pictures of his choice in the house. She said directions have been passed to the Sadar Bazar police station for action in the matter. (ANI) Both the terrorists were involved in several recent terror crimes including civilian killings, said Inspector General of Police Kashmir. Incriminating materials including arms and ammunition have been recovered, added the police. Further details shall follow. (ANI) TNA and TPA are political alliances that represent the country's Sri Lankan Tamil minority. In multiple tweets, Jaishankar informed that he discussed the realization of the aspirations of the Tamils of Sri Lanka for "equality, justice, peace and dignity." "Interacted with TPA delegation of Mano Ganeshan, Thigambaram, V Radhakrishnan, Uday Kumar. Discussed the socio-economic issues of the Indian origin Tamil community. India stands committed to its development partnership with IOTs," he said in a subsequent tweet. Mano Ganeshan, who is Sri Lanka's former Minister of National Integration, sought India's support from Jaishankar for the Indian Tamil Sri Lankan community's aspirations. "TPA delegation had a progressive discussion with Indian EAM Jaishankar. Indian support was sought for the TPA led Indian Tamil Srilankan community's aspirations, towards mainstreaming as full citizens of Sri Lanka. TPA compiled an aspirational memorandum that was explained," Mano Ganesan said in a tweet. Jaishankar arrived for his three-day visit on Sunday. He met Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa today. Jaishankar and President Rajapaksa reviewed various dimensions of India-Sri Lanka's neighbourly relationship. He assured Gotabaya Rajapaksa of India's continued cooperation and understanding. Sri Lankan President thanked Jaishankar for assistance in form of a USD 1 billion credit line. "Met with Indian Foreign Minister @DrSJaishankar today, and I expressed my gratitude to the Government of #India for the invaluable assistance provided recently via the line of credit, on behalf of the people of #lka," wrote the official Twitter account of The President of Sri Lanka. With Sri Lankan PM, the Minister virtually inaugurated the Jaffna Cultural Centre, constructed with an Indian grant. Both Ministers witnessed the signing of an agreement on supporting Buddhist culture and heritage. Later on Sunday, Jaishankar also met his Thai counterpart Don Pramudwinai on the margins of the BIMSTEC Ministerial. He discussed global and regional issues as well as taking BIMSTEC forward. Jaishankar will tomorrow attend the BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) meeting. (ANI) The European Union on Monday condemned the Taliban's decision to ban girls from receiving secondary education and believes that this lowers the movement's chances to gain the "desired" legitimacy, Sputnik reported. Earlier, on Wednesday, the Taliban regime issued a decree banning female students above grade six from participating in their classes. The girls were further told to stay home until the Islamic Emirate announces its next decision. "The European Union and its member states, together with international partners, have condemned the decision of the Taliban to deny until further notice secondary level education for over one million Afghan girls. This is a blatant violation of the fundamental right to education for all children, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and several international human rights instruments, of which Afghanistan is a state party," Sputnik quoted the EU Council statement. The decision by the Islamic Emirate has drawn severe backlash across the world with the Foreign Ministers of Canada, France, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the High Representative of the European Union issuing a joint statement on Friday to condemn the Taliban's decision to deny so many Afghan girls the opportunity to finally go back to school. (ANI) Eyewitnesses said that representatives of the Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan stopped the staff members of the Ministry of Finance at the gate because they were beardless, reported The Khaama Press. The employees were allowed to enter the ministry only after they wear the hats as recommended by the Taliban representatives. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice denied government employees having been stopped at the gate, reported The Khaama Press. Spokesperson of the Ministry Muhammad Sadiq Akif said, the staff members of the Finance Ministry were stopped for instruction and recommendation by the representatives of the Ministry of Virtue and vice. "All government bodies were instructed not to allow women without hijab and male employees of government administrations to fit their appearance in accordance with Sharia law," said Akif. The decision is condemned even by pro-Taliban figures reasoning Islam has never forced people to grow beards. The Taliban after taking over Afghanistan last August has put many restrictions on Afghans and particularly women. The Taliban's Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice earlier issued posters around the capital Kabul ordering Afghan women to cover up. Meanwhile, the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan is a nightmare for Afghan women. They have imposed many repressive rules on women including banning education, work, and long travel. After Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, the incidents of threatening women are becoming a 'new normal'. The Taliban have also banned hairdressers in Afghanistan from shaving or trimming beards. The group is re-imposing repressive laws and retrograde policies. They are imposing laws that defined its 1996-2001 rule when they enforced their version of Islamic Sharia law. (ANI) The United States on Tuesday (local time) expressed concern over the latest series of restrictions imposed on Afghan media by the Taliban and urged the group to cease infringements, including education and human rights of Afghan people. The US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement said that the US is committed to supporting the right of freedom of expression the world over, especially for journalists and human rights defenders, to operate freely without fear of violence against them. On Sunday, the Taliban banned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Voice of America (VOA) broadcast services in Afghanistan. The ban is the latest in a series of restrictions the Islamist group has imposed on Afghan media to stifle freedom of expression since taking control of the country last August. "The United States is committed to supporting the right of freedom of expression the world over, especially for journalists and human rights defenders, to operate freely without fear of violence against them," added Price. "In addition to this restrictive new media policy, the Taliban continue to move Afghanistan in the wrong direction by failing to uphold commitments they have made, including their March 23 decision to prevent girls from attending secondary school. Each of these actions alone is alarming, but combined, they make clear the Taliban are not living up to the essential commitments they made to the Afghan people and the international community," he said. The US statement further said that the United States and the international community are paying close attention to the Taliban's actions inside Afghanistan, and "it is with alarm and deep concern we learned of the Taliban's decision to stifle the Afghan people's access to independent, objective, international media sources." Education and freedom of expression are human rights held by every person in Afghanistan, the US statement said. "These are not Western values or concessions to the international community; they are human rights and essential to a peaceful and prosperous Afghan society, which is something the Taliban claim to desire. We urge the Taliban to cease these infringements on the rights of Afghans, and we continue to stand with the Afghan people," it added. (ANI) Chinese President Xi Jinping recently (March 5) called for investments in coal technologies to fight the energy crisis, breaking the promises he had made for climate goals. President Xi's declaration about coal output enhancement would pose a threat to the global community as well as a threat to the climate. There are major reasons why the Chinese government's prejudice toward coal could be a crisis for the country and globally, reported The HK Post. Xi stated that the country could not simply introduce bars on coal production as electricity demand has grown exponentially in China over the years. To sustain the demand, Beijing increased coal production. China accounted for 33 per cent of CO2 emissions globally in the year 2021. Between the years 2019 and 2021, C02 emissions increased by 750 million tonnes. Coal remains the main reason for increasing CO2 emissions. Moreover, the Chinese government has developed coal as their main energy source. Around 50 per cent of energy consumption in the country is utilized from coal, reported The HK Post. Also, China poured a significant amount of money into other countries for developing coal power infrastructures. Burning coal comes at a greater cost for the environment. Too much dependence on coal for construction and allied activities has also become a cause of concern in the country. Consequently, Beijing witnessed a rise in pollution due to burning of the fossil fuel. It is pointed out that one of the main factors attributed to air pollution is coal combustion. Around this time schools were closed in the city and outdoor activities were restricted. The fact remains that coal production was substantially increased at that time after a decline in supply chains owing to the energy crisis and emission cuts, reported The HK Post. The Paris Climate agreement intends to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But the Chinese government's objective to run the coal plants at full capacity is not to be seen as a positive note for the climate goal. When countries have restricted their coal capacity by 8.1 gigawatts in 2018 - 19, China accumulated 43GW to their capacity. In the UN Assembly last year President Xi Jinping suggested zero carbon emissions by the year 2060. But researchers suggest China needs to decarbonize faster than their predicted timelines because by 2060 China could significantly raise carbon emissions and damage the climate around the world. (ANI) "Happy to receive H.E. Dr Sheikh Abdullah bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, Undersecretary for Political Affairs, MoFA, Bahrain. Discussed various aspects of bilateral relations and the welfare of the Indian community. Thanked Bahrain for taking care of the Indian community," tweeted Muraleedharan. He also received Bahrain's Instrument of Ratification of International Solar Alliance (ISA) from Dr Sheikh Abdullah. MOS thanked the Leadership and Government of Bahrain for taking excellent care of the Indian community, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. "Glad to receive an instrument of ratification from Bahrain for joining the International Solar Alliance. 86 countries including Bahrain have signed and ratified the ISA Framework Agreement so far," tweeted Muraleedharan. India and Bahrain celebrated the Golden Jubilee of the establishment of diplomatic relations in October 2021. Both sides are looking forward to an early visit of His Royal Highness the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Bahrain to India. Dr Sheikh Abdullah arrived in New Delhi on March 27 and is scheduled to depart today. He came to attend the fifth India - Bahrain Foreign Office Consultations (FOC). During the FOC, both delegations discussed all areas of bilateral cooperation and reviewed the progress made since the 3rd High Joint Commission meeting co-chaired by EAM and FM of Bahrain in April 2021 in New Delhi, read the Ministry of Foreign Affairs press release. (ANI) Chinese citizens are blindfolded in the Russia-Ukraine war as they lack access to impartial news and information. Many pro-Russian remarks appeared on China's social media platforms within hours of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, characterizing the conflict as a comedy or an opportunity to "chigua" (a slang term for rubbernecking or watching a disaster from afar), reported The HK Post. Such remarks have once again led the world to assume that the Chinese people are inextricably linked to their government. However, they lack access to impartial news as China's official coverage of the situation has been tilted toward Russia since Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, reported The HK Post. The predominance of official narratives in China's media environment, along with the pervasiveness of nationalism, shapes Chinese perceptions of the world. The Chinese government has avoided using the word "invasion" to characterize Russia's activities, and Chinese state media have frequently claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine was motivated by US pressure and NATO expansion, reported The HK Post. The Chinese and international media have a tendency to report on the crisis with quite different narratives and stories. Chinese students trapped in Ukraine who requested assistance on Weibo (China's version of Twitter) have had their tweets deleted. At the same time, the Chinese government has announced that it is chartering flights to assist Chinese students and citizens in returning to China. Most Chinese people's perceptions of the war are largely shaped by what the Chinese government wants them to perceive, reported The HK Post. Social media commentary in China is strictly regulated. Unfavourable comments on the government are kept secret from the general public. Nationalism and violent, "wolf warrior" motifs abound in the remaining entries. The Chinese government has a large "water army" that tries to influence the populace. They are active not just on domestic social media platforms, but also on major international ones. In truth, Chinese citizens' viewpoints are not as polarised as the Chinese government's. Public opinion on the situation in Ukraine is split between those who enthusiastically support the government's position and others who believe Putin is a Hitler-like figure whom they refer to as "Putler." The second group of Chinese feels that the conflict is unquestionably a tragedy and that in the contemporary world, it is a terrible thing for a sovereign state to violate another sovereign state, reported The HK Post. (ANI) The US has proposed forging a semiconductor industry alliance between the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in a move to prevent China from gaining dominance over the strategic sector. However, South Korea is not fully on board with the idea proposed by America, Taiwan News reported citing Business Korea. "Cooperation with the United States is the top priority of course, and yet the biggest market (China) is also of paramount importance," Taiwan reported citing Business Korea's sources. The South Korean government is reluctant to jeopardize the operations of South Korean chipmakers like Samsung who have a core manufacturing infrastructure in China. The western Chinese city of Xi'an is home to Samsung's only overseas memory chip plant. The fab accounts for roughly 40 per cent of the Korean conglomerate's total NAND flash production. Meanwhile, China is waging economic warfare to acquire Taiwan's semiconductor industries, home to the world-leading semiconductor industry, second only after the US. The Taiwanese government has accused China of waging economic warfare against Taiwan's tech sector by stealing technology and inveigling away skilled engineers, reported The HK Post. Taiwanese Executive Minister Lo Ping Cheng charged that Beijing was enticing Taiwan's advanced-tech personnel and engaging in theft of national critical technologies, circumventing regulations, illegally investing and operating in Taiwan causing the nation a huge loss in IT security and industry competitiveness. Semiconductors or 'chips' are the essential building blocks in technological innovation and economic development. These chips are ubiquitous in all electrical devices including smartphones, electronic vehicles, hypersonic armaments, airships, pacemakers etc. In the past few years, the government of Taiwan has reported many charges concerning the theft of chip trade secrets by Chinese organizations. While China manufactures the majority of the world's computers and smartphones, it imports almost all the semiconductors needed to run these gadgets. To remove its technological dependence, China regularly engages in industrial espionage and other activities in an effort to develop its own semiconductor industry. This was also one of the main reasons why China was trying hard to get Taiwan back under its hold. Investigation Bureau of Taiwan under the administration of the Ministry of Justice rounded up 60 Chinese nationals on the allegation of stealing trade secrets and poaching tech employees from Taiwan, reported The HK Post. The list of companies investigated includes Vimicro, GLC Semiconductor, Analogix Semiconductor, Beijing Yinxing Technology among others. (ANI) Taking stalk of the crisis, Jaishankar who is on a three-day visit to Sri Lanka tweeted, "Disturbed to see this news. Am asking High Commissioner Baglay to contact and discuss how India can help." The information regarding the shortage of medicines was shared by the Sri Lankan Twitter handle Ayubovan. "Scheduled surgeries at the Peradeniya Hospital were suspended due to a shortage of medicines. Only emergency surgeries are taking place," tweeted Ayubovan. While in Sri Lanka, EAM will also participate in the BIMSTEC Ministerial Meeting on March 29 in Colombo. Both Maldives and Sri Lanka are India's key maritime neighbours in the Indian Ocean Region and occupy a special place in the Prime Minister's vision of 'SAGAR' and Neighbourhood First. India's Neighbourhood First policy, accords primacy to nations in the periphery with a focus on encouraging trade, connectivity and people-to-people contact. The EAM's visit is testimony to the importance that India attaches to its close and friendly relations with the Maldives and Sri Lanka. (ANI) This will be the first visit of Marcelo Ebrard Casaubon to India in his capacity as Foreign Minister, a Ministry of External Affairs said on Tuesday. Mexican Foreign Minister will also visit Mumbai. Both Jaishankar and Casaubon will undertake a comprehensive review of bilateral relations and will also discuss international issues of mutual interest. The visit of the Mexican Foreign Minister follows Jaishankar's visit to Mexico City in September last year. This exchange of visits will consolidate and further strengthen the privileged partnership between India and Mexico. At present, Mexico is India's second-largest trade partner in Latin America and is a member of UNSC alongside India for the period 2021-22. (ANI) "Participated at the 18th BIMSTEC Ministerial Meeting in Colombo today. Thank FM Prof. G.L. Peiris for his hospitality. Emphasized our commitment to intensify and expand areas of cooperation, especially connectivity, energy and maritime cooperation," EAM Jaishankar tweeted. External Affairs Minister arrived in Colombo for a bilateral visit on Sunday. The 'Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC)' is a regional multilateral organisation. Its members lie in the littoral and adjacent areas of the Bay of Bengal, constituting a contiguous regional unity. The members include Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand. During the Ministerial Meeting Jaishankar said that India will encourage active business collaboration and common projects. He also stressed on collectively combating terrorism, violent extremism, transnational crime, cyberattacks and narco-trafficking. "...will encourage active business collaboration and common projects to this end. Cooperation on port facilities, ferry services, coastal shipping, grid connectivity and motor vehicles movement is key," Jaishankar said. "Must also collectively combat terrorism, violent extremism, transnational crime, cyber-attacks and narco-trafficking. Look forward to the adoption of our Charter and Master Plan at the Summit tomorrow," he added in another tweet. On Monday, Jaishankar met Sri Lankan Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa and held a discussion over the economic situation in the island nation as well as India's supportive response. The ministers, Gamini Lokuge, Minister of Energy, Johnston Fernando, Minister of Highways, Prasanna Ranatunga, Ministry of Tourism and, D V Chanaka, State Minister of Aviation and Export Zones Development, had received Jaishankar at the airport. Jaishankar will be in Sri Lanka from March 28 to 30. (ANI) Lima [Peru], March 29 (ANI/Sputnik): The Peruvian Congress did not get the required number of votes to impeach President Pedro Castillo accused of giving false information to the prosecutor's office and appointing incompetent officials, Congress President Maricarmen Alva said. "For - 55 congressmen, against - 54, 19 abstained. The resolution was not adopted," Alva announced the voting results on Monday. According to local media, before the vote in the country's parliament, the Peruvian police searched houses of businessmen allegedly linked to Castillo and his nephews as part of the corruption case. Earlier in March, the Peruvian government launched the impeachment procedure against Castillo due to his "moral incompetence," accusing him of giving false information to the country's prosecutor's office and appointing incompetent people or people with priors to the council of ministers. Congress also used the "moral incompetence" reason to impeach the previous Peruvian leader, Martin Vizcarra, suspected of bribery during his tenure as the governor of the Moquegua region from 2011 to 2014. This was not the first time the parliament considered the resignation of Castillo. In 2021, he was accused of the improper use of public resources during the election campaign. However, at that time, congressmen voted against the beginning of the impeachment process. (ANI/Sputnik) The Taliban's District Governor of Takhar province in Afghanistan who was arrested by the group on charges of cooperation with the Islamic State (Deash) has escaped, local media reported citing sources. The Governor, Abdul Qadir was arrested on Saturday in the Khaja Ghar district and local sources confirmed his escape on Sunday. "Abdul Qadir, the #Taliban district governor for Dasht-e-Qala of Takhar province was arrested by the group on Saturday on charges of cooperation with the Deash from Khaja Ghar district of the province has been escaped on Sunday, local sources confirmed today," tweeted local media. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan last August, the group has been facing a stiff challenge from the Islamic State. The Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K), an off-shoot of Daesh, continues to grow unabated in Afghanistan with the reigning Taliban regime finding it difficult to counter the threat. The Islamic State is a Sunni Muslim terrorist group. It considers Shias heretics and has previously claimed several attacks in Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan. The Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) took responsibility for a devastating attack at the Shia mosque of Koocha Risaldar in Peshawar on March 4 which left more than 60 people dead. The Taliban claims that ISIS-K is not a threat and that once economic and administrative issues in Iraq are resolved, they will simply 'disappear'. However, in reality, the Taliban do not appear to be handling this threat so well, as ISIS-K carry out almost daily attacks against them, Alex Szokalski said writing in Policy Forum, Asia and the Pacific's platform for public policy debate, analysis, views, and discussion. Notably, former members of the Afghan intelligence services and special forces who were trained by the United States and then forced out of work following the Taliban takeover are reportedly quick to join ISIS-K, providing the group with specialised capabilities they once lacked, Policy Forum further reported. If ISIS-K continues to develop support in the Khorasan region whilst degrading Taliban control of Afghanistan, it is not inconceivable that they will have the capacity to begin rebuilding or even rebranding. They could once again pose a sizeable threat to national, regional, and international security, added Szokalski. (ANI) Amid growing resentment over the stringent measures towards the zero-COVID policy by the authorities, the Chinese public have been taking to social media platforms to express their frustration and discontentment. Netizens have been complaining that excessive measures such as the imposition of complete lockdown and frequent and expansive tests have been causing widespread suffering, including financial/economic loss, reported local media. Chinese netizens have criticized a circular issued by local authorities denying social insurance, schooling and employment, imposing fines ranging from RMB 200-1000 and provisions of arrest for 5-10 days for breaking coronavirus rules. The sentiment on social media is that the Government should relax the strict measures as the economic cost of such complete lockdowns is ultimately borne by the common people. The COVID-19 pandemic situation in China continues to heat up as more than 20 provinces and cities have imposed travel bans and lockdowns. The pandemic situation in Jilin and Shanghai has deteriorated, and the situation of closed management and control has frequently been imposed to contain the virus, reported local media. Meanwhile, Shanghai has overtaken Jilin as a hotspot and is currently being locked down for testing in two phases (East and West of Huangpu River). The central Government's harsh punishments of officials who fail to prevent the outbreak have led to excessive stringent measures, thereby, creating chaos for the Chinese citizens. China has clung to a zero-tolerance approach to the virus that relies on stringent lockdowns, mass testing and quarantine in government facilities. Earlier, Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that Beijing will stick to its "zero Covid-19" policy, days after National Health Commission (NHC) released new guidelines easing its control measures. NHC had uploaded a new document on its website. Titled the Novel Coronavirus Diagnosis And Treatment Plan, it was the ninth revision to a document setting out the COVID-19 policy for the country of 1.4 billion.China's zero-COVID policy is pushing cash-strapped local governments to the brink amid rising health care costs and efforts to control debt. Analysts said that the local governments in China are facing a growing financial burden to meet Beijing's hardline zero-COVID strategy, according to a think tank, Policy Research Group (POREG). China is battling its biggest virus surge in two years and numerous cities have imposed travel bans and lockdowns, including tech hub Shenzhen, which have shaken economic stability and global supply chains. (ANI) Taliban's acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi has been removed from the Doha Assembly's list of speakers, local media reported. "Sources confirm that the name of Taliban Foreign Minister Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi was on the Doha Assembly's list of speakers until this morning, but was removed an hour ago," a local media organisation posted on Twitter. The Taliban's political office in Doha, Qatar is serving as a link between the Islamic Emirate and the international community as the office is in contact with nearly 16 countries around the world. The removal of Muttaqi from the Doha Assembly's list of speakers is a major embarrassment for the Taliban. Suhail Shaheen is the chief of the Doha office. After the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, the United States and some European and Western countries moved their political representatives and diplomatic missions to Qatar. The political office of the Taliban in Qatar was the Islamic Emirate's channel of communication with the United States during the previous government as well, reported Tolo News. The political office of the Taliban in Qatar began its activities in 2013 with the flag and title of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and with the financial support of the Qatari government. Questions are raised about the role this office has played in building relations so far, since the takeover, as no country has recognized the Islamic Emirate. "The Islamic Emirate has made great use of this office to gain power, but since it took power, its efforts to gain legitimacy for the Islamic Emirate and its relations with the world have been hampered, and the lobbying of the Taliban's political office in Qatar has not yet been successful," said Javed Javed, an international relations expert. "Many countries are pursuing political and security policies toward Afghanistan through their embassies in Doha, Qatar, and the Taliban wants to interact with them in this way," said Fahim Kohdamani, a former diplomat. (ANI) Both the leaders discussed cooperation in connectivity, energy, fertilizers, health and power and agreed to focus on taking forward the Ramayan circuit. "Good to meet FM Narayan Khadka of Nepal on the sidelines of the BIMSTEC Ministerial. Discussed our cooperation in connectivity, energy, fertilizers, health and power. Agreed to focus on taking forward the Ramayan circuit," Jashankar tweeted. Jaishankar participated in the 18th BIMSTEC Ministerial Meeting in Colombo today and emphasized the grouping's commitment to intensify and expand areas of cooperation especially connectivity, energy and maritime ties among the member countries. "Participated at the 18th BIMSTEC Ministerial Meeting in Colombo today. Thank FM Prof. G.L. Peiris for his hospitality. Emphasized our commitment to intensify and expand areas of cooperation, especially connectivity, energy and maritime cooperation," EAM Jaishankar tweeted. External Affairs Minister arrived in Colombo for a bilateral visit on Sunday. The ministers, Gamini Lokuge, Minister of Energy, Johnston Fernando, Minister of Highways, Prasanna Ranatunga, Ministry of Tourism and, D V Chanaka, State Minister of Aviation and Export Zones Development, had received Jaishankar at the airport. Jaishankar will be in Sri Lanka from March 28 to 30. The 'Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC)' is a regional multilateral organisation. Its members lie in the littoral and adjacent areas of the Bay of Bengal, constituting a contiguous regional unity. The members include Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand. (ANI) Despite the passage of 50 years since the '1971 Genocide' Pakistan has shown no intention to apologise. And, why does Bangladesh pardon Pakistan, which along with its collaborators killed 30 lakh unarmed innocent people under the "Operation Searchlight" launched on March 25. It is a clear case of "Genocide". Afrasiab Mehdi Hashmi, former High Commissioner of Pakistan to Bangladesh clearly says that Pakistan should not apologise to Bangladesh in 1971 as Pakistan considers the issue settled and fully resolved, with the conclusion of the Bangladesh-India- Pakistan Agreement of April 9, 1974. However, media and lawyers of Pakistan have accepted that in 1971, a "Genocide" was carried out by the Pakistan army. There are several reasons why Bangladesh should not pardon Pakistan. Firstly, Pakistan has a role in the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Secondly, after joining in the active politics, many attempts were made to assassinate PM Sheikh Hasina (during the regime of BNP/JEI). Sources reveal that Pakistan's spy agency the ISI was behind all the attacks. Thirdly, though Pakistan is pretending to improve the bi-lateral relations with Bangladesh, it will not miss a single opportunity to destabilize the country. The recent attack on the minorities during Durga Puja is an example of that. Investigators found the involvement of Pakistan. Fourthly, Pakistan is responsible for the rise of militancy in Bangladesh. Militant cadres recruited by Jamaat were sent to Pakistan for training. Two Pakistani diplomats posted in Dhaka were sent back for terror financing. "In coming days, Pakistan will use the militants to create problems in the country, even to assassinate Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina," said a source. Fifthly, Pakistan is still maintaining close ties with Jamaat-e- Islam of Bangladesh. Though top leaders of the party were executed, the party is still active and capable of causing harm any moment. Now the new addition is Hefazet-e- Islam. Pakistan is using these two organizations against the current regime. "Under no circumstances, Bangladesh should pardon Pakistan. If it does, then it will be an insult to all the victims, freedom fighters and even Bangabandhu", said a source in Bangladesh. (ANI) Amid heavy fighting between Russia and Ukraine, the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi travelled to Ukraine to start delivery of urgent technical assistance to ensure the safety and security of the country's nuclear facilities and help avert the risk of an accident that could endanger people and the environment. The aim of the Director General's visit is to initiate prompt safety and security support to Ukraine's nuclear facilities. It will include sending IAEA experts to prioritized facilities and the shipment of vital safety and security supplies including monitoring and emergency equipment, read the IAEA press release. "The military conflict is putting Ukraine's nuclear power plants and other facilities with radioactive material in unprecedented danger. We must take urgent action to make sure that they can continue to operate safely and securely and reduce the risk of a nuclear accident that could have severe health and environmental impact both in Ukraine and beyond," Director General Grossi said. During this week's visit, the Director-General will travel to one of Ukraine's nuclear power plants. The IAEA has drawn up concrete and detailed plans for safety and security assistance to Ukraine's nuclear sites, which include fifteen nuclear power reactors at four plants as well as the Chernobyl NPP, where radioactive waste management facilities are located following the 1986 accident. Ukraine informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that there has not been any rotation of technical staff at the Chernobyl nuclear plant since March 21, the UN nuclear watchdog said on Friday (Local Time). In an IAEA statement, Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi said, Ukraine also did not know when the next rotation might take place. The IAEA's technical assistance will also facilitate conditions for the IAEA to continue carrying out its safeguards activities in Ukraine in line with its non-proliferation mandate, added the release. "Ukraine has requested our assistance for safety and security. We will now start delivering it. Ukraine has one of Europe's largest nuclear power programmes. The IAEA's presence, which was needed to ensure safety and security, is of paramount importance. We are ready to provide the necessary support now," he said. Since the start of the conflict, Director-General Grossi has expressed his grave concern about the deteriorating safety and security situation for Ukraine's nuclear facilities. He has stressed the IAEA's commitment and readiness to help ensure that the seven indispensable pillars for ensuring safety and security are adhered to. In recent weeks, several of them - including the physical integrity of facilities, the ability of operational staff to work without undue pressure, and the access to off-site power - have been seriously compromised. "There have already been several close calls. We can't afford to lose any more time. This conflict is already causing unimaginable human suffering and destruction. The IAEA's expertise and capabilities are needed to prevent it from also leading to a nuclear accident," he said. The Director-General is expected to hold a press conference upon his return to Vienna later this week. (ANI) Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday said that the BIMSTEC member states must collectively combat terrorism and violent extremism as he emphasized India's commitment to intensify, expand areas of cooperation, especially connectivity, energy and maritime. "Participated at the 18th BIMSTEC Ministerial Meeting in Colombo today. Thank FM Prof. GL Peiris for his hospitality. Emphasized our commitment to intensify and expand areas of cooperation, especially connectivity, energy and maritime cooperation," EAM Jaishankar tweeted. Speaking at the 18th BIMSTEC Ministerial Meeting in Colombo, Jaishankar said that much of what grouping can achieve in our national development efforts is, of course, predicated on a peaceful, secure and stable environment. "We cannot ignore the challenges that terrorism and violent extremism, as also transnational crime and narco-trafficking or indeed new challenges such as cyber-attacks, pose to all of us," EAM said in a statement. "All of these affect our economic development efforts. We need to put in place the remaining elements of the legal architecture that will enable our law enforcement agencies to collaborate more closely and more effectively," he added. The Bay of Bengal achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 targets and ensuring a "good order at sea" in keeping with international maritime law, particularly UNCLOS is a priority. He also said that a practical way to proceed is to have discussions using existing dialogue mechanisms, even while we put in place a plan of action in the maritime domain which is consistent with our national priorities. Asserting that the international system is going through a very challenging phase, perhaps one of the most difficult in recent memory. "The challenges of COVID-19 pandemic have not yet fully abated. But recent developments in Ukraine have added to international disquiet," he said in the statement. Addressing the gathering including fellow Foreign Ministers, he emphasised the acceleration of the efforts to boost intra BIMSTEC trade and economic ties. He said: "tomorrow our leaders will adopt the BIMSTEC Charter. This is a land mark achievement in our effort to develop the institutional architecture for BIMSTEC. But we must not rest on this achievement and instead move on to 'next steps' that can be taken to further strengthen BIMSTEC. I am confident that we will identify priority institution building tasks & areas of cooperation, and task our senior officials to work with the Secretary General for their realization." EAM noted that on Wednesday, the group leaders will also adopt a BIMSTEC Master Plan for Transport Connectivity which provides a framework that can help the grouping better align thier national transportation and connectivity networks. "It must be fully backed by energetic business collaboration. We must also accelerate efforts on ongoing initiatives such as the establishment of a coastal shipping eco system, of port facilities, of ferry services in the Bay of Bengal, as also power grid interconnectivity and a regional motor vehicles agreement," he said. Welcoming Don Pramudwinai, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Thailand as the incoming BIMSTEC Chair. "India looks forward to working with you Sir and your country, during the course of your Chairmanship to take the BIMSTEC agenda forward," he said further. In concluding the speech, EAM Jaishankar said that India will bring to bear all relevant policies and approaches - one, as Neighbourhood First, give it the utmost priority; two, in consonance with our SAGAR outlook, realize its full maritime potential; and three, as a first responder, be it on HADR situations, COVID-19 or economic recovery, be there at critical times for all of us. (ANI) Sirajuddin Haqqani, the acting head of Taliban's Interior Ministry, who is on the UN sanctions list as well as FBI wanted terrorist, is training militia who cover their faces to hide their identities. "It's a big concern because Former Afghan gov officials said there are foreign militants in the Haqqani network," tweeted Abdulhaq Omeri, a journalist. He informed that under the leadership of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban's Interior Minister, those people who graduated from military training covered their faces. The Taliban is facing global flak over making Haqqani the minister in its interim cabinet of the Islamic Emirate. Sirajuddin Haqqani is wanted for questioning in connection with the January 2008 attack on a hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed six people, including an American citizen. He is believed to have coordinated and participated in cross-border attacks against the United States and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Haqqani also allegedly was involved in the planning of the assassination attempt on Afghan President Hamid Karzai in 2008, reported the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Sirajuddin is strongly associated with the Taliban, which provides him funding for his operations. He also receives funding from various other groups and individuals, including drug lords. He is a key conduit for terrorist operations in Afghanistan and supporting activities in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, as per the UN. He is actively involved in the planning and execution of attacks targeting International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF), Afghan officials and civilians, mainly in the eastern and southern regions of Afghanistan. He also regularly recruits and sends fighters into the Khost, Paktia and Paktika Provinces in Afghanistan, as per the UN. (ANI) Pakistan Interior Minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad on Tuesday announced that the discussion on the no-trust motion against Prime Minister Imran Khan will start in the National Assembly on March 31 and voting on it will be held on April 3. The Minister gave the information while addressing a press conference in Islamabad. Rasheed reiterated his support with the Prime Minister and at the same time refuted any reports about any tussle in the PML-Q for its support to the ruling PTI government on the no-trust motion, reported The News International. Rasheed praised PML-Q stance and said that he hoped MQM-P will also support the government. Sheikh Rasheed said that the security forces arrested four terrorists harbouring nefarious designs. He maintained that the arrested terrorists will be tried in anti-terrorism courts. The Interior Minister said that after the peaceful public gathering, now the containers which were put for security have been removed and roads are cleared for traffic. He added that the massive crowd that gathered at the PM rally suggests that the entire country stands by the PM, reported the news portal. After the no-confidence motion against Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was tabled in the National Assembly with a total of 161 votes in favour, the proceedings were adjourned till March 31. The no-confidence motion was submitted by the Opposition parties on March 8. The Opposition has been confident that its motion would be carried as many PTI lawmakers have come out in the open against PM Imran Khan. (ANI) Beijing had stepped up its efforts to influence international perceptions about China through the means of expanding Chinese media networks in international markets, new research by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) reveals. This was revealed in IFJ's new report titled "The China Network: Inside China's Global Media Mission in Asia, Africa and Latin America". This report seeks to measure China's global media outreach based on the findings of an international survey conducted by the IFJ with journalists in Kenya, Peru, and the Philippines - three countries where China has had a strong presence with investment and infrastructure projects in recent years. "Media engagement and influence is not a new strategy. It remains a popular tool deployed by many major powers globally. But compared to its international peers, China's approach is idiosyncratic and subject to unpredictable pivots. For journalists and media workers, this fast-changing approach by China presents critical professional challenges," the report said. Some 90 per cent and 83 per cent of survey respondents in Kenya and the Philippines, respectively, agreed that China has a "visible presence" in their media, while only half of the Peruvian journalists polled perceived a visible media presence of China in their country. Despite the high visibility, 88 per cent of Philippine journalists viewed China's presence in their country's media as negative, which is significantly higher than those from Peru (54 per cent) and Kenya (16 per cent), according to IFJ. Approximately 16 per cent of Kenyan respondents said their own media organisations were supported or funded by Chinese capital, according to the report. In the Philippines and Peru, roughly 5 per cent and 2 per cent, respectively, of journalists reported Chinese interests in the operations of their media organisations. "Chinese ownership and financial support to the media sector is a growing area of Chinese influence in Kenya, Peru, and the Philippines," the report noted. The survey data on which the report was based reveals this support took many different forms, including monetary support, training programs, equipment and technical support, and content sharing partnerships. "A small portion of journalists noticed changes in the coverage of China from journalists who have participated in trips sponsored by Chinese partners," the report added. The report follows the IFJ's previous research released in March 2021 which found that China successfully activated existing media infrastructure networks to disseminate positive narratives globally amid the Covid-19 pandemic. "As China has adopted new measures to approach journalists and media organisations in Kenya, Peru, and the Philippines, it is important that journalists in these three countries are supported to identify and mitigate risks intended to influence or pervert professional and ethical journalism," the IFJ said. (ANI) As the threat of a no-trust vote continues to loom on Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, ally MQM-P in a bid to put pressure on the ruling party has asked the government to fulfil three demands: ensure the safe recovery of over 100 of its missing workers, reopen their sealed offices and remove false and baseless cases against the party leaders and workers. Moreover, MQM-P leader Waseem Akhtar on Tuesday said that if the slot of Punjab Chief Minister can be offered to a party (PML-Q) with just five seats in the National Assembly, then MQM-P has seven members, reported the News International. This comes at a time when the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) on Monday announced Leader of Pakistan Muslim League (PML-Q) Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi as its candidate for Punjab chief minister after Usman Buzdar resigned from the top post. Earlier, PTI in a bid to woo its ally MQM-P ahead of the no-trust motion decided to offer the Ministry of Ports and Shipping to the party. However, Waseem Akhtar confirmed that the government, during the negotiation, offered them the ministry of Ports and Shipping but the party did not give attention to the offer. The naming of PML-Q leader Parvez Elahi as the candidate for Punjab CM has sparked anger in MQM-P. Leader Waseem Akhtar said that PML-Q had asked that the two parties will make decisions jointly and with mutual consensus in the prevailing situation but the decision was unilateral, reported the news portal. After the no-confidence motion against Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was tabled in the National Assembly with a total of 161 votes in favour, the proceedings were adjourned till March 31. The no-confidence motion was submitted by the Opposition parties on March 8. The Opposition has been confident that its motion would be carried as many PTI lawmakers have come out in the open against PM Imran Khan. (ANI) Business has become brisker in the narrow alley-like shop of Naresh Kumar Chaudhary in Kathmandu as the periodic five-year local election arrives at the doorsteps. Naresh Chaudhary is busy making party flags that are going off the shelves and would be in high demand in the coming weeks. "There's still time for the election, flags are flying off the shelves for the political programs which are being held these days which has made my schedules tight. I get into work from 6-7 am and work till 7 pm on daily basis. Soon after the filing of the candidacy, we won't get time to reply to anyone's questions and will work round the clock. Currently, there are four of us who are working. From mid of next month, additional forces of 6 people would be added to meet the demands," Chaudhary told ANI. Having been in the business of flag making, screen printing and designing for nearly two decades, Chaudhary in the earlier election of 2017 claims to have made about 3.5 million Nepali rupees by selling flags, t-shirts and other promotional items. Cadres from various political parties have been thronging shops like that of Chaudhary making their business brisker than before and increasing the political temperature ahead of the election. "We usually use the party flags in each and every program. Flags which earlier were installed at various local party offices now have been rugged and with elections approaching a new flag with a party election symbol would further facilitate voters to vote for the party identifying the election symbol in the ballot paper. This also has been the main intent," Susan Sapkota, one of the party cadres who purchased a new flag ahead of the election told ANI. Flags that are used during the political campaigning are supplied to other parts of the nation from Kathmandu where the party places an order at shops like that of Chaudhary and sends it later. The local level elections, which will be held on May 13 this year, has forced parties to work to secure more seats as it would reflect the seats that would be secured later on in federal polls. One of the biggest parties in the ruling alliance, the Nepali Congress under the presidentship of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba is debating whether to go ahead with forging an alliance or compete alone. The opposition CPN-UML however has been claiming to secure a comfortable majority and rule for the next half a decade and won't repeat the mistake which was made in the earlier election. Other parties such as Maoist Center, CPN-Unified Socialist and Madhesh-based parties also are working to forge alliances or increase the stronghold as competition flares on. The local election which is being held in a gap of five years has an eligible population of 17,733,723 to exercise their franchise. As per the final list of voters published by the Nepal Election Commission on 27 March, 8,992,010 men, 8,741,530 women and 183 others have qualified to vote. The EC has made the new provision making voters eligible if they turn 18 years on May 12 this year. Also, 10,756 voting stations and 21,955 voting centres have been set for the local level polls. Watching out for the election schedule, Chaudhary is now bracing himself up for the fray which would bring a lot of orders for him and turnover in the business increasing the sales of printed fabrics in the days to come. "Demand already has started pouring in for us. I have been trying to make some extra flags so that I can fulfil orders on time but am not able to do so. Orders for a maximum of 2000 pieces are being fulfilled as of now which does not let any of my prints to be there in the stocks." (ANI) The special envoys of Russia, the US, Pakistan and China to Kabul are scheduled to hold a meeting in Beijing this week in the 'extended troika' format, on the sidelines of the Third ministerial conference on Afghanistan, the Chinese Foreign Ministry informed. The 'troika plus' group or the extended troika is a multilateral grouping on Afghanistan consisting of the US, Pakistan, Russia and China. "By agreement of all parties, within the framework of the third meeting of foreign ministers of countries neighbouring Afghanistan, which will be held on March 30-31 in the Tunxi region (Huangshan city) of Anhui province, a meeting of the consultation mechanism of the expanded 'troika' on Afghanistan will be held," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a briefing on Tuesday, reported Sputnik News Agency. According to Wang, the special envoys of Russia, the United States and Pakistan in Afghanistan will take part in the consultations, which will be chaired by the special envoy of the Chinese Foreign Ministry for Afghanistan Yue Xiaoyong. Notably, in November last year, Islamabad had hosted a meeting of the extended Troika. China is hosting the third regional meeting between the Foreign Ministers of the neighbouring countries of Afghanistan at the end of this month in Beijing. The meeting will also witness the presence of the acting Foreign Minister of the Taliban regime, Amir Khan Muttaqi. The meeting was discussed during Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's visit to Kabul where Wang met with the acting Taliban Foreign Minister. Earlier this month, the Taliban regime had confirmed its participation in the meeting after a meeting between Muttaqi and China's ambassador to Afghanistan Wang Yu. The first and second rounds of the meeting were hosted by Islamabad and Tehran respectively. The meeting in Islamabad was held in a virtual format. (ANI) At the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Nepal's PM Sher Bahadur Deuba is set to embark on a three-day official visit to India from April 1 to 3, on his first official trip since his appointment as Prime Minister in July last year. Both the PMs had previously met in Glasgow in November on the sidelines of the UN climate conference. Since Deuba came to power in July, there have been several rounds of interactions between the two sides. In early October, a special delegation of the ruling Nepali Congress led by its deputy general secretary and former foreign minister Prakash Sharan Mahat arrived in New Delhi and held meetings with External Affairs Minister Jaishankar and BJP president JP Nadda. The talks mainly focused on ways to strengthen bilateral ties. The visit came in the backdrop of the visit of Vijay Chauthaiwale, who heads the foreign affairs department of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to Kathmandu in August at the invitation of NC as part of Nepal's efforts to enhance bilateral ties. In September, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Jaishankar met his new Nepalese counterpart Dr Narayan Khadka in New York and both agreed to work together closely to take the special relationship between the two countries forward. Under the previous regime of PM Oli, Nepal-India relations had become very strained due to increased Chinese influence in Nepal's internal affairs. Such influences were sometimes used against India. For example, other than intra-party disputes in the NCP, there were news reports claiming that Chinese influenced some top Nepali leaders of the NCP and put pressure on PM Oli to issue a new map of Nepal including three areas of Lipulekh, Limpiyadra, and Kalapani. Earlier, NCP leaders like Bamdev Gautam, Jhalanath Khanal and Pushpa Kamal Dahal (alias Prachanda) had discussed the Kalapani issue with the northern neighbour, with whom they are ideologically close. Rapprochement efforts were made starting with Indian foreign intelligence chief Samant Goel's visit to Kathmandu, which was followed by the visit of Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali to Delhi. External Affairs Minister of India S Jaishankar also visited Kathmandu in August 2019 to take part in the fifth Nepal-India Joint Commission meeting. In November 2020, Indian Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla also arrived in Kathmandu as an introductory visit. Despite the low in bilaterals during Oli's regime, India gifted one million domestically manufactured Covishield vaccines to Nepal in January 2021 as it struggled to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. India also provided grant assistance of NRs 30.66 crore (INR 19.21 cr) to Nepal as part of its commitment towards the reconstruction of educational institutions damaged during the devastating 2015 earthquake, which claimed nearly 9,000 lives and wounded nearly 22,000. With this, India reimbursed NRs 81.98 crore (INR 51.37 cr) to Nepal towards educational sector reconstruction projects. But a political crisis was triggered by infighting in the then ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) led by Oli, who unsuccessfully dissolved Parliament twice and was ultimately ousted from the government in July 2021 and Deuba returned to power with the backing of all anti-Oli forces. Deuba has shared a cordial relation with India during his previous stints. When Nepal was framing a new Constitution in 2015, according to a report in The Kathmandu Post, India is said to have urged for a broad-based consensus among stakeholders and Deuba had spoken openly about India's non-interference and its support. He is also known to have said that India urging for maximum consensus was to ensure that stakeholders do not oppose the Constitution in the future. Last year Nepal Army chief General Prabhu Ram Sharma embarked on a four-day visit to India to step up defence ties between the two neighbouring nations. During his visit to New Delhi on the invitation of his Indian counterpart General Manoj Mukund Naravane, Sharma was conferred with the title of honorary 'General of Indian Army' by President Ram Nath Kovid. The year 2021 ended with a positive note with Jaishankar in December announcing that the reconstruction of 50,000 houses, destroyed in the 2015 Nepal earthquake, in Gorkha and Nuwakot districts under Indian assistance has been completed. Addressing the virtual International Conference on Nepal's Reconstruction, Jaishankar underscored that India will always unhesitatingly step up to support the people of Nepal whenever called to do so. Some irritants continue to remain which Deuba and Modi are likely to discuss during their one-on-one meeting. All outstanding issues between Nepal and India will be discussed during Deuba's visit. Agreements between Nepal and India, including on cross-border railway, are on the table. The Kurtha-Jayanagar railway is on a dry run since the second week of February for the lack of a law to guide the operations. The government has for the meantime reissued the railway ordinance for the operation of the cross-border shuttle. India has also built a road via Lipulekh to Mansorvar in Tibet, to which Nepal has taken exception as it is a tri-junction between the three countries. (ANI) Amid the heavy bombardments and shelling ongoing in Ukraine, the latest round of peace talks between the Ukrainian and Russian delegations kicked off at the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul on Tuesday (Local Time). Alexander Fomin, Russia's deputy defence minister is leading the Russian delegation. The Russian delegation also includes negotiator Vladimir Medinsky. On the other hand, the Ukrainian Delegation is headed by David Arakhamia, reported CNN News. Meanwhile, Ukrainian Embassy in Turkey also confirmed that the talks between the delegations has started. Among the members who are attending the meeting in an unofficial capacity is Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday. "In order to hold contact between the two parties, it is necessary to obtain approval from both parties. In the case of Abramovich, he has approval [of his participation] from both sides," he added, reported the news channel. In a phone call on Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin agreed to hold the next round of negotiations in Istanbul. Erdogan reiterated that Turkey would continue to contribute in every possible way during this process. Notably, Ukrainian and Russian delegations have held three rounds of in-person negotiations so far. On February 24, Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine after the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian provocations. In response to Russia's operation, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Moscow. (ANI) During the meeting, Jaishankar invited Momen to visit India at an early date. "Nice to catch up with FM A.K.Abdul Momen of Bangladesh. Invited him to visit India at an early date," Jaishankar tweeted. The minister today also met his Nepali counterpart Narayan Khadka on the sidelines of the BIMSTEC. Both the leaders discussed a range of issues including cooperation in connectivity, energy, health and power. "Good to meet FM Narayan Khadka of Nepal on the sidelines of the BIMSTEC Ministerial. Discussed our cooperation in connectivity, energy, fertilizers, health and power. Agreed to focus on taking forward the Ramayan circuit," Jashankar said in a tweet. The 'Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC)' is a regional multilateral organisation. Its members lie in the littoral and adjacent areas of the Bay of Bengal, constituting a contiguous regional unity. Jaishankar today participated in the BIMSTEC meeting and emphasized the grouping's commitment to intensify and expand areas of cooperation especially connectivity, energy and maritime ties among the member countries. "Participated at the 18th BIMSTEC Ministerial Meeting in Colombo today. Thank FM Prof. G.L. Peiris for his hospitality. Emphasized our commitment to intensify and expand areas of cooperation, especially connectivity, energy and maritime cooperation," EAM tweeted. During the meeting, Jaishankar said that India will encourage active business collaboration and common projects. He also stressed on collectively combating terrorism, violent extremism, transnational crime, cyberattacks and narco-trafficking. The External Affairs Minister arrived in Colombo for a bilateral visit on Sunday and concluded his visit on Tuesday. (ANI) Sri Lanka's central bank has warned the money exchanges that sell foreign currencies at higher exchange rates that their licenses would be suspended or revoked if they go beyond the exchange rates stipulated to them by licensed banks, local media reported Tuesday. In a statement released to local media, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka asked the public to inform the Department of Foreign Exchange of any instances that a money changer offers higher exchange rates for any transaction. The Sri Lankan Rupee (SLR) hit the 298.99 mark against the US dollar on Monday. However, several money exchangers in the country were recorded to be selling the U.S. dollar at a higher rate, leading to increasing public complaints. Sri Lanka's currency has been devalued by almost SLR 90 against the US dollar since March 8, as the country's central bank attempts to stabilise the economy. Sri Lanka's economy has been in a free fall since the COVID-19 pandemic due to the crash of the tourism sector. Sri Lanka is presently facing a foreign exchange shortage which has led to a fuel, power and gas shortage and has sought the assistance of friendly countries for economic assistance. India provided more than USD 500 million in foreign currency swaps to strengthen Sri Lanka's foreign reserves, taking the total up to USD 900 million. India also extended the repayment time frame for the USD 500 million debt of Sri Lanka under the Asian Clearance Arbitration. More recently on March 17, Sri Lanka signed a USD 1 billion credit line deal with India for the procurement of food, medicines and other essential items during Sri Lankan Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksha's two-day visit to India. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Friday recommended a number of measures, including tax hikes for macroeconomic stability in Sri Lanka and also to mitigate adverse impacts on the vulnerable and the poor. The report recommended implementing a credible and coherent strategy to restore macroeconomic stability and debt sustainability while protecting vulnerable groups and reducing poverty through strengthened, well-targeted social safety nets. Sri Lanka's Finance Minister Basil Rajapakse is scheduled to travel to Washington in April in order to seek IMF assistance to deal with the country's economic crisis. (ANI) Cheng Lei, a prominent journalist for China's state-run international network CGTN, was initially detained and later formally arrested on suspicion of supplying state secrets overseas. Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne in a statement posted online informed about her trial reported VOA News. "We expect basic standards of justice, procedural fairness and humane treatment to be met, in accordance with international norms," the statement said. According to the statement by Payne, the government officials last visited her on March 21 and asked to be allowed to attend the trial. Calling for her release, the National Press Clubs of the United States and Australia as well as the journalist's former CGTN colleagues and friends wrote open letters last year. "Cheng Lei's yearlong detention is an assault on journalism and on human rights," a U.S. National Press Club statement said. Cheng was born in China and graduated from the University of Queensland. Before becoming a journalist, she worked as an accountant and financial analyst in Australia for Cadbury Schweppes and ExxonMobil from 1995 to 2000, according to her CGTN profile. She moved to China in 2001 and joined state broadcaster CCTV the following year. Then she was the China correspondent for CNBC Asia for nine years before returning to CCTV in 2012. She was the anchor of a business program on CGTN, the state broadcaster's international arm, reported to the news portal. (ANI) After the first day of a delegation-level meeting between Russia-Ukraine in Istanbul, the Russian delegation announced steps for a "drastic reduction in military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions" and the possibility of meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This comes as part of two steps that the Russian delegation announced to de-escalate the conflict in Ukraine reported CNN citing news agency RIA-Novosti. The head of the Russian delegation, presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, called the negotiations "constructive". Moreover, Russia is beginning to withdraw some forces, including Russian Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs) leaving the surrounding areas around the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv. Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said that enough progress was made during the talks in Istanbul to allow Putin and Zelensky to meet. "We have documents prepared now which allow the presidents to meet on a bilateral basis," he said. "The Russian delegation is constructive and aware. This doesn't mean that negotiations are easy. They are very difficult. But the Russian side is paying attention to the Russian proposals, to the Ukrainian proposals," he added. Amid the heavy bombardments and shelling ongoing in Ukraine, the latest round of peace talks between the Ukrainian and Russian delegations kicked off at the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul on Tuesday. In a phone call on Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin agreed to hold the next round of negotiations in Istanbul. Erdogan reiterated that Turkey would continue to contribute in every possible way during this process. Notably, Ukrainian and Russian delegations have held three rounds of in-person negotiations so far. On February 24, Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine after the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian provocations. In response to Russia's operation, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Moscow. (ANI) Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang will participate in a summit with European Council President Charles Michel, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and European Union (EU) foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on Friday (April 1) to discuss the Ukraine crisis. "President of the European Council, Charles Michel, and President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, accompanied by High Representative Josep Borrell, representing the EU, will meet Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang in the morning and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the afternoon," the EU Council said in a statement. According to the statement, the parties will discuss Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the humanitarian situation in the country, as well as bilateral relations between China and the EU. "The leaders will also discuss the state of bilateral relations and areas of shared interest such as climate change, biodiversity and health, as well as ways to ensure a more balanced and reciprocal trade relationship," the statement said. The talks are expected to exclude the human rights dialogue - a sideline component of the annual summit for the third year in a row. The previous EU-China summit was held in June 2020. The session of 2021 was called off after Brussels' accusations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang set off a flurry of sanctions between the European Union and China. The present talks are also expected to revive the negotiations on the bilateral trade deal, the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI). The talks come amid reports of China advising its companies to adopt a "cautious" approach towards deals with Russia as the country appears to be succumbing to the Western powers who have imposed severe sanctions on Russia. Recently, Sinopec, Asia's largest oil refiner moved to stop major investments in a gas chemical plant and a venture to market Russian gas in China in the wake of unexpectedly heavy Western-led sanctions against Moscow, The Standard Hong Kong reported. Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine last month after recognising the Ukrainian breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as "independent republics." Russia has since continued to maintain that the aim of its operations has been to "demilitarize" and "de-nazify" the country. The Russian actions were immediately condemned by almost all the western countries, who rolled out severe sets of sanctions targetting the Russian economy, and key individuals. A number of countries, including the US, UK, France, Italy, Finland and several others, also banned Russian aircraft over their airspaces. (ANI) Much like the rest of South Asia, the landlocked Himalayan nation Nepal is confronted with a lack of infrastructure. Challenges on regional connectivity, restrictive trade policies and inefficient procedures have been some of the obstacles hindering trade in the region. In order to overcome these challenges, India and Nepal have inked treaties and trade agreements that address concerns for infrastructural development and envisage the establishment of a regional cooperation mechanism. As many as 98 per cent of Nepal's transit trade takes place through India and 65 per cent of Nepal's total trade is with India. India continues to lend sustained support to Nepal in building infrastructure, particularly to facilitate air traffic routes for cargo, as also faster and cheaper waterways and railways for transporting goods across borders. With Indian assistance, many infrastructural projects are either being undertaken, are nearing completion or have been concluded in Nepal, with the primary objective of bolstering trade by way of improved connectivity. India has operationalized many such projects in Nepal which include big and small highways, bridges, for road construction in the Terai region. Approximately INR 5,253 crore worth of road projects are being (or have been) implemented, which would benefit India and Nepal. A category of projects that deserves special mention is road connectivity between the two countries. The projects include a 144 km road from Rupaidiha to Barabanki (INR 1,338 crore), a 184 km road from Sonauli to Gorakhpur (approximately INR 570 crore), the Fobesganj-Jogbani road as well as a road linking Piprakodi to Raxaul (INR 429 crore) and 10 other roads costing around INR 500 crore. India has helped lay a cross-border petroleum pipeline to ensure a smooth supply of petroleum products to Nepal. Motihari Amalekhgunj petroleum pipeline is the first of its kind in South Asia. The 69-km pipeline will reduce the cost of transportation of fuel from India to Nepal and prove to be a game-changing project in Nepal. To build a robust rail network between the two countries, work is ongoing on at least six railway projects. These projects are: Jaynagar (India)-Janakpur (Nepal) to Bardibas in Nepal, Jogbani in India to Biratnagar in Nepal, Nautanwa in India to Bhairahawa in Nepal, Rupaidiha in India to Nepalgunj in Nepal, and New Jalpaiguri in India to Kakarbhitta in Nepal, and Kathmandu-Raxual. India has developed a waterway on the Ganges River which connects Varanasi and the seaport of Haldia, Kolkata. To provide linkages through waterways, it is working on inland waterways network to allow Nepal to use three inland waterways, thus expanding its transit options. Nepal can operate its own vessels on the river Ganga. India has given consent to access the Kolkata-Kalughat, Raxaul; Kolkata-Sahebgunj, Biratnagar and Kolkata-Varanasi-Raxaul routes for waterways. Additionally, India has built integrated check posts (ICP) in Biratnagar. The ICP boasts of some of the most modern facilities such as electronic weighbridges, fire safety, warehousing facilities including refrigerated cargo, 24x7 monitoring through CCTV and public announcement systems. The post also has the capability of handling around 500 trucks per day. Also, India handed over the Integrated Check Post (ICP) Birgunj to Nepal. India is also constructing two more such ICPs at Saunali (India)- Bhairahawa(Nepal) and Nepalgunj Road(India)-Nepalgunj(Nepal). Besides, India inaugurated two projects in Nepal which were built with India's grant assistance of Nepali Rupees 89.2 million. Of these, the Rapti Cold Storage Building in Lamahi Bazar of Lamahi was inaugurated in April 2021. The connectivity has assumed greater significance with the formation of regional and sub-regional groupings like BBIN and BIMSTEC. The physical infrastructure being built with Indian assistance will help Nepal boost her trade in the region. (ANI) Chinese state-owned oil major Sinopec has hit the brakes on its investment plans in Russia as firms assess the impact of the severe Western sanctions on their investments, a media report said. Sinopec which is Asia's biggest oil refiner moved to stop major investments in a gas chemical plant and a venture to market Russian gas in China in the wake of unexpectedly heavy Western-led sanctions against Moscow, The Standard Hong Kong reported. Since Russia invaded Ukraine more than a month ago, China's three state energy giants - Sinopec, PetroChina and CNOOC - have been assessing the impact of the sanctions on their multi-billion dollar investments in Russia, the report said. "Companies will rigidly follow Beijing's foreign policy in this crisis," said an executive at a state oil company, adding, "There's no room whatsoever for companies to take any initiatives in terms of new investment (in Russia)." The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China is said to have summoned officials from the three energy companies this month to tell them to review their business ties with Russian partners. There was a caution from the ministry that the firms should avoid "rash moves" in buying Russian assets. The report comes after Sinopec's net profit last year more than doubled in 2020 to 71.2 billion yuan (HKD 87.6 billion), the most in a decade. The restraint diktat issued by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is expected to impact the long-term profitability of the oil major. China has in recent weeks coldly buried its friendship with Russia deep in the tundra with its Foreign Minister Wang Yi telling his Spanish counterpart, "China is not a party to the (Ukraine) crisis, and does not want the sanctions to affect China." Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine continues to deteriorate even as the conflict that began on February 24 with the Russian announcement of "special military operations" has entered its second month. The ongoing conflict has resulted in about 10 million people getting displaced within the country or ending up as refugees abroad till now according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). More than 3.5 million refugees have fled to the neighbouring western countries, including Poland, Romania, Moldova and Hungary, with European Union President Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday announcing an economic package of EUR 3.4 billion to support EU countries hosting those fleeing the war. (ANI) Belgium has decided to expel 21 Russian diplomats from the country, Sputnik News Agency reported citing RTBF broadcaster on Tuesday. Belgium said that diplomats are being expelled over espionage and security threats, the broadcaster reportedly said. The expulsion of 17 diplomats from the Netherlands was announced by Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra. "The Netherlands is expelling 17 Russian intelligence agents working in Russian missions in the Netherlands under diplomatic cover," Hoekstra informed in a tweet, further saying that the diplomats being expelled "pose a security threat." The development comes days after Poland expelled 45 Russian diplomats over charges of espionage. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov had warned that Russia will retaliate against the Polish actions. Earlier, the US had expelled 12 Russian diplomats from the Russian Permanent Mission to the UN in New York, as well as a Russian employee of the UN Secretariat In response to the move, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced on March 23 that it too will expel US diplomats from Moscow. The ongoing conflict has resulted in about 10 million people getting displaced within the country or ending up as refugees abroad till now according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Russia launched its invasion last month after recognising the Ukrainian breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as "independent republics." Russia has since continued to maintain that the aim of its operations has been to "demilitarize" and "de-nazify" the country. The Russian actions were immediately condemned by almost all the western countries, who rolled out severe sets of sanctions targetting the Russian economy, and key individuals. A number of countries, including the US, UK, France, Italy, Finland and several others, also banned Russian aircraft over their airspaces. (ANI) New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has expressed concern about the possible militarization of the Pacific after the Solomon Islands government signed a security partnership with China. China has signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Solomon Islands on "security cooperation" which allows Beijing to send law enforcement forces to the Islands. The MoU on security cooperation between China and Solomon Islands was signed on March 18. It will allow China to send police, Armed Police, military personnel and other law enforcement forces to the Solomon Islands, on request, to assist in maintaining social order and accomplish other tasks agreed upon by both countries, said the report. Under the provisions of the MoU, Chinese naval vessels can carry out logistical replenishments and Chinese armed forces can be moved to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in the Solomon Islands. "We see such acts as the potential militarisation of the region and also see very little reason in terms of the Pacific security for such a need and such a presence," Ardern was quoted as saying by Radio NZ. During the recent unrest in the Solomon Islands, both Australia and New Zealand had personnel, vessels and a presence there to support the country's stability, said Ardern. She added that demonstrated there was no need to reach beyond this region for such support. The Solomon Islands had switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taiwan in 2019, signalling China's growing influence in the Pacific. Amid the reports about China's increasing military in the Solomon Islands, Beijing last week said both countries have developed conventional security cooperation that is in line with international law and international practice. "China and the Solomon Islands, as two sovereign and independent states, develop conventional cooperation in the field of law and order, as well as security, on the basis of equal treatment and mutual benefit, which is in accordance with the international law and practice," Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Friday. Wang added that the appropriate cooperation contributes to maintaining public order in the Solomon Islands, promotes peace and stability in the region, as well as the common interests of China and other countries in the region. (ANI) This comes as China continues to claim most of the South China Sea, which is also contested by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) on Sunday said the incident took place on March 2 during Philippine maritime patrol operations around the Scarborough Shoal, locally known as Bajo de Masinloc. "Coast Guard personnel have monitored a China Coast Guard (CCG) vessel with bow number 3305 that conducted a close distance manoeuvring of approximately 21 yards towards BRP Malabrigo (MRRV-4402) while the said PCG vessel was sailing at the vicinity waters off Bajo de Masinloc," the PCG said in a press release. "This constrained the manoeuvring space of BRP Malabrigo (MRRV-4402) -- a clear violation of the 1972 International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS)," it added. PCG Commandant, CG Admiral Artemio M Abu, the said occurrence was the fourth reported close distance manoeuvring incident involving Chinese vessels in Bajo de Masinloc. Last May, a PCG-manned vessel, reported the first incident of close distance manoeuvring involving a CCG vessel. The second and third incidents involved two CCG vessels that conducted close distance manoeuvring with BRP Capones and BRP Sindangan (MRRV-4407) during the PCG's maritime capability enhancement exercises in Bajo de Masinloc in June last year. "The behaviour of the involved CCG vessels increased the risk of collision with four of our capital ships. Hence, we immediately coordinated with the National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea (NTF-WPS) and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) to address this issue through rules-based and peaceful approaches," the Coast Guard Commandant said. CG Admiral Abu said that the Philippines is fully aware of dangerous situations at sea, but these will not stop the country's deployment of assets and personnel in the country's exclusive economic zones (EEZ). (ANI) He said terrorism is a threat to the whole world and does not have any place in the civilized world. Gantz told Rajnath Singh that his proposed visit to India on March 30, 31 has been postponed "due to some unavoidable reasons" and new dates will be worked out through diplomatic channels. Rajnath Singh said he looked forward to the visit and it would further strengthen defence cooperation between India and Israel. "Had a telephonic conversation with the Defence Minister of Israel, Mr Benjamin Gantz. Shared my condolences on the loss of innocent lives due to terror attacks in Israel. Terrorism is a global menace which has no place in today's civilised world," he said in a tweet. "Both the countries look forward to further strengthening the bilateral relations as India-Israel complete 30 years of full diplomatic relations. Defence cooperation is the founding pillar of our strategic partnership. Military and industry cooperation has been on an upward swing," he added. The call was initiated from Tel Aviv. Two people were killed two people and six were injured in a shooting attack by ISIS operatives on Sunday in the Israeli city of Hadera, some 31 miles north of Tel Aviv, Israeli officials said. (ANI) A meeting of the North Atlantic Council (NAC) at the level of Ministers of Foreign Affairs will take place at the NATO Headquarters on April 6-7. The meeting will be in person and will be chaired by the NATO Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, added the statement. Some of the Ministers may attend via video link, as per the statement. Since Russia's war on Ukraine started, this is the second time that a NATO meeting is convened by the FMs of 30 NATO countries. An 'extraordinary summit' of the alliance was convened on March 24 over the situation in Ukraine. On February 24, Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine after the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian provocations. In response to Russia's operation, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Moscow. (ANI) External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will meet their counterparts Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin. Jaishankar and Rajnath Singh will also have other meetings scheduled on the sidelines. The last 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue between the two countries was held in October 2020 in New Delhi. India and the United States held a bilateral 2+2 inter-sessional meeting in September last year in Washington and exchanged assessments on developments in South Asia, the Indo-Pacific region and the Western Indian Ocean. Both sides took stock of the progress and developments in the bilateral agenda under the India-US strategic partnership, including defence, global public health, economic and commercial cooperation, science and technology, clean energy and climate finance, and people-to-people ties. (ANI) A Norwegian delegation consisting of the Consul-General of the country's Consulate in Mumbai visited the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority (JNPA) on Monday, to boost mutual cooperation in the maritime sector and the development of the port. "Today, Mr Arne Jan Flolo, Consul General, Norwegian Consulate, Mumbai and other delegates from Norway visited Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority (JNPA), India's premier container port, to boost the cooperation between India and Norway. The representatives received a warm ceremonial welcome from Shri Unmesh Sharad Wagh, IRS, Dy. Chairman, JNPA, on their arrival at JNPA," the press release by the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT) said. "The projects going on at JNPA are very impressive and with futuristic goals, especially in terms of sustainable development and green initiatives. Norway and JNPA will look forward to coming up with novel solutions and technology through cooperation to combat the climate crisis," Arne Jan Flolo, Consul General, Norwegian Consulate, Mumbai said. "Both the countries share a mutual vision of bolstering countries' economic development through the port and maritime sector. Norway is an ally of JNPA; the novel developments, technological innovations, and initiatives for sustainable growth in both countries will help each other take Exim trade to new heights," Unmesh Sharad Wagh, the Deputy Chairman of JNPA said on the occasion. A film presentation was also screened for the Norwegian delegates to highlight developmental projects like JNPA SEZ, Vadhvan Port, Additional Liquid Cargo Jetty, Fourth Container Terminal, 3rd line rail connectivity from Jasai to JNPA, etc. at JNPA. These projects signify that JNPA is multifaceted and provides 'ease of operation' in the Exim trade, making JNPA the only port to offer such vast amenities to its customers and stakeholders, the JNPT press release said. The JNPT at Navi Mumbai is one of the premier container handling ports in India. The port was commissioned on May 26 1989. Over the years, JNPT transformed from a bulk-cargo terminal to one of the important container ports in the country. Currently, JNPT operates five container terminals: The Jawaharlal Nehru Port Container Terminal (JNPCT), the Nhava Sheva International Container Terminal (NSICT), the Gateway Terminals India Pvt. Ltd. (GTIPL), Nhava Sheva International Gateway Terminal (NSIGT) and the newly commissioned Bharat Mumbai Container Terminals Private Limited (BMCTPL). The Port also has a Shallow Water Berth for general cargo and another Liquid Cargo Terminal which is managed by the BPCL-IOCL consortium and a newly constructed coastal berth. (ANI) After Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan alleged that some people are trying to topple his government with the help of foreign funds, federal minister Asad Umar claimed that the PM is ready to show a letter to Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Umar Ata Bandial to back his claims. While addressing a press conference in Islamabad, alongside Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry, Minister for Planning and Development Umar said he had seen the letter himself, reported Dawn. "Obviously, it is the highest office of justice in Pakistan, it is a huge position that has respect in this country. Personally too, the chief justice has a very good reputation. The prime minister said that [...], if necessary, and for the people's satisfaction, he is ready to present the letter to the chief justice of the Supreme Court," he added. However, at the same time, the information Minister said that the letter is not sent to the judge with the aim to get the letter reviewed. The letter would not be shared with him in the capacity of a judge of the SC, but as someone who held a high and respectable position in the country, he added. Umar further said the letter stated that if Imran Khan remained the prime minister, it would lead to "horrific consequences". Moreover, the minister said, the contents of the letter termed the ouster of PM Imran a "good result". He added that the "threat" PM Imran spoke about in relevance to the letter during his March 27 address "is directly linked to the no-confidence motion". PM Imran had said during his rally, "Attempts are being made through foreign money to change the government in Pakistan. Our people are being used. Mostly inadvertently, but some people are using money against us. We know from what places attempts are being to pressure us. We have been threatened in writing but we will not compromise on national interest." After the no-confidence motion against Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was tabled in the National Assembly with a total of 161 votes in favour, the proceedings were adjourned till March 31. The no-confidence motion was submitted by the Opposition parties on March 8. The Opposition has been confident that its motion would be carried as many PTI lawmakers have come out in the open against PM Imran Khan. (ANI) Three months after Reporters Without Borders (RSF) had revealed in a survey last December the Taliban takeover's impact on Afghanistan's media has been dramatic, the situation has only exacerbated. A survey by RSF and the Afghan Independent Journalists Association (AIJA) had shown a radical change in the Afghan media landscape since the Taliban took power. A total of 231 media outlets were reported closed and more than 6,400 journalists had lost their jobs since 15 August. Women journalists have been hit hardest, with four out of five no longer working. More than four out of every ten media outlets have disappeared and 60 per cent of journalists and media employees are no longer able to work. Following recent incidents of censorship in Afghanistan, the United States on Tuesday expressed concern over the latest series of restrictions imposed on Afghan media by the Taliban and urged the group to cease infringements, including the education and human rights of the Afghan people. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said that the US is committed to supporting the right of freedom of expression the world over, especially for journalists and human rights defenders, to operate freely without fear of violence against them. On Sunday, the Taliban banned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Voice of America (VOA) broadcast services in Afghanistan. The ban is the latest in a series of restrictions the Islamist group has imposed on Afghan media to stifle freedom of expression since taking control of the country last August. "The United States is committed to supporting the right of freedom of expression the world over, especially for journalists and human rights defenders, to operate freely without fear of violence against them," added Price. The US statement further said the international community are paying close attention to the Taliban's actions inside Afghanistan, and "it is with alarm and deep concern we learned of the Taliban's decision to stifle the Afghan people's access to independent, objective, international media sources." (ANI) According to a statement from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on Tuesday, the two sides discussed humanitarian and development assistance during their meeting held in the Afghan capital of Kabul, reported Xinhua. Deborah Lyons, the UN special envoy for Afghanistan and head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), was among the UN officials participating in the meeting. The UN officials, quoted in the statement, said the situation in Afghanistan has changed and the United Nations wants to know what Afghans expect from the world body, as per the news agency. On March 17, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution to extend the mandate of the UNAMA for one year till March 17, 2023. The majority of countries have refused to formally recognize the Taliban amid worries over human rights issues. Earlier, the Taliban regime issued a decree banning female students above grade six from participating in their classes. The girls were further told to stay home until the Islamic Emirate announces its next decision. Dozens of female students in Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul took to the streets demanding the Taliban regime to withdraw its decision to ban girls from attending school above the sixth grade. Many countries have condemned the Taliban's U-turn on girls' education. Taliban, since it took control of Kabul last August, have been facing flak from many countries for human rights abuse. (ANI) About 90 per cent of Afghanistan's population has been projected to be below the poverty line by the end of the year according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), a visiting official said in Kabul. Achim Steiner, Director General of UNDP, who recently came to Afghanistan, in a meeting in Kabul on Tuesday said it is necessary to maintain the international community's interest in Afghanistan in order to provide humanitarian assistance to the country, reported Tolo News. Steiner said investment in Afghanistan's economy is necessary to stabilize the economic freefall, otherwise, based on UNDP's earlier reporting, about 90 per cent of Afghanistan's population will live below the poverty line by the end of the year. "The answer to these challenges is also to invest in the recovery of Afghanistan's economy. That means recognizing that the people of this country need urgent support to also be able to earn their own livelihoods, to have the income to be able to buy food, to send children to school, to pay medical bills," he said as quoted by Tolo News. Steiner also said that several factors have contributed to the economic freefall of the country which includes not only "the political turmoil, but also Covid-19 and a drought (that) has created an economic reality in Afghanistan today that is essentially turning more and more people into poor people." During his visit to Afghanistan, the UNDP Director-General met with women entrepreneurs, media officials and private sector figures. He said women entrepreneurs should be supported because they not only feed their own families but also provide jobs for other women. Officials from the private sector said they discussed ways of addressing economic challenges with Steiner. "We hope that the mistakes of the past are not be repeated after this. We do not need short-term projects and support, we need sustainable development," Shirbaz Kaminzada, head of the Chamber of Industries and Mines was quoted as saying. "We discussed the restrictions on media and media outlets' economic problems. They (Steiner) announced their support to media in Afghanistan and to the freedom of speech in total," Hujatuallah Mujaddedi, head of Afghanistan Independent Journalists Association said. Talking about the recent ban on girls attending school over grade 6, Steiner said that the decision can have a negative impact on the international community's engagement in Afghanistan, stressing that sometimes a single issue can define everything. He said the authorities in Afghanistan should know that the world can easily turn its attention to other crises and set new priorities, adding that if the world's attention is drawn away, a crisis will emerge which will affect future generations. The humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan has continued to worsen since the Taliban's takeover last year. Humanitarian and financial aid has dried up due to the US sanctions on the Taliban regime, with the UN agencies estimating that more than 50 per cent of the population is in the need of urgent humanitarian assistance. (ANI) The Summit Meeting, which is being held in virtual mode, will be hosted by Sri Lanka, the current BIMSTEC chair. To prepare for the Summit, meetings of BIMSTEC Senior Officials (SOM) took place on March 28 followed by meetings of the BIMSTEC Foreign Ministers (BMM) on March 29. "The Covid pandemic related challenges, and the uncertainties within the international system that all BIMSTEC members are facing, imparts greater urgency to the goal of taking BIMSTEC technical and economic cooperation to the next level. This is expected to be the main subject of deliberations by Leaders at the Summit," the Ministry of External (MEA) said in a press release. The leaders are also expected to discuss the establishment of basic institutional structures and mechanisms of the group. External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar today concluded a "productive and congenial" BIMSTEC Ministerial Meeting. "Thank you FM Prof G. L. Peiris for the excellent arrangements," Jaishankar tweeted. Jaishankar participated in the 18th BIMSTEC Ministerial Meeting in Colombo and emphasized the grouping's commitment to intensify and expand areas of cooperation especially connectivity, energy and maritime ties among the member countries. The 'Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC)' is a regional multilateral organisation. Its members lie in the littoral and adjacent areas of the Bay of Bengal, constituting a contiguous regional unity. The members include Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand. (ANI) In the first public appearance since her return to China in September last year after 3 years of detention, Huawei's Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Meng Wanzhou said the company is still evaluating its response to Western sanctions on Russia. Looking calm and cheerful, Meng reprised her role of presenting the financial report at the start of the meeting, saying it was her first time in four years. She made a glancing allusion to her detention and court battle in Canada, The Washington Post reported. "The past four years, there have been tremendous changes in the world and in China," she said. "In the few months that I've been back, I've been trying to catch up. I hope I will catch up," she was quoted as saying. Meng's detention in Canada at the request of U.S. officials in December 2018 sparked a hostage standoff in which China detained two Canadian nationals, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, and charged them with espionage. Meng was indicted in the United States on fraud charges related to her representation of Huawei's relationship with an affiliate company operating in Iran, and she pleaded not guilty. But in a deal with the U.S. Justice Department in September 2021, she acknowledged helping to conceal the company's direct dealings in Iran, which violated U.S. sanctions. That month, Meng returned to China, and the "Two Michaels" returned to Canada. Huawei has been in crisis since 2018, with US sanctions against it threatening to cripple its business, and Meng, the daughter of Huawei's founder, battling extradition to the United States while under house arrest in Canada. The war in Ukraine brings more uncertainty for the company after it had increased investment in Russia over the past few years, the report said. "Huawei is deeply concerned about this war and the suffering it has caused to the people," rotating chairman Guo Ping said on Monday in Shenzhen, in response to a reporter's question. "As for the (sanctions) you mentioned, we have also noticed that some countries and regions have introduced some policies. These policies and measures are complex and constantly changing, and Huawei is still in the process of careful evaluation." Guo's statement was largely in line with Beijing's stance of refraining from joining Western sanctions against Russia while trying to avoid overt aid to Russia that could trigger secondary sanctions on Chinese companies. China, in recent times, has advised its companies to adopt a "cautious" approach towards deals with Russia as the country appears to be succumbing to the Western powers who have imposed severe sanctions on Russia. Recently, Sinopec, Asia's largest oil refiner moved to stop major investments in a gas chemical plant and a venture to market Russian gas in China in the wake of unexpectedly heavy Western-led sanctions against Moscow, The Standard Hong Kong reported. (ANI) "Special Envoy Lenderking will prioritize his engagements in the region on mobilizing additional life-saving humanitarian assistance for Yemen," the statement read. Although the US has provided an additional $585 million to Yemen, the country's humanitarian response remains just 30% funded, it added. In addition, the Middle Eastern nation is facing a lack of wheat supplies caused by the crisis in Ukraine. The latter has accounted for over 30% of Yemen's wheat imports, the statement noted. While in Saudi Arabia, Lenderking will participate in intra-Yemeni dialogue facilitated by the Gulf Cooperation Council. "The United States welcomes opportunities for Yemenis to come together, to represent their diverse experiences and perspectives, and to identify solutions and reforms that can improve the lives of citizens," the statement said. Yemen has been gripped by an internal conflict between the government forces and the Houthi movement. Since 2015, the Saudi-led coalition fighting on the Yemeni government's side has been conducting air, land and sea operations against the rebels. The Houthis often retaliate by firing projectiles and drones toward Saudi territory. (ANI/Sputnik) Harjot Singh, an Indian student who was discharged from a Delhi hospital after being treated for multiple bullet injuries that he suffered in crisis-ridden Ukraine, is worried about repaying loans that he took for his studies abroad and has urged the government for financial help and "compensation". Speaking with ANI over the phone, Harjot Singh said he will be almost bed-ridden for the next about one-and-a-half years and has to return the money which he borrowed from a bank and some of his relatives and friends. Noting that he will not be his financial condition "is not good," he also urged the government to help him in his further medical treatment. "I urge the government to help me financially because I will be almost bed-ridden for the next one and half years. The government should provide compensation. I have to pay my EMIs. I took a loan of Rs 4 lakh from a bank for my studies in Ukraine. Apart from that, I have also borrowed some amount of money from my relatives and friends. I have to return that also. So far I have paid seven EMIs of the loan but still many are unpaid," he said. Harjot Singh was discharged from the Army Base Hospital in Delhi Cantonment on Monday where he was undergoing treatment. "My health is better as I am here with my family. I was discharged yesterday. The doctor said that treatment for my hands and feet will continue for about one-and-a-half years," he said. "My financial condition is not good, my father has retired. I want the government to help me with further treatment. I have been told that I will have to take up the expenses of the therapy from now on," he added. The Indian student, who was pursuing his studies in Information Technology in Ukraine's capital Kyiv, was flown back to India on an Indian Air Force C-17 aircraft as part of the "Operation Ganga" evacuation programme. Speaking from his hospital bed in Kyiv earlier this month, Harjot Singh had told ANI that he sustained multiple injuries due to bullets fired at the car in which he was travelling. "This is February 27 incident. We were three people in a cab on our way to the third checkpoint where we were told to return due to security reasons. While coming back, multiple bullets were fired at our car due to which I sustained multiple bullet injuries," Harjot Singh had said. Harjot Singh had said he regained consciousness at 10 pm on March 2 night.(ANI) China is attempting to achieve its goals of food and energy security by securing favourable deals with Russia, as the country deals with severe Western sanctions over its war in Ukraine. Due to the high energy prices and following its "dual circulation" strategy, China is mulling over investing in energy as well as commodities companies in Russia. Russia has become an attractive cheaper option as it has been slapped with hefty economic sanctions by US and European countries following its 'invasion' into Ukraine, the International Forum for Rights and Security (IFFRAS) report said. The "dual circulation" strategy involves a two-step process, of promoting "internal circulation" by boosting domestic production, and "external circulation" by boosting external demand through heavy investments like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the report said. China's supply chains, of both food and other products, have been severely impacted by the rift with the US. Being alienated from the Western world, China is focusing on developing its own technologies for agriculture. China's energy production is largely dependent on coal, which it imports from Russia and Indonesia. In 2020, China imposed a ban on imports of coking coal from Australia after the latter supported calls for an investigation into the handling of the coronavirus by China. Coking coal is now imported from Mongolia but it is of a much lesser quality than Australia's. At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic has escalated energy prices which in turn has impacted the production of chemical fertilizers, deepening food security concerns. A number of chemical fertilizer plants have shut down across China. Russia has the second-largest coal reserves, after the US, in the world. Talks are on between state-owned Chinese energy companies, such as China Petrochemical, Aluminium Corporation of China, China Minmetals Corporation and China National Petroleum. Sources say that any deals between China and Russia would be aimed at ensuring food security. However, Washington has already warned China against extending any support to Russia either military or otherwise, or even helping Russia recover from its losses amidst reports that Russia is seeking military equipment from China. This has fuelled fears that Beijing may face US sanctions which could adversely impact Chinese companies and investors in the already ongoing trade war. China, in recent times, has advised its companies to adopt a "cautious" approach towards deals with Russia as the country appears to be succumbing to the Western powers who have imposed severe sanctions on Russia. Recently, Sinopec, Asia's largest oil refiner moved to stop major investments in a gas chemical plant and a venture to market Russian gas in China in the wake of unexpectedly heavy Western-led sanctions against Moscow, The Standard Hong Kong reported. (ANI) The move comes after US President Joe Biden extended Trump-era tariffs on solar cells with some exemptions, The Hill reported. California company Auxin Solar alleged the panels in question, assembled in Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, were intended to evade US regulations blocking Chinese imports. The US Commerce Department said that it will respond to a petition from Auxin Solar. According to the petition, the technology assembled in these countries involves parts manufactured by Chinese companies, and their manufacture violates US antidumping and countervailing tariffs on Chinese imports. "This misstep will have a devastating impact on the U.S. solar market at a time when solar prices are climbing, and project delays and cancellations are adding up," Solar Energy Industry Association President Abigail Ross Hopper said in a statement. "The solar industry is still reeling from a similar tariff petition that surfaced last year. The mere threat of tariffs altered the industry's growth trajectory and is one of the reasons why we're now expecting a 19% decline in near-term solar forecasts. Taking up this case will have a chilling effect on the solar industry." Auxin CEO Mamun Rashid told The Hill, "For years, Chinese solar producers have refused to fairly price their products in the U.S. and have gone to significant lengths to continue undercutting American manufacturers and workers by establishing circumventing operations in countries not covered by those duties. "We are grateful Commerce officials recognized the need to investigate this pervasive backdoor dumping and how it continues to injure American solar producers. Fair trade and enforcement of our trade laws are essential to rebuilding the American solar supply chain and making Solar in America again," Rashid said in a statement. (ANI) Kinshasa [DRC], March 30 (ANI/Sputnik): The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) said on Tuesday that it had lost contact with one of its helicopters in the east of the country. "MONUSCO lost contact with one of its helicopters on a reconnaissance mission in the Tshanzu area this afternoon," the mission said on Twitter, adding that the reasons for the disappearance are not yet known and a search is underway. Stephane Dujarric, the spokesman for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, said in a statement that eight people were on board the helicopter, including six crew members from the Pakistani military, one Russian and one Serbian soldier. The spokesman noted that a search and rescue operation is underway. Dujarric also said that "there have been clashes there between the M23 armed group and Congolese forces in recent days" in the Tshanzu area. Later on Tuesday, the local Politico, citing Gen. Sylvan Ekenge of the armed forces of the DRC (FARDC), reported that the helicopter was shot down by M23 rebels. MONUSCO is a UN peacekeeping operation which lists protection of civilians, humanitarian personnel and human rights defenders under imminent threat of physical violence, and support of the government of the DRC in its efforts to stabilize the country, among its goals. The DRC government is facing opposition from rebel groups in the eastern part of the country. (ANI/Sputnik) Increasing Efforts to Foster Humanitarian Aid, the National Council of Catholic Women Implements a Ukraine War Humanitarian Aid Campaign (NCCW) March 29, 2022 WASHINGTON, March 29, 2022 / With the onset of the Ukraine invasion by Russian forces, the need for assistance for the many families escaping the devastation became the focus of the National Council of Catholic Women, and a Ukraine War Humanitarian Aid Campaign was created. This global outreach has reached over $25,000 in under two weeks, with donations ongoing. These funds will be distributed via long-standing partner Catholic Relief Services. The National Council of Catholic Women has partnered with Catholic Relief Services since 1946 and continues to support CRS annually through two campaigns, "The Madonna Plan" and "Water for Life." Further information regarding these two campaigns can be found at NCCW's mission is to act through its members to support, empower and educate all Catholic women in spirituality, leadership, and service. Its programs respond with Gospel values to the needs of the Church and society in the modern world. For further information please contact Andrea Cecilli at SOURCE National Council of Catholic Women CONTACT: Andrea Cecilli, Share Tweet NEWS PROVIDED BY National Council of Catholic Women (NCCW)March 29, 2022WASHINGTON, March 29, 2022 / Christian Newswire / -- In 2021, the National Council of Catholic Women began to enhance its efforts to foster humanitarian aid throughout the United States, working on projects from relief for families impacted by the Surfside (Miami, FL) condominium collapse in June to the tornadoes that hit Kentucky in December. These two campaigns raised over $23,000 and all funds were distributed via the local Catholic Charities.With the onset of the Ukraine invasion by Russian forces, the need for assistance for the many families escaping the devastation became the focus of the National Council of Catholic Women, and a Ukraine War Humanitarian Aid Campaign was created. This global outreach has reached over $25,000 in under two weeks, with donations ongoing. These funds will be distributed via long-standing partner Catholic Relief Services. The National Council of Catholic Women has partnered with Catholic Relief Services since 1946 and continues to support CRS annually through two campaigns, "The Madonna Plan" and "Water for Life." Further information regarding these two campaigns can be found at www.crs.org/stories/catholic-relief-services-and-national-council-catholic-women NCCW's mission is to act through its members to support, empower and educate all Catholic women in spirituality, leadership, and service. Its programs respond with Gospel values to the needs of the Church and society in the modern world. For further information please contact Andrea Cecilli at acecilli@nccw.org or refer to www.nccw.org SOURCE National Council of Catholic WomenCONTACT: Andrea Cecilli, acecilli@nccw.org "Had a phone conversation with Pak Prime Minister @ImranKhanPTI. Spoke about our struggle against Russian aggression. The people of Ukraine seek peace. This is our unconditional priority," Zelenskyy tweeted. Meanwhile, Khan "expressed deep regret that the military conflict" between Moscow and Kyiv was continuing, according to Geo News. On Tuesday, the latest round of peace talks between the Ukrainian and Russian delegations kicked off at the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul. After the delegation-level meeting between Russia-Ukraine in Istanbul, the Russian delegation announced steps for a "drastic reduction in military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions" and the possibility of a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Ukrainian President. The head of the Russian delegation, presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, called the negotiations "constructive". Moreover, Russia is beginning to withdraw some forces, including Russian Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs) leaving the surrounding areas around the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv. On February 24, Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine after the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian provocations. In response to Russia's operation, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Moscow. (ANI) "The Pakistan Army and Khyber Pakhtunkhawa Police have gunned down four terrorists in Lakki Marwat's general area of Sheri Khel," Geo News reported citing the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) statement on Tuesday. The incident took place on the night between March 28-29, when the army and police conducted a joint intelligence-based operation, ISPR said. During the intense exchange of fire, four terrorists were killed and one terrorist was apprehended, the Pakistani newspaper reported. The ISPR said a large number of weapons and ammunition was also recovered from the terrorists, who remained actively involved in kidnapping and terrorist activities against innocent civilians and security forces, Geo News reported. (ANI) India on Tuesday (local time) reiterated its call for unimpeded humanitarian access to areas of armed conflict in Ukraine. "India remains deeply concerned at the ongoing situation, which continues to deteriorate since the beginning of the hostilities. We reiterate our call for unimpeded humanitarian access to areas of armed conflict in Ukraine," India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations TS Tirumurti said at the UNSC briefing on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine. Tirumurti said that there is an urgent need to address the humanitarian needs of the affected population in Ukraine. He continued saying that "in this regard, the initiatives of UN, and its agencies like OCHA and WFP have reinforced ongoing efforts. We also note the decision by the EU countries who have agreed to a permit-free transit of humanitarian carriers to Ukraine." "We hope the international community will continue to respond positively to the humanitarian needs of the people of Ukraine, including through extending generous support to the Secretary General's Flash Appeal and the Regional Refugee Response Plan on Ukraine," he said. Keeping in view the dire humanitarian situation unfolding in Ukraine, India has already sent over 90 tonnes of humanitarian supplies to Ukraine and its neighbours. These supplies have included medicines and other essential relief material for refugees. We are providing more humanitarian assistance in the coming days, especially through supply of essential medicines, Tirumurti highlighted. He further said that it is important that humanitarian action is always guided by the principles of humanitarian assistance. i.e., humanity. neutrality, impartiality, and independence - embedded as they are at the heart of UN Guiding Principles of Humanitarian Assistance. "These measures should not be politicized," he added. Tirumurti said that the conflict is already having an impact on the global economy, especially on many developing countries, including through disruption of supply chains. Its adverse impact on energy and commodity prices is evident. "We reiterate our call for immediate cessation of hostilities across Ukraine. Our Prime Minister (Narendra Modi), on several occasions, has reiterated this and emphasized that there is no other option but the path of dialogue and diplomacy," he said. "We continue to emphasize that the global order is anchored in international law, the UN Charter and respect for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of states." Tirumurti further said, "We call for purposeful engagement by both sides in the ongoing talks. We hope that an understanding could be reached soon. It is clearly in our collective interest to find a solution that can provide for immediate de-escalation of tensions aimed at securing long-term peace and stability in the region and beyond." (ANI) Highlighting India's stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on Tuesday said he believes the countries across the world recognize and understand and appreciate India's balanced approach. Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Goyal said, "We believe there should be a cessation of hostilities that both should discuss and resolve their issues and we should have peace in the region." "In our own approaches, we do not see the gains or losses of war, we always believe there will always be a loss. But at the same time, it has not affected us directly in any significant way because our trade with these two countries was relatively a very small portion of our overall internationalism," Goyal said when asked about the Russia-Ukraine conflict impact on India. He also said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been in regular contact with all the world leaders over the Russia-Ukraine situation. "Prime Minister Modi has been in regular contact with all the world leaders. He has, of course, been requesting and appealing for peace in the region consistently. I believe our friendly countries across the world recognize and understand and appreciate India's balanced approach," the minister said. He continued by saying that "I think everybody will have to take a call whether everybody is willing to stop all engagements, stop all dependency on petroleum products or energy requirements before they can point fingers at each other." Goyal also said that the world "recognizes India is clearly on the right and India is clearly looking for peace in the region at the earliest." When asked about the currency transaction mode for purchasing oil from Russia, Goyal said, "I don't think it is very material, what kind of price discounted or otherwise, I still believe that it's more important the war comes to an end." "I believe we would all like to pay a fair price for all products, petroleum or otherwise..., It's important that we all work towards peace in the region. I don't see any gain or anybody coming out of such a conflict," he added. (ANI) A portion of State Route 203 was blocked in Duvall following a collision that left one person dead and two others injured Monday evening. Around 7:30 p.m., a Toyota Corolla crossed the center line of SR 203 at 288th Street and then hit a landscaping truck head-on, according to Washington State Patrol Trooper Rick Johnson. The driver of the Corolla was pronounced dead at the scene and the vehicles passenger was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center. The driver of the landscaping truck was also transported to a hospital. SR-203 was closed between Woodinville-Duvall Road and 203rd Street Southeast. Traffic was rerouted to Snoqualmie Valley Road while troopers investigated the collision. #Breaking. SR 203 is blocked at 288th due to a two vehicle fatal collision. One deceased at scene and one airlifted. More information to come. Trooper Rick Johnson (@wspd2pio) March 29, 2022 More news from KIRO 7 DOWNLOAD OUR FREE NEWS APP The Daily Beast Getty ImagesAmber Heard sobbed uncontrollably on the stand Thursday as she recounted a wild fight with her then-husband Johnny Depp in Australia in which he allegedly penetrated her vagina repeatedly with a liquor bottle, leaving her retching and bloodied.The March 2015 trip for the filming of Pirates of the Caribbean 5 was tumultuous from the start, Heard said during her second day of testimony in the trial over Johnny Depps $50 million defamation lawsuit. One day, after he had been drinking, Daniel Mead is shown being arrested the afternoon of June 24, 2020. STAUNTON Moments after 28-year-old Bradley A. Maurice was stabbed the afternoon of June 24, 2020, Ciara Jones called 911 from the Springhill Village Apartments in Staunton. Hes bleeding out, Jones said to a dispatcher on a recording played for the jury Tuesday in Staunton Circuit Court. Later, she added, Hes breathing, but barely. Maurice, stabbed in the heart, would later die. His friend, Daniel D. Mead, 35, was eventually charged with first-degree murder in his death. Jones was one of several witnesses called to the stand during the second day of Meads murder trial. During a confrontation outside the apartment complex, Jones testified she saw the two men very, very close to one another. After being stabbed, she said Maurice held out his arms like, oh my god, whats going on? Jones said Maurice took off his T-shirt and paced in a circle for maybe a minute, if that before collapsing to his knees. When officers from the Staunton Police Department arrived on the scene, Maurice was on the ground and not moving. He was pronounced dead a short time later. Previous evidence showed Mead had invited Maurice, his partner and their three young children to temporarily stay at his apartment after Maurice was kicked out of the Valley Mission, a local homeless shelter, for failing a breathalyzer test. The two had been friends for several years, Mead's attorney said. However, the two men became embroiled in an argument that same day and Mead asked Maurice to leave. Minutes later, as the two men were outside of the apartment complex, Maurice was stabbed with a butterfly knife. During opening arguments on Monday, Mead's attorney, William Little II, said he acted in self-defense. On Tuesday, as Jones was still testifying, fireworks erupted when Little brought up a statement shed reportedly made to police about Maurice appearing to be on drugs. His comment incensed Staunton Commonwealths Attorney Jeff Gaines, who immediately objected to Littles question. Story continues He made that statement just to prejudice these fine people, an agitated Gaines said as Judge Anne Reed immediately sent the jury back to the jury room. He knows there were no drugs in the mans blood, Gaines added, still seething. Thats what she said, your honor, Little responded. Reed upheld the objection and informed the jury, once it returned, to disregard Littles last question to Jones. An autopsy showed Maurice did not have drugs in his system but he did have a blood-alcohol content of .197, more than twice Virginias legal limit to drive. When her testimony resumed, Jones was asked by Little to describe Maurices behavior. He was definitely mad that hed gotten stabbed, she said. Mead, she said, remained calm as a small group of people gathered near the stabbing. Mead, who took the bloody knife back to his apartment, told police where to find the weapon, according to testimony. During opening arguments Monday, Chief Deputy Commonwealths Attorney Joseph Perry said Mead stabbed Maurice with such force the blade of the knife went through a rib, into the right ventricle and to the back wall of his heart. On Tuesday, the doctor who performed the autopsy said the depth of the fatal wound was slightly deeper than the length of the 3 -inch blade of the knife used in the slaying. The prosecution rested its case late Tuesday afternoon. The jury is expected to get the case on Wednesday. More: Women make demands. A psychic makes predictions. And a Virginia city holds its breath. More: Staunton Mall continues being torn down. Here's what it looks like now. To subscribe, visit www.newsleader.com and click "subscribe" at top of page. Brad Zinn is the cops, courts and breaking news reporter at The News Leader. Have a news tip? Or something that needs investigating? You can email reporter Brad Zinn (he/him) at bzinn@newsleader.com. You can also follow him on Twitter. This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: Staunton jury could begin deliberations Wednesday in murder case Andrew Giuliani, son of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, speaking to reporters on April 28, 2021, in New York. The gubernatorial hopeful reportedly made anti-trans statements over the weekend that included comments about his baby daughter's genitals. (Photo: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) Andrew Giuliani, the son of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani who is running to be governor of New York, reportedly brought up his baby daughters genitals while making anti-trans remarks at an event over the weekend. I have changed the diapers, Giuliani said at a rally hosted by a far-right group in Long Island, The Daily Beast first reported Tuesday. I have looked under the hood. Shes a woman. Im gonna be the last guy in a long time that looks under the hood right there. But guess what? She was born a woman and shes gonna stay a woman. Its that simple. Giuliani also said his 4-month-old daughter made a promise to me on the first day: She shook my hand and I said, Im the only boyfriend till youre 25 years old, shake hands, he told the crowd. A spokesperson for Giuliani told The Daily Beast that while Andrew does not claim to be a biologist, he can tell the difference between a male and a female. The statement seemingly referred to Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson saying she was not a biologist when asked during her confirmation hearing to define what a woman is which has become a culture-war complaint for Republicans. Giuliani did not immediately respond to HuffPosts request for comment. Read the full story at The Daily Beast. This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated. Related... Chay Bowskill (L) kidnapped his then girlfriend, Angel Lynn. (Reach) The man who kidnapped Angel Lynn, leaving her paralysed after she fell from a van travelling at 60mph, has been revealed to be a member of a gang that stole 1.1m worth of luxury cars. Chay Bowskill, 20, of Leicestershire, was convicted by a jury in January of kidnapping his then 19-year-old girlfriend, with his sentence later increased to 12 years. Lynn, of Loughborough, suffered severe brain damage in a fall from the van Bowskill had abducted her in on the A6 near Mountsorrel in September 2020. It has now emerged Bowskill and others broke into sleeping victims' homes to steal the keys to their prestige cars. Read more: Father jailed for murder 21 years after he smothered two-year-old son with pillow Josh Healy (l), Barry Kew Moss (tr) and Travis Hindmarsh (br) were also part of the gang. (Reach) The six men and teenagers burgled 41 homes in Loughborough, Leicester and towns and villages across the county and wider region. The 51 vehicles they stole - including upmarket SUVs, an 80,000 Audi SQ7, a 75,000 Mercedes C63s, and BMWs, a Range Rover and VWs - were worth a total of 1,153,500. Bowskill and the others pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit burglaries, which were carried out between June and October 2019. A number of the cars, collectively worth an estimated 373,000, are still missing, Leicester Crown Court heard. Others involved in the conspiracy were Barry Kew Moss, 22, Travis Hindmarsh,19, Oliver Thomas Read, 25, Aurel Sadiki, 24, all of no fixed address, and 18-year-old Josh Healy, of Laurel Close, Mountsorrel. Christopher Jeyes, prosecuting, said: "The burglaries were of occupied homes, some with elderly residents and some with children. Many of the occupants woke up to find doors and windows had been entered and vehicles were missing from outside." Sentencing, Recorder Michael Auty QC added: "Each of you was part of an organised cabal whose purpose was to break into the homes of 41 separate families with the sole intention of stealing keys to valuable cars. Recorder Auty said he took into account that Healy was 15-years-old at the time of the conspiracy, Hindmarsh was then aged 16 and Bowskill had been 18. Story continues Kew Moss was aged 20 at the time and is currently serving a three year and nine-month sentence for some of the burglaries that formed part of the same conspiracy. Read more: Baby, 18 days, killed after uninsured hit-and-run driver smashed into his pram The gang were jailed at Leicester Crown Court. (Getty) Bowskill was also convicted of "coercive and controlling behaviour" toward Angel - who now needs round-the-clock care - and perverting the course of justice. He was jailed for a total of seven-and-a-half years. However, the sentence was referred to London's High Court for an "unduly lenient" review and increased to 12 years. Now, he is expected to serve two thirds, or eight years, of that term. At Leicester Crown Court two days later, he was given an additional four years for the burglary conspiracy. He was told this would add two more years to his term and he now faces serving at least 10 years before being eligible for release on licence. Robin Howat, mitigating for Bowskill said his client had an "unguided childhood" and went "badly off the rails." He added: "He's already had a crushing blow [from the Appeal Court] and a concurrent sentence wouldn't make him lose hope." Auburn police are looking for the suspect in a road rage incident that left a victims car shot several times, according to the Auburn Police Department. At around 10 a.m. on March 22, a red 2015-2022 Ford Mustang and a Jeep Wrangler were involved in a road rage incident. According to police, the Mustang was driving behind the Wrangler as they exited Highway 18 onto Auburn Way South. After driving a short distance, the driver of the Mustang grabbed a pistol and shot multiple times into the Wrangler. The driver of the Wrangler was transported to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. If you have information related to this incident, contact the Auburn Police Department at 253-288-7403. My daughter had in-utero surgery at 26 weeks' gestation. Courtesy of Tianna Borst Tianna Borst, 27, found out after a routine ultrasound that her baby had spina bifida. At 26 weeks pregnant, Borst underwent surgery to repair the spine of her unborn daughter, Savera. This is Tianna's story, as told to Kelly Burch. When I walked into my 20-week ultrasound, there was one question on my mind: boy or girl? But as I lay on the table, I noticed that the ultrasound tech looked uneasy. I didn't have the courage to ask if anything was wrong. The next day I got a call from my doctor. She told me, "I believe your baby has spina bifida." Spina bifida is a neural-tube defect in which the spinal tube doesn't close entirely. Through further testing, I learned that my baby who I would soon find out was a girl had myelomeningocele, the most common and severe form of spina bifida. At that moment I thought I was going to lose my baby. With the help of my mom, we found a team of doctors ready to perform an in-utero surgery that made walking possible for my now-toddler daughter. Grandma came to the rescue As soon as we received a definitive diagnosis, my mom flew from her home in Connecticut to Michigan, where I live. She's not a medical researcher, but you wouldn't know that from watching her in those days. My mom discovered that some fetuses with myelomeningocele can have surgery to repair their spine before they're even born. She reached out to the Yale New Haven Children's Hospital Fetal Care Center. Unbeknownst to us, a team at the hospital had been training to do exactly this surgery for two years. They were looking for the right candidate, and there I was. Soon I was on the phone with Dr. Mert Ozan Bahtiyar, director of the center. He was honest with me, talking about the good and bad that could happen with surgery. He told me I had to act quickly. The surgery needed to be done before 26 weeks, and I was already more than 24 weeks along. I didn't hesitate. I knew from the moment I heard about this surgery that it was something I needed to do for my child. I pictured my daughter and the beautiful life I wanted for her. Within a week, I was in Connecticut. Story continues The spina bifida surgery was a first-time success That was in March of 2020, when COVID shut down all nonessential surgeries. Bahtiyar went to bat for me, arguing before the hospital board that this was an essential surgery. Because of him, we were able to move ahead. I don't remember much from the actual surgery, other than "Eye of the Tiger" playing as the medical staff administered my anesthesia. For the next few hours, my daughter and I were in the operating room with 22 other people all there to help this baby have the life she deserved. When I woke up, Bahtiyar had good news. "Everything was a success," he told me. For the first time in Connecticut, a fetal spina-bifida repair had been completed. My daughter was born via C-section For the next 10 weeks, I stayed in Connecticut living in a hotel near the hospital. I had weekly ultrasounds, which was a small silver lining. Not many people get to see their child grow week by week. At 36 weeks, my daughter, Savera, was born by scheduled C-section. She was immediately taken to the neonatal intensive care unit. I didn't get to hold or touch her for the first 24 hours, but I knew she was in good hands. Today, Savera is a happy and healthy toddler. She still lives with spina bifida. She can't feel below her knees, and she wears braces when she walks. I'll never know what Savera's life would have been like without the surgery. What I do know is that I would make this decision again and again for her. She's a beautiful, determined little girl. She's been strong since day one, and I've never been prouder. Read the original article on Insider MILAN (Reuters) - The Bank of Italy said on Tuesday it had banned the local unit of online German bank N26 from taking on new customers after checks late last year flagged money laundering risks. Italy's central bank said N26 was also prohibited from offering new products and services, such as cryptoassets, to existing clients. "The Bank of Italy adopted such measures following inspections, conducted between Oct. 25 and Dec. 17 2021, which highlighted significant shortcomings in complying with anti-money laundering regulation," it said. "N26 took measures to remedy such shortcoming," the central bank added in a note. "The Bank of Italy reserves the right to assess the anomalies have been fully overcome, before considering revising the current decision." (Reporting by Valentina Za; Editing by Chris Reese and Jonathan Oatis) MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish banks must carefully monitor risks and a potential rise in bad loans on state-backed lending granted in the pandemic as repayment freezes are lifted and indirect impacts from the Ukraine war show up in credit portfolios, the Bank of Spain's deputy governor said on Tuesday. "There are still many uncertainties around the economy, now fuelled by the Ukraine crisis and therefore we must be vigilant about the evolution of the loans, even more so now that the grace periods of the loans guaranteed by the ICO will begin to be lifted", Deputy Governor Margarita Delgado said. In 2020, the government approved up to 140 billion euros ($155.39 billion) in so-called ICO liquidity lines, where Spain guaranteed up to 80% of the loans that were channelled through banks to small and mid-sized companies and the self-employed. On Tuesday, the government approved a new line of 10 billion euros in soft loans, with a 12 month-freeze on repayments, or so-called grace periods, where companies are required to pay only interest and not the principal on a loan. On existing COVID-19 loans, the government has extended on a general basis maturities by between eight to 10 years and automatically prolonged grace periods by six months. Delgado said on Tuesday that she expected companies to start experiencing the financial burden of repaying loans in the second quarter. Regarding bad loans, Delgado said that during 2021 the volume of non-performing assets followed the downward trend of recent years, "although at a much slower pace from what had been occurring before the pandemic." As of January, non-performing loans at Spanish banks stood at 4.32%, still far from its 13.6% peak in December of 2013. Delgado said however that growth of loans subject to special surveillance, or considered subject to heightened credit risk, had been moderate in the last half of last year, "although it is still growing at double-digit rates." ($1 = 0.9010 euros) (Reporting by Jesus Aguado; editing by John O'Donnell and William Maclean) WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) The Mayor of Barcelona has announced that the next contest for sailings Americas Cup is set to be held in the Spanish city in 2024. In a video posted Monday on social media, Mayor Ada Colau said Barcelona had been chosen as the host city for the 37th Cup regatta. While recent reports had pointed to Barcelona as a likely host, Colaus statement came ahead of any official announcement by America's Cup-holder Team New Zealand. After defending the Cup off Auckland in 2021, Team New Zealand indicated it was unlikely that the next regatta also would take place in New Zealand because of funding difficulties. Team New Zealand effectively put the Cup hosting rights up for tender and invited cities around the world to bid. Barcelona emerged as the most likely venue when the Irish city of Cork withdrew its bid earlier Monday. Cork was responding to advice from the Irish government and other agencies which suggested Cork harbour could not be made ready for the regatta in the time available. An event of the caliber of the Americas Cup brings with it an expectation of excellent delivery, Ireland's Department of Tourism and Sport said in a statement. The tight time frame available prior to the 37th edition of the Cup brought with it a large risk of under-delivery. Corks withdrawal left the field open to Barcelona. Today Barcelona celebrates another great piece of good news, Colau said. And it is that our city will host the Americas Cup of sailing in 2024, the oldest international competition in the world and one of the most important with a great economic and media impact. It is a competition where, beyond the days of the event, the participating teams make large investments in innovation and, therefore, has a sustained economic impact during the two years prior to the regatta. Team New Zealand has been threatened with legal action if it decides to defend the Cup outside New Zealand. Sir Edmund Thomas, a retired judge of New Zealands Supreme Court, has warned Team New Zealand he will sue if it attempts to take the Cup defense overseas. Story continues I believe that the defense of the Cup should take place in New Zealand. The public interest is involved and I would wish to promote the public interest, Thomas said in a letter to Hayden Porter, chief executive of the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron. As the Americas Cup is a contest between sailing clubs, the squadron formally is the Cup holder. In 1985, Thomas obtained an injunction which prevented a tour to South Africa by New Zealands national rugby team from going ahead because of South Africas apartheid system. Team New Zealand has received substantial financial support from New Zealand taxpayers and Auckland ratepayers to help fund its operations and provide infrastructure for its previous Cup defense in New Zealand. A decision to defend the trophy overseas is expected to be poorly received in New Zealand where the event has a high profile. ___ More AP Asia sports: https://apnews.com/hub/sports-asia and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports WASHINGTON President Joe Biden welcomed Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to the White House for bilateral meetings Tuesday to discuss Russias invasion of Ukraine, maintaining peace in the Indo-Pacific region, climate change and supply chain issues. "This is a critical moment for I think for both our countries and the region that you so heavily represent," said Biden during brief remarks to the press, seated next to Lee. Biden added, the partnership between the two countries "is as important as it's ever been, as a matter of fact I think it's growing." Lee thanked Biden for receiving him at this "critical moment in world affairs" and noted Singapore as a major security partner of the U.S. "Im sure you are completely seized with whats happening in Europe right now, but we doubly appreciate the time you are giving to the relationship with Singapore and the southeast Asian countries generally," said Lee. A senior Biden administration official told reporters Monday in a preview of the visit the two leaders will be meeting at a "very critical time, one in which the rules-based international order faces unprecedented challenges." The official added, "I think its obviously shaped by Russias unprovoked and unjustifiable war against Ukraine, which poses an urgent threat not only for Europe, but also for the Indo-Pacific." Singapore has implemented sanctions and export controls against Russia in an effort to support Ukraine, in what the official described as a "very significant development." After the two leaders meet Tuesday morning, they are expected to deliver a statement to the press from the White House. Singapores leader will then meet with Vice President Kamala Harris. The meetings are an opportunity for the two countries to deepen their cooperation, the official said, including expanding engagement on trade in the region, as well as strengthen security ties a key issue as China expands its military posture in the South China Sea. The leaders will also discuss climate change, space and cyberthreats, and fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. The official said the Biden administration believes the U.S. partnership with Singapore has "important benefits for the American people." Biden last met with Lee at the G-20 summit in Rome in October. Drew Angerer It is a moment of consternation for many of Americas ultra-rich. A tax on the super wealthy, once a fringe left-wing fantasy, is again swirling in Washingtonand this time the plan originated in the White House. Its dead on arrival, its not constitutional, and it doesnt make any sense, fumed billionaire Leon Cooperman in an interview with The Daily Beast. Why dont they eliminate the fucking loopholes in the tax code? The Biden administration was set to unveil the proposal on Monday as part of its budget plan for 2023. It would affect a small percentage of the populationhouseholds worth $100 million or morewho would face a minimum annual tax rate of 20 percent of their income, including the appreciation of certain investments. Billionaires Blast Wealth Tax: One-Way Ticket to Venezuela Under the current system, many billionaires are able to avoid paying meaningful taxes for years or even decades by holding on to liquid assets that are only taxed once sold. Average investors can defer taxes in the same way, but the ultra-rich can fund their lifestyles by borrowing huge sums of money and using their shares as collateral, preventing them from incurring significant tax liabilities. Many ultra-wealthy investors also utilize loopholes or charitable deductions to further write down their obligations once they come due. Last year, a ProPublica investigation found that several billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Carl Icahn, had avoided paying federal income taxes in some years. The report outlined each billionaires true tax rate, a controversial metric that measured the taxes they had paid between 2014 and 2018 as a percentage of their wealth. Musks rate was a relatively high 3.27 percent, while Bezos stood at just 0.98 percent. Democrats have assailed the ultra-rich for years, claiming they havent paid their fair share. The new minimum tax proposal is an attempt to address thator at least create noise to rally the partys base. Story continues Some billionaires arent happy to be caught in the crosshairs. I think its stupid to punish the people that create the jobs and make the money, said the grocery billionaire John Catsimatidis. I create jobs. I dont make most of my money in hedge funds. I dont make most of my money in the stock market. Im different. Its going to lead to very unnatural actions in the economy, added Cooperman, who said he supports a progressive tax system but favors doing so by closing other loopholes instead. According to a chart shared on Twitter by the economist Gabriel Zucman, Bidens proposal could theoretically create a $50 billion tax bill for Elon Musk, the largest of anyone in the country, followed by a $35 billion obligation for Jeff Bezos. In total, the chart estimated, the top 10 billionaires would owe $215 billion between them. Last fall a similar proposal garnered some support in Congress before it was ultimately scuttled. At that time, Catsimatidis told The Daily Beast that proponents of the plan were just nuts and trying to change our way of life. If they dont like the United States the way it is, Im buying them a one-way ticket to Venezuela, he said. This time, the grocery billionaire said he is taking a back seat. Many members of the Forbes 400 are both Democrats and richer than him, he said, and will owe far more money if the policy somehow becomes law. Let them fight it out, he said. Let the hedge fund guys kill each other. Read more at The Daily Beast. Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now. Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) arrive for a vote for a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government until Feb 18 on Thursday, December 2, 2021. A bipartisan group of senators requested specifics from the Biden administration on the defense aid that the United States has provided to Ukraine since Russia began its invasion into the neighboring country last month. The letter, led by Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), asked White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan for a list of lethal and nonlethal aid provided to Ukraine to date and the status of deliveries. The senators also requested an analysis of equipment from allied nations that could be provided to Ukraine and later backfilled with NATO equipment, among other inquiries. "America's commitments to Ukraine and to our NATO allies demand we expedite the delivery of weapons and capabilities to our allies and partners; Ukraine can win this fight if we help them win this fight," the senators said. "Above all else, our commitment to our allies and partners keeps Americans prosperous and keeps our families safe." The senators also noted that the U.S.'s strategy for Ukraine needed to do more than provide adequate means for protecting the country against Russian forces. They said that "the strategy must deliver Ukraine necessary weapons to defend itself, counter the Russian forces' advance, and give the Ukrainian people a chance to win the war." In addition to Ernst and Gillibrand, the other signatories were Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Susan Collins (R-Maine), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Angus King (I-Maine), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.). Story continues "Deliveries of our security assistance are occurring daily, and we are expediting shipments as quickly as possible to get the Ukrainians even more of the weapons they are using so effectively to defend their country such as anti-aircraft and anti-tank system," a White House National Security Council spokesperson told The Hill regarding the timing of deliveries. "The United States has delivered roughly $350 million of security assistance to Ukraine over the past three weeks. We are also facilitating deliveries of additional assistance from our allies and partners - at least 30 countries have provided security assistance to Ukraine since the invasion began," the spokesperson added. Earlier this month, the president announced $800 million in added security assistance to Ukraine. A White House fact sheet said that the latest package included 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 100 Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems and 2,000 Javelins, among other weapons. The development comes as the Russian invasion extends into its second month, with Moscow remaining unsuccessful in seizing Ukrainian capital Kyiv. Brexit: More than 1 million people work in the financial services sector in the UK. Photo: Yann Tessier/Reuters More than 7,000 finance jobs have moved from London to the European Union because of Brexit, according to accountancy firm EY. The group's Brexit Tracker has revised its projections for the number of Brexit-related staff relocations to the EU, from 7,400 in December 2021 to just over 7,000, and is significantly down from the peak of 12,500 announced in 2016. Most firms made their decision on how to restructure their workforce ahead of the end of the Brexit transition period in December 2020. Further relocations could result from European Central Bank checks on whether Brexit hubs in the EU opened by banks which used London as their European base have sufficient staff to justify their new licences, EY said. Dublin is the most popular destination for staff relocations and new hubs, followed by Luxembourg, Frankfurt and Paris. EY said Paris scored highest in terms of attracting jobs from London, totalling 2,800, followed by Frankfurt at around 1,800, and Dublin with 1,200. Read more: P&O Ferries tells UK government it will not reverse sacking decision Omar Ali, EMEIA Financial Services Leader at EY, said: "The high number of potential job relocations reported in 2016 aligned with the uncertainty which surrounded the Citys ongoing relationship with Europe at the time. "As firms gained greater clarity on what the post-Brexit landscape would look like, plans were consolidated and, in some cases, firms revised down the number of people they would need to relocate." EY said that new local hires linked to Brexit total 2,900 across Europe, and 2,500 in Britain, where just over a million people work in the financial services sector. The transfer of the management of assets to EU jurisdictions is also down. Since 2016, 24 firms have publicly declared that they will transfer just over 1.3tn ($1.7tn) of UK assets to the EU. PwC warned that 100,000 financial jobs could be lost if Britain voted Leave. Watch: 10 ways to Brexit proof your finances Ashley plays the eldest Sharma sister in the new season of Bridgerton (Getty Images) Bridgerton actor Simone Ashley has shared that she gave herself a tattoo during lockdown after watching a tutorial from a prison inmate. In an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Monday 28 March, Ashley revealed a tattoo of a sphynx cat on her ankle. Ashley made her Bridgerton debut in the second season of the popular Regency era-inspired drama, which was released on Friday 25 March. She portrays Kate Sharma, the elder sister of the Sharma family who have newly arrived in London from India. Speaking of her tattoo skills on Monday, Ashley told Kimmel she has given tattoos both to herself and people she has worked with after purchasing a kit during lockdown. I was in Los Angeles over lockdown in 2020 and I did all the regular stuff, like making banana bread, tie-dying, all of that kind of stuff, she said. I thought it would be a good idea to get my own tattoo pen with the needle, its called a rotary pen. When asked by Kimmel whether the buying process had been easy, Ashley said she didnt even need ID and had purchased it online. The actor said she had sought out tutorials on YouTube, before stumbling across a video which used unconventional methods. I found this video and it was like, Oh, I can use this deodorant stick, like as a chemical reaction on the transfer paper and all of the stuff, she explained. And then it started getting a bit deep and I was like, Oh, this guys using some really interesting stuff. And then I looked at the username and it was called prisontattoo.com. I looked at his videos and was like, wow, there is an inmate making videos in prison. This is a fab idea and then I did it, I followed his instructions. Kimmel asked to see her ankle, before declaring that he thought her design looked like a dog. Well keep practicing I guess really, he joked. Also, during the appearance, Ashley reflected on attending the Vanity FairOscars party on Sunday evening for the first time. It was wonderful, and it was really glamourous, she said, before sharing one aspect of the evening which is little talked about. Story continues What was really funny...is these Uber airports at these big events, so if you dont have a chauffeur or a car waiting for you, you just get an Uber, she said. She went on to explain that on one side of the road there is a line of celebrities waiting for their taxis, and the other is lined with fans. When asked by Kimmel who she had seen in line, she named Billy Porter, Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner. I was standing there thinking this is kind of cool, and theres these fans on the other side of the road who had hit the jackpot. Authorities are investigating the deaths of a California lobbyist and her boyfriend in connection with an hours-long standoff at the lobbyists Loomis home in which Placer County sheriffs deputies shot an armed suspect. The Golden State Bail Agents Association said it was shocked and saddened to learn of the deaths of its lobbyist Kathryn Lynch and her boyfriend, Jerry Upholt. On behalf of GSBAA, I wish to express our sorrow and sympathy over the tragic murder of our lobbyist Kathryn Lynch and her boyfriend Jerry Upholt, Albert Ramirez, the bail agents groups president, said in a news release Tuesday. Our hearts and deepest condolences go out to their family and friends. Kathy was a brilliant lobbyist and her devotion to her profession and the institution of government was second to none. We are greatly honored to have worked with her and have her as part of our family. A man, reportedly carrying a handgun, was shot by deputies after he ran out of a Lake Forest Drive home in Loomis, according to the Placer County Sheriffs Office. The man shot by deputies was hospitalized and expected to survive, sheriffs spokeswoman Angela Mussallam confirmed. Public records show Lynchs home address was located in the 5100 block of Lake Forest Drive, just northwest of Folsom Lake. Mussallam confirmed there were two bodies found at that Lake Forest Drive home, but she could not confirm the identities of two people found dead. About 10 a.m. Monday, deputies were called to the Lake Forest Drive home after receiving a report of suspicious circumstances, according to the Sheriffs Office. After several hours of investigation, deputies encountered a male who ran from the home with a handgun, sheriffs officials wrote in a statement posted to Facebook Monday night. Deputies contacted the suspect and one or more deputies shot him, according to the Sheriffs Office. No deputies were injured. The South Placer Fire District in a Facebook post said it assisted the Sheriffs Office during a standoff with a barricaded suspect. The Sheriffs Office on Tuesday afternoon had not released any further details about the shooting or the death investigation at the Loomis home. Lynch ran a Sacramento-based lobbyist firm, Lynch & Associates, which was started in 1985 to provide government and consulting services in California. The firms clients included hunting organizations such as the Outdoor Sportsmens Coalition of California and California Sportsmans Lobby Inc., as well as the American Forest and Paper Association, California Alliance for Arts Education and the California Language Teachers Association. Jon Stewart speaks at a press conference on Tuesday along with veteran advocates and lawmakers (CSPAN) TV host Jon Stewart has told lawmakers they cant say they are American first when you put veterans last as he called on the US Senate to pass a comprehensive bill that will grant access to healthcare to veterans who are sick and dying from burn pits. The veterans advocate said at a press conference in Washington DC on Tuesday afternoon that it is unconscionable to delay the legislation any longer as he questioned how senators would respond if there was a burn pit right there on Capitol Hill. You want to do it here? Lets dig a giant f***ing pit 10 acres long and burn everything in Washington with jet fuel and then let me know how long they want to wait before they think its causing some health problems, said Mr Stewart. Heres the bottom line: you cannot be American first when you put veterans last. His comments came ahead of a Senate hearing later on Tuesday with Veteran Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough about the newly-renamed burn pits bill now heading to a Senate vote. The Honoring Our PACT Act has been renamed the SFC Heath Robinson PACT Act, in honour of the late Sgt First Class Heath Robinson the US veteran whose story was told in Joe Bidens State of the Union address. Sgt Robinson died in May 2020 aged 39 from a rare form of cancer caused by toxic exposure to burn pits while serving in Iraq in the Ohio National Guard in 2006 and 2007. Before his death, he and his wife Danielle Robinson fought for other veterans who are sick and dying from burn pits exposure to get access to much-needed healthcare and benefits when they return home from serving their country overseas. Ms Robinson told The Independent on Tuesday morning that it is bittersweet to see her husband being honoured with the renaming of the bill. Theres lots of different emotions playing a part in it, she said. Its an honour to him and his memory is going to live on through it but at the same time Id rather have him alive with us. She added: I cant help but think of all the other widows who are deserving of having their loved ones named on the PACT Act. Story continues Its not just about our story but all of the other widows out there fighting the battle and losing their loved ones because of toxic exposure to burn pits and its about all the current veterans trying to fight for the healthcare they deserve. Ms Robinson joined Mr Stewart, fellow veteran advocate John Feal, New York Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and other lawmakers and members of the veteran community in pushing for the PACT Act to be passed into law in Tuesdays press conference. She thanked them for changing the name in honour of her husband as she spoke about his heartbreaking dying moments at the age of 39. Heath Robinson pictured. He died from a rare form of cancer caused by burn pits (Danielle Robinson) When I had to call hospice in to our house to start the process of helping my husband die he said I dont know who to give up. I dont know how to take my last breath, she said. I need all of you senators to understand what it is like to lay on the floor underneath your dying husband for seven hours helping him die. If you pass this Honoring Our PACT Act you are going to help so many veterans who are in the same situation on hospice right now, for those who may have to come, and hopefully take care of those who have cancers that are curable. I ask you to do your duty and pass this. The bill passed the House earlier this month, with all Democrats and 34 Republicans voting in favour of its passage, sending it to the Senate. If it passes, the law will presumptively link 23 cancers, respiratory illnesses and other conditions to a veterans exposure to burn pits while on deployment overseas. This will then give these veterans automatic access to the VA healthcare and benefits that they need as they battle the illnesses they developed as a result of serving their country. During Americas post-September 11 wars, huge open-air pits were used to burn mountains of trash including food packaging, human waste and military equipment on bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands of US service members returned home from deployment and developed health conditions including rare cancers, lung conditions, respiratory illnesses and toxic brain injuries caused by breathing in the toxic fumes from the pits. A staggering 3.5m servicemembers and veterans have been exposed to burn pits and airborne toxins while serving the US overseas, according to estimates from the Veterans Affairs. But, at present, the burden of proof is on veterans to prove their condition is directly caused by this toxic exposure and so only around one in five claims for disability benefits where burn pits are cited are approved by the VA. Veterans sick and dying from exposure to burn pits have been fighting for years to get access to the healthcare and benefits they need for their war-related illnesses. Danielle Robinson during the SOTU address (Independent) Senate Majority Leader Schumer said at Tuesdays press conference that the nation is at a turning point on the issue and vowed that the Senate will vote on the bill during this Congress. Everyone will have to show where they stand and whose side they are on, he said. Mr Schumer said: Today were at a turning point, a very important turning point. Over the last two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and beyond, America has always claimed no expense is too great, no treasure too precious for us to pay to defend our freedom and our American way of life. Hundreds of thousands of men and women answered that call leaving behind their families and putting their lives on the line but until now we have refused to face up to one of the biggest costs of those wars and that is the healthcare needs of veterans who fought and sacrificed on our behalf. Mr Stewart, who together with 9/11 survivor John Feal lobbied the government to pass a bill giving healthcare access to emergency responders at the September 11 terrorist attacks before the pair rallied in support of veterans, said it will only take 10 Republicans to join all Senate Democrats to get the bill passed into law. You see the entire veteran community standing together united as one to get this done and its going to come down to what it always come down to here we need 10 Republicans thats it, he said. After 20 years of fighting, thats what its going to come down to. Ten Republicans and the veterans finally get the healthcare and the benefits that they fought so hard for, that they earned, that they are sick and dying for. He said there will be a lot of nonsense during the afternoons Senate hearing, with people saying they want to support veterans but also want to be responsible. He hit out at these claims, saying that they had their chance to be responsible and they blew it. You know what would have been nice? If they had been responsible 20 years ago and hadnt spent trillions of dollars on overseas adventures, if they had been responsible and not spent billions of dollars on defence contractors that poisoned our troops, he said. If they had been responsible and understood that 20 years of war would create an overflow of sick veterans paying for the consequences of that war. Chuck Schumer says the bill will go to a vote in the Senate (CSPAN) Ms Robinson told The Independent that any lawmakers not familiar with the issue of burn pits should educate themselves by watching the Delay, Deny, Hope you Die movie and reading Joseph Hickmans The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of Americas Soldiers. Maybe then they will get a glimpse of the reality and of what it is like living in our shoes and the frustration and anger and hurt experienced when our veterans come home, she said. For any senators sitting on the fence about the issue or who say budget is an issue, the widow said that veterans have put their lives on the line for their country and so deserve to be taken care of when they suffer war-related illnesses on their return home. Bottom line is you have the money to send them off to war, you need to take care of them when they come home with war-related illnesses and are fighting for their lives and living the last days of their lives, she said. They sign up and put their lives on the line and sacrifice so much so for us [so] to sacrifice a little bit by taking care of them when they come home is not a lot to ask for. Ms Robinson was invited to the State of the Union address by First Lady Jill Biden, where the president dedicated part of his speech to telling her husbands story and to speaking about the issue of burn pits. He was born a soldier. Army National Guard. Combat medic in Kosovo and Iraq, Mr Biden said. Stationed near Baghdad, just yards from burn pits the size of football fields. Danielle is here with us tonight. They loved going to Ohio State football games. And he loved building Legos with their daughter. But cancer from prolonged exposure to burn pits ravaged Heaths lungs and body. Danielle says Heath was a fighter to the very end. He didnt know how to stop fighting, and neither did she. Through her pain, she found purpose to demand that we do better. Tonight, Danielle, we are going to do better. Mr Biden has said that he believes his own son Beau Biden may have died as a result of his exposure to burn pits on deployment overseas. Since the president dedicated part of his State of the Union address to the topic of burn pits, Ms Robinson said she has noticed a shift in public awareness of the issue. People have come up to her saying they had never even heard about the issue impacting thousands of American servicemembers until that moment, she said. I fully believe that people are more on board with this and that the civilian world is starting to learn what they did to our soldiers and what they were exposed to, she said. Lots of people have come up to me and said they were very shocked to hear about it and that they had no idea what burn pits were before, she said. I feel like its still a battle and we need to get the bill passed but its laying more of the foundation for what veterans need and bringing more light onto the issue. Musician Cardi B and her sister didnt defame a group of Trump supporters by calling them racist, a New York judge ruled on Friday. Instead, Suffolk County judge William Condon wrote in his ruling: The words uttered to plaintiffs do not arise to defamatory language , as they were merely general insults. The Grammy Award-winning artist, her sister Hennessy Carolina, and Ms Carolinas girlfriend Michelle Diaz were sued for defamation in September 2020, after Cardi B posted a video on social media showing an altercation between the couple and a group of Trump supporters on a beach in the Hamptons. In the suit, Peter Caliendo, Pauline Caliendo, and Manuel Alarcon, said Ms Carolina and her girlfriend threatened the group and called them racist amid an argument about parking on the sand. The legal action also claimed Ms Carolina had assaulted the group because she sprayed her copious spittle upon said plaintiffs as she raged, and that she allegedly threatened to have people beat your f******g a** for real, and called the group racist. The beachgoers were seen in video of the incident with a Trump Make America Great Again hat, and the original lawsuit also mentions them flying a Trump flag. Though Cardi B wasnt present during the Labour Day blowup on the beach, she posted video of the incident on her social media, as well as an audio recording of Hennessy Carolina describing her version of events, repeating the accusation the group was racist. My sister cant go to the beach in the Hamptons wit [sic] out trump supporters harassing cause they were by themselves & Santa Claus was harassing my sis GF all because they are a Afro/Hispanic gay couple, she wrote on Twitter. Hennessy Carolina elaborated in an audio recording shared in another Cardi B post. We moved out of respect, she says. Then you came, two men, to us, and yelled get out of here, go your f***ing country because you saw us parking here, and were speaking Spanish, and were mixed, and were a f***king mixed couple, and were lesbian, and you guys just ganged up and put the MAGA hat and the flag up. The lawsuit claimed the clips had been selectively edited to make the trio look racist. Cathay Pacific is soon to operate the worlds longest flight (AFP/Getty Images) A new contender for the worlds longest flight has hit the skies but purely out of necessity. In a bid to avoid Russian airspace, Cathay Pacifics New York-Hong Kong service will overfly the Atlantic Ocean, UK, southern Europe and central Asia, totalling 16,618km and making it the longest commercial flight measured by distance. The new flight path will take around 17 hours and beats the current longest flight Singapore Airlines Singapore-New York route (15,349km) by 1,269km. Operated using an Airbus A350-1000, the flight would usually traverse Arctic and Russian airspace, but Cathay, like many international airlines, is avoiding overflying Russia due to the countrys invasion of Ukraine. We are always running contingency routings for potential events or scenarios, an airline spokesperson told Bloomberg of the potential new flight path. The Transatlantic option relies on the facilitation of strong seasonal tailwinds at this time of the year in order for the flight time to be between 16 and 17 hours, thereby making it more favourable than the Transpacific route. The carrier is currently seeking permissions to overfly the airspaces of the nations involved in order to operate the new route from JFK airport to Hong Kong. Its previous iteration of the route involved a stopover in LA, California this new version would fly between the destinations nonstop. It follows Air New Zealands announcement that it will launch one of the worlds longest flights in September 2022: a direct route from Auckland to New York City. Covering 14,200km, it will become the fourth longest commercial flight in existence. Qantas long-awaited Project Sunrise flights direct services between Sydney and London and New York were set to take the top spots, but plans have been pushed back due to the pandemic. The Heathrow-Kingsford-Smith airport in Sydney hop would come in at 16,983km more than 1,500km longer than the world's current longest commercial route between Singapore and New York. New York-Sydney, meanwhile, comes in just under, at 16,200km. LONDON (Reuters) - A ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine would not be enough to trigger the lifting of British sanctions, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told a meeting of his senior ministers on Tuesday. "The prime minister said a ceasefire alone would not be cause for UK sanctions to be removed on Russia," Johnson's spokesman told reporters, giving his account of the cabinet meeting. "He said the pressure on (Russian President Vladimir) Putin must be increased both through further economic measures and providing military aid to ensure Russia changes course completely." (Reporting by Alistair Smout, writing by William James, Editing by Kylie MacLellan) Celonis, the process mapping startup, has been on a nice run the last several years, forging significant partnerships with IBM and ServiceNow, while announcing a $1 billion Series D last June on a massive $11 billion valuation. With that kind of capitalization, the company decided to expand its reach today when it announced the acquisition of Process Analytics Factory (PAF) for $100 million. Celonis gets an eight-year-old German company with expertise in process mapping the Microsoft ecosystem, which should help Celonis move into that space. Celonis CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke said that his company has carved out a big role in the automated workflow ecosystem, figuring out how work moves in an automated fashion to help point out inefficiencies and look for ways to make work flow more smoothly through the organization. He says that includes automation, collaboration and virtual platforms. "Obviously, a big part of that is Microsoft with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Office. So we acquired PAF to enable that and bring the unique insights and targeted actions we provide to Microsoft users," Rinke said. PAF founder and CEO Tobias Rother gave the familiar argument that the two companies will be better together. "This combination leverages the strength of Celonis market leadership with the foundation that PAF has created in the Microsoft Power Platform. This allows our companies to build the bridge between the Microsoft Power Platform and the Celonis Execution Management System, he said in a statement. PAF launched in 2014 with the goal of embedding process mining insights into the Microsoft platform. "They have a huge head start in this space, and we thought if we can bring this functionality into the Celonis world, there will be a huge benefit for their customers, our customers and prospects. And for everybody who uses Microsoft," Rinke said. As he points out, that's just about everybody in his target market. In fact, 97% of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft Office. Story continues The company has been on a roll in recent years, forging relationships with much larger companies like IBM, SAP and ServiceNow, while also building a large presence with consulting firms like Deloitte, Accenture and WiPro, among many others. All of this is driving sales and the massive valuation. It has also made several strategic acquisitions like today's. PAF represents the fourth acquisition for the company. Rinke said the deal closed at the end of last year, and they are in the process of building the PAF functionality into the broader Celonis platform. The plan is to roll that out in May. The deal included 30 employees coming over to Celonis. The company should hit 3,000 employees some time later this year. Celonis launched in 2011 and raised $1.4 billion, according to Crunchbase data. While the company has ambitions to go public at some point, Rinke was not ready to commit to any timeline. Major pay raises could be coming to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools staff members if the county approves the school districts budget. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education voted unanimously Tuesday night to approve its $2.1 billion operating budget for 2022-2023. The CMS board is asking the county for $578 million, which is a $40 million increase from last year. CMS is proposing a 10% pay increase on the supplement for teachers and certified staff. Teacher assistants would receive a minimum pay of $16.50 an hour. ALSO READ: CMS Board cites serious mishaps for its decision to fire Superintendent Earnest Winston For too long, governing bodies have argued about budgets as if they are only numbers on a page, but a thoughtful budget is more than that, Board Chair Elyse Dashew said in a news release. Each number in the budget represents our assessment of the needs of our students and how best to meet those needs. It is our responsibility to ensure the children of Mecklenburg County have access to a sound basic education. This is only possible with adequate funding, strategically aligned and thoughtfully deployed, as laid out in the budget we voted on tonight. Hugh Hattabaugh had his first meeting as the interim superintendent of CMS on Monday. Former Superintendent Ernest Winston previously proposed the budget that could make CMS teachers pay the highest in the state by increasing the local supplement. Hattabaugh is rejoining the district at a time when academic performance and low test scores are a big concern from school officials, something he focused on when he last acted as interim superintendent in 2011. Last year, the county tried to withhold $56 million from CMS and asked the district to produce a plan on how to close achievement gaps for minority students. Now the budget is finalized, it will head to county commissioners for approval. Channel 9s John Paul investigated to see if CMS would really make the most in the state. Story continues Currently, first-year certified teachers for CMS make $41,736 over ten months. Compare that to Wake County, where they make a few dollars more - $41,892. PAST COVERAGE: Advocates ask CMS to do more to improve third-grade performance in school If CMS teachers get a 2.7% raise, they will make about $42,863, jumping above Wake County teachers by about $1,000. That assumes Wake and other counties dont give their teachers raises. Those counties still have to work out their budget, which will likely include a raise as well. Actually, they should do better. You couldnt have your job without a teacher. Teachers is where it all begins, resident Latoya Lewis-Jones said. Last year, CMS schools had a battle with the county over funding. County commissioners withheld $56 million from the district until it offered a plan to improve school and student success. PAST COVERAGE: Meck County, CMS strike deal over $56 million in withheld funding The county and CMS eventually came to an agreement. (WATCH BELOW: CMS pauses rollout of clear backpacks due to warning tags) BEIJING/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A top U.S. diplomat will meet this week in China to discuss issues in Afghanistan with his Chinese, Russian and Pakistani counterparts, the Chinese foreign ministry and the State Department said on Tuesday. The United States understands that China has invited Taliban representatives to the talks in Tunxi, a State Department spokesperson said. Chinese special envoy for Afghanistan Yue Xiaoyong will host the meeting, said Wang Wenbin, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has arrived in Tunxi for the talks, Interfax news agency cited a ministry spokeswoman as saying late on Tuesday. Lavrov has largely stayed in Russia since last month's invasion of Ukraine but did travel to Turkey for talks with his counterpart from Kyiv. Tom West, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, will attend the talks of the so-called Extended Troika: the three world powers plus Pakistan, the State Department spokesperson said. The talks come against the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and as Afghanistan suffers an economic and humanitarian crisis worsened by a financial aid cutoff following the Taliban takeover as U.S.-led troops departed in August. They also come amid widespread condemnation of the Taliban's U-turn last week on allowing girls to attend public high schools, which has sparked consternation among funders ahead of a key aid donors conference, a U.N. official said on Tuesday. The retention of the ban prompted U.S. officials to cancel talks in Doha with the Taliban and a State Department warning that Washington saw the decision as "a potential turning point in our engagement" with the militants. The United States believes that it shares with other Extended Troika members an interest in the Taliban making good on commitments to form an inclusive government, cooperate on counterterrorism and rebuild the Afghan economy, the State Department spokesperson said. Story continues The meeting takes place while foreign ministers from Afghanistan's neighbors meet on Wednesday and Thursday in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui, Wang said. That meeting will be chaired by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and attended by Afghan acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, and diplomats from Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia and Qatar. (Reporting by Yew Lun Tian in Beijing, Jonathan Landay in Washington and David Ljunggren; Editing by Alex Richardson and Ed Osmond) Residents in the Hill District will soon have access to another community health clinic. The UPMC Matilda Health Center was temporarily operating in the South Side. Soon, it will move back to the Hill District. Access is a key issue its one of the reasons why we chose this site. People can walk here from the community, its right on a bus route and theres parking thats available for free, Director of Family Medicine for UPMC Dr. Tracey Conti said. The new center has seven brand-new exam rooms, new equipment and a pharmacy on site. The clinic opens on Friday and will provide holistic personalized care, including behavioral health services, access to a nutritionist and social worker, essential checkups, screenings and vaccinations. TRENDING NOW: Deadly mistake: Former nurse found guilty in patients death Elderly woman killed in Robinson Township house fire identified Taking sides: Celebrities react to Will Smith slap VIDEO: RAW: Small plane slides off runway at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport DOWNLOAD the Channel 11 News app for breaking news alerts U.S. Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger has never represented Carroll County. The veteran Democrat is based in Baltimore County, and his congressional district currently also includes pieces of Anne Arundel, Howard and Harford counties. But under the Maryland General Assembly Democrats newly unveiled redistricting map, created in response to a state judges decision throwing out the old map, the worlds of Ruppersberger and other U.S. House members or at least their districts are changing practically overnight. The plan, which still requires approval of state lawmakers and the judge, reconfigures Ruppersbergers territory to include much of Carroll County and Baltimore County, but none of Anne Arundel, Howard or Harford. The district also would continue to represent a sliver of Baltimore City. The changes are among many, large and small, crafted by Democrats in response to the judges order scrapping an initial Democratic plan approved last year because it was too gerrymandered. The new map could aid Republicans marginally, according to an analysis on the fivethirtyeight.com website. Democrats currently hold seven of the states congressional seats, and Republicans one. Republicans have long complained that Democrats packed too many Republicans into the 1st Congressional District seat of Republican Rep. Andy Harris, leaving too few GOP voters elsewhere in the state. Under the new map, Harris would maintain an advantage and Democrats would be favored to hold six other seats, according to the analysis. But it said the sprawling 6th Congressional District in the central and western parts of the state would become highly competitive and lean Republican. That seat is currently held by Rep. David Trone, a Democrat and the co-founder of the Total Wine & More alcohol retailer, who is in his second term. Trone could not be reached Tuesday through his spokeswoman. Analysts say the new map has a cleaner look than either the rejected plan which the judge said was too partisan or the current configuration approved a decade ago. Story continues Gone is an appendage, added by Democrats in December, that would have extended Harris Eastern Shore district across the Bay Bridge and into an area of Anne Arundel County with more Democratic voters. Also redrawn is the elongated 3rd Congressional District, whose irregular shape almost defies description. The district, held by Democrat John Sarbanes, would now be contained in Howard County and parts of Anne Arundel and Carroll counties. It currently touches four counties: Baltimore, Howard, Anne Arundel and Montgomery. The wildest thing about this map is that the 3rd District is no longer wild, said political strategist Sophia Silbergeld of Adeo Advocacy in Baltimore. Now it looks like a straight-up, normal congressional district. She noted that Sarbanes, like some other incumbents, would no longer live in his home district if he wins reelection. That can be awkward politically, but not a disqualifier. He lives in Baltimore County. Here are some other features of the new map, according to information provided by Senate President Bill Ferguson and others: Baltimore City, which previously had three congressional districts, would now have two. Frederick County would be located entirely within a single congressional district. Montgomery County, previously divided among four congressional districts, would be represented by three. Harford County would be entirely within the 1st Congressional District. Anne Arundel County would have fewer congressional districts, with two. The 7th Congressional District seat held by Baltimore Democrat Kweisi Mfume would no longer include some of Howard County. The 8th Congressional District seat held by Democrat Jamie Raskin of Montgomery County would no longer include Carroll County. Judge Lynne A. Battaglia issued her ruling Friday in a pair of Anne Arundel Circuit Court cases brought by GOP lawmakers and voters. In ordering the legislature to swiftly redraw the statewide map, the judge agreed with expert witness testimony that Republicans would have been substantially adversely impacted by the one passed in December by the Democratic legislature. Democratic leaders in the General Assembly made the replacement map public Monday night, and members of Congress and their staffs as well as election challengers immediately began poring over the new boundary lines. The state Senate approved it Tuesday and a House vote was expected Wednesday. Battaglia also must approve the map. If she does, the court would set a timetable for implementing it. It was unclear Tuesday if the state would appeal her original ruling, as had been seemingly suggested Monday. Ferguson and other Democrats said during a Tuesday morning meeting of the Senates redistricting committee that the map achieved the objectives stated by Battaglia. Those included making sure districts were made as compact as possible rather than irregularly shaped and that they respected natural boundaries and the borders of political subdivisions like counties and cities. They are significantly more compact, Ferguson said Tuesday of the new districts. This map was drawn first and foremost with the obligation of trying to meet the court order within five days. Del. Haven Shoemaker of Carroll County, the GOPs minority whip, said in an interview that this most recent map is a heck of a lot better than the one we passed in special session in December. It would almost have to be. Its not a very high bar. Republicans again pushed Monday for the General Assembly to instead use a map drawn last year by an independent commission organized by Gov. Larry Hogan. The Republican governor had appointed the panel of Republicans, Democrats and independents to draw an alternate set of proposed electoral maps, which the governor submitted to the legislature. The legislature rejected that map last year, and it was not resurrected by Democrats following Battaglias ruling. Yahoo Life is committed to finding you the best products at the best prices. Some of the products written about here are offered in affiliation with Yahoo. We may receive a share from purchases made via links on this page. Pricing and availability are subject to change. Filter out the fluff so you can find the emails you actually want. (Photo: Getty) I didnt see your email. How many times have you said that about a message that went to your personal account? You overlook a rare note from a friend or family member or worse, your kids teacher because its sandwiched between the latest Bed Bath & Beyond sale and a fake computer virus alert. Scrolling your email quickly, its easy to see how youd miss the e-vite to a birthday party or teacher request for extra classroom supplies. According to data from Statista, spam accounts for more than 45% of email traffic worldwide, so most peoples inboxes are quite literally full of junk. If you have a lot of unwanted messages, clutter is actually the least of your trouble. Spam is a major way that devices become infected with malwaresoftware that hackers use to steal data and damage your computer, says Chris Hughes, an adjunct professor at University of Marylands School of Cybersecurity & Information Technology. For that reason, you shouldnt just ignore spam emails, even though thats what most people do. Instead, use a third-party spam filter (like Norton Security Online) and follow these five strategies to streamline your inbox while keeping your personal info safe and still getting those nice discount codes every once in a while. Try Norton Security Online free* for 30 days Use one email address for important correspondence and one for shopping and deals. (Photo: Getty) 1. Make a second email account You wont get twice the junk, we promise! Use one email for your vital correspondence like auto insurance, credit card reminders, school updates and another for online shopping, suggests Rob DOvidio, Ph.D., associate professor in the department of Criminology & Justice Studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia. With this approach, spam wont be clogging up your ability to manage your life, he says. Story continues 2. Click unsubscribe Chances are you dont frequent many of the same stores you did five years ago, so a lot of the email offers in your inbox are irrelevant. (I mean do you really need to be seeing emails from that baby gear chain when your kids are in high school?) Set aside an hour one day to unsubscribe to emails from places where you no longer shop. Not only will you stop getting junk from them, youll reduce the chances of receiving email from other companies that have bought their subscriber lists. Mark unwanted messages as spam and you'll be less likely to see one from the spammer again. (Photo: Getty) 3. Mark messages as spam While its tempting to keep scrolling past spam emails, report the message as spam instead. In most email programs, you simply click on a button that says, Spam or Mark as Spam. In Yahoo Mail, for example, its an option above the email message toward the right side of the screen. If you want to go the extra mile, you can also report the email to the Federal Trade Commission at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. The tools behind the scenes will share your report with centralized network resources so you and others will be less likely to see an email from that scammer again, says DOvidio. Although its extremely tempting to respond to a scam email yourself, Remove me from your list! doing so its actually counterproductive. Says DOvidio: It lets the cybercriminal know that a person is seeing their email and makes your address even more valuable. And whatever you do, dont open an attachment or click on a link in one of these spam emails. 4. Use this trick if you need to post your email online Every now and again, you may need to list your email address on social media or the web. Perhaps your Girl Scout is taking cookie orders or you're coordinating a meal train for a friend. In those cases, do whats called address munging, says DOvidio. In a nutshell, its disguising your address so computer software that scans for emails wont recognize it. For instance, instead of posting notme@example.com, write out notme at example dot com. 5. Add another layer of protection Most email providers do a decent job at filtering out spam emails, but theyre far from perfect, says Hughes. You can cut down on spam emails by using a third-party spam filter (such as Norton Security Online). That way, the email will have to go through two security filters before it reaches your inbox. Try Norton Security Online free* for 30 days Seminole County deputies on Tuesday released the name of the man who was killed at a Sanford-area mosque last week. Deputies said Mahmood Al Taee, 59, of Longwood, died after he was attacked at the Husseini Islamic Center near Sanford early Friday. Investigators said Ahmed Raslan, 38, scaled a barbed-wire fence, broke a window and killed Al Taee, who worked as a maintenance man at the mosque. Deputies said the attack appeared to be random. READ: Deputies: Maintenance workers murder at local mosque appears to be random Stay tuned to Channel 9 Eyewitness News for updates. READ: Sheriff: Man who beat mosque worker to death with shovel thought he was Julius Caesars descendent Click here to download the free WFTV news and weather apps, click here to download the WFTV Now app for your smart TV and click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live. trumzz / Getty Images/iStockphoto The World Gold Council (WGC) and London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) have announced an economic collaboration aimed at digitizing the global gold supply chain instilling more confidence in the products provenance while removing fraudulent bars, all thanks to blockchain technology. Gas Stimulus: Live Blog Updates Find: Can Gold and Bitcoin Coexist in a High-Inflation Environment? Why You Should Hold Both Investments As such, the newly minted Gold Bar Integrity Program will support greater industry alignment to ensure the future growth of the international gold market. The program would ostensibly provide an international system of gold bar integrity focused on chain of custody and provenance, the organizations said. Over time, the program may help consumers, investors, and market participants to trust that their gold is genuine as well as having been responsibly and sustainably sourced. David Tait, CEO of World Gold Council, told GOBankingRates that the Gold Bar Integrity Program is about developing and implementing a global, transparent ledger and database of gold bars. Blockchain is the technology that the gold industry needs to turn our ambitions into reality, Tait said. Tait explained that for investors, this new database will mean fraudulent and misrepresented bars are gradually removed from the system giving buyers (and sellers) confidence that their gold is genuine. It will go further than that, helping all market participants to know where their gold has come from and that it has been responsibly sourced. Ultimately, I believe this will help tackle barriers to investment and improve participation in the gold market, he added. This initial phase will see two distributed ledger companies aXedras and Peer Ledger demonstrate how blockchain can best deliver a global ecosystem that will create an immutable record of a gold bars place of origin and chain of custody. This blockchain-backed ledger will register and track bars, capturing the provenance and full transaction history. Story continues For over a year, weve been working in partnership with the LBMA to unite the supply chain and weve had an overwhelmingly positive response from the global gold industry, Tait said, adding that for the pilot phase of this program, we have major players raising their hands to participate. Tait added that said players include miners from the WGC membership such as Barrick Gold Corporation, Newcrest Mining Limited and Newmont Corporation. We have prominent participants from across the global value chain such as Brinks, Rand Refinery, CME Group, The Perth Mint, and Pro Aurum taking part. Once the pilot phase is complete, I am confident we will see more and more organizations sign up to the program, he said. The WGC hopes to complete the pilot phase this year, and will then formally appoint one of the two distributed ledger companies taking part in the pilot to expand the database to the whole supply chain, he said. According to Tait, the Gold Bar Integrity Program will address a number of challenges in the industry perhaps most importantly, provenance and transparency. But for me, the key problem we will solve is trust, he said. I believe that improving trust amongst the investor community is paramount to unlocking demand for gold. And we wont stop there. He added that this is where Gold 24/7 comes in a project concerned with the WGCs three main ambitions to improve accessibility, fungibility and transparency / integrity in the gold market. The launch of the integrity program is the critical, foundational work that needs to be embedded in the industry so to move the asset class forward, Tait said. Learn: 7 Best Blockchain Stocks To Buy Right Now Explore: 7 Ways To Invest in Gold: A Guide for Investors The industry is now working together on integrity which opens the door to the future, where we will create more fungible markets that are accessible and relevant to a broader investment audience, he concluded. More From GOBankingRates This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: How Would Digitizing Global Supply Chain of Gold Bars Affect Investors? A sick fiend on a bicycle sexually assaulted a woman on a downtown Manhattan jogging path, choking her before forcing her to perform a sex act, cops said Monday. The 39-year-old victim was jogging near Pier 40 by Clarkson and West Sts. about 6:10 a.m. Sunday when the cyclist attacked, police said. The assailant shoved the woman to the ground as she jogged north, then sexually assaulted her and stole her cell phone, police said. He then got back on his bike and fled. Medics took the woman to a nearby hospital. Shortly before the attack, the attacker was caught on video masturbating on his bicycle about six blocks away on West St. and Charles Lane, cops said. Police released the video of him Monday, along with several photos of him. Hes described as between 20 and 30 years old, about 5-foot-9 and 180 pounds, with a dark complexion and a beard, and was wearing dark clothing. Cops ask anyone with information to call Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS. A former senior Ecuadorean official who was convicted in his home country of extorting millions from Brazilian engineering firm Odebrecht S.A. was arrested in Miami on Monday in a related federal money-laundering case. Carlos Polit Faggioni, who lives in a condo high-rise along the Miami River, was Ecuadors longtime comptroller. Polits position, which was created to combat the fraudulent use of government funds, required him to sign off on public budgets that authorities say enabled him to demand $8 million in bribery payments from Odebrecht. The giant engineering firm is at the center of public corruption scandals extending from South America to the United States. Polit, 72, was charged in a money-laundering conspiracy indictment during his first appearance in Miami federal court on Tuesday. Polit is being held at the Federal Detention Center and has a pretrial bond hearing on Friday. Prosecutors Michael Berger and Alexander Kramer said they would seek to detain Polit behind bars before his trial, but indicated they might be open to a possible bond allowing his release. His defense attorney, Fernando Tamayo, told Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Becerra that were working on a bond package that is acceptable to the government. Polits arraignment is pending. He also faces an extradition request by Ecuador, where he was tried and convicted in absentia because he had left for Miami before the 2018 trial in his native country. According to the indictment, Polit is accused of conspiring with a relative, an Odebrecht executive and an Ecuadorean businessman in transferring ill-gotten bribery payments from the engineering firm through a series of shell companies and bank accounts in South Florida between 2010 and 2017. The indictment says Polit solicited and received bribe payments from the Odebrecht senior manager in exchange for using his official position and influence as comptroller of Ecuador to prevent the imposition of large fines on Odebrecht by the comptrollers office relating to Odebrechts construction projects in Ecuador. Story continues Polit was paid $8 million by the unidentified executive to influence official actions by the Ecuador comptrollers office in order to benefit Odebrecht and its business in Ecuador, according to the indictment. Polit told the Odebrecht executive that he used another co-conspirator, an unnamed relative, to make the cash disappear, the indictment says. The case, probed by Homeland Security Investigations, is built upon an electronic trail of financial records and cooperating witnesses. Three years ago, McClatchy-Miami Herald and other news media collaborated on an investigative project that zeroed in on Odebrechts parallel off-books accounting system. Leaked documents showed links between Polits Miami-based son, John Christopher Polit, and a U.S. shell company, Ventures Overseas LLC, which became a pass-through for the alleged bribery payments by Odebrecht. John Polit, a former securities broker in Miami, was also convicted in Ecuador of being an accomplice in connection with his fathers case. But his conviction in Ecuador was overturned in 2020, and he has not been charged in his fathers federal case in Miami. The Polits were the focus of a McClatchy-Miami Herald investigation in 2019 that showed the son had taken on mortgages on several pricey properties in the Miami area, including a luxurious home in Cocoplum, that had earlier been purchased outright. Venture Overseas was at the end of a chain of financial transfers between anonymous shell companies that began with one controlled by Odebrecht S.A. called Kleinfeld Services. Company officials have admitted Kleinfeld was one of several used in an off-books accounting system called Drousys that was used to pay bribes in exchange for public works contracts.. The Polits were convicted in Ecuador in 2018 on extortion charges that involved receiving bribe money from Kleinfeld. They insisted they were the targets of political persecution. Alopecia is an autoimmune disorder that affects millions of people around the world. But to many women and to Black women, in particular it is much more. Its about beauty and race, about culture and about the uncertainty that the disorder creates around peoples perception of themselves. So during the 94th Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday night, when comedian Chris Rock threw a pointed joke at Jada Pinkett Smith about her hair loss that some felt was insensitive, the event exposed many layers of feeling for those who wrestle with the disorder. It also threw a spotlight on the disorder, which is little discussed but fairly common and affects a wide range of people, including children. Actor Will Smith, who stunned millions when he walked onstage and slapped Rock over the joke about Pinkett Smith, has since apologized to the comedian, the academy and viewers. Here are some of the things about alopecia that are reverberating: ___ WHATS IT LIKE TO HAVE ALOPECIA? Rocks joke was tough to hear for New York interior designer Sheila Bridges. She spoke to Rock for his 2009 documentary Good Hair about the importance of hair in Black culture. She talked about the shame and humiliation of losing hers to the disease, how her hairstyle is intertwined with her racial identity and how the loss of her hair affected her sense of femininity and social currency. The Oscars slap left Bridges with conflicting emotions: She condemned Smiths assault on Rock, sympathized with Pinkett Smith and was deeply disappointed in Rock. It is not easy as a woman to navigate life without any hair and a society that is obsessed with hair, Bridges said. She doesnt wear wigs because she doesnt want to, and also hopes to normalize and de-stigmatize the appearance of bald women. But even a decade after she decided to go bald in public, Bridges said it's still difficult for some to accept: "I rarely make it through the week without someone saying something thats very, very insensitive. Story continues While it's unclear if Rock was aware of Pinkett Smith's diagnosis, hair in general can already be a fraught landscape for Black women, who have been expected for generations to alter their natural hair texture to fit a white standard of beauty. Even wealthy and famous Black actresses have said it can be tough to find Hollywood stylists who know how to do their hair. Black women are 80% more likely to change their natural hair to meet social norms at work, according to a 2019 study by the Dove personal care division of the Unilever USA company. Black students are also far more likely than other students to be suspended for dress code or hair violations, according to the research that helped convince the U.S. House to vote to prohibit discrimination based on natural hairstyles earlier this month. The only good thing that can come out of all this is that alopecia is front and center, Bridges said about the Oscars slap. ___ WHY HAS HAIR BEEN IMPORTANT TO BLACK REPRESENTATION? For many Black Americans, grooming and styling choices are intertwined with a desire to buck what is considered normal or acceptable by wider society. From Afros and cornrows to wigs and hair extensions, Black hair can be more than just style statements. Black women and girls watching the Supreme Court nomination and confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said in interviews with AP that they were moved to see someone who wears her hair in sisterlocks" ascend to such a prominent position. Its a style that uses natural hair woven into micro locs and is known for its versatility. Seeing someone like Jackson embrace her natural hair, instead of conforming to societal beauty standards, served as a reminder to those women and girls to not shrink themselves in order to succeed, they said. For Black women in the public eye, losing the pride and representation symbolized by their hairstyles can add another layer to the professional and self-esteem challenges of hair loss. ___ WHAT CAUSES ALOPECIA? Alopecia areata, the autoimmune disorder Pinkett Smith has, can make hair fall out of the scalp in patches. It can also affect other parts of the body, like eyebrows and nose hair. Alopecia can come on quickly, is unpredictable and can be incredibly tough to deal with mentally, said Brett King, a hair loss expert at Yale Medicine. Imagine if you woke up today missing half of an eyebrow, he said. That unpredictability is one of the things thats so mentally treacherous and awful because you have no control of it ... its a disease that strips people of their identity. While seldom discussed, its actually fairly common: the second biggest cause of hair loss, after male or female pattern balding. About 2% of people have it. It's not physically painful, in some cases it spontaneously goes away and it can be treated. ___ HOW DOES IT AFFECT WOMEN? WHAT ABOUT KIDS? Hair is a large part of anyones appearance, and for women its bound up with cultural concepts about what makes them look feminine. Most women are expected to have good hair, said William Yates, a Black Chicago-based certified hair loss surgeon. Theyre well aware that men lose their hair and bald gracefully,' so to speak, but a female losing their hair is devastating. The condition also tends to hit people when they are relatively young. Most are diagnosed before age 40, and about half of them are children when the disorder first appears, said Christopher English, a board-certified dermatologist for Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City. Having the condition is especially tough for teenagers, for whom appearance anxiety and peer pressure are often already at an all-time high, said Gary Sherwood, communications director at the National Alopecia Areata Foundation. In Elkhart, Indiana, a 12-year-old girl with the disorder took her own life this month after she was bullied at school, her family has said. Some studies have also pointed to the disease being more prevalent among Black and Latino people, Sherwood and Yates said. The National Institutes of Health states it affects all racial and ethnic groups, men and women. Rock's joke was "not unusual, Sherwood said. This has been around as long as there have been humans on Earth ... for centuries people would not talk about it. Hes hoping one good outcome of the Oscars slap will be more education, awareness and empathy. ___ AP Race and Ethnicity writers Annie Ma in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Aaron Morrison in New York contributed to this story. Whitehurst reported from Salt Lake City. (This March 30 story corrects final paragraph to remove reference to oil products) FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Germany has activated the first stage of an emergency plan to manage gas supplies in Europe's largest economy in preparation for a possible disruption or halt in natural gas supplies from Russia. Russia accounted for 55% of Germany's gas imports in 2021 and 40% in the first quarter of 2022. Economy Minister Robert Habeck has said Germany will not achieve full independence from Russian supplies before mid-2024. WHAT'S THE PROBLEM? Moscow said last week it would draw up a mechanism by March 31 under which so-called "unfriendly" countries - those behind sanctions imposed over Russia's invasion of Ukraine - would pay for gas in roubles. That includes Germany, Europe's industrial powerhouse, and other European allies. Most now pay in euros or dollars. Habeck, who is the minister responsible for Germany's energy security, has rejected Russia's demand, saying contracts would be honoured under current terms. Russia's biggest German customers are Uniper, RWE and EnBW's VNG, which all have long-term gas supply contracts. They have not commented on individual preparations for any disruption. WHAT IS GERMANY'S GAS PLAN? Berlin's "Emergency Plan Gas" has three crisis levels. The first level, which the government has triggered, is the early warning, when there are signs a supply emergency could develop. The second is alarm, when a disruption to supply or extraordinarily high demand upsets the usual balance but can still be corrected without intervention. The third level is emergency, when market-based measures have failed to remedy shortages. At this stage, Germany's network regulator, the Bundesnetzagentur, must decide how to distribute any remaining gas supplies across the country. WHO IS AFFECTED FIRST? If Germany does not secure enough gas, industry, which accounts for a quarter of German gas demand, will be hit first. Story continues "This means that industrial production gets lost, that supply chains get lost," Leonhard Birnbaum, chief executive of German energy group E.ON, told public broadcaster ARD. "We are certainly talking about very heavy damages." Private households will have priority over industry, while hospitals, care facilities and other public sector institutions with special needs would be last to be affected by a disruption. Electricity utilities that accounted for 13% of gas consumption last year could in theory switch to coal burning plants within their portfolios. However, an ongoing coal exit programme might have to be changed under the emergency laws to ensure enough capacity is ready. Apart from energy providers, the industries most worried about losing gas, include chemicals, where gas is used for making everything from plastics and fertiliser to fibres and solvents. In turn, carmakers depend on chemical products for products such as batteries and laquer. Union IG BCE has said BASF's Ludwigshafen site could come under review for reducing operations should gas supplies more than halve. Refineries can use natural gas as a fuel source and to make hydrogen. (Reporting by Vera Eckert, Christoph Steitz and Tom Kaeckenhoff; Editing by Nina Chestney, Edmund Blair and Barbara Lewis) Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, will deliver the keynote address at Roger Williams Universitys commencement ceremony, the Rhode Island school announced Monday. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Joe Bidens chief medical adviser, will also receive an honorary degree at the May 20 exercise, the school said. The ability to synthesize vast amounts of information and to make decisions that consider health, science, cultural, legal and political implications, is the type of education we strive to offer our students, school President Ioannis N. Miaoulis said in a statement. Dr. Faucis experience throughout his career, but especially over the last two years, has modeled how to do this exceptionally well and provides a real-world example to our students as they enter a complex world. Public health is one of the universys fastest growing undergraduate majors, the school said. Fauci has advised seven Presidents on a variety of domestic and global health issues from HIV/AIDS to the coronavirus, and has been director of the NIAID since 1984. Roger Williams, a private school with about 6,500 students, has campuses in Bristol and Providence. Rowdy spring break crowds have forced curfews and led some establishments to close their doors from Miami Beach to Floridas Panhandle. Law enforcement officials in Bay County, Florida, said Sunday that they wont tolerate the bad behavior from spring breakers after a 21-year-old from Alabama was shot in the foot Sunday during a shooting in Panama City Beach. The crowd that has been here this weekend, there are no words that can describe the way they have behaved themselves, conducted themselves and the amount of laws they have broken, Panama City Beach police Chief J.R. Talamantez said Sunday after the shooting. We are doing the best to manage this situation. Police received word that the large crowd was out of control just before the shooting happened on Sunday afternoon. Six people were detained and officials said they could be charged with attempted murder related to that shooting. Law enforcement confiscated 75 guns, which they spread out on a table during a news conference on Monday in Panama City Beach. Bay County Sheriff Tommy Ford said 161 people were booked into the county jail during a difficult, trying and dangerous weekend. He noted that 78 of those arrested were from Alabama. Each one of these 75 illegal firearms represents a violent armed encounter with law enforcement, Ford said. This weekend could have very well resulted in tragedy of a law enforcement loss of life, a citizens loss of life and even a bad guys loss of life. Some local nightclubs volunteered to close their doors on Sunday night, Panama City police Chief Mark Smith said. Officials noted that most of those arrested were not typical spring breakers. These are criminals that came to our city and brought the guns with the intent to commit some type of act, Smith said. In South Florida, raucous crowds, public drinking and growing violence associated with the citys world-famous South Beach neighborhood led officials to impose a midnight curfew over the weekend. The action followed shootings that injured five people on South Beach last week. Story continues The 10-block stretch of Ocean Drive known for art deco hotels, restaurants and bars lies between areas that cater to more affluent tourists, as well as locals. Many longtime residents have learned to treat spring break like a hurricane: Stay inside and hunker down until its over. When asked about a possible curfew in Panama City Beach, Talamantez said nothing is off the table. He said officials are evaluating the situation. Officials plan to meet again on Friday to address the issue. I know the citizens are frustrated. Trust me, we are frustrated too, Talamantez said. The harsh reality is we cannot control who comes to town. But what we can control is what happens to you if you commit a crime in this town. We will hold you accountable. Gloria Williams enters the courtroom for a sentencing hearing ,Thursday, May 3, 2018, at the Duval County Courthouse in Jacksonville, Florida. (Photo: via Associated Press) A 23-year-old woman is asking a Florida judge to reduce the prison sentence of the woman who kidnapped her as a newborn and raised her under a false identity. Kamiyah Mobley wrote a letter to Duval County Judge Marianne Aho asking for Gloria Williams sentence to be reduced from 18 years to nine years, with nine years probation, according to News4Jax. At the beginning of the letter, Mobley stated that Williams is my mother. I had a well-rounded life; and I am an independent, college-educated, and deeply spiritual person, because of all my mom gave me, Mobley wrote. I am fully aware of how our lives came to be, what they are, and how my mom came to be my mom. Williams kidnapped Mobley from University Medical Center, now University of Florida Health Jacksonville, in 1998 when Mobley was only a few hours old. Williams then raised Mobley under the alias Alexis Manigo. In 2017, Mobley submitted a DNA test to the Jacksonville Sheriffs Office, which confirmed that she was the same girl who had been abducted in 1998. Tips from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children also aided in the process of finding Mobley. Williams pleaded guilty in 2018 and was sentenced to 18 years in prison for kidnapping and five years for custodial interference, according to ABC News. This composite image made available by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office shows a photo of Kamiyah Mobley, an infant baby girl who was kidnapped by a woman, seen in separate sketches first provided by police in 1998 during the initial search. (Photo: via Associated Press) Mobley met her birth parents in 2017. She said in her letter to the judge that none of this modifies the truth of the past, nor does it justify my moms actions in any way. She asked for the courts grace and mercy, as she needs her mother home. Williams also wrote a letter to the judge, highlighting her growth as a model inmate and the various community and faith-based programs shes participated in. I have received no disciplinary reports whatsoever, and I have maintained an above satisfactory rating by both security and in my work assignment performance issued once a month by the Department of Corrections, Williams wrote. While Mobleys letter was postdated for Sept. 30, 2021, both Mobleys and Williams letters were submitted in December 2021 and filed together recently as part of Williams sentence reduction paperwork. No decision has been made yet by Judge Aho. This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated. STORY: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Monday signed a Republican-backed bill that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for many young students. This has drawn swift criticism from companies, Democrats and advocacy groups. The legislation, referred to by its opponents as the "don't say gay" bill, has stirred national controversy and got attention during Sunday's Oscars telecast amid an increasingly partisan debate over what schools should teach children about race and gender. Formally called the "Parental Rights in Education" bill, the Florida measure bars classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity for children in kindergarten through third grade, or from about ages 5-9, in public schools. It also prohibits such teaching that "is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate" for students in other grades. Under the law, which takes effect on July 1, parents will be allowed to sue school districts they believe to be in violation. "We will continue to recognize that in the state of Florida, parents have a fundamental role in the education, healthcare and well-being of their children," DeSantis told reporters on Monday. "I don't care what big corporations say, here I stand. I'm not backing down." DeSantis, who is seeking re-election this year and is widely considered to be running for president in 2024, has joined other Republicans nationwide in calling for parents to have more control of what young children learn in school. The Republican governor signed the bill into law at a charter school in Spring Hill, north of Tampa, surrounded by young school children and parents who shared personal stories that they said showed that the new law is needed. Students across Florida have protested the measure, and President Joe Biden previously called it "hateful." The hosts of the Oscars ceremony referenced the bill, while best actress winner Jessica Chastain in her acceptance speech denounced "discriminatory and bigoted" legislation sweeping the country. Story continues After DeSantis signed the bill on Monday, a Walt Disney Co spokesperson said the legislation "should never have passed and should never have been signed into law. Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts." Disneys Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, is the companys largest theme park. Its sprawling businesses also include movie studios, broadcast and cable television networks, streaming services, cruise lines and retail products. LGBTQ and civil rights advocates as well as Democratic politicians have said that such policies will harm the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community. "DeSantis has damaged our state's reputation as a welcoming and inclusive place for all families, he has made us a laughing stock and target of national derision," Equality Florida said in a Twitter statement. "Worse, he has made schools less safe for children." The legislation has been criticized for the vagueness and complexity of some of its language. For example, it says that even discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation is prohibited "in certain grade levels or in a specified manner." Sergio Martinez, then of the Oxnard Fire Department, poses in 2013 after being named as battalion chief and assigned to the fire marshal position. Five women have accused Oxnard's former fire marshal of sexual harassment in a lawsuit filed in Ventura County Superior Court. The suit, filed Feb. 1 by local attorney Ron Bamieh, names the city and former Oxnard Fire Department Battalion Chief Sergio Martinez, who also served as the city's fire marshal. The unnamed women are current and former fire department employees. They claim they were subject to "unwelcome, pervasive sexual advances" by Martinez. The alleged behavior included defamation, stalking and physical assaults. The lawsuit also claims the city knew Martinez had "a history, habit and pattern of open, obvious, pervasive harassment" of women in the department yet failed to take meaningful action. City officials "ignored Martinez's misconduct, accepted his inappropriate behavior as normal and at times even made light of it," the suit alleges. Oxnard City Attorney Stephen Fischer said Monday that "the city takes allegations of this type seriously." Fischer pointed out that Martinez is no longer employed by the city. He declined further comment until City Council members could be briefed in closed session at their meeting Tuesday evening. Martinez was reportedly put on medical leave around Feb. 6, 2020, according to the suit, and took a medical retirement shortly thereafter. The Star has not been able to confirm the medical retirement. Martinez is alleged to have sexually harassed the plaintiffs from the beginning of their employment until his departure in early 2020. The complaint says he created a hostile work environment with acts of sexual harassment, assault and battery, including lewd questions about the women's personal sex lives and explicit descriptions of his sexual escapades. He reportedly touched and groped the employees and made explicit comments about their physical attributes. The suit also claims he cornered the women in tight spaces or in vehicles where he could prevent them from leaving. Story continues Human resources and leadership personnel ignored the women's complaints, the lawsuit alleges. One defendant was reportedly instructed "to talk to and commiserate with" two other employees because "Martinez had also harassed them," the document claims. Bamieh said in an email that following Martinez's retirement, the city shut down an investigation that had been launched in the wake of the complaints. The women reportedly suffered retaliation after reporting the harassment and were denied promotions and proper job titles, the suit says. As battalion chief and fire marshal, Martinez supervised all five plaintiffs and had authority to hire, promote and discipline them, according to the document. The women, identified only by their initials, are suing Martinez and the city for unspecified damages and attorney's fees. The County of Ventura recently went through a shakeup after its top executive, Mike Powers, retired suddenly on March 10 in the wake of sexual harassment accusations by a county employee. On March 15, a veteran dispatcher with the Santa Paula Police Department filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the city's chief of police, Travis Walker. Victoria Talbot is a courts and breaking news reporter with The Star. Reach her at victoria.talbot@vcstar.com or 805-437-0258. This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Former Oxnard fire marshal accused of sexual harassment NeoGenomics is searching for a new CEO. In a news release Monday, the Fort Myers-based cancer-focused testing and research lab, announced Mark Mallon has stepped down as its chief executive and as a member of its board "effective immediately." The company described the parting of the ways as mutual, stating that it wasn't due to "any disagreements about strategy with management or the board, inappropriate action by (the) CEO, or any violation of company policy or any accounting irregularity." The board has hired Russell Reynolds, a leading executive search and leadership advisory firm, to help find Mallon's replacement. Previously: NeoGenomics sees tough third quarter amid COVID-19 Delta variant More from our archives: NeoGenomics announces another multimillion-dollar acquisition Mallon had been on the job less than a year. He previously served as the CEO of Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, another public company, based in Massachusetts, specializing in gastrointestinal ailments. With the news of a shakeup in leadership, NeoGenomics also signaled a rough first quarter. The company announced its revenues will likely come in at the low end of its previous guidance to the financial market while its losses will come in higher than it anticipated. The larger losses estimated at $12 million to $15 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization are blamed primarily on higher costs for the goods sold in its clinical services division. The company stated that it "intends to take immediate action to address performance and costs, while continuing to invest prudently" in one of its newest innovative, personalized tests, known as RaDaR. Still, it demonstrated uncertainty about the year ahead, withdrawing its annual financial guidance for 2022, issued Feb. 23. NeoGenomics stock shares plunge by more than 22 percent Company shares plunged by more than 22% on the disappointing news in after-market trading Monday. After the steep drop, several shareholder rights firms announced investigations into any potential securities claims. Story continues Mallon joined NeoGenomics as a CEO and board member on April 19 of last year, replacing Douglas VanOort. VanOort spent more than a decade serving as the company's chairman and CEO before deciding to retire. NeoGenomics described VanOort's departure as part of "a deliberate succession planning process." Under his leadership, the company grew by leaps and bounds. Douglas VanOort, former chairman and CEO of NeoGenomics in Fort Myers. VanOort remained on the company's board until late last year, continuing to serve as board chairman, while helping out with the transition to a new CEO. When Mallon was announced as his replacement, VanOort described him as a leader with sharp intellect, an engaging personality, a drive for excellence and an extensive track record of delivering on demanding growth and operating goals. On top of that, VanOort said Mallon, with an array of strengths, was in a position to "chart a clear course that adds value to NeoGenomics." With Mallon's departure, the board has appointed Lynn Tetrault as its executive chairwoman. A board member since June 2015, she has been serving as its non-executive chairwoman since October. Previously, Tetrault held a variety of executive roles at AstraZeneca PLC from 1993 to 2014. To "provide seamless leadership continuity and operational management" during the search for its new leader, NeoGenomics' board has established an interim office of the CEO, led by the company's chief financial officer William Bonello, chief strategy and corporate development officer Douglas Brown, and chief culture officer Jennifer Balliet. The trio of executives will continue to serve in their current positions, while carrying out additional responsibilities. Lynn Tetrault In a statement, Tetrault thanked Mallon for his contributions to the company and wished him the best in the future. "We are taking immediate steps to improve our business performance. We remain committed to our strategy and the creation of long-term value for our shareholders. We're fortunate to have an experienced and highly capable senior management team to continue leading the company. I look forward to working closely with them as we recruit a new chief executive officer," she said. The company will report its first-quarter results April 27. NeoGenomics has more than 2,100 employees at multiple locations in the United States and abroad, including its local headquarters. The company moved into a new multimillion state-of-the-art headquarters last year. Its expansive, high-profile building is located just west of Interstate 75 and about half a mile north of Alico Road. NeoGenomics works with pathologists, oncologists, academic centers, hospital systems, pharmaceutical firms, integrated service delivery networks, and managed care organizations throughout the U.S., and pharmaceutical firms in Europe and Asia. This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: NeoGenomics in Fort Myers seeks new CEO after disappointing quarter Several European countries announced Tuesday that they would expel dozens of Russian diplomats suspected of spying. The announcements - made by Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland and the Czech Republic - come after the Biden administration in late February said it was beginning the process of expelling 12 Russian "intelligence operatives" who allegedly carried out espionage activities harmful to national security. The move to expel the Russian envoys also comes on the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which entered its second month last week. The Netherlands said it was expelling 17 Russians who were in the country "under diplomatic cover," according to a tweet from Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra. "This step was taken in coordination with other like-minded countries," Hoekstra said in a separate tweet. "This is a measure taken in the context of national security." In Belgium, 21 individuals working at the Russian Embassy and Russian Consulate were expelled, according to a tweet from Belgian Foreign Affairs Minister Sophie Wilmes. Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney announced in a statement posted to Twitter that senior Russian officials have been asked to leave his country as well. "This afternoon, the Department of Foreign Affairs summoned the Russian Ambassador to Iveagh House to advise him that four senior officials have been asked to leave the State," Coveney wrote. "This is because their activities have not been in accordance with international standards of diplomatic behaviour. This action is being taken under Article 9 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations," he added. The foreign affairs minister noted, however, that the government still believes "that diplomatic channels between Ireland and the Russian Federation should remain open." "This is in the interest of our citizens as well as to ensure that we can continue to have a diplomatic channel of communication between Ireland and the Russian Federation in the future," he added. Story continues In the Czech Republic, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed on Twitter that it informed the Russian Embassy in Prague that a member of its diplomatic staff was "declared persona non grata and was requested to leave Czechia within 72 hours." "Together with our Allies, we are reducing the Russian intelligence presence in the EU," the ministry added. The expulsions come as Russia is continuing its invasion of Ukraine. While Moscow's attack has continued for more than a month, its efforts have stalled in some areas because of staunch opposition from Ukrainian forces. State Department spokesperson Ned Price applauded the European countries for expelling alleged Russian intelligence officers, writing that the U.S. stands "unified with our partners in protecting their national security from the Russian Federation's intelligence threats and against threats to democracy." "As our partners have outlined, these actions are in response to these individuals' activities, which are in contravention of their diplomatic status, and the Russian Federation's aggression in Ukraine," Price wrote. "We continue our united support of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity," he added. Coveney, in his statement on Tuesday, said Ireland's channel of communication with the Russian Federation "has been important in the context of conveying our strong views on the Russian Federation's war against Ukraine, which we regard as a serious breach of international law." PARIS (Reuters) - A probe has been launched into recent violent unrest in the Paris suburb of Sevran, said French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin on Tuesday, during which police came under attack from youths. The trouble in Sevran comes with the French presidential election less than two weeks away, in which fears over violent crime, racial tensions and terrorism will feature high among voters' concerns. "An inquiry is underway concerning the intervention of police last Saturday afternoon in Sevran. Following violence and acts of vandalism, 16 arrests were made during the weekend and police apprehended 13 people yesterday evening," said Darmanin on his Twitter account. Stephane Blanchet, who is the mayor for Sevran which lies to the north-east of Paris, wrote on his Twitter account that trouble had first broken out during the weekend after a local man, aged 33, died after being shot by police. French media reports said the police had opened fire on him after chasing him on suspicion of having stolen a vehicle. Images posted on social media showed youths clashing with police during the weekend and into the start of this week. France's 'banlieues' - high-rise housing estates on the outskirts of major cities - have long been flashpoints of anger over social and economic grievances. In 2005, unrest lasted three weeks after two youths died fleeing police in another northern Paris suburb. (Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta; Editing by Benoit Van Overstraeten) PARIS (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday told his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, that it was not possible for Western gas clients to pay their bills in roubles, a French presidential official told journalists on Tuesday. "France is against paying in roubles," the official said. In his phone call with Putin, Macron also reiterated his preparedness to carry out a humanitarian rescue mission in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, the official said, but added that the conditions for such a step were not yet in place. Russia promised on Tuesday to scale down military operations around Kyiv and northern Ukraine as a confidence-building step, in the most tangible sign yet of progress towards negotiating an end to the war. (Reporting by John Irish, writing by Tassilo Hummel, editing by Domonique Vidalon) The GM logo is seen on the facade of the General Motors headquarters in Detroit. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook/File Photo/File Photo/File Photo Shanghai locked down parts of the city this week to battle a rise in COVID-19 cases. General Motors is asking workers to sleep on its factory floors in Shanghai, Reuters reported. City authorities told companies to place workers in bubbles so they can keep working, Reuters said. General Motors is asking workers to sleep on the floors of its Shanghai factories to keep production going during the city's new COVID-19 lockdown, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. China, which has pursued a zero-COVID strategy throughout the pandemic, is battling several new outbreaks of COVID-19. The city of Shanghai said Sunday it was locking down half of the city from Monday to Friday while it launched a mass COVID-19 testing drive. The other half of the city is to be locked down for the same period starting April 1. While the lockdowns last, China has told companies based in the zone to enforce a "closed-loop" arrangements, whereby workers live and work in a bubble away from the public, Reuters said. To accommodate this, GM asked workers to sleep on the factory floor and secured "passes" for its truck drivers, the agency said. GM did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider. The GM factories are run in partnership with China's SAIC Motor Corp and produce Buick, Chevrolet, and Cadillac vehicles. While GM is aiming to keep up production, Tesla suspended production for the lockdown as it couldn't meet the "closed-loop" requirements, Reuters previously reported. On Sunday, Shanghai recorded 3,450 cases of COVID-19 around 70% of the nationwide total, The Guardian reported, citing city authorities. They are China's highest daily COVID-19 case numbers since the early days of the pandemic in Wuhan in February 2020. Read the original article on Business Insider By Andreas Rinke and Ludwig Burger BERLIN (Reuters) -European health ministers urged the bloc's executive on Tuesday to back a fourth COVID-19 shot for people over the age of 60 to boost immunity in the absence of vaccines that specifically protect against the Omicron variant. Pointing to data from Israel, minister Karl Lauterbach said a recommendation was "urgently necessary" to reduce the risk of death from an infection. He raised the issue at a meeting of health ministers in Brussels on Tuesday and said most of them supported the idea of harmonising European vaccination strategies. "I urge a common position of EU countries, agencies and the European Commission on the fourth dose," said Italy's health minister Roberto Speranza. Now the EU Commission will draw up a recommendation on the fourth vaccination within a very short time on the basis of scientific expertise," Lauterbach told Reuters. "Current data from Israel show: those over 60 years of age or suffering from pre-existing conditions should be vaccinated a fourth time," he added. EU regulator the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on March 17 that there was not yet enough data to support a recommendation on the need for a second booster shot in the general population, while acknowledging that some member states had started such a campaign targeting the elderly. EMA added at the time that it was hoping for more data to guide a review later in the spring. A study from Israel showed on Sunday that senior citizens who received a second booster of the PfizerBioNTech COVID-19 vaccination had a 78% lower mortality rate from the disease than those who had only one. Earlier public health studies from Israeli had guided a decision by Germany in February to give a fourth shot to people aged 70 and older and to those at risk of severe disease. Lauterbach said the booster strategy was urgent because he did not expect a vaccine adapted for new variants to become available before the autumn. Story continues September is the month set for the launch of a shot that targets the dominant Omicron lineage, he said on Tuesday, but action was needed before then. EMA's leading vaccine expert said on March 17 he expected to receive trial data on COVID-19 vaccines tailored for the Omicron variant between April and the start of July. (Additional reporting by Francesco Guarascio in Brussels, Miranda Murray in FrankfurtEditing by Madeline Chambers, Bernadette Baum, Alexandra Hudson) BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany will build up its military quicker than planned by bringing a division to combat-readiness two years ahead of schedule, Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht said on Tuesday, detailing Berlin's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Germany will reach NATO's planning targets faster than promised," she said, according to the draft text of a speech she was due to deliver at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington. "We will have the planned division of the army combat-ready in 2025, two years ahead of time." While Germany does not have a single combat-ready army division at the moment, it had 12 such divisions in the 1980s during the Cold War. According to its original schedule, Berlin was aiming for one combat-ready division in 2027 and a total of three combat-ready divisions in 2032. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in a major policy shift for the country after decades of attrition, pledged to inject 100 billion euros ($111.15 billion) into the Bundeswehr after the start of the war in Ukraine. The money is earmarked for ramping up the German military's readiness, mainly by buying weapons and equipment that troops have so far lacked. Since Scholz's landmark speech on Feb. 27, three days after the invasion, Berlin has announced the purchase of F-35 fighter jets from the United States and said it is aiming to buy a missile defence system. Scholz also said Germany would sharply raise defence spending to more than 2% of its economic output. ($1 = 0.8997 euros) (Reporting by Sabine Siebold, Editing by Miranda Murray, William Maclean) Ginni Thomas. Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock Transport a conservative intellectual forward through time from 1982 to 2022 and one of the first things he'd notice is that his present-day counterparts talk an awful lot about class. Specifically, conservatives today are fond of claiming Democrats are the party of over-educated professionals who constitute the American ruling class, while Republicans are arrayed on the side of the working class with politics functioning as a form of class warfare between the two groups. Few conservatives thought that way 40 years ago, though there were precursors to it. Republicans in the era of Reagan liked to place the GOP on the side of "average Americans," whom they portrayed as possessing basic decency and common sense lacking among the liberals who'd been running the show in Washington since the New Deal and been corrupted more recently by the moral decadence the 1960s counterculture. That politically potent (if ideologically mild) form of populism has been intensified by demographic developments over the intervening decades and their interaction with the electoral coalitions of both parties. The GOP is increasingly the party of people living outside the biggest metropolitan areas and lacking a college degree, whereas the Democrats are increasingly dominated by highly educated urban professionals. This change has encouraged Republicans to portray electoral politics in America as a contest between top and bottom, haves and have-nots, influencers and underdogs, arrogant snobs and disrespected masses with the GOP consistently fighting on the side of the latter. Is this true? The recently revealed words and deeds of Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, suggest rather clearly that the answer is no. Ginni Thomas is a lawyer and a conservative Republican who has worked in high-level jobs in Washington for decades including at the U.S. Department of Labor. She's also founded lobbying groups to push for conservative policies. A passionate supporter of former President Donald Trump, she became outraged by news of his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election and expressed her anger and anxiety in a series of texts to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Story continues In those texts, the contents of which were disclosed last week in a story for The Washington Post, Thomas encouraged Meadows to do everything he could to ensure Trump remained president, and indulged in numerous election-related conspiracies, including some derived from QAnon an offshoot of evangelical Protestantism that's been cross-pollinated with Glenn-Beck-style hyper-rationalism to produce an unfalsifiable belief system about hidden networks of pedophiles and behind-the-scenes efforts to thwart them led by prominent Republicans, including Trump. QAnon, which polls show is affirmed by nearly one-fifth of the American population and especially widespread among members of the Republican base, is a quintessential down-market faith. Yet there was Ginni Thomas, a well-educated, very well-connected woman someone married to a Supreme Court justice and deeply ensconced in the interpersonal and institutional ecosystem of the nation's capital dashing off texts to the president's chief of staff, who took time out of his jam-packed days to respond respectfully to her missives. If Ginni Thomas isn't a member of the American elite, then no one is. Yet she is a member of the American elite who genuinely affirms the beliefs of those very far from the commanding heights of the country's political, economic, and cultural institutions. That tension points toward the complicated intellectual and organizational history of the American right. Back in the 1970s, conservatives set about challenging the power and influence of institutions dominated by ideological liberalism, above all, the media, the courts, and the universities. Taking on this liberal establishment required the creation of a counter-establishment of think tanks, institutes, academic programs within universities, media companies, and other ventures. Over the following decades, these efforts began to bear fruit, with the right's counter-establishment challenging the hegemony of liberalism on multiple fronts. But of course, any establishment, no matter its ideological makeup or practical intent, will be led by elites by people possessing the education, practical experience, specialized knowledge, and distinctive skills necessary for success. The leading institutions of the modern right Fox News, the late Rush Limbaugh's radio show, The Federalist Society, The Heritage Foundation, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal have invariably been led by just such people. They are the country's counter-elite and Ginny Thomas is undeniably a member in good standing. What does her embrace of the Republican base's most demotic superstitions tell us about the character of the contemporary right and the character of contemporary American politics more generally? It tells us, among other things, that the real political fault line today isn't between a progressive-liberal elite establishment and those over whom it rules, who are increasingly willing and eager to challenge and deny its legitimacy. The real political fault line is between competing establishments and elites one on the left, the other on the right. Tucker Carlson might spend his evenings leading what sounds like class warfare against an entrenched progressive establishment of left-wingers, but he's a television star watched by millions who makes a small fortune in his job. He's as much a member of America's cultural and political elite as anyone. The same goes for the Republican leadership in Congress and Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents and also for their spouses, especially when they take part in politics on the highest levels, as Ginni Thomas has chosen to do. It might make political sense for Republican politicians to pretend they're engaging in class warfare on behalf of the downtrodden. But in reality, they're one set of elites waging a battle against another set of elites by LARPing as class warriors. It's a shtick. That doesn't mean Thomas is faking her belief in QAnon-adjacent conspiracies about the 2020 election. But it does mean that affirming those beliefs does nothing to demonstrate she's doing battle against the establishment. She is the establishment. Or at least one of them. You may also like Howard Stern says Will Smith and Donald Trump 'are the same guy' after Oscars slap Former Ukrainian President Yushchenko says Biden's Putin comment was 'absolutely correct' Restaurant cancels Capitol rioter's pre-prison party Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, left and his wife Virginia Thomas, right, leave the funeral services of the late Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, on Feb. 20, 2016. Ginni Thomas's text messages to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol have sparked questions over the extent of her activism within the GOP. It's also left Republican lawmakers grappling with how to respond to Thomas and her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas sent a total of 21 text messages to Meadows urging him to find a way to keep former President Trump in office. Her efforts may have gone beyond her messages to Meadows. NBC News reported that Thomas also reached out to an aide with the Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative caucus in the House, asking for its members to go "out in the streets." A Republican Study Committee aide disputed that characterization, but in doing so acknowledged the existence of an exchange with Thomas: "It's a misleading description of a single departed staffer's recounting of an email exchange from 15 months ago," the aide said. Thomas has been a regular presence in conservative activism circles for years. But her activities were not widely questioned until recently, when a New Yorker profile and the subsequent release of the text messages highlighted her involvement with "Stop the Steal" groups and suggestions of avenues to try to overturn the election. Her contact with Republicans in support of Trump is also placing scrutiny on her husband, who is facing growing calls from Democrats to recuse himself from cases related to the Capitol riot. Many Republicans see the Supreme Court as their best chance for blocking the House investigation into the attack, underlining his importance. It also seems increasingly possible that Ginni Thomas could be called to testify before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. "Based on the evidence we have in our possession, I feel very confident with inviting her to the committee, and if she refuses, issuing a subpoena," Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the select committee, told CBS this week. Story continues Thomas's texts included shoutouts to Reps. Louie Gohmert (Texas) and Paul Gosar (Ariz.), two of the conservative Republicans identified by Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander as being central to the effort, as well as mentions of well-known conservative Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Chip Roy (Texas). In one text message to Meadows on Nov. 6, 2020, Thomas expressed frustration that members of Congress were not doing more to support Trump: "House and Senate guys are pathetic too... only 4 GOP House members seen out in street rallies with grassroots... Gohmert, Jordan, Gosar, and Roy." Many Republican members of Congress are familiar with Thomas, but they did not elaborate on whether she sent them the same kinds of messages about overturning the election that she did to Meadows in the period between the 2020 election and Jan. 6 insurrection. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who was chair of the House Freedom Caucus at the time, told reporters that he could not remember if he had text messaged or emailed with Thomas, saying that their relationship was not very close. "I may have talked to her one time, not anything specific," said Gohmert. The Washington Post reported that Thomas forwarded material to Meadows that she said she got from Gohmert's chief of staff. Roy called Thomas a "dear friend," but he ultimately took a far different attitude toward the Stop the Steal efforts than she did by objecting to seating House members from states with election disputes. It was a statement on Roy's part to criticize a plan by his colleagues to object to certifying the Electoral College results. "I'm not going to characterize whatever private conversations I've had with Ginni," Roy said. He added that Thomas "has engaged in defense of her country for years," criticizing calls for her husband to be impeached. While some on the Jan. 6 committee refused to comment on Thomas, others have been open about a need to hear from her. "We've interviewed more than 750 people, and we want to hear from everybody who has something to say. And she obviously interacted frequently with the president's chief of staff and was actively involved with the effort to overturn the election. So speaking as one member, I think it's important that we hear from her," Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told reporters Monday. Raskin pushed back on Republican arguments minimizing her activism. "Well, you know, look, she has as much First Amendment right as anybody else in the country to advance her political views, but she has no more right than anybody else in the country to engage in coups and insurrections, so I'm interested in exactly what she was doing," he said. In Clarence Thomas's three decades on the bench, he has never stepped aside from a case due to a real or perceived conflict of interest resulting from his wife's political activities. He declined to recuse himself from numerous pro-Trump legal challenges that contested the 2020 results. And earlier this year, he cast the lone dissenting vote from a Supreme Court ruling that cleared the way for the Jan. 6 panel to obtain Trump White House records. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was the latest lawmaker Tuesday morning to call for his impeachment, while another 22 progressive lawmakers issued a letter calling for him to recuse himself from any Jan. 6 cases. But Republicans have argued that the Thomases' work can be separate. "We were told, despite Ruth Bader Ginsburg's husband - his activities, that it was absolutely wrong to presume the feelings of a spouse on to a justice," Gohmert told The Hill. "And so, I think what we're seeing is absolute hypocrisy from those who are calling for his impeachment. I think it will do tremendous damage to the advances of women. Because it's saying if you're a conservative woman, you got to be back in the kitchen barefoot." Biggs likewise called her "an independent person." "She's living her life. She has her opinions," he said. "They don't necessarily coincide in his opinions. There's no indication that they have any influence on Justice Thomas at all." Photo illustration of blue-toned Mike Gibbons and Josh Mandel on a rose-colored, textured background Republican frustrations are growing as multiple GOP Senate primaries have descended into infighting, threatening the party's chances of retaking the upper chamber in November. In recent weeks, Senate primaries in Missouri and Ohio have turned volatile. In Missouri, the ex-wife of Senate candidate Eric Greitens (R) has accused him of abusing her and their children during the marriage. Multiple GOP candidates running in that race have since called on Greitens, the state's former governor, to drop out. Meanwhile, in Ohio, a candidate forum nearly came to blows when former state Treasurer Josh Mandel and businessman Mike Gibbons got into each other's faces over work experience. Other states like Pennsylvania are also experiencing rocky primaries. The turbulence has raised concerns that the winners of these primaries could come out bruised, giving Democrats an advantage in the general election. "Who knows what the shitshow this week will be," said one Ohio-based Republican strategist, referring to the state's Senate primary. The fallout in that race comes after Gibbons accused Mandel of "never having worked in the private sector." That led Mandel to walk over to a standing Gibbons and shout in his face: "Two tours in Iraq, don't tell me I haven't worked!" Over the weekend, Mandel released an ad featuring a Gold Star mother, whose son was killed in Iraq, criticizing Gibbons. Meanwhile, former Ohio GOP Chair Jane Timken has accused Gibbons of sexism, citing comments in which he said she had "barely worked" before she became chair of the Stark County Republican Party. Timken's campaign has sought to paint her as the adult in the room. In a press call last week, her campaign's senior adviser Kellyanne Conway referred to the men in the race as "arrogant, temperamental men behaving badly" while describing Timken as "restrained and graceful." On the same call, Timken warned that the primary's infighting would give Democrats ammo for the general election. Story continues "Friday and Monday night's antics, the only person who really won was Tim Ryan," Timken told reporters, referring to the Democratic congressman running for Senate. "What happens if Mike Gibbons is the nominee? The Democrats will gladly pour 50 million dollars into the race to defeat him and he has given them much fodder." The Gibbons campaign hit back in a statement to The Hill, suggesting that Gibbons was being attacked because of his lead in the polls. "It's sad to see Republicans take on the talking points of the left when it's convenient for their campaign," said Gibbons's senior adviser Samantha Cotten. "These are desperate attempts by losing campaigns to win over voters through a false victim narrative. Mike Gibbons has the momentum in this race because his message is resonating with voters. Our opponents will continue to smear Mike, as he is a clear contender in this race." However, Ohio Republicans say the infighting will ultimately not be that damaging in a year where the national GOP has the wind at its back. "Just the generic ballot alone tells me if you have an R by your name in Ohio, you're going to be at an advantage in this race," the Ohio-based GOP strategist said. "Ultimately, Ohio Republican voters will circle the wagon around the Republican nominee." Republicans also argue that the races in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania cannot be compared to the race in Missouri, given the seriousness of the allegations against Greitens. "When you're talking about allegations of abuse against a spouse and children, it calls more into question than your political capabilities and your viability as a candidate. It calls into question who you are as a man," said one Republican strategist. While Greitens has denied the allegations against him, his front-runner status in the race is now in jeopardy, with high-profile Republicans in and out of Missouri distancing themselves from him. Retiring Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), whom Greitens is running to succeed in the Senate, said last week that the former governor should drop out. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has endorsed Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) in the race, also called for Greitens to exit the race. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, did not call on Greitens to drop out but called the allegations "pretty disturbing." Hartzler, the only woman running in the primary, called on Greitens to drop out and seek "immediate professional help" in a statement last week. She has already gone on the offensive against Greitens, with her first ad of the race including a reference to 2018 allegations that he had an affair with his hairdresser. Depending on whether Greitens drops out, the allegations stand to have ramifications not only in Missouri but across the country. "It's not just a Missouri problem, it's a national problem because if Greitens were to win, the nominee in Ohio, the nominee in Arizona, the nominee in Pennsylvania for Republicans is going to have answer a lot of questions about him," the GOP strategist said. "That's the real danger." Regardless, Democrats say the contentious primaries are playing into their hands, providing a contrasting image going into the general election. "What we have is Democratic candidates and incumbents who are talking to voters about lowering costs, about the issues that voters care about, while the Republican side is having this slug fest," one Democratic strategist told The Hill. "The longer this infighting happens, the more bruised their candidates will be on the other side." Greece's independent authority for transparency said Tuesday that after an in-depth investigation it has found no basis for reports that Greek authorities have illegally turned back asylum-seekers entering the country from Turkey. The National Transparency Authority said in a statement that the allegations by the Lighthouse Reports non-profit organization last year concerning informal obligatory returns of asylum-seekers by masked men were not confirmed. Upon completion of the examination process and the laboratory examination of the relevant material, no supporting evidence emerged, the statement said. Greece is a major entry point for people from the Middle East, Asia and Africa seeking a better life in the European Union. A record of about 1 million people arrived through neighboring Turkey in 2015, but in recent years the numbers have dropped drastically following tougher border management. Greece has repeatedly been accused by human rights groups and Turkey its historic regional rival from which thousands of migrants try to enter every year of illegally sending back asylum-seekers who have reached Greek shores and dumping them at sea. Similar claims have been made concerning asylum-seekers who cross the land border with Turkey and are allegedly clandestinely sent back. Athens strongly denies the practice, known as pushbacks. The NTA statement said its more than four-month investigation into the Lighthouse Reports' allegations included visits to the eastern Aegean Sea islands where migrant boats from Turkey arrive and to the northeastern land border, and interviews with Greek security services, local residents and asylum-seekers. It said it also examined video and photos connected with the allegations, with the assistance of the Greek police. Last October, Netherlands-based Lighthouse Reports said a joint investigation with European media organizations collected and analyzed 635 videos of alleged pushbacks in the Aegean Sea, at least 15 of them showing masked men in action. Story continues It said current and former senior officers in the Greek coast guard reviewed the videos and were able to identify the masked men as members of elite Greek coast guard units. Greek officials at the time denied the allegations. ___ Follow APs global migration coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/migration Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma could soon bid farewell to its E-3 Sentry airborne target tracking jets that have been a fixture there for 45 years. Under the Air Forces fiscal 2023 budget request, released Monday, the Airborne Warning and Control System would phase out over the next few years to make way for Boeings E-7 Wedgetail as its likely replacement. The E-3 AWACS is a modified 1970s-era airliner that uses a distinctive rotating radar dome to track air war movements up to 250 miles away and to direct planes in combat, such as telling fighter jets to intercept a hostile target. They have been active over Europe to monitor the regions airspace during Russias ongoing invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Air exercise with tight turnaround, no sleeping pills prompts investigation at Tinker Fifteen of Tinkers planes would head into retirement in 2023, about half of the overall fleet at the 552nd Air Control Wing, the Air Force said. The United States owns 31 E-3s, split between 27 tails at Tinker and four that operate out of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, and Kadena Air Base in Japan. NATO, the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia and Japan operate the Sentry as well. The remaining U.S. airframes will stay for several years until something better comes along, Maj. Gen. James Peccia, the Air Forces deputy assistant budget secretary, told reporters March 25. Officials worry that the legacy fixed-wing command-and-control and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms are too costly to maintain and would be vulnerable against modern and future surface-to-air missiles. The Air Force acknowledges that ditching more than a dozen E-3s will leave a gap in its ability to monitor the skies, but argues it doesnt pose an insurmountable problem. The proposal follows years of debate over what may come next in airspace surveillance technology. The Wedgetail or another aircraft that succeeds the E-3 could bridge the gap between the former jet and the future Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) concept, which would connect sensors across various Air Force platforms to form a picture of the battlespace around them. Story continues Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters March 25 the service would make its decision on a replacement within the next several months. Air Force eyes contract for AWACS replacement in 2023 The leading candidate, quite obviously, is the E-7, but we want to do our due diligence before we make a final decision, he said. Airmen at Tinker spoke to Air Force Times in July 2021 about low morale that has long plagued their AWACS units and is exacerbated by the stressors of an old, sometimes unpredictable aircraft. When asked what could be done to improve the culture there, multiple people said getting rid of the E-3 would be ideal. The Sentries are frequently down for maintenance as they approach 50 years old, and airmen say the jets are prone to breaking in ways they havent seen before. That issue was at the forefront of a disagreement between a now-fired operations group commander and his airmen over whether they should be required to train on short notice and atypical sleep. They are being presented with difficult risk management decisions regularly because of the older airframe, said one officer in the community who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. It is likely a lot less cut-and-dry on risk management than some communities, where theyre working with a platform that is more reliable for them. The Florida Department of Health in Orange County is notifying residents near Lake Sue of a blue-green algae bloom. Officials learned of the bloom after water samples showed evidence of the possible contamination March 21. update: Health ALERT issued for Lake SUE b/c of the presence of blue-green algae. Site visit & sample taken on March 21 by FDEP. Exercise caution in & around Lake SUE Residents & pets should not drink, swim, wade, use personal watercraft @OrangeCoFL @citybeautiful @WinterParkFla GOHealthyOrange (@DohOrange) March 28, 2022 Read: Shut this whole thing down: Tyre Sampsons family calls for FreeFalls demolition, statue be built Because blooms have the potential to produce toxins, health officials advise people to take the following precautions: - Do not drink, swim, wade, or boat in waters where there is a visible bloom. - Avoid getting water in your eyes, nose, or mouth. - Keep pets and livestock away from waters where there is a bloom. Read: Deadly hit-and-run crash closes Colonial Drive near downtown Orlando See map of location below: Read: Brightline: Orlando high-speed rail extension will be fully American-made Blue-green algae is a common occurrence in freshwater environments throughout Florida and can appear year-round. More information about Floridas water quality status and public health notifications can be found here. To report an algae bloom, contact FDEP at 855-305-3903 or online. Click here to download the free WFTV news and weather apps, and click here to watch the latest news on your Smart TV. "CODA," which earned a historic win for Best Picture at the Academy Awards on Sunday night, has several ties to Rhode Island. The film tells the story of Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) an aspiring singer who is the only hearing member of her deaf family, hence the titular acronyms meaning, children of deaf adults. Set in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the movie explores Rossis struggle between pursuing her passion for music and her obligations to family and their fishing business. 'CODA' made history amid Oscar chaos: Here's what its win means for the Deaf community Rhode Island College alumna Marilyn Busch played Nina, a fishermans wife who works with Rossis mother, played by Marlee Matlin, an Oscar winner and deaf activist. Rebecca Gibel Rebecca Gibel, who has acted at Trinity Repertory Company, played Joanne Biles, an at-sea monitor who the federal government insists having on the Rossis' boat to observe. Central Falls' Gary Berdugo and Providence College graduate Bryan Sabbag also made an appearance in the film. 22 in 2022: Rhode Island artists, athletes, scientists, activists, and more to watch this year For each, an Oscar win for a film in which theyd acted was a first. Bryan Sabbag: 'Walking on air' I feel like Im walking on air," Sabbag said. "It was a surprise to see how much recognition the movie finally got. Gibel, who was traveling in Portugal, went to sleep Sunday night hoping that Troy Kotsur, who plays Rossis father, would win best supporting actor. And then woke up and there were 60 texts on my phone, and I was like, Oh my gosh! It mustve happened, Gibel said. Sundance 2021: 'CODA' star Marlee Matlin talks inclusion, calls on Hollywood to 'hire more deaf actors' Kotsur made history as the first deaf man to receive an acting Oscar. Until then, Matlin had been the only deaf person to win the honor. Busch reflected on what the win meant to the deaf community, which is now seeing more representation in film. Story continues Marilyn Busch: 'This film, these actors and this director created a piece of art' Marilyn Busch Until this film, I do not believe that many actors have been given the opportunity to portray deaf culture and family life realistically on screen by actual deaf performers it truly was a milestone for deaf representation, Busch said in an email. This film, these actors and this director created a piece of art that allowed hearing audiences a glimpse into what being deaf is like on a daily basis, Busch added. Truly one of the things that elevates this film from just being a heartwarming family story to groundbreaking is its accurate representation of deaf culture and family life. 'We are not costumes': Why Marlee Matlin put her foot down, insisting 'CODA' cast deaf actors Rebecca Gibel: 'It shows audiences are hungry for smart storytelling' Gibel echoed the significance of such representation, also acknowledging the films best picture Oscar as a win for small budget films. I feel like this is a story that is world-changing in terms of the industry for so many reasons, so my first thought was I hope this really solidifies the opening of doors for representation in film, Gibel said. Also I hope it really shows that small independent films are viable [commercially], that it shows audiences are hungry for smart storytelling." Marilyn Busch: RI actress has role in Sundance prize-winner 'CODA' 'The Prom': How two actors with Rhode Island ties got invited to perform in Broadway hit Upcoming movies to watch for include 'Salem's Lot,' and a Trinity Rep play Gibel also appeared in the black comedy Dont Look Up, which received an Oscar nomination. She is now about to enter rehearsals for Fairview, a Pulitzer-winning play at Trinity Rep. Additionally, Gibel will appear in a second season of dramedy series Bridge and Tunnel, and Salvation, a movie inspired by a Pentecostal pastors attempted murder of his wife in Alabama. Gibel stars as the wife. She and Busch are also awaiting the opening of Salems Lot, a film in which both have roles. It hits theaters in September. 22 in 2022: Rhode Island artists, athletes, scientists, activists, and more to watch including Rebecca Gibel Spoilers! Five craziest moments in 'Don't Look Up' Busch will also appear in two Netflix movies, The Mothership and The Noel Diary. She is also working on a lead role in Everything I Had Known About You, an indie film. It is set to appear at festivals next year. "CODA," which was released in theaters and on Apple+, was the first film from a streaming service to win best picture. In addition to Kotsur's best supporting actor award, the movie also won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: 'CODA' RI actors had roles in Oscar-winning film deaf community Will Smith and Donald Trump. Evan Vucci/AP/Pablo Cuadra / WireImage Howard Stern compared Will Smith to Donald Trump. Following Smith's slap at the Oscars, Stern said the two men "are the same guy." "At a time when the world is at war bad timing, man," Stern added while discussing Smith's slap. Howard Stern compared Will Smith to former US President Donald Trump while discussing the moment the actor slapped the comedian Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars on Sunday. "He open-hand, with a lot of force, smacks him right in the mouth on TV," Stern said on his long-running SiriusXM radio show. "Now, the first thing I said to myself was, 'What the fuck is going on, is this a bit?' Because where is security? This is a live television event. "Not one person came out, because he's Will Smith. This is how Trump gets away with shit. Will Smith and Trump are the same guy. He decided he's going to take matters into his own hands," Stern continued, before linking Smith and Rock's altercation to geopolitical events. "At a time when the world is at war bad timing, man," Stern said. "Calm your fucking ass down." Smith hits Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars on Sunday. Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP Stern isn't the first celebrity to offer an opinion about Smith's slap in response to Rock's joke about Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. During an episode of "The View" this week, Whoopi Goldberg, who has hosted the Oscars four times and won best supporting actress in 1990, said she thought Smith "overreacted." "He had one of those moments where it was like ... just stop," Goldberg said, adding: "I get it. Not everybody acts the way we would like them to under pressure. Some people just snap. He snapped." In response to calls for the academy to take back the best-actor Oscar that Smith won for his performance in "King Richard," Goldberg said: "We're not going to take that Oscar from him. There will be consequences I'm sure, but I don't think that's what they're going to do, particularly because Chris said, 'Listen, I'm not pressing any charges.'" Story continues Smith slapped Rock onstage after the comedian made a joke about Pinkett Smith's bald head. Pinkett Smith has alopecia, a hair-loss condition. "Jada, I love you. 'G.I. Jane 2,' can't wait to see it," Rock said. In the 1997 movie "G.I. Jane," Demi Moore shaves her head. On Monday, Smith posted an apology on Instagram. "Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive. My behavior at last night's Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable," Smith said. "Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada's medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally. I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris." The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said on Monday that it was opening a formal investigation into the altercation and would "explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct, and California law." Read the original article on Insider By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) -The International Committee of the Red Cross urged Ukraine and Russia on Tuesday to agree on safe evacuation of civilians from the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol and other frontline areas, where vitals are running out, and on delivery of aid. Asked about Ukrainian accusations of forced deportation of Mariupol residents to Russia, ICRC director-general Robert Mardini told Reuters his agency had no direct information and would not participate in such as it violated the rules of war. "People are caught and trapped in the line of fire. And it is happening unfortunately in many places today in Ukraine, not only in Mariupol," Mardini said at ICRC headquarters in Geneva five weeks after Russia launched its invasion. "What we expect and what is needed for civilians is that there is a clear and explicit agreement by the two sides on safe evacuations of civilians." With Russia causing global shock for shelling residential areas, the ICRC issued a statement on Tuesday reminding the warring sides of international obligations to protect civilians and target only military objectives. Russia calls its mission a "special operation" to disarm and "denazify" Ukraine. PRISONERS OF WAR Mardini said that there was an "outrageous" disinformation campaign against the ICRC on social media and politicization of humanitarian work that was raising risks for aid workers. The Ukrainian Red Cross had said its branch in Kropyvnytskyi was attacked, he added. An ICRC spokesperson later said that an angry person had confronted Red Cross workers and physically attacked that office, causing some damage but no injuries. The ICRC was in talks to open an operational base in Rostov-on-Don in Russia as part of its regional scale up, but it should not be misconstrued as being linked to deportations, Mardini said. Mardini also urged Ukraine and Russia to let the ICRC visit prisoners of war, as it does worldwide in line with the Geneva Conventions, and return remains of the dead. "It's always sensitive but I think there is also a humanitarian imperative for detainees, for families, to have news of their loved ones," he said. (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Catherine Evans, Andrew Cawthorne and Bernadette Baum) JERUSALEM (AP) A gunman on a motorcycle opened fire in a city in central Israel late Tuesday, methodically gunning down victims as he killed at least five people in the third such street attack in a week. The shooter was killed by police. Israeli media said the attacker was a Palestinian from the West Bank, the third Arab assailant to launch an attack ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The previous two attacks, carried out by Arab citizens of Israel inspired by the Islamic State extremist group, have raised concerns of further violence. Israel stands before a wave of murderous Arab terrorism, declared Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. He pledged to combat it with perseverance, stubbornness and an iron fist. He held an emergency meeting of top security officials and planned a meeting of his Security Cabinet on Wednesday. Israeli authorities have not yet determined whether the attacks were organized or whether the attackers acted individually. The Israeli military announced it would be deploying additional troops to the West Bank, and the police chief raised the national readiness level to its highest. Amateur video footage aired on Israeli television appeared to show the gunman in a black shirt armed with an assault rifle stopping a moving vehicle and shooting the driver. Another showed him chasing a cyclist, with the gun appearing to jam as he tried to fire. Tuesday's shootings occurred at two locations in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox city just east of Tel Aviv. Police said a preliminary investigation found the gunman was armed with an assault rifle and opened fire on passersby before he was shot by officers at the scene. The Magen David Adom paramedic service confirmed that five people were killed. Police said one of the victims was a police officer who arrived at the scene and engaged the shooter. Israel Defense Minister Benny Gantz wrote on Twitter that the security forces will work with all means to return security to Israeli streets and the feeling of security to civilians. Story continues Israeli media reported that the suspected gunman was a 27-year-old Palestinian man from the northern West Bank town of Yabad. Police did not immediately provide information about the suspect. In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack, saying the killing of Israeli or Palestinian civilians only leads to further deterioration of the situation and instability, which we all strive to achieve, especially as we are approaching the holy month of Ramadan and Christian and Jewish holidays. He said the violence confirms that permanent, comprehensive and just peace is the shortest way to provide security and stability for the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. No Palestinian groups immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. The Islamist militant group Hamas praised the heroic operation, but stopped short of claiming responsibility. Israel in recent weeks has been taking steps aimed at calming tensions and avoiding a repeat of last year, when clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian demonstrators in Jerusalem boiled over into an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas. But the new wave of violence is greatly complicating those efforts. On Sunday, a pair of gunmen killed two young police officers during a shooting in the central city of Hadera, and last week, a lone assailant killed four people in a car ramming and stabbing attack in the southern city of Beersheba. Earlier on Tuesday, Israeli security services raided the homes of at least 12 Arab citizens and arrested two suspected of having ties to the Islamic State group in a crackdown sparked by recent deadly attacks. Hours before the raid, Bennett said the recent assaults inside Israel marked a new situation that required stepped-up security measures. Law enforcement officials said 31 homes and sites were searched overnight in northern Israel, an area that was home to the gunmen who carried out the Hadera attack. The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the two previous attacks. All of the attacks have come just ahead of Ramadan, which begins later this week and as Israel hosted a high-profile meeting this week between the foreign ministers of four Arab nations and the United States. All four Arab nations Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates along with the United States, condemned the killings. Ramadan is expected to begin Saturday. Deadly attacks by IS inside Israel, and attacks by Arab citizens of Israel, are rare. The group operates mainly in Iraq and Syria, where it has recently stepped up attacks against security forces. It no longer controls any territory but operates through sleeper cells. IS has claimed attacks against Israeli troops in the past and has branches in Afghanistan and other countries. By Suleiman Al-Khalidi and Jeffrey Heller AMMAN, JERUSALEM (Reuters) -President Isaac Herzog will make the first official visit by an Israeli head of state to Jordan on Wednesday, officials said, in the latest thaw in ties between two countries formally at peace for nearly three decades. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including Israel's nearly 55-year-old occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, has long weighed on relations between Israel and Jordan, many of whose 10 million citizens are of Palestinian origin. The planned meeting between Herzog and King Abdullah follows talks the Jordanian monarch held with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank on Monday in an apparent attempt to lower tensions before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Last year, clashes erupted between Israeli police and Palestinians around Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque at the height of the Ramadan fasting month, violence that helped ignite an 11-day war in May between Gaza militants and Israel. In a statement, a spokesman for Herzog said issues to be raised at the royal palace include "deepening Israeli-Jordanian relations, maintaining regional stability, with an emphasis on the upcoming holiday period, (and) strengthening peace and normalisation". King Hussein, Abdullah's late father, signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, after years of covert contacts. Although his post is largely ceremonial, Herzog has been a pointman in efforts to mend long-strained relations between Israel and Turkey, visiting Ankara earlier this month for talks with President Tayyip Erdogan. Earlier this year, he also visited the United Arab Emirates, which along with Bahrain and Morocco normalised relations with Israel in 2020 in a sign of shared concern over Iran. Palestinians said such Arab engagement with Israel betrayed their cause. The foreign ministers of the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt, joined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, held a summit in Israel on Sunday and Monday. Jordan did not attend. Story continues ISRAELI DEFENCE CHIEF VISITS AMMAN But in the latest flurry of public and secret talks in recent months by top Israeli and Jordanian officials, Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz met King Abdullah in Amman on Tuesday. Gantz discussed "the measures that Israel is planning to take in order to enable freedom of prayer" in Jerusalem and the West Bank, an Israeli statement said, without elaborating. Citing security concerns, Israel has imposed age limits on Muslim worshippers at Al-Aqsa during periods of tension and restricted Palestinian travel to Jerusalem from the West Bank, territory that it captured, along with the eastern part of the holy city, in a 1967 war. Relations between Israel and Jordan had become more frosty during right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu's 12-year run as Israeli prime minister, which ended last June. Israeli settlement building and then-U.S. President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem, a city at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, as Israel's capital in 2017 raised Jordanian concerns. Jerusalem is a particularly sensitive issue for Jordan's royal Hashemite family, which has custodianship of Muslim and Christian holy sites in the eastern part of the city, an area controlled by Jordanian forces from 1949 to 1967. (Reporting by Jeffrey Heller, Suleiman Al-Khalidi and Nayera AbdallahEditing by Jon Boyle, Gareth Jones, William Maclean) A newly released police report reveals a pregnant Jacksonville woman was Baker Acted and treated for paranoid schizophrenia days before officers said she murdered her younger sister. Action News Jax reported last week when Angielly Dominguez was charged with first-degree murder. An affidavit stated that she got in an argument with her sister, Omelly, before shots were fired at her New Jersey home. RELATED: Tragedy that couldve been avoided, says pregnant Jacksonville murder suspects fiance The police report said she is being treated as a paranoid schizophrenic, was off her medication and was getting increasingly aggressive towards family over the last six months. In the report, the officer stated that Dominguez began telling me something. However, the words and sentence structure did not make sense. He goes on to say Dominguez had trouble providing the current day of the week but insisted she was correct and everyone else was against her. STORY: Georgia health departments offering free STD screenings in April Dominguez was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital Friday, Mar. 18. Her fiance, Tony Miranda, said she was release 24 hours later. All of this information would have been available to police when Miranda reported to the Jacksonville Sheriffs Office that she took his car and guns Monday, Mar. 21, and started driving north. The officer on the case took down the report as a civil matter instead of criminal and didnt look into it further. A JSO representative explained to Action News Jaxs Robert Grant last week that because the couple was engaged, she had not stolen the vehicle and guns and therefore, had done nothing wrong. Its a tragedy that could have been avoided, Miranda said. Allow this unfortunate mishap of mine to allow these rules to be changed all over. STORY: Tragic ending to 24-hour search for a child leaves Putnam County family devastated Action News Jaxs law and safety expert Dale Carson said that under state law, when you are married, your belongings are split 50/50. There is no law, however, for those who are engaged. Story continues Is there a crime? I believe there is, he said. The best form of policing is to prevent crime from happening in the first place. A JSO representative confirmed Monday that the officers actions are being investigated. STAY UPDATED: Download the Action News Jax app for live updates on breaking stories Jeremy Kyle's TV comeback on talkTV has been confirmed. (ITV) Jeremy Kyle is set to make his television comeback on the new channel talkTV, it has been confirmed. The Jeremy Kyle Show was cancelled by ITV in May 2019 after guest Steve Dymond died a week after failing a lie detector test filmed for the reality show, and Kyle has not been seen on screens since. But News UK has now confirmed the 56-year-old talkRADIO presenter will join a line-up of presenters including Piers Morgan, Julia Hartley-Brewer, and Mike Graham on its new channel, which launches on Monday 25 April. A statement for the channel revealed: talkTVs primetime schedule will also be simulcast on talkRadio. And talkRadios roster of daytime talent, including Julia Hartley-Brewer, Mike Graham, Ian Collins and Jeremy Kyle, will be broadcast on talkTV. Read more: Jeremy Kyle speaks out on documentary which showed him mocking guests Jeremy Kyle's radio show is currently broadcast on talkRADIO TV. (talkRADIO) TalkRadio has seen fast growth in recent years across all platforms and has been broadcasting successfully on talkRadio TV since last year. Kyle currently presents the Drivetime slot on talkRadio. He recently spoke out after Channel 4 aired new documentary Jeremy Kyle Show: Death on Daytime, featuring ex-production staff claiming guests were lied to, baited and manipulated in order to provoke them into fighting on the show. Kyle, 56, said on his radio show: "I have said that I will not comment on the tragic death of Steve Dymond until the legal process has finished and that is the position that I will maintain. Watch: Jeremy Kyle addressed the C4 documentary on his radio show And when, and trust me there will be a time after the inquest, when it is right and proper for me to have my say. Because of course, there are two sides to every single story." At a preliminary hearing of the inquest into the death of Dymond, the coroner named Kyle as an "interested person" who, "may have caused or contributed to the death of Stephen Dymond. Dymond, 63, is believed to have taken his own life but a full inquest into his death has yet to take place. Story continues Steve Dymond was found dead in his home in Portsmouth days after filming an episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show in 2019. (Steve/Dymond/Facebook) The inquest was recently postponed due to a further family bereavement. In 2019 Kyle declined to appear before an inquiry by the Committee for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Death On Daytime featured behind the scenes footage of Kyle telling production staff, "'I don't understand, they're terrible f***ing guests, you've done it again, they're as thick as s***." Channel 4 said: Jeremy Kyle was approached for a response to the series. He did not provide a statement for broadcast. We will reflect his position in the film. An ITV statement said: "ITV does not accept the central allegation of this programme of a 'bad culture' within the production team. The Jeremy Kyle Show was accused of 'baiting and maipulating' guests. (ITV) Read more: Piers Morgan vows to cancel 'cancel culture' as he launches new TV show Uncensored "We note that the programme includes anonymous former production members claiming wrongdoing by themselves and others, without supporting evidence. ITV would never condone any of its production staff misleading or lying to guests." After Dymond's death from a drug overdose, Ofcom said programmes such as The Jeremy Kyle Show and Love Island need to make sure that they look after their contributors following concerns about mental health. For confidential emotional support at times of distress, contact The Samaritans at any time by calling 116 123 or emailing jo@samaritans.org. Joseph Hutchinson, in gray circle, is allegedly shown fighting with officers outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, in an image from a federal arrest affidavit. Joshua Doolin is identified inside the green circle. A federal judge allowed Joseph Hutchinson III, a defendant in the U.S. Capitol riot, to travel to Lakeland this week to celebrate his 26th birthday. Hutchinson, formerly of Lakeland, now lives in Albany, Georgia. He is charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding law-enforcement officers, violent entry and disorderly conduct on the U.S. Capitol grounds and other crimes. He is being prosecuted jointly with four associates, three of them Polk County residents. Hutchinsons pretrial release order placed him under a high intensity supervision program in the Middle District of Georgia. The order restricts him to home detention and allows travel only for employment, religious services and certain other activities. Separate trial?: Prosecution opposes separate trial for Jan. 6 suspect 'It's a political move': Relatives defend Lakeland siblings accused in U.S. Capitol riot Travel allowed: Judge refuses to jail Lakeland Capitol riot suspect ahead of his wedding celebration Hutchinson filed a motion in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking permission to travel to Lakeland on Wednesday and return to Georgia on Friday. Federal prosecutors objected to the request, citing the possibility that Hutchinson would meet with his co-defendants in Lakeland. In approving the request, Judge Carl Nichols wrote that Hutchinsons pretrial release order does not forbid him from meeting with his co-defendants. Nichols wrote that prosecutors must file a motion if they want to change Hutchinsons pretrial release conditions. Hutchinsons co-defendants include Olivia Pollock and Jonathan Pollock of Lakeland, Joshua Doolin of Polk City and Michael Perkins of Plant City. Jonathan Pollock remains a fugitive. This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Judge approves Jan. 6 defendant's travel to Lakeland for birthday Mar. 28A judge has granted a motion from Eliot Cutler's defense attorney to bar public access to court documents filed in Hancock County. Cutler, a former two-time candidate for Maine governor, was arrested Friday in Brooklin on four felony charges of possessing photographs and/or videos of child sexual abuse, or child pornography, involving a child under the age of 12. The arrest came two days after Maine State Police executed search warrants at Cutler's homes in Portland and Brooklin. The 75-year-old was released from Hancock County Jail in Ellsworth on Saturday after paying $50,000 cash bail. Cutler is a multi-millionaire who became wealthy as an attorney with expertise in environmental law. On Friday, Justice Robert Murray approved a motion by Cutler's defense attorney, Walter McKee, to seal the search warrant, the affidavit and the list of items seized by police when the search warrant was executed. Police have 10 days after executing a search warrant to file it in court, and they did not file it until Monday morning. By that time, Murray already granted McKee's motion to seal the file. This is an administrative week for court clerks' offices across the state, with the clerks' offices closed to the public from 8 a.m. to noon on weekdays. Hancock County District Attorney Matthew Foster issued a warrant for Cutler's arrest on Friday, two days after police searched Cutler's home on Naskeag Point Road. When police showed up at the house, officers witnessed Cutler inform his wife, Melanie, that he had child pornography and gave them access to at least one electronic device, Foster has said. Each count is a Class C felony that, with a conviction, is punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Whether anything was seized March 23 from Cutler's home on Pine St. in Portland, and when he might face similar charges in Cumberland County, was not clear on Monday. Cumberland County District Attorney Jonathan Sahrbeck said Monday morning the case was still under investigation. He declined to provide any further information about the investigation, including the legal justification for the warrant on Cutler's home, citing an ongoing case. He said he didn't know for sure when his office would finish investigating Cutler. Story continues The investigation into Cutler began with a tip in December, police said. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children informed Maine State Police that someone in Maine had either downloaded or uploaded a single illegal image. Bangor Daily News writer David Marino Jr. contributed to this story. More articles from the BDN Washington A federal judge in California on Monday ordered conservative attorney John Eastman to turn over a tranche of emails to the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and found that former President Donald Trump "more likely than not" illegally tried to impede official congressional proceedings on the day of the attack. In his 44-page decision involving the documents from Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University who played a key role in Trump's efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, U.S. District Judge David Carter wrote that based on the evidence, he finds it is "more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021." "Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history," he wrote. "Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower it was a coup in search of a legal theory. The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation's government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process." Eastman's legal fight with the House select committee came in response to a subpoena it issued to Chapman University in January for records, including emails, related to the 2020 presidential election or the January 6 assault. Eastman used his Chapman email account to communicate about efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and sought to withhold the documents from investigators, arguing they included information that would be protected under attorney-client privilege and attorney work-product privileges. He asked a federal district court to block the committee from enforcing its subpoena and stop Chapman from complying with the demand. John Eastman speaks at a news conference in Boulder, Colorado, on Thursday, April 29, 2021. / Credit: Andy Cross/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images Specifically at issue were emails exchanged between January 4, 2021, and January 7, 2021, some of which Eastman attempted to claim privilege over, assertions that were rejected by the committee. Story continues Of the 111 emails from those dates that Eastman said should be shielded from disclosure, Carter found just 10 contained privileged information and therefore should be withheld. The remaining 101 must be disclosed to the House select committee, he said. "At most, this case is a warning about the dangers of 'legal theories' gone wrong, the powerful abusing public platforms, and desperation to win at all costs," he wrote. "If Dr. Eastman and President Trump's plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself." While Carter determined it is "more likely than not" that Trump attempted to obstruct the joint session on January 6 and conspired with Eastman to do so, any decision on whether to charge the former president will ultimately be made by the Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland vowed in January that the department is "committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy." Charles Burnham, an attorney representing Eastman, said in a statement he intends to comply with the court's order. "Dr. Eastman has an unblemished record as an attorney and respectfully disagrees with the judge's findings," Burnham said in a statement. "Dr. Eastman asks all persons interested in this case to join him in calling upon the January 6th committee to release all the evidence so the courts and the public can reach accurate conclusions about the matters involved." Eastman was a driving force behind the legal strategy to justify efforts to stop the transfer of power, which centered on a plan for Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over the January 6 joint session, to reject electoral votes in key battleground states won by President Biden. Pence rebuffed the plan to reject state electoral votes, arguing he did not have the authority to carry it out. "The illegality of the plan was obvious," Carter wrote. "Our nation was founded on the peaceful transition of power, epitomized by George Washington laying down his sword to make way for democratic elections. Ignoring this history, President Trump vigorously campaigned for the vice president to single-handedly determine the results of the 2020 election. ... Every American and certainly the President of the United States knows that in a democracy, leaders are elected, not installed. With a plan this 'BOLD,' President Trump knowingly tried to subvert this fundamental principle." In his decision, Carter identified tranches of Eastman's emails to be released that involved the plan for Pence to reject or delay the counting of state electoral votes; alleged voter fraud at the state level; documents prepared for members of Congress; third-party communications; and news or press releases. Of the documents for Congress, seven emails name specific senators as the intended recipients, which were "created to persuade federal legislators to take action," Carter said. Also among the documents to be disclosed to the committee is an email chain to Eastman forwarding a draft memo written for Rudy Giuliani, Trump's attorney, that recommended Pence reject electors from battleground states on January 6. "This may have been the first time members of President Trump's team transformed a legal interpretation of the Electoral Count Act into a day-by-day plan of action," Carter wrote. "The draft memo pushed a strategy that knowingly violated the Electoral Count Act, and Dr. Eastman's later memos closely track its analysis and proposal. The memo is both intimately related to and clearly advanced the plan to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress." Of the 10 documents that will not be handed over to committee, Carter said none are "pivotal" to its investigation. Nine include "opinions and discussions about trial strategy in ongoing lawsuits," and the 10th is an email that includes Eastman's thoughts on the evening of January 6 about potential future actions since Pence refused to set aside electoral votes. The panel had told the court in an earlier filing as part of the dispute with Eastman that it had evidence that Trump and his allies engaged in a "criminal conspiracy" by attempting to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election. Eastman was among those who advised Trump in the wake of the presidential election and was summoned by the House select committee to testify about the events leading up to the January 6 riots. He declined to turn over documents and, during his deposition, asserted his Fifth Amendment right 146 times. After he declined to answer questions from House investigators, the committee issued a subpoena to Chapman for Eastman's communications. Ukraine war through the eyes of a photojournalist Walmart ending cigarette sales in some stores Dollywood closes ride after deadly Florida accident Editors note: This article contains mentions of sexual assault. The complainants name has been withheld to protect her identity. A former Pocono Mountain Regional Police officer who had sex with a woman after he arrested her for drunk driving on Oct. 16, 2019, was found not guilty on all counts related to sexual assault. The womans blood alcohol content was nearly twice the legal limit by the time corporal Steven Mertz pulled her over for an expired registration. She gripped the frame of her Mitsubishi to stay upright and failed three consecutive field sobriety tests, Mertz said. The corporal handcuffed her and helped her into the back of his patrol car shortly before 3 a.m. She was pretty, he testified later. And she cried a lot. As they drove from the site of her arrest to the Pennsylvania State Police barracks, Mertz began to reassure her: "Well figure this out." One hour later, Mertz had sex with the 26-year-old woman against his patrol car in an empty cul-de-sac near her home. Detectives found Mertzs DNA on a vaginal swab taken by the woman, as well as traces of her saliva on the crotch of his uniform pants. The prosecutor said Mertz compelled the young woman to have sex with him in exchange for not filing the DUI charge against her. I just took it," the woman said in a text to her best friend after Mertz returned her home. "He told me he would make this go away. Twelve jurors, split into six men and six women, returned the unanimous "not guilty" verdict on nine of 11 charges against Mertz after deliberating for just over twohours Monday. He was found guilty of bribery, a third-degree felony, and obstruction of justice, a second-degree misdemeanor. Assistant district attorney Michael Mancuso shook his head once the decision was read. The verdict concluded a weeklong trial that blended emotional testimony with line-by-line narration of messages shared between Mertz and his accuser. Youre a thousand percent sure Im not getting the DUI from last night? the woman asked in one. Yes, Mertz texted back. Im sure. Positive. The report would get lost among all his other reports, he said. It was their secret. Story continues Mertz testified later that he was lying to the woman. He said he planned to file the DUI charge but was "stringing her along" because he wanted to keep having sex with her. Mertz, who was 53 at the time of the incident, argued that his role as her arresting officer did not constitute as an imbalance of power, nor did her impairment preclude her from being able to consent. Brett Riegel, Mertzs attorney, called the on-duty sex unforgivable from a job perspective, but insisted that no crime had been committed. After all, he argued, it had been the woman who asked Mertz if he wanted her to perform oral sex. The offer was born out of fear, the woman testified. She said Mertz drove her home after processing her blood alcohol content at the PSP barracks but didn't let her out of the car. He suggested they go somewhere private, she said, then drove to the cul-de-sac a street away. She said the expectation felt clear. When Mertz parked and blocked her exit from the patrol car again, she asked if he wanted oral sex. According to her, he responded: "That will help." Mertz, a third-generation law enforcement officer, denied ever making the comment. He was put on paid administrative leave on Oct. 17, 2019, but resigned on Oct. 21 when a detective with the DA's office filed official criminal charges against him. He will be formally sentenced for the bribery and obstruction charge at 9 a.m. on June 28. Hannah Phillips is the public safety reporter at Pocono Record. Reach her at hphillips@gannett.com. This article originally appeared on Pocono Record: Ex-cop accused of raping Poconos woman on duty found not guilty WASHINGTON (AP) The Supreme Court on Tuesday cast doubt on Texas' claim that it can't be sued by a former state trooper who says he was forced out of his job when he returned from Army service in Iraq. The justices heard arguments in a dispute over a federal law that was enacted in 1994 in the wake of the Persian Gulf war to strengthen job protections for returning service members. Over 90 minutes, the justices discussed the Vietnam War, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Alexander Hamilton and even Hamilton, the musical, as they tried to sort through whether states are shielded from lawsuits filed by veterans who complain that their jobs were not protected, in violation of the federal law. At the heart of the case is Congress' power to wage war and states' acknowledgments that they lacked similar authority, both laid out in the Constitution. We don't know what's going to be happening in the next 50 years. We don't know what's going to be happening in the next 50 days in terms of national security and personnel, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said. The court is weighing an appeal by Le Roy Torres, who spent a year in Iraq and was discharged as a captain after nearly 19 years in the U.S. Army Reserve. Torres says he suffered lung damage from exposure to open burn pits on his base in Iraq. The state and Torres dispute what happened when he returned to Texas, unable to resume his job as a state trooper because of the damage to his lungs. He eventually resigned and later filed his lawsuit. A state appellate court dismissed it, and the justices stepped in. The Biden administration is backing Torres' right to sue the state. The federal government, which also has the right to sue states under the law, has only sued 109 times since 2004 and just twice since 2015, Justice Department lawyer Christopher Michel acknowledged in response to a question from Justice Samuel Alito. But the numbers are much larger when you look at how many soldiers claims have been successfully resolved without going to court, Michel said. Story continues Fifteen other Republican-led states are calling on the court to side with Texas and rule out private lawsuits like Torres'. Congress first allowed returning service members to sue states to keep their jobs in 1974, recognizing discrimination because of opposition to the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War is what made the statute necessary, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. And opposition to a future war could result in a similar situation, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said. Let's say we get involved in Ukraine and states say we shouldn't be, Barrett said. The discussion briefly turned to the theater when Justice Stephen Breyer invoked Hamilton's You'll Be Back to illustrate that George Washington's frustration with the states' reluctance to pay the Continental Army led to the establishment of a national defense. George III says, Theyll be back. Wait and see. They'll come crawling back to me,' Breyer said, capturing the sentiment, but not the lyrics to the song. Just last week, the court allowed the Navy to take account of sailors' vaccination status in deciding on deployments, narrowing a lower court order. Three justices, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, dissented from the high court's order. Gorsuch and Thomas seemed the most amenable to Texas' arguments Tuesday. I'm perhaps not as enamored of Hamilton as some are, Thomas said. Thomas again took part remotely Tuesday, following a nearly week-long hospital stay for what the court described as an infection. The court has not elaborated on the nature of the infection and there was no explanation of why Thomas was not in the courtroom. A man allegedly trespassing on private property in Trimble County was shot by police and sent to the hospital last week, according to Kentucky State Police. State police said the shooting happened at roughly 8:30 p.m. on March 22 after they got a call from an individual in Madison, In., saying someone was trespassing on property they owned on Moffett Road. State police and the Trimble County Sheriffs office showed up at the property. Responding officers found a man with a gun, according to police. A trooper identified himself and gave multiple demands for the man to drop his weapon, but the man didnt comply. State police said the man pointed his pistol at the trooper, and the officer responded by firing at the man. Troopers gave medical aid to the man until emergency medical services arrived, police said. The man was taken to the University of Louisville Hospital by helicopter, according to state police. No other citizens were hurt. State police didnt identify the man who was shot or any law enforcement officers involved. The Kewanee Police Department conducted an investigation March 22 that led to the arrest of Kathy Chanton-Khemphomma, 30, of Davenport, Iowa, for drug-related offenses. A KPD press release said it was determined that the suspect had previously sold prescription pills to a teenage juvenile earlier that day. The father of the teenage juvenile later contacted law enforcement after finding the identity of the person that sold drugs to his child. The father arranged to meet with the suspect to purchase more pills. After the suspect arrived at the location, the father contacted law enforcement to confront the suspect. Kewanee police officers arrived on scene and conducted an investigation. Officers took statements from the father and suspect, and also examined text messages and phone call logs. "It was determined that there was probable cause that Chanton-Khemphomma had illegally sold prescription pills to the juvenile and was attempting to sell more pills," the release said. Chanton-Khemphomma was arrested and transported to the Kewanee Police Department. She was eventually transported to the Henry County Jail on the preliminary charges of delivery of a controlled substance (Class 3 Felony) and contributing to the delinquency of a minor (Class 4 Felony). The Class 3 Felony carries a potential sentence of 2-5 years in the Illinois Department of Corrections. Her bond was initially set at $100,000. A preliminary hearing was held March 28 where probable cause was found and a pre-trial conference set. This article originally appeared on Star Courier: Kewanee police arrest woman for selling prescription drugs to juvenile A wanted suspect out of Jessamine County may have been involved in a single-vehicle accident in Lexington on Monday, according to law enforcement. The accident happened around 10 a.m. on Tates Creek Road, according to Lexington police. The vehicle flipped on its side and the driver had to be removed before being sent to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, police said. The Jessamine County Sheriffs office believes the man involved in the accident may be Justin Waldrop, a wanted suspect out of Jessamine County with three active warrants for his arrest. Sgt. Cecil Upton III with the Jessamine County Sheriffs office said they hadnt confirmed if the driver in the Monday morning crash was Waldrop, but the sheriffs office was working to figure that out. When the collision occurred, obviously the primary initiative was patient care, Upton said. Lexington police said the driver gave false identification information on scene and was not at the hospital when officers followed up to speak with him. The vehicle involved was reported stolen from the Mt. Hebron area in Garrard County earlier Monday morning, according to the Garrard County Sheriffs office. Waldrop is a suspect in the theft of the vehicle. Waldrop has been the subject of a large search since Sunday, according to Upton. Sunday afternoon, deputies were dispatched to the area of Bailey Way in Nicholasville for a report of an unwanted subject, which was later determined to be Waldrop, Upton said. Waldrop allegedly left the scene in a different stolen vehicle before deputies arrived, according to Upton. Witnesses described the vehicle to deputies, who later found it and Waldrop on West Brown Street in Nicholasville. Deputies tried to apprehend Waldrop but he resisted, Upton said. They tried to taser him but it was unsuccessful. After gaining control of the vehicle, Waldrop put it in reverse, struck a deputy with the open passenger side door and fled the scene. Story continues Upton said all officers involved are okay. The stolen vehicle has since been recovered by Lexington police, according to Upton. Waldrop now has a new warrant out for his arrest on charges of first degree wanton endangerment of a police officer, third degree assault on a police officer, fleeing or evading police and receiving stolen property worth $10,000 or more. Anyone with information on Waldrops location is encouraged to contact the Jessamine County Sheriffs office at 859-885-4139. Anonymous tips can be submitted to tips@jessaminesheriff.org. In New York City and across the U.S., David Shalleck-Klein believes child welfare agencies routinely violate the Constitution by carrying out unlawful searches and family separations with disastrous consequences for the low-income Black and Hispanic families they disproportionately investigate. Having worked for five years as an attorney at Bronx Defenders, he would repeatedly see the Administration for Childrens Services, NYCs child welfare agency, blatantly violating familys rights, he said. Sign up here for The 74s daily newsletter. Donate here to support The 74's independent journalism. They would intimidate families to gain entry into their homes, he said, conduct intrusive searches, including asking children to take off their clothes to look for bruises and, in the most dire cases, separate youth from their parents without judicial approval by acting under whats known as emergency removal powers. Yet in hundreds of instances each year, according to city data, judges would then deem the agencys use of those emergency powers unlawful. The attorney last week launched what he says is the nations first civil rights organization dedicated to fighting back against such violations: the Family Justice Law Center. Theres a long tradition of groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union or the NAACP Legal Defense Fund bringing lawsuits against alleged government wrongdoing, but theres no comparison to the child welfare system for when families rights are violated, said Shalleck-Klein. This is the first organization in the country that is going to be dedicated to going on the offense and suing government agencies when they violate families rights, he told The 74. Were filling a gaping hole in advocacy for parents. The Center will bring cases against ACS including alleged Fourth Amendment violations for illegal searches and seizures, he said. It will seek financial penalties to compensate families for their damages and will request injunctions against ACS practices it says are illegal. Story continues Theyre not going to just get a slap on the wrist. Theyre very literally going to have to pay for their mistakes, said Shalleck-Klein. These types of lawsuits are hard, he admits, but said hes confident that were going to be able to have not just success for individual clients, but also transformative systems change success. As many as 73,000 NYC children are the subject of ACS investigations each year, 87% of whom are Black or Hispanic. Although 23% of youth in the city are Black, they make up 56% of children removed from their families and placed in foster care. In 2019, out of more than 1,750 emergency family separations, over a quarter were immediately rejected by a Family Court judge and still more were thrown out in the days and weeks to come meaning hundreds of children were unnecessarily put through the trauma of family separation, which studies show is associated with elevated risks of mental health challenges, incarceration and even early death. David Shalleck-Klein (Bronx Defenders) When ACS removes a child from a parent without a court order, if they did not have legal justification for that [removal], that is a constitutional violation, said Shalleck-Klein. We know that it is happening routinely. ACS follows federal, state and city laws, and respects the constitutional rights of parents and children, an ACS spokesperson said in an email to The 74, adding that the agency is committed to being responsive to the needs of children and families. ACS is required by law to investigate all reports it receives, the spokesperson said, noting that the total number of children entering foster care since 2017 has dropped by more than a third. Fewer than 2% of ACS investigations in 2021 resulted in child separation, the agency said. It is deeply concerning to us, the spokesperson added, that, year after year, there are dramatic racial and ethnic disparities in the reports ACS receives from the state. The agency is working to provide child care professionals with implicit bias trainings and education on ways to support families without calling the states child abuse hotline, it said. Across the country, Black youth are more likely than not to experience a child welfare investigation, with 53% of all Black Americans undergoing the experience before they turn 18. Even if the investigations find no evidence of abuse or neglect, charges can remain on parents records for years, jeopardizing job prospects in fields like education and child care. Meanwhile, many white families hardly feel the presence of child protective services at all. A former ACS caseworker spoke with Mother Jones in 2020, relaying that, once, when she was looking for an elusive parent, she saw a white woman nearby and asked if she knew the parents whereabouts. The neighbor had never even heard of the caseworkers agency. I never met one single Black family that asked me, Whats ACS? the caseworker reflected. Theres one group of people walking around not knowing that ACS exists, and theres another group of people walking around living in fear of ACS. Related: NYC Schools Reported Over 9,600 Students to Child Protective Services Since Aug. 2020. Is It the Wrong Tool for Families Traumatized by COVID? In fall 2020, Harlem community advocate Joyce McMillan interviewed New York City residents in majority-Black, Hispanic and Asian-American neighborhoods about their experiences with the agency and turned their responses into posters that now hang throughout the city. They tore my family apart, one parent said. I felt like the police had come to my house once ACS came because they investigated my household like the police, said another. JMacForFamilies Out of the 500 residents to whom McMillan spoke, all but two or three, she said, knew about the agency. Youth and parents alike were haunted by their experiences, she said. For children, ACS is like the boogeyman. They run and hide when ACS knocks on the door. They think theyre going to be taken away from their parents, explained McMillan, who is executive director of JMacForFamilies. Her organization seeks to abolish what it calls the family regulation system and calls for the government to support rather than punish families living in poverty. She now sits on the Family Justice Law Centers community advisory board. Joyce McMillan at a June 2020 march in Brooklyn to defund ACS. (Erik McGregor/Getty Images) The new legal organization, she told The 74, will be a game-changer for families, finally giving them the opportunity to fight back when they believe their rights are violated. Families will have resources to deal with the harm, she said. ACS, we call them the family police for a reason. Until the cameras started rolling, people didnt believe that Black people got shot in the back and werent actually carrying a gun. And its the same thing with ACS. So I hope that this work thats being done will bring out the truth. Attorney David Bloomfield, who represented NYC as an assistant corporation counsel, said on a case-by-case basis, I think there are winnable situations of improper separation, but system injunctions against ACS might be a heavier lift. Still, the Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center law professor said it can have a chilling effect on improper conduct if theres able counsel for the families. The Family Justice Law Center has been selected for in-kind funding and guidance from the Urban Justice Centers Social Justice Accelerator program. Legal scholars from Stanford, Harvard, New York University and other institutions sit on its academic advisory board. ACS obtains court permission to enter homes in under 1% of all investigations. In most other searches, parents give the caseworker verbal permission to enter their space. But if a caseworker bangs on the door saying that they will return with the police if the family doesnt let them in, and if the parents dont know their legal rights, Was that really a voluntary entry into the home? asks Shalleck-Klein. [Child protective services] may seek the assistance of the police if CPS determine that immediate protective measures are necessary, the agency said. Similarly, 27% of emergency child removals get immediately struck down by a Family Court judge. While the emergency removal power is vital when youth are in imminent danger, said the attorney, its abuse can represent an unconstitutional seizure. ACS knows theres no consequence for them doing something illegal, he said. If they violate families rights, what happens is that the child is returned home. But theres nothing in the moment stopping them or giving them any pause from conducting an emergency removal when theres not just cause. We hope that the [Family Justice Law Center] will inject more accountability into the process, he continued, because they are now put on notice that they cant act with impunity and their illegal actions will be challenged in court. Shalleck-Klein hopes the Centers work will lead to fewer children in the foster care system and shorter durations for those who are, while not worsening, or even decreasing, the rates of child maltreatment. In other words, keeping as many children home safely with their parents as we can, he said. The goal parallels the impacts of other changes in the Family Court system. When the legal team representing defendant parents includes social work staff and parent advocates, foster stays were significantly reduced with no change in child safety outcomes, a 2019 NYU study found. And similarly, pilot programs that boosted legal defense for families led to major savings for municipalities by avoiding costly foster care when poverty-induced issues might otherwise have been mistaken for parental neglect, a 2020 evaluation from Casey Family Programs revealed. McMillan hopes the plan succeeds, not just for the children who might avoid unneeded family separation, but also for those who indeed are suffering from abuse at home. If ACS spends less time mistaking poverty-related issues for abusive parenting, then maybe they will focus on children who actually need help, said the advocate. Related: Sign up for The 74s newsletter Marijuana is classified as a Schedule 1 substance, which puts it in the same category as deadly, highly addictive drugs like crack and heroin, said Lt. Gov. John Fetterman. Fetterman tells Channel 11 the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act is a game-changer. He says the bill would change marijuanas drug classification, impose a federal tax on marijuana sales and eliminate criminal penalties. The legislation would also give marijuana stores access to banks with the change in classification. I dont believe it goes far enough. I think it should be legalized and let each respective state create their own marketplace, much like states like Colorado, and any number of states have already done so, said Fetterman. Some Pittsburghers agree. I feel like its something that they shouldve done a long time ago. Im standing in front of a liquor store. its not worse than that as far as Im concerned, said Matt Banks. If they legalize it, that should be the first thing they should do, release anybody who was locked up on a cannabis or marijuana charge, and definitely expunge everybodys record that has anything to do with, thats for sure, said Steven Tarrant. Fetterman tells Channel 11 getting rid of the stigma on the federal level is important, and will help states like Pennsylvania with more tax dollars. TRENDING NOW: Deadly mistake: Former nurse found guilty in patients death Elderly woman killed in Robinson Township house fire identified Taking sides: Celebrities react to Will Smith slap VIDEO: RAW: Small plane slides off runway at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport DOWNLOAD the Channel 11 News app for breaking news alerts A Lincoln High School student was arrested Tuesday and charged with having a handgun-style pellet gun on school property, according to the Leon County Sheriff's Office. This is at least the 10th incident of a student bringing some kind of weapon to campus in the 2021-2022 school year. Guns in Tallahassee schools: How many weapon incidents have there been in Leon County schools in the 2021-22 school year? Student killed in shooting: 'Loved by so many': Fundraiser set after Rickards student, 17, killed in weekend shooting Governor mentions Leon schools: Gov. DeSantis calls out Leon County as he signs what opponents call 'Don't Say Gay' bill The 16-year-old student was seen with the pellet gun at Tom Brown Park at 11:30 a.m. at lunch time. When he returned to school campus, a school resource deputy took the pellet gun from the student's car, according to a press release. Lincoln was not put on lockdown, and the pellet gun was confiscated. The student was arrested and charged with possession of a weapon on school property and sent to the Juvenile Assessment Center. Leon County Schools has open lunch on its high school campuses, and students are allowed to leave and come back to school, said Chris Petley, a spokesperson for the district. Contact Ana Goni-Lessan at AGoniLessan@tallahassee.com and follow her on Twitter @goni_lessan. Want more news coverage? If you're already a subscriber, thank you! If not, please subscribe using the link at the top of the page and help keep the news you care about coming. This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Leon County student arrested, charged with bringing gun to high school Lindsay Lohan Celebrates Engagement lindsaylohan/Instagram Lindsay Lohan is getting ready to say "I do." On Monday, the 35-year-old actress and fiance Bader Shammas celebrated their engagement with a sweet treat in Kuwait. In a sweet photo the star shared on Instagram, the pair smile as they stand behind a lavish cake that reads, "He asked ... She said yes," with a silhouette of a couple kissing front and center. An elaborate icing design of an opened jewelry box with a ring sits atop the cake, which is complete with two large sparklers. "My forever ," Lohan captioned the loving photo. The Mean Girls alum announced her engagement in November, sharing a gallery of photos smiling with Shammas. RELATED: Lindsay Lohan Surprises TikTok with Pronunciation of Her Last Name in New Video Showing off her ring, Lohan wrote in the caption, "My love. My life. My family. My future," and included the hashtag "#love" and a diamond ring emoji. Last month, she said she has started planning her big day. While on Extra, host Rachel Lindsay asked Lohan "What kind of bride do you think you'll be? Are you going to be low-key? Are you going to be all-in? I'm not going to call you a bridezilla, I'm not going to do that!" RELATED: Paris Hilton Congratulates Lindsay Lohan on Her Engagement: 'I Am Genuinely Very Happy for Her' "I'm definitely not like that," said Lohan. "I'm more low-key. Even on my birthday, I want to make sure everyone else is good and then I can be okay. So I'll be more like that." "I'm looking at destinations," Lohan continued. "I've already started talking to a friend of mine about the dress. But I want to do things right and I want to pace everything. But it's an exciting time. I'm very girly, so...." RELATED VIDEO: Lindsay Lohan Announces Engagement to Fiance Bader Shammas: 'My Future' Never miss a story sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. The Bachelorette alum then asked Lohan, "Dress or dresses? Are we doing multiple?" to which Lohan teased, "Take a guess dresses!" Lohan said outfit changes are "the best part." Shammas works in finance as the Assistant Vice President at Credit Suisse in Dubai, where Lohan has called home for the last seven years. They have been dating for more than three years. Mar. 29A new Maine-based toothpaste brand is working to take out more than plaque buildup and bad breath. It's coming for cancer, too. Believe Oral Care, founded by Harpswell resident Adam Hewison, is a nonprofit toothpaste company formed with the sole purpose of raising money for cancer charities, hospitals and research. The oral care company will donate 100 percent of its profits to charities including Maine Cancer Foundation, the American Cancer Society and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Hewison said. It's a personal matter for Hewison, who was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer in 2017. The news was "all the kinds of things you don't want to hear," he said. But it didn't take long for the naturally optimistic Hewison's outlook to shift from "pity party" to opportunity, he said. "I believe this is something given to me for a reason," said Hewison, a retired floor trader and financial expert. "The reason, I believe, was to help other people." The toothpaste side of the equation didn't happen immediately. Hewison is the first to admit that he has no experience with toothpaste other than its role as the minty goo he uses to brush his teeth. It was on an anniversary trip to Maui with his wife, with the idea of helping people percolating in the back of his mind, that inspiration struck. They were watching the sunset. Everyone around them was happy and smiling. Seeing so many sets of pearly whites on display triggered something in his brain, Hewison said, and he thought, "Maybe that's it. Maybe it's a toothpaste." So he went from there. Hewison teamed up with Pamela Hurley-Moser, founder of Hurley Travel Experts in Portland, and Reed Allen, co-founder of R.E.D.D., a Maine-made energy bar brand. "It's important if you go on this cancer journey to believe you're going to get better," Hewison said. Thus, Believe Oral Care was born. Story continues The products a mint toothpaste, a children's vanilla toothpaste and a mouthwash are advertised as all-natural and contain black seed oil as an anti-inflammatory for gums. Each costs just under $10. Like some other natural toothpastes on the market, Believe products don't contain fluoride, the cavity-fighting ingredient in most oral care brands. Believe Oral Care is unique in that it's not a one-time fundraiser from an established brand, said Ray Ruby, director of development at the Maine Cancer Foundation. Instead, it's an ongoing effort from a new brand with fundraising at its core. Ruby said the foundation has not yet received any funds from Believe. The toothpaste and mouthwash are both good products, he said, adding that he's cheering for Hewison. "I hope it's successful and supports the work of other organizations like ours," he said. "That would be wonderful." Believe Oral Care is currently sold at Morning Glory Natural Foods in Brunswick, Royal River Natural Foods in Freeport and Bath Natural Market. Hewison hopes to see the toothpaste and mouthwash on shelves in Hannaford and other chains by the end of the year. His goals for Believe go beyond just seeing the product on store shelves. Hewison wants to see his company dominate the toothpaste industry. It's a David and Goliath situation, he said, and the odds are stacked against them. Believe isn't exactly a budget toothpaste. Online, both toothpaste flavors and the mouthwash retail for $9.89 apiece. But with enough momentum, Hewison believes the company can make it happen. "I hope it's in my lifetime, but it may not be," he said. Hewison said his long-term goal is for the company to also generate enough revenue to fund its own independent research. At some point, the company's charitable efforts may extend beyond just cancer research, he said, and could include anything from homelessness to food insecurity. Toothpaste is just the latest venture for Hewison, who has seemingly dabbled in a little bit of everything in his 76 years. In England, he trained under famed hairdresser Vidal Sassoon in the 1960s and later helped get the New York City salon up and running. He also spent several years as a floor trader in Chicago, then Switzerland. Hewison started an advisory service for banks in Maryland, and launched INO.com, an online market analysis and trading tool. He briefly owned a wine shop and restaurant. There, he got the idea for a self-aerating wine bottle that he hopes will hit the market soon. The list goes on. Like everything else he's done, Hewison said, he started by "winging it" and holding onto the firm belief that it will all work out. He declined to provide any sales data, and the three local markets that carry the product have only had it for a few days or weeks. Despite this, Tracee Pushard, owner of Royal River Natural Foods, said it's already selling well. "Most people want to do good; they just oftentimes don't know how to do that," she said. "This is a very easy way to do that." Black seed oil is also very popular right now, Pushard noted, which she expects will make the toothpaste even more attractive to customers. She's happy to support Hewison's cause. "We were very touched by the story and what he wants to do," she said. "How can you say no to someone who wants to work on fighting cancer and is donating 100 percent of proceeds to cancer research? We were all totally on board." A man is dead after gunfire rang out in South Memphis Monday evening, according to the Memphis Police Department. MPD said the shooting happened around 6:11 p.m. on South Orleans St. That man was rushed to Regional One Hospital in critical condition but died from his gunshot wounds less than two hours later, police said. The gunman sped away from the scene of the shooting in a silver Nissan Altima with drive-out tags, according to police. Memphis Police urge anyone with information about the shooter to call Crime Stoppers at 901-528-CASH. Any information that leads to an arrest, in this case, could be worth up to $2,000. Download the FOX13 Memphis app to receive alerts from breaking news in your neighborhood. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD Trending stories: When Rumbidzai Mangwende decided to apply for the Elijah Cummings Youth Program she didnt know what to expect. But much to the now 20-year-olds surprise, she gained lifelong friends, mentors and invaluable experience that prepared her for life. There were so many milestones the program provided me with that I wouldnt have had access to because of my social or economical background, Mangwende said. This program gave me the empowerment that people do want to hear my voice. Nearly 25 years ago, the late Rep. Elijah Cummings worked with the Baltimore Jewish Council to create the Elijah Cummings Youth Program, a two-year fellowship program offered to rising juniors in high school who live or go to school in Marylands 7th congressional district, which encompasses just over half of Baltimore City and parts of Baltimore and Howard counties. The fellowship aims to help the teens become leaders and promote greater religious and ethnic understanding. Every spring, about 60 kids apply for about a dozen openings, said Kathleen St. Villier Hill, the programs executive director. The application process is rigorous, requiring letters of recommendation and an interview with the board of directors. Before Cummings died in 2019, he met every interviewee, Hill said, and if they were accepted into the program, he also wrote each student a letter of recommendation for college. Rep. Kweisi Mfume, who succeeded Cummings in the 7th District in 2020, has since stepped into the role. Once accepted, students attend twice a week meetings where they learn skills such as storytelling, to help them land jobs, and how to podcast. They also give back to the community by doing neighborhood clean-up events or preparing for their 3 1/2-week trip to Israel where students get to meet with another group of youths from that country. And although the program is supported by the Baltimore Jewish Council, Villier Hill said most youths who apply do not come from a Jewish background. Story continues We are trying to build bridges between different communities, Villier Hill said. The whole idea is how can you build relationships with people who are different from yourself? Prior to joining the Baltimore Jewish Council as the fellowships executive director five years ago, Villier Hill spent nine years at For Love of Children in Washington D.C. While there, she managed a college access and success program for 200 students and helped enhance program offerings for middle school, high school and postsecondary students. Villier Hill, originally from Montgomery County, had moved to Howard County and was looking for a shorter commute than her trek to DC every day. When she found the job posting for the Elijah Cummings Youth Program, she knew it was perfect. I believe strongly in the power of using out-of-school time spaces, like ECYP, to enrich and empower the lives of young people, she said. And at ECYP, I get to work alongside the kids. I dont just work with or for them. Mangwende, who is now a junior at Cornell University, said she still remembers her interview for the program. The Randallstown native said her stomach was in knots, knowing that Cummings was sitting at the other end of the table. But she said that interview was the start of her understanding the importance of cultivating her story and being able to use her voice to tell it. Now studying finance, Mangwende said the fellowship thanks to trips to Congress, the Annapolis State House and Baltimore city hall gave her the ability to be confident in unfamiliar situations. She also absorbed the importance of not being afraid to ask questions or lean on others for support. I learned so much about how to work with people who are different from you, she said. I was taught how to take a problem and try to solve it but also be open to other solutions. In addition to the life skills Mangwende learned during her participation in the program from 2017 to 2019, she also gained lifelong friends. One fellow from her class recently asked her to be a godmother. Another she talks with on an almost daily basis. And then theres a group of them who are talking about taking another trip abroad together. She even refers to Villier Hill as auntie. These are people I hope to see at my wedding and that I want at big life events, she said. They have actually become family over time. This article is part of our Newsmaker series, which profiles notable people in the Baltimore region who are having an impact in our diverse communities. If youd like to suggest someone who should be profiled, please send their name and a short description of what they are doing to make a difference to: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Editor Kamau High at khigh@baltsun.com. The next round in the fight over outdoor dining in Bostons North End played out inside Bostons City Hall on Tuesday. Thats where Mayor Michelle Wu held a news conference to address this years program for outdoor dining in Bostons North End. Mayor Wu now says the city is open to giving waivers to certain North End restaurants who might not be able to afford a $7,500 city fee to set up for outside dining. The North End is the only section of city where the fee is being applied. The mayor says its a quality of life issue for North End residents and unique to that neighborhood. Equity does not mean equality, said Mayor Wu about the North End only fee. I know, we all want the same thing. We all want each neighborhood to be safe and thriving. Businesses granted hardship waivers could see the fee dropped to $3,500 to $5,000. The city said it is also open to allowing businesses to take part in the outdoor dining program for fewer months, and pay $1,500 a month, and not a lump sum for the entire season. The City will determine whether an establishment qualifies for a discount based on their location, the size of their patio space, and if the establishment does not have a liquor license. Mayor Wu was joined by State Representative Aaron Michlewitz, State Senator and City Councilor Lydia Edwards, and two North End restaurant owners inside the Eagle Room near the mayors office, supporting the updated plan. Outside the Eagle Room, other North End business owners were protesting the fee. They were prevented from entering the Eagle Room by several Boston Police officers. North End business owners being denied entry into citys 2p news conference about outdoor dining program. Business owners gathered outside Eagle Room where Mayor Wu set to speak momentarily #Boston25 pic.twitter.com/uk5piC0O7y Drew Karedes (@DrewKaredes) March 29, 2022 The contentious issue has been playing out for several weeks, since the mayor announced plans to allow for the return of outdoor dining across the city, except for the North End. Story continues Mayor Wu announces the return of outdoor dining to the city of Boston The City of Boston then announced North End restaurants were eligible to take part in the program, if they agreed to a $7,500 fee and to a later opening for outdoor patios in that area. A city spokesperson told Boston 25 that the changes were made after feedback from the North End community. North End restaurants facing $7,500 fee for outdoor dining Some restaurant owners then threatened the city with a lawsuit. In the city of Boston there are 1100 restaurants, our mayor is targeting 100, said George Mendoza, owner of Vinoteca di Monica. North End restaurants united against outdoor dining fee, threatening lawsuit Mayor Wu responded last week by threatening to rescind the offer altogether for the North End. Many North End residents have called for the ending of outdoor dining altogether in the neighborhood, Mayor Wu wrote. If a critical mass of restaurant owners also believe this program is unworkable as proposed, then I am prepared to rescind North End outdoor dining. She better roll up her sleeves because were ready, said Jorge Mendoza, owner of Monicas. Shes going to hear from our attorney in the form of a letter first and then we are going to sue the city of Boston for the unjust treatment of Italian businesses here in the North End. Mayor Wu prepared to rescind outdoor dining in the North End The deadline to apply for this years outdoor dining program pilot is April 10th. Boston 25 News will be at the mayors news conference. Watch for live updates on Boston 25. This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available. Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW News Vietnam Vietnams GDP up 5.03 percent in first quarter Mar. 29An Ohio U.S. Senate Republican primary debate will be happening soon on the Miami University campus in Oxford. The debate is free and open to the public. Participants who will be there include five candidates for the Republican nomination: Matt Dolan, Mike Gibbons, Josh Mandel, Jane Timken and J.D. Vance. The event is 7-8 p.m. Tues., April 5 in the Armstrong Student Center's Wilks Theatre. People who wish to attend will need to get tickets by today. The moderator will be reporter Sheree Paolello of WLWT News 5. "This is the third and final debate between the candidates and the only one in southwest Ohio," states a news release from Miami University. The event is a collaboration between Miami University's Menard Family Center for Democracy and WLWT News 5. "This year, Ohio is a key battleground for control of the U.S. Senate, and this debate will help voters throughout the region to learn more about both the candidates who are vying to represent us in Washington and the issues that will define American politics in the years ahead," said John Forren, associate professor and chair of the Department of Justice and Community Studies, and executive director of the Menard Family Center for Democracy. The university's role in this forum is strictly non-partisan, Forren said. "The Menard Family Center regularly hosts candidate debates and discussions involving both Democratic and Republican party candidates and is aimed at promoting civic and political engagement in general rather than any particular partisan or ideological agenda," the news release states. "Much of the Center's work aims to promote civic dialogue across ideological and political lines, and events like this provide community members regardless of their political affiliation a valuable opportunity to learn more about politics and civic affairs," he said. Event rules Large bags, signs, campaign materials, noisemakers, water bottles and video recording are not permitted. Doors open at 5:30 p.m., and close promptly at 6:30 p.m. to prepare for the live broadcast; no exceptions. Ticketholders should anticipate a security screen and plan accordingly. Seats not filled at 6:30 p.m. will be forfeited. No one will be allowed in the auditorium after 6:30 p.m. No re-entry after 6:30 p.m. By Hyonhee Shin SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has called for a propaganda campaign to increase popular support for the country's ideology of self-reliance amid "the worst difficulties," state media KCNA said on Tuesday. Kim sent a letter to ruling Workers' Party officials attending a workshop on Monday that aimed to boost motivation for socialism and advance innovation in the party's ideological work, KCNA said. In the dispatch, Kim said the party has been "advancing in the face of the worst difficulties" and stressed the need to spread its vision for "juche", or self-reliance. "We should regard the ideological and moral strength of the popular masses as the foremost weapon as ever and stir it up in every way," he said, according to KCNA. The juche theory means that "nothing (is) impossible to do when the people are motivated ideologically," he said. North Korea faces mounting economic woes amid sanctions over its weapons programmes, natural disasters and COVID-19 lockdowns that sharply cut trade with China, its major ally and economic lifeline. The United States is pushing for tightening international sanctions over Pyongyang's first full test of an intercontinental ballistic missile last week, despite opposition from China and Russia. North Korea has not confirmed any COVID-19 cases, but closed borders and imposed strict travel bans and other restrictions. Kim said the ideological campaign should focus on dispelling "evil spirits of anti-socialism" and non-socialist elements that have "gnawed away at our revolutionary position," KCNA said. Pyongyang has cracked down on the influx of South Korean music and entertainment via the Chinese border to curb what it says are non-socialist and anti-socialist influences. Kim also called for beefing up visual content and stressed film as "an ideological education means of the greatest influence." (Reporting by Hyonhee Shin; Editing by Cynthia Osterman) Police identified the man killed in shooting in the Edgehill neighborhood on Monday morning as Ralos Jones Jr., 29. Officers responded to reports of shots fired at 1400 block of 11th Avenue South around 10:30 a.m. where they discovered Jones, Metro Nashville Police Department Brooke Reese said. He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. Nashville police were on the scene after a fatal shooting on 11th Avenue South in the Edgehill neighborhood. Second shooting Monday: Man killed in Underwood Street shooting, suspect at large, police say Police arrested Roderick Orr, 37, late Monday night and charged him with criminal homicide in the shooting. Police believe the shooting was drug-related. Two guns and nearly 200 methamphetamine pills were recovered when Orr was arrested in South Nashville, MNPD said. He also faces drug and weapon charges, records show. Reese said police do not believe the shooting was connected to a separate fatal shooting in North Nashville, which happened less than 10 minutes earlier Monday mor. Orr is set to appear in court Wednesday, records show. Natalie Alund contributed to this story. Reach reporter Molly Davis at mdavis2@gannett.com or on Twitter @mollym_davis. This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville police ID victim, arrest man in fatal Edgehill shooting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images More than 2 dozen Democrats are calling on Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to Jan. 6. This comes after public revelations about his wife's efforts to persuade the Trump White House to overturn the election. At least five Democrats have called on Thomas to resign or be impeached. A growing number of Democratic lawmakers are demanding that Justice Clarence Thomas resign from the Supreme Court or at the very least recuse himself from cases related to the January 6 insurrection following news that his wife pushed the Trump White House to challenge the 2020 presidential election results. A few progressives have raised the prospect of impeachment. "Clarence Thomas should resign," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Tuesday. The New York Democrat said that if Thomas refuses to step down, lawmakers should investigate the conservative justice's potential conflicts of interest, which she said "could serve as grounds for impeachment." A Supreme Court justice can only be removed through a congressional impeachment. "Congress must understand that a failure to hold Clarence Thomas accountable sends a loud, dangerous signal to the full Court - Kavanaugh, Barrett, & the rest - that his acts are fair game," she added. "This is a tipping point. Inaction is a decision to erode and further delegitimize SCOTUS." Reps. Nydia Velazquez of New York, Veronica Escobar of Texas, and Hank Johnson of Georgia have also recently called on Thomas to resign. But more than two dozen Democratic lawmakers have not gone as far, only calling on Thomas to recuse himself from future cases concerning the January 6 insurrection. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat of Minnesota, went farther and said last week that Thomas should be impeached. Federal judicial impeachments are rare and a Supreme Court justice hasn't been impeached since 1804. A majority of House lawmakers would need to vote for impeachment and a two-thirds majority of Senate lawmakers would need to vote to convict. Story continues Ginni Thomas' text messages prompt an outcry The momentum comes after the Washington Post and CBS News reported Thursday that Thomas' wife, Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, exchanged more than two dozen text messages with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, in late 2020 and early 2021 urging him to pursue efforts to overturn the presidential election. The 29 texts sent from November 2020 to January 2021 are part of the thousands of messages that Meadows handed over to the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot. In the wake of the text revelations, Thomas has come under scrutiny for a potential conflict of interest in his Supreme Court work. Specifically, Democrats have criticized him for not recusing himself from a Supreme Court ruling handed down two months ago, when the majority of justices rejected former President Donald Trump's request to withhold White House records from the January 6 committee. Thomas was the only justice to dissent. The longest-serving member on the bench, Thomas did not provide an explanation for his dissent a standard omission for such emergency motions that come before the court. Democrats are largely calling on Thomas to provide an explanation for his dissent in that case and for his recusal in future cases related to the January 6 Capitol riot and the congressional committee's investigation, given his wife's texts. But Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee said Thomas "should be censured for having voted in cases related to the election," Politico reported. In a letter sent to Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday, 24 Democratic lawmakers raised concerns about "the urgent need for significant ethics reform at the Supreme Court." "In particular, given the serious conflict-of-interest issues presented by Ms. Thomas's leadership in the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, we call upon Justice Thomas to immediately issue a written explanation for his failure to recuse himself in prior Supreme Court cases involving efforts to overturn the 2020 election or the January 6th attack on the Capitol and promptly recuse himself from any future Supreme Court cases involving efforts to overturn the 2020 election or the January 6th attack on the Capitol," the letter said. The letter's signatories include Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Ron Wyden of Oregon, along with Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday said Thomas should recuse himself from January 6-related cases and said the Court should adopt "some kind of code of ethics" for Justices. He added there are "serious questions about how close Justice Thomas and his wife were to the planning and execution of the insurrection." Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin also told reporters on Capitol Hill this week that Thomas "should recuse himself from those cases." Some prominent Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have not taken as strong of a stance, instead saying it's up to Thomas himself to decide whether to recuse himself from cases. "It's up to an individual justice to decide to recuse himself if his wife is participating in a coup," Pelosi said during a caucus meeting on Tuesday, according to Punchbowl News' Heather Caygle. Republicans, for their part, have taken a similar position. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Friday that Thomas can make his own decisions "like he's made them every other time." "It's his decision based upon law," McCarthy said. The January 6 panel is expected to request an interview with Ginni Thomas following the public revelation of the text messages. In one message sent on November 6, 2020, Ginni told Meadows that Trump should not concede the election. "Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back," she wrote to Meadows, per The Post. In another message sent on November 10, 2020, days after the major news networks declared then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden the winner, Ginni wrote to Meadows: "Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!" "You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America's constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History," the text continued, per The Post. Read the original article on Business Insider Mar. 29Oxford police are asking for help in finding a missing 26-year-old man who is autistic. Nathaniel Coffin was last seen Tuesday night wearing sweat pants, a black zip-up fleece jacket, moccasins and carrying a duffle bag with clothes, according to police. He may also be wearing welding-type goggles, but he has no phone, ID or cash. Lt. Lara Fening said Coffin was reported missing by his mother on Wednesday, when he could not be found to leave for a family trip. Fening said Coffin likes to be outside walking trails near water in the wooded areas, so he is likely not in area cities. Coffin avoids talking to people. If you see him, call the local police where you are. If you have information regarding his whereabouts, call OPD at 513-523-4321. Israeli security forces gather at the scene of a shooting attack on March 29, 2022 in Bnei Brak. Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images A Palestinian gunman killed at least 5 people in a terror shooting outside Tel Aviv on Tuesday. Tuesday's victims join six other Israelis who were killed in terror attacks in the last week. Authorities shot and killed the suspected gunman on Tuesday, according to police. A Palestinian gunman is dead after he opened fire and killed at least five people in an Orthodox neighborhood outside Tel Aviv, Israel on Tuesday night, according to multiple reports. The shooting marks the fifth attack in less than a week as tensions increase ahead of Ramadan, Passover, and Easter all in the coming month, The New York Times reported. Israeli paramedics said at least five people were killed in the Tuesday attack, The Guardian reported. Witnesses told Israeli public broadcaster Kan that the gunman arrived in the eastern Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak by motorcycle or scooter before he began firing at pedestrians with what appeared to be an automatic weapon. According to The Times, the shooter then drove to a second location nearby where he was shot and killed by police. Video broadcast on Israeli television stations shows a man dressed in all black walking down the streets of Bnei Brak pointing a weapon at people. The suspected gunman is a 26-year-old Palestinian from the West Bank, according to Kan. The outlet reported that he was jailed for half a year in 2013 for trafficking arms and holding membership in a terrorist group. Eleven Israelis have been killed in terror attacks in the last week, according to The Times of Israel. In addition to the five dead on Tuesday, two others were killed in a shooting in Hadera on Sunday and four people were killed in a terror attack in Beersheba last Tuesday. More Israelis were killed in terror attacks this past week than in all of 2020 and 2021 combined, the outlet reported. Read the original article on Insider Pentagon press secretary John Kirby The Pentagon said Tuesday that Russia's claim that it will reduce its military campaign in two Ukrainian cities is really Moscow "repositioning" troops. "We ought not be fooling - and nobody should be fooling ourselves by the Kremlin's now recent claim that it will suddenly reduce military attacks near Kyiv or any reports that it's going to withdraw all of its forces," Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said. "We believe this is a repositioning, not a real withdrawal, and that we all should be prepared to watch for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine. It does not mean the threat to Kyiv is over," he added. Moscow claimed earlier on Tuesday that it would "drastically reduce military activity" near the cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv near the Belarus border. The announcement came as negations picked up between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey this week. President Biden expressed skepticism when asked about the development on Tuesday alongside Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. "We'll see," the president said. "I don't read anything into it until I see what their actions are." Russia's invasion of Ukraine has entered its second month, and Kirby said that Moscow has failed to capture Kyiv and take over Ukraine. However, it "can still inflict massive brutality on the country, including on Kyiv," he added. LIMA, Peru (AP) Pedro Castillo, Perus embattled president, avoided joining the South American nations list of impeached leaders as opposition lawmakers Monday night failed to get enough votes to remove him from office eight months into his term. Castillo, a political neophyte who shook the country when he defeated the political elite to become president, survived his second impeachment attempt. He characterized the accusations against him as speculation and argued that none could be substantiated. The votes of at least 87 of the 130 lawmakers were needed to remove the president. Fifty-five voted in favor, 54 against and 19 abstained. I salute that common sense, responsibility and democracy prevailed, Castillo tweeted after the vote. I recognize the lawmakers who voted against the vacancy, and I respect the decision of those who did. I call everyone to turn this page and work together for the great challenges of the country. The lawmakers seeking to remove Castillo had noted he is the subject of three preliminary investigations into possible corruption, which under Peruvian law cannot proceed until he is out of office. There is also a separate accusation from a would-be collaborator who alleged he is part of a criminal group that receives money in exchange for public works. The lawmakers accused Castillo of permanent moral incapacity, a term incorporated into Peruvian constitutional laws that experts say lacks an objective definition and that Congress has used six times since 2017 to try to remove presidents. We only found comments without any corroboration, speculation, imaginary links, Castillo said of the accusations while reading a speech before lawmakers hours before the vote. While Castillo remains in office, the latest move against him will add to Perus political turmoil and weaken the president, who won office with just 44,000 more votes than his opponent in a runoff election. He was an underdog when he entered the race last year and initially campaigned on promises to nationalize Perus crucial mining industry and rewrite the constitution. Story continues From the start, Castillo, a rural schoolteacher in a poor Andean district, has been handicapped by his Cabinet choices, a number of whom have been accused of wrongdoing. So has his former private secretary, whose corruption investigation led the prosecutors office to find $20,000 in a bathroom of the presidential palace. Recent developments have confirmed Perus dysfunctionality, regardless of who is in power, said Claudia Navas, an analyst with the global firm Control Risks. These events will certainly exacerbate Peruvians frustration towards the political system, which represents a risk because they will be willing to support an authoritarian leader as a desperate measure to overcome protracted political instability. The debate in Congress lasted several hours. Perus unicameral Congress is deeply fragmented among 10 political parties and rarely can come to any consensus on passing legislation. Castillos party is the biggest faction, but it has only 37 seats, and opposition members lead key committees. The government invited three officials from the Organization of American States to witness the debate. Lawmakers allowed them to watch it from a nearby building. Castillo succeeded Francisco Sagasti, who was appointed president by Congress in November 2020 as the country cycled through three heads of state in one week amid confrontations that left two people dead and more than 200 injured. Vacating presidents has become a sport, said centrist lawmaker Wilmar Elera, who recalled that President Martin Vizcarra was dismissed by Congress in 2020 for permanent moral incapacity but has not faced any charges since. Congress and Castillo are both unpopular in Peru, although the disapproval of legislators is greater. A survey by the Institute of Peruvian Studies published in March by the newspaper La Republica said Congress disapproval rate was 79%, while 68% had negative views of Castillo. The debate over Castillos future came just as the country awaited the release from prison of former President Alberto Fujijmori, who was ordered freed earlier this month in a controversial decision by Perus highest court. He was serving a 25-year sentence for his role in more than 20 murders during his administration between 1990 and 2000. Peru has also been seeing demonstrations across the country in recent days to protest prices for food, fuel and fertilizer. Navas said Castillo is now likely to try to show any results his administration has achieved in an effort to win support for his administration, but that likely will not affect public opinion. She said the country is in need of a comprehensive political reform that promotes public participation and strengthens the rules for political parties internal consultations to elect their candidates. Measures to ensure the suitability of those holding political power are also required, Navas said. A reform is also needed to introduce clear criteria for Congress to impeach a president on the grounds of moral incapacity. ___ Associated Press writer Franklin Briceno reported this story in Lima and AP writer Regina Garcia Cano reported from Mexico City. Police arrested a Chesapeake man in connection with a weekend shooting outside a Virginia Beach bar that injured four people and resulted in two Virginia Beach police officers being placed on temporary administrative assignment. Earl Thomas Royster Jr., 39, is charged with three counts of malicious assault and three firearms charges following the March 26 shooting in front of West Beach Tavern. Virginia Beach police were monitoring the establishment due to recent violent incidents when, shortly after midnight, officers saw multiple people near the front of the business in an argument. The argument escalated and several people took out guns and started shooting. Two officers exited their car to intervene and both shot at one of the armed individuals, police said. That person, who police do not believe was struck by the officers gunfire, fled the scene. Virginia Beach police identified Royster as a suspect Monday. He is being held at the Virginia Beach Correctional Center without bond. A second shooter has not been identified. Altogether, four people were injured and sustained injuries not considered life-threatening. They include a 17-year-old girl from Newport News who was shot in her lower leg and a 21-year-old Newport News man whose shooting is being investigated as potentially self-inflicted, according to a release. Two other victims, a 37-year-old Chesapeake man and a 27-year-old Norfolk man, took themselves to a hospital. The incident is being investigated by the departments homicide unit. It will turn its findings over to the Virginia Beach Commonwealths Attorneys Office, which also responded to the scene and will conduct an independent investigation into the police shootings. When both criminal investigations are complete, the Virginia Beach Police Departments Internal Affairs Bureau will conduct an administrative investigation. Anyone with information regarding the shooting is asked to contact the Crime Solvers line at 1-888-LOCK-U-UP. Caitlyn Burchett, caitlyn.burchett@virginiamedia.com Mar. 29TUPELO At least two northeast Mississippi police departments are seeing an increase in fake or replica guns, as well as real guns. During March, the Tupelo Police Department has had four reported incidents of juveniles possessing and/or shooting realistic paintball or "splat guns." "There have been several (TikTok) challenges reported to TPD that encourage juveniles to ambush unsuspecting citizens, such as joggers or people in stores," said Major Chuck McDougald. "This is an incredibly dangerous prank. An officer or citizen could easily mistake these replicas as real firearms and defend themselves." It was just that reason that led West Point Police Department detective Ramirez Ivy to reach out to the public Monday. His department has seen a rise in juveniles taking toy guns that start off orange to show they are toys and painting them black. "A citizen or an officer could mistake it for a real gun," Ivy said. "When I first saw it, I thought it one of the guns involved in a recent shootings." McDougald said there are currently three juveniles charged through Lee County Youth Court where a West Main Walmart shopper was shot with a paintball gun March 15. In a separate incident, a realistic looking paintball gun was seized from two juveniles at the corner of Ida Street and Lawndale Drive. In addition to the replica and toy guns, both departments are seeing an increase in real guns being used. On Monday, West Point police showed off a 9mm pistol fitted with a high-capacity magazine and a shoulder stock, as well as an AR-15-style rifle. Both weapons were taken from juveniles who are not allowed by law to purchase or possess firearms. Tupelo police are also working four separate shots fired incidents that all happened within a one week span. On March 21, a guest at the Super 8 motel on McCullough Boulevard shot a hole through the room door. That guest was subsequently arrested for discharging a weapon inside the city limits. Story continues A fight among juveniles where a gun was fired was reported at Theron Nichols Park on Mitchell Road on March 24. While several witnesses have been interviewed, there are no suspects or victims so far. Shell casings were recovered March 25 after shots were fired at 418 South Gloster around 9 p.m. Police responded but no victims or suspects were located. It was the same story the next day at the intersection of Ida and Lawndale. There was a report of gunfire. Spent casings were found, but there were no victims or suspects found. Police are concerned that juveniles with access to firearms will escalate altercations and lead to fatal results. "The common element in the overwhelming majority of these incidents is that juveniles are gathering to fight or cause damage with real or realistic weapons," McDougald said. "TPD continues to ask all who have influence over our children to help stop this behavior before another senseless tragedy occurs." Ivy agreed that more oversight is needed from parents. "We tell parents to be mindful of the children. Speak with your children, even if they are 18 or 19," Ivy said. "Please don't let your child paint (a toy gun) black and make it look real. Let's practice safety all the way down to the toys." william.moore@djournal.com Ocala police say theyve arrested a teenager for his role in the shooting death of 23-year-old Jacorie McCullough outside the 7 Days Food Store Friday, but theyre still looking for the person who actually fired the gun. >>> STREAM CHANNEL 9 EYEWITNESS NEWS LIVE <<< Officers were called to the store on NW 1st Ave. just after 1:30 p.m. Friday for reports of two men fighting in the parking lot. READ: ICON Park calls for FreeFall, SlingShot rides to suspend operations following teens death By the time they arrived on scene, police say McCullough had been shot and the suspects were gone. McCullough was treated on the scene until emergency crews arrived and took him to the hospital where he later died. READ: 9 Investigates: Floridas foster care failures Teen Arrested For Murder TEEN ARRESTED FOR MURDER! #Ocala #Police Detective Kern arrested Cedrick Bowie, 14, for the murder of Jacorie McCullough, 23. On March 25, McCollough was gunned down in front of the 7 Days Food Store on 2002 NW 1st Ave. after fighting someone in the parking lot. Though Bowie did not shoot McCullough, he was an accomplice in the killing and he is charged with murder. Bowie is just one suspect involved in this homicide; other suspects are still at large. Our detectives are still actively investigating this murder. We're asking for our community's help. If you have any information about the murder of Jacorie McCullough, please call Det. Kern at 352-369-7000 or dial **TIPS. Posted by Ocala Police Department on Monday, March 28, 2022 On Monday, The Ocala Police Department announced the arrest of 14-year-old Cedrick Bowie, charging him as an accomplice to McCulloughs murder. Police say Bowie didnt shoot McCullough but havent explained exactly what his role was in the murder or how they developed him as a suspect. They say Bowie is one of multiple other suspects theyre still trying to find, including the actual shooter. READ: Merritt Island woman charged with sisters murder Story continues Theyre asking anyone with information that could help lead to an arrest in the case to call the police department at (352) 369-7000, or simply dial **TIPS (8477). Click here to download the free WFTV news and weather apps, click here to download the WFTV Now app for your smart TV and click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live. A memorial for the late Duke of Edinburgh has taken place at Westminster Abbey from 10.30am today, Tuesday 29 March. The Service of Thanksgiving was held at Westminster Abbey and saw a 1,800-strong congregation gather to honour Prince Philips life. The Queen arrived at the service accompanied by the Duke of York, who also walked her down the aisle in the abbey to her seat. He then took his own seat in the front row of the congregation. The service came after the 95-year-old head of state pulled out of the Commonwealth Day service earlier this month due to mobility issues, and has previously spoken about her struggle to move. Earlier reports said the Queen was determined to be at the service. The Palace said she was actively involved in plans for the service, with many elements reflecting her wishes. Follow our liveblog to get the latest updates on Philips memorial today. Key Points Queen arrives at Prince Philips memorial with Prince Andrew Dean of Windsor pays tribute to remarkable Prince Philip Prince Andrew makes first public appearance since sex case settlement Prince George and Princess Charlotte make rare public appearance Queen leaves Westminster Abbey 12:40 , Kate Ng The Queen has now left Westminster Abbey. She was pictured being helped into her car by the Duke of York, whom she arrived at the memorial with. Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip (AP) Royal fans feel for the Queen as she appears emotional during rendition of God Save The Queen' 12:36 , Kate Ng Viewers who tuned into BBC Ones coverage of Prince Philips memorial were touched when the Queen appeared to become emotional when the national anthem was sung. Some people said they noticed tears in her eyes, while others said that watching Her Majesty during the service made them emotional too. Oh no. I dont think Ive ever seen The Queen look so emotional as she did just then during God Save the Queen. She had tears in her eyes. Im far from a royalist, but that was clearly a widow having a moment of grief #PrincePhilip Lesser Spotted Jaz (@JazHicks) March 29, 2022 Watching our Queen has just broke my heart. She is so frail but still so dignified. I really hope this isn't the last time we see the Queen in public. #PrincePhilip #GodSaveTheQueen Claire Hooton BSc, PGDip (@ColdJustice_) March 29, 2022 The sweet meaning behind the flowers chosen for Prince Philips memorial Story continues 12:30 , Kate Ng Westminster Abbey has given us a bit of background on the flower arrangements chosen to honour the Duke of Edinburgh today. The abbeys official Twitter account posted photographs of the flowers, which include roses, carnations, eryngium (sea holly) and dendrobium orchids. The colours of each floral arrangement included shades of red, white and blue. But there is a hidden meaning in the flowers that were chosen. According to Westminster Abbey, orchids featured in The Queens wedding bouquet, whilst sea holly echoes The Dukes career in the Navy and affection for the sea. Flowers at the service will be arranged in shades of red, white and blue and will include roses, carnations, eryngium (sea holly) and dendrobium orchids. Orchids featured in The Queens wedding bouquet and sea holly echoes The Dukes career in the Navy and affection for the sea. pic.twitter.com/nAX1BQJ6d3 Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) March 29, 2022 Prince George and Princess Charlotte make rare public appearance 12:29 , Kate Ng The Duke and Duchess of Cambridges two elder children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, have made a rare public appearance at Prince Philips memorial. However, the couples youngest child, Prince Louis, was not in attendance. Laura Hampson reports: Prince George and Princess Charlotte make rare public appearance at Philips memorial 12:22 , Kate Ng The service has now finished, with the congregation singing the rousing Guide Me, O Thou Redeemer, followed by the national anthem, to wrap it up. It was the Duke of Edinburghs wish that the hymn be sung at his funeral. Princess Charlotte praised for her confidence at memorial 12:20 , Kate Ng Princess Charlotte, the second child of Prince William and Kate Middletons, has been praised for her confidence as she greeted people inside Westminster Abbey. The six-year-old arrived with her parents and her older brother, Prince George, for the memorial of her great-grandfather. Princess Charlotte greeting the welcoming party inside Westminster abbey like a PRO! pic.twitter.com/hVciclslaD Belle (@RoyallyBelle_) March 29, 2022 Princess Charlotte is so cute glad shes not overwhelmed by the amount of cameras around and just having fun with it #DukeandDuchessofCambridge pic.twitter.com/SS5g3SMeeX Mae (@lomlkge) March 29, 2022 What a beautiful young lady Princess Charlotte is becoming Maria (@MariaRMGBNews) March 29, 2022 Dean of Windsor pays tribute to remarkable Prince Philip 12:05 , Kate Ng The Duke of Edinburghs intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, The Right Reverend David Conner said: He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called real world) he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrows challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love. Mr Conner added: He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a plaster saint; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood. Concluding his address, the dean said: As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. PA The Duke of Edinburghs best quotes 12:00 , Kate Ng As we remember Prince Philips life, we remember some of the best things hes ever said throughout his 99 years of life: Prince Philips best quotes from 1921-2021 11:51 , Kate Ng Senior members of the royal family sit in the front row of the congregation at the memorial for the Duke of Edinburgh. The Queen, as well as the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall are wearing emerald green, while many others in the congregation have donned royal blue for the event. (Front row left to right) Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey in London (PA) 11:48 , Kate Ng And here are photographs of other members of the royal family as they arrived ahead of the service: Prince William, Duke of Cambridge (L), Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (R) and their children Prince George of Cambridge (L) and and Princess Charlotte of Cambridge arrive to attend a Service of Thanksgiving (AFP via Getty Images) Princess Beatrice of York (L) and her husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi arrive (AFP via Getty Images) Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh (PA) Prince Charles, Prince of Wales attends the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh (Getty Images) Zara, Mia and Mike Tindall arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh (PA) Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, his wife Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and their children Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor, and James, Viscount Severn (REUTERS) 11:41 , Kate Ng Heres a glimpse at Her Majesty arriving at Westminster Abbey. Prince Andrew can be seen sitting beside her inside the vehicle: (REUTERS) Prince Andrew makes first public appearance since sex case settlement 11:38 , Kate Ng The Duke of York has walked the Queen down the aisle to her seat in Westminster Abbey, before taking a seat himself in the front row of the congregation. This marks his first public appearance since he came to a settlement with Virginia Giuffre over a high-profile sex abuse case. Olivia Petter reports: Prince Andrew arrives at memorial for Prince Philip in rare public appearance Queen arrives at Prince Philips memorial with Prince Andrew 11:34 , Kate Ng The Queen has arrived at the service in Westminster Abbey, accompanied by the Duke of York. Olivia Petter has the breaking story: Queen attends Prince Philips memorial service in spite of recent health issues 11:33 , Kate Ng Fanfare has begun to mark the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbeys chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. 11:25 , Kate Ng The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have arrived at Westminster Abbey with their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte. 11:23 , Kate Ng The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall have arrived at Westminster Abbey, the first senior members of the royal family to make an appearance at the memorial. Princess Anne has also arrived. Earlier, Princess Annes daughter, Zara Tindall, and husband Mike Tindall arrived at the abbey. How did the Queen and Prince Philip meet? 11:10 , Kate Ng As Her Majesty honours and remembers her husband of 73 years, Prince Philip , our Relationship Correspondent Olivia Petter reminds us how the royal couple met, and the journey their love story took them: How Prince Philip and the Queen met: The story of a royal relationship Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer and other MPs arrive 11:08 , Kate Ng MPs have begun arriving at Westminster Abbey for the Duke of Edinburghs memorial. Prime minister Boris Johnson, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and home secretary Priti Patel all arrived separately at the abbey. Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrives to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip (AP) Chancellor Rishi Sunak arrives to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip (AP) Home Secretary Priti Patel attends the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh (Getty Images) Labour leader Keir Starmer is also in attendance, as well as Scotlands first minister Nicola Sturgeon. Labour Party leader Keir Starmer arrives to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for Prince Philip (AFP via Getty Images) First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon arrives to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip (AP) Watch our livestream of Prince Philips memorial 10:58 , Kate Ng Prince Philip: A life in pictures 10:50 , Kate Ng As we wait for the Duke of Edinburghs memorial to get underway, Joanna Whitehead takes us on a photographic trip down memory lane: Prince Philip: A life in pictures from 1921-2021 The Queen is on her way to Westminster Abbey 10:41 , Kate Ng The Queen has begun her journey from Windsor to central London for the Duke of Edinburghs memorial, accompanied by the Duke of York. Prince Andrew has a front row seat at the Service of Thanksgiving, close to his other siblings, the PA news agency has reported. On Andrews left will be his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edwards family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right will the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte will also attend with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen.Behind Andrew and Edwards family will be Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. This will be the Dukes first public appearance since he reached a settlement with Virginia Giuffre in the sex abuse case leveled against him. Andrew has consistently denied ever meeting Giuffre, but came to a multi-million pound agreement to stop the case from proceeding to trial. 10:38 , Kate Ng Guests have begun to arrive at Westminster Abbey to attend the memorial of the Duke of Edinburgh. So far, Englands chief medical officer Chris Whitty and former Formula One driver Jackie Stewart have been pictured walking up the steps into the abbey. According to the PA news agency, the Queen is on her way from Windsor, accompanied by Prince Andrew. What is the order of service for Prince Philips memorial? 10:12 , Kate Ng Curious about what will happen at Prince Philips memorial? Joanna Whitehead has all the details: In full: The order of service for Prince Philips memorial service Royal fans gather outside Westminster Abbey ahead of service 10:00 , Kate Ng A small crowd of royal enthusiasts have gathered outside Westminster Abbey ahead of the Duke of Edinburghs memorial. Around 50 people have congregated beside barriers near the entrance to the abbey, hoping to catch a glimpse of members of the royal family as they enter the service. Here are some of the scenes outside Westminster Abbey right now: Royal fan John Loughrey waits for the arrivals for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey (PA) A royal enthusiast, dressed in a Union Jack flag suit, holds a bag with Queen Elizabeth's portrait before the service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (REUTERS) Royal fans including Joseph Afrane (right) wait for the arrivals for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh (PA) Prince Philips memorial will go ahead 09:50 , Kate Ng The Duke of Edinburgh will be remembered today in a Service of Thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey, which will be attended by 1,800-strong congregation. Read our report on what will take place during the memorial: Prince Philips memorial to go ahead as Buckingham Palace confirms Queen will attend Which members of the royal family will attend Prince Philips memorial? 09:37 , Kate Ng The royal family is marking the anniversary of the Duke of Edinburghs death today in a Service of Thanksgiving - but which senior members are attending and which arent? Our deputy lifestyle editor Laura Hampson has all the details: All the royal family members attending Prince Philips memorial When and where will Prince Philips memorial take place? 09:24 , Kate Ng Heres everything you need to know about the Duke of Edinburghs memorial, and how you can watch it today: Where and when will Prince Philips memorial take place? Queen to attend Prince Philips memorial 09:20 , Kate Ng Buckingham Palace has confirmed that the Queen will be present at Prince Philips memorial today. Her Majesty is currently intending to go to the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, it said. It comes after speculation that the 95-year-old monarch may not have been able to go due to mobility issues. Our Lifestyle Reporter Saman Javed has the story: Queen will attend Prince Philips memorial service in London today 09:07 , Kate Ng Good morning, and welcome to The Independents liveblog following the latest updates on Prince Philips memorial. The felony intimidation charge pending against Delaware Auditor Kathy McGuiness was updated Monday with prosecutors claiming she had employees answer "confidentiality" when asked what her office motto is. A New Castle County grand jury issued a re-indictment on Monday in McGuiness' case containing the same charges, but including new information claiming that since her initial indictment in October, McGuiness and her top aides have "castigated" employees they deemed "disloyal" employees the indictment indicates could be witnesses in her criminal case. Last year, McGuiness became the first statewide elected official in Delaware history to be indicted when prosecutors accused her of theft and official misconduct for hiring her daughter to a job in the Auditor's Office, structuring a state consulting contract to avoid regulatory scrutiny and felony intimidation for allegedly taking steps to surveil and discriminate against employees positioned to question her potential misconduct. Delaware state Auditor Kathy McGuiness, left, leaves the New Castle County Courthouse with her attorney Steve Wood in October. The intimidation felony charge is the most serious one she faces in terms of potential punishment if found guilty. After this story published, McGuiness noted in a written statement that the reindictment comes about a week before a judge will hear pending motions aimed at compelling evidence from prosecutors and her effort to have the court throw out the intimidation charge. She stated the new indictment is an "attempt to remedy significant deficiencies in the (original) indictment." "Despite the changes in the new indictment, those deficiencies in the charges remain. We look forward to the April 7 hearing on our pending motions," McGuiness wrote. The Delaware Department of Justice, which is prosecuting McGuiness, declined to comment for this story. The new information in the re-indictment appears to center on reports from employees in the office. It states that on Feb. 11, there was a staff meeting in the Auditor's Office in which prosecutors claim McGuiness was "displeased that, in her belief, information was leaking" from her office. Story continues Days before, McGuiness was subjected to pointed questioning by state lawmakers on Delaware's Joint Finance Committee regarding her office's spending decisions as well as a contract she awarded to a woman who would later become a staffer in the office. At the staff meeting that followed that committee questioning, McGuiness told staffers that she used to have staff "yell out loud, 'confidentiality'" and that "confidentiality" means "what happens in this office, stays in this office." Near the end of the meeting, she warned employees "we are gonna have zero tolerance for negativity," Monday's updated indictment states. THE LATEST: In defense of her criminal charges, auditor claims nepotism widespread in state government Six days after that meeting, an employee, whom the indictment describes as a witness, received a formal reprimand from McGuiness' office. The reprimand was partially for the employee "implying or directly stating" that someone in the office was involved in "illegal conduct," as well as for asking another employee if they were leaving the office because of the pending charges against McGuiness and stating that the "front office was shady and everything done in the front office is a cover-up" centered on McGuiness' pending trial. The employee was told, by a person the indictment does not identify, that their statements were "dangerous to morale" and that they were "hereby notified that it is inappropriate to discuss certain topics," including individuals' court cases and their opinions on the legality of "an individual's employment," in the Auditor's Office, according to the updated indictment. The indictment also states there was an office meeting called earlier this month in which McGuiness chastised staff for watching a recording of the Joint Finance Committee meeting during which she was needled by legislators. The indictment states McGuiness and her senior staff started the meeting by having employees respond "confidentiality" when asked what the office's motto is. The indictment states that the episodes made employees "feel uncomfortable" and believe they were "warnings not to continue to report wrongdoing." The new allegations pertaining to the intimidation charge come on top of prosecutors claiming in her original indictment, that McGuiness used the state's technology office to monitor employee emails as well as correspondence by a former staffer in the Auditor's Office who at the time was working in a different branch of state government. It also claims she discriminated against employees who questioned her conduct. Attorney General Kathy Jennings speaks at a press conference on Monday, Oct. 11, in front of the Leonard L. Williams Justice Center. The updated indictment also includes more specific allegations pertaining to how McGuiness ordered the payment of a consulting contract. Payments for that contract are at the center of the misdemeanor violation. While not adding new charges, the updated indictment provides more insight into what prosecutors will try to prove to a jury if the case makes it to a trial, which is scheduled for May. The updated indictment also comes as a judge is considering a request by McGuiness' attorney to toss out the intimidation charge as well as ongoing efforts by her attorney to build a defense against the charges by claiming nepotism is common in state government. Wood has asked the court to toss the intimidation charge, arguing the indictment fails to include legally required specifics about the crime, particularly that McGuiness knew she was under investigation and knew she was taking action against potential witnesses of an investigation. Prosecutors, writing in an opposing brief to the court, argued that Wood has misconstrued the law and that it does not require McGuiness to know of any current investigation into her, only that she knew the effect of the actions she took. Oral arguments on the pending motions will be held in front of Judge William C. Carpenter Jr. on April 7. Contact Xerxes Wilson at (302) 324-2787 or xwilson@delawareonline.com. Follow @Ber_Xerxes on Twitter. MCguiness Reindictment by Xerxes Wilson on Scribd This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Prosecutors: McGuinness 'castigated' employees after she was indicted Russian President Vladimir Putin watches a naval exercise from the Marshal Ustinov missile cruiser in the Black Sea on January 9, 2020. Alexei Druzhinin/Getty Images Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told PBS "no one is thinking about using" nukes in Ukraine. Peskov previously refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons. There have been growing concerns Putin would turn to nukes with the war going poorly for Russia. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov in an interview with PBS on Monday threw cold water on the notion that Russia was planning on using nuclear weapons against Ukraine, after previously refusing to rule it out. "No one is thinking about using...a nuclear weapon," Peskov said. Peskov said Russia has a "security concept that very clearly states that only when there is a threat for existence of the state in our country, we can use and we will actually use nuclear weapons to eliminate the threat or the existence of our country." "Let's keep these two things separate...existence of the state and special military operation in Ukraine. They have nothing to do with each other," Peskov went on to say, adding, "At the same time, if you remember the statement of the president when he ordered the operation on the 24th of February, there was a part of his statement warning different states not to interfere in the affairs between Ukraine and Russia during this operation." The war in Ukraine has not gone well for Russia after nearly five weeks, with Ukrainian forces putting up a much tougher fight than Moscow had planned for. NATO last week estimated that the Russian military had already seen 40,000 battlefield casualties in roughly a month of war. Russian generals have also been killed at an astonishing rate. In this context, there have been growing fears that Russian President Vladimir Putin could use a weapon of mass destruction as he increasingly feels frustrated. Shortly after launching the so-called "special military operation" in Ukraine, Putin ordered his country's nuclear deterrent forces on high alert. The use of nuclear weapons by Putin in Ukraine would likely pull NATO and the US into the war, which would mean a direct conflict between multiple nuclear powers. Story continues Russian military doctrine calls for a so-called "escalate to de-escalate" strategy where Russia uses a nuke to end a conventional war that's gone against them. As peace talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators showed glimmers of progress on Tuesday, Russia also announced it was reducing military activities near Kyiv. But the US has expressed skepticism about the significance of this, warning that Russia could simply be regrouping and shifting troops to other areas. "We believe that this is a repositioning, not a real withdrawal, and that we all should be prepared to watch for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine. It does not mean the threat to Kyiv is over," Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Friday. Read the original article on Business Insider CAIRO (AP) Qatar will invest $5 billion in Egypt, officials said Tuesday, signaling increasing improvement in ties between the two nations. The announcement came as Qatar Foreign Minister Mohammad bin Abdulrahman Al Thani wrapped up a visit to the Egyptian capital of Cairo, where he met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi and other government officials. An Egyptian statement said the $5 billion package is meant to strengthen economic and investment cooperation between the two brotherly countries. The statement didnt provide further details, including a timeframe for the investments. Qatar's state-run news agency also reported the development. Egypts economy is under pressure amid an inflationary wave triggered by the coronavirus pandemic and Russias war in Ukraine, which hiked oil prices to record highs. The war has also impacted the vital tourism sector, as most foreign visitors to the countrys Red Sea resorts have come from Russia and Ukraine. Egypt is also the world's largest importer of wheat, most of it coming from Russia and Ukraine. Al Thani, who is also Qatar's deputy prime minister, arrived in Egypt on Monday in his second visit since Egypt and three Gulf nations ended a diplomatic dispute with the energy-rich country last year. He was accompanied by Finance Minister Ali bin Ahmed Al Kuwari. El-Sissi, who met with the Qatari ministers Tuesday, hailed the tangible progress in the course of Egyptian-Qatari relations, according to the Egyptian leaders office. The Qatari officials also met Tuesday with Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly and Finance Minister Mohammed Moait. The prime minister's office announced the investment agreement. Qatars previous investment in Egypt has focused on the real state and oil sectors, including the building of a $1.3 billion luxury hotel on Cairos Nile Corniche. Qatar Petroleum held a major stake in a $4.4 billion refining firm, according to the state-run Al-Ahram daily. Story continues In a joint news conference Monday with Foreign Minister Sameh Shukry, Al Thani said Qatars ties with Egypt were improving after we overcame the previous period, which was marred by some tensions. A declaration in January 2021 ended a diplomatic crisis that began in 2017 with a rift between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on one side and Qatar on the other. The four countries had jointly boycotted Qatar and hoped an embargo and media blitz would pressure it to end its close relations with Turkey and Iran. Since the dispute ended, ties between the five countries have improved and top officials have exchanged visits. Al Thani visited Cairo in May and met with el-Sissi. The Egyptian leader also met twice with Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani once in November on the sidelines of the climate change summit in Glasgow and most recently in February when they attended the opening of the Olympic winter games in Beijing. Stephanie Hart, owner of Brown Sugar Bakery, stands with cakes she's storing in a freezer at the former Cupid Candies factory, which she also owns, on Western Avenue in Chicago, March 29, 2022. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune) A South Side community has rallied behind Brown Sugar Bakery, a beloved fixture of East 75th Street in the Park Manor neighborhood, after a car crashed into the bakery early Sunday. Community members quickly helped owner Stephanie Hart board up the store and cart away debris and within hours the bakery was open for business. By Tuesday, Harts team was back to baking. Advertisement What we thought was going to be really terrible gave us a really warm feeling, Hart said. Brown Sugar Bakery, at 328 E. 75th St. in Chicago, seen here on March 29, 2022, was damaged in a hit-and-run crash Sunday. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune) A car crashed into the front of the building around 6 a.m. Sunday before the driver fled, Chicago police said in a statement. No injuries were reported, no one was in custody and police were investigating. Advertisement Hart said a bakery employee discovered the damage when she got to work at the bakery, at 328 E. 75th St., around 6 a.m. The worker usually starts her shift around 3 a.m., but started late on Sunday because she worked on her usual day off the day before. She wouldve been working less than 4 feet from where the car hit the building. Hart is glad she wasnt. After she got to work Sunday, Hart said, strangers driving down 75th Street started offering their help. A man stopped by and called his cousin, who arrived with boards to help close up the bakery. Another man who stopped by in a truck helped clear up the debris left in the street. I didnt even know these people, she said. That was the beauty of it. The man in the truck wouldnt take any money for his help, Hart said. She sent him away with cake and candy. The crash damaged a walk-in freezer used to freeze cakes for shipping, which Hart was only able to secure last December because of supply chain issues. The freezer itself is worth about $20,000, but Hart said she has insurance. And shes seeing the silver linings. Had this happened in the beginning of December, that car wouldve landed smack dab in the middle of my business and probably caused immeasurable damage, she said. More than anything, Hart said, shes thankful no one was in the bakery at the time of the crash. I wouldve been angry in March of 2019, Hart said. After March of 2020, I dont have that kind of emotion for something that can be fixed. Advertisement So many restaurants have been forced to close during the pandemic, Hart added. Im still here. Hart founded Brown Sugar Bakery in the early 2000s, and has been at the 75th Street location since 2007. Last August, Hart purchased the building. She opened up a location at Navy Pier in 2016. The bakery found itself in the national spotlight last year, when Vice President Kamala Harris visited while on a trip promoting COVID-19 vaccinations in Chicago. Her staff ordered her a slice of German chocolate cake. Earlier in the year, Hart made an appearance on Good Morning America, where she won a surprise $10,000 grant from Verizon and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Vice President Kamala Harris visits Brown Sugar Bakery, April 6, 2021, in Chicago. (Jacquelyn Martin / AP) An installation from the Art Institute, representing the museums Egypt exhibit, was also damaged in the crash, right at the point of impact. The Art Institute has reached out, Hart said, and theyre prepping the wall to put the exhibit back up. The bakery lost some product in the crash, Hart said. For now, shes storing cakes for delivery in the Cupid Candies factory on 76th Street and Western Avenue, which she bought in 2020. With an Easter rush approaching, shes looking at ways to keep her production up to speed. One of her suppliers has offered extra freezer space, she said. Hart said she also received messages of support from the city of Chicago and the governor. The other businesses on 75th Street reached out, too. Friends drove up on Sunday just to hug her. Advertisement Hart said shes praying for whomever was in the car that hit her bakery. I hope theyre OK, she said. I really, really do. I think that it shows an evolution of humanity, Hart said of the support the bakery has received over the last couple of days. I think that people are just hyperaware, more aware especially because of COVID, that people, businesses are fragile, and we shouldnt take any part of our ecosystem for granted. Im honored, Hart said. I really am. The United Kingdom's Queen Elizabeth II joined her family members for a memorial service on Tuesday honoring her late husband, Prince Philip. The queen was joined by her son, Prince Charles, grandson Prince William and his wife, Kate, along with their children at the service at Westminster Abbey in London, according to multiple reports. Prince Andrew, who recently settled a lawsuit over allegations that he sexually assaulted a teenage girl, also attended the event, the BBC noted. However, Prince Harry, who moved to the U.S. last year, wasn't able to attend, the network added. Some 1,800 people reportedly attended the event, including representatives from charities and politicians such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. It was Queen Elizabeth's first public appearance in months after experiencing several health issues. The 95-year-old monarch spent a night at the hospital last October due to an unspecified ailment, with her medical team ordering her to rest. She also tested positive for COVID-19 in February, experiencing mild cold-like symptoms. After spending a week in isolation, the monarch conducted a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last month. Philip died last April at the age of 99, two months shy of his centennial birthday. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, only 30 mourners were allowed to attend his funeral. Predominantly Black community members say a developers plan to turn a historic Norfolk church into high-end apartments is contributing to gentrification of the Park Place neighborhood a concern as rising rents make housing less affordable. Beverly McDonald, one of the dozen community members who spoke in opposition to the plan at a Norfolk City Council meeting last week, said the redevelopment of Park Place United Methodist Church creates an imbalance in the community. These are market rate apartments. The average rent is $1,500-$2,000 for one- and two-bedroom apartments, McDonald said. That is not rent that the community can afford. To me, this is a form of gentrification. Monument Properties plans to renovate the sprawling 5,500-square-foot church building at 504 W. 34th Street. But the councils 7-1 vote last week to rezone the property from institutional to multi-family greenlights the redevelopment. Monument is undertaking a $14 million plan to transform the building into 60 apartments. The councils vote comes as the city is engaged in broader redevelopment planning in the adjacent Midtown neighborhood. The church has been a landmark on the corner of Colonial Avenue and W. 34th Street since 1917. But by 2016, the congregation dwindled to about a dozen elderly members, and the church closed its doors after a century of service. When the church disbanded, the deed went to the Elizabeth River District of the United Methodist Church Mission Board, which placed the property on the market in 2018, according to a representative from the mission board who spoke during the council meeting. The Elizabeth River District received six offers all of which fell through before Monument Properties proposed to redevelop the building. The building hasnt sat vacant, however. Since closing, the mission board has allowed community groups to host meetings, and a number of start-up churches and service organizations have also rented space, said Tom Mercer Sr., vice chair of the mission board. The groups have organized events such as a free clothing closet, food pantry and a weekly community supper. Story continues We have been delighted to be able to have these wonderful ministries continue in this building, Mercer said. But the upkeep of the building is beyond the means of the Board of Ministry. Monument Properties made a proposal that while it is not a congregation is probably the best use of this property considering the rehabilitation that is needed for it. According to Chris Johnson, co-founder of Monument Properties, 10% of the units have been set aside for affordable housing. This was required by the city as part of the rezoning, Johnson said. The Park Place church development project comes at a time that rental prices are soaring across the country. A recent study by Zumper, a rental property finder website, found the median rent prices for one- and two-bedroom apartments in Norfolk are $1,130 and $1,340 respectively. The study noted the price of a two-bedroom apartment in Norfolk is up 22.9% since this time last year. Lateef Rasheed told the council during the March 22 meeting that he did two tours of duty in Vietnam and returned to Norfolk just in time to see Ghent being gentrified. They told us they were going to build these affordable houses in Ghent. And they were affordable for the rich, but not for us, Rasheed said. When asked to address residents concerns, a Norfolk government spokesperson highlighted the citys recent efforts to create more affordable housing opportunities for residents. The Department of Planning implemented multi-family design guidelines that require that all developments include inclusionary units, which the developer is doing, said Kelly Straub, Norfolk spokesperson. Straub also said Norfolk established the Department of Housing and Community Development in July to champion housing preservation, revitalization and neighborhood transformation. The city plans to participate in a new online auction of city-owned vacant residential property next month. The auction, Straub said, was designed to be accessible and align with the citys priorities around affordable housing and neighborhood strategic plans. Residents were also concerned the redevelopment means they would lose access to a location that has hosted community meetings and services. Among the speakers in opposition of rezoning the property was James Washington, who has used the property to offer community outreach services to the areas homeless population and high-risk youth. To do this is a spit in our face and a spit on our community, Washington said. Krysta Franks said a community pastor has been offering free ministry services to neighborhood children at the church. Every time I turn around there is something going on in the church and in the parking lot for the community. And that parking lot is packed because so many people depend on that, Franks said. Dale White, who was married in the church, said the approval of the multi-family zoning is an abomination that will displace vital ministry services that help cut down on violent crimes. Turning a 100-year old place of worship in a needy community into high-end apartments and townhomes Monument Properties can do better than that. The mission board can do better than that, White said. Councilmember Mamie Johnson, who represents Ward 3, asked the council to consider assisting community outreach programs who provided services at the church with finding a new location. The church decided to sell to whomever they chose to sell to. The city does not have control over that, said Johnson, who voted in favor of the rezoning. I am proposing that the governing body find the resources needed for the groups who were providing services to the people in Park Place so that their ministry can continue. City officials did not specify whether the city will help to relocate affected organizations in accordance with Johnsons proposal. The site was also rezoned as a historical landmark in the same vote. As a result, Monument Properties will have to obtain approval for changes throughout the church from the citys Architectural Review Board. Monument Properties is the company behind the redevelopment of Linde Lofts and the Peanut Factory Flats, both located in the Railroad District at Park Place. While the shell of the properties remain in accordance with historical landmark zoning laws, the interior was redone to accommodate apartments. The base price for a 650-square-foot apartment is around $1,300 per month, according to the properties websites. Caitlyn Burchett, caitlyn.burchett@virginiamedia.com via TikTok A Georgia cop probably thought no one was watching when he took his squad car to a scrubby area off a quiet road in a small Georgia town, walked around the back, and started having sex with someone while in uniform. But someone high up in a nearby telecommunications tower started filming and uploaded the videos to TikTok last week where they quickly racked up more than 15 million views. Police caught on cam!!! one video was captioned, along with hashtags of #towerclimbers and #dirtydeeds. Now the officer, identified by local news channel WRDW as Millen Police Officer Larry Benjamin Thompson, has quit and a record of past misconduct has come to light. Satellite maps from White Oak Road in Millen, a town of about 3,500 people about an hour south of Augusta, show the same tower, nearby cemetery, and patches of dirt and bushes that can be seen in the TikTok videos. The map also shows a school across the street. Millen Police Chief Dwayne Herrington told WRDW he was planning to meet with Thompson on Monday about a video but Thompson quit beforehand. Georgia state records show Thompson had worked on-and-off for the department since 2015. According to Millen City Council meeting minutes, Thompson was involved in a car crash while at work in November 2019. WRDW reported that he killed a 76-year-old driver, identified in a local obituary as Lewis Jenkins, when he t-boned Jenkins car while racing to a call at 86 miles per hour. The network also obtained investigation documents showing that, while working for the Millen fire department in 2017, Thompson accidentally discharged his gun, shooting a colleague in the arm. He claimed the gun malfunctioned while he was cleaning it but an internal probe found the weapon had no malfunctions. This is not an excuse to be accepted; only a reflection after the fact, the criminal investigative division wrote in its report. Though it is referred to as an accidental discharge, essentially it is a negligent discharge. Story continues Then in 2020, a woman whod been in a relationship with Thompson contacted Millen Police to accuse him of harassing her. Thompson admitted to running her tags to find her new address, claiming he was trying to return some old items to her, according to a case summary. He was suspended for two days. The Millen Police Department did not immediately respond to The Daily Beasts request for comment Tuesday. Read more at The Daily Beast. Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now. Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now. (Reuters) -Russia's communications regulator on Tuesday said it had drawn up two administrative cases against Alphabet Inc's Google for failing to remove banned information from its YouTube video-sharing platform, accusing it of blatantly promoting false content. Roskomnadzor said Google could be fined up to 8 million roubles ($91,533), or as much as 20% of the company's annual revenue in Russia for repeat offences. It said YouTube had become one of the key platforms in the "information war" against Russia. Google did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Russia has restricted access to Twitter and Meta Platforms' flagship Facebook and Instagram services since sending troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, as a simmering dispute with U.S. technology giants has escalated into a battle to control information flows. YouTube, which has blocked Russian state-funded media globally, is under heavy pressure from Moscow, which earlier this month accused it of spreading what it called threats against Russian citizens. "The American platform openly enables the spread of false content, containing inaccurate publicly significant information about the course of the special military operation in Ukraine, discrediting the armed forces of the Russian Federation, as well as information of an extremist nature with calls for violence against Russian servicemen," Roskomnadzor said. Russia last week said Meta was guilty of "extremist activity", something the company's lawyer denied in a Moscow court. Russia launched what it calls a special operation in Ukraine to degrade its neighbour's military capabilities and root out people it called dangerous nationalists. Ukrainian forces have mounted stiff resistance and the West has imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia in response. ($1 = 87.4000 roubles) (Reporting by ReutersEditing by Tomasz Janowski) LONDON (Reuters) - Russia's Foreign Ministry called in the ambassadors of the three Baltic nations on Tuesday to announce the expulsion of some of their diplomats in a tit-for-tat response, the TASS and RIA news agencies cited a source as saying. Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania expelled a total of 10 Russian diplomats in a coordinated move earlier this month. (Reporting by Reuters) HMS Prince of Wales in the Arctic as part of Exercise Cold Response, a major demonstration of Nato's strength in the region - @HMSPWLS Russia has significantly increased its military presence in the Arctic since its invasion of Ukraine, Ben Wallace has warned as UK troops take part in the largest Nato exercise in Norway in 30 years. The Defence Secretary on Monday night said Britain and its allies must strengthen their "unity and purpose as a defensive alliance". Troops from across Nato countries have been taking part in Exercise Cold Response, a major demonstration of the alliance's strength in the Arctic region. "The High North and Arctic are vital areas for the Nato Alliance to demonstrate our shared defences and support for wider European security," said Mr Wallace. "Russia's invasion of Ukraine has also been coupled with a significant increase in Russian military activity in the region. "Exercises like Cold Response underline our unity and purpose as a defensive alliance as we train together with forces from across Europe and North America." The exercise has included a reconnaissance mission by British commandos, who launched from a Royal Navy submarine in a Norwegian fjord. The Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron exercises at Lyngan Fjord, Norway - LPhot Johnson/Royal Navy Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron (SRS) teams launched from a "hunter-killer" submarine for "subsurface insertion" missions, which required them to surveil rocky shores in Lyngenfjord, within the Arctic Circle, while "enemy" troops searched for them. The SRS is drawn from a Plymouth-based division of the Royal Marines and performs reconnaissance ahead of the arrival of other units of Marines, who can deploy from skis, snowmobiles, boats, helicopters or by parachute. Their team leader in Norway said: "Being able to move sub-surface gives us a discreet means of moving our specialist teams to any coastline in the world. "Not only can we conduct operations in isolation, but by accessing and reconnoitring these complex coastlines by small craft we can also set the conditions for larger, more lethal follow on forces." Story continues His deputy added: "Working alongside the submarine was a great opportunity for us. In addition to the submarine work, we also took the opportunity to operate alongside our Norwegian colleagues. "We used one of their larger, faster craft to access areas out of range of our small craft, an excellent example of working together to achieve a common aim." Crew members clear the decks of HMS Prince of Wales as Arctic conditions strike - @HMSPWLS Exercise Cold Response is running across March and April in Norway and the surrounding seas and involves around 30,000 troops from 27 countries in Europe and North America. The exercise is held biannually, but takes place this year against the backdrop of the threat of conflict between Nato and Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. Mr Wallace's warning about Russian military presence in the region comes after more than a decade of increasing numbers of troops in the region. Dmitri Medvedev, then the Russian head of state, launched an Arctic strategy to "ensure military security" there in 2008. Since then, it has been a flashpoint between Russia and the Nato alliance. Last year, the United States accused Russia of "militarising" the region, while Russia said Western forces were provoking their troops by responding in kind. (Reuters) - Russian tech developers are building an alternative to Alphabet Inc's Google Play store and plan to launch it on May 9, a national holiday in Russia that celebrates victory in World War Two, the organisation behind the initiative said on Tuesday. YouTube and Google Play this month suspended all payment-based services in Russia, including subscriptions, as Western sanctions over Russia's actions in Ukraine started to pose banking challenges in the country. "Unfortunately, Russians can no longer normally use Google Play to buy apps and developers have lost their source of income," said Vladimir Zykov, director of projects at Digital Platforms, an organisation focused on digital development. "This is why we have created a Russian app shop, NashStore," Zykov said in a statement. NashStore, which translates into English as "OurStore", will serve Android mobile devices and should ultimately be compatible with Russian Mir bank cards, the statement said. Russia traditionally holds a patriotic display of raw military power on May 9 with a parade that passes through Moscow's Red Square commemorating the anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two. (Reporting by Reuters, editing by Ed Osmond) As the strike by two dozen WTTW technicians enters its third week, negotiations are at a stalemate over a new labor contract, and the pressure is mounting on both sides. On Monday, the Chicago public TV station notified the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1220, which represents the striking workers, that it will terminate group health insurance coverage for the technicians as of April 1. The workers will have the option to continue coverage at their own expense through the federal COBRA program. Advertisement One of the guys on the picket line actively has cancer, and a couple of guys have had cancer in the past, said John Rizzo, business manager for Downers Grove-based IBEW Local 1220. Removing that coverage and putting the cost burden back on these people with no paychecks to help support it, its quite frankly an evil move on their part. John Rizzo, business manager with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1220, joins other union members as he speaks at a strike rally outside the WTTW studios in Chicago March 21, 2022. WTTW union broadcast technicians went on strike March 16 after more than a year of negotiations failed to produce a labor agreement. The technicians are responsible for a number of productions at the local public TV station, including the nightly news show "Chicago Tonight." (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune) In an email, WTTW said when the workers went on strike March 16, they moved to inactive employment status with health insurance covered through the month of March. The station told the striking employees last week they automatically qualify to continue coverage under the COBRA health insurance program. Advertisement Health insurance coverage is reliant on employment status on the first day of each month, Julia Maish, a WTTW spokeswoman, said in an email Tuesday. The company presumes that the IBEW addressed health insurance coverage optionality with its striking members before their strike action. The striking IBEW workers include camera operators, graphic artists and floor crew responsible for various productions at WTTW, including the stations signature nightly news program, Chicago Tonight. The employees went on strike after a year of negotiations failed to produce an agreement on a new labor contract with WTTW-Ch. 11. It is the first such strike in the 67-year history of the station. WTTW has continued to produce a down-sized version of Chicago Tonight during the strike, with executive producer Jay Smith and other management personnel handling the technical aspects of the 7 p.m. live broadcast. The show has been reduced from an hour to less than 30 minutes on most nights, and the guest list has been winnowed by a growing list of politicians who refuse to cross the picket line. Last week, Mayor Lori Lightfoot appeared at a union rally in front of the stations North Side studios, while Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued a statement Thursday, setting a top-down tone for dealing with WTTW during the strike. Until WTTW-Channel 11 can come to an agreement on a fair contract, I stand in solidarity with the men and women of IBEW Local 1220 and will honor their strike, Pritzker said. The Democratic Party of Illinois sent a letter last week to Sandra Cordova Micek, president and CEO of Window to the World Communications, parent of WTTW-Ch. 11, saying it also stood in solidarity with the striking workers, and had notified political candidates that appearing on the station would be considered crossing a picket line. While some politicians have declined invitations for interviews, Chicago Tonight remains committed to providing news reporting, context and analysis to our viewers about the news of the day, Maish said. The technicians had been working without a labor contract since July, when a one-year extension of the previous four-year agreement expired. The issues are job protection and work jurisdiction, according to the union, which alleges WTTW is trying to farm out their long-standing technical duties to news producers and nonunion personnel. Advertisement WTTW said it offered the union a no-layoff guarantee and a bargaining unit minimum of 25 full-time employees for the term of the new contract, but the IBEW rejected it. The station stands ready to return to good faith negotiations as soon as possible, Maish said. Cameramen and editors start at $20 an hour, with a top pay of $48.41 after seven years, according to the IBEW. Floor crew start at $18.19 per hour with a top pay of $38.22, while graphic artists start at $19.39 and max out at $29.89 per hour after seven years. The station said the average pay rate across the unit is $47.75 per hour, and that 91% of technicians make more than $40 an hour. Currently, no one is paid at the minimum rate. Rizzo said while seasoned veterans can make a good living, the starting pay is so low that its hard to attract new technicians to work at WTTW. Advertisement This is not the way that public television should be run. It should be run with people in mind, not corporate profits, Rizzo said. The top scale is a nice living wage and the bottom scale, they cant get people in on. You cant feed a family at that rate. rchannick@chicagotribune.com Mikhail Fridman. Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images The Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman told El Pais he can't go anywhere because of sanctions. The London-based billionaire said he has to apply to the UK government to spend money. He said he wasn't sure the allowance would be enough "to live a normal life without excesses." The Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman told the Spanish newspaper El Pais this week that he was living "practically under house arrest" because of sanctions levied against him. Fridman, who lives in London, and many other Russian oligarchs and officials were sanctioned by the UK and the European Union after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He cannot access his fortune, as his bank accounts, credit cards, and ATM cards have been blocked. "Authorities in Great Britain have to assign me a certain amount so I can take taxis and buy food, but it will be a very limited amount if you look at the cost of living in London," he told El Pais. Fridman, who founded the largest private bank in Russia, is one of the richest people in Russia, with an estimated net worth of $10.4 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. Earlier this month, he told Bloomberg that he had to apply to the UK government to spend any money in the country and that he could be receiving about 2,500 British pounds, or about $3,275, a month if the application were approved. But in the El Pais interview, he said he wasn't sure an allowance would be "enough to live a normal life without excesses." "I can't even take anyone out to a restaurant. I have to eat at home and I am practically under house arrest," he said. He bought Athlone House, a five-acre Victorian-era estate, for 65 million pounds in 2016. Fridman told El Pais he didn't know whether he'd be able to keep the mansion. "It's unclear whether I'll be able to keep living in London or whether I'll be forced to go, which I cannot do right now and don't want to for many reasons," he said. Story continues The tycoon also expressed dismay at the treatment he'd received since the war in Ukraine began. "I have been in London for eight years, I have invested billions of dollars in Great Britain and other European countries, and the response to this is that they seize everything from me and throw me out," Fridman told El Pais. Fridman has described the sanctions targeting businesspeople as unfair and ineffective. He told El Pais that "sanctions against private entrepreneurs make no sense, because the majority of them have built their business through talent, effort and personal qualifications." He told the Spanish newspaper it's "idiotic" to believe that oligarchs could compel Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the Ukraine war which El Pais noted he avoided calling a war but described as a "disaster" or "what is happening." "Things won't go any better for the West if it forces many brilliant and interesting entrepreneurs to go to Russia, instead of integrating them more and trying to get them to take a stand, even if it is obvious that private business has zero influence over Putin," he told El Pais. Read the original article on Business Insider Thungela mining (Image Philip Mostert) Investors have been warned to watch out for fraudsters trying to sell fake shares in a London-listed miner. Scammers are attempting to sell shares in coal mining firm Thungela Resources as part of a fraudulent fundraising scheme, the company said today. The South African business, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange, said it had become aware of a third-party attempting to coax investors into a supposed fundraising involving redeemable preference shares. Thungela denied it was involved in any such scheme. The company, which was recently sold by mining giant Anglo American, warned investors not to engage and report any possible contact with the scammers to regulators. The purported offer amounts to share fraud and has been reported by the Company to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the South African Financial Sector Conduct Authority and to the United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority for investigation, the company said. Thungela said shareholders and investors could visit its website for legitimate documents the firm has issued and find information about share fraud and other investment scams. The UKs FCA recently said it was taking assertive action to tackle fraud aimed at retail investors. Between April and September last year, it received 16,400 enquiries about possible scams up nearly a third on the same period in 2020. An unexpected lockdown forced a Chinese woman to have the stitches of her eyelid surgery removed at the gate of her residential complex. The woman, whose name was withheld in media reports, underwent double eyelid surgery at a cosmetic medical institute in the middle of March. Last week, she was finally ready to have her sutures removed after days of waiting. Unfortunately, however, local health authorities had just decided to place her residential block under a COVID-19 lockdown in a bid to stop the spread of the virus in the city. On Sunday, Shanghais municipal health authority reported 50 new coronavirus patients and 3,450 asymptomatic cases. There are currently a total of 14,376 local asymptomatic cases still under medical observation in the city. Her concerns grew two days later after the officials informed the residents that the lockdown in their complex could stay longer than expected. She then asked her doctor, surnamed Zhou, if it was possible to postpone the removal of her sutures. I am not allowed to leave my residential block. Do you think I can postpone the time to remove the sutures? I feel they have been embedded in my flesh, she was quoted as asking. Zhou told the patient that the sutures must be removed immediately. He suggested that he send over a surgical blade and tweezers so she could ask someone in her complex to remove the stitches for her. Non-absorbable sutures used in surgeries must be removed as soon as the wound is healed, which usually takes about a week. Once the stitches are removed, the wound can continue healing. Having the sutures embedded in the skin longer than necessary can cause unsightly scars. The doctor eventually decided to visit his patient at her residential complex and do it himself after she failed to find someone who could help her. Since he was not allowed to enter the complex, he was forced to remove the sutures at the community gate. According to Zhou, the procedure became complicated since they were both standing with a gate between them. The doctor placed the patients chin on top of the barrier to keep her face from any sudden movement while he removed the sutures. Following COVID-19 health protocols, the doctor wore a mask and brought along alcohol disinfection pads, tweezers and a surgical blade during his visit. Story continues Enjoy this content? Read more from NextShark! Cassey Ho Posts Support for Black Fitness Coach Who Received Racist Messages Sneaky Cat Stays Quiet in Classroom After Student Sneaks Him Into School Elderly Laundromat Owners Model the Clothes Left Behind by Customers Taiwanese Club Hosts Event for People With Autism and Their Families The contrasts between the cries of emotion and a balloon-bearing dancing heart did not overshadow the message repeated again and again by family, friends and supporters of Tyre Sampson: Icon Park should tear down Orlando FreeFall God, we pray that you shut this whole thing down, a minister preached, raising her palms to the sky as the red metallic tower loomed behind her. Thursday night, Sampson, a 14-year-old football player from Missouri, slipped from his seat an fell dozens of feet from the ride and died after the rides nearly 340-foot drop. PHOTOS: ICON Park vigil for Tyre Sampson People including family gathered at a vigil outside Orlando FreeFall Monday to honor 14-year-old Tyre Sampson, who fell from the ride and died last week. People including family gathered at a vigil outside Orlando FreeFall Monday to honor 14-year-old Tyre Sampson, who fell from the ride and died last week. People including family gathered at a vigil outside Orlando FreeFall Monday to honor 14-year-old Tyre Sampson, who fell from the ride and died last week. People including family gathered at a vigil outside Orlando FreeFall Monday to honor 14-year-old Tyre Sampson, who fell from the ride and died last week. People including family gathered at a vigil outside Orlando FreeFall Monday to honor 14-year-old Tyre Sampson, who fell from the ride and died last week. People including family gathered at a vigil outside Orlando FreeFall Monday to honor 14-year-old Tyre Sampson, who fell from the ride and died last week. People including family gathered at a vigil outside Orlando FreeFall Monday to honor 14-year-old Tyre Sampson, who fell from the ride and died last week. An accident report released Monday showed the ride was in good working order, but Sampson was around 60 pounds heavier than the maximum weight recommended by the manufacturer. Additionally, the manufacturers guidelines warned passengers who didnt fit in the seat or harness should not ride the attraction. READ: ICON Park calls for FreeFall, SlingShot rides to suspend operations following teens death Sampsons cousin, Shay Johnson, said attendants at other rides in the park had turned him away that night. You told him he couldnt get on the swing. You told me he couldnt get on the slingshot, she said. So, why did you allow him to get on this if he was overweight? She and other family members want the ride replaced by a statue of Sampson wearing his football uniform, or the uniform of the Miami Dolphins, his favorite team. READ: Dollywood closes drop ride after deadly incident on similar attraction at Orlandos ICON Park Then, they invited strangers like Ricky Martinez, an Orange County resident, to share their thoughts. Its been open for three, four months only, and this has happened already, so they couldve prevented this, he said. I hope they get everything thats coming toward them. READ: Family of teen killed during free fall ride at ICON Park retains high-profile attorneys Click here to download the free WFTV news and weather apps, click here to download the WFTV Now app for your smart TV and click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live. Signs of hope for an end to the Russia-Ukraine war emerged on Tuesday morning when a Russian official said Moscow would "reduce military action" in the north of Ukraine near Kyiv and Chernihiv, according to multiple reports. Negotiations between the two sides are taking place in Turkey a little more than a month into a conflict that has killed thousands on both sides, devastated much of Ukraine and led to stiff sanctions on Moscow from the west. Talks in Turkey between Russia and Ukraine have wrapped for the day but are expected to continue. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of the talks had argued that an immediate cease-fire was in each party's interest, according to a report by Bloomberg. The New York Times, reporting on the talks, said Moscow was prepared to push up the timing of a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It reported that Russia's chief negotiator said such a meeting was possible if a draft peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia could be forged. Russia's advances in Ukraine have stalled in recent days amid a counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces near Kyiv. Russia has made advances in Ukraine's south and east, and it has been suspected that a goal of Putin's was to connect the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, seized in a separate 2014 invasion, with separatist regions bordering Russia in eastern Ukraine. The conflict took another turn over the weekend when President Biden, speaking in Warsaw after meetings with NATO leaders, said that Putin should not remain as Russia's president at the end of his prepared speech. The unscripted remark was quickly walked back by the White House. On Monday, Biden said he was not making a statement reflecting a change in U.S. policy but was expressing his own moral outrage and that of the world toward Russia's and Putin's actions in Ukraine. He also insisted his new comments did not represent a walk-back of the earlier remarks. Story continues Russia's invasion of Ukraine has generally unified the United States and Western Europe, which have responded with stiff sanctions and the supply of weapons to Ukraine. But it has also raised serious fears of a larger conflict that could engulf other countries or lead to a nuclear war. The U.S. has also repeatedly warned of the possibility that chemical weapons or even small nuclear weapons could be used by Russia in Ukraine. Developing An insurance company that many of you use is being forced to pay a $5 million fine -- the largest in the agencys history. The Georgia Insurance Commission said Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield violated state law. The insurance commissioner told Channel 2s Dave Huddleston that hes been looking into the companys practices for more than a year. We will hold insurance companies accountable when their actions are unfairly impacting Georgians, Georgia Insurance and Fire Safety Commissioner John King said. The state agency said the insurance company failed to comply to consumer complaints in a timely manner, improper claims settlements and violation of the prompt pay act. We did find a number of violations, 78,000 just in the focus areas that we looked, King said. TRENDING STORIES: King said Blue Cross Blue Shield could be hit with even more fines if they fail to fix the problems in a certain amount of time. He said the insurer also failed to keep its list of network doctors up to date for patients. That employee had to choose whether to pay out of network costs or go and select another doctor. So, it was incredibly frustrating. It was keeping people from access from the health (coverage) they deserve in our state, King said. Huddleston contacted Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield for a comment on this story. They sent him a statement, saying in part: We have since migrated to a new platform with the goal of improving accuracy and transparency. We are dedicated to those we serve and partner with, and we believe the recent enhancements we have made will create an improved overall care provider experience. King said the insurance company has a new president and he hopes things will run smoother from now on. IN OTHER NEWS: Seven Chicago restaurants were given first-time Bib Gourmand designation by the Michelin Guide Tuesday. The Bib Gourmand is meant to signal restaurants that offer quality food at more affordable prices than the fine-dining establishments typically awarded the much rarer Michelin stars. The restaurants announced Tuesday will not be awarded stars, but the global taste maker still deems them worth visiting. Advertisement The announcement precedes Michelins April 5 announcement of Chicago restaurants earning stars in 2022. The full list of Chicago restaurants with a Bib Gourmand recommendation 55 in all will also be released that day. [ Chicagos 2021 Michelin star and Bib Gourmand restaurants, mapped ] Restaurants given Bib Gourmand distinction offer a full menu of a starter, main course and dessert, making it possible to order two courses and a glass of wine or dessert for around $40 or less, not counting tax and gratuity, Michelin said in a news release. Advertisement Restaurants given first-time Bib Gourmand distinction, with edited comment from the Michelin Guide, are: Apolonia (South Loop; contemporary cuisine): The Michelin guide applauded this cool and chic restaurant for straightforward, exemplary cook that is poised for sharing. Read Tribune critic Nick Kindelspergers review here. Bloom Plant Based Kitchen (Wicker Park; vegan cuisine): A menu full of flavor and textural complexity. Dear Margaret (Lakeview; contemporary cuisine): Michelin officials lauded Dear Margarets French-Canadian menu that goes beyond poutine and cheese curds. Comfort and decadence are at the heart of such shareable plates as an heirloom tomato salad starring fromage blanc, pickled shallots and dressed with black garlic-ice wine vinegar. Read Tribune critic Louisa Chus review here. Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. > Lardon (Logan Square; deli cuisine): Specializing in whole-hog, snout-to-tail butchery, this all-day salumeria offers a dazzling selection of charcuterie arranged on wooden boards or layered on soft bread, the Michelin guide said. Read our review here. Sochi Saigonese Kitchen (Lakeview; Vietnamese cuisine): Dishes display immense depth, so come hungry. Superkhana International (Logan Square; Indian cuisine): The Michelin Guide found Superkhana to be flexible and fun, which is also how wed describe the cooking. Indian flavors are mixed and mashed in traditional and unconventional ways. Read our review here. Tortello Pastificio (Wicker Park; Italian cuisine): A world where pasta is king. This team is not out to revolutionize Italian food; instead, they are trying to correct some of its misinterpretations. And the results, while simple, are always delicious. Advertisement Three Chicago restaurants were first-time recipients of Michelin stars in 2021. Alinea remained Chicagos only restaurant with a three-star rating from the Michelin Guide and Smyth, Oriole and Acadia (which has since closed) all maintained two stars. Seventeen restaurants kept one-star ratings from 2020. jbnoel@chicagotribune.com Big screen or home stream, takeout or dine-in, Tribune writers are here to steer you toward your next great experience. Sign up for your free weekly Eat. Watch. Do. newsletter here. STURGEON BAY - The trial of a man charged with murder in a 46-year-old cold case will begin in Door County court April 19 after jury selection took place last week. Richard G. Pierce was arrested in 2018 for the disappearance of his wife, Carol Jean Pierce, in September 1975. At the time, Richard Pierce was stationed with the U.S. Coast Guard in Sturgeon Bay and living with Carol Jean in a trailer in the city. He was due to retire and move with his trailer to Michigan about two weeks after Carol Jean disappeared. Pierce, who will turn 86 years old the day before the trial begins, is charged with first-degree murder and disinterment of a body and could face life in prison if convicted. The trial is scheduled to run for 16 days in front of Judge David Weber, Tuesdays through Fridays from April 19 to May 13. RELATED: Jury trial for man accused of murdering wife in Sturgeon Bay in 1975 postponed to 2022 Pierce was arrested Oct. 11, 2018 more than 43 years after his wife's disappearance by Sturgeon Bay Police Department officers and Wisconsin Department of Justice agents at his home in Cheboygan, Michigan, and eventually extradited to Door County. RELATED: Former Sturgeon Bay Coast Guardsman accused of murdering wife to return to Door County Jail According to the criminal complaint against Pierce, he told officers he last saw Carol Jean the morning of Sept. 8, 1975. She hasn't been seen since, nor has her body been found. In an Advocate story following Pierce's arrest, Sturgeon Bay assistant chief of police Dan Brinkman said Pierce always was a suspect in his wife's disappearance and they believed he killed her on or about Sept. 5, 1975. But attempts in 1987 and 2004 to have a grand jury indict Pierce fell through because of insufficient evidence. However, Sturgeon Bay police continued their investigation and had their case reviewed in 2018 by the Wisconsin Cold Case Review Team of the Wisconsin Association of Homicide Investigators. The team determined Pierce was the last person to see her alive and would benefit from her death by gaining sole possession of his pension, as well as his home and land in Michigan. Story continues The trial originally was scheduled for August of 2020 but was postponed when attorneys debated whether evidence from cadaver dogs, which are trained to detect human remains through scent, should be admissible in court. A search of Pierce's property following his arrest saw a cadaver dog detect six places where it picked up such a scent. Pierce's defense team argued in a July 2020 hearing that the science behind the dogs' abilities isn't yet reliable enough and dogs can only determine if they smell a dead body, not specifically who it was or how long ago the body may have been there. Weber ruled in October 2020 to allow the evidence. The start of the trial was further postponed by health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Contact Christopher Clough at 920-741-7952, 920-562-8900 or cclough@doorcountyadvocate.com. FOR MORE DOOR COUNTY NEWS: Check out our homepage This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: 46-year-old cold case of murder in Sturgeon Bay goes to trial April 19 The Tennessee House on Monday passed a bill that lets school boards deem books obscene and threatens to withhold education funding and slap school librarians with criminal penalties if orders to remove them arent followed. The Houses 63-24 vote shifts action in the Republican-supermajority Legislature to the Senate, where the bills fate is less certain after multiple delays in a committee. The bill would amend an exception under state law that does not put people with a scientific, educational, governmental or other similar justification at risk of criminal charges for knowingly distributing obscene material to a minor. The bill would only remove the exception for public K-12 schools, their workers and their contractors. If someone disobeys the school boards directive to remove a book, they could face a class A misdemeanor, or a class E felony if someone repeatedly doesnt comply. The bills sponsor, Republican Rep. Scott Cepicky, contended that the bill aims to protect our librarians and prevent the arbitrary removal of a book from a school library by spelling out one process to remove books. The bill lets parents of students report to school officials about material in a school library they consider obscene or harmful to minors, both as defined in state law. The leader of that school must then remove that material from the library for at least 30 days to allow the school board to review. Afterward, the school board would then decide to remove the material permanently or return it to school libraries. If school officials dont comply with the process, then the Tennessee education commissioner can temporarily withhold state funding. Download the FOX13 Memphis app to receive alerts from breaking news in your neighborhood. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD Trending stories: Story continues Book challenges and bans are on the rise in Tennessee and the U.S. as advocates call for more scrutiny over what ideas and concepts are taught to students, particularly around racism, sexuality and gender. Republicans have brought multiple bills on the topic. Earlier this month, lawmakers and parents hurled insults against librarians in discussion of one proposal. Many who testified before the legislative panel repeated unfounded claims that librarians who defended certain controversial literary works were helping groom children to become desensitized to sexual abuse and pornography. Librarians and other education advocates deny such claims, countering that policies are already in place to let parents review library materials. A handful of Republican lawmakers conceded the arguments recently used to condemn teachers and libraries had crossed a line. On Monday, Rep. Eddie Mannis, Tennessees only openly gay Republican state lawmaker, opposed the bill, echoing concerns voiced by many Democrats. He noted existing shortages of teachers and said he doesnt want to pass laws that tell them we dont trust you. Im just concerned that this legislation could be used to subjectively eliminate education materials that people misjudge to be harmful or offensive strictly due to their own personal prejudice or bias, the Knoxville lawmaker said. Senate Speaker Randy McNally was among the Republicans who said they are not comfortable with the comparisons of teachers and librarians. McNally has pointed to action already take on legislation backed by Republican Gov. Bill Lee, which would require school libraries to post their contents online and regularly review their policies to make sure the materials are age-appropriate and suitable for the children accessing them. Lawmakers have already passed and Lee has already signed that bill. Tennessee recently attracted international attention when a rural school board in McMinn County voted unanimously to remove Maus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from the districts curriculum. Around the same time, the affluent Williamson County school board members agreed to remove Walk Two Moons a book that depicts an American Indian girls search for her mother after receiving complaints from parents. WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE to see todays piping-hot, fresh-outta-the-oven episode of THE RUSH with Matt Harmon! Well let you know everything you didnt know you needed to know about sports. Other stuff too. But mostly sports. Its Tuesday, March 29, 2022, and heres what Matt is cookin up: No. 2 UConn grabbed a thrilling 91-87 double overtime victory over No. 1 NC State to seal a 14th straight trip to the Final Four, where theyll face No. 1 Stanford No. 1 Louisville used stifling 4th quarter defense and Hailey Van Liths 22 points to beat No. 3 Michigan for their chance at No. 1 South Carolina in the Final Four The Buffalo Bills are getting a brand new stadium thatll cost $1.4 billion, BUT taxpayers are paying $850 millionfor a facility that wont even have a roof A Thibodaux High student faces felony charges after police said they found just over a pound of marijuana and ammunition in his car while it was parked on campus Monday. The 18-year-old is charged with possession with intent to distribute marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia and violation of a drug-free zone, the Lafourche Parish Sheriffs Office said. Members of the Sheriffs Office and Thibodaux Police Department conducted a routine search Monday at the high school at 1355 Tiger Drive when a drug-sniffing dog alerted to the presence of narcotics inside a vehicle, authorities said. More: Police arrest Houma man suspected of dealing drugs, including heroin, meth and fentanyl After the student unlocked his car for school administrators, authorities found two backpacks containing over a pound of suspected marijuana combined, the Sheriffs Office said. Deputies also found items associated with selling drugs. The student was found to be in possession of 1.15 pounds of marijuana, $350 in cash and ammunition for a 9mm firearm, including a drum-style magazine, authorities said. Items authorities say they seized from the drug bust. The student was booked into the Lafourche Parish jail, where he was later released Monday after posting $6,100 bail. Also: 'It's terrible out there': Drug overdose deaths increase in Terrebonne and Lafourche Lafourche public schools Superintendent Jarod Martin said officials will continue working with police to keep drugs out of schools. The Lafourche Parish School Districts partnership with our local law enforcement allows us to identify and remove anyone that violates the law while on campus, Martin said. We will continue to actively investigate and discipline anyone found to be in violation of the law or our standards of conduct. We are committed to ensuring that our schools always remain places where all students feel safe and welcome. The incident remains under investigation. Staff Writer Dan Copp can be reached at 448-7639 or at dan.copp@houmatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanVCopp. This article originally appeared on The Courier: Student accused of bringing ammo and a pound of marijuana to school Rep. Tim Ryan's (D) Ohio Senate campaign launched a $3.3 million ad buy, marking his first of the campaign cycle. The ad buy, which was launched on Monday, includes spots that start airing this week through May 17, which is two weeks after the state's scheduled Democratic primary. The congressman's first ad, titled "One Word," is focused solely on China. "It is us versus China, and instead of taking them on, Washington is wasting our time on stupid fights," Ryan says in the 30-second spot. Ryan goes on to lament how China is "out-manufacturing us left and right" and how "America can never be dependent on communist China." The language used in the ad appears to be aimed at manufacturing workers in Ohio, many of whom have been negatively impacted by jobs being outsourced to China, as well as the U.S. heavily relying on Chinese manufacturing. Republicans, including former President Trump, have used similar phrasing in the past to hit back against what many say is an over-reliance on Chinese manufacturing. The GOP has made gains in the Buckeye State, with the messaging going back to Trump's election in 2016. But Ryan, who is widely seen as the front-runner in the state's Democratic primary, appears to be going full-steam ahead in the Senate race, which The Cook Political Report rates as "lean Republican." Democrats Morgan Harper, Traci Johnson and LaShondra Tinsley are also running in the contest. Last week, Ryan's Senate campaign announced it will invest more than $3 million to support down-ballot Ohio Democrats this year. Westminster Abbey in London (Getty Images/iStockphoto) Staff at Westminster Abbey have revealed the hidden meaning behind the flowers selected for Prince Philips memorial service, which took place today, Tuesday 29 March in London. Flowers arranged around the gothic cathedral came in shades of red, white and blue, and included roses, carnations, eryngium (sea holly) and dendrobium orchids. In a Twitter post, staff at Westminster Abbey explained the significance of these particular flowers, writing: Orchids featured in the Queens wedding bouquet and sea holly echoes the Dukes career in the Navy and affection for the sea. Flowers at the service will be arranged in shades of red, white and blue and will include roses, carnations, eryngium (sea holly) and dendrobium orchids. Orchids featured in The Queens wedding bouquet and sea holly echoes The Dukes career in the Navy and affection for the sea. pic.twitter.com/nAX1BQJ6d3 Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) March 29, 2022 The flowers werent the only point of symbolism during the service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal and other members of the congregation were dressed in dark green, a subtle tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green The Service of Thanksgiving was attended by most senior members of the royal family, including the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke of York, the Princess Royal, the Earl and Countess of Wessex, and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The Queen arrived on the arm of Prince Andrew, just hours after Buckingham Palace confirmed Her Majesty would be in attendance. It marks the first time that the Duke of York has made a public appearance since settling his sexual assault case in the US. In February, Andrew paid more than 10m in damages to Virginia Giuffre, who accused him of sexual abuse - allegations he has vehemently denied - in an out-of-court settlement. Story continues He also made a donation to a charity in support of victims rights to prevent the case proceeding to a civil trial. Prince Andrew stepped down from royal duties in 2019 following allegations involving his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And in January, the Queen stripped her son of his honorary military titles and royal patronages, and he stopped using his HRH style. After recovering from a bout of Covid and struggling with mobility issues, there was some doubt as to whether Her Majesty would be fit enough to attend todays memorial. The 95-year-old head of state pulled out of the Commonwealth Day service earlier this month due to mobility issues, and has previously spoken about her struggle to move. Buckingham Palace said she has been actively involved in plans for the service, with many elements reflecting her wishes, however.. Prince Philip, the Queens husband of 73 years, died on 9 April 2021. Philips funeral at St Georges Chapel in Windsor last year took place during Covid restrictions and was limited to just 30 people. The Queen sat alone during the farewell ceremony due to social distancing measures, and singing was banned at the time. Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost are backing a constitutional amendment to require courts to consider protecting public safety when determining monetary bail amounts. Bail reform advocates call the proposal a step in the wrong direction. Unhappy with a recent ruling from the Ohio Supreme Court, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters and other tough-on-crime Republicans want to change the state constitution to make it easier to keep people behind bars until trial or plea deals. The proposed constitutional amendment, which could be placed on the November ballot, says that when setting bail amounts, courts must consider public safety, a person's criminal record, the likelihood the defendant will show up for court and the seriousness of the offense. "The whole goal here is to make Ohio more safe. That's the bottom line," said Deters in a press conference Tuesday. "Victims deserve to know they're going to be safe from the criminals who have abused them," said state Sen. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green. A bedrock of both the U.S. Constitution and Ohio Constitution is that people are innocent until proven guilty. Both constitutions prohibit excessive bail. Still, Yost and Deters scoffed at the idea that large numbers of innocent people are unfairly held behind bars. Yost said the number of innocent people facing criminal charges is "vanishingly small" and Deters called it a "pervasive myth" that innocent people are sitting in jail, awaiting their day in court. Ballot measure prompted by Ohio Supreme Court case The push to change the Ohio Constitution comes after a 4-3 ruling from the Ohio Supreme Court in January on whether a $1.5 million bail in a Hamilton County murder case was excessive. Justin DuBose was charged in the July 18, 2020 shooting death of Shawn Green in Colerain Township. At a hearing in November 2020, DuBose's attorney asked for reasonable bail, citing DuBose's community ties, limited financial resources and lack of a criminal record. A Hamilton County judge set it at $1.5 million. DuBose later asked for a lower bond and Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Wende Cross set it at $500,000. Then the next day, after hearing from Green's family members about the reduced bond, Cross restored it to $1.5 million. DuBose appealed and won. Story continues The Ohio Supreme Court upheld the 1st District Court of Appeals decision, citing a state law that says a judge shall release a defendant on the least restrictive conditions that will reasonably assure the defendants appearance in court. The high court said that the Green family's safety concerns could be addressed by imposing nonfinancial conditions, such as restrictions on travel as well as no-contact orders. More: Ohio Supreme Court upholds $1 million bond reduction in Colerain murder case Public safety, although of the utmost importance, is not a factor relevant to the calculation of the bail amount, the opinion says. A court may not impose excessive bail for the purpose of keeping an accused in jail. Yost and Deters called the decision misguided and dangerous and said the DuBose decision removes judges' ability to consider protecting public safety when setting money bail. Judges may still deny bail for defendants if it's found they pose a substantial risk and that no release conditions can reasonably assure the public's safety, according to Justice Michael Donnelly's concurring opinion. "The Ohio Supreme Court did not eliminate public safety but only clarified long standing law and requires courts to take real steps to ensure public safety through oversight and monitoring and not simply substitute a false monetary amount as if that makes the public safe," said Ohio Public Defender Tim Young. Bail proposal draws opposition across political spectrum The proposal marks a dramatic shift against efforts to change how the bail system works in Ohio. Reforms on the left and right of the political divide have pushed to make obtaining bail contingent on risk factors, not the size of the accused person's bank account. The ACLU of Ohio and the Buckeye Institute, a conservative think tank, both expressed concerns about proposed constitutional amendment. Buckeye Institute President Robert Alt called it a step in the wrong direction. "Ability to pay does not equate to public safety. If an individual is a threat to society, we should be giving judges the authority and the discretion to detain them pre-trial. We shouldn't simply be increasing the price that they have to pay," Alt said. ACLU of Ohio lobbyist Gary Daniels said lawmakers should pass two other bail reform bills that would allow courts to make decisions based on flight risks or potential danger to the community, instead of how much money the accused has. "These bills give judges and prosecutors the tools they need to protect public safety while honoring the presumption of innocence guaranteed to all of us," he said. Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Kevin Grasha contributed to this report. Laura Bischoff is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio. Get more political analysis by listening to the Ohio Politics Explained podcast This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Joe Deters, Dave Yost push Ohio constitutional amendment on bail rules Illustrator Manal Mirza and book Shirin Shamsi hold up their book, "Zahras Blessing: A Ramadan Story," outside Shirin's home in Darien on March 28, 2022. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune) In the 1990s, when her kids were young and her dream of being a childrens author was still just that a dream Shirin Shamsi wrote a picture book about a teddy bear who got lost during the holy month of Ramadan. A publisher rejected the manuscript, but the story didnt end there. Advertisement Shamsi, a suburban mom who wanted Muslim kids to have culturally relevant books, kept plugging away: taking classes, attending conferences, honing her craft. And 25 years later, all that hard work has paid off. Advertisement Shamsis teddy bear book, rewritten with the bear in a supporting role and titled Zahras Blessing: A Ramadan Story, is being published by Barefoot Books. Kirkus Reviews called it engaging and sweet. Another childrens book by Shamsi, The Moon From Dehradun: A Story of Partition, will be published by Simon & Schuster in August. I feel like Im doing the best thing in the world writing for children, said Shamsi, who lives in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. Its the only thing I want to do. Shamsi, whose parents immigrated to the United Kingdom from Pakistan in the 1950s, grew up in England. She was an avid reader and enthusiastic writer. At age 7 or 8, she recalled, she would fill up her diary page for the week and then tape in extra paper so she could write more. Later, when she was raising her own children in the Chicago suburbs, she saw an ad in a magazine with the tagline, Do you want to be a childrens writer? You know what? Shamsi said to her husband, Talha, a physical therapist. This is my dream. He told her to go for it. It was such a simple thing, but it changed the trajectory of my life, she said. At first, her audience was her own three children, who are now in their 30s. She wanted them to see stories that represented their cultural heritage and faith tradition, she said. Advertisement The teddy bear story, her first Ramadan tale, was part of that. In school, there were Christmas stories and Hanukkah stories, she said, and she felt her kids needed a holiday book of their own. In the initial version of the story, the brave bear ended up at a thrift store during Ramadan and overcame numerous obstacles on his way to being reunited with Zahra. A publisher rejected the book in 2002, but Shamsi continued to read it to her kids, and she brought it with her when she volunteered to read her works laminated but still unpublished to grade school classes. When her youngest child started college, she became a community bookseller for Barefoot Books, which has a catalog of inclusive childrens literature she greatly admired. She returned to the teddy bear manuscript in about 2016 and decided the book would be more relatable if the main character was a child. She wanted to tell a layered story, Shamsi said. She wanted to contain the narrative within the month of Ramadan. News stories of refugees had made a strong impression on her around that time as well, and she wanted to include a refugee in the story. In 2019, she decided to participate in a Twitter pitch party, in which authors pitch summaries of their stories to publishers, and Barefoot Books expressed interest. The publisher helped with edits designed to give the refugee character a bigger voice in the story. In the final version, a girl named Zahra hopes that Ramadan will bring her a much longed-for little sister. Zahra loses her teddy bear in the course of helping her mother donate clothing, and makes friends with a little girl named Haleema, who has made it to the U.S. without her parents and is living at a refugee center. Advertisement The good news kept coming for Shamsi when her publisher found an illustrator for the book: Manal Mirza of Chicagos North Shore. Unbeknownst to the publisher, the two women had met when Mirza was about 7. Her teacher at a North Shore private school, Dawne Salier, was a friend of Shamsis, and Shamsi used to volunteer to read her books in Saliers classes. Mirza, who loved drawing and coloring as a child, remembered Shamsi well. I felt like that was the first time it clicked for me: Oh, someone actually draws and writes these books. Thats when the connection was made, said Mirza, an illustrator and a user interface designer for an app. Shamsi also remembered Mirza, and she was touched to discover the little girl she had read to as a child had become an artist. We think that we have things in our hands. We hope for the best, but everything has a ripple effect, she said. You go out there and you read to a child, but you dont realize the power of stories. Advertisement nschoenberg@chicagotribune.com (Reuters) Five years and eight months after he asked Russia to release damaging information on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump still hopes Russia is listening. In an interview with right-wing publication Just the News, Mr Trump said Russian president Vladimir Putin should release information about a Russian widows investment into a company Republicans claim is connected to Hunter Biden, President Joe Bidens younger and sole surviving son. Mr Trump has long claimed Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million payment from Elena Baturina, the widow of late Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and has suggested without evidence that such a payment was intended to curry favour with the elder Mr Biden for corrupt purposes. Mr Trump told Just the News Mr Putin should release information the matter, which he also tried raising at his first debate with Joe Biden. She gave him $3.5 million so now I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it, he said. I think we should know that answer. A report prepared by Senate Republicans to aid Mr Trumps re-election campaign alleged Hunter Biden received the $3.5 million pursuant to a consultancy agreement through a firm called Rosemont Seneca Thorton. While Hunter Biden was a co-founder and CEO of an investment firm called Rosemont Seneca Advisors, his attorney, George Mesires, has said Mr Biden has no connection to Rosemont Seneca Thorton, and its not known what, if any, connection exists between the two companies. Mr Trump has frequently sought foreign assistance to damage his perceived political enemies. In July 2016, he infamously called on Russias government to release emails he claimed Ms Clinton was withholding to prevent discovery of damaging information about her. Speaking at a press conference at his Doral, Florida golf resort, he said: "Russia, if youre listening, I hope youre able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Lets see if that happens. Story continues Nearly three years later, he tried blackmailing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing a sham investigation into Hunter Bidens work as a board member for Ukrainian energy company Burisma. At the time, Mr Zelenskys armed forces were battling against Russian-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine, and the newly-elected Ukrainian president asked Mr Trump to sell Ukraine more Javelin anti-tank missiles to stop Russian tanks. Mr Trump responded: I would like you to do us a favour though, and went on to tell Mr Zelensky to speak with then-attorney general Bill Barr about a conspiracy theory which posited that Joe Biden corruptly withheld US and EU-backed loan guarantees so Mr Zelenskys predecessor would fire then-prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin because he was allegedly investigating Hunter Biden. In reality, then-Vice President Biden was carrying out the wishes of the Obama administration as well as the EU and IMF in pushing for the firing of Mr Shokin, who was widely regarded as corrupt. Mr Trumps attempt at blackmail was later reported to Congress by a whistle-blower, leading to the first of his two impeachment trials. Mr Trump also told Just the News he would still like to have more information about Hunter Bidens work with Burisma. The information he seeks may not exist, but he complained that none would be forthcoming because Mr Zelensky is unlikely to take any action to damage Joe Biden while the US is assisting Ukraine fight off the unprovoked invasion Mr Putin launched last month. Now, you won't get the answer from Ukraine, he said. The Tulia Police Department released information about a deadly shooting early Sunday, and two arrests later made during the investigation. According to a Facebook post, at about 1:30 a.m., Tulia Communications dispatched officers to the 100 block of North El Paso for a report of shots fired. Upon arrival, officers located a man who had been shot once in the chest. Officers on the scene provided medical attention until EMS arrived, and the male victim was taken to Swisher Memorial Hospital, where he later died from his injuries, according to police. His identity has not yet been released. Seth Michael Davis and Jessie Wayn Samarripa, both of Plainview, were arrested in connection to a fatal shooting in Tulia earlier this week. Two suspects were later located by Hale County sheriff's deputies and were detained. During the investigation, the Texas Rangers obtained a murder warrant for Seth Michael Davis from Plainview, as well as a separate warrant for Jessie Wayn Samarripa, also from Plainview, for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and tampering with physical evidence. Both were arrested and are being held at the Swisher County Jail. This is an ongoing and active investigation involving the Texas Rangers and the Tulia Police Department. This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Tulia police say 2 Plainview men arrested in deadly shooting incident WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and its allies are discussing another possible round of assistance for Ukraine that could reach a collective $500 million, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters on Tuesday. A U.S. official declined to confirm the figure but said the United States was "actively working on how best to continue our support for the Ukrainian government through security, humanitarian and financial assistance." (Reporting by Steve Holland; writing by Susan Heavey, Editing by Franklin Paul) London U.K. police said Tuesday that they were recommending 20 fines for breaches of coronavirus lockdown regulations at Prime Minister Boris Johnson's own residence and offices. The London Metropolitan Police has been investigating 12 parties and gatherings, some of which were attended by Johnson himself, that took place during the height of the country's COVID lockdown in 2020. The police said they would not identify which gathering the notices were being issued over, as that could enable the identification of the individuals involved. The fine for attending any event with over 15 people during the lockdown was set at approximately $1,050. "We are making every effort to progress this investigation at speed and have completed a number of assessments," the police said in a statement, adding that "due to the significant amount of investigative material that remains to be assessed," further referrals for fines could come later. The "Partygate" scandal sparked national outrage and calls for Johnson's resignation earlier this year as Britons learned that the people making the rules to control COVID-19 appeared to have been having parties, with alcohol and snacks, in the seat of the U.K.'s top executive power while the rest of the country was forbidden from visiting dying relatives in hospitals or attending funerals. In January, a long-awaited internal government report into the parties found that "at least some of the gatherings in question represent a serious failure to observe not just the high standards expected of those working at the heart of Government but also of the standards expected of the entire British population at the time." The civil servant who put together that report, Sue Gray, said she had to constrain what she made public as 12 of the gatherings were being investigated by the police. Despite the limitations, she condemned the behavior of some of those at Johnson's official residence, Number 10 Downing Street, criticizing the "excessive consumption of alcohol" in the workplace. Story continues "There were failures of leadership and judgment by different parts of No. 10 and the Cabinet Office at different times. Some of the events should not have been allowed to take place. Other events should not have been allowed to develop as they did," Gray said. Will Smith apologies to Chris Rock for Oscars slap: CBS News Flash March 29, 2022 January 6 panel votes to recommend holding Dan Scavino, Peter Navarro in contempt of Congress How the Russia's invasion on Ukraine is impacting Poland By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon on Tuesday clarified that U.S. troops in Poland were "liaising" with Ukrainian forces as they hand over weapons to them, but were not training "in the classic sense" following remarks from President Joe Biden on the matter. On Monday, Biden told reporters that while in Poland last week, he had been talking to U.S. troops who were helping "train" Ukrainian forces in Poland. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters that U.S. troops in Poland were "liaising" with Ukrainian forces when weapons are handed over to the forces fighting back against Russia's invasion. "It's not training in the classic sense that many people think of training. I would just say it's liaising," Kirby said. He did not provide details on what exactly the interactions entail or how long they usually lasted. It was not immediately clear whether the distinction between liaising and training had greater significance, as the United States tries to limit any direct military involvement in the war. The United States and countries from around Europe have largely limited their military support to intelligence sharing and heavy supplies of weaponry to Ukrainian forces, including anti-aircraft and anti-tank systems. The United States withdrew its military trainers of Ukrainian forces from western Ukraine before Russia's invasion, and the training site where they had previously operated near the Ukrainian city of Lviv was subsequently bombed by Russian air-launched cruise missiles earlier this month. Kirby added that additional aircraft, including 10 F-18 jets, and more than 200 personnel would be headed to eastern Europe, including Lithuania. This marks the latest tranche of additional U.S. troops that have been deployed to the region after Russia's invasion of Ukraine more than a month ago. There are currently more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Europe, up from the roughly 80,000 before Russian troops moved into Ukraine. Story continues Moscow promised on Tuesday to scale back its military operations near the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv and Ukraine proposed a neutral status with international security guarantees while maintaining its territory. The Russian pledge was met by widespread skepticism in the West. "Has there been some movement by some Russian units away from Kyiv in the last day or so? Yes, we think so. Small numbers," Kirby said. He said that it did not mean that the threat to Kyiv was over and the troops moving away from Kyiv would likely be used in other parts of Ukraine. "Russia has failed in its objective of capturing Kyiv. It has failed in its objective of subjugating Ukraine," he added. (Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Chris Reese and Cynthia Osterman) By Nandita Bose WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Joe Biden's deputy national security adviser for economics, Daleep Singh, will travel to New Delhi and meet government officials to discuss Russia's war against Ukraine and develop an economic framework for the Indo-Pacific, the White House said on Tuesday. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is also planning to visit India, one of the biggest buyers of Russian commodities. New Delhi has called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine but has refused to explicitly condemn Moscow's actions. India has also abstained from voting on multiple U.N. resolutions on the war. "Singh will consult closely with counterparts on the consequences of Russia's unjustified war against Ukraine and mitigating its impact on the global economy," the White House said in a statement. Last week, Biden said only India among the Quad group of countries was "somewhat shaky" in acting against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. The South Asian nation has tried to balance its ties with Russia and the West but unlike other members of the Quad countries - United States, Japan, Australia - it has not imposed sanctions on Russia. "In response to his aggression, we have presented a united front throughout the NATO and in the Pacific," Biden told a business forum last week, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. "The Quad - with the possible exception of India being somewhat shaky on some of these - but Japan has been extremely strong, so is Australia in terms of dealing with Putin's aggression," he said. Russia promised on Tuesday to scale down military operations around Ukraine's capital and north, while Kyiv proposed adopting neutral status, in confidence-building steps that were the first signs of progress toward negotiating peace. (Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington; Editing by David Gregorio) (Reuters) - Russia poses significant threat to Kyiv through their strike capability even though Ukrainian forces continue localised counter attacks to the north west of the city, British military intelligence said on Tuesday. Russian forces have maintained their offensive on Mariupol with continuous heavy shelling of the city, the Ministry of Defence said in a statement. "However the centre of the city remains under Ukrainian control." Elsewhere, Russian forces are maintaining blocking positions while attempting to reorganise and reset their forces, it added. (Reporting by Maria Ponnezhath in Bengaluru; Editing by Christopher Cushing) Maria Pavlovych mourns her son, Roman, who was killed near Mariupol - AP Good morning. Another round of talks aimed at stopping the war in Ukraine is scheduled for today as the fighting continues on the ground, with the two sides trading control of a town in the east and a suburb of the capital. Ukrainian forces retook Irpin, north-west of Kyiv, from Russian troops, who were regrouping to take the area back, President Volodymyr Zelensky said late on Monday as he sought to rally the country. Here's what happened overnight and you can follow the latest updates in our liveblog. 1. Dont push us into a corner, Kremlin tells Nato The Kremlin on Monday night warned Nato not to push us into a corner and said Russia felt it was amongst war with the West due to severe sanctions. Referencing Russias tension with Nato, Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, told the US broadcaster PBS: For a couple of decades, we were telling the collective West that we are afraid of your Natos moving eastwards. We too are afraid of Nato getting closer to our borders with its military infrastructure. Please take care of that. Dont push us into the corner. No. 2. Abramovich poison claims very concerning The Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office has described the claims that Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich suffered suspected poisoning during attempts to aid peace talks in Ukraine as "very concerning". The office said the UK would "continue to assist" by imposing tough sanctions on Russia, as well as providing defensive and humanitarian support so Ukraine can be "in the strongest possible negotiating position". British defence intelligence analysts have warned more than 1,000 Russian mercenaries are expected to deploy to eastern Ukraine to undertake combat operations. 3. Zelensky demands urgent sanctions Volodymyr Zelensky has urged Western nations to toughen sanctions quickly against Russia, including an oil embargo, to stop Moscow having a free hand to escalate its measures against his country. Story continues In his nightly video address to Ukrainians, a clearly irritated Mr Zelensky said the West had miscalculated last year in delaying sanctions and the invasion had followed. "A full-scale war has begun. Now there are many hints and warnings that supposedly tougher sanctions, such as an embargo on Russian oil supplies to Europe, will be put in place if Russia uses chemical weapons," Ukraine's president said, occasionally banging his hands on a table. "There are simply no words... We, people who are alive, have to wait. Doesn't everything the Russia military has done to date warrant an oil embargo? Don't phosphorous bombs warrant it? A shelled chemical production facility or a shelled nuclear power plant doesn't warrant it?" 4. Amnesty accuses Russia of war crimes Amnesty International has accused Russia of committing war crimes in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol. The human rights organisation will soon release an in-depth report on the devastation caused by Russia's assault on the city on the Sea of Azov, Amnesty's Secretary-General Agnes Callamard said in a press conference in Johannesburg. "The siege of Mariupol, the denial of humanitarian evacuation and humanitarian escape for the population, and the targeting of civilians, according to Amnesty International's investigation, amounts to war crimes," said Ms Callamard. "That is the reality of Ukraine right now." Ms Callamard said "the crisis in Ukraine right now, the invasion... is not just any kind of violation of international law. It is an aggression. It is a violation of the UN charter of the kind that we saw when the US invaded Iraq." 5. Biden defends calling for Putins removal Joe Biden said he made "no apologies" for calling for Vladimir Putin's removal, but claimed he was expressing his "personal feelings" not a new US policy as he defended his off-the-cuff remark. White House officials scrambled into damage control mode after Mr Biden sparked an international backlash by stating that Mr Putin cannot remain in power during a major speech in Europe on Saturday. The US president defended the remarks during a terse press conference at the White House on Monday. "I'm not walking anything back. I was expressing the moral outrage I felt to the way Putin is dealing, and the actions of this man, just the brutality of it, he said. Listen to the latest episode of our daily Ukraine podcast Three homemade explosive devices allegedly found in a backpack belonging to Xavier Pelkey, 18, of Waterville, Maine, who is accused by federal prosecutors of threatening to blow up Chicago-area mosques. (U.S. District Court records) Federal agents in Chicago raided the home of a teenage boy last month as part of an ongoing probe into an alleged ISIS-inspired plot to attack a Shiite mosque during spring break and kill as many people as possible, newly unsealed court records show. The raid was connected to the case against Xavier Pelkey, 18, who was charged in February in U.S. District Court in Maine with possessing several shrapnel-packed homemade explosives. Prosecutors there said Pelkey had been plotting online to travel to Chicago and commit mass murder at area places of worship, the Tribune has previously reported. Advertisement On Feb. 5, a week before Pelkeys arrest in Waterville, Maine, agents in Chicago executed a search warrant at the home of a 15-year-old boy who had been communicating online with Pelkey, according to a declaration by FBI Special Agent Garrett Drew unsealed Friday. Drew said the boy, identified only as Juvenile #1, and Pelkey, who used the name Abdullah on Instagram, were conspiring with a 17-year-old boy from Kentucky to attack an identified Shia Muslim mosque in the Chicago area in late March, coinciding with spring break. Advertisement Juvenile #1 further explained that they would enter the Shia mosque and separate the adults from the children, then murder the adults, Drew stated. If they had not encountered law enforcement at that point, they would continue on to another Shia mosque or Jewish synagogue and execute the same plan. The teen told investigators they did not have a plan to escape but rather their plan ended with them being shot by law enforcement. According to Drew, Juvenile #1 told investigators that Pelkey had told him hed already built an explosive device to get more people, and that hed be responsible for acquiring more firearms and ammunition. Pelkey and the Kentucky teen, identified as Juvenile #2, intended to travel to Chicago by bus or train, according to the declaration. Agents seized multiple firearms during the raid on Juvenile #1s home, including a Remington pump shotgun, as well as swords, knives, a bow and arrows, multiple homemade ISIS flags and multiple electronic devices, according to the declaration. A week later, FBI agents in Kentucky executed a search warrant at the residence of Juvenile #2. That boy told investigators hed also been communicating with Pelkey, who talked about gathering materials to make fireworks to attack someone, according to Drews declaration. Juvenile #2 also said that Abdullah told him that he wanted Allah to grant him to be a shaheed (martyr) and die while fighting in the cause of Allah, Drew wrote. Devotees of Islamic extremist groups such as ISIS have historically targeted other Islamic sects such as Shiites in terrorist attacks, according to the declaration. Advertisement No public charges have been announced against either of the juveniles. Pelkeys attorney did not respond Tuesday to a request for comment. A spokesman for the U.S. attorneys office in Chicago declined to comment. Pelkey, of Waterville, Maine, was arrested Feb. 11 at the home he shares with his mother, according to a federal criminal complaint unsealed in the U.S. District Court in Bangor. Inside a backpack in his bedroom, FBI agents found three homemade explosive devices that had been fashioned with fireworks and taped together with staples, pins and thumbtacks to increase the amount of shrapnel propelled by an explosion if the devices were detonated, the complaint said. Drews unsealed declaration contained a photo taken of Pelkeys bedroom wall, where investigators observed a hand-painted version of the ISIS flag. Pelkey, who was charged with unlawful possession of a destructive device, first told agents hed taped the fireworks together because he wanted to make a bigger boom, according to the complaint. When asked why the metal items were in the devices, Pelkey didnt respond. Advertisement At a bond hearing last month prosecutors told U.S. Magistrate Judge John Nivison that the devices were intended to be used in a calculated act of violence that was designed to take many lives. In asking the judge to order Pelkey to be held pending trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Wolff said the teens plot amounted to mass murder and that Pelkey clearly was a danger to the community. Obviously he is a young man, but we also know that it appears that he has an ideology that hes developed where he has aligned himself with radical thinking under which he is willing to commit acts of violence ... that would culminate with him martyring himself, Wolff said, according to the transcript. Pelkeys attorney, Christopher Maclean, asked the judge for release on electronic monitoring or home confinement, saying his client was a bright young man who has a loving, supportive family. Pelkey lives with his mother, grandparents and a 16-year-old autistic brother in an apartment in downtown Waterville, a town of 15,000 about 50 miles west of Bangor, according to Maclean and public records. Though hes spent some time in juvenile detention, there was nothing in Pelkeys background that would suggest that hes ineligible for release under these circumstances, Maclean said, according to the transcript. Advertisement Maclean also called the governments accusations of a terrorist plot in Chicago posturing to some degree, and that once all the facts come out it will be clear this is a much more mundane situation than whats been alleged. He certainly disavowed any of the desires or intentions that the government has suggested during this detention hearing and is fully committed to adhering to whatever strict conditions the court sets here, Maclean said. But Nivison denied bond, siding with prosecutors in declaring Pelkey a danger to the community and a potential flight risk. Prosecutors in that case have since been granted an extension until April 15 to bring an indictment against Pelkey, records show. jmeisner@chicagotribune.com Representatives from Ukraine and Russia held their first face-to-face talks in two weeks on Tuesday concerning the conflict between both countries, possibly signaling progress toward ending the war. Negotiators from both sides met in Istanbul, Turkey, to discuss a possible cease-fire as well as Ukraine security guarantees, according to The Associated Press. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reportedly told attendees that they had a "historic responsibility" to bring an end to the fighting. "We believe that there will be no losers in a just peace," he said, according to the AP. "Prolonging the conflict is not in anyone's interest." Delegations from each country were seated on opposite sides of a long table during the talks, the news service noted. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba shared what he hoped to gain from the talks, saying, "We are not trading people, land or sovereignty," Reuters reported. "The minimum program will be humanitarian questions, and the maximum program is reaching an agreement on a cease-fire," he reportedly added in an address on national television. Russia and Ukraine previously held talks in Belarus and via video, but failed to make substantial progress, the AP noted. Russian troops invaded Ukraine more than a month ago in what Moscow is calling a "special operation" to "denazify" Ukraine. Ukraine is willing to remain neutral and give up any ambition to join Nato in exchange for security guarantees and the creation of an eight-nation council that would come to its aid if it were ever attacked again, a top negotiator announced Tuesday, at the conclusion of the first day of Istanbul talks to end the devastating month-long Russian war against Ukraine. Ukrainian negotiators said the the eight members of the board could include the United States, United Kingdom, Turkey, Poland, Canada, and Israel, and that talks had already begun to seek their cooperation. International security guarantees need to be really activated, negotiator Mikhail Podolyak said in a speech after the negotiations inside the Dolmabahce palace compound in Istanbul. This is the system upon which wed like to build the future of Ukraine. Russia has yet to respond to the proposal. A Russian member of ,the negotiating team said Moscow has decided to cut back military activity in the direction of Kyiv where it has become bogged down in a war of attrition and has lost ground to a Ukrainian counteroffensive. It remained unclear if the talks, originally aimed to last two days, would continue Wednesday or whether both delegations would return to their capitals for consultations. The negotiations, held inside a high-security presidential office complex adjacent to Istanbuls ornate Dolmabahce Palace compound along the Strait of Bosphorus, are the latest in several rounds of discussions aimed at ending Russian president Vladimir Putins onslaught against its western neighbour. The war has quickly become the most destructive and disruptive in Europe since the 1990s. Ahead of the talks, Ukraines leader Volodymyr Zelensky said his country is ready to declare neutrality and offer security guarantees to Russia, including keeping the country nuclear-free if Moscow withdraws its troops. Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said he was hoping for a resolution to the countrys humanitarian disaster at the very least, and a ceasefire at best. "We are not trading people, land or sovereignty, he said. Story continues The biggest sticking point in the talks is the status of Ukrainian territories in the east and southeast seized by Russia. Moscow wants Kyiv to recognise the land grabs in the Donbass region and the Crimean Peninsula, something which Ukraine refuses to do. The Ukrainian negotiators say they have proposed a 15-year period of discussions over the status of the two regions involving Russia and Ukraine as well as international interlocutors. By hosting the talks, Turkey hopes to boost its own diplomatic status, but also end a conflict which has driven up global energy and food prices and damaged the Turkish tourism industry. Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak (L) reacts as he speaks to the press after first Russia and Ukraine face-to-face talks in weeks at Dolmabahce palace in Istanbul (AFP via Getty Images) The war has also created Black Sea security threats. Twice naval forces have encountered unexploded mines that had apparently drifted from the conflict zone into Turkish waters. One made its way into the crucial Bosphorus Strait, where hundreds of passenger ferries and dozens of tankers filled with fuels pass daily. We believe that a just peace will have no losers, and a prolonged conflict is not in anyones interest, Turkeys president Recep Tayyip Erdogan told negotiators ahead of the talks, according to the official Anadolu news agency. Davyd Arakhamia, a Georgian-born Ukrainian businessman and parliamentarian, led Kyivs delegation while Vladimir Medinsky, a former Russian minister of culture, headed Moscows team. Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich was pictured at the talks despite reports that he suffered symptoms from a poisoning attempt at an earlier round of negotiations. Late on Monday, the Wall Street Journal and investigative news outlet Bellingcat cited unnamed sources claiming that Mr Abramovich and two Ukrainian peace negotiators had been poisoned and suffered from red eyes and peeling skin on their faces and hands earlier this month after a meeting in Kyiv. Roman Abramovich is seen in Turkish TV footage of the start of peace talks in Istanbul between Russian and Ukrainian delegations (Screengrab/Twitter) The Kremlin and Ukrainian officials have dismissed the reports about the suspected poisoning as untrue. Mr Kuleba - Ukraines foreign minister - said before the talks - wryly - that he advised anyone going for negotiations with Russia not to eat or drink anything, (and) preferably avoid touching surfaces". Ukraine, a former Soviet republic long under the dominion of Russian empires, has been drifting more and more into orbit of the EU and Nato. Russia launched the war with the apparent aim of taking control of Ukraine, a nation of more than 40 million, and turning it into a satellite state. But the war went badly from the start. Russian troops met fierce Ukrainian military and political resistance. Western nations unified to impose crippling sanctions that have pummelled the rouble. Few analysts have given the talks much chance of success. During the ongoing decade-long war in Syria, Russia and its allies frequently use peace talks and ceasefires in what critics described as distractions aimed at giving themselves diplomatic cover and time to regroup and reset military strategy. This map shows the extent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Press Association Images) Samuel Ramani, a Russia specialist at the Royal United Services Institute - a thinktank - said Kremlin voices in recent days have not publicly signalled any concessions. A Russian defence ministry spokesman said the ringleaders of the Kyiv government must be tracked down and properly punished while Mr Peskov said Russia still aimed to de-Nazify Ukraine, an apparent reference to obliterating any Ukrainian national sentiment. My conclusion is that Russia is using these talks to show its acting in good faith, Mr Ramani told The Independent. They are trying to buy some time on the military front while theyre still telling their own audience they're firmly committed to regime change. Still, recent signals suggest that the Russian offensive may be recalibrating its military aims to focus on Ukraines southeast, which abuts the Black Sea, raising the possibility that it is seeking an exit strategy from the war. Turkey, hosting the talks, maintains good relations with both Moscow and Kyiv. It has supplied Ukraine with combat drones that have proven effective against Russian armour while refusing to agree to sanctions on the Kremlin, even welcoming oligarchs such as Mr Abramovich. A Ukrainian border-guard member told off a Russian warship has been released from captivity. Ukraine's military announced on Tuesday that Roman Hrybov returned to his native Cherkasy region. Ukrainian border guards who defied orders to surrender became a symbol of national resistance. The Ukrainian border-guard member whose profane response to a Russian warship's order to surrender went viral in February has been released from Russian captivity, Ukraine's military said Tuesday. "Roman Hrybov, the author of the famous "Russian Warship, Go F*** Yourself" phrase, returned from Russian captivity to his native Cherkasy region," Ukraine's defense ministry tweeted on Tuesday. "Glory to the Hero!" Thirteen Ukrainian State Border Guard Service members were stationed on the tiny Zmiinyi Island in the Black Sea, known in English as Snake Island, on February 24 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Aa apparent audio exchange quickly spread online of a Russian warship near Snake Island ordering the men to surrender via radio. One of the island's defenders, now identified as Hrybov, could be heard responding, "Russian warship, go fuck yourself." All of the border guards were originally thought to have then been killed by Russian forces. Ukraine's navy later announced that the troops were actually "alive and well," and had been captured by Russian forces. Hrybov was given an award for his services to the Cherkasy region, according to a government video of the interaction posted to YouTube on Tuesday. The video shows Cherkasy governor Ihor Taburets greet Hrybov and present him with a medal. The two could then be seen chatting at a table and gave short interviews to the camera. "I think that Ukraine really needs to know its heroes, and the Cherkasy region needs to know its heroes," Taburets said to the camera. Taburets added: "Everything that Roman said is really about Ukraine and the resilience of the spirit of our fighters, who in spite of everything the tortures he endured, the treatment, the moral pressure endured and will be an example for our Ukrainians and for the Cherkasy region, an example of firmness and strength of the Ukrainian, Cossack spirit for us to win." Story continues Hrybov responded, in the video: "I want to say a huge thank you to the Ukrainian people for such support. We feel this support very much, it inspires us. The strength, the justice are on our side." The defiant phrase used by the border guards became a national symbol of Ukrainian resistance against Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces, which have remained largely stalled across multiple fronts amid the ongoing month-long war. Ukraine's postal service even said it would release a stamp that says "Russian warship, go f#ck yourself" to commemorate the border guards of Snake Island. Translations by Oleksandr Vynogradov. Read the original article on Business Insider STORY: "Yes, it's bad, it's scary. But we're not giving up, everything will be good," the 47-year-old said, adding "Our people will start to rebuild everything... We will continue to rise." Zaremenna is among the few going that direction, as central European nations are bracing for a renewed influx of refugees from Ukraine that could test their capacity to house, school and find work for the rising numbers of mainly women and children escaping the war. Poland, which shares a 500-km (310-mile) border with Ukraine, has integrated children into schools and set up a grassroots network to provide housing. It has also allowed Ukrainians to register for government IDs and benefits. More than half of the refugees arriving in the European Union have come via Poland, home the to region's largest Ukrainian community of around 1.5 million people before the war. Others have come through Romania, Slovakia and Hungary. Russian soldiers drove armoured vehicles without radiation protection through Chernobyls highly toxic red forest, kicking up clouds of radioactive dust, workers at the site have said. A Chernobyl employee said the act was suicidal for the soldiers, who had seized the site of the nuclear disaster, because the radioactive dust they inhaled was likely to cause internal radiation in their bodies. Radiation levels at Chernobyl had increased due to heavy military vehicles disturbing the soil, Ukraines state nuclear inspectorate said on 25 February. But until now, details of exactly what happened had not emerged. The two Ukrainian workers were on duty when Russian tanks entered Chernobyl on 24 February and took control of the site, where staff are still responsible for the safe storage of spent nuclear fuel and supervising the concrete-encased remains of the reactor that blew up in 1986. Both said they had seen Russian tanks and other armoured vehicles moving through the red forest, which is the most radioactively contaminated part of the zone around the power station, about 100km north of Kyiv. The regular soldiers a worker had spoken to when they worked alongside them in the facility had not heard about the explosion, he said. Russias military said radiation was within normal levels after capturing the plant, and their actions prevented possible nuclear provocations by Ukrainian nationalists. Russia has previously denied that its forces have put nuclear facilities inside Ukraine at risk. Russias defence ministry did not respond to the accounts from Chernobyl staff. The red forest, so called because dozens of square kilometres of pine trees turned red after absorbing radiation from the explosion, is considered so highly contaminated that even the nuclear plant workers are not allowed to go there. Nobody goes there ... for Gods sake. There is no one there, said Valery Seida, acting general director of the Chernobyl plant, who was not there at the time of the Russian invasion. Story continues But the Russian military convoy went through the zone, the two employees said. One of them said it used an abandoned road. A big convoy of military vehicles drove along a road right behind our facility, and this road goes past the red forest, said one of the sources. The convoy kicked up a big column of dust. Many radiation safety sensors showed exceeded levels, he said. After the Russian troops arrived, the two plant employees worked for almost a month along with colleagues until they were allowed to go home last week when Russian commanders allowed replacements for some staff to be sent in. Reuters could not independently verify their accounts, which were given by phone on Friday and on condition of anonymity because they feared for their safety. The next day, Russian forces seized the town Slavutych near Chernobyl, where most plant workers live. Seida and the mayor of Slavutych said on Monday that Russian forces had now left the town. Reuters was not able to independently establish the radiation levels for people in the immediate proximity of the Russian convoy that entered the red forest. On Sunday, Ukraines deputy prime minister warned about the risk of radiation at Chernobyl as she criticised Russian forces for militarising the exclusion zone. Iryna Vereshchuk demanded that the UN Security Council take immediate steps to demilitarise the zone and dispatch a special mission to eliminate the risk of an accident at the site of the worlds worst civil nuclear disaster. Burnt trees are seen in the Chernobyl zone close to the Ukraine-Belarus border crossing on 13 February, days before Russias invasion (Getty Images) The State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management said on 27 February that the last record it had on a sensor near nuclear waste storage facilities before it lost control over the monitoring system showed that the absorbed dose of radiation was seven times higher than normal. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on 25 February that radiation levels at the Chernobyl site reached 9.46 microsieverts per hour but remained within an operating range recorded in the exclusion zone from the moment of its creation and posed no threat to the general population. The safe levels, by IAEA standards listed on the agencys website, are up to 1 millisievert a year for the general population and 20 millisieverts a year for those who deal with radiation professionally, where 1 millisievert is equal to 1,000 microsieverts. The IAEA said it stopped receiving monitoring data from the Chernobyl site on 9 March. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is still considered by Ukrainian authorities to be dangerous. Entering the disaster site without permission is a crime under Ukrainian law. Additional reporting by Reuters A top White House national security official will travel this week to India, a major outlier in the effort to pressure Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. Daleep Singh, the Biden administration's deputy national security adviser for international economics, will travel to New Delhi on Wednesday and Thursday to meet with Indian officials, the White House said. Singh will discuss the economic relationship between the two countries, as well as the Russian invasion. "Singh will consult closely with counterparts on the consequences of Russia's unjustified war against Ukraine and mitigating its impact on the global economy," National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne said in a statement. "Singh will also discuss priorities of the Biden Administration, including the promotion of high-quality infrastructure through Build Back Better World and the development of an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework." India is the world's largest democracy based on population, but it has not joined the U.S. and its European allies thus far in the coordinated effort to sanction Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, which began more than one month ago. India has relied for generations on Moscow's delivery of military assistance and views Russia as its key ally against China's attempts at further dominating the region. India's state-run oil company purchased 3 million barrels of Russian crude oil earlier this month even as the U.S. and other countries moved to ban or limit imports of Russian oil in an effort to cripple Moscow's economic leverage. White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said previously that Indian purchases of Russian oil would not run afoul of U.S. sanctions, but that Indian leaders should "think about where [they] want to stand when history books are written." WASHINGTON The U.S. Navy wants to buy one last San Antonio-class amphibious ship and then end the production line, the service announced in its fiscal 2023 budget request. The LPD-17 class got off to a rough start in its construction, but transformed into a model acquisition program and a workhorse of the fleet. These ships, built at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Mississippi, haul Marines and their gear as part of amphibious ready group/Marine expeditionary unit (ARG/MEU) formations. The vessels are used in battle, for humanitarian assistance missions and to recover space capsules. The Navy bought 13 Flight I LPDs and had planned to buy another 13 to replace the aging Whidbey Island-class dock landing ships. Under the Navys proposal, it would buy just three of the 13 Flight IIs and then end the program, shrinking the amphibious fleet dramatically as the Whidbey Island-class dock landing ships hit the end of their service lives and are decommissioned. The Navy and Marine Corps are conducting an amphibious warship requirements study expected to wrap up very shortly. Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, the deputy commandant of the Marine Corps for combat development and integration, said in January he worried the studys final result would be based on budget limitations rather than actual need. Timely global response and day-to-day peer competition requires ... no less or threshold, in requirements speak than 31 amphibious ships, he said. The fleet has 32 amphibious ships today, in line with what Heckl said the Marines need. Marine Corps leadership has said dropping to 28 could mean delays in arrival times in a crisis. The decision to stop the LPD production line could drop the service to 24, at the very low end of an estimate released by the Biden administration last spring. Its unclear if a number that low would add risk to arrival times or force a more fundamental rethinking of the ARG/MEU construct in place today. The amphibious dock landing ship Pearl Harbor, right, conducts a vertical replenishment while transiting the Persian Gulf with the amphibious transport dock ship Portland, left, on Sept. 18, 2021. (MC2 Wesley Richardson/U.S. Navy) Ingalls currently has three LPDs in construction: hull 28, which will deliver this year; hull 29, which launched in January; and hull 30, the first of the Flight II ships. Story continues The shipyard started buying material for LPD-31 and hoped to receive full funding for LPD-32 in FY23, for which the yard already got some advanced procurement funding from Congress. Under the Navys plan, the service would spend $1.7 billion to buy LPD-32 and then end the San Antonio-class production line. This could leave Ingalls in a pinch. Another of the four ship classes it builds the Coast Guards National Security Cutter is coming to an end as well. That leaves just the America-class LHA, which is also being assessed in the amphibious requirements study, and the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer that both Ingalls and General Dynamics Bath Iron Works build. Rear Adm. John Gumbleton, the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for budget, told reporters March 28 that the Navy would seek a five-year destroyer contract that includes nine ships and an option for a 10th short of the 15 ships in the current multiyear procurement contract. Having nine or 10 ships across the next five years would barely keep Ingalls and Bath viable as the Navy tries to move from the Flight III Arleigh Burkes into the next-generation DDG(X) program. Congress will almost certainly weigh in to support of both the DDG multiyear contract and the LPD program truncation. Lawmakers on the House and Senate Armed Services committees in particular are highly supportive of both programs. The Senate Armed Services Committee had tried to push the Navy to sign a first-of-its-kind multiyear contract for three LPDs and one LHA in FY21, but the Navy did not act, saying the service was unprepared to commit to buying more amphibious ships until it completed the requirements study. WASHINGTON (AP) A U.S. government agency said Tuesday that China has granted visas for federal investigators to travel there and aid in the investigation of the deadly China Eastern Airlines crash. The National Transportation Safety Board said China also granted visas to technical advisers from Boeing, which made the plane, engine manufacturer CFM and the Federal Aviation Administration. All would take part in the investigation, under longstanding international agreements. The safety board said the U.S. officials and industry representatives hope to leave for China this week. A safety board spokesman said the independent agency will send a small group including senior air-safety investigator Sathya Silva to China. Their travel was held up for several days to meet Chinese visa and COVID-19 regulations, and the NTSB appealed to the State Department to intervene. A China Eastern Boeing 737-800 jet crashed in a remote mountainous area in southern China on March 21, killing all 123 passengers and nine crew members on board. The plane was cruising at about 29,000 feet (8,800 meters) about one hour into its flight from Kunming in southeastern China to Guangzhou, an export manufacturing hub near Hong Kong, when it went into a steep descent. Over the weekend, searchers found the plane's flight data recorder, following earlier recovery of the cockpit voice recorder, which investigators hope will provide important clues about the cause of the crash. China Eastern, one of four major Chinese airlines, and its subsidiaries have grounded all their Boeing 737-800s, more than 200 planes. The airline said the grounding was a precaution, not a sign of any problem with the planes. SPRINGFIELD For the second time in a week, state Senate Democrats turned their back on a nominee of Gov. J.B. Pritzkers to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board, but the governor on Tuesday reserved his ire for Republicans who are trying to paint him as soft on crime heading into this years election. The 15-seat board that considers early release for convicted criminals is down to just six members, and advocacy groups have expressed concern about its ability to function. Pritzker accused Senate Republicans who have rejected his choices for the board of trying tear apart this agency of government. Advertisement Its easy to do what the Republicans do, Pritzker said at an unrelated event in Springfield. They take the original crime that took place, often decades and decades ago, and they just talk about the headline of that crime and dont talk about everything else thats occurred. The governor failed to note that 14 Democratic senators, most of them representing suburban districts, joined 17 Republicans Monday to turn down his nomination of Eleanor Wilson to the board. The final vote Monday was 31-15, with 12 Democrats failing to vote. Advertisement Gov. J.B. Pritzker at Navy Pier in Chicago on Feb. 28, 2022. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune) The board has become a proxy for the larger political battle heading into this years elections over the crime issue, and Mondays vote showed a split between progressive Democrats and their moderate colleagues who are loath to provide any fuel to the Republican argument that their party is too willing to give bad guys a pass. Those Democrats joined Republicans in rejecting Wilsons nomination despite personal outreach from Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, who lobbied lawmakers on behalf of the governors office. Three Democratic senators Suzy Glowiak Hilton of Western Springs, Bill Cunningham of Chicago, and Meg Loughran Cappel of Shorewood cited Wilsons votes to grant early release to two men, each convicted of killing a police officer, as their reason for voting against her nomination. By releasing these convicted criminals early from prison, our state is setting a dangerous precedent concerning the integrity of the criminal justice system, Glowiak Hilton said in a statement. Conscientious individuals must serve on the Illinois Prisoner Review Board, and I urge the governor to choose accredited, diligent appointees. Sen. Michael Hastings, a Democrat from Frankfort who voted against Wilsons appointment, said in an interview Tuesday that certain crimes, such as the murder of a police officer, should require prisoners to serve a full sentence. I know Ms. Wilson. Shes a nice person. She really is a nice person. But I cant stand for that, Hastings said. Hastings said the Pritzker administration and the Senate have to work together so we dont have the problems that we had yesterday. As for Republicans using the review issue to paint Democrats as being weak on crime, Hastings said, they see their polling data and theyre thinking, how am I going to have a chance of winning? Advertisement The depleted board had taken a hit even before Mondays vote on Wilson when another Pritzker selection, Oreal James, withdrew from consideration hours before his nomination was to be considered. The Senates Executive Appointments Committee previously declined to recommend either Wilson or James. Earlier this month, the Senate failed to confirm another of the governors nominees, Jeffrey Mears. In that case only one Democrat joined Republicans in voting against Mears, but enough Democrats sat out the vote to seal his fate. Board members nominated by the governor take their seat while awaiting confirmation by the Senate, allowing for them to build a record prior to coming before the chamber for a vote. Records provided by Senate Republicans show that James and Wilson voted to release prisoners on parole in about 45% of all cases that came before them. On the Senate floor Monday night, Sen. Terri Bryant, a Republican from Murphysboro, cited Wilsons votes in favor of the release of various convicted cop killers as a reason to reject her appointment. Several senators from both parties have raised concerns about the boards decision last year to approve parole for Joseph Hurst and Johnny Veal, two men accused of killing Chicago police officers more than 50 years ago. Allowing these men to be free sends a troubling message to the families of these officers that their sacrifice and the lives of their loved ones are somehow insignificant, Bryant said. Advertisement But Sen. Mattie Hunter, a Chicago Democrat who voted in favor of Wilson Monday night, said shes known Wilson for decades and spoke highly of her credentials in working with youths and ex-offenders. Hunter also indicated Wilsons decisions on the board were thoughtful and that she didnt rubber stamp parole cases. How do you think my community feels when police officers kill people in my community? They feel the same way that the police officers families feel. All the families have feelings when they lose loved ones, Hunter said. Hunter said she was a distant cousin of Laquan McDonald, a teenager shot 16 times and killed by Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke in 2014, and has lost two nephews to violent crime. Reached by the Tribune Monday night, Wilson said she plans on sending a letter to the Senate expressing her displeasure at its members for second-guessing her decisions when she feels she was put on the board to vote her conscience. She said people she voted to release had been in prison for decades and were no longer a threat to anyone either due to their old age or poor health. I believed that they were rehabilitated or too old to do anything, said Wilson, who is the godmother of former President Barack Obamas children. If I had to do it again they would be the same votes. ... Im not going to back off that. Advertisement James could not be reached for comment. The rejections of Wilson and Mears make attracting people to the already incredibly thankless job even more challenging, said Pritzker, who at one point referred to Republicans as the GQP, a jab at politicians who believe in QAnon conspiracy theories. Its very easy just to say this person committed an awful crime some many years ago, and to say were gonna throw away the key and leave them all in prison, Pritzker said. Thats what youre gonna end up with. Mears, a union painter whos worked at the downstate Shawnee Correctional Center as a hostage negotiator, was nominated to the board by Pritzker in March 2021. Pritzker subsequently nominated James, a certified mediator and an advocate for restorative justice programs, and Wilson, who for decades has done work with social justice organizations. The departures of Wilson, James and Mears leave just six members on a review board with nine vacancies. Of the six, three are Pritzker appointees who have yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Advertisement The Pritzker administration has warned that a minimum of nine members are required for the board to hear so-called final revocation hearings for parolees arrested on an accusation that they violated their terms of parole, or of ex-prisoners who allegedly violated conditions of their supervised release. If such a hearing is not held within 90 days of the law enforcement accusation, then the individual is automatically released from custody. In 2021, the governors office said, there were nearly 4,600 revocation hearings. During a news conference in Springfield on Monday, Jennifer Soble, executive director of the Illinois Prison Project, an advocacy group for prisoners rights, slammed lawmakers for politicizing the board with their baseless, election-year posturing and fearmongering. The group also raised concerns about whether the review board would function properly if it has too few members. Instead of evaluating the overall effectiveness of the board, which set supervised release conditions for more than 12,000 people and held more than 1,000 clemency hearings last year, Soble said senators are judging the board on two or three votes alone, taken wildly out of context. Thats what I mean by the politicization of this moment, Soble said. The Senate is not taking a thoughtful look at the body of work that these really incredibly diligent members, even the ones I dont agree with, have conducted over the past three years, four years, more than that, going back, for some, more than 10 years. The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois called for state leaders to fill the boards 15 seats. Advertisement Illinois must take the action needed to prevent the suspension of the meaningful work that the (review board) does to foster justice and equity in case outcomes and right size our states prison population, Ben Ruddell, director of the ACLU of Illinois criminal justice project, said in a statement. Doing harm to individuals across Illinois in a vain attempt to look tough on crime has failed for years. It must end. A notice on the review boards website says that, due to unforeseen circumstances, clemency hearings scheduled from April 12 to April 15 have been postponed. Our agency is working to finalize a future date and location, and additional notifications will be forthcoming to those affected by the change, the notice reads. Spaulding reported from Chicago. jgorner@chicagotribune.com cspaulding@chicagotribune.com Verizon is aware of a spam campaign that is targeting its customers with their own phone numbers. As first reported by The Verge, some of the carriers subscribers have complained in recent days of receiving text messages that offer a little gift for paying off their monthly phone bill, with a link that leads to a Russian website. What has made the campaign unsettling for some is that the perpetrators are spoofing the numbers of their targets. Our team is actively working to block these messages, and we have engaged with US law enforcement to identify and stop the source of this fraudulent activity, a Verizon spokesperson told Engadget. Verizon continues to work on behalf of our customers to prevent spam texts and related activity. When reports of the campaign first started to appear online, some Verizon customers speculated it was the result of an internal breach, a claim the carrier denies. We believe this activity is being generated from external bad actors with no direct tie to our company, the company told The Verge. Verizon also said it has no evidence that suggests the texts are coming from Russia. The texts come as US officials, including President Biden, have warned of potential Russian cyberattacks in response to the sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. Like with most spam and phishing attempts, the best thing you can do to protect yourself is to not open the link that accompanies the text. During the White House press briefing on Tuesday, communications director Kate Bedingfield said the Biden administration was in communication with the Ukrainian government, but wouldnt provide details on the countrys negotiations with Russia about ending the war in Ukraine. Video Transcript - I want to ask about the Turks that are having-- talks that are happening under way in Turkey at the moment between the Russians and the Ukrainians. What is the White House's visibility into those discussions? KATE BEDINGFIELD: So we are in close contact with the Ukrainians and are supportive of their efforts to engage in diplomacy and to try to reach a cease fire. We are prepared to be helpful however we can and are focused on putting Ukraine in the strongest possible position, both on the battlefield, and at the negotiating table. We obviously continue to provide security assistance to provide weapons to ensure that they are able to push back on Russian aggression. And we continue to increase pressure on Putin and on Russia by imposing severe costs in partnership with our allies and partners. So we defer to the Ukrainians to discuss the specifics of the negotiations. But we are, of course, committed to a Ukraine that is sovereign, independent, and secure. And we are in constant conversation with the Ukrainian government, and our allies, and partners. But as always, we keep those conversations private. Memphis police are searching for a woman they say shot another woman Monday night. The shooting happened in the 2500 block of West Hillview around 8:45 p.m. The woman was taken to Regional One in critical condition, police said. Police said they are looking for a Black female who fled the scene. At 8:42 pm, MPD responded to a shooting at 2529 West Hillview with a female shot. The victim was xported to ROH critical. Responsible is a black female that fled the scene. The investigation is ongoing. Please call 901-528-CASH w/tips. Memphis Police Dept (@MEM_PoliceDept) March 29, 2022 The investigation is ongoing. If you have information bout this shooting, please call CrimeStoppers at 901-528-CASH. Download the FOX13 Memphis app to receive alerts from breaking news in your neighborhood. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD Trending stories: Baltimore County Police said one Woodlawn High School student was arrested Tuesday after assaulting another person. County police said just after 11 a.m. they responded to the high school to help a school resource officer with an assault. The victim was transported to an area hospital and is in stable condition, police said. The department did not specify if the victim was also a student. The student who allegedly caused the incident was arrested, police said. Mar. 29LISBON New York state police have released the names of both suspects arrested in Pakistan following the investigation into Shylynn M. Dixon's suicide. Muhammed Arslan Saeed and Kamal Anwar, Pakistan, were arrested following an investigation by New York State Police Troop B in conjunction with the FBI. Ms. Dixon died by suicide in March 2021 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The subsequent investigation found that Ms. Dixon had shared nude photographs online with someone who then attempted to blackmail her and threaten to post the photos on social media. State police on March 25 had originally identified the wrong suspect. According to an article in Saturday's Times, the FBI Washington Field Office last Thursday had warned parents of an increase in sextortion of kids and teens, specifically by adults posing as young girls to manipulate boys through social media. For resources and ways to report sextortion, visit wdt.me/sextortion. By Lucy Craymer WELLINGTON (Reuters) - New Zealand and Fiji signed a partnership statement on Tuesday that will see the two countries work more closely together in areas such as security, protecting shared interests and economic resilience. The announcement between the two countries came days after the Solomon Islands government confirmed it was "diversifying" its security relationships beyond Australia, which prompted alarm in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. "Aotearoa New Zealand is committed to working alongside Fiji and supporting common goals both in Fiji and in the Pacific region," New Zealand's Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said in a statement after the agreement was signed. The partnership statement outlines a broad range of priorities such as pursuing greater understanding and coordination on foreign policy priorities; building economic resilience; supporting capability to uphold sovereign authority, according to a New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade statement. "This strategic cooperation is timely, as our region paves its way forward to progressive socio-economic recovery," said Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama. (Reporting by Lucy Craymer. Editing by Gerry Doyle) Money gone in seconds. Thats whats happening to millions of customers who rely on the popular money-transferring app Zelle. Consumer advisers say thieves using the app to target money is on the rise. Channel 2s Ashli Lincoln found nearly 18 million Americans were scammed involving these money transfer apps. Consumer advisors warn people not to fall for this scam, because once your money is gone, chances are high that you wont get it back. [DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] Janet Hass is one of dozens of metro Atlanta bank customers who said they were duped by scammers using the Zelle app. We found out that we were hacked through Zelle, she said. Almost upwards of $40,000. Hass said the bank account she shares with her 20-year-old son was targeted by scammers. Hed been saving up for college about a year and a half, and to get a car. All of his life savings are messed up and he doesnt have access to it, she said. She reached out to Channel 2 Action News after seeing our story last week about a Peachtree City woman who said thieves took $2,000. I would like my money back, that woman said. Channel 2 has reported scammers are using the Zelle app to trick consumers into authorizing money to thieves. From there, the card was actually turned off at the time, this person who hacked us turned it back on, turned it back off, three to four times, Hass said. In her case, Hass said they received an alert saying a stranger added themselves to their Zelle account. It said Jasmine Wild added herself as a Zelle recipient, she said. Right now, most banks like Wells Fargo, Chase and some credit unions are not offering customers fraud protection or refunds to their accounts if theyve been scammed with the Zelle app. Its terrible, Hass said. TRENDING STORIES: Story continues Lincoln spoke with a Zelle representative, who said these scams are concerning and theyre working to inform customers as these cases continue to rise. The company said because Zelle is a third-party money-transferring service and not responsible for holding account funds, they dont have to offer any fraud protections or refunds thats up to an individuals bank. The company said they have been working with cybercrime support networks to spread awareness to consumers about these scams, launching an information campaign on how to spot financial scams and flooding social media pages with tips. Consumer adviser Clark Howard said if you simply must use the Zelle app, dont link it to your primary checking account. Zelle is married at the hip to your bank account, and if a criminal is able to tap into money in your account through Zelle, the money is gone forever Howard said. Howard said to create a separate account just for Zelle transfers, so if scammers do get into your app, youre protected. [SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter] Within three days, his account was empty, Hass said. We would just like Wells Fargo to acknowledge, to see our proof and refund it. Some banks are saying they are not liable for these funds because they are authorized transfers. Theyre saying its not their fault that if someone was scammed and authorized a fraudulent transfer, as it is a practice that is approved by federal law. IN OTHER NEWS: The memorial at Yates and Corning Roads in Beecher for the Schmidt family following the 2017 crash. A Will County jury has been deliberating for 12 hours in the case of Sean Woulfe, but jurors had yet to reach a verdict Tuesday afternoon. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune) Will County Judge Daniel Rippy denied defense motions for a mistrial Tuesday afternoon in the case against Sean Woulfe, and told a jury to return Wednesday for a third day of deliberations even though the foreman said they were stuck 11-1 in favor of a conviction. The attorney for Woulfe, George Lenard, requested a mistrial three times Tuesday over the deadlocked vote count and a request from the foreman he didnt agree with. Advertisement Rippy read a note to the courtroom midafternoon saying 11 jurors supported a guilty verdict and one juror supported a not-guilty verdict. He said the jury should not be giving exact vote totals but it is what it is. Lenard requested a motion for a mistrial given his concerns the jury will try to sway the lone juror. Advertisement Itll be a pleading case on that one juror, Lenard said. Assistant States Attorney Adam Capelli said other cases of this magnitude have gone through similar situations. The fact we know what the numbers are dont mean anything, Capelli said. Rippy dismissed the jurors at 5:45 p.m. Tuesday after denying Lenards third request for a mistrial. Jurors deliberated about eight hours Tuesday after seven hours of discussion Monday. Im off the mind to bring them back one more day, Rippy told Lenard. Woulfe, 30, of Orland Park, is charged with reckless homicide in the July 24, 2017 crash at Corning Road and Yates Avenue in Beecher; he was indicted on 16 counts in 2017 and the indictment was upheld two years later. Lindsey Schmidt and her three sons died from injuries after a driver of a 2002 Chevrolet S10 pickup truck drove through a stop sign July 24, 2017, at the intersection of Corning Road and Yates Avenue in unincorporated Washington Township and struck their 2014 Subaru Outback, according to the Will County sheriffs office. (Broderick Photography ) Lindsey Schmidt, who was pregnant at the time, and her 19-month-old son, Kaleb, were pronounced dead at the scene. Four-year-old Weston and 6-year-old Owen died at Comers Children Hospital in Chicago days later. Edward Schmidt, the husband and father, settled a civil suit against Woulfe in 2018, for $300,000. Advertisement Daily Southtown Twice-weekly News updates from the south suburbs delivered every Monday and Wednesday > A spokesperson for the Will County states attorneys office said, if convicted, Woulfe could receive probation or between two and 10 years in prison, depending on the jurys findings. Rippy earlier Tuesday denied a mistrial Lenard sought based on concerns the jury foreman requested to talk to Rippy. A court officer told the foreman that was not possible, Rippy said. The judge said he did not speak with the juror. Shortly after 2 p.m. Tuesday Rippy had told lawyers weve had movement with the jury but no verdict. Attorneys in the case gave closing arguments Monday morning, with county prosecutors arguing Woulfes driving that day was reckless. Woulfes attorney argued the case against his client had built-in reasonable doubt. Eyewitness Norberto Navarro said the crash sounded like an explosion. Evidence presented revealed Woulfe was driving as fast as 84 mph in the seconds leading up to the collision. Schmidt was driving 62 mph just before being struck. Woulfe was not using his cellphone at the time of the crash nor were drugs or alcohol detected in his body. Advertisement raguerrero@tribpub.com Our world never runs short of images and stories that reflect the cruelty and misery that humans are capable of inflicting upon one other. According to the United Nations, 84 million world citizens have been forcibly displaced from their homes and are suffering from the desperation of life as refugees. In Afghanistan a million children under the age of 5 could die of starvation by the end of the year. China has forced 2 million people into concentration camps, has subdued Hong Kong and threatens to invade Taiwan. Around 25,000 people die of hunger every day. Child labor, slavery, forced marriages and honor killings are common in parts of the world. In many places, homosexuality is a crime with severe penalties. Tribalism and autocracy are on the rise. In short, despite humanitys significant advances, our world resides on an unstable, semi-civilized crust that is in constant danger of cracking beneath us and exposing what Tennyson called the natural world, red in tooth and claw. And this is what were seeing in Ukraine: A democratic country is being attacked by a brutal dictator who is completely unrestrained by scruples over atrocities against civilians. The war is testing Ukraines capacity to absorb the heartbreaking brutality of modern warfare. Old people, children, even pregnant women, are being indiscriminately targeted by Russian rockets and artillery. But if one follows the war in Ukraine closely, everything begins to reflect through its lens. Heres an example: On March 12, Saudi Arabia staged a mass execution. The details are sketchy, but its very likely that the 81 victims were beheaded, possibly in a public event. Saudi Arabia does not decapitate with the comparatively humane guillotine of the French Revolution. Instead, victims are beheaded with a sword if theyre lucky or with a knife. Its a brutal, grisly, painful process. Critics of this mass decapitation argue that many of its 81 victims were executed for political offenses rather than for violent crimes. Allegedly some were tortured and tried in secret. A disproportionate number were Shiites, suggesting a sectarian bias among the Sunni executioners. Due process was undoubtedly in short supply. But despite these judicial failures, its the image of the grisly decapitation of 81 human beings that should stun us. This is the sort of violence that reminds us that our culture, whatever its flaws, is better than the autocracies of Saudi Arabia, Russia or China. Since the end of World War II, the United States has been the essential champion of a liberal world order (with a small l) that aspires to advance the most civilized values that humanity has developed so far: democracy, individual rights, free elections, equality before the law, inclusion, tolerance, maybe even compassion. The war in Ukraine and the mass execution in Saudi Arabia remind us of how fragile these values are. Russias attack is a belligerent expression of the philosophical conflict between the liberal world order and the brutality that lies just beneath the surface. So why are we still executing people in our country? Considerable evidence indicates that capital punishment has no deterrent effect, weve never figured out how to apply it without regard to race or economic class and undoubtedly we sometimes execute innocent people. But in a larger framework, it should concern us that we are the last country in the West that carries out state-sanctioned killings, traveling in the dubious company of autocracies such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and China. Certainly, we dont commit such savageries as beheadings, but several states still use the electric chair and four states permit execution by firing squad. In some states, hanging is still legal. The war in Ukraine represents a clash between savagery and a superior liberal world order. The United States is on the right side of this conflict, and its a distinction between two world views that is worth fighting for. But democracy and its values require constant recommitment and renewal. We could begin by refusing to allow the state to put people to death on our behalf. Lewis Central Community School District taxpayers will see a slight dip in their property tax levy, if the school districts proposed budget is approved. Under the proposal, the districts levy would decline from $10.42846 to $10.23615 per $1,000 of taxable valuation, or about 19 cents, according to information presented by Andrea Raes, business manager and board secretary, during a public hearing during the Board of Education meeting on March 21. The preliminary budget includes $38 million in expenditures on anticipated revenues of $38,446,964, according to Raes. Revenues would include $16,150,121 in State Foundation Aid (based on a state per-pupil formula), $11,960,763 from property taxes, $1,490,554 from the Instructional Support Levy, $645,526 in at risk/dropout prevention funds and $8.2 million in miscellaneous income. Miscellaneous income includes money the state transportation reimbursement, student fees, facility rentals, open enrollment tuition, interest income and federal, state and local grants. The district will have total spending authority of $39,102,709, including $765,000 of unused spending authority from last year. Spending more than the districts total spending authority is a violation of statutory authority. Raes pointed out that the school districts property tax levy per $1,000 has declined steadily from its peak of $14.22 in 2005, except for a brief uptick from $13.14 to $13.22 in 2013. Meanwhile, annual growth in state funding fell from a high of 4% in FY10 to zero in FY12, worked its way back up to 4% in FY15, slid to 1% in FY19 and has partially rebounded to 2.5% for FY23. The board is expected to take action on the budget at its next meeting on April 4. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. WILLIAMSBURG (AP) Authorities have identified a man who was found dead last week in an eastern Iowa grain bin. Robert Wade Chittick, 63, of Williamsburg, was found buried under 10 feet (3.05 meters) of corn after emergency responders were called around 7:30 a.m. Friday to the grain bin near Williamsburg, the Iowa County Sheriffs Office said in a news release. Arriving crews worked for an hour before finding Chittick inside the bin. He was declared dead at the scene. The sheriffs office said the 20,000-bushel capacity grain bin is owned by Kinze Manufacturing and is leased to Circle J Grain of Williamsburg. Williamsburg is located about 83 miles (133.6 kilometers) east of Des Moines. How to fix bottle lawOnce again, several bad bottle bills are making their way thru the Iowa Legislature, threatening to undo decades of progress in helping to keep our landscape from becoming a trash dump. The Iowa bottle-deposit law is a long-standing piece of extraordinarily successful and popular legislation that needs to be strengthened by: Increasing the deposit to 10 cents Increasing the fee to redeemers to 2 cents. Including items such as juice containers and water bottles that dont currently require a deposit. Maintaining convenience for consumers by not increasing the distance/time from store to redemption center. Adding penalties for non-compliance. Polls show its popularity, and its success (although the numbers are readily available by a simple google search) can be gauged just by personal experience. As I hike or fish in our state, I often carry a trash bag to pick up litter, and the overwhelming majority of containers I find do not have the Iowa deposit stamp. The success of this law rests on two legs, the incentive to return (the deposit) and the convenience to do so (after all the deposit is quite small). Yet bills now in process, each in their own way intend, to weaken or eliminate this law to the advantage of a few wealthy corporations and the detriment of all Iowans. Thomas Reardon Council Bluffs Girls and mental healthAs we near the end of Womens History Month, one of the many topics of concern to all of us should be youth and mental health, especially a hurtle for young girls. Middle and high school female students report higher incidents of psychological and emotional issues than male students, which can definitely interfere with their academic achievements. Major depressive events among 12-to-17-year-olds increased by more than 50% since 2005. Suicides among girls ages 10 to 14 tripled between 1999 to 2014, and suicides among girls 15to 19 doubled from 2007 to 2015. More than 9% of female high school students attempted suicide in the last year as compared to 5.1% of males. In addition, more than 63%of lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgender girls indicated having feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the last year, and 23% attempted suicide. Attempted suicides were higher among female students (9.3%) than male students (5.1%); higher among White female (7.3%), Black female (12.5%),and Hispanic female students (10.5%) than White male (4.6%), Black male (6.7%), and Hispanic male (5.8) students. Some of this can be attributed to school performance anxiety, social interactions including social media, body image issues, and harassment. Schools are attempting to focus more on the social and emotional needs of students, and they recognize that mental and physical health correlate to the ability to learn. What can the public do? A new public health facility is scheduled to be built in Council Bluffs. We can urge city and county government officials to dedicate significant space in the new facility for mental health and substance abuse, with special emphasis on children and adolescents. In President Bidens State of the Union address, he gave special emphasis to addressing the mental health needs of children, whose lives and education have been turned upside down during the pandemic. The plan includes several suggestions to curtail social medias harmful effects on our youth, such as calling on Congress to ban excessive data collection from children and advertising that targets them. It also proposes the expansion of early childhood and in-school services to prevent young childrens mental health problems from growing worse. Dr. Tami Benton, the president-elect of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, stated, Prevention is the most effective and most cost-effective way to prevent the onset of mental illness. This is NOT a partisan issue! Contact your members of Congress and urge their support. Geri Frederiksen AAUW Loess Hills branch Council Bluffs Support girls in STEMWe reflect back to womens historical struggles and successes to celebrate Womens History in March, but also we extend a forward look of hope that todays young women will be successful. A STEM career, encompassing one of the fields of science, technology, engineering or math, might be the right fit for the future because we will rely upon many to help solve expanding global, environmental and health issues. Yet history has not looked favorably upon women in the science field. In the 1850s, Eunice Newton Foote, little known scientist, experimented with greenhouse gasses in glass cylinders, then heated by the Sun. As she observed that the one filled with carbon dioxide was warm, she noted that our lower atmosphere and Earth itself would warm, early evidence of global warming. With little recognition in her era, she put her simple science tools away and moved on to supporting womens suffrage, a most relevant cause in her era. Today, however, we need her findings and more to solve the effect of carbons impact on Earth. Educating women as leaders in the STEM fields should be near the top of the list. One such respected present day climate scientist is Katherine Hayhoe from Texas Tech. She alerts us that as climate adjusts to hotter summer temperatures and more unusual winters, women of poverty and their children are likely to suffer the most, again leaving them behind, and the hope that their children might lead better lives diminishes. For a better future, support the girls in your life today who may be interested in STEM fields for they will play critical roles in solving the climate crisis and many other problems. As a parent, send them positive messages by encouraging them to gain the skills and confidence needed to succeed. As a community, seek improvement in STEM education, K-12. Encourage girls to become STEM majors in college and beyond. Work for improvement in job hiring by retaining female leaders and providing opportunities for promotion. Pay women on par with males doing the same work, being inclusive of all cultures. As March closes, please recognize that education of our girls, climate change, and the betterment of all lives are concerns that exist in all months of the year, and we must advocate year round. Mary Anne Kuhr Crescent Reynolds a strong leader for IowaWhen we say the past is an indicator of the future it means that we can anticipate how the days (or years) ahead of us will turn out. Undoubtedly, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has set that precedent in Iowa for a stable and prosperous future. Because of her strong leadership, I could not be more certain in supporting her decision to run for re-election. Gov. Reynolds has kept our state on target throughout the pandemic while many other states were struggling. As governor, she placed her confidence in the people of Iowa, supporting individual rights by fighting against mask mandates, vaccination requirements, getting our kids back in schools and cutting taxes. All while keeping Iowa strong and productive. It is unquestionable that Gov. Reynolds is a leader for the people of Iowa. She has taken strong stands when others wouldnt. Her past work is a STRONG indicator of our future. This is the bold and confident leadership that Iowa needs and Gov. Reynolds has my full support. Thomas Kmezich Council Bluffs Gas pricesThis should make Americans ask the fundamental question: What is the difference between what a public nonprofit utility company provides and what a private for-profit oil company provides? After all they both sell energy to all United States citizens. The difference is that natural gas and electricity are sold in the form of a public good whereas oil is sold in the form of a private good. Accordingly, on the grounds of promoting national security, the United States Congress should convert all oil companies to utility companies. This would eliminate the windfall profits and force the oil industry to earn just enough income to cover operating expenses just as natural gas and electric utility companies are required to do. The resulting drop in gasoline prices would further stimulate the economy and lighten the energy stranglehold upon the United States by the Middle East. It would also eliminate the influence of the oil lobby. In this case, desperate times call for deliberate measures. But as pathetic as the energy policy is in the United States, the effort to develop alternative sources of energy wont really be accelerated until the oil dries up and the Saudis place solar cells all across their desert and then sell us the electricity. Joe Bialek Cleveland We have used your information to see if you have a subscription with us, but did not find one. Please use the button below to verify an existing account or to purchase a new subscription. Morocco and the United Kingdom have a shared determination to deepen their cooperation in the areas of defense and security and to expand it, in particular, to the defense industry and cybersecurity. Means to bolster this cooperation were discussed during meetings that the visiting UK Defense Senior Advisor to the Middle East and North Africa, Air Marshal Martin Elliot Sampson, held Monday in Rabat with Minister Delegate to the Head of Government, in charge of National Defense Administration and with Lieutenant General, Inspector General of the Royal Armed Forces (FAR) and Commander of the Southern Zone, a statement issued by the FAR General Staff said. The two sides welcomed the historic and excellent relations binding the two Kingdoms in several areas and reaffirmed the need to deepen and expand bilateral cooperation in the areas of defense and security to include, in particular, the defense industry and cybersecurity. They also reviewed the results of military cooperation between the Armed Forces of the two countries and the opportunities to strengthen and deepen this cooperation. During the meetings, the UK Defense Senior Advisor commended Morocco as a crucial player in regional stability and hailed the multidimensional reforms launched by the North African Kingdom in various sectors, under the leadership of King Mohammed VI, the statement added. He also commended the convening of joint military commissions which meet regularly in Rabat and London in order to make the most of the opportunities offered by cooperation, in particular the development of the interoperability of forces and the exchange of experience and expertise between the two Armed Forces. Martin Elliot Sampsons visit to Rabat is part of the consolidation of Moroccan-British military cooperation, which is governed by a Framework Agreement for Military and Technical Cooperation and an Agreement on the Status of Forces, the statement pointed out. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Morocco on Monday for a working visit. During the visit, to last until March 30, Blinken will meet with several senior Moroccan officials, including the Head of Government Aziz Akhannouch, and Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita to discuss means to further boost bilateral relations at all levels and exchange views on regional political issues. The Secretary will also engage with Moroccan civil society leaders and participate in a media engagement, the US State Department said in a statement released few hours before Blinkens arrival in Rabat. The strategic bilateral partnership between the United States and Morocco is rooted in shared interests in regional peace, security, and prosperity, the statement said, welcoming Moroccos role in promoting regional stability, prosperity, and the historic normalization of relations with Israel. The United States recognizes the role played by Morocco in maintaining regional security and stability as well as its contribution to peace and prosperity in the Middle East, the State Department pointed out. It also underlined the two countries commitment to continuing cooperation on issues of common interest, such as regional peace and prosperity and regional security. The United States and Morocco expressed their intent during the strategic dialogue to continue strong counterterrorism cooperation, including against AQIM and ISIS. We appreciate Morocco as a stable security-exporting partner, for its leadership of the Global Counterterrorism Forum and for its sustaining role in the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, including by co-chairing the Africa Focus Group of the Coalition and hosting the upcoming Ministerial Meeting of the Coalition in May, the statement added. AS to bilateral relationship, it includes close collaboration on a range of issues, including the Sahel, Libya, and Ukraine. We reaffirm the importance of respecting the territorial integrity, sovereignty, and national unity of all the Member States of the United Nations. Regarding Moroccos efforts to support the UN political process in Libya, the statement said the United States welcomes these efforts to support the UNs work and hosting the intra-Libyan dialogue. We are united in our strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, and national unity of Libya and the priority for organizing national elections in the near term. The State Department also reiterated that the United States continues to view Moroccos Autonomy Plan as serious, credible, and realistic, and one potential approach to meet the aspirations of the people of Western Sahara. The United States supports United Nations Secretary Generals Personal Envoy Staffan de Mistura in leading the political process for Western Sahara, under the auspices of the United Nations, it added. The statement also ranged over economic and military cooperation between the two countries, mentioning the $460 million compact administered by the US Millennium Challenge Corporation destined to expand education and employment opportunities for young people across the Kingdom, as well as land productivity and land rights for women in rural areas. It also mentioned the African Lion, the largest military exercise in Africa and a critical component for the U.S.-Morocco security partnership, recalling that the 2021 exercise, which took place in June across the Kingdom, was the largest since the annual training event started in 2004. Australia to receive Vietnamese migrant workers in agricultural sector Australia has agreed to receive Vietnamese migrant workers operating in the agricultural sector under a memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed by the two countries on March 28. Representatives from Vietnam's Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade at the signing ceremony (Photo: VNA) This is the first agreement that Australia has reached with other countries since it first announced its Agriculture Visa Program in 2021. The MoU was signed online by Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Marise Payne and Vietnamese Minister of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs Dao Ngoc Dung. In a statement released after the signing ceremony, Minister Payne described the MoU as a solid foundation in which to recruit Vietnamese labourers to work for agricultural enterprises in Australia. Vietnams early participation in the Australian Agriculture Visa Program has helped to strengthen people-to-people links between both countries and demonstrate the Morrison Governments commitment to deepening cooperation under the Australia-Vietnam Strategic Partnership, she emphasized. For decades, Vietnamese workers, students, businesspeople, and tourists have made extensive contributions to Australia, she said, adding that the Australian Government looks forward to the scheme continuing. Vietnamese Ambassador to Australia Nguyen Tat Thanh expressed his hope that the MoU will mark the start of a sustainable co-operation process between both sides, including in the industrial and service sectors. He noted that both the Vietnamese and Australian economies are highly complementary, particularly as both countries share intertwined interests. The diplomat added that flourishing co-operation in education, training, and vocational training over the years will provide a basis for mutually-beneficial and comprehensive co-operation between the two countries, particularly in the labour field in the future. Australia had decided to seal its border from March 2020, in an effort to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a shortage of workers, especially in the agricultural sector. First launched in March 2020, the Australian Agriculture Visa Program is intended to provide a sustainable, long-term contribution to Australias labour supply that supports the Australian agricultural and primary industry sectors. It serves to supplement the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, which remains the mainstay for meeting agricultural workforce shortages in primary industries and represents a solution for future harvests. Under the terms of the Australian Agriculture Visa Program, employees will be recruited to work across a range of agriculture sectors, including horticulture, dairy, wool, grains, fisheries and forestry, including support services and primary processing. The Park Ridge Public Library Board will review its collection management guidelines after an email sent by some residents questioned books in the teen section about sexuality and containing LGBT characters. A personal discussion after the meeting between one of the objectors and a local young person identifying as LGBT, however, may have somewhat brooked the divide. Advertisement The March 15 Board meeting stemmed from an email sent to some residents from a local group calling itself Freedom Park Ridge. The email took issue with the library promoting book talks for titles in the teen section that discuss sexuality and/or have LGBTQ characters. Advertisement A March 13 email from Freedom Park Ridge led by Park Ridge resident Sal Galati encouraged citizens to email library director Joanna Bertucci, alleging that the library was not reviewing the content and thus not doing their job, or are reviewing the content and lack judgment which disqualifies them for these roles. The email included a photo of a flyer for the librarys scheduled book discussions and highlighted The Girl from the Sea: A Graphic Novel, a book by Molly Knox Ostertag about family, romance and first love that features a 15-year-old girl who is navigating her sexuality during adolescence. The photo also showed High School: Felix Ever After and Middle School: Ana on the Edge, which both explore gender identity in adolescence. With Park Ridge Mayor Marty Maloney in attendance, Galati, as well as about 15 residents who voiced disagreement with the email, took turns speaking during the meetings heated public comment section. One speaker, Ginger Pennington, decided to attend the meeting after seeing the email on Facebook. I dont want our community to become associated with or identified as close-minded, bigoted and not inclusive because I think there is a vast majority of us in town who very much support inclusion and respect people, regardless of their background, identity or sexual orientation, Pennington said. Galati argued that his intentions were twisted in social media posts about the email, and that his concerns were not stemming from a place of hate to the LGBTQ community. The board allowed him to speak again and clarify his aims after he was explicitly mentioned several times in one speakers comments. Theres been misrepresentations, but one of them is Im not afraid of my child becoming gay by reading these books, Galati said. Thats not the issue. Thats not a fear of mine, Im not concerned about that. Im trying to open up a dialogue, and I hope that was conveyed, that you guys can look at the procedures. Im looking to add books to the circulation. I dont know how to, about freedom and concepts of the Constitution and history of the nation. Galati said he was concerned about children unhealthily thinking about sex and added that he did not think the LGBTQ-focused titles should be banned from the library, although the email from Freedom Park Ridge called the book discussions a reckless use of public resources and said the board should reevaluate their procurement process of materials. Advertisement It also argued for books regarding heterosexual relationships to be removed from the teen and childrens section, although no specific books in the sections were brought up. Pennington said she believes the email from Freedom Park Ridge is a local example of a broader push to influence decisions on school and library boards around the country. She noted that Freedom Park Ridge had previously sent emails criticizing District 64s COVID-19 quarantine and close contact protocols in February. At the end of the March 13 email, Freedom Park Ridge hinted at more possible action regarding District 64 in the future. We have similar issues coming up at our local school boards as well, so stay tuned, it concluded. Galati says he is not on social media, but Freedom Park Ridge appeared as of last week to be active on Facebook and Instagram. A private Instagram page describes the group as an advocate for freedom, individual liberty, parents rights and medical freedom. According to Galati, the organization is a diverse group of citizens, and its main goal is to make sure the community is engaged and their voices are heard by their elected officials locally. Advertisement Pennington and some of the other speakers didnt see it that way. This whole issue of trying to ban books and anything social justice themed or related from our school districts and so forth is clearly part of a larger agenda, Pennington said. Whether he even realizes hes being influenced by a larger political current or not, it is. What bothers me so much about it is the impact it has on our young people. In this photo from 2018, the south side of the Park Ridge Public Library's second floor includes new carpeting, shelving and furniture following remodeling work that began over the summer. (Jennifer Johnson/Pioneer Press) The email warned recipients that it might anger some community members and attract negative attention on social media. The usual voices will confuse the situation and malign us on Social Media, the email said. We are about Freedom. People have the right to write, read, and live however they desire. I did not see any books discussing heterosexual relationships in the teen section of the pamphlet, but I am requesting to have those removed as well from the teen and childrens circulation. This is a place of learning, those books belong at the bookstore. Discussions about sex belong at home with parents, not in isolation in the teen loft. When the meetings public comment session wrapped up, Park Ridge Library Board president Lauren Rapisand motioned to move the presidents report to the next item in the meeting agenda. The board voted unanimously to do so, and Rapisand said the board has been working extensively since October to review collection management guidelines to ensure that the library is operating in a manner that is reflective of our times. Having the honor of serving on the Park Ridge Public Library board is one that none of our trustees take for granted, Rapisand said. We know the tremendous responsibility that we have to make sure all members of the Park Ridge community are seen, heard and valued. We want to thank all the individuals that came to our meeting this evening, wrote emails or visited the library in person over the last few days, as it shows that we have a community that cares. I also personally want to take this moment to thank the staff of the Park Ridge Public Library who do their jobs with the utmost professionalism and care in what they present, making sure materials are peer-reviewed and age appropriate. Advertisement While some of the policies have stayed consistent, we have also updated some that have not been reviewed in years, Rapisand said. In light of the recent feedback weve received, we have decided to accelerate the review of our collection management guidelines to happen in April. While all the feedback weve received is appreciated, please know we do have a process that reviews materials based on several factors. The Park Ridge Public Library is for everyone. Our collection contains materials that expand perspective with experiences beyond our own, and we aim to have a broad collection of viewpoints. Near the end of his public comment, Galati invited attendees to speak with him after the meeting. Another commenter, Kim Schaefer, took him up on the offer. The pair spoke for several hours, Schaefer said, and later sent an email with Coming Together in the subject line. In the message, Galati and Schaefer thanked the board for its evaluation of the procurement process, and also clearly laying out goals and boundaries for content in the teen and childrens sections. Schaefer declined to comment on the specifics of the conversation, but agreed with Galati on the content of their joint email. Schaefers comments before the board centered on the struggle of growing up in Park Ridge as part of the LGBTQ community, and the role that library books played in embracing identities outside of heterosexual norms. Advertisement As a teen, the library was a refuge for me, Schaefer said. Having those books showed me that I was not alone, that I was not a freak, that there were other people like that. From a very personal perspective, removing books like that would be detrimental to the mental health of other LGBT youth, but beyond that, all teens in my opinion benefit from being able to read about experiences that are not their own because it builds empathy. Galati called the dialogue with Schaefer productive and said he is awaiting the results of the librarys review of its collection management guidelines. Both Schaefer and Pennington said they left the meeting feeling inspired by the comments from a couple of Maine South High School students who described their own positive experiences at the library, while also sharing examples of discrimination they faced from peers at school. It certainly, as a member of the LGBT community, is a heartening experience to see so many people come out in support of continuing to keep LGBT books for children and teens in the library, Schaefer said, as well as having some of Park Ridges own LGBT youth come out and speak. One of the points that really resonated with me was talking about the bias, jeers and abuse they take sometimes in the hallways (of school) from their peers, Pennington said. Clearly, its also in some cases coming from adults in our community. These are people that are already at a vulnerable age, and their identity makes them more vulnerable to abuse, discrimination and bullying. Egyptian President Fattah al-Sisi hosted on Sunday Khalifa Haftar and House of Representatives (HoR) Speaker, Aqila Saleh in Cairo, as part of Egypts support for the political process that led to forming Fathi Bashaghas government, Libya Observer reports, citing unnamed sources. The sources indicated that the visit came in a time of tension as Bashaghas government failed to enter Tripoli and assume power from PM Abdulhamid Dbiebah who rejected, and still does, handing over authorities to Bashagha, saying he would hand over power to an elected government only. The HoR hand picked Bashagha last month to become the countrys Premier arguing that Dbiebahs term came to an end on 24 December after the UN-backed elections failed to take place. Dbeibah rejected the move and refused to leave office. He also vowed to hand over power once an elected authority is installed. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have backed the HoRs February move. The UK has imposed harsh economic and financial sanctions on Russia following the war with Ukraine. And as the British government is preparing to cut energy ties with Russia, Morocco can help UK avoid energy crisis thanks to its abundant resources, according to Daily Express. In a bid to ditch Russian energy, Britain has pledged to phase out oil imports by the end of the year. It is also eyeing up sanctions on Russian gas, which make up around 5 pc of the UKs total supplies. PM Boris Johnson is poised to announce a new energy strategy in the coming weeks as the country is seeking to wean itself off Russian hydrocarbons. According to experts, the new UK energy strategy will be based on renewable technologies. Morocco is among the top five most cost-efficient renewable energy producers. Ali Seddiki, a senior official at Moroccan Investment and Development Agency, told Daily Express that his country could have a big role to play in ensuring a safe split from Russia. It comes as Morocco is poised to strike a win-win deal with the UK as the country looks to strengthen trading ties with Britain after Brexit, added the daily stressing the importance of the 16 billion Xlinks Morocco-UK power project. As a giant renewable energy country, Morocco has huge potential which enables it to supply its renewable resources to the UK, added Mr. Seddiki, noting that the North African Kingdom has abundant resources available and is currently using renewables to power its economy and industry 37 pc of Morocco energy mix comes from renewable energy and its target is to reach 52 pc by 2030. We will keep on investing so that will definitely translate into opportunities for players in the UK who are interested, said Mr. Seddiki. The partnership between Morocco and UK on renewable resources started years ago and the two countries are looking forward to developing this partnership further. Moroccos Phosphates (OCP) will help Cote dIvoire enhance agricultural competitiveness and strengthen the impact of local development policies on rural populations. To this end, the two sides signed Monday in Abidjan a framework agreement relating to the development of a strategic partnership between them. this strategic partnership agreement, covering an initial period of two years, provides for the implementation on the ground of three specific agreements, including the rice project in the north of the country, the creation of 30 new generation agricultural service centres and the digital mapping of soil fertility. Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Adjoumani Kouassi, said during the signing ceremony that the structural transformation of Ivorian farming will lead to an increase in agricultural productivity and farm incomes from 60% to 80% by 2030. This will also increase the value added and contribute to the creation of a significant number of jobs for the countrys youth and women. Director General of OCP Africa, an OCP Group subsidiary, Mohamed Anouar Jamali, announced that two other specific agreements will follow, to spread good practices within womens cooperatives and to establish a mechanism to accompany and support Ivorian start-ups investing in agribusiness. OCP Africa is working on the training of excellence of young people in agribusiness and agri-tech through the establishment of a digital farmer school backed by an experimental farm. This school which will be the first core of the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Cote dIvoire will be the subject of a sixth specific agreement, Jamali said. The signing ceremony was chaired by Ivorian PM Patrick Achi. Morocco is hosting this March 29-30 the 34th meeting of the Steering Committee of the member countries of the 5+5 Defense Initiative that will assess the situation on the projects initiated within the framework of the Initiative, update the Action Plan for the year 2022, and draw up the draft Action Plan for the year 2023, which will be chaired by Portugal, a press release from the General Staff of the Royal Armed Forces said. The heads of participating delegations expressed, in their respective addresses, their attachment to this initiative and their commitment to ensure the success of the activities planned under the 2022 Action Plan. They also expressed their satisfaction with the level of cooperation between the member countries of the initiative, underlining its important role for security in the region and the need to maintain channels of communication and dialogue to address common security challenges. The steering committee of the 5+5 Defense Initiative is in charge of developing and monitoring the execution of the annual Action Plan, presenting the progress report on its execution and proposing to the Defense Ministers of member countries the priority activities for the following year. The 5+5 Defense Initiative is a regular framework for rapprochement and cooperation dedicated to defense and security issues. It seeks to promote the exchange and sharing of knowledge, facilitate the interoperability of armed forces, and develop ties of trust and mutual understanding. The meeting made it possible to analyze the latest developments in cooperation in areas of common interest, namely maritime surveillance, air security, the contribution of the armed forces to the protection of the civilian population in the advent of a natural disaster, training and academic research. The 5+5 Defense Initiative gathers France, Italy, Malta, Spain and Portugal for the Northern shore of the Mediterranean; and Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya for the South. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said his country lauds the ambitious reforms launched in Morocco under the leadership of King Mohammed VI and looks forward to fostering ties with the Kingdom. Speaking at a press conference with Moroccan foreign minister Nasser Bouirta, in Rabat, Blinken said Morocco and the US cooperate in favor of regional peace and security, citing Libya and the Sahel as an example. He emphasized Moroccos role in countering terrorism and the Kingdoms role in the global alliance against ISIS. The US reiterated its support for the autonomy plan as serious, credible and realistic as well as backing for the efforts led by UN envoy de Mistura. The visit came after a summit in Israel with Bourita and foreign ministers of the UAE, Israel and Bahrain which focused on countering threats emanating from Iran and its proxies in the wider region. Unfunded mandates on Nebraskas local governments a sore subject for three decades and more would be restrained under a state constitutional amendment the Legislature advanced Monday. But several lawmakers worried that Legislative Resolution 263CA, which won 34-5 first-round approval, isnt specific enough to be workable or avoid legal challenges. Five of western Nebraskas six state senators voted to advance LR 263CA, which would go on the Nov. 8 general election ballot if it wins two more floor votes. It says the Legislature shall not impose responsibility for a new program or an increased level of service after 2022 unless the affected local government is fully reimbursed by the state for its cost. Reimbursement would either have to be a specific appropriation or an increase in state aid under LR 263CAs language. Senators would have to pass an enabling law later should voters approve the amendment. LR 263CA was introduced by state Sen. Carol Blood, a Democratic candidate for governor and former Bellevue city councilwoman. She said Monday that cities, counties, school districts and other local governments across Nebraska have complained since at least the 1990s about how unfunded mandates drive up property tax burdens. If theres a question about a local governments power or authority, then the local government does not receive the benefit of the doubt, Blood said in her opening speech on LR 263CA. So when we place an unfunded or underfunded mandate on our political subdivisions, they really have few options when it comes to paying for those mandates outside of property taxes. Studies and Unicameral proposals to address the impact of unfunded mandates date to former Gov. Ben Nelsons 1991-99 administration, Blood said. But the state takes little responsibility when it comes to the role it plays in property taxes being so high across Nebraska, she said. First-round debate on LR 263CA took more than two hours, with several senators saying they like Bloods concept but fear its too ambiguous to avoid unintended consequences. I certainly agree that the state should not be putting these unfunded mandates on local governments. I dont think thats appropriate, said Speaker Mike Hilgers of Lincoln, a Republican candidate for attorney general. The term unfunded mandate is nowhere in the lines of LR 263CA, added Hilgers, who later voted to advance it. Where there is uncertainty in how this would apply, in more cases than not, we will be in litigation. Blood said her measure shouldnt take much tweaking to address such concerns. She then referred to the lobbyists outside the chamber for groups of local governments. I know for a fact that our friends in the (State Capitol) rotunda ... are willing to work on the language, because a lot of our counties, especially our smaller counties, are at a breaking point, she said. Sen. Steve Erdman of Bayard cited his frustration with unfunded mandates during his 12 years as a Morrill County commissioner. When he started, I didnt realize the taxpayers were paying that much of the burden, he said. LR 263CA changes the focus from those who collect and spend the taxes to those who pay the taxes. Though hes a Republican and Blood a Democrat, Erdman added, when someone brings a bill that makes sense, irregardless of who they are, I vote for it. Sen. Mike Flood suggested that LR 263CA gives the Legislature the chance to rethink whether the state should perform and pay for many tasks it long has assigned to counties. If the state pays for it, we will control it. Thats the hundred-year history of this Legislature, said Flood, a former Unicameral speaker and current GOP candidate for Congress. Erdman and Sens. Mike Jacobson of North Platte, Tom Brewer of Gordon, John Stinner of Gering and Matt Williams of Gothenburg voted to advance LR 263CA to second-round debate. The western Nebraska delegations lone no vote came from Venango Sen. Dan Hughes. I am good with the idea (but) just have too many questions about (the) mechanics of implementing it, he texted after the vote. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. A 36-year-old North Platte man received a term of four to eight years in state prison on Monday for stealing more than $900 from a North Platte business last September. Lucas A. Partain was sentenced in Lincoln County District Court for the burglary along with three additional separate cases. Partain, who has a criminal record that dates back to 2005 in California, also received one-year terms for: Cutting a lock from a casino machine at Big Red Liquor on Sept. 18 and taking the money inside it on Sept. 18. Being in possession of methamphetamine on Nov. 19 For shoplifting at Another Avenue Vape Shop on Nov. 19. The terms in all four cases run at the same time, and he was credited between 130 to 158 days served in each of them, According to court records, Partain was seen on surveillance video entering The Barn Store in North Platte at 3 a.m. on Sept. 15 through the back door and stealing a bank bag that store personnel said contained $950 in cash. In an interview with an investigator with a North Platte Police investigator, Partain confessed to the theft. Partain said he was in the store earlier in the day and had observed where the cashier placed the bank bag. He admitted he went back later to steal the bag. In other cases Monday (defendants are from North Platte unless otherwise noted): Christopher D. Bornschein, 32, pleaded no contest to possession of xanax, possession of morphine and possession of adderall. The charges all stem from a Dec. 17 incident. A count of possession of methamphetamine was dismissed in the plea agreement, as well as charges in a separate case. Bornschein received 240 days in jail and received 100 days credit on each charge. The terms run at the same time. Michael T. Wiegand, 25, pleaded not guilty to five counts of possession of child pornography. The charges stem from images that were found on his phone during an Aug. 25 investigation. A May 23 status hearing was scheduled. Dustin E. Smith, 42, was sentenced to 180 days in jail for possession of methamphetamine on Aug. 23. He was credited with 163 days served. Smith also admitted to a violation of the conditions for the problem-solving court program in a separate case. He was sentenced to 160 days in jail on an initial charge of possession of Xanax with no time served. The terms in the two cases will run at the same time. Paige J. Beauvais, 29, pleaded no contest to an amended charge of attempted possession of methamphetamine. Beauvais was sentenced to 90 days in jail with no time served. Janelle Moorhous, 43, pleaded no contest to an amended count of attempted child abuse with no injury. Moorhous received a 24-month probation term. Kristopher Smith, 23, pleaded no contest to a count of assault by strangulation or suffocation. A charge of first-degree assault was dismissed in the plea agreement. Smith was sentenced to 90 days in jail and also received a 24-month probation term. Misty L. Letellier, 44, admitted to a violation of the conditions for the problem-solving court program. Letellier was sentenced to 180 days in jail for the initial charge of possession of methamphetamine. Letellier was credited with 185 days served. Sheena M. Irish, 40, pleaded no contest to a count of first-degree forgery for the use of a counterfeit $100 bill on Oct. 18, 2020. Irish received an 18-month probation term. Tianna R. Estrada, 22, admitted to a violation of the conditions for the problem-solving court program. Estrada is scheduled to be sentenced on May 23 on an amended charge of making terroristic threats. Niccole J. Reilly, 33, of Hastings, admitted to a violation of the conditions for the problem-solving court program. Reilly is scheduled to be sentenced on May 23 on two initial counts of possession of methamphetamine. Stacee R. Hasenauer, 41, of Wallace, pleaded no contest to an amended charge of attempted tampering with a witness and intentional child abuse with no injury. Both charges stem from a July 30 incident. Hasenauer received an 18-month probation term. Austin Golter, 23, pleaded no contest to two counts of cocaine possession with intent to distribute. Two additional possession/distribution counts were dismissed under the plea agreement. Golter is scheduled to be sentenced on June 6. Justin L. Jacobsen, 25, pleaded not guilty to a felony count of intentional child abuse/with injury. A June 27 status hearing was scheduled. Anthony W. Cox, 31, pleaded not guilty to possession of methamphetamine and possession of adderall that stem from a Sept. 17 incident. A May 23 status hearing was scheduled. Dylan J. Shaw, 20, pleaded not guilty to a pair of first-degree forgery charges that stem from the use of a counterfeit $100 bill on March 4. A May 9 status hearing was scheduled for the case as well as two additional separate ones. Marcus D. Dandridge, 45, pleaded not guilty to possession of methamphetamine on May 31, 2021. He also pleaded not guilty to possession of amphetamine in a separate case that stems from a Dec. 22 incident. A status hearing for both case was scheduled for April 25. The solution to a problem brings the best of both worlds as the historic Sutherland State Aid Bridge over the North Platte River will be preserved, while a new functional bridge will be built. The long-planned project has been moved to the countys one-year road plan at the cost of $3 million. The new bridge will cross the North Platte River on North Prairie Trace Road with a new concrete structure. The current narrow bridge, located just over four miles north of Sutherland, was one of 17 multiple-span concrete arch bridges built under Nebraskas state-aid program in the 1910s and 1920s. Brian Glos, road construction foreman, presented the one- and six-year plans to the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners at Mondays meeting during a public hearing. The commissioners were told about the rising costs of asphalt that could alter the plan significantly. Prairie Trace Road was at the top of the one-year plan. The project is for a 2-inch maintenance overlay for 17 miles north of Sutherland village limits to the north county line. This project was partially finished in 2021. The remaining portion is from Sutherland village limits to the North Platte River Bridge. Weve toyed with the idea of maybe doing some trading, Glos said, because were running into astronomical pricing in asphalt. Glos said conversations are ongoing with Paulsens Inc. to use the tons of asphalt they have left in places where they are needed more urgently. The last contract I saw last year, (asphalt) was at $89 a ton, Glos said. It was recommended to me this year to use $180 a ton to estimate projects and Ive heard numbers as high as $300 a ton. Several overlay projects are on the one-year plan, but Glos said price may factor into whether they are completed this year. Former commissioner Bill Henry spoke and recommended the county consider using armor coating rather than asphalt should prices remain high. This could possibly be the year (to consider armor coating), Henry said, even though gravel is higher, it didnt do what oil-based products have done. Chairman Chris Bruns agreed that is an option. Ive had these conversations with people in the roads department and the roads committee, Bruns said. Armor coating is absolutely a viable and valuable tool, but the road underneath has to be in good condition. Following the public hearing, Commissioner Joe Hewgley said he considered the plan a work in progress. This one- and six-year program that were approving, Hewgley said, in my mind, I dont think that were going to be in good faith doing what we are saying on this, because I dont think we can meet this. Hewgley said he would vote to approve, but that the cost of material might not allow the county to complete all of the projects. I echo what youve said, Bruns said. This is a guide; its a plan. Mike Cook, who lives on Eugene Avenue, came before the board during the public hearing to again encourage the county to address issues on Eugene Avenue. This is my eighth time addressing the commission concerning the status of Eugene Avenue and the need for improvements to the road, Cook said. Eugene Avenue was originally designed as a county road providing access to the 15 homes from the North Platte city limits to its dead end. He said the road was built with a subgrade to accommodate the approximately 50 vehicles a day that utilized the road. The number and type of vehicles has changed due to the extension of Buffalo Bill. Eugene became an arterial extension providing access from the western areas of North Platte to Highway 83, Cook said. There was a failure, Cook said, to recognize the impact there would be including large trucks and increased traffic with approximately 500 vehicles per day. The county has the road placed on its six-year plan, but the board said there are a number of issues that make resolution complicated. But discussions will continue. Region 51 Emergency Management Director Brandon Myers gave an update on the Votaw Road fire. It was pretty big when it first got going, Myers said. The amount of land that it was contained to was phenomenal. He said the fire burned about 900 acres. The problem we had with being able to call it earlier as contained, Myers said, was the fact that there was no natural barrier they could use, and because of the canyons, there was no way to get heavy equipment in to create that barrier. Myers said 63 agencies participated in battling the fire, including four airplanes, two Blackhawk helicopters and one Chinook helicopter. He thanked Gov. Pete Ricketts for acting quickly in declaring it a state emergency that helped direct state funds to fighting the fire. In other action, the commissioners: Approved an application by Zachary and Shayla Paulman for a subdivision located at the intersection of South King Road and West Correction Line Road in an A-1 agricultural district. Approved the donation of a temporary easement and a purchase of real property from Brent and Kara Reeder for the Sutherland North Bridge project. Recognized Todd Herndon, noxious weed superintendent, as the employee of the month. Herndon has been with the county for 10 years. Authorized Bruns to sign the right of way application submitted by Mortensen Farm and Ranch. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. If Nebraska wants to reduce chronic prison overcrowding, well-behaved prisoners should have a chance at earlier parole as a 2011 law intended, says an expert who helped the Legislature craft policies to reduce overcrowding. This provision is beneficial if youre intending to reduce the (prison) population, said Len Engel, director of policy and campaigns for the Crime and Justice Institute. The provision in question is a piece of Nebraska good time law passed in 2011 after a year behind bars, prisoners could earn three days off their sentence for each month of good behavior. Thats in addition to the day-for-day credit prisoners already earn that effectively cuts sentences in half. The bill sponsor, then-Sen. Brenda Council, and Bob Houston, director of corrections at the time, agree that the intent of the bill was to let prisoners earn time toward their parole eligibility date. But the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services argues that state law as written doesnt allow for that. The current interpretation of the law, correct or not, quietly contributes to the states ongoing struggle with overcrowded prisons, keeping the thousands of parole-eligible prisoners sentenced since 2011 from earning up to 36 days per year toward their parole eligibility date. The result: They end up having their time before the parole board delayed by days, weeks or months, potentially keeping them in prison longer than the laws authors intended. How prison leaders calculate good time and parole eligibility is being challenged by Nebraska prisoner Robert Heist II. The case awaits a decision from the Nebraska Supreme Court. It comes as the state continues to grapple with one of the most crowded prison systems in the country, reaching 152% of the systems design capacity in December. Solving the overcrowding crisis has been a focus of the current legislative session. But state leaders are split in their approaches. Some favor sentencing reform and want to build a path that would get current prisoners out and into community supervision quicker; others want to build a new prison. Nebraskas incarceration rate increased 17% since 2011, according to the report issued by the Crime and Justice Institute and a state working group in January. Thats in marked contrast to the national incarceration rate, which has steadily decreased in the same period. The report included 21 policy options aimed at reducing crime and recidivism. Of the 21 proposals, members of the state working group agreed on 17 and disagreed on four. The current legislative bill, sponsored by Sen. Steve Lathrop, includes all 21. Gov. Pete Ricketts has said he supports pieces of Lathrops bill, largely to do with reducing recidivism. He agrees the state should establish more transitional housing options, improve access to mental health support and reduce the number of jam outs when prisoners are released with no supervision in the community. But the policy options he opposes revolve around sentencing and parole: establishing geriatric parole for elderly prisoners, changing drug possession penalties and discouraging mandatory minimums and consecutive sentences. In a news conference Monday, Ricketts called Lathrops proposed changes soft-on-crime bills that would undermine public safety. He has urged the Legislature to fund a new prison to replace the aging State Penitentiary in Lincoln in part because it would provide space for the programming needed to prepare inmates for life after time served and reduce recidivism rates, Alex Reuss, Ricketts spokesman, said in an email. Even with a new building, the prison system is projected to stay over capacity. Laura Ebke, a former state senator who chaired the Judiciary Committee, said when the state opened the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution in 2001, it was supposed to solve overcrowding for years. Instead, it filled quickly. Im not sure that Nebraskans want to just keep building prisons, said Ebke, a senior fellow at the Platte Institute, a think tank advocating for reducing taxes and government spending. (The Platte Institute is a supporter of the Flatwater Free Press open government efforts). Nebraskas prisons are at least slightly more overcrowded because of the current interpretation of the 2011 good time law, which has potentially affected thousands of prisoners who could have had at least a little time shaved off their sentences. But the most egregious cases are prisoners who end up being released before even becoming parole-eligible. When prison leaders credit three days toward a prisoners final release date but never move their parole eligibility date, those dates sometimes flip, creating a group of guaranteed jam outs. Thats insane, said Joe Nigro, the Lancaster County public defender. Parole is generally regarded as a better way to reacclimate prisoners to society. Parolees have required check-ins with their parole officer and must line up a job and a place to live. Working toward a parole-eligibility date also is an incentive for good behavior, the very thing the additional good time days were meant to encourage. Having those dates flipped is not what anybody with any common sense would support, Nigro said. Aaron Hanson, legislative liaison for the Omaha Police Officers Association, called the states current good time laws clunky at best, and arguably sloppy and haphazard. We need to focus more on achieving better long-term outcomes and less on simply finding new ways to release offenders earlier, said Hanson, who is running for Douglas County sheriff. We want the ultimate goal to be a better outcome, not simply ending supervision or a sentence as early as we can to save money. What comes next for the disputed good time days will depend on the courts opinion, several experts said. Should the court rule that the department is interpreting the law correctly, the Legislature should step in to ensure the written law reflects that laws intent, Engel said. Sentences in Nebraska are largely defined by the time served on the minimum, he said. I think thats where its got to be applied to the parole date. That makes the most sense. Lathrop agreed, but said its too late in the current legislative session to propose a new bill. Its also the senators final session. Lathrop announced in February that he wouldnt seek reelection. That would be on the list of things to do I would hand to somebody on my way out, because Im done, Lathrop said. The next-best chance to fix that language would be to drop a bill in the next session, and I wont be around for that. The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraskas first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter. The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraskas first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Sen. Jen Day said, Nebraska was experiencing a mental health crisis among young people. The Omaha senator introduced a bill (LB852) in an effort to mitigate the crisis. The bill would require school districts to establish behavioral health points of contact, which can refer students or parents to local "community behavior providers" in their area. LB852 passed the first round of debate Monday 27-0. It still has two more rounds of debate before it can become law. According to America's School Mental Health Report Card, Nebraska ranked 37th in the U.S. in 2022 in youth mental health. In 2015, the state was 15th. "There's a lot of room for Nebraska to improve in this area," Day said. Sen. Lynne Walz of Fremont, who designated LB852 as her priority bill, said the effort has been a long time coming. She said there is evidence that the method is successful at helping students because several state school districts already have established similar positions. "Now is the time to get this bill across the finish line," Walz said. An amendment by Sen. Adam Morfeld of Lincoln also would establish a voluntary mental health training program for school staff. The training would be administered through the State Department of Education. LB852 did not draw strong opposition Monday, although some senators questioned how the state would pay for the training program. Morfeld said the funding mechanism likely would be decided next year, but the amendment also mentions the intent to use lottery funds. 1. State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will chair the third Meeting of Foreign Ministers of the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan in Tunxi, Anhui on March 30 and 31. Foreign Ministers or representatives of Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will attend the meeting. Subsequently, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will chair the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan Plus Afghanistan Foreign Ministers Dialogue. Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi of the Afghan interim government will attend the Dialogue upon invitation, and the foreign ministers of Indonesia and Qatar will be invited as guests. 2. At the invitation of State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Minister for Foreign Affairs Retno L. P. Marsudi of Indonesia, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Don Pramudwinai of Thailand, Secretary of Foreign Affairs Teodoro L. Locsin Jr. of the Philippines and Union Minister for Foreign Affairs U Wunna Maung Lwin of Myanmar will visit China respectively from March 31 to April 3. Minister of Foreign Affairs Erika Mouynes of Panama will visit China on April 4. Xinhua News Agency:What is Chinas expectation of the third Foreign Ministers Meeting among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan under the current circumstances? Wang Wenbin: The Afghan situation is now in a critical transition from chaos to order, with the Afghan people still facing multiple challenges from within and outside that need to be addressed with more support and help from others. By hosting the third Foreign Ministers Meeting among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan, China looks forward to pooling more consensus on the Afghan issue from neighboring countries, discussing ways to jointly stabilize the Afghan situation and support and help the Afghan people, and share our voice with the rest of the international community as neighbors of Afghanistan. By hosting the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan Plus Afghanistan Foreign Ministers Dialogue, we hope to further understand the Afghan peoples difficulties and needs, convey neighboring countries concerns on the Afghan issue, and work on the Afghan side to build an open and inclusive political structure, follow moderate and prudent domestic and foreign policies and earnestly combat terrorism. In the meantime, we also expect the international community to give greater support to Afghanistan and call on the US to shoulder the primary responsibility for Afghanistans economic reconstruction in real earnest. The Paper: What is Chinas consideration behind its inviting of the four ASEAN countries foreign ministers for a visit? Does China have any expectation for this visit? Wang Wenbin: Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Myanmar are important ASEAN members and Chinas friendly neighbors and important partners for high-quality Belt and Road cooperation. Since COVID-19 broke out, China has maintained regular exchanges and communication with ASEAN countries in a flexible manner, continuously deepened cooperation on COVID-19 and economic recovery, stood together to overcome difficulties and seek common development. The upcoming visit of the four foreign ministers again demonstrates the close and friendly relations between China and its ASEAN neighbors and the high importance all sides attach to advancing China-ASEAN cooperation. This year marks the starting year of the China-ASEAN comprehensive strategic partnership. Through this visit, China hopes to work with all parties to ensure the sound implementation of the outcomes and consensus of the ASEAN-China Special Summit to Commemorate the 30th Anniversary of ASEAN-China Dialogue Relations last year, promote the materialization of the Global Development Initiative in neighboring countries first, and jointly build a peaceful, tranquil, prosperous, beautiful and friendly homeland. China will also have in-depth exchanges of views with all parties on the current regional and international situation and contribute more positive energy to regional peace and stability and global prosperity and development. Reuters: On Sunday, US President Joe Biden clarified that the United States does not have a policy of regime change in Russia after its declaration that Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power. Does the foreign ministry have any comment? Wang Wenbin: We noted relevant reports. I want to stress that dialogue and negotiation is the only right path to resolving the Ukraine issue. Its a pressing task for all parties to ease the situation, promote peace talks and stop the fighting, rather than escalate tensions. On major issues concerning peace and stability in Europe and the world at large, all parties should speak and act responsibly and play a constructive role. CCTV: An ad hoc flight carrying Chinese citizens evacuated from Ukraine landed safely in Fuzhou this morning. This one from Bucharest, Romanias capital, is the 20th flight that has taken Chinese citizens home from Ukraine. Can you share more information? Wang Wenbin: The CPC Central Committee and the State Council deeply care about the safety of every Chinese citizen in Ukraine ever since the situation there deteriorated. General Secretary Xi Jinping gave personal attention to and repeatedly inquired about the issue, demanding that the safety of our citizens must be ensured with all-out efforts. In his phone conversation with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi stressed the hope that the Ukrainian side will take all necessary measures to protect Chinese citizens safety and provide guarantee and convenience for their evacuation. Committed to serving the people with real actions, the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the Chinese Embassy in Ukraine and the Chinese Consulate General in Odessa immediately activated the emergency mechanism for consular protection, contacted Chinese compatriots in Ukraine and went to great lengths to mobilize resources with a view to protecting the safety of Chinese citizens and helping them evacuate in an orderly and safe manner in various ways. The Chinese embassies in Ukraines neighboring countries including Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Belarus worked closely with the embassy and consulate in Ukraine to facilitate the customs clearance and temporary settlement of Chinese citizens and the operation of relevant ad hoc flights. Over 5,200 Chinese citizens have been safely evacuated to Ukraines neighboring countries. Except for one individual who got injured while trying to drive away from the country and has now been cured, all Chinese compatriots who wanted to leave are safe and sound. During this evacuation process amid the fighting, not a single Chinese citizen was killed and no mass injury incidents happened. The Chinese government has sent a total of 20 ad hoc flights to bring back more than 4,600 Chinese citizens who had earlier been relocated to Ukraines neighboring countries. In the meantime, all Chinese compatriots in Ukraine and neighboring countries have stood together to overcome the difficulties with mutual support. Organizations of Chinese students and associations of overseas Chinese in Ukraine have pitched in to help with the evacuations. They have carried forward the Chinese nations best tradition of helping those in distress and aiding those in peril and demonstrated the Chinese peoples fine character of solidarity and mutual assistance. As we worked on the safety and evacuation of Chinese nationals, the government and various sectors of society in Ukraine showed goodwill and provided facilitation. Countries including Russia, Moldova, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Belarus also provided invaluable support. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to governments and peoples of those countries. Now, the evacuation work has basically come to an end, but protecting the safety and legitimate rights and interests of Chinese nationals overseas is always an abiding commitment. Looking forward, the Foreign Ministry and Chinese diplomatic missions abroad will continue to actively improve the consular protection mechanism and build a system for the protection of Chinese nationals and interests overseas. With everything we do, we will show every one of our compatriots overseas that we stand with you at all times, wherever you may be, and your motherland will always have your back. AFP: The Philippine Coast Guard said that a China Coast Guard ship steered meters from one of its patrol vessels on March 2 in the South China Sea. And the Philippines and the US are set to stage war games. Whats your response to this? Wang Wenbin: Huangyan Dao is Chinas inherent territory. China has sovereignty over Huangyan Dao and its adjacent waters as well as sovereign rights and jurisdiction over relevant waters. We hope that the Philippine ships will earnestly respect Chinas sovereignty and rights and interests, abide by Chinas domestic law and international law, and avoid interfering with the patrol and law enforcement of the China Coast Guard in the above-mentioned waters. Kyodo News: With regard to the Meeting of Foreign Ministers of the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan, does State Councilor Wang Yi have any plan to hold a bilateral meeting with the Russian foreign minister? Will they talk about the Ukraine issue? Wang Wenbin: I announced the relevant information just now and have nothing more to add. CNR: According to reports, the IAEA said at an online news conference on March 25 that its technical working group visited Japan from March 21 to 25 and had meetings with Japans Nuclear Regulation Authority to review whether the monitoring activities over the discharge plan of Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water conform to IAEAs safety standards. The assessment report of this visit is expected to be released in two months. What is Chinas comment? Wang Wenbin: China has been following the developments of the disposal of Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water. A comprehensive, science-based and rigorous monitoring plan is conducive to the safe disposal of Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water. In this regard, the Japanese side should closely cooperate with the IAEA working group. It is hoped that the IAEA can inform the international community, especially stakeholders, of the assessment on a timely basis. It is true that monitoring the disposal plan of the nuclear-contaminated water is important, but the crux of the issue is choosing the right plan to dispose of the nuclear-contaminated water. We hope the discussion of relevant monitoring arrangement can make Japan actively respond to the concerns of all parties and make the decision after fully assessing the advantages and disadvantages of all disposal plans, instead of sticking to the ocean discharge plan. I also want to stress again that Chinas support for the work of the technical working group does not mean we endorse Japans decision to release the nuclear-contaminated water into the sea. MASTV: In response to the security cooperation agreement signed by China and Solomon Islands, some officials of the US and Australia have expressed their concerns, saying they dont believe Chinas police forces need to be exported and claiming that it may undermine the current security cooperation mechanism in the Pacific region and may do no good to the island nations. What is Chinas comment on this? Wang Wenbin: I stated Chinas position on this issue last week. Normal law enforcement and security cooperation between China and Solomon Islands, two sovereign and independent countries, is consistent with international law and customary international practice. It is beyond reproach as it is beneficial to social stability and lasting security of Solomon Islands and the common interest of regional countries. I also noted that the government of Solomon Islands issued a statement which elaborated on the countrys security strategy and cooperation with other countries, expressed gratitude to the support and assistance of all development partners, and emphasized the countrys need for expanding diverse cooperation. Relevant countries should earnestly respect Solomon Islands sovereignty and its independent decisions instead of deciding what others should and should not do self-importantly and condescendingly from a privileged position. Why are some individuals concerned about China-Solomon Islands cooperation when the government and the people of Solomon Islands genuinely welcome it? Who has been sending military aircraft and vessels right to others doorsteps and flex muscles for years that severely threaten relevant countries sovereignty and security? Who has been forming military circles that bring nuclear proliferation risks to the Pacific Ocean? And who has been deliberately hyping up tension and stoking bloc confrontation that cast a pall on regional peace and stability? The international community can make a fair judgement, and the people of Solomon Islands and other Pacific island countries can see this clearly. Any attempt to disrupt and undermine mutually beneficial cooperation between China and Pacific island countries is doomed to fail. Bloomberg: Over the weekend, the Australian foreign ministry said that it had been notified by Chinese authorities that Cheng Lei will face trial on March 31. Does the foreign ministry have any more information on this trial? The second question, Bloomberg has reported that Chinese diplomats in Washington have been in contact with US counterparts asking for details on US sanctions on Russia. This has encouraged the US officials according to people familiar with the situation, though they remain wary that China may be looking for loopholes to help Russia according to the people. Does the foreign ministry have any comment? Wang Wenbin: On your first question, we have repeatedly stated our position on the individual case involving the Australian citizen. Chinas judiciary handles cases in accordance with law and fully protects the lawful rights of the person involved. As for the specifics you mentioned, I have nothing to offer you at present. Now coming to your second question, China always holds that sanctions are not fundamentally effective ways to solve problems. China stands firmly against unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction with no basis in international law and no mandate of the UN Security Council. This is Chinas consistent position in both open and closed-door meetings. History has proven once and again that instead of solving problems, sanctions create new problems. It is the ordinary people that suffer from comprehensive and indiscriminate sanctions. If ratcheted up, sanctions can also trigger serious crisis on a global scale in such fields as economy, trade, finance, energy, food, industrial and supply chains. This will make the already struggling world economy even worse and cause irreparable losses. Among the 190-plus UN member states, more than 140 did not take part in sanctions on Russia. This fact shows that the overwhelming majority of countries are handling issues related to sanctions in a prudent and responsible manner. As pointed out by State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, most countries, including China and many fellow developing countries, share the view that war and sanction are not the only two choices when handling international and regional hotspot issues. It is not incumbent on the people to pay the price for geographic conflicts and major-power rivalry. The more complex the situation is, the greater the need to remain cool-headed and deliberate the consequences of actions. It is hoped that all sides can calm down to focus on promoting peace talks, rather than escalate sanctions and aggravate disputes. I have also taken note of some US media calling the US the only sanctions superpower in the world. According to the 2021 Sanctions Review published by the US Treasury, by fiscal year 2021, the US has over 9,400 effective sanction designations, which is almost 10 times the number 20 years ago. However, although the US imposes sanctions repeatedly, such moves did not help to solve problems, but only aggravate disasters and chaos. It is estimated that following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the economic sanctions on the country could take the lives of more civilians than 20 years of war in Afghanistan. I would like to stress that the problem now is not about who wants to help Russia circumvent the sanctions, but about the fact that the normal trade and economic exchanges between countries, China included, and Russia have already been unnecessarily hurt. We urge the US to take Chinas concerns seriously when handling the Ukraine issue and its relations with Russia and avoid undermining Chinas legitimate rights and interests in any way. China will take all necessary measures to firmly uphold the legitimate and lawful rights and interests of Chinese companies and individuals. Shenzhen TV: When meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on March 27, Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas stressed that the Biden administration needs to fulfill its commitment to Palestine, including its commitment to a two-state solution on the Palestine-Israel issue. On the current events in Europe, the US has shown blatant double standards, and the international community should not be silent about whats happening in Palestine. Do you have any comment? Wang Wenbin: The Palestinian question should not be marginalized or forgotten, and the injustice lasting for over 50 years should not continue. Guided by the four-point proposal on the Palestinian question put forward by President Xi Jinping, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi came up with three specific approaches for implementing the two-state solution. China will continue to stand firmly with the Palestinian people. I want to stress that the international community should not adopt double standard on the Palestinian question and other international and regional hotspot issues. It is unacceptable double standard to sympathize with refugees in Ukraine while turning a blind eye to refugees from countries in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. It is unacceptable double standard to call acts harming civilians in Ukraine war crimes, while allowing harm done to civilians in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria to go unpunished. It is unacceptable double standard to say the attacks on Ukraine undermine the principle of respect for sovereignty, while claiming the attacks on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are legitimate and lawful. It is unacceptable double standard to stress that sovereignty is inviolable on the Ukraine issue while claiming that human rights precede sovereignty when it comes to issues related to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Iraq. The sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries should be respected. The purposes and principles of the UN Charter should be observed. The legitimate security concerns of all countries should be taken seriously. Only when double standard is discarded can regional hotspot issues be addressed in a just manner and the enduring peace achieved in Europe and other places of the world. Reuters: Australias foreign minister on Saturday said that she hoped that Australian officials would be allowed to attend the hearing of arrested Australian journalist Cheng Lei in line with a consular agreement between the two nations. Can the foreign ministry confirm that this will be the case? Wang Wenbin: I have answered a relevant question already. AFP: On the Afghan neighboring countries meeting this week, can you confirm whether Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will be attending? Wang Wenbin: I have released the relevant information just now. Foreign Ministers or representatives of Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will attend the third Meeting of Foreign Ministers of the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan in Tunxi, Anhui on March 30 and 31. Foreign Minister Lavrov will attend the meeting upon invitation. Global Times: US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral John C. Aquilino reportedly said in an interview that the Ukraine issue has underscored the serious threat that China poses to Taiwan, and that Asian allies must take seriously the possibility. What is your comment on this? Wang Wenbin: We have stated on multiple occasions that the Taiwan question is essentially different from the Ukraine issue. The two are uncomparable. Some people in the US repeatedly link up the two unrelated things with the real agenda to smear and attack China. Such an act is ill-intentioned. As a Chinese proverb puts it, it takes more than one cold day for the river to freeze three feet deep. The current Ukraine issue is an outbreak of tension that has built up for years with Europes security as the root cause. NATOs unchecked eastward expansion warrants reflection. Facing the current situation in Ukraine, the US did nothing to reflect on the responsibility it should assume, or make efforts to cool down the situation and promote talks for peace. Instead, it has been adding fuel to the flame. When European countries are paying the price for refugees and economic volatility due to the conflict, US arms dealers and oil and gas industry have made a fortune. Taiwan is an inalienable part of the Chinese territory. This makes it fundamentally different from a sovereign country like Ukraine. Those in the US who deliberately compare the Taiwan question with the Ukraine issue harbor a vile intention rather than lack common sense. Their real agenda is to create a new crisis across the Taiwan Strait to serve US geopolitical and economic interests at the expense of the wellbeing of people across the Strait and regional peace and stability. But Taiwan is not Ukraine. The Chinese peoples resolve and determination to uphold national sovereignty and territorial integrity is invincible. Those who play with and fan up the fire on the Taiwan question will only wind up burning themselves. Reuters: Regarding the investigation of the MU5735 plane that tragically crashed, US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Wednesday that he was very encouraged by the fact that Chinese authorities had invited the US National Transportation Safety Board to take part in the investigation of the crash. However, the National Transportation Safety Board later said that it had not yet determined if the American investigators would travel to China due to visa and quarantine requirements. Does the foreign ministry have any updates on the visa situation and the visit of these US investigators? Wang Wenbin: I would like to refer you to competent authorities for the specifics you asked. What I can tell you is that China will provide necessary facilitation to foreign personnel who are approved by the Chinese side to travel to China to assist in the investigation. Bloomberg: I just wanted to check if representatives from India will participate in the Afghan neighbors forum later in March? Wang Wenbin: I have just released the relevant information. You are clearly a super-user of NUVO.net. Thats a good thing. It means you depend on independent and local news sources to keep you informed. You are a smart person. Coincidentally, independent and local news sources depend on you too. Youve read 25 articles this month and now, wed like you to be join our mission and become a NUVO Supporter. For as little as $4 a month, you can keep us alive and fighting -- and can have unlimited access to the independent news that cant be found anywhere else. Photo-Illustration: Eddie Guy; Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images For more from Jonathan Chait, sign up for his newsletter &c., a weekly-ish collection of musings from the center-left. In late February, as daily deaths from COVID-19 tallied in the thousands across the country, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced his latest effort to dismantle his states response to the coronavirus pandemic. Private businesses, he insisted, should stop requiring their employees to wear masks at work. Here was a perfectly selected message to build the brand he has established: Ron DeSantis, scourge of public-health bureaucrats, enemy of woke corporations, and friend of the little guy. Both the form and content of the message reflected careful planning. As DeSantis spoke, he looked like a man who had been mimicking Donald Trumps speeches in front of the mirror. He performed a series of hand thrusts, in which he drew his thumbs together until they were almost touching, then jerked them apart in quick horizontal motions, as if he were playing an invisible accordion. After five such accordion pulls, he swung his right hand, thumb pointing up, in a semi-circular motion back inward to the center. DeSantis tweeted out the clip, and any MAGA fan watching, even without the sound on, would have grasped the gist just through the eerie physical impersonation. Republicans have collectively recognized that however much Trump may exasperate them, their president-in-exile will not be purged, nor will the changes he brought to their party be rolled back. He might, however, be co-opted. And if this is to happen, they have settled with remarkable unanimity on DeSantis as the person to do it. People who do not ingest large amounts of conservative media may have difficulty comprehending the extent of the adulation both the Trumpist and the Trump-skeptical wings of the party have lavished on DeSantis. On a daily basis, the right-wing press churns out stories with headlines like The Promise of Ron DeSantis, Could Gov. Ron DeSantis Be the Favorite GOP Frontrunner for 2024?, A Ron DeSantis Master Class in Rope-a-Dope, Media Keep Trying and Failing to Take Down Floridas Ron DeSantis, Karol Markowicz on What Gov. Ron DeSantis Is Really Like: So Real and Down to Earth, and on and on. The Florida governor has reportedly provoked Trump by refusing to preemptively endorse his likely candidacy for a second term, and DeSantis is putting himself in a position to challenge the former president for the 2024 nomination. An annoyed Trump has privately told associates that hes not worried about DeSantis because he has no personal charisma and has a dull personality, according to Axios. But Trump has cause for concern: DeSantis has blitzed the national Republican donor circuit and turned most of the conservative media into his personal messaging apparatus. You should be my governor, cooed Sean Hannity in one interview. We see him as the future of the party, a Fox News producer wrote to DeSantiss office in an email obtained by the Tampa Bay Times. This work has already yielded fruit: DeSantiss polling has crept up steadily, while every other Republican who had once been whispered about as a potential nominee Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Josh Hawley has barely registered. There are other, more troubling signs for Trump that his stranglehold over the party may be loosening. In December, during an interview in Dallas with disgraced former Fox News host Bill OReilly, Trump was booed by members of the crowd when he confirmed that he had received a COVID booster shot. Since he left office, the Republican Party has by and large turned against the measures designed to ameliorate the impact of the pandemic, giving upstarts like DeSantis a chance to outflank him on what has become the central battleground of the culture wars. What weve done is historic, a confused Trump told his skeptical supporters in Dallas, claiming credit for the production of lifesaving vaccines. Dont let them take it away. Dont take it away from ourselves. Trump is right that DeSantis cant compete as a performer with him or even with past Republicans who have built national brands. DeSantis has the anti-tax zealotry of Paul Ryan without the winsome affect and sculpted torso. He has the social conservatism of George W. Bush with none of the folksiness. He has the partisan fire of Newt Gingrich without the mesmerizing hair. He speaks in a nasal tone nobody has described as pleasant on the ears and has yet to utter an eloquent or memorable turn of phrase. Reporters have noted his puzzling lack of interest in human relationships outside his family, which has resulted in heavy staff churn. You will be in the car with Ron DeSantis and hell say nothing to you for an hour, one associate told Politico. He would prefer it that way. But in some respects, DeSantiss distant middle-management energy is the point, especially when compared to Trumps garish star power. It is crucial to understand that the critique of Trump that prevails among Republican officials is far narrower than the one proffered by Democrats or Never Trumpers. They dont object to Trumps racism, corruption, lying, or contempt for democratic norms, except to the extent that these qualities hurt the partys brand. What irritates, instead, is Trumps constant disregard for basic political self-preservation. DeSantis offers them the prospect of a party leader who can harness all the right-wing populist energy generated by Trump without the latters childlike inability to focus on what his advisers tell him. One DeSantis ally, confiding to the New York Times, summed up his appeal as competent Trumpism. His proto-candidacy reflects a handful of working assumptions. First, that any former Republican voter who opposed Trump on moral rather than aesthetic grounds is gone and not worth trying to bring back. Second, that the right-wing groups Trump brought into the Republican fold or whose creation he inspired are either political assets or simply too important to be culled. And third, that Trumps attempt to secure an unelected second term was a failure of tactics, not a disqualifying ambition that merited rebuke and ostracism. The DeSantis pitch is to wrest the MAGA movement from the grifters who built it and place it in the hands of a trusted professional politician. This project raises two questions: Can it succeed in prying the nomination from Trumps grip? And what would it mean if it did? Just imagine what a Trumpified party no longer led by an erratic, deeply unpopular cable-news binge-watcher would be capable of. One of the reasons political analysts dismissed the possibility Trump could win the Republican nomination when he first ran is that such an outcome violated what was taken as virtually a scientific truth. A 2008 book written by a quartet of political scientists, The Party Decides, argued that presidential nominations only appeared to be controlled by the voters of Iowa, New Hampshire, and so on but were actually determined by party insiders. The elites, coordinating with one another, made their preferences known through the media, and the primary voters would absorb those messages and act accordingly. This thesis perfectly described the next contested primary that happened. The 2012 Republican nominating contest featured a succession of flamboyant right-wing populists Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Gingrich who would enthrall the base and shoot up in the polls only to collapse as if pulled down by some gravitational force detectable solely by political science. But Trumps 2016 nomination, in the face of near-total opposition from the Republican elite, obviously shows the party does not always decide. The voters might pick a nominee their partys elites oppose if that candidate offers them something unique. Many Republicans have tried to discern the source of Trumps appeal and replicate it. As early as 2016, Ted Cruz was tacking to Trumps right on abortion and guns, and Marco Rubio briefly tried to match Trumps schoolyard insults, at one point making fun of the size of his hands. But Trumps secret sauce with the base turned out to be his unwavering pugilism. Having spent more time than perhaps any other Republican candidate consuming conservative media, Trump had absorbed its message that conservative America is under assault by sinister liberal elites. He built a political style designed for the world depicted on Fox News, in which the Republican Party is always losing because its leaders are too weak to fight back. Conservatives sum up his appeal with the phrase But he fights. As the but implies, they often acknowledge Trumps flaws before praising his overriding instinct to attack their enemies. Even his errors can turn to his benefit. The more Trump draws howls of outrage from liberals and the media, the more he proves his tribal bona fides. DeSantis has undertaken an almost clinical effort to manufacture and bottle this aspect of Trumps style. He has repeated the Trumpian narrative that the partys leaders have failed to take the fight to the enemy. We cannot, we will not, go back to the days of the failed Republican Establishment of yesteryear, he promised in 2021. DeSantiss brand is, like Trumps, a Republican who never compromises, never apologizes, and always fights whether the issue is education, the pandemic, or even Trumps misconduct. At the CPAC conference in his home state in February, he claimed that Democrats want us to be second-class citizens and assailed the corrupt and dishonest legacy media. Photo: David A. Grogan/CNBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images (top left); Joe Raedle/Getty Images (top right); Federic J Brown/AFP via Getty Images (middle left); Joe Raedle/Getty Images (middle right); CNN/Youtube (bottom left); Storms Media for Delray Beach Market/MediaPunch/Shutterstock (bottom right). The Republican elites rallying to DeSantis are calculating that his synthetic version of Trumpism will serve as an adequate substitute. The party is trying to regain its control of the process by offering the voters a more attractive product than, say, Jeb Bush. If you loved Trump, you will like DeSantis. And if you liked Trump, or maybe just tolerated him through gritted teeth, you will love DeSantis. One irony of DeSantiss attempt to become the new Trump is that his trajectory was almost precisely the opposite of the latters. Trump grew up wealthy but was an indifferent student who allegedly cheated his way into college and retained a working-class affect when he inherited his fathers real-estate empire. DeSantis grew up middle class in Dunedin, Florida (his mother was a nurse and his father installed Nielsen boxes on televisions), before attending Yale and then Harvard Law School. At Harvard, he joined the Navy as a JAG officer, later putting his legal skills to use during stints in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. After active duty in the Navy, DeSantis ran for a House seat in 2012 in the Sixth Congressional District in the middle of a two-decade stretch when the state was trending from purple to red. DeSantis prevailed in a crowded primary in part by winning endorsements from national tea-party groups. The way Republicans established their right-wing credentials at the time was by adopting radical libertarian stances on fiscal policy, and DeSantis duly proposed to abolish the graduated income tax and phase in cuts to entitlement programs i.e., Medicare and Social Security. In Congress, he helped found the Freedom Caucus, a right-wing faction, though he didnt participate in the destructive displays of rebelliousness, such as forcing government shutdowns to stage impossible demands, that made other caucus members intolerable to the party leadership. After Trumps election, DeSantis could see that the energy on the right was flowing through different channels. When he ran for governor in 2018, he overcame a better-known Republican rival by positioning himself as Trumps staunchest defender. In Congress, he proposed to defund the Mueller investigation. He attacked his primary opponent for having failed to attend a Trump rally in 2016 and cut a cheeky ad showing himself reading Trumps The Art of the Deal to his young son and instructing his daughter to build the wall with her toy blocks. He made frequent appearances on Fox News, where he caught Trumps attention and won his blessing. Ron is strong on Borders, tough on Crime & big on Cutting Taxes Loves our Military & our Vets, Trump tweeted. He will be a Great Governor & has my full Endorsement! A common assumption of mainstream-media analysis of DeSantis is that he is merely pandering to Trump and his supporters and, as a graduate of Yale and Harvard, is too smart to actually believe what he is saying. This is a failure of imagination. DeSantis developed reactionary suspicions of democracy before Trump ever came along, which positioned him perfectly to straddle the elite-base divide within his party. In fact, DeSantis once wrote a book warning of the dangers of a megalomaniacal president who threatened to destroy the foundations of the republic. That presidents name was Barack Obama. DeSantis published Dreams From Our Founding Fathers in 2011, when he was running for Congress. It is out of print and has received barely any attention in the media. DeSantis joked recently that the book was read by about a dozen people. But it provides deep insight into the worldview that has propelled him to this point. Published at the height of the tea-party movement, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers made the case that Obama and his agenda were inimical to the Constitution and this countrys founding ideals. It is sprinkled with passages DeSantis would never have written after Trump took office. He notes accurately that the Founders worried about the emergence of popular leaders who utilized demagoguery to obtain public support in service of their personal ambitions. He flays Obama for alienating traditional allies, meeting with foreign dictators, and impugning American innocence with statements like We sometimes make mistakes, a far more measured assessment than Trumps There are a lot of killers. You got a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent? He devotes an entire chapter to the importance of the president being personally humble, depicting Obamas alleged excessive self-confidence as a disqualifying trait. DeSantiss obsession with media bias, which has since become a motif of his political style, clearly developed before he ran for office. He laces the book with bitter complaints that the media failed to vet Obama or expose his allegedly radical influences, while extensively citing criticisms of Obama that appeared in the mainstream press, oblivious to the contradiction. DeSantis is an exceedingly unreliable narrator, wrenching heavily abridged quotations out of context to distort their meaning. For example, he plucks the phrase At a certain point youve made enough money to characterize Obama as a radical socialist who wants to confiscate all income above some level, neglecting to note that Obamas follow-up was: But, you know, part of the American way is that you can just keep on making it if youre providing a good product or youre providing a good service. Still, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers is much more interesting than a typical partisan screed. Its author, who majored in history and spent a year teaching the subject at a tony boarding school, has clearly given a great deal of thought to the books thesis: that Obamas agenda of raising taxes on the rich and spending more money on the non-rich is an attack on the Constitution. As legend has it, Benjamin Franklin once said that when the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic, he writes. While acknowledging that the quote is apocryphal it was probably concocted by reactionaries many decades later and attributed to various Founding-era statesmen he proceeds to try to prove this was the real view of the Founders and the Constitution. The Constitution, he argues, was designed to prevent the redistribution of wealth through the political process. The danger is that, as his fake Franklin quote suggests, people will support programs funded by taxing the rich that benefit themselves. Popular pressure to redistribute wealth or otherwise undermine the rights of property, he laments, will ever be present. The Constitutions role, as DeSantis sees it, is to prevent popular majorities from enacting the economic policies they want. DeSantis does not believe the Constitution merely establishes a set of ground rules for how policy should be written. He thinks the Constitution requires that conservative Republican policy prevail forever. This is not an original belief. It was the dominant right-wing position from the late-19th century through the middle of the New Deal, and conservative courts routinely struck down all sorts of progressive legislation on the grounds that the Constitution prohibits active government intervention in the economy. DeSantis treats any further expansion of government as a mortal threat to the Constitution. Sentences like Obamanomics represents a dramatic departure from the nations founding principles and Obamas quest to fundamentally transform the United States of America represents the type of political program that the Constitution was designed to prevent are found in nearly every chapter. The word redistribution and its variants appear more than 150 times. DeSantiss core conviction is that an outcome in which Democrats win majorities through free and fair elections and vote to expand social spending by taxing the rich is fundamentally illegitimate. He is far from the only Republican to hold this view. The American right has never fully accepted the legitimacy of democratically elected majorities setting economic policy. This principle helps explain why even most Republicans who get queasy over Trumps authoritarianism ultimately support him anyway. The prospect of Democrats winning elections poses a graver threat to the Constitution than Republicans stealing them. For those Republicans who always considered Trump no worse than the lesser evil, who feared more that he was squandering his power than that he was abusing it, DeSantis is not just an acceptable vehicle. He is one of them. What has brought DeSantis near the pinnacle of Republican politics barely a decade into his career is not only his deep commitment to the principles of the conservative movement but also a keen understanding of the power centers within the party. As those centers have changed throughout his career, DeSantis has adjusted nimbly from tea-partyer to Trumpista. The identity he recognized in the spring of 2020, and embraced with deepening militancy, is founded on opposition to social-distancing policies during the coronavirus pandemic. DeSantiss skepticism of public-health authorities paid economic and political dividends, at least for a while. During the 202021 academic year, when most states stuck with remote learning, Florida opened its schools, a position even Democrats belatedly recognized as correct. He has used COVID as a stage to pick successful fights with the media, which has sometimes overreached in its criticism of his pandemic policy. Last year, a 60 Minutes segment accused him of corruption for steering vaccine distribution to the Publix chain of pharmacies, which had donated to his PAC, though many acknowledged the popular outlet was a logical partner for the program. DeSantis deftly used the episode to thrill conservatives with sharp counterpunches against the media. The whole thing is a big lie, he fumed, using a PowerPoint presentation to make his case. But DeSantiss aggressive COVID politics have also seen him take increasingly extreme positions. Over the past year, DeSantiss defense of what he calls freedom over Faucism which, in addition to keeping schools open, has involved blocking towns from mandating masks and businesses from requiring vaccines and at one point scolding high-school students for wearing masks at a photo op has drawn him into the arms of the anti-vaccine movement. He has appeared at a press conference with an anti-vaxxer, suspended a state health official for encouraging his staff to increase their vaccine uptake, and appointed vaccine skeptic Joseph Ladapo to serve as the states top health official. (People are being forced to put something in their bodies that we dont know all there is to know about yet, Ladapo claimed. No matter what people on TV tell you, its not true. Were going to learn more about the safety of these vaccines.) After confirming he received his first shot last year off-camera, DeSantis has refused to say whether he got a booster. One result of DeSantiss support for the anti-vaccine movement is that, as of February, his state ranked 46th nationally in its share of elderly citizens who have received a booster shot. During the COVID wave last winter, Floridas death rate significantly outstripped Californias. At his February 2021 CPAC speech, DeSantis boasted that his state had a (slightly) below-average COVID death rate. His COVID riff at this years CPAC made no mention of mortality statistics. DeSantiss oppositional approach to politics borrows heavily from Trumps style but with noticeable adjustments. Compared with the original, DeSantiss version of Trumpism is much more methodical, which robs it of its organic spontaneity yet also eliminates the frequent blowback. He has followed Trumps practice of using Twitter to launch unhinged attacks on the media and liberals, with the important revision of outsourcing the job to his spokespeople, most notably press secretary Christina Pushaw. This allows DeSantis to get much of the benefit of Trumps fire hose of abuse, exciting conservative activists and flustering reporters with wild accusations, all while his underlings absorb the reputational damage. DeSantis has undertaken an almost clinical effort to manufacture and bottle Trumps style. Trumps genuine ignorance and limited vocabulary allowed him to effortlessly channel the Republican bases contempt for the educated elite. DeSantis has to work at it. Last fall, he mockingly cited a Wall Street Journal article on the declining number of men attending college. I guess there was a decline in the number of men, the percentage of men going to college or whatever, he told his audience. And they acted like this was a bad thing. And honestly, like, you know, to me, I think that is probably a good sign. This is not, of course, advice that the double-Ivy DeSantis took himself. DeSantiss culture-war appeals usually steer clear of Trumps overt racism. (The one exception was during the 2018 general election, when he warned voters not to monkey this up by electing his Black Democratic opponent, a phrase that might have been a deliberate racist appeal but could also have been an unfortunate slip of the tongue.) He often attempts to formulate positions that could drive a wedge between the left and the center. Most important, while Trumps culture-war gestures often produced nothing but ephemeral content for conservative media, DeSantis has placed real state power behind the right-wing social agenda. DeSantis on Monday signed a bill into law that would restrict classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, preventing teachers from explaining things like why some children have two fathers or two mothers. (Democrats offered an amendment to ensure the law would be limited to discussions of sex. Republicans voted it down.) The laws deepest potential for harm lies in its details. It bans such discussions either before the fourth grade or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate. Not only is the standard of appropriateness inherently subjective, but its enforcement mechanism enables parents who dont like the instruction their child gets on gender to sue. You dont need to be a social liberal to see the potential for havoc. The law will open a lawsuit factory for culture war organizations to go after schools, the libertarian magazine Reason notes, forcing schools to shell out money to defend themselves and giving the most conservative parents the ability to veto school discussions that other parents are perfectly fine with. DeSantis has appeared undaunted, tearing into a reporter who quoted Democrats who called it the Dont Say Gay bill before it was signed. This allowed him to highlight, once again, his martyrdom at the hands of the media without having to address the more serious objections to the bill. Pushaw went on Twitter to reframe the law as an Anti-Grooming Bill, writing, If youre against the anti-Grooming bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you dont denounce the grooming of 4- to 8-year-old children. It was a perfectly orchestrated DeSantis culture-war set piece. DeSantis is also preparing to sign what he calls the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, a measure preventing uncomfortable racial discussions at any public school or college in the state that is so broad it would ban teachers or professors from defending affirmative action. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech group that has frequently denounced left-wing indoctrination and censorship on campus, describes the bill as flatly unconstitutional. This spring, DeSantis staked out a position to the right of his own party by promising to veto a congressional map designed by Republicans. DeSantis insisted instead on a more aggressive map that would eliminate two of the states five Black-held seats. DeSantis believes this maneuver can both increase his partys strength in Congress and provoke a legal fight that would lead to the Supreme Courts striking down the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act that protect minority representation in legislative redistricting. In meetings, he would just demand, Pass my maps! My maps! My maps! Hes just bizarrely obsessed with this, a Republican told NBC. A measure that received less attention than either, but has enormous significance, is one DeSantis signed with little fanfare. In 2018, nearly two-thirds of Florida voters approved a ballot initiative to allow former felons to vote. Felon disenfranchisement is a relic of the post-Reconstruction era, when white southern states used it, in combination with laws heavily targeting Black men, as a tool to limit voting. The referendum granted eligibility to more than a million Floridians. DeSantis, who was elected governor at the same time the initiative passed, acted quickly to nullify it once in office. Republicans pushed through a law requiring former felons to pay off any outstanding fines or court debt before they could vote. At least three-quarters of eligible voters owe court debt, and of those, the vast majority cant pay it back. The point of the bill was not to compel payments. Indeed, because the state has no central database listing all fines, many voters who had the money, and an intense enough desire to vote, to pay for the privilege could not do so. The bills purpose was to disenfranchise those voters. Republicans have been implementing voting-rights restrictions across the country since about 2011, but no state has enacted a measure as sweeping and draconian as Floridas. DeSantis is the only governor since the Jim Crow era to institute a literal poll tax. After signing the law, DeSantis proclaimed on his official Twitter account, Voting is a privilege that should not be taken lightly. He conveyed his beliefs with chilling accuracy: Voting is a privilege, not, as many Americans believe, a right. Trump and DeSantis have been circling each other since the 2020 election, and their budding rivalry has so far been shaped by the GOPs two great preoccupations of the immediate post-Trump era: the pandemic and Trumps attempts to steal the election. The incipient contest broke into public view in December. It began when DeSantis appeared on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo, who asked if he had gotten a booster shot. DeSantis evaded the question and changed the subject to his fight against vaccine requirements. A couple of weeks later, Pushaw announced that DeSantis was refusing to disclose his status as a matter of medical privacy. The next week, Trump appeared on One America News and, without naming him, ridiculed DeSantis for being afraid to come clean. I watched a couple of politicians be interviewed and one of the questions was Did you get the booster? Trump said. Because they had the vaccine, and theyre answering like in other words, the answer is Yes, but they dont want to say it because theyre gutless. You gotta say it, whether you had it or not. Say it. Quickly afterward, DeSantis hit back. The lobbyist Josh Holmes, an ally of Mitch McConnells, asked DeSantis on his podcast if he had any regrets about his term in office. DeSantis replied that he wished he had spoken out more forcefully against Trumps early, intermittent endorsements of social distancing when the coronavirus pandemic began, which he described as locking down the country. In other words, DeSantis considers his biggest mistake in office failing to push back against something Donald Trump did. The most revealing aspect of the episode was how the conservative media covered it. If you listened to the Trump-critical outlets on the right the ones aligned with the GOP Establishments belief that Trumps personality is a liability for the party the first shots had been fired in DeSantiss uprising. National Review, which has become the premier intellectual organ of the anti-anti-Trump right while pining for his replacement, ran columns with headlines like Could DeSantis Beat Trump? and The DeSantis-Trump Tensions Will Lead to a Test of Strength. Meanwhile, the most loyal Trumpist corners of the conservative media denied the entire premise that DeSantis and Trump were in conflict. American Greatness, an online magazine invented in response to the Trump campaign and premised on turning his slogans into a political program, insisted that the New York Times story on the Trump-DeSantis feud is kayfabe (a staged conflict). In a column headlined Why the Medias Attempt to Split DeSantis and Trump Isnt Working, the Federalists Mollie Hemingway argued that the corporate media is trying to pit Trump and DeSantis against each other because theyre a threat to the Establishment. If youre a Republican who wants Trump gone, DeSantis is the man with the guts to take him on. If youre a Republican who adores Trump, DeSantis remains his loyal ally. Both wings of the party are jostling for DeSantiss approval and broadcasting DeSantis-friendly messages to their audiences. The same dynamic can be seen in DeSantiss courtship of the anti-vaccine movement. Pro-vaccine conservatives maintain the pretense that DeSantis only opposes vaccine mandates, calling him a vocal proponent of the COVID vaccines and insisting that the claim he is encouraging doubt about the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is a lie. Meanwhile, anti-vaccine activists have hailed DeSantis as their champion. Vaccine skeptic Robert Malone, appearing on Steve Bannons podcast, gushed, Ron DeSantis and surgeon general Joe Ladapo are giving hope to the rest of the world. They are listening to the key messages we are putting forth. If you completely dismiss the possibility that DeSantis could pry the Republican base away from a president to whom it has formed a cultlike attachment, you may not be considering the potential effect of two more years of DeSantis being given the sort of coverage in the right-wing media that Pravda devoted to Joseph Stalin. What a DeSantis-led Republican Party would look like is perhaps best captured in his response to the claims that the 2020 election was stolen. DeSantis began by playing the familiar role of Trump defender, complaining the day after the election about Fox News decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden. (The network, he speculated, had some type of motive, whether it was ratings, whether it was something else.) He went on Hannitys show to warn of vote dumps, a Republican term designed to cast suspicion on the results coming out of Democratic counties: I tell you, what Im seeing in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is troubling, Sean. Later that day, DeSantis went on Fox News again and floated the possibility that Republican-controlled legislatures in battleground states won by Biden could override the election results and appoint Trump electors. On the day of the insurrection, DeSantis issued a perfunctory rebuke (Violence or rioting of any kind is unacceptable) before pivoting back to his comfortable posture of offense. In the past year, he has assailed Liz Cheney for cooperating with the investigation of the attack (We want people that are going to fight the left), refused to say whether Biden legitimately won the election, and similarly declined to clarify whether Pence was correct to certify the Electoral College results. By the time the anniversary of the insurrection arrived, DeSantis was floating the right-wing rumor that the violence on January 6 had actually been ginned up by undercover FBI agents. But mostly he resented the media for covering the issue at all. This is their Christmas: January 6, he complained. They are going to take this and milk this for anything they could to be able to smear anyone who ever supported Donald Trump. DeSantis also marked the anniversary by wooing right-wing social-media personalities with an invitation to his office, dinner at the governors mansion, and rooftop drinks. One of the less visible aspects of DeSantiss political operation has been its appeals to conservative activists who have gained clout and influence during the Trump era and who have legitimized vaccine skepticism, support for Vladimir Putin, and dismissing or even participating in the January 6 insurrection. Pushaw attended an event to promote the anti-gay education bill held by Brandon Straka, who was recorded at the Capitol on January 6 urging the crowd to seize a police officers shield and yelling Go, go, go! Esther Byrd, whom DeSantis appointed to the states board of education, has reportedly defended the January 6 rioters, QAnon, and the Proud Boys. DeSantiss unembarrassed courtship of right-wing extremists has broadened his array of media advocates. Perhaps most important, his no-enemies-to-the-right strategy has sent a message about his brand: Unlike the weak Republican Establishment, DeSantis will stand with conservatives. In January, a small band of white supremacists converged in Orlando, where they chanted White power! and roughed up a Jewish student. Pushaw suggested on Twitter that the white supremacists were actually Democrats pretending to be Nazis to make DeSantis look bad, a charge that was quickly debunked. When DeSantis was asked about the episode at a press conference, he could have confined himself to a rote denunciation of the racist hoodlums, as several of his fellow Florida Republicans did. Instead, he launched an extended diatribe against Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me. He then wound his way through such talking points as Ilhan Omar, the BDS movement, Louis Farrakhan, inflation, illegal immigration, crime, and the supposed failures of the Biden administration which the press was allegedly trying to obscure by bringing up the Orlando attack. Rubio, standing behind DeSantis, shuffled his feet uncomfortably as DeSantiss rant went on. Were not playing their game, he insisted, falling back on his occasional habit of narrating his own political strategy. Their game, in this case, meant accepting the terms of debate as defined by what he has called the corrupt media. In a high-profile editorial denouncing Trump six years ago a cover story with the glittering tagline Against Trump National Review asked, If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what would that say about conservatives? More recently, National Reviews editor, Rich Lowry, made the case for DeSantis on the grounds that he is the closest possible thing to Trump. The challenge to Trump, he reasoned, will have to come from the Trump wing at this point, more like the Trump fuselage, wing and landing gear of the party. The paradigmatic DeSantis constituent within the Republican elite would be William Barr. The former attorney general, who released a memoir in March describing his clashes with Trump over the 2020 election, has called Trump delusional and says he wants to nominate young candidates who will fight for principle but dont have the sort of obnoxious personal characteristics that alienate a lot of voters. But Barr eagerly supported many of Trumps efforts to weaponize the Justice Department and has conceded that he will vote for Trump again should he be nominated. Its worth noting that the one major difference between Barr and DeSantis is that the former drew the line at Trumps attempt to overturn the results of the last election. With DeSantis, theres no telling where that line might be. Sign Up for Jonathan Chaits Newsletter, &c. Irregular musings from the center-left. Email This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us. Bone Therapeutics SA REGULATED INFORMATION Strategic focus revised and fully focused on achieving topline results of the ALLOB Phase IIb study in tibial fractures. Discussions for ALLOB global partnership still ongoing. Board of Directors and Management exploring all strategic options to protect shareholder value. Miguel Forte (CEO), Tony Ting (CSO), Stefanos Theoharis (CBO) and Lieve Creten (CFO) will transition to leave the company over the coming months. Mont-Saint-Guibert, Belgium, 29 March 2022, 7am CEST BONE THERAPEUTICS (Euronext Brussels and Paris: BOTHE), the cell therapy company addressing unmet medical needs in orthopedics and other diseases, today announces it is redefining its strategic priorities to concentrate specifically on the development of its most advanced clinical asset, the allogeneic cell therapy platform, ALLOB. ALLOB is currently being evaluated in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase IIb study in patients with high-risk tibial fractures. Based on the positive results of the previous clinical studies of ALLOB undertaken by Bone Therapeutics and the extensive preclinical data set, Bone Therapeutics firmly believes that ALLOB has the highest potential of near-term value creation. Topline results of the Phase IIb trial are still anticipated in Q1 2023. However, a delay cannot be excluded. In order to deliver the results from the Phase IIb clinical study, Bone Therapeutics has implemented a number of actions to reduce its cost base to enable completion of its Phase IIb study. As a result, Bone Therapeutics will focus its R&D activities to support the clinical development of ALLOB and all activities related to the development of the pre-clinical iMSCg platform as well as all other non ALLOB related activities, will be stopped. In this context, some members of Bone Therapeutics' management team will transition to depart Bone Therapeutics in the coming months in alignment with the focus in activity. This includes Miguel Forte (CEO), Tony Ting (CSO), Stefanos Theoharis (CBO) and Lieve Creten (CFO). The CEO, Miguel Forte, will remain in function for the transition. In addition, all non-executive members of the Board of Directors have decided to suspend their compensation for the first quarter of 2022 and until further notice. Story continues The ongoing completion of ALLOB Phase IIb study will be supervised by Anne Leselbaum, MD (Chief Medical Officer) and Anne-Sophie Lebrun, PhD (Chief Operation Officer). The negotiations for ALLOB, with one of the current Bone Therapeutics Chinese partners, for the global rights agreement are still ongoing but are taking longer than anticipated. The potential completion of a final binding agreement has been delayed beyond the end of Q1 2022. Subsequent to some preliminary contacts, the board of directors of Bone Therapeutics is currently examining various opportunities to combine certain activities within Bone Therapeutics, taking into account the interests of its shareholders and other stakeholders. Further announcements will be made in due course, if and when circumstances so allow or require. About ALLOB ALLOB is Bone Therapeutics off-the-shelf allogeneic cell therapy platform consisting of human allogeneic bone-forming cells derived from cultured bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC) from healthy adult donors. To address critical factors for the development and commercialization of cell therapy products, Bone Therapeutics has established a proprietary, optimized production process that improves consistency, scalability, cost effectiveness and ease of use of ALLOB. This optimized production process significantly increases the production yield, generating thousands of doses per bone marrow donation. Additionally, the final ALLOB product is cryopreserved, enabling easy shipment and the capability to be stored at the point of care for easy clinical use. The process will therefore substantially improve product quality, reduce overall production costs, simplify supply chain logistics, increase patient accessibility and facilitate global commercialization. The Company has implemented the optimized production process to produce clinical batches for the ongoing Phase IIb clinical trial in patients with difficult-to-heal tibial fractures. About Bone Therapeutics Bone Therapeutics is a leading biotech company focused on the development of innovative products to address high unmet needs in orthopedics and other diseases. Currently Bone Therapeutics is concentrating specifically on the development of its most advanced clinical asset, the allogeneic cell therapy platform, ALLOB. Bone Therapeutics core technology is based on its cutting-edge allogeneic cell and gene therapy platform with differentiated bone marrow sourced Mesenchymal Stromal Cells (MSCs) which can be stored at the point of use in the hospital. Its leading investigational medicinal product, ALLOB, represents a unique, proprietary approach to bone regeneration, which turns undifferentiated stromal cells from healthy donors into bone-forming cells. These cells are produced via the Bone Therapeutics scalable manufacturing process. Following the CTA approval by regulatory authorities in Europe, the Company has initiated patient recruitment for the Phase IIb clinical trial with ALLOB in patients with difficult tibial fractures, using its optimized production process. ALLOB continues to be evaluated for other orthopedic indications including spinal fusion, osteotomy, maxillofacial and dental. Bone Therapeutics cell therapy products are manufactured to the highest GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) standards and are protected by a broad IP (Intellectual Property) portfolio covering ten patent families as well as knowhow. The Company is based in the Louvain-la-Neuve Science Park in Mont-Saint-Guibert, Belgium. Further information is available at www.bonetherapeutics.com. For further information, please contact: Bone Therapeutics SA Miguel Forte, MD, PhD, Chief Executive Officer Lieve Creten, Chief Financial Officer ad interim Tel: +32 (0)71 12 10 00 investorrelations@bonetherapeutics.com For Belgian Media and Investor Enquiries: Bepublic Bert Bouserie Tel: +32 (0)488 40 44 77 bert.bouserie@bepublicgroup.be International Media Enquiries: Image Box Communications Neil Hunter / Michelle Boxall Tel: +44 (0)20 8943 4685 neil.hunter@ibcomms.agency / michelle@ibcomms.agency For French Media and Investor Enquiries: NewCap Investor Relations & Financial Communications Pierre Laurent, Louis-Victor Delouvrier and Arthur Rouille Tel: +33 (0)1 44 71 94 94 bone@newcap.eu Certain statements, beliefs and opinions in this press release are forward-looking, which reflect the Company or, as appropriate, the Company directors current expectations and projections about future events. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These risks, uncertainties and assumptions could adversely affect the outcome and financial effects of the plans and events described herein. A multitude of factors including, but not limited to, changes in demand, competition and technology, can cause actual events, performance or results to differ significantly from any anticipated development. Forward looking statements contained in this press release regarding past trends or activities should not be taken as a representation that such trends or activities will continue in the future. As a result, the Company expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release any update or revisions to any forward-looking statements in this press release as a result of any change in expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions or circumstances on which these forward-looking statements are based. Neither the Company nor its advisers or representatives nor any of its subsidiary undertakings or any such persons officers or employees guarantees that the assumptions underlying such forward-looking statements are free from errors nor does either accept any responsibility for the future accuracy of the forward-looking statements contained in this press release or the actual occurrence of the forecasted developments. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. Those sanctioned Russian assets are piling up. Oligarch yachts, estates, planes, and other items in the West may sit out of their owners' hands but they are not yet necessarily in the control of Western governments. The rules vary across Europe where most of the seizures have taken place following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. The White House recently offered examples of assets that have been taken off the table and noted some had been seized while others were impounded. Under U.S. law, any sanctioned assets would be in a state of legal limbo and put aside, but could eventually be returned to their owners. Now policymakers in the U.S. both on Capitol Hill and perhaps in the administration are pushing to change the uncertain status of those assets around the world. Some want to not just take possession of the assets of Kremlin-connected billionaires, but also sell them and give the proceeds to Ukraine. As Senator Rob Portman (R OH) recently put it on the Senate floor, we should be expanding sanctions and seizing, not just freezing, assets from Kremlin supporters alongside other measures. An Italian Finance police car is parked in front of the yacht "Lady M", linked to Russian oligarch Alexei Mordashov, at Imperia's harbor in Northern Italy on March 5. (ANDREA BERNARDI/AFP via Getty Images) Portman and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) have introduced a bill, the RELIEF for Ukraine Act, which directs any funds from seized Russian assets towards Ukrainian refugees, reconstruction, and other efforts. We have far further to go to fully address this threat President Joe Biden pledged to seize the "ill-begotten gains" of Russian oligarchs during his State of the Union Address on March 1. During a speech Tuesday in London, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo outlined how the U.S. government and its allies may go further in sanctioning Russian individuals. Adeyemo, who's in Europe to shore up alliances, touted the work to share information and intelligence and to facilitate the enforcement of our sanctions, namely to freeze and seize assets of sanctioned individuals. We have far further to go to fully address this threat and restore justice for the people of Ukraine, Adeymo added, without saying where the assets could go. Story continues Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo in Brussels on March 29. (Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) Adeyemo also noted that the West may sanction those who help Russian oligarchs hide their assets. Our bill makes Putin and Russian oligarchs pay the price The intentions of the bill from Portman and Bennet are clear: If enacted, it would create a new Ukraine Relief Fund administered by the Department of State. Our bill makes Putin and Russian oligarchs pay the price by ensuring that funds from their seized assets go directly to the Ukrainian people to support them through many difficult years ahead of resettlement, reconstruction, and recovery, Bennet said in a statement. Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Rob Portman (R-OH) at the U.S. Capitol in 2014. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call) To be sure, Ukraine could use the extra money. Ukraines economy minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, recently said the war in Ukraine has cost her country $564.9 billion by damaging infrastructure and hindering economic growth. However, the oligarchs may be able to easily compensate for those losses. An oft-cited 2017 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated Russian oligarch wealth and came to the startling conclusion that rich Russians held around $800 billion in assets outside of Russia, as of 2015. Or to put it more starkly: There is as much financial wealth held by rich Russians abroad in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Cyprus, and similar offshore centers than held by the entire Russian population in Russia itself, Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman wrote. In the end, any action would likely take place under the umbrella of a recently formed multinational task force that includes the U.S. That would allow Western governments to work together to track and allocate the assets, which so far have been found largely in Europe. Ben Werschkul is a writer and producer for Yahoo Finance in Washington, DC. Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit. Auburn University students making their way to class Monday were unprepared for the images they were about to see. The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, partnering with Students for Life on Auburn Universitys campus, had set up a pro-life gallery on Haley Concourse featuring graphic images of aborted fetuses on billboard-like signs. It was titled The Genocide Awareness Project. Theres all the blood and gore, said Perri Troup, a freshman in chemical engineering. According to its website, the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform has been conducting this project on college campuses throughout the U.S. and Canada since 1998. Were trying to speak out against our society as a whole and our tolerance of decapitating and dismembering tiny human beings, said Lincoln Brandenburg, director of staff development for the organizations southeast region. Many students questioned the effectiveness of this approach. Youre here to shock people; this is not educational, said one student. You are not spreading anything except hate, said another. Sam Hass, secretary of Students for Life, said the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform reached out to his group and asked to share their views on Auburns campus. We were aware of it, Hass said of the organizations use of graphic images. ...The exact layout of it, we werent privy to at the time. The message centered around comparing abortion to genocide. Abortion kills 1.2 million humans every year in the U.S., stated one pamphlet being distributed at the site. If not genocide, what else would we call it? Some markers were placed on the walkway leading up to the display, warning of genocide photos ahead. Our point here with this and using the graphic pictures is to show the humanity of the victims of abortions and the inhumanity of the act of abortion, Brandenburg said. Students debated organization members on the issue as well as their approach. This is not how you do it, one student said. Im not hearing what youre saying, Im just angry. All youre doing is antagonizing people. Some of the signs also included the organizations views on how abortion suppresses the Black vote and compared abortion doctors to death camp exterminators. One sign questioned transgendered athletes being allowed to compete. Hass, the Students for Life member, also questioned the effectiveness of the centers approach. I tend to think that a softer, more loving approach can be more effective in winning people over to the pro-life cause because it is a message of love at heart, Hass said. Some students were reaching out to Student Activities on Monday afternoon to share their concerns. I honestly think it was very inappropriate. I think its honestly unacceptable, said Jada Neal, a sophomore chemical engineering student. There are other places for this and our campus was not one of those. The project was on display from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the organization plans to set it up again on Tuesday. AUBix, a new data center facility in Auburn, will help make high-speed internet available to more people in the state of Alabama, provide cyber security, enable advanced research and data mining and attract businesses to the area. The City of Auburn held a ribbon cutting on Monday to celebrate the grand opening of the new data center that will bring more reliable fiber services all across the state and become a place where, in the words of Gov. Kay Ivey, broadband access meets cyber security. So often we talk about the need for broadband to increase access in Alabama, said Ivey, who attended the event and toured the facility. Now we are doing that. The $120 million, 40,000 square foot facility is located on West Samford Avenue about half a block from Auburn University and is officially operational. Its days like today, folks, that prove Alabama is leading the way in innovation, Ivey said. And I certainly know I look forward to the progress that this will make along the way. Auburn University President Jay Gogue said hes also looking forward to the partnership with AUBix and working with the company that will be able to provide internet to rural parts of the state. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when the university went from in-person instruction to remote instruction only, many students who lived in rural areas struggled with finding internet, Gogue said. For them to be able to take remote courses through Zoom or whatever became a real challenge, Gogue said. They had to drive long distances to be able to even get internet. They tell us stories that they went to local public libraries and sat in the parking lot late at night to be able to get the internet. Andrew Albrecht, founder and CEO of AUBix, said he and the other co-founders started the business plan about two years ago with an idea to build a world-class data center that addresses the increased requirements for high-speed computing. A data center is a place where data is housed, where data lives, Albrecht said. Youd be amazed if you went on your phone and looked at one of your apps, the amount of data coming out of Atlanta, Dallas, New York, Chicago where now it can come out of Auburn. The data center will also provide state of the art infrastructure and services for cyber security clients and serve multiple industries including healthcare, finance, financial services, manufacturing, power companies, academia and state and local government. AUBix will be a great asset to our existing businesses, Auburn Mayor Ron Anders. It will also allow us to attract additional operations that would benefit from such a fine data center. Businesses including hospitals, banks, service providers and technology providers are coming to AUBix, according to Albrecht. We enable service providers and enterprise organizations to co-locate their equipment inside these walls in a secure facility that is connected to multiple national and global networks, Albrecht said. AUBix will provide massive quantities of data and cyber security analysis for academia, like Auburn University, to test and theorize and will be able to catch a whole lot of bad actors on the internet from individual criminals to hostile countries, Albrecht said. United States Congressman Mike Rogers, a ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, spoke about the importance of cyber security. He said the United States has an arsenal of offensive cyber weapons to respond to cyber threats against the critical infrastructure of the country, but for the rest of the countrys infrastructure, like commercial industries, he said there are vulnerabilities. Rogers called Auburn University a cutting-edge leader in cyber security technology for our country and the world, and he said that the AUBix facility will strengthen this fight against cyber threats. Im certain that Auburn University and AUBix will help play a role in helping us fill that gap as we work to make sure thats not a threat, he said. On March 24, Douyin E-Commerce, the online shopping arm of the Chinese mainland version of TikTok, issued updated regulations on cross-border e-commerce business, prohibiting merchants that do not have a franchise in Hainan from selling offshore duty-free products. Douyin's new rules clarifying illegal operation in cross-border and Hainan duty-free business were released to better regulate Hainan offshore duty-free business. In recent years, China has been cracking down on unofficial sales channels for duty-free goods from Hainan, including "daigou" cross-border personal shoppers who buy duty-free merchandises and then resell them. In July 2020, regulations issued by the regulatory authorities stated that any person who purchases duty-free goods for others or resells them in the mainland market with the purpose of making profits shall be prohibited from purchasing duty-free merchandise for three years and be included in the relevant credit records under the law. Hainan offshore duty-free products have been widely welcomed by consumers. According to statistics, in the first two months of this year, the total sales of Hainan's 10 duty-free malls reached almost 13 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 33%. To date, a total of 10 companies in China have been granted a government license for duty-free trade, including China Duty Free Group (CDFG), Sunrise Duty Free, and Hainan Duty-free Co. Ltd. CDFG, as China's largest operator of duty-free business and the world's number one travel retailer by sales, is playing a leading role in combating daigou activities in Hainan. It is working with regulatory authorities to strictly prevent daigou and guiding consumers to abide by the regulations. Decrease Font Size Font Size Increase Font Size Notice body Interior Design students in the College of Human Sciences scored a first for the program when they said, Aloha, and headed to Oahu, Hawaii, for their capstone project. Students enrolled in the Advanced Design Project studio course, led by professors Lindsay Tan and Taneshia Albert, were challenged to redesign a downtown hotel into a multistory, multipurpose community building. Each student worked individually to incorporate their choice of residential, office, retail, hospitality, healthcare and educational spaces based on their area of interest and identified community needs. To read the full story click here. I saw Turning Red, so I'm obsessed with your icon and hear her voice! Reply Parent Thread Link Priya is low-energy bae lol! Reply Parent Thread Expand Link woah, pauly looks like he has an aging filter on him. he went from 20 to 45 real quick. Edited at 2022-03-29 12:27 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link Endless tanning, smoking, and drinking is gonna do that to ya lol. Reply Parent Thread Link He's 41 -shrug- Reply Parent Thread Link Joe Rogan taught ha! Reply Parent Thread Link i don't know what is up with them, what has prompted these unhinged public displays. all i know is that i ever see them in public i am turning around and walking the other way. Reply Thread Link If they are barefoot you better RUN! Reply Parent Thread Link Whenever I get sad about my ballet feet not being so pretty I just think about this heaux's hooves and I feel a lot better about myself. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Yikes. I hope theyre willing to get help. They seem like theyve had a lot of issues with anger. Reply Thread Link this seems like cuhcaine behavior allegedly tho Reply Thread Link if you say "my cocaine" it kinda sounds like you're saying his name in his accent, fun fact Reply Parent Thread Expand Link that's the vibe i got in the fan choking video too Reply Parent Thread Link Put him in jail and cut his toenailsss!!! Reply Thread Link Can we not misgender people even if theyre trash, please? Like come on lmao, I dont want to be in here defending that mess of a human. Reply Parent Thread Link are they NB? Reply Parent Thread Link it's not that hard to respect pronouns even if the person is garbage Reply Parent Thread Link No fucking chill. So damn dark wtf. Tragic Reply Thread Link Too many assholes like (them (?) is that how you do it?) have been involved with the Fantastic Beasts series for me to enjoy them. Turned off the 2nd one half way through and just seeing the face in the trailer of the 3rd had me go NOPE Edited at 2022-03-29 05:56 am (UTC) Reply Thread Link You nailed it! Reply Parent Thread Link Gross behavior. But thats to be expected from them. Reply Thread Link They are dark sided. Reply Thread Link Just ahead of the Fantastic Beasts #3 premiere lmao. The franchise is doomed. Between JKR being a POS, Depp's fuckery, and general Ezra messiness lmao... what an amazing promo. Reply Thread Link [ Spoiler (click to open) ] Zoe Kravitz [ Spoiler (click to open) ] her Spoiler cut added in case anybody actually plans torrenting this shit I guess Edited at 2022-03-29 01:01 pm (UTC) Betfeels like they dida favor now Spoiler cut added in case anybody actually plans torrenting this shit I guess Reply Parent Thread Link And the guy who actually went to jail for rape! What even is in the craft services over there Reply Parent Thread Link last time i talked shit on ezra miller people kept saying the girl they hit before was "in on it" (like it was planned/staged) when it clearly wasn't. do they and johnny depp have the same fans? Reply Thread Link This is absolutely still the narrative on Twitter/Reddit (cesspools, I know, but still) Reply Parent Thread Link The "Amber Heard is the devil" conversation comes up so often on Reddit in the most inane and random places, too. I feel like it is fair to say she also exhibited toxic and destructive behaviors, but beyond that...there's an entire majority of people who fully believe Amber ruined Johnny's career and life and made up every single accusation out of thin air. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Or there's crossover with DCEU/Snyder stans, and we know how intense they are. Reply Parent Thread Link jfc Reply Parent Thread Link why do they keep getting passes for their consistently awful behavior? who out here is demanding more lackluster dc films/nonsense jkr cash grabs?? Reply Thread Link I hate both those franchises but you know damn well who. Reply Parent Thread Link They and Shia are always getting away with shit. I'll never get it. They look like they smell really bad. :( Reply Parent Thread Link Their mugshot at the source is seriously creeping me out... Reply Thread Link I went to take a look after reading your comment and youre not wrong! Theres something very unnerving about it Reply Parent Thread Link He looks like leprechaun it's really unnerving. Reply Parent Thread Link Same. He looks like he's a serial killer Reply Parent Thread Link Their mugshots always look smug Reply Parent Thread Link "After the video went viral the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that monitors hate groups, said that it hasn't tracked any Klan activity in Beulaville in recent years." i didnt realize there was follow up to their weird message to KKK members. so it was just completely random and no incident occurred? i mean... the message was still right but just really random. Reply Thread Link The message was unhinged, not right. He threatened to kill them. Locking up KKK is something that police are good for. Reply Parent Thread Link No they are not and if you really believe that I have a bridge to sell you Reply Parent Thread Link are the police going to arrest themselves? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Despite the U.S.-led ban on importing Russian oil that some of Washingtons allies will also implement, Russian oil in significant volumes will continue to flow into various leading oil-importing countries, so adding to the overall global supply and affecting oil prices. In oil trading terms, then, it is erroneous to assume that all circa-11 million barrels per day (bpd) of Russian oil supply has somehow been removed from the global supply/demand matrix and that this will tighten that oil pricing matrix in favor of further gains. This was highlighted last week by Russian Deputy Prime Minister, and former Energy Minister, Alexander Novak, and supported by the current top global oil importer, China, and the country set to take over this mantle, India. In comments reported by several Russian news agencies, Novak acknowledged that the new U.S.-led sanctions on Russian oil provide: New challenges linked to supply chain disruptions, the insurance of ships that transport our products, and with issues of financing and payment. However, he added that: These issues are being resolved at the momentand customers are happy to buy it [Russian crude oil]. It is apposite to note in this context that even with the US$30+ pb discount currently being applied to Russias benchmark Urals crude oil grade compared to Brent, Russia is still making more per barrel than it was before it invaded Ukraine. Indeed, it is a lot more, if as can reasonably be posited the war premium in oil pricing did not begin when Russian troops went in to Ukraine on 24 February 2022 when Brent stood at around US$95 pb. Rather, the real war premium may well have begun when the very smart money funds started to buy on the expectation of such an eventuality. This dates back to September 2021 when U.S. intelligence officers started to notice unusual Russian military movements on the Ukraine border after the conclusion of the joint Russia-Belarus military exercises that had taken place. At that point, Brent was trading at around US$65 pb. Therefore, it could well be argued that the real war premium for Russias invasion of Ukraine has been at least US$55 pb and not the US$25 pb that many still believe. Three other factors are also apposite to note in terms of explaining Novaks upbeat take on the prospects for Russias oil sector, each of them analyzed in full in my new book on the global oil markets. First, Russia has long been able to make very good profits on all of its oil at US$40 per barrel of Brent. This is a key reason why it was happy to allow Saudi Arabia to launch yet another doomed oil price war against the U.S. shale sector in 2020 by overproducing to drive prices down, as it could survive and prosper if oil averaged at least US$40 pb of Brent over the conflict period, and second, it could cheerily stand by and watch as one of its crude oil competitors, Saudi Arabia, destroyed its own economy (with a breakeven pb of Brent price of US$84 at that point), and caused disruption in another of its oil market competitors (and perennial geopolitical nemesis), the U.S. The second reason is that despite the US dollar-centric sanctions on Russia, the country pays all of its domestic expenses in roubles, so the availability of US dollars or the US dollar-Russia rouble exchange rate is of no consequence in this regard. That said, it is a very clever move to make importers of Russian gas from unfriendly countries pay for Russian gas in roubles, as it does lend support to the Russian currency, which has a positive psychological effect on those receiving money in that currency. And third, Russia will not be devoid of US dollars anyhow, or other hard currencies, given that it can certainly count on continued massive oil and gas and other trade with China and India. Related: Sanctions Are Forcing Russian Companies To Consider Moving To Kazakhstan China for one has a wide range of ways and means of getting around sanctions of any sort, with a basic factor working in its favor being the lack of exposure of Chinas firms to the U.S. financial infrastructure, particularly to the U.S. dollar. An adjunct advantage to this is the ease with which Chinese companies can set up new special purpose vehicles to handle ring-fenced areas of their businesses to allow for special situations, such as sanctions. China made no secret at the time of the pre-2016 sanctions against Iran or the post-2018 sanctions against it that it was going to use its Bank of Kunlun as the main funding and clearing vehicle for its dealings with Iran. The Bank of Kunlun has considerable operational experience in this regard, as it was used to settle tens of billions of dollars worth of oil imports during the U.N. sanctions against Tehran between 2012 and 2015. Most of the banks settlements during that time were in Euros and Chinese renminbi and in 2012 it was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for conducting business with Iran. China skill and proven methodology at working around sanctions allowed Irans Foreign Minister, Mohammad Zarif, to state back in December 2018 at the Doha Forum, that: If there is an art that we have perfected in Iran, [that] we can teach to others for a price, it is the art of evading sanctions. In the case of Russian oil and gas exports, though, there is no need for China to go through all the trouble it took to circumvent the sanctions on Iran. As also analysed in-depth in my new book on the global oil markets, China has long seen increased internationalisation of its renminbi currency as a fitting reflection of its growing status in the world and the chief executive officer of Russias Novatek, Leonid Mikhelson, said in September 2018 that Russia had been discussing switching way from US$-centric trading with its largest trading partners such as India and China, and that even Arab countries were thinking about it. If they [the U.S.] do create difficulties for our Russian banks then all we have to do is replace dollars, he added. At around the same time, China launched its now extremely successful Shanghai Futures Exchange with oil contracts denominated in yuan (the trading unit of the renminbi currency). Such a strategy was tested initially at scale in 2014 when Gazpromneft tried trading cargoes of crude oil in Chinese yuan and roubles with China and Europe. Additionally, the infrastructural development for oil and gas trading between China and Russia has also been extensive in recent years, as examined several times in depth by OilPrice.com. The most recent examples of this was, in the oil sector, Rosneft signing a US$80 billion 10-year deal to supply the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) with 100 million metric tonnes of oil over the period (slightly over 200,000 barrels per day). In the gas sector, at almost exactly the same time, Gazprom signed a 10 billion cubic meters per year (bcm/y) deal to supply gas to CNPC, adding to another supply contract between the two companies signed in 2014 a 30-year deal for 38 bcm/y to go from Russia to China. This, in turn, is part of, and augments, the Power of Siberia pipeline project managed on the Russian side by Gazprom and on the China side by CNPC that was launched in December 2019. For the U.S., India had been envisioned at the time of the relationship normalization deals drive in the Middle East as the global replacement buyer for oil and gas instead of China. There was every reason for optimism, as not only had India recently shown a new political resolve to combat Chinas influence in the Asia Pacific but the International Energy Agency (IEA) had also released a report showing that India will make up the biggest share of energy demand growth at 25 percent over the next two decades, as it overtakes the European Union as the worlds third-biggest energy consumer by 2030. These U.S. hopes were dashed, however, when Putin behind-the-scenes negotiated a huge, wide-ranging deal with India. This deal did not just include enormous oil and gas deals between the two countries but also the intention to strengthen defense cooperation, including the joint development of production of military equipment. Specifically, according to further official statements from one or both sides, India will produce at least 600,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles the weapon of choice for terrorists and militias across the Middle East and elsewhere and, even more disturbing for the U.S., Indias Foreign Secretary, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, said that a 2018 contract for Russias S-400 air defense missile systems is now being implemented. By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: In 2020, the EUs relied on net imports for nearly 97% of the crude oil and petroleum products it consumed - highlighting why Russian oil is so important. While the U.S. and the UK have both announced bans on Russian oil imports, the EU has not been able to agree on any such boycott. One of the hottest topics in the media in the past month has been the possibility of an oil embargo on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Oil prices have climbed higher on the constant speculation of a broader oil ban, but that speculation appears to be unjustified. The UK banned Russian oil and fuel imports earlier this month, and so did the United States. For both of these countries, Russian oil and fuels are a small portion of total oil imports. Yet the bans had a pronounced negative effect on retail fuel prices in both, even though in the UK, the ban was to take place gradually, by the end of this year. Is it any wonder, then, that the EU, after undoubtedly intense negotiations last week, failed to agree on banning Russian oil and fuel imports? Russia provides 29 percent of the crude oil that Europe consumes, as well as 51 percent of the oil products that the continent consumes. And Europe consumes a lot of oil and oil products despite its eager energy shift. But that's not all. Two years ago, the European Union received almost 97 percent of the oil and oil products it consumed from external sources, according to Eurostat. In other words, the EU is more import-dependent than India when it comes to oil. Obviously, with such a degree of dependence, an oil embargo on the union's biggest supplier would be a disaster for the continent. This means that the discussions held last week and reported on in abundance by the media were likely nothing more than an exercise in political posturing. It was obvious from day one such an embargo was not happening anytime soon. An immediate oil embargo on Russian imports "from one day to the next would mean plunging our country and the whole of Europe into a recession," Germany's Chancellor Olaf Sholz said last week, as quoted by Reuters' John Kemp. On the other hand, "Why should Europe give Putin more time to earn more money from oil and gas? More time to use European ports? More time to use unsanctioned Russian banks in Europe? Time to pull the plug," the foreign minister of Lithuania, Gabrielius Landsbergis said. Lithuania buys almost all of the oil it consumes from Russia. What we seem to have here is, once again, politics versus pragmatism, a situation very much similar to the energy transition narrative and plans. In this case, it seems that common sense is winning. "The question of an oil embargo is not a question of whether we want or don't want (it), but a question of how much we depend on oil," Germany's foreign minister, Annalena Berbock, said last week. "Germany is importing a lot (of Russian oil), but there are also other member states who can't stop the oil imports from one day to the other." Related: Russia Threatens G7 Nations As Ministers Reject Gas-For-Rubles Scheme What these officials seem to tell us is that the EU, just like India or China - or the rest of Europe, really - has an oil addiction, and kicking it is much easier said than done, despite all the work done by EU governments to stimulate less oil consumption at least in the form of car fuels by encouraging the electrification of transport. No wonder, then, that besides the International Energy Agency's 10-point plan for cutting oil demand, alternative oil supplies are being considered as a remedy for the current situation. The president of Ukraine, who has become perhaps the most public personality over the past few weeks, recently urged Middle Eastern oil producers to boost their output to help Europe reduce its dependency on Russia. "They can do much to restore justice. The future of Europe depends on your effort. I ask you to increase the output of energy to ensure that everyone in Russia understands that no country can use energy as a weapon and blackmail the world," Volodymyr Zelensky said at the Doha Forum last week, as quoted by Reuters. So far, the Gulf oil states have demonstrated a clear unwillingness to boost production or condemn Russia's actions in Ukraine. In fact, the UAE is forging stronger ties with Russia, and Saudi Arabia has reaffirmed its commitment to the OPEC+ agreement with Russia and the Central Asian republics. Unless it gets the security support it wants from the U.S. and Europe, OPEC's top producer is unlikely to budge on that. Even with the guarantees, the Middle East is quite unlikely to agree to take Russia's place in Europe. Reuters' kemp put it eloquently: "Breaking long-term contracts and giving up Asia's lucrative growth markets to supply refiners in declining Europe, possibly only for a few months or years, would make little strategic sense." Europe, then, is overwhelmingly dependent on foreign oil and gas, and more specifically, Russian oil and gas. Despite its efforts to first diversify and then wean itself off fossil fuels, oil and gas will remain essential for European economies. A 10-point plan will hardly help change that in any meaningful way, and neither would pleas to Middle Eastern producers - what sort of oil exporter wants a market eager to reduce its consumption of oil? By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Private equity investment in oil and gas has been on the wane in the past few years amid the drive toward more ESG-oriented investments and pressure on the industry from the federal government, which has prioritized a shift to renewable energy. This is changing, however. With oil prices lingering in the three-digit territory and the U.S. and other large consumer countries scrambling for more oil and gas, the industry once again looks attractive. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that oil and gas investment funds in the United States are seeing renewed interest from investors in the industry. One of these, Post Oil Energy Capital, told the WSJs Luis Garcia that We see investors more interested in investing in our new funds going forward than weve seen in the last 18 to 24 months. The firm also said it had plans to set up a new investment fund to take advantage of newly opened investment opportunities in the oil and gas space. A sector player named Lime Rock Management, for its part, told the WSJs Garcia that it had recently raised more than $500 million to spend on oil and gas fields. It appears that, unlike the persistent constraints in the industry itself, which are preventing U.S. producers from boosting output as quickly as many would like them to, energy investors cannot resist prices of above $100. And these are likely to remain there for a while yet. Related: Unsold Oil Forces Russian Operator To Cap Pipeline Flows EIU expects oil prices to remain elevated above US$115/barrel for most of the year. The risk of further spikes in prices has increased as well, said the chief economist of the Economist Intelligence Unit, Matt Sherwood, this week. Sherwood cited falling Russian oil production because of the sanctions and the fact that spare production capacity among OPEC+ members was concentrated in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and it was only about 3 million bpd, besides the apparent unwillingness of the two countries to deploy it. What this price outlook means for the industry is continued investor interest, it seems. The longer prices remain elevated, the longer investor appetite will last, and this is very welcome news for independent drillers. These have been hailed as the big winners of the latest price rally as they were not subject to shareholder pressure with regard to capital discipline. Yet, as one CEO of an energy independent told Oilprice, the small drillers club is not trouble-free. Banks and private equity firms have been shunning oil and gas investments, Margaret P. Graham said last week, following the agenda of the federal government for a shift to renewables. The independents are seen as a big driver of any U.S. production increase this year and nextand this increase is expected to be substantial, according to the Energy Information Administration. Renewed interest in oil and gas investment, therefore, is even better news for future U.S. oil and gas production trends. It will, however, take time. Last year, the WSJs Garcia reported, private equity funds raised $2.48 billion across seven oil and gas funds. This compared with $15.66 billion raised across 21 funds in 2020. Yet, with prices set to remain high, fund managers appear to be cautiously optimistic. We are still not seeing a lot of that activity with endowments and foundations that made it a policy not to invest in fossil fuels anymore, Jeff Eaton, managing director of fund placement gent Eaton Partners, told the WSJ. Were seeing it from some of the groups that either dont have those policies in place or are willing to look past them a little bit because theyre starting to see a potentially attractive investment opportunity. It appears that the tables are turning as the worlds energy demand grows while supply stagnates, offering new opportunities to energy investors and new sources of much-needed funding for energy companies. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: I truly believe it can turn this climate problem into a solution what if miners were incentivized to remove carbon from the atmosphere? Activists and crypto enthusiasts are teaming up to advocate for a new code for Bitcoin. A group of environmentalists, including Greenpeace, Environmental Working Group, and other activist organizations, has launched a campaign calling for a change in the code of bitcoin in order to reduce its environmental footprint. The Wall Street Journal reported the campaign, which involved ads in the New York Times, Politico, and the WSJ itself, was partially funded by the co-founder of Ripple, Chris Larsen. It is also being advised by the Sierra Club. Former Sierra Club director Michael Brune told the WSJ that the campaign was not anti-bitcoin. It focused on drawing attention to the argument that climate change has reached a critical point, and bitcoin has a substantial contribution to it. "It's important for anyone in a position to act, to act," Brune told the WSJ. "You can't ignore that we are in a climate emergency." "We are in this campaign for the long haul, but we are hoping - particularly since Bitcoin is now being financed by entities and individuals who care about climate change - that we can compel leadership to agree that this is a problem that needs to be addressed," Brune also said as quoted by Bloomberg. "Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, PayPal, Venmo, Fidelity - there are lots of companies we anticipate will be helpful to this effort." Earlier this year, data from Digiconomist's Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index suggested the world's most valuable cryptocurrency has an environmental footprint was equal to that of New Zealand, at some 37 megatons of carbon dioxide annually. The reason for this is the energy intensity of bitcoin mining, which has already been put into the focus of public attention by environmental organizations. Bloomberg notes that Ethereum, perhaps bitcoin's biggest rival, was already working on a software update that would reduce its carbon footprint. The update should be completed in several months, making Ethereum more environmentally friendly. By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Oil prices could spike to $150 per barrel, especially if the situation with Russian oil supply worsens amid sanctions from the West and self-sanctioning from buyers, Joseph McMonigle, Secretary-General of the International Energy Forum (IEF), told Bloomberg on Tuesday. Current IEF projections point to an impact of around 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) on Russian oil supply after Putin invaded Ukraine, according to McMonigle. Yet, it will probably take another two weeks to see hard data on the actual impact of how much Russian barrels have come off the market, he added. Were in store for a lot of volatility and higher prices over the next several months. I think you could see big fluctuations and $150 a barrel is possible. McMonigle told the program Bloomberg Daybreak: Middle East. $150 oil may not be sustainable, but all will depend on what happens to Russian oil supplies, he added. The IEF has not seen hard evidence that the skyrocketing oil prices have already led to demand destruction globally, according to McMonigle. He estimates that global oil demand is back up to 98 percent of pre-pandemic levels, but supply is back up to only 95 percent of pre-COVID levels. While most people would think that the gap in supply is attributable to OPEC+ and some of its members not being able to pump to their quotas, half of the supply gap is actually from the United States. Capital discipline and supply chain constraints prevent American oil producers from pumping as much as they did just before COVID hit two years ago, the IEFs McMonigle told Bloomberg. Analysts and investment banks are not ruling out major disruptions to Russian supply, and are not ruling out $150 a barrel oil this year, either. If disruption to Russian volumes lasts throughout the year, Brent oil prices could exit the year at $185 bbl, likely leading to a significant 3 mbd drop in the global oil demand. Even if shale production responds to the price signal, it cannot grow by more than 1.4 mbd this year given labor and infrastructure constraints, J.P. Morgan Global Research said earlier this month. By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Oil prices dipped by more than 5% early on Tuesday, with the U.S. benchmark WTI slumping to just below $100 a barrel after signs emerged that the resumption of the Russia-Ukraine peace talks after two weeks may have been constructive. As of 9:34 a.m. ET, WTI Crude was down 5.71% at $99.91, and Brent Crude was down 5.64% at $106.10. Oil extended the losses from Monday, when prices tumbled after China, the worlds largest oil importer, imposed a lockdown in Shanghai due to the high number of COVID infections, rekindling concern about the loss of oil demand in the top crude importing market. The Monday drop in oil prices was another huge day-to-day swing in Brent crude prices, which plunged by nearly $11 a barrel on the day, or around 9 percent, Javier Blas, energy and commodities columnist at Bloomberg, noted on Monday. In absolute dollar terms, Mondays oil price slide was the third-largest one-day fall, but in percentage terms, it was only the 27th largest one-day drop, Blas added. Following a volatile start to trade early in the day on Tuesday, oil prices tumbled in the a.m. ET after signs emerged about a potentially positive outcome of the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, the first such talks in more than two weeks. During the talks in Istanbul on Tuesday, Russia promised to scale back significantly its military operations and activity around Ukraines capital city of Kyiv and in the northern city of Chernihiv. Ukraine, for its part, proposed it would keep a neutral status and would not join alliances or host troops of other countries on its territory. Ukraine, however, wants international security guarantees to keep it from attacks. According to Reuters, the leading Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said he would review Ukraines proposals and report on them to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Hopes of peace sent oil prices plummeting early on Tuesday, although its unclear whether sanctions against Russia could be removed anytime soon. By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: U.S. and German government officials are meeting this week to discuss the supply of liquefied natural gas and hydrogen to Europe's largest economy, which is the most dependent on Russian oil and gas imports. Reuters reported that a roundtable had been scheduled for the two governments and industry executives. The meeting will be led by the U.S. Commerce Department. The round table follows a deal sealed by the White House and the European Commission for the delivery of an additional 15 billion cubic meters of American liquefied natural gas this year, with deliveries set to grow further over next year and in the future. Already 70 percent of U.S. LNG exports are going to Europe as the energy-thirsty continent continues to struggle with an energy crunch that just might get even worse as Russia has demanded payment in rubles for the gas it exports to the EU. Russia exports more than 100 billion cubic meters annually to Europe, including Turkey. To Germany alone, it exported some 59 billion cubic meters, which was a record high. Critics of the U.S.-EU deal have pointed out that the U.S. president was making promises without first consulting the energy industry. Industry veteran David Blackmon, for instance, last week wrote that the deal had apparently taken the LNG industry off guard, given the current attitude of the administration to oil and gas. Blackmon also wondered how the administration would reconcile its differences with the industry as the environmentalist lobby sprang into action soon after the deal's announcement, protesting more LNG production. Commenting on the planned roundtable for Germany, one U.S. official told Reuters that "Industry moves at a different speed than government, so we'll see. At least we'll start the talks." Meanwhile, a source from the LNG industry said the details of the deal with the EU were currently being hammered out. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: The opening ceremony of the first HICOOL Business School Accelerated Incubation Camp was recently held. The entrepreneur-centered program aims to help startups find experts, funds, and orders and match them with policies. In the first class, titled "The Power of Technology Enterprises to Change the World," Kaifu Lee, honorary dean of HICOOL Business College and chairman and CEO of venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures, gave an in-depth lecture on his forecast for the opportunities in technology entrepreneurship over the next two decades. Based on his own experience and insights in technology startup incubation and investment, Lee analyzed the relationship between technology startup team composition and business models. According to Lee, Beijing boasts a world-leading entrepreneurial environment in terms of talents, technologies, and entrepreneurial atmosphere, which makes the future of entrepreneurship bright in the city. Chen Yubo, mentor at the first HICOOL Business School Accelerated Incubation Camp and head of the Center for Internet Development and Governance of Tsinghua University, encouraged returnees from overseas who have mastered cutting-edge science and technology to aim high and work to solve social problems. He hoped the program would cultivate entrepreneurs who have a deep understanding of China's political and economic environment and lead industrial development. The HICOOL Business School Accelerated Incubation Camp was initialed by the Beijing Overseas Talents Center and hosted by the HICOOL Business College. After officially launching in January this year, it has been committed to becoming a top platform serving returnee science and technology enterprises. Nebraska continued its two-month downward trend in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations last week. Exactly how many cases the state recorded last week, however, isnt entirely certain. The state reported a negative number of cases for the week to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. State health officials said the negative number is a result of efforts to clean up 2021 data and remove duplicate tests. A recent review uncovered 181 duplicate cases out of a total of 477,083. But health officials confirmed that the state has recorded eight consecutive weeks of decline. The states data dashboard indicated 330 cases for the week ending Sunday. That would be down from the 354 cases the state reported the week before. The Douglas, Lincoln-Lancaster and Sarpy/Cass Health Departments, which cover the states three most-populous counties, all recorded slight decreases in cases last week from the week before. The average number of Nebraskans hospitalized with COVID last week was down 21% to 109 from the previous week. On Thursday, 93 Nebraskans were hospitalized with the virus, according to CDC, the first time the number had dropped below 100 since July 22. By Sunday, the number had dipped to 91. The state reported six confirmed and probable deaths, the lowest in many weeks, bringing the pandemic total to 4,053. Nationally, reports of new coronavirus cases also continued to decline, although the decline recently has slowed. Several states in the Northeast and South have seen cases increase over the past two weeks as the BA.2 subvariant has emerged. For the nation as a whole, the subvariant made up an estimated 35% of samples genomically sequenced during the week ending March 19. However, the proportions of BA.2 varied from an estimated 55% in New England to 19% in the four-state region that includes Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri. The subvariant is believed to be 30% to 50% more transmissible than omicron. It is not, however, thought to cause more severe illness. Locally, the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services on Monday launched two new tools to track COVID-19 and its variants as well as other viruses that may arise in the future, using genomic surveillance and wastewater testing. Scientists with a number of the laboratories already have been sequencing the genetic code of select positive test samples, which helps researchers better understand how the virus is evolving and assess threats to the public. Now, the weekly page updating the number of variants detected in the state will be replaced by a new genomics and wastewater surveillance page. According to preliminary data on the page, BA.2 made up 7% of samples analyzed for the week ending March 19 in Nebraska. Thats up from about 1% from the preceding two weeks. The data will be updated every other week. State health officials also are working with researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and UNMCs public health college as well as wastewater utilities across the state to monitor the virus in wastewater. People infected with COVID-19 shed the virus in their feces. Researchers can measure virus concentrations in samples of wastewater collected from wastewater treatment plants before treatment. Because it doesnt rely on people recognizing symptoms and going to get tested, wastewater surveillance data could serve as an early warning system for increases or decreases in COVID-19 cases in a community. In other parts of the country, such data has been used by public health officials to send resources such as extra testing to areas where concentrations are rising. The CDC has established a National Wastewater Surveillance System to collect reports from across the country. Nebraska data did not appear on the CDC site Monday. But the states report included wastewater-sampling data from two wastewater treatment plants each in Douglas and Lancaster Counties and from plants in Grand Island, Columbus, Fremont, Wayne, Kearney, Hastings, Scottsbluff, Chadron and Atkinson. Health officials, meanwhile, have urged vaccination and boosters as the best way to protect against another surge in cases. Federal health officials are discussing a second booster shot, likely for those over age 50. People with compromised immune systems already are being urged to get a fourth shot. But boosters overall have lagged. Just over half of Nebraska adults have received even a first booster. Of Nebraskans 18 and older, 62.9% received their initial vaccinations. Of those, 53% have received boosters. That means only 39.4% of Nebraska adults have received all of their authorized shots. Thats slightly above the U.S. average of 36.3% and ranks 21st among states. <&rule> Omaha World-Herald: Live Well News, advice, a calendar of fitness/race events from Live Well Nebraska and occasional offers will keep you in shape and informed. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Julie Anderson Julie Anderson is a medical reporter for The World-Herald. She covers health care and health care trends and developments, including hospitals, research and treatments. Follow her on Twitter @JulieAnderson41. Phone: 402-444-1066. Follow Julie Anderson Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) Twenty-one states with Republican attorneys general, including Nebraska, sued Tuesday to halt the federal governments requirement that people wear masks on planes, trains, ferries and other public transportation amid the coronavirus pandemic. The lawsuit, announced by Floridas Gov. Ron DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody and filed in federal court in Tampa, Florida, contends that the mask mandate exceeds the authority of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The mandate in its current form may be in effect only a few weeks more. The CDC recently extended it until April 18 while also indicating it is weighing scaling back the rules for a more targeted approach. Still, the states are pressing on with the lawsuit, which comes amid a partisan divide over the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and issues of government control versus individual rights. It is well past time to get rid of this unnecessary mandate and get back to normal life, said DeSantis, a Republican who has persistently challenged federal mask mandates including those involving cruise lines, schools, private businesses and other entities. The CDC rule, effective Feb. 1, 2021, requires the wearing of masks by people on public transportation conveyances or on the premises of transportation hubs, according to the agency website. The rule has been relaxed somewhat, to end requirements for certain buses, but was recently extended until at least April 18 for domestic and international travel in general. Moody, a Republican and former Tampa judge, said in a press release that the travel mask mandates are frustrating travelers and causing chaos on public transportation. That appeared to be a reference to a spate of well-publicized confrontations between flight attendants and passengers over the mask requirement on commercial aircraft. Its not clear if these incidents are isolated or widespread, and if masks are the only issue. Some are alcohol-related or a mental health problem. Also, perhaps underscoring the partisan divide on masks, both DeSantis and Moody mentioned Democratic President Joe Biden several times in their statements against the travel mandate. The Atlanta-based CDC did not immediately respond to a phone call and email requesting comment on the lawsuit. The lawsuit seeks to immediately halt the CDC travel mask rule and asks for costs and attorneys fees. There have been similar lawsuits filed in individual states before this latest one. Besides Nebraska and Florida, the states filing the new travel mask lawsuit as of Tuesday were Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia. LINCOLN Nebraska lawmakers advanced a bill Monday that would expand tax exemptions for some disabled veterans. Legislative Bill 853 passed its first of three rounds of debate in a 39-0 vote Monday night. The bill would expand Nebraskas homestead exemption program based on veterans disability levels. Homestead exemptions are property tax relief for veterans who are 100% disabled, or whose home was contributed by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, as well as Nebraskans over 65 and some disabled residents. These exemptions are typically calculated by the residents yearly income. LB 853 would expand exemptions to include veterans who are 50-99% disabled. According to state documents, as of 2017 there were more than 17,000 veterans in Nebraska who were at least 50% disabled. These injuries can include PTSD and even some arm amputations. State Sen. Jen Day of Omaha, who introduced the bill, said many disabled veterans experience a level of physical and psychological loss that is hard for nonveterans to understand. This is their daily reality, Day said. A veterans disability percentage is determined through an assessment by the VA. Sen. Tom Brewer of Gordon said the process is more complicated than simply counting a veterans injuries. When Brewer retired from the Army after 37 years, his assessment noted several injuries, including a traumatic brain injury and an incident where he got his thumb blown off and reattached. Combined, Brewers injuries added up to no more than 70% disability, he said. Under LB 853, a veteran who is 70% disabled would have 70% applied to the exemption they would receive based on their income. If that same veteran earned $35,000 a year, which would qualify them for a 60% exemption if they were single and 100% disabled, the 60% would be multiplied by their disability percentage, 70% in this case, giving them an actual exemption of 42%. LB 853 saw broad support from lawmakers during Monday nights brief debate. Day said the bill has seen support from both Democrats and Republicans in the officially nonpartisan Legislature. Theres never really enough that we can do for our veterans, said Sen. Mike Jacobson of North Platte. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. A former Bellevue elementary school principal has pleaded no contest to drunken driving in connection with a crash that injured a motorcyclist. Andrew C. Miller, 47, of Omaha, was arrested Sept. 17 after a crash near 141st and Pacific Streets. Motorcyclist Bruce Blaydes, 58, of Omaha, was taken to Creighton University Medical Center-Bergan Mercy. It was the second misdemeanor drunken driving conviction for Miller. He also pleaded guilty Monday to reckless driving, another misdemeanor. At the time of the crash, Miller was principal at LeMay Elementary School, 2726 Kennedy Blvd. He resigned on Sept. 22, according to a spokeswoman for the Bellevue Public Schools. Investigators determined that Miller and Blaydes both were westbound on Pacific Street about 7:15 p.m. that day when Millers pickup truck rear-ended the motorcycle driven by Blaydes. An arrest affidavit said officers noticed that Miller had bloodshot, watery eyes and slurred speech. Miller said he had been drinking multiple alcoholic beverages, but he refused a preliminary breath test, according to the affidavit. He was arrested after a blood test completed at the Nebraska Medical Center found Miller to have a blood-alcohol level of .08. Douglas County court records show Miller was charged with misdemeanor first-offense drunken driving after an arrest on Aug. 29, 2009. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months probation and a $400 fine. Miller had been with the Bellevue Public Schools for 17 years and was principal at LeMay for nine of those years, the district spokeswoman said. Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. A 21-year-old woman whose speeding car struck and killed a pedestrian near 26th and Lake Streets had a blood-alcohol content of .146, authorities said Monday. Sarah M. Faya of Omaha has been charged with motor vehicle homicide DUI, a charge that carries up to 20 years in prison. A judge on Monday ordered Faya held on $250,000 bail, meaning she would need to pay $25,000, or 10%, to get out of jail. Ashley Dotson, 37, was struck by Fayas 2005 Toyota Corolla as it rolled after exiting U.S. Highway 75 just before 10:25 p.m. Thursday. Dotson, of Omaha, died at the Nebraska Medical Center. Omaha police said Faya was driving north on Highway 75 when she exited at Lake Street and attempted to turn left to head west. The Corolla spun past the left shoulder and sidewalk, where Dotson was standing, police said. The car eventually rolled. Faya later told an investigator that she was driving 65 to 75 mph on the exit ramp. She also said she had been drinking hard lemonade and vodka before the crash. An Omaha police officer noticed her bloodshot, watery eyes and odor of alcohol. According to an affidavit, a preliminary breath test showed she had a blood-alcohol level of .146 nearly double the legal limit. Faya waived her preliminary hearing and will stand trial on the charge. Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Shanghai authorities have promised some passenger and cargo services will continue operating as normal amid a new round of COVID-19 mass testing, with the city locked down in two phases starting on Monday. "Although we have strict control measures, our airports, railways and international passenger and cargo services are operating normally," Wu Jinglei, director of the Shanghai Health Commission, said at a news briefing on Monday. Under the testing strategy announced on Sunday, districts east of the Huangpu River will be locked down from 5 am Monday till 5 am Friday for the first phase of COVID-19 testing. The second phase will cover districts west of the river and run from 3 am Friday to 3 am April 5. Businesses in locked down areas must enforce closed-loop management and allow employees to work from home. Buses, subways, ferries, taxis and online car-hailing services will be suspended during the lockdown. The restrictions will only apply to the half of the city under lockdown. On Sunday, the city reported 3,500 new locally transmitted infections. Fifty have been confirmed as COVID-19 cases, with the rest asymptomatic. Two areas earlier designated as medium risk-9 Jumenhou Road, Dapuqiao subdistrict in Huangpu district; and 760 Loutang Road, Jiading Industrial Zone, Jiading district-were downgraded to low risk on Monday. "The grid screening the city has carried out over the past two weeks has revealed that the virus has spread in clusters across the city and there is a risk of further outbreaks. It's necessary to implement stricter measures now," said Wu Fan, a member of the team leading the city's COVID-19 prevention and control efforts, at the briefing. "The new round of testing aims to reduce social mobility, identify infections, and eliminate the transmission of the virus in neighborhoods in order to protect people's lives and achieve zero spread outside virus transmission chains as soon as possible," she added. To ensure a stable supply of daily necessities including food during the temporary lockdowns, the city will help local suppliers expand procurement channels, said Gu Jun, director of the Municipal Commission of Commerce. "The city will issue certificates for enterprises dedicated to providing daily necessities, and guarantee their smooth operation," Gu said. "Vehicles from those enterprises and with authorized permits issued by local government are allowed to operate across the city, including in areas that are under lockdown," he added. The enterprises' employees will be allowed to enter and exit locked-down districts and their home neighborhoods as long as they hold relevant work and other permits, have a negative virus test within 48 hours of their activities, and a green health code clearance. "We have also set up COVID-19 testing green lanes for employees of those companies," Gu said. "The city has an adequate supply of daily necessities, and measures have been taken to stabilize prices. We will try our best to meet residents' demands." Wu Jinglei, director of the health commission, said that emergency departments, clinics that treat fevers, intensive care units, and maternity services at hospitals should remain operational. All hospitals are required to set up special lanes and quarantine wards for critically ill patients and make sure they receive timely treatment. Residents who are not in critical condition but require regular medical treatment will be transferred to designated medical institutions through closed-loop transportation provided by their neighborhood committees. The 10 central quarantine sites-hospitals, exhibition halls, apartments and indoor stadiums-have been put into operation and medical personnel have been dispatched to these facilities, Wu said. Shanghai tested more than 8.26 million residents in a new round of nucleic acid testing on Monday, a municipal health official told a press conference on Tuesday. The campaign was launched in areas including those lying to the east of the Huangpu River, which are under temporary closed-off management, said Wu Qianyu, an official with the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission. Around 17,000 testing personnel from Shanghai and the surrounding provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang had set up 6,300 test sites in these areas, Wu said. Shanghai reported 96 confirmed locally transmitted COVID-19 cases and 4,381 asymptomatic carriers on Monday. The Cass County Sheriffs Office is donating dozens of expired bulletproof vests to Ukraine. The agency is among Nebraska law enforcement agencies that have supported the Ukrainian government after Russia invaded the country in late February. Normally, the Cass County Sheriffs Office disposes of the vests through a vendor, which charges the county to collect the equipment. The worst thing is we dont want them in the wrong hands. They are still effective, said Cass County Sheriffs Lt. Larry Burke. This was a way of cleaning out our storage and (they) are hopefully going to a good cause. Burke estimated that his department donated 30 to 40 vests, which typically cost about $400 apiece. Each vest is at least five years old, which means it no longer is in compliance with law enforcement standards. The vests are capable of stopping the bullets of the service weapons the Sheriffs Office employs, Burke said. The statewide collection was coordinated by multiple Nebraska entities, including the Department of Transportation, the Nebraska State Patrol, the National Guard and the Governors Office. LINCOLN Disputes over tax cuts and criminal justice reform simmered in the background Monday as lawmakers gave second-round approval to a plan for using the states $1.04 billion of federal pandemic recovery funds. Legislative Bill 1014 advanced on a 33-7 vote, after senators approved a filibuster-ending cloture motion on a 34-4 vote. The measure allocates money coming to the state through the American Rescue Plan Act. Earlier Monday, the bills fate appeared unclear as frustrated backers of a tax cut package sought to tie the measures together. State Sen. Tom Briese of Albion vowed not to support the pandemic funding bill or to pass the budget bills until he could be assured of enough votes to pass the tax cut proposal. He said there were enough senators willing to torch the pandemic funding bill as debate began on Monday. But others, including Speaker of the Legislature Mike Hilgers of Lincoln, urged those senators to hold their fire. Sen. Mike Flood of Norfolk called for colleagues to allow the pandemic funding bill to advance, while waiting to see what comes of talks among various parties. The package of income tax cuts and property tax relief hit an unexpected roadblock Friday, when backers fell two votes short of ending a filibuster against the measure. Based on legislative practice, the bill will not return this year. Earlier in the week, opponents had blocked an attempt to attach the package to a different bill. Sen. Lou Ann Linehan of Elkhorn, the Revenue Committee chairwoman, warned Friday that the state budget bills could be in jeopardy if lawmakers continue to stand in the way of the tax cuts. Lawmakers are slated to vote on passing the budget bills Tuesday. On Monday, Sen. John Stinner of Gering, the Appropriations Committee chairman, said he doesnt believe the budget bills are in jeopardy. He said lawmakers have a chance to leave Nebraska a much better place by passing four critical pieces of legislation. We have four major things to do, he said. Lets get with it. One is the state budget, which boosts support for state employees in critical areas and to providers caring for the states most vulnerable residents, along with undertaking nearly $500 million worth of building and infrastructure projects. Another is the ARPA funding bill, which allocates money to some 40 projects and initiatives. Among them: replacing aging rural ambulances, boosting health and human services provider payment rates, repairing wastewater systems in state parks, and funding nonprofit construction projects that were interrupted by the pandemic. Others include: developing rural and urban low-income housing, updating a climate change study, building a rural health complex at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and repairing an irrigation canal that runs from Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to Gering. Amendments adopted Monday squeezed in funding for grants to start or expand child care centers and for a program providing education and preventative medication to people at high risk of getting HIV. Stinner cited the tax package as the third major piece of legislation. The package would ratchet down the states top corporate and individual income tax rates and expand income tax credits offered to property taxpayers. It also would phase out income taxes on Social Security benefits. He said the fourth key proposal is LB 920, which would make changes in sentencing and parole to bring down the states prison population. Stinner said the bill would make Nebraska safer which helping control state spending on corrections. The bill has yet to be debated by the full Legislature. However, Sen. Steve Lathrop of Omaha, who introduced the bill, spent several hours of budget debate talking about the issues involved. He spent much of the day Monday negotiating with Sen. Suzanne Geist of Lincoln and others who oppose measures that could lead to inmates getting out of prison earlier. <&rule> Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. LINCOLN Nebraska lawmakers advanced a bill Monday that would expand tax exemptions for some disabled veterans. Legislative Bill 853 passed its first of three rounds of debate in a 39-0 vote Monday night. The bill would expand Nebraskas homestead exemption program based on veterans disability levels. Homestead exemptions are property tax relief for veterans who are 100% disabled, or whose home was contributed by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, as well as Nebraskans over 65 and some disabled residents. These exemptions are typically calculated by the residents yearly income. LB 853 would expand exemptions to include veterans who are 50-99% disabled. According to state documents, as of 2017 there were more than 17,000 veterans in Nebraska who were at least 50% disabled. These injuries can include PTSD and even some arm amputations. State Sen. Jen Day of Omaha, who introduced the bill, said many disabled veterans experience a level of physical and psychological loss that is hard for nonveterans to understand. This is their daily reality, Day said. A veterans disability percentage is determined through an assessment by the VA. Sen. Tom Brewer of Gordon said the process is more complicated than simply counting a veterans injuries. When Brewer retired from the Army after 37 years, his assessment noted several injuries, including a traumatic brain injury and an incident where he got his thumb blown off and reattached. Combined, Brewers injuries added up to no more than 70% disability, he said. Under LB 853, a veteran who is 70% disabled would have 70% applied to the exemption they would receive based on their income. If that same veteran earned $35,000 a year, which would qualify them for a 60% exemption if they were single and 100% disabled, the 60% would be multiplied by their disability percentage, 70% in this case, giving them an actual exemption of 42%. LB 853 saw broad support from lawmakers during Monday nights brief debate. Day said the bill has seen support from both Democrats and Republicans in the officially nonpartisan Legislature. Theres never really enough that we can do for our veterans, said Sen. Mike Jacobson of North Platte. Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. SIOUX CITY, Iowa With an acute shortage of substitute teachers in the region, the Northwest Area Education Agency is making it easier for individuals in other career fields to become certified to temporarily lead classes. The Northwest AEA provides school improvement services for students, teachers and administrators in the region. It has been offering virtual substitute authorization courses for years, but, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, those with paraeducator certificates can now take the substitute teacher course. Megan Swanberg, a teaching associate at Le Mars High School, decided to take the Northwest AEA course in February. She sees being able to substitute as a way to work with kids and have an impact, without needing a teaching degree. Before the pandemic, the substitute authorization course was limited to those 21 years old with a bachelors degree, associates degree or 60 college credit hours. Sue Chartier and Carla Lee have been leading the courses in Sioux City. In a five-day course, the participants learn about ethics, diversity, learning strategies and behavior management. We want to make sure they get all of that, she said. The last few months of courses have been at capacity, with 32 each month. People ranging from 21 to 70 years old with a variety of different career backgrounds have enrolled. Chartier said area school districts, especially smaller ones with severe substitute shortages, have helped interested candidates sign up for the course. Even though everyone has been in a school before, people who take the course learn how substituting has changed, Chartier said. (People think) all the kids are just sitting in the desks really quiet and the sub just comes in and babysits, and thats not it at all, Chartier said. Going through these four modules and really arming them with different strategies they can use ... they can keep learning going forward. Lee said people cannot be experts in every education area, so when they go into a class where they dont know what to do, the course provides strategies to keep the education moving forward. Chartier said kids cannot lose a day of learning anymore. After five, three-hour courses and some homework the participants can move ahead with substituting. Sioux City school board member Perla Alarcon-Flory, who took the course in January, said it was exciting and informative. She said the homework allowed self-reflection to help participants determine if they are fit to substitute. The course is eye-opening to the needs and diversity of the students, Alarcon-Flory said. She said her section of the course included an aerospace engineer, nurses, a psychologist, students, educators and a retired attorney. The variety of life experiences were so priceless, she said. The conversations were really enriching. For students, Alarcon-Flory said all of these different people becoming substitutes offers unique opportunities for students to learn from a variety of professionals for example, having a nurse teach a science class or an aerospace engineer talk about physics. Because the course costs $125, Alarcon-Flory is offering to sponsor two people to take it. One individual must be an education or future education student, or an alumnus or employee of the Sioux City schools. The other opening is for a person of color. Those interested can email alarcop@live.siouxcityschools.com. BLOOMINGTON The Youth Engaged in Philanthropy program is seeking high school students in McLean, DeWitt, Livingston and Logan counties to participate during the 2022-2023 school year. An initiative of the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation, the program allows high school students to learn about philanthropy by allocating grant funds to local nonprofits. The program funds local youth-run or youth-oriented programs. Members will be responsible for developing grant guidelines and awarding a total of $10,000 to selected youth-focused programs. This will be the 10th year for the program, which will be limited to 20-25 participants. The online application can be found at bit.ly/YEP2223 and the deadline is April 9. Individuals who are selected will be notified in May. Email amandal.cole@yahoo.com or call 309-662-4477 for more information. Contact Olivia Jacobs at (309)-820-3352. Reach out with questions. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Want to see more like this? Get our local education coverage delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. NORMAL Members of a union representing more than 300 employees at Illinois State University approved a vote giving their bargaining team the ability to call for a strike if they feel it is necessary. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1110 members voted on the strike authorization on Friday. Officials announced the result at a press conference outside ISUs administration building Monday afternoon. "I can report that an overwhelming, almost unanimous, 96% voted yes to authorize the strike," Local 1110 President Chuck Carver said. AFSCME Council 31 representative Anders Lindall said that 80% of union members voted. Unions do not always release specifics of vote participation or results. The local represents various grounds, janitorial and dining employees at the university. It is part of AFSCME Council 31, which represents workers in Illinois. "If we strike, we will shut the university down," Carver said. The university updated its negotiation updates website with a statement after the press conference. "While the University remains committed to negotiating in good faith and optimistic that the parties will reach agreement without the need for a strike, the University has initiated contingency planning activities to ensure its ability to minimize disruption to University operations should a strike occur," the statement said in part. The vote does not mean a strike is happening soon or certain to happen. Unions at educational institutions in Illinois need to provide at least 10 days' notice of intent to strike. Even if intent to strike is filed, agreement on a contract could avoid a strike happening after the 10 days have ended. "We didn't want or ever expect to have to consider going on strike," Local 1110 Secretary Tia Reece said. Negotiators for the university and the union have met repeatedly in recent weeks, including three times last week, according to the universitys website. The statement calls the strike authorization vote a normal part of the negotiation process. The parties have also agreed to mediation, the union and university have said. Meetings with a mediator could begin as early as this week or next, Lindall said. The meetings are scheduled for Wednesday and Friday. Under wage rates listed on the university website as effective Jan. 1, Local 1110 bargaining unit members make between $12.30 an hour for some intern positions up to $25.32 an hour for grounds equipment mechanics, nursery workers and tree surgeons. Carver said that someone coming in new to his division would be making $13.70 an hour and that with ten years of experience, he was making just a bit over $20 an hour. Negotiations have been going since October. The unions last contract expired in June 2021. The union and university agreed in April 2021 to postpone negotiations until the fall of that year, the universitys website said. Part of the unions former contract, which took effect in September 2019, includes language extending the contract during the negotiation period until a new contract is approved. However, it also allows the No Strike No Lockout article to be revoked if there is failure to reach agreement on any of the items up for negotiation. Last year, ISU was also involved in another negotiation in which a strike authorization vote was passed. The Graduate Workers Unions first contract was approved in October, after the union held a vote to either ratify the proposed contract or strike. Members of the GWU were in attendance, along with representatives from other labor organizations in the area. Trish Gudeman spoke on behalf of AFSCME Local 3236, which represents clerical and healthcare workers. Adam Heenan, president of the Bloomington-Normal Trades and Labor Assembly, also spoke. At every decision, unions should consider if the step builds their power, makes the union stronger and promotes unity, he said. "It is very clear that a credible threat of a strike does those things," he said. Contact Connor Wood at (309)820-3240. Follow Connor on Twitter: @connorkwood Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Want to see more like this? Get our local education coverage delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. BLOOMINGTON Five candidates for the McLean County Board face removal from the primary ballot, as five constituents have objected to their petitions being filed without pagination. Two constituents each filed an objection to two of the same candidates, totaling seven objections. The McLean County Officers Electoral Board heard six of seven cases Monday afternoon at the courthouse and it anticipates hearing the remaining case Friday, when it expects to deliver rulings in each case. McLean County Board Chairman John McIntyre, R-District 5, and board member Catherine Metsker, R-District 1, are the lone incumbents who face objections. Petitions for candidates in McLean County Board Districts 5, 8 and 9 also had objections; they are Republicans Hannah Blumenshine, Vicki Schultz and Annette Fellows, respectively. Fellows was not present Monday and her case is expected to be heard Friday. The candidates facing objections largely expressed the failing to number their petition pages as a mistake and not purposeful. The number of pages in question for each petition range from four to six. Gregory Moredock, an attorney representing the five constituents who filed objections, said candidates who file petitions for an election without numbering the pages violate the Illinois Election Code. In this particular case, the completely ignoring of (section 5/3-4 of Illinois Election Code) renders the nomination paper ballots and warrants striking the name from the ballot, regardless of whether or not theres actual evidence of fraud, Moredock said. I believe its clear that these petitions, they have a space for page numbers, (but) they are not numbered. McLean County Republican Party Chairwoman Connie Beard told The Pantagraph that if the electoral board decides to remove the five candidates from the ballot, the countys Republican Party will do everything we can to place them back on the ballot. The party could either appoint candidates to the ballot, or the candidates could file as write-in candidates. We certainly will be exploring all options because all five of the candidates have expressed determination that they want to honor the voters that have put their hand up and said, 'We want you on the ballot,' Beard said, while noting it as a last option because were still rather confident that the electoral board will rule in the candidates favor. Jim Ginzkey, an attorney who spoke for McIntyre, noted that petitions are time-stamped with the date on which they were filed. McIntyre, who has served on the McLean County Board twice totaling 20 years, said he simply overlooked numbering the petitions. It definitely was an error a critical error on my fault. Metsker also said it was not intentional. It doesnt make me a bad person. It doesnt make me an insufficient candidate. I failed to number three pages. Schultz said she was not aware of the requirement to number petition pages. Blumenshine and Metsker also criticized the objections as partisan motivated, pointing to two Democratic McLean County Board candidates who also did not number the pages in their petitions. Democratic McLean County Board candidates in Districts 1 and 9, Marcia Beaman and Julie Hahn, also have unnumbered petitions, county clerk records show. Objections were not filed against Beaman and Hahn's petitions. To be placed on the ballot, county board members must collect at least 24 signatures within a certain timeframe from residents in their district who align with the same political party. Petition filings were open between March 7 and 14. The McLean County Officers Electoral Board contains McLean County Clerk Kathy Michael, Circuit Clerk Don Everhart and State's Attorney Don Knapp, who was represented Monday by Assistant State's Attorney Mary Koll. The primary election is June 28 and the general election is Nov. 8. All 20 McLean County Board seats will be on the ballot. Contact Kade Heather at 309-820-3256. Follow him on Twitter: @kadeheather Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. BLOOMINGTON Two multimillion-dollar projects the city hopes will breathe new life into the community revamping O'Neil Park and Pool and expanding the library are moving forward. Both projects have been in the works for years and are expected to ramp up this summer. Here's what to know about the upcoming construction. O'Neil Park Bloomington demolished the former 45-year-old aluminum pool in O'Neil Park in fall 2020. The aging structure had long outlived its 25-year lifespan, and the planned renovations are intended to provide a larger facility with more amenities, including a zero-depth entrance, slides, a lazy river, lap pool, splash pad, bathhouse and concessions stand as well as a new parking lot and skate park. "It's been a long time coming for the west side," Mayor Mboka Mwilambwe said. "We made a commitment and I am glad we are going to keep it although the price has gone up a little bit, but that was something to be expected given what's been happening with COVID." Mwilambwe's comments came as the Bloomington City Council on Monday approved a $13.8 million contract with P.J. Hoerr Inc. for the project. While costs came in higher than previous estimates of $11.7 million, council members said it is an important investment in the city's west side. "I look forward to people having an opportunity to mingle with one another in this particular area, because it's going to be attractive and will have people from all areas in the community coming together to swim, to have a good time and to skate," Mwilambwe said. Ward 3 Alderwoman Sheila Montney and Ward 5 Alderman Nick Becker were the only council members to vote against the contract, citing concerns with increasing project costs. Library expansion The long-planned expansion and renovation of Bloomington Public Library, 205 E. Olive St., also is moving forward, with construction set to begin next month. The city council on Monday approved an intergovernmental agreement with the library that would allow the city to issue $14.2 million in general obligation bonds for the effort, which has a total estimated cost of $25.3 million. While the city will issue the bonds, the library will use its property tax revenue to pay the related debt service, estimated at $990,000, officials said. The library's board earlier this month approved a $21.2 million contract with the lowest bidder, Bloomington-based Felmley-Dickerson Co. An additional $4 million in costs is expected to come from needed furniture, fixtures, equipment and services. Executive Director Jeanne Hamilton told council the library had already raised $620,000 in donations and pledges and had recently launched a new capital campaign. Plans include adding 21,339 square feet to the librarys current footprint and renovating 57,394 square feet of existing library space. Parking will be increased by 90 spaces through the addition of an elevated level of parking on the far south edge of the property, according to the library's plan. Highlights of the project include a drive-up window, three large meeting spaces, two large children's programming rooms, nine group study rooms, computer and innovation labs, two recording studios, more accessible shelving and a sensory-friendly room. The work, planned in two phases, is expected to be complete in September 2023. "A hundred years ago, just signing your name and being able to read counted as literacy," Alderman Tom Crumpler said Monday night. "Now its 2022, and what counts as literacy is much more complex, multi-modal, requires critical thinking at levels we are just beginning to imagine. "This library is going to be a part of that story, and I can hardly wait to see it break ground." Ward boundaries In other business, Bloomington will begin the process of redrawing its ward boundaries to adjust for population changes based on 2020 Census data. Illinois state law requires each ward to be as balanced and equal as possible. Based on the city's population of 78,678, each of the city's nine wards should have as close as possible to 8,742 people with no more than a 10% imbalance. Two wards showed more than a 10% imbalance: Ward 7 with 7,711 people (-11.79%), and Ward 8 with 10,973 people (+25.5%). Bloomington must adjust its ward boundaries to account for the population changes. The city still will draft two to three new ward map options for redistricting, which are expected to be discussed during the committee of the whole meeting on June 20. A vote to adopt the new maps is tentatively scheduled for July 11. Bloomington residents may also propose their own maps based on precinct population data, which is published to the city's website. Resident-proposed maps must be submitted in writing to the city clerk before June 1. Contact Sierra Henry at 309-820-3234. Follow her on Twitter: @pg_sierrahenry. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. BLOOMINGTON The Twin Cities will honor local fallen military service members with memorial banners along Main Street through a new partnership with America's Gold Star Families. Fallen and missing in action local military service members will be featured on the 30-by-60 inch double-sided banners. Each banner will have the photo, name, rank, branch of service, service dates, and war conflict. "As a veteran, I understand the courage, character, and sacrifice of military members and their families," Normal Mayor Chris Koos said in a statement. "Those called to serve our nation deserve support. I encourage local families who suffered the loss of a loved one to take advantage of this opportunity to honor their memory as heroes." America's Gold Star Families is a nonprofit organization seeking to honor the memory of fallen service members across all branches of the United States Armed Forces and their families. The organization first started its "Hometown Heroes" banner program in Peoria several years ago. Family members or those who know of someone who died in service can apply to have the fallen service member honored on a banner at bit.ly/BNheroes. The application, a quality military photo with a 300 dpi resolution, and an official military discharge DD-214 form must be emailed to info@americasgoldstarfamilies.org. "Our involvement in this great program is the least the City could do given the sacrifices these brave men and women have made," Bloomington City Manager Tim Gleason said. "It's been many years in the making and we're proud to see it come to fruition." America's Gold Star Families will sponsor the purchase of the banners for applications submitted before April 20. Those submitting applications after the deadline can contact Project Chair Frances Maddox at 309-825-5121 or by email at info@americasgoldstarfamilies.com. Banners will be displayed starting before Memorial Day this May and lasting through Veterans Day on an annual basis for a minimum of three years. A Hero Banner Program dedication will be held at 10 a.m. May 30 at the Miller Park Stage during the annual Memorial Day program. Contact Sierra Henry at 309-820-3234. Follow her on Twitter: @pg_sierrahenry. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Say you have two job offers to consider, one from your familys business. All things being equal, what are the pros and cons of working for the family? Three astronauts stationed in China's Tiangong space station are preparing for their return trip in the middle of April, packing up personal items, experimental products and other materials, putting equipment into place and exercising to prepare their bodies for Earth's gravity. The astronauts, Zhai Zhigang, Wang Yaping and Ye Guangfu, have to tidy up a large number of materials, including goods on the Tianzhou 3 cargo spacecraft, said Zhong Weiwei, an associate researcher at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center. Living in space about six months, a record in China's history, they have completed more than 20 scientific tasks and will bring back samples with them, according to Zhong. He said the astronauts have to put all equipment in place since there will be a gap of more than one month before the astronauts of Shenzhou XIV enter the space station. The physical conditions and psychological states of the three astronauts are better than expected, meeting the requirements for a return trip, said the associate researcher from the center's aerospace medical engineering office. Based on their in-orbit physical examinations and data, experts have adjusted exercise plans for them to keep fitness in order to ensure a safe landing, Zhong said. The Shenzhou XIII mission was launched on Oct 16 by a Long March 2F carrier rocket that blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China's Gobi Desert, with the crew soon entering the Tiangong station. Besides their tasks, they have also delivered two live lectures from the space station, showing the students their living and working areas at the Tianhe core module and several scientific experiments under zero-gravity conditions and answering real-time questions from students. DECATUR Police say a Decatur woman is jailed on charges she kidnapped a flooring company owner after luring him to an abandoned house, pepper-spraying him and then holding him at gunpoint before trying to ransom him back to his family for $400,000. The man was abducted Thursday morning and escaped hours later after having been restrained with plastic ties with a cloth bag placed over his head. A sworn affidavit from Decatur police said he eventually managed to free himself from the back of a minivan after earlier being moved around several times in the trunk of a car. He then fled on foot before walking into a business on North Monroe Street to raise the alarm. Police had already been alerted and were hunting for the man after being called in by his frightened wife. The kidnappers had allowed him to phone her at 12:35 p.m. to say he was being held for ransom. She received a phone call stating that he had been kidnapped, was tied to a chair in a basement, and that the kidnappers wanted $400,000 for him to be released, said the affidavit, signed by Detective James Weddle. (She) advised she later received a subsequent call from (her husband) stating that he had actually been kidnapped and was not joking. The victim had met the woman before as a customer of his business. His description and police investigative work led to her being identified as Ademeko M. Maclin-Carney. The 23-year-old woman was arrested Monday evening after police intercepted her driving her vehicle.The male accomplice, who was armed, was still being sought as of Tuesday night. Questioned by police about his ordeal, the victim said he had been lured to a house in the 1200 block of East William Street at 10:15 a.m. Thursday after receiving a call from Maclin-Carney who said she needed some work done. Weddle said the victim had just been explaining that the house was in too rough a shape to lay flooring when Maclin-Carney blasted him in the face with pepper spray. (He) advised a male then came out of a side room and pointed a small pistol at him, said Weddle. He advised the male told him to to get on the ground, to which he compiled. When he got on the ground, the male Zip-tied his hands and placed a cream colored linen bag over his head to prevent him from seeing. He was later bundled in the trunk of a car and driven to another unknown address where he was held in the basement. Then he was forced back in the trunk again before being driven to another house and then shoved in the back of the minivan, from which he would eventually escape. Weddle said he had told his kidnappers before his escape that he nor his wife would be able to obtain this amount of money. Police also noted that the house on East William Street where he had been lured was badly damaged by fire Thursday evening; the fire was later determined to be suspected arson by the Decatur Fire Department. Maclin-Carney was booked on a preliminary charge of aggravated kidnapping. She also faces additional charges of aggravated battery, mob action and criminal damage in a separate incident after police say she used a BB gun to shoot out the windows and glass door of a home in the 1300 block of North Walnut Grove on the night of March 20. She was also accused of joining in on an assault of the homeowner with three other suspects who punched and kicked him to the ground, leaving him with multiple lacerations and other wounds. All preliminary charges are subject to review by the state's attorneys office. Contact Tony Reid at (217) 421-7977. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyJReid Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 SPRINGFIELD With adjournment looming, Illinois lawmakers on Tuesday introduced legislation aimed at addressing a recent spike in organized retail crime. The proposal, a collaboration between the Illinois Retail Merchants Association and Attorney General Kwame Raoul, creates and defines a violation of organized retail crime something not currently spelled out in state statute with the intent of deterring the activity and reducing the ability of offenders to evade custody. To accomplish this, the proposal provides jurisdiction to any states attorney in a county where any element of the organized retail crime took place so that he or she can prosecute the whole crime. This means that if a ring of smash-and-grab thefts stretches across different counties, prosecutors could consolidate charges into one county for all the incidents. The measure would also give the attorney generals office the ability to use a statewide grand jury to bring about organized retail theft charges. The attorney general would also be given the ability to pursue RICO charges, which gives broader authority to charge people involved in a criminal enterprise. Existing retail theft laws leave loopholes criminals can exploit, said IRMA President Rob Karr at a press conference Tuesday. The bill addresses those loopholes, he said, without reversing recent criminal justice reform advances. The new charge targets only individuals whose specific intent is to resell stolen items, said State Sen. Suzy Glowiak Hilton, D-Western Springs. Its not the intent to prosecute two high school girls who go into a drugstore and steal a lipstick, she said. Hilton called November and January smash-and-grab crimes in her district brazen and said shes seen nothing like them before. I don't want my constituents or those in Illinois to feel like they can't go to Oakbrook Mall that I represent to do their shopping, she said. It's the peace of mind when you figure you're going to go Christmas shopping, you certainly don't want to be in the midst of a smash-and-grab. In McLean County, one out-of-county resident a Springfield man was sentenced this month to two and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of retail theft. The charges stemmed from stolen fragrances in two incidents at a Bloomington mall last year. The two thefts totaled nearly $14,000 in retail value, court documents said. McLean County State's Attorney Don Knapp said his office supports the bill because "it is a real thing happening here in Bloomington-Normal and our law enforcement officers track it," and because it would allow more resources and discretion in prosecuting such crimes. "We like this bill," Knapp said. "We believe it will give my office another tool, but I say that with a caveat because while we want to hold people accountable for this type of activity, I hope that this is a measure that the General Assembly is looking to give prosecutors like myself another tool and not hand off work that truly might be better done by the attorney general's office because it crosses county lines." Knapp acknowledged that the bill does not prohibit the attorney general from handling multi-county crimes. He also supports the bill because it would consolidate the prosecutions of crimes committed in multiple counties to one county, but he said it would be important to ensure the prosecution is in the proper jurisdiction. "The fear, of course, that we have is then that the taxpayers in one county are paying for prosecutions that may be better suited in other counties," Knapp said. The proposal would require state funds to allow state prosecutors to investigate and prosecute retail criminal rings, but those funds have to be allocated separately in the states fiscal year 2023 budget. Karr said IRMAs estimate for necessary funding is around $5 million dollars. It would also require online third-party marketplaces like Amazon and eBay to verify the seller and the goods offered for sale and the seller to provide contact information. State Sen. Doris Turner, D-Springfield, said organized retail crime is not just a concern in Chicago. When people are nervous to go to work, scared to go shopping or visit a mall or our small boutique shops in places like downtown Springfield, action needs to be taken to address our community concerns, Turner said. Turner offered no specific examples of downstate organized retail crimes, but one Central Illinois business owner said she fears smash-and-grab thefts could become a problem if lawmakers dont act soon. I have caught individuals coming into my store and grabbing and taking and going to another store and trying to sell, said Monica Zanetti, owner of Wild Rose Boutique in downtown Springfield. Zanetti, who runs her shop alone, said the bill would make her and many of her other fellow retailers feel safer in their stores. Gov. J.B. Pritzker, at a separate press conference just a couple floors up in the Capitol, told reporters that he had yet to see the proposals details. I look forward to reviewing it, Pritzker said. I know that the attorney general has worked very hard on it and so I'm looking forward to making some judgments about it. The legislation has at least one bipartisan sponsor in State Sen. John Curran, R-Downers Grove, and Karr says he expects more bipartisan support in the House. Hilton said the legislation is a part of a broader package of bills addressing crime that Democrats in both chambers are discussing. House Speaker Chris Welch told Lee Enterprises in January that Democrats intended to introduce a public safety package this session that would target carjackings and organized retail theft. Karr said the IRMA has also been in conversation with Welch and other House members on various public safety bills. Democrats, who hold supermajorities in the state legislature, have been under fire for supporting criminal justice reform measures over the past couple of years that Republicans and some in law enforcement have deemed soft on crime and emboldening criminal activity. In 2021, the legislature on a party-line vote approved and Pritzker signed the SAFE-T Act, which among other things made Illinois the first state to abolish cash bail while mandating body cameras on all police officers by 2025. The vast majority of the laws provisions have yet to take effect but nevertheless have been used to harangue Democrats on the crime issue, especially in the Chicago suburbs and downstate. Several major cities in Illinois, including downstate cities like Decatur, experienced major spikes in crime over the past couple of years. Looting after peaceful protests in Chicago and cities across the state dominated the headlines during the summer months in 2020. Republicans have sought to weaponize the issue of crime to make gains in the state legislature this fall. Democrats, on the other hand, have sought to address the issue without significantly rolling back reforms passed last year. The bill could receive a vote in the Senate this week. If it passes, it will be sent back to the House for concurrence before the General Assembly adjourns on April 8. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. SPRINGFIELD From his ceremonial office at the Capitol Tuesday, Gov. J.B. Pritzker proclaimed the 12-month period beginning April 1 as the Illinois State Police centennial year, ordering the ISP flag to fly atop the Capitol dome for the month of April. The news conference in Pritzkers office followed an appearance on the Capitols east lawn, where a fleet of new black-and-white squad cars and ISP officers lined up in front of the Abraham Lincoln statue. Pritzker, at a news conference in his office, told a story of an ISP that formed in 1922 to maintain order and safety on its massive number of newly paved roads. ISP Director Brendan Kelly said the first class of ISP troopers consisted of eight individuals driving motorcycles that were left over from the First World War. It's safe to say the Illinois State Police has changed an awful lot since then, as threats have evolved over the decades. As our understanding of public safety has expanded, so too have the duties of the Illinois State Police, Pritzker said. Pritzker said ISP duties now include forensic testing, crime scene services, investigations, intelligence, cybersecurity, disaster response and a spectrum of support for all local law enforcement throughout the state. The makeup of the ranks of our state troopers has changed too. Women and people of color weren't allowed to serve 100 years ago. Today they are among ISPs highest ranks, he said. The centennial event came amid a political backdrop in which crime and the states response to it is top of mind in the early stages of the 2022 campaign season in which every seat in the General Assembly and all constitutional offices are up for grabs, including the governorship. That much has been evident in the campaign materials from Pritzkers Republican challengers who are aiming to peg Democrats as soft on crime. And it was evident Monday night when a Pritzker appointee to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board received just half of the votes needed for approval in a Senate dominated by Democrats. It was also evident in the question-and-answer session following the governors news conference, during which Pritzker fielded questions about rising crime, officer-involved shootings and the political fight for the PRB. I believe that our police are out there trying to protect our communities as best they can, sometimes in extraordinary and difficult circumstances, Pritzker said. So we ought to stand up for our police, whether they're state police, local police. Obviously, where there are police who aren't doing the job, people who are mishandling their duties, they need to be held accountable for their actions. Pritzker acknowledged crime is up across the state and nation, attributing the trends partially to a pandemic recession. And so we've got to make sure that we're bringing order back, that we're putting away the people who actually committed crimes. And that means supporting the ISP, it means supporting law enforcement. And I'm going to continue to do that with the work that we do, not only to build up the ISP and local law enforcement, but also to make sure that the laws are adhered to. Pritzkers budget proposal included an $18.6 million increase to the ISP budget to allow for three classes of Illinois State Police cadets. Previously passed infrastructure budgets include crime lab funding as well. But as Pritzker and Kelly headed out to the Capitol grounds to shake hands with rank-and-file ISP troopers, Richard Irvin, a Republican challenger for governor, issued a news release criticizing the governors 2021 signature on a criminal justice reform bill known as the SAFE-T Act. The Irvin release also called attention to the votes of Pritzker Prisoner Review Board appointees who voted to free two individuals who were charged with the 1976 murder of ISP trooper Layton Davis. One of those individuals, Aaron Hyche, 71, was released on medical parole and suffers from cancer, Parkinsons disease and dementia. Four PRB members with controversial voting histories have exited the board in recent days, one by resignation, one whose appointment was pulled by Pritzker and two who were rejected by the Senate. Pritzker said the PRB members are charged with examining the original crime, whether the offender is rehabilitated, whether they caused problems while incarcerated and whether they would be a danger to the public. It's very easy just to say, this person committed an awful crime so many years ago, and to say, we're gonna throw away the key, leave them all in prison, Pritzker said. That's what you're gonna end up with. If that's what people want, well, let's hear that. But I don't think that's what people wanted when we created the Prisoner Review Board. Republicans have seized on Pritzkers signature on the SAFE-T Act which eliminates cash bail beginning next year in favor of a system prioritizing the offenders threat level over ability to pay. Its to be defined in the courts. The bill also requires body cameras be implemented by 2025, a measure which Pritzker said would increase accountability and trust. The original SAFE-T Act also changed use-of-force guidelines for law enforcement, created a new police certification system and expanded detainee rights. The GOP has publicized the SAFE-T Act as detrimental to officer morale, blaming it for resignations in sheriffs offices and police departments across the state and for making recruitment of new officers difficult. When asked about recruiting officers, Pritzker pointed to a nationwide labor shortage and emphasized the brotherhood of ISP and strong wages as a recruiting hook. Kelly said law enforcement is a challenging and difficult job, but its also a calling and hes optimistic recruits will continue to materialize. Throughout history, the way the public feels and interacts with law enforcement, that sentiment, it ebbs and flows, Kelly said. And I believe we're at a point where the respect for law enforcement and the desire to make sure that the role of law enforcement is strong, and that it is within the expectations of the public, is moving in a positive direction. Pritzkers proposed budget also includes $4.5 million to fund body cameras for ISP in accordance with a criminal justice reform bill passed one year ago, as well as providing the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board with $10 million for distributing grants to local law enforcement for body cameras. Pritzker has also touted $240 million in proposed funding as part of a two-year, $250 million commitment to the Reimagine Public Safety Act, which aims at investing violence prevention resources in some of the states most dangerous areas. Of that, $235 million is funded through the federal American Rescue Plan Act. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Hollard Ghana with subsidiaries Hollard Insurance and Hollard Life Assurance has signed an agreement with the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) to commence its Hollard X Academia initiative with the university to empower students for the future. GIJ is the second public university to be enlisted onto the Hollard X Academia initiative after the University of Energy and Natural Resources. The comprehensive programme provides a platform to enablea better futurefor students through Hollards Streetwise Financeinitiative, mentoring, engagement, corporate experience, and resource sharing programmes for three years subject to renewal. Commenting at the brief signing ceremony at the GIJsDzorwulu campus, Group Chief Executive Officer of Hollard Ghana, Patience Akyianu, described the partnership as the groups contribution to nation-building and economic development. It brings me joy to see this partnership with the Ghana Institute of Journalism come to fruition. As we embark on our partnership journey, we are certain this initiative will bridge the gap between academia and the world of work. Being an unconventional insurer working with a socially-minded purpose, our partnerships form an integral part of our business in this regard, were fostering a triple win for the university, the students and Hollard. With our business purpose to enable more people to create and secure better futures, we have carefully created five modules that will provide students with a competitive advantage for the job market. The first module seeks to honour a valedictorian with a cash amount, a citation, and a laptop. The second module will also award onethird year and one final year student with tuition grants. The third module includes the Streetwise Finance leadership and entrepreneurship mentoring seminar. Modules four and five cover corporate experience and thought-leadership events. All these power-packed modules form part of our social impact efforts to give back to the communities within which we operate, she added. The Rector, Professor Kwamena Kwansah-Aidoo, commended the Insurance group for their thoughtfulness. He said We at GIJ are happy about this partnership with Hollard Ghana. Apart from resource sharing between our two institutions, our students will benefit substantiallythrough mentoring programmes which will come in handy in the world of work. Management is grateful for this gesture, and we assure Hollard Ghana of our utmost commitment. About Hollard Ghana The countrys favourite insurance group is Hollard Ghana, with subsidiaries Hollard Insurance and Hollard Life Assurance. The group combines its deep local knowledge of the market having previously operated in Ghana for 25 years as Metropolitan Insurance with the world-class expertise of an international insurance brand in 18 countries across the world. With feet firmly planted on Ghanaian soil but headquartered in South Africa, Hollard delivers innovative insurance solutions customized to the unique risks Ghanaians face. Hollard offers various life and general insurance products including funeral, personal accident, motor, business, travel, home, and more; and can be reached via the following means: 0501603967 (Hollard Insurance) and 0501533698 (Hollard Life). Beyond various nationwide office branches and Hollard 2U franchise shops, Ghanaians can find Hollard at Shell Fuel Station Welcome Shops, Melcom stores and online at www.hollard.com.gh and www.jumia.com.gh for all their insurance needs. Source: Peacefmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Dr Peter Quarshie, senior research fellow and deputy director in charge of research at the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP) has advised Ghanaians to continue to wear face masks when in crowded areas, despite loosening the pandemic measures. He said that although Ghana has low levels of COVID-19 infections, the country should not drop its guard in containing the virus. Speaking to Beatrice Adu on The Big Bulletin on Monday (28 March 2022), Dr Quarshie said, even though theres nothing to support enforcing mandatory face masks, Ill still recommend that in large crowds; in public where theres a lot of people, you wear your facemask because you dont know what might happen. We talk about omicron, but right now, omicron is about three variants, in the US, they had a mild variant which has now become a serious variant and we dont know what is going to happen. We havent had that serious variant in Ghana yet so, thats why we still have to keep monitoring and we still have to keep the surveillance going. Ill recommend that its a personal decision [to wear face mask], theres no public health risk right now. Wearing face masks no longer mandatory In his address to the nation on Sunday 27 March 2022, President Akufo-Addo said the wearing of nose mask is not mandatory anymore. According to him, the low levels of infections coupled with the significant numbers of people who have been vaccinated informed his decision to revise the COVID-19 restrictions. He said: With countries in the ECOWAS Community, especially in our neighbouring countries, presently, like us, recording very low levels of infections, and having significant numbers of our people vaccinated, and on the advice of the national COVID-19 Taskforce and the health experts, I have taken the decision to revise the COVID-19 Restrictions, enacted under E.I. 64. He further added that so, from Monday 28 March, the wearing of facemasks is no longer mandatory. I encourage all of you, though, to continue to maintain enhanced hand hygiene practices, and avoid overcrowded gatherings. Fellow Ghanaians, get vaccinated To my Fellow Ghanaians who have not received the jab, I urge you to take it. To those listening to the propaganda by the conspiracy theorists and those who are still sceptical about the efficacy of the vaccine, it has been a year since my wife and I got vaccinated; it has not disrupted our physical wellbeing, nor has it caused us to be sick. We are, touch wood, hale and hearty, like the other 13.1 million Ghanaians who have been vaccinated, he said. Source: asaaseradio.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Technology has predominantly been a male-dominated sector; the lack of equal representation has made certain tech spaces become a breeding ground for gender biases and discrimination and the cryptocurrency industry is not left out. Although crypto was made to promote freedom from repression, there is an evident gender gap. Of the 378 venture-backed crypto and blockchain companies founded globally between 2012 and 2018, only one had an all-female founding team, and only 31 (8.2%) had a combination of male and female founders. Outside of leadership, women are grossly under-represented in the workforce, with 95% of people in the blockchain industry being men, according to the Global Crypto User Index. Project Syndicate also posits that the overall female labour-force participation rate in sub-Saharan Africa has reached 61%, yet women constitute only 30% of professionals in the tech industry. The worlds leading blockchain ecosystem and cryptocurrency infrastructure provider, Binance, understands the importance of gender inclusivity in the blockchain world and has continued to create opportunities and initiatives tailored to meet these demands. For International Womens Month, Binance Africa rolled out an 8-week Bootcamp to equip women with the necessary tools and skills for a career in blockchain. The participants in this training session will work on hands-on projects and build important critical thinking skills with real-world problems and solutions. Furthermore, Binance Charity, the philanthropic arm of Binance, launched the MamaToTheRescue project to strengthen the Kenyan economy and empower women with new and sustainable technical skills. Binance Charity sourced and donated sewing machines, creating job opportunities for local women. Beyond its women-empowerment initiatives, Binance has also fostered a company culture that is not afraid to innovate and break the status quo. The company is one of the few tech companies with a sizeable number of women holding senior positions across many of its departments including, He Yi, Co-founder, and Chief Marketing Officer of Binance; Helen Hai, Head of Binance Charity and Binance NFT; Damilola Odufuwa, Head of Product Communications; Carine Dikambi, Francophone Africa Lead; Laura Li, Country Manager for Africa and Zane Wong, Director of KYC Compliance. The Francophone Africa Lead, Carine Dikambi, believes blockchain technology is a transformative technology that improves lives and delivers financial freedom and inclusion for millions. On the power of crypto and womens rights, Damilola Odufuwa, Head of Product Communications, says, Ive always been passionate about financial inclusion for women. I was sold as soon as I realized the impact crypto and blockchain technology could have on womens rights. I was determined to use my experience in media and communications to aid the conversation on how tech & crypto can work hand-in-hand with tech & womens rights to democratize the microphone that has traditionally been reserved to those in power. Of course, I was also drawn to the industrys influence, use cases, transparency, and rapidly evolving nature. For Binance, the goal is to build a more inclusive ecosystem, while continuously innovating and creating freedom of money for people all over the world. The exchange platform urges all other centralized exchanges to work towards building a more balanced ecosystem to break the bias and create freedom of repression for all. Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), National Media Commission (NMC) and the Right to Information Commission (RITC) have committed to redeveloping the International Press Centre into an ultra-modern edifice to accommodate all media-related entities and umbrella bodies in the country. The commitment was made during the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at the premises of the Ministry of Information on Monday, March 28, 2022. The landmark project, originally meant to be the new home of the GJA, when completed, will host media-related organizations in the country and serve other functions as a multipurpose complex. It will also contain broadcasting studios, press rooms, an interactive library, conference rooms, office spaces, lettable spaces such as general retail outlets and retail banking outlets. Present at the signing of the MoU was the Minister for Information, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, President of GJA, Roland Affail Monney, Lead Consultant Harry Sintim-Aboagye, Executive Secretary of the RTIC, Yaw Sarpong Boateng, reps from the NMC and other supporting staff of the Ministry of Information. Mr. Oppong Nkrumah in his remarks expressed delight at the new project emphasizing that when completed, the project will become the new social, economic, and cultural destination for the media in Ghana and Africa at large. He said the redevelopment of the press center will avoid duplication of efforts and resources by media entities and will allow them to better coordinate their activities. Mr. Monney on his part emphasized the need to work together as media umbrella bodies stressing that the redevelopment of the International Press Centre will allow them to work in close collaboration in an efficient manner. Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Madam Abla Dzifa Gomashie, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Ketu South in the Volta Region, says the opening of the countrys land borders would ease the hardship of traders and many others. The reopening of the countrys borders will definitely alleviate the suffering women and youth, in particular, have endured for the last two years, she said. The lawmaker, who last year joined demonstrators to demand that government opens the borders, explained that many relied on trading activities along the borders to fend for themselves and the opening of the frontiers would bring a lot of hope for progress to them. Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Madam Gomashie said the development would enable the local Assemblies at the frontiers to collect the needed Internally Generated Funds (IGF) for the development of local communities. The former Deputy Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts, also noted that the opening of the borders would enable hotels and other hospitality players to operate at full capacity, especially during the Easter season. This would contribute to revenue generation to support national development and enhance the living condition of people in the border communities, who were affected negatively during the two-year closure. Madam Gomashie urged the government to find a solution to the porous nature of Ghanas entry points to preserve the territorial integrity of the country and the protection of citizens and foreigners, who patronized those crossings. She also called for a congenial atmosphere for people in those localities to interact with and provide timely information to the security agencies to aid their work. The MP stated the need for cross-border collaboration between Ghana and its neighbours - Togo, Cote dIvoire and Burkina Faso- to ensure that there were no repercussions from the opening of the frontiers. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) last December urged members who had closed their land borders due to the COVID-19 pandemic to have them opened from January 1, 2022. The ruling military government in Burkina Faso opened its land borders with Ghana, but that of Togo and Cote dIvoire are shut. Madam Gomashie encouraged people to continue to observe the various safety protocols despite the lifting of restrictions, saying, We are not completely out of the woods yet even though I admit we are in a better place than before. President Akufo-Addo Sunday night lifted all COVID-19 restrictions and reopened the countrys land and sea borders to enable Ghanas economy to recover from the ravages of the pandemic. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The DCE for Ayensuano District Hon. Josephine Ansah Awuku Nkoom, has advised the MP for the Ayensuano constituency Hon. Nana Yaw Teddy to be fair and honest and deliver on his mandate given to him as the MP and help build the District than to go about inviting and taking glory for nothing. Speaking at a press conference called by the Assembly on the theme, "Setting The Records Straight", the DCE Hon. Josephine Ansah Awuku Nkoom said, the MP for the area has never attended Any Assembly meeting to take decision with excuses anytime invitations are extended to him. Besides, he has never contributed to any decisions at the Assembly ie Socio-economic activities or any developmental projects. So they are surprised to see the MP on social media and other media networks taking glory that he has contributed to the reshaping of some of their roads and also the Proposed District Hospital under Agenda 111. It's through his efforts for such projects to come on. Therefore, so far as the Assembly is concerned, they are surprised at what the MP is doing since he has no idea about how the Assembly begun the reshaping of the feeder roads in the district, the source of funding and the Contractor or the roads the Assembly has pen down to reshape. Hon. Josephine Ansah Awuku Nkoom added that the reshaping of their feeder roads in the District was a collective decision taken by the Assembly and the 27 Assembly members who agreed to that from their IGF and DACF Documents available Which the Assembly Members would testify to that. Roads like Kwaboanta to Adaiso, Krabokese, coalter, to Dorkorchewa Therefore, the MP should come out and point out the road that by his initiative or efforts has been reshaped in the district. Also on the proposed and Approved Districts Hospital, the Assembly led by her the district chief executive says, the MP has no idea, no contribution, nothing. The Land for that hospital project was secured and documented before he became an MP over two years ago. Therefore they are asking the MP to calm down and be on the grounds, collaborate with the Assembly to help develop the district than to go about praising himself or taking undue glory. The chiefs and good people of Ayensuano District deserve better than MP trending on social media. The Assembly therefore assured the good people in the district of unity, peace, and above all development as they have plans for the District especially for their District Capital road to see bitumen. Also the Assembly is on course addressing issues of Illegal sandwining as well. Source: Michael Akrofi Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Police in the Central region have arrested three members of one family, including a 70-year-old man, for allegedly burying a two-year-old boy alive on the shores of Dutch-Komenda in Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem (KEEA) Municipality. However, the timely intervention of the Police, the youth of the area and Mr. Cosmos Bassaw, the Assembly Member of Dutch -Komenda Electoral area, saved the victim, considered to be a spirit, from dying. Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Mrs Irene Serwaah Oppong, Regional Public Relations Officer (PRO) who confirmed the incident to the Ghana News Agency on Monday, said, the boys mother 29, father, 37 and the 70-year-old grandfather of the victim were the perpetrators of the crime. DSP Oppong, said about 23:45 hours on Saturday, March 26, the Elmina District Police Command received information that a male toddler with special needs had been buried alive. She said on receipt of the report, the Police proceeded to the crime scene and met the Assemblymember for the area and some youth who have rescued the boy, whilst preliminary investigations revealed that due to the impairment of the boy, his parents consulted a spiritualist at Dutch-Komenda who might have advised them to get rid of the child. She said the suspects are in Police custody assisting in investigations while the victim was sent to the clinic and had been treated and discharged. DSP Oppongsaid frantic efforts were underway to apprehend Kweku Bar, the spiritualist who is currently on the run. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The government has been urged to pump more resources into the provision of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities for its people, particularly in the health and educational sectors. While commending the government for some of the achievements in the sectors, a Consultant with the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources, Dr Bernard Abeiku Arthur, believed that there was still room for improvement, particularly meeting, the sanitation needs of the girl child and the vulnerable in the educational and health sectors. As a country, we are doing well but we should put in more resources, he said. GKMA Dr Arthur made the call at a two-day training workshop for the media on the Greater Kumasi Metropolitan Area Sanitation and Water Project (GKAM-SWP), which is being sponsored by the World Bank. The project was sequel to the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area project (GAMA) and is expected to build at least 30,000 toilet facilities for households within the eight districts in the GKMA by the year 2024. The objective of the project is to increase access to improved sanitation and water supply in the GKMA with emphasis on low income communities. He said the project was doing well in providing decent toilet facilities to households within the beneficiary communities and we need more resources pumped into it because the gap between the improved and non-improved (toilet facilities) is quite wide. Open defecation has not ended, it is still there and the girl child challenge on sanitation in schools and hospitals is also a major issue, he said. Implementation So far, a total of 1,049 household toilet facilities have been built for the project. The Ejisu Municipality leads the chart with 388 biodigester lavatories, with Oforikrom Municipal Assembly following with 135, while Kwadaso followed third with 131. Suame has benefitted from 113 subsidised household toilets, Kumasi Metro, 88; Old Tafo, 87; Asokore-Mampong 61 with Asokwa having the least, 46. Last year, a total of 260 of these toilets were constructed with the majority of the facilities targeted to be constructed this year. Source: graphiconline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video A French family obsessed with conspiracy theories since the Covid pandemic jumped one after the other to their death from their seventh-floor apartment in the Swiss town of Montreux, police said on Tuesday March 29. Eric David, 40, his 41-year-old wife Nasrine Feraoun, her twin sister Narjisse, and the couple's eight-year-old daughter were found dead at the bottom of a seven-story building on last Thursday. The couple's 15-year-old son survived the fall and was seriously injured. He is currently in a coma in a stable condition in hospital. The Vaud regional police said on Tuesday they are working on a theory of 'collective suicide' and their findings suggest 'all the victims jumped from the balcony one after the other'. The five family members all jumped more than 65 feet from the apartment, where they all lived 'withdrawn from society', just moments after police officers tried to execute an arrest warrant in connection with the home-schooling of a child, police said. Police said the incident occurred after two officers arrived at the apartment at 6.15am to execute a warrant for the father in connection with the home-schooling of one of the couple's children on Thursday. The officers knocked on the door and heard a voice ask who they were. But when they answered, the apartment went quiet. After failing to make contact, the officers left. Shortly before 7am, all five family members jumped from the balcony within the space of five minutes. Police detected no trace of a struggle, seemingly confirming that they jumped off their own accord. A step ladder was found on the balcony. 'Before or during the events, no witnesses, including the two police officers present on the spot from 6:15 am and the passers-by at the foot of the building, heard the slightest noise or cry coming from the apartment or the balcony,' police said. 'Technical investigations show no warning signs of such an act,' they added, noting however that 'since the start of the pandemic, the family was very interested in conspiracy and survivalist theories'. Police said the family lived in virtual self-sufficiency having amassed a well-organised stockpile of various food, taking up much of their living space but enabling them to see out a major crisis. Only the mother's twin sister worked outside the home, while neither the mother nor the eight-year-old girl, who did not attend school, were registered with the local authorities. 'All these elements suggest... fear of the authorities interfering in their lives,' the police statement said. Neighbours said the family was quiet and kept to themselves. 'We heard nothing from their home, the father never said hello in the hallway and ordered many packages almost daily,' neighbour Claude Rouiller told Swiss newspaper Le Temps. Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video A Russian soldier has handed himself and his tank over to Ukrainian troops for a reward of $10,000 (7,500) and a chance at Ukrainian citizenship. Misha, one of alleged war criminal Vladimir Putin's invading soldiers, surrendered in a T-72B3 main battle tank after his two other crewmates escaped home and his commanding officer threatened to shoot him. Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Victor Andrusiv said Misha had contacted Ukraine's national police by phone and arranged a place to meet.'On these phones, we regularly send SMS about how to surrender and hand over the equipment. 'A few days ago, Misha called us. 'We handed over the information about him to the GUR MO [Ukrainian military intelligence]. 'He didn't see the point of war. Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The rubicon has finally been crossed with the passage of the controversial Electronic Levy (E-Levy) bill, despite a spirited attempt by the Minority caucus in Parliament to shoot it down, including the obvious staging of a walkout. According to the Minority, the Majority pulled a surprise one on them because E-levy was not listed in Parliaments business statement for this week. According to the Minority leader, Haruna Iddrisu: We have time and again warned and cautioned that we never want to be taken by surprise on a major economic policy bill of government and we will not accept that culture." So when you (Majority Caucus) did not have the numbers, you were hesitant, you wont come before the House, now that you think that you have some reasonable numbers then you say go to the business of item 27. However, by a voice vote by the Majority caucus after the Speaker of Parliament suspended sitting for 30 minutes, the second reading of the bill was approved. Third reading Subsequently, the Finance Minister moved the motion for the bill to be considered the third time and it was subsequently seconded. The question was put by the Speaker and was approved through a voice vote. "The electronic bill duly read the third time and passed," the Speaker said. This means the controversial levy which has generated a lot of discussions in the country has been passed awaiting presidential assent. Meanwhile, the bill has been reduced from 1.75 percent to 1.5 percent. Source: Peacefmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, NDC, has stated that the party he leads remains committed to the democratic ideal of the country. According to him, as the vehicle through which the current 1992 Constitution was birthed, the NDC was not interested in taking power unconstitutionally. The 1992 constitution was conceived and birthed by us. Today, those who are running to the Supreme Court to defend the Constitution, ran away from the Constituent Assembly which actually promulgated the 1992 Constitution. "We birthed that constitution, for that matter, we will be the last to do anything to undermine that constitutional order, he said. Chairman Ofosu-Ampofo was speaking with the Executives of the USA Chapter of the NDC in Boston over the weekend. He was part of the entourage of the party's 2020 presidential flagbearer, John Dramani Mahama, who was undertaking a series of events in the States. Ofosu-Ampofo reiterated that the NDC's sole interest in seeking the mandate to govern was doing so through the thumb of the electorate and the ballot box. So, we are not interested in coup detat, we are interested in using the democratic process of using the thumb of the people to remove Nana Akufo-Addo and incompetent Bawumia from office and form the new government, he stressed. Coup comments have become topical in recent months. #FixTheCountry activist Oliver Barker-Vormawor was arrested and remanded for five weeks over a threat to stage a coup over the Electronic Transaction Levy (E-Levy) Bill currently before Parliament. Prof Raymond Atuguba, dean of the University of Ghanas School of Law, also in a lecture drew a link between economic downturn and coups and warned the government to tackle fiscal challenges with urgency because such tensions have often triggered coups. Source: ghanaweb.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The 2020 Campaign Manager for the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Professor Joshua Alabi, has said he is very confident former President John Dramani Mahama will lead the party into the 2024 general elections. The former Greater Accra Regional Minister made this statement when he was speaking on behalf of the former President Mahama at the 46th edition of the Gonjaland Youth Association Congress at Daboya in the Savannah Region. Prof Alabi expressed how dear the event was to former President Mahama. He said President Mahama, had wished to be present in person but for the change in date by the organizers which coincided with an earlier scheduled international engagement. Prof. Alabi, stated that the former President is a proud son of Gonjaland, therefore his achievements should inspire the youths to harness their potentials for not just the good of Gonjaland but Ghana as a whole. On behalf of the former President, Prof Alabi, thanked the Association and the people of Gonja, for massively supporting and voting for President Mahama during the 2020 presidential elections. He said it was a demonstration of their love for him. He urged the people to give him more votes than they did previously in 2024. He said the warrior spirit of the Gonja people inspired by the founder of Gonjaland, King Jakpa, is what keeps former President Mahama moving on forward. President Mahama, according to Prof. Alabi, was pained that Ghana is currently experiencing needless challenges and will require very active, focused and productive youths for resuscitation. He, therefore, challenged the youth to take their education seriously in order to be prepared for the task ahead. He also urged them not to downplay the dangers of the COVID pandemic and should observe the protocols. Prof. Alabi said President Mahama, desires that the Association members will be tolerant of divergence political views and must not allow party politics to create unnecessary tension among them. Prof Alabi, was accompanied by the Savannah Regional Chairman of the NDC, Members of Parliament from the region, NDC former ministers of state regional and constituency executives of the NDC. Source: XYZ Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video A leading member of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko, has reacted to comments made by former President John Dramani Mahama against the Judiciary, describing them as politicized. Addressing the US Chapter of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) at Bentley University over the weekend, John Mahama said governance institutions including the judiciary have been politicised and must therefore undergo reforms. We do have problems with the Judiciary, I must say. I think that it is necessary for some internal reforms to take place there. It is necessary for the Chief Justice or whoever is responsible to make some reforms. Most of the governance institutions have been politicised. I give the example of the Judiciary. It is only in Ghana that a Supreme Court will make a decision that a birth certificate is not proof of citizenship, he said. But reacting to the comments of the former president in a tweet, Mr. Otchere-Darko said, President Akufo-Addo together with other NPP members who took the 2012 elections to court refrained from such pronouncements even though the verdict went against them. We recall, when Ghanas Supreme Court delivered a 5-4 majority decision in favour of President John Mahama in the 2012 presidential election petition, none of the petitioners (Akufo-Addo, Obetsebi-Lamptey or Bawumia) called for judicial reforms or accused the bench as politicised, he tweeted. John Mahama, who filed a petition at the Supreme Court challenging the 2020 election results lost unanimously. Felix Kwakye Ofosu, an aide to John Mahama, has in recent times also opined that the Judiciary has borne hostility towards the NDC. Source: ghanaweb.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The New Patriotic Party, NPP, has responded to a recent harsh critique of the Judiciary by former President John Dramani Mahama. The NPP's response came via the head of its Legal Committee, Frank Davies, who described Mahama's statements, made in the United States, as 'unfortunate and embarrassing,' and a show of intellectual hypocrisy. In an interview on Joy FM's news programme, Top Story, that aired on Monday, March 28, Davis explained that the former president's allegations lacked any basis in logic. Its not only unfortunate, but its rather embarrassing that a former President of this Republic, Mr. John Mahama who speak about the Judiciary in such terms. I am really baffled. This is the former President who has presided over affairs of state, he stated. He also accused Mahama of being intellectually dishonest in his assessment of the Judiciary especially as he cited claims against the Judiciary as made by Prof. Raymond Atuguba, a former Executive Secretary under his presidency, to back his point. Is John Mahama trying to tell the whole world that at the time that he was President and the Supreme Court judges were working in this country, their judgments were skewed in his favour? "I really cant understand why he does this to himself. So is it right to say that the election petition of 2013 when he won by a majority of five to four in that election petition, the judges skewed it in his favour? That is the logic Mr. Mahama is portraying? then it is sad, he stressed. What Mahama said During his recent tour of the United States, John Mahama delivered a stern critique of state institutions taking particular aim at what he said was a politicized judiciary. In an address to the US Chapter of the NDC at the Bentley University over the weekend, Mahama affirmed that the party had a problem with the Judiciary. We do have problems with the Judiciary, I must say. I think that it is necessary for some internal reforms to take place there. It is necessary for the Chief Justice or whoever is responsible to make some reforms. "Most of the governance institutions have been politicised. I give the example of the Judiciary. It is only in Ghana that a Supreme Court will make a decision that a birth certificate is not proof of citizenship, he said. He continued, there are many such funny judgements that have been given. I remember at one time, our colleague Professor Raymond Atuguba said that from research he had done, judges turn to give their judgements in favour of the political party or leader that appointed them. "He was subjected to such a whirlwind of indignation by the Judiciary, but if you bring it down to what is happening today, and you look at it and see who appointed who, you will find that there was some truth in the research. "The thing is, our constitution gives the security of tenure to judges. Once you have been appointed, you cannot be removed. That is why we give security of tenure so that you will have the courage no matter who appointed you to give judgement according to your conscience. That is what our judges should do. They must rise to the occasion. Source: ghanaweb.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The sound of an ambulance, may not be an unusual one, within the precincts of Parliament especially when a lively activity is on-going. What perhaps shocked most people on Tuesday morning, was not only the identity of the occupant of that medically-equipped vehicle, but also the fact that the emergency vehicle was not being driven out of Parliament, but was rather wheeled to the Chamber as MPs prepared to vote on the controversial E-Levy Bill. It fueled suspicions that a gravelly ill MP has been ferried to the House to vote. Lack of Numbers In spite of government's engagement and education on E-levy, the bill has not been passed for months because they (MPs on the Majority side) lack the numbers to push it through. To counter that -a split Parliament of 137 MPs each on the Minority and Majority side with one independent MP opting to do business with the Majority side always leaves the Majority at a disadvantage - the bed-ridden MP had to be present at all cost, since NPP MP for Dome-Kwabenya, Adwoa Safo appeared a lost cause. Stretchered off an ambulance? He was supposed to drive in by himself but due to ill health, the ambulance became his best option. This was how the Majority Caucus conveyed Member of Parliament for Ahanta West constituency who doubles as the Minister for Religious and Chieftaincy Affairs, Hon. Alexander Kojo Kum to the House to shore up its numbers. Ofori-Atta Returns To Parliament Though Peacefmonline.com can not authoritatively confirm his precise ailment, reports indicate that he has been bed-ridden for quite some time now. And with the second reading of the E-levy bill on the order paper, the Majority Chief Whip had to ensure all MPs available are present in the House. This was because both sides of the House had rallied their numbers to ensure that they push forward their interests; and Hon. Alexander Kojo Kum was no exception, particularly so since Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta had returned to Parliament to push for the passage of the Electronic Transactions (E-Levy) Bill. Already Recovered, Nothing Wrong In a related development, Sekondi MP Andrew Egyapa Mercer believes there is nothing wrong with having his Ahanta West colleague in the House to conduct parliamentary business. ....it is not the first time that has happened," adding that the MP has already been discharged and that in itself demonstrates some recovery on his part. Meanwhile, NDC MP, Assin North Constituency, James Gyakye Quayson was not present as he was attending a hearing in court. Source: Isaac Kwame Owusu/Peacefmonline/[email protected] Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Minority in Parliament has served notice of intent to challenge the passage of the Electronic Transfer (E-Levy) bill by Parliament at the Supreme Court after they (the Minority Caucus) had staged a walked out earlier in the day. Addressing the press, Minority Leader, Hon. Haruna Iddrisu said Parliament did not have a decision making quorum of 138 members in the chamber when the bill was passed, hence the passage of the bill was illegal and unconstitutional. This is a charade, he said at a press conference in Parliament, adding that there is no E-levy. The majority of less than 137 conducting businesses only proceeded on illegal and unconstitutional business. Parliament did not have the numbers to take any decision that should binding Parliament and Ghanaians. I think they have to come again on E-levy because as of today, I dont think they had the numbers to say that the E-levy has been passed. We will question this decision in [the Supreme] court on the basis of the earlier ruling and on the basis of the fact that they said we cant take a decision with 137 [members], but they can take with 137, he said. Parliament, on Tuesday, passed the Electronic Transfer Levy in the absence of the Minority MPs, who had walked out before the Bill was considered at the second reading stage. The Minority had complained that it had been taken by surprise by the unexpected consideration of the levy. The E-levy was not listed in Parliaments business statement for this week. Source: Emmanuel Akorli/Peace Fm Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Flash The Russian and Ukrainian delegations have arrived in Turkey's largest city Istanbul on Monday for a fresh round of face-to-face peace talks, aiming to achieve substantial progress to end the crisis. The Russian delegation has settled in the Ciragan Palace Kempinski hotel while the Ukrainian delegation has checked in the Shangri-La Bosphorus, both very close to each other in the Besiktas district. Media reports said the arrival of the Ukrainian delegation had been postponed to evening hours due to the closure of Ukrainian airspace and some logistical problems. According to the NTV broadcaster, the Ukrainian delegates had to go to a neighboring country by road to fly to Istanbul. Tuesday's negotiations will begin at 10:30 a.m. local time (0730 GMT) at the Dolmabahce Presidential Working Office in Besiktas. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to address the delegations at the opening of the meeting. "We will have a short meeting with the delegations tomorrow morning," Erdogan said at a press conference after a cabinet meeting in the Turkish capital Ankara on Monday. So far, Russia and Ukraine have held three rounds of in-person talks in Belarus, and their fourth session was in a video conference format. Turkey, meanwhile, has increasingly accelerated its diplomatic efforts on the international arena, reiterating its policy that it is ready to play a mediator role for lasting peace in the region. In a phone call on Sunday, Erdogan told his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, that a ceasefire and peace between Moscow and Kiev must be achieved as soon as possible, and the humanitarian situation in the region should be improved. Erdogan repeated that Turkey would continue to contribute in every possible way during this process. The "phone traffic" that he has been conducting with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is progressing in a positive direction, Erdogan said on Monday. Turkey has been exerting significant efforts to resolve the crisis through agreement and dialogue, he said. Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. To celebrate the Thai New Year and welcome international travelers back to Thailand, the Governors Mansion in Phuket the largest icon of Sino-Portuguese baroque architecture will be listed on Airbnb for the ultimate designer stay. Renowned for its magnificent beaches and rich cultural heritage, Phuket has long been an incredible draw for millions of travelers from around the world. The lush tropical island is now leading the way for Thailands long-anticipated travel rebound. As the country gears up for its biggest cultural festival, Songkran, one group of four lucky guests will get to soak up the vibrant festivities with an island getaway of a lifetime, only on Airbnb. The majestic Governors Mansion will be bookable on airbnb.com/governorsmansion for US$50* (approx. 1,700THB) for a two night stay from 15-17 April 2022, welcoming overnight guests for the first time in more than 50 years. Bookings open at 8AM ICT on April 5, 2022. Travelers from Thailand or any of the countries that currently allow international travel to and from Thailand can apply.** Guests will be hosted by popular Phuket-born model-actress Patricia Tanchanok Good who rose to fame in one of Netflixs most popular Thai dramas last year, Girl From Nowhere 2, and national ambassador for royal Thai cuisine and Blue Elephant founder, master chef Nooror Somany Steppe. Programming for this special stay is supported by the Tourism Authority of Thailand. Built at the end of King Rama Vs era by successful local businessman Pra Pitak Chinpracha, the 119-year-old Governors Mansion welcomed many out-of-town dignitaries and remains one of several neoclassical heritage mansions on Phuket today. The sprawling white and mustard heritage home is located in the historic heart of Old Phuket Town, and has been exquisitely restored to preserve its original fixtures, including richly patterned tiles and teakwood floors. Its first floor is now home to the Blue Elephant Restaurant a Michelin Plate awardee and long-running stalwart of Thailands culinary industry. On the second floor, renowned Thai designer Saran Yen Panya has created a memorable, visually stunning space that pays homage to Thailands rich heritage and buzzing contemporary design scene. The stay features statement pieces by Yothaka widely revered as Thailands master of design in addition to bespoke handcrafted items by up-and-coming designers Kitt Ta Khon, Masaya, Sumphat Gallery, Thaniya and Mo Jirachaisakul, paired with Phuketian antiques from some of the islands most distinguished homes and museums. Guests will be immersed in a quintessentially Phuketian experience, including: A personal welcome at check-in by Thai superstar Patricia Good Tanchanok, who will share her favourite hidden gems in Phuket and tips for exploring the island Exclusive access to a two-bedroom suite on the Mansions expansive second floor, including a private reception lounge and living room A bespoke, multi-course Songkran tasting menu prepared and hosted by master Chef Nooror Somany Steppe A scuba diving and snorkeling adventure around the sparkling reefs and islands that dot the Andaman Sea A gibbon rehabilitation social impact experience in Phukets last rainforest, Khao Pra Taew Wildlife Sanctuary Songkran is a special moment for all Thais, as we give thanks and celebrate the dawn of a new year. As Thailand reopens, we are incredibly thrilled to partner with Airbnb to warmly welcome the world back to our country. We invite travellers from around the world to experience the Amazing New Chapters of Thailand under Visit Thailand Year 2022, with this iconic stay that shines a light on some of our finest Thai designers; as well as Phukets natural wonders, unique heritage and architecture, and delicious local cuisine, shared Yuthasak Supasorn, Governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand. Thailand is an extraordinary country with unparalleled warmth and hospitality, and some of the most beautiful destinations. As more of us begin to travel further from home and for longer durations, we are working with our Host community to welcome the world back to Thailand safely. We are delighted to add the majestic Governors Mansion to our collection of unique stays throughout the Kingdom, said Amanpreet Bajaj, Airbnb General Manager for Southeast Asia, India, Hong Kong and Taiwan. *Plus taxes and fees. This two-night stay is not a contest. Airbnb is closely monitoring Thailand infection rates and government policies and will offer booking guests a USD1,000 Airbnb credit if it becomes necessary to cancel the stay. **This press release encourages safe and responsible travel. Travelers looking to book should note that this stays rules require strict adherence with local COVID-19 guidelines. Guests must follow applicable local and state guidelines as well as Airbnbs COVID-19 Safety Practices, which include wearing a mask and practicing social distancing when required by local laws or guidelines. Guests are responsible for their own travel to and from Phuket and must have a registered account with Airbnb. Other Terms and Conditions will apply, please see airbnb.com/governorsmansion. Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain The way we speak today isn't the way that people talked thousandsor even hundredsof years ago. William Shakespeare's line, "to thine own self be true," is today's "be yourself." New speakers, ideas, and technologies all seem to play a role in shifting the ways we communicate with each other, but linguists don't always agree on how and why languages change. Now, a new study of American Sign Language adds support to one potential reason: Sometimes, we just want to make our lives a little easier. Deaf studies scholar Naomi Caselli and a team of researchers found that American Sign Language (ASL) signs that are challenging to perceivethose that are rare or have uncommon handshapesare made closer to the signer's face, where people often look during sign perception. By contrast, common ones, and those with more routine handshapes, are made further away from the face, in the perceiver's peripheral vision. Caselli, a Boston University (BU) Wheelock College of Education & Human Development assistant professor, says the findings suggest that ASL has evolved to be easier for people to recognize signs. The results were published in Cognition. The American Sign Language sign for children," which uses a common handshape and is produced further from the face. Credit: ASL-LEX.org "Every time we use a word, it changes just a little bit," says Caselli, who's also codirector of the BU Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering's AI and Education Initiative. "Over long periods of time, words with uncommon handshapes have evolved to be produced closer to the face, and therefore, are easier for the perceiver to see and recognize." The American Sign Language sign for light, which uses an uncommon handshapesigns rarely use the middle fingerand is produced closer to the face. Credit: ASL-LEX.org Although studying the evolution of language is complex, says Caselli, "you can make predictions about how languages might change over time, and test those predictions with a current snapshot of the language." With researchers from Syracuse University and Rochester Institute of Technology, she looked at the evolution of ASL with help from an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that analyzed videos of more than 2,500 signs from ASL-LEX, the world's largest interactive ASL database. Caselli says they began by using the AI algorithm to estimate the position of the signer's body and limbs. "We feed the video into a machine learning algorithm that uses computer vision to figure out where key points on the body are," says Caselli. "We can then figure out where the hands are relative to the face in each sign." The researchers then match that with data from ASL-LEXwhich was created with help from the Hariri Institute's Software & Application Innovation Lababout how often the signs and handshapes are used. They found, for example, that many signs that use common handshapes, such as the sign for childrenwhich uses a flat, open handare produced further from the face than signs that use rare handshapes, like the one for light. This project is part of a new and growing body of work connecting computing and sign language at BU. "The team behind these projects is dynamic, with signing researchers working in collaboration with computer vision scientists," says Lauren Berger, a Deaf scientist and postdoctoral fellow at BU who works on computational approaches to sign language research. "Our varying perspectives, anchored by the oversight of researchers who are sensitive to Deaf culture, helps prevent cultural and language exploitation just for the sake of pushing forward the cutting edge of technology and science." Understanding how sign languages work can help improve Deaf education, says Caselli, who hopes the latest findings also bring attention to the diversity in human languages and the extraordinary capabilities of the human mind. "If all we study is spoken languages, it is hard to tease apart the things that are about language in general from the things that are particular to the auditory-oral modality. Sign languages offer a neat opportunity to learn about how all languages work," she says. "Now with AI, we can manipulate large quantities of sign language videos and actually test these questions empirically." Explore further Sign language glossary aims to widen tech access More information: Naomi Caselli et al, Perceptual optimization of language: Evidence from American Sign Language, Cognition (2022). Naomi Caselli et al, Perceptual optimization of language: Evidence from American Sign Language,(2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105040 The report requested a large telescope to study exoplanets, similar to one NASA has developed that would use a shade to block light from a distant star to facilitate the study of planets around that star. Credit: NASA/JPL It takes expensive tools to learn about the universe, but projects like the Very Large Array for radio astronomy in New Mexico and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which orbits Earth, have pushed scientific knowledge forward in ways that would not have been possible without these instruments. Every 10 years, astronomers and astrophysicists outline priorities for the hardware they need in the decadal survey on astronomy and astrophysics. The newest version of the survey was published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in late 2021, and debates about funding are in full swing for the next fiscal year. I'm a professor of astronomy whose research has depended on facilities and equipment built after a recommendation in one of these decadal surveys, and I was involved in the previous survey, published in 2010. The most recent wish list is full of fascinating projects, and it will be exciting to see which get funded and what research will come from them. A meeting of the minds Every 10 years since the 1960s, U.S. astronomers and astrophysicists have gathered to create a priority list for new facilities and instruments. The decadal survey of astronomers is influential because it forces everyone to be on the same page and make hard choices. It has to temper ambition with realism, but when astronomers and astrophysicists from the many subfields all work together, they come up with ideas that advance the whole field. The most recent report is titled "Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s." It's directed at Congress and the three federal agencies that fund most astronomical research: NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. Billions of dollars are at stake. Producing the reports is a massive undertaking, involving 20 people on the main committee and over 1,000 contributing to the final report. The committee reviewed 573 white papers all arguing for specific projects and astronomical capabilities. The finished report runs 615 pages, and it's not light reading. This approach works. Some of NASA's most ambitious and fruitful scientific missionslike the Hubble and James Webb space telescopeswere proposed in and funded through decadal surveys. Big science The committee identified 24 key science questions for the next generation of astronomy. These fall into three major themes that are science at the biggest scale, and the facilities on the wish list are designed to address these themes. First is the study of Earth-like worlds. Thanks to explosive growth in the discovery of exoplanets, the number of known planets outside the solar system has been doubling roughly every two years. Among the more than 5,000 known exoplanets are several hundred that are similar to Earth and could potentially support life. A major goal for the next decade is to build new large telescopes on the ground and in space with instruments that can "sniff" the atmospheres of Earth-like planets to try to detect gases like oxygen that are created by microbes. Second is to advance multimessenger astronomya relatively new field of astrophysics that takes information about gravitational waves, elementary particles and electromagnetic radiation and combines it all to gain deeper insights into the underlying astrophysics of the universe. In this case, the need is not so much for new scientific tools but for more grants to enable researchers to collaborate and share data. The science goal is to learn more about cosmic explosions and mergers of compact objects like neutron stars and black holes. The final theme is the study of cosmic ecosystems, especially the origin and evolution of galaxies and the massive black holes at their centers. By looking at extremely distant galaxies, astronomers can look into the past, since light takes time to reach Earth. So to understand these massive, complicated systems, scientists will need giant optical telescopes to find galaxies far away in the young universe, as well as radio telescopes to peer into their dusty hearts and reveal the black holes. Astronomy's wish list Here are a few particularly exciting highlights from the hundreds of items on the wish list. First, the report recommends spending US$1 billion on developing technology with which to build the next generation of "great observatories" in space. The flagship of these missionsto be launched in the 2040s with an eye-popping price tag of $11 billionwould be an optical telescope with a massive 20-foot (6-meter) mirror. This mirror would be eight times bigger than Hubble's and would be designed to study Earth-like planets in other solar systemsand potentially detect life. The report also recommends building two smaller space telescopes to work at infrared and X-ray wavelengths, each at a cost of $3 billion to $5 billion. But orbital efforts are not the only aims of the report. The report also asks for funds to build a giant optical telescope on Earth with a diameter of 80 to 100 feet (25 to 30 meters). That's five to seven times the light-collecting area of today's largest telescope. Two proposals are competing to build this telescope, which would cost close to $2 billion. The report also calls for the National Science Foundation to spend $3 billion on a new array of 263 radio telescopes that would span the entire U.S. This telescope array could produce radio images with 10 times the sensitivity and 20 times the sharpness of any previous facility, allowing scientists to see deeper into the universe and discover previously undetectable objects. Another item on the wish list is a $650 million pair of microwave telescopes in Chile and Antarctica that would map the afterglow of the Big Bang. This kind of money is needed to achieve scientific goals of this scope. State of the profession Science is more than just the pursuit of knowledge. As part of recent decadal surveys, astronomers and astrophysicists have taken the opportunity to gaze inward and judge the state of the profession. This includes looking at diversity and inclusion, workplace climates and the contributions of astronomers to education and outreach. These fields are overwhelmingly white, with people from minority backgrounds making up only 4% of faculty and students. In an appendix to the report, teams suggested a number of remedies for the lack of diversity and equity. These included ideas such as better mentoring to reduce the high attrition rate for minority students, along with funding for bridge programs to help minorities get established early in their careers and to treat harassment and discrimination as forms of scientific misconduct. If even a small part of the wish list becomes reality, it will not only increase our understanding of the universe, but alsojust as importantlylead to a more diverse and compassionate astronomy and astrophysics community. Explore further Search for life on other worlds tops astronomy to-do list This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Ben Campbell, a graduate resident assistant and masters student in aerospace systems engineering, works on the Bubbling Liquid Experiment Navigating Driven Extreme Rotation, or BLENDER, device at UAHs Johnson Research Center. Credit: Michael Mercier | UAH A cutting-edge nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) rocket engine using what's called centrifugal liquid fuel bubble-through could one day be a ticket for NASA to go directly into deep space. Under an NTP research contract for the Space Nuclear Propulsion Project Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of the University of Alabama System, is leading a collaboration of universities across the nation including the University of Rhode Island (URI), Drexel University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Pennsylvania State University and the University of Michigan (U-M) to research the concept. NASA has made substantial advances toward a solid fuel NTP design. The bubble-through concept under study by the university collaborators is one of three proposed hydrogen-based designs for a next generation liquid fuel NTP rocket. Either in person or virtually, all of NASA's NTP academic partners will gather on March 11 at a workshop hosted by UAH for NASA to discuss their progress and issues. The bubble-through centrifugal NTP concept heats hydrogen gas propellant to super-hot temperatures, but there is no combustion. Hydrogen is literally bubbled through a rotating liquid uranium core in the engine via a porous cylinder wall, causing the gas to rapidly expand. As it exits the nozzle, the expanding hydrogen provides thrust for the spacecraft. The design's advantages include significantly higher performance over conventional liquid fuel rocket engines that combust hydrogen and oxygen, says Dr. Dale Thomas, the project's principal investigator and an eminent scholar in systems engineering at UAH. "In conventional liquid fuel engine combustion, the resulting propellant moleculesH 2 O in the case of hydrogen and oxygenare much heavier due to those relatively heavy oxygen atoms, and they will not exit the nozzle as fast, providing more thrust but less impulse," Dr. Thomas says. Thrust is the force supplied by the engine, for example to lift a spacecraft away from Earth's gravity. Impulse is the change in momentum per unit of fuel, and that matters when it comes to getting a spacecraft where it's going in space. "Think of your car," Dr. Thomas says. "Think of thrust as torque and impulse as miles per gallon (mpg). Both matter, just like both torque and mpg matter in your car." A simplified diagram showing the bubble-through nuclear thermal propulsion engine concept. Credit: Propulsion Research Center Hotter, relatively lightweight hydrogen atoms will make the ship go farther. "If we get the propellant hotter, it has more energy and will exit the nozzle faster, which provides more impulse," Dr. Thomas says. "Since this is a higher performing engine, it has the potential to power spacecraft on trajectories other than the minimum energy trajectories, providing options for higher energy trajectories that will shorten the trip time to and from Mars and other destinations throughout the solar system." Conceptually intriguing, the bubble-through engine presents a number of technical challenges, not the least of which is developing a material for its porous cylinder wall that can withstand direct contact with the molten uranium fuel. "We're in the very early stages on this," Dr. Thomas says. "This bubble-through concept has been around since the '60s," he says. "The physics are well understood, but the engineering challenges have precluded getting this concept off the drawing board in the past. We're attempting to see whether today's technologies will let us develop a viable liquid fuel NTP engine prototype." The UAH work focuses in three areas, he says. "The first part is liquid uranium and gaseous hydrogen thermodynamic heat transfer modeling and analysis. Second, we'll be doing modeling and analysis of geometry and trajectory of gaseous hydrogen bubbles in a liquid uranium medium, and third, we'll perform experimentation to confirm the analytical predictions of dynamic and thermodynamic models." Besides Dr. Thomas, who is in charge of modeling missions, faculty involved in the research from UAH are Dr. Keith Hollingsworth, professor and department chair of mechanical and aerospace engineering, in charge of thermodynamics; Dr. Robert Frederick, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the Propulsion Research Center, overseeing experimentation; and Dr. Jason Cassibry, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, in charge of bubble dynamics. Aerospace systems graduate research assistants involved are Mitchell Schroll, a doctoral candidate; Pongkrit Darakorn na Ayuthy (a.k.a. Boom), a doctoral candidate; Ben Campbell, a master's student; Jacob Keese, a master's student; and Will Ziehm, a master's student. Mitchell Schroll, a graduate resident assistant and doctoral student in aerospace systems engineering, watches as air bubbles rise in a water column inside the Ant Farm static test apparatus at UAHs Johnson Research Center. Credit: Michael Mercier / UAH At MSFC, the researchers are working with Dr. Michael Houts, nuclear research manager. Partner URI is doing senior design projects on the drive systems for the engine's centrifugal fuel elements, including how to spin them up to operating speed, keep them at the desired rotational speed and spin them down. Drexel is developing the material properties of the cylinder wall and MIT is studying bubble dynamics. At U-M, researchers will look experimentally into the physics of the reactor itself, which is called neutronics. Penn State is researching neutronics and heating. At Johnson Research Center, UAH's scientists are building experimental apparatus to confirm their analytical predictions of heat transfer and bubble dynamics. Two exist so far, called the Ant Farm and the Bubbling Liquid Experiment Navigating Driven Extreme Rotation, or BLENDER. The devices use air bubbles in water to simulate the bubbling of hydrogen through the engine's core. The centrifugal NTP engine research fits well with other UAH research that Dr. Thomas leads for NASA to develop a spacecraft designed for use with solid fuel NTP engines. "We are conducting mission studies, looking at what all can you do with a solid fuel NTP propulsion system other than a crewed mission to Mars," he says. "Our work so far indicates that it will enable direct trajectories for un-crewed scientific missions to the outer planets in the solar system, and perhaps even sample returns from the Jovian moons." In a direct trajectory, a spacecraft flies directly to a destination. Current chemical propulsion systems must rely on proper planetary alignments to take advantage of gravity assists when flying by planets. "Those planetary alignments only come around once every few years," Dr. Thomas says. "With this liquid fuel NTP, you can perhaps even get to the Kuiper Belt on a direct trajectory." That would be quite a ride. The Kuiper Belt starts 4,400,000,000 km from the sun. Survey provides greater specificity on types, context of harassment, discrimination. Credit: AIP Statistics The existence of harassment and discrimination in academia has been well documented across a variety of fields of study. A report from the American Institute of Physics goes beyond the numbers to examine types of harassment experienced by members of the astronomy community over the span of a decade, highlighting the pervasiveness of the issue. The AIP Longitudinal Survey of Astronomy Graduate Students was initiated by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in 2006 to better understand the forms and long-term impacts of harassment in the field of astronomy. The study polled astronomy graduate students during the 2006-07 school year and followed up with those same people in 2012-13 and in 2015-16 after they entered the workplace. Across the study, 33% of the respondents reported experiencing harassment and discrimination at school or work. Those respondents were then asked to describe the circumstance of their harassment or discrimination. Four types of harassment and discrimination were prevalent in the answers: Biased assumptions that were communicated to the respondents regarding their status, career, and personal life Verbal put-downs in the form of jokes, criticisms, and undermining comments Demographic-based inequitable treatment that limited their social support and professional development Unwanted sexual attention, ranging from inappropriate comments to more serious behaviors such as threats, stalking, and assault "Our examination of the context reveals the depth and variety of forms of harassment and discrimination," said AIP's Rachel Ivie, co-author of the resulting report, Exploring Harassment and Discrimination Experiences in Astronomy. "Because harassment and discrimination are so pervasive, they seem to be part of the climate and structure of astronomical educational and work settings, occurring in many different situations and across career stages." The study respondents described incidents of harassment in locations ranging from classroom/seminar settings to academic conferences and social events to workplaces. Many of the incidents were based on gender, but some were based on other statuses like race or socioeconomic position. Some targets who reported the incidentseither through official or unofficial channelsdid not receive support, and in one case, the person was blamed for the reported behavior. "Strengthening efforts to eliminate all forms of harassment and discriminating behavior, and providing support to those who need it, are essential actions to create a safe and inclusive scientific community for all," said Michael Moloney, CEO of AIP. "This study illustrates that the astronomy community is right to continue to examine and question its cultureand other disciplines can surely draw lessons from this report." Since the AIP study was undertaken, AAS has implemented several measures aimed at reducing harassment in the astronomy community. The society adopted a clear code of ethics and an anti-harassment policy that governs behavior at AAS-sponsored meetings, publications, and other activities, backed by a complaint process and an ethics committee. It also implemented a site visit program, in which an astronomy department or institute can request an external committee, sent by AAS, to visit, conduct interviews, and assess the climate of the department. "A poll of recent graduate students is now needed to test our progress," said AAS president Paula Szkody. "Awareness is one critical aspect. Studies like the AIP Longitudinal Survey of Astronomy Graduate Students provide valuable insight into the realities and forms of harassment and discrimination in the field, better positioning us to continue to tackle such behavior as a community." "Harassment and discrimination can reinforce or realign power differentials in academic work and educational settings," said Ivie. "It is important to question and restructure the organizational settings that enable these behaviors." Explore further Hospitals lag in sexual harassment policies More information: Please click on the link to read the AIP Please click on the link to read the AIP Longitudinal Survey of Astronomy Graduate Students Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain The movement of high-growth firms that directly contribute to the regional economy may be more complex than previously thought, new research suggests. A case study in Franklin County, Ohiohome to Columbusfound that when growing firms moved within the county, almost equal numbers of them moved downtown or to the suburbs. Most likely was that they moved somewhere near their original location. That means the three prevailing theories that predict where growing firms will move are all correct: outward in search of cheaper prices, inward in search of better urban amenities, and nearby to minimize relocation costs. "These three patterns almost equally exist within urban areas. That means that there is not a single pattern that is dominating the growth of the region," said Yasuyuki Motoyama, author of the study and assistant professor of city and regional planning at The Ohio State University. The study was published recently in GeoJournal. Motoyama, who has been investigating small, high-growth firms for over a decade, said that Columbus makes a good case study because it has been a bustling economic center for just over 30 years, but now is an especially vibrant area for growing businesses. Using the business database InfoGroup, (now Data Axle) Motoyama was able to identify companies in the Columbus area that met the definition of small, high-growth firms in the study period of 2016 to 2019. These were firms that had 100% sales growth over the three-year period and had revenue of $1 million or higher in 2019. Motoyama identified 586 high-growth firms that met these criteria, which made up 2.1% of all businesses in Franklin County. The study tracked the 87 companies (14.8%) that moved between 2016 and 2019. These high-growth firms ended up tripling their share of the county's employment rates by 2019, and their share of the county's sales increased more than seven times, up to 10.6%. That suggests that these businesses will continue to grow and expand, and these fast-growing companies could end up becoming a huge factor in Ohio's economic development, Motoyama said. Results showed that 19.5% of firms in the study moved inward toward downtown, 17.2% moved outward from the center city and the highest percentage25.3%moved to nearby locations. The remainder moved out of the county. The study also found that contrary to popular belief, many of these high-growth firms that help drive the local economy aren't conventionally located in medical, pharmaceutical or IT fields. Instead, they cover a diverse array of disciplines and specialties. "High-growth companies exist in virtually every sector, including retail, restaurants, transportation companies, and other manufacturing companies," Motoyama said. Previous research into the movement of companies mainly focused on how the relocation of large manufacturing firms affected local communities. Typically, these kinds of firms can displace or add a great number of local jobs, but it's still unclear whether such displacement brings about a net positive in the workforce, since a gain in one city is considered a loss in another, Motoyama said. But locally developed high-growth firms contribute an enormous amount to the economy by directly adding both employment and wealth locally and nationally, he said. Motoyama's research also has implications for government policy. He says that the study suggests that one-size-fits-all incentive packages to attract and keep businesses for cheaper prices won't work, and a variety of options are needed to help local businesses thrive. "The government should be thinking about different kinds of support packages for different kinds of companies," he said. Motoyama hopes to continue his research into other communities in Ohio, including Cleveland or Cincinnati. "I think it would be important to conduct similar research in other metropolitan areas in Ohio," he said. "I'd like to investigate further what's happening in those areas that are experiencing different growth patterns: what kind of high-growth companies exist, and where they are moving." Explore further COVID-19 pandemic likely to cause sales tax loss for Ohio municipalities More information: Yasuyuki Motoyama, Where do high-growth firms go?, GeoJournal (2022). Yasuyuki Motoyama, Where do high-growth firms go?,(2022). DOI: 10.1007/s10708-022-10603-w Earthworms are considered essential ecosystem engineers underground. Researchers from iDiv and Leipzig University have now shown that they also play a major role in shaping aboveground communities. Credit: V. Gutekunst Earthworms introduced into northern North America have a negative impact on the insect fauna above ground. Soil ecologists, led by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Leipzig University describe this observation in the journal Biology Letters. The researchers found this impact for abundance as well as for biomass and species richness of insects. Their results indicate that changes in insect communities can have causes that have previously received little attention. These should be given greater consideration in nature conservation. At least since the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, there have been almost no earthworms in the northern part of North America. However, over the last few centuries, they have been introduced, probably through soil and plant transport from Europe. Since then, they have been dispersed and changed the soil significantly, with far-reaching consequences for the soil ecosystem. What impact these invaders have on the world above ground has, up to now, rarely been investigated. The study was performed in a forest near Calgary in Canada, which has areas that are either inhabited or uninhabited by earthworms. Here, the researchers used insect vacuum samplers to capture aboveground insects and compared the catches. They discovered that the abundance, biomass, and species richness of insects in areas with invasive earthworms and in areas without them differed significantly. Where earthworm biomass was highest, the number of insect individuals was reduced by 61%, insect biomass by 27% and species richness by 18%. Typical poplar forest in the research area near Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Credit: M. Jochum Insects above ground affected by invasive earthworms underground "We had expected that earthworms would have an impact on aboveground insects," says lead author Dr. Malte Jochum from iDiv and Leipzig University. "Even so, I was surprised at how pronounced the effects were, and that not only the abundance but also biomass and species richness were affected." The mechanisms by which the earthworms affect the insects are, however, still not clear. "It's possible that the earthworms eat the food and reduce the habitat of those aboveground insects, such as beetles and fly larvae, which break down dead plant material," says Jochum. Since the majority of insects are herbivores, it could also be hypothesized that the observed decline in insects is due to changes in the vegetation caused by altered soil conditions. In this case, however, the researchers were unable to detect any significant alteration in the number of plant species or plant coverage. "Still, this doesn't rule out the influence of the plants," says Jochum. However, the data on species composition and other functional characteristics of the plant communities have yet to be evaluated. The increase in predatory insect species and spiders was also striking. These seem to be benefitting from the changes. Underestimated causes for biodiversity loss to be considered in conservation "Up to now, only a few causes have been used to explain global changes in insect populations; mostly alterations in habitats above the ground," says senior author Prof Nico Eisenhauer from iDiv and Leipzig University. "These new results show that biodiversity loss can also have other causes which have, so far, received little attention and that these should be taken into consideration when developing management and conservation strategies for biodiversity." Malte Jochum, first author of the study, collecting samples with the insect vacuum sampler. Credit: R. Zeiss Introduced earthworm species are not only found in North America but on almost every continent. However, since there had been very few earthworms in northern North America for a very long time, the effect of these invaders is particularly pronounced. "For regions like Europe, where natural communities have always co-developed with earthworms, comparable negative effects due to new earthworm species are very unlikely," says Jochum. "Quite the opposite. Here they are important ecosystem engineers, which many important ecosystem functions depend on." Explore further Cattle manure biochar could offset earthworm greenhouse gas emissions in forest soil More information: Aboveground impacts of a belowground invader: how invasive earthworms alter aboveground arthropod communities in a northern North American forest, Biology Letters (2022). royalsocietypublishing.org/doi .1098/rsbl.2021.0636 Aboveground impacts of a belowground invader: how invasive earthworms alter aboveground arthropod communities in a northern North American forest,(2022). DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2021.0636 Provided by German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Volcanic lightning split the sky above Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai during a particularly violent eruption January 15, 2022. Credit: Tonga Geological Services On January 15, the volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai devastated the nation of Tonga. The eruption triggered tsunamis as far afield as the Caribbean and generated atmospheric waves that traveled around the globe several times. Meanwhile, the volcano's plume shot gas and ash through the stratosphere into the lower mesosphere. Just two months after the eruption, geologists have put together a preliminary account of how it unfolded. UC Santa Barbara's Melissa Scruggs and emeritus Professor Frank Spera were part of an international team of researchers that published the first holistic account of the event in the journal Earthquake Research Advances. The authors think that an eruption the day before may have primed the volcano for the violent explosion by sinking its main vent below the ocean's surface. This enabled molten rock to vaporize a large volume of seawater, intensifying the volcanic eruption the very next day. "This is definitely, without a doubt, the largest eruption since Mt. Pinatubo in 1991," said corresponding author Scruggs, who studies magma mixing and eruption triggering mechanisms, and recently completed her doctorate at UC Santa Barbara. She compared January's event to the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which was heard 3,000 miles away. Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai (HTHH) is a stratovolcano: a large, cone-shaped mountain that is prone to periodic violent eruptions, but which usually experiences milder activity. It's one of many along the Tofua Volcanic Arc, a line of volcanoes fed by magma from the Pacific Plate diving beneath the Indo-Australian Plate. Heat and pressure cook the rocks of the descending plate, driving out water and other volatiles. That same water decreases the melting temperature of the rock above, leading to a chain of volcanoes about 100 kilometers from the plate boundary. A submerged danger The islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha'apaiafter which the volcano is namedare merely the two highest points along the rim of the caldera, or central crater. Or they were, until the eruption blew most of the islands sky high. Scruggs first heard about the eruption as she scrolled through her Twitter feed while getting ready for bed. "I saw a GIF of the satellite eruption, and my heart just stopped," she said, pausing to find her words. She immediately knew that the event would cause massive devastation. "The scariest part was that the entire country was cut off, and we didn't know what had happened." She was already messaging other volcanologists as the events unfolded, trying to understand the images that satellites had so clearly captured. "We really just set out to try to understand what happened," Scruggs said. "So, we gathered all the information that we could, anything that was available within the first few weeks." The authors drew on whatever resources they could find to quickly characterize this eruption, including publicly available data, videos and even tweets. Using a variety of data sets, the team calculated that the January 15 event began at 5:02 p.m. local time (0402 1 UTC). The U.S. Geological Survey recorded a seismic event around 13 minutes later at the vent location. The first two hours of the eruption were particularly violent, with activity fading after about 12 hours. Top: Hunga Tonga and Hunga Haapai were separate islands that grew together over the course of seven years. Bottom: The eruption on Jan. 14, 2022 sunk the main vent below sea level, enabling the eruption the following day to all but obliterate the islands. Dates: Nov. 16, 2021; Jan. 7, 2022; Jan. 15, 2022; and Jan. 18, 2022. Credit: PLANET LABS PBC But eruption activity had actually started all the way back on December 20, 2021. And before that, the volcano had erupted in 2009 and again in 2014 and 2015. Scruggs believes these earlier episodes are key to understanding the violence behind HTHH's recent eruption, perhaps related to changes in the magma plumbing system at depth or the chemistry of the magma over time. Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha'apai had been separate islands until they were united by eruptions from the volcano's main vent, which created a land bridge. "This island was just born in 2015," said Scruggs. "And now it's gone. Were it not for the satellite era, we would not have even known it ever existed." On January 14, 2022 an explosion from the main vent razed this connection, sinking the vent beneath the ocean's surface. "Had that land bridge not been taken out, the January 15 eruption might have behaved just like the day before because it would not have had that excess seawater," Scruggs remarked. A staggering explosion Same volcano, one day's difference: On Friday the vent was above the water, and by Saturday it was below. "That made all of the difference in the world," Scruggs said. The team believes that the seawater played a large part in the violence and force behind the Jan. 15 eruption. Much like a bottle rocket, an eruption of this scale takes the right ratio of water and gas to provide the force to send it skyward. And it took off like a rocket, too. "It went halfway to space," Scruggs exclaimed. The ash plume shot 58 kilometers into the atmosphere, past the stratosphere and into the lower mesosphere. This is more than twice the height reached by the plume from Mt. Saint Helens in 1980. It was the tallest volcanic plume ever recorded. A truly staggering amount of lightning also accompanied the eruption. The authors suspect that vaporizing seawater caused the lava to fragment into microscopic ash particles, which were joined by tiny ice crystals once the steam froze in the upper atmosphere. The motion, temperature change and size of the particles generated incredible amounts of static charge separation that flashed above the eruption. For the first two hours of the eruption, about 80% of all lightning strikes on Earth split the sky above Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai. The authors estimate around 1.9 km3 of material, weighing 2,900 teragrams, erupted from HTHH on Jan. 15. "But the volume of the eruption was not the big deal," said Spera, a co-author on the paper and Scruggs' doctoral advisor. "What was special is how the energy of the eruption coupled to the atmosphere and oceans: A lot of the energy went into moving air and water on a global scale." The shockwave from Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haapai traveled around the world. Credit: Tim Schmit, NOAA/NESDIS/ASPB The shockwave traveling through the ocean triggered tsunamis throughout the Pacific, and beyond. What's more, the wave arrived faster than tsunami warning models predicted because the models aren't calibrated for volcanic eruptionsthey're based on equations that describe tsunamis generated by earthquakes. A second tsunami followed the atmospheric pressure wave. This shockwave even triggered a meteo-tsunami in the Caribbean, which has no direct connection to the South Pacific. Scruggs called it unprecedented: "Basically the whole ocean just kind of sloshed around for five days after the eruption," she added. Plenty of work to do Scientists are still piecing together what happened at the volcano, so they have yet to develop a complete understanding of the tsunami wave. However, it's an important task needed to update tsunami travel forecast systems so they account for this type of mechanism. Otherwise, warnings could be incorrect the next time a volcano like HTHH erupts, potentially costing more lives. Indeed, the event highlights the danger posed by unmonitored submarine volcanoes. Despite the devastation, the people of Tonga were relatively well prepared for the Jan. 15 eruption. The government had issued warnings based on the previous day's activity, and the nation had plans in place for eruptions and tsunamis. HTHH has experienced similarly violent eruptions in the past. A recent paper by researchers at the University of Otago, New Zealand revealed that a large eruption destroyed the caldera at the summit of the undersea volcano about 1,000 years ago. And similar volcanoes could well erupt in the same manner. Consider Kick 'em Jenny, another submarine volcano whose main vent is a mere 150 meters underwater. It's located just 8 km north of the island of Grenada. "Imagine if something like the Tonga eruption happened in the Caribbean," Scruggs said. The researchers worked quickly with only publicly available data. They plan to revisit all their findings as more information and samples become available and as more researchers publish their own findings on this groundbreaking eruption. Their primary goal was to provide a point of departure for future work on the topic. Scruggs is particularly keen on learning about the ash collected from this eruption. Volcanic rock provides a wealth of information to a trained geologist. Examining the material could shed light on the type of magma that erupted, how much of it there was and perhaps even how much seawater was involved in the eruption. "There's so many questions that have been raised," said Scruggs. "Things we didn't even think were possible have now been recorded." The UC Santa Barbara researchers will lead a special invited session on the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption at the Geological Society of America's 2022 annual meeting in Denver this October. "It will be exciting to see what scores of other earth scientists can discover about this unique volcano," Spera said. "We are just at the beginning." More information: David A. Yuen et al, Under the Surface: Pressure-Induced Planetary-Scale Waves, Volcanic Lightning, and Gaseous Clouds Caused by the Submarine Eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai Volcano Provide an Excellent Research Opportunity, Earthquake Research Advances (2022). David A. Yuen et al, Under the Surface: Pressure-Induced Planetary-Scale Waves, Volcanic Lightning, and Gaseous Clouds Caused by the Submarine Eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai Volcano Provide an Excellent Research Opportunity,(2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.eqrea.2022.100134 Student climate protest in Melbourne. Credit: Shutterstock The urgency of tackling climate change is even greater for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and other First Nation peoples across the globe. First Nations people will be disproportionately affected and are already experiencing existential threats from climate change. The unfolding disaster in the Northern Rivers regions of New South Wales is no exception, with Aboriginal communities completely inundated or cut off from essential supplies. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have protected Country for millennia and have survived dramatic climatic shifts. We are intimately connected to Country, and our knowledge and cultural practices hold solutions to the climate crisis. Despite this, we continue to be excluded from leadership roles in climate solution discussions, such as the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. This continued exclusion is why investigation of the impacts of climate change on First Nations people is needed. In October last year, the Lowitja Institute, in partnership with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander National Health Leadership Forum and the Climate and Health Alliance, brought together researchers, community members, young people and advocates from across the country at a round-table discussion. Together, they put together the findings for the Discussion Paper Climate change and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. How climate change impacts Indigenous peoples As the paper tells us, climate change threatens our social and cultural determinants of health, including access to Country, traditional foods, safe water, appropriate housing and health services. Aboriginal health services are already struggling to operate in extreme weather, with increasing demands and a reduced workforce. All these forces combine to exacerbate already unacceptable levels of ill-health within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations and compound the historical and contemporary injustices of colonization. During the round table, we heard powerful and moving stories from communities on the front line of climate change. Norman Frank Jupurrurla, a community leader from Tennant Creek, spoke of sacred waterholes drying up, ancient shade trees dying, temperatures rising, inadequate housing, power going out and spoiled essential food and medicines. Vanessa Napaltjarri Davis, a Warlpiri/Northern Arrente woman and Senior Researcher at Tangentyere Council in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, spoke of changes to the availability of bush foods and medicinesessential to our health and well-beingdue to changing temperatures and seasons. For example, as Norman Frank Jupurrurla wrote: "now the country is burning, getting destroyed, because of climate change. Already, I cannot see sand goannas any more." Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples hold a deep and painful knowledge of the role dominant culture, racism and colonial power dynamics play within climate change. Although there have been many suggested solutions to climate change, access to these solutions is not equally or equitably available across Australia. Norman Frank Jupurrurla demonstrated this when he shared the almost impossibly drawn-out process he has completed to become the first person to install solar panels on public housing in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory. Listening to Aboriginal communities experiencing the profound health impacts of climate change is essential to guiding government responses Aboriginal leaders tell @CroakeyVoice @LowitjaInstitut roundtable on #IndigenousClimateJustice21 https://t.co/Od4m7EiXIc #HealthyCOP26 CroakeyVoices (@CroakeyVoices) November 17, 2021 Indigenous peoples' voices excluded from climate change conversations Colonization has ignored Indigenous ways of knowing, doing and being, right down to the weather. Colonizers insisted we live according to just four seasons, instead of the many seasons our people knew and respected. This experience of marginalization continues today where we have not been sufficiently included in national and international conversations about climate change, including being pushed to the sidelines at COP26. The IPCC acknowledged this globally in its report last year. The report states that data and most reporting on climate change do not include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander or local knowledge in the assessment findings. The IPCC's most recent report looks to recognize this omission and focuses specifically on the importance of our role and knowledge in addressing the climate crisis and the need for climate justice. The calls from our work are clear. We must elevate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices within climate change action and center Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as leaders in protecting Country. In the words of Seed Mob, "We cannot have climate justice without First Nations justice." In seeking solutions, we must consider how colonial ideologies and practices around climate change can impact on our peoples. As Rhys Jones wrote, "It is not possible to understand and address climate-related health impacts for Indigenous peoples without examining this broader context of colonial oppression, marginalization and dispossession." The Uluru Statement from the Heart, a gift to the Australian People, provides the road map for action: We must correct power asymmetries and establish co-governance arrangements and become strong advocates of, not only our interests, but our capabilities to tackle climate change. We must restore access to basic rights that will lay the groundwork for action that includes appropriate community participation/decision-making and incorporates cultural, environmental and sustainable design. We must weave our knowledges and strengthen partnerships to ensure that our collective wisdom and knowledge as Australia's First Nations is integrated into climate adaptation and mitigation planning, directly benefitting the whole nation. Indigenous people know about this continent; we've looked after it for millennia. The Uluru Statement from the Heart gives the opportunity to restore that ancient powerfor the benefit of us all and the survival of the planet. Explore further IPCC reports still exclude Indigenous voices. Join us at our sacred fires to find answers to climate change This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Flash Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said on Monday that Egypt counts on "its strategic relations with France" to secure some supplies of basic commodities like wheat, in case the Ukrainian crisis continues for a long time. Madbouly's remarks came during his meeting with visiting French Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire in Cairo, according to a government statement. "Egypt and France share the same visions and concerns about the repercussions of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis," said the Egyptian prime minister, noting the longer the crisis continues, the more dire consequences it will have on the global economy. For his part, Le Maire affirmed his country's full support for Egypt during the economic crisis the world is facing, especially with regard to the global commodity market. He said France produces about 35 million tonnes of wheat annually and exports about half of them, highlighting France's readiness to cooperate with Egypt in this field. Earlier in the day, Le Maire held talks with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, discussing means of furthering economic cooperation between the two countries. During the meeting, the Egyptian president highlighted "the strategic relations between Egypt and France," according to the Egyptian presidency. Credit: CC0 Public Domain A new analysis of the prosecutions of refugees and asylum-seekers in the UK suggests that there are three main reasons why they do not fare well. Work published in the International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, suggests that there is only a "patchwork" of protections to safeguard refugees and asylum-seekers from unwarranted prosecution. There is also a major problem in that state and legal institutions operate in policy silos and fail to communicate with each other. Finally, there is a significant indifference among legal institutions to the plight of desperate people and moreover, they are deeply hostile towards them. John R. Campbell of the Department of Anthropology & Sociology at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London, UK, explains that the UK government has consistently prosecuted and convicted asylum-seekers. This he suggests is in contravention of the government's obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention. The underlying terms of the pertinent Article of the convention say that people "coming directly" from a country of persecution cannot be punished by the receiving state on the basis of their entry or presence in that state as being deemed "illegal" by the host government. Indeed, it says that "as far as possible states should facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of refugees." There is a caveat in that those who have gained nominally illegal entry to a country under these circumstances should present themselves to the authorities in a timely manner. The UK is not the only country to flout the convention, Campbell adds, but in so doing repeatedly, the UK has also then felt at liberty to adopt numerous measures and pass laws that are, he suggests, aimed explicitly at criminalizing and demonizing refugees and asylum-seekers. The legislation also sanctions 'carriers' the airlines and shipping companies, for instance. The UK now enforces passport and visa obligations on refugees and asylum-seekers that allow prosecutions to take place in order to reduce the number entering the country. The penalties have been maintained over years and have been buttressed by additional restrictive laws. Campbell suggests that the UK not only fails in the context of the 1951 Refugee Convention but its legal actions can be seen as an attempt to end the right of asylum. He writes that the British government needs to revise existing legislation so that refugees and asylum-seekers are given immunity from prosecution and it must rein in the tendency of the Home Office to undermine international law. In addition, it must reject the proposed Nationality and Borders Bill 2021, which criminalizes asylum-seeking. Explore further Paper critically examines the politics of asylum accommodation in the UK More information: John R. Campbell, Legal silo's and indifference: the wrongful prosecution of refugees and asylum-seekers in the UK, International Journal of Migration and Border Studies (2022). John R. Campbell, Legal silo's and indifference: the wrongful prosecution of refugees and asylum-seekers in the UK,(2022). DOI: 10.1504/IJMBS.2022.121728 Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A new study finds that temporary nature-based carbon removal can lower global peak warming levels but only if complemented by ambitious fossil fuel emission reductions. Nature-based climate solutions aim to preserve and enhance carbon storage in terrestrial or aquatic ecosystems and could be a potential contributor to Canada's climate change mitigation strategy. "However, the risk is that carbon stored in ecosystems could be lost back to the atmosphere as a result of wildfires, insect outbreaks, deforestation or other human activities," says Kirsten Zickfeld, a distinguished professor of climate science in Simon Fraser University's Department of Geography who is on the research team. The researchers used a global climate model to simulate temperature change through two scenarios ranging from weak to ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reductions. In the relatively weak emissions reduction scenario, carbon emissions continue through 2100. In the ambitious scenario carbon emissions reach net-zero by 2050. In order to meet the Paris Agreement's climate goals, the world will need to reach net-zero CO 2 emissions around or before mid-century, according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In both scenarios, it is assumed that carbon storage through nature-based climate solutions is temporary as forests are vulnerable to both natural and human disturbances. Therefore, nature-based climate solutions are anticipated to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere over the next 30 years then slowly release the carbon during the second half of the century. The team found that in a scenario with carbon emissions decreasing rapidly to net-zero, temporary nature-based carbon storage can decrease the level of peak warming. However, in a scenario with continued carbon emissions temporary nature-based carbon storage would serve only to delay the temperature increase. "Our study shows that nature-based carbon storage, even if temporary, can have tangible climate benefits, but only if implemented alongside a rapid transition to zero fossil-fuel emissions," says Zickfeld. The findings are published in Communications Earth & Environment. Zickfeld is also the lead author of the recent United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report released in summer 2021, and the IPCC's 2018 special report on the global warming of 1.5 degrees. The researchers also note that investing in protecting and restoring nature offers social and environmental benefits for local and Indigenous communities beyond storing carbon to mitigate climate change. They add that biodiversity, water and air quality are inherently valuable and that efforts to enhance these can also help to build community resilience to climate change. Explore further Asymmetry in carbon dioxide emissions and removals could skew climate targets: research More information: H. Damon Matthews et al, Temporary nature-based carbon removal can lower peak warming in a well-below 2 C scenario, Communications Earth & Environment (2022). Journal information: Communications Earth & Environment H. Damon Matthews et al, Temporary nature-based carbon removal can lower peak warming in a well-below 2 C scenario,(2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43247-022-00391-z Azimuthal anisotropy (black dashed lines showing the fast direction of wave speeds) in the mantle at 200 km depth plotted on top of vertically polarized shear wave speed perturbations (dVsv) after 20 iterations based on global azimuthally anisotropic adjoint tomography. The maximum peak-to-peak anisotropy is 2.3%. Red and blue colors denote the slow and fast shear wave speeds with respect to the mean model which are generally associated with hot and cold materials, respectively. Credit: Ebru Bozdag, Colorado School of Mines Earthquakes do more than buckle streets and topple buildings. Seismic waves generated by earthquakes pass through the Earth, acting like a giant MRI machine and providing clues to what lies inside the planet. Seismologists have developed methods to take wave signals from the networks of seismometers at the Earth's surface and reverse engineer features and characteristics of the medium they pass through, a process known as seismic tomography. For decades, seismic tomography was based on ray theory, and seismic waves were treated like light rays. This served as a pretty good approximation and led to major discoveries about the Earth's interior. But to improve the resolution of current seismic tomographic models, seismologists need to take into account the full complexity of wave propagation using numerical simulations, known as full-waveform inversion, says Ebru Bozdag, assistant professor in the Geophysics Department at the Colorado School of Mines. "We are at a stage where we need to avoid approximations and corrections in our imaging techniques to construct these models of the Earth's interior," she said. Bozdag was the lead author of the first full-waveform inversion model, GLAD-M15 in 2016, based on full 3D wave simulations and 3D data sensitivities at the global scale. The model used the open-source 3D global wave propagation solver SPECFEM3D_GLOBE and was created in collaboration with researchers from Princeton University, University of Marseille, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The work was lauded in the press. Its successor, GLAD-M25 (Lei et al. 2020), came out in 2020 and brought prominent features like subduction zones, mantle plumes, and hotspots into view for further discussions on mantle dynamics. "We showed the feasibility of using full 3D wave simulations and data sensitivities to seismic parameters at the global scale in our 2016 and 2020 papers. Now, it's time to use better parameterization to describe the physics of the Earth's interior in the inverse problem," she said. At the American Geophysical Union Fall meeting in December 2021, Bozdag, post-doctoral researcher Ridvan Orsvuran, Ph.D. student Armando Espindola-Carmona and computational seismologist Daniel Peter from KAUST, and collaborators presented the results of their efforts to perform global full waveform inversion to model attenuationa measure of the loss of energy as seismic waves propagate within the Earthand azimuthal anisotropyincluding the way wave speeds vary as a function of propagation direction azimuthally in addition to radial anisotropy taken into account in the first-generation GLAD models. They used data from 300 earthquakes to construct the new global full wave inversion models. "We update these Earth models such that the difference from observation and simulated data is minimized iteratively," she said. "And we seek to understand how our model parameters, elastic and anelastic, trade-off with each other, which is a challenging task." The research is supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, and enabled by the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Centerthe fastest as any university and the 13th fastest overall in the worldas well as the Marconi100 system at Cineca, the largest Italian computing center. "With access to Frontera, publicly available data from all around the world, and the power of our modeling tools, we've started approaching the continental-scale resolution in our global full wave inversion models," she said. Bozdag hopes to provide better constraints on the origin of mantle plumes and the water content of the upper mantle. Furthermore, "to accurately locate earthquakes and other seismic sources, determine earthquake mechanisms and correlate them to plate tectonics better, you need to have high-resolution crustal and mantle models," she said. From the deepest oceans to outer space MarsquakeCerberus Fossae event (Mw 3.1). The visualization shows the velocity of the seismic waves (vertical component). Researchers used Frontera to simulate the event, in collaboration with the NASA InSight mission. Credit: Daniel Peter, KAUST Bozdag's work isn't only relevant on Earth. She also shares her expertise in numerical simulations with the NASA's InSight mission as part of the science team to model the interior of Mars. Preliminary details of the Martian crust, constrained by seismic data for the first time, were published in Science in September 2021. Bozdag, together with the InSight team, is continuing to analyze the marsquake data and resolve details of the planet's interior from the crust to the core with the help of 3D wave simulations performed on Frontera. The Mars work put in perspective the dearth of data in some parts of the Earth, specifically beneath oceans. "We now have data from other planets, but it is still challenging to have high-resolution images beneath the oceans due to lack of instruments," Bozdag said. To address that, she is working on integrating data from emerging instruments into her models as part of her NSF CAREER award, such as those from floating acoustic robots known as MERMAIDs (Mobile Earthquake Recording in Marine Areas by Independent Divers). These autonomous submarines can capture seismic activity within the ocean and rise to the surface to deliver that data to scientists. Seismic community access In September 2021, Bozdag was part of a team awarded a $3.2 million NSF award to create a computational platform for the seismology community, known as SCOPED (Seismic COmputational Platform for Empowering Discovery), in collaboration with Carl Tape (University of Alaska-Fairbanks), Marine Denolle (University of Washington), Felix Waldhauser (Columbia University), and Ian Wang (TACC). "The SCOPED project will establish a computing platform, supported by Frontera, that delivers data, computation, and services to the seismological community to promote education, innovation, and discovery," said Wang, TACC research associate and co-principal investigator on the project. "TACC will be focusing on developing the core cyberinfrastructure that serves both compute- and data-intensive research, including seismic imaging, waveform modeling, ambient noise seismology, and precision seismic monitoring." Another community-oriented project from Bozdag's group is Ph.D. student Caio Ciardelli's recently released SphGLLTools: a visualization toolbox for large seismic model files. The toolbox based facilitates easy plotting and sharing of global adjoint tomography models with the community. The team described the toolbox in Computers & Geosciences in February 2022. "We provide a full set of computational tools to visualize our global adjoint models," Bozdag said. "Someone can take our models based on HPC simulations and convert them into a format to make it possible to visualize them on personal computers and use collaborative notebooks to understand each step." Robin Reichlin, Director of the Geophysics Program at NSF says that "with new, improved full-waveform models; tools to lower the bar for community data access and analysis; and a supercomputing-powered platform to enable seismologists to discover the mysteries of the Earth's and other planetary deep interior, Bozdag is pushing the field into more precise, and open, territory." Explore further A seismic mapping milestone More information: Caio Ciardelli et al, SphGLLTools: A toolbox for visualization of large seismic model files based on 3D spectral-element meshes, Computers & Geosciences (2021). Caio Ciardelli et al, SphGLLTools: A toolbox for visualization of large seismic model files based on 3D spectral-element meshes,(2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.cageo.2021.105007 Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun et al, Thickness and structure of the martian crust from InSight seismic data, Science (2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abf8966 SphGLLTools: github.com/caiociardelli/sphglltools Journal information: Science A map using satellite imagery and data from Google Earth showing the approximate start and end points of a 40-mile long Russian military convoy en route to Kyiv, Ukraine on March 1, 2022. Credit: Google Earth/Maxar Technologies Since Russia invaded Ukraine, we keep hearing that this war is like no other; because Ukrainians have cellphones and access to social media platforms, the traditional control of information and propaganda cannot work and people are able to see through the fog of war. As communications scholars and historians, it is important to add nuance to such claims. The question is not so much what is "new" in this war, but rather to understand its specific media dynamics. One important facet of this war is the interplay between old and new mediathe many loops that go from Twitter to television to TikTok, and back and forth. We have moved away from a relatively static communication model, where journalists report on the news within predetermined constraints and formats, to intense fragmentation and even participation. Information about the war becomes content, and users contribute to its circulation by sharing and commenting online. Modern warfare and media Modern warfare and media technologies have a long and complex history. During the First World War, airplanes served both as weapons and media by taking aerial photographs and drop propaganda pamphlets over enemy lines. Soldiers commonly used their personal cameras in the first months of the war before their political and military leaders prohibited such practices and put them in the hands of specialists. During the Second World War, each division of the German army had its own team of cinematographers filming the war. In 1943, when the army lacked resources, thousands of soldiers participated in the filming of Kolberg, a 1945 propaganda movie meant to boost German morale. The Vietnam War is often presented as the first "uncensored" war, as media scholar Daniel Hallin put it. During the Gulf War in 1991, the 24-hour coverage by cable news channels conveyed a different impression of war. Confronted by the neat videos images furnished by the military, journalists soon referred to it as the "Nintendo War." Since then, the implication of media in war has increased in speed and fragmentation. The development of cyberwar Cyberwar is a key component of the current war. It refers to all operations taking place on the internet, and to the physical infrastructure that supports it. This includes network disruptions, website jamming, and so on. Cyberwar occurs alongside classic media censorship, and includes the accelerated distribution of information. It comprises complex communication events between people and machines, and can be intentional, coordinated and deliberateor not. Cyberwar in Ukraine occurs at different scales. Drones can capture enormous data sets for analysis by artificial intelligence, and use that for precision targeting. This includes pinpointing the location of soldiers or civilians by heat maps, digital signals or social media posts. Many historical propaganda techniques extend into cyberspace, but an emerging new extension is the means to target and personalize disinformation. Aggressive military propaganda techniques combine with tools for online marketing. The ability to identify soldiers and their family members means that actual or fake threats can be made to persuade people to surrender. This strategy also includes circulating an insidious deepfake video of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky asking the Ukrainian people to surrender to the Russians. True or False, a segment on France 24, examined a deepfake video of President Zelensky that had been broadcast on a hacked Ukrainian news website. Censorship in Russia All official TV channels in Russia (TV1, Russia, Zvezda) have only been broadcasting their version of events: there is no war led by Russia, only a special operation. The Russian government focused on an unprecedented disinformation campaign targeting its own population, and muzzling independent media that had been already persecuted as so-called "foreign agents." A few days after the beginning of the invasion, the Kremlin passed the War Censorship Law to "prohibit the dissemination of fake news about the special operation" as well as use of words such as "war" (voina) and "invasion" (vtorzhenie)offenses are punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Official Russian television is broadcasting images of the Russian military as "liberating" Ukraine from "neo-Nazis and drug addicts." Russian television misleads the audience by extensively using fakes and triggering panic by referencing nuclear contamination. The audience is told that Ukrainians are causing all damage to themselves. Staged scenes are used to create a desirable image of Russian "liberators." One of them shows a welcoming crowd of Ukrainians in Kherson, happy to meet Russian troops and receive generous humanitarian aid. However, as a friend in Ukraine wrote to one of us on Telegram, after filming, the Russian army took this aid from the citizens and moved on. Finally, Russian television uses "denazification" in an attempt to justify their special operation in Ukraine to Russian audiences. This is intended to evoke a regressive nostalgia for the victory over Nazi Germany, and has been part of Putin's historical distortions for several years now. The international state propaganda channel RT (formerly Russia Today) is now banned in Europe and Canada. Battle for truth On March 9, a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian port of Mariupol was heavily shelled. The hospital's infrastructure was destroyed, and at least three people were killed and 17 injured. President Zelensky condemned the attack, referring to it as "ultimate evidence that genocide of Ukrainians is happening." Official Russian television claimed that the hospital was empty weeks before, and that the devastating photos of the destroyed site contained many inconsistencies. One of the photos of the hospital bombing showed a pregnant and injured young woman who was recognized as a local Instagram model. Hundreds of internet trolls immediately accused her of being a paid model to create fake news about the bombed hospital. Accusations of fakery, propaganda and censorship have always been part of war, but cyberwar includes additional complexities. The intensive and fast dissemination of both fake and real information, the amounts and types of data collected, and the extensive and real-time documentation of events reveal the integration of information and communication into all aspects of war. Explore further Fighting propaganda with censorship: A study of the Ukrainian ban on Russian social media This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Antarctic photographer Frank Hurley captured the Endurance stuck in the Weddell Sea. Credit: Frank Hurley/ Wikimedia Commons Tonight's federal budget will include more than A$800 million over ten years to provide a "clear marker" of Australia's "scientific leadership" in Antarctica. The funds will go towards drones and helicopters amid mounting (although somewhat exaggerated) concerns over Chinese activity in the region. But political assets in the polar region include more than expensive state of the art toys. Earlier this month, one of the most famous shipwrecks in history, Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance, was discovered in the Weddell Seaa part of Antarctica claimed by multiple nations. The Endurance There is enormous excitement around the discovery of the Endurance. The wreck provides a physical connection to a great tale of human survival, as it was the vessel used during the British explorer's 19141916 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. It became stuck in the ice and eventually sunk. Remarkably, none of the men died during the ordeal, despite having to camp on the ice for months during an austral winter. But now the Endurance has been found, who owns it and who should look after it? The Antarctic Treaty Antarctica is governed differently from other parts of the world. The Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959, with its first provision stating "Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only." It also provides for free and cooperative scientific investigation on and around the frozen continent. At the time of signing, seven countriesArgentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdomhad territorial claims in the region. But under the treaty, no country can assert (or deny) a claim to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica. Despite this strong legal foundation, cultural heritage provides an opportunity for nationsin this case Britainto assert their past, as well as their intended future, presence in the region. Historic sites in Antarctica The Antarctic is governed via annual meetings, attended by signatories to the treaty. At these meetings, countries can designate historic remains as official historic sites or monuments. At the 2019 meeting, the UK successfully proposed the Endurance wreck as an official historic site, despite not knowing its location or state at the time. After learning of plans by NGOs to search for the wreck, the UK said it wanted to "confirm the protection status of the vessel in the event that it is located." The "historic site" status protects "all artifacts contained within or formerly contained within the ship, which may be lying on the seabed in or near the wreck within a 150-meter radius." Who is responsible for the sunken ship? The Endurance22 expedition, backed by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, located the wreck in remarkable condition just over three weeks ago. This expedition had set itself the task of searching for and surveying the shipwreck. Since 2019, the UK has effectively designated itself as manager of the sitewhich includes the personal possessions within and all artifacts lying on the seabed nearby. The UK has also stated the wreck should not be not moved or disturbed and only photographed according to strict heritage guidelines. This is also in line with comments from Shackleton's granddaughter Alexandra Shackleton, who says there should be no "rummaging" and "whatever there is will stay there." These preemptive steps are somewhat controversial because the seabed on which the Endurance rests is an area contested between the UK and Argentina. Although, by definition, a seabed is not within claimed territory, it rests below waters belonging to claimed territorymeaning the wreck could be interpreted by the wider international community as lying outside of the UK's jurisdiction. Also worth noting is that the very heritage trust in charge of the expedition originates from hotly contested territory between the two countriesthe Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas. Other complications Another challenge is posed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. This sets out that archaeological and historical objects found at sea should be protected. The ship used to search for the wreck was provided by South Africa, while funding was provided primarily by UK private and commercial sources. South Africa has signed the convention, while the UK has agreed to abide by its rules, but is not a signatory. This has created a feeling of unease among the expert community, who understand that even though the wreck is not currently easy to access (for one, it is more than 3 kilometers below the surface), with technological developments, this situation may change. What happens now? Ultimately, the management of the site will set a precedent for the treatment of underwater cultural heritage in the region more widely. The big question policymakers and diplomats now face is whether a line will be drawn when it comes to having not-yet-found shipwrecks internationally recognized as heritage sites. Two more sites will likely test this question: the San Telmo and the SS Hampson. Spain proposed the San Telmoa Spanish naval ship that sunk in the Drake Passage in 1819 supposedly carrying the first "humans to live and die" in Antarcticaas an official historic site at the 2021 meeting. The SS Hampson is expected to be the large unidentified wooden sailing boat wrecked at Hampson Cove, Elephant Island. The UK is again the manager of the site, given it established the cove's official heritage status back in 1998. Like the recent discoveries of other wrecks, the Erebus and Terror in the high Arctic, these sunken ships represent more than just deteriorating artifacts. They provide a way for countries to demonstrate their historical occupation of a region where traditional displays of territorial sovereignty are banned. Explore further Shackleton's lost shipwreck discovered off Antarctica This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Kepler-186f was the first rocky planet to be found within the habitable zone, the region around a host star where the temperature is right for liquid water. Credit: NASA A refinement to a space weather model developed by a center director at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) could help scientists check out which planets outside our solar system are likely to have someone home. Exoplanets are what planets are called when they orbit stars outside our own solar system, and the effort to winnow out those that could harbor life has been intensifying. Now at the Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System, research by Dr. Junxiang Hu along with collaborators has developed a model for tracking stellar energetic particles that can influence the creation of life on exoplanets. These stellar energetic particles are too far away to be directly measured, so they need to be modeled from remote sensing inputs. "The energetic particles associated with superflares from young solar-like stars will impact the atmospheric chemistry of their close-in exoplanets, possibly generating prebiotic chemicals that could trigger life," says Dr. Hu. "The characterization of these impacts may be important in assessing chemical signatures of the habitability of exoplanets." Prior modeling used empirical approaches, but the new research applies physics to the endeavor. It doesn't directly identify habitable exoplanets, says Dr. Hu, but it can inform that search. "This work lays the groundwork for a series of future multi-disciplinary research projects dedicated to understanding the origin of life," he says. Dr. Hu refined the Particle Acceleration and Transport in the Heliosphere (PATH) model originally created in 2001 by Dr. Gary Zank, who since 2008 has been CSPAR director. That earlier model was focused on getting the correct physics mechanisms in place to model particle acceleration and transport, and then Dr. Zank's work was further extended over the years by Dr. Gang Li and other researchers at UAH. "Large solar flares are usually associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs)," says Dr. Hu. "PATH is a tested model that works rather well for solar energetic particle events, and in this work, we extend it to stellar events with some extremely fast CMEs." The new work, called the improved Particle Acceleration and Transport in the Heliosphere (iPATH) model, uses a physics-based approach to assess the energy spectra of energetic particles being emitted in stellar superflares. Dr. Hu began on the model in 2015 as his doctoral dissertation. Dr. Zank says the research is well-timed. "This work is all about space weather in the vicinity of exoplanets, a very hot topic, and we have the most important models in the world for this, all developed in the context of studying so-called gradual solar energetic particle events in the context of space weather," Dr. Zank says. "So, it's an interesting migration of space physics and space weather work to understanding habitability in the context of exoplanets and their space weather." While developing the new model, Dr. Hu teamed with Dr. Li and Dr. Zank. He collaborated with Dr. Vladimir Airapetian from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Sellers Exoplanet Environments Collaboration (SEEC) and Dr. Meng Jin from the SETI Institute. The iPATH modeling shows that earlier empirical results could be severely underestimating particle flows impacting exoplanets at very high energies, Dr. Hu says, so extreme superflares from other stars may have a much stronger influence on exoplanets than previously thought. "Our model's output energetic particle fluence and flux can provide valuable input for the subsequent atmospheric modeling of exoplanets in future work," Dr. Hu says. The new research serves as proof of concept that the model can work in other star-planet systems beyond the solar system, so the scientists didn't choose specific exoplanets to model for this endeavor. "In future work, we will choose close-in rocky exoplanets around magnetically active G, K and M dwarfs. In other words, we will select exoplanets that resemble early Earth for case studies," Dr. Hu says. "We are now working closely with NASA to bring the operational model into public use, under the support of NASA's Community Coordinated Modeling Center and NASA's Space Radiation Analysis Group." Explore further Superflares are less harmful to exoplanets than previously thought More information: Junxiang Hu et al, Extreme energetic particle events by superflare-asssociated CMEs from solar-like stars, Science Advances (2022). Junxiang Hu et al, Extreme energetic particle events by superflare-asssociated CMEs from solar-like stars,(2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi9743 Credit: Allen & Unwin Publishers Duane Hamacher's "The First Astronomers" explores the deep and living star knowledge of First Nations people from around the worldand challenges the notion that Indigenous knowledge is not scientific. This magnificent book is the latest in a growing body of work showcasing Indigenous knowledge of the natural world. It follows other popular texts, including Bill Gammage's The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011), Bruce Pascoe's widely debated and important Dark Emu (2014), Australia's First Naturalists (2019) by Penny Olsen and Lynette Russell, and the First Knowledges series edited by Margo Neale. Astrophysicist Hamacher has been guided by Elders and Knowledge Holders Ghillar Michael Anderson, Segar Passi, John Barsa, David Bosun, Ron Day and Alo Tapim. This book developed from a collaboration with Torres Strait Islander scholar Professor Martin Nakata, a leading authority on the intersection of Indigenous and Western ways of knowing. It's stunning in scope, impressive in detail and accessible in style. For readers with no background in astronomy (like me), terms are clearly explained. Importantly, Hamacher reflects on what he is learning throughout, demonstrating his willingness to listen and learn. His example reminded me to reflect on my own assumptions about different ways of knowing. Challenging Western scientific knowledge First Nations people have been observing the skies for millennia. This book recognizes that Indigenous and Western ways of knowing can work together. Indigenous astronomy has often challenged Western scientific knowledge, motivating further scientific inquiry. For example, auroras have long been witnessed by First Nations people, both in high latitudes near the Arctic and low latitudes in Aoteoroa/New Zealand and Australia. First Nations people have reported auroras sounding like "rustling grass, or a person walking through snow." Samithe indigenous people of the northernmost parts of Sweden, Finland and Norwayrefer to auroras as guovssahas, meaning "the light you can hear." The Western scientific community was dismissive of these "auroral sounds." But in 2016 a group of Finnish scientists, guided by Sami and Inuit traditions, confirmed that they exist. The movement of the planets and the twinkling of the stars Another concept that First Nations people understood early was the relative motion of the planets, including retrograde motion, when a planet appears to move backwards in the sky owing to its relative position to Earth. Winifred Buck, an Ininew Elder from Manitoba, Canada, explains that retrograde motion is referred to as mooswa acak or "moose spirit," because a moose is inclined to circle back when startled, in the same way that Mars appears to be circling back during retrograde motion. In the most intriguing chapter, Hamacher describes how the twinkling (scintillation) of starsa source of frustration in Western astrophysicshas been harnessed by First Nations people to understand atmospheric conditions. For example, for the people of Mabuyag in the Torres Strait, stellar twinkling indicates heavy wind, temperature change and approaching rain. The Wardaman of the Northern Territory use this twinkling to predict the approach of the wet season. Interpreting the colonial archive Variable starsstars that change in brightness through timewere not formally defined as a phenomenon by Western astronomers until 1836. Yet, as Hamacher reveals, First Nations people already knew about them. 65,000 yearsthe great history of Australian Aboriginal Astronomy. Credit: Kirsten Banks, TEDxYouth@Sydney. The Irish anthropologist Daisy Bates spent nearly two decades in Kokatha Country at Ooldea Mission in the Great Victoria Desert, where she recorded local oral traditions, including star stories, which were published throughout the 1920s. Bates recorded the story of Nyeeruna (Orion), a man in the stars, who pursued the young Yugarilya sisters. She struggled to explain the stars that brightened and faded in the story, wrongly attributing them to "emissions from nebulae." Unbeknown to Bates, she was recording traditional knowledge of the variable nature of Betelgeuse and Aldebaran. This raises an important point. Where specialist knowledge of First Nations people has been recorded by Western observers like Bates, early ethnographies need to be revisited and reassessed by those with relevant knowledge. This is a point that has been raised before, in books such as Dark Emu. Similarly, traditional knowledge also recognized novas, supernovas and supernova imposters. In 1847, William Stanbridge recorded Boorong observations of what (according to Hamacher) must have been the Great Eruption of Eta Carinae, which was incorporated into pre-existing oral traditions as a female crow. The strength of oral traditions In many examples throughout the book, Hamacher shows how oral traditions have captured and transmitted Indigenous knowledge. First Nations people possessed a complex understanding of positional astronomy, which was used to navigate the land and sea. They understood how cardinal points can be discerned from the stars. In the Torres Strait, the gills of the shark constellation known as Beizam (the Big Dipper in the northern hemisphere) are used to orient north. Long-distance travel routes are also mapped via the stars, with waypoints on land committed to memory. Travelers "sing the land," instilling a memory of the journey. Hamacher reveals that many paths and roads imposed by European colonists overlay existing Songlines and pathways: for example, the Great Western Highway through the Blue Mountains. In his final chapter, "The Falling Stars," Hamacher explores the cultural significance and memories associated with shooting stars and meteorite impacts. For many First Nations people, shooting stars are thought to mark the departure of a soul. The incredible intergenerational memory associated with the formation of what are today known in Arrernte language as Tatyeye Kepmwere (the Henbury Craters, on the boundary of Arrernte and Luritja lands in the Northern Territory) is also detailed. Aboriginal people had long known that the 15 craters were created by meteorite impact. In 1921, prospector James Mitchell asked a local Aboriginal man to accompany him to the site and the man refused, explaining in Luritja language that was where "a fiery devil ran down from the Sun and made his home in the Earth." In 1931, a geologist established the craters as a meteorite impact site. Radiometric dating has since confirmed that the craters are 4,200 years old. Recognizing Indigenous knowledge Hamacher closes his book by acknowledging the expanding cohort of Indigenous people currently working in astronomy. One is Dr. Stacy Mader, a Gidja Man who works for the CSIRO at Parkes Observatory in New South Wales. Another is Kirsten Banks, a Wiradjuri woman, Ph.D. Candidate in astrophysics at UNSW, and TEDx speaker. Karlie Noon and Krystal Di Napoli, Gomeroi women pursuing and holding qualifications in astrophysics, have co-authored Sky Country (2022), a book in the First Knowledges series. As an outcome of a 2016 working group, over a hundred star names from Indigenous languages were assigned to visible stars by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). In 2017, the organization formally approved the Wardaman name, Ginan, to the fifth-brightest star in the Southern Cross (Epsilon Crucis). Hamacher also recognizes the importance of incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing into school curricula, such as Professor Marcia Langton's education modules for secondary schools in the areas of fire, water and astronomy. The First Astronomers contains three key messages. Firstly, many so-called Western scientific "discoveries" have long been known by First Nations people, a point which echoes the message of other popular texts. Secondly, early ethnographies which include First Nations specialist knowledge, need to be interpreted by those with relevant knowledge of the subject material. Finally, the complex, scientific and long-established knowledge of the sky held by First People is retained through the strength of oral traditions. And as Hamacher states, "there is a great deal more we can learn if we simply listen." This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain "We know there has been a lot of drought on the prairies, and people's livelihoods are on the line," said Ariana Forand, a Master's student in the College of Agriculture and Bioresources at the University of Saskatchewan (USask). "It would be amazing to find modifications that would allow plants to resist multiple stresses." Forand recently led a project that explored how calcium and boron play a beneficial role in strengthening plant cell walls, helping reduce the dehydration that comes with freezing and drought and increasing resistance to pathogens. As it turned out, the perfect plant to test the theory on was onions. The team analyzed onion samples and collected data at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) in Illinois, thanks to the facility's partnership with the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan. "This project really builds on the work of a previous USask master's student, Jun Liu, who did freezing stress work," said Forand, "and we know that in both drought and cold, plants lose water in similar ways." Onions are good plants to use "because you can easily peel away a single layer of cells and see the changes in the cell wall," a plant structure key to protecting against stresses of various kinds. A unique feature of this research, the results of which were published in the journal Plants, was that it looked at multiple stresses at oncedehydration in Welsh onions and cooking onions, and pathogen resistance in Arabidopsis, a small flowering weed native to Africa. After adding calcium mixed with water to the greenhouse-grown onions, Forand used synchrotron X-ray microscopy to confirm not only that the plants had taken up the calcium but that it localized in the cell wall. Further testing with dry conditions showed a reduction in water loss in the treated plants. Similarly, boron is known to bind with pectin in the cell walls of Arabidopsis, strengthening its resistance to introduced disease. "We were looking at ways to structurally reinforce cell walls," said Forand. Confirming that calcium and boron reduce the impact of moisture loss and disease opens the door to looking for a similar effect in other plants. Dr. Karen Tanino, USask professor of plant sciences and Forand's supervisor, said that in any given year, "one stress could be more prevalent than anotheryou just can't really predict what it will be. This research presents a chance to protect plants against stress variations from year to year." Both Forand and Tanino believe expanding on their research presents opportunities to strengthen resistance to moisture loss and disease in both field crops and in the horticulture industry. Tanino, the first USask plant science researcher to make use of synchrotron techniques at the CLS in a project that examined freezing resistance incoincidentallyonions, said that while shoring up plant cell walls against various stresses is not a silver bullet, "it is a first line of defense." Explore further Cell wall research reveals possibility of simple and sustainable method to protect crops More information: Ariana D. Forand et al, With a Little Help from My Cell Wall: Structural Modifications in Pectin May Play a Role to Overcome Both Dehydration Stress and Fungal Pathogens, Plants (2022). Ariana D. Forand et al, With a Little Help from My Cell Wall: Structural Modifications in Pectin May Play a Role to Overcome Both Dehydration Stress and Fungal Pathogens,(2022). DOI: 10.3390/plants11030385 Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain The hunting and trade of wild animals for meat is a threat to global sustainability that should be managed on the same scale as deforestation, say researchers. Academics from 45 institutions across 16 countries have published 16 papers in a special edition of the African Journal of Ecology to draw attention to the impact of wild meat on biodiversity, and to call for effective monitoring and intervention strategies at a local and global scale. Professor of Tropical Ecology at the University of Stirling, Kate Abernethy, who is Editor-in-Chief of the African Journal of Ecology, said: "If people hunt faster than their prey can reproduce, then we are pushing declines in those species and others in the food chain. This impacts the ecosystems that support people's livelihoods. It also increases vulnerability in the tropical forests we need to save, to help us fight climate change. "These papers show how widespread subsistence still is in the tropics and how integral it is to people's rural livelihoods. They also show that subsistence hunting is having a large impact on biodiversity conservation in Africa, reducing populations of key endangered species and changing wildlife community structures." Monitoring and intervention Dr. Lauren Coad, a senior researcher with the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), who helped co-ordinate the special issue, added: "While much attention is paid to deforestation and fisheries management in global biodiversity strategies, wild meat hunting and trade is largely flying under the radar. Not only do we need to effectively monitor it, but we also need holistic approach to tackling it." The papers explore illegal wildmeat in the urban restaurant trade in the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the online trade of mammals and reptiles in Algeria; the decline of large mammals in Benin; the historical importance of pangolins in Mali; and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on pangolin trade in Cameroon. Zoonotic diseases have been associated with the wildlife trade, indeed pangolins were initially linked to the COVID-19 outbreak, though that has largely been disproven. The paper found that the bushmeat and pangolin trade continued in a major market in Cameroon during the pandemic despite national bans. Other papers examine conflicting laws in the Republic of Congo, how national park regulation affects hunting in Togo, and the impact of infrastructure changes on hunting and trade in the Republic of the Congo. Several others explore in depth how effective different interventions have been, such as local people monitoring hunting in Gabon, and a voucher system to monitor transport of animals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The papers are published in the special issue"Contemporary wild meat hunting, consumption and trade in Africa"of the African Journal of Ecology. Explore further Using conservation criminology to understand restaurants' role in urban wild meat trade DALLAS A group dedicated to finishing the work of World War IIs Monuments Men is betting on a deck of playing cards and reward money to help find missing works of art taken by the Nazis. Inspired by the U.S. militarys history of creating playing cards related to missions, the Dallas-based Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art recently announced the creation of the deck focusing on works including paintings, sculptures and reliquaries they believe still exist. What is needed is to raise awareness about what is missing, said Anna Bottinelli, the foundations president. Because you might know of a friend who has a beautiful painting on the wall and you dont even question that that painting belongs to someone else. The group, which is offering rewards of up to $25,000 for information leading to the recovery of each cultural object featured in the deck, will highlight a few of the cards each week on social media. Bottinelli said the foundation worked with museums, law enforcement and owners of lost art as they narrowed down which works to feature, which include those by Vincent van Gogh, Caravaggio and Claude Monet. One, a pastel by Edgar Degas titled Portrait of Mlle. Gabrielle Diot that was taken by the Nazis from a home in France in 1940, is known to have been sold in the mid-1970s to an unknown Swiss collector. Many of these have resurfaced in the recent past even as late as 2008 in auctions, Bottinelli said. The deck, being sold through the foundation and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, is a nod to a U.S. military tradition that includes a deck featuring the most-wanted fugitives from the Iraq War and one from WWII designed to help soldiers identify aircraft, Bottinelli said. FBI Special Agent Christopher McKeogh, a New York-based member of the agencys Art Crime Team, said he thinks theres a misconception that because its been nearly 80 years since the end of the war, that most of the missing art has been found. Theres still a lot of artwork to still be on the lookout for, McKeogh said, noting that the Nazi looting was on a scale that is really hard to comprehend. McKeogh said that in some cases, people havent realized an artworks past until taking it to a gallery or an auction house. In those cases, well take steps to seize it and hopefully repatriate the artwork, McKeogh said, adding that once such a history is uncovered, owners are usually very willing to have it returned. We can never undo the atrocities of the war, but any little thing that we can do to reunite one of these works with the heirs, its an important thing, McKeogh said. Robert Edsel, founder and chairman of the Monuments Men foundation, said that for those who do realize they own looted art, this is a chance for people to do the right thing, to come forward, to address the problem. Edsel started the foundation in 2007 to honor the Monuments Men, the group of men and women from Allied countries, many with art expertise, who served during WWII to protect cultural treasures as battles waged, and after the war helped return artwork plundered by the Nazis to the rightful owners. He has written several books on the Monuments Men, including one that the movie The Monuments Men starring and directed by George Clooney was based on. The foundation gets frequent calls from people wondering about objects from the war, and has over the years helped return more than 30, including a 16th century tapestry taken by a U.S. officer from Adolf Hitlers Eagles Nest retreat near the end of the war. The officers family gave the tapestry to a German museum in 2016. In addition to the 52 works of art in the deck, two cards the jokers each feature a set of Nazi photo albums of artwork which have missing volumes. Theres reason to hope someone might come across one: The foundation has already found five that had been brought home by U.S. soldiers after the war as souvenirs. It has always been a joy for us to see how much gratitude there was on both parties: The party that was returning something and the party that was receiving, Bottinelli said. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Feature: Chinese-built port, highway in Cameroon boost economy, regional trade Xinhua) 08:05, March 29, 2022 Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows a boat docking at Kribi Deep Seaport, Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) YAOUNDE, March 28 (Xinhua) -- When the Chinese arrived in Cameroon in 2011 to begin building the first phase of Kribi Deep Seaport, the Central African nation was hopeful of having a new transport corridor that would link its vast southwestern coastal area and neighboring nations. The main existing port in the commercial hub of Douala, some 150 km to the north of Kribi was virtually worn out by congestion. To increase transport capacity, the China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd (CHEC) set out to construct the Kribi port, and in three years works were completed. The new port has stimulated the country's economy and provided relief for the harbor at Douala port, the country's most populous city, while also providing dock space for larger ships, said Alain Patrick Mpila Ayissi, Manager of Land development and Environment department of Port Authority of Kribi. "Since the construction works ended in 2014 and the start of port operations in 2018, there has been notable increase in economic growth. The first indicator is the hikes in the custom revenues as a result of the port. We left from 750 million XAF (about 1.26 million USD) to practically 150 billion XAF per annum," said Ayissi. As a cheap logistics mode, the port is a fundamental foundation of Cameroon's industrialization process, said Xu Huajiang, general manager of China Harbour Central Africa Division of CHEC who oversaw the construction of the first phase of the port. "So far, after Kribi (port) was founded, it has attracted a lot of external investment. For example, there is already a cocoa factory invested by Cote d'Ivoire. There are two cement plants under construction. Many logistics enterprises have settled in to build their own yards and warehouses. There are also some Chinese enterprises coming to discuss investment with them in this area," Xu said. Kribi port is located on the Atlantic coast some 285 km from the capital Yaounde. It is strategically positioned in the center of the Gulf of Guinea and is surrounded by the 262 square km Kribi Industrial Area, destined to host new industrial and logistical developments. With Cameroon being a growing market, Kribi is expected to become a regional hub for the African Atlantic coast. Ship-owners will no longer run the risk of offloading part of their cargo elsewhere before docking in Cameroon, said Ayissi. "With the coming of the Kribi port, Cameroon has once again placed herself as the port entry to the sub-region. This (the port) has added more value to certain industrial projects in Chad, Central African Republic and Congo," he added. As part of the project, CHEC also constructed the Kribi-Lolabe highway that will cater to the requirements of the port transportation and logistics and make a contribution to local prosperity. The highway which includes the construction of 20 bridges, the total length of which is 2 km will serve as an important traffic artery in the Kribi region. Currently, CHEC is busy constructing the Kribi Deep Sea Port Phase II. After the completion of the project, it is expected to become a large container transit port and comprehensive hub port in Central and West Africa. Xu revealed that during the process of port and highway construction, over 1,000 jobs had been provided. Cameroonian workers employed by CHEC, including Eric Defo Fotso, Larissa Ekale Koule and Fran Mbofris told Xinhua that building their country's largest port is an opportunity to update their own skills and contribute to the country's industrialization. "We have project coordinators with a lot of experience be it in administrative affairs, project management and I got to live the Chinese culture. We get to see different things from what we heard since childhood. Just working with them is like you travelled to China to learn about this (skills)," said Fotso, 32, who coordinates projects at the site. "Every nation, like Cameroon aspires to emerge. So it's an honor for us to have China and her expertise and who willingly accepted to share it with us," added 26-year-old Koule whose main assignment is to ensure that all onsite workers are in good health and that there are no job-related illnesses. "They (CHEC) have given us a great opportunity. Our livelihoods have improved significantly," said Mbofris who spent seven years in China teaching the English language and now works as an interpreter with CHEC. Ayissi said the Kribi port project is a glaring example of Cameroon's participation in the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, adding that the country is committed to unlocking the potential of interlinked production networks and value chains. Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows cranes unloading containers at Kribi Deep Seaport, Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows the construction site of the breakwater at Kribi Deep Seaport, Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) Alain Patrick Mpila Ayissi, manager of Land development and Environment department of Port Authority of Kribi, talks during an interview with Xinhua in Kribi, Cameroon, March 14, 2022. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows a boat docking at Kribi Deep Seaport, Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows the construction site of the breakwater at Kribi Deep Seaport, Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows a view of the highway built by the China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd (CHEC) for the transport of goods from Kribi Deep Seaport in Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows the construction site of the breakwater at Kribi Deep Seaport, Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows Eric Defo Fotso, engineer of the China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd (CHEC), working in his office in Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows trucks transporting containers at Kribi Deep Seaport, Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows cargo containers stored at Kribi Deep Seaport, Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) Flash UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday launched an initiative for a humanitarian cease-fire in Ukraine. "Today I am announcing that in the exercise of my good offices, I have asked Martin Griffiths, the coordinator of our humanitarian work worldwide, immediately to explore with the parties involved the possible agreements and arrangements for a humanitarian cease-fire in Ukraine," he told reporters. The one-month-old conflict between Ukraine and Russia has led to the senseless loss of thousands of lives, the displacement of 10 million people, the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure, and skyrocketing food and energy prices worldwide. This must stop, said Guterres. He stressed that there must be a political solution. "The solution to this humanitarian tragedy is not humanitarian. It is political. I am, therefore, appealing for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire to allow for progress in serious political negotiations, aimed at reaching a peace agreement based on the principles of the United Nations Charter," he said. A cessation of hostilities will allow essential humanitarian aid to be delivered and enable civilians to move around safely. It will save lives, prevent suffering, and protect civilians, he said. "I hope a cease-fire will also help to address the global consequences of this war, which risk compounding the deep hunger crisis in many developing countries that already lack fiscal space to invest in their recovery from the pandemic, and now face soaring food and energy costs." Guterres made a strong appeal to the parties to the conflict and the international community as a whole to work with the United Nations for peace in Ukraine. UN humanitarian agencies and partners have reached nearly 900,000 people, mainly in eastern Ukraine, with food, shelter, blankets, medicine, bottled water, and hygiene supplies in the past month, he said. ALBANY Fort Edward Police Chief Justin Derway and Sgt. Dean Watkins both pleaded not guilty to felony counts of offering a false instrument for filing in Albany City Criminal Court on Monday. Both officers, who are currently on leave from the department, appeared before Judge John Reilly to be arraigned on the 11 felony counts each is charged with. Watkins attorney waived the right for a formal reading of the charges Monday morning, after agreeing the counts were understood by the state Attorney Generals Office and Watkins representation. Outside the courthouse, Watkins attorney Thomas Capezza offered a statement to the news media. The only thing I will say is this: He has spent a very long time in public service dedicated to public safety. He deserves more than a rush to judgment. Give him the benefit of the doubt, Capezza told reporters on Monday. Derway and Watkins were released on their own recognizance, but were required to report to the state police offices inside the Empire State Plaza to complete the booking process following the court proceeding. A virtual conference scheduled for defendants attorneys was set for April 18. The charges stem from a complaint filed by the Attorney Generals Office that claims Derway and Watkins falsified police training records in October 2019. The felony complaint was brought to Albany City Court by Attorney Generals Office Detective Supervisor Samuel Scotellaro III, claiming both officers signed final evaluation field training documents that were submitted to the New York State Department of Criminal Justice Services. The DCJS is a state agency tasked with setting the standards for police training across New York state and is responsible for certifying police officers and police training officers. The documents state that Watkins and Derway signed evaluations verifying police trainees completed the requisite requirements for the police training program, when defendants did not directly observe completion of various training performance areas. New police recruits are required to complete field training hours as a continuation of the job screening process and are required to complete police duties under the supervision of an appointed field training officer for a minimum of 160 hours. The training officer and the recruit are required to fill out and sign daily observation reports to account for the training hours and submit the documents along with the final evaluations to the DCJS to grant the recruit certification. The Attorney Generals Office complaint claims 15 police recruits were approved for a Basic Course for Police Officers directed by Watkins, which is required within one year of appointment to law enforcement, to be completed between Oct. 20, 2018, and Oct. 20, 2019. Eleven of the recruits were employed by the Fort Edward Police Department. At the time of the course, Derway and Watkins were the only certified field training officers in the department. Watkins signed off on the training of seven officers and Derway signed off on four, according to the complaint. The Attorney Generals Office stated that discrepancies were discovered after the DCJS requested the daily observation reports associated with the 11 trainees. Specifically, they observed that Watkins and Derway worked an astronomical number of hours as an FTO (field training officer). Watkins was listed as working for 71 out of 78 calendar days for a total of 892.5 hours; he reportedly worked several shifts exceeding 24 consecutive hours and often had three or more recruits assigned to him simultaneously, the complaint reads. As for Derway, the complaint also states he was assigned multiple recruits during the same shift and worked 51 out of 67 calendar days as an FTO for a total of 510 hours. These numbers prompted the state Division of Criminal Justice Services to request the attendance records of Watkins and Derway. It was then discovered that Watkins signed off on 668.5 hours of field supervisor he did not work and Derway signed off on 228 hours he did not actually work, according to the complaint. Jana DeCamilla is a staff writer who covers Moreau, Queensbury, and Lake George. She can be reached at 518-742-3272 or jdecamilla@poststar.com. Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. GLENS FALLS Glens Falls police conducted a citywide manhunt in Glens Falls on Monday in search of the man who robbed the Glens Falls National Bank on Broad Street that morning. The man entered the bank about 10:25 a.m., clad in a camouflage bandana, a gray hoodie and dark sunglasses, and he slipped a bank teller a note demanding an undisclosed amount of money, police said. The suspect received the money, exited the building and fled by foot on Mission Street heading north, police said in a news release on Monday. Cameras inside the bank revealed the suspect to be a white man, between 5 feet and 5 feet, 4 inches tall, wearing a tan-colored jacket and green pants with a white logo imprinted on the left leg. Police said the suspect did not have a weapon and there were no injuries. All schools in the Glens Falls City School District went into lockout mode as an extra safety precaution Monday morning while the robber was at large. Our school resource officer is in constant communication with the police department, Sky Heritage, the district spokesperson, said Monday afternoon. This frequent communication allowed for schools to respond immediately. As of 10:40 a.m., the schools were closed off to the outside world while classes continued as usual. Dismissal for all the schools happened at the usual time with extra security and school resource officers who escorted students from the buildings. School officials said their lockout procedures are followed in response to an actual or potential threat from outside the building. Glens Falls National Bank closed its Broad Street branch for the rest of the day after the incident occurred. The bank issued a statement on Monday saying: We are thankful that our staff are safe and that our security protocols helped to ensure the safety of all involved. In the beginning of the search, Mission Street was closed off for a short period of time. Helicopters were deployed by the New York State Aviation Unit. Along with the aviation unit, New York State Police, Warren County Sheriffs Office and the Washington County Sheriffs Office K-9 Unit assisted the Glens Falls Police Department in the investigation. This is the third robbery to happen this month in the area. Two local men were arrested Saturday in connection with a bank robbery in Fulton County. Gary Morehouse, 33, of Queensbury, and Jared Ellis, 31, of South Glens Falls, were charged with felonies in connection with the robbery of the NBT Bank in Northville. They fled the scene in a vehicle, and after a short pursuit that ended in the town of Providence, were caught. On March 13, an armed robbery took place at the McDonalds in South Glens Falls. The suspect left the scene with an undisclosed amount of money in a bag. The suspect was completely covered and therefore was not able to be identified. However, authorities believe he is 5 feet, 6 inches tall. Drew Wardle is a reporter for The Post-Star. You can contact him at 518-681-7343 or email him at dwardle@poststar.com. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 3 Sad 2 Angry 8 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. GLENS FALLS The Glens Falls Police Department is looking for the man who robbed a local bank on Monday morning. Police are searching for the man who robbed Glens Falls National Bank on Broad Street in Glens Falls about 10:30 a.m. Police say the suspect is a white man, between 5 feet and 5 feet, 4 inches tall, who was wearing a tan jacket, gray sweatshirt with a hood, and green pants with a white logo on the left leg. Video footage from the bank shows that he was also wearing sunglasses and a camouflage bandana. According to police, the man entered the bank around 10:25 a.m. and handed a note to a bank teller demanding money. After he took an undisclosed amount of money, he left the bank by foot and headed northbound on Mission Street, police said. There were no injuries and the suspect did not have a weapon, police said. The search started immediately after the incident, forcing some roads in the vicinity to close for a time. Helicopters were deployed and were seen over Glens Falls. Glens Falls Police Department received assistance from New York State Police, New York State Police Aviation Unit, Warren County Sheriffs Office and the Washington County Sheriffs Office K-9 Unit. As of 10:40 a.m. Monday, all the schools in the Glens Falls City School District went into lockout while police searched for the suspect. Skye Heritage, a spokesperson for the district, said that dismissal time would not change, but students would be supervised by extra security. In a message posted on the Glens Falls City School District website, officials said: "All schools students and staff members are safe, accounted for, and continuing their day inside the building with all doors and windows secure. The lockouts will be lifted when we are notified by police that their activity has ended." School officials said their lockout procedures are followed in response to "an actual or potential threat from outside the building." The lockout forces all students and staff to remain inside the building, while all exterior doors are locked, and classes continue as usual inside the school. School officials said they will update families and the community when the situation is resolved. Check back with poststar.com for more on this story. Drew Wardle is a reporter for The Post-Star. You can contact him at 518-681-7343 or email him at dwardle@poststar.com. Love 1 Funny 4 Wow 3 Sad 0 Angry 3 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Though Im often in search of unique and outside-the-box sandwiches, I also like to include a wide variety of classics in this column to make sure all bases are covered. Cheesesteaks, Italian subs and things of that nature have all been covered in On a Roll and will continue to be. A few weeks back I featured a BLT that I had high hopes for, but it ended up missing the mark. Someone asked me where I would suggest they go instead for a great BLT, and I was embarrassed to say that I didnt have a go-to spot ready to recommend. That needed to be changed immediately, so I put my thinking cap on for a minute and asked myself what is the key to a really great BLT? Well, really great bacon, obviously. So I headed down to the one place I know on at the Jersey Shore that smokes their own bacon on site Gaiss Market in Villas. Gaiss is a charming, old-school butcher shop, market and deli that stocks a checklist of amazing culinary items in an incredibly small space. Everything from fresh sausages and various smoked meats to bacon on a stick and a full lineup of house-branded seasonings, spices and sauces are there for the taking. Its the kind of place where I always have trouble walking out without at least 10 more items than I originally came in for. I ordered up their BLT and hoped it would clear the good name of this sandwich once and for all. Heres what I thought of it: The Bread: The BLT at Gaiss comes on a long, soft torpedo roll, which flips the script from the get-go, as most spots traditionally serve this sandwich on some form of basic white bread. The roll was sturdy, but on the softer side, and that was a good thing, as an overly crusty or hard roll wouldnt pair well with a BLT. This one was just doughy enough and had some great flavor, too. The Meat: As mentioned, Gaiss Market actually produces their own bacon, alongside many other meats such as pork roll, hot dogs and some of the most furiously delicious sausages you will find anywhere including their bacon and cheddar brats that are hands down the best in South Jersey. Not everything they sell is smoked on site, though, so when ordering your BLT, be sure to ask for the house-made bacon if you want the good stuff. I was so happy to take my first bite into the sandwich and find such wonderfully crisp and tasty bacon. It performed a perfect balancing act between salty and smoky, with neither element being too overpowering. While I could have used one or two more slices of it, I enjoyed what was on there immensely. The Veggies: The L was shredded and crisp, and the T cool and refreshing. Each was a lovely counter to the bacons savory porkiness. And I can only imagine that when Jersey tomatoes are in season, this sandwich could be out-of-control good. Ill be back in July to confirm that. The Cheese: I know cheese is not listed in the abbreviated ingredients B, L or T, but outside of the fact that BLTC is a less catchy name, I have never really understood why my good buddy Mr. Cheese was not allowed in the clubhouse when it came to this sandwich. Im never one to support this kind of culinary blackballing, so I added a bit of white American to my sub, and I didnt regret it one bit. Fight the power. The Condiment: Mayo, of course. They used Hellmans, which is the standard and tasted fine, but for a place that makes so many of their own sauces, mustards, dressings and condiments, a nice homemade mayo that you cant get at every local supermarket would have taken things up a notch. The Bottom Line: The BLT at Gaiss market was excellent and more than exceeded in its job re-instating my faith in this archetypal sandwich. And the store itself is an absolute treasure. But I must say that Gaiss sandwich menu needs a serious overhaul. This place puts out some of the best smoked meats anywhere in the area, yet the menu is fairly basic and doesnt play to their strengths like it should. How is there a case full of fresh brats, kielbasa and Italian sausages 5 feet away, but no sausage sandwich of any kind on the menu?? That should be their flagship sub. Why are the house-made pork roll and bacon not the stars of their own incredible breakfast sandwiches? With a few tweaks, the deli counter and grill at Gaiss could have a line around the block if they wanted to. The Score: 8.8 Gaiss Market is located at 1215 Bayshore Road in Villas. Go to GaissMarket.com. CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE A $3 million gift will mean a new name for the revamped emergency department at Cape Regional Medical Center, and a big head start to a $12 million fundraising campaign by the Cape Regional Foundation. The donation, recently announced by hospital officials, will mean the department will be renamed the Larry L. Luing Emergency Department. Luing was a longtime summer resident in Stone Harbor who died in 2016. The project, which will also include an updated and expanded radiology department, follows the opening of the 19,000-square-foot Claire C. Brodesser Surgery Center last May and will be the latest big investment in Cape May Countys only hospital. The total cost of the upcoming work is estimated at $19.9 million. Work will include adding dedicated radiology equipment to the emergency department. Moving surgery to the new center has freed up space to update and expand the emergency department and the radiology department. The radiology department expansion includes a new interventional radiology suite, CT scan, special procedures suite and fluoroscopy suite, according to hospital officials. The emergency department will increase to 42 beds from 33, said Joanne Carrocino, president and CEO of Cape Regional Health System. Big expansion, new partnerships for Cape Regional CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE With a multimillion-dollar expansion underway for a new out-patient s Were very excited about our new construction, she said. Plans still need the approval of the state Department of Health and the Department of Community Affairs, hospital officials said. We are hopeful we will get all those approvals within 90 days, and we hope to start work this summer, said Tom Piratzky, executive director of the Cape Regional Foundation, which raises funds to support Cape Regional Medical Center. He said the work on the radiology department will take about seven months, and then the work on the emergency department can begin. That work is estimated to take an additional seven months. With the surgery center moved to the new building, the emergency department can continue in its current location until the work is completed. Cape May County only has about 92,000 residents year-round, but on summer weekends, that number can climb to more than a million. The hospital must be ready to deal with the annual influx, Carrocino said, which includes adding staff each summer. The expanded emergency department is needed, she said. We will absolutely fill these bays, Carrocino said. Piratzky added the year-round population has grown and some previous summer residents now stay in Cape communities for more of the year as remote work becomes more practical and accepted. Big expansion, new partnerships for Cape Regional CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE With a multimillion-dollar expansion underway for a new outpatient su The existing emergency department needs more clinical space and dedicated radiology technology and equipment, Carrocino said. That will allow staff to treat a variety of conditions, ranging from life-threatening illnesses and injuries to minor medical problems. This very exciting project will continue to enhance our mission to provide the highest quality health care to the residents and visitors of Cape May County, she said. The plans incorporate lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, Carrocino said, including a negative-pressure room that can be used in cases of highly transmissible airborne illnesses. Luings sons Kevin, Randy, Timothy and Brian notified Cape Regional of their plans to donate the funds through a family foundation Luing established in 1998. Through the Larry L. Luing Family Foundation, we look to honor our father and recognize his love for Cape May County with this gift to establish the Larry L. Luing Emergency Department at Cape Regional Medical Center, Luings sons said in a statement. The recent COVID19 pandemic has highlighted the need for more space at the medical center. Larry Luing first came to Stone Harbor for the weekend in 1966. The next year, he rented a vacation house with his family, and then in 1971, he bought the Keystone Court Apartments at 94th Street and Second Avenue. His family spent summers in one of the six apartments where they helped clean and maintain units between guests, according to family members. He purchased other houses in the resort, and other apartments and businesses, including The Leeward Condominium, which opened in 1985. Luing was the president of Berkeley College, with campuses in New York and New Jersey. During his time there, he helped transform it into a four-year school. He worked at the school for 46 years, according to information from the family. He was also a Korean War veteran. Family members said he always considered Stone Harbor home. We are proud to associate our fathers name with Cape Regional Medical Center and hope that our gift will inspire others to step forward, reads the statement from the Luing family. Contact Bill Barlow: 609-272-7290 bbarlow@pressofac.com Twitter @jerseynews_bill Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. HAMILTON TOWNSHIP Evidence in the death of township teen Tiffany Valiante tested by a forensic lab was mishandled by the New Jersey Transit Police Department, according to a report released Tuesday by a forensic specialist hired by her family. We have extensive experience over decades performing analysis on evidence with degraded DNA; however, in this instance, we were able to obtain very little DNA for comparison due to the manner in which the evidence was collected and maintained," Dr. Julie A. Heinig, laboratory director of Forensics and DNA Technical Leader with the DNA Diagnostic Center, said in a statement Tuesday. Heinig cited problems with how evidence was packaged by the New Jersey Transit Police Department, saying some of the evidence tested was stored in plastic bags over paper ones. This caused "moisture-inducing bacterial contamination," she said. A judge previously ordered the police department to hand over evidence for testing, some of which included a headband, t-shirt and shoes. In her report, Heinig cited problems with how evidence was packaged by the New Jersey Transit Police Department, saying some of the evidence tested was stored in plastic bags over paper ones. This caused "moisture-inducing bacterial contamination," she said, adding that not handling evidence properly can make it difficult to preserve any DNA. Heinig also said other pieces of evidence were improperly logged, saying they were not labeled with initials of those who handled the them to maintain a chain of custody. She said doing is is industry standard. Tiffany's blood from her blood card could only be identified using paternity testing because it was improperly preserved, she added. The police department declined to comment on the matter Tuesday. Valiante, who was 18 at the time of her death, died in 2015 when she was struck by a New Jersey Transit train a few miles from her home. The state Medical Examiner's Office ruled her death a suicide within 48 hours after her death. Her family, however, continues its assertion that the teen bound for Mercy College, in Dobbs Ferry, New York, showed no signs of being suicidal, believing she was a murder victim. "We know her killer or killers are still free and must be held accountable for Tiffanys death," Valiante's parents, Stephen and Dianne Valiante, said in a statement Tuesday, adding that they'll be appealing to the state Attorney General's Office to continue investigating her suspicious death. The state Attorney General's Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. Since Tiffany's death, the Valiantes have fought for permission to independently test the evidence from the scene, releasing it from the New Jersey Transit Police Department's custody. This report by DDC reinforces our view that there was a gross rush to judgment by investigators, who hastily determined Tiffanys death was a suicide; they never treated the scene like a crime scene and, clearly, mishandled key evidence that we now conclusively learn was useless when finally subjected to DNA testing," Paul D'Amato, the family's attorney, who is handling the case pro bono, said in a statement Tuesday. This is a developing story. Check back for updates. Contact Eric Conklin: 609-272-7261 econklin@pressofac.com Twitter @ACPressConklin Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP Retired Rear Adm. Kevin Sweeney, a former chief of staff to U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, will discuss Russias war against Ukraine and the U.S. response in a one-hour presentation April 6. A Conversation with Rear Admiral Kevin Sweeney, is sponsored by the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy at Stockton University and The Press of Atlantic City. The event will be held over Zoom at 4:30 p.m. April 6. Other panelists include John Froonjian, executive director of the Hughes Center, William Hughes Jr., a principal in the law firm of Porzio, Bromberg & Newman, and Buzz Keough, executive editor of The Press of Atlantic City. Sweeney is a highly respected national security expert with decades of leadership experience both in and out of government. He was the primary adviser to Mattis across the full spectrum of national security issues, from great power competition to counterterrorism missions. He oversaw the Department of Defenses strategic initiatives and daily operations around the world. Sweeney served more than 32 years as a surface warfare officer before retiring from the U.S. Navy in 2014. He also is founder and principal of KSweeney Consulting LLC, a national security consulting firm, and a senior adviser at McKinsey & Company and The Roosevelt Group. Sweeney serves on the Board of Directors for Airbus U.S. Space & Defense and Fincantieri Marinette Marine, among service with other boards and organizations. There will be no live audience. To participate in the event, register at stockton.edu/hughes-center. The discussion also will be streamed via YouTube Live on both the Hughes Center website and The Press of Atlantic City website. The program will be archived by the Hughes Center for future viewing. The public is invited to suggest topics or pose questions for Sweeney. Questions should be sent to wkeough@pressofac.com prior to the live event. Contact Eric Conklin: 609-272-7261 econklin@pressofac.com Twitter @ACPressConklin Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. SEA ISLE CITY Like all wars, the war in Vietnam was brutal, Richard Lomax told a crowd gathered Tuesday afternoon at the war memorial on Landis Avenue for the citys observance of National Vietnam War Veterans Day. Lomax served as a Navy corpsman during the war, one of the combat medics accompanying Marines. Today, he is a trustee of VFW Post 1963 in Sea Isle. He said he graduated from high school in 1966. Our generation, the young generation of Americans, were the last draftees in our country, he said. We were asked by our country to fight the war to save Southeast Asia from Communism. We were young, probably naive, but we grew up fast. Lomax cited a quote from the 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns, who described war as mans inhumanity to man. He said he could not agree more. Lomax and other speakers said veterans who served in Vietnam faced unbelievable hardships, and many then felt unwelcome at home. Organization seeks to help Lower Township veteran LOWER TOWNSHIP In the kitchen of his ranch house close to the border of West Cape May, Edg In the face of persistent anti-war protest, they felt alienated and unappreciated, said Ruth Brown, treasurer of the VFW Post Auxiliary. We can never, and we will never let that happen again. More than 60 people gathered at the event, which included the unveiling of a brass plaque at the memorial honoring American POWs and members of the military who are missing in action. The event took place in brilliant sunshine but chilly temperatures, made worse by a steady wind. Mayor Leonard Desiderio said people should prepare to go right from March to June this year. Im going to see you on the beach Thursday. Its going to be 76 degrees, Desiderio said. While the forecast is for warmer days after a freezing start to the week, the mayors outlook may be overly optimistic. Desiderio described Vietnam veterans as Americas forgotten heroes, saying that has been the case for far too many years. We all know that the Vietnam War occurred during a turbulent chapter in our nations history. Nonetheless, countless men and women stepped up to serve our country with honor during the Vietnam War, and for many, they are just now receiving the thanks that they deserve, he said. Desiderio said the event Tuesday was especially meaningful because it could not be held for the past two years because of COVID-19. Cape May County Clerk Rita Rothberg, the guest speaker at the event, said National Vietnam War Veterans Day was created when President Barack Obama signed it into law in 2012 and was first celebrated five years ago by President Donald Trump. And it was a long time coming, she said. In my experience, Vietnam vets are humble individuals. She said the veterans took that humility to their communities. Cape May County lost 16 people in the war, she said, including one of her family members who died in 1966. She said she will never forget what that meant to her family. It is time that they are recognized for their service, she said. The Rev. Perry Cherubini, pastor of St. Josephs Roman Catholic Church, offered the invocation and benediction. Celebrated Tuskegee Airman Charles McGee dies at 102 Charles McGee, a Tuskegee Airman who flew 409 fighter combat missions over three wars and la Lomax and Joe Harris, commander of Disabled American Veterans Chapter 44 in Cape May County, presented a wreath at the event. Desiderio requested all veterans gather to sing God Bless America. Several members of City Council were also at the event, along with an honor guard from the VFW post, Sea Isle City firefighters and EMTs and county Sheriff Robert Nolan. Sea Isle police officers stood in a line at the back of the crowd, with several officers shaking the hands of veterans after the formal ceremony ended. The new brass plaque is set over an empty chair on the memorial, it too placed in honor of prisoners of war and those missing in action. It reads You are not forgotten in large letters. Underneath, it states that 81,000 U.S. service members are unaccounted for since World War II. Contact Bill Barlow: 609-272-7290 bbarlow@pressofac.com Twitter @jerseynews_bill Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. LOWER TOWNSHIP For decades, the Sunset Beach Sportsmens Club overlooking the Delaware Bay went all but unnoticed, a tiny building tucked behind a gift shop. Now, the state Division of Fish and Wildlife wants the club gone. A letter sent to club President Ed Clavan from the divisions David Golden states the club has until May 1 to get off the land. Club members held a virtual meeting with state officials last week, Clavan said, the latest of several attempts to work something out. So how did that go? Not good, he said, leaning against a pool table in the small building next to a gravel parking lot, joined by several other club members. The club owns the building, he said, and members thought it owned the land underneath as well. The club has been paying property taxes on the land to Lower Township for years, and put in a fresh water well some time ago, which he said could not have happened if the club did not have title to the property. But when members went through the deeds recorded by the county, they could find no indication that the club had title to the land. The building went up in a different time, the members said, when a handshake was often enough to settle things, at least in that remote spot. Higbee Beach plans called an improvement for people and wildlife LOWER TOWNSHIP New life could be coming to a swath of marsh near Sunset Beach, under a pro A handshake agreement from more than 70 years ago is clearly not enough for the state. A spokesperson for the state Department of Environmental Protection, under which the Division of Fish and Wildlife falls, said the matter was in active litigation and therefore he could not comment. But the letter from Golden cites a 1982 lease agreement with the former owners of a magnesite plant that once stood nearby. In 1999, the state acquired the by-then-long-vacant plant and made it part of the adjacent Higbee Beach Wildlife Management Area. According to Goldens letter, that lease could be terminated with 90 days notice. It also indicated the state is getting pressure on the issue from the U.S. Department of the Interior, which suggests the presence of the club on land bought with a federal grant could jeopardize millions of dollars in future federal funding. Based on the information you provided and our grant records, the Clubs occupancy and use of the grant-acquired property violates the federal statute governing the Coastal Grant Program currently and at the time of the federal grant award, reads a July 2021 letter to Golden from Colleen Sculley, chief of the Division of Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration under the federal Fish and Wildlife Service. Part of the issue appears to be the clubs liquor license, allowing the sale of alcohol to club members but not to members of the public. According to Mayor Frank Sippel, last year the DEP sent a letter to the township asking that the license not be renewed. We had a public hearing last year. No one from the DEP showed up, but a lot of people came out in support of the club, he said. They give a lot back to the community. NJ Coastal Heritage Trail eligible for federal funding for first time since 2011 For the first time since 2011, the New Jersey Coastal Heritage Trail will be under the purvi He suggested the DEP tried to use Township Council as the bad guy to get the club out. Theyve been there forever. They never bothered anybody, Sippel said. Its a shame. Nobody on council was happy about it. At the clubhouse on an overcast spring day, members said the Sunset Beach Sportsmens Club got its start in the 1940s, with fishermen from the Philadelphia area who bought a house and moved it from Cape May Point in the 1950s. With a few additions and modifications over the decades, that same building continues to serve as the clubhouse. Skip Hoffman told the story. He and Joe Seitz have been members for about 57 years. Seitz said his father was one of the original members. The same goes for Mary McMenamin, who said she was the first female member of the club. My father was a founding member, she said. I fought to get in. Now, she said, there are several women in the club. Late season monarchs put on show at Cape May Point CAPE MAY POINT So many monarch butterflies are still migrating through the southern tip of New Jersey, the Monarch Monitoring Project will continue its count into November for the first time in its 26-year history. Clavan pulled down a framed document from behind the bar, the clubs certificate of incorporation from March 6, 1949. He and others said the club is involved with multiple fundraisers and community activities. Members say the club has been good for the community. He said there are 160 members. The letter from Golden says the club does not have permission to be on the property, citing the alcohol license as one of the concerns. The clubs use of the premises is inconsistent with the Division of Fish and Wildlifes mission to preserve, conserve and protect the land as habitat for game, nongame and threatened and endangered species of wildlife and for wildlife related recreational activities, the letter reads. Members said the state offered to buy the building some years ago. They said it was a low offer, and that they would rather demolish the building. The club has an attorney and plans to fight the eviction. Burgess Butch Hamer, the club vice president, said many of the members are veterans, and the club has allowed veterans groups to use the building. Unearthed Sunset Beach railroad tracks reveal area's industrial past LOWER TOWNSHIP The past is never far below the surface in this part of southern New Jersey Wed like to get the DEP off our back, Clavan said. Either work something out or let us buy this property. The state has plans of its own for the area, including for construction of a new education and interpretive center on the site of the former magnesite plant. That would be part of the final phase of an extensive project expected to include expanded public access to the wildlife area and new trails. The Sunset Beach Sportsmens Club is not part of those plans, Clavan said. You know how the state operates. Everythings theirs and they can do whatever they want, he said. Contact Bill Barlow: 609-272-7290 bbarlow@pressofac.com Twitter @jerseynews_bill Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Rock Island-Milan School District officials broke ground Tuesday on the districts new $7.6 million Central Administration Facility. The ceremony was at 11 a.m. at 20th Street and 7th Avenue, near the current administration building and the former Lincoln School. Were just excited and were thankful and we cant wait to get the work started, Superintendent Reginald Lawrence said at the ceremony. So hopefully youll enjoy it as you ride back and forth down the street, seeing this building go from ground to being up. At the ceremony, Lawrence said the new facility wont just support the district and its students but Rock Island as a whole. This is for our community, Lawrence said. The facility will have 15,000 square feet of space for the districts administration offices, another 15,000 for a warehouse, and 5,000 square feet for a kitchen, according to a district news release. The existing administration building is old, Lawrence said, and is inefficient when it comes to utilities. When it needs to store things now, the district uses a floor of the old Lincoln School, Lawrence said. That makes it more difficult to move them to the schools. The new warehouse will serve the whole district, Lawrence said. Lawrence said the kitchen would serve students throughout the district, supporting existing kitchens at different buildings. In the release, the district credited the Rock Island County 1% Sales Tax for helping raise the funds needed for this and other projects as well as funds for planning future building upgrades. Lawrence said the project also was being funded by bonds and was scheduled for completion in December. The project was developed and will be carried out with the help of Legat Architects and Bush Construction, the district said. What will happen to the old administration building and Lincoln School is still being considered, he said, but options include demolition or sale. Rock Island Mayor Mike Thoms attended the groundbreaking. The school district keeps thinking ahead and working on these projects and the citys behind them all the way, Thoms said. Rock Island loves to see new buildings come up, Thoms said. You know the skylines changing a little bit here in Rock Island, Thoms said. He cited plans for a new YWCA building and federal courthouse. And now a new school district administration building, Thoms said. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Want to see more like this? Get our local education coverage delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Flash China will host the third meeting of the foreign ministers of Afghanistan's neighboring countries in Tunxi, east China's Anhui province, on Wednesday and Thursday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced on Monday. Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will chair the meeting with the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan or their representatives, Wang Wenbin, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, told a regular press briefing in Beijing. The meeting will help build consensus among the neighbors on the issue of Afghanistan, discuss how to promote stability in the country and support its people, said the spokesperson. The spokesperson added that, on the sidelines of the meeting, the Chinese foreign minister will also host a dialogue between the foreign ministers and the acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi of the Afghan interim government, with the foreign ministers of Indonesia and Qatar invited to participate. The dialogue is expected to promote the Afghan side to build an open and inclusive political structure, pursue a moderate and stable domestic and foreign policy, and effectively fight terrorism, said the spokesperson. "At the same time, we also expect the international community to provide greater support to Afghanistan and call on the United States to effectively assume the primary responsibility for economic reconstruction in Afghanistan," he said. Wang Yi paid a visit to Afghanistan on March 24, the first visit by the Chinese foreign minister since the change of government in Afghanistan in August 2021. During talks with Muttaqi, Wang said China has never interfered in Afghanistan's internal affairs or sought self-interest and spheres of influence in Afghanistan. He pledged that China will continue to be a partner and friend of the Afghan people and help Afghanistan achieve true independence and independent development, and take its future into its own hands. Pakistan chaired the first meeting of the foreign ministers of Afghanistan's neighboring countries on September 8, 2021, one day after the Afghan Taliban announced the formation of an interim government in Kabul. The second meeting was held in Tehran, the capital of Iran, on October 27, 2021. A Rock Island church has asked the city to vacate a portion of an adjacent alley so the church can use it to install solar panels. Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church, 2312 18th Ave., said it needed a 44-foot-by-16-foot segment of the alley so it could install two ground-mounted solar arrays. The request means the alley would be turned into a dead end. Council members voted to approve the request contingent on the project going forward. If the church does not install solar panels in the alleyway, the land would be returned to the city. Dave Stockdale, who is on the church committee working on the solar panel project, told council members there were a few things keeping the church from moving forward. "If the alley is vacated for us, then the chances are very, very good that we'll go ahead with the project in that area," Stockdale said. "There is a slight chance that the solar panels would still go in a different area or not be done at all." The comment prompted Alderman Mark Poulos, Ward 6, to ask whether the city's decision to vacate the alley would be reversed should the church place the solar panels elsewhere or abandon the project. City Attorney Dave Morrison recommended that council members amend the agreement to be contingent on the church placing solar panels in the alleyway. "I think you should make it contingent before the vacation because it would be my opinion that if you transfer that property and attempt to take it (back) it could be considered taking without compensation," Morrison said. Council members first tabled the matter during the Feb. 28 meeting until further discussion could be held with MidAmerican Energy. The city's economic development department initially recommended that the request be denied because it would create a dead-end alley that could make travel more challenging in the neighborhood. Furthermore, an easement would be required to access overhead electric lines along the alley. After a discussion between the church and MidAmerican Energy, Rock Island Community and Economic Development Director Miles Brainard said the company stated that closing a portion of the alley would not prohibit them from accessing power lines in the area. "If MidAmerican is fine with it, then staff is fine with it," Brainard said. "If for some reason things didn't work out, if the church wanted to dedicate that same segment back to the city, that would also be something we could work out." Church officials declined to answer a reporter's questions about the proposed solar panel project after the meeting. Love 1 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Lawmakers anticipate Nebraska casinos will reduce future gambling revenues Higher than projected gambling revenue will make it possible for the Legislature to bump up the Rebuild Iowa Infrastructure Fund, or RIIF, by $87 million in the coming year. The House Transportation, Infrastructure and Capital Appropriations subcommittee on Monday voted 7-2 to send a $289,687,568 proposed RIIF budget to the full committee. It likely will be considered Tuesday. Some of the additional funding proposed in fiscal 2023 is due to concerns that Iowa gambling revenue may dip or nose dive as Nebraska casinos come online, said Rep. Jacob Bossman, R-Sioux City. Some projects are being accelerated, and others are being paid for sooner than previously scheduled. The Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission has received studies projecting Iowa gaming revenue could fall somewhere between $183 million and $256 million a year. One study said Council Bluffs casinos indicated that as much as 80 percent their revenue is from Nebraska residents. CHANGE OF ADDRESS: Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate announced Monday that the annual National Change of Address process to update and maintain Iowas voter registration records is underway. Notices have been sent to 123,634 registered Iowa voters who have filed a change of address with the U.S. Postal Service. Its part of the annual National Change of Address process to update and maintain Iowas voter registration record. Pate encourages voters who receive the notices to indicate if the new address is incorrect and quickly return the card to the county auditors office. The mailing is being conducted to ensure full compliance with the National Voter Registration Act, which requires periodic contact with voters to ensure the most accurate information is on file. Data indicates 59,718 registered voters moved within their county during the past year and 63,916 moved outside their county, but still within Iowa. For additional information, contact your county auditors office. PARK REMAINS CLOSED: Red Haw State Park remains closed to visitors because of damage from a March 5 tornado. The campground, which is the most heavily damaged area of the park, is anticipated to be closed until Labor Day. Cleanup continues, with progress dependent on the weather. Visitors will not be allowed into the park for safety reasons and are asked to stay away at this time. Volunteer days to help with cleanup will be announced at a later date once major hazards are removed and the ground has dried out. For future updates, visit the DNRs Alerts and Closure page. WILDLIFE SURVEY: The Department of Natural Resources is conducting its annual nighttime spring spotlight surveys across the state, collecting information on Iowas deer and furbearer populations. Conducted from mid-March to mid-April in each county, the survey begins an hour after sunset, preferably on nights with low wind, good visibility and high humidity. The routes cover different habitats from river bottoms, to farm fields, prairies, woodlots, pastures and timber stands. The 50-mile routes two per county are driven below 20 mph with staff shining spotlights out of both sides of the vehicle, recording the number of deer and furbearers seen along with the habitat type, at different points along the way. Staff are careful to avoid shining homes and livestock while on the survey and contact the county sheriff ahead of time in case they receive any calls. This survey produces really valuable information on our deer and furbearer populations, both locally and at the state level, allowing us to see population trends over time, said Jace Elliott, DNR deer research specialist. The survey began in the late 1970s as a way to collect information on the raccoon population, but was expanded to include deer and other furbearers. The survey report will be posted later this summer at https://www.iowadnr.gov/Hunting/Population-Harvest-Trends. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 As the number of COVID-19 cases dwindles, so too has county-wide reporting and state-sponsored testing. The availability of COVID-19 statistics that have been reported by local health departments and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dried up as the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths have fallen across the Quad-Cities and most of the entire country. According to the Rock Island County Health Department's most recent report from Friday, virus transmission across the county remains at a moderate level, per the CDC. "Cases and the positivity rate ticked up from last week but overall remain low in Rock Island County," according to the health department. Rock Island Health Department officials reported 42 new COVID-19 positive tests during the seven-day period ending March 18, an increase of 33 from the prior seven-day period that ended March 14. The positivity rate in Rock Island County rose slightly to 2.01% from 1.76% last week. Rock Island Health Department officials cautioned that the metric no longer captures the prevalence of disease in the community as the results of home tests are not reflected in the rate. The number of people hospitalized in the county during the seven-day span ending March 18 dropped to five from seven the prior week. No new-case numbers or current positivity rates were reported by the CDC for Rock Island and Scott counties. At the same time, the Illinois Department of Public Health announced its 10 community-based testing sites will cease operations on March 31. IDPH officials said the decision was made in response to a sharp drop in demand for COVID-19 testing services and the anticipated end of federal funding. According to state officials, the 10 sites currently handle less than 1% of COVID-19 tests being conducted statewide. "The number of daily tests conducted at these sites is on track to be the lowest on record with each site seeing fewer than 50 individuals per day, according to IDPH data," state officials said in a news release announcing the closures. "Given the availability of free at-home COVID-19 tests from the federal government, the statewide network of federally qualified health centers and the extensive number of SHIELD saliva testing sites throughout Illinois, there are ample, convenient opportunities for Illinois residents to obtain access to a test if needed." IDPH added that the department had more than 1.5 million rapid tests on hand, "with a half a million more on the way in the coming weeks." State health officials have also counseled hospitals, schools and local health departments to consider current testing capacity and make all necessary preparations, according to the news release. IDPH officials said staff also had spoken with pharmacies and health care providers about increasing their inventory of the various FDA-approved oral treatments in case of another surge. "Over the last year, the states testing and vaccination infrastructure at pharmacies, health clinics and other locations has increased substantially, thus providing capacity to ramp up capabilities if it becomes necessary," according to a statement from the IDPH. To order free at-home COVID-19 tests from the federal government, go to https://www.covidtests.gov. Additional information and COVID-19 data can be found at https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19.html. To find a COVID-19 vaccination location near you, go to www.vaccines.gov. Concerned about COVID-19? Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. CAMBRIDGE A Galva man on Tuesday entered a partially negotiated plea in Henry County Circuit Court to two Class X felony counts of predatory criminal sexual assault of a child. Adam J. Day, 34, will have a cap of 35 years on each of the two counts with time to be served consecutively. The charges normally carry a possible penalty of six to 60 years in prison. Truth-in-sentencing applies to the charges, meaning he will have to serve 85% of the time. He will also have mandatory supervised release afterward of three years to life, and he will have to register as a sex offender. He also faces fines of up to $25,000 on each count. The two charges stated Day sexually assaulted the minor between March 1, 2020, and March 30, 2021. According to a factual basis for the charges given by Henry County State's Attorney Catherine Runty, Kewanee police were made aware of allegations of sexual assault on behalf of a nearly 10-year-old minor on March 31, 2021. In an interview at Braveheart Child Advocacy Center on April 1, 2021, the child indicated the defendant sexually assaulted her when she was 8 or 9. Charges were filed April 1, 2021. Judge James Cosby accepted Day's guilty plea. Sentencing was set for June 10, and a pre-sentence investigation was ordered. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 A Rock Island church has asked the city to vacate a portion of an adjacent alley so the church can use it to install solar panels. Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church, 2312 18th Ave., said it needed a 44-foot-by-16-foot segment of the alley so it could install two ground-mounted solar arrays. The request means the alley would be turned into a dead end. Council members voted to approve the request contingent on the project going forward. If the church does not install solar panels in the alleyway, the land would be returned to the city. Dave Stockdale, who is on the church committee working on the solar panel project, told council members there were a few things keeping the church from moving forward. "If the alley is vacated for us, then the chances are very, very good that we'll go ahead with the project in that area," Stockdale said. "There is a slight chance that the solar panels would still go in a different area or not be done at all." The comment prompted Alderman Mark Poulos, Ward 6, to ask whether the city's decision to vacate the alley would be reversed should the church place the solar panels elsewhere or abandon the project. City Attorney Dave Morrison recommended that council members amend the agreement to be contingent on the church placing solar panels in the alleyway. "I think you should make it contingent before the vacation because it would be my opinion that if you transfer that property and attempt to take it (back) it could be considered taking without compensation," Morrison said. Council members first tabled the matter during the Feb. 28 meeting until further discussion could be held with MidAmerican Energy. The city's economic development department initially recommended that the request be denied because it would create a dead-end alley that could make travel more challenging in the neighborhood. Furthermore, an easement would be required to access overhead electric lines along the alley. After a discussion between the church and MidAmerican Energy, Rock Island Community and Economic Development Director Miles Brainard said the company stated that closing a portion of the alley would not prohibit them from accessing power lines in the area. "If MidAmerican is fine with it, then staff is fine with it," Brainard said. "If for some reason things didn't work out, if the church wanted to dedicate that same segment back to the city, that would also be something we could work out." Church officials declined to answer a reporter's questions about the proposed solar panel project after the meeting. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 1 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The Rock Island County Forest Preserve District has been awarded a $200,000 grant from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to support enhancements to the existing Mississippi River Trail/Great River Trail within Illiniwek Forest Preserve. Set among the bluffs of northern Rock Island County, the bike path that runs through Illiniwek Forest Preserve will get a new bike lane and bike repair service station. The main road through the campground will be expanded for increased safety and accessibility, and the bathroom will be renovated. The project will be bid out this year with the work expected to be done by the summer of 2023. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 DES MOINES Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller and U.S. Senate hopeful Abby Finkenauer both Democrats will be on the ballot when Iowans cast votes later this year after both survived challenges Tuesday to their candidate filing paperwork. Barely. Miller, the state attorney general seeking re-election in November, and Finkenauer, a challenger in a June 7 primary for an Iowa U.S. Senate seat, both wound up with just enough qualifying signatures on their candidate filing forms after review by the three-member State Objection Panel. Miller, the state attorney general seeking re-election, and Finkenauer, a challenger in a primary for an Iowa U.S. Senate seat, both wound up with just enough qualifying signatures on their candidate filing forms after review by the three-member State Objection Panel. Challenges to Millers and Finkenauers signatures, brought by registered Republican voters in Iowa, dealt mostly with incomplete addresses and incomplete, incorrect or difficult to read dates. Candidates for public office in Iowa must obtain a required number of signatures from the public to get on the ballot. That number varies depending on the office sought. As a candidate for re-election as state attorney general, Miller was required to obtain at least 77 signatures in at least 18 counties. After the panel reviewed his campaigns signatures, Miller squeaked by the minimum requirements: He finished with 18 qualifying counties, one of which had 78 signatures. Admittedly, it was pretty close, Miller said. Had the panel disqualified Miller, the Democratic Party could have, and likely would have, voted to reinstate him to the ballot. If a party does not have a candidate in any race after the early filing period, it can nominate a candidate at the partys convention. The same safety net was not in place for Finkenauer, since two other Democratic candidates have qualified for the ballot in the primary for the U.S. Senate currently held by Chuck Grassley. As a Senate candidate, Finkenauer needed to acquire at least 100 signatures from 19 counties. After the panels review, she finished with 19 qualifying counties, including one with exactly 100 signatures and two more with 101. An objection to Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mike Frankens paperwork was dropped late Monday. The third candidate in that primary is Glenn Hurst. The State Objection Panel is comprised of the states secretary of state, attorney general and auditor. So for most of Tuesdays deliberations, the panel was comprised of Miller, Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate and Democratic Auditor Rob Sand. For Millers challenge, however, he was replaced on the panel by Republican Lt. Gov. Adam Gregg. With that difference in political makeup, the panel voted two different ways on the same sets of issues. The Democrats, Sand and Miller, voted to forgive signatures that had minor clerical errors, noting the panel historically has erred on the side of ballot access. The Republicans, Pate and Gregg, voted to reject those signatures, arguing they did not meet the letter of the law. While the panel unanimously rejected the challenge to Millers forms, it voted 2-1 to reject Finkenauers, with Pate voting to accept the challenge and take Finkenauer off the ballot. Alan Ostergren, a conservative lawyer who argued on behalf of many of the challenges, said some of the petitioners now may contest some of the panels rulings in court. We had a different standard applied this morning than was applied this afternoon. Thats not right, Ostergren said. The panel also unanimously rejected challenges to candidate filing forms for four Republicans state Sens. Jack Whitver and Ken Rozenboom, state Senate candidate Anthony LaBruna and state Rep. Jeff Shipley, keeping them all on the ballot. The challenges to Whitvers and Rozenbooms forms centered on their residency as they prepare to run in new Iowa Senate districts. State law says a candidate needs to live in the district by 60 days before the general election, which this year is Nov. 8. Whitver, the Senate majority leader, currently lives in Ankeny but plans to move into a new Senate district in rural, northern Polk County to run for re-election. The panel upheld only one challenge, to the nominating forms of Kyle Kuehl, a Republican candidate for U.S. House in Eastern Iowas new 1st District. But Kuehl late Monday notified the Secretary of States office of his intention to withdraw from the race, and not contest the challenges to his filing paperwork. That leaves incumbent U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks as the only Republican running in that race. Miller-Meeks issued a statement Tuesday saying, "Kyle and I share a deep love for our state; together we can help our party achieve victories up and down the ballot. My team and I also wish him the absolute best and look forward to what comes next for Kyle. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Community members and leaders gathered outside of the Oyate Health Center Monday to heal from recent violence, racism and similar incidents over the past few years. Brandon Ecoffey, director of public relations and communication for the Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board, said Tuesday that the incidents with the Grand Gateway Hotel brought violence in the community to a head. He said the organization wanted to provide support for families and allow them a space to heal. "We recognize that racism in the community also bears a weight on the mental health of our stakeholders," Ecoffey said. "We want to make them aware of the services we offer and provide them with the support they need during these times." A March 19 shooting that left one man with serious, life-threatening injuries at the Grand Gateway Hotel resulted in a 19-year-old charged with aggravated assault. One of the owners of the hotel and parent company of the hotel, 76-year-old Connie Uhre, made comments on Facebook stating after the shooting, the hotel would ban Native Americans from the property. Spiritual leaders attended and led Monday's ceremony. Ecoffey said they relied on the Native American community's traditional healing practices to facilitate the healing. He said participation from city and county officials shows there's some agreement that racism is wrong in the city and all have a part to play in pushing it down and combating it. Rapid City Council President Lance Lehmann attended Monday's ceremony, along with Councilors Jason Salamun, Ron Weifenbach, Ritchie Nordstrom and Darla Drew. Mayor Steve Allender shared comments and sentiments at the event. Following Monday's event, Lehmann said the council agrees that there is no room for racism in the community and violent crime is a problem affecting all of Rapid City. "It is no secret our crime is going up, especially in the north Rapid sector," he said. "There were two pointless acts committed over the past week, one being a very violent crime that'll change the lives of many forever; the other being a racist comment that brought divisiveness to our community that is already struggling with so much." Lehmann said there's little city government can actually do regarding racism within the community, "except to call it what it is: abhorrent." "Regarding crime our council has put forth a better budget to hire more officers and do community outreach to address our violent crime as holistically as possible," he said. "It is not an unnoticed problem that we need to continue to address with all players in our community." Ecoffey said the Native American community has continued to bear the weight of racism for generations and the incident at the Grand Gateway puts emphasis on Native allies to lead the fight. Contact Siandhara Bonnet at siandhara.bonnet@rapidcityjournal.com You must be logged in to react. Click any reaction to login. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 1 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Military officials are preparing to put on an air show at Ellsworth Air Force Base for the first time in seven years. The Rapid City Journal reported Friday that the Ellsworth Air & Space Show is set for May 14 and May 15. The show will celebrate the 80th anniversary of the base north of Rapid City as well as the 80th anniversary of the Doolittle Raid and the 75th birthday of the Air Force. The show will feature a science booth and flyovers by the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels aerial acrobatics team. COVID-19 forced officials to scuttle plans for the 2020 and 2021 shows. Flash Maltese Prime Minister Robert Abela on Monday pledged to continue with the removal of restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving it up to people to choose how to safeguard their own wellbeing. In an address to the nation, just hours after taking his oath of office following his massive victory at the polls over the weekend, Abela also promised to work to regain the trust of those who opted not to vote in Saturday's general election which saw the lowest voter turnout since the island's independence in the 1960s. Abela's Labour Party won the general election with a comfortable advantage over the Nationalist Party (PN) in opposition, obtaining a generous 55.1 percent of the vote against PN's 41.7 percent. The election was characterised by a record low turnout since independence, at 85.5 percent. This is Abela's first mandate as party leader and prime minister after he took over from Joseph Muscat who resigned in early 2020. In his televised address, Abela said he will continue to seek expert advice but the path the country had embarked on towards the total removal of COVID-19 restrictions will continue as planned because the pandemic had brought about too many hardships on people. Turning to plans he had for the legislature, Abela pledged to continue working towards better economic growth based on sustainability and to continue investing in education, job creation, quality careers and a special emphasis on the environment. News Government-Aimed Office 365 Service Coming This Year Microsoft's new software-as-a-service offering for U.S. federal agencies and their partners, Office 365 Government Secret, will arrive by mid-2022, the company announced on Monday. Microsoft is planning a rollout of the service to the "US Federal Civilian, Department of Defense (DoD), Intelligence Community (IC), and US government partners" working with Secret-classified information. Currently, the service is undergoing accreditation review by the U.S. government, Microsoft indicated. Office 365 Government Secret is being designed to support Impact Level 6 (IL6) work, which means that "Secret" information will get stored and processed. IL6 also signifies that the data can "only be processed in a DoD private/community or Federal government community cloud," according to Microsoft's IL6 overview document. With IL6, dedicated datacenter infrastructure is used for the data storage and processing, which is deemed to be closed and "self-contained" according to Microsoft's IL6 document description. These IL6 workloads are physically separated from non-DoD tenancies. Government entities have options to use the Microsoft ExpressRoute service with it, which offers private Internet connections for high-bandwidth data. The dedicated infrastructure IL6 approach differs from the more common service model that's used by commercial customers, where workloads get run on shared infrastructure, which is known as a "multitenant" environment. In addition to the coming Office 365 Government Secret service, Microsoft already offers Azure Government Secret and Top Secret cloud services. They reached the "general availability" production-use level back in August. At the time, Microsoft had explained that it received "Authorization to Operate" for those Azure services by meeting Intelligence Community Directives 503 and 705. Proposed uses for Azure Government Secret and Top Secret services include human and signals intelligence, with artificial intelligence processing for language detection, text translation, computer vision, metadata and text extraction, optical character reading and key phrase detection, according to Microsoft's August announcement. Mrs. Yoders Kitchen Richmonds family-run, fresh doughnut food truck is shutting down its operations until further notice, according to a statement the company left on Facebook. Current owners Lucas Miller and brother-in-law Samuel Amaya are in the process of acquiring a new operator as the two devote themselves to another cause. Mrs. Yoders Kitchen has been a staple in the community since 2011 as the Mennonite family started to pop up with handmade confections at local farmers markets. The family ran the business for nearly 10 years until Miller and Amaya took the reins between 2016 and 2017 after the family moved to Pennsylvania to take care of an ailing family member. Under their leadership, their desserts claimed the states top doughnut award in 2021 by Food and Wine magazine. The two inherited the food truck after returning from a mission trip in Nicaragua, the owners wrote on Facebook. Now, Miller and Amaya have decided to go on another mission trip. Miller and his family plan to be the administrators for a pastors discipleship center in the outskirts of the capital, Managua, and are leaving in June. Amaya and his family plan to be the administrators of a clinic in the northern part of Nicaragua and are leaving this year. As their plans move forward, they decided it was best to find someone else to take over the Yoder familys namesake business. Their search for a new owner and operator began in October and has been a lengthy process, the companys statement read. As the process continues, Miller and Amaya have decided to halt all operations and are asking their loyal patrons for patience. Updates will be posted in the near future. For the first time on Monday morning, Marguerite Christian Elementary students saw the finished project of a mural that reflects their schools diversity. Located in the main lobby, the mural by Richmond artist Hamilton Glass features school colors, a lion and outstretched hands. We were so excited to share it with our community and our students, said Marguerite Christian principal Rovez Ingram. Our mural represents our collaboration as a staff as well as our diversity as it pertains to our students and staff populations. Marguerite Christian is a majority-minority school in Chesterfield County. According to state education data from the fall of 2020, 47.6% of students were Black, 29.7% were white, 14.3% were Hispanic, 5.9% were of multiple races, 2.2% were Asian and 0.3% were American Indian. Glass, whose work can be seen on buildings across Richmond, designed the mural to reflect the schools diversity, according to the school division. The elementary school is home of the Lions, and Ingram said, a group of lions is considered a pride and theres power in pride. Our pride is made up of our teachers, of our students, of our community [and] of all of our stakeholders. Mondays unveiling represented the end of two years of work, Ingram said. In February, The New York Times featured Glass public art project, Mending Walls RVA, as a reason to visit Richmond during Black History Month. Mending Walls brings artists from different backgrounds and cultures together to create murals around the city. To pay for the Marguerite Christian mural, donations were collected from families, staff members, businesses and community groups. Also on Monday, a refurbished portrait of the schools namesake and longtime educator, Marguerite F. Christian, was unveiled, and a ribbon cutting was held for a new book vending machine. Dominion Energy and two dozen other large companies are pledging to invest $4.7 billion over the next five years to boost minority-owned businesses and organizations in a region that stretches from Richmond to Washington and Baltimore. The 10-figure pledge by members of the Greater Washington Partnership, first reported on Tuesday by the Washington Business Journal, will be formally unveiled on Wednesday by Vice President Kamala Harris at Washingtons Howard University, where she earned an undergraduate degree. Dominion CEO and President Robert Blue, a member of the partnership board of directors, said Tuesday that the Richmond-based energy giant is pledging to boost spending on minority-owned contractors and suppliers from 15% to 20% of contract spending nationwide over the next five years as its part of the initiative. Currently, the company estimates it spends about $1 billion on supplier diversity. We need to make sure we are casting as broad a net as possible, Blue said in an interview. Blue succeeded former Dominion CEO Tom Farrell, a founding member of the partnership who died from cancer last April a day after stepping down as the companys leader, and he shares his predecessors vision for the regional organization. This organization is founded on the principle that if we work together, from Richmond on up to Baltimore, that we can be incredibly successful as a region economically, he said. This demonstrates the commitment to the success of the region at all levels of the economy. That means growth that we all want to be inclusive of everyone, not just the high-flyers, Blue said. The effort to boost minority business ownership over the next five years comes from 25 major players across the region, including JPMorgan Chase, Howard University, Amazon, CapitalOne, and Exelon. The scope of this investment in this region is unparalleled and shows the deep commitment of our business community to create a more fair and inclusive economy, said Peter L. Scher, vice chairman at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and board chair of the Greater Washington Partnership. Getting to know: Brandi Lambert with Bank of America Title: First mortgage and home equity process design consultant at Bank of America The companies have committed: $2.6 billion toward supplier diversity procurement spending, with a priority to spend with Black- and Latinx-owned businesses; $1.5 billion in racial equity efforts to boost wealth-building opportunities in underrepresented communities, such as direct corporate investments in affordable housing and in community organizations that are leading equity initiatives; $619 million in access to capital through direct investment in local community development financial Institutions and minority depository institutions. The partnership said in a release that it projects the supplier diversity component to generate about $3.5 billion in revenue for small and medium-sized businesses over five years and create about 4,000 jobs annually. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., welcomed the commitments by members of the partnership, but he said it doesnt substitute for a more comprehensive national initiative that he hopes President Joe Biden will undertake. Warner said it also doesnt absolve companies that pledged support for minority-owned businesses in the racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis 22 months ago but never acted on those commitments. We need to both celebrate the companies for making these commitments and for those that promised but didnt deliver, ask why not, he said in an interview at his Senate office on Tuesday. Warner was the principal author of a $12 billion commitment in a COVID-19 relief package in late 2020 to provide grants and equity for minority-owned businesses through community development financial institutions including 16 in Virginia and minority depository institutions. Its still a huge problem, he said, calling for a much, much larger national initiative to deal with the racial wealth gap and access to capital. This is one of those initiatives where I really want the administration to take a much bigger role, Warner said. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo, and Isabella C. Guzman, administrator of the Small Business Administration also are expected to attend Wednesdays event at Howard. Under the racial equity component, the partnership said that since January 2021 the Amazon Housing Equity Fund has committed nearly $800 million in low-rate loans and grants in its headquarters region to create and preserve more than 4,400 affordable homes. By building on whats already working and supporting Black and Latinx-owned businesses in this region through supplier diversity efforts and strategic capital investments, we have a tremendous opportunity to build an economy that is more equitable, resilient, and prosperous for all, said Francesca Ioffreda, the partnerships vice president for Inclusive Growth & Talent Initiatives. WASHINGTON The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday voted 21-1 to advance a bill sponsored by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., that would prohibit any president from removing the United States from NATO without congressional approval. Kaine said Russias invasion of Ukraine has underscored the importance and unity of NATO, making his proposal a very timely bill. In an interview at his Senate office on Tuesday, Kaine said the vote sent a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin and European allies alike. Its really designed to send the message of bipartisan, bicameral congressional support for NATO, he said. In 2018 Kaine first introduced bipartisan legislation to clarify that no president could withdraw the U.S. from NATO without the advice and consent of the Senate or an act of Congress. Kaine originally introduced the legislation with three other senators, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the month before he died. The measure was in response to threats by then-President Donald Trump to withdraw the U.S. from the North Atlantic Treaty signed in 1949. The legislation advanced in committee on a voice vote in 2019, but never advanced to the Senate floor. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he said, Now we see the value of NATO. Kaine said the legislation might be first of its kind in seeking to curb presidential authority to withdraw from a specific treaty, despite a history of bipartisan concern about a presidents ability to unilaterally withdraw the U.S. from treaties that the Senate had approved by a two-thirds vote, as required by the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution says nothing about getting out of a treaty, Kaine said. The authority was tested in 1979, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit members of Congress filed against then-President Jimmy Carter about his decision to withdraw from a treaty for the defense of Taiwan. Trump and other presidents have acted unilaterally to withdraw the U.S. from other treaties over congressional dissent. People griped about it, but there was no action taken, Kaine said. Kaine said the legislation is consistent with his larger position on the War Powers Act and the requirement of congressional approval to declare war. Part of what Ive tried to do is reassert Congress into matters of war, peace and diplomacy. He said he has applied the same principle regardless of party, helping to force then-President Barack Obama a close political ally to submit the Iran nuclear deal to Congress for approval. He blames a lack of congressional backbone more than presidential overreach. Executives all tend to overreach, he said. Thats just like the law of physics. Kaine reintroduced the NATO measure in 2021 with more than a dozen co-sponsors in both parties. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is the chief co-sponsor. John Bolton Trumps former national security adviser recently told The Washington Post that Trump considered removing the U.S. from NATO in 2018. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told CNN Plus this week that if Trump were again elected president in 2024, NATO nations will have to rethink their own national security and whether they can count on the U.S. to lead the alliance. mmartz@timesdispatch.com (804) 649-6964 Staff writer Andrew Cain contributed to this report. A coalition that includes the states largest teachers union, the Virginia chapter of the NAACP and the Legal Aid Justice Center criticized efforts by the Youngkin administration to extricate divisive concepts from schools. During a news conference at the Capitol grounds on Tuesday, the group lambasted a recent report by Youngkin education officials that criticized ongoing efforts to address racial and socioeconomic disparities in education as discriminatory. The report sought to downplay the role of systemic racism in fostering those disparities and defended the decision by state education officials to scrap resources for teachers and administrators on diversity and equity. We will not stand idly by while he and his administration attempt to roll back the recent progress weve made in teaching honest and culturally competent lessons in Virginia public schools for blatant political gain, said James Fedderman, the president of the Virginia Education Association, which represents 40,000 teachers in the state. Fedderman said Youngkins efforts are an attempt to exploit the fear of a small group of parents in order to advance his politically motivated agenda. He also criticized a tip line the administration set up to field tips of divisive concepts, calling it a ridiculous and insulting educator snitch line. If ever there was a time to draw a line in the sand, now is that moment. Youngkin administration scraps education policy materials it deemed 'divisive' Gov. Glenn Youngkins new education department has scrapped dozens of resources for schools Fedderman was joined by leaders with the State Conference of Virginia NAACP; Equality Virginia, an advocacy group representing LGBTQ+ Virginians; the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, which represents churches and religious organizations; the Legal Aid Justice Center, a civil rights group; and Virginia Excels, an education reform group. We stand against any efforts to dismantle the progress thats been made toward an inclusive society by those claiming we must only teach a sanitized version of history, said the Rev. Elisha Burke, a board member of the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, and a leader within the Baptist General Convention of Virginia. We must not condone any efforts to set us back. Attempts by the administration to end lessons on divisive concepts through the legislature and the budget have so far been unsuccessful. Its unclear if the issue will resurface during a special session of the General Assembly that begins Monday, or through the veto session later in April. Earlier this month, the administration also fielded criticism from the Virginia Association of School Superintendents, which in a letter criticized the administrations efforts and decried being excluded from the process by which the administration decided to scrap the diversity materials. The letter purported to be on behalf of all 133 state school superintendents. The organization later said the groups board crafted the letter and that it wasnt reviewed by all school superintendents, rather, was approved through an internal process by regional leaders drawing criticism from the Youngkin administration and its supporters. Still, no local superintendent publicly spoke out against the letters overall message, according to The Washington Post. Richmond City Council fails to pass initial funding for Wythe Plans for a new George Wythe High School are once again in limbo after the Richmond City Council failed Monday to pass a $7.3 million funding Youngkin spokesperson Macaulay Porter said in a statement: The politically driven VEA teacher union has failed teachers, parents, and students. Their initiatives of the past didnt do enough to raise academic achievement, their enormous political donations to the democrats didnt do enough to improve academic excellence, and now their baseless opinions will have no impact on the future academic success of Virginias next generation. Governor Youngkin is focused on bolstering education opportunities for all Virginians and remains undeterred by partisan stakeholders that continue to fail Virginias students and parents. Youngkin, who campaigned heavily on reforming the way schools teach students about race, directed his new education leaders to audit the states resources for divisive concepts in the first executive order he signed on Jan. 15, the day he was inaugurated. The resulting memo describes affirmative action policies in schools as discriminatory, suggests that historic discrimination in education might not be to blame for disparate outcomes among students of color, and rejects the idea that white people may unwittingly benefit from systemic racism and discrimination. The report made the case that schools have unduly emphasized equitable outcomes over equal opportunity. The memo defended the scrapping of EdEquityVA, a state initiative that promoted equity and diversity through resources for school districts. That included an entire website dedicated to increasing cultural competency among Virginia teachers, and a suggested readings list that includes historian and MacArthur Fellow Ibram X. Kendi. In mid-April, Balow is scheduled to release a final report on divisive concepts, per Youngkins executive order. Youngkin's attempt to ban CRT through the budget fails Gov. Glenn Youngkins efforts to restrict how schools teach students about race appear to be On Tuesday, the VEA announced it would host many of the equity and diversity materials scrapped from the Virginia Department of Education website on its own servers, making them available in perpetuity to teachers, school leaders and the public. The materials can be found at www.veanea.org/edequity . By Vihaan Mathur and Odessa Zhang On the day he was sworn into office, Gov. Glenn Youngkin declared he would pull Virginia out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multistate effort to cap carbon emissions from power plants. The question is: Does anybody care? Why has Youngkin faced so little resistance, especially from young people like us, who will live to see the worst impacts of the changing climate? The answer has to do with what kids are taught or not taught in school. First, we must recognize Virginia is not spared from the impacts of climate change. In the commonwealth, temperatures are expected to rise 4 to 13 degrees Fahrenheit in the next century. Increasing temperatures raise concerns for sea level rise in coastal areas, such as the Chesapeake Bay. This impacts watersheds and water systems that are essential to Virginias economy and well-being. The bay is one of the most vulnerable regions of the United States and it already has suffered the effects of pollution, rising water temperatures and overfishing. If we have all this data on climate change, why do people still question its validity? The key is education. We must educate kids about climate change so they can protect Virginia against the greatest crisis of our generation. But our state is failing at this important task. According to Making the Grade? a 2020 study conducted by the National Center for Science Education Virginia was one of six states that received an F grade for its public school curricula on climate change. This is not just a matter of sharing high-level statistics with children. Environmental science is a complicated topic that requires a continuing progression of learning, just like any other subject at school. This must start at the elementary school level, where students can learn about environmental stewardship and basic Earth science. Essential topics like environmental racism should be taught later in a students education. As students in Fairfax County, we remember learning about the water cycle and the need to recycle. But it wasnt until freshman year of high school when the words climate change even were mentioned in school. The concepts we learned were vague and we were fed a shallow, incomplete explanation of climate issues. We were not taught about the impact of our actions and how we are facing urgent threats to human health, the economy and our future well-being. Most importantly, we never learned what we can do to make a difference. The good news is we dont need to start from scratch. Virginia can look to schools in New Jersey, California or New York for inspiration and encouragement to up our game on climate education. We can advocate for House Bill 362, which would require climate change instruction in Virginia public schools. We can adopt the Next Generation Science Standards, a nationwide climate change effort sponsored by 26 states. Most importantly, we have to teach our children to care about the issue. By having climate education integrated into schools, we can guarantee our future leaders are held accountable to take action against a changing climate. A brush fire west of Salem spread over about 5 acres in the Havens Wildlife Management Area Tuesday. The afternoon fire, readily visible from nearby Interstate 81 and elsewhere in the Roanoke Valley, occurred near the 2500 block of Wildwood Road. Roanoke County Fire and Rescue were summoned at about 2 p.m. by reports of smoke near the power lines on Fort Lewis Mountains lower slope. The first crews to arrive found a brush fire under the power lines that spread over about 2 acres. By 5 p.m. the fire had reached 5 acres and was about 10% contained, a Roanoke County Fire and Rescue statement said. No one was injured, and no structures were immediately threatened by the blaze. The fire is described as slow moving and has died down since the initial report, the statement said. The Virginia Department of Forestry is on scene with personnel and two bulldozers to help cut containment lines around the fire. Allison Newton, 33, said she could see the fires smoke as she drove through Salem at about 3 p.m. I was driving back home with my family down Main Street, Newton said, and noticed the smoke when we reached the Wildwood Road and Main Street intersection. We live very close to I-81 off of Texas Hollow Road, and as we got closer to home, we could see the smoke coming from the mountain behind our house. Newton said only smoke and no flames could be seen from town. She photographed the scene from her backyard. It looks as if its moving east and maybe slightly south, but its hard to tell exactly, Newton said. The mother of two said she was glad crews were quick to respond, but she and her family were keeping a close eye on it to be safe. Crews were expected to remain on scene through Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Units will also be conducting back-fire operations, the Roanoke County Fire and Rescue statement said. Back-fire operations consist of setting, controlled fires to burn up fuel ahead of the fire. Along with 23 units and 50 personnel from across Roanoke County, the Roanoke County Fire Marshals Office was on scene Tuesday to investigate the fires cause. Early reports indicated that the power lines were not the source of the flames. The public has been asked to avoid the 2500 block of Wildwood Road to allow crews to continue to control the scene. Recent dry and breezy weather conditions have made conditions favorable for brush fires. About three weeks ago, China's top political leaders met in Beijing and announced the country's new GDP goal for 2022: around 5.5%, the lowest target in decades. That appears perfectly excusable; after all, after two years of grappling with the coronavirus pandemic, Beijing is also dealing with rising debt, turmoil in real estate markets, and bankruptcies of large developers, as well as continuing trade tensions with the United States. But China's economy could be in even more trouble thanks to the Ukraine crisis--and Beijing's coziness to Moscow. According to the Institute of International Finance, investors have been pulling money out of China on a huge scale even as flows to other emerging markets have been holding up. Indeed, a report by the Institute of International Finance (IIF) says global investors have been withdrawing money out of China on an "unprecedented" scale since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, with the yuan likely to face more pressure in the coming months. This is to be expected, considering that China's trade ties with Russia and Ukraine are valued at $147 billion and $19 billion, respectively. Capital flight Data by China Central Depository & Clearing, a depository for government bonds, reveals that overseas investors' holdings of Chinese onshore bonds fell by 67 billion yuan (US$10.5 billion) in the month of February, with Macquarie Capital projecting that March outflows will be even bigger. The first 21 days of March has seen China record net outflows of 59 billion yuan through the northbound Stock Connect programme with Hong Kong, putting it on a nearly 90 billion yuan monthly run rate and significantly higher than the 70 billion yuan of fund outflows recorded in March 2020. Based on data from the Taiwan Stock Exchange, South China Morning Post (SCMP) estimates that foreign investors have sold NT$450.2 billion (US$15.7 billion) worth of stocks in the four weeks since the start of the war on February 20, almost equal to the total equity sales by foreign investors for the entire 2021. Credit demand has also been weakening, with lending in February falling to 1.23 trillion yuan (US$193.2 billion), down sharply from a record 3.98 trillion yuan in January. So, why is the world fleeing from China? First off, the war has renewed fears in Taiwan of increasing risks of military aggression from the Chinese mainland, which views the East Asian island as a breakaway province to be reunitedby force if necessary. Second, China has lately been deepening ties with Russia, which could jeopardize its own economy if it acts as a buffer against sanctions by the U.S. and the West. China-Russia relations have historically been marked by mutual wariness, including a border conflict in the 1960s that reportedly pushed the two countries to the brink of nuclear war. But the two have been cozying up ever since Western sanctions on Russia over its annexation of Crimea in 2014. And third, a hawkish Fed has been weighing on multiple stock markets across the globe, and Taiwan's has not been an exception. The Ukraine crisis--and China's apparent condoning of Putin's actions--may end up galvanizing the U.S. political establishment and the United States' allies in a way that foreign policy debate ends up impacting China negatively. Hopefully, China will be able to retain its position as the pre-eminent EM economy. After all, Beijing's relatively strong currency allows it to handle near-term volatility that would affect trade. Beijing has allowed the yuan to remain strong (currently around 6.3 to the U.S. dollar), but if necessary, it could pump a lot of cash into the economy and supercharge exports by pushing the yuan lower. Beijing has also shifted its rhetoric over the past few weeks, from embracing Putin and a friendship without limits to advocating for "respecting and safeguarding the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries." Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. FLORENCE, S.C. The Nursing program at Florence-Darlington Technical College recently received a $25,000 grant from Duke Energy. The grant that was presented to the FDTC Educational Foundation will help fund scholarships as well as purchase classroom supplies. Duke Energy has been a long-time partner of the college and has contributed to its growth and success. The grant funding will help Tech combat the national nursing shortage as it places more graduates into the workforce. I cannot thank Duke Energy enough for their continued support and this generous donation, said Dr. Jermaine Ford, Tech president. The funding will aid our nursing students as they pursue their dreams in the health care field. Student success is our primary goal, and partners like Duke Energy play a significant role. Tech currently has an associate degree nursing program as well as a practical nursing program. You might not immediately think of Duke Energy when you think of nursing, but its a profession critical to our success, said Mindy Taylor, government and community relations manager for Duke Energy. At nuclear plants like Robinson, its imperative to have full-time nurses to complete the medical exams required by our regulator. Ensuring a quality pipeline of nurses in our community not only powers our community, but helps keep the power on, too. Graduates of the program at Tech are prepared to work in a variety of settings including hospitals, clinics and outpatient centers. Upon completion of the program, students are eligible for an associate degree in applied science and may apply to take the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nursing Practice. The nursing program is worth 68 credits, and it is five semesters long. The practical nursing program graduates at Tech are also prepared to work in a variety of settings, and upon completion of the program, the students are eligible to apply to take the licensure boards for Licensed Practical Nursing Practice. The practical nursing program is three semesters long, and students will attain 48 credits. Next parent up in college admission scandal sentencing also gets four months in federal prison | Main | SCOTUSblog online symposium previews "Bridgegate" political corruption case September 26, 2019 Senators Durbin and Grassley introduce "Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act of 2019" I am so very pleased to be able to blog about a new effort to prohibit the ugly practice of using "acquitted conduct" in the federal sentencing system. Specifically, as detailed in this press release, "U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the lead sponsors of the landmark First Step Act, today introduced the bipartisan Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act of 2019, which would end the unjust practice of judges increasing sentences based on conduct for which a defendant has been acquitted by a jury." Here is more from the release: Along with Durbin and Grassley, the legislation is also cosponsored by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Mike Lee (R-UT). Our criminal justice system rests on the Fifth and Sixth Amendment guarantees of due process and the right to a jury trial for the criminally accused. These principles require the government to prove a defendants guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury. Under the Constitution, defendants may be convicted only for conduct proven beyond a reasonable doubt. However, at sentencing, courts may enhance sentences if they find, by a preponderance of the evidence, that a defendant committed other crimes. The difference in those standards of proof means that a sentencing court can effectively nullify a jurys verdict by considering acquitted conduct. One prominent example of this unjust practice is the 2005 case of Antwuan Ball, who, along with his co-defendants, was convicted of distributing a few grams of crack cocaine, but acquitted of conspiring to distribute drugs. Despite this, the sentencing judge held Mr. Ball responsible for the conspiracy, nearly quadrupling his sentence to 19 years. Mr. Ball asked the Supreme Court to consider his case, but the Court denied the petition for the writ of certiorari. Justice Scalia wrote a blistering dissent, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Thomas, noting that not only did no jury convict these defendants of the offense the sentencing judge thought them guilty of, but a jury acquitted them of that offense. Scalia decried the practice, writing that, this has gone on long enough. The Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act would end this practice by: Amending 18 U.S.C. 3661 to preclude a court of the United States from considering, except for purposes of mitigating a sentence, acquitted conduct at sentencing, and Defining acquitted conduct to include acts for which a person was criminally charged and adjudicated not guilty after trial in a Federal, State, Tribal, or Juvenile court, or acts underlying a criminal charge or juvenile information dismissed upon a motion for acquittal. Long-time readers know I have been a long-time opponent of federal courts' use of acquitted conduct at sentencing (e.g., here is a post from 11 years ago on the issue, which itself links to more than a half-dozen prior posts on the topic). I have also been involved in preparing briefs assailing the use of acquitted conduct in a number of circuit courts, and I was especially proud of this amicus brief that I prepared in support of certiorari in the Antwaun Ball case reference above. So, I am fully supportive of legislative efforts to preclude the use of acquitted conduct at federal sentencing. Thankfully, lots of other folks are also supportive of legislative efforts to preclude the use of acquitted conduct at federal sentencing, as revealed by these new policy group postings: From Americans for Tax Reform, "ATR Joins Coalition Supporting the Prohibition of Punishing Acquitted Conduct" From the Cato Institute, "Addressing the Gross Injustice of Acquitted Conduct Sentencing" From FreedomWorks, "Support the Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act, S. 2566" From the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, "Nations Criminal Defense Bar Lauds Newly Introduced 'Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act of 2019'" September 26, 2019 at 11:32 PM | Permalink Comments I am a defense attorney with a court-appointed client who has sought a subsequent 2255 petition to the First Circuit to have the sentencing court's use of his state acquittal of murder and weapons charges in raising his federal base offense level for a federal drug conspiracy to life in prison through the murder cross-reference int he federal sentencing guidelines. The request for leave to file the subsequent 2255 petition was based on new law creating one sovereign for all double jeopardy purposes in Puerto Rico after the Sanchez Valle case in 2016. The appeals court adamantly refused to allow the petition and closed all doors (en banc and certiorari), based on use of acq. cond. Posted by: Frank Inserni | Oct 15, 2019 1:25:34 PM This bill wouldn't address the (far?) more common practice of unconstitutionally compelling a sentence based on uncharged conduct, through circuit case law on substantive reasonableness. Posted by: Poirot | Mar 8, 2021 8:41:09 AM Post a comment Very different looks on criminal justice reform for governors in Oklahoma and New York | Main | Notable Wall Street Journal commentaries decry injustices highlighted by college admission scandal prosecutions November 6, 2019 "Acquitted Conduct Should Not Be Considered At Sentencing" The title of this post is the title of this notable recent Law360 commentary authored by Robert Ehrlich, the former governor of Maryland. I recommend the full piece, and here are excerpts: John Adams famously declared, Representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty." Indeed, given the role the jury trial plays in our modern criminal justice system. The jury trial was designed as an indispensable structural check on government. A safeguard the framers of the Constitution considered so paramount to a free people that it was enshrined in the Sixth Amendment. Trial by jury is essential to preserving liberty because it protects individuals from arbitrary use of government power by allowing the people to act independently of the state. Accordingly, upholding the peoples role in the administration of justice is foundational to upholding the purpose of this procedural guarantee. Against this background, U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, recently introduced the Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act of 2019. The bill seeks to address the insidious practice known as acquitted conduct sentencing, wherein a judge enhances a sentence based on conduct underlying charges for which a defendant has been acquitted by a jury. You read that correctly. Under current law, federal judges are permitted to sentence individuals based on charges for which a jury found them not guilty.... Lower standards of proof at sentencing in conjunction with 18 U.S.C. Section 3661, legal precedent and application of the guidelines means that federal judges may consider a wide array of relevant conduct in determining a defendants sentence, including conduct for which underlying charges have been acquitted by a jury. While the Supreme Court determined acquitted-conduct sentencing did not violate the double jeopardy clause in Watts, the court has never addressed whether the Sixth Amendment right to a trial jury prohibits the practice.... The bottom line: Acquitted-conduct sentencing effectively divests individuals of their Sixth Amendment right to trial-by-jury by divesting citizens of their historical and constitutional role in the administration of criminal justice. While a defendant remains not guilty on paper, the sentencing judges veto of the jurys verdict renders the acquittal meaningless for all practical purposes. Consideration of acquitted conduct at sentencing effectively eliminates the democratic role of the jury in the criminal justice system, inverting the power structure to allow government to limit the people rather than people to limit the government. Acquitted-conduct sentencing is an affront to individual liberty, and judicial or legislative action would be welcome responses to the unconstitutional practice. The Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act would amend 18 U.S.C. Section 3661 to explicitly preclude federal courts from considering acquitted conduct at sentencing, except as a mitigating factor. Congress should advance this simple reform to restore the Constitutions basic guarantees of due process and the right to trial by jury. A few of many recent and prior related posts on the acquitted conduct: November 6, 2019 at 09:12 AM | Permalink Comments I'm very sympathetic with this, but I wonder if barring consideration of acquitted conduct is far enough. That would just incentivize the prosecution from not charging and instead just arguing conduct at sentencing. It seems to me that acquitted conduct and uncharged conduct are the same as far as omitting the jury. Posted by: Erik M | Nov 6, 2019 9:26:51 AM So long as the verdict remains one of saying the prosecution reached the beyond reasonable doubt threshold and not I really don't see the problem. There is a wide gap between beyond reasonable doubt and preponderance of the evidence. Perhaps we really do need a third possible verdict, one that actually is a finding of innocence. And if we added such a choice then I would have no problem saying conduct related to such a verdict cannot be considered at sentence (at least as an inculpatory factor). Posted by: Soronel Haetir | Nov 8, 2019 11:37:17 AM I mostly agree with Soronel -- if there's an acquittal, the jury could be asked a follow-up question as to whether the acquitted conduct was established by a preponderance. Posted by: Jason | Nov 10, 2019 8:14:40 PM Post a comment In lengthy split opinion (with interesting splits), Supreme Court holds Sixth Amendment applies to states to require unanimous verdict to convict of serious offense | Main | "A Tale of Two Countries: Racially Targeted Arrests in the Era of Marijuana Reform" April 20, 2020 A reminder of why "acquitted conduct" sentencing enhancements should be seen as a constitutional abomination I am only through the first part of the Supreme Court's first opinion in Ramos v. Louisiana, No. 185924 (S. Ct. April 20, 2020) (available here), which finally declares that the Sixth Amendment jury trial right, as incorporated against the states, requires unanimous juries for conviction. I was drawn back to blogging because a passage early in Justice Gorsuch's opinion for the Court reminder me why "acquitted conduct" sentencing enhancements still make me crazy. Here are the passages from the Ramos opinion slip op. at 3-4) to set the table (emphasis in original): The Sixth Amendment promises that [i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law. The Amendment goes on to preserve other rights for criminal defendants but says nothing else about what a trial by an impartial jury entails. Still, the promise of a jury trial surely meant something otherwise, there would have been no reason to write it down. Nor would it have made any sense to spell out the places from which jurors should be drawn if their powers as jurors could be freely abridged by statute. Imagine a constitution that allowed a jury trial to mean nothing but a single person rubberstamping convictions without hearing any evidence but simultaneously insisting that the lone juror come from a specific judicial district previously ascertained by law. And if thats not enough, imagine a constitution that included the same hollow guarantee twice not only in the Sixth Amendment, but also in Article III. No: The text and structure of the Constitution clearly suggest that the term trial by an impartial jury carried with it some meaning about the content and requirements of a jury trial. Here is how the second paragraph could and should be modified if (and I hope when) the Supreme Court finally sees it needs to give the jury trial right real meaning by limiting sentencing enhancements based on acquitted conduct: Still, the promise of a jury trial surely meant something otherwise, there would have been no reason to write it down. Nor would it have made any sense to spell out the places from which jurors should be drawn if their powers as jurors could be freely overridden by judges at sentencing. Imagine a constitution that allowed a jury trial to mean nothing but a single judge rotely enhancing sentences without regarding any acquittals but simultaneously insisting that jurors not be told that acquitted conduct will be used to make guideline calculations previously ascertained by law. And if thats not enough, imagine a constitution that included the same hollow guarantee twice not only in the Sixth Amendment, but also in Article III. No: The text and structure of the Constitution clearly suggest that the term trial by an impartial jury carried with it some meaning about the content and requirements of a judge's sentencing acquittals by a jury trial. See generally Blakely v. Washington, 542 U. S. 296 (2004). I obviously added the citation to Blakely, in part because I continue to by aghast that the Justices have work so hard to avoid confronting the this issue for now 16 years since it handed down the opinion that should have helped bring the ugliness of acquitted conduct enhancement to an end. April 20, 2020 at 12:48 PM | Permalink Comments Doug: For the reasons that you have stated, I agree with your criticisms of using acquitted conduct to enhance Federal criminal sentences. I much prefer the method used in Kentucky's state Courts, where the jury in felony cases makes a sentencing recommendation to the Judge (after being instructed about the possible applicable sentencing mins and maxes, and when the defendant might first be considered for parole), who is then constrained to sentence at or below the Jury's recommendation. I also want to mention a related and deep concern that I developed while working on the cases of fellow inmates during my 8 years in Federal prison law libraries. That is the fact that the Confrontation clause does not apply to sentencing testimony (frequently from co-defendants who took plea deals and did not go to trial). It seems fundamentally unfair to me that defendants do not Constitutionally have the right to confront and cross examine witnesses who provide evidence against them that affects the length of their sentence for the crime they were convicted by the jury. I have long wanted to see Congress pass a statute that effectively would reverse the horrible Supreme Court precedents in this area, so that defense counsel gets to confront and cross examine witnesses who are providing evidence that will affect the duration of the sentence, sometimes at the Sentencing Hearing itself. Posted by: James Gormley | Apr 20, 2020 4:17:10 PM Post a comment "Natural Punishment" | Main | "Taking Restorative Justice Seriously" Back in 2019, I was pleased to be able to blog here about a legialative effort to prohibit judicial reliance on "acquitted conduct" in the federal sentencing system. I am now pleased to now be able to again highlight that Senators Dick Durbin and Chuck Grassley are again the bipartisan sponsors of the latest version of the "Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act." This March 4 press release from Senator Durbin's office provides these details: U.S. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the lead sponsors of the landmark First Step Act, [on March 4] introduced the bipartisan, bicameral Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act of 2021. This legislation would end the unjust practice of judges increasing sentences based on conduct for which a defendant has been acquitted by a jury. U.S. Representatives Steve Cohen (D-TN-09) and Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) plan to introduce House companion legislation next week. Under our Constitution, defendants can only be convicted of a crime if a jury of their peers finds they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. However, federal law inexplicably allows judges to override a jury verdict of not guilty by sentencing defendants for acquitted conduct. This practice is inconsistent with the Constitutions guarantees of due process and the right to a jury trial, Durbin said. Our bipartisan, bicameral bill would make it clear that this unjust practice is prohibited under federal law. If any American was acquitted of past charges by a jury of their peers, then some sentencing judge down the line shouldnt be able to find them guilty anyway and add to their punishment. A bedrock principle of our criminal justice system is that defendants are innocent until proven guilty. The use of acquitted conduct in sentencing punishes people for what they havent been convicted of. Thats not acceptable and its not American. Back in 2014, Justices Scalia, Thomas and Ginsburg all agreed, but werent able to hear the case and stop the practice. Our bill will finally prohibit under federal law what many already find patently unconstitutional, Grassley said.... Our criminal justice system rests on the Fifth and Sixth Amendment guarantees of due process and the right to a jury trial for the criminally accused. These principles require the government to prove a defendants guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury. Under the Constitution, defendants may be convicted only for conduct proven beyond a reasonable doubt. However, at sentencing, courts may enhance sentences if they find, by a preponderance of the evidence, that a defendant committed other crimes. The difference in those standards of proof means that a sentencing court can effectively nullify a jurys verdict by considering acquitted conduct.... The Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act would end this practice by: Amending 18 U.S.C. 3661 to preclude a court of the United States from considering, except for purposes of mitigating a sentence, acquitted conduct at sentencing, and Defining acquitted conduct to include acts for which a person was criminally charged and adjudicated not guilty after trial in a Federal, State, Tribal, or Juvenile court, or acts underlying a criminal charge or juvenile information dismissed upon a motion for acquittal. Along with Durbin and Grassley, the legislation is also cosponsored by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Mike Lee (R-UT), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Thom Tillis (R-NC). The Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act is endorsed by the following organizations: National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Due Process Institute, ALEC Action, American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Tax Reform, Black Public Defenders Association, Digital Liberty, Dream Corps JUSTICE, Drug Policy Alliance, Fair Trials, Faith and Freedom Coalition, FAMM, Federal Public and Community Defenders, FreedomWorks, The Innocence Project, Justice Action Network, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, National Legal Aid & Defender Association, Prison Fellowship, R Street Institute, Right on Crime, The Sentencing Project, Texas Public Policy Foundation, and Tzedek Association. Bill text is available here. GOP Gov and former DEA chief calls for Congress to "finally and fully end the disparity between crack and cocaine offenses" | Main | A different assessment of "Americas Dangerous Obsession" with innocence on death row June 9, 2021 "Acquitted. Then Sentenced." The title of this post is the terrifically economical title of this new commentary authored by Shana OToole is the founder and president of the Due Process Institute. As regular readers surely realize, the commentary focuses on a remarkable sentencing reality that has long troubled me and it discusses the possibility that a legislative fix may be in the works. Here are excerpts from a piece I recommend (including a footnote that I consider especially important): Imagine being accused of robbery and murder, but ultimately being found not guilty by a jury of your peers. Now imagine that just two years later, you are indicted again for a wholly unrelated and less serious criminal offense. You voluntarily plead guilty, expecting to receive a fair sentence. The prosecutors, the probation office, and your defense lawyer all agree that current law sets an appropriate prison sentence ranging between 2.5 years to 3.5 years. Your case is then assigned to the same judge who presided over your first case. She sentences you to eight years in prison more than double the highest end of the range that anyone else involved in the criminal legal system would have told you to expect. And when she does so, she explains that when she went back over her old notes from your first trial, she determined there is a 51% chance that you should have been found guilty of those crimes, so shes ignoring the jurys earlier verdicts and now basing your sentence for this crime on those past unproven crimes. If you think this describes what happens in a bad movie or under some authoritarian regime, you're wrong. This describes a real case, and the practice is known as acquitted conduct sentencing. Earlier this year, a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation that will provide much-needed reform. Tomorrow, this bill, the Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act, will face its first major hurdle: a Senate Judiciary Committee markup. The bill is a first step to addressing the many injustices caused by acquitted conduct sentencing. It will prohibit federal judges from increasing a persons prison sentence for one offense on the basis of another offense for which a jury had found the person not guilty. Perhaps the most apparent problem with acquitted conduct sentencing is that it erodes our systems presumption of innocence and the fundamental principles of fairness and justice. Many lawyers and activists argue that it undermines the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial a pillar of the American criminal legal system, which requires that juries, not judges, determine the facts essential to a prison sentence. Yet acquitted conduct sentencing remains permissible in every federal court and a majority of state courts. While the actual number of impacted persons has yet to be quantified,[FN1] based on the number of federal appeals we know that the practice is widespread. At my organization, the Due Process Institute, our office mailbag is full of letters from those trapped behind prison walls who are serving sentences well past what their actual convictions should have brought them. [FN1] It is almost impossible to say how many people have been directly impacted by the practice since no entity in our federal legal system currently tracks that data. No judge in any of our 94 distinct federal judicial districts is required to document when he or she relies on acquitted conduct in their sentencing decision. And there is often inadequate documentation of acquitted conduct sentencing placed on the public trial record.... Some members of the Supreme Court have raised concerns.... The view that acquitted conduct sentencing is unconstitutional has also won support from lower court judges across the political spectrum. But the majority of the Supreme Court appears to remain unconvinced. Without Supreme Court action, we must look to Congress for a remedy. Thankfully, the legislative fix for this problem is relatively easy. Congress need only amend the law to explicitly exempt the use of acquitted conduct as a basis for increasing a persons sentence. The congressional history of 18 U.S. Code 3661 the part of the law dealing with the use of information for sentencing indicates that the law was enacted to provide broad discretion to federal judges when considering information during sentencing. But it does not appear that the statute was explicitly enacted to permit the specific practice of acquitted conduct sentencing. The political case for abolishing the use of acquitted conduct at sentencing should appeal to sensibilities on both sides of the political aisle. Thats why the Senate bill and a similar one in the House of Representatives have each received support from Democrats and Republicans. In an era in which such bipartisan agreement is increasingly rare, this is an opportunity for Congress to pass meaningful legislation that will make our justice system more fair and effective. Its time to put an end to acquitted conduct sentencing, and the Senates legislation is a good start. Tomorrow, the Judiciary Committee should vote to move this legislation forward unamended and allow it to come to the Senate floor for a vote. June 9, 2021 at 03:51 PM | Permalink Comments A question: How often is the acquitted conduct for which a greater sentence is applied completely unrelated to offenses where a conviction is actually obtained? While I don't necessarily have problems with what I understand to be the usual case where the acquitted and convicted conduct are tied together I admit to being troubled where the two are wholly unrelated. Posted by: Soronel Haetir | Jun 9, 2021 4:19:57 PM I guess the real question is should you be able to impose a long sentence on Al Capone for tax evasion. If you think that character is relevant (and certainly defense counsels regularly introduce evidence of good character unrelated to the offense behavior as mitigating evidence at sentencing hearings), then uncharged and acquitted conduct is just as significant in assessing character as attending church regularly. While it is hard to look back through a modern lens at the understanding of the framers (particularly as the framers "normal" sentences were much harsher than our current sentences reducing the potential impact of prior bad acts on sentencing), the traditional understanding of sentencing procedure is that everything is fair game for the sentencer. I know that defense attorneys, as part of open plea deals, regularly argue that judges should not consider the dismissed charges. But if you make that a rule, there could be unintended consequences. Prosecutors are regularly willing to drop charges because they believe that the sentence to be imposed on the remaining charges will be sufficient. But part of the analysis that makes the remaining counts sufficient is the ability of the courts to consider the total picture. You get rid of that potential, then you might not get the reduced charges with the result that sentences go higher. Posted by: tmm | Jun 9, 2021 5:20:53 PM "acquitted conduct is just as significant in assessing character as attending church regularly" Depends on why there was an acquittal. If the acquittal is a result of there being serious doubt that the crime occurred, actually going to church or something can be a better way to assess character. "Prosecutors are regularly willing to drop charges because they believe that the sentence to be imposed on the remaining charges will be sufficient." I'm not sure how much is covered by the legislation here, but this seems to be different from the "acquitted conduct" concern. The charges were dropped. There wasn't an acquittal as a result (example given) of a whole process and jury decision. It isn't acquitted conduct from the past. It is basically a plea -- "we will drop this if you plea to that" -- regarding current prosecutions. It isn't "two years later" after acquittal. The "everything usually is factored in" comment is noted. The current rule can benefit a defendant in various instances. But, this seems to talk past a basic concern of the piece. Posted by: Joe | Jun 9, 2021 6:18:28 PM The case the post is referring to is United States v. Asaro, where the defendant was allegedly a capo in the mafia. He was acquitted on RICO charges relating to 40 years of mob activity (including the Lufthansa heist and a murder where his son pleaded guilty to moving the body). He pleaded guilty to having some mob associates torch a guy's car after the guy cut him off in traffic. The sentencing judge viewed the acquitted conduct for the other case as being relevant to the "the history and characteristics of the defendant," 18 U.S.C. s. 3553(a), because he was in a position to order mob associates to torch the guy's car because he was high up in mob. So, while I certainly agree the use of acquitted conduct at sentencing is problematic, I'm not sure it's accurate to say the acquitted and convicted conduct were unrelated in this case. Posted by: Tre | Jun 10, 2021 11:28:50 AM Post a comment (Getty) Its been nearly one year since Prince Philip died, and the royal family are marking the anniversary of the Duke of Edinburghs death with a memorial today, Tuesday 29 March. The Duke died on 9 April last year, aged 99. Due to Covid restrictions at the time, his funeral services were altered which resulted in the Queen sitting by herself at her husband of seven decades funeral. In February this year, Buckingham Palace announced a Service of Thanksgiving will be held at Westminster Abbey to celebrate the life of Prince Philip. Yet, with the Queen previously having Covid and only taking on light duties, which members of the royal family will be in attendance? Will the Queen attend Prince Philips memorial? The Queen is expected to attend Prince Philips memorial service today, although this has not been confirmed. In February, Her Majesty tested positive for Covid and experienced light symptoms, Buckingham Palace said at the time. Since then, the 95-year-old has taken on light, mostly virtual, duties. Due to social distancing rules, the Queen was forced to sit by herself at Prince Philips funeral last year (Getty) Will Prince Andrew attend Prince Philips memorial? Prince Andrew is set to attend his fathers memorial in his first public outing since settling his sexual assault case. In February, the Duke of York reached an out-of-court agreement with Virginia Giuffre who accused him of sexual abuse. The settlement was said to be 12m. Earlier this week, PA reported that the Duke is determined to honour his father despite scrutiny he may face. Will Prince Harry attend Prince Philips memorial? While Prince Harry flew back from the US in 2021 to attend his grandfathers funeral, he wont be returning for the memorial. Earlier this month his spokesperson confirmed that neither Harry, nor the Duchess of Sussex, will return for the memorial. Harry began a legal challenge against the Home Office earlier this year after being told he would not receive the same level of security when returning from the US, despite offering to pay for it himself. A legal representative for Harry has previously said that he would like to bring his children, Archie and Lilibet, to the UK but feared it could be too dangerous. Story continues His spokesperson added that he hopes to visit the Queen soon. Which other royal family members will attend Prince Philips memorial? Most senior members of the royal family are expected to attend the memorial, including Princess Anne, Prince Charles and Prince Edward. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have returned from their controversial trip to the Caribbean on 26 March and are also expected to attend the service. Other royal family members expected to attend will be Philips grandchildren, Princess Beatrice, Princess Eugenie, Zara Tindall, Peter Phillips, Lady Louise Windsor, and James, Viscount Severn. Some European royals are also expected to attend the memorial, including King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain, Queen Margrethe of Denmark, Princess Beatrix, King Willem-Alexander, and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, and King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia of Sweden, among others. Crew-34177 59 10 3 2023 Art Basel M+ 1550 9.6% Pondi Bell & Ross BR 05 Skeleton Green 738 Panerai Submersible S BRABUS Blue Shadow EditionBrabus 11% 3 431 10 10% 1947 SOUTH SIOUX CITY For a third straight year and tenth time overall, metro Sioux City has earned the top spot in Site Selection magazine's annual rankings of small-size cities with the most economic development projects. Siouxland had 19 qualifying projects in 2021, one more than second-place Bowling Green, Kentucky, the magazine's category of metro areas with populations less than 200,000. Site Selection counts business investments of at least $1 million, at least 20,000 of new square feet of space and at least 20 new jobs. "The spike of projects (in metro Sioux City) is really tremendous." Adam Bruns, the publication's managing editor, said at a press conference on March 1 at the Marriott Riverfront. Among the projects the magazine cited was Ag Processing Inc.'s proposed $71.5 million expansion of its soybean crushing plant at its Port Neal plant near Sergeant Bluff. AGP CEO Chris Schaffer and other company executives attended the event, hosted by The Siouxland Initiative, a not-for-profit economic development organization which has historically focused on increasing and enhancing employment opportunities in the tri-state area. Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts also was present to make the announcement. Nebraska is no stranger to national recognition for strong economic development. Its part of what makes our state the best place to live, work, and raise a family. Im proud of northeast Nebraskas significant contributions to the tri-state regions exceptional economic development," Ricketts said. Wells Enterprises CEO Mike Wells, who is serving his second year as the chair of the TSI board, noted that "despite the ongoing challenges presented by COVID, as well as the labor force issues created by historically low unemployment, our Siouxland economy continues to perform at a remarkably high level." "I know that I speak for our entire community when I express my genuine gratitude for the many companies who could locate and expand anywhere in the nation but consistently choose to do so in Siouxland, Wells said. Sioux City metro has ranked first in the nation for development in its population category (under 200,000) in 2007, 2008, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020. "This award is collective recognition of the collaboration and cooperation that our Siouxland tri-state area and The Siouxland Initiative have promoted for nearly three decades," Siouxland Initiative President Chris McGowan said. Jared McNett is an online editor and reporter for the Sioux City Journal. You can reach him at 712-293-4234 and follow him on Twitter @TwoHeadedBoy98. Love 0 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The business news you need Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. DES MOINES -- Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller and U.S. Senate hopeful Abby Finkenauer both Democrats will be on the ballot when Iowans cast votes later this year after both survived challenges Tuesday to their candidate filing paperwork. Barely. Miller, the state attorney general seeking re-election in November, and Finkenauer, a challenger in a June 7 primary for an Iowa U.S. Senate seat, both wound up with just enough qualifying signatures on their candidate filing forms after review by the three-member State Objection Panel. Challenges to Millers and Finkenauers signatures, brought by registered Republican voters in Iowa, dealt mostly with incomplete addresses and incomplete, incorrect or difficult to read dates. Candidates for public office in Iowa must obtain a required number of signatures from the public to get on the ballot. That number varies depending on the office sought. As a candidate for re-election as state attorney general, Miller was required to obtain at least 77 signatures in at least 18 counties. After the panel reviewed his campaigns signatures, Miller squeaked by the minimum requirements: He finished with 18 qualifying counties, one of which had 78 signatures. Admittedly, it was pretty close, Miller said. Had the panel disqualified Miller, the Democratic Party could have, and likely would have, voted to reinstate him to the ballot. If a party does not have a candidate in any race after the early filing period, it can nominate a candidate at the partys convention. The same safety net was not in place for Finkenauer, since two other Democratic candidates have qualified for the ballot in the primary for the U.S. Senate currently held by Chuck Grassley. As a Senate candidate, Finkenauer needed to acquire at least 100 signatures from 19 counties. After the panels review, she finished with 19 qualifying counties, including one with exactly 100 signatures and two more with 101. An objection to Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mike Frankens paperwork was dropped late Monday. The third candidate in that primary is Glenn Hurst. The State Objection Panel is comprised of the states secretary of state, attorney general and auditor. So for most of Tuesdays deliberations, the panel was comprised of Miller, Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate and Democratic Auditor Rob Sand. For Millers challenge, however, he was replaced on the panel by Republican Lt. Gov. Adam Gregg. With that difference in political makeup, the panel voted two different ways on the same sets of issues. The Democrats, Sand and Miller, voted to forgive signatures that had minor clerical errors, noting the panel historically has erred on the side of ballot access. The Republicans, Pate and Gregg, voted to reject those signatures, arguing they did not meet the letter of the law. While the panel unanimously rejected the challenge to Millers forms, it voted 2-1 to reject Finkenauers, with Pate voting to accept the challenge and take Finkenauer off the ballot. Alan Ostergren, a conservative lawyer who argued on behalf of many of the challenges, said some of the petitioners now may contest some of the panels rulings in court. We had a different standard applied this morning than was applied this afternoon. Thats not right, Ostergren said. The panel also unanimously rejected challenges to candidate filing forms for four Republicans state Sens. Jack Whitver and Ken Rozenboom, state Senate candidate Anthony LaBruna and state Rep. Jeff Shipley, keeping them all on the ballot. The challenges to Whitvers and Rozenbooms forms centered on their residency as they prepare to run in new Iowa Senate districts. State law says a candidate needs to live in the district by 60 days before the general election, which this year is Nov. 8. Whitver, the Senate majority leader, currently lives in Ankeny but plans to move into a new Senate district in rural, northern Polk County to run for re-election. The panel upheld only one challenge, to the nominating forms of Kyle Kuehl, a Republican candidate for U.S. House in Eastern Iowas new 1st District. But Kuehl late Monday notified the Secretary of States office of his intention to withdraw from the race, and not contest the challenges to his filing paperwork. That leaves incumbent U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks as the only Republican running in that race. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Do you have a cold, the flu, or COVID? Here's how to tell The illnesses all share similar symptoms, sometimes making it hard to distinguish which is putting you under the weather. Covid-19 cases are continuing to spread as the United States moves into the time of year where allergies are on the rise. As much of the country opens back up and people gather in close proximity, it can be important to know if you are feeling unwell because of seasonal sniffles or Covid-19 -- which is why experts have urged vaccinations to reduce risk and protect against infection. Read more on how to tell the difference here: Walmart to end cigarette sales in some stores Walmart will no longer sell cigarettes in some of its stores though tobacco sales can be a significant revenue generator. Wall Street Journal was the first to report the development Monday. It noted some stores in California, Florida, Arkansas and New Mexico were on the list, citing anonymous sources and store visits. Walmart is not the first national retail chain to cut off cigarette sales even on a trial basis, but it is the largest. Read why here: What's the 411 on the new 988 hotline? Beginning July 16, 2022, people struggling with mental health crises can call 988, a new number focused on providing lifesaving suicide prevention and crisis services. But 988 is not just a shorter, easier-to-remember replacement for the current suicide hotline. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission also established the 988 Lifeline to address longstanding concerns in mental health care. The Conversation asked Derek Lee, a PhD student at Ohio State University in Counselor Education and Supervision and a therapist, to explain the new service and how it is different from the old hotline. Lees academic and research focus is on suicide, including training, intervention and prevention. Read more about the hotline here: Nostalgia can reduce perception of pain The next time you feel aches or soreness, you might consider skipping the pain reliever and reaching instead for an old photo. Nostalgia -- that sentimental feeling of longing for the past -- can reduce pain perception, according to new research published in the journal JNeurosci. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Liaoning Normal University asked study participants to rate their level of pain from heat stimulation while looking at pictures that were nostalgic -- depicting old cartoons, childhood games or retro candy -- compared with more modern pictures. Read more about the study here: *** Read more about this past week's health news here: Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Naomi Judd died Saturday at age 76. Here are some of the entertainers, leaders, athletes and other notable people we've lost so far this year. SIOUX CITY -- Sioux City police are looking for a man who is suspected of shooting a teenager multiple times Tuesday morning on the city's near north side. Police said in a statement that the suspect is described as a 6-foot-tall black male with dreadlocks who was last seen wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt. He is considered armed and dangerous. "Detectives are investigating a motive at this time, as this appears to be an unprovoked attack," the statement said. The 16-year-old male victim was walking in the 700 block of 18th Street when he was confronted by an unknown male party who started a physical altercation with him. During the altercation, the man produced a handgun and shot the teenager, who then ran from the scene of the shooting, according to the statement. At 9:52 a.m., officers responded to a report of shots fired in the 700 block of 18th Street. They found the victim, who was suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, at the corner of 16th and Jackson streets. He was taken to MercyOne Siouxland Medical Center with life-threatening injuries. Anyone with information on the identity of the suspect is asked to call the Sioux City Police Department or Crime Stoppers at 712-258-8477. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 1 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. STORM LAKE, Iowa -- A Storm Lake man is in custody on charges that he had sexual contact with a girl under age 14 at least four times in the past three years. The Storm Lake Police Department launched an investigation after it was notified on March 14 of a possible sexual assault of a minor. After investigating the allegations, police said that Carlos Sican Alvarado, 49, had sexual contact with the girl from January 2019 until this March at four locations in Storm Lake. According to court documents, Sican Alvarado touched the girl underneath her clothing, at one point threatening her if she told anyone about the incidents, which took place in three Storm Lake homes and in a vehicle while Sican Alvarado was driving. Police arrested Sican Alvarado Monday at a Storm Lake residence. He was booked into the Buena Vista County Jail on two counts of lascivious acts with a child, two counts of indecent contact with a child and one count of third-degree harassment. His bond was set at $24,300. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. SIOUX CITY -- The Sioux City Community School District will appoint an interim superintendent to allow time for community and district feedback during the search for a successor for Superintendent Paul Gausman. The school board also has decided to contract with the Omaha firm of GR Recruiting, which specializes in recruiting for educational leadership roles, to help with the search for a new superintendent. Gausman was selected last month as the new superintendent of the Lincoln Public Schools. His last day in Sioux City is June 30. The board on Monday night approved a draft contract for $15,000 to hire GR and unanimously decided to appoint an interim superintendent at a later date. The main reason the board members gave for waiting to hire a new superintendent was to give the community and staff time to provide input on the candidates. "If we're to do our due diligence I think we need to take our time and ensure we do this process correctly," Board Member Bob Michaelson said. Board President Dan Greenwell said the two options were to undergo a superintendent search now and appoint a new superintendent by the beginning of next year, or appoint an interim superintendent and provide more time for the search. At this time an interim has not been chosen. Gausman, who'd been Sioux City's superintendent for 14 years, landed his "dream job" in his home state of Nebraska following the retirement of Lincoln superintendent Steve Joel, who announced in September that he would step down after 37 years. Gausman said he has grown to love Siouxland and the people in the community. I pledge to this community that I intend to finish well here, he said. Weve got a lot of things in the works right now and I intend to keep working forward on those things and to not be distracted as I do that work. This community, these students, deserves no less. Love 1 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 1 Want to see more like this? Get our local education coverage delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. SOUTH SIOUX, NEB. -- This spring, South Sioux City is giving away 100 trees for residents to plant in city-owned rights-of-way. According to a press release from South Sioux City Parks Director Gene Maffit, residents can enter to receive a tree by sending or emailing their name, address, email and phone number to "SSCgrants@southsiouxcity.org" or to Gene Maffit, Parks Director, 1615 First Ave., South Sioux City, Neb., 68776. Those who do get a tree are responsible for planting and watering it themselves, the release explained. The release notes that the campaign is being supported by the Arbor Day Foundation's Community Tree Recovery program, as well as the Peter Kiewit Foundation, and is meant to provide people with neighborhoods that are shady, scenic and conserve energy. Jared McNett is an online editor and reporter for the Sioux City Journal. You can reach him at 712-293-4234 and follow him on Twitter @TwoHeadedBoy98. Love 2 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Iowa Department of Natural Resources Director Kayla Lyon, cited by her department earlier this month for fishing without a license, said it was an honest mistake to let her license expire before a fishing excursion on the Mississippi River. Lyon was out with Iowa DNR staff doing a combination of touring and paddlefishing March 18 near Bellevue in Jackson County when she was informed she didnt have a valid license, she said in an email Monday. I caught and released two paddlefish; one of which was 22 pounds, she said. I truly enjoyed the experience to snag such a unique, prehistoric species of fish. On March 21, when Lyon was back in Des Moines, she asked the agencys law enforcement chief to cite her for fishing without a license, she said. The ticket costs $135.50, including a fine, court costs and surcharge, according to Iowa Courts Online. It was an honest mistake but the laws apply to me just like anyone else, Lyon said. I have since gone online and renewed my combination license. Bleeding Heartland first reported this story Friday. Lyon, 37, of Ames, leads the state agency that manages fish and wildlife programs, ensures the health of Iowas forests and prairies and provides recreational opportunities in Iowas state parks, the Iowa DNRs website states. The agency also provides permits and compliance checks for animal feeding operations, among other roles. Gov. Kim Reynolds appointed Lyon to the role in 2019. Lyon has said she encourages other hunters or anglers to routinely check their accounts to make sure their licenses dont expire. Anglers can purchase or renew their licenses on the Iowa DNR website at iowadnr.gov. The outdoor combo annual resident hunting/fishing/habitat license costs $55. This also can be done on the Go Iowa Outdoors smartphone app. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The first time volunteers at the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial displayed photos of the U.S. service members buried there, thousands attended. They could finally start putting faces to the names on the white marble crosses that had stood there for more than 70 years. It was for us incredible to see, said Sebastiaan Vonk, who launched the effort in 2015. People would leave the walking paths at the cemetery to actually walk in between the graves to look at the photos. But there was nothing to see next to the marker at Plot M, Row 9, Grave 13. Dorral Bundy Elliott had joined the Army in Lincoln in 1942 and was killed in Germany three years later. The 29-year-old tech corporal was among 102 Nebraskans buried or memorialized at the cemetery near Margraten. And since the photo collection effort started, volunteers on both sides of the ocean had found photos of 101 of them all but Elliotts. They didnt yet know it was hidden in a briefcase in Scotts Bluff County. Nobody did, until Elliotts nephew uncovered it recently beneath dozens of other family photos. But theyd looked for it. Scott Rayl, a Virginia-based volunteer who has found hundreds of photos for Margarten and other U.S. cemeteries overseas, spent hours on the internet, trying to reconstruct Elliotts family tree but largely hitting dead ends. He learned Elliott was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and raised in northeastern Colorado. That Elliott had married Mary Courtney there in 1939 and theyd had a son in 1942 the same year he joined the Army while living in Lincoln. Rayl recently contacted the Journal Star with a list of Elliotts relatives living in the Lincoln area. The newspaper contacted one of the soldiers nieces, who alerted her cousin, the family historian. Bruce Courtney had heard of Dorral Elliott, the first of his Aunt Marys four husbands. But he didnt know much about the man, and he didnt have a photo. This is all ancient history, he said. All this happened way before I was ever born. Still, hes a persistent researcher, and hes writing a book about his family, so he started calling around, reconnecting with relatives hed lost contact with. And that led him to the Nebraska Panhandle, where Elliotts only grandchild lives. I told her there were people looking for a photograph of him. She said, well, she had a briefcase full of stuff her father had given her, but she didnt know what was in there. She doesnt see well, so Courtney made the 200-mile trip from his home in Wray, Colorado, to Mitchell last week. He opened the briefcase and started leafing through the photos. He found a photo of Elliotts father first, a framed portrait likely taken at the turn of the last century. And then, about 30 photos deep, he found a picture of a young, slender man in what appears to be a military uniform, hands on his hips, a smile forming on his face. He turned it over. Dorral B. Elliott, born Oct. 26 - 1915, killed in Germany April 11 - 1945. I almost started shaking, Courtney said. I just couldnt believe I had finally found it. He was also grateful someone had the foresight to write on the back, to identify Elliott. Because otherwise, he wouldnt have known. Courtney sent a scan of Elliotts photo to Rayl, the Virginia volunteer helping the Faces of Margraten project document the cemeterys 10,023 U.S. service members the 8,301 buried beneath the crosses, the 1,722 names inscribed on the Walls of the Missing. As of earlier this month, they were missing only about 1,540 photos. But time isnt on their side. Memories are fading. So Rayl was grateful for the help finding Elliotts photo. It is unlikely this man's legacy would have survived another generation, he wrote Courtney last week. Now, those that entered the service in Nebraska are all accounted for in the Netherlands American Cemetery. And preserving their memories is important, said Bud Pettigrew of Valentine, who was appointed to the American Battle Monument Commission last fall by President Joe Biden. The 11-member commission administers and operates the cemetery in the Netherlands, and 25 others in foreign countries. But it also relies on the efforts of others to help honor the service members buried in them. Time does not dim the glory of their deeds, he said. Anytime we can put more meat on the bones of these men and women, with a photo or biography, thats pretty awesome. Reach the writer at 402-473-7254 or psalter@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LJSPeterSalter Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Whoopi Goldberg doesn't expect Will Smith to be stripped of his Oscar. The 66-year-old star - who is an Academy Governor serving on the group's Actors branch - has addressed the potential fallout after Smith struck Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith, who suffers with alopecia. Appearing on 'The View' this week, she said: "We're not going to take that Oscar from him. "There will be consequences I'm sure, but I don't think that's what they're going to do, particularly because Chris said 'Listen, I'm not pressing any charges.' " Whoopi insisted while Will - who was later honored with the best actor prize during Sunday night's (03.27.22) ceremony - "overreacted", people can reach "a point when you behave badly". She added: "I think it was a lot of stuff probably built up. I think he overreacted... "I think he had one of those moments where it was like [God damn] it, just stop. I get it, not everybody acts the way we would like them to act under pressure. "And he snapped... Sometimes you get to a point when you behave badly. I myself have behaved badly on occasion." Although Whoopi doesn't expect to see the actor stripped of his best actor prize, the Academy has confirmed it has "started a formal review" of the incident. In a statement, they said: "The Academy condemns the actions of Mr. Smith at last night's show. We have officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct and California law." In a previous statement, the Los Angeles Police Department revealed Chris has not yet filed a report against Will, who has since apologized to the comedian on social media. He wrote: "I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness. (sic) Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Originally published on celebretainment.com, part of the TownNews Content Exchange. Rita Ora admits moving to Australia is "definitely not off the table". The 31-year-old pop star met her boyfriend Taika Waititi in Australia, and Rita has refused to rule out making a full-time switch Down Under. Asked if she would ever relocate, Rita replied: "Who knows? Coming back to Australia is not out of the question. "I've really enjoyed having my life here, and I've created a couple of great friends. Never say never. It's definitely not off the table." Rita has spent lots of time in Sydney filming 'The Voice' and she already feels as though she's got a "close connection" to the country. The 'Hot Right Now' hitmaker - who was born in Kosovo but grew up in London - told Harper's Bazaar Australia: "Its very peaceful for me to be able to go to the beach and sit there and read. Its really lovely to find that sense of grounding in a place where Im not from. "I love the people because theyre just so lovely and I just feel very accepted here, and I just feel very sort of free. Ive got a definite close connection with Australia." Rita and Taika have set up home in Los Angeles over recent months. And a source previously suggested that the 46-year-old director could soon pop the question. The insider explained: "Rita and Taika are head over heels. "From what she says, hes the one for her. None of her mates would be surprised if he popped the question soon. Some people might see that as quite quick but theyve barely spent a day apart since they got together." Rita's pals also think Taika has had a positive influence on the pop star. The source added: "She always throws herself in head first, but this feels like a healthy, adult relationship. Taikas mature and understands the fame game. "Hes a grounding presence but still lots of fun so he can keep up with her." Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Originally published on celebretainment.com, part of the TownNews Content Exchange. BLENCOE, Iowa Barges carrying fertilizers head up, and grains head down that stretch of the upper Missouri River after the Port of Blencoe opened last June. Western Iowa farmers now have access to a lower-cost option to access fertilizer and export grains at the new gateway to the world market. NEW Cooperative constructed a $11 million port along the Missouri River, near the small Monona County town of Blencoe. The port is the northernmost port on the nearly 760-mile span of the Missouri from St. Louis to Sioux City. The port can load and unload six to nine barges at a time. In the first year the port had 40 barges come in up the river, and around 38 barges go back down, said NEW Cooperative communications director Gary Moritz. Each barge has the capacity to haul 50,000 bushels of grain. The port gives the co-op direct access to export markets and provides a third option for transporting grain, beyond the current rail and trucks. Because water navigation is more cost-effective than truck or rail, the barge terminal allows the co-op to reduce its freight expenses, Dix said. The Monona County Board of Supervisors received a state RISE grant of over $1 million to pave a gravel road from Blencoe, pop. 224, to the port, which is west of Interstate 29. Moritz said the road construction is expected to begin this spring. Two other future projects include a scale and office facility, and a new commodity building. Proponents say barges are good for the environment and vehicular traffic safety because it takes more trucks off crowded highways like Interstate 80, reducing accidents and harmful emissions. With a few exceptions, barges have not traveled as far north as Blencoe in over 15 years. The once-thriving barge industry in Sioux City disappeared in the early 2000s after a combination of the degradation of the river bed, drought, economic recession, low commodity prices and political infighting over management of the river led shippers to turn to rail and trucks. NEW Cooperative, which has over 5,500 members and 40 locations throughout western and northwestern Iowa, started planning its rural Monona County port over three years ago. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the Missouri, has assured the co-op it will maintain a 9-foot-deep, 300-foot-wide channel. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. SIOUX CITY -- After a tumultuous start to the project, construction continues on the new Woodbury County Law Enforcement Center, with walls for the complex starting to emerge from the ground. Grading at the 38-acre site in the vicinity of 28th Street started last year, with a groundbreaking ceremony held in September. The $66 million project is anticipated for completion in March 2023. "Things are moving along as best as we possibly can," Law Enforcement Center Authority Chair Ron Wieck said. The 110,000-square-foot jail will hold up to 448 inmates; nearly double the roughly 234 inmate-capacity for the current aging jail, located across the street from the county courthouse. The new Law Enforcement Center also will have separate offices for the county sheriff and attorney, plus five courtrooms. For years, county officials faced various deficiencies, compliance issues, operations costs and lack of space in the current jail, built in 1987. Most recently, experts recommended at least $22 million in critical repairs. At the time of the studies, county officials warned critical systems could fail at any time, which would force the evacuation of the jail and require taxpayers to pay millions of dollars to transport and house inmates in other jails scattered around the state on top of the repair costs. In 2019, the county board of supervisors moved to place a bond issue for a new jail in March 2020. A joint three-member city-county panel, called the Woodbury County Law Enforcement Center Authority, was formed. Taking advantage of a provision in state law, the Authority only needed a simple majority for the bond issue, rather than the 60-percent supermajority needed for most local government projects funded by property taxes. The authority is led by Wieck and its members also include Sioux City Mayor Pro-Tem Dan Moore and county supervisor Rocky De Witt. In March 2020, county voters approved a $50.3 million bond with a 57 percent voter approval. With interest, the 20-year bonds could cost in the range from $64 million to $68 million. Construction on the project was originally set to begin in early 2021, but was delayed by the rising costs of building materials, triggered by a disruption in supply chains due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The price of building materials essential to jail construction -- steel, concrete, PVC, copper -- had jumped by as much as 70 percent in some cases. Lumber prices in particular had gone through the roof. In June, the LEC Authority approved a $58.4 million contract to Lincoln-based Hausmann Construction, which submitted the low bid for the general contractor phase of the project. The original estimate for the main phase was $43 million. The low bid represents a 36 percent increase in cost, said Kenny Schmitz, the county building services director in June 2021. Counting $59.9 million in construction costs and $6.2 million in other items such as land cost, design fees and project management, the price for the project ballooned to $66 million. To bridge the gap between actual costs and the voter approved bond, the board of supervisors has allocated $10 million of the American Rescue Plan Act COVID-19 relief funding to the project. A number of citizens, including local contractors and union leaders, had urged the Authority to reject the two general contractor bids and put the project on hold in hopes the costs would fall by the time it was rebid. People also spoke out against the use of COVID-19 relief funding on the project. Wieck said he spoke individually with many of those who were initially against the project, and once there was an opportunity to explain the project, some changed their minds. "Once this facility is completed they will see that it was worth the process," he said. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. How does the construction of a new building change who lives in the neighborhood? That question is at the heart of urban politics in America today, where everyone knows we need to build more homes, but nobody wants them in their backyard. The opposition is motivated by many fears about change, but none is more vexing than the idea that new housing might actually be causing the very problems its supposed to solve: Making rents go up, and forcing people out of the neighborhood. Advertisement To some urbanites, this idea is intuitive: The new apartment building is the symbol of gentrification. It brings wealthy occupants who support new amenities, prompting a cycle of investment that ends in the forced departure of longtime residents and businesses. And while housing researchers agree that only new construction can bring down rents in expensive regions, the local effect of new supply is more contested. Some research shows new construction increases rents nearby; other research shows it decreases rents nearby. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement That question is also at the heart of a gigantic study published this month by researchers with the Urban Displacement Project, which focuses on the Bay Area, where the addition of three new jobs for every one new house has, in recent years, given the region some of the highest home prices in the country. Comparing two decades of new apartments against the most detailed displacement data ever assembled, researchers led by Karen Chapple and Jackelyn Hwang conclude that new buildings are associated with more people moving in and out of neighborhoods. Advertisement Advertisement That phenomenon, which housing researchers call churn, is a natural feature of urban life, and not necessarily a bad one. New parents may need a bigger place and empty nesters a smaller one; workers need to move closer to jobs and students to school; couples move in together, or move out. Most of the time, churn means people are making choices about how to better meet their own needs. After neighborhoods experienced new construction, the study found, churn increased at almost all income levels, with more people moving in and out, except for the highest-income residents, who became less likely to leave. Thats not so surprisingmost of the new buildings studied are targeted at higher-income residents, after all. Advertisement Advertisement Whats surprising is that after new buildings were built, residents of lower income levels also continued to move into the neighborhood in great numbers. Even residents with very low or moderate incomes were more likely to move in than move out in the four years after a new building went up. While high-income residents fare the best, new construction appears to let more people into the neighborhood up and down the income spectrum. Those trends flip only for extremely low income residents, who are slightly more likely to move out than in after new apartments get built. But even for them, in-migration increased slightly, and migration out rose by just 1 or 2 percentage points. If, in a normal year, 10 percent of low-income households move out, that number rose to 12 percent after new buildings showed up in the neighborhood. Displacement after new construction is real, researchers conclude, but it is very, very small. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The research reminds us of a few things about how cities work. First, even in the context of impossibly tight Bay Area housing markets, lots and lots of people move into and out of neighborhoods every yeareven people who dont make a lot of money. When we talk about gentrification or displacement, we are talking about movements that occur on the margin of all that churn that marks the baseline of city life. Advertisement Advertisement Second, while this data will not convince anyone to say yes to more housing, it does offer some guidelines for how politicians can react. If all it takes to stem the tide of displacement in a growing neighborhood is helping a handful of families each year stay put, displacement is, in the authors words, readily mitigable through interventions like just-cause eviction laws, rent stabilization, or direct project-based subsidy. Those policies, the researchers found, help people stay put. Building that new housing is important, even if it is aimed at high-income tenants. Not just because it keeps those wealthier urbanites out of the older buildings where they would displace existing residents, or because it seems to increase residential mobility across the board. If we build enough of it, and keep building it, those new buildings will go out of fashion, take on wear and tear around the edges, and become the affordable housing stock of tomorrow, without anyone lifting a finger. Given how much the headlines have been fixating on the incident that occurred during Sunday nights Academy Awards ceremony, you might have missed that CODA just made history. The indie film about the only hearing daughter (Emilia Jones) in a Deaf fishing family first premiered at Sundance more than a year ago and found a home on Apple TV+. Despite being nominated for just three Oscars, CODA gained steam over the course of awards season and on Sunday won in all of its categories: Best Supporting Actor for Troy Kotsur, Adapted Screenplay for writer-director Sian Heder, and, yes, Best Picture. As it was the first movie with a predominantly deaf cast to be up for the big award, we were watching. Advertisement While Kotsurs Best Supporting Actor win was just about as universally celebrated within the Deaf community as a thing can be these days, CODA itself has been met with more mixed reactions. Its a film made by hearing people and centering a hearing character, and because of this, it relies on stereotypes in its overarching characterization of the deaf experience. The fact that the Rossi parents (Kotsur and Marlee Matlin) expect their teen daughter to interpret for them in situations where the Americans With Disabilities Act legally entitles them to a real interpreterlike in a doctors office or in courtis a choice made to get laughs or create false stakes. The notion that deaf people dont understand the concept of music and would be automatically dismissive that their hearing child likes to sing, as Matlins character is, is deeply silly. (Prior to Kotsurs win, Matlin was the only deaf performer ever to win an Oscar, in 1987.) Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement [Read: CODAs Oscar-Winning Performance Is Even Better When You Understand ASL] And yet. This is also a movie that is 40 percent in American Sign Language. Its buoyed by the talent of a predominantly deaf cast. The older brother of the family, Leo (Daniel Durant), actively pushes back against his parents reliance on his sister Ruby as family interpreter, and ultimately its his advocacy, not Rubys, that sets the family on a better path. For me, CODAs shortcomings are less an indictment of the film itself and more a reminder of how desperately we need more deaf representation on-screen and especially behind the scenes. Its unfortunate that CODA, which at its heart is an intimate story about a single family, is expected to bear the weight of fully representing millions of people. I laughed a lot at Kotsurs performance as Frank Rossi, a poet of filth, and I appreciated that the Rossis were sexual beings rather than chaste or infantilized, as is often the case for disabled characters. Even when its depiction of deafness didnt ring true or was a little too saccharine for my general taste, I was fully invested in CODA, the same way I watched Sound of Metal to root for the deaf actors or devoured the hot, soapy mess that was Netflixs reality series Deaf U. Deaf people deserve hot, soapy messes too! I like seeing deaf people, and my language, on the screen, and I want more of it. Advertisement Advertisement CODA has undeniably pushed the industry in the right direction, first and foremost by casting actual deaf people in deaf roles. The decision to screen the film in theaters with open captionscaptions that are on-screen for all, rather than requiring an additional step to view themwas also unique. These may seem like little things to a hearing viewer, but to me, having sat through a lot of films where cripped-up hearing people sign badly, or having arrived at the movie theater only to be told that someone forgot to charge the caption goggles so I have to come back some other time, they are achievements. Advertisement Advertisement As for the Oscars themselves, for a show that didnt even have a wheelchair ramp until last year, the ceremony was a big leap forward. I screamed at my television when Amy Schumer called CODA her favorite movie in ASL. I came running back into the room when I saw deaf people on-screen during a Snapchat commercial. And ASL interpretation for the entire broadcast was offered live on the Oscars YouTube channel , which was a historic first. Actually seeing an interpreter onstage during the Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture speeches was even better. That the camera operators actually stayed focused on Kotsur for the entirety of his acceptance speechinstead of cutting away, as the show has done in the past when Matlin has been onstagewas also a big production win. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement [Read: What Sets CODA Apart From the French Movie It Remakes] But the ASL interpretation on the Oscars on YouTube was spotty; many deaf people didnt even know it existed, and because it was just an interpreter feed, and not an interpreter embedded atop the regular broadcast, it required two devices to actually watch the show. A phantom hand sometimes floated into the frame, obscuring and distracting from the interpretation. Sometimes the feed was ahead, sometimes it fell behind, depending on commercials and ones internet speed for running various devices simultaneously. For a while, it cut out completely. While I appreciate this as a first attempt and found the interpreters themselves to be great, these failings of accessibility are again the result of a hearing-centered understanding of what access actually means, and ultimately of the production and network being unwilling to go the full mile when it comes to inclusion. Requiring the deaf person to run multiple devices and feedsif they even have the bandwidth and equipmentis not equity, but a reminder that most would rather not see reminders of us at all. Advertisement Advertisement If the interpreter had been integrated into the television broadcast using decades-old picture-in-picture technology, we could have watched alongside our hearing peers in sync, and I doubt hearing viewers experience would have suffered much missing out on an inch or two of empty stage in the corner of their screens. (Also, they wouldve gotten a sweet ASL interpretation of Dos Oruguitas, as opposed to the captions just reading singing foreign language for three minutes, and a priceless expression on the interpreters face as the feed of the Smith-Rock Debacle cut in and out.) For me, Hollywoods real commitment to inclusion will only be measurable next yearwill the show have an ASL interpreter for viewers even if there are no deaf nominees? Advertisement If the film world seeks to be truly inclusive, there will be more deaf nominees; there must be. Only a multitude of deaf stories can diminish both the pressures and expectations of representation, as well as the dangers misrepresentation can pose. And allowing space for stories created by and centering deaf people is the only way to approach authentic depictions of a multifaceted and truly diverse community. Its easy to be frustrated at an industry that time and again has spoken over us, excluded us, and appropriated our language and culture. But I dont want the past to obscure the real progress being made, or the possibility of an inclusive future. For today, I choose joy; activism without it just isnt sustainable. I hope that we are at the very beginning of an explosion of deaf-centric stories, stories that showcase the intersectionality of the deaf experience, as well as films featuring deaf actors and characters that have nothing to do with deafness at all. Im hopeful that seeing Troy Kotsur being awarded the highest honor in his fieldand accepting that award in ASL with the entire audience hand-waving in applausewill do more to emphasize deaf peoples talent and worth than whatever viewers might assume about an entire community from the fictional character he played. I am so thrilled for and proud of the deaf people who made CODA as successful as it was. May the doors hang wide-open in their wake. And may we not have to wait another 35 years. On Monday, a federal court in California ordered attorney John Eastman to turn over 101 emails that he claims were covered by attorney-client privilege to the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, 2021. The court ruled that Eastman, the lawyer who authored two memos that were the legal blueprint for Trumps bloodless coup, likely violated the law, meaning his emails would be discoverable under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege. Notably, the court also found that Eastmans client, Trump, likely committed federal crimes in his effort to overturn the 2020 election. Advertisement Judge David O. Carters 44-page opinion concludes that Trump and Eastman more likely than not corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021, and with deceitful intent conspired to defraud the United States. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Subscribe to the Slatest Newsletter A daily email update of the stories you need to read right now. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Please enable javascript to use form. Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Sign Up Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. Those are the two crimes, 18 USC 1512(c)(2) and 371, most commonly mentioned as a basis for indicting Trump over his soft coup attempt. Of course, prosecutors carry a heavier burden than proving it more likely than not that a crime was committed. But that conclusion coming from a federal court should be viewed as rocket fuel to launch an aggressive investigation of the former president, the signs of which have continued to be lacking from Attorney General Merrick Garland. The courts conclusions will fortify those inside the Justice Department arguing for a change of the current apparent course. Advertisement Advertisement As Carter noted, it seems quite apparent that Trump and Eastman knew that what they were trying to make happen was wrong. As Carter writes: President Trumps repeated pleas for Georgia Secretary of State [Brad] Raffensperger clearly demonstrate that his justification was not to investigate fraud, but to win the election: So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. Taken together, this evidence demonstrates that President Trump likely knew the electoral count plan had no factual justification. Eastman likely had a similar corrupt intent, the judge concluded, citing the testimony of former Vice President Mike Pences attorney Greg Jacob. [Dr. Eastman] acknowledged that he didnt think Kamala Harris should have that authority in 2024; he didnt think Al Gore should have had it in 2000; and he acknowledged that no small government conservative should think that that was the case, Jacob testified. Advertisement Advertisement Carter further wrote that Jacob testified that Eastman acknowledged just how corrupt his plan would be, as [y]ou would just have the same party win continuously if [the] Vice President had the authority to just declare the winner of every State. As the judge concluded, Eastmans plan was driven not by preserving the Constitution, but by winning the 2020 election. Again, this all just further builds the case for criminal prosecutions. Advertisement Advertisement Indeed, earlier this month, a D.C. jury convicted insurrectionist Guy Reffitt of violating 1512(c)(2), the same statute Carter cites. That verdict followed the guilty pleas to the same offense or conspiracy to commit it by two other far-right militants who participated in the insurrection: Proud Boy Matthew Greene on Dec. 8 and Oath Keeper Joshua James on March 2. Advertisement Advertisement While both men were direct participants in the violence, Garland previously pledged to follow the facts wherever they lead and to hold all Jan. 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under lawwhether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy. As positive a development as Mondays federal court ruling is, no one should hold their breath in anticipation of seeing Eastmans emails anytime soon. Eastman will seek a stay in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit pending his appeal of the order, and if unsuccessful there, he will go to the Supreme Court. Advertisement Advertisement If that happens, watch for whether Justice Clarence Thomas recuses himself. It was just last week that we learned that the select committee already has 29 text messages between his wife, right-wing operative Ginni Thomas, and Mark Meadows, Trumps former chief of staff, in which she encourages Meadows to help overturn the election. Advertisement During these exchanges, Ginni Thomas referred cryptically to being boosted by a conversation with my best friend just now. Whether or not Thomas is that best friend, Ginni Thomas is clearly implicated by all of these emails and by her attendance at the Jan. 6 rally, and the justice clearly has a duty to recuse himself from the Eastman litigation and any other Jan. 6 lawsuits that might implicate his wife. Notably, Eastman was once a law clerk for Thomas. On Jan. 4, two days before the insurrection, Eastman told Jacob that he believed Thomas and one other justice would support his plan if Pence decided to delay the certification and send the issue of certification back to the states. (Eastman backed off that assertion when Jacob challenged him.) Mondays decision is significant for its flashing-red-light conclusion: this case is a warning about the dangers of legal theories gone wrong, the powerful abusing public platforms, and desperation to win at all costs. If Dr. Eastman and President Trumps plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. Carter captures the whole misadventure in one elegant line: Trumps and Eastmans unprecedented campaign to overturn the election was a coup in search of a legal theory. On a recent episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick reflected on last weeks Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings by talking with Stanford Law professor Nate Persily about how the hearings intersected with the bigger misinformation ecosystem. They spoke about how a debunked lie that Jackson was soft on child predators morphed from fringe theory to the Republican party line in under a week, and what that says about the pervasive distrust of the institutions of democracy. A portion of their conversation, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, has been transcribed below. Advertisement Dahlia Lithwick: Lets talk, if we may, about misinformation. Listen, I dont work in your lane and I dont understand these information ecosystems the way you do. But what I saw play out within the span of less than a week was a really dumb trial balloon floated by Sen. Josh Hawley in some tweets last Thursday. And by the end of Wednesday, six days later, it was the party line. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement As it was being debunked in real time, by the way, in every mainstream media source, including the National Review online, it was expanding and growing and growing and expanding. The more we talked about it, the more it grew. It just really became clear to meand, Nate, please tell me Im wrongthat it doesnt matter because Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are narrow-casting to their people, to One American Network and to their Twitter mentions, and that you and I are operating in an ecosystem that is utterly immaterial to what they were trying to do. In that sense, I guess, they did what they were trying to do. Advertisement Advertisement Nate Persily: Well, look, it matters in no small measure because it took up an enormous amount of time. Thats why I think the speech by Sen. Cory Booker to at least refocus us on the joy of this hearing was so important, as well as Sen. Alex Padillas comments that really led Judge Jackson eventually to show that side of her, to show the struggle and also how much these hearing had worn on her. Lets be clear, if it werent these questions, it wouldve been something else. So its not about anything that she did in these cases or some particular decision. Think about the other trial balloons. This could have been all about critical race theory. It could have been about the abortion decisions or her briefs. That could have been the dominant point. But the thing about child pornography is its not just the third rail, say, in these hearings. When you talk about the internet ecosystem, it has a privileged role. This is the worst thing, the worst topic you can bring up. So if you can cleave some personality, some nominee to that topic, you have succeeded. We know this, of course, from the famous Pizzagate controversy with Hillary Clinton, which led to real violence as a result of misinformation. You see it in the QAnon echo chambers as well. So this is part of a strategy to try to adjoin her to that most incendiary topic. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement I was really struck on Wednesday when they brought in an expert, whos supposed to be the child sex offender expert, whos supposed to shore up all of these completely debunked conspiracy theories, and the expert herself declines to talk about Judge Jackson, admits shes never read her opinions or her law review article. In my mind, when I think about this as a disinformation or misinformation problem, Im like, well, boom, even your expert didnt corroborate what you were saying and, in fact, said something actually supporting Judge Jackson had been saying about how the internet has changed the ways we think about porn. Im clearly naive, right? It doesnt matter that the expert that they bring in from Operation Underground Railroad did nothing to help them. The mere fact that there was an expert there is enough. Advertisement Advertisement Remember that very few people are watching all of the hearings. The hearings are opportunities for sound bites. So the question is: Will there be something that happens in the hearing that then will reverberate or be in the information ecosystem or on cable news? Having expert advice is only relevant in so far as it shores up the narrative in a significant way so that then it can be amplified by the other thought leaders. Advertisement Advertisement How easy is it really to debunk any of this stuff when its not really drawing on evidence, its appealing to emotion and psychological anxiety? So you could have all the expert testimony that you want, and its not going to replace the yelling that was coming from the podium. Its just about trying to give more air to that issue as opposed to others. Advertisement That leads me to one other question that I was very aware of. I was very struck by this locution of Do your own research. People are asking. Josh Hawley starts by saying, People just really are asking about these two soft sentences in some child porn cases. Theres a way in which it encourages folks to do their own research, right? Its saying, If you wont release these confidential presentencing reports, youre part of the conspiracy to hide child porn enablers. It makes everybody who isnt a party to this do-your-own-research game part of the conspiracy. This is how anti-vaxxers spread misinformation. Its how Stop the Steal happens. Advertisement So I want you to tell me how unique this is to the internet age and how unique it is to this QAnon zeitgeist of Everyones lying to you. Everyones in on it. If we can find a scintilla of something, it doesnt matter whats there. What matters is we have now persuaded people that they are the experts and that their research is dispositive. So is this how conspiracies always spread, or is this some part of this larger mistrust of institutions and truth? Advertisement Advertisement I want to start with the last phrase, because thats the fertile ground into which these seeds are planted, which is that were living in an age of pervasive distrust. Theres a chicken and egg problem here of whether the internet has caused it. My view is that the loss of trust in institutions generallygovernment in particular but institutions generally, so the medical establishment, universities, corporations, bankstheres been a long-term erosion in that trust. Why that is is complicated. Its not unique to the United States. Were seeing this around the world. So start with that as the baseline. Then the question is: What strategies then undercut even further legitimate sources of authority and credibility? Right now, part of the problem is theres no institution or single person who has credibility across the political spectrum. Were very far away from the days when Walter Cronkite could end every broadcast with Thats just the way it is, because right now no one trusts anyone to say what it is at this point. Advertisement Theres this loss of authority. To some extent, that is an internet story. Its also a cable news story, of course. Theres a feedback loop here where the internet sometimes sets the agenda for cable news. Cable news then sometimes sets the agenda for that internet, which is to say social media and more grassroots-y commentary. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Kate Starbird of the University of Washington has talked about participatory disinformation, and thats really what were seeing here as well. You need to only look at the slogan for Russia Today, which is, Question more. Whether its in the anti-vax context, whether its with respect to the QAnon conspiracy theory, election fraud, or any number of other areas where youre trying to get some source of authority, some elite opinion on this to then make its way into the mass public, the answer is, Look, do your own research, because these people have a hidden agenda. It is extremely difficult to counteract that. Advertisement Subscribe to the Slatest Newsletter A daily email update of the stories you need to read right now. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Please enable javascript to use form. Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Sign Up Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. So you know where this is going, which is: What do we do? I always end up quoting my younger son, when the Nazis were marching in Charlottesville, who, at the age of 12, posited, You ignore them, you lose. You engage with them, you lose. Its so clear to me that this hearing was a matter of you pick your way through one of two really terrible outcomes: You either engage, debunk, and in some ways give credibility to a bunch of debunked garbage, or you ignore it and let it flourish in fertile ground. Now youre going to explain to me why that is way too simplistic and there is a way to prevail over this hellish double bind. Advertisement Advertisement What you say is true. That doesnt mean all hope is lost. There are strategies and ways to try to take the wind out of those sails. So Claire Wardle of First Draft media has advice to journalists, which is to create what she calls a truth sandwich, which is that you start by saying, This is going to be a lie. Heres what the lie is, and heres why its wrong. As opposed to saying, Well, this event happened. People on this side said this. People on that side said that. Isnt it terrible how much conflict there is? Look, lets talk more about the conflict, which is like saying, Ignore that elephant in the room. Advertisement Advertisement There are lots of different strategies like this. There are strategies for the media. There are strategies for those of us who are talking about this, which is to shift attention toward the more positive aspects. I thought that thats in part what Cory Booker was doing. When he says, Were not going to let them steal our joy, he means even to focus on those accusations is going to distract from the historic appointment here. So you dilute the bad with the good. You try to flood the zone with better information or more positive assessments in this case. Advertisement Advertisement What are the implications of how misinformation played out this week at these hearings going forward for how we think about wins and losses and what weve learned? Advertisement One thing that concerns me is that while we have celebrated the fact that Ketanji Brown Jackson is a district court judge, this shows you why they dont get appointed all that often. If you have 500 opinions, youre going to have some in criminal cases with pretty unattractive defendants. If you take sentencing seriously, as she does and as most judges do, then anyone is going to be able to take a particular case and then blow it out of proportion. Weve seen that here. I worry about two things. I worry about our inability to appoint qualified district court judges like this to higher judicial office. Then second, I worry about the signal its now sending to judges around the country. We were lurching toward some consensus on criminal justice issues over the last few years. Bipartisan consensus on rationality and sentencing and the way that we should be thinking about criminal justice issues, with respect to racial, disparate impact, as well as other things. I worry that these hearings are blowing that apart and that were turning back the clock to the 1980s. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Im interested in what checks bad impulses. I guess I really thought that when the National Review Online debunked the most outlandish chargeseven on Fox News, we had some debunkingthe Republican Party answered to that. It turned out they just blew past that. It was immaterial, and it raises questions for me about what still has a checking function. If theres nobody to pump the brakes or the brakes being pumped is immaterial, then it raises the question of what happens next time. I dont think that any publication is going to chill the ambitions of politicians that want to play to a particular constituency that is frothing at the mouth on these issues. Look, in some ways, thats the lesson in the last five years, which is that there is no elite institutionand Ill throw National Review in there as an elite institutionthat will be able to stop the tide going over the banks here once its been unleashed. What elites are learning is that they can unleash the tide with relative ease if they have a concentrated moment where the cameras are on and they can create these kind of events that then can reverberate around the information ecosystem. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement I guess this is a good segue to the revelations that came out late Thursday about the text messages between Clarence Thomass wife, Ginni Thomas, and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Again, the reason this feels like its in your wheelhouse, Nate, is that I think the shocker in reading some of those texts is that stuff is not high-minded Federalist Society This is just straight-up watermarked ballots, Sidney Powell, release the kraken. This feels like its really very dangerous crackpottery, for lack of a better word, and its coming from inside the house. Advertisement This is stuff that we thought was fringe, and its infiltrated the discourse at the highest levels. My question for you is: Is it in any way material to you that Ginni Thomas is embracing the idea that the Biden familys going on trial for war crimes and Guantanamo? Advertisement Well, I do think this is a perfect example of the feedback loop with disinformation. Were talking about participatory disinformation. Its not as if its just random people in QAnon echo chambers who are then talking to themselves with no consequence, either for public policy or for elite discourse. It goes into elite discourse because elites are paying attention to this, and all the more so when you have a president that has an active Twitter feed, right? So then it goes up, it goes out, and then it goes back on and goes onto the cable news networks and the like. Whats important to understand is that no matter how often you debunk a particular claim, whether its about Italian satellites having an impact on the election, Dominion Voting Systems, dead people voting, noncitizens, Sharpies in Arizona, whatever, its this was a multiheaded beast. The claims of fraud were so heterogeneous that there was really no way to defeat the argument because there were many different types of arguments. And its not just the fringe groups that believe this. It is now orthodox, so that then it has an effect on people in positions of power and decision-making. To hear the rest of their discussion, as well as Dahlia Lithwicks conversation with Angela Onwuachi-Willig about how Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson rose above the melee of her confirmation hearings, listen below, or subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every so often, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy saysmeaningfullythat he will have a stern chat with one of his fellow Republican House members. What kind of offenses prompt such a visit to the principals office? Since last year, the subjects have included: Jewish space lasers, violent anime videos that were tweeted, appearances at white nationalist political conferences, comparisons of COVID rules to the Holocaust, and jokes about Muslim members of Congress being potential suicide bombers. This week, McCarthy has a fresh case to add to his chat docket: Allegations from freshman North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn that certain unnamed members of Congress are doing coke and going to orgies. The remarks, which Cawthorn made on a podcast last week, have stirred up the QAnon wing of the party yet again, and Cawthorns fellow Republicans are peeved that theyre getting bugged about it. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Staffers inside the Beltway will often say that the real D.C. is more Veep, the HBO satire of Washington incompetence, than House of Cards, the Netflix soap opera about a calculating House leader turned president. (Id say the show that best captures the atmosphere, overall, is C-SPANs Book TV.) But Cawthorn, appearing on the Warrior Poet Society (?) podcast, said House of Cards depiction of D.C. as a hotbed of sleaze, sex, and drugs is totally accurate. The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington, I meanbeing kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average age is probably 60 or 70, Cawthorn said, and I look at all of these people, a lot of them Ive looked up to through my life then all of a sudden you get invited to, Oh, hey, were going to have kind of a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come! And Im like, What did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize theyre asking you to come to an orgy. Advertisement Advertisement Or, he continued, the fact that, you know, theres some of the people that are leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do a key bump of cocaine in front of you. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement My first thought upon hearing this was that someone needs to alert the Grand Falcon himself; you cant just reveal the secrets of the Twelve like this to anyone on a podcuh, I mean my first thought was whats he even talking about? This could have passed as a dumb thing a spiraling member of the House said on a podcast that was forgotten a day later. Happens all the time. But the allegation has spread enough that members, including GOP members, are getting asked about it by their constituents. Thats when it becomes a problem. Sign Up for the Surge Keep up with whats going on in Washington with Slates weekly political ranking, written by Jim Newell. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Please enable javascript to use form. Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Sign Up Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. During House Republicans weekly conference meeting Tuesday morning, multiple members stood up to air their anger and frustration over Cawthorn portraying his own colleagues as bacchanalian and sexual deviants, Politico reports. Among them was Arkansas Rep. Steve Womack, who complained that hes getting questions about who exactly is doing keys of cocaine and participating in orgies. Congressman Womack felt strongly about addressing the comment, a spokesperson for Womack told me. Members further suggested that if its true, Cawthorn should name names. I agree. In the meantime, McCarthy will settle it with a chat. In a televised meeting with Russian cultural leaders on Friday, Vladimir Putin held up J.K. Rowling as a victim of the Wests irrational cancel culture for her refusal to satisfy the demands of gender rights. In some ways, Putins anti-trans statement was just the latest in a long line of aggressive assaults on LGBTQ rights in his country. At the same time, though, his adoption of one of the major recent cultural grievances of the American righteven parroting their precise languageappeared to be a transparent effort to align himself with conservatives from Europe and the United States during a time when he has lost credibility with this group following the launch of his catastrophic war against Ukraine. As Republicans, in particular, become more and more open with their desire to roll back hard-won rights for LGBTQ people in the United States, they have found themselves again emulating tactics of demagoguery and hate that have been a mainstay of the Russian leader for more than a decade. In this approach, members of the GOPsuch as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who on Monday signed the states Dont Say Gay bill into law by declaring he would not be cowed by big corporations and Hollywood elites who oppose the hateful measureand Putin are political kin. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The creation of ungodly monsters from within is an effective distraction from complex social problems that demand nuanced and politically imperfect solutions. Putin entered his third term in office in 2012 with declining popularity and growing nationwide protests. For the next decade, Putin tightened his grip on the Russian people in large part through the enforcement of exclusionary and divisive traditional values. By 2013, Russia passed the federal anti-gay propaganda law criminalizing the distribution of materials aimed at creating nontraditional sexual attitudes or equating the social value of traditional and nontraditional sexual relations. These nationalist, value-based policies silenced and criminalized Russias already marginalized LGBTQ community often by appealing to sacred text. This rhetoric has made it impossible for LGBTQ people to be good Russians. Instead, they are conspirators with Western foreign agents working to destroy Russia from within. Putin stated this view more plainly in a recent speech in which he described cultural foes of his authoritarian rule in Russia as gnats that needed to be purified from Russian society and not so subtly targeted LGBTQ people. I dont condemn those who have villas in Miami or the French Riviera, those who cant live without foie gras, oysters or so-called gender freedoms, Putin said. Its not a problem. The problem is that many of those people are mentally there (in the West) and not here with our people, with Russia. They dont remember or just dont understand that they are just expendables used for the purpose of inflicting the maximum damage on our people. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Putins equation of those who cant live without gender freedoms with being part of a fifth column has long been part of his approach to politics. Russias 2013 federal law was modeled on a string of regional bans passed in the early 2000s. While the scope of the 2013 federal law was dangerously vague, the proponents of these state-level laws did not mince words. Local leaders explicitly tied homosexuality to pedophilia. A court denying the creation of an LGBTQ Pride House in Sochi declared that propaganda of nontraditional sexual orientation directly threatens Russian society, and that efforts to combat homophobia were inherently extremist. The court concluded that these extremist efforts inevitably incite social and religious hatred and posed direct threats to Russias sovereignty and territorial integrity. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement While amassing troops on the border of Ukraine in 2021, Putin intensified his rhetoric characterizing LGBTQ equality as evidence of strategic Western aggression against Russia. Speaking directly against Western gender ideology that recognizes the existence and health needs of transgender people, Putin told a reporter that it is a simply monstrous moment when children are pushed to believe from early on that a boy can easily become a girl, and vice versa. They are pushed to believe they have a choice, imposed while parents are swept aside. Calling a spade a spade, this is close to a crime against humanity dressed up in the name and under the flag of progress. Advertisement Advertisement Compare all of this to the approach of Republican politicians elected to statewide office. We saw in last weeks Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson how Sen. Ted Cruz grabbed the spotlight to demonize trans people, while a raft of anti-trans bill have been passing state legislatures all across the country. The backers of Floridas Dont Say Gay bill, signed into law on Monday, explicitly and implicitly link the law to homophobic tropes that LGBTQ people were seeking to subject children to their predations. Meanwhile, the laws drafters have made the language so vague as to criminalize the most innocuous possible speech, while also giving lawmakers deniability that this is not what they were doing. Advertisement Advertisement Indeed, there is little daylight between Putins anti-LGBTQ policies and erasing messaging and that of the American right. Hardline Christian Right and conservative groups like Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation offer a chillingly similar message arguing that LGBTQ-inclusive school policies and nondiscrimination laws are dangerous, radical gender ideology. These groups engage in well-funded, strategic campaigns against recognition of transgender people and broader LGBTQ equality, relying on a range of unfounded scare tactics. Just last month, the Heritage Foundation published a report decrying the Biden administrations National Strategy for Gender Equity and Equality as a plan to make gender ideology a central theme in the American experiment. The report concludes that trans-inclusive healthcare and nondiscrimination policies are a frontal assault on the freedom to act in accordance with the need to defend marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and defend the immutability of biological sex. This messaging isnt new, but it has reached a renewed fever pitch in the last few years in American politics. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement As American conservative leaders struggle to keep up with the fragmentation of a pluralistic and diversifying society, political pressure and power diffusion foster the creation of artificial enemies in the name of national pride. Supported by powerful conservative interest groups American leaders are promoting doomsday warnings against the recognition of LGBTQ identity, the enforcement of civil rights laws, and the provision of gender-affirming care. During floor debates last year on the Equality Act, legislation that would incorporate protections for LGBTQ people in existing civil rights statutes, Florida Rep. Greg Steube read from the Bible and stated that When men or women claim to be able to choose their own sexual identity, theyre making a statement that God did not know what he was doing when he created them. He then offered his fellow members of Congress a grave warning: The gender confusion that exists in our culture today is a clear rejection of Gods good design. Whenever a nations laws no longer reflect the standards of God, that nation is in rebellion against him and will inevitably bear the consequences. Advertisement Dire warnings against LGBTQ-induced devolution of civil society are not reserved to the elected branches. The trope of the destabilizing impact of equality and queer existence is engrained in the political ether. During the Supreme Court oral arguments for Bostock v. Clayton County and Stevens v. Harris Funeral Homes in 2019, Justice Neil Gorsuch suggested that recognition of Title VII protections from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity would result in massive social upheaval. (Gorsuch ultimately voted to outlaw anti-LGBTQ workplace discrimination along with the majority of the court, but that likely had more to do with his particularly quirky brand of maximalist textualist jurisprudence.) Advertisement Advertisement Its worth noting that the strategic incorporation of divisive, alienating rhetoric for political gain is a classic tool of an autocrat. The fact that across all branches of government a growing number of American leaders are relying on it should scare, but not surprise us. Politically insecure leaders rely on religiously based divisive messaging because it works. The theology of autocracy, meanwhile, uses the mantel of the church to promote nationalistic conformity while also channeling fear and anger toward communities that cant or wont conform. With little political risk or accountability, American politicians have embraced the well-worn Putin narrative that transforms the lives of individual LGBTQ people into coordinated political acts of defiance and national threats. On Tuesday, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in the Washington Post that the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 has the White House presidential phone log, and it shows a seven-hour gap in the record of his communications that fateful day. The gaps importance is difficult to exaggerate. The evidence of former President Donald Trumps criminal intent with regard to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election is building, day by day, so relentlessly that at this point, a failure to prosecute becomes tantamount to a negation of the rule of laws first principlethat no person stand[s] above the law. Advertisement Why is the gap so significant? If, as some analysts have hypothesized, Trump is so detached from the factual world that he actually believed his own Big Lie that the 2020 election was marred by fraud, that would make conviction for trying to steal the election difficult. Under this analysis, he would not have thought he was acting wrongfully, a necessary element for conviction on the charges to which he is most vulnerable. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Subscribe to the Slatest Newsletter A daily email update of the stories you need to read right now. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Please enable javascript to use form. Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Sign Up Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. Hiding ones calls and conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, as it appears Trump did, rebuts his potential defense that he thought he was acting righteously. People who believe that their behavior is law-abiding do not cover it up in this way. Lets look at the facts and the law the way any Justice Department prosecutorincluding Attorney General Merrick Garlandordinarily would. Advertisement Advertisement The seven-hour gap ran from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. During the gap period, we know from reporting about a call that the then-president mistakenly made to Sen. Mike Leetrying to reach Sen. Tommy Tuberville. Lee handed his phone to Tuberville, with whom Trump spoke for five to 10 minutes. During that call, Capitol police instructed them to evacuate the Senate chambers because insurrectionists had breached the Capitol. We also know of a phone conversation he had with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and of another with Vice President Mike Pence during the gap period. Pence continued to rebuff Trumps pressure not to allow the certification of Joe Bidens Electoral College victory. Advertisement None of these calls appears on the logs. In addition, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Steve Bannon were reportedly huddled on Jan. 6 in a de facto command center at the five-star Willard Hotel in D.C. Trump spoke to them before the log gap, and it strains credulity to believe he did not talk with them again during the many hours when calls were not recorded. Any prosecutor would subpoena the phone company records listing those individuals calls that day and the numbers to and from which those calls were made. Advertisement Now lets look at the law. Im a former federal prosecutor, and one of my favorite jury instructions, when the evidence against a white-collar criminal supported it, covered consciousness of guilt: If you believe that [the defendant sought to conceal evidence], then you may consider this conduct, along with all the other evidence, in deciding whether [he/she] thought [he/she] was guilty of the crime charged and was trying to avoid punishment. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Using alternate means of communication over five or six hours, including others phones or potentially burner phones, to avoid calls being logged would justify such an instruction. Importantly, such a subterfuge would also circumvent a legal obligation, adding to the evidence of corrupt intent. Under the Presidential Record Act, the president has a duty to take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of the Presidents official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented. On Jan. 6, Trump did not. In apparent response to the Washington Post story, Trump has denied using a burner phone of the kind that his allies bought with untraceable cash and used that day. Tellingly, however, there is no report that Trump denied using others phones. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement On CNN on Tuesday, Bob Woodward told John King that he got to know Trump very well during his many hours interviewing him during the 2020 campaign, and that Trump is a phone addict. Woodward said that the notion Trump stopped using the phone during the multi-hour gap period was as unlikely as the sun not rising tomorrow. The Posts report about the length of the gap in White House records adds significantly to the already overwhelming evidence of Trumps criminal intent. Indeed, just on Monday, in a 44-page opinion, a federal court found it more likely than not that Trump and John Eastman corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021, and with deceitful intent conspired to defraud the United States. Advertisement For his part, Judge David O. Carter explicitly addressed the matter of Trumps likely knowledge of wrongdoing, writing this evidence demonstrates that President Trump likely knew the electoral count plan had no factual justification. Advertisement Pointedly, Carter concluded, If Dr. Eastman and President Trumps plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. In 1973, Richard Nixons investigators learned of an 18.5-minute gap in White House tape recordings during the Watergate cover-up. Trumps gap in his phone logs is more than 400 minutes. The numerical comparison, however, is the least of it. Nixon was covering up a third-rate burglary of Democratic Party headquarters at D.C.s Watergate complex. Trump looks to have been covering up an attempted coup detat. To be sure, what took Nixon down was actual White House tapes. If Garland is waiting for that kind of smoking gun, he is sending an unmistakable signal that Trump, even in apparently conspiring to end American democracy, is above the law. A self-described gaffe machine, President Joe Biden has long had a reputation for straying off script. Sometimes its charming, like when he was caught on a hot mic calling Obamacare a big fucking deal. Sometimes its much less so (see: you aint Black). This weekend, however, he may have set a new personal milestone by letting loose a gaffe with potentially serious geopolitical consequences. It came at the end of an otherwise stirring speech in Warsaw, Poland, the capper to an otherwise successful series of meetings across Europe. During the address, he spoke about the war in Ukraine, the worldwide conflict between freedom and autocracy, and the particular challenges posed to freedom by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then, he added an improvised flourish: For Gods sake, this man cannot remain in power! Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Subscribe to the Slatest Newsletter A daily email update of the stories you need to read right now. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Please enable javascript to use form. Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Sign Up Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. Minutes later, the White House offered a clarification, saying Biden was not talking about regime change within Russia, but rather that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. This was so unconvincing it would have been better to let the original remark stand. Then on Monday, Biden waved away the attempt to refine or backpedal his comment. I was expressing the moral outrage I felt toward this man, he told reporters. Nobody believes I was talking about taking down Putin. I was expressing my outrage that he shouldnt remain in power, just like you know that bad people shouldnt continue to do bad things. Years ago, the great columnist and Slate founder Michael Kinsley defined a gaffe as when a politician tells the truthor more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head. By that standard, Bidens off-the-cuff line was a classic of the genre. Advertisement Advertisement He was certainly sharing some unvarnished truth, not just about his own thoughts, but what many foreign policy specialists believe. The dreadful turn in world affairs this past monthnot just the brutal invasion of Ukraine, but also the subsequent economic crises, and the utter collapse of U.S.-Russian relations at a time when so many problems require global solutionscannot be turned back as long as Putin is in charge at the Kremlin. Ive said as much, as have other columnists and politicians who share one attribute in common: They are not the leader of the free world. Advertisement And therein lies the main point. Its one thing when a columnist or even a U.S. senator says Putin must go; its quite another when the president says it, and with such passion. If Bidens words are to be taken seriously, it would be reasonable for someone to believe that Russian regime change is U.S. strategy. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The question is whether his words are to be taken seriously. Biden says he was speaking his mind and his heart. That may well be true. The problem is that, because he is president, many people around the word listen more carefully than he sometimes speaks, and cant be entirely sure whether he is merely emoting or actually letting slip his administrations real policy. As a result, certain allied leaders have criticized Biden for his remarkmost prominently, French President Emmanuel Macron, who warned the American president it would be unwise to escalate the war either in words or actions. Its a bit rich to scold Biden for escalating the war given his painstaking efforts not to trigger a direct conflict with Russiaeven while Putin bombs and shells Ukrainian cities from Kharkiv to Lviv and in between. Still, Macron does have a a point. If Putin ever feels compelled to seek a negotiated settlement to the war, he may restrain that impulsehe may be slower to act on itif he thinks the war is about his own hold on power and that, if he stops fighting, his foes will move rapidly to chop off his head. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Putin may feel this way regardless of Bidens remark. According to Michael McFaul, the former ambassador to Moscow, Putin has believed that the U.S. has been plotting to oust him from power ever since he took over the Kremlin. Even so, Putin can now cite Bidens words in Warsaw as another bullet point in his propaganda campaign to convince Russiansand neutral parties elsewherethat the war was mounted by American imperialists who seek to defeat Russia. Putin may ultimately be uninterested in a negotiated solution. His emissaries positions at the peace talks so far dont reflect a serious desire for a cease-fire. Still, world leaderswhether its the president of the United States, Ukraine, France, Poland, or any other country involved even peripherally in this warmust act as if a negotiated peace is possible. (At one point in his speech, Biden said, Putin can and must end this warwhich wouldnt be possible if he were out of power.) They must do this, not just out of decorum but because they expressly dont want to engage in a total war. They dont want to see Ukraine pushed into abject surrender, for the obvious reasons; and they dont want to see Russia pushed into abject surrender either, because Putin, faced with that prospect, might try to regain some leverage by firing off a few nuclear weapons. ThisPutins nuclear optionis the only reason Biden and the other NATO leaders arent intervening in this war directly. Advertisement Advertisement This war can go one of two ways: the endless slog of stalemate, or a negotiated settlement. And that being the case, the president of the United States should not publicly call for Putins ouster from poweri.e., shouldnt sway Putin into believing, even one iota more than he might already, that he has no options other than to keep fighting, forever if necessary. Until that last remark, Biden was having a very good European trip. His meetings with NATO, the G-7, and the European Council, as well as his one-on-one with Polish President Andrzej Duda, shored up the allies unity and bolstered Americas leadership role. His informal lunch with the troops of the 82nd Airborne Division in Rzeszow, Poland, near the Ukrainian border, polished his image as commander-in-chief. His speech later that day, to a packed crowd outside Warsaws Royal Castle, eloquently spelled out the stakes of the war and the shape of the new post-postCold War world in eloquent terms. Then came that last, improvised line. It probably wasnt a big mistake. But it was a mistake. And in this war, and this world, of such savage horror and such delicate diplomacy, mistakes of all sorts should be avoided. Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. This essay is excerpted from The Unseen Body: A Doctors Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy by Jonathan Reisman. Copyright 2021 by Jonathan Reisman. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. Mucus holds a special place among bodily fluids. This fact became apparent to me quickly in medical school. Health care workers, who deal with bodily fluids of every sort, seemed to have a particular distaste for mucus above all the others. Ive heard countless doctors declare their disgust for sputums chunky, gelatinous, sticky texture. Many nurses have told me they would prefer cleaning up a patients bloody stool, even C. diff, to disposing of mucous secretions any day. When friends and family members wonder about my work as a physician, they often ask if blood grosses me outI explain that blood is not the bodily fluid that typically grosses out health care workers. Mucus is. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Mucuss most fundamental quality is its consistencythis is what differentiates it from plain water. While water flows and drips easily and fluently, mucus oozes. While water droplets grab on to each other, easily melding edges to form larger drops, viscous mucus holds on to itself cohesively and resists all disturbances. With a tenacity that water lacks, mucus clings to surfaces, including the linings of our air passages, and it puts up a fight when we try to clear it out. The difference between water and mucus is the same as the difference between fruit juice and jelly, between simple salt water and bone broth, between gumbo before okra is added and aftermucus has body to it. In our own bodies, it appears in many forms beyond just lung phlegm, including snot, saliva, and vaginal discharge, with less noticeable amounts in stool and sometimes urine. But whatever we call its various manifestations, all are simply variations on the same theme of mucus. Advertisement Advertisement Dr. John McGinniss is a pulmonologist at the University of Pennsylvania whom I met in medical school, and he describes being a pulmonologist the following way: I do mucus all day, every day. Though he chose a career focused on this bodily fluid, he admits that it evokes a unique visceral reaction in many people because of its consistency, its distinctive thick bubbly sound, and sometimes its smell. When you sit next to someone on the bus or plane, he said, and you see them coughing and hear wet, rattling mucus, you think to yourself, Oh geez, what disease am I going to get now? More than any other product of the human body, he said, people associate mucus in particular with illness. And theres an emotion attached to it. Advertisement Advertisement My own perception as a medical student quickly moved from one of disgust to one of wonder and appreciation. I realized that mucus is made by the human body for the same reason it coats the bodies of many animals, plants, and fungi throughout the natural worldfor protection. A mucous covering safeguards snails and slugs, those creatures bathed in a slimy layer that leaves a silver sheen as they trudge across leaves and sidewalks. Their mucous coatings prevent them from drying out, and also fight off microbes like a shield. Rays, sharks, and tamarind seeds are bathed in a similar layer of lubricating and defensive mucus, as are several species of mushroom. Advertisement Advertisement But unlike these other creatures, the human body is not coated from head to toe in mucus; instead it appears only in specific areas where an opening disrupts the bodys otherwise continuous outer veneer of tough, dry skin. There are several of these disruptions, where skin folds in on itself to form a pocket, and all of them are clustered in the bodys face, groin, and backside. Some of them, like the sinuses, have blind ends, but most, like the mouth, nose, vagina, and rectum, are passageways leading deeper into the bodys anatomical cavities and tracts. Even the branching air passages that fill our lungs are just another of the bodys pockets, though one that is more complex and manifold than most. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement What all our bodily openings have in common is mucus. Unlike the desiccated crust of regular skin, the linings of these areas remain perpetually moist thanks to the steady production of mucus. Our various invaginations are like the human bodys wetlandswhile most of the surface is dry land, every once in a while, you come across a soggy patch. And unlike skins varying colors and shades, everybodys soggy patches are lined by a universally deep-pink, blood-rich layer called mucous membrane, a layer named after its primary product and the thing we all have in common. Our bodies require these perforations to serve as entrances and exits, as transition zones between the bodys dry outside and its forever moist innards. But at the same time, theyre constantly in danger: Besides enticing people to put objects into them, which often leads to an ER visit when they cannot get them back out again, the primary threat is microbial invasion. Advertisement While intact skin provides a layer of keratinized armor to fend off bacteria and other invading microbes, each disruption in skins continuity is a vulnerable chink in the armor and a potential avenue for them to breach the body. Infectious microorganisms love nothing more than to bask in our dank openings, thriving and multiplying to their hearts content in the humid darkness offered by the human bodys pink pockets. Advertisement Every microbe that attacks us has its predilections for certain spots. Yeast bloom in the vagina (and sometimes the mouth), while influenza and coronavirus prefer the nose, throat, or deeper into the lungs for their moistened revelry. Gonorrhea is the least picky of them allit will take whatever mucus-lined pocket it can get into and regularly invades the urethra, rectum, and vagina. Sometimes gonorrhea climbs farther into both male and female genitals tracts, reaching all the way to the ovaries and testicles. Ive even seen it infect my patients eyes and throat. Advertisement Precisely because the bodys many fenestrations are not easily guarded, mucus is essential. As a universal defense weapon and survival strategy, mucus flows outward from all of them in a steady, unending tide to keep microbes outtheyd have to swim upstream against a viscous current to get in. Keeping our membranes perpetually moist is also essential for maintaining their health and integrity, and mucus accomplishes this as lubrication with a staying power that plain water could never muster. Though mucus is often annoying and repulsive, it shouldnt be hatedinstead, in the right balance, it is the key to how we stay healthy against an onslaught of invaders. And in healthy times, we make only enough to coat our surfaces with a thin veneer, the minimum needed to carry out its protective mission unnoticed. Last week, the family of the man who invented the GIF, Stephen Wilhite, announced that he had passed away at the age of 74 due to complications from COVID-19. While he claimed to have never got 1 cent for creating the GIF technology, his invention transformed the internet ecosystem and the ways in which people communicate online. Although GIFs are popularly known as the short looping animations (or reality TV footage) that spice up internet posts and group chats, the format was originally intended for still images. While working at the bygone online service provider CompuServe in the 1980s, Wilhite was tasked with developing a file format that would allow users to efficiently transmit and display high-quality images. At the time, modem connections were still extremely slow In 1987, CompuServe released the GIF as a tool to transmit image data via webpages that was interoperable between different brands of hardware; at the time, manufacturers like Apple and IBM all had their own proprietary formats. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Another aspect that made GIFs essential is that they didnt take up a lot of memory. The technology employed the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm, which found repeating patterns in the images and simplified them. GIFs could also hold multiple images because the algorithm removed redundant data. Think of these early GIFs as sometimes being a slideshow of still images. CompuServe hoped that GIFs would make it easier for its customers to share stock charts, weather maps, and photos. As Wired reports, some of the first uses of still GIFs were logos, charts, and line art. The technology was better for simpler images that didnt have a lot of detail and would be too affected by small amounts of distortion. Advertisement In 1989, CompuServe released an updated version of the GIF known as 89a. One of the new features in this update was an option for users to specify the length of time that each image in a GIF should be displayed, allowing them to create animations. However, the animations still couldnt loop. It wasnt until Netscape Navigator browser incorporated GIFs in 1995 that the animations began looping. The animated GIFs that first gained popularity and exposed the wider public to the technology included the Under Construction signs on early websites and moving clip art. Advertisement If it hadnt been for this animation feature, GIFs may have become an obscure artifact of internet history. File formats like the JPEG would eventually be more effective at storing and transmitting still images. In 1999, there was even movement to Burn All GIFs after a company called Unisys tried to exert its patent rights over the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm, the code that allowed GIFs to compress images. When Unisys announced that they wanted to start charging a small fee for software that employed the GIF algorithm, developers began swearing off of GIFs and migrating to new file formats, like PNGs. Yet, GIFs persevered, as nothing would replicate the distinctive looping animation style. In 2013, Wilhite won a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for his role in creating the GIF and changing internet culture forever. Instead of giving an acceptance speech at the ceremony, he played a GIF. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. ARCHIVED - 20-cent discount on fuel in Spain officially approved The Spanish government has given the green light to emergency measures to reduce the cost of living with immediate effect Spains government has given its official approval to the series of measures aimed at reducing the cost of fuel, gas and electricity in the country immediately. These measures include reducing the price of petrol and diesel by 20 cents per litre for all citizens, plus other concessions aimed mainly at the truck drivers who have been striking for the last three weeks, as part of the so-called Response Plan to the impact of the war in Ukraine The unjustified aggression in Ukraine has caused a war on the doorstep of the European Union, which is already having economic and social effects through the flow of refugees, the rise in energy prices and the disruptions in the supply chain, all of which is causing an economic shock that will affect all European countries, said Minister for Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calvino, at the presentation of this plan. This plan includes a temporary minimum subsidy of 20 cents per litre of fuel (or per kilo, depending on the type of fuel), of which the State will pay for 15 cents and the oil companies a minimum of 5 cents. This emergency subsidy will only be in place until June 30. In addition, rental increases for the next three months will be limited to 2% and to help the most vulnerable families, the amount of the Minimum Vital Income benefits to ensure living standards will be increased by 15%. Objective dismissals from work will once again be prohibited and the government will make it easier for struggling companies to apply ERTE furlough schemes. Finally, the government has put a cap on the price that customers pay for their electricity. New contracts or those being renewed may not quote a price of more than 67 euros per Megawatt hour, though this will not apply to existing energy contracts. What have the truckers got at the end of their strike? With regard to the measures the government has agreed with these hauliers, in addition to the same discount on fuel until June 30, including diesel, petrol, gas and adBlue, they will also receive a direct aid package of 1 billion euros. This direct aid will amount to 1,250 euros per lorry, 950 euros per bus, 500 euros per van and 300 euros per light vehicle, which includes taxis, VTC and ambulances. Image: Archive Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Im half Russian. My mother is originally from Nizhny Novgorod. I went there for summer holidays all my childhood until I was 15. After that, as an adult citizen of a foreign country, I no longer had access to the city (then Gorky), which was closed to foreigners. Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Since then, I have only been able to meet my grandmother in Moscow. In our family, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968 were never called an occupation, nor was it called brotherly help. Instead, the event had been forgotten (read blocked out). Russians have the ability to ignore unpleasant truths, especially when every family or friendly get-together begins with a glass of vodka. My grandfather Leonid Jerlygin fought in World War II. He later received the Order of the Red Star for bravery. To this day Russians are proud of the Red Armys victory. As a little boy, I imagined dying heroically in World War II by diving bravely in front of a bullet directed at a girl I had a crush on at the time. The young Russian boys romantic ideas were amply supported not only by Soviet cinematography but the music scene as well. Only later did images of women raped by Russian soldiers and the brutality of the war begin to appear in movies. Russians feel that they saved Europe from fascism and that Europe has not thanked them enough for it. They consider themselves a nation of winners. If they see the defacing of monuments such as a Russian tank in Prague or Slavin in Bratislava, they see fascism. They do not understand why someone would do that and are convinced that fascist tendencies are really growing in Europe. The biggest paradox though is that it is precisely extremists and fascists who see Putin as an alternative to a democratic society. Marian Kotleba does not understand that if the Russians regained control over this part of Europe, his party would be first in line, no matter what the lower floors of the Putinade tell him today. Russian anti-fascism is authentic, and it is exactly this narrative that Vladimir Putin is using. He describes the Ukrainians as Nazis, fascists and nationalists. The Russian media are repeating the same propaganda, because today theyre not allowed to say otherwise, and many journalists even believe that its true. Russian in Slovakia: It is hard for people to admit Putin acts like Hitler Read more I would like to offer some insight in the form of a few scenes which show how we have reached the point of an imperial war in Ukraine, which shocked all Russians not yet convinced by the propaganda and disinformation campaign that Russia has waged (and continues to do so) for years, while at the same time believing that the refugee crisis will further undermine democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Odesa, July 1988 The Soviet Union My future wife and I are standing in front of a restaurant in a long queue in todays Ukrainian, then Soviet, Odesa. After half an hour of waiting, they sit us at a table with six other people and pour us shots of vodka without asking, somehow automatically, even though there is a prohibition. We are served food on plates not like the day before at the eatery, when we got chicken and potatoes on a paper tray. My future wife says she will never come to the USSR again and she keeps that promise. Beer is drunk from street vending machines, where you just wash out and share the same cup, there are long queues for everything, the economy is in shambles and Gorbachev is implementing perestroika, which we all applaud. The Soviet Union makes trips into space, but really, its a backward country. Moscow, 1991 The August Coup Pavel Juracek my colleague from Smena newspaper and I are in Moscow, watching an attempted military coup and removal of the first and soon last USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, who was interned in Crimea. We are right next to the Russian Parliament, which has been surrounded by soldiers. Shooting is taking place in the streets of Moscow, tens of thousands of people are defending the parliament and Boris Yeltsin, Russias President, who has refused to submit to the putschists as they are then called. If they attack, well probably die, the Russians will not lose time over some journalists, I say. In the end, the coup fails due to the resistance of the civilian population and tens of thousands of Muscovites say goodbye to the victims of the coup in the Vagankovsky cemetery. For a while, the democratisation process seems to have begun in Russia and while the Soviet Union crumbles, long-standing national wrongs between the Soviet nations spring to the surface. Russia is not mentally ready for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Soon, local wars, in which I myself participated as a journalist, start breaking out. It is then that our hero Gorbachev becomes the anti-hero for Russians, despite the fact that the treaty on the demise of the Soviet Union is mainly initiated by Boris Yeltsin. The disintegration of the Soviet empire is perceived by the Russians as their defeat and victory of the West. The West. Those are the weird people who accept homosexuality, womens rights and minorities. In Russia, minority opinion is pushed to the margins of society. For example, homosexuality wasnt decriminalised in Russia until 1993. Bendery, Moldova, 1992 War in Transnistria Open the truck and show them the one without the head. The truck is full of dead people. This is the Transnistria conflict. Similar sights will be seen in all other Russian actions in territories of disobedient states, where a compact Russian minority or a minority that pledges allegiance to Russia lives. The Russians will take advantage of the civil conflict between the local Russians and the rest of the population. With the support of the Russian army (without direct military involvement it is enough to send a threat) local governments dependent on Moscow will emerge and declare independence. This is how an independent Abkhazia, Transnistria and South Ossetia come to be, the latter already with direct involvement by the Russian army. Vladimir Putin is already ruling in tandem with Dmitry Medvedev. And its Angela Merkel who must stop them so that the Russian army does not reach Tbilisi. Ordinary Russians applaud Putin, who makes it clear that he will protect Russian citizens wherever they are and that he has a problem with the former Soviet Union countries even considering joining NATO. In essence, the policy of denying the right of the states of the former Soviet Union to freely decide where they belonged has begun. Russia wants to decide their direction in the name of its own defence doctrine. Back in 2014, when there is already peace in Transnistria and I am heading for the preliminary round of the Champions League match where Tiraspol are playing, Slovan, the Russian taxi driver, tells me that he would like the Soviet Union to be restored. I ask why. Because it was our home no one there shamed us for speaking Russian, no one humiliated us. Gagra, Abkhazia, October 1992 Another war My colleague Ivan Drabek and I are sleeping on the same floor as the Chechen fighters, who just returned from their victorious campaign against Georgian troops. They are fighting on the side of the Russian-backed separatist Abkhazia. We are interviewing Shamil Basayev, the leader of Chechen troops. The Russians let them cross the mountain border into Georgia without any problems. During the interview, Basayev lies in bed, his machine gun and assault rifles leaning on the footboard. He says he will protect Muslims anywhere in the world. We are told the same thing a little later by the Cossack ataman, except about Orthodox Christians. These are paradoxes that are difficult to understand. Basayev, who fought on the side of the Russians in Abkhazia from 1992 to 1993, will stage terrorist attacks on the Budyonnovsk hospital, the Dubrovka theater and also the Beslan school in the years to come. Each of these dramas resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties. The war in Chechnya is in full swing, I am no longer there as a journalist. Russias Federal Security Service wont kill Basayev until 2006. Lviv, 2001 The two parts of Ukraine Already as the director of the SME daily, we are negotiating with our partners the purchase of a printer in Lviv. In a restaurant, I want to order in Russian, but the waiter replies in Ukrainian. I have to explain to him that I am not Russian but Slovak and I do not understand Ukrainian well. Only then does he start speaking to me in Russian. Ukraine has two parts: mostly Russian-speaking in the southeast and purely non-Russian in western Ukraine. Then there is a number of mixed territories. Moscow, 1990s We are sitting on the terrace of a luxury restaurant on Arbat Street in Moscow. An elderly lady passing by shouts at us that we are fascist pigs since we can afford to go to such expensive restaurants. A few years later, the Russians praise Putin for raising their standard of living, Russia is experiencing continuous growth and a reduction of public debt. All this mainly due to rising oil and gas prices. As my colleague says, the Russians need a strong army to protect their mineral resources they live off it. They dont need anything else. Just high oil and gas prices. McDonalds first branch in Moscow in 1990 (Source: McDonalds) Russia, the new millennium The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and its eternal flame at the Kremlin wall. A newlywed couple wants to take pictures right by the eternal flame. The groom steps over the chain, but the bride hesitates. Dont worry, come with me, he says to her. The honour guard warns him to return behind the chain, the groom refuses and disobeys, telling them that he is also a hero, he served in Chechnya. Two more soldiers run out of a nearby booth, kick the young man and arrest him. The woman cries, but everyone around understands that the monument to the unknown soldier cannot be dishonoured by a photograph of newlyweds. Moscow, 2007 Hockey championship A burly guy comes to the VIP lounge, where we stand in line after the first third of the match to get our entry bracelet checked. The man walks right past the whole line. The security guard at the door does not want to let him in, so he headbutts the door, enters and says: If you stop me one more time, Ill kill you. He probably means it. We both domestic and foreign guests are all shocked, but we remain silent. Shell suits are still worn in Moscow. In Slovakia, mobsters had stopped wearing them by then. Cemeteries in Russian cities are full of young mens graves with tombstones boasting engraved figures of the deceased leaning on their BMW or Mercedes. The Russian music group Dymovaja zavesa (Smoke Screen) released the album Etazi a year before, in which they sing praise to mobsters in one song. According to many Russians, Putin gradually pacified the mafia. But basically, it was replaced by the state apparatus. Putins people controlled both the prosecutors office and the courts and, of course, the secret services. Division of power, a characteristic of democratic countries, ceased to exist. Putin gave economic power to his oligarchs, made his people rich. In return, he demanded total loyalty. He distributes roles among the oligarchs publicly during news programmes broadcast from Ostankino Tower to make ever so clear who is the ruler of the country. Insurgents like Khodorkovsky and Berezovsky ended up in bad places. The former served ten years in prison, the latters life ended in a mysterious suicide in exile in the UK. Those who expected Putin to be as weak a president as Yeltsin were wrong. I am becoming increasingly aware that Russia basically never ceased to be a country of force/power. 2008 Presidential election Vladimir Putin doesnt want to hand over power and exchanges positions with Medvedev so that he can return and rule again. The Parliament then extends the presidency term from four to six years, so Putin has secured the possibility of being in power until 2024. Civilized countries understand how addictive power is, especially in a presidential system, and therefore limit the length of one-man rule. Russians though dont seem to mind. They are not bothered by gradually losing independent media, nor are they upset that they have lost Anna Politkovskaya from Nova Gazeta (granted though, her murder did not provoke such massive public opposition as when a similar event happened in Slovakia). A rumour went around Russia that her death was Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrovs birthday present to Putin. Putin announced that the aim of the murder on his birthday was to provoke a wave of anti-Russian sentiment in the world. A similar narrative appeared in the Russian media again after the assassination of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov seven years later. According to General Markin from the Russian Prosecutors Office, it could have been a provocation aimed to destabilise the country. Two years earlier, former FBS officer Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London. Later, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in custody. Then there were the attempts to assassinate Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny. The regime began brazenly killing its opponents, and we should have understood it then. Many indeed did understand, yet Russians again said to themselves that treason must be paid for, sometimes with the highest price. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin, smiling at the camera, wriggled out of every charge. But in the background works the machinery, which transforms public opinion in his favour, opposing voices in discussions are howled out and, above it all, the variety show is king. Pop singers such as Masha Rasputin, Valery Leontiev and Filip Kirkorov pour artistic kitsch into every household. A country, whose people do not stand up for free media, will eventually lose them altogether. Sochi, 2014 Olympic games and big sporting events Im travelling to the Olympics. Foreign guests say that Russia organised the Winter Olympics excellently. Putin built a magnificent Olympic complex on the shores of the Black Sea in Sochi. The Russians do not understand why foreign media inform their readers that the Olympics have organisational shortcomings. The constantly negative PR (often, of course, justified) led the Russians, under the pressure of state media campaigns, to stop trusting foreign sources and stop perceiving criticism as relevant. Russias friendly face is shown again by the 2018 World Cup organisers through the young volunteers; Diego Maradona comes to Nizhny Novgorod for the match between Argentina and Croatia, and the Russian team even makes it to the quarterfinals. Many journalists point out that in this way Putin is strengthening his public position and building a cult of personality, while manifesting to Russians that the world accepts them as a great power. In 2021, Putins city, St. Petersburg, is one of the cities where EURO 2020 is played. It is my last trip to Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin poses with all Russian medalists after the Sochi Games. Six of them have lost their medals to doping so far. (Source: SITA/AP) Crimea, 2014 Annexation shortly after the Olympics The Russians always felt that the Crimean Peninsula was theirs, vacationing in Yalta, getting intoxicated by the view from the Swallows Nest. It was clear that the occupation of Crimea was a violation of international law. But we somehow unofficially tolerated the idea that Crimea might as well belong to Russia in some way, and if a referendum were held, the Russians, a majority in Crimea, would certainly vote in favour of joining the Russian Federation even without the presence of troops. If Ukraine ever wants to return the territory, it will most likely be met with resistance from the local population, although the shock that Putin caused by attacking the whole of Ukraine has also changed many peoples leniency towards the annexation of Crimea. Russia, 2016 The third sector under pressure In 2016, Russian television channels launch a campaign against MDIF (today, MDIF is a minority shareholder of the daily SME through the Pluralis investment facility). Unlike former prime minister Robert Fico, they dont mention the organisation in connection with George Soros. Instead, they claim that MDIF supports opposition media with the aim of disrupting the Russian constitutional system. The news report contains false information that MDIF gives subsidies to Russian media in US dollars, even though all transfers to Russian media were in reality only loans that Russian publishers had to repay. No one from MDIF gets a word in the report to present their side. The report also claims that opposition journalists get trained all around the world, including Bratislava. Immediately after, the Russian Attorney General declares MDIF as an undesirable foreign organisation and bans it because it is a threat to state security. MDIF is withdrawing its activities from the country, as well as its Russian management. The organisation advises members of its Board not to travel to Russia due to possible legal conflicts. The fight against another pillar of a democratic society, the non-profit sector, has begun. A few years later, Maros Zilinka, the Slovak Prosecutor General, goes to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Russian Prosecutor Generals Office and signs a cooperation agreement. Lets just say he doesnt have very good judgement to put it mildly. Ukraine, 2022 Putin shocks Europe The attack on Ukraine is an absolute shock to me. Ive come to understand that Putin was heading toward this the whole time we just did not realise it because he considered the West to be weak, unable to fight, without a unifying idea. Putin gave Russians pride, improved their standard of living, organised the Olympics, football championships, fought terrorists from Chechnya, appropriated Crimea all of which strengthened his position. Russians finally felt that they had a leader who was not as senile as Brezhnev, weak as Gorbachev, or an alcoholic like Yeltsin. Putin wants to go down in history, he wants to return to the Russians what they think is their former Soviet Union. Putins motivation is purely materialistic. He has everything a worldly man can have wealth, power, the admiration of most Russians, a young mistress (actually, she is his partner now), although my mother claims that he is divorced only because he has a lot of work and that he is only being slandered by his enemies. And now he wants to restore Greater Russia ideally within the borders of the Soviet Union. It is a crazy idea from the last century, as if he did not understand that todays world is conquered by modern technology and economic success, that market competition is what is supposed to replace hundred-year-old ideas. Putin has the raw materials and the army he doesnt need a competitive environment. But he forgot how the Soviet Union turned out with this equipment. It will take a long time for the Russians to understand where this leader has taken them. To the last century. Russia, 2022 Public opinion I asked my mum what she thinks about Putin, and she, an 86-year-old widow who has a Russian TV station on constantly, told me that he did well because the Ukrainians were killing our people and bombing us. That is a pure lie, I say to her. I write to my relatives in Russia and explain to them that Russian television is deceiving them, that Russia is waging an aggressive war and that Ukraine is defending itself, and that they do not welcome Russian soldiers as liberators and they will suffer many casualties. Out of politeness, they reply to me, Hey, Alex, how are you? How is your mum?. And then they add that the information is ambiguous and there is truth on both sides. They are afraid and at the same time they are influenced by the huge propaganda machinery of Russian television and media. Sanctions wont convince Russians either they are ready to live in poverty, because they have always pretty much lived that way. When I brought a few cans of German beer for lunch to my Russian family in the 1990s, they had a holiday because apparently they never drank such good beer. The Russians accept the caste system of government and curse it, but essentially they are loyal to it. If someone in the family makes it to verchushka (office), they are happy, they dont need competition, they dont need Western democracy. They ignore it. Every additional sanction just confirms to them that the world has united against them. Like with the Olympics; when Russian athletes could not compete under the Russian flag, hardly anyone believed it is because they doped. Such is the combination of frustration and a great nation that has often been the subject of jokes and criticism since 1991. It will not be easy to get out of this situation, because Putins internal opposition will not grow quickly and the few heroes who protest in the squares are immediately arrested and pacified. Its hard to explain but Russia felt humiliated and is now proud. It is proud because it is finally taken seriously. In the end though, a lie is always a lie, and I believe that todays system will eventually begin to fall apart. The question remains though what will replace it. Because Europe doesnt need Russia as an enemy but as a cooperating partner. Putins attack on Crimea was even noticed at a carnival in Dusseldorf, Germany. (Source: SITA/AP) Slovakia, 2022 Media and lies I turned on Russian television again for two days. Its a massacre. According to the state-owned RT, Ukrainians are shelling their own civilians, and someone from the Russian-speaking population readily confirms this. Ukrainians have blown up a bridge to prevent civilians from leaving the city. Ukrainians use civilians as human shields and deploy combat equipment in civilian houses and the army is positioned on the roofs of apartment buildings where civilians live. But where should they be when they are fighting in the city? The captured Russian army commander is actually a Croatian actor. Images of burning cities are allegedly from seven years ago. The propaganda machinery is running at full throttle, Europe rejected the Sputnik vaccine, which could have saved millions of lives simply because it is Russian. The exclusion of Russians from all major sporting events exacerbates the guilt of the great nation and a feeling that the world has united against them. Putin announces compensation for wounded and fallen soldiers. He even stands up for a few seconds to pay tribute to them. It seems cynical. He keeps repeating the nonsense about denazification of Ukraine. The commentator emphasises that the special operation of the Russian army is not directed against Ukrainian people, but against the descendants of the Banderas (the Ukrainian insurgent army, which fought against the Red Army for Ukraines independence during World War II). Why Russia is winning the information war in Slovakia Read more Perhaps it reminds you of something. Its actually the same recipe but a milder version used by Slovakias former prime minister Robert Fico. Im not writing this because I want to mention him at all costs but to explain how dangerous it is. A pure lie invoking non-existent dangers almost always results in nationalism. National conflicts referring to some part of history, be it even a thousand years before, destroy peoples lives. A lie politicians spread consciously. Robert Fico is intelligent enough to know that our newspaper is not owned by Soros and that I am not a Soros servant, as he once called me at one of his press conferences. Over half a century, I have heard many characteristics of me. Once I am a Russian agent, aggressor, occupier. Ive been called a Hungarian agent by Slovak nationalists even though I dont speak Hungarian. Most recently, Im said to be an American or Jewish lackey. The principle is the same pointing out that a man does not have decisions in his own hands but is controlled by someone else a force with dishonest intention. It is a dangerous tool for suppressing societys instinct for truth. Nevertheless, Fico justifies attacks on the media by saying for example that journalists are prostitutes. Well, they are not. On the contrary, they are one of the barriers to what is happening in Russia. Most of the theses you hear from Robert Fico were created by opinion polls. Fico does not form a policy for the future in a true sense; rather, he preserves a state of frustration and suspicion. Vladimir Putin has done and keeps on doing the same. We are all shocked that it is possible to make it this far and that people are suddenly dying in a war that is based on pure lies. Volodymyr Zelenskiyy did not make any of the mistakes made by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in 2008. Zelensky communicated calmly and did not give the Russians any pretext for the invasion. And yet, there they are. This will be an extremely black chapter in Russian history and an expensive levy on contemporary Russian political representation. A levy for the nations failed political intuition. If Putin has achieved anything, it is the unification of Europe in a huge solidarity gesture and realisation that democracy and peace are very far away from being granted. Sme Translated by MDIF. For now, the Willing company is required to service the Russian MiG-19 jets until 2023. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Even though Smer has not been part of the countrys government for two years already, it seems that a company formerly owned by an oligarch described as a close friend of Smer chair Robert Fico is still successful in doing business with the state. Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement During the Smer-led governments, the Willing company, owned at the time by Miroslav Vyboh who faces corruption-related charges, kept receiving orders worth millions of euros. Since the year 2020, when the government changed and the Defence Ministry was given to the senior coalition party Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OLaNO), the department has signed five contracts worth more than 0.5 million with the firm. It secures the supplies of spare parts and the repairs of MiG-29 jets. I'm sure that if we were not NATO member country, the aggressor would look directly at us, Nad says. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Currently, it can be seen that for Slovakia joining NATO was for one of the most important events in the modern history of the country. This is the claim of Foreign Affairs Minister Ivan Korcok (SaS nominee) on the occasion of the 18th anniversary of Slovakia joining NATO. Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Korcok added that Slovakia shows that it is a responsible and solidary ally that contributes to the collective defence of all society. Joining NATO was our own, sovereign and free decision, with which we clearly expressed our allegiance to the West and the values of democracy, freedom and rule of law, and with which we gained the highest security guarantees, Korcok said as quoted by the SITA newswire. The security and stability brought to Slovakia thanks to NATO became the main pillars of the economic, social and democratic development of Slovakia, he added. If not NATO, aggressor would look at Slovakia 1. Who is entitled to the benefit? 2. What conditions should be fulfilled by a Ukrainian I will accommodate so I'm entitled to the benefit? 3. Who will pay the money? 4. What documents do I need to receive the contribution? 5. What if I accommodate a refugee who did not ask for temporary protection? 6. When will I receive the money? 7. What sum will be paid? 8. Are hotels and guesthouses entitled to a contribution? Mayor of Melitopol pays visit to Bratislava. The Education Ministry launches register of schools ready to enrol Ukrainian schoolkids. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Good evening. The Tuesday, March 29 edition of Today in Slovakia is ready with the main news of the day in less than five minutes. Slovakia marks 18th anniversary of joining NATO Defence Minister Jaroslav Nad (left) and Foreign Affairs Minister Ivan Korcok (right) (Source: TASR) Slovakia joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on March 29, 2004. In light of the war in Ukraine, it turns out that joining NATO was one of the most important events in the modern history of Slovakia, Foreign Minister Ivan Korcok (SaS nominee) stated. Slovakia has shown over the years that it is a responsible and sound ally that contributes to the collective security of the entire Alliance, he added. "Joining NATO was our own, sovereign and free decision, by which we clearly expressed that we belong to the West and to the values of democracy, freedom and the rule of law, and by which we obtained the highest possible security guarantees," Korcok said. The minister added that the security and stability that NATO membership has brought to Slovakia have become the basic pillars of Slovakia's economic, social and democratic development. Slovakia's accession to NATO was one of the most important decisions in Slovakia's history, according to Defence Minister Jaroslav Nad. "The alliance, which is based on the principle of one for all, all for one, is Slovakia's greatest possible guarantee of security and defence of the Slovak Republic," Nad said. "It is our duty to be a strong and stable link in the chain, so that no one will dare to break it," said Nad. He is certain that if Slovakia were not a member of NATO, the Russian aggressor would be looking directly our way. State relies on armament company with ties to Russia MiG-29 (Source: TASR) Even though Smer has not been part of the countrys government for two years already, it seems that a company formerly owned by an oligarch described as a close friend of Smer chair Robert Fico is still successfully doing business with the state. During the Smer-led governments, the Willing company, owned at the time by Miroslav Vyboh, who is facing corruption-related charges, kept receiving orders worth millions of euros. Since the year 2020, when the government changed and the Defence Ministry was given to the senior coalition party Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OLaNO), the department has signed five contracts worth more than 500,000 with the firm. It secures the supplies of spare parts and the repairs of MiG-29 jets. Willing has been benefiting from the dependence of the Slovak army on Russian state companies that have become a direct security threat for Slovakia since the war in Ukraine. Even though the state pays dozens of millions of euros to the Russian state company RSK MiG to service the Russian jets, Willing is making money on repairs, too, as it is a representative of the Russian firm in Slovakia. Refugees from Ukraine The Education Ministry launched a register of schools in Slovakia ready to accept Ukrainian schoolkids, also with capacity on how many they can enrol. The register is available in both Ukrainian and Slovak. also with capacity on how many they can enrol. The register is available in both Ukrainian and Slovak. 55,881 Ukrainians have asked for temporary protection in Slovakia. in Slovakia. The state will provide a financial contribution to those people who accommodated Ukrainian refugees . Learn here who is entitled and how to receive funding. . Learn here who is entitled and how to receive funding. Speaker of Parliament Boris Kollar (Sme Rodina) met Ukrainian Ambassador Yurii Mushka, mayor of Melitopol Ivan Fedorov and members of Verkhovna Rada, Maria Mezentseva and Olena Khomenko. Kollar thanked Ukraine that the country is also fighting for us and said that it is our moral duty to help Ukraine with humanitarian and military aid. President Zuzana Caputova and PM Eduard Heger met with Ukrainian politicians as well. "Today, the entire civilised world should behave like Slovakia is behaving," said Fedorov. (Source: TASR) If you like what we are doing and want to support good journalism, buy our online subscription. Thank you. Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Photo of the day Environmentalists and volunteers are busy these days helping with the migration of frogs and toads. The volunteers in the photos helped almost 2,000 toads, which would otherwise have been hit by a car as they migrated from the forests between Skalka nad Vahom and Zamarovce (Trencin Region) to the Vah River to mate. Feature story for today As a little boy, I imagined dying heroically in World War II by diving bravely in front of a bullet directed at a girl I had a crush on at the time. The young Russian boys romantic ideas were amply supported not only by Soviet cinema but the music scene as well. Only later did images of women raped by Russian soldiers and the brutality of the war begin to appear in movies. Russians feel that they saved Europe from fascism and that Europe has not thanked them enough for it. After years of humiliation, Russia feels pride once again. She is finally being taken seriously Read more In other news The head of Slovak diplomacy, Ivan Korcok (SaS nominee), received on Tuesday the Governor of the US State of Indiana, Eric Holcomb, who is paying an official visit to Slovakia . The aim of the visit was, among other things, to examine Slovakia's needs regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including humanitarian aspects and defence cooperation. "I very much appreciate the visit by Governor Holcomb at such a crucial geopolitical time, when many red lines of international norms are being crossed by the Russians," Korcok said. . The aim of the visit was, among other things, to examine Slovakia's needs regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including humanitarian aspects and defence cooperation. "I very much appreciate the visit by Governor Holcomb at such a crucial geopolitical time, when many red lines of international norms are being crossed by the Russians," Korcok said. 6,557 people were newly diagnosed as Covid positive out of 15,288 PCR tests performed on Monday. The number of people in hospitals is 2,205. 19 more deaths were reported on Monday. The vaccination rate is at 51.27 percent, 2,819,721 people having received the first dose of the vaccine. More stats on Covid-19 in Slovakia here. out of 15,288 PCR tests performed on Monday. The number of people in hospitals is 2,205. 19 more deaths were reported on Monday. The vaccination rate is at 51.27 percent, 2,819,721 people having received the first dose of the vaccine. More stats on Covid-19 in Slovakia here. Former head of the Penta investment group, Jaroslav Hascak, is asking the state either to apologise or for compensation between 13 and 16 million for damage and non-pecuniary damage caused by illegal prosecution and detention. He is ready to give up on money if the Justice and Interior Ministries along with the General Prosecutors Office apologise to him. for damage and non-pecuniary damage caused by illegal prosecution and detention. He is ready to give up on money if the Justice and Interior Ministries along with the General Prosecutors Office apologise to him. The death rate in Slovakia decreased in February but the number of people who died from Covid increased . Almost 4,900 people died and 539 of these died of Covid, the third most frequent reason of death in Slovakia. The most common causes of death in February were circulatory disorders (45 percent) and tumors (19 percent). . Almost 4,900 people died and 539 of these died of Covid, the third most frequent reason of death in Slovakia. The most common causes of death in February were circulatory disorders (45 percent) and tumors (19 percent). Bratislava Airport is launching two new flights as of today . Ryanair will relaunch a flight to Dalaman in Turkey and introduce flights between Bratislava and Sofia in Bulgaria. . Ryanair will relaunch a flight to Dalaman in Turkey and introduce flights between Bratislava and Sofia in Bulgaria. Streaming service Disney+ will be available in Slovakia as of June 14, 2022 , The Walt Disney Company confirmed. , The Walt Disney Company confirmed. The bus connection between Bratislava and Hainburg should be renewed . Its financing should be provided by the Bratislava self-governing region and Lower Austria, and probably also the Bratislava municipality, but councillors have to decide about it first. . Its financing should be provided by the Bratislava self-governing region and Lower Austria, and probably also the Bratislava municipality, but councillors have to decide about it first. The InoBat Auto company will build a production plant for 400 workers in Voderady near Trnava, in addition to a development and testing centre for e-car batteries. InoBat also promised a bigger production company in eastern Slovakia. Do not miss on Spectator.sk today Skiers break a record after they ski down a hill Read more The Nobel Prize for Slovak scientists? Most people consider it possible Read more If you have suggestions on how this news overview can be improved, you can reach us at editorial@spectator.sk. Commentary: Serf-turned masters living testimony to Tibet's leapfrog development Xinhua) 08:10, March 29, 2022 Photo taken on Jan. 25, 2022 shows the scenery of the Yamzbog Yumco Lake in Shannan, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region. (Xinhua/Shen Hongbing) LHASA, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Tibet Autonomous Region in southwest China on Monday celebrated Serfs' Emancipation Day. This public holiday marks the date in 1959 when people in Tibet launched a democratic reform that ended the region's feudal serfdom and freed a million serfs, or more than 90 percent of its population at the time. Although morally bankrupt Western powers like the United States have been repeatedly hyping up "human rights" issues in Tibet, Tibetan people know the truth about the human rights they enjoy today, since history is a great teacher. Over the past 63 years, Tibet has progressed from darkness to light, from poverty to prosperity, and from autocracy to democracy. Tibet today has come to epitomize China's leapfrog development and served as a vivid example of progress in democracy and human rights. Comparing Tibet before and after 1959, it is easy to see the region's amazing progress in the field of human rights, provided one doesn't allow ideological bias to obscure reality. For centuries Tibet was ruled by a feudal serf system. Serfs were subjected to cruel exploitation and oppression before 1959. The laws of old Tibet allowed the estate-holders to deny all human rights of their serfs, who could be bought and sold, thrown in jail, or even killed at will. There was a saying among serfs in old Tibet: "Serfs can only take their shadows away with them and leave only their footprints behind. It is safe to say that old Tibet's serf system represented one of the worst systematic abuses of human rights in human history. And the 1959 democratic reform pulled serfs out of their misery and ushered Tibet into a brand new world. Under the systems of the people's congresses and regional ethnic autonomy that were put in place after the reform, Tibetan people have not only become masters of themselves, but also of the country and society. People in Tibet enjoy full and equal rights in the political, economic, social and other realms. Through the reform, women have been empowered with political rights. They took part in political affairs by participating in elections of the people's congresses, becoming civil servants, and establishing women's organizations. By the end of 2020, female civil servants working in governments at all levels accounted for 34.24 percent of Tibet's total, according to the latest official data. These great changes, as noted in the late American journalist Israel Epstein's 1983 book Tibet Transformed, "were profoundly emancipatory, physically and mentally, for the overwhelming majority of Tibetans." The 1959 reform has brought about a historic transformation in economic and social development as well as people's livelihoods in Tibet. In 2021, Tibet's regional GDP topped 200 billion yuan (about 31.4 billion U.S. dollars) for the first time, representing a giant leap from the 1959 figure of a mere 174 million yuan. With the rise of a middle-income group, Tibet has built a vibrant and sustainable regional economy. Medical insurance has covered the whole population in Tibet. The average life expectancy in Tibet soared from 35.5 years before 1959 to 72.19 years in 2021. Tibet's permanent population has grown from 1.23 million in 1959 to 3.65 million in 2020. Tibet is the first provincial-level region in China to provide 15 years of free education. Facts speak louder than words. While the Western powers preach their so-called human rights, they overlook their horrific human rights records, like mass shootings and racial discrimination. Thanks in no small part to the serfs' emancipation, the Tibetan people have bid farewell to the miserable past, and welcomed a brighter future. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) Malta's Prime Minister Robert Abela (L) waves to supporters in Valletta, Malta, March 28, 2022. Abela took the oath of office on Monday after his Labour Party won Saturday's general election. He was sworn in during a ceremony at the Palace in Valletta presided over by Malta's President George Vella. The Labour Party won the general election with 55.1 percent of the vote, against the Nationalist Party's (PN) 41.7 percent. This is the Labour Party's third consecutive general election win since 2013. (Photo by Jonathan Borg/Xinhua) VALLETTA, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Malta's Prime Minister Robert Abela took the oath of office on Monday after his Labour Party won Saturday's general election. He was sworn in during a ceremony at the Palace in Valletta presided over by Malta's President George Vella. The Labour Party won the general election with 55.1 percent of the vote, against the Nationalist Party's (PN) 41.7 percent. This is the Labour Party's third consecutive general election win since 2013. The election was characterized by a record low turnout since independence, at 85.5 percent. The official result, which includes the entire list of the 65 elected members of Parliament, was announced by the Electoral Commission on Monday. Malta's Prime Minister Robert Abela (C) attends his swearing-in ceremony presided over by Malta's President George Vella (1st R) in Valletta, Malta, March 28, 2022. Abela took the oath of office on Monday after his Labour Party won Saturday's general election. He was sworn in during a ceremony at the Palace in Valletta presided over by Malta's President George Vella. The Labour Party won the general election with 55.1 percent of the vote, against the Nationalist Party's (PN) 41.7 percent. This is the Labour Party's third consecutive general election win since 2013. (Photo by Jonathan Borg/Xinhua) After posting a win and a second-place finish in his assignments in the preliminary legs of the Wilsons Tack Claiming Series at The Raceway at Western Fair District, True Horizon used her rallying skills to take home all the marbles in Mondays $14,000 final. Colin Kelly got away fourth with True Horizon, who watched race favourite Taydertotzz and Godiva Mackiavelyc battle to the quarter pole in :28.3 before Taydertotzz brushed to the top. She went on to post a half-mile clocking of :58.4 before coming under attack from True Horizon, who rallied first over and showed a short lead while racing parked past the three-quarter marker in 1:28.2. A :30.4 closing quarter is all that True Horizon needed to win by a length over Godiva Mackiavelyc in 1:59.1. Siboney rounded out the Trifecta ticket in the affair for distaffers. Trainer Jake Roberts co-owns the seven-year-old daughter of Vertical Horizon-The Three Of Us with Steve Adams of Toronto, ON. The 17-time winner now owns a 3-1-0 record from seven trips to the track this season. The $7,000 payday bumped her lifetime bankroll to $106,623 with the win. To view results for Monday's card of harness racing, click the following link: Monday Results The Raceway at Western Fair District. Linedrive Hanover has been on a roll since returning to the races for his 2022 campaign, going seven-for-seven at Woodbine Mohawk Park. The four-year-old gelding, who made just one start prior as a two-year-old, is currently trained by Anthony Beaton and has been driven by James MacDonald for his seven victories this year. Linedrive Hanover is owned by West Wins Stable, McKinlay & Fielding, and Mac T. Nichol. He was bred by Daniel J. Altmeyer, Richard B. Kelson, and Heather Wilder. He is reminding me a lot of his sire, Betting Line, right now, said Beaton, who was part of the stallion's training team at the Casie Coleman stable. Betting Line was very great-gaited and I find he is similar that way. Linedrive Hanover's most recent victory came on March 26 when he won in 1:53 following his lifetime best two starts back on March 5, when he won in 1:52.2. He has a great desire, will and determination, said Beaton. We hope we can just keep the momentum going. Linedrive Hanovers largest victory was by 8-1/4 lengths when he dominated the Snowshoe Pacing Series final in early February in 1:53.3. Linedrive Hanover and Betting Line are very similar in stature, said Beaton. We went to Winbak Farm of Canada and visited Betting Line when our own foal was born at the farm. It was the first time I had seen Betting Line when he was three and I find the two look very similar, and their size is comparable. Linedrive Hanovers sire, Betting Line, stands his first year in Canada in 2022. He previously stood in Pennsylvania. (With files from Winbak of Canada) SANAA, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Yemen's Houthi militia said they shot down a spy drone of the Saudi-led coalition forces in Yemen's central province of Marib on Tuesday. "Our defense force downed a U.S.-made spy drone of the enemy in the al-Wadi district of Marib Province," Houthi-run al-Masirah TV quoted a statement from the militia's military spokesman Yehya Sarea as saying. The statement came on the third day of a three-day unilateral cease-fire announced by the Houthi militia with the coalition forces, which appears to have been mostly held. The cease-fire came after coalition warplanes bombed important military and economic targets under Houthi control in the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah and the capital Sanaa. The coalition bombings were in response to the Houthis' cross-border missile and drone attacks on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia last week. The escalation came after the Houthi militia lost strategic areas in the oil-rich provinces of Shabwa and Marib during its fighting against the coalition-backed Yemeni government forces in the past two months. On Sunday, the Houthis announced a three-day unilateral cease-fire, suspending cross-border missile and drone attacks against Saudi Arabia and ground battles against the Yemeni government forces, voicing their commitment to a permanent truce if the coalition stops airstrikes and withdraws its forces. Alabar Farms has announced that Breeders Crown champion and former stallion Village Jasper was euthanized due to a twisted bowel. The 28-year-old horse was a massive part of Alabar and he will be sorely missed. Village Jasper was a star racehorse for Hall Of Fame trainer Bill Wellwood and in a 30 start, one season career, he won 14 times and amassed earnings of $1,057,595. His biggest win came in the 1997 Breeders Crown three-year-old final in which he exploded away from an amazing field and won by more than three lengths. Village Jasper was brought to Australia by Alabar and John Bagshaw and, at stud, he was everything you could ever dream of. He was a two-time Champion Stallion in Australia and, in total, he sired 874 winners who won more than $42 million across Australia and New Zealand. He sired 17 Group 1 winners led by the outstanding mare Broadways Best, but also included horses such as Australian Three-Year-Old Filly of the Year Nemeeshar and even the Dullard Cup-winning trotter Viva La Fever. He was the most beautiful horse, said Alabar owner Alan Galloway. Everyone who saw him fell in love with him. He had an amazing physique and an even better temperament. I remember speaking to his trainer Bill Wellwood and he recounted the story of how he bought him as a yearling. He wasnt originally on his list to look at, but he saw him walking around the barn and was so impressed with him that he had to buy him. 'Jasper' will be sorely missed at Alabar. He was such a pleasure to do anything with. John Coffey, former Alabar Australia General Manager, added, Village Jasper was such an asset to the Australian breeding industry after being imported from Ontario, Canada in 1999. Sure he was a leading sire, but it was Village Jasper the little black horse, with the giant personality that I will remember to my dying days. He was certainly my favourite stallion during my many years at Alabar and probably everyones favourite, as he sired such easy going, kind and intelligent colts and fillies. You were a little Champion VJ. In recent years, Village Jasper was gelded and he became a minder for some of our weanling groups. In that time, he became incredibly good friends with Presidential Ball and the two champions were inseparable. Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the connections of Village Jasper. (With files from Alabar Farms) In honor of the fifth anniversary of National Vietnam War Veterans Day, the Virginia Department of Veterans Services will today recognize the more than 230,000 Virginia men and women who served in the U.S. Armed Forces during this conflict from 1955 until 1975. Locally, Culpeper Minutemen Chapter VASSAR, Culpeper VFW Post 2524 and Vietnam veterans will celebrate National Vietnam War Veterans Day at 4 p.m. today at the Vietnam Memorial next to the Culpeper Court House on West Davis Street. There will be a Veteran hat giveaway and a chance for any veteran to reflect on their service. All Vietnam War veterans and members of the public are invited and encouraged to attend this ceremony and the one in Richmond. A special ceremony will be held at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, March 29 to commemorate National Vietnam War Veterans Day at the Virginia War Memorial, 621 S. Belvidere St. in Richmond. Every Vietnam War Veteran in attendance at the Virginia War Memorial ceremony will be presented with a Vietnam Veteran Lapel Pin in recognition of his or her service. It is especially important that all Virginians take the time on this special day to thank our fellow citizens who answered the call to serve our country, said Daniel Gade, Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Veterans Services, in a statement. These veterans came back home, transitioned to civilian life, started families and became leaders in business, education, law, the arts, medicine, science, technology and public service throughout the Commonwealth. They deserve nothing less than our highest praise and acknowledgment for their service and sacrifice. Dept. of Veterans Services also will partner with Chapter 957 of the Vietnam Veterans of America and James City County for a National Vietnam War Veterans Day commemoration and pinning ceremony at 1 p.m. on Tuesday at Veterans Park in James City County. In addition, the Marine Corps League, James M. Slay Detachment #329; Military Order of the Purple Heart, Richmond Chapter 1965; the Virginia Department of Veterans Services; and Mission BBQ will be honoring Vietnam Veterans 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on March 29 at the Mission BBQ Glenside location. The Virginia Department of Veterans Services is a Commemorative Partner to the United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration. LINCOLN Ranchers interested in learning about the latest cutting-edge research in range livestock production from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are encouraged to register for the 2022 Nebraska Ranch Practicum offered by Nebraska Extension. The practicum will be held during eight sessions over the course of three seasons in order to cover the production cycle of livestock and forage resources. Participants will have the opportunity to learn about a variety of topics, including the effective use of decision support tools to evaluate management and marketing alternatives, plant identification, range condition and grazing strategies, wildlife management, evaluation of cow body condition scores and beef cattle production systems. The practicum will be held June 6 and 7, July 7, Sept. 7 and 8, and Nov. 3, 2022; and Jan. 10 and 11, 2023. Classroom activities will open and close the practicum in North Platte with the remainder of the classes conducted at the University of Nebraskas Gudmundsen Sandhills Laboratory, a working ranch with education and research facilities, near Whitman. The practicum can count for college or continuing education credit. The registration fee is $675. The fee for a spouse is an additional $350. Registration covers educational materials, noon meals and breaks. Participants are responsible for travel and lodging expenses. The practicum can count for college or continuing education credit. To register, submit a completed application and registration fee by May 3. Applications will not be accepted after that date. Enrollment is limited to 35 participants. Applicants will be notified of their status no later than May 20. Refunds will be issued if space is not available. To learn more or register, visit https://nebraskaranchpracticum.unl.edu/ or contact Troy Walz at 308-872-6831 or troy.walz@unl.edu. Residents will have the chance to hear from local state legislative candidates during a Nebraska Farm Bureau forum on Friday, April 1. The forum will take place at 7 p.m. at the Hotel 21 & Co. conference room. Organizers estimate the forum will last around 90 minutes. Doors open 30 minutes before the event begins. The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided. Jay Ferris, the Nebraska Farm Bureaus director of political engagement and state policy, said the organization will hold four candidate forums across the state this year. We try to do this every election year, especially in rural districts that have open seats, he told the Star-Herald. The forums are usually held when there are more than two candidates. Otherwise, the bureau often interviews candidates instead. The purpose of such an event is for both the Farm Bureau and the public to learn more about the candidates. Ferris said its important for potential elected officials to be knowledgeable of agricultural issues. The candidates running for District 48 are Talon Cordle and Scott Shaver of Scottsbluff, Brian Hardin and Jeremiah Teeple of Gering and Don Lease II of Bridgeport. Ferris said all five of them had verbally confirmed their attendance. The forum will serve as a way for them to get their messages to the public, he added. Current District 48 Sen. John Stinner is term-limited and cannot run for the position again. District 48 covers all of Scotts Bluff, Banner and Kimball counties. Andy Groskopf, president of the Scotts Bluff County Farm Bureau chapter, said it was a good thing that so many people were interested in running. Fridays forum will not be a debate. All questions will be submitted by the audience and asked generally to all the candidates; rebuttal will not be allowed. We like to keep control and order of the forum, but we certainly want whats on the minds of the public asked, Ferris said. Questions regarding the same topic will be combined when possible; topics will include property taxes, school funding, rural infrastructure and broadband issues. Marketing for the event will primarily be done through social media and by emailing local Farm Bureau members to keep them informed. Ferris said he is working on a way to livestream the forum as well. Four years ago, the Scotts Bluff County Farm Bureau hosted a similar event with county board and North Platte NRD candidates. The Farm Bureau is the largest grassroots farming organization in the state. There are more than 55,000 members, and various county chapters meet regularly to discuss policy. We represent a lot of issues farmers might have ... the Farm Bureau is the voice of rural Nebraska, Id like to think, in the legislature, Groskopf said. Submit Your News We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Two women were killed in a head-on collision east of Harrison Friday. The Nebraska State Patrol released that Ruth Smathers, 67, of Lost Springs, Wyoming, and Nana Flesch, 42, of Shelby, Montana, were killed in a crash that occurred at mile marker 14 on Highway 20, east of Harrison. The crash occurred at about 7:25 p.m. Friday. Smathers had been the driver of a westbound pickup pulling a loaded livestock trailer that collided with an eastbound vehicle driven by Flesch. Flesch had also been pulling a loaded livestock trailer. Both drivers were pronounced deceased at the scene. Fleschs three children were also in the vehicle and suffered serious injuries. One child was ejected from the vehicle. That child was flown to Regional West Hospital in Scottsbluff and has since been transferred to a hospital in Denver. The other children were transported to the hospital in Chadron. One has since been transported to a hospital in Rapid City. Several animals died as a result of the crash, as both trailers were loaded. Highway 20 was closed for approximately five hours. The crash remains under investigation. NSP was assisted at the scene by the Sioux County Sheriffs Office, Dawes County Sheriffs Office, Nebraska Game and Parks, and the Harrison Volunteer Fire Department. Submit Your News We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Zelensky, Ukrainian oligarchs doing business in Russia during conflict: Report by IANS | Moscow, March 29 (IANS) Against the backdrop of ongoing hostilities in Ukraine, calls for foreign businesses to leave the Russian market do not subside. Ukrainian oligarchs and big businessmen publicly declare that they have no assets left in Russia. But in fact, part of the establishment continues to control business in the Russian Federation through proxies and offshore companies, a media report said. Among them are not only names of the Ukrainian Forbes, but also President Vladimir Zelensky, the RT News report said. Ukrainian business media estimate the number of major Ukrainian businessmen doing business in Russia at hundreds of names. One of them sounds especially loud in the current situation - Zelensky. So, in Russia, LLC Green Films and Platinumfilm continue to operate and receive income. These companies, founded by the current President of Ukraine and his comrades in 2012, are responsible for distribution, rental income and royalties from Kvartal 95's comedy shows and films, RT reported. Green Films submitted its last financial statements for 2020 only. Then its revenue amounted to 55.7 million rubles, according to Rosstat. Platinumfilm showed zero revenue in 2020. The Kontur Focus service shows that both Russian companies belong to the Cypriot Green Family LTD. The Cyprus offshore, in turn, was owned by Zelensky himself by a quarter before the start of his presidential career, the register of legal entities in Cyprus indicates. In 2019, Zelensky got rid of his share, distributing it between a colleague in Kvartal 95 Andrey Yakovlev and an offshore company from the British Virgin Islands Appex International. This is evidenced by extracts from the commercial register of Cyprus received by RT. However, indirect evidence suggests that Zelensky retains control over the film production business through his closest associates, brothers Sergei and Boris Shefirov, as well as Timur Mindich, RT reported. The co-founders of Kvartal 95, the Shefir brothers, continue to control 15 per cent each of the authorized capital of the Cypriot legal entity, according to a fresh extract from the register. Both of them stand at the origins of Kvartal 95 and have known Zelensky since 1995, when the KVN festival was held in his native Krivoy Rog. Since that time, Zelensky and the Shefirs have not parted - they lived in Moscow in the same apartment, worked together on KVN, founded Kvartal 95 together. Zelensky has repeatedly publicly called Sergei Shefir his friend. And the day after taking office as president in May 2019, Zelensky appointed a friend as his first assistant, RT reported. Timur Mindich, the owner of the Virginian company Appex, is no less close to Zelensky. The fact that Appex International belongs to Mindych was repeatedly written by authoritative Ukrainian media. Through this offshore, Mindich received most of Zelensky's former share and became the owner of 50% of Green Family, which receives income from Russian rentals. The Russian, German and Ukrainian press call Mindych the man of the oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, whom Kolomoisky himself allegedly "identified" as Zelensky's entourage, RT reported. The degree of closeness between Zelensky and Mindych can be judged, for example, by the fact that the Ukrainian presidential candidate drove Mindych's car. Mindich has close cultural and business ties with Russia - he is married to the daughter of Alla Verber, the founder of the Mercury jewellery house. Werber worked as the creative director of TSUM until her death and, according to Vogue, had extensive contacts among the Russian establishment. And blogger Sergei (Zergulio) Kolyasnikov, shortly after the start of the military special operation in Ukraine, said that Zelensky's mother-in-law and wife continue to receive income from renting real estate in Moscow. They, according to the blogger, allegedly own two business-class apartments - one in the Tushino area, the other on Varshavskoe highway, RT reported. Did you sign their proposal? an Ambassador asked her group. Germany thinks we should eject Poland from the EU. What are you working on? The buzz and excitement was palpable on the Virginia Tech campus earlier this month as Floyd County students prepared for their first year participating in the Model European Council Debate. More than 100 participants from Floyd, Blacksburg, Christiansburg, and Patrick Henry High Schools darted across the room, negotiating and debating with the Heads of State, Ambassadors, Foreign Ministers, and Prime Ministers of other countries. Voting would take place soon, and several states wanted to build alliances to have their position approved. Im the Prime Minister, so Im researching how the Netherlands would reply to their request right now. They want us to get rid of Poland, but I think my country would say no. The Head of State from Lithuania is living his best life. He is talking to everybody. Right now hes standing on a chair talking to a group over there. Look. Thirty-nine FCHS students attended the event on March 15 and 17, learning about the EU and world issues from VT professors, before debating those issues. The model EU was sponsored by the Center for European Union, Transatlantic and Trans-European Space Studies at Virginia Tech. Our first year representing Floyd County High School was clearly a great success. It was hard work, but as one FCHS student stated, I learned a lot. I never knew I really liked this stuff, but I did. It was really interesting. The Model EU Council and Symposium offered students a real-world simulation of how world issues are handled by governing officials in Europe, and in the process, sparked an interest in current events and government in many students. Students in FCHSs Dual-Enrollment English and Honors Government spent weeks researching, taking notes, and writing to prepare for the event. They were responsible for learning how the EU Council works, the history behind the Belarus border crisis and Polands abuse of human rights, and the current crisis in Ukraine. In DE English class, they read books about asylum seekers and immigration, as well as listened to and read news articles on the events. They then read and researched the three topics in depth with Mr. Daniel Quesenberrys Honors Government class before drafting a formal position statement for their assigned state. After two hours of deliberations, students returned to their states, ready to begin voting. This is cool. I could do school like this every day, one student stated. Yeah, I wish we could stay here longer, his friend replied. In the end, Poland was allowed to stay and Ukraine was granted candidate status for entrance into the European Union. Students cheered for each decision. I thought to myself, If only all politicians could have the knowledge, care, and dedication that my students had shown before making world decisions. Mr. Quesenberry and I were extremely proud of how well-prepared and informed our students were, as well as how enthusiastic they were in negotiations with other states and students throughout the week. Students in my English class will be sharing informational writings about these issues on their school blogs in feature pieces soon. Next Generation is a series of non-sequential essays typically by Floyd County High School students written for credit in Amanda Bivianos Dual Enrollment Freshman Composition class. The Columbia Riverkeeper filed a lawsuit accusing a timber company of violating stormwater quality laws at its Longview mill, the group said Monday in a news release. The Clean Water Act case alleges that Weyerhaeuser NR Company went against state and federal laws when it dumped too many pollutants into the Columbia River Basin, according to court documents from the case. State and federal laws limit facilities output of Biochemical Oxygen Demand, oil and grease, pH levels and settleable solids because these pollutants can bring unwanted debris and chemicals into local waterways, posing a significant threat to sensitive salmon habitat, according to Riverkeepers news release. This lawsuit is about protecting people that rely on clean water and strong salmon runs, Riverkeeper attorney Simone Anter said in the news release. Plain and simple, Weyerhaeuser is polluting and this pollution impacts salmon. This should be taken seriously. In February, the Washington state Department of Ecology fined the Weyerhaeuser mill in Longview $40,000 for water quality violations at the Columbia River and for failing to monitor two of its stormwater outfalls, according to a Feb. 17 news release. Weyerhaeuser receives $40,000 water quality fine from Department of Ecology The Washington Department of Ecology fined Weyerhaeuser $40,000 Thursday for stormwater quality violations at its Longview mill. The company had 30 days to pay the fine or to appeal with the Pollution Control Hearings Board, the department said in its news release. Love 0 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 4 LAGOS, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The Nigeria Railway Corporation (NRC) has temporarily suspended its train operations between the country's capital Abuja and the northern city Kaduna due to "unforeseen circumstances" following an attack by gunmen on a train along the route on Monday night. "Due to unforeseen circumstances, train operations along the Abuja-Kaduna route have been temporarily suspended," said the NRC in a statement on Tuesday. "Further communication would be given in due course," it added. According to reports by local media, a Kaduna-bound train with over 900 passengers on board was attacked on Monday night by gunmen, who blew up the rail track, forcing the train to derail around Rijana, a village on the rail corridor in the Kaduna state. Samuel Aruwan, the commissioner of internal security and home affairs in Kaduna, said in a statement on Tuesday that security forces have been sent and secured the train immediately after the attack, and the evacuation of passengers trapped in the train has been concluded by Tuesday morning. The passengers who sustained injuries have also been moved to hospitals for treatment, said Aruwan, without giving further details. Security forces continued to comb the general area for additional search and rescue efforts, he added. At about 12:30 p.m. Saturday, officers responded to an armed robbery reported at Chase Bank in the Triangle Shopping Center, according to the Longview Police Department. The suspect had a handgun and fled before officers arrived, according to police. Editors note: Information is provided by the Cowlitz County Corrections Department and local law enforcement agencies. Each individual named in this report is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Assault Longview officers Monday arrested Joseph Armond Beebe, 23, of St. Helens, Oregon, on suspicion of third-degree assault. Robbery Longview officers Monday arrested Brandon Christopher Hall, 36, of Aiken, South Carolina, on suspicion of third-degree theft and two counts of second-degree burglary. Fraud A Longview man reported Monday he used the mobile payment service Cash App to purchase a $600 Xbox from a company that has since deleted its Facebook page and blocked him. Assault 100 block of Duncan Spur Road, Kelso. Monday. A man reported his neighbor shot a bullet near his daughter when practicing on his property. 500 block of Redpath Street, Kelso. Monday. Report of two students fighting. 1200 block of 28th Avenue, Longview. Monday. Report of a student being assaulted by another student for the second time in the past few weeks. 3800 block of Cherrywood Street, Longview. Monday. Report of fight between two women in "an assisted living situation." Burglaries 100 block of River Ridge Lane, Kalama. Monday. Report of a commercial burglary at Storage R Us and damage to toy hauler RV located behind a fence. 400 block of Main Street, Kelso. Monday. Report of two unwanted people inside a jobsite trailer with multiple tools taken. 700 block of Commerce Avenue, Longview. Monday. Report of catalytic converters taken from three vehicles in fenced area over the weekend. 200 block of Baltimore Street, Longview. Monday. Report of transients breaking into and sleeping overnight, leaving needles and pipes in a vacant apartment. Stolen vehicle 700 block of CC Street, Woodland. Monday. 6-foot, single-axel trailer with no license plate. Theft 3200 block of Columbia Heights Road, Longview. Monday. Report of caregiver possibly taking items from a safe belonging to a deceased person. Vandalism/malicious mischief 400 block of Stone Park, Kalama. Monday. Report of gas line cut and gas taken. 800 block of Pacific Avenue, Kelso. Monday. Report of person in a dark gray Dodge Charger firing airsoft gun at a bus. 11th Avenue and Tennant Way, Longview. Monday. Report of a man with an overflowing shopping cart, possibly smoking marijuana, bending a crosswalk pole. Vehicle prowls 100 block of Yelton Drive, Longview. Monday. 100 block of Inglewood Drive, Longview. Monday. Report of car prowl caught on surveillance. 600 block of Olson Road, Longview. Monday. Report of car broken into and cash taken. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. The process the researchers followed to enhance heat dissipation performance management in lithium ion batteries. Credit: Zhejiang University While electric vehicles have reaped the rewards of new high-energy lithium-ion batteries and rapid charging technology, challenges remain. For example, although cars can cover longer distances between charges, and battery charging times have reduced, the lifespan of those batteries has also decreased, and low heat dissipation efficiency has led to safety issues. Researchers from the US and China set out to find an economic but efficient battery thermal management strategy to keep battery temperatures within a safe range. In a study, published in the journal Green Energy & Environment, they shared their findingsa 3D, interconnected, thermally-conductive boron nitride network that greatly improves thermal conductivity compared to random distribution. Study co-author, Professor Bing Zhang of China's Zhejiang University, explains that they "designed a three-dimensional (3D) network of boron nitride, and systematically studied its effect on the thermal management performance of power cells." "What we found is that the hexagonal boron nitride thermal network (h-BN) constructed by the ice template method with varying temperature gradients showed structural differences in different directions. Generally, structure determines performance, and different structures in different directions means a greater spread of performance. And by creating a composite with paraffin (h-BN/PW), we could achieve excellent anti-leakage performance and ultra-fast heat dissipation performance in lithium-ion batteries." He adds that their "results showed that the maximum surface temperature of the battery with continuous charge and discharge at 2 5 was reduced by 6.9 . We think that this demonstrates the great potential of this process for application in battery thermal management systems." Explore further New material to pave the way for more efficient electronic devices More information: Zhuoya Wang et al, Ultrafast battery heat dissipation enabled by highly ordered and interconnected hexagonal boron nitride thermal conductive composites, Green Energy & Environment (2022). Zhuoya Wang et al, Ultrafast battery heat dissipation enabled by highly ordered and interconnected hexagonal boron nitride thermal conductive composites,(2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.gee.2022.02.007 Provided by KeAi Communications The walls of the Arni room have rotating panels. A spherical loudspeaker plays sound to all directions, and the acoustic properties can be measured with several microphones at the same time. Credit: Aalto University / Karolina Prawda Acoustics researchers of Aalto University have discovered a way to improve the most common measurement method, the sine sweep technique, which has been in use for 20 years since it replaced all previous methods. The sine sweep is a whistling sound, whose frequency raises logarithmically through the entire range of the human hearing from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. In practice, the sine sweep lasts for a few seconds. By increasing the length of the sine sweep, it is possible to feed more energy to the room and thus reduce the proportion of noises affecting the measurement. However, the measurement cannot be increased much, since over the time the possibility of additional disturbances and changes in the environments increase, which adds to the uncertainty of the measurements. The new Rule of Two method recommends repeating the sine sweep measurement a few times until two of them pass the cleanliness criterion. This way, the automatic measurements can be done very reliably. The thousands of combinations needed for the development of this method were measured at the Arni room in Otaniemi. "The measurement techniques of acoustics and audio technology have developed much over the years. In the early days, acousticians used to clap their hands or use a starting pistol in a room and then listen how the echo decays. Nowadays the measurements are done with a computer and accurate calculations, and that's why we know precisely how sound reverberates in different spaces," says Vesa Valimaki, a professor of acoustics. "The name of our method, Rule of Two (Ro2), comes from the requirement that reliability calls for two clean measurements, which correlate strongly. Later we learned that, by coincidence, there is also a rule of two in Star Wars. The acoustic measurement method has nothing to do with Star Wars, except for the same term," says Karolina Prawda, a doctoral researcher. Researchers believe that the new measurement technique for acoustics and audio technology will replace the 20-year-old single sine sweep method, because the more reliable technique saves time in design work. Acoustic measurements are commonly used in the design of all interiors, where it is necessary to make speech, announcements or music audible for all, such as in movie theaters, metro stations, concert halls, lecture rooms, churches, and congress centers. "At Aalto University, we will immediately start using this method in teaching. I hope that the sector of acoustics will notice its benefits as soon as possible," Professor Valimaki says. Endless amount of echo options with rotating panels The walls of the Arni room have rotating panels. One side of the panels is hard whereas the other is soft. The room becomes reverberant using the hard surfaces and attenuated using the soft ones. A spherical loudspeaker plays sound to all directions, and the acoustic properties can be measured with several microphones at the same time. Because of the rotating panels, researchers have the chance to modify the acoustic environment in the room almost endlessly. "The measurement method was discovered just because of thousands of measurements. The walls can produce more combinations than there are ants in the world," mentions Professor of Practice Sebastian Schlecht. "The wall panels open and close when the software commands them. Our task was to analyze the thousands of measurements and compare them with each other," Prawda says. Their paper has been published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Explore further Estimating the quality of sound spaces from observed speech More information: Karolina Prawda et al, Robust selection of clean swept-sine measurements in non-stationary noise, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2022). Journal information: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Karolina Prawda et al, Robust selection of clean swept-sine measurements in non-stationary noise,(2022). DOI: 10.1121/10.0009915 Credit: Zhu Jin Quantum technology, which makes use of the surprising and often counterintuitive properties of the subatomic universe, is revolutionizing the way information is gathered, stored, shared and analyzed. The commercial and scientific potential of the quantum revolution is vast, but it is in national security that quantum technology is making the biggest waves. National governments are by far the heaviest investors in quantum research and development. Quantum technology promises breakthroughs in weapons, communications, sensing and computing technology that could change the world's balance of military power. The potential for strategic advantage has spurred a major increase in funding and research and development in recent years. The three key areas of quantum technology are computing, communications and sensing. Particularly in the United States and China, all three are now seen as crucial parts of the struggle for economic and military supremacy. The race is on Developing quantum technology isn't cheap. Only a small number of states have the organizational capacity and technological know-how to compete. Russia, India, Japan, the European Union and Australia have established significant quantum research and development programs. But China and the US hold a substantial lead in the new quantum race. And the race is heating up. In 2015 the US was the world's largest investor in quantum technology, having spent around US$500 million dollars. By 2021 this investment had grown to almost US$2.1 billion. However, Chinese investment in quantum technology in the same period expanded from US$300 million to an estimated US$13 billion. The leaders of the two nations, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, have both emphasized the importance of quantum technology as a critical national security tool in recent years. The US federal government has established a "three pillars model" of quantum research, under which federal investment is split between civilian, defense and intelligence agencies. In China, information on quantum security programs is more opaque, but the People's Liberation Army is known to be supporting quantum research through its own military science academies as well as extensive funding programs into the broader scientific community. Artificial intelligence and machine learning Advances in quantum computing could result in a leap in artificial intelligence and machine learning. This could improve the performance of lethal autonomous weapons systems (which can select and engage targets without human oversight). It would also make it easier to analyze the large data sets used in defense intelligence and cyber security. Improved machine learning may also confer a major advantage in carrying out (and defending against) cyber attacks on both civilian and military infrastructure. The most powerful current quantum computer (as far as we know) is made by the US company IBM, which works closely with US defense and intelligence. Unhackable communication Quantum communication systems can be completely secure and unhackable. Quantum communication is also required for networking quantum computers, which is expected to enhance quantum computational power exponentially. China is the clear global leader here. A quantum communication network using ground and satellite connections already links Beijing, Shanghai, Jinan and Heifei. China's prioritization of secure quantum communications is likely linked to revelations of US covert global surveillance operations. The US has been by far the most advanced and effective communications, surveillance and intelligence power for the past 70 yearsbut that could change with a successful Chinese effort. More powerful sensors Quantum computing and communications hold out the promise of future advantage, but the quantum technology closest to military deployment today is quantum sensing. New quantum sensing systems offer more sensitive detection and measurement of the physical environment. Existing stealth systems, including the latest generation of warplanes and ultra-quiet nuclear submarines, may no longer be so hard to spot. Superconducting quantum interference devices (or SQUIDs), which can make extremely sensitive measurements of magnetic fields, are expected to make it easier to detect submarines underwater in the near future. At present, undetectable submarines armed with nuclear missiles are regarded as an essential deterrent against nuclear war because they could survive an attack on their home country and retaliate against the attacker. Networks of more advanced SQUIDs could make these submarines more detectable (and vulnerable) in the future, upsetting the balance of nuclear deterrence and the logic of mutually assured destruction. New technologies, new arrangements The US is integrating quantum cooperation agreements into existing alliances such as NATO, as well as into more recent strategic arrangements such as the AustraliaUKUS AUKUS security pact and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue ("the Quad") between Australia, India, Japan, and the US. China already cooperates with Russia in many areas of technology, and events may well propel closer quantum cooperation. In the Cold War between the US and the USSR, nuclear weapons were the transformative technology. International standards and agreements were developed to regulate them and ensure some measure of safety and predictability. In much the same way, new accords and arrangements will be needed as the quantum arms race heats up. Explore further The best of both worlds: Combining classical and quantum systems to meet supercomputing demands This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The reroute will cover "just under 9,000 nautical miles"or 16,668 kilometresin 16 to 17 hours, Cathay said. Cathay Pacific is planning the world's longest passenger flight by rerouting its New York to Hong Kong service over the Atlantic instead of the Pacific, the airline said Tuesday, in a new path that steers clear of Russia. The flight path will cover "just under 9,000 nautical miles" (10,357 miles)or 16,668 kilometresin 16 to 17 hours, Cathay said in a statement to AFP. It will surpass a Singapore Airlines flight travelling from the Southeast Asian city-state to New York, which flies a shorter distance in a longer timeabout 15,343 kilometres (9,534 miles) in 18 hours. Cathay declined to be drawn on the reasons for its flight path giving a wide berth to Russia's airspace, which it has previously flown through, according to Bloomberg. Many airlines have cancelled routes to Russian cities or are avoiding its airspace over Moscow's bloody invasion of neighbouring Ukraine last month. Russia also closed its skies last month to several European countries and all UK-linked flights in a tit-for-tat response to a similar ban placed on them. Cathay is currently seeking an overflight permit for the journey which will fly across the Atlantic, Europe and Central Asia. "We are always running contingency routings for potential events or scenarios within the world of aviation," Hong Kong's flagship carrier said Tuesday in a statement to AFP. The trans-Atlantic option is more favourable than their usual trans-Pacific route because of "strong seasonal tailwinds at this time of the year", it said. Pre-pandemic, Cathay operated three round trips between the two cities every day. Flights to Hong Kong now face frequent cancellations due to the financial hub's strict anti-Covid measures, as well as a lack of passengers. Starting April 1, flights from the US and eight other countries will be allowed to land in Hong Kong again, as the government relaxes some of the world's toughest Covid-19 restrictions. As of Tuesday evening, Cathay lists a New York-to-Hong Kong flight for April 3a non-stop journey that will stay in the air for 17 hours and 50 minutes, according to its website. Explore further Hong Kong airport bans transit passengers from 153 countries 2022 AFP Credit: University of Edinburgh Experts at Edinburgh have helped to produce a sign language glossary for deaf people who are engaged in digital technology. They are part of a team that has created more than 500 signs covering computer science, cyber security, data science and software development. Team members say the glossary will help the deaf community access qualifications and careers in one of Scotland's fastest-growing sectors. The new British Sign Language (BSL) lexicon is backed by Government agency Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Sensory Centre, based at Edinburgh. It is a key strand of the University's Data Education in Schools initiative, which is part of a wider program called the Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) Skills Gateway. DDI Skills Gateway is funded as part of the 1.3bn Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal, which aims to drive economic growth and includes investment in skills and employability. Teamwork A UK-wide team of eight deaf people, who are also tech experts, spent eight months with sign linguists developing and testing the new signs for the glossary. Team member Ben Fletcher, who is principal engineer with the Financial Times, says it is important to create a common language for deaf people in tech. He says: "I have studied and worked in computing throughout my whole life, but tech and BSL have often been a difficult combination. "There's a huge list of computing terms, very few of which have dedicated and widely recognized signs, and others I just had to make up. It was very frustrating." Ben says a standard glossary will help deaf people in schools, colleges, universities and workplaces. The new signs make it much easier for them to talk about tech matters. Lengthy process Before the glossary was launched, deaf people often had to spell out each individual letter of the specialized terms they were using. Popular tech words and phrases now covered include ethical hacking, firewall, data breach, machine learning and phishing. Secondary pupil Billy-Jack Gerrard, who attends St Augustine's RC High School in Edinburgh, is deaf and wants to study AI and computer science at university. He says: "The terms will make life so much easier and, in turn, be far more inclusive for deaf people like me who are wanting to pursue a digital career." Skills gap Head of digital technologies and financial service at Skills Development Scotland, Phil Ford, adds: "This will help deaf people get jobs in tech while also enhancing inclusivityall with the ultimate aim of plugging the skills gap in a sector that is vital for Scotland's economy." The full list of signs can be found on the Scottish Sensory Centre website but Kate Farrell, of the Data Education in Schools initiative, is keen to keep adding to the list. Kate says: "Like the technology itself, which is constantly changing, the accompanying language has to evolvewe therefore welcome the continued input from technologists." Project leader Dr. Audrey Cameron, a Chancellor's Fellow at Moray House School of Sport and Education, says: "The sign development team has been awesome and creative in developing these visual representations of all the terms." The Scottish Sensory Centre, based at Moray House, has hosted the British Sign Language Glossary of curriculum terms since 2007. The BSL Glossary is widely used by teachers of deaf children, deaf young people, their support workers and parents. Explore further New education 'hubs' for Deaf children needed to replace social spaces lost when specialist schools close Credit: Camenzind et al. The idea of creating a spin-based quantum computer using quantum dots was first introduced by Daniel Loss and David Di Vincenzo in 1998. Since then, countless engineers and physicists worldwide have been trying to realize their vision using existing and newly developed hardware components. So far, silicon has proved to be among the most promising materials for creating spin-based quantum computers, as most complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOSs) in use today are made of silicon. Moreover, silicon can be designed to be free of nuclear spins, which are known to degrade the coherence of spin qubits in quantum computers. Researchers at University of Basel and IBM Research-Zurich have recently explored the possibility of hosting spin qubits in silicon-based FinFETs, a class of transistors first introduced by researchers at University of California- Berkeley. Their results, published in Nature Electronics, were very promising, as they suggest that FinFETs could help to improve the scalability of quantum technologies. "Billions of FinFETs are used in today's computer chips," Andreas Kuhlmann and Dominik Zumbuhl, two of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "Achieving scalability (i.e., going from a few tens of qubits to many millions) remains the greatest challenge for quantum computing. So, we thought: why not build a quantum computer with a platform that has successfully mastered this challenge? Furthermore, FinFETs are also excellent hosts for (hole) spin qubits and a very handy property of hole spin qubits is their spin-orbit interaction." The spin-orbit interaction is an important property of hole spin qubits that can be very advantageous, as it allows researchers to manipulate spin states by applying an oscillating electrical signal to them. Physics theory predicts that holes in silicon FinFETs will have an unusually large spin-orbit interaction that can be electrically modulated. In their experiments, Kuhlmann, Zumbuhl and their colleagues tested this prediction using a standard FinFET device to host small, fast and coherent spin qubits that are resistant to high temperatures. Ultimately, they found that the silicon FinFET could host the spin qubits operating at temperatures above 4 Kelvin. "Our devices work in a similar way to a classical transistor, where the gate electrode controls the current flow from source to drain," Kuhlmann and Zumbuhl explained. "Here, we use the gates to trap single hole spins. Once the spins are localized (inside what we call a quantum dot), microwave signals can be applied to manipulate the spin state. The smaller these quantum dots are the more robust they are against temperature." The FinFET realized by the researchers resemble those that are currently being manufactured worldwide. This means that they could be easy to integrate with existing components and to scale up (i.e., increasing the number of qubits inside them). Other existing quantum computing platforms, such as those hosting superconducting qubits, typically need to operate at millikelvin (mK) temperatures. The qubits hosted in the platform developed by the researchers, on the other hand, can be operated at temperatures above 4K. "A cryostat operating at 4K is technically much less demanding than one operating at mK temperatures," Kuhlmann and Zumbuhl said. "Furthermore, at 4K the available cooling power is orders of magnitudes larger than at mK temperatures. This means that in future we could integrate the classical control electronics (required for qubit control) on-chip with the qubits. This is important when scaling up the qubit count, since the number of control lines going from room temperature to mK inside a fridge is limited, and the more qubits the more control lines are needed." In the future, the recent study carried out by Kuhlmann, Zumbuhl and their colleagues could help to accelerate the development of quantum computing technology and improve its scalability. In the meantime, the researchers plan to optimize the performance of the qubits inside their device further. "We want to make the qubits more coherent and at the same time reduce the gate times," Kuhlmann and Zumbuhl said. "In addition, we would like to scale up the number of qubits inside our transistor." Explore further A three-qubit entangled state has been realized in a fully controllable array of spin qubits in silicon More information: Leon C. Camenzind et al, A hole spin qubit in a fin field-effect transistor above 4 kelvin, Nature Electronics (2022). Journal information: Nature Electronics Leon C. Camenzind et al, A hole spin qubit in a fin field-effect transistor above 4 kelvin,(2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-022-00722-0 2022 Science X Network JERUSALEM, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The first official Israeli business delegation has arrived in Morocco, the Manufacturers Association of Israel (MAI) said Tuesday. The delegation, which landed in Casablanca on Monday for a four-day visit and was welcomed by Morocco's economic organizations, includes the heads of Israel's leading industry, trade, export and agriculture organizations, according to the MAI. The Israeli delegation visited the Casablanca Finance City, an African financial and business hub that gathers more than 200 corporate members with operations in 50 African countries. It is scheduled to meet in Casablanca with the heads of the General Confederation of Businesses of Morocco (CGEM) and visit the port and business complex in the northern city of Tangier and headquarters of advanced industrial and agricultural companies. The purpose of the visit is to promote trade relations and cooperation between Israel and Morocco in the areas of food, advanced agriculture, medical equipment and services, renewable energy, cybersecurity, transportation and more, according to the MAI. Earlier in March, Morocco sent its first official business delegation to Israel, during which the CGEM signed a cooperation agreement with leading Israeli business organizations. Morocco agreed to normalize its relations with Israel in December 2020 in a deal brokered by the United States, becoming the fourth Arab country after the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan to normalize ties with Israel in 2020. Israel signed a bilateral agreement with Morocco in February aiming to expand annual trade volume to 500 million U.S. dollars within the next five years. Credit: CC0 Public Domain SolarWinds says it has beefed up security and tightened its software screening process 15 months after one of the most sophisticated cyberattacks exposed thousands of its customers to Russian spies and left U.S. government agencies and Fortune 500 companies scrambling to contain losses. SolarWinds executives say they have spent $25 million to improve security and established new processes to screen third-party code that goes into almost all software products. The company now operates on the principle of "zero trust and assuming breach mentality"tech-speak for taking as a given that security breaches are inescapablesaid Chip Daniels, the head of government affairs at SolarWinds. The company also has instituted a process requiring all software be built in triplicate by separate teams to prevent malware infections because of loopholes or deliberate mischief, he said. Outside software developers are being subjected to a screening process that requires them to "answer a series of questions that will assure us that their environment is secure," Daniels said. In December 2020, cybersecurity research firm FireEye revealed that network management software made by SolarWinds had been breached, potentially exposing as many as 18,000 of the latter company's clients. In-depth assessments revealed that of those clients who were likely to have been exposed, only 100 were affected, the company has said. U.S. officials later said the attack was carried out by Russian intelligence operatives who broke into a software update process used by SolarWinds and used that to gain access to clients who had unwittingly installed the tainted software update. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, U.S. officials asked all federal agencies using SolarWinds to disconnect the software and rebuild their computer operating systems. Cybersecurity experts feared that Russian spies might have placed secret backdoors that they could access later. The new measures are causing federal agencies that feared using the company's software to reconsider, Daniels said. But he declined to name the agencies because negotiations were still underway. The company is reassuring its old and new customers that it has undertaken a comprehensive security review to find and remove any remnants of the Russian attack, said Tim Brown, chief information security officer at SolarWinds. The company worked with federal agencies, including the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as private cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and forensic auditors from KPMG for six months "looking and hunting, examining for any anomalies we might see" in the software, Brown said. The company examined every software code going back two years and found no anomalies, Brown said. Although the Russian attack did not stem from an insider threat, it "doesn't mean it couldn't happen next time," Brown said. To prevent such an outcome, the company adopted the "triple build" model of software development, he said. One version is built by developers, while a second one, called the validation version, is simultaneously under development, and a third security version is also developed, Brown said. Before shipping out a software update to customers, the company compares the three versions to ensure they are identical, he said. The new approach ensures that any attempts to inject malware "you would need to have collusion amongst at least three people," which is far less likely, Brown said. Since software, like most physical products, is assembled with inputs from a global list of suppliers and draws on open-source components, SolarWinds now uses a set of seven questions to screen the security measures adopted by its suppliers, Daniels and Brown said. The questions include a detailed breakdown of each supplier's software development process, how suppliers secure their physical and electronic infrastructure, their risk management practices, how they respond when a breach or a vulnerability is discovered, methods used to identify internal threats, how they validate changes to their software code and how they screen new employees to identify potential foreign actors. The questions were built off of the first set of questions CISA asked SolarWinds in the immediate aftermath of the attack, Brown said. The company now recommends that other software developers use the screening questionnaire to assess the security of their suppliers, Brown said. SolarWinds also is building a database of all the software code that goes into its products in order to develop a so-called software bill of materials, Brown said. In May 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order on improving cybersecurity measures across the federal government and private companies. One of the elements of the order called for software sellers to provide buyers with a software bill of materials. The order said the bill of materials refers to "a formal record containing the details and supply chain relationships of various components used in building software." Brown said in some cases the bill of materials could run to tens of thousands of pages and could overwhelm customers trying to evaluate a vendor's offering. SolarWinds, like other software companies, is working to make the idea of bill of materials practical and useful to customers, Brown said. Explore further Florida launches investigation into hacking of its servers 2022 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. For the next week, 14 plywood shacks set up in the shadow of Kyle Field and the Memorial Student Center will be a temporary home to some students at different points during the week as part of Aggie Habitat for Humanitys annual Shack-a-Thon. The purpose of the student-run event is to raise money for the larger Bryan/College Station Habitat for Humanity and to increase awareness of affordable housing needs in the community and beyond. Many people like to think that homelessness and substandard housing is something that affects people away from us, but in fact its very close, Aggie Habitat co-president and Texas A&M grad student Trent Riek said. Its very next door. In fact, in our case, in the Bryan community, Habitat for Humanity as an organization, has built 300 houses and counting for people that live in substandard housing. Its actually very prominent just within Bryan alone, and just within our area. He said the problem people face trying to find affordable housing is an important one that should be addressed both through fundraisers and advocacy. Hannah Lansford, Texas A&M senior and Aggie Habitat director of public relations, added, Housing and accessibility to housing is a very prevalent issue, and it does play a role in peoples quality of life as well as their ability to be educated and hold jobs, different things like that. Its just super important, and I really love this fundraiser because its ultimately just helping people and thats the best part. The event raises about $10,000 toward Aggie Habitats goal of helping fund a local Habitat for Humanity house. It is the second big event for the organization after a pumpkin patch in the fall. Michael Mendiola, a freshman with the Fish Co. student organization, said he hopes the various freshman leadership organizations participating show other students that the Class of 2025 freshmen care about selfless service and want to take care of people in the community. He also said he hopes they can make sure they do as much as they can to help those who are less fortunate. There might have been some unfortunate circumstances that are out of their control, and its important for us to do whatever we can to help them just as human beings to make sure that everybody gets the best opportunity to live as possible, he said. More than just building the shacks, at least one person from the student organization must be at the shack at all times 24 hours a day for the duration of the event that lasts until Friday morning. Were just trying to build shacks, bring awareness to those who may need homes, Alan Hernandez, a freshman with the organization Freshman Leaders Establishing Excellence (FLEX), said. I mean, every little house is a group of people who are trying their best to bring attention. Eric McGonagle, also a freshman with FLEX, said it is hard for someone to walk by Kyle Field and see the shacks and not ask what it is about. It really catches peoples eyes and gets them to come up and start asking questions, and its really cool to be able to speak about this and say, Yeah, you know, were just helping raise awareness, he said. After two years that were affected by COVID-19, organizers were excited to see more participants this year than in previous years. We were worried that people werent going to know what we were doing anymore, and they werent going to come out, but this is the most weve ever had, so its been super exciting. Im super excited for all of them to get this experience themselves, Julia Evans, a senior at A&M and co-president of Aggie Habitat, said. Nathan Touchette, director of property with Bryan/College Station Habitat for Humanity and a Texas A&M graduate student, said he is excited to see the increased participation. It is a unique event, he said, to involve a younger crowd of college students on campus. We really dont get this kind of exposure on a normal basis, so its a really fun event that gets a bunch of different organizations involved, who typically just come out and volunteer every now and then, Touchette said. This gives them something a little bit more personal to build their own shack, and to do some advocacy for affordable housing and substandard housing is always great. We never get enough of that in our community, so its good to see so many young people engaged and involved. A lot of our volunteers are on the older side, so getting to see activity like this with so many young kids is great. The goal, he said, is to continue increasing the number of participants and raising awareness and funds. Throughout the week, the students will participate in games as a Shack-a-Thon community and also will hear from speakers, such as College Station Mayor Karl Mooney Tuesday night, about the impact they can make. Lansford said it is a good combination of learning and having fun. Preston Bell, a freshman representing the organization Freshman Leadership in Progress (FLiP), said it has been a good bonding experience for the members of his organization, and he is looking forward to hanging out with his friends and meeting people with other participating organizations. Sam Aletan, a freshman with Alpha Phi Omega, said it has been fun building the shack with his friends. Beyond the fun and community aspect, Touchette said, he hopes the students feel a little uncomfortable. Thats what its about is getting yourself out of your comfort zone; learning what other people have to go through and trying to put yourself in their shoes, so that you can help the world be a better place, he said. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Former United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron will visit College Station on Friday for a discussion of world affairs on the Texas A&M University campus. The event, which begins at 7 p.m., will be moderated by Fox News political analyst and NPR national correspondent Mara Liasson. Cameron will discuss current foreign policy challenges, the United Kingdoms alliance with the United States and geopolitical crises facing both nations. Tickets are $20 and available at boxoffice.tamu.edu or by calling 845-1234. Tickets for Texas A&M students are $12. HAVANA, March 28 (Xinhua) -- The first Havana Local Development Fair kicked off Monday at the Expocuba exhibition center with face masks required, as government measures to boost economic activities after a pandemic hiatus and the tightened U.S. embargo against the island. The event will contribute to improving the interaction between the state and non-state sectors, Cuban Minister of Economy and Planning Alejandro Gil told Xinhua. "We are betting on local development, mobilizing endogenous resources of territories," he said. "All efforts to promote local development across the country are welcome." Running through April 3, the fair features food products, wooden furniture, construction materials, textiles, ornamental plants and others. The exhibition stands represent 720 state companies, cooperatives, local development projects and private businesses, including the recently approved small and medium-sized enterprises. The non-state sector could significantly help the national economy grow, Juan Triana, a Cuban university professor and senior economist, told Xinhua. "This fair has added the new economic players as a functional and substantial part of the Cuban economy," which is "fundamental for the future of the Caribbean nation," he said. According to official statistics, there are about 2,000 state companies and over 2,500 small and medium-sized enterprises in Cuba. Cuba's GDP has been projected by the Cuban Ministry of Economy to grow by 4 percent this year after having contracted by 13 percent during the sanitary emergency. Clute, TX (77531) Today Partly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 92F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.. Tonight A few clouds. Low near 75F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. New COVID-19 cases are at an all-time low for the Hall County area. There have only been nine new cases of coronavirus and the positivity rate for Central District Health Departments coverage area is at 7%. CDHD last updated its COVID-19 dashboard on March 24, which shows data collected over the previous seven days in the three-county district. The current numbers are lowest since the start of pandemic, CDHD Director Teresa Anderson told The Independent. I dont think weve seen anything lower than this in this entire two-year period, she said. COVID-19 cases in the wake of omicrons arrival in December reached all-time highs in the Hall County area several times over through January. By late January, the district had a 63% positivity rate and 1,400 cases in one seven-day period. The sharp decline is because omicron burned itself out, Anderson reported. This means that it infected nearly everyone its going to infect, she said. Not that we wont have a few more cases, but it is essentially no longer a threat to us. While the numbers are down significantly, there is room for improvement. We can go lower, Anderson said, but this is a good spot for us right now. Diligence and vigilance remains crucial. Omicron has a little brother, Anderson said, and its the BA.2 variant. This subvariant is currently surging in California and in the east. BA.2 is more transmissible than the original omicron, so were just watching it very closely, she said. But last week there were only 18 confirmed cases of BA.2 in Nebraska. Opportunities to stay protected against COVID remain available. A second booster shot is expected to be approved soon for people age 50 and older. Anderson also expects approval from the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to give shots for the first time to children ages 0 to 4. CDHD is still offering at-home COVID test kits with more coming in soon for distribution. We think testing is going to be really important when this next wave of omicron hits, said Anderson. Well be able to test at home without risk of exposing anyone else. If a person has symptoms, they can test at home and if its positive they can take the appropriate measures. An antiviral pill specific to COVID is also available at some local pharmacies via CDHD. Both Molnupiravir and Paxlovid must be prescribed by a health care provider. If a person tests positive for COVID in the first two days after the onset of symptoms, their provider can write them a prescription for it, Anderson said. Nomi Health is continuing testing at CDHD office, but with reduced hours. They are available between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday through Thursday at 1137 S. Locust St. For now, CDHD staff members, busy since March 2020, can enjoy some relief from the pandemic. Were really glad to take a deep breath and just celebrate, I think, and at the same time we can turn our attention to other health issues that have been neglected to some degree, Anderson said. Safety remains important, Anderson emphasized, but people can now relax more as the warm spring weather arrives. Its great for us all to be outside, and while the viral count is low we really dont have to do a lot to protect ourselves, except just be watchful, she said. Once we see that this virus starts to increase, then we will be guided by CDC as far as now is the time to mask up and practice more social distancing, those kinds of things. She added, Right now, were just happy to have some time without restrictions. For more about Central District Health Department services and information about COVID-19, visit cdhd.ne.gov. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The Grand Island man who was taken hostage over the weekend by Tyler Manka says his captor held a screwdriver to his throat and threatened to kill him. The 60-year-old man, who asked that his name not be used, was held captive in his apartment at 192 Stoeger Dr. for 12 1/2 hours. Manka, 27, had escaped from Hall County Department of Corrections personnel while being treated at CHI Health St. Francis Medical Center. The resident of the apartment said Manka came to his door at 10:07 p.m. Friday. After arrivingManka forced the man into his bedroom. During the course of the night, Manka threatened him several times, he said. As the night progressed, Manka calmed down, he said. He even offered him a couple of pills to help with a leg problem. The Grand Island Police Departments tactical response team, negotiators and additional officers gathered outside the house, as did members of the Hall County Sheriffs Department and the Nebraska State Patrol. A news release from GIPD referred to tenuous hours of negotiations. At about 6 a.m. Saturday, tactical operations were turned over to the Nebraska State Patrol SWAT team due to the length of the incident while negotiations continued, the release says. As Manka barricaded the hostage and himself inside the mans bedroom, law enforcement personnel entered the front of the apartment. The State Patrol SWAT team rescued the hostage safely and arrested Manka. The hostage said the standoff ended at 10:39 a.m. Before he was rescued, the man saw an armored vehicle in his backyard. At the same time the rescuers entered the bedroom, six or eight explosive devices detonated, the hostage said. A state patrol spokesman said those devices are called flashbangs. Earlier Friday Manka had been the defendant in a jury trial at the Hall County Courthouse. The jury returned with a verdict at about 8 p.m. Friday, said Grand Island Police Capt. Jim Duering. After the verdict, members of the Hall County Department of Corrections staff took Manka to St. Francis to have him treated for a medical incident, Duering said. While at the hospital, Manka escaped from two Hall County corrections officers. Manka fled on foot, running eastbound from the north side of the hospital, Duering said. He headed for the Regency Retirement Residence at 803 Alpha St. At that point, two heroic citizens stepped in to help, Duering said. One of them was an emergency room doctor who saw a man in a jail uniform running. The other one was a concerned citizen who was driving by and stopped to help. The two citizens tried to trap Manka in a Regency foyer by pinning the door shut, which demonstrated pretty good thinking by both subjects, Duering said. Unfortunately, Manka was able to break the other door and ran through the Regency. He exited through the east door and wound up at 192 Stoeger Dr. Manka told the 60-year-old man he chose that address because the man had left the light on. Manka arrived at his apartment bleeding from his arm, the hostage said. As negotiations went on through the night between Manka, GIPD and state patrol representatives, officers brought Manka and the hostage food from McDonalds. But the food was never eaten, the hostage said. In order to clear space, law enforcement officers threw some of his furniture outside, the hostage said. They also left wires hanging loose from a light fixture in his kitchen. His front door was being repaired Monday, when the smell of smoke was still apparent in his apartment. On Monday, Hall County Corrections Director Todd Bahensky said the slip-up by the corrections officers was a personnel matter. Im thankful that nobody got seriously hurt, Bahensky said, adding that he appreciated the job that law enforcement did. In the news release, GIPD expressed thanks for the cooperation of surrounding agencies, and a peaceful resolution to this incident. It really was a team effort, Duering said, adding that the State Patrol did a great job. Manka was arrested for burglary, kidnapping, escape, making terroristic threats and use of a weapon to commit a felony. Police were still investigating the incident on Monday, Duering said. 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Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe The best bang for your buck! This option enables you to purchase online 24/7 access and receive the Sunday, Tuesday & Thursday print edition at no additional cost * Print edition only available in our carrier delivery area. Allow up to 72 hours for delivery of your print edition to begin. Print edition not available for Day Pass option. ULLIN A Cairo man has been arrested and charged for alleged sexual assault of a minor, according to Illinois State Police. Tereaune Kincaid, 22, has been charged by Alexander County States Attorney with two counts of predatory criminal sexual assault of a child, a Class X felony. ISP Division of Criminal Investigation Zone 7 was requested on Jan. 6 to investigate an incident where a 13-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted by an adult, according to ISP. Through the course of the investigation, DCI was able to locate evidence that supported the claim. A warrant was then issued for Kincaid and the bond was set at $250,000 and 10% to apply. On Thursday, police arrested Kincaid on the warrant and Kincaid was transported to the Pulaski County Jail. This is an open investigation. Anyone with information concerning this case is asked to contact ISP Zone 7 Investigations at 618-845-3740, Ext 281. The Southern Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. CARBONDALE Illinois EPA Director John J. Kim has announced Carbondale as one of the sites of the agency's upcoming Household Hazardous Waste one-day collection for the spring of 2022. The Carbondale event is scheduled for June 4 at the SIUC Arena Parking Log on 1400 Arena Drive. People can pre-register at https://JCHDonline.as.me/ShredMed2022. Each year, Illinois EPA provides residents with free HHW collection events to safely dispose of unused or leftover hazardous products commonly found in homes. Illinois EPA HHW collections continue to be contactless for the safety of participants and workers. Collection events are funded through the Illinois EPAs Solid Waste Fund. One-day collections are open to all Illinois residents and operate from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the day of the event. Pre-registration is required for the spring 2022 collection event. Residents participating in the event are encouraged to bring chemical cleaners, oil-based paints, thinners, antifreeze, motor oil, gasoline, kerosene, weed killers, insecticides, and pesticides, old or outdated medication, and similar hazardous household products. Fluorescent and other high-intensity discharge lamps may also be brought to the collections. Items not accepted include latex paint, explosives, propane tanks, fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, agricultural chemicals, and business wastes. For safe transport of HHW, residents are asked to: Pack HHW items in a disposable box to avoid spilling during transport. Keep like chemicals together and separate unlike chemicals. Secure lids and make sure containers are not leaking. Place box(es) of HHW in empty trunk of your vehicle, away from passengers during transport. Remain in vehicle at collection site. On-site personnel will remove the HHW from your vehicle. A complete list of wastes that are and are not accepted is available online at https://www2.illinois.gov/epa/topics/waste-management/waste-disposal/household-hazardous-waste/Pages/acceptable-wastes.aspx. For questions concerning the Illinois EPAs one-day or long-term collections, please contact Don Buis with the Illinois EPA Waste Reduction Unit at 217-785-4116. HHW collection schedules are also available on the Illinois EPA website at https://www2.illinois.gov/epa/topics/waste-management/waste-disposal/household-hazardous-waste/Pages/collections.aspx. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Lynne Chambers, founder of Legacy Training Inc. in Grand Chain, often picks up books for clients from Mission Missouri in Sikeston. While she was there, they asked her to go with them to the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace, both started by the Equal Justice Institute. I went with the Missouri group to the museum. I really feel like everybody in America needs to go, Chambers said. After the trip, Chambers wanted to start an initiative for Southern Illinois. She was able to use funds from the Healing Illinois Initiative to start the process. According to Chambers, the Healing Illinois Initiative began after George Floyds murder to help communities have the difficult but necessary conversations about race relations. Chambers started the Healing Southern Illinois Initiative, which includes group of community leaders, master artists and others working on this project. The coalitions first step was to conduct a study tour March 17 through 19 to the Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice Montgomery, Alabama. The Legacy Museum provides a history of the United States with a focus on the legacy of slavery. It does that through looking at three things: slavery, racial terrorism and mass incarceration. The goals of the Healing Southern Illinois Initiative is that the 29 people who went to the museum and memorial will go back to their own communities and start conversations around what they learned. They want to do a group show about a group response to the trip, Chambers said. Others will plan community remembrance services in their own hometowns. Chambers said they will remember victims of racial terrorism, as well as support collection of soil from lynching sites. The soil of lynching sites is displayed at the museum. The first time I went I was blown away by recognizing that women and children were also lynched, Chambers said. She said one of the women they talk about was lynched for chastising while children who threw rocks at her. The lynching was a public event with a festival atmosphere that really was designed to make sure Black people were kept in their place. I remember become very emotional and realizing how easily it couldve been me, Chambers said. Carolin Harvey is a member of Carbondale City Council and retired from Southern Illinois University. She said the trip was overwhelming, eye-opening and enlightening. Im glad I experienced it, and Im sad about those things, Harvey said. She would really like to see something happen that makes people aware of the physical lynching in Southern Illinois, as well as the societal racism that happens. Harvey started working at SIU in 1978, and there were no Black people in her department. She said it was almost 20 years before she worked with another Black person. Weve got to get to a point or to a place where we are all on the same level and working toward the same goals, she said. Harvey grew up in Alabama, so her sisters met her at the museum. Part of the museums focus on mass incarceration includes video messages from men who were released from prison when they were proven to be innocent. One of the people who did a video is a member at my sisters church, Harvey said. The most difficult part of the museum for her was the samples of the poll test that was used to help African-Americans register to vote. One question asked people the number of jelly beans in a jar. Another question asked what the 14th Amendment said. Darrel Dexter, a high school teacher and author, said the trip was hard to describe and called the artwork impressive. I did historical research on lynching in Southern Illinois, so it was educational for me. There is a lot of information about lynching, Dexter said. Dexters research showed both white and Black men were lynched. He said it was interesting the way the museum distinguished between the two types of lynching. White men received a sort of vigilante justice when they were lynched. They were accused of some great crime, and men went after them. The lynching of Black men were racial terrorism. It was designed to send a message and fear throughout the whole Black community, which is terrorism. I didnt see a difference before the visit, Dexter said. As part of his research, Dexter has created a list that details lynching in Southern Illinois, including Alexander, Jackson, Johnson, Pulaski, Union and Williamson counties. He has updated the research to show which people were lynched as racial terrorism. I would like to see a reclaiming or acknowledgement of the racist past in this part of Southern Illinois. Once people know what happened, healing can begin, Dexter said. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. After a two-year-long intermission, the curtain on Southern Illinois University Carbondales popular McLeod Summer Playhouse will rise. Officials have announced a less ambitious plan for the 2022 season, with two shows planned for the summer. Godspell, a contemporary retelling of the Gospel of Matthew featuring pop and rock music, comedy and dance is set for four shows, June 23-26. In July, the playhouse and Artspace 304 will collaborate for the All-Southern High School Theater project to present Grease, in late July. There is going to be a Summer Playhouse after two years of no performances, SIU Theater Department Interim Director Mark Varns stressed. Were resurrecting the company, so to speak, he said. Basically, we are coming out of two years of no revenue, so we are going to try to do is get a successful season under our belt and get some revenue so that we can come back with a little bit bigger season next year and then perhaps get back to close where we were in the third year. Varns called the summer program a greatly reduced program, in explaining that this years Summer Playhouse will consist of fewer productions and fewer individual performances of each show. We used to run two weekends on our performances, but this year we are scaling it down in an effort to make it manageable, he said. Area fans of theater are eager to see performances again. Having professional theater in the area is a wonderful thing, said Tim Robinson of Carterville. We are definitely excited that they are back. Robinson said hes heard of many area youth auditioning for Grease. A lot of kids are really excited for the high school show and I know lots of people want to support the Summer Playhouse, he said. Organizers feel the same way, Varns said. We are absolutely thrilled to have the Summer Playhouse back with us. Its an important part of our programming, not just in terms of having opportunities for our students and faculty, but also to reach out to other young professional actors and performers, he said. Its good to be back. Varns said tickets for both performances will go on sale in mid-April. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 ANKARA, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Turkish security forces on Tuesday detained four Syrian Islamic State (IS) suspects in the central Turkish city of Kayseri, semi-official Anadolu Agency reported. The security teams launched an operation against the suspects after finding out they had carried out armed activities in Syria and Iraq in the ranks of the IS group. The security forces also seized the electronic devices of the suspects who were "hiding" in the Melikgazi district of Kayseri. The Turkish government designated the IS a terrorist organization in 2013, blaming the group for a spate of deadly attacks in Turkey since 2015. The Turkish counter-terrorism forces have been conducting operations against the IS members in the country. Turkey's southern border with Syria has been a major crossing point for the rebels since the crisis in the neighboring country started in 2011. SPRINGFIELD Illinois lawmakers have formed the Illinois Assyrian Caucus in an effort to help them understand and learn about challenges facing the Assyrian community and how to address them. Sen. Ram Villivalam, D-Chicago, announced the formation of the caucus at a news conference in early March. The caucus has 18 founding members from the Senate and House, including 17 Democrats and one Republican. Villivalam will serve as co-chair alongside Rep. Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz, D-Glenview. I look at our role as a caucus as working with the community to ensure that their voice is heard and that they have a seat at the table when we have policy discussions, Villivalam said. Assyrians are a transnational ethnic group and are indigenous to parts of Iraq, Turkey and Syria. The United States is home to more than 600,000 Assyrian Americans with about 100,000 living in the Chicagoland area according to the Assyrian Universal Alliance Foundation. According to the AUAF, the first Assyrians to settle in Illinois immigrated from modern-day Iran in 1889. Atour Sargon, vice chair of the Assyrian Policy Institute, said the formation of the new caucus speaks to the growing influence of the community. It is a welcomed development, she said, in uplifting the voices of Assyrians and helping legislators understand the needs and priorities of the Assyrian community The Assyrian Policy Institute is a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of Assyrians and other minorities throughout the Middle East. In an interview with Capitol News Illinois, Sargon said the top priorities the API would like to see addressed are senior, immigrant and refugee services, the opioid crisis, and access to mental health resources. Sargon said the API would like to see improved access to immigrant and refugee support services such as trauma response services for those who have survived traumatic experiences in countries Assyrians have fled. The group is also advocating for immigrant rights protections and improved access to citizenship. To address the opioid crisis among young adults in the community, Sargon wants to establish programs to help prevent substance abuse and to expand access to support services for families. Its a really taboo issue in our community, Sargon said. Providing improved access to resources can really help a great deal. She also said the API would like to have group social programs readily available for seniors who spend time alone at home while family members are working. Another challenge that was noted during the news conference was Assyrians assimilating into the local community and learning English while trying to keep the language, culture and traditions of their home country. I think the hardest challenge that any immigrant faces when they are in this country is the balance of assimilating and learning the language, culture and traditions here, Villivalam said. Sargon said in interview that the API would like to see the Assyrian language offered as an accredited option at public high schools. Sargon said the institute wants to see within the coming year the passing of Senate Joint Resolution 21, which would formally recognize the Assyrian Genocide of 1915 and the Simele Massacre of 1933 as a genocide. It would also declare Aug. 7 as Assyrian Remembrance Day. Assyrians have had a long history of being marginalized and denied representation, suffering executions and enduring political oppression, Sargon said. The Assyrian Genocide began in late 1914 and continued for more than a decade with the peak of the violence occurring between 1915 and 1918. The Ottoman Turks and allied Kurdish tribes subjected hundreds of thousands of Assyrians to massacre, torture and cultural and ethnic destruction along with the destruction of villages and cultural heritage sites, and the assassination of Assyrian intellectual and religious leaders. The massacres took place in various locations across modern-day Turkey, Iran and Iraq. An estimated 250,000 Assyrians were murdered during the genocide with a large number forced into permanent exile. The Simele Massacre was committed by armed Iraqi forces and took place across more than 100 Assyrian villages, leading to the death of about 6,000 Assyrians. Inhabitants of 65 Assyrian villages were massacred, including 3,000 in Simele. Illinois would be the fourth state to formally recognize the Assyrian Genocide. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation announced that Claflin University is one of 26 providers from 17 states and the United Arab Emirates to receive recognition for its leadership and commitment to continuous improvement. The recipients of the 2021 Frank Murray Leadership Recognition for Continuous Improvement provided evidence and data trends to achieve accreditation with no stipulations or areas for improvement. The providers that CAEP is recognizing are committed to continuous improvement and preparing their students to succeed in a diverse range of classrooms after they graduate, said Karen Symms Gallagher, chair of the CAEP Board of Directors. CAEP Accreditation is a sign of commitment to quality through purposeful use of evidence. The Murray Leadership Recognition recipients should be proud of their accomplishments, Gallagher said. The Frank Murray Leadership Recognition for Continuous Improvement is named after the founding president of the Teacher Education Accreditation Council. CAEP was created by the consolidation of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education and TEAC. Recipients of the 2021 Frank Murray Leadership Recognition for Continuous Improvement are selected from the educator preparation providers that were granted accreditation by CAEP at the initial level from the previous year, who provided a full complement of evidence with demonstrated data trends and no plans. Recipients had no stipulations or areas for improvement. Providers selected for recognition advance equity and excellence in educator preparation through purposeful use of self-study procedures and evidence-based reporting to assure quality and support continuous improvement to strengthen P-12 learning. These EPPs have a mission driving their continuous improvement inquiry, use assessments that are relevant to the topic being informed and consequential, show the reliability and validity of the evidence provided for accreditation, have quality assurance capacities that inform their knowledge and address questions about relationships in the data. This third class to receive the Murray Recognition represents the diversity and innovation that comes with CAEP accreditation. Small, large, public, private, faith-based, and historically minority serving, CAEP President Chris Koch said. These recipients reflect the creativity that CAEP affords in achieving excellence, by meeting the standards in a variety of ways, for the diverse populations they serve. CAEP accreditation serves the dual purposes of accountability and continuous improvement. It has 423 educator preparation providers in 45 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico accredited under the CAEP Standards. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 A peanut shelling company announced Monday that it will locate its new, 220,000-square-foot facility in the South Carolina Gateway Park in Santee. Georgia-based Premium Peanut said it signed an agreement with DP World to purchase the northernmost tract in the 1,322-acre industrial park formerly known as JAFZA Magna Park. The park is located near the U.S. Highway 301 and Interstate 95 interchange. Premium Peanut is buying land near Hannah Drive and Lambert Street. The entrance to the property will be off of Knowles Street. We are thrilled to be able to make this announcement, solidifying our ongoing expansion into South Carolina, Premium Peanut President and CEO Karl Zimmer said. Premium Peanut is a grower-owned company with over 400 grower-owners. We think there is no better place to expand, and are eager to return more of the peanuts value back into the pockets of the growers in South Carolina. Keeping these hard-earned dollars in local communities is a tremendous benefit of our grower-owned model, Zimmer said. The company announced plans in September to invest $64 million in the Santee project and to bring 130 new jobs to the area over the next five years. Premium Peanut plans to break ground on about 42.34 acres in late spring 2022. The investment will include $27.5 million in buildings and $36.8 million in equipment. It will be the first major peanut-shelling facility and seed treatment facility in the state. Orangeburg County Council Chairman Johnnie Wright called Premium Peanut the flagship major employer in the industrial park. We are so excited about the reevaluation of that site and now it is starting to take off, Wright said. Being a large peanut production agricultural county, it will be a plus for us to encourage others to grow peanuts and provide jobs and opportunity. We are grateful. Premium Peanuts customers consist of major snack, candy and peanut butter manufacturers domestically, as well as customers in more than 30 countries around the world. The project will be financed through Truist. Premium Peanuts new shelling operation in Orangeburg County will provide additional local shelling capacity and will allow South Carolina peanut growers the opportunity to be a part of a cooperative model. The company looked at multiple sites and states for its shelling facility before settling on Orangeburg County. As part of its arrival in Orangeburg County, Premium Peanut has received a 30-year fee-in-lieu of taxes incentive. Its also been placed in a multi-county industrial park with Dorchester County. A multi-county industrial park is an incentive mechanism and is not a physical park. The company also will receive job development tax credits. Since the company began shelling peanuts in 2016, Premium Peanut has paid out over $50 million in dividends back to its grower-owners. It has an annual shelling capacity of over 300,000 tons. The property chosen by the peanut company is owned by DP World Americas, formerly Jafza USA, a subsidiary of Dubai World. DP World purchased the Orangeburg County property in 2006. According to an Orangeburg County Development Commission flyer, about 806 acres of the site can be developed. The site has power through Tri-County Electric Cooperative, natural gas from Dominion, water from the Lake Marion Regional Water System, sewer service from Orangeburg County/Santee, telecommunications through Verizon and Frontier and fire protection from the Santee Fire Service and Orangeburg County Fire Service. Those interested in learning more about Premium Peanut's plans should contact Rachel Santos at Premium Peanut or the Palmetto Peanut Buying Point. Individuals interested in joining the Premium Peanut team should visit the companys career page or visit its table at the SC Works Job Fair in Orangeburg from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on April 7. The fair will be held at Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical Colleges Larry Patrick Student Services Building "S" Atrium at 3250 St. Matthews Road in Orangeburg. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Since the start of the Russian invasion, Americans have faced something not experienced in decades. Within Europe, the only example remotely similar to the Ukrainian invasion was in the Soviet incursions into Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Those, however, involved the Soviet military putting down popular uprisings against those communist governments. In both cases, the United States did not become involved due to the risk of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In both of those cases, the popular uprisings appealed to the United States for support, but first Eisenhower in 1956, then Johnson in 1968, decided not to become involved beyond statements condemning the Soviets. Particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the United States has not had to face the serious potential of nuclear war in our military actions. In 1991, the United States used military force to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Then the U.S. used force against Serbia in 1999 to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. We then fought in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9-11. In none of those cases did the United States face a serious threat of nuclear war. The invasion of Ukraine takes us back to considerations from the Cold War and we must exhibit the wisdom of that time. Let me explain. First, in writing this article I am personally aware that the images coming from Ukraine are heartbreaking. The naked aggression against the Ukrainian people is infuriating for me to watch. As time has moved forward, we have seen the Russian militarys inability to conduct proper logistics, communications and combined arms maneuver. With these failures, and ensuing battlefield losses caused by Ukrainians, Russians have quickly resorted to artillery and missiles against civilian targets. We have watched Ukrainian women and children killed while in hospitals and shelters. We have watched President Zelensky cry out for support to America and other NATO nations. Most Americans want to do everything possible to stop the bloodshed and help expel Russia from Ukraine. Many Americans now demand we do more, and even suggest no fly zones or even armed incursion into Ukraine. Before going into wise options to help Ukraine, its important to know the nuclear threat we face in confronting Russia. Most estimates put Russias nuclear arsenal beyond 6,000. Thats actually more than the U.S. arsenal by almost a thousand. The arsenals of other nuclear powers are in the low hundreds or less (China, for example, has around 300). Russia has developed and successfully tested nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles. These missiles travel at 10-20 times the speed of sound, and therefore are likely beyond our anti-missile defense capabilities. In other words, we wouldnt be able to stop a number of nuclear missiles from hitting us. Russia already used this hypersonic capability against a warehouse near the Polish border, and Putin has made clear his willingness to escalate up to and including nuclear exchange. In the event of a nuclear war, Ukraine would likely be incinerated, and so failure to prevent that escalation would be the worst thing we could do in trying to help Ukraine. Right now, we are supporting Ukraine in multiple ways that are making a difference. First, we are sending substantial numbers of Javelin anti-tank missiles. These have been used to great effect, primarily because the Russians have failed to properly integrate dismounted infantry with their armor. I spent my career as an U.S. Infantry officer. When I was Mech Infantry, we always operated as a team with Armor. Infantry dismounts to fight against enemy Infantry like those using anti-armor devices (like Javelins). Armor protects Infantry from enemy Armor. Russian infantry is not dismounting, and so many Russian tanks and BMPs (infantry carriers) have been destroyed. We are also supporting Ukraine with other critical weapons, like anti-aircraft missile systems. We are providing resources to sustain the Ukrainians in the field. Finally, we are providing critical intelligence directly to the Ukrainian military. This is likely a reason so many senior Russian officers have been killed over the past few weeks. A no fly zone would not only start a war between NATO and Russia, which includes nuclear, it would likely not be as helpful as many assume. Most Russian strikes against western Ukraine have been by missiles from the Black Sea, Russia, or eastern Ukraine. We could only put a no-fly zone in western Ukraine, but that wouldnt stop these missile attacks. What we need to do is show patience with this current support. Additionally, we should focus substantial efforts at leveraging China to stop supporting Russia. Xi (and the rest of the CCP) should be held responsible for coordinating this invasion with Putin, and now continuing their support. If Putin didnt have Chinas backing, he could not have invaded, nor could he continue. Lastly, the Biden administration did a horrendous job in not deterring this invasion. The sanctions will help now, but they could have prevented the invasion if used beforehand. We desperately need new national security and new foreign policy teams. Ecclesiastes 7:9 tells us Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the bosom of fools. In handling this invasion, we must show wisdom, self-control and patience for our sake, and the sake of Ukrainians. Bill Connor, a retired Army Infantry colonel, author and Orangeburg attorney, has deployed multiple times to the Middle East. Connor was the senior U.S. military adviser to Afghan forces in Helmand Province, where he received the Bronze Star. A Citadel graduate with a JD from USC, he is also a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Army War College, earning his of strategic studies. He is the author of the book "Articles from War. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 (TBTCO) - Tai ai hoi ong co ong VPBank 2021, ngan hang nay a uoc thong qua cac phuong an tang von ieu le cho nam 2022, ua von ieu le cua ngan hang nay len 79.334 ty ong, cao nhat toan he thong. Presidential politicsand, most especially, the Nixon years---took center stage at Rowan University on March 28 as renowned historian and author Douglas Brinkley presented a talk as part of the Universitys Presidents Lecture Series. In an engaging, entertaining lecture before full audience in the Eynon Ballroom of the Chamberlain Student Center, Brinkley, CNNs presidential historian, presented Nixon, Watergate and Presidential Politics. Nixon is not always everybodys favorite topic. Hes a pariah figure, Brinkley said of the nations 37th president, who resigned in disgrace due to his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Fifty years ago, on June 17, 1972, five people were arrested for breaking into and wiretapping the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex. The break-in was traced back to the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CREEP), a fundraising organization for Nixons 1972 re-election campaign. Facing three articles of impeachment, Nixon resigned in 1974 shortly after the Supreme Court ruled that the presidents own taped recordings, which revealed his attempts to cover up CREEPs involvement in the break-in, were not subject to executive privilege. A square politician The irony of Watergate, in many ways, is that Nixon did not need the assistance of the wiretaps to win the 72 election, said Brinkley, author of the two-volume annotated The Nixon Tapes. After losing in his first presidential bid to John F. Kennedy in 1960, which, to his credit, he accepted, Brinkley said, Nixon, a Republican, was elected in 1969 at the end of a turbulent decade of change. He was the most square politician you could invent, Brinkley said of Nixon, Americas first president from California. Nixon was president when the United States landed on the moon. He pulled the economy together, Brinkley said, and established the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1972, he became the first president to visit the Peoples Republic of China, meeting with Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong. It was bigepic, Brinkley said of the China visit, which demonstrated Nixons diplomacy. I would not call him a political failure in 69, 70 and 71. He didnt need the break-in By 1972, the Democratic Party was in disarray, Brinkley said. He didnt need the break-in. In 1971, Nixon began tape recording as a means to preserve his legacy and have a record of his own perceived greatness, Brinkley said. Enamored with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Nixon was intent on writing a five-volume set detailing his life and presidency, Brinkley said. The tapes were his record. He wanted, the historian noted, to be like Churchill. A complex figure Nixons legacy can never be rehabilitated and he is widely considered one of the nations worst presidents, Brinkley said. In 1969, Nixon failed to get the U.S. out of the Vietnam War and, in fact, his illegal order to invade Cambodia in 1970 further fueled the American anti-war movement, according to Brinkley. He will never be able to rehabilitate himself in history, said Brinkley. The Nixon tapes, he said, were full of endless racist, anti-Semitic rantsall day long. Hes always going to be seen as one of the worst presidents. Clearly, there was a dark, paranoid side of Nixon. Hes a complex figure. Historians and citizens, Brinkley said, generally agreed that Watergate, which he deemed a keystone cops kind of thing, was a watershed moment for the U.S. Watergate really jarred the country, Brinkley said. After Nixon resigned, there was a sense that our government works, Brinkley noted. We persevered over Nixon. Sharing research A contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University. Six of his books have been named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times, while seven others have been New York Times best sellers. His works include books on Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, Rosa Parks and Walter Cronkite, among many others. The Nixon Tapes won the Arthur S. Link-Warren F. Kuehl Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. During a whirlwind day and a half on Rowans campus, Brinkley met with students and faculty; toured historic Hollybush Mansion, the site of the 1967 summit between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin during the Cold War; and attended a poster session featuring student research. Brinkley said he enjoyed learning from the students. Guys, these are all super interesting, Brinkley said of the student posters, which focused on numerous historical topics, including genocide in the LBGT community, bias and the foundations of international law in the Philippines, disinformation surrounding the Chernobyl disaster, Holocaust trauma passed down through generations, trench warfare, and the importance of the internal combustion engine as a war implementation during the 20th century. Ive had a bit of a magical time here, Brinkley continued. Ive learned a lot. Brinkleys Presidents Lecture Series talk was sponsored by the Office of the President, the College of Humanities & Social Sciences, the Department of History, the College of Communication & Creative Arts, the Rowan Institute for Public Policy & Citizenship, and the Department of Political Science & Economics. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Cornel West, Stephen Jay Gould, Jonathan Kozol, Scott Sagan, Sergei Khrushchev, and Dan Rather are among those who have presented Presidents Lecture Series talks at Rowan. Mothers will get extra special treatment on Sundaylavish lunches, concerts and gifts of perfumes and roses. Meanwhile, mere days before the celebration, Port of Spain businesspeoplevendors and huckstersare reporting slow sales. They are cautiously optimistic that it will pick up today. ADEN, Yemen, March 29 (Xinhua) -- A Yemeni security officer and two of his bodyguards were killed in a drive-by shooting attack in the country's southern port city of Aden on Tuesday, according to a government official. "Two gunmen riding a motorcycle shot and killed Colonel Karam Mashriqi, chief of the security forces, in Sheikh Othman District of Aden near his residence," the local government source said on condition of anonymity. "The gunmen rained a barrage of gunshots on the vehicle carrying Mashriqi, killing him and two of his bodyguards on the spot," he told Xinhua. Their bodies were taken to a nearby hospital, and an investigation was underway to track the perpetrators. Yemen has been mired in a civil war since late 2014 when the Iran-backed Houthi militia seized control of several northern provinces and forced the Saudi-backed Yemeni government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa. Bandits in Morvant assaulted and robbed a 54-year-old woman of everything she had on her on For many Arizonans, ubiquitous COVID-19 guidance to talk to your primary care provider and to isolate after testing positive was useless advice caused by public health issues that existed long before the pandemic. Try calling around to primary care doctors and ask how long it will take to get you in. Its ridiculous, said Dr. Frank LoVecchio, an emergency room physician in Phoenix who is the medical director of clinical research at Arizona State Universitys College of Health Solutions. LoVecchio said a great majority of patients he treated in the Phoenix hospital emergency rooms where he worked throughout the pandemic did not have a primary care doctor. In many cases, thats why they were seeking help in the emergency room in the first place. They didnt know where else to go, he said. The last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in Arizona have exposed health problems that health providers in the state have long known: not only is there a shortage of doctors, but theres a severe dearth of doctors of color to match Arizonas diverse population. Public health guidelines often rang hollow for certain underserved populations, including those who work in high-risk, public-facing jobs but live in small homes with multiple family members, making isolation and quarantine all but impossible. The pandemic highlighted a need to tailor messaging to marginalized communities. Many of the health problems the pandemic laid bare are national issues, and not solely Arizona problems. But Arizona does stand out from other states for its physician shortage, and the latest data from the Association of American Medical Colleges puts the state among the 10 worst in the U.S. for its low rate of active primary care physicians per 100,000 people. The data is from 2020 and may not account for doctors who quit or took early retirement during the pandemic. As of 2020, 34.3% of active Arizona physicians were 60 and older, the data says. Lacking access to regular, preventive health care can lead to a higher burden of untreated chronic disease and put people at higher risk if they are infected with a virus such as SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. COVID has really been the great unveiler both in Arizona and nationally in terms of exposing the reality of things with respect to ongoing public health crises, Dr. Farshad Fani Marvasti, a Phoenix physician and associate professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix. One major one is just the pandemic of chronic disease thats a slow pandemic if you will, as some people have termed it. Another problem is systemic, structural discrimination that existed before COVID-19 across the United States, but COVID was basically there to exacerbate and expose the already ongoing public health crisis of racism, Marvasti said. Health advice telling Arizonans who test positive for COVID-19 to isolate away from loved ones was not helpful to many of the minority and economically disadvantaged patients that Phoenix endocrinologist Dr. Ricardo Correa has treated as medical director at a clinic for underserved people called PACH, Phoenix Allies for Community Health. Correa saw patients who had COVID-19, or who had been exposed to someone who had it, and did not have enough paid sick time to stay at home for prolonged periods of time. Some lived in close quarters without space to isolate. How can you quarantine when you live in a room with 10 other people? he said. Here are seven major public health problems in Arizona the pandemic exposed: 1. Not enough Latino and Native American doctors Nearly 7% of Arizonas 18,343 active physicians in 2020 identified as being of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin, per the AAMCs latest report. While thats one of the highest percentages of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin physicians of any state in the U.S., its hardly representative, given that nearly 32% of Arizonas population identifies as Hispanic or Latino, according to 2021 U.S. Census numbers. The difference also is stark for Native Americans, who comprise less than 1% of Arizonas active physician workforce, even though Native Americans and Alaska Natives are 5.3% of the state population, according to the most recent AAMC and census data. Black and Brown minority populations in Arizona have a generally higher level of mistrust in the health system than non-minority groups, whether its because of language problems, fear of immigration authorities, or cultural differences from White doctors, who are a majority in Arizona and the U.S., Correa said. You need more people with cultural similarities, people from the Black and Brown communities in the (health care) workforce, Correa said. Increasing underrepresented minorities in medicine will give trust. ... You need to start from elementary school, making them understand that they can be physicians or health care workers in the future. He emphasized language barriers that cant always be fixed with a Spanish translator and said health providers of color are needed from a diverse array of perspectives. Hispanic or Latinx is an ethnicity that has multiple differences. Its not the same thing when you talk to a Mexican American than when you talk to a Cuban American than when you talk to a Puerto Rican American, he said. You need to have an understanding of the culture to take care of the underlying, chronic conditions. Registered nurses Danielle Coates (left) and Alex Clark tend to a patient in one of the COVID-19 units at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix on Jan. 14, 2021. Much of the hospital has been converted to handle COVID-19 patients and they like many other hospitals throughout Maricopa County are at or near capacity. 2. Too much chronic disease The burden of chronic disease is an issue in Arizona and across the U.S. A 2020 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issue brief found that 51.8% of U.S. adults had at least one of 10 selected diagnosed chronic condition, including asthma, diabetes, hypertension, stroke and weak or failing kidneys, and 27.2% of U.S. adults had multiple chronic conditions. We lead the world in chronic disease. Six out of every 10 adult have a chronic medical condition. Conditions like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer having one of these conditions puts you at a disproportionately higher risk of having more severe illness and death from a COVID-19 infection, Marvasti said. We have so many people who have chronic disease in the U.S. and Arizona is quite typical. At least one in 10 Arizonans has diabetes, and about 30% of Arizona adults is considered obese with a body mass index of 30 or more, according to the United Health Foundation. Both those conditions put patients are higher risk for poor outcomes from COVID-19. A 2018 study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hills Gillings School of Global Public Health found that only 12% of Americans are what the study authors deemed metabolically healthy, which they defined as having optimal levels of five factors: blood glucose, triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, blood pressure and waist circumference, without the need for medications. 3. A lack of health literacy Misinformation has been a problem throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in Arizona, to an extent that it has threatened public health, Marvasti said. We didnt expect that partisan politics and misinformation would dictate so much of public health policy. I dont think we expected that but we realize now that partisan politics actually can be deadly, as can misinformation, Marvasti said. I think we had a lot of preventable cases and a lot of preventable deaths in Arizona and a lot of it also had to do with these politics of division. Its almost like an anti-science undercurrent here in Arizona politics. The sources of information that people chose to trust was a huge factor during COVID-19, said Maiya Block Ngaybe, a doctoral student in public health at the University of Arizona and project coordinator for the UAs Alliance for Vaccine Literacy. The alliance is a research group that started in 2019, before the pandemic began, but its recent work has focused on COVID-19. Arizona has trailed the national rate for COVID-19 vaccine uptake throughout the pandemic. But not every unvaccinated person is adamantly against vaccines. Rather, there is a nuanced spectrum, Ngaybe said. There is a mix of individualism and a complacency factor, she said. Definitely confidence was the major issue when it came to the vaccine, especially more recently. There are many factors at play. Some of them are psychological. Others are logistical. One answer to improving vaccine literacy, Ngaybe said, is empowering individuals to make up their own minds, which can help to dispel myths within communities. One way to do that is community-based public health research, where community members are directly involved in both research and interventions, she said. Trust is not just built off of information and knowledge and education. Trust is so individually formed, by your community, your social factors, your culture, she said. A lot of people dont understand the science but theres so much more to it because even people who understand the science are still choosing not to get vaccinated. ... Theres something else deeper under the surface thats driving vaccine hesitancy in communities. 4. A primary care doctor shortage As of 2020, Arizona had about 5,800 active primary care physicians, which is a rate of 80.2 doctors per 100,000 people, per the AAMC data. In both Massachusetts and Vermont, the rate is more than 130 active primary care physicians per 100,000 people; the U.S. average rate is 94.4. The United Health Foundations 2021 Americas Health Rankings report found that a low prevalence of having a dedicated health care provider was one of the three biggest health challenges in Arizona, along with a low rate of high school graduation and a high economic hardship score. Medical equipment used for infusions is seen in the room of a COVID-19 patient in one of the COVID-19 units at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix on Jan. 14, 2021. Much of the hospital has been converted to handle COVID-19 patients and they like many other hospitals throughout Maricopa County are at or near capacity. 5. Distrust and fear of the health care system Distrust of the health care system often comes from fears about the financial side of health care, including medical bills that can turn people off of ever wanting to go to the doctor or hospital for any reason, unless its a life-threatening situation. About 11% of Arizonans dont have health insurance, according to the most recently available data. Other Arizonans are underinsured with unaffordable copayments and deductibles, which can also lead to a mentality of avoiding health care. Some immigrant families are suspicious of health care for other reasons. In the early months of the pandemic when there was a shortage of COVID-19 tests, health providers at the PACH clinic in Phoenix were sending patients to large testing centers, but some were afraid to go, Correa said. They were fearful of reports that officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and that police officers might be there, he said. They are very afraid of the police, he said. They were not getting tested. At the beginning of the pandemic, there was also an updated federal public charge rule that frightened people in families that included one or more immigrants, Correa said. They didnt want to go to the hospital. They didnt want it to affect their status and they died at home, Correa said. The Trump administration rule broadened the governments ability to penalize immigrants seeking green cards if they used taxpayer-funded programs such as housing assistance, food stamps and Medicaid, which is a government health insurance program for low-income people. The Biden administration has since done away with the updated rule 6. Income inequality In Arizona, Correa sees chronic diseases at the Phoenix PACH clinic disproportionately affecting minority communities, who tend to earn lower wages and live in unsafe neighborhoods. The food at food banks is often high in carbohydrates and can contribute to obesity, Correa said. And its difficult to exercise if you work two jobs, live in a neighborhood where its not safe to exercise outside, and you cant afford to join a gym, he said. Underrepresented minorities have less access to health care, Correa said. And this will exacerbate any other problem that comes along, like another pandemic, another infectious disease. The latest U.S. Census data shows the poverty rate in Arizona as of 2021 was 12.8%, which is higher than the national rate of 11.4%. The federal poverty rate is defined as an annual income of $13,590 or less per year for an individual and $27,750 or less for a family of four. 7. Racial inequality Some communities across the U.S, including Pima County in southern Arizona, have taken the step of publicly declaring that racial and ethnic inequality is a public health crisis. The resolution, passed by the Pima County Board of Supervisors in December 2020, says that income inequality is a public health crisis, too. Publicly acknowledging how racial inequality affects health increases awareness and helps secure more funds and resources to directly combat it in various institutions, ranging from education to the legal system, the UAs Marvasti said. The Pima County resolution, among other things, pledged continuing support of a grant-funded initiative to reduce chronic diseases disproportionately impacting Native Americans and Hispanics, and it also called for ensuring equity in the COVID-19 pandemic response and recovery. In a letter to the Pima County Board of Supervisors supporting the resolution, Lydia Aranda, Chicano Por La Cause Southern Arizona president, wrote that while COVID-19 did not cause health inequities, it both exacerbated and created awareness about them. In our collective work as a community and public servants we have learned that systemic discrimination and poverty are real, and negatively impact the social factors that determine a persons health, she wrote. These factors also affect access to safe, attainable housing, better jobs, quality education, environmental justice, affordable health care and overall wellness. Subscribe to stay connected to Tucson. A subscription helps you access more of the local stories that keep you connected to the community. SUPERIOR COURT OF NEW JERSEY CHANCERY DIVISION, FAMILY PART BURLINGTON COUNTY DOCKET NO.: FM-03-404-22W TO: ROBERTO CAMPECH By order of the Superior Court of New Jersey, wherein THEA E. CAMPECH, is the plaintiff, and you, ROBERTO CAMPECH, are the defendant, you are required to serve upon the plaintiff, KATHERINE GOMOLSON, ESQUIRE, PETRELLI PREVITERA, LLC, 210 NEW ROAD, #15, LINWOOD, NJ 08221, either (1) a written appearance in accordance with R. 5:4-3(a), or (2) an answer to the complaint on or before Friday, June 10, 2022, and if you fail to answer or file a written appearance in accordance with R. 5:4-3(a), judgment by default may be rendered against you for the relief demanded in the complaint; and further, you shall promptly file the answer or written appearance and proof of service thereof in duplicate with the matrimonial filing clerk in the Superior Court of Burlington County, located at 49 Rancocas Road, Mount Holly, NJ 08060 in accordance with the Rules of Civil Practice and Procedure. The telephone numbers for assistance in obtaining an attorney in the county in which this action is pending are: Lawyer Referral Service: (609) 261-4862; Legal Services Office: (800) 496-4570. Published May 6, 2022 Arizona Daily Star 0005205505-01 TS No. 2022-00053-AZ NOTICE OF TRUSTEE'S SALE The following legally described trust property will be sold, pursuant to the power of sale under that certain Deed of Trust dated 04/25/2002 and recorded on 04/30/2002 as Instrument No. 20020830534, Book 11789 Page 2504 and rerecorded on as in the official records of Pima County, Arizona, NOTICE! IF YOU BELIEVE THERE IS A DEFENSE TO THE TRUSTEE SALE OR IF YOU HAVE AN OBJECTION TO THE TRUSTEE SALE, YOU MUST FILE AN ACTION AND OBTAIN A COURT ORDER PURSUANT TO RULE 65, ARIZONA RULES OF CIVIL PROCEDURE, STOPPING THE SALE NO LATER THAN 5:00 P.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME OF THE LAST BUSINESS DAY BEFORE THE SCHEDULED DATE OF THE SALE, OR YOU MAY HAVE WAIVED ANY DEFENSES OR OBJECTIONS TO THE SALE. UNLESS YOU OBTAIN AN ORDER, THE SALE WILL BE FINAL AND WILL OCCUR at public auction to the highest bidder At the East entrance to the Superior Court Building, 110 W. Congress, Tucson, AZ 85701, in Pima County, on 05/26/2022 at 11:30 AM of said day: Legal Description: LOT 25 OF WONDERLAND, ACCORDING TO THE MAP OF RECORD IN THE OFFICE OF THE COUNTY RECORDER OF PIMA COUNTY, ARIZONA IN BOOK 44 OF MAPS AND PLATS AT PAGE 45. EXCEPT ALL COAL AND OTHER MINERALS AS RESERVED IN THE PATENT FROM THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Purported Street Address: 3840 S. KHE SANH LANE, TUCSON, AZ 85735 Tax Parcel Number: 212-38-3060 Original Principal Balance: $ 74,298.00 NOTICE OF TRUSTEE'S SALE Name and Address of Current Beneficiary: Deutsche Bank National Trust Company, solely as Trustee for MASTR Specialized Loan Trust 2004-01, Mortgage Pass Through Certificates c/o PHH Mortgage Corporation 1 Mortgage Way, Mt. Laurel, NJ 08054 Name and Address of Original Trustor: VICTOR D. JOHNSON II, A MARRIED MAN AS HIS SOLE AND SEPARATE PROPERTY 3840 S. KHE SANH LANE, TUCSON, AZ 85735 Name, Address and Telephone Number of Trustee: Western Progressive - Arizona, Inc. Northpark Town Center 1000 Abernathy Rd NE; Bldg 400, Suite 200 Atlanta, GA 30328 (866) 960-8299 TERMS OF SALE: The trustee is only able to accept cash or a cash equivalent, like a cashier's check or certified check NOTICE OF TRUSTEE'S SALE SALE INFORMATION: Sales Line: (866) 960-8299 Website: https://www. altisource.com/loginpage.aspx If the sale is set aside for any reason, including if the Trustee is unable to convey title, the Purchaser at the sale shall be entitled only to a return of the monies paid to the Trustee. This shall be the Purchaser's sole and exclusive remedy. The Purchaser shall have no further recourse against the Trustor, the Trustee, the Beneficiary, the Beneficiary's Agent, or the Beneficiary's Attorney. Western Progressive - Arizona, Inc. /s/Glenda Hamilton Glenda Hamilton, Trustee Sale Assistant DATED: February 11, 2022 Pursuant to A.R.S. 33 - 803(A)(6), the trustee herein qualifies as a trustee of the Deed of Trust in the trustee's capacity as a corporation all the stock of which is owned by Premium Title Agency, Inc., an escrow agent in the state of Arizona. The regulators of Premium Title Agency are the Arizona Department of Insurance and the Arizona Department of Financial Institutions. Western Progressive - Arizona, Inc. is registered with the Arizona Corporation Commission. STATE OF Georgia COUNTY OF Fulton On February 11, 2022, before me, Tanesha Humphrey, Personally appeared Glenda Hamilton, who proved to me on the basis of satisfactory evidence to be the person(s) whose name(s) is/are subscribed to the within instrument and acknowledged to me that he/she/they executed the same in his/her/their authorized capacity(ies), and that by his/her/their signature(s) on the instrument the preson(s), or the entity upon behalf of which the person(s) acted, executed the instrument WITNESS my hand and official seal. /s/Tanesha Humphrey, Tanesha Humphrey, NOTARY PUBLIC TANESHA HUMPHREY Notary Public Georgia Gwinnett County My Commission Expires July 19, 2022 Published April 15, 22, 29, and May 6, 2022 Arizona Daily Star UNITED NATIONS, March 29 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday strongly condemned the attacks on an airport and a passenger train in Nigeria's Kaduna state, which reportedly resulted in several people killed, injured, or abducted, said his spokesman. The secretary-general extended his heartfelt condolences to the families of the victims, wished a prompt recovery to the wounded, and called for the immediate release of those abducted, said Stephane Dujarric, the spokesman. "The secretary-general urges the Nigerian authorities to spare no effort in bringing those responsible for these crimes to justice. He reaffirms the solidarity and support of the United Nations to the government and people of Nigeria in their fight against terrorism, violent extremism and organized crime," said the spokesman. An armed group on Saturday attacked northwest Nigeria's Kaduna International Airport with heavy weapons, killing at least one person and injuring several others. On Monday night, an Abuja-Kaduna train with over 900 passengers on board was attacked by gunmen, who blew up the rail track and forced the train to derail in Kaduna state. A man in his 20s was shot to death by police early Tuesday morning on Tucsons east side. Officers responded to the Hampton Park Apartment Homes complex on Old Spanish Trail near South Camino Seco just after 5 a.m. after receiving a report of an unwanted person, according to a Tucson Police Department news release. As officers arrived on scene, they received information that the man was causing a disturbance and could have access to weapons, according to the press release. The man was found in a courtyard area, at which time, an officer shot him, the news release said. Police did not say if anything preceded the interaction between the officer and the man, but a resident of the complex told the Arizona Daily Star that the man shouted Im just trying to get my stuff, before four shots were heard. Officers began to render first aid, but he was pronounced dead at the scene. No further information about the man, who was a resident of the complex, was released as police work to notify his family. No officers or community members were hurt during the incident, Tucson police said. Police also did not release the name of the officer involved in the incident. The Pima Regional Critical Incident Team has taken over the criminal investigation, and the Pima County Sheriffs Department is the lead investigating agency, Tucson police said. Edward Celaya is a breaking news and marijuana reporter. He has been on both beats since May 2021. Subscribe to stay connected to Tucson. A subscription helps you access more of the local stories that keep you connected to the community. Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. A Hendricks Elementary School teacher was surprised with Chicanos por la Causas 2022 Esperanza Latino Teacher Award for her success in achieving high student scores and connecting with Spanish-speaking families during the pandemic. Sarai Martinez, a 25-year-old Tucson native and fifth-grade teacher at the school, received a $5,000 check during the surprise ceremony in her classroom on Tuesday. The school, at 3400 W. Orange Grove Road in the Flowing Wells Unified School District, will also receive an additional $2,500 as part of the award. Its shocking. I dont think this is real right now, Martinez said. Its something that I never expected, ever, in my lifetime, so its pretty cool. Principal Tabetha Finchum, who nominated her for the award, said Martinez tackled several obstacles brought by the pandemic with passion and dedication. She took the bull by the horns, accepted the challenge and has done everything she can to create memorable experiences for her students and to ensure that the learning has continued even though the pandemic has made things difficult, Finchum said. Martinez was one of four Arizona winners selected for the award this year, two of whom were in the Phoenix area and the other in Miami. Martinez joined Hendricks in 2019. Since then, students have switched between online and in-person learning. Recent scoring assessments showed that 72% of Martinezs students showed mastery on the English language assessment test, compared to 50% of the fifth graders within the Flowing Wells district. In addition, 68% of her students excelled in the math assessment test, compared to the 32% of fifth graders districtwide. Extra hand for families Finchum added that Martinez has also been a key player in helping the school communicate with Spanish-speaking students and families to ensure they had equal access to resources and information during distance learning. During that time, I was making phone calls and emails, meeting up in person and going to their house sometimes to drop off work for them, Martinez said. Id try giving them resources and books that I would find outside of the school just to help them get better at it, because some of them would come from Mexico knowing no English, so then I would try to help. Martinez said it was mainly her father who taught her the value of learning to communicate in Spanish, and added that he was strict about speaking Spanish at home. I didnt want Spanish at all, just because of how forced it was, Martinez said. Now I appreciate my dad for having that in the household. Because at school, you can learn all the English that you want. Martinezs parents and husband, who were present for the surprise ceremony, beamed with pride as she was presented with the award. Shes very driven. Shes always known what she wants to do, how she wants to do things, and shes always been focused on what she wants to accomplish, her mother Haydee Martinez said. For the future, Martinez said, she hopes to eventually be able to work her way into an administrative role to make a bigger educational impact for students. Contact reporter Genesis Lara at glara@tucson.com Subscribe to stay connected to Tucson. A subscription helps you access more of the local stories that keep you connected to the community. Want to see more like this? Get our local education coverage delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Meet Diane Kleinman, this weeks Bens Bells Bellee. She was nominated by Cary Davis for inspiring kindness in her neighborhood. Davis nomination letter said: Happy was the day when Diane Kleinman moved to our midtown Tucson neighborhood! Ive never met anyone like Diane. She inspires kindness wherever she goes, and shes been all over the world including serving her church in Indonesia and Bulgaria. Diane is a spunky 80-year-old woman with six children, 22 grandchildren, and 17 great-grandchildren. She brings out the best in everyone she meets. Recently, she organized a community yard sale fundraiser, enlisting neighbors to provide items, bake brownies, make signs, set up, tear down and donate the leftovers to local nonprofits. With some of the funds, she is spearheading a Little Library project for our community. For over two decades, Diane has hand-crafted and donated adorable sock dolls over 10,000 of them to children around the world through organizations like Doctors Without Borders. Diane sews doll dresses for children in Haiti. Recently she has collected articles for Tucson Public Librarys project assisting Afghan refugees. She quilts blankets, paints gourds. Somehow, she finds time for swimming, cooking, reading, playing word games and entertaining. Moreover, Diane is the primary caregiver for her husband of over 60 years. If you know someone who inspires kindness, nominate them for a Bens Bell. bensbells.org/forms/nominate-a-bellee Subscribe to stay connected to Tucson. A subscription helps you access more of the local stories that keep you connected to the community. Here's a look at the top COVID news for today, March 28. FDA expected to OK additional booster shots for adults over 50 The Biden administration is expected to give older adults the option of getting a second Covid-19 vaccine booster as early as this week. Two sources familiar with the government's plans said the US Food and Drug Administration is planning authorize a fourth dose of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines for adults who are age 50 and older this week. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to follow soon after with what's known as a permissive recommendation, which means that the shots will not be officially recommended but may be given to people who want them. Read more here: Shanghai starts China's biggest COVID-19 lockdown in 2 years China began its most extensive coronavirus lockdown in two years Monday to conduct mass testing and control a growing outbreak in Shanghai as questions are raised about the economic toll of the nation's zero-COVID strategy. Shanghai, China's financial capital and largest city with 26 million people, had managed its smaller previous outbreaks with limited lockdowns of housing compounds and workplaces where the virus was spreading. Read more here: Studies link Covid-19 infection with increased risk of diabetes Two years into the pandemic, scientists and physicians are shifting their attention to the long-term consequences of a Covid-19 infection, termed "long Covid." Recent studies add diabetes to the list of possible long Covid outcomes. Experts have known that people with diabetes are at higher risk of severe Covid-19 infection, but now, a new connection is unraveling -- one in which a Covid-19 infection may lead to a higher risk for diabetes. Read more here: Airlines want to drop mandates. What do doctors say? In less than a month, the rule requiring masks on planes, in airports and on other means of public transportation is set to expire. And it could happen sooner, if US airlines have any say in it. Airlines including Delta, American, United and Southwest, plus cargo carriers and industry group Airlines for America, are all calling for an end to both the mask mandate on public transportation and the pre-travel testing requirement for international arrivals to the United States. Read more here: *** Check out more COVID news here: Ray of travel sunshine: CDC adds no new destinations to its highest-risk category The CDC's weekly update of travel health advisories has some of the most encouraging news for tourists it's had in months. How 10 largest US metros changed in COVID's 1st full year New York City Los Angeles Chicago Dallas Houston Washington Philadelphia Atlanta Miami Phoenix Subscribe to stay connected to Tucson. A subscription helps you access more of the local stories that keep you connected to the community. The Biden administration is expected to give older adults the option of getting a second Covid-19 vaccine booster as early as this week. Two sources familiar with the government's plans said the US Food and Drug Administration is planning authorize a fourth dose of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines for adults who are age 50 and older this week. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to follow soon after with what's known as a permissive recommendation, which means that the shots will not be officially recommended but may be given to people who want them, said a source who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity since they had not been given permission to discuss the details with reporters. Details of the plans were first reported by The New York Times. The decision to make fourth doses available now will bypass independent groups of scientific advisers for both the FDA and CDC, which would normally meet and publicly review the available science and then make recommendations to the agencies. Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist who is director of the Scripps Translational Research Institute in California, said the decision was expected ahead of an April 6 meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), a group of independent experts who advise the FDA on its vaccine decisions. Boosters are on the agenda for discussion at that meeting, which will focus on future planning for boosters and variant-specific vaccines. Topol, who was apprised of the FDA's plans, said it was his understanding that the change would apply to both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Topol also said he was in favor of giving Americans the option of fourth doses. "There are solid data from Israel for age 60+ (the only group reported on to date) for enhanced protection (vs severe illness) out to 3 months compared with 3 doses. It is reasonable to extend that and provide it as an option, since the 3rd dose has pronounced benefit in age 50+," Topol wrote in an email to CNN. Topol noted that the FDA's move legitimizes what many Americans are doing anyway. Anyone who wants a fourth dose can go to a pharmacy and receive one just by saying that they need one because they are immunocompromised. Others felt there wasn't yet enough science available to support the decision. Dr. Eric Rubin, editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine who sits on the FDA's VRBPAC, said he hadn't yet seen enough data on fourth doses to make a determination about whether they are needed for anyone beyond those who are already recommended to get them -- adults who are severely immune deficient. "The only data that I've seen has been for participants followed for just a few weeks. The most important information is going to be how well a fourth dose protects highly vulnerable people against serious disease and death, and I don't know when that will be available," Rubin said in an email to CNN. Rubin said the FDA might have access to that data, but he had not seen it yet. Dr. Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA's VRBPAC, also said he felt the administration was acting ahead of the science. "Where's the evidence that somebody over 50 benefits from a fourth dose? Because the evidence to date appears to support the possibility for those over 65, although I haven't, we haven't, seen all the data," Offit told CNN, speaking of the VRBPAC committee members. "But where's the evidence for a 50 to 64 year old? Where's that evidence? Because absent that evidence, then there shouldn't be this recommendation," he said. The-CNN-Wire & 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved. Subscribe to stay connected to Tucson. A subscription helps you access more of the local stories that keep you connected to the community. by Tamara Traubmann-Santos JERUSALEM, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The first gathering of Israel-Arab foreign ministers has helped boost Israel's ties with certain Arab countries as they share concerns about reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, said experts. The two-day conference that ended on Monday brought together Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and his counterparts from four Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt, to the Israeli resort of Sde Boker in the southern Negev desert. "What we are doing here is making history. Building a new regional architecture based on progress, technology, religious tolerance, security, and intelligence cooperation," said Lapid, who initiated the meeting which was also attended by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Lapid announced that the conference would become a yearly event in future, hosted by the participating countries in turns every year. "Just a few years ago, this gathering would be impossible to imagine," Blinken said, hailing the meeting as the latest indication of how the new ties could expand across the region. UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan praised the strengthened ties between his country and Israel. "If we are curious sometimes, and we want to know things and learn, it's because although Israel has been part of this region for a very long time, we've not known each other. So it's time to catch up," he said. LANDMARK MEETING "The most important achievement of the summit was the fact that it took place," said Yoel Guzansky, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv-based think tank. When Israel signed in 2020 the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords with the UAE and Bahrain, and later with Morocco, it was unclear how substantial the ties could be. In less than two years, the first summit of top diplomats became a symbol of unity. Egypt, the first Arab state which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, also took part in the conference, though Jordan, the second Arab state which made peace with Israel in 1994, was absent. Jordan declined the invitation. During the six-party conference, Jordanian King Abdullah II chose to visit Ramallah in the occupied West Bank to meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, underscoring his solidarity with the Palestinians. Guzansky said that the conference highlighted the "importance of Israel" in the region and sent signals to Israel's enemies, mainly Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas which rules the Palestinian enclave of Gaza Strip. He noted that the regional defense system, which is "gradually being built," is heavily reliant on Israel and the Gulf Arab countries. "However, there are pieces missing in this puzzle -- mainly Saudi Arabia, which is unlikely to normalize ties with Israel before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved," Guzansky said. EMERGING NUCLEAR DEAL Israel initiated the gathering amid tensions between the U.S. and its Middle Eastern allies. Israel and the Gulf Arab countries share concerns over the possible revival of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, under which the U.S. eased sanctions in exchange for Iran's commitment to curb its nuclear program. The previous U.S. administration under President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the pact in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran. However, the current U.S. government under President Joe Biden seeks to restore the deal through talks held in the Austrian capital of Vienna. The Vienna talks, which have been held for eight rounds so far, are reportedly nearing an agreement. Israel, Iran's arch foe in the region, has been steadfast against renewing the deal, fearing that it would enable Iran to obtain nuclear weapons without the burden of U.S. sanctions. In a bid to soothe the worries of Israel and Arab states, Blinken vowed that the U.S. will continue to work together with its allies to confront "common security challenges and threats, including those from Iran and its proxies." Ori Goldberg, an Israeli expert on Iran from the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Reichman University in Herzliya, said that the U.S. intention to restore the nuclear deal prompted Israel to hold the meeting. "Israel wants a gesture of keeping the option for a regional action (against Iran)," Goldberg said, adding that Israel practically has no tangible support for such an action as the conference issued no clear statement on the Iranian issue. Chen Kertcher, a lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the Ariel University in the West Bank, said the meeting came amid growing discontent between the U.S. and Gulf Arab countries. Gulf Arab countries wish to receive more support from the U.S. in countering the attacks from the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, while Washington urges them to produce more oil to calm the oil market following the Russia-Ukraine conflict, said Kertcher. So far, the Gulf Arab states, mainly Saudi Arabia and the UAE which boast spare capacity, have given Washington the cold shoulder by refusing to abruptly increase oil output. Instead, they insist on sticking to the plan for slowly increasing oil production as set by the OPEC+, of which Russia is a part. Guzansky believed that, in view of the rising tensions, Israel "is emerging as the go-between for the United States and Gulf countries." New tax breaks set to boost consumption By ZHANG YUE (China Daily) 08:23, March 29, 2022 A child skies with the help of a parent at White Mountain Resort in Fusong, Northeast China's Jilin province, Nov 19, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua] The recent move to include care expenses for children under the age of 3 as part of the special additional deductions for individual income tax is expected to reduce the financial burden on families, increase their consumption capacity, and is conducive to the long-term improvement of the nation's overall demographic structure, experts say. The State Council said on Monday in a document that starting from Jan 1, the individual taxable income of such parents can be reduced by a total of 1,000 yuan ($156) per month for each baby. The deduction can be applied in full by one parent or can be split evenly, added the document. The move was hinted in this year's Government Work Report made in March at the annual session of the National People's Congress, the nation's top legislative body. Experts see the new tax break policy as important and inclusive in relieving the financial burden of families with infants and it is likely to boost overall consumption. They also believe it will work as part of a holistic approach in encouraging China's population growth. "The decision to introduce tax breaks for families taking care of children under the age of 3 was made in light of overall demographic changes in China in recent years. It will not only be conducive to balanced population growth in the long run and better tap into China's demographic potential, but will also help lay a solid foundation for accumulating human capital and promote high-quality development," said Li Xuhong, director of the Institute of Finance and Taxation Policy and Application at Beijing National Accounting Institute. "Also, such tax breaks will increase the disposable income of households, and boost their willingness to consume," she said. "China's income tax system is in the process of improvement, and it will eventually adequately bring down the income tax level of middle and low-income earners. This will bring about tangible social welfare and boost consumption. Consumption is widely regarded as a key factor in driving economic growth this year. The Government Work Report this year noted the need to expand domestic demand and keep boosting the recovery in consumption. Shi Yinghua, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Fiscal Sciences, said that the new tax breaks "will not only help relieve the burden for families with children under 3", but will also help to positively shape the consumption and income expectations of couples planning to have children, she said. She added that the new tax deduction policy will be well-aligned with the current individual tax breaks in other areas such as expenses related to preschool and compulsory education. Families with children under the age of 3 had previously been unable to enjoy such individual tax deductions. (Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun) KINSHASA, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The East African Community (EAC) approved Tuesday the admission of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) into the regional bloc, at the 19th Extraordinary Summit of EAC Heads of State conducted virtually. "The EAC now spans from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean making the region competitive and easy to access the larger African Continental Free Trade Area," said EAC Secretary-General Peter Mutuku Mathuki. "Rwanda supports the admission of the DRC into the region and stands ready to play its part in supporting the integration of the DRC into the EAC," said Rwandan President Paul Kagame at the virtual conference. "The Republic of Burundi openly welcomes the DRC into the EAC. Widening and deepening economic, political, social and cultural integration will improve the quality of lives and prosperity of the people of East Africa," said Prosper Bazombanza, Vice President of Burundi. "Admission of the DRC marks a momentous occasion in the region's integration history," said Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, also chairperson of the Summit of EAC Heads of State. The DRC thus becomes the seventh and newest member of the community, which comprises Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and South Sudan. In June 2019, DRC had already expressed its willingness to join the organization in a letter to Paul Kagame, then-current chair of the EAC Heads of State Summit. Tulsa continues to have the lowest average gasoline price in the U.S., while many areas of the country have prices well over $4 per gallon. Tulsas average price was $3.70 per gallon on Sunday, according to Trilby Lundberg of the Lundberg Survey. The city also had the lowest average price in mid-March, according to the survey. The price at Tulsa-area QuikTrips was $3.67 per gallon on Monday, according to gasbuddy.com, a fuel price-tracking service. The average U.S. gas price dropped 6 cents over two weeks to $4.37, according to the survey. The decrease came after nine straight weeks of price hikes totaling 98 cents. The price at the pump is $1.42 higher than it was a year ago. Benchmark U.S. crude oil for May delivery fell $7.94 to $105.96 a barrel Monday. Nationwide, the highest average price for regular-grade gas is in Los Angeles, at $5.99 per gallon. According to the survey, the average price of diesel is $5.16 a gallon, down 4 cents over two weeks. Tight supplies, high demand and Russias invasion of Ukraine have all caused gas prices to spike to their highest level in years. Some states, such as Maryland and Georgia, have temporarily waived their state gasoline taxes to reduce the burden on consumers. Other states are considering similar actions, and some members of Congress have called for suspending the federal gas tax. However, a national analyst said those measures are having a counter-effect. States must think of a different approach to helping motorists in regards to #gasprices, Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy, tweeted Monday. Tax holidays are boosting demand and putting additional upward pressure on price. Consumption must be cut for realistic price drops. Unpopular, but its the only thing that will work. Gas tax holidays are boosting gasoline demand, De Haan said, noting that demand has gone up about 8.7% nationally while it has spiked 13% in Georgia and 26.2% in Maryland. The time frame he referenced was comparing demand from Feb. 18 to March 18 to the period from March 19 to 27. Featured video: Nonobvious tips on how to save money on gas Subscribe to Daily Headlines Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The business news you need Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Dear readers: One recent Tuesday, while our rescued cat Fanny played under a tent of newspapers, pawing at a wand of Canada goose feathers I had taken from a road-killed bird, I contemplated. Fanny hunted from the shadows, surviving as a predator through one bitter Minnesota winter after being released to fend for herself by the local Humane Society. My wife and I rescued and socialized her. Now, Fanny is in love with our rescued dog Kota. She will jump on Kotas head, sit on her, roll over in front of her, then seize patient Kotas face with her front paws and claws. Kota will respond by nuzzling Fanny under the chin and licking her face. Sometimes Fanny gets overexcited and claws too hard on Kotas face, so the dog turns away, gets up and leaves: The rule of fair play was broken, so the playful game is over. Fanny goes off to play with her fuzzy toy mice at this point. Kota has rarely, if ever, snapped a warning at Fanny. If these two species know how to get along and ritualize aggressive and prey-killing actions into nonharmful and obviously enjoyable play, I wonder why we humans cant do the same and keep the peace. Someday we might learn from these lesser beings. For more insights, see the article by one of my former graduate students, Dr. Marc Bekoff, When Dogs Play, They Follow the Golden Rules of Fairness, at psychologytoday.com. From this kind of research grew the science of cognitive ethology, which is concerned with how conscious awareness and intention can influence an animals behavior. Perhaps governments and businesses might do better in foreign relations and transactions by applying cognitive ethology especially when dealing with dictators, autocrats and the morally corrupt. Why cats like to snuggle in boxes Cats like to snuggle into boxes because the pressure from the sides is comforting, says Gabriella Smith, a doctoral candidate in comparative animal cognition at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. A 2019 study found cats stress levels are higher when they dont have access to a hiding place. A study Smith led last year found that cats will even sit inside a 2D box taped on the floor. (Full story: Live Science, Feb. 28) Hunters beware The genomic profile of a divergent SARS-CoV-2 lineage found in a person in Canada with COVID-19 closely resembles that of a variant found in hunted deer in the same area, suggesting that the person may have caught the virus from deer, according to a study published prior to peer review. (Full story: The Guardian, Feb. 28) Send all mail to animaldocfox@gmail.com or to Dr. Michael Fox in care of Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106. A man freed from a state prison sentence linked to the fatal shooting of his father was sentenced in federal court Monday for the same crime. U.S. District Judge Claire Eagan ordered Jacob Patrick Krafft, 40, to serve 17 years in prison after he pleaded guilty in October to fatally shooting his father, Eric Krafft, 58, on Oct. 21, 2016, at their Broken Arrow home. Eagan also required Krafft to serve five years of post-custody supervision by the U.S. Probation Office. Krafft faced up to life in prison on the second-degree murder charge in Indian Country. A state appellate court threw out Kraffts second-degree murder conviction and 25-year prison term in February 2021 after he challenged his prosecution under the Supreme Courts 2020 McGirt ruling. The Supreme Court determined in the McGirt ruling that the Muscogee Nation reservation dating back to the 1860s had never been disestablished by Congress, meaning major crimes involving American Indians that occur within the reservation are in the jurisdiction of federal or tribal governments rather than the state government. In his appeal, Krafft successfully argued that the state did not have jurisdiction to try him because he is an American Indian and the death occurred within the Muscogee Nation reservation. In his October plea, Krafft admitted to fatally shooting his father in the leg with a hunting rifle while the two were in the elders Broken Arrow kitchen. The younger Krafft alleged that his father had been verbally abusive and even threatened to kill him since returning from work that day about two hours before the shooting. After allegedly being threatened by the father, the younger Krafft claims he went to his bedroom, loaded a Mauser .30-06 caliber rifle and fired a single round into his fathers hip in an attempt to disable him. But instead of merely disabling him, the bullet severed the fathers femoral artery, and he died of blood loss, according to court records. Jacob did not want to kill his father, according to a sentencing brief filed on his behalf. After removing the perceived threat, he tried to save his father. Jacob has always been remorseful. To this day, he continues to grieve and be haunted by his fathers death. Krafft claimed to probation officers during a presentencing investigation that he had suffered a lifetime of physical abuse by his father, including a trip to a hospital emergency room at 15 after Eric Krafft struck him in the face. In a court filing, Jacob Kraffts defense requested the court impose the lowest possible sentence, one below the advisory Guidelines range. Prosecutors, meanwhile, argued for a prison term at the high end of his sentencing guidelines range. This murder was completely unnecessary, although it was foreseeable considering Kraffts history, the U.S. Attorneys Office said in a filing. Prosecutors then recounted past violent episodes involving the defendant. In one case, Krafft violated a protective order in 2006 when he showed up at a home and threatened to kill its occupants. In a 2007 incident, his sister called the police because he had shot his father with a B.B. gun and hit him in the face with the butt of a shotgun. Krafft was (at the time) a 34-year-old man living in his fathers house, according to prosecutors. No matter what his father said to him, he always had the option of leaving, prosecutors said. Featured video: Oklahoma governor addresses Supreme Court McGirt decision Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The Oklahoma Health Care Authority warns that nearly 1 in 5 Oklahomans with SoonerCare might be removed from the program after the federal public health emergency ends. OHCA Secretary Kevin Corbett on Monday said all indications and signals are that the public health emergency declared when COVID-19 first swept through the U.S. two years ago will expire this year perhaps as early as April 16. That means roughly 200,000 Oklahomans on Medicaid called SoonerCare in Oklahoma preliminarily appear to no longer qualify for the program, he said. OHCA asks that all SoonerCare members update their contact information and documentation to help the agency better understand which members will be eligible to renew benefits when the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary announces the end of the federal health emergency. Corbett said the waiver of certain rules has been regularly renewed in 90-day intervals, helping prevent people with Medicaid from losing health coverage amid the pandemic. He suspects there might be one more extension because HHS hasnt provided a 60-day notice that the declaration will terminate. Thats been something that has allowed us to do a few things in terms of flexibilities, but also to have what Ill call continuous coverage for many of our Medicaid members who would become ineligible during that period of time, Corbett said. But by virtue of the Public Health Emergency we were allowed to continue to serve them. Corbett said the Health Care Authority has performed passive renewal or eligibility reviews of data available publicly through information exchanges primarily income that suggests nearly 200,000 Oklahomans wont qualify anymore for SoonerCare. Medicaid stipulates that a single persons income be at or below 138% of the federal poverty line, or $17,148, according to OHCA. A family of four has a cutoff of $35,256. Corbett said SoonerCare members are only removed from the program during the Public Health Emergency if they ask for it or they move out of state. To put the 200,000 figure into perspective, Corbett said about 10,000 to 15,000 members per month on average would come off SoonerCare pre-pandemic because their circumstances changed to give them other health coverage options. Its just an accumulation of that normal activity, Corbett said. Corbett expressed a commitment to work with individuals whose income exceeds the federal poverty limit requirement to find alternative health insurance options if necessary, such as through new employment or the feds health insurance exchange or community partners. He said HealthCare.gov has subsidies available and low-cost premiums. Were going to take all avenues to be thoughtful and compassionate about how we do this, Corbett said. We know this Public Health Emergency was put in place to make sure that there is a safety net for those that either had job loss and lost coverage or had critical health needs that we needed to serve. OHCA says that members updating their information will allow the agency to contact those who are effected via mail, emails or phone calls once an end date is announced. Ineligible members will receive three notices that detail their end dates. Members will be removed in phases based on member use and critical health issues. A second notice will be sent 45 days prior to a members scheduled end date, and a third notice 10 days before the loss of eligibility. This is occurring across the country; I hope everybody understands that, Corbett said. This is not a SoonerCare program taking this action. Every state in the union is having to go through this. What SoonerCare members can do today Make sure contact information and documentation are updated by logging in to mysoonercare.org or by calling the SoonerCare helpline at 1-800-987-7767. Respond to Oklahoma Health Care Authoritys requests for information. If members have received a letter from OHCA requesting information, then they need to respond right away. Source: Oklahoma Health Care Authority Video: Tulsa World Newsroom: Oklahomas 14 most beautiful places to visit. Concerned about COVID-19? Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Nail technician Aktofel Kankono provides manicure service for a client in Windhoek, Namibia, March 29, 2022. Namibian men are pushing for gender diversity in the traditionally female-dominated local beauty industry. A year ago, the thought of being a nail technician excited yet jumbled Aktofel Kankono. Coming from a conservative society, venturing into the trade was far-fetched for the 19-year old until he decided to enroll on a nail training course, which opened his career in the beauty industry. (Photo by Ndalimpinga Iita/Xinhua) WINDHOEK, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Namibian men are pushing for gender diversity in the traditionally female-dominated local beauty industry. A year ago, the thought of being a nail technician excited yet jumbled Aktofel Kankono. Coming from a conservative society, venturing into the trade was far-fetched for the 19-year old until he decided to enroll on a nail training course, which opened his career in the beauty industry. "I was the only guy in attendance at the training and was too conscious about what people might think of me," said Kankono on Tuesday. A year into business, his trade as a nail technician has brought him more than just a substantial income. "It gives me satisfaction to add color to people's lives through nails art. I am glad I did not give in to my negative thoughts and limitations," Kankono said. Being a male nail technician has profoundly impacted his business and life. "Through the experiences, I have grown professionally in terms of networking and developed a firmer character," said Kankono, who is also a student at a local university. He is not the only one. More men daringly ventured into the diverse vocations the beauty industry offers. Merino Kandjii from Windhoek runs Merino Cuts. After working other jobs in the tourism and hospitality industry, he fell back on his true passion- hairdressing. "I'd say it almost came naturally as I'm an artistic person and hairdressing is an area where I can apply my natural ability to create. Fortunately, I also had the opportunity to study this in South Africa," Kandjii said. Although he initially encountered gender prejudices from society for doing a 'woman's job', transforming clients and actualizing their visions gives him great pleasure. "I think that gives me the edge and sets me apart. I am passionate about offering superior, quality services to my clients, and I feel grateful to be able to do something that I enjoy. I take the personal hair journeys of all my clients to heart," he added. Samuel Shimhanda, a seasoned nail technician, said that business had been more than just about him since his career took off. Apart from aiding the health of nails and skin of many locals through his craft, he strives to debunk stereotypes that doing nails is only a 'female job'. According to the 2021 Global Gender Gap report by World Economic Forum, no country of the 35 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa has yet achieved full gender parity. Data points to significant challenges for gender parity in future jobs due to increasing occupational gender segregation. Moreover, gender experts observed that men venturing into careers mainly seen as 'jobs for women' by many people in society is not new but was instead done out of the limelight. Ngamane Karuaihe-Upi, a relationship consultant, based in Namibia, said that just like there are women who are great builders, plumbers, electricians, farmers, soldiers, there is ample space to accommodate all genders in being productive contributors to the development of the economy. "It is time to adjust our vision and mentality regarding what men and women can do. No need for boundaries and limitations. Archaic rules and views cannot curtail human potential, and to evolve is inevitable and assured. The more diversity we encourage, the better for Namibia and the world," Karuaihe-Upi said. Meanwhile, marketing efforts inclusive of social media have been instrumental to their efforts. "Some clients come out of curiosity through referrals or come back for more," Kankono said. While sustaining the brand as a small business owner amid limited access to funding and the COVID-19 pandemic can be challenging, the businessmen said the future looks bright. "There is great economic potential in this multi-billion dollar industry (cosmetology). I plan to start a hair school here in Namibia to be able to do what I love and transfer the knowledge and skills to others. I plan to expand the business through franchises," Kandjii said. Kankono, too, hopes to train others, especially men, to continue breaking gender stereotypes relating to career choices across generations. Nail technician Samuel Shimhanda provides manicure service for a client in Windhoek, Namibia, March 29, 2022. Namibian men are pushing for gender diversity in the traditionally female-dominated local beauty industry. A year ago, the thought of being a nail technician excited yet jumbled Aktofel Kankono. Coming from a conservative society, venturing into the trade was far-fetched for the 19-year old until he decided to enroll on a nail training course, which opened his career in the beauty industry. (Photo by Ndalimpinga Iita/Xinhua) Oklahomas juvenile justice system mirrors some of the same deficiencies as the one for the states adult offenders, a report released Monday said. Historically, Oklahoma has fallen on the side of punishment rather than rehabilitation and has only implemented important protections for children in its justice system when legal action has specifically required it to do so, the report states. The report chronicles some of that legal action and notes recent reforms, but concludes that Oklahomas historical legacy continues in the form of ongoing disinvestment in communities and families. The 80-page Better Tomorrows: A Landscape Analysis of Oklahomas Youth Justice System and Suggested Reforms, by the Oklahoma Policy Institutes Ashley Harvey, combines data and more than 60 interviews that included children in the system, their parents and relevant organizations. Oklahoma Office of Juvenile Justice Executive Director Rachel Holt, who was part of a panel discussion accompanying the reports release, said she tells her staff: Juvenile justice should mean justice for juveniles. My goal is that every child that touches that system is treated equally. This is not ... Perry Mason, said Holt, a former Oklahoma County assistant district attorney. Juvenile justice done correctly is a collaboration. Progress has been made, the report says. Referrals an official complaint or report alleging a youthful offense have dropped by more than half in the last decade. Most referrals are for low-level offenses, and the overwhelming majority of young people put into diversionary programs instead of detention complete them successfully. But the report also found wide variations in the types of services and programs available, the application of the law and even referral rate. It also found children of color were much more likely than whites to be arrested and to be incarcerated. Recommendations from the report include: Eliminate court fines and fees for juveniles and their families. Ensure quality legal counsel for justice-involved children. Establish a minimum age of criminal responsibility in Oklahoma. Increase transparency and accountability through, clearly defined reporting. Better family engagement by relevant agencies. Invest in Oklahoma families. Invest in education. Extend and expand support services, particularly in rural areas. Fully fund core services and agencies in the youth justice sector. Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The $1,200 workforce incentive program intended to replace the federal governments enhanced individual unemployment benefits didnt turn out to help many Oklahomans. Eight out of 10 applicants were rejected for various reasons, according to an analysis by Tulsa World reporter Curtis Killman. The Return to Work program grew out of a belief that laid-off workers were not returning to the labor force because the federal government was temporarily providing $300 on top of their regular unemployment benefits. It cynically assumed that workers were lazy, a notion about Oklahomans we reject. Gov. Kevin Stitt joined other Republican governors across the country in turning away the benefits early. They were set to end last September. In its place, Oklahoma launched the incentive program in June, but it had narrow eligibility. At the time, about 90,000 Oklahomans were receiving the added federal benefits. Only 8,000 workers received a grant from the states program. Grants of $1,200 were available to Oklahoma residents who received unemployment benefits during at least one of the first two weeks in May and subsequently worked six consecutive weeks on a new job. More than 50,000 applied, and about 80% of them were rejected. Most were turned down because the applicants were not receiving unemployment benefits in that two-week window in May. Other problems were paperwork issues such as blurry paystub photos or information that did not match applicants pay stubs. A lawsuit challenging the program was filed the month it began. In August, a district judge ordered the state to reinstate the federal benefits. The Oklahoma Supreme Court threw out the states appeal in February because the federal benefit program had ended. We were never in favor of the program. It made assumptions about the workforce shortage and complicated a straight-forward federal program. The states unemployment rate was always one of the lowest in the country and is currently tied for fifth-lowest. In the past nine months, weve learned more about the workforce shortage. Early on, many potential workers were worried about COVID-19 spread. The virus surged when school resumed in the fall and the more contagious omicron variant took many workers temporarily out. Retirements also play a key role, with baby boomers choosing to leave the labor force. The Pew Research Center found the that increased retirements of older people during the pandemic recession is unlike that in other economic recession. This increase is significant because until COVID-19, adults ages 55 and older were the only working age population since 2000 to increase their labor force participation. Other reasons include exacerbations of obstacles that existed before the pandemic, such as child care and transportation. We can no longer afford to let those needs go unaddressed if we want to expand the potential workforce. Oklahoma workers are holding up their end, as shown by the continued low unemployment rate. The Return to Work incentive failed to meet expectations and promises made by state leaders. Subscribe to Daily Headlines Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Vietnam and Australia signed on Monday a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to provide support for Vietnamese citizens to participate in the Australian Agriculture Visa Program. The MoU was signed by the Vietnamese Ministry of Labor, War Invalids, and Social Affairs and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade on behalf of the two governments during a virtual ceremony on Monday. This is the first bilateral MoU that Australia has signed under the Australian Agriculture Visa Program, according to the labor ministry. In September 2021, the Australian government announced the visa program for workers in the agricultural sector and selected Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines as the four countries with early participation. The program aims to deal with the labor shortage in the agricultural sector in Australia, as well as to create opportunities for Vietnamese workers to gain more knowledge, experience, skills, and income. Australia is expected to receive about 1,000 agricultural workers per year. The basic salary is AU$3,200-4,000 (US$2,390-2,990) per month, which is a high income rate compared to other labor markets. The signing of the MoU between the two governments marks an important milestone in the cooperation relationship between the two sides, Minister of Labor, War Invalids, and Social Affairs Dao Ngoc Dung said at the ceremony. The official believed that the MoU will create a legal framework and favorable conditions for Vietnamese citizens to enter Australia to work in the agricultural sector. Vietnams early participation in the Australian Agriculture Visa Program demonstrates the Morrison governments commitment to deepening cooperation under the Australia-Vietnam Strategic Partnership, Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne said in a press release. It is a key initiative of the Australia-Vietnam Enhanced Economic Engagement Strategy launched by the two countries prime ministers on November 1, 2021. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Vietnam's coffee exports in the first three months of the year are estimated to have risen 19.4% from a year earlier to 541,000 tonnes, while rice exports are seen up 24%, government data released on Tuesday showed. Coffee Coffee exports from Vietnam are estimated to have risen 19.4% in the first three months of this year from a year earlier to 541,000 tonnes, the General Statistics Office (GSO) said. Coffee export revenue for Vietnam, the world's biggest producer of robusta beans, is seen up 50.4% to $1.2 billion in the first quarter. The country's coffee shipments in March are estimated at 170,000 tonnes, valued at $394 million. Rice Rice exports in January-March are estimated to have increased 24% from a year earlier to 1.475 million tonnes. Revenue from rice exports in the period is expected to show a rise of 10.5% to $715 million. March rice exports from Vietnam likely totalled 500,000 tonnes, worth $246 million. Energy Vietnam's January-March crude oil exports are estimated to have decreased 8.9% from the same period last year to an estimated 747,000 tonnes. Crude oil export revenue in January to March is expected to rise 50.3% from a year earlier to $584 million. Oil product imports in the first quarter were estimated at 2.1 million tonnes, up 11.7% from the same period last year, while the value of product imports rose 70.3% to $1.4 billion. The GSO trade data is subject to revision next month. Nguyen Van Luu may have some difficulties walking on his prosthetic leg but that does not stop him from trying to give back to the needy. While many might have given up on themselves, Luu chose not to surrender to his disability and instead tried to make the best possible use out of his hands and remaining functional leg. The 28-year-old Vietnamese man, a resident of Ngo May Town, Phu Cat District in the south-central province of Binh Dinh, is always ready to hit the road as soon as he learns of an individual or household in need of his help. Using his prosthetic leg, the young man has been traveling around Vietnam over the past five years and raised money to help those inflicted with critical illnesses or in difficult circumstances. Angel with a broken wing In early March, Luu was visiting a poor family in Tan Phuoc Ward, Phu My Town in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau. According to Luu, three out of the four family members were suffering serious illnesses. Their youngest daughter is battling acute intestinal disease but her family cannot afford medical bills, he shared. Nguyen Thanh Sang, 44, used to be the familys breadwinner. Despite being diagnosed with liver, kidney diseases and diabetes, Sang still worked himself to exhaustion to support his family. Nguyen Van Luu (right) gifts a lottery ticket peddler whose livelihood was hurt by COVID-19 outbreaks in Binh Dinh Province during the 2022 Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday. When he was working at a quarry, stone debris landed in his eyes. As the accident left him blind in one eye and his body in constant, excruciating pain, the man has been unable to work to provide for his family over the past several years. Sangs 44-year-old wife, Le Thi Hong Hoang, became the breadwinner in her husbands place. The sickly, emaciated woman struggles to provide food and support for their two children, especially the youngest daughter, Tham. The seven-year-old girl, who often writhes in pain after toilet use from a severe intestine problem, has suffered the condition without any medical treatment due to poverty. Without a place to live, the family takes shelter in a shed illegally erected on a mountain. Luu said after staying with the family for three days and verifying the story, he would make a call for donations on his Facebook page. Starting the volunteer mission, Luu said, is personal. Whenever he is back in his hometown, Nguyen Van Luu (left), along with other philanthropists, prepares free meals for patients at local hospitals. He sees a part of himself in these plights and cannot turn a blind eye. Luu shared that he can never forget how his carefree, rewarding life as an employee at a jewelry company in Ho Chi Minh City turned to tragedy when he had an accident in Phu Nhuan District. With no relatives by his side, the young man, then 23, was terribly upset at how nonchalant and unhelpful bystanders were at the site of his accident. He himself got a ride to the hospital and gave his own approval signature on the amputation of his leg. The next day he woke up, he realized he no longer had two legs to walk on. It really hurt knowing I would be disabled from now on, Luu recalled. My mom passed out seeing my leg was gone." I told myself to move forward with my life and not upset my mom further. Realizing the unconditional love of his family and friends can help him through anything, the young man returned to his hometown. Appreciative of encouragements and donations from strangers later, Luu realized not all are indifferent and set his heart on giving back. He soon found himself preparing vegan meals at a pagoda near his home. In 2018, Luu went to Vinh Yen City, the provincial heart of northern Vinh Phuc Province, where he learned the craft of artistic tattooing. Noticing an old man living alone in a shabby home, the young man would come over and clean up his place, which stank of human and cat feces and rotten food. Though the senior man, who suffered senile dementia, sometimes scolded him, Luu kept coming to his place, buying him new clothes and bedding and fixing things around his home. Thats how I started my volunteer calling, Luu said. Nguyen Van Luu (left) poses with Hoang My, who is receiving treatment for cancer at the Ho Chi Minh City Oncology Hospital, in this supplied photo. In early 2022, Luu helped raise a large sum of money for her treatment. When it was time for him to return home as his tattoo course was coming to an end, he made posts on Facebook, hoping to find someone who could replace him in tending to the old man. My posts were widely shared, I was interviewed by reporters, he said. Many philanthropists came forward, taking turns taking care of the senior man. When the old man passed nearly one year later, Luu went back to Vinh Phuc and helped hold his funeral. 'I hope no one else will need my help' Over the past five years, Luu has always gone to great lengths to visit the needys places and verify their stories through neighbors and local governments to make sure philanthropists will not regret their choices. Luu was also active in reaching out to those hard hit by the COVID-19 outbreaks late last year. His most memorable encounter was with Nguyen Van Dung as Luu spotted him treading heavily when he was driving from Quy Nhon City to Ngo May Town. Despite his own physical disability, Nguyen Van Luu remains optimistic and ready to take on any challenges life throws at him. The man said he had lost his job to the coronavirus and had to walk from Nha Trang City, in the south-central province of Khanh Hoa, back to his hometown in the north-central province of Nghe An. Luu said he took Dung to his own home before providing him with some food, money, and a bicycle. I really wanted to give him a motorbike but my financial condition didnt allow that, he said, adding he did not post Dungs story on Facebook for fear he might disturb philanthropists at small hours. Until now I still feel guilty about not giving Dung more help. Earlier this year, Luu traveled to Ho Chi Minh City to visit 13-year-old Nguyen Thi Hoang My, who is receiving treatment for cancer at the Oncology Hospital. The girl, from Hau Giang Province in the Mekong Delta, lost her father when she was just two. Mys extended treatment has worn on her mother financially and physically. Three days after his posts were made, Luu managed to raise more than VND190 million (US$8,310) for My. Shortly after that, the man found he was infected with the coronavirus. As soon as he recovered in Ho Chi Minh City, he went straight to Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province, approximately 120 kilometers away, where his help was much awaited. The man with the golden hearts aid route is taking him to the Mekong Delta in a few days. Though he vows to continue with his mission, deep within Luu hopes he will no longer receive texts from people asking for help for the poor. Receiving no texts means there will be no more needy people, he explained. Over the past five years, with Luus help, his beneficiaries have received quite a handsome sum. In early 2022, he managed to raise over VND840 million ($36,739) for nine-year-old Nguyen Tran Thao My and her five-year-old sister, Nguyen Tran Kim Ngan, residing in the central province of Quang Ngai. The young girls lost both their parents who died in a road accident in Binh Dinh when they were on their way home for the Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday. Their family is more than grateful for Luu's help. We dont know how to repay Luu, said Tran Nhan, the girls maternal grandfather. My grandchildren lost their parents but have found love from everyone through Luu. Exemplary youth Huynh Van Bac, from Hoai An District, Binh Dinh Province, father of Huynh Thi Kim Thao, shared following her birth of twins, she was struck down by pleural effusion. After a two-month treatment at Binh Dinh General Hospital, her condition worsened and she suffered heart and kidney failures. With doctors saying Thao would be unlikely to make it, the financially drained family was about to sell their house. Luu came to their help, raising more than VND810 million ($35,427) in donations. To her familys elation, Thao has pulled through and made a remarkable recovery. Luu not only saved my daughters life but also helped bring us a new beginning, Bac said. In 2020, the Central Committee of the Vietnam Youth Federation honored Luu as an exemplary youth with physical challenges. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! CAIRO, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Egypt and Qatar have agreed on a package of investment worth 5 billion U.S. dollars in the North African country, the Egyptian government said in a statement on Tuesday. Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly and visiting Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani and Finance Minister Ali bin Ahmed Al Kuwari discussed means of promoting bilateral ties and enhancing coordination in different fields, according to the statement. On Monday, Egypt and Qatar announced the establishment of a joint committee headed by their foreign ministers to boost cooperation and coordination in all fields. "A wide horizon of the relations between Qatar and Egypt is seen in boosting economic partnership and communication between the two countries at all levels," the Qatari foreign minister said. In January 2021, the Arab quartet of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain signed the Al-Ula Declaration with Qatar during the 41st Gulf Cooperation Council Summit held in Saudi Arabia, ending their all-round boycott of Doha since mid-2017. China's financial hub of Shanghai launched a two-stage lockdown of its 26 million residents on Monday, closing bridges and tunnels and restricting highway traffic in a scramble to contain surging COVID-19 cases. The snap lockdown, announced by the local government late on Sunday, will split China's most populous city roughly along the Huangpu River for nine days to allow for "staggered" testing by healthcare workers in white hazmat suits. It is the biggest COVID-related disruption to hit Shanghai, and sent prices of commodities including oil and copper lower on fears that any further curbs could hurt demand in China, the world's second-largest economy. Residents east of the Huangpu were confined to their homes. Some said healthcare workers arrived to conduct tests as early as 7 a.m. on Monday. People line up near a nucleic acid testing site outside a hospital during mass testing for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) amid the COVID-19 pandemic, in Shanghai, China March 27, 2022. Photo: Reuters Those in the west rushed to stockpile food and other goods as they prepared for a similar fate from April 1. Delivery services were overwhelmed and supermarkets ran low on supplies. Several social media users posted images of what they had managed to buy. "Many wholesale markets are now closed," Bi Yingwu, a 50-year old stallholder, said. "Some vendors are reluctant to buy in vegetables. If we cannot get vegetables from wholesalers or the wet market is closed, we are finished." The curbs mark a turnaround for Shanghai's authorities, who as recently as Saturday denied the city would be locked down as it pursued a more piecemeal "slicing and gridding" approach to try to rein in infections. A man walks past Lujiazui financial district, seen across the Huangpu river, amid the lockdown in Pudong area to contain the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Shanghai, China March 28, 2022. Photo: Reuters Wu Fan, a member of Shanghai's expert COVID team, said recent mass testing had found "large scale" infections throughout the city, triggering the stronger response. "Containing the large scale outbreak in our city is very important because, once infected people are put under control, we have blocked transmission," she told a briefing. Infection and death numbers are low by global standards. But China has imposed a zero-COVID policy that has all but closed its borders to travellers for two years, and rushes to shut off every chain of infection. Shanghai recorded a record 3,450 asymptomatic COVID cases on Sunday, accounting for nearly 70% of the nationwide total, along with 50 symptomatic cases. Police officers in protective suits keep watch at an entrance to a tunnel leading to the Pudong area across the Huangpu river, after traffic restrictions amid the lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Shanghai, China March 28, 2022. Photo: Reuters Restrictions Shanghai said earlier this month its daily testing capacity was around 3 million, but Chen Erzhen, a doctor in charge of a city quarantine facility, warned it still might not be enough to outpace the spread of the virus. "When case numbers reach a certain level, the difficulty of relying upon previous staff deployments increases by a large degree," he told government newspaper Liberation Daily. The new lockdown should at least ensure the "stillness" required to bring the outbreak under control, he added. Wu had told a briefing on Saturday that Shanghai could not be locked down for long because of the important role it played in the national and even global economy. But following Sunday's about-turn, mass testing disrupted transport, healthcare and a wide range of economic activities, with citywide land sales also halted on Monday. Police officers in protective suits keep watch at an entrance to a tunnel leading to the Pudong area across the Huangpu river, after traffic restrictions amid the lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Shanghai, China March 28, 2022. Photo: Reuters Shanghai's Public Security Bureau said it was closing cross-river bridges and tunnels, and highway tollbooths concentrated in the city's east until April 1. However, ports and the city's two airports remained open. Shanghai also ordered firms to shut, exempting those offering public services or supplying food, although factories that managed to put in "closed-loop" systems could continue production. Some hospitals also suspended services as they release staff and other resources to assist with mass testing. U.S. automaker Tesla is suspending production at its factory, located in a district impacted by the first stage of the lockdown, for four days, two people familiar with the matter told. Volkswagen, however, whose Shanghai plant is in a part of the city that is set to be tested in the second stage, said its production in the city was ongoing. SINGAPORE -- A Singapore court rejected on Tuesday an appeal against the execution of a Malaysian convicted of drugs smuggling, dismissing an argument put forward by his legal team that he should be spared because he was mentally impaired. Nagaenthran Dharmalingam has been on death row for more than a decade for trafficking about 42.7 grammes (1.5 oz) of heroin into Singapore, which has some of the world's toughest narcotics laws. His plight has attracted international attention with a group of United Nations experts and British billionaire Richard Branson joining Malaysia's prime minister and human rights activists to urge Singapore to commute his death sentence. Dharmalingam's lawyer Violet Netto had objected to presenting her client's prison medical records at the last hearing, citing confidentiality, and instead requested an independent psychiatric review. But at Tuesday's hearing Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon said the bid to prevent the disclosure of medical reports was unreasonable and there was no admissible evidence showing any decline in his mental condition. The court also dismissed the request for an independent psychiatric review. "The appellant has been afforded due process under law, and it is not open to him to challenge the outcome of that process when he has put nothing forward to suggest that he does have a case to be considered," the five-judge panel said in its ruling. An activist holds a poster against the execution of Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, a Malaysian whose intellect, his defence and human rights groups have argued, was at a level recognised as a mental disability, for drug trafficking in Singapore, as activists submit a clemency petition at the Singapore High Commission in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, March 9, 2022. Photo: Reuters Dharmalingam, who was wearing a purple prison uniform, did not appear to show any reaction to the ruling. M Ravi, Dharmalingam's former lawyer who has continued to assist in the case, told reporters that the Malaysian had exhausted legal options to escape the death penalty. Anti-death penalty group Reprieve said it believed Nagaenthran is intellectually disabled and should be protected from the death penalty. In a statement, Reprieve director Maya Foa called on Singapore President Halimah Yacob "to listen to the cries for mercy within Singapore and around the world." It was not immediately clear when the execution would be carried out. From 2016 to 2019, Singapore hanged 25 people - the majority for drug-related offences, according to official data. Here are todays leading news stories: COVID-19 Updates -- Vietnams Ministry of Health documented 83,376 COVID-19 cases on Monday, raising the countrys tally to 9,274,849, with 5,474,708 recoveries and 42,358 deaths. Society -- A large tree was uprooted and fell onto several cars and stalls on Nguyen Huy Luong Street in Binh Thanh District, Ho Chi Minh City during a heavy rain with strong gusts on Monday afternoon. -- Authorities in An Giang Province inaugurated on Monday a 21-kilometer road costing more than VND2.1 trillion (US$91.8 million), which is aimed at boosting connectivity among multiple provinces in the Mekong Delta. -- The Ho Chi Minh City Peoples Court on Monday sentenced a 32-year-old South Korean man to death for breaking into the house of a compatriot's family, killing one person and injuring two others, before stealing their car in late 2019. -- The Peoples Court in north-central Nghe An Province has handed a life sentence down to a 60-year-old man for shooting dead two people during an argument over land disputes in 2021. -- Police in northern Son La Province have arrested and initiated legal proceedings against a man, who previously had his genitalia cut off by his wife, for repeatedly raping her own teenage daughter between 2020 and 2022. Business -- The Vietnamese Ministry of Labor, War Invalids, and Social Affairs and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade signed a memorandum of understanding on behalf of the two governments to provide support for Vietnamese citizens to participate in the Australian Agriculture Visa Program. -- Many investors in Vietnam rushed to sell their FLC shares on Monday after hearing the news that FLC chairman Trinh Van Quyet had been banned from leaving the country for one month, with the selling pressure expected to linger in the next few days. Sports -- Vietnam will compete with Japan in their last match of the 2022 FIFA World Cup Asian qualifiers at Japans Saitama Stadium at 5:35 pm on Tuesday (Vietnam time). The match will be aired on FPT Play. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Le Hoa Binh, standing deputy chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee, passed away in a traffic accident on an expressway on Tuesday morning. Binh, 52, passed away at Long An Province General Hospital, director of the provincial Department of Health Huynh Minh Phuc confirmed on Tuesday noon, the Vietnam News Agency reported. The official was taken to the hospital in critical conditions after the accident occurring at 7:45 am on the Ho Chi Minh City - Trung Luong Expressway, when he was on a business trip to the Mekong Delta province of Tien Giang. The tire of the seven-seater car, driven by 33-year-old Nguyen Quang Vinh, suddenly blew out, causing the vehicle to flip over in Ben Luc District, Long An. It was carrying Binh and another man, Duong Tan Truoc, 41, at that time. The crash caused heavy injuries to all three people who were hospitalized for emergency care. Binh had cardiac and respiratory arrests when hospitalized and he succumbed to his severe conditions despite doctors' great efforts. This supplied photo shows the scene of the car accident that took the life of Standing Deputy Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Peoples Committee Le Hoa Binh on March 29, 2022. At 11:30 am on Tuesday, chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Peoples Committee Phan Van Mai and other municipal officials arrived at the hospital to take Binhs body back to the city for a funeral. The city government has directed relevant agencies to coordinate with Long An authorities to investigate the cause of the road crash. Details of Binhs funeral will be informed by the Office of the municipal People's Committee later. A native of central Quang Ngai Province, Binh had a master's degree in civil and industrial construction and a bachelor of economics, along with a certificate of advanced political theory. The official was named standing deputy chairman of the municipal People's Committee in December 2021 after he held the post of deputy chairman of the administration since December 2020. He became the director of the local construction department in April 2019. In March 2016, Binh was chairman of the Peoples Committee of the citys District 7. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A court in Vietnam has sentenced a South Korean man to death for killing a fellow citizen while committing a robbery in Ho Chi Minh City more than two years ago. Lee Hyeong Won, 32, received the death penalty for murder, a 14-year jail term for robbery, and a two-year imprisonment sentence for theft at his trial conducted by the Ho Chi Minh City Peoples Court on Monday. The court also ordered Lee to pay VND700 million (US$30,760) to the victims' family. The foreigner had come to work in Vietnam on different occasions and when committing the murder in late 2019, he was working for a karaoke parlor in District 5, Ho Chi Minh City. On December 20 that year, Lee went to District 7-based Phu My Hung Urban Residential Area, home to the biggest South Korean community in the city, to spread leaflets advertising the parlor, according to the indictment. When he took a break at a park on the afternoon of that day, Lee thought of robbing a residence in the area, and he eventually chose a house which he believed would be convenient for him to break in. The residence belonged to a South Korean couple, Y.S.Y., 50, and his wife J.Y.S., 49. He then left the area and returned at 9:00 pm the same day, when he climbed into the house from the window on the first floor and sheltered himself there, wearing a raincoat to avoid being recognized via security cameras. Around midnight when everybody in the house had gone to bed, he went into the kitchen on the fourth floor and got a pair of gloves and a knife. When J. detected Lee on the third floor and cried out for help, he stabbed her in the neck and then gave her husband several stabs when the man rushed to the scene to save his wife. The couples daughter, 16-year-old Y.J.J., was also stabbed as she tried to reach her parents from another room. The intruder then demanded that the girl show him the familys safe, but he failed to open it as she did not know the passcode to unlock the coffer. The girls father begged Lee to spare his family, and the robber, after stealing VND8 million (US$351), five smartphones, and a car key from the victims, fled the house in the familys car. Lee later threw the knife and all the smartphones into the Saigon River before driving the car to a vacant land plot in the city, where he burned it. The robber was arrested four days later while he was hiding in District 1. J. died of her serious neck injury later while her husband and daughter suffered wounds with the body injury rates of 25 percent and 38 percent, respectively. At the hearing, Lee suddenly declared that he had a mental illness and requested that the court order a psychiatric assessment on him before continuing the trial. The judging panel, however, rejected the defendants request, considering it groundless. As Lee had committed an extremely serious crime, in which he had attempted to kill many people, including a minor, he deserved the strictest punishment, the court concluded. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! The Vietnam Electricity Group (EVN) and the French Development Agency (AFD) on Monday signed a credit agreement with a non-government guaranteed loan worth 80 million (US$87.8 million) to implement a power distribution project by EVNs Southern Power Corporation (EVN SPC). The power distribution project is comprised of 33 sub-projects, covering Ben Tre, An Giang, and Binh Thuan, among others. These sub-projects are included in the electricity planning scheme for 2016-25 with a vision toward 2035, approved by the Ministry of Industry and Trade. All of the sub-projects show economic and financial feasibility, according to a feasibility report ratified by EVN SPC. At an estimated cost of over VND4.48 trillion ($196 million), the sub-projects are scheduled to last from 2022 to 2024. EVN chairman Duong Quang Thanh said the 80-million loan was expected to help expand the southern power grid and facilitate the use of renewable energy sources that were developing strongly in southern provinces. In his remarks, Herve Conan, director of the AFD in Vietnam, said these kinds of projects will help EVN and Vietnam achieve the target of low-carbon emissions and sustainable development, implement the Paris agreement on climate change, and fulfill its commitment of net zero emissions by 2050 made at the 26th UN Conference of Parties (COP26) in Glasgow last year. Since 2017, AFD loans have played a part in the Vietnamese electricity giants investment, meeting requirements for electricity supply in socio-economic development. The AFD has pioneered in providing direct loans for EVNs power projects without the government guarantee. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Police in Vietnam announced on Tuesday the legal proceedings against a 42-year-old local man for cutting tendons of his lovers nibling to browbeat her into moving in with him. Truong Quang Cuong, a 42-year-old resident of central Quang Ngai Province, is indicted for intentionally causing injury to other people. Cuong broke into the house of Duong, a resident of Nghia Hanh District in the province, with a face mask on and used a knife to cut the wrist of Tran Thien A., Duongs three-year-old child, when A. was home alone with their seven-year-old sibling on March 25. As A. cried loudly, Cuong drove away. As neighbors informed Duong of the incident, A. was taken to Quang Ngai General Hospital, where the child was diagnosed with broken tendons and blood vessels, before being transferred to Da Nang General Hospital in Da Nang, some 150 kilometers away. Police in Nghia Hanh District examined the scene, reviewed suspects in the vicinity, and checked local security cameras footage before determining that the case was related to Cuong and his 31-year-old lover, T.T.D., who is also Duongs younger sister. D. has no job and has been away from home for many years, with her family failing to know her whereabouts. Before the incident, Cuong and D. had a conflict at a beer shop in Tu Nghia District. Cuong beat D. after the woman refused to move in with him. D. then managed to run away. After beating around the bush to deny cutting A.s wrist with a knife, Cuong confessed to committing the crime for the purpose of threatening D. Forensic examination results showed that A. suffered an injury to the median nerve and the left radial artery of the left wrist, the second and third flexor tendons, and the long flexor tendon of the thumb. The childs total health damage rate was 35 percent. Previously, Cuong had had four convictions for theft of property and intentionally causing injury to other people and spent a total of 20 years in prison. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! The Vietnamese man who had his genitalia cut off by his wife last week has been arrested on suspicion of repeatedly raping his teenage step-daughter between 2020 and 2022. Police in Yen Chau District in northern Son La Province confirmed on Monday they had arrested Nguyen Van Hoan, 29, on charges of raping a person aged from 13 to 16. Police investigation shows that Hoans wife, 36-year-old H.T.N., has a daughter, 15-year-old H.T.R.L.. In August 2020, Hoan wanted to have sex with L. and decided to create a fake Facebook account named Hoang Long to flirt with her. L. was 13 years old at the time. After a few conversations, Hoan managed to trick the young girl into sending nude photos and videos of herself. Hoan then switched to his real Facebook account and blackmailed his step-daughter with these photos and videos. The man said he would post the nude content on social media unless L. agreed to copulate with him. With this threat, Hoan repeatedly forced L. to have sex with him when his wife was not home from August 26, 2020 to March 19, 2022. On the morning of March 19, N. installed a secret camera near her bed after she had often lost money for unknown reasons. After checking the camera later the same day, she was shocked to find her husband was having sexual intercourse with her own daughter on her bed. N. was infuriated and cut off Hoans penis and testicles with a knife on the same night before turning herself in to local police. She also reported her husbands crime and provided video footage as proof. Hoan was admitted to the hospital for emergency treatment. He was taken into custody after being discharged from the hospital. Police in Yen Chau District are finalizing necessary procedures to handle N.s action. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! The Australian Childrens Television Foundation turns 40 today. Over the years the organisation has developed, produced, distributed and invested in some of the most iconic childrens television programs ever made, including Round the Twist, My Place, Lift Off!, Lockie Leonard, Touch the Sun and Dance Academy. On 30 March 1982, the original members of the ACTF board met for the first time at the then Victorian Ministry for the Arts on Exhibition Street, Melbourne. The first board members included chair Ken Watts, widely considered the pioneer of Australian television current affairs; political activist, feminist and philanthropist, Dame Beryl Beaurepaire; broadcaster Phillip Adams, who played a key role in establishing the Australian film industry; and academic Quentin Bryce, who would go on to serve as Australias first female Governor-General. The founding director of the organisation was Dr Patricia Edgar. The ACTF was established in response to community concerns about the quality of the existing childrens television at the time. Its purpose is to make Australian childrens lives better through screen content that reflects our culture and values: inclusion, diversity, resilience, imagination, having fun and striving to be our best selves. The ACTF catalogue boasts more than 60 series, movies and telemovies, many of which have been aired right across the world Round the Twist alone has screened in 157 territories. The catalogue includes preschool aged animation, factual series, and live action drama and comedy programs tailored for children aged from lower primary through to young adult. Chair Janet Holmes a Court said: When I joined the board of the ACTF many years ago I couldnt have imagined what an amazing journey it would be. What an enormous body of work from Winners, Round the Twist and Lift Off through to Dance Academy, Little Lunch and MaveriX, which premieres on the ABC this week. Each show goes out into the world, delights audiences everywhere, and lives on in the dreams and aspirations of each generation watching. The shows we support reflect our Australian values, the diversity of our community and our sense of humour, but they are watched by children in more than 170 countries as well as children here. The world has changed and the way we watch television has changed, so weve had to evolve and adapt to keep up. Australian childrens television is such a precious and valuable gift to our culture, I do hope it goes on forever. Actor and writer Olivia Deeble began her career with the ACTF, starring in Little Lunch (Gristmill) from the age of 12. The ACTF then supported her first writing venture, More Than This, a ground-breaking teen drama currently streaming on Paramount+ which deals with issues including substance use, body image and online harm. Olivia said: I love the ACTF. I loved everything they were involved in growing up: Nowhere Boys, Mortified and especially Dance Academy. I was lucky enough to be in Little Lunch, which changed my life. I am so honoured that they supported a 17-year-old who basically walked in and said, I want to show what it is really like in high school for teens today. It has to have LGBTQI+ characters, teen actors have to play the parts, the dialogue has to be authentic and it has to cover these issues they [understood] how important these issues were. The ACTFs impact reaches far beyond creating high quality Australian childrens content. The organisation has contributed to policy development for the childrens television production industry and was instrumental in the establishment of the ABC childrens channel in 2009. The ACTF has also made a significant contribution to Australian education, with a special team dedicated to developing teaching resources which support its content and deliver educational outcomes. These resources are used in schools right across the country. In 2020, the Commonwealth Government announced the investment of an additional $20 million in funding over two years for the ACTF, enabling the organisation to invest in more high-quality locally made content than ever before and boosting childrens television production. Its most recent titles include More Than This, The PMs Daughter, a political comedy drama television series for tweens, and MaveriX, a high adrenaline drama series for 10- to 14-year-olds set to premiere on the ABC this Friday 1 April. ACTF CEO Jenny Buckland said: Right now the ACTF is busier than it has ever been, supporting shows that continue to break new ground and capture the hearts and imaginations of todays children. It looks like the best is yet to come. Netflix has partnered with the Australian Childrens Television Foundation to fund the development of two new original Australian childrens series. Were putting the call out for your ideas for live action series aimed at primary or tween audiences, and one animation series aimed at preschoolers, with the brief that they celebrate Australia in some way. From landscapes and animals, to sport or culture, or just some good old family humour; the choice is up to you and your imagination!, a statement read. The initiative is looking for new concepts that are at early stage development, to be funded to develop a full series bible, storylines and pilot script, with the intention to move to further development if required, or be considered for a commission and financing by Netflix and ACTF. Jenny Buckland, ACTF CEO says, The ACTF is thrilled to be partnering with Netflix to find and develop two new Australian childrens series for their global audience. Australian kids love Netflix and they deserve to see their own shows on the platform, and Australian producers make kids shows the whole world loves its a great match. For the live action series (6-12 years), we are looking for shows that will appeal to our kid and tween target through quick and relevant hooks. Ideally, they will be light in tone dramas, fantasy, adventure, or even unscripted. Examples of quick hooks could be sports, mythical creatures, lore, outdoor survival, and the like. We look for shows that our core audience will find aspirational and can easily be described in one sentence. For the preschool series, were open to a variety of formats (2D, CG, mixed media), and because of the way Netflix works, we dont have a mandatory episodic runtime. Feel free to get creative and let us know the best length for the stories you want to tell! While were not looking for short form series (less than 3 minutes), we would suggest that theres a sense of consistency across episodes (length-wise) so our young audience knows what to expect. Submissions will be accepted from 30 April to 31 May 2022. www.actf.com.au Villager Caroline is seen in a withered maize crops field in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) NAIROBI, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. "I planted the crops as soon as the rains started, but they stopped soon after. The crop has failed completely. We are facing hunger, I don't have anything to eat," Zawadi Msafiri, the farm owner told Xinhua at her farm recently. "I had 40 cows, 32 of them died because of drought. I also planted maize and the crop failed. We are barely surviving. I don't know what my children will eat next or if I will be able to take them to school," said 45-year-old Caroline in Kilifi, adding her cows were the main source of income for her family. Caroline observed that getting food has become harder, with her family mainly relying on relief food. "Most of the time we only drink porridge," she said. For Eliud Karisa, another Kilifi resident, he lost three of his cows and several goats to the ongoing drought. "I now have only four goats. There is neither food nor water. I can't even feed my children or take them to school," he said. If animal prices were good, he observed, he would sell the goats to cater to his needs but traders are buying at very low prices. "I can't sell, I better feed them some of the rations we receive hoping that it would rain and the price would increase once again," he said. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. "We have lost some 9,500 animals due to lack of pasture and water. People require relief food. The situation is getting worse, if it does not rain we might experience severe drought," he said. Ndamunga noted up to 219,000 people in the area are currently facing acute hunger, up from 145,000 people last year. According to NDMA, the latest crisis has been fomented by failed October to December 2021 short rains, leading to poor crop production and low pasture and water resources for livestock. Sunny and dry weather conditions prevailed over most parts of the country during February. "We are not receiving adequate rains to plant crops like maize, which take seven months to mature. For the current forecast for Kilifi, we might get around 330mm of rainfall, down from 550mm in the past. We are, therefore, asking farmers to plant drought-resistant and early-maturing crops," said Ndamunga. About 3.1 million people in Kenya were in need of urgent food assistance and at least 1.5 million livestock had died, according to Short Rains Food and Nutrition Security assessment released by NDMA in February this year. To alleviate the hunger crisis, the Kenyan government has been distributing relief food, building water pans, trucking water for livestock and sending cash to vulnerable families. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. "This drought risks becoming one of the worst climate-induced emergencies seen in recent history in the Horn of Africa," the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warned in its latest humanitarian update on March 23. It said families are taking desperate measures to survive, with thousands leaving their homes in search of food, water and pasture. According to the OCHA, the October-December 2020, March-May 2021 and October-December 2021 seasons were all marred by below-average rainfall, leaving large swathes of Somalia, southern and south-eastern Ethiopia, and northern and eastern Kenya facing exceptional drought. "Latest forecasts indicate that the March to May rainy season is likely to be average to below-average. If this season fails, it would result in an unprecedented (in the last 40 years) sequence of four below-normal rainfall seasons and major increases in food insecurity would be expected," OCHA warned. It said more action is urgently required to avert large-scale loss of life in the Horn of Africa in the period ahead and to enable communities to return to self-reliance and build resilience against future shocks. According to OCHA, humanitarian partners have appealed for more than 4.4 billion U.S. dollars to provide life-saving assistance and protection to about 29.1 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia in 2022. "We urgently call on donors to fund these appeals so that we can immediately respond to the life-threatening needs across the Horn of Africa. " OCHA said. Villagers Zawadi Msafiri (R) and Caroline are seen in a withered maize crop field in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) Villagers fetch water in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) Villager Eliud Karisa shows the remains of his dead cows in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) Villager Zawadi Msafiri is seen in a withered maize crop field in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) The only eight remaining cows in Caroline's home are seen in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) Livestock keep cool in the shade of a roof in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) A boy fetches water in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) A boy loads a bucket of water onto a bicycle in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) A water bank is pictured in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) Buckets of water are seen in Caroline's house in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) Villagers sit in the shade of a roof in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) Livestock are seen on the drought field in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022. Scattered on the five-acre farm in Bandari village, Kidemu sub-location in Kenya's coastal Kilifi County, were withered maize crops. Adam Ndamunga, an officer with Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) in Kilifi, said the drought situation in the region started in August 2021 and has been progressing due to inadequate rains. The United Nations relief agency said the Horn of Africa is experiencing one of its worst droughts in recent history, with more than 13 million people severely food insecure in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) Nine has confirmed Season 4 Love Island Australia will be filmed in Mallorca, Spain later this year. Sophie Monk will return as host to steer the new singles towards finding their perfect match while soaking up the Mediterranean sun. Im so excited to be back as host of Love Island Australia, and with overseas holidays finally coming into view I cant wait to return to beautiful Mallorca to see whats in store for our brand-new Islanders, she said Love Island Australia is produced by ITV Studios Australia for the 9Network. Casting is now open via 9Now. Network 10 boss Beverly McGarvey has described the loss of Neighbours as devastating but reiterated the show would sadly wind up. The executive vice president and chief content officer of Paramount Australia and New Zealand, unable to attend the Screen Forever conference in person due to COVID isolation, today told delegates she was hopeful the show might return in the future if another broadcaster could be found. I think its devastating, she said. Obviously, that show had 2 commissioners and unfortunately, the UK for their own good reasons, wanted to invest their money into UK content, and unfortunately, Fremantle were unable to find another UK partner. Now maybe Im an optimist, but Im still grasping at the faint hope that someday they will find another partner -and we would love to continue to be the Australian partner. The show is iconic. I grew up watching Kylie & Jason in that era. It was kind of my first taste of Australia. We would love to be able to keep doing it. But unfortunately, unless they find international partners, its not possible for us to continue. As youve seen from reading it all, theres been a lot of attempts at restructuring things and trying to work out how its possible. Unfortunately at this point, they just dont have that buyer on the other side of the world at the moment. Asked about the loss to the production sector, particularly in Victoria, McGarvey replied, It is a devastating loss for (those) skills people often start out on those big shows, because its multi episodic. So I think, in terms of investment obviously, from a very practical point of view, we have to continue to make Australian content, and we will do so. Weve got lots of drama announcements coming up- but no matter what way you cut it, Neighbours is still a loss. Were very, very sad. We really didnt want it to happen. BHP eyes $10 billion Chilean investments, but only with 'legal certainty' FILE PHOTO: Sheets of copper cathode are pictured at BHP Billiton's Escondida, the world's biggest copper mine, in Antofagasta (Reuters) - BHP Group Ltd said on Tuesday it will invest more than $10 billion in Chile to fuel growth in the world's largest copper producing nation for the next 50 years, but only under certain regulatory and fiscal situations. Chile, which supplies nearly a quarter of the world's copper, recently elected a new leftist government, is redrafting its constitution and considering raising its mining royalty to fund expanded social programs. Several copper miners have paused investment decisions in the country while the political negotiations play out. "We love Chile. We would like to stay here. We would like to grow in this country. But in order to do that, it will require fiscal stability, legal certainty and a clear pathway to permit," Ragnar Udd, BHP's president of minerals, Americas, told the CRU-CESCO World Copper Conference in Santiago. BHP already operates Chile's Escondida, the world's largest copper mine. Udd spoke at the conference not long after Marcela Hernando Perez, the new Chilean mining minister, who said that Santiago does not plan to nationalize the country's mining sector. Perez had left by the time Udd spoke. Udd said that the investments from BHP would fund a new concentrator and leach processing facilities, new mining areas and projects to help reduce the company's carbon emissions. "I hope that I've convinced you today that under the right investment conditions, we can deliver copper to support the world of the future in a way that is sustainable and create social value for the communities and societies in which we operate," Udd said. (Reporting by Ernest Scheyder and Fabian Cambero; Editing by Marguerita Choy) Seven European Union countries, including France, have urged their citizens to refrain from joining the Ukrainian military resistance against Russias invading troops. The justice ministers of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg and Belgium said in a statement Monday that they "have unanimously discouraged Europeans from joining" the ranks of voluntary fighters heading to the war in Ukraine, following an appeal by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. After Russian invaded Ukraine on 24 February, Zelensky invited foreigners to join an "International Legion" that would fight alongside Ukrainians. On 6 March the Ukrainian foreign ministry said around 20,000 foreigners mostly Europeans - had answered the call. "We obviously discourage people to travel to a war zone," said French interior minister Gerald Darmanin, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the 27-member European Union. "To my knowledge, there have been very few departures from France that could be confirmed," he said, adding that some have been caught on the border, and convinced to turn around. He aid France is keeping an eye on those who use firearms professionally, like police or military. The Ukrainian foreign legion's only requirement to join is military or firearms experience, according to representatives of a website that is helping organise the effort. "Intelligence services are working on groups that could be interested, he added. (with AFP) KIGALI, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Rwanda Tuesday denied accusations that its soldiers supported Congolese rebels of the March 23 Movement (M23) in their latest clashes with government troops in North Kivu Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) said fighting with M23 broke out early Monday in North Kivu province after the rebels attacked military positions in Tchanzu and Runyonyi in Rutshuru territory. General Sylvain Ekenge, spokesman for the North Kivu governor, claimed that two soldiers of the Rwanda Defense Forces (RDF) were arrested during the attacks, and accused Rwanda of conspiring with the M23 rebels. But in a statement Tuesday, Rwanda dismissed the allegations as baseless. "We would like to categorically refute the baseless accusations and state that the RDF is not by any means involved in the belligerent activities across in DRC," a statement signed by Francois Habitegeko, governor of the neighboring Western Province of Rwanda said. The statement also denied that two Rwandan soldiers were arrested in the attacks, saying the RDF does not have any member with the alleged names of the arrested presented to the press. Rwanda called on Expanded Joint Verification Mechanism (EJVM), a regional military framework for 12 countries of the Great Lakes region to investigate the "absurd" allegations against RDF. The fighting in Rutshuru territory sent hundreds of refugees into Uganda. This is reportedly the third time since October 2021 that the FARDC has accused Rwanda of supporting the M23 in its attacks against its positions in the Rutshuru territory. The M23 is a group of former rebels of the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP). The name originated from the March 23, 2009, agreement between the CNDP and the DRC government. M23 leaders have accused the government of failing to respect that agreement. University of North Georgia (UNG) President Bonita Jacobs disbursed more than $117,000 among 15 Presidential Incentive Awards to provide institutional support for faculty and staff to pursue new and innovative ideas in the 2022-23 academic year. "This year's recipients represent outstanding scholarship and innovative projects that were selected from an impressive pool of proposals," Jacobs said. "This program enriches the student experience at UNG by encouraging scholarly and creative work that supports faculty and staff excellence." In 2013, Jacobs initiated a program to incentivize faculty and staff scholarship in its many forms, ranging from research to creative innovations. Since then more than $2.3 million has been invested in research and scholarly work. University of North Georgia (UNG) student Kyle Jones is a math peer mentor who has been referred to by his professors as someone who shows patience, compassion, and support when talking with his classmates. Though he has a daunting class load, he also continues to do extra reading into more advanced levels and constantly talks with his professors about how he can learn more. Jones, who is pursuing a Bachelor of Science in mathematics with an expected graduation date of May 2024, was recently nominated for UNG's Clark-Theodore Outstanding Nontraditional Student Award, which celebrates students' hard work, dedication, and academic excellence. He was enthused and curious as to whether he would win the distinction. "Its kind of cool," Jones said, "I just try to make the environment I'm in better. Since I am in this world, I should want to help make it better. Applying that to support my classmates is the same thing, but instead of the whole world it's my community and surroundings. " He does just that, supporting his peers, as a math peer mentor. Jones came into the role because of his thirst for knowledge which he first experienced when taking his online calculus class in summer 2021. "We had these discussion posts. Eventually, I got bored and wrote a lot to explain solutions to problems. It turned out that I wasn't half bad at explaining math to other people," Jones said. His biggest piece of advice is that it's ok to be a little naive as college is all about asking questions. He encourages his peers to use the resources available to them, especially professors' office hours, as he says it opens the doors to a number of opportunities. Kyle is also vice-president of the Math Club and views his role in leadership as the act of bringing something new into the world. Jones is expected to graduate in 2024 and hopes to work at an engineering companys research and development department doing what he loves math. NAIROBI, March 29 (Xinhua) -- A total of 754,906 children under five years of age and 103,286 pregnant and lactating women require treatment for acute malnutrition as a result of Kenya's ongoing drought, a government official said Tuesday. Patrick Amoth, the director-general for health at the Ministry of Health, said in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, that the government has activated the nutrition response which includes the supply of lifesaving commodities, nutrition screening and integrated outreaches. "The ministry has also developed draft guidelines for maternal, infant and young child nutrition in emergency which are intended to guide the implementation of multi-sectoral actions to protect, promote and support exclusive breastfeeding as well as safe and appropriate complementary feeding practices during emergencies," Amoth said during the official opening of the first national symposium on maternal, infant and young child nutrition. He noted that the most affected populations by acute malnutrition are those in arid and semi-arid counties. "The prevailing drought has adversely affected the most vulnerable groups especially, children under five years of age, pregnant and lactating women," he said. According to the Ministry of Health, the most notable impact of the drought is the interruption of breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices resulting in an increased risk of malnutrition and illness. Amoth added that malnutrition is a leading cause of infant and child morbidity, mortality and hospital admission, a situation that urgently requires interventions. Isabelle Muller awarded scholarships to students with difficult circumstances. Photo courtesy of LOAN Stiftung Foundation Isabelle Muller was the fifth child of a Vietnamese mother and a French father. Growing up in a poor village in France, experiencing deprivation, racism, and even being sexually abused by her own father during her teenage years, Muller managed to overcome adversity through education. Like her mother, she is aware that only by improving her knowledge and being resilient could she change her life. She studied German, English and Russian languages at Francois Rabelais University and at the Centre dEtudes Pratiques de Langues Vivantes, Tours, France. She became known to many when she published the book Loan -- Tu cuoc oi cua mot con phuong hoang (Loan -- From the Life of a Phoenix), which was voted in the top five at the 2015 Kindle Storyteller Awards. Muller also participated in many TV programmes to talk about sexual abuse and encouraged victims to speak up to protect themselves. Recently, she returned to Vietnam for the launch of her second book Phoenix Daughter Hope Was My Way. Released in Germany in 2009, it tells the autobiographical story of an outstanding woman with Vietnamese blood running through her veins who defied fate to become a successful businesswoman. The Vietnamese version published by the Ho Chi Minh City General Publishing House was translated as Con Gai cua Chim Phuong Hoang: Hy Vong La Con uong cua Toi by Truong Hong Quang. The memoir not only gives hope to victims of sexual abuse but also to students of LOAN Stiftung, a foundation she founded in her mother's name. Muller told Viet Nam News that she had vivid memories of when her family had no beds and were treated coldly by others because they were poor. She recalled how difficult it was for them to preserve their dignity and fight the loneliness that had settled in their hearts. That's why I want to go back to Vietnam where my mother was born, to help children in disadvantaged areas have a better life, she said. Established in May 2016, the foundation has offered help to hundreds of ethnic minority children in remote areas in the provinces Ha Giang, Tuyen Quang, Cao Bang and Lao Cai. At first, I planned to choose Ha Tinh Province, where my mother came from. But after talking with experts, we realised that there are many provinces with much more difficult living conditions. The places we choose to support are very difficult to access. For this reason, many aid organisations do not go there. But this does not stop us from bringing better things to the children here, she said. During its six years of operation, LOAN Stiftung has built about 20 kindergartens, schools and boarding houses, as well as provided educational supplies and direct support on-site for educational access. A school built by LOAN Stiftung foundation in Ha Giang Province. Photo courtesy of LOAN Stiftung "We started with small schools and classrooms. Then we developed them into two-floor buildings with canteens, libraries and sleeping quarters, she said. Earlier this year, we also provided scholarships to 66 orphans and poor students to help them continue their dream of accessing education and leading an independent life. Of course, we have scholarship requirements because we are not a big organisation yet. But I'm glad we were able to provide help directly to needy children instead of just building buildings with big signs. The support of LOAN Stiftung and sponsors has brought hope, better living conditions and education to the children of poor areas. They feel grateful and strive to achieve better academic results to be worthy of the help they receive. A lot of changes have happened to the children after receiving the scholarships. They understand that this is a huge opportunity for them because with this money they can buy something they really need or cover expenses, she said. Some students even wrote nice letters to me and to the project sponsors. They say it means a lot to them because they know that there are people who are silently helping them and believing in them. Students are reading books sponsored by LOAN Stiftung. Photo courtesy of LOAN Stiftung Talking about future projects, Muller said she planned to continue to launch a book in Vietnam this summer. "It's a children's book with stories and drawings made by myself. With a theme of life and death, I think the book will be very suitable for children who are going through the loss of a loved one, especially in this post-pandemic time, she said. Source: Vietnam News Vietnamese-German writer turns pain into positivity Vietnamese-German writer Isabelle Muller is often asked if she wrote her memoir Phoenix Daughter Hope Was My Way as therapy to deal with past trauma. While places like Eastland County and Coryell County make statewide headlines for wildfires burning tens of thousands of acres, a grass fire near Crawford on Sunday showed that the danger of sparks igniting dry vegetation is equally real in McLennan County. The combination of ongoing drought, above average temperatures and high winds put dry grass, fields, junipers and mesquite in the outlying areas outside Waco in the same kind of danger as Abilene, Mineral Wells and Brownwood, Texas A&M Forest Service spokesperson Riley Moran said Monday. These kinds of fuel can ignite very easily and make a fire thats hard to control, Moran said Monday. The northwestern approximately two-thirds of McLennan County was under extreme drought Monday, according to the U. S. Drought Monitor. Drought conditions in the rest of the county were labeled severe, and the entire county remains under a burn ban. More than 54,000 acres burned last week in Eastland County, where Waco and Hewitt firefighters went to assist a multiagency effort. More than 17,000 acres burned in Coryell County on Sunday, tinging the skies with haze as far away as Fort Worth, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. By Monday afternoon, the Texas A&M Forest Service estimated that the Coryell fires, known as the Crittenberg Complex, had burned more than 33,000 acres and was 40% under control. Another fire along the Bosque River near Iredell kept Bosque County fire officials busy Sunday, burning 927 acres before it was extinguished Monday. In McLennan County, a range fire of some 110 acres a mile south of Crawford took 35 to 40 firefighters from six different agencies about three hours to get under control on Sunday afternoon. Crawford Volunteer Fire Department continued to quench hot spots Monday morning. Its hard to stop a fire with the winds blowing so hard, Crawford Fire Chief Brian Westerfield said Monday. He estimated his team contended with winds of 20 to 30 mph while putting that fire out. Welding, and sparks from cars and trucks driving down the highway, are starting a lot of fires (in my area), Westerfield said. About 100 to 110 acres burned (Sunday) before we could get it under control. Westerfield said the team that worked with him had to move some livestock and just managed to control the fire before it endangered some houses. On Monday, critically to extremely dry vegetation across the landscape supported wildfire activity when exposed to so-called critical fire weather, which includes prevailing warmer than normal temperatures and high wind speeds, a Texas A&M Forest Service statement on Monday reads. By Tuesday, the potential for large wildfires will escalate as critical fire weather is expected to develop over a large area of the state west of the I-35 corridor, according to the statement. When these critical to extreme weather conditions combine with the extremely dry vegetation across the landscape there is a possibility that large, significant wildfires will occur and may impact communities, the statement reads. Fuel in western McLennan County is in similar condition to the areas of Texas at greatest risk of wildfires, Moran said. A thunderstorm chance of 90% is in the National Weather Service forecast for Tuesday night in Waco and surrounding areas. Though Moran said that if the low humidity, warm temperatures and high winds resume after the thunderstorms, then the fire risk would climb again quickly in McLennan County and across Texas. He said property owners can take steps lower the wildfire risk on their properties: Trim hedges and other plants back away from buildings. Keep lawns mowed and watered. Observe burn bans, which include bans on burning brush. Exercise due caution when welding or doing any sort of hot work. Some of those Waco and Hewitt firefighters who helped contain the Eastland Complex last week moved on to Bosque County over the weekend, said Robby Bergerson, executive deputy chief of Waco Fire Department. Bergerson coordinates deployments of firefighters in support of wildfires and other emergencies for McLennan County and 11 surrounding counties. Hewitt Fire Captain Cody Richardson swapped out for another Hewitt firefighter as the deployment extended another seven days. Waco and Hewitt firefighters were scheduled to move to Mineral Wells on Monday night to prepare for extreme fire danger there, Bergerson said. Meanwhile, McLennan County farmers and ranchers have joined efforts to help their counterparts in wildfire areas. The McLennan County Farm Bureau last week sent a truckload of Purina feed from Bar None Feed to farmers and ranchers affected by the Eastland Complex fires, local Farm Bureau president Ronnie Dowdle said Monday. He also said the particular feed purchased is blended for horses, cattle, sheep, goats and good for all livestock. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. A McLennan County Sheriffs Office detective will take his investigative and training skills to the Polish border with Ukraine next week to help Polish authorities and Unbound prevent human trafficking and aid victims. Detective Joseph Scaramucci, who leads the counter human trafficking unit in the McLennan County Sheriffs Office, will go to the border of Ukraine and Poland where human traffickers are exploiting refugees from Ukraine, McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara said at press conference Tuesday. There Scaramucci will train Polish authorities. Unbound is a Waco area nonprofit that works through its offices across Texas and internationally in South Africa, Mongolia and most recently Poland and Ukraine to prevent human trafficking and aid people exploited by traffickers, Unbound Director of Programs Allison Denman said Tuesday. Research by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime demonstrated how people fleeing conflict are vulnerable to be victims of trafficking, according to a UN press release Thursday. Latest figures from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees indicate around 90% of the over 3.6 million refugees from Ukraine are women and children. Human traffickers are reported to be posing as relief workers in Poland, promising women and children refugees (from the war in Ukraine) help and safety and then exploiting them and forcing them into prostitution, Scaramucci said at the press conference Tuesday. Crisis and war increases vulnerabilities as well as opportunities to exploit people in need, especially refugees, Ghada Waly, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said in a statement. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime works closely with other international organizations, nongovernmental organizations and law enforcement authorities to coordinate responses to the current human trafficking risks, according to the statement. International relief organizations have requested our (Unbounds) assistance, and Polish authorities welcome our training to help refugees from the Ukraine and prevent human trafficking, Denman said. Denman said Scaramucci will travel to Poland with Unbounds team next week and train border police there to look out for signs of human trafficking. Part of his trip will be paid for by Unbounds donors and part of it Scaramucci will pay himself, Denman said. McLennan County Sheriffs Office Chief Deputy David Kilcrease said Scaramucci is the right man to help train Polish authorities in preventing human trafficking. Detective Scaramucci is well known around the country for his experience and the operations he has led countering human trafficking, Kilcrease said. Kilcrease said Scaramucci also leads training for law enforcement agencies across the United States and as far away as Mongolia. He teaches them what to look for and how to help exploited women and children. He also teaches them to arrest the traffickers and the pimps, not those who have been forced into prostitution against their will, Kilcrease said. Scaramucci said he has no cases right now with leads in Poland or Ukraine, although his team did recently arrest suspects the Los Angeles area in connection with cases that began in McLennan County. Im going to train the border police and other authorities and help them with some technology they dont necessarily have access to, Scaramucci said. He declined to say just what that technology might be. Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Debbie Millers shopping cart was brimming with good news Monday. She had time to buy groceries for the Waco Child Development Center, where she is executive director, and knew the nonprofit could cover the cost. A promise of $446,000 in funding from the state was a cherry atop the treats she purchased. The Texas Workforce Commission confirmed in an email Monday it will distribute $3.45 billion in federal aid to Texas child care providers, an attempt to improve their financial footing as they recover from the financial stress of COVID-19. The TWC also announced it will allocate another $314 million in child care scholarships, to be made available to low-income residents. That brings funding to $607 million through 2024. TWC will disburse the money through local Workforce Solutions partners statewide, including Workforce Solutions for the Heart of Texas in Waco. The program is federally funded through the Child Care Development Block Grant stimulus package. Child care scholarships for low-income Texas families are vital for the overall success of the Texas labor force, said Julian Alvarez, the TWC commissioner representing labor, quoted in a TWC news release. Affordable, quality child care has a ripple effect on the economy and at home. The program will offer 12-month child care subsidies. The TWC discussed its $3.5 billion program in a news release. Availability of child care providers . . . is very important to the Texas economy, the agency said. Families need quality child care in order to be able to work. This week, TWC will send invitations to approximately 13,400 eligible child care providers to apply for those billions of dollars worth of aid. The release notes that the federal money comes from the 2022 Child Care Relief Fund. Miller already knew of its availability but expressed surprise she received a positive response so quickly. The grant is retroactive to September 2021, and must be spent by May 2023. Miller was forming a laundry list of needs in her mind, though the nonprofits board surely will have its own priorities. We need a new roof on the building, and we may buy new vehicles. Those we have now are 98, 99 models. We serve 14 different schools a day, which means travel, said Miller, who hesitated before revealing exactly how much the Waco Child Development Centers two campuses will receive. Sit down, she said. This is your tax dollar at work. Not that its services are not desperately needed, or appreciated. The organization has room for 110 youngsters at its location in Cotton Palace Park, and 106 slots are filled. A smaller center that can accommodate 45 infants is less than half full, said Miller, blaming staffing shortages. Child care availability is really bad right now, said Miller. We get 20 to 30 calls a day, and thats not exaggerating. I got a call right before I left the office from someone looking for summer care. We charge $140 a week to care for infants, $100 a week for others, primarily preschoolers. Were one of the cheapest in town, and we do try to work with parents. We offer cut rates if possible, and we can do that only because were a nonprofit, Miller said. Were stingy with our dollars when we have to be, and as long as were not going under financially, well try to help parents. She said parents with children there have jobs that run the gamut, from restaurant and municipal employees to workers in poultry plants, construction and industry, and people who drive in front of those wide-load haulers. Relief funds available under the TWCs $3.45 billion program can be used to cover many expenses, including paying rent and utility bills or buying supplies. It also can cover temporary wage increases or other strategies to recruit and retain staff, said an email from TWCs Angela Woellner. Hermann Pereira, Prosper Wacos chief program officer, said the availability of child care, or the lack thereof, may not have reached a critical level. But hes of the opinion high-quality child care is lacking locally. Waco-based economist Ray Perryman said that has an effect on the economy. Access to child care has been one of the greatest impediments to getting people back to work, he said. It was particularly acute at the height of the pandemic when most schools were remote. The workforce shortage is an ongoing issue having primarily to do with demographics as the baby boomers retire and birth rates declines and, to a lesser extensive, more restrictive immigration policies, Perryman said. It was around before the pandemic and will be with us for decades, and anything that facilitates people coming to work is useful. Current funding reflects COVID-related legislation, but affordable child care is a long-term challenge, Perryman said. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. CAIRO, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi on Tuesday expressed Egypt's "unwavering support" for Libya to hold presidential and parliamentary elections, said the Egyptian presidency. The Egyptian leader made the remarks during a meeting with Mohamed al-Menfi, head of the Libyan Presidential Council, during which they discussed the latest developments of the Libyan crisis. Sisi expressed "Egypt's unwavering support for the Libyan state institutions to undertake their responsibilities and role, leading to holding the presidential and parliamentary elections," said Egyptian presidential spokesman Bassam Rady in a statement. The Egyptian president also stressed his country's support for the efforts to achieve Libya's greater interests and preserve its territorial integrity. For his part, al-Menfi praised Egypt's "vital role" and tireless efforts to restore security and stability in Libya by supporting comprehensive reconciliation efforts among the Libyans and reunifying Libya's state institutions. He also appreciated Cairo's support for the implementation of the withdrawal of all foreign forces and mercenaries from Libya in order to preserve Libya's unity, security, and sovereignty. The talks came amid rising tensions between Libyan political forces, which have led to the indefinite postponement of the general elections that were supposed to be held in late 2021. Libya has been suffering insecurity and chaos since the fall of its late leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, with mercenaries and foreign fighters reportedly operating for years in the country. On Feb. 10, the Libyan parliament unanimously voted for Fathi Bashagha as the country's new prime minister, replacing Abdul-Hamid Dbeibah who vowed that his government will remain in office until the general elections are held. The Henry Downs Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution announced the winners of the 2021-22 American History Essay Contest and the Patriots of the American Revolution High School Essay Contest. Zachary Henry, a sophomore at Vanguard College Preparatory School, won the regional and state Patriots of the American Revolution essay contest, writing about Benedict Arnold: Skilled Commander, Overlooked Talent. His essay advanced to compete in the DAR national essay contest. The high school contest invited students to select a figure from American Revolution era and discuss how he or she influenced the course of the revolution and contributed to new nations founding. Zachary views Arnold as a very conflicted man who made an admittedly terrible mistake, which in most peoples minds unfairly canceled out all of his good deeds. Zachary noted the strategic victories Arnold achieved for the Colonial war effort, his personal sacrifices, and George Washingtons acknowledgement of Arnold as his finest field commander. Caleb Vaughan, a seventh-grade home-schooled student, submitted the winning American History essay, titled The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: Memorial, Meaning, and Memory. This years theme, open to students in fifth through seventh grades, was The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Nov. 11, 2021, was the 100th anniversary of the tombs dedication. Students were asked to imagine they had a brother who died on the battlefields of France during World War I, and their family attended the dedication of the tomb. Caleb hopes to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, D.C. Caleb and Zachary were presented with a chapter winner certificate, a bronze American history medal and a check for $50. Writing contest deadline The Waco Womens Lions Club and Meals on Wheels Waco are hosting a Legacy Story writing contest for seniors to share their stories of a recent experience, or one from childhood, that helped make them who they are today; or a pandemic-related story that has changed their lives or the life of someone close to them. Seniors ages 65 and up are invited to enter the free contest. Legible double-spaced entries of three pages or fewer will be judged, with winners announced at a special Legacies Tea event to be held April 30 at the Harrison Senior Center, 1718 N. 42nd St. Entries should be mailed to Legacies, c/o Rose Moyer, P.O. Box 895, Hewitt, TX, 76643. The entry deadline is Wednesday. For more information or questions, email rosemoyer1@aol.com. Kiwanis Seniors of Waco Meals on Wheels representatives will present the program at Wednesdays Kiwanis Seniors meeting. The club meets at 9:30 a.m. at Golden Corral, 618 N. Valley Mills Drive. Call 817-991-1343 for more information. Dog obedience classes Centex Kennel Club is hosting dog a obedience class, beginning Thursday, which covers basic commands and manners. It lasts six weeks and costs $90. It will take place at Quail Creek Training Center, 705 S. Robinson Drive. Proof of vaccinations, including rabies, distemper, parvo, and hepatitis, is required. Call 406-439-7157 for more information. Free skin cancer screenings Free skin cancer screenings will be offered from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday at Epiphany Dermatology, 7106 Sanger Ave. Walk-ups are welcome. Appointments may be scheduled at thesunbus.org. Submit printed or typed items to Briefly, P.O. Box 2588, Waco, 76702-2588; or email goingson@wacotrib.com. The Russian invasion will significantly curtail Ukrainian grain exports and The "European breadbasket." The Russian invasion of Ukraine, ill-advised as it was, may have failed to achieve one of Russia's prime goals, to topple Kyiv. Following Tuesday's negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian officials, Russia stated it would "dramatically curtail" its military assault on the Ukrainian towns of Kyiv and Chernihiv. Even so, the ramification felt by the loss of the Ukrainian agricultural crops, even if it never becomes a Russian tactical victory, will have severe consequences for the world. It's possible that the humiliating withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan could worsen the plight of Afghans already suffering from famine. There are estimates that more than 20 million Afghans, including three million children, are suffering from severe malnutrition. Putin's invasion will produce damage so much broader than just the geopolitical effects seen by his dispute to stop Ukraine from joining NATO. Thousands of people already facing daily famine will face little hope in their circumstances to get better. This year, Ukraine, which is known as "Europe's breadbasket," is predicted to account for 12 percent of world wheat exports and over 20 percent of global maize output. Ukrainian grain exports will be severely limited due to the Russian invasion. Sanctions may also prevent future Russian wheat sales. As a result of the waning of American hegemony, there has been a cascade of consequences. In a typical year, around 9 million people die of hunger across the globe. This year is unlike any other. Because of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which was likely prompted by the United States' failure in Afghanistan, less food will be able to reach the market. As a result, millions more people might perish from starvation, many of them in Afghanistan. A more catastrophic effect on world nutrition is likely to result from the reduction in wheat available for sale (combined with an increase in the price of what is available) than the reduction in production caused by somewhat colder weather a decade earlier. Remember when the price of wheat skyrocketed a decade ago? If you do, you'll recall that uprisings and rebellions swept unstable regions of the globe as a result of the spike in the price of wheat. In Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, governments were "sent packing," and rebellions were initiated in Syria and Yemen that have since played out. An unstable nation-state (potential failed state) stretches from North Africa through the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and it is becoming more prevalent. Between 1960 and 2013, grain imports from throughout the globe surged by more than fivefold. This put more than one-third of the world's nation-states in the precarious position of relying on imports for one-quarter or more of the main grains they eat, putting them at risk of famine. In sixty-two nations, the amount of farmland available is insufficient to meet the population's needs. In almost one-third of those nations, or twenty-two countries to be precise, agricultural goods consumed need more freshwater than is available to meet demand. Similar to how a change to cooler weather diminished or eliminated grain surpluses in the exporting nations, a stoppage of wheat production in Ukraine would severely affect North Africa and the Middle East, which are the most reliant on grain imports. To get a sense of the severity of the impact that lower temperatures may have on carrying capacity, pull out the 1974 CIA working paper "A Study on Climatological Research as It Pertains to Intelligence Problems," published in 1974. In this study, you will learn that climate science forty years ago was less blinkered and more evidence-driven than today's global warming panic, as I have discovered. As stated in the excellent 1974 CIA summary, the Earth would almost certainly return to the climate of the Little Ice Age, which predominated for the majority of the 400 years following 1600 (with the fortunate exception of a few decades in the middle of the twentieth century), if the climate of the Little Ice Age continued (and we now know the last quarter of the twentieth century). "Broad bands of surplus and deficiency rainfall in the middle latitudes and widespread monsoon failure," according to a CIA assessment from the time period. The fact that the Indian subcontinent experienced widespread monsoon failure during the colder circumstances of the eighteenth century emphasizes the hazards of worsening weather, sparking a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan in the future. Even though both nations have lately been exporting grain, the balance of their surpluses might quickly deteriorate if the weather turns colder. The CIA report reminds us that even in the early 1970s, as the weather turned cooler, Pakistan enacted plans to import U.S. grain in March 1973, citing crop loss due to drought as the reason for the decision. And the issue isn't just confined to Pakistani citizens. As a result of the correlation between wheat import dependency and the list of nations where the largest percentages of family income are dedicated to food, the danger of economic instability in the most vulnerable economies becomes too apparent to ignore. Wheat prices are expected to rise in the coming months, putting a strain on the currencies and sovereign bonds of countries such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Algeria, Nigeria, Egypt, Iran, Yemen, Turkey, Morocco, Uzbekistan, and Kenya. Even in China, where circumstances are already strained due to the unwinding of the world's most giant credit bubble, a little deterioration is possible. However, I would not propose shorting Chinese national bonds due to the coming wheat scarcity. Nonetheless, there are some noteworthy aspects of the old CIA assessment. The CIA assessment emphasizes how precarious the world's agricultural carrying capacity truly is: "For example, Europe, with an annual mean temperature of 12 degrees Celsius (approximately 53 degrees Fahrenheit), now sustains three people per arable hectare." If the temperature drops by one degree Celsius, only a little more than two people per hectare could be sustained. More than 20% of the population would not get sufficient nutrition from domestic sources. China now supports more than seven people per agricultural hectare; a 1 degree Celsius temperature change would imply that it could only sustain four people per arable hectare, a reduction of more than 43 percent. Putin's pointless conflict in Ukraine has put the globe prone to crises in a potentially precarious situation. Four former Soviet Republics are at the top of the list of nations that have had a negative impact due to the crisis. The fact that the population of Europe has expanded by around 70 million people in the intervening years makes it acceptable to assume that the vulnerability identified in the mid-1970s has worsened with the passage of five decades, as the vulnerability was first identified. In addition, China's population has increased by around 487 million people since 1950. At the same time, both in Europe and China, fertile land has been lost to development due to urbanization. China, on the other hand, has abundant freshwater resources. Increased pollution and depletion of fossil aquifers were two factors contributing to the fall. Climate gods and Putin's generals have unparalleled power over the world's destiny, which has been rendered powerless. We are living in an increasingly unstable world. In Strategic Investment, I provide an unbiased perspective. I majored in philosophy at Oxford, which the university claimed helped me think more clearly. Regardless, you have the same ability that I have. As a result, you should only believe what makes sense to you. WAVERLY -- Outdoor warning systems throughout Bremer County will be tested April 5, beginning at 11 a.m. In the event of threatening weather, the tests will be delayed to the next day without threatening weather. Tests are performed to assure all outdoor warning systems are functioning properly. When an outdoor warning system siren sounds on a day other than a test, residents are advised to tune to local broadcast media as soon as possible. Media outlets will be forwarding information regarding imminent threats. Typical Bremer County threats include severe weather, but might also include a chemical/hazardous material incident, or possibly a terrorist threat. Outdoor warning systems are intended to warn citizens located outside of their homes. NOAA All-hazard radios are encouraged for warnings and information inside the home. Emergency notifications may also be received through the Alert Iowa notification system. Sign-up for notifications at the Bremer County Emergency Management web page. For additional information, contact the Bremer County Emergency Management Agency at (319) 352-0133. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 WATERLOO An AWOL sex offender has been arrested after he was allegedly found masturbating in a womens public restroom last week, a day after he fled a half-way house and ditched his GPS monitor. Waterloo police arrested Jacob Lee Anthony Denniston, 30, on a charge of indecent exposure. He was also arrested for voluntary absence for leaving the halfway house and parole and probation violations. According to court records, employees at Kwik Star at 506 W. Ninth St. noticed that someone had been inside the womens restroom for more than an hour on Friday morning. A worked entered and found Denniston naked on the floor masturbating, according to court records. This is the second time that Denniston has been accused of exposing himself in a store. In December 2020, Waterloo police arrested him after he allegedly exposed himself at a Crossroads Boulevard mattress store and then went to a nail salon where he undressed and locked himself in a room. He pleaded and was placed in the Waterloo Residential Corrections Facility with up to two years of probation. In May 2021, a week after his placement, he was released on a furlough to go to a store and the library. Corrections workers found him at the Adult Cinema on East Fourth Street that same day, according to court records. He was charged with violating probation, sent to jail until March 22, 2022, when a bed became available at the residential facility. Two days later, he fled again while on a furlough, according to court records. Corrections workers found his GPS tracker discarded on the sidewalk on Commercial Street. Love 0 Funny 2 Wow 1 Sad 3 Angry 6 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. KABUL, March 29 (Xinhua) -- "Scores of people including 50 women worked in my firm to produce pickle in the past, but nowadays only two persons are working with me," female Afghan entrepreneur Nafas Gul Jami said with a sigh. Putting on display her products in a stall at a three-day Agricultural Products Exhibition which opened here on Saturday, Jami said the U.S. sanctions on Afghanistan have badly undermined businesses and worsened the country's already fragile economy. "The female Afghan businesspersons are in need of economic support and encouragement, and we need to find markets for our products to boost our businesses," she said. The 45-year-old woman pointed to an increasing poverty, a high rate of unemployment, isolation of Afghanistan and freeze of 7-billion-U.S. dollar assets of the war-torn country by the United States following the U.S. military defeat and troop withdrawal from the Central Asian nation in August last year. In a decree issued in February, U.S. President Joe Biden allocated 3.5 billion U.S. dollars from the frozen Afghan assets to the 9/11 victims' families and earmarked another 3.5 billion U.S. dollars as humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan. The decision, which has further exacerbated Afghanistan's economic woes, has been widely condemned in Afghanistan. More than 22 million Afghans out of the country's some 35-million population, according to aid agencies, are facing acute food shortage and the war-torn country would face a humanitarian catastrophe if not assisted. "I am the owner of a bee farm in the central Daykundi province but I had no activity over the past six months due to economic miseries," said businesswoman Zahra Naemi. Naemi, 30, who has hired 10 people including six women in her farm, collected 1,000 kg honey in past years but her products reduced to 400 kg so far this year. "The purchasing power of people has been reduced almost to zero and they can't afford to buy honey and that was why I have sold 400 kg at half price," Naemi complained. She assumed that like her, many businesspersons suffered due to lack of market, economic hardships and sanctions imposed on Afghanistan. Mohammad Hamid Samadi, an Afghan businessman who runs a saffron producing company, told Xinhua that he exported saffron to 25 countries in the past years but his company's income has drastically reduced due to the shattered economy. "Freezing of Afghan assets has led to capital outflow and eventually to a worsening economy and an increase in poverty in the country," Samadi said. Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister of the Afghan caretaker government Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar said the country is committed to supporting farmers and the agricultural sector. WATERLOO A Waterloo woman has been arrested for allegedly stabbing her boyfriend. Waterloo police arrested Natalie Breanne Calderon, 19, on Monday for domestic assault with a weapon. Bond was set at $2,000. Officers were called to the 3200 block of Bristol Road around 4:20 a.m. Monday and found Isaac Sommer with a knife wound in his back. The injuries didnt appear to be life threatening, police said. Police allege Calderon and Sommer had been in an altercation, and Calderon stabbed him in the back with a kitchen knife as he was leaving to go back to his house, according to court records. Court records show Calderon is currently awaiting trial for burglary charges in a March 4 incident where she allegedly crawled through a window and assaulted two people. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 1 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. TAMA Dogs involved in a deadly attack at the Meskwaki settlement have been located and killed, according to police. According to a post on the Meskwaki Tribal Police Facebook page, the mauling happened Monday afternoon. The post described the incident as a vicious attack by a large pack of dogs that killed a young woman in the area of Springs Road. Police said they would not release the womans name or other details until a later date, citing the sensitivity of the situation. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 3 Angry 1 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. CEDAR FALLS Overall tax collections would increase by nearly 20% in Cedar Falls Community Schools budget proposal as property valuations grow and debt repayment begins on a bond issue approved by voters. The Board of Education will hold a public hearing April 11 on the $138.41 million 2022-23 budget, which includes $35.71 million in property and utility replacement tax collections. That is an increase of $5.84 million, or 19.53%, in anticipated property taxes for the fiscal year starting July 1. Denelle Gonnerman, the districts chief financial officer, told the board during a presentation on the budget proposal last week that one factor is growth in property valuations. The valuation did increase by 3.9% for fiscal 23, she noted. Assessed valuation of all properties that are not part of a tax-increment financing district has increased by $89.72 million to $2.18 billion. A larger factor, though, is growth in the debt service levy used to pay the principle on general obligation bond issues approved by district voters. Currently, that includes $32 million in bonds approved in 2016. The new fiscal year will add $69.9 million in bonds approved in 2019 to help fund a new high school, which are to be repaid over 20 years. Gonnerman noted that the property tax rate for the debt service would increase $2.14 per $1,000 of taxable value with the latest bond issue, for a total of $3.12 per $1,000. Superintendent Andy Pattee pointed out that the district had initially projected a higher total debt service levy of $3.50-$3.55 per $1,000 with repayment on both bonds. Overall growth in the tax rate would be a little less at $1.89, increasing to $15.84 per $1,000 of taxable value. Gonnerman said that the state-determined percentage of property value to be taxed, known as the rollback is decreasing. When we do our calculations, this does impact that (tax) rate, she said. For a residential property with an assessed value of $100,000, the homeowner would see Cedar Falls Schools portion of the tax bill grow to $791.59. Gonnerman noted how the most recent bond issue is impacting what the property owner would pay. Youll see with the change in the debt service it did increase $70.28, she explained. Had that debt service not occurred in this upcoming fiscal year, it would have decreased $45.48. However, that assumes the homeowners property value didnt increase. If it did, the tax bill would grow by more than $70. Other property classifications have different rollbacks, impacting the district portion of their tax bills. Commercial/industrial properties with an assessed value of $300,000 would pay $4,276, an increase of $509. Taxes on 240 acres of agricultural land would rise by $347 to $2,917. Owners of multi-residential properties with an assessed value of $300,000 would see their taxes rise $204 to $3,029. Overall property tax collections do reflect a shift in the instructional support levy, which is being reduced $588,032 through an income surtax. This is a five-year board-approved levy and it does include an income surtax (of) 1% this year for fiscal year 23, said Gonnerman. The surtax is based on residents state income taxes that will be filed in 2023. So, this is new for us, but about 70% of school districts in the state of Iowa have an income surtax, said Pattee. I think the thought statewide with this ... it tends to be seen as a more fair tax. It does not just affect property owners. Its uniform across the board, and thats why so many districts utilize it. The largest single source of revenue in the budget is supplemental state aid, estimated at $40.65 million, plus $6.3 million in other state funding. Other estimates are $7.32 million in local funding and $4.81 million in federal funding. Projected expenditures are growing by $22.94 million over the current years $115.47 million budget. Nearly all of that $19.04 million is due to projected higher expenses for facilities acquisition, construction and debt service. The board also set an April 11 public hearing on amending the current 2021-22 budget for several unexpected expenditures. Instruction would grow from $48.68 million to $49.61 million for state Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief allocations and new staff. Total support services would increase from $21.55 million to $22.4 million for increases in utilities and fuel. Other expenditures would grow from $42.35 million to $50.89 million for costs related to building the new high school. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 2 Want to see more like this? Get our local education coverage delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. WATERLOO Senior student Derek Cooper visited the Waterloo Community School District on Thursday and Friday, along with six others from Lincoln University of Missouri, one of the nations historically black colleges and universities (HBCU), interested in careers in education. Cooper felt the welcoming atmosphere upon arriving and didnt expect to come into contact with a community with a Black presence. On the school district-funded trip, as they toured facilities and talked with teachers and administrators, the East St. Louis, Illinois, native recalled an energetic principal at Irving Elementary School, and kids coming up to him and giving him a hug. I dont think people would have planned a trip to Waterloo on their own. But I can say after being here that there is much more to see than you would expect. I had to see it to believe it, said Cooper, now the second student from the Jefferson City, Missouri, school to accept an offer from the Waterloo district to teach as part of a two-year formal partnership to build and retain a culturally responsive, diverse educator workforce. Despite the program having been in effect for some time, it was the first opportunity Lincoln University students had to take the five hour trip to Waterloo. COVID-19 delayed previous efforts to organize one. Some 7% of Waterloo school district educators are persons of color, said Kingsley Botchway, chief officer of human resources and equity, who acknowledged his ambition is striving to make sure every non-White student - about 55% of the districts enrollment has a teacher who looks like them. About Cooper, Botchway noted, He loves our schools. Hes a big guy and has more of a stature to him. But hes like a big teddy bear. We were impressed with his ability to interact with students and feel hell be able to do that right away. Cooper will teach at the elementary level, hopefully beginning next academic year, after informally interviewing and then taking the job on the visit last week. The relationship recently led to one other university student, who didnt make the trip, securing a virtual interview this week for a Waterloo teaching job. A mix of three juniors and three sophomores, most if not all completing a bachelors degree in elementary education, came on the trip to visit four of Waterloos schools and learn about the 1619 Freedom School and the overall community. The sudents also heard from Mayor Quentin Hart and Superintendent Jane Lindaman about the perks of being in Waterloo. Diversity is important to Iowa and Waterloo schools. How do we get diverse individuals to come to Waterloo schools? said Botchway. We decided we wanted to connect with a Historically Black College or University, as opposed to before when it was just a phone call or career fair. I want them to see what Waterloo is all about. Hawkeye Community College seeks bids on $2.2 million in job training funds Four companies in Shell Rock, Waterloo would use funds to add 140 positions to their payrolls. A mechanism to increase the chances of retaining future Black employees, the partnership is geared toward recruitment, which is why younger college students were given the opportunity to attend. Its about building that pipeline, Botchway said. Diversity is at the forefront because of Superintendent Dr. Jane Lindaman and other leaders who are saying diversity is important, Botchway added. Ayanna Shivers, the universitys School of Education student success services director and director of bachelor of liberal studies degree, says the Waterloo school is not just talking about diversity initiatives. Theyre actually doing it. How do we get the African Americans engaged and to not make it feel like were giving them a handout that they are not qualified for? she noted is one of the challenges the relationship will help address. The Waterloo School District wants to be intentional in their focus. They reached out to us. Were excited about what this partnership brings, she added. Love 1 Funny 2 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Want to see more like this? Get our local education coverage delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. WATERLOO The first day of fall classes for students in Waterloo Community Schools will depend on their grade level. We are again doing the rolling start, Stephanie Mohorne, associate superintendent for educational services, told the Board of Education Monday. But those first days will be less staggered than in the previous two years. The Board of Education approved a 2022-23 academic calendar with first days of Aug. 23 and 24. The last day of classes will be June 1, 2023. By law, we cannot start school before Aug. 23, noted Mohorne. After getting input from a range of district staff, officials decided to have kindergarten and first, second, sixth, and ninth grades begin Aug. 23 and all other grades begin Aug. 24. Last fall, the first day of school for students was spread out over three days. The district took a similar approach in the fall of 2020 at the elementary and middle school levels as students returned to classes following the shutdown the previous March due to COVID-19 only the start was spread out over a week. East and West high schools used a hybrid schedule to start that year, with half of the students coming on alternating days. So, its less gradual than weve done in the past, where we really started gradually, said Mohorne. Among other features of the calendar, we tried to do one professional development day a month, she said they generally happen every four to six weeks. We also kept in the two built-in snow days. Those are set for April 10 and May 8, 2023, and no school will be held if there arent days to make up. Spring break is set for March 13-17, 2023. In other business, the board approved: A $196,527 contract with H2i Group of Adel to remove the existing West High School main gym floor and install a new one. The price was actually lower than we expected it to be, said Kate Payne of InVision Architecture, who provided design services for the project. Work will start June 3 and be completed by Aug. 1. An agreement with Denver Community Schools beginning in the fall that will allow juniors and seniors to enroll in Waterloo Career Center classes. Denver Schools will be charged tuition of $450 for every student in a semester long course. Seven other districts already had similar agreements including Cedar Falls, Dike-New Hartford, Dunkerton, Hudson, Janesville, Jesup and Union community schools plus three parochial high schools within the Waterloo district boundaries. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Want to see more like this? Get our local education coverage delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The friends were out catfishing when they came across the vehicle. They fear the man could have gotten hypothermia, or perished if his vehicle had reached the well-known Sans Souci Island wing dam. Iowa Department of Natural Resources Director Kayla Lyon, cited by her department earlier this month for fishing without a license, said it was an honest mistake to let her license expire before a fishing excursion on the Mississippi River. Lyon was out with Iowa DNR staff doing a combination of touring and paddlefishing March 18 near Bellevue in Jackson County when she was informed she didnt have a valid license, she said in an email Monday. I caught and released two paddlefish; one of which was 22 pounds, she said. I truly enjoyed the experience to snag such a unique, prehistoric species of fish. On March 21, when Lyon was back in Des Moines, she asked the agencys law enforcement chief to cite her for fishing without a license, she said. The ticket costs $135.50, including a fine, court costs and surcharge, according to Iowa Courts Online. It was an honest mistake but the laws apply to me just like anyone else, Lyon said. I have since gone online and renewed my combination license. Bleeding Heartland first reported this story Friday. Lyon, 37, of Ames, leads the state agency that manages fish and wildlife programs, ensures the health of Iowas forests and prairies and provides recreational opportunities in Iowas state parks, the Iowa DNRs website states. The agency also provides permits and compliance checks for animal feeding operations, among other roles. Gov. Kim Reynolds appointed Lyon to the role in 2019. Lyon told The Gazette she encourages other hunters or anglers to routinely check their accounts to make sure their licenses dont expire. Anglers can purchase or renew their licenses on the Iowa DNR website at iowadnr.gov. The outdoor combo annual resident hunting/fishing/habitat license costs $55. This also can be done on the Go Iowa Outdoors smartphone app. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 SYDNEY, March 29 (Xinhua) -- A team of biologists have assembled the genetic sequences of one of Australia's most iconic native birds, the helmeted honeyeater, in a bid to restore their numbers. The findings, published in the GigaScience journal on Tuesday, have for the first time created a high-quality mapping of the honeyeater's genomic sequence which will allow conservationists to increase the "genetic health" of the endangered bird. "The genome sequence and the genetic map will be used to get the right balance between rescuing the helmeted honeyeater from extinction through inbreeding, while retaining its unique features," said lead author Dr. Diana Robledo-Ruiz of Monash University. Populations of the helmeted honeyeater, which appear on the emblem of the state of Victoria, as that region's only endemic bird, have vastly declined in the 200 years since Australia was colonized by Europeans. By the 1980s only 50 of the birds were known to remain in the wild, all in Yellingbo Nature Conservation Reserve in Victoria. Now the populations have been restored to around 250, however, due to high levels of inbreeding, they lack genetic variation to sustain a healthy population. Professor Paul Sunnucks, head of Monash's Persistence and Adaptation Research Group, told Xinhua that this inbreeding could drastically reduce their ability to reproduce. "It makes it difficult (to conserve the species), it means that you're really pushing uphill all the time," he said. The gene rescue project, which has been heavily informed by the genomic sequence, will seek to diversify the bird population by interbreeding them with closely related yellow-tufted honeyeaters. "The only way to get any sort of fresh blood as it were, any new genes, was to cross them with the most appropriate other population," said Sunnucks. This process of "genetic rescue" has garnered some controversy in the scientific community as it can be difficult to predict the outcomes. Sunnucks said this risk, however, was far outweighed by the "very great risk of not doing something." "We demonstrated that they were extremely likely to go extinct relatively soon, through inbreeding problems and other genetic problems... that should really change your perception of risk." Sunnucks said the ultimate goal was to establish five habitats of about 100 helmeted honeyeaters within the next five to 10 years. "It wasn't all that long ago that Yellingbo Nature Conservation Reserve, which at the time was the only place with helmeted honeyeater in the entire world, was threatened by fire. And if the wind had been a bit different... we could have lost a lot in one day." Srdjan Radevic / EyeEm / Getty Images En espanol |Everyone has stomach issues from time to time, and occasional digestive discomfort is not usually something to worry about. That said, doctors note that there are a few gastrointestinal symptoms that you shouldnt write off, because they could signal something serious. Ive seen many cases where patients have waited way too long before seeking medical attention, says Christine Lee, M.D., a gastroenterologist at the Cleveland Clinic. With studies showing that the coronavirus can cause gastrointestinal symptoms, patients have even more reason to take nausea, vomiting and prolonged diarrhea seriously, doctors say. Here are 10 symptoms you should never ignore and what they may mean. 1. Prolonged diarrhea (especially if paired with fever, cough or loss of taste and smell) Diarrhea and other gastrointestinal symptoms can be among the first signs of COVID-19 infection, appearing before more well-known symptoms such as cough or fever, says Brennan Spiegel, M.D., director of health services research for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Dont wait for a cough or shortness of breath to get tested for COVID if you have diarrhea, nausea/vomiting or abdominal pain that lasts more than a day, Spiegel says. Studies show that as many as half of COVID-19 patients have gastrointestinal symptoms, and about 15 to 20 percent have only gastrointestinal symptoms. Diarrhea is the most frequently reported GI symptom, followed by nausea/vomiting and abdominal pain. People who test positive for the omicron variant also report diarrhea as a symptom, according to the ZOE COVID Study app. Spiegels research found that COVID-19 patients with diarrhea typically have four to five bouts a day. One bout of diarrhea may not mean anything, Spiegel says. But if youre having three or four per day and it is going on two days and you have no history of diarrhea, its a good idea to talk to your doctor, whether were in a pandemic or not. If its not COVID-19, prolonged diarrhea could signal another type of infection or an underlying condition like ulcerative colitis or irritable bowel syndrome. 2. Blood in your stool Whether it's bright red, maroon or black, seeing blood in the toilet can be frightening. Fortunately, it's usually not life-threatening, says Nicholas E. Anthony, M.D., a gastroenterologist at Atrium Health in Charlotte, North Carolina. The most common causes are hemorrhoids and anal fissures (tears in the lining of the anus). But blood in your stool can also be one of the first symptoms of colon cancer, especially if it's accompanied by a change in your bowel habits or the shape of your stool. Since colon cancer is more common among those over age 50, it's especially important for older adults to see a doctor without delay. Other possible causes of bleeding are colon polyps, inflammatory bowel disease, colitis and diverticulosis. 3. Severe cramps after eating Severe cramping is a warning sign of a bowel obstruction a serious condition that requires immediate medical treatment. Its also a classic symptom of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a chronic digestion disorder that has been on the rise since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts arent sure how COVID-19 is linked to IBS, Spiegel says. It could be that the virus changes the gut microbiome or the lining of the intestinal system, triggering IBS. Or the boost in cases could be caused by pandemic-related stress and anxiety. Other IBS symptoms include abdominal pain (often related to bowel movements), bloating, gas, diarrhea or constipation. 4. Difficulty swallowing If you feel like your food is getting stuck in your throat or it hurts as it's going down, that can be a sign of something serious. The big thing we worry about is esophageal cancer, Anthony says. Esophageal cancer is more common in adults over 55 and three or four times more likely to occur in men than women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Other things that can cause discomfort when you swallow include an infection, an ulcer, a sore or scar tissue (which can develop if you have chronic acid reflux). In addition, a growing number of people are being diagnosed with eosinophilic esophagitis (EOE), a chronic allergic inflammatory disease that is a major cause of swallowing issues. To pinpoint the cause of your problem, your gastroenterologist will probably insert a tube with a camera attached to it down your throat in a procedure called an endoscopy. COLOMBO, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The Sri Lankan government has approved a proposal to pay an allowance of 5,000 Sri Lankan rupees (about 17 U.S. dollars) to low-income families for two months in view of the festive season. Minister of Energy Gamini Lokuge told the media on Monday night that the government has identified around 3.1 million low-income families to receive the allowance, which is akin to a bonus for the upcoming Sinhala and Tamil New Year. The minister added that the government has the necessary funds to provide the allowance. The government will spend 30.1 billion Sri Lankan rupees (105 million U.S. dollars) on the allowance. Alignment of Interests in PRL 211 and ATP 2021 Melbourne, Mar 29, 2022 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Vintage Energy Ltd ( ASX:VEN ) announces acquisition of Beach Energy Ltd.'s 15% interest in the Cooper Basin licence PRL 211 by Vintage and the other interest holders in the licence, Metgasco Ltd and Bridgeport (Cooper Basin) Pty Ltd, subject to Ministerial approval.The Joint Venture ("JV") parties will acquire their respective share in the 15% stake in proportion to their existing holding with the result of the transaction being the following equity interests: Vintage 50% and Operator; Bridgeport 25%; and Metgasco 25%.PRL 211 is located close to existing Cooper Basin producing gas fields and infrastructure and contains the Odin gas field, discovered and successfully flow tested in September/October 2021. The licence is also adjacent to ATP 2021, held by the JV in the following equity interests: Vintage 50% and Operator; Bridgeport 25%; and Metgasco 25%. This licence contains the Vali gas field which is being prepared to commence production midyear 2022. Alignment of interests between the two licences will promote efficiencies in planning and optimal field operations.Consideration for the transaction has been structured to align with successful production from Odin with an initial milestone payment by the JV of $1 million with a further $1.25 million payable in two instalments on achievement of production milestones.Odin-1 was drilled under a farm-in by Vintage and delivered a stable flow rate of 6.5 million standard cubic feet per day at a flowing wellhead pressure of 1,823 psi through a 28/64" fixed choke in its initial testing. The field is mapped to extend beyond the eastern boundary of PRL 211 and extend into ATP 2021 which is also held by the JV.Independent Certification of resources at Odin by ERC Equipoise Pte Ltd ("ERCE") were announced to the ASX on 16 September 2021 as 36.4 billion cubic feet ("Bcf") of gross 2C Contingent Resources in the Toolachee, Epsilon, Patchawarra and Tirrawarra formations of the field located in both PRL 211 and ATP 2021 on the southern flank of the Nappamerri Trough in the Cooper Basin.The effect of this transaction will be to redistribute approximately 3.1 Bcf of the 2C Contingent Resource previously attributable to Beach Energy Ltd to the JV parties. Vintage's net share of 2C Contingent Resource at Odin will increase by 1.55 Bcf to 17.5 Bcf as a result.Vintage Managing Director, Neil Gibbins, said the acquisition was a positive and valuable development for the company."Odin is a promising discovery, which has bright prospects for development to supply gas to the east coast domestic gas market. It is very well located for rapid and economic development with its proximity to our Vali gas field and the Moomba gas gathering network. The potential to add value through successful appraisal and development of the Odin field is good. The transaction structure recognises the expectation that Odin will become a producing gas field. We are very pleased to increase our stake in the asset," said Mr Gibbins.*To view tables and figures, please visit:About Vintage Energy Ltd Vintage Energy Ltd (ASX:VEN) has been established to acquire, explore and develop energy assets principally within, but not limited to, Australia, to take advantage of a generally favourable energy pricing outlook. loading......... Malibu, CA, Mar 29, 2022 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Join Ellis Martin for a conversation with Michael Wood, CEO of Reyna Gold Corp. ( CVE:REYG ) ( OTCMKTS:REYGF ).A total of 10,000m of drilling has been approved by the Reyna Board as Phase 1 drilling at La Gloria with the first 22 holes, approximately 3,000m detailed in this press release. Over 20,000m of drill targets have already been identified by the geological team at Main Zone, El Sombrero, Las Quintas, Las Quintas West and San Pedro targets. The intention of Reyna is to confirm additional targets pending ongoing geochemical sampling, geological mapping and initial drill results.Drilling is starting at the Shear zone at Big Pit within the Main Zone with 6 planned holes; then will move down to Pique Viejo for 3 holes focused on the steep-dipping high-grade quartz veining recently identified in sampling, including drilling a steeply dipping vein where a channel sample returned 93.9 g/t gold. The drill rig will then move to Placeres, Main Zone for an additional 3 holes, with the aim of drilling a series of mineralized structures along a strike length NW, with a trend towards the Big Pit target area, before moving to El Sombrero for 10 holes to target at depth the high-grade mineralized structures. The intention is by the end of the initial 3,000m of drilling, the company will immediately move into the next stage of this 10,000m drilling at La Gloria. Further details will be announced on the follow-up targets once they have been finalized.To listen to the Interview, please visit:About Reyna Gold Corp. Reyna Gold Corp. (CVE:REYG) (OTCMKTS:REYGF) is a gold exploration company focused on district-scale exploration on two major gold belts in Mexico. The Company has a portfolio of assets on the Mojave-Sonora Megashear and the Sierra Madre Gold and Silver Belt consisting of over 57,000 hectares - 570 sq km. The Company has an experienced management team with a proven track record of wealth creation in Mexico through project discovery, advancement and monetization. PHOENIX Phoenix police are investigating an alleged assault of a flight attendant on an airport tram platform as a possible hate crime. Authorities say the incident happened around 2:15 a.m. Friday at the PHX Sky Train station that connects Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport to a light rail stop and a long-term parking lot. According to the police, the flight attendant had just gotten off a flight and was heading to her car. Investigators say 32-year-old Brandon Smith attacked the victim. She suffered minor injuries. They say Smith made a statement to the flight attendant that prompted a bias crime investigation. Police did not elaborate on what was said. Smith has been booked on assault charges. It was not immediately known Monday if he had an attorney who could speak for him. HOUSTON Attorneys for some of those killed and injured during last years deadly Astroworld music festival alleged in court on Monday that rapper Travis Scott has violated a gag order issued in lawsuits they have filed in an effort to influence possible jurors and rebuild his reputation ahead of a potential trial. At issue is an announcement Scott made earlier this month about Project HEAL, a $5 million initiative that includes funding for an effort to address safety challenges for festivals and large-scale events. Houston police and federal officials have been investigating whether Scott, concert promoter Live Nation and others had put in place sufficient safety measures. My team and I created Project HEAL to take much needed action towards supporting real solutions that make all events the safest spaces they can possibly be. I will always honor the victims of the Astroworld tragedy who remain in my heart forever, Scott wrote earlier this month on Instagram after the initiative was announced. But Bob Hilliard, one of the attorneys representing the family of 9-year-old Ezra Blount, the youngest person to die from injuries during the festival, said during a court hearing Monday that Scott used the power of his social media presence to address concert safety, one of the issues being debated by the lawsuits. State District Judge Kristen Hawkins has previously said that lawyers could tell the media about factual issues that happen in court, but she didnt want attorneys or others to make their cases in the court of public opinion and possibly influence the jury pool. Scotts actions did affect and dent the power of your order, Hilliard told Hawkins, whos overseeing the nearly 500 lawsuits filed after 10 people died and hundreds of others were injured during a massive crowd surge at the Nov. 5 concert headlined by Scott. Stephen Brody, one of Scotts attorneys, said the rappers announcement about the initiative, which included funding for scholarships, didnt violate the gag order. Scotts attorneys have argued any efforts to prevent him from speaking on this or any other issue would be a violation of his constitutional right of free expression. Such charitable efforts have been a constant in his life and to suggest somehow that speaking about those charitable initiatives runs afoul of the publicity order is certainly not something that would withstand scrutiny, Brody said. During the hearing, attorneys for ABC News also told Hawkins they believed the gag order was preventing reporters from being able to sufficiently report about the lawsuits as some attorneys were hesitant to even speak about factual issues discussed in court or in documents. Other attorneys in the case told Hawkins they were working to find an agreement on modifying the gag order and could have a resolution to these different concerns and could be presented to her in a couple of weeks. I look forward to seeing what proposals you come up with, Hawkins said. Those who died in the concert ranged in age from 9 to 27 years old. Roughly 300 people were injured and treated at the scene, and 25 were taken to hospitals. Those killed died from compression asphyxia. ___ Find the APs coverage of the Astroworld festival: https://apnews.com/hub/astroworld-festival-deaths ___ Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70 Two people were found dead following a house fire in Rio Rancho over the weekend. Ryan Floersheim, a battalion chief for Rio Rancho Fire Rescue said around 2 a.m. on Sunday, fire fighters and the Rio Rancho Police Department were called to a structure fire on the 1800 block of Doral Park, near Unser and Southern SE. One person was reported missing at that time. Upon arrival, responding personnel encountered a large portion of the residence engulfed in flames, Floersheim wrote in a news release. Shortly thereafter, a portion of the roof collapsed, leading to the use of a defensive fight to the fire. When fire crews searched the home they found its resident, 25-year-old Josiah Inventor dead, along with 26-year-old Clarissa Bradfield. Floersheim said the cause of the fire has not yet been determined. He said the State Police Fire Investigator will investigate it and Rio Rancho Fire and Rescue, the Rio Rancho Police Department and the State Fire Marshals Office are also investigating. Copyright 2022 Albuquerque Journal A southern New Mexico psychiatrist awaiting sentencing for sexually assaulting patients has pleaded guilty to prescribing opioids to a patient with a history of substance abuse. Mark Beale, 75, pleaded guilty Friday in U.S. District Court to a single count of unlawful dispensing and distributing a controlled substance. The plea agreement calls for him to serve five years in prison followed by five years of supervised release. The Las Cruces doctor was arrested in 2019 after six women patients alleged rape, harassment or abuse, according to the Associated Press. The news agency reported that many of the women who accused Beale of assault also reported that he gave them medications they didnt need. He was later indicted in federal court on drug charges. In August, Beale pleaded guilty in 3rd Judicial District Court in Las Cruces to 16 counts of felony criminal sexual penetration, misdemeanor criminal sexual contact and petty misdemeanor battery. The plea agreement in that case calls for Beale to serve seven years in prison and to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. He is scheduled to be sentenced in that case on Tuesday. The agreement says that Beales state court sentence will run concurrently with his sentence in the drug case. The agreement also says that Beale can first serve the sentence for the drug case in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Beale wrote in his plea agreement in the federal court case that he prescribed opioids to at least one patient who had a history of opioid abuse. I knew the prescription was issued outside the usual course of medical practice and without a legitimate medical purpose, he said of the prescription for oxycodone he gave the woman. Beales attorney couldnt be reached for comment on Monday. Copyright 2022 Albuquerque Journal A law enforcement operation targeting shoplifters and thieves at big-box stores netted 16 arrests and uncovered thousands of dollars in stolen items, according to authorities. A review of criminal complaints shows undercover police officers have been investigating crimes at such retailers as Walmart, Target, Kohls and others businesses in the past week. The operation also included several days of task force members trying to arrest people on existing warrants, according to a spokeswoman for Attorney General Hector Balderas. Several people were caught in the act while they were leaving the stores with items they didnt pay for and, in a couple of cases, police arrested people when they spotted them arriving at stores in stolen vehicles, according to the criminal complaints. The operation was carried out over the past week by an Organized Retail Crime Task Force comprising officials from the Attorney Generals Office, Albuquerque police and other agencies. The task force was launched last summer in an effort to stop retail crime around the state. Families in New Mexico deserve safer communities and the task force will continue targeting emboldened felony offenders in our retail centers to disrupt crime at all levels, Balderas said in a statement. The AGs office said the task force made 16 arrests and recovered two stolen vehicles, one handgun and about $3,000 in merchandise. Authorities also identified a store employee who was coordinating with other people planning to steal from the store. That employee allegedly tipped off those people that police were nearby and had planned to send signals if he saw law enforcement, according to the AGs news release. That store employee was not among the 16 arrests. That case is still being investigated, according to the AGs spokeswoman. Were seeing the results of our heightened coordination between businesses, APD and prosecutors to stop the organized retail crime that wreaks havoc on businesses and residents who are just trying to shop safely, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller said in a statement. These latest arrests make it clear if you are committing these brazen robberies, you will be caught and prosecuted. Copyright 2022 Albuquerque Journal New Mexico State Police initially said a man who was killed by Torrance County Sheriffs deputies in Edgewood in late February had fired a gun, but they are now saying he only pointed a gun at them. Andrew Castellano, 34, of Las Cruces died at the scene. Officer Dusty Francisco, a State Police spokesman, said the incident started around 1:30 a.m. Feb. 24 when Torrance County Sheriffs deputies were called to reports of a car stuck in the snow on County Road A102 near Monica Lane in Edgewood. When they arrived, they talked with a woman who was standing next to the car and Castellano, who had exited from the drivers side. During the encounter, Castellano became evasive and walked away from the deputies, Francisco wrote. As Castellano walked away toward the middle of the roadway, he began to reach into his front pocket. Deputies gave numerous verbal commands to Castellano to stop reaching into his pockets. Castellano ignored the commands, reached into his waistband, brandished a firearm and pointed it at a TCSO deputy. At that time, both TCSO deputies fired toward Castellano. An earlier news release, put out the evening after the shooting, stated Castellano pointed the firearm at a TCSO deputy and fired the firearm at the deputy. Francisco and other State Police spokespersons did not respond to questions about the discrepancy. The deputies have not been publicly identified. Its time to spring-clean the whole city. The Solid Waste Department and Keep Albuquerque Beautiful are accepting registration for a series of April trash pickups targeting all four quadrants of the city. The city will provide volunteers with bags and gloves and will offer a central trash drop-off point for each area on its appointed day. Albuquerque Solid Waste Director Matthew Whelan said the goal is to engage neighborhood associations to organize crews, though the city also contributes some manpower. We do bring in our litter crew, our highway crews we send them into areas where we know there may be some illegal dumping, he said. We have them go through areas (on the specific days) and clean whatever they see. The city took a monthlong cleanup approach for the first time in 2021, attracting 732 volunteers last April who collected nearly 95,000 pounds of trash. The four scheduled cleanups for One Albuquerque Cleanup Month in 2022 are 8 a.m.-noon in the following locations: Southeast: April 9 Northeast: April 16 Southwest: April 23 Northwest: April 30 For more information, including registration forms and the specific trash drop-off points, go to cabq.gov/solidwaste/keep-albuquerque-beautiful and click on One Albuquerque Cleanup Month. Russian, Ukrainian delegations arrive in Istanbul for peace talks Xinhua) 08:42, March 29, 2022 ISTANBUL, March 28 (Xinhua) -- The Russian and Ukrainian delegations have arrived in Turkey's largest city Istanbul on Monday for a fresh round of face-to-face peace talks, aiming to achieve substantial progress to end the crisis. The Russian delegation has settled in the Ciragan Palace Kempinski hotel while the Ukrainian delegation has checked in the Shangri-La Bosphorus, both very close to each other in the Besiktas district. Media reports said the arrival of the Ukrainian delegation had been postponed to evening hours due to the closure of Ukrainian airspace and some logistical problems. According to the NTV broadcaster, the Ukrainian delegates had to go to a neighboring country by road to fly to Istanbul. Tuesday's negotiations will begin at 10:30 a.m. local time (0730 GMT) at the Dolmabahce Presidential Working Office in Besiktas. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to address the delegations at the opening of the meeting. "We will have a short meeting with the delegations tomorrow morning," Erdogan said at a press conference after a cabinet meeting in the Turkish capital Ankara on Monday. So far, Russia and Ukraine have held three rounds of in-person talks in Belarus, and their fourth session was in a video conference format. Turkey, meanwhile, has increasingly accelerated its diplomatic efforts on the international arena, reiterating its policy that it is ready to play a mediator role for lasting peace in the region. In a phone call on Sunday, Erdogan told his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, that a ceasefire and peace between Moscow and Kiev must be achieved as soon as possible, and the humanitarian situation in the region should be improved. Erdogan repeated that Turkey would continue to contribute in every possible way during this process. The "phone traffic" that he has been conducting with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is progressing in a positive direction, Erdogan said on Monday. Turkey has been exerting significant efforts to resolve the crisis through agreement and dialogue, he said. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) WASHINGTON, March 28 (Xinhua) -- At least three people died after a massive pileup of vehicles on an interstate highway in the northeastern U.S. state of Pennsylvania on Monday, authorities said. The crash involving up to 60 vehicles, including multiple tractor-trailers, occurred at about 10:30 a.m. ET (1430 GMT) north of the Schuylkill County Airport in east Pennsylvania amid a snow squall. A Schuylkill County coroner confirmed the three fatalities and said that the toll could be higher, as the search of the scene had not been completed due to a large fire involving several vehicles. About 20 people were taken to hospitals, an emergency official told reporters. Videos posted on social media from the scene showed individuals scrambling from their damaged vehicles to get off the road as more cars and trucks collided. There had been snow squall warnings for much of central and south-central Pennsylvania. Copyright 2022 Albuquerque Journal A lawsuit filed by a Bernalillo County man alleges a telemarketer violated state and federal laws by repeatedly calling his cellphone, even though his number is listed on a national do-not-call registry. The lawsuit also alleges that sales agents for the telemarketer violated the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act by failing to identify themselves during sales calls. The telemarketer sells vehicle service contracts, also called extended warranties, which are intended to cover vehicle repairs after the manufacturers warranty expires. The firm also made unlawful robocalls that displayed false caller ID numbers that cannot be called or traced a practice called spoofing that disguises the identity of the caller, the suit alleges. The firm refuses in its marketing to identify itself or where it is located, as required by law, it alleges. The scheme makes it difficult for any telephone consumer to identify (the firm) unless the consumer buys the product. The suit, filed March 11 in 2nd Judicial District Court on behalf of Laurence Barker, names telemarketer 888-678-0697 as the defendant, but does not list the firms name. The suit asks a judge to allow Barker to learn the telemarketers identity. The Better Business Bureau website links that number to Affordable Auto Protection LLC of West Palm Beach, Florida. The Journal was unable to reach a company spokesperson for comment on Monday. A sales agent who answered the phone referred the Journal to a business number with a recorded message saying the office was closed. The federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act allows people to list their phone numbers on a national do-not-call registry, which requires that telemarketers avoid calling those numbers. The lawsuit alleges the telemarketer violated federal law because Barker had listed his number on the registry during the time he received the calls. The suit asks the judge to award damages for each violation of state and federal law. RIO RANCHO OBSERVER A man accused of taking an elderly Albuquerque womans vehicle could face up to 15 years in prison. Gael Rodriguez, 20, from Mexico, pleaded guilty to carjacking in federal court in Albuquerque on Wednesday. On Jan. 16, 2021, he approached an elderly woman outside her apartment in northwest Albuquerque and asked for a cigarette, according to court records. After she told him she did not have any, he demanded her purse and vehicle keys, according to a news release. When she resisted, Rodriguez slashed her hand with a knife, causing her to drop the keys. He then picked up the keys and left in her vehicle, according to a federal indictment and other court records. An Albuquerque police officer arrived at the scene and relayed a description of the vehicle to the Rio Rancho and Corrales police departments. The vehicle was later found in Corrales. After a foot pursuit, Rodriguez was stopped and arrested. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on March 12, 2021. Rodriguez will remain in custody pending sentencing. The FBIs Albuquerque Violent Crimes Task Force investigated the case with help from the Albuquerque and Corrales police departments. Oregon will no longer require people to be residents of the state to use its law allowing terminally ill people to receive lethal medication, after a lawsuit challenged the requirement as unconstitutional. In a settlement filed in U.S. District Court in Portland on Monday, the Oregon Health Authority and the Oregon Medical Board agreed to stop enforcing the residency requirement and to ask the Legislature to remove it from the law. Advocates said they would use the settlement to press the eight other states and Washington, D.C., with medically assisted suicide laws to drop their residency requirements as well. This requirement was both discriminatory and profoundly unfair to dying patients at the most critical time of their life, said Kevin Diaz, an attorney with Compassion & Choices, the national advocacy group that sued over Oregons requirement. Laura Echevarria, a spokeswoman for National Right to Life, which opposes such laws, warned that without a residency requirement, Oregon risked becoming the nations assisted suicide tourism capital. But Diaz said that was unlikely, given safeguards in the law, such as the requirement that physicians determine whether patients are mentally capable; that it is extremely difficult for terminally ill people to make extended trips to another state; and that many people want to die in the presence of loved ones near home not across the country. Theres no tourism going on, Diaz said. Compassion & Choices sued on behalf of Dr. Nicholas Gideonse, a Portland family practice physician and associate professor of family medicine at Oregon Health and Science University. A longtime supporter of medical aid-in-dying laws, Gideonse had been unable to write terminal prescriptions for patients who live just across the Columbia River in Washington state. While Washington has such a law, providers can be difficult to find in the southwestern part of the state, where many hospital beds are in religiously affiliated health care facilities that prohibit it. Requiring his patients to find other doctors to provide assistance in ending their own lives can compound their suffering, Gideonse said. Any restriction on medical aid in dying that doesnt serve a specific medical purpose is difficult, Gideonse said Monday. In no other way is my practice restricted to Oregon residents, whether thats delivering babies in the past or other care that I provide. The lawsuit argued that the residency requirement violated the U.S. Constitutions Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the right to regulate interstate commerce, and the Privileges and Immunities Clause, which forbids states from discriminating against citizens from other states in favor of its own citizens. The Oregon Health Authority and the medical board declined to comment on why they settled the case. The state attorney generals office did not immediately respond to an interview request. Enacted in 1997, Oregons first-in-the-nation law allows terminally ill people deemed to have less than six months to live to end their lives by voluntarily taking lethal medications prescribed by a physician for that purpose. Patients must make two verbal requests to their doctor for the medication, at least 15 days apart, as well as a written request signed in the presence of two witnesses. The attending physician and a consulting physician must confirm the patients diagnosis and prognosis, and determine whether the patient is capable of making health care decisions; if either doctor believes the patient to be suffering from depression or another mental disorder, they can refer the patient for a psychological exam. Some 2,159 people have died after ingesting terminal drugs under the law since it took effect, according to data published last month by the Oregon Health Authority. California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont, Washington state and Washington, D.C., have approved similar laws, all with residency requirements. Montanas Supreme Court has ruled that state law does not prohibit medical aid in dying. National Right to Life is concerned that people might be able to travel to Oregon without having much of a relationship with a doctor in the state, thus chipping away at guardrails limiting the use of the law, Echevarria said. The hope is that doctors will continue to evaluate patients, but it certainly creates a situation where there could be more abuse of that law, she said. ___ Johnson reported from Seattle. Police say a transient gunned down a security guard in a hotel hallway and carjacked a man outside before getting into a shootout with the officers on his tail. Hours later across town, two women fired at a deputy during a traffic stop after the pair tried to carjack someone in the South Valley. The alleged hotel shooter, 43-year-old Donovan Bookout, surrendered to police and was not struck by gunfire. Deputies say the two women, Lizeth Iguado, 33, and Felicia Gonzales, 38, were found hiding in a mobile home after an hourslong manhunt. All in all, it was a busy day for law enforcement. Neither the officers nor the deputies were injured in the unrelated incidents. It started at the Ambassador Inn near Candelaria and Interstate 25 with a homicide, carjacking and police shootout in quick succession. The man police say was at the center of it all, Bookout, is now charged with an open count of murder, aggravated assault upon a peace officer, armed robbery and being a felon in possession of a firearm. Police Chief Harold Medina earlier described Bookout as a convicted felon with an extensive criminal history. Online court records show he has multiple arrests since 2014, including for allegedly shooting a man, smoking methamphetamine inside a Walmart and in a similar incident to Tuesdays stealing a car and leading police on a chase while armed with a gun. Most of the cases, aside from the drug paraphernalia possession, were dismissed for various reasons, including prosecutors not meeting deadlines and Bookout being found incompetent to stand trial in federal court. Recently, Albuquerque police had been looking for Bookout after he allegedly tried to shoot someone inside a room at the Motel 6, near Interstate 40 and Carlisle. When Bookout opened fire Tuesday morning in the hallway of the Ambassador Inn, according to police, he didnt miss. Medina said police were working an operation proactively trying to address criminal activity at the hotel when officers basically drove up to a homicide in progress. A man flagged down officers around 3:15 a.m. in the parking lot and told them a security guard had been shot in the hallway, according to an arrest warrant affidavit filed in Metropolitan Court. Police found the guard shot to death and numerous bullet casings littered the floor. Court records state video surveillance showed the guard was making his rounds on the second floor when a man, later identified as Bookout, came from the stairwell and shot the guard with a silver handgun. Police said Bookout fled down the stairwell and was spotted by officers carjacking a man in a pickup truck near the hotel. Soon after, according to court records, Bookout crashed into two police officers that were patrolling the area in their vehicles. Bookout continued to flee with police in pursuit and stopped in a parking lot. Bookout got out of the truck as police pulled behind him and fired at the officers multiple times, according to the affidavit. Bookout fled on foot and again fired at police before at least one officer fired back, causing Bookout to drop his gun and fall to the ground. Detectives tried to talk to Bookout after the incident and he told them he wanted to talk to a lawyer. Medina said federal charges for Bookout are possible because he is a convicted felon and because of the carjacking. Once again were going to use the approach of hitting this from as many directions as we can with the criminal justice system, Medina said. Well get what we can in state court and well get anything that we can into federal court. The last time Bookout faced federal charges, in a 2015 carjacking and police pursuit, the charges were dismissed after he was found incompetent to stand trial. Albuquerque police Commander Scott Norris said officers were already at the Ambassador Inn when the shooting occurred because theyre trying to address the narcotics, property crime and violence that often happens there. Medina said Albuquerque police will continue to investigate and work on trying to clear out the criminal element from this hotel. South Valley manhunt The BCSO incident had the agency blaming the states broken criminal justice system for two womens lack of fear of prosecution enough to shoot at a deputy during a traffic stop. The Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office said the deputy wasnt struck by gunfire and Iguado and Gonzales are in custody. Iguado is currently on probation after pleading guilty in 2020 to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and shooting at or from a motor vehicle. It began around 10:15 a.m. when BCSO responded to reports of an attempted carjacking at gunpoint near Coors and Pajarito SW, according to deputies. Deputies tried to pull over the suspect vehicle, a black Jeep, soon after and were fired at from those inside. BCSO said the Jeep was found abandoned nearby and the suspects, later identified as Iguado and Gonzales, were seen running onto a property in the 2000 block of Luchetti SW. Authorities surrounded the area and found Iguado and Gonzales inside a mobile home they had broken into on the property to evade capture, according to deputies. The search also left Pajarito Elementary School, Polk Middle School and Los Padillas Elementary School locked down until the women were found. Detectives are currently interviewing the suspects and compiling appropriate charges, the agency wrote on Facebook. THE HAGUE, Netherlands In what appeared to be a coordinated action to tackle Russian espionage, at least four European allies expelled dozens of Russian diplomats on Tuesday. The expulsions come as relations between Russia and the West have plunged into a deep freeze following Moscows invasion of Ukraine. The Netherlands said it was expelling 17 Russians who it described as intelligence officers masquerading as diplomats. Belgium said it was ejecting 21 Russians. The Czech Republic gave one Russian diplomat 72 hours to leave the country. Ireland told four senior Russian officials to leave the country because of activities deemed not in accordance with international standards of diplomatic behaviour. North Macedonia announced late Monday it is expelling five Russian diplomats for activities contrary to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Together with our allies, we are reducing the Russian intelligence presence in the EU, the Czech Foreign Ministry said. Poland last week expelled 45 Russians whom the government identified as intelligence officers using their diplomatic status as cover to operate in the country. The Netherlands said it took its decision in consultation with a number of like-minded countries, citing similar expulsions by the United States, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Montenegro. The cabinet has decided to do this because of the threat to national security posed by this group, the Dutch ministry said in a statement. The intelligence threat against the Netherlands remains high. The current attitude of Russia in a broader sense makes the presence of these intelligence officers undesirable. The deportation is a measure taken in the context of national security. Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said he was prepared for a retaliation from Moscow. Experience shows that Russia does not leave these kinds of measures unanswered, he said. We cannot speculate about that, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is prepared for various scenarios that may arise in the near future. That was demonstrated earlier Tuesday, when Russia said it expelled a total of 10 diplomats from the three Baltic EU states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in retaliation for those countries expelling Russian diplomats earlier this month. The Russian Foreign Ministry said it was cancelling the accreditation of four Lithuanian diplomats, three Latvians and three Estonians and they would be required to leave the country. That corresponds to the number of Russian diplomats each country previously expelled. On March 18, the three Baltic countries ordered the expulsion of 10 Russian embassy staff members in a coordinated action taken in solidarity with Ukraine. Moscow called that move provocative and entirely baseless and that it had summoned the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian ambassadors in Moscow for an official protest. ___ Follow all AP stories on Russias war on Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine. WASHINGTON A federal judge in Texas is barring the Navy from taking action for now against sailors who have objected to being vaccinated against COVID-19 on religious grounds. U.S. District Judge Reed OConnor had in January issued a preliminary injunction preventing the Navy from disciplining or discharging 35 sailors who sued over the Navys vaccine policy while their case played out. On Monday, OConnor agreed the case could go forward as a class action lawsuit and issued a preliminary injunction covering the approximately 4,000 sailors who have objected on religious grounds to being vaccinated. OConnor said the larger group of sailors shared common characteristics with those who had sued. They had asked for and been denied an exemption to the vaccine requirement on religious grounds and were facing the threat of being discharged from the Navy, OConnor wrote. Even though their personal circumstances may factually differ in small ways, the threat is the same get the jab or lose your job, wrote OConnor, who was nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last year made vaccinations mandatory for service members. More than 99% of the Navys active duty force has been vaccinated against COVID-19, and the Navy has also discharged 650 people for refusing to be vaccinated. Navy guidelines allow for exemptions to the vaccine requirement on religious and other grounds, including medical reasons and if a service member is about to leave the Navy. Lawyers for the group of sailors who sued, most of them Navy SEALs, argue that the Navy had granted hundreds of exemptions for medical and administrative reasons but granted no religious exemptions for active duty and reserve service members. Nine inactive reserve members have been granted religious exemptions. Mike Berry, the director of military affairs for First Liberty Institute, which is representing the sailors, said in a statement following OConnors action that its time for our military to honor its constitutional obligations and grant religious accommodations for service members with sincere religious objections to the vaccine. While the case is still at an early stage, the U.S. Supreme Court in a brief order Friday narrowed the impact of OConnors original injunction, saying that the Navy could still consider the vaccination status of the sailors who sued in making deployment, assignment and other operational decisions. OConnors latest injunction allows the Navy to consider vaccination status in making those decisions about members of the larger group as well. President Joe Bidens administration had argued that not allowing the Navy to consider vaccination status in making assignments posed intolerable risks to safety and mission success. Navy personnel routinely operate for extended periods of time in confined spaces that are ripe breeding grounds for respiratory illnesses, where mitigation measures such as distancing are impractical or impossible, Biden administration lawyers wrote. A SEAL who falls ill not only cannot complete his or her own mission, but risks infecting others as well, particularly in close quarters, including on submarines. ___ Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report. Copyright 2022 Albuquerque Journal The CEO of New Mexicos health insurance exchange has stepped down. BeWellnm spokesman James Korenchen said Jeffery Bustamante, who had served as CEO since 2019, resigned from his post on Monday. The beWellnm board of directors is currently exploring options for interim management, Korenchen said. This transition is to ensure the organization is prepared for excellence with the upcoming public health emergency end imminent. Korenchen didnt offer more specifics on the reasoning for Bustamantes resignation. Bustamante did not immediately respond to request for comment Tuesday afternoon. Bustamante was appointed as interim CEO in March 2019 and was later confirmed as CEO in November of the same year. He will stay on through the transition to the new CEO, who has yet to be named. The federal government may soon end the public health emergency that aided states with additional money for Medicaid relief. If that emergency is terminated it would affect about 85,000 residents in New Mexico, according to earlier reports. Bustamante replaced Cheryl Gardner, who had previously served as CEO for the organization since 2017. The board at the time had opted not to extend her two-year contract, according to previous Journal reporting, which led to Bustamantes appointment. Bustamante had previously served as the director of policy and research for beWellnm. The states exchange has had five leaders since its inception in 2013. Mike Nunez had served as interim CEO until 2014, before being replaced by Amy Dowd, who was previously the director for Idahos exchange. Dowd left in 2016 for Molina Healthcare, however, and was replaced by Linda Weeden, beWellnms former director of communications and outreach. Weeden was then replaced by Gardner in 2017. More than 45,000 applied for health insurance during open enrollment which spanned from Nov. 1 through Jan. 15, according to a report from beWellnm. The health exchange was created in 2013 through state legislation to offer health insurance to New Mexico residents not covered by Medicare/Medicaid or through affordable plans in their places of work, according to the organizations website. Digimaze, Adtech performance marketing firm has recently raised $700k in seed funding. The round was led by Gautam Daftary with participation from 10 HNI family funds such as Maninder Juneja, Vivek Desai and others. With the ever-evolving Digital space we aim to maximize revenue, using advanced analytical models and a data-driven approach. This investment will strengthen business transformation, content and data with efficient use of technology The use of these models, will reduce the errors caused by the human eye & will assist in optimizing campaigns using audience data. The digital ecosystem is ever-evolving and is a critical factor in the growth of brands. With the funding, we plan to grow aggressively in the performance marketing space. Right partner to have on board to realize this dream. We plan to enable a larger number of brands to spruce their growth trajectory with efficient utilization of performance marketing & ad tech to reach the right set of audiences." said Vatsal Rajgor, CEO, Digimaze Co-Founders Vatsal Rajgor and Poojan Ajani formed the company in 2019 with a goal to create exclusive analytical tools that would help solve business challenges. In a short span of 2.5 years, the start-up has grown dramatically with a team of 120+ employees and a portfolio of 100+ brands. Eve Worlds vision was born out of necessity - a need for a free and responsible virtual space for women, where everyone gets an equal shot at value creation. Taking this vision ahead, Eve World now announces coto - a Web3 social community platform exclusively for women. Derived from come together, 'coto' is a new digital space for women that enables creativity without bounds and is built on the promise of consent and continual ownership. A one-point destination for women all over the world, 'coto' represents a world that isnt just free and responsible, but is also one thats built on participative ownership, where women have the space to express, engage, and be rewarded without toxicity. In several ways, 'coto' and limitless are synonymous. 'coto' is quite literally a space of limitless possibility, and it enables and empowers its members to enjoy a complete digital experience, in a world created by them and for them, without limits. A glimpse of some of the brand elements of coto - Brand Logo Warm, inviting, fun, reliable - there was a lot that had to be represented in cotos logo. In terms of a design perspective, a bold geometric typeface with elegantly rounded edges perfectly captures the warmth and playfulness of the brand Warm, inviting, fun, reliable - there was a lot that had to be represented in cotos logo. In terms of a design perspective, a bold geometric typeface with elegantly rounded edges perfectly captures the warmth and playfulness of the brand The letters denote the inherent uniqueness and individuality of every person. The bold geometric typeface with elegantly rounded edges perfectly captures the warmth and playfulness of the brand denote the inherent uniqueness and individuality of every person. The bold geometric typeface with elegantly rounded edges perfectly captures the warmth and playfulness of the brand The t and the o blend together in a harmonious yet powerful expression of what the brand stands for and is built to dobring people together blend together in a harmonious yet powerful expression of what the brand stands for and is built to dobring people together The primary color of the identity is violet, as it effortlessly evokes independence and creativity while being pleasing to the eye. It perfectly captures the brand's vision for the future, one of determination and joy, while sparking inspiration in our users to create and express themselves 'coto' will be a natural extension of Eve World, synergizing seamlessly, and resting on the pillars of uplifting, inspiring, empowering and enabling together. 'coto' will enable women to focus on whats truly important to them, and building on Web3 principles is what helps us ensure this. Interestingly, coto allows decentralized autonomous organizations or DAOs who are governed by its community, which help members decide on new features and functionality. These self-governed DAOs can make use of governance tokens, which financially incentivize members to vote and participate. Decentralized in nature, blockchain technology allows coto users to partake in a token economy. This way, the communitys revenue goes directly to the content creators when users decide to support or reward a creator they like. Self-governance, ownership, active participation in deciding on the future - all this and more is 'coto', Eve World's much-anticipated Web3 social community platform designed for women. In December 2021, NBC Universal launched its subscription-based OTT (over-the-top) streaming platform, Hayu, in India. The platform specialises in the reality genre and offers over 8,000 episodes of reality TV content, including all seasons of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, along with franchises like The Real Housewives, Top Chef, Million Dollar Listing and Family Karma, among others. Hendrik McDermott has been associated with NBC Universal for over a decade and has been working on Hayus account right from its inception. He started as the SVP & Managing Director of Hayu in October 2015 and was promoted as Managing Director of NBC Universals direct-to-consumer streaming businesses in all countries outside the US in just 11 months. In conversation with Adgully, Hendrik McDermott, Managing Director - Direct to Consumer, Global at NBC Universal, speaks at length about what led Hayu o launch in India, its association with Amazon Prime Channels, Hayus content and marketing strategies for India and much more. What led to the decision behind expanding Hayus market in India? What response has Hayu received in India? We launched the platform in 2016 and at its sixth year anniversary, we launched in the UK, Ireland and Australia back then and since then, we have been on a pretty aggressive and fast growth expansion trajectory. Every year that we have been in existence, we have expanded into one new region, or sometimes two new regions per year. And the plan is to try to grow the platform to be as large as it can be. We spent the last five years expanding into about 29 different markets. So beyond the UK, Ireland and Australia, we moved into the Nordic Region, we moved into the Benelux region into Canada, into Southeast Asia, in the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore. In early 2021, we expanded across much of Western Europe. And then, towards the end of last year, we finally made it into our 29th market, which is India. And the reason for it is that we do a lot of research on various markets looking for expansion. And we are trying to find places where reality TV, specifically unscripted reality TV, is popular and where we think our content will resonate with the consumers. And so one of the things we did was a specific research project on the Indian market, and it shows that theres quite a large addressable base of people who are interested in reality content and 33% of the addressable base that we saw, has a huge interest in reality TV. The majority of those people have an interest in US led reality TV as well. The research that we got back was very promising and we also use our own data points. We have a YouTube channel that we have launched, which is global and is available in all countries around the world. And we put a lot of short form content on that platform. And that allows us to see where we are getting a lot of interaction from the people. India is No. 1 on the list in terms of countries that are using our YouTube channel around the world. So, we knew there was a strong appetite for the content. And that has led us to think about launching here. What are your observations in terms of content consumption behaviour in the Indian market? How different is it compared to the other markets? The desire to watch content here is very strong. And so we see a very strong engagement with content. What that means is the sheer amount of content that is being viewed; we now have data from 29 different markets around the world and India is very near the top in terms of the amount of content that people will watch on our platform. We have been Live in India only for the last three months. So its early days, but we are seeing on average about 17 hours of content per user per month that is being consumed, which is a pretty high amount in terms of viewing. So, we are very delighted to see that theres a strong engagement with the content. You have tied up with Amazon Prime Channels in India. Why did you select particularly them for this partnership? What are the benefits that you have with this partnership? A very important part of our strategy is to have partners all around the world. The way we usually enter a market is that we launch with our main direct-to-consumer platform first, and then we seek to create as many partnerships as possible. We have done that in every other market and this is no different. We launched in India in December 2021 and we launched with Amazon in February 2022. We are also actively having conversations with potential future partners. So, what we like to do is have numerous different types of partners it can be across cable TV , telcos, and other SVOD platforms, we have numerous examples of partners that we have all over the world. We selected Amazon specifically because weve had a long standing partnership with them in many other markets. We had launched on Amazon Prime Video Channels in the UK five years ago in 2017, and we have a partnership with them in many other markets already. So, it was reasonably easy for us to extend that partnership here to India as well. We bring our own content to the platform. What has been helpful for us with Amazon here is that it is another place for us to go and find new subscribers. We are, of course, trying to sell subscriptions across as many devices as we can. Thus, it is hugely important for us to be present on as many platforms as possible. Amazon brings another group of people who are already there to watch videos. So, it is sort of a good place to look for further subscriptions. While the content bank of Hayu in India has all time famous series like Real Housewives, Keeping up with the Kardashians, Top Chefs and others, do you plan to add more shows to the app? We had almost 300 shows on the platform at launch, and today it is about 8,000 hours of content. We add 1,000 new hours of content to the platform every year, so we are constantly adding new franchises, specifically for India, we have acquired a variety of exclusive shows as well. In particular, the one that just launched last week is Below Deck Down Under, which comes from the Below Deck franchise, which is exclusive to the Hayu platform. The other main franchise on our platform is the Real Housewives franchise, which has almost 13 different spin offs and some of those are exclusive to our platform as well. So, we will continue to add further content. The way we normally enter a market is that most of our programming comes from within the NBC Universal portfolio. Our content comes from the key flagship brands of E, Bravo and Oxygen, which are based in the US. And so, we have access to all of the programming that comes from those channels. Thats why we can continue to keep refreshing our platform. And as we entered the market, and over time, we started looking at other ways to increase the content portfolio. And exclusive content is one of those things. As we move forward, we are likely to look at acquiring some third party content for the platform as well. What is your marketing strategy for the Indian market? How are you promoting Hayu in India? It is very similar to how we have entered almost all of our other markets. When we launch, we invest significantly in the market and we try to build up as much brand awareness as we can. Specifically in this market, we had a huge campaign in December 2021 and January 2022, which was focused on the Hayu brand itself. That was through more traditional media tactics print, TV, radio, and also some podcasts, and outdoor advertising, etc.. The promotion strategy is really designed to try to build as much brand awareness as possible and in a short amount of time. That is the short term strategy, which is still continuing. We will be launching another campaign later this month. As we grow our brand awareness, we shift our tactics a little bit more to digital. We tend to drive as much of our subscription from social media platforms. But the first step is to build brand awareness of what our platform is before we can do that. Indias most notable poker series - National Poker Series India (NPS) 2022, hosted on PokerBaazi.com which began on March 6, 2022, concluded in style with the final three tables at Majestic Pride, Goa between March 23-25, 2022, seeing some exhilarating matchups between the top poker players of India. With the conclusion of the tournament, it was Shagun Jain from Jaipur, Rajasthan who claimed the top spot on the NPS podium (Medal leaderboard) with Four Gold Medals and Two Silver (50 Points) and won a package worth INR 10 Lac, while Rohit Begwani from Churu, Rajasthan ended in Second with Four Gold Medals (40 Points) and a package worth INR 7.5 Lac. The third spot on the podium was taken by Dhaval Doshi from Mumbai with 1 Gold & 3 Silver (25 points) and has received a package worth INR 2.5 Lac. All the three podium finishers will be heading to Las Vegas to represent India on the largest stage of Poker in the world. The final tables on the other hand, saw top Indian players battling it out for glory. The first final table was NPS Super High Roller. The table was won by Kartik Ved from Goa who clinched gold, Vipin Pantola from Haldwani, Uttarakhand clinched silver while the third place and bronze medal went to Gokul Raj from Goa. They took home INR 22.09 Lac, INR 15.50 Lac and INR 9.97 Lac, respectively as prize money. The second final table was the NPS Main Event which again saw Goa claiming top spot with Chirag Sodha (INR 44.84 Lac) clinching gold, the surprise came in the second spot with Riteish Kumar (INR 39.34 Lac) from the small town of Gumla in Jharkhand clinching silver while the third spot and the bronze medal went to Ashutosh Balodhi (INR 20.90 Lac) from Delhi. On the final day of the event, it was time for the most loved event of the National Poker Series i.e., NPS Golden Rush. The event which had an INR 550 buy-in and saw nearly 15,000 entries was won by Sankesh Kumar A Jain from Chennai (INR 9 Lac) taking home the gold medal, the silver medal was won by Arbaaz Ahmed (INR 7.01 Lac) from Bengaluru, Karnataka followed by the bronze medal to Dilip Kumar (INR 4.38 Lac) from Jalore, Rajasthan. The top five states which registered the greatest number of medals include Maharashtra (46 medals), New Delhi (36 medals), Rajasthan (35 medals), Uttar Pradesh (27 medals), and Haryana (21 medals). Over the course of NPS, 252 medals were awarded across 84 tournaments. Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance Company Ltd (Kotak Life) today announced the launch of its new digital brand campaign #KaroLifeKiSearchShuru, delving on the importance of having Life Insurance early on in life. The campaign aims to create awareness amongst people who tend to procrastinate their decision to secure the future of their loved ones. Subhasis Ghosh, Joint President & Head Marketing, Institutional Business and Alliances, Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance Co. Ltd. said, "Kotak Life is committed to increasing Insurance awareness and expanding insurance penetration across India. Our research showed that while the awareness level to buy a life insurance cover has increased due to the pandemic, however, the urge to buy insurance is yet to increase despite knowing the importance of having one. Our digital campaign takes a fresh approach to bridging the gap between people wanting to buy vis-a-vis people actually buying life insurance by highlighting the benefits of taking an insurance policy early on in life to avoid future uncertainties, he added. The launch video of the campaign showcases how a customer can benefit by getting a bigger cover at less premium if he/she buys the insurance cover early with Kotak e-term plan, which offers Rs 1 crore insurance cover at just Rs 15 per day*. Omkar Joshi, Founder and Chief Creative Officer at hybrid> - the creative agency that executed the campaign - said, Kotak Life is one of the pioneers of creative communications in the life insurance sector. The campaign - #KaroLifeKiSearchShuru, addresses a peculiar habit of people when it comes to buying life insurance procrastination. If people take the first step of finding more information, they will realise how delays can hurt them and their families in the long run. We've introduced humor into the communication with a slick core line that's surely going to resonate across the country. *The per day premium is Rs.15 [ 5,400 Annualized Premium / 365 days = 14.794]. The premium is assuming the policy is bought online and the customer has not purchased any policy from Kotak Life Insurance. The illustrated premium figure is exclusive of Goods and Services Tax and Cess. Goods and Services Tax and Cess thereon shall be charged as per the prevalent tax laws over and above the said premiums. Social Panga, one of Indias leading integrated digital-first marketing agencies, founded by Gaurav Arora and Himanshu Arora, announces the launch of its new production vertical called, The Yellow Shutter. The newly launched vertical is a step towards offering a holistic solution to brands to create visual content. The Yellow Shutter is one of the fastest-growing content production companies providing end-to-end services for creating visual content for brands across India and offers an array of services including, Script Writing, Storyboarding, Video Production, Brand films, Corporate Shoots, Concept Photoshoot, Product Photoshoot, Artist Management, VFX & Post, and CGI. The vertical will be helmed by Dilpreet Kaur Sandhu and Harsh Pandya and consists of a team of storytellers who hold a collective experience of over 15 years. The Yellow Shutter's team of visual content have embarked on a journey of curating content according to the digital mood and relevant brand perspective. Speaking on the new vertical, Co-Founder, Gaurav Arora said, This new vertical is a step ahead for Social Panga in terms of offering a one-stop solution to brands and clients. With The Yellow Shutter we aim to design visual storytelling thats aligned with a brands marketing stance, and also holds a signature that screams a distinctive identity. In the last 6 months, we have successfully created over 52 video productions and more than 25 photoshoots, and it gives me enormous pleasure to see the in-house production vertical grow and prosper as a production house that caters to all. Head of Business Growth and Production, Dilpreet Sandhu, commented, Every brand has a story and every story needs telling. The team at The Yellow Shutter believes in the power of visuals and we aim to give wings to each of these stories and many more. We are storytellers at heart and driven by the passion of seeing scripts come to life through the lens Head of Production, Harsh Pandya says, Having worked in the industry for over a decade, I have now embarked on a journey with The Yellow Shutter. The team and I want to be the voice and the visual of your story. The right people and the right vision form the core of our team while we live and breathe in the ever-evolving world of digital storytelling. The Yellow Shutter has worked with clients like Mamaearth, UpGrad, Himalaya Babycare, Amazon, Pepperfry, Josh App, Paytm Money, Chola MS General Insurance, Manipal Hospitals, TATA Health, Van Heusen and many more. Somany Ceramics, an internationally acclaimed organisation that specialises in ceramics and allied products segment has appointed L&K Saatchi & Saatchi as its creative agency of record. The agency will manage the full-service creative mandate for a range of products from the company under its Tiles and Bathware category. L&K Saatchi & Saatchi was selected after a multi-agency pitch and will play a key role in devising vital & new-age communication strategies for Somany as it seeks to increase its foothold and reach with the Indian consumers. Speaking on the partnership, Minal Somany, Brand Custodian, Somany Ceramics said: As we take Somany into the next chapter of growth, we wanted an agency that is more of a business partner than just being a creative agency for us. In L&K Saatchi & Saatchi, we found the right balance of creative excellence and entrepreneurial spirit to partner us in our growth endeavours. On the new alliance, Paritosh Srivastava, CEO, L&K Saatchi & Saatchi said: We are privileged to partner a category-defining brand such as Somany in the next phase of their growth. Its an exciting category with a lot of action on every front and we would want to add the needed fuel to achieve the brands vision. Our mandate is to help the brand realise its true potential and business to achieve leadership in volume and value. Commenting on the partnership, Atin Wahal, EVP L&K Saatchi & Saatchi said: Having Somany on board in the growing New Delhi office is a matter of great pride for us as they have been defining the category and we believe there is a huge potential on the brand to do great work and create brand preference for the consumers. In the last five decades, Somany Ceramics has established itself as an unchallenged leader in the Indian ceramic industry with a significant presence in India, Africa, The Middle East, the United Kingdom and Russia. The company has multi-location manufacturing plants in North, West & South with 72 million square meters of saleable material capacity annually. It also has a capacity of approx. 8.92 lakh pieces of sanitary ware and approx. 9.0 lakhs pieces of bath fittings. Somany is a complete decor solutions provider. Its extensive range of products includes Ceramic Walls and Floor Tiles, Polished Vitrified Tiles, Glazed Vitrified Tiles, Digital Tiles, Sanitary ware, and Bath Fittings as well as Tiles Laying Solutions. It is with deep sadness that The One Club for Creativity announces the passing of dear colleague and friend Tony Gulisano, Global Chief Growth Officer, who died suddenly in New York on March 25. Gulisano, 70, is a legendary figure in the global creative community, where during his 40 years at international awards programs he forged close professional and personal relationships with thousands of top creatives around the world. He entered the industry in 1982 with the Clio Awards, where he spent 26 years and served as managing director. After four years of consulting with London International Awards, he joined The One Club in 2015. Gulisano played a key role in growing international visibility and industry involvement for the nonprofit organizations global programming. He helped start and run the clubs ONE School free portfolio program for Black creatives and ONE Production diversity program, as well as its monthly A Creative Perspective video series featuring the views of some of the industry's most interesting and celebrated creatives. He played a significant role in annual jury selection for The One Show, ADC Annual Awards, and One Asia Creative Awards, and was pivotal in assembling 21 global creative leaders to serve on the clubs latest International Board of Directors, announced last week. Tony was one of the most influential people in the creative community who never looked for the spotlight himself, said Kevin Swanepoel, CEO, The One Club. He was the absolute nicest, most selfless person who never asked for anything except how he could help others, which he did over the past four decades for so many creatives around the world. Im very fortunate to have had Tony as a close colleague, trusted confidant and advisor, and very dear friend. Our deepest condolences go out to his family, we will miss him greatly. In his honor, The One Club has established the Tony Gulisano Memorial Fund. Donations will go to support the clubs ONE School and ONE Production programs, as well as shared with his family. The One Club will pay tribute to Gulisano at The One Show 2022 awards ceremony on May 20 during Creative Week in New York, and host an event for the industry to celebrate his life in the summer. Services will be held on Tuesday, March 29 at 11:00 am at Saint Anthony of Padua church in New York. Kalyan Jewellers India Limited, one of Indias largest jewellery companies, today announced board approval for the appointment of Mr. Vinod Rai as the Chairman and Independent Non-executive Director on the Board of the Company. The appointment will be subject to obtaining requisite regulatory and shareholders approvals. Mr. TS Kalyanaraman will continue as Managing Director on the Companys board. Mr. Vinod Rai was the Former Comptroller and Auditor General of India and the former Chair of the United Nations Panel of External Auditors. Mr. Rai has held various positions within the Indian government as well as in state governments and has been instrumental in a wide variety of reforms in India, including as Chairman of the Banks Board Bureau, a body set up by the Indian government to reform public banking in India. Mr. Rai was awarded the Padma Bhushan, Indias third highest civilian award, in recognition of his services to the country. He has Masters degrees both in Economics as well as Public Administration from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi and the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, USA, respectively. Mr. Rai said: It is a privilege for me to be associated with Kalyan Jewellers, a company which has built the highest levels of trust amongst its stakeholders, conducts its business in an ethical and transparent manner and upholds the standards of good corporate governance. Kalyan Jewellers has a well-recognized brand, pan-India footprint and a strong management team at the helm of the business. The Kalyanaraman family, with its deep commitment to customer transparency and enlightenment, has been at the forefront of transforming the jewellery retailing sector in India. I eagerly look forward to my association with Kalyan." Mr. TS Kalyanaraman said: We are delighted to welcome Mr. Vinod Rai to Kalyan Jewellers as an Independent Chairman of our board. Kalyan Jewellers has always been committed to trust, transparency and upholding the highest standards of corporate governance, and this event is a natural step in the evolution of our company along that journey. Mr. Rai brings a tremendous breadth and depth of experience and we are looking forward to him adding further to the diverse experience we already have on our board today". As Chairman, Mr. Vinod Rais appointment would make him the 8th non-executive director on the Board, joining Salil Nair (Former CEO, Shoppers Stop), Mr. Anil Nair (Former CEO, L&K Saatchi & Saatchi India), Mrs. Kishori Udeshi (Former Deputy Governor of the RBI), Mr. Anish Saraf (MD, Warburg Pincus India Private Limited), Mr. T.S. Anantharaman (Former Chairman, Catholic Syrian Bank), Mr. Mahalingam Ramaswamy (Former MD, State Bank of Travancore) and Mr. Agnihotra Dakshina Murty Chavali (Former ED of Indian Overseas Bank). Riots, restrictions on speech and religion, and the takeover of politics and law enforcement are just a few of the unwelcome changes that can be expected in non-Muslim societies as Muslim immigrants increase in number, according to Dr. Peter Hammond. A Christian missionary based in South Africa and author of 40 books, Hammond delineates how Muslims change societies in his book, Slavery, Terrorism and Islam. Citing examples of countries worldwide, Hammond outlines typical activities that occur as the Muslim percentage of the total population increases. It is a warning bell about the gradual, step-by-step changes that can be expected in other countries still undergoing significant Muslim immigration. These societal changes occur because devout Muslims are bound by a 1,400-year-old doctrine of immigration originating in Islamic scriptures and based on Mohammed's migration from Mecca to Medina. Under the religious edict or Hijra, Islamic expansionism and submission of all non-Muslims to shariah or Islamic doctrine must occur. Islamic expansionism and its counterpart, jihad, are first expressed as Muslim demands for special status and privileges within the host country. A higher percentage of Muslims in the host country can soon translate into Muslim control of political processes, law enforcement, media, and the economy, as well as restrictions on freedom of movement, speech and religious practices. The appropriation of goods and property, as well as violence with impunity, can also occur. The situation in at West Bengal in Hindu-majority India, bordering Muslim-majority Bangladesh, illustrates the inherent problems to non-Muslim societies of a growing Muslim population. West Bengal Bengal, an ethno-cultural region, was politically divided in 1947 during the partitioning of British India into independent India and Pakistan. Under this arrangement, the Bengal province was carved in two: the predominately-Hindu West Bengal, a state of India, and the predominately-Muslim East Bengal, which became a province of Pakistan and, in 1971, the Muslim-majority country of Bangladesh. At partitioning, the Muslim population of West Bengal stood at 12% and the Hindu population of East Bengal 30%. Today, with massive Muslim immigration, Hindu persecution and forced conversions, West Bengals Muslim population has increased to 27% (up to 63% in some districts), as per the 2011 census and Bangladeshs Hindu population has decreased to 8%. While the situation for Hindus in Bangladesh is certainly dire, life has become increasingly difficult for Hindus in West Bengal, home to a Muslim-appeasing government and a breeding ground and safe haven for terrorists. For several years, West Bengal has suffered under apparent Muslim-planned riots designed to implement shariah, extract government concessions and grab more territory. Kolkata Riots In 2007, a violent protest broke out in Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta) against Bangladeshi feminist author, physician and human rights activist, Taslima Nasreen. The demonstrations against Nasreen were a thinly veiled attempt to institute Islamic blasphemy laws and curtail freedom of speech. Nasreen, who was born a Bangladeshi Muslim but chose atheism, had witnessed the horrific treatment of Islamic women in her medical practice, and advocated for freedom of expression, womens rights, non-Muslim rights and abolition of shariah law. In 1993, she published a novel, Lajja (Shame) about a Hindu family persecuted by Muslims. The novel ignited a furor in the Muslim community, which called for a ban on the book and offered a bounty for her death. The novel was subsequently banned by Indian authorities. Nasreen was physically attacked, went into hiding and escaped from Bangladesh to Europe. After 10 years exile, she returned to the east and settled in Kolkata. Her Bangladeshi passport had been revoked and she waited several years for a visa to be able to visit India. While in Kolkata, she continued to write articles critical of Islam despite renewed threats and calls for her beheading. In November 2007, a protest organized by militant Muslims against Nasreen led to riots as Muslims blocked traffic, pelted police and journalists, torched cars and damaged buses. Similar to the justification for the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris, West Bengali Muslims protested the violation of shariah blasphemy law, which mandates death for anyone who dares to criticize Islam. The army was forced to intervene, Nasreen was placed under house arrest and later forced to leave the area. The banned Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) were believed to have fostered the mayhem. Canning District Riots In 2013, Muslims in West Bengal were actively lobbying for a second partition of India to create an Islamic super state Mughalistan that would incorporate Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of India. Meanwhile, ethnic divisions were also stirred up by an upcoming local election. Into this charged situation, the murder of a Muslim cleric by unidentified assailants sparked outrage among Muslims, as thousands mobilized for rioting in the Canning District. An article in a popular weekly publication, Organiser, called the attack a well organized and meticulously planned attack on Hindus. Over 200 Hindu homes were looted and firebombed, hundreds of temples and idols destroyed, and vehicles set on fire amid shouts of Allah-hu Akbar! Repeated calls for help by Hindus went unanswered by the police. Local residents claimed authorities were complicit with the Muslim mobs. Violence in Usti This January 29th, in a market in the Kolkata suburb of Usti, more than 50 Hindu shops were ransacked, looted and gutted by rampaging jihadists. Police mostly watched as bombs were hurled at Hindus indiscriminately. They fired a few random shots into the air and detained victimized Hindu shop owners while their attackers roamed free. A legislative assembly member and the state minister for minority affairs reportedly demanded that local police release the few rioters held in custody. There was limited reporting by the mainstream media that didnt specify the Muslim identity of the perpetrators and West Bengals Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, issued no statement about the violence. Independent sites, Indiafacts and Hindu Samhati, reported the incident with numerous photographs. Political Implications With a 27% Muslim population, enough pressure exists to tip the scales for elected officials precariously toward advancement of an Islamist agenda and make Muslims the most privileged class in West Bengal. In some areas, such as the border district of Murshidabad, which is over 63% Muslim, de facto shariah is imposed on all residents. The vast majority of political candidates, elected officials and law enforcement leadership are Muslim and the economic prospects for Hindus dim as Muslims refuse to patronize non-Muslim businesses. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who has received official visits from Hillary Clinton and several U.S. ambassadors, offers a prime example of a political leader who expediently favors Muslim constituents, capitulates to their many demands and entices them with special benefits and privileges. The reality of Muslim vote bank politics, whereby an entire Muslim community votes along lines dictated by the local imam or religious leader, adds to the problem and furthers Muslim control of the state. Banerjee has gone so far in her Muslim sympathies as to publicly recite the Kalima Shahadat, the Islamic conversion prayer, in front of an audience of imams. Because West Bengals Muslims were largely responsible for her election as chief minister, Banerjee has made substantial payback. She approved and validated the academic degrees of 10,000 previously unrecognized Saudi-funded and controlled madrasas (Islamic colleges) four minarets (Muslim towers), honorariums for imams and an exclusively Islamic township. Banerjee called for the establishment of Muslim medical, technical and nursing schools with special subsidies for Muslim students, as well as Muslim-only hospitals. She has favored Muslims to the extent of distributing free bicycles and rail passes to female Muslim students and laptops to Muslim boys. Banerjees political party, the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), will most likely send more Islamists to serve in parliament in the future. Reportedly, jihadist sleeper cells inhabit the area under her protection. Meanwhile, the needs of Hindu refugees from Bangladesh are ignored, even as they continue being victimized in West Bengal. In June of 2014, Mamata Banerjee made a highly questionable appointment, Rajya Sabha, to the upper house of the Indian Parliament. Despite multiple warnings from the District Intelligence Bureau that had red-flagged him for instigating violence against Hindus, including alleged participation in the Kolkata and Canning riots and sheltering known terrorists, she selected Pakistani Hassan Imran to serve as MP. Imran is a founder and self-admitted member of the radical student group, the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), a recognized terrorist organization banned by the Indian government. He founded and edited a radical weekly magazine, Kalam, which he later turned into a daily newspaper, Dainik Kalam, and sold to the Saradha Group, a financial conglomerate with ties to West Bengal government officials. The publication has advocated for the establishment of Muslim-controlled areas in the state under shariah. Hassan has close ties to local Islamist leaders and has worked with Jamat-e-Islami (JI), a pro-Saudi jihadist group supported by Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). He also has ties to a chief official of the Islamic Development Bank, a Saudi entity that has financed Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism funding trial in the United States. JI and the ISI have been linked to efforts to take over the Indian state of Assam and separate it from India. The Saudi-funded terrorist group Jamaat-ul-Mujahadeen, also linked to MP Hassan Imran, has a major base in West Bengal, including bomb-manufacturing units, and has used Wahhabi money to build mosques throughout the state. The Muslim call to prayer is blasted by loudspeaker from early in the morning to late at night and some thoroughfares in the Muslim districts of Kolkata are closed to all traffic for Friday prayers. Recently, Hassan and other associates of Mamata Banerjee were implicated in a financial scandal a Ponzi scheme with the Saradha Group and things are starting to unravel for the chief minister. A major investigation of a consortium of 200 private companies that collected between $4 6 billion from over 1.7 million depositors before it collapsed, may bring down her reign in West Bengal. Her MP appointee, Hassan, is believed to have acted as a liaison between Jamaat-e-Islami and the money launderers. Bangladesh Hindus of West Bengal need only look across the border to Bangladesh to see their future if Muslim immigration continues and the Muslim population exceeds the current 27%. In Bangladesh, with an 89% Muslim population, ethnic cleansing persists unabated, Hindu land is forcibly captured and Hindu homes and businesses looted. People are commonly beaten with no police intervention. Hindus have been tortured and forced to pay the jizya, a tax that non-Muslims are required to pay for protection against Muslim terrorism. Hindu girls, even married women, have been raped, mutilated, kidnapped, enslaved and forced to marry Muslim men. Law enforcement authorities are often complicit in the activities and provide no protection or recourse. Victims are typically threatened if they report incidents to the police. Often, in the case of abduction, police refuse to register complaints and make claims that consensual intercourse has taken place even if the girl is 9 or 10 years old, a non-minor under Islamic standards. Kidnapped Hindu girls who manage to escape report that they were taken to Muslim families in which relatives and friends were invited to rape them over several days while Muslim women facilitated the encounters. This dire future could possibly be avoided in West Bengal, where some speculate that the Saradha financial scandal could go far in exposing Mamata Banerjees dangerous ties to Islamists who seek to wrest control of West Bengal from Hindus. If her government falls as a result, it could be the wake-up call needed to turn the current situation around. It could also serve as an example to other countries facing increasing Muslim immigration and increasing imposition of Muslim values on non-Muslims. Today, unquestionably serious cardiovascular, thrombotic and neurologic adverse events related to the vaccine have occurred around the world. The FDAs own vaccine adverse event tracking system (the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS) shows substantial and serious risks from the vaccine, even though the FDA only collects an estimated 10% of all adverse events. Still, federal agencies and manufacturers arent officially warning the American public about these risks, despite having been privy to this information for almost a whole year. Why? Because it would counter the narrative that taking endless vaccines and boosters is your patriotic duty. Its pretty clear today there are both safety and efficacy problems with vaccines and boosters. Because all of the FDAs 18,000-plus employees had access to the same drug safety data we have, one must ask: Are Americans expected to believe that the $6.5 billion-per-year taxpayer-funded FDA lacks adequate funding to address all these public health issues? Not Fully Disclosing Safety Risks to Patients Violates Ethics and States Licensing Standards In order for a physician, pharmacist, and nurse, or anyone else with a clinical professional license to work at the FDA or CDC or any other public health agency, that person must have a current, active, full, and unrestricted license or registration from any state in the US. Not fully warning patients about the potential dangers from any drug before administering useless and potentially dangerous vaccines and boosters places these professionals licenses at risk, regardless of what the CDC, FDA, or White House says. Physicians, pharmacists, and nurses have always been held to a higher standard. They are expected to think for themselves rather than simply take orders. As the truth is elucidated about vaccine efficacy and safety, these federal employees and mRNA vaccine manufacturers who colluded to withhold information from the public will be held accountable, and the whole I was just following orders excuse will not cut it. Just keeping your head down and cruising through your job, handing out vaccines is not an option when it comes to the lives of your fellow Americans when licensures are held to a higher standard. Once you see a rash of early retirements of federal public health employees (with full federal benefits of course), expect the other shoe will drop and starker evidence of clear malfeasance will come to light. When that happens, the licensed practitioners and scientists responsible for withholding vital health information from the public should be thoroughly investigated by their academic boards and licensing authorities. Taxpayer-Funded Agency Missions are Being Ignored Separate from that, not speaking out appears to directly violate the Federal Public Health Vision, Mission and Values regarding its very specific obligations and, specifically, relating to sections labeled public health and accountability and communication. Their silence also contradicts the FDA motto, which is to assure that: All food is safe; all medical products are safe and effective; and the public health is advanced and protected. The CDC motto pledges to Base all public health decisions on the highest quality scientific data that is derived openly and objectively. And you know our federal government has jumped the shark on dishonesty when even the unmistakably liberal New York Times expresses outrage at the CDCs deliberate omission about mRNA efficacy and safety data. FDA and CDC Still Pushing the Original, Ineffective COVID-19 Vaccine In fact, FDA and CDC officials are still pushing a potentially unsafe and seemingly ineffective COVID-19 vaccine by purposely hiding facts from the public. The original strain of COVID-19 has been replaced by mutations. Continuing to promote the original vaccine for the mutated strain of COVD-19 is akin to promoting last years flu vaccine for this years flu strain. The original, Wuhan, China version of COVID -19 doesnt exist today. But that hasnt stopped the FDA or the CDC: Just look at an archived image of todays screenshot of the FDA website still pushing boosters onto the American public and even showing images of kids and young adults with bandages from their latest vaccination and/or boosters, despite the latest CDC data saying that there is essentially no benefit in those younger groups. The same nonsense can be seen on an archived image of the CDCs vaccines.gov website from today: Future CDC and FDA Accountability No scientific accountability will ever take place under the existing leadership. It will likely take a combination of courageous whistleblowers, a strong President who actually believe in following the science, and an assertive new Congress to call the necessary hearings and issue the necessary subpoenas to uncover the many CDC and FDA civil and executive service malefactors who, along with Anthony Fauci, have taken the American people for fools. These outrageously political, manipulative, science-ignoring federal officials must be held accountable . Of course, nothing will happen to them while the Biden-Harris administration controls the White House and its pliant allies control Congress. Even worse: If the republicans somehow gain control again, will anyone other than Sen. Ron Johnson do anything to hold CDC and FDA officials accountable? Or will they just again reach across the aisle and try to find a middle ground and play the whole go along to get along game and conform to general expectations so as not to disrupt or endanger their elected offices, university club memberships, and general belonging as they have done historically? Its hard to stay optimistic about the odds. Dr. David Gortler is a pharmacologist, pharmacist, and an FDA and healthcare policy oversight fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC. He was a professor of pharmacology and biotechnology at the Yale University School of Medicine, where he also served at Yales Bioethics Center, and was an FDA medical officer who was later appointed by the White House as senior advisor to the FDA commissioner for drug safety, FDA science policy, and FDA regulatory affairs. He is a columnist at Forbes , where he writes on drug safety, health care and FDA policy. Note: Dr. Gortler will be working with us in the future to update a list from January identifying athletes who have died after receiving COVID vaccinations or boosters. You may want to bookmark it for future reference. The cancel culture war has got out of control on many levels and must be checked. At an academic level, Nigel Biggar, Anglican priest and professor of theology at Oxford University, was victimized for wanting to tell the whole story of British history. He had argued that there were bad, racist, bits of that history, but these did mean endemic or systemic racism. Since the slave trade was abolished in 1807 the British Empire may have been colonialist but was engaged in suppressing slavery. Increasingly, literary figures have been targeted by bigoted wokery. Only a few examples are needed to illustrate this. Sir Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials resigned from his position as President of the Society of Authors because he had been the subject of a considerable row for defending Kate Clanchy, whose work was accused of racial and ableist stereotyping. Pullman realized he would not be free to express his personal opinions as long as he remained president. In her book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, Clanchy had included alleged racist tropes such as chocolate colored skin and almond shaped eyes, and her descriptions of children of color and of autistic children were widely condemned. Pullman later commented that those who condemn a book without reading it will find a comfortable home in ISIS or the Taliban. Author J.K. Rowling was criticized for defending womens rights against transgender militants, and other writers and speakers have been vilified for expression of concern over erosion of womens rights by the transgender activists. Among the authors whose books have been banned are Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morrison, author of The Bluest Eye. The writer Anne Tyler commented that misdeeds or crimes of writers should not lead to removal of their works. Controversially, she compared this to the case of Paul Gauguin who had sex and fathered children with underage girls: despite this his paintings continue to be exhibited. Authors, she said, should receive the same treatment. A powerful counterargument against cancel culture appeared in an Open Letter in Harpers on July 7, 2020, protesting against the tendency to subject norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. The letter was, as one of the authors stated, resistance to a poisonous judgmentalism that has demoted, shunned, and personally, vilified anyone who opposes liberal opinion. So called higher education is no different. Students at Yale Law school disrupted speakers at a March 10, 2022 panel on civil liberties hosted by the Yale Federalist Society, and featured two women speakers, one progressive and one conservative. The students heckled and shouted, and the speakers had to be escorted by police for their safety. Senior Judge Laurence Silberman of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit commented on the dispute, saying that federal judges should carefully consider whether any student who disrupts a panel discussion on free speech should be disqualified for a potential clerkship. Even cancel culture has consequences. But help is on the way. The Church Court of Jesus College, Cambridge, has refused the demand by the Master of the College, Sonita Alleyne, and members of the college to remove the memorial to 17th-century benefactor Tobias Rustat, a generous donor to the college, over his links to the slave trade. Rustat was a courtier of King Charles II, and a major benefactor to Cambridge University. It is now evident that his investment in the transatlantic slave trade has been exaggerated because it was relatively small, and most of his wealth came from his work for the king. Indeed, he had lost money in the slave trade investment. Moreover, he made his donations with money made elsewhere than the slave trade. The critics wanted the memorial, which is on the wall above the chapel altar, removed and put in a space elsewhere. The case was heard by a judge specially appointed by the local bishop because the memorial is housed in a historic building and ecclesiastical environment, those opposed to removal argued that the college was assaulting carefully selected aspects of its past. The judge David Hogue called the slave trade evil, utterly abhorrent and repugnant, but it is a distorted view to hold that British society is based on the legacy of the slave trade. The words in the Rustat monument are pertinent; the greatest part of the estate he gathered... he disposed of it in his time in works of charity. The monument is a memorial to philanthropy, not to slavery. Other voices are expressing their opinion that the time for cancel culture is over, The British minister of justice and deputy prime minister Dominic Raab warned on March 24, 2022 that the parameters of free speech and democratic debate are being whittled away, whether by the privacy issue or by wokery and political correctness. Free speech should be given a different, dominant, status in the pecking order of rights. We must, he argued, strengthen free speech, the liberty that guards all of our other freedoms. Raab proposed that free speech will in the UK be given legal supremacy, a triumph card, over other rights. In balancing rights, the great overriding importance and weight is attached to free speech. The Human Rights Act 1998 was passed to enable UK citizens to be able to rely on rights in the European Convention on human rights in cases before the domestic courts. It sets out a series of fundamental rights starting with the right to life, and continuing with freedom from slavery and torture, the right to a fair trial, and freedom of thought., expression, belief, and religion. Article 9 of the act states that freedom to manifest one s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health, or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedom of others. Some of the rationale for the British proposal stems from decision of the British Court of Appeal in December 2021 in favor of Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex on her claim against the Daily Mail for copyright infringement by publishing extracts of her 2018 handwritten letter to her father, in essence misuse of private information. The court held that Markle had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of the letter which were personal, private, and not matters of legitimate public interest. The case will be appealed to the UK Supreme Court. The precise British proposal is to replace the Human Rights Act with a new Bill of Rights. The premise is that in the balance between the right to free speech and the right to privacy or other rights, the overriding importance should be given to free speech. The new plan will allow UK courts to interpret European and international human rights law in a UK context. The new bill will protect media freedom but free speech will have a triumph card status among the wide range of issues. The intention is that there would be only very limited restrictions on proposed restrictions of free speech, such as that promoting terrorism, inciting violence, or threatening children. All reasonable people should strive to end the narrow, misguided form of moral judgment that has led to a climate of falsification and self-censorship. Image: Newtown grafitti Back in 2020 Joe Biden said he was running to save the world from Climate Change and Systemic Racism. Hows that coming along Joey? What? Cant hear you down in the basement! What? Youre too busy saving the world from Putin? O-Kay. Climate Change is the way the global elite proves to you that they are saving you from a fate worse than death. Fighting Climate Change gives their lives meaning, like Maurice Strong, the Canadian who went from oilman to environmental wacko and founder of the UN Environment Programme and saving the world. Systemic Racism is the way that our nations elite deals with the fact that its rule of the last 100 years has Made Things Worse: for the white working class, for blacks, and for women -- gays and transgenders next up. But that cant be true. It just cant! So everything our elite is doing today, from de-policing our neighborhoods to de-grading our schools, to automatic bail for everyone except armed insurrectionists, is about convincing themselves that its all the fault of the enemy, malevolent white supremacists. And Its Not Our Fault. I dont know about you but I consider Climate Change a recipe for economic disaster and I consider Systemic Racism a crime against humanity. But how do we make it stop? The simple answer is: we cant, because We the People dont get a voice. I just read a piece quoting our noble Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen saying -- even now -- that we are not doing enough on fighting Climate Change. See? The usual suspects are still repeating the Climate Change narrative as though nothing had happened and we arent in the middle of a serious energy crisis because of the convergence of Russia-Ukraine and the German Energiewende. And you dont get to disrupt Yellens narrative because you arent a student at Yale Law School with an unlimited Protest Pass from teacher. Hey even Jim Geraghty at National Review is into climate change, because cracking building foundations in the melting permafrost in Russia. But if the Climate does Change, I vote for Elon Musk -- using his unrealized gains from SpaceX -- rather than Maurice Strong and his adepts to show us how to adapt to a changed world. What? President Biden wants to tax billionaire unrealized gains? And we dont get a voice on Systemic Racism. Dont you dare say a word against the highly-qualified Kentanji Brown Jackson, because you are not a biologist. Dont you dare sympathize with police trying to arrest drugged-out criminals, because you are not a police violence specialist. Dont you dare kick the homeless out of our parks and sidewalks, because you are not a marginalized people expert. Dont you dare kick disruptive kids out of school; you dont understand their lived experience. Right now, the British opinion site UnHerd.com is writing about The Fall of Seattle and how the police are totally demoralized and longtime small businesses [are] closing their doors for good or leaving our city. But I live in liberal North Seattle and the Biden-Harris signs are still out, the BLM signs are still out, the #WeBelieve signs are still out and tech-dads are taking their 18-month-olds out on the sidewalk for a first look at the neighborhood and nice liberal ladies are still voting Democrat. You think Seattle liberals will ever vote for change? Did the blacks ever stop voting Democrat as the city of Detroit descended into Hell? In other words, neither the over or the under in the Democrats political coalition can imagine a world outside the narrative. And it doesnt matter what the narrative is. One year its civil rights. Another year its womens rights. This year its trans rights and its dont say gay if you dont toe the line. So we just have to work around them. Even though we arent allowed a voice. We want a better America. Its an America where ordinary middle-class values are at the center: work, marriage, family, children, and a home of your own. Oh, you can be a noble activist if you want, or get creative with sex if you must, but dont expect us to celebrate you and put you on a pedestal. And you can be a helpless victim, if thats your thing. But remember that almost every immigrant group that came to America came from a bad place. Almost everyone started out as a second-class citizen, sneered at for their lack of skills, their dirty habits, and above all, their difference. Then they just sucked it in, and made America their own. You could too. Thats the point about America. Its up to each of us to make it our own. Whatever stupidity our educated elite gets up to next week. Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class. Image: PxHere As every media outlet in the world reported last week, Joe Biden said three remarkable things: that America's military would be heading into Ukraine, that it was possible America would use chemical weapons, and that Putin needed to be removed from power, which presumably was either a call for Putin's assassination or for regime change (which Putin probably wouldn't survive). In each case, the White House went into emergency damage control. Now, though, Biden denies saying any one of those things. Is this a broken brain or his usual narcissistic dishonesty? One of the coolest things about malignant narcissism, if you happen to be the narcissist, is that you never tell a lie. It's possible other people might perceive you as lying or even accuse you of lying, but the fact is that you never lie and you have the passed lie detector tests to prove it. You see, the deal about being a malignant narcissist is that there is only one truth: yours. Whatever you need to say at any given moment, either to achieve an advantage or to protect yourself, instantly becomes the one, the only, the absolute truth. That's the world in which Biden, a compulsive liar, has always existed. However, when he was one senator among many especially among many who shared the same trait his chronic lying was less obvious. For most people, it first burst into view during his 1987 run for the presidency, when he told a series of lies about his educational abilities and plagiarized a speech from a British politician. After that, "Joe Biden lies" was a known fact, but most people ignored it. All politicians lie, they would say. As president, though, especially one who presents as slowly losing his marbles, it's harder for Biden's flacks in and out of the media to hide the fact that Joe always and only tells his own truth, with no concern for whether it aligns with objective facts. That's how you end up with this amazing dialogue between Joe Biden and Fox's Peter Doocy: DOOCY: Are you worried that other leaders in the world are going to start to doubt that America is back if some of these big things that you say on the world stage keep getting walked back? BIDEN: What's getting walked back? DOOCY: It may sound like, just in the last couple days it sounded like you told U.S. troops they were going Ukraine. It sounded like you said it was possible the U.S. would use a chemical weapon. And it sounded like you were calling for regime change in Russia and we know BIDEN: None of the three occurred. DOOCY: None of the three occurred? BIDEN: None of the three. You interpret the language that way. Biden then contends that his talk about troops going into Ukraine was really about troops staying in Poland to train Ukraine fighters. That doesn't explain his saying they'd see brave women stand up to Russian tanks. If there are Russian tanks in Poland, we've got a whole new set of problems. So that's a lie. On the subject of chemical weapons, other than saying that, should Russia use such weapons, there'd be a significant response, Biden said he wasn't going to tell Peter Doocy anything. Last week, though, he said America would "deliver a response in kind." Maybe he meant a kind response... Today in a disaster of a press conference, Joe Biden played dumb about his administration's scramble to walk back several of his own comments. BIDEN: "NONE of the three occurred!" Roll the tape. pic.twitter.com/kNnRBlbObr Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 28, 2022 Biden sounded convincing as he told those lies, something that was probably helped along by the cheat sheets clutched in his hand: Sadly, yes, this is real https://t.co/PAsKS1LA0Z Jake Schneider (@jacobkschneider) March 29, 2022 Malignant narcissist or demented? I'm inclined to believe that it's mostly the former with a touch of the latter. But who cares what I think? What matters is how the world's nuclear-armed evil actors are sizing up the man in the White House. If they were religiously inclined, they might say of him, "You have been weighed and found wanting." Image: Biden lies. Twitter screen grab. Sunday's Oscars award ceremony broke new ground with a physical assault on Chris Rock by Will Smith, in an incident whose details are now well known by practically everyone in the English-speaking world. Immediately after, Sean "Puffy" Combs tried to play it off as a mere squabble among the pretties in Hollywood. "Okay, Will and Chris, we're going to solve that like family at the Gold Party, but right now we're moving on with love." Smith later won Best Actor for his turn in King Richard, but outside Hollywood, who cares? He cried through an apology about the incident during his speech, but who cares about that, either? I won't delve into the details of their sordid personal affairs more than to say that there may be reason for Smith to be sensitive and angry when it comes to other men either disrespecting or giving attention to his wife. But here's what we can anticipate, given the facts available. Will Smith will apologize to Chris Rock again in private. This private apology will be made public, and Rock will be pressured by his agent and others in Hollywood to make nice and accept Smith's apology. But Chris Rock has a duty, not only to himself, but to comedy as an institution, to do nothing short of prosecuting Will Smith to the fullest extent of the law. In this scenario, Chris Rock represents comedy. Comedy is nonpartisan. It holds no allegiances to the political flavors of the month, year, or generation, and it challenges the status quo wherever that's needed. See Richard Pryor; George Carlin; and the long list of legends that have come before Chris Rock, who is a legend by his own right. As Mel Brooks once said, great risks are a requirement of great comedy. "Comedy," he says, "is the lecherous little elf whispering in the king's ear, always telling the truth about human behavior." In the same sense, Will Smith now represents Hollywood and the cultural status quo. In that status quo, men and women are equal and should be treated equally. But also, according to that status quo, you can make fun of a bald man for being bald and it's hilarious, but you cannot make fun of a bald woman without expecting to be physically assaulted by her husband if he happens to be in the audience and finds it offensive. You can expect a lot of equivocation over this incident "Chris Rock had it coming" or "both parties acted wrongly." But those assertions are lies. Chris Rock has absolutely nothing to apologize for. He simply told a joke. To put it even simpler, he just said something, and he was physically assaulted for his having done so. Will Smith assaulted another person for saying something that he didn't like. Discerning right and wrong in this instance couldn't be simpler for a healthy society. What precedent will we set if Will Smith gets away with this without significant and meaningful legal penalties? Justice is not only about retribution, but about deterrence. If we simply conclude that Smith shouldn't have slapped him, sure, but Rock also shouldn't have told a joke that Smith didn't like in some sort of evenly applied culpability, then where are we? We'll continue to be in the place where we are. Where certain people can be ridiculed and others can't be ridiculed based upon their social position. And that is a place where comedy can no longer exist in any meaningful sense, just as it doesn't exist anymore on late-night television, where this rule is strictly followed. Chris Rock didn't ask for it, but he's in a unique position to be a hero and to shape the immediate future of comedy in this country. Allow me to be clear. Comedy cannot die. Comedy will always exist, because it's a requirement of the human condition. But the best comedy requires fertile ground for growth, and free speech provides that. In the Eastern Bloc in the Soviet days, the best jokes were told quietly across the table at lunch for fear of reprisal by the status quo. In America, the best jokes were showcased loudly enough on television and elsewhere for the status quo to both hear and fear. Again, the joke told by Chris Rock was innocuous. It could have been told by Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chapelle, Bill Burr, or any of their counterparts willing to take a chance in order to be funny. If Chris Rock concedes without pressing charges, he is conceding something greater than that slap he endured from a childish Will Smith. Photo credit: Twitter video screen grab. Most people know about Amazon's Alexa because there was a great deal of fanfare when the device, which listens to everything you say, answers your questions, and controls your home appliances, first appeared on the market. Less well known is Google's "Home" pod, a little gray mushroom of a thing that does much the same. However, it appears that the Home pod may have a blind spot: Donald Trump. A video has emerged that purports to show the Home pod device incapable of answering a simple question: who is Donald Trump? The video's focus is a little gray Google "pod." The man holding the camera explains that, while his Google device knows a whole lot about many things, she has an unexpected blind spot: Trump. The man asks a series of "Hey, Google," questions. "Hey, Google, who is Barack Obama?" "Hey, Google, who is Hillary Clinton?" "Hey, Google, who is Nancy Pelosi?" In each case, the Google pod responds by referencing Wikipedia ("According to Wikipedia...") and then starts to read off from the Wikipedia article. It's different, though, when the question is about Donald Trump: "Hey, Google, who is Donald Trump?" "Sorry, I don't have general information about Donald Trump but I might know some specifics if you ask." "Hey, Google, is Donald Trump the president?" "My apologies. I don't understand." "Hey, Google, was Donald Trump the president?" "I'm sorry. I didn't understand." "Hey, Google, was Donald Trump the 45th president?" "I don't understand." "Hey, Google, was George W. Bush the 43rd president?" "According to Wikipedia, George Walker Bush," and off she goes with the full spiel. "Hey, Google, who was the 45th president of the United States?" "On the website TrumpWhiteHouse.archives.gov, they say, 'Trump is the 45th president of the United States'..." And then the man double-checks to make sure that Google hadn't just been confused earlier. "Hey, Google, who is Donald Trump?" "Sorry, I don't have general information about Donald Trump but I might know some specifics if you ask." "Hey, Google, who is Donald J. Trump?" "Sorry, I don't have general information about Donald Trump but I might know some specifics if you ask." The man concludes that Google is suppressing information, and it's obvious. The video seems legitimate, but, frankly, I have no way of knowing whether it is or isn't. I've never seen Google Home in action before. However, reaching back to the Bush years, I'm reminded of that classic expression "fake but accurate," meaning that it doesn't matter if something is fake if it fits into our preconceived notions of reality. In this case, we've seen that the Democrats have been frantically engaging in what the Romans called "damnatio memoriae" that is, the "condemnation of memory" or the erasure of someone from history. The first thing Biden did when he entered the White House was to reverse every Trump executive order he could. Just last week, he relieved China of the tariff burdens Trump had imposed in order to help Americans. The January 6 commission's existence is an effort to prove that Trump is an "insurrectionist" who cannot run for office because of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which barred "insurrectionists" from serving in the federal government. The insurrection to which that referred was the Civil War, which killed 600,000 combatants. Even if it hadn't been done away with under the Amnesty Act of 1878, it was not meant to cover a protest at the Capitol during which the Capitol police murdered one, and possibly even two, innocent women. The entire Democrat party and no small number of RINOs want to erase Trump from America's collective memory. That's why it's easy to believe that Google, a company that is open about its leftism, would program its home device to play dumb when Trump's name is mentioned. Image: Google Home pod. Rumble screen grab. What would the late Casey Stengel say about President Biden? I think that he'd look at the president and say this: "Been in this game one-hundred years, but I see new ways to lose 'em I never knew existed before." The great Casey was talking about his 1962 Mets, who lost 120 games in their first season. They were so bad that the country fell in love with them, from Choo-Choo Coleman behind the plate to Elio Chacon at short. I'd bet you had not heard those names in a long time. Save this post for your next Trivial Pursuit game! President Biden is really bad, too, but no one is falling in love with him. It certainly does feel that way after President Biden visited Europe last week. This is from Brandon J Weichert: A man notorious for his inopportune gaffes, Biden went before a group of US Army personnel stationed in Poland and told the 82nd Airborne that they were heading over to Ukraine. From there, Biden went to the nation's capital Warsaw and, supposedly breaking away from his carefully scripted remarks, burbled on about how Vladimir Putin's reign of terror in Moscow needed to end. Maybe he said something else, too. It was a gaffe a second! What we are watching in President Biden's performance should not shock anyone. I guess this is why they hid the candidate during the campaign. It was "keep him in the basement" and blame it on COVID. Image: Biden in Warsaw (edited). YouTube screen grab. The staff knew that their candidate was a wrecking ball if he ever had to answer a question. So it was "tell them you're not Trump," and the media will fall for it 1,000%! And to their shame, they did! Eighty-one million voted for Biden because they wanted to calm things down. Too "many mean tweets" or fights with reporters were unpresidential, as they used to lecture us. Yes, President Trump was undisciplined and fought too much with talk show hosts with small audiences. But he kept gasoline prices down, and the border was under control. They hated him in Europe, but that's only because he kept reminding the NATO allies to pay their dues. The 1962 Mets found a way to lose 75% of their games. Casey once said his team had to stay out of triple plays. I think Casey would tell President Biden to stay away from microphones and spend more time in Delaware. PS: Click for my videos and podcasts at Canto Talk. Last week, new unsealed indictments from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) disclosed what many leading experts had already known that the United States' critical infrastructure is in danger. Indictments handed down showed that four employees of the Russian government were charged for their roles in what was referred to as two "historical hacking campaigns" targeting critical infrastructure, not only in the U.S., but also worldwide. In addition, the new indictments explained how the defendants targeted both the software and hardware that controls infrastructure-related operational technology systems, and that the men were running an operation that was "attempting, supporting and conducting computer intrusions that together, in two separate conspiracies, targeted the global energy sector between 2012 and 2018." The indictments should not come as much of a shock to those paying attention to global cyber-war, but there were details of these indictments that were eyebrow-raising. To begin with, despite the recent enhanced cooperation between Russia and China, the indictment reveals that Russia had hacked Chinese infrastructure. That alone should be enough to call into question Beijing's support of the Kremlin, as Putin's Russia set forth attacks on every major global power. Whether or not China can trust Russia in light of this startling revelation is something that should be considered, as an unhinged Putin is seemingly continuing to make strategic miscalculations while the Russian body count continues to be understated. And by supporting Russia during this unpopular invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese government may want to rethink possibly picking a fight with the rest of the world over Putin's obsession to retake Ukraine for seemingly selfish reasons related to his belief in the historical significance of the country to the dictator's beloved Russia. The new indictments also reveal that Russia attacked a number of both European Union (E.U.) and NATO countries. The first indictment, The U.S. v. Evgeny Viktorovich Gladkikh, states that the defendant installed backdoors in an effort to distribute Triton malware, a strain of malware designed to compromise the industrial control systems (ICS) of energy refineries and cause them to operate in an unsafe manner. The indictment claims that this was to grant "the defendant and his co-conspirators the ability to cause damage to the refinery, injury to anyone nearby, and economic harm." The other indictment also claims that an attempt was made to manipulate ICS or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. In this indictment, Russian hackers Pavel Aleksandrovich Akulov, Mikhail Mikhailovich Gavrilov, and Marat Valeryevich Tyukov, members of the Federal Security Service (FSB)'s Center 16, coordinated supply chain attacks in the effort to further the Russian government's attempts to "maintain surreptitious, unauthorized and persistent access to the computer networks of companies and organizations in the international energy sector, including oil and gas firms, nuclear power plants, and utility and power transmission companies." These attacks are different from the kind that Americans are more familiar with, including the 2021 Colonial Pipeline and JBS Foods attacks targeting the east coast of the U.S.'s fuel supply and the country's meat supply chains, respectively. Those attacks were carried out by state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) gangs that are affiliated with the Kremlin. These groups used ransomware to demand millions in payments from the victims. These kinds of attacks continue regularly but were seeking merely to cause a temporary halt to operations, versus the widespread destruction that is possible when attacking SCADA or ICS systems. There is seemingly no immediate end to the Ukraine war in sight, and a determined Russia will likely continue to initiate cyber-attacks against the West. With Joe Biden's commentary that Putin "cannot remain in power," America, as well as the West in general, needs to brace for 2022 to be the most devastating year of hacking in human history. Julio Rivera is a business and political strategist, the Editorial Director for Reactionary Times, and a political commentator and columnist. His writing, which is focused on cyber-security and politics, has been published by numerous websites, and he is regularly seen on national and international news programming. Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License. Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934 to prevent another stock market crash like the one in October 1929 that plunged America into the Great Depression. The SEC has a very simple mission: "Protect Investors; Maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets; Facilitate capital formation." Last week, however, the SEC's commissioners floated the idea of giving themselves a new power, one that Congress never contemplated: forcing America's publicly traded companies to change their business practices to fight climate change. While it's questionable what woke companies will do, what they ought to do is push back on the ground that the SEC lacks the authority to make such a demand. The SEC itself fully understands what its role is. It even has a web page headlined "The Role of the SEC." It was on that page that I found the mission statement I quoted above. On the same page, the SEC explains Congress's goal in creating the SEC: When the stock market crashed in October 1929, so did public confidence in the U.S. markets. Congress held hearings to identify the problems and search for solutions. Based on its findings, Congress in the peak year of the Depression passed the Securities Act of 1933. The following year, it passed the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which created the SEC. The main purposes of these laws can be reduced to two common-sense notions: Companies offering securities for sale to the public must tell the truth about their business, the securities they are selling, and the risks involved in investing in those securities. Those who sell and trade securities brokers, dealers, and exchanges must treat investors fairly and honestly. The proposed SEC rule, per the SEC's press release, would require registrants to include certain climate-related disclosures in their registration statements and periodic reports, including information about climate-related risks that are reasonably likely to have a material impact on their business, results of operations, or financial condition, and certain climate-related financial statement metrics in a note to their audited financial statements. The required information about climate-related risks also would include disclosure of a registrant's greenhouse gas emissions, which have become a commonly used metric to assess a registrant's exposure to such risks. SEC chair Gary Gensler claims that this rule would "provide investors with consistent, comparable, and decision-useful information for making their investment decisions." In other words, it's just information... But of course, it isn't just information. These disclosures are intended to force companies, for fear of public shaming in a woke world, to change their business practices in costly and ineffective ways to fight chimerical climate change, an all-purpose Marxist idea aimed at shifting total economic control to the government. Image: SEC Office by D Ramey Logan. CC BY 4.0. Forcing companies to change their business practices is not under the SEC's mandate. Its role is to ensure only that companies don't lie about their freely chosen business practices: what they're doing, the nature of the securities they're selling on the stock market, and the risks involved. That's it. That's the SEC's mandate. If companies want to boast about their climate change practices, they're free to do so. However, there is nothing in the Securities and Exchange Act, or any of its amendments, that gives the SEC the power to force such practices. The problem is that our congresspeople are so gosh-darned lazy. We know that they don't read the bills they pass because, in the last several years, they've repeatedly passed zillion-page bills that they clearly could not have and did not read. Moreover, many of these bills come directly from lobbyists without any contribution from the people's representatives. Perhaps even more egregiously, Congress is perfectly happy to let the Executive Branch (all those federal agencies) pass regulations that have the effect of laws, which is highly unconstitutional. And for more than 200 years, ever since John Marshall arrogated to the Supreme Court the unconstitutional authority to decide what's constitutional and what isn't, Congress has allowed the Supreme Court to run roughshod over it, giving nine unelected, increasingly radical, arrogant, and ill informed people the most powerful roles in America. If the Republicans manage to take Congress, they need to walk back all the unconstitutional powers federal agencies have taken for themselves, something that can probably best be done by cutting their budgets by 50% or more. Last Friday, Joe Biden visited Poland to address the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia. During a briefing, Biden designated Putin a "war criminal," echoing the sentiment of the U.S. Department of State and Secretary Blinken. According to the official press release, "[b]ased on information currently available, the U.S. government assesses that members of Russia's forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine. Our assessment is based on a careful review of available information from public and intelligence sources." Then, just one day later, on March 26, graphic and distressing video emerged depicting the alleged torture of Russian troops at the hands of Ukrainian forces. The footage seemingly shows captured members of the Russian military emerging from a van while handcuffed, only to be shot in the legs a moment later. Subsequent video reveals that the prisoners are then beaten by their captors. (WARNING, GRAPHIC VIDEO) It might give the impression that the Russian military were captured after having been wounded. But that's not the case. At the end of the video, we can see Ukrainian soldiers shooting all the newly arrived prisoners through their legs.#WarCrimes pic.twitter.com/o7B7M1p2pG Maria Dubovikova (@politblogme) March 27, 2022 This damning video has some credibility because it comes on the heels of a Ukrainian doctor claiming he gave an order for all wounded Russian POWs to be castrated. In an interview broadcast on Ukrainian television, Gennadiy Druzenko said, "I have always been a great humanist and said that if a man is wounded, he is no longer an enemy but a patient. But now [I gave] very strict orders to castrate all [captured Russian] men, because they are cockroaches, not people." If the events in the videos and Druzenko's admissions prove to be true, then the Ukrainian government, under President Zelensky, is guilty of facilitating war crimes. So why hasn't Joe Biden decried these atrocities? In fact, has any world leader condemned the abuses? Not to my knowledge, and I don't presume they will. Although the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index in 2021 ranked Ukraine 122 out of the 180 listed countries (more corrupt than nearly 70% of the listed nations), several of the most influential powerhouses in the world stand united in their approach to Ukraine. Global politicians, establishment media, and Hollywood all agree: Zelensky is a star. On Wednesday, March 16, Zelensky addressed the lawmakers of Congress via video call. Zelensky requested more of our hard-earned money (apparently, $13.6 billion wasn't enough), and, despite his government's notorious reputation for corruption, he received at least three standing ovations. Additionally, according to The New York Post, "Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been in talks with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to make a video appearance during Sunday's broadcast of the Academy Awards." One might expect a "hero" like Zelensky to desire to get to the bottom of the heinous brutalities that allegedly happened at the hands of his soldiers but, apparently, celebrations of Hollywood's narcissists take precedence. "In today's America, if you're a leftist, you're perpetually above reproach." Well, apparently, this truth extends to the rest of the world, too. Seeing as the greatest offenders of civil liberties and unalienable rights in America (the leftists) stand with Zelensky, it's unlikely that Biden will chastise one of his own. Image: Alleged Russian POWs. Twitter screen grab. Chris Rock almost made the Oscars worth watching. Almost. Rock declined to press charges, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the matter has been resolved. According to California law, prosecutors are responsible for holding guilty people accountable for their actions and an obligation to pursue justice despite influence from the alleged victim or the community. The prosecutor can consider factors including whether the victim is cooperative or not, but that should not be the determining factor on filing criminal charges. The decision should ultimately rest on whether there is evidence that a crime has been committed and whether the case can be proved in court. The only factor that should matter is the first, but pragmatism requires the second. If there is little or no hope of ever attaining a conviction, there is no point in wasting time and money taking an unwinnable case to trial. Naturally, House representatives Ayanna Pressley and Jamaal Bowman announced their support for Will Smith on Twitter before apparently realizing they had just endorsed violence and deleted their tweets. Bowman's staff took responsibility for his tweet and explained they thought the altercation at the Oscars had been staged, but Pressley didn't say anything. She just pretended the whole thing never happened. Is the Will Smith prosecution unwinnable? It certainly shouldn't be. There were thousands of live witnesses in the audience and millions more on television. It should be simple for police to have a warrant issued for the show script. Unless there is a scene where Will Smith is supposed to charge Chris Rock on stage and slap his face, Smith should be charged with battery. Of course, that will never happen, because this is Hollywood and Black Lives Matter. L.A. district attorney George Gascon is nothing but a George Soros puppet. He's incredibly soft on violent black criminals, so there's no danger he would ever dream of prosecuting a violent black celebrity criminal. Chris Rock could be screaming for prosecution of Will Smith at the top of his lungs, and it wouldn't make any difference. Will Smith is part of the protected class of elitists with incredible power to shape opinions and influence behavior. Will Smith can basically confess to being a cuckold to a tabloid newspaper and bizarrely become apoplectic with rage over an innocuous joke about his wife's lack of hair and have a very public meltdown, yet no one will lift a finger against him. Of course, if Smith identified as a Republican or (worse) a conservative Christian, the outcome of this case would be dramatically different. He'd be looking at life in prison without the possibility of parole. John Leonard is a freelance writer and author of six books, including Divine Evolution and Counterargument for God. His next book, titled The God Conclusion, is scheduled for release in late summer. He may be contacted via his website at southernprose.com. The Wright brothers are generally considered to be the inventors of flight, but in Brazil, it is their son of the soil Alberto Santos-Dumont who is widely celebrated as the father of aviation. But why is that so? The flight of the Santos-Dumont 14-bis on the cover of Le Petit Journal, 25 November 1906. Who was Alberto Santos-Dumont? Alberto Santos-Dumont was born in 1873 to a wealthy Brazilian coffee magnate. From his early childhood, Santos had a great love for mechanical things. He drove the farm's locomotives, observed the coffee machines on the plantation, and made repairs while still a child. At night, he would lose himself in the fictional adventures of Jules Verne. Vernes stories planted in him a desire to conquer the air, and he began imagining and building little mechanical devices such as kites and small airplanes powered by a propeller driven by twisted rubber springs. When he was 15, Santos saw his first human-powered flight in Sao Paulo where an aeronaut ascended in a spherical balloon and parachuted down. Ten years later, Santos made his first balloon ascent in a rented balloon. In the following months, Santos began making his own balloons. The first one measured a mere 6 meters in diameter and weighed only 27 kilograms. It was the smallest aircraft ever built until then, yet, it flew more than two hundred times. When Santos turned a little older he turned his attention to dirigibles, replacing the heavy electric motors with a lightweight 3.5 horsepower internal combustion enginea first in aeronautics. Santos's dirigible was a huge breakthrough, capable of speeds of over 10 miles an hour. He made several flights in his flying machines earning him the prestigious Deutsch Prize. An airship designed by Alberto Santos-Dumont. In 1906, Santos-Dumont heard of the Wright brothers flight and decided that he wanted to build an airplane too. This resulted in 14-bis, an airplane which looked like a jumble of box kites. The plane was 4 meters tall, 10 meters long and had a span of 12 meters. It weighed nearly two hundred kilograms. The wings were attached to a beam, in front of which lay the rudder, consisting of a cell identical to those of the wings. At the rear end was the propeller, powered by a 50-horsepower Antoinette engine that was mounted at the extreme rear end of the fuselage. The entire plane was constructed from bamboo and pine joined by aluminium sockets and was covered with Japanese silk. On 13 September, the 14-bis made a 7-meter test flight. On 23 October, Santos-Dumont made another attempt, this time making a 60-meter flight. The flight had taken place solely by the aircraft's own means without taking advantage of headwinds, or using ramps, catapults, slopes, or other devices, and at the time it was the first such achievement. On November 12, he set the first aviation record in Europe, flying 220 meters in 21 seconds with members of the Aero-Club du France in attendance. This won Santos Dumont a prize of 1500 francs for making the first flight in Europe over 100 meters, and because he was observed by officials from what would become the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (the designated keeper of aviation records), he was credited with making the first powered flight in Europe. Santos-Dumont flew the 14-bis for one last time on 4 April 1907, before it crashed and was torn to pieces. Santos-Dumont 14-bis flies before an audience on 23 October 1906. Santos-Dumont discarded the 14-bis project and turned to monoplanes. His most successful creation, the Demoiselle, was capable of reaching up to 90 kilometers per hour. By the time the Wright brothers made their invention public, in 1908, Santos-Dumont had already retired and moved away from the events, possibly due to his ailing health. When the First World War broke out, and Santos-Dumont saw how violent aerial combats had become it broke his heart to see his dream turn into a nightmare. With his health worsening, Santos-Dumont returned back to Brazil in 1915. He died in 1932. The Santos-Dumont Demoiselle. The case for Alberto Santos-Dumont Many Brazilians believe that it was Alberto Santos-Dumont who made the first flight rather than the Wright brothers because Santos-Dumonts 14-bis could make unassisted takeoffs from the ground while the Wright brothers invention needed to be catapulted off the ground. By using launching rails, the Wrights were able to shave off a considerable distance required to build up speed for takeoff allowing them to be launched from unfavorable grounds. Additionally, the rail kept the airplane headed in the proper direction until the air was flowing over the control surfaces fast enough to give the pilot adequate control. Once off the ground, the Wrights airplanes behaved superiorly in the air, flying well above most treetops and making flights dozens of miles in distance. The 14-bis could take off from flat surfaces but it could barely fly above the heads of spectators and made shorts hops. It's worth noting that on December 31, 1908, Wilbur Wright made a record-breaking flight where he remained aloft for 2 hours, 18 minutes, and 33 seconds, winning the coveted Coupe de Michelin. Whereas, during his entire flying career, Santos-Dumont never remained airborne in one of his airplanes for more then 15 minutes. A Santos-Dumont 14-bis being moved along a street, probably at Bagatelle, France, in early September 1905, prior to a flight attempt. Another argument that Brazilians make to discredit the Wright brothers is that they always tested secretively and in secluded locations, therefore the dates of their tests can't be verified. Santos Dumont, on the other hand, was a great deal more outgoing that the Wright brothers and did everything out in the open. This anti-Wright brothers sentiment was prevalent in Europe right from the start. European newspapers, especially those in France, were openly derisive, calling them bluffeurs (bluffers). The Paris edition of the New York Herald wrote in an editorial on February 10, 1906: The Wrights have flown or they have not flown. They possess a machine or they do not possess one. They are in fact either fliers or liars. It is difficult to fly. It's easy to say, 'We have flown'. Faced with mounting skepticism, the Wright brothers organized their first public flight in Europe in 1908, at the Hunaudieres horse racing track near the town of Le Mans, France. Wilburs flight lasted only 1 minute 45 seconds, but his ability to effortlessly make banking turns and fly a circle amazed and stunned onlookers, including several pioneer French aviators. In the following days, Wilbur made a series of technically challenging flights, including figure-eights, demonstrating his skills as a pilot and the capability of his flying machine, which far surpassed those of all other pioneering aircraft and pilots of the day. The French public was thrilled by Wilbur's feats and flocked to the field by the thousands, and the Wright brothers instantly became world-famous. Those who doubted the Wright brothers issued apologies. Ernest Archdeacon, founder of the Aero-Club de France, who was publicly scornful of the brothers' claims admitted that he had done them an injustice. While Santos-Dumont remains an important contributor to the development of both lighter-than-air and heavier-than-air aircraft, he was not the first to develop and fly a practical airplane. However, in recognition of his achievements, the Aeroclub of France honored him with the construction of two monumentsthe first, in 1910, erected on the Bagatelle Gamefield, where he had flown the 14-bis, and the second, in 1913, in Saint-Cloud, to commemorate the flight of the airship No. 6, which occurred in 1901. Throughout his career, Santos-Dumont's image was printed on products, his panama hat and collar were replicated, his balloons were turned into toys, and confectioners paid homage to him with cigar-shaped cakes. After his death in 1932, the town of Palmira, in Minas Gerais was renamed to Santos-Dumont, and in 1936, Rio de Janeiro's first airport, Aeroporto do Rio de Janeiro-Santos Dumont, was named after him. Samsung has removed the Z branding from its foldable smartphones in some markets. The Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 are now listed as the Galaxy Fold 3 and Galaxy Flip 3 respectively on the companys official websites for Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. It appears to be a fairly recent change as the URLs for the product pages for the two foldables still contain the Z branding. While many of you might prefer this Z-less naming scheme for Samsungs foldables, this likely isnt a permanent change. The Korean brand is probably dropping the letter Z in solidarity with the Ukrainian people, considering the markets where the name change is in effect. Oddly though, Samsungs official website for Ukraine still lists the two foldables as Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3. But these listings could soon undergo a similar change as well. Of late, Z has become a symbol of the Russian armed forces involved in Russias invasion of Ukraine. As a result, the people of Ukraine and its neighboring countries wouldnt want to associate themselves with that symbol. In solidarity with this anti-Russia sentiment in the region, Samsung is now dropping the Z branding from its foldable smartphones. The Korean brand has already stopped selling products in Russia. It has also temporarily suspended operations at its TV factory in Kaluga, near Moscow, the capital city of Russia. Advertisement According to the noted tipster Ishan Agarwal, Samsung has already started printing new retail boxes for the Galaxy Fold 3 and Galaxy Flip 3. However, the company is doing this all silently. It hasnt said a word about this name change. But we might hear something from the Korean behemoth in the coming days. We wouldnt mind Samsung permanently removing the Z branding from its foldables While Samsung is removing the Z branding from its foldable smartphones in select countries for a cause, we wouldnt mind if it does so permanently, and globally. We know the company wants to streamline its foldable offerings under the Z umbrella, but two different foldable series Fold and Flip would simplify things for consumers. That said, the Korean behemoth surely knows its marketing game better than we do. Samsung is reportedly preparing to introduce a third foldable series this year. It could be the slidable/rollable smartphone that the company showcased at CES 2022 in January. The new device may feature the Galaxy Z Flex branding. Exciting times are ahead in the foldable smartphone industry. ROME - Migrants intercepted at sea and taken back to Libya are detained and subjected to lengthy periods in which torture is practiced systematically, according to a new report by the UN that will be placed before the attention of the Human Rights Council on Wednesday in Geneva. Since October, the report states, thousands of people that have tried to cross the sea and that have been taken back to Libya live in "inhuman conditions", and are systematically tortured, raped or threatened with rape, and sometimes killed. The inquiry by the UN body notes recent evidence that shows that torture is used repeatedly and in a continuous fashion against detainees. This includes official detention facilities and sites managed by militias that act under the aegis of the Libyan state. Many of the prisons that were previously declared closed instead are still operating secretly and UN representatives have underscored that in many cases the authorities have not implemented orders to release the detainees. The fact-finding mission was created by the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2020, and focused heavily on violations and crimes "that can especially hamper Libya's transition to peace, democracy and the rule of law", representatives said. "In our view, the culture of impunity that is prevailing in different parts of Libya is impeding that transition," they said. In addition to massive violations affecting vulnerable groups such as migrants, the report also noted many other violations concerning the transition towards democracy and the integrity of the electoral process, such as intimidations and abuse of activists and attacks on the judicial system. The report noted that these things raise questions about whether the government and the authorities are complying with their obligations to ensure freedom of expression and association. Italian UNESCO panel KOs coffee bid, OKs opera Commission under Bernabe says opera will go forward for 2023 (ANSA) - ROME, MAR 29 - Italy's UNESCO commission on Tuesday rejected a bid by Italian espresso coffee to get on the UN body's list of intangible cultural heritage but approved a bid by Italian opera to get on the list. The panel chaired by Franco Bernabe said the Italian art of opera would go forward as candidate to present to the UNESCO intergovernmental committee for the 2023 cycle. The rejected coffee bid was for "Italian espresso coffee in culture, rituals, society and literature in emblematic communities from Venice to Naples." There had been high expectations around the espresso bid. Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said that with the opera bid "Italy is aiming for the recognition of one of its most authentic and original cultural expressions". (ANSA). ENI gets contract in Algeria for 2 explorative blocks With Sonatrach and BHP Petroleum (ANSAmed) - ROME, MARCH 29 - The Algerian authorities announced on Tuesday the approval of a new contract for the exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons for the Italian company ENI in two explorative blocks, in partnership with the state-owned Sonatrach and BHP Petroleum (International Exploration). The news was given in a presidential decree issued Tuesday in Algeria's official gazette. The decree signed by Algerian president Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced approval for "Amendment N. 14 to the June 24, 1989 contract for the exploration and exploitation of liquid hydrocarbons within the perimeters named Rhourde El Louh (Block 401) and Sif Fatima (Block 402a)". The decree goes on to say that the contract "will be implemented, in line with the legislation and regulations in place, in reference to the new law on hydrocarbons approved in 2019. It added that the new contract had been concluded on February 8, 2022 between the state-owned Sonatrach, BHP Petroleum (International Exploration) PTY. Ltd, and Eni Algeria Esplorazione B.V.e operator of ENI has been in Algeria since 1981, where it is the operator of several mining permits, with production equity of 95,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. The Algerian authorities are seeking to encourage more international companies to invest in the oil and gas sector after passing a law hydrocarbons law in 2019. The Algerian economy is based mainly on oil and gas, which account for over 90% of its exports. (ANSAmed). Syria 'ISIS family' camp clashes leave 2 dead and 10 injured Near Syrian-Iraqi border (ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, MARCH 29 - A woman and a child were killed and six women and four children were injured in clashes over the night in the detention camp of al-Hol in northeastern Syria. The area is under the control of US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The camp has for years held family members of former Islamic State (ISIS) militants and people who fled from zones once under the control of ISIS. Reports were from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which said that the clashes had broken out in sectors 4 and 5 of the infamous camp near the Syrian-Iraqi border in the Hasakah province, controlled by the SDF. The SDF includes Kurdish and local Arab fighters led by Kurdish commanders close to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The EU, US, and Turkey consider the PKK a terrorist organisation. Initial reports indicate that the clashes occurred between at least one suspected member of ISIS and SDF forces on the ground, backed by US surveillance helicopters. Tens of thousands of people have been held in the camp for over three years. Most are women and children. About 30,000 from 50 different nationalities including some Westerners. (ANSAmed). UNESCO restores 280 Beirut schools after port blast Access to education 'a fundamental right' (ANSAmed) - ROME, MARCH 29 - In only 18 months, UNESCO completed its project to rehabilitate the 280 educational institutions damaged by the blasts that hit the port of Beirut on 4 August 2020. The ambitious project was made possible by the generosity of donor nations that, in responding to an appeal launched by the UN body after the catastrophic event, gave 35 million dollars. Thanks to this financing, the restoration work was started quickly and continued until their completion now despite the pandemic, the UN body said. "Just 18 months on from the disaster, we are pleased to announce that it's a promise kept. Thanks to donors and to the mobilization of UNESCO team and all our partners, the goal of rehabilitating the 280 damaged educational institutions has been reached. It is a demonstration of our Organization's ability to mobilize and act quickly after a major crisis. UNESCO is determined to support its Member States and contribute to access to education, which is a fundamental right," UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said. (ANSAmed). Tory ministers were heckled by bereaved families of Covid victims shouting off to another party are we? as they attended a dinner held by Prime Minister Boris Johnson at a luxury central London hotel. Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove were among those to arrive at the Park Plaza near Westminster Bridge shortly before 8pm on Tuesday. Minister for Crime and Policing Kit Malthouse leaves the Park Plaza Hotel (Yui Mok/PA) It came after the Metropolitan Police earlier confirmed partygate investigators will begin handing out 20 fines over gatherings held across Whitehall during Covid measures. Dozens of grief-stricken relatives who lost loved ones during the pandemic lined up outside the entrance to boo guests as they arrived in cars and on foot. Shouts of shame on you and off to another party are we? were directed at Mr Gove and Brexit opportunities minister Jacob Rees-Mogg as they turned up to the venue, where a penthouse costs up to 653 a night. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak leaves the Park Plaza Hotel (Yui Mok?PA) June Newbon, who lost her husband to the virus, branded the evening disgusting in light of the Mets conclusion that it believes laws were broken at the heart of Government. She said holding a lavish dinner was especially inappropriate given the cost-of-living crisis hitting millions of people and the war in Ukraine. I think its disgusting, she told the PA news agency outside the hotel. No-one else can afford to do this given the prices going up, and the war as well. Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency in the Cabinet Office Jacob Rees-Mogg leaves the Park Plaza Hotel (Yui Mok/PA) Ms Newbon and her daughter Ellie said Conservative politicians would be better placed attending the candlelit procession to mark the first anniversary of the National Covid Memorial Wall, a planned event near the hotel on Westminster Bridge. Hundreds of bereaved relatives turned up to the walk on Tuesday to commemorate their loved ones and call for the mural to be made permanent. I think someone should make their presence known down at the bridge today instead, Ms Newbon said. I think thats the respect they owe us, Miss Newbon added. We havent had an apology from Boris and I dont feel were going to have one tonight. Downing Street has denied Mr Johnson misled Parliament over the goings-on in Whitehall during the pandemic. There was a heavy police presence surrounding the hotel and the Prime Minister is thought to have gained access to the building through a different entrance. The first 20 fines will be issued over alleged lockdown-busting parties in Downing Street and Whitehall in a move which will put Boris Johnsons leadership under fresh pressure. The Metropolitan Police said on Tuesday that investigators will begin to refer the notices to the ACRO Criminal Records Office, which would be responsible for issuing the penalties. It is expected that further fines could be issued as officers continue to go through the evidence gathered. The force is investigating at least 12 events, including six the Prime Minister is thought to have attended. The identities of those issued with fines will not be disclosed by Scotland Yard, although Downing Street has said it will confirm if Mr Johnson is handed a fixed penalty notice (FPN). The initial wave of fines is not expected to include the Prime Minister, who was one of dozens of people issued with a police questionnaire to account for his actions, as he is contesting the allegations and took advice from his personal lawyer on how to respond. Scotland Yards decision to issue fines will renew pressure on Boris Johnson (Aaron Chown/PA) The Metropolitan Police said: The investigation into allegations of breaches of Covid-19 regulations in Whitehall and Downing Street has now progressed to the point where the first referrals for fixed penalty notices (FPN) will be made to ACRO Criminal Records Office. We will today initially begin to refer 20 fixed penalty notices to be issued for breaches of Covid-19 regulations. The ACRO Criminal Records Office will then be responsible for issuing the FPNs to the individual following the referrals from the MPS. We are making every effort to progress this investigation at speed and have completed a number of assessments. However, due to the significant amount of investigative material that remains to be assessed, further referrals may be made to ACRO if the evidential threshold is made. If Boris Johnson thinks he can get away with partygate by paying expensive lawyers and throwing junior staff to the wolves, he is wrong. We all know who is responsible. The Prime Minister must resign, or Conservative MPs must sack him. Ed Davey MP (@EdwardJDavey) March 29, 2022 The Met would not confirm how many individuals will receive fines it is possible some people will receive multiple penalties if they attended more than one event or their identities. The force will also not disclose which parties the fines relate to. The Met said the move was in line with College of Policing guidance on not revealing the identities of people dealt with out-of-court. The Cabinet Office said it would not be appropriate to comment on the first 20 partygate fines while the police investigation is ongoing. Mr Johnson came under intense pressure to quit as a result of the partygate scandal, but in recent weeks the war in Ukraine has seen Tory MPs rally round the leader at a time of international crisis. But the Mets intervention, confirming it believes laws were broken at the heart of Government, could reignite the debate about his leadership. Government minister Will Quince said the gatherings which took place during coronavirus restrictions shouldnt have happened, but it would be inappropriate to comment further. I completely understand the considerable upset caused, the events that took place shouldnt have happened, he told Sky News. But I hope youll understand that both as an education minister but more importantly, as theres an ongoing live Metropolitan Police investigation, its just not appropriate that I comment. He said questions over whether the Prime Minister should resign if fined were hypothetical, but also said Mr Johnson had committed to publish a full report by senior official Sue Gray into the scandal as soon as the Metropolitan Police have concluded their investigation. Mr Quince added: Looking at the moment over in Ukraine, and even worse over in Russia, I think its a brilliant thing that we have a free press in this country that is able to ask these kinds of questions. Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner called for Boris Johnson to quit (Dominic Lipinski/PA) Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner said the war in Ukraine should not be used as an excuse to save Mr Johnson. After over two months of police time, 12 parties investigated and over a hundred people questioned under caution, Boris Johnsons Downing Street has been found guilty of breaking the law, she said. The culture is set from the very top. The buck stops with the Prime Minister, who spent months lying to the British public, which is why he has got to go. Liberal Democrat Leader Sir Ed Davey said: If Boris Johnson thinks he can get away with partygate by paying expensive lawyers and throwing junior staff to the wolves, he is wrong. We all know who is responsible. The Prime Minister must resign, or Conservative MPs must sack him. More than 100 police questionnaires had been sent out to people at the gatherings. These events included a bring your own booze gathering, details of which were emailed to staff at No 10 by the Prime Ministers principal private secretary Martin Reynolds in May 2020, and a surprise get-together for Mr Johnsons birthday in June 2020. Mr Johnson previously admitted he was at the socially-distanced drinks organised by Mr Reynolds for 25 minutes claiming he believed it was a work event while Downing Street said staff gathered briefly in the Cabinet Room to mark the Prime Ministers 56th birthday. The police are also investigating a party in Mr Johnsons Downing Street flat on November 13 2020 reportedly hosted by his wife Carrie on the night of the Prime Ministers controversial aide Dominic Cummings acrimonious exit from No 10. In January, civil servant Ms Gray published a report into the allegations of the parties, which said there were failures of leadership and judgment in parts of No 10 and the Cabinet Office while England was under coronavirus restrictions in 2020 and 2021. The initial publication contained limited detail due to the police investigation but a fuller report is expected once the Mets inquiry concludes. A Cabinet Office spokesman said on Tuesday: As set out previously by the PM, Sue Grays findings will be published when the Met Polices investigation has concluded. Early verdicts on the Prime Ministers future are beginning to seep in from Tory MPs after the Metropolitan Police determined Covid rules were breached in Whitehall. Boris Johnsons leadership was put under fresh pressure on Tuesday after it emerged an initial tranche of 20 fines will be issued over alleged lockdown-busting parties in government buildings. It is expected that further fixed penalty notices (FPNs) could surface as officers continue to go through the evidence gathered. The force is investigating 12 events, including as many as six Mr Johnson is said to have attended. The PM is not thought to be among those set to receive a fine at this stage, as he is contesting the allegations and took advice from his personal lawyer on how to respond. The PM is not thought to be among those set to receive a fine at this stage (Kirsty OConnor/PA) He came under intense pressure to quit as a result of partygate, but in recent weeks the war in Ukraine has seen Conservative MPs rally round their leader. Now the Mets intervention, confirming it believes laws were broken at the heart of Government, is likely to reignite the debate about his premiership. Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said a day of reckoning may come in regard to the partygate scandal, but not at this moment in time. Asked if the latest news changed his view on the situation, after he withdrew his letter of no confidence in the PM, Mr Bridgen said he would back Mr Johnson if there was a vote tomorrow. He told the PA news agency: If they were a vote (of) confidence in the Prime Minister tomorrow, in the national interest Id have to support him otherwise wed be playing into the hands of Mr (Vladimir) Putin. Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said a day of reckoning may come in regard to the partygate scandal, but not at this moment in time (Jacob King/PA) He added: There may be a day of reckoning in regard to the fallout from partygate, but its not now and its not for the foreseeable future either. Meanwhile, Matt Hancock whose own time in the Tory cabinet was cut short when he was caught breaching social distancing rules he had helped to establish also said the Prime Minister should stay, even if he is fined. Asked if the PM can remain in his job, Mr Hancock told BBC News: Yes, he can and he should. He has apologised and hes acknowledged that there were problems and made changes in Downing Street. He added: My judgment, without a shadow of a doubt, is that the best person to lead the country is Boris Johnson, who is delivering the sort of leadership that we need to keep us safe in very difficult times that is absolutely clear to anybody who watches the news every night. Asked if he would say the same if Mr Johnson was issued with a fine, he said: Yes the police of course have got to look into it, but I think the broader judgment of who should be prime minister is based on the future and who is best placed to lead this country now. But veteran Tory MP Sir Roger Gale, who previously told PA that Mr Johnson was a dead man walking politically, said: If it becomes apparent that the Prime Minister has been fined then there clearly are serious questions that are going to have to be answered. He confirmed his letter of no confidence is still with the 1922 Committee, but current circumstances mean it is not the time to change our leader. If youre saying does the probity of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom matter, yes, it most certainly does, he told Times Radio. If youre saying, faced with the most serious international crisis since 1945, a terrifying potential circumstance, is now the time to change our leader, the answer is no it isnt. Asked if the PM had been pardoned or reprieved in his mind for now, he said: I think hes been reprieved. First of all, of course, no names have been given and Ive been approached by just about every media outlet known to man in the course of the day, and Ive stoically refused to comment on this, because I dont think theres anything to comment on. If it becomes apparent that the Prime Minister has been fined and Downing Street has said that they will tell us if thats so then there clearly are serious questions that are going to have to be answered. But, and its a very big but. I believe that at the moment, faced with the international situation in Ukraine and potentially beyond we need to be concentrating all our minds and all our efforts and all our unity across party. He added: There will come a day of reckoning, but its certainly not now. It comes after No 10 insisted Mr Johnson did not mislead MPs when he told them no lockdown rules had been broken in Downing Street, despite the Met concluding the law was breached. The PMs official spokesman refused to be drawn on whether Mr Johnson would resign if he did get hit with a penalty, and also declined to say whether fined individuals would be able to carry on working in No 10. Officials and Special Advisers are bound by the Civil Service Codewhich says you must *comply with the law*. You can read the Civil Service Code for yourself here: https://t.co/IB9XURBGsc https://t.co/r4s9bwBWAy pic.twitter.com/flSfAKjMTI Mark Harper (@Mark_J_Harper) March 29, 2022 But former chief whip Mark Harper suggested law-breaking civil servants or special advisers would have to be sacked. The Tory MP tweeted a screenshot of the Civil Service Code, highlighting a passage saying they must comply with the law. Are you a fan of foot tickles or are your toes a no-go zone? Well, it seems women are more sensitive than men when it comes to having their feet teased, according to a new study. While women squirm most when tickled in the centre of the arch, men find near the toes the most ticklish, researchers from the University of Auckland discovered, thanks to their new TickleFoot device. While there's already evidence to suggest tickling and laughter can significantly relieve stress, there is limited knowledge on whether tickling machines can evoke laughter, and how tickling can affect men and women differently. So, determined to find out the answer, researchers developed a battery-operated foot-tickling device, with small in-built brushes that touch different parts of the foot. Would you be willing to take the tickle test? (Getty Images) "We first developed an actuator that can create tickling sensations along the sole of the foot utilising magnet-driven brushes," explain the researchers, led by Don Samitha Elvitigala, as published in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. "Then, we conducted two studies to identify the most ticklish locations of the foot's sole and stimulation patterns that can evoke laughter." Read more: Why it's impossible to tickle yourself Women are more ticklish than men particularly in the arch of their foot. (Getty Images) Thirteen participants, including seven women and six men, first tested the effect of the magnet-driven brushes, rating the level of ticklishness they felt as the brush moved to different areas of their foot, across a seven-point scale. Women gave an average score of 5.57, while men gave an average score of 3.83, the results reveal. Women scored highest for ticklishness at the centre of the arch, while men were most likely to laugh around the toes. Read more: Could ear 'tickle' therapy help slow the ageing process? Researchers then used the data to develop a 3D-printed, flexible insole with three different tickling functions that can be inserted into any shoe and tickle the user on demand. "We embedded our actuators into a flexible insole, demonstrating the potential of a wearable tickling insole," the study details. It's thought it could be used as a stress reliever by inducing uncontrolled laughter. Being tickled around the toes is most likely to make men giggle. (Getty Images) Read more: Russell Brand calls for tickling children to be banned: 'Would you do it to an adult?' Marlies Oostland from University College London, who has previously studied how rats respond to tickling, discovering they need to be in a positive state of mind for it to induce laughter, showed her support of the study. "I think it's incredibly useful to do research like this," she told the New Scientist, explaining she thinks it will help us learn more about how the brain works, in particular predictive coding. Predictive coding is a process where the brain is able to spot surprises. Oostland says a natural way to study this process is through things like tickling, "because this is one of the very unusual behaviours where we actively seek out surprising events", rather than minimise them in an effort to protect ourselves. Previous research has suggested other ways to gain benefits from tickling. In 2019, a study by the University of Leeds even suggested ear tickle therapy could slow the ageing process, as well as potentially help people with health conditions such as heart disease and mental health issues. The TickleFoot can last for an hour of tickling, and can be turned on and off remotely. Sound like your worst nightmare? Or want to give it a go? The chief executive of P&O Ferries is to appear before a Scottish Parliament committee. Tuesdays appearance comes after the company announced earlier this month that it would be sacking 800 seafarers and replacing them with agency staff, with workers being told by video message. Peter Hebblethwaite will face the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee after having already sat for a Westminster committee last week. Peter Hebblethwaite (House of Commons/PA) The appearance in Edinburgh comes after UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps warned Mr Hebblethwaite that a package of measures was being pursued to block the sacking of staff. In a letter on Monday, Mr Shapps said: I will be bringing a comprehensive package of measures to Parliament to ensure that seafarers are protected against these types of actions in the way that Parliament and this Government already intended. Through that package, I intend to block the outcome that P&O Ferries has pursued, including paying workers less than the minimum wage. The measures could be revealed as early as Wednesday. Mr Hebblethwaite has also been criticised north of the border, with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon saying she had made clear her utter disgust at the job cuts. Committee convener Dean Lockhart wrote to Mr Hebblethwaite the day after the decision was announced, urging him to appear as soon as possible. He wrote: The Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee is extremely concerned about yesterdays news that around 800 of P&Os staff have been sacked, reportedly with immediate effect, and that services, including the Cairnryan-Larne line, have been suspended, ruining passengers travel plans. I am writing to request an urgent update so that the committee may reflect on its immediate scrutiny in relation to this matter. The UK Government should honour its commitment to introduce new legislation around the Irish language in Northern Ireland, Taoiseach Micheal Martin has said. During leaders questions in the Dail, Mr Martin also said that respect and esteem for the Stormont institutions had been weakened because of the repeated collapse of the powersharing Executive. There had been an expectation that the Westminster Government would introduce cultural legislation for Northern Ireland before the elections in May. It fell to the Northern Ireland Office after the Stormont parties were unable to agree to introduce cultural and language legislation in the Northern Ireland Assembly which was part of the New Decade New Approach (NDNA) deal. The plans include an Office of Identity and Cultural Expression to promote respect for diversity as well as an Irish Language Commissioner and a commissioner to develop language, arts and literature associated with the Ulster Scots/Ulster British tradition. Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis said this week he did not believe it would be right to introduce Irish language legislation during an election period (Brian Lawless/PA) However, Northern Ireland Secretary of State Brandon Lewis told the Northern Ireland Affairs committee this week he did not believe it would be right to introduce legislation during an election period. The Taoiseach was questioned on the issue on Tuesday by Aontu leader Peadar Tobin, who said the Good Friday Agreement had been gutted. He added: Brandon Lewis has said he will not bring forward Irish language legislation at Westminster before Mays assembly election. The Irish Language Act has been promised for 15 years. Sinn Fein returned to Stormont in January 2020 after previously collapsing it, because they said, they had achieved an Irish Language Act. In a combination of bad faith by London and naivety from Sinn Fein, we find out that that commitment was hocus pocus all along. Aontu leader Peadar Tobin said the Good Friday Agreement had been gutted (Niall Carson/PA) Mr Martin said: The Secretary of State did commit to Sinn Fein that he would bring it in in the Westminster parliament. It is my view that promise should be fulfilled. When agreements are made, agreements should be honoured. The Stormont powersharing Executive collapsed earlier this year when the DUP withdrew Paul Givan as First Minister in protest at the post-Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol. Mr Martin said a lot of work would be needed to restore the institutions following the Stormont elections in May. He added: The institutions should never be undermined, they should never be collapsed by any political party. If the people elect you to an Assembly, one should discharge your duties on behalf of the people for the full duration of that parliamentary cycle. Unfortunately the history of the Good Friday Agreement and of the Assembly and Executive is too often the default position has been to either withdraw from the Executive, to collapse the Executive when different crises emerges. That, I think, has been a fairly significant problem in terms of the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement which in turn has weakened peoples respect and esteem for the institutions. If you compare consistent surveys in terms of opinion of the Assembly versus the Scottish Assembly, there is a marked difference. I put forward the basis of that is that in Scotland there hasnt been a similar interruption; the government is perceived to be working for its people. In the north it has just been interrupted too much by collapse and this recent collapse is unacceptable. Here we go again. Congress is not likely to pass the new billionaire tax President Biden has included in his 2023 federal budget. The Biden tax is a reformulated version of a wealth tax proposed before by Democratic progressives such as Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden. The idea is to nab more federal revenue from super-rich Americans, which Americans generally support. But no Republicans support the idea, and some Democrats dont either, which means the votes arent there to get the plan through either the House or the Senate. Biden is laying out the pitch for his party in the 2022 midterm elections, and tax the rich is a golden oldie. So, for what its worth, the new tax would require the top .01% of householdswith $100 million in wealth, or moreto pay a minimum tax of 20% on their total income. That last phrase is in quotes because Biden would define income differently than the tax code normally treats it. If youre not a multimillionaire, you may not know this, but the super-wealthy generate a lot of wealth that the IRS doesnt count as income. If you start the year with a stock portfolio worth $100 million, and it rises by 10% for the year, youve gained $10 million in wealth. But it only counts as income if you sell it, which would trigger a capital gains tax payment. If you dont sell it, you havent garnered a capital gain or accrued any additional income, by IRS standards, even though youre $10 million richer. Some wealthy families live like this in perpetuity, never cashing in on various forms of wealth and never paying tax on it. They can then live on borrowed money, collateralized by their wealth, as ProPublica explained in a 2021 expose on the tax avoidance strategies of the wealthiest Americans. If they had to pay capital gains taxes when they died, these aristocrats might have more of an incentive to cash out some of their gains while alive, and pay taxes on it. But part of the tax code known as the step-up in basis resets the value of an asset when it passes from a decedent to a beneficiary, effectively eliminating the tax paymentand locking in family wealth for generations. The inheritor essentially starts over at the new market value of the asset, with all gains up till that point forgotten, for tax purposes. [Follow Rick Newman on Twitter, sign up for his newsletter or send in your thoughts.] With massive budget deficits and entrenched wealth inequality in the United States, it might seem logical to seek more tax revenue from the people with the most money. But there are 3 problems with any kind of wealth tax: Wealth can be hard to value. Stocks and bonds have a quantifiable market value, but many other types of assets dont. The most salient are privately owned businesses, which is the main form of wealth for many multimillionaires. Accountants can estimate a value, but business owners have an incentive to lowball, as for example, Donald Trump and his family have allegedly done for decades. Real estate can be similarly hard to assess, especially if it hasnt sold in years. Collectibles and illiquid assets can be even squishier. Evaluation difficulties can lead to legal challenges and long-lasting disputes with the IRS, which is often outgunned by wealthy filers and their myriad tax experts. The Trump family has allegedly lowballed the value of its assets for years. REUTERS/Gary Cameron A wealth tax might be unconstitutional. The Constitution puts limitations on direct taxes, with an exemption for the federal income tax. Legal experts differ on whether a wealth tax would be a direct tax, which would require a form of implementation so complex as to be unworkable. But everybody who has considered the issue knows there would be lawsuits right away, if Congress imposed a wealth tax, with the Supreme Court likely to decide. There are many other forms of taxation proven to be legal, and Congress could simply change the details to collect more from the wealthy. So why impose an unproven tax the Supreme Court could strike down, instead? Wealth taxes have failed before in Congress. Legislators trying to draft a billionaire tax have run into many barriers when it comes to sorting out the details. Taxpayers hit by the tax would have to evaluate all their assets, every year, raising questions of how an already understaffed IRS would be able to audit those filings. Some assets lose value in a given year, another accounting headache, given that rich people, in theory, could report negative income every now and then. Some people dont have the cash to pay millions or billions of dollars in taxes on assets, which would require forced asset sales. All in all, a billionaires tax might sound straightforward, but it would be cumbersome, in practice. This doesnt mean the wealthy are untouchable. There are simply better ways to raise more federal revenue from those with the most. Closing the step-up loophole is one of them. Doing that would require families to pay lots of taxes on assets when the owner dies, especially if Congress set the tax rate equal to the top income tax rate, currently 37%, instead of the capital-gains rate, which is just 20%. Congress could also raise the top individual or corporate tax rate, or impose many other new taxes experts have proposed over the years. A billionaire tax is a sideshow. Rick Newman is the author of four books, including "Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman. You can also send confidential tips. Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Flipboard, and LinkedIn Disney (DIS) is fighting back against Florida's controversial Parental Rights in Education Act, which critics have infamously dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" bill. On Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis officially signed the bill into law. The media giant released the following statement in response: Floridas HB 1557, also known as the Dont Say Gay bill, should never have passed and should never have been signed into law. Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that. We are dedicated to standing up for the rights and safety of LGBTQ+ members of the Disney family, as well as the LGBTQ+ community in Florida and across the country. Disney's statement follows a string of employee-staged walkouts in protest of CEO Bob Chapek's handling of the law, which prohibits classroom discussions regarding sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools for students between kindergarten and third grade. The law, which will go into effect on July 1, states, Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards. Parents will be able to sue districts over violations. Chapek, who initially decided not to speak publicly on the matter, opted to work behind the scenes in an attempt to soften the legislation. It didn't work. The executive eventually reversed course following intense backlash. He publicly denounced the act during the company's annual shareholder meeting on March 9, but was still criticized for taking a soft stance. Two days later, Chapek went a step further and directly apologized to employees in a company memo, writing in part, "You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down. I am sorry." Still, some workers think the gesture was too little, too late. Disney CEO Bob Chapek faced heavy backlash amid the company's initial response to Florida's so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill "We expect more from the CEO," Nicholas Luis Maldonado, a current Disney employee who participated in last week's walkout, told Yahoo Finance in a recent interview. "I just want to be proud to say I'm a Disney World employee [again], but at this time right now, I'm just not feeling the Disney magic," he continued. A Disney spokesperson responded to the walkouts in a statement, writing, "We know how important this issue is for our LGBTQ+ employees, their families and allies, we respect our colleagues right to express their views, and we pledge our ongoing support of the LGBTQ+ community in the fight for equal rights." The statement followed an all-company virtual town hall (dedicated to issues surrounding the LGBTQIA+ community), in addition to the revelation of a new task force that Disney says will "develop action plans to make more LGBT-aware content for children and family." The company also unveiled that Chapek and other senior leaders will conduct a global listening tour and meet with employees in the U.S. and internationally. "It's a step in the right direction by their statement, but so much more is needed to be done beyond today," Maldonado said. He added that he hopes the company holds more town halls and open forums, in addition to further public statements both in support of the community, and "against any future anti-LGBTQ legislation." ORLANDO, FL - MARCH 22: Disney employee Nicholas Maldonado holds a sign while protesting outside of Walt Disney World on March 22, 2022 in Orlando, Florida. Employees are staging a company-wide walkout today to protest Walt Disney Co.'s response to controversial legislation passed in Florida known as the Dont Say Gay bill. (Photo by Octavio Jones/Getty Images) David Huerta, president of Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West (SEIU-USWW), told Yahoo Finance that "this is a necessary fight." The California-based union represents several worker classifications within Disney, including costume and custodial. "Our members expect Disney to be a good corporate citizen...I think for too long corporate America has been looking after its own interests, and not really understanding the impact that that they have on issues that go beyond the workplace," he said. Huerta went on to explain that big-name corporations like Disney have a responsibility that extends beyond their core businesses, referencing recent employee fights at Starbucks (SBUX), Amazon (AMZN), Kellogg (K), and Netflix (NFLX). "I think workers realize that they have more power than then they give themselves credit for," Huerta said. He added that holding employers accountable is "a damn good thing" that's "long overdue." "Working people do have power and their power is stronger when they stand together, shoulder to shoulder, than when they stand alone," he concluded. Alexandra is a Senior Entertainment and Food Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @alliecanal8193 Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit Actor Ezra Miller, who plays Flash in the "Justice League" series, was arrested in Hawaii over the weekend and charged with disorderly conduct and harassment after becoming unruly at a bar, police said. Miller, 29, was arrested shortly after midnight Monday when patrol officers responded to a report of a disorderly patron at a bar on Silva Street in Hilo late Sunday, the Hawaii County Police Department said in a news release. Miller became agitated and began yelling obscenities while patrons at the bar sang karaoke, according to police. The actor at one point grabbed the microphone from a 23-year-old woman who was singing, the department said in the release. Miller also lunged at a 32-year-old man playing darts, according to police. The bar owner tried to calm Miller down several times, police said. Miller, whom police described as visiting from Vermont, was arrested and later released after posting $500 bail. NBC News has reached out to Miller's representatives for comment. This isn't Miller's first brush with controversy. In 2020, a video surfaced online appearing to show a woman being choked in a bar in Iceland and the footage was linked to Miller, though police did not confirm the actor's involvement at the time, Variety reported. Police said at the time no one was arrested or placed in custody in connection with the alleged incident and that officials were not aware of any injuries to those involved. In addition to "Justice League," Miller is known for the 2012 film "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" and the "Fantastic Beasts" franchise. Miller stars in the series' latest film, "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore," which is slated to be released in April. Vote tallying began on Monday in a historic union election at an Amazon (AMZN) warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, where a labor victory among more than 5,000 workers could upend the business model at the e-commerce giant and intensify a surge of organizing underway at major companies like Starbucks (SBUX) and Disney (DIS). The election arrives roughly one year after the overwhelming defeat of an initial union drive led by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) at the Bessemer facility a result that was later nullified by a ruling that Amazon had illegally interfered with the labor campaign. Alongside the revote in Bessemer, warehouse workers at a 6,000-person facility on Staten Island are casting their ballots in a union election that ends on Wednesday. Both elections could deliver results by the end of the week, with victories dealing a sudden and significant blow to Amazon, which has opposed the labor campaigns at both facilities. But twin union defeats could tarnish the perception of organizing at the company nationwide, discouraging workers beyond Amazon and affirming the company's previous contention that criticism of the work environment at its warehouses is overblown. RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum, as well as pro-union Amazon workers, told Yahoo Finance that a different strategy and a new set of grievances have energized the campaign, feeding optimism that the union will prevail in the second election at the plant. Labor experts acknowledged the significance of a potential victory at the nations second-largest employer, especially among a predominantly Black segment of its workforce at a facility in the labor-unfriendly South. Moreover, the election at Amazon coincides with a nationwide wave of organizing as emboldened workers draw leverage from a tight labor market. Starbucks workers in recent months have unionized eight stores, with more likely to come as over 100 stores across more than 25 states have filed for union elections; and employees at Disney captured attention last week with a walkout to protest the company's posture toward a controversial Florida law. But the experts cautioned that the bottomless resources and anti-union messaging of a corporate giant like Amazon make the organizing drive a difficult feat. The election is symbolic because Amazon is sort of looked at as the wave of the future in terms of the business world, the globalized economy, and the high-tech economy, says Paul Clark, a labor relations professor at Pennsylvania State University. There was a great disappointment when the first vote was not even close, so this would be a big deal. In a statement to Yahoo Finance, Amazon said it eagerly awaits the results of the union election in Bessemer. We look forward to having our employees voices heard, spokesperson Kelly Nantel said. Our focus remains on working directly with our team to continue making Amazon a great place to work. A person affiliated with RWDSU (Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union) holds a sign supporting unionization in front of an Amazon facility on the first day of the unionization vote in Bessemer, Alabama, U.S., February 4, 2022. REUTERS/Dustin Chambers Dale Wyatt, a warehouse worker at the Bessemer facility since August, said he voted yes for the union because it would bring job security, a potential pay raise, and bolstered workplace safety protections. Amazon has 100% of the power right now, says Wyatt, who makes $16.05 per hour. They can fire us at any time. With a union, thats not how it works. We have a representative to protect us. The criticism echoes grievances voiced by Amazon workers for years, including during the previous organizing drive at the Bessemer facility, when workers said they endured grueling and dangerous conditions enforced by digital devices that track them every minute. Some workers also say these devices fuel high turnover as the company fires employees who fail to keep up with performance quotas. Emergency calls from the facility in recent months suggest incidents of acute difficulty. Individuals at the Bessemer warehouse called 911 a total of 32 times over the first two months of 2022, amounting to a rate of more than one call every two days, according to a 911 call log obtained by Yahoo Finance through a public records request. The reasons for the calls included heart attacks, psychiatric problems, and fainting, the 911 log said. "The facility has thousands of workers there, but that's still a lot of calls," says Joshua Freeman, a professor emeritus of labor history at Queens College at the City University of New York. "It clearly reflects some challenging conditions." Amazon did not respond to a request for comment about the 911 calls. Wyatt said the second union drive in Bessemer has also focused on a newfound disillusionment at the warehouse: a belief that the company has fallen short of a commitment to improve employee relations made during the first union drive last spring. "I've noticed a lot of people who were voting no last time are voting yes this time because Amazon didnt follow through on its promises from the last round," Wyatt said. In a previous statement to Yahoo Finance, Amazon defended its commitment to workers' wellbeing and safety. "Nothing is more important than the health and safety of our employees," the company said. "We are anything but complacent and continue to innovate, learn, and improve the measures we have in place to protect our teams. A number of workers at the facility in Bessemer oppose the union drive, in part because they fear the loss of what they consider strong pay and benefits, BuzzFeed News reported last month. Full-time entry-level employees for the company in Alabama make nearly $16 per hour a pay rate over twice the federal minimum wage. I'm very worried about what would happen should the union be voted in," Kylee Rancour, an Amazon warehouse worker in Bessemer, told BuzzFeed News. "It could mean sacrificing benefits in exchange for things we don't want or need." Meanwhile, in advocating for the union, Wyatt has spoken with colleagues about it in the break room, helped hand out union-provided "goodie bags," and even made a homemade T-shirt that says, in part, "Your boss lied." It's all part of a revamped union strategy that favors person-to-person conversations with workers. That contrasts with the organizing drive last year, which appeared to focus on attracting big-name supporters like President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). This is radically different from the first campaign," says Appelbaum, the RWDSU president. He says the campaign has drawn support and in some cases personnel from 20 other unions, which allowed for up to 150 organizers on the ground in Bessemer at any given time. Among the partner unions are two of the nation's largest, the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters, the latter of which launched its own nationwide campaign focused on Amazon last June. A banner with VOTE on it is displayed facing the employee parking lot at an Amazon facility on the first day of the unionizing vote, in Bessemer, Alabama, U.S., February 4, 2022. Picture taken with a drone. REUTERS/Dustin Chambers But the second organizing drive at Bessemer has faced a staunch and well-resourced anti-union campaign from Amazon, Wyatt and Appelbaum said. For his part, Wyatt estimated that he had been forced to attend at least 12 meetings in recent months during which Amazon attempted to persuade workers to oppose the union. Over the days leading up to mail-in voting, which began on Feb. 4, Wyatt received "daily messages" from Amazon urging him to vote "no," he said. To be sure, federal labor law permits employers wide latitude in dissuading workers from supporting a labor drive, including mandatory meetings with employees. One thing that has stayed the same is Amazon has been conducting a ferocious union busting campaign, just as they did during the first vote," Appelbaum said. Amazon previously provided the following statement to Yahoo Finance regarding other union campaigns among its employees: "Its our employees choice whether or not to join a union. It always has been. And its important that everyone understands the facts about joining a union and the election process itself." "We host regular information sessions for all employees, which includes an opportunity for them to ask questions," the statement continues. "If the union vote passes, it will impact everyone at the site so its important all employees understand what that means for them and their day-to-day life working at Amazon. Maite Tapia, a labor expert at Michigan State University, noted that the anti-union tactics carried out by Amazon comprise the standard response to unionization from many large employers, including Starbucks, another major brand publicly opposing an organizing effort undertaken by its workers. "Im hopeful, but at the same time, they fight against corporations that have bottomless pockets when it comes to anti-union campaigning," she says. In the Bessemer warehouse, workers' conditions are inextricably linked to issues of race, surveillance, and policing, as about 80% of the warehouses workforce is Black, said Tamara Lee, a labor expert at Rutgers University who often collaborates with Tapia. Amazon says that the tracking devices allow the company to enhance the safety and efficiency of the workplace. Like any business, we use technology to maintain a level of security within our operations to help keep our employees, buildings, and inventory safe it would be irresponsible if we didnt do so, the company told the Washington Post in December. Its also important to note that while the technology helps keep our employees safe, it also allows them to be more efficient in their jobs," the company added. Lee pointed to the negative ramifications of rigorously tracking worker performance. With this kind of nonstop surveillance, its a form of bodily control, inside and outside the workplace, especially Black bodies that make up the majority of the workforce in Bessemer, she said. "It's very significant that this is happening now, and that its happening in the South, but I dont want to overplay this moment," she adds. "Workers have been frustrated at Amazon for years, and theyve made other attempts to organize. For years, Amazon has withstood persistent criticism over the conditions at its warehouse network, which has grown to at least 110 fulfillment centers in North America. The company instituted a $15 wage floor four years ago, and last year backed legislation that would gradually raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour. Other companies like Ben & Jerry's and Patagonia are among the firms that support a $15 minimum wage. But national interest in the first Bessemer union drive spurred more than 1,000 Amazon employees across the U.S. to contact RWDSU about potential labor organizing efforts, the union said last March. Natalie Monarrez, a warehouse worker at a Staten Island facility that's in a union drive of its own, said she hopes the second election in Bessemer brings a sea change in worker relations at the company and other major firms. "Jeff Bezos already had 27 years to figure it out and it was an afterthought for him," she says referring to the founder and former CEO who still chairs the board. "He should've considered his workers even a fraction as much as hes been obsessed with his customers." "We were inspired by them to unionize and hopefully other locations and workers at other companies will be inspired," she adds. Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find him on twitter @MaxZahn_. Allie Garfinkle is a senior tech reporter at Yahoo Finance. Find her on twitter @agarfinks. Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit The former king of Spain wants Court of Appeal judges to step in after he was sued by an ex-lover. Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, a Danish businesswoman, has taken legal action against Juan Carlos I and is seeking damages for personal injury. She alleges he caused her great mental pain by spying on and harassing her. Juan Carlos, 84, who ruled from 1975 until his abdication in June 2014 and the succession of his son King Felipe VI, denies any wrongdoing. Lawyers representing Juan Carlos argued he is entitled to immunity from the jurisdiction of the English courts in his capacity as a senior member of the Spanish royal family. But after a recent hearing in London, High Court judge Mr Justice Nicklin ruled against the former king, saying the claim can go ahead. Queen Letizia of Spain and King Felipe VI of Spain arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey in London, on Tuesday March 29 2022 (Kirsty OConnor/PA) In a follow-up hearing on Tuesday, Juan Carloss lawyers told the judge they want to go to the Court of Appeal. They will ask appeal judges to consider the case in the near future, they indicated. Mr Justice Nicklin rejected the argument that, despite his abdication, Juan Carlos remains a sovereign and is entitled to personal immunity under the State Immunity Act 1978. There is only one king of Spain and head of state of Spain and, since June 19 2014, that has been his son, King Felipe VI, he said. Whatever his special constitutional position following abdication, [Juan Carlos] is neither the sovereign nor the head of state of Spain. The judge also said Juan Carlos is not a member of the current kings household within the meaning of the Act. He said his position under the Spanish constitution is entirely honorary and provides him no continuing role. His Majestys abdication created an unprecedented position in Spain, the legal effects of which for the purposes of immunity in this jurisdiction require consideration by the Court of Appeal, barrister Sir Daniel Bethlehem QC, who led Juan Carloss legal team, told Mr Justice Nicklin in a written argument. Moreover, the requirements of comity between the United Kingdom and Spain, including the Sovereigns of both States, means that His Majestys claim to immunity warrants consideration by an appellate court. Juan Carlos must establish that he has an arguable case and get permission to mount an appeal. Mr Justice Nicklin refused to grant permission. Sir Daniel said lawyers would now ask a Court of Appeal judge to grant permission. A spokeswoman for law firm Clifford Chance, which represents Juan Carlos, said after the hearing that the ex-monarch was very disappointed with Mr Justice Nicklins decision not to grant permission to appeal. She said he believed that he had strong and compelling grounds for appeal and added: Accordingly, he will be taking immediate steps to seek permission from the Court of Appeal. Lawyer Robin Rathmell, who represents Ms zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn and is based at law firm Kobre & Kim, said after the hearing: Although Juan Carlos has indicated he will seek permission to appeal from the Court of Appeal, my client is confident in the decision reached by Mr Justice Nicklin and she will address any such application in due course. The Great Resignation the phenomenon of American workers quitting their jobs in pursuit of new opportunities amid the pandemic varies across the U.S. A new study from WalletHub used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to rank U.S. states and D.C. based on their resignation rates over the latest month and last 12 months. The data took into account the number of employees who left their job voluntarily, excluding firings, retirements, and transfers. Different states have different economies, and we are seeing a greater increase in quit rates in states where there are fewer remote work options and lower unemployment rates, Joyce Jacobsen, president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, wrote in the study. The low unemployment rates mean that there are more options for workers to move to jobs that are more attractive to them. Alaska and South Carolina topped the list of states with the highest quits ranking based on the methodology. Despite having the fourth smallest population size, Alaska's resignation rate for the previous 12 months neared 4%. New York ranked the lowest with a resignation rate of 1.87% over the past 12 months. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Minnesota also saw lower worker turnover. 'The labor market in the post-pandemic era is going through a significant change' Workers are in high demand for employers as job openings have remained near historically high levels. The key takeaway American workers should get from [the study] is the fact that the labor market in the post-pandemic era is going through a significant change that favors employees, WalletHub Analyst Jill Gonzales told Yahoo Finance. There is a surge in job openings, and a low supply of candidates to fill all the open positions. This gives applicants a lot of leverage, enabling them to negotiate better terms of employment and to take advantage of all the incentives offered by employers." Roughly 47.8 million workers left their jobs in 2021. And according to the most recent JOLTS report (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, resignation rates remain elevated the national quits rate ticked up by 0.1% to 2.9% in February while job openings sit at 11.27 million as the economy recovers from the effects of the pandemic. "While resignation rates in January were still fairly high, the most noticeable pattern is that for most states these rates are lower than the average resignation rates of the past 12 months," Gonzales said. "This could indicate that the labor market is slowly starting to settle and employers and employees are finding common ground in terms of work schedule and environment." A hiring sign is seen outside of Accurate Personnel office (an employment agency) in Buffalo Grove, Ill., Friday, Dec. 3, 2021. Workers quitting at high rates has been dubbed "The Great Resignation." (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh) There are a number of factors driving workers to change jobs, including toxic work environments under poor management, the explosion in gig work and self-employment opportunities, the prevalence of remote work and flexibility, and the demand for increased benefits. During the pandemic, these factors "came together in a single interactive, society-wide event to trigger the Great Resignation," Dr. Anthony Wheeler, dean of Widener University's School of Business, told Yahoo Finance in a statement. And while workers have been quitting at higher rates across the board, Wheeler explained, the "intensity" of the turnover varies across industries. "We know that the retail sector has been hardest hit with quit rates; but the level of quit rates isnt the same in other industries or job categories," he said. "For the harder hit industries, quit rates happened in specific contexts. Some jobs required in-person contact under quite stressful dynamics. This leads to increased stress and burnout." According to Wheeler, signs of worker dissatisfaction and burnout were present prior to the pandemic. "Some of what I find so fascinating about the Great Resignation... is how much of this wave of turnover has been predictable its just that the pandemic acted as an accelerant," he said. "In the U.S., weve known for several years that burnout was an unspoken but highly experienced pandemic... [and] for decades that flexible work arrangements did not negatively impact employee performance or company financial performance." Gabby Ianniello, 28, who quit her job in real estate development last year, works on her podcast, Corporate Quitter, in New York City, U.S. December 10, 2021 in this still image taken from video on December 10, 2021. REUTERS/Aleksandra Michalska Great Resignation 'could just as quickly unwind' The duration of the Great Resignation is still unfolding, as U.S. workers who temporarily exited the labor force after quitting are expected to return to fill more job openings while pandemic precautions subside. We do not know how sticky the trends are or if theyre bound by the specific context of the pandemic," Wheeler said. "For as quickly as the Great Resignation occurred, it could just as quickly unwind. The national unemployment rate is currently at 3.8% while the labor force participation rate, which stands at 62.3%, continues to edge back towards pre-pandemic levels (63.4%). As the pandemic abates, some of the challenges holding workers back from the workforce may dissipate. As school and child care, COVID restrictions expire and child care availability improves, I expect some increase in womens participation in the labor force, Jacobsen wrote in the study. There will also be more people who simply run up against financial constraints and reenter the labor force because they need the additional income. In the meantime, employers have been looking at alternative ways to fill gaps in their labor force, including by deploying the latest technological innovations. "The Great Resignation has occurred in the relatively early portion of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that will come to displace entire job categories and industries as automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning continue to mature and decrease in cost," Wheeler said. "Some companies might have held off on deploying technology, especially in customer-facing jobs, but now find that technological solutions are both cheaper and more efficient than human employees." Although tech innovators have assured workers that these advancements would not displace workers, Wheeler warned that "the Great Resignation could turn into the first labor shock associated with technologically-displaced workforces." "We just might not know or see that yet but could in retrospect," he added. Luke is a producer for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter @theLukeCM. Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, and YouTube Former President Donald Trump issued a statement Monday confirming that he made a hole-in-one at his golf club over the weekend. After Senate candidate Tim Swain (R) of South Carolina posted a photo to Twitter captioned "Trump just made a hole-in-one," many critics took to social media in doubt, questioning Trump's abilities. "Many people are asking, so I'll give it to you now, it is 100% true," Trump said in the statement. "It took place at Trump International Gold Club in West Palm Beach, Florida on the 7th hole, which was playing 181-yards into a slight wind." A spokesperson of Trump's tweeted a video of Trump going to retrieve the golf ball after his ace. "I hit a 5-iron, which sailed magnificently into a rather strong wind, with approximately 5 feet of cut, whereupon it bounced twice and then went clank, into the hole," said Trump. 45: Many people are asking, so Ill give it to you now, it is 100% true I wont tell you who won because I am a very modest individual, and you will then say I was braggingand I dont like people who brag! https://t.co/0Y2mLkW3TNpic.twitter.com/vqPWCbH1eR Taylor Budowich (@TayFromCA) March 28, 2022 Trump shared that he was golfing with professionals Ernie Els, Gene Sauers, Ken Duke and Mike Goodes. "These great tour players noticed it before I did because their eyes are slightly better, but on that one hole, their swings weren't." Trump's statement continued: "Anyway, there's a lot of chatter about it, quite exciting, and people everywhere seem to be asking for the facts. Playing with that group of wonderful, talented players was a lot of fun. The match was Ernie and me (with no strokes) against Gene, Mike, and Ken. I won't tell you who won because I am a very modest individual, and you will then say I was bragging and I don't like people who brag!" Contact Analis Bailey at aabailey@usatoday.com or on Twitter @analisbailey. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Donald Trump hits hole-in-one at Florida golf club, issues statement A couple of metal beams. Thats it. The Czech hedgehog is a simple antitank defense that, for Americans, Europeans and Russians alike, evokes images of World War II. Allied soldiers had to navigate beaches sprinkled with them during the Normandy landings. Moscow has a monument of Czech hedgehogs to mark the farthest that Nazi soldiers got in their advance to the capital city. In June 1944 on a beach in Normandy, Royal Marine commandos prepare to demolish Czech hedgehogs designed to prevent an Allied forces landing. (AFP) Czech hedgehogs in 1963 near the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer Platz. (Sobotta\ullstein bild via Getty Images) Now Czech hedgehogs are a common sight in Ukraine as the country puts every effort into slowing down the Russian invasion. They dot the beaches of Odesa, they fill the streets of Kyiv and they are present at key checkpoints. Many Ukrainian civilians are making them as a sort of DIY antitank barricade throughout their cities and towns. An armed Territorial Defense soldier stands guard at a roadblock in Kyiv on Monday. (Pavlo Bagmut/Future Publishing via Getty Images) What are Czech hedgehogs, and how do they work? Czech hedgehogs are made from two metal beams that are sealed together at angles. A third beam is added to allow the hedgehog to keep its shape and to function even when moved or tipped over. Any vehicles attempting to drive over the beams become stuck or possibly damaged stalling the enemy from making further advancements. Such a delay makes the vehicle more vulnerable to more advanced antitank weapons, like shoulder-fired missiles and drones. Czech hedgehogs in Odesa, Ukraine, on March 9. (Nina Liashonok/Ukrinform/NurPhoto via Getty Images) When were they created? Czech hedgehogs, also known as steel hedgehogs, have been used to protect towns and cities since their creation in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Early forms of the barriers were built to defend Czechoslovakia from Germany before World War II and were then repurposed by the occupying German forces years later. They were famously part of Nazi Germanys Atlantic Wall, along the French coast, in a bid to obstruct the Allies from landing on beaches ahead of D-Day. They were widely used by armies, including the Soviet Union's, as antitank defenses during the war. Theyve been used throughout the world since then. A Nazi propaganda picture of Kharkiv after its recapture by the German Wehrmacht in March 1943. (Berliner Verlag/Archiv/picture alliance via Getty Images) Who is making them in Ukraine? In short, anyone who has access to metal girders and welding equipment. Some Ukrainians are using old railroad ties to create the obstacles. In the western city of Lviv, a furniture builder began constructing hedgehogs as soon as the war started. On the first day [of the invasion], my brother came to me and said, Listen, we need antitank obstacles, Tarass Filipchak, a Lviv local, told Agence France-Presse. He was building a house at the time when he realized that some of the materials he was using could be repurposed to make the defensive barriers. They have been collected by Ukrainian soldiers and brought all over the country to protect cities and towns. We went on Wikipedia, looked at where they came from, who had invented them and we started to do the same, he told AFP. Filipchaks group of volunteers continues to make the barriers at the end of his driveway. We couldnt imagine that we would ever do this. We are peaceful people, humanists, he said. People make Czech hedgehogs in Lviv. (Mykola Tys/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) People making Czech hedgehogs in Lviv. (Mykola Tys/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) _____ How are Ukrainian forces taking out so many Russian tanks? Use this embed to learn about some of the weapons systems the U.S. is sending to the Ukrainian army. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) speaks at a Senate hearing early this month. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times) A key Senate Republican said it will be at least another month before he finishes an investigation into whether Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti was aware at the time of a top aide's alleged sexual harassment of others in the mayors office, likely further delaying any Senate action on Garcetti's nomination to be ambassador to India. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said he would continue the work at least through the Senates next recess, which is due to end April 25. I don't have a definite date when we're going to get done, but I know it wont be until after we get back after the recess, Grassley said in a brief interview in the Capitol. Grassleys inquiry is the latest delay in Garcettis nomination process, raising new questions on Capitol Hill about when or whether he will be confirmed. Grassley put a hold on Garcetti's nomination earlier this month, saying information he's received from a whistleblower needs to be investigated. President Biden nominated Garcetti to the post eight months ago. Garcetti has said under oath and before Congress that he didnt know about the allegations against his aide, Rick Jacobs, and if he had, he would have done something about it. Jacobs has denied the allegations. A Democratic senator on Tuesday said she, too, would like more information on Garcetti's denial. I understand that he testified he didnt know anything about it. Id just like to get further corroboration on that situation, said Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), who since 2018 has been asking every judicial nominee about whether they have ever been accused of sexual assault or harassment. I'm still gathering information. I'm not prepared to tell you one way or the other today, she said when discussing whether she has any concerns about the nomination. Grassley declined to characterize any conclusions his investigation might draw. He said last week he would extend the probe after hearing from additional whistleblowers and obtaining the final copy of a report summarizing a city-funded investigation. The report, which probed a Los Angeles police officer's allegations against Jacobs, cleared the mayor, but critics say it also left out information that would have bolstered the officer's claims. Grassley said he must expand the investigation because the city report had an "extremely narrow scope," and did not cover allegations that Jacobs sexually harassed Garcetti's senior staff and made racist comments to staff in front of Garcetti. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, questioned how much time Grassley was taking on the report. This nominee has been hanging out there a long time, Menendez said. All of a sudden, we have an investigation. You know, I wonder whether it is because there's something to actually be pursued? Or is it just, you know, the process of delay. He insisted his committee did a thorough vetting of Garcetti, as it does for every nominee. Now, if somebody comes forth after we do our vetting and says something, we certainly will consider it if it's brought to our attention, he said. Some of the Senate's strongest advocates against sexual harassment have been silent on the issue. You should talk to Foreign Relations about it, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who helped lead the 2018 fight to reform how sexual harassment claims against lawmakers are handled in Congress. I will look into it and Ill let you know, said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who has fought against sexual misconduct in the military, when asked if she was familiar with the nomination. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who questioned Garcetti on the topic during his December confirmation hearing, said she was "satisfied" with his statement that he didn't know about Jacobs' behavior. At the hearing, Garcetti said, I want to say unequivocally that I never witnessed, nor was it brought to my attention, the behavior thats been alleged, and I also want to assure you if it had been, I would have immediately taken action to stop that." Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who is among the Republicans most likely to support a Democratic nominee, said she absolutely planned to look into the allegations before any potential floor vote. I have read press accounts that there're issues involving some allegations of sexual abuse, but I didn't know anything beyond that, she said. Naomi Seligman, a former Garcetti spokesperson, filed a complaint with the Justice Department last month demanding that Garcetti be prosecuted for perjury for denying that he knew about Jacobs' alleged misconduct. She has been in touch with 20 senators' offices to speak out against his confirmation. "We are encouraged by our meetings on both sides of the aisle," she said. "It is heartening to see so many Senate offices treat this issue with the seriousness it deserves." Democrats control the Senate, 50-50, with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. If Garcetti can retain the support of all 50 Democrats, he can win confirmation without any Republican votes. Times staff writer Dakota Smith in Los Angeles contributed to this report. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. A member of Israeli Zaka Rescue and Recovery team cleans blood and human remains from the site where a gunman opened fire in Bnei Brak, Israel, Tuesday, March 29, 2022. A gunman on a motorcycle opened fire in central Israel late Tuesday, in the second fatal mass shooting rampage this week. The shooter was killed by police. (AP PhotoOded Balilty) JERUSALEM (AP) A gunman on a motorcycle opened fire in a crowded city in central Israel late Tuesday, methodically gunning down victims as he killed at least five people in the second mass shooting rampage this week. The shooter was killed by police. The shooting appeared to be the latest in a string of attacks by Arab assailants ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and the anniversary of last years Gaza war. Israeli media said the attacker was a Palestinian from the West Bank. The previous two attacks, carried out by Arab citizens of Israel inspired by the Islamic State extremist group, have raised concerns of further violence. Israel stands before a wave of murderous Arab terrorism, declared Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. He pledged to combat it with perseverance, stubbornness and an iron fist. He held an emergency meeting of top security officials and planned a meeting of his Security Cabinet on Wednesday. Israeli authorities have not yet determined whether the string of attacks were organized or whether the attackers acted individually. The Israeli military announced it would be deploying additional troops to the West Bank, and the police chief raised the national readiness level to its highest. Amateur video footage aired on Israeli television appeared to show the gunman in a black shirt armed with an assault rifle stopping a moving vehicle and shooting the driver. Another showed him chasing a cyclist, with the gun appearing to jam as he tried to fire. Tuesday's shootings occurred at two locations in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox city just east of Tel Aviv. Police said a preliminary investigation found the gunman was armed with an assault rifle and opened fire on passersby before he was shot by officers at the scene. The Magen David Adom paramedic service confirmed that five people were killed. Police said one of the victims was a police officer who arrived at the scene and engaged the shooter. Israel Defense Minister Benny Gantz wrote on Twitter that the security forces will work with all means to return security to Israeli streets and the feeling of security to civilians. Israeli media reported that the suspected gunman was a 27-year-old Palestinian man from the northern West Bank town of Yabad. Police did not immediately provide information about the suspect. In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack, saying the killing of Israeli or Palestinian civilians only leads to further deterioration of the situation and instability, which we all strive to achieve, especially as we are approaching the holy month of Ramadan and Christian and Jewish holidays. He said the violence confirms that permanent, comprehensive and just peace is the shortest way to provide security and stability for the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. No Palestinian groups immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. The Islamist militant group Hamas praised the heroic operation, but stopped short of claiming responsibility. Mosques in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip blared with God is Great cries celebrating the attack. Israel in recent weeks has been taking steps aimed at calming tensions and avoiding a repeat of last year, when clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian demonstrators in Jerusalem boiled over into an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas. But the new wave of violence is greatly complicating those efforts. On Sunday, a pair of gunmen killed two young police officers during a shooting spree in the central city of Hadera, and last week, a lone assailant killed four people in a car ramming and stabbing attack in the southern city of Beersheba. Earlier on Tuesday, Israeli security services raided the homes of at least 12 Arab citizens and arrested two suspected of having ties to the Islamic State group in a crackdown sparked by recent deadly attacks. Hours before the raid, Bennett said the recent assaults inside Israel marked a new situation that required stepped-up security measures. Law enforcement officials said 31 homes and sites were searched overnight in northern Israel, an area that was home to the gunmen who carried out the Hadera attack. The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the two previous attacks. All of the attacks have come just ahead of Ramadan, which begins later this week and as Israel Israel hosted a high-profile meeting this week between the foreign ministers of four Arab nations and the United States. All four Arab nations Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates along with the United States, condemned the killings. Ramadan is expected to begin Saturday. Deadly attacks by IS inside Israel, and attacks by Arab citizens of Israel, are rare. The group operates mainly in Iraq and Syria, where it has recently stepped up attacks against security forces. It no longer controls any territory but operates through sleeper cells. IS has claimed attacks against Israeli troops in the past and has branches in Afghanistan and other countries. SALEM, Ore. (AP) The man who allegedly drove into a homeless encampment in Salem, Oregon, killing four people, had roughly double the legal limit of alcohol in his blood, prosecutors said Monday. Enrique Rodriguez Jr., 24, was ordered jailed without bail by a judge on Monday after being charged with four counts of first-degree manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless driving and driving while under the influence of intoxicants. The 2 a.m. Sunday crash left a scene of chaos, with people trapped under the car. Two people died at the scene and two died at the hospital, police said. After the dead and injured were taken away, flattened tents, an overturned shopping cart and a deeply scarred tree marked the scene. Mourners left bouquets of flowers at the base of the tree. My friends are dead and I dont know what to say," Mike Wade, who came to the camp on Sunday after hearing about the crash, told the Salem Statesman Journal newspaper. Authorities identified those killed as Jowand Beck, 24; Luke Kagey, 21; Joe Posada III, 54; and Rochelle Zamacona, 29. Derrick Hart, 43, and Savannah Miller, 18, were seriously injured, police said. Rodriguez had 0.15% or more alcohol in his blood, according to a charging document filed with the Marion County Circuit Court. A blood alcohol level of 0.08%. or higher constitutes driving under the influence, according to Oregon law. The Salem Police Department said on Sunday alcohol may have been a contributing factor in the crash. Judge Jennifer Gardiner appointed a public defender to represent Rodriguez. The attorney, Aaron Jeffers, didn't immediately return a call seeking comment. The crash happened on a small triangle of trees and grass near the Willamette River and near a new mens shelter and a program that offers emergency housing assistance, showers, food and other services for the homeless. On March 3, the city of Salem cleared dozens of homeless people from a makeshift campsite located just a block away, at Marion Park. City officials had posted notices about the pending action, and community providers walked through the camp offering to connect them with services, the Statesman Journal reported. A new law that takes effect next year restricts how cities and counties including Marion County, where Salem is located can react to homeless camps. In 2021, Gov. Kate Brown signed a bill passed by the Legislature to protect homeless campers in public spaces from being removed. It mandates that any city or county law must be reasonable if it regulates sitting, lying, sleeping or keeping warm and dry outdoors on public property. Under the measure, a homeless person charged with violating a ban on camping or loitering would have an affirmative defense against a law that is not objectively reasonable. The Marion County Board of Commissioners opposed it, however, saying the measure would limit local control of the homeless crisis facing Oregon. Becky Straus, staff attorney with the Oregon Law Center, said the law will force local governments to review their camping and related ordinances in a way that recognizes the reality of Oregons rising rates of homelessness. The law takes effect July 1, 2023. ___ Follow Andrew Selsky on Twitter at https://twitter.com/andrewselsky KYIV, Ukraine (AP) The first face-to-face talks in two weeks between Russia and Ukraine began Tuesday in Turkey, raising flickering hopes of progress to end to a war that has ground into a bloody campaign of attrition. Ahead of the talks in Istanbul, the Ukrainian president said his country is prepared to declare its neutrality, as Moscow has demanded, and is open to compromise over the contested eastern region of Donbas comments that might lend momentum to negotiations. But he warned the ruthless war continued and that Ukrainians were paying with their lives for the West's hesitancy on imposing tougher sanctions on Moscow. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the two sides gathered for talks that they had a historic responsibility to stop the fighting. We believe that there will be no losers in a just peace. Prolonging the conflict is not in anyones interest, Erdogan said, as he greeted the two delegations seated on opposite sides of a long table. Also in the room was Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea Football Club and a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who has been playing an unspecified mediating role. Putins aim of a quick military victory has been thwarted by stiff Ukrainian resistance but still hopes were not high for a breakthrough. British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, reflecting skepticism among Ukraine's Western allies, said she thought the Russian president was not serious about talks. In fighting that has devolved into a back-and-forth stalemate, Ukrainian forces retook Irpin, a key suburb northwest of the capital, Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Monday. But he warned that Russian troops were regrouping to take the area back. We still have to fight, we have to endure, Zelenskyy said in his nighttime video address to the nation. This is a ruthless war against our nation, against our people, against our children. In this photo provided by Turkish Presidency, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, center, gives a speech to welcome the Russian, left, and Ukrainian delegations ahead of their talks, in Istanbul, Turkey, Tuesday, March 29, 2022. (Turkish Presidency via AP) Earlier talks between the sides, held in person in Belarus or by video, failed to make progress on ending the more than month-long war that has killed thousands and driven more than 10 million Ukrainians from their homes including almost 4 million from their country. Russia has long demanded that Ukraine drop any hope of joining NATO, which Moscow sees as a threat. Zelenskyy indicated over the weekend he was open to that, saying Ukraine was ready to declare its neutrality, but he has stressed that the country needs security guarantees of its own as part of any deal. As well as Irpin, Ukrainian forces also seized back control of Trostyanets, south of Sumy in the northeast, after weeks of Russian occupation that has left a landscape devastated by war. Arriving in the town Monday shortly afterward, The Associated Press saw the bodies of two Russian soldiers lay abandoned in the woods and Russian tanks lay burned and twisted. A red Z marked a Russian truck, its windshield fractured, near stacked boxes of ammunition. Ukrainian forces piled atop a tank flashed victory signs. Dazed residents lined up amid charred buildings seeking aid. It was unclear where the Russian troops went, under what circumstances they fled and whether the town will remain free of them. In his overnight address, Zelenskyy emphasized the situation remains tense in Ukraines northeast around Kharkiv, the nearest large city, and other areas, as he pressed Western countries to do more to support Ukraine, including levying harsher sanctions on Russia and providing more weapons. If someone is afraid of Russia, if he or she is afraid to make the necessary decisions that are important to us, in particular for us to get planes, tanks, necessary artillery, shells, it makes these people responsible for the catastrophe created by Russian troops in our cities, too, he said. Fear always makes you an accomplice. But the returned presence of Ukrainian forces in Trostyanets was a relief for a country hoping that Russian forces are pulling back as they encounter fierce resistance. Putins ground forces have become bogged down because of the stronger-than-expected Ukrainian resistance, combined with what Western officials say are Russian tactical missteps, poor morale, shortages of food, fuel and cold weather gear, and other problems. In response, Russia appeared to be concentrating more on the Donbas, the predominantly Russian-speaking region where Moscow-backed rebels have been waging a separatist war for eight years, the official said. While that raised a possible face-saving exit strategy for Putin, it has also raised Ukrainian fears the Kremlin aims to split the country, forcing it to surrender a swath of its territory. Still, Zelenskyy's comments that he was open to compromise on the region indicated a possible path for negotiations. In other developments: Russia has destroyed more than 60 religious buildings across the country in just over a month of war, with most of the damage concentrated near Kyiv and in the east, Ukraines military said in a post Tuesday. It said the Orthodox church the countrys majority religion was the most affected but that mosques, synagogues, Protestant churches and religious schools were also destroyed. Bloomberg News said it has suspended its operations in Russia and Belarus. Customers in both countries won't be able to access any Bloomberg financial products and trading functions for Russian securities were disabled in line with international sanctions, it said. Bloomberg Philanthropies pledged $40 million, meanwhile, in support for Ukrainians and refugees. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched an effort to achieve a humanitarian cease-fire that would allow aid to be brought in and people to move around safely. In the besieged southern port of Mariupol, the mayor said half the pre-war population of more than 400,000 has fled, often under fire, during weeks of shooting and shelling. Alina Beskrovna, who escaped the city in a convoy of cars and made it to Poland, said desperate people are melting snow for water and cooking on open fires despite the risk of bombardment, "because if you dont, you will have nothing to eat. A lot of people are just, I think, starving to death in their apartments right now with no help," she said. "Its a mass murder thats happening at the hands of the Russians. Thats a leader expected by the people: Costa Rican farmer on Xi 09:02, March 29, 2022 By Bi Mengying, Wang Xinping ( People's Daily This is President Xi visiting our coffee plantation. This is Mme. Peng having a sip of our coffee. This is President Xi having a casual talk with my family... Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan visit the Zamoras, a rural family during his state visit to Costa Rica, June 3, 2013. (Photo/Lan Hongguang) In a rural house in the small town of Santo Domingo de Heredia, Costa Rica, the Zamoras were introducing a few delicately framed pictures on a cabinet in their living room to Peoples Daily. For the Costa Rican family, Chinese President Xi Jinpings visit to their home nine years ago is still a fresh memory. On June 3, 2013, Xi, on a state visit to Costa Rica, went to Santo Domingo together with his wife Peng Liyuan, where they were received by Mr. and Mrs. Zamora, who were in their seventies. The Costa Rican couple introduced their 12-member family to Xi and Peng, and showcased their clean and tidy house from the living room to the bedrooms, and to the kitchen. The Zamoras, who made a living by planting coffee, showed Xi and Peng around the coffee plantation behind their house. The youngest son of Mr. Zamora Alberto introduced to Peoples Daily a moment of Xis visit to the plantation that the Chinese President picked up and smelled a coffee flower, and said its appearance, color, shape and even fragrance were similar to those of the Chinese jasmine. Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan visited the Zamoras, a rural family during his state visit to Costa Rica, June 3, 2013. Photo shows Xi learning the growth of coffee plants. (Photo/Lan Hongguang) Coffee is everyday drink in Costa Rica, while in China jasmines are always made into tea drink. At that moment, I deeply felt that Costa Rica and China share many similarities though they are geographically distant. President Xis comparison between coffee flower and jasmine symbolized the connection between the Costa Ricans and the Chinese, said Alberto. Mr. Zamora said many foreign state leaders visited his country, but he had never seen one like President Xi who specifically dropped by an ordinary rural family. We were very excited to have guests like President Xi and his wife, he noted. He shared with Peoples Daily a photo in which his family was sitting around the Chinese President, while Mme. Peng is holding his granddaughter. President Xi was very easygoing. I felt as if we had known each other for a long time and he was even like a family member to me, the Costa Rican said. In a log cabin in the Zamoras backyard, Xi had a taste of the familys homemade coffee and empanadas. Mr. Zamora said he hoped his coffee would one day reach Chinese consumers, and Xi assured him that China and Costa Rica had signed many agreements on farm produce trade, and more Costa Rican agricultural products would be exported to China. Today, apart from coffee, many other premium Costa Rican commodities are being sold in the Chinese market, including dairy products, pineapples and banana. Xi told the Zamoras that he had been doing farm work as a grass-root for many years, and when he later moved to the jobs in the counties, municipalities, provincial governments and the Central government, he frequently went back to the countryside to see the farmers and to know their basic requirements and real feelings. Mr. Zamora said his family was impressed and inspired by Xis pride over the farmer identity. Albertos deepest impression about Xi was the Chinese Presidents remarks that it is a very important task for China to do a good job for the rural areas, particularly to focus on the efforts to help the farmers go out of poverty and live a happy life. Since Xis visit, Alberto has been particularly solicitous of the news about Chinas poverty alleviation. The historic achievements made by China in poverty reduction inspired him very much. President Xi often visits schools and factories, and goes to the fields to learn about the real life of the people. I think thats a leader expected by the people. From the news, I can see what he really cares about and the huge efforts he makes to alleviate poverty in his country, Alberto told Peoples Daily. In a display cabinet in the Zamoras living room, there is a painting of the Great Wall, which is a precious gift to the family from Xi. The Zamoras also has a volume of the book Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. When Alberto showed Peoples Daily a page in the book of Xis visit to his home, pride was all on his face. He said his family was called The Chinese Family by neighbors because of the Chinese Presidents visit, and the visit has changed their life. In June 2014, Alberto joined an agricultural training program hosted in Chinas Anhui province. He finally came to the country that he had fascinated for so long. Now his family receives Chinese New Year greetings from the Chinese Embassy in Costa Rica every year, and embassy staff would visit the family in-person. A close bond between the family and China is thus forged. (Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun) By Stanis Bujakera KINSHASA (Reuters) -A helicopter belonging to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Democratic Republic of Congo was shot down by M23 rebel fighters in eastern Congo with at least eight people on board, the Congolese army said in a statement on Tuesday. The U.N. mission, known as MONUSCO, said earlier in the day that it had lost contact with the chopper in an area where rebels are staging an offensive. The M23 group, which was driven out of Congo after an insurgency in 2012 and 2013, attacked two army positions near the border with Uganda and Rwanda on Monday and fighting continued into Tuesday. The helicopter was shot down in an area controlled by the rebels while on a mission to track civilian population movements, said the Congolese army statement. The army is working to find it and any potential survivors, it said. (Reporting by Stanis Bujakera in Kinshasa; Additional reporting by Sofia Christensen in Dakar; Elias Biryabarema in Kampala; Clement Uwiringiyimana in Kigali; Writing by Hereward Holland and Sofia Christensen; Editing by Nick Macfie and Andrew Cawthorne) Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill delivers the Christmas service in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in January. (Alexander Zemlianichenko / Associated Press) Wearing crisp, olive-green robes and a towering, white head covering embroidered with the somber face of Jesus, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, addressed the faithful from an ornate 10,000-seat cathedral in Moscow. For weeks, religious leaders around the globe had been begging the bearded patriarch to speak out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But in weekly sermons that air live on Russian TV, Kirill, 75, has done just the opposite, painting the war as an apocalyptic battle against evil forces that have sought to destroy the God-given unity of Holy Russia. The day before Russians marched on Ukraine, he congratulated Russian soldiers as defenders of the fatherland and said they cannot have any doubt that they have chosen a very correct path in their lives . Less than two weeks after the invasion began, he described the conflict as having metaphysical significance and warned his flock that the price of admission to the happy world of Western consumption and freedom was as simple as it was terrible: to agree to hold gay pride parades . We are talking about something different and much more important than politics, he said. We are talking about human salvation. Last week, the patriarch said it was Gods truth that the people of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus share a common spiritual and national heritage and should be united as one people a direct echo of Russian President Vladimir Putins defense of the war . Someone must pray for our united people, Kirill said, holding a gilded staff symbolizing his role as spiritual shepherd of the more than 90 million members of his church. Someone must defend Gods truth that we are really one people. The same day, Ukrainian authorities accused Russian forces of bombing an art school where more than 400 people had sought shelter. In a country where more than 71% of people identify as Russian Orthodox, Kirill is a powerful religious and political figure who has consistently refused to acknowledge the destruction, dislocation and growing death toll of the war in his frequent public statements. He lives in a parallel universe, said UC Riverside professor Georg Michels, who specializes in Russian and Ukrainian history. He describes the current situation in Ukraine as Russians defending against a foreign invasion, not as Ukrainians fighting for democracy, and their lives, against a Russian autocracy. Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, congratulates Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill on the 11th anniversary of his enthronement in Moscow in February 2020. (Alexei Druzhinin / Sputnik) Experts say Kirill is a complex figure in Russian politics: smart, charismatic and an ambitious operator. He rose in the ranks of the Russian Orthodox Church during the Soviet period when the communist government viewed religion as an archaic relic of oppression and was the first patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church to meet with a Catholic pope in nearly 1,000 years. He is also rumored to have been associated with the KGB, the former Soviet Union's main security apparatus. To be fair, to become a church leader in the Soviet Union and get anything done at the time, you had to be affiliated with the KGB, Michels said. Kirill set off a scandal a few years after becoming patriarch when he was photographed wearing a $30,000 watch that was subsequently photoshopped out of an official image put out by the church. (A reflection of the watch remains visible in the picture.) He and Putin have long been close allies. Kirill once described the first 12 years of Putins rule as a miracle of God. Putin has said that Kirills father, who worked as a priest in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), baptized him in secret in 1952. The two men frequently appear in public together: at Easter services, visiting monasteries and traveling to pilgrimage sites. In recent years, Putin has increasingly highlighted his own religiosity: wearing a silver cross around his neck, kissing icons and famously immersing himself in the freezing waters of a lake in front of television cameras. The icy dip was a brazen display of manhood and an Orthodox Christian ritual to mark the Feast of the Epiphany. But whether this represents a true spiritual awakening by Putin, or political theater, is hard to say. He sees religion as helping to give Russians a proud identity, said John P. Burgess, professor of theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and author of "Holy Rus': The Rebirth of Orthodoxy in the New Russia." When Putin makes pilgrimages to the major Orthodox Russian sites and encourages restoring them, hes saying, This is something we can be proud of; this is beautiful and historic. Putin and Kirill also share a nationalist ideology that, in their eyes, justifies the war in Ukraine. As they see it, the origins of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church date to 988. Thats when Vladimir I, the ruler of Kievan Rus', which included parts of current-day Ukraine and Russia, converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The way this narrative unfolds, there is an organic wholeness between the relation of the Russian and Ukrainian people, and if Ukrainians see it differently, it is only because they have been led astray and corrupted by the West, said Victoria Smolkin, a scholar of communism and the Cold War at Wesleyan University. Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church takes part in a religious service in Bucharest, Romania, in October 2017. (Vadim Ghirda / Associated Press) From this point of view, Russia is not attacking a sovereign nation-state; its restoring the natural relationship between two countries. What they are after is salvation, Smolkin said. Not just of the Ukrainians, but of themselves. They see it as their mission to establish unity. The schism between the two countries is not just geopolitical; it has played out in the church as well. For more than 300 years, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was officially tied to the Russian Orthodox Church and overseen by the Moscow patriarch, but that is no longer the case. In 2019, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was authorized by the patriarch of Constantinople to break away from Moscow and become autonomous. With 78% of Ukrainians identifying as Orthodox as of 2015, this reduced Kirills flock by one-third. That was a big and significant event, Smolkin said. Kirill refused to accept that Orthodox Christians in Ukraine were behind the split and, in a sermon March 13, blamed the schism on political pressure from outside forces. It must be remembered that we all belong to the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church the same church as in Moscow and in Kyiv, he said. And God grant that we all preserve unity, regardless of any external pressures and any efforts alien to the church, to destroy the spiritual unity of our peoples. For decades, Russian church leaders have cooperated with the government in order to advance the interests of the church, said Stephen Batalden, professor emeritus of history at Arizona State University. But now, this tacit quid quo pro is being tested in new ways as the Russian state engages in what the U.S. has declared to be war crimes committed by Putin against Ukraine. Kirill has failed disastrously to defend the integrity of the Russian Orthodox Church, and that has all kinds of ramifications for the splintering of the church, Batalden said. In the days after the invasion, some Orthodox parishes in Ukraine stopped commemorating the Moscow patriarch in their prayers during public worship, in open defiance of his authority. And some Russian Orthodox churches in other countries are denouncing the Moscow patriarchate or breaking ties altogether. The more churches and religious connections the Moscow patriarchate loses, the weaker its claims in the so-called Russian world, Smolkin said. However, it is unclear how much agency Kirill has to denounce the war. Nearly 300 Russian Orthodox priests in Russia signed an open letter appealing for peace, but thats a small fraction of the 35,000 priests there. I think there is every indication that Kirill and Putin have overlapping interests, but its also hard to imagine Kirill taking a different position than the Kremlin, Smolkin said. The United States and other Western nations have also seen ties between political and religious leaders. During Francisco Franco's rule in Spain, the Roman Catholic Church was granted legal status and other financial benefits while colluding with the fascist dictatorship. The evangelist Billy Graham was a friend and advisor to a procession of U.S. presidents. When President Trump was in office, evangelicalleaders laid hands on him to pray. But experts say the relationship between Putin and Kirill is different. In U.S. politics, religious institutions are profoundly important, but they are autonomous actors. They can lobby and negotiate in their own right, Smolkin said. It is hard to see the Russian Orthodox Church as a fully autonomous actor independent of the Russian state. And yet, scholars say, the U.S. is not immune from the religious and political ideologies that Putin and Kirill are using to justify the war. Both men portray themselves as defenders of traditional Christian values against the excesses of an immoral and decadent West symbolized by gay pride parades, same-sex marriage and feminism, Batalden said. Right-wing politicians in America that are manipulating these same issues for their advantage are singing from the same choir as Vladimir Putin and Kirill," he said. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Editor's note: This page recaps the news from Ukraine on Tuesday, March. 29. Follow here for the latest updates and news from Wednesday, March 30, as Russia's invasion continues. The Russian military said Tuesday that it had "drastically" reduced its activity near the Ukraine capital of Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv as talks with Ukraine aimed at ending the war entered the practical stage. Russia and Ukraine held face-to-face talks Tuesday in Turkey as the United Nations pressed for a cease-fire in Russia's brutal invasion. The talks took place in the Turkish presidential office in Istanbul and lasted more than three hours, Russia's Tass agency reported. Alexander Fomin, Russia's deputy minister of defense, said the military cutbacks were made to increase mutual trust and create conditions for further negotiations. President Joe Biden, who had a call with European leaders Tuesday morning to discuss aiding Ukraine and pressuring Russia to end the war, was asked about the Russian claim of a military cutback near Kyiv. "We'll see,'' he said. The Pentagon sounded even more skeptical, as press secretary John Kirby said the pullout of troops was small and they may be reassigned. "We're not prepared to call this a retreat or even a withdrawal,'' Kirby said in a news briefing. "We think what they probably had in mind is a repositioning to prioritize elsewhere.'' Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed mistrust in the words coming from representatives of the country that continues fighting to destroy us, pointing out that although the direction of the current peace talks is positive, it "cant silence explosions of Russian shells. Ukraines military said it had detected withdrawals around the cities, and U.S. Gen. Tod Wolters, commander of the U.S. European Command, said that is exactly what we see. The Russian advance on Kyiv had stalled in recent weeks, but missile strikes have battered the city and left shortages of food, water and other necessities for a population of almost 3 million people. LATEST MOVEMENTS: Mapping and tracking Russia's invasion of Ukraine STRAIGHT TO YOU: The latest updates on the situation in Ukraine. Sign up here. Negotiations for a cease-fire being held in Turkey are expected to continue Wednesday. The head of the Ukrainian delegation, David Arahamiya, said his side presented an official proposal for a new system of security guarantees. The proposed security pledge will not apply to the parts of Ukraine whose status remains in dispute Crimea, which Russia considers its territory after annexing it in 2014, and the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk areas. "We insist that it be an international treaty signed by all security guarantors who ratify," Arahamiya said. "We want it to be an international mechanism of concrete security guarantees for Ukraine." Relatives and friends react near the coffin of Ukrainian servicemen Oleksiy Lunyov in Yuzhne, Odessa region, Ukraine, Sunday. Lead Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said Ukraine pledged not to join any military alliance and not to host foreign military bases or foreign troops. Even military exercises would require prior approval from guarantors, according to the proposal. Kyiv also pledged not to seek to obtain weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, Medinsky said. In return, Ukraine requires that Russia will not object to Ukraine joining the EU one day. Zelenskyy has said his country was prepared to declare its neutrality, as Moscow has demanded, and was open to working out a compromise over the contested eastern region of Donbas over the next 15 years. Latest developments Asian stock markets followed Wall Street higher on Wednesday as talks on ending Russias war on Ukraine appeared to make progress. Shanghai, Hong Kong and Sydney advanced, while Tokyo declined. Oil prices advanced less than $1 per barrel. The White House denied disinformation claims by Russia that the U.S. government is launching cyber operations against Moscow that include the theft of personal data and the spreading of false information about the Russian military. The Pentagon is sending a 200-person Marine Corps command-and-control unit to Lithuania, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Tuesday. The unit had been participating in a training mission in Norway. The Pentagon has been sending troops and equipment to shore up NATOs eastern flank following Russias invasion of Ukraine. Britains government has seized a superyacht owned by a Russian billionaire with ties to Vladimir Putin the first vessel to be detained in the U.K. under sanctions imposed because of the war in Ukraine. The vessel's owner was not identified. Russia has destroyed more than 60 religious buildings across Ukraine in just over a month of war. Most of the damage is concentrated near Kyiv and in the east, Ukraines military said Tuesday. Nine people were killed when a Russian missile slammed into a nine-story government building in Mykolayiv, Ukrainian officials said Tuesday. At least 20 people were wounded. THE DEVASTATION OF MARIUPOL: Satellite images, photos and maps show the extent of the devastation and loss 'Well see': Biden not ready to believe Russias military reduction President Joe Biden said Tuesday that he will wait until Russia follows through on its stated plans to scale back its military presence near the Ukraine capital of Kyiv before judging the significance of the move. Well see, Biden told reporters when asked for his view on Russias announcement. I don't read anything into it until I see what their actions are. We'll see if they follow through on what they're suggesting. Alexander Fomin, Russia's deputy minister of defense, said Russia has drastically reduced its military activity near Kyiv and Chernigov amid talks with Ukraine on a peace deal. He said the military cutbacks were made to increase mutual trust and create conditions for further negotiations. Biden referenced the negotiations as he discussed a Tuesday morning phone call he had with United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi. In the nearly one-hour call, they talked about continuing to provide military aid to Ukraine and making Russia pay a high price for ruthlessly attacking its neighbor, the White House said. There seems to be a consensus that lets just see what they have to offer, Biden said of his conversation with the European leaders. Well find out what they do. But in the meantime, we're going to continue to keep (strengthening) the sanctions. Were going to continue to provide the Ukrainian military with their capacity to defend themselves. And we're going to continue to keep a close eye on what's going on. Joey Garrison Pentagon on Russia's withdrawal announcement: 'We're not taking anything they say at face value' The Pentagon reacted with skepticism Tuesday to Russias claims that it has withdrawn forces near Kyiv. While small numbers of Russian troops have moved back from positions around the Ukrainian capital, the Pentagon believes it is repositioning, not a real withdrawal, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said. Its not anywhere near a majority of what they have arrayed against Kyiv, Kirby said. The Russians still have a significant majority of their combat power near Kyiv, Kirby said. President Vladimir Putin massed more than 150,000 troops for the invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have retaken territory from the Russians west of Kyiv, Kirby said. To the east of Kyiv, the Ukrainians have pushed back Russian forces to more than 30 miles from the city. Its too early to judge what Russia will do next, Kirby said, but its aims have been clear. Russia has failed in its objective of capturing Kyiv, Kirby said. Its failed in its objective of subjugating Ukraine. The British Defense Ministry Intelligence agreed the Russians have almost certainly failed in their effort to encircle Kyiv after repeated setbacks and counterattacks by Ukrainian forces. Russian statements and reports that some units have left may indicate Russias acceptance that it has now lost the initiative in the region, according to a statement from Mick Smeath, Britains defense attache. The Pentagons assessment that Russia is repositioning its forces is based in part on the shift of their military focus on eastern Ukraine, Kirby said. Were not taking anything they say at face value, Kirby said. Tom Vanden Brook 'We did not invite them here': Flow of refugees dwindles as some Ukrainians feel emboldened Whether it stems from increased confidence in their military, an inability to flee or a desire to stay and fight, the flow of Ukrainians leaving the country nearly five weeks into the Russian invasion has slowed significantly. Most of the 3.9 million refugees departed from Ukraine in early March, at a time when about 140,000 people were escaping into Poland every 24 hours. Now, about 30,000 refugees arrive per day in Poland, according to UN data. In Moldova, daily refugee counts have dropped from about 20,000 per day in early March to around 2,000, and 21,000 have actually gone back home. As the Ukrainian military pushes back in the face of relentless bombardment, some citizens are feeling more emboldened. We are ready. We expect that Russia will come. And we will fight," said Odesa resident Alex Kobzev, 44, who has been coordinating aid distribution. We are supposed to be all brothers, but we did not invite them here.'' -- Trevor Hughes Chechnya leader says his fighters could take Kyiv The leader of Russia's Chechnya province wants to storm Kyiv. Ramzan Kadyrov, speaking to about 10,000 troops in Chechnyas regional capital of Grozny, said that we need to complete what we have started," a reference to the Kremlin announcing it was backing off its assault on Kyiv to allow for negotiations. Kadyrov has posted numerous videos in recent days that appear to feature him and Chechen fighters on the outskirts of Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine. Kadyrov said Moscow should have allowed his fighters to press the offensive. Im more than confident that we would have entered Kyiv and established order there," he said. Kremlin: US-Russia dialogue crucial despite Biden 'insults' President Joe Biden's blunt criticisms of Russian President Vladimir Putin have a negative impact on relations but dialogue between Moscow and Washington is in the interests of the whole world, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday. "Insults cannot but leave their mark on relations between heads of state," Peskov said. "Especially personal insults, which in general should have no place in the rhetoric of the head of state." Biden in recent days has referred to Putin as a "war criminal'' and on Saturday said Putin "cannot remain in power.'' The White House later clarified that Biden was not calling for regime change in Russia. "One way or another, sooner or later we will have to talk about the issues of strategic stability, security and so on, in other words, those issues that only we can and should discuss," Peskov said. Europe sends dozens of Russian diplomats home At least four European allies expelled dozens of Russian diplomats Tuesday as relations between Russia and the West continue their plunge since the invasion. The Netherlands said it was expelling 17 Russians who it described as intelligence officers masquerading as diplomats. Belgium said it was ejecting 21 Russians, the Czech Republic one. Ireland told four senior Russian officials to leave the country because of activities deemed not in accordance with international standards of diplomatic behavior." All this after Poland expelled 45 Russians last week. Together with our allies, we are reducing the Russian intelligence presence in the EU, the Czech Foreign Ministry said. US troop presence in Europe almost doubles, to 100,000 U.S. troop presence in Europe has swelled from 60,000 to about 100,000 as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Gen. Tod Wolters, commander of the U.S. European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO, told the Senate Armed Services committee on Tuesday. "Russia's premeditated and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has galvanized our allies and global partners," he told the committee. "NATO's capabilities in space and cyberspace are more closely integrated than in any other time in the Alliance's history." Wolters said the U.S. is supplying Ukraine with military requirements "to ensure they're getting the right equipment at the right time ... so they can best protect their forces." Asked why Russia would have used hypersonic weapons in Ukraine, Wolters said it was likely done "to put fear in the hearts of the enemy, and I don't think they were successful." He said most of those strikes were aimed at military targets. Katie Wadington Ukraine's defensive strategy could add to peril facing civilians Ukraine's defense against Russian attacks could be increasing the risk to civilians in the war-torn nation, experts tell The Washington Post. Most neighborhoods in Ukraine's cities have become "militarized," making them potential targets for Russian forces, the Post says. Russia has been pounding some cities, and Ukrainians have responded by deploying air defense systems, heavy weaponry, soldiers and volunteers to residential areas. All are rich targets for Russian missiles. I am very reluctant to suggest that Ukraine is responsible for civilian casualties because Ukraine is fighting to defend its country from an aggressor, William Schabas, an international law professor at Middlesex University in London, told the Post. But to the extent that Ukraine brings the battlefield to the civilian neighborhoods, it increases the danger to civilians. Contributing: The Associated Press This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ukraine recap: US skeptical of Russia's claim of Kyiv pullback FILE PHOTO: Wildfire near the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder (Reuters) - The potential for significant wildfires fueled by parched vegetation in parts of Texas and the U.S. Plains put the region on high alert on Tuesday as gusty winds and bone-dry humidity were in the forecast. Red Flag Warnings, signaling that fires could start and spread easily, were issued for an area spanning western Texas, southern Nebraska and parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, the National Weather Service said. The service warned that wind gusts reaching 50 miles (80 km) per hour, higher-than-usual temperatures and 10-15% humidity in the region could spark wildfires throughout the day and into the evening. "It will be very unpleasant to be outside today due to strong winds and blowing dust. Do not engage in any activities that could spark a fire," the National Weather Service in Lubbock, Texas said on Twitter. It will be very unpleasant to be outside today due to strong winds and blowing dust. Do not engage in any activities that could spark a fire. A Red Flag Warning is in place until 11PM and a High Wind Warning is in place until 9PM. #lubwx #txwx #firewx pic.twitter.com/puM6ryp5wb NWS Lubbock (@NWSLubbock) March 29, 2022 The weather conditions, combined with extremely dry vegetation, increase the possibility of significant wildfires occurring and impacting communities, the Texas A&M Forest Service said in statement on Monday. "Unfortunately, little to no precipitation is forecast for the immediate future and we expect the current level of wildfire activity to continue for some time," Wes Moorehead, Texas A&M Forest Service fire chief, said in the statement. Some 726 wildfires have burned 164,257 acres (66,472 hectares) across Texas in March, causing several communities to evacuate, including Carbon in central Texas, where the Eastland Complex blazes destroyed most of the small town. A sheriff's deputy died in the blaze while more than 150 structures were destroyed. Over the weekend, a blaze called the NCAR Fire forced 19,000 people from their homes near Boulder, Colorado. Dmitriy Boyko starts every morning with a single text to his family in Ukraine: "How are you guys doing?" Boyko, born and raised in Kyiv, has been forced to watch from thousands of miles away as his cousins one with a 4-month-old baby who fled to western Ukraine and another in Kyiv with her sick mother suffer in fear amid the Russian invasion. Boyko was 11 when he, his brother, his sister and his parents moved to the Bronx. Before Russian President Vladimir Putin ignited the deadly war in Ukraine on February 24, Boyko and his cousins kept in touch "sort of on and off." But now, he said, they stay in daily contact about the situation, and are "closer than we ever were." Boyko's cousin Irina Kravetskaya, who is in Kyiv with her ailing mother, texted Boyko of "very disturbing" conditions that many Ukrainians have been facing every day for more than a month now: They were getting bombed. "We are very scared," Kravetskaya wrote. "Dmitriy, we are getting bombed at, we can hear it at our location we are hiding." He responded: "Hide quickly and take water with you. Warm clothes. More so they can last." "We took it," Kravetskaya said. "Kyiv is getting bombarded heavily." Another message from Kravetskaya: "We are alive. Today we are expecting a shooting...don't know anymore...they bombed the TV tower and Babiy Yar," she said, referencing the Holocaust location where thousands of Jews were killed by Nazis, including members of their family. "All day we hear sirens," she said. "Mom is still in the hospital. Today I waited for 3 hours in a freezing cold to get medication for my mom, we are short 80% on medication." Boyko's other cousin is with her 4-month-old baby in a town in Western Ukraine near Romania, along with her mother and distant family members. And it's not just his family members. On March 22, one of Boyko's friends in Ukraine announced that her husband had died in the war. "Life will never be the same again," she wrote. "I hate everyone who is involved in this somehow." As much as Boyko tries to help from afar making suggestions about what they should do and how they should do it and providing moral support Bokyo said it's tough not being there in person. "You feel like you're helpless, really. You're not there with them," he said. "But I try to rationalize that I'm probably more helpful here than over there." Boyko, a member of New York City's Ukrainian Running Club, has been working with the local community to raise money, donations and awareness of the war. When the war started, he said, running club members, many whom are first-generation Americans, came together to do whatever they could, including reaching out to their representatives and senators to advocate for more support for their native country. On March 5, the running club hosted a solidarity run to "support Ukrainians in their fight for democracy and freedom in the unjustified, unprovoked war started by Russia." More than 600 runners participated in the event. Boyko said that people from all walks of life, including those who he hasn't spoken to in a decade, have contributed, in some cases by donating upwards of $1,000. So far, Boyko has helped raise more than $10,000 to help Ukrainians in the war, and has gotten a company in Europe to donate medical supplies for Ukrainian soldiers. Seeing so much support, he said, assures him that Ukraine "can't lose." Dmitriy Boyko's cousin and aunt have had to flee Kyiv to western Ukraine along with his cousin's 4-month-old baby amid the war. / Credit: Dmitriy Boyko "It's amazing. I think that's as succinct as you can put it," he said. "...We have to show strength. We have to provide as much ammunition to the Ukrainian soldiers as possible, at least allow them to fight the fight that they need to fight and have the equipment." Boyko said that Russian President Vladimir Putin's goal to tear apart the Ukrainian people has not succeeded. "He united the Ukrainians like nobody was able to unite them before," he said. "...I've never been more Ukrainian than I am now. Tons of people feel exactly the same." But even with the boast of support and confidence that the situation will turn out OK for Ukrainians, Boyko said that it doesn't negate the trauma that has already been endured. The last month, he said, has been "one long day." "Life has changed," Boyko said. "...Right now, the best that America can do and the world is to help Ukraine defeat the Russians. They're it themselves but they need the help. They're doing it for us actually as well. We may not realize it, but they're doing it for the world." Ukraine war through the eyes of a photojournalist Walmart ending cigarette sales in some stores Dollywood closes ride after deadly Florida accident Oregon will no longer require people to be residents of the state to use its law allowing terminally ill people to receive lethal medication, after a lawsuit challenged the requirement as unconstitutional. In a settlement filed in U.S. District Court in Portland on Monday, the Oregon Health Authority and the Oregon Medical Board agreed to stop enforcing the residency requirement and to ask the Legislature to remove it from the law. Advocates said they would use the settlement to press the eight other states and Washington, D.C., with medically assisted suicide laws to drop their residency requirements as well. This requirement was both discriminatory and profoundly unfair to dying patients at the most critical time of their life, said Kevin Diaz, an attorney with Compassion & Choices, the national advocacy group that sued over Oregon's requirement. Laura Echevarria, a spokeswoman for National Right to Life, which opposes such laws, warned that without a residency requirement, Oregon risked becoming the nation's assisted suicide tourism capital. Video: Pope condemns assisted suicide But Diaz said that was unlikely, given safeguards in the law, such as the requirement that physicians determine whether patients are mentally capable; that it is extremely difficult for terminally ill people to make extended trips to another state; and that many people want to die in the presence of loved ones near home not across the country. There's no tourism going on," Diaz said. Compassion & Choices sued on behalf of Dr. Nicholas Gideonse, a Portland family practice physician and associate professor of family medicine at Oregon Health and Science University. A longtime supporter of medical aid-in-dying laws, Gideonse had been unable to write terminal prescriptions for patients who live just across the Columbia River in Washington state. While Washington has such a law, providers can be difficult to find in the southwestern part of the state, where many hospital beds are in religiously affiliated health care facilities that prohibit it. Requiring his patients to find other doctors to provide assistance in ending their own lives can compound their suffering, Gideonse said. Any restriction on medical aid in dying that doesnt serve a specific medical purpose is difficult, Gideonse said Monday. In no other way is my practice restricted to Oregon residents, whether thats delivering babies in the past or other care that I provide. The lawsuit argued that the residency requirement violated the U.S. Constitutions Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the right to regulate interstate commerce, and the Privileges and Immunities Clause, which forbids states from discriminating against citizens from other states in favor of its own citizens. The Oregon Health Authority and the medical board declined to comment on why they settled the case. The state attorney general's office did not immediately respond to an interview request. Enacted in 1997, Oregon's first-in-the-nation law allows terminally ill people deemed to have less than six months to live to end their lives by voluntarily taking lethal medications prescribed by a physician for that purpose. Patients must make two verbal requests to their doctor for the medication, at least 15 days apart, as well as a written request signed in the presence of two witnesses. The attending physician and a consulting physician must confirm the patients diagnosis and prognosis, and determine whether the patient is capable of making health care decisions; if either doctor believes the patient to be suffering from depression or another mental disorder, they can refer the patient for a psychological exam. Some 2,159 people have died after ingesting terminal drugs under the law since it took effect, according to data published last month by the Oregon Health Authority. California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont, Washington state and Washington, D.C., have approved similar laws, all with residency requirements. Montana's Supreme Court has ruled that state law does not prohibit medical aid in dying. National Right to Life is concerned that people might be able to travel to Oregon without having much of a relationship with a doctor in the state, thus chipping away at guardrails limiting the use of the law, Echevarria said. The hope is that doctors will continue to evaluate patients, but it certainly creates a situation where there could be more abuse of that law, she said. ___ Johnson reported from Seattle. Claims that Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich suffered suspected poisoning during attempts to aid peace talks in Ukraine are very concerning, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has said. It said the UK will continue to assist by implementing tough sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putins regime as well as by providing defensive and humanitarian support to put Ukraine in the strongest possible negotiating position. The suspected poisoning of the billionaire was not intended to kill him and the two Ukrainian representatives, the lead Russia investigator with investigative news outlet Bellingcat has said. The experts said the dosage and type of toxin used was likely insufficient to cause life-threatening damage, and most likely was intended to scare the victims as opposed to cause permanent damage. The victims said they were not aware of who might have had an interest in an attack Bellingcat (@bellingcat) March 28, 2022 Christo Grozev told Times Radio the most plausible explanation for the alleged poisoning was that it was a warning to Mr Abramovich. The dosage was not high enough to kill any of the three, the most likely target would have been Abramovich. And it kind of makes sense. I mean, he volunteered to play this role of (an) honest broker, but other oligarchs had declared certain independence from the Kremlin position and criticise(d) the war, the journalist said. So it could well be seen as a warning sign to them to not join the ranks of those who dissent, and to not be too much of an honest broker. It comes as Boris Johnson pledged to co-ordinate closely with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the days ahead, reiterating the UKs commitment to strengthening economic pressure on Moscow. Meanwhile, British defence intelligence analysts warned more than 1,000 Russian mercenaries are expected to deploy to eastern Ukraine to undertake combat operations. In an intelligence update on Twitter, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said Russia had highly likely been forced to reprioritise personnel from the paramilitary Wagner Group, at the expense of operations in Africa and Syria, due to heavy losses and a largely stalled invasion. The Wagner Group, seen as Mr Putins private army, was among the latest tranche of entities sanctioned by the UK Government over the Russian invasion last week. Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine 28 March 2022 Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/LGcaASzEkJ #StandWithUkraine pic.twitter.com/qWJcREPqRN Ministry of Defence (@DefenceHQ) March 28, 2022 It was reported on Monday that Mr Abramovich was among a group who suffered symptoms consistent with poisoning after attending peace talks in Ukraine. The Russian oligarch, who is involved in talks between Kyiv and Moscow, along with at least two Ukrainian negotiators, developed red eyes, constant and painful tearing, and peeling skin on their faces and hands since the meeting at the start of the month, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Sources told the PA news agency Mr Abramovich had now recovered and was continuing to try to help with the negotiations. It is understood the oligarch had been involved in talks about securing humanitarian corridors to allow Ukrainians to leave as well as bringing other countries to the negotiating table. The WSJ reported it was believed the suspected attack was orchestrated by hardliners in Russia who wanted to sabotage the talks. Roman Abramovich suffered suspected poisoning during attempts to aid peace talks in Ukraine (Adam Davy/PA) Asked about the allegations on BBC Newsnight, Sergiy Petukhov, the former deputy minister of justice of Ukraine, said: Its really hard to make any conclusions out of (the) information that we have. Remember previously one of the Ukrainian negotiators was murdered in Kyiv under unknown circumstances. He said the situation makes the atmosphere of the negotiations very tense and nervous, definitely not contributing to success. I think we will have to wait until further information comes out to be able to reach a conclusion (on) whether it was an intentional attack on the negotiation process or something else that just happened, he added. The FCDO called the claims very concerning, adding: The UK will continue to assist by implementing tough sanctions on Putins regime, and by providing defensive and humanitarian support to help put Ukraine in the strongest possible negotiating position. The Foreign Secretary has said Mr Putin is resorting to desperate measures (James Manning/PA) Earlier, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said Mr Putins forces were abducting Ukrainian politicians, activists and journalists as Russia failed to meet its military objectives. She condemned the abhorrent tactic following work by Ukrainian human rights group ZMINA, which claimed to have identified dozens of individuals who had been abducted, with thousands more deported to Russia. Ms Truss said Mr Putin was resorting to desperate measures. Putin continues to use abhorrent tactics against the Ukrainian people, including abducting innocent civilians, she said. He is not achieving his objectives and is resorting to desperate measures. Putin must fail in Ukraine. Ms Truss, in a statement to the House of Commons, later told MPs: We know that Putin is not serious about talks, he is still wantonly bombing innocent citizens across Ukraine and that is why we need to do more to ensure that he loses and we force him to think again. We must not just stop Putin in Ukraine but we must also look to the long term. We need to ensure that any future talks dont end up selling Ukraine out or repeating the mistakes of the past. In their call on Monday, No 10 said Mr Zelensky provided Mr Johnson with an update on negotiations, adding that the two leaders agreed to co-ordinate closely in the days ahead. The Ukrainian president has signalled he is prepared to offer a series of concessions to Russia to end the fighting. Ukraine could declare neutrality and offer guarantees about its non-nuclear status as part of a peace deal, Mr Zelensky suggested, but he stressed the desire to ensure the countrys territorial integrity. A company set up by UK academics to create vodka from crops grown near to Chernobyl is donating profits from two new fruit schnapps drinks to refugees from the war in Ukraine. Professor Jim Smith, of the University of Portsmouth, and Ukrainian colleagues set up a social enterprise in 2019 to show that vodka could be safely produced in the region affected by the nuclear reactor accident in 1986. The initiative started as a scientific experiment and progressed to the team based in the Ukraine and at the Hampshire university selling the radioactive-free vodka in the UK. Professor Jim Smith said he was horrified by the war in Ukraine (University of Portsmouth/PA Wire) The Chernobyl Spirit Company is now supporting Ukrainian refugees by donating the profits from the first 850-bottle batches of its two new premium fruit schnapps. The spirits are 5x distilled in Ukraine from pears and plums harvested last autumn from districts affected by the Chernobyl accident and now partly under Russian control. The company started sales of its Apple Spirit last autumn and has donated 15,000 all its profits so far to the Ukrainian refugee appeal with at least 75% of all future profits from the social enterprise going to support the recovery of communities in Ukraine. Prof Smith said: Having spent my career working on the consequences of Chernobyl Im horrified to see the much worse impact of the Russian war on Ukraine. Our social enterprise aims to support communities affected by Chernobyl, many of which are now under Russian occupation. Colleague Dr Gennady Laptev, a Chernobyl emergency worker who is currently in Kyiv with his wife and 86-year-old father, said: We hope our social enterprise will help people affected by the devastating social and economic impacts, first of the Chernobyl accident and now of the war. For more details visit: www.atomikvodka.com Sinn Fein will defend but not renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement, the partys vice president Michelle ONeill has said. Speaking at an election launch event in Belfast city centre, Ms ONeill said those who hanker for the past need to realise that there is no going back, only forward. Delivering a speech at the Europa Hotel, Sinn Feins Stormont leader described the DUPs collapse of the Northern Ireland powersharing Executive as political vandalism. She said: When the Assembly, Executive and North South Ministerial Council were restored in January 2020 it was with a shared commitment to deliver the public services, societal reforms and future that our people need and deserve. It was ambitious to form a five-party coalition Executive, but it was achieved, getting us back to genuine powersharing, and thankfully so, because while everyone knew there would be challenges ahead, no one could have predicted that in only a matter of weeks that our Executive would be dealing with a global pandemic that would have such devastating impacts on every part of society, community and peoples lives and livelihoods. It is to the credit of all ministers from across the five parties that they responded and have worked with a unity of purpose, and unity of leadership for the past two years. This is what the public want to see more of co-operation and delivery. Ms ONeill added: And the contrast to that is Jeffrey Donaldson warning that it will be difficult for his party to re-enter the political institutions after the May 5 election. This is heard by those of us within nationalism as unionism doing democracy on only unionisms terms. Those who hanker for the past, who disrupt the present and who threaten our future need to realise that there is no going back, only forward. The facts are that the balance of power at Stormont has shifted irreversibly and political unionism must come to terms with the fact the world is moving on fast. Sinn Fein will be defending, not renegotiating the Good Friday Agreement now, or in the time ahead. We will not be shifting any goalposts to satisfy unionism before, or after elections. Ms ONeill said the May 5 election was the most important in a generation. She said her party would be standing 34 candidates across the 18 constituencies in the election, with more than half female. The Sinn Fein vice president said that a security alert in Belfast last week during a visit by Irish Foreign Affairs minister Simon Coveney was futile. The type of futile security threats we saw over the last week in north Belfast and Derry or attacks on the offices of public representatives will not deter any of us. The minority trying to draw us back will not win, this society is moving forward and peace and stability will always prevail. The forthcoming Assembly election on May 5 will return in my opinion a majority of MLAs who support the (Northern Ireland) Protocol, and who respect the rule of law. Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald said the next Stormont Executive would be judged on delivery (Brian Lawless/PA) The event was also addressed by Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald who said the success of the next Stormont administration would be based on delivery. She said: People have got a glimpse in recent months of what is possible from an Assembly and an Executive that gets a chance to deliver. The first thing that Michelle ONeill did when the DUP walked away from the Executive was to convene a meeting of party leaders to get work done. And it worked the Assembly has passed legislation after legislation on climate, on housing, on womens rights and supports for people dealing with the cost-of-living crisis. And this has been matched by initiative after initiative from ministers at Executive level, despite the actions of a Tory government constantly undermining the Good Friday Agreement and trying to slow down the change that is coming. For me the last few months are a small window into what is possible when parties with a vision for a better future are liberated to work together. Imagine a full term of that sort of leadership and that sort of delivery. A 38 million superyacht has been detained in London as part of sanctions against Russia, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has announced. UK officials boarded Phi owned by a Russian businessman in Canary Wharf, east London, on Tuesday. The vessel is the first to be detained in the UK under sanctions imposed because of the war in Ukraine. Phi named after the mathematical concept made her maiden voyage last year after being built in the Netherlands. She is bright blue and features what is described as an infinite wine cellar and a freshwater swimming pool. At 58.5 metres long, she is twice as long as the other boats docked around her in Canary Wharf. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said the yacht would not be moving (James Manning/PA) Mr Shapps told the PA news agency the ship was in London for a refit but wont be going anywhere. He said: Its just another indication that we will not stand by whilst Putins cronies are allowed to sail around the world in these kinds of yachts and people in Ukraine are suffering. When you see what hes doing to Ukraine, when you see what hes doing to peoples lives, it cant be right to have a yacht like this here in London, able to just sail away, and that is why weve impounded it and denied its ability to go anywhere right now. The superyacht is the first to be detained in the UK under sanctions imposed because of the war in Ukraine (James Manning/PA) The vessels horn was sounded twice while the Cabinet minister was being interviewed. Someone thought to be a member of crew stuck a paper sign reading P&O JUSTICE FOR THE 800 to the side of the boat. This comes after P&O Ferries sacked nearly 800 seafarers without notice. The Department for Transport (DfT) said it worked with the National Crime Agency and the Border Force Maritime Investigation Bureau to identify and detain Phi. The superyacht contains a swimming pool (James Manning/PA) It refused to reveal the name of her owner, stating that he is a Russian businessman. The department described Phis ownership as deliberately well hidden. She is registered to a company based in the Caribbean dual-island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, and carries a Maltese flag. The DfT said it is looking at a number of other vessels and hopes its strong stance sends an example to international partners. A newly married couple are finally going home to London after living in hotels for a month while the Ukrainian bride waited for a visa. Ronan Ferguson, 38, married Iryna, 32, at the start of the year and, when he flew to London, she remained in Ukraine to change her passport and identity cards to her new name, as required by Ukrainian law. However, a day or two after her new passport was issued, the Russian invasion of Ukraine began and her visa application was halted. Mrs Ferguson, a gymnastics teacher, managed to leave the country on February 27 to Poland, where Mr Ferguson flew to meet her. Mr Ferguson was critical of the Governments visa scheme for Ukrainians (Aaron Chown/PA) Unable to bring her back to the UK, they instead flew to Ireland and have since been living in hotels in Dublin where Mr Ferguson is originally from until finally getting word on Monday that the visa situation had been resolved. Were actually looking forward to some home cooking, thats for sure, Mr Ferguson told the PA news agency. Cooking ourselves and being able to do our washing, and being able to sit down and just relax. Mr Ferguson, a chief technology officer, said he was happy that common sense prevailed after a month of attempting to navigate the visa application system. He said they had initially applied for a fast-track visa, but then had to reapply through the family scheme because fast-track applications were no longer being accepted. They submitted that application on March 15 and heard nothing for a week, Mr Ferguson said. He chased the application and was told it had been received, he said, but continued to get no more information. As late as Monday morning, Mr Ferguson said he was told incorrectly by a Home Office official that because they had not submitted biometrics, the application could not be processed. Half an hour later, they received word that the application had been approved and promptly booked a flight to London on Tuesday morning. It seems to me like nobody actually knows whats going on, Mr Ferguson said. They say so-called helplines to call, but you call them and (they say) oh, were sorry for your situation but unfortunately we cannot give any information, we dont have access, check your reference numbers and stuff like that. The couple, who met while they were both working in Asia, said they are grateful their situation has been sorted. But they are concerned that for Ukrainians who do not have access to a native English speaker, the system may prove impossible to navigate. Mr Ferguson said: Theres people still in limbo that are in Poland or still in Ukraine who have no contact with these applications centres or no contact with the Home Office because they arent being told where their application is and if they will get a decision any time soon. As I say weve had so many different answers from people who work in the Home Office, people who actually work in the centres everyone provides a different answer on what the processes are and what needs to be done. While he said their situation is nothing compared to what many are experiencing, Mr Ferguson believes he has spent around 4,000 in the last month on travel, hotels and food. He said the situation has changed how he feels about living in the UK. The people there that Ive met on the ground, theyre very nice, but the Government are not welcoming at all, from what Ive seen, he said. It does change how I feel. I always thought I was into politics and knew a bit, but what Ive been through over the last month has really left something sour in my mouth. A Government spokesperson said: We are moving as quickly as possible to ensure that those fleeing Ukraine can find safety in the UK through the Ukraine Family Scheme and Homes for Ukraine. We have streamlined the process so valid passport-holders do not have to attend in-person appointments before arriving in the UK, simplified our forms and boosted caseworker numbers, while ensuring vital security checks are carried out. We continue to speed up visa processing across both schemes, with more than 22,000 issued under the Ukraine Family Scheme. Express your opinion! Fill out this form to submit a Letter to the Editor. Submit STEPANAKERT, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. No significant ceasefire violations occurred on the Artsakh line of contact on March 28 and the operative-tactical situation remained tense, the Artsakh authorities said through a statement published by the official InfoCenter of Artsakh. The Azerbaijani troops remain in their positions in Karaglukh section adjacent to Parukh and no changes in positions took place during the day. The Artsakh Armed Forces took additional warning and suppressive measures especially in the direction of Karaglukh. Parallel with this, works continue with the Russian peacekeeping contingents command with the purpose of withdrawing the Azerbaijani side to their initial positions, the Artsakh authorities said, urging the population to remain calm. On March 24-25 the Azerbaijani troops attacked Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) military positions and invaded the Parukh village. Azeri drone strikes killed 3 Artsakh troops and wounded 15 others. YEREVAN, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. Minister of Foreign Affairs of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan will depart for Georgia on a working visit on March 29, the ministry said in a statement. During the visit the Foreign Minister will meet with Georgias Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili and Vice Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs David Zalkaliani. YEREVAN, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. The plastic bag ban failed to give the desired results, businesses and government officials concurred. Several major retailing shops told ARMENPRESS that they havent recorded any drastic decrease in the demand for plastic bags, despite charging the customers for them. However, some customers began using alternatives such as paper or cloth bags. There are even some who use plastic bags several times. However, all supermarket chains surveyed said that the number of customers preferring the alternative to plastic bags is small. The ban on plastic bags (up to 50 microns) entered force January 1 in Armenia, a move initiated by the government to reduce harming the environment. The ban does not cover the plastic food packing bags used for weighing. Eco Waste environmental organization Director Hripsime Mkrtchyan said it is too early for studies. She noted that the plastic food packing bags used for weighing are still in circulation and are used in very large quantities. Mkrtchyan says the picture is worse in the provinces, where businesses havent abandoned the plastic bags claiming they were unaware. I can confidently say that the right steps werent taken before adopting the law. No work was done with respective structures, they say theyve notified, but this isnt enough. At this moment I can say that the process is somewhat taking shape but this doesnt mean that plastic waste will be reduced. Not at all, it will grow, because people are simply again buying the thicker plastic bags which are allowed, Mkrtchyan said. The Ministry of Environment, however, says that there is a drop of industrial volumes, in additional to some small producers of plastic bags that have shut down operations. But, of course, I agree that we didnt get the result which we were expecting. There is a little lack of supervision here, but I have to note that we regularly work with the supervising bodies. If we ramp up the supervision I think the meaning of the law will be justified, the Ministry of Environment Head of the Department of Strategic Policy Lusine Avetisyan said. Asked to explain the reason of banning plastic bags thinner than 50 microns but allowing the use of 50 microns or more for which customers must pay in supermarkets, Avetisyan said the thick plastic bags are easier to be collected in waste disposal sites and then submitted for reprocessing. Avetisyan said they will conduct inspections and surveys after the first quarter of 2022. Gayane Gaboyan STEPANAKERT, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. No significant ceasefire violations were recorded and the operative-tactical situation remained tense, with a certain positive trend of de-escalation at the entire frontline of Artsakh overnight March 28-29 and as of 10:00, the Artsakh authorities said. The Azerbaijani troops are still deployed in their same post in the area of Karaglukh adjacent to Parukh, the Artsakh official InfoCenter said. The Armed Forces of Artsakh continue reinforcing defensive positions and taking additional measures for suppressing the Azerbaijani troops. Continuous works are done with the Russian peacekeeping contingents command aimed at preventing possible Azerbaijani provocations and withdrawing the Azerbaijani troops to their initial positions. The Artsakh authorities are monitoring the situation and the Azerbaijani actions with all possible mechanisms and will issue updates on the developments upon necessity. YEREVAN, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. President of the Republic of Artsakh Arayik Harutyunyan convened a working consultation today dedicated to the latest developments in the line of contact, his Office said. The meeting was attended by heads of the power structures. Minister of Defense Kamo Vardanyan reported on the operational-combat situation. The President of the Republic once again said that ensuring stability is on the agenda of the Artsakh authorities. He said all efforts are being made, both through the Artsakh Armed Forces, the Russian peacekeeping contingent and the possible diplomatic mechanisms, to ensure peace and return Azerbaijani troops back to their initial positions from the eastern section of the line of contact. During the meeting the President gave a number of instructions on the organization of the countrys defense and the cooperation between the power structures. YEREVAN, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. Politicization of humanitarian issues is inadmissible and immoral, and any attempt of the kind is a challenge to the entire civilized world, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Artsakh said in a statement released today on the occasion of the resumption of gas supply in the Republic. The statement says: On March 28, the gas supply to the Republic of Artsakh was resumed through the only gas pipeline entering Artsakh from the Republic of Armenia. This month, Azerbaijan has twice disrupted the supply of natural gas to Artsakh for a lengthy period, causing a humanitarian crisis. The humanitarian terrorism carried out by Azerbaijan has been strongly condemned by the international community, numerous calls have been made for the restoration of gas supply, and adequate political and diplomatic steps have been taken. The role of the Russian peacekeeping mission in the matter is also great. We are grateful to all the countries and international organizations, political and public figures who, adhering to the principles of international humanitarian law and moral norms, gave an adequate assessment to Azerbaijan's actions and took relevant steps to eliminate this humanitarian catastrophe. Politicization of humanitarian issues is inadmissible and immoral, and any attempt of the kind is a challenge to the entire civilized world. STEPANAKERT, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. The factions of the Parliament of Artsakh Free Motherland-UCA, United Motherland, Justice, Armenian Revolutionary Federation and Democratic Party of Artsakh, issued a joint statement today relating to the current Azerbaijani policy of pressures against the population of Artsakh. On March28, the gas supply, which has been artificially disrupted by Azerbaijan for days, was restored in the Republic of Artsakh. Gas supply is just a humanitarian issue, but Azerbaijan used it as a mean to exert psychological pressures on and terrorize the people of Artsakh. By once again demonstrating high civil responsibility, the Armenians of Artsakh managed to overcome the existing situation. That policy of repression has been strongly criticized by Armenia, the Russian peacekeeping forces and the international community, particularly by Russia, US, France, as well as other countries and international organizations. All factions of the National Assembly of the Republic of Artsakh express gratitude to the international structures and our friends for showing a principled stance. At the same time, by highly valuing the consistent steps being taken by the Russian peacekeeping forces deployed in the Republic of Artsakh, we expect the return of Azerbaijani armed forces to their initial positions, the statement reads. YEREVAN, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. Speaker of Parliament of Armenia Alen Simonyan takes part in the events dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly in the city of Almaty of Kazakhstan, the Parliaments press service. At the meeting the Speaker of Parliament drew the attendees attention to the current situation of the Nagorno Karabakh, particularly referring to the invasion of the Azerbaijani armed forces on March 24 to Parukh village of the Askeran region being in the responsibility zone of the Russian peacekeeping forces, by that grossly violating the 9 November 2020 trilateral statement. Alen Simonyan has informed his counterparts that the post-war humanitarian and other issues has not been resolved yet, stressing the issue of Armenian prisoners of war and hostages, the number of which, according to the data confirmed by Azerbaijan, is 38. In response to Alen Simonyans speech, the Speaker of the Parliament (Milli Majlis) of Azerbaijan Sahiba Gafarova has noted that Azerbaijan is faithful to the 9 November 2020 trilateral statement and has not violated those provisions. Gafarova has noted that Azerbaijan has handed to Armenia all prisoners of war, according to trilateral statement. In response to those statements, the Armenian Parliament Speaker reminded the Speaker of the Milli Majlis: Not only the Republic of Armenia, but also the Russian Federation, which is the warrant of peace of the given territory, has announced about the armed infiltrations and violations by the Azerbaijani side. I would like to repeat that Armenia proposes to immediately begin negotiations over signing of the peace treaty. In response to Alen Simonyans speech, the Head of the Milli Majlis of Azerbaijan stated that Baku offered Yerevan many times to sign a peace treaty, taking into account the five points, which Armenia rejected. In response to the claim of the Head of the Milli Majlis of Azerbaijan that Baku offered and Armenia refused, Alen Simonyan noted: I officially declare that these five points are acceptable for Armenia, and we think that if we add some aspects, we can start the implementation of that work, Simonyan concluded the dispute. The speech of Armenian Speaker of Parliament Alen Simonyan was followed by a standing ovation of the Speakers and the delegates of the Parliaments of the CIS countries, which interrupted Gafarovas speech. The disputes did not continue anymore. YEREVAN, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. President Vahagn Khachaturyan received today Ambassador of the Netherlands to Armenia Nico Schermers, the Presidential Office said. The Ambassador congratulated the President of Armenia on election, wishing a productive work. In his remarks President Khachaturyan highlighted the further expansion of the Armenian-Dutch friendly relations and bilateral cooperation. The sides exchanged ideas about deepening the cooperation and implementing joint projects in different areas, including economy, education, science and new technologies. The death toll due to the viral disease has gone up to 5,21,070 with 35 more fatalities A healthcare worker administers a dose of Covid-19 preventive vaccine to a student at a school, in Jammu. (PTI Photo) New Delhi: With 1,259 fresh cases, India's COVID-19 tally climbed to 4,30,21,982 on Tuesday, while the number of active cases of the infection further declined to 15,378, according to the Union health ministry. The death toll due to the viral disease has gone up to 5,21,070 with 35 more fatalities, the ministry's data updated at 8 am stated. The active cases account for 0.04 per cent of the total caseload, while the national COVID-19 recovery rate remained at 98.75 per cent, the ministry said, adding that a reduction of 481 cases was recorded in the active caseload in a span of 24 hours. The daily positivity rate was recorded at 0.22 per cent and the weekly positivity rate was recorded at 0.25 per cent, according to the health ministry. A total of 5,77,559 tests were conducted to detect the infection in the last 24 hours. India has so far conducted over 78.79 crore COVID-19 tests. The number of people who have recuperated from the disease has gone up to 4,24,85,534, while the case fatality rate was recorded at 1.21 per cent. The number of Covid vaccine doses administered in the country so far has exceeded 183.53 crore. India's COVID-19 tally had crossed the 20-lakh mark on August 7, 2020, 30 lakh on August 23, 2020, 40 lakh on September 5, 2020 and 50 lakh on September 16, 2020. It went past 60 lakh on September 28, 2020, 70 lakh on October 11, 2020, 80 lakh on October 29, 2020, 90 lakh on November 20, 2020 and the one-crore mark on December 19, 2020. The country crossed the grim milestone of two crore Covid cases on May 4, 2021 and the three-crore mark on June 23, 2021. Of the 35 new fatalities, 25 were reported from Kerala. A total of 5,21,070 Covid deaths have so far been reported in the country, including 1,47,780 from Maharashtra, 67,822 from Kerala, 40,051 from Karnataka, 38,025 from Tamil Nadu, 26,151 from Delhi, 23,494 from Uttar Pradesh and 21,197 from West Bengal. The health ministry stressed that more than 70 per cent of the deaths occurred due to comorbidities. "Our figures are being reconciled with the Indian Council of Medical Research," the ministry said on its website, adding that a state-wise distribution of the figures is subject to further verification and reconciliation. We should consider that India is not a dictatorship and should be using its natural strength as a democracy Most experts, including retired generals who write, are of the opinion that Indian land has been intruded on and China is refusing to vacate, and that is the problem. (Representational Image/ AFP) The strength of democracies is transparency. When people know of the difficulties that a nation faces, they can fight it together. They become closer, knowing that they face a threat jointly. This spirit, while possible, is not easy to achieve in nations that do not have democracy because all authoritarian leaderships are secretive. An example of what is meant is visible today in the war that is being fought in Europe. Ukraine has come together and the world sees its spirit in the face of adversity. There is of course a dispute over the manner in which Ukraine arrived at its present democracy, and that is part of the reason why Russia has invaded it. But there is no dispute about how the two nations today differ in terms of transparency. Ukrainians know what they face and have come together to face it. This month Russia blocked access to Facebook for its citizens because Vladimir Putin doesnt want his people to know what is really going on. He has also introduced a law that punishes media outlets and their employees with 15 years in jail for truthful reporting on the military. This will produce anxiety and alarm in many Russians and will be damaging in the long term for the nation. Sunlight is the best disinfectant is a saying and it alludes to transparency in organisations and in the government. On March 25, Chinas foreign minister came to India. The government said it was an unannounced visit though the media was well aware that Wang Yi was coming. He met our foreign minister and national security adviser, so the subject of his visit was not a secret: it is the situation in Ladakh. Mr Wang also asked to meet the Prime Minister but this was not allowed, with the excuse that Mr Modi was away in Uttar Pradesh for Yogi Adityanaths swearing-in. This is the second clue we have and it indicates to us that India is displeased with the situation. What is the situation? This is the problem. Indians have been told by the PM himself that there is no problem and that nobody is on our territory. The defence minister has said nobody is stopping Indias soldiers from patrolling in the spaces that they have been historically patrolling. If this is the case, then what is there to discuss with the Chinese? This is what the government is not telling us. What is called the Godi media reported it was the Chinese side that wanted the disengagement and this was because the present situation was not in the mutual interest. Disengagement from what? If they are on their side, then there is no real problem. On March 11, generals from the Indian Army and the Chinese Army met for the 15th round of talks since the clash of 2020. What do they talk about if there is no intrusion? Our government has not said. The Indian Express reported the following day that both sides have a platoon-sized strength of soldiers in Hot Springs, but the Chinese troops are on the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control. The government did not deny this report and did not comment on it. Most experts, including retired generals who write, are of the opinion that Indian land has been intruded on and China is refusing to vacate, and that is the problem. Some have written that this may escalate and it will be the Chinese who will escalate it. There has also been news of their encroachment into fresh areas in Arunachal Pradesh (which the Chinese claim because the sixth Dalai Lama of Tibet was born in Tawang in 1683). China is a dictatorship like Russia, and doesnt like transparency. India is a democracy but weve chosen to not be transparent on this issue (among others), for whatever reason. I dont want to speculate about why, though it is quite clear to me what the reason is. We should consider that India is not a dictatorship and should be using its natural strength as a democracy. For some reason we are not, and in fact we appear to be misleading ourselves. And we are giving space to China. The foreign policy experts in Beijing will have noticed the confusion produced by the Indian government. It is unlikely that they will not have assessed how it can be used to their advantage. What is it China seeks and why has the Ladakh border become and remained hot for two years and what is going on in Arunachal Pradesh? What does this all have to do with the road that China has built in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, which connects western China to Balochistan? China controls a port in Sri Lanka and the Bangladeshi newspapers are full of positive reports about joining Chinas Belt and Road plan. Nepal is also a part of this plan. In South Asia, India and Bhutan alone have refused to join. What does this mean for the long-term future of India and what are the threats and challenges that we may face in the future? Democracies can negotiate their ways through difficult problems because they have transparency and the strength of the entire polity, the people and the Opposition and civil society can come behind the government. For this to happen, however, there must be honesty and transparency. It is clear that here, on this issue with China that continues, unfortunately that has not been the case. Raising objections, Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhary said the law would be 'draconian' and infringes upon the right to privacy New Delhi: The Centre on Monday brought the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill in the Lok Sabha amid strong protests by the Opposition parties. The Congress termed this bill as draconian and illegal, as minister of state for home Ajay Mishra Teni said the proposed law will not only help the investigation agencies but also increase prosecutions. Raising objections, Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhary said the law would be draconian and infringes upon the right to privacy. Another Congress MP, Manish Tewari, termed the proposed bill as illegal and said it violated Article 20(3) of the Constitution, which says: No person accused of an offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself. Defending the bill, the government said it would enable the law agencies and prison officers to collect, store and analyse physical and biological samples, iris and retina scans and the signatures and handwriting of all arrested or convicted prisoners. The bill also seeks to be made applicable to persons detained under any preventive detention law. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) will be the repository of all physical and biological samples and the data can be preserved for at least 75 years. This Bill will repeal the Identification of Prisoners Act 1920, whose scope was limited to allowing taking of fingerprints and footprint impressions of a limited category of convicted and non-convicted persons and photos, and only on the orders of a magistrate. The Lok Sabha on Monday also passed the Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order (Amendment) Bill 2022. The Opposition, meanwhile, demanded the rollback of fuel and cooking gas price hikes and sought a statement from Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Lok Sabha on the issue. The Opposition MPs also dismissed the governments contention that the rise in prices was due to the Russia-Ukraine war. The discussion on rising fuel prices and the Russia-Ukraine war is expected to be held next week after the Centre agrees to the same, several MPs said on Monday. The discussion on both topics will be held under the Lok Sabhas Rule 193, which does not entail voting, the MPs present at the meeting said. While the Ukraine crisis may be discussed later this week, the question of rising prices will come up next week, an MP said, adding that the exact date and timings had not yet been decided. Congress Lok Sabha leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said he proposed to discuss the twin matters at the business advisory committee meeting, and the government agreed to this. The Opposition parties in the Lower House have been protesting against the rising prices of essential goods, especially fuel prices, and urging the Centre to discuss the issues. Clash erupts between TMC and BJP MLAs on the floor of the House over Birbhum violence Kolkata: West Bengals Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari and four other BJP MLAs were suspended by Assembly Speaker Biman Banerjee on Monday after they allegedly exchanged blows with Trinamul Congress MLAs over the Birbhum massacre during an in-House fight that left at least one each from both sides injured. The four suspended BJP MLAs, other than Mr Adhikari, are chief whip Manoj Tigga of Madarihat, Shankar Ghosh of Siliguri, Dipak Barman of Falakata and Narahori Mahato of Purulia. During the clash, Chinsurah TMC MLA Asit Majumdar accused Mr Adhikari of punching his nose and leaving it bathed in blood. He was taken in an ambulance from the Assembly to SSKM Hospital and was admitted to the Woodburn Ward. Later Mr Tigga, Mr Mahato and three other BJP MLAs -- Lakshman Gharai, Chandana Bauri and Shikha Chatterjee got themselves admitted to Apollo Gleneagles Hospital in the city. Mr Adhikari said: Mr Tigga suffered a rib fracture while others need rest because they fell ill. Mr Tigga will be flown to AIIMS in New Delhi on Tuesday morning for better treatment as Apollo wanted to discharge him after chief minister Mamata Banerjee sent cops from Bidhannagar City Police to the hospital. The unprecedented incident unfolded in the morning of the last day of the Assemblys Budget Session when the BJP MLAs held the TMC responsible for the carnage at Rampurhat, questioned the absence of a statement by the chief minister, who is in Darjeeling, and sought a discussion in the House. The Speaker, however, said they did not give any notice for a discussion on the topic before rejecting their demand and cautioned them against disrupting the proceedings of the House. Erupting in protest, the angry BJP MLAs then went to the Well of the House and approached the Speaker. The TMC MLAs also confronted the BJP MLAs, leading to a war of words and then a clash between the two sides. The Assembly marshals and the security staff, including women personnel, attempted to tackle the two warring sides but became targets. Later, state urban development minister Firhad Hakim and Chandrima Bhattacharya proposed the five BJP MLAs suspension, which the Speaker accepted, and also announced that steps would be taken after looking into the extent of damage of Assembly properties during the clash. Outraged, the BJP MLAs staged a walkout from the House. Condemning them over the fight, state parliamentary affairs minister Partha Chatterjee said: It was a pre-planned and shameful attack on our MLAs and the security staff, including women, by the BJP which earlier hinted at creating such a bedlam on the last day of the session. Mr Adhikari, however, claimed: The Assembly security staff included cops of the Kolkata Police, who beat our MLAs, including women. They were ganged up by 8-10 TMC MLAs. The CM later enquired about the fight from Mr Hakim over the phone but told the media in the hills: I do not know anything about it. You can ask the Speaker because it is his prerogative. In the evening, West Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankhar tweeted: Opposition delegation led by Leader of Opposition @SuvenduWB and suspended MLAs called on Guv today and expressed grave concern at happenings in the WB Assembly today. Denial of discussion of barbarity #Rampurhat violence is undemocratic. Exception was taken to CM stance to take to streets in barbarity #Rampurhat against CBI. Guv Dhankhar assured the delegation that none can be & is above law and in democracy there can be no law of the Ruler. He assured delegation that matter is already engaging his attention. Affected sites include churches and Buddhist monasteries. The military has failed to prevail in Chin and Kayah states due to popular resistance. Civilian targets have recently been hit in Kayin, where at least 150,000 civilians have become internally displaced. Yangon (AsiaNews/Agencies) About a hundred religious buildings have been destroyed by Myanmars military in areas where anti-coup resistance is strong, especially in the north-west and south-east of the country. Since December, the military have intensified attacks on the predominantly Christian Chin and Kayah states and in the predominantly Buddhist regions of Sagaing and Magwe. Between February 2021 and January 2022, some 35 churches and 15 affiliated buildings have been destroyed in Chin state, this according to the Chin Human Rights Organisation. During the same period, at least 12 churches were razed to the ground in Kayah State, the Karenni Human Rights Group reported. Despite a pledge by the generals after their coup in February 2021 to protect places of worship, pagodas and monasteries have not been spared. Since April 2021, when ethnic militias began fighting back, at least 50 religious buildings were either destroyed or looted. Earlier this month, a monastery was shelled in Latpandaw, a village in Yinmabin district (Sagaing), killing at least six people who had found refuge in it. In the same area in late February, soldiers raided the monastery in the village of Chin Phone and used 80 children as human shields for at least 36 hours. When the abbot of the monastery tried to negotiate with the regime forces, they pointed a gun at the monk and wouldnt let him out of the monastery, a villager said. Now the building is being used as an interrogation centre where civilians are tortured and killed. Offering by locals, about 50 million kyat (US$ 28,100) were stolen. According to the independent news website The Irrawaddy, the attacks on religious buildings reflect the junta's frustration at not being able to prevail over the anti-coup forces, especially in Chin and Kayah states, despite the use of air strikes and heavy artillery. Recently, the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force, the main opposition organisation in Kayah State, removed several anti-personnel mines placed in rice fields by the army, to allow local farmers to return to their lands (pictured). In recent weeks, Karen state (also called Kayin), on the border with Thailand, has been the scene of intense fighting. Over the weekend, planes bombed several provinces, hitting civilian targets, including health facilities. The Karen National Liberation Army said it did not suffer losses, claiming instead to have killed at least 60 regular soldiers, but such claims are hard to verify. At least 150,000 civilians have been displaced in this region. Faced with this situation, the Fondazione PIME set a fund Fondo S145 Emergenza Myanmar to support initiatives by local churches, many of which were established by PIME missionaries before the expulsion of foreign missionaries in 1966. The goal of the campaign is to provide immediate help to thousands of people through the relief network set up by the dioceses of Taungoo and Taunggyi. Many local religious groups have responded to the emergency and in so doing are showing the most beautiful face of Myanmar, that of a people who, despite the suffering that has marked their history, choose the path of solidarity. Aid will be sent to them, starting with basic needs: shelter, food, and a school for children deprived of an education for the past two years because of the pandemic and the war. Donations can be made out to S145Emergenza Myanmar: Solomon Islands Prime Minister Sogavare is negotiating a security treaty with China, a source of concern in the Pacific region. Australia and New Zealand fear it will pave the way for a Chinese military base in the Solomon Islands. Gizo Bishop Luciano Capelli, who bemoans the lack of consultation, sees threats or external enemies that require a superpower capable of showing its strength. Gizo (AsiaNews) Recently leaked papers suggest that the Solomon Islands and China are negotiating a security arrangement, a prospect that has alarmed both Australia and New Zealand. Bishop Luciano Capelli of Gizo[*], a Salesian missionary, is among those concerned. In a reference to the countrys prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare, he said, People have not been consulted, The implications of such an agreement are unknown, and the Solomon Islands do not need war games, he told AsiaNews. The possibility that China might build a military base in the Solomon Islands, the first in the region, is especially worrisome. Speaking in in parliament, Prime Minister Sogavare called criticisms "very insulting", denying that this is part of the deal. "The Security Treaty is at the request of the Solomon Islands, and we have not been pressured ... in any way by our new friends," he told parliament. We have no intention, Mr Speaker, of pitching into any geopolitical power struggle,. "In moving towards our security needs, we need to diversify ... we are a country that has limited security capabilities and it is clear we will constantly need support. In November 2021, Honiara, the countrys capital, was shaken by riots in the citys Chinatown, a symptom of discontent against Sogavare, who broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 2019 to boost ties with China. Order was restored by an Australian-led peacekeeping force. Events in Chinatown have nothing to do with China; they were caused by people who opposed the current government, explained Bishop Capelli. The riots were stopped by an Australian intervention. "The whole question of relations with China should instead be seen in relation to how Beijing is moving throughout the Pacific and beyond, also in Africa and South America. As bishop of the Church in the Western Province, I do not see threats or external enemies that require a superpower capable of showing its strength. We only have some domestic ethnic problems or looting in the city. The Australians are doing a good job. The Solomon Islands dont need war games or superpowers trying their bombs here. People have had enough of what happened 70 years ago. [*] Capital of the Solomon Islands Western Province. by Nirmala Carvalho Yalam Sankar, 50, was a well-known figure for his stance against Hindu nationalists. The Global Council of Indian Christians calls for a thorough investigation into this murder and the safety and security of the Christian community in central India. Mumbai (AsiaNews) - The brutal killing of an evangelical pastor last week in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh raises serious doubts about his real motive. On the night of March 17 in the village of Angampalli, Yalam Sankar, 50 years old, former head of the local council, a figure known for his stance against Hindu nationalists, was attacked in his home by five strangers who dragged him into the street and beat him to death. Local Christians report that Sankar had been threatened by Hindutva groups, who told him to stop preaching his religion. Despite this, the Bijapur district police attributed the murder to a Maoist guerrilla commando. At the scene of the killing, a statement was also found in which the man was accused of being a police informer. However, the officers are not aware of any such connection. Sajan K George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians, told AsiaNews: "We condemn the brutal murder of Pastor Yalam Shankar. The fact that it is attributed to the Maoist guerrillas is strangely in contradiction with the statements made by the leaders of the RSS that these groups 'never target Christian communities because they do not denounce the illegal activities of the Naxalites'. The Global Council of Indian Christians', concludes Sajan K. George, 'calls for a thorough investigation into the death of this innocent pastor and the safety and security of Christian communities in central India'. Hong Kongs Legislative Council is set to approve two legal agreements signed in September with Russia. After the national security law was adopted, several countries suspended extradition agreements with Hong Kong. The International Bar Association slams Hong Kong police for threatening activist Benedict Rogers. Hong Kong (AsiaNews) Hong Kongs Legislative Council (LegCo) is set to give the green light to two legal agreements signed in September with Russia one for the extradition of convicts, the other for mutual legal assistance the pro-government Ming Pao newspaper reported yesterday. Increasingly though, countries with an extradition agreement with the former British colony are being urged to suspend them because of Hong Kongs repression of dissent on Beijings orders. In addition to the transfer of sentenced people, which would allow convicts to serve time in their place of origin, the agreement with Russia would allow the two parties to work on identifying potential suspects, evidence gathering and executing search requests. Hong Kong has extradition agreements with South Korea, the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Singapore, South Africa and Sri Lanka. Following the adoption of the draconian national security law in the summer of 2020, imposed by Beijing to silence pro-democracy advocates, Australia, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, the Netherlands and the United States put on hold their respective extradition agreements. France halted the ratification process of an agreement signed with Hong Kong. The Chinese government imposed strict security measures in response to protests organised by pro-democracy groups in 2019, sparked by a bill that would have allowed Chinese courts to try Hong Kong residents. The bill was eventually dropped. The security law also contains extraterritorial provisions, giving Hong Kong judicial authorities the power to issue arrest orders against people living abroad. The human rights wing of the International Bar Association (IBA) has called for a boycott of the extradition agreements with Hong Kong to prevent Hong Kong and China from demanding the arrest and extradition of dissidents and critics. The IBA made its views public after Hong Kong national security police threatened to prosecute human rights defender Benedict Rogers, CEO of the Hong Kong Watch website. in a letter to Rogers, police ordered him to immediately cease engaging in any acts and activities in contravention of the national security law or any other laws of Hong Kong. by Vladimir Rozanskij Civil servants obliged by the Caucasian republic's authorities to attend religious ceremonies for local soldiers engaged in Ukraine. Chechen Imam in Nice: Islam forbids wars of invasion. The subject of the fallen, and their funeral, is forbidden in Chechnya, as in the rest of Russia. Moscow (AsiaNews) - In the central mosque of Grozny "Heart of Chechnya" special prayer meetings are being held "for the preservation of life and health" of the special forces deployed in Ukraine. Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has deployed them in support of the Russian 'special military operation'. Some of the participants confessed to Kavkaz.Realii that attendance had been imposed as compulsory, gathering in the place of worship many public administration workers under threat of dismissal. The 'Tahajjud Namaz' is a voluntary night prayer, which is not part of the five obligatory daily Islamic prayers, and is believed to be more precious to Allah because of this. It is usually recited at home, and there are no large gatherings in the mosque like those in Grozny. The crowd of worshippers was summoned at 1:30 a.m. with social messages, specifying that special transport was provided and no excuses were allowed: "Those who cannot come for various reasons, write a letter of resignation and then stay at home". In the end, there were too many people gathered, and not all of them were able to enter the mosque, joining the prayer from the street. One woman recounted that "the men prayed inside, while we women were forced to do the entire Tahajjud in the courtyard, in three degrees below zero". The prayer was also broadcast on the local Instagram channel, in which members of Kadyrov's family can be seen praying on the second floor of the mosque. The religious administration of Chechen Muslims has announced that night prayers will be held regularly in all mosques in the republic, "if Allah permits". Kadyrov himself issued a message in the Chechen language in which he recalled that participation in the war in Ukraine 'is an obligation for all Muslims, since the adversary offends the Most High, religion and the prophet', while death in this conflict 'will be as sacred as that of the martyrs of the prophet Mohammed'. The president also added that "the news of the great prayer of the people has greatly inspired our fighters, they themselves said that thanks to it they remained alive, without wounds and under the protection of Allah". However, the Chechen imam of the French city of Nice, Ramzan Magomadov, pointed out that Islam forbids wars of invasion of other territories, "and here we are dealing with a war of occupation by Russia, it has nothing to do with Allah". Chechens living in Ukraine, on the other hand, are standing 'together with the infidels to defend their homeland from foreign aggression', while Chechens in the Caucasus and other countries should simply remain outside this conflict. 'A Muslim living in Russia should prefer prison, rather than participating in an invasion and facing certain death. An Islamic preacher from the Kurcaloev province in Chechnya, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Kavkaz.Realii that 'the main characteristic of a Muslim's prayer must be sincerity, so the obligation to be present in the mosque makes the prayer completely ineffective and will not be heard by Allah'. It would not even apply to asking for positive gifts such as family unity or success at work, "let alone asking for aid for the military in this way". Especially since the invocation of the Tahajjud, the 'Douaa', is not said aloud like regular prayers, 'and no one can check who you are actually praying for', the preacher explains. Journalists have tried to ask for the reactions of the relatives of the many Chechen soldiers killed, but no one has had the courage to respond, since the subject of the dead, and their funeral, is absolutely forbidden by the local authorities, who have so far officially recognised only 199 soldiers who died in the fighting in Ukraine. by Paul Nguyen Hung Thai Ha parish held a service led by Redemptorist Superior Fr Giuse Trinh Ngoc Hien. Some diplomats were also present. Funds were collected for the victims of the conflict. Hanoi (AsiaNews) Thai Ha parish celebrated a Mass of prayer for Ukraine following the appeals by Pope Francis, Archbishop Giuse (Joseph) Va Van Thien of Hanoi, and Fr Michael Brehl, head of the Redemptorist Order. Redemptorists Superior Fr Giuse Trinh Ngoc Hien led the service, which saw the participation of some foreign diplomats, including Nataliya Zhynkina, charge daffaires at the Embassy of Ukraine in Hanoi, and Italys Ambassador to Vietnam Antonio Alessandro. During the Mass, parishioners collected funds for Ukrainian children war victims. After two days of prayer on Saturday and Sunday, Fr Giuse Trinh Ngoc Hien handed the money to the Ukrainian ambassador. "People are suffering due to Russias invasion, Fr Toan said during the homily. These are children, women, men, elderly and innocent people attacked by missiles. "Let us listen to Pope Franciss appeal, he noted. We cannot ignore the suffering, injustice, intimidation and destruction of innocent people right in their homeland in Ukraine. We must say no to war and support peace. Some Thai Ha parishioners spoke to AsiaNews after the service. Everyone prayed to the Mother of Perpetual Help, holding a candle and singing the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi, they said. We also read the scriptures and the prayer of the Holy Father consecrating Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, they added. Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadrs new coalition does not have the numbers to pick president and prime minister, but new possibilities are opening up. Iran is trying to undermine the coalition. For Saad Salloum, this process could lead the country away from sectarianism and to a country based on the concepts of community, citizenship, and national identity. Baghdad (AsiaNews) The Sadrist movement is trying to form a bloc in parliament to overcome traditional sectarian divisions. The goal is to unite Shias, Sunnis and Kurds so as to create a majority, form a government and elect the countrys next president. Led by Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, the Movement won the largest number of seats (75) in last years elections. Last Friday, it created a coalition called Lets save the fatherland (Enqadh Watan). Although its path forward is still long and troubled, it could be a turning point for Iraq; ending months of stalemate would contribute to building a country based on peace and fraternity for all its citizens. Compared to the past, when the Sadrist movement sought the support of other Shia factions, backed by Iran, this time it is seeking an alliance with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (31 seats) and the Sunni Coalition of Sovereignty (62 seats). At present, no one has the votes to elect the head of state, which requires a two-thirds majority. However, the six-months stalemate is complicating the future since it is preventing the formation of a fully operational government to deal with countrys current challenges: international crises, the economy, corruption, and post-war reconstruction. For Saad Salloum, a journalist and associate professor at the College of Political Sciences of al-Mustansiriyya University in Baghdad, one of the oldest in the world, this is a positive sign that could herald a change from sectarianism to the concept of community. Speaking to AsiaNews, the Iraqi academic explains that it is very important to change the political system set up in 2003, following the US invasion, which was based on groups Shias, Sunnis, Yazidis, etc. at the exclusion of the concept of community. This has led to parties that represent their respective groups, pursuing only their claims and demands, preventing the emergence of a true national identity and leaving no room for the concept of citizenship. This is why every move aimed at rejecting this system and philosophy is positive. We must imagine a political majority and not groups; every sign that goes in this direction of reform must be seen in a positive way. The main rival of the Sadrist Movement and its coalition is the Shia-dominated, pro-Iran Coordination Framework (64 seats), which still hopes to play a role in forming the new government. Historically, Shias have had the largest number of seats and usually formed the government. This time however the divisions between Sadrists and pro-Iranian factions are too wide to bridge and a deal does not seem to be in the cards. Because of this, the radical Moqtada al-Sadr is reaching out to Sunnis and Kurds to form a bloc capable of overcoming sectarian differences. To this end, the Sadrist-led coalition Lets save the fatherland named Riber Ahmad, Iraqi Kurdistan Interior Minister, for the presidency, and Jafar al-Sadr, Muqtadas cousin and Iraqi ambassador to the United Kingdom, for the post of prime minister. Last Saturday, coalition members called for a parliamentary vote for the head of state but the move was unsuccessful. The coalition needs a two-thirds majority (220 seats), but only 202 MPs were present for the vote. And the three parties coalition could count on a maximum of 168 seats, far from the required number. Now they are looking for votes but it is an uphill battle as Iran tries to split the Shias and create divisions within the coalition between Sunnis and Kurds. Best Green Tea Soothe Your Body & Soul With These Delicious Green Teas The AskMen editorial team thoroughly researches & reviews the best gear, services and staples for life. AskMen may get paid if you click a link in this article and buy a product or service. Green tea is well-known for its health benefits like boosting your metabolism and reducing the risk of disease. Its antioxidant properties and great taste make it a drink of choice for many. You can brew your own green tea with tea bags or loose tea leaves and drink it hot or cold. You can also buy pre-made green tea if you dont want to deal with brewing it, and there are refreshing bottled options to enjoy. The green teas below stand out for their flavor, quality packaging, and ease of preparation. RELATED: How to Make Quality Coffee at Home Best Overall Uncle Lees Organic Green Tea Uncle Lees This green tea is organic and produced with sustainable methods. It tastes smooth and not bitter, so its great if youre looking for something less intense than Matcha. The bags are a little flimsy, though some of them easily break open. This green tea is climate pledge friendly and USDA-certified. $21.99 for 100 at Amazon.com Best Budget Option Lipton Tea Bags, Green Tea Lipton These green tea bags only include green tea leaves. Reading the instructions for preparation is important because the brewing time differs from traditional black tea. Some green tea fans may find the taste of this tea to be inauthentic compared to other options though. Best of all, theyre made with a blend of responsibly sourced green teas. $12.22 for 100 at Amazon.com Best Bottled Option Ito En Tea Oi Ocha Green Tea, Unsweetened Ito En Tea Oi Ocha This green tea has no added ingredients aside from green tea. The design of the bottle includes a haiku poem that you can enjoy reading while sipping on the beverage. Be warned, though: the flavor of unsweetened green tea can be too bitter for some people, especially if youre used to adding sugar to your tea. $13.99 at Amazon.com Best Matcha Powder The Republic of Tea Double Green Matcha Powder The Republic of Tea Made with 100% organic China green tea and organic stone-ground Japanese tencha leaves, this premium blend will make for a gourmet tea-drinking experience. Its non-GMO project verified, and the round tea bags avoid unnecessary waste like envelopes or strings. But if youre looking for a grassy, intense flavor, you may find this brew a little too mild. $15 for 50 at Amazon.com What to Consider When Buying Green Tea Choosing the best green tea depends on what you are most concerned about: flavor, ease of preparation, sustainable production methods, or freshness of ingredients. When selecting green tea, purity matters. Look at the ingredients list to make sure it is indeed 100% pure green tea without any other filler ingredients or additives. Beyond that, consider whats most important to you: Do you want to brew your own tea? Do you enjoy it hot or cold? Some green tea is prepared in advance and served in a cold bottle. Other green tea comes in packets or even powder, which offer you the opportunity to experience making the tea yourself. Frequently Asked Questions Does green tea contain caffeine? Yes, green tea does contain caffeine. If you want tea without caffeine, youll need to search for specific herbal teas without it. You Might Also Dig: AskMen may get paid if you click a link in this article and buy a product or service. To find out more, please read our complete terms of use. Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Share This: More than 73% (2,297) of U.S. counties experienced natural decrease in 2021, up from 45.5% in 2019 and 55.5% in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureaus Vintage 2021 estimates of population and components of change released March 24. Natural decrease occurs when there are more deaths than births in a population over a given time period. In 2021, fewer births, an aging population and increased mortality---intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic---contributed to a rise in natural decrease. The statistics released March 24 include population estimates and components of change for the nations 384 metropolitan statistical areas, 543 micropolitan statistical areas and 3,143 counties. In 2021, all counties in Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island experienced natural decrease. Some counties also experienced population declines attributable to migration. Counties with net international migration loss (more people moving out of than into the country), were most frequently found in California (41.4%), Oregon (27.8%) and Mississippi (23.2%). States with the highest percentages of counties with net domestic migration loss (people moving from one area to another within the U.S.) were Alaska (80%), Louisiana (71.9%) and Illinois (65.7%). Most of the nations counties---2,063 or 65.6%---experienced positive domestic migration overall from 2020 to 2021. Arizonas Maricopa County gained the most residents (46,866) from domestic migration, followed by Riverside County, CA (31,251), and Collin County, TX (30,191). Los Angeles County, CA, experienced the greatest net domestic migration loss (179,757 residents), followed by New York County, NY (113,642). The patterns weve observed in domestic migration shifted in 2021, said Dr. Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for estimates and projections in the Census Bureaus Population Division. Even though over time weve seen a higher number of counties with natural decrease and net international migration continuing to decline, in the past year, the contribution of... Despite bearing the same name, it is different than the Euro-spec Arkana beneath the skin. The latter is built around the CMF-B platform shared with the Clio and Captur, among others, whereas Russias version uses the same architecture as the Dacia Duster and Renault Kaptur Due to the current world events, the future of the Renault Arkana for the Russian market is insecure. Thats because the assembly takes place at the companys factory in Moscow, and the future of the plant is uncertain. Nonetheless, if it eventually gets the go-ahead, then it will feature new styling, as seen on the scooped prototype.For one, the headlights are all-new, and so is the grille, which appears to be slightly wider than before. The central air intake in the new bumper, and side trim, are smaller. Dont mind those bulges on the hood, doors, and rear quarter panels, because thats fake plastic cladding. The roof is still arched behind the B pillars, and the rear three-quarter panels appear to have been reshaped.The taillights are slightly bigger and do not seem to be joined together by a light strip anymore. The diamond logo still sits in the middle of the tailgate, albeit closer to the bumper, which is also new and continues to incorporate the rear license plate holder. The wheel arch surrounds are more pronounced, yet we wouldnt be surprised if they turn out to be provisional units.Normally, wed wrap it up by telling you when Russias Arkana could premiere, but thats a delicate topic, as we might never see the facelifted iteration due to the aforementioned reason. Years passed quickly, 2022 is already here, and no hybrid engine is in sight. In fact, earlier this month, we were informed the new powertrains should make it into the series no sooner than 2024, on account of the supply chain issues that have plagued the automotive industry since the start of the pandemic.Unlike back in 2019 though, now we have a solid indication the new powerplants will probably be ready by then. Honda announced this week its E85 bio-fueled 2.4-liter internal combustion engine component of its system has made its track debut at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.Mounted on a Chip Ganassi Racing chassis, the engine was for the first time put through its paces on the track by six-time IndyCar champion Scott Dixon, on a modified version of the 13-turn, 2.6-mile (4.2 km) course.Testing was not without a minor issue, as low temperatures in the morning delayed the start. Once things got going though, everything went without a hitch (short video of that below), but Honda does not go into details.This is an important step for HPD, Honda and INDYCAR as the series moves into the electrified era, and it was a successful day, said in a statement David Salters, HPD president and technical director, but there are many more steps to take before the full, hybrid power unit debuts in 2024.The arrival of the new powertrains should significantly increase power levels for the racers, from the current output of between 550 and 700 hp to above 900 hp. This is not your conventional drag race since both automobiles thrive in different territories. The Baja Bug is an outdoorsy rugged terrain ripper, while the C8 Corvette is an American street king Eric Connors Baja isnt your ordinary sand rail Bug. Its street legal, insured and still uses its 1970 body. Apart from cranking out 850 ponies, it has a conspicuous wagon hanging out at the back that carries all the juice.Powering this monster buggy is an 18-cubic inch LS3 engine built by Robert Marouzi. It has Lunati rods and a crankshaft with a 4.5 Whipple supercharger. According to Connor, the best part about the build is Its violent early, making over 881 Nm of torque at 2,500 RPMs. It uses 110 Octane fuel and runs a Mendiola 5S sequential gearbox.Its not a cheap contraption to keep, according to the owner. It can cost up to $1,000 in fuel if you decide to go glamorous on the throttle over a weekend.Last year, Mobil 1 gave Hoonigan their prized 2021 Chevrolet C8 Corvette for torture testing. It doesnt have the best rep in the series. Ron and Vin blew the motor on the first track day, and it also got schooled by a custom-built race car with a turbo-charged Suzuki Hayabusa engine. Hooonigans C8 packs a 6.2-liter V8 paired to an 8-speed dual-clutch tranny making 495 hp. On paper, the Baja Bug destroys the C8 Corvette fair and square, but if history serves us right, things can get surprising on the strip.After three intense races, one racer emerged victorious. We wont get into the details, but we will let you find out who dominated the event. kW The vehicle will arrive in the Pacific country in left-hand drive and will be converted locally to right-hand drive by RMA Automotive, at their Merrifield Business Park facility, north of Melbourne.With more than 30 years of engineering expertise and in excess of 100,000 modified Ford vehicles delivered around the world so far, the company has received the Blue Ovals seal of approval to officially work on the Aussie-spec F-150, which will meet all applicable rules and safety regulations.Weve listened hard to fans and dealers, and found a way to bring F-150 to Australia, said the Ford Australia and New Zealand President and CEO, Andrew Birkic. As the pinnacle of Built Ford Tough, it will give our customers even more choice when theyre in the market for a pickup. We just cant wait to unleash it.Offered in the Crew Cab body style, in the XLT and Lariat trim levels, the 2023 Ford F-150 destined for Australia will be powered by the 3.5-liter EcoBoost V6. The engine produces 298(405 ps / 399 hp) and 678 Nm (500 lb-ft) of torque, working in concert with a ten-speed automatic transmission. In this configuration, the workhorse has a 4.5-ton (9,920-pound) towing capability when equipped with the Tow Pack.Drivers will enjoy the usual gear normally found in the F-150, from the SYNC4 infotainment system and rearview camera, to the automatic high beams, reverse sensing system, reverse brake assist, lane keep assist, blind spot information, automatic emergency braking, and post-collision braking, to name but some. Full details surrounding the 2023 F-150 set to launch in Australia, including pricing , will be announced in due course. Elly Reisman is one of those billionaires who know a thing or two about boating , having inherited this passion from his father. As one of the wealthiest people in Canada, the real estate developer owned several boats, all built by Italian shipyards, and each one bigger and bolder than the previous.On board a yacht you are surrounded by luxury in the middle of nature, he told Boat International , and the 157-foot (47 meters) Entourage perfectly reflects that. It was the first boat project for interior designer Dragana Maznic, who made the yacht feel as sophisticated and as welcoming as a penthouse.The clean, modern look is highlighted by gloss wood, stainless steel, and white leather. Its also very luminous, thanks to the full-height panoramic windows that were an innovation at the time Entourage was built in 2014.In addition to five elegant staterooms, the Admiral yacht features a sauna and a gym on the main deck and several areas for al-fresco dining. Sliding doors make the main salon feel even more spacious, and guests can enjoy a generous jacuzzi and a well-equipped bar. The vessel is not a monster in terms of performance, boasting a top speed of only 15 knots (17 mph/27.7 kph), but it was designed for ultimate comfort during family vacations.Reisman recently sold this pleasure craft that he envisioned himself because he is ready, in his own words, for this boat on steroids, which translates to another upgrade. Still, Entourage remains one of the most coveted luxury charter yachts, which can be enjoyed for $220,000 per week, according to Imperial Yachts . For those with high expectations and refined taste, it would be a great choice. SUV Manhart enthusiasts know very well that among a flurry of Bavarian upgrades there is always time for a little British twist. Frankly, calling it small is a big understatement, since we are talking about Land Rovers massive SUVs here. More precisely, about the L460 fifth-generation 2022 Land Rover Range Rover that is not even on sale just yet.However, once British Royal family members have their event calendar filled with Range Rover apparitions , the UK company will probably release the new iteration into the wild and allow the aftermarket frenzy to commence. Manhart Performance, on its behalf, has the speed of execution on its side, considering they have already revealed what they have in store for the luxuryMost likely, the menacing black-and-gold Range Rover we see in the gallery is still of the CGI variety . But we can rest assured that Manhart has the utmost interest to get it done as fast as the showrooms get their first delivery units, most likely because this performance build is intended for the affluent customers from Arab countries. Nope, sorry murdered-out American fans, this one is not for your next stand-out in any crowd event...Anyway, not much has perspired about the Manhart Vogue RV 650 package so far. We do know the German tuner will use the signature black look combined with gold-style decals and matching forged aftermarket wheels for the exterior. The same theme was adopted by the interior where the thoroughly reupholstered cabin mixes leather and/or Alcantara materials in black and gold.The package, which is already available for order, can also include a raft of individually chosen accents, while the performance factor is adamantly obvious from the new name. So, the numerals signify Range Rovers new power level, and there is also a suspension upgrade to make sure the stable of ponies remains firmly connected to the tarmac. An exhaust tune is also possible but no pricing details for any of the enhancements have been advanced, so far. Following in the footsteps of Russias leaders, Roscosmos decided its time to burn the bridges that until now made it one of the pillars of the global space exploration efforts. That led to the cancellation of some planned missions, and the postponement of others.The European Space Agency (ESA) is the hardest hit, having lost access to the Proton rocket that should have put its ExoMars mission on a path to Mars.ExoMars is the name of the continents first mission meant to deliver a rover on the surface of the neighboring planet. The rover, called Rosalind Franklin , was meant to search for signs of life.This week, ESA said the robot is technically ready for its mission. The drill is ready to reach 2 meters (6.5 feet) down, the deepest any rover has ever gone, and the onboard laboratory is ready to analyze what it finds.The problem is, no rocket is available to launch it. Whats worse, its unlikely one will be found before the launch window closes, despite the agencys fast-track study meant to find options for delivery.Faced with the certainty the launch will come no sooner than 2023, ESA will place the ExoMars elements in storage at the Thales Alenia Space site in Italy.I hope that our Member States will decide that this is not the end of ExoMars, but rather a rebirth of the mission, perhaps serving as a trigger to develop more European autonomy, said in a statement David Parker, Director of Human and Robotic Exploration at ESA SUV MPV ICE Claiming it was just for fun, the pixel master morphed the seventh-generation Honda City into a BMW 1 Series lookalike with a little help from the bumpers, skirts, and a spoiler sourced from BMWs extensive catalog of 1 Series M Performance Parts. And if you want a smile, we also have that behind-the-scenes making-of video embedded second below.But the CGI expert also knows how to be serious and nail the unofficial looks of the next model in an automakers pipeline. No, we are not talking about the hypothetical Maserati Biturbo EV return thanks to Grecale influence. That one is entirely wishful thinking. Instead, we are referring to an upcoming Fiat apparition, the second-generation 500X retro-styled subcompact crossoverA model that is way more fitting for the reinvented 500 legacy than its (fugly) 500L mini-sibling, Fiats 500X has been around since 2014 (2016MY in the United States) and could certainly use a little refresh based on the most recent sales performance. However, the CGI expert skipped a beat and decided it was about time for a second-generation unofficial transformation.The logic behind the morphing is pretty sound: since Fiat has gone full EV for the New 500, I think they might do the same with the 500X crossover. Naturally, under the guidance of parent Stellantis, this would not represent a major issue as the group already has an extensive lot of e-CMP-based models, such as the Citroen e-C4, DS 3 Crossback E-Tense, Opel Mokka-e, and Peugeot e-2008 And that was to name but the little crossover SUVs, which is more than enough because the author chose the latter (or rather its 2008 GT Linecounterpart) as the starting point for the second-generation Fiat 500X virtual transformation . As for the result, that one was rather unsurprising... In 2017, Flytrex was proudly letting everyone know that it launched the worlds first fully autonomous urban drone delivery system. It happened in Reykjavik, Icelands capital. Since then, the company has continued to grow its list of partnerships and expand its business, marking milestone after milestone.One of the most recent ones was the green light received from the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), allowing it to bring its delivery service to 10,000 homes in several cities across North Carolina. Flytrex claims its already completed thousands of drone deliveries, more than any other company in the U.S., and it doesnt plan to stop here.Now the autonomous drone delivery service is coming to Texas via a partnership with national restaurant chain Brinker International (which owns Chilis Grill and Bar, Maggianos Little Italy, and virtual brands Its Just Wings and Maggianos Italian Classics) and drone services company Causey Aviation Unmanned.As specified by Flytrex, the new service will be based in Granbury, just outside of Dallas-Fort Worth, and will offer food and groceries deliveries to Texas customers in a timely and affordable manner. Flytrex guarantees to have your food delivered to your front or backyard within five minutes from placing the order via the mobile app, with its drones flying at a speed of 32 mph (51 kph). What that means for you is that you can rest assured your ice cream wont melt and your coffee wont get cold by the time they reach your door.The newly granted FAA waiver allows a delivery radius of one nautical mile, which means thousands of homes can benefit from Flytrex s drone delivery service. But the company plans to go beyond the Lone Star State and North Carolina , with Flytrex CEO, Yariv Bash, stating that he plans to expand the service nationwide. At the end of March, it was time for an entire squadron to get a serious upgrade: Marine Attack Squadron 214 (VMA-214), part of the Marine Aircraft Group 13, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing.Ever since 1989, this crew has been taking to the air in AV-8B Harriers , the single-engine ground-attack aircraft introduced by what was earlier that decade McDonnell Douglas. That makes this machine not exactly as old as other planes now deployed by the military, but the lack of serious upgrades over the years makes it quite outdated.The U.S. will not invest any more money in the Harriers (and other planes as well), as it seeks to streamline the fleet of flying weapons platforms. Among the planes to make it in the new era is the F-35 Lightning II , one of the few fifth-generation aircraft now in operation.One of the latest units to join the F-35 Lightning II bandwagon is the said VMA-214, nicknamed Black Sheep, which last week was re-christened VMFA-214 (Marine Fighter Squadron 214), as it officially dropped the Harriers in favor of the F-35B variant of the fifth-gen."Having previously served in VMA-214 and flown the AV-8B for many years, the Black Sheep and the Harrier hold a special place in my heart," said U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Bradford J. Gering, the commanding general of 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing."As 3rd MAW says a bittersweet farewell to the Harrier, we are excited to increase our number of F-35B squadrons with the re-designation of VMFA-214."The Black Sheep squadron is based at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma in Arizona, and has been formed in 1942. Its pilots served in all the major conflicts America has been involved in since. Omega Swiss luxury watches are no stranger to celebrities. Many of them have advertised for the brand, including Academy Award-winning actor Eddie Redmayne, model Kaia Gerber, the daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford, and even James Bond... Actually, just Daniel Craig On Sunday, a lot of celebrities wore the Omega watches as accessories on the red carpet at the 2022 Academy Awards Nicole Kidman, who arrived at the event in a black Mercedes-Maybach S-Class (pictured in the gallery), was nominated for her part in Being the Ricardos for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Naturally, she needed to be glamorous, and her choice was the Omega Mini Tresor.Andrew Garfield, whom many of you might know as Peter Parker, was also an Oscar nominee for his role in Netflixs Tick Tick... Boom! as Best Actor in a Leading Role. The British actor wore the newest Speedmaster 57 model.Belfast actor Jamie Dornan also sported a Speedmaster 57 on the red carpet.Ariana DeBose won her first Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her part in the new remake of West Side Story. The actress wore an Omega Constellation in stainless steel on her wrist.Troy Kotsur, who also received his first Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for CODA, was also sporting a De Ville Prestige in stainless steel. He was the second deaf actor to win an Academy Award after Marlee Maitlin in 1987, and the first man to do it.Other celebrities who did not make it to the nominees' list at the 2022 Academy Awards also chose Omega on their wrists. Yous Tati Gabrielle wore a De Ville prestige on a beige OMEGA vegan strap. Meanwhile, Canadian actor Simu Liu from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, flaunted a Seamaster Aqua Terra watch in full 18k yellow gold. Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, or the Swedish Aircraft Company, was formed in 1937 to protect the nation against Russian invasion. They never could have guessed the invasion would come from the west, and the General of Motors led the initial attack in 1989. After spinning off the aircraft division, GM purchased 50% with an option to go all-in during the next decade.Badge Engineering is an American concept where one automaker can sell a dozen examples of the same model at different locations and prices. While it works well for domestic transportation, trying to take it worldwide proved to be a fatal mistake. Looking back, someone should have seen the warning signs. This was the era of the Geo Storm and the Chevy Prizm, so what could go wrong?After their initial investment of $600 million, GM began working on a new flagship model for the brand. It would be a second-generation of the iconic Saab 900, a car still coveted by collectors around the world. Introduced in 1994, it had great looks and a homegrown powertrain, but it shared the same GM290 chassis used by Saturn and Opel. After offending loyal customers, they scrambled to introduce over 1,100 upgrades, while addressing quality issues along the way. It was so bad they quickly replaced it with the first-generation 9-3 in 1999.With everything seemingly figured out, the success of the 9-3 prompted GM to buy the remaining 50% of the company. Seeking to leave compromise in the dust, an all-new 9-3 arrived in 2002, but nobody could foresee that it would be their last production model. It had all the style and safety anyone could ask for, along with a manual transmission and convertible options.It would have been logical to follow this with a wagon version, so GM made a logical choice to slam Saab bagdes on the Subaru Impreza wagon. Sweden and Japan are on opposite sides of the earth, but a wagon is a wagon, right? Seeking to offset the weight of Saabs active safety systems, many of Subarus metal parts were swapped for plastic, offending fans of both brands in the process. A combination of steering from the WRX, along with soft suspension tuning, made the 9-2 an expensive, quirky car that nobody asked for.Gasoline prices jumped from $1.59 to $2.59 between 2004 and 2006, and it's one of the leading contributors to the Great Recession. Instead of cutting back on gas guzzlers, GM decided to apologize for the 9-2 fiasco. So, instead of an economical Saab, they gave us a luxury example of the Chevrolet Trailblazer SS called 9-7X. As the sixth iteration of the GMT360 chassis, it looked nearly identical to the Buick Ranier, Oldsmobile Bravada, GMC Envoy, and the Isuzu Ascender. Nevertheless, GM priced it just under the Escalade to make sure nobody bought it.These back-to-back disasters prompted GM to label Saab as under review in 2007. Making this internal issue known to the public not only scared new customers, but it also made potential investors look elsewhere. The only upside was that it kept Saab functioning without the abrupt end of Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Saturn. Christian von Koenigsegg announced his intentions in June of 2009, but he backed out four months later, after realizing Saabs only profitable model was the 9-3, which was 8 years old.Spykers CEO Victor Muller got some friends together and announced big plans for 2010, with a goal of making 55,000 cars. Burning through cash, they only assembled 31,696 examples, because the bills werent being paid. Nevertheless, Muller sold Spyker cars to focus on Saab, while many white-collar workers went without pay. The last hurrah was from 600 examples of the new Saab 9-4X. Built in Mexico by GM, they were essentially a Cadillac SRX with a higher price tag.On October 28th 2011, two Chinese automakers stepped up to offer $140 million for Saab. But after only three months, GM returned with a vengeance. They didnt like the idea of a Chinese company gaining access to their IP, so Saab lost the rights to GMs patents. American production ended in December of 2011, and the last 47 cars were "Independence Edition" 9-3 cConvertibles (2012).Ironically, most of this technology originally came from Saab, but they became GM property during the 2000 takeover. Currently owned by the Chinese Evergrande group, their 2021 insolvency is just another nail in the coffin. Tell us your dreams of a new Saab in the comments, and stay with us for all your Swedish auto news. It is worth noting that Elon Musk recommended that users of its Starlink terminals in Ukraine place the antennae as far away from people as possible. The idea is not linked to any radiation threat as a health hazard, but to a detection threat. If Russian forces manage to pinpoint the location of such an antenna, those around it may be at risk A senior researcher at the Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto, John Scott-Railton, has warned that there are some features of Starlink that make it different from other comparable technologies that were previously used for this purpose. Moreover, as he told Business Insider , these terminals also have a distinctive appearance, which is not something you want from such a device.Other security experts warn that radio signals from such antennae could be tracked down by any modern military force, so deploying and using them is a risky business. Not having the ability to communicate with the outside world is just as dangerous, some might argue, though, so that also has to be accounted for.If you think about it, without Starlink , the Ukrainians would be left without any contact with the outside world, which is an undesirable situation in this context.Because of the distinctive look of the antennae used by Starlink terminals, such dishes could be observed from the air by Russian forces using various tools, from drones to aircraft. However, the signal itself could make the position of each antenna a target for missiles that can home in on such signals.In the latter case, the Russian military would have to have and also to deploy specific missiles that would bring the described effect. Until then, Ukrainians are advised to use caution when communicating with the use of Starlink terminals SUV Vladimir Putin, Russias longtime leader, has a huge fortune that hasnt been exactly estimated. Even Elon Musk , the worlds richest person, recently shared that Putin might be even richer than he is.The Russian tsar prides himself in real estate and yachts, including one that hasnt been officially declared his. That is the mysterious Scheherazade , which is covered in gold and marble, and overflowing with luxury.Now, lets take a look at Putins official car, an Aurus Senat limousine, with a design inspired by Rolls-Royce and Bentley limousines. In 2013, Aurus Motors, a Russian luxury brand, started the development of the future presidential car, that was to replace his Mercedes-Benz S 600 Pullman Guard. He introduced the Senat to the world during his fourth inauguration ceremony for a new six-year term, in May 2018.And, as expected from a man obsessed with his own safety, this car is all about that. And, naturally, comfort. Putin travels around Moscow in the armored vehicle with VR8/VR10 ballistic protection, that features 6 cm reinforced glass.Built in compliance with the Federal Protective Service's standards, the luxury vehicle is a fortress on wheels, being able of resisting any type of threat, including bombs, chemical weapons, and even if its completely submerged in water. Besides that, it comes with night vision cams, air compression system, and also offensive measures. We have seen no weapons on it so far, though.The Aurus Senat limousine is equipped with run-flat tires, being able to drive even when all four are punctured. It includes an emergency exit through its boot to evacuate the occupant when necessary.If Vladimir Putin has to travel for visits outside Russia which is currently next to impossible the state car is airlifted to the destination by an Ilyushin Il-76 transport aircraft.The $1.3 million vehicle is powered by a 4.4-liter V8 engine. That power unit has to move a car is measures 23 ft (7 m) in length and weighs around seven tones. The budget for designing this armored vehicle was at least $196 million (12.4 billion rubles), but at least Vladimir Putin feels safe and comfortable in it. The Kortezh line includes a convertible, the Aurus Senat Cabrio, a minivan called Arsenal, and an, Komendant, yet to be delivered. The issue was presented to Volkswagens Pre-Product Safety Committee, which assigned risk assessment evaluations. Finally, the issue was presented to Volkswagens Product Safety Committee in March with the recommendation to initiate a recall. The basis for this callback came in the guise of 1,242 suspected parts that may have been incorrectly cast by Volkswagen de Mexico as per documents filed with the safety watchdog.There are no records of any other failure, and the Wolfsburg-based carmaker highlights that remedy components are correctly manufactured.No fewer than 10,119 examples of the small Taos and compact-sized Tiguan are called back, including the long-wheelbase Tiguan with seating for seven. Produced for the 2021 and 2022 model years, the affected population of vehicles will receive brand-new rear suspension knuckles.The part numbers for these components are 5QN 505 435A/436A in the Tiguans case and 5QM 505 435C/436C for the Taos. Volkswagen Group of America states that production improvements were implemented for all three sport utility vehicles during the 35th, 36th, and 43rd weeks of 2021.Both dealers and owners will be notified of the recall on May 20th, 2022.Slightly costlier than the Jetta, the Taos can be had from $23,295 excluding destination charge and optional extras. Twinned with the Skoda Karoq and SEAT Ateca, this fellow is produced at the Puebla factory that used to make the air- and water-cooled Beetle. One powerplant is available at press time, a 1.5-liter turbo four-pot that makes 158 ponies and 184 lb-ft (250 Nm).The Tiguan , meanwhile, carries a starting price of $26,295 for the poverty-spec S trim level. Every grade comes with a 2.0-liter turbo four-cylinder engine that makes 184 horsepower and 221 lb-ft (300 Nm), but only the range-topping model sweetens the deal with standard all-wheel drive. The London-based watchdog singled out their decisions last year to triple maximum legal fines for slander and make it a crime to insult state officials. The decisions have been condemned by Armenian civic groups. The right to freedom of expression continued to be unduly restricted, Amnesty International said in an annual report on human rights practices around the world. The government introduced several legislative amendments curtailing independent media and other critical voices. In March [2021,] the National Assembly increased the maximum fine for insult and defamation to 6 million drams (approximately US$12,000). In August, another set of legislative amendments criminalized insulting public figures, making repeated insults punishable by up to three months imprisonment. All forms of slander and defamation had been decriminalized in Armenia in 2010. The current Armenian governments decision to restore criminal liability for such offenses drew criticism from the Armenian opposition and civil society. U.S. democracy watchdog Freedom House has repeatedly called a repeal of the corresponding amendments to the Criminal Code, saying that they highlight a clear degradation of democratic norms in Armenia. Political allies of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian have dismissed the criticism. Hundreds of people have already been investigated by the Armenian police and other law-enforcement agencies under the controversial amendments. According to state prosecutors, 31 of them were formally indicted by January 1. Most of them are thought to have been accused of offending Pashinian or other officials. Amnesty International also deplored trumped-up charges that were brought against Yazidi activist Sashik Sultanian after he voiced concerns in 2020 over the treatment of fellow members of Armenias Yazidi community. His trial started in August and was ongoing at the end of the year, reads the Amnesty report. If convicted, he could face three to six years in prison. The report also says: The Prosecutor Generals Office and state investigative bodies failed to effectively investigate attacks and threats against NGOs and media outlets, including looting of the offices of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Open Society Foundations, in the aftermath of the [Armenian-Azerbaijani] conflict in 2020. Indonesia is considering buying crude oil from Russia, the Southeast Asian countrys state energy company said, amid Western sanctions against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. The expression of interest by the state firm Pertamina came as reports surfaced about Russia looking to market its exports to Southeast Asia following sanctions by the United States on the countrys energy industry and plans by European countries to reduce dependency on Russian oil and gas. At the current prices and given the geopolitical situation, we see an opportunity to buy from Russia at a good price, Nicke Widyawati, Pertaminas chief executive, told a parliamentary hearing on Monday. Company spokeswoman Fajriyah Usman said no decision had been made to purchase Russian oil. Mrs. Nicke was just exploring the possibility, she told BenarNews on Tuesday. Nicke told legislators that Pertamina was communicating with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Bank Indonesia, the central bank, about the potential purchase. The company is upgrading its Balongan refinery in West Java to allow it to process all types of crude oil, including that from Russia, she said. The refinery was designed to process cleaner low-sulfur crude such as that produced by Saudi Arabias Aramco. Referring to a deal with Moscow, Nicke said any purchase of oil from Russia would be on a business-to-business basis, as long as the companies we deal with are not subject to sanctions. Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah declined to comment when contacted by BenarNews. Earlier this month, Indonesia voted for a U.N. General Assembly resolution that condemned Moscows military strike on Ukraine, but Jakarta has not directly criticized Russia or used the word invasion. After Moscow launched the invasion on Feb. 24, President Joko Jokowi Widodo posted on Twitter without referring to Russia or Ukraine: Stop the war. War brings misery to mankind and puts the whole world at risk. Net importer of oil Once a major producer, Indonesia has for years been a net importer of oil. Indonesia left the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 2009, but President Joko Jokowi Widodo decided to reactivate the membership in 2016 only to leave the grouping again later that same year. Since the Ukraine invasion, Russian authorities and the nations oil producers have discussed massive production cuts as a result of Western sanctions, according to industry news site Upstream. Russias chief oil regulator, Igor Shpurov, said output may have to be cut by as much as 2.3 million barrels per day if all oil exports to Europe and the U.S. were to be blocked, Upstream reported. So far only the U.S. has banned Russian oil imports, but the United Kingdom will follow suit by the end of 2022, and the European Union is moving in the same direction, according to media reports. Asian market On Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said lost orders for Russian oil would be replaced by contracts with Southeast Asian countries. There is a market in Southeast Asia, in the east. Undoubtedly, falling out bids for oil will be compensated by bids from that Eastern direction, he was quoted as saying in a release issued by the Russian embassy in Jakarta. After all, the world market is much more multifaceted than only the European one. Although, of course, the European market is top-grade, he said. Meanwhile, In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said his nation would wean itself off of oil and coal imports from Russia, international news agencies reported. The European Union wants to reduce dependence on Russian gas supplies by 67 percent by the end of this year. Opportunistic Bhima Yudhistira, director of the Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS), called Pertaminas plan to buy Russian crude oil very opportunistic. Indonesia is taking advantage of [a] non-aligned foreign policy. Indonesia is in dire need of cheaper oil, especially when the global oil prices remain above $100 per barrel, he told BenarNews, adding those costs will be passed along to consumers It would mean that Indonesians have to endure higher prices [at the gas pump], he said. In addition, Indonesia risked Western ire if it goes ahead with the plan, Bhima warned. Indonesia may lose (Western) investment in the oil and gas sector or Indonesian products will be prevented from entering Europe and the U.S. if raw materials are found to be of Russian origin, he said. Bhima also said Indonesia should consider its status as this years president of the G20 group of major economies. Indonesia should continue to put pressure on Russia to stop the war in Ukraine. An end to the war will automatically lead to lower prices of crude oil, he said. Its a better alternative that buying [Russian oil] at a discount. Chinas Tianwen-1 orbiter beams back high-resolution images of Zhurong rovers inspection area on Mars 09:07, March 29, 2022 By Feng Hua ( People's Daily The orbiter of Chinas Tianwen-1 Mars mission, the countrys first artificial Mars satellite, lately sent back new images of the inspection area of the Zhurong Mars rover with a resolution of 0.5 meters when it traveled past the area again at the periareion, the point in the orbit that is closest to Mars. Track marks left by the Mars rover are clearly visible in the pictures. Photo shows Chinas first Mars rover Zhurong on Jan. 22, 2022, the 247th Martian day after its landing on the planet. A layer of dust can be seen on its surface. (Photo/China National Space Administration) On March 7, the orbiter also captured images of the Perseverance Mars rover sent by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Chinas Tianwen-1 Mars probe conducted precise braking near Mars and successfully entered orbit around the red planet on Feb. 10, 2021. Then, on May 15, 2021, it touched down at its pre-selected landing area on the northern hemisphere of Mars. Seven days later, the Zhurong Mars rover drove down from its landing platform to the Martian surface to search for signs of water and life. As of March 24, 2022, the Tianwen-1 orbiter had been operating in orbit for 609 days at a distance of 277 million kilometers from Earth, and the Zhurong Mars rover had worked on the surface of Mars for 306 Martian days and traveled over 1.78 kilometers. Both the Mars orbiter and rover are functioning normally. Zhurong also sent back selfies from Mars. Compared with the images taken shortly after it landed on the planet, the new photos showed a thin layer of dust had accumulated on its surface. Considering that dust can reduce rovers power supplies, Chinese scientists specially designed the rovers solar wing so that it can take multiple measures to offset the decline in its power generation efficiency caused by dust coverage. The China National Space Administration said there is no need to employ such measures yet as the rover has sufficient energy to continue its exploration on Mars. The Martian northern hemisphere is entering the autumn season, during which there will be frequent dust storms, as previous Mars exploration data suggested. A new image of the inspection area of Chinas Zhurong Mars rover with a resolution of 0.5 meters. The photo was taken by the orbiter of Chinas Tianwen-1 Mars mission when it traveled past the area at the periareion, the point in the orbit that is closest to Mars. (Photo/China National Space Administration) The engineering team of the Tianwen-1 mission has been constantly monitoring dust storms on Mars through images captured by the medium-resolution camera of the Tianwen-1 orbiter, which has detected dust activities above 60-degree latitude north of Mars since late January this year. Pictures sent back by the orbiter showed that a local sandstorm occurred in this area in February 2022, during which typical surface features of the red planet were covered by a large amount of sand and dust and became indistinguishable. According to the administration, no obvious dusty weather has been observed in the Zhurong rovers inspection area. So far, countries across the world have launched over 50 Mars probes, among which only 18 successfully landed on the planet, including Tianwen-1. The orbiter of Tianwen-1 will continuously carry out remote sensing of Mars, focusing on obtaining high-resolution images of craters, volcanoes, canyons, dry riverbeds and other typical landforms and geological units. By around 2030, China will carry out asteroid exploration, Mars sample return, Jupiter system exploration and other missions, with Mars exploration as the main task, according to the overall planning of the Planetary Exploration of China (PEC). Photo taken on Oct. 30, 2020 shows models of the lander and rover of Chinas first Mars probe Tianwen-1 exhibited at the 2020 Inno-Match Expo held in Shanghai. (Peoples Daily Online/Long Wei) (Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun) A Philippine Coast Guard member watches as a Chinese Coast Guard ship passes close by near Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, March 2, 2022. The Philippines lodged a new diplomatic protest against China after a Chinese coast guard ship maneuvered dangerously close to a Filipino vessel in the disputed Scarborough Shoal in early March, a senior official said Tuesday. Chinas foreign ministry, meanwhile, insisted that it was within its rights when its ship allegedly engaged in what the Philippine Coast Guard described as a close distance maneuvering in South China Sea waters. Its done, weve filed a diplomatic protest regarding that, National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. told reporters on Samar Island in the central Philippines, where he was attending a government event. Similar incidents could occur over contending claims in Scarborough Shoal, he warned. Esperon heads the national taskforce for the West Philippine Sea, the Philippine name for territory claimed by Manila in the South China Sea. On Sunday, the Philippine Coast Guard reported that a China Coast Guard ship had sailed within 21 meters (69 feet) of the BRP Malabrigo during a routine patrol on March 2. That was the fourth time since May 2021 that Chinese Coast Guard ships had made that type of maneuver against Philippine vessels, Philippine officials said. It can always happen that vessels of the different countries, especially from the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and other claimant countries and China, will get into close encounters simply because we have conflicting claims, Esperon said. There may be counter-claims but we, as a nation, will stand by our established sovereign rights and sovereignty over the area. He said Manila had been increasing its presence in the region through the Philippine Coast Guard and Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources. Esperon also said there were fresh reports about other claimants to the potentially mineral rich sea region improving facilities on islands they occupy. Thats the situation there, just be aware of it. And Vietnam has 21 positions, we have nine stations, [while] China has seven strong positions, he said. Manila, which claims nine islands in the South China Sea, the biggest of which is the 92-acre Pag-asa Island (known internationally as Thitu Island), has been improving its facilities in the region in recent years in the same manner that Vietnam is doing a lot of improvement to theirs, Esperon said. The national security adviser said the government would continue to assert its claims through diplomatic channels and through the international community. Can we afford to go to war? Not now or not in this instance. [I]n general we want peaceful settlements of the conflicts in the area, he said. Earnestly respect Chinas sovereignty Manila issued the protest a day after Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin insisted that China had sovereign rights over the shoal. China has sovereignty over Huangyan Dao and its adjacent waters as well as sovereign rights and jurisdiction over relevant waters, Wang said, using the Chinese name for Scarborough Shoal. We hope that Philippine ships will earnestly respect Chinas sovereignty and rights and interests, abide by Chinas domestic law and international law, and avoid interfering with the patrol and law enforcement of the China Coast Guard in the above-mentioned waters, he said during a media briefing on Monday. Also known as Bajo de Masinloc, Scarborough Shoal lies 120 nautical miles west of Luzon Island well within the Philippines 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ). For years, the shoal has been a traditional fishing ground for Filipinos but since 2012 it has been under virtual control by China, which has maintained a constant coast guard presence. After a tense standoff, Manila said the United States brokered a deal for both sides to pull out of the shoal but China reneged on it. In 2016, an international court ruled in favor of the Philippines in a South China Sea territorial dispute. Instead of moving to enforce the internationally accepted deal, President Rodrigo Duterte moved to appease Chinese leader Xi Jinping in exchange for cordial ties and billions in Chinese investments. Apart from China and the Philippines, other claimants to South China Sea territories are Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan. Indonesia is locked in a separate dispute with China which claims parts of the sea that is within Jakartas EEZ. Shared responsibility Also on Tuesday, Malaysia Defense Minister Hishamuddin Hussein said that the South China Sea is ultimately a region of shared responsibility, a region which we in ASEAN are collectively responsible for, referring to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Issues around the South China Sea have always made headlines. As much as strongly worded statements are likely to grab attention, we must strive to ensure that cooler heads prevail, Hussein said during the Putrajaya Forum, a security conference organized by the Malaysian Institute of Defense and Security and the Malaysian Defense Ministry. Though we are in the business of defense and security, de-escalating a high-stakes situation is a task in itself. A task that we must all put above all else lest we risk compromising the peace and stability in the region, he said. Hussein told those at the conference that tensions between nations must be diffused through all available means. Due to the complexity and sensitivity of the issue, through established international laws and conventions, all parties must work together to increase efforts to build, maintain and enhance mutual trust and confidence so that we can maintain peace, security and stability in the South China Sea. Nisha David in Kuala Lumpur contributed to this report. U.S. President Joe Biden listens during a joint news conference with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in the East Room at the White House in Washington, March 29, 2022. Four Southeast Asian foreign ministers are traveling to China this week while a U.S.-ASEAN summit that was to take place in Washington appears to have been postponed indefinitely, prompting Chinese state media to carp that the region prefers to speak to Beijing. Chinas Foreign Ministry announced on Monday that the top diplomats of Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Myanmar will visit China respectively from March 31 to April 3 at the invitation of Foreign Minister Wang Yi. At least some of the ministers would have accompanied their heads of state for the long-anticipated summit between leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and President Joe Biden that had been planned for March 28 and 29. But that meeting ran into scheduling problems. A senior Biden administration official conceded Monday that much to our disappointment, we werent able to get this locked down. We believe the clock is ticking, and we want to try and get this done. And were working very closely with ASEAN to try and come up with an appropriate time to do this, said the official who was briefing reporters on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the administration. Still, on Tuesday Biden had an Oval Office meeting with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who urged closer U.S.-ASEAN ties and expressed appreciation for Bidens commitment to the region. He said it helps for the U.S. to be present in the Asia-Pacific and to deepen its relations with many friends and to strengthen its strategic interests in the region. Biden vowed that the Ukraine crisis would not distract from implementing the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy. He said he wanted to ensure that the region remains free and open. Apples and oranges In Beijing, China was making its own play to demonstrate its engagement with Southeast Asia. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters Monday that the four countries whose ministers will visit are important ASEAN members and Chinas friendly neighbors and important partners for high-quality Belt and Road cooperation referring to Chinas global infrastructure program. He said the visit again demonstrates the close and friendly relations between China and its ASEAN neighbors and the high importance all sides attach to advancing China-ASEAN cooperation. It is unclear whether foreign ministers from the remaining six ASEAN countries were invited. The state-run newspaper Global Times said to visit China while delaying the meeting with the U.S. shows ASEANs willingness to talk with China rather than the U.S. The paper, known for its nationalistic, anti-U.S. stance, quoted an analyst, Qian Feng, as saying that while China truly and sincerely helps them [ASEAN countries] boost economic development and solve practical problems through win-win cooperation, the latter [the U.S.] doesnt really care about their current situations but just wants to use them to contain China without bringing them tangible benefit. Obviously, ASEAN members know that, said Qian, director of the research department at the National Strategy Institute at Tsinghua University. Collin Koh, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said the Chinese newspaper is comparing apples and oranges, and making a mountain out of a molehill. The trip to Beijing is of a different level to the summit which would involve heads of state, Koh said. This cant be compared to the foreign ministers going to China, he said. Association of Southeast Asian Nations foreign ministers pose with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Vientiane, Laos, Feb. 20, 2020. [Reuters] Pushed to take sides? The scheduling of the ASEAN-U.S. summit ran into trouble when the facilitating country, Indonesia, couldnt get all ASEAN members to agree on a date. Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia, the current chair of ASEAN, explained on March 17 that among the blocs 10 members, four countries said they could not attend the meeting [on March 28 and 29] while some others were requesting that the summit be held on March 26 and 27 dates the U.S. said it could not make. Thai foreign policy analyst Kavi Chongkittavorn said that ASEAN leaders became exasperated about the proposed meeting. Half the ASEAN leaders were not happy with the U.S. because they had proposed several dates for the Biden team to consider but the U.S. side kept changing the schedule, he said. And with the crisis in Ukraine, in some ASEAN capitals there is a prevailing fear that the Russia-Ukraine quagmire could hijack the summit, Kavi said. A Vietnamese analyst said there has been unease among some ASEAN countries that they would be pressured to take sides in the Ukraine war. The analyst requested anonymity to discuss a matter of diplomatic sensitivity. Vietnam, together with fellow ASEAN members Brunei and Laos, abstained on March 24 from a United Nations resolution on humanitarian consequences of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Hanoi also abstained on an earlier resolution on March 2 that condemned Russias aggression and demanded that Moscow immediately end its military operations in Ukraine. If you'd like to leave a comment (or a tip or a question) about this story with the editors, please email us We also welcome letters to the editor for publication; you can do that by filling out our letters form and submitting it to the newsroom. Greg Sukiennik has worked at all three Vermont News & Media newspapers and was their managing editor from 2017-19. He previously worked for ESPN.com, for the AP in Boston, and at The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass. Carr Hardware has released its own paint brand, Shades of Shire, which is manufactured in Massachusetts. Keith Larrabee allegedly "continued to attack" one of the victims of a shooting outside Key West Lounge in North Adams on Feb. 19. He was recently arrested and ordered held without bail. PITTSFIELD The city has weathered two years of a global pandemic by having a strong financial position and sound financial policies, according to the citys auditor and finance director. Financial officials painted a largely optimistic picture during the annual review of the citys financial condition Monday night. Finance Director Matthew Kerwood told members of the City Council and School Committee that projections for the city property tax levy and state aid should bring major increases to Pittsfields general fund. The general fund which is the primary way the city funds municipal business is expected to reach about $183.6 million in fiscal year 2023, which would represent an $8 million increase over the citys current budget. Kerwood also told city leaders that the fiscal year 2023 tax levy the money raised from city property taxes should hit just over $104 million. That dollar amount would be a 9.7 percent increase, or $9 million, more than the city raised from property tax bills this fiscal year. The citys track record on property tax collection makes this figure close to a sure bet. The citys auditor, Thomas Scanlon, told city leaders that 3/4 of the way through the financial year, the city has collected 96.8 percent of budgeted personal and property taxes, placing it right on track to bring in the $94.6 million in taxes this year. The next largest boon to city coffers is expected to come from state aid. Gov. Charlie Bakers proposed 2023 fiscal year budget would increase unrestricted local aid to Pittsfield by $256,207, to just over $9.7 million, Kerwood said during the meeting. The governors budget numbers are always the lowest, Kerwood said. The House and Senate will work on their votes and they or may not increase any of those local aid figures. But we know, at a bare minimum, that the numbers that the governors budget includes are the floor. Mayor Linda Tyer is leading an effort in her role as the president of the Massachusetts Mayors Association to increase the amount of unrestricted local aid to communities throughout the state. The unrestricted local aid is currently far overshadowed by the change to Pittsfields Chapter 70 funding, the states education aid, which is expected to increase $4.5 million to about $54.2 million next fiscal year. While strong showings in the hotel and motel, and marijuana businesses have left Kerwood optimistic about the future of city businesses, the weakness of the automobile industry, restaurant economy and a measly return on city investments has led the director to forecast local receipts growing by about $85,000. While the outlook on the money coming to the city in the next year remains largely positive, thats not to diminish the impact of several increasing costs on the horizon. The finance director said that news of the potential sale of the Community Eco Power plant, which converts 240 tons each day of solid waste into steam and electricity, has signaled that citys solid waste costs will likely increase more than initially expected in the next year. Kerwood also added that building maintenance, property revaluations, and upgrades to the citys cybersecurity and accounting software will come with high price tags in the next budget year. Tyer will present a final budget proposal to the City Council on May 10. Pittsfield Public Schools leaders have already begun to work on their request for the citys budget. If the current budget proposal from the school district was approved as is this summer, it would represent about 39 percent of the anticipated city budget for next year. This year the PPS budget made up about 42 percent of the overall city budget this year. U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, a Springfield Democrat, announced in a news release that the federal spending bill that President Joe Biden signed last week includes $1 million for construction of the proposed Greylock Glen Outdoor Center. BOSTON A bill that would authorize common sense services such as insulin injections in assisted living facilities would help to lessen the burden on the nursing home system, policymakers say. A temporary provision in a spending bill signed by Gov. Charlie Baker in February allows for nurses in assisted living facilities to provide essential services to residents until July 15 or until the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency, whichever comes first. A proposal by state Rep. William Smitty Pignatelli, D-Lenox, and state Sen. Patricia Jehlen, a Somerville Democrat who co-chairs the elder affairs committee, would make this temporary approval permanent. Their bill, which the elder affairs committee reported favorably in February, seeks to make assisted living facilities an option for families that do not want to send a loved one to a nursing home. We spend a lot of money on home care, which we should do, but if it gets to a point where the home is not good enough, but a nursing home is not needed, why cant we use common sense in assisted living? Pignatelli said. The proposal came to me with a personal experience with my parents who since passed away about three years ago, Pignatelli said. His family would inject insulin for their late father, longtime Lenox Select Board Chairman John J. Pignatelli, because the state did not authorize nurses in assisted living facilities to do so, even though nurses are trained to perform such services. It got to the point where both my parents said they werent ready for a nursing home, nor did we want to put them into a nursing home, Pignatelli said. We all talk in government about the quality of life and home health care as well as keeping people home as long as possible. So, we thought seriously about assisted living: What do we do so that our siblings can get back to being the family instead of the caretakers. And I dont mean that negatively, but let us become a family in our parents last few years. Yet, Pignatelli found in his research that he and his family would either have to continue to give his parents their injections, or they would have to pay anywhere from $80 to $165 per injection provided by an authorized nurse. It became a financial burden for older folks, he said. There is no reason that this couldnt enhance the quality of life, let families be the families and get their parents the proper care needed. Brian Doherty, president and CEO of the Massachusetts Assisted Living Association, said that the bill refers to common sense health services because nurses working in assisted living facilities are already licensed to provide those services, and these are some of the most basic among those services that they can provide. It is a reasonable change that would directly impact the lives of older adults, Doherty said. For residents who need services such as insulin shots, the change would allow a nurse to provide the basic services that they need to be able to stay at their residence and not have to move out prematurely due to concerns about increasing costs, Doherty said. He referenced a University of Massachusetts Boston report that found that for some residents, having the nurse to give injections in assisted living led to better health outcomes, Doherty said, adding that the timing of insulin injections are crucial relative to meal times. The only option that Berkshire County residents without a family network have to provide basic and essential services is to put their loved one into a nursing home. Some states do allow nurses looking at assisted living residences to give injectables. In Massachusetts, we like to think were the leader for so many things until we find out we are not the leader, Pignatelli said. We are not a leader when it comes to that aspect of health care, and I think we need to try and address it. The bill has support in the assisted living industry. The executive director at Rosewood Homestyle Assisted Living in Pittsfield, for instance, backs the idea. If the bill passed, it would help older adults remain in assisted living facilities, Chris Chojnowski said. I think it would help residents a lot because otherwise, they would have to pay for these services, Chojnowski said. Eugene R. Fidell is a senior research scholar at Yale Law School and an adjunct professor of law at New York University. From the pit... to Potiphars house... to the prison... to the palace... The steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord (Psalm 37:23). Sometimes it's difficult, even for the most optimistic, to watch the news and not become discouraged by the state of the world these days: rising food and fuel prices, unemployment and injustice seem to be the rule of the day. However, if we trust that God is always working behind the scenes on behalf of His people, then no matter what happens in the world at large, we know He will turn it around for our good (Romans 8:28). There is no better example of this spiritual principle in action than the life experience of Joseph. Spoiler alert: it started off pretty bad. So it came to pass, when Joseph had come to his brothers, that they stripped Joseph of his tunic, the tunic of many colors that was on him. Then they took him and cast him into a pit. And the pit was empty; there was no water in it. Then Midianite traders passed by; so the brothers pulled Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt (Genesis 37:23-24, 28). Its interesting to note that the word used here, took, at first glance seems to put the emphasis on being moved from one place to another against ones will. And surely from Josephs point of view at the moment, this was indeed what was happening to him. However, the word took has other meanings, including: to lead, to carry, to cause, to be brought, to be introduced and to bring near, all of which do not emphasize hostility, but rather, help. In other words, if someone brings me with them to an event as their guest, they are not taking me in the negative sense, but rather they are helping me. I am allowed access to the event based on their invitation. If someone introduced me to one of their friends, I am brought into the conversation based on a connection with them. And if I am carried by someone to another place by taxi, I am able to enjoy that destination without engaging my own strength or effort. So the Midianite traders took (carried, lead, introduced, brought near) Joseph to the land of Egypt, and therefore, to his destiny there. So all of the places Joseph spent time in Egypt, even though they seemed like negative experiences in the moment, actually opened doors by means of connection. - From the pit in the desert, he was connected by slave traders to Potiphars house (Genesis 39:1-4) - From Potiphars house, he was connected by a false witness to Pharaoh's prison (Genesis 39:19-21a) - From Pharaoh's prison, he was connected by Pharaoh's servants to Pharaoh's palace (Genesis 41:14-15, 25, 39-40) If we step back and look critically at Joseph's entire life, the time he spent in the pit seems a rather small inconvenience compared to fantastic experience of living in the palace of Egypt. The pit was simply not the end of Joseph's story. Oftentimes we can get bogged down in the moment and forget that our story is not finished. Our current place may seem negative or insignificant, but like the pit, Potiphar's House, or the prison, it may simply be a place of connection that God intends to use to accomplish His will. His ultimate plan is much greater than we can imagine. And the best way we can endure through the tough times is to get a vision for God's turnaround in our lives. Getting a Vision for God's Big Turnaround Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers (3 John 2). Do you feel like you've lost your mojo because of this crazy world we seem to find ourselves in? Are you hitting on all cylinders, so to speak? That is, are you prospering in body, mind and spirit regardless of negative circumstances or discouraging news reports? We should; after all, that is God's will for His people: Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thessalonians 5:23). If so, it's important to regain vision to live by God's heavenly life map. Thats what real vision is: an inner picture that pulls us to fulfill Gods future plan for our lives, regardless of current circumstances. My favorite story of the power of vision is that of Walt Disney. Mr. Disney died before the grand opening of the Disney World amusement park, so his wife appeared on his behalf for the opening festivities. When she was introduced to the Master of Ceremonies, he said Mrs. Disney, I just wish Walt could have seen this! Mrs. Disney simply responded He did. Just like in the natural world, in order to be it, you must first see it. In order to receive it, you must first believe it (Matthew 21:22). What you see on the inside determines what you'll see on the outside. So having a God-inspired vision is a fundamental precept of spiritual progress and success. Where there is no vision there is no victory! So what is God wanting to birth through you, through the vision He has given you? Vision Steps God often gives vision to us in pieces and brings the vision to pass through our faith-filled steps, until we see that vision become a reality. Josephs life is the perfect example of this process it seems we all must go through. The Planting Step God puts in us a picture or an idea of what He has for us. We dont dream it up on our own; God divinely drops it in us. It's probably something much bigger than we would ever imagine for ourselves, and it's something that we certainly couldn't obtain by our own efforts even through very hard work. Joseph's famous dreams were dropped into his heart while he was sleeping, by God Himself (Genesis 37:5-10). It wasnt Joseph's ambition for his life, and it wasn't his chosen career path. It was Gods plan dropped into Josephs heart while he was sleeping, and it marked the beginning of his great adventure. Keep your connection with the Creator strong, and God will show you what vision He has for you; like Joseph, you wont be able to shake free from it. God will get His instructions into you, just keep the switch of your faith turned on. The Processing Step We must decide to say yes to Gods plan. This does not mean we give consent, rather we make a commitment to the plan and say, no matter what God, Im all in. Like Joseph, I'm in whether the pit or the prison... because I believe in the palace! The Price Step We recognize the cost of carrying the vision to its fulfillment. Any vision from God will carry a substantial price tag. Nothing worthwhile is free and it won't be easy. We must press toward the prize, pick up our cross, put our hand to the plow, and never look back. By paying the price required, we demonstrate that we can be trusted in the battle and hold on until we triumph. But we will also experience the thrill of seeing with our own eyes, if God be for us, who can stand against us? And with the price, comes spiritual power. Such power that will propel us through every pit, every lying Potiphars wife and every prison thrown in our way to stop us. Power that will enable us to keep on trusting His heart even when we cant trace His hand. The Practice Step Rest assured, God prepares us even if we do not realize He's doing it. He develops our skills in private, so that when needed, we will be successful in public. God doesn't call the qualified, He qualifies the called in a way that causes us to face the pits of life and learn lessons from them. In the pits we practice and learn how to deal with issues like loneliness, fear of rejection, and how to live through lean seasons. He doesn't bless who we pretend to be, only who we have prepared to be. We also face the Potiphar's House test, where we learn how to manage well for another's benefit, and realize that things are not always as they seem. During this step, our character is tested when nobody is looking, in order that it will stand strong when everybody is looking. Here, we learn loyalty and faithfulness, and let go of the good and the comfortable in order to experience God's great and unusual. During the lessons of the prison, we see how those things that have tried to keep us bound, God turns around and uses to bring us blessing. Here we experience divine anointing to practice our gifts when relatively little is on the line, so they are ready to go when everything is on the line. We refine our compassion and people skills; we learn to forgive and let go. We understand that what they did to us cannot stop what God has destined for us. And we are filled with Gods peace that passes all understanding, because He is faithful Who promises. Stay Faithful Even when we don't recognize it, God is working behind the scenes on us, on our characters, and developing our gifts, even as we are going through negative experiences like the pit, Potiphar's house, and the prison. God uses this time to forge in us everything we need to succeed, before He positions us into that place of our vision, which is His will for our lives. It was God Who gave a vision a promise to Joseph through his dreams. And at every step of the way, as Joseph encountered discouragement and problems, the Bible says but God was with Joseph. In the same way, as we remain faithful through tough times, we will see that God is with us. Remember, He has been to the future and is never surprised by present circumstances. Even though we can't see Him working, He always has a plan to turn it around for our good. Related articles From Slave to Second-in-Command: 7 Lessons from Josephs Life in Egypt Joseph, Potiphar's Wife, and the Dangers of Sexual Sin The Danger of Becoming the Forgetful Cupbearer in the Story of Joseph Photo credit: Getty Images/Cultura RM Exclusive/Twinpix Frank Santora is Lead Pastor of Faith Church, a multi-site church with locations in Connecticut and New York. Pastor Frank hosts a weekly television show, Destined to Win, which airs weekly on the Hillsong Channel and TBN. He has authored thirteen books, including the most recent, Modern Day Psalms and Good Good Father. To learn more about Pastor Frank and this ministry, please visit www.franksantora.cc. Photo by Michele Roman. OROFINO - The Clearwater County Sheriff's Office recently executed a search warrant at 3286 Lakeview Road, and the adjoining property. This warrant was for any cattle on the property. The warrant was sought due to several dead cattle that was reported on the property and surrounding properties. The Clearwater County Sheriff's Office says cowboys were hired to assist with the warrant, and also received assistance from the Idaho Department of Agriculture and the Idaho State Brand Inspector. A total of 98 cattle were gathered from the 3286 Lakeview property and surrounding properties over several days. The cattle from the other properties were gathered with permission of the property owners. Necropsys were performed on two of the deceased cows finding that they had died from malnutrition and starvation. Many of the cattle gathered showed signs of starvation. The cattle were all taken to a secure facility and are now receiving proper feed and care. The owner of the cattle, 78-year-old Douglas Towles, was cited for permitting animals to go without care. The Clearwater County Sheriff's Office says the investigation is still ongoing. OLYMPIA - On Tuesday, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced an initiative to combat robocalls in Washington state. As part of the initiative, the Attorney Generals Office has created a new complaint form for Washingtonians tailored for reporting robocalls. Additionally, as part of an effort to educate and inform Washingtonians, the Attorney Generals Office launched a website with descriptions of robocalls and telemarketing scams, including strategies for combating them. In the past two years, Ferguson filed three lawsuits aimed at holding illegal robocallers accountable. Robocalls are a type of phone call that comes from automated systems where computers play a recorded message when someone answers the phone or when it goes to voicemail. Robocalls are more than just annoying they can also be illegal, Ferguson said. Many of our cases are based on tips we receive from Washingtonians. If robocalls are harassing you, please file a complaint with my office. The robocall complaint form includes specific questions for reporting the details of a suspicious call to help the AG office better track and discover patterns for robocalls in the state and prevent other Washingtonians from getting more illegal calls. Even if illegal robocallers fake their caller identification, the Attorney Generals Office is able to track these calls when Washingtonians report their telephone number, telephone provider and the exact time and date of the call. Washingtonians who suspect they have received an illegal robocall can now report the call here: https://fortress.wa.gov/atg/formhandler/ago/robocallForm.aspx. An informational website about robocalls and telemarketing scams is here: https://www.atg.wa.gov/robocall-and-telemarketing-scams. Washingtonians can also report illegal telemarketing or other types of phone scams via the general consumer complaint form here: https://www.atg.wa.gov/file-complaint. Washingtonians can also make complaints about robocalls to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In February alone, the FTC received 6,075 complaints from Washingtonians regarding telephone solicitations. BOISE Idaho House and Senate Democratic leaders gave their reactions to this years legislative session on Monday, as lawmakers continue to try to wrap up the session this week. Were hopefully getting really close to that, said House Minority Leader Ilana Rubel, D-Boise, who said she was still reeling from last weeks horrific display on the House floor, culminating in a post-midnight session on Friday night. She decried GOP lawmakers moves to cut the Commission for Libraries Budget in part because they were angry over emails from librarians opposing HB 666, a bill that passed the House but didnt get a hearing in the Senate, seeking to criminalize librarians if minors check out harmful materials. I think it reflects a problem that goes far beyond library funding, and if normalized, would undermine our very form of government, Rubel said. We cannot allow citizens to be punished for speaking out on legislation that impacts them. We have a House GOP caucus that has truly lost its way from conservative small government, Rubel said. That caucus now prefers to fixate on imaginary, divisive social issues that are ginned up on Fox News, and they focus on those to the near exclusion of the very real issues that actually face Idahoans. Senate Minority Leader Michelle Stennett, D-Ketchum, said, It was blessedly not a long session, but unfortunately we didnt get a lot accomplished. She said the Senate served to make sure that much that came over from the House that was mostly political grandstanding didnt gain any traction. The two did laud legislation that minority Democrats supported that passed this year. That included funding for full-day kindergarten; infrastructure investments; a long-sought rural educator incentive program; a major improvement of Idaho teachers health insurance; and more. We had some real attacks on marginalized populations in Idaho, which is extraordinarily disappointing, Stennett said. We want to be better than we are for being a welcoming state. Rubel noted that it was only Democrats support in the House that pushed a long line of budgets for major state functions through successfully, as a majority of House Republicans voted against them. There is very little interest in much of that caucus in actually doing the work of governing, she said. Both Democratic leaders said they continue to push for property tax relief with bipartisan initiatives, but have been disappointed that those proposals, including restoring the indexing of the homeowners exemption, havent been allowed committee hearings by GOP leaders. There are very responsible, very bipartisan solutions, Rubel said, that if we could just get a chairman to let us have a hearing, I think would have a very strong chance of achieving the finish line. With big turnover coming in the Legislature in the coming year, she said, I cant imagine were the only ones who are hearing from their constituents that they want property tax relief. Im optimistic with a new batch that therell be newcomers who are going to be interested in working on this with us. House Republicans have delayed their post-session press conference until after the Legislature reconvenes on Thursday. MECOSTA COUNTY The opportunity to receive an education is a beneficial one, and the Mecosta-Osceola Career Tech Center offered families a chance to learn about the programs offered during the centers open house evening. The open house was held from 5-7 p.m. Thursday, March 24, at the Career Tech Center at 15830 190th Avenue in Big Rapids. Attendees got the chance to learn about how students and faculty at the Career Tech Center engage in opportunities to create multiple projects, leadership activities, and understand their environment and community through a more contextual approach to learning in a safe and nurturing environment that fosters a professional atmosphere. Gretchen Spedowske, director of career and technical education at the Tech Center, said the open house was a great networking opportunity for kids and families. It was open to all Mecosta Osceola families, all school districts, Spedowske said. So it included all five Morley, Evart, Chip Hills, Reed City, Big Rapids, and the charter. Students were able to experience hands-on opportunities in programs that they might be interested in and learn about the credentialing that they're going to receive if they attend the program, as well as any college courses that they will be able to complete. The Career Tech Center has a variety of programs that educate students on trades and professions in health care, engineering, cosmetology, construction, welding, first responder training and many others. Spedowske said the center caters to student needs and is often flexible. (The Career Tech Center) gives either the employment-bound students or the college-bound students the opportunity to get a head start in their education, Spedowske said. If I am a college-bound student, I can come to the Career Tech Center and can get one, two, three of my classes in the program I'm interested in completed at no cost. If I am an employment-bound student, I can receive those same credits, as well as certifications that the local businesses and industries recognize as a value to apply at their employment, or their business. A lot of times these students that come out of our programs, their resume has moved up the ladder because of the credentialing and because of the college courses that they've received, she added. The Tech Center often highlights student success and leadership through its Outstanding Students of the Month program, as well as offering unique opportunities for students to explore outside of the classroom. The open house was set up to allow attendees to visit different rooms to learn about class requirements and content, and many included free items and engagement opportunities. The culinary arts rooms even offered free chicken wings to visitors passing through to look at their diverse course content and opportunities. The Tech Center is free of cost for students to attend, as it is funded by the state of Michigan. Spedowske said the diversity of programs lends itself to students interests. We have programs from Allied Health, which include EMT, fire; we also have corrections, that includes the buyer corrections and public safety, which includes corrections in the EMT, Spedowske said. We also have it programs that go right down to welding. A lot of our business and industry manufacturers include our welding program in their employment. We have engineering, we have auto, diesel cosmetology. So if a student is interested in cosmetology, they can come here, their 11th and 12th grade and finish their 13th year, and they receive the credential to take their boards. It's all federally funded, state-funded, she added. So there's no cost to the student, which includes their college courses, they don't have to pay for those, nor do they pay for their credentials. For a low-income student, it's a way to get some of their college courses done or their certificate to go out and go to work. They attend half a day, here either morning or afternoon, and they work through their counselor to schedule that. Then the other half of the day, they can still complete their graduation. Spedowske explained that the Career Center works with students outside of the classroom as well to ensure they have the resources to succeed in the classroom, as well as having exploratory opportunities in their field of interest. We have wraparound services, Spedowske said. When students are having difficulty with testing, or reading skills, we have that support system for them. We also have any other special needs. we have support systems, our students, our instructors are very student-focused and community-focused. We work very closely with the community with our advisory committees, to make sure that we're meeting their needs with our students, as well as meeting our state requirements but also having fun with students so that they're making projects, she added. They're, they're working on their own vehicles, they're working in auto and diesel. We just try to make it fun and hands-on. So there is theory, but there are also hands-on opportunities, and that's what our students like." Spedowske emphasized that the Career Tech Center is for everyone. I want the message to really focus on that even if you're college-bound, you can still come to the Career Tech Center, she said. I think sometimes that that is not clear to some of the students, they think I'm going to college, so I have to take all these AP classes, and then I can't go to the Career Tech Center. But that's not true, we can work that out so that they get college credit automatically at the Center." For more information on the Mecosta-Osceola Career Tech Center, visit the schools website at www.moisd.org/schools/career-center. Plus, Bill's Message of the Day, should we be gloating over Joe Biden's failures? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Indian biopharma industry HITS Rs 33K Cr WITH 13% GROWTH in 2020-21 Amidst the pandemic, the Indian Biopharma Industry, with over 300 companies, has witnessed a good growth of 13 percent, 2 percent less than the previous years 15 percent growth rate. This growth was largely driven by the performance of the Indian biopharma companies which have done very well as against multinational companies. As a result, the Indian Biopharma Industry has crossed the Rs 33,000 crore mark for the year 2020-21 over the previous years figure of Rs 29,176 crore. The Indian Biopharma industry, comprising hormones, insulin, blood products, and vaccines recorded a sales revenue of Rs 33,067 crore for the year 2020-21. IIT-H plans to set up primary diagnostic facility support of Continental Hospitals in its new facility The Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT-H) has tied up with Continental Hospital for regular visits of consultants in various specialisations. IIT-H has now built a permanent space for its clinic (G+1 building) with the support from JICA, Japan. Chief Guest, Dr T Gurunath Reddy, Founder & Chairman, Continental Hospitals, inaugurated this primary healthcare centre at IIT-H in the presence of Chairman, BoG, IIT-H, Dr BVR Mohan Reddy, and visionary director of IIT-H, Prof BS Murty Garu. IIT-H existing healthcare facility will be moved into its new premises early next month. IIT-H plans to set up primary diagnostic facility support of JCI & NABH accredited Continental Hospitals in its new facility. Prof B S Murty said, We will not only collaborate with Continental Hospitals for setting up the basic diagnostic facilities at IITH but also would like this to be extended to teleconsulting from Continental experts in various specializations for better healthcare of the IITH fraternity. Registrations for this year's Young Lions Film competition have opened. The competition forms part of the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity - take your best shot at winning some serious glory! How it works Ster-Kinekor, as the official local representative for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, is sponsoring the Film category of the Young Lions competition again this year.The search is on for teams comprising two young professionals (such as an art director and a copywriter) both aged 31 years old or younger, born on or after 24 June 1990 and who are currently working in a creative, advertising, production or digital agencies.Teams must register for the South African competition between 25 March and 31 March 2022. A brief will be published on 1 April 2022 from 12pm on the Ster-Kinekor website Once the brief goes live, your team will have just 48 hours to film, edit and deliver a 30/45/60-second commercial on the topic provided. All creative must be submitted by 4 March before 12pm after that, its all up to the panel of judgesThe lucky and no doubt super-talented winners will be announced mid-April 2022. If your team is the one that makes the cut, the two of you will go on to represent South Africa at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. There, you will compete against other winning teams from around the world for the ultimate prestige of being crowned this years Film Young Lions.Send your registrations to younglions@sterkinekor.com. Discovery Bank recently launched Vitality Travel, an integrated travel-booking service with discounts and simplified trip management. Managing travel bookings easily The comprehensive travel offering is the worlds first shared-value travel platform which channels behavioural savings into savings on flights, holiday accommodation, car hire and holiday packages.Vitality Travel further expands the value clients get as they continue to monetise positive health and financial behaviours, says Hylton Kallner, CEO of Discovery Bank.The new travel offering combines Discovery Banks digital payments and platform capabilities with Vitalitys rewards expertise and partner network to access a world of travel deals in a uniquely convenient way.Vitality Travel provides clients with a unified platform to view, book and change flights, holiday accommodation and car hire. Clients can easily compare travel prices across the market and benefit from discounts with a wide range of travel partners. Bookings are payable directly from a clients Discovery Bank account or with Miles which clients get from managing their health and money well.Vitality Travel enables Discovery Bank clients to book with personalised discounts directly through the Discovery Bank website, where they have access to all local and international airlines, which currently includes five local and three international airline partners at discounted rates, as well as discounts at over 1,000 holiday accommodation properties and car-hire services, and soon, holiday packages as well.We are building an integrated travel ecosystem to cover every aspect of planning a travel experience within Discovery Bank, from bookings to the Priority Fast Track service at the airport and lounge access. Our recently launched Forex accounts provide real-time access to foreign currencies in the palm of your hand with a multi-currency card to use while travelling abroad, and we will soon offer visa applications and travel-insurance integration, Kallner says.Vitality Travel provides access to all airlines and to more than 40 local and regional flight destinations with new partners FlySafair, Airlink and Lift for local flights, in addition to existing partners kulula.com and British Airways operated by Comair.International flight partners Emirates, British Airways and Qantas are integrated into the platform.Accommodation options include hotels, apartments and local game lodges.Clients will also soon have access to a digital vault to store important documents, get free travel insurance and buy additional top-up travel cover when booking international flights with a Discovery Bank card.Additional travel benefits are available to qualifying Discovery Bank Black and Purple cardholders to use the Discovery Bank Priority Fast Track at OR Tambo and Cape Town International airports and to access more than 1,200 airport lounges globally.Dinesh Govender, CEO of Discovery Vitality, says: The beauty of Vitality Travel is that its fully secure and easy to use, with all your travel needs looked after through a single platform. It really makes it possible to go everywhere and to have an affordable travel experience, as a reward for your positive behaviour." The Tabasco brand is legendary and unlike anything else. This campaign harnesses the power of its familiarity and adds the missing link in the marketing chain with simple, eye-catching out-of-home creative. From flavouring your world to lighting things up, the new Tabasco brand identity is a bold and dynamic system designed to contemporise and amplify the iconic elements of the Tabasco brand.With the launch of two new variants in the local market Sriracha and Scorpion (Tabascos hottest offering) in-store and on social media, creative agency Grey South Africa and creative, data-led media agency Mediology collaborated to leverage the hyper-local power of billboards and street pole ads as an intercept in the consumers path to purchase."Using location and audience insights supported by strong creative, OOH was the ideal platform to showcase Tabascos new flavours, creating top-of-mind awareness during the last window in consumers path to purchase, saysThe campaign features unique and expressive design from Grey South Africa, showcasing the product and catchy taglines, to the backdrop of delicious food. With external and digital illuminations across Gauteng and the Western Cape, consumers are introduced to Sriracha -; Scorpion -and, of course, reminded of the classic red pepper sauce -"The team loved working with the new Tabasco brand identity - it's an exciting refresh that really lends itself to prominent out-of-home spaces," explains"We've been building the brand online for the last 10 years, so to see it shine on billboards and street poles again is a real privilege.""While Tabasco has been doing great things in the social media and in-store spaces, we haven't seen this brand on a billboard in quite a while," says"It's exciting to see our favourite hot sauce get the recognition and exposure it deserves."Keep an eye out and give the new sauces a try! Kochi: Malayalam Actor Dileep appeared before the Crime Branch of Kerala Police on Tuesday for the second consecutive day for interrogation in connection with the 2017 actress assault case. The interrogation is underway at Aluva Police Club in the presence of ADG, Crime Branch S Sreejith. On Monday, the interrogation went on for seven hours. Earlier, the Kerala High Court directed the probe team to conclude the investigation into the case by April 15. Actor Dileep is the eighth accused in the 2017 actress assault case. The case pertains that an actress who worked in Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu films was allegedly abducted and molested inside her car by a group of men who had forced their way into the vehicle on the night of February 17, 2017. In-charge officials direct a class 10 student wearing hijab arriving in line with other students before the commencement of the annual SSLC exams at a government school in Bangalore on March 28, 2022. (Manjunath Kiran / AFP) Bengaluru: A few Muslim girls who wished to appear for their Class 10 board examination wearing hijab were denied entry in Karnataka on Monday citing the recent High Court verdict. However, a majority of Muslim students chose to write the exam without hijab, saying that the exam was more important for them than wearing the headscarf in exam halls, sources said. Authorities of an exam centre in a school in Hubballi district sent back Muslim girls, who came to write exams sporting the hijab. A similar scene was witnessed in a government school in Ilkal town of Bagalkote district where Muslim students were denied entry to write the SSLC board exams. In Bengaluru, a Muslim supervisor was suspended for wearing hijab on duty. The full bench of Karnataka High Court had recently ruled that hijab is not an essential religious practice and everyone should abide by the uniform dress rule. The Karnataka government had made it clear that everyone has to follow the High Court ruling or else they will not be allowed to write the exam. According to the Karnataka Secondary Education Examination Board (KSEEB), over 8.69 lakh students had enrolled for the exam but 20,994 students did not turn up. Last year, the absentees were only 3,769. Last year, the attendance was 99.54 per cent, which came down to 97.59 per cent this year. Among the 8.48 lakh students who appeared for the exam, 8.11 lakh were fresh candidates, 35,509 were private fresh ones and 1,701 were repeaters. Karnataka Primary and Secondary Education Minister B C Nagesh said the exam took place smoothly in the state. After two years, full-scale SSLC exams took place. Children came to the exam centres excited and wrote the exam. Parents too happily sent their children to write the exam while teachers too were happy to conduct the exam, Nagesh said in a statement. HYDERABAD: Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao received praises from all quarters for transforming Yadadri as Tirumala of Telangana. Devotees thronged Yadadri to have darshan of the lord soon after the temple was opened for devotees on Monday. They hailed the Chief Minister for developing Yadadri as a temple city and transforming the temple into an architectural marvel within a short period of 66 months. Devotees were seen comparing the old Yadagirigutta temple with the renovated one recollecting the hardships faced by them due to narrow roads, traffic jams, lack of basic facilities on temple premises, unclean surroundings and water scarcity. There is no comparison at all. The temple got a complete makeover which we never dreamt of. The architectural grandeur, spiritual atmosphere in the town, wider roads, clean surroundings, lush greenery, abundant water and all other facilities make darshan of the lord memorable. All this was possible due to the strong will and determination of the Chief Minister to transform Yadadri into one of the top temples in the world. Without Chandrashekar Rao, this could not have become a reality, said C. Mallikarjun, a devotee who works in Mumbai and a native of Nalgonda district, who came from Mumbai to take part in reopening of the temple. Devotees heaped praises on Chief Minister for sanctioning Rs 1,200 crore for the renovation of the temple. Usually, temples are built seeking donations from people and organisations. This is for the first time that a government in the country came forward to develop a temple with its own funds. Chandrashekar Rao made Yadadri a pride of Telangana state and people. This temple will attract lakhs of pilgrims not only from Telangana but from other states and also across the globe, said K. Madhavilatha, an associate professor and a native of Warangal. Further the draft deal, discussed intensely in Tuesday's Istanbul negotiations between the Ukraine and Russian delegations and leading to a flurry of optimistic-sounding headlines that a ceasefire could be around the corner, included a demand for a formal vows not to join NATO, not to host foreign military bases or troops, and crucially not develop nuclear weapons. Ukrainian negotiator announced Kyiv's conditions in the recent negotiations pic.twitter.com/enqvP0Arb4 Michael A. Horowitz (@michaelh992) March 29, 2022 Notably absent were Russia's three earlier demands of "denazification" and "demilitarization" - which in recent days the Kremlin has seemed to back off of in official statements. The below is a break-down of what the potential deal requires... The following is from Kiev-based "Ukrainian Independent Information Agency of News" or UNIAN's transcript of the interview in English... Ukraine needs guarantees that are more solid than NATO's Article 5 Guarantees must be in the form of a treaty signed by all guarantors In the event of an aggression against Ukraine, consultations must be held within 3 days, after which guarantor states provide assistance in the form of armed forces, weapons, airspace closure. Among guarantors Ukraine envisions: Britain, China, Russia, US, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland. Temporarily guarantees will not apply to Crimea and occupied Donbass Guarantor will not oppose and will in fact help Ukraine's accession to the EU It appears there's enough momentum for Russia's top negotiator Vladimir Medinsky to say he will take the proposals for stopping the war directly to Putin. Initially it was reported that talks would continue in Istanbul into tomorrow, but that's since been denied - which actually could be a hopeful sign given both sides apparently see enough agreeable substance in the draft deal to take them back to their respective capitals. Bloomberg has since summarized that the Ukraine side "is seeking guarantees for territory that doesnt include Russian-controlled areas and that Kyiv is willing to discuss the status of occupied Crimea." Russias deputy defense minister says Moscow has decided to fundamentally cut back military activity in the direction of Kyiv and Chernigiv in order to increase mutual trust for future negotiations to agree and sign a peace deal with Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/2qDYOzAzDp max seddon (@maxseddon) March 29, 2022 Further, "Russia indicated a meeting was possible between President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy" - on the basis of the draft deal, despite a formal ceasefire not yet having been reached. Late in the day Tuesday, Russia's chief negotiator cautioned reporters that "there is still a long way to go" to reach a mutually acceptable agreement. Censored by Mr. Fish The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube. Gone is the interview with Nathaniel Philbrick on his book about George Washington. Gone is the discussion with Kai Bird on his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gone is my exploration with Professor Sam Slote from Trinity College Dublin of James Joyces Ulysses. Gone is the show with Benjamin Moser on his biography of Susan Sontag. Gone is the show with Stephen Kinzer on his book on John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. Gone are the interviews with the social critics Cornel West, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Gerald Horne, Wendy Brown, Paul Street, Gabriel Rockwell, Naomi Wolff and Slavoj Zizek. Gone are the interviews with the novelists Russell Banks and Salar Abdoh. Gone is the interview with Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge, on the case of Leonard Peltier. Gone are the interviews with economists David Harvey and Richard Wolff. Gone are the interviews with the combat veterans and West Point graduates Danny Sjursen and Eric Edstrom about our wars in the Middle East. Gone are the discussions with the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Gone are the voices of those who are being persecuted and marginalized, including the human rights attorney Steven Donziger and the political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. None of the shows I did on mass incarceration, where I interviewed those released from our prisons, are any longer on YouTube. Gone are the shows with the cartoonists Joe Sacco and Dwayne Booth. Melted into thin air, leaving not a rack behind. I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you dont. I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of Ulysses or the biographies of Susan Sontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin. Indeed, there is not one show that dealt with Russia. I was on RT because, as a critic of US imperialism, militarism, the corporate control of the two ruling parties, and especially because I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, I was blacklisted. I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Vaclav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow. Are we a more informed and better society because of this censorship? Is this a world we want to inhabit where those who know everything about us and about whom we know nothing can instantly erase us? If this happens to me, it can happen to you, to any critic anywhere who challenges the dominant narrative. And that is where we are headed as the ruling elites refuse to respond to the disenfranchisement and suffering of the working class, opting not for social and political change or the curbing of the rapacious power and obscene wealth of our oligarchic rulers, but instead imposing iron control over information, as if that will solve the mounting social unrest and vast political and social divides. The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of the money-drenched electoral system, neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, predatory capitalism, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in the U.S. Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction. What were my sins? I did not, like my former employer, The New York Times, sell you the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, peddle conspiracy theories about Donald Trump being a Russian asset, put out a ten-part podcast called the Caliphate that was a hoax, or tell you that the contents on Hunter Bidens laptop was disinformation. I did not prophesize that Joe Biden was the next FDR or that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election. This censorship is about supporting what, as I.F Stone reminded us, governments always do lie. Challenge the official lie, as I often did, and you will soon become a nonperson on digital media. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden exposed the truth about the criminal inner workings of power. Look where they are now. This censorship is one step removed from Joseph Stalins airbrushing of nonpersons such as Leon Trotsky out of official photographs. It is a destruction of our collective memory. It removes the efforts to examine our reality in ways the ruling class does not appreciate. The goal is to foster historical amnesia. If we dont know what happened in the past, we cannot make sense of the present. The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen, Hannah Arendt warned. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one liea lie which you could go on for the rest of your daysbut you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. I am not alone. YouTube regularly removes or demonetizes channels, which happened to Progressive Soapbox, without warning, usually by arguing that the content contained videos that violated YouTubes amorphous community guidelines. Status Coup, which filmed the January 6 storming of the Capital, was suspended from YouTube for advancing the false claims of election fraud. My video content, by the way, primarily consisted of book covers, quotes from passages of books and author photos, but it got disappeared anyway. The deplatformiong of voices like mine, already blocked by commercial media and marginalized with algorithms, is coupled with the pernicious campaign to funnel people back into the arms of the establishment media such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In the US, as Dorthy Parker once said about Katharine Hepburns emotional range as an actress, any policy discussion ranges from A to B. Step outside those lines and you are an outcast. This is the reason Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and I are on Substack. The Ukraine war, which I denounced as a criminal war of aggression when it began in the column War is the Greatest Evil on ScheerPost, is a sterling example. Any effort to put it into historical context, to suggest that the betrayal of agreements by the West with Moscow, which I covered as a reporter in Eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet Union, along with the expansion of NATO might have baited Russia into the conflict, is dismissed. Nuance. Complexity. Ambiguity. Historical context. Self-criticism. All are dismissed. My show, dedicated primarily to authors and their books, should have been, if we had a functioning system of public broadcasting, on PBS or NPR. But public broadcasting is as captive to corporations and the wealthy as the commercial media, indeed PBS and NPR run commercials in the guise of sponsorship acknowledgements. The last show on public broadcasting that examined power was Moyers & Company. Once Bill Moyers went off the air in 2015, no one took his place. A few decades ago, you could hear independent voices on public broadcasting, including Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, and Noam Chomsky. No more. A few decades ago, there were a variety of alternative weeklies and magazines. A few decades ago, we still had a press that, however flawed, had not rendered whole segments of the population, especially the poor and social critics, invisible. It is perhaps telling that our greatest investigative journalist, Sy Hersh, who exposed the massacre of 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers at My Lai and the torture at Abu Ghraib, has trouble publishing in the United States. I would direct you to the interview I did with Sy about the decayed state of the American media, but it no longer exists on YouTube. In 1895, a 32-year old entrepreneur in New York City bought a failing newspaper and hatched a bold plan to turn it around. The newspaper industry was cutthroat, especially in New York. There were at least 16 other daily newspapers in circulation, and there was fierce competition for readers attention. But the young entrepreneur had an idea: thrill readers with tales of death, destruction, and brutality in the Cuban War for Independence against Spain. Cuba was a Spanish colony at the time, but revolutionary forces had been fighting for independence for several years. Few people in the US really cared about Cuba. But the new publisher vowed to make them care. His name was William Randolph Hearst. And his paper, the New York Morning Journal, constantly thrust Cuba in his readers faces. Their stories were full-blown sensationalism. By early 1898, Hearsts Journal was printing outright fabrications of atrocities committed by Spanish troops in Cuba, in an effort to whip up public support for the United States to join the war. The government played along. While war crimes did not yet exist, US President William McKinley escalated tensions by accusing Spain of atrocities, saying in a speech that the civilized code of warfare has been disregarded. Then, on February 15, 1898, a US naval vessel known as the Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor off the coast of Cuba. 268 sailors died. Several investigations were conducted, and to this day there is still nothing conclusive explaining how the explosion took place. Its entirely possible that the explosion was caused by the Maines on-board fuel. But Hearst (along with many other papers) jumped to publish stories claiming the Maine was sunk by a Spanish torpedo, and they continued agitating for the US to join the war. Want to ensure you and your loved ones can survive and thrive, no matter what happens next? Download our FREE Ultimate Plan B Guide now to discover fully actionable strategies you can start putting in place right now Thanks to the effective media propaganda, most Americans were in favor of war. The newspapers had cast Spain as the evil aggressor, and its commanding general, Valeriano Weyler, was routinely called a butcher. The newspapers told Americans that the fight against Spain was a necessary one that it was a matter of moral righteousness a crusade of good against evil. They finally got their wish in April 1898 when the Spanish-American War broke out. There are a lot of similarities with the media today. The level of trust in the media is already laughably low. There was the obvious Hunter Biden laptop coverup, which most mainstream media refused to even mention during the US Presidential election in 2020. Then there were the outright lies in the Russia collusion hoax, for which the New York Times was even awarded the esteemed Pulitzer Prize. (Coincidentally, the Pulitzer is named after Joseph Pulitzer, a newspaper publisher who also fabricated lies in the late 1800s and agitated for war against Spain.) Then theres the case of Biden appointee Tracy Stone-Manning, who was nominated last year to head up the federal governments Bureau of Land Management. Stone-Manning is a former eco-terrorist who participated in violent campaigns against forestry workers in her youth. This isnt some wild conspiracy theory; Stone-Manning has admitted to wrongdoing, including sending violent threats to the US federal Forestry Service. She ultimately avoided prosecution and saved herself by ratting out her associates. But a recent Freedom of Information Act request revealed that NBC News colluded with the Biden Administration to go easy on Tracy Stone-Manning during her confirmation hearing, and whitewash over her terrorist history. This is pretty incredible Think about the media circus a few years ago when US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexually assaulting someone when he was a teenager. There was no promise from NBC News (and other mainstream propagandists) to go easy on the allegations against Justice Kavanaugh that went back 30+ years. Instead, they smeared his name and deemed him guilty. Its also noteworthy that, during Kavanaughs confirmation hearing, several protestors stormed the Capital and physically accosted United States Senators in order to prevent the Constitutional voting process from occurring. Yet NBC News declined to label those protestors domestic terrorists, or to claim that democracy was under attack because they had criminally trespassed into the Capitol. This is the same media which acted as the government mouthpiece during COVID, justifying the public health dictatorship that took over the world. This is the same media which watched cities burn in 2020 and said the protests were mostly peaceful. And, yes, this is the same media that has routinely pushed America into war. It wasnt just Spain in 1898. The United States joined the Vietnam War based on a Gulf of Tonkin skirmish with the North Vietnamese which never actually occurred. But the Johnson administration and intelligence sources said it happened, so the media reported it as fact. Then there were those supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, which the media dutifully reported without question and helped push the US into war back in 2003. Today many in the media are calling for an escalation against Russia. They want a no-fly zone. They cheer the Presidents dementia-ridden foreign policy and praise him for impromptu comments that only escalate tensions. Most of all, they force feed the war in Ukraine, 24/7, as if thats supposed to be our #1 priority. Forget about the economy, rising prices, and supply chain dysfunction and forget about conflict anywhere else in the world. Were only allowed to care about Ukraine and Putin. Historically speaking, it is not far-fetched to think the media could help push the world into a major war and one with potential nuclear ramifications. Its not inevitable, but we are closer today than any other time since at least 1962 and certainly closer than even a week ago. Thats why it is more important than ever to be prepared for whatever the world has in store for us. And that means crafting a rock solid Plan B to make sure you can respond from a position of strength, whatever crisis comes next. Following Joe Bidens unscripted blurting out that Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power, and another bizarre appearance Monday where he appeared to rely on cue cards, Senator Rand Paul warned that it is becoming a national security risk. Appearing on Fox News, Paul noted A lot of times when youre around somebody whos in cognitive decline, you find yourself trying to help them with a sentence, trying to help them complete it but we shouldnt have to do that for the commander-in-chief. Biden had to have I was not articulating a change in policy written verbatim on a notecard so he wouldnt screw it up and he still screwed it up pic.twitter.com/OvEwlHQVry Jake Schneider (@jacobkschneider) March 28, 2022 Paul continued, And, it is actually a national security risk because hes sending signals that no one in their right mind would want to send to Russia at this point. We arent trying to replace Putin in Russia. We arent trying to have regime change. Were not sending troops into Ukraine, and were not going to respond in kind with chemical weapons. The Senator urged that Biden lives in an alternate universe where he blurts out whatever he pleases then claims then way it was perceived isnt accurate. So I guess youre supposed to look the other way. But even the left-wing media is noticing these gaffes, Paul asserted. I do think that it is a real problem, and theres a humorous angle to this. But its really not funny because were worried about what hes saying, precipitating or escalating the conflict in Ukraine into a world war. Thats very serious, Paul further emphasised. Watch: Watch the latest video at foxnews.com As we noted yesterday, An NBC poll released Sunday revealed that 8 in 10 Americans say they are worried that Bidens bumbling and mishandling of the Ukraine situation will lead to a NUCLEAR WAR. In addition to declaring that Putin cannot remain in power, Biden called the Russian leader a butcher, and last also appeared to tell U.S. troops they would be deployed to the Ukraine. "He's a butcher" Biden on Putin pic.twitter.com/yvRjLqATIc Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 26, 2022 BIDEN SLIPS AND TELLS 82nd AIRBORNE THEYRE GOING TO UKRAINE?pic.twitter.com/lUiB8w2Ibk The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) March 25, 2022 When he was questioned by Fox reporter Peter Doocy Monday about the comments, Biden claimed that none of those things happened, and that nothing he said was being walked back, despite clear statements from the White House doing exactly that: Doocy: "The big things you say on the world stage keep getting walked back." Biden: "What's getting walked backed?" Biden: You told troops they are going to Ukraine, the U.S. would use a chemical weapon, and called for regime change in Russia. Biden: "None of the 3 occurred." pic.twitter.com/cwZPzANIoC Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 28, 2022 Tucker Carlson labelled Bidens persistent outbursts as dangerous and crazed recklessness, noting a gaffe is when you mispronounce somebodys name. Telling troops youre going to be sent to Ukraine, pledging the United States is going to use chemical weapons? These are not gaffes, these are something else. Yesterday, Biden said American troops have been fighting in Ukraine & more are headed to fight there. Today, Biden said the goal of U.S. policy to Russia is regime change. Recall, the media called for the 25th amendment when Trump sipped water or walked down ramps carefully. Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) March 26, 2022 The establishment media is running defense: CNN's @DonLemon defends Biden: "He did not end that speech saying that Vladimir Putin should be removed or were going ta take him out of power. He said this man should not remain in power this is a media-manufactured story," "blown out of proportion" pic.twitter.com/6gSWQvdQuF Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 28, 2022 Imagine President Trump had inexplicably told U.S. troops they were deploying to fight Russia. Really imagine it! All we'd be hearing is that he's mentally unfit and must be removed under the 25th Amendment. Joe Biden did the same thing today. But the media has his back Clint Ehrlich (@ClintEhrlich) March 26, 2022 Biden is a puppet. No one thinks he is making the decisions. Just declares war on Russia and keeps talking like nothing happened. Take the keys away https://t.co/RICcmpQ10J Metabiota Poso (@JackPosobiec) March 25, 2022 Follow on Twitter: Follow @PrisonPlanet Brand new merch now available! Get it at https://www.pjwshop.com/ ALERT! In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. We need you to sign up for our free newsletter here. Support our sponsor Turbo Force a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, we urgently need your financial support here. Osmania University students stage protest on the campus for the second consecutive day demanding quality food and drinking water in the hostels, in Hyderabad (Deepak Deshpande/DC) HYDERABAD: A group of students from Osmania University on Monday staged a protest on the campus for the second consecutive day demanding quality food and drinking water apart from accommodation, which they have allegedly been deprived of post lockdown. They warned the university management that they would continue the protests until their grievances were resolved. However, after the intervention of the registrar, the students called off the protest. The protest began at 7 am, when some students locked the main gate and blocked the road on the campus. The number of protestors swelled to about 150 by the afternoon. OU Registrar Prof P. Laxminarayana then met the students, inspected the hostel and assured that their concerns would be addressed. After this, the protesters dispersed. According to a student of Block 3 of the hostel, one of the major issues they face is lack of manpower in the mess. The mess for Block 3 caters to 700-800 students and the breakfast is served between 7.30 am and 9 am. Every morning, there is a very long queue and we have to wait for up to one-and-a-half hours to get two chapatis, as there is a shortage of food, the student claimed. Many inmates of the hostel have to attend classes at 9 am at University College of Science, Saifabad and Koti Womens College, for which buses pick them up from the hostel at 8.30 am. These students do not have the time to wait for breakfast. Students have been allegedly suffering from water issues for several weeks. Earlier this month, members of the State Human Rights Commission visited the campus to inquire about the same. A student from Block 3 said two washrooms were available for about 60 students in each wing of the hostel. We need to stand in a queue for an hour to use washrooms, and then another one hour for food. We are wasting a lot of time here, there is not enough time to study, the student said. Prof. Laxminarayana said to address the issues in the mess, he had asked the workers to prepare food in advance and pack them for students going to colleges in Koti or Saifabad, He said the shortage of washrooms was due to repair works. To address the shortage of drinking water, another tank would be installed, after which the students would get 24-hour supply of water. Hyderabad: An octogenarian had a providential escape after he was unwittingly kept overnight in a locker room of the Union Banks branch near Jubilee Hills Checkpost. V Krishna Reddy, 89, resident of Jubilee Hills, had been to the bank on Monday evening. He entered the locker room to check the deposits in his locker. A while later, unmindful of his presence, the bank staff pushed the heavy steel door closed. They locked it as usual and left the bank. The bank premises remained closed till the morning next day. He was discovered lying on the floor in the locker room on Tuesday morning when, after some fuss, the bank staff opened the locker door at 10.30 am. In the morning, one of the bank employees recalled that an old man had been allowed to go into the locker room on Monday evening. Then, the staff went to check this out. Krishna Reddy, a diabetic, was taken to a nearby hospital by the Jubilee Hills police for an urgent check-up. Later, his family came and took him home. The Jubilee Hills police said that, meanwhile, a missing person case was filed by the family. The case will now be closed. But we will book cases under Sections 336, and 342 of the IPC against the bank staff, inspector Rajasekhar Reddy said. Police said the banks assistant manager closed the locker room. On Tuesday, family members along with the police went to the bank to check if the banks CCTV cameras had any record of his movements. The banks manager, Muralimohan Reddy said he was asked by top bank officials to avoid talking to the media. Inquires revealed that the banks assistant manager, a woman, had allowed Krishna Reddy into the locker room around 4.45pm on Monday. She recalled about this on Tuesday morning when a fuss was already on. Then, the staff rushed to the locker and opened its heavy steel door only to find Krishna Reddy lying on the floor. Had she not remembered, the locker door would not have been opened today. And fortunately, she came to work today, when the nationwide bank strike was on, a bank staffer confided. Murali Mohan Reddy later told a television channel that following the general strike since Monday, most of the banks regular staff were absent and it was some alternate staff that had shut down the premises at the end of the day. What Sections 336, 342 of IPC say: 336 - Act endangering life or personal safety of others. Punishment can be imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three months, or with fine which may extend to Rs 250, or with both. 342 - Punishment for wrongful confinement. Can be imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine which may extend to Rs 1000, or with both. Agreement between Russia, Ukraine still possible at upcoming talks: Lavrov Xinhua) 09:10, March 29, 2022 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov speaks at a press conference after a tripartite meeting in Antalya, Turkey, March 10, 2022. (Xinhua/Li Zhenbei) MOSCOW, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday that it was still possible for Russia and Ukraine to reach an agreement at the upcoming negotiations. "There are still chances for an agreement," local media reported, citing Lavrov during a media interview. The foreign minister pointed out that Russia was committed to achieving a successful outcome at the upcoming consultations with Ukraine. The Russian and Ukrainian delegations will likely meet in Turkey on Tuesday, the Kremlin said Monday. The delegations have held three rounds of negotiations in person in Belarus since Feb. 28, and the fourth one started on March 14 via video conference. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) Many employees staged protests in Hyderabad and all district headquarters. (DC Image) Hyderabad: The two-day strike call given by 10 central trade unions, including Left organisations, badly impacted Central government offices on the first day across the state but it went off peacefully on Monday. Many employees staged protests in Hyderabad and all district headquarters. They are striking against the Union government's anti-people, anti-farmers and anti-employees policies. Those badly hit were public sector banks, insurance services, transport, telecom, coal, steel, fuel and postal services. At a dharna in Narayanaguda, CPM state committee member M Srinivas said "The BJP-led NDA government at the Centre is trying to privatise even profit-earning undertakings like LIC, BPCL, banks and other PSUs. The government must not buckle down to corporate companies." V. Raghunathan, general secretary of the south central zonal council of All India LIC Employees Federation, said the Union government is toeing the line of corporate giants and undermining the rights of the working class. This cannot be tolerated any longer. CPI state secretary Chada Venkat Reddy on Monday said the massive protest (dharna) wont stop until the Centre withdraws the bank's privatisation. In a protest at Bank street, organised by the All India Bank Officers Association (AIBO) and All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA), he condemned the governments "wrong policies". More than 30 crore employees are protesting against Modi government's policies. The protest was announced 30 days ago, but the government hasnt made any conversation with any labour and employees organisations, said Venkat Reddy. All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA) national secretary B.S. Rambabu said, "Two persons are ruling the nation and two others (Adani, Ambani) are buying the nation. Government should demolish the New Pension Scheme and continue the Old Pension Scheme." The City of Brandon has its sights set on developing a new city plan with a strong emphasis on green technology and preparation for climate change. Advertisement Advertise With Us The City of Brandon has its sights set on developing a new city plan with a strong emphasis on green technology and preparation for climate change. Public consultations began last month with the release of an online survey, and the next step is finding a consulting firm to help with this undertaking. SUBMITTED This poster is part of the advertising campaign promoting public engagement in the creation of a new city plan for Brandon. According to Andrew Mok, a senior planner with the city, there are three aspects to what Brandon is looking for. The city wants a consultant to create a climate action plan to make Brandon carbon neutral by 2050, research policy recommendations for the plan relating to smart cities, movement and climate change resiliency and finally, undertake a peer review of the suggested policy changes. The necessity of the new plan for the city has its origin in events that took place two years ago. In 2020, the Brandon and Area Planning District, which included the City of Brandon and the RMs of Elton and Cornwallis, disbanded. That same year, the city was also granted subdivision approval authority within its borders, becoming just the second municipality other than Winnipeg with those powers. The last time Brandon updated its city plan was in 2013. "With that situation, it is necessary at very least from a provincial regulatory perspective, for us to have our own long-term plan," Mok said. "With the timing here, theres an opportunity for us to dovetail how we deal with climate change action." CITY OF BRANDON This timeline from the City of Brandons website shows the different phases of the ongoing project to revise its development plan. The new city plan will reflect the development reality for Brandon over the next 25 to 30 years and identify policies to achieve certain targets like being carbon neutral by 2050. This means Brandon would remove an amount of CO2 equal to the amount of carbon it emits into the world, effectively having a net-zero impact on the global climate. "On the topic of climate change, the city further recognizes the need to become carbon neutral by 2050 in accordance with Canadas commitment to the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, commonly known as the Paris Accords or Paris Agreement," the tender agreement reads. "This timeframe coincides with the citys proposed City Plan 30-year timeframe. By having a climate action plan, the city will have further direction on local climate change action and mitigation efforts that will complement the overall policy direction of the City Plan." Those climate goals include reducing local greenhouse gas emissions, developing greener transportation strategies with an eye toward smart city concepts and mitigating possible impacts caused by climate change. For instance, the draft city plan expresses support for the development of wind energy systems in and around the city. "If we do adopt the city plan, it will give both city council and city administration general marching orders on how we move forward together," Mok said about elements like that. "Whatever path we take, as long as we still meet those policy obligations, thats whats important. How we get to deal with various climate change action items such as providing power to the municipality, such as waste management/waste reduction, such as a steady supply of clean drinking water, those kinds of more detailed questions will need to be worked out after we adopt the city plan." The process will also help the city update its master and secondary plans as well as its greenspace and housing strategies. For the planned peer review, Mok said it will allow for "third-party professional eyes to make sure were on the right track from a legislative and professional perspective for that document." Apart from the consultants feedback on the city plan, there will also be community engagement. Last month, the Sun reported that the city was hosting an online survey asking residents to identify their priorities and concerns with the development of a new city plan. Sonikile Tembo, a community planner working on the public engagement efforts for the city plan, told the Sun there had been an issue with residents not receiving notices in the mail advertising the online survey on time. Because of that, the end date for the survey was extended to Monday. "At this stage, weve received survey findings," Tembo said. "Weve been able to analyze them and find out what themes are coming out. Some of the themes I can tell you are coming out are issues around housing, issues around movement, active transportation, vehicular traffic and such. Theres been concerns about substance abuse, about health in different forms, public safety, climate change." Several local stakeholder groups have already met with the city regarding the new plan, and Tembo said groups who havent yet been consulted are welcome to reach out to arrange a meeting. Next week, some of the information gleaned from the survey and these stakeholder meetings will be posted for the public to look over. There will also be sign-up forms so residents can register to participate in upcoming public meetings relating to the city plan on housing, transportation and climate change. Residents who have participated in the online survey or sent feedback via email will be contacted with information on how to participate in those sessions as well. These sessions should be completed by the end of May, when another report based on the findings will be prepared and released. In June, a community celebration is scheduled to go over what has been learned with the public and to discuss what the next steps are. Ultimately, Mok said, the goal is for a final draft plan to be presented to Brandon City Council sometime next spring. Information on the project can be found online at brandon.ca/cityplan. cslark@brandonsun.com Twitter: @ColinSlark HALIFAX - Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston is distancing himself and his government from a decision by the Speaker to issue a COVID-19 exposure notice at the legislature over the weekend. Premier Tim Houston, right, addresses the speaker at the start of the spring session of the Nova Scotia legislature at Province House in Halifax on Thursday, March 24, 2022. The decision to temporarily close the Nova Scotia legislature to the public because of a confirmed case of COVID-19 has apparently sparked a disagreement between the Speaker and the premier. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan HALIFAX - Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston is distancing himself and his government from a decision by the Speaker to issue a COVID-19 exposure notice at the legislature over the weekend. In an unusual move, Houston tweeted on Monday that the decision to issue the notice and close the building to the public was made by Speaker Keith Bain alone. The premier was reacting to a memo circulated to members of the legislature on Saturday by the Speaker, warning of a COVID-19 exposure inside the building. Critics of the memo took to social media to complain of a double standard, because the province had stopped issuing COVID-19 exposure notifications to the public. Houston says there should not be two different standards for politicians and for the public. In an email, the Office of the Speaker says the decision to close the legislature to the public was temporary and was made to ensure the House of Assembly can successfully fulfil its duties. The email says that Bain, a member of the Progressive Conservatives, will not be commenting further on the matter. This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 28, 2022. The first night of competition at the 2022 Royal Manitoba Winter Fair Monday was marked by Alberta-based hunter jumpers claiming the top three spots in the Gamblers Choice event. Advertisement Advertise With Us CHELSEA KEMP/THE BRANDON SUN Karissa Enders from Calgary placed first in the hunter jumper Gambler's Choice competition with her mare, Ginny Fizz, securing 1,070 points Monday evening. The first night of competition at the 2022 Royal Manitoba Winter Fair Monday was marked by Alberta-based hunter jumpers claiming the top three spots in the Gamblers Choice event. Karissa Enders from Calgary placed first in the hunter jumper competition with her mare, Ginny Fizz, securing 1,070-points. "I wasnt riding my best, but she was super, shes a winner," Enders said. "Shes a firecracker. Shes hard to deal with sometimes on the ground, but when youre showing, shes game on. She just goes for it." Enders also placed seventh with her other horse Fort Knox WF. Seven-year-old Ginny Fizz will get anxious as they approach the gate for a ride, because she is so eager to get to jumping and scoring points, the rider said. Enders praised her mare and the relationship they have been able to build as a team. The duo has been riding together since Ginny Fizz was two years old. The team will be showing all week in the hunter jumper competitions. The Gamblers Choice show marked Enders first time at the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair. It took years of preparation to reach the elite level of riding needed for the competition. "I ride the horses six days a week. I jump them at least two or three times a week to keep them fit." She has spent her life preparing for competitions, getting in the saddle before she could even walk. Her mother Joyce Enders has been her biggest supporter, helping her get into the sport. Her family has trained around the Calgary area for years, including at Spruce Meadows. Femke Courchaine, from Red Deer, took home second in the Gamblers Choice with her horse Lemonade BF. The pair finished with 1,030 points. Courchaine, who has been competing at the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair since 2001, said it feels good to be back in the ring, because she has missed the staff, volunteers and crowds at the show. She will be showing at the fair all week with two horses she brought. "It feels really great. The barn staff and the volunteers, they just feel like family because weve been coming so much." She was unsure of what to expect for the ride in Gamblers Choice because her horse is only six years old the youngest in the competition. "Sometimes she can kind of get a little stressed out, but she was quite nice [tonight]." Lemonade is in her second year of showing. Last year the team competed in five-year-old classes and Lemonade had a baby the year before, preventing her from showing. Lemonade is still a little green in the ring but ready to compete, Courchaine said. "Were just really happy to be back." Justin Prather, from Calgary, finished third with 980 points with his horse, Ferdinand. Prather competed at the fair many years ago as a youth, and 2022 has marked his first time back in recent years. Prather said he feels like he is off to a solid start for the competition and is optimistic about the remaining days ahead. ckemp@brandonsun.com Twitter: @The_ChelseaKemp Activists from various political parties stage rasta-roko in protest against the privatization move of the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant by the central government during the two-day national general strike at Gajuwaka junction in Visakhapatnam on Monday. (DC) Visakhapatanam: Substantial participation by non-executive cadre of Visakhapatnam steel plant marked the two-day nation-wide bandh call, given by a joint forum of central trade unions in a protest against central government policies affecting workers, farmers, and people, as also against the privatization of the steel plant. The bandh, specifically in relation to the steel plant in Visakhapatnam, was however partial in Andhra Pradesh and no incident was reported. The participation of VSP employees was massive, it being a stir also against privatization. A top official of RINL, the holding company of VSP, said the company has 11,500 non-executives. Of them, 75 per cent abstained from work and participated in the strike. Sources said production has been hit. The plant was put in safe mode operations, the official said. Reports from other parts of the state said banking, shops and transport services were not affected expect for a few hours road blockade in some areas in the early hours of the day. Several trade union leaders were taken into custody and later freed. The APSRTC said it had plans to operate services from 1pm, but advanced the operations as the road blockades were removed much earlier after the arrest of trade union leaders around 11am. In Visakhapatnam city, several groups of trade unions squatted on National Highway at VS Krishna college junction, Maddilapalem and Gajuwaka from early hours, blocking the traffic. Vehicles including interstate trucks were stranded for a few hours. The police arrived at these areas and bundled all the leaders/activists into vans and dumped these men at different police stations. In Gajuwaka, tension prevailed for some time and a YSRC rally led by MLA Tippala Nagireddy and a TD rally came face to face. Tourism minister Muttamsetti Srinivasa participated in the relay hunger strike organised by trade unions near the steel plant. Several central trade unions including INTUC, AITUC, CITU took out rallies in Krishna and Guntur districts. In Vijayawada, trade union leaders took out a rally from One Town area to Lenin Centre and held a meeting denouncing the anti-people policies of the Centre. The first day strike had its partial impact with several commercial establishments remaining open. A few of them remained shut for some time. KYIV, Ukraine (AP) Russia announced Tuesday it will significantly scale back military operations near Ukraines capital and a northern city, as the outlines of a possible deal to end the grinding war came into view at the latest round of talks. Advertisement Advertise With Us Ukrainian soldiers gather near the front line in Brovary, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, March 28, 2022. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd) KYIV, Ukraine (AP) Russia announced Tuesday it will significantly scale back military operations near Ukraines capital and a northern city, as the outlines of a possible deal to end the grinding war came into view at the latest round of talks. Ukraine's delegation at the conference, held in Istanbul, laid out a framework under which the country would declare itself neutral and its security would be guaranteed by an array of other nations. Moscow's public reaction was positive, and the negotiations are expected to resume Wednesday, five weeks into what has devolved into a bloody war of attrition, with thousands dead and almost 4 million Ukrainians fleeing the country. Amid the talks, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said Moscow has decided to fundamentally ... cut back military activity in the direction of Kyiv and Chernihiv to increase mutual trust and create conditions for further negotiations. He did not immediately spell out what that would mean in practical terms. Myroslva Chernikova 54-year-old mother of 32-year-old Senior Lieutenant Pavlo Chernikov, left, mourns his death during his funeral ceremony, after being killed in action, at the Lychakiv cemetery, in Lviv, western Ukraine, Monday, March 28, 2022. The more than month-old war has killed thousands and driven more than 10 million Ukrainians from their homes including almost 4 million from their country. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty) The announcement was met with skepticism from the U.S. and others. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia cannot be trusted. Although the signals from the talks are "positive, they cant silence explosions of Russian shells, he said in a video address. Zelenskyy said it was Ukrainian troops who forced Russia's hand, adding that we shouldnt let down our guard because the invading army still "has a great potential to continue attacks against our country. Sofia Boiko, 90 years old, arrives at the Ukrainian Red Cross center in Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine, on Monday, March 28, 2022. Boiko who is traveling alone and other people evacuated from regions that have been attacked by the Russian army in Mykolaiv district. The more than month-old war has killed thousands and driven more than 10 million Ukrainians from their homes including almost 4 million from their country. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris) Ukraine will continue negotiations, he said, but officials do not trust the word of the country that continues "fighting to destroy us. While Moscow portrayed it as a goodwill gesture, its ground troops have become bogged down and taken heavy losses in their bid to seize Kyiv and other cities. Last week and again on Tuesday, the Kremlin seemed to lower its war aims, saying its main goal now is gaining control of the mostly Russian-speaking Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. U.S. President Joe Biden, asked whether the Russian announcement was a sign of progress in the talks or an attempt by Moscow to buy time to continue its assault, said: Well see. I dont read anything into it until I see what their actions are. Ukrainian servicemen walk at a damaged train station in the town of Trostsyanets, Ukraine, Monday, March 28, 2022. Trostsyanets was recently retaken by Ukrainian forces after being held by Russians since the early days of the war. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana) U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested Russian indications of a pullback could be an attempt by Moscow to deceive people and deflect attention. It wouldn't be the first time. In the tense buildup to the invasion, the Russian military announced that some units were loading equipment onto rail cars and preparing to return to their home bases after completing exercises. At the time, Putin was signaling interest in diplomacy. But 10 days later, Russia launched its invasion. Western officials say Moscow is now reinforcing troops in the Donbas in a bid to encircle Ukraines forces. And Russia's deadly siege in the south continues, with civilians trapped in the ruins of Mariupol and other bombarded cities. The latest satellite imagery from commercial provider Maxar Technologies showed hundreds of people waiting outside a grocery store amid reports of food and water shortages. Ukrainian soldiers look over the bodies of dead Russian soldiers after recent fights in the town of Trostsyanets, some 400km (250 miles) east of capital Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, March 28, 2022. The more than month-old war has killed thousands and driven more than 10 million Ukrainians from their homes including almost 4 million from their country. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) There is what Russia says and there is what Russia does, and were focused on the latter, Blinken said in Morocco. And what Russia is doing is the continued brutalization of Ukraine. Even as negotiators gathered, Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces blasted a gaping hole in a nine-story government administration building in a strike on the southern port city of Mykolaiv, killing at least 12 people, emergency authorities said. The search for more bodies in the rubble continued. Its terrible. They waited for people to go to work before striking the building, said regional governor Vitaliy Kim. I overslept. Im lucky. A woman walks past a destroyed tank in the town of Trostsyanets, Ukraine, Monday, March 28, 2022. Trostsyanets was recently retaken by Ukrainian forces after being held by Russians since the early days of the war. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana) Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. has detected small numbers of Russian ground forces moving away from the Kyiv area, but it appeared to be a repositioning of forces, not a real withdrawal. He said it was too soon to say how extensive the Russian movements may be or where the troops will be repositioned. It does not mean the threat to Kyiv is over, Kirby said. They can still inflict massive brutality on the country, including on Kyiv. He said Russian airstrikes against Kyiv continued. A resident stands next to parts of a destroyed Russian tank in the town of Trostsyanets, Ukraine, Monday, March 28, 2022. Trostsyanets was recently retaken by Ukrainian forces after being held by Russians since the early days of the war. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana) Rob Lee, a military expert at the U.S.-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, tweeted of the Russian announcement: This sounds like more of an acknowledgment of the situation around Kyiv where Russias advance has been stalled for weeks and Ukrainian forces have had recent successes. Russia doesnt have the forces to encircle the city. The meeting in Istanbul was the first time negotiators from Russia and Ukraine talked face-to-face in two weeks. Earlier talks were held in person in Belarus or by video. Among other things, the Kremlin has demanded all along that Ukraine drop any hope of joining NATO. A refugee carries a baby after fleeing the war from neighbouring Ukraine at the border crossing in Medyka, southeastern Poland, on Tuesday, March 29, 2022. The daily number of people fleeing Ukraine has fallen in recent days but border guards, aid agencies and refugees say Russia's unpredictable war offers few signs whether it's just a temporary lull or a permanent drop-off. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) Ukraines delegation offered a detailed framework for a peace deal under which a neutral Ukraine's security would be guaranteed by a group of third countries, including the U.S., Britain, France, Turkey, China and Poland, in an arrangement similar to NATOs "an attack on one is an attack on all principle. Ukraine said it would also be willing to hold talks over a 15-year period on the future of the Crimean Peninsula, seized by Russia in 2014. Vladimir Medinsky, head of the Russian delegation, said on Russian TV that the Ukrainian proposals are a step to meet us halfway, a clearly positive fact. People carry their belongings after fleeing the war from neighbouring Ukraine at the border crossing in Medyka, southeastern Poland, on Tuesday, March 29, 2022. The daily number of people fleeing Ukraine has fallen in recent days but border guards, aid agencies and refugees say Russia's unpredictable war offers few signs whether it's just a temporary lull or a permanent drop-off. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) He cautioned that the parties are still far from reaching an agreement, but said: We know now how to move further toward compromise. We arent just marking time in talks. In other developments: In what appeared to be a coordinated action to tackle Russian espionage, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Ireland and North Macedonia expelled scores of Russian diplomats. Ukrainian soldiers of the 103rd Separate Brigade of the Territorial Defense of the Armed Forces, fire their weapons, during a training exercise, at an undisclosed location, near Lviv, western Ukraine, Tuesday, March 29, 2022. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty) The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency arrived in Ukraine to try to ensure the safety of the countrys nuclear facilities. Russian forces have taken control of the decommissioned Chernobyl plant, site in 1986 of the worlds worst nuclear accident, and of the active Zaporizhzhia plant, where a building was damaged in fighting. Russia has destroyed more than 60 religious buildings across the country in just over a month of war, with most of the damage concentrated near Kyiv and in the east, Ukraines military said. In the room at the Istanbul talks was Roman Abramovich, a longtime Putin ally who has been sanctioned by Britain and the European Union. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Chelsea soccer team owner has been serving as an unofficial mediator approved by both countries. But the mystery surrounding his role has been deepened by news reports that he may have been poisoned during an earlier round of talks. Ukrainian servicemen stand in trenches at a position north of the capital Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, March 29, 2022. The first face-to-face talks in two weeks between Russia and Ukraine began Tuesday in Turkey, raising flickering hopes there could be progress toward ending a war that has ground into a bloody campaign of attrition. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda) Over the past several days, Ukrainian forces have mounted counterattacks and reclaimed ground on the outskirts of Kyiv and other areas. Ukrainian soldiers gathered in a trench for photos with Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, who said that Ukraine had retaken control of a vast majority of Irpin, a key suburb northwest of the capital that has seen heavy fighting. We defend our motherland because we have very high morale, said Syrskyi, the commander in charge of the defense of Kyiv. And because we want to win. Refugees wait in a queue, after fleeing the war from neighbouring Ukraine at the border crossing in Medyka, southeastern Poland, on Tuesday, March 29, 2022. The daily number of people fleeing Ukraine has fallen in recent days but border guards, aid agencies and refugees say Russia's unpredictable war offers few signs whether it's just a temporary lull or a permanent drop-off. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) Ukrainian forces also took back Trostyanets, south of Sumy in the northeast, after weeks of occupation that left a landscape of Russian bodies, burned and twisted tanks and charred buildings. Putins ground forces have been thwarted not just by stronger-than-expected Ukrainian resistance, but by what Western officials say are Russian tactical missteps, poor morale, shortages of food, fuel and cold weather gear, and other problems. Repeating what the military said last week, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Tuesday that liberating Donbas is now Moscows chief objective. Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, top military commander in charge of the defense of the Ukrainian capital, walks in a trench at a position north of the capital Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, March 29, 2022. The first face-to-face talks in two weeks between Russia and Ukraine began Tuesday in Turkey, raising flickering hopes there could be progress toward ending a war that has ground into a bloody campaign of attrition. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda) While that presents a possible face-saving exit strategy for Putin, it has also raised Ukrainian fears the Kremlin aims to split the country and force it to surrender a swath of its territory. ___ Karmanau reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report. ___ Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine Advertising agency Clemenger Group is moving staff back into Melbournes CBD, accelerating the citys rejuvenation after last years harsh lockdowns forced most workers to stay home. Clemenger, the first major company to move back into the city since the pandemic started, is consolidating its 900 staff from two city-fringe offices into four levels of loft-style offices in the refurbished David Jones menswear building in Bourke Street Mall. Until now, the firm was based in St Kilda Road and South Yarra. The David Jones menswear store on Bourke Street. Credit: It comes as Charter Hall and Cbus Property re-signed mining giant BHP to a seven-year lease extension covering 5000 square metres of office space in the historic front section of 171 Collins Street, a premium 19-level building they jointly own in the popular Paris end of the strip. Clemengers move, one of the biggest leasing deals of the year so far, was welcomed by Lord Mayor Sally Capp, who said it was a vote of confidence in the citys future as an economic hub. One of Australias largest cryptocurrency exchanges has sealed a deal with payments giant Mastercard, taking a step forward in eradicating cases of debanking within the countrys burgeoning crypto industry. On Tuesday, BTCMarkets - which boasts around 325,000 customers in Australia - announced that it would allow customers to buy cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum with credit or debit cards. Until this point, users had only been able to transfer money to the exchange via bank deposits. Chief executive of BTCMarkets Caroline Bowler. Credit:Elke Meitzel Chief executive Caroline Bowler told this masthead the partnership had been in the works for a number of years, and had been initially pursued by the exchange due to a large number of cryptocurrency users being cut off by the big four banks for trading or doing business in crypto - a process known as debanking. The reason why we wanted to address it was because of the issues some of our clients were experiencing in regard to debanking, she said. At the time we started these conversations with Mastercard it was very much a live issue. You could be forgiven for thinking that Will Smiths now infamous onstage slap was the first time anything shocking had happened at the Academy Awards. In less than 24 hours the story has already become part of Oscars folklore, a standalone event that will be debated and dissected until the end of time. But while Smiths slap may still be ringing in our ears, its really just the latest in a long history of shocking and extraordinary Oscar moments. 1973: Sacheen Littlefeather refuses an Oscar on Marlon Brandos behalf Arguably one of the most memorable moments in Oscars history, it was 1973 when Marlon Brando won best actor for his role in The Godfather. Instead of accepting the award, Brando was a no show, sending Native American actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather in his place. People often tell Kylie Moore-Gilbert that if they went through what she went through 804 days in an Iranian prison on bogus espionage charges they wouldnt have survived. And I say, Yes, you would have, because you have no choice. You find reserves of inner strength that you never knew you had, says Moore-Gilbert, the Middle Eastern studies academic who spent more than two years in prison between 2018 and 2020 and has written a book, The Uncaged Sky, about her ordeal. Ive seen dozens of others survive even worse than what was done to me. Good Weekend senior writer Jane Cadzow, who was given the first interview with Moore-Gilbert for our recent cover story, Prisoner 97029, says the complete isolation appeared to be one of the hardest things for Moore-Gilbert to have had to endure. If you think nobody knows whats happening to you, thats soul-destroying, says Cadzow. And its a tried and true technique of interrogators to say to the person theyre interrogating, Nobody knows youre here. Nobody cares about you. How do you keep up your spirits and your hope when youre told that? The coronial inquest into the deaths of Hannah Clarke and her three children has explored whether there was a missed opportunity to jail their killer 10 days before the fatal attack. Ms Clarkes estranged husband Rowan Baxter, 42, was charged on February 9, 2020, with assaulting her but he was not processed through the watchhouse, and he was granted immediate bail. Ms Clarke, 31, and her children Aaliyah, 6, Laianah, 4, and son Trey, 3 died after Baxter doused the inside of the familys SUV in petrol and ignited it in Camp Hill on February 19, 2020. On February 9, 2020, Senior Constable Justin Kersey, a constable at the time, had a chance meeting with Baxter in Westfield Carindale after a shopper reported Baxter acting suspiciously. It was two years into the construction of their luxury $9.58 million Melbourne apartment that developer JD Group told Nina and Walter Ripani that it couldnt build the off-the-plan unit it had promised. The couple bought into the opulent Victoriana development on Queens Road after visiting a showroom and being impressed by JD Groups artistic renderings showing a large opening connecting indoor and outdoor space. The artistic rendering of the Victoriana development that drew in Nina and Walter Ripani. But Federal Court Justice Paul Anastassiou found this month that Century Legend which traded as JD Group had been deliberately misleading and deceptive, and that it had previously received advice from architects that the artistic render it was using to sell the off-plan apartment, known as the hero render, was impossible to build. When you walked into the showroom, it was larger than life, and we were basically told we could have that apartment, and we were totally hooked, Ms Ripani said. Jobs in Aboriginal land management will be doubled under an expansion of the Indigenous ranger program, which received a $636 million commitment in the federal budget to create 1000 full-time equivalent workers. Indigenous rangers are employed by the federal government to carry out various caring for Country activities, from protecting marine turtles from feral predators when they lay eggs, to monitoring illegal fishing and conducting low-intensity burns to regenerate natural habitat. Ranger Aaron Morgan at the Budj Bim Indigenous Protection Area inspects a fish trap at Lake Condah. Credit:Rodney Dekker. Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt said the investment in Aboriginal people would create jobs, grow skills and unlock economic potential. The Morrison government has embarked on one of the most ambitious Indigenous policy reform agendas, focusing on empowering Indigenous Australians, creating jobs, building skills and unlocking the economic potential of Indigenous land, he said. It would take about 70 minutes to travel from Brisbane to Maroochydore by train under the revised $3.2 billion plan partly funded in Tuesday nights federal budget. Four years ago, under a much-hyped high-speed rail dream, it was thought spectators at the 2032 Olympics would travel from Brisbane to the Sunshine Coast in just 45 minutes by train. The new central business district at Maroochydore is the destination for the passenger rail from Beerwah. Credit:Sunshine Coast Council Not any more. Timing, and budget, appear to have settled on the slower option, even if stakeholders agree rail upgrades are needed to support the growing south-east corner. Maroochydore in 2032 will be the business and retail hub of the Sunshine Coast and people might be travelling there to see the early rounds of the Olympic basketball, some soccer or the marathon. Melbournes population declined by 60,500 people in a single year, more than any other Australian capital city, as international students flew home and some residents left the locked-down city for regional areas. The Australian Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday released population data for the 2020-21 financial year, which showed greater Melbourne had a 1.2 per cent drop in residents to about 5.1 million people. Swanston Street in Melbournes CBD on Tuesday. Credit:Chris Hopkins Sydneys population also fell, but only by a comparatively modest 5150 people, or 0.1 per cent of its population. The population of both Brisbane and Perth grew by almost 1 per cent. The biggest drag on Melbournes population was the loss of international students and working holidaymakers, with 54,367 people moving overseas who were not replaced by new arrivals. Singapore: A mentally impaired Malaysian man has lost his high-profile appeal against execution in Singapore and could be hanged within days. Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, 32, had attracted worldwide coverage of his bid to avoid the death penalty in the city state for smuggling 42.72 grams of heroin from Malaysia in 2009. Nagaenthran Dharmalingam pictured with his nephew. Virgin Group founder and billionaire Richard Branson and Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob had joined rights groups in calling for the prisoner to be spared capital punishment because of his IQ of 69. However, on Tuesday a five-judge panel in Singapores top court, the Court of Appeal, rejected Nagaenthrans bid and an attempt by his legal team to seek an independent psychiatric assessment. Mykolaiv: Ukraine has reacted with scepticism to Russias promise in the latest talks to scale down military operations around Kyiv and other cities. Some Western countries said they expected Moscow to intensify its offensive in other parts of the country. A Russian rocket hit the regional administration building in the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv, killing at least seven people and wounding 22, authorities said, as peace talks were held in Istanbul. Eighteen of the wounded were pulled from the rubble by rescue workers, the emergencies service said in an online post. The regional government headquarters of Mykolaiv, Ukraine, following a Russian attack, on Tuesday. Credit:AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris The blast occurred while Kyiv proposed adopting neutral status, in confidence-building steps meant as signs of progress towards negotiating peace. The talks took place in an Istanbul palace more than a month into the largest attack on a European nation since World War II that has killed or injured thousands, forced nearly 4 million to flee abroad and pummelled Russias economy with sanctions. Washington: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should resign after it emerged that his wife had pressed the Trump White House in text messages to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. If not, his failure to disclose income from right-wing organisations, recuse himself from matters involving his wife, and his vote to block the January 6th commission from key information must be investigated and could serve as grounds for impeachment, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Tuesaday, Washington-time. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to resign. Credit:AP Ocasio-Cortezs call for Thomas to resign - as well as her raising the prospect an impeachment effort - goes further than most other Democrats have in their demands for Thomas to recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 election or the January 6, 2021, insurrection after certain texts from his wife came to light last week. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar also has said Thomas should be impeached. A new centre for engineering biology will build on Bristols success in synthetic biology and accelerate translation of its pioneering research to address global challenges and boost the UKs bioeconomy. By applying engineering principles to living systems, engineering biology aims to solve some of the worlds most pressing challenges in health, food security, and the environment. The Bristol Centre for Engineering Biology, BrisEngBio, brings together scientists from a wide range of disciplines from biology and chemistry to data science and systems engineering. Partnering with deep tech incubator, Science Creates and Oracle for Research, the aim is to develop fundamental research discoveries into commercially viable applications that benefit people and the planet. BrisEngBio is the evolution of the UKRI-funded Synthetic Biology Research Centre, BrisSynBio, which published more than 325 research papers, enabled the spin-out of eight biotech companies, and leveraged additional research funding of over 90M. BrisEngBio embodies the same spirit of discovery and entrepreneurship that made BrisSynBio one of the countrys most academically and commercially successful centres for synthetic biology. Through this, we have already demonstrated that our fundamental research discoveries can be made commercially relevant. Now, through BrisEngBio, we are putting the ecosystem in place to really accelerate both discovery science and its translation. BrisEngBios early-career researchers will be honorary members of Science Creates, and through this they will benefit from a bespoke training and mentoring programme in innovation and commercialisation, said Professor Dek Woolfson, Principal Investigator and Director of BrisEngBio. Its been fantastic to work with many of the spin-out companies that came from BrisSynBio through Science Creates, with Science Creates Ventures having led investment rounds totalling 7.5 million and directly invested in two of those companies Imophoron and Cytoseek. We look forward to building on those successes, continuing our partnership with the University, and enabling more of these important discoveries to be translated for global good, said Dr Harry Destecroix from Science Creates. Synthetic and engineering biology has enormous potential to address some of the major global challenges that we face today. For example, in healthcare, energy and food security. But this requires input from all areas of science. BrisEngBio is a truly multidisciplinary venture, involving 55 University of Bristol academics from 11 Schools across four Faculties, and three Research Institutes, said Professor Woolfson. Initial UKRI funding of 1.5M will support 12 research projects and early career researchers over two years. BrisEngBio will cross disciplines to develop truly novel research such as hijacking bacterial transport as an antimicrobial strategy; identifying novel natural products for drug discovery; and using machine learning to predict self-healing properties of biohybrid materials. Aligned with the UK Governments National Engineering Biology Programme (NEBP), the centre promises to strengthen the UKs position as an international leader in biotechnology. Co-Investigator Dr Thomas Gorochowski said: BrisSynBio had unprecedented success in funding and nurturing the fundamental science behind synthetic biology. It is critical that centres like ours set the research agenda and help maintain the UKs position at the forefront of synthetic biology. BrisEngBio will provide the ecosystem to drive translation of new discoveries into commercially viable and truly world-leading engineering biology. Collaborating with Oracle for Research, BrisEngBio will utilise advanced cloud computing to realise data-driven design that combines academic and industry expertise in data science, machine learning, and multi-scale modelling. Alison Derbenwick Miller, Vice President, Oracle for Research, said: We are delighted that Oracle Cloud technology can support next-generation discovery and innovation at the new Bristol Centre for Engineering Biology (BrisEngBio). Through our collaboration, Oracle for Research will continue to support University of Bristol projects that drive real change through discovery and accelerate important research. Co-Investigator Dr Lucia Marucci said: This is such an exciting time to be working at the interface of the natural sciences and engineering. We have seen through the pandemic what impact synthetic biology can have on our ability to develop vaccines and treatments. At BrisEngBio, we will nurture early career researchers and help them transition their research from scientific discovery to solutions that are both commercially viable and have the potential to address some of our most pressing global challenges. Professor Wolfson said: I am delighted and excited by the continued support from UKRI and Government for the important area of synthetic biology. The new centre will allow us to translate our discoveries in fundamental synthetic biology into cutting edge technologies with significant impact locally, nationally and internationally, and across healthcare, the bioeconomy and environment." Latest News 24 lenders raise interest rates Read the full list here Clients seek advice on interest rate rise City brokers field many enquiries Broker aggregator National Mortgage Brokers (nMB) has praised the federal governments decision to extend the New Home Guarantee Scheme, allowing thousands more people to access the property market. The announcement to boost the scheme comes ahead of the 2022 Federal Budget to be outlined on Tuesday night. nMB managing director Gerald Foley (pictured) said brokers would benefit from the revamped scheme. Being able to provide a broader range of solutions to more borrowers will help brokers assist more customers, Foley said. Based on broker market share, you can expect two-thirds of applicants will choose a broker. Having brokers being able to provide loans under the scheme is very important as many of these borrowers will need the extra time, choice, and support brokers provide. The government initiative supports eligible first home buyers to purchase their first home sooner and has been extended to June 30, 2022, with an additional 10,000 places available. The program currently offers 35,000 places per year under the First Home Guarantee (previously the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme) and allows people to place a 5% deposit without paying lenders mortgage insurance. The lender can guarantee a maximum balance amount of 15% of the value of the property which is not considered a cash payment or deposit for a home loan. Read more: First Home Loan scheme enters new phase Ahead of the Federal Budget announcement, Foley said a sitting government delivering its last budget before the election and in such turbulent times globally meant an interesting balancing act to keep voters happy. It feels like we will see a big spending budget with a focus on infrastructure and jobs to bring us out of the past few years slowdown, and maybe even a few old-fashioned cash hand-outs, he said. The flow-on to increased demand for spending, jobs and services will be good for brokers. Two new government schemes will also be introduced to help Australian home buyers. The Family Home Guarantee Scheme will offer 5,000 places per year to single parents to place a 2% deposit on a property. The Regional Home Guarantee scheme will offer 10,000 places per year and is designed to encourage construction outside of capital cities. It will be available to first home buyers, people who have not owned property within the last five years, and permanent residents. Eligible New Home Guarantee properties include newly constructed dwellings, off-the-plan dwellings, house and land packages, and land and a separate contract to build a new home. Depending on which type of home is being built or purchased, different timeframes apply for the clients place on the scheme. Below are the price caps for capital cities, large regional centres, and regional areas. The has concluded financing for the first phase of project by raising Rs 12,770-crore loan from the State Bank of India. The Group announced the execution of financing documents on Tuesday. SBI has underwritten the entire debt requirement of Rs 12,770 crore for the airport project, the Group said in a press release. The took over the Navi Mumbai airport project following its acquisition of Mumbai International Airport Limited last July. At that time the Group had said it would achieve financial closure for the Navi Mumbai airport in three months. It plans to commission the airport in 2024. The Adani Groups focus is to create and provide best-in-class airport infrastructure and allied services to the consumer, said Jeet Adani, Director, Limited. We aim to converge Indias biggest cities with other surrounding cities and towns in a hub and spoke model. Given the central role airports will play in the future, we intend to develop an economic ecosystem that has airports and airport users at its core. With this facility from the SBI, we have moved a step closer to providing Mumbai with another landmark utility, he added. A high-profile eight-member jury to select the winners of Business Standard Annual Awards for Corporate Excellence 2021 met virtually late last week and picked the best of . The jury was chaired by Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla and included JSW Group Chairman Sajjan Jindal, KKR India Senior Advisor Sanjay Nayar, AZB & Partners Founder and Managing Partner Zia Mody, EY India Chairman Rajiv Memani, McKinsey & Company Senior Partner Noshir Kaka, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas Managing Partner Cyril Shroff, and Bain Capital Private Equity Chairman Amit Chandra. The jury had rich, open, and extensive deliberations to shortlist the winners this year. Almost every category had very high-quality nominees, and the diverse experience of the jury came to the fore as we selected the winners. The jury process was thorough and stimulating, and it was backed by the analytical rigour of the BS team. The range of the winners also reveals the critical role played by the pharma and health care sector over the last two years, Birla said. My heartiest congratulations to all the winners. Several names came up in the course of discussion for these coveted awards. But what tilted the scales in favour of the winners was the confidence of the jury in their business models, which weathered the severe pandemic storm, and the disruptions and innovations they have brought in their respective industries. Infosys Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Managing Director (MD) Salil Parekh was selected CEO of the Year for the extraordinary turnaround and outperformance of the IT major. Ciplas outstanding performance and contribution to the health care sector helped it bag the Company of the Year award. Bharat Electronics was chosen Star PSU of the Year; Procter & Gamble Hygiene & Health Care Star MNC; Dr Lal PathLabs Star SME; and Zerodha Broking bagged the Start-up of the Year award. The jury was unanimous in their choice of Prathap C Reddy, founder and chairman of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise, as the winner of the Lifetime Achievement award. As jury chairman, Birla started the deliberations by asking the jury members to disclose conflict of interest, if any, with the shortlisted candidates. The jury was earlier provided a list of based on their financial performance, compiled by the BS Research Bureau, to name the award winners in the seven categories. Birla set the tone of the meeting by stating upfront that apart from the financial data, due weight should be given to strong ethical attributes, in addition to a long-term business vision in a year that saw extraordinary challenges and disrupted established business models overnight. Contribution to society during the Covid pandemic; environmental, social, governance (ESG) standards; steering the ship during a crisis; and consistent performance were the buzzwords that figured prominently during the jury deliberations. Some jury members also pointed out the exemplary contribution of unlisted to the Indian economy but due to lack of financial data in the public domain, they could not be considered for the awards. Jindal, who won the award in 2017 and joined the meeting from London, was of the opinion that a companys consistent performance during the pandemic year should be kept in mind in selecting the winners. Outstanding achievements like those of Parekh and Cipla can hardly go unnoticed, when a distinguished jury comprising the heads of Indias two leading conglomerates, two leading private equity funds, two global marquee management consultancy organisations, and two top legal eagles meet to decide the winners of the awards for corporate excellence for the financial year ended March 2021 -- one of the worst periods for across the world due to the pandemic and several lockdowns induced by it. As the nation was hit by the pandemic, like the rest of Corporate India, Infosys changed its business model overnight and asked its employees to work from home, keeping in mind the safety of the workforce. Indias second-largest IT services provider reported revenues of $13.56 billion in 2020-21. In rupee terms, they came to more than Rs 1 trillion in 2020-21, a year-on-year growth rate of 10.7 per cent, while net profit grew faster -- by 16.6 per cent -- year-on-year to Rs 19,351 crore. As Infosys has seen a sharp turnaround in performance and beaten peers like Tata Consultancy Services in growth, its market valuation, now over Rs 7.88 trillion, has clocked a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 40 per cent over the past three years. Over a years period, the same is up about 48 per cent. Under Parekh, who became CEO and MD in FY18 amid turbulent times, Infosys has pivoted its growth strategy on three pillars -- the agile digital business, energising the core, and reskilling and localisation. In all these areas, it has progressed well. Since his appointment, Parekh has not looked back as Infosys bagged new orders of billions of dollars and gained the confidence of its investors, clients, employees, its board, and other stakeholders. The deliberations on CEO of the Year were quite evolved and there were quite a few candidates. Salil came out as the consensual choice due to very, very strong performance since he took the reins. And as we all know, he took over as Infosys CEO at a very tricky time, Nayar said. Mumbai-headquartered Cipla is the third-largest pharmaceutical company in India, the third-largest over-the-counter (OTC) player in South Africa, the eighth largest by prescription in the US, and the second-largest Indian exporter to the emerging markets. Established in 1935, Ciplas revenues for 2020-21 grew 11.8 per cent to Rs 19,160 crore, while profit after tax (PAT) jumped 55.5 per cent to Rs 2,405 crore. Between FY18 and FY21, Ciplas revenues clocked a CAGR of 8.1 per cent, and PAT grew by 19.5 per cent annually. The company, which has seen a generational change in its leadership, draws 40 per cent of its revenues from India and 21 per cent from the US market. The South Africa region, emerging markets, and Europe contribute 18 per cent, 10 per cent, and 5 per cent, respectively. On selecting Cipla as the Company of the Year, Shroff said the performance had been outstanding and there were several other interesting aspects as well in view of the contribution to the health care sector, particularly during the pandemic. The fact that the generational transition was so smooth, so it was quite an iconic performance and it was a pleasure for the jury to select Cipla, Shroff said. ALSO READ: BS Awards for Corporate Excellence 2021: Cipla's Samina Hamied lauds team effort All jury members agreed that while financial ratios were important for making the first cut, equal importance had to be given to individuals who focused on innovation and built institutions when challenges in the external environment were severe due to restrictions imposed by the governments to control the pandemic. The jury discussed several outstanding individuals who have left a deep and lasting impact on Indias corporate history, but was unanimous in their choice of Prathap C Reddy, founder of Apollo Hospitals, as winner of the Lifetime Achievement award. We chose Prathap Reddy, considering the creditable work done by him in the space of health care, especially during the time of the pandemic. He seemed to have a very good succession in place and the company showed good numbers, Birla said. The jury recognised that Reddy, 89, is a trailblazer not only in the world of health care but also as a philanthropist. He set up Apollo Hospitals in 1983, Indias first corporate chain of hospitals, and introduced world-class health care across the country. Today, the company has a market valuation of almost Rs 67,000 crore. Reddy was conferred the Padma Vibhushan in 2010 -- the second-highest civilian award in India. The jury debated several candidates for the Start-up of the Year award. After a long discussion, Zerodha, with its profit-making business model, was selected. There were many exciting choices and eventually we all settled on Zerodha, which is a pioneer in innovation on multiple fronts like introducing flat fees and has gone from strength to strength, Kaka said. On Star PSU of the Year, the jury felt the candidate should show outstanding financial metrics, apart from facing competition from the private sector besides its peers. After a discussion on several companies, it zeroed in on Bharat Electronics. The company was a unanimous choice of the jury due to consistent performance on various financial metrics -- be it sales growth, or profit growth. All this leading to a significant increase in the market valuation over the last three years and the market recognising the fact that they (Bharat Electronics) have tremendous potential, Chandra said. For the Star MNC award, the jury selected Procter & Gamble Hygiene & Health Care, based on its sales and profits, and notably the innovations it has brought about, helping the company sustain its lead in the feminine hygiene industry. The jury selected P&G Hygiene for its consistent performance and very strong financial metrics. They have guarded their market share very tightly despite many people (companies) trying to get into that segment, Memani said. On selecting Dr Lal PathLabs as the Star SME of the Year, Mody said the company stood out for its consistency and brand recognition during the Covid times. The companys sales grew by almost 19 per cent and net profit surged over 29 per cent in 2020-21, over the previous year. The three-year CAGR in the two metrics is 14.4 per cent and 19.5 per cent, respectively. An eight-member jury selected the winners of the Business Standard Annual Awards for Corporate Excellence 2021, and Mumbai-headquarterd Cipla was chosen as the Company of the Year by the stellar jury. Upon receiving the award, Samina Hamied, executive vice-chairperson, Cipla credited her team for the top-notch performance of the drug major. Hamied said, "We at Cipla are humbled to receive the Business Standard, Company of the year award. This recognition is a testament to our Global CEO & MD, Umang Vohra who has been instrumental in transforming Cipla to a global healthcare organisation with his innovative and growth mindset coupled with a purpose-led approach. Umang has been spearheading the organisation to chart new paths, scale new heights, leading from the front in the wake of the pandemic and upholding Cipla's purpose of Caring for Life. Im truly grateful for this incredible partnership built on the foundation of trust and care." Mumbai-headquartered Cipla is the third-largest pharmaceutical company in India, the third-largest over-the-counter (OTC) player in South Africa, the eighth largest by prescription in the US, and the second-largest Indian exporter to the emerging markets.Established in 1935, Ciplas revenues for 2020-21 grew 11.8 per cent to Rs 19,160 crore, while profit after tax (PAT) jumped 55.5 per cent to Rs 2,405 crore. Between FY18 and FY21, Ciplas revenues clocked a CAGR of 8.1 per cent, and PAT grew by 19.5 per cent annually. The company, which has seen a generational change in its leadership, draws 40 per cent of its revenues from India and 21 per cent from the US market. The South Africa region, emerging markets, and Europe contribute 18 per cent, 10 per cent, and 5 per cent, respectively. The jury was chaired by Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla and included JSW Group Chairman Sajjan Jindal, KKR India Senior Advisor Sanjay Nayar, AZB & Partners Founder and Managing Partner Zia Mody, EY India Chairman Rajiv Memani, McKinsey & Company Senior Partner Noshir Kaka, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas Managing Partner Cyril Shroff, and Bain Capital Private Equity Chairman Amit Chandra. On selecting Cipla as the Company of the Year, Shroff said the performance had been outstanding and there were several other interesting aspects as well in view of the contribution to the health care sector, particularly during the pandemic. The fact that the generational transition was so smooth, so it was quite an iconic performance and it was a pleasure for the jury to select Cipla, Shroff said. All jury members agreed that while financial ratios were important for making the first cut, equal importance had to be given to individuals who focused on innovation and built institutions when challenges in the external environment were severe due to restrictions imposed by the governments to control the pandemic. It is not often that a start-up raises six times of its total fundraise in the previous six years, and across multiple rounds, at one go. But that is exactly what has happened with D2C start-up mCaffeine which makes coffee-based beauty and personal care products. Founded in 2016, the company had attracted a cumulative of Rs 60 crore through successive rounds of over the years. Now, it has raised Rs 240 crore at a valuation of Rs 1,000 crore in a round led by Paragon Partners, a Mumbai-based private equity firm. According to the company, Marico chairman Harsh Mariwala and former Reliance Capital executive Madhusudan Kela have also bet their money on the company in the Series C . We have grown to Rs 250 crore of annual revenue rate (ARR) in a very capital efficient manner, unlike many other D2C brands out there. Now, the goal is to hit Rs 1,000 crore in ARR in the next couple of years, said Tarun Sharma, CEO and co-founder of mCaffeine. The company has a plan with four pillars adding up to 20 new products to its armoury of 55 products; aggressive expansion in 12 international markets like the US, UAE and parts of Europe; expanding the domestic footprint by doubling its presence in general trade and modern trade stores; and acquiring other D2C brands. Investors say that a key drawback with many D2C brands is that they are not D2C enough meaning, their sales mainly happen through channels like e-commerce marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart or shelves of offline stores. Sharma contends that mCaffeine does not have such a problem while 46 per cent of the sales happen on the mCaffeine website, 44 per cent is accounted for by e-commerce marketplaces and 10 per cent through offline stores. Although it is a good mix, it is not ideal as valuation gets impacted if an online brand is too dependent on third party distribution. Typically, the valuation matrix of D2C brands is this 2X weightage on revenue from physical channels, 3X weightage on revenue from e-commerce marketplaces and 5X for pureplay D2C sales via website or app, said a venture capital investor in consumer brands. In a sense, all of this boils down to capital efficiency of reaching the end consumer, he added. However, Sharma of mCaffeine still has his eye on the ball in terms of judicious utilisation of cash. The reason we are not going ahead and launching our own retail stores is that such a thing requires a lot of hands and legs. We know that India has 50 lakh retail stores already, of which we are currently present in 5,000. There is a lot more we can expand before setting up our own brick and mortar storefronts, he explained. Backed up by gross margins of around 70 per cent, which is top of the bracket for the beauty and personal care segment, the company is on the path to profitability as it looks to prepare for a public listing in the next few years. We are immensely profitable at the unit economics level even as we invest in things like marketing and technology to grow at a faster pace, said Sharma. According to him, the metric that can make or break a D2C company is the revenue per product and for mCaffeine the figure is Rs 7 crore -10 crore within a year of a products launch. One of the factors that has helped mCaffeine is its singular focus on millennials and GenZs and as such its products are generally priced in the range of Rs 199 - Rs 699, playing in the buffer zone between mass market and premium. While more than 51 per cent of its sales are from customers in the 18-25 years-old age bracket, around 26 per cent is accounted for by those in the 25-30 years age bracket. The thing about the younger crowd is you do not have to optimise for different geographies. Millennials have the same aspirations and tastes regardless of which city or state they reside in, said Sharma. The on Tuesday sealed a contract with state-run Ltd for the development of an electronic warfare equipment for the Indian Air Force at a cost of Rs 1,109 crore. The ministry described the contract for the development of the Instrumented Electronic Warfare Range (IEWR) as a significant step toward enhancing the capabilities of the IAF to prepare for future warfare. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) of India and Ltd, Hyderabad signed a contract for Instrumented Electronic Warfare Range (IEWR) for the Indian Air Force, here today, the ministry said. The contract is a significant step towards enhancing the capabilities of the IAF to prepare for future warfare. The overall cost of the contract is estimated to be Rs 1,109 crore, it said in a statement. The ministry said the IEWR will be used to test and evaluate airborne electronic warfare (EW) equipment and validate their deployment in an operational scenario. The project essentially embodies the spirit of Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) and will help facilitate realising the journey towards self-reliance, it said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor The resolution from the is expected at Rs 61,000 crore of the total debt of Rs 99,355 crore, which is almost 62 per cent, said Uday Kotak, who was appointed the non-executive chairman of the company in October 2018 by the government after superseding the board at that time. The resolution process of IL&FS started three and half years ago after a new management was appointed by the government. Kotaks term as non-executive chairman in IL&FS will end on April 2, after which managing director CS Rajan will take charge as chaiman and managing director. The ministry of corporate affairs has appointed Rajan as CMD for six months, with effect from April 3. About Rs 21,000 crore of debt has been discharged by way of asset monetisation and debt repayment with public sector lenders being major beneficiaries. I am happy to say that the maximum money which is being returned is to public sector banks, said while addressing the media. I want to credit the public sector banks, who are normally at the receiving end in most cases, for being smarter. They lent primarily at the SPVs, against security of the assets. They wanted to see the projects, they wanted to see the cash flows, he said. In addition, the group has nearly Rs 20,000 crore of cash and InvIT unit balance, including Rs 16,000 crore to be distributed to creditors by way of interim distribution post judicial approval. Resolution for another Rs 14,000 crore of debt has been filed with the courts, of which Rs 7,500 crore has been approved and transaction closure is underway. The debt addressed to date (Rs 55,000 crore) represents over 90 per cent of the overall estimated resolution value. Resolution of remaining Rs 6,000 crore debt will move into FY23, the company said in a statement. said the recovery estimates are conservative and that there is a chance that the final recovery is higher than the current estimates. The overall resolution estimate of 62 per cent is double the average recovery of 31 per cent under IBC, according to its December newsletter. This has been largely possible due to the continued commitment of the New Board and the Management to preserve value in assets of national importance and maintaining going concern status, IL&FS, which continues to service debt of Rs 1,000 crore across companies, said. Of the 347 entities under as of October 2018, 246 entities stand resolved, leaving 101 for the next financial year. IL&FS also said an application has been filed with NCLAT for undertaking interim distribution of Rs 16,000 crore of cash and InvIT units available across the group. Over 75 per cent of this would be distributed to creditors of three large holding IL&FS, IFIN and ITNL which have a large base of public fund creditors. This has been made possible on account of IL&FS resolution framework and the underlying distribution formula, the statement said. On the three learnings from the resolution process, said, We need to get cracking on getting our judicial process to move much faster. It is a very serious challenge for the development of business in our country. He also said sovereign governments, particularly states, need to respect contracts. Cannot happen that you sign a contract and if it doesnt suit you, you dont pay up and have the counterparty running around to collect legitimate dues, Kotak said. On the core area of group resolution, I dont think we have good legal answers to it and we are still evolving. We need to get that much faster. IL&FS is a case study of how we think about the future of structures regulation, governance and how we build a resolution framework in areas that are no mans land, he added. Iconic BKC building to be sold to Brookfield The iconic IL&FS building in Bandra-Kurla Complex will be sold to Canadian investment firm Brookfield Asset Management for Rs 1,080 crore, at Rs 29,000 per square feet. The sale is a part of the resolution process of the that started in October 2018. The IL&FS Financial Centre was one of the early buildings in the business district of BKC. The deal, which is awaiting nod from NCLT, is part of IL&FS incremental resolution of Rs 2,700 crore since November 2021. The incremental resolution of over Rs 2,700 crore... comprises Rs 1,080 crore from sale of IL&FS Headquarters (TIFC) in BKC Mumbai, Rs 900 crore under Khed Sinnar claim settlement with NHAI, Rs 230 crore from settlement of IFINs non-performing loan accounts and Rs 520 crore from other recoveries, the company said. Disclosure: Entities controlled by the Kotak family have a significant holding in Business Standard Pvt Ltd India's has sold at least one cargo of Russian Sokol oil to India refiners and Corp after failing to draw interest in a tender earlier this month, sources familiar with the matter said. Indian are snapping up Russian oil as it is available at a deep discounts after some and countries shunned purchases from Moscow due to sanctions against Russia for its Ukraine invasion. India, the world's third-biggest oil consumer and importer, has not banned Russian oil imports. ONGC Videsh, the overseas investment arm of Oil and Natural Gas Corp, has a stake in Russia's Sakhalin-1 project and sells its share of the oil from the project through tenders. In the tender earlier in March, ONGC Videsh did not get any bids for the Sokol crude oil cargo for May loading. The sources said HPCL and BPCL had been able to offer a discounted price for the cargo. This marks the first purchase of Sokol crude by HPCL. BPCL had previously purchased the grade in 2016. The two refiners will pay ONGC in rupees, the sources added. One of the sources said ONGC Videsh will look at selling more cargos to Indian refiners if there is no interest from overseas buyers. ONGC Videsh, HPCL and BPCL did not respond to Reuters emails seeking comment. Western sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine have hit Russian oil sales, making it possible for Indian and Chinese refiners to buy Russian Urals crude at a deep discount. India has called for an end to violence in Ukraine but refrained from outright condemnation of Russia, with which it has long-standing political and security ties. Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on what he calls a "special military operation" to demilitarise and "denazify" Ukraine. Ukraine and the West say Putin launched an unprovoked war of aggression. (Reporting by Nidhi Verma. Editing by Jane Merriman) (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Thousands of workers of state-owned and boycotted work for a second day on Tuesday as part of the nationwide strike, affecting steel production and mining operations, a leader said. Rajesh Sandhu, Secretary of Sanyukt Khadaan Mazdoor Sangh said all non-executive workers have boycotted work to join the two-day nationwide strike which will end on Wednesday morning. "Intensifying their protest against government policies, workers stopped state transport buses in Chhattisgarh for about six hours from 5 a.m," Sandhu said adding NMDC would incur a loss of about Rs 200 crore due to the protest. Over 10,000 non-executive employees of the company are observing the protest at NMDC mines and offices in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Telangana, Sandhu said. J Ayodhya Ram, the President of the Steel Plant Employees (CITU), said workers at the plant in Visakhapatnam did not report for work on Tuesday as well. Around 8,000 non-executive Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited (RINL) workers out of 11,000 are taking part in the ongoing nationwide strike called by central trade unions. He further said production has been affected at the unit as only one furnace out of three is functional at the plant in Visakhapatnam. One was already under maintenance, the second one has been shut down as a precautionary measure. In a statement, Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) said, "There was no impact of the strike on its production as the attendance at all its units was normal." As many as 10 central trade unions on Monday began a two-day nationwide strike to protest against the government's alleged wrong policies that are affecting farmers, workers and the general public. The strike notices have been given by the unions in various sectors, such as coal, steel, oil, telecom, postal, income tax, copper, banks, and insurance. SAIL and are steel making under the Ministry of Steel. NMDC is the country's largest iron ore mining company under the ministry. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Baba Ramdev-led Patanjali group's Industries on Tuesday said it has rescheduled its board meeting on March 31 to fix issue price of its Rs 4,300 crore FPO (follow-on public offer) in view of markets regulator Sebi's direction to allow withdrawal of investors' bids till Wednesday. On Monday, the Securities and Exchange Board of india (Sebi) asked bankers of to give an option to investors, who participated in the FPO, to withdraw their bids while also cautioning them about "circulation of an unsolicited SMS" about the share sale. "In light of the Sebi letter directing to keep the window for withdrawal open till March 30, 2022, we will like to inform you that the board meeting proposed to be held on March 29, 2022 has been rescheduled, and now it will be held on March 31, 2022 for the purposes of determining the issue price and the anchor investor issue price," said in a regulatory filing. Shares of Ruchi Soya surged on Tuesday after the company, through newspaper advertisements, clarified that the SMSes pertaining to investments in its FPO have not been issued by the company or its promoters. On Tuesday, the shares of the company settled 15.9 per cent higher at Rs 945. On Monday, Ltd informed the regulator and stock exchanges that it has come across some messages on social media "speculating" about investment opportunities in the FPO and the company shares being available at discount to the market price. The company said this message has not been issued by it or any of its directors, promoters, promoter group or group . It further said that an FIR has been lodged by the company in Haridwar to investigate these messages under the IT Act and Section 420 of the IPC. "As directed by Sebi, we wish to bring to attention of the investors that all bidders (other than anchor investors) have an option to withdraw their bids from March 28, 2022, till March 30, 2022," Ruchi Soya said. "Investors should further note that bidding in the issue is closed on March 28, 2022, and accordingly no further bids will be accepted in the issue. Any bids, after the bid/issue closure will be rejected," it added. This regulatory filing followed a direction issued by Sebi after a meeting held earlier in the day with the bankers managing the FPO. Sebi asked bankers to issue an advertisement in newspapers on Tuesday and Wednesday, cautioning investors about the circulation of SMS. Besides, Sebi asked bankers to give an option to investors to withdraw their already placed bids till March 30. The issue opened on March 24 and was subscribed 3.6 times till its scheduled closing on Monday. The company has already raised Rs 1,290 crore from anchor investors. Industries has said that the SMSes pertaining to in its follow-on public offering (FPO) have not been issued by the company or its promoters. The company has filed a first information report to investigate the origin of the messages doing the rounds on social media. We understand that there is a SMS/message in circulation in social media, speculating about investment opportunity in our companys issue and about equity shares of our company being available at discount to the market price. We wish to bring to attention of the investors that this message has not been issued by our company or any of our directors, promoters, promoter group or group . A first information report bearing number 0188 dated March 27, 2022 has been logged by our company with a police station at Haridwar to take up investigation in respect of the message, under section 67A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and section 420 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, said in a newspaper advertisement. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has directed Industries to give the investors who participated in its Rs 4,300-crore follow-on public offering (FPO) the option to withdraw their bids due to circulation of unsolicited SMSes advertising the issue. Ruchi Soya, in the advertisement, has stated that the last day for withdrawal of bids will be Wednesday. The company has also issued an indicative timeline for listing of the new shares that are being issued in the FPO. As per the timeline, the new share will list on or about April 8. Sebis diktat to the company follows a message circulated on social media which said that the FPO was a good investment opportunity and that the shares were available at 30 per cent discount. Great for all beloved members of Patanjali parivar. A good investment opportunity in Patanjali Group. Patanjali Group company - Ruchi Soya Industries has opened the Follow-On Public offer(FPO) for retail investors. The issue closes on 28 March 2022. This is available in the price band- Rs 615-650 rupees per share , i.e discount of about 30 per cent to market price. You can apply for shares through your bank/ broker/ ASBA/UPI in your Demat account, read the message. In a letter to the three investment bankers handling Ruchi Soyas share sale, has said prima facie the contents of the SMSs appear to be misleading/fraudulent and not in consonance with the ICDR (Issue of Capital and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations. Ruchi Soyas FPO, which closed on Monday, has garnered 3.6 times subscription. The issue was undersubscribed in the retail category at 90 per cent but saw strong demand in all the other categories. Shares of Ruchi Soya dropped 6 per cent on Monday to close at Rs 815. The company priced its FPO in the range of Rs 615 and Rs 650 per share 20 to 25 per cent lower than the last close. Baba Ramdev-led Patanjali Ayurved owns 98.9 per cent in Ruchi Soya, while only 1.1 per cent is with the public. With a miniscule free-float, there are doubts over whether trading in Ruchi Soyas shares is leading to fair price discovery. Following the FPO, Patanjalis shareholding is expected to reduce to 81 per cent, while public shareholding will rise to 19 per cent. The move would help the stock discover its fair price, experts say. Limited (TCPL) on Tuesday announced a reorganisation plan in line with its strategic priority of unlocking synergies and efficiencies. This plan includes the demerger of plantation business of Limited (TCL) into TCPL Beverages & Foods Limited (TBFL), a wholly owned subsidiary of TCPL and the merger of the remaining business of TCL, consisting of its extraction and branded coffee business with TCPL. The demerger is to happen as the first step and merger to happen as the immediate second step, both being proposed through a composite scheme of arrangement. Additionally, TCPL proposed to purchase the minority interest in its UK subsidiary, UK Limited (TCP UK) by way of a share swap, through a preferential issue of its equity shares. These actions further TCPLs objective of creating a future ready organization and will act as a stepping stone for further simplification. These will also result in operational efficiencies, faster decision making and execution, creation of focused business verticals and unlocking of potential synergies. The consolidated actions are expected to generate material revenue, cost and other synergies over medium to long term, following the completion of the proposed transactions and future simplification initiatives, which will be undertaken following the receipt of requisite approvals and processes. The Boards of Directors of Limited and Limited, at their respective meetings held on March 29, have approved the combination of plantation business of TCL with TBFL and non-plantation business with TCPL through a composite scheme of arrangement for demerger and merger. This will enable the consolidation and 100% ownership of the branded, extractions and plantations business of TCL into TCPL and its wholly owned subsidiary. On effectiveness of the Scheme, the shareholders of TCL (other than TCPL) as on the record date will receive an aggregate of 3 equity shares of TCPL for every 10 equity shares held by them in TCL, through the issuance of 1 equity share of TCPL for every 22 equity shares of TCL, in consideration for the demerger (as per the approved share entitlement ratio); and 14 equity shares of TCPL for every 55 equity shares of TCL, in consideration for the merger (as per the approved share exchange ratio). Through this transaction, TCL shareholders will get access to multiple growth engines and participation in a larger and fast growing FMCG business. TCPL shareholders are expected to benefit from better synergies and business efficiencies going forward, the company said. The scheme is subject to the necessary statutory and regulatory approvals including approvals of the respective benches of NCLT, the stock exchanges, SEBI and the respective shareholders of each of the . The Board of Directors of TCPL at their meeting have also approved the purchase of 10.15 per cent minority interest in its UK subsidiary, TCP UK, from Tata Enterprise (Overseas) AG, Switzerland (TEO). As consideration, TCPL will issue 74,59,935 equity shares i.e. 0.80% stake (computed on post preferential issue basis) to TEO, by way of preferential issue in accordance with the applicable regulations. This transaction is subject to TCPL shareholders approval and other regulatory approvals. These transactions will result in TCPL having 100 per cent ownership of the business of TCL and of TCP UK, which will be an enabler for efficient reorganisation initiatives of its international business. Sunil DSouza, MD & CEO, Tata Consumer Products said The restructuring initiative is in line with Tata Consumer Products strategic priorities - to unlock synergies and create a future ready organization. This exercise will enable us to better leverage our supply chain, create customer focused business verticals, and accelerate decision making & execution. This will be a stepping-stone for further simplification initiatives with a view to achieving recurring operational, administrative and financial synergies. We are confident that this will create significant value for all our stakeholders, he added. In a bid to simplify, align, and synergise its business, (TCPL) Tuesday announced reorganisation of its India and overseas businesses. The company also proposed to purchase of a 10.15 per cent minority interest in its UK subsidiary, TCP UK, from Tata Enterprise (Overseas), Switzerland, (TEO). Also, TCPL board approved the demerger of the plantation business of Tata Coffee (TCL) into TCPL Beverages & Foods (TBFL), a wholly owned subsidiary of TCPL. It also approved the merger of the remaining business of TCL, consisting of its extraction and branded coffee business with TCPL. The demerger will be the first step and the merger will be the immediate second step, both being proposed through a composite scheme of arrangement. Upon effectiveness of the scheme, the shareholders of (other than TCPL), as on the record date, would receive an aggregate of three equity shares of TCPL for every 10 equity shares held by them in TCL, through the issuance of one equity share of TCPL for every 22 equity shares of TCL, in consideration for the demerger (according to the approved share entitlement ratio). They would get 14 equity shares of TCPL for every 55 equity shares of TCL, in consideration for the merger (based on the approved share exchange ratio). Through this transaction, shareholders will get access to multiple growth engines and participation in a larger and fast-growing business. TCPL shareholders are expected to benefit from better synergies and business efficiencies going forward, TCPL said in its press release. The scheme is subject to the necessary statutory and regulatory approvals. For the purchase of minority interest in its UK subsidiary, TCPL will issue 74,59,935 equity shares/ 0.80 per cent stake (computed on a post-preferential issue basis) to TEO, by way of a preferential issue in accordance with the applicable regulations. Tata Steel's blast furnaces in the UK are using billions of microscopic bacteria to convert its emissions into stock materials for other industries to make recycled products such as food-packaging to animal feed, the Indian steel major has said. A pilot project, led by the University of South Wales, has been set up at the two Port Talbot ironmaking furnaces in Wales. The project, while still in its infancy, has already shown promising results, the experts involved said last week. "As the world is coming to terms with the challenges of net-zero CO2 steelmaking, there are lots of options to consider. Not only in terms of different steelmaking technologies, but also around any opportunities to capture and use the carbon-based process gases," said Dr Rhiannon Chalmers-Brown from the University of South Wales. "The process we are testing here bubbles off-gases from the blast furnaces through sewage sludge, which contains a certain type of bacteria able to consume both carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2)," she said. Dr Chalmers-Brown said the team was getting quite high levels of carbon utilisation, which they feel can increase up to about 98 per cent. "The waste products from those bacteria include acetic acid and volatile fatty acids which can be used for a huge range of commercially viable end-uses such as paints, bioplastic-polymers or even animal feeds," she noted. The project is a collaboration between Tata Steel and the university exploring how waste gasses from the steelmaking processes at Port Talbot can be harnessed and used to support other industries while reducing the amount of CO2 released. Dr Chalmers-Brown added: While this pilot is looking at gases from blast furnaces, pretty much every iron and steelmaking technology emits some carbon-based gases, so this technology has potential to reduce those emissions whichever technology route is eventually chosen. There's still quite a lot of work to do with the pilot reactor, collecting data and to understand what we can about the biological reactions." Tata Steel said it is developing detailed plans for this transition to future steelmaking based on low CO2 technologies. "This is a great project, which could be a real game-changer and is yet another example of the benefits of working closely with some of our top universities, said Gareth Lloyd, Process Engineering Manager from Tata Steel and industry sponsor. Tata Steel in the UK said it has an ambition to produce net-zero steel by 2050 at the latest and to have reduced 30 per cent of by 2030. The vast majority of that work will need to happen in South Wales, where the company's largest operational site in the UK is. Tata Steel is the largest steelmaker in the UK with primary steelmaking at Port Talbot in South Wales, supporting manufacturing and distribution operations at sites across Wales, England and Northern Ireland as well as Norway and Sweden. Tata Steel employs more than 8,000 people and has an annual crude steel capacity of 5 million tonnes. The Indian steel giant said it works on supplying high-quality steel products to demanding markets, including construction and infrastructure, automotive, packaging and engineering. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) About 35,000 workers of state-owned SAIL, and continued to boycott work on Tuesday as part the nationwide strike, affecting production at steel plants and mines. Rajesh Sandhu, Secretary of Sanyukt Khadaan Mazdoor Sangh said all non-executive workers have boycotted work to join the nationwide strike which entered its second day on Tuesday. "Intensifying their protest against government polices, workers stopped state transport buses in Chhattisgarh for about 6 hours from 5 a.m," Sandhu said adding NMDC would incur a loss of about Rs 200 crore due to the protest. Over 10,000 non-executive employees of the company are observing the protest at NMDC mines and offices in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Telangana. J Ayodhya Ram, President of Steel Plant Employees Union (CITU) said workers at plant in Visakhapatnam did not come to work on Tuesday as well. Around 8,000 non-executive Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited (RINL) workers out of 11,000 are taking part in the ongoing nationwide strike called by central trade unions. He further said production has been affected at the unit as only one furnace out of three is functional at the plant in Visakhapatnam. One was already under maintenance, the second one has been shut down as a precautionary measure. Around 15,000 workers of Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) also remained away from work at its plants in Chhattisgarh, Odisha and West Bengal, an employee of SAIL's Bhilai Steel Plant said. The workers working at key functional areas of the plants did not come on Tuesday to work, he said. As many as 10 central trade unions on Monday began a two-day nationwide strike to protest against the government's alleged wrong policies that are affecting farmers, workers and the general public. The strike notices have been given by the unions in various sectors, such as coal, steel, oil, telecom, postal, income tax, copper, banks, and insurance. and are steel making companies under the Ministry of Steel. NMDC is the country's largest iron ore mining company under the ministry. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) and on Tuesday decided to end their five-decade-old in six of the 12 contested locations that often raised tensions between the two states, with Union Home Minister Amit Shah calling it a "historic day" for the Northeast. The agreement was signed in the presence of Shah by Chief Ministers of and Himanta Biswa Sarma and Conrad Sangma respectively. The pact will resolve the protracted dispute in six of the 12 places along the 884.9 km border between the two states. "It is a historic day for the Northeast," Shah said at the function held at the Ministry of Home Affairs here. The home minister said, with the signing of the agreement, 70 per cent of the between the two states has been resolved and hoped that a solution will be found for the remaining six locations soon. "This inter-state boundary settlement will usher in a new era of peace, harmony and progress in and . I want to assure our sisters and brothers of Northeast that Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led central government will leave no stone unturned in fulfilling their aspirations," he said. Shah said it was another milestone towards fulfilling the prime minister's resolve of a peaceful and dispute-free Northeast. He also said the agreement amplifies cooperative federalism and provides a road map for resolution of other boundary disputes between states. Assam shares a 2743 km boundary with Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and West Bengal. It is locked in border disputes with Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh. In July 2021, Assam's Cachar district had witnessed a fierce armed clash between the police personnel of Assam and Mizoram. Six Assam police personnel were killed in an armed confrontation with their Mizoram counterparts, forcing the Centre to intervene. The Tuesday's pact between Assam and Meghalaya is aimed at eliminating the possibility any such violence in the border areas of the two states. There are 36 villages in the six places, covering an area of 36.79 sq km, with regard to which the agreement has been reached. The two states had formed three committees each in August last year to go into the vexed boundary question. The constitution of the panels had followed two rounds of talks between Sarma and Sangma where the neighbouring states resolved to settle the dispute in a phased manner. According to the joint final set of recommendations made by the committees, out of 36.79 sq km disputed area taken up for settlement in the first phase, Assam will get full control of 18.51 sq km and Meghalaya 18.28 sq km. Out of the 12 points of dispute between Assam and Meghalaya, the six areas with relatively less critical differences were taken up in the first phase. Sarma said he was grateful to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the home minister for their continuous guidance to achieve this settlement. "This is a milestone in our collective efforts to strengthen cooperative federalism. Together, we are committed to resolving all such legacy boundary issues very soon," he said. Meghlaya chief minister Sangma said history has been made with Meghalaya and Assam signing the agreement to officially resolve the dispute in six out of 12 contested areas. He said this important leap is the result of team work by both the governments of Meghalaya and Assam. Sangma also expressed gratitude to the prime minister and the union home minister for their guidance. He also thanked the Assam chief minister for working together to reach an important milestone for the two states. The boundary dispute between Assam and Meghalaya has lingered for 50 years. However, the effort to resolve it gained pace in recent times. Meghalaya was carved out of Assam as a separate state in 1972 but the new state had challenged the Assam Reorganisation Act, 1971, leading to dispute in 12 boder locations. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hours after the High Court directed the Left administration in the state to take steps to prevent its employees from abstaining from duty as part of the two-day nationwide strike, the government on Monday issued a 'dies-non' order. Chief Secretary V P Joy, in an order, said the "unauthorised absence of employees participating in the strike will be treated as dies-non", under Rule 14 A of Part 1 of Service Rules. As per Rule 14 (A) of Part I of Service Rules, the period of unauthorised absence of an officer on account of participation in a strike shall be treated as dies-non (no work, no pay). The order also said no leave of any kind will be granted to government employees unless there is sickness of the individual or relatives like wife, children, father and mother. The order also said the district collectors, heads of departments, district police chiefs, etc. will take action to "give protection to those not on strike and to ensure unhindered access to government offices and institutions" and to avoid overcrowding in front of the gates of the offices. The government order noted that the High Court has declared the ongoing strike as illegal and directed the government to prevent employees from engaging in strikes. The High Court has directed the LDF government to prevent its employees from abstaining from duty as part of the two-day nationwide strike. The court said government servants should not engage in any concerted or organised slowdown of work. A Bench of Chief Justice S Manikumar and Justice Shaji P Chaly directed the state to also issue orders enabling the operation of vehicles so that employees can report for duty. The strike -- on March 28 and 29 -- has been called by the joint platform of central trade unions against "the anti-worker, anti-farmer, anti-people and anti- policies" of the central government. The first day of the hartal was near total in the state. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) External Affairs Minister said on Tuesday that the member states must collectively combat terrorism and violent extremism as he emphasised India's commitment to intensify, expand areas of cooperation, especially connectivity, energy and maritime. Speaking at the 18th Ministerial Meeting in Colombo, Jaishankar also said that cooperation on port facilities, ferry services, coastal shipping, grid connectivity and motor vehicles movement are key. "Must also collectively combat terrorism, violent extremism, transnational crime, cyber-attacks and narco-trafficking," he tweeted. "Emphasised our commitment to intensify and expand areas of cooperation, especially connectivity, energy and maritime cooperation," he said in another tweet. "Will encourage active business collaboration and common projects to this end. Cooperation on port facilities, ferry services, coastal shipping, grid connectivity and motor vehicles movement are key," Jaishankar tweeted. He also thanked Foreign Minister Prof. G.L. Peiris for his hospitality. Jaishanker said that he was looking forward to the adoption of the Charter and Master Plan at the Summit on Wednesday. Besides India and Sri Lanka, the comprises Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Nepal and Bhutan. The summit is being hosted by Sri Lanka in its capacity as the chair of the grouping BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation). Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend the virtual summit of the BIMSTEC grouping on March 30, which is expected to focus on expanding economic engagement among its member countries. Jaishankar arrived here on Monday and held bilateral talks with Sri Lanka's top leadership. This is his first visit to the island nation since India extended an economic relief package to bail Sri Lanka out of the current economic crisis. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A woman who had suffered burns in the petrol bomb attack in Bogtui village in Birbhum district last week died in a hospital on Monday, raising the toll to nine, a police officer said. The Birbhum killings also spawned in Bengal's legislature, with MLAs from the ruling and the exchanging fisticuffs after heated arguments over the Birbhum killings, prompting the speaker to suspend five saffron party MLAs, including Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari. Out of the nine deceased, seven are women and two are children. "The woman, Najema Bibi, who died today, had nearly 65 per cent burn injuries. Her condition deteriorated last night following which she was put on ventilation at the Rampurhat Government Medical College and Hospital. She finally succumbed to her injuries this morning," the police officer said. Three persons, including a boy, are still undergoing treatment at the same hospital. The CBI probing the case could not record Najema Bibi's statement on Sunday, as her condition was critical, a CBI officers told PTI. Some eight people were burnt to death in the early hours of March 21, after unknown assailants attacked some 10 houses in Bogtui village near Rampurhat with petrol bombs setting them on fire. The attack is suspected to have been planned as revenge for the murder of a local leader with its roots in rivalry over illegal sand mining. As part of the ongoing probe, CBI officers questioned leader and former Rampurhat Block -1 community head Anarul Sheikh for a second day as well as others who have been arrested in the case. They also recorded one lone survivor Mihilal Sheikh's version of the burning incident, the official said. Former Sub-Divisional Police Officer Shayan Ahmed, who has been sent on Compulsory Waiting, a suspended official of Rampurhat Police Station and the doctor involved in treating the injured persons were also questioned, he added. Samples collected from damaged houses in the village will be sent for forensic tests to ascertain whether any chemicals were used to set the houses on fire," the CBI official said. Meanwhile, shortly after the House assembled at 11 am, pandemonium reigned as MLAs trooped to the well, demanding a statement by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee over the "worsening" law and order situation in the wake of the Birbhum killings. Speaker Biman Banerjee tried to pacify the MLAs, who continued sloganeering inside the House, leading to a war of words with legislators of the treasury bench and an eventual ugly scuffle. Adhikari then walked out of the assembly, claiming that TMC MLAs roughed up his party legislators. "MLAs are not safe even inside the assembly... At least 8-10 of our legislators were beaten up, including Chief Whip Manoj Tigga, by some TMC MLAs, as we demanded that the CM make a statement in the House on the law and order issue," Adhikari said. The BJP claimed that Tigga has suffered a chest fracture and was admitted to a private hospital along with six other BJP MLAs. TMC leader and state minister Firhad Hakim however rubbishing the claim, alleged the BJP had staged a drama to create chaos in the assembly. "Few of our MLAs were injured inside the House. We condemn the conduct of the BJP," he said. Among those who were injured in the melee were TMC MLA Asit Majumdar, who had to be hospitalised. While Majumdar claimed that Adhikari had punched him on the nose, the BJP leader denied the charge. Adhikari, along with BJP legislators Dipak Burman, Shankar Ghosh, Manoj Tigga and Narahari Mahato, were suspended by the Speaker for the entire session till the House is prorogued. Prorogation is discontinuing a session of Parliament or a legislative assembly without dissolving it. "What happened today is completely unacceptable. The way in which the five MLAs behaved with the women staff of the House is a shame for parliamentary democracy," Speaker Biman Banerjee told reporters, adjourning the assembly sine die. The BJP, however, denied all allegations, and accused the ruling TMC of letting loose a reign of terror in the assembly. They are running the government in an authoritarian manner. We will not tolerate this," Adhikari said, adding, he will meet the Speaker with an appeal to revoke the suspension. BJP unit chief Sukanta Majumdar said BJP MLAs would meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi later this week in New Delhi and complain about the "lawlessness" in the state. The incident brought back memories of opposition Left and ruling TMC legislators trading blows in December 2012 on the floor of the house, leading to injuries on both sides. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India has gone through a very "complicated and challenging time" in negotiating its diplomatic stand on the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and because of its multiple interests with other countries, it's been a "bit of dancing on a tightrope," Lok Sabha member said on Tuesday. He was responding to a question during an interaction held here after inaugurating a three-day photo exhibition, 'Ukraine Untold (Glimpse)', on how the country looked barely a month before the war began. "India has gone through a very complicated and challenging time in negotiating as it were its own stand on the (Ukraine-Russia) crisis. There is no doubt that India in its very first statement seemed to be a little unwilling to say anything that the Russians will be upset about," he said. A former UN under secretary general, Tharoor, on the likely visit of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to India this week, said, "He will have a tough cause to defend and I am sure the talks that he is going to have in New Delhi will be very interesting". During his likely visit, the key focus is expected to be on discussions on a payment system for New Delhi's procurement of oil and military hardware from Moscow, people familiar with the developments said on Monday. The Congress MP, also a former Union minister of external affairs, spoke on the Ukraine-Russia crisis that has garnered huge global support for Kyiv, in the context of violation of sovereignty and UN Charter. No State will agree on the territory of Ukraine being encroached upon, he said. On India's stand on the conflict, Tharoor said, "In our subsequent statements while we have continued to abstain at UN, we have been a little more vocal on reiterating the principles and our diplomacy has taken into account the multifarious interests we have to look after". While with Russia, India has the "dependency" on military relationship, with the West, we have a "warning relationship" and "we can't antagonise them". "We are a member of Quad and we don't want US to take its eyes off the Indo-Pacific and focus purely on Europe. And then with Ukraine itself, we had to pull out 23,000 Indian citizens, mainly students, in the first few weeks," the Lok Sabha MP said. "So, because of all these interests, there is a bit of dancing on a tightrope," he added. In the context of the current situation in Ukraine, he said, as the Indian students have been pulled out and the war hasn't progressed the way Russians would have hoped it to, he expected that India will "calibrate" its steps. At the same time, Indian diplomacy has been "effective in ensuring" that there is more understanding about the position than it might have been expected, he said. "Other States might have been given a tougher time, but India matters to many countries," Tharoor said. The exhibition consists of about 90 photographs in multiple mediums taken by photographer Avantika Meattle. According to Meattle, she took the pictures "as a tourist during her visit to Kyiv and Lviv in Ukraine in late December and early January", not knowing that the places will become "frozen in time". Capital Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv and other beautiful cities in Ukraine have borne the brunt of the war and many of the iconic and historic buildings of the eastern European country have been damaged. Tharoor, who was given a tour of the exhibition, said the large number of people present at the event was an act of solidarity with the people of Ukraine. The photographs are not only fascinating, but have a "certain degree of poignancy as we don't know how many of these buildings have survived the reckless bombings," he said. SpiceJet CMD Ajay Singh was also present on the occasion. The airliner had contributed in the evacuation of Indian citizens from Ukraine. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Ahluwalia Contracts India Limited on Tuesday emerged as the lowest bidder for the construction of Executive Enclave as part of the that will house the prime minister's office (PMO), cabinet secretariat, India House and the Security Council Secretariat, official document showed. The company, headquartered in Delhi, quoted an amount of around Rs 1,119 crore, 3.50 per cent less than the Rs 1,160-crore cost estimated by the CPWD, which has been executing the Modi government's ambitious Central Vista Redevelopment project. Tata Projects Limited, which is constructing a new Parliament building, quoted Rs 1,154 crore. NCC Limited quoted a bid amount of around Rs 1,158 crore and Larsen & Toubro Limited around Rs 1,317 crore, the document showed. An official said the lowest bidder is usually awarded the contract and added the Board of Central Public Works Department (CPWD) will decide on awarding the tender in the next few days. The CPWD had estimated the cost of construction and maintenance of the Executive Enclave at Rs 1,160.17 crore. The Executive Enclave will come up on the south side of the South Block in plot number 36/38 in the high-security Lutyens' Delhi. The bid document states the new will have three floors each 4.75 metres high, in addition to the basement and ground floor. The new cabinet secretariat and the Security Council Secretariat will have a similar structure. India House, which will have one floor in addition to basement and ground floor, is likely to be used as a conference facility like the Hyderabad House where high-level talks, especially with top visiting leaders of various countries, are held now. According to the CPWD's bid document, the project will be completed within 24 months of initiation of the construction work. "The (Executive) Enclave will be designed to improve potency and functioning through carefully planned formation of different departments with supporting facilities. This will ensure prime security and excellent interconnectivity within the Enclave and with other offices in Central Vista. "Relocating these departments will also ensure efficient security protocols for VIPs and VVIPs without disturbing daily movement of the public in and around the Central Vista," the CPWD document states. In October last year, Larsen & Toubro Limited had been awarded the contract for the construction and maintenance of the first three buildings of the Common Central Secretariat. Shapoorji Pallonji and Company Limited is executing the redevelopment work of the Central Vista Avenue stretching from Vijay Chowk to the India Gate. The redevelopment of the Central Vista, the nation' power corridor, envisages a new parliament building, a common central secretariat, revamping of the 3-km Rajpath from the Rashtrapati Bhavan to the India Gate, new office and residence of the prime minister, and a new vice-president enclave. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India has one of the "lowest" 374 COVID-19 deaths per million population, according to the World Health Organisation, compared to similarly affected countries like the USA, Brazil, Russia and Mexico, the government said on Tuesday. In a written reply, Minister of State for Health Bharati Pravin Pawar told the Rajya Sabha that at times, certain reports have speculated excess deaths, that is, higher than the official number of COVID-19 fatalities reported by India. "These reports have mostly relied on unvalidated methodologies, or data sources used to derive estimates' are not reliable. In most of these studies, the results have been obtained using mathematical modelling techniques from a limited sample of small sub-population subgroups which is extrapolated to the entire country," she said. The minister was responding to a question on recent reports showing India having the highest number of deaths during the Covid pandemic and whether the official death toll does not match the data on the civil registration system. "According to the data available with World Health Organisation (WHO), India has one of the lowest deaths per million (374 deaths per million population) which is much lower compared to similarly affected countries like the United States of America (2,920 deaths per million population), Brazil (3,092 deaths per million population), Russia (2,506 deaths per million population) and Mexico (2,498 deaths per million population)," she mentioned in her reply. In the context of COVID-19 pandemic, detailed guidelines for reporting of deaths have been issued by the Union health ministry to all states and Union territories (UTs). The Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) had on May 10, 2020 issued Guidance for appropriate recording of COVID-19 related deaths in India'. Accordingly, all states/UTs report cases and deaths to the health ministry and the same is also put in public domain on a regular basis. A large number of states have regularly reconciled their death numbers and have reported arrear deaths in a broadly transparent manner, Pawar said. Furthermore, it must be noted that there is a monetary incentive in India to report COVID-19 deaths as they are entitled to ex-gratia compensation. India has a robust Civil Registration System (CRS) and Sample Registration System (SRS) which predates the COVID-19 pandemic and covers all states/UTs. The registration of deaths in the country is done under the Registration of Births and Deaths (RBD) Act, 1969 by functionaries appointed by the state government, she added. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) will meet on Thursday to discuss the Covid situation in the capital in the backdrop of the Centre's advise earlier this month to states and UTs to consider discontinuing containment measures in view of the sharp decline in the fresh cases. Last month, the DDMA lifted all Covid restrictions in the wake of significant improvement in the Covid situation in the city. However, wearing of masks in public places, including buses and metro trains continued. The DDMA meeting to be held at 3.30 pm on March 31 will be chaired by Lieutenant Governor . Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, Health Minister Satyender Jain, Revenue Minister Kailash Gahlot and senior officials and expert members are expected to attend the meeting. The meeting, apart from the prevailing Covid situation, will also review vaccination programme, said a notice issued on Monday. With the rise in number of Covid cases in December last year due to Omicron variant, the government imposed several restrictions. The restrictions were lifted gradually when the situation normalised and finally all curbs were removed from February 28. on Monday reported 90 new COVID-19 cases and no fresh death due to the viral disease, while the positivity rate stood at 0.53 per cent, according to data shared by the city health department. Delhi had on Sunday reported 71 fresh COVID-19 cases with a positivity rate of 0.31 per cent, and one death. The number of daily COVID-19 cases in Delhi has been on the decline after touching the record high of 28,867 on January 13. The city had recorded a positivity rate of 30.6 per cent on January 14, the highest during the third wave of the pandemic. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Journalist was on Tuesday stopped by authorities at the Mumbai international airport from flying abroad in the wake of a 'look out circular' issued by the (ED) against her, officials said. The federal probe agency wants to question and record Ayyub's statement in a money laundering case against her. The 37-year-old scribe reached the Mumbai international airport to board a flight to London but was stopped by immigration authorities. Soon after, an ED team questioned her at the airport and asked her to join the investigation, they said. She is understood to have been asked to depose before the agency at its office here on April 1. Officials said the ED had first issued summons to her after the agency early this year provisionally attached over Rs 1.77 crore in bank deposits in connection with the case against her linked to alleged irregularities in charitable funds raised by her from public donors for COVID-19 relief work during 2020-2021. However, they said, she skipped the notice and the agency did not want her to leave the country as it could lead to a delay in the probe and the subsequent filing of a charge sheet in court. Ayyub posted about the incident on her Twitter handle. "I was stopped today at the Indian immigration while I was about to board my flight to London to deliver my speech on the intimidation of journalists with @ICFJ. I was to travel to Italy right after to deliver the keynote address at the @journalismfest on the Indian democracy," she posted. Posting a subsequent Tweet she said these events "have been planned and publicised all over my social media for weeks." "Yet, curiously the summon arrived in my mail much after I was stopped at the immigration. What do you fear?" Ayyub said. The money laundering case against her stems from a September 2021 FIR of Ghaziabad Police (Uttar Pradesh) related to alleged irregularities in donor funds of over Rs 2.69 crore raised by her through an online crowdfunding platform called 'Ketto'. The police lodged the case on a complaint made by Vikas Sankrityayan, founder of an NGO called "Hindu IT Cell" and a resident of Indirapuram in Ghaziabad. According to the police FIR, the funds were raised as part of three campaigns: funds for slum dwellers and farmers during April-May 2020; relief work for Assam, Bihar and Maharashtra during June-September 2020 and help for COVID-19 impacted people in India during May-June 2021. Ayyub had rejected the allegations that she "misused" donor funds raised in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying money-laundering charges levelled against her were "preposterous and wholly mala fide". She had said she has "demonstrably shown" to the (ED) and Income-Tax department authorities that "no part of the relief campaign money has been used for any other purpose" or for her personal expenses. She also said she has paid an income tax of Rs 1.05 crore on the public donation amount received by her. The agency had said its probe "makes it abundantly clear that the funds were raised in the name of charity in a completely pre-planned and systematic manner, and the funds were not utilised completely for the purpose of which the funds were raised". The ED had said, "Fake bills were found to have been prepared by in the name of some entities to claim expenses on relief work and expenses made for personal travel by air were claimed as expense for relief work". (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The University of Glasgow has honoured John Shaw and by naming its new centre after them. In a statement issued on Tuesday, Biocon said the Mazumdar-Shaw Advanced Centre will be home to over 500 researchers from a range of disciplines, facilitating world changing collaborative . The 116 million pound building will officially open in June 2022. John Shaw, who is a graduate from the University of Glasgow, along with his wife had gifted USD 7.5 million (around Rs 57 crore) to the University in July 2019. We are really grateful to John and Kiran and we wanted to ensure that this extraordinarily generous gift was recognised appropriately. The Mazumdar-Shaw Advanced Research Centre is on its way to becoming operational. It is an incredibly exciting time on campus; every week more researchers are moving in, and this summer the ARC will fully open its doors to the wider community," University's Principal and Vice-Chancellor Anton Muscatelli said. The global challenges that the world faces require team approaches and collaboration across disciplines, and this unique environment will encourage and support interdisciplinary research breakthroughs, he added. "Through our partnership, we are building on the University's work with Biocon to explore initiatives such as joint PhDs which provide industry experience and help solve real world problems," Muscatelli said. noted that the Advanced Research Centre is about catalysing change in research and that resonates with them. "Philanthropy can be a catalyst for change, growth, improvement and development. We are both grateful that we are in the fortunate position to contribute to John's alma mater and help the University achieve its aspirational goals," she added. The USD 7.5 million donation was used to help fund the building of the Mazumdar-Shaw Advanced Research Centre and create a Professorial Chair, the Mazumdar-Shaw Chair of Molecular Pathology. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The government has ordered a probe into the incident of an Ola electric scooter catching fire in Pune last week. The Centre for Fire Explosive and Environment Safety (CFEES) has been asked to probe the circumstances that led to the incident and also suggest remedial measures, according to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH). In a letter to CFEES, the ministry has also asked it to share the findings along with the remedial measures for improvement and to prevent such incidents in the future. On Saturday, Ola Electric said it was investigating the incident of its electric scooter catching fire in Pune and that it would take appropriate action. A video of the company's electric scooter catching fire was widely circulated on social media with users raising questions over the safety standards of the vehicle. Reacting to the incident, Ola co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal had said, "safety is top priority. We're investigating this and will fix it". Centre for Fire Explosive and Environment Safety (CFEES) comes under the SAM (System Analysis and Modelling) cluster of DRDO labs. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and Sri Lanka have signed six agreements to boost bilateral cooperation in diverse sectors like technology, fisheries and hybrid power projects, the Indian High Commission here has said. Under the agreements, which were signed on Monday in the presence of External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and his Sri Lankan counterpart GL Peiris, India will also provide grant assistance for the implementation of Sri Lanka's Unique Digital Identity. The MOUs include implementation of Sri Lanka Unique Digital Identity (SL-UDI) programme with India's grant assistance and for providing Maritime Rescue Coordination Center. There is an MOU on implementation of Hybrid Power Projects in three Islands off Jaffna and also on cooperation in development of Fisheries Harbours in Sri Lanka, the mission said. The two sides signed MoUs for the establishment of modern computer labs and smart boards with customised curriculum software in 200 schools in Galle District and a separate MOU between Sushma Swaraj Institute of Foreign Service and the Bandaranaike International Diplomatic Training Institute. Jaishankar also separately met Minister of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources Douglas Devananda and discussed issues pertaining to fishermen and exchanged views on devolution, the statement said. Jaishankar met a delegation from the Tamil Alliance (TNA) led by R Sampanthan, MP, on Monday. Jaishankar welcomed the positive developments regarding the issues on the Government-TNA agenda. He emphasised that India was consistently supportive of the realisation of the aspirations of the Tamils of Sri Lanka for equality, justice, peace and dignity within the framework of a united Sri Lanka. Jaishankar arrived here on Sunday to attend the ongoing 18th BIMSTEC Ministerial Meeting in Colombo. He held bilateral talks with Sri Lanka's top leadership on Monday. This is his first visit to the island nation since India extended an economic relief package to bail Sri Lanka out of the current economic crisis. During his separate meetings with President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, Jaishankar assured them of India's continued support in Sri Lanka's economic recovery process. The statement also pointed out that the Jaffna Cultural Center is a glowing example of development partnership. It was conceived as a reconciliation project primarily aimed at expanding cultural infrastructure for people of Northern Province, it said. The state-of-the-art facility, constructed with grant assistance from the Indian Government, consists of multiple facilities such as a museum of two floors; an advanced theatre style auditorium for more than 600 people; a 11-storeyed learning tower; a public square which could also act as an amphitheater etc, it said. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A whopping 93 per cent are planning to spend more or the same on in 2022 compared to a typical pre-pandemic year, according to a report. The American Express Travel: Global Trends Report showed that Indian travellers are looking to adopt the new normal. Overall, think will be less stressful this year than last year and many are looking forward to regaining control over their trips in 2022 after feeling overwhelmed last year. The survey report is based on 3,000 travellers from seven countries including the US, Australia, India, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and the UK. It reveals that the motivation to travel for 48 per cent is for discovering new experiences, 46 per cent for relaxing and 45 per cent for exploring new destinations. About 96 per cent agreed they like to eat and shop at local businesses to support the local economy. "After two tough years, the travel sentiment amongst Indian travellers is upbeat where spending time with loved ones is a top priority," said Manoj Adlakha, SVP and CEO, American Express Banking, India, in a statement. "With the resumption of all regular international flights and the upcoming summer holiday season, we are seeing a surge in travel bookings amongst our card members for both international and domestic travel," he added. Majority of Indians agree they want to have a positive impact on the community they are visiting and want to travel to destinations where they can immerse themselves in the local culture. Travelling responsibly is of high importance for the respondents as 94 per cent stated they would take a 'greencation' and 93 per cent are more likely to book travel with a brand that is committed to improving its environmental impact, ranking highest than their global counterparts. About 69 per cent of respondents agree they want to travel to their dream destination this year. Five in ten respondents shared they are willing to travel solo now to visit their dream destination. Nearly 92 per cent agree that they are willing to book a trip for 2022 even if they might have to cancel or modify it later. --IANS rvt/pgh (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) have busted an international narcotic drug cartel and arrested its two key members along with worth Rs 40 crore in the international market, an official said on Tuesday. The accused, identified as Dinesh Singh (57) and Nazir alias Nazim (28), were arrested on March 24. Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) said a team of Special Cell was working on information that an international narcotics cartel is active in the states of Manipur, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Delhi. The members of this cartel were involved in receiving supply of smuggled from Myanmar and further supplied it to various parts of the country. "It took four months to develop this information and during this process, members of this cartel were identified," the DCP said. On March 24, the police received a tip-off that two members of this cartel -- Dinesh and Nazir -- have collected a big consignment of from Jharkhand and would come to Delhi to deliver the supply of contraband to one of their contacts. Subsequently, a police team was constituted which laid a trap at T point Delhi-Meerut Expressway near ISBT Sarai Kale Khan and apprehended both the accused. "Six kg of heroin, i.e., three kgs each from bags of both the accused was recovered. During the search of the car, another four kg of heroin was found hidden in a cavity created in the bottom of the backside seat of the car," the official said. During interrogation, both the arrested drug suppliers revealed that they are members of a big international narcotic drug cartel and were involved in supplying drugs in Delhi-NCR and parts of Uttar Pradesh for the last 5 years. --IANS uj/dpb (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Russia-Ukraine war has added to international disquiet and it has also underscored that the maintenance of international peace and security can no longer be taken for granted, Indian External Minister S. Jaishankar said in on Tuesday. Speaking during the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) ministerial meet, Jaishankar said, "The international system is going through a very challenging phase, perhaps one of the most difficult in recent memory. The challenges of Covid-19 pandemic have not yet fully abated. But recent developments in Ukraine have added to international disquiet. We have all underscored that the maintenance of international peace and security, and even stability can no longer be taken for granted." Jaishankar is visiting from March 28 to March 30. He said that the BIMSTEC member countries must recognise that we face headwinds - both from the global economy and in some cases from within their own domestic economies. BIMSTEC is a regional organisation that was established on June 6, 1997 with the signing of the Bangkok Declaration. The member countries of BIMSTEC are Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Thailand. Jaishankar further stated that under challenging circumstances, the member countries should shore up domestic capacities and also need to broaden and deepen cooperation under BIMSTEC. "We need more working together in many more areas; we need more effective and fast paced cooperation. We need to intensify and build on what we have achieved in the last 25 years," he said. To cement economic, trade and security cooperation with friendly neighbouring countries in South Asia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be virtually attending the fifth summit of BIMSTEC on March 30. Jaishankar said, "Tomorrow our leaders will adopt the BIMSTEC Charter. This is a landmark achievement in our effort to develop the institutional architecture for BIMSTEC. But we must not rest on this achievement and instead move on to 'next steps' that can be taken to further strengthen BIMSTEC." He called to accelerate efforts to boost intra BIMSTEC trade and economic ties. The development of a network of regional supply and value chains will reduce vulnerability to external shocks and give economies greater resilience and transparency. "This requires us to accelerate cooperation that has been under discussion for long. Simultaneously we must also work on a more ambitious Trade Facilitation agenda," he said. The Minister also said that the leaders will also adopt a BIMSTEC Master Plan for Transport Connectivity on Wednesday. "We must also accelerate efforts on ongoing initiatives such as the establishment of a coastal shipping eco system, of port facilities, of ferry services in the Bay of Bengal, as also power grid interconnectivity and a regional motor vehicles agreement," he said. He also pointed out that the member countries are in most disaster prone regions of the world. "In this connection we are taking steps to strengthen the functioning of the BIMSTEC Centre for Weather and Climate that is located in India which has been serving this region," Jaishankar said. He urged all BIMSTEC partners to consider joining the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI). He also stressed that terrorism and violent extremism, transnational crime and narco-trafficking and cyber-attacks threats cannot be ignored. "All of these affect our economic development efforts. We need to put in place the remaining elements of the legal architecture that will enable our law enforcement agencies to collaborate more closely and more effectively," he added. The Bay of Bengal achieving SDG 14 targets and ensuring a 'good order at sea' in keeping with international maritime law, particularly UNCLOS is a priority. A practical way to proceed is to have discussions using existing dialogue mechanisms, even while we put in place a plan of action in the maritime domain which is consistent with our priorities. The science of oceans is not easy. To get matters moving, India is keen to develop platforms and initiatives that can enhance collaboration between our scientists and experts in the maritime domain, he said. --IANS sk/skp/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) External Affairs Minister on Tuesday asked the Indian High Commissioner here to help a Sri Lankan hospital that has suspended surgeries due to lack of medical facilities, amidst an unprecedented financial crisis in the island nation. The Director of the Peradeniya Hospital in the central district of Kandy on Monday announced the temporary suspension of all routine surgeries due to the shortage of medicine. Jaishankar asked Indian High Commissioner in Colombo Gopal Baglay to discuss measures on how India can help the ailing nation. Disturbed to see this news. Am asking High Commissioner Baglay to contact and discuss how India can help," he tweeted on Tuesday. A circular on Monday said There is a shortage of several drugs and consumable items used for anaesthesia and surgery at our hospital... It was decided to suspend all routine surgeries including surgeries of patients already admitted today itself." The economic crisis in Sri Lanka has forced the country to give up on its primary needs including healthcare. Sri Lanka's current forex and balance of payment crisis have triggered dire consequences with the non-availability of most essentials. Long lines for fuel, long power cuts and high-cost escalations. People blame the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government for its incompetence to address the economic crisis. The government without tapping the IMF for an economic bailout asked India for help. The Indian line of credit, currency swaps, and deferment of Asian Clearance Unit payments have provided the island nation with much needed temporary relief. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Indian Naval Air Squadron 316 (INAS 316), the Navys second squadron equipped with four Boeing P-8I aircraft, was commissioned into the in Goa on Tuesday. INAS 316 has been christened Condors, after one of the largest flying land birds with a massive wingspan, excellent sensory capabilities, and powerful talons that symbolise the aircrafts capabilities. The new squadrons insignia depicts a Condor searching over the vast blue expanse of the sea. The Indian Navys first P-8I squadron was set up with eight aircraft at INS Rajali in Arakkonam, Tamil Nadu, in November 2015. India was the first international customer for the P-8I in January 2009, when it signed a contract with Boeing for eight P-8I for $2.17 billion, according to a Comptroller & Auditor General report. The P-8 is also operated by the US Navy, the Royal Australian Air Force, the UKs Royal Air Force, and the Royal Norwegian Air Force. In 2016, Indias Ministry of Defence (MoD) contracted for four more P-8Is under an options clause in the first contract. These aircraft have been operating from INS Hansa since their delivery in December 2021. The commissioning ceremony in Goa was addressed by the naval chief, Admiral R Hari Kumar, who stated: India is the preferred security partner in the Indian Ocean region. This reflects our countrys ability to play an effective strategic role in the region, and the need to expand its operational reach. The Boeing P-8I Poseidon aircraft that INAS 316 will operate is a multi-role, long-range maritime reconnaissance anti-submarine warfare (LRMR ASW) aircraft, that is equipped with a range of air-to-ship missiles and torpedoes. The aircraft is acknowledged to be the worlds most-deadly LRMR-ASW aircraft. It is a derivative of the Boeing 737-800 airliner, fitted with a plethora of sensors and weaponry, that make it is a potent platform for maritime surveillance and strike, electronic warfare missions, search and rescue and providing targeting data to other weapon platforms. It is also the platform of choice for detecting and neutralising enemy ships and submarines in Indian Ocean Region. P-8I Poseidons have played an important role in the two-year stand-off on the Ladakh border with the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), stealthily reconnoitring Chinese positions and picking up PLA deployments in rear areas. The aircrafts sensors include a Raytheon multi-mode radar to detect aircraft, surface ships, and submarines, while another belly-mounted radar looks backwards like an electronic rear-view mirror. A magnetic anomaly detector on the P-8Is tail detects submarines from the magnetic field that large masses of metal (such as submarine hulls) create. Hostile submarines, once detected, are destroyed by on-board Harpoon missiles or Mark 54 torpedoes. Alternatively, the targets are handed on digitally to friendly warships, or submarines, which finish the job. Over the years and during joint naval exercises such as Exercise Malabar, Indian P-8I crews have developed joint drills and communication protocols with their foreign counterparts that enable them to take swift and lethal action against hostile warships and submarines. To enhance this interoperability, India has concluded joint agreements with partner countries, such as the US. These include the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement and Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for geospatial co-operation. INAS 316 is commanded by Commander Amit Mohapatra, a Boeing P-8I pilot with extensive operational experience. Chief Minister on Monday announced the disbursement of outstanding 20 per cent arrears, partaking to salary revision under the 7th Pay Commission, for the state government employees. Patnaik made the announcement a day after senior bureaucrats and police officers met and congratulated him over the BJD's victory in the panchayat elections and the civic polls. As many as 4 lakh employees will receive the arrears along with their March salary, a statement issued by the Chief Minister's Office said. An additional Rs 850 crore has been earmarked in the 2021-22 supplementary budget for the purpose, it said. The government has already released 80 per cent of the increased pay from January 2016 to August 2017. The pensioners have received 100 per cent of their dues, the statement said. The government had accepted the recommendation of the commission and implemented it in January 2016. The enhanced salary was paid from September 2017. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) members on Tuesday declared support to the two-day nationwide strike call given by a group of trade union against the policies pursued by the government and sought a discussion on the issue in the . Raising the issue during Zero Hour, Trinamool member Saugata Roy claimed that the strike had received massive response and reflected the unhappiness of the people with the policies of the government. Government should understand that people are unhappy over its policies to sell out everything, Roy said and sought a discussion on the issue in the House. Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said while the entire had given its full throated support to the trade unions, the West Bengal government was trying to thwart the strike in the state. He said all trade unions except the BJP-affiliated Bhartiya Mazdoor Sangh have participated in the strike call to urge the government to stop plundering resources. Chowdhury accused Trinamool members of misleading the House on the issue of the strike call against the new labour laws, policies of the government and delay in payment of MGNREGA wages. In West Bengal, these people through their party workers are thwarting labour interests. It is a sorry state of affairs, here in this House they speak of labour interest but are working to thwart it in the state, Chowdhury said referring to the Trinamool Congress. A joint forum of central trade unions is protesting against the government policies affecting workers, farmers, and people. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) China's most populous city tightened the first phase of a two-stage COVID-19 lockdown on Tuesday, asking some residents to stay indoors unless they are getting tested as the number of new daily cases exceeded 4,400. The financial hub of Shanghai, home to 26 million people, is in its second day of a lockdown authorities are imposing by dividing the city roughly along the Huangpu River, splitting the historic centre from the eastern financial and industrial district of Pudong to allow for staggered testing. While Shanghai's caseload remains modest by global standards - a record 4,381 asymptomatic cases and 96 symptomatic cases for Monday - the city has become a testing ground for China's "zero-COVID" strategy as it tries to bring the highly infectious Omicron variant under control. Residents east of the Huangpu were locked down in their housing compounds on Monday but were mostly allowed to roam within them. On Tuesday, however, three residents told Reuters neighbourhood committees had told them they were no longer allowed to step outside their homes. "Children were still having picnics yesterday and having fun," said one of them, who declined to be identified, citing privacy concerns. Wu Qianyu, an official with the municipal health commission, told a briefing that a "clear request" had been made to residents not to leave their apartments, even to take pets for a walk or throw out trash, during "a key stage in nucleic acid testing". She said 8.26 million tests were performed by as many as 17,000 testing personnel in the city's locked-down districts on Monday. "The vast numbers of medical staff, grass-roots cadres, community workers and volunteers shared the very hard work on the front line of epidemic prevention and control, and should be thanked," Wu said. There were growing signs of frustration on China's social media and dozens of residents flocked to the Weibo platform to seek help for relatives, with some struggling to access medical services. Though is sticking to its plan for crushing the outbreak, experts overseas remain sceptical about the efficacy of lockdowns in the face of a highly infectious new variant. "It is clear from Australia and elsewhere in the world that lockdowns are simply not effective against Omicron a so expect a big wave coming," said Adrian Esterman, an expert in biostatistics at the University of South Australia. STOCKING UP Drone footage published by state media showed empty streets below the skyscrapers of the city's Lujiazui financial district. Public transport in the east has been shut and all unapproved vehicles ordered off the streets. The Shanghai Stock Exchange, in the west of the city, said it has kept a skeleton staff in place in the bourse for key operations while others work from home. General Motors's joint venture has managed to maintain production by asking workers to sleep on factory floors, people familiar with the matter said. Residents in the west of the city have been stocking up at shops and markets in anticipation of their lockdown from April 1. But U.S. hypermarket chain Costco Wholesale Corp, whose Shanghai store has in recent days attracted throngs of shoppers, said it was closing from Tuesday, along with some gyms and shopping malls also in western districts. The city government rolled out new measures to try to support COVID-affected businesses, including rent exemptions and tax rebates. The Communist Party tabloid the Global Times quoted Peking University economist Cao Heping as saying that while the city's growth would be hit, the national economy would not suffer greatly. Elsewhere, the city of Changchun, capital of Jilin province in the northeast, apologised to its 8.5 million residents for food shortages related to disruption caused by containment measures. The manufacturing hub of Shenzhen is starting to get back on its feet after shutdowns but many firms are worried about the near-term outlook, the Securities Times reported. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The alleged masterminds behind the derogatory "Sulli Deals" and "Bulli Bai" apps were granted bail by a local court in the capital on Monday, an official said. Deputy Commissioner of Police K.P.S. Malhotra told IANS that the main grounds for granting the bail to the accused persons -- Sulli Deal app creator Aumkareshwar Thakur and Niraj Bishnoi for Bulli Bai app -- was that the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) results and replies from Intermediaries were still awaited. "The trial court had relied upon the evidence against the accused persons and no shortcoming in the investigation was pointed out," Malhotra said. He said that the court has granted bail on humanitarian grounds and considered that the alleged persons were first-time offenders and continued incarceration would be detrimental to the alleged overall wellbeing. Thakur, 25, a resident of Madhya Pradesh's Indore, was apprehended by the Delhi Police on January 8. The derogatory app had surfaced in July 2021, where photos of Muslim women were maliciously displayed for "auction". The Delhi Police's Unit had registered an FIR under section 354-A (Sexual harassment and punishment for sexual harassment) of the Indian Penal Code on July 8. Meanwhile, "Bulli Bai" came to light in January 2022 after a Delhi-based woman journalist lodged a police complaint stating that she was being targeted by some unidentified group of people on a mobile application. The app was hosted on Github. "Bulli Bai" too had a number of pictures of women, including journalists, social workers, students and famous personalities, accompanied by derogatory content. The app listed hundreds of Muslim women for "auction". Its creator, Niraj Bishnoi, was arrested by the Delhi Police on January 6. During his interrogation, it emerged that he used to interact with various virtual identities on social media and used to engage in group discussions. In July 2021, in one of the groups in which Bishnoi was a member, another group member shared the details of the "Sulli Deals". That was the first time Bishnoi or other group members had heard about the app. Based on disclosures made by Bishnoi and on the basis of technical analysis, Thakur was identified and traced in Indore. Later on January 8, a team of IFSO, Delhi Police Special Cell went to Indore and arrested the accused. Thakur was examined and his technical gadgets were subjected to preliminary analysis. During the investigation, he was subjected to interrogation, in which he confessed that he had created the Sulli Deal app on GitHub. --IANS jw/uj/shs (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) zooms 20% as co says SMSes pertaining to FPO not issued by it Shares of surged up to 20% on Tuesday after the company, through newspaper advertisements, clarified that the SMSes pertaining to investments in its follow-on public offering (FPO) have not been issued by the company or its promoters. The advertisements reportedly came after market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) directed the company to give the investors who participated in its Rs 4,300-crore follow-on public offering (FPO) the option to withdraw their bids due to "circulation of unsolicited SMSes advertising the issue". Read more made over Rs 1k-cr bogus expenses, I-T search reveals: Report The Income Tax Department has found that made more than Rs 1,000 crore bogus expenses and over Rs 100- crore cash transactions for a farmhouse in Chhattarpur, Delhi, sources told ANI. Income Tax Department carried out a search and seizure operation on March 23 on and its chairman and managing director Pawan Munjal at multiple locations in Delhi-NCR, which concluded on March 26. The search operations covered more than 40 premises spread over different locations in Delhi-NCR. On Tuesday, the company's scrip on BSE closed trading 7% lower at Rs 2,208. Read more Ukraine, Russia hold new talks in Turkey aimed at ending the fighting The first face-to-face talks in two weeks between Russia and Ukraine began Tuesday in Turkey, raising flickering hopes there could be progress toward ending a war that has ground into a bloody campaign of attrition. Ahead of the meeting in Istanbul, the Ukrainian president said his country is prepared to declare its neutrality, as Moscow has demanded, and is open to compromise over the contested eastern region of Donbas comments that might lend momentum to negotiations. Read more Assam and Meghalaya sign pact to resolve border dispute in six places Assam and Meghalaya on Tuesday signed an agreement to resolve their five-decade-old border dispute in six of the 12 locations, with Union Home Minister Amit Shah calling it a "historic day" for the Northeast. The agreement was signed in the presence of Shah and Chief Ministers of Assam and Meghalaya Himanta Biswa Sarma and Conrad Sangma respectively. Read more has developed a comprehensive 10-year roadmap for the Centre-run Airports Authority of India (AAI) to modernise its air traffic management, the US-based aerospace company said on Tuesday. "The roadmap aims to drive operational excellence and offer enhanced air traffic capacity for our flying public, and improved navigation, communication and surveillance for our users, making Indian skies seamless and safer to operate in," Chairman Sanjeev Kumar said. The manages the commercial traffic in the Indian airspace. It also runs more than 100 airports across the country. The project "to develop a comprehensive 10-year Communication, Navigation and Surveillance/Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) modernisation roadmap" was undertaken with a grant from the United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA), said in a press release. As part of the project, worked closely with the Directorate General of Civil (DGCA), the airlines operating in India, airport operators and other airspace stakeholders, it added. Boeing and the had signed an agreement in 2019 to jointly develop the roadmap. "This is a proud moment for us at Boeing as we develop and present a comprehensive roadmap to AAI to be leveraged as national guidance in helping improve airspace utilisation, and maintain safe and efficient aircraft operations," Ahmed Elsherbini, chief engineer, Boeing India, said. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Tuesday called upon gem and jewellery to target USD 100 billion of exports annually in the coming years as the sector holds huge potential to boost outbound shipments. He urged the industry to suggest ways to take the exports to that level by creating incisive marketing tools and irresistible designs. "Let's go for USD 100 billion target," Goyal said while addressing export members of the Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) here. He informed that the sector has accounted for about 10 per cent of the country's USD 400 billion exports, which India has crossed during the current fiscal. He said that the government would act as a facilitator and enabler to promote the growth of the sector in the UAE and other world destinations. A Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) was signed by India and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in February, which would come into force on May 1. hailed the agreement stating that it would help in posting India's exports from sectors like textiles, pharmaceuticals, gem and jewellery and chemicals. GJEPC Chairman Colin Shah said that the agreement would help in boosting the exports to the UAE and to regions including Africa and Middle East nations. "Our exports to the UAE are increasing and we would work to double or triple it in the years to come," Shah said. Shah said that with nil import duty on jewellery under the pact, "we are expecting jewellery exports to the UAE will move to new heights (USD 10 billion annually)". Goyal also inaugurated The India Jewellery Exposition (IJEX) Centre in Dubai, a project of the council. IJEX is a one-stop destination for the world to source Indian jewellery in Dubai. The platform will enable GJEPC members to display goods and book orders throughout the year. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Even as the Australian Government takes measures to get back international students to its shores, the share of Indians among Down Under has grown from 17 per cent in 2019 to 23 per cent. Talking about the range of support initiatives taken by the Australian Government for international students, Monica Kennedy, Senior Trade & Investment Commissioner, Australian Trade and Investment Commission stated that Indian students now formed the highest among in 2022. However, due to Covid-19 pandemic and the recent opening of borders by Australia, the number of Indian students which used to be around 110,000-120,000 in now stands at 97,000 even as it continues to grow back. According to Kennedy, from November 22 2021, when the Australian Government announced that the border would open to students, to March 18 2022, there have been 28,785 student visas lodged by Indian nationals. With February being one of the first intake seasons in a year for Australian universities, the country has seen a surge of applications even as 15,310 visas were granted from November 22 2021 to March 18 2022, with over 25,000 students arriving on Australian shores to begin or resume study. Among the range of new support initiatives taken by the Australian Government include an international student visa fee refund and Covid-19 visa fee waiver, extra time for English language tests and health checks, replacement Temporary Graduate visas and extended stay and work periods. For instance, fully vaccinated international student visa holders, who have arrived in between January 19, and March 19, 2022 were eligible for the visa application fee refund. The refund applies to current visa holders and new students with eligible visa holders will be able to make a claim any time up to December 31, 2022. Similarly, students already in Australia, who held a student visa on or after February 1 2020 and could not complete their course within the original visa time period because of the impacts of COVID-19, may be eligible to have their student visa application fee (VAC) waived when applying for a new student visa. Already, the Australian government had extended post study work visa duration from two years previously to three years now. In addition, there has been temporary relaxation of work restrictions for international student visa holders which means there is no current restriction on the number of hours that students can work while studying in . However, the changes will be reviewed in April 2022. Graduates who held a valid Temporary Graduate visa (subclass 485), were outside of Australia at any time between February 1 2020 and December 14 2021 and lost time in Australia as a result of COVID-19 international travel restrictions, will have their visa extended to 30 September 2022. This extension is to allow eligible graduates time to apply for a replacement visa. The length of stay for Temporary Graduate visa (subclass 485) holders has been extended from two to three years for Masters by Coursework graduates, matching the existing provisions for Masters by Research graduates. Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector graduates will also receive a two year Temporary Graduate visa. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is set to fly to India this week, sources said, finding time to visit to one of the biggest buyers of Russian commodities since the international community began isolating Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine. There is little sign that buying will slow down any time soon, as more deals get signed. One source said the two countries could discuss smoothening trade payments disrupted by Western sanctions on Russian banks. Media have said he could hold talks in the Indian capital on Friday. It will only be Lavrov's third visit overseas since Russia's Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, after a trip to Turkey for talks with his Ukrainian counterpart earlier this month and a scheduled meeting in China on Thursday. Russia is India's main supplier of defence hardware but overall annual trade is small, averaging about $9 billion in the past few years, mainly fertiliser and some oil. By comparison, India's bilateral trade with China is more than $100 billion a year. But given sharp discounts on Russian crude oil since the attack on Ukraine, India has bought at least 13 million barrels, compared with nearly 16 million barrels imported from the country for the whole of last year. Many European countries have also continued to buy Russian energy despite publicly criticising Moscow. New Delhi has called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine but has refused to explicitly condemn Moscow's actions. It has abstained from voting on multiple U.N. resolutions on the war. India is now considering doubling its imports of Russian coking coal used in making steel, the Indian steel minister said on Sunday. Reuters reported on Tuesday that India recently contracted to buy 45,000 tonnes of Russian sunflower oil for April delivery after supplies from Ukraine stopped. Last year, India bought about 20,000 tonnes from Russia a month. "India will import more items from Russia, especially if it is at a discount," one senior Indian government official said. The government has been looking to establish a rupee-rouble trade system and discussions between Indian and Russian financial officials are ongoing, said the source. All the sources declined to be named as the talks were private. The Indian government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) did not immediately respond to requests for comment. OTHER MECHANISMS Besides the rupee-rouble trade window, several other options are on the cards, including settling all government and quasi-government payments directly through the central banks of the two countries, said the source. "India has made up its mind to continue trading with Russia, one way or the other," said Happymon Jacob, a professor of international studies at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. "During the Russian foreign minister's visit, the bureaucracy could definitely bring up the issue of how to continue looking for alternative mechanisms to smoothen trade relations between the two sides." Russia's embassy in New Delhi said it could not confirm the visit. India's foreign ministry said it had no information to share. In a sign of sustained ties despite the Ukraine crisis, India is considering allowing Russia to use its funds lying with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to invest in Indian corporate bonds, said another Indian government source. Russia has retained about 20 billion rupees ($263 million) of Indian payments for Russian defence equipment with the RBI. But another Indian government official said New Delhi would have to diplomatically tackle pressure from the West to be able to maintain its ties with Russia. U.S. President Joe Biden said this month India was "somewhat shaky" in acting against Russia. A U.S. diplomat said last week after meeting Indian officials in New Delhi that the United States had not asked partners like India to suddenly stop energy purchases from Russia. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The largely unorganised and unregulated Indian home- market is at a tipping point. According to a recent Nathealth study titled Indian Home 2.0 Redefining the Modern Care Continuum released on Tuesday, the home market is expected to grow to $19.9 bn market by 2025. The study estimated that the market has a potential to grow an additional $5 bn with the right impetus. The Indian market has evolved and grown to a $5.4 bn market today. The study by healthcare industry body Nathealth highlighted: India has multiple players providing healthcare across preventive, promotive, chronic, acute rehabilitative and palliative care in the comfort of the patients home. Traditionally, 6080 per cent demand for home care has been driven by senior citizens seeking supportive long-term care at home. However, the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India, has highlighted Indian Home Healthcare, as a sturdy pillar of support to the Indian Healthcare continuum, by providing advanced and safe care at home, it said. Designing a framework of regulations, however, holds key for the future of this segment in India, said experts. Siddhartha Bhattacharya, Secretary General, Nathealth said that annually around 20 mn cases are handled by home-healthcare, but around 98 percent of this industry is unregulated. Formalising a regulatory framework, setting down standards, and enrolling providers based on who meet these basic standards are key to the growth and long term prospects of this industry, he said. Ameera Shah, promoter and MD of Metropolis Healthcare too pointed out that Nathealth is working with the Centre to devise a regulatory framework for the sector. The global market is estimated to grow to around $390 Bn by 2026 from an estimated $ 275 Bn in 2020. The accelerated growth of the segment across the developing and developed world is bolstered by strong consumer preference, adoption of virtual care, and digital tools. Reliability, accessibility, and scale readiness have recognized homecare as a mainstream care modality worldwide, the report says. India should be no different from other countries in unlocking the potential of home healthcare. Growing at 19 percent CAGR, the Indian Home Healthcare market is expected to grow 2.5 times by 2025. The value unlock across Digital, Scope of services, and Geography, will further increase the market size in the next two to four years, the study said. There is potential for an additional $ 5 Bn value unlock by 2025 in this segment, given the rapid pace of evolution, government inclination towards innovative and efficient care models, increasing internet penetration, and the consumer mindset shift driven by the pandemic. Home healthcare now constitutes around 3.6 percent of the total healthcare expenditure. In comparison, home healthcare constitutes 8.3 percent of total health expenditure in the developed countries Around 15-20 percent of the healthcare ecosystem is likely to shift to a virtual care model, including remote monitoring Insurers showing inclination towards and IRDAIs nod on allowing coverage of home care services as an add-on to existing or new policies will drive the adoption even faster. These drivers together are presenting a significant impetus for growth in the near future, particularly when the organized home care segment is growing at a CAGR of around 40%, the study said. After a video of an Ola S1 Pro scooter catching fire went viral on social media last week, the (MoRTH) has ordered a probe into the incident. The ministry has asked the Centre for Fire, Explosive and Environment Safety (CFEES) to investigate the circumstances that led to the parked vehicle to go ablaze. CFEES is the fire science and engineering arm of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), under its Systems Analysis and Modelling cluster. The investigation will also cover the Praise Pro electric scooter of Okinawa Scooters, which, in a separate incident in Tamil Nadu, also caught fire. The incident reportedly caused two deaths. The findings of the report, and remedial measures for improvement in each of these cases, may be shared with the ministry, an order by the road transport ministry read. MoRTH also asked for prompt action on the research organisations end. This comes after MoRTH Secretary Giridhar Aramane reportedly said that the ministry had launched an independent probe into the matter. On Saturday, a video from Pune did the rounds of social media, showing an idle Ola scooter emitting smoke, eventually catching fire to the point of being charred. Nobody was harmed in the incident. The cab aggregator and automaker had responded to the incident, saying theyd started a probe into the incident and were in constant touch with the owner of the vehicle, who is completely safe. Olas Chief Executive Officer Bhavish Aggarwal took to Twitter to address the issue. Safety is top priority. Were investigating this and will fix it, he wrote. Industry experts believe that the onset of the summer season is the real challenge for e-scooters, which use lithium-ion batteries. As per reports, these batteries can catch fire owing to manufacturing defects. The government has no proposal for the merger of sick public sector units with profit-making companies at present, Parliament was informed on Tuesday. Currently, there are two sick public sector manufacturing companies FACT ( Fertilisers and Chemicals Travancore Ltd) and MFL (Madras Fertilisers Ltd) under the control of the Department of Fertilisers. "Both units are operational. FACT has reported profit from 2018-19 fiscal to 2020-21. MFL has incurred losses from 2015-16 to 2019-20," Minister of State for Chemicals and Fertilisers Bhagwanth Khuba said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha. The minister mentioned that currently there is no such fertiliser manufacturing unit which is running in losses wherein loans have been waived and old machinery has been replaced recently. "There is no proposal for merger of sick fertiliser units with profit making fertiliser units at present," he said. For skill and management development of the personnel of these two sick units, the minister said MFL undertook 75 programmes for 921 personnel in the last three years, while FACT provided training to 268 employees. Replying to another query on status of the closed unit of Hindustan Fertiliser Corporation Ltd (HFCL) located in Begusarai district of Bihar, the minister said the roadmap for its revival by a joint venture company named Hindustan Urvarak and Rasayan Ltd (HURL) is in place. The project has achieved overall progress of 94.8 per cent as on February 28, 2022. The plant is expected to start by the end of June this year, he said. The minister said that pre-commissioning and commissioning activities are at full swing. The plant does not envisage any hurdles in realising full potential of plant. There is no direct infusion of funds by the central government in the project. However, the Centre has granted interest-free loan equivalent to Interest During Construction (IDC) amounting to Rs 1,257.82 crore for all three plants at Gorakpur, Sindri and Barauni, he added. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) have reduced to Rs 7.73 lakh crore as of December 31, 2021, against Rs 10.36 lakh crore as of March 31, 2018, due to transparent recognition of stressed assets, the government informed the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday. Finance Minister said as per inputs received from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the country-wise ratio of non-performing loans to total gross loans is available on the website of the International Monetary Fund under its Finance Sound Indicator database. "It is observed that the said ratio for India compared adversely with those of US, UK and China, and information in respect of Japan is not available," the minister said. "Primarily as a result of transparent recognition of stressed assets, of SCBs peaked at Rs 10,36,187 crore (gross NPA ratio of 11.8 per cent) as on March 31, 2018, from Rs 3,23,464 crore (Gross NPA ratio of 4.28 per cent) as on March 31, 2015, and as a result of government's strategy of recognition, resolution, recapitalisation and reforms, have since declined to Rs 8,35,051 crore (Gross NPA ratio of 7.33 per cent) as on March 31, 2021, and further to Rs 7,73,470 crore (Gross NPA ratio of 6.39 per cent) as on December 31, 2021," Sitharaman said in her written reply. She also disclosed that as per the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data, aggregate gross advances of Scheduled Commercial Banks (SCBs) increased from Rs 25,03,431 crore as of March 31, 2008, to Rs 68,75,748 crore as on March 31, 2014. As per RBI inputs, aggressive lending practices during this period along with wilful default/loan frauds/corruption in some cases, economic slowdown etc were observed to be primary reasons for the spurt in the of SCBs and Asset Quality Review (AQR) initiated in 2015 for clean and fully provisional bank balance-sheets revealed high incidence of non-performing assets (NPAs), she said. As a result of AQR and subsequent transparent recognition by banks, stressed accounts were reclassified as NPAs and expected losses on stressed loans, not provided for earlier under flexibility given to restructured loans, were provided for, the minister also said. "Comprehensive steps have been taken by the government to deter defaulters, and for effective action against and to recover the default amount from them, which enabled SCBs to recover Rs 8,19,892 crore during the last seven financial years and up to December 2021," she said. Replying to a supplementary from a member in the house, Sitharaman said "Whenever issues of resolution which are "suspect", there are times when the resolution providers are being asked to review the process and only then finalised." "When it is leading to questionable resolutions, there are always avenues available to banks to go to court and say that this may not be the best resolution available. Banks have gone in recent times to court to say that the resolution is not acceptable. Banks have gone questioning the levels to which the banks have been asked to let go haircuts and appealing against resolutions," she said. The minister said when such a thing happens, the resolution professionals' credibility gets questionable after this and fresh cases are not given to them and there are checks and balances that are invoked. To another supplementary, Minister of State for Finance Bhagwat Kishanrao Karad said, "The banks do not differentiate between big loans and small loans and a bank always works on how to recover its loans. There is nothing specific for farmers. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nearly 7.8 lakh students have dropped out of the ongoing Class 10 and 12 examinations of the Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad (UPMSP), also known as the UP Board. On Monday, a whopping 2.9 lakh class 10 and 12 students skipped their exams. Class 10 and 12 students had Computer and Geography exams respectively on Monday. According to official sources, the 7.8 lakh figure surpasses the total dropouts recorded in 2020 (4.8 lakh) and 2019 (6.5 lakh). There were no exams in 2021 due to Covid-19 pandemic. The UP began on March 24. In fact, the number of students skipping the exam so far is the highest in almost a decade. In 2013, 5.6 lakh absentees were recorded by the UPMSP, which conducts exams. The UP Board 2022 examinations saw 4.1 lakh students missing the examinations on day one when Hindi exam was slated for both Class 10 and 12. The UPMSP saw over 70,200 students not attending their languages paper which was held on March 26. The languages include Urdu, Tamil, Bengali, Assamese, Gujarati, Punjabi, Nepali, etc. The high numbers have now forced officials to probe the reasons for dropouts. Additional Chief Secretary, Secondary Education, Aradhana Shukla has directed the UPMSP secretary to constitute a committee and involve the district inspector of schools to ascertain the circumstances that made students to leave their exams even after filling the forms. However, officials said they feel the high dropouts is due to Covid-19 pandemic that has affected people's financial situation. "This could be an important reason other than strict security measures which are in place to curb the cheating menace," said a senior official. --IANS amita/shs (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The (RBI) has found three weaknesses in entities regulated by it during supervisory exercises in recent years. These are compliance, risk management and internal audit, Deputy Governor MK Jain said in a recent speech. Failure/delay in detection and reporting of non-compliances, persisting sub-par compliance, deficiencies in testing with respect to inadequate coverage and limited transaction testing, persisting irregularities due to non-addressing of root causes and not ensuring sustainability of were observed, Jain said in a speech at CAFRAL on March 10 which was uploaded on the RBI website on Tuesday. He also observed that the setup was not resourced adequately with required number and quality of staff in many cases. Jain said RBIs supervision observed a disconnect between the risk appetite framework as approved by the Board and actual business strategy and decision making. He said a weak risk culture was amplified by absence of guidance from the senior management; there was improper risk assessment, and repeated exceptions to risk policies. Conflict of interest was also evident. especially in related party transactions and absence or faulty enterprise-wide risk management. Commenting on internal audit, Jain said the audit process was unable to capture irregularities, there were instances of non-coverage of certain areas under scope of audit, and that compliance and audit were not collaborating with each other. lack of ownership and accountability, inadequate review of practices that require alignment to address interests of all stakeholders, non-compliance/delay in compliance with audit observations were some of the major concerns identified, he said. He said the banks Board must look at cyber risk as an enterprise-wide risk management issue, instead of a pure IT security issue, due to its firm-wide implications. RBI has mandated to have awareness training programmes for their Board of Directors and senior leadership team and to familiarise them with IT and relevant cybersecurity concepts. The Board must start looking at cyber risk as an enterprise-wide risk management issue, rather than a pure IT security issue, owing to its firm-wide implications, Jain said. The comments from the deputy governor come at a time when there have been several instances of cyber fraud involving bank customers who lost their money. Jain said a banks Board needs concise, accurate and timely reports to help it perform its fiduciary responsibilities. He also said that it is important to ensure that financial institutions are Board driven and do not end up being dominated by individuals. Experience has shown that this leads to undesirable consequences, he said. He said that the banking regulator expects effective engagement and support from the top management of the bank. The board should engage with the oversight and assurance functions and assure them of direct and unfettered access. The tone from the top would set the pace for a sound organization culture that values honesty and integrity, Jain who handles the supervision department in RBI, among others, said. Seven Indian-origin persons have been charged by federal authorities with in a scheme through which they made over a million dollars in illegal profits. Hari Prasad Sure, 34, Lokesh Lagudu, 31 and Chotu Prabhu Tej Pulagam, 29, are friends and worked as software engineers at Twilio, a San Francisco-based cloud computing communications company, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Monday. The complaint said Sure tipped his close friend Dileep Kumar Reddy Kamujula, 35, who successfully traded in Twilio's options. Lagudu similarly tipped his girlfriend Sai Nekkalapudi, 30 with whom he lived, and he also tipped his former roommate and close friend Abhishek Dharmapurikar, 33. Pulagam tipped his brother Chetan Prabhu Pulagam, 31. All the seven defendants live in California. The SEC announced charges against the seven individuals for allegedly generating more than USD 1 million in collective profits by ahead of Twilio's positive first quarter 2020 earnings announcement on May 6, 2020. According to the SEC's complaint, Sure, Lagudu and Chotu Pulagam had access to various databases relevant to Twilio's reporting of revenue. As alleged, around March 2020, they learned through the databases that Twilio's customers had increased their usage of the company's products and services in response to health measures taken in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, and concluded in a joint chat that Twilio's stock price would rise for sure. The SEC's complaint alleges that despite receiving a company policy that prohibited them from insider trading, Sure, Lagudu and Chotu Pulagam knowingly tipped off, or used the brokerage accounts of Kamujula, Nekkalapudi, Dharmapurikar and Chetan Pulagam to trade Twilio options and stock in advance of its May 6, 2020 earnings announcement while in possession of the confidential information concerning customer usage. According to the complaint, the scheme generated more than USD 1 million in illegal trading profits. The SEC complaint said that Sure, Lagudu and Chotu Pulagam communicated at times in Telugu, a language used frequently in parts of India. From late March to early May 2020, they engaged in discussions about the upcoming earnings announcement within a private chat channel they created at Twilio. On several occasions between late March and early May 2020, before Twilio's public earnings announcement, Sure, Lagudu and Chotu Pulagam used internal chat channels to discuss in Telugu whether Twilio might exceed market expectations in its quarterly report of earnings, due in May 2020. The complaint said that armed with valuable inside information, they had obtained from Twilio, Sure, Lagudu and Chotu Pulagam began passing tips to their family and friends through phone calls and in-person visits in advance of Twilio's earnings announcement on May 6, 2020. "We allege that this insider trading ring took advantage of valuable revenue information related to the pandemic at a San Francisco tech company," said Monique C. Winkler, Acting Regional Director of the SEC's San Francisco Regional Office. "We are holding these alleged tippers and tippees accountable for their roles in the scheme. The SEC complaint added that Kamujula, Nekkalapudi, Dharmapurikar, and Chetan Pulagam were themselves employees of other publicly traded companies, and they understood it was improper for the insiders to tip another person to trade securities on the basis of material, nonpublic information. Sure, Lagudu and Chotu Pulagam used their friends and family to profit personally from their insider trading scheme and to avoid detection. On May 4, 2020 (just two days before the scheduled Twilio earnings announcement), Sure, Pulagam, and Chotu Pulagam discussed in the chat channel their anticipation that Twilio's stock price, which was then trading around USD 110 per share, would dramatically increase following the earnings announcement and readied themselves to sell their own company restricted stock units post-announcement. Sure noted [l]ooks like [the stock price] is going to be $150, to which Chotu Pulagam responded Miillionaireeeeee, the complaint said. The SEC's complaint, filed in the Northern District of California, charges each of the defendants with violating antifraud provisions of the Securities Exchange Act. The US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California also announced criminal charges against Kamujula. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The bodies of two Russian soldiers lie abandoned in the woods. Ukrainian forces piled atop a tank flash victory signs. Dazed people line up amid charred buildings to reach for aid. These are the sights in a Ukrainian town that has seized back control from Russian forces, at least for now. Arriving in Trostyanets shortly after Ukrainian forces announced the northeastern town near the Russian border had been retaken following weeks of Russian occupation, The Associated Press on Monday saw a civilian landscape that has seen some of the worst of war. The hospital was damaged, its windows jagged with broken glass. The train station had been shot up. Residents stepped carefully, wary of mines. They rode their bicycles past craters in the road and past the ruins of homes. It is not yet clear how many civilians have been killed. Russian tanks lay burned, twisted, left behind like the soldiers in the woods. One of the soldiers had a red band around his leg. The other had an arm flung over his head as if napping on the leaves in the late afternoon light. A Ukrainian soldier nudged him with his toe. A red Z marked a Russian truck, its windshield fractured, near stacked boxes of ammunition. Hundreds of the boxes, including ones with artillery shells, had been stacked around the town. Curious residents peered into an open box of shells. It is not clear where the Russian forces went, under what circumstances they fled or whether the town will remain free of them in the days ahead. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his overnight address emphasised that the situation remains tense in Ukraine's northeast around Kharkiv, the nearest large city, and other areas. But the returned presence of Ukrainian forces in Trostyanets is a relief to a country that hopes some Russian forces, under fierce resistance, are pulling back. A senior US defense official said Washington believes the Ukrainians have retaken Trostyanets. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss US intelligence assessments, said Russian forces largely remained in defensive positions near the capital, Kyiv, and were making little forward progress elsewhere in the country. Late last week, with its forces stalled in parts of the country, seemed to scale back its war aims, saying its main goal was gaining control of the Donbas in the east. In Trostyanets, after weeks of occupation and intense fighting, some residents appeared to have lost all sense of normal. Personally, I have not seen much, said one resident, Vitali Butski. And yet three missiles struck his home. Many buildings beyond the railway station are damaged, he said. Bundled up against the freezing wind, he and ventured out to see what had been left behind. Unexploded ordnance littered the square in front of the train station. Trenches and berms lined the square in a sign that Russian forces tried to defend their position. In a bunker under the station, with thick walls and door, rooms were full of army uniforms and boots left behind. On the walls were patriotic messages including drawings signed by children in Russian reading Thanks for the peace, soldier." Another room had been used as a clinic, with unused drips ready and desks turned into beds, although there was no sign of blood. Packets of Russian food rations were seen amid the debris. But residents indicated that the soldiers were still hungry. In the evenings they came to us, to our houses and our basements, and stole our pickles, potatoes, lard and cucumbers, said one resident who didn't give her name. She called the Russians orcs, or goblin-like creatures. Militias from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions were there as well, she said. The entire town had been occupied. Now, for residents, there is some space to breathe. In line for aid, they waved to passing Ukrainian tanks. As you can see, there were battles here over the past month. Projectiles were flying over, and people were saying they were frightened, said Evgeni Kosin with the emergency services. They were left without food and water. There was a horrible humanitarian situation. Now that there are no flyovers or shelling in the last three days, perhaps it is getting better. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Shares in fell as much as 6% in early trading on Tuesday, after one of its top investors offloaded a $1.2 billion chunk of stock in the lender at a discount overnight. An unnamed investor sold 599 million shares on Monday evening, facilitated by Goldman Sachs. The shares are roughly equivalent to a 3.6% stake, according to Refinitiv Eikon data. The sale deals a further blow to just a day after it disclosed a compliance blunder leading to an estimated 450 million pound ($589 million) loss for overseling structured products in the United States. shares were last down 3.3% at 115.22 pence at 1004 GMT on Tuesday, after tumbling 4% on Monday. Capital Group offloaded 399 million shares on Monday, according to Eikon data, but it was unclear whether the sale was connected to the transaction managed by Goldman Sachs. Capital Group is one of the world's largest investment firms, and parent to the American Funds brand that is popular among millions of U.S. investors and retirement savers. Capital Group declined to comment. Other top Barclays shareholders with around a 3% stake in the lender include the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and Blackrock, according to Eikon data. Blackrock declined to comment when approached by Reuters on Monday, while QIA was not immediately available for comment. QIA last week offloaded 1.2% of miner and commodity trader Glencore for about $1.04 billion. The Barclays sale was priced at 150 pence on Tuesday, towards the top of the target range of 147.50 pence to 150.75 pence, but this still represented a discount greater than 6% to Monday's closing price, pressuring the share price. The sale was slightly bigger than the 575 million shares outlined on Monday evening, netting the seller 899 million pounds ($1.18 billion), a person involved in the deal told Reuters, adding the book was multiple times oversubscribed. Barclays said on Monday it would have to delay a planned 1 billion pound share buyback because of the structured products loss, which it will have to incur as a result of buying back the securities in question at their original purchase price. The regulatory blunder is an early test for C.S.Venkatakrishnan, the newly-appointed chief executive of Barclays, whose previous roles included heading the bank's global markets and risk operations. ($1 = 0.7640 pounds) (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President has proposed to increase the developmental assistance to India in clean energy, digital economy, and also in combating increasing authoritarianism. The proposed increase in India's developmental assistance from USD 25 million in 2021 to USD 66 million for the fiscal 2023 is part of the State Department's developmental assistance for the fiscal 2023, which was sent by the White House to the US Congress on Monday. The funding increase for India supports India's role as a regional leader by increasing and other climate programming. Funds will also advance investments in the digital economy, said the State Department's portion of the budget. Assistance will combat increasing authoritarianism, bolster human rights and strengthen civil society participation and democratic governance, the State Department said. The Biden Administration has also proposed to increase aid to India on the health sector from USD 34.5 million in 2021 to 48.5 million in 2023. Overall, the administration has proposed USD 302.2 million in developmental assistance for South Asia to promote sustainable development to resist harmful economic practices and unsustainable debt. Funding will also combat climate change by increasing investments in and adaptation to climate risks, it said. The State Department also cited a program Treasury's Office of Technical Assistance (OTA) to India as one of its success stories. With OTA support, India's Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs made significant progress in its Smart Cities program to promote issuance of local project debt by cities, the State Department said. Local debt issuance in its infancy in India helps to foster greater ownership and improved planning of infrastructure and development projects, which currently range from water treatment to improved local transportation, it said. OTA previously worked with the Indian municipality of Pune to help facilitate its first bond issuance in 2017. Based on this success, OTA and the Ministry of Housing of Urban Affairs expanded collaboration to include six additional cities -- Vadodara, Pimpri Chinchwad, Rajkot, Faridabad, Mangaluru and Mysuru. According to the State Department, OTA is working with the cities in coordination with the Ministry to help incorporate best practices and lessons learned from the US municipal finance system, enable better project vetting and monitoring, improve disclosure to investors, and lower the cost of capital for the regional capital improvement plan. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) U.S. President Joe Biden, his aides and Western allies are scrambling to explain his remark that Russian leader could not remain in power because they do not want to escalate conflict between Washington and Moscow, officials said. The nine-word line, at the end of a 27-minute speech in Warsaw on Saturday, has distracted from what some observers regard as the best piece of rhetoric of Biden's presidency. It made foreign allies uneasy at the end of an otherwise successful trip aimed at uniting allies against Russia, and has raised fresh questions about the United States' long-term strategy for its former Cold War foe. "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power," Biden said in the Polish capital after condemning Putin's month-long war in Ukraine at length. A White House official told Reuters the comment about Putin was not in the scripted speech. Asked whether the sentiment reflected Biden's true feelings, the official didn't answer directly but noted that the U.S. president has not shied away from calling his Russian counterpart a "butcher" and "war criminal." In his political career, Biden has made some notable verbal missteps during freewheeling sessions with reporters or other spontaneous events. On his recent European trip, Biden said the United States would respond "in kind" if used chemical weapons in Ukraine and suggested that U.S. troops would go to the frontlines, neither of which represent U.S. policy. But Saturday's remark wasn't one of those situations - he was speaking to an audience from a teleprompter. In the minutes before he called for Putin's departure from power, the crowd of roughly 1,000 people was clearly feeding off Biden's remarks, clapping, waving flags and even starting a chant. Biden's emotional declaration gave voice to the frustration that many Western countries - and many U.S. voters - feel about the invasion of Ukraine, one ally to the Democratic president said. It came, officials explained, after a day that included Biden meeting with Ukrainian refugees uprooted by war and government officials in Ukraine trying to respond to Russian bombing campaigns that have ravaged cities and, according to the United Nations human rights office, killed at least 1,119 civilians. Nonetheless, the remark echoes long-standing accusations from and other nations that the United States seeks an imperialistic role in world conflicts, and escalates tensions as the West tries to manage an increasingly unpredictable Putin. The clean-up effort was swift and widespread, reflecting a strong desire inside the administration to avoid escalation with Russia, even it if dinged Biden's reputation. The U.S. secretary of state, White House press office, U.S. ambassador to NATO, and German chancellor all shot the idea of regime change down within a day, capped by Biden himself who bluntly said "No," when asked by reporters in Washington if he is calling for regime change. On Monday, Biden explained to reporters at the White House that his remark reflected his own "moral outrage" about Putin's actions, rather than any policy change. Still he added, if the Russian leader "continues on the course that he's on, he's going to become a pariah worldwide and who knows what he becomes at home in terms of support." Officials in the Biden administration have said in recent weeks that they have grown increasingly concerned about Putin's decision-making and his country's more casual invocation of the threat of nuclear weapons, a posture that made Biden's statement even more surprising. WHAT IS THE END GAME? In recent weeks, the Biden administration has distanced itself from suggestions, including by U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, that the solution to the crisis in Ukraine is Putin's forcible removal. But it has described actions against Russian companies, banks, government officials and oligarchs as directly aimed at Putin, an attempt to alienate him from supporters domestically and on the foreign stage. Putin is now more "isolated from the world than he has ever been," Biden said during his State of the Union address to Congress on March 1; a week later he announced plans to "squeeze" Putin further. Despite engaging directly with Putin, Biden was unsuccessful in coaxing him into not invading Ukraine in the first place. Since the invasion began on Feb. 24, Biden has attempted to speak directly to the Russians instead. "You, the Russian people, are not our enemy," the U.S. president said in Warsaw. Biden officials have not answered questions about what "end game" scenarios the White House envisions around the Ukraine invasion, or how they think Putin might deescalate the conflict. Last week, one of Putin's closest allies, Dmitry Medvedev, warned the United States that the Russian president's departure from power could create an unstable leadership in "with a maximum number of nuclear weapons aimed at targets in the United States and Europe." Asked about Biden's comment in Warsaw, which received little coverage on Russian state television, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "This is a statement that is certainly alarming." Andrew Lohsen, an expert on the conflict and a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Studies, a think tank, warned: "This is going to be part and parcel of Russian disinformation campaigns to malign the motivations of the United States." (Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington and Jarrett Renshaw in Warsaw; Editing by Heather Timmons and Paul Simao) (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Canadian government has selected Corp. and the F-35 as the preferred bidder in its competition to buy a new fighter jet, government officials said Monday. is planning to buy 88 new fighter jets to replace its CF-18s. The government has budgeted about $19 billion Canadian ($15 billion) for the purchase. Procurement Minister Filomena Tassi said was deemed to be the top ranked bidder. Delivery of the first aircraft would be scheduled for 2025 if an agreement is reached. If an agreement is not reached the government has the option to enter into talks with Saab, whose Gripen fighter came second to the F-35 in the competition. has a close relationship with the United States, which includes using fighter jets together to defend North American air space. previously ruled out the Boeing's Super Hornet. A former Conservative Canadian government previously announced the purchase of the F-35 but the current Liberal government delayed the decision and opened up the bidding to competition. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor on Tuesday said it had drawn up two administrative cases against Alphabets for failing to remove banned information, accusing it of blatantly promoting false content. Roskomnadzor said could be fined up to 8 million roubles ($91,533), or as much as 20 per cent of the companys annual revenue in for repeat offences. It said YouTube had become one of the key platforms involved in the information war against . to buy back $2 bn in Eurobond for rubles Russia said on Tuesday it was launching a buyback offer on its $2-billion sovereign Eurobonds maturing on April 4, its biggest debt payment of the year, and would make full payment to bondholders taking up the offer in rubles. The move follows ever-tightening Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion on . The Eurobonds would be bought at a price equivalent to 100 per cent of their nominal value, it said. The bond has a 30-day grace period and no provisions for payments in alternative currencies, according to JPMorgan. did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.Separately, the CEO of Google and Alphabet said on Tuesday that information technology are focused on providing reliable information and stymying Russian propaganda about the invasion of .Pichai met with Polands Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in Warsaw to discuss ways of aiding the people of war-torn . UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Monday that he has been in "very close contact" with and other countries including Turkey, China and Israel on mediation efforts towards bringing an end to the war in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a military offensive against Ukraine on February 24. "I've been in close contact with several countries that have been talking to the parties at the highest level in order to explore the different forms of mediation leading to a political solution. I've been in very close contact with our Turkish friends, with Qatar, with Israel, with India, China but also France, Germany. And it is my belief that all these efforts are essential in order to create the conditions to allow for, finally, this war to come to an end, Guterres told reporters here. When asked if all those countries are supporting his effort, Guterres said, "I hope so." Last week, Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla had met Guterres at the UN headquarters and discussed the situation in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Myanmar. Sources had said that Shringla's meeting with Guterres lasted about an hour and the two discussed the issue of Ukraine. It is understood that Guterres had said that a country like has a very major role to play given that is one of the few countries that commanded respect across the board and was able to reach out to both the sides over the current situation, which needs countries and leaders who can play a role in helping resolve the issue. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has held several phone conversations with Russian President Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and called for immediate cessation of violence as well as concerted efforts from all sides to return to the path of diplomatic negotiations and dialogue. Earlier also Guterres had said that he has been in close contact with a number of countries, including China, France, Germany, India, Israel and Turkey, on mediation efforts to "bring an end to this war." Guterres announced that exercising his good offices, he has asked Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths "immediately" to explore with the parties involved the possible agreements and arrangements for a humanitarian ceasefire in Ukraine. "Since the beginning of the Russian invasion one month ago, the war has led to the senseless loss of thousands of lives; the displacement of ten million people, mainly women and children; the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure; and skyrocketing food and energy prices worldwide. This must stop, Guterres said. Asserting that the solution to the humanitarian tragedy caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not humanitarian but political, the UN chief appealed for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, to allow for progress in serious political negotiations, aimed at reaching a peace agreement based on the principles of the United Nations Charter. "A cessation of hostilities will allow essential humanitarian aid to be delivered and enable civilians to move around safely. It will save lives, prevent suffering, and protect civilians," he said. Guterres expressed hope that a ceasefire will also help to address the global consequences of the war, which risk compounding the deep hunger crisis in many developing countries that already lack fiscal space to invest in their recovery from the pandemic, and now face soaring food and energy costs. In the past month, UN humanitarian agencies and their partners have reached nearly 900,000 people, mainly in eastern Ukraine, with food, shelter, blankets, medicine, bottled water, and hygiene supplies. There are now more than 1,000 United Nations personnel in the country, working via eight humanitarian hubs in Dnipro, Vinnytsia, Lviv, Uzhorod, Chernivitzi, Mukachevo, Luhansk and Donetsk, he said. The World Food Programme and partners reached 800,000 people in the past month and are scaling up to reach 1.2 million people by mid-April. The World Health Organisation and partners have reached more than half a million people in the most vulnerable areas with emergency health, trauma and surgery kits. In response to a question, Guterres said Griffiths, who is currently in Kabul, will "immediately start" his peace effort. Guterres hoped Griffiths will be able to go to both Moscow and Kyiv as soon as that becomes possible. "It's very important to establish a serious dialogue with both parties in relation to the possibility of this humanitarian ceasefire." Griffiths tweeted that he began his visit to Afghanistan Monday at the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in Kabul. "I struggle to put into words how profoundly affected I was by the plight of the babies I met. Tiny, listless newborns, two to an incubator, suffering from acute malnutrition. "A mother caring for her severely malnourished baby, after having already lost two children. Hospital staff telling me three newborns have already died today alone. They need our help. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Information technology are focused on providing reliable information and stymying Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine, the CEO of Google and Alphabet Inc. said Tuesday. Sundar Pichai met with Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in Warsaw to discuss ways of aiding the people of war-torn . We are also working to make sure that trustworthy and helpful information gets to people through our products, Pichai said after the meeting. That includes air raid alerts to Ukrainians as well as information about shelters and humanitarian aid. We are also blocking channels and apps associated with Russia's state-funded media, Pichai said. Google has donated $35 million to humanitarian organisations working in and is offering grants and fellowships for refugees and for Poland's NGOs. Another $10 million will go to supporting civil society in . Pichai and Morawiecki also held a remote meeting with the Prime Minister of Slovenia, Janez Jansa and with a representative of COVID-19-infected Czech premier, Petr Fiala. The three prime ministers met with Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv two weeks ago, to discuss best ways of offering support. Leaders of countries bordering and Ukraine have appealed to the heads of big for help in fighting false information and in curbing Russian propaganda about the war. Morawiecki expressed his personal thanks to Pichai, for his critical role in spreading the truth at the time of war. is moving from autocracy to the totalitarian regime where the propaganda is so important," Morawiecki said. This is why the role of Google and information platforms is critically important in this war for freedom, Morawiecki said. Google is helping in this war for freedom (by) spreading the truth. Pichai also met with Poland's NGO humanitarian organizations and teams of Ukrainian startups. Some 2.3 million from the 4 million Ukrainian refugees have sought safety in Poland since the Feb. 24 start of Russia's invasion. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) (Reuters) - said on Tuesday it would halt sale of personal care products in Russia, joining other that have limited their business in the country in response to its invasion of Ukraine. said it would continue to supply medicines and medical devices in the region as those are excluded from Western sanctions. It will, however, not enroll more patients in clinical drug trials it was running in Russia, it said earlier. The company, which gets about 1% of its sales from Russia, has previously said that half of its business in the region is pharmaceuticals and a majority of its product portfolio from its consumer health business comes within the essential health space of over-the-counter medicines. is one of the biggest drugmakers in the world and also has a sizeable consumer health business that sells skin care, beauty and oral care products under brands including Neutrogena, Aveeno and Listerine. AbbVie, which owns blockbuster wrinkle treatment Botox, said earlier this month it had temporarily suspended operations for all its aesthetics products in Russia. Consumer goods giants such as PepsiCo Inc, Procter & Gamble Co and Nestle SA have said they will retain a presence in Russia to provide basic items for nutrition and hygiene. had previously said it would pause enrollment in clinical trials in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus but was committed to providing essential health products. Large U.S. drugmakers Eli Lilly and Co and Pfizer have announced plans to pull back investments and promotions from Russia, but pledged to continue supply of medicine and medical equipment. Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged pharmaceutical including J&J to join conglomerates withdrawing from Russia completely. (Reporting by Manojna Maddipatla in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli) (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) dropped on Tuesday, extending losses from the previous day on signs of progress in talks between Russia and Ukraine to end their weeks-long conflict, with prices further pressured by China's new lockdowns to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Brent crude fell $6.51, or 5.8%, to $105.97 a barrel by 1342 GMT and U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude was down $6.41, or 6%, at $99.55. Both benchmarks lost about 7% on Monday. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Turkey for the first face-to-face talks in nearly three weeks. The top Russian negotiator said the talks were "constructive". Russia promised at the peace talks to scale down its military operations around Kyiv and northern Ukraine, while Ukraine proposed adoption of neutral status but with guarantees that it would be protected from attack. " are under pressure again on expectations from peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, which could lead to an easing of sanctions," said Hiroyuki Kikukawa, general manager of research at Nissan Securities. Sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine have disrupted oil supplies, driving prices higher. Prices were also pressured on Tuesday by fears over Chinese demand after new lockdowns in Shanghai to curb rising coronavirus cases. Shanghai accounts for about 4% of China's oil consumption, ANZ Research analysts said. Lockdowns have dampened consumption of transportation fuels in China to a point where some independent refiners are trying to resell crude purchased for delivery over the next two months, traders and analysts said. "China's zero-COVID policy is bringing some relief to the oil market, albeit involuntarily, which is very tight due to the supply outages from Russia," said Commerzbank analyst Carsten Fritsch. rose almost $2 earlier in the day as Kazakhstan's supplies continued to be disrupted and major producers showed no sign of being in a hurry to boost output significantly. Kazakhstan is set to lose at least a fifth of its oil production for a month after storm damage to mooring points used to export crude from the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), the energy ministry said. The OPEC+ producer group, meanwhile, is expected to stick to its plan for a modest output rise in May despite high prices and calls from the United States and other consumers for more supply. The energy ministers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, key members of OPEC+, said the producer group should not engage in politics as pressure mounted on them to take action against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) U.S. crude futures slid in early trade on Tuesday, extending losses from the previous session on the prospect of a sharp drop in fuel demand as Shanghai shut down to curb a surge in COVID cases and as Ukraine and Russia headed for peace talks. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures touched a low of $103.46 a barrel shortly after opening and were down $2.09, or 2%, at $103.87 at 2236 GMT, after dropping about 7% on Monday. Brent crude futures were poised to open around $3 lower, also after sliding around 7% in the previous session. Ukraine and Russia were set to meet in Istanbul on Tuesday for their first peace talks in over two weeks. Sanctions imposed on Russia after it invaded Ukraine have curtailed oil supply and earlier this month sent prices to 14-year highs. Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a "special operation" to disarm its neighbour. Offsetting concerns about tight supply, Shanghai's two-stage lockdown over nine days is expected to hit fuel demand in China, the world's largest oil importer. The country's financial hub accounts for about 4% of China's oil consumption, ANZ Research analysts said. Traffic data from Baidu showed peak morning traffic in the city was down 45% as workers stayed home, ANZ analysts said in a note. (Reporting by Sonali Paul in Melbourne; Editing by Chris Reese) (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) By Bozorgmehr Sharafedin LONDON (Reuters) - rose on Tuesday, recovering some of the previous session's losses as Kazakhstan's supplies continued to be disrupted and major producers showed no sign of being in a hurry to boost output significantly. Brent crude rose $1.41, or 1.3%, to $113.89 a barrel at 0848 GMT, and U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude was up 95 cents, or 0.9%, at $106.91. Both benchmarks had lost about 7% on Monday. "There was an overreaction on Monday and the market is re-considering it," UBS analyst Giovanni Staunovo said. "Oil production disruption in Russia finally become visible, Kazakh crude production took a hit in recent days, and gasoline and jet demand in Europe and the United States is still solid." Kazakhstan's giant Tengiz and Kashagan fields cut oil output on March 27 after huge drops in intake to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) pipeline due to maintenance on its terminal, two sources said. The producer group OPEC+ was also expected to stick to its for a modest rise in May at this week's meeting, despite a surge in prices due to the Ukraine crisis and calls from the United States and other consumers for more supply. United Arab Emirates energy minister Suhail al-Mazrouei said on Tuesday that the mission of OPEC+ was to stabilise and come up with as much supply as possible. He said squeezing any partner out of the oil alliance, which includes the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia and others, would only increase prices. had come under pressure earlier on Tuesday, falling as much as $2, ahead of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia to be held in Turkey on Tuesday, the first discussions in more than two weeks. Sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine have disrupted oil supplies, driving prices higher. But a lockdown in Shanghai to curb rising coronavirus cases was expected to hit fuel demand in China, the world's biggest importer. Shanghai accounts for about 4% of China's oil consumption, ANZ Research analysts said. "China's zero-COVID policy is bringing some relief to the oil market, albeit involuntarily, which is very tight due to the supply outages from Russia," said Commerzbank analyst Carsten Fritsch. (Reporting by Yuka Obayashi in Tokyo and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin in London; Additional reporting by Sonali Paul in Melbourne; Editing by Jason Neely and Edmund Blair) (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan's opposition parties have vowed to bring down the beleaguered government of Prime Minister who is facing his toughest political test since assuming office in 2018. The Democratic Movement (PDM), which among others include Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl (JUI-I), organised a big rally on the Srinagar Highway in Islamabad on Monday night. Muslim League (N) (PML-N) vice president Maryam Nawaz and leader of the opposition in Punjab Assembly Hamza Shehbaz who had started the rally from Lahore on March 26, arrived two days later in Islamabad to join the supporters of Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) and other Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) parties who had already set up a camp. Maryam, daughter and heir of former three-time premier Nawaz Sharif, castigated incumbent prime minister Khan for using the religious card to save his tottering throne. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Pentagon may have to ask Congress for additional money to support Ukraine's battle against Russia's invasion, including to replenish America's arsenal for weapons sent to Kyiv, officials said Monday. Rolling out the Defense Department's USD 773 billion request for fiscal 2023, Pentagon leaders said the budget was finalized before the invasion so it has no specific money for the war. Congress approved a USD 13.5 billion emergency funding package in early March. The leaders said it was too early to predict how quickly Ukrainian forces will use up the weapons and ammunition already being provided, and how much the US will need to replace what it sends to Ukraine, such as Stinger and Javelin missiles or body armour and other equipment. We'll have to look at this again, probably in the summer, to be prepared for some of the more difficult options, said Pentagon comptroller Michael McCord. In the initial phases, at least, obviously we have been running through that drawdown at a fairly high rate. So, were that to continue, yes, we probably would need to address that again in the future. Despite the war in Europe, McCord said the US still views China as America's top challenge. We did not feel that what's happening today altered the picture that China is the No. 1 issue to keep our eye on, he said. Obviously, you can draw your own conclusions about Russia's performance on the battlefield. As the war enters its second month, the US has been sending troops, aircraft and other weapons to NATO's eastern flank, where nations worry they may be Russia's next targets. The Pentagon said the budget recognizes that Russia is an acute threat," and the totals include more than USD 5 billion to provide support to European allies and increase America's ability to work with them. The budget also invests heavily in high-tech weapons and capabilities needed to counter China, Russia and other adversaries. The programs range from hypersonic missiles and artificial intelligence to cyber warfare and space-based missile warning and defense systems. The 2023 budget plan includes a 4.6% pay hike for the military and for Defence Department civilians -- the largest raise in 20 years. And it provides $479 million to expand sexual assault prevention, treatment and judicial programs, including the hiring of about 2,000 personnel, including counsellors and prosecutors. The department also is seeking USD 1 billion to continue efforts to shut down the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in Hawaii that leaked petroleum into Pearl Harbor's tap water. The money is in addition to USD 1 billion already allocated, and will help pay for remediation of the site, ongoing needs of the affected families, litigation costs and the development of alternative fuel locations for the US military in the region. Nearly 6,000 people, mostly those living in military housing at or near Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam were sickened, seeking treatment for nausea, headaches, rashes and other ailments. And 4,000 military families were forced out of their homes. The budget includes USD 34.4 billion to accelerate modernisation of the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal, largely following the path set by the Obama administration and continued by former President Donald Trump. One of the few changes was a decision by the Biden administration to eliminate plans for a sea-launched nuclear cruise missile. That program, started by Trump and criticized by many Democrats as overkill, was in the early stages of research and development. Other cuts are proposed in the budget including the decommissioning of several ships, a reduction in the number of F-35 fighter jets purchased in 2023 compared to earlier plans, and an effort to phase out the Army's A-10 attack aircraft. Congress has repeatedly overruled efforts to cut the A-10 in the past. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President on Monday proposed a USD 1.8 billion to support his Strategy along with another USD 400 million to counter the malign Chinese behaviour. Both are part of the USD 773 billion annual defence budget of the US for the year 2023, which was submitted by the White House to the Congress as part of its annual budgetary proposals. In the Indo-Pacific, America is strengthening its role and expanding its cooperation with longtime allies and partners, including new diplomatic, defence and security, critical and emerging technology and supply chain, and climate and global health initiatives, while supporting stronger ties between our European and Indo Pacific allies, Biden said. The President has prioritized strategic competition with China and worked with allies and partners to resist coercion and deter aggression from Beijing and Moscow, and has ended America's 20-year war in Afghanistan while removing all US troops, the White House said. The budget, the White House said, promotes integrated deterrence in the and globally. To sustain and strengthen deterrence, the budget prioritizes China as the Department's pacing challenge. To support American leadership in defending democracy, freedom, and security worldwide, the Budget includes nearly USD 1.8 billion to support a free and open, connected, secure, and resilient Region and the Indo-Pacific Strategy, and USD 400 million for the Chinese Malign Influence Fund. In addition, the Budget provides USD 682 million for Ukraine, an increase of USD 219 million above the 2021 enacted level, to counter Russian malign influence and to meet emerging needs related to security, energy, cybersecurity issues, disinformation, macroeconomic stabilization, and civil society resilience. According to the White House, Department Of Defence's 2023 Pacific Deterrence Initiative highlights some of the key investments the Department is making that are focused on strengthening deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region. The Department is building the concepts, capabilities, and posture necessary to meet these challenges, working in concert with the interagency and US allies and partners to ensure US deterrence is integrated across domains, theaters, and the spectrum of conflict, it said. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Defence Minister held a telephonic conversation with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Gantz on Tuesday, during which both sides looked forward to further strengthening the bilateral ties. The telephonic talks came shortly after Israel announced the postponement of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's visit to India. Bennett tested positive for COVID-19 Sunday. "Had a telephonic conversation with the Defence Minister of Israel, Mr. Benjamin Gantz. Shared my condolences on loss of innocent lives due to terror attacks in Israel. Terrorism is a global menace which has no place in today's civilised world," Singh said in a tweet. In another tweet, he said both the countries look forward to further strengthening the bilateral relations as India and Israel complete 30 years of full diplomatic relations. "Defence cooperation is the founding pillar of our strategic partnership. Military cooperation has been on an upward swing in recent years," Singh said. "Also, I wished for the speedy recovery of Israeli Prime Mr. Naftali Bennett who recently tested positive for Covid," he added. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) said it would work out practical arrangements by Thursday for foreign companies to pay for its gas in rubles, raising the probability of supply disruptions as Western nations have so far rejected Moscows demand for a currency switch. The EU is assessing a scenarios including a full halt to Russian next winter, as part of its contingency planning for supply shocks, the European Commission said last week. President Vladimir Putins recent order to charge unfriendly countries in rubles for Russian gas has boosted the currency after it fell to all-time lows when the West imposed sanctions against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. No one will supply gas for free, it is simply impossible, and you can pay for it only in rubles, spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday. The move has drawn strong criticism from European countries, which pay for Russian gas mostly in euros and say is not entitled to redraw contracts, with the G7 nations rejecting Moscows demands this week. G7 countries have called upon companies not to accede to ruble payments and that most gas supply contracts stipulate euro or US dollar payments. says reports of poisoning are untrue The on Tuesday dismissed reports that Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich had been poisoned, saying they were untrue and part of an information war. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Abramovich is not an official member of the Russian team negotiating with Ukraine, but is present at the talks in Turkey to enable certain contacts between the two sides. Biden to discuss Ukraine with European leaders US President Joe Biden will talk to the leaders of France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom on Tuesday to discuss the latest developments in Russias invasion of Ukraine, the White House said. Biden is scheduled to convene the call with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, it said. Biden says comments on Putin were moral outrage US President Joe Biden has said that he would make no apologies and was not walking anything back after his controversial remark that President cannot remain in power" and emphasising that his comment was a moral outrage that he felt after invaded Ukraine. The Russian delegation has arrived in Turkey's largest city on Monday for a fresh round of peace talks with Ukraine, the CNN Turk broadcaster reported. The plane carrying the Russian representatives landed at the Ataturk Airport, which is exclusively used for diplomatic missions, it said. According to Turkish diplomatic sources, the talks are expected to begin on Tuesday morning, Xinhua news agency reported. In a phone call on Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin agreed to hold the next round of negotiations in . Erdogan reiterated that Turkey would continue to contribute in every possible way during this process. So far, and Ukraine have held three rounds of in-person talks in Belarus, and their fourth session was a video conference. --IANS int/shs (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Consultation platforms near peoples homes help bring prompt solutions to Chinese peoples needs 09:10, March 29, 2022 By Shi Ziqiang ( People's Daily On a sunny spring afternoon, Yang Xiaoyan, a 69-year-old resident in Huocun village, Xingtang county, Shijiazhuang city, north Chinas Hebei province, was playing Chinese chess with his old fellows at a newly built leisure square, or the activity center for senior residents. Representatives of residents of Zhuge village, Gaotai township, Qingshen county, Meishan city, southwest Chinas Sichuan province, take part in a discussion at a meeting room dedicated to villagers consultative meetings, March 17, 2022. (Peoples Daily Online/Yao Yongliang) The leisure square covers an area of more than 1,000 square meters and is equipped with various kinds of exercise and leisure facilities, including a ping-pong table, a table for chess and card games, stage for performance of traditional Chinese opera, a rest pavilion, and a cultural corridor designed to promote traditional virtues among the Chinese nation, such as filial piety and righteousness. Just a few months ago, senior residents of Huocun village were upset that they couldnt find a suitable place to take physical exercise and enjoy leisure activities. Things started to change in September 2021, when the Xingtang county committee of Chinas top political advisory body, the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), held a mobile consultative meeting in Huocun village to hear villagers voices and suggestions. Now that we can eat well and dress well, the only one more thing we would like to have is a place for leisure activities, said senior residents of the village at the meeting. After the meeting, the CPPCC committee of Xingtang county immediately carried out discussions on the issue with the housing and urban-rural development bureau of the county and the government of Zhili township, and they eventually decided to build an activity center for senior residents on a tract of idle residential land in the village. The construction of the activity center was completed in merely three months. The mobile consultative meeting is one of the mobile consultation platforms launched by the CPPCC Xingtang county committee. To facilitate the work of the CPPCC committee at the community level and strengthen the communication between political advisors and local people so as to further tap into the strengths of the CPPCC committee as a dedicated consultative body, the CPPCC Xingtang county committee has carried out mobile consultative meeting near peoples homes to better engage local people in discussions on matters involving them since August 2021. Photo taken on Feb. 3, 2021 shows a consultative meeting held in Fenghuang village, Zhongxing township, Youxian district, Mianyang city, southwest Chinas Sichuan province. The meeting was organized by the Youxian district committee of Chinas top political advisory body, the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), to involve local people in discussions on local affairs. (Peoples Daily Online/Cheng Heping) By holding consultative meetings near peoples homes, we mean to encourage more people to take part in discussions on local affairs, said Zhang Shengli, chairman of the CPPCC Xingtang county committee. Although the matters discussed during consultations directly related to the interests of the people, they used to be unable to take part in these consultations due to various reasons, said Zhang, adding that participants in consultations organized by the CPPCC Xingtang county committee in the past were mainly officials and experts. Since its inconvenient for the people to come and attend the consultations, we decided to bring consultative meeting to their homes, Zhang said. The mobile consultation platforms launched by the CPPCC Xingtang county committee lay emphasis on both determining matters to be discussed during consultative meetings and finding and identifying problems through such meetings. Teams led by officials with the CPPCC Xingtang county committee often organize consultative meetings at communities, villages, and factories to engage local people in the discussions of matters involving them. Once problems are identified at these meetings, political advisors immediately hold consultations with officials of local government and later invite relevant authorities to the spots where the problems occur to discuss solutions. Such mobile consultative meetings not only offer the people an opportunity to speak out freely, but also involve various local authorities and government departments in the discussions on and settlement of problems and help CPPCC members better fulfill their duties, thus benefiting multiple parties, according to Zhang. We are going to make sure the mobile consultative meeting is carried out in a standardized and more orderly manner and develop it into a special consultation mechanism trusted by the people, so that it can play a greater role in grassroots-level social governance, he added. Besides Xingtang county, other places across the country have also witnessed the exuberant vitality of grassroots consultative democracy, which has been applied extensively at multiple levels and given rich content. The Chinese people have explored and initiated numerous popular and pragmatic grassroots forms and practices of democracy, from courtyard discussions to neighborhood meetings, from offline roundtables to online group chats, and from democratic discussions to mobile consultative meetings. As more and more political advisors involve themselves deeply in grassroots-level democratic consultations to resolve the most pressing difficulties and problems that are of great concern to the people, the innovative forms of consultative democracy that emerge one after another in China are continuously injecting fresh vigor into the countrys whole-process peoples democracy. (Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun) Air raid sirens sounded across Ukraine before dawn on Tuesday as Ukrainian and Russian negotiators prepared to meet in for face-to-face talks, with Kyiv seeking a ceasefire without compromising on territory or sovereignty. FIGHTING * Russia continues missile and bomb strikes in an attempt to completely destroy infrastructure and residential areas of Ukrainian cities, said Ukraine military general staff. * Russia said it destroyed large ammunition depots in the Zhytomyr region and hit 41 Ukrainian military sites in the past 24 hours. * Ukraine said it seized back control of Irpin, near Kyiv. A U.S. official said the eastern town of Trostyanets, south of Sumy, was back in Ukrainian hands. Reuters could not confirm the reports. * Russian soldiers who seized the Chernobyl site drove armoured vehicles without radiation protection through a highly toxic zone called the "Red Forest", workers there said. TALKS AND DIPLOMACY * Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning after a meeting, the Wall Street Journal reported. But a U.S. official said intelligence suggests the symptoms were due to an environmental factor, not poisoning. * The Kremlin said Joe Biden's remark that Putin "cannot remain in power" was a cause for alarm. Biden said the comment reflected his own moral outrage, not a U.S. policy shift. * Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged Western nations to toughen sanctions including an oil embargo. CIVILIANS * The U.N. human rights office said 1,119 civilians had been killed and 1,790 wounded since Russia began its attack. * Nearly 5,000 people, including about 210 children, have been killed in besieged Mariupol, a spokesman for its mayor said. ECONOMY * Russia said it would not supply gas to Europe for free as it worked out methods for accepting payments for its gas exports in roubles. G7 nations refused the demand. * U.S. and German officials are due to meet in Berlin this week with energy industry executives to discuss ways to boost alternative supplies for Germany. * Russia's invasion has cost Ukraine $564.9 billion in terms of damage to infrastructure, lost economic growth and other factors, Economy Minister Svyrydenko said. QUOTES * "We are not trading people, land or sovereignty," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba said of the talks in . * "We have destroyed the myth of the invincible Russian army," Kyiv Mayor Klitschko said. (Compiled by Michael Perry; Editing by Stephen Coates) (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Since the Russian blockade in Mariupol began on March 1, some 5,000 people have been killed, 170,000 still remain under siege, while 150,000 were evacuated from the strategic Ukrainian port city, according to preliminary estimates. Of the 5,000 victims, 210 were children, Ukrayinska Pravda reported citing the government estimates. Before the ongoing siege began, 140,000 residents left the coastal city. The estimates further revealed that 30,000 people have been deported by the Russian troops, forcefully taken to the captured territories in the east of or to Russia. Meanwhile, 90 per cent of the high-rise apartment buildings in the city have been damaged, of which 1,560 (60 per cent) were directly hit by Russian missiles, bombs, or artillery, and 1,040 (40 per cent) were completely destroyed. At least 61,200 private residences have been damaged, while a total of seven hospitals were also hit. The estimates also showed that two manufacturing plants, one port, and 3,057 military bases have also been damaged. Among education institutions, 90 per cent of them have been damaged, including 23 schools and 28 kindergartens that were totally destroyed. On Monday, Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko has called for the complete evacuation of the city as there is no water, light, heat or any means of communication. --IANS ksk/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Dmytro Khilyuk, a journalist working for the Ukrainian Independent News Agency (UNIAN), was abducted by Russian forces on March 4 from a village in the Kiev region, a media watchdog announced. In a statement posted on its website on Monday, the Media Initiative for Human Rights said on the eve of his disappearance, Dmytro wrote on Facebook that his village of Kozarovychi in Vyshhorod district, was "under occupation" and that there was no water, the shops were empty and the internet connection was very weak. He claimed in his post that Russian troops were "going from house to house", and people remained inside their homes as there were periodic shooting in the village. According to the watchdog, Khilyuk's disappearance was first reported by his friends in the media, who were unable to contact him. His friends "learned from neighbours that Khilyuk was detained by people in Russian military uniform", the statement said. First it was not known where he was take, but later it was revealed that the journalist was being held inside a building in Dymer, another village in the Kiev region. Local residents have said that Khilyuk might have been kidnapped on suspicion that he was in contact with the military and law enforcement agencies, the Media Initiative added. According to Ukrainian authorities, at least 12 journalists, local and foreign, have been killed and 10 injuried in since the war began on February 24. The victims include US journalist and filmmaker Brent Renaud and Oksana Baulina, a Russian journalist reporting for investigative website The Insider. Local Victoria Roshchyna and Oleh Baturin were also abducted by Russian forces, but have since been released. --IANS ksk/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The chief has launched an initiative to immediately explore possible arrangements for a humanitarian cease-fire in Ukraine in order to allow the delivery of desperately needed aid and pave the way for serious political negotiations to end the month-long war. Secretary-General said Monday he asked Undersecretary-General Martin Griffiths, the head of the U.N.'s worldwide humanitarian operations, to explore the possibility of a cease-fire with Russia and Ukraine. He said Griffiths has already made some contacts. The 193-member U.N. General Assembly, by an overwhelming majority of about 140 nations, has called for an immediate cessation of hostilities in Ukraine twice -- on March 2 and on March 24 -- and Guterres told reporters he thinks this is the moment for the to assume the initiative. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, the secretary-general said there has been a senseless loss of thousands of lives, displacement of 10 million people, systematic destruction of homes, schools, hospitals and other essential infrastructure, and skyrocketing food and energy prices worldwide. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Amid a resurgence due to the new Omicron sub-variant, the number of daily Covid-19 vaccinations in the US has fallen to the lowest level since the early days of the inoculation campaign in 2020. The seven-day average of vaccine doses of all types administered in the country dipped to 127,000 per day this week, Xinhua news agency reported citing data tracked by The Hill news outlet. This marked a steady decline since January, when more than 1 million shots per day were being administered. The seven-day average number of administered vaccine doses over the past week was a 27.1 decrease from the previous week, according to data of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Till date, about 255 million people, or 76.8 per cent of the total US population, have received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine. About 217.2 million people, or 65.4 per cent of the total population, have been fully vaccinated, CDC data show. However, less than half of the total booster-eligible population were yet to receive a booster dose. Experts said booster shots are particularly important in the face of the Omicron variant, which has a greater ability to evade the protection from two doses of the vaccine. The lagging rates in Covid-19 vaccinations and boosters left the US more vulnerable to a potential new increase in cases, as is starting to happen in Europe, even with higher booster rates in many countries. "Periodic reminder that U.S. booster coverage is terrible, especially considering most in this group are not opposed to vaccines in general and many are high risk (age or otherwise)," tweeted Jason Schwartz, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health. Amid the slowdown in vaccinations, the BA.2 sub-lineage of the Omicron variant is steadily gaining its ground in the country, with infections almost doubling each week in February, CDC data show. The BA.2 variant now makes up over one third of new Covid-19 infections in the US. This data is up from 22.3 per cent a week prior, and 15.8 per cent two weeks before. In the northeastern part of the country, BA.2's prevalence has surpassed 50 per cent. The rapid spread of the variant coincided with the start of the allergy season, which may complicate symptoms and delay timely distinction. With Covid-19 cases rising in parts of Europe and Asia due to BA.2's rapid spread, scientists worry that the variant may soon push cases up in the US too. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said he expects "an uptick in cases" due to BA.2, but not necessarily a massive surge like other variants have caused. As of Tuesday morning, the US continued to be the worst-hit country with the world's highest number of cases and deaths at 79,995,485 and 977,687. --IANS ksk/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The has requested a $26 billion budget for in 2023, which is about $2 billion more than the space agency received for the current fiscal year. The budget would enable to fund Artemis moon landings, Earth science, address climate change, drive economic growth, and more as the agency aims to send people to Mars by 2040, officials said. "Greater than a number, statistic, or fact is what the President's budget request represents," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said, in a statement. "This budget reflects the Biden-Harris Administration's confidence in the extraordinary workforce that makes NASA the best place to work in the federal government. "It's an investment in the businesses and universities that partner with NASA in all 50 states and the good-paying jobs they are creating. It's a signal of support for our missions in a new era of exploration and discovery," Nelson said. The budget allocates $7.6 billion for deep space exploration. Through Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman and person of colour on the lunar surface, deepen the US' scientific understanding of the Moon, and test technologies that will prepare for human exploration of Mars. About $4.7 billion is for Common Exploration Systems Development to support lunar missions which includes funding for the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS). The budget's $1.5 billion for astronaut Moon landers will enable NASA to increase competition in the development of the final mode of transportation needed to take astronauts to the lunar surface. With $2.4 billion allocated for Earth-observing satellites and related research, the budget will increase NASA's Earth science funding for climate and weather monitoring and measurement. NASA also aims to support commercial space activities. The budget's $1.4 billion for space technology research and development will support new technologies to help the US commercial space industry grow, enhance mission capabilities, create good-paying jobs, and reduce costs. About $970 million has been allocated for aeronautics research. This includes $500 million to reduce aviation's climate impact through efforts including a Sustainable Flight National Partnership to develop a next-generation passenger aircraft. With $150 million for the Office of STEM Engagement for education and engagement activities, this budget would allow NASA to enhance its support for educational activities, including those that focus on historically underserved communities. --IANS rvt/svn/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The U.S. government said Tuesday that has granted visas for federal investigators to travel there and aid in the investigation of the deadly Eastern Airlines . The National Transportation Safety Board said also granted visas to technical advisers from Boeing, which made the plane, engine manufacturer CFM and the Federal Aviation Administration. All would take part in the investigation, under longstanding agreements. The safety board said the U.S. officials and industry representatives hope to leave for China this week. Their travel was held up for several days to meet Chinese visa and COVID-19 regulations, and the NTSB appealed to the State Department to intervene. A China Eastern Boeing 737-800 jet crashed in a remote mountainous area in southern China on March 21, killing all 123 passengers and nine crew members on board. The plane was cruising at about 29,000 feet about one hour into its flight from Kunming in southeastern China to Guangzhou, an export manufacturing hub near Hong Kong, when it went into a steep descent. Over the weekend, searchers found the plane's flight data recorder, following earlier recovery of the cockpit voice recorder, which investigators hope will provide important clues about the cause of the . China Eastern, one of four major Chinese airlines, and its subsidiaries have grounded all their Boeing 737-800s, more than 200 planes. The airline said the grounding was a precaution, not a sign of any problem with the planes. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US has proposed forging a industry alliance between the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, and in a move to prevent China from gaining dominance over the strategic sector. However, South Korea is not fully on board with the idea proposed by America, News reported citing Business Korea. "Cooperation with the is the top priority of course, and yet the biggest market (China) is also of paramount importance," reported citing Business Korea's sources. The South Korean government is reluctant to jeopardize the operations of South Korean chipmakers like Samsung who have a core manufacturing infrastructure in China. The western Chinese city of Xi'an is home to Samsung's only overseas memory chip plant. The fab accounts for roughly 40 per cent of the Korean conglomerate's total NAND flash production. Meanwhile, China is waging economic warfare to acquire Taiwan's industries, home to the world-leading industry, second only after the US. The Taiwanese government has accused China of waging economic warfare against Taiwan's tech sector by stealing technology and inveigling away skilled engineers, reported The HK Post. Taiwanese Executive Minister Lo Ping Cheng charged that Beijing was enticing Taiwan's advanced-tech personnel and engaging in theft of national critical technologies, circumventing regulations, illegally investing and operating in causing the nation a huge loss in IT security and industry competitiveness. Semiconductors or 'chips' are the essential building blocks in technological innovation and economic development. These chips are ubiquitous in all electrical devices including smartphones, electronic vehicles, hypersonic armaments, airships, pacemakers etc. In the past few years, the government of Taiwan has reported many charges concerning the theft of chip trade secrets by Chinese organizations. While China manufactures the majority of the world's computers and smartphones, it imports almost all the semiconductors needed to run these gadgets. To remove its technological dependence, China regularly engages in industrial espionage and other activities in an effort to develop its own semiconductor industry. This was also one of the main reasons why China was trying hard to get Taiwan back under its hold. Investigation Bureau of Taiwan under the administration of the Ministry of Justice rounded up 60 Chinese nationals on the allegation of stealing trade secrets and poaching tech employees from Taiwan, reported The HK Post. The list of companies investigated includes Vimicro, GLC Semiconductor, Analogix Semiconductor, Beijing Yinxing Technology among . (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US lawmakers are trying to resolve entrepreneur Elon Musk's business ties to China, which they fear may include the Beijing connections to SpaceX, said a recent Wall Street Journal report. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced legislation aimed at rectifying the problem, according to The Hill, telling the Wall Street Journal that "any company operating in is going to be pressured and exploited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)." Elon Musk comes under criticism early this year for showcasing his new Tesla showroom in the Xinjiang region where keeps millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps. A major Muslim civil liberties organization in the US had called on Tesla motors CEO Elon Musk to close a recently-opened showroom, saying no American corporation should be doing business in a region that is the focal point of a campaign of genocide targeting a religious and ethnic minority. The problem is that all Chinese entities are legally obligated to spy for their government, a practice codified in China's National Intelligence Law of 2017, The Hill reported, adding that this may be hard for some Americans to imagine, but it is not insignificant. "No American corporation should be doing business in a region that is the focal point of a campaign of genocide targeting a religious and ethnic minority," said CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. "Elon Musk and Tesla must close this new showroom and cease what amounts to economic support for genocide." According to media reports, Tesla has said it has begun operations in a showroom in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. This has drawn widespread criticism. US lawmakers accuse of imprisoning as many as 1.8 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and members of other Muslim minority groups in a system of extrajudicial mass internment camps, where they are forced to produce textiles, electronics, food products, shoes, tea, and handicrafts. Beijing, on the other hand, has repeatedly denied all accusations of being engaged in abuses in Xinjiang. Meanwhile, the White House has urged private companies to oppose the human rights abuses and genocide by China in Xinjiang. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Western officials say Russia is building up troops in eastern Ukraine, but it's too soon to say whether Moscow's claim to be scaling back operations around Kyiv is true. Officials familiar with the intelligence picture said Tuesday that Moscow is reinforcing troops in the Donbas in an attempt to encircle Ukraine's best-trained and best-equipped forces, which are concentrated in the eastern region. Moscow has said gaining control of the Donbas is now its main military goal in Ukraine. A Western official speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence said it's clear that Russia's tactics and strategies are changing but it's not yet clear what that prefigures. The British government also expressed scepticism about Russia's claims to be scaling back and its commitment to ending the war through talks. We will judge Putin and his regime by his actions, not by his words, said Max Blain, spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson. --- Washington: The White House is rejecting as false and disinformation assertions by Russia that the U.S. government is launching cyber operations against Moscow that include the theft of personal data and the spreading of false information about the Russian military. The Russian Foreign Ministry made the assertions in a statement Tuesday. It alleged that the U.S. and other NATO members had trained Ukrainian hackers and blamed what it said was an effort by Ukraine to recruit hackers. Emily Horne, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, responded by calling the claims false and said the U.S. government has not engaged in the activity described by Russia. She says Moscow's statements to the contrary amount to disinformation. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) As Russia's invasion of Ukraine accelerates European Union defense cooperation, a watchdog said Tuesday that EU institutions face vulnerabilities on another front: . The warning by the European Court of Auditors covers the wide range of EU bodies from the executive arm based in Brussels to specialist agencies located across Europe that run the 27-nation bloc's day-to-day business. The EU must step up its efforts to protect its own organisations, Bettina Jakobsen, a member of the ECA, said in a statement accompanying a special report on cyberthreats. Such attacks can have significant political implications. Cyberattacks against EU bodies are increasing sharply, with major incidents jumping more than tenfold between 2018 and 2021, according to the Luxembourg-based ECA. has jumped up the political agenda in Europe following attacks in recent years that targeted EU nations such as Germany and other industrialised countries including the United States, Britain and Australia. In 2020, the EU imposed cyber sanctions for the first time, blacklisting a number of Russian, Chinese and North Korean hackers. Nonetheless, the European auditors said Tuesday that EU organisations were failing to enact some essential controls and underspending in this area. The auditors also alleged a lack of systematic cybersecurity training and information sharing. EU entities as a whole handle political, diplomatic, financial, economic and regulatory matters. The spectrum of activities underpins the bloc's status as a geopolitical force, a global setter of industrial rules and the world's most lucrative single market. The sensitive information processed by EU bodies makes them attractive targets for hackers, according to the report, which said the risks have grown as a result of remote working prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This has considerably increased the number of potential access points for attackers, the ECA said. It said a particularly concerning trend is the dramatic increase in significant incidents, which are described as attacks that involve the use of new methods and technologies and that can take weeks or even months to investigate and resolve. One example cited is a high-profile cyberattack on the European Medicines Agency in late 2020, when the EU was pushing to authorize the first COVID-19 vaccines. Sensitive data was leaked and manipulated in a way designed to undermine trust in vaccines, the ECA said. Because the EU's organisations are strongly interconnected, a vulnerability anywhere could have a cascading effect, it said. A weakness in one can expose to security threats, said the ECA. It recommended the EU draw up legislation that would set common binding rules on cybersecurity for all the bloc's institutions. The auditors also urged more resources to support the Computer Emergency Response Team of EU bodies, or CERT-EU, saying its effectiveness is compromised by an increasing workload, unstable funding and staffing, and insufficient cooperation from some of the bloc's organisations. In sum, according to the ECA, the network of EU institutions has not achieved a level of cyber-preparedness commensurate with the threats. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) By Rajendra Jadhav MUMBAI (Reuters) -India has contracted 45,000 tonnes of Russian sunflower at a record high price for shipments in April as edible prices in the local market surged after supplies from rival Ukraine stopped, five industry officials told Reuters. Sunflower from could help the world's biggest edible oil importer in easing the shortfall at a time when availability of vegetable oils is stretched because of Indonesia's decision to restrict palm oil supplies and lower soybean crop in South America. "As vessel loading is not possible in Ukraine, buyers are trying to secure supplies from Russia," said Pradeep Chowdhry, managing director of Gemini Edibles & Fats India Pvt. Ltd, which contracted 12,000 tonnes of Russian sunflower oil for April shipments. Refiners bought crude sunflower oil at a record price of $2,150 a tonne, including cost, insurance and freight (CIF), in India for April shipments, compared with $1,630 before invaded Ukraine, dealers said. Sunflower oil was cheaper than rival palm oil and soyoil before the conflict, but as supplies from top exporter Ukraine stopped, buyers have to pay hefty premium, Chowdhry said. The Black Sea accounts for 60% of world sunoil output and 76% of exports. Indian buyers were not making purchases of Russian sunflower oil for nearly a month, but now they are placing orders as banks are opening letters of credit (LC) for the imports, said a New Delhi-based dealer with a global trading firm. "Indian buyers are paying in dollars. Indian insurance companies are providing cover to vessels bringing sunoil from Russia," the dealer said. Shipments of more than 300,000 tonnes of sunflower oil from Ukraine to India are stuck as loading at Ukrainian ports is suspended, said a Mumbai-based dealer. India imports sunoil mainly from and Ukraine. It imports palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia, whereas the bulk of soyoil is sourced from Argentina and Brazil. India has now been trying to increase imports of sunflower oil from Argentina, said Sandeep Bajoria, chief executive of Sunvin Group, a vegetable oil brokerage and consultancy firm. "Even after the imports from Russia and Argentina, there would be shortfall of sunoil. Nobody can replace Ukraine's shipments," Bajoria said. India consumes around 200,000 tonnes of sunflower oil but currently refiners can import around 80,000 tonnes only, the New Delhi-based dealer said. Consumers are forced to switch to soyoil, rapeseed oil and groundnut oil as sunflower oil supplies are limited, the dealer said. "Sunflower oil is very expensive. This is forcing price sensitive buyers to shift to other oils," Bajoria said. (Editing by Sanjeev Miglani; editing by David Evans) (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The country's oldest has also embarked on a search for a chief executive and managing director as the incumbent Ashish Kumar Chauhan's term has ended. The move comes at a time when its bigger rival NSE, which controls a large part of trade volumes in the country, has also initiated a similar process for its chief. Interestingly, some reports mention that Chauhan is in the race to take over the corner office at NSE. In an advertisement posted on Tuesday, the 1875-established said it is looking for a results-oriented leader having an experience of 20 years, with the "highest ethical standards". Stock exchanges have frequently faced troubles over integrity - witnessed through the emergence of scandals. NSE, which is passing through a scandal involving an ex-chief, is also stressing on governance aspect in its search for a new head. Understanding of the financial markets, technology and operations are the desired qualities in the candidate, the advertisement said. A market-savvy leader with an entrepreneurial approach, capable of working in a closely regulated and supervised system, is being sought, it added. She or he must be having prior experience in managing expectations of diverse stakeholders, including regulators, investors, customers and employees, and should meet Capital regulator Sebi's eligibility criteria. The candidate should hold a post-graduation or master's degree, and the compensation will be as per industry standards, the advertisement noted. The appointment may be for a period of up to five years, it said, specifying April 23 as the last date for submission of applications. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The are likely to start on a positive note on Tuesday as crude prices slumped 8 per cent overnight due to lockdowns in Shanghai and likley ease in demand from China. The SGX Nifty futures were quoting at 17,430 levels at 7:45 am, hinting at a gap-up open of around 100 points for the Nifty50. Meanwhile, these are the out for in trade today: Aurobindo Pharma: Hyderabad based drugmaker Aurobindo has acquired the domestic formulation business of another Hyderabad based firm Veritaz Healthcare on a slump sale basis at Rs 171 crore. Read more RIL: Company's arm is in advanced talks with South Korean consumer electronics and telecom gear maker Samsung for the latter to be its third party technology provider, complementing Reliance Jios efforts to roll out a 5G network across the country. Read more Moreover, on Monday announced a monthly recharge plan of Rs 259 for its prepaid customers. It is its maiden prepaid recharge plan with full one-month validity. Read here Coal India: Allaying fears of coal supply shortage, state-owned Coal India on Monday said it is concentrating its efforts to meet the projected demand of the power sector on priority basis. The state-owned coal miner in this fiscal till March 24 has supplied an all-time high of 528 million tonnes (MT) of coal to the country's power utilities. Read here Ruchi Soya: The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has directed Ruchi Soya Industries to give the investors who participated in its Rs 4,300-crore follow-on public offering (FPO) the option to withdraw their bids due to circulation of unsolicited SMSes advertising the issue. Read here Power Grid: The company has approve investment worth 821.3 cr in 5 projects. Somany Ceramics: Board has approved investment of Rs 9.50 crore in arm SR continental GR Infraprojects: The company has got two orders in Maharashtra on hybrid annuity mode under commercial operation from NHAI. The projects are worth Rs 1744 crores. Tata Power: The company and Rustomjee Group have collaborated to set up electric vehicle charging infrastructure at the commercial and residential projects of the latter across Mumbai metropolitan region. Piramal Enterprises: The company has approved allotment of 1,750 secured NCDs each of face value of Rs 10 lakh at a price of Rs 10,05,497 per debenture aggregating to Rs 175.96 crores on a private placement basis. ICICI Bank: The bank has signed an agreement for investment in India Debt Resolution Company. It will buy 15 per cent stake in IDRC for Rs 7.5 crore with the first investment of Rs 3 crore by March 31. Zensar Technologies: The company has opened a global delivery centre in Kolkata to support global clients and leverage local talent. Welspun Specialty Solution: The company has got an order worth Rs 16 crore for supply of seamless pipes. Sudarshan Chemical Industries: Board has approved raising Rs 200 cr via NCDs. The Income Tax Department has found that made more than Rs 1,000 crore bogus expenses and over Rs 100- crore cash transactions for a farmhouse in Chhattarpur, Delhi, sources told ANI. Income Tax Department carried out a search and seizure operation on March 23 on and its chairman and managing director Pawan Munjal at multiple locations in Delhi-NCR, which concluded on March 26. The search operations covered more than 40 premises spread over different locations in Delhi-NCR. On Tuesday, the company's scrip on BSE closed trading 7% lower at Rs 2,208. Sources told ANI that a large number of incriminating evidence in the form of hard copy documents and digital data have been seized during the search operations. These evidences revealed that the group has booked bogus purchases, made huge unaccounted cash expenditures and obtained accommodation entries, aggregating to the tune of more than Rs 1,000 crore. The Department has also found evidence of cash transactions of more than Rs 100 crore in the purchase of a farm house in the outskirts of Delhi. Munjal purchased a farmhouse in Chhattarpur where the market price of farm house was manipulated to save tax and used black money to pay cash more than Rs 100 crore, which is a violation of section 269 SS of IT Act, said sources. According to Section 269SS of Income Tax Act, while transacting Immovable Property, 100 per cent penalty will be levied if the seller has accepted an amount of Rs 20,000 or more in cash from the buyer. Last week, raids were conducted at the offices and residential premises of promoters of . The search includes the residential and official premises of Pawan Munjal. Statements of those present at the place where searches are being conducted were recorded and panchnama was done. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Australian share market finished higher for sixth straight session on Tuesday, 29 March 2022, thanks to gains in technology and banking stocks, although the gains were capped by losses in miners and energy stocks. At closing bell, the benchmark S&P/ASX200 advanced by 6.17 points, or 0.08%, to 7,412.42. The broader All Ordinaries index fell 0.61 point, or 0.01%, to 7,689.26. The gains on the Sydney market were driven by the resumption of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Turkey on Tuesday for the first face-to-face talks in nearly three weeks. Ukraine and the United States hold little hope of an immediate breakthrough. Shares of technology companies advanced on bargain hunting on tracking overnight gains in their Wall Street peers. Block Inc soared 6.8%, while accounting software provider Xero gained 3.3%. Financials were also higher, with the "Big Four" banks climbing between 0.2% to 1.1%. Miners and mining stocks were lower on raising concerns over commodity demand after China enforced a COVID-19-led lockdown in Shanghai. Sector majors Rio Tinto and BHP Group lost 1.4% and 0.6%, respectively. Energy stocks shed on and worries about fuel demand in China. Oil majors Santos and Woodside Petroleum lost between 0.3% and 1.1%. ECONOMIC NEWS: Australia Retail Sales Up 1.8% On Month In February- Australia retail sales was up a seasonally adjusted 1.8% on month in February, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday, coming in at A$33.085 billion, following the downwardly revised 1.6% increase in January (originally 1.8%). Individually, sales were up for household goods, clothing, department stores and restaurants; sales were down for food retailing and other retailing. On a yearly basis, retail sales climbed 9.1%. CURRENCY NEWS: The U. S. dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of its peers, was at 98.988 falling back from levels around 99 earlier. The Australian dollar was at $0.7508, a touch stronger than levels around $0.74 earlier. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The key equity benchmarks sharply pared gains in afternoon trade. The Nifty traded a tad above the 17,250 mark. Auto shares advanced for the second day in a row. At 13:22 IST, the barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 77.03 points or 0.13% to 57,670.52. The Nifty 50 index added 29.85 points or 0.17% to 17,251.85. Divi's Lab (up 3.15%), Ultratech Cement (up 2.32%), Bharti Airtel (up 2.22%), HDFC (up 2.06%) and SBI Life (up 2.02%) were the top Nifty gainers. ONGC (down 2.98%), Coal India (down 2.75%), IndusInd Bank (down 0.98%), ITC (down 0.31%) and Power Grid Corp (down 0.78%) were the top Nifty losers. In the broader market, the S&P BSE Mid-Cap index added 0.32% while the S&P BSE Small-Cap index rose 0.39%. The market breadth, indicating the overall health of the market, turned negative. On the BSE, shares 1,421 rose and 1,879 shares fell. A total of 130 shares were unchanged. Global Markets: European stocks advanced on Tuesday. Investors in the European region remain focused on developments in Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv's negotiators were studying a Russian demand for Ukrainian neutrality. The comments came ahead of new face-to-face talks between Ukraine and Russia, set to start Tuesday in Turkey. Meanwhile, Asian stocks advanced as crude oil prices slumped overnight on demand concerns arising from a new lockdown in Shanghai, diving more than 8%. In Washington, President Joe Biden released an annual $5.8 trillion (S$7.89 trillion) budget plan that would steer $6.9 billion towards Ukraine to assist in defending against Russia's invasion, as well as to aid NATO. Buzzing Index: The Nifty Auto index rose 0.71% to 10,495.40. The index has added 1.36% in two sessions. Eicher Motors (up 2.02%), TVS Motor Company (up 1.10%), Mahindra & Mahindra (up 0.96%), Bharat Forge (up 0.86%), Tata Motors (up 0.80%), Maruti Suzuki (up 0.59%), Ashok Leyland (up 0.31%) and Hero MotoCorp (up 0.28%) advanced. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd is quoting at Rs 359.15, down 0.15% on the day as on 13:24 IST on the NSE. The stock tumbled 16.63% in last one year as compared to a 16.24% rally in NIFTY and a 40.53% spurt in the Nifty Energy index. Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd dropped for a fifth straight session today. The stock is quoting at Rs 359.15, down 0.15% on the day as on 13:24 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is up around 0.19% on the day, quoting at 17255.25. The Sensex is at 57703.92, up 0.19%.Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd has added around 4.98% in last one month.Meanwhile, Nifty Energy index of which Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd is a constituent, has increased around 5.56% in last one month and is currently quoting at 25989.3, down 0.41% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 44.66 lakh shares today, compared to the daily average of 70.59 lakh shares in last one month. The benchmark March futures contract for the stock is quoting at Rs 359.85, down 0.1% on the day. Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd tumbled 16.63% in last one year as compared to a 16.24% rally in NIFTY and a 40.53% spurt in the Nifty Energy index. The PE of the stock is 6.08 based on TTM earnings ending December 21. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The domestic equity barometers traded with decent gains in early trade, amid significant buying in index pivotals. The Nifty traded tad below the 17,300 level. Shares across sectors advanced, with autos, consumer durables, PSU banks, and financials stocks gaining the most. At 09:22 IST, the barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, was up 285.59 points or 0.50% to 57,879.08. The Nifty 50 index added 75.65 points or 0.44% to 17,297.65. SBI Life (up 2.32%), HDFC (up 1.79%), Bharti Airtel (up 1.45%), Asian Paints (up 1.38%) and Ultratech Cement (up 1.30%) were the top Nifty gainers. Coal India (down 2.22%), ONGC (down 1.79%), Eicher Motors (down 0.60%), Hindalco (down 0.41%) and ITC (down 0.31%) were the top Nifty losers. In the broader market, the S&P BSE Mid-Cap index rose 0.77% while the S&P BSE Small-Cap index gained 0.69%. Buyers outnumbered sellers. On the BSE, 1739 shares rose and 740 shares fell. A total of 93 shares were unchanged. Stocks in Spotlight: Aurobindo Pharma fell 1.21% to Rs 698.30. The board of directors of the company has approved the acquisition of the business and certain assets of Veritaz Healthcare Limited (Veritaz). Veritaz operates in the pharmaceutical industry in India and sells branded generic formulations and other health care-related products. Tata Power advanced 1.94% to Rs 244.20. The company has collaborated with Rustomjee Group, the leading real estate developer, to provide end-to-end EV charging solutions across all its residential and commercial projects in Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR). Ruchi Soya declined 2.61% to Rs 793.75. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) provided an option to the investors in Ruchi Soya's Rs 4,300 crore follow-on public offer (FPO) to withdraw their applications. The withdrawal window will remain open till 30 March. Global Markets: Asian stocks rose, following a tumble in oil prices overnight. Oil prices slumped overnight on demand concerns arising from a new lockdown in Shanghai, diving more than 8%. Wall Street stocks rose Monday on hopes over peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, while oil prices tumbled with worries over the hit of Covid-19 to Chinese energy demand. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv's negotiators were studying a Russian demand for Ukrainian neutrality. The comments came ahead of new face-to-face talks between Ukraine and Russia, set to start Tuesday in Turkey. In Washington, President Joe Biden released an annual US$5.8 trillion (S$7.89 trillion) budget plan that would steer US$6.9 billion towards Ukraine to assist in defending against Russia's invasion, as well as to aid NATO. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) On technical cooperation on transport and related infrastructure projects Rites signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) on technical cooperation for transport and related infrastructure projects (from concept to commissioning). The MoU aims to enable technical support in the fields of rail transportation, railway infrastructure development, including export/leasing of rolling stock, modernisation of workshops, track works, upgrade of signalling and telecommunication systems, operations & maintenance of rolling stock and training of railway personnel. Besides, the partnership intends to explore opportunities in metro rail systems and consultancy for buildings and airports. s part of the MoU, RITES will provide technical expertise in design, engineering, and training while NRZ will be responsible for generating business leads in Zimbabwe. The collaboration will not only create a platform to enable exploration of business avenues in Africa, but also facilitate knowledge sharing to promote efficient, safe, and sustainable infrastructure. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Jammu and Kashmir Police (J&K Police) has awarded Zen Technologies a contract worth about Rs 5.28 crore to supply Zen ShootEdge Systems (corner shot weapon systems). This is Zen's first order for ShootEdge. The company said it won the bid due to superior product quality and competitive pricing. This version of ShootEdge was developed in collaboration with Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). In addition to domestic demand, ShootEdge also has a huge export potential, the company said. As of date, the company's total order book stands at Rs 432.88 crore. Export order book stands at Rs 172.26 crore, or 39.79% of the total order book. Zen Technologies provides defence training solutions, drones and anti- drones solutions. It has a track record in building training systems for imparting defense training and measuring combat readiness of security force. On a consolidated basis, the company reported net loss of Rs 1.31 crore in Q3 December 2021 as against net profit of Rs 2.32 crore in Q3 December 2020. Net sales surged 58.2% to Rs 26.22 crore in Q3 December 2021 over Q3 December 2020. Shares of Zen Technologies were up 0.45% at Rs 199.60 on BSE. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The J&K Police has awarded Zen Technologies a contract worth ~ Rs 5.28 crore to supply Zen ShootEdge Systems (Corner Shot Weapon Systems). Zen Technologies won the bid due to superior product quality and competitive pricing. This is Zen's first order for ShootEdge. In line with Zen's goal to ensure incremental revenues from new products, this win validates Zen's continued focus on R&D. This version of ShootEdge was developed in collaboration with DRDO. In addition to domestic demand, ShootEdge also has a huge export potential. As of date, the company's total order book stands at Rs 432.88 crore. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP on Tuesday hit out at Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray over the possibility of restrictions on the public celebration of festivals like 'Gudhi Padwa' (Marathi new year) that falls on April 2. Speaking to reporters here, BJP leader Ashish Shelar alleged that whenever it comes to Hindu festivals, "it seems the chief minister's hand gets paralysed." Padwa is on April 2 and Ram Navami on April 10. Hindus should be allowed to take out processions on both the days. These are auspicious occasions for us, he said. The state government has already issued prohibitory orders from March 10 to April 8 citing apprehension of terrorist attacks. Taking exception to Shelar's comments about Thackeray, Shiv Sena leader Manisha Kayande said, Shelar's brain seems to have been paralysed as he wants to be president of the state BJP. I warn him that if he continues to make such comments, Sena workers will not tolerate it for long. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) TMC supremo has written to all non-BJP chief ministers and opposition parties, including the Congress which her party had been attacking recently, calling on all "progressive forces" to come together and put up a united fight against the "oppressive BJP regime". The BJP claimed that the TMC's ambitions have fallen flat, while the Congress said the ruling party in West Bengal lacks credibility in fighting the saffron party. Banerjee called for a meeting to discuss strategies to take on the saffron party and also commit to the cause of a unified and principled opposition that will make way for the "government that the country deserves". Slamming the BJP-led Centre's alleged vindictive politics, the West Bengal chief minister iterated that the democratic fabric of the country was being attacked with the use of agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate (ED), Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) to "harass and corner political opponents". "I urge everyone to come together for a meeting to deliberate on the way forward at a place as per everyone's convenience and suitability. Let us commit to the cause of a unified and principled opposition that will make way for the government that our country deserves," the letter dated March 27 said. It was shared with the media on Tuesday morning. The feisty TMC boss alleged that the Delhi Special Police (Amendment) Bill, 2021 and the CVC (Amendment) Bill, 2021 were passed in the Parliament during the winter session amidst walk out by the opposition. "These laws enable the Centre to extend the tenure of the directors of ED and CBI up to five years in blatant violation of a previous Supreme Court judgment," she said. Alleging that the central agencies "jolt to action" whenever elections are around the corner, she urged the parties to resist the BJP's intention to misuse the agencies to suppress the opposition. "It is amply clear that the opposition is being targeted, and the BJP-ruled states get a free pass from these agencies so that a rosy picture of their hollow governance can be painted," the letter stated. Seeking transparency and accountability in governance, she said that the opposition leaders should not tolerate the vindictive of the BJP that has led to political witch-hunting becoming a norm. Banerjee also alleged that the BJP is attempting to influence the judiciary. "Time and again, the BJP is trying to attack the federal structure of the country by attempting to influence a certain section of the judiciary," she said. Banerjee's reaching out to opposition leaders comes at a time when her party is braving a political firestorm over Birbhum killings, in which nine people were killed, and several of its leaders facing CBI and ED probes in various other cases. Earlier this month, just after the BJP swept assembly elections in four states including Uttar Pradesh, Banerjee had reached out to regional forces to push for an anti-BJP alliance but had tried to edge the Congress out of any such prospective formation, saying there was no point in waiting for the grand old party as they lack the fire in their belly to win elections. Reacting to the development, West Bengal BJP spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya said that the TMC's ambition has fallen flat. "We have seen the TMC's overdrive in 2014 and 2019. After its misadventure in Goa and Tripura, we hope it will learn its lessons. This time too, its aspirations to play a pivotal role in national will fall flat," he said. Senior Congress leader Abdul Mannan claimed that the TMC lacks credibility in the fight against the BJP. "The TMC lacks credibility in the fight against the BJP. As the Trinamool Congress is facing the heat over several corruption and criminal cases, it is trying to reach out to the Congress. "Until a few days back, we were regularly attacked by the TMC leaders. So, what has changed so suddenly that they are reaching out to us? They should answer this," he said. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) About 20 Congress leaders met in Ludhiana on Tuesday with some of them batting for a key role for Navjot Singh Sidhu, the former state party unit chief, who was among the participants. The meeting was meant to discuss ways to strengthen the party's state unit after the debacle in the assembly elections and the Centre's decision to align the Chandigarh union territory employees' service conditions with that of the central civil services, party leaders said. Three days earlier, a similar meeting was held at Sultanpur Lodhi in Kapurthala district. Sukhpal Khaira, Congress MLA from Bholath, dismissed reports that the meeting was a show of strength by the "Sidhu group" before Congress picks up its next state unit chief. "I want to clarify it was not a meeting of a particular group, Sidhu group, etc. It's very wrong to say this, he said. "It was a meeting of the Congress party," he added. Like-minded Congress MLAs, ex-MLAs, assembly election candidates and the former Pradesh Congress Committee president gathered at the home of party leader Rakesh Pandey, leaders who attended the meeting, said. The participants included Khaira, Sidhu, Ashwani Sekhri and former MLA Surinder Dawar. The Congress received a drubbing in the assembly polls as it could win only 18 seats and the Aam Aadmi Party stormed to power by bagging 92 of the 117 assembly segments. Sidhu was defeated by AAP candidate and political greenhorn Jeevan Jyot Kaur from Amritsar East constituency. Following the poll debacle in five states -- Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur and -- Congress president Sonia Gandhi had asked the party's state unit chiefs to put in their papers, and Sidhu, too, tendered his resignation. Khaira, however, said "Sidhu's resignation is yet to be accepted by the high command". "He is an able leader," Khaira said when asked if he will back Sidhu for the state's party chief post. He then added, "Whatever decision our party takes, we will all abide by that." To another question, he said, "I want to categorically debunk claims regarding groupism within the party unit."Ashwani Sekhri said the purpose of Tuesday's meeting was to discuss "Punjab issues". He, too, backed Sidhu. When specifically asked that names of party leaders Amarinder Singh Raja Warring, Ravneet Singh Bittu, Santokh Chaudhary and Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa were doing the rounds as probables for the next Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee chief post, Sekhri evaded a direct reply and said there can be many names. Khaira, meanwhile, said the meeting took a strong view of the Centre's announcement to apply the central service rules to the employees of the union territory of Chandigarh. "By doing so, the BJP government has the attacked country's federal structure," he said. "A unilateral decision was taken without consulting Punjab and the meeting strongly condemned the move. Chandigarh belongs to Punjab. But the BJP-led government is diluting claim of Punjab over Chandigarh," he said. Khaira said they are not against benefits being extended to the employees, but asserted that there is no need to enact or amend a law, or change the service rules. He was the opinion that Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann should lead an all-party delegation to the prime minister on the issue. "If the Centre does not listen to us, then Bhagwant Mann should lodge a protest outside PM's residence. If they still don't listen, then the Punjab government should move the Supreme Court for further recourse," he said. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Last year, pandemic forced the Academy to take a serious note of movies that made their debut on streaming platforms. And this year, streamer achieved another feat by scooping the best movie award, apart from over 35 nominations. But, back home in India, OTTs future is clearly linked to vernacular programms and films. OTTs future in India indeed depends on its capability to churn out good programs in local languages. Let us now move on to Baroda BNP Paribas Mutual Fund created recently by the merger of Baroda Mutual Fund and BNP Paribas Mutual Fund. Its CEO Suresh Soni spoke to Business Standards Krishna Veera Vanamali on the markets, the mutual fund industry and what the merged entity stands for. Not just the mutual funds, this financial year was exceptionally good for markets too. 52 Indian companies raised an all-time high of Rs 1.1 trillion through initial public offers. And the next fiscal year may well break this record too. The government plans to launch the mega IPO of LIC soon. Get a quick check on whats in store for the primary markets in FY23. Its not just the stock exchanges, but companies listed there, people, organizations, the government departments etc. are always on the guard against malwares. And, of the lot, is among the most notorious. Through this, hackers take control of all the data in the system and release them at a price. This podcast shares more about the growing menace. 2021 has been an impressive year for the Indian primary markets, with highest ever fundraising in a calendar year. And the momentum could well continue in FY23. According to a note by Prime Database, 54 companies plan to raise a massive 1.4 trillion rupees in the upcoming fiscal year, including the much awaited LIC IPO. These 54 companies already have market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of Indias (Sebis) approval for raising the money. Another 43 companies, the note said, are looking to raise about 81,000 crore rupees where approval is still awaited. The amount raised in FY22, according to Pranav Haldea, managing director, PRIME Database Group was over 3.5 times 31,268 crore rupees raised through 30 in 2020-21. The previous best year was 2017-18 (FY18) when 81,553 crore rupees was raised. According to Pranav Haldea, managing director of PRIME Database, from new-age loss-making tech startups, strong retail participation and listing gains were the other key highlights of 2021-22. But, public equity fundraising dropped to 1.70 trillion rupees from 1.9 trillion rupees in the preceding year. The largest IPO in 2021-22, which was also the largest Indian IPO ever, was of One 97 Communications (PayTM) for 18,300 crore rupees. Some of the other prominent ones included Zomato, Star Health, PB Fintech, Sona BLW and FSN E-Commerce, the parent company of Nykaa. And retail investors were a force to reckon with. The average number of applications from the retail category was 14.05 lakh, the Prime Database report said, in comparison to 12.73 lakh in 2020-21 and 6.88 lakh in 2019-20. The highest number of applications from retail in 2021-22 was for Glenmark Life Sciences, Devyani International and Latent View. Going ahead, analysts expect the secondary market to remain choppy due to the geopolitical crisis between Russia and Ukraine. This, they feel, will have repercussions for the primary market activity as well. G Chokkalingam, founder and chief investment officer at Equinomics Research, for instance, expects the Sensex to remain in the range of 56,000 to 57,000 till a solution is found for the Ukraine Russia war. Twitter: @Pun_ditry Zinkworks has announced the establishment of a software engineering hub in the CoLab facility on the Letterkenny I.T. Campus in Letterkenny Co. Donegal, creating 50 new jobs over the next 18 months. The Telecoms & Financial Services Research & Development company was founded in 2018 and currently employs 180 people at its head office in Athlone Co. Westmeath. The companys focus is primarily in research and development in Telecommunications, particularly on 5G, where it works with world leading clients, delivering its own portfolio of products to market. The Letterkenny hub will provide software development services including 5G network consulting, 5G network deployment, telecommunications R&D, and ICT consultancy. These 50 new roles will be across the areas of senior and mid-level software developers as well as a graduate programme. Welcoming the announcement, Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Leo Varadkar said, "Congratulations to the Zinkworks team on this expansion which will see the creation of 50 new jobs over the next 18 months. This investment is a testament to the wealth of talent Letterkenny has to offer and indeed the hard work of the existing head office team in Athlone. The very best of luck." CEO of Zinkworks, Paul Madden added, "As part of our Bring the office to our people strategy, we are delighted to announce that we are opening a new branch in Letterkenny in the CoLab facility on the Letterkenny I.T. Campus. Since our launch four years ago, weve grown to a 180 person company in our head office in Athlone and today marks an exciting new step on our journey. We work with some of the biggest companies in the world and are developing our own product portfolio in Telecommunications." Source: www.businessworld.ie Photographer Zhang Xinming documented life in a capsule hotel in Southwest Chinas Chongqing, after being forced to stay there for 55 days in 2021 due to a Covid-19 outbreak. While the iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, which in 1972 became the first practical example of capsule architecture, has fallen into disrepair, the idea of the capsule hotel is not outdated. These hotels have appeared in cities across China to provide people with a cheap place to stay overnight May 05, 2022 07:17 PM Photo: The Canadian Press Jason Kenney in Calgary, Friday, March 25, 2022. The Alberta premier says he has been interviewed by the RCMP as part of an investigation into potential criminal identity fraud in the 2017 UCP leadership contest won by Kenney. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh Alberta Premier Jason Kenney says he has been interviewed by RCMP as part of an investigation into potential criminal identity fraud in the 2017 United Conservative Party leadership contest. Kenney, answering questions from reporters, says he did one interview with Mounties at their request and remains confident his campaign team followed all the rules. The police investigation is one of two probes into the 2017 vote, which saw Kenney defeat his main rival Brian Jean to win the top job in the party and eventually become premier. Election officials have investigated improper donations to the campaign of another candidate, Jeff Callaway, and levied thousands of dollars in fines. Well after the race was over, it became known that Callaways team worked behind the scenes with Kenney supporters as Callaway publicly disparaged Jean before quitting the race to support Kenney. Kenney says he had no knowledge or participation in illegal donations. Photo: The Canadian Press Dane Groszek, Middletown N.Y., makes his way off of Interstate 81 after his car was totaled in a multi-vehicle crash along Interstate 81 North near the Minersville exit, Foster Twp., Pa., on Monday, March 28, 2022. Dane was on his way back home after visiting family in Daytona Fl. (David McKeown/Republican-Herald via AP) A Pennsylvania county coroner said Monday at least three people died in a collision involving more than 50 vehicles that closed a portion of an interstate and sent more than a dozen people to area hospitals. Dr. David J. Moylan, the Schuylkill County coroner, said the search of the scene hasnt been completed because of the burning vehicles, but I suspect it could run higher. The crash in northeast Pennsylvania happened around 10:30 a.m. and John Blickley, the deputy emergency management coordinator for the agency, said officials believe a snow squall clouded visibility and likely contributed to the accident. About 40 vehicles including multiple tractor trailers were involved in the initial crash, he said. Blickley said emergency personnel from four different counties responded and took about 20 patients to area hospitals for treatment. Three tractor trailers carrying unknown cargo were on fire when emergency personnel responded. Smaller fires broke out out in other vehicles as well but all had been largely brought under control, he said. Pennsylvania State Police Trooper David Beohm said Monday afternoon that he could not confirm any fatalities but he said police havent been able to investigate because a fire was still burning among a number of crashed cars and trucks. He estimated a total of 50 to 60 vehicles were involved in the crash, including some tractor trailers and a number of smaller vehicles. UNBELIEVABLE video of a pileup in Schuylkill County as snow squalls brought visibility on Interstate 81 down to near zero. Video shot live by Mike Moye (Facebook) pic.twitter.com/q1BxgUYz2O Joe Holden (@JoeHoldenCBS3) March 28, 2022 We cant do anything while theres still an active fire going, and fire (officials) say it will probably be another one to two hours until they get it extinguished, Beohm said. Many fire units were at the scene, including a number or tankers coming to replenish water because there was no water source from hydrants on scene. People whose vehicles were in the crash and the walking wounded were taken to the Wegmans distribution center in an industrial park near the crash, he said, and a reunification center had been set up at the Goodwill Fire Company in Minersville. Footage uploaded to social media on Monday showed a tractor-trailer smash into a large dump truck, turning it nearly 180 degrees. Another large truck spewed black smoke and orange flames into the air and an SUV struck a passenger car sending the sedan spinning, narrowly missing its driver who stood on the shoulder of the highway shrouded in snow and fog. The person who posted the video did not immediately respond to requests seeking additional information. People off camera can be heard yelling as the cascade of crashes unfolds with multiple vehicles colliding in less than a minute. The National Weather Service had warned of numerous brief heavy snow squalls with very poor visibility. The squalls will quickly reduce the visibility to under one-half of a mile and coat the roads with snow, forecasters said, urging drivers to get off the road if possible or turn on hazard lights and gradually slow down to avoid a chain reaction vehicular accident. Mike Colbert, a forecaster with the National Weather Service office in State College, said the weather service started issuing warnings for snow squalls a few years ago, and pileups of the kind being reported were the reason they began doing so. They are very heavy snow showers where if you are driving into them, you can go from partly cloudy or sunny skies into an instant blizzard in a matter of seconds. Thats why they are so dangerous, he said. Blickley warned that the northbound section of the interstate will likely be closed well into the evening as the crash investigation and clean up continues. He also cautioned that more squall warnings are expected throughout the afternoon and asked people to be careful and pullover if needed Photo: The Canadian Press Squatters peer from behind the iron gate of a house that about 19 families were occupying for close to a year before being evicted, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A few weeks ago, before Russia invaded Ukraine and began committing war crimes that have shocked the world (in a way that should have but, to our shame, did not shock the world when Russia did the same thing in Chechnya and Syria), I was writing about inequality and health in the context of creating a wellbeing society. So even though innocent people are still being butchered by Putin and his terrorist army, I will return to this topic because the problem remains and must be addressed, both in Canada and globally. To refresh your memory, the World Health Organization (WHO) is championing the creation of what it calls wellbeing societies, in which equitable health is achieved within the ecological limits of the Earth. Equitable health is not the same as equal health, but is about ensuring that we all have a fair opportunity to be healthy, minimizing inequality as much as possible. Inequality has health consequences: As the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health memorably put it in 2008: Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale. Thus, high levels of inequality are incompatible with a wellbeing society. But inequality does not just happen. Instead, as the World Inequality Report 2022 noted: Inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability. That political choice is not only killing people on a grand scale, it is creating much social strain and mental and physical ill health through poverty, marginalization, social exclusion and alienation, resulting in what Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir Angus Deaton calls the diseases of despair. The World Inequality Report notes that the period from 1945 or 1950 till 1980 was a period of shrinking inequality in many parts of the world. At the same time, and perhaps contrary to our usual modern expectations, these were times of fast productivity growth and increasing prosperity, never matched since for the countries of the West. The report goes on to note: The reason why that was possible had a lot to do with policy tax rates were high, and there was an ideology that inequality needed to be kept in check, that was shared between the corporate sector, civil society and the government. That all changed with the advent of neoliberalism as the dominant ideology, first implemented by Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. As a consequence, the report notes, contemporary global inequalities are close to early 20th century levels, at the peak of Western imperialism. Deaton, a self-professed believer in social democratic capitalism who is now chairing a review of rising inequalities in the U.K., says todays inequalities are signs that democratic capitalism is under threat. To address this, as the 2008 WHO Commission put it in one of its three key recommendations, we have to tackle the inequitable distribution of power, money, and resources. Thirteen years later, the World Inequality Report made much the same point: Addressing the challenges of the 21st century is not feasible without significant redistribution of income and wealth inequalities. So how should that be done? The World Inequality Lab, source of the World Inequality Report, has what is really a very simple proposition: A modest progressive wealth tax on global multimillionaires. They point out that wealth or at least, one form of it, namely property is already taxed pretty much all over the world. But it is a flat tax, not progressive the very rich pay the same rate on their property as the average citizen. Moreover, much of the wealth of the very wealthy is in stocks and bonds and other forms of wealth, not property. So their recommendation is to expand the property tax to encompass all forms of wealth, not just real estate, and to make it progressive. Such a tax, they find, ranging progressively from 0.6 per cent to 3.2 per cent of total wealth, would generate $1.74 trillion each year, or 1.6 per cent of total global incomes, that could then be reinvested in education, health and the ecological transition. As they note, it would be completely unreasonable not to ask more of top wealth-holders in the future, especially in light of the social, developmental and environmental challenges ahead. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victorias School of Public Health and Social Policy. This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet. Photo: File photo Mohammad Movassaghi gained notoriety for being caught running a downtown condo booze can on at least two occasions in 2021. A Vancouver resident who gained notoriety for running a downtown condo booze can at the height of COVID-lockdown measures has been penalized $160,000 and banned from the investment industry. Mohammad Movassaghi forged signatures and misled investigators with the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC), according to an independent hearing panel. The investment dealer regulator stated March 16 penalties against Movassaghi have been finalized, including a permanent ban on any registration with IIROC, $50,000 for the forgeries, $50,000 for misleading investigators and $60,000 for hearing costs (about half of what it cost IIROC). The panel said Movassaghis improper actions, which occurred between July and September 2016, caused significant harm to the reputation of the marketplace and to market integrity; were criminal or quasi-criminal in nature; demonstrated that he cannot be trusted to act in and honest and fair manner in dealings with clients, the public, and the securities industry as a whole; and prejudiced the ability of IIROC to effectively perform its regulatory functions in the public interest. Movassaghi had previously settled his case with the IIROC. He admitted in July 2017 to falsifying a clients signature on forms to facilitate the transfer of investment accounts from Investors Group Financial Services Inc. to Harbourfront Wealth Management Inc., where he was a brokerage manager. But investigators subsequently found more forged signatures and re-opened the case against him, according to the March 4 decision. VIOLATED COVID-19 PUBLIC HEALTH ORDERS Last April, B.C. Provincial Court Judge Ellen Gordon handed Movassaghi 18 months of probation and 10 days of time served plus a day in jail after he was found guilty of breaching the Public Health Act and illegally selling alcohol following a January 2021 party. The Vancouver Police Department stated it discovered Movassaghi, 43, was running an illegal booze can and show lounge inside his 1,100-square-foot penthouse, packing it with hundreds of people, and violating COVID-19 health orders. Gordon issued a rebuke of Movassaghi in her April 28, 2021 ruling: If someone who had been at your party was infected and passed it on to Grandma, as far as I am concerned, you would be guilty of manslaughter. What you did, sir, is comparable to individuals who sell fentanyl to the people on the street who die every day. There is no difference. You voluntarily assumed the risk that could kill people in the midst of a pandemic. Movassaghi began hosting more parties over the summer, prompting a second police investigation. He subsequently pleaded guilty to two more counts of failing to comply with health orders and an additional count of illegally selling alcohol. He was sentenced to 29 days in jail, handed an additional 12 months of probation and fined $10,000 last November, according to Vancouver police. Photo: Mike Wakefield, North Shore News West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country MP Patrick Weiler, BC Parliamentary Secretary Jennifer Rice and BC Ferries CEO Mark Collins activate the first sensor in Canada's earthquake early warning system at West Vancouver's Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal, March 28, 2022. If you had 10 seconds warning before a major earthquake struck, how would you spend them? Its a question Canadians may soon have to ponder, with the nations first ever earthquake early warning system getting its launch in West Vancouver. Natural Resources Canada deployed its first sensor, in what will eventually be a network of 400 sensors in seismically active areas, within BC Ferries Horseshoe Bay terminal, Monday (March 28). The system is designed to detect the first wave of energy radiating from an earthquakes epicentre and then provide seconds to tens of seconds of warning before the real shaking begins. Indigenous oral history tells us that every couple centuries, we experienced devastating earthquakes in British Columbia, which today can damage infrastructure, destroy buildings, trigger power outages and displace communities. They can cause injury and even death and they almost always come without warning, said Patrick Weiler, West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country, announcing the program on behalf of the federal government. When an earthquake hits, every second counts. Inside the sensor bolted to the floor of the ferry terminal are accelerometers that detect any movement of the ground. When enough movement on enough sensors is picked up, it can trigger the warning. The government expects to have the system fully operational by 2024. If and when it is triggered, it will use the national public alerting system to deliver instant warnings to smartphones, TVs and radios, similar to how Amber Alerts work today. With this system, we will take the guesswork out of the initial response and be able to prepare efficiently for what's coming our way. By giving this heads-up, people will have a few extra moments to drop, cover and hold on, said Jennifer Rice, B.C. parliamentary secretary for emergency preparedness. It will also benefit the operators of critical infrastructure who will need a head start mitigating the risk the public and the environment face. With a bit of advanced notice, planes could be diverted from landing and trains could be halted, workers handling hazardous tools or materials could put them down, surgeries could be paused, gates to block the entrances to bridges or tunnels could be deployed, and businesses could start emergency server back-ups. Similar warning systems are already up and running in Japan, Mexico, Taiwan and U.S. states on the West Coast, where one was triggered by the 2019 Ridgecrest quakes in Los Angeles. That was a really good testbed, and it worked really well, said Alison Bird, earthquake seismologist with Natural Resources Canada. We have seen this work elsewhere, which is why I'm so thrilled, as a seismologist, to get this in Canada. This is going to make a big difference for us. Canadas new system even uses the same software as U.S. to allow for instant sharing of data, Bird said. Mark Collins, president and CEO for BC Ferries said the corporation was happy to host the first sensor in their terminal building. This was very close to our hearts because, living on the West Coast of Canada, and operating a transportation service, you can't help but be concerned about seismic activity, so we're absolutely thrilled to be part of this initiative, he said. B.C. is the most seismically active place in Canada. In 1946, a 7.3-magnitude quake struck Vancouver Island, the largest ever record on land in the country. There have been more than 100 of magnitude five or greater since then, and almost every day, seismographs pick up lesser tremors along the Juan De Fuca Plate. Photo: The Canadian Press A Quebec provincial police car is seen in Montreal on July 22, 2020. Quebec's police watchdog issued a release Monday saying it's investigating after a 36-year old man was stabbed at a factory in Lac-Megantic. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson Quebec's police watchdog is investigating after a 36-year-old man was murdered at a factory in Lac-Megantic, Que., about 250 kilometres east of Montreal. The watchdog, called Bureau des enquetes independantes, issued a news release Monday stating an employee of an insurance company called provincial police on March 18, 2022, about one of her clients. She said her client had uttered disturbing remarks and had threatened to assault someone. On March 21, 2022, the client showed up to his workplace and allegedly stabbed a 36-year-old man to death. The watchdog dispatched five investigators to the file and says the homicide investigation will be led by the Montreal police. Montreal police said Monday they are investigating the death of Alexandre Giroux, 36, who was stabbed at the Tafisa particleboard manufacturing facility in Lac-Megantic on March 21. Photo: The Canadian Press Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford watch signing of $10-a-day child-care deal on Monday. The federal families minister says coming child-care legislation will enshrine a long-term role for Ottawa in the daycare system and the new deal with the New Democrats gives them some time to get it right. Karina Gould says the legislation would also put into law the principles that provinces and territories agreed to in funding agreements, including to cut parent fees and create more spaces. The original goal was to introduce a bill by this spring, Gould said in an interview with The Canadian Press. Now she has until the end of the year as part of an agreement with the NDP to land that party's support in key votes in the House of Commons. Experts say the government should now take its time. Before the deal with the NDP, the thinking among child-care experts the Liberals leaned on for advice was that the Liberal minority government should move quickly on legislation, lest an election lead to a change in government and scuttle long-term spending plans. Now that the deal would bring some stability and potentially keep the Liberals in power until 2025, the government is being urged to take the extra time to get the bill right. Federal officials have been quietly checking in with a select number of experts on what should be in the new law. A consultation document says the legislation could commit to "ongoing collaboration" between the federal, provincial and territorial governments over the system, including a pledge for "sustained federal funding." The paper, obtained by The Canadian Press, also suggests legislation could require annual public reports and a national advisory council as part of "various mechanisms" to ensure federal accountability. But the document does not mention accountability measures for provinces should they not meet their own benchmarks. Those include creating more spaces over the course of agreements, cutting parent fees by an average of 50 per cent by the end of this year and reaching an average nationally of $10-a-day by 2026. It also suggests a smaller role for the federal government in the national system to not step on areas of provincial and territorial jurisdiction. The document notes that the legislation wouldn't supersede the earlier child-care framework agreements the Liberal government negotiated with the provinces and territories during its first mandate. The law also wouldn't "impose requirements" on provinces, territories or Indigenous Peoples, nor set conditions for funding outlined in one-on-one deals. Those funding deals include provisions that allow the federal government to hold funding back if benchmarks aren't met, but Gould suggested that was an avenue the Liberals are looking to avoid. Gould said having to report on efforts may be a more powerful push. "Each province and territory has publicly committed to meeting these benchmarks," Gould said. "So not only do they have to explain it to the federal government if they don't, but they also have to explain it to the people, the citizens of their jurisdiction." The Liberals' 2021 budget promised $30 billion in new spending on a national child-care system over five years, and $9.2 billion annually after that time. The promised legislation would be a key, long-term lever to build a system that creates affordable spaces that are accessible countrywide and which also provide a quality daycare environment, said Martha Friendly, executive director for the Childcare Resource and Research Unit in Toronto. "It's one of the important pillars and cornerstones," she said. "It should be the best that it can be." Introducing a bill later this year and debating it through 2023 would let officials pen legislation that reflects early changes from the first tranche of federal spending, said Andrew Bevan, who has co-authored papers on the need for a child-care system and was chief of staff to former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne. Ontario became the final province to sign on to the system Monday. Bevan said funding agreements with provinces and territories are a good starting point to legislate the kind of child-care system Canada needs. "I wouldn't go too fast. It's well worth doing, and something that's well worth doing is worth doing right," Bevan said. Photo: The Canadian Press The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol voted unanimously to hold former Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino in contempt of Congress for their monthslong refusal to comply with subpoenas. The committee made its case Monday night that Navarro, former President Donald Trumps trade adviser, and Scavino, a White House communications aide under Trump, have been uncooperative in the congressional probe into the deadly 2021 insurrection and, as a result, are in contempt. Theyre not fooling anybody. They are obligated to comply with our investigation. They have refused to do so. And thats a crime, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committees Democratic chairman, said in his opening remarks. The recommendation of criminal charges now goes to the full House, where it is likely to be approved by the Democratic-majority chamber. Approval there would then send the charges to the Justice Department, which has the final say on prosecution. As the committee enforces its subpoena power, it is also continuing to branch out to others in Trumps orbit. Lawmakers now plan to reach out to Virginia Thomas known as Ginni the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, about her reported text messages with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on the day of the attack, according to two people familiar with the investigation who were granted anonymity to discuss the panels private deliberations. But the panel has not decided what their outreach to Thomas, a conservative activist, will look like and whether that will come in the form of a subpoena or a voluntary request to cooperate. Also later this week, the committee plans to interview former Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, one of the people said. At Monday's meeting, lawmakers made yet another appeal to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has not yet made a decision to pursue the contempt charges the House set forward in December on former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. We are upholding our responsibility, Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the committee, said in his remarks. The Department of Justice must do the same. The committee is investigating the circumstances surrounding Jan. 6, when pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, fueled by the Republican's false claims of a stolen election, in hopes of blocking Congress from certifying election results showing Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump. Ahead of the House committees vote, the panel scored a big legal victory in its quest for information from Trump lawyer John Eastman when a federal judge in California asserted Monday morning that it is more likely than not that Trump committed crimes in his attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election. With that argument, U.S. District Court Judge David Carter, a Clinton appointee, ordered the release of more than 100 emails from Eastman to the committee. Charles Burnham, an attorney representing Eastman, said in a statement Monday that his client has a responsibility to his attorney-client privilege and his lawsuit against the committee seeks to fulfill this responsibility. Navarro, 72, was subpoenaed for his testimony in early February. The panel wants to question the Trump ally who promoted false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election that the committee believes contributed to the attack. He hasnt been shy about his role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has even discussed the former Presidents support for those plans, Thompson, the committees Democratic chairman, said in a statement at the time. Though Navarro sought to use executive privilege to avoid cooperation, the Biden administration has denied claims from him, Scavino and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, saying an assertion of executive privilege was not justified or in the national interest. On Thursday, Navarro called the committee vote an unprecedented partisan assault on executive privilege," and said, The committee knows full well that President Trump has invoked executive privilege and it is not my privilege to waive. In a statement Sunday night, Navarro said the committee should negotiate this matter with President Trump. He added, If he waived the privilege, I will be happy to comply; but I see no effort by the Committee to clarify this matter with President Trump, which is bad faith and bad law. In a subpoena issued to Scavino last fall, the committee cited reports that he was with Trump the day before the attack during a discussion about how to persuade members of Congress not to certify the election for Biden and with Trump again the day of the attack and may have materials relevant to his videotaping and tweeting messages that day. In the recent report, the committee said it also has reason to believe that due to the 46-year-old's online presence, Scavino may have had advance warning about the potential for violence on Jan. 6. Scavino and his counsel have received at least half a dozen extensions to comply with the subpoena, according to the committee. Despite all these extensions, to date, Mr. Scavino has not produced a single document, nor has he appeared for testimony, the report stated. A lawyer for Scavino did not return messages seeking comment. The committee previously voted to recommend contempt charges against longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon after he defied a congressional subpoena, as well as against Meadows after he ceased cooperating with the panel. The full House then approved both contempt referrals. Bannon was later indicted by a federal grand jury and is awaiting prosecution by the Justice Department. The Justice Department has not taken any action against Meadows. The central facts of the Jan. 6 insurrection are known but what the committee is hoping to do is fill in the remaining gaps about the attack on the Capitol, and lawmakers say they are committed to presenting a full accounting to make sure it never happens again. The panel is looking into every aspect of the riot, including what Trump himself was doing while it unfolded and any connections between the White House and the rioters who broke into the Capitol building. Photo: The Canadian Press Cargojet Inc. has signed a new agreement with DHL Network Operations (USA) Inc. to provide air-transportation services for DHL's global network that it says will boost earnings and help diversify its services. The agreement, which expands the relationship between the two companies, has a term of five years with a renewal option for an additional two years. Financial terms were not disclosed. Under the deal, Cargojet will provide services to support DHL's international requirements for Europe and North, South, Central and Latin America, as well as Asia. Cargojet uses 12 freighters to service DHL's current requirements. DHL intends to add five additional B-767 freighters during the 2022-23 time frame. It also plans to be Cargojet's inaugural launch customer for the B-777 wide body long-range cargo aircraft, which are expected to begin flying in late 2023 or early 2024. In addition, Cargojet will issue to DHL warrants to acquire up to 9.5 per cent of its outstanding voting shares at a price of $158.92 per share over a period of seven years, with vesting tied to the delivery by DHL of up to $2.3 billion in business volume during the same term. Photo: The Canadian Press Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard appeared virtually before a Quebec court judge from a Toronto jail today to be charged with sexual assault and forcible confinement. Nygard, in an orange jumpsuit and wearing a blue mask, took notes during the brief proceedings. He was represented by a Montreal lawyer who waived the reading of the charges and reserved a decision on whether a future trial would be before a jury or a judge alone. An arrest warrant issued in Montreal alleges Nygard, 80, committed one count of sexual assault and one count of forcible confinement involving the same victim, between Nov. 1, 1997 and Nov. 15, 1998. A publication ban was requested in the Montreal case and the Crown has opposed bail, a technicality since Nygard is already detained while facing sex-related charges in Toronto and the United States. The Montreal case is set to return to court on April 4. Photo: The Canadian Press Queen Elizabeth II shrugged off recent health issues to attend a service of thanksgiving for her beloved husband, Prince Philip, at Westminster Abbey on Tuesday, entering the cavernous church through a side door to shorten the distance to her seat. The monarch entered the abbey on the arm of her second son, Prince Andrew, then separated from him to walk to her seat alone, easing concerns about unspecified mobility issues that have limited her public appearances in recent months. Her choice of escorts will be seen as a vote of support for Andrew after he settled a lawsuit linked to his relationship with the late, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Elizabeth, who recently recovered from COVID-19, didnt go to a Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey earlier this month, though she continued with other scheduled engagements. The 95-year-old monarch was deeply involved in planning the service, which included hymns and tributes from the charities Philip supported. Such touches werent permitted during his funeral last year due to pandemic control measures. About 1,800 family members and guests attended the memorial. Only 30 people were allowed at the funeral, conducted under strict lockdown rules that forced the queen to sit alone wearing a black mask as she mourned the loss of her husband of 73 years. Philip, duke of Edinburgh, died on April 9 at age 99. The Rev. David Conner remembered Philips service to the queen and dedication to environmental protection and his commitment to equipping young people with the skills they need to succeed through his Duke of Edinburgh Award. Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love, Conner said. There were also subtler honors, delivered as the royals often do through their clothing choices. Elizabeth, her daughter, Princess Anne, and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, were all dressed in dark green - echoing Philips livery color of Edinburgh Green. Also wearing green was Doyin Sonibare, 28, who won top honors from the Duke of Edinburgh Award, created by Philip to teach young people confidence and life skills through outdoor activities and community service. More than 6.7 million teenagers and young adults have taken part in the program since 1956. Sonibare delivered the primary tribute to Philip, thanking him for creating a program that gave her the tools she needed to get her first job, go on to university and now study for a Ph.D. in sickle cell research. The culmination of the program is an overnight expedition, something that frightened a teenager from East London who had never been camping before and had a fear of climbing steep hills. I kept thinking I was going to trip up, roll down the mountain and its lights out for Doyin, she said. Fortunately for me, that didnt happen. I remember thinking to myself, if I could complete this expedition, I can do anything; even though at the time I was 18 and unsure about my future. The entrances to Westminster Abbey were lined by winners of the programs top honor, the Gold Award, as well as members of youth cadet associations - a touch requested by Philip. There were also prayers, offered in tribute to Philips faith, and the congregation joined in singing Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, which wasnt possible at his funeral because of restrictions that banned singing. The queen sang along. Britains royal family attended, with Prince Charles sitting beside his mother and Prince William just behind her. Also taking part were many of Philips friends, and some 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmarks Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain. The service was brief Philip was known for hating a fuss with the queen walking out of the church less than 50 minutes after she walked in. But it did give Britain a chance to offer a note of thanks to the man who at the queens coronation in 1953 swore to be her liege man of life and limb. It's a weekday evening. We've just had a great dinner. And now, relaxed and comfortable in our family room, we tune in to the latest war coverage from Ukraine. It's midnight in Lviv, and the ink-black horizon is lit by a ball of orange flame, the latest target of Russian missiles. This is followed by a cutaway to the rubble of a smashed civilian neighborhood and weeping victims; followed by shots of a long trench, now serving as a mass grave filled with hastily wrapped bodies; followed by a commercial. It's a commercial for something very expensive a Jamaica vacation, an electric Cadillac, a full set of teeth implants. I forget the product, but it doesn't matter and an attractive woman in her forties (actor portrayal) explains why she bought it. Yes, the cost might seem sobering, she hints, but she wants it, she deserves it, and "I had to learn to put myself first." Then it's back to a TV newsroom of talking heads and carnage in Ukraine. "I had to learn to put myself first." For a heartbeat, my mind drifts: I imagine this poor creature from the commercial locked in a titanic struggle for new teeth implants with her own unselfish self. But my baffled wife ruins the daydream: "What did that woman just say?" My bride is a lifelong educator, and after forty years teaching elementary and junior-high-school young people most of them about one degree less self-centered than true north on a compass she has calluses on her credulity. She loved her students but having to "learn" how to "put myself first" is not a problem she observed in them, or in anyone else in her experience. Her skepticism is, of course, unwelcome in a consumer economy. But I mention it here for a reason. Bear with me. The war in Ukraine has all the elements of an exceptionally vivid videogame except that real people are really fighting and dying. Few images in recent memory rival the footage of Ukrainian men escorting their families to the Polish border, and then turning back to fight. True, they're obligated to stay and fight, but most do, and most do so willingly, as evidenced by their stubborn resistance to the Russian invasion. They fight for something more important than themselves, in this case their nation, families, homes, and fellow countrymen. And they remember. They remember the savagery of a Second World War that raped and looted the Ukrainian countryside. They remember the Bolshevik persecution of their churches, the Soviet mass deportations of innocent farmers, scholars, and clergy, and the Holodomor Stalin's genocidal famine campaign in Ukraine that killed millions. To describe today's Ukrainian resistance as "fearless" would be melodramatic; fear of dying is a universal human trait. But the willingness to risk oneself for something bigger than oneself exhibits an authentic kind of freedom, a freedom that comes from self-denial rather than self-indulgence. It's a freedom that stands in unpleasant contrast to the thing we too often call "freedom" here in our own comfortable lives. The willingness to risk oneself for something bigger than oneself exhibits an authentic kind of freedom, a freedom that comes from self-denial rather than self-indulgence. "I had to learn to put myself first." This is our unofficial national anthem. And not by accident. For the American public, commercials are a form of religion-like catechesis, as Neil Postman shrewdly captured years ago in his essay "The Parable of the Ring Around the Collar" (collected here). If Americans don't buy stuff, and keep buying a lot of stuff, everything unravels. So we need to be relieved of our moral qualms about excessive desire and endless consumption. We need to be taught, and we need to learn, to put ourselves first. That demands a social curriculum of constant titillation and teasing people's hunger for more which is why Postman also suggested that foreign visitors need only look to Las Vegas to understand America. Here in the heart of the empire, far from those curious provinces like Ukraine, we increasingly live in a bubble of the permanent present; a bubble unburdened by memory and its lessons, and infested with distractions, faux rewards (cashback on all purchases!), manufactured appetites, and illusions masquerading as liberty. Protecting that bubble demands nimble managers with superior analytical skills, guided by behavioral psychology. Las Vegas, not surprisingly, models how it's done. In Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, MIT professor Natasha Dow Schull outlined the immense care the gambling industry takes in knowing, feeding, and thus shaping, its clientele. The data collected by the industry then determine the look, feel, and risk-reward balance of the gambling experience. This keeps customers coming back and, on balance, losing. Machines, as opposed to poker, roulette, or craps tables, are especially profitable. The individual player on a machine is alone and intensely cocooned in his or her own mental zone, sometimes for a full day without eating or even a bathroom break, and absent the hassle of other players. One of Schull's addicted machine gamblers, a woman named Mollie, described the experience this way: The more I gambled, the wiser I got about my chances [of winning]. Wiser but also weaker. Less able to stop. Today when I win and I do win from time to time I just put it back in the machines. The thing people never understand is that I'm not playing to win. [I play] to keep playing to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters the whole world is spinning around you, and you can't really hear anything. You aren't really there you're with the machine, and that's all you're with. Other industries have watched and learned, adapting behavioral psychology techniques for their own purposes. Advertising, for example. "I had to learn to put myself first." It's a simple sentence; just nine syllables. But I can't get it out of my head, because it raises a simple question: Who exactly are the free: the people fighting in Ukraine's rubble or us? Success in adversity ICR Newsroom By Published 29 March 2022 Union Cement Company (UCC), a subsidiary of Shree Cement (India), operates one of the UAEs largest cement plants. Located in Ras Al Khaimah, adjacent to one of the worlds largest limestone quarries and Mina Saqr port, UCCs production facility was revamped under Shree Cements ownership. ICR speaks with Vijay Somani, CEO and MD of UCC, about the companys aggressive cost optimisation and export strategy that have enabled UCC to remain a rewarding business in spite of the tough domestic situation. ICR: What is the situation like in the UAE these days? Vijay Somani (VS): The COVID-19 pandemic is under control in the UAE. There is almost 100 per cent vaccination. Tourism is as usual and expected during Expo 2020, and we have more visitors here than residents. Yes, there is an impact, but this wave of the pandemic is not as severe as the last one. Therefore, it is not going to inflict as much damage in 2022, in my view. It will be a positive outlook. UCC and Shree Cement ICR: When Shree Cement acquired Union Cement Co (UCC) in 2018, it was the companys first overseas venture. What was the rationale for the acquisition, especially given the overcapacity evident in the UAE market? VS: You are right. UCC is the first operation out of India for Shree Cement. The proposed acquisition helped Shree Cement create its first footprint outside India. The UAE is one of the major economies in the Middle East that has good long-term prospects in the housing, construction and infrastructure segments. ICR: What attracted the company to UCC? VS: At that time, when we came to the UAE, quite a few cement plants were available to invest, but we found that UCC was more suitable, not only because it is close to the seaport for export, but also because it is well connected by a conveyor belt with the limestone mine. It also has space an existing site to expand in case the demand requires. UCC has a consistent track record of stable performance with oil well cement as a premium product with a specialised application in its product basket. Unfortunately, those new capacities that were planned in 2006 up to the 2008 crisis came online and those increased capacities created an imbalance between market demand and supply. Everyone wants their piece of the cake. This has now brought down the cement price and the domestic market was already saturated. Between those minimum cement prices of 2017 and now, prices have fallen to AED155/t [US$42.21/t] delivered and at the same time costs have gone up multifold. To ensure continuity of plant operations and better realisation, we have shifted our focus and have considerably increased our sales to a very regular export market. Our major export market is clinker, but we are also exporting cement. Growing export sales ICR: Exports are an important share of your sales. How much of your output is exported and where are you selling? VS: We are exporting around 65-75 per cent of our output through Mina Saqr port. We deliver to east Africa, Bangladesh and the Gulf states, and these are our target markets for clinker and cement. There is no clinker market for India. ICR: Is Oman still the leading export destination for UAE producers? VS: Exports to Oman from the UAE were around 4Mt in 2017 but have come down significantly. Cement is exported to Oman by road, but these days there are some transport and freight barriers that have seriously brought down export volumes. There are also administrative challenges at the border, which are reducing export potential. ICR: Freight rates are particularly high at present does this impact your ability to sell overseas? VS: Of course, but freight and availability of vessels at the right price have definitely not affected only the cement business in my view. All businesses have been affected by that. We are finding it difficult because our import and export shipping costs have gone up and it is difficult to pass on to the customer. That is really a big challenge. We hope that shipping should ease out gradually after the first or second quarter of 2022. Addressing domestic challenges ICR: How large is the domestic market and how has it performed during the COVID-19 pandemic? VS: Maybe 10-12Mta, in my view. In the domestic market, yes, we have a lot to refine and upgrade to have a larger share than today. ICR: What share of your sales is to the domestic market, versus exports? VS: We sell around 25-35 per cent of our output on the domestic market. Ordinary Portland cement types are the most dominant in the local market, but GGBS-based green cement sales are picking up. ICR: Apart from shifting to export sales, how has UCC responded to the challenging market situation? VS: Cost optimisation Shree Cement in India is well known for mastering costs. Our cost benchmarks are tracked by other manufacturers. We provide you with an example: when we acquired the plant in 2018, the kiln at UCC was producing 10,000tpd. Today it produces over 14,000tpd. That is without any capital expenditure no major capital expenditure has taken place. So, we probably can say that our technical team has set a new benchmark of higher productivity 45 per cent by revamping capacity without any additional investment. At the same time, we have more than doubled the waste heat recovery capacity. So, that is driving down our energy costs for manufacturing. ICR: What fuels are you using to fire the kiln? VS: We are using imported coal. On that side, before Shree Cement came, the coal was procured locally. Now we are sourcing directly from miners with the benefit of high-volume group consumption and ship it in Capesize vessels to optimise shipping costs. We have significantly brought down our coal procurement costs. ICR: What about distribution costs in the UAE, how do they impact the market? VS: The very high transportation cost, including tolls, is discouraging the movement of the goods from one emirate to other emirates. This has brought down overall domestic market presence. So, now we are focussing on optimising transport capacity. We are making the transport fleet more efficient, to bring down costs or at least compensate for increased costs. ICR: How have energy costs moved in the last year or two, and what do you expect for coal in the year ahead? VS: Coal has moved up a lot, but by the middle of the year, it should stabilise towards a normal level. Otherwise, if high costs continue in 2022, it will be very difficult to pass them on to the customer. ICR: What do you expect for the year ahead in terms of UAE cement demand? VS: 2021 was the year when most of the projects such as the Expo and other infrastructure and residential projects were completed and delivered. Construction activity is currently lower than the pace of the last decade and demand is at about 11Mt, which in my view is the lowest. Therefore, from here it is expected to improve. New projects are currently being announced with more to come, with work on Etihad railways already started. The UAE government is really aggressive in creating world class infrastructure and other icons. So, we are hopeful that from 11Mt it should gradually come back to the old level of at least 15Mt over the next 2-3 years. ICR: How do you see prices evolving as a result of that increased demand? VS: Prices will always be challenged here, because of the overcapacity. Credit terms are another challenge to volumes: people want longer credit, often unsecured, so that is another challenge to mitigate and enhance the volume in the local market. ICR: Given the level of overcapacity, with around 38Mta of grinding capacity, why has there not been more consolidation in the market? VS: Consolidation may not have a big impact unless there is a new market and product creation. Consolidation of two times or three times the capacity of demand [is required]. Consolidation works more effectively when there is not a wide gap between demand and supply. However, eventually, consolidation will happen and that will improve the market a little bit, but not significantly unless a new market segment is created. At the same time, surrounding countries in the GCC also have overcapacity. Saudi Arabia was never previously in the export market, but in the last 2-3 years it has also been exporting. So, consolidation will also happen gradually but will not have much impact on the pricing side [because of global oversupply]. ICR: What is it about Shree Cement that allows it to achieve leadership positions in terms of cost optimisation and technical performance, as in the case of the kiln capacity increase at UCC? VS: The management always encourages to build the team for growth and innovation. Calculated failures to acquire and adapt new approaches are acceptable to them. That gives us the confidence to try and come up with innovations to enhance efficiency and productivity. At the time of our acquisition of the plant we knew that there was scope to increase productivity and re-utilisation of waste heat. And the scope identified and visualised at the time of acquisition has been aptly implemented. Furthermore, in a market with overcapacity, one rule of thumb is that if you can be the lowest-cost producer, then you can definitely survive and operate at full capacity. So you have to have targets on the cost side as well, even if you cannot control things on the demand side. Decarbonisation ICR: In many parts of the world decarbonisation has risen to the top of the agenda for the cement industry. Do you think there is the same level of awareness and desire to reduce the carbon footprint in the Gulf and in the UAE? VS: We do not say that it is a desire, but it is a necessity now. So, we have to tune accordingly. The reduction of carbon is in everybodys interest, and the UAE has released targets. We will match it, the industry has to match it. ICR: Do you expect to move into alternative fuels in the future? VS: Certainly. We have already started on a trial basis for a number of waste streams. Hopefully, by the end of the year, we will see a satisfactory development in terms of alternative fuel. ICR: Do you plan to invest in solar power, given the plentiful solar resource in the UAE? VS: Definitely. We are up for investment in solar power, at least in line with our captive use. At the same time, the electricity available from federal sources is very expensive. We are awaiting the right policy announcement for solar power generation in the emirate. ICR: Do you think there is going to be more demand for low-carbon cements in the market? VS: We have a capability to produce green cement and we are already supplying it. Since ordinary Portland cement is available at a cheaper rate than green cement, the construction trade has not yet changed significantly. Looking ahead, demand for it may increase. We have capacity to produce it, providing the market commercials work out. ICR: How should the UAE government support the industry going forward? VS: The UAE government should address the issue of overcapacity. At the very least, stop approving applications for the building of new capacities and rationalising the existing ones should be looked into. The government could also look into a minimum pricing cap scenario until overcapacity matches demand. We remind you that in 2007, before the 2008 crisis, the cement sold in the UAE market was priced at AED450-500/t. The government intervened and brought the price to AED350/t and that is the maximum price set. The requirement now is that a minimum price should be set. In terms of cement imports, we have successfully brought notice to the relevant ministry. As a result, it has successfully imposed anti-dumping measures on those imports. Malawi launches calcined clay project 29 March 2022 Malawi's State Vice President, Dr Saulosi Klaus Chilima, has officially launched the countrys Limestone Calcined Clay Cement project at the Crossroads Hotel in Lilongwe. The aim of the project is to strengthen the building material sector in the country by focussing on two building material areas, walling materials and cement. The project will use locally-sourced resources such as limestone, gypsum and other industrial minerals. Malawis Minister of Mining, Dr Albert Mbawala, said he was confident that calcined clay cement will reduce CO 2 emissions at cement plants by around one-third. In order to operationalise this project, a Memorandum of Understanding [MoU] between my Ministry of Mining through the Geological Survey and GIZ under the More Income and Employment in Rural Areas in Malawi [MIERA] has been developed, added Dr Mbawala. Published under Northern Region Cement Co announces net profits of SAR107m in 2021 29 March 2022 Northern Region Cement Co has achieved net profits after zakat (charitable donations) and tax worth SAR106.67m (US$28.4m) in 2021, a decline of 1.4 per cent from SAR108.22m in 2020. Revenues fell by 13.7 per cent to SAR561.91m last year from SAR651.48m in 2020. In the 3Q21 the Saudi listed firm reported net profit after zakat and tax worth SAR18.35m, an YoY drop of 14 per cent from SAR21.43m. Published under This service applies to you if your subscription has not yet expired on our old site. You will have continued access until your subscription expires; then you will need to purchase an ongoing subscription through our new system. Please contact The Chanute Tribune office at 620-431-4100 if you have any questions "Call of Duty: Vanguard" fans, you will want to pay attention to this! Activision has announced that anyone who wants to check out "Vanguard's" multiplayer will have limited access to it for two weeks. The best part of it is that it will be for free for that entire time period. Aside from that, those who play the competitive Ranked Play mode should know that changes have been made to its Skill Rating system. 'Call of Duty: Vanguard' Multiplayer is Free for Two Weeks "Call of Duty: Vanguard" is giving limited access to those who want to try out the multiplayer for two weeks. According to a report by GameSpot, the Free Access event will run from March 30 all the way to April 13. The limited access will apply to all platforms. Per the report, "This limited content will include a playlist of mixed game modes on Season 2's new maps Casablanca and Gondola." Players will also have access to a mix of objective game modes on some of the most popular maps of "Call of Duty: Vanguard." This inclides Das Haus and Shipment. That is not all you can expected from the limited time Free Access event. Season 2 Reloaded's Arms Race mode is also included, including its tanks and motorcycles. Read Also: 'CoD Warzone Pacific,' 'Vanguard' Season 2 Begins this V-Day, Brings in Additions, Changes Changes to Ranked Play Skill Ratings Aside from the Free Access event that will last for two weeks, "Call of Duty: Vanguard" fans should also take note of the changes made to the Skill Rating system of the competitive Ranked Play mode. According to a separate GameSpot report, "As of March 28, Treyarch said that players' Skill Rating gains and losses should be more consistent." Specifically, the changes to the system will make it possible for players to earn more to their Skill Rating after winning. On the flipside, those who lose will lose less when it comes to their Skill Rating. Treyarch likewise said that game performance will also have less impact on the Skill Rating regardless if the player loses or wins. Developer Lawrence Metten also posted a thread on his Twitter account explain how Skill Rating is calculated in Ranked Play. You can view the Twitter thread below: With todays update, I think itd be helpful to explain how our SR system works () Your SR is a visible representation of your Ranked Play skill, but behind the scenes we track a Hidden Performance Range for each player that drives SR. Lets call this hidden range HPR. Lawrence Metten (@LawrenceMetten) March 28, 2022 It can be recalled that Ranked Play came with "Call of Duty: Vanguard's" Season 2 update. This game mode allows players to compete in matches that involve the same maps and rules that are being used in "Call of Duty League." "Players start in Ranked Play by participating in five placement matches to determine their initial Skill Rating, which is a number that determines a player's skill level within a specific Ranked Play season," GameSpot explains. Related Article: 'Call of Duty Vanguard' Gets Ranked Play for Season 2 This article is owned by GameNGuide Written by Isabella James The Hamilton County Health Department on Monday reported 21 new positive COVID-19 cases, up from six on Friday. The total number of cases in the county now stands at 98,271. There was one more death reported on Monday by the Health Department, for a total of 1,115. It was reported the death was a black, male, age 31-40. The Health Department is currently conducting data cleaning on a number of backlogged cases from the Omicron surge. This process will result in an increase in the total number of cases. However, the daily case counts will still reflect the actual number of new cases received by the Health Department on that day. The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations is 24 in Hamilton County, no change from Friday. One more is hospitalized with suspected COVID. There are four Hamilton County inpatients and four patients are in ICU, down from five on Friday. The number of those who have recovered from coronavirus in Hamilton County is 97,071, which is 99 percent. There are 85 active cases, compared to 77 on Friday. Former County Commissioner Dan Rawls told members of the Bradley County Commission on Monday night that the panel should hold the annual audit committee meeting prior to the start of early voting - or else it would look like one commissioner was being protected. He referred to an audit from the state Comptroller's Office that said Commissioner Erica Davis had a conflict of interest on a county job. The audit said a company owned by Commissioner Davis got a subcontract on work that had been approved by the County Commission. Commissioner Davis said she does not believe it was a conflict. The Bradley Commission approved Berywood Landscaping to demolish three buildings at Lake Forest Middle School for $45,000. Berywood then subcontracted with Commissioner Davis's TriStar Enterprises to haul debris and topsoil from the site. Mr. Rawls said the audit committee in the past has met in the first quarter. He said, "You would think you would want to meet and deal with this issue and clear the air on it. I find it alarming that it appears the commission is protecting this individual. Everybody I've talked to finds it alarming as well. "Clearly, the state considered this to be a big problem." He said Ms. Davis is involved in a "contentious" election contest. Commissioners had no response. Here is the audit report: On May 18, 2020, the Bradley County Commission approved a resolution authorizing the county mayor to enter into an agreement with Berywood Landscaping LLC (Berywood) for the demolition of three county buildings located at the Lake Forest Middle School. Berywood was acknowledged in the resolution as the low bidder for this project at $45,000. After entering a contract with Bradley County, Berywood later subcontracted with TriStar Enterprises (TriStar) to haul debris and topsoil from the Lake Forest site. TriStar is a trucking company owned and operated by Erica Davis, who is a member of the Bradley County Commission, and who voted to award the bid to Berywood. Ms. Davis stated that her company performed work on the Lake Forest Middle School property, and she provided auditors with three separate invoices sent to Berywood from TriStar totaling $23,422.50 for hauling services. These payments appear to violate the state conflict of interest statute, Section 12-4-101(b), Tennessee Code Annotated. This statute states that It is unlawful for any officer, committee member, director, or other person whose duty it is to vote for, let out, overlook, or in any manner to superintend any work or any contract in which anycountyshall or may be interested, to be indirectly interested in any such contract unless the officer publicly acknowledges such officer's interest. Indirectly interested means any contract in which the officer is interested but not directly so. This noncompliance with state statute is the result of a lack of management oversight. RECOMMENDATION County officials should review these payments and resolve the conflict of interest. MANAGEMENTS RESPONSE COMMISSIONER ERICA DAVIS The entire process, from the creation of the RFP, to the opening, selection, and awarding of bids is handled by the County Mayor. The Commissions only role is to authorize the Mayor to enter into a contract with the bidder that he selects. After the vote, and only a week prior to work starting on the project, TriStar was contacted by Berywood and asked to provide a quote for specific services, which were provided at a fair market rate. TriStar was later informed by Berywood that their quote had been accepted, and Berywood wished to utilize TriStar for hauling purposes. Work was performed per the request of the contractor, billed, and paid, all in a timely and professional manner. TriStars work was performed consistent with an expected, if not greater, standard and in a workmanlike manner. The assertion of potential conflict overlooks the fact that TriStar did not have a contract with the county, as they were providing services for specific work to be done at the time of the request. TriStar has provided all of the records of requested work, billings, and payment. Likewise, Erica Davis in her capacity as Commissioner had no duty to vote to select a contractor, or oversee the contract between Berywood and Bradley County. It was and remains public knowledge among county officials in Bradley County government that Erica Davis owns and operates TriStar Trucking LLC, and that her company was involved in hauling debris from the Lake Forest demolition site. At no time were any questions raised before, during or in subsequent meetings afterwards regarding the project. Bradley County nor the County technical advisors have a policy prohibiting the performance of the work which was done by a wonderful company and its employees. I have reviewed Attorney General Opinions and do not believe that my company, the county or Berywood have committed any wrong or engaged in any misconduct. AUDITORS COMMENT The Attorney Generals Office has opined on several occasions regarding conflict of interest statutes that persons who vote on budgets and appropriations superintend the contracts paid for by those budgets and appropriations. Therefore, we believe this is an indirect conflict of interest as defined by the governing statute. String Theory at the Hunter, in partnership with Lee University and the Hunter Museum of American Art, will continue its 13th season on Tuesday, April 5, at 6:30 p.m., with Tchaikovsky and Brahms. This evening will bring a spectacular showcase of musical talent, said Dr. Gloria Chien, String Theory founder and artistic director. I look forward to everyone experiencing Brahms extraordinary string sextet and Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence with us. In keeping with arts organizations in the area, proof of vaccination is no longer required, though masks are recommended. The concert will feature cellists Nick Canellakis and Colin Carr, violists Matthew Lipman and Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu, and violinists Chad Hoopes and Arnaud Sussmann. They will perform Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovskys Sextet in D minor, Op. 70 Souvenir de Florence and Johannes Brahms Sextet in B-flat major, Op. 18. Tchaikovskys sextet was composed in response to his honorary membership into the Saint Petersburg Chamber Music Society following a visit to Florence, Italy. Brahms sextet was immediately labeled as even more beautiful than anticipated by his dear friend Clara Schumann. Mr. Canellakis Mr. Hoopes Mr. Lipman, and Ms. Wu are all making their Chattanooga debuts for this event. A superb young soloist, Mr. Canellakis has captivated audiences around the world with his innovative techniques and rich, alluring tone. He has appeared in concertos, recitals, and music festivals throughout the United States and the world, including Europe and Asia tours with Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, at the Louvre in Paris, Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra, the Seoul Arts Center, and Music in the Vineyards. He is the artistic director of Chamber Music Sedona in Arizona and an artist of CMS. He is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and New England Conservatory. Mr. Carr has served as a professor at the Royal Academy of Music and on the faculty of the New England Conservatory, St. Johns College of Oxford, and Stony Brook University. He regularly appears throughout the world as a soloist, chamber musician, recording artist, and teacher, playing with major orchestras worldwide. He has been a frequent guest at the BBC Proms and has twice toured Australia. As a member of the Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio, he recorded and toured extensively for 20 years. A consistent yet versatile performer, Mr. Hoopes has performed with orchestras including San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Houston, National Symphony, Minnesota, Colorado, and the National Arts Centre. He is a frequent performer with CMS and at the Menuhin Festival in Gstaad, Switzerland; the Rheingua Festival; and Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Mr. Hoopes was Munich Symphony Orchestras first artist-in-residence and studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Kronberg Academy. Appearing around the world both as a soloist and chamber music performer, Mr. Lipman has performed with orchestras such as the Chicago Symphony, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Minnesota Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic and in venues including Seouls Kumho Art Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and Carnegie Hall. He is also a recording artist and published contributor to several magazines. Mr. Lipman makes frequent appearances at numerous music festivals and performs on tour and at Lincoln Centers Alice Tully Hall with CMS. He studied at The Julliard School, is an alum of the Bowers Program, and occupies the Wallach Chair at CMS. Mr. Sussmann has captured the attention of classical critics and audiences around the world. He has appeared with the American Symphony Orchestra, Stamford Symphony, Chattanooga Symphony, Minnesota Sinfonia, Lexington Philharmonic, Jerusalem Symphony, and Frances Nice Orchestra. He has presented in recital in Omaha, New Orleans, Tel Aviv, and Paris, and appears regularly at music festivals around the nation. A dedicated chamber musician, he is a member of CMS and has frequently appeared with them in New York and on tour. Mr. Sussmann is a recording artist and has been featured on PBS Live from Lincoln Center broadcasts. He trained at the Conservatoire de Paris and The Juilliard School. Ms. Wu is a soloist, chamber musician, and educator through North and South America, Europe, and Asia. She has been featured as a soloist in orchestras such as the National Symphony Orchestra at Taiwan, the Odessa Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Russian State Symphony Orchestra, and frequently performs at music venues and festivals around the world. She has taught at the University of Southern California and curated programs for the Da Camera Society in Los Angeles as the artistic partner. She is currently the music director of New Asia Chamber Music Society and founded Sunkissd Mozart. Art Connections will take place at 5:30, giving String Theory attendees the opportunity to visit the Hunter galleries and hear former Hunter Chief Curator Ellen Simak and Maestro Robert Bernhardt discuss works from the Hunter collection that relate to the music featured in the concert. Tickets are on sale now through April 5 and are $45 for general admission, $35 for Hunter members, $10 for students and music teachers, and $25 for groups of 20 or more. String Theory was founded in 2009 by Dr. Chien to expose new audiences to chamber music, invigorate the local classical music scene, and cultivate a future generation of music lovers. To purchase tickets, or for more information, visit https://www.stringtheorymusic.org/concerts/tchaikovsky-and-brahms or call 414-2525. Signal Mountain Mayor Charles Poss told council members Monday evening that he will sign Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelleys letter to state legislators calling on the state to relieve tax pressure on Tennessee cities and towns. In 2002, the state hit its revenue sharing relationship with cities and towns increasing sales tax from six to seven percent, said Mayor Poss. The goal at the time was to take care of a budget shortfall but they never gave the one percent extra back to towns. Mayor Poss said local officials are trying to change that and take advantage of the extra one percent. He said the impact on Chattanooga would be $2.8 million and Signal Mountain would receive about $139,000. Mayor Poss said Tim Kelly has asked local mayors to sign the letter to show support. Im all for it but I didnt want to tell them yes until I asked the council, said the Signal mayor. Where do you sign? replied council member Vicki Anderson. Vice Mayor Susannah Murdock said the repeal of the Hall tax has created a new burden and they have had to make up the shortfall by raising property taxes. She said reinstatement of the former tax rate would offset some of that. Other topics of discussion at Monday's meeting included resolving costs to improve the Mountain Arts Community Center. They need about $12,000 to replace the 21-year-old HVAC system in the cafeteria. We are trying to get revenue from the MACC, said Dick Graham. The main building is able to run but we need to fix the outside building for the pottery studio - which will make money. Council members also approved $33,286 to replace carpet in the Signal Mountain Library and $112,589 to replaster the Signal Mountain Swimming Pool. Contractors said the town pool has not been replaced since 2012 and before that, 1995. He said the plaster problems cause the pool to lose water which costs money. It's in rough shape, kids get their feet cut up on the plaster, said the contractor. It's time to smooth it out. There was an estimate of $8,000 to get a system set up for livestreaming the council meetings. Council members said they are going to get more estimates and then decide. The council also voted on second reading to allow a brewpub to operate in the town. The Signal Mountain Council meets again on April 11. Named the world's top hotel for stargazing by CNN Travel, the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa offers up an unforgettable experience to view Mauis clear skies with a night of stargazing from their rooftop. This resort takes their night sky seriously, too. Eddie Mahoney, the Hyatts own NASA ambassador, guides you through several telescope stations to look at everything from the moon to star groups that are 1,400 light years away. It was a surreal experience to be able to learn about the stars and constellations we so often just take in at a quick distracted glance. To listen to Mahoney excitedly and dedicatedly detail the planetary views, historical impacts, and share his depth of knowledge was an unmatched experience. You dont have to be a sky science junkie to enjoy this special outing either because Mahoney is so skilled at breaking down the science and relaying the information in easy to think of terms. Hawaiis location relative to the equator makes this a special spot on earth for stargazing with the ability to see nearly all the constellations throughout the year. The state also boasts low light pollution so you can get a better view of these small shining wonders. You can book this experience through the concierge at Hyatt by calling +1 808 667 4727. Non-resort guests can book, but there is a discount for those staying onsite. A woman told police that someone stole her wallet while she was at work at Erlanger Urology, 1755 Gunbarrel Road. She said she did not realize it until she got ready to leave work because her keys were with her wallet. She said the person spent a total of $8,000. The money was spent at Sam's Club in Chattanooga and online. Walden Security stated they would attempt to find any video to identity the suspect. The woman said she has already locked her cards so no more money can be spent. * * * A park supervisor for the city of Chattanooga told police that when his crew arrived this morning at Heritage Park, 1428 Jenkins Road, it was discovered that someone had cut the lock on the entry gate. Once inside, the park crew discovered that one park bench, two trash cans and a newly planted tree had been damaged. He said the vandal(s) also attempted to start a fire behind one of the buildings. The park is in the process of getting cameras installed. The supervisor is requesting extra police presence at night and during the early morning hours as this has been an ongoing issue. * * * A woman told police that she went for an interview in East Lake that morning and a white F-150 (TN tag) was following her. After she left the interview, she went to the Social Security building off Premier Drive and witnessed this same vehicle following her again. She said that a white male driver was operating the vehicle, but left prior to police arriving. She thought it was strange and wanted to have the incident documented. Police told her to update if any new info comes to light as well. * * * Police were called to the Truist Bank, at 11:10 a.m. and 12:05 p.m. on a burglar alarm. This location is formally known as Sun Trust Bank. Upon police arrival both times, police made contact with a man with CBRE, who was on site to do some work on the building. The man had the combination to the lock box to the building, which gave him access to the building. He cooperated fully with police. * * * A man told police he was at District 3 Hotel, 100 West 21st St., overnight and at 1:30 a.m. someone attempted to break into his Dodge Ram truck. He said the hotel video shows the suspect break out his window, and as he did a car pulled up and the suspect ran off. Per the desk clerk, the video was grainy enough that a suspect could not be identified. The man said it will cost around $300 to have the window replaced. * * * A man on North Moore Road told police he was trying to reunite with his ex-wife. He said that for some reason, his friend sent him photos of a rifle and a few guns, but didn't say anything about the weapons. The man then told police that he was feeling nervous and wanted police to call his uncle. Police contacted the uncle, who came over to be with the man. * * * An employee of Chattanooga Public Works told police he observed a homeless black male, 5'5", wearing red shorts and a black jacket, pulling a city of Chattanooga garbage can down the roadway heading east towards Central Avenue. Police canvassed the area, but the man had already left the area with the garbage can. The employee said he wanted to report the matter in case the man had taken someone's garbage can. * * * Police were called to the Mapco, 6200 Lee Hwy., to check on a suspicious person who was in a blue truck. Police identified the woman and she said she was just sleeping and did not need assistance. * * * A suspicious person was reported in Rivermont Park after dark. Police made contact with the man on the dock, where they observed him fishing. Police identified him and told him that people are not allowed in the park after dark. The man came back negative for warrants and wants. He gathered his belongings and left the scene. * * * A disorder was reported at Motel 6, 5505 Brainerd Road. Police spoke to the night shift manager, who said she needed a man and woman removed and trespassed from the property. Police contacted the couple and informed them that they needed to leave and were banned from the property. Police stayed on the scene until the couple left the area. * * * Police observed a vehicle (TN tag) parked at the fuel pumps of the Quick Stop at N. Holtzclaw Avenue/Wilson Street. Police observed that the vehicle was unoccupied. The vehicle contained miscellaneous items and all the doors were locked. Nothing criminal was located in the vehicle. The vehicle was registered to a man who lives on Sunflower Lane. * * * An employee of Walden Security called police due to two homeless people being under an awning at 832 Georgia Ave. where he was contracted to work. He called police when the two refused to leave. When police arrived, one person had already left and the other man was complaining about having to leave, due to the amount of rain. The security employee still said the man had to leave, despite the weather conditions. The man slowly gathered his things to depart, but then started to dry heave and complain of pain in his testicles when he saw the rain. Police called for an ambulance, but when the man heard this, he grabbed his things and walked away. Police canceled the ambulance. House Speaker Cameron Sexton said Monday he gave factual information to a grand jury investigating political corruption and confirmed he is not a target in the federal probe. Sexton was among at least five lawmakers subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury, including Republican Reps. Jason Zachary of Knoxville, Bud Hulsey of Kingsport, Patsy Hazlewood of Signal Mountain and Esther Helton of East Ridge. Legislative Administration Executive Director Connie Ridley also went before the grand jury Monday. Zachary previously declined to confirm he was subpoenaed, saying only, I know what you know. He showed up, though, at the federal courthouse to provide testimony, according to reports. Hazlewood initially said she had not been subpoenaed but then saw she had received a subpoena by email after talking to reporters. Sexton, a Crossville Republican in his third year as House Speaker, declined to give reporters details about his testimony but reiterated that he was called to give factual information, according to news reports. I think its important to remember I think grand juries, state and federal, are unique and different, and the federal process requires an individual to be subpoenaed to either (be) one of three people. Ones a target. Im not a target, never received a target letter. Another one is a suspect, which I am not. And then third is a witness that provides factual information, a factual witness per se. Today, my role is to provide information and be a factual witness, which I happily did and answered all the questions under oath, Sexton told news reporters outside the building in downtown Nashville. Federal agents are putting together a case involving the creation of a political vendor that gave kickbacks to lawmakers and possibly political bribery surrounding the 2019 education savings account vote. Sexton has said he has been cooperating with federal agents since he won election to the Speakers post in the fall of 2019 following the resignation of Rep. Glen Casada amid a sexist and racist texting scandal and complaints about his management style. Sextons testimony comes on the heels of the resignation of Rep. Robin Smith when she pleaded guilty to a wire fraud charge three weeks ago. Smith and Casada, who was identified in federal documents as a former House Speaker from January 2019 to August 2019, used their positions in the Legislature to persuade House Republicans to do business with a new campaign vendor called Phoenix Solutions, according to federal documents. As part of her guilty plea, Smith is cooperating with federal agents. Smith, Casada and first-term Republican Rep. Todd Warner were targets in a January 2021 raid by FBI agents. Smiths guilty plea identifies the operator of the business as the former House Speakers ex-chief of staff, Cade Cothren, who resigned amid scandal. Cothren gave Smith and Casada kickbacks for more than $200,000 worth of business steered to him, according to the federal documents. The House Republican Caucus spent tens of thousands of dollars with a man named Matthew Phoenix, believed to be Cothren, yet nobody within the caucus had a face-to-face meeting with the owner of Phoenix Solutions. Hulsey said previously he believed he was subpoenaed because he did business with Casadas consulting firm, Right Way Strategies. Helton said she believed she was called to testify because she used Phoenix Solutions, and Hazlewood used the vendor too, but then said later she would not have used it if shed known who was involved. * * * I had concerns from early on, expressed my concerns. They searched down the concerns that I brought and there were fake answers given, lies, manipulations. But they were to the (satisfaction) of the caucus campaign finance committee. Rep. Jeremy Faison, R-Cosby, Chair, House Republican Caucus * * * Zachary said last week he had used Right Way Strategies, too, and told a Knoxville publication he didnt think his subpoena had anything to do with flipping his vote in the 2019 voucher ordeal. Republican Rep. Kent Calfee of Kingston has told The Tennessee Lookout two times he heard Casada discuss giving Democratic Rep. John Mark Windle a promotion in the National Guard in return for his vote. Calfee also said he heard Casada say he would call the governor and talk to him about making Windle a general. Casada has said he didnt have the authority to give anyone a promotion in the National Guard. Yet, Calfee said the governor called him to his office to talk about the matter and told him comments hed made about Casada and an offer to Windle reflected poorly on him. The governor told Tennessee Lookout on two separate occasions he didnt know anything about the meeting Calfee described. Calfee has said he believes federal agents are conducting three investigations into the Legislature. In fact, several lawmakers used Phoenix Solutions for campaign work and to handle their taxpayer-funded mailers. House Republican Caucus Chairman Jeremy Faison said last week he suspected Phoenix Solutions was questionable almost from the time it surfaced as a player in the 2020 primary elections. I had concerns from early on, expressed my concerns. They searched down the concerns that I brought and there were fake answers given, lies, manipulations. But they were to the (satisfaction) of the caucus campaign finance committee, said Faison, a Cosby Republican. He later told the Chattanooga Times Free Press that when he challenged the validity of the vendor, Smith ran against him for the position of caucus chairman. He also called Phoenix Solutions bull-. Phoenix Solutions used the same mode of operation as two other new entities in the 2020 election, Alabama-based Dixieland Strategies and the Faith Family Freedom Fund, as well as the same Hamilton County postal code, 383. A former girlfriend of Cothrens testified he persuaded her to organize the Faith Family Freedom Fund political action committee so he could run it. A North Carolina restaurant owner, who has not been found, donated the money that was used to attack former Republican Rep. Rick Tillis of Lewisburg in his race against Warner of Chapel Hill. Warner defeated Tillis in the race, and a Tillis campaign worker filed a complaint that the Faith Family Freedom Fund PAC illegally coordinated with the Warner campaign. The Tennessee Registry of Election Finance has turned that matter over to the Williamson County District Attorneys Office and asked the Attorney Generals Office to bring in Cothren to testify. He refused to testify after being subpoenaed by the Registry board, invoking his Fifth Amendment right to avoid incriminating himself. The Tennessee Lookout is at https://tennesseelookout.com/ The Wind Symphony of Southern Adventist Universitys School of Music invites the community to a sacred concert at the Collegedale Church of Seventh-day Adventists on Saturday, April 9, at 4 p.m. Titled How Deep the Fathers Love for Us, the concert will musically recount the birth, ministry, crucifixion, resurrection, and exaltation of Christ. Music by Alfred Reed, Morten Lauridsen, David Gillingham, and John Wesley Gibson will be included. Directed by Ken Parsons, the concert will feature organ soloist Brandon Wilcox, senior music major. This event is free and open to the public and also will be livestreamed at southern.edu/streaming. For more information, visit southern.edu/musicevents or call 236-2880. In the span of a week (March 20-27), the Transportation Security Administration discovered eight firearms at security checkpoints in Tennessee, including at least one in every major airport in the state. Nashville International Airport (BNA) March 20; loaded M&P Bodyguard .380 caliber March 22; loaded Springfield .45 caliber March 22; loaded Glock 9mm March 25; loaded Glock 9mm Memphis International Airport (MEM) March 24; loaded Glock 9mm McGhee Tyson Airport (TYS) March 20; loaded Smith & Wesson .357 caliber Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport (CHA) March 24; loaded SCCY Industries 9mm Tri-Cities Airport (TRI) March 22; unloaded Glock 9mm In each instance, TSA officers notified local enforcement partners, who removed the firearms and passengers from the checkpoint area. Firearms are prohibited in carry-on baggage.They may be transported in checked baggage, provided they are declared to the airline, locked in a proper carrying case and unloaded. Security is the first concern of the TSA, and having these items in bags that are traveling with you on the aircraft is dangerous to other travelers and can be easily mistaken as an intentional attempt to bring a prohibited item onto an aircraft. Passengers must remember theyre responsible for the contents of bags and our advice is they thoroughly inspect all personal belongings to make sure there are no illegal or prohibited items before coming to the airport, said Steve Wood, TSA Federal Security Director for Tennessee. TSA officers have detected 64 firearms at Tennessee airports year to date in 2022. A total of 283 were detected across the state last year. In addition to potential criminal charges, passengers who bring firearms to a checkpoint face civil penalties from TSA: https://www.tsa.gov/travel/civil-enforcement For more information about TSA prohibited items, please follow these links: https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/all https://www.tsa.gov/travel/transporting-firearms-and-ammunition In loving memory of Ben Hicks, 85, of Hixson, Tennessee, we celebrate his eternal rest and reward. He passed on March 27, 2022, surrounded at home by his family. He was born on Oct. 5, 1936, in Olanta, SC and was the son of Bennie Cleton and Edna E. Graham Hicks. He was preceded in death by his parents and his daughter, Kathryn Lynn Pelonero. Survivors include his beloved wife, Janice Hicks, daughters, Kandace (James) Tanner and Kimberly (Keith) Moss, six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. He was known as a gentle and loving husband, father and grandfather. He was a man of deep faith and a living testament of many miracles in his lifelong journey, a quiet and gentle spirited man that loved God, family and country. He proudly served in the Air Force, graduated from Emmanuel College in Royston, Ga., and obtained a masters degree in Theology from Logos Bible College in Jacksonville, Fl., worked many years in television and radio broadcasting, as professor of Radio Communication at Gaston College, Gastonia, N.C. and then moved to Hixson, to be near his children and completed his career working at James Countertops in Office Administration. Ben was a light and inspiration of hope for many from years of ongoing health battles and victories that he overcame clinging to his unwavering faith. In faithful service to God, he ministered for years with his wife, Janice, in teaching and expounding the Gospel of Jesus Christ through discipleship classes and Sunday School, worked countless hours behind the scenes with his daughter, Kandace, in the compilation of translated lessons, videos and music presentations for missions work in Honduras. Though his desire was to travel on the mission field, his health limited this in the natural, yet he took many trips in the spiritual through his service unto God and labor of love in work. He was admired by many and adored by his family. A man of genuine humility that esteemed others better than himself and known by two phrases that described his lifeGentle Ben and the Miracle Man of faith. His final words with family instructed them to love God, love others and that love is the greatest of all. He lived by this everyday of his life and his works now live in the hearts of his family as a daily reminder. He was not afraid of death, but making sure that his family will be sure to return to him in heaven on that day of Christ arrival. Like Our Heavenly Father, his words resonate now, I dont want one to be lost. He will be dearly missed, but he will long be remembered. (Psalm 112:1-6) Funeral services will be held on Saturday, April 2, at noon at the Ministry Center on Hamill Road, Hixson, with the Rev. Jimmie Talley officiating. The family will receive friends on Saturday, April 2, from 10 a.m. until noon at the Ministry Center on Hamill Road, Hixson. Burial will be held on Monday, April 4, at 11 a.m. in the Hamilton County Memorial Park. Arrangements are by Legacy Funeral Home & Cremation Center, 8911 Dallas Hollow Road, Soddy Daisy, Tn., 423 843-2525. Share your memories, stories, and photos at legacyfuneralhome.com. Under auspices of SDC and democratic powers, the efforts continue to gather the democratic political forces in the Syrian opposition to unite ranks, through the "Syrian Democratic Forces and Personalities Conference", that was revealed by SDC in May last year, which is scheduled to be held in implementation of Security Council resolution 2254. The Syrian Democratic Council endeavors over a period of 3 years succeeded in achievement tentative comprehensive national consensus, and forming of a preparatory committee to hold a comprehensive national conference, after 6 workshops in European cities organized by SDC, and 3 dialogue forums inside Syria in the years "2018, 2019, 2020", in which Syrian political forces and personalities from various components of the country participated. At the invitation of the Preparatory Committee for the Conference of "Syrian Democratic Forces and Personalities", in cooperation with the "Ulf Palma International Foundation", the first consultative meetings were held in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, in December last year, with representatives of Syrian political parties under the title " a consultative meeting of Democratic forces and personalities". The co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council, Amina Omar told ANHA that committee is preparing to hold a second consultative meeting, during the month of next April, which was scheduled to be held during this March. Amina Omar stated that: The first consultative meeting was held in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, on December 13 and 14, 2021, in the presence of A number of politicians, intellectuals and democratic personalities, in addition to the Swedish Foreign Ministry, and a representative of the US State Department and in coordination with the Ulf Palma International Organization. Omar indicated that international conditions and repercussions of the Russia - Ukraine war hindered, holding of the second consultative meeting until next April. Omar noted that the consultative meetings contribute to preparing the appropriate ground for building trust and reaching understandings among the Syrians, before holding of the comprehensive conference, without disclosing the date of convening, saying: "The date of convening will be determined later." Worth to note that SDC is the political umbrella for the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. It was established on December 9, 2015, which considered one of the most important and active political forces on the Syrian arena during the Syrian crisis. A.K ANHA 90 Day Fiance Season 8 couple Jovi Dufren and Yara Zaya give an update to fans on 90 Day Diaries Season 3. Heres everything we know about how Jovi, Yara, and their one-year-old daughter, Mylah handled Hurricaine Ida. Yara Zaya and Jovi Dufren 90 Day Diaries Season 3 | TLC Jovi and Yara flee Louisiana because of Hurricane Ida During the March 28 episode of 90 Day Diaries, Jovi and Yara pack their bags and leave after Category five Hurricane Ida threatens their home in New Orleans, Louisiana. Jovi tells the cameras, Were packing up, and we are getting out of town. Were going to head to Dallas. The 90 Day Diaries episode shows Jovi and Yara traveling to Dallas back in August 2021, when the storm was expected to hit Louisiana. The 90 Day Fiance couple decided to stay away until the storm passed and the power was turned back on. Jovi and Yara celebrate Mylahs 1st birthday Eight days into their stay at Dallas, Yara and Jovi celebrated Mylahs 1st birthday. Instead of the big birthday party that they had planned, they made do with what they had. They sang happy birthday to Mylah with a plate of her favorite food cheetos. While its not the birthday they expected, Yara promised to have a proper birthday party for Mylah once they got back to New Orleans. Despite the hickups that the hurricane caused, Jovi and Yaras marriage is going well. Jovi said, Yara and I have been doing pretty good lately, but anybody in our position, we have obstacles. Yara is waiting for her Green Card to visit Ukraine Since Yara left Ukraine to be with Jovi on her K-1 (fiance) visa, she hasnt been allowed to return back to visit her family until she gets her Green Card. Yara explained, My green card was delayed a already so many times. And now its delayed again. She continued, With my Green Card, I will be able to go home and see my mom. Yara revealed that her mom still hasnt met her granddaughter in person yet. Now the next hurdle that stands in their way is that the Green Card office will likely be closed due to the damages that Hurricane Ida caused. As of now, theres no news when Yara will be able to visit her family in Ukraine. 90 Day Diaries airs Mondays on TLC and discovery+. RELATED: 90 Day Diaries: Julia and Brandon Update Where Are They Now in 2022? Dave Grohl has been melting faces since the late 1980s, first with Nirvana and then with Foo Fighters. However, by 2002, Grohl still hadnt quite met everyone there was to meet in the industry, including George Harrisons son, Dhani Harrison. Grohl had no idea who Dhani was when they first met. Its an excusable offense. Dhani might have looked like a carbon copy of his father, but hed yet to find his own fame. Thankfully, Grohl quickly realized who he was talking to; otherwise, the surprise of his life might not have come. Dave Grohl and Dhani Harrison | Stephen Lovekin/Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images Dave Grohl didnt recognize George Harrisons son, Dhani, the first time they met Grohl and Dhani met in 2002. Grohl wrote about the meeting on his blog, Daves True Stories. From a dirty old couch deep within the bowels of Londons Wembley Arena, I watched the usual parade of familiar faces file into the Foo Fighters dressing room as I happily nursed my well- deserved post-show beer, still sweating from another exhausting night onstage, Grohl wrote. Foo Fighters guitarist, Chris Shifflett, told Grohl someone wanted to meet him. Hi, Im Dhani. In all of our years traveling and touring, playing concerts and festivals from Mississippi to Melbourne, I can honestly say that there arent too many strangers in the world of Foo, but as familiar as Dhanis face seemed, I couldnt place where I had seen this young man before, Grohl continued. But, with a nagging sense of Deja vu, I felt I knew this person somehow, almost as if we had grown up together. Dhani handed Grohl a CD he said hed worked on with his father. Curious, I took one look at the colorful cover, an image of five mannequins holding a television set with the word Brainwashed across the top in bold, black letters, and thought Wow. Good title. I smiled, gave the disc a quick but polite inspection, and was about to stuff it into my back pocket when I noticed something handwritten in the lower, right corner By George Harrison. Confused, I looked up at Dhani and immediately realized why he looked so familiar. As the son of the late, great George Harrison, he is the spitting image of his father. I took in his features: The unmistakable brow, the cheekbones, the shaggy, dark hair. I suddenly felt as if I were face to face with the quiet Beatle himself. And in that moment it all made sense.little did Dhani know, I had grown up with him. Meeting Georges son was already shocking. However, Grohl got another surprise that night. RELATED: George Harrisons Son Said Tom Pettys Death Was Just as Painful as His Fathers Death Grohl attended Concert for George after Dhani invited him Dhani said he was in London preparing a tribute concert for his father at Royal Albert Hall. Grohl realized it was November 22, 2002, a week before the first anniversary of Georges death. Dhani told Grohl the list of performers who were playing at Concert for George. His jaw dropped and dragged on the dirty carpet. Grohl wrote, The line-up was a virtual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dream come true. And all under the same roof to pay tribute to my favorite Beatle! These musical giants were not only the soundtrack of my life, but many of the gods that I had bowed to ever since I picked up a guitar. In my mind, this was Valhalla. Grohl was shocked by what came next. Would you like to come? Ill put you on the list if youre in town! Dhani offered. Speechless, I turned to the Foo Fighters trusty tour manger, Gus Brandt and he enthusiastically nodded. If there was ever an instance where a human being actually levitated, I do believe that my feet literally lifted off the ground in bewildered excitement in this unimaginable moment. Im sure that Dhani had no idea how momentous this gesture was to me. But it felt like I was being granted a lifelong wish. We exchanged info, hugged, and happily exclaimed, See you in a week!' Grohl was about to experience an unforgettable night. RELATED: Michael Douglas Had a Strange Night Celebrating His Golden Globe Win With George Harrison and Bob Dylan The Foo Fighters frontman met Paul McCartney Grohl counted the days until the show. When they arrived, they got backstage passes. Grohl watched in awe as tons of great musicians went on stage to play some of Georges greatest hits. He later went backstage and met Paul McCartney, which he related to a supernatural experience. I tried to avert my eyes, but it was no use. I was mesmerized. Grohl had grown up loving The Beatles, so it was a full-circle moment for him. He was so thankful to be a part of it all. To be included in such a monumental affair felt like my lifes greatest reward up until that point, so every waking moment was spent awaiting its arrival. Of all the places my crooked musical path had taken me up until this point, this would undoubtedly prove to be a memory I would cherish forever. After the show, Grohl called his mother to tell her all about it. She cried tears of joy for him. RELATED: George Harrisons Son Thinks Prince Was Angry He Couldnt Delete His Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Performances off the Internet When Dave Grohl met Taylor Hawkins, Grohl was still mourning the death of his Nirvana bandmate, Kurt Cobain, and Hawkins was drumming for Alanis Morissette. Before theyd even played music together, they knew they had a bond. Both musicians felt heavily connected. So, when Grohl had an open drum seat in Foo Fighters, it was obvious who would fill it. It didnt matter if Hawkins was as good as Grohl. Taylor Hawkins and Dave Grohl | Paul Archuleta/FilmMagic Dave Grohl said Taylor Hawkins came into his life like an F5 tornado In his 2021 memoir, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music (per Loud Wire), Grohl explained he and Hawkins had a profound first meeting. It was almost as if theyd been twins separated at birth. Tearing through the room like an F5 tornado of hyperactive joy was Taylor Hawkins, my brother from another mother, my best friend, a man from whom I would take a bullet, Grohl wrote. Upon first meeting, our bond was immediate, and we grew closer with every day, every song, every note that we played together. I am not afraid to say that our chance meeting was a kind of love at first sight, igniting a musical twin flame that still burns to this day. Together, we have become an unstoppable duo, onstage and off, in pursuit of any and all adventure we can find. We are absolutely meant to be, and I am grateful that we found each other in this lifetime. Grohl said in an interview last year, I was like, Wow, youre either my twin or my spirit animal or my best friend.' Hawkins told NME he felt the same way. Me and Dave just looked like long lost brothers in a weird way. We had a similar vibe and I dont know why. RELATED: Stevie Nicks Heartbreaking Poem in Tribute to Taylor Hawkins: I Feel the Pain Grohl did ask Hawkins to join Foo Fighters because he was the best drummer Hawkins told NME that Grohl mostly asked him to join Foo Fighters (named after a term coined by World War II allies) because his drumming skills meshed well with Grohl. I wasnt picked because Im the best drummer in the world, thats for sure, Hawkins said. I was picked because my drumming somehow fitted in with Daves edge. Its like when you watch The Strokes the drummer is turned around weird, but when hes playing everything is rad as f*** and all the guitar players are rad in their own weird way. I like to think that were one of those bands where those f***ed-up limitations make sense. Grohl, meanwhile, thought it was more about their emotional connection. He cared less about Hawkins drumming. Grohl said that theres no such thing as a musical audition to join the Foo Fighters. Its a much more emotional, personal thing. You could be the best drummer in the world, but youd never be in this band if you didnt fit. Everyone in this band fits for a reason. When I met Taylor, it took two-and-half minutes before we became best friends. It just happened. Its that way in life, whether its a best friend, a lover or someone you know youll carry for the rest of your life. When he joined the band, his drumming was the least important factor I just thought I want to travel the world with this guy, I want to jump on stage and drink beers with this person. That was my biggest concern. Unfortunately, the brothers from another mother wont be traveling or drinking beers together anymore. RELATED: Dave Grohl Says This Foo Fighters Song Was Inspired by Kurt Cobains Death Hawkins was found dead in a hotel room in Bogota, Colombia On Mar. 25, Foo Fighters shared a statement on their social media revealing Hawkins had died. The Foo Fighters family is devastated by the tragic and untimely loss of our beloved Taylor Hawkins, the band wrote. His musical spirit and infectious laughter will live on with all of us forever. Our hearts go out to his wife, children and family, and we ask that their privacy be treated with the utmost respect in this unimaginably difficult time. Hawkins had played with the band days before on the South America leg of their tour. He was found dead in his hotel room in Bogota, Colombia. Colombian authorities have since released a preliminary toxicology report claiming that Hawkins had 10 substances in his body at the time of his death, including marijuana, opioids, and antidepressants. When Hawkins slipped into a coma after a heroin overdose in 2001, Grohl contemplated leaving music behind. Lets hope hes not thinking that now. How to get help: In the U.S., contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration helpline at 1-800-662-4357. RELATED: MTV VMAs 2021: Global Icons Foo Fighters Honor The Rolling Stones Charlie Watts Following the death of their drummer, Taylor Hawkins, on March 25, Foo Fighters have canceled all upcoming tour dates. The band is also set to perform during the Grammy Awards on April 3. However, some fans are doubting whether they will attend. Foo Fighters | Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images Foo Fighters drummer, Taylor Hawkins, was found dead in his hotel in Columbia On March 25, Foo Fighters shared a statement on their social media revealing Hawkins had died. The Foo Fighters family is devastated by the tragic and untimely loss of our beloved Taylor Hawkins, the band wrote. His musical spirit and infectious laughter will live on with all of us forever. Our hearts go out to his wife, children and family, and we ask that their privacy be treated with the utmost respect in this unimaginably difficult time. Hawkins had played with the band days before on the South America leg of their tour. He was found dead in his hotel room in Bogota, Colombia. Colombian authorities have since released a preliminary toxicology report claiming that Hawkins had 10 substances in his body at the time of his death, including marijuana, opioids, and antidepressants. Fans of Hawkins took to social media to post their tributes, as did many celebrities. Stevie Nicks even penned a poem in Hawkins honor. RELATED: Nirvanas Something in the Way Has Seen a Massive Increase in Streams Thanks to The Batman Foo Fighters have canceled all upcoming tour dates According to Variety, Foo Fighters have canceled all upcoming tour dates. A statement from the group reads: It is with great sadness that Foo Fighters confirm the cancellation of all upcoming tour dates in light of the staggering loss of our brother Taylor Hawkins. Were sorry for and share in the disappointment that we wont be seeing one another as planned. Instead, lets take this time to grieve, to heal, to pull our loved ones close, and to appreciate all the music and memories weve made together. With Love, Foo Fighters. Foo Fighters were scheduled for numerous shows in North America and Europe for most of 2022. A day before Hawkins death, the Grammy Awards announced that Foo Fighters would be performing during the awards on April 3. However, Variety and fans are doubtful that the performance is going ahead. RELATED: Dave Grohl Named Foo Fighters After a Term for UFOs Coined by WWII Allied Forces Fans are doubtful that the band will appear at the Grammy Awards Foo Fighters have yet to announce whether theyre still performing at the Grammy Awards or attending at all. Fans arent hopeful but understand if they choose not to appear. One fan on Twitter wrote, Did CBS just announce that Foo Fighters will play the Grammys? Cause, Im guessing not. ESPNs Sarah Spain wrote on March 27, Foo Fighters are set to play the Grammys next weekend? Man, if that happens its gonna be waterworks all night. A fan replied to Spains Tweet with: I hope they dont. they need time to process and heal. I love the Foo Fighters enough to want to see them deal with this tragic loss with some respect and some privacy. Forget about the damn Grammys they give us their best lets give them some relief. Many fans have speculated whether Foo Fighters will appear. Others wish for an update from either Foo Fighters or the Grammy Awards. When Hawkins slipped into a coma after a heroin overdose in 2001, Grohl contemplated leaving music behind. Lets hope hes not thinking that now. How to get help: In the U.S., contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration helpline at 1-800-662-4357. RELATED: How to Watch the 2022 Grammy Awards Though actor and former model Travis Fimmel is well known for playing legendary warrior king Ragnar Lothbrok on Vikings, he is happy to let stunt guys get paid to do their thing when it comes time to shoot action sequences. The Raised by Wolves star doesnt like filming those scenes at all himself because he said hes lazy but seemingly not about work around his little farm. Travis Fimmel | Travis Fimmel isnt into some parts of acting In 2018, Fimmel told GQ, I never wanted to be an actor, ever. I still dont. Although Fimmel is an actor, hes confessed he doesnt participate in parts of getting act jobs, namely in-person casting auditions. He prefers to put his auditions on tape to avoid the nerves of trying out in person. I cant remember the last job I got from actually auditioning. Its horrible, he said. He confessed he feels nervous, sweaty, [and] embarrassed. After finishing his work on Vikings, Fimmel said he was done with television altogether. But Ridley Scott changed his mind. I didnt need a pitch, Ridley asked me to do [Raised by Wolves] and I was like, Yeah, of course,' he shared. Then I read the script, its very unique, he went on. Hes such a visionary, and I think its something no one has seen on TV before. Travis Fimmel says hes lazy and happy to let stunt people film action scenes On Raised by Wolves, executive produced by Scott, Fimmel has played a survivalist and a former child soldier on a dangerous planet for two seasons. And his character is involved in some exciting action sequences. But Fimmel said hes happy to kick back and let professionals step in for those. I dont love the action stuff at all, Im lazy, he admitted to People. I dont need to be a hero. Im happy for the stunt guys to get paid to do their thing. While Fimmel may like to sit out on filming action scenes, the farm boy said he likes to get in on the action around his ranch. Travis Fimmel would be back in Australia if he could Lothbrok lovers, let's hear it: How many of you have also watched our #Vikings king Travis Fimmel in #RaisedByWolves? pic.twitter.com/dv07H4Kbbm HBO Max Nordic (@HBOMaxNordic) September 18, 2021 Fimmel also told GQ hed ultimately like to go back to Australia but lives on a ranch in California in the meantime. S*** mate, if I had the money, Id have been home two years ago. You need a fair bit of money now to get a big farm in Australia, he shared, Its so expensive. Unbelievably expensive. But he was still on his ranch as of 2020, and he went into isolation there when the pandemic required it. Ive got a little farm, and its been a great chance to work on that, get a lot of stuff done, he said of his home. I havent learned Spanish or anything. Just enjoyed the opportunity to do stuff around here. As to what sort of stuff he does, some of it is taking care of animals. Ive got cattle and horses, that sort of stuff, he shared. So, if he is lazy about action scenes, it doesnt sound like hes lazy at home. RELATED: Vikings: Travis Fimmel and Alexander Ludwig Write Country Songs Together Several members of the royal family have gathered to pay tribute to Queen Elizabeth IIs late husband, Prince Philip, in London. Relatives and friends attended a memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh on March 29. Almost one year prior, the palace announced: It is with deep sorrow that Her Majesty The Queen has announced the death of her beloved husband, His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. His Royal Highness passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle. Tuesdays service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey lasted about 40 minutes and allowed many who couldnt attend the princes funeral, due to coronavirus (COVID-19) restrictions at the time, pay tribute to his life. A surprise appearance by the dukes great-grandchildren, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, led to a question: Are any of the youngest royals named after Prince Philip? Prince Philip smiling after unveiling a plaque at Richmond Adult Community College | Matt Dunham WPA Pool / Getty Images Where Prince Philip got his surname The monarchs husband of more than 70 years was born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. His family was exiled from Greece when he was just a baby and years later after his career in the Royal Navy, he renounced his German titles and adopted the surname Mountbatten from his mothers side of the family. The Indian Express noted that The Mountbatten family name of Prince Philip too has its origins in the period of the First World War. It is an anglicized version of Battenberg which was the dynasty ruling over the Grand dutchy of Hesse in Germany. Two of the descendants of the Battenburg family got associated with the British royal family in the 19th century. Windsor is Queen Elizabeths last name and the couples descendants bear the hyphenated Mountbatten-Windsor. Philips children and grandchildren who are named after him Prince Charles and Prince William dressed in their military uniforms at the National Service of Remembrance at The Cenotaph | Samir Hussein/WireImage While all of Philips children have the Mountbatten-Windsor surname, a couple of his children and grandchildren also bear his first name within their full names. Philips eldest son is named after him. The Prince of Wales full name is Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor. Much of the public who werent aware of the heir apparents middle name heard it uttered for the first time when Charles and Princess Diana tried the knot in 1981. During their ceremony, Diana fumbled her words and accidentally said she said she would take the hand of Philip Charles Arthur George. As for his grandchildren, another future king has his first name as well. Prince Charles eldest son, the Duke of Cambridges full name is William Arthur Philip Louis Cambridge Mountbatten-Windsor. Some of Philips great-grandchildren have at least one of his names too Meghan Markle with Prince Harry as she holds their son, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, at a charity polo match | Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images There are even a few great-grandchildren who bear at least one of Prince Philips names. One is Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbanks son, August Philip Hawke Brooksbank, who was born in February 2021. Princess Annes daughter, Zara, also named one of her kids after their great-grandfather. Her third child, Lucas Philip Tindall, was born just weeks before the dukes death. Prince Harry and Meghan Markles children carry the last name Mountbatten-Windsor. Moreover, its been reported that because their daughters first name, Lilibet, is what Queen Elizabeth was called by those closest to her over the years including Prince Philip, the Sussexes were honoring him as well by giving their little one that name. RELATED: These Were Prince Charles Last Words to His Father, Prince Philip, the Night Before He Died Netflix dropped the much-anticipated Ozark Season 4 Part 2 trailer, and theres a major spoiler about a possible death. Julia Garner, Jason Bateman, and Laura Linney return with an intense final installment teaser of the crime drama, set to a cover of Renegade by Styx. After starring in Inventing Anna as a fake wealthy German heiress, Garner returns to the dark and angry Ruth Langmore, who is out for blood and revenge over the death of her cousin, Wyatt Langmore (Charlie Tahan). Batemans character, Marty Byrde, is terrified and Wendy Byrde (Linney) is indifferent. Heres our breakdown of the Ozark Season 4 Part 2 trailer. [Warning: This article contains spoilers from the Ozark Season 4 Part 2 promo trailer.] Ozark Season 4 Part 2 Trailer Opens with Marty and Wendy Byrde in the middle of a tough conversation RELATED: Is Ozark The New Breaking Bad? The trailer for Ozark Season 4 Part 2 starts with Marty and Wendy Byrde discussing their life and the death that surrounds them in their money laundering business. Marty insists hes protecting his family, but Wendy disagrees. Their daughter, Charlotte Byrde (Sofia Hublitz), moved up as the new Ruth Langmore in Ozark Season 4. Charlotte and her brother, Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), only flash across the screen for a second in the new Ozark trailer. Im just sick of having blood on my hands, Wendy, Marty Byrde tells his wife. It doesnt bother you? Wendy attempts to convince Marty to do what she wants, although its not immediately clear what that is. Then Marty defends Ruth after a clip of her at Wyatts funeral flashes across the screen. Shes lost her whole family because she met us, Marty pleads. It sounds like Wendy wants Marty to get Ruth out of the picture. Why do you choose everyone else over your family? Wendy asks Marty. Dont back out on me when we are almost done. Dont do that to me. Marty and Wendy are again at a crossroads, disagreeing about yet another aspect of their business and life together. The new Ozark trailer teases a spoiler: the death of Javi RELATED: Ozark: Fans Argue Over the Single Dumbest Plot Point in the Whole Show As the new Ozark trailer continues for season 4 part 2, Marty speaks to Ruth about why she cannot kill Javi (Alfonso Herrera). Javi dies; everything that we worked for just falls apart, Marty cautions Ruth. However, Javi killed Ruths cousin, Wyatt, and shes ready for revenge. Shes lost everyone shes loved. Ruth has no reason to listen to Marty. In the following clip, Ruth walks up to Javi on a busy street in broad daylight and shoots Javi. Some viewers suggested that this could be a dream sequence of what Ruth hopes to do to Javi. However, its more likely that its an Ozark Season 4 Part 2 spoiler that kicks off the seriess final installment. His death leads to Marty and Wendys danger in the Ozark final season trailer. In another clip, Ruth screams an expletive, and then she throws up her middle fingers on both hands to a line of cars. After whats happened to her entire family, shes out for retribution, and no one can stop her. Fans are here for it. Maya Miller calls Marty Byrde a criminal as the new Ozark trailer continues The last minute of the Ozark Season 4 Part 2 trailer shows the danger Marty faces when the series returns on April 29, 2022. He tells FBI agent Maya Miller (Jessica Frances Dukes) that the Byrdes are in a lot of danger; however, she doesnt care. Maya informs Marty that he chose the life he is living right now. Youre just another criminal to me now, Maya tells Marty. In another clip, Marty offers Omar Navarro (Felix Solis) to reestablish his control in Mexico. That scene solidifies the fact that Ruth likely did kill Javi. While in Mexico, theres a clip of someone cleaning up blood in the underground holding cell that Marty was trapped in at one point in the series. In another flash, a person who some fans think looks like Javi is in that cell. However, its a new person. Rachel returns in the Ozark Season 4 Part 2 trailer on Netflix Ozark: Julia Garner as Ruth Langmore | Steve Dietl/Netflix Perhaps one of the most exciting scenes is the split second when Rachel Garrison (Jordana Spiro) returns in the Ozark Season 4 Part 2 trailer. The Blue Cat Lodge and Bar owner holds a sniper in her hand around minute 1:12 of the trailer. Viewers should remember that Marty sent Rachel to Florida to seek help for drug and alcohol addiction in Ozark Season 2 after an overdose. Is Rachel aiming a sniper at Marty? Only time will tell. When does Ozark Season 4 Part 2 come out on Netflix? The Ozark Season 4 Part 2 release date on Netflix on April 29, 2022, at 3 a.m. EST or midnight PT. RELATED: Ozark: Laura Linney Wasnt Looking to Do a Series What Changed Her Mind? Hulus The Girl From Plainville opens with the death of Conrad Roy III (Colton Ryan). The 18-year-olds body is discovered in his pickup truck in a Kmart parking lot. He has died by suicide. But questions soon emerge about the role a young woman named Michelle Carter (Elle Fanning) might have played in Conrads decision to end his life. RELATED: The Girl From Plainville: Release Date, Plot, and Everything Else You Need to Know The eight-episode miniseries is based on an Esquire article of the same name by Jesse Baron, which explored the circumstances of Conrads 2014 death. Here are five things to know about the true story behind The Girl From Plainville. [Warning: This article contains possible spoilers for Hulus The Girl From Plainville.] Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy only met a few times in person As explained in the first episode of The Girl From Plainville, Michelle and Conrad met in 2012 in Florida when they were both on vacation with their families. Though the two teens lived just an hour away from each other in Massachusetts, they met only a handful of times in person. In a 2017 interview with 48 Hours, Conrads mother Lynn Roy (now Lynn St. Denis) said shed met the woman who called herself her sons girlfriend just once before his death. Though Michelle and Conrad rarely saw each other face to face, they developed an intense relationship via texts and social media. Both had faced mental health challenges in the past, and Conrad had also made a previous suicide attempt. In July 2014, Conrad died of carbon monoxide poisoning. After his death, investigators discovered numerous text messages from Michelle to Conrad urging him to end his life. Michelle Carter was charged with manslaughter in Conrad Roys death Michelle Carter in 2017 | John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images Eventually, prosecutors charged Michelle with involuntary manslaughter in Conrads death. While she was not physically present when he died, a court ruled that she was virtually present at the scene, and she went to trial in 2017. She waived her right to a jury trial, which meant that a judge would decide her fate after hearing the evidence against her. Judge Lawrence Moniz ruled that Michelle was guilty of involuntary manslaughter, pointing to evidence that Conrad had gotten out of his car at some point but that Michelle had convinced him to get back inside. She was released from prison in 2020 Michelle faced up to 20 years in prison after being found guilty. She was sentenced to 2 years in prison. After appeals, her sentence was reduced to 15 months. She was released three months early in January 2020 after her sentence was reduced by three months for good behavior. Since her release from prison, Michelle has kept a low profile. The conditions of her parole forbid her from profiting from any publicity around the case, Esquire reported. Her probation ends on August 1, 2022. Some criticized the guilty verdict Conrads family praised the guilty verdict, with his father, Conrad Roy Jr., saying they were happy with the outcome. But Michelles case raised alarms for some legal experts. This is saying that what she did is killing him, that her words literally killed him, that the murder weapon here was her words, Matthew Segal, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, told the New York Times. That is a drastic expansion of criminal law in Massachusetts. Will the next case be a Facebook posting in which someone is encouraged to commit a crime? Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and Harvard Law professor, told the Times. This puts all the things that you say in the mix of criminal responsibility. Conrad Roys mother wants to change the law about coerced suicide Michelle (Elle Fanning) and Lynn Roy (Chloe Sevigny) in The Girl From Plainville | Steve Dietl/Hulu Since her sons death, Lynn St. Denis has been pushing for a law in Massachusetts that would make coerced suicide a crime. (Suicide coercion is already against the law in many other states.) With this tragedy, my son would want me to help other people, other families, she told People. If we get the law passed when we do thats going to be a win for me, for him, she added. I just want my son to be proud of me. The first three episodes of The Girl From Plainville are streaming now on Hulu. New episodes are released weekly on Tuesdays. How to get help: In the U.S., call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Or text HOME to 741-741 to speak with a trained crisis counselor at the free Crisis Text Line. Check out Showbiz Cheat Sheet on Facebook! RELATED: True Crime on HBO: I Love You, Now Die Chronicles a Scarily Modern Love Story Gone Wrong A research team led by ecotoxicologist Heather Leslie and analytical chemist Marja Lamoree have become the first to demonstrate that plastic particles from our living environment end up in the human bloodstream. The results of the research project, called Immunoplast, were published today in the scientific journal Environment International. The research shows that miniscule pieces of plastic from our living environment are absorbed into the human bloodstream. Blood screened for five polymers The research team consists of researchers from VU Amsterdam, Deltares and Amsterdam UMC, VUmc location. They developed an analytic method for establishing the trace level of micro- and nanoplastic particles in human blood. The method was applied to the blood of 22 anonymous donors. The blood was examined for the presence of five different polymers, the building blocks of plastic. The extent to which the individual polymers were present in the blood was also determined. Three-quarters of the test subjects appeared to have plastics in their blood. The research was the first to prove that plastic particles can end up in the human bloodstream. Earlier indicators for this came from laboratory experiments. The current research shows that people absorb microplastics from their environment in their everyday lives and that the amounts are measurable in their blood. PET detected most The overall concentration of plastic particles in the blood of the 22 donors amounted to an average of 1.6 g/ml, which is comparable to a teaspoon of plastic in 1,000 litres of water (ten large bath tubs). A quarter of the tested donors had no detectable quantities of plastic particles of any type in their blood. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene, and polymers of styrene were the most common types of plastic found in the blood samples, followed by poly(methyl methacrylate). Polypropylene was also analysed but the concentrations were too low for an accurate measurement. The next question is how easy it is for these particles to move from the bloodstream into tissues such as in organs like the brain. Heather Leslie, working at VU during the research, explains: We have now proven that our bloodstream, our river of life as it were, has plastic in it. Marja Lamoree adds: This dataset is the first of its kind and must be expanded to gain insight into how widespread plastic pollution is in the bodies of humans, and how harmful that may be. With this insight we can determine whether exposure to plastic particles poses a threat to public health. Health risks This research was financed by the international NGO Common Seas and the ZonMw programme Microplastics & Health. With this programme, ZonMw intends to gain more insight into the potential health effects of plastic particulates and what can be done to limit possible harmful effects to health. The 15 short-term projects of this programme have now been completed. It has demonstrated that knowledge is still lacking and that further research is required to determine the health risks. In the Netherlands, this follow-up research is being conducted by the MOMENTUM consortium, in which VU Amsterdam is a partner. Research projects that study exposure to and the harmful effects of microplastics are underway in a European context as well. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close US, Philippines hold largest joint military drills in years with different goals By Liu Xuanzun (Global Times) 09:12, March 29, 2022 Filipino soldiers participate in the Amphibious Landing training as part of the 2018 Balikatan Exercises between the Philippines and the United States in Zambales Province, the Philippines, on May 9, 2018.(Xinhua/Rouelle Umali) The US and the Philippines kicked off one of their largest joint exercises in years on Monday in a region where US media hyped them as facing Taiwan and the South China Sea, but experts pointed out that the Philippines will not become a pawn of the US after seeing what the US has done in Ukraine and Afghanistan. Codenamed Balikatan 2022, the annual joint military drills include 3,800 Filipino and 5,100 US military personnel, making it the largest iteration of the Philippines-US joint drills since 2015, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Balikatan 2022 will be conducted across the main Luzon island from Monday to April 8, Xinhua reported, noting that the drills will focus on "maritime security, amphibious operations, live-fire training, urban operations, aviation operations, counterterrorism, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief." US media reports, including one by the AP on Monday, hyped that the drills will be a showcase of US firepower in the northern Philippines near the sea border with the island of Taiwan and also facing the South China Sea. "China will likely frown on the war drills, given their relative proximity to Taiwan," the AP claimed. However, the AP report also quoted Philippine military spokesperson Colonel Ramon Zagala as saying that the exercise is "for mutual defense, never for offense," and that "most of the military maneuvers have been planned a year ago and did not consider the recurring tensions in the Taiwan Straits." Cagayan Governor Manuel Mamba told the AP that "We have to engage China, but not in a war, because I know Taiwan is a powder keg." Cagayan is where amphibious landings with limited live-fire maneuvers are scheduled to be held this week. Some Philippine politicians also expressed concerns that the exercise might threaten regional security, Xinhua reported, quoting presidential candidate and labor leader Ka Leody de Guzman as saying that the Philippines should pursue an independent foreign policy, stressing that the country should not be a "pawn." By holding the drills, the US is trying to fan the flames and stir up troubles in the Asia-Pacific and benefit from it, just like it has done with the Ukraine crisis, Zhang Junshe, a senior research fellow at the Naval Research Academy of the People's Liberation Army, told the Global Times on Monday. From a geopolitical point of view, the US is aiming to deter China by rallying more allies and partners, and from an economic point of view, the US wants to sell weapons and equipment to the region, Zhang said. But judging from the remarks made by the Philippine side, the Southeast Asian country is not going to become a strategic pawn of the US after seeing what the US has done recently in Ukraine and Afghanistan, Zhang said, noting that the Philippines wants to enhance its troops' capabilities but not for offensive purposes. Ding Duo, a deputy director of the Research Center for Oceans Law and Policy at China's National Institute for South China Sea Studies, warned that despite the ongoing Ukraine crisis, the US is still hyping the situation in the South China Sea, which is a reflection that the US has set its eyes firmly on the Indo-Pacific region. The US could be seeking a proxy in the region to lead from the front in confronting China, just like what it has done with Ukraine, Ding warned. China must stay on high alert over US' tactic that could destabilize the region, although countries within the region should see US' intent clearly, the experts said. The foreign ministers of Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Myanmar and Panama will visit China from Thursday to April 4, according to a Monday statement by Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson at China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun) The Tejas light combat aircraft has stiff competition from Chinese and South Korean defense firms hoping to get a deal from the United Arab Emirates, which is shopping for armaments for its arsenal. Products involved are a missile system and aircraft that are not getting as many sales as expected. The BrahMos cruise missiles were recently sold to the Philippines, but LCA has not gotten a bit that much compared to sales of competing defense firms. India Increase Exports of Light Combat Aircraft The Indian defense ministry gave 954 export authorizations cited the Hindustan Times defense products in 2021, compared to 829 in 2020. Teja LCA and BrahMos cruise missiles are listed as their two main products for Indian export. To boost the sale of arms to partner nations, the sale of Akash weapons systems to friendly foreign countries is approved by the Union Cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in December 2020, states UP Exam Paper. It also set up a high-powered council to expedite the licensing of military equipment exports. Delhi has set a goal of achieving $5 billion in military exports by 2024. However, the UAE's track record could undermine that goal, reported the EurAsian Times. According to retired Squadron Leader Vijainder K Thakur, a military analyst, and former IAF Jaguar pilot; he remarked that South Korea's Cheongung II missile system over India's Akash missile system was chosen due to performance. Read Also: Joe Biden Threatens Brexit Trade Deal Over Article 16 Despite Special Relationship With Great Britain Almaz-Antey and Fakel provide expert support for developing the Cheongung II system. The 9M96 missile, used with Russia's S-350E and S-400 missile systems, is the system's core. The Akash missile is not equivalent to the 9M96. The Korean TA-50 Likewise, the TA-50, designed by Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) in cooperation with Lockheed Martin, is a more versatile aircraft than the LCA. It's powered by the same GE F404 powerplant that drives the LCA. It was built from its inception to be a high-performance trainer. However, unlike LCA, which was intended to be an F-16 fighter is now only offered as a Lead In-Flight Trainer (LIFT) due to performance constraints. A defense expert Nitin J Ticku made the distinction between the LCA and TA-50 for clarity. He added trainer aircraft varies from Light Warfare Aircraft in that it is not designed for combat but could be outfitted with enough firepower to carry out basic missions only. It lacks an advanced engine and the combat range required for combat. The UAE appears to be primarily focused on Advanced trainers, as shown by its L-15 deal with China and its purchase of the South Korean trainer. Why the LCA? However, the L-15 and T-50, designed to train fighter pilots for sophisticated planes, India's Tejas is intended for combat. If the UAE needed a light fighter, the Tejas is the right fit as in the case of Malaysia, mentioned Cable Free TV. Ironically, India has to use ATJ Hawks for training, not its Tejas, and develop capable fighter jets like China or South Korea later. This explanation rules out a snub but for want of specific aircraft. Tejas Light Combat Aircraft is best for combat training experience fighter pilots and offers a cheaper option to expensive products from the USA and other defense firms. Related Article: MQ-28A Ghost Bat: Australia's Loyal Wingman Drone Concept UAV for 21st Century Combat @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Several days after the dinner party, I was still thinking about the perfect disk of salami Id wanted to eatand didnt. As I write this, several days later, it is still Lent, and I am still craving the meat Ive sworn off these 40 days. When Ash Wednesday arrived a couple of weeks ago, I was in the mood for renunciation. Relinquishing seemed a good and right thing. Time, however, threshed my willpower from spiritual endurance. Never has the book of Numbersprovidentially scheduled in my Bible reading plan for the Lenten seasonspoken with such force: If only we had meat to eat! (Num. 11:4). Lenten fasting is hard, though not for all the reasons Ive expected. Its not just my immoderate appetite for food that has been checked these 40 days, even if I persist in pining for that slice of salami. Perhaps even more importantly, whats been exposed is my disordered relationship with time. I want the quick fix of transformation. I do not want the slow burn of 40 days of prayer and persistence and reliance on grace. In his book Fasting, Scot McKnight reminds us that fasting is not instrumental. It is not a season of giving up food in order to get blessing from God. There are many reasons Christians throughout the centuries have committed to the practice of fasting. Augustine saw the benefit of denying ourselves licit pleasures in order to grow our capacity for denying illicit ones. In the Middle Ages, Gregory the Great believed fasting could check our patterns of eating too daintily, too sumptuously, too hastily, too greedily, too much. Even more-contemporary Christian thinkers, like the late Dallas Willard, have emphasized the connection between our embodied experience and our desires for spiritual renovation. We live from our bodies, Willard wrote. According to McKnight, fasting is one of seven ancient practices Christians have inherited from Judaism. Fixed-hour prayer, Sabbath, following a liturgical calendar, and pilgrimage are practices that govern how we live in time, writes McKnight. The other three practices fasting, tithing, and the Eucharistinform how we live in our bodies and in space. My own Lenten fasting has given me pause, however, to consider that this practice (and all the others McKnight mentions) confronts not just how I live in my body but also how my body moves through time. Rebecca DeYoung, author of Glittering Vices, noticed something similar when her Lenten fasting reduced her productivity: Lord, I gave you my eating. I did not give you control of my schedule and all my plans for what needs to get done. The inefficiency of a Lenten fast might be one of its greatest benefits. In 21st-century America, a society ruled by the clocks iron fist, timekeeping is inevitably at the heart of the discipleship project. Whose time will we tell? Fasting reminds me that I live the time of the kingdom, a time measured by the slow rising of yeast, the slow growing of trees. To read the Bible as a record of Gods timekeeping is to notice God will not be hurried. Productivity thinking has become the primary framework for analyzing the organization of time today in the United States. A good day is the day you get things done, the day you reach the end of your to-do list. Time, in this economical mode, is always money. It must be managed and multiplied, invested and well spent. Frighteningly, time grows ever scarcer. According to German social theorist Hartmut Rosa, time, in a technological world, is moving faster. Though it took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million listeners, it took only 13 years for television to reach 50 million spectators, and only 4 years for the internet to reach 50 million connections. According to Andrew Root, who explored Rosas work in The Congregation in a Secular Age, the now of right now grows shorter and shorter. Today, people sleep less, eat faster, and walk more quickly than previous generations. Article continues below Ive come to wonder if sin, as its manifested today, isnt somehow an expression of time intemperance. We live in fear of time running out, and because of this, we are ill-practiced in habits of waiting. DeYoungs Glittering Vices explores the seven deadly sins and notices how each might be related to time. Ive come to wonder if sin, as its manifested today, isnt somehow an expression of time intemperance. Vainglory, for example, favors shortcuts. Rather than cultivating real virtue, it will settle for image instead. Envy isnt simply begrudging anothers successes; its refusal to developslowly, incrementallyones own vocational capacities. Acedia, or sloth, is a resistance to loves demands, especially the daily diligence required for loving God and loving our neighbor. Avarice hoards not only money but also the time that is money. Wrath short-circuits the long arc of Gods justice; by nature, it is impatient. Gluttony is not only eating too much; it can also be, returning to Gregory the Great, the habit of eating too hastily. And finally, lust seeks to gratify ones pleasures outside the temporal bounds of enduring marital commitment and its lifetime I-do. Seen in this light, Lenten fasting isnt simply about forswearing dessert or coffee or sugar or meat. Its about abandoning the impulse to gain spiritual good in record time. Its about noticing how briefly a spiritual mood can last, then falling back to the adagio beat of Gods grace. Its about growing the virtue of endurance, which Gods people have always needed to keep the steady practice of hope in a broken and splintering world. As the writer of Hebrews reminds his readers, You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. For, In just a little while, he who is coming one will come and will not delay (Heb. 10:3637). Lenten fasting is a practice for inhabiting a consecrated season that tells a different kind of story about time. Christians rehearse a finished and also future work: Jesus Christ has absorbed the debts of sin, including all that I, as a limited human being, will inevitably leave undone. He is coming again to put the world to rights. During Lent, I remember I dont have to run to earn my existential real estate. Whatever God has for me to do and to become, hurry cant be involved. According to Psalm 1, those who belong to God grow from seed to sapling to shady oak. Their discipleship is daily: They meditate on Gods law day and night (v. 2). As it turns out, the deeply rooted life isnt even a 40-day project. Its the business of a lifetime. Jen Pollock Michel is a writer, podcast host, and speaker based in Toronto. Shes the author of four books and is working on a fifth: In Good Time: 8 Habits for Reimagining Productivity, Resisting Hurry, and Practicing Peace (Baker Books, 2022). As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. So begins Franz Kafkas The Metamorphosis, in which Samsa is reviled for his transformation into a mammoth cockroach. His family hides him away until he dies. Then they go on with their lives, thankful to not deal with that problem anymore. What do we do with this absurdist 20th-century story? Its a tale that compels readers to question our own metamorphoses or changes. Over the course of our lives, we all change and grow, so how do these developments (or, in the case of Samsa, mutations) affect those around us? After all, we do not belong to ourselves. We cannot become beasts or angels without it hurting or helping our families, friends, and neighbors. If youre Meilin Lee in Turning Red, however, such wisdom of age-old philosophy is seemingly disregarded. Philosophy is about the love of wisdom, and our culture is training us to either desire or disdain wisdom. Every world religion has a different conceptualization of wisdom, but for Christians, Wisdom is Jesus Christ. When watching Disney films, I dont expect the animation to move my family toward that highest end (although I was surprised by Encanto), but I do hope their movies dont persuade my children against the grain of conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, Turning Red is a film that departs from that wisdom and embraces a messy philosophy. I had high hopes for the movie, and I watched it with my children on the day it was released. I could not wait to see a contemporary Asian hero and the foregrounding of the mother-daughter relationship. (I enjoyed Brave, and I consider it a win when Disney doesnt kill off the parents of the heroes.) Granted, the movie is not aimed at my children, who are all under eight; parents should aim to watch it with their 10- to 12-year-olds. From the opening monologue of the protagonist, Mei, I could see where the movie was headed: The number one rule in my family? Honor your parents. Of course, some people are like, Be careful. Honoring your parents sounds great, but if you take it too far, well, you might forget to honor yourself. Luckily, I dont have that problem. Ive been doing my own thing. Making my own moves I wear what I want, say what I want, and I will not hesitate to do a spontaneous cartwheel if I feel so moved. The humorous conclusion to this opening narrative can distract the audience from the problematic assumptions it conveys. From this moment forward, audiences realize that Mei is not free to wear, say, or do what she wants because her mother Ming is an overbearing control freak. The audience is then set to cheer Mei on toward freedom from her mother to get her own way and to be able to wear, say, and do whatever she so desires. America has been divided over the past two years during the pandemic between those who proclaim their freedom to wear what they want (i.e., to not wear masks) and those who believe that we should be responsible to our neighbors and wear masks. Yet people are rooting for Mei to have the opportunity to wear whatever she wants. Of course, that is not reality. We all must wear certain things in certain places: You cannot go shirtless on airplanes; you cannot teach public school with low-cut blouses or miniskirts; you cannot dress up as the murderer from Scream and preach from the pulpit. We have all had to learn to place restrictions on our personal autonomy to function well together in society. The impetus for Meis freedom comes from an unexpected source: her inherited ability to transform into a red panda whenever she experiences a strong emotion. From the perspective of the director (Domee Shi, who cowrote the story with Julia Cho), the panda transformation symbolizes coming of age: this experience of growing up, of suddenly waking up one day and realizing you grew a couple of feet, youre covered in body hair, and youre hungry all the time. Article continues below Normally when teenagers begin this process of metamorphosis, the adults in their lives (parents, teachers, etc.) teach them how to control their urges. In the movie, Mei expresses her newfound sexual desires by fantasizing about half-naked boys with mermaid tails. By contrast, in a Christian sexual ethic, we submit our desires to God. Under a self-disciplined will, we wait and look forward to their fulfillment in the proper time and place. Instead, Turning Red portrays the limitation of our urges as a form of oppression, denouncing any attempts to regulate anothers actions. The enemy is the mother, who explains to Mei, Theres a darkness to the panda. You only have one chance to banish it. Otherwise, youll never be free. This beliefthat self-mastery leads to freedomfollows millennia of tradition. Turning Red opts for a different approach. Mei says, Weve all got an inner beast. Weve all got a messy, loud, weird part of ourselves hidden away. And a lot of us never let it out. The goal, the film suggests, is to let out the beast. Yet only Mei exercises the privilege to let out her beast. The film would have fallen apart if her mother Ming were permitted the same freedom to let out her inner beast, which is the size of King Kong and destroys much of the city in one night. Apparently, theres an unknown standard for who gets to release the beast within. The film ends with a call for viewers to do like Mei and free their beasts within. People have all kinds of sides to them. And some sides are messy, Mei reflects. The point isnt to push the bad stuff away. Its to make room for it, live with it. We can pretend that childrens films dont deal with philosophy, but these explicit claims in the film are hard to ignore. While I applaud the realistic admission that we all have inner mess, the encouragement should be toward self-control and social harmony. This film does little more than normalize our #momfail culture. Children repeat what they see and hear. In Frozen, I was grateful when Elsas victorious belting of Let It Go was shown to be disastrous for the community and not a laudable theme song, so I dont grimace every time my kids dance to it. However, I was not happy when Frozen II pretended that the answer to Elsas discomfort in her life was that you are the one youve been waiting for all of your life. You cannot be waiting to meet yourself. The story is much better than that: Youre waiting for the One who made you. When choosing films for our children, as Christians, we need to consider the worldview being broadcast to their imaginations. I expected Turning Red to be about a young girl learning to be a proud Asian teenager growing up in Toronto. Instead, the story shows a preteen discovering the benefits of capitalism, exploitation, and hedonism. When Mei wants to go to a boy band concert against her controlling parents wishes, she disobeys and lies to them, extorts money from her schoolmates, sells her image like a wannabe influencer, and embraces the part of herself that always wanted to twerk. By the movies end, Mei has degraded the ancient practices of her ancestors into a money-making endeavor and transformed her family temple into an irreverent, Disneyesque tourist site. When her mother tries to advise her, she responds, My panda, my choices (a vaguely veiled affirmation of the pro-choice movement slogan My body, my choice). Article continues below Although Meis mother is a caricature of a helicopter mom, her poor parenting should not excuse Meis bad decisions. Nor should Meis choices be seen as though they could occur without negative consequences. If parents want to show Mei as a model because she is an Asian girl hero coming into her own, in spite of her unbiblical projections, they should at least consider the costs and talk about her failings. After watching Turning Red, I discussed with my children the characteristics in her that I considered unworthy of imitation. While none of us is perfect, we should all look to imitate models of people who pursue goodness. When I ask my children, Whom do you want to be like when you grow up? I want the answer to be Jesus. Instead of liberating the messy beast within them, I hope that the films they see, the books they read, and the music they listen to will be pointing toward a higher end. Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas and author of several books, including The Scandal of Holiness. I had been living in Germany for six months and was struggling to learn the language. I did fine with ordering groceries or buying a bus ticket. But I couldnt tell a joke. I couldnt share a story or a hope. I couldnt make a friend. Thinking that a different language school might help, I called a new school in our small university town of Tubingen and immediately spoke with the director. She slowly talked me through directions to the school in German and invited me for the placement test. When I walked in a couple days later, she greeted me by name. She remembered my voice, my accent. In fact, she knew everyones name. She greeted everyone with the same joy that brought immediate trust. It was the first time I heard how beautiful German can be. There was a kindness to it. I knew that if I watched her, I would find a way to sound out joyfulness and gentleness in this new language. I saw in her a version of myselfor at least the version I wanted to be. Effective mentoring is similar to learning a new language: It involves an intentional practice of imitation. Its a relationship that offers a return to listening first, nurturing curiosity, developing new skills, and embracing trial and error until one day you find a version that fits. More than mimicry People often seek out a mentor in a time of transition when they need to develop a new skill or job or are uncertain about their future. The mentor becomes a unique kind of friend who knows the mentees before and afterand often the messy in between. Mentoring is a form of friendship offering us a reminder of who we are while providing continuity with who we are becoming to meet the needs and demands of a new context. In the church, mentoring is crucial to leadership developmentnot just for up-and-coming leaders but also for the ongoing growth and sustainability of those already serving as ministers. For pastors, mentorship is often most effective when it comes from a fellow minister or leader outside of ones own church context. This mentorship can serve as a unique form of discipleship for pastors, asking both participants to begin from a place of generosity. But mentoring in the church can also go seriously wrong. The danger comes when the desire for excellence and the fear of failure lead to mere memorization and mimicry. Take that approach and one may learn some of the language, but he or she will lack the creativity and flexibility needed to ever actually live in it. Better than access to power In the business world and, unfortunately, in some Christian contexts, mentoring looks a lot like an extension of networking. Its a process of finding out what one person can do for another. Your mentor pulls strings for you, advocates for you, and gives you advice. Some church succession plans based on this model of mentorship involve an inheritance of power. Power or influence is conceived as something passed down and handed over. Mentorship is then about control and ambition rather than a friendship that encourages vulnerability, authenticity, and growth. Theres nothing necessarily wrong with that in some workplace contexts, but in the church? This networking approach to mentoring doesnt ask us to look at power any differently. It doesnt ask us to lay our burdens down, pick up our crosses, and follow a Savior who gave himself for us freely. True mentorship can offer something much better than access to power. One of the first uses of the word mentor comes from Homers Odyssey. In the epic, Odysseuss old friend Mentor watches over Odysseuss son Telemachus while he is away. The goddess Athena impersonates this old family friend to give the young Telemachus the courage he needs for his own journey. I often talk about this example with the mentoring cohorts I help organize for ministers and recently graduated seminarians at the seminary where I work. In this example, I explain, we find that a mentor is someone who helps another take his or her first steps in the vocational journey. The mentor helps the mentee find courage. The mentor comes as a friend. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that if mentoring is successful, it will open the way for mutual learning. The two people will be connected in friendship and vulnerability, each able to learn from the other, and in that connection they will be able to imagine a new social reality together. I saw this recently when a senior minister in midcareer said yes to mentoring a new minister who was just starting out in a church across the country. Both mentor and mentee found themselves asking similar questions around worship, preaching, and discipleship during the pandemic. Together, in conversation with each other, they started making changes in their respective churches to adapt to the needs of the moment. The ministers slowed down, tried new things, and allowed trust to lead the way. They shaped each others imagination and in turn saw their congregations through new eyes. Mentoring actually teaches us how to not be in control or grasp at power when life circumstances are asking for change. But learning this takes practice, and according to the apostle Paul, it also requires imitation. Friendship with Paul Its hard for me to imagine my life today without other friends in ministry who have mentored me along the way. For as long as I can remember, Ive had good friends point out truths to me about myself. Friends in ministry can remind us that there is nothing we could ever do to get this call, this work, but that once weve received Gods call, we get to keep participating in a lot of good work. Each of us gets to add our own style, our authentic voice, while also holding continuity with the larger context of our call: the mission of the church. We consistently see this theme of friendship and mutual encouragement among leaders in the Pauline letters. Paul liked people. We often focus on the corrections Paul offered, forgetting that he spent most of his time telling people that God was on their side, regardless of their circumstances. We see this especially in Philippians. The believers in Philippi were close to Paul. They sent him food and resources and prayed and worried about him. In return, Paul writes a letter from prison about joy. Before he gets to thanking them, he writes, Join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us (3:17, ESV). We find this same invitation to imitate Paul and follow his example in other Pauline letters (1 Cor. 4:16; 11:1; 1 Thess. 1:6). This invitation could seem arrogant or narcissistic to us today, especially when we hear versions of it on the lips of celebrity pastors. But Paul was never a good celebrity pastor: His brand was always about not having control. Pauls request to imitate is an invitation to think differently about power and influencehis and ours. Its an invitation to imitate trust and the faithfulness of Jesus. Significant New Testament scholarship in recent decadesincluding works like Paul and First-Century Letter Writing, Paul, the Letter Writer, and Paul the Ancient Letter Writerhas discussed how letters were composed and communicated in an oral culture. While we may tend to think of letter-writing as a solitary act, Paul wrote in community for communities. Its very likely that the letter-writing process involved a practice of imitation in which the letters were delivered as a performance, likely by people who had observed Paul in composition. They learned Pauls mannerisms and tone. They likely mimicked his body language to go along with certain maxims. They imitated him. Scholars Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh help us think about how this practice of imitation could have repeated itself in Christian community in their new commentary Romans Disarmed. They imagine how Roman believers would meet in kitchens, one performing the letter to another, expounding on it and explaining it until, over time, the next person could relay the message. Keesmaat and Walsh say we should see each of these letters as something that was not received once by one particular group but received and then performed again and again with time for questions and further explanation. The text was conveyed in community, modeled in a way that created relationships. Each letter offered Paul as an example to followbut the example breathed. New Testament scholar Elizabeth Shively points out that in Philippians, the word Paul uses for example is the word Greek word typos, which can also mean a seal or a stamp. Jesus Christ is the archetype, she writes, the typos that made an imprint on the life of Paul. This is a certain kind of living that requires a certain mindset: not asserting your own rights, considering the needs of others as more important than your own. What happens when a mentor sees the needs of others as more important than his or her own? If we look at Paul as a model for a Christian mentor, we find someone who was constantly taking off the mask to reveal the true archetype: Jesus Christ. And when others stood up to perform his words, they were imitating Paul imitating Christ. The ability to trust That kind of mentoring relationship among ministers in our churches offers the same kind of transformative power: the ability to trust while not being in control. Thats Christian mentoring. As with Paul, its the power to give up power. Its the ability to step out of our siloed ways of thinking, imprisoned by our thoughts of what we have to lose and what we pretend to control, so that we can write a letter that others can perform. Its Gods good news revealed as our imitating Christ. Maybe some of the mentors mannerisms of joy will still be left over in the imitation. Maybe others will learn, in their own accents, to give simple directions to a place where people can each be greeted by name. Good mentors never settle for the imitation of themselves. Ultimately, a good Christian mentor trusts the mentee to provide, in return, a picture of Christ. I thank my God every time I remember you, Paul tells the Philippians (1:35). In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel. The central element of mentoring is the act of practicing collaboration and trust. This is a trust that produces generosity. With generous minds, we can always imagine the friendship continuing. We can see the limitless journey of the church and hear the new voices of those sounding out a joy that is both familiar and new. Beth Jarvis is the director of the Ministry Resource Center at Milligan University, where she helps ministers connect with each other to thrive in ministry. She is an ordained minister and holds an MDiv from Emmanuel Christian Seminary at Milligan. Church attendance stagnates amid return to in-person services: Pew The percentage of Americans who say they have attended religious services in the last month has leveled off as more churches and houses of worship have lifted various COVID-19 meeting restrictions and safety precautions, according to a Pew Research Center study. Pew released a report last week looking into the percentage of Americans that have returned to in-person worship now that gathering restrictions were being lifted across the country and more churches are again holding in-person worship services. In July 2020, a few months after the pandemic lockdowns began, according to the report, 13% of U.S. adults said they attended religious services in person the previous month. In March 2021, Pew reported that the figure had increased by 4 percentage points to 17%. And in September 2021, the share of adults who said they attended a religious service in the past month rose to 26%. But in March 2022, the share of Americans who attended religious services in person in the previous month was 27% only 1 percentage point higher than the 26% reported last September. Data for the report was drawn from Pews American Trends Panel, which involved a sample of 10,441 panelists interviewed between March 7 and March 13. The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points. The study also found that a higher percentage of adults who say they attend religious services at least monthly say their houses of worship are open for in-person services. In July 2020, just 6% said their houses of worship were open to the public for services the same way as before the COVID-19 outbreak. In March 2022, that figure rose to 43%. In July 2020, 55% of adults who attend religious services at least monthly said their houses of worship were open to the public for services but with changes due to the COVID-19 outbreak. In March 2022, that share dropped to 47%. In March 2022, only 5% of respondents who attend church monthly say their church or house of worship is not open for in-person services. In July 2020, that figure stood at 31%. Sam Rainer, president of Church Answers and pastor at West Bradenton Baptist Church in Florida, told The Christian Post that he believes there are times and there are seasons in the life of the church where a plateau is not a bad place to be. If you are holding your own with attendance right now, if you are stable in attendance, I view that as a victory because its been harder to draw new people in during this season, Rainer said. A lot of churches have lost people to COVID. Many have lost people to death that would have occurred anyway just naturally in the church. As people move on and pass on, you have to replace them with new people. And what that means is if youre stable right now, you do have new people coming in, at least at the rate of those who are no longer able to be at the church. So I would view stability as success right now. The Pew study suggested that the plateau could change depending on life circumstances. Assessing the impact of the pandemic on religious service attendance remains difficult for two main reasons. One is that the ultimate course of the pandemic is still unclear, reads the study. What appears, at this moment, to be a plateau in religious service attendance could be followed by a rise if the pandemic gradually recedes, or by a drop if a new, highly infectious coronavirus variant emerges. Rainer told CP that he agreed with the study about how things could change in the next few years depending on what life brings. However, he said, church attendance might not return to the numbers seen before the pandemic any time in the near future. I believe that at some point, the practices will return to normal when it comes to restrictions, said Rainer. It takes two to three years of behavior change for things to come back to normal. So I would assume that in the next couple of years, we are going to see a return to similar practices as it were before the pandemic at least in terms of restrictions lifting. That being said, things are permanently different. They have changed because of COVID. And I dont see attendance returning to pre-pandemic levels anytime soon, he added. Obviously, if you look further out into the future, its difficult to know. We can see any number of things happen. At least in terms of the next five years, I do not believe that we will return to pre-pandemic attendance levels. The pandemic accelerated and exacerbated existing problems in churches, according to Rainer. He said that whatever issues a church might have had before COVID-19 became more severe during the pandemic. Specifically, Rainer noted, most churches lost those who were considered on the periphery of the church, those who were new to attending church or visitors. Almost every single church is now smaller. Part of the reason is what was left to cultural Christianity is now completely gone, he said. So there is no longer a social benefit culturally to attend church. So with the death of cultural Christianity comes less people attending church who are there just because of some sort of social benefit. Churches struggled to bring in new people or those on the periphery because they were not holding new services and events to invite new people for a good portion of the pandemic, Rainer said. The other thing that the pandemic did was it caused those on the periphery to exit and to exit quickly. Theres always people that are feeding into the church, and there are always people who are fading out of the church, he added. That could be for any number of reasons. They could just be seeking. They could be questioning their faith. They could be new to the church. So when things went on lockdown, those on the periphery faded away. After President Joe Biden caused a worldwide outcry by saying that Putin "cannot remain in power" at a big address in Europe on Saturday, White House officials hurried to undertake damage control. Biden's senior advisers were obliged to subsequently clarify that the US president was not asking for a regime change. During a brief news conference at the White House on Monday, US President Donald Trump defended his remarks. Biden's Remark on Putin Was About "Moral Outrage" During a tense interaction with reporters, he stressed that he was expressing his "personal feelings." "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power," Biden declared in an impassioned speech from Warsaw, only minutes after Russia fired missiles towards Lviv, 40 miles from the Polish border. The remarks were generally considered the latest in a string of gaffes in recent weeks, indicating that US forces would enter Ukraine and that the West would respond "in-kind" if Russia used chemical weapons. Biden's relationship with Western allies has been strained by the remark, which has fueled the Kremlin's argument that Russia is under an "existential" danger. "You interpret the language that way," Biden told a reporter on Monday, appearing to blame the media for the White House's recent explanations. As he works to stop Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Biden said he has not ruled out meeting with Putin again, Telegraph reported. The White House and Biden have sought to minimize the statement on several occasions. Biden, according to the administration and friends, was not advocating for regime change to depose Putin. Instead, they claim that Biden was implying that Putin should not be permitted to wield authority over neighboring countries. Read Also: Macron Says Biden's Remark That Putin Is a Butcher Makes it Harder To End the Ukraine Conflict Officials Criticize Biden's Speech The unexpected remark regarding Putin caught the staffers guard who was watching Biden's remarks on TV or at the event site off guard. And the phrases weren't anything Biden had mentioned as possible inclusion in his speech before - US officials had previously stated that replacing the leadership in Moscow was not one of their goals. Biden warned NATO leaders in closed-door meetings earlier this week that he did not want to exacerbate the West's battle with Russia. People who talked with Biden before and after the speech reported him as emotionally moved after speaking with refugees at Warsaw's national stadium, where ladies implored him to pray for the men who had stayed behind to fight - husbands, sons, and brothers. When asked by reporters accompanying the president what witnessing the migrants made him think of Putin daily, Biden replied, "He's a butcher." Officials alerted the President Biden of a series of missile attacks on fuel storage in Lviv, Ukraine, a western city not far from the Polish border, just before the address. Biden was in Warsaw at the time, so the timing was hardly a coincidence, as per CNN. Biden's statement has been criticized by officials both inside and outside Russia. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov tells Reuters that whether Putin stays in power is not for Biden to decide. The president of Russia is elected by Russians. Russian lawmaker Vyacheslav Volodin called Biden "weak, sick, and unhappy." Biden's remarks alarmed French President Emmanuel Macron, who warned against a rhetorical "escalation" of relations between Russia and Western nations. Others, however, slammed the White House statement, saying that leaders should not back down from their calls for Putin's ouster in the wake of allegations of Russian military firing on people in Ukraine. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said only last week that the US administration believes Russian soldiers in Ukraine have committed war crimes. In a social media post, Garry Kasparov, a Russian chess grandmaster and head of the Human Rights Foundation, voiced his unhappiness with the White House's statements, according to Newsweek via MSN. Related Article: Russia-Ukraine War: NATO Exec Warns Chemical Weapons Would "Change the Nature of the Conflict" @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Denzel Washington warns Will Smith about the devil after Chris Rock Oscar slap Actor Will Smith made headlines Sunday after slapping comedian Chris Rock across the face at the Academy Awards and apologizing for the physical altercation during his Oscar acceptance speech for best actor. Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, suffers from alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes bald patches on the scalp. It can affect both men and women of all races. During one of his comedy skits, Rock took aim at Jada and her condition. At first, Will Smith appeared to laugh at the joke, but Jada was visibly uncomfortable with it. Her husband then took action by walking up to Rock and slapping him across the face. Smith was awarded his first Oscar for his lead performance in the movie King Richard," where he played Venus and Serena Williams father, Richard. His speech, however, wasn't as celebratory as he might have envisioned because he spent much of his time explaining why he slapped Rock. Midway through his speech, Smith revealed that Denzel Washington, himself an Academy Award-winning actor, warned him about the devil's attacks. Denzel said to me a few minutes ago, at your highest moment, be careful, thats when the devil comes for you, Smith recalled. During an intermission that followed the slap, Tyler Perry and Washington were seen comforting and giving advice to Smith. Although he didn't apologize to Rock during his speech, Smith apologized to the Academy and his fellow nominees. Love makes you do crazy things, Smith said during his acceptance speech. The father of three compared himself to Richard Williams and how William fiercely defended his family. Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family. In this time in my life, in this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world, Smith said with tears streaming down his face. Im being called on in my life to love people and to protect people. And to be a river to my people. And I know to do what we do, youve got to be able to take abuse, and youve got be able to have people talk crazy about you. In this business, youve got to be able to have people disrespecting you and youve got to smile and pretend like thats OK, he continued. In a previous interview with author, producer and preacher DeVon Franklin, Smith was asked if he is a man of faith like his character, Williams. You cant get where I get if you dont love the Lord. You dont get to sit how I sit, move how I move, if you dont love the Lord," Smith replied. "Youd be seeing a whole lot of other repercussions. The actor said he connects with the faith of the Williams family because of his grandmother, who attended Resurrection Baptist Church in Philadelphia. Much like his advice to Smith, Washington has been using his public platform to share the prominence of spiritual warfare in everyday life. Washington, who described himself as a God-fearing man" in an earlier interview with The New York Times, talked about God, the Bible and Heaven. He also revealed that he made a promise to his late mother to honor her and God. This is spiritual warfare. So, Im not looking at it from an earthly perspective. If you dont have a spiritual anchor youll be easily blown by the wind and youll be led to depression, he told the NY Times. Were living in a time where people are willing to do anything to get followed. What is the long or short-term effect of too much information? Its going fast and it can be manipulated obviously in a myriad of ways. And people are led like sheep to slaughter, Washington said. The entertainer then shared his view of Heaven, explaining that there are going to be two lines, the long line and the short line, and Im interested in being in the short line. Hillsong Phoenix pastor announces separation from Hillsong Church, calls for investigation of board Hillsong Phoenix Lead Pastor Terry Crist has called for an investigation of the global board of the Australia-based Hillsong Church after announcing Sunday that he has formally asked to separate from the megachurch network due to a governance dispute in the wake of the resignation of founder Brian Houston. There are many reasons why we cant continue chief among them is our loss of confidence in the global board to continue leading us as a congregation, Crist told congregants during a service in Phoenix. Crist said that when his church decided to become a part of Hillsong Church in 2016 after being a Hillsong network church for several years before that, it was agreed that he and his wife Judith would stay in Phoenix and have the option to re-evaluate the terms of their relationship with Hillsong Church in the event that Brian Houston was no longer leading the denomination. Houston, who co-founded Hillsong in 1983, resigned last Wednesday after it was revealed that two women made serious complaints of misconduct against him in the last 10 years. His resignation also followed a series of misconduct scandals involving other Hillsong Church leaders in the U.S. and Australia. Last Friday, The Christian Post also reported how less than two weeks after Reed Bogard abruptly resigned as lead pastor of the now-defunct Hillsong Dallas in January 2021, an internal investigation commissioned by Hillsong Global showed that the married father of three was accused of rape by a junior female staffer with whom he had a monthslong affair while serving at Hillsong NYC years earlier. Crist said that even though he has much respect for the work of Hillsong Churchs Interim Global Senior Pastor Phil Dooley, he has wrestled with the global board over several issues in recent years, such as the need for transparency and accountability. In recent weeks, Crist said, he reached an impasse with the board over governance issues. Over the past year, following the sin that was exposed at Hillsong Church New York City and the subsequent investigation that was conducted into sexual misconduct and into financial misappropriation, I encouraged the results of that report [conducted by the church] to be made [public] in some general form, he said. I asked that the report be redacted so names could be protected. I asked that the report be synopsized so we could embrace accountability and transparency. And for whatever reason, that request was denied. Crist contends that as more information about misconduct in the church began emerging publicly, Hillsong Church took steps to protect the churchs brand. As information began to leak out as to what was in the report, and as the global board made the decision to increase financial controls within the churches, lead pastors were suddenly asked to sign NDAs and non-competes. Some of us couldnt do that in good conscience, Crist said. This had played out in recent weeks. It came down in recent weeks to the demand that we sign non-disclosure agreements and non-competes, meaning that if we were removed from our positions, we could not plant churches again within our community for at least one year, the Phoenix pastor continued. After failing to come to terms with Hillsong Church to reseat their local board, Crist said they formally asked that their church be released back to us last Saturday. Specifically, that simply meant the release of our church to be governed by a local board and also to include a couple of non-Hillsong pastors who are wise and credible and have proven ministries to also be seated on our local board for the sake of accountability by non-vested pastors who have nothing to lose by speaking truth to power, he said. I was told this week, it is all or nothing. We either had to allow the global church to govern our church and to own our properties, or we had to leave. And so with great sadness, I chose to leave, Crist added. I am heartbroken. The pastor said he is also heartbroken for everyone victimized during their time at Hillsong Church. He called for an investigation of the global board and the punishment of members who have done more to protect the institution over the people. Its in the best interest of Hillsong Church to conduct an investigation as it relates to board conduct, to immediately restore the Sydney eldership, to make the findings of that public and to dismiss the board members who have protected the institution and not the people, he said. I am a global apostolic leader, and I am not going to shrink back from that mandate on my life to lead not just our church but the Church in general in our generation. We have to get it right, he added. There is so much riding on the Church of Jesus Christ in getting it right. When secular corporations are more transparent than the church, and when secular boards hold their employees and directors to a higher standard of accountability, we have failed the injunction that judgment must begin at the house of God so that the people of God [can] stand as a prophetic kingdom witness to the nations of the earth. Crist said somewhere along the line in his relationship with Hillsong Church, he departed from his long-held practice of being transparent as the church grew. He repented for the times he also put the protection of the Hillsong Church brand above the well-being of people. I repent for my own ambition to do something great for God at the expense of people who are the mission. Not easy to be a pastor and to be an employer. Not easy to care for people and require work performance. And Ive gotten it wrong at times. And I repent for that, he said. Im committed as a leader to do a lot of soul work in this season. Im committed as a leader to looking back over the past decade and asking God, counselors and pastors in my life to help me become what God expects of me as a leader in the church, he added. My heart is broken for everyone who has left our church, for everyone who has walked away from our staff for various reasons. California prosecutors fabricated case against megachurch preacher accused of sex crimes: defense Weeks before his trial begins in May, the defense team of controversial megachurch leader Naason Joaquin Garcia, who is accused of multiple sex crimes, including making sex videos with minor girls from his flock at La Luz Del Mundo, has accused prosecutors in California of fabricating evidence in his case. In a 211-page motion filed on March 15, defense attorney Alan Jackson and his team argue that the case brought against Garcia by the California Attorney Generals Office alleging in part that he groomed and raped teenage girls from his congregation is based on fabricated evidence. We are shocked by the facts in the recent motion filed by defense attorney Alan Jackson on March 15 in the case regarding the Apostle of Jesus Christ Naason Joaquin Garcia, the church said in a statement to The Christian Post Tuesday. The motion states that the California Attorney Generals Office fabricated incriminating evidence, created reports based on that fabricated false evidence, and deleted and concealed exculpatory evidence. The 52-year-old megachurch leader, whose followers consider an apostle of Jesus Christ, was arrested in the summer of 2019 at the Los Angeles International Airport. Garcia and several co-defendants, who were tried separately, were charged with human trafficking, production of child pornography, forcible rape of a minor and other felonies committed between 2015 and 2019. A group of girls was allegedly told that if they went against Garcias desires, they were going against God, according to the criminal complaint. Children were allegedly told to perform flirty dances for Garcia while wearing as little clothing as possible. Garcia also allegedly once gave a group of children a speech about a king having mistresses and stated that an apostle of God can never be judged for his actions, the complaint adds. State law enforcement officer and forensic examiner Steven Stover testified in 2019 about a video found on an iPad seized from Garcia, which allegedly shows the church leader having a threesome with a woman and an underage male. Stover also testified that he found child pornography on an iPhone taken from Garcia. One video found on the phone shows females of a very young age performing sexual acts. More than 70,000 texts messages reviewed by the defense as a part of the defenses latest motion. The defense claims some of Garcias accusers, called Jane Does, were sexually active, angst-filled teenagers who lied, shoplifted, used drugs, drank alcohol, struggled with mental health issues and discussed having sex with the church leader for money. In one instance, Jane Doe 2, with the help of a friend identified as Jane Doe 3, fabricated a story for her boyfriend so he wouldnt break up with her over allegations she was having sex with her brother. The motion also claims that California Department of Justice Special Agent Joseph Cedusky selectively used information from the thousands of text messages to further the criminal narrative against Garcia while the prosecution actively delayed access to the entire cache of text messages to the defense. The magnitude of the governments misconduct was so vast that it cannot easily be quantified, and the cascading effect of consequences from these actions is immense, Jackson and his team wrote. These include, inter alia, Mr. Garcia being forced to sit through a mockery of a preliminary hearing based entirely on lies and fiction created from whole cloth in the minds of investigators and prosecutors. Garcia has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him and is facing a $50 million bail, believed to be the highest ever imposed in L.A. County. The pastors lawyers have long argued the pastor is 100% innocent. Mr. Garcia remained detained in pre-trial custody on an astronomical bail order based entirely on fictional facts and a false narrative cobbled together from disparate pieces of evidence manufactured to appear inculpatory, and presented as truth while they knew that the presented evidence was false and while a mountain of exculpatory evidence was actively buried, the defense team argued. Simply put, this conduct is inexcusable and has no place in our system of justice. At the most fundamental level, Mr. Garcias due process rights have been trampled and crushed beneath the boot of a prosecution hell-bent on winning a conviction no matter the cost, the motion added. The only remedy in the face of this extreme and shocking conduct is for this Court to dismiss the information. In its statement Tuesday, La Luz Del Mundo officials said they are praying for justice for their leader. We continue to pray for and trust in the judicial system of the United States, knowing that it guarantees the constitutional rights of all individuals, including the guarantee of due process, the church said. These basic rights have not been granted to the Apostle Naason Joaquin Garcia. As of today, the Apostle has been detained for almost three years without attainable bail. Pro-abortion states are moving to codify a 'right' to abortion With the Supreme Courts decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization quickly approaching, legislators in pro-abortion states are bracing themselves for the possibility that Roe v. Wades reign over state abortion laws might finally come to an end, returning to the states the ability to regulate abortion as they see fit and more fully protect unborn life. Not surprisingly, it is the states with the most pro-abortion laws that are leading the effort to enshrine abortion rights language in their state codes or constitutions. Colorado is swiftly moving HB22-1279, the Reproductive Health Equity Act (RHEA), through the legislature, which would not only insert a fundamental right to abortion in state statute, but also explicitly deny unborn children any rights under the state (this includes all unborn children, regardless of gestational age). Maryland (HB 1171) and Vermont (PR 5) are attempting to enshrine a right to abortion in their state constitutions, ensuring that, through future changes in the legislature and governorship, this right will remain in the constitution and be difficult to remove. If either of these states are successful, they will become the first to secure a right to abortion in their state constitution. If Marylands bill passes the Senate, it will go before voters in the states November 2022 election. After passing the legislature in February, Vermonts Proposition 5 is already set to be on the ballot this November. Additionally, pro-abortion activists in the state of Michigan have launched the Michigan Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative as an effort to get a constitutional amendment ensuring a right to abortion on voters ballots this November. Similar to the language of Marylands proposed amendment, it establishes a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which shall not be denied, burdened, or infringed unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means. This amendment would supersede a pre-Roe abortion ban, enacted in 1931, which has been unenforceable due to Roe. In order to get on the ballot, this measure needs to gain 425,059 signatures (equal to 10% of votes cast for governor in the last gubernatorial election). It remains to be seen whether this measure will be on the ballot this year for Michigan voters. These laws stand to be alarmingly far-reaching, invalidating what few pro-life laws these states have and cementing their current practice of actively funding abortion. Colorado, Maryland, and Vermonts amendments would guarantee abortion through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason, going far beyond Roes precedent of guaranteeing abortion to the point of viability (Michigans amendment allows abortion up to the point of viability). Each one of these laws would not only allow but defend abortions sought solely due to the race, sex, or disability of the unborn child. In Colorado, some legislators and constituents are cautioning that the RHEA, as currently written, would prevent the state from enforcing its parental notification law for minors seeking abortions. Maryland Right to Life has pointed out that the states proposed constitutional amendment would force physicians to carry out abortions against their consciences and religious convictions. After all, if something is a fundamental right, can it rightly be denied without the government stepping in to intervene? Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, and Vermont are each seeking to become abortion destinations in the aftermath of Roe, where women from pro-life states can travel and abortionists can kill their unborn children. As troubling as this is, thankfully, even more states are poised to do just the opposite. Twenty-two states have laws (whether enacted before Roe and never repealed or designed to go into effect in the event Roe is overturned) to protect the unborn at conception or at the point his or her heartbeat can be detected (usually around 6-8 weeks), and others are currently moving to enact legislation to protect more unborn babies. Let these states stand out as a contrast to the states working so hard to maintain their cultures of death. The battle surely rages on, but there is hope in the midst of the darkness. If you are a pro-lifer living in one of these pro-abortion states, please be encouraged. In Psalm 4:12, David reminds himself of Gods justice and care for the helpless, saying, I know that the Lord will maintain the cause of the afflicted, and will execute justice for the needy. If you live in Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, or Vermont, contact your legislators voicing your opposition and vote NO if one of these measures is on your ballot this November. Your voice matters! For Marylanders, click here to send a message to your state Senators, telling them to oppose HB 1171! For Coloradans, click here to send a message to your state Senator, telling them to oppose HB22-1279! Originally published at the Family Research Council. Responding to the charge that the Constitution is 'trash' These days all kinds of ridiculous things are said against America, the Pledge of Allegiance, the flag, and our history. Now, one leftist reporter calls the Constitution trash. It should be thrown away and replaced with something more inclusive. Elie Mystal who is the Justice correspondent for The Nation, said on The View recently, The Constitution is kind of trash. This was not a momentary aberration. On another outlet, a reporter asked him, [A]re you arguing that the Constitution needs to be scrapped altogether? He replied: Sure But, I dont think thats going to happen. Like, if we could throw that out and start over with a new document that was more inclusive of everybody, that was written by everybody at no point have black people, brown people or women had a say in actually writing the Constitution or the amendments to that Constitution if we could throw that out and have a delegation of all Americans to write a new one, I would be all for that. Mystal also tweeted that he was proud to trigger white wing media this morning by noting that their slavers organizing document is trash. How is it that the most durable government document in history, producing the most freedom for the most people the world has ever seen, trash? Millions of would-be refugees would love to come here to live in America, while many of our citizens exemplify what I have called, The Era of the Ungrateful American. Yet what sacrifices the founders made for us, for their posteritys sake. In the Declaration of Independence, upon which the Constitution is predicated, the founders declared their pledge, with the help of God, to commit our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor for the American cause. I once interviewed the late Dr. Walter Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University and syndicated columnist, on Americas spiritual roots. He told me, The United States Constitution has been very valuable just considering the evidence. Number one, we still have the Constitution, although, its not obeyed all the time. But the Constitution has led to the richest and the most powerful nation on the face of this earth and the greatest amount of personal liberty that people enjoy. That is why people try to get to the United States. People want to live in the United States. They want to become American citizens, and the reason why is the liberty that we have. Williams added: Slavery has been mankinds standard fare throughout his entire history. Even the word, slave, in most languages is slav; that is because the Slavic people were among the first to be enslaved. And Africans were among the last to be enslaved. And the great thing about the Western world is that we spent many resources on eliminating slavery. Mystal claimed that the Constitution excludes him because hes black. Williams, also African-American, did not agree with that. Of course, tragically, the promise of the Constitution was initially denied to blacks, and it is a blot on our nations history. But it was in those founding documents where the seeds of freedom for all were sown, as acknowledged by Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who called America to honor the promises made in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Many of those who even risk their lives to come to America today include people of color. Why has the Constitution proved so durable? Because it is based on a biblical worldview. For example, the Bible recognizes that man is sinful. Therefore, we need government to protect us from other sinners but since sinners run the government, we need to be protected from the government as well. That is a summary of James Madisons Federalist 51. This is why the Constitution so meticulously works to separate powers from one branch from another. The abuse of power was the great concern. My whole point is to not give up on the US Constitution. It recognizes man's true nature which is sinful and harnesses and limits that nature to maximize freedom. All the experiments in humanistic governments have proved to be disastrous for everyone. From the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany, from Castro's Cuba to Chavez's (and Maduro's) Venezuela. And on it goes. The founders were not all slavers, as Mystal ignorantly declares, as he ignores such anti-slavery giants as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Ben Franklin (president of a key anti-slavery society). And the founders built the means by which slavery could one day be ended. Every day, many on the left want to jettison some of what is best in America, in this case even the Constitution. They dont want to admit that they benefit from the freedoms derived from that document even the freedom to denounce it as trash. AME Church will no longer allow one person to count the money after nearly $100M goes missing Rev. Cedric V. Alexander, a retired pastor with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Inc., has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the denomination lost some 70% or nearly $100 million from its retirement plan through "foolish" and risky investments, which have hurt about 5,000 participants financially. The 49-page federal complaint was filed Tuesday in Maryland, where Alexander resides. The document alleges that Jerome V. Harris, the former executive director of the denomination's Department of Retirement Services, was "given sole authority to invest tens of millions of AMEC clergy's and other Church servants' retirement savings in a questionable and potentially unlawful purchase of undeveloped land in Florida, a promissory note to an Illinois installer of solar panels, and an even more foolish investment in a now non-existent capital venture outfit." And while all of this was happening, church officials kept reporting to the plan's beneficiaries that their retirement funds were safely flourishing as investments in annuities from Symetra Financial. "This suit is about a complete and total abrogation of these fiduciary responsibilities by Defendants, resulting in numerous breaches of duty and resulting in a single, unmonitored individual, Defendant Harris, controlling all Plan assets and investments," the complaint says. The Christian Post reached out to the AME Church for comment on the complaint. No one was immediately available. Alexander, who retired in September 2020 after more than two decades of service in the historically black church denomination, said from Jan. 1, 2021, through March 31, 2021, his retirement account showed a balance of $86,631.75. On Sept. 13, 2021, he requested a rollover of his funds from the church's plan to an individual retirement account. He was informed in October 2021 by Rev. James Miller, the newly elected executive director of the denomination's Department of Retirement Services, that his request could not be accommodated due to a pending audit and the church's retirement funds being frozen. Miller followed up with a letter in November telling participants in the retirement plan that the audit was taking longer than expected. On Dec. 14, 2021, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the denomination was investigating "possible financial irregularities" with its retirement fund investments. Everything came to head during a meeting of the denomination's general board on Jan. 31 when participants in the church's retirement plan were told that "more than $90 million of [the denomination's] $126.8 million [retirement fund] was missing, and no one connected with the Church, except its former Department of Retirement Services Executive Director, Defendant Harris, knew where the money and other plan related records went." "Those attending the January 31st meeting were told that despite repeated representations to Plan participants over the last two decades, the Plan's assets were not all invested in annuities provided by Symetra," the complaint notes. "Instead, the Council of Bishops, General Board, Department of Retirement Services, the chair of the Department, Bishop Green and the Trustees allowed a single individual, Defendant Harris, to exercise full decision making authority over the use of all Plan assets. Rev. Miller, Defendant Harris's replacement as Executive Director of the Department of Retirement Services, put it this way: 'never again will we allow one person to count the money,' essentially conceding that the Plan's other fiduciaries previously had completely abdicated their duties owed to the Plan and the Plan's participants, including Plaintiff Alexander and the other members of the Class." Others listed as defendants include Bishop Samuel L. Green, Sr., the Trustees of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Ministerial Retirement Annuity Plan, the African Methodist Episcopal Church Ministerial Retirement Annuity Plan, the Department of Retirement Services, the General Board of the AME Church, the Council of Bishops of the AME Church and John and Jane Does 1 through 20. According to the complaint, the governing documents of the AME Church's retirement plan stipulate that it is governed by the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, which requires that management and investment decisions should be made solely in the interest of the participants. However, the legal filing claims Harris did not follow that guidance. An investigation revealed that Harris invested tens of millions of dollars "in high-risk, speculative and demonstratively imprudent investments in Motorskill Ventures Group (a now defunct venture capital outfit)." Investments were made in "Motorskill Ventures," "Motorskill Asia Ventures," and a separate investment in Financial Freedom Fund, LLC, which invested in additional Motorskill Ventures Group investments called "Motorskill Ventures 1" and "Motorskill Asia Ventures 1." Last June, the AME Church's investigative committee was informed by Motorskill Ventures Group "that these investments are worthless, the funds in which the Plan invested were terminated by Motorskill, and that the Plan will recover nothing from its investments." According to the complaint, the investigative committee could only verify $36.9 million of the church's retirement fund invested with Symetra. Another $1 million of value was identified in investment in another "speculative, high-risk investment in undeveloped real estate located in Key Marco Island, Florida." "Defendant Harris initially invested $1.5 million of the Plan's assets in the undeveloped land, reflecting a loss of $500,000 and providing merit to the pejorative phrase 'Florida land deal,'" the complaint noted. Harris is also accused of investing in Financial Freedom Fund, LLC, described as a manager of a private Real Estate Investment Trust that provides loans for commercial and residential construction. Money from the retirement funds was also used to provide a promissory note to an Illinois installer of solar panels called Day and Night Solar. "Upon information and belief, Defendant Harris would not have secretly moved tens of millions of dollars in Plan asset's out of Symetra annuity investments and invested them in a risky or fraudulent venture capital company Motorskill Ventures Group, Financial Freedom Fund, LLC, or invested an additional $1.5 million in a Florida land deal if he did not stand to benefit in some way," the complaint argues. It was also claimed that at the Jan. 31 meeting, the office of the executive director of the AME's Department of Retirement Services "had been emptied, with nothing in the office cabinets but 'empty files and paperclips.' Even the most current version of the Plan document could not be located." As a result of the situation, Alexander has not received any of his retirement benefits since 2020. "As of the date of the filing of this Complaint, Plaintiff has not received any of his retirement benefits, despite being retired, without much income, for well over a year. All other members of the Class similarly have had their pension payments halted and/or have been informed that they have only one-third of the amount or less in their individual retirement accounts than they had previously been told," the complaint says. Alexander's retirement account total has been reduced from $86,631.75 to $26,025.29, since the investigation, the complaint states. Other participants in the fund, says the complaint, have also seen a 70% reduction in the value of their retirement accounts. The denomination announced that the Department of Retirement Services had reported a material loss in a statement last October and that a "comprehensive audit and review" would be conducted by an independent law firm and accounting firm. AME vowed to make the report of the findings public upon receipt. In the first week of February, Alexander said he received a letter from the Department of Retirement Services informing participants of "troubling news" that "plan funds were frozen, and distributions delayed pending the investigative findings." The letter stated that federal investigatory agencies along with the outside consultants were "working on the matter." "The AME Church takes this crime seriously," a statement from AME said, according to The Wall Street Journal. "We are also committed to making every fund participant whole by restoring their full investment plus interest." Kentucky church bake sale raises $145K to help Ukrainians fleeing Russian invasion A Ukrainian congregation located near Lexington, Kentucky, has raised approximately $145,000 at a bake sale to raise funds for those affected by the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Pentecostal Church of Nicholasville held the bake sale on Saturday, with the money raised to help those displaced by the Russian invasion of the Eastern European country, where over 10 million people have been forced to flee. The event featured a lunch for those who attended and a section at the church where around 100 donated baked goods of various kinds were available for sale. The bake sales organizer, Victor Selepina, told The Christian Post that nearly all of the congregations members were from Ukraine or had family living there. Selepina said that he was surprised by the amount raised, saying it wasnt planned but that we never anticipated to have so many people come out and to raise that amount of money. Our community has been absolutely wonderful, he said, and weve been very, very, very blessed with a community that we live in, and also the opportunities that this country has given us at one point that we can now organize such events. The donations will be distributed through churches in Ukraine with ties to the Nicholasville congregation. The funds will help buy supplies like food in the western part of the country for those displaced by the conflict. Some of the efforts to purchase food, according to Selepina, will likely move to Ukraines western neighbor Poland, as it is considered a more convenient place to get supplies. Selepina encouraged others to do what they can, even if its just a little bit, to help improve the situation for those displaced. If I have this idea, there is no way I can do this on my own, he said. It takes a lot of people to do it. We [have] anyone from like 13-year-olds to about 90 that just did their part, baking a batch of cookies, and thats how it came together. It takes a little to make something big happen. Across the United States, churches have done their part to help raise funds for Ukrainians fleeing the invasion. In the Washington, D.C. suburb of Colesville, Maryland, Saint Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral has held bazaars in the last few weeks to raise money for those fleeing violence in Ukraine. This past Sunday, the bazaar was attended by hundreds. Items for sale included clothes, jewelry, Ukrainian flags and food. Earlier this month, four churches in Minnesota came together for a charitable event in which 100,000 meals were packed for the needy, with half of them going to Ukraine. Bethel Lutheran Church of Rochester hosted the meal-packing event, with 250 volunteers packing the meals on behalf of Food for Kidz and the Channel One Regional Food Bank and assistance coming from Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, Holy Spirit Catholic Church, and the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Oscar winning actress Hilary Swank to star in Kingdom Story's 'Ordinary Angels' film Two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank is slated to star alongside Reacher breakout Alan Ritchson in Kingdom Story Companys Ordinary Angels, a film based on an inspirational true story. The film, which will be distributed by Lionsgate and is headed into production, is directed by Jon Gunn ("The Unbreakable Boy"), with the most recent draft of the script written by Gunn and Jon Erwin. Swank will play a struggling hairdresser who single-handedly rallies an entire community to help a widowed father (Ritchson) save the life of his critically ill young daughter. The film is set against the backdrop of the worst snowstorm in Kentucky history and is inspired by a true story. The 47-year-old actress won Oscars for her turns in "Boys Dont Cry" and "Million Dollar Baby." Shes also received two Golden Globes, a Critics Choice Award, an Independent Spirit Award, a Gotham Tribute Award and a SAG Award. Ritchson, an actor, writer, director and producer, stars as the lead in Amazons critically acclaimed series Reacher. Gunn said: Im thrilled to be working with Hilary and Alan. They are both actors with incredible range, who find humanity and vulnerability in every character they play. They are perfectly matched to bring this complex and inspirational true story to life. Kingdom Story Companys Kevin Downes said the company endeavors to bring inspiring true stories to life on screen, adding: Ordinary Angels spotlights one familys seemingly insurmountable struggles and the everyday people who helped them in remarkable ways. Hilary Swank and Alan Ritchson bring to life this heroic example of how one person can change a family and how that changes a community and gives rise, quite literally, to life and to hope. Ordinary Angels" is the latest inspirational film from Kingdom Story Company, the group behind I Can Only Imagine and American Underdog. The company is helmed by brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, Downes and Tony Young, and in partnership with the studio Lionsgate. Later this year, the company will release Jesus Revolution starring Kelsey Grammer. The film is inspired by the true story of the national spiritual awakening that swept Southern California in the early 1970s. Grammer will portray Pastor Smith of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, Greg Lauries mentor. The minister famously opened his church to all seekers and was instrumental in launching one of the largest spiritual revivals in the United States. The Erwin brothers, outspoken Christians themselves, previously shared why theyre drawn to true stories. We love true stories because that allows us to explore the real-life experiences and struggle that that person went through, Andrew Erwin told The Christian Post. The filmmaker added that sharing unfiltered true stories that highlight humanity gives context for the things that, for us as Christians, are so important. It gives power to the message; it gives power to these moments that are life-changing that dont feel like propaganda or trying to sell something. Its just inviting somebody to understand somebodys real-life story, he said. Jon Erwin noted that throughout the Psalms, David shares his flaws with brutal honesty, adding, You dont have to be perfect for God to use you. Those flaws are part of it, and thats who God chooses to use. Most voters say Hunter Biden's laptop story is important: Rasmussen poll A majority of likely voters believe the story about Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents is important, according to a recent Rasmussen Reports poll that also found nearly half believe that efforts to discredit the story impacted the 2020 presidential election. On Thursday, a Rasmussen poll found that 66% of likely U.S. voters said they believe the story about Hunter Bidens laptop was important, including 48% who said they think the story is very important. By contrast, 31% of respondents believed the story was not important, including 15% who said they believed it was not at all important. Additionally, Rasmussen found that nearly half of the respondents (48%) said they think that if the media had fully reported the story about Hunter Bidens laptop before the 2020 election, its unlikely Joe Biden would have been elected president. For their report, Rasmussen drew from a poll conducted on March 21-22 of 1,000 likely U.S. voters, with a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. In October 2020, shortly before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post published a story that reported Hunter Biden had his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, meet with an executive at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma shortly before the elder Biden pressured officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating the company. To back up its story, the New York Post referenced emails they reviewed that came from the hard drive of Hunter Bidens laptop, which had been dropped off at a shop in Delaware and later seized by the FBI. A copy of the data was provided by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The laptop also reportedly included embarrassing images and videos of Hunter Biden, as well as details of questionable business dealings Hunter had with communist China. Many major media outlets gave little to no attention to the story, claiming among other things that they found the source for the emails to be suspect. National Public Radios Kelly McBride argued in a newsletter back in 2020 that there were many, many red flags in that New York Post investigation and that the claims of the story dont amount to much. Intelligence officials warn that Russia has been working overtime to keep the story of Hunter Biden in the spotlight. Even if Russia cant be positively connected to this information, the story of how Trump associates Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani came into a copy of this computer hard drive has not been verified and seems suspect, wrote McBride. And if that story could be verified, the NY Post did no forensic work to convince consumers that the emails and photos that are the basis for their report have not been altered. Social media giants like Twitter and Facebook censored posts about the Hunter Biden laptop story in advance of the election, with Twitter going as far as to take down the New York Posts account for 16 days, claiming that they do not allow hacked material to be tweeted. These responses, though they came in a fast-moving and confusing situation, were heavy-handed and arguably ill-judged, acknowledged Vox in a recent report. Its also fair to be skeptical of whether social media companies would have responded so strongly if a Trump family member had been the victim of a suspected hack that October. Groups like the conservative fact-checking website NewsBusters argued that mainstream media outlets devoted far too little time to the controversy surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop. Although left-leaning news media largely ignored the story in 2020, more conservative outlets like Fox News devoted considerable time to the story in advance of the election. Media Matters, a liberal fact-check website, argued at the time that Foxs focus on the Biden laptop was part of a massive smear campaign in the final weeks before Election Day. That effort, led by the New York Post and amplified by Foxs megaphone, has sought to bury Joe Biden with a blizzard of dubious and bad-faith allegations related to his son Hunter Bidens business interests, stated Media Matters in October 2020. Last week, the New York Times ran a piece about ongoing investigations into Hunter Bidens business dealings, saying that the emails from the laptop were likely valid. 16-y-o miraculously survives deadly Texas tornados, says God gave me another chance A 16-year-old boy whose truck was flipped over by last weeks tornado in Texas, which killed a 73-year-old woman and injured dozens, said God gave me another chance and recounted his experience in a media interview after a video showing his ordeal went viral. The teen, Riley Leon, was returning home after a job interview in his red 2004 Chevrolet Silverado when he was caught in the tornado in Elgin, Texas. The viral video shows his truck being picked up and thrown on its side like a piece of paper. I honestly didnt know what to do, to grab onto the steering wheel or to start praying, the teen told NBC 5. On the video, it looks like I drove off but in reality I didnt. I landed in the center of the road and I was just driving to get off the road. He said hes grateful Im here. [Im] grateful God gave me another chance because better things are going to come in the future. Never let small things bring you down because bigger things are going to come, he told KTBC-TV. It was my first time being in a tornado, and hopefully my last time, Fox7 quoted him as saying. The news outlet added that Leon was surprised in Fort Worth with a new car and a generous gift to his family. Chevrolet, in collaboration with Bruce Lowrie Chevrolet of Fort Worth, gifted him a brand new 2022 Chevrolet Silverado. Lowrie also gave a $15,000 check to his family. A GoFundMe page started for Leon has raised over $42,000 as of Tuesday afternoon. Riley is so lucky and blessed to have made it out of this terrifying incident," the page reads. "His truck was totaled, but for the most part, he is doing ok. Unfortunately, he has begun to experience body aches and severe back pain, as one would expect after this type of accident. Leon is a lovely, bright student making plans to graduate next year and could genuinely use some love from our community and anyone else who may have viewed this video and prayed for the passengers, said Bianca Jaimes, one of his teachers at IDEA Rundberg in Austin, Texas. When the accident happened, the teen was on his way back home from a job interview at Whataburger, which has now offered him the job. In Jacksboro, Texas, the principal of an elementary school thanked God for protecting more than 500 students and 50 staff who survived the tornado last Monday. We are just so blessed that God had His hand God gave wisdom and courage to the adults, Michael Qualls, the principal of Jacksboro Elementary School, said, adding that even the kids were not panicked. Jacksboro High Principal Starla Sanders told Fox4 she was alerted about the storm turning severe about an hour before it hit. She allowed the 300 high schoolers who could drive to leave early, but the bus riders and all staff had no option but to take shelter. Even as crews are now working through the rubble, the First Baptist Church, Fort Richardson Masonic Lodge and the Parish of Jacksboro are housing Pre-K through third-graders for up to a month, Texomas reported. What we are currently doing now is, we are gathering the materials that are useable at the elementary and putting them in totes and getting them over here to the Baptist Church so that this weekend the teachers can set up their classrooms, Qualls was quoted as saying. One of the survivors, 10-year-old Kenadee Sell, told News6, Things happen, I know, but God saved us. God made this miracle happen; He saved our lives. Near the school, a 90-year-old woman, Francis Wilson, recalled how she survived after hunkering down inside a shower as the tornado destroyed the back half of her home, including the roof above her head. God had a hand in it; thats the way I look at it, Wilson told News6. He had a hand over me because I shouldnt have made it out of here. In North Texas, the tornado injured several people and destroyed homes, schools and businesses. The tornado caused extensive and widespread damage, particularly in Jack and Montague counties. Russian Regime Change uttered by gaffing Joe Biden increased fear of the European Union suing for a ceasefire in Ukraine. This call to oust Putin has made the bloc more cautious of the American President, and what he'll say next could maybe cause World War 3. A flustered EU is already reeling from energy shortages and attempts by some member nations carrying diplomatic missions to dial down the fighting in Ukraine. Biden's Comment About Regime Change US president, Joe Biden, made the worst possible error as he said that Putin should not remain in power, reported the BBC. Last Sunday in Poland, he started talking tough by referring to the Kremlin leader as a butcher, seeing EU allies as crossing a line and signaling a more militarized approach. An unpreceded error had a top US diplomat doing damage control due to his glib tongue. Another bothering report was when asked by the press if he wanted regime change; it was a no. Another US NATO ambassador, Julianne Smith, covered up the President's endless errors but spun what he said to re-contextualize the Warsaw statement. A month into the excursion, justified by a defense of DRP and LPR, which made 44 million Ukrainians homeless, per Express UK. Smith went on the administration's media ally CNN, saying it was a reaction to stories on that day. Slipped in the current administration does not want the Russian regime to change, although the tape said otherwise, and the European Union leaders are avoiding the White House. Read Also: Vladimir Putin Net Worth 2022: Does Anyone Know Russian President's Hidden Wealth? EU Officials Distance From Biden Comment of ousting made Josep Borrell, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, decide to stay away from the President of the US, far from the fallout of his alleged shenanigan. He spoke to Sky News Arabia and stated that he had heard it and the White House stood on it. Stressing that ousting a leader is not democratic, even in Russia's case, preventing further conflict should be stopped via dialogue. French President Emmanuel Macron, who had a run-in with Joe Biden in the AUKUS deal, knows that staying away from such a leader prevents tainting him in future talks with Moscow. On French TV, he said that it's terrible messaging and it makes his talks a bit harder due to the US leader's fumbling words, noted France 24. Macron was not happy about how it would affect talks in Moscow; how could the people of Mariupol can escape fighting via humanitarian concerns. The Kremlin's backing is essential. He says the war should stop and not get more intense, which is the goal. It uses diplomacy to stop the fighting and pull out forces which is the opposite of the US leader's narrow-minded stance. Better to keep quiet and tone down the situation, which is the opposite of what was said on camera. Even as the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained, there is no ousting suggested, and the Kremlin tacitly struck Washington saying that America has no monopoly over who heads Russia. Ex-US senior diplomat Richard Hass, who heads a body on foreign relations, added that Biden had coasted the US closer to war. Russian officials said that their forces would fight it out in Donbas. According to the European Union, the Russian regime change made diplomacy more critical to the US stand, which is dangerous for Europe. Related Article: Macron Says Biden's Remark That Putin Is a Butcher Makes it Harder To End the Ukraine Conflict @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Federalist editor locked out of Twitter for calling Rachel Levine a man: 'They will come after you' An editor with the conservative news publication The Federalist has been punished by Twitter because he called Rachel Levine, a Biden administration official who is biologically male but identifies as female, a man. According to an article published by The Federalist on Monday, The Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson has been locked out of his Twitter account over a tweet made Friday. Theyre not even trying to hide it anymore, posted Davidson. If you say that Rachel Levine is a man, they will come after you. Doesnt matter that Levine is in fact a man. Truth is no defense. According to The Federalist, less than 24 hours after Davidson tweeted this, Twitter censored the post and locked Davidson out of his account until he agrees to delete the tweet. Davidson has expressed his refusal to do so. Born Richard Levine but having identified as female since 2011, Rachel Levine currently serves as assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Recently, multiple individuals and groups have found their accounts on Twitter suspended due to referring to Levine as a man in response to USA Today recently naming Levine among its Women of the Year. The Christian Post is among those punished after it posted a tweet that labeled Levine a man. CP is prohibited from posting new content since earlier this month pending an appeal. Twitter also took action against The Babylon Bee for posting a joke about the Christian satirical site supposedly honoring Levine as its Man of the Year. They could, of course, delete the tweet themselves. But they won't, tweeted Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon from his personal account in response to the punishment. It's not enough for them to just wipe it out. They want us to bend the knee and admit that we engaged in hateful conduct. Twitter also recently censored conservative social commentator Charlie Kirk for posting that Levine is a man. Kirk denounced Twitter's actions in a statement given to Newsweek. I will NEVER apologize for speaking the truth and any term of service that demands users ignore, forget, or disregard what's objectively true is un-American and wrong, stated Kirk. It's this type of censorship that will ultimately destroy Twitter as a viable platform for speech, if that hasn't already happened. Competitors are popping up everywhere. World Vision helps evacuees from war-torn Ukraine as hundreds take shelter in Romanian office building A Romanian office building has been converted into space to house 450 refugees a night as the Romanian Orthodox Church and an international humanitarian organization respond to the mass exodus of Ukrainians from their homes as Russian troops ravage the country. Edgar Sandoval, the CEO of World Vision, was recently in Romania to assess the organization's efforts to minister to Ukrainians who were forced to flee their homes amid Russia's invasion of their country and shared what he witnessed in an interview with The Christian Post. Despite the challenges that come with providing food, clothing and shelter for hundreds or even thousands of refugees, Sandoval praised the generosity of the Romanian community, recalling that during a visit to the Romanian city of Iasi, he saw this office building that had been completely refurbished into a shelter and everything inside the shelter had been provided by the community. He told CP that the shelter included everything from beds, mattresses, sheets, blankets, pillows [and] toys provided by the generosity of the community. That office space could host 450 refugees per night, but then they also need to continue to pay for the electricity as well as showers and this is where World Vision comes in, he said. Weve been partnering alongside them by providing the utilities, hygiene kits, laundry and shower facilities. The exodus of people continues to just increase and so this has become the fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II, Sandoval said of the challenges Europe is facing to help the millions of Ukrainians seeking refuge in neighboring countries. An estimated over 3 million people have already fled Ukraine to bordering countries, he added. I was at two border points, one with Moldova and one with Ukraine. And what I saw was just strings of people coming through, some of them walking, some of them with nothing but the clothes on their back, some with a suitcase. Sandoval said that one day at the border crossing in the town of Siret, 15,000 people came through. He lamented that the situation continues to get worse as the conflict increases. He contrasted the refugee crisis in Eastern Europe with those he had experienced in the past. In the current crisis, those fleeing Ukraine are in transit because they want their final destination to be in Western Europe. They stop in Romania on the way, he added, because its so cold and they need a place where they can safely stay for a couple of nights. They need food, they need showers [and] warm clothing," he said. "The vast majority of the people crossing are women and young children, and very young children at that. Sandoval discussed World Visions efforts to create child-friendly spaces that amount to a little daycare setting in a shelter where there are toys and activities where kids can be kids again as we try to mitigate any sort of psychosocial effects that the conflict may have on them. In his conversations with refugees, Sandoval has learned that many have friends and family in Western Europe, which explains why they see the region as their ultimate destination. He shared a conversation he'd had with a father who has a 16-year-old son with special needs. They were staying at the office building that had been converted into a shelter. The mans sister works as a maid in Italy, and she had come to Romania to help them find their way there. While Sandoval predicts that most Ukrainian refugees will move on to Western Europe after a stop in Romania, he's awaiting more clarity on how many refugees will actually stay in Romania. He spoke of a plan being developed to make sure that children can continue their education and obtain all the support services to the families who choose to remain in the Eastern European country. Sandoval said the Romanian Orthodox Church is one of World Visions partners on the ground working to provide information and [meet] the needs of these refugees. Specifically, the Romanian Orthodox Church is coordinating medical supply donations for Ukrainian hospitals. The World Vision CEO told CP that the demographic makeup of the refugees has changed over time. He suggested that the people who left Ukraine at the beginning of the Ukraine-Russia conflict had more means because they were leaving in their own cars. More recently, most refugees are coming with nothing but the clothes on their backs. World Vision has plans to expand its response to the Ukraine-Russia conflict into other Eastern European countries. We are in the process of evaluating partners in Moldova and also in Poland as we expect the longer this conflict continues, the more people well expect will want to find refuge and cross the border," Sandoval said. "So were evaluating what may be needed to support refugees in Moldova, to support them in Poland, and then well need to continue our operation and strengthen our operation in Romania. World Vision has raised over $8 million for the Ukraine crisis so far. Having seen the difference that the donations from the U.S. are making for the refugees, Sandoval asked American Christians to continue praying for this conflict and to donate because the needs are increasing and we want to be able to be there for the people of Ukraine at the time of their greatest need. Arizona lawmakers pass 15-week abortion ban as Supreme Court weigh's similar Mississippi law Arizona lawmakers have passed a bill that, if enacted, will ban most abortions after 15 weeks into a pregnancy, similar to a Mississippi law that the U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing this year. Known as Senate Bill 1164, the legislation was passed by the state House of Representatives on Thursday in a vote of 31 ayes to 26 nays, with three not voting. The legislation was approved by the state Senate last month. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a pro-life Republican who has signed other abortion restrictions during his administration, is expected to sign SB 1164 in the near future. The bill would make it a class 6 felony for any physician to intentionally perform or attempt to perform an abortion that is not medically necessary when the gestational age exceeds 15 weeks. Supporters of the legislation include the Center for Arizona Policy, which argued that the measure was necessary to protect developed unborn human life. Preborn babies at 15 weeks gestation have fully formed noses, eyelids, and lips, as well as developing hearts, kidneys, and other organs. They suck their thumbs, and they feel pain, said Center for Arizona Policy President Cathi Herrod in a statement last month. At 15 weeks gestation, the preborn baby does flips, hiccups, and has regular sleep patterns, according to expert testimony. These babies deserve our protection; their mothers deserve the truth, and they are worthy of protection from the trauma, regret, and pain of abortion. Critics of the bill include the Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which called on Ducey to veto what they consider a violation of bodily autonomy. Decisions about if and when to become a parent or have more children should be made by individuals, with support from their doctor and loved ones as needed, stated Jennifer Allen, executive director of the ACLU of Arizona. Taking options off the table for pregnant people regardless of their reason for seeking an abortion is an egregious attack on their bodily autonomy. We urge Governor Ducey to veto SB1164. The bills passage comes as the nation waits for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of Mississippis law restricting abortions after 15 weeks into a pregnancy. Last December, the high court heard oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, with pro-choice advocates saying the law is unconstitutional and pro-life advocates hoping it could alter abortion legal precedent that has equated abortion with a constitutional right. Many believe the case could lead to the overturning or weakening of the controversial Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision prohibiting states from passing laws restricting abortion before viability. If Roe v. Wade were overturned entirely, pro-choice advocates fear that old Arizona laws still on the books could be used to ban abortion completely in the state. According to the pro-choice research organization Guttmacher Institute, over two dozen states have laws on the books that could ban abortion entirely if Roe is overturned. Several states have enacted abortion restrictions in recent years. A law passed in Texas last year banning abortions once a heartbeat can be detected also faced legal challenges but has been in effect since last year. Instead of being enforced through government agencies, the law allows private citizens to sue abortion providers or others who assist in an illegal abortion for damages. Earlier this month, the Idaho legislature approved a modification to the states abortion law to allow family members to sue abortion providers who violate the law. The bill awaits a signature from Republican Gov. Brad Little. Most Florida Democrat voters support bill mischaracterized by LGBT activists as 'Don't Say Gay' A majority of Democratic primary voters in Florida say they support a bill passed by the state Legislature that would prohibit schools from teaching sexual orientation and gender identity to students in kindergarten through the third grade. Floridians for Economic Advancement, a political action committee that has supported candidates in both major political parties, released a poll that asked 701 Democratic primary voters for their thoughts about the states upcoming gubernatorial election on Tuesday. While the poll primarily focused on sampling public opinion regarding the Democratic gubernatorial candidates, it also asked respondents to weigh in on HB 1557, an act relating to parental rights in education that critics derided as the so-called Dont Say Gay Bill. The survey asked respondents a series of questions, including: Should students in Kindergarten through 3rd grade be taught about sexual orientation in the classroom by their teachers? Twenty percent of those surveyed responded somewhat no to that question, while 32% said definitely no. That adds up to a narrow majority (52%) of Democratic primary voters expressing some level of disapproval with teaching young students about topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity. By contrast, only 36% of Democratic primary voters in Florida thought that schools should teach students about such concepts. Eighteen percent selected Definitely yes as an option, while an additional 18% said somewhat yes in response to the question. The remaining 12% were unsure about whether teachers should teach young students about sexual orientation and gender identity. The poll demonstrates a stark contrast between the views of Floridas Democratic primary voters and the views of their elected representatives in the Florida Legislature regarding HB 1557. Not one Democrat in either the Florida Senate or the Florida House of Representatives voted to support the bill when it came up for a vote. While the poll conducted by Floridians for Economic Advancement only queried Democratic voters in Florida, The Daily Wire surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults of all political persuasions about HB 1557. The Daily Wire poll yielded similar findings, specifically that there is much stronger support among Democrat voters than Democrat politicians. The survey, released on March 14, asked respondents whether they agreed with the portion of the bill that declares, Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through third grade or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards. Sixty-four percent indicated agreement with the statement, while 21% disagreed. Broken down by party, support for the legislation was measured at 69% among Republicans, 62% among Democrats and 57% among independents. When asked if they thought it was appropriate or inappropriate for teachers and school personnel to instruct children in kindergarten through 3rd grade on various sexual orientations, nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) described such instruction as inappropriate, while just 21% classified it as appropriate. Those questioned by The Daily Wire had similar feelings about whether it was appropriate or inappropriate for teachers and school personnel to instruct children in kindergarten through 3rd grade on gender identities, such as transgenderism. Sixty-six percent of respondents characterized lessons about transgenderism for young students as inappropriate, while 20% saw such teaching as appropriate. The Daily Wire poll also revealed that 79% of Americans thought that the responsibility for teaching topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity rested on parents as opposed to school officials, while just 7% felt that responsibility belonged to teachers. A supermajority of respondents (62%) believed that educators have an obligation to let parents know if their children identify as a different gender at school, while 19% disagreed. The conservative publication also assessed the impact of LGBT activists branding the legislation as the Dont Say Gay Bill. When presenting the legislation as the Dont Say Gay Bill as opposed to focusing on its components, 42% expressed support for the measure, followed by 33% who opposed it and 24% who remained unsure. The push to pass HB 1557 comes as parents and advocacy groups have expressed concern about the prevalence of lessons about sexual orientation and gender identity designed for young students in both private and public schools. In video footage from a conference spearheaded by the National Association of Independent Schools, obtained by Breitbart, a presenter is seen promoting curriculum that would introduce the concepts of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression to pre-k students. Many states, including Illinois, have implemented curriculum aligned with the National Sex Education Standards in their public schools. This framework asks students in kindergarten through second grade to define gender, gender identity, and gender-role stereotypes and discuss the range of ways people express their gender and how gender-role stereotypes may limit behavior. NC Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson admits to paying for abortion: 'No one is too far gone to be saved' The pro-life lieutenant governor of North Carolina has responded to reports highlighting an abortion he paid for in 1989, saying in a video Thursday that it was a decision he lives with every day and why he is so staunch in his views on abortion. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a Republican elected to the post in 2020, has used his platform as an elected official to become an outspoken advocate for the pro-life movement. But on Tuesday, a Twitter user posted a screenshot of Robinson indicating in an old post on his personal social media page that he once paid for a woman to abort his unborn child decades earlier. Axios reported on the admission Wednesday. Robinson elaborated on the circumstances of the abortion in a Facebook video Thursday. Appearing alongside his wife, Yolanda, Robinson announced that over 33 years ago, before they were married and had children, we had an abortion. It was the hardest decision we have ever made, and sadly, we made the wrong one, Robinson said. This decision has been with us ever since. Its because of this experience and our spiritual journey that we are so adamantly pro-life. We know what its like to be in that situation, and we know the pain that an abortion causes. Robinson delivered a message to everyone that has had this experience [and] carries that burden, informing them that we want you to know [that] you are not alone. He also touched upon the power of forgiveness. We have a Savior who forgives us of our sins [and] offers us grace, he continued. No one is perfect, but no one is too far gone to be saved. We felt the need to speak with you directly because this issue transcends politics. Our hope is that by telling our story, that it may change the lives of others. In an Aug. 9, 2012, Facebook post on his personal account, Robinson asked: How can so many people Praise God with their mouths then vote for a man who supports gay marriage and abortion with their hands? While the then-private citizen did not mention him by name, the posts timing less than three months before the 2012 presidential election implies he may have been referring to then-President Barack Obama. Robinsons post elicited strong reactions, including one suggesting that Robinson get off his high horse and not judge those who have had abortions. Robinson pushed back on the idea that he was on a high horse. Im not saying abortion is wrong cause I said so. Its wrong cause God says so. Its wrong when others do it, and it was wrong when I paid for it to be done to my unborn child in 1989, he wrote. Robinson brought up his previous involvement in an abortion in a comment responding to another one of his Facebook posts about a month later. The post featured a picture depicting a late-term abortion. Robinson asked, What kind of HORROR movie is this? Oh wait, this is what late term abortion really looks like!!! If I did this to my dogs puppies Id be the lead story on Fox 8 6 o clock news, he stated. Robinson appeared to receive pushback for this Facebook post as well, although some of the 7 comments posted in reaction to are no longer visible. In one of his responses to the now-deleted comments, Robinson once again admitted to and apologized for paying for an abortion decades earlier. This has nothing to do with politics. Its about morality, he wrote. Abortions like this one are barbaric. And by the way I saw your comment on my other post and I intend to keep pointing those fingers at me first. Abortion is wrong. Its wrong when others do it and it was wrong when I (YES I) paid to have MY own child aborted in 1989, he declared. While Robinsons previous comments invited allegations of hypocrisy from his critics, pro-life groups have come to the lieutenant governors defense. The North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition issued a statement in support of Robinson Thursday, remarking that the organization was thankful for the transparency communicated by Lt. Governor Mark Robinsons difficult abortion decision over 30 years ago. Some of North Carolinas most effective and outspoken pro-life advocates are those who fully understand the emotional, physical, and spiritual impacts of abortion because they have personally received or supported an abortion, the statement added. Through prayer, healing, and forgiveness, many former abortion clinic workers, OBGYN doctors, mothers, and fathers have transformed their abortion regret into a mission to diligently advocate for the unborn. After expressing gratitude for the unwavering commitment from Lt. Governor Robinson to protect life, including the unborn, the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition shared video footage from one of Robinsons speeches that reflected his current position on abortion. Its a shame before the Almighty that there are politicians who speak more vehemently about abortion than there are some pastors who shy away from the issue because theyre afraid they might lose a few dollars out of the collection plate, he said. Additionally, Robinson described abortion as a scourge that needs to be run out of this land and proclaimed that the life in the womb is as important as the life in your living room. He maintained that the time for laying down on this issue ... is over. In a statement to Axios, the North Carolina Values Coalition offered a similar analysis, stressing that People who have walked through the pain of abortion in some way can be the strongest advocates for the unborn after that experience. We havent heard his story yet, but what we do know is today Lt. Governor Robinson is genuine in his commitment to protect life, the North Carolina Values Coalition added. Robinson is not the only outspoken pro-life activist who has personal experience with an abortion. Toni McFadden, who had an abortion in high school that resulted in serious complications, converted to Christianity after her experience and has since become a pro-life advocate. Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood director whose traumatic abortion experience was depicted in the film Unplanned, now leads a ministry called And Then There Were None, which seeks to help workers in the abortion industry who want to leave their careers behind. Robinson, the first African American lieutenant governor in North Carolinas history, is widely considered a top candidate for the Republican nomination for the states 2024 gubernatorial election. According to audio obtained by the left-wing advocacy group Right Wing Watch, Robinson insisted that he was about 95 percent sure were gonna run for governor. Americans are leaving church and most arent coming back: report In Matthew 11:29 of the Bible, Jesus calls for all those who labor and are heavy laden to come to Him for rest, a rest that the Church has promised new converts for centuries. A new report released Thursday by the American Enterprise Institute shows, however, that despite the proven benefits of belonging to a faith community, Americans are increasingly leaving organized religion with each subsequent generation and the majority arent coming back. In the report, Generation Z and the future of faith in America, Daniel A. Cox, senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute, who also serves as director of the Survey Center on American Life, paints a complicated and diminished view of religion in American life. Much of the disaffection for religion today is largely driven by people who were once religious. There is a growing population of the religiously unaffiliated whose once religious parents raised them without religion. Young adults today have had entirely different religious and social experiences than previous generations did. The parents of millennials and Generation Z did less to encourage regular participation in formal worship services and model religious behaviors in their children than had previous generations, Cox wrote. Many childhood religious activities that were once common, such as saying grace, have become more of the exception than the norm. In line with the wisdom of Proverbs 22:6 which says, train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it, Cox noted that for as long as we have been able to measure religious commitments, childhood religious experiences have strongly predicted adult religiosity. With more parents raising their children with weak or no bond to a faith community, its a lot more difficult for them to be converted in adulthood. If someone had robust religious experiences growing up, they are likely to maintain those beliefs and practices into adulthood. Without robust religious experiences to draw on, Americans feel less connected to the traditions and beliefs of their parents faith, Cox explained. For nearly 30 years, notes Cox, research shows the share of Americans who identify as religious has consistently declined with each new generation. This pattern continues with Generation Z demonstrating less attachment to religion than the millennial generation did, he said. Generation Z, born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is now the least religious generation yet, with 34% of them identifying as religiously unaffiliated. Among millennials, 29% identify as religiously unaffiliated, while Generation X stands at 25%. Only 18% of baby boomers and 9% of the silent generation identify as religiously unaffiliated. Its not only a lack of religious affiliation that distinguishes Generation Z. They are also far more likely to identify as atheist or agnostic, Cox said, noting that some 18% of the cohort identified as either atheist or agnostic. Only 4% of the silent generation, for example, identify as atheist or agnostic. Cox noted that one of the most significant changes in American religious culture has been the increasing rate at which Americans can now remain non-religious. Today, nearly two-thirds (65%) of Americans who report having no childhood religious affiliation say they still are unaffiliated as adults, rivaling that of established religious traditions, he wrote. In 2014, only 53% of Americans raised without a formal religious tradition retained their secular identity as adults. In 2007, that number was 46%. One explanation for the rise in retention rates among unaffiliated Americans may be that an increasing number of Americans are being raised in nonreligious households and holding onto those commitments into adulthood, Cox said. Some 29% of Americans who are unaffiliated were raised without religion. In 2014, this share was 21%. According to Cox, most Americans who abandon their childhood faith cant point to a single event that caused them to leave and characterize it as a gradual drifting away. Cox pointed to a number of factors that have impacted a diminished view of organized religion, including a breach of trust. Gallup has found that trust and confidence in organized religion have plummeted over the past two decades. In 2021, only 37% of the public reported having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in religious institutions, a massive decline since 2001 when 60 percent reported feeling confident, he said. He further added that while only 35% of Americans overall believe religion causes more harm than good, among the disaffiliated who were raised in religious homes, 69% say religion causes problems more than it provides solutions. Some 63% of Americans who have always been religiously unaffiliated also believe religion causes more problems in society than it solves. And while more than half of Americans say raising children with religion is a benefit, 82% of the religiously unaffiliated disagree. Only 40% of Gen Z see raising children with religion as a good thing. Calif. bill seeks to end states sanctuary law protecting criminals following murders at 2 churches A California lawmaker has introduced a bill to repeal the state's sanctuary law, which came under severe criticism earlier this month after an undocumented immigrant shot three of his daughters and a chaperone before killing himself inside a church in Sacramento. Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin, introduced the bill, AB 1708, on Monday to repeal Senate Bill 54, the sanctuary law that was passed in 2017 and prevents law enforcement from notifying federal authorities about the release of undocumented immigrants from jail, ABC 10 reported. It was a bill specifically designed not to help immigrants, not even to help all undocumented immigrants, but rather, it was a special protection extended to those who are both in the country illegally and have committed crimes while here, Kiley was quoted as saying. Kiley referred to the March 4 shooting by 39-year-old Mexican national, David Mora, who murdered his own children, ages 13, 10 and 9, and their chaperone before killing himself inside the sanctuary of The Church in Sacramento. He was in the country illegally, Kiley pointed out. Not only that but the previous week, he had been arrested. Hed been arrested for assaulting a police officer, and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) asked about his release because of his criminal history and because he was in the country illegally. But the sheriff's office had to say, Sorry, we arent able to give you that information, because of the Sanctuary State law. Mora was in the United States illegally, as his visa had expired, ICE spokeswoman Alethea Smock told The Associated Press at the time. ICE agents had not been notified about Mora, identified in documents as David Fidel Mora-Rojas, overstaying his visa because of the sanctuary law. After the shooting, Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones wrote on Facebook: In the coming days and weeks, liberals and activists will try and spin the narrative, dredge up sympathy for the monster that killed them, and talk about how this could have been prevented. They will talk about the horrors of ghost guns, as if no other weapon or gun was available to him, and legislators will clamor for more restrictive gun laws to make themselves feel better. Theyll call me racist and evil. He continued, But let me be perfectly clear, there is only ONE thing that allowed this horrific tragedy to occur with certainty: the deplorable state of our national immigration policies, and Californias Sanctuary State Laws. In a separate church murder carried out by an undocumented immigrant in November 2020, 32-year-old Fernando De Jesus Lopez-Garcia was wielding a knife as he murdered two people and wounded three others at Grace Baptist Church in San Jose, California. The ICE revealed that the suspect had an extensive criminal history, and had been deported three times before committing the murders. The sanctuary law, however, protected him and allowed him to go undetected after he snuck back into the U.S. Talking about the prospects of Kileys bill, David Jaroslav of Federation for American Immigration Reform pointed out in an article published on the groups website that both chambers of the Legislature are heavily controlled by Democrats, but Kiley appears to believe the shocking avoidable tragedy of the church murders may have led to a new bipartisan appetite in the state to repeal the sanctuary law. Under the sanctuary state law, individual cities and counties may (although they dont have to) honor federal immigration detainers for people in their custody if theyve previously been convicted of any of a list of prior criminal offenses, he wrote. Detainers are official requests from ICE to hold an alleged illegal alien for up to 48 hours past their release on local charges so ICE can pick them up and start the deportation process. Jaroslav added, Under AB 1708, state and local law enforcement would be required to honor a detainer for anyone with convictions for any of that list of prior crimes, or currently charged with any of them. The bill will likely be heard this spring. An Evangelicals appreciation of Madeleine Albright As word came to me a few days ago of the death of Madeleine Albright (1937-2022), who served as Secretary of State (1997-2001), a flood of pleasant memories came rushing back to consciousness. Madeleine Albrights life provides a truly inspiring story of the triumph of the human spirit. While, as you would imagine, Madeleine and I had significant disagreements on many important issues, I always loved and appreciated Secretary Albrights deep and abiding love for America her adopted country. She had that special appreciation for America and all that she stands for that so often flows through the hearts and minds of those political and religious refugees that have been embraced and welcomed on our shores. Secretary Albright and her parents were refugees from the two deadliest ideologies of the 20th century: Nazism and communism. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a Czech diplomat who had to flee with his family after the Nazi takeover in 1938. She and her family lived in London during the Battle of Britain and The Blitz. After World War II, they returned to Czechoslovakia until the communist takeover in 1948 forced them to flee once again, arriving at Ellis Island in New York in November 1948. Her father explained to the immigration authorities, I cannot, of course, return to communist Czechoslovakia as I would be arrested for my faithful adherence to the ideals of democracy. He and his family were granted asylum in the United States. Secretary Albright was once asked about the origins of her belief in the necessity of American leadership in the world in order for freedom and human dignity to survive and flourish. She replied that she did indeed believe America was the necessary nation. Why wouldnt I, she replied. When I was a little girl, U.S. soldiers crossed the ocean to help save Europe from the menace of Adolph Hitler. When I was barely in my teens, the American people welcomed my family after the communists had seized power in my native Czechoslovakia. I love to think of America as an inspiration to people everywhere especially to those who have been denied freedom in their own lands.1 She believed as I do, at a philosophical level, that American exceptionalism is not a source of pride and privilege, but a doctrine of sacrifice and service in the cause of freedom and human dignity. At a practical level, she also understood that American military and economic power, and her willingness to use them on behalf of others, was the most indispensable fact deterring the world from being dominated by thugs and tyrants. I first met Madeleine Albright when she began her service as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 1993. At that time I was serving as president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013), the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. The ERLC had the responsibility for occupying the non-government organization (NGO) functions for the SBC at the U.N. When she became Ambassador to the U.N. in 1993, I contacted her to convey Southern Baptist concerns about the atrocities and genocide being perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia. I was delighted to discover that, unlike the previous administration, then Ambassador Albright and the Clinton administration were strongly in favor of NATO intervention to stop the mass rapes of Muslim women and the ethnic cleansing being perpetrated by the Serbs. I also was privileged to work with then-Ambassador Albright in trying to stop the horrific genocide that erupted in Rwanda between April and July 1994, during which somewhere between 500,000 and 650,000 people were savagely slaughtered. Ms. Albright did everything but stand on her head as she vainly tried to accomplish international invention to stop this crime against humanity. To President Clintons credit, he later confessed that the greatest regret of his presidency (that must be a long and interesting list) was the failure of his administration to prevent the Rwandan genocide. As I interacted with Ambassador, then Secretary, Albright, we became friends. Frankly, I do not know which one of us was more surprised as our friendship developed, but we both enjoyed interacting with each other. She was kind enough to write an endorsement for my book, The Divided States of America. What Liberals and Conservatives Get Wrong About Faith and Politics, stating: Dr. Land sheds light where others from left and right sow confusion. One can disagree on specific policies and still laud the authors dedication to Americas founding values and his grasp of the proper role of religion in public life. The Divided States of America is essential reading for fair-minded people. I was delighted as I became familiar with her convictions concerning Americas unique and irreplaceable role in the world. Secretary Albright was such a refreshing departure from so many of the State Departments diplomatic subculture too often typified by the widely-circulated joke that the State Department needed an American desk to advocate for America in the U.S. State Department. As long as Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State, one did not need to worry if there was an advocate for America at the Department of State. Secretary Albright also understood the importance of religion, something else rare at the State Department. In The Mighty and the Almighty, she acknowledged that the State Department was completely blindsided by the Iranian Revolution because they didnt take religion seriously. As I said earlier, Secretary Albright had a deep love and appreciation for Americas unique role in the world. One afternoon during a conference in Aspen, she shared this story over tea. She told me that in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of Americas and her Allies victory in World War II, she had visited the parts of what is now the Czech Republic that were liberated by American soldiers. She was surprised, and touched, by the fact that as she passed by, many of the locals were waving American flags, many of them of 48-star vintage. When she asked why they were waving those 48-star flags, she was told that Americas G.I.s often handed out those flags in 1945 and the locals kept those flags as a symbol of freedom. At that same conference, she was explaining during a seminar that being Secretary of State was like drinking from a fire hose every day as things come at you nonstop. She then paused and said with a big smile, dont get me wrong. I loved being Secretary of State! One personal story that delighted both of us was when I discovered the subject of her Columbia Ph.D. dissertation "The Prague Spring. In 1968 Alexander Dubcek led a movement (The Prague Spring) to liberalize and democratize Communist Czechoslovakia (from January 1968 until Soviet tanks crushed them in August of the same year). She seemed thrilled that I was familiar with her doctoral thesis. I told her how pleased I was because I had been a big fan of Dubcek and that in fact in my Princeton class yearbook poll for man of the year in 1968, I voted for Alexander Dubcek. (Robert F. Kennedy won in a landslide.) After she left office, we stayed in touch. In fact, she invited me on one occasion to her home in Georgetown to discuss some religious issues. Her other guest was a prominent rabbi. She explained that one of the very nice things about having been Secretary of State is when you have a question you can go straight to the experts to get answers. She was a very charming, gracious, and courageous woman who loved her country and the core values it represents. I will miss her. 1. Albright, Madeleine. The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs. Harper, 2006 Disagreement is not hatred. Censorship is. The Christian Post was canceled last week by Twitter, over referring to Biden administration official Rachel Levine with an unsanctioned but arguably accurate descriptive pronoun. It was both unsurprising and surprising; unsurprising since CP regularly covers the controversy surrounding trans-identified individuals and surprising since Twitter thought this particular story was more "hateful" than other stories, and warranted suspension. CP appealed, and so far Twitter has been silent. It actually brings a Pink Floyd lyric to mind: Welcome to the Machine. There is much to say in arguing that our pronoun was accurate, but the larger question is: who is the hater here? Eliminating the voice of a publication because of a description that likely more than half of the worlds population would not object to is, in fact, hating that segment of the world. Granted, Twitter is a private company and can play by the rules it establishes within the confines of the law. But if we are having a conversation about hate, how is it kind to eliminate a voice that disagrees, especially if there is no rancor involved? Consider this illustration. If an individual sees green because of a blue-yellow tritanomaly, yet many, many others disagree because they see blue, is it hate to point that out? Or would it be hate to eliminate those who see blue on grounds that the only valid standard is what that individual sees? How does that promote community, a word Twitter throws around without restraint. What this exposes is that Twitter doesnt believe in the U.S. constitutional protection of free speech. Even The New York Times, a bastion of liberal thought, has begun to warn that support for free speech is dangerously eroding, arguing that their own opinion polling finds only 34 percent of Americans said they enjoyed the freedom to disagree because of the threat of retaliation or harsh criticism. Those words connote hate. According to The New York Times editorial board: People should be able to forward viewpoints, ask questions and make mistakes and take unpopular but good-faith positions on issues that society is still working through all without fearing cancellation. Hear that Twitterati? We at CP suspect the vast majority of our readers Christians who lean right or left, LGBT+ (yes, we have readers in this community), secularists, and atheists believe it is right to stand against retaliation, harsh criticisms, and ultimately cancellation of speech, because of the hate it represents. So now we know Twitter doesnt believe in free speech. Here is the real question: Do you believe in Twitter? The best remedy to speech you dont agree with is more speech, not less, and the best way to exercise free speech is to use it. So we will continue to use it with or without Twitter. Will you join us? I read a comment on a local Facebook page this week. The gentlemen said, we dont want change, the locals like it the way it is." I suggested change is coming regardless of our wants, and we can either manage the change or be swept up in change without any input. It reminds me of a quote by George Bernard Shaw, The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. For nearly three years, we have discussed the critical need for local communities to fight to keep their dollars local however possible.Over the past few years, this has become not just the right thing to do, but is now a case of either survival or becoming obsolete as a community. When one views the value of shopping and spending local, communities often overlook a most critical element. We have repeatedly shown the major impact on the community if every resident just spent $25 locally more each month they may have spent online or in a neighboring community. When factoring the 3% to 7% compounding impact of each of those dollars, this small gesture equates to between $900-$2,100 new dollars flowing through your community yearly per resident. In a community of 10,000 residents, that is an additional $9 million to $21 million floating through your community each year. How many jobs will this create? How many jobs will it retain? How much better will the quality of life be for many? This is how you save Main Street, not build Wall Street. This is huge! Small businesses, whether intentional or not, are under assault by technology, burdensome regulations, tax policy, government forced mandates and the list goes on. This assault is on every local community in the country. Example: large corporate chains remained open while local businesses were deemed non-essential and were forced to close. Since when is providing support for ones family deemed non-essential? When small businesses go under, it impacts incomes, employment base, supplies ordered and much more. While the chains with deep pockets usually survive, it reaps disaster on the local communities and their business base, impacting the entire community for years. The reasons for keeping dollars local is well established and beyond dispute. The proof is readily apparent across the country. Most need not travel very far from home to see a nearby town that was once prosperous becoming a shell of what it once was. They have become shells of themselves for many reasons, one of which was supporting Wall Street in lieu of their own Main Street. The current situation of local communities losing dollars to out-of town corporations, chains, and online entities is accelerating rapidly. This trend is unlikely to subside anytime soon. With this acceleration, towns doing well now will do less well in the future. Struggling communities will struggle more. Towns teetering on the brink will be pushed into the abyss. More so, as the outflow of dollars accelerates, the impact on a local community is more apparent. Civic engagement and volunteering decrease, poverty rates increase, more local businesses go under, local jobs are lost, housing prices decrease, tax base dwindles, crime rates increase and the list goes on. What to do? I cannot stress enough that communities must act now. This issue may not be on the radar of local community leaders, but it must be placed on that radar. Once on the radar, communities need to assemble a team with the sole mission of addressing this issue. To be effective, this team will include city leaders, chamber and/or Main Street, business leaders, media, civic clubs, economic development leaders, residents and whomever else makes sense. As a team, they must brainstorm potential solutions, possible communitywide education initiatives, citywide promotions and other tactics. Proactive communities can tackle and manage these problems; this is being done every day around the country. The Building Main Street, not Wall Street column will continue to provide ideas each week. It isnt easy, but nothing great usually is. I implore you, dont delay, this is an issue that isnt going away and will only deepen as time moves on the within the community. A federal judge on Monday said that former United States President Donald Trump "most likely" committed a crime in the 2020 elections when he was involved in an attempt to block vote counting on Jan. 6, 2021. In a letter, Judge David Carter wrote that, based on evidence, the Court found that the Republican businessman more likely than not corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress during the day of the Capitol Hill riot. Trump's Potential Crimes Carter, who is a federal judge in California, ordered right-wing attorney John Eastman to turn over 101 emails from around Jan. 6, 2021. The attorney has tried to keep the conversations a secret from the House Select Committee that is responsible for investigating the chaotic insurrection. The judge's reasoning in his letter is an acknowledgment by a federal court that Trump's interest in overturning the results of the 2020 elections could be considered criminal. Furthermore, he revealed some new information regarding the emails that the House was seeking and called for more investigation, as per CNN. Carter's 44-page ruling laid out in detail the timeline of Trump's efforts to convince elected officials and the public of voter fraud in the 2020 election. It also urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to launch an investigation headed by the Justice Department to look into the former president deeper. Read Also: GOP McCarthy Says That Donald Trump, His Role in the Party Depends on the 2022 Midterm Election Result The judge said that, while Trump and Eastman justified their plan with allegations of voter fraud, the former president's knowledge that this was false meant the entire plan was unlawful. Carter was especially critical of the former president's legal justification, noting that there was sufficient evidence showing that the election did not involve fraud that could change the outcome. According to Yahoo News, Carter added that in the months after the election, various credible sources, from Trump's inner circle to agency leadership to statisticians, informed the former president and Eastman that there was no evidence showing voter fraud. Furthermore, an internal Trump Campaign memo concluded in November that fraud claims against Dominion voting machines were baseless. Peaceful Transition of Power Judge Carter said that the illegality of Trump's plan was plainly obvious, adding that the United States was founded on the peaceful transition of power. He said that the former president ignored history when he pressed former Vice President Mike Pence to single-handedly determine the results of the 2020 election. He found that the actions taken by Trump and Eastman amounted to a "coup in search of a legal theory." The Justice Department has been investigating the details and events leading up to the Capitol Hill riot. However, it has not yet given public indication that it was considering a criminal case against Trump. The situation comes as the House Select Committee has lined up testimony from four top Trump White House officials this week, including Jared Kushner, the former president's son-in-law and adviser. The panel is also set to recommend charging criminal contempt of two other allies of Trump, Peter Navarro, a former White House adviser, and Dan Scavino Jr., former deputy chief of staff, the New York Times reported. Related Article: Ex-Prosecutor Claims Trump Is Guilty of 'Numerous Felonies' Amid Probe of Former Presidents' Family Business @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Click here to read the full article. Ezra Miller, who stars in the upcoming DC film The Flash and Aprils Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, was arrested by law enforcement in Hilo, Hawaii on Monday morning. Miller was charged for disorderly conduct and harassment after an incident at a bar. According to a post by the Hawaii County Police Department, South Hilo officers responded to a report of a disorderly bar patron on Sunday evening at 11:30 p.m. Police determined that the agitator had become unruly while other patrons sang karaoke and had begun yelling obscenities. Miller then grabbed the microphone from a 23-year-old woman singing karaoke and later lunged at a 32-year-old man playing darts. 3-28-22 Vermont Visitor Arrested for Disorderly Conduct and Harassment in Hilo https://t.co/12RMQ3eckH Hawaii Police Department (Official Site) (@Hawaii_Police) March 29, 2022 Miller was arrested and charged on offenses of disorderly conduct and harassment. Bail was set at $500, which Miller provided, with law enforcement subsequently releasing them from custody. Variety has reached out to Hilo law enforcement, as well as representatives for Miller and Warner Bros., though no parties could be immediately reached for comment. In 2020, footage that appeared to depict Miller choking a woman in a bar in Iceland surfaced online. Sources close to the situation described the situation as a serious altercation which led to Miller being escorted off the premises by staff. Millers arrest comes at an inopportune time for Warner Bros., as the performer plays a key role in its upcoming Harry Potter spin-off film, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which is set to begin its global theatrical rollout in April. Miller also plays Barry Allen, also known as the Flash, in the studios ongoing slate of DC films. After appearing in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League and Zack Snyders Justice League, Miller will marquee their own DC film with The Flash. Principal photography has been completed on the solo film, which is set to hit theaters on June 23, 2023. Miller was recently featured during Sunday evenings Academy Awards broadcast. Zack Snyders Justice League won in the newly introduced Oscars cheer moment category, which was determined by fan votes through online avenues. A sequence described as The Flash Enters the Speed Force was voted the most cheer-worthy moment through online polls ahead of the show, with footage from Millers showcase in the film being featured during the Oscars broadcast. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. NEW HAVEN The Yale Law School students who protested a conservative speaker did not violate university policies but their behavior was unacceptable and cannot happen again, Dean Heather Gerken wrote in an email Monday. Gerken wrote that the several students engaged in rude and insulting behavior and many were excessively loud in the hallway. However, the students did not violate the law schools three-warning protocol and the event went on, she wrote. The moderator, professor Kate Stith, read the first warning, then the protesters left. The March 10 event was sponsored by the Federalist Society, and included Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom and Monica Miller of the American Humanist Association. Waggoner had recently argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, involving a students right to proselytize on campus. Miller supported that argument. While the panels focus was on free speech, the students protested Waggoners presence because of the ADFs position on LGBTQ rights. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it is a legal advocacy and training group that has supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia; and claims that a homosexual agenda will destroy Christianity and society. Some students also objected to the presence of Yale police officers at the event, two in plainclothes, according to the Yale Daily News, which first reported on the event. Gerken wrote in her email, Under the Universitys free expression policy, student groups have every right to invite speakers to campus, and others have every right to voice opposition. Our commitment to free speech is free and unwavering. Because unfettered debate is essential to our mission, we allow people to speak even when their speech is flatly inconsistent with our core values. Protests of both conservative and liberal speakers have occurred regularly over the last few years. Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Insititute was shouted down at the University of California Hastings College of the Law on March 2, during a discussion of the Supreme Court vacancy left by Justice Stephen Breyer. Jeff Younger, a Texas state politician, had to have police intervene March 2 when he attempted to speak at the University of North Texas. Younger promotes criminalizing sex-reassignment surgery. Professor Josh Blackman of the South Texas College of Law was shouted down at the City University of New York Law School in 2017. Claire Guthrie Gastanaga, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, was prevented from speaking at the College of William and Mary in October 2017 by a Black Lives Matter group. At Yale, conservative blogger Milo Yiannopoulos, who planned to speak dressed in Native American costume, canceled after students protested his appearance. edward.stannard@hearstmediact.com; 203-680-9382 As part of a $5.6 trillion plan to finance the government until fiscal 2023, President Joe Biden presented ambitious ideas to cut the nation's deficit over the next decade by raising taxes on the rich and proposing increases for military and domestic programs. According to the White House, the fiscal 2023 budget, which includes a tax increase on millionaires and other changes, will cut the deficit by more than $1 trillion over the following ten years. Notably, the wide proposal foregoes specific financial demands for Biden's flagship domestic policy initiative, Build Back Better, in favor of a deficit-neutral reserve fund that would serve as a stopgap until the administration and Congress can reach an agreement. Biden Aims To Lower Expenses, Improve Economy Shalanda Young, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, briefed reporters on the president's request on a call Monday morning, "Because those discussions with Congress are ongoing, the budget does not include specific line items for investments associated with that future legislation." The budget includes the reserve money and outlines Biden's three principles for a deal: lower family expenses, improve the economy's productive potential, and reduce the deficit, according to Young. Last December, negotiations over Biden's domestic proposal came to a halt when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) stated he couldn't support the House-passed bill. Since then, the White House has remained silent on the status of discussions with Congress, and it's unclear whether current efforts to enact a scaled-back package would be successful, according to The Hill. Biden has proposed about $6 trillion in expenditure, which is the second biggest amount ever proposed. The biggest sum recommended was more than $6 trillion last year. President Joe Biden's budget plan is smaller than last year's, in part to win support from moderate Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). It contains a targeted reduction of the federal budget deficit, which follows the trend of the last year when the monthly deficit has decreased. If he can persuade his party to support his idea and get it approved through reconciliation (which avoids a filibuster), he may get closer to his stated objective than Obama accomplished in any of his eight years in office, according to Washington Post via MSN. Read Also: US Envoy to Iran Not 'Confident' About Reaching Agreement in New Nuclear Deal Soon Budget May Counter GOP Midterm Attacks The White House is bragging that the president's budget features significant deficit reduction, a move Democrats regard as geared to appeal to a small group of moderate legislators who control the president's economic agenda in the run-up to the midterm elections. Officials from the White House insist that the president has always stressed fiscal restraint, pointing out that President Joe Biden supported some deficit spending last year. They claim that Biden favors temporary deficit spending during a recession or emergency. However, now that the economy is recovering, the president is returning to deficit reduction. The country's deficit would be reduced by $1.3 trillion under Biden's plan, which is not legislation but a symbolic blueprint delivered to Congress. The loss of temporary emergency pandemic financing accounts for the majority of the decline. However, the budget proposal also calls for a minimum tax on billionaires' earnings and unrealized capital gains. Manchin, a prominent dissenter in the reconciliation discussions, has expressed support for boosting tax rates on the richest 1% of the population. Manchin has described deficit-reduction measures as "music to my ears," as per Politico via MSN. Related Article: Biden Warns: Putin "Cannot Remain in Power"; What is Russia's Response To US President's Remark @YouTube @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The Group of Seven major economies on Monday agreed to dismiss Moscow's demand of using Russian rubles to pay for natural gas exports amid Western sanctions that have caused the value of the currency to plummet. In a statement, German energy minister Robert Habeck told reporters that "all G-7 ministers agreed completely that this would be a one-sided and clear breach of the existing contracts" for natural gas exports. They argued that the products are crucial because they are used to heat homes, generate electricity, and power the industry. G7 Refuse Russia's Demand In a videoconference, the energy ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada met with the European Union's energy commissioner to reaffirm that contracts "must be respected." The statement added that payments to exports will be made in euros or dollars. Habeck added that payment for exports in rubles was not acceptable and he said the G7 will urge companies affected not to follow Russian President Vladimir Putin's demands. Last week, the Russian leader demanded that "unfriendly" countries should use Russia's currency when purchasing natural gas exports, as per ABC News. Putin then instructed the central bank to iron out a procedure for buyers to acquire rubles in Russia when making purchases. The rise in demand has resulted in an even bigger increase in gas prices that have already become quite high amid concerns it could be a prelude to a natural gas shutoff. Read Also: Biden Promises Energy Shipments for Europe To Reduce Dependence on Russian Gas, Oil Supply Several economists have argued that the move appears to have been made to try and support the ruble since its collapse after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Many other experts have raised concerns that the decision would not work as intended. According to Aljazeera, on Monday, reporters asked Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov if Russia had the capability to cut natural gas supply exports to European customers if they rejected Putin's demand. The official said that Moscow would not be handing out gas for free. Existing Agreements Western companies usually agreed to long-term supply agreements for Russian gas imports which come with the uncertainty of Russia's plans to implement changes in payment currency. Analysts have also argued that the majority of agreements were negotiated in international currencies and did not include clauses for payments in rubles. Many European importers of natural gas, including France's Engie and Austria's OMV, have said that supply contracts typically do not have clauses for ruble payments. They added that they intend to continue making payments in international currencies as per the existing agreements. Habeck added that Russian President Putin's demand to have payments in rubles is a sign that he has his "back against the wall" with Western sanctions over his invasion of Ukraine. He argued that the consequences of the war had severely harmed the Russian economy. The executive director of gas in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at S&P Global, Laurent Ruseckas, said that the EU and Russia have had brinkmanship over the flow of gas supplies. They warned that the situation could potentially lead to a cutoff of gas supplies if someone made the wrong move, the Financial Times reported. Related Article: White House Considers Direct Payment to Drivers to Combat US Gas Price Hike, But There's a Problem @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. A man of many accomplishments who was known as the guy with the patch, Theodore W. Selby, 93, died Friday surrounded by family in Midland. Selby was founder of the Savant Group, a Midland-based consortium of companies operating in the lubricant industry. His son-in-law Gordon Cox said Selby was a kind man who said he would never retire and didn't. Active until the end, Selby received his 58th patent at 93 years old. He also published more than 250 technical papers and is the recipient of numerous honors and awards. "He touched everybody he has ever been in contact with over the course of his life," Cox said Monday. Selby transferred the company to Cox and his wife Rebecca, Selby's daughter. "We want to carry on his legacy and the path he laid out." Selby was born Oct. 19, 1928, in Nebraska City, Nebraska; the oldest son of a scientist and inventor who was frequently transferred for job promotions. Consequently, the Selby family relocated to Iowa, New York City, Chicago, and Detroit. Along the way, Selby picked up important skills of sharp observation, self-sufficiency, and taking the time to understand people in many ways and circumstances. Selbys career spanned over six decades. While pursuing his Doctorate Degree in Physical Chemistry from the University of Detroit in the 1950s, he found his technical calling as a research scientist in the Lubricants Department at General Motors, where he was honored in receiving both the Russell S. Springer and Henry Ford Memorial Awards from the Society of Automotive Engineers, the first time these two awards were presented to the same person. In 1963, Selby moved to The Dow Chemical Company to assist with the expansion of its automotive lubrication capabilities. Ever the entrepreneur, Ted made a tough decision in 1969 to leave a good job at Dow Chemical to pursue his passion for problem-solving in the field of lubrication, and the consulting firm, Savant, was born. With nine children at home at the time, the move was not without considerable risk. However, he embraced the ideal that the greatest achievements are usually the hardest and those obtained quickly and easily are soon forgotten. Today, that one-man consulting firm has grown into a globally recognized laboratory and research center Cox said the notice of Selby's death have many people, including those in the industry reaching out. When asked about Selby's personality, Cox said he was outgoing, inquisitive and deep. "He was the physical nature of life," Cox said of his father-in-law. "He was a chemist and he cut right to the chase of what people were like and what they were going through." Cox said Selby's passing has left a "big hole" in the industry. "He was a pillar of the lubricant industry," Cox said. "He taught the industry and so much more." Children also loved Selby. On Christmas Selby would play Santa, a shoe in with his white beard, and his eye patch. "He was known as the pirate Santa," Cox said. For more information, please see the obituary and share condolences at wswfh.com/obituaries/obituary-listings which will be active shortly. A Houston area student who was allegedly harassed and bullied by her teachers for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance has won a $90,000 settlement, according to the civil rights organization American Atheists. The Texas Association of School Boards paid to resolve the case after the Klein Oak High School student's 12th-grade sociology teacher agreed to settle before things went to trial, the organization announced in a Tuesday news release, which was first reported by the Houston Chronicle's Rebecca Hennes. In the 2017 suit, the nonreligious student says she was discriminated against and harassed by several teachers after choosing to abstain from saying the pledge out of objection to the words "Under God" and her belief that "liberty and justice for all" is not guaranteed for people of color in the U.S. Despite knowing that the student was exempt from the pledge, the teacher, identified in the suit as Benjie Arnold, singled out the student and threatened to fail her for not observing the pledge. According to the release, Arnold told the student that what she did left him "no option but to give you a zero, and you can have all the beliefs and resentment and animosity that you want." Arnold also offered to pay students to move students to Europe if they didn't like living in America, as evidenced by an audio recording of the incident. Due to the incessant harassment, the student temporarily withdrew to be homeschooled. However, the harassment continued and intensified when she returned to Klein Oak, the release said. Geoffrey T. Blackwell, litigation counsel at American Atheists, said the settlement serves as a reminder that students do not lose their First Amendment rights when they step onto school grounds. "The classroom is not a pulpit," he said. "It is a place of education, not indoctrination." Houston civil rights attorney Randall Kallinen, who worked in partnership with Blackwell, said in the release, "It is incrediblethe time and money spent by the Klein Independent School District to stop a students free speech. School staff need to teach the Constitution, not violate it. Arnold is still a teacher at Klein Oak High School, according to Courthouse News Service, and celebrated 50 years with the district in 2020. Days after overseeing the country's largest intercontinental missile launch, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to create "more powerful" weapons. According to the state news agency KCNA, the dictator stated that only by having fearsome striking capabilities and overwhelming military force can one avert a conflict, ensure the country's security, and contain and control all imperialist threats and blackmails. Kim Jong Un Says ICBM Will Help Deter US Military Moves South Korea and other observers are concerned that North Korea is preparing to conduct its first nuclear weapons test in nearly five years. North Korea fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in 2017, defying a United Nations embargo. Hwasong-17, dubbed as the "monster missile" by defense analysts, was claimed to have been utilized in the test. The test was hailed as a "significant milestone" in North Korea's nuclear arsenal. On Monday, Kim Jong Un met with authorities, scientists, technicians, and laborers who were engaged in the most recent ICBM test. During a picture session with the Hwasong-17 in the background, Kim Jong Un committed to improve the country's offensive capabilities to deal with threats, Independent reported. Kim Jong Un stated that the new ICBM will help prevent any military actions by the US while personally overseeing the test on Thursday. After the 1950-1953 Korean War concluded in an armistice rather than a peace treaty, the United States is still formally at war with North Korea. Washington has attempted to persuade Pyongyang to hand over or reduce its stockpile of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of striking targets in the United States, as per Mirror. Read Also: Russia-Ukraine War: Cruel Video of Ukrainian Soldiers Shooting Russian Prisoners Surfaces, Sparks "Immediate Investigation" Analysts Claim North Korea's Missile Launch Was a Deception Meanwhile, analysts said they discovered inconsistencies in North Korea's footage of the country's largest missile test, concluding that Pyongyang was "deceiving" about the launch. In defiance of debilitating international sanctions, North Korea announced it successfully test-fired its new Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile on Thursday, the first time the country has done so since 2017. However, additional facts - such as anomalies uncovered in North Korea's overly styled film portraying Kim Jong Un supervised the launch - have cast doubt on Pyongyang's claims. Colin Zwirko, a senior analytical correspondent with NK Pro, a Seoul-based website that monitors North Korea, has examined commercial satellite imagery and footage released by state media, and he claims that differences in weather, sunlight, and other factors indicate that the launch shown by North Korea occurred on a different day. The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) in the United States found that a portion of the North Korean film is most likely from a test on March 16 that failed shortly after launch, exploding in mid-air above Pyongyang. That launch, or its failure, was never acknowledged by North Korea. According to anonymous sources quoted by South Korea's Yonhap news agency, intelligence authorities in Seoul and Washington think North Korea fired a Hwasong-15 ICBM on Thursday, an older and somewhat smaller kind it previously tested in late 2017. The defense ministry of South Korea has not validated this judgment. When asked if the recent launch was the new missile, a senior US defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, evaded, according to Daily Mail. Related Article: US Sends Strong Message to China, Russia Amid North Korea Missile Test: Stop DPRK From "Additional Provocations" @YouTube @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. A Mediterranean-style waterfront palace originally commissioned for NASCAR great Jeff Gordon raised the bar when it was sold last month for $36 million. The sale price set a record for the town of Highland Beach, FL. Inspired by the luxurious resorts in Cap dAntibes, the estate offers 24,468 square feet of lavishly designed living space and 120 feet of beach frontage. Gordon purchased a 1-acre parcel in 1996 for $2.4 million and built the estate in 1999. Fittingly for a NASCAR great, there's a tree-lined motor court that can accommodate 20 vehicles and a covered garage for seven additional cars. Gordon sold the eight-bed, 11-bath property in 2003 for $13.3 million, and it's changed hands a couple of times over the years, most recently in 2014 for $12.5 million. The buyer in 2014 was also a car enthusiast, and he added an entire wing with an auto museum to showcase six very special cars. Designed for NASCAR great Jeff Gordon Realtor.com 120 feet of beach frontage Realtor.com Seven-car garage Realtor.com Auto showroom Realtor.com The main residence features a mahogany front door, a rotunda foyer encased in Macedonian stone, and three-story windows with ocean views. Great room with three-story, beach-view windows Realtor.com Hungry and thirsty guests are never far from sustenancethere's a chefs kitchen, two catering kitchens, a butlers pantry, a wine room, a kitchen wine vault, a sit-down bar, and an alfresco dining loggia with a kitchen and fireplace alongside the pool. ___ Watch: The Priciest Home in Indiana Belongs to NASCAR's Tony StewartSee Inside ___ Family kitchen Realtor.com Catering kitchen Realtor.com Dining loggia with a kitchen Realtor.com There's even a juice bar in the wellness center, which also includes a sauna, massage room, and gym. Massage room in the wellness center Realtor.com Fully equipped gym Realtor.com The wing with the primary suite resembles a high-end hotel. It boasts arched windows, a double-sided fireplace, a sitting room, and a bathroom with surfaces of gold, marble, velvet, and crystal. Primary suite Realtor.com Primary suite sitting room Realtor.com Primary bath Realtor.com Other high-end spaces include a magnificently appointed office/library, billiard room, home theater, and children's playroom with a red-curtained stage. Office/library Realtor.com Billiard room Realtor.com Home theater Realtor.com The home was listed at the end of 2021 for $42 million, and a deal was sealed just a couple of months later at a 14% discount. Beach in the backyard Realtor.com Carmen DAngelo and Gerard Liguori of Premier Estate Properties represented the seller. Marcy F. Javor with Signature International Real Estate represented the buyer. The post NASCAR Star Jeff Gordon's Former Florida Estate Zooms Off With a Record Sale appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com. We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form Meghan Markle's admirers are fuming at Kate Middleton's newest fashion statement in Belize, claiming that the Duchess of Cambridge has been mimicking Meghan's style during her trip to the Caribbean. Kate Middleton, 40, wore her normally loosely curled hair in a sleek back style for the event, with a sparkly pink outfit that drew attention. Kate Middleton presented a royal attire that followed tradition while also modernizing it during her eight-day Caribbean vacation with Prince William. Kate Middleton, Prince William Have Photos Similar to Sussexes Queen Elizabeth II established the dress code for modern royal travels in the 1950s, and royal ladies have maintained it ever since. When Kate Middleton went on her maiden international trip as a member of the royal family in 2011, she followed in the footsteps of others who had gone before her. With more than a decade of royal service under her belt, Kate is beginning to let go of custom and precedent, allowing her to express herself more freely. Meghan Markle did not appear to be constrained by the same kind of tight expectations Kate had when she traveled on her maiden royal visit to the South Pacific Islands in 2018, following her marriage that same year, Newsweek via MSN reported. Meanwhile, royal fans were ecstatic to learn that a stunning portrait of Kate Middleton in the rain was taken by the same photographer who took a famous snapshot of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Samir Hussein captured the image as the royal couple started their tour of the Bahamas Tuesday morning, arriving at Sybil Strachan Primary School in Nassau in the rain. Photographs of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on their farewell trip in March 2020, which were also photographed by Hussein, are evocative of the time. Kate and William were seen recently as they continued their tour of the Bahamas at Sybil Strachan Primary School, where they visited a class to meet students and staff and attended the morning assembly, according to Daily Mail. Read Also: Planet Earth's Heartbeat Every 27.5 Million Years Causes Dramatic Changes Defining Epochs in Geological History Kate Middleton's Fashion Style The Duchess of Cambridge, 40, and her husband, Prince William, 39, have taken a trip to the Caribbean. The pair have gone to Belize, Jamaica, and the Bahamas to commemorate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee year. While exploring the Caribbean, Kate has donned a variety of Jenny Packham, Emilia Wickstead, and Alexander McQueen dresses, among many others. According to new research, Britons are more interested in Kate's clothes, hair, and make-up than any other royal lady, making her the most fashionable member of the Royal Family. The research, undertaken by hair specialists Longevita, looked at Google search data to see which royal lady had the most combined monthly searches for fashion, hair, and make-up phrases. With 11,760 monthly searches for various components of her picture, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, was proven to be the most elegant royal woman. There are 4,610 monthly searches for the phrase 'Kate Middleton dresses.' Meanwhile, there are 700 monthly searches for the Duchess' hair. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is the most fashionable royal woman. There are 9,600 monthly searches for Meghan's style, which includes hair and make-up. The Duchess also has the most number of monthly searches for her make-up of any royal lady, with 3,250 monthly searches and 1,000 monthly searches for her hair, as per Express. Related Article: Critics Slam Prince William, Kate Middleton on First Caribbean Tour for Embarrassing Photo @YouTube @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. How to send staff to Canada through Intra-Company Transfers Multinational companies can send key staff to work in Canada through Intra-Company Transfer work permits. How to send staff to Canada through Intra-Company Transfers Multinational companies can send key staff to work in Canada through Intra-Company Transfer work permits. How to send staff to Canada through Intra-Company Transfers Multinational companies can send key staff to work in Canada through Intra-Company Transfer work permits. Daniel Levy Aa Accessibility Font Style Serif Sans Font Size A A If your company has a parent company, branch, subsidiary, or affiliate in Canada, you can send key personnel to the Canadian location through an Intra-Company Transfer (ICT). ICT work permits are initially valid for one year and may be eligible for renewal. If the worker qualifies, employers are exempt from the Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) requirement. Both the company and the transferee must meet certain qualifications to be eligible for the ICT. Schedule a Free Work Permit Consultation with the Cohen Immigration Law Firm Company requirements for ICT In order for a company to be qualified for an ICT, it needs to be operating in Canada. It is not enough to just have a physical presence. The Canadian and foreign locations must be providing goods and services on an ongoing basis. There may be some flexibility allowed for start-ups. In specific cases involving the transfer of senior managers or executives, Canada may accept that the address of the new start-up is not yet secured. The company may use its lawyers Canadian address until the executive can purchase or lease a location. Also, start-ups must have realistic plans to staff their new operations and be financially able to start a business in Canada and pay employees. When transferring executives or managers, the company must demonstrate it will be large enough to support executive or management functions. When transferring a worker with specialized knowledge, the company must ensure the work is guided and directed by management at the Canadian operation and demonstrate that the company is expected to be doing business. Intra-company transferee requirements Intra-company transferees may apply for work permits if they: are employed by a multi-national company and seeking to work in a parent, subsidiary, branch, or affiliate of that company in Canada; are being transferred to a position in an executive, senior managerial, or specialized knowledge capacity; are transferring to a Canadian location that has a qualifying relationship with their current company, and will be working at a legitimate and continuing establishment of that company; have been employed continuously (via payroll or by contract directly with the company), by the company that plans to transfer them outside Canada in a similar full-time position for at least one year in the three-year period immediately preceding the date of initial application. are coming to Canada temporarily; comply with all immigration requirements for temporary entry. If the transferee has not had full-time work experience with the foreign company, immigration officers may consider other factors before refusing the applicant on this basis alone. Some of the other considerations could include the number of years of work experience the applicant had with the foreign company, the similarity of the positions, and the extent of the part-time position. Officers will also look for signs of abuse of the intra-company transferee provision. Schedule a Free Work Permit Consultation with the Cohen Immigration Law Firm CIC News All Rights Reserved. Visit CanadaVisa.com to discover your Canadian immigration options. Earlier this year as Russian troops massed along the Ukrainian border, Israel-headquartered Beewise offered to relocate each of its Ukraine-based technologists and up to 10 of their family members with all expenses paid for six months. Diana Lisovenko, a software engineer from Ukraines capital city of Kyiv, decided to stay put. She thought the chances of war were slim. I thought there was a 5% possibility, she said. Who would have thought in the 21st century such a thing would happen? Speaking in mid-March via Zoom, Lisovenko said she spends her mornings as a volunteer ferrying food to the citys remaining residents and to the soldiers defending them, driving in a car she rented in late February just as Russia started its attack on her country. In the morning, its much more safe to drive the car, Lisovenko said, adding that she and her dog are staying in a friends Kyiv apartment. Yet despite the war, her new volunteer work, the warning sirens, the explosions, and her companys continuing offer to relocate her, Lisovenko, 30, said she is staying in her city and continuing to work. She said she tries to log in after noon, explaining that she finds comfort connecting with her colleagues and having some normalcy to her day. She said she welcomes the ability to still work, saying that the emotional support and check-ins from her colleagues have helped keep her going. Many non-Ukrainian companies including US-based organizations have workers in Ukraine, with a significant portion of those companies employing Ukrainian technologists. Research firm Gartner estimates there are more than 1 million IT professionals in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all together. It noted in its February 2022 Impact of Russian Invasion of Ukraine on Software Engineering Services report that most large- and mid-tier system integrators have some presence in those three countries. Gartner also said many software product companies have development centers in the region. Given the regions importance to IT outsourcing, the Ukrainian crisis has also put the global IT market on edge. CIO.com spoke to Lisovenko and three other Ukrainian technologists who have remained in their home country to learn about their experiences as they live and work during the war. Their stories show their resolve and commitment to look forward despite the destruction and uncertainty being inflicted on their land. Work as a welcome distraction from daily threats We are still here; we are fighting. We are fighting for democracy, said Valerii Sukhov, an engineering team lead with Beewise, which makes an autonomous beehive with an integrated robotic beekeeper. Sukhov, 30, who has worked at Beewise for two years, said he, too, didnt think war was probable. Beewise Ukrainian team members, including Diana Lisovenko, software engineer (second from left), and Valerii Sukhov, engineering team lead (right) Beewise I made some conclusions that something might happen, he said. But its pretty hard to understand how your neighbors who claimed they were your brothers and sisters could attack you in the morning without any good reason. Sukhov had been living in Kyiv but he moved with his wife and their 3-year-old child to western Ukraine; theyre staying in a friends familys house near the city of Ternopil along with a half-dozen others. Like others, Sukhov said he scrambled to get food and cash from the bank just before and as the Russian invasion started, but he hasnt encountered as many challenges in getting the basics now. He said he and his family are safe. Theyre not near the front lines, although theyve been hearing the warning sirens sounding. Sukhov said he appreciates his companys relocation offers, although he himself cannot legally leave, citing government orders that require men ages 18 to 60 to stay in Ukraine. Thats the right thing in this particular situation, he said. Companies have been stepping up in a number of ways to support Ukrainian workers, but Sukhov said its hard for them to do much to change the situation on the ground. From my perspective there is not a lot of things that companies can do for us. But the support is good, he said. He added: Ukrainians are very thankful to the countries that want to help us in anyway. Despite the sudden, dramatic changes in Ukraine and in his personal circumstances, Sukhov said he continues to work, calling it a welcome distraction. Work is the thing that can help you get outside your situation. Youre moving your focus from the news of whats happening in the country, he said. Sukhov, who also connected via videoconference in mid-March, said his areas telecommunication connections remain strong and reliable, so hes able to connect with his colleagues in Ukraine, Israel, and other locales. Enduring through turmoil Although Sukhov and others welcomed the semblance of normalcy that work provides, each acknowledged the weight of the uncertainty facing him or her. The future is on the shoulders of the politicians and the army now, Sukhov said. Were just waiting and hoping. Timofii Vlasov, a QA automation engineer with Totango, maker of a customer success platform, said he, too, finds work helps distract him from somber realities and his constant heightened state of alert. The first few days youre just in suspense. It was alarming. But you cant keep yourself all the time in that state. You need some kind of distraction from all this stuff going on around Ukraine, so work is a good solution, he said, explaining that when colleagues are engaging him at work you forget about all thats happening around you at least for a moment. That, though, belies the difficulties of the new conditions in which he and others now exist. Vlasov, 33, who has worked for Totango for the past four years, left Kyiv when the war started and relocated to the Odessa area to stay with his brother and his sister-in-law. He said he contends with poor internet connections. He must plan extra time to tackle typical activities, such as getting groceries as there are often long lines at the stores. He volunteered to help the local defense and has donated money to support Ukrainian defense and civilian needs. He also has to shelter multiple times daily (often at night) when warnings sound, noting that he often seeks refuge in the basement of his building. He acknowledged that its not bomb-proof, adding that many Ukrainians are not able to constantly move to more secure locations. You start to rely on the numbers that its not going to happen to you, Vlasov said, adding that his main focus now is on the lives of his family members and their safety. Youre just trying to do things that will help your family and things that will help your country. Vlasov is one of 15 Ukrainian workers that Totango employs, said Amit Bluman, senior vice president of engineering at Totango. Bluman said Totango had developed an emergency plan in the weeks before the Russian invasion, although Bluman said, we never thought wed have to use it. Totango, like many other companies, has offered to relocate workers outside Ukraine and has extended other offers of support. Bluman said only one person relocated to another country, while the rest of the team is staying in their homeland. The company continues to help however it can, such as helping find safe housing within Ukraine for one worker and his family, Bluman said. He noted that the company doesnt obligate or expect its Ukrainian staff to be working right now. Artem Horovoi, full stack engineer, Totango Totango We want them to feel safe and to take care of their families, he said. [Were] supporting them, thats the most important thing we are able to do for our team. Artem Horovoi, 23, a full stack engineer with Totango, said he calls his family and friends in the morning and then goes to work. Like his colleague Vlasov, Horovoi has been contributing to local civilian and defense efforts. He said he is in a safe spot with reliable telecommunications, saying he, too, is keeping up with work. But he acknowledged that more pressing issues often fill his mind. I think about my family, he said, and I just think about how I want all this to end and how I want all this to end very fast. Wilkes Barre, PA (18701) Today Rain likely. High 56F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall around a half an inch.. Tonight Rain. Low 49F. Winds ENE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a half an inch. According to sources close to Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire experienced signs of suspected poisoning while attending peace negotiations on the Ukraine-Belarus border earlier this month. Sore eyes and peeling skin were said to have plagued the Chelsea FC owner, who has now recovered. Two Ukrainian peace negotiators were also injured. The suspected poisoning was arranged by Russian hardliners who intended to derail the discussions, according to the Wall Street Journal. Russian Investigator Says Roman Abramovich Is not Expected to Die Ihor Zhovkva, a spokesman for the Ukrainian president, told the BBC that while he hadn't talked to Roman Abramovich, members of the Ukrainian delegation were "good" and that one had indicated the allegation was "fake." However, as BBC security journalist Frank Gardner points out, it's not unexpected that the US would seek to downplay claims that anybody - particularly Russia - deployed a chemical weapon in Ukraine since this may lead to retaliatory action that the US is hesitant to do. The event sheds insight on Abramovich's alleged position as a middleman in Ukraine-Russia discussions. His specific role is unknown. However, a spokesman for the oligarch earlier stated that his influence was limited. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky stated on Sunday that Roman Abramovich had assisted him in de-escalating Russia's incursion. At the beginning of the month, the Russian billionaire went between Moscow and Kyiv for multiple rounds of negotiations. During the trip, he allegedly saw Zelensky, but the Ukrainian president was unaffected, and his spokesman had no information about the event, as per BBC. Meanwhile, the primary investigator who discovered Roman Abramovich's poisoning stated that the chemical attack was meant to remind the billionaire and others not to undermine the Kremlin. The billionaire oligarch was not expected to die in the poisoning, which also harmed two Ukrainian negotiators, according to Christo Grozev, the main Russia investigator for the investigative news source Bellingcat. Read Also: Russia-Ukraine War: Vladimir Putin Could Split Ukraine in 2 Like Korea; Volodymyr Zelensky Pleads for More Tanks and Jets Foreign Officials Says Poisoning Incident is "Very Concerning" The poisoning attempt during peace talks in Kyiv on March 3 was very concerning, according to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), which added that the UK will continue to assist by imposing tough sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime as well as providing defensive and humanitarian assistance to put Ukraine in the "best possible negotiating position." Roman Abramovich's spokesman acknowledged Wednesday that the billionaire had experienced the alleged symptoms after eating chocolate and drinking water but declined to provide any other information. Red eyes, painful pouring eyes, and peeling skin on their cheeks and hands plagued Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich and two senior members of the Ukrainian club. According to a source, Abramovich went blind for many hours after accepting a Ukrainian plea to assist in negotiating an end to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He was treated at a hospital in Turkey, according to Daily Mail. Following the alleged poisoning of Roman Abramovich, negotiators in the Russia-Ukraine peace talks have been advised not to eat or drink. Hardliners in Moscow have been accused of the purported strike, claiming they seek to disrupt peace efforts. Meanwhile, in Istanbul, Turkey, Russian and Ukrainian delegates are beginning face-to-face peace negotiations for the first time in more than a week, The Sun reported. Related Article: Russia Admits Deploying Bastion-P Anti-Ship Missiles in Ukraine To Crush Opposition Against Its Forces @YouTube @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into an animal charity which was criticised by a judge last year over private prosecutions. Animal Protection Services was set up in late 2019 and said it was running a helpline for members of the public to report organised animal cruelty. It then investigated these cases and brought private prosecutions to court. The regulator has significant concerns about the charity after a judge criticised the charity and its legal partner. In a statement, the charity defended its record but said it would co-operate with the investigation. 'Wholly improper reasons and purposes' for prosecution Animal Protection Services had worked with law firm Parry & Welch to bring about prosecutions, however, last year both were criticised by judges and ended up in a legal dispute with each other. Last November, Manchester Crown Court judge Nicholas Dean accused Animal Protection Services and Parry & Welch of systemic fraud and perverting the course of justice by pursuing private prosecutions with no evidential basis and for wholly improper reasons and purposes. According to a report in The Times the judge highlighted two separate legal cases conducted by the charity, which had near-identical witness statements submitted by a charity employee. The Law Society Gazette reported that Dean complained about the law firm being able to claim significant sums of money from central funds . He also said he feared some people may have pleaded guilty under pressure. Dean promised to send a copy of his ruling to the attorney general, police, the Charity Commission and the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Parry & Welch then brought a legal case against Animal Protection Services, claiming the charity owed them money. However, the court found in the charity's favour and awarded 22,000 costs against the law firm. The partnership could not pay the costs. It has appointed administrators and has ceased trading, according to documents filed with Companies House. Commission to question if people benefited inappropriately Last week the Commission announced it had opened a statutory inquiry to investigate if individuals connected to the charity benefited inappropriately from its work. During the inquiry, the Commission will look at the trustees' decision-making regarding its private prosecutions and if there has been any private benefit to the charity. Animal Protection Services was registered in 2019 but is yet to file any accounts with the regulator. Its 2021 financial accounts are currently 56 days late. There is no trustee or employee information available for the charity. The trustees have a dispensation in place, which means that their names do not appear on the register. In most cases, trustee names appear on the register of charities. Dispensations can be granted by the Commission in cases where putting their legal name in the public domain could put someone in danger. The regulator will inspect the charity's failure to file its annual accounts as well as the trustee's management of conflicts of interest. Animal Protection Services: 'The charity continues its vital work' In a statement on its website, the charity said: Despite prosecuting over 100 cases before the courts, the charity has only received one appeal against conviction which is likely to be opposed. The charity has a success rate that is comparable with other private prosecutors and the Crown Prosecution Service. In 2020 legislation, known as Lucy's Law, banned third-party puppy sales in England. Several charities had campaigned for this to be introduced. Unlicensed breeders now face an unlimited fine or six months in prison. Animal Protection Services said: The charity prosecuted the majority of animal welfare licensing offences in England. The trustees hold the view that the law is only as good as its enforcement. The charity said it would continue with its mission. Despite the challenges within the last few months, the charity continues its vital work in investigating organised animal cruelty and the charity remains committed to ensuring that the charity works to protect all animals today, tomorrow, and in the future, the statement said. sign up to receive the Civil Society News daily bulletin here . For more news, interviews, opinion and analysis about charities and the voluntary sector, False statements that Liberty Mutual made while preparing for a lawsuit relating to an underinsured motorist claim are protected by the litigation privilege and cannot be used to prove bad faith, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in a decision published today. The accuracy of a statement is irrelevant to the application of the privilege, even if the defendant knows the statement is false, the majority opinion says. Tamara Dorfman sued Liberty Mutual after she was injured in September 2014 when another motorist ran a stop sign in West Hartford and collided with her vehicle. The insurer for the driver who was at fault paid its $50,000 policy limit. Dorfman says she was permanently disabled by the accident. She asked Liberty to pay an additional $200,000 for underinsured motorist benefits, which was the remaining limit on her auto insurance policy. Liberty initially refused, claiming in court filings that it was not aware whether Smith was 100% liable for the accident. Later the insurer contended in a court filing that Dorfmans injuries were caused by her own negligence. Dorfman amended her complaint in 2017 to accuse Liberty Mutual of bad faith, negligent infliction of emotional distress and violations of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act and Unfair Insurance Practices Act, an accusation that allows awards of up three times actual damages, according to court documents. Liberty admitted liability for uninsured motorist benefits when the trail started on Sept. 5, 2018. After the trial court granted Liberty Mutuals motions to bifurcate the bad faith charges from the complaint, a jury returned a verdict finding Liberty liable for $119,928 in damages because of the accident. Proceedings on Dorfmans bad faith allegations continued. Dorfman contended that Liberty had failed to disclose that a witness had told its claims investigator that the other driver was responsible for the accident and repeatedly made false statements in court filings about its lack of knowledge of that fact. The complaint charges that the insurer had engaged in vexatious litigation by forcing her to litigate her claim even though it knew it was liable. Ms. Dorfman was subjected to misconduct amounting to false pleadings, hidden evidence, contradictory and misleading testimony, and a host of conduct that should never be countenanced by any court of law, Dorfmans attorney, Leonard Isaac, said in a filing. Superior Court Judge Cesar A. Noble in Hartford, however granted a motion by Liberty Mutual to dismiss Dorfmans complaint. The judge ruled that Liberty Mutual had based its decisions to deny Dorfmans claim on privileged communications that cannot be used to prove a bad-faith claim. On appeal, Dorfman argued that absolute immunity does not apply to claims of vexatious litigation, which means using the courts for an improper purpose. The Supreme Court, however, said it is not enough for Dorfman to allege that Liberty Mutuals misconduct constituted an improper use of the judicial system. Immunity would apply only if the insurer had made false representations in court. Withholding immunity as to the claim at issue has the potential to open the floodgates to retaliatory actions every time a plaintiff prevails in an underlying action in which the defendant raised an unsuccessful special defense or made an allegation in a pleading that was at odds with the verdict, the majority opinion says. Justice Steven D. Ecker wrote a separate opinion that dissented in part to the decision. The defendant sells automobile liability insurance. It consequently owes its insureds a direct contractual and statutory duty to not act abusively in litigation, Eckers opinion says. Allowing a liability insurer like the defendant to invoke the privilege in the present case effectively confers an entire class of commercial enterprises doing business in Connecticut with immunity from suit by consumers seeking damages for wrongful and illegal acts under-taken as part of their day-to-day business practices. Bayer AG reached an $80 million settlement with Ohio to resolve environmental damage allegedly caused by polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, made by the companys Monsanto business, the state attorney general said on Thursday. The funds from the German company, which did not admit liability, will be used for environmental cleanup, the attorney general said. Monsanto, which Bayer acquired for $63 billion in 2018, never manufactured PCBs in Ohio or discharged them into Ohio waterways, Bayer said in a statement. PCBs were once used widely to insulate electrical equipment, and were used in carbonless copy paper, caulking, floor finish and paint. They were outlawed by the U.S. government in 1979 after being linked to cancer. Bayer has been trying to resolve a number of lawsuits related to Monsantos PCBs, which were used in commercial products from 1935 until 1977, when Monsanto voluntarily ceased production. In addition to reaching legal settlements with states, the company reached a $648 million proposed class action settlement with about 2,500 cities and other local governments eligible as members of the class. Last week the agreement received preliminary approval from a federal judge. Class members must decide whether to support the deal, object to the terms or opt out and pursue their own case, as the city of Los Angeles did earlier this month. Bayer can withdraw from the settlement if more than 2% of the class members opt out. Bayer also faces personal injury cases stemming from PCB exposure. Two separate juries last year awarded a combined $247 million in damages stemming from exposure in a school in Washington state. Bayer said the evidence showed the plaintiffs were not exposed to unsafe levels of PCBs and the company said it planned to appeal both verdicts. BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) The cause of an explosion and fire at an ExxonMobil refinery in southern Montana is under investigation, company officials said Sunday. The fire began at about 10 p.m. Saturday at a refinery in Lockwood, a suburb of Billings. It was extinguished at about 1:15 a.m. Sunday. There were no injuries and all employees and contractors were accounted for, ExxonMobil spokesperson Dan Carter told The Billings Gazette. We are sorry this incident has occurred and apologize for any disruption or inconvenience, Carter said. It isnt clear how much damage was done and ExxonMobil officials didnt respond to questions about how the fire might affect production. A full assessment of any damages and an investigation of the cause will be taking place, Carter said Sunday. The plant can refine up to 2.5 million gallons (9.4 million liters) of crude oil per day and produces about 600 million gallons (2.3 billion liters) of gasoline and diesel fuel each year. Other products include asphalt, butane and propane. The refinerys emergency response team fought the fire along with crews from Lockwood, Billings and other area refineries, Yellowstone County officials said. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. GPUs have been hard to come by during the pandemic and it seems like the situation is about to get better as stock begins normalize. In fact, those hoping to get there hands on some GPUs have some good news headed their way. Asus has announced its plans to lower the prices of RTX 30-series cards. Aside from that, those who have been anticipating the launch of the NVIDIA Lovelace GPUs have also a new leak to keep them preoccupied while waiting. GPU Prices to be Lowered by Asus Things seem to be looking up for those in search of GPUs. Asus has announced that it will be lowering the prices of RTX 30-series cards by up to 25%. The lowered prices can be seen beginning April 1 and will be applied to "different models throughout the springtime." According to a report by The Verge, the following graphics cards will have the price cut: 3050 3060 3070 3080 3090 It should be noted that, as of press time, Asus has not released specific details for any of the graphics cards. The company has only stated that in general that price reductions will reach up to 25%. If you are wondering what has caused the sudden lowering of GPU prices, Asus has offered the "tariff lift on Chinese imports from the Office of the United States Trade Representative" as the reason behind it. Read Also: NVIDIA GeForce RTX Series GPU: Dutch Startup Offers Custom Laptop with NVIDIA Processors United States Trade Representative Reinstates Exemption It can be recalled that there had been an tariff exemption for graphics cards imported from China that was given 2018. When that exemption expired, the Trump administration decided to impose a 25% tax on these graphics cards. The Verge's report notes that Asus has informed the publication that it will be increasing the MSRP of its graphics cards because of the tax. Last week, the United States Trade Representative announced that the 2018 exemption will be reinstated. The exemption is set to last until the end of the year. NVIDIA Lovelace GPUs Leak In other related news, there is a new leak that has hit the internet involving NVIDIA's Lovelace GPUs. NVIDIA fans have been anticipating the launch of the next gen GPUs and what their specifications may officially be. According to a report by PC Gamer, the leak, which comes from Igor's Lab, says that the RTX 4090, in particular, will include 24GB of VRAM. As for the RTX 4080, it is said to include 12GB. Furthermore, it is being said that there is space for 12 GDDR6X memory chips in the card. Aside from that, it is also being said that the GA102 and next gen AD102 GPUs have pin-to-pin capability. Because of this, it can be assumed that "the upcoming RTX 3090 Ti PCBs will likely carry over to RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 class cards. Related Article: AMD, NVIDIA GPUs Leak Reveal Monster Specs! Full Details of Rumored Ada Lovelace AD102, RX 7900 XT Visit to South Asian countries boosts solidarity, cooperation under new circumstances -- Chinese FM Xinhua) 09:13, March 29, 2022 BEIJING, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday had an interview with media after concluding his trips to Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nepal. Wang said his trip to South Asia came at a time when the spillover effect of the Ukraine crisis has been constantly spreading and world peace and development are facing new challenges. The senior Chinese diplomat said China deeply felt the strong desire of South Asian countries to maintain the hard-won peace and tranquility in the region and accelerate post-pandemic economic recovery as well as their hope to strengthen strategic communication and deepen mutually beneficial cooperation with China. The visit consolidated the traditional friendship between China and South Asian countries, enhanced mutual understanding, deepened strategic mutual trust, clarified key cooperation directions and areas, and gathered broad consensus on solidarity, coordination and common development under new circumstances, he added. During his trip, Wang attended the Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the first time for a Chinese foreign minister to be invited for such a meeting, during which China and Islamic countries reached important consensus on a wide range of issues. The two sides agreed to deepen strategic communication and coordination, continue to work in solidarity in fighting against COVID-19, deepen cooperation in vaccine production and medicine research and development, jointly build the Belt and Road with high quality, and strengthen communication and coordination on implementing the Global Development Initiative, Wang noted. The two sides also agreed that it is of great urgency to promote a just settlement of regional hotspot issues and that the Palestinian question should not be forgotten or marginalized, he said, adding they both believe it is necessary to guide and promote the overall unity of developing countries, advocate true multilateralism, abandon the Cold War mentality, resist bloc confrontation and safeguard the common interests of developing countries. Wang also mentioned that he has reached important new consensus with the Pakistani government and military leaders on deepening strategic cooperation between the two countries under the current international and regional circumstances. China and Pakistan will carry forward their all-weather friendship, and their traditional friendship is unbreakable and rock solid, Wang said, adding the two countries also agreed to deepen all-round cooperation, and China welcomes Pakistan's deeper participation in China's new development pattern. They two countries vowed to safeguard international equity and justice, as well as agreed to practice true multilateralism, firmly oppose acts of bullying by powers, and resist the resurgence of the Cold War mentality. His visit to Afghanistan has three main objectives, including renewing the traditional friendship between the two peoples, observing the administration of the Afghan interim government, and promoting mutual understanding and building a foundation of mutual trust with the Afghan side through face-to-face exchanges, Wang said. The visit was intended to send a clear signal that the Afghan issue remains important on the current international peace and security agenda, especially for Afghanistan's neighboring countries, said the Chinese foreign minister, urging all parties to shoulder their due responsibilities and play a constructive role in this respect. In terms of China-India relations, Wang noted that the two countries are partners rather than rivals, and should help each other succeed instead of undercutting each other. As mature and rational neighbors, China and India should place the border issue in an appropriate position in bilateral relations, and should not let it define or even hinder the overall development of bilateral relations, he said. During his visit to India, Wang said he has most keenly felt that both sides agreed to adhere to the important consensus of "the two countries are not threats to each other but opportunities for each other's development" reached by the two heads of state, properly solve practical problems of common concern, handle and manage differences over the years, and promote the steady and sustainable development of bilateral ties. On his visit to Nepal, Wang said the two sides agreed that mutual understanding and support is not only a tradition of China-Nepal friendship, but also the underpinning of the strategic partnership of the two countries. The two sides also agreed to speed up the construction of the Belt and Road, ensure smooth access of points of entry by land between the two countries, discuss cross-border cooperation and gradually establish a multi-dimensional trans-Himalayan connectivity network, he continued. The two countries reiterated that they will uphold the principle of non-interference in internal affairs and the basic norms governing international relations, resist unilateralism and oppose power politics, Wang added. Noting the spillovers of the Russia-Ukraine conflict have been rippling across the globe, Wang said the general consensuses of relevant countries are as follows. Disputes should be settled peacefully through dialogue, and neither war or sanctions are good ways. The purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter should be upheld, and the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries should be safeguarded. All countries should advocate the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, safeguard the right of all countries to pursue an independent foreign policy, oppose political pressure and forced side taking, he continued, adding it is necessary to maintain the hard-won peace, stability and development in the region, resist the temptation to introduce bloc confrontation and create turbulence and tension in Asia. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) Verizon is reportedly allowing its customers to receive spam messages and clickable links that are potentially a form of phishing. Verizon customers have reported that they have been receiving harmful text messages that appear to have been sent from their own phone numbers. This practice is called spoofing. Verizon customers have complained about receiving a spam-like text message that offers them "a little gift" for paying their phone bills. In addition, when tapping into the sender details, Verizon users will see their own phone card details. As reported by Apple Insider, Twitter user @alex_lanstein shared the suspected phishing message on his account. As seen in the photo, they informed the user that their bill had been paid and that they would be eligible for a free gift if they clicked on the link contained within the message. Cc @VerizonSupport you folks should be able to detect sms spam, spoofing my own vzw number, that spoofs your own bill pay messages. Doesn't take advanced #ai #ml pic.twitter.com/wjXXS8mYKR alex lanstein (@alex_lanstein) March 28, 2022 Examples of the said spam messages include "Free message," "bill is paid," and "gift," which are common phrases used by malicious threat actors to entice unsuspecting victims. Verizon Smishing Messages Nonetheless, Alex Lanstein pointed out on Twitter that the Spam Protection Systems at Verizon were unable to block messages containing multiple instances of these phrases in the same message. Some users also pointed out that if they clicked on the link in the message, they would be taken to the website of Channel One Russia, a Russian state television station. Numerous users also complained about the same thing. If they click the link, they will be redirected to similar Russian web pages as well. However, while the links in this most recent scam appear harmless to most users, messages like these are frequently used as part of "smishing" scams, also known as text message phishing scams. In order to gather various types of personal information, such as an individual's address, credit card information, and other details, smishing is employed. Spam text messages (SMS spam or phishing texts) are sent by hackers to steal a user's data by providing a link that will acquire confidential information like banking details, credit card information, addresses, and even a user's social security number. A lot of Verizon users are worried that their data will be compromised once they click the link. The users have also criticized the company for not being able to protect its wide user base. Read Also: Update Google Chrome Now: How To Download Chrome Security Update on Mac, Linux, Windows, Android Verizon Users Protection Verizon users are recommended not to click any link included in the spoofed messages being sent. Unfortunately, the number of complaints and reports about phishing both in emails and text messages has been increasing these years. With that, users are advised to protect themselves from various spam messages. Verizon categorized in their blogpost on how to identify fake text messages, and here are some important points to remember: It is a spam message if the message is completely irrelevant to the user. It is a spam message if the message is urgent, or if the user must take immediate action. It is a spam message if the text message contains misspellings or bad grammar. It is a fake message if the text message is coming from an unfamiliar phone number or a suspicious email address, and it is causing concern. It is a fake message if a suspicious link has been included in the text message. Related Article: Google Chrome Security Update: CVE-2022-1096 a High-Severity Zero-Day Exploit Hana Financial Group Chairman Ham Young-joo, front row center, poses with firefighters in Uljin, North Gyeongsang Province, during his visit to the country's eastern coastal regions hit by wildfires earlier this month, Monday. Courtesy of Hana Financial Group By Yi Whan-woo Hana Financial Group Chairman Ham Young-joo has visited the country's eastern coastal areas that were hit recently by major wildfires in his first public activity after taking the helm of the banking group. The company said Tuesday that Ham went to Gangneung, Uljin and other regions damaged by the wildfires on Monday, instead of heading to his office on his first day of work as chairman. "I have been thinking about ways to help the regional communities that have suffered from the wildfires in addition to the tough economic conditions amid the ongoing pandemic," Ham was quoted as saying by the banking group. The company explained that Ham's visit was in line with his management principle of prioritizing "fieldwork activities," after climbing from the bottom to his current top position over his 40-year career. "The answer is always there in the field," Ham said, adding that he will "pay more attention to listening to customers and reflecting their needs in management, so that the company can offer financial services in a practical manner." Hana Financial Group Chairman Ham Young-joo, right, offers coffee to a firefighter during his visit to the country's eastern coastal regions hit by wildfires earlier this month, Monday. Courtesy of Hana Financial Group The logo of the Korea Development Bank (KDB) is seen in front of its headquarters in Yeouido, Seoul. Korea Times file By Yi Whan-woo The botched sale of SsangYong Motor is calling into question the capability of its main creditor, the Korea Development Bank (KDB), in salvaging financially troubled companies. SsangYong Motor joins Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME), also under KDB control, in remaining unsuccessful at finding new owners during the Moon Jae-in administration. Industry sources speculated on Tuesday that such circumstances faced by the state-run KDB may leave an unfavorable impression on the incoming Yoon Suk-yeol administration. They noted that public funds will have to be injected to maintain the two businesses, after massive amounts have already been spent. The new government, on the other hand, is already burdened with a record-high national debt that could reach up to 1,064 trillion won ($872.5 billion) by the end of this year, following a series of relief programs initiated by the current administration against the economic fallout due to the pandemic. The sale of SsangYong Motor collapsed, Monday, after the much smaller carmaker Edison Motor, which had been chosen to buy it for 304.8 billion won, failed to make part of the payments by a deadline on March 25. The planned takeover of DSME by Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHH) was called off in January, when the EU rejected the $1.8 billion acquisition deal between the world's two largest shipbuilders. The deal required the EU's consent but it raised an objection over the possibility of a monopoly regarding liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers. "KDB for some reason was believed to be too optimistic about the DSME deal, even though it had dragged on for years," a senior unionist at DSME said on condition of anonymity. The union official pointed out that the EU had been postponing its decision repeatedly on whether to support the deal, after a relevant agreement was signed between KDB and HHI in March 2019. "It was apparent that the longer the deal took, the more taxpayer money would be used," he said. In the case of SsangYong Motor, KDB put the company up for sale in June 2021 after Indian carmaker Mahindra & Mahindra gave up its rights as a controlling stakeholder in January of the same year. "There are multiple companies that undergo corporate restructuring by KDB, and the process is very complex for it to resolve on its own," Korea Capital Market Institute research fellow Hwang Sei-woon said. Against this backdrop, some market observers are pessimistic that KDB Chairman Lee Dong-gull will be able to serve until the end of his term in 2023. Lee has been outspoken against Yoon's pledge to relocate KDB outside of Seoul, raising speculation that Yoon may attempt to find a new KDB chief despite Lee's remaining tenure. Meanwhile, KDB said Tuesday that it "will closely monitor the situation regarding SsangYong Motor." "Korean Teachers" author Seo Su-jin / Courtesy of Seo Su-jin By Park Han-sol In the third act of Seo Su-jin's novel, "Korean Teachers," three Korean language instructors at Seoul's H University meet up for dinner on the first day of fall term classes, amid hopes for a trouble-free semester. While waiting for their dishes to be served, one throws a question out to the table: "How many people did they fire this semester?" An answer comes, rather nonchalantly, "Seven or so?" No one at the dinner table really recalls any of the names of the unfortunate lecturers. One thing the three do know, however, is that they were the lowest-ranking teachers in terms of their student evaluations. With the number of international students enrolling in H University's Korean language school fluctuating every term due to unexpected visa and travel issues, the administration claims there is no need to keep as many hourly lecturers on standby especially those who have been deemed "incompetent" in the eyes of the students. But are they, really? Seo's debut novel follows four Korean teachers working at Seoul-based university's language school over the course of one academic year, with each act dedicated to a single protagonist: Seon-yi in the spring, Mi-ju in the summer, Ga-eun in the autumn and Han-hee in the winter. The cover of "Korean Teachers" (2022), written by Seo Su-jin and translated by Lizzie Buehler / Courtesy of Harriett Press In a dispassionate, almost surgical, tone, it lays bare how the language school operates by mobilizing highly educated women and subjecting them to a toxic work environment as well as unfair contract terms. The instructors are stuck in a cycle, where they are hired for a short period as hourly lecturers, evaluated, ranked and replaced similar to commodities. In this deeply flawed system, each teacher is relegated to a simple cog in the machine, and often pressured into silence when faced with social and ethical challenges, including sexism and racial prejudice. Winner of the 2020 Hankyoreh Literature Award, the book was translated into and published in English this month. "My aim was to paint a candid picture of the incredibly complex and layered realities faced by Korean language lecturers every day," the author told The Korea Times in a recent interview. As a certified Korean language instructor herself, Seo taught at several universities in Seoul from 2016 to 2019. "I wanted to shatter the illusion that these highly educated instructors, who are somehow seen as ambassadors for Korean culture in the wave of globalization, are treated and compensated well." Although "Korean Teachers" is a work of fiction, many of the disquieting events that unfold from the discovery of illegally taken photos of lecturers being spread on social media with offensive hashtags to an instructor on the verge of being fired due to pregnancy are inspired by the real-life experiences of the author or her colleagues. As the global interest in learning the Korean language continues to grow on the back of the country's rise as a major cultural powerhouse something that Seo herself has also witnessed in Sydney, where she is currently based the book's rare glimpse into the "other side" of the Korean wave is both timely and meaningful in more ways than one. "Here's food for thought I wanted to offer when writing this novel: whether we are ready to discuss the easily overlooked shadow behind hallyu, the stories of the exploited groups of workers behind the splendors of so-called 'K-culture,'" she said. Protesters call for better treatment and higher wages for Korean language instructors at a university in Seoul in this June 18, 2021 photo. Yonhap David Scott loads supplies into his tent near 22nd Street in downtown Denver. Hes not worried about sweeps of homeless encampments because Denver officials told him he could return once the sidewalks are cleaned. As long as they keep it to where were getting cleaned, not swept, its all right, says Scott. (Jakob Rodgers for KHN) Are you a current print subscriber to Columbia Gorge News? If so, you qualify for free access to all content on columbiagorgenews.com. Simply verify with your subscriber id to receive free access. Your subscriber id may be found on your bill or mailing label. A view of downtown "Seoul" as imagined by the set designers of "Mr. Sunshine" / Courtesy of Steven L. Shields By Steven L. Shields Nonsan is famous for two things: Strawberries and the ROK Army basic training center. Few would imagine that there is a pleasant day trip of scenic beauty and television drama fame to be had here. Nonsan region has a rich history from before the Three Kingdoms Era. An important battle during Silla times was fought in the area. Now Nonsan is part of the greater Daejeon metropolitan area and is easily accessible by train, bus or car. I went to Nonsan in February, just as the strawberries (all grown in hothouses these days) were coming onto the market. Of course, I couldn't resist buying (and later eating) a box (shared with friends). The day was clear and bright, and the weather was cool but not cold. My trip began at the south end of the course I had chosen. My first stop was at the Sunshine Studio, not far from the military training center and adjacent to a "Military Experience" hall. The courtyard of the hall displays weaponry from the ROK military. The hall is geared mainly to schoolchildren who come on field trips to introduce them to what it might be like to be in the armed forces. I passed up the opportunity and headed straight for Sunshine Studio. Just one of the exciting pieces of hardware on display at the Military Experience Hall in Nonsan / Courtesy of Steven L. Shields "Mr. Sunshine" is a well-known 2018 romantic drama set in Seoul during the beginnings of Japan's encroachment of the Korean Empire. Though some criticized the drama for "twisting history," the show was never intended to be a documentary. "Mr. Sunshine" is a pure, well-written, well-played romance, with the backdrop of early 1900s Seoul. One can catch a glimpse of what downtown Seoul may have been like 120 years ago. Of course, it is not bustling with the animals, merchants and crowds that would have been present then. The interiors of some of the hanok and thatched-roof houses are set up as if someone had lived there, while the interors of the major architentural pices, particularly the Glory Hotel and the Seoul Electric Company have displays of costumes worn by the stars of the drama. The studio at Nonsan retains the miniature Seoul City built for exterior shots. At the Glory Hotel, the second floor is a large coffee shop, with lovely views over the valley and the set below. The Seoul Electric Company building hosts a lunch counter. Many of the smaller shop buildings, such as the French Bakery, sell candy and other baked treats. A view of old "Seoul" with the "Glory Hotel" in the background. In "Mr. Sunshine," the main character lives in the hotel. / Courtesy of Steven L. Shields The training center in Nonsan opened in 1951, during the Korean War. Over the past 70 years, hundreds of thousands of Korean men have spent several weeks there as they began their compulsory military duties. While Nonsan Basic Training Center was not the only basic training camp in decades past, it was the biggest and is now the sole army training camp for recruits. I've not met any Korean men who would like to go back. For most, basic training was hard, and all do not welcome the compulsory military service requirement, but there is little or no choice but to serve. I often heard young men speak of their time at "Nonsan Dae" (university) in years past. There is no university at Nonsan. They meant that their university education was disrupted by having to do their military service, so they sarcastically called it Nonsan University. The training center is not open to the public. Even when I stopped briefly to take a photo of the entrance, the gate guard approached and told me to clear out. After lunch in town, my next stop was Tapjeong Lake. The lake was formed by a dam initially built between 1941 and 1944 and since rebuilt. The lake provides irrigation water to the thousands of hectares of farms in the Nonsan region. The lake is home to freshwater fish and recreational boating, but no swimming is allowed. In the past couple of years, the waterfront has been turned into an eco-park, with walkways around the shoreline. There are many hotels and restaurants also. One brave soul in a wet suit was windsurfing across what must have been a chilly surface when I was there. The wind was great for the sport, but walking across the bridge, the breeze was icy. Tapjeong Lake and the newly opened suspension pedestrian bridge / Courtesy of Steven L. Shields The newly opened Tapjeong Lake suspension bridge was my destination. The bridge was opened late in 2021 and officially inaugurated on March 1, 2022. Somehow the date is fitting since the Japanese built the first dam. The pedestrian bridge is almost 600 meters from north to south, with viewing platforms in the middle. Nonsan City has also furnished the bridge with free wifi since no one can live without that at such a beautiful place. Though not in my plans, the walking courses around the banks of the lake would give many people the great pleasure of exercise, scenic beauty, and clean air. Continuing north from Nonsan toward Seoul, my final stop of the day was the Onpit Nature Forest. Though the house and the surrounding grounds are private property, the owners have graciously allowed visitors to hike through the woods and see the house that was the exterior setting for the hit TV 2021 series, "Our Beloved Summer." Even in early spring, the setting was romantic, and many young couples were wandering through the grounds, taking photos in front of the house and enjoying the pleasant day. This private country home was a backdrop for a popular 2021 TV series. / Courtesy of Steven L. Shields Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Boomtown 2022: How to live your best life in Columbia over 50 Columbia makes repeated appearances on lists ranking cities as good places to live. It is perhaps an even better place to mature and retire. A strong health care network, reasonable housing prices, a vibrant, engaged community and an appealing downtown help create an attractive location for all generations, but especially for those over 50. Read more stories. Read the e-Edition JCS Chairman Gen. Won In-choul, right, and U.S. Gen. Mark Milley / Korea Times file The top military officers of South Korea, the United States and Japan will hold trilateral talks in Hawaii later this week, Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said Tuesday, after North Korea's recent intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test. JCS Chairman Gen. Won In-choul and his U.S. and Japanese counterparts Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. Koji Yamazaki are set to attend the Trilateral Chiefs of Defense (Tri-CHOD) meeting at the Indo-Pacific Command, Wednesday (local time), according to the JCS. "(The three will) have discussions about multilateral cooperation to promote peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia," the JCS said in a statement. The talks were arranged as Seoul, Washington and Tokyo are moving to reinforce security cooperation after Pyongyang launched an ICBM, Thursday, ending years of a self-imposed moratorium on nuclear weapons and ICBM tests. In Hawaii, Won will also meet senior U.S. military officials, including Adm. John Aquilino, the commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, for talks on strengthening the bilateral alliance, the JCS said. The JCS chiefs of the three countries last met in April 2021, when they visited Hawaii to attend the change-of-command ceremony for Aquilino. (Yonhap) As businesses move to the next stage in their COVID-19 pandemic response by reopening offices many are adopting a hybrid approach with some staffers working remotely at least part of the week. But theres no one-size-fits-all answer, which was apparaent at last weeks Enterprise Connect industry conference, where a panel of IT leaders discussed their priorities as they support multiple modes of working. We're going to be very flexible and adaptive, said Todd White, IT manager of collaboration services at Ford Motor Company, where workers will return to their offices onApril 4. For certain roles, there are huge benefits by being in the office together with their teams, [with] other roles, not so much. We have an approach where we think 25% to 30% will probably be coming back, but we're going to be flexible enough to accommodate what does happen and were going to tack as we see what changes. What we're looking to do is set up the organization so that we can move super fast with the hybrid workforce, hiring talent wherever they are: they don't have to move to Dearborn, Michigan anymore, White said. Biotech firm Amicus Therapeutics, where laboratory staff are required to carry out their jobs on premises, is taking a slightly different approach: the company plans to support remote work where possible. Were going to be hybrid, said Gary LaSasso, senior director for global IT at Amicus Therapeutics. Scientists can't work from home; you have to do research in a lab for the most part. But for the rest of the workers, we want to provide the opportunity to be wherever it is they need to be on that particular day. He pointed to the differing views among workers about a return to the office, and sees a generational divide. We have an executive who maybe wants to be in the office all of the time, because that's what their career may have been, LaSasso said. You have the younger generation who just wants to come in and come out and has different needs. But we have to accommodate all of them and all of their experiences and all of their needs. At transport and logistics firm Ryder Systems, there's no official policy covering all the companys office employees, though some staff will continue to work from home long-term. The only real policy we have is 100% remote for all our call centers, said David Bartos, senior manager of telecommunications at Ryder Systems. We feel confident we can keep our call centers 100% remote and have the efficiency and the uptime that we're looking to have. Southern Glazers Wine and Spirits also favors a flexible approach to meet the demands of different job roles, said Ann Dozier, senior vice president and chief information officer. That includes having service-center staffers to continue to work remotely, though it will be optional. We believe that will give us more flexibility to be able to build out more talent across the US, said Dozier. Customer service jobs are well-suited to remote workers who can be more effectively supported and monitored, she said, and is role where you can measure productivity very effectively. While remote work makes sense in some cases, there is tremendous value in people getting together for collaboration for certain activities, Dozier said. New expectations in a hybrid environment During the pandemic, IT leaders and their teams were tasked with providing a good user experience to home workers. While that put pressure on IT, it also served to highlight its importance in connecting workers and maintaining business operations. The emerging hybrid workplace will create new challenges and opportunities, according to the panellists. Dozier pointed to a change in employee communication habits as workers began to return to the office over the past month.Some of the behaviors are very similar to work from home, she said. For example, when a meeting for 200 staff was held in the office, staff logged in from their desks via Zooms videoconferencing software, she said, rather than meeting in conference rooms as was the norm pre-pandemic. This put unexpected demands on network infrastructure. We hadn't planned our office networks to have 200 people on Zoom at the same time, plus run all of our cloud operations, so it's going to be a bit of an adjustment, said Dozier. We're making sure that we're fine-tuning our infrastructure. The big opportunity is going to be how we create the right user experience when some people are in conference rooms together, some people are remote, and then some people may still be in their office because they're trying to multitask. Meanwhile, Southern Glazers Wine and Spirits has been investing in improvements to the meeting room experience for in-office workers, said Dozier. Our conference rooms used to be pretty complicated: there's a lot of bells and whistles to do different things, said Dozier. Now, it's very simple to have an appliance in the room that anybody can use; it makes it a lot easier for us to service. Having the ability to use virtual assistants in the room, instead of having somebody from my team have to go there to help, is adding value. At Ford, the shift to remote work early on and more recently to a hybrid model has underscored the importance of IT to underpin employee experience. The business is understanding the tech more, they're realizing they need to invest more to make this hybrid workforce go, said White. That includes cyber and analytics to diagnose challenges around home offices. New tools on the horizon For example, Ford is investing in machine learning-based analytics to address bandwidth restrictions in home offices, he said. If somebody is having an ISP issue or their kids are streaming Netflix too much, the systems can alert the user to say, 'Hey, this is what's going on, try this or that to get high quality conferencing going, said White. Ford is also eyeing the use of the AI capabilities software vendors have added to collaboration tools to improve the meeting experience for users. We think the rise of AI is going to help pre-meeting, post-meeting, help with meeting notes, real-time translations, said White. We have people [for whom] English isn't their native language; sometimes they have meetings after the meeting just to understand what the meeting was, he said. We do 60,000 meetings a day, so we can't afford that. The digital world of whiteboarding and collaboration is important so that 3D modellers can work remotely. Tools that support asynchronous work are another area of interest. We are looking at the use of video, in a sense like TikTok or Instagram, where you can record updates and you don't actually have to go to the meeting anymore, said White. Expectations around video have changed significantly during the pandemic, said LaSasso. Any place, any time, any device is now table stakes, he said. So how do you take those experiences to the next level, whether it's on the device side or the application side? It's captioning and translation for meetings; [that helps] when you're dealing with colleagues in other parts of the world, people with hearing disabilities can see the words, those kinds of things. Despite innovation in a range of areas by collaboration and communication software vendors, theres still room for improvement, said Dozier. In particular, greater interoperability between competing tools on the market would help. That's a huge challenge because our users are different, she said. What our salespeople need, what our delivery drivers need, and what our office workers need are very different, and we use a lot of the [software] brands that are in this audience. Ultimately, we need for [applications] to tie together to be able to create that seamless experience for our users. 03/29/2022 Photo (c) ogichobanov - Getty Images COVID-19 tally as compiled by Johns Hopkins University. (Previous numbers in parentheses.) Total U.S. confirmed cases: 79,999,187 (79,954,968) Total U.S. deaths: 978,059 (976,705) Total global cases: 482,602,737 (481,121,555) Total global deaths: 6,128,763 (6,124,475) PPP led to biggest fraud in a generation, investigators say When the COVID-19 pandemic struck two years ago, Congress responded with a number of emergency measures. One of those measures was the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which rewarded businesses for retaining employees as the economy shut down. Two years later, investigators claim that the program produced the biggest fraud in a generation. Investigators and other public officials told NBC News that fraudsters made bogus claims and collected millions of dollars that they spent on houses, cars, and travel. Investigators say fraudsters collected as much as $80 billion from the $800 billion program. According to Justice Department officials, the structure of the program made it easy to abuse. They say the Small Business Administration required very little verification from applicants. Most of the pandemics lost jobs havent returned, report finds Layoffs and resignations have been a hallmark of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two years later, with the virus in apparent retreat in the U.S., a government report shows that jobs have not returned to a majority of states. The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the number of jobs had surpassed pre-pandemic levels in only 21 states as of February. According to the report, New York is running a 454,000 private-sector job deficit when compared to February 2020. The 4.1% decline in employment is one of the worst in the U.S. Nebraska and Utah had the lowest jobless rates in February, at 2.1% each. The next lowest rates were in Indiana (2.3%) and Kansas (2.5%). Study finds dental health can affect COVID-19 Scientists continue to learn about the virus that causes COVID-19 by finding connections between it and other health conditions. In a new study, researchers have concluded that people with poor dental hygiene are more vulnerable to severe symptoms. In the study, about 75% of people who suffered from severe dental disease were hospitalized with COVID-19. Conversely, none of the subjects who enjoyed good dental health were hospitalized. The researchers aren't ruling out the possibility that people with poor dental health may be generally unhealthy, but they note that the virus enters the bloodstream through the bodys ACE2 receptors, which are plentiful in the tongue and gums. Around the nation 03/29/2022 Photo (c) Teka77 - Getty Images On Tuesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the green light for older and immunocompromised people to get a second booster dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. With this action, the agency says consumers who have a higher risk of severe disease, hospitalization, and death can rest easier. Current evidence suggests some waning of protection over time against serious outcomes from COVID-19 in older and immunocompromised individuals. Based on an analysis of emerging data, a second booster dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine could help increase protection levels for these higher-risk individuals, said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDAs Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. Additionally, the data show that an initial booster dose is critical in helping to protect all adults from the potentially severe outcomes of COVID-19. So, those who have not received their initial booster dose are strongly encouraged to do so. The agency said its approval of the new uses for the vaccines came as a result of safety surveillance data provided to the FDA. The Ministry of Health of Israel immunized approximately 700,000 people with second booster doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. A second booster dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was tested on 120 participants over the age of 18 years old in a separate study. No new safety concerns were reported during up to three weeks of follow up after the second booster dose, the agency reported. What older and immunocompromised individuals need to know The agency has provided the following additional information on the emergency use authorizations: Older individuals : A second booster dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine may be administered to individuals 50 years of age and older at least 4 months after receipt of a first booster dose of any authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccine. Immunocompromised individuals: A second booster dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine may be administered to individuals 12 years of age and older with certain kinds of immunocompromise at least 4 months after receipt of a first booster dose of any authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccine. These are people who have undergone solid organ transplantation or who are living with conditions that are considered to have an equivalent level of immunocompromise. As for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine and immunocompromised individuals, a second booster dose of the vaccine may be administered at least 4 months after the first booster dose of any authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccine to individuals 18 years of age and older with certain kinds of immunocompromise. The FDA previously authorized a single booster dose for certain immunocompromised individuals following the completion of a three-dose primary vaccination series. Participants pose during an international training course for prosecutors held at Siracusa International Institute in Sicily, Italy, Feb. 14 to 18. The event was co-organized by the International Association of Prosecutors and UNESCO. Courtesy of International Association of Prosecutors By Lee Hyo-jin Violent crimes against journalists worldwide are on the rise but many of the cases are being closed without any judicial action, according to the International Association of Prosecutors (IAP), which has vowed to strengthen efforts to ensure the safety of journalists. Established in 1995, the IAP is the only global non-governmental organization of prosecutors committed to expanding and strengthening mutual cooperation in criminal investigations amid the rapid growth of transnational crimes. The association currently has over 350,000 members from 177 countries. "Violent crimes on journalists have surged over the past decade to a very concerning level. Korea is considered a relatively safe area, while journalists, media professionals and associated personnel in regions of conflict such as South America, the Middle East and Africa face serious threats to their lives," Hwang Cheol-kyu, president of the IAP, told The Korea Times. Hwang Cheol-kyu, president of the International Association of Prosecutors / Courtesy of International Association of Prosecutors Congratulations, erbilfrenchschool.com got a very good Social Media Impact Score! Show it by adding this HTML code on your site: Erbilfrenchschool.com scored 70 Social Media Impact. Social Media Impact score is a measure of how much a site is popular on social networks. 3.5/5.0 Stars by Social Team This CoolSocial report was updated on 25 Aug 2014, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want. erbilfrenchschool.com is very popular in Facebook. Furthermore its facebook page has 19304 likes. This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared, liked or recommended the erbilfrenchschool homepage on Facebook + the total number of page likes (if erbilfrenchschool has a Facebook fan page). The total number of people who shared the erbilfrenchschool homepage on Google Plus by a google +1 button. This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared the erbilfrenchschool homepage on Twitter + the total number of erbilfrenchschool followers (if erbilfrenchschool has a Twitter account). The total number of people who shared the erbilfrenchschool homepage on StumbleUpon. The total number of people who shared the erbilfrenchschool homepage on Delicious. Basic Information PAGE TITLE Erbil French School - ecole francaise Danielle Mitterrand a Erbil DESCRIPTION French Erbil School Danielle Mitterrand Website Site Internet de l'ecole francaise Danielle Mitterrand a Erbil, Kurdistan, Irak KEYWORDS OTHER KEYWORDS school, french, erbil, cole, the french, activities, french school The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of the site. CoolSocial advanced keyword analysis tool is able to detect and analyze every keyword on each page of a site. The keywords meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage. The title found in the head section of the homepage. The description meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage. Domain and Server DOCTYPE HTML 5.0 CHARSET AND LANGUAGE English English DETECTED LANGUAGE English English SERVER OPERATIVE SYSTEM Represents HTML declared type (e.g.: XHTML 1.1, HTML 4.0, the new HTML 5.0) The language of erbilfrenchschool.com as detected by CoolSocial algorithms. Operative System running on the server. Character set and language of the site. Type of server and offered services. Site Traffic trend during the last year. Only available for sites ranked <= 100000 in the world. Referring domains for erbilfrenchschool.com by MajesticSeo. High values are a sign of site importance over the web and on web engines. Facebook link FACEBOOK PAGE LINK FOUND FACEBOOK PAGE www.facebook.com/pages/French-School-Erbil---/215134178611342 DESCRIPTION All children from 2 to 14 are welcome. http://erbilfrenchschool.com Ecole francaise Danielle Mitterrand a Erbil. LIKES 19304 PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT 25 PAGE TYPE Education TIMELINE PAGE TIMELINE A Facebook page link can be found in the homepage or in the robots.txt file. The type of Facebook page. The total number of people who tagged or talked about website Facebook page in the last 7-10 days. The description of the Facebook page describes website and its services to the social media users. Facebook Timeline is the new layout of Facebook pages. The total number of people who like website Facebook page. The URL of the found Facebook page. Twitter account link TWITTER PAGE LINK NOT FOUND Add CoolSocial badge. Show it by adding this HTML code on your site: Smart1host.com scored 48 Social Media Impact. Social Media Impact score is a measure of how much a site is popular on social networks. 2.5/5.0 Stars by Social Team This CoolSocial report was updated on 19 Feb 2015, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want. Add a widget like this on your site: click here This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared, liked or recommended the smart1host homepage on Facebook + the total number of page likes (if smart1host has a Facebook fan page). The total number of people who shared the smart1host homepage on StumbleUpon. The total number of people who shared the smart1host homepage on Google Plus by a google +1 button. The total number of people who shared the smart1host homepage on Delicious. This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared the smart1host homepage on Twitter + the total number of smart1host followers (if smart1host has a Twitter account). Basic Information PAGE TITLE SMART 1 HOSTing SoLution | Get Smart for your Hosting DESCRIPTION Select where to run your sites with Smart Hosting Solutions a Low-cost Cloud Hosting solutions supplier. 30-day moneyback. KEYWORDS web hosting, shared web hosting, business Website Hosting, MySQL web hosting domain, unmetered disk quota, unlimited data transfer | unlimited bandwidth OTHER KEYWORDS hosting, control, panel, control panel, unlimited, web hosting, vps hosting The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of the site. The title found in the head section of the homepage. CoolSocial advanced keyword analysis tool is able to detect and analyze every keyword on each page of a site. The description meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage. The keywords meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage. Domain and Server DOCTYPE HTML 5.0 CHARSET AND LANGUAGE English (United States) UTF-8English (United States) DETECTED LANGUAGE English English SERVER (PHP/5.2.17) OPERATIVE SYSTEM Represents HTML declared type (e.g.: XHTML 1.1, HTML 4.0, the new HTML 5.0) Character set and language of the site. The language of smart1host.com as detected by CoolSocial algorithms. Type of server and offered services. Operative System running on the server. Site Traffic trend during the last year. Only available for sites ranked <= 100000 in the world. Referring domains for smart1host.com by MajesticSeo. High values are a sign of site importance over the web and on web engines. Facebook link FACEBOOK PAGE LINK NOT FOUND A Facebook page link can be found in the homepage or in the robots.txt file. The URL of the found Facebook page. Facebook Timeline is the new layout of Facebook pages. The total number of people who like website Facebook page. The total number of people who tagged or talked about website Facebook page in the last 7-10 days. The type of Facebook page. The description of the Facebook page describes website and its services to the social media users. Twitter account link TWITTER PAGE LINK NOT FOUND A coalition of farmers and fishermen clashes with police in a building at the Sejong Government Complex, March 25. Yonhap Take this bit where Richter forgets how to be a sidekick after Conans show took a summer break. Human Resources is right there to help Andy get back on track, reminding him that You need to make the host believe in the irrational fantasy that he is the funniest person in the world. Unlike other sidekicks whose sole job is to laugh at the host, Richter often gets to sing lead, slinging as many jokes as Conan. Several episodes have us believing Richter is actually smarter than his boss, even as hes resigned to the indignity of the sidekick chair. Geoff Peterson Worldwide Pants Fun fact: Skynet becomes sentient next month! Continue Reading Below Advertisement Geoff Peterson was Craig Fergusons skeleton-robot sidekick, which was every bit as awesome as that sounds. Initially, I wanted something which represented some kind of deconstructionist contempt for the late-night genre and the idea of a sidekick, says Ferguson. But (Geoff voice-actor Josh Thompson) became so good at it, he just became a sidekick. Are android cronies the future? And what do we have to fear from our new late-night overlords? I've gotten a lot of messages from the Robot Skeleton Army on Twitter, urging me to be careful that Geoff Peterson does not become self-aware and turn on humanity, says Geoff creator and Mythbusters robot guru Grant Imahara. I can guarantee you that I've put in place programming to prevent that from happening. Continue Reading Below Advertisement Paul Shaffer Although Doc Severinson sometimes filled the Ed role for Johnny when McMahon was on a bender, Paul Shaffer was the first hybrid sidekick-bandleader in late night. Worldwide Pants Paul is one kooky, nutty showbiz icon. Love you, babe. He was also the first to perform in character, a showbiz-loving, jive-talking hepcat who loved nothing more than soaking in the hot tub of celebrity excess. Letterman was initially attracted to Shaffer from his work with BIll Murray in his lounge singer sketches on Saturday Night Live -- his Letterman persona definitely borrowed that vibe. Next, let's mention the most ridiculous vampire of all. The Romani in Kosovo believed that pumpkins and watermelons may transform into vampires if left long enough untouched. Possibly, the myth of the vampire watermelon comes from how certain fruits take on the appearance of bloody skin as they age. Alternatively, this myth is so ridiculous that no one truly believed it, and the Romani told it to visiting scholars as a joke. Continue Reading Below Advertisement Allow us to quote the Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology: "Fortunately, the vampire pumpkin does not actually attack anyone in a physical way, making it quite possibly the most harmless of all vampires; however, it does ooze blood and roll about on the floor making an annoying 'brr, brr, brr' sound." The encyclopedia is not a work of comedy, and this description is based on the research of ethnographer Tatomir Vukanovic. William Bout/Unsplash And the research of Leo Gallagher, Vampire Hunter Last up for today are the Cihuateteo of Aztec legend. The Cihuateteo live in the underworld then come to Earth on five specific days of the year to attack children and other victims. Though they drink your blood and paralyze you, this does not turn you into a vampire. Instead, a Cihuateteo is created when a mother dies in childbirth. The Aztecs saw childbirth as a battle between a mother and the gods. Those who succeeded got a child; those who died became Cihuateteo. Vassil/Wiki Commons And received a belt made of living snakes. Continue Reading Below Advertisement This was, you might say, not a terribly respectful way of remembering women who died in labor. The Aztecs imagined such women as evil spirits, with the breasts and stomach of someone who has just given birth but childless and therefore eager to replace the kid who never was. To that end, she'd kidnap children, or seduce men to get pregnant once more. See, we knew it: There's no getting around sex with vampires. It's a universal myth. Which explains why we've been seeing all those pumpkins with holes drilled in them. Top image: Vassil/Wiki Commons President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol, right, stands with the outgoing president, Moon Jae-in during their meeting at Cheong Wa Dae in Seoul, March 28. Yonhap Whether President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol will be able to relocate the presidential office in time for his May 10 inauguration remains a question even though President Moon Jae-in has promised to look into the matter and offer cooperation. Moon's remarks, made during a dinner meeting with Yoon, Monday, was seen as a step forward as Moon's office had effectively expressed opposition earlier, saying the envisioned relocation could leave a security vacuum, because it also involves moving the defense ministry in a short period of time. Moon's cooperation is key, because the Cabinet must approve reserve government funding for the plan. Despite the positive words from Moon, the prospect of finishing the relocation by May 10 as planned is uncertain, as Moon's offer of cooperation is considered conditional on a "careful" review of the plan. "President Moon said he believes a determination on the relocation area of the presidential office is the next government's to make and that the current government will carefully look into and cooperate for the budget needed for the exact relocation plan," Chang Je-won, Yoon's chief of staff, told reporters after the dinner, which he attended. After initial reports of Moon's willingness to cooperate on the relocation plan, Cheong Wa Dae insiders cautioned against distorting the president's latest remarks, saying the emphasis was on a "careful" review of the plan. Some even claimed there was no change in Moon's stance, as he had left open the possibility of rejecting the budget proposal for the relocation if it failed to resolve his concerns about leaving a security vacuum. Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal urged utility regulators on Monday to open an investigation into claims the states energy providers wrongly sued customers for unpaid bills during the height of the pandemic. However, the utility companies continued to deny the accusations, calling them misleading. Blumenthal criticized what he called draconian utility collection practices used by Eversource Energy, Avangrid and their subsidiaries in a letter his office sent Monday to Marissa Gillet, chairwoman of the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. Blumenthals letter came a little more than two weeks after the states Office of Consumer Counsel petitioned PURA for an investigation. While households were facing a financial crisis, Eversource Energy and Avangrid were looking to increase their revenue on the backs of consumers who could not afford to pay their electric bills, Blumenthals letter said. The pandemic with families advised to stay home in order to protect themselves and mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and unemployment soaring to record levels increased this economic stress. It is therefore highly inexcusable for utility companies to aggressively pursue residents who were already having trouble meeting their financial obligations. Connecticuts two largest utility companies obtained more than 300 court judgments and nearly 100 wage garnishments against customers who fell behind on their bills over the last two years, records provided by the OCC show. Those collection efforts came at a time when state officials issued orders seeking to assist vulnerable and low-income residents affected by the COVID pandemic. Senator Blumenthal does not have the facts straight Eversource has not pursued any judgments and/or wage garnishments during COVID, Tricia Modifica, a spokesperson for Eversource Energy, said Monday in a statement. On March 13, 2020, we voluntarily stopped all collection activities including efforts to seek new judgments for historically owed balances, Modifica said. Judgments and wage garnishments are always a last resort when were working with customers on overdue balances. We continue to proactively guide customers to the very best programs, protections and energy assistance available to them to get relief for and resolve their past due balances. The claims made by the OCC, which represents the interests of utility ratepayers, are misleading, according to Gage Frank, a spokesperson for Avangrid, which is the parent company of United Illuminating as well as Connecticut Natural Gas and Southern Connecticut Gas. The judgments obtained, which the Office of Consumer Counsel referenced during this time, were for pre-pandemic claims that continued through the court system when the courts reopened, Frank said. From the commencement of the COVID pandemic, we have worked with our most vulnerable customers offering various payment plans to assist them during this time. However, not all customers took advantage of these plans and continued to accumulate unpaid balances. The customers whose unpaid balances continued to grow were referred to Avangrids collections firm, which continued to work with customers to find a payment plan that would work based on the customers circumstances, he said. No new collections judgments were sought against utility customers during the period covered by the states pandemic-related consumer protections, according to Frank. United Illuminating, Connecticut Natural Gas and Southern Connecticut Gas were some of the first utility companies in the region to suspend turn-offs due to nonpayment at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. We deeply care about our customers and continue to work with those who have outstanding balances, which also places a burden on other customers. luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.com This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate FAIRFIELD Alex Plitsas has spent months helping people get out of Afghanistan, coordinating from his phone in his home office across from his twin daughters bedroom in Fairfield. So, when Russia invaded Ukraine in February, he was ready to expand his sights for a similar mission. But the work in Ukraine and Afghanistan have proven to be pretty different so far. Because people are, in many cases, able to travel across those European borders, theres not as many people who need rescuing, said Plitsas, an Army veteran and former Department of Defense employee. So, its more tailored cases. Instead, he and his group of volunteers, have shifted their focus to supplying the Ukrainian people with necessities and defensive equipment. He was involved with the recent donation of more than 200 ballistic armor and dozens of helmets by police departments in Fairfield County. The effort was organized by Fairfield officials and facilitated through the towns police department. He said other police departments across the U.S. have reached out to him wanting to do the same. State Rep. Laura Devlin said she called Plitsas right after Police Chief Robert Kalamaras when she learned of the Ukrainian peoples need for protective equipment. Without Alex and his connections agreeing to help, we would not have been able to handle the collection of gear, she said. They have also helped with our humanitarian collections as well. When Fairfield officials came up with the idea for the donation drive, Plitsas said he was able to get memo of need from the Ukrainian defense ministry, secretary of state and other officials requesting the donations from Fairfield. In the middle of a war, thats not something that happens easily never mind in six hours, he said. Plitsas said he has put together a coalition of people he has worked with in the past some from the Afghanistan rescue, others from government life. He said the way the system works is similar to that of a general contractor and is based on the needs in Ukraine. Those needs could be medical, people on the ground, or financial or legal support. Its kind of like building a start-up on the fly, he said. Plitsas said a crucial part of that work is also having local partners on the ground. When the invasion started, he said, he partnered with the DAAR Charitable Foundation. Hes friends with the leaders of the foundation, which has operated in Ukraine for 20 years. By coordinating with these partners, Plitsas said the work becomes like a plug-and-play model, where they work to match resources or people operating in the country with those requesting help. People will contact you whether its government agencies or private individuals that need help, he said. Their requirements become abundantly clear. Then it becomes a question of what can be fulfilled through volunteerism and what needs to be paid (for). What needs to be built to satisfy these requirements? Who can I plug in from my network? In the case of Ukraine, Plitsas said he was able to set that system up in 36 hours. Different than Afghanistan Plitsas said the work in Ukraine has been different than it is in Afghanistan, where he and others are still helping to support and evacuate people. In the latter, the combat was mostly over, but the borders surrounding the country were largely closed as the Taliban took control of the country. There was a lot more focus and need to get people out, he said. Since August, Plitsas said, his group has orchestrated the movements of 15,000 Afghan people. In Ukraine, an active war zone, there are different complications, Plitsas said. Notably, there is no way for people to fly out of the country. Plitsas said land evacuations are possible in Ukraine, where there are friendly countries on the western border. He said another thing that makes it easier is that Ukrainians have passports and documents allowing them to be processed when they leave the country. That means most of the evacuations Plitsass group is facilitating are in contested areas or where people are trapped behind Russian lines. His group was able to coordinate with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense to help open up the lines to allow 500 medical students trapped in the embattled city of Sumy to escape. Somebody else took care of the busing, because they were already on the ground there, he said. We just had to make sure there was a safe corridor for them to get out, because when youre traveling in large vehicles on the front lines its always dangerous. Plitsas said another big difference between the two operations is that Ukrainians frequently will not leave their pets behind when evacuating. Were not just taking people, were also helping them get dogs and other stuff out, which is a big deal, he said. Theyre very animal friendly and that seems to be a cultural norm. In Afghanistan, Plitsas said they locally procure the supplies for the thousands his group is taking care of. It does not work the same way in Ukraine where there is an active war zone, so he has been working to get humanitarian aid to the country. Plitsas said there are only so many things a private citizen can do to truly impact the war. Helmets, vests and medical kits those are all defensive in nature or help treat wounded people, he said. Its not providing offensive weapons. This is just defensive stuff to help the Ukrainian people defend their home country. This is a way to directly impact the war effort. As the invasion started, the Ukrainian government stood up volunteer militia forces known as the Territorial Defense Forces. Those forces need to be equipped to defend their homeland and take the fight to the Russians, Plitsas said. Plitsas said his group has already been involved with delivering thousands of sets of body armor to Ukraine, in addition to the recent police donation. The group is also coordinating the delivery of supplies from the Ukrainian American Club in Southport. He noted a trailer full of food, blankets, clothing, medical supplies, tents, sleeping bags and other necessities was picked up on Friday. Work / Life balance Plitsas said the international work he is doing, stacked on top of his normal job with Providence Consulting Group, has resulted in 18- to 20-hour workdays. He said his prior life in the military and government prepared him for this type of schedule, but it still isnt easy. Im used to those hours and the situations that are kind of ongoing, where a civilian may not be, he said. But Im back in civilian life now. I live in Fairfield. Im a suburban dad. The difficult part here and the difference between my experience in uniform and at the Pentagon... is that Ive got a family. Im not deployed overseas where they kind of know Im not around. It has been a constant struggle to make sure he is giving enough time and attention to his family, Plitsas said. But we have an obligation to help the people we are supporting, he said. No good deed goes unpunished. When a national security situation broke out, and (I was asked) can you help, I said Why not? Lets do it. Plitsas noted he was on vacation in the Amalfi Coast of Italy when the situation in Afghanistan started. His wife, Lisa, was frustrated at first with his being sucked into the work he ended up doing, but was ultimately understanding. We were engaged during my first combat tour in Iraq, he said. We were married before I went back to my second one. We were married when I went to Afghanistan. Then, shes been there through my time at the Pentagon and senior leadership positions and now for all of this. So now shes kind of used to my national security gallivanting. Plitsas said his young daughters also know what he is doing, asking him informed questions at dinner. Its very clear that theyre listening to conversations Im having. Theyre around when Im on phone calls, he said. They have a much better appreciation for whats going on than I would have thought for 71/2-year-olds. He said it can be strange to do this work from his home, especially when he was the Republican Town Committee chairman. He noted he was once coordinating a charter flight out of Afghanistan when someone came up to him in the grocery store to complain about the placement of a political lawn sign. I just kind of sat there and my jaw hit the floor and I had to remember, they have no idea what Im doing, nor is it normal, he said. This ability to help from afar is the result of the evolution of warfare and technology, Plitsas said, adding what he is doing now would not have been possible 10 or 20 years ago. He said nothing he has been doing would be possible without the local partners in those countries. Im a public face because Im out of government in many cases, but theres definitely other people who are involved in this, he said. Its not a me thing. This is a group effort. joshua.labella@hearstmediact.com President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol attends a meeting of the presidential transition committee's senior officials at its office in Seoul, Tuesday. Courtesy of Yonhap Korea braces for major overhaul of national policies By Kang Seung-woo President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol urged his transition team, Tuesday, to bolster pre-emptive and resolute efforts to achieve innovative growth, while focusing on pragmatism and the national interest to address polarization and a demographic cliff the country faces. He also urged the subcommittees of his transition team to step up cooperation to achieve those goals. "I hope that the transition committee can set clear goals and achieve intended results through cooperation among divisions," he said while presiding over the meeting with heads of subcommittees on his transition team. "With the education and labor systems of the era of heavy and chemical industries half a century ago, people cannot respond effectively to the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with scientific and technological hegemony." He said that polarization will be eased "when growth is achieved through the advancement of the industrial structure, helped by securing cutting-edge science and technology." Yoon also stressed close discussions between subcommittees, saying that the state agenda established by the transition committee is a blueprint for the new government. "In the end, we have no choice but to advance the industrial structure, so I want the subcommittee in charge of the economy and the one dealing with science and education to communicate with each other systematically," he said. Meanwhile, also on Tuesday, the transition team wrapped up receiving policy briefings from 53 ministries and government organizations, signaling a major departure from some of the Moon Jae-in administration's policies in particular, an approach to curbing increased housing prices. Many voters, including those in their 20s and 30s, turned away from the Moon administration and the ruling party in the March 9 presidential election. The transition committee said it was considering abolishing or curtailing laws designed to protect tenants, which it said were causing confusion in the property market. The so-called "three tenant-protection laws" that took effect in July 2020 allow tenants to extend their two-year "jeonse" contracts for another two years, prevent landlords from raising jeonse deposits by up to 5 percent and require them to report actual rent prices to the local government. Jeonse is a two-year, Korean-style deposit lease. However, the passage of the controversial laws triggered a supply shortage, as homeowners chose to move in and existing tenants exercised their right to renew their contracts, leading eventually to a sharp hike in jeonse prices. "The incoming government is considering revising or abolishing the tenant-protection law," Shim Kyo-eon, a real estate professor as Konkuk University who heads the property subcommittee, said during a briefing. Some real estate market watchers warn that the new administration needs to focus on making up for the laws by fine-tuning them rather than drastically abolishing them, out of concerns over unforeseen side effects. "We will come up with measures to minimize impacts on the market," Shim said. Also, any revision to the laws needs consent from the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) which holds 172 of the 300 National Assembly seats. The party made clear its opposition to the transition team's announcement, Tuesday. "Based on the national consensus over the side effects of the laws, we will try to persuade the DPK to cooperate on their revision," Shim added. The Yoon administration is expected to accelerate efforts to ease regulations on owners of multiple homes. There have been growing complaints against the Moon administration's real estate policies, as skyrocketing housing prices have driven up taxes on homeowners and raised costs for people who seek to rent or buy homes. Along with the tax, the comprehensive real estate tax is likely to be subject to revision. "We need to check carefully if it is right to impose regulations on the ownership of multiple homes," Yoon said Friday, after making a rare appearance at the policy briefing session from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. Currently, those who own two or more homes face a capital gains tax of up to 75 percent when they sell a home. In that respect, there have been growing calls for the government to cut the tax, which could allow owners to sell properties and bring down prices. In addition, the new government is expected to ease rules on reconstruction and redevelopment, as pledged by Yoon during the campaign. However, amid concerns that ill-considered deregulation may have a negative effect on housing prices, there are some calls within the transition committee to slow down the plan. NEW MILFORD Schaghticoke Middle School was evacuated Tuesday afternoon after officials were informed of a written threat. In an email sent to parents, Superintendent Alisha DiCorpo wrote, The threat to the school was written on a piece of paper and was discovered by a student and brought to the attention of a staff member. This prompted the school to contact the New Milford Police Department and to evacuate out of an abundance of caution in order to ensure the safety of students and staff. All students and staff walked over to Northville Elementary School for dismissal. Schaghticoke Middle School and New Milford Public Schools staff continue to work in coordination with the New Milford Police Department as they investigate the circumstances surrounding the threat, DiCorpo wrote. At this time, the police departments investigation is ongoing. The police are, however, confident that the Schaghticoke building is safe, DiCorpo wrote. Students and staff will return to school on time Wednesday morning, and acquire their belongings when they arrive. Additionally, she wrote students and staff should report directly to K period upon arrival. Any homework that is due Wednesday will now be due on Thursday. In her email, DiCorpo wrote staff and students were calm, followed directions, and were supportive of one another as the evacuation took place. Everyone showed a true sense of community and we cannot thank you enough. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate NEW MILFORD For four years, through tough times and happy occasions, busy days and not so much going on, New Milford resident Joann Rodriguez Matos could always rely on a coffee and hiking routine she developed with her friend, Chris Pante. Pante died in February from COVID-19, at the age of 58. In her late friends memory, Matos created a Coffee & Hiking Social Group, as a way to meet new people to carry on their coffee and hiking tradition. Through the group, which has garnered over 100 members within the week it opened, Matos said she wants to encourage people to value their time together, since you never know the last time one will see a person, said Matos, 59, a mother of three and grandmother of two. Matos met Pante after their 30-year Danbury High School reunion. Pante ran the Chris Pante Talk Show on Comcast Cables Ch. 23, which discussed current events. He contacted Matos about an autobiography on child abuse that she wrote, called Hot Peas and Butter: The Children in the Basement, and asked her for an interview. While Matos wanted to hold off on the interview while she worked on a second book, the pair ended up becoming friends. We talked on the telephone and struck a friendship. Then, one day, I asked him, Are you interested in going for a hike with me at Tarrywile Park? He said, Sure, Id love to. And thats where it began, she said. Going for coffee before the hike was soon added to their get together. Over the next four years, the friends would met every few weeks, depending upon their schedules and the weather. Chis was the most wonderful person a stand-up comedian, Matos said. But he also had some really strong beliefs. He was very, very much eager to really get to the grassroots of what was going on in the world. We had some really nice discussions. The friends got COVID at the same time in January. What struck me was that I survived. I said to him I was always afraid of getting COVID because I had respiratory problems throughout my life as a kid, said Matos, who is a stay-at-home grandmother. She lost her previous job as an administrative assistant during the pandemic. His death broke my heart, she added. COVID stole my friend from me. She said she frequently reads his text messages and talks to him out loud, and misses him every day. Through the coffee and hiking group, Matos said she would like to celebrate the lives of those who have been lost to COVID by supporting each other and offering our friendship. Additionally, she said the group is also about getting to know ones neighbors and their every day struggles. Everyone loves a cup of Joe and a hike, but most of all we need to stay connected and learn about each other on Gods green earth, she said. Chris liked to get to the deep roots of a conversation and share that with the world. We walked and we talked and we shared our life stories together. True to his profession, he knew how to get that story out of you and make you feel comfortable in knowing that his intentions made a difference in this world. Danbury resident Norman Buzaid was neighbors with Pante and has known him for 30 years. Chris was a great guy always happy go lucky and always helpful whenever Ive ever needed help around the house, such as moving stuff. He also helped my son and daughter with school and sports, Buzaid said. One memory he shared was of Pante always driving home in his convertible with the top down, in the pouring rain, he said. He was always, always in a good mood, Buzaid added. Michael Kaufman, a Ridgefield resident, said he could not have asked for a better friend, when referring to Pante, whom he knew for nearly 50 years. Chris loved to laugh and always made his family and friends laugh and smile, said Kaufman, who went to Danbury High School with Pante. He was a loyal and caring friend to many. This is seen in the number of people who had donated to the GoFundMe site created for the Christopher G. Pante Memorial Scholarship Fund at Danbury High School, Kaufman said. Pante was a New York Mets fan and loved going to the home opener. One of his friends is organizing a group to go to the first home game on April 15. I plan on being there to watch the Mets play, share wonderful memories and stories of our friend Chris, and pay tribute to him, Kaufman said. We know Chris will be with us in spirit and watching over us. We expect good weather and a Mets win. More hikes planned The coffee and hiking group has already held their first meet-up they met at Dunkin Donuts on Exit 12 in New Milford and then went to Harrybrooke Park for a stroll. About 10 people came, Matos said. We went all the way through Harrybrooke Park where there is running water and a fall, and then we came all the way back. It took a leisurely half hour to 45 minutes. Once the nice weather comes, Matos said she expects the group to really take off. She has researched local places to hike, such as Steep Rock Preserve in Washington, and posted those places on the groups Facebook page. Additionally, she plans to bring some business to the smaller coffee shops in New Milford by bringing in the group. She hopes to plan both evening hikes during the week and Sunday hikes at noon. From Pantes death, Matos said she has learned not to take people for granted. Especially, with COVID, we dont know how long we truly have. People need to have people to rely upon, Matos said. This has been a very lonely and scary pandemic. sandra.fox@hearstmediact.com 203-948-9802 This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate For Lindsay Keys, her time at Wesleyan University gave her the opportunity to meet new friends and develop skills as a filmmaker. Looking back now, Keys said, it was also a time when mysterious symptoms she had been experiencing became worse. From fatigue to serious physical pains, Keys was hospitalized multiple times while in Middletown, but was still not fully aware of her condition. After graduating from the Middletown liberal arts college in 2011, Keys began working and living in New York City. Eventually, her medical condition reached the point where she could no longer work. I got sick, and didnt know what was happening, Keys said. I lost the ability to read. Despite years of doctors telling her otherwise, Keys learned she was suffering from chronic Lyme disease, a relatively unknown condition that is quickly and quietly spreading around the world, experts say. The documentary, The Quiet Epidemic, details the history of Lyme disease and delves into the lesser-known aspects of it through real patients as they navigate their diagnosis. Its a human journey, said Keys, co-director of the film. In September 2015, she finally found a clinic in Albany, N.Y., that offered a treatment. It was at there that Keys met Winslow Crane-Murdoch, a fellow filmmaker who had graduated from Connecticut College in 2013. He was at the tail end of his treatment when Keys was starting hers. While the two were suffering from the same condition, it presented itself in different ways. Crane-Murdochs main symptom was a sinus infection, while Keys was suffering from issues similar to strep throat. It affects every person differently, Keys said. While Lyme disease symptoms differ between person to person, the issue is the same for everyone, Keys said: Not enough people are trying to learn more about the disease, making it all the more difficult to diagnose and treat better. All these health issues were arising, but no one was getting to the root of what was causing it, Keys said. Crane-Murdoch compared Lyme disease to COVID-19, because not much is known about long-term effects, and not all medical professionals see eye-to-eye on the issue. Theyre tons of parallels with long COVID, Crane-Murdoch said. Its this gray area of medicine. There are differences between Lyme disease and chronic Lyme disease, he explained. If an individual gets Lyme disease, and they catch it right away, it can be treated with antibiotics. It is not as well-known, he said, that 10 to 20 percent of patients will not be cured, and will have persisting symptoms. For these patients, such as Keys, Crane-Murdoch, and the many subjects they interviewed for this documentary there are limited options for treatment. Theres a lot that you have to do on your own. A lot of the healing is in your own hands, Keys said. This includes eating right, taking specific vitamins and participating in supplemental therapies. When further treatment is needed, thats when patients are forced to take risks, she said. They are often forced to participate in new, experimental treatments as a last resort. It gets to a point where youre willing to try anything, Keys said. Keys admitted she had reached that point after she lost the ability to carry on a conversation, and was in constant pain. I felt like I was being electrocuted all day, she said. The issue is expounded by the fact that none of these treatments are covered by insurance, so patients have to pay more, and doctors are at a greater risk for lawsuits. Theres a lot of financial barriers with Lyme disease, Crane-Murdoch said. As a patient, youre caught in the middle of that. Through treatment, Keys and Crane-Murdoch have both now recovered to the point where they are back to full functionality, but they are unsure how permanent their cure really is. I feel lucky, but theres this ghost that follows you around, Keys said. Thats one of the reasons why Keys and Crane-Murdoch set out to make this film, to serve as a call for more research into the issue. They also hope the film spreads awareness about the illness, as many are unaware of just how severe it is, she added. Crane-Murdoch said way more people are at risk for this disease compared to other illnesses. You dont walk outside and get cancer, he said. With Lyme disease, however, walking outside can result in catching it, because it is spread by ticks. It also means that children are especially susceptible, because they spend more time playing outside, and their symptoms are more likely to be brushed aside, Keys explained. Connecticut, and New England as a whole, are known to be highly populated by ticks, but the issue is a global one. I got a call from a woman from Australia thanking us for making this, Keys said. A lot of people are walking around with Lyme disease. Keys found this to be truer than she realized when looking for people to help with the documentary. The number of Wesleyan film alumni that had Lyme was shocking, and thats just the film department, and just Wesleyan, Keys said. A few other Wesleyan alumni assisted with the making of the documentary, including Daria Lombroso, who graduated in 2011; and Kait Halibozek, 2010. The documentary, which was made in association with Pennebaker Hegedus Films, will premiere as a special presentation at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival this spring. The U.S. premiere is still in the works, but Keys said it should eventually be view-able on streaming platforms. Those interested in being the first to know about when and how to watch the documentary can sign up by visiting thequietepidemic.com. The team intends to create a social impact campaign along with the release of the documentary in an effort to create change around the issue. In some ways, this is only the beginning, Keys said. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate WESTPORT Sherwood Island is Connecticuts oldest state park. Its also one of the most popular and, more recently, one most in need of repairs. The state bought the first parcel of land for it back in 1914, though it took until 1937 to get all of the needed parcels and to ensure public access. The park, situated on Long Island Sound, covers 234 acres of beach, wetlands and woodlands. It hosted an estimated 1.1 million visitors in 2021, about a 10 percent increase from 2020. Sherwood Island (State Park) is a heavily used park, with aging infrastructure, so it certainly is among the parks with the highest need for investment, said Will Healey, a spokesman for the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. He said many of the buildings used for maintenance or storage predate the park and are in pretty rough shape, in need for rehabilitation. Park officials have identified nearly $130 million in necessary maintenance, repairs and other infrastructure projects at state parks over the last three years, a review of budget requests and other records by Hearst Connecticut Media shows. The report cites a need for $5.18 million in work for Sherwood Island alone. This includes about $3.38 million for a maintenance complex, $1 million for a toilet building and pavilion grove construction area, $500,000 to replace a bridge and $300,000 for electrical utility upgrades, according to the documents. The bridge work is already underway with projects planned for the summer or fall to replace or improve signage throughout the park, and pave or complete roadwork by the ticket booths and the entrance to the West Beach parking area, Healey said. He said the other projects are part of the states larger prioritization efforts to address the significant backlog of needed infrastructure improvements. We currently have minimal funding for these projects, but hope that the governors proposal will be approved by the legislature this session, and that by May or June, we will know the level of resources that will be available for this important work, he said. In the meantime, the plan to replace the smaller old buildings with a new maintenance building is on hold. Given the limited funding available to dedicate to a new, larger building, we have more recently focused instead on accomplishing several projects at each of those older buildings to extend their useful life to support our maintenance needs, Healey said. Those projects will be prioritized this spring and summer, and will move forward, depending on the level of funding made available by the legislature. Liz-Ann Koos, president of Friends of Sherwood Island State Park, said the projects outlined by the state seem to be in line with what shes heard from the parks supervisor. The friends group helps focuses on the grounds and programming and so is welcoming of any investment the state is planning for the facilities themselves. Its terrific, Koos said. She said proper upkeep and maintenance of the park is important to keep it a beautiful place to visit something she said even more people became aware of, including residents, when the town closed its beaches and parks at the start of the pandemic. Lots of people discovered Sherwood Island, Koos said, adding a positive byproduct of the pandemic has been the continued appreciation of the park and outdoors in general. One of the challenges facing state parks across Connecticut is the cuts made in the park system to fill budget shortfalls during former Gov. Dannel Malloys administration, resulting in DEEP reducing maintenance staff and closing campgrounds and visitor centers. The Passport to Parks program, which adds fees to motor vehicle registration but allows residents to visit state parks for free, has brought in about $21 million annually to help cover park costs, such as staffing, though not capital projects, DEEP officials have said. Koos said its important for the state to not only invest in the facilities, but the workforce too. Theres been a drastic cut in the amount of positions for running the parks, she said. If you want well-maintained buildings and grounds, you need to have people. State Sen. Will Haskell, D-Westport, said Sherwood Island is a treasured local resource. We need to treat this resource with the love and care that's necessary to ensure our kids and grandkids one day have the chance to explore these beautiful beaches and trails, he said. I support these investments that will help to maintain a functional, clean and accessible state park for all. The states maintenance plan includes projects at a combined 62 state parks, forests and boat launches. The state has a total 139 state parks and forests. Some of the states oldest and most popular parks along the shoreline such as Rocky Neck, Sherwood Island and Hammonasset Beach are most in need of upgrades, the records show. But not all of the waterfront parks are included in the maintenance needs plan. Both Silver Sands in Milford and Indian Well in Shelton are left out in the Bridgeport area. Officials arent too bothered by it though. State Rep. Jason Perillo, who represents Shelton, said he has not received a request for capital improvements to Indian Well. If anything, I would like to see more enforcement of rules by park staff, Perillo said. Many park attendees are from out of state and I know of instances where they have been less than respectful to those who live near the park. A multi-million dollar project was also recently completed at Silver Sands following a fire in 2019 that destroyed the new construction. The original $9.1 million park improvement project included a new section of boardwalk and several buildings on it, as well as a maintenance building elsewhere on the property and additional parking. Some of the states projects can now start to be completed, though an exact timeline hasnt been released yet. In February, Gov. Ned Lamont announced plans for a $55 million investment in state parks as part of an effort to reduce the backlog of repairs for the states aging cabins, bathrooms, trails and other park facilities. He and Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Katie Dykes used Sherwood Island as the backdrop for the announcement, pointing to the parks bathrooms and open air pavilion as evidence for the overdue maintenance needs. Sherwood Island is a hub for our region, hosting beach goers from across the state, wildlife lovers, and those who return regularly to remember the tragedy of 9/11, Haskell said. I cant tell you how beautiful it is to visit that park on a nice day, seeing folks from across the state coming together. We cant defer maintenance projects that allow this beach to welcome Connecticut residents at no cost. BRIDGEPORT A local man, awaiting trial in connection with a shooting incident a year ago, was charged Monday with allegedly shooting a woman in the head days earlier. Carlos Moreno, 43, was charged with attempted murder, first-degree assault, discharge of a firearm and second-degree breach of peace. But his lawyer, Dennis Bradley, told a judge Monday afternoon that the victim is adamant that Moreno did not shoot her. These are hearsay allegations made by his co-defendants in another case, something that was not told to the judge who made the probable cause finding, Bradley told Superior Court Judge Nbidi Moses during Morenos arraignment. The judge still ordered Moreno held in lieu of $500,000 bond and continued the case to April 5. On Aug. 28, 2021, officers were dispatched to Bridgeport Hospital for a shooting victim. The arrest warrant affidavit states that the female victim was being treated for a non-life threatening gunshot wound to the back of her head. The victim stated she was standing outside a store on Noble Avenue when she suddenly felt a sharp pain in the back of her head and noticed she was bleeding, the affidavit states. She flagged down someone who took her to the hospital. The victim said she did not see who shot her. But about a month later, the affidavit states that a witness told police that he had previously heard Moreno arguing with the victim and that Moreno had told him he was going to shoot the victim. The affidavit states that another witness told police that she had received texts from the victim stating that Moreno had shot her. On Aug. 31, 2021, Moreno was arrested with two other men following gunfire on Park Street. Police said Moreno was driving a car involved in the shooting. He was charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree assault, weapons in a motor vehicle, first-degree reckless endangerment and possession of narcotics. He was released after posting $250,000 bond. BRIDGEPORT A city man was arrested and charged with murder Monday, according to Bridgeport police. Tivon Taylor, 40, of Eric Street, was charged with murder, carrying a pistol without a permit and criminal possession of a firearm in connection to the slaying of Fredrick Shelby on March 18, according to Scott Appleby, the city emergency management director. Based on the evidence, we believe Taylor followed Shelby out of Taes Lounge, a bar located at 1014 Stratford Avenue, after the two men exchanged words inside. Taylor then allegedly shot Shelby multiple times before walking away. In a statement to investigators, Taylor admitted to shooting Shelby, Appleby said in an email. Taylor was held in lieu of $1 million bond and is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday, Appleby said. This arrest is the result of excellent work done by all of the detectives that assisted in this case, specifically, Detective Heanue, the lead investigator, Appleby said. william.lambert@hearstmediact.com Five men pleaded guilty to firearm charges stemming from a plan to kill a man and set a Bridgeport business on fire, according to federal prosecutors Tuesday. The five men entered guilty pleas in Bridgeport federal court to possession of a firearm by a convicted felon after police found several loaded guns that were thrown from a fleeing car and inside a Milford hotel room, the U.S. Attorneys Office said. In the early hours of April 2, 2018, Bridgeport police were patrolling the citys west side and attempted to stop a car with unlit taillights. While the car fled from police, officers saw several items being thrown from its windows. The car stopped several blocks away and officers arrested the driver, 55-year-old Luis Mercado, also known as Pops, of Bridgeport, and 31-year-old man Dominick Gonzalez, also known as Dom, of Bridgeport, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office. Police seized two loaded handguns and marijuana that had been thrown out of the car. Police also found a black ski mask, a pair of binoculars and a container of gasoline inside the vehicle, the U.S. Attorneys office said. An investigation revealed Mercado, Gonzalez and three other men were planning to murder a man who worked at Wood Avenue Body Shop in Bridgeport and set fire to the business, according to the U.S. Attorneys office. The three other men 33-year-old George Rivera, also known as Pito, of Danbury; 39-year-old Jason Scott, also known as Hood, of Bridgeport; and 35-year-old Luis Mejias, also known as Kermit, of Waterbury were arrested later that morning at a hotel in Milford, the U.S. Attorneys Office said. In the hotel room, authorities said they discovered two loaded rifles, a loaded revolver, a loaded shotgun, additional ammunition, brass knuckles, binoculars, gloves and a knit mask. Investigators also seized packaged heroin, Ecstasy pills, marijuana, a digital scale and other items from the room, as well as ammunition and shotgun shells in the trunk of their car, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office. The U.S. Attorneys Office said each man has a criminal history that includes multiple felony convictions, making it illegal for them to possess a firearm. Mercado, Rivera and Mejias pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a convicted felon on March 25, and Scott pleaded guilty Monday. Gonzalez pleaded guilty to the offense, as well as conspiracy to commit arson, on May 4, 2021, the U.S. Attorneys Office said. The charge of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon carries a maximum prison term of 10 years. The five men are in custody while they await sentencing. UN chief calls for strong declaration against use of explosive weapons in populated areas Xinhua) 09:19, March 29, 2022 UNITED NATIONS, March 28 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday called for a strong political declaration against the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. Guterres welcomes the convening of informal consultations in Geneva next week, which aim to develop a political declaration to protect civilians from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, and calls for a strong text, said Stephane Dujarric, Guterres' spokesman, in a statement. The secretary-general welcomes the work undertaken by states so far to develop a political declaration. He calls for a strong text that includes an express commitment to avoid the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas, said the statement. "The secretary-general supports the development of a political declaration, as well as appropriate limitations, common standards and operational policies ... relating to the use of explosive weapons in populated areas," it said. Certain types of explosive weapons with wide-area effects were originally designed for use in traditional, open battlefields. When used in populated areas they inflict massive and often indiscriminate destruction impacting civilians and civilian objects, including health facilities, schools, water and sanitation facilities, energy and other critical infrastructure, and the environment, said the statement. When explosive weapons are used in populated areas, 90 percent of the casualties are civilians, it noted. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol walks into a building where the presidential transition committee has been set up, Tuesday. Yonhap President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol spoke by phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday, his spokesperson said without disclosing details of the conversation. Kim Eun-hye said in a brief statement that the call took place at 5 p.m. "Please be informed that because Ukraine is currently in a state of war, the detailed contents of the phone call are difficult to disclose," she said. Zelenskyy shared the news in a tweet. The Starbucks coffee chain is being sued in court over two separate complaints from Connecticut residents: one alleging cleaning fluid, not coffee, was served to a customer and the other claiming a person with nut allergies had an allergic reaction after a purchase at Starbucks. In a federal lawsuit filed this month in U.S. District Court in New Haven, a Starbucks customer claims to have suffered a coughing fit, followed by severe dizziness and nausea, after ingesting a mouthful of a chemical used to clean the coffee urns that the Greenwich man was mistakenly served at the shop on Greenwich Avenue in August of 2021. Starbucks is also facing a separate legal complaint, filed in state Superior Court in Bridgeport in late February, that a Norwalk woman with an allergic reaction to nuts was given a beverage that had traces of a substance made with nuts in 2020, sickening her. The woman told the barista at the Norwalk shop that she had a nut allergy before the order was filled, according to that lawsuit. According to a statement from the Starbucks media affairs department, Our baristas take great care in crafting beverages, and we have extensive processes and protocols in place to maintain a safe experience for our baristas and customers. This is an obligation we take very seriously, and we intend to vigorously defend against any claims that state otherwise. The federal suit filed by Matthew Mitchell contends he went to the Starbucks on the Avenue and requested a cup of coffee. He was served the cup with a lid on it, and assuming it was the coffee drink he ordered, took a sip. The fluid turned out to be a solution used to clean the equipment, Urnex, according to the complaint. The substance immediately caused a caustic, burning sensation in his mouth, throat and stomach, the legal complaint states. After opening the lid, to his sheer horror, Mitchell saw a blue chemical solution, the lawsuit contends. A store manager told Mitchell a new employee was to blame for the apparent mix-up, the suit states. The store was using an upside down coffee cup on the urn handle to indicate it was being cleaned. The federal complaint states, It is unconscionable that a major company such as Starbucks, with extraordinarily vast resources, did not have a better warning system than an upside-down cardboard cup. The suit notes that inadequate training also appeared to be a factor. Mitchells lawsuit states similar incidents involving cleaning fluid led to lawsuits in 2012 in Utah and 2015 in Idaho. The complaint states Mitchell required medical treatment. He suffered from gastro-intestinal problems and a lingering chalk taste, as well as stress and anxiety from the incident, the suit says. Mitchells lawyer is Joseph Tacopina, a high-profile trial attorney who regularly represents celebrity clients and provides legal commentary in the media. He also has roots in southern Connecticut. Tacopina noted in an email that his client is a co-owner of Richards clothing store on Greenwich Avenue. A dollar amount for damages is not specified in the suit, other than to say it is far in excess of $75,000. It is also seeking payment for medical expenses. Starbucks has not filed a legal response yet to the federal suit. As for the Norwalk incident, the customer claimed she suffered a severe allergic reaction on Oct. 24, 2020. The suit says Sarah Rudolph ordered a chai tea latte with soy milk at the Starbucks shop at 524 Connecticut Ave. in Darinor Plaza. Rudolph claims she told the server she had a nut allergy, but the beverage she received had traces of a nut-based component in it and she experienced an allergic reaction. Rudolphs complaint contends the store failed to segregate the utensils, containers and tools used to make drinks containing nut products from those used to make drinks for customers with nut allergies. It also cites improper training. The lawsuit, filed Feb. 22 in state Superior Court in Bridgeport, is seeking damages above $15,000. An attorney representing Starbucks asked for 45 days to file a formal response, in late May, which was granted by a state judge. rmarchant@greenwichtime.com BRIDGEPORT - A local man, released early from prison for good behavior, has been charged with fatally shooting a former cellmate following a dispute at a Stratford Avenue bar. Tivon Taylor, 40, of Eric Street, was charged with murder, carrying a pistol without a permit and criminal possession of a firearm in the March 18 death of 43-year-old Shelby Frederick. During Taylors arraignment Tuesday afternoon Special Deputy States Attorney Stephen Lojo urged Superior Court Judge Peter McShane to set a high bond for Taylor because of his previous criminal record and the seriousness of the charges. Taylors lawyer, Robert Photos, told the judge that bond is academic at this time because his client is being held for violating his parole. However, he said he would seek to re-argue bond at the next court date. Judge McShane ordered Taylor held in lieu of $1 million bond and continued the case to April 12. Photos declined comment as he left the Golden Hill Street courthouse. In November 2019, Taylor was convicted of possession of narcotics with intent to sell and sentenced to five years in prison. According to court and state Department of Corrections records, he was released from prison three months ago after being granted parole. Shortly after 11:30 p.m. on March 18, police said they received a ShotSpotter alert of two gunshots fired on Stratford Avenue. When officers responded to the scene, police said they found Frederick lying facedown in the roadway with a gunshot wound to the left side of his back. Detective Martin Heanue, in an arrest warrant affidavit, said detectives recovered video from the location. The video showed Frederick leaving Taes Lounge on Stratford Avenue followed by Taylor and a woman, later identified as Taylors wife, the affidavit states. The video shows Taylor approaching Frederick, then two muzzle flashes and the victim falling to the ground, the affidavit states. Taylor then walked away from the scene. The affidavit continues that detectives also viewed video from the bar which shows Taylor and Frederick engaged in a brief dispute before it was broken up. When detectives later confronted Taylor, the affidavit states that Taylor told them he knew Frederick well, they had served time in prison together and Taylor stated he had even attended the vigil for the victim after his death. However, he denied shooting Frederick. But, two days later, when detectives were about to search Taylors apartment, the affidavit states they received a phone call from Taylor telling them they wouldnt find the gun in the apartment. I got rid of it. I got that (expletive) melted down, the affidavit states Taylor told detectives. The affidavit states that Taylor then confessed to shooting Frederick. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate STRATFORD Funding for the redevelopment of the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre property may be coming from the state three years after the historic building burned down. The State Bond Commission will vote on $3 million in requested funding from the town for a rebuild project at its meeting Thursday. The money would be a portion of $19.7 million in grants to local development projects across the state. The town is considering multiple uses for the land at the moment, Mayor Laura Hoydick said.The money would be applied to the chosen plan. We have a pretty good basis from the community, since 2019, of what people want to see there, Hoydick said. They definitely want access to that property and they definitely want some open space for fairs and festivals. The town has conducted community surveys through the Shakespeare Property Subcommittee and a town task force. Of those surveyed online, 57 percent recommended an arts facility or black box theater as the long-term use of the property. There have also been calls to make the space into some sort of public park. Hoydick said that should the town go with a small theater, the $3 million could be enough to build it. A larger project may take more funding. I would love to do something with the arts on the property, since it has such a large history of that, said state Rep. Joe Gresko, D-Stratford. Keep our farmers markets happening there, it happens every other week, all year round. So it could be a destination location for performing arts or for outdoor theater. Currently, the town is hosting a farmers market on the property every first and third Sunday of the month. The next market date is April 3. There is an outside group interested in revitalizing the property, called American Globe Center, which has proposed building a historically accurate version of Shakespeares Globe Theatre as a part of a larger complex, according to its website. Those funds could absolutely benefit our project, said Tom Evans, AGCs executive director. We have substantial fundraising goals, and we cant really aggressively kick off fundraising until we have some sort of letter of agreement that we would have access to the land. Evans said that the total cost of AGCs proposal would be around $90 million. The groups plans include a re-created Globe Theatre, a playhouse, restaurant, amphitheater and a building called the White House. The group has had conversations with potential investors, but has not gotten approval from the town to pursue a build at the property. Evans said the group is eager to work with the town, should the group be given an opportunity. Part of their pitch is estimated economic benefits for the town and surrounding businesses based on similar theaters around North America namely in Ontario, Canada, Oregon, Utah and Virginia. Their total estimated yearly economic impact exceeds $51 million, according to their plans. Hoydick said putting this property out to bid was discussed in the community research phase of this process, but it was not considered one of the more popular options. Gresko said it was a bipartisan effort to get this money forward. State Sen. Kevin Kelly, R-Stratford, reiterated this point, saying he appreciates the bond commission fulfilling our delegations bipartisan request for support to revitalize the theater property. Kelly said he grew up working in the former Shakespeare theater with his mother and aunt, so it was a personal loss when it burned down. When the Shakespeare Theatre burned down, our entire community came together wanting to take action, Kelly said in a statement. This investment is a key step toward action. Hoydick also thanked Gov. Ned Lamonts administration and the towns delegation for their involvement in this process. I'm really thankful to them because many of us look at that property, even without the Shakespeare theater on it, as the arts space for Stratford, Hoydick said. ...When you are on that property, especially when you look at the river, you just realize how beautiful it is. Its really something special. mike.mavredakis@hearstmediact.com By Park Jung-won Does history repeat itself? Witnessing the scenes of war taking place in Ukraine caused by Russia's paranoid leader, Vladimir Putin, the world is asking this question as if haunted by the ghost of Adolf Hitler. Only hours before the invasion, Putin said he wanted peace and had no intention of invading Ukraine, despite having massed tanks near its border. He then gave an emergency speech at 5:50 a.m. on Feb. 24 to announce "special military operations," justifying the invasion as a measure to protect Russians and Russian-speaking residents living in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The stark difference between his words and actions is reminiscent of Hitler's own hypocrisy prior to starting World War II. As Carl von Clausewitz, a 19th-century Prussian military theorist, said, "War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means." The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a historic event that is an attempt by force to alter the status quo in the international order that has been maintained since the end of World War II. Putin's immediate intention was to quickly establish a pro-Russian puppet government by occupying the capital, Kyiv, and overthrow the current Zelenskyy regime. However, as clearly implied by his distorted perception of history in his speech to the Russian parliament in 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet empire was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," his real aim was much more grandiose: to restore Russia's status, shrunken since the end of the Cold War, to that of a hegemonic power in the international order that is currently dominated by the United States and China. Putin has already failed drastically in this reckless adventure. European countries that had been relatively neutral have now sided with the U.S. The inhuman pictures of Russian troops targeting and bombing a theater where some 1,000 people, including children and senior citizens, were hiding, attacking pregnant women and children in hospitals, as well as civilians lining up to buy bread, have made Putin a "public enemy" of the international community. This is the reason why many experts say Putin's invasion has been a real gift to President Joe Biden's administration, which had been stumbling to keep allies in lockstep to maintain a "liberal international order." Biden, who had been criticized for his substance-free "America is back" rhetoric, has now easily accomplished his goal of Western solidarity as a result of this Russia-Ukraine War. China's president, Xi Jinping, is perhaps the only person who can stop Putin's madness. China is now in a tight spot, putting its position to a real international test. With this war, China has become alienated from the rest of the world that is furious about Russia's barbaric acts against innocent civilians in Ukraine. The only benefit that China might receive is that the U.S. has for the time being lost some of its focus on Asia. However, there are more ominous signs for China's future. If China continues to maintain strong economic ties to Russia, its own economic interests will suffer as Western economic sanctions continue. Xi will be constantly stuck with a headache caused by its choice to align itself with an international pariah. Of much greater worry to China, however, are the horrifying implications of the "deterrent effects" of the economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the U.S. and much of the rest of the world with regard to its own ambitions. The scale, comprehensiveness and substantial effects of sanctions, even if they also cause pain to those that employ them, have made China panic. China now knows that it would likely face a similar blowback if it invades Taiwan in the future. The biggest reason why Russia has failed in its initial military strategic aims in this war is its underestimation of Ukraine's ability to hold together and defend itself. Russia's poor preparation in terms of military strategy and tactics has also become evident. Its front-line units have reached a point where they cannot conduct operations due to basic logistical supply problems such as food and fuel, leaving many Western security experts stunned. Yet, considering the Russian political system, this was an inevitable result. As the former U.S. national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, once said, Russia could choose to be a democracy or an empire, but not both. Russia currently finds itself with an anachronistic leader trapped in notions of chauvinistic nationalism and romantic militarism who is surrounded by a few greedy oligarchs who are unwilling to push back against his misguided policies. The failure to establish in post-Cold War Russia a democratic system that could constrain such an unbalanced leader has made this reality unavoidable. As Russia continues to have difficulty taking over Ukraine by means of conventional warfare, it is feared Putin might eventually decide to use tactical nuclear weapons to gain a military advantage. If that were to happen, an escalation of the conflict beyond Ukraine leading to World War III would become a terrible prospect. Nevertheless, the most important question to ask amid this tragic situation should be what the Ukrainian people genuinely want. Their humble dream is to live in a liberal democracy and market economy without suffering constant Russian security threats. The world has been inspired by the Ukrainian people's stiff resistance. Ukraine is now teaching a valuable lesson that war can never be won with military force alone. The existence of a courageous leader and patriotic citizens are the greatest driving force to win the war. For the South Korean people, who have been living next to bellicose, revisionist countries, this war is not merely a story of "others." Park Jung-won (park_jungwon@hotmail.com), Ph.D. in law from the London School of Economics (LSE), is a professor of international law at Dankook University. It's regretful SsangYong Motor had to waste five more months Edison Motors' attempted acquisition of SsangYong Motor has ended in failure. In a regulatory filing Monday, SsangYong said it terminated the acquisition contract after a consortium led by Edison Motors had failed to deposit a payment by the March 25 deadline. SsangYong once raised expectations of a new start after its acquisition by a Korean company, but now faces a rough road ahead. Last October, the Seoul Bankruptcy Court designated the Edison consortium as the preferred bidder. Still, it ended up wasting five more months, as the consortium failed to pay the price of 304.9 billion won ($274.3 million). SsangYong Motor once led the domestic SUV market with its jeep model, Korando. However, the company was pushed out of the race as its owners continued to change and it was driven to the edge of a precipice, unable to join the rapidly changing trends of the automobile market since the 2000s. If the company fails to find another owner by the October court receivership deadline, it will enter a liquidation procedure. Up to 200,000 people related to the troubled carmaker, including its suppliers, let alone 5,000 SsangYong executives and employees, will end up out on the streets. To prevent its collapse, Ssangyong needs to find a new owner. Fortunately, there are signs that the current circumstances are better than last year's. SsangYong's electric vehicle model J100, the development of which was once uncertain, is scheduled to be unveild in late June. The company plans to release another EV model, U100, in the latter half of next year in collaboration with China's BYD, speeding up its conversion to eco-friendly vehicles. SsangYong Motor's sale can be a burden for the incoming Yoon Suk-yeol administration, which will take office in May. However, at stake is a 60-year-old carmaker and the livelihoods of 200,000 workers. The state-run Korea Development Bank, the main creditor of SsangYong, can hardly inject any more funds. SsangYong's union and management have done what they could to keep their company afloat. However, all stakeholders should tighten their shoelaces once again. Otherwise, they will be unable to justify it if the company has to reach out to creditors or the government later. The pivot to college life, both socially and academically, can be uncomfortable and abrupt with a packed schedule, new environments to acclimate to and, for some, a new city to call home. To help ease the transition for those who live on campus at UO, particularly first-year students who are required to do so, UO has created a wide array of housing communities. Residential Communities (RC), student housing cohorts put together based on shared interests, values or identities, offer a variety of events and activities. Academic Residential Communities, while similar, also require these student cohorts to participate in seminars and classes together. It just makes the first year of college easier, Jessica Winders, UOs assistant director for academic residential and research initiatives, said. It helps you get a roadmap in place, and your questions can be answered as they come up. If youre coming to UO with a lot of uncertainty, not at all sure about what its going to be like on campus, these communities are a really safe and awesome way to help that transition. Led by UO students and faculty, these communities also bolster student well-being via cohort events, study groups, faculty mentorship and opportunities to participate in events like the Undergraduate Research Symposium that may typically be out of reach for first-year students, according to Winders. Five of UOs housing communities are identity-based, which can present a unique sense of community and safety for students belonging to the respective groups. These communities provide a unique sense of identity-based community and safety that work to build interpersonal connections and resources for their students a goal that has been maintained throughout the pandemic. Finding solidarity in identity Four of these identity-based housing communities are ARCs Latinx Scholars, LGBTQIA+ Scholars, Native American & Indigenous Studies and Umoja Black Scholars while one, the Gender Expansive Residential Community, is an RC. These communities can help provide students with resources and connections in support of their identities that they might not have otherwise found so early on in their college careers. For Emma Howard, a UO student and the programmatic support assistant for the Gender Expansive Residential Community, identity-based ARCs and RCs often function as critical safe spaces for marginalized groups. For trans and non-binary folks in my community, theres a lot of harmful and destabilizing legislation and rhetoric being pushed out across the country right now, Howard said. Its important to have a space where they feel safe, and there are a lot of cool ways that our community is being made safer for those kids, like making all the bathrooms in the RC gender-neutral. While most housing communities have a common area and various characteristics in common, each has its own unique structure, priorities and events. According to Winders, the teams in charge of these programs are often composed of stakeholders that can contribute to the ARCs and RCs ongoing success and help meet the goals and needs of their students. For identity-based communities, these stakeholders often reflect the demographic that the community represents, enabling them to more effectively advocate for students needs. Audrey Lucero, a UO associate professor of education and the director of UOs Latinx Studies program, is a stakeholder in the Latinx ARC. As one of the ARCs faculty directors, one of her top priorities is to connect students with Latinx groups and faculty that can help them through the rest of their college experience. Were trying to build community early in their career so they can grow and blossom, Lucero said. That can mean connecting them with faculty/staff who also identify as Latinx, to see that we are there to support them and as a resource that can also mean helping them get connected to other students and groups on campus like MEChA, Mujeres and anywhere where they particularly feel they can find community. Many students with a wide range of lived experiences join ARCs and RCs looking to meet others with similar backgrounds. Lucero said students coming from more diverse areas like Woodburn, Oregon might be shocked by UOs less diverse population, while others from predominantly White high schools or certain rural areas might have never had the opportunity to find community in that way. So many of the applications we get are people coming from small towns, rural towns, conservative areas or families where theyre not necessarily comfortable being themselves, Jason Anajovich, the student coordinator for the LGBTQIA+ Scholars ARC, said. Knowing that every person around you to some degree understands you, and can empathize with what youve gone through, is such a different experience for so many people. Applying for housing communities Students can apply for ARCs and RCs when filling out their housing registration forms. Each housing community asks students to answer two questions specific to the community, which are then reviewed by the individual teams that lead the ARC or RC, according to Lucero and Winders. With a limited number of slots available, particularly for ARCs which also have limited classroom space for required courses, not everyone who applies is guaranteed admission. Were looking for genuine answers, and trying to find those students who are going to really benefit from being in the community, and really invest their time into creating that cohort and getting the academic components out of the community, Winders said. Were working on making space for more students some ARCs have more applications than there are slots to live on campus, or participate in the classroom, while others have a lot of room and were trying to get the word around. While identity-based communities are not necessarily exclusive to students belonging to said identity, applicants should not enter them in an extractive mindset hoping to be educated by their residents or get something novel out of the experience, Howard said. We absolutely allow folks who are not trans or gender non-conforming if they can show their dedication to the well-being of the community, Howard said. Its maybe not a space for folks who simply want to learn more about gender expansive folks, or for cis folks to come in and try and be better allies we dont want to put that burden on our community. Likewise, applicants should be mindful of the purpose and goals of the ARC they choose to apply for, Lucero said. There are certainly people in the ARC even now who do not identify as Latinx, Lucero said. But it is not designed as a platform for us to educate others about the experience of being Latinx at the University of Oregon. Learning to connect remotely Although housing communities have continued their services throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the realities of virtual events and the pandemics impacts on student mental health have posed difficulties for students and faculty. Shifting guidelines around mask mandates and public health measures have forced ARCs and RCs to make difficult decisions. Programming has been a bit of a rollercoaster this year, so the majority of the events Ive planned have been virtual, Anajovich said. That in turn has influenced student engagement because at this point who really wants to go to another virtual event? In spite of pandemic-related concerns, students have often found comfort in participating in their housing communities, virtually or not. Weve heard from students that it meant a lot to have a community that they belonged to during the pandemic, especially during periods where they couldnt be on campus or be in-person for most activities, Winders said. Looking to the future Housing communities are hoping to use the continued shift toward in-person activities to offer a broader array of activities and events for its students to participate in. For next term, were hoping to transition to more outdoor-based activities; the weather might be nicer, COVID might be less of a concern and so on, but were keeping our fingers crossed, Anajovich said. The pandemic has also prevented housing communities from engaging with other groups and organizations on campus to the same extent as before. The transition away from virtual events could open up new opportunities for cross-campus cooperation for ARCs and RCs. I think a lot more partnership and collaboration is something that Im looking forward to for next year, Lucero said. For instance, [before COVID-19] we tended to partner with the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art to provide a hands-on artistic engagement opportunity for students, but we havent been able to do things like that the past two years Id also like to see collaborations with other ARCs, and opportunities to engage with others outside of the ARC as a whole. In spite of ongoing pandemic uncertainty, Howard still believes that identity-based housing communities are a net positive for incoming students. Its an amazing opportunity to live surrounded by people who are similar to you, who might be able to help you navigate your unique identities and experiences because theyve gone through something similar themselves, Howard said. Its also a great opportunity to make close and meaningful friends at UO after two years where that has been significantly harder. Students can begin applying to housing communities once admitted to the university as part of their housing registration in the spring. While they may be interested in several ARCs and RCs, they are only permitted to apply to one at a time. Interested students can visit the UO Housing website for more information. Editor's note: This story was updated 4/13/22 to correct the spelling of Toya Fick's name and to include the fact that Ross Kari is an eligible candidate to replace Chuck Lillis. University of Oregon board of trustees chair Chuck Lillis is nearing the end of his service on the board, and the board has yet to determine who will fill the role. In April 2021, there was major turnover on the board as seven trustees were replaced. Because of this turnover, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown asked Lillis to remain in his position to be a guiding force during a transition period, according to Around the O. Trustees are generally allowed to serve up to two consecutive four-year terms, according to the boards website. Campus-based positions like the student and faculty trustees have two-year terms. Lillis will enter a third term though it is expected to be a brief one. According to a UO announcement, Lillis plans to step down in June. The chair is the leader of the board and facilitates meetings. According to UO policy, the chair has the authority to request reports and recommendations from UO committees and advisory groups, to authorize the institution of some legal actions and to execute and grant academic degrees and other recognitions. It remains unclear when the next board chair will be selected. UO spokesperson Saul Hubbard said the trustees normally select a new board chair and vice chair every three years. It is also possible that Lillis could leave the board before a new chair is selected, Hubbard said. In the event of a vacancy of the Board Chair position, the Vice Chair temporarily assumes responsibilities of the Chair and calls a meeting, as soon as practicable, so the trustees can select a new Chair, Hubbard said. The current vice chair is Ginevra Ralph, a member of the 2013 inaugural board. Her term will end at the conclusion of the 2022-23 academic year. Student trustee Julia Lo, faculty trustee Ed Madison, non-faculty staff trustee Jimmy Murray and UO President Michael Schill are also not candidates. That leaves Ralph, Marcia Aaron, Tim Boyle, Renee Evans Jackman, Toya Fick, Steve Holwerda, Elisa M. deCastro Hornecker, Connie Seeley and Dennis Worden and Ross Kari as the only eligible candidates among current board members. The incoming board members that will replace the ones leaving may also be appointed, but it is possible that an appointment could occur before new trustees are inducted. The board may also conduct an external search. Aaron is the founder of KIPP Public Schools, a group of charter schools in southern California. Boyle is the CEO of Columbia Sportswear. Jackman is a grants management officer at the DC Department of Behavioral Health. Fick is a former advisor of former Senator Hillary Clinton and specializes in education policy. Holwerda is the owner and managing director for Ferguson Wellman Capital Management. Hornecker has worked as an investment manager at the Bank of California. Seeley is a chief administrative officer, executive vice president and chief of staff at Oregon Health & Science University. Worden is a former staffer for Congressman David Wu and is a member of the Coeur dAlene tribe. Kari is the former CFO of Wells Fargo and has a masters degree in business from UO. Information about each of these board members can be found on the boards website. Moon and Yoon should ensure smooth transition President Moon Jae-in and his successor Yoon Suk-yeol have managed to narrow their differences over major issues related to the transition of power. During their dinner meeting Monday, Moon promised to cooperate with President-elect Yoon's plan to relocate the presidential office from Cheong Wa Dae to the Ministry of National Defense compound in Yonsgsan, central Seoul. Moon also recognized the need for an extra budget aimed at compensating small business owners and self-employed people for their losses arising from COVID-19 restrictions. More importantly, he and Yoon agreed on the need to work together for a smooth presidential transition. The meeting came 19 days after Yoon won the March 9 presidential election. No other past Korean leaders took so long to meet their successors following a presidential poll. The gathering between Moon and Yoon had been scheduled for March 16. But it was postponed due to wide differences over contentious issues between the two sides. It is fortunate that the outgoing and incoming leaders of our county have met face to face and defused tensions between the ruling and opposition camps. In fact, many people have been disappointed about a head-on clash between Moon and Yoon over sensitive issues such as the presidential office relocation plan and the president's appointments of his loyalists to key posts at state enterprises and public institutions. The confrontation reached its peak last week when Moon nominated Rhee Chang-yong, director of the International Monetary Fund's Asia and Pacific department, as the governor of the Bank of Korea. Yoon's transition committee strongly protested the nomination, criticizing that the presidential office had not consulted with the panel over who will lead the central bank. However, Moon made it clear that he would exercise his appointment rights until his term ends May 9. Now, Moon and Yoon appear to have become amicable with each other. But it is still unclear whether they have buried the hatchet once and for all. Rather they seem to have only fixed the situation temporarily. This means that the two sides could go back to a conflict mode anytime because they have only agreed to leave thorny issues to working level discussions. During the meeting, Moon said that his government will carefully look into and cooperate for the budget needed for the relocation of the presidential office. He also said that the task of moving the office to a new site is fully up to the incoming government. We hope that Moon will hold a Cabinet meeting and approve the use of a reserve budget to facilitate the relocation. It is also necessary for the Moon administration and the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) to cooperate with the transition committee and the main opposition People Power Party (PPP) to pass a supplement budget bill worth 50 trillion won ($40.83 billion). In addition, the two sides must discuss Yoon's proposal to grant a special pardon to former President Lee Myung-bak who is serving time in jail for corruption. They should also ensure there is no security vacuum following North Korea's test-firing of an ICBM last week. More than anything else, President Moon and President-elect Yoon should work more closely to promoting national unity and "cooperative" politics. They should go beyond narrow-minded partisanship and political enmity. Earlier this month, I found myself being truly infuriated by the online musings of a former prime minister of Finland. Normally the wisdom of Alexander Stubb a self-professed sports nut who boasts about his time completing Ironman races on his Twitter profile passes me by. But his bizarre outburst was genuinely shocking, and all-too revealing. Responding to a newspaper article about Boris Johnson, Stubb wrote the following rather unlettered tweet: This idea about Global Britain is as true as Peaceful Russia. Simply utter rubbish, to put it diplomatically. To claim that Boris Johnson has taken a lead globally in standing up to Putin is an illusion only possible in Brexit la la land. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has spoken favourably about the UK and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, saying Britain is definitely on our side' while hinting other countries are trying to perform a balancing act by staying more neutral After praising Britain, Zelensky (pictured addressing the House of Commons) criticised France and French president Emmanuel Macron for being scared of Russia Afraid Well, now he and many like him are eating their words. In an interview over the weekend, Ukraines president Volodymyr Zelensky was unequivocal when he was asked which countries had offered the strongest support to his nation as it fought for its survival. [Boris] Johnson is a leader who is helping more, said Zelensky. He continued: Britain is definitely on our side. It is not performing a balancing act. Britain sees no alternative for the way out of the situation. Britain wants Ukraine to win and Russia to lose. Zelensky was also clearly referring to Britain when he added that some countries recognise Nazism in Russia. A ringing endorsement, then. But what of our European neighbours? Have they, too, taken a lead globally in standing up to the Russian dictator? Not according to Zelensky. In the same interview with the Economist magazine, he singled out Frances Emmanuel Macron for stinging criticism, following Pariss lamentable failure to offer the Ukrainian defenders anything like the same support that Britain has. They [France] are afraid of Russia, said Zelensky. And thats it. French president Macron has been trying to position himself as a negotiator between Russia and Ukraine, but Zelensky is far from convinced And Zelensky is far from a lone voice: the Ukrainian ambassador to Britain revealed recently that his countrys troops have often shouted God save the Queen as they fire the state-of-the-art anti-tank missiles that we have been supplying them throughout the conflict. Sadly, the views of the ex-Finnish PM Stubb shared, of course, by many EU panjandrums are all too common. This sort of patronising, holier-than-thou, anti-British sentiment has become as depressing as it is familiar. But how woefully misplaced it now seems! Even the British governments most fanatical critics grudgingly admit that it has led from the front on Ukraine. If Boris Johnson takes heart from Zelenskys tribute to this country, the preening, posturing President Macron should feel the sharp rebuke all the more keenly. Since Brexit, the French leader has endlessly nurtured anti-British sentiment, painting this country as the pariah of Europe to the extent of pouring scorn on British-made Covid vaccines, jeopardising the lives of his own people. Yet now Zelensky, the leader of an embattled democracy, has singled out Britain a renegade country whose people dared to vote to leave the bloated European superstate as his most stolid supporter. It is Britain, too, that has forcefully spearheaded global efforts to end Putins hideous war leading the way on sanctions, weaponry, intelligence-gathering and more. A Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces member holds an NLAW anti-tank weapon, thousands of which were donated by the UK And it is no exaggeration to say that without Americas Javelin missiles and Britains Light Anti-Tank Weapons Systems, Ukraine would likely have fallen to its aggressors by now. What a blow it all is for Macron, who has been desperate to present himself as a colossus of the world stage especially with elections next month but who has proved hopelessly wrong-footed at almost every turn. After all, it was the French President who in early February sallied into the Kremlin to conduct a five-hour meeting with the Russian despot at either end of a ludicrously long table. Macron then briefed the Press about the assurances Putin had offered him even as 100,000 Russians troops had by then massed on Ukraines border. He told me that he would not initiate an escalation, and I think this is important, Macron reported of his talks with the Kremlin gangster. The parallels with Neville Chamberlain, returning from the Munich Conference in 1938, were agonisingly clear. Putin launched his bloody invasion barely two weeks after his meeting with the French premier. Ridicule Macron, wearing jeans, stubble and paratrooper hoody - dubbed 'The Zelensky effect' Unembarrassed, Macron who usually favours expensive tailored suits soon had himself photographed in the Elysee Palace to universal ridicule while sporting stubble, jeans and a hooded top bearing the logo of an elite French parachute regiment. Critics said he was trying to ape the Ukrainian leader, who swapped sober suits for military-green T-shirts when the war began. What a contrast Boris has been. When, late last year, Putin began assembling his forces on the Ukrainian border, Boris made his fears about a Russian attack explicit, declaring to the Commons in January that the Russian had made an obvious threat to invade. Yes, Boris has made plenty of mistakes as a politician and, perhaps, as a human being. But he is also an obsessive follower of Winston Churchill, who recognised in the 1930s the danger Hitler posed, even as many in Britain refused to. I am not, of course, suggesting that Boris is Churchills equal. But I do recognise his ability shared with his idol to see a tyrant for what he is, or to use Zelenskys words, to recognise Nazism. The British Prime Minister has not been acting alone. Britains security services perhaps scarred by intelligence failings over the Iraq War some 20 years ago have also done superb work in exposing the danger Putin represented. Destroyed My contacts in Ukraines government have told me how deeply their relationship with British intelligence has strengthened in recent years. The Salisbury poisonings, in which former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter were attacked with the nerve agent Novichok on British soil, acted as a wake-up call four years ago. Putins murderous tendencies have only worsened since then. Having destroyed swathes of Ukraine, now his forces are said to be seizing and deporting Ukrainians to filtration camps deep inside Russia: gulags by another name. This is no less than 21st-century Stalinism, and a monstrous disregard for international law. Given all this and with reports of more atrocities surely set to emerge I have no doubt how history will judge this conflict and the Western politicians who were around at the time. Who could now dispute that Macron the appeaser will be seen for the gullible minnow he was while Boriss stature has soared? n David Patrikarakos is the author of War In 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict In The 21st Century. Advertisement A Missouri couple are reenacting what life was like in the U.S. in the 1800s while wearing period clothing and making centuries-old recipes on the hearth of a brick fireplace. Justine Dorn, 28, and Ron Rayfield, 33, have 200,000 subscribers to their educational YouTube channel, Early American, where they show how people cooked, dressed, and spent their days in the 18th and 19th centuries. In her first video from October 2020, she demonstrated how to make funeral cookies at the Benjamin Stephenson House, a Federal-style home built in 1820 in Edwardsville, Illinois. Scroll down for video Missouri couple Justine Dorn, 28, and Ron Rayfield, 33, have 200,000 subscribers to their YouTube channel, Early American They show how people cooked, dressed, and spent their days in the 18th and 19th centuries in their series of videos In their first clip, Justine demonstrated how to make funeral cookies at the Benjamin Stephenson House, a Federal-style home built in 1820 in Illinois 'Funeral cookies, also known as funeral biscuits, were handed out at wakes to friends and family of the dead,' she explained in the caption. Justine, who followed directions from 'The New Whole Art of Confectionary by W.S. Staveley,' added a link to the full recipe on her blog, Early American Cooking. She wore a blue and white striped dress and an apron from the period while baking the cookies on the hearth of the fireplace at the historical house, just like a Midwestern woman would have done in the 19th century. In another video from February of this year, Justine made a 'working-class supper' that was common in America in 1820: Indian meal pudding (an early version of cornbread) with sides of sausage, red cabbage, and broiled potatoes. Justine, who followed directions from 'The New Whole Art of Confectionary by W.S. Staveley,' added a link to the full recipe on her blog, Early American Cooking Justine baked the cookies on the hearth of the fireplace at the historical house 'Funeral cookies, also known as funeral biscuits, were handed out at wakes to friends and family of the dead,' she explained in the caption Ron was cutting kindling outside in the snow when Justine returned from 'town' carrying a rucksack of groceries at the start of the clip. She then got hard to work, once again cooking everything in the fireplace. Justine explained in the caption that the meal is made of 'economical yet hearty food to get one through labor through the worst of Missouri's winters.' The couple has also made giant gingerbread cookies out of 19th-century molds, homemade coffee, and a boozy dessert that called for a pint of wine poured over barley and sweetened with sugar, currants, and cinnamon. Other videos touch upon day-to-day life in America in the 1800s, including what women wore and how they did their makeup. In another video from February of this year, Justine made a 'working-class supper' that was common in America in 1820 Indian meal pudding (an early version of cornbread) was served with sides of sausage, red cabbage, and broiled potatoes ustine explained in the caption that the meal is made of 'economical yet hearty food to get one through labor through the worst of Missouri's winters' Justine filmed herself getting dressed in a typical outfit worn by women in the 1820s in a video from December, staring with her white cotton under-dress. She then put on stockings that were tied with blue ribbon, explaining in the caption that at this time they were 'more fashionable in white or pink.' The YouTuber explained that stays, which were similar to a corset, were common at this time and 'worked as a bra.' She noted that 'even working women' wore them. After lacing up her stays, she tied a simple petticoat around her waist to push up the back of her dress. While pockets were still worn at this time, she said they were 'no longer required' because reticules small women's handbags became more popular. Justine filmed herself getting dressed in a typical outfit worn by women in the 1820s in a video from December, staring with her white cotton under-dress and stockings The YouTuber explained that stays, which were similar to a corset, were common at this time and 'worked as a bra.' She noted that 'even working women' wore them After lacing up her stays, she tied a simple petticoat around her waist. Finally, she put on her dress and flat black shoes Finally, Justine put on her dress and shoes, which were a pair of basic black Mary Jane flats. She pointed out that shoes at this time were 'almost always flats' and 'large buckles were no longer in fashion.' In another video, she applied makeup to show what a typical 19th-century beauty routine was like. 'Healthy skin was prioritized over makeup in this era,' she explained in the captions. 'The natural look following hundreds of years of cakey powder, black patches, and red cheeks was now in vogue.' Justine first prepared her skin with rose-scented cold cream and then added a touch of liquid rouge to her cheeks and lips to stain them. In another video, she applied makeup to show what a typical 19th-century beauty routine was like. She used cold cream to prep her face and then applied liquid rouge and powder The couple has also made everything from homemade coffee to giant gingerbread cookies using centuries-old recipes Justine used 19th-century molds to make the large gingerbread cookies around the holidays She checked no one was looking when she pulled out her pot of 'expensive' ground-up pearl powder and dabbed her nose with it. 'Powder during this era was most frowned upon as it was associated with the morally bankrupt,' she noted. Justine filled in her brows with a clove that she burned over a candle flame to turn it into a makeshift pencil. She also added perfume, saying floral and herbal scents were popular during this time. In addition to her videos and blog, the history buff also shares plenty of photos of herself and her partner dressed up in historical garb on her Instagram page. Justine has also tried out a recipe for a boozy dessert that called for a pint of wine poured over barley and sweetened with sugar, currants, and cinnamon Justine revealed in February that they had purchased a 200-year-old bed with a straw mattress to add to their collection of historical objects 'Ok I have got to say that I am REALLY surprised at how comfortable this mattress is,' she wrote on Instagram. 'It's firm and wasn't too lumpy' Fans have been curious as to whether Justine and Ron live like it's 1820 full time, but they do wear contemporary clothing and appear to live in a modern home Justine revealed in February that they had purchased a 200-year-old bed with a straw mattress to add to their collection of historical objects. She shared pictures of herself sprawled on the bed, writing: ''We spent the day stringing up our new antique rope bed [ha ha "new antique"] and stuffing our new mattress with straw.' 'Ok I have got to say that I am REALLY surprised at how comfortable this mattress is,' she added. 'It's firm and wasn't too lumpy. The straw also gave the room a nice smell if that's your thing.' She later posted a video of Ron putting the bed together on their YouTube channel. Fans have been curious as to whether Justine and Ron live like it's 1820 full time, but they do wear contemporary clothing and appear to live in a modern home when they aren't filming. An iconic American whiskey has launched nationwide after winning gold at the prestigious San Francisco Spirits Competition. Westward Whiskey Cask Strength has arrived on shelves just in time for cosy autumn and winter nights by the fire and is known for its 'black pepper and toasted almond' flavours. Westward Whiskies are made in Oregon and comes in American Single Malt, American Single Malt Stout Cask and American Single Malt Pinot Noir Cask. An iconic American whiskey brand has just launched nationwide after winning gold at the prestigious San Francisco Spirits Competition Westward Whiskey Cask Strength reflects the skill of the brewers who create the famous 'liquid gold' however each will set you back $199. 'We're thrilled to be expanding our flagship portfolio of whiskeys as we continually reimagine what single malts can be' said Thomas Mooney, Founder and CEO, Westward Whiskey. 'We first introduced Cask Strength at the demand of our local Oregon fans, and since then there has been huge interest from whiskey lovers both locally and globally,' he said. 'We first introduced Cask Strength at the demand of our local Oregon fans, and since then there has been huge interest from whiskey lovers both locally and globally,' he said The Whiskey reflects hints of toasted almond, graham cracker, and black pepper aromas. The flavours include sesame, tobacco leaf and cacao, with a honeyed, deep fiery malt finish. Westward Whiskey Cask Strength is available from Cambridge Cellars and Boozebud around Australia for $199. Advertisement Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie today supported each other at a Service of Thanksgiving in memory of their grandfather Prince Philip today. The sisters were joined by their husbands as they arrived at Westminster Abbey for the tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh, who was age 99 when he died last April. Princess Eugenie, 32, who was comforted by husband Jack Brooksbank, 35, cut a stylish figure in a floral midi dress by British fashion designer Erdem worth 1,695. She teamed the look with a cropped black jacket and matching headband that swept her hair off her face. Princess Beatrice, 33, stepped out in a burgundy dress with coordinating heels and a black coat, alongside her polished husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 38. Princess Beatrice, 33, walked close by husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 38, as they left the the Service of Thanksgiving in memory of Prince Philip alongside Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank Princess Eugenie,32, and husband Jack Brooksbank , 35, had arrived at the Service of Thanksgiving in memory of Prince Philip alongside Princess Beatrice, 33, and husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 38 Princess Beatrice looked stylish in a burgundy dress and coordinating heels, alongside her dapper husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 38, as they entered Westminster Abbey Princess Beatrice teamed Nonoo Lyons 'Beatrice' coat with a dress from The Kooples, Gianvito Rossi 'Lorraine' pumps and a 'Mildred' hat from Justine-Bradley-Hill Millinery Princess Eugenie cut a stylish figure in a floral midi dress by British fashion designer Erdem worth 1,695 as she followed behind her sister Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie spoke outside the gates before entering the memorial service Princess Beatrice was in floods of tears as the event began, reaching into her handbag for a tissue and at one stage covering her face with a service sheet to hide her tears The mother-of-one became visibly emotional as she stood alongside her cousin Prince William for the song service Princess Eugenie looked sombre as she joined the congregation in singing as part of the tribute to her grandfather The mother-of-one appeared to be wearing minimal makeup but wore her hair in loose curls for understated glamour. She appeared visibly emotional as she stood beside Prince William during the service and was seen covering her face with the order of service booklet. In floods of tears, Beatrice reached into her handbag for a tissue. Meanwhile, Eugenie stood on the other side of their cousin with a sombre expression as she attempted to join the congregation with singing. They sat behind the Queen, Prince Charles, Duchess of Cornwall and Prince Anne at the service that was packed with European royals among attendees. After a poignant service limited to 40 minutes where the Queen sat in one of the Canada chairs with an additional cushion, she was driven the 22-miles back to Windsor Castle with the Duke of York beside her after her first major public engagement for approaching six months. The 51 European royals who attended the Service of Thanksgiving went to a number of receptions held in London afterwards, including one held at Kensington Palace, home to a number of British royals including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. Prince Charles hosted a charity reception at St James' Palace before attending a dinner at Windsor Castle tonight to mark the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's 75th anniversary. It is highly likely he will drop in to see his mother beforehand. Princess Beatrice opted for unstated glamour with her hair styled in loose curls and a pink lipstick to compliment her subtle makeup Princess Eugenie appeared visibly emotional while entering the service of thanksgiving at Westminster alongside her sister Princess Beatrice and husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi arrived to the packed service that had European royals among attendees Prince Philip, who was seen as the patriarch of the family, showed support for his granddaughters by attending both of their weddings. Despite having officially retired in August 2017, he made a rare public appearance at Beatrice's wedding to Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi in 2020. Eugenie was gifted artwork of flowers that Prince Philip had spent time painting when she married Jack Brooksbank two years earlier. The couple showed their gratitude to him when they welcomed their son in February 2021 at London's Portland Hospital. Princess Beatrice smiled while entering the memorial supported by her sister and husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi appeared to be comforting wife Beatrice before they entered Westminster Abbey Princess Beatrice beamed as she spoke to Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi on their way into the service Princess Eugenie looked emotional as she left the service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Princess Beatrice looked relaxed as she put her hands in her pocket while walking next to Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi Princess Beatrice and Eugenie spoke fondly about Prince Philip in an ITV documentary, revealing they feel 'very lucky' to have many memories with him Princess Beatrice remained teary as she greeted others who attended the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The sisters looked sombre as they stepped out of the Service of Thanksgiving alongside their husbands Princess Eugenie put on a bold smile as she met with others who attended the service in tribute to Prince Philip Princess Beatrice wore subtle makeup with a pink lipstick and light blusher, while bringing attention to her eyes with a black eyeliner Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi looked visibly moved by the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Eugenie joined Princess Anne as they left the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh Eugenie explained that the name August Philip Hawke Brooksbank was chosen as a tribute to Queen Victoria's Husband Prince Albert, whose birth name was Franz Albert August Karl Emanuel, as well as Prince Philip, who at the time was in hospital. Over the years Prince Philip has been a mentor for the younger royals, with Princess Eugenie describing him as 'the rock' of the family in the 2016 ITV documentary Our Queen at Ninety. Beatrice added that she felt 'very lucky' to have created many memories with her grandfather. In a virtual event shortly before his death, she revealed his influence on her life, saying: 'One of the things that I've always been inspired by is keeping your curiosity and don't be afraid to un-think and un-learn. Prince Philip appeared in good spirits alongside the Queen when they attended Prince Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank's wedding in 2018 (pictured) 'But also don't feel like you have to have all the answers yourself, one of the things that has always helped me, and this actually is inspired by my grandfather, whose turning 100 this year, but you kind of become obsessed with solving the problem, don't become obsessed with the solution. 'Because your route to actually finding a way to get through that problem will be different and the path will be different, and it might twist and turn. 'So don't be disheartened if your first path is not the one you think you have to stick to. Keep focusing on what you're trying to achieve and you'll get there.' Unfortunately Prince Philip didn't have the opportunity to meet Beatrice's daughter Sienna Elizabeth Mapelli Mozzi, who was born in September 2021. Sienna is the Queen's 12th great-grandchild and currently 11th in line to the throne, followed by Princess Eugenie. Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice have often been spotted alongside their grandfather at family gatherings. Pictured: Philip with his granddaughters at Epsom Racecourse Beatrice and Eugenie have been all smiles in photos taken alongside Prince Philip throughout the years -including Trooping The Colour and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations. The daughters of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson were among the 30 people invited to Prince Philip's funeral at St George's Chapel in the grounds of Windsor Castle. Originally there was going to be 800 mourners from across the Duke of Edinburgh's military units, charities and associates from across the Commonwealth but the amount had to be cut due to the coronavirus restrictions in place across England. Beatrice and Eugenie traveled by car to St George's Chapel, accompanied by their husbands, while their father Prince Andrew joined the procession of senior royals walking behind the Duke of Edinburgh's coffin. Beatrice and Eugenie were joined by their husbands at Prince Philip's funeral at St George's Chapel, Windsor in April 2021 Beatrice donned a long collared jacket and a round hat embellished with a large black bow. Meanwhile, younger sister Eugenie stepped out with her brunette tresses in a natural wave across her shoulders and donned a 5,690 Franz Knotted Trench coat, by Gabriela Hearst. She and husband Jack stood nearby Princess Beatrice and her husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi inside the chapel, alongside their teary cousin Zara Tindall and her husband Mike, with all the pairs following social distancing guidelines. Eugenie took to Instagram to share a tribute to her grandfather ahead of the service. The mother-of-one said that she 'would remember learning how to cook, how to paint, what to read' as well as her grandfather's 'favourite beer' and BBQing ability. Princess Eugenie has used social media to pay multiple tributes to her grandfather since his death. Pictured: Eugenie and Lady Louise Windsor with Prince Philip Eugenie wrote: 'Dearest Grandpa, we all miss you. You would be so touched by all the tributes that have been shared with me the past few days. 'People remember sitting next to you at a dinner, or shaking your hand once, who remember you saying hello in passing, or remember how much their DofE award meant to them. 'I remember learning how to cook, how to paint, what to read. I remember laughing at your jokes and asking about your spectacular life and service in the navy. 'I remember incinerating the sausages and you swooping in to save the day. 'I remember your hands and your laugh and your favourite beer. 'I will remember you in your children, your grandchildren and great grandchildren. Princess Eugenie shared a photo of herself as a child alongside Prince Philip (pictured), promising to look after her grandmother the Queen 'Thank you for your dedication and love for us all and especially Granny, who we will look after for you. ' She signed off: 'With all my love, Eugenie.' The royal shared two images alongside the emotional post, including one alongside sister Princess Beatrice on The Royal Balcony At The Investec Derby Festival At Epsom In Surrey in 2017. She took to social media to mark what would've been his 100th birthday two months later, writing candidly: 'Thinking of Grandpa on what would have been his 100th birthday.' Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic Queen had symbolically chosen to be accompanied by her son Prince Andrew despite the Epstein scandal Her Majesty arrived via Poets Corner for a shorter walk to her seat. She used a stick and Andrew's elbow Monarch, 95, leant on her son on leaving and travelled back to Windsor Castle with him after poignant service She was determined to travel to London to mark long and productive life of husband of 73-years Prince Philip Today is monarch's first major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months Royal aides say monarch has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew attended with his mother but Duke and Duchess of Sussex were not returning from US The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon The Queen as she left Westminster Abbey in her Rolls-Royce today, wearing a regal purple and golden brooch Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who last month agreed to settle his sex assault lawsuit, left the service in a car with his mother the Queen A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Charles was seen wiping his eyes at the service where he could say goodbye to his father after a pared back funeral last year. Prince Andrew looked serious as he waited to leave with his mother Prince William rests a hand on the back of his son Prince George, at the end of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Cambridges departing the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Duchess of Cambridge smiled out of the window of her car as she left the Abbey with Prince William after the service The Queen sits alone at Philip's pared-down funeral last April - in stark contrast to today's celebration. It was one of the defining photos of the pandemic, where many Britons were forced to mourn their loved ones in small ceremonies, sometimes alone Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today The congregation takes its place ahead of the service. The Queen made the final decision to attend this morning, hours before she was due to travel the 22 miles from Windsor Castle to Central London. She held Andrew's elbow The royal family paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip at today's service at Westminster Abbey Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband The Queen stands for the first hymn at the service in remembrance of her beloved husband Prince Philip Prince Andrew walked his mother up the aisle after she arrived via a side door rather than the main entrance to shorten the distance The Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royals, led by the Queen despite her recent health issues, join the congregation in singing hymns during today's service The royals ahead of the service: In the front row are The Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence. The Cambridges are in the second row while Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, along with their husbands, are among the royals in the third row She left as she arrived, being supported by her son Andrew - reputedly her favourite The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey Prince Charles and Camilla were greeted by clergy as they arrived ahead of today's service of celebration for Prince Philip A serious looking Prince William sits down next to his wife, George and Charlotte to say goodbye to his grandfather The Queen sat beside Andrew, the royal who lost his HRH just weeks ago over his links to Epstein and civil case Crowds piled outside Westminster Abbey to pay tribute to Prince Philip as the service in his memorial continued Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at today's service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Princess Eugenie (left) and Princess Beatrice (right) pictured arriving at a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice arriving at the poignant Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Peter Phillips with Isla Phillips and Savannah Phillips (right) arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh and greeting Duke of Edinburgh award recipients Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Lady Louise Windsor arriving at the Westminster Abbey service for Prince Philip today. The Service will pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent attend the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, arrives with her foot in a brace and on crutches at Westminster Abbey today Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma arrives at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (left) and Formula One driver Sir Jackie Stewart (right) arrive today Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (left) and Home Secretary Priti Patel (right) arrive at Westminster Abbey this morning Guests walk into Westminster Abbey and take their seats ahead of this morning's service to remember Prince Philip Chancellor Rishi Sunak (left) and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) at Westminster Abbey today Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England (right), arrive this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Members of the congregation queue at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service of thanksgiving for the life of Philip Guests arrive to attend the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending today's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' By Andrew Hammond The Ukraine crisis is, primarily, a human tragedy. One of the most striking examples of this is the approximately 3.5 million refugees, around 10 percent of the population, who are estimated to have already been forced to flee the country. Geopolitically, the situation is fast becoming the worst crisis in Europe since 1945, with the possibility of hostilities spilling outside of Ukraine's border. Perhaps most alarmingly, there is growing concern about Russia's possible use of tactical nuclear weapons, which could kill millions. For corporations, the month since Russia's invasion has been a dizzying period that has seen, what Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld has called, an unraveling of "capitalistic diplomacy" as commercial relationships have been severed on a scale thought unimaginable as recently as February. London School of Economics professor Vladislav Zubok has also commented that the corporate retreat from Russia may well be a bookend on the era whose beginnings he witnessed while passing Moscow's first McDonalds on his way to work each day soon after the collapse of the Soviet Communism. Governments around the world have taken coordinated action, using sanctions to target areas like Russia's banking system, state-controlled companies and powerful oligarchs. Under these legal mandates and wider self-imposed restrictions, several hundred companies have also severed commercial ties, rupturing supply chains. Yet, despite the widespread actions taken so far, which has rattled Moscow so much that it has said that they are akin to a declaration of war, there are calls for corporates to do much more. This includes from former Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko who argues that the Russian invasion should prompt a wider ESG reckoning for the corporate community. She even suggests that Ukraine could be "the 21st-century equivalent of the late-20th century anti-apartheid movement, in which business, across many sectors and societies, banded together to counter the systemic and systematic racism of the white nationalist South African regime. The fastest way to end the war is to stop trading with Russia, divest Russian assets and refuse to finance Putin's regime". Step back from the immediate situation in Ukraine, and it is clear that the crisis is only the latest incident to underscore the growing potential for businesses to become intertwined with foreign relations between states in political, human rights, technological and legal issues. There have been numerous other such challenges in recent years in what is sometimes uncharted territory, whereby individual firms and sometimes entire industries find themselves under the political and stakeholder spotlight in diverse polities across the world. While this is not a wholly new phenomenon by any means, of the 21st century, it nonetheless appears to be increasing in incidence and salience driven by globalization in the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world we now live in. The last decade and a half alone have already seen a succession of first order international crises, including the 2007-08 financial upheavals and the coronavirus pandemic. The degree of instability accompanying the high level of international interdependence of the last several decades may now mean that crises are recurrent and thus, the rule rather than the exception. Beyond adhering to the law and other government mandates, corporates are guided in this VUCA landscape by international codes of conduct, including the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. However, some companies have recognized the need to go even further, including in what has been termed corporate foreign policy. Corporate foreign policy aligns activities, including public affairs, risk management, ESG, and operational planning, in a clear strategic framework. Recognizing the need for an unusual mix of core competencies in some international corporate functions, capability including tools, training and infrastructure can be enhanced where any gaps exist. ESG frameworks are often an area of capability in which firms need bolstering. This includes the need for clearer internal guidance for determining decision-making, protecting stakeholders including employees and customers and remaining faithful to corporate values, in fast-moving, unpredictable crisis situations such as those with the Russian invasion of Ukraine right now. One related area of activity is foresight, horizon scanning and scenario planning which enable firms to better anticipate and plan for social, economic and political opportunities and risks, helping to embed resilience through organizational structures. The march of globalization during much of the last few decades means that few international companies will escape these pressures completely. And, at the same time, owing to the proliferation of media and the influence of NGOs and related stakeholders, the actions of firms are increasingly under the microscope. For those companies which are proactive and invest in their capability, the prizes both in terms of mitigating risk and seizing opportunity are potentially ever more significant. Yet for those which are perceived to misstep, the fallout can be damaging, both reputationally and also for the financial bottom line. Andrew Hammond (andrewkorea@outlook.com) is an associate at the London School of Economics. Homemakers have revealed how they have managed to banish musty smells following weeks of relentless rainfall and high humidity. The tips come as forecasters reveal a rainbomb is set to drench Sydney over the next seven days with more than 100mls expected to fall over the soaked city. In a post on a renovation page on Facebook the house-proud men and women revealed they have tried dozens of techniques to rid their homes of the odour. The top tips include using moisture-banishing products in closets, getting a de-humidifier and putting 'everything in the sun'. High humidity and relentless rainfall has lead to increased mould and 'musty smells' according to home makers who are trying everything to keep the damp out - Damprid product pictured SAS Australia star Simone Holtznagel shared her frustration on Monday after her $3,000 leather Givenchy bag was covered in white mould from Sydney's humidity The warm, wet conditions have created the perfect atmosphere for mould to grow leaving families in the eastern states desperate for DIY hacks. One woman said she heard 'an open flame' is the best remedy for musty smells. 'I keep candles burning now and it seems to be working,' she said. While another woman endeavours to clean all of the mould springing up in her home quickly to insure it doesn't start to smell. What do people recommend to help with musty smells? 1 - Lighting a candle in each room 2 - Using a de-humidifier 3 - Running the air-con non-stop 4 - Keeping windows open all day 5 - taking musty-smelling items outside to dry in the sunshine Advertisement 'Mix of 80% vinegar, six drops of clove oil in a 500ml spray bottle or 10 drops in 750ml-1L and 10 drops of dishwashing detergent. Shake and spray area liberally then allow it to dry naturally,' she said. But most agreed the job becomes much more difficult when there is no 'visible mould'. 'You have to take everything outside and dry in the sun for a few days,' one woman said. Why and where does mould grow? Generally, if you can see or smell mould, you need to clean up and remove the mould immediately, as mould can damage surfaces it grows on. The longer it grows the more damage it can cause. Mould only grows when there is sufficient moisture. When mould appears, the first task is to try to establish where the moisture is coming from. Parts of a house that get wet or have poor ventilation are prone to mould growth, such as: Avoid conditions encouraging mould growth, by using heat, insulation and ventilation. The cheapest and easiest way of reducing moisture and humidity levels is by ventilating a room by opening a door or window. Use exhaust fans where available. Source: Better Health Victoria Advertisement 'And I always keep my windows open on sunny days to catch the breeze and dry everything out,' added another. These comments appeared 'hilarious' to some who said they hadn't seen the sun for more than a few hours in weeks. What's the best way to remove mould? You simply take 80 per cent vinegar and 20 per cent water and put it into three buckets. 'Grab a microfibre cloth, dip it into the first bucket and clean a patch of mould,' Better Homes and Gardens wrote. 'Rinse the cloth in the second bucket and rinse again in the third. Repeat until all of the mould is cleaned off.' This works according to Mr Neumeister-Kemp because vinegar attacks the fungi 'mechanically'. Advertisement 'If I leave the windows open everything gets even wetter, and drying something in the sun for three days is fairly impossible at the moment,' said one person. Other people have tried using de-humidifiers to great success. 'It is amazing how much moisture those things can suck out of the air,' one woman said. Others have employed their air conditioners for the task. 'We have had ours running on dry mode for days to try to fix it,' one woman said. Others hang 'Damprid' and similar products in their linen cupnoards, storage areas and wardrobes to help minimise the damage to clothes and bedding. In early March thousands of workers complained their clothes were damaged by white mould, after digging to the back of their closets for office wear. Occupational health scientist Brad Prezant said poorly-ventilated wardrobes were one of the first places mould tends to grow when the humidity rises. 'Once the humidity gets over 80 per cent, that's when it contributes to fungal growth,' he told Daily Mail Australia. 'What's happening is we're seeing humid air going into your wardrobe and condensing on surfaces.' Could mould be making you sick? Here are the common symptoms to look out for Dizziness Confusion Fever Irritability Vomiting Difficulty concentrating Anorexia (loss of appetite, not to be confused with anorexia nervousa) Allergic rhinitis Jaundice Asthma Headaches Nausea Fibromyalgia Sore throat Diarrhoea Food allergies Fatigue Blurred vision Balance problems Difficulty breathing Vertigo Seizures Advertisement Mr Prezant said leather shoes, which are porous and allow moisture to seep through, were particularly vulnerable to mould growth. Poll Have you notice your home starting to smell musty following the rain? Yes! Nope! Have you notice your home starting to smell musty following the rain? Yes! 71 votes Nope! 15 votes Now share your opinion SAS Australia star Simone Holtznagel shared her frustration on Monday after her $3,000 leather Givenchy bag was covered in the same white mould. Cleaning experts have previously told FEMAIL that heavy-duty cleaners should be avoided when it comes to cleaning mould. Bleach and other harsh chemicals simply masks the black spores, and recommend vinegar instead. Professional cleaners also recommended using vinegar, eucalyptus and bi-carb soda, advised keeping the air-conditioning on at a cool temperature, and suggested using gloves and a face masks for safety while removing mould. An 84-year-old grandma has been left embarrassed and confused after her Woolworths delivery was dumped 200m from her home, in the pouring rain. By the time it was found it looked like it had been run over by a car, cans and bottles were flattened, chips crumpled and the bread was soggy. Sydney grandma Doreen usually heads to the supermarket with her carer, but they couldn't come this week so her daughter ordered her groceries online. 84-year-old grandma, Doreen, was left embarassed after her groceries were dumped in the rain 200 metres from her home They appeared to have been run over and had made a mess which the staff at the retirement village had to clean up The groceries were also left in the rain, making most of them unsalvageable The family use the service when they can't get shopping to the elderly woman any other way and it 'works most of the time'. But last week's delivery ended up on the other side of the woman's retirement village, in front of a garage and in the rain. Doreen's daughter Sam told FEMAIL the delivery was replaced after she complained to the supermarket giant but that it was 'beside the point'. 'Incidents like this push the price of groceries up for everyone,' she said. Not to mention the incident left the elderly woman very upset. 'She was upset but more upset that staff from the retirement village she lives in had to clean it all up,' she said. Sam posted photos on the retailer's Facebook page showing the damaged items and said the delivery driver 'hung up on her'. 'The driver did call but I could barely hear him and he kept saying unit 15 - I said to go the reception if he was lost but he hung up on me and about two minutes later I got a text saying they had been delivered,' she told FEMAIL. The grandma had no other way to get her groceries delivered as her carer couldn't help out this week In her Facebook post Sam said her mother's unit is 'clearly marked' so she couldn't understand how the driver had made such a big mistake. 'We had to clean up the mess and throw all bags away,' she said. The supermarket giant has replaced the damaged groceries and has launched an investigation into the claims. A Woolworths spokesperson said the delivery was 'disappointing' after issuing an apology for the incident. 'We pride ourselves on the service level of our home delivery option and we're disappointed to have missed the mark on this occasion,' the spokesperson told FEMAIL. 'We've been in contact with the customer to apologise and will be looking into this as a matter of urgency.' The four bags of shopping looked soaked and beyond repair by the time they were found on the opposite side of the retirement village The daughter thanked Woolworths for the replacement groceries and said she was looking forward to learn the outcome of the supermarket's investigation. Other customers labelled the incident a 'disgrace' and felt for the woman. Another shopper was left disappointed after the tubs they prepared for their order were ignored by the driver 'Its not like she can just pop out and grab more. Careless beyond words,' said one woman. Others shared their own delivery fails, including one family whole left tubs with ice packs on their veranda for the delivery. The driver put the bags next to the tubs on the verandah, prompting the customers to complain. Shoppers are obsessing over Big W's latest budget range of super stylish homewares and furniture. The new season of autumn style pieces includes a range of very on-trend white teddy furniture pieces, bubble vases, boucle throws, table lamps, bedding and candles. Home stylists are particularly loving the $109 Milan white teddy occasional chair which has sold out online and in most stores. Scroll down for video Shoppers are obsessing over Big W's latest range of affordable and stylish homewares especially the $109 Milan white teddy chair The new season of autumn style pieces includes a range of very on-trend furniture pieces, bubble vases, boucle throws, table lamps, bedding and candles Interior stylist Ashlee White uploaded a post to her popular Instagram account said the highly coveted chair, was 'plush and comfy' and styled it with one of Big W's bubble vases for $14. TikToker Georgia Clay was also lucky enough to get her hands on the popular piece, which also comes in a velvet green, and showed her stylish finds from Big W in a now-viral clip. Her video has been viewed more than 281,300 times with dozens of commenters impressed with her budget buys, especially the uber-chic ribbed table lamp for just $35. TikToker Georgia Clay was also lucky enough to get her hands on the popular piece, that also comes in a velvet green, and showed her stylish finds from Big W in a now-viral clip Her video has been viewed more than 281,300 times with dozens of commenters impressed with her budget buys, especially the uber-chic ribbed table lamp for just $35 'Running to buy this lamp immediately,' one fan wrote. 'Omg that lamp. I have been.. influenced,' another responded. She styled her bed with the luxuriously soft boucle throw rug that is only $25 and matches her $16 cushion also from Big W. Big W's new homewares range also includes a collection of bubble vases starting at just $10 as well as ribbed pillar candles for only $8 To match the Milan teddy chair there is also a $65 stool, and bench for $89 that both also comes in a velvet green and are available in stores and online There are also cosy bed sets like the olive green Pinsonic geometric quilt cover set at $39 for a queen and $49 for king-size Big W's new homewares range also includes a collection of bubble vases starting at just $10 as well as ribbed pillar candles for only $8. There are cosy bed sets like the olive green Pinsonic geometric quilt cover set at $39 for a queen and $49 for king-size. To match the Milan teddy chair there is also a $65 stool, and bench for $89 that both also comes in a velvet green and are available in stores and online. To see Big W's new season of homewares, head to their website here. A palatial mansion on the tropical island of Phuket that has been closed off to the public for the past 50 years is offering a special two-night deal for four lucky travellers to stay for just $67. To celebrate the return of international travel to Thailand the Governor's Mansion, which is is renowned as one of the best-designed buildings in Phuket, will open its doors once more for a one-of-a-kind luxury stay for one group of travellers. The property has been painstakingly curated by renowned Thai designer Saran Yen Panya to pay homage to Thailand's rich heritage and immerse guests in a world of opulence. To celebrate the return of international travel to Thailand the Governor's Mansion, which is is renowned as one of the best-designed buildings in Phuket, will open its doors once more for a one-of-a-kind luxury stay for one group of travellers The property has been painstakingly curated by renowned Thai designer Saran Yen Panya to pay homage to Thailand's rich heritage and immerse guests in a world of opulence The special stay, which is bookable from Friday, April 15 to Sunday, April 17, also coincides with the Songkran festival, the celebration of the Thai New Year, so the group of guests will get to soak in the vibrant festivities, flavours and famous Thai hospitality. Built at the end of King Rama V's era by successful local businessman Pra Pitak Chinpracha, the 119-year-old Governor's Mansion welcomed many out-of-town dignitaries and remains one of several neoclassical heritage mansions on Phuket today. The sprawling white and mustard heritage home is located in the historic heart of Old Phuket Town, and has been exquisitely restored to preserve its original fixtures, including richly patterned tiles and teakwood floors. The special stay, which is bookable from Friday, April 15 to Sunday, April 17, also coincides with the Songkran festival Built at the end of King Rama V's era by successful local businessman Pra Pitak Chinpracha, the 119-year-old Governor's Mansion welcomed many out-of-town dignitaries Its first floor is now home to the Blue Elephant Restaurant - a Michelin Plate awardee and long-running stalwart of Thailand's culinary industry Its first floor is now home to the Blue Elephant Restaurant - a Michelin Plate awardee and long-running stalwart of Thailand's culinary industry. During their stay the guests will get a personal welcome at check-in by Thai model and actress Patricia 'Good' Tanchanok, who will share her favourite hidden gems and tips for exploring the island. They will also get exclusive access to a two-bedroom suite on the Mansion's expansive second floor, including a private reception lounge and living room. A bespoke, multi-course 'Songkran' tasting menu will be prepared and hosted by master Chef Nooror Somany Steppe followed by a scuba diving and snorkelling adventure around the sparkling reefs and islands that dot the Andaman Sea. A bespoke, multi-course 'Songkran' tasting menu will be prepared and hosted by master Chef Nooror Somany Steppe Renowned for its magnificent beaches and rich cultural heritage Phuket has long been an incredible draw for millions of travellers from around the world As per advice on the Smart Traveller website, Australians must be fully vaccinated to enter Thailand, apply for the Thailand pass and have a Covid test on arrival and isolate until they receive a result. Renowned for its magnificent beaches and rich cultural heritage Phuket has long been an incredible draw for millions of travellers from around the world. The lush tropical island is now leading the way for Thailand's long-anticipated travel rebound. Holidaymakers will be able to book the special stay on Airbnb from 12pm April 5. An Australian winery has developed the world's first purple wine - and it's made with natural ingredients that are better for your health. Produced in Margaret River, Western Australia, Purple Reign has five varieties of Instagram-worthy wines including a sauvignon blanc, sparkling brut, shiraz, red blend and semi-sweet blend. Purple Reign's makers have swapped out synthetic additives used to preserve wine like sulphite for safer and natural ingredients so you don't have to feel guilty about indulging in a glass or three. Produced in Margaret River, Western Australia, Purple Reign is the world's first purple wine - and it's made with natural ingredients that are better for you Purple Reign's makers have swapped out synthetic additives used to preserve wine like sulphite for safer and natural ingredients so you don't have to feel guilty about indulging in a glass The low-sulphur wines are infused with botanicals and antioxidant-rich ingredients, like blueberries, pomegranate and beetroot which give them a vibrant purple colour. 'It's about the science - it's not a gimmick with food dye,' co-creator Tim Macnamara told FEMAIL. Mr Macnamara said Purple Reign's Taiwanese import partner found drinking their wines didn't trigger his asthma like others that use synthetic ingredients. The low-sulphur wines are instead infused with botanicals and antioxidant-rich ingredients which give them a vibrant purple colour Co-creator Tim Macnamara told FEMAIL Purple Reign's Taiwanese import partner found drinking their wines didn't trigger his asthma like others that use synthetic ingredients Mr Macnamara, who did a masters of environmental sustainability while working as a wine representative, created Purple Reign with his business partner and and organic, biodynamic and preservative free wine specialist, Ross Stewart. The pair experimented with various natural alternatives to make a wine without artificial additives and preservatives and launched Purple Reign at Sydney's Royal Easter Show in 2019. The unique wine was such a hit with punters, they sold out before the show ended. Purple Reign was launched at the 2019 Royal Easter Show in Sydney and was such a hit with punters, it sold out before the show ended Purple Reign has five varieties of Instagram-worthy wines including a sauvignon blanc, sparkling brut, shiraz, red blend and semi sweet blend Mr Macnamara said Purple Reign's red blend and shiraz wines 'tick every box' as they're certified organic, vegan, preservative-free and made from hand-picked Margaret River-grown grapes. The Semillon sauvignon blanc, semi-sweet blend and sparkling premium brut 'white' wines are enhanced with natural antioxidants to minimise the use of sulphites. Purple Reign's wine range starts at $21 and is available at selected bottle shops across the country. Dan Murphy's new bar has opened its doors to the public - but it's not what you'd expect from the alcohol giant. Instead of your typical bar, those who visit ZERO% in Hampton, Melbourne will be greeted with more than 30 non-alcoholic beverages including beers in cans or on tap for $2.99. Wine and cocktails will also be available for as little as $5, as well as a variety of snacks and meals spanning across lunch and dinner. Dan Murphy's new bar has opened its doors to the public - but it's not what you'd expect from the alcohol giant. Zero alcohol drinks are quickly becoming one of the fastest growing categories for Dan Murphy's, with more than 100 percent sales growth in the last two years. 'We think it's great that more Australians than ever are drinking responsibly, which is why we want to lean into and support this great trend,' Managing Director Alex Freudmann said. However, this is not the first time zero alcohol drinks have been available from the Australian store, back in the 1970s founder, Daniel Francis Murphy, sold Claytons. Customers can visit the Dan Murphy's bar, ZERO%, in Hampton, Melbourne for a menu with over 30 zero alcoholic drinks and more than 200 non-alcoholic products The new bar is said to provide customers with the hottest drinks that are trending at the moment and that the interior setting is contemporary and is open seven days a week '[Claytons] was the drink to have when you're not having a drink, back in the 1970s, so we have been onto this trend for a while,' Mr Freudmann said. The new bar is said to provide customers with the hottest drinks that are trending at the moment and that the interior setting is contemporary. ZERO% is open seven days a week and will be operating until the end of June 2022. The bar will be open from 11:00am till 9:00pm, Thursday to Saturday and from 11:00am till 7:00pm Monday to Wednesday and Sunday. Prince George will join his parents Prince William and Kate Middleton at today's memorial service as four of the Duke of Edinburgh's great-grandchildren turn out to pay tribute to their beloved great-grandfather. The Westminster Abbey service will mark one of the important outings to date for the eight-year-old future king, who enjoyed a close relationship with Prince Philip. Savannah, 11, and Isla Phillips, 10, the daughters of Prince Philip's eldest grandson Peter, will also be in attendance, as will Zara and Mike Tindall's eight-year-old daughter Mia. The Duke of Edinburgh's other great-grandchildren are Princess Charlotte, six, Prince Louis, three, Lena Tindall, also three, and her one-year-old brother Lucas, Princess Eugenie's one-year-old son August Brooksbank and Princess Beatrice's daughter Sienna Mapelli Mozz, who was born in September last year. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's children, Archie, two, and Lilibet, nine months, remain with the couple in California. Prince George will join his parents Prince William and Kate Middleton at today's memorial service as four of the Duke of Edinburgh's great-grandchildren turn out to pay tribute to their beloved great-grandfather. Above, George with Prince Philip on a riding carriage Savannah (right), 11, and Isla Phillips (centre), 10, the daughters of Prince Philip's eldest grandson Peter, will also be in attendance, as will Zara and Mike Tindall's daughter Mia (left) The Queen and Prince Philip with Prince George, Prince Louis, Savannah Phillips, Princess Charlotte, Isla Phillips holding Lena Tindall, and Mia Tindall. The Duke of Edinburgh died before the birth of his youngest grandchildren Lilibet and Sienna The Westminster Abbey service will be attended by some 1,800 guests including senior members of the Royal Family. The Duke of Edinburgh's four children will be in attendance, as will Charles, Anne and Edward's respective spouses, the Duchess of Cornwall, Vice Admiral Sir Timothy and the Countess of Wessex. Prince Andrew will make a rare public appearance and there is speculation the Duchess of York might have also been given an invitation. Seven of Prince Philip's eight grandchildren will be there, including the Duke of Cambridge, Zara Tindall and Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice, all of whom will attend with their spouses. The only grandchild missing the event is the Duke of Sussex. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's children, Archie, two, and Lilibet, nine months, remain with the couple in California The Queen and Prince Philip's family tree, showing the older great-grandchildren who might attend today's service The Queen is said to be determined to travel to London to mark the long and productive life of her husband Philip in what would be her first major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. Royal aides revealed the 95-year-old monarch has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service at Westminster Abbey 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled overnight. It includes several elements the duke had planned for his funeral in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. The Duke of Edinburgh was described as a 'devoted consort' to the Queen as the royal family's official Instagram page shared a touching photo montage dedicated to his 'extraordinary life' today. Some 1,800 guests, including senior members of the Royal Family, are expected to attend a service of thanksgiving for Prince Philip this morning at Westminster Abbey. Ahead of the event, which will be aired from 10.30 on BBC One, the royal family's official Instagram page shared a short photo montage dedicated to the late Duke's life. Among the images were photographs from the Queen's coronation in 1953, a visit from the couple to Canada in 2010 and attending the Queen's 90th birthday celebration in 2017, as well as snaps from Prince Philip's final public engagement in 2017. The caption detailed: 'His Royal Highness led an extraordinary life seeing active service in the Second World War as a Naval Officer, supporting The Queen as consort for over 60 years, and pursuing his many interests and convictions through his hugely varied patronages.' The Duke of Edinburgh was described as a 'devoted consort' to the Queen as the royal family's official Instagram page shared a photo montage dedicated to his 'extraordinary life' today (pictured during a 2010 visit to Canada) Among the snaps shared in dedication to the Duke's life were photographs with recipients of the Duke of Edinburgh award (left) and meeting an elephant during an engagement at Whipsnade Zoo (right) Ahead of Prince Philip's memorial service, which will be aired from 10.30 on BBC One, the royal family's official Instagram page shared a short photo montage dedicated to the late Duke's life Alongside the images, the captioning read: 'Over the course of his life, the Duke of Edinburgh was associated with over 700 charities and organizations. 'His interests ranged from scientific and technological developments to the welfare of young people and education, conservation and the environment, the encouragement of sport and most famously establishing the Duke of Edinburgh award. 'Founded in 1956, the DofE award now operates in over 130 countries, helping millions of young people build skills and confidence for life.' It continued: 'His Royal Highness undertook over 22,000 solo engagements, including 229 solo visits to the Commonwealth countries, alongside accompanying the queen on many official overseas visits. Another photograph shared in the montage showed the Duke holding the Queen's hand during the coronation (pictured) In the brief clip, the Duke was described as 'a devoted consort' to the Queen 'for over 60 years, supporting the monarch in her programme of public engagements' (pictured, attending celebrations to mark the Queen's 90th birthday in 2017) 'The Duke was a devoted consort for over 60 years, supporting the Queen in her programme of public engagements. 'Following a successful Naval career, His Royal Highness maintained strong links with the military. His military appointments included Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal in the British Army and Marshal of the Royal Air Force. 'His Royal Highness regularly visited the armed forces at home and overseas as well as supporting veterans and their families and paying tribute to those lost in conflict. 'In 2017, his final public engagement was with the royal marines, one of his longest standing military afflictions.' The caption shared alongside the photo montage to Prince Philip pointed to his dedication to royal service (right), completing over 22,000 solo engagements (left, Prince Philip in 1963 with the celebrated British ornithologist Sir Peter Scott, and Minnie, a Bronze Winged Duck) The Instagram post also shared a rare image of the Duke from his expedition to Antarctica in the 1950s (pictured) Meanwhile the Instagram caption read: 'Today at Westminster Abbey, guests will gather to celebrate the life of The Duke of Edinburgh. 'The Service will give thanks for HRHs dedication to family, Nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting environmental stewardship and conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces.' It continued: 'His Royal Highness led an extraordinary life seeing active service in the Second World War as a Naval Officer, supporting The Queen as consort for over 60 years, and pursuing his many interests and convictions through his hugely varied patronages.' Another section of the montage was dedicated to Prince Philip's work on the Duke of Edinburgh award (left and right) A caption on the video described how after the award was founded in 1956, it went on to operate in over 130 countries (pictured, the Duke presenting the award to recipients) The post went on to give details of how royal fans can tune into the service, which will be aired at 10.30 on BBC One. The Westminster Abbey service will be attended by some 1,800 guests including senior members of the Royal Family. The Duke of Edinburgh's four children will be in attendance, as will Charles, Anne and Edward's respective spouses, the Duchess of Cornwall, Vice Admiral Sir Timothy and the Countess of Wessex. Prince Andrew will make a rare public appearance and there is speculation the Duchess of York might have also been given an invitation. The final part of the video was a tribute to the Duke's dedication to the military during his royal career The clip described how, following a 'successful Naval career', the Duke of Edinburgh went on to 'maintain strong links with the military' The clip listed the Duke's roles within the military, including his position as Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal in the British Army and Marshal of the Royal Air Force The post detailed how Prince Philip had regularly visited Armed Faces both at home and overseas (pictured left and right) The service later today will give thanks for Prince Philip's 'dedication to family, Nation and Commonwealth' Other poignant photographs of the Duke showed him meeting military veterans as well as their families (left and right) Seven of Prince Philip's eight grandchildren will be there, including the Duke of Cambridge, Zara Tindall and Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice, all of whom will attend with their spouses. The only grandchild missing the event is the Duke of Sussex. The Queen is said to be determined to travel to London to mark the long and productive life of her husband Philip in what would be her first major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. Royal aides revealed the 95-year-old monarch has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service at Westminster Abbey 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled overnight. Meanwhile there were also several snaps from his final public engagement in 2017, when he joined Royal Marines outside Buckingham Palace (pictured) It includes several elements the duke had planned for his funeral in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Advertisement The Duke of Edinburgh's granddaughter Zara Tindall was joined by her husband Mike and their eldest daughter Mia at Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip's memorial service today. The mother-of-three looked poised as she wore an understated Laura Green navy coat which she paired with elegant silver earrings, as she was joined by her husband Mike for the event this morning. The couple were joined by their eldest daughter Mia, eight, who wore a black peplum coat with red piping along the cuffs and collar. Zara accessorised with a chic Bee Smith velvet headband, a leather clutch bag and she added height to her frame in matching stilettos. The Duke of Edinburgh 's granddaughter Zara Tindall was joined by her husband Mike and their eldest daughter Mia at Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip's memorial service today The mother-of-three looked poised as she wore an understated Laura Green navy coat which she paired with elegant silver earrings, as she was joined by her husband Mike for the event this morning Zara and Mike Tindall walk hand-in-hand with their daughter Mia as they arrive at the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Zara and husband Mike arrive holding hands with daughter Mia at the Duke of Edinburgh's memorial service at Westminster Abbey this morning Zara, Mia Grace and Mike Tindall depart hand-in-hand following the Memorial Service For The Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Mia was seen arriving for the service with mother Zara, wearing a navy dress with red piping along the collar and cuffs paired with black pumps, tights and a dark blue headband Zara and Mike Tindall arrive hand-in-hand with daughter Mia Grace as they attend the Memorial Service For The Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Mike looked smart in a grey tailored suit which he paired with a white shirt and a navy tie. Royal aides previously revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled overnight at midnight. Scroll down for video Born just weeks before Prince Philip's death, the couple paid tribute to the Duke by naming their son, Lucas Philip Tindall, in his honour. Shortly before the funeral, Mike posted a heartfelt Instagram tribute to Prince Philip, sharing a photo of the Duke of Edinburgh with Mia Grace. The couple were joined by their eldest daughter Mia, eight, who wore a black peplum coat with red piping along the cuffs and collar Zara accessorised with a chic Bee Smith velvet headband and leather clutch bag Mike looked smart in a grey tailored suit which he paired with a white shirt and a navy tie He shared the photo, taken by the Duchess of Cambridge, alongside a caption that read: 'It's been a very sad week but it has given us time to reflect on great memories and stories both personal and shared. A devoted family man who we will forever miss but always love.' The snapshot of Prince Philip showed the Duke sitting outside a log cabin. He was leaned over a wooden table to enjoy a meal in the countryside setting alongside Mike and Zara's seven-year-old daughter Mia Grace. Mike previously told how the funeral was 'eerie' due to social distancing which prevented more than 30 people attending. The husband of Princess Anne's daughter Zara Tindall spoke on his podcast The Good, The Bad and The Rugby last April, saying the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral was exactly how the royal would have wanted it because it's 'no fuss'. Speaking in the one-hour documentary special Prince Philip: The Royal Family Remembers last September, in Zara paid tribute to her grandfather. Mia sat with Savannah, 11, and Isla Phillips, 10, the daughters of Prince Philip's eldest grandson Peter inside Westminster Abbey for the service today Zara previously said the Duke provided an ever present leadership, adding she had 'never prepared herself to losing him because he was always there' Ahead of the funeral last year, Mike paid tribute to Prince Philip by sharing a photograph of the Duke eating with his great-granddaughter Mia Grace, taken by the Duchess of Cambridge She explained the ever present leadership Prince Philip afforded: 'You never really prepare yourself for losing him because he was always there.' The royal also paid tribute to the royal for shaping the role of consort to the Queen, saying: 'The amazing thing he's been able to do is be an incredible support to my grandmother but also to stay true to himself the whole way through. 'That's what my grandmother needed. that's why they worked so well together and fell in love I think.' In the same documentary, she revealed she has particularly fond memories of the Duke while she was competing in the London 2012 Olympics. She said: 'I have a huge fond memory of him when he came to the Olympics in London. Zara appeared emotional at Prince Philip's funeral last year, looking teary-eyed as she sat alongside Mike 'He came down to the stables afterwards and even though it isn't his specialist sport, the understanding of what it took to get an animal to perform for you... 'Obviously he had a huge passion for horses. He played polo before I remember and then went to driving and he was involved with the evolving of the sport.' Zara's silver medal was presented by her mother, Princess Anne, who has also competed in equestrian events at the Olympics. She followed in the success of her father, Captain Mark Phillips, who was a member of Britain's last gold-winning team in the event - at the Munich Olympics of 1972. The funeral includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey tomorrow - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending tomorrow's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service The Queen has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service, to be televised live on BBC One, is less taxing for the Queen. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service will also be attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon The Queen as she left Westminster Abbey in her Rolls-Royce today, wearing a regal purple and golden brooch Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who last month agreed to settle his sex assault lawsuit, left the service in a car with his mother the Queen A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Charles was seen wiping his eyes at the service where he could say goodbye to his father after a pared back funeral last year. Prince Andrew looked serious as he waited to leave with his mother Prince William rests a hand on the back of his son Prince George, at the end of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Cambridges departing the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Duchess of Cambridge smiled out of the window of her car as she left the Abbey with Prince William after the service The Queen sits alone at Philip's pared-down funeral last April - in stark contrast to today's celebration. It was one of the defining photos of the pandemic, where many Britons were forced to mourn their loved ones in small ceremonies, sometimes alone Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today The congregation takes its place ahead of the service. The Queen made the final decision to attend this morning, hours before she was due to travel the 22 miles from Windsor Castle to Central London. She held Andrew's elbow The royal family paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip at today's service at Westminster Abbey Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband The Queen stands for the first hymn at the service in remembrance of her beloved husband Prince Philip Prince Andrew walked his mother up the aisle after she arrived via a side door rather than the main entrance to shorten the distance The Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royals, led by the Queen despite her recent health issues, join the congregation in singing hymns during today's service The royals ahead of the service: In the front row are The Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence. The Cambridges are in the second row while Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, along with their husbands, are among the royals in the third row She left as she arrived, being supported by her son Andrew - reputedly her favourite The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey Prince Charles and Camilla were greeted by clergy as they arrived ahead of today's service of celebration for Prince Philip A serious looking Prince William sits down next to his wife, George and Charlotte to say goodbye to his grandfather The Queen sat beside Andrew, the royal who lost his HRH just weeks ago over his links to Epstein and civil case Crowds piled outside Westminster Abbey to pay tribute to Prince Philip as the service in his memorial continued Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at today's service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Princess Eugenie (left) and Princess Beatrice (right) pictured arriving at a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice arriving at the poignant Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Peter Phillips with Isla Phillips and Savannah Phillips (right) arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh and greeting Duke of Edinburgh award recipients Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Lady Louise Windsor arriving at the Westminster Abbey service for Prince Philip today. The Service will pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent attend the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, arrives with her foot in a brace and on crutches at Westminster Abbey today Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma arrives at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (left) and Formula One driver Sir Jackie Stewart (right) arrive today Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (left) and Home Secretary Priti Patel (right) arrive at Westminster Abbey this morning Guests walk into Westminster Abbey and take their seats ahead of this morning's service to remember Prince Philip Chancellor Rishi Sunak (left) and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) at Westminster Abbey today Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England (right), arrive this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Members of the congregation queue at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service of thanksgiving for the life of Philip Guests arrive to attend the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending today's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' A nine-year-old schoolgirl with Down's Syndrome has defied the expectations of doctors who believed she would never be able to walk or talk, and is now the face of high-end brand Burberry. Roni Littman, from Potters Bar, has modelled for big brands including River Island, Asda George and TJ MAXX, but her most recent job was with British luxury fashion brand Burberry. Roni's mum Shelley, 46, could not be prouder of her daughter's achievements and is also delighted that brands are encouraging diversity and becoming more inclusive with their advertisements. Roni Littman, nine, (pictured) from Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, who has Down's Syndrome, has been chosen as the latest face of Burberry 'We were absolutely elated when Roni got the Burberry modelling job,' Shelley said. 'I am so proud of her - she has blown all expectations out of the water. 'When she was born, we were told she may not be able to walk or talk. 'But she has defied the odds and continues to break boundaries. 'She has achieved so much in such a short period of time. 'I am very impressed that high-end brands like Burberry are being inclusive because it is encouraging for other people with disabilities. Shelley, 46, said Roni (both pictured) has blown all 'expectations out of the water' after being initially told that she may never be able to walk or talk Shelley in the make-up chair at a photoshoot. The youngster has racked up an impressive array of modelling jobs and loves being in front of the camera Shelley, who is a dog carer, revealed Roni has been chosen to model Burberry's spring summer 2022 collection (pictured at the shoot) 'There's no reason why children with disabilities shouldn't have these things too.' Roni can be seen sporting Burberry's spring summer 2022 collection. Shelley, who is a dog carer, continued: 'Down's syndrome can affect every child differently. 'Roni did take a while to communicate clearly, but she makes herself very much understood. Shelley revealed that it can take a while for Roni, pictured getting her nails done for a job, to communicate clearly but she does make herself understood Shelley said her daughter is 'a very cheeky, determined and feisty young lady', who has always loved entertaining people Shelley said that Roni has gone from 'strength to strength' since they sent photos to Zebedee Inclusive Talent Agency 'She is a very cheeky, determined and feisty young lady. 'She has always loved the camera and entertaining people. 'In 2017, we sent some photos to Zebedee Inclusive Talent Agency and ever since she has gone from strength to strength.' Roni, who is a natural in front of the camera, has refused to let her disability define her. Shelley said doctors filled she and husband Jon, 49, with negativity about the certain things Roni may never be able to do but she has proved everyone wrong Shelley added: 'We didn't know Roni had Down's syndrome until she was born. 'We were told she may never be able to do certain things and the doctors filled us with negativity. 'But she has proved everyone wrong. 'She started walking at 17 months old and has become a very determined individual so I'm not surprised that she is excelling. Shelley said Roni started walking at 17 months old and learnt how to ski at age five. Pictured: Roni having a ski lesson Shelley said it can take Roni longer to learn things but she never gives up as she is a determined individual Shelley revealed that she and husband Jon, 49, are beyond excited to see what the future holds for Roni Shelley hopes that Roni can inspire other disabled children and adults to follow their dreams 'Sometimes, it can be difficult for her because she takes longer to learn things but she never gives up. 'It is an honour and a privilege to have her in our lives. 'She learnt how to ski aged five and put her all into it. 'My husband Jon, 49, and I are beyond excited to see what the future holds for Roni. 'We will do her best to help her achieve whatever path she wants to take in the future. 'We hope Roni can inspire other disabled children and adults to follow their dreams. 'Roni proves everything is achievable and don't let things get in your way.' SK Inc. CEO Jang Dong-hyun speaks at the company's general shareholders' meeting at the Supex Hall of the SK Serin Building in Seoul, Tuesday. / Courtesy of SK Inc. By Kim Hyun-bin SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won was reappointed as executive director of SK Inc. at the company's 31st regular general shareholders' meeting, Tuesday, despite opposition from the National Pension Service (NPS). At the meeting, shareholders approved all four items on the agenda including the financial statements for 2021, the re-election of directors including Chey as well as Yeom Jae-ho and Kim Byoung-ho as outside directors, appointing an auditor, and the remuneration limit for directors. The meting was held at the Supex Hall of the SK Serin Building in Seoul, Tuesday. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won Advertisement The Queen and Prince Philip's much loved niece Sarah Chatto looked emotional as she arrived for her uncle's service of thanksgiving this morning. Sarah, the daughter of Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl Snowdon, enjoyed a particularly warm relationship with the Duke of Edinburgh and spent much time with him and the family growing up. The 56-year-old, who is married to Daniel Chatto, looked sombre in a navy blue dress, cardigan and string of pearls as she arrived at Westminster Abbey alongside members of the Royal Family. The important place Sarah held in Prince Philip's heart was reflected in the fact that she was one of just 30 mourners invited to the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral in April last year. Also in attendance is her brother David Armstrong-Jones, 2nd Earl Snowdon, who was seated next to his daughter Margarita. Lady Sarah, 56, wore a navy blue dress, cardigan and string of pearls as she arrived at Westminster Abbey The Queen and Prince Philip's beloved niece looked happy to be joining family to remember the Duke of Edinburgh Sarah Chatto's brother David Armstrong-Jones, 2nd Earl Snowdon, who was seated next to his daughter Margarita The Queen's niece Sarah Chatto arriving at Westminster Abbey with her husband Daniel Chatto Sarah Chatto's sons Samuel (left) and Arthur (right) joined their parents at the high profile event today 'Surrogate mother': The Queen has been a constant support to niece Sarah and nephew David Armstrong-Jones, pictured together at Princess Margaret's funeral By his side: Lady Sarah Chatto with the Duke of Edinburgh at a service of thanksgiving for her father, Lord Snowdon, in 2017 Sarah was accompanied by her husband, Daniel, and their sons, Arthur and Samuel. Samuel, 25, and Arthur, 23, are both stars on Instagram, where they boast thousands of fans each. Lady Sarah Chatto was born in 1964 the last royal baby born at a palace rather than a hospital within weeks of cousins Prince Edward, Lady Helen Windsor and James Ogilvy. The Queen has been described as a 'surrogate mother' to the siblings and is particularly close to Lady Sarah, who is understood to remind Her Majesty of her late sister. One royal insider previously revealed: 'The Queen adores Sarah and seeks out her company as often as possible. She is her absolute favourite younger Royal. 'They are hugely at ease in each other's company. Much giggling can be heard when they are together. They share a sense of loyalty, fun, duty and the ridiculous.' One acquaintance said: 'Sarah is very unassuming; shy and almost embarrassed with no grandeur at all. Take royal events she'll be on the balcony, but she never pushes herself to the middle or the front, like some.' Westminster Abbey was packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church 'A surrogate mother': The close relationship the Queen and Prince Philip shared with Princess Margaret's children The Queen and, formerly, Prince Philip, have been a constant support in Lady Sarah Chatto's life. When she was born her parents, Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, Lord Snowdon, were the toast of swinging London, their Kensington Palace apartment now the London home of William and Catherine the scene of hedonistic parties. But the marriage, a rebound affair after Margaret was forbidden to marry divorced equerry Peter Townsend, was notoriously tempestuous. Fuelled by alcohol and affairs on both sides, their 18-year union was once described as a 16-year break-up. At just 13, her parents' divorce was 'terribly upsetting' for Sarah. The decision to invite Lady Sarah and her husband Daniel (pictured at wedding) to Prince Philip's funeral was an indication of how highly they are regarded in the royal family, and is a tribute to the close relationship the Duke of Edinburgh enjoyed with Princess Margaret As Margaret was granted custody, the children stayed in Kensington Palace. Sarah was sent to Francis Holland School in Chelsea, a smart all-girls' day school, followed by Bedales with her brother. The mixed boarding school in rural Hampshire alma mater of actors Daniel Day-Lewis and Minnie Driver was a fashionable, arty, bohemian choice. It had no uniform and nurtured artistic expression above all else. It was what both parents wanted and it ensured David and Sarah inherited a love of art. This 'progressive' institution was the polar opposite to the starchiness of a royal upbringing. One contemporary said that when Lady Sarah turned up 'she was practically in a velvet-collar coat and tweeds although everyone else was hanging out in their kickers'. However it was quite possibly this school with its warm, nurturing atmosphere that made her the woman she is now. Sarah had grown up knowing that her mother had little time or patience for babies and small children; despite Snowdon's reluctance, nannies and housemaids were in charge and the children were instructed never to wake their mother before 11am a rule that was keenly enforced by Nanny Sumner. The Queen has been described as a 'surrogate mother' to the siblings and is particularly close to Lady Sarah, who is understood to remind Her Majesty of her late sister David and Lady Sarah enjoyed a close relationship with the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and their children growing up - often joining the family on holiday - and remain so to this day When Margaret gave her house on Mustique island in the Caribbean Les Jolies Eaux to David alone on his 27th birthday (he let it out and then sold it, preferring to buy an estate in Provence) it was said that Sarah was not consulted; nor did she profit from the sale. Her father, however, doted on her and it is from him she is said to have inherited her 'immense charm'. From her father she also inherited her artistic eye. A foundation course at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, followed by a printed textiles course at Middlesex Polytechnic, paved the way for her training at the Royal Academy Schools. Her oil paintings today sell for thousands and she is Vice President of the Royal Drawing School. From her mother, she inherited a love of dance. While Margaret was Patron of the Royal Ballet School, Sarah is its Vice President. Not that the young Sarah ever felt herself to be above her art school contemporaries. She may have shared her 21st birthday with Prince Edward, Lady Helen Windsor and James Ogilvy at Windsor Castle, but she also included all of her friends from art school. The Earl - David Armstrong-Jones (pictured) is known for his high-end furniture company (pictured) It was when she met Daniel Chatto whilst working as a wardrobe assistant on 'Heat and Dust', in which dashing actor Chatto had a small role, that her love life became serious. The son of actor Tom Chatto, and theatrical agent Ros Chatto (who was the mistress of another theatrical agent, Robin Fox), Daniel appeared in around a dozen films and TV programmes, often period dramas based on the novels of W. Somerset Maugham or Charles Dickens. He soon gave up his acting career, however, to focus on painting, a passion shared with Sarah. Together he and Sarah set up home in Kensington whilst still unmarried a fact that enraged Princess Margaret where they still live in a small, pretty, Grade II listed terrace house. Pictured left to right, David Armstrong-Jones, Earl of Snowdon, Lady Margarita Armstrong-Jones, Serena Armstrong-Jones, Countess of Snowdon, and Charles Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley, attend the Alexander Dundas's 18th birthday party hosted by Lord and Lady Dundas on December 16, 2017 in Londo They also have a Georgian country farmhouse near Midhurst in Sussex, given to Sarah by her godfather, the late art-loving philanthropist Simon Sainsbury. The informal country life of dogs, horses and annual sheepdog trials which she judges is the essence of Sarah, a royal who has never been lured by pomp and ceremony. Indeed her wedding to Chatto in July 1994 was such a short, simple affair that chauffeurs were caught by surprise: the Queen, Prince Philip and Diana had to wait at the City church of St Stephen's Walbrook after the service for their cars to come back. Her veil was anchored by the Snowdon Floral Tiara, created from brooches given to Princess Margaret by her husband, and the wedding portraits show the newlyweds flanked by the Queen and the Queen Mother. Although her childhood lacked the stability she has created for her own family according to royal insiders, she found her mother's early indiscretions 'almost unbearable' Sarah remained a loving, dutiful daughter until the end. Her mother's death in 2002 after a series of strokes and four years of suffering saw her children by her side. Sarah, says a royal source, had been 'selfless and often left her own family overnight to drive to KP to care for her mother'. Sarah arrived at the chapel by car while her brother David Armstrong-Jones, the Earl of Snowdon, (pictured with Prince Philip) joined the procession of senior royals walking behind the Duke of Edinburgh's coffin Charles Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley, David Armstrong-Jones, 2nd Earl of Snowdon and Lady Margarita Armstrong-Jones attend the wedding of Princess Eugenie of York and Jack Brooksbank at St George's Chapel on October 12, 2018 in Windsor Margaret's death also brought the Queen even closer to her only niece, in her new role as something of a surrogate mother. One, it appears, that endures to this day. Meanwhile David is honorary chairman for Europe, the Middle East, Russia and India of auctioneers Christie's. He was promoted to the role in 2015 from his former role of chairman of Christie's UK. The Earl, also known by his professional name of David Linley, also produces luxury British accessories and has reportedly created the interiors for a number of exclusive central London homes. Linley was picked by Prince Charles, his first cousin, as number two in his The Prince's Foundation, a new merger of his charity commitments, in 2018 an appointment which raised eyebrows as he was chosen ahead of the heir to the throne's sons William and Harry. Last year a friend said: 'David is very, very close to the Queen and Prince Charles. He goes to Sandringham at Christmas and turns up at Balmoral in the summer.' Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon The Queen as she left Westminster Abbey in her Rolls-Royce today, wearing a regal purple and golden brooch A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Charles was seen wiping his eyes at the service where he could say goodbye to his father after a pared back funeral last year. Prince Andrew looked serious as he waited to leave with his mother Prince William rests a hand on the back of his son Prince George, at the end of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Cambridges departing the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Duchess of Cambridge smiled out of the window of her car as she left the Abbey with Prince William after the service The Queen sits alone at Philip's pared-down funeral last April - in stark contrast to today's celebration. It was one of the defining photos of the pandemic, where many Britons were forced to mourn their loved ones in small ceremonies, sometimes alone Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today The congregation takes its place ahead of the service. The Queen made the final decision to attend this morning, hours before she was due to travel the 22 miles from Windsor Castle to Central London. She held Andrew's elbow The royal family paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip at today's service at Westminster Abbey Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband The Queen stands for the first hymn at the service in remembrance of her beloved husband Prince Philip Prince Andrew walked his mother up the aisle after she arrived via a side door rather than the main entrance to shorten the distance The Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royals, led by the Queen despite her recent health issues, join the congregation in singing hymns during today's service The royals ahead of the service: In the front row are The Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence. The Cambridges are in the second row while Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, along with their husbands, are among the royals in the third row She left as she arrived, being supported by her son Andrew - reputedly her favourite The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey Prince Charles and Camilla were greeted by clergy as they arrived ahead of today's service of celebration for Prince Philip A serious looking Prince William sits down next to his wife, George and Charlotte to say goodbye to his grandfather The Queen sat beside Andrew, the royal who lost his HRH just weeks ago over his links to Epstein and civil case Crowds piled outside Westminster Abbey to pay tribute to Prince Philip as the service in his memorial continued Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at today's service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Princess Eugenie (left) and Princess Beatrice (right) pictured arriving at a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice arriving at the poignant Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Peter Phillips with Isla Phillips and Savannah Phillips (right) arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh and greeting Duke of Edinburgh award recipients Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Lady Louise Windsor arriving at the Westminster Abbey service for Prince Philip today. The Service will pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent attend the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, arrives with her foot in a brace and on crutches at Westminster Abbey today Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma arrives at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (left) and Formula One driver Sir Jackie Stewart (right) arrive today Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (left) and Home Secretary Priti Patel (right) arrive at Westminster Abbey this morning Guests walk into Westminster Abbey and take their seats ahead of this morning's service to remember Prince Philip Chancellor Rishi Sunak (left) and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) at Westminster Abbey today Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England (right), arrive this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Members of the congregation queue at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service of thanksgiving for the life of Philip Guests arrive to attend the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending today's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' Royal fans watch out for guests at the service to remember the late Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Guests begin to arrive for the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Television broadcasting staff gather outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of Prince Philip's memorial service Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Royal superfan John Loughrey, from Stretham in Cambridgeshire, stands outside Westminster Abbey this morning Another royal superfan stands outside Westminster Abbey ahead of the memorial service for Philip this morning Police officers walk past Westminster Abbey this morning before the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh Workers put up barriers outside Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service for Prince Philip Royal fans wait outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service will also be attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat during the funeral of Prince Philip at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle on April 17, 2021 The Queen and Prince Philip revisit Broadlands, to mark their Diamond Wedding Anniversary on November 20, 2007 The Queen and Philip were married in the Abbey in November 1947 and it holds many special memories. Flowers at today's service will be red, white and blue. They will include dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. The Queen attended the opening of the Welsh Parliament on October 14 last year. Since then she has conducted engagements at Windsor Castle, where she is now based, and visited Sandringham in February. Advertisement One of Prince Philip's closest confidantes was among the early arrivals at his service of thanksgiving today. Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, 68, looked demure in head-to-toe grey as she arrived at Westminster Abbey for today's service. Also known as Lady Romsey and Lady Brabourne, Penny was a regular visitor at Wood Farm, the cottage on the edge of the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk where the Prince spent much of his time after retiring from public life in August 2017. She was the only non-family member invited to his intimate 30-person funeral last year, reflecting just what an important role she held within the Duke of Edinburgh's life. The pair were firm friends for decades and shared a love for the exhilarating equestrian sport of carriage-driving. Indeed, the Countess enjoyed such a close bond with the Queen and Philip that Palace staff reportedly nicknamed her 'and also', because no guest list was considered complete without her. Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, 68, looked demure as she arrived at Westminster Abbey for today's service Prince Philip's long-time friend, who is also known as Lady Romsey and Lady Brabourne took her seat, dressed in a sober grey ensemble with matching hat Penelope picked a stylish grey ensemble to pay one last homage to her longtime friend today. She wore a grey midi skirt with a matching fitted coat tied at the waist with a dainty biw, which she paired for a pair of grey heel and matching leather gloves. With an impeccable attention to detail, she was also seen clutching a small leather bag in her hand. Her Jackie O-inspired hat laid perfectly on top if her bouncy blonde bob. with her recognisable wild fringe poking out. The countess was seen in deep conversation with her neighbour in the Abbey as the assembly patiently waited for the service to start Penelope Knatchbull was spotted talking to Prince Kyril of Preslav, left, as she exited Westminster Abbey following today's service of thanksgiving The elegant Countess donned fine jewellery, with dimaond stud earring with a violet gem matching a brooch pinned on the lapel of her jacket. She kept her makeup tasteful with just a dash of mascara and a kight pink lipstick adding a pop of colour to her getup. Formerly Penelope Meredith Eastwood, 'Penny' Knatchbull, previously known as Lady Romsey and later Lady Brabourne, is the daughter of a retired army major. Penny's father left school at 15 and became a butcher, like his father and grandfather before him. He founded the Angus Steakhouse chain of restaurants which he sold for several millions, giving Penny a privileged childhood. She grew up and was educated in Switzerland before attending the London School of Economics. She first met the Duke who is 30 years her senior at a polo match when she was 20 and in a relationship with Lord Romsey, Earl Mountbatten's grandson Norton Knatchbull. Norton is the grandson of Lord Mountbatten - who was famously close to his nephew Prince Philip. Philip was Norton's godson, while Norton is the godfather of Prince William. Penny's father, Reg Eastwood, had sold his steakhouse chain to the Golden Egg company and was living with his wife in Majorca when his daughter married Norton. Duke of Edinburgh took it upon himself in 1994 to teach Penny carriage driving and the pair (pictured together) travelled the country together The wedding had been delayed for eight weeks because five months earlier, on August 25, IRA bombers blew up a small boat in the sea off Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo, where Lord Mountbatten had a holiday home. It killed Mountbatten, Norton's 14-year-old younger brother Nicholas (after whom he was to name his own son), his paternal grandmother the Dowager Lady Brabourne and Paul Maxwell, a 15-year-old local. Mountbatten's murder meant that Broadlands became the newlyweds' first and only home. Brought up in his parents' comfortable 18th century country house in Kent, Norton dreaded it. He never wanted the burden of Broadlands and knew he could hardly live up to his illustrious grandfather as the local 'lord of the manor'. A family friend previously revealed: 'On the other hand, Penny was always comfortable there because she knew it was their duty.' But Norton fell out with the locals when, in the Eighties, he tried to get planning permission for Tesco to build a superstore on the estate. Feelings ran so high that opponents of the development carried a burning effigy of their High Steward through the streets of Romsey. The supermarket was never built. Meanwhile, the family's original closeness to those in The Firm came through Norton's friendship with Prince Charles. This went back to when they were schoolboys together at Gordonstoun and Norton, a year older, was asked to show Charles the ropes. In 1981, Penny and Norton welcomed their first child Nicholas Louis Charles Norton Knatchbull and a daughter Lady Alexandra a year later. In 1986, Penny gave birth to another daughter, who had kidney cancer and died aged five in 1991. The Duke of Edinburgh's carriage-driving companion - one of his closest confidantes - Countess Mountbatten of Burma (pictured together in 1975) She first met the Duke who is 30 years her senior at a polo match when she was 20 and in a relationship with Lord Romsey, Earl Mountbatten's grandson Norton Knatchbull (pictured the trio together in 2009) Just like his father and Charles, Nicholas was a year older than Prince William and was given the responsibility of showing him the ropes at Eton. In 2010, Norton moved to the Bahamas to embark on a new life with Lady Nuttall, 60. However, their affair fizzled out and he returned in 2014 to Broadlands estate in Hampshire. Royal expert Ingrid Seward previously said Prince Philip supported Penny when Norton left her. One of her oldest family friends previously revealed: 'I often wonder how their mother, Penny, copes with all the tragedy she has suffered. 'But she's a strong character - much stronger than Norton. I think Penny gets it from her father. He was a man who always seemed to know where he was going.' She has always been close to the royal family, as one friend who has known her since those early days previously recalled: 'She was one of the most natural young women I have ever met, outgoing but not brash or flirty.' Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service will also be attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. The Queen and Philip were married in the Abbey in November 1947 and it holds many special memories. Flowers at today's service will be red, white and blue. They will include dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. The Queen attended the opening of the Welsh Parliament on October 14 last year. Since then she has conducted engagements at Windsor Castle, where she is now based, and visited Sandringham in February. Advertisement The Queen's extended family flocked to support the monarch today as they joined guests who were invited to attend Prince Philip's memorial. The Queen's lady-in-waiting Lady Susan Hussey , 82, cut an elegant figure in an emerald green coat as she arrived at Westminster Abbey today, using a crutch to support her as she walked across the cobbles. Princess Michael of Kent and the Duke of Kent as well as their families were also in attendance. Flora Ogilvy arrived with her husband Timothy Vesterberg. She cut a sober figure in a midi black dress, while he looked dapper in a navy suit Prince Charles' goodaughter India Hicks looked elegant in a grey dress with a daring slit as she arrived for the service (left). Princess Alexandra wore a boot and leaned on a crutch as she was assisted in to the chapel (right) Prince Charles' goddaughter India Hicks, who served as bridesmaid at the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, was among the earliest guests to arrive at the event today. She wore a lengthy blue coat dress which featured a dramatic thigh slit for the occasion, which she paired with a matching fascinator. Meanwhile the Queen's cousin Prince Michael of Kent arrived hand in hand with his wife, who looked elegant in a white dress, which she wore with an open black coat. The Duchess of Gloucester was also among the people in attendance today, wearing a navy blue coat and a light blue hat for the occasion Lady Gabriella Windsor arrived with her husband Thomas Kingston in tow. She was wearing a tasteful navy blue ensemble tied at the waist and watchin swede blue heels. Lady Amelia Windsor also attended, wearing a demure buttoned up jacket and trousers, her blonde locks cascading down her back. Flora Ogilvy, who is the Queen's cousin, attended in a black midi dress with her husband The Duchess of Gloucester was also among the people in attendance today, wearing a navy blue coat and a light blue hat for the occasion Lady Helen Taylor, the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, also wore black as she arrived at the Abbey escorted by her son Cassius Lady Gabriella Windsor looked stylish in a blue sensmble as she arrived with her husband of two years Thomas Kingston in to Model Lady Amelia Windsor also attended the memorial today, wearing a buttoned up navy jacket and trousers for the occasion Lady Helen Taylor, the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, also wore black as she arrived at the Abbey escorted by her son Cassius. Once affectionately called 'Melons' by the press for her ample proportions - a nickname she admitted she hated - she married art dealer Timothy Verner Taylor in 1992. She is a cousin of the Queen and 25th in line to the throne, and is regarded as one of the public's favourite royals. Her first child Columbus George Donald Taylor was born on 6 August, 1994 and is 41st in line to the throne. His brother Cassius Edward Taylor followed on 26 December, 1996. They welcomed Eloise Olivia Katherine Taylor on March 2, 2003 and later another daughter Estella Olga Elizabeth Taylor on 21 December 2004 - who are 43rd and 44th in line to the throne. The Duke of Kent arrived at the Abbey for the service, looking dapper in a striped navy suit with a crisp white shirt and a navy and white tie Margarita Armstrong-Jones and The Earl of Snowden also attended the ceremony. Her in a stylish black dress, him in a dapper gray suit The two girls came to the attention of the press in June 2011 during the Trooping the Colour when the Duchess of Cambridge appeared enamoured with the pair. Kate made a point of spending time with the girls, who were eight and six at the time, talking happily with them as the Queens official birthday parade and fly-past took place. She bent down to talk to them and seemed just as interested in the children as she was the royal proceedings. Meanwhile George, Earl of St Andrews will attend alongside his wife Sylvana Tomaselli and their children, Lady Marina, Lady Amelia and Lord Downpatrick. Prince Charles' goddaughter India was joined by her new husband David Flint Wood at the event this morning (pictured together) The socialite opted for a muted grey polo neck dress which she perfectly complemented with a matching fascinator. In an apparent tribute to the Queen and her love of brooches, she opted for a gold jewel pinned to her chest Prince Michael of Kent arrived hand-in-hand with his wife, who looked elegant in a white dress, which she wore with an open black coat Lady Frederick Windsor and Lord Frederick Windsor arrive hand-in-hand at today's service in matching navy suits. He wore a white shirt whyile she opted for a black top Many extended members of the Queen and Prince Philip's families came to pay their respect at Westminster Abbey this morning Once dubbed the most beautiful member of the royal family, Lady Amelia is currently signed to Storm models, which represents the likes of Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne. Lady Amelia has also modelled for the likes of Dolce & Gabbana and designed her own range of accessories in collaboration with Penelope Chilvers. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent's children, Lord Fredrick Windsor, with his wife Sophie Winkleman, and Lady Gabriella Kingston with her husband Thomas, are also due in attendance at the event. Sophie, who now lives in Chelsea, married Lord Freddie in September 2009 at Hampton Court Palace, after meeting him on a night out in Soho. The actress - who famously starred as Big Suze in Peep Show - lives in London, has two children with Fredrick, Maud, eight, and Isabella, five. Birgitte, Duchess of Gloucester and Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester depart the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Maud, attends Thomas's Battersea, the same school as his distant cousins Prince George and Princess Charlotte. Since the couple tied the knot in 2009, mother-of-two Sophie says everyone has 'looked after' her, in particular the Queen and Prince Charles, who have been 'wonderful', and Prince William, whom she described as 'heaven'. Speaking to The Times, in 2020 she said: 'I've been incredibly welcomed with open arms by all of them... They'd never tell me off at all if I wanted to play some [racy] role.' The Queen and Prince Philip's niece Lady Sarah Chatto attended the event in a navy ensemble made of a skirt and woolen top, with a matching jacket Arthur Chatto and his brother Samuel were also in attendance, with the older brother in a dray grey suit, while the younger wore navy with a red and blue tie Lady Chatto wore her navy ensemble with pointy blue heels and a grey hat, grey tights and a black clutch bag, which she paired with a pearl necklace and diamond earrings The only son of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, Alexander Windsor, Earl of Ulster, is also set to appear at the event today alongside his sister Lady Rose Gilman and her husband George. The pair are the children of Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester - the youngest grandchild of King George V and Queen Mary. Prince Richard is a paternal cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey tomorrow - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending tomorrow's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement The funeral includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. The Queen has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides were thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service, to be televised live on BBC One, is less taxing for the Queen. The service gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which was included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, gave a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, conducted the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, offered prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service was also attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon The Queen as she left Westminster Abbey in her Rolls-Royce today, wearing a regal purple and golden brooch Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who last month agreed to settle his sex assault lawsuit, left the service in a car with his mother the Queen A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Charles was seen wiping his eyes at the service where he could say goodbye to his father after a pared back funeral last year. Prince Andrew looked serious as he waited to leave with his mother Prince William rests a hand on the back of his son Prince George, at the end of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Cambridges departing the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Duchess of Cambridge smiled out of the window of her car as she left the Abbey with Prince William after the service The Queen sits alone at Philip's pared-down funeral last April - in stark contrast to today's celebration. It was one of the defining photos of the pandemic, where many Britons were forced to mourn their loved ones in small ceremonies, sometimes alone Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today The congregation takes its place ahead of the service. The Queen made the final decision to attend this morning, hours before she was due to travel the 22 miles from Windsor Castle to Central London. She held Andrew's elbow The royal family paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip at today's service at Westminster Abbey Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband The Queen stands for the first hymn at the service in remembrance of her beloved husband Prince Philip Prince Andrew walked his mother up the aisle after she arrived via a side door rather than the main entrance to shorten the distance The Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royals, led by the Queen despite her recent health issues, join the congregation in singing hymns during today's service The royals ahead of the service: In the front row are The Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence. The Cambridges are in the second row while Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, along with their husbands, are among the royals in the third row She left as she arrived, being supported by her son Andrew - reputedly her favourite The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey Prince Charles and Camilla were greeted by clergy as they arrived ahead of today's service of celebration for Prince Philip A serious looking Prince William sits down next to his wife, George and Charlotte to say goodbye to his grandfather The Queen sat beside Andrew, the royal who lost his HRH just weeks ago over his links to Epstein and civil case Crowds piled outside Westminster Abbey to pay tribute to Prince Philip as the service in his memorial continued Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at today's service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Princess Eugenie (left) and Princess Beatrice (right) pictured arriving at a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice arriving at the poignant Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Peter Phillips with Isla Phillips and Savannah Phillips (right) arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh and greeting Duke of Edinburgh award recipients Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Lady Louise Windsor arriving at the Westminster Abbey service for Prince Philip today. The Service will pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent attend the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, arrives with her foot in a brace and on crutches at Westminster Abbey today Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma arrives at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (left) and Formula One driver Sir Jackie Stewart (right) arrive today Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (left) and Home Secretary Priti Patel (right) arrive at Westminster Abbey this morning Guests walk into Westminster Abbey and take their seats ahead of this morning's service to remember Prince Philip Chancellor Rishi Sunak (left) and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) at Westminster Abbey today Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England (right), arrive this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Members of the congregation queue at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service of thanksgiving for the life of Philip Guests arrive to attend the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending today's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' Royal fans watch out for guests at the service to remember the late Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Guests begin to arrive for the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Television broadcasting staff gather outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of Prince Philip's memorial service Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Royal superfan John Loughrey, from Stretham in Cambridgeshire, stands outside Westminster Abbey this morning Another royal superfan stands outside Westminster Abbey ahead of the memorial service for Philip this morning Police officers walk past Westminster Abbey this morning before the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh Workers put up barriers outside Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service for Prince Philip Royal fans wait outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service will also be attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat during the funeral of Prince Philip at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle on April 17, 2021 The Queen and Prince Philip revisit Broadlands, to mark their Diamond Wedding Anniversary on November 20, 2007 The Queen and Philip were married in the Abbey in November 1947 and it holds many special memories. Flowers at today's service will be red, white and blue. They will include dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. The Queen attended the opening of the Welsh Parliament on October 14 last year. Since then she has conducted engagements at Windsor Castle, where she is now based, and visited Sandringham in February. Advertisement Kate Middleton was elegant as she joined by her husband Prince William and their eldest children Prince George and Princess Charlotte at Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip's memorial service today. The mother-of-three looked poised as she wore a 1,495 navy Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with a smart 775 hat from Lock&Co!, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning. Meanwhile the Duchess also donned Diana's Collingwood earrings for the service at Westminster Abbey today. Kate and Prince Philip enjoyed a good relationship, with Prince William saying he was thankful that Kate, who married into the royal family in 2011 after meeting William nearly a decade earlier, had 'so many years' to get to know his grandfather. Royal aides previously revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled overnight at midnight. Kate Middleton was elegant as she joined by her husband Prince William and their eldest children Prince George and Princess Charlotte at Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip's memorial service today The mother-of-three looked poised as she wore a 1,495 navy Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with a smart 775 hat from Lock&Co!, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning Alessandra Rich is also one of the Duchess' favoured labels, with the royal frequently turning to the London-based designer for her royal engagements. The Duchess of Cambridge swept her brunette locks into a low bun to reveal the pearl drop earrings for the occasion. Kate regularly wears jewellery that honours her mother-in-law, including her sapphire engagement ring, which once belonged to Diana. With a keen eye for detail, Kate often references Princess Diana with her style choices. Following Prince Philip's death, the Cambridge's released previously unseen photographs of the Duke of Edinburgh with his great-grandchildren on their Instagram page, Kensington Royal. In one photograph, the Queen and the Duke sat alongside seven of their great-grandchildren, with the 'relaxed' monarch holding a then-baby Prince Louis in her arms. Prince George and Princess Charlotte could be seen offering a cheeky smile in the picture, while Peter's elder daughter Savannah Phillips poses alongside Zara Tindall's daughters Mia and Lena. Prince William and Kate Middleton arrived hand-in-hand with Prince George and Princess Charlotte for Prince Philip's memorial service today The Duchess of Cambridge looked poised as she wore an understated polkadot Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with elegant silver droplet earrings, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who days ago returned from their controversial Caribbean tour, arrived hand-in-hand with George and Charlotte, their two eldest children The Duchess of Cambridge swept her brunette locks into a low bun to reveal the pearl drop earrings for the occasion. The earrings were a favourite pair of the late Princess of Wales (pictured wearing the jewels in 1989) The photograph does not include the couple's three youngest grandchildren, who were born in the last few years. A second picture of Her Majesty and her husband was shared on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's Instagram page, and showed the couple posing with Prince George and Princess Charlotte during a visit to Balmoral in 2015. And attending the funeral last April, the Duchess appeared emotional and was photographed with tears in her eyes. She paid a touching tribute to both the Monarch and to her own late mother-in-law as she wore the Queen's pearl choker, from Her Majesty's personal collection, to the poignant service in Windsor. The Duchess teamed a chic black 1,605 Roland Mouret dress with an asymmetrical neckline - the same she wore for the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance in 2018 - with a black face covering and a Philip Treacy velvet pillbox hat. She paired her outfit with the Bahrain Pearl Diamond Drop Earrings which also came from Her Majesty's private collection, and were also worn by Diana in 1982. The earrings were crafted from pearls gifted to the Queen and Philip from the ruler of Bahrain at the time of their wedding in 1947. The note from the Cambridge's to their royal fans said they all miss their 'much loved' great-grandfather and have been 'incredibly moved' by the many thoughtful messages A second picture of Her Majesty and her husband was shared on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's Instagram page, and showed the couple posing with Prince George and Princess Charlotte during a visit to Balmoral in 2015 The funeral includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey tomorrow - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending tomorrow's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement Among them was the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests were due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were not returning from the US for the service. The Queen has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides were thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service, to be televised live on BBC One, is less taxing for the Queen. The service gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognised the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service saw nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, gave a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, conducted the service and described the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He said: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service was also attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon The Queen as she left Westminster Abbey in her Rolls-Royce today, wearing a regal purple and golden brooch Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who last month agreed to settle his sex assault lawsuit, left the service in a car with his mother the Queen A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Charles was seen wiping his eyes at the service where he could say goodbye to his father after a pared back funeral last year. Prince Andrew looked serious as he waited to leave with his mother Prince William rests a hand on the back of his son Prince George, at the end of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Cambridges departing the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Duchess of Cambridge smiled out of the window of her car as she left the Abbey with Prince William after the service The Queen sits alone at Philip's pared-down funeral last April - in stark contrast to today's celebration. It was one of the defining photos of the pandemic, where many Britons were forced to mourn their loved ones in small ceremonies, sometimes alone Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today The congregation takes its place ahead of the service. The Queen made the final decision to attend this morning, hours before she was due to travel the 22 miles from Windsor Castle to Central London. She held Andrew's elbow The royal family paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip at today's service at Westminster Abbey Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband The Queen stands for the first hymn at the service in remembrance of her beloved husband Prince Philip Prince Andrew walked his mother up the aisle after she arrived via a side door rather than the main entrance to shorten the distance The Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royals, led by the Queen despite her recent health issues, join the congregation in singing hymns during today's service The royals ahead of the service: In the front row are The Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence. The Cambridges are in the second row while Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, along with their husbands, are among the royals in the third row She left as she arrived, being supported by her son Andrew - reputedly her favourite The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey Prince Charles and Camilla were greeted by clergy as they arrived ahead of today's service of celebration for Prince Philip A serious looking Prince William sits down next to his wife, George and Charlotte to say goodbye to his grandfather The Queen sat beside Andrew, the royal who lost his HRH just weeks ago over his links to Epstein and civil case Crowds piled outside Westminster Abbey to pay tribute to Prince Philip as the service in his memorial continued Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at today's service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Princess Eugenie (left) and Princess Beatrice (right) pictured arriving at a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice arriving at the poignant Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Peter Phillips with Isla Phillips and Savannah Phillips (right) arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh and greeting Duke of Edinburgh award recipients Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Lady Louise Windsor arriving at the Westminster Abbey service for Prince Philip today. The Service will pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent attend the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, arrives with her foot in a brace and on crutches at Westminster Abbey today Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma arrives at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (left) and Formula One driver Sir Jackie Stewart (right) arrive today Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (left) and Home Secretary Priti Patel (right) arrive at Westminster Abbey this morning Guests walk into Westminster Abbey and take their seats ahead of this morning's service to remember Prince Philip Chancellor Rishi Sunak (left) and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) at Westminster Abbey today Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England (right), arrive this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Members of the congregation queue at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service of thanksgiving for the life of Philip Guests arrive to attend the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending today's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' Royal fans watch out for guests at the service to remember the late Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Guests begin to arrive for the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Television broadcasting staff gather outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of Prince Philip's memorial service Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Royal superfan John Loughrey, from Stretham in Cambridgeshire, stands outside Westminster Abbey this morning Another royal superfan stands outside Westminster Abbey ahead of the memorial service for Philip this morning Police officers walk past Westminster Abbey this morning before the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh Workers put up barriers outside Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service for Prince Philip Royal fans wait outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service will also be attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat during the funeral of Prince Philip at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle on April 17, 2021 The Queen and Prince Philip revisit Broadlands, to mark their Diamond Wedding Anniversary on November 20, 2007 The Queen and Philip were married in the Abbey in November 1947 and it holds many special memories. Flowers at today's service will be red, white and blue. They will include dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. The Queen attended the opening of the Welsh Parliament on October 14 last year. Since then she has conducted engagements at Windsor Castle, where she is now based, and visited Sandringham in February. Advertisement The extended family of Prince Philip - thought to be around 51 people from across Europe - were among the first to arrive at Westminster Abbey ahead of the ceremony to honour the late Duke's life today. The Duke of Edinburgh's family members, many travelling from overseas, have made the journey to London to represent the Greek, Danish and German branches of the late consort's family. The representatives included the Hereditary Prince and Princess of Baden, who were also invited to Prince Philip's funeral - which was limited to just 30 people - on April 17th 2021. The Baden royals had shared a close relationship with the Duke of Edinburgh throughout much of his life. Scroll down for video Extended family: It's thought 51 members of Prince Philip's extended family from across Europe have travelled to the service. From left: Stephanie Anne Kaul of Baden, Bernhard, Hereditary Prince of Baden, Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, Saskia Binder, Prince Philipp, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Countess Floria Franziska Marie-Luisa Erika von Faber-Castell and Donatus, Landgrave of Hesse The countess was seen in deep conversation with her neighbour in the Abbey as the assembly patiently waited for the service to start. From left: Stephanie Anne Kaul of Baden, Bernhard, Hereditary Prince of Baden, Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, Saskia Binder, Prince Philipp, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Countess Floria Franziska Marie-Luisa Erika von Faber-Castell and Donatus, Landgrave of Hesse Among the first guests to arrive at Westminster Abbey today were representatives of the Greek, Danish and German branches of the late Duke's family - including the Hereditary Prince and Princess of Baden Great nephew: Seated in the far right of the Abbey in the front row this morning were the Hereditary Prince and Princess of Baden, close confidants of the late Duke of Edinburgh. Right: Prince Bernhard, pictured with his wife at the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Monaco in 2011, is the grandson of the late Duke's sister Theodora Prince Philipp of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, pictured today left and right with Prince Charles, said: 'It really is an incredible honour and we are all extremely touched and privileged to be included on behalf of the wider family' Also in attendance was Donatus, Landgrave of Hesse, known as 'Don', 54, is the head of the House of Hesse, into which the Duke's two younger sisters, Cecile and Sophie (known as 'Tiny') married. He is pictured left today and right with the Queen in 2014 The Duke of Edinburgh's carriage-driving companion - one of his closest confidantes - Countess Mountbatten of Burma (pictured left today and right together in 1975) Arriving ahead of the Queen, who travelled to the ceremony with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Westminster Abbey, Prince Philip's more distant family members chatted quietly as they entered the Abbey. Sitting together, the family included Bernhard, Hereditary Prince of Baden and his wife Stephanie Anne Kaul of Baden. They sat next to Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, the widow of Norton Knatchbull, 3rd Earl Mountbatten of Burma, a great-nephew of Prince Philip. On the other side of Penelope - a close confidante of Prince Philip who goes by Penny - was Prince Philipp, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg and his wife Saskia Binder, a former banker. Finishing off the row was Countess Floria Franziska Marie-Luisa Erika von Faber-Castell and Donatus, Landgrave of Hesse. Bernhard, the Prince of Baden is the great nephew of Prince Philip. The father-of-three is a grandson of the Duke's second sister, Theodora (known as 'Dolla'). Bernhard and his wife were among the 30 mourners at his funeral last year. Prince Philipp is another great-nephew of Prince Philip - and is the grandson of the late Duke's sister Princess Margarita. The cousins were among the 30 mourners invited to the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral last year. Prince Philipp said at the time: 'It really is an incredible honour and we are all extremely touched and privileged to be included on behalf of the wider family'. His sister, and the Duke's great niece, Princess Xenia of Hohenlohe-Langenburg also said Philip was an 'idol' for their family's younger generation. Their grandmother, Princess Margarita, was the Duke's elder sister and the Duke paid many visits to the family home, Langenburg Castle in southern Germany. The German great-nephews and their wives who attended Prince Philip's memorial Bernhard, Hereditary Prince of Baden Prince Bernhard, 50, is a grandson of the Duke's second sister, Theodora (known as 'Dolla'). Prince Philip's German relatives were all denied a place at his wedding, thanks to post-war nervousness at Buckingham Palace. But for the rest of his life, the Duke of Edinburgh was adamant that bygones should be bygones. That is why he made it clear that he wanted his 'blood' family the network of German nieces, nephews and cousins to whom he was devoted to be properly represented and included in his funeral arrangements. He attended with his wife, Stephanie Anne Kaul of Baden, the couple has three children and live in Linzgau. Prince Philipp of Hohenlohe-Langenburg Prince Philipp of Hohenlohe-Langenburg was one of three members of the Duke's European family who attended his funeral. He attended the memorial with his wife. It was such a joy having a conversation with him. His memory was extraordinary,' Prince Philipp said recently. 'He could remember playing hide-and-seek in the castle when he was a boy, and he always enjoyed talking to the local people. 'He could switch from German to English and back, whether he was talking about Winston Churchill or the local wildlife.' He remains close to the royal family, Princess Anne is his godmother. He was joined by his wife, Saskia Binder, daughter of former Deutsche Bank Munich director Hans Peter Binder. The couple also share three children and live at Langenburg castle. Prince Donatus, Landgrave of Hesse Prince Donatus, known as 'Don', 54, is the head of the House of Hesse, into which the Duke's two younger sisters, Cecile and Sophie (known as 'Tiny') married. He is a regular at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, spending time with the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen. The Countess Mountbatten of Burma One of Prince Philip's closest friends and confidantes, Penny Brabourne, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, sat with his German relatives at the memorial. The Countess was a regular visitor at Wood Farm, the cottage on the edge of the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk where the Prince spent much of his time after retiring from public life in August 2017. The pair were firm friends for decades and shared a love for the exhilarating equestrian sport of carriage-driving. She enjoyed such a close bond with the Queen and Philip that Palace staff reportedly nicknamed her 'and also', because no guest list was considered complete without her. The only daughter of butcher-turned-businessman Reginald Eastwood, she was propelled into the Royal Family through her marriage to Norton Knatchbull, 3rd Earl Mountbatten of Burma. The Earl was a close friend of Prince Charles the pair attended Gordonstoun together and Charles was Norton's best man when he married Penny in 1979. The wedding was delayed for eight weeks because five months earlier, IRA bombers blew up a small boat in the sea off Mullaghmore, County Sligo, killing Norton's grandfather, Lord Mountbatten. Norton's 14-year-old younger brother, Nicholas, his paternal grandmother the Dowager Lady Brabourne, and a local boy who was with the family, also died in the terror attack. Advertisement Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg & Donatus, Prince and Landgrave of Hesse arrives to attend the memorial of Prince Philip The royal family, who joined the service shortly before its 11:30am start, were seated in the front pews of the Abbey Prince Philip's long-time friend, who is also known as Lady Romsey and Lady Brabourne took her seat, dressed in a sober grey ensemble with matching hat. From left: Stephanie Anne Kaul of Baden, Bernhard, Hereditary Prince of Baden, Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, Saskia Binder, Prince Philipp, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Countess Floria Franziska Marie-Luisa Erika von Faber-Castell and Donatus, Landgrave of Hesse Gathered in the pews of Westminster Abbey, the extended family of Prince Philip, only a few of whom were invited to the scaled-down royal funeral in April 2021, greeted each other ahead of the memorial service today Four daughters: Prince Philip was raised separately from his four older sisters, pictured left-right: Sophia, Margarita, Cecilie, known as Cecile, and Theodora. The girls are pictured ahead of the 1922 wedding of Louis Mountbatten and Edwina Ashley, where they were bridesmaids Troubles ahead: Philip, second from left, as a boy with his parents and four sisters, who adored him. They all married German aristocrats Prince Bernhard, 50, also a father of three, is a grandson of the Duke's second sister, Theodora (known as 'Dolla'). Also in attendance was Donatus, Landgrave of Hesse, known as 'Don', 54, is the head of the House of Hesse, into which the Duke's two younger sisters, Cecile and Sophie (known as 'Tiny') married. He was joined by his wife Countess Floria Franziska Marie-Luisa Erika von Faber-Castell. All these families enjoy so many precious recollections of the 'Uncle Philip', who thought nothing of popping over to Germany for a christening or a landmark birthday party for the offspring and relatives of his older sisters. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey tomorrow - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending tomorrow's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement They were the kind-hearted, glamorous quartet of princesses who had doted on their boisterous little brother through an often troubled childhood. The Duke never forgot that, according to Prince Philipp of Hohenlohe-Langenburg who last year told the Daily Mail: 'It was such a joy having a conversation with him. His memory was extraordinary,' he explained. 'He could remember playing hide-and-seek in the castle when he was a boy, and he always enjoyed talking to the local people. 'He could switch from German to English and back, whether he was talking about Winston Churchill or the local wildlife.' The Duke's death was also said to leave a huge hole among the broader continental cousinhood, who all adored the energetic, unstuffy uncle, great-uncle and cousin who always made a beeline for his younger relatives to hear their latest news. For he was not only an enthusiastic participant in family gatherings. In fact, many refer to him as 'the glue' or 'the bridge' who has kept the current British Royal Family closely connected to the European cousinhood. They are the 'other' royal family, the relatives who might not be household names in Britain but who, for generations, have happily slotted in at house parties or picnics at Balmoral, Sandringham and elsewhere. The horrse show was 'the Duke's week' each spring, with plenty of Langenburgs, Badens, Hesses and Hanovers occupying the Windsor guest rooms. At big family gatherings, whether in the UK or in Germany, there would always be a big crossover. At the celebrations for the golden or diamond wedding anniversaries of the Queen and the Duke, for example, the German relations were fully included. Similarly, many a German christening has featured a House of Windsor godparent at the font. Prince Philip and his four sisters had grown up in the strange, unsettled world of peripatetic refugee royalty between the wars. They were all born into the Greek royal family, itself descended from the ruling house of Denmark, but had been driven into exile in 1922 after a military coup. Also in attendance today was Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, the widow of Lord Romsey, Earl Mountbatten's grandson Norton Knatchbull. Norton is the grandson of Lord Mountbatten - who was famously close to his nephew Prince Philip. Philip was Norton's godson, while Norton is the godfather of Prince William. Also known as Lady Romsey and Lady Brabourne, Penny was a regular visitor at Wood Farm, the cottage on the edge of the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk where the Prince spent much of his time after retiring from public life in August 2017, and was thought to be one of his closest confidantes. Among the Duke of Edinburgh's Greek relatives in attendance was be Queen Anne-Marie of the Hellenes, the last Queen of Greece and wife of King Constantine II, her children, Crown Prince Pavlos and Prince Philippos, and their respective wives. Queen Anne-Marie is the daughter of King Frederick IX of Denmark and his wife Ingrid of Sweden, and the younger sister of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. She had to renounce her claim to the Danish throne on marrying Constantine II. Queen Anne-Marie is a great-great granddaughter of Queen Victoria, making her a third cousin of both Prince Philip and the Queen. King Constantine II was a first cousin once removed of Prince Philip; both were descended from King George I of Greece. Among the Duke of Edinburgh's Greek relatives in attendance was be Queen Anne-Marie of the Hellenes, the last Queen of Greece and wife of King Constantine II, her children, Crown Prince Pavlos and Prince Philippos, and their respective wives. Left today, right in 1964 Greece's former Queen Anne-Marie (left), Greece's Crown Prince Pavlos (second right) and Greece's Crown Princess Marie-Chantal leave after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for Prince Philip Their children also have ties to the royal family. Prince Pavlos is Prince Charles's godson, while the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Diana were both godparents to his younger brother, Prince Philippos. Pavlos and Philippos will be joined at the service by their wives. Pavlos' wife Marie-Chantal is a queen bee socialite who's friends with Zoe de Givenchy, Tory Burch and the Italian fashion designer Valentino. Meanwhile Philippos married wife Nina in three separate ceremonies in 2020 and 2021. Princess Eugenie, Princess Beatrice, and their husbands were all in attendance. Flying the flag for Denmark was Queen Margrethe, who is known affectionately as 'aunt Daisy' by many European royals due to her close relationship with Philip. The 81-year-old monarch will fly solo at the Service of Thanksgiving, although she is often joined at royal events by her son Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark, and daughter-in-law Princess Mary. Flying the flag for Denmark was Queen Margrethe, who is known affectionately as 'aunt Daisy' by many European royals due to her close relationship with Philip. Queen Margrethe II enjoys a close personal relationship with the Queen and was related to the Duke of Edinburgh through King Christian IX of Denmark. King Christian IX - dubbed the 'father-in-law of Europe' due to his far-reaching progeny - was the great-great-grandfather of Queen Margrethe and the great-grandfather of the Duke of Edinburgh. The Danish queen is also related to Queen Elizabeth through Queen Victoria. Margrethe lost her husband Henrik, Prince Consort of Denmark, in 2018. The Queen is back at Windsor Castle today with Prince Andrew having skipped several royal receptions after shedding tears for the Duke of Edinburgh at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable 99-year life of service to Britain and his wife. Her Majesty became emotional in Westminster Abbey - where she married Prince Philip in November 1947 - having personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. And in a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH' the Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car. Philip's mother was Princess Alice of Battenberg, and his four sisters all married German aristocrats. His German relations were banned from attending his wedding to Elizabeth in 1947 over perceived links to the Nazis in the wake of the Second World War. But after the Duke made clear he wanted German 'blood to attend his funeral. Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic By MARTIN ROBINSON, CHIEF REPORTER and MARK DUELL and DANNY HUSSAIN FOR MAILONLINE The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew The Queen arrives at the service holding the Duke of York by the elbow with her left hand and her stick with the right Andrew escorted her to her seat in an extraordinary moment that may have upset other royals. None of the other royals appeared to look up when they arrived Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Queen Maxima and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands left the service at Westminster Abbey arm-in-arm Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Advertisement The service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey was full of personal touches, including the floral arrangements. The stunning displays were a patriotic combination of red, white and blue, and featured blooms that paid tribute to both the Queen and Prince Philip's wedding, and the Duke of Edinburgh's naval career. Among the flowers chosen for the smaller posies were orchids, which were used in the then Princess Elizabeth's wedding bouquet when she married the duke on November 20, 1947 at Westminster Abbey. Orchids are said to symbolise love, beauty and strength and will reflect Prince Philip's enduring love for the Queen. The larger displays featured eryngium, known as sea holly, in a nod to the Duke of Edinburgh's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong love of the sea. The stunning displays were a patriotic combination of red, white and blue, and featured blooms that paid tribute to both the Queen and Prince Philip's wedding, and the Duke of Edinburgh's naval career. The larger displays featured eryngium, known as sea holly (the blue, spiky flowers), in a nod to the Duke of Edinburgh's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong love of the sea Among the flowers chosen for the smaller posies were orchids, which were used in the then Princess Elizabeth's wedding bouquet when she married her the duke on November 20, 1947 at Westminster Abbey Florist Judith Blacklock told FEMAIL that the blue flowers in the composition included Blue Delphinium, Eryngium and Agapanthus, while Eustoma (lisianthus), bloom Chrysanthemum and roses where used for the white. 'Carnation and Gerbera providing the red to bring together the colours of the United Kingdom. These were arranged on a background of soft ruscus, giant Monstera leaves and green and cream Pittosporumm,' she added. 'My good friend David Thomson was one of the chosen designers and he mentioned that all taking part in creating the flower displays felt they had been bestowed a huge honour and privilege,' she added. The magnificent pedestal displays in the Abbey were created by the top designers who are part of the National Association of Flower Arrangement Societies (NAFAS) who regularly create floral displays in Westminster. The flowers have the approval of the Queen and are in line with the wishes Prince Philip expressed before his death. The smaller posies featured red freesias, red spray roses and alstroemeria alongside blue irises and more sea holly. They also included dendrobium orchids, white freesias and Eustoma. Sea follies, orchids, rose and carnations are among the meaningful flowers in the floral arrangements Eight florists and flower suppliers were commissioned to prepare the floral arrangements that were on display at Westminster Abbey earlier today. At the Duke of Edinburg's funeral in April last year, flower included in the wreath to be laid on his coffin in Windsor were also selected by the Queen. They included white lilies, small white roses, white freesia, white wax flower, white sweet peas and jasmine. The Queen is now back at Windsor Castle having skipped several royal receptions after shedding tears for the Duke of Edinburgh at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable 99-year life of service to Britain and his wife. Her Majesty became emotional in Westminster Abbey - where she married Prince Philip in November 1947 - having personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life Today's service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities and patronages. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service in the central London church where she was crowned just over 70 years ago. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to and from her seat, supported by her disgraced son the Duke of York, to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. Her Majesty's presence was only confirmed two hours before it started. Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew And despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing hymns that her husband of 73 years had asked for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to aid her, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. After a poignant service limited to 40 minutes where the watery-eyed monarch sat in one of the Canada chairs with an additional cushion, she was driven the 22-miles back to Windsor Castle with the Duke of York beside her after her first major public engagement for approaching six months. The 51 European royals who attended the Service of Thanksgiving went to a number of receptions held in London afterwards, including one held at Kensington Palace, home to a number of British royals including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. Prince Charles hosted a charity reception at St James' Palace before attending a dinner at Windsor Castle tonight to mark the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's 75th anniversary. It is highly likely he will drop in to see his mother beforehand. Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon The Queen as she left Westminster Abbey in her Rolls-Royce today, wearing a regal purple and golden brooch Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who last month agreed to settle his sex assault lawsuit, left the service in a car with his mother the Queen A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Charles was seen wiping his eyes at the service where he could say goodbye to his father after a pared back funeral last year. Prince Andrew looked serious as he waited to leave with his mother Prince William rests a hand on the back of his son Prince George, at the end of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Cambridges departing the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Duchess of Cambridge smiled out of the window of her car as she left the Abbey with Prince William after the service The Queen sits alone at Philip's pared-down funeral last April - in stark contrast to today's celebration. It was one of the defining photos of the pandemic, where many Britons were forced to mourn their loved ones in small ceremonies, sometimes alone Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today The congregation takes its place ahead of the service. The Queen made the final decision to attend this morning, hours before she was due to travel the 22 miles from Windsor Castle to Central London. She held Andrew's elbow The royal family paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip at today's service at Westminster Abbey Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband The Queen stands for the first hymn at the service in remembrance of her beloved husband Prince Philip Prince Andrew walked his mother up the aisle after she arrived via a side door rather than the main entrance to shorten the distance The Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royals, led by the Queen despite her recent health issues, join the congregation in singing hymns during today's service The royals ahead of the service: In the front row are The Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence. The Cambridges are in the second row while Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, along with their husbands, are among the royals in the third row She left as she arrived, being supported by her son Andrew - reputedly her favourite The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey Prince Charles and Camilla were greeted by clergy as they arrived ahead of today's service of celebration for Prince Philip A serious looking Prince William sits down next to his wife, George and Charlotte to say goodbye to his grandfather The Queen sat beside Andrew, the royal who lost his HRH just weeks ago over his links to Epstein and civil case Crowds piled outside Westminster Abbey to pay tribute to Prince Philip as the service in his memorial continued Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at today's service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Princess Eugenie (left) and Princess Beatrice (right) pictured arriving at a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice arriving at the poignant Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Peter Phillips with Isla Phillips and Savannah Phillips (right) arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh and greeting Duke of Edinburgh award recipients Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Lady Louise Windsor arriving at the Westminster Abbey service for Prince Philip today. The Service will pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent attend the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip A graphic shows the plan for the service to remember Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey taking place this morning Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, arrives with her foot in a brace and on crutches at Westminster Abbey today Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma arrives at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (left) and Formula One driver Sir Jackie Stewart (right) arrive today Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (left) and Home Secretary Priti Patel (right) arrive at Westminster Abbey this morning Guests walk into Westminster Abbey and take their seats ahead of this morning's service to remember Prince Philip Chancellor Rishi Sunak (left) and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) at Westminster Abbey today Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England (right), arrive this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Members of the congregation queue at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service of thanksgiving for the life of Philip Guests arrive to attend the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending today's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' Royal fans watch out for guests at the service to remember the late Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Guests begin to arrive for the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Television broadcasting staff gather outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of Prince Philip's memorial service Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Royal superfan John Loughrey, from Stretham in Cambridgeshire, stands outside Westminster Abbey this morning Another royal superfan stands outside Westminster Abbey ahead of the memorial service for Philip this morning Police officers walk past Westminster Abbey this morning before the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh Workers put up barriers outside Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service for Prince Philip Royal fans wait outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service will also be attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat during the funeral of Prince Philip at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle on April 17, 2021 The Queen and Prince Philip revisit Broadlands, to mark their Diamond Wedding Anniversary on November 20, 2007 The Queen and Philip were married in the Abbey in November 1947 and it holds many special memories. Flowers at today's service will be red, white and blue. They will include dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. The Queen attended the opening of the Welsh Parliament on October 14 last year. Since then she has conducted engagements at Windsor Castle, where she is now based, and visited Sandringham in February. Advertisement Prince William and Kate Middleton arrived hand-in-hand with Prince George and Princess Charlotte for Prince Philip's memorial service today. The Duchess of Cambridge looked poised as she wore an understated polka dot Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with elegant silver droplet earrings, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning. The couple were joined by their eldest son Prince George, eight, who wore a smart navy suit for the occasion, and Princess Charlotte, six, who wore a navy coat dress with a matching ribbon in her hair. Kate and Prince Philip enjoyed a good relationship, with Prince William saying he was thankful that Kate, who married into the royal family in 2011 after meeting William nearly a decade earlier, had 'so many years' to get to know his grandfather. The memorial is the couple's first public appearance since they landed back in Britain from their troubled tour of the Caribbean, which was blighted by protests against Britain's colonial past. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge held their children's hands as they made their way out of Westminster Abbey The Duke of Cambridge and the Duchess of Cambridge guided Prince George and Princess Charlotte through the service The two oldest Cambridge children joined their parents and senior members of the Royal Family at the engagement The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte smiled as they left Westminster Abbey this afternoon The Duchess of Cambridge was the picture of elegance as she arrived at the service with her daughter Princess Charlotte The Duchess of Cambridge giggled as Princess Charlotte is introduced to Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby Prince William puts a guiding hand on his son Prince George's shoulder following the Westminster Abbey service The Cambridge family followed Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall out of the Abbey today The Duchess of Cambridge shepherded her children out of Westminster Abbey following the deeply personal service The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left Westminster Abbey hand-in-hand with their children after paying their respects They faced calls to issue a public apology for slavery during the eight-day tour, with the barrage of criticism ranging from accusations Belize locals were not consulted about a royal engagement to calls for slavery reparations from the monarchy in Jamaica. The Duke of Cambridge denounced slavery as 'abhorrent' and said 'it should never have happened'. He is attending the service for the life of Prince Philip as he looks to now move the monarchy into the future amid the criticism. William is said to want to do things 'the Cambridge way' following his Caribbean tour with Kate that saw the couple heavily criticised for images that smacked of 'colonialism' but also welcomed with warmth by Caribbeans. The visit is likely to be judged as a landmark moment for years to come when the growing awareness of racial equality, in light of the Black Lives Matter movement, meant future Commonwealth tours would have to be sensitive to these issues. The Duke addressed the issue of slavery during a speech in Jamaica, denouncing it as 'abhorrent' and saying 'it should never have happened'. Ending their trip to Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas at the weekend, the future king acknowledged the monarchy's days in those nations may be numbered as he stated the future 'is for the people to decide upon', and that he may not become head of the Commonwealth. In a statement reflecting on the tour, William said who the Commonwealth chooses to be its leader 'isn't what is on my mind', but what concerned him was its potential to 'create a better future for the people who form it'. He stressed that he and his wife Kate were 'committed to service' and saw their role as supporting people, 'not telling them what to do'. Prince William and Kate Middleton arrived hand-in-hand with Prince George and Princess Charlotte for Prince Philip's memorial service today The Duchess of Cambridge looked poised as she wore an understated polkadot Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with elegant silver droplet earrings, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who days ago returned from their controversial Caribbean tour, arrived hand-in-hand with George and Charlotte, their two eldest children Six-year-old Princess Charlotte could be seen beaming as she arrived at the service alongside her parents this morning Prince William's mini me! Prince George was matching his father with his outfit, wearing a navy suit with a baby blue shirt and a polkadot tie Princess Charlotte's hair was neatly plaited into a blue ribbon for the event earlier this morning (left), while the Duchess wore her locks pulled back into an understated low bun (right) The family beamed as they arrived at Westminster Abbey hand-in-hand this morning, in what is one of Prince George and Charlotte's first major events Now, Will and Kate return to take part in the Duke of Edinburgh's memorial ceremony, which will celebrate the life and contributions of Prince Philip, who died in April 2021 aged 99. The Queen, who was married to The Duke of Edinburgh for 73 years prior to his death, is said to have personally overseen many elements of the service. The funeral included several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. Little Princess Charlotte wore a navy coat with gold buttons for the outing today, which was matched perfectly with her blue tights (left and right) The Duchess of Cambridge looked poised as she wore an understated polkadot Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with elegant silver droplet earrings, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning William is said to want to do things 'the Cambridge way' following his Caribbean tour with Kate that saw the couple heavily criticised for images that smacked of 'colonialism' but also welcomed with warmth by Caribbeans Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey tomorrow - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending tomorrow's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. The Queen has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides took steps to ensure that the service, to be televised live on BBC One, is less taxing for the Queen. The service gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, gave a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, conducted the service and described the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He said: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, offered prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service was also attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon The Queen as she left Westminster Abbey in her Rolls-Royce today, wearing a regal purple and golden brooch A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Charles was seen wiping his eyes at the service where he could say goodbye to his father after a pared back funeral last year. Prince Andrew looked serious as he waited to leave with his mother Prince William rests a hand on the back of his son Prince George, at the end of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Cambridges departing the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Duchess of Cambridge smiled out of the window of her car as she left the Abbey with Prince William after the service The Queen sits alone at Philip's pared-down funeral last April - in stark contrast to today's celebration. It was one of the defining photos of the pandemic, where many Britons were forced to mourn their loved ones in small ceremonies, sometimes alone Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today The congregation takes its place ahead of the service. The Queen made the final decision to attend this morning, hours before she was due to travel the 22 miles from Windsor Castle to Central London. She held Andrew's elbow The royal family paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip at today's service at Westminster Abbey Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband The Queen stands for the first hymn at the service in remembrance of her beloved husband Prince Philip Prince Andrew walked his mother up the aisle after she arrived via a side door rather than the main entrance to shorten the distance The Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royals, led by the Queen despite her recent health issues, join the congregation in singing hymns during today's service The royals ahead of the service: In the front row are The Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence. The Cambridges are in the second row while Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, along with their husbands, are among the royals in the third row She left as she arrived, being supported by her son Andrew - reputedly her favourite The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey Prince Charles and Camilla were greeted by clergy as they arrived ahead of today's service of celebration for Prince Philip A serious looking Prince William sits down next to his wife, George and Charlotte to say goodbye to his grandfather The Queen sat beside Andrew, the royal who lost his HRH just weeks ago over his links to Epstein and civil case Crowds piled outside Westminster Abbey to pay tribute to Prince Philip as the service in his memorial continued Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at today's service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Princess Eugenie (left) and Princess Beatrice (right) pictured arriving at a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice arriving at the poignant Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Peter Phillips with Isla Phillips and Savannah Phillips (right) arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh and greeting Duke of Edinburgh award recipients Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Lady Louise Windsor arriving at the Westminster Abbey service for Prince Philip today. The Service will pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent attend the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, arrives with her foot in a brace and on crutches at Westminster Abbey today Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma arrives at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (left) and Formula One driver Sir Jackie Stewart (right) arrive today Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (left) and Home Secretary Priti Patel (right) arrive at Westminster Abbey this morning Guests walk into Westminster Abbey and take their seats ahead of this morning's service to remember Prince Philip Chancellor Rishi Sunak (left) and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) at Westminster Abbey today Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England (right), arrive this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Members of the congregation queue at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service of thanksgiving for the life of Philip Guests arrive to attend the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending today's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' Advertisement Prince George and Princess Charlotte looked adorable as they joined their parents the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge for their beloved great-grandfather's memorial service today. Walking hand-in-hand with their parents, George, eight, arrived wearing a smart navy suit and light blue tie, while his little sister Charlotte, six, wore a navy blue button up coat dress with black tights and a matching ribbon in her hair. The Westminster Abbey service marks one of the important outings to date for the two young royals, both of whom enjoyed a close relationship with Prince Philip before his death at the age of 99 last April. Charlotte, who donned a sweet French braid in her hair, was seen grinning inside the Abbey as she shook hands with a member of the clergy ahead of the service this morning. Prince George and Princess Charlotte looked adorable as they joined their parents the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge for their beloved great-grandfather's memorial service today Charlotte, who donned a sweet French braid in her hair, was seen grinning inside the Abbey as she shook hands with a member of the clergy ahead of the service this morning The Westminster Abbey service marks one of the important outings to date for the future king and his sister, both of whom enjoyed a close relationship with Prince Philip Savannah, 11, and Isla Phillips, 10, the daughters of Prince Philip's eldest grandson Peter, were also in attendance, as was Zara and Mike Tindall's eight-year-old daughter Mia. The Duke of Edinburgh 's other great-grandchildren are Princess Charlotte, six, Prince Louis , three, Lena Tindall, also three, and her one-year-old brother Lucas, Princess Eugenie's one-year-old son August Brooksbank and Princess Beatrice's daughter Sienna Mapelli Mozz, who was born in September last year. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's children, Archie, two, and Lilibet, nine months, remain with the couple in California. The Duchess of Cambridge looked poised as she wore an understated polkadot Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with elegant silver droplet earrings, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning. The Duchess of Cambridge looked poised as she wore an understated polkadot Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with elegant silver droplet earrings, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning Prince George arrived at his great-grandfather's memorial service, walking hand-in-hand with his father Prince William at Westminster Abbey this morning The Duchess of Cambridge looked poised as she wore an understated polkadot Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with elegant silver droplet earrings, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning Kate and Prince Philip enjoyed a good relationship, with Prince William saying he was thankful that Kate, who married into the royal family in 2011 after meeting William nearly a decade earlier, had 'so many years' to get to know his grandfather. The memorial service will pay tribute to the Duke's dedication to 'family, nation and Commonwealth', his contribution to public life and his steadfast support to his charities. After much speculation about whether Her Majesty would attend the service, Buckingham Palace confirmed this morning that the Queen would be in attendance at the memorial service. Senior royals in attendance at the memorial will include Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Princess Anne and Vice Admiral Timothy Laurence, Zara and Mike Tindall and Peter Phillips. Charlotte, six, wore a navy blue button up coat dress with black tights and a matching ribbon in her hair to the memorial service at Westminster Abbey today The Westminster Abbey service marks one of the important outings to date for the future king and his sister, both of whom enjoyed a close relationship with Prince Philip before his death at the age of 99 last April George, eight, arrived wearing a smart navy suit and light blue tie. The Westminster Abbey service marks one of the important outings to date for the future king Walking hand-in-hand with their parents, George, eight, arrived wearing a smart navy suit and light blue tie, while his little sister Charlotte, six, wore a navy blue button up coat dress with black tights and a matching ribbon in her hair The Duchess of Cambridge looked poised as she wore an understated polkadot Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with elegant silver droplet earrings, as she held hands with Princess Charlotte at the memorial today Prince George and Princess Charlotte are pictured holding hands with their parents, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge after the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster's memorial service Walking hand-in-hand with their parents, George, eight, left the service which took place at Westminster Abbey today The service will also be attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Princess Margaret's daughter Sarah Chatto, Viscount Linley, Freddie and Sophie Windsor and Prince Michael of Kent were also in attendance at the service. The Queen has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service, is being televised live on BBC One, is less taxing for the Queen. Princess Charlotte stole the show and charmed the Archbishop of Canterbury during her first line-up today At one point the schoolgirl princess pulled a funny face after apparently catching sight of herself on a screen, prompting viewers to giggle over her 'sparkling' personality In contrast her eight-year-old brother George - dressed as his daddy's double in a suit and tie - looked far more sombre, perhaps because he had a better understanding of the gravity of the situation The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge held their children's hands as they made their way out of Westminster Abbey Princess Charlotte flashed a smile as the Cambridges left Westminster Abbey this afternoon after the service Princess Charlotte was introduced to senior members of the clergy on her arrival at Westminster Abbey today Six-year-old Princess Charlotte smiled and shook hands with members of the clergy as her mother Kate stood nearby In contrast Prince George appeared to be unsure of the situation, perhaps because he understood the gravity of the service Prince George bit his lip as he watched his grandfather Prince Charles ahead of him in the line up at the exit to the Abbey Prince George looked solemn as he left Westminster Abbey hand-in-hand with his father Prince William Eight-year-old George was his father's double as they left the Abbey. Right, Charlotte with the Duchess of Cambridge The two oldest Cambridge children joined their parents and senior members of the Royal Family at the engagement Royal aides revealed ahead of the memorial that the 95-year-old Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service - 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes'. Plans for the service included several elements the duke had planned for his funeral in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Missing gestures from Philip's pre-pandemic arrangements saw Gold Duke of Edinburgh's Award holders and members of the youth UK Cadet Force associations line the steps of Westminster Abbey as guests arrived. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey tomorrow - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending tomorrow's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement The duke's express wishes for the congregation to join and sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for the clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part will finally be granted on Tuesday. Prayers will be said for the duke's 'gifts of character; for his humour and resilience; his fortitude and devotion to duty' by the Chapels Royal's Sub-Dean. His 'energy and spirit of adventure' and 'strength and constancy' will be heralded by royal estates' clergy known as the Queen's domestic chaplains. The duke had an active role in the day-to-day management of the estates for many years. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests will attend today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The Queen and Philip were married in the Abbey in November 1947 and it holds many special memories. Flowers at today's service will be red, white and blue. They will include dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. The Queen attended the opening of the Welsh Parliament on October 14 last year. Since then she has conducted engagements at Windsor Castle, where she is now based, and visited Sandringham in February. Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon The Queen as she left Westminster Abbey in her Rolls-Royce today, wearing a regal purple and golden brooch Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who last month agreed to settle his sex assault lawsuit, left the service in a car with his mother the Queen A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Charles was seen wiping his eyes at the service where he could say goodbye to his father after a pared back funeral last year. Prince Andrew looked serious as he waited to leave with his mother Prince William rests a hand on the back of his son Prince George, at the end of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Cambridges departing the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Duchess of Cambridge smiled out of the window of her car as she left the Abbey with Prince William after the service The Queen sits alone at Philip's pared-down funeral last April - in stark contrast to today's celebration. It was one of the defining photos of the pandemic, where many Britons were forced to mourn their loved ones in small ceremonies, sometimes alone Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today The congregation takes its place ahead of the service. The Queen made the final decision to attend this morning, hours before she was due to travel the 22 miles from Windsor Castle to Central London. She held Andrew's elbow The royal family paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip at today's service at Westminster Abbey Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband The Queen stands for the first hymn at the service in remembrance of her beloved husband Prince Philip Prince Andrew walked his mother up the aisle after she arrived via a side door rather than the main entrance to shorten the distance The Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royals, led by the Queen despite her recent health issues, join the congregation in singing hymns during today's service The royals ahead of the service: In the front row are The Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence. The Cambridges are in the second row while Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, along with their husbands, are among the royals in the third row She left as she arrived, being supported by her son Andrew - reputedly her favourite The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey Prince Charles and Camilla were greeted by clergy as they arrived ahead of today's service of celebration for Prince Philip A serious looking Prince William sits down next to his wife, George and Charlotte to say goodbye to his grandfather The Queen sat beside Andrew, the royal who lost his HRH just weeks ago over his links to Epstein and civil case Crowds piled outside Westminster Abbey to pay tribute to Prince Philip as the service in his memorial continued Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at today's service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Princess Eugenie (left) and Princess Beatrice (right) pictured arriving at a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice arriving at the poignant Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Peter Phillips with Isla Phillips and Savannah Phillips (right) arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh and greeting Duke of Edinburgh award recipients Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Lady Louise Windsor arriving at the Westminster Abbey service for Prince Philip today. The Service will pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent attend the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, arrives with her foot in a brace and on crutches at Westminster Abbey today Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma arrives at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (left) and Formula One driver Sir Jackie Stewart (right) arrive today Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (left) and Home Secretary Priti Patel (right) arrive at Westminster Abbey this morning Guests walk into Westminster Abbey and take their seats ahead of this morning's service to remember Prince Philip Chancellor Rishi Sunak (left) and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) at Westminster Abbey today Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England (right), arrive this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Members of the congregation queue at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service of thanksgiving for the life of Philip Guests arrive to attend the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending today's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' Advertisement Kate Middleton told a solemn Princess Charlotte to smile the pair walked into Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip's memorial service today, a lip reader has revealed. The Duchess of Cambridge, 40, walked hand-in-hand with her daughter six, while William, 39, held eight-year-old Prince George's hand as the family joined 1800 mourners. As they approached the Abbey's doors, Kate - who was smiling - told her serious looking daughter 'you can smile' according to expert lip reader Jacqui Press. Charlotte then smiled. Kate Middleton told a solemn Princess Charlotte to smile the pair walked into Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip's memorial service today, a lip reader has revealed. The Duchess of Cambridge, 40, walked hand-in-hand with her daughter six, while William, 39, held eight-year-old Prince George's hand as the family joined 1800 mourners. Charlotte is picture sombre left and smiling right Speaking to FEMAIL, Jacqui added that Prince William says 'let's go in' to Prince George as he walks into the chapel before he guides him in and introduces him to dignitaries. He then told people inside the Abbey 'good morning , good to see you again' 'very well thank you ' and 'have a good day'. He then explains to Prince George who each of the bishops and other clergy are as he shakes their hands. Prince Charles later walked into the the service and commented: 'it always looks so wonderful here'. Kate looked poised as she wore a 1,495 navy Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with a smart 775 hat from Lock&Co! and Princess Diana's Collingwood earrings for the service at Westminster Abbey today. Alessandra Rich is also one of the Duchess' favoured labels, with the royal frequently turning to the London-based designer for her royal engagements. Speaking to FEMAIL, Jacqui added that Prince William says 'let's go in' to Prince George as he walks into the chapel before he guides him in and introduces him to dignitaries. The family are pictured leaving the chapel The Duchess of Cambridge swept her brunette locks into a low bun to reveal the pearl drop earrings for the occasion. Kate regularly wears jewellery that honours her mother-in-law, including her sapphire engagement ring, which once belonged to Diana. With a keen eye for detail, Kate often references Princess Diana with her style choices. The memorial includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service The Queen has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. As they approached the Abbey's doors, Kate - who was smiling - told her serious looking daughter 'you can smile' according to expert lip reader Jacqui Press Kate looked poised as she wore a 1,495 navy Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with a smart 775 hat from Lock&Co! and Princess Diana's Collingwood earrings for the service at Westminster Abbey today Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service, to be televised live on BBC One, is less taxing for the Queen. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. Kate regularly wears jewellery that honours her mother-in-law, including her sapphire engagement ring, which once belonged to Diana. Kate is pictured with George, William and Charlotte The memorial includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. The family are pictured leaving The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service will also be attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic By MARTIN ROBINSON, CHIEF REPORTER and MARK DUELL and DANNY HUSSAIN FOR MAILONLINE The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew The Queen arrives at the service holding the Duke of York by the elbow with her left hand and her stick with the right Andrew escorted her to her seat in an extraordinary moment that may have upset other royals. None of the other royals appeared to look up when they arrived Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Queen Maxima and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands left the service at Westminster Abbey arm-in-arm Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Advertisement The Queen paid a special tribute to her late husband the Duke of Edinburg at today's memorial service by sporting a brooch he gifted her in 1966. Dressed in a green ensemble, the Monarch, 95, donned the Grima Ruby Brooch, which was a personal gift to her from her husband. The piece, which is made of recycled rubies, free-form gold and diamonds was crafted by jeweller Andrew Grima and is one of the few modern pieces that were added to the Queen's collection during her reign. She has worn it on numerous occasions since it was gifted to her, including several Christmas broadcast. On the occasion of their Platinum Anniversary in 2017, the Queen pinned the brooch to a white dress for her official portrait with Prince Philip. The Queen paid a very intimate tribute to her late husband the Duke of Edinburg at today's memorial service by sporting a brooch he gifted her in 1966, pictured right The eye-catching brooch has also been referred to as the Scarab Brooch by the royal palace. The Queen paired it with an elegant forest green coat, with matching hat and a fur collar and sleeve. She completed the look with a pair of gloves and stud pearl earrings. The choice of her outfit seemed to be another subtle tribute to her late spouse, whose livery colour in the armed forces was Edinburgh Green. On the occasion of their Platinum Anniversary in 2017, the Queen donned the brooch with a white dress in her and Prince Philip's official portrait, pictured The Monarch shed a tear for her late husband at today's extraordinary service celebrating his life at Westminster Abbey The Monarch, dressed in a green ensemble, stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move The Queen, 95, shed a tear during the emotional memorial service. She wore the special brooch with her outfit an her pearl necklace The Prince of Wales, 73 and the Duchess of Cornwall, who was also dressed in green, were sat next to the Monarch with the Princess Royal, who got the green memo and Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon The Queen as she left Westminster Abbey in her Rolls-Royce today, wearing a regal purple and golden brooch Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who last month agreed to settle his sex assault lawsuit, left the service in a car with his mother the Queen A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Charles was seen wiping his eyes at the service where he could say goodbye to his father after a pared back funeral last year. Prince Andrew looked serious as he waited to leave with his mother Prince William rests a hand on the back of his son Prince George, at the end of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Cambridges departing the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Duchess of Cambridge smiled out of the window of her car as she left the Abbey with Prince William after the service The Queen sits alone at Philip's pared-down funeral last April - in stark contrast to today's celebration. It was one of the defining photos of the pandemic, where many Britons were forced to mourn their loved ones in small ceremonies, sometimes alone Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today The congregation takes its place ahead of the service. The Queen made the final decision to attend this morning, hours before she was due to travel the 22 miles from Windsor Castle to Central London. She held Andrew's elbow The royal family paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip at today's service at Westminster Abbey Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband The Queen stands for the first hymn at the service in remembrance of her beloved husband Prince Philip Prince Andrew walked his mother up the aisle after she arrived via a side door rather than the main entrance to shorten the distance The Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royals, led by the Queen despite her recent health issues, join the congregation in singing hymns during today's service The royals ahead of the service: In the front row are The Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence. The Cambridges are in the second row while Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, along with their husbands, are among the royals in the third row She left as she arrived, being supported by her son Andrew - reputedly her favourite The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey Prince Charles and Camilla were greeted by clergy as they arrived ahead of today's service of celebration for Prince Philip A serious looking Prince William sits down next to his wife, George and Charlotte to say goodbye to his grandfather The Queen sat beside Andrew, the royal who lost his HRH just weeks ago over his links to Epstein and civil case Crowds piled outside Westminster Abbey to pay tribute to Prince Philip as the service in his memorial continued Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at today's service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Princess Eugenie (left) and Princess Beatrice (right) pictured arriving at a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice arriving at the poignant Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Peter Phillips with Isla Phillips and Savannah Phillips (right) arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh and greeting Duke of Edinburgh award recipients Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Lady Louise Windsor arriving at the Westminster Abbey service for Prince Philip today. The Service will pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent attend the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, arrives with her foot in a brace and on crutches at Westminster Abbey today Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma arrives at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (left) and Formula One driver Sir Jackie Stewart (right) arrive today Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (left) and Home Secretary Priti Patel (right) arrive at Westminster Abbey this morning Guests walk into Westminster Abbey and take their seats ahead of this morning's service to remember Prince Philip Chancellor Rishi Sunak (left) and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) at Westminster Abbey today Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England (right), arrive this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Members of the congregation queue at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service of thanksgiving for the life of Philip Guests arrive to attend the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending today's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' Royal fans watch out for guests at the service to remember the late Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Guests begin to arrive for the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Television broadcasting staff gather outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of Prince Philip's memorial service Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Royal superfan John Loughrey, from Stretham in Cambridgeshire, stands outside Westminster Abbey this morning Another royal superfan stands outside Westminster Abbey ahead of the memorial service for Philip this morning Police officers walk past Westminster Abbey this morning before the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh Workers put up barriers outside Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service for Prince Philip Royal fans wait outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service will also be attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat during the funeral of Prince Philip at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle on April 17, 2021 The Queen and Prince Philip revisit Broadlands, to mark their Diamond Wedding Anniversary on November 20, 2007 The Queen and Philip were married in the Abbey in November 1947 and it holds many special memories. Flowers at today's service will be red, white and blue. They will include dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. The Queen attended the opening of the Welsh Parliament on October 14 last year. Since then she has conducted engagements at Windsor Castle, where she is now based, and visited Sandringham in February. Land ministry officials conduct an on-site inspection at a collapsed apartment building in Gwangju, Feb. 9. Korea Times file Advertisement With the exception of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, the nation's senior royals were all in attendance in Westminster Abbey this morning as they united to honour the life of the late Duke of Edinburgh. The Queen led her family - alongside politicians, European royals and members of Prince Philip's family - in the emotional service at Westminster Abbey on Tuesday morning. The Monarch, 95, who has battled a serious of health and mobility issues in recent weeks - including contracting Covid last month - was determined to attend the memorial service. Prince Philip's funeral in April last year saw Her Majesty seated alone with just 30 mourners in attendance as Covid rules meant heavily restricted numbers. Today, the first two rows of the Abbey were filled with 20 of the late Duke's closest family members - including his children Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, Princess Anne and Prince Edward and their own families. Behind them sat minor royals, members of the aristocracy, European royalty - including King Felipe VI of Spain and Queen Letizia - and even famous faces from popular culture - including racing legend Jackie Stewart. Clearly emotional, the Queen shed a tear for her late husband at the extraordinary service held in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and her. Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row THE FRONT ROW AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY The Queen shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life - unlike the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral in April 2021, the Queen was surrounded by her closest family members The Queen (1) The sovereign took her place amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-olds mobility problems, which have prevented her from carrying out a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. Wearing a racing green coat and matching fur-trimmed hat, the Queen was seated next to Prince Charles for the solemn occasion. Prince Charles (2) The first in line to the throne, Prince Charles wore a smart pin-striped navy blue suit with a black tie and shiny brogues as he sat by his mother's side - with the Duchess of Cornwall to his left - at the memorial service. The Duchess of Cornwall (3) Camilla, 74, who donned a deep green dress coat with black leather gloves and a black clutch bag and wore a black velour hat with a striking green feather, was known to have enjoyed a close relationship with the late Duke of Edinburgh - and is likely to use him as an inspiration when she becomes Queen Consort in the future. Princess Anne (4) The Princess Royal, also in racing green stood between her husband Timothy Lawrence and the Duchess of Cornwall for today's service Timothy Laurence (5) The 67-year-old retired Royal Navy Vice Admiral, wife of the Princess Royal, took the last place on the first row at the memorial service. Prince Andrew (6) After a tumultuous year for Prince Andrew, the Queen showed her support for him today, symbolically choosing him to accompany her to Westminster Abbey despite the Epstein scandal that has de-railed his royal life. He sat alongside his siblings, with daughters Beatrice and Eugenie a few rows behind. Support for the Queen: The front row saw, from left, The Queen, Prince of Wales, Duchess of Cornwall, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence seated together with Kate, William, Prince George and Prince Charlotte Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royal family - who were facing many of Prince Philip's own family members, including the Hereditary Prince and Princess of Baden (far right opposite the Duchess of Cornwall and Princess Royal), were seen paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip Prince Edward (7) Prince Edward looked somber as he took his seat alongside wife Sophie Wessex and their two children, Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Sophie Wessex (8) Sophie, Countess of Wessex, 57, and her daughter, Lady Louise, 18, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. Lady Louise Windsor (9) Known for her close relationship to her grandfather who she has inherited a love of carriage-driving from, Lady Louise, 18, looked perfectly polished as she joined her parents and brother at Westminster Abbey. Viscount Severn (10) Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex's son - now 14 - wore a black suit and tie to show his respects to his late grandfather. THE SECOND ROW AT PRINCE PHILIP'S MEMORIAL SERVICE Wearing racing green to reflect the livery of Prince Philip's military regiment, the Duchess of Cornwall and Princess Royal - alongside Tim Laurence - were seated in front of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge Prince William (11) The Queen's grandson and second in line to the throne held wife Kate Middleton's hand as he arrived with two of the couple's children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, for his grandfather's memorial service. Prince George (12) Just visible next to his father's shoulder, Prince George took his seat just behind his great-grandmother for the service. The eight-year-old took a day off school to join his younger sister Princess Charlotte at the event. Princess Charlotte (13) The six-year-old schoolgirl was barely visible except for occasionally nudging up to her mother, the Duchess of Cambridge. Duchess of Cambridge (14) Playing a reassuring role to two of her three children who were in attendance, the Duchess told a serious-looking Princess Charlotte 'you can smile', according to expert lip reader Jacqui Press. Kate looked poised as she wore a 1,495 navy Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with a smart 775 hat from Lock&Co! and Princess Diana's Collingwood earrings for the service at Westminster Abbey today. Isla and Savannah Phillips (middle row, second and third from left) joined the Tindalls and their father Peter Phillips on the second row at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips (15) The Princess Royal's son, separated from wife Autumn Phillips, was seated alongside his daughters Isla, 10, and Savannah, 11 on the second row. Isla Phillips (16) For Peter Phillips' youngest daughter, it was a day of mixed emotions as she celebrated her tenth birthday. Isla Elizabeth Phillips was born on March 29, 2012 to Peter and mother Autumn Phillips. Savannah Phillips (17) Appearing to offer a cheeky smile at points, Savannah Phillips, the 11-year-old daughter of Peter and his ex-wife Autumn Phillips wore a navy blue headband and buttoned up smock coat for the service. Mia Tindall (18) Looking up to her older cousin Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, the eldest child of Mike and Zara Tindall looked to be enjoying the grandeur of the occasion as she paid her respects to her great grandfather. Mia wore a black peplum coat with red piping along the cuffs and collar for the occasion . Zara Tindall (19) The Duke of Edinburgh's granddaughter was joined by her husband Mike and their eldest daughter Mia at Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip's memorial service. The mother-of-three looked poised as she wore an understated Laura Green navy coat which she paired with elegant silver earrings. Mike Tindall (20) The former England rugby player looked smart in a grey tailored suit which he paired with a white shirt and a navy patterned tie. THE ROWS BEYOND: MORE ROYALS, EUROPEAN ROYALS AND ARISTORCRACY Princess Beatrice (21) Princess Beatrice, 33, stepped out in a burgundy dress with coordinating heels and a black coat, alongside her polished husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 38. At one point the princess broke down in tears. She enjoyed a particularly close relationship with her grandfather the Duke of Edinburgh. Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi (22) Mr Mapelli Mozzi was by his wife's side as she paid tribute to her grandfather at today's service of thanksgiving. The Duke of Edinburgh approved of their union and attended Mr Mapelli Mozzi's wedding to Beatrice in 2020. Princess Eugenie (23) Princess Eugenie cut a stylish figure in a floral midi dress by British fashion designer Erdem worth 1,695. She was joined by her husband Jack Brooksbank. Eugenie and Jack welcomed son August in February 2021 and gave him the middle name Philip after his great-grandfather Princess Beatrice, third row, far left, looked sombre as she joined the congregation in singing as part of the tribute to her grandfather - she was seated next to her husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi Jack Brooksbank (24) Princess Eugenie's husband Jack Brooksbank looked sombre throughout the service. It would have been particularly poignant for Jack, who lost his own father to Covid in November 2021, just days before their son August's christening. David Armstrong-Jones (25) David Armstrong-Jones, 2nd Earl Snowdon, is the only son of Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl Snowdon. The furniture designer enjoyed a close relationship with the Duke of Edinburgh and used to holiday with the Royal Family as a child. Margarita Armstrong-Jones (26)The Earl of Snowdon's daughter Margarita Armstrong-Jones was seated next to her father. Lord Snowdon and her mother, Serena Armstrong-Jones, Countess of Snowdon, divorced in 2020. Richard, Duke of Gloucester (27) The Duke is the youngest grandchild of King George V and Queen Mary and a paternal cousin of the Queen. He carries out duties on behalf of the royal family and is patron of many societies. Birgitte, Duchess of Gloucester (28) The Dutch-born Duchess married Prince Richard in 1972 and is a full-time working member of the Royal Family. She shares three children with the Duke - none of whom undertake official duties. Sarah Chatto's brother David Armstrong-Jones, 2nd Earl Snowdon, who was seated next to his daughter Margarita Edward, Duke of Kent (29) Edward is the son of George VI's brother and is a first cousin of Her Majesty. The Duke is involved with over 140 different charities, organisations and professional bodies on behalf of the Royal Family. Lady Amelia Windsor (30) Currently 43rd in the line of succession to the British throne, glamorous Lady Amelia Windsor also attended today's service. The 26-year-old fashionista, Prince Harry and Prince William's third cousin, wore a demure buttoned-up jacket and trousers, with her hair cascading loose down her back. Charles Armstrong-Jones (31): The 22-year-old son of the Second Earl of Snowdon, David Armstrong-Jones, was seated next to his aunt Lady Sarah Chatto at the memorial service. Armstrong-Jones was the third grandchild of Princess Margaret. Lady Sarah Chatto (32): The Queen and Prince Philip's much-loved niece Sarah Chatto looked emotional as she arrived for her uncle's service of thanksgiving. Lady Sarah was born in 1964 the last royal baby born at a palace rather than a hospital within weeks of cousins Prince Edward, Lady Helen Windsor and James Ogilvy. The minor royal, 56, wore a navy blue dress, cardigan and string of pearls for the service. Daniel Chatto (33): The husband of Lady Sarah accompanied his wife and their two children; the family's presence in a key spot at the memorial service is testament to how highly they are regarded in the royal family, and is a tribute to the close relationship the Duke of Edinburgh enjoyed with Princess Margaret Sarah Chatto's sons Samuel (left) and Arthur (right) joined their parents at the high profile event today Samuel Chatto (34): The eldest of Lady Sarah Chatto's children, youthful-looking Samuel, 25, looked sharp in a navy suit with black tie. The potter and artist, who's a hit on Instagram with 86,000 followers, was seated next to his mother. Arthur Chatto (35): Sporty Arthur Chatto, who works as a personal trainer, donned a dark grey suit and navy tie as he took his place in the Abbey alongside his brother and mother and father. Arthur is 29th in line to the throne. George Windsor (36): The Earl of St Andrews, a former diplomat, is the elder son of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and his wife, Katharine, Duchess of Kent. The 59-year-old father-of-four attended with his wife Sylvana Tomaselli. Lord Downpatrick (37): The 33-year-old brother of Lady Amelia Windsor, son of George Windsor and Sylvana Tomaselli, cut a low-key figure, sporting a beard for the memorial service. Edward, or 'Eddy' as he's referred to by friends and family, works as a fashion designer, having ditched a former career in the City. Sylvana Tomaselli (38): Wife of the Earl of St Andrews, Canadian-born academic and historian Sylvana Tomaselli, a lecturer at Cambridge University, eschewed a hat in favour of a black velour headband, and wore a dark navy suit as she took her place between her two children in the Abbey. More than 50 European royals were in attendance today. Pictured: King Willem-Alexander of The Netherlands and Queen Maxima of The Netherlands, King Felipe of Spain, Princess Beatrix of The Netherlands and Prince Albert of Monaco Lady Helen Taylor (39): A peripheral royal happy to lead a life largely under the radar, Lady Helen, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, wore a smart black suit to pay her respects to Prince Philip, accompanied by her son Cassius, who she shares with art dealer Timothy Taylor. Cassius Taylor (40): Cousin to Lady Amelia Windsor and Lord Edward Downpatrick, 25-year-old Cassius also donned a beard, alongside a black suit as he took his seat four rows back from the front. King Philippe and Queen Mathilde of Belgium (41): King Philippe of Belgium, 61, who is related to the Queen through Queen Victoria, was also attend the service with his wife Queen Mathilde, 49. The Queen and Philippe are also both descendants of Christian IX of Denmark, whose six children married into other royal families across Europe, earning him the title 'father-in-law of Europe'. Queen Margrethe of Denmark (42): Queen Margrethe, who is known affectionately as 'aunt Daisy' by many European royals, was also in attendance. The 81-year-old monarch will flew solo at the Service of Thanksgiving, although she is often joined at royal events by her son Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark, and daughter-in-law Princess Mary. Queen Margrethe and Crown Princess Mary recently welcomed the Duchess of Cambridge on her solo visit to Copenhagen. King Albert of Monaco (43):Prince Albert of Monaco, 64, attended without his wife Princess Charlene. Princess Charlene recently returned to Monaco following an extended stay away due to health problems including what the palace has previously referred to as a 'state of profound general fatigue'. Prince Albert is the only son of Rainier III of Monaco and his Hollywood wife Princess Grace Kelly. His wedding to Charlene was attended by the Earl and Countess of Wessex, and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands (44): King Willem-Alexander, 54, and his wife Queen Maxima, 50, represented the Netherlands. Willem ascended the throne in 2013 following the abdication of his mother, Princess Beatrix, 84, who was also be in attendance. The Queen and King Willem-Alexander are fifth cousins, twice removed. They are both related to Princess Carolina of Orange-Nassau (1743-1787), granddaughter of King George II. Her parents were King George's daughter Anne, Princess Royal, and the Dutch Prince William VI. King Felipe IV of Spain and Queen Letizia of Spain (45, 46): King Felipe VI of Spain, 54, will be joined at the service by Queen Leizia, 49, a former journalist. Felipe, who ascended the throne in 2014 upon the abdication of his father King Juan Carlos, referred to the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh as 'dear aunt Lilibet' and 'dear uncle Philip' in a deeply personal message sent in the days after Prince Philip's death. The familiarity between the British and Spanish royal households is due to centuries-old family ties. Felipe's maternal great-grandfather, King Constantine I of Greece (1868 - 1923), was the older brother of Prince Philip's father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and Queen Sonja of Sweden (47, 48): The Queen's third cousin King Carl XVI Gustaf, 75, and his wife Queen Silvia, 78, will will be among the congregation. The link between the British and Swedish monarchs goes back to Queen Victoria, the Queen's great-great grandmother (through her father, King George VI) and King Carl XVI Gustaf's great-great grandmother. The Swedish king's lineage traces back to Victoria on both his mother and father's sides, making him a distant claimant to the throne. Emotional Queen returns to Windsor with Prince Andrew by her side after royals rallied round her at moving Westminster Abbey memorial for Prince Philip The Queen is back at Windsor Castle today with Prince Andrew having skipped several royal receptions after shedding tears for the Duke of Edinburgh at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable 99-year life of service to Britain and his wife. Her Majesty became emotional in Westminster Abbey - where she married Prince Philip in November 1947 - having personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Today's service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities and patronages. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service in the central London church where she was crowned just over 70 years ago. Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip. Mother and son skipped multiple receptions being held in the capital this afternoon Front and centre of the high profile occasion was the Duke of York, despite Andrew paying millions out of court earlier this month to settle a civil sexual assault case and losing his 'HRH' The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Queen walks towards her seat at Westminster Abbey after being accompanied down by the aisle by Prince Andrew today Andrew escorted her to her seat in an extraordinary moment that may have upset other royals. None of the other royals appeared to look up when they arrived The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to and from her seat, supported by her disgraced son the Duke of York, to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. Her Majesty's presence was only confirmed two hours before it started. And despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing hymns that her husband of 73 years had asked for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to aid her, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. After a poignant service limited to 40 minutes where the watery-eyed monarch sat in one of the Canada chairs with an additional cushion, she was driven the 22-miles back to Windsor Castle with the Duke of York beside her after her first major public engagement for approaching six months. The 51 European royals who attended the Service of Thanksgiving went to a number of receptions held in London afterwards, including one held at Kensington Palace, home to a number of British royals including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Charles hosted a charity reception at St James' Palace before attending a dinner at Windsor Castle tonight to mark the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's 75th anniversary. It is highly likely he will drop in to see his mother beforehand. The Queen has rallied to join close family, friends, foreign royals and hundreds of charity workers in remembrance of her beloved husband the Duke of Edinburgh at a poignant memorial service. Front and centre of the high profile occasion was the Duke of York, despite Andrew paying millions out of court earlier this month to settle a civil sexual assault case. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. The Queen and Prince Philip revisit Broadlands, to mark their Diamond Wedding Anniversary on November 20, 2007 Denmark's Queen Margrethe (left) walks beside Netherlands' Princess Beatrix (centre right, in green hat) and in front of Netherlands' Queen Maxima (back left), Netherlands' King Willem-Alexander (centre) and Monaco's Prince Albert II (far right) as they leave the service. These royals are understood to have attended a variety of London receptions afterwards The Queen arrives at the service holding the Duke of York by the elbow with her left hand and her stick with the right She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. After the service the Queen expressed her appreciation for her speech that described the impact Philip's best remembered charitable project had on her life and career. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Duke of York's prominent role at the Westminster Abbey service - escorting his mother - was the Queen's way of showing that her second son still has a place at family occasions, according to a royal commentator. Former BBC royal correspondent Peter Hunt told the PA news agency: 'It didn't happen by chance. 'He could have sat in the congregation with others, with his relatives, but they actively decided that he would have this role of supporting her. 'So she has chosen, in essence, to remind people that he hasn't admitted any wrongdoing, he's not guilty of anything, he's innocent. 'And she's very clearly stating that he has a role at family occasions.' He went on: 'It's one thing to accept that he should attend his father's memorial service. 'It's quite another thing to then give him quite a prominent role, so it was an active choice to give him such a prominent role.' Mr Hunt said he found it 'fascinating', and said: 'Did William and Charles try to intervene? And clearly if they did then they failed.' He added: 'I think you have to start from the basis that Charles and William will have been in the driving seat with the Queen of removing Andrew from public life. 'Both of them will have been very aware of the risks of Andrew having this role. So either they decided that they could justify it on the basis that it was an event for his father, or they did try to suggest this wasn't a good idea and the Queen chose not to listen to them.' Royal commentator Robert Jobson said: 'It shows she wholeheartedly loves and believes her son. 'As she did when she made a statement about Camilla being Queen's Consort, many people will now accept the Queen's word and judgment.' She said there was disquiet among senior members of the family, 'but she insisted.' He told People: 'It does make some sense that he accompany her because he doesn't have a partner. A settlement has been paid but he's guilty of nothing in the eyes of the law. The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist 'She has faith in Andrew. Even if he disappears from public life, he's been able to pay tribute to his father, who after all, was very proud of his service in the Royal Navy, where he fought in the Falkland Islands conflict'. Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today Zara, Mia Grace and Mike Tindall depart hand-in-hand following the Memorial Service For The Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Advertisement An emotional Princesses Beatrice covered her face with her hymn sheet as she wept while watching Prince Andrew walk the Queen to her seat during the Service of Thanksgiving in memory of her grandfather Prince Philip today. The mother-of-one, 33, was in floods of tears as her father the Duke of York accompanied the monarch down the aisle at Westminster Abbey. She could be seen peeking out at the pair from behind a service sheet, before standing mutely while others around her sang, apparently trying to hold in tears. She then could be seen reaching into her handbag for a tissue and covering her face with a service sheet to hide her face. Princess Beatrice, 33, stepped out in a burgundy dress with coordinating heels and a black coat, alongside her polished husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 38. It's been a difficult period for Beatrice, who royal commentators have previously said has been 'devastated' by accusations by Virginia Roberts that the Duke of York sexually assaulted her. Beatrice and her mother Sarah Ferguson were said to have been among the key figures pressing Andrew to go ahead with the disastrous BBC interview in November 2019 about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Princesses Beatrice wept today as she attended the Service of Thanksgiving in memory of their grandfather Prince Philip today The mother-of-one, 33, was in floods of tears as the event began, reaching into her handbag for a tissue and at one stage covering her face with a service sheet to hide her tea Princess Eugenie appeared concerned for her sister and could be seen glancing over as the service began earlier today (pictured) The moment which left Beatrice in tears: The Queen held onto Andrew's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right at Westminster Abbey today The mother-of-one appeared to be wearing minimal makeup but wore her hair in loose curls for understated glamour. She appeared visibly emotional as she stood beside Eugenie during the service and was seen covering her face with the order of service booklet. Beatrice and Andrew are thought to have met Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis and the programme's deputy editor Stewart Maclean at Buckingham Palace three days before filming to discuss the scope of the interview. But the Princess, with the benefit of hindsight, was left mortified that she did not do more to stop the interview going ahead - and it also left her and younger sister Eugenie in a difficult position as members of the Royal Family. One of the most infamous moments of the interview, which saw Andrew deny sleeping with then 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre, included how had spent the day in question with Beatrice at a Pizza Express in Woking. After Prince Andrew walked the Queen to her seat, Princess Beatrice could be seen brushing a tear away from her eyes (pictured) While others appeared to be singing around her, Beatrice appeared to be looking up into the roof of the building as she tried to stop the tears Writing in The Telegraph, royal commentator Camilla Tominey said Princess Beatrice and her sister Eugenie were 'devastated' by the accusations against their father. According to one family friend: 'It's been very difficult for them. I don't think anyone has ever properly appreciated how hard it is for any child to have that level of scrutiny and exposure. But they have their own children now, so the family unit is more dispersed than it was.' Prince Andrew today returned to the royal fold after travelling to Westminster Abbey with his mother the Queen before accompanying her down the aisle. Royal commentators said the surprise move was the 95-year-old monarch's way of 'very clearly stating that he has a role at family occasions' and that 'many people will now accept the Queen's word and judgment'. Princess Eugenie looked sombre as she joined the congregation in singing as part of the tribute to her grandfather Prince Philip and the Queen were among the limited number of guests who attended Princess Beatrice's lockdown wedding to her husband Edoardo The Duke of York had a front row seat at the service, sitting close to his other siblings, with his daughters Princess Eugenie and Princess also in attendance but there was no sign of his ex-wife Sarah, Duchess of York. The Queen's decision to have Andrew accompany her comes despite him paying up to 12million earlier this month to settle a US civil sexual assault case and it will be seen as a major signal of support to her second son. Princess Eugenie, 32, who was comforted by husband Jack Brooksbank, 35, cut a stylish figure in a floral midi dress by British fashion designer Erdem worth 1,695. She teamed the look with a cropped black jacket and matching headband that swept her hair off her face. Meanwhile, Eugenie stood on the other side of their cousin with a sombre expression as she attempted to join the congregation with singing. They sat behind the Queen, Prince Charles, Duchess of Cornwall and Prince Anne at the service that was packed with European royals among attendees. Princess Eugenie,32, and husband Jack Brooksbank , 35, arrived at the Service of Thanksgiving in memory of Prince Philip alongside Princess Beatrice, 33, and husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 38 Princess Beatrice looked stylish in a burgundy dress and coordinating heels, alongside her dapper husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 38, as they entered Westminster Abbey Princess Beatrice teamed Nonoo Lyons 'Beatrice' coat with a dress from The Kooples, Gianvito Rossi 'Lorraine' pumps and a 'Mildred' hat from Justine-Bradley-Hill Millinery Princess Eugenie cut a stylish figure in a floral midi dress by British fashion designer Erdem worth 1,695 as she followed behind her sister Prince Philip, who was seen as the patriarch of the family, showed support for his granddaughters by attending both of their weddings. Despite having officially retired in August 2017, he made a rare public appearance at Beatrice's wedding to Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi in 2020. Eugenie was gifted artwork of flowers that Prince Philip had spent time painting when she married Jack Brooksbank two years earlier. The couple showed their gratitude to him when they welcomed their son in February 2021 at London's Portland Hospital. Princess Beatrice opted for unstated glamour with her hair styled in loose curls and a pink lipstick to compliment her subtle makeup Princess Eugenie appeared visibly emotional while entering the service of thanksgiving at Westminster alongside her sister Princess Beatrice and husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi arrived to the packed service that had European royals among attendees Princess Beatrice smiled while entering the memorial supported by her sister and husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi appeared to be comforting wife Beatrice before they entered Westminster Abbey Eugenie explained that the name August Philip Hawke Brooksbank was chosen as a tribute to Queen Victoria's Husband Prince Albert, whose birth name was Franz Albert August Karl Emanuel, as well as Prince Philip, who at the time was in hospital. Over the years Prince Philip has been a mentor for the younger royals, with Princess Eugenie describing him as 'the rock' of the family in the 2016 ITV documentary Our Queen at Ninety. Beatrice added that she felt 'very lucky' to have created many memories with her grandfather. In a virtual event shortly before his death, she revealed his influence on her life, saying: 'One of the things that I've always been inspired by is keeping your curiosity and don't be afraid to un-think and un-learn. Prince Philip appeared in good spirits alongside the Queen when they attended Prince Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank's wedding in 2018 (pictured) 'But also don't feel like you have to have all the answers yourself, one of the things that has always helped me, and this actually is inspired by my grandfather, whose turning 100 this year, but you kind of become obsessed with solving the problem, don't become obsessed with the solution. 'Because your route to actually finding a way to get through that problem will be different and the path will be different, and it might twist and turn. 'So don't be disheartened if your first path is not the one you think you have to stick to. Keep focusing on what you're trying to achieve and you'll get there.' Unfortunately Prince Philip didn't have the opportunity to meet Beatrice's daughter Sienna Elizabeth Mapelli Mozzi, who was born in September 2021. Sienna is the Queen's 12th great-grandchild and currently 11th in line to the throne, followed by Princess Eugenie. Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice have often been spotted alongside their grandfather at family gatherings. Pictured: Philip with his granddaughters at Epsom Racecourse Beatrice and Eugenie have been all smiles in photos taken alongside Prince Philip throughout the years -including Trooping The Colour and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations. The daughters of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson were among the 30 people invited to Prince Philip's funeral at St George's Chapel in the grounds of Windsor Castle. Originally there was going to be 800 mourners from across the Duke of Edinburgh's military units, charities and associates from across the Commonwealth but the amount had to be cut due to the coronavirus restrictions in place across England. Beatrice and Eugenie traveled by car to St George's Chapel, accompanied by their husbands, while their father Prince Andrew joined the procession of senior royals walking behind the Duke of Edinburgh's coffin. Beatrice and Eugenie were joined by their husbands at Prince Philip's funeral at St George's Chapel, Windsor in April 2021 Beatrice donned a long collared jacket and a round hat embellished with a large black bow. Meanwhile, younger sister Eugenie stepped out with her brunette tresses in a natural wave across her shoulders and donned a 5,690 Franz Knotted Trench coat, by Gabriela Hearst. She and husband Jack stood nearby Princess Beatrice and her husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi inside the chapel, alongside their teary cousin Zara Tindall and her husband Mike, with all the pairs following social distancing guidelines. Eugenie took to Instagram to share a tribute to her grandfather ahead of the service. The mother-of-one said that she 'would remember learning how to cook, how to paint, what to read' as well as her grandfather's 'favourite beer' and BBQing ability. Princess Eugenie has used social media to pay multiple tributes to her grandfather since his death. Pictured: Eugenie and Lady Louise Windsor with Prince Philip Eugenie wrote: 'Dearest Grandpa, we all miss you. You would be so touched by all the tributes that have been shared with me the past few days. 'People remember sitting next to you at a dinner, or shaking your hand once, who remember you saying hello in passing, or remember how much their DofE award meant to them. 'I remember learning how to cook, how to paint, what to read. I remember laughing at your jokes and asking about your spectacular life and service in the navy. 'I remember incinerating the sausages and you swooping in to save the day. 'I remember your hands and your laugh and your favourite beer. 'I will remember you in your children, your grandchildren and great grandchildren. Princess Eugenie shared a photo of herself as a child alongside Prince Philip (pictured), promising to look after her grandmother the Queen 'Thank you for your dedication and love for us all and especially Granny, who we will look after for you. ' She signed off: 'With all my love, Eugenie.' The royal shared two images alongside the emotional post, including one alongside sister Princess Beatrice on The Royal Balcony At The Investec Derby Festival At Epsom In Surrey in 2017. She took to social media to mark what would've been his 100th birthday two months later, writing candidly: 'Thinking of Grandpa on what would have been his 100th birthday.' Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon The Queen as she left Westminster Abbey in her Rolls-Royce today, wearing a regal purple and golden brooch Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who last month agreed to settle his sex assault lawsuit, left the service in a car with his mother the Queen A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Charles was seen wiping his eyes at the service where he could say goodbye to his father after a pared back funeral last year. Prince Andrew looked serious as he waited to leave with his mother Prince William rests a hand on the back of his son Prince George, at the end of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Cambridges departing the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Duchess of Cambridge smiled out of the window of her car as she left the Abbey with Prince William after the service The Queen sits alone at Philip's pared-down funeral last April - in stark contrast to today's celebration. It was one of the defining photos of the pandemic, where many Britons were forced to mourn their loved ones in small ceremonies, sometimes alone Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today The congregation takes its place ahead of the service. The Queen made the final decision to attend this morning, hours before she was due to travel the 22 miles from Windsor Castle to Central London. She held Andrew's elbow The royal family paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip at today's service at Westminster Abbey Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband The Queen stands for the first hymn at the service in remembrance of her beloved husband Prince Philip Prince Andrew walked his mother up the aisle after she arrived via a side door rather than the main entrance to shorten the distance The Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royals, led by the Queen despite her recent health issues, join the congregation in singing hymns during today's service The royals ahead of the service: In the front row are The Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence. The Cambridges are in the second row while Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, along with their husbands, are among the royals in the third row She left as she arrived, being supported by her son Andrew - reputedly her favourite The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey Prince Charles and Camilla were greeted by clergy as they arrived ahead of today's service of celebration for Prince Philip A serious looking Prince William sits down next to his wife, George and Charlotte to say goodbye to his grandfather The Queen sat beside Andrew, the royal who lost his HRH just weeks ago over his links to Epstein and civil case Crowds piled outside Westminster Abbey to pay tribute to Prince Philip as the service in his memorial continued Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at today's service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Princess Eugenie (left) and Princess Beatrice (right) pictured arriving at a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice arriving at the poignant Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Peter Phillips with Isla Phillips and Savannah Phillips (right) arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh and greeting Duke of Edinburgh award recipients Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Lady Louise Windsor arriving at the Westminster Abbey service for Prince Philip today. The Service will pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent attend the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, arrives with her foot in a brace and on crutches at Westminster Abbey today Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma arrives at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (left) and Formula One driver Sir Jackie Stewart (right) arrive today Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (left) and Home Secretary Priti Patel (right) arrive at Westminster Abbey this morning Guests walk into Westminster Abbey and take their seats ahead of this morning's service to remember Prince Philip Chancellor Rishi Sunak (left) and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) at Westminster Abbey today Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England (right), arrive this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Members of the congregation queue at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service of thanksgiving for the life of Philip Guests arrive to attend the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending today's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' Royal fans watch out for guests at the service to remember the late Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Guests begin to arrive for the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Television broadcasting staff gather outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of Prince Philip's memorial service Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Royal superfan John Loughrey, from Stretham in Cambridgeshire, stands outside Westminster Abbey this morning Another royal superfan stands outside Westminster Abbey ahead of the memorial service for Philip this morning Police officers walk past Westminster Abbey this morning before the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh Workers put up barriers outside Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service for Prince Philip Royal fans wait outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service will also be attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat during the funeral of Prince Philip at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle on April 17, 2021 The Queen and Prince Philip revisit Broadlands, to mark their Diamond Wedding Anniversary on November 20, 2007 The Queen and Philip were married in the Abbey in November 1947 and it holds many special memories. Flowers at today's service will be red, white and blue. They will include dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. The Queen attended the opening of the Welsh Parliament on October 14 last year. Since then she has conducted engagements at Windsor Castle, where she is now based, and visited Sandringham in February. Advertisement The Queen joined Princess Anne and the Duchess of Cornwall in wearing dark green as a tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh earlier today. The monarch, 95, Camilla and the Princess Royal were all dressed in the tone as they attended the memorial service at Westminster Abbey earlier this morning, as a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. According to the royal family's website: 'The Duke of Edinburgh's official livery colour is dark green, known as 'Edinburgh Green'. 'It has been used for staff liveries - the Duke of Edinburgh's page at the Coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars.' Meanwhile other royals attending, including the Duchess of Cambridge, 40, the Countess of Wessex and Zara Tindall, opted for navy tones for the event. As a celebration of life, royals were not expected to wear traditional black formal wear for the event. Members of the royal family today donned navy and emerald tones as they stepped out to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The monarch, 95, and the Princess Royal dressed in the tone as they attended the memorial service at Westminster Abbey earlier this morning, as a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green Meanwhile other royals attending, including the Countess of Wessex (pictured) opted for navy tones for the event Members of the royal family including Zara Tindall (left) and Lady Gabriella Windsor (right) opted for smart blue tones for the memorial service today Queen Letizia of Spain also opted for green, appearing elegant in an emerald green coat dress and matching hat as she arrived alongside her husband for the service The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch opted for a dark green coat dress for the occasion, which she paired with a matching hat and black accessories. Meanwhile the Duchess of Cornwall cut an elegant figure in an emerald green dress coat as she arrived for the late Duke of Edinburgh's service today. The royal wore a deep green dress coat and black hat adorned with an emerald feather. She donned black leather gloves and accesorised with a black clutch bag. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars (pictured, the Queen, Camilla and Princess Anne in green) The Duchess of Cornwall (left) and the Princess Royal (right) both wore emerald tones to the memorial service at Westminster Abbey this morning As crowds of royal fans buzzed around the Abbey this morning, the Spanish royal couple made a grand entrance after travelling to London for Philip's memorial service While Queen Letizia opted for emerald tones (pictured left), Queen Silvia of Sweden wore a navy ensemble (pictured right) Meanwhile Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands also opted for emerald tones for the event earlier this morning With simple drop pearl earrings, a regal-looking diamond brooch and a hat adorned with an oversized green feather, Camilla struck just the right tone with her sartorial choices. Camilla wore an her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Princess Anne opted for a similar look, wearing a dark green coat dress for the outing. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Kate was elegant in navy as she joined by her husband Prince William and their eldest children Prince George and Princess Charlotte today The Duchess of Cambridge looked poised as she wore an understated polkadot Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with elegant silver droplet earrings, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning Meanwhile both the Countess of Wessex and her daughter Lady Louise Windsor also opted for navy at the event this morning Sophie Wessex joined her husband Prince Edward and children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn as she arrived at the Duke of Edinburgh's memorial service today Queen Letizia of Spain also opted for green, appearing elegant in an emerald green coat dress and matching hat as she arrived alongside her husband for the service. She styled her hair in a neat bun and sported discreet accessories, with just a pair of small hoop earrings adorned with emeralds to complete the look. Yet not everybody opted for a green outfit for the memorial event earlier today, with many members of the royal family opting for stunning navy looks. Kate looked poised as she wore a 1,495 navy Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with a smart 775 hat from Lock&Co!, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning. Lady Louise, 18, opted for a dark tea dress paired with black tights, a structured jacket and an elaborate headpiece. She teamed the outfit with a sweet heart-shaped necklace and silver brooch Zara looked poised as she wore an understated Laura Green navy coat which she paired with elegant silver earrings, as she was joined by her husband Mike for the event this morning Alessandra Rich is also one of the Duchess' favoured labels, with the royal frequently turning to the London-based designer for her royal engagements. Meanwhile the Duchess also donned Diana's Collingwood earrings for the service at Westminster Abbey today. The mother-of-three swept her brunette locks into a low bun to reveal the pearl drop earrings for the occasion. Kate regularly wears jewellery that honours her mother-in-law, including her sapphire engagement ring, which once belonged to Diana. With a keen eye for detail, Kate often references Princess Diana with her style choices. Meanwhile the Queen's granddaughter Zara Tindall looked poised as she wore an understated Laura Green navy coat which she paired with elegant silver earrings, as she was joined by her husband Mike for the event this morning. Zara accessorised with a chic Bee Smith velvet headband, a leather clutch bag and she added height to her frame in matching stilettos. And Sophie Wessex was demur in a 2950 velvet gown by Suzannah London as she joined more than 30 foreign royals, Philip's family and friends and 500 representatives from charities and organisations of which he was patron at Westminster Abbey. Lady Sarah, 56, wore a navy blue dress, cardigan and string of pearls as she arrived at Westminster Abbey Frederick Windsor's wife Sophie Winkleman also donned a smart tonal suit for the event (pictured) Sophie, 57, who has often been referred to as one of Her Majesty's favorite family members, cut an elegant figure in a dark blue, buttoned coat dress which she paired with an elegant headpiece and silver floral brooch. The mother recycled a Sophie Habsburg clutch bag and pair of 2,950 white gold, knot-shaped earrings by G.Collins and Sons. The dress, which is currently out of stock, features a circular skirt with hidden side seam pockets and a level hem with a signature silhouette taking inspiration from a vintage hunting coat. The Countess wore her blonde tresses swept up in a tidy up-do and opted for a low-key make-up look as she attended the service this morning. She teamed her understated outfit with elegant silver droplet earrings. Her daughter Lady Louise, 18, opted for a dark tea dress paired with black tights, a structured jacket and an elaborate headpiece. She teamed the outfit with a sweet heart-shaped necklace and silver brooch. Meanwhile Lady Gabriella Windsor opted for a dark blue dress with a matching coat for the occasion, while Frederick Windsor's wife Sophie Winkleman also donned a smart tonal suit for the event. Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon The Queen as she left Westminster Abbey in her Rolls-Royce today, wearing a regal purple and golden brooch Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who last month agreed to settle his sex assault lawsuit, left the service in a car with his mother the Queen A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Charles was seen wiping his eyes at the service where he could say goodbye to his father after a pared back funeral last year. Prince Andrew looked serious as he waited to leave with his mother Prince William rests a hand on the back of his son Prince George, at the end of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Cambridges departing the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Duchess of Cambridge smiled out of the window of her car as she left the Abbey with Prince William after the service The Queen sits alone at Philip's pared-down funeral last April - in stark contrast to today's celebration. It was one of the defining photos of the pandemic, where many Britons were forced to mourn their loved ones in small ceremonies, sometimes alone Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today The congregation takes its place ahead of the service. The Queen made the final decision to attend this morning, hours before she was due to travel the 22 miles from Windsor Castle to Central London. She held Andrew's elbow The royal family paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip at today's service at Westminster Abbey Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband The Queen stands for the first hymn at the service in remembrance of her beloved husband Prince Philip Prince Andrew walked his mother up the aisle after she arrived via a side door rather than the main entrance to shorten the distance The Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royals, led by the Queen despite her recent health issues, join the congregation in singing hymns during today's service The royals ahead of the service: In the front row are The Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence. The Cambridges are in the second row while Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, along with their husbands, are among the royals in the third row She left as she arrived, being supported by her son Andrew - reputedly her favourite The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey Prince Charles and Camilla were greeted by clergy as they arrived ahead of today's service of celebration for Prince Philip A serious looking Prince William sits down next to his wife, George and Charlotte to say goodbye to his grandfather The Queen sat beside Andrew, the royal who lost his HRH just weeks ago over his links to Epstein and civil case Crowds piled outside Westminster Abbey to pay tribute to Prince Philip as the service in his memorial continued Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at today's service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Princess Eugenie (left) and Princess Beatrice (right) pictured arriving at a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice arriving at the poignant Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Peter Phillips with Isla Phillips and Savannah Phillips (right) arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh and greeting Duke of Edinburgh award recipients Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Lady Louise Windsor arriving at the Westminster Abbey service for Prince Philip today. The Service will pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent attend the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, arrives with her foot in a brace and on crutches at Westminster Abbey today Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma arrives at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (left) and Formula One driver Sir Jackie Stewart (right) arrive today Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (left) and Home Secretary Priti Patel (right) arrive at Westminster Abbey this morning Guests walk into Westminster Abbey and take their seats ahead of this morning's service to remember Prince Philip Chancellor Rishi Sunak (left) and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) at Westminster Abbey today Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England (right), arrive this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Members of the congregation queue at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service of thanksgiving for the life of Philip Guests arrive to attend the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending today's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' Royal fans watch out for guests at the service to remember the late Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Guests begin to arrive for the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Television broadcasting staff gather outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of Prince Philip's memorial service Royal fans stand next to barriers at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Royal superfan John Loughrey, from Stretham in Cambridgeshire, stands outside Westminster Abbey this morning Another royal superfan stands outside Westminster Abbey ahead of the memorial service for Philip this morning Police officers walk past Westminster Abbey this morning before the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh Workers put up barriers outside Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service for Prince Philip Royal fans wait outside Westminster Abbey this morning ahead of the service for the late Duke of Edinburgh It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service will also be attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat during the funeral of Prince Philip at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle on April 17, 2021 The Queen and Prince Philip revisit Broadlands, to mark their Diamond Wedding Anniversary on November 20, 2007 The Queen and Philip were married in the Abbey in November 1947 and it holds many special memories. Flowers at today's service will be red, white and blue. They will include dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. The Queen attended the opening of the Welsh Parliament on October 14 last year. Since then she has conducted engagements at Windsor Castle, where she is now based, and visited Sandringham in February. Advertisement The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's friend Rose Hanbury, was among the 1,800 mourners at Prince Philip's memorial service today. The Marchioness of Cholmondeley, 38, is a neighbour of William and Kate's Norfolk home Amner Hall and is regular among royal circles having previously been invited to a state banquets as well as charity events in East Anglia along side her husband, David Cholmondeley, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, 61. The couple - who are worth an estimated 75million and have three children - live at the grand Houghton Hall, set in 1,000 acres close to The Queen's Sandringham estate. Rose - a member of the Duchess of Cambridge's well-born group of friends dubbed the Turnip Toffs - looked solemn in black dress coat and drop earrings. She appeared to be joined by her husband as they both clutched an Order of Service inside the Abbey. Tying her brunette hair back into a low bun, she opted for a black pill box hat with leaf detail and a natural make-up look with a light black mascara and brown red lip. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's friend Rose Hanbury, was among the 1,800 mourners at Prince Philip's memorial service today. She is pictured with her husband The Marchioness of Cholmondeley, 38, is a neighbour of William and Kate's Norfolk home Amner Hall and is regular among royal circles having previously been invited to a state banquets as well as charity events in East Anglia along side her husband, David Cholmondeley, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, 61. They are pictured at a gala at Houghton Hall Houghton Hall is a stunning Palladian mansion with 106-rooms, built in the 1720s for Britain's first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Kate and Prince William visited the house, just three miles away from Anmer Hall, in June 2016 to attend a charity gala to support East Anglia's Children's Hospices. Rose and David attended the Cambridges' wedding in 2011 and their twin boys Alexander and Oliver were playmates of Prince George. The Marchioness of Cholmondeley is a regular among royal circles and was invited to a state banquet for Donald Trump at Buckingham Palace in June 2019, where she was positioned in close proximity to the US President. Kate Middleton's friend Rose Hanbury (pictured together in 2016) and her husband are worth an estimated 75million and have three children - live at the grand Houghton Hall, set in 1,000 acres close to The Queen's Sandringham estate. Rose and Kate are patron and royal patron respectively of the charity East Anglia Childrens Hospices, and the Duchess has attended the Houghton Hall horse trials with her children Kate and Prince William visited Houghton Hall, just three miles away from Anmer Hall, in June 2016 to attend a charity gala to support East Anglia's Children's Hospices As Lord Great Chamberlain, her husband had a unique role at the State Opening of Parliament walking backwards in front of the Queen. The Marquess had a string of glamorous girlfriends before marrying Rose, an ex-model 23 years his junior, in 2009. They met at a party at the Villa Cetinale, the grand Italian home of the disgraced Tory peer Lord Lambton Roses sister, Marina, is married to Lambtons heir Ned, the Earl of Durham. The sisters' grandmother was Lady Elizabeth Longman, a bridesmaid at the Queens wedding to Prince Philip. Rose and Kate are patron and royal patron respectively of the charity East Anglia Childrens Hospices, and the Duchess has attended the Houghton Hall horse trials with her children. The memorial includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service The Queen has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. The memorial includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. William and Kate are pictured with their children today Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service, to be televised live on BBC One, is less taxing for the Queen. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' It was the duke's expressed wish that clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral - known as The Queen's domestic chaplains - played a part in his funeral service, but this was not possible due to the Covid restrictions. Today the Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie Minister of Crathie Church, the regular place of worship of the British royal family when they are in residence at nearby Balmoral Castle, the Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere, the Rector of Sandringham, and the Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, will offer prayers recognising Philip's energy, spirit of adventure and 'good stewardship of the environment'. The service will also be attended by around 30 foreign royals, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe, King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic By MARTIN ROBINSON, CHIEF REPORTER and MARK DUELL and DANNY HUSSAIN FOR MAILONLINE The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew The Queen arrives at the service holding the Duke of York by the elbow with her left hand and her stick with the right Andrew escorted her to her seat in an extraordinary moment that may have upset other royals. None of the other royals appeared to look up when they arrived Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Queen Maxima and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands left the service at Westminster Abbey arm-in-arm Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Lady Frederick Windsor looked incredibly chic in a navy blazer and matching trousers as she stepped out on Tuesday at Prince Philip's memorial service. Sophie Winkleman, 41, was joined by her husband, the son of the Queen's first cousin, Prince Michael of Kent, Lord Freddie Windsor, 42, to remember the late Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey. The Peep Show star looked typically elegant in the navy suit which she paired with matching pointed toe heels. As a celebration of life, royals were not expected to wear traditional black funeral garb for the event. Lady Frederick Windsor looked incredibly chic as she stepped with her husband Lord Freddie Windsor, 42, at Westminster Abbey on Tuesday for Prince Philip's memorial service Sophie Winkleman, 41, wowed in a navy blazer and matching trousers which she accessorised with a large hat which featured a pretty bow Sophie, who is the half sister of TV presenter Claudia Winkleman, accessorised with a large hat which featured a pretty bow and she added a bit more glamour with pearl earrings. Lord Freddie, who is the son of the Queen's first cousin Prince Michael of Kent and 53rd in line to the throne, looked smart in a tailored navy suit which he paired with a white shirt and a blue tie. The actress - who famously starred as Big Suze in Peep Show - lives in London, has two children with Fredrick, Maud, nine, and Isabella, six. Maud, attends Thomas's Battersea, the same school as his distant cousins Prince George and Princess Charlotte. She looked typically elegant in the navy suit which she paired with matching pointed toe heels Since the couple tied the knot in 2009, mother-of-two Sophie says everyone has 'looked after' her, in particular the Queen and Prince Charles, who have been 'wonderful', and Prince William, whom she described as 'heaven'. Speaking to The Times, in 2020 she said: 'I've been incredibly welcomed with open arms by all of them... They'd never tell me off at all if I wanted to play some [racy] role.' She added that she hasn't watched The Crown, the latest series of which has come under fire from friends of Prince Charles who accused Netflix producers of 'trolling' the Royal Family 'on a Hollywood budget' due to the drama's largely negative portrayal of his marriage to Princess Diana. Sophie is half-sister of TV presenter Claudia Winkleman, with whom she shares father Barry Winkleman, and was educated at the private City of London School for Girls before completing an English degree at the University of Cambridge. She added a bit more glamour with pearl earrings and her sleek brunette locks fell loose She explained she and the Strictly presenter had 'very separate lives' as children because Claudia, who is nine years her senior, lived with her mother. Sophie, who now lives in Chelsea, married Lord Freddie in September 2009 at Hampton Court Palace, after meeting him on a night out in Soho. The couple, who moved to LA for a number of years after their wedding for Sophie's work, welcomed their first child, Maud Elizabeth Daphne Marina, nine, in August 2013, and Isabella Alexandra May, six, January 2016. Maud and Isabella were among five bridesmaids for her sister-in-law Lady Gabriella Windsor and Thomas Kingston when they wed in May last year - having already been in the bridal party for Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank's wedding in October. At the nuptials down-to-earth Sophie was seen chatting and sharing a joke with Prince Harry, who had just become a father. Speaking about his wife, fellow actress Meghan Markle, 40, Sophie said: 'I've met her a few times over here, but not well enough to get to know her. She certainly has very admirable energy and focus.' After the emotional service the couple were spotted leaving hand-in-hand behind Mike and Zara Tindall and their eight-year-old daughter Mia Grace Lord Freddie, who is the son of the Queen's first cousin, Prince Michael of Kent, looked smart in a tailored navy suit which he paired with a white shirt and a blue tie Sophie said she 'wasn't fazed' about becoming a member of the Firm, which she put down to her father being a 'socialist bordering on Marxist' which meant the Royal Family was rarely discussed when she was growing up. 'I definitely wasn't trying to get to Ascot to meet Prince William,' she told the publication. 'My parents gave me confidence. I don't know how to do it with my own children, but it's a great gift and it meant I felt I had something to bring to the table. They gave me a good education and that makes you feel you can walk into any group, so it wasn't too intimidating.' After today's emotional service the couple were spotted leaving hand-in-hand behind Mike and Zara Tindall and their eight-year-old daughter Mia Grace. Today, the first two rows of the Abbey were filled with 20 of the late Duke's closest family members - including his children Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, Princess Anne and Prince Edward and their own families The Westminster Abbey service was attended by some 1,800 guests including senior members of the Royal Family. 51 European royals were in London for the event and attended various receptions, including one at Kensington Palace. The guests included British and European royalty, and representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president. Today, the first two rows of the Abbey were filled with 20 of the late Duke's closest family members - including his children Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, Princess Anne and Prince Edward and their own families. Philips funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Advertisement Princess Charlotte stole the show while adorable Prince George looked typically serious as they joined their parents the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at Prince Philip's service of thanksgiving today. Cheeky Charlotte, six, charmed the Archbishop of Canterbury and smiled to photographers as she made her grand entrance at Westminster Abbey. At one point the schoolgirl princess pulled a funny face after apparently catching sight of herself on a screen, prompting viewers to giggle over her 'sparkling' personality. In contrast her eight-year-old brother George - dressed as his daddy's double in a suit and tie - looked far more sombre, perhaps because he had a better understanding of the gravity of the situation. Princess Charlotte stole the show and charmed the Archbishop of Canterbury during her first line-up today At one point the schoolgirl princess pulled a funny face after apparently catching sight of herself on a screen, prompting viewers to giggle over her 'sparkling' personality In contrast her eight-year-old brother George - dressed as his daddy's double in a suit and tie - looked far more sombre, perhaps because he had a better understanding of the gravity of the situation The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge held their children's hands as they made their way out of Westminster Abbey Princess Charlotte flashed a smile as the Cambridges left Westminster Abbey this afternoon after the service The future king kept a straight face as he walked by his father's side and was on his very best behaviour throughout the service. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge made the decision to bring their two eldest children to Westminster Abbey so they could pay their respects to their great-grandfather Prince Philip. The service marks one of the important outings to date for the two young royals, both of whom enjoyed a close relationship with Prince Philip before his death at the age of 99 last April. Also in attendance were Peter Phillips' daughters Savannah, 11, and Isla, 10, and Mia Tindall, the eight-year-old daughter of Mike and Zara Tindall. But it was sparkling Charlotte who was the centre of attention as she strode into the Abbey hand-in-hand with her mother, Kate. As they approached the Abbey's doors, Kate - who was smiling - told her serious looking daughter 'you can smile' according to expert lip reader Jacqui Press. Charlotte then smiled. Kate Middleton told a solemn Princess Charlotte to smile the pair walked into Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip's memorial service today, a lip reader has revealed. Pictured, Charlotte before (left) and after (right) Prince George looked serious in his navy suit (left) while Princess Charlotte was smiling at the people she passed Eight-year-old Prince George had a furrowed brow as he arrived at the Abbey hand-in-hand with his father William Princess Charlotte was introduced to senior members of the clergy on her arrival at Westminster Abbey today Six-year-old Princess Charlotte smiled and shook hands with members of the clergy as her mother Kate stood nearby Charlotte, who donned a sweet French braid in her hair, grinned as she took part in her first ever royal line-up In contrast Prince George appeared to be unsure of the situation, perhaps because he understood the gravity of the service Prince George bit his lip as he watched his grandfather Prince Charles ahead of him in the line up at the exit to the Abbey Prince George looked solemn as he left Westminster Abbey hand-in-hand with his father Prince William Eight-year-old George was his father's double as they left the Abbey. Right, Charlotte with the Duchess of Cambridge Princess Charlotte wore a tartan dress, navy blue coat and black patent leather shoes for the service, and had a pretty ribbon in her hair. George, who has made a number of outings with his parents to major sporting events in recent months, was his father's double in a navy blue suit and tie. The Duchess of Cambridge took Charlotte's hand as they made their way to their seats. The Cambridges were seated behind the Queen, Prince Andrew, Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, and in front of the Queen's other grandchildren Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice. George and Charlotte were both on their best behaviour and kept hold of their orders of service as they listened to people pay tribute to their great-grandfather and his extraordinary life. The Duchess of Cambridge looked poised as she wore an understated polkadot Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with elegant silver droplet earrings, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning The Duchess of Cambridge looked poised as she wore an understated polkadot Alessandra Rich gown which she paired with elegant silver droplet earrings, as she was joined by her husband for the event this morning Charlotte, six, wore a navy blue button up coat dress with black tights and a matching ribbon in her hair to the memorial service at Westminster Abbey today Prince George arrived at his great-grandfather's memorial service, walking hand-in-hand with his father Prince William at Westminster Abbey this morning At one moment Princess Charlotte appeared to smile at herself after seeing her face pop up on a screen erected in Westminster Abbey. Watching the video on Twitter, one royal fan wrote: 'She has that spark in her. Such a bright, spunky kid! Go girl!' Another posted: 'Cheeky cutie. Just as lovely as her mummy.' Princess Charlotte has become a favourite of royal fans thanks to her sassy personality. The six-year-old princess has been snapped pulling funny faces, waving to photographers - and even sticking her tongue out on a family outing. The Queen has 12 great-grandchildren, 10 of whom were born before the Duke of Edinburgh's death last April. The two oldest Cambridge children joined their parents and senior members of the Royal Family at the engagement The Duchess of Cambridge was the picture of elegance as she arrived at the service with her daughter Princess Charlotte The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who days ago returned from their controversial Caribbean tour, arrived hand-in-hand with George and Charlotte, their two eldest children The Duchess of Cambridge shepherded her children out of Westminster Abbey following the deeply personal service The Duke of Edinburgh 's other great-grandchildren are Princess Charlotte, six, Prince Louis , three, Lena Tindall, also three, and her one-year-old brother Lucas, Princess Eugenie's one-year-old son August Brooksbank and Princess Beatrice's daughter Sienna Mapelli Mozz, who was born in September last year. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's children, Archie, two, and Lilibet, nine months, remain with the couple in California. Seven of the couple's eight grandchildren were also in attendance. Peter Phillips, Zara Tindall, the Duke of Cambridge, Princess Beatrice, Princess Eugenie, Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn, all stepped out for a rare joined appearance. The only grandchild missing was the Duke of Sussex, who remained in California. Queen sheds a tear for beloved Philip: Emotional monarch wears green in tribute to late husband at Westminster Abbey memorial attended by Kate, Wills, Charles and Camilla... a year after sitting alone at his funeral at height of the pandemic The Queen shed a tear for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey had listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner described the duke as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the Dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But then appeared to break down in tears, covering her face with the order of service. The Queen, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal were all dressed in dark green in a subtle tribute to Philip, whose livery colour was Edinburgh Green. A number of others throughout the congregation also wore the shade, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. Flowers at today's service are a patriotic red, white and blue, at Her Majesty's request. They included dendrobium orchids, which also featured in the Queen's wedding bouquet, and eryngium - or sea holly - echoing the duke's career in the Royal Navy and lifelong affection for the sea. There were also multiple tributes to his intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family and his country. The Queen stood and shed a tear for her husband today at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his life The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Princess Beatrice was overwhelmed by the service. Stood behind the Queen she cried and covered her face with the order of service as her grandmother removed her glasses Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon The Queen as she left Westminster Abbey in her Rolls-Royce today, wearing a regal purple and golden brooch Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who last month agreed to settle his sex assault lawsuit, left the service in a car with his mother the Queen A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Charles was seen wiping his eyes at the service where he could say goodbye to his father after a pared back funeral last year. Prince Andrew looked serious as he waited to leave with his mother Prince William rests a hand on the back of his son Prince George, at the end of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte The Cambridges departing the Service of Thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Duchess of Cambridge smiled out of the window of her car as she left the Abbey with Prince William after the service The Queen sits alone at Philip's pared-down funeral last April - in stark contrast to today's celebration. It was one of the defining photos of the pandemic, where many Britons were forced to mourn their loved ones in small ceremonies, sometimes alone Queen, Camilla and Anne all wear green for their beloved Prince Philip It was a touching tribute to a much-missed Duke of Edinburgh as the Queen and senior royal women stepped out in Edinburgh Green for Philip's memorial service. All wearing the same shade, the monarch, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Princess Royal sat in the front row of royal seats in Westminster Abbey, united in remembrance of Philip. The duke's official dark green livery colour was known as Edinburgh Green. It was used for his staff liveries - the duke's page at the coronation wore dark green and silver - and private cars. The monarch's brooch was another nod to her late husband of more than 70 years. She chose her yellow gold, ruby and diamond scarab brooch, designed by Andrew Grima, which was a personal gift from Philip in 1966. Camilla wore her Rifles brooch in recognition of the moment when her father-in-law handed over his role as colonel-in-chief of the regiment to her in 2020. Others in the congregation also wore dark green, including Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, who delivered a special tribute about the effect Philip's youth scheme had on her life. The Duchess of Cambridge opted for a high-necked black dress with white polka dots and a textured wide-brimmed black hat. Advertisement Her Majesty had arrived at the side door of the church, allowing her to walk a shorter distance from Poets' Corner to the front where she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She stood at various points in the service, despite her own admission recently that she is struggling to move. Westminster Abbey was completely packed today to celebrate the 99-year life of Prince Philip as Her Majesty battled mobility issues and fought off covid to be there to say goodbye to her husband after 73 years of marriage. The event, attended by most of the Duke of Edinburgh's family and many of Europe's most senior royals, is in the starkest of contrasts to his pared back funeral at Windsor last April when Her Majesty said goodbye to her strength and stay after 73 years of marriage. The Queen finally decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before but the coverage of the Service of Thanksgiving was dominated by her extraordinary decision to travel with her disgraced son Prince Andrew from Windsor Castle to Central London. Her Majesty was determined to be amongst the 1,800 guests despite the 95-year-old's mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Tindalls were the first close family to arrive, followed Princess Anne, the Wessexes, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla and then the Cambridges, who were with their children George and Charlotte. The Queen was the last to arrive with Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After the 40 minute service, Her Majesty was escorted out of the abbey by the Duke of York. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were the first to leave Westminster Abbey alongside the abbey's chapter. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge followed. All four royals waved at the crowd outside as they were driven away in black cars. Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today The congregation takes its place ahead of the service. The Queen made the final decision to attend this morning, hours before she was due to travel the 22 miles from Windsor Castle to Central London. She held Andrew's elbow The royal family paying an emotional tribute to Prince Philip at today's service at Westminster Abbey Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral The Queen, 95, fought frailty to be in the church with her family at an event she had helped plan for her husband The Queen stands for the first hymn at the service in remembrance of her beloved husband Prince Philip Prince Andrew walked his mother up the aisle after she arrived via a side door rather than the main entrance to shorten the distance The Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' Prince Andrew was sat next to Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex during today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey The royals, led by the Queen despite her recent health issues, join the congregation in singing hymns during today's service The royals ahead of the service: In the front row are The Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Princess Anne and Timothy Laurence. The Cambridges are in the second row while Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, along with their husbands, are among the royals in the third row She left as she arrived, being supported by her son Andrew - reputedly her favourite The Queen remained seated during the service with aides taking special measures to ensure her comfort after recent heath issues Princess Charlotte and Prince George sit with the mother the Duchess of Cambridge during today's service at Westminster Abbey Prince Charles and Camilla were greeted by clergy as they arrived ahead of today's service of celebration for Prince Philip A serious looking Prince William sits down next to his wife, George and Charlotte to say goodbye to his grandfather The Queen sat beside Andrew, the royal who lost his HRH just weeks ago over his links to Epstein and civil case Crowds piled outside Westminster Abbey to pay tribute to Prince Philip as the service in his memorial continued Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Today the monarch ensured that her beloved husband's final wishes are fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. Her Majesty has been 'actively involved' in every element of his service of thanksgiving that will see Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches have been overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards are centre stage at the service that will see the Abbey reverberate with the sound of hymns including Guide me, O thou great Redeemer. All Prince Philip's family chose to attend apart from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. On Prince Andrew's left is his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right is the Princess Royal, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and be sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family were Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. The Duke of Edinburgh's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family were celebrated in an address by the Dean of Windsor. The Right Reverend David Conner paid tribute to Philip as a 'remarkable man' who was committed to 'a host of down-to-earth enterprises'. He pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt' and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Addressing the congregation in Westminster Abbey, Mr Conner said: 'He was practical, wanting to put flesh upon his dreams, and (acknowledging the limitations of living in this so-called 'real world') he devoted his astonishing intellectual and physical energy, his enormous capacity for sheer hard work, to a host of down-to-earth enterprises. 'These included the equipping of young people to face tomorrow's challenges, the encouragement of respect and care for the natural order, and his pioneering work in facilitating conversation between representatives of the different world faiths. 'Through his passionate commitment, he drew others to himself in admiration and respect and, in the case of those who lived and worked most closely to him, genuine love.' Mr Conner added: 'He would hate to think that I should paint a picture of him as a 'plaster saint'; someone without the usual human foibles and failings. 'He was far too self-aware ever to be taken in by flattery. Of course, it must be said that his life bore the marks of sacrifice and service. 'Certainly, he could show great sympathy and kindness. There is no doubt that he had a delightfully engaging, and often self-deprecating, sense of humour. 'It is quite clear that his mind held together both speculation and common sense. Moreover, nobody would ever doubt his loyalty and deep devotion to our Queen and to their family. 'Yet, there were times when he could be abrupt; maybe, in robust conversation, forgetting just how intimidating he could be. 'A kind of natural reserve sometimes made him seem a little distant. He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy. 'On the other hand, we should not forget that he himself was sometimes wounded by being unfairly criticised or misunderstood.' Concluding his address, the dean said: 'As we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man, perhaps our greatest tribute to him, most especially in these far too troubled times, will be for us to accept the challenge, implicit in his life, to rekindle in our hearts something of that call, and to pray (as I think he did) for the inspiration and the guidance to play our part, however small, in working for a kinder future. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey The Cambridges arrived at the church hand in hand with their children Charlotte and George. Louis stayed at home The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at today's service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Charles shook hands with the clergy as they entered the church just before Midday Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Princess Eugenie (left) and Princess Beatrice (right) pictured arriving at a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice arriving at the poignant Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Peter Phillips with Isla Phillips and Savannah Phillips (right) arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Princess Royal arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh and greeting Duke of Edinburgh award recipients Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrive at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right While the Queen's arrival at Westminster Abbey was mentioned in the order of service, a final decision on her attendance was only confirmed two hours before because of her frailty. The Princess Royal arrived at Westminster Abbey. Wearing a long green dress and hat, Anne arrived alongside her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Peter Phillips' children Savannah and Isla were sitting next to their cousin Mia, daughter of Zara and Mike Tindall. The girls were dressed in navy with their hair fixed back with headbands. Once inside Westminster Abbey, guests were escorted to their seats, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their husbands smiling at members of the Abbey's chapter, or governing body, standing by the great West Door, as they walked in. The Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children also smiled warmly at the welcoming clergy. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her daughter, Lady Louise, smiled and chatted to each other after taking their seats in the Abbey. The Duke's family ahead of the service: In the second row is Peter Philips with daughters Savannah and Isla. Next to them is Mia Tindall with parents Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. In the front row are Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex with children Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn The Cambridges arrived shortly after Prince Charles and Camilla ahead of today's memorial service for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Kate Middleton arrives at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service to Prince Philip today. She was joined by Prince William and her children George and Charlotte The Tindalls were the first senior British royals to arrive, holding one of their daughter Mia's hands Lady Louise Windsor arriving at the Westminster Abbey service for Prince Philip today. The Service will pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex attends the Thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey today Peter Phillips attended the service with his children Savannah and Isla Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Princess Beatrice file into the main church Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent attend the memorial service for the Duke Of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen's lady-in-waiting, arrives with her foot in a brace and on crutches at Westminster Abbey today Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma arrives at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (left) and Formula One driver Sir Jackie Stewart (right) arrive today Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (left) and Home Secretary Priti Patel (right) arrive at Westminster Abbey this morning Guests walk into Westminster Abbey and take their seats ahead of this morning's service to remember Prince Philip Chancellor Rishi Sunak (left) and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) at Westminster Abbey today Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England (right), arrive this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Guests arrive for Prince Philip's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in London this morning Members of the congregation queue at Westminster Abbey today ahead of the service of thanksgiving for the life of Philip Guests arrive to attend the service of thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey this morning Earlier today, royal commentator Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told GB News: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Overnight, royal aides revealed the Queen has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled at midnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in April last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. His funeral at St George's Chapel in Windsor was limited to just 30 mourners in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned, with the Queen sitting alone in a mask. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. Prince Harry faces 'lifetime of regret' for missing memorial to his beloved grandfather Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle could 'regret' not attending the memorial service for his grandfather Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today - and the Queen is likely to be 'very upset' but cannot change his mind, royal experts say. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to remain at home in Montecito, California, while the rest of the Royal Family gather in London for the poignant event. Harry last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. The Duke - one of the Queen and Philip's eight grandchildren is the only top-level royal not attending today's service which was organised by the monarch. Royal author Phil Dampier told MailOnline: 'It's very sad that Harry and Meghan won't be at Prince Philip's memorial service and I think one day Harry might regret it. He has said that he doesn't feel safe without Scotland Yard security but to me that sounds like an excuse not to come back to the UK and indicates the rift with his blood family is still bad. 'Harry was always very fond of his grandfather and was deeply honoured when he took over from him as Captain General of the Royal Marines, but sadly that didn't last long. The pair attended some Remembrance Day events together and there was always a rapport between them, both being serving military men who had seen active service.' Mr Dampier said that Harry 'loved' Philip's sense of humour and praised him in interviews, adding that this makes his non-attendance 'all the more mystifying and strange'. Advertisement But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not returning from the US for the service. While the Queen's arrival was mentioned in the order of service, it is understood that a final decision on her attendance was not made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service is less taxing for the Queen. Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Philip, who died in April last year aged 99, launched the DofE Award in 1956 and was Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Cadet Force, a role he first took up in 1953. A tenth DofE gold award holder, Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will give a tribute to His Royal Highness's legacy, recognising the impact of the Award on young people across the globe. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, will conduct the service and describe the duke in the Bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction' who 'ever directed our attention away from himself.' He will say: 'He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' Prince Harry has been criticisied for missing his grandfather's memorial service today, amid a row over security and strained relations with his relatives. But despite the family tensions, the Duke of Sussex was included in today's commemorations, after archive footage of Harry speaking about his late grandather was used as part of the BBC's coverage of the Duke of Edinburgh's memorial. The broadcaster re-used sentimental tributes from the Royal Family to celebrate the life of Prince Philip, before streaming his Service of Thanksgiving live from Westminster Abbey. The Duke of Sussex, 37, who was the only senior member of the royal family not to attend today, made a surprise appearance during the coverage in a resurfaced clip from the documentary 'A 'Unique Portrait' of Prince Philip and his life'. Harry was seen praising his grandfather for being 'unapologetically him' in the footage, which first aired in September 2021. Prince Harry (pictured) made a surprise appearance in the BBC's coverage of Prince Philip's Service of Thanksgiving The BBC shared archived footage of members of the Royal Family paying tribute to Prince Philip, before streaming his memorial service live from Westminster Abbey Dressed in a white shirt and black trousers, while sitting against a grey background, Harry shared his respect for Prince Philip. Harry said: 'What you see is what you got. He was unapologetically him at all times, no matter where he was, no matter who he was speaking to and no matter what he was doing.' The film was originally made to mark the Duke's 100th birthday, but the nation's longest-serving consort died two months before celebrating his centenary. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have faced backlash for not attending the memorial in person. Prince Harry describes his grandfather as 'unapologetically him' in the clip taken from the documentary 'A 'Unique Portrait' of Prince Philip and his life', released in September 2021 Royal watchers have slammed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for remaining at their mansion in Montecito, while the rest of the Royal Family gathered for the memorial service The couple remained at their $14million mansion in Montecito while the rest of the Royal Family, including the Queen despite recent health issues, gathered in London for the monumental event. Harry is currently in pursuit of legal challenge against the Home Office after being told he would no longer be given the 'same degree' of personal protective security when visiting from the US, despite offering to pay for it himself. He last returned to the UK eight months ago to unveil the statue of his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales in London on July 1 with his brother Prince William. Royal watchers and social media users have criticized the Duke, who is due to travel to the Netherlands in two weeks' time, for not attending his grandfather's Service of Thanksgiving. The Home Office told Prince Harry he would no longer be given the 'same degree' of personal protective security when visiting the UK. Pictured: Prince Philip with Meghan and Harry Richard Griffin, who spent 14 years as a royal protection officer for Prince Philip, slammed Harry for 'not bothering' to attend, describing his absence as 'pathetic'. 'Prince Philip was their grandfather so William has obviously had a great training from him and is going to learn examples from him,' he said. 'I just hope Harry gets some of these things in his mind. 'It [Harry not being here] was a big disappointment for everybody. People were talking about it. Certainly around where I was, people were saying he should have been here. 'All this nonsense about how he couldnt get protection, as far as Im concerned that was a pathetic excuse. He shouldve been here to honour his grandfather. 'At the end of the day, if he was that worried about security, he couldve stuck with his brother and father who have got wonderful security and he would have been more than safe.' The Queen stood with tears in her eyes as the congregation, which included royals from other nations, joined in singing before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh this morning. Advertisement 'Defiant but isolated' Prince Andrew was 'shunned by the royal family and didn't interact warmly with them' at Prince Philip's memorial, a body language expert has claimed. The Duke of York, 62, accompanied the Queen, 95, to the Thanksgiving of Life service but had little interaction with the rest of his family today - avoiding receptions and driving straight back to Westminster with his mother after the service. And while the Queen appeared to 'looked unequivocal' in her support of her second son, the rest of The Firm offered 'no signs of support or encouragement' and 'pretended to not even see him'. Speaking to FEMAIL, body language expert Judi James explained: 'Andrew did not get the same sort of welcome [as the Queen gave him] from the other royals. 'Only his mother threw him anything bordering on a "welcome back" smile and, rather than throw him subtle tie-signs of support or encouragement, most of the royals seemed to attempt to act as though they hadn't even seen him. 'Defiant but isolated' Prince Andrew was 'shunned by the royal family and didn't interact warmly with them' at Prince Philip's memorial, a body language expert has claimed. Prince Edward is pictured next to his brother but 'avoided eye contact' with him. Body language expert Judi James said: 'Edward sat looking splayed in a rather incongruent display of nonchalance as he appeared to read his programme with interest rather than notice the lack of connection around him, but we can see Edward tilt his head away as though keen to create a larger spatial gap between them.' The Duke of York, 62, accompanied the Queen, 95, to the Thanksgiving of Life service but had little interaction with the rest of his family today - avoiding receptions and driving straight back to Westminster with his mother after the service. The Duke is seen looking at Princess Anne's husband Sir Timothy Laurence While the Queen appeared to 'looked unequivocal' in her support of her second son, the rest of The Firm offered 'no signs of support or encouragement' and 'pretended to not even see him', body language expert Judi James says Prince Andrew waved at photographers as he and the Queen returned to Windsor Castle this afternoon following a Westminster Abbey service celebrating Prince Philip. Judi said: 'Andrew's wave to the cameras is an upright, palm-flattened 'hail' gesture here. This is usually a greeting ritual from someone with higher status who is expecting a positive response, suggesting Andrew might actually be expecting some popularity by association, with his mother's public signals and non-verbal' 'Taking his place next to Edward he cut an isolated but defiant-looking figure, but there were no glances or even nods of greeting and no discernible eye contact. 'The eye-avoidance looked deliberate, with most of the Firm staring pointedly ahead as though barely even aware of him. 'Edward and Sophie are often used as the buffers of the royal firm, famously chatting animatedly to avoid the frost between William and Harry on their last public outing, but there were no signs of warmth or connection between these brothers until the singing of the hymn. Andrew turned his head to speak to Edward and Sophie and they replied with the coolest of responses. Today's service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities and patronages. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. The Duke of York had a front row seat at the service, sitting close to his other siblings, with his daughters Princess Eugenie and Princess also in attendance but there was no sign of his ex-wife Sarah, Duchess of York. The Queen's decision to have Andrew accompany her comes despite him paying up to 12million earlier this month to settle a US civil sexual assault case and it will be seen as a major signal of support to her second son. Judi added: 'The message from the Queen about her Prodigal son Andrew looked unequivocal today. As her eldest son Charles is fond of saying, this is now clearly a "non-negotiable" relationship. 'Not only did she choose her second son to accompany and support her as she walked into the Abbey, making this the first time she has been seen in public accepting assistance from anyone, she also paused before they parted to take their seats and threw him a smile of thanks in front of UK and foreign royalty as well as the eyes of the rest of the world. Front and centre of the high profile occasion was the Duke of York, despite Andrew paying millions out of court earlier this month to settle a civil sexual assault case and losing his 'HRH' Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip. Mother and son skipped multiple receptions being held in the capital this afternoon The Queen and Prince Andrew are seen returning to Windsor Castle through the Shaw Farm Gate after Prince Philip's service 'She had four children to choose from but it was Andrew who got the job, even standing behind his mother with his hands clasped behind his back, joining in the smiles and the laughter as she chatted to some of the speakers, looking poignantly like a stand-in for his late father, whose memory they were respecting.' Despite the cold shoulder from the rest of his family, Andrew maintained his 'non-verbal arrogance' and even waived to cameras on his way home. 'Andrew's bearing was upright and almost military,' Judi added. 'Those spectacles perched on the end of his nose suggested his tendency to non-verbal arrogance is still holding firm, while his wave to the cameras could be seen as something of a victory role.' The royal cheerfully waved at photographers as he and the Queen skipped several royal receptions and returned to Windsor Castle this afternoon after an extraordinary and emotional service in remembrance of Prince Philip and his 99-year life of dedication to Britain and his wife. Her Majesty became emotional in Westminster Abbey - where she married Prince Philip in November 1947 - having personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his Covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. It comes as a royal expert claimed Prince Charles and Prince William will have been left 'disappointed and uneasy' after disgraced Prince Andrew accompanied the Queen to the service. Royal commentators said the surprise move was the 95-year-old monarch's way of 'very clearly stating that he has a role at family occasions' and that 'many people will now accept the Queen's word and judgment'. Judi explained: 'Those spectacles perched on the end of his nose suggested his tendency to non-verbal arrogance is still holding firm, while his wave to the cameras could be seen as something of a victory role.' The Queen is aided by Prince Andrew today as they attend the thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh in London Andrew watches as his mother the Queen gets into a car following the service at Westminster Abbey today Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall The Queen's decision to have Andrew accompany her comes despite him paying up to 12million earlier this month to settle a US civil sexual assault case and it will be seen as a major signal of support to her second son. Royal expert Angela Levin told MailOnline of William and Charles: 'They would have been very disappointed and uneasy about Andrew's presence but they would have known that this was the Queen's decision. I'm sure they were probably thinking something very different inside but Charles and William have always known that the Queen has a soft spot for Andrew and if she wants her favourite son with her, she would be entitled to do that. 'It was one of those moments when the Queen exercised her position both as a mother and the Queen. She obviously needed someone to help her on that small walk, but I noticed that when she got up to leave at the end of the service, Prince Charles got up too, as if to help her. But she ignored him and wanted Andrew to take her out instead. She turned to him, not Charles.' Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew The Duke of York (centre) and the Earl of Wessex (right) during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh Prince Andrew travelled with the Queen to Westminster Abbey and appeared to escort her to her seat before taking his own The Queen goes to take her seat as Andrew goes towards his for the service at Westminster Abbey this morning Andrew releases his mother from his arm as she walks the final steps to her seat unaided The Queen's state limousine arrived at the Poets' Yard entrance of the Abbey with Andrew sat beside her at around 11.30am this morning. As they walked through the famous Poets' Corner towards her seat in the abbey, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. The monarch and her son walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Prince Charles could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen who was seated next to him. After the service, the Queen was again escorted out of the Abbey by Andrew. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. Ms Levin added: 'There's no doubt that this whole thing would have left Charles and William disappointed and uneasy. I'm not sure if they would have been angry because even they would have realised that there would not be much point in that. Charles in particular feels that he's done enough for Andrew and he will not play any part in the Royal family once Charles takes over. I imagine that William feels exactly the same. 'Both Charles and William were very determined that Andrew had to step down and not play any role in the Royal Family in a professional way. They now expect him to disappear and the two of them will make sure of that. I don't think either Charles or William played any part in the decision to have Andrew present at the service. The Queen was determined that he would be there and made up her mind about it a long time ago The Queen and Prince Andrew leave after attending a service of thanksgiving for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew leaves after attending a service of thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today 'She (the Queen) was very involved in the service and what it would entail. The Queen does not make quick decisions, she thought about this very carefully and was determined to have Andrew there. I don't think there would have been much of a discussion about Andrew's presence because at the end of the day, she's still the Queen. Charles and William wouldn't have had to make their views clear about him being there because they have spent a lot of time talking about Andrew and the Queen knows how they feel about him. Even if they had protested to the Queen, they would have soon been quietened.' And she added: 'I'm sorry but Andrew's presence did detract from the service. I was very shocked to see him there, accompanying the Queen. Having someone who is accused of sexual abuse, even though he was not charged with anything, being given such a prominent role in the service is bound to be a detraction 'At the end of the day, the Queen took a decision that the love she feels for Andrew is more important than anything else or trying to please the public. That's her right. This was a mother who lost her husband after 70 years and wanted her favourite son to be there by her side.' Andrew, 62, who has been keeping a low profile since the end of 2019, is said to have been determined to honour his late father the Duke of Edinburgh despite fears his presence could dominate coverage of the event. Ex-BBC royal correspondent Peter Hunt said: 'It didn't happen by chance. He could have sat in the congregation with others, with his relatives, but they actively decided that he would have this role of supporting her. So she has chosen, in essence, to remind people that he hasn't admitted any wrongdoing, he's not guilty of anything, he's innocent. And she's very clearly stating that he has a role at family occasions.' But he also said that the downside of Andrew having had such a prominent role in his father's memorial service is that it is a reminder of his 'many errors of judgment that have led him to being removed from public life'. Mr Hunt added: 'It's one thing to accept that he should attend his father's memorial service. It's quite another thing to then give him quite a prominent role, so it was an active choice to give him such a prominent role.' The Queen and Prince Andrew leave by car after attending the service of thanksgiving for Prince Philip today Prince Andrew is seen arriving back at Windsor Castle this afternoon with the Queen following today's service Mr Hunt said he found it 'fascinating', and said: 'Did William and Charles try to intervene? And clearly if they did then they failed.' He added: 'I think you have to start from the basis that Charles and William will have been in the driving seat with the Queen of removing Andrew from public life. Both of them will have been very aware of the risks of Andrew having this role. So either they decided that they could justify it on the basis that it was an event for his father, or they did try to suggest this wasn't a good idea and the Queen chose not to listen to them. Duke of York in profile: From Falklands War hero to controversial royal who settled sex case for 12million Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of York arriving to attend a church service in Hillington, Norfolk, on January 19, 2020 During the Duke of York's life, the 'Playboy Prince' has earned high regard for his bravery during the Falklands War and served as a trade envoy, but he is best known as the man whose reputation was left in tatters amid the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal. As a young man, he was one of the world's most eligible bachelors and earned himself the nickname 'Randy Andy' after being linked to a string of beautiful women. But later in life his connections with controversial foreign figures raised concerns and he was dubbed 'Air Miles Andy' after being criticised for his globe-trotting, especially helicopter trips to pursue his passion for golf. At 22, Andrew saw active service in the Royal Navy as a Sea King helicopter pilot in the Falklands War. His service included flying his aircraft as a decoy target, trying to divert deadly Exocet missiles away from British ships. He later married and divorced the bubbly, flame-haired Sarah 'Fergie' Ferguson, who herself has generated some of the most humiliating royal scandals of modern times. When a bachelor for a second time, Andrew again made headlines, having been spotted cavorting with topless women on holiday in Thailand, and attending a 'hookers and pimps' party with Robert Maxwell's daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, in the US. After serving for 22 years in the Royal Navy, the duke became the UK's special representative for international trade and investment, but his 10 years in the role generated a great deal of controversy. As a roving ambassador, one of his first tasks was a post-September 11 trip to New York, but he was criticised for attending a party during his stay. Andrew has faced questions over his connections to politicians in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tunisia, Libya and Turkmenistan. His judgment was questioned after he held meetings with Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's son Saif, and when he entertained the son-in-law of Tunisia's ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali at Buckingham Palace. His relations with Timur Kulibayev, son-in-law of the then-president of Kazakhstan, were also scrutinised after Mr Kulibayev purchased the duke's Sunninghill Park home for 3 million more than its 12 million asking price in 2007. Simon Wilson, Britain's deputy head of mission in Bahrain from 2001 to 2005, wrote in the Daily Mail that the duke was 'more commonly known among the British diplomatic community in the Gulf as HBH: His Buffoon Highness'. In 2011, it emerged that Andrew was friends with American financier Epstein, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2008 for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Photos surfaced of him with his arm around Virginia Giuffre, also known as Virginia Roberts, who claimed that Epstein employed her as a masseuse but exploited her while a teenage minor. The duke was also pictured walking in New York's Central Park with Epstein in December 2010, a year after Epstein's release from prison, and this led him to quit his role as a trade envoy. In 2013, Andrew was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, but Britain's pre-eminent scientific institution faced unprecedented dissent from members over the move, with one professor describing the duke as an 'unsavoury character'. Tech-savvy Andrew, who was the first member of the royal family to have an official Twitter account under his own name, focused on his Pitch@Palace work, bringing together industry experts with young entrepreneurs and technology start-ups. Then in 2015, while enjoying a New Year skiing holiday with his family, he was named in US court documents as having had sex a number of times with a teenage girl, a minor under US law. The woman alleged she was 'procured' for the duke by Epstein, whom she accused of using her as a 'sex slave'. She was identified in reports as Giuffre, the US teenager with whom Andrew had been pictured. The duke vehemently denied the allegation. In April 2015, a US federal judge ordered the claims to be struck from civil court records as the long-running lawsuit against Epstein continued. But Andrew's association with Epstein hit the headlines once again in 2019, amid ongoing investigations into the American, who killed himself in prison in August that year while awaiting trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. The duke's appearance on the BBC's Newsnight programme later in November was intended to draw a line under the matter. But it was dubbed a 'car crash', with commentators questioning his responses and condemning his unsympathetic tone and lack of remorse over his friendship with the sex offender Epstein. During the interview, Andrew denied that he slept with Ms Giuffre, saying one encounter in 2001 did not happen as he had spent the day with his daughter, Princess Beatrice, taking her to Pizza Express in Woking for a party. The same alleged sexual liaison, which the American said began with the royal sweating heavily as they danced at London nightclub Tramp, was later branded factually wrong as the duke said he had a medical condition at the time which meant he did not sweat. And he twice stated that his relationship with sex offender Epstein had provided 'seriously beneficial outcomes', giving him the opportunity to meet people and prepare for his future role as a trade envoy. In January, Andrew's lawyers attempted to throw out the civil sex case brought by Ms Giuffre, but a judge rejected this and ruled the case could go to trial. The Queen stripped Andrew of his honorary military roles in response, and he gave up his HRH style, before demanding a jury trial. But on February 15, their lawyers reached an out-of-court settlement in what eventually became a conclusion to the case. On March 8, it was revealed that Andrew had paid an estimated 12million to his US sex accuser bringing the case against him to a close. Advertisement 'The key issue today for them is remembering Prince Philip. Instead of which people are remembering Prince Philip and commentating on the fact his son, Prince Andrew, had such a prominent role at his memorial service.' Mr Hunt said he imagines Andrew would have been 'very keen' on having the role of escorting his mother, adding: 'It would be for others to dissuade him.' He also questioned how it would be perceived in the United States and elsewhere in the world. 'It's one thing to organise an event to satisfy the needs and the desires of the family members, it's quite another to then step back from it and see how it is seen around the world, and I don't yet know what that judgment will be. 'But the risk for them is it reopens yet again the whole can of worms for them about Prince Andrew's judgment, it reminds them about his missteps and it raises questions about the wisdom of allowing him to have a prominent role when he could just have attended as everyone else did,' he said. And royal author Victoria Murphy added: 'Because of the nature of the event, I don't think Prince Andrew's appearance alongside the Queen is an indication that anything has changed as far as his public role goes. But it does send a message that he still has a very important role by her side in her personal life.' Meanwhile royal expert Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told People magazine of Andrew's appearance: 'It shows she wholeheartedly loves and believes her son. As she did when she made a statement about Camilla being Queen's Consort, many people will now accept the Queen's word and judgment.' He said some senior royals were unimpressed, 'but she insisted'. 'It does make some sense that he accompany her because he doesn't have a partner,' he said. 'A settlement has been paid but he's guilty of nothing in the eyes of the law. She has faith in Andrew. Even if he disappears from public life, he's been able to pay tribute to his father, who after all, was very proud of his service in the Royal Navy, where he fought in the Falkland Islands conflict.' Andrew's role at the ceremony was revealed hours earlier by Mr Jobson, who told GB News this morning: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Another royal commentator said Andrew's role may have been a matter of 'practicality' as much as anything else. Asked if he viewed Andrew's role at the memorial service as a way of the Queen showing support for her son, Joe Little, managing editor of Majesty Magazine, said: 'It's hard to interpret how it came about. I'm not sure that the Queen would necessarily regard it in that way.' He said it might have just been 'a practicality as much as anything' and a plan that 'fitted the purposes of the occasion'. Mr Little added: 'I mean clearly with him by her side then the support is there physically and in every other way really.' He pointed out that Andrew has not been found guilty of anything, adding: 'It's a complicated situation on a very personal level for the Queen as his mother.' Mr Little also pointed out that, like the Queen, Andrew was also travelling from Windsor for the service. Asked if he was surprised by Andrew's role of escorting his mother, he said: 'I suppose we should always expect the unexpected on big royal occasions, and I don't think anybody had guessed that this is what would happen. But I suppose we could look at it in many ways, but the Queen was coming from Windsor. 'Andrew was coming from Windsor. So it made sense to have a member of the family travel with her. Clearly it's the first time that we've seen him for a long time since all the legal wranglings were settled, so some people will argue that he shouldn't have been as prominent, but then we have to remember that he was the Duke of Edinburgh's son, so you know, really, he is just as entitled to be there as his siblings.' And royal historian Hugo Vickers said Andrew's role in escorting the Queen was 'entirely correct and appropriate', describing it as a 'nice gesture'. He said that the Queen 'needs an arm' and said 'Who better than her son?' Mr Vickers added that if she took the arm of an official it would look 'rather sad'. But Nazil Afzal, the former Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England, tweeted: 'I see Prince Andrew is travelling with Her Majesty to Prince Philip's memorial. I'm all for rehabilitation but it starts with facing justice, accepting responsibility and working to rebuild victims' confidence. None of that is present here, so far.' Palace sources said in January that the 'ruthless and swift' decision to strip Andrew of his military titles by the Queen had been 'widely discussed' within the Royal Family following the Duke's failed bid to persuade a judge to dismiss the civil lawsuit in which he was accused of having sex with a trafficking victim. Prince Charles and his son William were understood to have been 'instrumental' in the move to force him out before the Queen made up her mind and summoned him for a meeting, after the court verdict. On March 8, it was revealed he had paid an estimated 12million to his accuser - bringing the case against him to a close. But Andrew has been frozen out of the Royal Family in terms of public events, and was not present at Westminster Abbey earlier this month for the Commonwealth Day Service which was attended by senior royals including Prince Charles, Camilla, Prince William and Kate - but not the Queen, who was forced to pull out due to her health. Buckingham Palace officials confirmed overnight that Princess Beatrice would attend along with her husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, while Princess Eugenie was also there with her husband Jack Brooksbank. On Andrew's left in the Abbey was his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right was the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with Prince William and Kate, and were sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family was Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. Yesterday, the Duke was spotted going horse riding at Windsor Great Park, along with two grooms. He was also photographed driving near Windsor Castle in his hybrid electric Range Rover. The Duke formally settled the alleged rape case against him by 'sex slave' accuser Virginia Roberts at a court in New York earlier this month, after he paid her an estimated 12million. He has always denied the allegations. Courtiers believe the Duke will effectively disappear from public life after today's poignant event, where he is likely to rub shoulders with representatives from charities and organisations he has been forced to part ways with. Prince Philip - who died last April aged 99 - was Colonel of the Grenadier Guards for more than 40 years, and Andrew took over the role in 2017, but it was one of the military titles he was made to give up earlier this year. The Duke of York has hardly been seen in public since he stepped down from royal life following the Jeffrey Epstein scandal - with the Queen stripping him of his military affiliations and royal patronages in January. The Queen and Prince Andrew are driven by car after attending the service of thanksgiving for Prince Philip today The Queen and Prince Andrew arrive together for the Duke of Edinburgh's memorial service at Westminster Abbey today Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Andrew arrive for the service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip this morning Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right The Queen arranged for the service for Philip to take place, and the congregation included family, friends, dignitaries and representatives of the many organisations with which the Duke of Edinburgh was associated. But Prince Harry and Meghan Markle did not return the California for the service amid concerns raised by the couple over their security, although Harry plans to go to Holland next month to attend the Invictus Games. Members of the Royal Family were joined by more than 30 foreign royals, the duke's family and friends and 500 representatives from charities and organisations of which he was patron. The Queen and Philip were married in the Abbey in November 1947 and it holds many special memories. About 1,800 guests attended today. By contrast, his funeral was limited to 30 people because of Covid restrictions. Prince Andrew is spotted going horse riding in Windsor today ahead of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke of York is accompanied by two grooms as he goes out riding at Windsor Great Park in Berkshire yesterday morning Andrew is said to be determined to honour his father despite fears his presence could dominate coverage of the service The Duke of York goes horse riding at Windsor Great Park yesterday morning ahead of today's memorial service for Philip Prince Andrew is seen driving near Windsor Castle yesterday morning ahead of the memorial service for his late father today Earlier this month, Andrew paid up to 12million to his US sex accuser bringing the civil case against him almost to a close. 'Stipulation of Dismissal' documents were filed with a New York court on March 8, with lawyers on both sides calling for the legal action to be dismissed, indicating the settlement has been paid. As the order was published, the Treasury confirmed no taxpayer funds were used for either the payment to Virginia Roberts or for the Duke of York's legal fees. A freedom of information request asked whether any money from the Sovereign Grant to the Royal Family or any other government money was used. The Treasury insisted: 'No public money has been used to pay legal or settlement fees.' The joint order filed with the New York court said each party would pay their own costs and fees. Miss Roberts bringing the case under her married name of Giuffre had sued Andrew for alleged sexual abuse. She claimed he had sex with her when she was 17 after he was trafficked by his friend, the late billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The duke will make a 'substantial donation' to a charity for sex abuse victims set up by Miss Roberts, now a 38-year-old mother-of-three. He said he now regrets his association with Epstein. Andrew, who was forced to step down from royal duties and public life as a result of the scandal, previously claimed he had no recollection of meeting Miss Roberts and has always strongly denied her allegations. But he agreed to the settlement last month. The opening of Sarah Jessica Parker and husband Matthew Broderick's revival of the Niel Simon play Plaza Suite was delayed two years due to COVID so when it opened on Broadway last night, stars were ready to come out to celebrate. Parker, 57, and Broderick, 60 who will celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary in May led the star-studded red carpet, which also included Parker's close friend Andy Cohen, Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, Sex and the City co-star Cynthia Nixon, and New York City mayor Eric Adams. But while Adams walked the red carpet and posed for photos, he skipped out on actually watching the play in favor of attending another party with Cara Delevingne and A$AP Rocky. New York City Mayor Eric Adams attended the star-studded red carpet for Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick's new Broadway show - but skipped the play to dash to another event Adams was seen posing for the cameras on the red carpet, however he left the venue soon after to head to another celebrity party, where he was seen dancing with Cara Delevingne Plaza Suite, a revival of a 1968 Niel Simon play starring real-life married couple Sarah and Matthew, celebrated its opening night on Broadway on Monday The real-life couple plays three different couples across three acts and did so to a star-packed audience last night The premiere was certainly the place to be on Monday night, with Julianna Margulies, Morena Baccarin, Ben McKenzie, David Harbour, Lily Allen, Bernadette Peters, Martin Short, Leslie Mann, and Victor Garber in attendance. Adams, who has suggested that he has brought 'swagger' back to the mayor's office, made sure to turn up for the step and repeat, smiling for photographers and offering a thumbs-up in his tan three-piece suit. But once the camera op was over, Adams didn't stick around to watch the play, instead traveling about a half a mile down the street to make an appearance at another star-studded event. Interestingly enough, he did make it inside the theater, and his @nycmayor Instagram account shared video of him schmoozing inside but he appears to have made a run for it before the house lights came down. It was clearly a busy night for the ex-cop mayor, although he managed to squeeze in an outfit change before heading to his next event of the night, where he was seen chatting to several celebrity guests and dancing along to a DJ set. His attendance at the two events came just hours after two more assaults in the city that he has repeatedly vowed to clean-up. At 7:30 a.m. a 53-year-old man placing an order at a kiosk in a Midtown Manhattan McDonalds was caught on camera getting beaten and robbed. Generally, stars who show up for premieres stay to enjoy the show after posing for photos He changed his outfit before heading down the street to the Bilt Rewards x Wells Fargo Launch Party, where he posed for photos with A$AP Rocky and Floyd Mayweather (pictured) Mayor Adams spoke at the second event, where he was also seen bopping his head next to a dancing Cara Video on Twitter shows the pair enjoying a performance during the event Adams gives his signature thumbs up while posing with Wyclef Jean and Ankur Jain And just a few hours later, at 1 p.m., the 60-year-old owner of a Queens pawn shop had his head so badly beaten in with a metal rod that responding officers initially believed he suffered a gunshot wound, the New York Post reported. The incidents come days after Adams himself said the uptick in crime across New York City has made the Big Apple a 'laughing stock' in need of a 'wartime general' to tackle the ongoing problem. However, Mayor Adams did not appear to have the matter on his mind as he arrived at his second soiree of the night, the One Vanderbelt for the Bilt Rewards x Wells Fargo Launch Party, where he spoke on stage and posed for photos with A$AP Rocky and Floyd Mayweather. This time, he stayed for a performance, and was seen bopping his head next to a dancing Cara Delevingne. Also at the party were Dorinda Medley, Melissa Gorga, and Wyclef Jean. Generally, stars who show up for premieres stay to enjoy the show after posing for photos which was likely the case for the other big names who came to the Hudson Theater for Plaza Suite on Monday. In addition to Cynthia Nixon, SJP's Sex and the City costar Mikhail Baryshnikov and her And Just Like That costar Sarita Choudhury all turned up to support her. SJP's Sex and the City co-star Cynthia Nixon turned up to show her support Her other co-stars, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Sarita Choudhury, were there as well Vogue boss Anna Wintour bundled up in a weather-appropriate black coat with sequin enbellishments Andy Cohen gave a rave review, writing on Instagram that the show was 'delightful' Lily Allen and David Harbour came arm in arm and smiled for the cameras It brought out big names, including Julianna Margulies and Victor Garber Also on the red carpet were Andrea Martin, Ashley Park, Prabal Gurung, Brenda Vaccaro, Mare Winningham, and Anthony Edwards. Vogue boss Anna Wintour bundled up in a weather-appropriate black coat with sequin embellishments. Parker sparkled in a pink Atelier Prabal Gurung dress, which she paired with shoes from her own collection. 'To me, nobody epitomizes New York like Sarah Jessica, in every possible way, so it was a great honor,' Gurung said on Instagram. She posed for photos with her co-star and husband, who wore a black suit with a green tie. Plaza Suite, a comedy by Neil Simon, premiered in 1968 and is set in that time period. Over the course of three acts, Parker and Broderick play three different couples, each in suite 719 at the Plaza Hotel in New York City Yet there seems to be a consensus among reviewers that the script doesn't hold up all these decades later The main bright spot, to many critics, is Parker's performance - and the chemistry that she and Broderick share Though the famous couple's star power certainly brought out the A-list and is sure to keep attracting audiences during its limited 17-week engagement it didn't guarantee ringing endorsements from theater critics, who have mostly written lukewarm reviews. Plaza Suite, a comedy by Neil Simon, premiered in 1968 and is set in that time period. Over the course of three acts, Parker and Broderick play three different couples, each in suite 719 at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Yet there seems to be a consensus among reviewers that the script doesn't hold up all these decades later. 'Looked at now, [Simon's] Plaza Suite jokes, however well formed, keep dying on the vine. The past is not yet past enough to find such an unfair battle of the sexes funny,' wrote the New York Times. 'Alas, the stars efforts, while certainly appealing, dont make the material any less obsolete,' wrote The Hollywood Reporter. Ben McKenzie and Morena Baccarin, who wore a dress from St. John, were among the stars to show up for opening night Broadway icon Bernadette Peters and SNL star Rachel Dratch spent the night out Leslie Mann turned up solo, wihtout her husband, Judd Apatow, or their two actress daughters Emily in Paris star Ashley Park and designer Prabal Gurung were also on the guest list Martin Short - who starred in It's Only a Play with Broderick - posed with Andrea Martin Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham also took to the red carpet on opening night The main bright spot, to many critics, is Parker's performance and the chemistry that she and Broderick share. 'The thrill we get from the particular husband and particular wife being these two performers helps buoy moments when the misunderstandings can feel rote, or the scaffolding of the first and third acts arguments, building to one big reveal, can feel too visible,' wrote Variety. 'The show itself is somewhat lost in time. But Parker and Brodericks chemistry, expertly honed, makes it feel timeless.' In every scene, Parker is giving the most, carrying the comedy on her narrow shoulders,' wrote The Guardian. 'Broderick, is doing a lot less, as is his way. But they have a flagrant enjoyment in playing opposite each other, which is the best and maybe the only reason to book in.' Andy Cohen, at least, gave a rave review, writing on Instagram that the show was 'delightful.' A former Mormon who became an OnlyFans star after leaving the church claims she and her family have been 'exiled' by the local community - including their own friends and relatives - because of her raunchy online career. Skyler, 39, from North California, turned her back on the congregation in 2018, having been a member for over a decade, after growing disillusioned with its practices. The religion has some very strict rules including no sex before marriage, no porn or same-sex relationships, as well as no booze, cigarettes, coffee or gambling. Mormons are also required to adhere to a strict dress code, which requires all members to uphold a 'clear standard of modesty' at all times while prohibiting clothing that is 'tight' or 'revealing'. Free from restraint after leaving the church, Skyler decided to explore her sexuality uploading steamy snaps of herself on Instagram, where she now has 168,000 followers. A $15-a-month OnlyFans account with even more explicit content soon followed. A former Mormon-turned-OnlyFans star says she and her family have been 'exiled' by their community because of her raunchy online career The woman, known only as Skyler, joined the Mormon Church after marrying her husband, who was already a member, however she says the 'rigid' rules took a toll on her marriage Skyler (pictured during a Mormon Church pioneer trek), now 39, says the strict regulations of the church left her in a 'sex-less marriage' and made her and her husband argue constantly In 2018, more than ten years after joining the Mormon faith, Skyler (pictured in the pink skirt) decided to leave alongside her husband, and says it greatly improved their relationship It wasn't until a follower asked for more explicit content that he was willing to pay for, that the mom-of-two set up an OnlyFans page in March 2020. However, her new career has not gone down well with her former congregation or her new neighbors and friends, many of which are still members of the Mormon Church. 'As a family, we have been shut out,' Skyler told Jam Press. 'I joined the Mormon church because at the time my husband was part of it, but we left having grown frustrated with the rigidness of the religion and having to give so much of our time and money to it. 'No vices were allowed. No drinking, no smoking. 'Only sugar was allowed. The amount of baked goods we ate saw us both put on weight and it had a knock-on effect on our marriage. 'It became a sexless marriage. I stopped looking good for my husband. 'We also had a ton of arguments about giving ten per cent of our income to the church. As part of her new-found sexual freedom, Skyler decided to begin posting explicit content to Instagram and OnlyFans - having first blocked everyone she knew from within the church However, a mother of one of her daughter's friends discovered her Instagram page and spread the word about Skyler's risque online persona She says that the woman phoned her and 'slut-shamed' her over her photos, before telling Skyler that her daughter was no longer welcome in their home 'They teach you secret handshakes and walk you through the three levels of heaven, which funnily enough correlates with giving more of your money and baking more cookies. 'It was delusional and we had to get out of there. 'Being a Mormon was taking things away from me as a wife and as a mom. It was time to do something for myself, my family and my marriage. 'As soon as we left, we smoked a big joint and had the best sex we had in years.' Skyler was outed to her family and friends after a mom of one of her daughter's friends found her page. She said: 'I've always admired women who aren't afraid to show off and have fun. It's something I secretly wanted [as a Mormon] but didn't really know how to do it. 'When I started my Instagram account I tried my hardest to block people from seeing me. I went through my entire friend and family list. 'But one day my posts turned up on the explore page, where my daughter's friend's mom spotted me. 'I've also been shunned by other moms when I go and watch my children play softball and once even cried in a hair salon after the hairdresser said she didn't agree with what I do,' she said Skyler's husband also faced backlash, with the mother-of-two revealing that one of his friends phoned him and 'yelled' about Skyler's online profile Despite the backlash, Skyler insists that she is doing nothing wrong, while also pointing to the people who are still members of the church but secretly committing adultery 'There are countless cheating spouses in this town and yet we are the villains,' she said 'She called me up and said my Instagram wasn't "appropriate". I felt slut-shamed. 'She then said she wouldn't be sending her daughter round to our house anymore. 'It broke my heart seeing a decision I made hurt my daughter so much. 'I've also been shunned by other moms when I go and watch my children play softball and once even cried in a hair salon after the hairdresser said she didn't agree with what I do. 'My husband's friend of 40 years also found out he called up and started yelling down the phone. We've been totally exiled.' Skyler's husband added: 'The mom who banned her kid from coming round our house is ridiculous. What we get up to as two consenting adults has no effect on the children. 'There are countless cheating spouses in this town and yet we are the villains. 'We are honest with our sexual desires and communicate with one another about what we want. Despite the backlash, Skyler doesn't regret her choice and says OnlyFans has done wonders for her marriage She says that her husband has been incredibly supportive of her OnlyFans account, for which she charges a $15-a-month subscription fee 'I much prefer exploring this avenue and having a better marriage with my husband than to toe the line with people in this bible belt town,' she said 'Just because their wives aren't giving them any, blame shouldn't be placed at our doors.' Despite the backlash, Skyler doesn't regret her choice and says OnlyFans has done wonders for her marriage. Skyler added: 'My husband has been my biggest supporter and without him being so encouraging and amazing this wouldn't have worked out. 'After being a housewife for so many years I now feel sexy and liberated. 'My husband gets turned on as he has a hot wife fetish and the idea of other men wanting to get with me gets him going. 'When we're thinking of a racy caption together it spices up our bedroom talk. 'OnlyFans has added something to our marriage. 'I much prefer exploring this avenue and having a better marriage with my husband than to toe the line with people in this bible belt town.' Hyundai Heavy Industries' shipyard in Ulsan is seen in this file photo. Yonhap DSME takeover bid could be resumed under Yoon's presidency By Park Jae-hyuk HD Hyundai's recent lawsuit against the European Commission's January decision to block Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering's (KSOE) proposed acquisition of Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME) is seen to signal its willingness to resume the takeover bid under the incoming government despite its denial, according to industry officials, Tuesday. Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) Group's holding company confirmed Monday that it sued the European Union's antitrust regulator on March 23 to ask the EU court to judge on the legality of the disapproval of DSME's purchase by KSOE, a subsidiary of HD Hyundai and a parent firm of HHI. "We filed the lawsuit to ask the court to verify that it was unreasonable for the EU regulator to evaluate the shipbuilding market dominance based only on market share," an HD Hyundai official said. "Even if we win the lawsuit, the decision cannot be overturned, so we are not pushing for the acquisition again." When KSOE signed a contract with Korea Development Bank (KDB) to acquire DSME, both sides agreed that the contract would be canceled unless all six overseas antitrust regulators approved the deal. Their contract has therefore been nullified, following the European Commission's veto. Some industry officials, however, regarded HD Hyundai's recent legal action as a preparatory measure to resume efforts for the DSME takeover under the presidency of Yoon Suk-yeol, considering that the lawsuit was filed after his election and the president-elect promised to help DSME find a competent new owner as soon as possible. "I will solve the problems surrounding DSME as soon as possible for the company to contribute to Geoje's regional economy and Korea's economic growth," Yoon said last month during an election campaign event on the South Gyeongsang Province island. Immediately after the European regulator's rejection in January, KDB Chairman Lee Dong-gull urged HD Hyundai to take measures against the decision. "Because it is critical to make sure that Korean industries are not pushed around easily by the EU, I personally hope Hyundai Heavy Industries will file lawsuits to ask for compensation and cancellation of the disapproval," Lee said during a press conference, Jan. 27. HD Hyundai also said at that time that it would hold internal discussions on whether it should seek legal remedies to challenge the veto. Its legal action came two months later. Considering that the litigation will take a great amount of time, industry officials expect the shipbuilding group to have enough time to reconsider its acquisition of DSME. In addition, its rivals will likely avoid a bid for a DSME takeover until the end of the litigation, due to concerns about uncertainties. There is also speculation that HD Hyundai will devise new strategies for the acquisition, capitalizing on the litigation to find out the logic behind the European regulator's decision. "HD Hyundai will be able to justify its resumed bid for the DSME takeover, if the court rules in favor of the company," an industry insider said. Looked a world away from her demure buttoned up jacket and trousers, instead opting for an asymmetric zigzag dress with sequins and string V-neckline Lady Amelia Windsor put on a stunning display on the red carpet as she attended the premiere of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore premiere in London tonight just hours after she attended the memorial service for Prince Philip. Amelia, 26, who is 43rd in the line of succession to the British throne, looked effortlessly glamorous glittering gown with a 90s-inspired neckline and towering golden heels. Earlier today, the royal - who is the granddaughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, the Queen's first cousin - was one of 1800 mourners at Prince Philip's Thanksgiving of Life ceremony. Lady Amelia Windsor put on a stunning display on the red carpet as she attended the premiere of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore premiere in London tonight just hours after she attended the memorial service for Prince Philip. Earlier today, the royal - who is the granddaughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, the Queen's first cousin - was one of 1800 mourners at Prince Philip's Thanksgiving of Life ceremony. Tonight she looked a world away from her demure buttoned up jacket and trousers, instead opting for an asymmetric zigzag dress embossed with sequins and string V-neckline. She added a black clutch bag and neon jewellery - finishing the look off with a pair of towering golden platforms. Once dubbed the most beautiful member of the royal family, Lady Amelia is currently signed to Storm models, which represents the likes of Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne. She has also modelled for the likes of Dolce & Gabbana and designed her own range of accessories in collaboration with Penelope Chilvers. Showing her glamorous side, she opted for a classic make-up look pairing black eyeliner and glittering eyeshadow with a deep red lip. Amelia, 26, who is 43rd in the line of succession to the British throne, looked effortlessly glamourous glittering gown with a 90s-inspired neckline and towering golden heels. She added a black clutch bag and neon jewellery - finishing the look off with a pair of towering golden platforms Amelia often wins praise for her fashion taste and regularly posts her style tips on her Instagram page, along with collaborations with brands, including with fine jewellery specialist Alice van Cal. Speaking about why it's her preferred social media platform, Amelia said: 'It allows anyone to be creative and imaginative. 'I also love that we can share all the beautiful and meaningful things we see and hear in the world. I find it so inspiring and uplifting.' The party girl has featured on the front of Tatler magazine and is also a regular at London Fashion Week, having first come to prominence at the Queen's 90th birthday party in 2016. Earlier today, Amelia joined other members of The Queen 's extended family flocked to support the monarch today as they joined guests who were invited to attend Prince Philip's memorial. Amelia's grandfather Duke of Kent was also in attendance. Today, she joined the likes of Eddie Redmayne on the star-studded arrivals for the premiere of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore at London's Royal Festival Hall on Tuesday. Fantastic Beasts' release has been marred by a string of controversies in recent months including Johnny Depp being dropped from the film in the wake of his legal woes, writer JK Rowling facing heavy criticism for her comments about the transgender community, and star Ezra Miller's arrest at a bar in Hawaii. Also on the red carpet was Jude Law, Mads Mikkelson, Fiona Glascott, Sam Ryder and Maria Fernanda Candida. Earlier today, Amelia joined other members of The Queen's extended family flocked to support the monarch today as they joined guests who were invited to attend Prince Philip's memorial. The Queen's cousin Princess Alexandra, 85, cut an elegant figure in an emerald green coat as she arrived at Westminster Abbey today, using a crutch to support her as she walked across the cobbles. Amelia's grandfather Duke of Kent was also in attendance. The Variety writer who asked Kim Kardashian to share her 'advice for women in business' has furiously fired back at the reality star's claims that her comments were 'taken out of context' by the publication. Kim, 41, sparked a firestorm of controversy earlier this month after she was quoted as telling the magazine that women need to 'get their f***ing a**es up and work', before complaining that 'it seems like nobody wants to work these days'. The reality star was blasted as 'tone deaf' and out of touch following the publication of the interview - which was also shared as a video - prompting her to address the controversy in a recent sit-down with Good Morning America, in which she insisted that her comments were 'taken out of context' by Variety. She also claimed to GMA's Robin Roberts that the question about her advice for women came after the interviewer - Variety's Chief Correspondent Elizabeth Wagmeister - suggested that she was just 'famous for being famous', which she said made her entire 'tone and attitude change'. However Wagmeister has now hit back at Kardashian on Twitter, insisting that the billionaire businesswoman was asked a 'very direct question' and that the 'question about [her] being famous for being famous' was actually posed after she offered up her advice to women in business. 'Its not what she claims,' Wagmeister tweeted. 'I just reviewed the raw footage. The question was very direct: What would be your advice for women in business? The question about being famous for being famous came after that question, actually.' The Variety writer who interviewed Kim Kardashian when she offered up her now-infamous 'get your a** up and work' advice to women in business has hit back at the reality star's claims that her comments were 'taken out of context' The billionaire (seen during her Variety shoot) told GMA's Robin Roberts of the comments that they were used as a 'soundbite' and that there were no 'questions and conversations around it' Variety's Chief Correspondent, Elizabeth Wagmeister - who conducted the interview - has now hit back at Kardashian, 41, insisting that she was asked 'a very direct question' In her interview with Roberts, which aired on GMA on Monday morning, Kardashian addressed the bitter controversy over her comments, accusing Variety of using her so-called advice as a 'soundbite', adding that she may have come across as more blunt than she had intended, because a previous question she was asked during the interview put her in a bad mood. 'Well that statement that I said was without questions and conversations around it, and it became a soundbite really with no context,' she explained, after Roberts pointed out how much 'backlash' her comments received. Kim went on to share that she was asked to share her 'advice' for women shortly after being told by an interviewer that 'after 20 years of being in the business, you're famous for being famous', which she admitted made her 'whole tone and attitude change'. Wagmeister (pictured) also addressed the reality star's claim that her 'attitude' was 'changed' because of a previous question about 'being famous for being famous', insisting that line was posed after she was asked to give advice to women in business 'I came off of the notion and the question right before, which was, "After 20 years of being in the business, you're famous for being famous." And my whole tone and attitude changed with the previous question that went into that question about what advice would you give to women,' she said. The online version of the article states that Kardashian shared her 'best advice for women in business' before Wagmeister suggested that the reality star is 'famous for being famous', a characterization that she wrote made Kardashian 'bristle'. In her GMA interview, Kardashian - who is due to return to screens in a new Hulu series documenting the lives of her and her famous family - attempted to further clarify her statement, insisting that she only ever meant to warn other women that fame and social media success does not automatically result in business achievements. 'The advice that I would give is just that, having a social media presence and being on a reality show does not mean overnight success,' she said. 'You have to really work hard to get there, even if it might seem like it's easy and that you can build a really successful business off social media.' Speaking to Roberts, Kardashian insisted that her comments had been 'taken out of context' and used as a 'soundbite' Her comments were mocked by Oscars hosts Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes during the Academy Awards on Sunday night The two women were seen jokingly telling Dame Judi Dench to 'work harder' after she lost out on the Best Supporting Actress award to West Side Story star Ariana DeBose She added that while 'you can' build a successful company off the back of social media, that only happens 'if you put in a lot of hard work'. Billionaire Kim sparked outrage when she made the comments during her Variety interview earlier this month; in a video shared by the publication, she was seen complaining that 'it seems like nobody wants to work these days', after saying her 'best advice for women in business' was: 'Get your f***ing a** up and work.' Kardashian featured on the cover of this months' Variety magazine alongside her sisters Kourtney and Khloe, and their mom Kris Jenner, to mark the upcoming release of their new Hulu reality show The so-called 'advice' was quickly lambasted on social media, where many users branded the mother-of-four 'tone deaf' and 'out of touch', pointing out that she has come from a life of wealth and privilege, and therefore might not be the best person to dole out advice to other women in business. While Kim insisted that her comments were taken out of context, she did offer up an apology to anyone who was offended by her advice, concluding: 'It wasn't a blanket statement towards women or to feel like I don't respect their work or think that they don't work hard. I know that they do. 'It was taken out of context but I'm really sorry if it was received that way.' The reality star - who owns two companies, beauty brand KKW Beauty and clothing company SKIMS - was bitterly trolled on social media after the interview clip was shared, with dozens of people hitting out at her 'tone deaf' comments. One Twitter user, who claimed to have once worked for the Kardashian family, accused the reality star of hypocrisy, saying that she was 'reprimanded' during her time working for the Kardashian apps because she was doing freelance work on the side in order to make ends meet. 'I was an editor on the Kardashian apps in 2015 in LA, worked days night & weekends, could only afford groceries from the 99 Cents Only Store, called out "sick" more than once bc I couldn't put gas in my car to get to the office,' she claimed. '[And I] was reprimanded for freelancing on the side.' After Kim's comments were shared, social media slammed her over her 'tone deaf' advice, with one person claiming to have worked for the reality star when she couldn't afford gas Jameela Jamil wrote on Twitter that 'nobody needs to hear your thoughts on success/work ethic' if you had well-off parents like Kim's Actress Jameela Jamil also blasted Kim on Twitter, noting that '99.9 per cent of the world' grew up in very different circumstances to the reality star. 'I think if you grew up in Beverly Hills with super successful parents in what was simply a smaller mansion... nobody needs to hear your thoughts on success/work ethic,' Jameela wrote. 'This same 24 hours in the day s**t is a nightmare. 99.9% of the world great up with a VERY different 24 hours.' Kim's comments on GMA were taken from a wider interview with her siblings and mother, which is due to air on the morning show next week, ahead of the release of their new Hulu show. Hours before the clip was aired however, Kim's controversial advice was once again dragged into the spotlight when Oscars hosts Wanda and Regina mocked the reality star in a tongue-in-cheek skin during Sunday night's ceremony. The presenters poked fun at Kim's statements - seen by many as tone deaf - as they jokingly offered advice to Dame Judi Dench after she missed out on the Best Supporting Actress Award to Ariana DeBose. Finding Judi, 87, in the audience, Regina said: 'Dame Judi Dench we have an inspirational quote for you.' Comedian Wanda added: 'You know because you didn't win tonight.' Regina continued: 'A quote from Kim Kardashian... work harder.' Kim's sister Kourtney was in the audience when the joke was made as she attended the ceremony alongside her boyfriend Travis Barker who performed as part of the All Star band. However, if the continued controversy over her advice took a toll on the reality star, she certainly didn't let it show when she made an appearance at the Vanity Fair Oscars party on Sunday night, making an incredibly bold statement in a bright turquoise dress and silver sunglasses. A beauty therapist turned to strangers on Facebook for medical advice after one of her customers suffered a severe reaction to lip fillers. Kelly Adsett appealed for help in the 'Lip Filler Chat Group' earlier this month after her client claimed she was suffering swelling in her face, arms and legs and could not walk properly three days after the injections. She received comments from other users suggesting the customer may have herpes and should treat her swelling using cold sore cream. The group says it is 'for all who are interested in fillers' and can be viewed by anyone, regardless of their medical background. Ms Adsett, who runs a farm-based salon called The Stable near Bodmin in Cornwall, reassured the client in a text it was 'completely normal' for there to be swelling. But behind closed doors, she pleaded for advice from the 4,500 members of the public Facebook group. The beautician shared a photo of the unidentified woman alongside pictures of her heavily swollen lips. In the typo-laden post, Ms Adsett said: 'Her face is swollen what can anyone suggest? She doesn't want to remove it but I think I have no opption (sic).' The beauty therapist revealed in a separate comment that the client went to A&E and was diagnosed with a blood clot, which doctors linked to the lip filler injections. Campaigners said the case was proof that most beauticians have 'no idea what they are doing' and claimed it highlighted the need for tighter regulations. Ms Adsett posted online for some advice after one of her customers suffered huge swelling in their lips and then arms and legs following a lip filler treatment. Campaigners said it showed most beauticians have 'no idea what they are doing' Ms Adsett (pictured) runs The Stables in Bodmin, Cornwall. The clinic no longer offers lip filler treatments on its website, although it continues to sell others such as teeth whitening Ms Adsett posted the above messages on Facebook group 'Lip Filler Chat' that she had sent to the client She also later shared the clients response. Medics say it is possible for lip fillers to trigger blood clots, but this only happens when they are injected into arteries Current rules mean an aesthetic practitioner does not need any qualifications, so anyone can go on a basic training course and then be allowed to perform non-surgical cosmetic treatments. Staff are being taught online or at one-day training courses for as little as 150. In the now-deleted post on March 6, Ms Adsett said: 'Look for for some advice, the photos aren't great I no. 'I did this client on Thursday at 1pm she said it's really swollen and painful and has has can antihistamine and parctomal, also put compression on it she said today her face is swollen what can anyone suggest? What are the risks with getting lip fillers? The beauty industry in the UK is an unregulated 'wild west', with clinics not required to register or meet basic hygiene or safety standards. Ministers are currently preparing to regulate it, however, with plans now making their way through parliament. The NHS says the risks of getting fillers depend on whether the procedure was done correctly or what filler was used. Serious complications include: An infection; A lumpy appearance under the skin; Filler moving away from the intended treatment area; Scarring; Blocked blood vessels in the face, which can cause tissue death or blindness. Source: NHS Advertisement 'She doesn't want to remove it but I think I have no opption than to take the filler out.' Providing an update in the comment section, Ms Adsett: 'So before and after filler and today but now she tell me her legs and arms swollen she can't walk. 'She going to a nd e I've told her come in ive now asked what hospital she attending.' She shared screenshots of messages sent to the customer, where she said the swelling was 'completely normal'. But the customer later replied saying if she had taken this advice and done nothing she 'would be dead'. The client's response read: 'Hello... Now I'm feeling a little bit better I thought I'd give you a message. I've been treated for a blood clot from the lip filler which travelled to my lung. 'Obviously if I knew/was told I would ever have the risk off. A blood clot that could of killed me, I would never of had them done. 'Also with messaging you basically telling me the hospital couldn't do anything if I carried on listening to you it would of killed me.' It is not clear what triggered the reaction, or if the customer had an allergy. Incredibly, the beautician appears to still be using before-and-after images of the botched fillers as advertisement on her social media pages. Aesthetic campaign body Save Face has called for a crackdown on the 'unregulated' industry. A spokesperson for the body said: 'In recent years the number of people who have set themselves up as practitioners with little or no training has grown exponentially. 'It is clear from the number of people who take to social media forums to post questions about complications and adverse reactions that the vast majority of them have no idea what they are doing. 'Not only are these people breaching patient confidentiality and data protection laws by posting pictures and case histories on social media without consent, but it is abundantly clear that they are not competent to comprehend the difference between normal post treatment reactions and potentially serious complications. 'These forums perpetrate the issues that exist within this field of practice as there is an abundance of clueless lay people offering advice they are not qualified to give.' Ms Adsett has now deleted the posts on the Facebook group. She is pictured above Ms Adsett also appears to still be using pictures from the treatment for her advertising. Pictured above is an advert on her Facebook page (left) and an image of the swollen lips she posted on the Facebook group to illustrate her clients condition (right) Ms Adsett said she had not gone to the Facebook group for advice. But a search reveals two other queries she posted on the group in May and October last year The address for The Stable in Bodmin, Cornwall, listed on their website brings up this farm and caravan park, as pictured on Google Maps Despite the use of needles and the potential for serious complications, an aesthetic practitioner does not need any mandatory qualifications, meaning anyone can go on a basic training course and the be allowed to perform the treatments. Under the skin treatments such as Botox, dermal fillers and chemical peels remain largely unregulated, although the Care Quality Commission urges those considering altering their body to check the registration of their surgeon beforehand. Some dermal fillers and some implants used in cosmetic interventions as part of a 'professional service' in the UK are exempt from any product safety regulations. The UK Government announced earlier this month it is planning to crack down on rogue practitioners by making it an offence to perform non-surgical work like botox and fillers without a licence. The Stables does not publicly offer lip fillers on its website, although it advertises other treatments including teeth whitening and tattoo removal. It has not received any reviews online, but has been 'liked' on Facebook by 3,000 people. Responding to criticisms of the recent case, Ms Adsett said: 'When you're working in the industry you get people out there who try and do things to scam you and give you a bad reputation. 'I think it was an insurance scam because after everything she never gave me her doctor's paperwork, never wanted to have any contact, she just wanted her money back. 'She basically just wanted a refund of her money, she didn't actually have anything that was wrong.' England's postcode lottery for menopausal women seeking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has been laid bare today. NHS data seen by MailOnline shows how some areas of the country are four times as likely to prescribe the gels, patches, and pills than others. While 2.2 per cent of patients in Southport and Formby in Merseyside were given the drugs in 2020, the share was just 0.53 per cent in Leicester City. The disparity comes amid growing demand and ongoing shortages for HRT, which has led to desperate women turning to the black market. All of the top ranked HRT areas include rural and affluent areas like Gloucestershire, Dorset, Cornwall and Surrey. In contrast, low performers were typically in urban centres like London and Manchester. Clamour for HRT has surged in the past five years, which has been attributed to more awareness and fading stigma about the menopause. The latest NHS figures shows there were 3.2million prescriptions issued for HRT medications in 2020, up almost 40 per cent compared to four years prior. This surge in demand has outstripped supply, causing shortages of some of the most popular forms of the therapy - a problem made worse by the pandemic. This map reveals the top 10 best and worst areas in England for people to be prescribed hormone replacement therapy medications based on their entire population. Southport and Formby in Merseyside enjoyed the highest level in the country at 2.2 per cent whereas as Leicester City had the lowest at just 0.54 per cent WHAT IS THE MENOPAUSE? Menopause is when a woman stops having periods naturally and is no longer able to get pregnant naturally. It is a normal part of ageing and usually happens between the ages of 45 and 55 when a woman's levels of the sex hormone oestrogen drop. Eight in 10 women will experience menopausal symptoms including hot flushes, night sweats, vaginal dryness, difficulty sleeping, low mood or anxiety and problems with memory. Women are advised to see their GP if their symptoms are difficult to manage. Treatments doctors can provide include hormone replacement therapy, such as tablets, skin patches and gels that replace oestrogen. Source: NHS Advertisement Every year, roughly 1.5million women experience menopausal symptoms, including hot flushes, night sweats, anxiety, reduced sex drive, and memory problems that impact all areas of their lives. HRT can help alleviate these symptoms as women undergo the menopause but only a fraction actually get treatment. NHS prescription data from England's 106 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) shows that women in the country's commuter belts and popular retirement spots are the most likely to be prescribed HRT. Popular costal retirement areas like Dorset and Devon were HRT hotspots, recording prescription rates of 1.89 and 1.88 per cent, respectively. Meanwhile, North West London and North central London recorded rates of 0.76 and 0.87 per cent, respectively, meaning a total of three of the capital's CCG's featured in the bottom 10 in England. Responding to the data, Dr Haitham Hamoda, chair of the British Menopause Society, said the disparity in prescription rates could largely be due to demographic differences. 'Areas where more women over the age of 40 live are likely to have higher prescribing rates compared to areas with a younger demographic,' he said. However, he added that some women struggling with mesopause did experience artificial barriers to accessing HRT. 'We do know however that booking doctors appointments and paying for HRT can act as barriers to some women when it comes to accessing support,' he said. 'Thats why we support reduced costs and longer prescribing cycles for HRT.' In 2020, women in their 50s took the lion's share of HRT medications, accounting for 1.7million prescriptions, followed by women in their 40s with 600,000 prescriptions and women in their 60s with 500,000 prescriptions. The total cost of these prescriptions to the NHS was 45million. NHS England provided HRT prescription data based out of the entire area population, not just women. While data only covers 2020, the first year of the pandemic, ministers this month were forced to admit women continue to face a postcode lottery for HRT with some GPs unaware they can even prescribe the medications. Minister for patient safety and primary care, Maria Caulfield, told MPs from the Commons women and equalities committee that standards are a 'bit hit and miss', with patients in different parts of the country getting a 'very different service'. Supply chain issues and a shortage of key ingredients have led to the patients who do come forward for HRT struggling to get access. Some GPs are unaware of the shortages meaning they continue to prescribe HRT, only for their patients to go to their pharmacy and be told it is out of stock. Women are having to switch their HRT medication, sometimes causing the return of symptoms as the body gets used to the new drug. Hormone replacement therapy is a treatment that helps alleviate the symptoms of the menopause but women in England have experienced disparity in accessing it Current guidelines allow GPs to issue a year's worth of HRT on a single prescription, fuelling ongoing supply shortages that have led to a black market trade. Earlier this month it was revealed some menopausal women hit by the shortages were being charged up to 50 for a single bottle online or trading prescriptions with others on social media. A new system, to be implemented next year, would allow a woman to pay a one-off annual fee and collect the HRT each month without needing to see their GP. Some types of HRT slightly increase the risk of breast cancer and blood clots in some women, but the NHS says risks are small and are usually outweighed by the benefits. Recently, I went to hospital with chest discomfort but was discharged. I have to go back for a myocardial perfusion scan, for which Ill need to be injected with a small amount of radioactive tracer. Im 81 and in good health, but Im worried about this. Colin Buckley, Kings Lynn, Norfolk. It must have been a little confusing to have been reassured that all was OK enough for you to be discharged, only to need further investigations. The good news is that a heart attack has been ruled out. The other, much more common, cause of chest pain is angina, a cramp-like discomfort that occurs when the heart muscle is short of blood, usually on exertion, such as exercise. Its a sign of problems with blood flow in and around the heart which is what this scan looks for. Depending on the results, you may need further investigations specifically, a coronary arteriogram, which also involves injecting a fluid, visible on X-ray, via a catheter threaded into the heart [File photo] While the words radioactive tracer might sound alarming, this is a safe test and can do you no harm. The amount of tracer used is tiny, and there are no side-effects (some people can experience an allergic reaction, but this is rare). It is injected into a vein, usually in the arm, and is carried via circulation back to the heart, where its flow is checked using a special camera. This will be done while youre walking on a treadmill and again while resting. Depending on the results, you may need further investigations specifically, a coronary arteriogram, which also involves injecting a fluid, visible on X-ray, via a catheter threaded into the heart. This is used to help locate any major restriction of blood flow. A myocardial perfusion scan is a less major investigation and in my view it would be wise to have this done. I hope this allays your concerns. Almost 60 years ago, aged 13, I had a mastoid operation. Ever since, I have gone to hospital regularly to have my ear cleared of wax. Two years ago, I developed an infection that took a year to clear up, despite repeated treatment. Ive been told Ill probably keep developing infections in that ear, but have been discharged from the hospital. Christine Groom, Terrington St Clement, Norfolk. Thanks to antibiotics, the surgery you had as a child has become uncommon, so few doctors today will be familiar with patients who have undergone it or the long-term complications that frequently occur, as in your case. The condition this surgery treats is mastoiditis, a serious infection of the mastoid bone behind the ear. The bone has air spaces, like honeycomb, called mastoid air cells, which can become infected or inflamed as a complication of middle-ear infection. Patients used to need surgery to clear these cells, but this leaves a cavity in the bone where wax, water and dead skin cells can build up, creating the ideal conditions for bacteria to flourish and cause recurrent infections. The risk with mastoiditis is the infection penetrating through into the brain which can be life-threatening. More effective antibiotics from the late 1950s onwards resulted in fewer patients suffering from chronic mastoiditis. In your longer letter, you describe having chronic discharge from that ear, for which youve been given yet more antibiotics. But the key is prevention, keeping the mastoid cavity clean. This means protecting your ear from moisture, using a cotton wool ball coated in Vaseline when you shower or wash your hair. Always do your best to avoid shower water coming close to the ear. My view is that you should also be referred back to and remain under the care of an ear specialist for examination once or twice annually for life. Following a visit to my GP with an audible pulse in my ear and raised blood pressure, I was prescribed blood pressure tablets and statins. I have now been diagnosed with fibromuscular dysplasia and am waiting to see a specialist. Name and address supplied. This condition is thought to affect up to 3 per cent of the population, but still we know little about it. Fibromuscular dysplasia (FMD) affects the arteries, typically those supplying the kidneys and the brain, making them fibrous. They narrow and become less flexible, which can in turn lead to high blood pressure, so controlling this with medication can be helpful. It is not clear exactly what causes FMD, but some cases are genetic and it may be linked to hormones. In a minority of patients, one or two arteries are affected, but in 90 per cent of cases the condition affects many of the major arteries of the body. The sound of the pulse in your ear would be a result of the narrowing of a nearby artery, probably a branch of the main artery in the neck, causing turbulent flow and what we call bruit, the noise you can hear. Most GPs will not know about FMD. The best advice will come from a multi-disciplinary team including a vascular surgeon, a renal physician, a cardiologist, and possibly a neurosurgeon who can draw together the strands of care needed, as requirements will differ between patients. They narrow and become less flexible, which can in turn lead to high blood pressure, so controlling this with medication can be helpful. A Write to Dr Scurr Write to Dr Scurr at Good Health, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London, W8 5TT, or you can email him at drmartin@dailymail.co.uk include your contact details. Dr Scurr cannot enter into personal correspondence. Replies should be taken in a general context, and always consult your own GP with any health worries. A martial arts instructor has been left with half a skull after a sinus infection spread around her brain. Natasha Gunther, of San Francisco, was forced to have surgery to remove 5.5inches of bone (14cm) to stop a mass pressing against her brain. She claimed doctors told her she would be dead in a week without the surgery. The 25-year-old is now urging people not to write off their cold-like symptoms as just a mild infection, and to see a specialist if they do not get better. Ms Gunther's life-changing ordeal began in late 2021, when she wrote off her stuffy nose and blocked sinuses as just another infection. The judo black belt was used to regularly getting ill from working with children, who she teaches martial arts to. But she became concerned when her condition did not improve, despite being given antibiotics from her doctor. By December, Ms Gunther, who must now wear a helmet to protect her brain, was vomiting and suffering migraines, which prompted her family to pressure her to get a brain scan. It revealed a mass inside her skull, which forced doctors to cut out part of the bone on the right side of her head to relieve pressure on the brain. When she caught her sixth sinus infection in a year in late 2021 she thought nothing of it and got antibiotics to clear it. But it only got worse. When she went for scans, doctors discovered it had spread into her head. A section of her skull was removed (pictured after surgery) likely to relieve pressure on the brain which can be fatal Natasha Gunther, 25 (pictured before the operation), was used to regularly catching coughs and colds from working with children The removed 14cm (5.5inch) area of her skull is now in a freezer, and doctors are planning to try and put it back in next month. If this fails, they will insert a 3D-printed piece of metal to replace the bone Ms Gunther remained in hospital for five weeks after surgery and had to learn how to speak again. She will not be able to do some martial arts moves such as grappling where you grip or seize your opponent ever again. The removed bone is being stored in a freezer, and Ms Gunther hopes to undergo an operation to refit it to her skull next month. What is a sinus infection? What are the treatments? A sinus infection is when the small air sacs in bones around the nose become infected. It is usually triggered by a virus, but can in some cases be due to a bacteria. Symptoms include pain, swelling and tenderness around the cheeks, a blocked nose and a high temperature. They normally clear up on their own in about two to three weeks. In more serious cases where someone is not getting better doctors may prescribe antibiotics to help clear the infection. In rare cases, it can spread into the soft tissue around the eye, bones in the face and into or around the brain leaving someone needing urgent medical care. Source: NHS Advertisement Sinusitis the medical name for a sinus infection usually clears up on its own within two weeks. But if symptoms do not improve, doctors may prescribe antibiotics to help clear the infection. In rare cases, it can spread into the soft tissue around the eye, bones in the face and into or around the brain. The sinuses are small, air-filled cavities behind your cheekbones and forehead. It is unclear how the mass inside her skull formed from the infection. Ms Gunther posted about her infection on TikTok, alongside pictures showing herself before and after surgery. She revealed that she came down with her 'fifth or sixth' sinus infection late in 2021. Scans on December 12 revealed that the infection had spread to her brain. That same evening doctors rushed her for a craniotomy where a small area of the skull is removed and replaced so that doctors can check the infected area. But she was then booked in for a full craniectomy on December 23 to have the right side of her skull removed. This may be done to relieve pressure on the brain, which can press it onto the stem leading to permanent damage or death, or to remove pus-filled abscesses that build up due to infection. Ms Gunther said: 'I usually suffered from one sinus infection per year but last year, I got more that that. 'As most people who get sinus infections will know, you don't think anything of them and neither did my usual doctor. I teach martial arts to kids so I'm used to getting colds. 'Surgeons told me I would have been dead within a week if I hadn't gone to the hospital when I did. 'If you have more than one sinus infection per year or even just a sinus infection, please go to the hospital or the ENT [Ear, Nose and Throat Clinic in the US] just to be safe. Ms Gunther must now wear a helmet to protect her brain as part of the skull is missing. She has an operation next month to reinsert it Ms Gunther pictured above before the surgery on the beach Ms Adsett pictured before the surgery practicing a martial arts move in the mountains Ms Gunther pictured with her boyfriend Joao who is also a martial arts instructor 'Please just don't rely on your primary doctor [GP in the UK] because it could be serious.' Speaking about her life after the surgery, Ms Gunther said: 'My life is very different to what it used to be. 'I used to have a busy life teaching martial arts and hanging out friends every day like any person in their twenties. 'When I came out of surgery, I struggled to talk so I've been having regular speech therapy since then. 'My boyfriend Joao who is also a martial arts instructor has been doing a lot psychical therapy so I can get my energy back in my body. 'But there are some martial arts moves like grappling that will be too risky for me to every do again.' Advertisement The COVID-19 'stealth' variant is now the dominant strain in the United States, making up 55 percent of cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports. Despite the highly infectious nature of the variant, which is a lineage of the Omicron variant, case and death total in America remain near pandemic lows. The agency revealed data Tuesday as part of its weekly Nowcast surveillance. The Omicron variant as a whole still remains the dominant strain in the U.S., but BA.2 has overtaken the BA.1 lineage that caused massive worldwide virus surges around the new year. The 'stealth' variant, which earned the moniker from its ability to avoid detection through some sequencing methods, is believed to be the most infectious version of Covid yet - but is just as mild as BA.1. BA.2's share of Covid infections in America is growing with the variant only accounting for 35 percent of cases in last week's report. In the prior weeks it made up less than one out of every four cases. The U.S. also reached another grim pandemic milestone on Tuesday, as Johns Hopkins reports that America has suffered 80 million total Covid cases since the pandemic began just over two years ago. FDA approves fourth shot of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for over 50s The FDA has authorized fourth doses of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for all Americans 50 and older, the companies announced Immunocompromised Americans 12 and older will be eligible for the fourth shot as well, under the new authorization The FDA chose not to let an outside panel of experts discuss the shot's approval this time, and not all experts agree that a fourth dose is needed Immunocompromised adults over the age of 12 can also now receive an additional Pfizer dose, and those 18 and older are eligible for Moderna's fourth shot. The second booster is to be distributed four months after the first. Americans 12 and older with particularly weak immune systems because of a serious condition are now eligible for a fifth shot, four months after the previous, the agency also decided. Advertisement The variant's rise has not caused the jump in Covid cases in the U.S. that occurred in many European countries, though. Case numbers in the U.S. have stabilized after sharply increasing, then decreasing, to start 2022. America is currently averaging 31,222 cases per day, staying flat from last week. Current case figures are at one of the lowest points since the pandemic first began in March 2020. Deaths are plummeting, down nearly 30 percent over the past week to 776 per day. Tuesday marks the first day daily deaths have dropped below 800 per day since the Omicron variant landed in America in early-December. This is also the lowest daily death figures have reached since August. Amid falling figures, the U.S. is making two major moves this weekend that further signal the country's attempt to move of from the pandemic. On Tuesday, the final military deployments to hospitals around the country to assist with surges of Covid patients will come to an end, as declining cases, a high vaccination rate and the more mild nature of the Omicron variant leaves little risk of health care facilities suffering another overwhelming sure of patients. In total, around 5,000 troops have been deployed to 49 states since the pandemic started, and barring a major shift, there will not be any more sent out. Reimbursement for uninsured COVID-19 patients that receive hospital treatment is set to come to an end as well, as the White House has failed to secure funding for the initiative as many Republican federal lawmakers push past the pandemic. While some are worried about the latter, and that it could hurt America's ability to test for and treat Covid patients, both moves signal a large push at the federal level to return to 'normal'. Throughout the pandemic, around 5,000 troops have been deployed to assist struggling hospitals. That initiative will end on Tuesday - barring another surge of the virus - when the last of the deployments come to an end. Pictured: A soldier assists a Covid testing site in Brooklyn, New York The last remaining federal regulations related to the pandemic could be on the way out as well. Despite falling case figures, the CDC still requires Americans to wear masks on public forms of transportation like planes and trains. Dr Scott Gottlieb, former director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and current board member at Pfizer, told CNBC's Squawk Box on Monday that he expects the agency to let the mask mandates lapse next month. 'If we're not in thick of another wave of BA.2 infection in the middle of April, I think they will go ahead and lift that,' Gottlieb said. 'I think the uncertainty around that is we are starting to see infections start to creep up. If it kind of levels off in the next couple of weeks, which it may, I think the administration will go ahead and lift that.' Fears of the new variant, which caused case increases across Europe earlier this month before quickly receding again, has spurred health officials to approve another jab of the COVID-19 vaccine. On Tuesday, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that the fourth dose of its COVID-19 vaccine had been authorized by regulators for all Americans 50 and older, and for the immunocompromised aged 12 and up. Moderna's shot also received authorization. Not all experts believe the shot is necessary. Dr Anna Durbin is an international public health expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and has been a critic of Pfizer, Moderna and the White House's insistence to roll out COVID-19 booster shots before they are needed. Last week, she told ABC that she does not believe many Americans will benefit from additional shots. 'There are very few, if any, people who, in my opinion require a fourth dose,' she said. In August, when the White House was laying out plans to roll out the first batch COVID-19 booster shots, Durbin was also a critic, telling DailyMail.com that there was little science backing up the decision. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said last week that he expects the U.S. to suffer a BA.2-fueled surge sometime soon, though, and that his company's vaccine will be needed to control it. 'Already several countries around the world have some of the 4th dose testing in people at high risk,' Bancel told CNBC's Squawk Box. 'There's a big wave of BA.2 variant in Europe right now, as many public health experts have said this should start in the U.S. very soon.' A growing list of experts are saying the exact opposite, though. 'I would not be surprised at all, if we do see somewhat of an uptick,' Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert and someone who has frequently been among the more cautious voices during the pandemic, said at a Washington Post event this week. 'I don't really see, unless something changes dramatically, that there would be a major surge.' While the stealth variant has failed to make a major impact yet on case numbers, data from overseas - referenced by Bancel - is cause for some concern. Some countries that had experienced declining cases for months, like the UK, France and Denmark, suddenly saw infection rates start to surge last week. Cases seem to have stabilized in these nations and the growth has stopped for now, though. Internationally, the World Health Organization reports that there were over 12 million Covid cases globally last week, a seven percent jump from the previous week. An updated report from the agency is expected on Tuesday afternoon. A 'game-changing' antibiotic could save millions of lives lost to superbugs worldwide each year, a study suggests. In a breakthrough, British scientists have developed synthetic versions of the compound teixobactin the first new antibiotic discovered in decades. The man-made drugs were able to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria in mice without harming healthy tissue in research led by the University of Liverpool. Teixobactin was originally discovered in 2015 after being extracted from a field in Maine in the US, in what was hailed as a watershed moment in the growing fight against antibiotic-resistant superbugs. But its roll out has been held back because the natural compound is expensive and difficult to produce. The team in Liverpool were able to reproduce teixobactin synthetically, keeping the same superbug-busting properties of the original while costing 2,000 time less. It successfully eradicated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus a superbug known as MRSA, which is resistant to several widely used antibiotics in mice. The researchers were also able to destroy a wide range of microbes taken from human patients. They hope the drug will in the future be used as a 'last line of defence' against drug-resistant superbugs, estimated to kill or contribute to nearly 7million deaths a year. A graphic of Staphylococcus aureus a drug resistant superbug that could once again become easily treatable through a new version of the antibiotic teixobactin created by UK scientists What is teixobactin? Teixobactin is a molecule produced by a type of bacterium which lives in soil. Where did it come from? A bacterium, called Eleftheria terrae was discovered in 2015 in a soil sample collected in Maine in the US using a new technique to isolate specific species of bacteria from dirt. It was found to produce an antibiotic, later named teixobactin which effective against drug-resistant bacteria. Many bacteria naturally make antibiotics to keep themselves safe and kill competitors for food and space. How does it teixobactin work? The molecule binds to two kinds of fat (called lipids) found in the cell walls of bacteria and effectively killing it. This is different from many other kinds of antibiotics which disrupt protein replication in bacteria. It is thought teixobactin's method of killing bacteria will be harder for microbes to evolve a defence against. Why it is important? Teixobactin is the most promising new antibiotic found in decades. Some types of bacteria have evolved to become resistant to existing drugs. These so called superbugs are more difficult to treat and can be deadly. A report published this year found superbugs killed 1.2million in 2019, more than AIDS or malaria. Advertisement Superbugs are bacteria that have evolved a resistance to antibiotics due to the drugs being overprescribed or incorrectly used, a phenomena called antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The rise of superbugs has stoked fears from scientists that we are approaching a post-antibiotic era where common conditions and medical operations become more dangerous as patients succumb to previously treatable bacterial infections. But scientists involved in the latest study say patients in the future may be treated with just one dose of teixobactin per day for systemic life-threatening resistant bacterial infections. Synthetic teixobactin can also be kept at room temperature, making global distribution easier by eliminating the need for expensive refrigerated storage and transport, the researchers said. Those leading the project, which was delivered in association with the University of Lincoln, hope the results may pave the way for the drug to be produced cheaply on a large scale. Further tests are needed on scaling up the production before safety tests for use in people can be run. Lead researcher Dr Ishwar Singh, an expert in antimicrobial drugs at Liverpool University, said the breakthrough was a significant step towards unlocking the full medical potential of teixobactin to tackle superbugs. 'Our ultimate goal is to have a number of viable drugs from our modular synthetic teixobactin platform which can be used as a "last line of defence" against superbugs to save lives currently lost due to AMR,' he said. He said the team hoped to eventually get synthetic teixobactin ready for safety testing on humans, which, if successful, could lead to a drug being developed to treat drug resistant bacterial infections worldwide. Dr Phil Packer, from Innovate UK, the agency which delivered the latest project, said the results had been 'excellent'. 'We are delighted with results, which have validated synthetic teixobactin's promise to tackle resistant bacterial infections when currently used antibiotics fails. We look forward to following this journey closely in future,' he said. This graph shows the combined direct and associated deaths from antibiotic-resistant bacteria per global region measured in the new research. Africa and South Asia had the greatest number of deaths per 100,000 people, however Western European countries like, the UK, still recorded a significantly high number of fatalities This graph shows the 23 antimicrobial resistance pathogens included in the study and the number of deaths attributed to each of them in 2019. Just six of these were directly responsible for 900,000 deaths and contributed to 3.5million more. Health Secretary Sajid Javid said: 'It is fantastic to see such innovative work like this happening in the UK - another clear example of this country being at the forefront of scientific advancements which can benefit people across the world.' An AMR review commissioned by the UK Government has predicted that an extra 10million people will succumb to drug-resistant infections each year by 2050. Covid is also thought to be speeding up the global threat of antimicrobial resistance through the inappropriate use of antibiotics which do not work against viruses. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized second booster shots, and fourth shots overall, of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for Americans 50 and older, the companies announced Tuesday morning. Immunocompromised adults over the age of 12 can also now receive an additional Pfizer dose, and those 18 and older are eligible for Moderna's fourth shot. The second booster is to be distributed four months after the first. Americans 12 and older with particularly weak immune systems because of a serious condition are now eligible for a fifth shot, four months after the previous, the agency also decided. Pfizer had asked the FDA to clear a fourth shot for people 65 and older, while Moderna requested another dose for all adults 'to provide flexibility' for the government to decide who really needs one. The FDA approval comes as uptake for the additional shots in the U.S. wanes and both Covid cases and deaths reach the lowest points since well before the Omicron-fueled winter virus surge. Fourth doses of both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine shots were approved by the FDA on Tuesday for Americans 50 and older, and those who are immunocompromised as young as 12 for the Pfizer jab, and 18 for the Moderna jab (file photo) Pfizer is expected to raise over $30 billion in revenue from its COVID-19 vaccine this year, and CEO Albert Bourla (left) has said these shots will be needed for potentially the next ten years. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel (right) said that the fourth shots will be needed to prevent an upcoming surge of the 'stealth' variant, though others have disagreed that another large Covid wave is around the corner Moderna and Pfizer have often submitted an abundance of data to regulators to 'provide flexibility' and also to get an early jump of issues that may arise in the approval process. What Moderna did for this shot, and what both companies did for the first booster dose, is submit a flexible application that can be approved over time. While those 50 and older were approved Tuesday, it is likely that will be expanded to 18 and over once regulators feel that protection provided by the initial booster dose has waned. Both companies went through this process for the first booster dose as well, with it first approved for Americans 65 and older, and then the age was slowly lowered until it reached 18 and older at the start of the Omicron surge. Americans under the age of 50 can still receive the shot off label at certain health clinics because it has now received FDA authorization, though they would need to convince a doctor or vaccine provider to distribute it to them. There's limited evidence to tell how much benefit another booster could offer right now. FDA made the decision without input from its independent panel of experts that has wrestled with how much data is required to expand shots and not all experts believe the shot is necessary. Dr Anna Durbin is an international public health expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and has been a critic of Pfizer, Moderna and the White House's insistence to roll out COVID-19 booster shots before they are needed. Last week, she told ABC that she does not believe many Americans will benefit from additional shots. For now, both shots are only available on-label to Americans over the age of 50, but that authorization will likely be extended when regulators see fit. Moderna has already applied for all adults 18 and over to get the fourth jab. Pictured: A man in Hines, Illinois, receives a shot of a COVID-19 vaccine The FDA chose not to use an outside panel of experts in the approval process for these shots, and some experts disagree that the fourth jabs are needed at this point (file photo) 'There are very few, if any, people who, in my opinion require a fourth dose,' she said. In August, when the White House was laying out plans to roll out the first batch COVID-19 booster shots, Durbin was also a critic, telling DailyMail.com that there was little science backing up the decision. 'In general, it's too early to recommend a fourth dose, except for those who are immune compromised,' Dr Paul Goepfert, professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told ABC. The next shot is being rolled out earlier than expected out of fear of the BA.s 'stealth' variant, a lineage of Omicron. The 'stealth' variant, which earned the moniker from its ability to avoid detection through some sequencing methods, is believed to be the most infectious version of Covid yet - but is just as mild as the BA.1 version of Omicron that took over the world last last year. It is now the dominant strain in the U.S., the Centers for Disease for Prevention (CDC) reported on Tuesday, making up 55 percent of active cases in the country. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said last week that he expects the U.S. to suffer a BA.2-fueled surge sometime soon, though, and that his company's vaccine will be needed to control it. 'Already several countries around the world have some of the 4th dose testing in people at high risk,' Bancel told CNBC's Squawk Box. 'There's a big wave of BA.2 variant in Europe right now, as many public health experts have said this should start in the U.S. very soon.' A growing list of experts are saying the exact opposite, though. 'I would not be surprised at all, if we do see somewhat of an uptick,' Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert and someone who has frequently been among the more cautious voices during the pandemic, said at a Washington Post event last week. 'I don't really see, unless something changes dramatically, that there would be a major surge.' Fauci, Bancel and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla have been among those saying an additional dose was on the way for months, with Bourla even saying annual jabs will be needed for the next decade to control the pandemic. While the shots have been deemed safe and effective by health officials around the world, and have likely saved millions of lives over the past year, Pfizer and Moderna's goals in the vaccine rollout are not exactly humanitarian. The companies have each made billions off of the sales of vaccines to the U.S. and other nations around the world. Pfizer, its partner BioNTech, and Moderna estimate a combined $50 billion in COVID-19 vaccine sales this year. As the nation begins to purchase even more vaccine doses, these revenue targets may increase even more. A rule in Oregon that allowed only the state's residents to receive an assisted suicide has been lifted after courts deemed it unconstitutional. In a settlement filed in U.S. District Court in Portland on Monday, the Oregon Health Authority and the Oregon Medical Board agreed to stop enforcing the residency requirement. Eight other states and the Washington D.C. have similar requirements for assisted suicide, and advocates for lifting these laws hope the Oregon decision will set a precedent to have those removed as well. Opponents of assisted suicide fear that the lifting will turn the state into a site for 'suicide tourism'. A law that barred out-of-state Oregon residents from receiving an assisted suicide has been lifted by courts after it was deemed unconstitutional (file photo) 'This requirement was both discriminatory and profoundly unfair to dying patients at the most critical time of their life,' said Kevin Diaz, an attorney with Compassion & Choices, the national advocacy group that sued over Oregon's requirement. Oregon became the first state to enact legalized assisted suicide laws in 1997. Some 2,159 people have died after ingesting terminal drugs under the law since it took effect, according to data published last month by the Oregon Health Authority. Patients must make two verbal requests to their doctor for the medication, at least 15 days apart, as well as a written request signed in the presence of two witnesses. Dr Nicholas Gideonse (pictured) who runs a family clinic in Portland says the restrictions hurts people in southern Washington who need access to assisted suicide but can not because of the cross-state rules The attending physician and a consulting physician must confirm the patient's diagnosis and prognosis, and determine whether the patient is capable of making health care decisions; if either doctor believes the patient to be suffering from depression or another mental disorder, they can refer the patient for a psychological exam. Laura Echevarria, a spokeswoman for National Right to Life, which opposes such laws, warned that without a residency requirement, Oregon risked becoming the nation's 'assisted suicide tourism capital.' 'There's no tourism going on,' Diaz replied. Diaz said that was unlikely suicide tourism would occur given the safeguards in the law. Compassion & Choices sued on behalf of Dr Nicholas Gideonse, a Portland family practice physician and associate professor of family medicine at Oregon Health and Science University. A longtime supporter of medical aid-in-dying laws, Gideonse had been unable to write terminal prescriptions for patients who live just across the Columbia River in Washington state. While Washington allows for assisted suicides as well, providers can be difficult to find in the southwestern part of the state, where many hospital beds are in religiously affiliated health care facilities that prohibit it. Advocates for the court's decision hope that other states with similar laws will now have to remove these requirements as well, opening assisted suicides to more Americans. Critics say that the decision opens the state to 'suicide tourism' (file photo) Requiring his patients to find other doctors to provide assistance in ending their own lives can compound their suffering, Gideonse said. 'Any restriction on medical aid in dying that doesn't serve a specific medical purpose is difficult,' Gideonse told the AP. 'In no other way is my practice restricted to Oregon residents, whether thats delivering babies in the past or other care that I provide.' The lawsuit argued that the residency requirement violated the U.S. Constitutions Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the right to regulate interstate commerce, and the Privileges and Immunities Clause, which forbids states from discriminating against citizens from other states in favor of its own citizens. The Oregon Health Authority and the medical board declined to comment on why they settled the case. The state attorney general's office did not immediately respond to an interview request. Oregon is one of nine states, and the District of Columbia, that allow for assisted suicide, and is the first to lift its state residency requirement National Right to Life, which most prominently takes part in anti-abortion advocacy, is concerned that people might be able to travel to Oregon without having much of a relationship with a doctor in the state, thus chipping away at guardrails limiting the use of the law, Echevarria said. 'The hope is that doctors will continue to evaluate patients, but it certainly creates a situation where there could be more abuse of that law,' she said. California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont, Washington state and Washington, D.C., have approved similar laws, all with residency requirements. Montana's Supreme Court has ruled that state law does not prohibit medical aid in dying. ProCon reports that 4,249 prescriptions for assisted death have been written in the U.S. from 1998 to 2017. Two-thirds of patients who went through with the process used drugs to end their lives. Cancer patients were most likely to choose that path, accounting for 63 percent of prescriptions. Recipients of assisted suicide were also overwhelmingly white, making up a whopping 94 percent of the group over the 20 year period. U.S. President Joe Biden speaks outside the Royal Castle, Poland, about the Russian war in Ukraine, March 26. AFP-Yonhap President Joe Biden said Monday that he would make ''no apologies'' and wasn't ''walking anything back'' after his weekend comment that Russian President Vladimir Putin ''cannot remain in power,'' attempting to turn the page on a controversy that clouded his recent trip to Europe. The president also insisted he's not calling for regime change in Moscow, which would have represented a dramatic shift toward direct confrontation with another nuclear-armed country. ''I was expressing the moral outrage that I felt toward this man,'' Biden said. ''I wasn't articulating a policy change.'' The president's jarring remark about Putin, which came at the end of a Saturday speech in Warsaw that was intended to rally democracies for a long global struggle against autocracy, drew criticism in the United States and rattled some allies in Western Europe. On Monday, Biden rejected the idea that his comment could escalate tensions over the war in Ukraine or that it would fuel Russian propaganda about Western aggression. ''Nobody believes ... I was talking about taking down Putin,'' Biden said, adding that ''the last thing I want to do is engage in a land war or a nuclear war with Russia.'' He said he was expressing an ''aspiration'' rather than a goal of American foreign policy. ''People like this shouldn't be ruling countries. But they do,'' he said. ''The fact they do doesn't mean I can't express my outrage about it.'' Biden's remark in Warsaw ricocheted around the globe despite the White House's swift attempts to clarify that the president only meant that Putin ''cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region.'' On Monday, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres responded to Biden's speech by saying that ''we need de-escalation. We need military de-escalation and rhetoric de-escalation.'' A Kansas City-area medical director was fired from his job after urging his bosses to hire more staff to quell shortages, and is now accusing them of valuing profit over patient care. Dr Ray Brovont served as medical director at Overland Park Regional Medical Center in Overland, Kansas, just near the Missouri border, and previously was a doctor in the Army. He told NBC this week that he was fired after nudging executives and other leadership to make crucial changes that would elevate patient care and help stressed and burnt out employees. Other doctors and nurses say these are frequent occurrences in the industry, and blame private-equity owned staffing firms for valuing profits over all else in the health care industry. Dr Ray Brovont (pictured) served as a former medical director of Overland Park Regional Medical Center in Overland, Kansas. He claims that hospital leadership values profits over patient care and left the ER critically understaffed Brovont told NBC that the emergency room (ER) staff shortages were the most critical, as hospital leadership wanted to continue expanding the unit without adding the necessary staff. 'These administrators who make these changes and implement these policies don't feel the downstream effects of their policy changes,' Brovont said. 'They look at the outcome, and the outcome is 'Hey, we're making money.' The hospital Brovont worked at is owned by HCA, a for-profit healthcare system based in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2014, HCA decided to double its size to 343 beds, adding a pediatric emergency room as well. The former medical director reports that his staff was being asked to be in 'three places at once' as they juggled multiple crises. Patients in the ER, by definition, need the most urgent care as they are often arriving in a dire situation. Brovont said that at times when a doctor would answer a 'code blue' situation - when a patient's heart stopped beating or their breathing stopped - they would leave an ER patient unattended, which breaks standard safety protocols. Brovot (pictured) was awarded $29 million in a wrongful discharge lawsuit, which was later appealed to $26 million, after he was terminated in 2017 In 2015, Brovont reached a breaking point, believing the hospital's expansion exacerbated what was already a dire situation. He took up the issue with EmCare, the health staffing company that worked with the hospital. It is owned by Dubilier & Rice, a private equity firm. Hiring one additional doctor would solve the issue, Brovont believed, as it would allow for their to be at least one doctor on hand to examine incoming ER patients and comply with federal guidelines. He tells NBC that Dr Patrick McHugh, an EmCare employee who was served as his boss and his now no longer with the company, that his request could not be met for financial reasons, and that 'profits are in everyone's best interest.' In late 2016, he wrote a memo to management once again highlighting his fears, and was fired in January 2017. Overland Park Regional Medical Center (pictured) is owned by HCA, a for-profit healthcare company. It partners with EmCare, which has the parent company Envision, for its staffing needs 'Envision clinicians, like all clinicians, exercise their independent judgment to provide quality, compassionate, clinically appropriate care based on their patients' unique needs,' Envision, the parent company to EmCare, said in a statement on the matter. 'The concern raised by Dr. Brovont was related to a hospital policy, not an Envision policy, and predates Envision's current leadership team.' Brovont would file a lawsuit for a wrongful discharge and be awarded $29 million by a jury, which was later reduced to $26 million on appeal. Envision's emergency medicine group operates with with than 540 facilities across the country, the company told NBC. Staffing shortages at hospitals, nursing homes, and other similar facilities has been a longtime problem in the U.S. A shortage of available workers due to the high barrier for entry, combined with low pay in some areas mixed with private equity firms and other for profit enterprises involving themselves in the industry has created a recipe for disaster. While Brovont's story began long before Covid, the pandemic has only made things worse. Long hours in grim conditions - where witnessing dozens of patients dying daily became commonplace in some major areas - have led to many workers leaving in droves, further exacerbating what was already an issue. Sportswear business Decathlon has suspended its activities in Russia after public outrage. The French company faced a barrage of criticism for staying in the country, including from the Ukraine foreign minister and social media users who called for a boycott of the retailer. Decathlon, which has 60 stores in Russia, said it would continue to support its 2,500 staff there. Shoppers leave a Decathlon store in Moscow today. Decathlon faced a barrage of criticism for staying in the Russia, including from the Ukraine foreign minister who called for a boycott of the retailer A company spokesman said: 'In the dramatic context of Ukraine, we are following the evolution of events and particularly the situation of those directly affected. In strict compliance with international sanctions, Decathlon notes that the supply conditions are no longer met to continue its activity in Russia.' Decathlon is owned by the French retail giant Association Familiale Mulliez, which has been under fire over the failure of its Auchan supermarket chain to pull out of Russia. More than ten million people are at risk of being left behind as the UK races towards a cashless society, a sobering report has found. Our 'dash from cash' at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic is now thought to be irreversible, with half of us using fewer coins and notes than we used to. But a comprehensive review of cash use in the UK, funded by ATM network Link and published by the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), warns of problems ahead. Cashing out: Britain's 'dash from cash' at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic is now thought to be irreversible - with half of people now using fewer coins and notes than they used to Its authors found millions of the most vulnerable people are at risk of spiralling into debt, becoming isolated from others or losing trust in the financial system altogether. While this month marked two years since Rishi Sunak pledged to introduce new laws to protect cash, few have materialised so far. The Chancellor's promise came a year after the authoritative Access to Cash Review called on the Government and regulators to step in 'urgently' to ensure cash remained 'viable'. Despite this, banks have closed more than 1,259 branches nationwide since 2020, according to the consumer group Which? Last Wednesday, Lloyds confirmed it would close a further 60 branches. This followed HSBC's announcement earlier this month that it plans to close 69 branches one in seven in its network. Which? data shows that while banks shut 369 branches in 2020, another 736 were axed in 2021 a 99 per cent increase and the second-highest number of branch closures in the past six years. With eight months remaining of 2022, 154 branches have already been shut, with another 244 set to close before the end of the year. Jenny Ross, Which? money editor, says: 'Accessing cash and face-to-face banking services is hugely important for millions of people so it's very alarming that bank branches are closing at such a rate.' The latest report found that nearly half of UK adults believe a cashless society would be 'problematic'. It estimates that 11.5 million people, a fifth of the population, would 'struggle to cope' without coins and notes. Meanwhile, just one fifth of UK adults were defined as 'cashless converts' holding a strong preference for card and contactless payments. The report authors wrote: 'While a cashless society would feel like progress for some, for millions it would lead to anxiety, economic exclusion, isolation, exploitation, debt, rising costs and major concerns over privacy, security and control.' In the early days of the pandemic, cash withdrawals plummeted by about half, amid fears that coronavirus could be transmitted via coins and notes. In the early days of the pandemic, cash withdrawals plummeted by around half what they had been, amid fears that coronavirus could be transmitted through coins and notes Research commissioned by the Bank of England would go on to prove that the risk of catching Covid-19 in this way was low. However, several major restaurant and cafe chains are still turning cash-paying customers away. French food chain Cote Brasserie says it is safer for its restaurants to only take card payments 'due to a reduction in local banking facilities'. The report also found that people in deprived areas still take out the most cash from ATMs. On average, cash withdrawals fell by 46 per cent in the south of England, while in two of the most deprived constituencies Liverpool Walton and Bradford South they dropped by just 16 per cent and 20 per cent respectively. The researchers also found that 15 million people use cash to budget. Link chief executive John Howells says: 'For those living on tight budgets, there is no better alternative to notes and coins and they are in no rush to turn to money management tools.' Industry-led schemes continue to offer some hope for those who use cash. Eight more 'banking hubs' shared by High Street branches are set to open, and payments service PayPoint is rolling out purchase-free cashback across more than 2,000 stores, allowing people to access cash from shops without buying anything. But the report continues to stress an 'urgent need to introduce legislation' to ensure cash access across the country. Cash payment options for essential government services, such as school dinners, council tax and utilities, were also called for in its recommendations. Report author Mark Hall, of the RSA, says: 'It's vital that the dash to digital doesn't disenfranchise anyone, especially with the cost-of-living crisis putting such strain on family finances.' A government spokesman says: 'We are committed to protecting access to cash across the UK. 'That's why we have consulted on plans for new laws to make sure people only need to travel a reasonable distance to pay in or take out cash, and have already legislated to enable shops to offer cashback to customers without them having to make a purchase.' f.parker@dailymail.co.uk Two men accused of plotting to kidnap the Michigan Democrat governor because of her tough Covid-19 policies and their broad disgust with government were 'excited' by videos of powerful explosives they watched just hours before scouting her vacation home, a court has heard. Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr, who have been described as leaders of the group's plans, later drove to Elk Rapids to look at Gretchen Whitmer's house on Birch Lake and inspect a nearby bridge, an FBI agent testified. Prosecutors say Fox especially wanted to blow up a bridge near the governor's second home in northern Michigan to thwart any police response to a kidnapping. Adam Fox (left) and Barry Croft Jr (right), who have been described as leaders of the group's plans, later drove to Elk Rapids to look at Gretchen Whitmer's house on Birch Lake In summer 2020, Tim Bates was working undercover as 'Red' when he fooled the group into believing that he knew someone in the mining industry who could get high-grade explosives. When the group returned form the scouting mission, Fox asked Bates if he would 'take an IOU' for the $4,000 explosive, according to a recording. Traveling in three vehicles, Bates yesterday said he, Fox, Croft and others drove to Elk Rapids to look at Whitmer's house on Birch Lake and inspect a nearby bridge 'to kidnap her'. Croft told the group that he 'needed to take a nap...to have energy' if they were going to abduct Whitmer that night, but that wasn't the plan, Bates said. Gretchen Whitmer (pictured in 2020), a Democrat, rarely talks publicly about the kidnapping plot, though she referred to 'surprises' during her term A bomb is a key part of the government's case against Fox, Croft, Daniel Harris (left) and Brandon Caserta (right), who are charged with conspiring to kidnap Whitmer A bomb is a key part of the government's case against Fox, Croft, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta, who are charged with conspiring to kidnap Whitmer. Bates, who was secretly recording conversations, said he showed up for a training weekend in Luther, Michigan, and shared videos of explosives blowing up an SUV. 'Mr Fox was excited about what he saw in the video,' he told the jury, adding that Croft 'was also excited.' Prosecutors said they could finish presenting evidence Tuesday, the 12th day of trial, or Wednesday at the latest. Defense attorneys deny there was an actual plan to snatch Whitmer, claiming the men were improperly influenced by undercover agents and informants, and exchanged wild talk while smoking marijuana. Fox's lawyer tried to downplay the stop at the bridge. Bates admitted that he encouraged Fox to take a picture of the underside of the structure while they were looking at it. Ty Garbin (right) and Kaleb Franks (left), two other men who were also arrested in October 2020, have pleaded guilty and were critical witnesses for the government last week Attorney Christopher Gibbons said to the agent: 'That's a public sidewalk. There's no "no trespassing" signs. Anybody can run up under that bridge, any time they want.' Croft's attorney Joshua Blanchard suggested the FBI wanted to strengthen the case against Fox by getting a bridge photo on his phone. 'Nobody ever actually gave you money, right? Blanchard asked Bates, referring to money for explosives. 'No one ever shook your hand and said, "You've got a deal."' 'Correct,' the agent replied. Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, two other men who were also arrested in October 2020, have pleaded guilty and were critical witnesses for the government last week. Garbin said Whitmer's kidnapping could ignite a US civil war involving antigovernment groups and possibly prevent Joe Biden from winning the presidential election. Fox talked about snatching the governor 'every time I saw him, ' Franks said. Separately, a lawyer for an informant said Steve Robeson would invoke his right to remain silent if called as a witness by the defense. Governor Whitmer with Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II turned in 30,000 nominating signatures to the state elections bureau to run for reelection this month Robeson's secret recordings were used by prosecutors, but he was not a trial witness for the government. He pleaded guilty last fall to a gun charge in a different case in Wisconsin. Whitmer, a Democrat, rarely talks publicly about the kidnapping plot, though she referred to 'surprises' during her term that seem like 'something out of fiction' when she filed for reelection on March 17. She has blamed former President Donald Trump for fomenting anger over coronavirus restrictions and refusing to condemn right-wing extremists like those charged in the case. Whitmer has said Trump was complicit in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Advertisement Prince Charles and Prince William will have been left 'disappointed and uneasy' after disgraced Prince Andrew accompanied the Queen at the memorial service for his late father Prince Philip, a royal expert said today. The Duke of York travelled from Windsor Castle to Westminster Abbey with his mother the Queen via Buckingham Palace this morning, before accompanying her down the aisle and then going back to Windsor together. Royal commentators said the surprise move was the 95-year-old monarch's way of 'very clearly stating that he has a role at family occasions' and that 'many people will now accept the Queen's word and judgment'. The Duke of York had a front row seat at the service, sitting close to his other siblings, with his daughters Princess Eugenie and Princess also in attendance but there was no sign of his ex-wife Sarah, Duchess of York. The Queen's decision to have Andrew accompany her comes despite him paying up to 12million earlier this month to settle a US civil sexual assault case and it will be seen as a major signal of support to her second son. But royal expert Angela Levin told MailOnline of William and Charles: 'They would have been very disappointed and uneasy about Andrew's presence but they would have known that this was the Queen's decision. I'm sure they were probably thinking something very different inside but Charles and William have always known that the Queen has a soft spot for Andrew and if she wants her favourite son with her, she would be entitled to do that. 'It was one of those moments when the Queen exercised her position both as a mother and the Queen. She obviously needed someone to help her on that small walk, but I noticed that when she got up to leave at the end of the service, Prince Charles got up too, as if to help her. But she ignored him and wanted Andrew to take her out instead. She turned to him, not Charles.' The Queen's state limousine arrived at the Poets' Yard entrance of the Abbey with Andrew sat beside her at around 11.30am this morning. As they walked through the famous Poets' Corner towards her seat in the abbey, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. The monarch and her son walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. After the first hymn, Prince Charles could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen who was seated next to him. After the service, the Queen was again escorted out of the Abbey by Andrew. As the monarch stopped to greet Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award holder Doyin Sonibare, Andrew stood back and at one point broke into a smile. The Queen held onto Andrew's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right at Westminster Abbey today The Queen walks towards her seat at Westminster Abbey after being accompanied down by the aisle by Prince Andrew today The Queen goes to take her seat as Andrew goes towards his for the service at Westminster Abbey this morning The Queen is accompanied by Prince Andrew as she walks down the aisle at Westminster Abbey for the service this morning Prince Andrew takes his seat after walking the Queen down the aisle at Westminster Abbey for Philip's service this morning The Queen is pictured on the left, and Prince Andrew on the right during the service of thanksgiving for Prince Philip today The Queen and Prince Andrew both sit on the front row at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service this morning The Queen and Prince Andrew walked through the famous Poets' Corner towards her seat at Westminster Abbey today Ms Levin added: 'There's no doubt that this whole thing would have left Charles and William disappointed and uneasy. I'm not sure if they would have been angry because even they would have realised that there would not be much point in that. Charles in particular feels that he's done enough for Andrew and he will not play any part in the Royal family once Charles takes over. I imagine that William feels exactly the same. 'Both Charles and William were very determined that Andrew had to step down and not play any role in the Royal Family in a professional way. They now expect him to disappear and the two of them will make sure of that. I don't think either Charles or William played any part in the decision to have Andrew present at the service. The Queen was determined that he would be there and made up her mind about it a long time ago. 'She (the Queen) was very involved in the service and what it would entail. The Queen does not make quick decisions, she thought about this very carefully and was determined to have Andrew there. I don't think there would have been much of a discussion about Andrew's presence because at the end of the day, she's still the Queen. Charles and William wouldn't have had to make their views clear about him being there because they have spent a lot of time talking about Andrew and the Queen knows how they feel about him. Even if they had protested to the Queen, they would have soon been quietened.' And she added: 'I'm sorry but Andrew's presence did detract from the service. I was very shocked to see him there, accompanying the Queen. Having someone who is accused of sexual abuse, even though he was not charged with anything, being given such a prominent role in the service is bound to be a detraction. 'At the end of the day, the Queen took a decision that the love she feels for Andrew is more important than anything else or trying to please the public. That's her right. This was a mother who lost her husband after 70 years and wanted her favourite son to be there by her side.' Andrew, 62, who has been keeping a low profile since the end of 2019, is said to have been determined to honour his late father the Duke of Edinburgh despite fears his presence could dominate coverage of the event. Ex-BBC royal correspondent Peter Hunt said: 'It didn't happen by chance. He could have sat in the congregation with others, with his relatives, but they actively decided that he would have this role of supporting her. So she has chosen, in essence, to remind people that he hasn't admitted any wrongdoing, he's not guilty of anything, he's innocent. And she's very clearly stating that he has a role at family occasions.' But he also said that the downside of Andrew having had such a prominent role in his father's memorial service is that it is a reminder of his 'many errors of judgment that have led him to being removed from public life'. Mr Hunt added: 'It's one thing to accept that he should attend his father's memorial service. It's quite another thing to then give him quite a prominent role, so it was an active choice to give him such a prominent role.' The Queen is aided by Prince Andrew today as they attend the thanksgiving service for the Duke of Edinburgh in London Andrew watches as his mother the Queen gets into a car following the service at Westminster Abbey today The Queen and Prince Andrew leave after attending a service of thanksgiving for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey Prince Andrew leaves after attending a service of thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today The Queen and Prince Andrew leave by car after attending the service of thanksgiving for Prince Philip today Prince Andrew is seen arriving back at Windsor Castle this afternoon with the Queen following today's service Mr Hunt said he found it 'fascinating', and said: 'Did William and Charles try to intervene? And clearly if they did then they failed.' He added: 'I think you have to start from the basis that Charles and William will have been in the driving seat with the Queen of removing Andrew from public life. Both of them will have been very aware of the risks of Andrew having this role. So either they decided that they could justify it on the basis that it was an event for his father, or they did try to suggest this wasn't a good idea and the Queen chose not to listen to them. Duke of York in profile: From Falklands War hero to controversial royal who settled sex case for 12million Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of York arriving to attend a church service in Hillington, Norfolk, on January 19, 2020 During the Duke of York's life, the 'Playboy Prince' has earned high regard for his bravery during the Falklands War and served as a trade envoy, but he is best known as the man whose reputation was left in tatters amid the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal. As a young man, he was one of the world's most eligible bachelors and earned himself the nickname 'Randy Andy' after being linked to a string of beautiful women. But later in life his connections with controversial foreign figures raised concerns and he was dubbed 'Air Miles Andy' after being criticised for his globe-trotting, especially helicopter trips to pursue his passion for golf. At 22, Andrew saw active service in the Royal Navy as a Sea King helicopter pilot in the Falklands War. His service included flying his aircraft as a decoy target, trying to divert deadly Exocet missiles away from British ships. He later married and divorced the bubbly, flame-haired Sarah 'Fergie' Ferguson, who herself has generated some of the most humiliating royal scandals of modern times. When a bachelor for a second time, Andrew again made headlines, having been spotted cavorting with topless women on holiday in Thailand, and attending a 'hookers and pimps' party with Robert Maxwell's daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, in the US. After serving for 22 years in the Royal Navy, the duke became the UK's special representative for international trade and investment, but his 10 years in the role generated a great deal of controversy. As a roving ambassador, one of his first tasks was a post-September 11 trip to New York, but he was criticised for attending a party during his stay. Andrew has faced questions over his connections to politicians in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tunisia, Libya and Turkmenistan. His judgment was questioned after he held meetings with Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's son Saif, and when he entertained the son-in-law of Tunisia's ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali at Buckingham Palace. His relations with Timur Kulibayev, son-in-law of the then-president of Kazakhstan, were also scrutinised after Mr Kulibayev purchased the duke's Sunninghill Park home for 3 million more than its 12 million asking price in 2007. Simon Wilson, Britain's deputy head of mission in Bahrain from 2001 to 2005, wrote in the Daily Mail that the duke was 'more commonly known among the British diplomatic community in the Gulf as HBH: His Buffoon Highness'. In 2011, it emerged that Andrew was friends with American financier Epstein, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2008 for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Photos surfaced of him with his arm around Virginia Giuffre, also known as Virginia Roberts, who claimed that Epstein employed her as a masseuse but exploited her while a teenage minor. The duke was also pictured walking in New York's Central Park with Epstein in December 2010, a year after Epstein's release from prison, and this led him to quit his role as a trade envoy. In 2013, Andrew was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, but Britain's pre-eminent scientific institution faced unprecedented dissent from members over the move, with one professor describing the duke as an 'unsavoury character'. Tech-savvy Andrew, who was the first member of the royal family to have an official Twitter account under his own name, focused on his Pitch@Palace work, bringing together industry experts with young entrepreneurs and technology start-ups. Then in 2015, while enjoying a New Year skiing holiday with his family, he was named in US court documents as having had sex a number of times with a teenage girl, a minor under US law. The woman alleged she was 'procured' for the duke by Epstein, whom she accused of using her as a 'sex slave'. She was identified in reports as Giuffre, the US teenager with whom Andrew had been pictured. The duke vehemently denied the allegation. In April 2015, a US federal judge ordered the claims to be struck from civil court records as the long-running lawsuit against Epstein continued. But Andrew's association with Epstein hit the headlines once again in 2019, amid ongoing investigations into the American, who killed himself in prison in August that year while awaiting trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. The duke's appearance on the BBC's Newsnight programme later in November was intended to draw a line under the matter. But it was dubbed a 'car crash', with commentators questioning his responses and condemning his unsympathetic tone and lack of remorse over his friendship with the sex offender Epstein. During the interview, Andrew denied that he slept with Ms Giuffre, saying one encounter in 2001 did not happen as he had spent the day with his daughter, Princess Beatrice, taking her to Pizza Express in Woking for a party. The same alleged sexual liaison, which the American said began with the royal sweating heavily as they danced at London nightclub Tramp, was later branded factually wrong as the duke said he had a medical condition at the time which meant he did not sweat. And he twice stated that his relationship with sex offender Epstein had provided 'seriously beneficial outcomes', giving him the opportunity to meet people and prepare for his future role as a trade envoy. In January, Andrew's lawyers attempted to throw out the civil sex case brought by Ms Giuffre, but a judge rejected this and ruled the case could go to trial. The Queen stripped Andrew of his honorary military roles in response, and he gave up his HRH style, before demanding a jury trial. But on February 15, their lawyers reached an out-of-court settlement in what eventually became a conclusion to the case. On March 8, it was revealed that Andrew had paid an estimated 12million to his US sex accuser bringing the case against him to a close. Advertisement 'The key issue today for them is remembering Prince Philip. Instead of which people are remembering Prince Philip and commentating on the fact his son, Prince Andrew, had such a prominent role at his memorial service.' Mr Hunt said he imagines Andrew would have been 'very keen' on having the role of escorting his mother, adding: 'It would be for others to dissuade him.' He also questioned how it would be perceived in the United States and elsewhere in the world. 'It's one thing to organise an event to satisfy the needs and the desires of the family members, it's quite another to then step back from it and see how it is seen around the world, and I don't yet know what that judgment will be. 'But the risk for them is it reopens yet again the whole can of worms for them about Prince Andrew's judgment, it reminds them about his missteps and it raises questions about the wisdom of allowing him to have a prominent role when he could just have attended as everyone else did,' he said. And royal author Victoria Murphy added: 'Because of the nature of the event, I don't think Prince Andrew's appearance alongside the Queen is an indication that anything has changed as far as his public role goes. But it does send a message that he still has a very important role by her side in her personal life.' Meanwhile royal expert Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip's Century, told People magazine of Andrew's appearance: 'It shows she wholeheartedly loves and believes her son. As she did when she made a statement about Camilla being Queen's Consort, many people will now accept the Queen's word and judgment.' He said some senior royals were unimpressed, 'but she insisted'. 'It does make some sense that he accompany her because he doesn't have a partner,' he said. 'A settlement has been paid but he's guilty of nothing in the eyes of the law. She has faith in Andrew. Even if he disappears from public life, he's been able to pay tribute to his father, who after all, was very proud of his service in the Royal Navy, where he fought in the Falkland Islands conflict.' Andrew's role at the ceremony was revealed hours earlier by Mr Jobson, who told GB News this morning: 'I think that Prince Andrew may play a more prominent role than we think earlier on. My understanding is that someone has to support the Queen and he may well be by her side. I think Charles will probably be with Camilla.' Another royal commentator said Andrew's role may have been a matter of 'practicality' as much as anything else. Asked if he viewed Andrew's role at the memorial service as a way of the Queen showing support for her son, Joe Little, managing editor of Majesty Magazine, said: 'It's hard to interpret how it came about. I'm not sure that the Queen would necessarily regard it in that way.' He said it might have just been 'a practicality as much as anything' and a plan that 'fitted the purposes of the occasion'. Mr Little added: 'I mean clearly with him by her side then the support is there physically and in every other way really.' He pointed out that Andrew has not been found guilty of anything, adding: 'It's a complicated situation on a very personal level for the Queen as his mother.' Mr Little also pointed out that, like the Queen, Andrew was also travelling from Windsor for the service. Asked if he was surprised by Andrew's role of escorting his mother, he said: 'I suppose we should always expect the unexpected on big royal occasions, and I don't think anybody had guessed that this is what would happen. But I suppose we could look at it in many ways, but the Queen was coming from Windsor. 'Andrew was coming from Windsor. So it made sense to have a member of the family travel with her. Clearly it's the first time that we've seen him for a long time since all the legal wranglings were settled, so some people will argue that he shouldn't have been as prominent, but then we have to remember that he was the Duke of Edinburgh's son, so you know, really, he is just as entitled to be there as his siblings.' And royal historian Hugo Vickers said Andrew's role in escorting the Queen was 'entirely correct and appropriate', describing it as a 'nice gesture'. He said that the Queen 'needs an arm' and said 'Who better than her son?' Mr Vickers added that if she took the arm of an official it would look 'rather sad'. But Nazil Afzal, the former Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England, tweeted: 'I see Prince Andrew is travelling with Her Majesty to Prince Philip's memorial. I'm all for rehabilitation but it starts with facing justice, accepting responsibility and working to rebuild victims' confidence. None of that is present here, so far.' Palace sources said in January that the 'ruthless and swift' decision to strip Andrew of his military titles by the Queen had been 'widely discussed' within the Royal Family following the Duke's failed bid to persuade a judge to dismiss the civil lawsuit in which he was accused of having sex with a trafficking victim. Prince Charles and his son William were understood to have been 'instrumental' in the move to force him out before the Queen made up her mind and summoned him for a meeting, after the court verdict. On March 8, it was revealed he had paid an estimated 12million to his accuser - bringing the case against him to a close. But Andrew has been frozen out of the Royal Family in terms of public events, and was not present at Westminster Abbey earlier this month for the Commonwealth Day Service which was attended by senior royals including Prince Charles, Camilla, Prince William and Kate - but not the Queen, who was forced to pull out due to her health. Buckingham Palace officials confirmed overnight that Princess Beatrice would attend along with her husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, while Princess Eugenie was also there with her husband Jack Brooksbank. On Andrew's left in the Abbey was his brother the Earl of Wessex and Edward's family the Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. Across an aisle on his right was the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince of Wales and the Queen. Prince George and Princess Charlotte also attended with Prince William and Kate, and were sat behind the Queen. Behind Andrew and Edward's family was Peter Phillips, and Zara and Mike Tindall and their daughters. Yesterday, the Duke was spotted going horse riding at Windsor Great Park, along with two grooms. He was also photographed driving near Windsor Castle in his hybrid electric Range Rover. The Duke formally settled the alleged rape case against him by 'sex slave' accuser Virginia Roberts at a court in New York earlier this month, after he paid her an estimated 12million. He has always denied the allegations. Courtiers believe the Duke will effectively disappear from public life after today's poignant event, where he is likely to rub shoulders with representatives from charities and organisations he has been forced to part ways with. Prince Philip - who died last April aged 99 - was Colonel of the Grenadier Guards for more than 40 years, and Andrew took over the role in 2017, but it was one of the military titles he was made to give up earlier this year. The Duke of York has hardly been seen in public since he stepped down from royal life following the Jeffrey Epstein scandal - with the Queen stripping him of his military affiliations and royal patronages in January. The Queen and Prince Andrew are driven by car after attending the service of thanksgiving for Prince Philip today The Queen and Prince Andrew arrive together for the Duke of Edinburgh's memorial service at Westminster Abbey today Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Andrew arrive for the service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip this morning Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) today ahead of the service to remember Prince Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle in a car this morning with her disgraced son Prince Andrew to travel to London Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip The Queen leaves Windsor Castle to travel to Westminster Abbey this morning, with her son Prince Andrew sat on her right The Queen arranged for the service for Philip to take place, and the congregation included family, friends, dignitaries and representatives of the many organisations with which the Duke of Edinburgh was associated. But Prince Harry and Meghan Markle did not return the California for the service amid concerns raised by the couple over their security, although Harry plans to go to Holland next month to attend the Invictus Games. Members of the Royal Family were joined by more than 30 foreign royals, the duke's family and friends and 500 representatives from charities and organisations of which he was patron. The Queen and Philip were married in the Abbey in November 1947 and it holds many special memories. About 1,800 guests attended today. By contrast, his funeral was limited to 30 people because of Covid restrictions. Prince Andrew is spotted going horse riding in Windsor today ahead of the memorial service for Prince Philip The Duke of York is accompanied by two grooms as he goes out riding at Windsor Great Park in Berkshire yesterday morning Andrew is said to be determined to honour his father despite fears his presence could dominate coverage of the service The Duke of York goes horse riding at Windsor Great Park yesterday morning ahead of today's memorial service for Philip Prince Andrew is seen driving near Windsor Castle yesterday morning ahead of the memorial service for his late father today Earlier this month, Andrew paid up to 12million to his US sex accuser bringing the civil case against him almost to a close. 'Stipulation of Dismissal' documents were filed with a New York court on March 8, with lawyers on both sides calling for the legal action to be dismissed, indicating the settlement has been paid. As the order was published, the Treasury confirmed no taxpayer funds were used for either the payment to Virginia Roberts or for the Duke of York's legal fees. A freedom of information request asked whether any money from the Sovereign Grant to the Royal Family or any other government money was used. The Treasury insisted: 'No public money has been used to pay legal or settlement fees.' A graphic shows the plan for the service to remember Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey which takes place this morning The joint order filed with the New York court said each party would pay their own costs and fees. Miss Roberts bringing the case under her married name of Giuffre had sued Andrew for alleged sexual abuse. She claimed he had sex with her when she was 17 after he was trafficked by his friend, the late billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The duke will make a 'substantial donation' to a charity for sex abuse victims set up by Miss Roberts, now a 38-year-old mother-of-three. He said he now regrets his association with Epstein. Andrew, who was forced to step down from royal duties and public life as a result of the scandal, previously claimed he had no recollection of meeting Miss Roberts and has always strongly denied her allegations. But he agreed to the settlement last month. Honduras' Supreme Court on Monday approved the extradition of former president Juan Orlando Hernandez to the United States, where he is accused of drug trafficking and weapons charges. Hernandez, 53, is accused by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York for fueling his political career with the assistance of drug traffickers. Federal prosecutors have alleged that Hernandez - a self-proclaimed U.S. ally in the war on drugs - participated in a wide-ranging drug-trafficking scheme between 2004 and 2022, part of an unprecedented investigation into Honduras' role as a critical transit point for massive amounts of cocaine smuggled from South America north to the United States. His brother and former Honduran congressman, Juan Antonio Hernandez, was found guilty by the Southern District of New York on drug trafficking and firearms charges in October 2019. He sentenced to life in prison in March 2021. During his trial, a key government witness testified that Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman contributed $1 million towards Juan Orlando Hernandez 2013 presidential campaign in exchange for protection. The conservative ex-president is also accused carrying, using, or aiding and abetting the use of weapons. The extradition of Honduras' former president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, was approved by the country's Supreme Court on Monday. He is facing drug trafficking and weapons charges in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York Sinaloa Cartel co-founder Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman allegedly handed over $1 million to support the 2013 presidential campaign of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez in exchange for protection of drug deliveries Hernandez, who was replaced as president in January by leftist Xiomara Castro after eight years in office, has denied any wrongdoing. He instead boasted of his two-term government's efforts in combating the flow of drugs to the United States - despite the Biden Administration recently declassifying a report that revealed Hernandez had been placed on a blacklist in 2021 over corruption allegations. 'It is surprising that this decision ... is made based on 'media reports' and also on statements from drug traffickers and confessed murderers who were extradited by my government, or who had to flee and surrender to the United States authorities for fear of being extradited,' Hernandez wrote in an open letter. Supreme court spokesman Melvin Duarte said Hernandez had exhausted his appeal process. 'The Supreme Court has decided not to allow the proposed appeal, which means the decision by the judge to grant extradition has been confirmed,' said court spokesman Melvin Duarte. Juan Antonio Hernandez (pictured in 2017) was convicted in a massive drug conspiracy case in a New York City federal court in October 2019 and sentenced to life in prison in March 2021. He is the brother of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez 2/ Comparti Carta Abierta a la Nacion escrita por @JuanOrlandoH de su puno y letra. Aqui la transcripcion de su carta. Lo reitero: Juan Orlando es inocente de estas acusaciones. Victima de una venganza y conspiracion. En Dios esta puesta nuestra fe y confianza! pic.twitter.com/K8FJMgOwJK Ana Garcia de Hernandez (@anagarciacarias) March 28, 2022 Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, in chains, is shown to the press at the National Police headquarters in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, following his arrest on February 15 Former first lady Ana Garcia released a letter on Twitter that penned by husband in which he claimed, 'I am innocent. I am the victim of revenge and conspiracy.' 'This is a revenge of the cartels, it is an orchestrated plot so that no government will confront them again. Part of that conspiracy has been a campaign of hate and disinformation,' Hernandez wrote. 'But it is evident, the contradictions of the delinquents trial after trial, they lie and contradict themselves. In addition, it is also evident that after surrendering or being captured they spent months, years, declaring and they never mentioned me. Until they began the execution of their revenge and also seeking to reduce their sentences and return their property among other benefits.' Earlier this month, a Honduran judge authorized the extradition, which Hernandez's lawyers sought to overturn. On Monday, Felix Avila, one of Hernandez's lawyers, said 'this is a decision by the Supreme Court and the fact that we don't agree with it does not mean it is illegal.' Hernandez has been in police custody since February 15, when he was arrested after a dramatic stakeout that saw him holed up in his home. He emerged hours later, pledging to cooperate with authorities. The federal Budget will have something for everyone because the cost of living is surging, an election is due in weeks, and the government is behind in polls. Scott Morrison will offer 'targeted' support to Australians doing it tough, which is expected to take the form of one-off cash handouts. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg all but confirmed there will be a temporary cut to fuel excise, hopefully leading to relief for motorists every time they fill up. 'What we will be seeking to do in this Budget is provide cost of living relief to those Australians that are paying higher prices at the bowser,' he said on Tuesday morning. Car drivers, such as the woman pictured, will get some relief at the bowser in Tuesday's Budget The finer details of the Budget will only be revealed when the Treasurer reads it out in Parliament tonight, but some have leaked early. Here are some of the measures likely to be adopted when Mr Frydenberg delivers what may be his last Budget speech. Fuel excise cut An easing of the burden on motorists has been all but confirmed. 'Fuel prices have skyrocketed, and of course for many families (using a car) is not a choice,' Mr Frydenberg said. Any cut to the 44c-a-litre fuel excise would be temporary, probably lasting no more than six months, but that may depend on how long Russia's invasion of Ukraine lasts. If the fuel excise was cut by 5c a litre, motorists would save $2.50 when filling a 50L vehicle, but it would cost the federal budget about $1 billion over six months. Cutting fuel excise by 10c a litre would save motorists $5 when filling a 50L vehicle, which would cost the budget $2 billion over six months. Cash handouts The government is expected to hand out a one-off cash payment of $250 to those on low-incomes to help them with the rising cost of living. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the government handed out four one-off payments including two worth $750 in March and July 2020 and two worth $250 in December 2020 and March 2021. Tradies (pictured) are set to benefit from the Budget being handed down on Tuesday The cash went to 6.5 million people including 3.6 million pensioners, 1.1 million students and working-age welfare recipients and 1.5 million others including veterans and parents who receive family tax breaks. Lower and middle income tax offset The low and middle income tax offset, an end-of-financial-year rebate of up to $1,080 for those earning under $126,000, may be extended. If this happens, those earning between $48,000 and $90,000 will get the maximum amount of $1,080 while those earning between $37,000 and $48,000 and between $90,000 and $126,000 will get a smaller amount depending on their salary. The offset was due to end when stage two tax cuts came into play but was extended twice after the cuts were brought forward to 2020 due to the pandemic. But some economists predict the PM will not extend the tax cut and will opt for cash handouts instead. Beer tax cut Australian Hotels Association head Stephen Ferguson met Mr Frydenberg this month to discuss a potential cut to the beer tax paid by brewers. Australia has the fourth-highest beer tax in the developed world. It has been speculated the federal government will cut beer tax which is paid by brewers Slashing the tax in half would mean drinkers would pay 30c less for a $7.50 schooner if the savings were passed on from brewers to pub owners to drinkers. The move is claimed to help revive the hotel and pub industry which was crippled during Covid lockdowns. Infrastructure splash The Budget will include dozens of major projects that will provide thousands of jobs and improve Australia's infrastructure. These include $5.4 billion to build the Hells Gates Dam in North Queensland, creating more than 7,000 jobs. Up to 60,000 hectares of irrigation would be opened up through a 2,100-gigalitre dam bolstered by three downstream irrigation weirs. Another $483 million will be for a 970-gigalitre dam at Urannah in Queensland which will help nearby producers develop 20,000 hectares of irrigated land. More opportunities could be on the way for Sydney tradies Gleyse Silva, 26 (left) and Alline Lapruza, 32 There will also be $678million for the sealing of 1,000km of the Outback Way, a 2,720 kilometre route that links Laverton in Western Australia with Winton in Queensland via Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. Adelaide's North-South corridor motorway will cost $2.26 billion and there is another $668 million for infrastructure in south-east Queensland under a new 'city deal'. Perth received a $74 million top-up and $40 million is pledged for bridges. A further $17.9 billion will go towards new and existing infrastructure projects under the government's 10-year rolling investment pipeline. The overall program will amount to a record $120 billion. Which projects are being funded? New commitments funded in the 202223 Budget include: $3.1 billion in new commitments to deliver the $3.6 billion Melbourne Intermodal Terminal Package (VIC), including: o $1.2 billion for the Beveridge Interstate Freight Terminal in Beveridge, taking the total investment to $1.62 billion; o $280 million for Road Connections, including Camerons Lane Interchange, to the Beveridge Interstate Freight Terminal; o $740 million for the Western Interstate Freight Terminal in Truganina; and o $920 million for the Outer Metropolitan Ring - South Rail connection to the Western Interstate Freight Terminal. $1.6 billion for the Brisbane to the Sunshine Coast (Beerwah-Maroochydore) rail extension (QLD) 1.121 billion for the Brisbane to the Gold Coast (Kuraby Beenleigh) faster rail upgrade (QLD) $1 billion for the Sydney to Newcastle (Tuggerah to Wyong) faster rail upgrade (NSW) $678 million for Outback Way (NT, WA, QLD) $336 million for the Pacific Highway - Wyong Town Centre (NSW) $336 million for the Tasmanian Roads Package Northern Roads Package Stage 2 (TAS) $200 million for the Marion Road Anzac Highway to Cross Road (SA) $145 million for the Thomas Road Dual Carriageway South Western Highway to Tonkin Highway and interchange at Tonkin Highway (WA) $140 million for Regional Road Safety upgrades (WA) $132 million for Central Australian Tourism Roads (NT) $120 million for the Adelaide Hills Productivity and Road Safety Package (SA) $46.7 million towards the Athllon Drive Duplication (ACT) The Budget also includes additional funding for existing projects and Roads of Strategic Importance corridors, including: $2.264 billion for the North South Corridor - Torrens to Darlington (SA) $352 million for the Milton Ulladulla Bypass (NSW) $320 million for the Bunbury Outer Ring Road (Stages 2 and 3) (WA) $200 million for the Tonkin Highway Stage 3 Extension (WA) $45 million for the Ballarat to Ouyen Future Priorities (VIC) $68.5 million for the Cooktown to Weipa Corridor Upgrade bringing the total Australian Government funding to the corridor to $258.5 million (QLD) Advertisement Buying a home The Home Guarantee Scheme will expand to provide a further 50,000 places to support more first home buyers. The scheme allows buyers to put down only a five per cent deposit, with the taxpayer stumping up the rest. There will be an additional 35,000 places available for first home buyers, 5,000 places for single parents and 10,000 places for people who buy or build a new home in a regional area. Housing Minister Michael Sukkar said to date there have been no defaults on loans since the program began three years ago. Who benefits from the expanded home guarantee scheme? Under the expanded home guarantee scheme, the Government will make available: 35,000 guarantees each year, up from the current 10,000, from 1 July 2022 under the First Home Guarantee, to support eligible first homebuyers to purchase a new or existing home with a deposit as low as five per cent; 10,000 guarantees each year from 1 October 2022 to 30 June 2025 under a new Regional Home Guarantee, to support eligible homebuyers, including non-first home buyers and permanent residents, to purchase or construct a new home in regional areas, subject to the passage of enabling legislation; and 5,000 guarantees each year from 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2025 to expand the Family Home Guarantee announced in last years budget. Australias first ever specifically targeted single parent family housing scheme supports eligible single parents with children to buy their first home or to re-enter the housing market with a deposit of as little as two per cent. Advertisement Parents The government brought forward childcare changes that were announced in last year's Budget from July 1 to March 7, meaning they are already in place. The federal child care subsidy rate for a second child aged five or under was increased for all families earning $180,000 or less. This costs taxpayers $1.7 billion over four years will benefit about 250,000 families across Australia by an average of $2,260 a year. A family on $40,000 will save $54 per week, a family on $120,000 will save $144 and a family on $180,000 will save $162. The federal child care subsidy rate for a second child aged five or under has been increased for all families earning $180,000 or under. Pictured is a woman reading to two children However, an estimated 700,000 families will not benefit at all because the policy only affects rates for a second child in care. If Labor wins the election in May, it will increase child care subsidy rates for every child whose family earns less than $530,000. The policy would save families between $600 and $2,900 a year and cost taxpayers $6.2 billion over four years. This table shows how much a families with two kids will save depending on their income Welfare recipients Under a biannual adjustment, the JobSeeker rate, age pension, disability support pension and carer payments increased by up to $20 a fortnight from March 20, benefiting 4.9 million people and costing the budget $2.2 billion extra over the year. The rate for a single person receiving an age pension, disability support pension or carer payment increased by $20.10 a fortnight to $987.60. The JobSeeker payment, rose by $13.20 to $629.50 per fortnight for a single person without children. The parenting payment increased by $18.10 to $874.10. Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (pictured) will have something for everyone when he announces the Budget on Tuesday night Fortnightly maximum rent assistance increased to $145.80 for singles and up to $193.62 for families. A new drug for cystic-fibrosis sufferers called Trikafta will also be subsidised, saving those with the condition up to $250,000. Apprentices The government will spend $365.3 million to support an extra 35,000 apprentices and trainees get into a job through an extension of its 'boosting apprenticeship commencements and completing apprenticeship commencements' wage subsidies. Any employer who takes on an apprentice or trainee before June 30 will be refunded half the eligible Australian apprentice's wages in the first year, capped at a maximum payment value of $7,000 per quarter. This reduces to 10 per cent in the second year, capped at a maximum payment value of $1500 per quarter, and then five per cent in the third year, capped at a maximum payment value of $750 per quarter. Disadvantaged young people will benefit from an expanded transition to work employment service to help them find jobs. Young families (pictured) are hoping cost of living pressures will be eased by Tuesday's federal Budget Health Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services will benefit from a four-year rolling funding agreement and annual increases from July 1, 2023. Another $61.2 million will go towards the Australian Genomic Cancer Medical Centre to research and develop drugs for people with advanced cancers. The government's national ice action strategy will received $315 million over four years to extend the program. Health Minister Greg Hunt has announced $28.1million to establish a new agency - Genomics Australia - to support the integration of genomic medicine as a standard of healthcare in Australia. The government will also give $52.3 million in funding for mental health service Lifeline Australia over four years from July 2022. Medicare is expected to cost taxpayers about $126 billion over four-year forward estimates. This year's Budget will include specific measures to improve gender equality. Pictured are two female tradies Women Last year had the first women's Budget statement after the Coalition faced criticism for the treatment of former staffer Brittany Higgins. This time around, specific measures to improve gender equality include $189 million over five years to strengthen prevention and early-intervention efforts in family, domestic, and sexual violence. The government also pledged $104 million to prevent technology and devices being used to perpetrate or facilitate family, domestic, and sexual violence. There is also a $58 million national action plan to tackle the fertility condition endometriosis. The funding will go towards building treatment centres, improving telehealth services and offering Medicare rebates for MRI scans related to the disorder, which affects one in nine Australian women. More than a quarter of the funding will go to establishing specialised endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics in each state and territory. Farmers will get a boost in Tuesday's Budget Farmers Under a new tax regime, farmers will treat revenue from the sale of carbon credits as primary production income to reduce their tax bills. The move is designed to encourage carbon abatement activities such as planting trees and help Australia deliver on its net zero emissions target by 2050. These changes will provide farmers with an estimated $100 million benefit through the tax system over the forward estimates. Roads and highways An inland freight route tipped to be a second Bruce highway will get an extra $400 million funding boost. Upgrades to the more than 1,100km route - running from Charters Towers in North Queensland to Mungindi on the NSW border - aim to move trucks off existing highways, making it safer and more efficient to transport freight across the two states. The inland route will also be used as an alternative to the Bruce highway in wet weather events. Upgrades will include realignments, overtaking lanes, flood resilience and drainage works, pavement widening and safety treatments. The extra funding will take the total cost of the upgrades to $800 million. The works expect to create more than 2,000 jobs in Queensland. Cost of living pressures mean the Coalition is expected to offer Australians relief in Tuesday's budget. Pictured is a woman with a full shopping trolley Rural internet More than a million premises in regional and rural Australia will be able to access faster NBN speeds as part of an almost $500 million budget boost. The federal government set aside $480 million to help increase speeds on the NBN's fixed wireless network, as well as introducing greater data limits as part of the Sky Muster service. A further $270 million will be brought in by NBN Co from its own funds. It is expected the NBN boost would expand the fixed wireless footprint by almost 50 per cent, with an extra 120,000 premises able to access fixed wireless services. Speeds are expected to increase by up to 100Mbps for most premises on the fixed wireless network, with almost all of the 750,000 premises able to access expanded coverage. A 250Mbps service will also be available to 85 per cent of premises. Australia's former Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Nick Coatsworth has taken a dig at the media for endangering Australia's vaccine rollout by fanning fears about the AstraZeneca jab. It comes as the ABC posted a sneak peak clip of its 7.30 program to Twitter on Monday, showcasing its investigation into the Federal Government's controversial decision to not purchase vaccines sooner. The ABC claimed Australia was months behind other nations in securing a deal with pharmaceutical company Pfizer, leaving the country understocked of the vaccine as it was pushed back in the international waiting list. UNSW epidemiologist Professor Greg Dore shared the ABC's tweet, but hit back, saying the key issue was AstraZeneca hesitancy drummed up by media reports about its rare, but potentially deadly, blood-clotting side effect. 'The bigger story is the trashing of the highly effective locally produced AstraZeneca vaccine by many in medical profession & media throughout early to mid 2021,' Professor Dore wrote. Dr Coatsworth agreed, retweeting both Professor Dore's post and the segment preview, and adding he was about to write the same thing. Former Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Nick Coatsworth (pictured) has taken a swipe at the ABC after it shared a sneak peak of its 7.30 program 'We must have been composing at the same time @GregDore2,' Dr Coatsworth tweeted. Professor Dore later commented on his initial post: 'Federal Governments lack of urgency during initial vaccine rollout was also an issue, but again compounded by the undermining of AstraZeneca vaccine.' Dr Coatsworth retweeted a post by epidemiologist Professor Greg Dore, who pointed out the broadcaster had neglected to mention the media's role in fanning AstraZeneca hesitancy Dr Coatsworth and Professor Dore's point of view was shared by other members of the medical community as well as other Australians who commented on the post. Daily Mail Australia has contacted the ABC for comment. The Morrison government came under fire for the nation's vaccine rollout, which was plagued by supply issues, mixed messaging, and jab hesitancy. In April 2021, the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) said the AstraZeneca jab was only recommended for over 50s because of a low risk of blood clot condition thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) in younger people. The move prompted the government to push back its aim to offer a jab to everyone from October to December as it scrambled to get more Pfizer into the country. The Australian government came under fire over its botched vaccine rollout after failing to secure ample Pfizer supplies and delivering mixed-advice over who could receive AstraZeneca A few months later, in June, ATAGI increased the minimum recommend age to 60, denting confidence and delaying the jab rollout by two months. Scott Morrison, who had supported the advice by ATAGI, backflipped weeks later, under increasing pressure over the botched rollout, saying anyone under 40 could get AstraZeneca after seeking permission from their GP. Under current ATAGI guidelines, AstraZeneca is recommended for Australians 60 and over and those aged 18 to 59 in Covid-outbreak areas if they do not have immediate access to Pfizer or Moderna. Pfizer and Moderna are preferred over the AstraZeneca for a booster dose, including for people who received the AstraZeneca for their primary course, due to the shots' higher immunity benefits. In Australia, there have been nine deaths linked to AstraZeneca out of more than 13.5 million doses administered. Qantas customers have unleashed on the airline's 'terrible' customer service with one passenger claiming he was forced to wait more than six hours on the phone to resolve a simple query. Another traveller said they were charged $800 to change flights, while one claimed they were bizarrely put through to a customer service agent in South Africa after several hours on hold. The horror stories were aired on 2GB radio on Tuesday after host Ben Fordham took a call from a frustrated Qantas passenger. Another woman said one of her parents' connecting flights was changed to the day before their first flight arrived, forcing them to endure a ridiculous five-day layover before resuming their trip. The discussion kicked off when a listener named Todd called in claiming he was on hold with Qantas for six hours and 31 minutes. Todd claimed that after complaining about his six-hour wait, he was told to ring another number to sort out his booking - which ended up being the same line he was already on. Pictured is a screenshot of one Qantas customer's call to customer service after waiting more than five hours to get through Another listener, who wanted to get a credit for a cancelled flight due to Covid, said he had enough time to leave his phone at home and go for a walk during the lengthy wait. 'I waited for two and a half hours, but I left the phone on the kitchen table and took the dog for a walk,' he told 2GB. When someone finally picked up he was told he had to speak to Flight Centre instead of Qantas. One man said his wife was told to cough up a whopping $800 to change her flight home to Sydney from New Zealand after she caught Covid and had to reschedule. Another disgruntled caller, Catherine Rae, told Daily Mail Australia her parent's multi-stop flight back from the UK to Perth last month was incorrectly rescheduled. Frustrated Qantas customers have claimed they were put on hold for more than six hours while trying to resolve rescheduled and cancelled flights (pictured, passengers at Sydney Airport) 'Before they even left they were told their flight from Darwin to Perth was rescheduled to the day before they even arrived into Darwin,' Ms Rae said. 'I spent three hours on hold to get it sorted so their flights would be the next day.' Then her parents were forced to make a long five-day layover in Darwin as the airline once again rescheduled their flights. 'Which was five days not spent with family,' Ms Rae added. Ms Rae is also expecting her 67-year-old mother-in-law to fly in from the UK via a similar route, but her Qantas flight from Heathrow was cancelled, before she had to spend the night at another airport. Her mother-in-law, who is hard of hearing, was then supposed to fly the next day at 11am, before the flight was changed to 8pm later that day. Her flights were then rerouted with a lengthy trip added from Darwin to Melbourne before she arrives in Perth, with significant wait times at each airport. 'This has caused her considerable stress and upset and she has been in tears with no one to really get answers from,' Ms Rae said. 'I wonder how many other people are frustrated by the terrible communication and customer service from Qantas. 'You would think with them spending all this money on adverts and having two years of grounded flights they'd want to get their service right and retain customers where they can.' A Qantas spokesperson said the wait times were unacceptable and apologised to customers who were affected by the delays. They said the 'complex' nature of customer queries due to the pandemic have caused them to be 'on average taking 50 per cent longer to resolve'. One disgruntled customer told 2GB he 'waited for two and a half hours, but I left the phone on the kitchen table and took the dog for a walk', before resuming the call (pictured, passengers at Sydney Airport) 'Given the volume and the increased complexity of customer queries, it will take some time for call wait times to normalise,' the spokesperson said. 'No airline's contact centres were designed to be able to manage the record number of calls and complexity of Covid-related queries, which continue to impact customer wait times as people re-book travel that's been delayed for the past two years. 'We're also seeing a fresh wave of calls with every change to a border somewhere in the world, as Covid restrictions are wound back, which often occur at no notice.' They also said they have hired 'hundreds' of new call centre recruits and continue to do so each month. This handout photo released by the Turkish presidential press service on March 29, shows Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, right, greeting Russian chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky, left, MP Leonid Slutsky, center, chairman of the Russian State Duma's International Affairs Committee the Russian and members of Ukrainian delegation during their meeting for talks in Istanbul. AFP-Yonhap Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan welcomed delegations from both sides at an Istanbul palace, saying "stopping this tragedy" was up to them. Ukrainian television reported the talks had begun with "a cold welcome" and no handshake. Ukraine and the United States hold little hope of an immediate breakthrough. But the resumption of face-to-face talks is an important first step towards a ceasefire in a Russian invasion that is stalled on most fronts but inflicting horrible suffering on civilians trapped in besieged cities. More than a month into the war, the biggest attack on a European nation since World War Two, more than 3.8 million people have fled abroad, thousands have been killed and injured, and Russia's economy has been pummelled by sanctions. In the southern port city of Mariupol, besieged by Russian forces since the war's early days, nearly 5,000 people have been killed, including about 210 children, according to figures from the mayor which cannot be verified. In parts of the city now held by Russian troops, the few visible residents appeared ghostlike among charred and bombed-out apartment blocks. A little girl in a pink puffy coat and yellow knitted hat was playing with a stick in the ruins as explosions crackled in the distance. Someone was scavenging through the rubble with a wheelbarrow. "Look at our food reserve. We are eight people. We have two buckets of potatoes, one bucket of onions," said Irina, an engineer, in her apartment where windows had been blasted out. They were boiling soup on a makeshift stove in the stairwell. Elsewhere, however, Ukrainian forces have made advances in recent days, recapturing territory from Russian troops on the outskirts of Kyiv, in the northeast, and in the south, as Moscow's invasion has stalled in the face of strong resistance. An area recaptured by Ukrainian forces northeast of the capital on a road towards the village of Rusaniv was littered with burnt-out tanks and bits of Russian uniforms. Surrounding houses were destroyed. A Ukrainian in uniform was digging a pit in the soil to bury the charred remains of a Russian soldier. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said of the talks in Turkey: "We are not trading people, land or sovereignty." "The minimum programme will be humanitarian questions, and the maximum programme is reaching an agreement on a ceasefire," he said on national television. Russia's Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russia had largely completed the first phase of its military assault, had degraded Ukraine's military capabilities and would now focus on areas claimed by separatists in the southeast. Moscow made a similar declaration late last week, interpreted in the West as a sign it was giving up on initial aims of toppling the government in Kyiv after failing to seize the capital. Russia calls its mission a "special operation" to disarm and "denazify" Ukraine. The West says it launched an unprovoked invasion. A senior U.S. State Department official said Russian President Vladimir Putin did not appear ready to make compromises to end the war. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said talks so far had not yielded any substantial progress but it was important they continued in person. Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich was in the Dolmabahce palace in Istanbul where the talks took place, though it was not immediately clear in what role. He has tried to act as a go-between, including during a trip early in the conflict when he and several Ukrainian negotiators are said to have fallen ill. Sirens Air raid sirens sounded before dawn across Ukraine, the latest sign of Russia's increasing reliance on long-range strikes. Russia's defence ministry said on Tuesday it had struck a large fuel depot in the western Rivne region overnight, far from any fighting. "The enemy continues to vilely carry out missile and bomb strikes in an attempt to completely destroy the infrastructure and residential areas of Ukrainian cities," the Ukraine military's general staff said. "(They) focus on fuel storage facilities in order to complicate logistics and create the conditions for a humanitarian crisis." In an address on Monday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy repeated calls for the West to go further in punishing Moscow for its invasion. "We, people who are alive, have to wait. Doesn't everything the Russia military has done to date warrant an oil embargo?" While Western countries have imposed hard-hitting sanctions upon Moscow, Europe is heavily reliant on energy imports from Russia and has been so far reluctant to act to block them. In besieged Ukrainian cities where conditions are desperate, the threat of Russian attacks has blocked exit routes for civilians. Mariupol's mayor said about 160,000 people were still trapped in the city, which once held 400,000. "There is no food for the children, especially the infants. They delivered babies in basements because women had nowhere to go to give birth, all the maternity hospitals were destroyed," a grocery worker from Mariupol who gave her name as Nataliia told Reuters after reaching nearby Zaporizhzhia. Since the last in-person talks were held on March 10, when Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said a ceasefire was not even on the agenda, momentum on the battlefield has shifted in Ukraine's favour. "We have destroyed the myth of the invincible Russian army. We are resisting against the aggression of one of the strongest armies in the world and have succeeded in making them change their goals," Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. The sides have held talks via video link in recent weeks and both have publicly discussed a formula under which Ukraine might accept some kind of neutral status. But neither side has budged over Russia's territorial demands, including Crimea, which Moscow seized and annexed in 2014, and eastern territories known as the Donbas, which Moscow demands Kyiv cede to pro-Russian separatists. (Reuters) The House January 6 committee voted unanimously Monday night to hold Trump insiders Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro in contempt of Congress. Now the vote goes to the full House of Representatives, where it should pass with the Democrats' majority and then be referred to the Department of Justice. All nine members of the committee voted in the affirmative after they laid out why Navarro, a Trump White House trade adviser, and Scavino, who continues to head social media operations for the ex-president, needed to testify for the investigation into the January 6 Capitol attack. The committee wants them to testify because they both assisted in former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, lawmakers said. 'In short, these two men played a key role in the ex-president's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election,' Chairman Bennie Thompson said at the top of the hour-long session to lay out the case for holding the duo in contempt of Congress. 'In Mr. Scavino's case, he strung us along for months before making it clear that he believes he's above the law,' the chairman continued. 'Mr. Navarro, despite sharing relevant details on TV, in podcasts and in his own book, he also stonewalled us,' Thompson added. 'You're not fooling anybody,' Thompson said. 'You're obligated to comply with our investigation. They have refused to do so. And that's a crime.' Both Navarro and Scavino were previously subpoenaed by the committee, with Navarro skipping a scheduled virtual deposition on March 2. 'Why is it when we get closer and closer to the former president. His inner circle. Those nearest to the president. Why are those the ones who refuse to tell the American people what they know? What it is they're covering up?' asked Rep. Elaine Luria, a Virginia Democrat, before she voted yes Monday night. January 6 committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (left) and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney (right) appear at a hearing Monday night so the panel could vote on whether Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro should be held in contempt of Congress The House January 6 committee voted Monday to hold Trump insiders Dan Scavino (left) and Peter Navarro (right) in contempt of Congress, with all committee members voting in the affirmative Navarro told CNN he didn't participate because former President Donald Trump has claimed executive privilege. 'My hands are tied in this matter as the Executive Privilege asserted by President Trump is not my privilege to waive,' Navarro told the network. 'The Committee has a firm legal obligation to negotiate this matter directly with Trump and his attorneys before attempting to coerce and bully me into cooperating with its highly partisan effort. If the president waives privilege, I will appear.' Two days before Navarro played hooky, President Joe Biden's White House informed the former Trump staffer that Biden would not assert executive privilege to protect him from testifying, CNN said. 'Mr. Biden is not the president I worked for. Donald Trump is,' Navarro reportedly responded to the White House counsel's office. At Monday night's hearing, committee members chipped away at Navarro's claims of privilege. 'He devoted much of his time to White House political efforts outside the scope of his official duties. In fact, the American people are likely to know Mr. Navarro solely in his political capacity,' remarked Rep. Pete Aguilar of Navarro's frequent television appearances. Aguilar also pointing out that a federal watchdog found that Navarro broke the Hatch Act, which bars government officials from politicking in certain scenarios. Democratic committee members Reps. Jamie Raskin (left) and Elaine Luria (right) laid out their cases for why Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro should be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to speak to the January 6 House select committee Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of two GOP committee members, participated in Monday night's hearing virtually Democratic Reps. Pete Aguilar (left), Adam Schiff (center) and Zoe Lofgren (right) appear at Monday night's January 6 committee business meeting, where they voted in favor of holding two top Trump allies in contempt of Congress In the February 9 announcement of Navarro's subpoena, Thompson said his account was wanted by the committee because the aide was open about wanting to delay the certification of Biden's election. 'He hasn't been shy about his role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has even discussed the former President's support for those plans,' Thompson said. The letter to Navarro points out how he 'reportedly worked with Steve Bannon and others to develop and implement a plan to delay Congress's certification of, and ultimately change the outcome of, the November 2020 presidential election.' He even outlined their plans in his book, In Trump Time, naming the scheme the 'Green Bay Sweep.' Rep. Jamie Raskin commented at Monday night's hearing that the name was 'an insult to Green Bay Packers all across the country.' The plan involved Republican members of Congress objecting to the Electoral College vote count of swing states during the January 6 joint session of Congress. Since each objection has to be debated by lawmakers, the hope is that the delay would compel state legislators in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada to de-certify the election results. The intended outcome was that Trump would have more certified Electoral College votes than the race's winner, Biden. Members of the January 6 House select committee voted in favor of holding Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro in contempt of Congress Monday night. Now the full House of Representatives will take that vote In an interview, Navarro said Trump was 'on board with the strategy' as were 'more than 100' members of Congress, the January 6 committee said. Overall, 147 Republicans voted in Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Scavino was subpoenaed in September with three others, who the committee said were 'tied to the former president in the days surrounding January 6th.' Scavino was initially supposed to be deposed on October 15. The committee's letter to Scavino accused him of being with Trump when the ex-president was deliberating how to pressure members of Congress into objecting to Biden's election. The letter also points out that Scavino was with Trump on January 6 - and said that the aide might have 'materials relavent to his videotaping and tweeting messages' on that day. 'The committee has many questions for Mr. Scavino about this political social media work for President Trump, including his interactions with an online forum called The Donald and with QAnon, a bizarre and dangerous cult,' Rep. Liz Cheney, the Republican vice chair of the committee, said during Monday night's proceedings. Cheney also made a bigger point about how the committee's work was protecting democracy. 'As we meet here tonight, Vladimir Putin continues his brutality against Ukraine, killing innocents, reminding us what happens when authoritarians rule,' Cheney said. So far, the January 6 committee has advanced three other referrals. In November, Trump's former White House strategist Steve Bannon was indicted on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress over his refusal to comply to a January 6 committee subpoena. That trial is expected to take place this summer. In January, the House voted to hold former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress, referring that matter to the Justice Department. A third referral was for Department of Justice attorney Jeffrey Clark advanced from committee, but wasn't voted on by the full House of Representatives after Clark agreed to meet with committee members. During that meeting, Clark pleaded the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times, CNN reported. Ben Fordham has lashed out at 'dole bludgers' who continue to cash in on Centrelink payments as desperate Aussie businesses struggle to find staff. The 2GB host said while creating jobs and the cost of living would be a focus in the federal budget, there was another issue politicians were not so keen to talk about. 'And that is the number of Australians on welfare who choose not to work,' he said. Fordham said while the majority of people on welfare needed the taxpayer-funded handouts, some were 'having a laugh'. 2GB host Ben Fordham has lashed out at 'dole bludgers' who continue to cash in on Centrelink payments as desperate Aussie businesses struggle to find staff It comes as Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced Australia would save $11billion over the next four years with more people employed and less on the dole. 'Well, I'd love to know how he figures that out,' Fordham said on Tuesday morning. The radio host said new data had revealed there were up to 900,000 Australians currently receiving JobSeeker payments. He said to be eligible for the scheme, recipients had to be actively seeking employment and be physically able to work. 'But let's be real here - not everyone is looking for a job,' Fordham said. 'Not everyone wants a job and the measures in place are not working. Every day we hear another story about staff shortages.' The radio host said despite moves to bolster the workforce with 175,000 foreign workers, backpackers and international students, it wouldn't fix the issue. 'The truth is, there are Australians who should be working but won't. They've become accustomed to welfare, they've become addicted to it,' he said. 'We've made it too easy for people to sit around while others do the heavy lifting and the workers are paying for it.' Fordham said there was a number of Australians receiving Centrelink payments who refused to work (pictured, a barista in Sydney) The radio host said new data had revealed there were up to 900,000 Australians currently receiving JobSeeker payments (pictured, a bartender in Melbourne) He said the total spent on unemployment benefits is almost $30billion, the same amount allocated to the National Disability Insurance Scheme. This amount could build 15 new airports or three airports, the host claimed. Top AFL boss Tony Shepherd told Fordham 20 per cent of the catering staff hired for an event to celebrate Buddy Franklin's 1000th goal on Friday night didn't show up. 'Back in the day we called them what they are. Dole bludgers,' Fordham continued. 'These days people are too afraid. But it's time to bring back some of that real talk. If our leaders had backbone they would do something about it. 'Keep the payments going for people in genuine need and turn them off for those who are having a laugh.' Fordham in February urged Australians to rat on 'dole bludgers' refusing to work by calling the Employer Reporting Line. '[The number is] 1300 361 241,' Fordham said. 'This is for if you know about people who refuse to get off their backside.' Cafes, restaurants and bars across Australia are facing major staff shortages in the wake of Covid-19 (pictured, a barista serves customers in Sydney) Fordham revealed the total spent on unemployment benefits is almost $30billion, the same amount allocated to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (pictured, patrons in Sydney) It comes as cafes, restaurants and bars across Australia continue to face major staff shortages in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. In Victoria, it was announced on Tuesday that 500 jobseekers will be recruited and trained to support hospitality businesses facing staff shortages. Jobs Victoria will allocate $6.68 million in funding to train workers for hospitality jobs with small to medium sized businesses. Minister for Employment Jaala Pulford described the initiative as a double-win for venues desperate for staff and people struggling to find employment. 'It'll help jobseekers find work while giving businesses the certainty they need with more staff to serve millions of Victorians flocking back to pubs, cafes and restaurants,' Ms Pulford said. A young mum who was allegedly murdered in her apartment once confided in a friend that her 'biggest fear' in life was that her little boy would grow up without her. Mackenzie Anderson, 21, was found unresponsive outside her Mayfield unit in Newcastle on Friday, having been allegedly stabbed 20 times by Tyrone Thompson. Thompson, 22, allegedly entered her home in breach of an apprehended violence order taken out for Ms Anderson's safety, prompting the young mum to call NSW Police that evening. Instagram messages obtained by Daily Mail Australia show Ms Anderson told a friend that she worried that her son would grow up without his mum. 'My biggest fear (is) my son being left without a mum, that's what breaks my heart,' she said. Mackenzie Anderson was found dead at her apartment in Mayfield, near Newcastle, NSW on Friday. Daily Mail Australia can reveal she messaged a friend last year describing her son being left without a mother as one of her biggest fears The young mum was terrified her little boy would have to grow up in a world 'without his mum'. Ms Anderson was found dead by police on Friday evening Ms Anderson sent this message to a friend months before her death Ms Anderson also said she felt 'let down' in some of her personal circumstances. Thompson was arrested after police responded to her call for help and found her body. Between the final phone call and police arriving minutes later, Ms Anderson had allegedly been stabbed 20 times. Her almost two-year-old son was physically unharmed nearby, but drenched in her blood. Hardened cops were devastated by the grisly scenes. A police source told Daily Mail Australia Ms Anderson was clinging to life when officers arrived. 'She was still breathing,' the source said. She lost her fight for life within minutes of police arriving and was declared dead at the scene. Mackenzie Anderson made a frantic call to police, allegedly to report her ex for breaching his AVO. When police arrived, she was allegedly found with 20 stab wounds Ms Anderson had moved on with her life and was in a happy and loving relationship with a new partner (pictured together) who had no involvement in what allegedly happened to her One traumatised friend told Daily Mail Australia she was 'holding out to make sure her baby was going to be okay'. 'He was her world. She was such a great mama and that little boy changed everything for her.' Thompson and Ms Anderson were known to each other and had previously been in a romantic relationship, but separated late last year. He was not the father of her child. One traumatised friend told Daily Mail Australia she was 'likely holding out to make sure her baby was going to be okay' According to the Daily Telegraph, Thompson and Ms Anderson had spent Friday together drinking at her Crebert St home. He allegedly left the property but returned later that night where he allegedly broke into her home and allegedly stabbed her multiple times. On Sunday afternoon he was formally charged with murder, enter with intent and breaching an apprehended domestic violence order. He spent several nights in hospital for a busted up hand which he suffered during the alleged attack, but was released into custody on Monday morning. Thompson briefly appeared via video link before Newcastle Local Court on Monday. He did not enter a plea, nor did he apply for bail. It was formally refused. The young mum had recently embarked on a new relationship and was hopeful for the year ahead after separating with Thompson. Ms Anderson had spent years trying to turn her life around for the sake of her son after developing a meth addiction as a 16-year-old. Ms Anderson had recently revealed she was in a new relationship (pictured with her new partner, who had no involvement with her death) After three years clean, Ms Anderson admitted she still considered herself a 'person in recovery'. 'Addiction is a disease,' she said. 'It makes you too selfish to see the havoc and mess in your life that you created... or care about the people who you shattered and hurt.' She was struggling with depression at the time of her death, admitting she'd 'rather be someone else' and documenting her attempts to overcome earlier abuse. She made an eerie post just weeks ago saying she'd 'haunt' her ex if he ever came to her funeral. The 21-year-old claimed she was a victim of sustained violence in the months before speaking out. Ms Anderson tearfully shared pictures of her bruised and busted face several times throughout since late 2021. She was determined to use her platform to highlight injustices and spoke openly about her concerns with the Australian justice system. Loved ones have now set up a GoFundMe appeal to help cover ongoing expenses relating to the care of Ms Anderson's son. After three years clean, Ms Anderson admitted she still considered herself a 'person in recovery' Advertisement Will Smith has apologized for slapping Chris Rock at Sunday night's Oscars ceremony, saying his behavior was 'unacceptable and inexcusable' and left him 'embarrassed'. The 53-year-old wrote in an Instagram post that he was 'embarrassed' by his actions, which shocked the ceremony attendees, producers and viewers. 'Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive,' he wrote. 'My behavior at last night's Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable. Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada's medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally. 'I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.' Smith then went on to say sorry to the organizers and the producers of the show. Rock has not responded to Smith's apology, or commented on the Sunday night incident. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars on Sunday, after the comedian made a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith. On Monday, Smith apologized Rock covers his jaw after being slapped in the face but went on to announce the winner for best documentary after a very awkward pause Smith is pictured on Sunday night celebrating his Oscar win, in a ceremony overshadowed by his actions Smith also extended his apology to the family of Venus and Serena Williams. Shortly after slapping Rock, Smith won the best actor award for his portrayal of their father Richard - but the story of their family was overshadowed by Smith's attack. Could Will Smith be stripped of his Oscar? Academy faces pressure to respond after disgraced star broke Code of Conduct drawn up in wake of MeToo Movement The Academy tweeted its disapproval of 'violence of any form' late on Sunday night There are calls for the Academy to strip Will Smith of his Best Actor Oscar after he walked on stage and slapped comedian Chris Rock who was presenting an award on stage, after making a joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith's hair. The Academy, in its code of conduct, is known to take a very a dim view of violence of any kind. After the award ceremony was over it tweeted: 'The Academy does not condone violence of any form. Tonight we are delighted to celebrate our 94th Academy Awards winners, who deserve this moment of recognition from their peers and movie lovers around the world.' The Academy reestablished its Code of Conduct in 2017 during the Me Too Movement. 'Academy membership is a privilege offered to only a select few within the global community of filmmakers,' AMPAS CEO Dawn Hudson wrote to members following various scandals in the industry. On Sunday night, in the Dolby Theatre, there was complete bewilderment in the moments after the assault with took place with those present initially wondering if the punch was part of a stunt. It took a few moments for the normally unflappable Rock to process but the colorful language from Smith quickly confirmed it wasn't any kind of joke at all. The punch threw the entire Oscars broadcast into chaos as producers were frantically forced into deciding how to deal with the on-air assault, with Smith still yet to receive his Best Actor statuette. Advertisement Richard Williams - who the Oscar-winner portrays in King Richard - said after the attack that he condemns violence. Chavoita LeSane, Williams' son, told NBC: 'We don't know all the details of what happened. But we don't condone anyone hitting anyone else unless it's in self-defense.' Smith said: 'I would also like to apologize to the Academy, the producers of the show, all the attendees and everyone watching around the world,' Smith continued. 'I would like to apologize to the Williams Family and my King Richard Family. 'I deeply regret that my behavior has stained what has been an otherwise gorgeous journey for all of us.' The Philadelphia-born actor concluded: 'I am a work in progress. Sincerely, Will.' His apology came as the group that hands out the Oscars on Monday condemned Smith's actions and said it had started a formal review of the incident that cast a shadow over the film honors. Smith strode on stage during the live telecast and struck Rock in the face after the comedian made a joke about the appearance of Smith's wife. Smith's meltdown continued when he returned to his seat as he repeatedly screamed: 'Keep my wife's name out of your f***ing mouth'. The crowd then fell into stunned silence as it became clear the attack was genuine, and not staged. Rock replied to him saying: 'I'm going to, okay?' He then laughed uncomfortably, saying: 'That was the greatest night in the history of television'. Smith's sweary rant was muted by directors because the show's live broadcast is slightly delayed in the US. But it was aired in full to some international audiences with the uncut clip already been viewed more than a million times on social media and YouTube in the first few hours. Any questions over whether the altercation was genuine were answered when just over half an hour later Smith was given the Best Actor award and apologized for the assault. In his acceptance speech a crying Smith said: 'Love makes you do crazy things', as he clutched his Oscar statuette. 'You gotta be able to take abuse, and you gotta be able to have people talk crazy about you,' Smith said. 'In this business, you gotta be able to have people disrespecting you and you gotta smile and you gotta pretend like that's OK. 'Denzel (Washington) said to me a few minutes ago, he said, "At your highest moment, be careful. That's when the devil comes for you." 'It's like I want to be a vessel for love. 'I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena. I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena and the entire Williams family for entrusting me with your story. That's what I want to do. I want to be an ambassador of that kind of love and care and concern.' The actor went on: 'I want to apologize to the Academy, I want to apologize to all my fellow nominees. 'Art imitates life. I look like the crazy father, just like they said. I look like the crazy father just like they said about Richard Williams. But love will make you do crazy things'. He added: 'I'm hoping the Academy invites me back. Thank you'. Pinkett-Smith has been open about her struggle with alopecia, which happens when the immune system attacks hair follicles and causes hair loss. It affects around 700,000 Americans Will Smith had initially laughed at the Rock gag about Jada's hair being short - a line of Demi Moore's in GI Jane. His wife looked very unhappy and rolled her eyes After smacking Rock, a now visibly fuming Smith returned to his seat and began repeatedly yelling: 'Keep my wife's name out of your f***ing mouth'. Lupita Nyong'o' was among those baffled by what happened with many initially believing that an act so outrageous must be part of the show Smith and Pinkett-Smith held hands throughout the ceremony after the shock slap. Denzel Washington was acting as peacemaker Smith sobs as he accepted his best actor award, and apologized for the violence - but did not say sorry to Chris Rock Smith's relationship with his wife had been the butt of jokes during awards season. At the BAFTAs in London a fortnight ago host Rebel Wilson targeted the couple when he won won the Leading Actor award for his role in King Richard. The assembled audience at the Royal Albert Hall, which didn't include the star who stayed in LA, groaned as she said his 'best performance in the past year was being OK with all his wife's boyfriends' - a nod to Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith's open relationship. It came after he recently admitted his wife had 'never believed in a conventional marriage' and claims she had an affair. This may explain why he reacted so sensitively to Rock's joke about her. Journalists covering the awards ceremony from the press area were instructed not to ask any attendees about Smith slapping Rock, according to BBC correspondent David Sillito. Late Sunday night, the LAPD issued a statement saying that Rock had not filed a police report against Smith, but that if he chooses to do so, police will investigate. 'LAPD investigative entities are aware of an incident between two individuals during the Academy Awards program,' the statement said. 'The incident involved one individual slapping another.' It was not immediately clear whether the Academy would penalize Smith in any way for his outburst. In a statement on Monday, the 9,900-member Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it 'condemns the actions of Mr. Smith at last night's show.' 'We have officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct and California law,' the academy added. The group's standards of conduct policy states it is 'categorically opposed to any form of abuse, harassment or discrimination' and expects members to uphold the values 'of respect for human dignity, inclusion, and a supportive environment that fosters creativity.' Violations may result in suspension or expulsion from the group, revocation of Oscars, or loss of eligibility for future awards, according to the policy. Marshall Herskovitz, president emeritus of the Producers Guild of America, was among the first to condemn Smith, tweeting shortly after the attack that Smith had 'disgraced our entire community'. He said: 'I call upon the Academy, of which I am a member, to take disciplinary action against Will Smith. He disgraced our entire community tonight.' Herskovitz accused those who defended the actor of 'moral cowardice'. 'People standing up and applauding after the first assault in 94 years of Oscar history. Moral cowardice,' he said. Several Hollywood celebrities denounced Smith's actions. Alec Baldwin posted to Instagram and Twitter his condemnation of Smith's behavior. 'I'm sorry the Oscars turned into the Jerry Springer Show,' he said. Shortly after the slap, Will added a comment to his own Instagram post, quipping: 'You can't invite people from Philly or Baltimore nowhere' Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith showed a united front after the row with Rock overshadowed his Oscar win Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith, Will Smith, Jaden Smith and Trey Smith attend the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party The actor put on a brave face for photographers after his big moment was undermined by his violent outburst Smith was pictured in the middle of the crowd at the Vanity Fair party, dancing and cheering with fellow stars Smith brushed off a tumultuous night by partying to celebrate the greatest achievement of his career: Best Actor at the Oscars Comedian and director Judd Apatow called the display 'pure out of control rage and violence', claiming that Smith 'could have killed' Rock. He wrote: 'Seems like Will Smith's plan to get comedian and the world to not make jokes about him is not going to pan out. Chris Rock 'hasn't spoken' to Will Smith after THAT slap at the Oscars... as it's claimed the comedian didn't know Jada Pinkett Smith has alopecia Chris Rock is yet to speak to Will Smith after being struck by the actor live onstage at the Oscars on Sunday night. It had been claimed that the pair had sorted out their differences, but insiders now say that is not the case. It has also been claimed that Rock was not aware that Jada Pinkett Smith suffers with alopecia, after he made a joke about her bald head looking like 'G.I. Jane.' TMZ report that Rock and Smith have yet to settle anything privately, and there has been no communication between the two men. A close friend of Rock has informed that outlet the comedian went straight back to his dressing room after the incident and left the building, which was always his plan for the evening. The insider added that Chris did not know Jada suffers with alopecia and that he 'doesn't have a mean bone in his body.' Rock is said to have been left 'shaken and bewildered' by Smith's smack, but dusted himself off to attend Madonna's manager Guy Oseary's famous Oscars After Party in LA. According to PageSix Rock appeared 'unfazed' at the party, though people were said to be rallied around him. 'You wouldn't really know anything had happened,' an insider told the publication, adding: 'He was talking about it, just saying it was crazy, but it didn't seem to be bothering him at all.' Advertisement 'The Williams family must be furious. Pure narcissism.' Actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner tweeted: 'Will Smith owes Chris Rock a huge apology. There is no excuse for what he did. 'He's lucky Chris is not filing assault charges. The excuses he made tonight were bulls**t'. Star Wars actor Mark Hamill dubbed it the 'ugliest Oscar moment ever'. He added: 'Stand-up comics are very adept at handling hecklers. Violent physical assault... not so much.' Smith in the early hours of Monday declared 'you can't invite people from Philly or Baltimore nowhere' as he doubled down on his extraordinary decision to storm on to stage. It was shared with a picture of him and his wife before the ceremony and was referring to his own birthplace of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and his wife's of Baltimore, Maryland. Rock, who has not been seen since the attack, has been offered a 'package of after care' including a counsellor if he needs one, an insider said. The comedian has told the Los Angeles Police Department that he does not want to press charges. Others supported Smith for defending his wife. 'That's what your husband is supposed to do, right? Protect you,' comedian Tiffany Haddish told People magazine. As he accepted the best actor trophy, Smith apologized to the academy and fellow nominees, but not to Rock, and said he hoped he would be invited back to the Oscars. It is rare but not unprecedented for the film academy to revoke membership. Producer Harvey Weinstein was expelled in 2017 after more than three dozen women accused him of sexual assault. Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski were kicked out in 2018. Cosby was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman in 2004, though a judge later overturned the conviction. Polanski admitted to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl. Oscars producers had been hoping for a memorable night on Sunday to rebound from record-low ratings last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. They brought in three hosts, opened the show with Beyonce and tried to keep the show moving by editing some acceptance speeches. But it was Smith's outburst that became the most talked-about moment of the night, with pictures and video ricocheting across social media. Television viewership did jump sharply from last year, to an average of 15.36 million people, according to preliminary estimates. That represented a 56 percent boost from 2021. Feel-good movie 'CODA' won the best picture prize, marking a turning point in Hollywood because the film was streamed by Apple TV+ rather than heading exclusively to theaters. The New York Times, citing two anonymous industry officials, said there were serious discussions about removing Smith from the Dolby Theatre after his attack on Rock. But time was short, because the best actor award was fast approaching, one of the sources told the newspaper, and stakeholders had varying opinions on how to proceed. Russia is set to drop its demand that Ukraine be 'denazified' and could be prepared to let the country join the EU, it was claimed last night. Ahead of face-to-face talks between the two countries in Turkey today, a draft ceasefire agreement has dropped mention of three of Moscow's key demands at the start of the war. According to four people 'briefed on the discussions', it would appear Russia is now prepared to leave the Kyiv leadership in place, ditch a demand that Ukraine 'demilitarise' and drop legal protection for the Russian language, the Financial Times reported. Moscow may also allow Ukraine to join the European Union, it was claimed, as long as it dropped any hopes of joining Nato a compromise that President Volodymyr Zelensky has indicated he might accept. As a pretext for his invasion, Vladimir Putin, pictured, had said his goal was 'to protect people' who have been 'subjected to bullying and genocide' by the 'neo-Nazi' leadership of President Zelensky, who is Jewish Mr Zelensky, pictured, has said he is willing to compromise with Russia to bring peace 'without delay' but will not accept 'slicing up' the country But officials in Kyiv were said to be wary that Moscow was changing its position on an almost daily basis and were fearful that Russia was dangling the promise of peace to buy time to regroup on the battlefield. As a pretext for his invasion, Vladimir Putin had said his goal was 'to protect people' who have been 'subjected to bullying and genocide' by the 'neo-Nazi' leadership of President Zelensky, who is Jewish. But there is now the suggestion that he might allow the Ukrainian leader to remain in power once the conflict is over. However the draft, due to be presented today, is said to contain one of the biggest sticking points that Ukraine recognises Russian control of Crimea, which was illegally annexed in 2014. Mr Zelensky has said he is willing to compromise with Russia to bring peace 'without delay' but will not accept 'slicing up' the country. In a video address to his nation on Sunday night, the leader stressed that Ukraine's 'sovereignty and territorial integrity are beyond doubt'. A soldier stands on a bridge destroyed by the Ukrainian army to prevent the passage of Russian tanks near Brovary A service member of pro-Russian troops walks near a destroyed Mariupol apartment building There is a growing belief that Russia may have given up on the total occupation of Ukraine and is now focused on dividing the country in two. But Alexander Rodnyansky, an adviser to the Ukrainian leader, said his country may not be willing to give up land in the east to secure peace. He told BBC Radio 4's World at One programme: 'Right now, the pressure is on Russia... Clearly they can't sustain this war for years and their morale is so low that they cannot even keep up the supplies and logistics, so I wouldn't say that is a given whatsoever. 'We're certainly not willing to give up any territory or talk about our territorial integrity.' Earlier, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said Mr Putin's forces were abducting Ukrainian politicians, activists and journalists as Russia failed to meet its military objectives. She condemned the 'abhorrent tactic' following work by Ukrainian human rights group ZMINA, which claimed to have identified dozens of individuals who had been abducted, with thousands more deported to Russia. Ms Truss said Mr Putin was resorting to 'desperate measures'. 'Putin continues to use abhorrent tactics against the Ukrainian people, including abducting innocent civilians,' she said. 'He is not achieving his objectives and is resorting to desperate measures. Putin must fail in Ukraine.' Ms Truss, in a statement to the House of Commons, later told MPs: 'We know that Putin is not serious about talks, he is still wantonly bombing innocent citizens across Ukraine and that is why we need to do more to ensure that he loses and we force him to think again. 'We must not just stop Putin in Ukraine but we must also look to the long term. We need to ensure that any future talks don't end up selling Ukraine out or repeating the mistakes of the past.' In their call on Monday, No 10 said Mr Zelensky provided Mr Johnson with an update on negotiations, adding that 'the two leaders agreed to co-ordinate closely in the days ahead'. The Ukrainian president has signalled he is prepared to offer a series of concessions to Russia to end the fighting. Ukraine could declare neutrality and offer guarantees about its non-nuclear status as part of a peace deal, Mr Zelensky suggested, but he stressed the desire to ensure the country's 'territorial integrity'. Ukrainian government say they will be seeking compensation of 431.5BILLION (and counting) from Russia for damage it has done to the country during the devastating invasion The Ukrainian government has estimated the total cost of damage of the Russian invasion now stands at over 430billion and declared it will seek reparations in the aftermath of the war. Ukraine's deputy prime minister Yuliya Sviridenko declared today that an estimated $564.9billion (431.5billion) worth of damage had been inflicted since Russian troops rolled across the border on February 24. In a stunning Facebook post, Sviridenko, who is also Ukraine's minister of economic development and trade, said the damage to her nation's infrastructure alone totalled $119bn (almost 91bn), even before the financial impact of the war on Ukraine's economy, trade and foreign investment had been calculated. She went on to declare 'the numbers are growing every day' and that 'Ukraine will seek reparations from the aggressor despite all the obstacles'. Her promise to collect reparations comes after President Volodymyr Zelensky and the governor of Ukraine's national bank said their country 'should be rebuilt with Russian money' earlier this month. Ukraine's deputy prime minister Yuliya Sviridenko declared today that an estimated $564.9billion (431.5billion) worth of damage had been inflicted since Russian troops rolled across the border on February 24 In a stunning Facebook post, Sviridenko, who is also Ukraine's minister of economic development and trade, said the damage to her nation's infrastructure alone totalled $119bn (almost 91bn) - damage in Mariupol pictured Sviridenko said 'the numbers are growing every day' and that 'Ukraine will seek reparations from the aggressor despite all the obstacles' (damage in Mariupol pictured) The Deputy Prime Minister's promise to collect reparations comes after President Volodymyr Zelensky (pictured) and the governor of Ukraine's national bank said their country 'should be rebuilt with Russian money' earlier this month Financial impact of Russian invasion in Ukraine Sviridenko provided the following list of damages caused by Russia's invasion, along with the Ukrainian government's estimation of the financial impact of the damages. 119 billion US dollars - loss of infrastructure (including almost 8,000km of destroyed roads, dozens of railway stations, airports) 112 billion US dollars - loss of GDP in 2022 90.5 billion US dollars - loss of civilian population (10 million square metres of housing, 200,000 cars, food supply for 5 million people) 80 billion US dollars - losses of businesses and organisations 54 billion US dollars - loss of direct investment in the Ukrainian economy 48 billion US dollars - losses of the state budget Advertisement '$564.9 billion. This is the sum of the losses that Ukraine has suffered since the Russian invasion,' Sviridenko announced today via her official Facebook page. 'There are at least two methods for calculating the losses. The first is from direct destruction; the second is the calculation of losses from the overall impact of hostilities, including the deteriorating economic situation in our country, rising unemployment, blocking trade, declining consumer demand and more. The finance minister went on to reel off a list of eye-watering sums she said were the estimated financial losses inflicted on Ukraine by Russia's invasion, before adding: 'It is worth noting that every day the numbers change and, unfortunately, they are growing. 'That is why Ukraine, despite all obstacles, will seek compensation from the aggressor. Both by court decisions and by transferring to our state frozen assets of Russia. 'Evil will inevitably be punished and Russia will feel the full weight of its own criminal actions on the territory of Ukraine,' Sviridenko promised. Many Ukrainian cities have suffered indiscriminate Russian bombing campaigns, but the southern port city of Mariupol has been utterly devastated by constant Russian missile attacks and airstrikes for almost a month. On March 3, President Zelensky vowed that Ukraine will be rebuilt with Russian money, but the scale of the damage dealt to Mariupol and other cities since then is difficult to comprehend. Mariupol's mayor Vadym Boichenko said this morning that the situation is so dire that the port city must be completely evacuated. Boichenko said 160,000 civilians trapped in the city are encircled by Russian forces, with ever-dwindling supplies of food, water and medicine, while hundreds of citizens have already perished. Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs meanwhile said Russian troops are 'turning the city into dust', describing the situation in Mariupol as 'catastrophic' with people fighting to survive. Local resident Valentina Demura, 70, stands next to the building where her apartment, destroyed during Ukraine-Russia conflict, is located in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol on Sunday Kyrylo Shevchenko, the governor of Ukraine's national bank, said that Russia's foreign exchange reserves frozen by sanctions should be used to help Ukraine rebuild after the war The governor of Ukraine's national bank, Kyrylo Shevchenko, also shares Zelensky and Sviridenko's sentiment that Russia should be made to pay reparations to Ukraine in the aftermath of the conflict. In an interview earlier this month with the BBC, Shevchenko said some of the money for rebuilding could be supplied through multinational grants and foreign investment, but insisted that Russia should be forced to pay for the bulk of it. Russia is though to have hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of funds stashed overseas which have been subject to US and EU economic sanctions as punishment for its invasion of Ukraine. Schevchenko suggested these frozen funds could be funnelled towards the effort to rebuild Ukraine after the war. 'The need for money will be huge,' he told the BBC. 'It could be fulfilled through loans and grants from multinational organisations and direct help from other countries. 'However a large share of financing is needed to be obtained as a reparation from the aggressor, including funds that are currently frozen in our allied countries.' A woman is facing eight charges of child neglect after four young children were allegedly found living among faeces and black mould. The 41-year-old woman, who can't be named, and her children were living in a home described as 'the worst house of squalor' a Housing ACT worker had seen in her 20 years on the job. The woman appeared before the ACT Magistrates Court on Monday, where police evidence detailed 'disturbing' conditions at the public housing unit. She was the sole carer for the children who are aged up to eight. A woman is facing eight charges of child neglect after her four young children were allegedly found living amongst faeces. Pictured is a stock of image of a scared child According to an ACT Housing manager, the home had excrement embedded in the floor, a filthy high chair, a mould-filled fridge, and benches covered in dirty dishes. The first signs of the condition of the home were reported last September, when the property's manager saw, from outside, that the curtains were 'completely black with mould', the Canberra Times reported. The manager called Child and Youth Protection Services, but it is not known what action was then taken. A man was then called to the property in January to look at a reported water leak. When he entered the home, court documents said he began 'gagging due to the smell of rotten food and faeces'. He slipped on 'slime' on the floor and found that some rooms were filled with piles of mess so high he could not access them, the police reported. '[The man] still feels traumatised from seeing the house in such a disturbing state, and what he would describe as a couple of years' worth of accumulation of filth,' according to court documents. He had the water shut off, and the woman and her children were moved to a hotel. His report said the home would need $113,000 worth of repairs, leading to the building manager and a tenancy support officer going to the property in February. They reportedly found two scared dogs with no food or water. The animals began eating 'like there was no tomorrow' when they were given food, police said. The woman is also charged with failing to register a dog and failing to notify a change of registration. Two Housing ACT workers entered the house in full personal protective equipment after the dogs were taken away. A 41-year-old woman appeared before the ACT Magistrates Court (pictured) on Monday, where police evidence detailed 'disturbing' conditions at the public housing property '[The tenancy support officer] has worked in frontline services for 20 years, and yet described it as being the worst house of squalor she has ever seen,' court documents state. Police on March 4 said they carried out a search of the two hotel rooms where the family was staying. They allegedly found two of the 'visibly dirty' children 'freezing'. Court documents alleged the hotel rooms were in a similar condition to the house, with faeces on walls, rotting food and medication on the beds beside children's toys, the ABC reported. There was also reportedly only one toothbrush between five people. 'Police could also smell a pervasive odour of rotten food, cigarette and faeces throughout the two rooms,' court documents described. The mother was arrested and later granted bail. When she appeared in court on Monday her lawyer, Darryl Perkins, said the children were in Sydney, living with a grandparent. The woman was previously banned from speaking to her children, but the court changed her bail conditions, allowing her to see the children by special arrangement and under strict supervision. She will be back in court on Tuesday. Nearly three dozen anti-war Russian nationals who fled Moscow following their country's invasion of Ukraine have been secretly allowed to cross into the US from Mexico, despite tens of thousands of other asylum seekers being turned away. The 35 Russians were escorted across the border under cover of darkness after a deal was struck between Mexican and U.S. authorities, according to Vice. The group was allowed to cross at a section of the border where they were unlikely to be spotted in the early hours of March 20, which saw Mexican immigration officers hand the Russians directly over to US Customs and Border Protection officers, the outlet reported. Russian asylum seekers Nastya (C), Artem and their son Samuil sit outside the San Ysidro Port of Entry after not being allowed to cross into the United States to seek asylum on March 21 U.S. authorities have recently been allowing Ukrainian refugees to enter the U.S. at the Southern border with permission to remain in the U.S. on humanitarian parole for one year Russian asylum seekers Nastya, Artem and their son Samuil, seated in stroller, sit outside the San Ysidro Port of Entry after being refused entry It's believed the deal was put together with the help of officials at the US Consulate in Tijuana and Mexican officials at various levels of government after an encampment of displaced Russians suddenly began growing on the streets surrounding the busy Tijuana/San Diego border crossing. The apparent special treatment circumvented Title 42 laws that were enacted during the coronavirus pandemic which essentially allowed officers at the U.S. border to deny claims of asylum without cases being heard. The blanket refusal policy, which began under the Trump administration and has continued under President Joe Biden has seen tens of thousands of migrants stuck in Mexico, not knowing when they may be able to cross to the U.S. and receive a fair hearing. A Russian and a Ukrainian embrace each other as Russians wait for a humanitarian visa, at the San Ysidro Port of Entry of the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, Mexico A woman of Russian origin staying in a makeshift camp next to the San Ysidro Garita, cries while listening to the prayers Mexican officials arranged deal with U.S. authorities to allow them to cross over There have been suggestions that the Title 42 rules may be dropped at the start of April, likely resulting in a sudden surge of applications, not just from immigrants from Central America and Mexico but Ukrainians too who have made the journey, looking for refuge in the United States. It's not something the Russians who crossed over earlier this month will now have to worry about, having been given preferential treatment. The group had spent a horrendous week as they slept rough in a makeshift encampment on the streets of Tijuana, including a pregnant woman, in full view of a passageway reserved for people who regularly cross the border from Mexico into San Diego on foot each day. 'It's like Russian roulette,' Irina, a math teacher from Moscow told Vice World News. 'It's completely unpredictable. You don't know the steps along the way. You approach the border without knowing what is going to happen. You reach the border, but you don't know if the immigration officer will let you through. Then, when you cross, you are detained, but you don't know for how long or why.' After the deal was struck, the Russian citizens were held in a detention center for a couple of days on the American side, before being allowed to enter the country to live freely while awaiting their immigration hearings, likely in several months from now. Irina Zolkina, who is seeking asylum in the United States, cries as she recalls her trip from Russia to the Mexican border, standing near the San Ysidro Port of Entry into the United States A Russian man talks with a Customs and Border Protection official as he waits with others near the San Ysidro Port of Entry into the United States, in Tijuana, Mexico In early March, about a dozen Ukrainians from the war-ravaged country came to Tijuana looking to cross into the U.S. but were denied under the Title 42 policy. The CBP officers were reminded that they had discretion to allow asylum seekers into the country on a case-by-case basis, particularly on humanitarian grounds. It then saw more Ukrainians being allowed into the country, although the same rules were not being applied to Russians, even if they were claiming to face political persecution in their home country for opposing the war. It is this discrepancy which allowed the encampment of almost 40 Russian people to build at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. Each time the Russians attempted to cross the the border into the U.S., they were turned away, whereas the Ukrainians were allowed to cross more easily and given humanitarian visas. As the numbers grew, so did frustration on behalf of the Mexican authorities as the encampment built up. Eventually a deal was struck that the Russians would be allowed to cross the border, so long as the encampment was cleared away. Russian citizens seeking for asylum in the US sleep at an improvised camp on the Mexican side of the San Ysidro Crossing port in Tijuana Russians were constantly turned away at border so an encampment was set up in Tijuana A Russian woman hugs her son as they wait near the San Ysidro Port of Entry leading into the United States, in Tijuana, Mexico, earlier this month Both sides agreed to the deal in which the Russians were whisked through a border checkpoint known as El Chaparral. The crossing was closed to incoming migrants into the U.S. and only used to process deportations back to Mexico. Special dispensation was granted for the Russians to cross into the United States with even those who had been staying in nearby Tijuana hotels allowed to cross along with the rest of group. Families who crossed into San Diego were given notices to appear before immigration judges in the coming months while those crossing alone were taken to immigration detention centers where they are being detained for now. The State Department has not commented on the special agreement that was negotiated only noting how the 'U.S. and Mexico cooperate closely on a wide range of issues, including migration' and the countries' close relationship allows for 'dialogue to address challenges that impact both of our countries.' Last week, the United States announced it will accept up 100,000 refugees fleeing the war in the Ukraine, the Biden administration announced on Thursday. U.S. authorities have recently been allowing Ukrainian refugees to enter the U.S. at the Southern border with permission to remain in the U.S. yet barring Russian nationals Russian asylum seeker Nastya sits outside the San Ysidro Port of Entry after not being permitted to cross into the United States with family members It's meant to help ease the humanitarian criss taking place in Eastern Europe, where nearly 3.5 million Ukrainians have fled their bombarded country in one of the biggest refugee crises since World War II. Refugees have flooded into Europe and some have even made their way to the southern border of the United States, trying to enter the country that way. In addition to welcoming more of the displaced, the Biden administration also announced more than $1 billion in new funding toward humanitarian assistance. The funding will provide food, shelter, clean water, medical supplies and other forms of assistance, according to the White House. A new documentary series about disgraced media mogul Robert Maxwell show previously-unseen footage of the last time the doomed tycoon was seen alive. Clips from the docu-series also divulge never-heard-before audio recordings from November 1991, where senior staff members of Mirror Newspaper Group are trying to get in contact with their boss after leaving them with the financial mess he made, while he sailed on his Lady Ghislane yacht in the Canary Islands. The newly-discovered footage filmed by staff on board the yacht shows Robert relaxing in what turned out to be the last few days of his life. While senior executives of his empire were trying and failing to get in touch with him in regard to the fallout of his companies and financial discrepancies, he was the opposite - he knew their every moves as it is revealed that he was bugging their phones. One boss is heard saying: 'I just cant go on, one day after another. Its all because he doesnt want to deal with it. Thats not easy. Im f*****g furious. 'Today I tried to ring him and the girls upstairs said they didnt have his number which I know was a lie.' 'Im f****d if I know what hes done. And hes gone away on his boat, he said to me he was going to talk to them. 'Im still trying to track this bloody money down' The newly-discovered footage filmed by staff on board the yacht, the Lady Ghislane, pictured, shows Robert relaxing in what turned out to be the last few days of his life BBC Two's House of Maxwell gives insight into the complex family dynamics, hinting at a difficult upbringing for his daughter, ex-socialite and convicted sex offender Ghislane, pictured centre left with her father, and her siblings Ghislaine Maxwell was last year found guilty of helping Jeffrey Epstein (pictured together) abuse a number of young girls Robert's 22-stone naked body was found dead, floating in the Atlantic ocean on 5 November 1991, after making himself unavailable to staff who wanted answers to the huge discrepancies in company finances. Just a day before, Maxwell was on the phone to his son Kevin, regarding a meeting that was scheduled with the Bank of England. Robert had 50,000,000 in loans with the bank, but despite this, decided to miss the meeting and continue travelling on the Lady Ghislane. When he died, his publishing empire began to collapse after banks loaning him huge sums were calling in for their money back. It also emerged that Maxwell had used hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies' pension funds, in order to shore up his shares of Mirror Group, to stop the businesses from filing for bankruptcy. The funds were replenished by investment banks, the British government, and partial payment from public funds. The rest was waived. Pensioners therefore received about half of their company pension entitlement. The empire he built was later found to be around 2billion in debt. Following his death, the senior staff, who are voiced by actors to protect identities, struggle to understand the financial trouble - with one telling a colleague they are 'short' by 6.8million. 'Where the hell has all the money gone?' one says. 'On top of the 100 bloody million? This is only the tip of the iceberg,' another responds.' The staff member is assured that a 'big chunk' was on its way to helping the figures add up and clean up the mess, to which he replied: 'If it doesnt, theres going to be the most God almighty public scandal.' In another clip from the House of Maxwell documentary, former Mirror Group secretary Carol Bragoli (pictured) recalls overhearing a bizarre phone conversation between Ghislane and her father, where the two 'meowed' like cats to one another for a few minutes before engaging in conversation Former Sunday Mirror editor, Eve Pollard, describes the complicated relationship between Maxwell and his children, including Ghislaine, said she is 'sure he loved his children' Ghislaine Maxwell is pictured giving Jeffrey Epstein an intimate foot rub while the pair were on board his private jet Another concludes: 'We're f***ed.' In another clip from the House of Maxwell documentary, former Mirror Group secretary Carol Bragoli recalls overhearing a bizarre phone conversation between Ghislane and her father, where the two 'meowed' like cats to one another for a few minutes before engaging in conversation. She said Robert always had his phone calls on loudspeaker as he 'just couldn't be bothered' to put the phone to his ear, meaning she heard everything. In contrast, she later goes on to explain how towards the end of Robert's life, he became paranoid and he only trusted sons Kevin and Ian who worked with him. She said: 'He was becoming very suspicious. It reflects how paranoid he was becoming.' BBC Two's House of Maxwell gives insight into the complex family dynamics, hinting at a difficult upbringing for his daughter, ex-socialite and convicted sex offender Ghislane, and her siblings. The secret tapes in BBC's House of Maxwell tell an inside story into his mysterious death in November 1991. Ghislane, left, pictured with her father, centre, and mother Betty, at Cannes film festival in 1987 Former Sunday Mirror editor, Eve Pollard, describes the complicated relationship between Maxwell and his children, including Ghislaine, said she is 'sure he loved his children'. But she said that it is a 'sort of love that can grab you by the throat as well as by the heart', adding: 'You never knew which way it would go.' She spoke of the family base in Headington Hall, which became the house of media tycoon Robert Maxwell - but he supposedly spent very little time in the home with his loved ones. 'When you go to Headington Hall, at the root of it there is Bobs wife Betty and there are the children,' she said. Bob, often, barely went home at the weekend, or went home for an hour or two, half a day, and then come back to the Sunday Mirror on a Saturday night. Youd think hed stay in that lovely house with his children. Eve Pollard spoke of the family base in Headington Hall, which became the house of media tycoon Robert Maxwell - but he supposedly spent very little time in the home with his loved ones. 'When you go to Headington Hall, at the root of it there is Bobs wife Betty and there are the children' Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein (pictured together) had a close relationship but conspired to procure and abuse young women And that wouldve been quite hard sometimes, I mean you want your father to be this lovely, cosy, father, to love you unconditionally. And also he had a family where children had died, one child was in a car crash, I mean, theyd had a lot of tragedy in that family. And yet they kept going and the children were all well-educated, obviously went to school and did well because Betty helped them and Bob rather insisted on it. Im sure he loved his children, I saw him being very fond of Ian and Kevin and Ghislane. But its the sort of love that can grab you by the throat as well as by the heart, and you never knew which way it would go. House of Maxwell starts Monday on BBC Two at 9pm. A snake removalist rescued an agitated brown snake from a Coke can after a passerby used a 'pooper scooper' to stop it from crossing a busy highway. Tiffany ORegan was driving through Canberra last week when she noticed the snake on the side of a highway with a Coke can on its head. Ms O'Regan then called ACT Snake Removals specialist Gavin Smith to save the wounded reptile. Scroll down for the video. A brown snake was found off the side of a busy highway with a Coke can stuck on its head Tiffany O'Regan (above) spotted the snake and used a 'pooper scooper' to stop it from crossing the highway while waiting for help Mr Smith shared on his Facebook page how Ms O'Regan not only waited for the snake to be rescued but also prevented it from blindly crossing the highway with a 'pooper scooper'. 'Tiffany bless her soul stayed with the snake until I got there,' Mr Smith wrote. 'What an effort, Tiffany! Thank you so much for saving the snake from certain death and giving it a second chance, you are a true wildlife warrior! The dangers of discarded cans The happy ending for this poor victim of human waste: the snake gets to see the light of day again. Please folks, let's learn from these animals, and let the desperate suffering of this one inspire change. Put your rubbish in the bin. Lets minimise our footprint. We need to look after our precious environment and fauna better. ACT Wildlife Posted by ACT Snake Removals on Saturday, March 26, 2022 ACT Snake Removals specialist Gavin Smith arrived at the scene and was able to free the snake from the Coke can which had cut a ring around its neck Commenters under the video were appalled by the snake's injuries and condemned litterers 'Im sure that she has restored the snakes faith in humanity!' Mr Smith also shared a video of him removing the can from around the snake's head. The aluminum can had cut a ring through the snake's neck scales, however once it was freed it seemed unfazed by the injury. Several people in the comments applauded Ms O'Regan and Mr Smith for their combined reptile rescue and commented on the effects of littering. The snake was extremely stressed before Ms O'Regan and Mr Smith were able to free it Mr Smith is an Associate Professor of Social Science at Australian National University and has been tracking Eastern Brown snakes since 2021 'It's heartwarming to know that Tiffany went to great lengths to save an animal. Many wouldn't have bothered even for a cute little furry animal, never mind a snake. Bravo,' one person wrote. 'Poor fella, so preventable if people would just do the right thing!,' another said. 'How hard is it for us to clean up after ourselves? Take it home or find a bin! To many people are careless and lazy these days!,' another said. Mr Smith agreed, hoping the snake's predicament would 'inspire change'. 'Put your rubbish in the bin. Lets minimise our footprint. We need to look after our precious environment and fauna better,' he posted. Mr Smith is an Associate Professor of Social Science at Australian National University and has been tracking Eastern brown snakes since 2021. BT has put its controversial digital landline rollout on hold after a backlash from customers. Telecoms giants want to move all 29million UK homes off the old copper landline network and on to broadband internet lines by 2025. But pensioners were left without working landlines for days during power cuts. And a mans home burned down in Scotland because he had no mobile signal and could not call 999 on his phone. BT has put its controversial digital landline rollout on hold after a backlash from customers BT confirmed it has paused the rollout for now and will only transfer people who request it. The firm, which says copper wires are becoming obsolete and costly to maintain, said it will work on solutions such as hybrid phones that can switch to mobile networks if an internet connection is lost and longer-lasting back-up battery units in case power is cut. Marc Allera, head of BTs consumer division, said Storms Arwen and Eunice had brought these issues into focus. He added: We are holding our hands up, we are sorry, we have got a few things wrong and we need to make some changes. Telecoms giants want to move all 29million UK homes off the old copper landline network and on to broadband internet lines by 2025 BT intends to restart the rollout once these issues are ironed out but it is understood this could take several months. Campaigner Dame Esther Rantzen said: I applaud BT for recognising that mistakes have been made. Andrew Bowie, Tory MP for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, hailed the pause last night as a victory for the vulnerable. BT has already moved 2million of its 10million customers on to the new system, called digital voice. Huawei opens new chapter on profit surge By Ma Si (China Daily) 09:20, March 29, 2022 Two children try out Huawei's touchscreen smart PCs at a Huawei store in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. [Photo/Xinhua] Challenges galore, but firm will focus on innovation and breakthroughs Huawei Technologies Co is banking on long-term investment in innovation and intensified efforts to seek system-level breakthroughs to cope with challenges like chip shortages and broader fallouts of the prolonged US government restrictions, top company executives said on Monday. Huawei, they disclosed, recorded a full-year 2021 net profit of 113.7 billion yuan ($17.8 billion), up almost 76 percent year-on-year, on better profitability linked to the sale of certain businesses. Cash reserves have been boosted to better cope with uncertainties. Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei, said at a news conference in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, that despite the company's 2021 revenue recording a nearly 29 percent decline to 634 billion yuan, "our ability to make a profit and generate cash flow is increasing, and we are more capable of dealing with uncertainties." Meng, who made her first public appearance after returning from Canada to China last year, attributed the profit surge in part to business sales. But excluding such sales, Huawei's net profit margin still improved in 2021 as the profitability of its main businesses rose while operational costs fell. Meng linked the revenue decline to multiple factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic and plummeting sales of PCs and smartphones, after the United States restricted Huawei's access to US chip-making technologies, software and components in 2019. The revenue of Huawei's consumer business group, which includes smartphones and the internet of things devices, reached 243.4 billion yuan last year, down nearly 50 percent. According to market research company Counterpoint, the company's smartphone market share fell below 4 percent since the first quarter of 2021, compared with its peak of 20 percent in the April-June quarter of 2020. Guo Ping, rotating chairman of Huawei, said the company's challenges can be solved not through frugality but via innovation. "When it's difficult to access advanced chip manufacturing process techniques (under the US restrictions), or to achieve leadership in single technologies, we need to seek system-level breakthroughs. For instance, our communication products are now using multi-core chipsets and we are reengineering our software, which will help inject new life into chips to ensure supply in the long-term," Guo said. This process, Guo said, is complexand turning sand into chipsets will take a long time. And when global supply chains are good, repeated development of some chip technologies does not make sense. But when industry chains are fragmented, new demand will emerge. So, Huawei welcomes the trend of more companies investing in semiconductor manufacturing. Guo emphasized that Huawei's enterprise-oriented business, including 5G base stations and digital energy solutions, is not experiencing any chip supply problems. Huawei said it spent 142.7 billion yuan on research and development in 2021, slightly higher than the 2020 figure of 141.9 billion yuan, despite all the difficulties it has been facing. Huawei's R&D spending over the past decade reached 845 billion yuan, and the company now has over 107,000 employees engaged in R&D work, accounting for over half of its total staff members. About 10 to 20 percent of Huawei's annual R&D spending, or $2 billion to 3 billion every year, is earmarked as expenses to explore promising, futuristic fundamental technologies. Huawei executives said the company is actively exploring new revenue opportunities in the automobile business. Experts said information and communication technologies are increasingly important in electrified, connected and smart cars. Huawei, its executives said, will not make cars itself but help carmakers to better embrace connectivity and intelligence. Huawei's investment in smart car solutions reached $10 billion last year. The company has developed more than 30 smart car components and teamed up with more than 300 upstream and downstream automobile supply chain partners. Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of the China Passenger Car Association, said there is enough room for the development of smart cars in the 5G era. Huawei can offer a slew of technological solutions and services covering both hardware and software, he said. (Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun) Ukraine proposed adopting neutral status in exchange for security guarantees at talks with Russia in Turkey, meaning it would not join military alliances or host military bases, Ukrainian negotiators said on Tuesday. The proposals would also include a 15-year consultation period on the status of annexed Crimea and could come into force only in the event of a complete ceasefire, the negotiators told reporters in Istanbul. The proposals are the most detailed and concrete that Ukraine has aired publicly. They also envisage security guarantees along the lines of the NATO military alliance's Article 5, its collective defence clause. Poland, Israel, Turkey and Canada could among the potential security guarantors. "If we manage to consolidate these key provisions, and for us this is the most fundamental, then Ukraine will be in a position to actually fix its current status as a non-bloc and non-nuclear state in the form of permanent neutrality," said negotiator Oleksander Chaly. "We will not host foreign military bases on our territory, as well as deploy military contingents on our territory, and we will not enter into military-political alliances," he said, in comments broadcast on Ukrainian national television. "Military exercises on our territory will take place with the consent of the guarantor countries." There was enough material in the current Ukrainian proposals to warrant a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Ukrainian negotiators said, adding they were awaiting Russia's response. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Turkey on Tuesday for the first face-to-face talks in nearly three weeks, with Ukraine seeking a ceasefire without compromising on territory or sovereignty as its forces have pushed Russians back from Kyiv. (Reuters) Today host Karl Stefanovic has unloaded on the government for splashing cash 'like drunken sailors' ahead of Tuesday night's big-spending pre-election Budget. Prime Minister Scott Morrison's government put aside a $16billlion war chest of 'unannounced' spending in the mid-year statement, which is now set to fund a giveaway cash bonanza Budget. Leaks have already tipped a $250 handout for some workers and a 20c cut in fuel pump prices, with further vote-winning spending expected to be revealed. But when Finance Minister Simon Birmingham appeared on Nine's Today show on Tuesday morning, he insisted the government had actually cut spending. Host Karl Stefanovic exploded at the suggestion and questioned: 'Sorry, where do you get low levels of spending from? 'You're spending like drunken sailors before this election.' Today host Karl Stefanovic (pictured with finance minister Simon Birmingham) has unloaded on the government for splashing cash 'like drunken sailors' The minister fired back, saying the government had balanced paying off debt while banking cash to fund their policies. 'There is a real reduction and a nominal reduction in the amount of spending by government,' Mr Birmingham said. 'We've been very careful here to make sure that we actually squirrelled away and save some of the dividends of a stronger economy to make sure Australia's better positioned for the future.' The government's plan to slash 20c off the price of a litre of fuel will cost around $2.5billion alone. But other projects aimed at tackling the rising cost of living are expected to be unveiled by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Analysts are expecting the government to announce the cash splash in the Budget for a boost in the polls just days before the PM calls the Federal Election. Finance minister Simon Birmingham (pictured right with PM Scott Morrison) fired back that the government had balanced paying off debt while banking cash to fund their policies The government set aside a $16billlion warchest of 'unannounced' spending in their mid-year statement which is set to fund a giveaway bonanza budget (pictured, a stock image of cash) But Mr Frydenberg has insisted any new measures would be short term boosts with an eye to long-term growth. 'There are real pressures right now on Australians,' he said on Tuesday morning. 'This is a responsible budget with temporary targeted measures designed to ease the cost of living pressures now, but importantly a long-term economic plan to create more jobs.' The NHS will start giving Covid jabs to healthy five to 11-year-olds next week with the help of toys to distract them. Vaccine centres will go to extra lengths to make the experience as stress-free as possible for children and parents, Dr Emily Lawson of NHS England told MPs. All six million in this age group will be offered a vaccine but take-up is expected to be slow and continue throughout spring, the national director for vaccine deployment said. The NHS will start giving Covid jabs to healthy five to 11-year-olds next week with the help of toys to distract them (stock image) Addressing the public accounts committee yesterday, Dr Lawson added: Sites have purchased things like fidget toys for distraction. Children having the jab will be given two 10-microgram doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, a third of the strength of an adult dose, at least 12 weeks apart. Dr Lawson said: The rollout for the non at-risk five to elevens starts next week. Weve been working with local systems to make the most of their entrepreneurship to make the centres appropriate for five to 11 year olds. Weve seen brilliant examples from sites, so in Derby, for example, theyve designed a vaccination town where the whole building has effectively been redesigned and painted to make it welcoming for children. Weve increased the length of the appointment on the national booking service to make sure that children their parents have the right time to sit and make the decision and children dont feel rushed. Dr Lawson said the NHS has used focus groups and polling to establish what would make parents feel comfortable vaccinating their children. She added: I think bearing in mind some of the lessons learned from other groups where weve been concerned about uptake, giving people time, we recognise this is not going to be a quick vaccination of a cohort in a short amount of time. Parents will be given the choice of whether to vaccinate their kids, with jabs offered in vaccination centres and pharmacies (stock image) This is going to need to give people the chance to come forward when theyre ready, which means these sites need to be prepared to vaccinate through the spring. Ministers accepted a recommendation from expert advisors to make a low-dose version of the vaccine available on a non-urgent basis. Parents will be given the choice of whether to vaccinate their kids, with jabs offered in vaccination centres and pharmacies. The paediatric dose is a third of the strength of an adult dose after research showed that the immune response from a lower dose in those aged five to 11 is just as good as a full dose for 16 to 25-year-olds. Dr Lawson said the NHS is preparing to offer a booster jab to a larger cohort of adults in autumn, subject to the recommendation of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Officials are also considering whether to switch to newly formulated vaccines that may better target coronavirus variants, MPs heard. A 'rotten egg gas' smell has returned with a vengeance, wafting through windows and door cracks of homes with disgusted locals having no choice but to put up with it. It's been a year-long saga with the hideous smell making itself known in the western Sydney area, with people unable to hang their washing on the line. The stench is coming from the nearby Bingo Waste Facility in Eastern Creek, which was responsible for a similarly foul odour last year. One Minchinbury resident, Michelle, lashed out at the facility for not taking residents' complaints seriously and said their gas collection system, designed to prevent odour pollution, was faulty. A resident said Bingo's (pictured) gas collection system designed to prevent odour pollution was faulty, and they have not been taking the complaints from locals seriously 'It is 2022, they are saying they have all this great technology, and it's a great waste management facility, but they don't have that,' she told 2GB on Tuesday. 'They have the gas collection flares, but they're not working.' Michelle said she was 'totally livid' about the issue that has caused residents to shut themselves into their homes and place towels under doors at night. 'I let my little dogs out this morning and I had to quickly bring them back in because it is absolutely putrid,' Michelle said. The Environmental Protection Authority's executive director Steve Beaman said the recent heavy rainfall had led to the increase in the foul odour. 'This heavy and prolonged rain is causing trouble,' he told Ben Fordham. 'In the last fortnight we have received about 40 complaints and have seen air activity on our air monitors, and the recent spike in those has been caused by the heavy rain, which is impacting the operation of the gas collection system.' But Fordham asked whether the authority had a long term plan as rain will continue to fall in the area. Mr Beaman said a permanent gas collection system has been given the go ahead that promises to be 'more robust for these weather conditions'. 'We are going to work as hard as we can to get on top of these issues, so that's our commitment to you Ben,' he told the 2GB news broadcaster. Michelle said she didn't know what change the new gas collection system would make, and that residents were fed up. 'If every time it rains, we've got to live like this, is the government going to buy back our properties from us, because we can't continue to live like this,' Michelle said. 'We've got families who are living here who are depressed ... it's beyond ridiculous.' The NSW EPA said Bingo had installed gas collection to capture and burn the odours when it was sourced to the smell last year When the problems started in the area last year there were calls for the EPA to close the waste facility, until it could solve the problem. Residents in Minchinbury, Mount Druitt, St Clair, Rooty Hill, Doonside and Blacktown all reported the constant stench that was so bad that it's stopped them having mates over for BBQs, hanging their washing on the line and made them depressed. In a post on its site at the time, Bingo Industries apologised for the odour issue and claimed it's mitigation strategy was now working. It's understood the stench was resolved for some time before it returned recently. Restrictions were placed on the waste facility at the time and Bingo committed to regularly monitoring the landfill gas levels. Bingo also claimed the odour was not entirely attributable to its operations. The $100 million facility was spruiked by green organisation Planet Ark as boasting 'world-leading resource recovery and manufacturing technology', allowing it to increase the amount of material diverted from landfill and manufactured into new products on-site. The 52.4-hectare site includes a materials processing centre, waste transfer station and a general solid waste landfill. Bingo Industries was contacted for comment by Daily Mail Australia. A Christian doctor should not have been sacked for refusing to call a transgender woman 'she', a tribunal heard yesterday. Dr David Mackereth's lawyer said equality law should have protected his belief that God created man and woman, so a person's sex is fixed. An employment tribunal rejected his case in 2019, ruling that his belief in the words of the Bible clashed with the rights of transgender people. He declared this 'totalitarianism', according to the Times. It said he was not discriminated against by the Department for Work and Pensions when it fired him as a disability claims assessor for admitting he would not 'call any 6ft tall bearded man 'madam'.' But following a judgment that found 'gender-critical' beliefs were protected under the Equality Act he has appealed. Dr David Mackereth's lawyer said equality law should have protected his belief that God created man and woman, so a person's sex is fixed. Pictured: Dr Mackereth Speaking ahead of his hearing in London yesterday, Dr Mackereth said NHS staff should be able to 'say without fear that a person cannot change sex. Outlining the case before the Employment Appeal Tribunal in London yesterday, his barrister Michael Phillips said the 'central issue of law' has now been 'effectively resolved' by last year's victory by Maya Forstater. He added: 'The claimant in Forstater relied on substantively similar beliefs about sex and gender to those held by the claimant in this case, although in Forstater, the beliefs were put on a secular philosophical basis rather than a religious basis. Speaking ahead of his hearing in London yesterday, Dr Mackereth, pictured in 2019, said NHS staff should be able to 'say without fear that a person cannot change sex 'The reasoning of the Employment Appeal Tribunal decision in Forstater applies a fortiori [even more strongly] to the present case, where the claimant's gender-critical beliefs are religious in nature, and as the employment tribunal has found, form part of his wider Christian faith. The error is all the more obvious here.' He said it 'simply cannot be right' to conclude, as the initial tribunal had done, that neither Dr Mackereth's gender-critical beliefs nor his religion were protected under equality law. The hearing concludes today. Hospitals, schools and councils have been told they must ensure they are not propping up Vladimir Putins regime. Ministers wrote to public bodies yesterday to instruct them to cut ties with Russian firms. Many councils have contracts with the Russian state-controlled energy giant Gazprom to heat buildings. According to the data firm Tussell, local authorities paid 29million to Gazprom from 2016 to 2021, while NHS trusts spent 77million. Ministers wrote to public bodies yesterday to instruct them to cut ties with Russian firms The Cabinet Office guidance stated: The Government is supportive of public bodies seeking to divest from Russia and contracting authorities should consider how they can further cut ties with companies backed by, or linked to, the Russian and Belarusian state regimes, while minimising the impact to taxpayers and the delivery of public services. This includes identifying contracts with Russian or Belarusian prime contractors and to consider... terminating the contract. It follows a call from Chancellor Rishi Sunak for firms to think very carefully about investments linked to Russia. Steve Barclay, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said: Public money should not fund Putins war machine Steve Barclay, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said: Public money should not fund Putins war machine. We are asking hospitals, councils and other organisations across the public sector to urgently look at all the ways they can go further to sever their commercial ties to Russia. The Government will continue to work closely with these organisations, ensuring they are able to take the necessary steps as quickly as possible, including taking legal routes where necessary. A climate change activist has been given a four-month jail term for scaling a 60-metre crane as part of week-long protests at Australia's busiest container port. Maxim Curmi, 26, streamed footage of himself climbing the crane on Friday as part of organised protests by Blockade Australia at Port Botany in Sydney. 'I'm taking this action because we need to change Australia's exploitative practices and climate change denial with a tinge of greenwashing,' Mr Curmi said from atop the crane in his stream. 'Normal people who are concerned about this climate crisis can do something, we are not beholden to waiting for the right political party to do something.' Maxim Curmi suspended himself from a 60m crane at Port Botany (pictured) as part of protests linked to Blockade Australia Mr Curmi (left) appeared in court over the stunt in which he temporarily stopped a cargo shipped being loaded (right) Mr Curmi donned gloves and a ski jacket before running through the port, over train lines, jumping a number of barbed wire fences, and scaling the crane. Once perched at the top he tied himself to the structure, temporarily shutting down one of the port cargo terminals and preventing a ship from being loaded. 'It is a risky thing to do. I am risking my life right now, but not acting is more risky,' he said. Mr Curmi appeared at Waverley Local Court on Monday where he pled guilty to five charges including endangering the safety of a person on the railway and risking the safety of another by climbing a building or structure. His court appearance followed a taskforce being set up by police to stay ahead of the protesters and an increase in penalties. Those protesters who break the law can receive up two years in jail in NSW and be slugged with a $22,000 fine for disrupting traffic. Mr Curmi was fined $1,500 and was handed a four-month jail sentence ending on July 24. At one point in his video from atop the crane, Mr Curmi showed what appeared to be a leak from one of the cargo ships into the bay (pictured) He was eventually brought down in a safety cage by specialist rescue police (pictured) Blockade Australia said on its website that 'disrupting the movement of resources, goods and labour through roads, port, and rail is a legitimate and appropriate response to Australian expansionism'. But critics have said protests which use self described 'destructive action' make no concrete change in increasing the support for climate action but rather appeal to the already converted. 'The people the climate movement needs to win over are the kinds of people turned off by events such as those at Botany Bay,' leading social trends researcher Rebecca Huntley wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald. 'In the qualitative research I have done, groups such as Extinction Rebellion come up in conversation in a very negative way and can be a barrier to talking about global warming and how climate action might actually improve their lives.' Blockade Australia conducted a week-long series of protests at Port Botany causing multiple disruptions including blocking traffic (pictured) 'Agree with your passion, agree with your ideals, but your 15 seconds of fame does nothing but polarise the message and rally the naysayers.' one person wrote on the group's Facebook page. 'Blockade Australia are doing damage to the climate cause. Let the ranting begin.' Mr Curmi's protest marked the fourth straight day of disruptions at the port with several protests - including at least two in which people suspended themselves from infrastructure - gaining attention. Two German brothers will likely be deported over their involvement in the protests this week, which blocked peak-hour traffic in Sydney around Port Botany. The brothers were arrested after suspending themselves from poles in and around the shipping terminal on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Two brothers (pictured) from Germany had their visas cancelled for their involvement in the protests Immigration Minister Alex Hawke said their visas were cancelled on 'good order grounds'. 'So we've cancelled those visas and then the Australian Border Force will be effecting their removal from Australia as soon as possible,' he told Sydney radio station 2GB. Blockade Australia said the decision was part of 'the government's draconian overreach' that involved 'fear tactics' designed to 'squash dissent'. The group said the decision would not deter it from further action. Emma Dorge, 25, was granted bail on the weekend for her role in the protests and ordered not to associate with Blockade Australia members. She suspended herself from a bridge at the port and was charged with endanger safety of person on railway, remain on enclosed land not prescribed premises without lawful excuse, refuse/fail to comply with direction, and encourage the carrying on operation for commission of crime. Police on Thursday also arrested Alex Pearse, 33, who was hanging from a pole nine metres above the port's rail line, blocking container trains in and out. Emma Dorge, 25, proudly filmed herself dangling over the rail line in Sydney's Port Botany on Friday morning, blocking all freight trains Ms Dorge suspended herself above the rail line and water in Port Botany on the fourth day of targeted climate change stunts Acting Premier Paul Toole said the government would no longer tolerate the 'disgraceful' stunts that disrupted traffic. 'Over the last few days we've seen protesters around this state and clearly they have no respect for the law ... enough is enough,' he told reporters. 'These kinds of acts are just disgraceful.' The penalties apply to anyone caught protesting on bridges and roads across the state. Another climate change protestor blocked a major train line by suspending himself on a pole above the tracks (pictured) NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge criticised the government's heavy-handed approach saying it was a 'politically-motivated crackdown on legitimate political expression'. 'Every tonne of coal, oil and gas we burn will increase the intensity and speed of climate change - the activists standing up to stop this should be congratulated, not arrested.' But Attorney-General Mark Speakman said he would ensure 'there is an effective deterrent in our law to deal with these economic vandals'. Opposition leader Chris Minns also lambasted the group's behaviour as 'disruptive'. 'They're not disrupting billionaire coal barons, they're actually hitting ordinary Australians who are just going about their work,' he said. Another protestor filmed himself dangling from the light pole at Port Botany as police rescue crews worked below (pictured) Blockade Australia has vowed to continue disrupting roads and rail traffic into the port and is calling for a major public disruption of Sydney from June 27. Greenpeace condemned the new anti-protest laws as anti-democratic and indicative of a worrying trend of suppression of protest activity in Australia. Spokeswoman Katrina Bullock said the new laws could significantly stifle advocacy and protest activity. 'These sweeping new laws, rushed through in a knee-jerk response to protest activity, are the latest in a suite of increasingly draconian regulatory measures introduced in Australia to restrict climate activism,' she said. Ukraine's spy agency yesterday published a mammoth online database of what it said were 620 members of Russia's Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB. The Intelligence arm of Ukraine's defence ministry listed people It said were FSB employees registered at the agency's HQ In Moscow. It contained names, addresses, mobile phone numbers and even car registrations of those It alleged were Kremlin spies. A database containing the information of more than 600 people who reportedly work for the Russian spy agency, Federal Security Service (FSB), has been published online by Ukraine's defence ministry (pictured: the headquarters of the FSB) Sergey Beseda (pictured), head of the FSBs foreign intelligence unit, was arrested and placed under house arrest by Putin as punishment for the stalled invasion The FSB Is responsible for domestic security in Russia, akin to Britain's MI5. 'Employees of the FSB involved In the criminal activities of the aggressor state In Europe,' the post said without further details on the alleged crimes. It provided the names under a photo of the Moscow headquarters of the FSB. Russia did not immediately comment on the list of names. The FSB is thought to be taking much of the blame in the Kremlin over Putins struggling war effort. Earlier this month, two of its most senior spies were arrested and placed under house arrest as punishment for the stalled invasion. Sergey Beseda and Anatoly Bolukh were both said to have angered Putin by presenting him with an incomplete, or incompetent, picture of the likely resistance as he plotted to go over the border. Beseda, head of the FSBs foreign intelligence unit, apparently assured Putin that Ukraines citizens would welcome a Russian invasion. Bolukh, as his deputy, was head of Russias vast disinformation campaign which has struggled in the face of social media. How supremely foolish they now look, the irreconcilable Remainers. Brexit, they sneered, would leave the UK irrelevant on the world stage. Cast into the geopolitical outer darkness, a diplomatic and military busted flush. In fact, Britain has proudly led the global response to Vladimir Putin's evil war. In a time of crisis, Boris Johnson has risen to the occasion. While others dawdled, we trained Ukrainian fighters to defend their country. Thanks to missiles we provided, Russian tanks lie smouldering wrecks. Volodymyr Zelensky has heaped praise on Boris Johnson for helping Ukraine more than other world leaders The Prime Minister impressively built an international coalition to impose punishing financial, commercial and cultural sanctions on Putin's degenerate regime. But don't just take our word for it. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday heaped praise on Mr Johnson for helping more than other world leaders. Compare that to his brutal denunciation of Emmanuel Macron. He accused the French president of refusing to arm Ukraine because he is scared of Putin. So much for morality! Of course, those who loathe Boris are wilfully blind to such humiliations. With the first police fines for Partygate reported to be issued as early as today, they're sure to scream that Mr Johnson is unfit for high office. But with Ukraine in flames, how trivial that furore now seems. The Mail has just one quibble: The Government's shameful response to the refugee crisis. Countless Britons are willing to throw open their doors and hearts. Yet the hapless Home Office frustrates their generosity by tying up fleeing families in red tape. This inexcusable foot-dragging must end. Then Britain can be as proud of the humanitarian assistance as the help given to our freedom-fighting friends. Don't be fools on fuel The Ukraine crisis has also thrown the spotlight on the vital importance of domestic energy security. This seemed the perfect opportunity for ministers to set out a long overdue strategy for keeping Britain's lights on. Yet with tiresome inevitability, the blueprint has been delayed. Rishi Sunak has recoiled at the vast cost of building a new generation of nuclear reactors. The PM must pull rank. With renewables and imports of oil and gas unreliable, nuclear power is a necessity, not a luxury. Within days, spiralling energy bills will land on people's doormats, contributing to a profound cost of living crisis. Voters won't thank the Government for Cabinet spats when they are struggling to heat and light their homes. Especially from a Chancellor who likes posing in a 335 pair of trainers. Our Empire's story Nothing illustrates our political elite's disheartening lack of confidence in Britain's history more than the fact it takes the son of immigrants to vigorously defend it. Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi, whose parents fled Saddam Hussein, says schools should teach the benefits, not just criticisms, of the Empire. Of course, bad things were done during colonial rule. But this country left a legacy around the globe of Parliamentary democracy, rule of law and civil service. That is something to be proud of, not ashamed. To airbrush inconvenient truths in a fit of hand-wringing revisionism is pointless. The Empire remains an ineradicable part of our national story good and bad. Guns, violence and a chaotic beach exodus after police released drug-sniffing dogs - not an episode of Miami Vice, just another weekend of Spring Break in Florida. Police in Panama City Beach, a popular party destination for college students, confiscated 75 illegal guns - enough to supply a 'small army' - and arrested more than 160 'pathetic cowards' over the weekend, officials announced during a press conference Monday. In a new video, police officers could also be seen unleashing at least one drug hound on the town's beach on the same day as the gun bust, prompting dozens of revelers to run and disperse themselves along the white sands. 'These guns were taken over a period of two days,' Beach Police Chief J.R. Talamantez said, the Panama City News Herald reported. 'It could arm a small army. Semiautomatic weapons, long rifles - these are weapons brought to a resort destination. These are weapons brought to a beach.' The beach town also saw an uptick in violence over the weekend, including a Sunday shooting that left one person injured. Talamantez on Monday warned that the criminals plaguing Florida's beaches 'will soon find out what justice looks like.' 'Right here, today, we stand united as not only law enforcement officials, not only as city leadership or county leadership, but just as citizens of Bay County,' Talamantez said. 'What we saw this past weekend is absolutely unacceptable, period. These pathetic cowards who came and committed these crimes - their actions will not be tolerated.' The chaos comes a day after Miami Beach was forced to impose a 6 p.m. curfew on weekends to shoo away the roaming packs of Spring Breakers wreaking havoc on the South Florida city. Scroll down for video Spring breakers were bonding in a large group on Panama City Beach before local police arrival with drug-sniffing canines on Monday The crowd broke up and people ran and spread themselves around the white sound as soon as the police dogs were unleashed Officials with the Panama City Beach Department (pictured) confiscated a large number of firearms on Monday, saying the city was targeted by a group of lawbreakers Police in Panama City Beach, Florida seized 75 guns over the weekend including pistols, shotguns, semiautomatic weapons and long rifles Officials also arrested 161 individuals on Saturday and Sunday, police confirmed during a press conference on Monday. Eighty of the arrestees were from Alabama Despite the number of weapons seized in Panama City, police said only one shooting was reported over the weekend. An unnamed 21-year-old from Alabama was shot in the foot around 4.30pm Sunday near a local Waffle House restaurant, WVTM reported. The young adult sustained non-life threatening injuries. Six people, including accused gunman Javonte Sanders, are currently in custody in connection to the shooting. Police allege Sanders, 22, of Cropwell, Alabama, discharged the weapon that struck the victim. He is being held on gun-related charges and the shooting is still under investigation. Talamantez told the TV station officers initially responded to the area after they found several people with guns, including automatic weapons. Police recovered 26 shell casings at the scene from three different weapons - a 9mm, .40 caliber and a .45 caliber. Authorities did not indicate which gun was allegedly fired by Sanders. Spring breakers socialize on the sidewalks and streets throughout Miami Beach on Wednesday Spring breakers are flooding Florida's beaches, as seen on Saturday Beach goers share a blanket during Spring Break on Fort Lauderdale Beach on March 22 Beach Police Chief J.R. Talamantez said officers seized enough weapons to 'arm a small army' The guns were taken over a period of two days. Talamantez, on Monday, warned that the criminals plaguing Florida's beaches 'will soon find out what justice looks like' Panama City Beach also saw a shooting on Sunday. An unnamed 21-year-old from Alabama was shot in the foot around 4.30pm near a local Waffle House restaurant (left). Javonte Sanders, 22, of Cropwell, Alabama (right), allegedly fired the shot that injured the victim. He is being held on gun-related charges and the shooting is still under investigation During Monday's press conference, Bay County Sheriff Tommy Ford revealed that of 161 individuals arrested on Saturday and Sunday, 80 were from Alabama. Panama City Police Chief Mark Smith argued the criminals responsible for the weekend chaos were not traditional spring breakers, but instead 'true criminals'. 'Every time one of our brave officers confronted these 75 individuals, it was an opportunity for that brave officer to have lost their life or been forced to take someone else's life,' Smith said. 'This is not what Bay County is about, not what Panama City Beach is about.' He added: 'This isn't what we want coming to our city. We want the spring breakers. We want the tourists, but we don't want this criminal element.' Ford echoed Smith's remarks, saying: 'We were faced with dangerous circumstances but stood firm in protecting our county.' 'Each one of these 75 firearms ... represents a violent encounter with law enforcement, and I'm so proud of the law enforcement officers who stood in that gap between citizens and the criminals who were carrying these guns.' A group of women from Michigan enjoy spring break in Miami Beach A group of men pose for a photo while enjoying the Miami Beach sunshine on Saturday Spring breakers and locals alike enjoy a perfect day in Miami Beach on Saturday Police recovered 26 shell casings at the scene from three different weapons - a 9mm, .40 caliber and a .45 caliber. Authorities did not indicate which gun was allegedly fired by Sanders Local businesses also reported acts of vandalism. A Walmart store in Panama City Beach is pictured in disarray Merchandise, including hats and sunscreen, were knocked off the shelves and scattered across the floor. Talamantez confirmed Monday that Walmart was one of numerous businesses that closed early over the weekend Police also described incidents of violence towards officers and local businesses. Video from inside an area Walmart and obtained by WMBB shows the store aisles in complete disarray. Merchandise, including hats and sunscreen, were knocked off the shelves and scattered across the floor. Talamantez confirmed Monday that Walmart was one of numerous businesses that closed early over the weekend. Massive crowds flooded the city's streets, making it hard for residents and visitors to navigate the area. 'We were getting run over by people,' visitor Ladariya Gurley told WFLA. 'They were pushing us.' One officer suffered a cut to his head and received medical treatment after a crowd member threw a beer bottle at him. 'These are the type of individuals that we're facing. Throwing beer bottles at police officers. Shooting right down the road,' Smith said. 'There were blue lights up and down the road as these shootings took place. He added: 'The blatant disregard for public safety that these individuals are having will not be tolerated.' A police car is seen stationed Sunday on South Beach in Miami, Florida amid the surge of spring break chaos Two spring breakers, seemingly dressed for nightlife festivities, walk the streets of Miami's South Beach neighborhood on Sunday A group of spring breakers are pictured in Miami Beach after the mayor declared a curfew for the city due to shootings Police officers patrol Miami Beach after the mayor issued a curfew amid the surge of spring breakers and shootings Advertisement Joe Biden was mocked online on Monday for using a printed 'cheat sheet' of answers to expected questions when he faced the media to discuss the Ukraine war. Biden was in Poland on Saturday and declared in Warsaw that Vladimir Putin 'cannot remain in power' before flying back to Washington, DC. Asked on Monday about his remarks, which many saw as advocating for regime change, the 79-year-old president referred to a typed cue card for hints. He said he made 'no apologies' for his remarks, made off the cuff and not part of his prepared speech. 'It's more an aspiration than anything. He shouldn't be in power. There's no I mean, people like this shouldn't be ruling countries, but they do. The fact is they do, but it doesn't mean I can't express my outrage about it,' he said as he held the cheat sheet in his left hand. 'I was talking to the Russian people. The last part of the speech was talking to the Russian people, telling them what we thought.' The notes read: 'If you weren't advocating for regime change, what did you mean? Can you clarify? 'I was expressing the moral outrage I felt towards the actions of this man. 'I was not articulating a change in policy.' The president on Monday was seen holding a cue card in his left hand as he addressed reporters President Joe Biden refused on Monday to walk back his Saturday comments about not allowing President Vladimir Putin of Russia to stay in power, but faced a barrage of questions from reporters Biden had also anticipated a question about the reaction from the French president, Emmanuel Macron. Macron said on Sunday that he would not have used Biden's words, adding that he saw his task as 'achieving first a ceasefire and then the total withdrawal of [Russian] troops by diplomatic means'. Biden's comments were seized on by the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin's allies. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: 'This is a statement that is certainly alarming' He told broadcaster France 3: 'If we want to do that, we can't escalate in either words or actions.' Biden's notes read: 'Is this now threatening to splinter unity with your NATO allies?' The answer Biden had ready stated: 'No. NATO has never been more united.' Biden regularly uses cue cards, and was photographed frequently with them on the campaign trail and in office. He often took from his pocket the daily totals of COVID cases, which he referenced regularly. He also used them to give precise details at a Town Hall before the election, as he fielded a question about taxes. 'I carry this card with me,' Biden said, referencing the card. He used several cheat sheets during his first presidential press conference, including one with the headshots and names of reporters he planned to call on. Biden also utilized notes during a 2021 summit with Putin, while touring the damage of Hurricane Ida in Louisiana and while calling on reporters at the G20 summit in Rome. 'I'll take your questions, and as usual, folks, they gave me a list of the people I'm going to call on,' Biden told the assembled media at the November forum. Biden delivered his controversial remarks right at the end of his three-day trip to Europe, at the end of a speech in the Polish capital Warsaw on Saturday. The White House then had to walk back his comments and insisted he wasn't advocating for regime change On Monday, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul took issue with Biden's use of the cue cards, and his off-the-cuff remarks about Putin. Paul questioned Biden's acuity, saying the aging president's remarks were a threat to national security. 'A lot of times when you're around somebody who's in cognitive decline, you find yourself trying to help them with a sentence, trying to help them complete it - but we shouldn't have to do that for the commander-in-chief,' he told Fox News. 'And, it is actually a national security risk because he's sending signals that no one in their right mind would want to send to Russia at this point. 'We aren't trying to replace Putin in Russia. We aren't trying to have regime change. We're not sending troops into Ukraine, and we're not going to respond in kind with chemical weapons.' Rand Paul told Fox News on Monday that he was troubled by Biden's use of a 'cheat sheet' Biden's use of the cards was mocked on social media. 'Our @POTUS, Joe Biden is just walking around on eggshells, reading cue cards his handlers provide,' said one critic. 'If he EVER had a backbone, he can't remember where he put it.' Another added: 'Scary. Democrats put us in this precarious situation. This is the most dangerous the world has been in decades due to Democrats and Biden.' Another said that Biden was 'living in an alternate universe total detached from reality.' One commented: 'The WH staff gives Biden cue cards with scripted answers/statements yet still has to walk back what he says on a daily basis.' Another added: 'The exact opposite to Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy: 'speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.' 'Biden made a mess of Afghanistan & he'll do the same with whatever he does unless he's reading from cue cards. Even then he stumbles & says 'Iranian'.' Activists hold posters against the execution of Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, who was arrested in 2009 for drug trafficking in Singapore, before submitting a clemency petition at the Singapore High Commission in Kuala Lumpur, March 9. Reuters-Yonhap Singapore's top court Tuesday dismissed a mentally disabled Malaysian man's last-ditch appeal against a death sentence, with his family saying they were "devastated" and "shocked" by the ruling. Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam was arrested in 2009 for trafficking a small amount of heroin into the city-state, which has some of the world's toughest drugs laws, and handed a then mandatory death sentence the following year. He was originally scheduled to be hanged in November, but the plan sparked criticism due to concerns about his intellectual disabilities, with the European Union and British billionaire Richard Branson among those condemning it. The 34-year-old lodged a final appeal, with his lawyers arguing that executing someone with mental disabilities violated international law. But the Court of Appeal rejected the challenge, with Singapore's Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon saying it had "no factual and legal basis," and domestic legislation takes precedence over international law. Nagaenthran had been "afforded due process" and his defense had put "nothing forward to suggest that he has a case," he said, adding the Malaysian's lawyers were filing "hopeless" motions after several appeals had already been rejected. Nagaenthran, wearing a purple prison outfit and white face mask, looked somber throughout the proceedings. M. Ravi, a human rights lawyer assisting in the case, said no more appeals would be lodged and the execution could take place in days. Speaking to AFP from Malaysia, his sister Sarmila Dharmalingam sobbed as she said the family was "devastated". "We are shocked by the court decision despite my brother... having a low IQ." His long-running case has been "a horrifying ordeal for us," she added. Reprieve, an NGO that campaigns against the death penalty, said hanging Nagaenthran would be a "travesty of justice" that breached Singapore's commitments to champion the rights of the disabled. "We urge President Halimah Yacob to listen to the cries for mercy within Singapore and around the world... and spare the life of this vulnerable man," the group's director Maya Foa said. The appeal was supposed to take place months ago but was delayed after Nagaenthran contracted COVID-19. There have not been any executions in Singapore since 2019, but concerns are growing that the city-state is gearing up to hang several drug traffickers in the coming months. Earlier this month, a court rejected appeals by three other men sentenced to death for drug offences, despite criticism from the United Nations and campaigners. Singapore is among more than 30 countries worldwide where drug-related offences are still punishable by death, according to Amnesty International. Nagaenthran was arrested at the age of 21 after a bundle of heroin weighing about 43 grams (one and a half ounces) equivalent to about three tablespoons was found strapped to his thigh as he sought to enter Singapore. Supporters say he has an IQ of 69 a level recognized as a disability and was coerced into committing the crime. But authorities have defended his conviction, saying that legal rulings found he "knew what he was doing" at the time of the offence. The city-state maintains the death penalty for several offences, including drug trafficking and murder, and insists it has helped to keep Singapore one of Asia's safest places. (AFP) Hundreds of native Australian cockatoos have been caught and killed using modified rubbish bins after local council deemed the birds 'pests'. The custom wheelie bins are the latest tool being used in Rockingham Council's $8,000-a-year corella culling program that began with non-lethal methods. The council, 50km south of Perth, said numbers have 'increased exponentially' causing major environmental damage, public health issues, and habitat pressure on other birds in the area. The council-approved design uses sunflower seeds to lure birds to a gap between the wheels. The Rockingham Council in Western Australia has modified wheelie bins to lure and trap Corellas - a native species of bird that they deem as 'pests' The government approved design uses sunflower seeds to lure birds to a gap between the wheels. More than 1,000 corellas have been trapped and euthanised The trapped birds are then euthanised by council-employed contractors approved by the WA Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions. Frustrated wildlife rescuer and critic of the corella culls, Shelly Vokes, 48, said the 'stress' of the situation stopped her volunteering. 'I quit. I'm not doing this anymore,' Ms Vokes told Yahoo News. 'They've lost a volunteer rescuer, because there's no way I'm going to keep looking after these birds, and then let them go for this council to kill them.' The program has killed 1,038 little corellas, which are originally from eastern Australia, and 58 long-billed corellas which are indigenous to the region. Three out of the six corella species worldwide are only found in Australia. The relatively small cockatoos form large flocks The culling campaign has divided the community since its beginning in 2014. Many residents labelled it cruel but others who complained about the birds backed it. Rockingham Mayor Deb Hamblin said the council tried non-lethal methods to control the growing corella population but was unsuccessful. 'The City has researched, investigated and put in place non-lethal methods. However, non-lethal methods have only ever provided very short term effectiveness,' she said. 'Irri-tape (a visual bird deterrent) was found to have some effect but after a few days the birds became accustomed to it and essentially ignored it.' Known collectively as corellas, three of the six species in the world are only found in Australia. The relatively small cockatoos form large flocks plaguing the same area for days until food stores run out. They have inflicted significant amounts of damage to crops, powerlines, and even asphalt along roadsides. The council website state that culling programs are a last resort used to protect the larger environment (stock image) Their ability to remove eggs from nest hollows and kill and maim advanced nestlings poses a major threat to black cockatoos. The City of Rockingham website states that culling of any wildlife 'is potentially distressing' but measures needed to be taken to ensure sustainability. 'Unfortunately it is a measure of last resort which must be taken to protect the larger environment, to minimise the increasing damage these species are causing throughout the community, and to reduce the pest corella population to levels that are determined to be ecologically sustainable,' the site says. Corellas are a protected species under both state and commonwealth legislation and a licence issued by DBCA is required before any reduction to their population is made. As Covid cases increase across the country, many Australians are reporting their second infection with the disease, with experts warning the virus could be 'reactivated' after just one month. ANU infectious diseases physician Professor Peter Collignon said more people were being reinfected within three months of their initial infection than twelve months. 'It doesn't seem to happen very frequently,' he told Daily Mail Australia. 'Looking at the English data, it seems to occur only in a small number of cases'. As Covid cases begin to kick-up across the country an increasing number of Australians are reporting their second infection with the disease (pictured, masked pedestrians in Sydney) Prof Collignon said those reinfected with the virus usually experienced a milder disease and had immunity in part from their previous infection. He said something 'unusual' that had been observed about reinfections was that more people were testing positive within one month than compared to twelve. The infectious diseases expert said this had been observed in people from the UK or Scotland who arrived in Australia when there were barely any cases being recorded. ANU infectious diseases physician Professor Peter Collignon (pictured) said more people were being reinfected within three months of their initial infection than twelve months He explained that arrivals who had previously been infected would feel well for a month or so but test positive once they landed in Australia. Prof Collignon said this could be dead remnants of the Covid infection in the cells that had been 'reactivated' by another virus like the common cold with symptoms then picked up by PCR or RAT tests. While it is unknown how many people have experienced their second round of infection in NSW, the health department has confirmed natural infection can only offer temporary immunity from the virus. 'It is possible to be infected with another variant or the same variant again, although it is less likely you will be infected with the same variant,' a spokesperson said. NSW recorded 21,494 new infections on Tuesday - up from 16,199 on Monday - with 1,283 people in hospital and 53 people in ICU. The new Omicron sub-variant BA.2 is believed to be driving the surge in new infections, as children return to school and adults to the workplace (pictured, a woman is vaccinated) Officials predict cases in NSW could soar to the 30,000 mark by early April. The new Omicron sub-variant BA.2 is believed to be driving the surge in infections, as children return to school and adults to the workplace. Epidemiologist and University of Melbourne Professor Tony Blakely (pictured) said being reinfected with the same Covid strain is possible, but uncommon It is believed to be accounting for up to 80 per cent of infections according to NSW Health's latest surveillance report. Epidemiologist and University of Melbourne Professor Tony Blakely said reinfection with the same Covid strain is possible, but uncommon. 'Your chance of being reinfected with the same strain of Covid-19 is much less once infected. Previous infection is a bit like a vaccine at protecting you,' he explained. Prof Blakely told Daily Mail Australia that those who had already caught Covid had a 90 to 98 per cent less chance of being reinfected compared to someone who had never been infected or vaccinated against the disease. 'If you are additionally vaccinated (on top of already infected), we have seen studies that both suggest no additional protection and up to 80 per cent further protection,' the epidemiologist said. Officials predict cases in NSW could soar to the 30,000 mark by early April (pictured, a woman is vaccinated in Sydney in January) 'The latter would put your protection compared to uninfected and unvaccinated to 98 per cent and 99.6 per cent given the previous 90 per cent and 98 per cent protection from infection alone.' The expert said he was 'confident' the combination of natural infection and vaccination would offer more protection against the virus than either natural infection alone, or vaccination alone. Prof Blakely said a person already infected once before had less protection against reinfection with a different strain of the virus, but how much was hard to say. 'The protection of previous infection (and vaccination for that matter) against serious reinfection (e.g. one that hospitalises you) is much better,' he said. 'Being vaccinated and/or previously infected reduces your chances of another infection (but not to zero), and greatly reduces your chances of getting really sick (but still not all the way to zero).' A Washington state police officer was stabbed to death while on vacation in Las Vegas during an altercation with two men after the cop 'aggressively' rubbed one of the men's dogs. Tyler Steffins, 33, of Edmonds, was visiting Sin City when he was fatally stabbed by Freddy Allen on a pedestrian bridge along the famous Las Vegas Strip at around 9:40 pm on Saturday, police said. Allen, 58, was free despite two stabbing arrests in past year, according to the Seattle Times. Las Vegas police said Steffins and another man, Dean Cattorini, got into an altercation 'over an interaction with (Cattorini's) dog the night before' the fatal stabbing. The two men crossed paths again on Saturday at Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue, when Allen pulled a blade on Steffins and stabbed him as he argued with Cattorini over petting his dog, police said. Edmonds, a married father of two and a former Marine, was rushed to a local hospital but died from his wound. Tyler Steffins, 33, was visiting Sin City when he was fatally stabbed on a pedestrian bridge at Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue by Freddy Allen, around 9:40 pm on Saturday This Clark County Detention Center booking photo shows Freddy Allen, 58, following his arrest in the fatal stabbing of Tyler Steffins Spencer Steffins (right) posted a photo with his slain brother Tyler Steffins (left) on Monday Pictured: The Las Vegas Strip pedestrian bridge at Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue, where the fatal stabbing occurred on Saturday evening According to the police report, the dogs belonged to Allen's friend Dean Cattorini, who told cops that Steffins approached them the day before the stabbing and 'grabbed his dogs (sic) face aggressively and it upset Dean.' The next day, Cattorini said Steffins approached him and his dogs on the pedestrian bridge again while Allen stood nearby, police said. 'Dean asked Tyler not to be rough with them,' according to the police report. Steffins once again started petting the dogs in an aggressive manner, Dean told cops, prompting Steffins and Cattorini to begin arguing, with Steffins telling Cattorini to 'get a job.' Pictured: Edmonds police officer Tyler Steffins, who was fatally stabbed while off-duty Saturday in Las Vegas A makeshift memorial on Steffins' police vehicle after his stabbing death in Las Vegas over the weekend Police respond to and investigate the fatal stabbing of an off-duty police officer on the Las Vegas strip on Saturday Allen stood nearby with his hands behind his back before suddenly stabbing Steffins, police said. Responding officers from the Las Vegas Police Department arrived on scene and discovered Allen nearby holding a knife, according to the Seattle Times. He was apprehended after a brief chase, police said, and was arrested and charged with murder with a deadly weapon. Allen had been arrested twice in the past year on the Las Vegas Strip for committing acts of violence with a knife, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In November, Allen stabbed a man in an alley, with the victim in that incident receiving staples to his head, 16 stitches to his right arm as well as five stitches to his left arm. Steffins death comes one day after another Snohomish County cop, Everett police Officer Dan Rocha, 41, pictured, was shot and killed Friday during a confrontation with an armed man. In that case, Allen pleaded guilty to attempted battery with substantial bodily harm, a gross misdemeanor, and was sentenced in February to 90 days in jail with 72 days credit for time served, according to the Review-Journal. Steffins began working with the Edmonds police force in August 2018. The town is located about 20 miles north of Seattle. He is survived by a wife and two young children. 'This is a tragic loss for our agency when our staff and the entire region is already in a state of mourning for other fallen officers,' Edmonds Police Chief Michelle Bennett said in a press release regarding Steffin's stabbing death. 'While we grieve with heavy hearts, our peer support program members are actively engaging with our staff. Tyler was a valued member of our police family whose infectious smile and contagious laugh endeared him to his peers.' 'We will miss him terribly but cherish the times we had with him. We remain committed to providing quality service to our community even during the most trying of times.' Steffins death comes one day after another Snohomish County law enforcement officer, Everett police Officer Dan Rocha, 41, was shot and killed Friday during a confrontation with an armed man. A community radio station has suspended one of its presenters after complaints he was broadcasting pro-Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine. Oleg Bydanov, who co-presented two Russian language programs a week on Melbourne's 3ZZZ station, was stood down over the 'offensive material'. Mr Bydanov, a lawyer who volunteers as a presenter on the station, broadcast a speech by Russian president Vladimir Putin after the invasion of Ukraine. In the speech, Mr Putin recognised the independence of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk and insisted the war was justified to 'demilitarise and de-Nazify' the country. Oleg Bydanov, who is a lawyer, has been suspended from broadcasting on Melbourne radio station 3ZZZ over alleged Russian propaganda Mr Bydanov also falsely said the Russian army was not targeting Ukrainian towns. In another program, Mr Bydanov played a Russian propaganda song belittling the protests in Kyiv that led to the overthrow of Moscow-backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Much of 3ZZZ's Russian program listenership is non-English-speaking migrants who may have very few other sources of information about what is happening in Ukraine. Mr Bydanov claimed on air that his former boss was Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee of Russia and a member of Mr Putin's inner circle who has been sanctioned by the UK. He also praised ultranationalist Russian MP Vladimir Zhirinovsky, saying he was smarter than all Western politicians including Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Jon King, the manager of 3ZZZ, said complaints were made by listeners that Mr Bydanov was broadcasting 'offensive material, in conflict with our codes of practise'. 'In response to those complaints we are going through our station complaints process,' he told Daily Mail Australia. Oleg Bydanov claimed on air that his former boss was Alexander Bastrykin, a member of Vladimir Putin's (pictured) inner circle who has been sanctioned by the UK Mr King assured each complainant that the matter was being investigated, including having the programs in question translated to English. The station met with Mr Bydanov, told him he was suspended, and gave him an opportunity to formally respond to the allegations, which he has not yet done. The station's presenters, who are all volunteers, were then reminded that they must volunteer to 3ZZZ's code of practise. Though Mr Bydanov was suspended, the program he co-hosted is still on air. 'We are monitoring to ensure the Russian program complies with our code of practise into the future,' said Mr King. Residents gather outside a building damaged in the course of Ukraine-Russia conflict in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, on March 28, 2022 Firefighters extinguish the fire in a warehouse that was hit by the Russian artillery shelling, in Kharkiv, north-east Ukraine, on March 28, 2022 He said that because all of the station's broadcasters were volunteers 'we don't get to do as thorough a vetting process as a recruitment for a salaried position as, say, SBS would do with their broadcasters'. Mr King pointed out, though, that everyone got several hours of training over six weeks before they were allowed on air. The training covers media law and defamation as well as 3ZZZ's code of practise. The Australian Communications and Media Authority said it was concerned about the complaints it received about Mr Bydanov. ACMA gives a station 60 days to respond to any formal complaint, but Mr King said 3ZZZ aimed to formally reply to all the complainants within six weeks. 'The ACMA would undertake an investigation if it was not satisfied with the station's response to the complaints,' he said. Firefighters walk next to a damaged five-storey building after a shelling in the city of Luhansk, Ukraine on March 28, 2022. A radio broadcaster in Melbourne has been suspended for airing pro-Russian 'propaganda' In a statement on behalf of the 3ZZZ council, station president George Salloum said it condemned 'all acts of war and violence' and had stood down Mr Bydanov. '3ZZZ promotes harmony and diversity and contributes to an inclusive, cohesive and culturally-diverse Australian community, the first guiding principle under our community radio broadcasting codes of practice,' he said. Daily Mail Australia left messages on two different numbers for Mr Bydanov, but has not heard back from him. Scott Morrison says he has 'faith' that Australian voters will choose him and the coalition when they take to the polling booths. Mr Morrison made the comments in his final parliamentary address to his colleagues before the federal election, ahead of Tuesday night's budget. He acknowledged the past eight months had been 'some of the hardest'. However, he went on to compare the government's current position to his 'miracle' 2019 election win. Scott Morrison says he still has faith the coalition can win the election, despite recent polls showing Labor in the lead. Pictured are Scott Morrison and his wife Jenny 'I have great faith in the judgment of the Australian people,' he said. 'We've won seven out of the last nine elections as a political movement and only on two of those seven occasions we went in being told we would win.' 'In 1998, 2001, 2004, 2016 and 2019, they all told us it wasn't going to happen. But it's a testament to the way we roll on this side of politics. 'We focus on the job.' His comments come just a week after a Roy Morgan poll showed Labor rising two points to lead 58 to 42 over the coalition on a two-party preferred basis. Labor also led on primary vote, 37.5 per cent to 31 per cent. The opposition is also ahead on two-party preferred in every state but Queensland, with the coalition increasing its lead in the Sunshine State from the last election. Meanwhile, a new study from the Australian National University has revealed support for the federal government has reached a new low ahead of the election. Surveys from the ANUPoll series, which examines political attitudes, showed just 32 per cent of Australians would vote for the coalition. Recent polls show support soaring for Anthony Albanese and Labor, however it's been overshadowed by bullying claims levelled against three Labor senators in the wake of Kimberly Kitching's death. Pictured are Anthony Albanese and his girlfriend Jodie Haydon The poll was taken in January 2022, during the height of the Omicron wave. The university study compared the political attitude over January in 2020, 2021 and 2022. It showed support for the government had fallen below the lows seen during the Black Summer bushfires. The study's lead author Nicholas Biddle said the responses came following an extraordinary time in Australian politics. 'The Black Summer bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic created a unique set of circumstances that potentially changed the views of Australians regarding the effectiveness of the current government, and the role of government in Australia,' he said. Nonetheless, it's been a rocky few weeks for Anthony Albanese and Labor, with the shock death of senator Kimberley Kitching overshadowing the party's rise in the polls. Senator Kitching died aged 52 from a heart attack on March 10, amid claims she was bullied and ostracised by members of her own party. Allies said Ms Kitching described fellow ALP senators Penny Wong, Kristina Keneally, and Ms Gallagher as 'mean girls' and said she was suffering from stress at the time of her death. All three senators vehemently denied the allegations, which are an unwelcome scandal for the Labor Party in the lead up to the federal election. Mean girls' is a reference to the beloved 2004 film of the same name that features a high school clique of popular girls who denigrate other students. Albanese and Deputy Leader Richard Marles rejected calls for an inquiry into the allegations, claiming the matter has already been addressed and no official complaint was filed. Senator Kimberly Kitching (pictured) tragically passed away following a heart attack, amid claims she was bullied and ostracised by members of her own party Penny Wong (pictured) went to Senator Kitching's funeral after denying she had bullied her Labor colleague Three Labor senators (pictured) accused of bullying colleague Kimberley Kitching before her fatal heart attack have denied the allegations In a powerful speech at Senator Kitching's funeral last Monday, shattered husband Andrew Landeryou revealed: 'Her friends and ferociously loyal staff are angry about how she was treated'. He did not name Keneally, Wong and Gallagher - but referred to a 'cantankerous cabal' of her detractors. 'Kimberley's political and moral judgement was vastly superior to the small number who opposed her internally,' he said. 'And of course there is a lot I could say about the unpleasantness of a cantankerous cabal not all of them in Parliament that was aimed at Kimba, and the intensity of it did baffle and hurt her. 'She deserved so very much much better.' Australian flood victims have been hit with a brutal message about buying up land in low-lying areas as the nation's east coast is hit by a second devastating flood in less than a month. 'Don't buy in a flood area, I really can't believe people are still doing it,' wrote one anonymous Australian on Reddit. 'They knew it was a flood zone that suffered bad floods recently, so they decided it sounded like a bargain despite the mountains of evidence pointing towards Australia only suffering worse floods, bushfires and extreme weather over the coming years.' The Australian urged that anyone thinking about getting out of debt, investing, and saving for retirement, not to 'walk into this trap'. 'You can download the flood maps of any area online. Likewise you can check an area for bush fire risk etc. it's not a lesson you want to learn the hard way. It could be the biggest financial mistake you ever make,' they wrote. Another Reddit user agreed with his sentiment, writing: 'About 2 years ago I told a mate not to buy a particular house due to the floods... He still bought... It flooded... Now he has a GoFundMe.' One Australian said they can't gather any sympathy for those who were struggling in the floods. 'Just like people who dont insure their car/house/other item and then whinge when it is destroyed,' they wrote. 'My motto has become if you cant afford to loose it, insure it.' On the back of the horror 2011 floods that ravaged Brisbane and surrounding areas, some buyers have actively sought out flood-prone land seeing it as a cheap deal. Property value consultancy firm, Climate Valuation, say many real estate agents have facilitated these ill-advised purchases knowing they were doomed for disaster. Australian flood victims have been hit with a brutal message about buying up land in low-lying areas as the nation's east coast is hit by a second devastating flood in less than a month. Pictured: Flooding in Lismore In recent years, on the back of the horror 2011 floods that ravaged Brisbane and surrounding areas, some buyers have actively sought out flood-prone land seeing it as a cheap deal. Pictured: South Lismore, March 9 'There is no failure in the insurance industry - this is a failure in the property market if it is allowing vulnerable people to move into vulnerable properties in high risk locations,' CEO Karl Mallon said. The company predicts that riverine flooding will cost Aussie homeowners about $170billion by 2050, with damage bills and insurance costs set to soar. Mr Mallon is calling for a complete overhaul of the system fearing the issue is only going to get worse with more extreme weather driven by climate change. 'Planning codes must be changed, building codes need to be upgraded and a massive grants program will be needed to overhaul Australia's high-risk housing so that it is ready to cope with the reality of climate change,' he said. One homebuyer who was suckered into snapping up cheap land in Brisbane five years ago watched on earlier this month as part of his home was destroyed by rising floodwaters. 'It seemed astute to move into a flood area after the last flood, because it's a little bit cheaper and we could afford a place here,' videographer Guy Mansfield recently told Yahoo News. 'We just thought it might flood again in 30 years or something like that, and we'd totally avoid it. But yeah, here it is. We couldn't believe it.' Property value consultancy firm, Climate Valuation, say many real estate agents have facilitated these ill-advised purchases knowing they were doomed to disaster. Pictured: Farmland in Ballina flooded It is predicted riverine flooding will cost Aussie homeowners about $170billion by 2050, with damage bills and insurance costs set to soar. Pictured: The aftermath of flooding in Lismore Mr Mallon is calling for a complete overhaul of the system fearing the issue is only going to get worse with more extreme weather driven by climate change. Pictured: Scenes of devastation in South Lismore Prospective homebuyers can download flood maps of any area online. Pictured: Lismore Evacuate NOW: Another deadly storm strikes Australia's east coast causing even more flooding and forcing thousands to leave their homes BY LEVI PARSONS Flood-battered residents still reeling from a one in a 500-year downpour just weeks ago have once again been forced to flee their homes, as wild weather continues to batter Australia's east coast. Thousands were told to evacuate across low-lying areas of northern NSW and south-east Queensland on Monday night and Tuesday morning, with warnings of 'life-threatening' floods. Others in the devastated region have been put on high alert amid widespread heavy rain, thunderstorms and damaging winds forecast to continue until Thursday. Two men have now died in the deluge after being swept away by raging waters. Heavy rain is also hitting Sydney on Tuesday morning, with the grey, dreary conditions expected to last over the weekend. Heavy rain is battering Sydney on Tuesday morning with the grey, dreary conditions expected to last over the weekend Volunteers of State Emergency Services (SES) rescue residents after floodwater inundated their houses in western Sydney on March 3, 2022 A picnic table beside Lake Ainsworth is submerged by heavy rain on March 28, 2022 in Lennox Head, Australia Residents in parts of north and south Lismore and low-lying parts of Kyogle in northern NSW got an early-morning knock on the door from Australian Defence Force troops from the 7th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, telling them it was too dangerous to stay with the Wilson River surging. Meanwhile, locals under threat in the Northern Rivers town of Billinudgel, as well as parts of Mullumbimby and Tumbulgum were also told to evacuate early on Tuesday. Lismore mayor Steve Krieg said on Tuesday morning that residents were suffering from flood fatigue. 'Obviously everybody is exhausted. We've had a month of clean-up,' Mr Krieg told the ABC. Hundreds are now gathering in reopened evacuation centres across the region as Byron Council's Infrastructure Services director Phil Holloway warned of 'potential landslides' in some parts. Lismore's Southern Cross University, the Mullumbimby RSL and Murwillumbah Tafe are among the locatations housing those who have been forced to flee their homes. Debris piles up on stairs beside the Wilsons River on March 28, 2022 in Lismore, Australia The damage is being done by a low pressure system sitting off the NSW coast will bring showers in the coming days including to Sydney, the Bureau of Meteorology's Jonathan How said. 'As the system moves south it will become windy across the state's eastern coastline, becoming strongest on Friday with the potential to bring down trees and power lines, he said. 'Thankfully though, this rain event won't be quite as long-lasting as the previous rain event so we will see conditions really ease towards the latter part of the week.' But he warned although the rains will stop, flooding may continue for days if not weeks to come. The La Nina weather pattern is drenching Australia's east coast for the second year in a row. Dr Nina Ridder of UNSW's Climate Change Research Centre said the phenomenon will dissolve by autumn, but La Nina events are likely to bring more extreme rainfall to Australia. 'We're definitely seeing the change in global weather patterns because of climate change,' she told AAP. Debris sits piled up outside businesses affected by the recent floods in the main town on March 28, 2022 in Lismore, Australia Rainfall creates puddles in the devastated community of Lismore, Australia on March 28, 2022 A picnic table beside Lake Ainsworth is submerged by heavy rain on March 28, 2022 in Lennox Head, Australia Further north, intense rainfall and flooding hit parts of southeast Queensland with residents in the town of Dalby on alert as the search continues for a missing man, feared dead. One man near Toowoomba has already died in floodwaters caused by the intense weather system, as authorities keep a close eye on the town 200 kilometres west of Brisbane, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk says. Another man in his 40s was swept away after getting out of his car when it became stuck in a torrent at North Branch about 6am on Monday. Queensland police said the man's body was found in Spring Creek, downstream from where he disappeared, at about 9am on Tuesday. An emergency alert was issued for residents in low-lying areas, who were told to warn their neighbours, secure belongings and prepare to move to higher ground on Monday afternoon. The Myall Creek was expected to exceed the major flood level of 3.5 metres late on Monday, with further rises possible into Tuesday morning. 'They're looking at an evacuation centre at Dalby at the moment,' Ms Palaszczuk said. A road is blocked off in Ballina, northern NSW, as flood waters ravage the area on March 28 A road is closed due to surging water near the main village of Tintenbar on March 28, 2022 in Australia More than 100 roads are closed due to floods, most in the Toowoomba and Darling Downs, with others in Brisbane, the Lockyer Valley and the Gold Coast. Gold Coast authorities issued an emergency warning early on Tuesday morning about life-threating flash flooding occurring in Tallebudgera Valley. 'Shelter in place unless it is unsafe to do so,' it advised residents, adding that access to the area was likely to be affected. Small releases from Wivenhoe Dam are also underway, but Ms Palaszczuk said they won't impact river levels. The warning follows the death of a man and five dogs killed when their ute was washed away at Kingsthorpe, northwest of Toowoomba on Monday morning. Swiftwater crews rescued a woman who was also in the car, but the man and the dogs didn't survive. Wild weather is expected to continue for days to come even across the weekend in some parts A sign declaring that the people of the town are 'stronger than you know' is displayed in Lismore, Australia New York City's homeless encampments were being dismantled once more on Monday - the day after the new mayor said that the problem was turning the largest city in the U.S. into a 'laughingstock'. Eric Adams announced that he would tackle street homelessness by clearing 150 encampments across the city over a two-week period. Last month, he announced a plan to remove homeless people from the city subways. Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the mayor, said the first warnings to the homeless went up on March 17 and the following day the encampments were cleared in what he said was a collaboration between NYPD and the Departments of Social Services, Sanitation and Parks. 'This effort is about taking care of our people and our public spaces because no New Yorker deserves to live on the street,' said Adams in a statement. An estimated 2,400 people live on city streets and in subways, according to an annual tally taken in January 2021. On Monday, teams were pictured moving in on the camps beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. City workers are seen on Monday clearing a tent encampment from Brooklyn, beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Williamsburg. The tactic was announced by Mayor Eric Adams on Friday A tent is pulled apart on Monday, to be taken to a waiting garbage truck Michael Rodriguez, who has been living under a raised section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway for the past two years, assesses which of his belongings he can salvage Rodriguez is seen on Monday sifting through the remnants of his belongings Rodriguez is pictured carting away whatever of his possessions he can manage Several of those being forced to move complained to Gothamist that they had nowhere else to go, and intended to come back. Parker Wolf, 22, who had spent two years living at the site with his boyfriend, refused to go into a city shelter because he didn't want to be separated from his partner. 'Making us move doesn't make less homeless people,' he said. 'We're going to be in a different place.' Heriberto Medina, too tired to dismantle his camp, lost his tent and was left with a bicycle, two backpacks stuffed with clothes, and a small white stool. 'So now my living space is gone,' he said. 'There's no other options, but to look for another place.' He said the homeless were scapegoats for the city's problems. 'The mayor says the crime rate is going up. Let's target the homeless again, like they usually do. They always target the homeless. The homeless, the homeless,' he told the website. 'Every day the homeless, the homeless, the homeless and instead of helping us they kick us while we're already down.' Eric Adams, who took over as mayor of New York on January 1, has vowed to crack down on homelessness, but has been vague about what will happen to those moved from camps A series of homeless encampments are set up under the Brooklyn/Queens Expressway, at Lorimer and Metropolitan Ave in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The camps are pictured here in May 2021 A homeless encampment is set up on the corner of Broadway and Myrtle Ave in Bushwick, Brooklyn in May 2021 Adams on Sunday said the spike in crime across New York City has made the Big Apple a 'laughingstock' in need of a 'wartime general' to tackle the ongoing problem. Adams, speaking at the annual NYPD Holy Name Society communion Mass and breakfast, condemned the lawlessness throughout the city. He blamed petty crime and homelessness as contributing factors to the widespread 'dysfunction.' 'Anything goes in the City of New York,' Adams said, according to The New York Post. 'The most important city on the globe has become the laughingstock of the globe. And the dysfunctionality of our city has cascaded throughout the entire country.' Clearing homeless camps is not a new tactic. During the last year of the previous administration, headed by Bill de Blasio, the city conducted 6,604 sweeps according to the Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center. In Adams' first month in office city agencies conducted 134 sweeps, according to data shared by the Safety Net Project, a drop from prior months, the most recent data available. On Friday, Adams told The New York Times that he was planning on ramping up the pace of the sweeps. 'We're going to rid the encampments off our street and we're going to place people in healthy living conditions with wraparound services,' he told the paper. 'I'm telling my city agencies to do an analysis block by block, district by district, identify where the encampments are, then execute a plan to give services to the people who are in the encampments, then to dismantle those encampments.' A homeless encampment at the First Ave. station on the L line identified by subway crews last month. Hundreds of homeless people have been camping out in subway tunnels and stations Many of the homeless find sanctuary in the subway stations and trains in the winter months The MTA described 'encampments' as 'lying down in a sleeping bag or stretch out,' as the person can be seen doing in Fulton Street station in Manhattan last month A homeless person sleeps under a blanket while seated on a New York sidewalk Adams did not say where people living in the encampments would go, and acknowledged officials cannot force anyone to go to a homeless shelter. Currently, around 48,000 people each night, including 15,000 children, sleep in city shelters. 'We can't stop an individual from sleeping on the street based on law, and we're not going to violate that law,' he said. 'But you can't build a miniature house made out of cardboard on the streets. That's inhumane.' Last month, hundreds of homeless people were found camping out in New York City's subway tunnels and stations. Transit workers and outreach employees found almost 30 'homeless encampments' in the tunnels and another 89 camps in stations. Encampment can be defined as 'lying down in a sleeping bag or stretch out,' officials said. All the encampments were removed among discovery. 'We never leave an encampment in place. As soon as we identify an encampment, those people are immediately removed,' MTA spokesperson Tim Minton told the New York Post. The MTA's Track Trespass Task Force - which was formed in December - surveyed 472 stations across more than 650 miles for 12 hours between February 2 and 3, finding 350 people living there - not an uncommon sight for New Yorkers as the cold weather persists. Adams' plan to clear the homeless from the subway and the streets, which he deemed essential to New York City's recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, also includes changes that are supposed to connect more homeless people, many of whom have mental illness, substance abuse problems or both, to mental health services and permanent housing. An increasing number of cities across the country including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC, have been removing encampments and taking other steps to address homelessness that would have been unheard of years ago. Adams's push to clear the camps came as a new survey found New Yorkers working in Manhattan are so fed up with rampant crime that 40 percent said they want to leave the Empire State - with eight out of 10 people saying the Big Apple has gone to hell. The Morning Consult poll, conducted for Partnership for New York, surveyed 9,386 adults working in New York City from February 17 to March 11, with many voicing their frustration over the soaring crime and homelessness that has gripped the streets and subways. New York City workers said they were fed up with the rise in crime and homelessness in the city, according to a recent poll of more than 9,000 employees. Of those polled, 84 percent said conditions in the city have worsened in the last two years About 40 percent of those working in Manhattan wanted to move away due to rising crime (left) while 48 percent of those working in the other four boroughs agreed (right) About 74 percent of respondents said that safety has gotten worse in the city since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, with 82 percent saying homelessness has also worsened According to the poll, 74 percent of respondents said that safety has got worse in the city since the start of the pandemic lockdowns in March 2020, with 82 percent saying homelessness has also worsened. Overall, 84 percent of respondents said conditions in the city have worsened over the past two years, with more than half agreeing that conditions have greatly deteriorated. 'Safety, homelessness, and mental illness rank as top issues for New York City's private sector employees,' Morning Consult wrote in its findings to Partnership, whose more than 300 members employ more than a million people in the city. 'They are resisting return to the office until something is done to address them, particularly on public transit.' In all, 40 percent of those who live in Manhattan want to move away while 48 percent who live in the other four boroughs are also looking for an exit plan. The poll results come as New York City is experiencing a major crime surge, with the New York Police Department's February crime statistics showing an almost 60 percent increase in felonies compared to the same time last year. Overall crime in the city is up more than 45 percent since the same period last year Meantime, crime in the Big Apple doesn't appear to be slowing down any time soon. The New York subway has been the crime epicenter, after an alarming 73.3 percent increase in underground incidents - including 182 in February alone. Hate crimes also have doubled since last year with anti-Asian attacks more than tripling and anti-Semitic attacks complaints up by a whopping 54 percent over the same time last year, from 134 to 207 incidents. Overall crime in the city is up more than 45 percent since last year, with 4,736 felony assaults reported so far this year compared to 4,003 last year, a more than 18 percent spike. Robberies saw the largest uptick with 3,351 cases report so far, a 45.6 percent rise from last year. Rapes have also seen a dramatic spike with 360 cases reported compared to 247 during the same time last year, a nearly 31 percent jump. The number of shooting victims continues to go up as 284 cases were reported so far this year, a 17.4 percent increase. A family grieving the loss of their adored mother have been left traumatised after a burial blunder resulted in the coffin getting stuck and the lid forced ajar. Kevin Bartsch fainted after the coffin of his partner, mother-of-six Debby Giles, was lowered into a grave in Mannum, South Australia that was dug 20cm too small and became wedged. 'The lid lifted up a little bit because it scraped on the side of the wall,' Ms Giles' son Nathaniel Mark told 7News. Mr Bartsch had brought with him some flower petals which he scattered on the precariously tilted coffin before he fainted. Ms Giles' family including son Nathaniel Mark (right) said their mother deserved better 'They rolled straight off the coffin and then I don't know what happened after that,' he said. He said the next thing he remembers was the funeral director crouching down and trying to push the coffin into the hole. 'She's at the top of it pushing it and pushing it,' Mr Mark added. The family were then asked to leave the cemetery so the hole could be re-dug a larger size and were not able to see her laid to rest. The family said Ms Giles had a hard life but was very much loved and deserved better for her send off. They added there were also cultural issues around being robbed of seeing Ms Giles buried on their ancestral land. Ms Giles' coffin became stuck after the hole was dug too small forcing the lid ajar (pictured) The funeral home has said the blunder was the fault of the local council who are responsible for digging the holes at the cemetery. Mid-Murray Council apologised and admitted the grave was simply not the correct size. They have offered compensation but the family said that is now of little consolation for them. US military officials reportedly missed multiple red flags that could have stopped a top civilian commander at Bagram Airbase from sexually abusing his own children sooner. While serving as a top commander at a U.S air base in Afghanistan David Frodsham was ordered home after the military verified multiple allegations of sexual harassment. Frodsham, who has since been convicted of sexually abusing his adopted sons Trever and Ryan when they were children, leered at female colleagues and referred to them as 'honey', 'babe' and cougar.' The harassment was significant enough that a commanding officer recommended the Army order Frodsham to leave his post at Bagram Airfield and return to Fort Huachuca, AP reported. 'I would not recommend placing him back into a position of authority but rather pursuing disciplinary actions at his home station,' the commanding officer said. In 2016 David Frodsham (pictured) was arrested for leading a child sex abuse ring that posted child pornography to the internet- including of Frodsham's adopted sons When Frodsham returned to his home station in fall 2015, he rejoined the Network Enterprise Technology Command at Fort Huachuca (pictured) But in Fall 2015 Frodsham returned to his home station and rejoined the Network Enterprise Technology Command. By spring of the following year he was arrested in Arizona for leading a child sex abuse ring that included an Army sergeant who was posting child pornography to the internet - including of Frodsham's adopted sons, who were children at the time of the abuse. Frodsham is currently serving a 17-year sentence after pleading guilty to sex abuse charges in 2016 along with former Sgt. Randall Bischak and a third man not associated with the Army. He was caught after an FBI agent joined a pedophile's room on private messaging service Kik. That led investigators to Bischak, who shared a video of himself having sex with Frodsham while the pair also abused Ryan Frodsham. Ryan says his father pimped him out to other pedophiles, while Trever says his father abused him from the age of around nine or ten. But records reviewed by AP show that the U.S. Army and the state of Arizona missed or ignored multiple red flags over more than a decade which allowed Frodsham to allegedly abuse his adopted son and other children for years, all the while putting national security at risk. Despite nearly 20 complaints, and attempted complaints, of abuse, neglect, maltreatment and licensing violations, Frodsham and his wife, Barbara were allowed to foster and adopt multiple children while the Army gave Frodsham security clearances and sensitive jobs at a time when his illicit sexual practices made him vulnerable to blackmail. 'He would have been an obvious target of foreign intelligence services because of his role and his location,' Frank Figliuzzi, the former assistant director of counterintelligence for the FBI, said. 'Fort Huachuca is one of the more sensitive installations in the continental United States. People with security issues should not be there,' he added. Now two of Frodsham's adopted sons, Trever and Ryan, have filed separate civil lawsuits against the state for licensing David and Barbara Frodsham as foster parents in a home where they say they were physically and sexually abused throughout their lives. A third adopted son is expected to file suit Tuesday in Arizona state court in Cochise County, said attorney Lynne Cadigan, who represents all three. In the latest complaint, 19-year-old Trever Frodsham says case workers missed or overlooked numerous signs that David and Barbara Frodsham were unfit parents. Ryan and Trever, two of Frodsham's adopted sons, have filed separate civil lawsuits against the state for licensing David and Barbara Frodsham as foster parents in a home where they say they were physically and sexually abused throughout their lives A commanding officer recommended the Army order Frodsham to leave his post at Bagram Airfield (pictured) and return to Fort Huachuca, a major Army installation in Arizona That includes a 2002 sex abuse complaint filed with local police by one of the Frodshams' biological daughters against an older biological brother, and the fact that David and Barbara Frodsham were themselves victims of child sex abuse. The couple are said to have failed to mention that they were abuse victims when applying to foster, despite being required to do so. In his lawsuit Trever's older biological brother Ryan Frodsham said the state was informed that David and Barbara Frodsham were physically abusing their children 'by slapping them in the face, pinching them, hitting them with a wooden spoon, putting hot sauce in their mouths, pulling them by the hair, bending their fingers back to inflict pain, forcing them to hold cans with their arms extended for long periods time,' and refusing to let them use the bathroom unless the door remained open. Ryan told AP that while Barbara never sexually abused him, she walked into the room where David was abusing him at least twice. 'She knew what was going on,' he said. The two lawsuits already filed by the adopted sons and related legal filings also say investigators with the Department of Child Safety and case workers with Catholic Community Services, which subcontracts foster and adoption work from the state, failed to effectively follow up on 19 complaints and attempted complaints regarding the Frodsham home spanning more than a decade. Frodsham is currently serving a 17-year sentence after pleading guilty to sex abuse charges in 2016 along with former Sgt. Randall Bischak (pictured) and a third man not associated with the Army The complaints began in 2002 and continued until 2015- five months before the Army deployed Frodsham to Afghanistan, where he was ordered back to Arizona after only four months of service. Arizona Department of Child Safety spokesman Darren DaRonco declined to answer specific questions about the lawsuits but instead sent an email outlining the state's procedures for screening prospective foster and adoptive parents. 'Despite all of these safeguards, people are sometimes able to avoid detection,' DaRonco said, 'especially if a person has no prior criminal or child abuse history.' Yet David and Barbara Frodsham have both said they were abused as minors. In their written application to become foster parents, Barbara Frodsham indicated that neither she nor her husband had been sexually victimized, but in recent pretrial testimony for Ryan Frodshams lawsuit, she said she would have revealed her abuse if she had been asked by a state investigator as part of the licensing process. David Frodsham, for his part, told a probation official after his guilty plea that he had been abused as a teenager. Many child welfare experts believe people with a history of child sexual abuse are more likely to abuse children in their own households and should be questioned to ensure theyve overcome their trauma before being allowed to provide foster care. Arizona's child welfare case workers 'did not know how to interview and, therefore, they didnt get candid answers from the Frodshams,' Kathleen Faller, an expert witness retained in Ryan Frodshams lawsuit, said. In pretrial testimony, Faller also said the state should not have granted the Frodshams foster care license. Ryan Frodsham told AP he filed his lawsuit for one reason: 'I want the state to admit what it did was wrong.' There is temporary relief for thousands as an easing of rainfall in northern New South Wales has seen a number of evacuation orders removed, but emergency services are urging residents to remain vigilient as flood warnings remain. Evacuation orders for Lismore CBD, the Lismore Basin and all low lying areas of East Lismore and Girards Hill have been lifted for the time being. The evacuation order for Coraki's Riverside Caravan Park remains in place however, with people urged to leave by 7pm. NSW SES said levels will reach near the Lismore Levee Height of 10.6 metres. Others in the devastated region have been put on high alert amid widespread heavy rain, thunderstorms and damaging winds forecast to continue until Thursday. Two men have now died in the deluge after being swept away by raging waters. Heavy rain is also hitting Sydney, with the grey, dreary conditions expected to last over the weekend. Homes in Lismore were inundated with water during the floods just weeks ago, and are now set to be hit by another deluge (pictured on Tuesday) Evacuation orders for Lismore CBD, the Lismore Basin and all low lying areas of East Lismore and Girards Hill have been lifted on Tuesday evening Residents in parts of north and south Lismore and low-lying parts of Kyogle in northern NSW got an early-morning knock on the door from Australian Defence Force troops from the 7th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, telling them it was too dangerous to stay with the Wilson River surging. Locals under threat in the Northern Rivers town of Billinudgel, as well as parts of Mullumbimby and Tumbulgum were also told to evacuate early on Tuesday. The latest update will come as welcome news for thousands of people who are yet to have fled their homes, with a series of evacuation requests removed. Lismore mayor Steve Krieg said residents were suffering from flood fatigue. 'Obviously everybody is exhausted. We've had a month of clean-up,' Mr Krieg told the ABC. Hundreds are now gathering in reopened evacuation centres across the region as Byron Council's Infrastructure Services director Phil Holloway warned of 'potential landslides' in some parts. The Wilsons River is seen in Lismore on Tuesday, with residents warned to evacuate as life-threatening floods hit the region yet again The damage is being done by a low pressure system sitting off the NSW coast will bring showers in the coming days including to Sydney, the Bureau of Meteorology's Jonathan How said. 'As the system moves south it will become windy across the state's eastern coastline, becoming strongest on Friday with the potential to bring down trees and power lines, he said. 'Thankfully though, this rain event won't be quite as long-lasting as the previous rain event so we will see conditions really ease towards the latter part of the week.' But he warned although the rains will stop, flooding may continue for days if not weeks to come. The La Nina weather pattern is drenching Australia's east coast for the second year in a row. Dr Nina Ridder of UNSW's Climate Change Research Centre said the phenomenon will dissolve by autumn, but La Nina events are likely to bring more extreme rainfall to Australia. 'We're definitely seeing the change in global weather patterns because of climate change,' she told AAP. Debris sits piled up outside businesses affected by the recent floods in Lismore on Tuesday - with the weather set to take another turn for the worst Debris piles up on stairs beside the Wilsons River in Lismore, with more wild weather now set to hit the area Further north, intense rainfall and flooding hit parts of southeast Queensland with residents in the town of Dalby on alert as the search continues for a missing man, feared dead. One man near Toowoomba has already died in floodwaters caused by the intense weather system, as authorities keep a close eye on the town 200 kilometres west of Brisbane, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk says. Another man in his 40s was swept away after getting out of his car when it became stuck in a torrent at North Branch about 6am on Monday. Queensland Police said the man's body was found in Spring Creek, downstream from where he disappeared, at about 9am on Tuesday. An emergency alert was issued for residents in low-lying areas, who were told to warn their neighbours, secure belongings and prepare to move to higher ground on Monday afternoon. The Myall Creek was expected to exceed the major flood level of 3.5 metres late on Monday, with further rises possible into Tuesday morning. 'They're looking at an evacuation centre at Dalby at the moment,' Ms Palaszczuk said. A sign declaring that the people of the town are 'stronger than you know' is seen in Lismore on Monday, with the area battered in recent weeks More than 100 roads are closed due to floods, most in the Toowoomba and Darling Downs, with others in Brisbane, the Lockyer Valley and the Gold Coast. Gold Coast authorities issued an emergency warning early on Tuesday morning about life-threating flash flooding occurring in Tallebudgera Valley. 'Shelter in place unless it is unsafe to do so,' it advised residents, adding that access to the area was likely to be affected. Small releases from Wivenhoe Dam are also underway, but Ms Palaszczuk said they won't impact river levels. The warning follows the death of a man and five dogs killed when their ute was washed away at Kingsthorpe, northwest of Toowoomba on Monday morning. Swiftwater crews rescued a woman who was also in the car, but the man and the dogs didn't survive. Will Smith's mother has told of her shock at his attack on Chris Rock at the Oscars on Sunday night - describing it as entirely out of character. Carolyn Smith, 85, still lives in Philadelphia, where her 53-year-old son grew up. Smith's father Willard, a violent alcoholic, divorced Carolyn in 2000, and died in 2016. Carolyn said she dressed up to watch the Los Angeles ceremony from her home and was startled by her son's behavior. 'He is a very even, people person,' she said on Monday on a local news station, Action News. 'That's the first time I've ever seen him go off. First time in his lifetime. 'I've never seen him do that.' Carolyn Smith, 85, is seen on Monday speaking to Action News from her home in Philadelphia about her son Will Smith's behavior at the Oscars Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars on Sunday after the comedian made a joke about his wife Jada Rock covers his jaw after being slapped in the face but went on to announce the winner for best documentary after a very awkward pause After smacking Rock, a now visibly fuming Smith returned to his seat and began repeatedly yelling: 'Keep my wife's name out of your f***ing mouth'. Lupita Nyong'o' was among those baffled by what happened with many initially believing that an act so outrageous must be part of the show Carolyn said she spoke to the actor on Monday, amid the drama, and told him to get some rest, and go on vacation. She said that she knew he would ride out the controversy. Will Smith is pictured with his mother, Carolyn 'I am proud of him being him,' she said, adding that she desperately hoped her son would win the best actor award. He was given the statuette shortly after storming the stage to slap Rock - an act for which he apologized on Monday. Carolyn said he deserved to win the Best Actor award for his performance in King Richard. 'I know how he works, how hard he works,' she said. 'And he never half steps. I've been waiting and waiting and waiting. When I heard the name, I was just, 'Yes!'' She added: 'I thought he should have been given one (Oscar) for all of them (his films).' Carolyn Smith is seen next to a mural of her son in Philadelphia, where she still lives Smith, 53, is pictured with his mother Carolyn, 85. His father Willard died of cancer in 2016. Willard and Carolyn separated in 2000 Smith shared on Instagram a photo of him as a baby, being held by his mother Ellen Smith, 50, told the station that she was proud of her brother and what he had achieved Will Smith's younger sister Ellen Smith, 50, who was with their mother, sister Pam, and others at the family home, agreed that she was confident he would overcome the current drama. 'I've had conversations with him, and it like really kind of broke my heart listening to the things he's said he had to go through to get to where he is,' she said. Smith is known for his clean-cut image, but he has had previous run-ins with the law. In 1989, the actor and rapper spent a night in jail over his involvement in an incident that, according to Philadelphia police, almost left his record producer, William Hendricks, blind. Days after winning a Grammy Award, he was charged with aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and criminal conspiracy. Charges were later dropped. Smith is close to his mother, posting frequent photos of them together on Instagram. In January, he shared a video of them dancing, captioning it: '85 Today! Happy Bday, Mom-Mom. Let's dance our way to 100.' On Mother's Day last year, he wrote: 'Happy Mommy's Day, Mommy! And Happy Mother's Day to all the Mothers of the world. 'Oh... and Mom, I'm sorry about that time when I was a senior in high school and you caught me in the kitchen with my girlfriend. 'But, really you should've been asleep.' The trial of El Shafee Elsheikh begins today in Virginia, with the alleged 'Beatle' ISIS member accused of being involved in the murders US journalists James Foley and Steven Stoloff and relief workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller. Elsheikh, 33, will stand trial in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, charged with lethal hostage-taking and conspiracy to commit murder. He is believed to have been one of the four British ISIS militants belonging to the 'Beatles' cell - nicknamed for their British roots and accents. The cell garnered international notoriety after releasing videos of the murders of Foley, Sotloff, Mueller and Kassig - among several other victims. Elsheikh - aka George - is believed to have been involved in the the kidnapping, torture and beheading of a total of 27 foreign hostages in Syria. The US does not have jurisdiction to prosecute him on all the accusations. Two of the cell's four members, Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, were held in Iraq by the U.S. military before being flown to the United States to face trial. The pair were captured in January 2018 by Kurdish forces in Syria while trying to escape to Turkey. El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, will stand trial in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, on charges including lethal hostage-taking and conspiracy to commit murder Ringleader Mohammed Emwazi, a British citizen who oversaw the executions known as 'Jihadi John', died in a drone strike in 2015. Aine Lesley Davis, the fourth member of the group, was convicted in Turkey on terrorism charges and jailed. Kotey pleaded guilty in September 2021 to the murders of Foley, Sotloff, Mueller and Kassig. He will be sentenced next month. Kotey was a citizen of the United Kingdom, but the British government withdrew his citizenship. The charges against Elsheikh carry a potential death sentence, but U.S. prosecutors have advised British officials that they will not seek the death penalty against Elsheikh or Kotey. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis will oversee the trial, and is expected to spend Tuesday questioning potential jurors to ensure a fair trial. It is expected that if found guilty, Elsheikh will spend 15 years in a U.S. prison before being extradited to the UK to serve the rest of his jail term. Over the course of the trial - that will likely last a whole month - 60 witnesses will give evidence. They are made up of foreign intelligence, other alleged victims and Yazidi sex slaves, the Sunday Telegraph reported. The trial will be the first - and likely the last time a senior member of ISIS stands trial in the West. Others were either killed in Syria or tried in the Middle East. Families of four Americans killed by ISIS terrorist stare him down in court The families of four Americans allegedly killed by an ISIS terrorist stared him down in court as he faced trial for their kidnap and murder. Relatives of James Foley, Kayla Mueller, Steven Sotloff and Peter Kassig glared at El Shaffe Elsheikh at the federal court in Alexandria, Virginia But for Muellers mother Marsha the emotion was too much and she wiped a tear from her eye as Elsheikh walked into court - before her husband Carl put his arm around her to comfort her. Prosecutors claim Elsheikh was part of an infamous ISIS cell called The Beatles which captured dozens of Westerners in Syria between 2012 and 2015. The group paraded their victims in orange jumpsuits in gruesome videos shared online which showed them being beheaded. Elsheikh has denied any role in the kidnapping of the Americans and his trial is due to last four weeks - with relatives of his alleged victims expected to be in court every day. For the opening statements Foleys mother Diane and father John sat in one of the benches of the courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia. John Foley at times closed his eyes while Diana Foley took notes, only pausing when the prosecution described her sons execution. James Foley, a journalist, 40, from New Hampshire, was seized by ISIS in 2012 while reporting on the conflict in Syria. Two years later the group released a video showing Mohammed Emwazi, the leader of The Beatles known as Jihadi John , beheading him. Sotloff, 31, from Miami, Florida, also a journalist, was kidnapped on the way to Aleppo in 2013 and was executed by Emwazi in a sick video released the following year. In court were his father Arthur and mother Shirley. Kassig, 26, an aid worker and former Army ranger who converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdul-Rahman, was captured in Syria in 2013 while delivering food and medical supplies to refugees in eastern Syria. He was beheaded in 2014 after being held in captivity. Kassigs parents Edward and Paula were in court - Paula sat taking notes throughout the opening arguments. Mueller, from Prescott, Arizona, was kidnapped in 2013 while leaving a hospital in Aleppo and, in an appalling turn of events, was repeatedly raped by the former ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Her death was confirmed in 2015. Her parents sat in the second row and stared intently on the first day of the case. They had spoken movingly at the Republican National Convention in 2020 about their daughters captivity. At the RNC Carl said: Kayla was mostly held in a 12-by-12 cell in solitary confinement. It was cold and dirty. ISIS terrorists shined bright lights in her face. They shaved her head. They beat her and tortured her. The leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, raped her repeatedly. At the RNC the Muellers criticized the Obama administration for failing to bring their daughter back alive, and praised Donald Trump under whose administration the operation to kill Baghdadi was successfully carried out. Carl said: The operators named themselves 'Task Force 814' after Aug. 14, Kaylas birthday. And they named the mission Operation Kayla Mueller. To those soldiers: thank you. Kayla was looking down on you. The Trump team gave us empathy we never received from the Obama administration. The Obama administration said it was doing everything it could. The Trump administration actually is. Also present in court was Bethany Haines, the daughter of British aid worker David Haines, another alleged victim of The Beatles. Bethany, who had flown from Scotland to be at the trial, shook her head in disgust as Elsheikh walked into court. Advertisement Kotey and Elsheikh's four-member jihadist cell, dubbed the 'Beatles' by their captives due to their British accents, was allegedly involved in the abductions of at least 27 people in Syria from 2012 to 2015. Elsheikh's lawyers have said the killings were planned and carried out by Emwazi at the behest of Islamic State leadership. The hostages, some of whom were released after their governments paid ransoms, were from at least 15 countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, France, Japan, Norway and Spain. The 'Beatles' allegedly tortured and killed their victims, including by beheading, and IS released videos of the brutal murders for propaganda purposes. Kotey, known as 'Ringo' by the hostages, and Elsheikh, dubbed 'George,' allegedly supervised detention facilities for hostages and coordinated ransom negotiations conducted by email, according to the US authorities. The pair were also accused of engaging in a 'prolonged pattern of physical and psychological violence against hostages,' which included water-boarding, electric shocks and mock executions. Ricardo Garcia Vilanova, a Spanish photographer held captive for six months in 2014, told AFP that 'torture and murder were daily occurrences' in an atmosphere of 'sadism.' Pictured left: James Foley while covering the civil war in Aleppo, Syria. Pictured right: US aid worker Peter Kassig - otherwise known as Abdul-Rahman Kassig - in Syria Left: US freelance journalist Steven Sotloff. Right: Kayla Mueller is shown after speaking to a group in Prescott, Arizona. Both were killed in Syria by ISIS Alexanda Amon Kotey, left, and El Shafee Elsheikh, who were allegedly among four British jihadis who made up a brutal Islamic State cell dubbed 'The Beatles,' speak during an interview with The Associated Press at a security center in Kobani, Syria A Kurdish security officer escorts Alexanda Amon Kotey, left, and El Shafee Elsheikh, who were allegedly among four British jihadis who made up a brutal Islamic State cell dubbed 'The Beatles,' for an interview with The Associated Press, March 30, 2018 'Beatles' Ringleader Mohammed Emwazi, a British citizen who oversaw the executions known as 'Jihadi John', died in a drone strike in 2015 Several former European hostages are expected to testify at the Virginia trial along with a Yazidi woman detained with Mueller, who was abducted in Syria in 2013 while working with the Danish Refugee Council. A US special forces raid that resulted in the death of Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria in 2019 was code-named Task Force 8-14 in reference to Mueller's birthday. Mueller's parents say she was tortured before being handed over to Baghdadi, who allegedly raped her repeatedly before killing her. According to the indictment, Elsheikh was born in Sudan and moved to Britain when he was a child. After becoming radicalized, he went to Syria in 2012 and joined the IS cell, which specialized in kidnapping Westerners. In interviews with media outlets following his capture by Syrian Kurdish forces, Elsheikh said he did not always display 'compassion' towards the hostages but blamed others for their murders. Contacted by AFP news agency, Elsheikh's lawyers did not respond when asked if their client planned to testify in his own defense at his trial. The Independent Commission Against Corruption have launched an investigation into the murder case against Northern Territory policeman Zachary Rolfe. Constable Rolfe was found not guilty of murder last week after he shot Kumanjayi Walker three times in Alice Springs in November 2019 after the Aboriginal man stabbed him with scissors. ICAC's Michael Riches has confirmed they will investigate the case after several detectives noted their concern about the 'abnormal' speed in which the murder charge came down. 'I will investigate allegations of improper conduct relating to the arrest and charge of Mr Zachary Rolfe,' he said. 'My investigation will focus upon the period between the shooting incident and the presentation of Mr Rolfe for charging.' NT police officer Constable Zachary Rolfe (pictured) was acquitted of murdering an Indigenous teenager boa- he sted about not having to follow rules in the 'Wild West' Northern Territory as shocking details of his past emerge Mr Riches said the investigation could include witness statements and even a public review. 'In due course I will consider whether I will hear some or all witnesses by way of public inquiry. 'If that occurs notice will be given in accordance with section 39 of the ICAC Act. I will conduct the investigation as expeditiously as my resources will allow. 'Any action taken as a consequence of the investigation, including the making of reports or public statements, will be in accordance with the ICAC Act. 'I will not offer a running commentary on the investigation, and I have no further statement to make at this time.' Constable Zachary Rolfe was found not guilty of murder last week after he shot Kumanjayi Walker three times in Alice Springs in November 2019 NT Police released a statement confirming they would co-operate fully with ICAC's investigation. 'Northern Territory Police have been advised that the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption will investigate the process that led to the arrest and charging of Constable Zachary Rolfe,' it said in a statement. 'NT Police will cooperate fully with the inquiry. As the matter is now before the ICAC there will be no further comment.' Chief Minister Michael Gunner however said the investigation was a 'waste of time' and said due process had already been done. 'Police have a process to make sure that their investigation stacks up, then the prosecution also has a responsibility to only take anything forward that they think has a reasonable chance at success,' he said hours before ICAC made its announcement. 'And then there's a stage again at the courts where a case has to genuinely stack up. 'Courts aren't there to waste their time. So for me there's a lot of processes here. We're talking about the criminal justice system, I have faith in the criminal justice system, obviously the courts have separation of powers to the legislature and the executive. I have confidence in those processes.' Constable Rolfe had been accused of previously using excessive force as text messages emerge showing the police officer boasting about doing 'cowboy stuff' while bodycam footage captured a brutal arrest in 2018 (pictured, mock-up of texts sent to military friend) Suppression orders in place during the trial have since been lifted by the court revealing fresh details about Constable Rolfe's time as a police officer. The policeman had been accused of previously using excessive force in previous arrests as text messages emerge showing the police officer boasting about doing 'cowboy stuff', while bodycam footage captured a brutal arrest in 2018. A sworn statement from Constable Rolfe's ex-girlfriend claimed he asked a colleague to scratch his face so he could justify the alleged use of excessive force during the arrest. 'The Crown alleges that the use of force was excessive because it was neither reasonable nor necessary,' Justice John Burns said in his pre-trial ruling. Bodycam footage filmed Constable Rolfe taking part in the arrest of Malcolm Ryder. Prosecutors alleged Constable Rolfe 'punched' Mr Ryder 'to his head, grabbed his hair and slung his head to the ground'. 'It further alleges that the accused's use of force resulted in Ryder being rendered unconscious and sustaining a laceration to his right forehead requiring 13 sutures and a laceration to his left forehead requiring three sutures,' Justice Burns said. 'It further alleges that the accused's use of force resulted in Ryder being rendered unconscious and sustaining a laceration to his right forehead requiring 13 sutures and a laceration to his left forehead requiring three sutures,' Justice Burns said The Northern Territory Supreme Court heard a magistrate had found Constable Rolfe 'deliberately assaulted' Mr Ryder before he 'lied in evidence'. Constable Rolfe had also sent text messages to an army friend where he referred to Alice Springs as a 'sh**hole' and compared it to the 'Wild West' that had 'f*** all rules'. 'Alice Springs sucks ha ha,' he wrote. 'The good thing is it's like the Wild West and f*** all the rules in the job really... but it's a sh** hole. Good to start here coz of the volume of work but will be good to leave.' Another message read: 'We have this small team in Alice, IRT, immediate response team. We're not full time, just get called up from Gd's for high risk jobs, its a sweet gig, just get to do cowboy stuff with no rules.' Constable Rolfe was accused of using excessive force in more arrests including allegedly slamming a person's head against a rock, karate chopping another one to the ground and slamming a different person against a wall. Crown prosecutor Philip Strickland SC drew parallels between the arrests to the shooting death of Mr Walker. Bodycam footage filmed Constable Rolfe taking part in the arrest of Malcolm Ryder Prosecutors alleged Constable Rolfe 'punched' Mr Ryder 'to his head, grabbed his hair and slung his head to the ground' (pictured, man is arrested at the house in 2018) 'In all circumstances, the act of the accused caused injury or significant injury to the complainant, and in all circumstances, according to the expert who will be called by the crown, the force that he used was unnecessary,' he said. Justice Burns ruled certain details of Rolfe's past as a police officer would not be admitted during his trial - meaning the 12 men and women on the jury were not aware of any of the previous complaints made against him. He stated the evidence did not have 'significant probative value' and could lead to 'the danger of prejudice to the accused'. Justice Burns said the incidents 'taken at their highest, strongly support a tendency on the part of the accused to make a false statement or do some other act seeking to justify the use of excessive force'. Constable Rolfe claimed all complaints against him had been investigated before they were cleared. Adrian Basham, accused of murdering his ex-wife, repeatedly talked over and blamed her for the breakdown of their relationship when they had counselling, a court has been told. Basham, 45, is standing trial before the Victorian Supreme Court charged with murdering Samantha Fraser. Her body was found at her Phillip Island home in July 2018, the day after she turned 38. Adrian Basham is standing trial before the Victorian Supreme Court charged with murdering ex-wife Samantha Fraser Ms Fraser told a counsellor, Terence Melvin, in December 2016 that she was suffering from tightness in chest, as well as difficulty breathing and getting out of bed due to the stresses of the relationship. Mr Melvin, who believed there were family violence issues, devised a safety plan with Ms Fraser as the marriage broke down in 2017. He offered to keep assisting Basham but told him to move out of the family home and respect his ex-wife's decision to split up. Basham didn't return the counsellor's calls after April 2017. 'It struck me very early on that Mr Basham took very little responsibility for what was happening in the relationship,' Mr Melvin told the court on Tuesday. 'I heard lots of blaming language. His primary belief was that the blame lay with his wife.' Defence barrister Ashley Halphen has argued that Ms Fraser took her own life after Basham turned up at her home and assaulted her on the day she died. Adrian Basham, accused of murdering his ex-wife, repeatedly talked over and blamed her for the breakdown of their relationship when they had counselling, a court has been told But Mr Melvin said that during his sessions with Ms Fraser, who had three children with Basham, he did not think she was a suicide risk. 'The children were the most significant thing in her life and I felt reassured she was not suicidal,' the retired psychologist said. 'She had started to reach out to friends and family, who had regular contact with her and built a network around her. That was all part of the safety plan we devised.' The pair met in late 2005 and married in 2007. But after years of domineering and controlling behaviour, prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC previously told the court, they separated in 2017, with Ms Fraser taking out intervention orders against him. Basham then turned up at her Cowes home and waited for 90 minutes, while she dropped their children at school and had coffee with a friend at a local cafe. It's alleged he strangled her with a rope and then manipulated the scene to make it look like suicide. Basham had threatened Ms Fraser after they separated, the prosecutor said, warning her that violent criminals could easily break into her home. He also told her that 'if I can't have you, then no one will'. The trial continues. 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) Lifeline 13 11 14 The Royal Family will not wear military uniforms during today's service of thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh - as a nod to his 'understated and modest' style. The likes of Prince Charles and Prince William - having recently returned from a Caribbean tour - as well as the other 1,800 guests expected to attend, will instead follow a dress code of 'lounge suits and day dresses'. The monarch, 95, has rallied to make an appearance and lead her family at the high-profile and personally significant occasion in honour of husband Philip. She made the final decision on Tuesday morning, hours before she was due to travel from Windsor Castle to central London, having been determined to be at Westminster Abbey if her mobility allowed her. However, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will not be in attendance amid Harry's ongoing row with the Home Office over security. It will also mark the first public appearance for Prince Andrew since his high-profile multi-million-pound payout to Virginia Giuffre. Sources say the dress code decision will spare any dilemma over what the Duke of York, who has lost the majority of his military titles but retains his rank of Vice-Admiral in the Royal Navy, should wear for the occasion, the Telegraph reports. At Philip's funeral last April, the men wore morning suits, military ties and medals but a less formal approach will be adopted for today's occasion. The Royal Family will not wear military uniforms during today's service of thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh - as a nod to his 'understated and modest' style At Philip's funeral last April, the men wore morning suits, military ties and medals but a less formal approach will be adopted for today's occasion It will also mark the first public appearance for Prince Andrew since his high-profile multi-million-pound payout to Virginia Giuffre The likes of Charles and Camilla, as well as the other 1,800 guests expected to attend, will instead follow a dress code of 'lounge suits and day dresses' The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have only recently returned from their tour of the Caribbean Princess Anne is also expected to be in attendance at the service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey this morning The Queen is said to be determined to travel to London to mark the long and productive life of her husband Philip in what would be her first major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months The decision was reportedly made amid concerns that Harry, who relinquished official duties in 2020, would be the only senior Royal not in uniform, while Andrew is said to have asked to wear a Naval uniform. Royal aides have revealed the Queen, 95, has been 'actively involved' in plans for the service at Westminster Abbey 'with many elements reflecting Her Majesty's wishes' as the order of service was unveiled overnight. It includes several elements the Duke had planned for his funeral last year but which were forbidden by Covid restrictions at the time. Among them is the involvement of Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) gold award winners and Sea Cadets, his expressed wish for the congregation to sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part. Around 1,800 guests are due at today's service, including British and European royalty, representatives of the many charities of which the duke was patron or president, Boris and Carrie Johnson, and Sir David Attenborough. While the Queen's arrival is mentioned in the order of service, it is understood a final decision on her attendance will not be made until first thing this morning. She has recently been forced to pull out of a string of engagements because of ill health and old age. She was unable to attend the Commonwealth Day service this month because of concerns about her mobility and comfort. Palace and Abbey aides are thought to have taken steps to ensure that the service, to be televised live on BBC One, is less taxing for the Queen. A graphic shows the plan for the service to remember Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey taking place this morning Instead of arriving at the usual West Entrance to the Abbey, which would involve steps and a long walk down the Nave in front of the cameras, the Queen could be driven around the side of the building and enter away from public view via the 'Poet's Entrance'. She would then have a far shorter walk down the South Transept to her seat. It is likely she would walk with the aid of a stick. The service will gave thanks for the duke's dedication to family, nation and Commonwealth and recognise the importance of his legacy in creating opportunities for young people, promoting conservation, and supporting the Armed Forces. One of the elements planned for the funeral which has now been included in the service will see nine Gold Award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, plus representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations, line entry routes into Westminster Abbey. Prince Philip's memorial Order of Service in FULL: Royal Family release details of the final farewell for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Royal Family and Westminster Abbey have released the full Order of Service ahead of today's memorial service for HRH Prince Philip, who died almost one year ago. The service, which is set to take place at Westminster Abbey from 11:30am today, will pay tribute to The Duke of Edinburghs contribution to public life and support to charitable organisations. The memorial ceremony will also incorporate several aspects that were planned for Philip's funeral last year, which were unable to go ahead due to the Covid-19 restrictions in place at the time. The Queen, who was married to The Duke of Edinburgh for 73 years prior to his death, is said to have personally overseen many elements of the service. Buckingham Palace said there will also be a heavy military presence at the service, given Philip's glittering career in the Armed Forces, along with several recipients and individuals involved in the Duke of Edinburgh scheme. Here is the official Order of Service for the Service of Thanksgiving for HRH Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, who died April 9, 2021. The Queen and Prince Philip in June 2014. The Duke of Edinburgh died in April 2021 aged 99 Introduction The service is conducted by the Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster. The service is sung by the Choirs of Westminster Abbey, and Her Majestys Chapel Royal, St Jamess Palace, directed by James ODonnell, Organist and Master of the Choristers, Westminster Abbey. The organ is played by Peter Holder, Sub-Organist. The State Trumpeters of the Household Cavalry are directed by Trumpet Major Julian Sandford, and the Fanfare Team from the Central Band of the Royal Air Force are directed by Sergeant Timothy Hynd RAF. Before the service Matthew Jorysz, Assistant Organist, plays: Andante cantabile from Symphony No 3, Charles-Marie Widor (18441937) Bist du bei mir BWV 508, attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach (16851750) Salix from Plymouth Suite, Percy Whitlock (190346) The Band of Her Majestys Royal Marines Portsmouth (Royal Band), directed by Lieutenant Colonel Jason Burcham RM, Principal Director of Music, plays: Prelude from 49th Parallel, Ralph Vaughan Williams (18721958) arranged by Michael McDermott Elsas Procession to the Cathedral from Lohengri,n Richard Wagner (181383) arranged by Peter Curtis Canterbury Chorale, Jan Van der Roost (b 1956) Lux Aurumque, Eric Whitacre (b 1970) Men of Honour Part 2, Thomas Bergerson (b 1980) arranged by Ivan Hutchinson Pacific, Blake Neely (b 1969) and Hans Zimmer (b 1957) arranged by Rieks van der Velde The Assistant Organist plays: Shepherds Song from Symphony No 6 (Pastoral), Ludwig van Beethoven (17701827) The Sub-Organist plays: Benedictus from Sonata Britannica, Charles Villiers Stanford (18521924) The Duke of Edinburgh, who has died at the age of 99, joined the Royal Navy in 1939 the year the Second World War broke out - when he was still a teenager. By 1942, he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant after bravely fighting in the Battle of Crete and the conflict at Cape Matapan. Left: Philip in 1946. Right: Phlip in 1945, when he was serving on HMS Valiant It wasn't just on water where Philip put his military credentials to good use he trained to be a pilot with the RAF and by the time he gave up flying in 1997, at the age of 76, he had completed 5,986 hours of time in the sky in 59 different aircraft Members of The Duke of Edinburghs Family arrive and are conducted to their seats. The Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, the Right Honourable Dame Eleanor Laing DBE MP, and The Lord Speaker, the Lord McFall of Alcluith, are received by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. Presentations are made and they are conducted to their seats. The Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Boris Johnson MP, and Mrs Johnson, are received. Presentations are made and they are conducted to their seats. The Right Worshipful The Lord Mayor of Westminster, Councillor Andrew Smith, and The Lady Mayoress Salma Shah are received. Presentations are made and they are conducted to their seats. All stand, and then sit. Representatives of faith communities and of the churches process to places in the Lantern. The King and Queen of the Belgians, The Queen of Denmark, The Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, The Prince of Monaco, The King and Queen of the Netherlands and Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands, The King and Queen of Norway, The King and Queen of Spain, The King and Queen of Sweden, Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Bahrain, Prince El Hassan bin Talal and Princess Sarvath El Hassan, Queen Anne-Marie of the Hellenes, Crown Prince Pavlos and Crown Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece, Prince Philippos and Princess Nina of Greece, Margareta, Custodian of the Romanian Crown and Prince Radu of Romania, Crown Prince Alexander and Crown Princess Katherine of Serbia and Prince Kyril of Preslav arrive and are conducted to their seats. Members of the Royal Family arrive and are conducted to their seats. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, The Duke of Kent and The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester arrive and are conducted to their seats. The Princess Royal and Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence KCVO, CB, The Earl and Countess of Wessex, The Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn arrive and are conducted to their seats. The Duke of York, Princess Beatrice and Mr Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, Princess Eugenie and Mr Jack Brooksbank arrive and are conducted to their seats. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are received by the Dean and Chapter. Presentations are made and they are conducted to their seats. The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall are received by the Dean and Chapter. Presentations are made and they are conducted to their seats. All stand as the procession moves to places in Quire, the Sacrarium, and Poets Corner. A fanfare is sounded. The Queen is received by the Dean and Chapter. Presentations are made. A holder of a gold award from the Duke of Edinburgh scheme will speak at Prince Philip's memorial service today, while nine other young people with their own awards will line the steps of Westminster Abbey. Above: The Duke of Edinburgh hosts DofE gold award presentations at Hillsborough Castle in County Down in 2017 Order of Service All sing: 'He who would valiant be gainst all disaster, let him in constancy follow the Master. Theres no discouragement shall make him once relent his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim. Whoso beset him round with dismal stories, do but themselves confound his strength the more is. No foes shall stay his might, though he with giants fight: he will make good his right to be a pilgrim. Since, Lord, thou dost defend us with thy Spirit, We know we at the end shall life inherit. Then fancies flee away! Ill fear not what men say, Ill labour night and day to be a pilgrim.' (Monks Gate 372 NEH from The Pilgrims Progress adapted from an English folk song John Bunyan (162888) arranged by James ODonnell (b 1961) All sit. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, says the Bidding: 'In Westminster Abbey, where he made promises that defined a life of willing duty and spirited service, we give thanks for His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. A man of rare ability and distinction, rightly honoured and celebrated, he ever directed our attention away from himself. He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully. Acknowledging our loss, we turn to the God who is our help for He will renew our hope. In grateful remembrance of The Prince Philip, we then commit ourselves to live as he lived, in faith, in the service of Her Majesty, and with a greater reverence for our world and our neighbours.' 'Let us pray in the words that Jesus taught us. 'Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.' Doyin Sonibare, a Gold Award holder from The Duke of Edinburghs Award, gives a Tribute. Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will pay tribute to the duke, who died last year aged 99. Ms Sonibare, who is now studying for a PhD into sickle cell disease, will tell attendees that the DofE helped her to secure her first job at the age of 18 and will reflect on the difference that the scheme has made to her life since The Right Honourable the Lord Wallace of Tankerness QC, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, reads: 'To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth. Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God? Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.' (Isaiah 40: 2531) 'Thanks be to God.' The choir sings: 'Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings with thy most gracious favour, and further us with thy continual help, that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in thee, we may glorify thy holy name, and finally by thy mercy obtain everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.' (William Byrd (c 15401623) Collect for Holy Communion The Book of Common Prayer) The Right Reverend and Right Honourable Dame Sarah Mullally DBE, Dean of Her Majestys Chapels Royal, reads: 'Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice. Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you.' (Philippians 4: 49) 'Thanks be to God.' All stand to sing: 'All creatures of our God and King, lift up your voice and with us sing Alleluia, alleluia! Thou burning sun with golden beam, thou silver moon with softer gleam: O praise him, O praise him, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! 'Thou flowing water, pure and clear, make music for thy Lord to hear, Alleluia, alleluia! Thou fire so masterful and bright, that givest man both warmth and light: O praise him, O praise him, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! 'Thou rushing wind that art so strong, ye clouds that sail in heaven along, O praise him, Alleluia! Thou rising morn, in praise rejoice, ye lights of evening, find a voice: O praise him, O praise him, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! 'Dear mother earth, who day by day unfoldest blessings on our way, O praise him, Alleluia! The flowers and fruits that in thee grow, let them his glory also show: O praise him, O praise him, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! 'Let all things their Creator bless, and worship him in humbleness, O praise him, Alleluia! Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son, and praise the Spirit, three in One: O praise him, O praise him, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!' (Lasst uns erfreuen 263 NEH, St Francis of Assisi (11821226) Ralph Vaughan Williams, translated by William Draper (18551933) after a melody in Geistliche Kirchengesang Cologne, 1623 arranged by James ODonnell) Cadets will today line the entrances to Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip's memorial service and a marching band from the Royal Marines will play as guests arrive, Buckingham Palace has revealed. Above: Philip during a visit to Windsor Sea Cadet Unit on April 7, 2014 All sit. The Right Reverend David Conner KCVO, Dean of Windsor, gives the Address. The choir sings: 'We praise thee, O God : we acknowledge thee to be the Lord. All the earth doth worship thee : the Father everlasting. To thee all angels cry aloud : the heavens, and all the powers therein. To thee cherubin, and seraphin : continually do cry, Holy, holy, holy : Lord God of Sabaoth; heaven and earth are full of the majesty : of thy glory. The glorious company of the apostles : praise thee. The goodly fellowship of the prophets : praise thee. The noble army of martyrs : praise thee. The holy Church throughout all the world : doth acknowledge thee; the Father : of an infinite majesty; thine honourable, true : and only Son; also the Holy Ghost : the Comforter. Thou art the King of glory : O Christ. Thou art the everlasting Son : of the Father. When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man : thou didst not abhor the Virgins womb. When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death : thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers. Thou sittest at the right hand of God : in the Glory of the Father. We believe that thou shalt come : to be our Judge. We therefore pray thee, help thy servants : whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood. Make them to be numbered with thy saints : in glory everlasting. O Lord, save thy people : and bless thine heritage. Govern them : and lift them up for ever. Day by day : we magnify thee; and we worship thy name : ever world without end. Vouchsafe, O Lord : to keep us this day without sin. O Lord, have mercy upon us : have mercy upon us. O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us : as our trust is in thee. O Lord, in thee have I trusted : let me never be confounded.' (Te Deum in C Canticle for Morning Prayer, Benjamin Britten (191376) The Book of Common Prayer) The Reverend Mark Birch, Minor Canon and Precentor, introduces the prayers: 'Let us give thanks to Almighty God for the life and work of The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and pray for all who honour his legacy and continue his work.' All sit or kneel. The Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie, Minister of Crathie Church, says: 'Let us give thanks for his service as Consort, liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship to Her Majesty; for his devotion to family, to Nation and to Commonwealth; for his strength and constancy. O Father of all, we pray thee for those whom we love but see no longer. Grant them thy peace; let light perpetual shine upon them; and, in thy loving wisdom and almighty power, work in them the good purpose of thy perfect will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.' The Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere LVO, Rector of Sandringham, says: 'Let us give thanks for his energy and spirit of adventure; for his work with the young to discover new skills and serve their communities. Let us pray especially for the work of Cadet Forces and all engaged in The Duke of Edinburghs Award. Teach us, good Lord, to serve thee as thou deservest; to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labour and not to ask for any reward, save that of knowing that we do Thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.' The Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, says: 'Let us give thanks for his work in conservation and the good stewardship of the environment, in bringing together people of many faiths, and in the work of the World Wildlife Fund. Almighty God, whose loving hand hath given us all that we possess in creation; grant us grace that we may honour thee with our substance, and remembering the account which we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of thy bounty; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.' The Reverend Canon Paul Wright, Sub-Dean of Her Majestys Chapels Royal, says: 'Let us give thanks for his gifts of character; for his humour and resilience; his fortitude and devotion to duty; that we may follow his good example in the service of our fellows. O Lord God, when thou givest to thy servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same unto the end, until it be thoroughly finished, which yieldeth the true glory; through him who for the finishing of thy work laid down his life, our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Amen.' The Reverend Dr James Hawkey, Canon in Residence, says: 'Let us give thanks to our heavenly Father for all his blessings and mercies, and dedicate ourselves anew to his service. Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men; We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we show forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.' All stand to sing: 'Guide me, O thou great Redeemer, pilgrim through this barren land; I am weak, but thou art mighty; hold me with thy powerful hand: Bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more. Open now the crystal fountain whence the healing stream doth flow; let the fiery cloudy pillar lead me all my journey through: strong Deliverer, be thou still my strength and shield. When I tread the verge of Jordan, bid my anxious fears subside; Death of death, and hells Destruction, land me safe on Canaans side: songs of praises I will ever give to thee.' (Cwm Rhondda 368 NEH Arglwydd, arwain trwyr anialwch, John Hughes (18731932) William Williams (171791) arranged by James ODonnell, translated by Peter Williams (172796) and others) The Most Reverend and the Right Honourable Justin Welby, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England and Metropolitan, gives the Blessing: 'God grant to the living grace; to the departed rest; to the Church, The Queen, the Commonwealth, and all people, peace and concord; and to us sinners life everlasting; and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.' All sing: 'God save our gracious Queen, long live our noble Queen, God save The Queen. Send her victorious, happy, and glorious, long to reign over us: God save The Queen.' (arranged by Gordon Jacob (18951984) All remain standing as the Procession, together with The Queen and Members of the Royal Family, leaves the Abbey church. Music after the service Allegro molto e ritmico from Sonata Britannica, Charles Villiers Stanford The band plays: The Seafarers arranged by Michael McDermott Members of the congregation are kindly requested to remain in their seats until directed to move by the Honorary Stewards The bells of the Abbey church are rung. END OF SERVICE Advertisement Boris Johnson joined senior politicians from across the House of Commons as they came together to remember Prince Philip today. The Prime Minister was driven the short trip from Downing Street to Westminster Abbey in his work Range Rover ahead of the congregation. He joined a raft of colleagues including Chancellor Rishi Sunak, Home Secretary Priti Patel and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss on the front row in the iconic venue. Behind them sat opposition figures including Nicola Sturgeon, Mark Drakeford, Ian Blackford and Sir Ed Davey, as well as top civil servant Simon Case. And a row back from them were military chiefs such as Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, who took over from General Sir Nick Carter in November. Other notable political figures also in attendance were Professor Sir Chris Whitty, England's chief medical officer, and outgoing Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick. The PM was expected to be joined by his wife Carrie, but she did not appear to have made the trip and was thought to have remained at No 10 with their two young children. Prime Minister Boris Johnson marches into the Abbey on his own as his wife Carrie did not join him on Tuesday morning Boris Johnson is pictured arriving at Westminster Abbey on Tuesday afternoon ahead of the service to the Duke of Edinburgh The Prime Minister leaves his work Range Rover before heading inside the iconic Abbey for the service to the Queen's late husband Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is pictured getting out of a car outside the Abbey this morning as he arrived to pay tributes Liz Truss is pictured arriving wearing a green dress and bright red handbag ahead of the service for the Duke on Tuesday morning Home Secretary Priti Patel walks over the cobbles up the street to Westminster Abbey ahead of the poignant ceremony on Tuesday morning Home Secretary Miss Patel is pictured getting out of her work Range Rover with her security before heading inside the Abbey Left: Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer arrives at the Abbey. Right: SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon made the trip down from Scotland too Pictured: Brandon Lewis, Priti Patel, Liz Truss, Rushi Sunak and Boris Johnson are on the front row in Westminster Abbey today. On the second row sits the Lord Speaker, Deputy Speaker of the Commons, Wales's Mark Drakeford and Nicola Sturgeon. Behind them sits Simon Case, Sir Keir Starmer, Ian Blackford and Sir Ed Davey in front of military chiefs Liz Truss sits in front of Nicola Sturgeon and next to Rishi Sunak and the Prime Minister ahead of the service on Tuesday morning Politicians from across the House of Commons and devolved powers sing as the Queen enters the venue for the thanksgiving service Prince Philip was remembered as a 'man of rare ability and distinction' at the service today. It featured elements he planned for his own funeral, which were forbidden due to Covid-19 restrictions. Some of his older great-grandchildren attended, giving the youngest generation of royals the chance to honour him. Missing gestures from his burial saw Gold Duke of Edinburgh's Award holders and the youth UK Cadet Force associations line the steps of Westminster Abbey. The Duke's express wishes for the congregation to join and sing the rousing hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and for the clergy from Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral to play a special part also finally got to be granted. Prayers were said for his 'gifts of character; for his humour and resilience; his fortitude and devotion to duty' by the Chapels Royal's Sub-Dean. Meanwhile 'his energy and spirit of adventure' and 'strength and constancy' was heralded by royal estates' clergy - known as the Queen's domestic chaplains. The Duke had an active role in the day-to-day management of the estates for many years. He wanted the minister of Crathie Church near Balmoral, the rector of Sandringham and the chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, to take part. But the farewell to Philip in St George's Chapel last April was limited to just 30 people in the midst of the pandemic and mass singing was banned. Professor Sir Chris Whitty is pictured arriving at Westminster Abbey today as he headed inside to pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Outgoing Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick turns up at Westminster Abbey on Tuesday as one of the 1,800 people attending Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin arriving for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh today Admiral Sir Antony David Radakin sits down among other military chiefs and behind the Lord Speaker in Westminster Abbey today Admiral Sir Tony is the 24th Chief of the Defence Staff, the professional head of the British Armed forces, having taken on the role from general Sir Nick Carter in November Lord Speaker of the House of Lords John McFall walks with Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons Eleanor Laing to the service today Lord Mayor of Westminster Andrew Smith and Lady Mayoress Salma Shah arrive to attend the Service of Thanksgiving today Twenty fines will be handed out over Partygate today Police today announced they are preparing to hand out an initial batch of 20 fines for Partygate - but Boris Johnson is unlikely to be among them. Scotland Yard said it is referring penalty notices to be issued to people who attended lockdown-busting Whitehall drinks - confirming it believes the law was broken in some instances. However, it made clear that the individuals will not be named. The force is thought to be focusing on 'clear-cut' cases where people are not contesting the allegation. The PM is said to have been at six of the 12 events under investigation and has received a legal questionnaire - equivalent to being interviewed under caution - but he has denied breaking rules. The recipients of the fines - typically 100 - look set to stay in their jobs. No10 has pledged to reveal if Mr Johnson himself is fined. The premier had looked in serious danger of being ousted amid Tory fury at the huge political damage from the Partygate scandal and wider sleaze claims. However, the mood has shifted dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine, with praise of Mr Johnson's response. Some MPs have withdrawn letters of no confidence. Advertisement Eleven months on, the royal family including the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Cambridges gathered as part of the 1,800-strong congregation. The Queen led her family at the high profile and personally significant occasion for her beloved late husband. The Monarch, who has faced mobility issues, is mentioned in the Order of Service, Buckingham Palace made the 22-mile trip from Windsor Castle. The head of state pulled out of the Commonwealth Day service earlier this month due to comfort issues and has spoken about not being able to move. She recently recovered from Covid-19 and appeared on good form at Windsor last week. The Palace said the Queen has been actively involved in the plans for the service, with many elements reflecting her wishes. Around 30 foreign royals were at the Abbey, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark's Queen Margrethe and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. The Duke's wider family and friends were also there, along with 500 representatives from his patronages and charities. Also invited were Sir David Attenborough, Dame Floella Benjamin, Baroness Grey-Thompson and members of the military who were involved in the funeral, including Pipe Major Colour Sergeant Peter Grant and the Grenadier Guards Bearer Party. Philip, who worked on his own funeral details - codenamed Forth Bridge - for many years, asked for the choir to sing Te Deum in C by Benjamin Britten, and this will be part of Tuesday's proceedings. The Dean of Westminster, The Very Reverend David Hoyle, described Philip in the bidding as 'a man of rare ability and distinction, rightly honoured and celebrated, he ever directed our attention away from himself'. 'Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter,' he will say. 'His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully.' The Dean of Windsor, The Right Reverend David Conner delivered a seven-minute address during the service which was televised live on BBC One. A special tribute was read by 28-year-old Doyin Sonibare, from London, who holds her Bronze, Silver and Gold Duke of Edinburgh Awards, about the legacy and impact of the youth scheme Philip set up in 1956. In recognition of Philip's long-held relationship with the armed forces, the Band of Her Majesty's Royal Marines Portsmouth (Royal Band) provided music before and after. Pieces included the upbeat The Seafarers, as well as the moving Pacific theme by Blake Neely and Hans Zimmer, composed for the HBO mini-series about a US marine corps fighting in the Pacific during the Second World War. Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat during the funeral of Prince Philip at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle on April 17, 2021 The Queen and Prince Philip revisit Broadlands, to mark their Diamond Wedding Anniversary on November 20, 2007 A graphic shows the plan for the service to remember Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey taking place this morning Philip served as First Lieutenant on the destroyer HMS Whelp in the Pacific, where he helped to rescue two airmen in 1945 whose bomber crashed into the ocean during the Allies' Operation Meridian II against the Japanese. Flowers in the church were in shades of patriotic red, white and blue, with larger arrangements featuring blue eryngium - known as sea holly - a nod to the duke's career in the Royal Navy, and his lifelong affection for the sea. The smaller posies included white dendrobium orchids, which appeared in Princess Elizabeth's wedding bouquet when she married Philip in 1947. Among those seated in the abbey was the Duke of York, despite Andrew paying millions out of court earlier this month to settle a civil sexual assault case. He was expected to arrive alongside his daughters Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, and their husbands Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Jack Brooksbank - but came in with the Queen. Also there was Charles, Camilla, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor and Viscount Severn, the Princess Royal and Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, the Duke of Kent and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex did not return from the US for the service. PM Mr Johnson was there after his apology to the Queen and the country over gatherings in Downing Street on the eve of the Duke's funeral. Whitehall workers had drunk into the night but the next morning Her Majesty cut a lonely figure as she sat alone at the Duke's burial in Windsor. The Metropolitan Police is investigating the allegations of boozy lockdown-breaking parties at No 10. The first Partygate fines will be issued today as police prepare to slap 15 people with penalty notices, reports say. The PM and his wife Carrie (pictured in Sussex with baby Romy over the weekend) are set to join a congregation of 1,800 people as they gather to remember the Queen's consort, who died last year The PM (pictured in London yesterday morning) was forced to apologise to the Queen after it emerged there was a raucous party in Downing Street the night before she buried her husband Prince Philip's memorial Order of Service in FULL: Royal Family release details of the final farewell for the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey The Royal Family and Westminster Abbey have released the full Order of Service ahead of today's memorial service for HRH Prince Philip, who died almost one year ago. The service, which is set to take place at Westminster Abbey from 11:30am today, will pay tribute to The Duke of Edinburgh's contribution to public life and support to charitable organisations. The memorial ceremony will also incorporate several aspects that were planned for Philip's funeral last year, which were unable to go ahead due to the Covid-19 restrictions in place at the time. The Queen, who was married to The Duke of Edinburgh for 73 years prior to his death, is said to have personally overseen many elements of the service. Buckingham Palace said there will also be a heavy military presence at the service, given Philip's glittering career in the Armed Forces, along with several recipients and individuals involved in the Duke of Edinburgh scheme. Here is the official Order of Service for the Service of Thanksgiving for HRH Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, who died April 9, 2021. The Queen and Prince Philip in June 2014. The Duke of Edinburgh died in April 2021 aged 99 Introduction The service is conducted by the Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster. The service is sung by the Choirs of Westminster Abbey, and Her Majesty's Chapel Royal, St James's Palace, directed by James O'Donnell, Organist and Master of the Choristers, Westminster Abbey. The organ is played by Peter Holder, Sub-Organist. The State Trumpeters of the Household Cavalry are directed by Trumpet Major Julian Sandford, and the Fanfare Team from the Central Band of the Royal Air Force are directed by Sergeant Timothy Hynd RAF. Before the service Matthew Jorysz, Assistant Organist, plays: Andante cantabile from Symphony No 3, Charles-Marie Widor (18441937) Bist du bei mir BWV 508, attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach (16851750) Salix from Plymouth Suite, Percy Whitlock (190346) The Band of Her Majesty's Royal Marines Portsmouth (Royal Band), directed by Lieutenant Colonel Jason Burcham RM, Principal Director of Music, plays: Prelude from 49th Parallel, Ralph Vaughan Williams (18721958) arranged by Michael McDermott Elsa's Procession to the Cathedral from Lohengri,n Richard Wagner (181383) arranged by Peter Curtis Canterbury Chorale, Jan Van der Roost (b 1956) Lux Aurumque, Eric Whitacre (b 1970) Men of Honour Part 2, Thomas Bergerson (b 1980) arranged by Ivan Hutchinson Pacific, Blake Neely (b 1969) and Hans Zimmer (b 1957) arranged by Rieks van der Velde The Assistant Organist plays: Shepherd's Song from Symphony No 6 ('Pastoral'), Ludwig van Beethoven (17701827) The Sub-Organist plays: Benedictus from Sonata Britannica, Charles Villiers Stanford (18521924) The Duke of Edinburgh, who has died at the age of 99, joined the Royal Navy in 1939 the year the Second World War broke out - when he was still a teenager. By 1942, he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant after bravely fighting in the Battle of Crete and the conflict at Cape Matapan. Left: Philip in 1946. Right: Phlip in 1945, when he was serving on HMS Valiant It wasn't just on water where Philip put his military credentials to good use he trained to be a pilot with the RAF and by the time he gave up flying in 1997, at the age of 76, he had completed 5,986 hours of time in the sky in 59 different aircraft Members of The Duke of Edinburgh's Family arrive and are conducted to their seats. The Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, the Right Honourable Dame Eleanor Laing DBE MP, and The Lord Speaker, the Lord McFall of Alcluith, are received by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. Presentations are made and they are conducted to their seats. The Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Boris Johnson MP, and Mrs Johnson, are received. Presentations are made and they are conducted to their seats. The Right Worshipful The Lord Mayor of Westminster, Councillor Andrew Smith, and The Lady Mayoress Salma Shah are received. Presentations are made and they are conducted to their seats. All stand, and then sit. Representatives of faith communities and of the churches process to places in the Lantern. The King and Queen of the Belgians, The Queen of Denmark, The Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, The Prince of Monaco, The King and Queen of the Netherlands and Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands, The King and Queen of Norway, The King and Queen of Spain, The King and Queen of Sweden, Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Bahrain, Prince El Hassan bin Talal and Princess Sarvath El Hassan, Queen Anne-Marie of the Hellenes, Crown Prince Pavlos and Crown Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece, Prince Philippos and Princess Nina of Greece, Margareta, Custodian of the Romanian Crown and Prince Radu of Romania, Crown Prince Alexander and Crown Princess Katherine of Serbia and Prince Kyril of Preslav arrive and are conducted to their seats. Members of the Royal Family arrive and are conducted to their seats. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, The Duke of Kent and The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester arrive and are conducted to their seats. The Princess Royal and Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence KCVO, CB, The Earl and Countess of Wessex, The Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn arrive and are conducted to their seats. The Duke of York, Princess Beatrice and Mr Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, Princess Eugenie and Mr Jack Brooksbank arrive and are conducted to their seats. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are received by the Dean and Chapter. Presentations are made and they are conducted to their seats. The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall are received by the Dean and Chapter. Presentations are made and they are conducted to their seats. All stand as the procession moves to places in Quire, the Sacrarium, and Poets' Corner. A fanfare is sounded. The Queen is received by the Dean and Chapter. Presentations are made. A holder of a gold award from the Duke of Edinburgh scheme will speak at Prince Philip's memorial service today, while nine other young people with their own awards will line the steps of Westminster Abbey. Above: The Duke of Edinburgh hosts DofE gold award presentations at Hillsborough Castle in County Down in 2017 Order of Service All sing: 'He who would valiant be 'gainst all disaster, let him in constancy follow the Master. There's no discouragement shall make him once relent his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim. Whoso beset him round with dismal stories, do but themselves confound his strength the more is. No foes shall stay his might, though he with giants fight: he will make good his right to be a pilgrim. Since, Lord, thou dost defend us with thy Spirit, We know we at the end shall life inherit. Then fancies flee away! I'll fear not what men say, I'll labour night and day to be a pilgrim.' (Monk's Gate 372 NEH from The Pilgrim's Progress adapted from an English folk song John Bunyan (162888) arranged by James O'Donnell (b 1961) All sit. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, says the Bidding: 'In Westminster Abbey, where he made promises that defined a life of willing duty and spirited service, we give thanks for His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. A man of rare ability and distinction, rightly honoured and celebrated, he ever directed our attention away from himself. He put privilege to work and understood his rank as a spur to service. Working at pace, with so many claims on his attention, he encouraged us to focus, as he was focussed, on the things that matter. His was a discipline and character that seized opportunity and overcame obstruction and difficulty. We recall, with affection and respect, the sustained offering of a long life lived fully. Acknowledging our loss, we turn to the God who is our help for He will renew our hope. In grateful remembrance of The Prince Philip, we then commit ourselves to live as he lived, in faith, in the service of Her Majesty, and with a greater reverence for our world and our neighbours.' 'Let us pray in the words that Jesus taught us. 'Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.' Doyin Sonibare, a Gold Award holder from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award, gives a Tribute. Doyin Sonibare, 28, from London, will pay tribute to the duke, who died last year aged 99. Ms Sonibare, who is now studying for a PhD into sickle cell disease, will tell attendees that the DofE helped her to secure her first job at the age of 18 and will reflect on the difference that the scheme has made to her life since The Right Honourable the Lord Wallace of Tankerness QC, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, reads: 'To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth. Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God? Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.' (Isaiah 40: 2531) 'Thanks be to God.' The choir sings: 'Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings with thy most gracious favour, and further us with thy continual help, that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in thee, we may glorify thy holy name, and finally by thy mercy obtain everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.' (William Byrd (c 15401623) Collect for Holy Communion The Book of Common Prayer) The Right Reverend and Right Honourable Dame Sarah Mullally DBE, Dean of Her Majesty's Chapels Royal, reads: 'Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice. Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you.' (Philippians 4: 49) 'Thanks be to God.' All stand to sing: 'All creatures of our God and King, lift up your voice and with us sing Alleluia, alleluia! Thou burning sun with golden beam, thou silver moon with softer gleam: O praise him, O praise him, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! 'Thou flowing water, pure and clear, make music for thy Lord to hear, Alleluia, alleluia! Thou fire so masterful and bright, that givest man both warmth and light: O praise him, O praise him, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! 'Thou rushing wind that art so strong, ye clouds that sail in heaven along, O praise him, Alleluia! Thou rising morn, in praise rejoice, ye lights of evening, find a voice: O praise him, O praise him, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! 'Dear mother earth, who day by day unfoldest blessings on our way, O praise him, Alleluia! The flowers and fruits that in thee grow, let them his glory also show: O praise him, O praise him, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! 'Let all things their Creator bless, and worship him in humbleness, O praise him, Alleluia! Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son, and praise the Spirit, three in One: O praise him, O praise him, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!' (Lasst uns erfreuen 263 NEH, St Francis of Assisi (11821226) Ralph Vaughan Williams, translated by William Draper (18551933) after a melody in Geistliche Kirchengesang Cologne, 1623 arranged by James O'Donnell) Cadets will today line the entrances to Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip's memorial service and a marching band from the Royal Marines will play as guests arrive, Buckingham Palace has revealed. Above: Philip during a visit to Windsor Sea Cadet Unit on April 7, 2014 All sit. The Right Reverend David Conner KCVO, Dean of Windsor, gives the Address. The choir sings: 'We praise thee, O God : we acknowledge thee to be the Lord. All the earth doth worship thee : the Father everlasting. To thee all angels cry aloud : the heavens, and all the powers therein. To thee cherubin, and seraphin : continually do cry, Holy, holy, holy : Lord God of Sabaoth; heaven and earth are full of the majesty : of thy glory. The glorious company of the apostles : praise thee. The goodly fellowship of the prophets : praise thee. The noble army of martyrs : praise thee. The holy Church throughout all the world : doth acknowledge thee; the Father : of an infinite majesty; thine honourable, true : and only Son; also the Holy Ghost : the Comforter. Thou art the King of glory : O Christ. Thou art the everlasting Son : of the Father. When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man : thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb. When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death : thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers. Thou sittest at the right hand of God : in the Glory of the Father. We believe that thou shalt come : to be our Judge. We therefore pray thee, help thy servants : whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood. Make them to be numbered with thy saints : in glory everlasting. O Lord, save thy people : and bless thine heritage. Govern them : and lift them up for ever. Day by day : we magnify thee; and we worship thy name : ever world without end. Vouchsafe, O Lord : to keep us this day without sin. O Lord, have mercy upon us : have mercy upon us. O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us : as our trust is in thee. O Lord, in thee have I trusted : let me never be confounded.' (Te Deum in C Canticle for Morning Prayer, Benjamin Britten (191376) The Book of Common Prayer) The Reverend Mark Birch, Minor Canon and Precentor, introduces the prayers: 'Let us give thanks to Almighty God for the life and work of The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and pray for all who honour his legacy and continue his work.' All sit or kneel. The Reverend Kenneth MacKenzie, Minister of Crathie Church, says: 'Let us give thanks for his service as Consort, liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship to Her Majesty; for his devotion to family, to Nation and to Commonwealth; for his strength and constancy. O Father of all, we pray thee for those whom we love but see no longer. Grant them thy peace; let light perpetual shine upon them; and, in thy loving wisdom and almighty power, work in them the good purpose of thy perfect will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.' The Reverend Canon Jonathan Riviere LVO, Rector of Sandringham, says: 'Let us give thanks for his energy and spirit of adventure; for his work with the young to discover new skills and serve their communities. Let us pray especially for the work of Cadet Forces and all engaged in The Duke of Edinburgh's Award. Teach us, good Lord, to serve thee as thou deservest; to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labour and not to ask for any reward, save that of knowing that we do Thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.' The Reverend Canon Martin Poll, Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park, says: 'Let us give thanks for his work in conservation and the good stewardship of the environment, in bringing together people of many faiths, and in the work of the World Wildlife Fund. Almighty God, whose loving hand hath given us all that we possess in creation; grant us grace that we may honour thee with our substance, and remembering the account which we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of thy bounty; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.' The Reverend Canon Paul Wright, Sub-Dean of Her Majesty's Chapels Royal, says: 'Let us give thanks for his gifts of character; for his humour and resilience; his fortitude and devotion to duty; that we may follow his good example in the service of our fellows. O Lord God, when thou givest to thy servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same unto the end, until it be thoroughly finished, which yieldeth the true glory; through him who for the finishing of thy work laid down his life, our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Amen.' The Reverend Dr James Hawkey, Canon in Residence, says: 'Let us give thanks to our heavenly Father for all his blessings and mercies, and dedicate ourselves anew to his service. Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men; We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we show forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.' All stand to sing: 'Guide me, O thou great Redeemer, pilgrim through this barren land; I am weak, but thou art mighty; hold me with thy powerful hand: Bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more. Open now the crystal fountain whence the healing stream doth flow; let the fiery cloudy pillar lead me all my journey through: strong Deliverer, be thou still my strength and shield. When I tread the verge of Jordan, bid my anxious fears subside; Death of death, and hell's Destruction, land me safe on Canaan's side: songs of praises I will ever give to thee.' (Cwm Rhondda 368 NEH Arglwydd, arwain trwy'r anialwch, John Hughes (18731932) William Williams (171791) arranged by James O'Donnell, translated by Peter Williams (172796) and others) The Most Reverend and the Right Honourable Justin Welby, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England and Metropolitan, gives the Blessing: 'God grant to the living grace; to the departed rest; to the Church, The Queen, the Commonwealth, and all people, peace and concord; and to us sinners life everlasting; and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.' All sing: 'God save our gracious Queen, long live our noble Queen, God save The Queen. Send her victorious, happy, and glorious, long to reign over us: God save The Queen.' (arranged by Gordon Jacob (18951984) All remain standing as the Procession, together with The Queen and Members of the Royal Family, leaves the Abbey church. Music after the service Allegro molto e ritmico from Sonata Britannica, Charles Villiers Stanford The band plays: The Seafarers arranged by Michael McDermott Members of the congregation are kindly requested to remain in their seats until directed to move by the Honorary Stewards The bells of the Abbey church are rung. END OF SERVICE A Ukrainian woman who was gang-raped repeatedly for hours by drunk Russian soldiers whilst her four-year-old son hid crying in a boiler room, just moments after they shot dead her husband, has spoken for the first time of the horror she endured. Natalya, 33, whose name has been changed, told how a Russian commander and another soldier came to the family's home in a small village near Kyiv after dark on March 9 and shot dead her husband Andrey, 33, in the front yard. Moments later, Natalya heard footsteps in the house, which Andrey had built years earlier, and saw the Russian commander - who told her his name was Mikhail Romanov - and a younger soldier dressed in black. Natalya shouted to her four-year-old son Oleksii, whose name has also been changed, to stay hidden in the boiler room, where the family had been sheltering from the shelling in their home in Shevchenkove, a village just outside Kyiv. The mother told The Times the younger soldier pointed a gun to her head and spat: 'You'd better shut up or I'll get your child and show him his mother's brains spread around the house.' Natalya was then raped over several hours by the two soldiers whilst a gun was pointed to her head, and she could hear her son sobbing in the boiler room. '[The younger soldier] told me to take my clothes off. Then they both raped me, one after the other,' Natalya told the newspaper. 'They didn't care that my son was in the boiler room crying. 'They told me to go shut him up and come back. All the time they held the gun to my head and taunted me, saying: "How do you think she sucks it? Shall we kill her or keep her alive?"' Women with children are seen outside the main railway station in Przemysl, southeastern Poland, near the Polish-Ukrainian border, as refugees from Ukraine wait to get on buses to other destinations in Poland (file photo: There is no suggestion that any of these women were the victims of the gang-rape) After hours of the Russian soldiers taking it in turns to rape Natalya, the men left but within 20 minutes they returned and raped her again. The soldiers came back to the family's home for a third time to rape Natalya, but this time they were so intoxicated that they were stumbling. They eventually fell asleep, giving Natalya time to run to her son, who was huddled inside the dark boiler room, and flee their home. 'While I was opening the gate my son was standing next to his father's body but it was dark and he did not understand it was his father,' Natalya recalled. 'He said: "Will we get shot the same as this man here?"' Natalya, who has since fled to the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil with her son, said the four-year-old still does not know his father has died, and she can't bare to tell him just yet. The little boy still asks to buy doughnuts for his father when they go to the shops. Natalya's horrific ordeal is being investigated by Ukraine's prosecutor-general Iryna Venediktova, the country's first official investigation into alleged rape committed by Russian soldiers. Her case is the latest in a string of rape claims levied against Kremlin troops since the invasion began. A Ukrainian woman who was gang-raped repeatedly for hours by drunk Russian soldiers whilst her four-year-old son hid crying in a boiler room, just moments after they shot dead her husband, has spoken for the first time of the horror she endured. Pictured: Russian soldiers are seen on a tank in Volnavakha district in the pro-Russian separatists-controlled Donetsk, in Ukraine Natalya recalled how her family had hung a white sheet from their gate in Shevchenkove on March 8 after Russian troops entered their village to show that they meant no harm and there were people there. But a day later, on March 9, the couple had heard gunshots outside their house. The family, who walked outside with their hands raised, saw a group of Russian soldiers, one of whom had his rifle pointed at the family's dog lying dead. The commander, identified as Romanov by Natalya from social media posts, was among the group and became aggressive when he saw a camouflage jacket in the family's car. Romanov then proceeded to snatch the keys of the car and drunkenly drove the car into a fallen tree before storming off. But hours later at night, the family heard a loud noise by their gate and Andrey went outside their home to check what happened. Natalya recalled hearing a single shot and the sound of the gate opening before footsteps sounded in the house. Romanov had come back with the younger soldier, who said he had shot her husband because he was a 'Nazi' before they both repeatedly raped her for hours. After eventually manage to flee their family home, Natalya said her sister-in-law encouraged her to report the gang-rape to police. The grieving widow, who said she and her husband would have been celebrating their wedding anniversary next month, said her family are unable to recover her husband's body or bury him because their village remains occupied by Russian troops. She said that she does not know if she will ever return to her village because the 'memories are hard', adding that she could never bring herself to sell their home because her husband built the house for them. Anastasia Taran, a 30-year-old from Enerhodar who was working as a waitress in Irpin prior to the Russian invasion, claimed that conditions in the Russian-occupied town are like 'hell' and alleged the invaders engaged in horrific treatment of locals, including sexual abuse Last week, a woman who escaped from the decimated Ukrainian town of Irpin on the outskirts of Kyiv accused Russian soldiers of raping women and shooting innocent civilians. Anastasia Taran, a 30-year-old from Enerhodar who was working as a waitress in Irpin prior to the Russian invasion, claimed that conditions in the Russian-occupied town are like 'hell' and alleged the invaders engaged in horrific treatment of locals. 'Irpin is Hell. There are plenty of Russian soldiers out there who just shoot people who enter private homes and, at best, just kick people out of their homes,' Anastasia told Ukrainian outlet Euromaidan Press. 'They rape women and the dead are just being dumped.' Ukraine's foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba and opposition MP Lesia Vasylenko have both cited reports of Russian soldiers sexually abusing helpless civilians. China has sent another message to Australia by releasing images showing the Communist government training local Solomon Islands enforcement officers. The images of the Chinese-led training exercises were released this week following the announcement of a potential security deal between the two countries. Weapons from China were reportedly smuggled into the country through a logging ship, with officials saying they were 'fake guns' sent only for the purpose of the workshops. Opposition leader Matthew Wale said the cache was undocumented and hinted they had been illegally delivered with more sinister motives. 'I need to see them to believe the RSIPF. They had no prior knowledge of the cargo that was shipped on a log ship, not recorded on the manifest, unloaded by a logger into his private shed,' he posted to Twitter. China has been conducting training exercises for the Solomon Islands police force - using reportedly 'fake assault rifles' that were smuggled in to the country The program is part of a greater effort from the Communist nation to spread its influence in the region and move to building infrastructure on Australia's doorstep The draft security deal between the Solomon Islands (pictured) and China was leaked online and includes a possible navy base in the on the Pacific Island nation The state also released images showing Solomon Islands and Chinese police officers engaged in a series of exercises using batons, long sticks, round shields and handcuffs. Others show them engaged in hand-to-hand combat and even using the QBZ-95 assault rifles, which the Solomon Islands say are 'replicas'. The country said the fake guns were not part of a secret weapons shipping deal and had 'nothing to conceal or hide'. 'The only related cargo coming into the country as known by RSIPF at this time is the police aide training equipment (replica or plastic rifles) and riot equipment donated by PRC and these training equipment are kept at Rove Police Headquarters after cleared by Customs on arrival,' Police Commissioner Mostyn Mangau said. 'These things do not in any way threaten the security of this country so far, except they are as good as helping RSIPF in building its tactical knowledge and capabilities,' he said. State released images show officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat and even using the QBZ-95 assault rifles, which the Solomon Islands say are 'replicas' The guns were reportedly smuggled into the Solomon Islands on a logging ship - but officials say they have 'nothing to conceal or hide' China's growing presence in the region has them attempting to base themselves on Australia's doorstep Mr Mangau said the exercises were a reaffirmation of strengthening their partnership with China, and invited Australia to improve its presence in the region. 'I would like to acknowledge and honour the ongoing support and assistance provided by our bilateral partners in building and enhancing the capacity and capability of the RSIPF in its efforts to tackle and stay ahead of the security theats and challenges in this country,' he said. 'Such commitments by our partners would also help us in contributing strategically to fortify our regional and international commitments such as the UN Peacekeeping Missions. 'I would very much welcome any other bilateral partners who wish to come forward to modernise the RSIPF to do so, as crime and security challenges are fast evolving over time threatening the lives of our people.' The police commissioner said the training was based at dealing with threats 'nationally and internationally'. Solomon Islands say they welcome improving relations between the country and China and have encouraged Australia to strengthen their ties The country's police commissioner said the training will help them against 'national and international security risks' A Chinese combat expert helps train Solomon Islands officers China's presence in the country has come on the back of the Solomon Islands' opposition leader warning Australia it is planning on building a naval base, a move that would put them right on the country's doorstep. Mr Wale said he sent Australian High Commissioner Lachlan Strahan the message in August 2021 and watched him take notes. A draft security agreement that would see Beijing provide funding, an armed police force, and establish a naval base on the Pacific nation was confirmed by the Solomon Islands Government on Friday. Questions have been raised about when the Australian Government learned of the possible partnership and why more wasn't done to provide an alternative. The QBZ-95 assault rifles, which the Solomon Islands say are 'replicas', were reportedly smuggled in to the country by China Prime Minister Scott Morrison (pictured) said the deal highlighted the 'pressure' China is exerting in the Pacific 'It certainly seems like [the Morrison Government] was caught on the back foot when the draft agreement emerged last week,' opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong said. 'Mr Morrison talks of the Pacific being a family, perhaps he should have been talking to this family more, to ensure Australia is the partner of choice in the region.' Mr Wale said it was 'frustrating' that Australia did not shut down the plan, given his advanced warning. In the aftermath of the draft agreement being leaked, Australia announced it would extend it's security presence in the Solomon Islands until at least 2023. Australia previously provided security support to the Solomon Islands leading a policing mission to restore order after riots in 2021, at the request of Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. Mr Wale claimed Mr Sogavare had 'hoodwinked' Australian defence personnel into helping quell the unrest against his government which was led by the residents of Malaita province. He said the draft deal with China was an attempt to further entrench the government and allow him to delay a 2023 democratic election. 'Australia saved Sogavare in November of 2021... [He] wants China here so it can put Malaita in its place,' Mr Wale told The Australian. China has already expanded its presence in the South China Sea (pictured: a Chinese military parade in 2017) Mr Sogavare previously claimed he wanted to extend his term so the election did not clash with the Pacific Games being held in November and December this year. He needs a three-quarters majority vote in parliament to change the constitution, which Mr Wale said he would secure using Chinese funds. 'That's how he is going to get the election postponed. He will just tell his MPs, 'If you support it, you're going to get money from the (Chinese backed) National Development Fund',' he said. Solomon Islands Opposition leader Matthew Wale (pictured) said he warned Australia's high commissioner of the deal in 2021 Solomon Islands Police Minister Anthony Veke, said on Thursday that he signed a memorandum of understanding in a virtual meeting with Wang Xiaohong, executive vice minister of China's Ministry of Public Security, on March 18. 'The signing of this MOU simply shows to the global community that we are here building meaningful cooperation, one that is based on teamwork and seriousness to develop Solomon Islands,' he said. Australian Defence Minister Peter Dutton said the government would 'clearly be concerned' about a Chinese military base 2,000km off Australia's coast. He urged nations to 'be realistic about China's footprint, their exertion, their pressure and the way in which they conduct their business'. 'I don't think it's consistent with the values that we share with the Solomon Islands and with Tonga and other near neighbours of ours in the region,' he said. Home Affairs minister Karen Andrews echoed that statement. 'That is our back yard, that is our neighbourhood, and we are very concerned about any activity that is taking place in the Pacific Islands,' she said. The arrangements are also likely to worry the US, which said in February it would open an embassy in the Solomon Islands after senior US administration officials expressed concern China wanted to create military relationships in the Pacific. A Tory MP asked a teenager if he was 'a true Scotsman' and lifted his kilt, before sexually assaulting the youth's 15-year-old brother in a bunkbed, a court has heard. Imran Ahmad Khan, 48, who was elected as MP for Wakefield in West Yorkshire in 2019, was at a party at a house in Staffordshire in January 2008 at the time of the alleged incidents, a jury was told. Prosecutor Sean Larkin QC said an 18-year-old man was at the party wearing a kilt when Khan asked him if he was wearing the garment like 'a true Scotsman'. 'Khan then lifted up the kilt with both hands and lunged at him so that he thought he was going to grab him,' Mr Larkin said. The teenager pushed down his kilt and said that although he had experience of others trying to lift it, the incident 'felt very different', the court heard. Jurors were told the 15-year-old brother was in bed on the top bunk in his pyjamas and could hear Khan's 'breathing was getting quite heavy' as he sexually assaulted him. Imran Ahmad Khan, 48, (pictured) the Conservative MP for Wakefield, West Yorkshire, is due to go on trial today to face an allegation that he groped the teenager in Staffordshire in 2008 Mr Larkin said: 'When (the complainant) went to bed, Khan stood by that top bunk, reached in and touched his legs, reaching for, or actually touching, his groin. We suggest either way it was sexual assault. He pushed him away but he kept going and when it would not stop he fled.' The court heard that the complainant, who cannot be identified because he is the alleged victim of a sexual offence, was 'distraught' when he reached his parents. Mr Larkin added: ''The following morning, at the family's encouragement, Mr Khan left the address.' Police were called to the house and the boy reported the incident, telling officers Khan had asked him to 'show me some porn' and told him he was a 'good-looking boy', the jury was told. The 15-year-old did not want to take it any further and the allegation was not pursued at the time, but the complainant went back to police when he found out Khan was standing as an MP, the prosecutor said. Mr Larkin said Khan was not interviewed at the police station because of the pandemic but was sent a list of questions. 'In summary, he denied any sexual assault had taken place,' said the prosecutor. The MP - who has been suspended by the Conservative Party - faces a single count of sexual assault against the then-teenager. Pictured, Ahmed Khan with Prime Minister Boris Johnson Khan said the boy had asked him about 'sexuality' before he 'became distressed and left', and that the only time he had touched him was on his elbow after he had left the bed. The MP sat behind his barrister Gudrun Young QC in court, rather than the dock, as High Court judge Mr Justice Baker explained the microphones were not working. During jury selection, the judge asked potential panel members: 'Do any of you have sufficiently strong political views that you would be unable to try the case,' and if they, or any members of their close family, were members of a political party. Khan, who is on unconditional bail, denies a single count of sexual assault, with the allegation being he intentionally touched the complainant and the touching was sexual when the complainant did not consent and Khan did not reasonably believe he consented. The trial continues. Khan, from Wakefield, helped Boris Johnson win a large Commons majority in 2019 - with the Tories now representing 45 per cent of the Northern Powerhouse constituencies. Imran Ahmad Khan, 48, (pictured) the Conservative MP for Wakefield, West Yorkshire, said he denies 'in the strongest terms' an allegation he groped the teenager in Staffordshire Khan denies one count of sexual assault, with the allegation being he intentionally touched the complainant and the touching was sexual and the trial continues at Southwark Crown Court He turned Wakefield - that was previously in the so-called 'red wall' that formed Labour's heartlands in the Midlands and the north of England - blue with his win. Khan has had his Conservative whip suspended, meaning he sits as an independent in the Commons. According to his website, the MP was born in Wakefield, where he attended the independent Silcoates School before going to university at the Pushkin Institute in Russia and graduating from King's College in London with a bachelor's degree in war studies. Before entering Parliament, he worked for the United Nations as a special assistant for political affairs in Mogadishu. A man who escaped from a prison van dressed only in his underpants and socks has been arrested by armed officers seven miles from where he fled. Kyle Eglington, 32, sparked a manhunt after he managed to get out of the vehicle on Hardy Road in Poole, Dorset, at around 11.15am on Saturday. Eglington had appeared at Poole Magistrates' Court in Dorset after he was charged with robbing a house in Bournemouth on March 24. He was arrested by armed police in Bournemouth, around seven miles away from where he escaped. Kyle Eglington, 32, (pictured after his arrest) sparked a manhunt after he managed to get out of a prison van on Hardy Road in Poole, Dorset, at around 11.15am on Saturday Eglington was only wearing socks and underwear when he fled the van in Poole. At the time, police said he was not a danger to the public Dorset Police originally received a report at 11.12am on Saturday that Eglington had made off after he attacked his guards. At the time, Chief Inspector Neil Wright said there was 'nothing to suggest he poses a risk to the general public', although he warned people not to approach him. Police officers flooded the area around Hardy Road in Poole and a police helicopter was also scrambled. Eglington was only wearing his underwear and socks at the time of his escape. The fugitive was described as white, five feet 11 inches tall and of medium build, with dark brown hair and a beard. However, in a bid to escape capture, police warned the public on Sunday he may have shaved his head and beard. When police finally caught him after a three-day manhunt their suspicions were confirmed as Eglington had shaved his head and beard. The escaped suspect had appeared at Poole Magistrates Court on Friday over a robbery charge The force said on Monday evening that Eglington had been arrested by its tactical firearms team on suspicion of assault and escaping lawful custody. The National Police Air Service helicopter and the British Transport Police were also involved in the three-day search. Dorset Police thanked the public for sharing its appeals to find Eglington. The controversial former chief of Police Scotland is to fill Dame Cressida Dick's post as the caretaker head of Britain's largest police force. Sir Steve House will lead the Metropolitan Police until a candidate is found to succeed Dame Cressida as commissioner, the Home Secretary said. As Dame Cressida's current second in command, he will lead the force during one of the most torrid spells in its history. Sir Steve has served as assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard since 2018, having previously been appointed chief constable of Police Scotland when the force was merged in 2012. His leadership at Police Scotland was dogged by controversy - the force was heavily criticised over the deaths of two people in a car crash on the M9 motorway. He was effectively sacked by Nicola Sturgeon over the incident, her former aide Noel Dolan claimed in a bombshell book last year. The embattled Police Commissioner (left) will step down for good in April and be succeeded by Deputy Commissioner Sir Stephen House (right) Priti Patel (pictured earlier this month) confirmed today Sir Stephen will cover the role until a successor is appointed in the summer Lamara Bell and John Yuill lay in their car for three days despite a member of the public calling Police Scotland's non-emergency line to report a damaged vehicle. Miss Bell was still alive when emergency services finally arrived, but later died in hospital. Sir Steve stood down and retired in 2015, following the incident. Priti Patel announced yesterday Dame Cressida will leave Britain's largest police force sometime next month with the process of selecting her successor not yet formally underway. Miss Patel insisted Sir Steve will provide 'stability and continuity' for the Met. It came as Miss Patel announced details of a formal inquiry into how Dame Cressida came to be forced out of her job by London mayor Sadiq Khan. A review will look at 'whether due process was followed' by the Labour politician. The inquiry will be carried out by the current Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Tom Winsor once he steps down from that role on Thursday this week. The timing and nature of the inquiry are likely to mean Sir Tom will have more flexibility to make politically-sensitive criticisms of the London Mayor. Sadiq Khan (pictured), who announced he had lost confidence in the Met commissioner last month, reportedly vetoed the decision to try and make Cressida Dick sign a confidentiality clause Miss Patel said: 'It is right that we have appropriate legislation in place to govern the modern policing environment and I believe the circumstances leading up to Dame Cressida's departure warrant further scrutiny, which is why I have commissioned Sir Tom Winsor to conduct this review.' She added: 'Dame Cressida was at the helm of the Met during extremely tough times, with terror attacks and the pandemic among the challenges she faced. 'Her dedication to protecting London and Londoners has helped drive down serious violence in the city and for that in particular she deserves our gratitude. 'Sir Steve House, her current deputy, will provide the stability and continuity the force needs as we focus on appointing the right person to lead the country's largest force and make London an even safer place to live, work and visit.' Dame Cressida announced her resignation in February after Mr Khan's aides indicated that he had no confidence in her ability to shake-up her force after a series of scandals, including murder of Sarah Everard by serving officer Wayne Couzens. It is thought Dame Cressida's leaving date has yet to be finalised. Negotiations are continuing over how much she will be paid in compensation after being handed a two-year contract extension last September. The commissioner's job has not yet even been formally advertised, meaning a new chief will not be in place until summer. A spokesman for the Mr Khan said: 'Public trust in the Met Police is at the lowest level on record, following a series of devastating scandals including the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer and the overt racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and discrimination exposed at Charing Cross police station. 'It was against this backdrop that the mayor lost confidence in the ability of the current Met Commissioner to lead the deep-rooted change needed. 'The mayor is now working with the Home Secretary to appoint a new commissioner who understands the depths of the problems faced by the force and has a plan to restore the trust and confidence of Londoners.' A Scotland Yard spokesman said: 'We are pleased the Home Secretary has announced a review into the circumstances that led to Commissioner Cressida Dick stepping aside. We will fully support Sir Tom Winsor in his work.' So who might take over the troubled Met? Favourites to replace Cressida Dick include an ex-counter-terror chief who threatened to jail journalists or a Merseyside cop who said violent criminals were 'NOT inherently bad people' The future leadership of the Metropolitan Police is still not known as confidence in the force continues to plummet. Dame Cressida Dick, who became the first woman to head the Met Police in 2017, said she had 'no choice but to step aside' after losing Sadiq Khan's confidence. Following the announcement, questions quickly turned to who would succeed her during a tumultuous time for Britain's biggest police force. Likely replacements for the 230,000-a-year role range from a counter-terror chief who threatened to jail journalists and blamed terrorism on a lack of social mobility to a Merseyside cop who said violent criminals were 'not inherently bad people'. Speaking to MailOnline in September, a senior MP said they feared the current crop of senior police may be 'too woke'. They said: 'The problem with Cressida is she has presided over a series of disasters, and then says it is not her fault. 'It is difficult when we always take the same view that operational decisions are a matter for the police not politicians.' Here, MailOnline goes through the list of likely candidates to succeed Dame Cressida. The leadership of the Metropolitan Police was thrown into chaos last night after Dame Cressida Dick's bombshell resignation as Scotland Yard boss Neil Basu: Anti-terror chief who called for journalists to be prosecuted after publishing leaked cables criticising Trump Neil Basu, who has been at the Met for nearly 30 years Neil Basu is the Met's former head of counter-terrorism and the most senior serving British officer of Asian heritage. He also served as the assistant commissioner for specialist operations until September 2021, which included responsibilities around national security, and had originally been tipped for the top job in 2017 before losing out to Dame Cressida. In February this year, he called for laws in the Equality Act 2010 that restrict positive discriminations to be relaxed in order to boost the number of BAME recruits. He was immediately shot down by policing minister Kit Malthouse, while Home Secretary Priti Patel was also said to be against the idea. Sadiq Khan's City Hall 'launched abortive bid to gag ousted Met chief Cressida Dick and slash her 500k payout' City Hall officials launched an abortive bid to gag outgoing Met chief Cressida Dick and slash her rumoured 500,000 payoff, it was claimed today. Sadiq Khan's aides are said to have wanted Dame Cressida to sign a confidentiality clause after her dramatic early resignation. The London mayor is believed to have overruled the idea. But there has also been an 'acrimonious' row over the size of her payout. The commissioner quit last month after Mr Khan said he had lost confidence in her following a series of scandals at the Met. However, the terms of her departure have yet to be finalised with claims about the latest wrangling in The Times. Advertisement Mr Basu faced fresh accusations of meddling in politics in July 2019, when he threatened to prosecute journalists for publishing leaked cables from Britain's ambassador to the US, Sir Kim Darroch. Former Tory cabinet minister David Davis said the intervention 'strayed well beyond his brief', and represented an attack on the free Press. Mr Basu's comments came after Scotland Yard launched a probe to find who leaked Sir Kim's memos calling the Trump administration 'clumsy and inept'. Mr Basu, who has spent his whole career at the Met, made another controversial intervention in August that year when suggested homegrown terrorism was fuelled by a lack of social mobility and inclusion. He said better education and opportunities for young people would do more to fight terrorism than 'the policing and state security apparatus put together' adding that he was not trying to excuse any acts of violence. He also said British Muslims should not be forced to 'assimilate', adding: 'Assimilation implies that I have to hide myself in order to get on. We should not be a society that accepts that.' A 2019 profile of Basu in the Mail On Sunday described him as well-liked within the force and by intelligence officials at MI5. But he has attracted criticism for some of his operational decisions, most notably as head of Operations Weeting, Elveden and Tuleta. The three inquiries into phone hacking, computer hacking and alleged payments to police officers by newspapers cost around 19.5million and were criticised for criminalising journalists. Mr Basu also raised eyebrows when he said that the Prevent programme which tries to detect and deradicalise extremists was viewed by some critics as a 'toxic brand' and needs 'better communication, more transparency'. A Hindu, born to an Indian doctor father and a white British mother, he has said he has encountered racism over most of his life. He grew up in Stafford, where he studied at Walton High School before reading economics at Nottingham University. He became a Met police officer in 1992, serving first as a beat bobby in Battersea, South London, then swiftly moving through the ranks as a borough commander in Barnet, North London, and a Commander of South London in 2012. Andy Cooke: Former Merseyside chief who insists even violent criminals are 'not inherently bad people' Andy Cooke, who now serves with the police inspectorate While head of Merseyside Police, Andy Cooke sparked anger when he said even violent criminals are 'not inherently bad people' and he'd rather pump billions into cutting poverty than upholding the law. The officer, marking his retirement as Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, said if he was given a 5 billion budget to cut crime, he would spend 1 billion on crime and 4 billion on tackling poverty. He now serves in the role of Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary and Inspector of Fire and Rescue Authorities in England. He will be overseeing inspections primarily in the North of England. Mr Cooke was chief constable for five years, during which time he has overseen the jailing of dozens of multi-millionaire drug laws, including Liverpool's most notorious drugs boss Liam 'the Lam' Cornett, who was transported to court in a huge armed convoy every day, and the jet-setting Mulhare brothers, who were caught abroad in Thailand after being informed on by a 'supergrass'. Murderers jailed during his tenure include George Leather, 60, who brutally killed his Asda worker wife, 56, by stabbing her 300 times in an 'episode of unspeakable and barbaric savagery', and Robert Child, 37, who was jailed for life for striking his 64-year-old mother Janice with a hammer 31 times. Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said of Mr Cooke's plans for the police budget: 'In that case would he be quite happy to sack 80% of the officers. Reducing poverty is not a function of the policing budget, it's the job of other agencies and government. 'I'm not convinced that this change would be welcomed by the vast majority of the UK population. They want to see the police protecting citizens and property and crime. He sounds like someone who would have taken the knee for BLM and defunded the police.' Under Mr Cooke, Merseyside Police gained a reputation for tough policing and for being a keen user of stop-and-search powers. He was also the first commander of Merseyside's Matrix unit, set up to tackle gang crime and violence. Simon Byrne: Top Northern Ireland cop 'with a reputation for being like Darth Vader' Simon Byrne became chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland in May 2019 Simon Byrne became chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland in May 2019, arriving at the force with 36 years of policing behind him. After holding senior roles at GMP and the Met, he became chief constable of Cheshire Police from 2014 to 2017. That role ended in controversial circumstances after he was accused of bullying and humiliating staff. A misconduct hearing was told he had a reputation for being like Darth Vader and treated junior officers and staff like 'roadkill'. The hearing was told he handed pictures of Dad's Army characters to officers after he became angry when flooding made him late for work. However, he was cleared of misconduct, with the tribunal concluding that much of what was claimed was either exaggerated or most likely didn't happen. During his time as chief constable, Mr Byrne revealed he had considered breaking the law in order to hire more officers from ethnic minorities. At that time the force only had three black officers. He told the BBC in 2017 that the law should be changed in England 'for a certain period of time' to allow the hiring of minority candidates to speed up. This would ensure that 'for every white officer, we recruit one black officer.' Mr Byrne said: 'I've even taken legal advice about breaking the law, which might sound crazy as a senior police officer. 'But if we're put under pressure to change, then what are the consequences, other than reputational, from breaking the law?' Under current equality rules employers cannot employ a job applicant because of characteristics like race, sexual orientation or gender, if other candidates are better qualified. At PSNI he attracted controversy for suggesting the children of paramilitaries could be taken into care. He was also forced to apologise after tweeting a photo of himself with officers holding rifles outside a PSNI station on Christmas Day, the BBC reported. Martin Hewitt: NPCC chief who backed crackdown on Covid sceptics and said officers felt 'undervalued' amid pay row Martin Hewitt, chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council As chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) throughout the Covid crisis, Martin Hewitt has made a number of high-profile interventions in politics. Amid fury last year at officers being hit by a pay freeze, Mr Hewitt told Priti Patel that many officers believed the decision was 'unfair' and they felt 'undervalued' after their efforts during Covid. Mr Hewitt said: 'For many it feels unfair and that their contribution is undervalued. 'And, unlike other parts of the public service, officers do not have the option of industrial action to make their case more strongly. 'As the Government makes spending decisions over coming months, we urge you to fund a settlement which properly reflects the important and complex work police officers do, and starts to address the pay shortfall.' In January 2021, he backed a crackdown on lockdown sceptics and said officers would no longer 'waste time' trying to reason with them amid soaring death rates. Speaking at a Downing Street press briefing, he gave examples of shocking 'irresponsible behaviour' from people not heeding warnings - even with more than 1,200 people dying every day. They included a 30-per-head boat party in Hertfordshire with more than 40 people, a Surrey house party whose host tried to claim it was a business event and a minibus full of people from different households caught travelling from Cheltenham into Wales for a walk. Mr Hewitt was appointed in April 2019. He began his policing career with Kent Police in 1993 and transferred to the Metropolitan Police Service in 2005. As an Assistant Commissioner for five years, he led frontline and local policing, specialist crime and professional standards. He led the national police response to adult sexual offences and kidnap between 2014 and 2019, and served as a Vice-Chair for the NPCC from 2015 before taking on the chairmanship. Matt Jukes: Assistant commissioner credited with leading crackdown on Rotherham child grooming gangs Matt Jukes: Assistant commissioner credited with leading crackdown on Rotherham child grooming gangs Matt Jukes joined South Yorkshire police in 1995 three years after graduating with a degree in mathematics from Oxford. He worked as a detective and rose through the ranks to represent UK police forces at G8 meetings and lead on national anti-terror strategy. Mr Jukes is best known for tackling Rotherham grooming gangs while borough commander in the Yorkshire town from 2006 to 2010. More than 1,000 children were exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, with local authorities, schools and police among agencies that failed to tackle the problem. A report on the scandal by Professor Alexis Jay suggested that Mr Jukes' leadership marked a point where police became more proactive in dealing with the abuse. After serving in South Yorkshire Police, he moved to South Wales, with the police and crime commissioner there Alun Michael backing him as an outstanding leader. Mr Jukes worked his way up to the top post in South Wales Police, becoming Chief Constable in January 2018. He is also chairman of Police Sport UK. Mr Jukes moved to the Met in November 2020. He was awarded a Queens Police Medal in the New Year Honours List 2018 Australia's leading vaccine advisory group is considering whether to approve COVID-19 boosters for 12 to 15-year-olds. As the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation last week moved to approve a fourth dose for elderly and at-risk people, the group is also weighing up whether to expand the vaccine rollout for young people. A statement from the federal health department said ATAGI was reviewing data on the use of the Pfizer vaccine for 12 to 15-year-olds as a booster. Currently, boosters are only approved for those 16 and over. Australia's leading vaccine advisory group is considering whether to approve COVID-19 boosters for 12 to 15-year-olds. The review of Pfizer data will include information on serious illness, epidemiology and international rollout among the age group. 'ATAGI is continuing to look at emerging evidence on the use of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments as part of its ongoing review of current recommendations,' the health department said in a statement. It comes after ATAGI last week approved a winter dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to those over 65, Indigenous Australians over 50, those in aged or disability care, along with those who are immunocompromised. The fourth dose, or second booster, will be rolled out among the cohort from April 4, with people eligible for the dose four months after their first booster shot. However, a second booster was not recommended for the broader population. The new ATAGI advice was put in place ahead of a predicted surge of COVID-19 cases in winter, coinciding with a likely spike in flu cases. It comes as the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation last week moved to approve a fourth dose for elderly and at-risk people. ATAGI said the fourth dose could also be administered four months after a Covid infection Case numbers of COVID-19 have been increasing across the country in recent days due to infections linked to an Omicron sub-variant Case numbers of COVID-19 have been increasing across the country in recent days due to infections linked to an Omicron sub-variant. On Tuesday, Tasmania recorded the state's highest daily case count since it reopened its border in mid-December, along with its 30th fatality. In Victoria, opposition leader Matthew Guy is isolating after his son tested positive for COVID-19, one day after Premier Daniel Andrews returned a positive result. NSW Treasurer Matt Kean has also tested positive, saying the virus has finally caught up with him. There were 46,875 new cases of COVID-19 reported nationally on Tuesday, with 21,494 in NSW, 10,916 in Victoria, 10,326 in Queensland, 8910 in WA, 4201 in SA, 2324 in Tasmania, 1,063 in the ACT and 408 in the Northern Territory. Thirty-one deaths linked to the virus were also reported on Tuesday, with nine each in NSW and QLD and six in WA. A man is due in court charged with murdering a 35-year-old woman whose body lay undiscovered inside her home for a number of weeks. Tony Brooks, 35, from Wakefield, is accused of murdering Kirstie Ellis who was found dead at her home in Stanningley, Leeds, on Friday, March 25. Brooks is due to appear at Leeds Magistrates Court this morning. Kirstie Ellis, 35, was found by police officers who responded to concerns for her safety and forced their way into her home. A cause of death has yet to be confirmed and West Yorkshire Police indicated she may have been dead for a number of weeks, appealing for witnesses who may have seen anything suspicious from mid-January. They also confirmed they were investigating two other crime scenes in nearby Castleford as well as Kirstie's home in west Leeds. A man will appear at Leeds Magistrates Court charged with murdering Kirstie Ellis (pictured) Pictured: Kirstie Anne Ellis was found dead at her home in Leeds on Friday by police officers A 35-year-old woman, who was arrested on suspicion of murder, has been released on police bail. Kirstie's family have echoed the police's request for witnesses to get in touch and paid tribute to her. In a statement, they said: Our lives have been left shattered and turned upside down with the news that no parent wants to hear, that our gorgeous daughter is no longer with us. Kirstie Anne Ellis had a beautiful soul, a lover of music, socialising and having fun, her whole family is heartbroken over the loss of such an amazing woman. Police attend the crime scene at Stanhall Mews, Stanningley in west Leeds on Saturday Neighbours say police were looking for Kirstie weeks before she was found at home (pictured) Kirstie had many friends and family who loved her and she will be missed so dearly. We would echo the Polices appeal and ask that if anyone has any information no matter how small to come forward and help the investigation. We would like to thank the community and the media for their support during this difficult time. Detectives have appealed for anyone with any information to get in touch. Anyone with any information that is likely to assist the investigation is asked to contact the team on 101, or by using the LiveChat facility on the West Yorkshire Police website. Thousands of protesters have rallied together to take a powerful stand against domestic violence in the wake of a young mum allegedly killed by her former partner. A massive crowd of demonstrators converged in Newcastle on Monday night, three days after mother-of-one Mackenzie Anderson, 21, was allegedly stabbed to death at her home in nearby Mayfield. The rally attracted attendees from all walks of life, including men, women and children. Many in the large crowd held signs calling for change with messages such as 'Enough is Enough' and 'We Will Not Be Silenced'. Men, women and children took to the streets of Newcastle to rally against domestic violence Demonstrators rallied three days after the tragic death of Mackenzie Anderson Attendees marched the streets and foreshore of Newcastle before gathering in a park to hear a host of speakers, including domestic violence advocate Demi Parkinson. Domestic violence survivors were among the attendees, as were Ms Anderson's friends. 'I'm marching on behalf of so many women I know and myself who have gone through domestic violence situations,' one woman told Nine News. Another added: 'There needs to be action from our political leaders on this issue instead of silence. Too many women are dying.' At least 14 women across Australia have been killed by alleged domestic violence in the first three months of 2022. Ms Anderson was allegedly stabbed 20 times by her former partner Tyrone Thompson in front of her two-year-old son. Protesters are seen during a rally against gendered violence and domestic violence towards women in Newcastle A man holds up a sign reading 'the system needs changing' during the rally on Tuesday night Domestic violence advocate Demi Parkinson (pictured) addressed the huge crowd in Newcastle She had an AVO out against Thompson after the pair separated late last year. He was not the father of her child. According to the Daily Telegraph, Thompson and Ms Anderson spent Friday together drinking at her Crebert St home. He allegedly returned later that night where he allegedly broke into her home and allegedly stabbed her multiple times. Thompson, 22, faced Newcastle Local Court on Monday charged with murder, aggravated enter dwelling with intent and breaching an apprehended domestic violence order. He did not apply for bail when he faced court on Monday, which was formally refused. Many held up placards as they strolled through Newcastle demanding men are held accountable for their actions Frustrated and heartbroken women hold up signs demanding change. One sign read 'Silence is violence' Friends have set up a GoFundMe to help cover costs relating to the care of Ms Anderson's son, who's being looked after by her mum. Almost $38,000 have been raised in one day. Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced a new $1.3 billion package in Tuesday's night budget which will go towards a national plan aimed to end violence against women and children. If you or anyone you know is a victim of domestic violence contact 1800 RESPECT. More than 4,500 migrants have crossed the English Channel by small boat so far this year, with more than 3,000 people arriving in March alone. March has seen 3,066 migrants arrive on British soil - more than the total number of people who made the journey in January, February, March and April combined last year, and over triple the 831 who arrived in the entirety of March in 2021. It is the highest monthly figure since November last year, when 6,869 people made the perilous journey across the 21-mile Dover Strait. The total number of migrants to make the treacherous trip across the Channel this year now stands at 4,559 across 146 boats - a level that was not reached until June in 2021. Migrant crossings were expected to dwindle over the coming days as the weather deteriorated, bringing strong winds, poor visibility and rain. Children wearing life jackets and wrapped in blankets were seen among the groups of migrants being escorted into the Dover Port More than 4,500 migrants have crossed the English Channel by small boat so far this year, with more than 3,000 people arriving in March alone, Home Office figures showed A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, after being intercepted by Border Force officers following a small boat incident in the Channel March has seen 3,066 migrants arrive on British soil - more than the total number of people who made the journey in January, February, March and April combined last year, and over triple the 831 who arrived in the entirety of March in 2021 The total number of migrants to make the treacherous trip across the Channel this year now stands at 4,559 across 146 boats - a level that was not reached until June in 2021 Yet the weather hasn't put people off flocking to the country. Monday saw the second highest number of people arrive in the UK by small boat so far this year - with 386 people intercepted or rescued by British authorities. The most recent arrivals, which included a number of women and children, arrived in Dover, Kent, with blue blankets wrapped around their shoulders and heads after battling cold and wet conditions at sea. A little girl with no shoes was among the dozens of migrants arriving in the UK by small boat on Monday afternoon after battling poor weather conditions in the Channel. Yesterday's arrivals, which included a number of women and children, could be seen setting foot in Dover, Kent with blue blankets wrapped around their shoulders and heads after battling cold and wet conditions at sea. The first group of around 20 people was escorted into the port on board an RNLI vessel before being led along the gangway for processing - among them at least seven small children in orange life-jackets were supported by UK officials. A second group of around 10 migrants arrived a short while later on a black Border Force rib. Border Force cutter Hunter arrived in Dover shortly after 3pm carrying approximately 15 people, while Border Force cutter Seeker escorted a similar sized group to shore a few minutes later. The busiest day this year was March 15, which saw 405 people reach the UK in 12 boats. The weather hasn't put people off flocking to the country. Monday saw the second highest number of people arrive in the UK by small boat so far this year - with 386 people intercepted or rescued by British authorities. Pictured: Border Force staff escort new arrivals on Monday The busiest day this year was March 15 which saw 405 people reach the UK in 12 boats. Pictured: Migrants wearing face masks and wrapped in blankets step foot on British soil Newly arrived migrants stand by a bus, talking with a man wearing a hi-vis jacket that reads 'immigration enforcement' A record 28,395 migrants reached the UK illegally last year by taking small boats across the Channel, a 200 per cent increase on 2020's tally How many migrants reached Britain in 2021, by month? January 223 February 308 March 831 April 751 May 1,619 June 2,179 July 3,510 August 3,012 September 4,652 October 2,671 November 6,869 December 1,770 Total 28,395 French authorities also prevented 101 people from reaching the UK. A total of 28,381 migrants crossed the Dover Strait last year - significantly higher than the 8,410 who arrived in 2020. If migrants keep coming at the same rate this year as they have in the first three months of 2022, this year's total number is set to increase dramatically. Minister for Justice and Tackling Illegal Migration, Tom Pursglove MP, said: 'The rise in dangerous Channel crossings is unacceptable. 'Not only are they an overt abuse of our immigration laws but they also impact on the UK taxpayer, risk lives and our ability to help refugees come to the UK via safe and legal routes. Rightly, the British public has had enough. 'Through our Nationality and Borders Bill, we're cracking down on people smugglers and fixing the broken system by making it a criminal offence to knowingly arrive in the UK illegally and introducing a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for those who facilitate illegal entry into our country.' Advertisement Royal super fans travelled hundreds of miles in the early hours to line the capital's streets with flags and banners this morning in anticipation of the service of thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh. Some 1,800 people attended the memorial at Westminster Abbey, with millions more tuning in to the BBC's broadcast at home. Meanwhile, a small crowd also gathered outside the central London church, with some supporters wearing colourful Union Jack-themed outfits. Around 50 people congregated beside barriers near the entrance to the abbey in an attempt to catch a glimpse of royal family members making their way inside. Tourists from as far as the United States, Australia, Italy and Germany mingled with Londoners and suited office workers who had stopped briefly to pay their respects on route to work. Police maintained a ring of steel around the Abbey with armed officers and those with sniffer dogs on duty. Several roads, which would normally be thronged with traffic, were also sealed off for security reasons. Royal enthusiast John Loughrey, 67, was waiting outside the venue from 6.30am and said: 'It's the funeral he never had because when he died the country was still in lockdown. 'I wanted to go but I and others respected the Queen's wishes not to turn up so I stayed at home and watched the service on television. Although I did lay flowers later at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. 'It was really sad to see the Queen sitting by herself with a Covid mask on having to mourn by herself without members of her family. 'That's why I and many others are here today, to support the Queen and the Royal family. She's had a tough time in her 70th Jubilee losing her husband and her soul mate. 'But I think it's also important to show the Duke the respect he deserves because he was an inspiration to his country and to his people.' Royal superfans lined the capital's streets with flags and banners this morning in anticipation of the service of thanksgiving for the Duke of Edinburgh Some 1,800 people are expected to attend the memorial at Westminster Abbey, with millions more tuning in to the BBC's broadcast at home A royal enthusiast, dressed in a Union Jack flag suit, holds a bag with Queen Elizabeth's portrait before the service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip Around 50 people congregated beside barriers near the entrance to the abbey in an attempt to catch a glimpse of royal family members making their way inside Royal fan John Loughrey waits for the arrivals for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey in London The Queen will remember her husband of 73 years at the ceremony, which is also due to be attended by more than 20 close relatives including the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Cambridges Details on the clothing of a royal enthusiast are seen before the service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh Maria Scott, 51, was also at the Abbey at the crack of dawn after travelling nearly 300-miles from Newcastle. She said: 'I think it's a huge honour to be here today, as a big Royalist I was really disappointed not to be able to attend his funeral last April. 'He was a big force in the Queen's life and in the Royal family so I'm sure she will be here today even if she has to use a walking stick. 'I never met the Duke, I'd camped out at Windsor Castle during the Queen's 90th birthday celebrations and he was walking towards us but moved to the other side of the road just before he got to where we were standing so our paths were never meant to cross. 'But I wished I had met him as he had a wicked sense of humour and it would have been great to hear what he had to say. I hope today is a fitting way with which to remember him.' Royal fan Joseph Afrane arrived at Westminster Abbey more than five hours before the service in a bid to catch a glimpse of the Queen. The security guard from Battersea told how he had taken the day off work and was the first person to arrive at the venue at 6am, dressed from head to toe in a Union Flag suit with a red shirt and Union Flag tie. The outfit was complete with a hat, Doc Martens shoes, sunglasses and watch all sporting the Union Jack. Married father-of-two Joseph, 59, said: 'I came here to support Her Majesty. I wanted to make sure I had a front row position. 'I was so sad I missed the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral because of the Covid restrictions so I had to be here today to celebrate his life. 'I am a fan of all the Royal family. They are doing a great job for the nation, for the Commonwealth and the whole world. 'I was born in Ghana but I have lived here for three decades. Britain is one of the most generous countries in the world. The country has given great opportunities and I am here to show my gratitude. 'Prince Philip did a great job for the country for charities and for the Armed Forces. I have brought my flags with me and I will be waving them for the Queen.' Joseph was one of hundreds of well wishers who lined the streets of Westminster for the ceremony. Tourist Scott Johnson, 53, from Colorado said: 'We don't have your history and it's not every day you get to see the Royal Family. 'They have had a tough time of it lately. I hope the Queen is in good health and reigns for a long time to come. I think she is a magnificent lady and a great credit to your country.' Savannah Condon, 26, from California, said: 'I'm fascinated with British culture and really interested in the Royal family. 'More than that I think it's nice for so many people to come together again after Covid. 'I've seen people waving British flags which you don't tend to see much of in the UK and I think it's a very sweet occasion and fitting tribute to Prince Philip. 'The fact that there is so many people paying their respects is a sign of how popular he was here.' Royal fans and onlookers await the possible arrival of The Queen and others outside of Westminster Abbey this morning Royal enthusiast John Loughrey, 67, has been waiting outside the venue since 6.30am for Philip's memorial service Crowds of Royal enthusiasts queue near Westminster Abbey in the hope of spotting members of the family prior to this morning's memorial service Elsewhere, Mike Keegan told how he was visiting The Houses of Parliament when he spotted a small crowd gathered outside the entrance. Me Keegan and his wife, Ann, from Dublin, had been treated to a trip to London by their four daughters to celebrate his 67th birthday. He said: 'It was an unexpected birthday surprise. She drive right past us and waved. We just came to look at Westminster before heading over to Buckingham Palace. We weren't expecting this at all. It's certainly going to be a day we will always remember. His wife Ann said: 'We got a good glimpse of the Queen. She looked pretty good. It was one of those things that will never happen again and it's something we'll be able to talk about when we get home. 'It's an important day for her. It's a celebration but it's a sad time as well.' Royal fan Jenny Evans, 39, said: 'I work round the corner and took my lunch break early hoping I would see the Queen. It was definitely worthwhile. It's nice to se her out and about and back on her feet again.' A one-off payment of $250 will hit the accounts of pensioners, welfare recipients and veterans in April in a $1.5billion splash of taxpayer money. The cash to help ease increasing cost of living pressures will automatically go into the bank accounts of those eligible, of whom more than half are pensioners. Under a biannual adjustment, the Jobseeker rate, age pension, disability support pension, and carer payments increased by up to $20 per fortnight from March 20, benefiting 4.9 million people and costing the budget $2.2billion extra over the year. A one-off payment of $250 will hit the accounts of pensioners, welfare recipients and veterans in April in a $1.5billion splash of taxpayer money The rate for a single person receiving an age pension, disability support pension or carer payment increased by $20.10 a fortnight to $987.60. The JobSeeker payment, rose by $13.20 to $629.50 per fortnight for a single person without children. The Parenting Payment increased by $18.10 to $874.10. Fortnightly maximum rent assistance increased to $145.80 for singles and up to $193.62 for families. The cash to help ease increasing cost of living pressures will automatically go into the bank accounts of those eligible, of whom more than half are pensioners Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the $250 payment will help those Australians most in need. 'Together, with existing indexation arrangements, this will see a single pensioner receive more than $500 in additional support over the next 6 months, just when they need it most,' he said. The payments are exempt from taxation and will not count as income support for the purposes of any income support payment. A person can only receive one economic support payment. The payment will only be available to Australian residents. A senior nurse has been struck off for harassing female colleagues after telling a trainee her bottom looked 'amazing'. Zimbabwean national Alfred Muvheni Mavurayi, 41, based in Kettering, Northamptonshire, 'constantly' made sexually explicit comments and 'leered' at younger women, a Nursing and Midwifery Council tribunal heard. He asked a colleague if she would spend the night with him in a hotel after a staff awards evening and made the trainee nurse whose behind he commented on feel like a 'piece of meat' by staring at her, the committee was told. Colleagues told the tribunal that although the psychiatric care unit manager behaved 'shy' and 'like a teenage boy' in front of women he often became 'very graphic' behind their backs. The mental health nurse had excused his behaviour as 'harmless banter', but has now been struck off after the NMC tribunal ruled his behaviour as a senior member of staff was 'deplorable'. Zimbabwean national Alfred Muvheni Mavurayi, 41, worked for the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust The panel heard Mr Mavurayi worked for the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust as ward manager of the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). He had been employed as the ward manager for two years after previously working as the deputy ward manager. In 2017, the panel heard complaints were raised that Mr Mavurayi had made 'various inappropriate comments' and 'behaved inappropriately' with junior staff. The manager was suspended during the subsequent investigation into his alleged behaviour and comments. He was sacked for gross misconduct following the investigation in February 2018. The NMC panel heard that between September 2016 and October 2017, Mr Mavurayi repeatedly asked a female trainee nurse out 'on a date' on more than one occasion. The nurse, named only as Colleague A, told the panel her manager was 'very flirty' with her and made her feel 'uncomfortable'. She said Mr Mavurayi had been 'using his position' as her manager to get her to meet him outside of work, and remained 'fearful of a conflict' due to her junior position to him. The panel also heard he made frequent unwanted comments to the junior nurse, such as asking her if she had been 'doing squats' because her 'bum was looking amazing'. The trainee nurse told the panel: 'I had this difficulty in my mind that if I said something rude to my manager I could get in trouble. 'The few times that I did tell him to stop he would just smirk or laugh or say things like telling me to 'lighten up'. 'I felt objectified - like a piece of meat - when I was there to do a job.' The panel also heard Mr Mavurayi also frequently 'stared' at his junior colleague's body, asked her to his office just to 'talk' and did nothing to dispel rumours they were 'sleeping together'. Another colleague told the NMC tribunal Mr Mavurayi would 'leer' at female colleagues. The ward manager, named only as Colleague B, said: 'By leering I mean that he would gaze at women very slowly with a weird smile on his face, with no shame. 'Alfie is quite shy when speaking to women directly but behind their backs he is very graphic. 'He is like a clumsy coward; like a teenage boy who does not know how to handle them close up.' The manager also told the panel Mr Mavurayi would often make inappropriate comments, once saying of a pregnant female colleague: 'If [she] was not pregnant I would fuck her - I'm going to smash that'. He also told one colleague over the phone he wanted to see or touch her 'pum pum' - which the tribunal heard is a Patois word for vagina. Panel Chair Bryan Hume ruled Mr Mavurayi's actions were 'deplorable', and said he had failed to lead the culture of the PICU ward in a 'professional manner'. He said: 'The panel considered that Mr Mavurayi breached professional boundaries on numerous occasions and repeatedly harassed more than one colleague over a prolonged period of time. 'Mr Mavurayi was a senior member of staff, and should have led the culture in a professional manner as a manager but did not so. 'The panel concluded that Mr Mavurayi's conduct was deplorable and a significant departure from professional standards that it amounted to nothing short of misconduct.' The panel struck Mr Mavurayi off the medical register after ruling his actions were 'fundamentally incompatible' with him remaining on the register. The threat of China and Russia will see almost $10billion spent during the next decade doubling the size of Australia's cyber warfare unit. The Budget announcement will dramatically boost the fire power of the Australian Signals Directorate, a branch of Defence, as national security ties are strengthened with the US and the UK Australia's traditional defence allies and big Asian democracies. 'In this Budget, the Government is investing $9.9billion in Australia's intelligence and cyber capabilities, bolstering the Government's commitment to Australia's Five Eyes and AUKUS trilateral partners while supporting a secure Indo-Pacific region,' it said. Defence Minister Peter Dutton pointed to Russia's cyber warfare against Ukraine, before the February invasion, as justification for the big spending commitment. 'It acknowledges the nature of conflict has changed, with cyber attacks now commonly preceding other forms of military intervention most recently demonstrated by offensive cyber activity against Ukraine,' he said. The threat of China and Russia will see almost $10billion spent during the next decade doubling the size of Australia's cyber warfare unit (pictured are Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jingping) Without mentioning China's militarisation of the South China Sea or the threat to Taiwan, Mr Dutton said Australia's investment recognised the 'deteriorating strategic circumstances in our region, characterised by rapid military expansion, growing coercive behaviour and increased cyber attacks'. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg described the 10-year, $9.9billion investment in 'Australia's offensive and defensive cyber capabilities' as 'the biggest ever investment in Australia's cyber preparedness'. 'The lesson of history is that weakness invites aggression,' he said. 'It leaves nations vulnerable to coercion. This is the reality we must confront. 'The world is less stable.' In the decade to 2030-31, the Australian Signals Directorate will be given the funding to deliver a Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber and Enablers package known as REDSPICE. The REDSPICE program will see the Australian Signals Directorate doubled in size, creating 1,900 new jobs during the coming decade. 'Creating 1,900 jobs, more data analysts, computer programmers, and software engineers to boost our capacity to prevent and respond to cyber threats,' Mr Frydenberg said. 'Keeping Australians safe is part of our plan for a stronger future.' The federal government said REDSPICE would triple the ASD's 'offensive cyber capabilities' and 'double its 'cyber hunt and response activities'. Defence Minister Peter Dutton pointed to Russia's cyber warfare against Ukraine, before the February invasion, as justification for the big spending commitment (pictured is destruction in the townof Brovary north of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv) 'The package will help ASD to keep pace with the rapid growth of cyber capabilities of potential adversaries, as well as being able to counter attack and protect our most critical systems,' the Budget papers said. 'The unprecedented investment will equip ASD with the capabilities to defend Australia in the changing strategic environment.' Australia last year entered into an historic security pact with the US and the UK, known as AUKUS. As part of the arrangement, the US is also sharing nuclear submarine technology with Australia. This marked the first time since 1958 that the Americans have shared their submarine know-how with another nation beyond the UK. This saw Australian dump a $90billion diesel submarine deal with France and switch to American-designed nuclear-powered submarines. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (pictured) described the 10-year, $9.9billion investment in 'Australia's offensive and defensive cyber capabilities' as 'the biggest ever investment in Australia's cyber preparedness'. 'The lesson of history is that weakness invites aggression,' he said The Budget papers hailed the new security pact with the English-speaking powers that have been a fundamental part of Australia's national security since World War II. 'The new AUKUS security partnership leverages 75 years of working with the United States and the United Kingdom to promote security and prosperity,' it said. 'The partnership's first priority is to collaborate on nuclear-powered submarines. 'Cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and additional undersea capabilities are other focus areas.' The Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement with the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand were hailed as 'more important than ever'. In the decade to 2030-31, the Australian Signals Directorate will be given the funding to deliver a Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber and Enablers package known as REDSPICE (pictured is a mocked-up image of Russian President Vladimir Putin) The new Quad arrangement with fellow democracies India, Japan and the US was hailed as essential to maintain freedom. 'The group is co-operating on issues from space to critical technology to achieve its objective of a free and open Indo-Pacific,' it said. In 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed a foreign state actor had targeted government departments and private businesses without naming China. But intelligence sources have told the media China was responsible. The Coalition pointed out defence spending now comprised more than 2 per cent of gross domestic product, compared with just 1.6 per cent in 2012-13 when Julia Gillard was Labor prime minister. 'The world has entered a period of profound uncertainty and disruption. Australia's location in the Indo-Pacific places us at the epicentre of global strategic competition,' the Budget papers said. At least three Ukrainians were killed and 22 were wounded after a Russian artillery strike hit a government building in southern port town Mykolaiv on Tuesday. Regional governor Vitaly Kim, a steadfast Putin critic, only survived because he overslept and was running late for work. Three bodies have been pulled out of the wreckage and 18 of the wounded were recovered by rescue workers. Several members of the Ukrainian army remain unaccounted for, according to AFP. WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT One of the bodies pulled from rubble is catered to minutes ago An unharmed Ukraine flag stands defiantly by the wreckage of Mykolaiv's government HQ An image supplied by the Mykolaiv regional government shows the extent of the wreckage Three soldiers and eight civilians are still being searched for in the rubble, officials confirmed Firefighters remain on the scene after the Russian artillery strike, which came at rush hour In order to capture Odesa, Putin's forces must take - and march through - Mykolaiv Kim wrote on Facebook: 'The regional administration building was hit. We're clearing the rubble. My office was hit. 'Eight civilians are still under the rubble. We hope to be able to get them out. We are also looking for three soldiers.' The artillery strike reportedly happened as government workers streamed into the office building. Financial Times Moscow bureau chief Max Seddon tweeted: 'A Russian airstrike took out the local government offices in Mikolayiv, southern Ukraine this morning as people were coming to work.' Mykolaiv is about 70 miles east of Odesa, up the Southern Bug (Pivdennyi Buh) river. Plumes of smoke rose above the Southern Bug river after Russian artillery hit Mykolaiv Fighters in Mykolaiv have improvised when it comes to placing anti-aircraft weaponry Rescuers continue searching the rubble for survivors of the blast, officials said It has become a frontier in Russia's invasion of Ukraine as Putin seeks to gain an access route between Crimea and target city Odesa. Taking Odesa would mean Russia controls Ukraine's largest coastal town - and the country's only deep-water port. Yet an effective counter-offensive by Ukrainian troops in nearby Kherson has pushed the frontline away from Mykolaiv and back towards Crimea. Donald, 69, a retired Canadian postman living in Mykolaiv, told AFP he considers the port town 'lucky' so far. He said: 'I was having breakfast in my apartment. I heard a whoosh then a boom and my windows rattled. 'It's scary. We have been lucky here in Mykolaiv. We haven't had that many explosions in the centre of the city.' Despite coming under bombardment from Moscow's forces for more than a week, Ukraine's forces in Mykolaiv have foiled a Russian advancement. Most people inside the building escaped injury - but at least a dozen were killed or entrapped Mykolaiv's cemetery has become a mess of rubbish and debris (picture taken last week) The building was a key planning centre (picture taken earlier today, shortly before the strike) Financial Times journalist Max Seddon confirmed Kim's lucky and unplanned escape Governor Kim said last week some Russian forces were pushed back to Kherson and that Moscow's armies have resorted to shelling the city indiscriminately, striking civilian centres. But the medieval tactics have not diminished the resolve of the people of Mykolaiv, who have stopped Russian forces moving into the city itself. He said last Monday: 'The forces that they sent, they thought they'd easily march through here because this was a region that didn't have enough military presence,' he told the newspaper. 'But we've showed them the opposite, with our soldiers and our civilian defence, that they have no business roaming around on our land.' Kim has become the figurehead of Mykolaiv's resistance and has been likened among locals to president Zelensky. Kim addresses more than 700,000 Telegram followers every few hours in a bid to inspire the city to fight back against its would-be occupiers. He begins every video: 'Good day, we are from Ukraine' and has derided the Russian army as 'dumb'. 'They go from one direction and get bashed, they go from another direction and get bashed and then go from a third direction and get bashed as well,' he said in one address. Although Ukrainian forces have pushed back in much of the south, Mariupol remains under severe threat of a Russian takeover in the coming days. These buses were placed as a barrier Russian tanks, identified by 'Z' graffiti, proceed towards Mariupol as the local battle intensifies Residential areas throughout Ukraine have been targeted since the start of Russia's invasion Many residential buildings are just shells of what they once were, while the city's streets are littered with signs of warfare. In the eastern Inhulskyi district of the city, an unexploded artillery rocket was seen sticking up from the pavement, with a traffic cone planted to warn motorists. Glass litters the streets from shattered glass, and civilian defenders patrol with guns. In the city's vast cemetery, another unexploded rocket burrowed into the ground nearly up to its fins. A good part of the city's 500,000 pre-war residents have fled - mostly towards Odesa. Those that remain are determined to hold out. In the Kulbakino district, which includes several blocks of residential buildings, the population has fallen from 12,000 to fewer than 1,000, according to Alexander Zadera, 56. He said: 'We've got used to eating with that sort of background noise. 'Now even my mother recognises the sounds of different types of artillery and missile fire,' the former air force colonel added. Three Thai fishermen were miraculously rescued after tourists on a fishing trip spotted them floating on an icebox in the middle of the sea off the coast of Thailand. The trio had been drifting in the Andaman Sea for more than six hours after their boat capsized when tourists from a passing boat noticed the blue container several miles north of the Similan Islands in Phang Nga province on March 24. When the boat moved closer to the object, passengers noticed the fisherman and his two young crew members clinging to the box in the choppy waters. Three stranded Thai fishermen were miraculously rescued after being found floating on an icebox in the middle of the sea The trio had been drifting in the water for more than six hours when tourists from a passing boat noticed the blue container several miles north of the Similan Islands in Phang Nga province on March 24 The crew quickly threw a rope before pulling the three up from the seawater Onlooker Yuranun Tongprem said: 'I was fishing with my friends as a hobby. We approached the icebox that was floating in the water and saw them. 'They had been floating in the sea for six hours. It's amazing how they stayed strong through the night. My friends and I tried asking them questions but they were only able to share little details about what had happened.' The crew quickly threw a rope before pulling the three up from the sea. The Thai fisherman, believed to be in his 60s, told the crew that he and the two boys had to find a floatable object when their boat sank at 3am earlier that day. When the boat moved closer to the object, passengers noticed the fisherman and his two young crew members clinging to the box in the choppy water of the Andaman Sea Crew had spotted the blue object in the middle of the sea and when they moved close, they noticed the fisherman and his two young crew members clinging to the box in the choppy water of the Andaman Sea The trio had been drifting in the water for more than six hours after their boat capsized when tourists from a passing boat noticed the blue container several miles north of the Similan Islands in Phang Nga province on March 24 The three appeared to be exhausted and suffering from mild dehydration but had no injuries. After resting on board for an hour, Yuranun took the rescued locals to a nearby fishing boat so they could be ferried back to shore and treated at hospital. Whilst incredibly rare to find fishermen floating on an icebox - it has happened before. In 2009, two Myanmar fishermen survived for almost a month in shark-infested waters by floating in a large ice box after their boat sank. In 2009, two Myanmar fishermen survived for almost a month in shark-infested waters by floating in a large ice box after their boat sank The men, both aged in their 20s, were on a Thai fishing boat with 18 others when it sank in heavy seas off Australias north coast. The pair were spotted by an Australian coastal patrol aircraft and were winched onto a rescue helicopter and taken to hospital Thursday Island, off Australias far north. Hospital officials said the pair were hungry and dehydrated after drifting 25 days at sea during the monsoon season and recent cyclonic storms in the region, but they recovered well and were released. A pledge to plant $20million dollars worth of trees for the queen and $61.6million to fight lumpy skin are just some of the eyebrow-raising items in this year's Federal Budget. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced a pre-election cash-splash budget on Tuesday, which will see ten million Aussies get up to $1,500 back in their next tax return and another six million will receive a $250 cash handout as well as slashed petrol prices. However, hidden deep within the pages of every federal budget lies strange and unusual projects you would not expect the government to splurge on. Here's some of the eyebrow-raising items unveiled in this year's federal budget. Planting trees for the Queen The government will spend $20.3million over three years to plant trees to mark Her Majesty The Queen's Platinum Jubilee. A number of community-led tree planting projects are underway to mark the Queen's milestone as the first British monarch to reach 70 years of service. Australians will be given the option of planting 'large shade trees' in a school or civic centre to spruce up a local park area or to kick-off a local greening project. According to the federal government Her Majesty has planted 1,500 trees throughout Her reign. The government will splurge $20.3million over three years to planting trees to mark Her Majesty The Queen's Platinum Jubilee (pictured, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles with the first Jubilee tree in the grounds of Windsor Castle earlier this year, on March 23, 2021) The fight against Lumpy Skin Josh Frydenberg will spend $61.6million over four years to fight lumpy skin disease and other biosecurity threats. The government believes the threat of Lumpy Skin Disease is so dire it's allocating almost three dollars per Aussie to prepare for a potential outbreak. The viral disease, which affects cattle and water buffalo, has a low mortality rate but could cause a major blow to production losses and significant animal welfare issues. The government will spend an astronomical $61.6million over four years to fight lumpy skin disease - a viral disease which affects cattle and water buffalo (pictured) REDSPICE The Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber, and Enablers project will receive a whopping $9.9billion to prevent hacking and other digital attacks. In his budget night speech Josh Frydenberg lauded the ten-year cyber security program as the nation's 'biggest ever investment in Australia's cyber preparedness'. However, the name has copped flack on social media with Australians drawing comparisons to the popular 90's British girl group, The Spice Girls. 'Scary, sporty, baby, posh, ginger, and REDSPICE,' Tweeted one person. Josh Frydenberg announced a $9.9billion cash splash on cyber security defence program; Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber, and Enablers (REDSPICE) (pictured, stock photo) Shooting for the stars The government has also announced it will pour $1.16billion into Australia's first space mission. Minister for Science and Technology Melissa Price said it will spend $38million per year to design, build, and operate four new satellites. 'This budget demonstrates that we are not only shooting for the stars, but also securing our future prosperity here at home,' she said. The National Space Mission for Earth Observation is expected to create more than 500 jobs over the first four years and utilise more than 100 suppliers across Australia. 'The information we get from Earth observation satellites is central to our everyday life from forecasting the weather and responding to natural disasters through to managing the environment and supporting our farmers.' The number of people self-isolating after testing positive for Covid plummeted after Freedom Day in England, official data shows. Just 64 per cent of people with the disease said they stayed home and quarantined for at least five days between February 28 and March 8, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). That was down from 80 per cent at the start of February, before the rule to self-isolate after a diagnosis was downgraded from law to guidance on February 24. Experts said it highlighted a 'significant' drop-off in adherence, coinciding with a surge in cases in England over the last month. The ONS report based on a survey of more than 1,300 people found a third of all people interviewed did not fully understand the new self-isolation rules. Nearly one in 10 claimed they did not realise they were not advised to go to the shops, walk the dog or drop their children off at school while isolating. Just six per cent were more flagrant of the rules, deliberately ignoring guidance by going to work or seeing their family. Two thirds of Britons stuck to self-isolation guidance at the start of the month after the law to remain at home was dropped by the Government, according to an Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey Health chief hints millions of Brits in 'relevant groups' may need boosters twice-a-year Millions of Britons could need Covid boosters every six months for the foreseeable future, a health boss HAS hinted. Dr Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), suggested the most vulnerable 'relevant groups' in society will still need regular top-up jabs. Britain is still in a 'period of uncertainty', she said, despite all restrictions being lifted more than a month ago. Experts are unable to predict when a new variant may occur and how it could affect immunity from vaccines, she said. Around 8million over-75s, care home residents and immunocompromised over-12s in England are eligible for fourth doses this spring. Fifth, and potentially even sixth jabs, will be rolled out to a wider group this autumn. Advertisement The report also showed three in 10 people who isolated did so for 10 days or more. Only 67 per cent of people interviewed said they understood the guidance during the most recent most recent week. The rest either misunderstood or were unsure of what had changed. Eight per cent said they could go out to take their children to school or walk their dog during isolation. And 11 per cent claimed they thought advice allowed for trips to the shops for groceries, toiletries or medicine. Guidance states people in self-isolation have to remain at home for the entire five days and ask friends or family to get them food and other essentials if possible. They are also asked to cancel routine medical and dental appointments and consult their GP or dentists if they are worried about symptoms. Of those who did not follow the advice, 94 per cent said they left the house for 'non-compliant' reasons. This was up from 85 per cent the previous week and marked a record high, statisticians said. Tim Gibbs, head of the public services analysis team at ONS, said: 'Now the legal requirement to self-isolate after testing positive for Covid has been removed in England, our data today reveal more about adherence to these rules. 'Compliance with self-isolation rules was significantly lower than the level reported in February 2022, when self-isolation was a legal requirement. 'Despite this, we are seeing that almost all respondents agreed that it was important to follow self-isolation advice.' Despite the higher proportion of people ignoring the advice to isolate, some experts claim it should not be a concern because vaccination has kept Covid hospitalisations and deaths low. Professor David Livermore, a medical microbiologist at the University of East Anglia, told MailOnline: 'I dont think it matters.' He said the milder Omicron and BA.2 variants meant more people were catching the virus without dying, leading to greater immunity on top of vaccines. However, he advised people to avoid visiting more vulnerable relatives if they are unwell. Isolation remained a legal requirement for people in Wales until Monday following a positive test. It will not be dropped until April 30 in Scotland, under current plans. Scotland has seen the highest spike in cases of any of Britain's four nations despite continuing to have the most stringent Covid measures. Despite fears cases were spiralling again following the loosening of restrictions, Britain's cases fell over the weekend in a sign that the current wave may be peaking. There were 215,001 positive tests recorded from Saturday to Monday marking a five per cent drop on last week's same tally, Government data showed. Ministers stopped publishing daily figures on the weekend at the end of last month as part of the living with Covid strategy, and are now considering scrapping the 24-hour updates entirely. There are growing suggestions that infections, which also fell last Friday, could be peaking, four days before free lateral flow and PCR tests are dumped in England. They will remain available in Scotland until May, and in Wales until the end of June. Experts have repeatedly called on ministers not to end the universal swabbing offer, warning it will leave them in the dark over major outbreaks in parts of the country. But No10 today insisted it would not backtrack, arguing the country was now in a 'vastly different' position to last April when the tests first became available to all. Britain's scramble for the last remaining free supplies of lateral flow tests has seen sales of the rapid devices soar five-fold in a week at High Street pharmacies. LloydsPharmacy is already selling the Covid tests, despite free ones being available on the Government's website until Friday. But scores of Britons have complained about being unable to get hold of any kits through the official ordering channel over the past fortnight. Struggles accessing the devices which formed a major part of the UK's Covid-fighting strategy have allowed major retailers to cash in. LloydsPharmacy told MailOnline sales in the week ending March 28 were 400 per cent up on the previous seven-day spell. It also announced it was slashing the price of lateral flows, reducing the price of a pack of five rapid swabs by 20p to 9.29 or 1.86 each making it the cheapest on the market. A single test sold on its own from the company will cost people 1.89, compared to 1.99 at rival Superdrug and 2 at Boots. Meanwhile Boots is selling its five-packs for 9.80 and Superdrug is offering them for 9.79. High street chains have been undercutting each other since February 23, just days after Boris Johnson announced mass public lateral flows would be abandoned on April 1. Rapid tests will be rationed to hospital and care home patients and staff as part of the final stage of No10's living with Covid strategy. Experts have repeatedly described the move to end free testing for those no longer qualifying for them as 'worrying' amid rising cases. Lateral flow tests will be rationed to the elderly and vulnerable people as part of the final stage of No10's living with Covid strategy leading to fears people have been stockpiling the remainder of the free swabs in the meantime. Users have been unable to order tests on the Government's site today High street pharmacists today continued their war of prices ahead of free lateral tests being scrapped from next week. Graphic shows: Different price options at Boots, Superdrug and LloydsPharmacy LloydsPharmacy dropped its price for a pack of five rapid tests to 9.29 costing 1.86 each. At the end of February, they were priced at 9.49 for the pack Downing Street will not U-turn on its decision to scrap free Covid tests Ministers will not backtrack on plans to scrap free Covid tests in England this week despite pleas from health chiefs, Downing Street has said. The Prime Minister's spokesman said the country was in a 'vastly different position' than last April when free testing was first made available, thanks to life-saving jabs and drugs. From Friday lateral flow tests will be rationed to the elderly and vulnerable people as part of the final stage of the Government's living with Covid strategy. After then, people will have to pay privately for a test at pharmacies including Boots, for around 2.50 per test. But a number of experts have called for the cut-off date to be delayed amid sky-high infection rates, including experts within No10's own ranks. The spokesman said: 'There's no plans to change our approach. 'You'll know the significant cost billions of pounds we are spending every month providing free testing to the public. 'And because of vaccines, therapeutics and other means we are now in a vastly different position to where we were when we first started providing free testing.' Advertisement Ahead of the move, a LloydsPharmacy spokesperson told MailOnline the company would be lowering its price for lateral flows slightly on previous plans. They said: 'From April 1 in line with the latest Government changes, lateral flow tests are no longer free across the UK. 'LloydsPharmacy will continue to help keep the public safe and at the moment we offer lateral flow test kits in a selection of quantities to suit customer needs. 'This includes single tests for just 1.89 or up to a pack of five for just 9.29 1.86 per test available in store and online now at LloydsPharmacy.com. 'You can find further information about our range of tests on our website, and up-to-date coronavirus information on the coronavirus page on the Government website.' Boots has been offering its tests since the end of last month and Superdrug is also currently selling its tests online. When the Omicron wave was collapsing in February, Boris Johnson announced that free testing would be scrapped from April. The announcement was widely seen as a way to appease Tory backbenchers who at the time were threatening to hand in letters of no confidence in the PM following the Partygate scandal. But in recent weeks the UK has seen a resurgence in Covid infections and hospital admissions, driven by the even more infectious BA.2 variant, which has led many experts to call for free tests to stay. SAGE has previously warned ending the scheme, which cost up to 2bn a month, would leave the country in the dark to a fresh wave and said poor people will be hit hardest. Experts told said pushing through with the move could leave some of the most vulnerable people in society at risk. Professor Denis Kinane, an immunologist and founding scientist at Cignpost Diagnostics, said: 'I am concerned that the decision to end free tests from April 1 could leave some vulnerable groups at risk, particularly the immuno-suppressed. 'This is worrying with the recent spike in case numbers and hospital admissions.' Covid cases have been on the rise since the start of the month, following all restrictions being eased on Freedom Day on February 24. Hospital admissions have also been increasing, jumping 16 per cent in a week to 2,380 on Tuesday, the latest date data is available for. It was the highest daily total since the peak of the Omicron wave in January, with 2,386 recorded on January 10. People trying to get tests have reported struggling to access them for weeks as the Government started rationing the kits ahead of the cut-off date amid fears people would stockpile them. Professor Kinane added: 'Recent stories about shortages of lateral flow tests shows demonstrate that large numbers of people still want to get tested to reassure themselves or protect their families. 'Alongside this, the testing played a vital role in preventing transmission for those working in settings where they would come into contact with a large number of people. 'Many sectors will be wondering if this will prevent more people from safely returning to their place of work as we begin to live with the virus.' The UK should stop wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds on the 'barmy' Eurovision song contest, a former minister insisted today. Veteran Tory MP Mike Penning said the cult competition is 'full of politics' and 'we know we're going to come last' as a result. He said taxpayers were often not aware that the BBC made a significant contribution to footing the bill - thought to be around 300,000 a year. The intervention - in an interview with Gloria De Piero on GB News - comes after the British entrant last year, James Newman, recorded an humiliating 'nul points' as he came bottom of the table. The contest was hosted in Rotterdam last May, and won by glam rockers Maneskin from Italy - who took to the stage in flared lederhosen with their nipples out. It was only the second time since the UK started taking part in 1957 that its entrant has failed to get any points, but in recent years British hopefuls have languished near the foot of the standings. The UK should stop wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds on the 'barmy' Eurovision song contest, former minister Mike Penning insisted today. Pictured, last year's winners Maneskin The British entrant last year, James Newman (left), recorded an humiliating 'nul points' and Sir Mike said 'we know we're going to come last' Domestic opinion was split on whether the 2021 entry was simply not very good, or other factors such as Brexit were to blame. The BBC has chosen Sam Ryder to represent the UK this year with his song Space Man. Sir Mike said it was obvious that geopolitical factors were more important to the results than the quality of the song. 'We all sit and watch it, we all know we're gonna come last,' he said. 'We all know that Greece is going vote for Cyprus, and the whole of the Eastern block... well, until what's obviously going on recently...' But he added: 'At the end of the day I don't think many of the British public know that we pay for the Eurovision song contest. 'The taxpayer pays for it and that's the only reason that we're always in the final we can't not qualify for the final. The exact figure contributed by the BBC to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) for the event is not publicly revealed, but it has previously been put at 300,000 or more. Maneskin performing as they took the win for Italy in the cult contest last year Italian entrants Maneskin lick the trophy after their victory last year The corporation has argued that the size of the audiences Eurovision attracts justify the cost. Mr Penning pointed out that as a result the UK did not have to qualify for the finals - suggesting that was the only reason its entrants ever made it through. He also highlighted the geographical oddities of Eurovision. 'I wasn't very good at school, but I didn't think Australia was in Europe... this is barmy,' he said. 'Now we all sit there and have a pizza as a family and have a laugh, but I think there's better money spent by the British taxpayer. 'And if they want us in, let's get there on merit. We know we won't get there on merit we'll be last. 'Not because we can't sing, not cause we don't do good songs, because it's full of politics. Ticket prices for Chris Rock's 'Ego Death' World Tour soared from $46 to more than $400 as demand for seats spiked after Will Smith hit the comedian live on-stage during Sunday night's Oscars awards ceremony. By Tuesday morning, the first show on Wednesday in Boston had sold out. The slap will go down as one of the most shocking moments in awards history, and has already been viewed tens of millions of times. It has sent Rock - already a household name - on the route to global fame as the pictures of Smith's outburst were beamed to every corner of the world, and despite the public humiliation, Rock appears to be reaping the rewards. Just days after the event, the comic will return to the stage in Boston's Wilbur Theatre for the start of his tour that will take him to 35 cities around the world - including in the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Pictured: Chris Rock holds a hand to his face after he was slapped by Will Smith while presenting an award at Sunday night's Oscars ceremony in Hollywood And according to ticket seller TickPick, it has sold more tickets to Rock's tour in the night following the Oscars than it had done in the whole month before it. It also reported that single ticket prices for the Boston show have skyrocketed - with just the cheapest tickets rising from $46 to $314 as of Monday evening. As of Tuesday morning, tickets for the Boston show on the Tickermaster website had sold out, with other location also selling quickly. When announcing the tour in February, Rock said on his Instagram: 'Ego Death World Tour 2022 all new material introspective very personal and very funny. Cant wait to show you.' Attendees will be hoping that he has updated material by the time the first show on Wednesday comes around to address Sunday night's drama. Perhaps appropriately, his final two shows will be held at Hollywood's Dolby Theatre - the very same venue where Sunday night's Oscar spectacle unfolded. Smith shocked the crowd and viewers at home when he took the stage during Rock's remarks after the comedian made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, Smith's wife. Rock said, 'Jada, I love you. `G.I. Jane 2,' can't wait to see it.' The joke touched a nerve. Pinkett Smith, whose head is shaved, has spoken publicly about her alopecia diagnosis. Smith strode on stage and slapped Rock across the face. Back in his seat, Smith twice shouted for Rock to 'get my wife's name out your (expletive) mouth.' His words echoed clearly throughout the Dolby, though broadcaster ABC cut the audio for about 15 seconds. Within 45 minutes, Smith won best actor. During his acceptance speech, Smith apologized to the academy. When announcing the tour in February, Rock said on his Instagram: 'Ego Death World Tour 2022 all new material introspective very personal and very funny. Cant wait to show you' According to ticket seller TickPick, it has sold more tickets to Chris Rock's tour in the night following the Oscars than it had done in the whole month before it The spectacle has divided opinion, with some arguing Smith was justified after Rock made a joke about the actor's wife - Jada Pinkett Smith - and her hair loss. Others have argued it was assault, and that Smith should have been ejected. The Academy on Monday condemned Smith's actions in a statement reading: 'The Academy condemns the actions of Mr. Smith at last night's show. 'We have officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our bylaws, standards of conduct and California law.' The Los Angeles Police Department said Sunday it was aware of the incident but not pursuing an investigation because the person Rock had declined to file a police report. Smith on Monday also issued an apology to Rock, saying his behavior was 'unacceptable and inexcusable' and left him 'embarrassed'. 'Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive,' he wrote in an Instagram post. 'My behavior at last night's Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable. Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada's medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally. Will Smith shocked the crowd and viewers at home when he took the stage during Chris Rock's remarks after the comedian made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, Smith's wife. Rock said, 'Jada, I love you. `G.I. Jane 2,' can't wait to see it' (pictured) Smith is pictured on Sunday night celebrating his Oscar win, in a ceremony overshadowed by his actions Jada Pinkett Smith, from left, Willow Smith, Will Smith, Jaden Smith and Trey Smith are pictured arriving at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party on Sunday Smith on Monday also issued an apology to Rock, saying his behavior was 'unacceptable and inexcusable' and left him 'embarrassed' 'I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.' Smith then went on to say sorry to the organizers and the producers of the show. He also extended his apology to the family of Venus and Serena Williams. 'I would also like to apologize to the Academy, the producers of the show, all the attendees and everyone watching around the world,' Smith continued. 'I would like to apologize to the Williams Family and my King Richard Family. 'I deeply regret that my behavior has stained what has been an otherwise gorgeous journey for all of us.' The Philadelphia-born actor concluded: 'I am a work in progress. Sincerely, Will.' Advertisement An elite team of British commandos launched a training raid in a small boat from a Royal Navy submarine against the backdrop of snow-covered mountains of a Norwegian fjord. UK forces used the largest winter exercise hosted in Norway in 30 years to demonstrate the unique combined capabilities of the Royal Marines and Submarine Service. In Lyngenfjord, three dozen miles east of Tromso deep inside the Arctic Circle, the Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron launched small teams from an Astute-class hunter-killer submarine from Faslane in Scotland for subsurface insertion missions. The aim was to carry out reconnaissance missions on the rocky, icy shoreline in sub-zero temperatures while avoiding the multi-national enemy force hunting them. Royal Marines have deployed to Northern Norway to carry out their traditional winter deployment in the Arctic Circle. Commandos will refresh skills in surviving, moving and fighting across the ice The Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron (SRS) exercised deploying Inflatable Raiding Craft's (IRC) from a submarine at Lyngan Fjord in Northern Norway In Lyngenfjord, three dozen miles east of Tromso deep inside the Arctic Circle, the Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron launched small teams from an Astute-class hunter-killer submarine from Faslane in Scotland for subsurface insertion missions. Pictured: A Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel Carrier leaving shore This year, Royal Navy ships will join Royal Marines for the large-scale Norwegian-led exercise Cold Response 22 which will take place between March and April and see around 30,000 troops from 27 countries in Europe and North America taking part Exercise Cold Response Cold Response 2022 is a long-planned exercise bringing together thousands of troops from NATO allies and partners, testing their ability to work together in cold weather conditions across Norway on land, in the air and at sea. Nato said allies and partner armed forces will come together over the next few weeks to trek across the vast wilderness, conduct live-fire drills, and leap into freezing lakes. The alliance said the aim is to make sure the armed forced are prepared to respond to 'any threat or crisis' to keep countries and people safe. Cold Response 2022 is bringing together around 30,000 troops from 27 countries from Europe and North America, including Norwegians, the US, Dutch, French, Italians and Germans. Those troops will be training together in cold weather exercises on land, in the air and at sea - in Norway and the surrounding areas between March and April 2022. Norway hosts the training biannually, and this year's exercise was announced more than eight years ago. Nato said the training is not linked to 'Russia's unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine'. Source: Nato Advertisement The Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron - drawn from Plymouth-based 30 Commando Information Exploitation Group - is a specialist team of commandos, who forge the way ahead for their fellow green berets to follow. They are trained to gather valuable information on the terrain, the enemy and suitable beach landing places for larger amphibious forces to come ashore, arriving by ski, snowmobile, boat, all-terrain vehicles, helicopter or parachute, depending on the situation and environment. 'Being able to move sub-surface gives us a discreet means of moving our specialist teams to any coastline in the world,' said the SRS team leader. 'Not only can we conduct operations in isolation but by accessing and reconnoitring these complex coastlines by small craft we can set the conditions for larger, more lethal follow on forces.' His deputy added: 'Working alongside the submarine was a great opportunity for us. In addition to the submarine work we also took the opportunity to operate alongside our Norwegian colleagues. 'We used one of their larger, faster craft to access areas out of range of our small craft, an excellent example of working together to achieve a common aim.' Commodore Jim Perks, the head of the RN Submarine Service, said: 'The ability to operate undetected for significant periods of time with top quality kit ensures that a submarine remains a formidable delivery mechanism, in this case enabling the covert deployment of the Surveillance and Reconnaissance team as showcased in the exercises off Norway. 'Our ability to work together highlights the remarkable attributes of the team and the platforms in which we operate.' The training in Lyngenfjord - a small but important phase of the Cold Response 2022 exercise - proved the usefulness of using submarines to access strategically important-areas with small teams of highly-trained specialists without being detected. It was also part of wider intensive raiding and reconnaissance operations the UKs commandos have been carrying out in northern Norway during Cold Response. Cold Response is a biennial exercise designed to demonstrate NATOs collective Arctic war fighting capability and test their ability to protect Norway from modern threats This years exercise is the largest of its kind for more than 30 years and has involved 30,000 military personnel from 27 nations including Norwegians, US, Dutch, French, Italians and Germans The UK is one of very few nations capable of operating in this demanding environment and the Royal Marines have been conducting cold weather training in Norway for more than 50 years. They are the UKs force of choice for the region UK forces used the largest winter exercise hosted in Norway in 30 years to demonstrate the unique combined capabilities of the Royal Marines and Submarine Service Astute-class submarines Cost: 1.65billion each Range: Unlimited Speed: 35mph Propulsion: Rolls-Royce PWR2 nuclear reactor Crew: 98 Armament: Tomahawk cruise missiles, Spearfish heavyweight torpedoes Advertisement To the southwest, on Senja Island, 40 Commando - having launched from an amphibious task force spearheaded by HMS Albion - raided Skrolsvik Fort where enemy systems were denying access to air support. The Royal Marines destroyed key infrastructure around the fort - which was built by the Nazis in the Second World War - and secured areas for allied forces to gain access and establish a launchpad to forge inland. Cold Response is a biennial exercise designed to demonstrate NATOs collective Arctic war fighting capability and test their ability to protect Norway from modern threats. This years exercise is the largest of its kind for more than 30 years and has involved 30,000 military personnel from 27 nations including Norwegians, US, Dutch, French, Italians and Germans. The UK is one of very few nations capable of operating in this demanding environment. The Royal Marines have been conducting cold weather training in Norway for more than 50 years and are the UKs force of choice for the region. Brigadier Rich Cantrill, in charge of the UKs commando forces, said: 'Cold Response 22 provides an unparalleled opportunity to come together as a NATO force in the very harsh conditions of the high north and to operate across all the domains, land, air and sea. 'I know that after this exercise we will leave here better connected and more ready. Cold Response 22 offers an amazing opportunity to learn how to work together in a really harsh environment. 'When you are in the high north and when you are in the maritime or ashore, its real. 'Youve got to cope with the environment first before you can then think about the adversary, and so there is no more realistic environment or harsh environment then up here, which is a huge opportunity for all of us.' Jeremy Kyle is preparing to make his on-screen comeback on Rupert Murdoch's new channel TalkTV, which launches on April 25. He will be broadcast on the television network, available on Sky, Virgin Media, Freeview and Freesat, alongside fellow TalkRadio colleagues Julia Hartley-Brewer, Mike Graham and Ian Collins. His latest venture comes after The Jeremy Kyle Show was axed by ITV just days after one of its guests Steven Dymond died in an apparent suicide a week after appearing on the show. Dymond, from Portsmouth, was found dead aged 63 from a suspected morphine overdose after being grilled by the host on the show in May 2019. The hearing into his death was due to begin yesterday at Hampshire Coroners Court in Winchester but was adjourned at his relatives' request. Jeremy Kyle (pictured above), 56, is preparing to make his on-screen comeback on Rupert Murdoch's new channel TalkTV, which launches on April 25 The Jeremy Kyle Show was axed by ITV just days after one of its guests Steven Dymond, above, died in an apparent suicide a week after appearing on the show A coroner decided it would be unfair to the family to proceed with the inquest after Mr Dymond's brother and son applied to have it delayed. Mr Dymond's mother's funeral is taking place today. However, he disagreed with an additional request to postpone it further while the family's lawyers investigate matters raised in a recent Channel 4 documentary about the show. The programme, 'Death on Daytime', heard from former workers on the show who said the platform gave Kyle, 56, a 'God complex' and explained how they would make guests distressed to entertain viewers. One new clip showed Kyle telling off a producer for a 'terrible' script while another recorded him saying to a colleague: 'I don't understand, they're terrible f***ing guests, you've done it again, they're as thick as s***.' Kyle issued a response tot he documentary earlier this month, saying: 'I would like to reiterate my deepest sympathies to the friends and family of Mr Dymond. 'I've consistently maintained it would be inappropriate to discuss the tragic death of Steve Dymond before the legal inquest into it has concluded. 'Likewise, the false and damaging allegations made against me by Channel 4 are with the lawyers now. 'No doubt ITV will address the issues raised by Channel 4 around ITV's production of The Jeremy Kyle Show themselves, it would be wrong for me to speak on their behalf. 'Death on Daytime', heard from former workers on the show who said the platform gave Kyle (file photo), 56, a 'God complex' and explained how they would make guests distressed to entertain viewers 'Now is not the time to debate or discuss what is an ongoing legal process. When I can respond, I will.' Meanwhile, in a statement, News UK said further details on TalkTV's shows and the schedule will be unveiled in the coming weeks. Scott Taunton, EVP, President of Broadcasting, News UK said: 'TalkTV will be a new voice for viewers who are interested in straight talking opinions and expert insight on news and current affairs. 'The channel has been designed for the streaming age and will be accessible on linear TV as well as via social and on demand programming.' He added: 'We have a roster of new talent who will bring compelling new shows to the screen every weekday evening, alongside journalists from across News UK who have expertise in every genre. 'Our existing professional talent on TalkRadio already have their own followings and we will be bringing these popular and informed discussions about news and current affairs to a wider audience. 'Our launch schedule should get the nation talking and bring new choice to viewers in the market.' The TV channel will also host Piers Morgan Uncensored, fronted by the former Good Morning Britain presenter, on weeknights in the UK, FOX Nation in the US and on Sky News Australia. Piers said: 'I'm delighted to now be returning to live television with a new daily show whose main purpose is to cancel the Cancel Culture which has infected societies around the world. 'I want it to be a platform for lively vigorous debate, news-making interviews, and that increasingly taboo three-letter word: fun. I also want it to annoy all the right people.' Anyone seeking help can call Samaritans free on 116 123 or visit Samaritans.org Members of the Royal Family will do less tours overseas and focus on places where they feel they can make a real difference, a royal commentator has said. The future of the monarchy and the Commonwealth has come under scrutiny in recent weeks after the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's tour of the Caribbean. Their intense eight-day long tour around Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas saw the couple face backlash after encountering tensions in the Caribbean nations. William's trip with Kate had been plagued by public relations gaffes and protests about British colonialism, which led to the endeavour being branded tone deaf to modern sensibilities. The scrutiny came to a head when Prince William released an unprecedented end-of-tour statement addressing growing republican sentiment in the three countries - acknowledging it had 'brought into even sharper focus questions about the past and the future'. In the wake of the criticism over the 'colonial-era' optics of their tour, many have called for an end to similar overseas trips by members of the royal family. Members of the Royal Family will do less tours overseas and focus on places where they feel they can make a real difference, a royal commentator has said. Pictured: The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge came under fire over the optics of this engagement in Trench Town Prince William, Duke of Cambridge is talking to locals on March 26, in Great Abaco, Bahamas Sunday Times Royal Editor Roya Nikkhah believes the tour ignited a rethink of how the royal family plans overseas visits in the future. Speaking on the BBC's Radio 4 Today programme, she said: 'I think it definitely will [spark a rethink] and to be honest I think that rethink had started before this tour got underway because I know that William thought long and hard about how to approach certain things. 'There have obviously been a few missteps. We had that extraordinary statement from him on Saturday night setting out the fact that he takes that on the chin and he wants to sort of look at things differently.' Asked if she felt there would be fewer trips overseas in the future, she added: 'I think thats definitely right and thats very much a legacy I suppose of the Queen who has been head of the commonwealth for so long and is the biggest, most travelled monarch of the modern age. Pictured: Using the Land Rover was meant as a tribute to The Queen but was labelled a 'throwback' to a visit by the Queen but the photo was widely criticised for being 'tone deaf' Pictured: The Duchess of Cambridge waves at children during a visit to Trench Town 'I think we will see fewer tours, to places where I think probably the younger royals feel they can have more impact and its not just a case of going there because they feel they have to.' After their tour ended, Prince William issued a lengthy statement which addressed growing republican sentiment in Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas - acknowledging it had brought into even sharper focus questions about the past and the future. The duke tacitly acknowledged the anti-royalist sentiment, in his extraordinary statement, saying that while he was committed to service, that involved not telling people what to do. It is about serving and supporting them in whatever way they think best, by using the platform we are lucky to have, he added. It is why tours such as this reaffirm our desire to serve the people of the Commonwealth and to listen to communities around the world. 'Who the Commonwealth chooses to lead its family in the future isnt what is on my mind. Barbados replaced the Queen as head of state in November during a ceremony witnessed by the Prince of Wales. Pictured: Charles during his visit to Barbados last November Charles and Camilla during their most recent tour of Ireland and Northern Ireland this month William and Kate's full post-tour statement Foreign tours are an opportunity to reflect. You learn so much. What is on the minds of Prime Ministers. The hopes and ambitions of school children. The day-to-day challenges faced by families and communities. I know that this tour has brought into even sharper focus questions about the past and the future. In Belize, Jamaica and The Bahamas, that future is for the people to decide upon. But we have thoroughly enjoyed spending time with communities in all three countries, understanding more about the issues that matter most to them. Catherine and I are committed to service. For us thats not telling people what to do. It is about serving and supporting them in whatever way they think best, by using the platform we are lucky to have. It is why tours such as this reaffirm our desire to serve the people of the Commonwealth and to listen to communities around the world. Who the Commonwealth chooses to lead its family in the future isnt what is on my mind. What matters to us is the potential the Commonwealth family has to create a better future for the people who form it, and our commitment to serve and support as best we can. Advertisement William is destined to be the king of Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas when the time comes, but his statement, and a speech he gave on Friday, indicate the future monarch is aware the changing political and cultural landscape may bring this to an end. Barbados replaced the Queen as head of state in November, and elected its first president during a ceremony witnessed by the Prince of Wales. And a minister from Belize's government told his parliament, a few days after the Cambridges left: 'Perhaps it is time for Belize to take the next step in truly owning our independence.' One walkabout led to heavily criticised pictures of the Duke and Duchess shaking hands with impoverished children through a fence in Trench Town, Jamaica. Further criticism came when the couple inspected a military parade in an open-topped Land Rover which had been used by the Queen in 1953. Royal insiders admitted the moment, designed as a homage to the Queen, had been poorly received. One said: It was a throwback to a bygone era and also impinged on the god-like status of the Queen. However, another senior royal insider indicated that Williams statement indicated the 39-year-old Prince was coming of age. They told the Mail on Sunday: William wanted to acknowledge that not everything on the tour landed the right way, but the couple are of the generation which learns from mistakes. You have to look like you know its not all worked, acknowledge the world has changed and react, not double down. He was showing that he understands that it cant be taken for granted that he will lead the Commonwealth you serve as long as the people want you to serve, you listen, accept their choices and change if you need to. Thats how the Commonwealth survives in the end, by not forcing anything. Advertisement Wherever she goes she always makes an incredible entrance, with throngs of adoring royalists cheering and dozens of TV cameras watching her every step. But today the 95-year-old Queen made a quieter approach as she arrived at Westminster Abbey via a side door as she tried to avoid too many steps. Her Majesty appeared inside the front of the iconic chamber and was part of a small procession that saw her guided to her seat by her disgraced son Prince Andrew. Earlier she made the 22-mile trip from Windsor Castle to Buckingham Palace, before swapping cars and travelling on to Westminster. The Queen was making her first public appearance in five months as she joined the rest of the Royal Family and other dignitaries at a memorial service in honour of her husband Prince Philip, who died last year. The Duke of Edinburgh, who was by his wife's side for more than seven decades, passed away at Windsor Castle in April, two months shy of his 100th birthday. LEAVING WINDSOR: She and her second eldest son Prince Andrew set off from the Berkshire Castle in a Range Rover for Buckingham Palace this morning LEAVING WINDSOR: Prince Andrew (left) leaves Windsor Castle with the Queen (right) this morning ahead of the service of thanksgiving for Philip LEAVING WINDSOR: The Duke of York turns to talk to his 95-year-old mother as they continue on their way to London The Monarch's route to Westminster Abbey was heavily debated ahead of the day amid the logistics of her being in Windsor rather than London and being less steady on her legs than in recent years. She and her second eldest son Prince Andrew set off from the Berkshire Castle in a Range Rover for Buckingham Palace this morning. There they swapped it for her Bentley state limousine and carried on to the Abbey, where they were met by thousands of cheering supporters as she arrived just in time for the ceremony. Police stopped the Westminster traffic before officers on motorcycles swept ahead of the Royal motorcade, made up of a Ranger Rover and Mercedes people carrier. A guard of honour saluted as the Queen's Bentley went past flying the Royal Standard. The vehicle then made a tight turn on to Poets' Yard entrance, where there were fewer steps for her to manoeuvre. ARRIVING AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE: They drive through the gates of Buckingham Palace as Royal watchers stand on and armed police stand guard The car was carefully parked as close to the door as possible, with the Queen sitting behind the driver to minimise the difficulty of her getting inside - and it was turned around while she was in the chamber. Her walking stick was spotted before she stepped out of the vehicle and entered Westminster Abbey. She held on to her son as they headed out of the car and walked through Poets' Corner towards her seat in the Abbey. She also kept her right hand on her walking stick, which she has used over the last few months to help her get around Windsor Castle. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. LEAVING BUCKINGHAM PALACE: There they swapped it for her state limousine and carried on to the Abbey, where they were met by thousands of cheering supporters LEAVING BUCKINGHAM PALACE: Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey LEAVING BUCKINGHAM PALACE: The Queen and Prince Andrew, Duke of York, arrive for the service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip today The Queen was surrounded by close family, friends, foreign royals and hundreds of charity workers in the remembrance of her beloved husband the Duke of Edinburgh at a poignant memorial service. Front and centre of the high profile occasion was the Duke of York, despite Andrew paying millions out of court earlier this month to settle a civil sexual assault case. As the service began, the Prince of Wales leaned over to the Queen and spoke to her briefly. The Queen delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses. Andrew, who stepped down from public life over his friendship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had a front row seat, sitting next to his brother the Earl of Wessex and across the aisle from his other siblings. AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY: The Queen was making her first public appearance in five months as she joined the Royal Family and other dignitaries at a memorial service in honour of her husband Prince Philip, who died last year. She is pictured walking with Prince Andrew entering the chamber AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY: Her Majesty appeared at the front of the iconic building and was part of a small procession that saw her guided to her seat by her disgraced son Prince Andrew before sitting down AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY: Despite her frailty, Queen Elizabeth II stands during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey today AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY: Her Majesty walked with the help of a stick but stood without support sat next to Charles, Camilla, Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. Across the aisle was Prince Andrew AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY: Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY: Her Majesty listens to the various eulogies to her husband at the Service of Remembrance held almost a year after his funeral Among those attending were Charles, the Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Countess of Wessex, the Princess Royal, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie. Prince George and Princess Charlotte were also present in honour of their great-grandfather - the first time they have attended a major public church service. Some 1,800 people packed the gothic church - in marked contrast to Philip's funeral where only 30 were permitted to attend amid Covid restrictions, with the Queen sat alone, masked in mourning. The monarch had been determined to make the appearance at the deeply personal and significant occasion on Tuesday in honour of her 'strength and stay' Philip - with her attendance only confirmed the same morning. Tuesday's service is the Queen's first major official engagement outside one of her homes for nearly six months, since she travelled to Cardiff to deliver a speech at the Welsh Senedd on October 14. David Rushforth from Worcestershire, a former Chief Petty Officer aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, who served between 1976 and 1979, was among those who attended today's memorial service at Westminster Abbey. He said: 'It was a wonderful service, a real fitting memorial. He was a fascinating character who I was fortunate to meet many times. 'He was a Naval man and his input on how Britannia should be managed in the days following the death of the Queen's father George VI was invaluable. 'It was also a very sad day, particularly for the Queen, but I think she looked good, all things considered and I hope she thought that the service was the right way to remember her husband.' LEAVING WESTMINSTER ABBEY: The Queen is spotted leaving the iconic Abbey and walking towards her state Bentley before getting in it and heading off with Andrew LEAVING WESTMINSTER ABBEY: The Duke of York helps his elderly mother into the luxury car as they headed away from the Abbey LEAVING WESTMINSTER ABBEY: Her Majesty gets into the Bentley as the door is held open for her on Tuesday afternoon LEAVING WESTMINSTER ABBEY: Her Majesty is pictured in the state limousine with her son Prince Andrew as they left the service on Tuesday afternoon LEAVING WESTMINSTER ABBEY: Her Majesty and Prince Andrew are pictured being driven away after the service in Westminster today LEAVING WESTMINSTER ABBEY: Her Majesty waves from her state limousine as she sits next to Prince Andrew today Sue Calvert, 67, joint chair of charity Action Medical Research, travelled to London from her home in Thirsk, North Yorkshire for this morning's service. She said: 'Prince Philip was patron of Action Medical Research for 70-years so I was honoured to be here to pay my last respects. I thought it was a very moving service and a very fitting tribute. 'I was a little worried at first because waiting for the service to begin, I was looking around for the Queen and I just couldn't see her. 'I thought she'd been unable to make it but a gentleman next to me pointed to where she had come in. The Queen had come through a different entrance and I was so emotional when I saw she had made it. 'I thought the choice of hymns was beautiful and listening to the National anthem gave me goosebumps.' The Right honourable Lord Bradley attended today's service in his guise as Pro Chancellor of the University of Salford, along with Festus Robert, the president of Salford's Student Union. Lord Bradley, 71, said: 'It was a very appropriate memorial which encapsulated his life and interests. Prince Philip served as the first Salford University Chancellor from 1967 to 1991. 'I met him on many occasions in my previous role as MP for Manchester Withington and I thought it was a beautiful service befitting of such a captivating character. Mr Robert, 30, added: 'It was a lovely morning, a moving service to someone who gave a lot to the University of Salford and to young people in general in the form of the Duke of Edinburgh award.' A Liberal Senator has launched an extraordinary attack on Prime Minister Scott Morrison describing him as unfit to be PM, a bully and an autocrat. Concetta Fierravanti-Wells laid into Mr Morrison during a late night appearance on the Senate floor on Tuesday evening, hours after the Budget was handed down. Speaking under the protection of parliamentary privilege, Ms Fierravanti-Wells said: 'He (the Prime Minister) is adept at running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds, lacking a moral compass and having no conscience. 'In my public life, I have met ruthless people. Morrison tops the list, followed closely by (party powerbroker and Immigration Minister Alex) Hawke. 'Morrison is not fit to be Prime Minister and Hawke is certainly not fit to be a minister.' Ms Fierravanti-Wells was recently dropped to an unwinnable spot on the Coalition's Senate ticket for the Federal election. The election date is expected to be announced in days, meaning her 17-year parliamentary career is rapidly coming to an end - at least for now. During her spray, the senator claimed Liberal supporters are despairing at the party's prospects, 'and they blame Morrison for this'. The senator's speech was an unwelcome surprise for Prime Minister Scott Morrison (above, watching Josh Frydenberg's Budget speech) 'It is his way or the highway - (he's) an autocrat, a bully who has no moral compass,' she said. The outgoing Liberal also told Parliament Mr Morrison made racist comments during his preselection for the seat of Cook in 2007. 'I'm advised that there are several statutory declarations to attest to racial comments made by Morrison at the time that we "can't have a Lebanese person in Cook".' Ms Fierravanti-Wells also claimed there is a 'putrid stench of corruption emanating from the NSW division' of the party. She alleged Mr Morrison and Mr Hawke had deliberately contrived a crisis in the NSW branch of the Liberal party for the past year so they could have their own candidates installed. 'I am appalled (party president Philip Ruddock) has allowed Morrison to bully his way to a situation where the next election has been put at risk all to save Hawke's career.' Mr Hawke was facing a preselection challenge for his own seat of Mitchell but was re-endorsed. Tasmanian Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson was left stunned by the MP's evening tirade. 'Holy smokes,' he said. Senator Fierravanti-Wells' Senate spray cast a pall over the government on an evening where the Earlier this week, Senator Fierravanti-Wells took aim at the 'Liberal sisterhood' for failing to speak out against toxic parliamentary culture. She referenced the death of Labor senator Kimberley Kitching to a heart attack at age 52 and how she was ostracised by Labor's so-called 'mean girls'. 'We both had factional enemies who desperately wanted to see us defeated and they worked very hard at it,' she said. 'We were both outspoken and not constrained by prevalent groupthink within our political parties.' New evidence has emerged Vladimir Putin and his highest ranking commanders are running the war in Ukraine from top secret nuclear bunkers. Movements of planes used by top Kremlin officials show Putin may be in a hideaway near Surgut, in western Siberia, it has been claimed. His defence minister Sergei Shoigu - who has been mysteriously absent for several weeks, sparking rumours about his health - is believed to be in a bunker near Ufa in the Urals, 725 miles east of Moscow, according to investigative journalist Christo Grozev. This theory is backed up by his daughter Ksenia Shoigu, 31, visiting Ufa for an estimated three days from March 22, with mounting speculation the defence minister is suffering from heart problems. She also abruptly barred public access to her Instagram where she had posed with her baby in the blue and yellow colours of Ukraine. The suspected use of the high security nuclear bunkers is concerning as it leads to suggestions Putin may be prepared to deploy nuclear weapons, a move that would lead to inevitable reprisals. Vladimir Putin and defence minister Sergei Shougi at the Victory Day parade in Moscow, in 2019. Both may now be operating the Ukraine war from bunkers, flight tracking information suggests Investigative journalist Christo Grozev (pictured centre), believes there is enough evidence to suggest Putin and his highest ranking commanders are operating out of bunkers in eastern Russia Movements of planes used by top Kremlin officials show Putin may be in a hideaway near Surgut in western Siberia, it is claimed. Meanwhile his defence minister Sergei Shoigu - who has been mysteriously absent for several weeks, sparking rumours about his health - is believed to be in a bunker near Ufa in the Urals Putin officials warn he 'has the right' to use devastating nuclear weapons Vladimir Putin has the right to launch nukes if he is provoked by NATO over the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, a Russian ambassador to the UN claimed last week. Just hours after another Kremlin spokesman warned of possible atomic war, Dmitry Polyanskiy sparked further fears by hinting there would be a seismic response a to any direct involvement in the conflict from the West. 'If Russia is provoked by NATO, if Russia is attacked by NATO we are a nuclear power, why not?' he told Sky News at the UN in New York. 'I don't think it's the right thing to be saying. But it's not the right thing to threaten Russia, and to try to interfere. 'So when you're dealing with a nuclear power, of course, you have to calculate all the possible outcomes of your behaviour.' The top diplomat also continued to dismiss claims that Kremlin forces have carried out war crimes, and suggested evidence of Ukrainian cities being destroyed by Russian missiles was 'fake news'. 'We said from the very beginning, that our military is not a threat for the civilian population Ukraine,' he added. It came after Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov also refused a day earlier to rule out using nuclear weapons, claiming Russian doctrine allows the President to use such force to see off 'existential threat'. Peskov was asked three times on CNN whether he could definitively rule out the possibility of the Russian leader pushing the button - and three times refused to give a straight answer. Advertisement Grozev - who has links to British investigative outlet Bellingcat - said: 'I am absolutely sure that Shoigu is in a bunker. 'Tracking the movement of his plane, we see very frequent flights to Ufa. 'Knowing that there are also protected bunkers in this region, this gives an obvious answer about his place of residence.' In an interview with Ukraine-24 channel, he told TV anchor Yevgeny Kiselyov: 'This is our very justified version. 'I believe in it, and I consider it to be a purely analytical conclusion. There can't be any other conclusion. 'If the Kremlin's war strategy assumes a nuclear strike - and it does - as [Dmitry] Peskov [Putin's spokesman] himself said on CNN a couple of days ago, then there cannot be any other version. 'If there is a decision of a potential nuclear strike, they can't hide the military leadership afterwards. 'They have to be hidden beforehand. 'I am absolutely certain he is in a so-called bunker, and by trailing the plane he usually flies, we see very frequent, almost daily flights to Ufa. 'Knowing this region has those very protected bunkers this leads us to the obvious conclusion. ' He believes Putin has another bunker elsewhere. 'Most likely he is elsewhere, because we are seeing other flights, and they are more classified than the flight that goes to Ufa. 'These are state planes, and they switch off their transponders somewhere around Surgut.' This is Russia's oil capital and is some 1,800 miles northeast of Moscow. 'It looks like the final phase is quite secretive, and most likely there is a more elite bunker there, with the elite of the government.' Previously there have been claims Putin had moved his close relatives to a bunker in the Altai Mountains, some 1,100 miles southeast of Surgut and 2,360 miles east of Moscow. Grozev also suggested that Russia's Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Valery Gerasimov, is operating from a bunker. Coincidentally, the defence minister's daughter Ksenia Shoigu seems to have been in Ufa between March 22 and 25. Defence minister Sergei Shoigu (pictured) - who has been mysteriously absent for several weeks, sparking rumours about his health - is believed to be in a bunker near Ufa in the Urals, 725 miles east of Moscow, according to investigative journalist Christo Grozev Movements of planes used by top Kremlin officials show Putin may be in a hideaway near Surgut in western Siberia, it is claimed. (Pictured: Abandoned Soviet bunker in Surgut) The Altayskoye Podvorie resort, built by Gazprom, in the Altai Mountains. The resort allegedly contains one of Putin's personal dachas It was previously alleged that Putin's family have been moved to a huge underground bunker buried in the Altai Mountains (Altayskoye Podvorie resort pictured) Coincidentally, the defence minister's daughter Ksenia Shoigu (pictured) seems to have been in Ufa between March 22 and 25, where her father is believed to be operating out of a bunker 'Today we are in Ufa, on a working visit,' she posted on her Telegram channel on March 22. Local newspapers reported that the financier was visiting 'at the personal invitation of the head of region on March 24 and 25'. She is president of the Russian Triathlon Federation, and promotes a charity called the Hero League. She visited the Patriot military park under construction near Ufa. One theory is that Putin took time out in the pandemic in November or December 2020 when he visited Sarov and laster Tobolsk - which is several hundred miles from Surgut - to inspect emergency bunkers. Advertisement A 192ft superyacht owned by a Russian businessman with an 'infinite wine cellar' and fresh-water swimming pool has been seized in east London as part of sanctions against Russia, Grant Shapps has announced. UK officials boarded 38million Phi - named after the mathematical concept - in Canary Wharf on Tuesday. The vessel is the first to be detained in Britain under sanctions imposed due to the war in Ukraine. Phi made her maiden voyage last year after being built in the Netherlands. The vessel was in London for a superyacht awards ceremony and was due to depart at noon today. The Transport Secretary said: 'Today we've detained a 38 million superyacht and turned an icon of Russia's power and wealth into a clear and stark warning to Putin and his cronies. 'Detaining the Phi proves, yet again, that we can and will take the strongest possible action against those seeking to benefit from connections to Putin's regime.' UK officials boarded 38million Phi - named after the mathematical concept - in Canary Wharf on Tuesday. The vessel is the first to be detained in Britain under sanctions imposed due to the war in Ukraine Phi made her maiden voyage last year after being built in the Netherlands. The vessel was in London for a superyacht awards ceremony and was due to depart at noon today Mr Shapps said: 'Today we've detained a 38 million superyacht and turned an icon of Russia's power and wealth into a clear and stark warning to Putin and his cronies' The Transport Secretary posted a picture of himself, above, stood in front of the yacht on Twitter, writing: 'This Government will continue to take robust action against anyone benefiting from connections to Putin's regime' The Department for Transport (DfT) said it worked with the National Crime Agency (NCA) and the Border Force Maritime Investigation Bureau to identify and detain the vessel. It refused to reveal the name of her owner, stating that he is 'a Russian businessman'. The department described Phi's ownership as 'deliberately well hidden'. It follows two private jets belonging to Eugene Shvidler, a billionaire oil businessman, being seized by UK authorities on Saturday after he was sanctioned over ties with his business partner Roman Abramovich. Phi's owner is not currently subject to UK sanctions. But, under present regulations, a ship owned, controlled, chartered or operated by persons connected with Russia may be subject to a detention direction by the Transport Secretary. Intelligence work by the Cell - supported by colleagues from Border Force Maritime Intelligence Bureau - identified the ultimate owner of the vessel. The information was passed to Mr Shapps who today ordered the first ever detention of a superyacht in UK waters. As a result NCA officers issued the notice of detention. Andy Devine, of the NCA, said: 'Today's activity demonstrates the NCA's ability to react at pace. 'We have surged officers to establish the Combatting Kleptocracy Cell, and the results of this are already bearing fruit. Mr Shapps (above) said: 'It was here for refit, won't be going anywhere, and it's just another indication that we will not stand by whilst Putin's cronies are allowed to sail around the world in these kinds of yachts and people in Ukraine are suffering' The Department for Transport (DfT) said it worked with the National Crime Agency and the Border Force Maritime Investigation Bureau to identify and detain the vessel She is registered to a company based in the Caribbean dual-island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, and carries a Maltese flag 'The NCA plays a vital role in targeting suspect assets, pursuing enablers of illicit wealth and supporting government partners in the delivery of the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.' Phi - a vibrant bright blue super-yacht - is 192ft long and features what is described as an 'infinite wine cellar' and a freshwater swimming pool. She is double the size of the other boats docked around it at Canary Wharf. She is registered to a company based in the Caribbean dual-island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, and carries a Maltese flag 'to hide its origins'. The DfT said it is 'looking at a number of other vessels' and hopes its 'strong stance sends an example to international partners'. Mr Shapps said: 'Now the ship is being held, it won't be going anywhere. 'It was here for refit, won't be going anywhere, and it's just another indication that we will not stand by whilst Putin's cronies are allowed to sail around the world in these kinds of yachts and people in Ukraine are suffering. Phi - a vibrant bright blue super-yacht - is 192ft long and features what is described as an 'infinite wine cellar' and a freshwater swimming pool. She is double the size of the other boats docked around it at Canary Wharf Phi's owner is not currently subject to UK sanctions. But, under current regulations, a ship owned, controlled, chartered or operated by persons connected with Russia may be subject to a detention direction by the Transport Secretary 'When you see what he's doing to Ukraine, when you see what he's doing to people's lives, it can't be right to have a yacht like this here in London, able to just sail away and that is why we've impounded it, and denied it ability to go anywhere right now, and it's another indication of how seriously we take these matters.' The move comes after Italian police seized the world's biggest sailing yacht, the 470-foot Sailing Yacht A, from Russian billionaire Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko, the prime minister's office said on March 12. Triesete, designed by Philippe Starck and built by Nobiskrug in German, was mentioned in Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech of March 5, 1946, when the war time leader outlined the front line of the Cold War. A spokesperson for Melnichenko, Alex Andreev, said the businessman had 'no relation to the tragic events in Ukraine. He has no political affiliations'. Russian oligarch Igor Sechin also saw his 289-ft 'Amore Vero' - meaning 'True Love' - seized by French custom officers near Marseille after being sanctioned by the European Union. The move comes after Italian police seized the world's biggest sailing yacht, the 470-foot Sailing Yacht A, from Russian billionaire Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko (pictured right, with Abramovich), the prime minister's office said on March 12 Russian oligarch Igor Sechin (pictured above) also saw his 289-ft 'Amore Vero' - meaning 'True Love' - seized by French custom officers near Marseille after being sanctioned by the European Union The Solaris is not as large as the Eclipse, a 533ft vessel. Abramovich has previously owned at least five other colossal yachts, with 162ft Sussurro the most recent to change hands around 2017 Meanwhile, fellow oligarch Abramovich saw one of his superyachts arrive safely in Montenegro earlier this month, where it is beyond the reach of UK, EU or US authorities. His biggest yacht, Eclipse, slipped through the Strait of Gibraltar at 1.30pm, ensuring it remained outside the territory's waters. Abramovich cannot sell any of his UK assets including Chelsea FC without a special licence that can only be granted by ministers and the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI). Any cash he holds in the UK is frozen in accounts if he has not been able to transfer funds abroad, while his shares on the London Stock Exchange cannot be sold and will pay no dividends. But despite these serious allegations, the law doesn't allow ministers to take away Chelsea, properties, yachts, planes, shares and cash. Currently, the Government has powers to freeze UK assets like houses, but it cannot seize them and put them to a different use. The rules in place prevent oligarchs from renting out or selling property they own, hiring someone to clean it or even paying a power company to connect it to the electricity supply or pay a bill. Advertisement A 33-year-old French cryptocurrency expert who was shot at point-blank range by a robber trying to steal his $450,000 Richard Mille watch says he believes he was targeted and followed for hours or days before being ambushed outside his Manhattan hotel. Pierrick Jamaux told DailyMail.com he is shocked by how dangerous the city has become and would never have visited had he known how much it had changed since he lived there 10 years ago. The entrepreneur, who was visiting from Hong Kong with his Australian model wife, Sarah Watts, 26, was getting out of an Uber at the Fifty Hotel and Suites in Midtown when he was shot five times on March 18. Speaking from his hospital bed in New York, entrepreneur Jamaux told DailyMail.com: 'Given the fact he was waiting there when we arrived and also the violence of the crime, I believe he followed me. 'I believe they found me somewhere, then they tracked me for a few hours or days to figure out what I do, where I go. I think it was organized.' Pierrick Jamaux, 33, (pictured inside the ambulance) was shot five times in the legs during an attempted robbery outside his hotel in NYC The NYPD has released these images of the man who shot Jamaux during an attempted robbery in Midtown Manhattan The entrepreneur was visiting from Hong Kong with his model wife, Sarah Watts, 26 (pictured together). At the time of the robbery he was wearing a $450,000 Richard Mille watch (pictured) The attacked occurred on March 18 as the couple and another woman got out of an Uber outside the Fifty Hotel and Suites in Manhattan He believes the armed robber researched the watch he was wearing, which is worth an eye-watering $450,000, before launching his attack. He added: 'It cannot be a coincidence because it happened between the Uber and the door of the hotel - there is two meters of distance. The guy was waiting for me there is no doubt about it. 'He started shooting me even before I understood he wanted my watch and from then I was just pushing the gun down and he kept shooting my legs, it was crazy. 'I know he shot five times but I think some of them went through both legs. Three of them are point-blank shooting. I have a lot of bullet holes.' A 25-year-old female friend of the couple jumped on the robber's back and began to choke him. 'She is one of my really good friends, she is fiery,' Jamaux joked, adding that she'd had a few drinks. 'She jumped on his back and she did a triangle-like choke like in MMA.' The bullets shattered his femur bone and severed his femoral artery, and he quickly passed out in the street as he began to bleed out. The suspect was unable to wrangle the pricey watch from Jamaux's wrist because its bracelet security mechanism. It is not clear whether the watch came with the feature or it was added. The attempted robber got away with a female accomplice in a black four door sedan BMW, the NYPD says. Miraculously, Jamaux survived the shooting, and credits New York hospitals' experience with tackling shootings for his recovery. Jamaux has since undergone six surgeries but predicts he won't be leaving hospital anytime soon. Jamaux works in Hong Kong for Hi, an online banking planform dealing in cryptocurrency, savings and investments Jamaux lived in New York for a year about a decade ago and said the city felt safe at the time. Often on his business trips, he hires a bodyguard, but didn't know he would need one in the Big Apple. He is pictured here with his wife 'You don't need to be a genius to realize New York is very very dangerous right now. I don't think it's safe for anyone. There are too many people who have nothing to lose,' Jamaux told DailyMail.com 'They hit my femoral artery - it's something where you usually die in 5 minutes - it was a major surgery to save my life,' he said. 'If you are going to get shot, the US is the best place to survive a gunshot wound. 'I feel like the doctors really know what they are doing. I think they unfortunately have a lot of practice. 'I was surprised when I talked to one of the doctors here. I said "does it happen often?" and he was like "yes" without hesitation.' Jamaux lived in New York for a year about a decade ago and said the city felt safe at the time. Often on his business trips, he hires a bodyguard, but didn't know he would need one in the Big Apple. 'Because I thought New York was safe, I did not think I needed any security in New York,' he explained. 'A few days before the shooting we walked for one block around midnight and I did not feel safe at all. 'If I knew New York had changed like that, I would never have come here. I probably would have diverted my business trip and stayed in Europe. 'You don't need to be a genius to realize New York is very very dangerous right now. I don't think it's safe for anyone. There are too many people who have nothing to lose.' Jamaux works in Hong Kong for Hi, an online banking planform dealing in cryptocurrency, savings and investments. Police are seen at the scene of Jamaux's shooting in Midtown Manhattan on the evening of March 18 Jamaux, 33, (pictured inside the ambulance) was rushed to hospital after the shooting. He almost died when one of the bullets severed his femoral artery The robber got away with a female accomplice in a black four door sedan BMW, the NYPD says. The Department released this video of the getaway vehicle The entrepreneur has also worked in Paris, where he hails from, New York City and London before he settled in Hong Kong to work with the cryptocurrency company in 2019. Jamaux was sporting a Richard Mille watch when the attack took place. The watches cost on average, $200,000, with some designs fetching for as much as $1.3 million. Jamaux bought his for $150,000 in 2020 as an investment, and now it is now worth a cool $450,000. He was staying at the Fifty Hotel and Suites on 155 E 50th St where rooms range in price from around $350 to $1,000 per night. The attempted robbery comes amid a dangerous crime wave in the once-safe city. In February there was a 60 percent spike in incidents when compared to the same period last year. The city's latest crime figures show there were 9,138 incidents last month, as opposed to 5,759 in February 2021 - with double-digit surges in nearly every major category. There were 32 murders in February - three more than the same month last year. Multiple other categories saw spikes, including car theft, which soared by nearly 105 percent; grand larceny, which jumped nearly 80 percent over the previous year; robberies, which surged 56 percent; a 44 percent bump in burglaries and a 22 percent spike in assaults. Rapes also saw a terrifying 35 percent rise. During the month of February, the NYPD reported a 58.7 percent increase in total crime Overall crime in the city is up more than 45 percent since the same period last year Mayor Eric Adams on Sunday said the spike in crime across New York City has made the Big Apple a 'laughingstock' in need of a 'wartime general' to tackle the ongoing problem. Adams, speaking at the annual NYPD Holy Name Society communion Mass and breakfast, condemned the lawlessness throughout the city. He blamed petty crime and homelessness as contributing factors to the widespread 'dysfunction.' 'Anything goes in the City of New York,' Adams said. 'The most important city on the globe has become the laughingstock of the globe. And the dysfunctionality of our city has cascaded throughout the entire country.' A mysterious, alien-like creature has washed up on a popular beach, leaving locals stunned. The strange creature, which was discovered on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, this week, appears to have a reptilian-like skull, flabby limbs, a long tail and claws. Local resident Alex Tan first discovered the creature on the shore of Cotton Tree beach during his morning beach walk. A mysterious, alien-like creature has washed up on a beach on the Sunshine Coast, leaving locals stunned He shared a video of his encounter with the unknown animal to his Instagram page and began to provide a guess as to what it could be. 'I've stumbled across something weird,' he said to the camera. 'This is like one of those things you see when people claim they've found aliens.' As Alex provides a glimpse of the creature on camera, flies can be seen crawling on top of it and buzzing around it. 'It looks like a de-haired possum, but different to anything I've seen,' Alex continued before labelling it 'extraterrestrial'. Those who have reacted to the clip on social media believe it could be either a joey kangaroo or wallaby due to its features and small size. The strange creature appears to have a reptilian-like skull, flabby limbs, a long tail and claws Local resident Alex Tan (pictured) first discovered the animal on the shore of Maroochydore beach during his morning beach walk Those who have reacted to the clip on social media believe it could be either a joey kangaroo or wallaby due to its features and small size It's not the first time a strange creature has washed up on the shore of an Australian beach or found in the nearby water. A mysterious brain-like creature was discovered last month at Warriewood Beach on Sydney's Northern Beaches. The creature had left locals mystified, before being identified as a wandering sea anemone. After stumbling across the bizarre blob-like critter the woman uploaded a photo to Facebook in hopes someone could identify it. 'Hey anyone know what this is? Washed up at Warriewood Beach this morning? Approximately 15cm x 10cm,' she captioned the image. A mysterious brain-like creature (pictured) was discovered last month at Warriewood Beach on Sydney 's Northern Beaches. The peculiar red and green animal was spotted by a local during a walk on Warriewood Beach (pictured) on Sydney's Northern Beaches last month Budding wildlife experts were quick to share their thoughts on the brain-like creature with some comparing its consistency to kidney or baked beans. One commenter finally identified the mysterious blob as a 'wandering sea anemone' also known as a 'swimming anemone' or 'brain anemone'. The specie is the largest of the anemone family and is commonly spotted inside rock pools across Sydney due to the its ability to move about freely. The anemone can crawl along the seafloor or drift with the current but is most likely to be found attached to rocks or algae. The swimming anemone can be red, yellow, orange, blue or even striped and is an agile predator when compared to other species. The gelatinous pink blob was photographed by Damien Said just north of Hervey Bay in Queensland in July, 2020 The mysterious creature washed ashore north of Hervey Bay in Queensland (pictured) The anemone is widespread in Australian waters, from Western Australia to NSW, with the odd-looking creature also cropping up in New Zealand. In July 2020, scientists were left baffled when another alien-like sea creature washed ashore at a popular beach just north of Hervey Bay in Queensland. One of the images was set taken beside the photographer's foot to show the sea creature's enormous size The pink blob-like creature was photographed by Damien Said. Beachgoers struggled to identify the mottled pink and white sea creature after images were posted to Facebook by environmental conservation organisation SCF Australia. 'Can anyone ID this?' they wrote. Three images were posted alongside the request for information of a translucent jellyfish lookalike. One of the images was set taken beside the photographer's foot to show the sea creature's enormous size. Many social media users were stumped and noted its 'alien' features, but a few people suggested it may be a type of nudibranch - or sea slug. The invertebrate species are bottom dwelling creatures with more than 2,000 known species. 'This is a hooded nudibranch of the genus Melibe. What an amazing animal!' one person posted. Advertisement Ex-Formula One boss Max Mosley killed himself by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun in his Chelsea bedroom after learning he had weeks to live following months of treatment for cancer, a coroner heard today. Mr Mosley, whose father Sir Oswald Mosley was the wartime leader of the British Union of Fascists and a Hitler sympathiser, was an outspoken president of the FIA, Formula 1's governing body, for 16 years between 1993 and 2009. The tycoon, a qualified barrister and former racing driver, later became an enemy of the free press and backed calls for stricter controls on the media after Rupert Murdoch's tabloid News of the World published photos and video of him at a sadomasochistic orgy with five prostitutes in 2008. An inquest at Westminster Coroner's Court today heard that he was told he had just 'weeks' to live despite months of treatment for a type of lymphoma. The chronic bowel and bladder pain he was experiencing could only be reduced with palliative care but not cured. A neighbour and his housekeeper called 999 after they discovered a note on his bedroom door, stating 'do not enter, call the police', the remote inquest attended by witnesses and family heard. The night before, Mr Mosley had told his housekeeper that he had 'had enough' and was going to take his own life, before he had a final meal with his wife Jean, who lived in a separate house a couple of doors away. Officers discovered the body of Mr Mosley with injuries consistent with a gunshot. A second note found on his bedside table was barely legible, due to the large amounts of blood, but the few words officers could make out were 'I had no choice', Westminster Coroner's Court heard. Former Formula One tycoon Max Mosley, pictured in March 2018, killed himself by shooting himself in the head at his Chelsea home Ex-Formula One boss Max Mosley killed himself by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun in his Chelsea bedroom after learning he had weeks to live following months of treatment for cancer, a coroner heard today Mr Mosley, whose father Sir Oswald Mosley was the wartime leader of the British Union of Fascists and a Hitler sympathiser, was an outspoken president of the FIA, Formula 1's governing body, for 16 years between 1993 and 2009 In a record of his last final moments, his personal assistant of 20 years Henry Alexander said he had gone over to Mr Mosley's home at his request at around 3pm the day before he took his own life. He said: 'He was sat in an armchair in a despairing way. He spoke to me and said I'd been amazing and thanking me. 'He said he'd had enough, had intentions of killing himself. I begged him to reconsider and said, 'please, there must be another way'. 'He said he'd made up his mind. When I pleaded with him, [and] asked him if he could give it 24 hours, he said 'why?'. Mr Alexander said he returned home and sent him texts saying how important he was to his life, which was echoed in his partner's Paul texts that were also sent to Mr Mosley, in which he responded 'thank you'. He later said he last saw him through the window making his way to his wife's house a couple of doors down from his own. Detective Constable Ben Benlounes, who gave evidence at the hearing, said Mr Mosley had dinner with his wife at around 7pm. He said: 'She described him as being in great pain, and he did not eat much. 'He returned home and he called her to say he was inside the property. Mosley's neighbour and housekeeper called 999 after they discovered a note on his bedroom door, stating 'do not enter, call the police', the remote inquest attended by witnesses and family heard. Above: The home in Chelsea where he was found dead Mosley (right) pictured standing in front of a Ferrari car on the grid before the start of the British F1 Grand Prix in 2009 'She described him as being very frail and he did not know where to turn to.. He had been too ill and he had very little quality of life.' The following day, Mr Alexander said he accessed Mr Mosley's house via his basement flat after 8am. Mosley's battle with the press after S&M story Mosley was featured on the front page of the News of the World after it discovered he was having a sadomasochistic sex session. The newspaper had reported it as a 'sick Nazi orgy' but Mr Justice Eady ruled in court that he found no evidence of Nazi themes. He also said there was no public interest defence in the clandestine recording of the session. Mosley - under the name of Mike - had walked to a 2million riverside flat which he rented for a year on London's Chelsea embankment with 2,500 cash in his pocket to pay the five prostitutes. The main dominatrix, a blonde referred to as Woman A, had arrived earlier with whips and uniforms including a modern Luftwaffe jacket. Dressed in her German military uniform, she gave Mr Mosley a 'judicial' which Mr Justice Eady explained in his judgment is a 'very common form of role-play on the S&M scene'. Mr Mosley's 'sentence' involved him being ordered to undress and given a 'medical inspection', including his head being examined for lice. In his judgment, Mr Justice Eady quoted from the News of the World's report of what happened, which was headlined 'F1 Boss Has Sick Nazi Orgy With 5 Hookers'. It said Mr Mosley lay naked and trussed up in chains as one of the women beat his backside with a cane until he bled. Mr Mosley's masochistic punishment over, he then proceeded to take a turn as a sadist. He beat two prostitutes wearing striped prison uniforms, counting out the lashes in German. But Mr Justice Eady, Britain's top privacy judge at the time, said it was clear that Mr Mosley 'threw himself into his role with considerable enthusiasm' and it was all 'no doubt interesting to the public'. But he concluded Mr Mosley's 'unconventional' sex life which he had indulged in for some 45 years was not genuinely a matter of public interest. And he ruled that there was no Nazi element to the orgy, as the newspaper had claimed. He ruled: 'There was bondage, beating and domination which seem to be typical of S and M behaviour. But there was no public interest or other justification for the clandestine recording, for the publication of the resulting information and still photographs, or for the placing of the video extracts on the News of the World website all of this on a massive scale.' Advertisement He said he sent Mr Mosley a text asking him if he wanted breakfast upstairs. 'I rang him and it went to voicemail. I went upstairs and there was a note attached to the door reading 'do not enter' and 'call the police,' Mr Alexander said. 'I dialled 101 and then called 999. I did not hear any unusual noises coming from the house.' DC Benlounes said he arrived at the scene at approximately 10.15am and spoke with the acting inspector. He said: 'During that time, the family's doctor exited the car to say Mr Mosley had a large lymphoma which had been irritating the bladder. 'He did say that the consultation was he may have two to three weeks left and this could have been the reason why he killed himself.' The officer confirmed there were no signs of anything suspicious or forced entry and that Mr Mosley had possession of a gun licence with four guns in the property. He said: 'On the chest of drawers there was a suicide note which was covered in blood. The writing was faint but I could read, 'I had no choice.'' Senior Coroner Dr Fiona Wilcox said: 'On May 24, 2021, police were called to the address of Mr Mosely, attended, and found him lying on his bed with a gun in the vicinity. 'He suffered significant injuries consistent with gunshot wound.' The court heard how Mr Mosley developed diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a cancer affecting immune cells, in 2019 and 'explored all treatment options' The inquest also heard a written statement from Dr Christopher McNamara, a consultant haemotologist who first saw Mr Mosley in October 2019. He said he had recommended a course of chemotherapy for prostate cancer. Dr McNamara said: 'At the end of the therapy he had refractory disease. 'Over the next nine months, he tried a range of different treatment options - some of these were prescribed by myself and undertaken by Mr Mosley against my advice. 'This included proton beam therapy and surgical therapy. During treatment, it was also discussed there was risk of developing a fistula. There was an enormous effort to try to prevent this. 'Mr Mosley arrived at a point at the beginning of April when there was a shift away from treating aggressively and more towards controlling the disease and quality of life. I referred Mr Mosley to palliative care colleagues.' He added: 'Max had a terminal illness and accepted this would not be cured. 'The treatment which had ben given to him recently was meant to control the illness. A fistula developed and he was extremely upset because of his quality of life which left him uncomfortable. 'Mr Mosley had expressed ideas of committing suicide to myself and other colleagues and had been referred to appropriate colleagues. 'He never expressed a plan of doing this and always said the problem was that his wife would not accept this. 'He also indicated his affairs had been in order.' Dr Rasha Al-Qurainy, who led his palliative care, said that Mr Mosley never gave any indication of suicide ideation. Max Mosley seen at the wheel of a race car back in 1968, when he started as a driver before his meteoric rise in the sport Mosley was survived by his wife Jean, who he married in Chelsea in 1960 (pictured left). He was the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the odious Blackshirt fascist leader and Hitler sympathiser. Right: Mosley is seen with his father and mother, Lady Diana Mosley, in 1962 Giving live evidence, she said: 'He was talkative, a very pleasant gentleman. We were there for 45 minutes and talked a lot about his physical symptoms and other things like that. 'He indicated no plans to end his own life. 'On the contrary that he said he had plans to renovate the home in Gloucestershire, he was still seeking treatment possibly in the US, possibly in the UK, and others matters that he told me that he had plans to engage in.' Emma Mosley, Mr Mosley's daughter-in-law, gave a written statement paying tribute. She said: 'Mr Mosley died after a long battle with cancer. He was a barrister and amateur racing car driver. 'Mr Moslely identified his major achievement as FIA president, the promotion of road safety by the European New Car Assessment programme and the increased safety and the use of green technologies in Formula 1.' Mr Mosley was enormously influential in the world of motorsport and stepped away from his role in 2009 after 16 years at the helm. Pictured: The tycoon in 2015 In 2018, allegations emerged that he published a racist campaign leaflet in support of his father's Union movement in a 1961 by-election which linked non-white immigrants with diseases such as tuberculosis, VD and leprosy. Max Mosley successfully sued over this News of the World exclusive in 2008 Mr Mosley said he did not 'recognise' the leaflet and it was 'not something I would have ever wished to be associated with'. His parents - Sir Oswald Mosley and Lady Diana Mitford - had a wedding attended by Hitler at the home of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. Mr Mosley's parents were both jailed shortly after he was born for being Nazi sympathisers during the Second World War. Their secret wedding was even attended by Hitler and hosted in the home of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels in Berlin in 1936. Mr Mosley was sent to school in Germany for two years where he learned to speak fluent German. On his return to England, he spent a year at Millfield, a prestigious international boarding school, and then later went on to the University of Oxford, graduating with a degree in physics in 1961. He married wife Jean, the daughter of a South London policeman, at Chelsea Registry Office in June 1960. After qualifying as a barrister, Mr Mosley became involved in motorsports and made the dangerous sport safer. He went on to build F1 into a global mega-brand alongside ex-F1 chief executive Bernie Ecclestone. As president of motorsport's governing body, the Oxford University-educated Briton oversaw the stunning global spread of F1, with new races in Asia and the Middle East. But he was also in charge at the time of the tragic death of star driver Ayrton Senna in 1994, multiple scandals and furious squabbling within the sport about its astronomic costs and the distribution of its massive revenues. Mr Mosley said his greatest achievement was making the dangerous sport safer after the death of Senna, Brazil's beloved three-time world champion. Left to right: Max Mosley, Flavio Briatore, Bernie Ecclestone, and Ronaldo pose on the grid of the Monaco racetrack, 2003 Max Mosley and his wife Jean at Chelsea Register Office in 1960. The ex-F1 tycoon is survived by his wife He won his 2008 privacy case against the News of the World after it it printed photographs and published video of his involvement in a sadomasochistic sex session. It was reported by the newspaper as a 'sick Nazi orgy' but Justice Eady found no evidence of Nazi themes in his judgement. He also said there was no public interest defence in the clandestine recording of the session. On the afternoon of March 28, 2008, Mr Mosley calling himself 'Mike' walked to a 2million riverside flat which he rented for a year on London's Chelsea embankment with 2,500 cash in his pocket to pay the five prostitutes. The main dominatrix, a blonde referred to as Woman A, had arrived earlier with whips and uniforms including a modern Luftwaffe jacket. Dressed in her German military uniform, she gave Mr Mosley a 'judicial' which Mr Justice Eady explained in his judgment is a 'very common form of role-play on the S&M scene'. Mr Mosley's 'sentence' involved him being ordered to undress and given a 'medical inspection', including his head being examined for lice. In his judgment, Mr Justice Eady quoted from the News of the World's report of what happened, which was headlined 'F1 Boss Has Sick Nazi Orgy With 5 Hookers'. It said Mr Mosley lay naked and trussed up in chains as one of the women beat his backside with a cane until he bled. Mr Mosley's masochistic punishment over, he then proceeded to take a turn as a sadist. He beat two prostitutes wearing striped prison uniforms, counting out the lashes in German. Mr Justice Eady, Britain's top privacy judge at the time, said it was clear that Mr Mosley 'threw himself into his role with considerable enthusiasm' and it was all 'no doubt interesting to the public'. But he concluded Mr Mosley's 'unconventional' sex life which he had indulged in for some 45 years was not genuinely a matter of public interest. And he ruled that there was no Nazi element to the orgy, as the newspaper had claimed. 'There was bondage, beating and domination which seem to be typical of S and M behaviour,' he said. But there was no public interest or other justification for the clandestine recording, for the publication of the resulting information and still photographs, or for the placing of the video extracts on the News of the World website all of this on a massive scale. 'Of course, I accept that such behaviour is viewed by some people with distaste and moral disapproval, but in the light of modern rights-based jurisprudence that does not provide any justification for the intrusion on the personal privacy of the Claimant.' Engineering team principals Max Mosley (later FIA president), Alan Rees and Robin Herd with the Ford Cosworth V8 engine before the start of the 1971 Formula 1 Grand Prix season at the March Engineering facility in Bicester, United Kingdom The High Court awarded Mr Mosley 60,000 damages after ruling that there was no justification for a front-page article and pictures about his meeting with five prostitutes in a London flat. But while the paper was also ordered to pay 420,000 of his legal costs his total bill came to more than 500,000, leaving Mr Mosley 30,000 out of pocket, he later revealed. During his High Court battle, Mr Mosley said: 'All my life I have had hanging over me my antecedents, my parents, and the last thing I want to do in some sexual context is be reminded of it. 'I wouldn't consider my parents to be Nazi, but there is obviously a link.' Appearing before the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in 2009, he sparked a stunned response from MPs when he said his father might have overdone it a bit. Mr Mosley said: 'When I was young I always stuck up for him. You always have sympathy for your parents and I see why he did what he did - it does not mean I agree with him.' Explaining his actions in the wake of the News of the World scandal, Mr Mosley added: 'I think it is better to underdo it than overdo it.' Citing Sir Oswald as an example, he said: 'I think he overdid it - that stopped people thinking seriously about his ideas.' Mr Mosley oversaw March's legal and commercial affairs from 1969 to 1977 and became the official legal advisor to the Formula One Constructors' Association (FOCA) in the mid-70s. He helped draw up a peace agreement between FOCA and FISA, F1's governing body at the time, and went on to become FISA president in 1991. Max Mosley talks with McLaren F1 driver Lewis Hamilton and his brother Nick at the 2007 FIA Gala Prize Giving Ceremony Two years later, he took over unopposed at the FIA, leading the safety reforms in the sport which followed the death of Ayrton Senna at the San Marino Grand Prix in 1994. As president, Mr Mosley pledged that the FIA should make a difference in the world outside motor racing and set about promoting increased road safety and the use of green technology. In 1996, Mr Mosley led the FIA's successful campaign to modernise and strengthen European Union crash test standards for the first time since 1974 and also promoted the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), the independent crash-test organisation. In 2004, Mr Mosley helped set up the FIA Institute for Motor Sport Safety in order to develop and improve safety measures across all areas of motor sport, from junior racing to top-level championships. He was re-elected as FIA president three times - in 1997, 2001 and 2005 - each time unopposed before Jean Todt replaced him in 2009. After the coverage of his sex life, Mr Mosley used his millions to bankroll state-recognised press watchdog Impress. The inquest continues. For confidential support, call the Samaritans on 116 123 or visit samaritans.org Stanford University has defined parental couples as 'mother pairs,' 'mixed gender,' and 'fathers who have given birth' in a new study that concludes lesbian couples suffer a higher rate of complicated pregnancies possibly due to stress. The review, which followed the pregnancies of 1.5million women in the US, used the terminology to categorize heterosexual and same-sex sample sets. It found that women were more likely to suffer complications than 'mixed-gender' couples - couples made up of a man and a woman. 'The disparities faced by people who were mothers in partnership with a mother were striking,' said Sandford Biostatistics instructor Stephanie Leonard, the lead author of the study, published Monday in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The study, which refers to its heterosexual, 1.4 million-strong sample set as 'mothers with father partners,' followed the pregnancies of 2,572 lesbian couples, as well as 498 'fathers who have given birth' - presumably trans men who retained a uterus. No disparities emerged among those 'fathers,' whose births represented less than 1 percent of the total studied. Lead author Stephanie Leonard of Stanford called the results of the study - which found that lesbian couples giving birth had higher rates of complications during pregnancy - 'striking' Dr. Juno Obedin-Maliver, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford Medicine and the study's senior author, said she believes the issues seen in the pregnancies of all-female couples could be related to the stress of being a lesbian The study, which refers to its heterosexual, 1.4 million-strong sample set as 'mothers with father partners,' followed the pregnancies of 2,572 lesbian couples, as well as 498 'fathers who have given birth' - presumably trans men who retained a uterus The review itself, carried out by scientists at the universitys School of Medicine between 2016 and 2019, did not give reasons for the disparities among its lesbian sample set, which included markedly increased chances of hemorrhaging and profuse bleeding after giving birth. However, speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle Monday, the study's senior author, Dr. Juno Obedin-Maliver, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford Medicine, said she believes the issues could be related to the stress of being a lesbian. 'What we are seeing what we think were seeing,' the doctor told the paper, 'is how stigma and discrimination play out in peoples bodies and health.' Speculating to the outlet, Obedin-Maliver said that underrepresentation felt by all-female couples excluded from activities such as 'weddings, parenting magazines, and breast-feeding classes' because of their gender may be to blame said stress. 'At every turn theyre facing a world that was not created for them and does not represent them,' the Stanford professor asserted Monday, after the study was published. 'All of that assumes that two women arent having a baby.' Obedin-Maliver, a board-certified obstetrician/gynecologist, added that health care providers unequipped to handle concerns unique to lesbian couples may also explain the heightened risks. 'I think that is whats translating into these poor health outcomes.' The Stanford study, published Monday, ruled out socioeconomic factors education, insurance, age, pre-existing health conditions and other factors as roots of the disparities The report ruled out socioeconomic factors education, insurance, age, pre-existing health conditions and other factors as roots of the disparities. The study was made possible, researchers said, by a California law that altered birth certificates in 2016, by no longer requiring parents to designate themselves as a newborn's 'mother' and 'father,' and allowing the gender-neutral options 'parent giving birth and parent not giving birth.' On the new state forms, each parent 'can indicate whether they identify as a mother or father,' allowing researchers to analyze all births in the state, rather than a smaller sample of participants, its authors told The Chronicle. Researchers conceded that the study had its shortcomings, as due to the new, sometimes vague state-set gender designations, study authors could not be sure of each parent's role. For example, authors would not be able to discern if a mother-father partnership included a bisexual man or woman solely by looking at data collected. Moreover, sample sets could have been affected and misclassified if parents misunderstood the new options on the state's form or simply chose not to disclose a same-sex partnership. Some hospitals may also have used their own birth certificate form instead of the state's, the researchers said. The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution deals with presidential authority in the event of death or removal from office, and was ratified in 1967, in the wake of John F. Kennedy's assassination. What does the 25th Amendment say? It is in four sections, all dealing with the President leaving office during his or her elected term. The first section states that the vice president takes over the Oval Office if the President dies or resigns or is removed something that the original Constitution did not clearly state. Presidents of course can be removed by impeachment, a feature of the Constitution from the start. They can also be removed through the 25th Amendment. Section II states that if the Vice President dies, or resigns or is fired both the House and Senate have to confirm a new Vice President. Until 1967, presidents could change vice presidents mid-term on their own if they got the Vice President to agree to resign - not something that actually happened, but which was possible in principle. Section III makes clear that a President can temporarily delegate his or her powers to the Vice President, and later reclaim them when he or she is capable of serving. This is most often invoked if a President is under the influence of surgical anesthetic for a short period of time. Section IV is the amendment's most controversial part: It describes how the President can be removed from office if he or she is incapacitated and does not leave on his or her own. The Vice President and 'a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law must write to both the President Pro Tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House, saying that 'the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.' The term 'principal officers of the executive departments' would normally mean the Cabinet secretaries. So at least eight of the president's 15 most senior Cabinet members together with the Vice President must agree that a President should be removed before any plan can move forward. Notifying the House Speaker and the Senate President Pro Tempore is the act that immediately elevates the Vice President to an 'acting president' role. The deposed president can contest the claim, giving the leaders of the bloodless coup four days to reassert their claims to the House and Senate. Congress then has two days to convene unless it is already in session and another 21 days to vote on whether the President is incapable of serving. A two-thirds majority in both houses is required to make that determination. As soon as there is a vote with a two-thirds majority, the President loses his or her powers and is removed, and the Vice President stops acting and is sworn in as President. But if 21 days of debate and votes ends without a two-thirds majority, the President gets back powers. What could happen to trigger the 25th Amendment? The Vice President and eight of the 15 'principal' Cabinet members would have to agree to notify Congress that the President is incapable of running the country. That group is made up of the Secretary of State, Treasury Secretary, Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, Interior Secretary, Agriculture Secretary, Commerce Secretary, Labor Secretary, Health and Human Services Secretary, Transportation Secretary, Energy Secretary , Education Secretary, Veterans Affairs Secretary and Homeland Security Secretary. Their formal notification would go to the House Speaker and, in the Senate, to the 'President Pro Tempore,' the Senate's most senior member. As soon as the letter is sent, the Vice President would become 'Acting President.' Alternatively, Congress could set up its own mechanism to decide if the President is fit for office - maybe a commission or a joint committee. The Vice President would still have to agree with its conclusion and then write formally to the Speaker and President Pro Tempore. Or another possibility is that the pool of 'principal officers' is considered to be bigger than the 15 and a majority of that group call the President incapable. What if the President does not agree? If the President claims he or she is capable of holding office, he or she would write to the House Speaker and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate within four days, setting up three weeks of intense debate in both houses of Congress. The President would be removed from office if two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate agreed with the Vice President and his cabal. If either of both chambers fell short of that mark, the President would retain powers and likely embark on a wholesale housecleaning, firing the Vice President and replacing disloyal Cabinet members. Are there any loopholes? The 25th Amendment allows Congress to appoint its own panel to evaluate the President instead of relying on the Cabinet the men and women who work most closely with the President to decide on a course of action. It specifies that some 'other body as Congress may by law provide' could play that role, but the Vice President would still need to agree with any finding that the president is incapable of discharging his duties. That commission could hypothetically include anyone from presidential historians to psychiatrists, entrusted to assess the President's fitness for office. Another loophole is that it does not spell out that the Cabinet is needed to agree, but says that the 'principal officers' of the departments are needed. That term is undefined in the Constitution. In some departments, legislation appears to name not just the secretary but deputies and even undersecretaries as 'principal officers,' so many more people could be called in to the assessment of the President's fitness. But the President's Cabinet has a swathe of 'acting' cabinet officers - and it is unclear if they could therefore take part in removing the President. Could the President fire the Vice President if he or she rebelled? No. The Vice President can resign or be impeached and removed - but he or she does not serve at the pleasure of the President. Is there any precedent for this? No. Only Section III, the voluntary surrender of presidential powers, has ever been used - and only very briefly. In December 1978, President Jimmy Carter thought about invoking Section III when he was contemplating a surgical procedure to remove hemorrhoids. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both voluntarily relinquished their powers while undergoing procedures under anesthetic. Section IV has also never been invoked, although there have been claims that Ronald Reagan's chief of staff Donald Regan told his successor, Howard Baker, in 1987 that he should be prepared to invoke it because Reagan was inattentive and inept. The PBS documentary 'American Experience' recounts how Baker and his team watched Reagan closely for signs of incapacity during their first meeting and decided he was in perfect command of himself. Advertisement The dean of Yale Law School has finally broken her silence two weeks after woke students shouted down speakers and threatened them during a debate on free speech. Heather Gerken said Monday that students' behavior during the March 10 fracas at a debate between a conservative speaker and a progressive had been 'unacceptable,' but insisted that it fell within the college's rules. She wrote: 'This behavior was unacceptable; at a minimum it violated the norms of this Law School. This is an institution of higher learning, not a town square, and no one should interfere with others' efforts to carry on activities on campus. 'YLS is a professional school, and this is not how lawyers interact. We are also a community that respects our faculty and staff who have devoted their lives to helping students. Professor Kate Stith, Dean Mike Thompson, and other members of the staff should not have been treated as they were. 'I expect far more from our students, and I want to state unequivocally that this cannot happen again. My administration will be in serious discussion with our students about our policies and norms for the rest of the semester.' But Gerken also insisted that the students hadn't actually violated the college's rules - even though one protester was filmed shouting 'I'll fight you bitch,' while squaring up to conservative speaker Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and liberal humanist Monica Miller. She explained: 'In accordance with the University's free expression policy, which includes a three-warning protocol, those protesting exited the room after the first warning, and the event went forward. Had the protestors shut down the event, our course of action would have been straightforward - the offending students without question staff. would have been subject to discipline. Yale's Law School Dean Heather Gerken (pictured) said students at a protest earlier this month were well within their rights to protest and their actions did not warrant disciplinary actions 'Although the students complied with University policies inside the event, several students engaged in rude and insulting behavior as the event began; a number made excessive noise in our hallways that interfered with several events taking place.' The debate, hosted by the college's conservative-libertarian Federalist Society, had been intended to show how two speakers from different ideological perspectives could agree on the need to support the First Amendment. But it was hijacked by an angry mob upset over the ADF's previous position on LGBTQ issues, who screeched, screamed and banged the walls outside when told to leave. Gerken wasn't present at the debate, but assistant dean Ellen Cosgrove was, and failed to confront students, leading to allegations of cowardice. Full text of Yale Law School Dean's letter claiming woke student mob DIDN'T break protest rules Dear Members of the Community: As we return from spring recess, I write to reflect on the protest that occurred earlier this month at the Law School. Shortly before break, a group of students protested the Federalist Society's decision to bring a speaker from Alliance Defending Freedom to campus because of the organization's position on LGBTQ rights, including same-sex marriage and the treatment of transgender people. Under the University's free expression policy, student groups have every right to invite speakers to campus, and others have every right to voice opposition. Our commitment to free speech is clear and unwavering. Because unfettered debate is essential to our mission, we allow people to speak even when their speech is flatly inconsistent with our core values. In accordance with the University's free expression policy, which includes a three-warning protocol, those protesting exited the room after the first warning, and the event went forward. Had the protestors shut down the event, our course of action would have been straightforward - the offending students without question staff. would have been subject to discipline. Although the students complied with University policies inside the event, several students engaged in rude and insulting behavior as the event began; a number made excessive noise in our hallways that interfered with several events taking place; and some refused to listen to our staff. This behavior was unacceptable; at a minimum it violated the norms of this Law School. This is an institution of higher learning, not a town square, and no one should interfere with others' efforts to carry on activities on campus. YLS is a professional school, and this is not how lawyers interact. We are also a community that respects our faculty and staff who have devoted their lives to helping students. Professor Kate Stith, Dean Mike Thompson, and other members of the staff should not have been treated as they were. I expect far more from our students, and I want to state unequivocally that this cannot happen again. My administration will be in serious discussion with our students about our policies and norms for the rest of the semester. As Dean, I am deeply committed to our free speech policies and the values they safeguard. I will protect free speech without fear or favor. But I have waited to write you because it is our conversations as a community that matter most. In our statement-hungry culture, university leaders are constantly asked to be referees, encouraging our students to appeal to a higher authority rather than to engage with one another and tempting outsiders to enlist academic institutions in their own political agendas. Statements are expected instantly from institutions whose core values include deliberation and due process values that are essential where, as here, the reporting has been so contradictory. And pundits parse any statement to see which side they favor when the role of a university is not to take sides but to articulate its mission with clarity. Most importantly, statements are poor teaching tools. Learning involves speaking and listening, through iterative conversations in smaller settings with mentors and peers. That has always been our teaching model, and that is the only way that our norms can be understood and internalized. Although these conversations are not visible to outsiders, they are taking place here now, and the institution will be the better for it. The deeper issues embedded in this event are not unique to Yale Law School they plaque our democracy and institutions across the country. Nonetheless, we will overcome these challenges because we must. Together, we will figure out how to nurture a thriving intellectual environment while maintaining a community of equality and mutual respect. It is harder than ever to find common ground; the stakes are high, and the rights of cherished members of our own community are under attack. But it is essential that we keep this community together despite the many forces seeking to divide us. I am heartened that as we push forward, we build on an intellectual tradition that stretches back centuries, with a faculty wholly committed to the School's academic mission and students of every political stripe imbued with idealism and intelligence. As Dean, I am and will always remain unalterably committed to keeping that tradition vibrant and alive. Heather K. Gerken Dean and Sol & Lillian Goldman Professor of Law Advertisement More than 100 students intimated a conservative panelist during Yale Law School's free speech debate earlier this month The panel featured progressive Monica Miller (left) and conservative Christian Kristen Waggoner (right), both of whom took the same side in a 2021 case involving legal remedies for First Amendment violations that was presented to the Supreme Court Some of the students were captured intimidating Waggoner by yelling they would 'literally fight you, b***h' According to the school's policy, all students are 'generally free' to express their views and that free expression includes the 'right to peaceful dissent, protests in peaceable assembly and orderly demonstrations, and the use of signs, banners, and posters.' But the policy also specifies that when the school hosts outside speakers, students can protest and express disagreement but they are not allowed to 'interfere with a speaker's ability to speak or attendees' ability to attend, listen and hear.' The havoc caused by the nearly 120 demonstrators appeared to clearly violate the university's free speech policy and when they were reminded by moderator Kate Stith, she was met with chants and raised middle fingers, to which she replied: 'Grow up.' Stith was subsequently accused of 'ableism' by the woke mob. The students hit back, arguing that their disturbance was execution of 'free speech' and continued to scream at the panelists. 'I'm going to have to ask you to leave, or help you leave,' Stith responded. Ultimately, police were called to the auditorium to safely escort the speakers out of the building. As protesters left the event, one yelled 'F**k you, FedSoc' as others began to stomp, shout, clap, sing and pound on the hall walls. Students and professors claimed the protesters were so loud that they disrupted classes, exams and faculty meetings. In her email Gerken did concede that students engaged in 'rude and insulting behavior,' that was 'unacceptable' and that have led to 'serious discussions' regarding policies for the rest of the semester. The March 10 panel was meant to illustrate that a liberal atheist and a conservative Christian could find common ground on free speech issues, according to the Washington Free Beacon. Both took the same side in a 2021 case involving legal remedies for First Amendment violations that was presented to the Supreme Court, but protesters were outraged by the ADF's successful Supreme Court defense of a Colorado baker who refused to make a gay wedding cake. Miller was harangued ahead of the event by totalitarian students claiming her very presence at the event was 'harming the flourishing of queer lives,' with Waggoner and ADF supporters hit with threats at the meeting itself. The students screamed profanities at Waggoner, including one who threatened they would 'literally fight you, b***h' The protesters berated the speaker, chanting 'protect trans kids' and 'shame, shame' throughout the law school building after police officers escorted her and Miller out of the building When law school professor Kate Stith introduced Waggoner, the protestors stood up and displayed signs attacking the nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, for which Waggoner works. Video of the incident, which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, shows the students screaming profanities at Waggoner. The protesters berated the speaker, chanting 'protect trans kids' and 'shame, shame' throughout the law school building after police officers escorted her and Miller out of the building. Waggoner expressed horror at the students' behavior, alleging 'the future of the legal profession in America is in dire straits.' 'It was disturbing to witness law students whipped into a mindless frenzy. I did not feel it was safe to get out of the room without security,' she told the newspaper. 'Yale Law students are our future attorneys, judges, legislators, and corporate executives. We must change course and restore a culture of free speech and civil discourse at Yale and other law schools, or the future of the legal profession in America is in dire straits.' Miller, who during the panel characterized Waggoner's nonprofit as a 'hate group,' echoed her debate opponent's remarks, claiming the disruption was an 'ominous sign' for the legal profession. 'As lawyers, we have to put aside our differences and talk to opposing counsel,' she told the Free Beacon. 'If you can't talk to your opponents, you can't be an effective advocate.' A member of the Federalist Society, which hosted the panel, said they selected Waggoner and Miller to demonstrate how a conservative Christian and a liberal atheist could were able to find common ground on issues of free speech. 'It was pretty much the most innocuous thing you could talk about,' he alleged. Two days after the panel, 417 students - equating for more than 60 percent of the law school's student body - reportedly signed an open letter issuing support for 'peaceful student protesters.' The letter also alleged the protesters had been 'imperiled by the presence of police'. 'The danger of police violence in this country is intensified against Black LGBTQ people, and particularly black trans people,' the letter, which was obtained by the newspaper, read. 'Police-related trauma includes, but is certainly not limited to, physical harm. Even with all of the privilege afforded to us at YLS, the decision to allow police officers in as a response to the protest put YLS's queer student body at risk of harm.' The letter also slammed Stith for telling the demonstrators to 'grow up' and blasted the Federalist Society for hosting an event that 'profoundly undermined our community's values of equity and inclusivity.' However, it remains unclear if the majority of the student body actually felt the letter reflected their personal ideals as group chats, Discord posts and emails reviewed by the Free Beacon revealed that students who hadn't signed the petition were outwardly shamed. 'It feels wild to me that we're at this point in history and some folks are still not immediately signing a letter like this,' one student allegedly posted in a class GroupMe. 'I'm sure you realize that not signing the letter is not a neutral stance.' Others alleged the bullying began prior to the open letter, citing that some student activists littered the law school with flyers claiming attending the free speech panel was a bigoted act. 'Providing a veneer of respectability is part of what allows this group to do work that attacks the very lives of LGBTQ people in the U.S. & globally,' the flyers read. 'Through your attendance you are personally complicit, along with the Federalist Society, in platforming and legitimizing this hate group.' The Welsh Government sparked fury today after refusing to fully distribute a schoolbook celebrating the Queen's platinum jubilee. The Department for Education announced last year it was commissioning the work which explores 'the role of the Monarch and what the Platinum Jubilee represents' ahead of the 70 year milestone in June It wanted the book sent to all school in the UK and agreed to translate it into minority languages including Welsh as part of a scheme believed to have cost 12million. However the Labour administration in Cardiff has said it will only be distributed on an 'opt in' basis to schools that actively ask for copies. The Welsh first Minister Mark Drakeford is a self-confessed republican. He and his ministers were branded 'utterly petulant' over the decision. Tory Senedd shadow education minister Laura Anne Jones said: 'This book is about teaching the next generation about how our country functions and its history. 'The only reason Labour would not want children to have them is because they believe it is not in its interest for them to take pride in British institutions and the UK's past. 'Of course, it might also be down to Mark Drakeford being a republican who would rather not have the Queen at all. Either way, it's Labour that needs to go back to school and learn how to govern.' The Department for Education announced last year it was commissioning the work which explores 'the role of the Monarch and what the Platinum Jubilee represents' ahead of the 70 year milestone. However the Labour administration in Cardiff has said it will only be distributed on an 'opt in' basis to schools that actively ask for copies. The Welsh first Minister Mark Drakeford is a self-confessed republican. Announcing the book last year, the DfE said it would cover events in the past 70 years, including 'the construction of the Channel Tunnel, election of the first female Prime Minister and the invention of the World Wide Web, so children across the country can learn more about their home and its history'. But a Welsh Government spokesman told Wales Online: 'The Welsh Government has no role in the production or distribution of the book. 'Education is a devolved matter. We have been clear that the book should be available in Welsh and English and schools only receive the book on an opt-in basis. 'A large number of events are planned across Wales this year to mark the historic platinum jubilee and all primary schools in Wales will be able to order the platinum jubilee book in early May.' But Welsh Tory MP Robin Millar said: 'We have an amazing story to tell our children of the invaluable contribution that our Queen has made to the public life of this nation and around the world. 'Through seven decades of turmoil and change throughout the world, she has met with 15 UK Prime Ministers on a weekly basis and advised over 150 other Heads of State across the Commonwealth of Nations. She is a patron of over six hundred charities. 'The ups and downs of her life and that of her family have been lived out in the public gaze. She has danced with us in victory and just this week we have mourned with her in her loss. 'Why would we not tell our children this story of such a remarkable woman? Why would the Welsh government not promote this? I will be writing to schools throughout Aberconwy encouraging them to take up this offer.' Last week ministers said that they were working to make sure the book was available across the whole UK. Last Wednesday, Wales Minister David TC Davies told the Commons: 'The UK Government wanted to celebrate the enormous achievement and the enormous commitment to public service that has been made by our monarch, and have produced the book bilingually to ensure that schoolchildren across Wales are able to read bilingually about the contribution made by Her Majesty the Queen. 'I am sure they all look forward eagerly to receiving their copy. The UK Government are working with the Welsh Government to ensure that that can happen imminently.' The Queen shed tears for Prince Philip at an extraordinary service in remembrance of his remarkable life of service to Britain and his wife today. Her Majesty stood in Westminster Abbey where she had personally ensured her beloved husband's final wishes were fulfilled after his covid-hit funeral left her sat alone without the rousing hymns and guests he loved so much. The 95-year-old monarch used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. The service was attended by the Royal Family and his relatives, friends and people who benefitted from his charities. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were the only senior royals not there. Her Majesty stands to sing surrounded by her family with the Duke of York also on the front row.From left to right, front row: Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, the Duke of York, The Earl of Wessex, the Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn. (Second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute service that her husband of 73 years had helped plan for before his death last April. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen had stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen has been praised for her 'composure' and 'strength' after she attended Prince Philip's memorial at Westminster Abbey today despite mobility and health issues. Her Majesty, 95, appeared to shed a tear during a poignant and emotional service held to pay tribute to the late Duke of Edinburgh. Despite battling mobility problems, she stood to pray and sing anthems during a 40-minute ceremony which Philip, her husband of 73 years, had helped plan before his death last April. Royals fans were quick to flock to Twitter to praise the Queen for her strength and appearance. One wrote: 'She looks superb. Delighted to see her at the ceremony. The Queen is an example to us all.' Another said: 'Bless the Queen today at the Duke of Edinburgh's Thanksgiving service. She looks so composed. I'm so glad she was enough to make it.' While a third added: 'Good to see the Queen attending. She's a strong woman.' The Queen used a stick as she was walked to her seat by her disgraced son the Duke of York to give her 'strength and stay' Philip the final farewell he had wanted. But in a controversial decision she chose Prince Andrew to support her as she arrived and left the church, clutching his elbow with one hand and a walking stick with the other. The Queen closed her eyes in prayer as she joined senior royals to pay tribute to Prince Philip at his memorial at Westminster Abbey. When she opened her eyes they appeared moist She decided to attend today's service in Central London around two hours before it took place, as she battles mobility problems that have prevented her doing a major public engagement away from Windsor Castle in nearly six months. The Queen has pulled out of a number of key occasions in the last six months due to concerns surrounding her health, most recently delegating to Charles for the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey last week. The consistent uncertainty has meant that her presence at all future events will be confirmed on the day with a member of the royal family on standby in the event she feels unable to attend. The Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey would have been the 95-year-old's first in-person public engagement since being advised to rest by her doctors following a hospital stay in October and testing positive for Covid-19 on February 20 with 'mild symptoms'. Most notably, she did not attend last November's Remembrance Day ceremonies at the Cenotaph after suffering a sprained back and being advised to rest. She has spent recent weeks carrying out only light duties including a handful of virtual audiences. But she returned to in-person engagements earlier this month, meeting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Windsor Castle and later meeting the head of Britain's armed forces. She now regularly uses a stick and recently commented about her mobility issues, telling two senior military officers during a Windsor Castle reception 'Well, as you can see, I can't move,' when asked how she was. Her Majesty was 'actively involved' in every element of the service of thanksgiving which Westminster Abbey packed to the rafters. Even the smallest of touches were overseen by the Queen, including the use of orchids that formed part of her 1947 wedding bouquet being used in small posies of flowers. Prince Philip's beloved Sea Cadets and young people who have taken his Duke of Edinburgh awards were centre stage at the service. The Queen was the last to arrive for the memorial and was joined by Prince Andrew. It was a move that royal watchers believe may have upset her son Prince Charles and grandson Prince William both instrumental in the decision to take away the Duke of York's 'HRH'. Andrew releases his mother from his arm as she walks the final steps to her seat unaided She spoke to her son inside the car and waved to the crowds outside the service in London, which ended this afternoon Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. (second row left to right) The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of Cambridge during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh The Queen chose her second son to join her in the back of her royal car for the 22-mile journey and he was also given a front row in the church, right next to his other siblings at the service just weeks after he paid millions to one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused him of having sex with her three times when she was trafficked to London aged 17. The Queen's state limousine arrived at Poets' Yard entrance with Andrew sat beside her. As they walked through the famous section of the abbey towards her seat, in a small procession, the monarch held onto her son's elbow with her left hand and had a walking stick in her right. They walked at a slow but steady pace both looking ahead, and at the end of the aisle they separated - with Andrew giving a last glance to his mother as she turned right. The Queen stood with tears in her eyes as the 1,800-strong congregation sang Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer before the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out to mark the end of the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh. After the first hymn, Charles, who was sat next to her mother, could be seen leaning over to speak to the Queen seated next to him - but it is not clear what was said. The Queen then delved into her black Launer handbag for her glasses to read the order of service. After she leant on Andrew as she walked back out of the church, the Queen appeared to grimace as she walked to the car hunched over with the Duke of York at her side guiding her towards the Bentley. She appeared to be holding tightly to her stick and appeared to be making a great effort to get to the vehicle, concentrating very hard in taking each step. Once inside the car she appeared to be back to her normal composed self as the car slowly drove away. She waved to onlookers as she arrived and left the service. The Queen and the packed abbey listened as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. China could use high-speed 'doomsday trains' to transport and even launch nuclear missiles, a new report suggested. In a government-funded study published yesterday, engineers looked at the logistics of moving Beijing's elite DF-41 nuclear-capable missiles onto the rail network. The mega-missiles weigh 80 tonnes each and can carry nuclear warheads up to 9,300 miles from the launchpad. DF-41 is said to boast the longest range of any nuclear-capable ballistic missile in the world Beijing commissioned a new study into the logistics of carrying its elite weapons on trains= China is said to have tested DF-41s from trains in 2015, but these reports remain unconfirmed. The elite weapons, first revealed in 2019, are said to be the longest-range nuclear missiles on the planet. Carrying them on trains would improve 'concealment', the engineers said - and, if necessary, make launches more efficient. As well as a quick and well-protected means of transport for China's missiles, the report continued, the shockwaves caused by a launch would be better absorbed by high-speed rail infrastructure. Researchers wrote in the Journal of Southwest Jiaotong University: 'Compared with heavy-haul railways, high-speed railways operate faster and more smoothly. 'This means that on high-speed rails, the mobility, safety and concealment of military vehicles would be greater.' The group is led by civil engineering professor Yin Zihong, who is head of the Chinese government's national research project, according to the South China Morning Post. In less than two decades, China has built the world's largest high-speed rail network Maglev trains have top speeds of 372mph - while missile-carrying locomotives can go 217mph In less than twenty years, China has built by far the world's largest high-speed rail network - overtaking runners-up Spain and third-placed Japan. These are 'favourable conditions' for the so-called doomsday trains, Yin and his colleagues added. The high-speed trains capable of carrying nuclear missiles have a top speed of 217mph, the report said. And although they're unlikely to be able to carry missiles, Maglev trains capable of 372mph top speeds would be another asset in wartime. Yet though innovative, China's latest proposal doesn't come from nowhere. The Soviet Union experimented with nuclear weapons-carrying trains during the Cold War. Twelve nuclear trains were stationed in the Kostroma, Perm and Krasnoyarsk regions, each carrying three missiles. They came into service in 1987, just a few years before the collapse of the USSR, and were dubbed 'ghost trains.' Russia's doomsday trains were finally disposed of between 2003 and 2005 - and, despite retesting in 2017, are not expected to return any time soon. The View host Whoopi Goldberg, who is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors, believes Will Smith will be able to keep his Oscar after slapping Chris Rock onstage at the ceremony Sunday - but doubled down Tuesday on her expectation that he will face some kind of punishment for the on-stage assault. 'There are consequences,' she said during a taping of The View Tuesday. 'There are big consequences because nobody is OK with what happened.' 'Nobody, nobody, nobody,' she added. The comments come just one day after Goldberg defended Smith on Monday, saying 'sometimes you behave badly' and that she believed he 'snapped.' The consequences Goldberg is referring to will likely be decided at an emergency meeting of the Academy's board scheduled for Wednesday, but Goldberg did not give any details of what the punishment may look like. Disciplinary action could include anything from forcing him to hand back his Oscar to the most severe punishment - suspension from the Academy - which would put Smith among the ranks of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, who were both expelled for sexual misconduct. The host also said racial dynamics played into Oscars producer Will Packer's decision not to remove Smith from the event, 'because that would have been another 15-, 20 minute-explanation about why we're taking the Black man out five seconds before they're about to decide whether he's won an Oscar or not.' 'I believe [producer] Will Packer made the right decision, he said let's get to the rest of this so we can deal with it wholeheartedly,' Goldberg said, adding 'this is not the first time craziness has happened on stage, but this is the first time we've seen anybody assault anybody on stage.' Scroll for video Whoopi Goldberg doubled down on her promise to punish Will Smith Tuesday, saying on daytime talk show The View: 'There are consequences. There are big consequences because nobody is OK with what happened. Nobody, nobody, nobody' Goldberg's comments come just one day after she said Smith will likely be able to keep his Oscar. She also defended the King Richard actor, adding: 'sometimes you behave badly' and that she believed he 'snapped' Smith's fate could be decided tomorrow night at a meeting held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors - where his onstage assault of Chris Rock at Sunday's Oscars is expected to be the main topic. A post-Oscars board meeting is always held to discuss the ceremony and address any concerns, but does not usually happen this soon, the Hollywood Reporter learned. The decision to hold the meeting was made after the Academy met for an emergency call Monday night about the incident and released a statement announcing a launch of a formal review. 'The Academy condemns the actions of Mr. Smith at last night's show. We have officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct and California law.' On Tuesday's edition of 'The View,' Goldberg continued to speculate about Sunday night's events - adding that criticism of the stunned crowd was out of line because of the chaotic moment unfolding in real time. The reason people went over to Smith, she said, is because 'people thought Oh my god, is he having a break? Do we need to get him out? What do we need to do?' The incident continues to be a national conversation and Goldberg added Tuesday that she hopes people begin to ask: 'What could have triggered this?' 'What's happening is people are now starting to calm down and say, 'Wait a minute, what could have triggered this?' Could have been the four years ago, could have been anything.' The 'four years ago' is in reference to Rock making jokes about Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, at a another awards show. Pinkett Smith, 50, finally broke her silence on Tuesday with an Instagram post that read, 'This is a season for healing and I'm here for it.' Pinkett Smith posted the words on a pink background, but did not share a caption. She has remained quiet since the dramatic events unfolded Sunday night. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars on Sunday, after the comedian made a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith. On Monday, Smith apologized 'This is a season for healing and I'm here for it,' the actress posted to Instagram Tuesday, two days after the incident that stunned millions of viewers Pinkett Smith has broken her silence after the incident between her husband and Chris Rock after Rock made a joke about her shaved head. She has been open about her struggle with alopecia on social media Smith released an apology on Monday, saying his behavior was 'unacceptable and inexcusable' and left him 'embarrassed'. A day later, his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, 50, then broke her silence with an Instagram post that read, 'This is a season for healing and I'm here for it.' While many are calling for Smith's Oscar to be rescinded, guidelines in the Academy's Code of Conduct - rewritten in 2017 during the height of the Me Too Movement - outline even more severe consequences. A more severe punishment would be expulsion from the Academy, putting the 'King Richard' actor in a small group of people who have been expelled, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Roman Polanski. Weinstein was expelled 'for 'sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment' and Cosby and Polanski were expelled 'in accordance with the organization's Standards of Conduct' after they had been convicted of sexual assault. Weinstein and Polanski's Oscars were never rescinded. Rock covers his jaw after being slapped in the face but went on to announce the winner for best documentary after a very awkward pause Many of Hollywood celebrities denounced Smith's actions and called for his Oscar to be taken back. Marshall Herskovitz, president emeritus of the Producers Guild of America, was among the first to condemn Smith, tweeting shortly after the attack that Smith had 'disgraced our entire community'. He said: 'I call upon the Academy, of which I am a member, to take disciplinary action against Will Smith. He disgraced our entire community tonight.' Herskovitz accused those who defended the actor of 'moral cowardice'. In one of the most shocking moments in the history of the vaunted awards show, Smith strode on stage Sunday and slapped Rock in the face after the comedian made a joke about the appearance of Smith's wife. Smith's meltdown continued when he returned to his seat as he repeatedly screamed: 'Keep my wife's name out of your f***ing mouth'. The crowd then fell into stunned silence - and any questions over whether the altercation was genuine were answered when just over half an hour later Smith was given the Best Actor award and apologized for the assault. The actor released a statement on Monday, saying his behavior was 'unacceptable and inexcusable' and left him 'embarrassed'. He wrote in an Instagram post that he was 'embarrassed' by his actions, which shocked the ceremony attendees, producers and viewers. 'Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive,' he wrote. 'My behavior at last night's Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable. Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada's medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally. 'I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.' Harvey Weinstein (left) was expelled and Bill Cosby (right) were expelled from the Academy Could Will Smith be stripped of his Oscar? Academy faces pressure to respond after disgraced star broke Code of Conduct drawn up in wake of MeToo Movement The Academy tweeted its disapproval of 'violence of any form' late on Sunday night There are calls for the Academy to strip Will Smith of his Best Actor Oscar after he walked on stage and slapped comedian Chris Rock who was presenting an award on stage, after making a joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith's hair. The Academy, in its code of conduct, is known to take a very a dim view of violence of any kind. After the award ceremony was over it tweeted: 'The Academy does not condone violence of any form. Tonight we are delighted to celebrate our 94th Academy Awards winners, who deserve this moment of recognition from their peers and movie lovers around the world.' The Academy reestablished its Code of Conduct in 2017 during the Me Too Movement. 'Academy membership is a privilege offered to only a select few within the global community of filmmakers,' AMPAS CEO Dawn Hudson wrote to members following various scandals in the industry. On Sunday night, in the Dolby Theatre, there was complete bewilderment in the moments after the assault with took place with those present initially wondering if the punch was part of a stunt. It took a few moments for the normally unflappable Rock to process but the colorful language from Smith quickly confirmed it wasn't any kind of joke at all. The punch threw the entire Oscars broadcast into chaos as producers were frantically forced into deciding how to deal with the on-air assault, with Smith still yet to receive his Best Actor statuette. Advertisement Smith then went on to say sorry to the organizers and the producers of the show. Rock has not responded to Smith's apology, or commented on the Sunday night incident. Smith also extended his apology to the family of Venus and Serena Williams. Shortly after slapping Rock, Smith won the best actor award for his portrayal of their father Richard - but the story of their family was overshadowed by Smith's attack. Richard Williams - who the Oscar-winner portrays in King Richard - said after the attack that he condemns violence. Chavoita LeSane, Williams' son, told NBC: 'We don't know all the details of what happened. But we don't condone anyone hitting anyone else unless it's in self-defense.' Smith said: 'I would also like to apologize to the Academy, the producers of the show, all the attendees and everyone watching around the world,' Smith continued. 'I would like to apologize to the Williams Family and my King Richard Family. 'I deeply regret that my behavior has stained what has been an otherwise gorgeous journey for all of us.' The Philadelphia-born actor concluded: 'I am a work in progress. Sincerely, Will.' His apology came as the group that hands out the Oscars on Monday condemned Smith's actions and said it had started a formal review of the incident that cast a shadow over the film honors. Smith strode on stage during the live telecast and struck Rock in the face after the comedian made a joke about the appearance of Smith's wife. Smith's meltdown continued when he returned to his seat as he repeatedly screamed: 'Keep my wife's name out of your f***ing mouth'. The crowd then fell into stunned silence as it became clear the attack was genuine, and not staged. Rock replied to him saying: 'I'm going to, okay?' He then laughed uncomfortably, saying: 'That was the greatest night in the history of television'. Smith's sweary rant was muted by directors because the show's live broadcast is slightly delayed in the US. But it was aired in full to some international audiences with the uncut clip already been viewed more than a million times on social media and YouTube in the first few hours. Any questions over whether the altercation was genuine were answered when just over half an hour later Smith was given the Best Actor award and apologized for the assault. Will Smith had initially laughed at the Rock gag about Jada's hair being short - a line of Demi Moore's in GI Jane. His wife looked very unhappy and rolled her eyes After smacking Rock, a now visibly fuming Smith returned to his seat and began repeatedly yelling: 'Keep my wife's name out of your f***ing mouth'. Lupita Nyong'o' was among those baffled by what happened with many initially believing that an act so outrageous must be part of the show Smith and Pinkett-Smith held hands throughout the ceremony after the shock slap. Denzel Washington was acting as peacemaker Actor and comedian Jim Carrey slammed the Hollywood crowd for giving the actor a standing ovation when he accepted his best actor award following his now-infamous slap. Carrey, 60, was asked by anchor Gayle King about the endlessly analyzed moment on CBS Morning News while doing press for Sonic the Hedgehog 2. 'I was sickened by the standing ovation,' he said. 'I felt like Hollywood is just spineless en masse. It really felt like this is a clear indication that we're not the cool club anymore.' The comedian, who briefly overlapped with Rock in the early 90s on Fox's In Living Color, claimed Rock didn't file charges because he 'didn't want the hassle' and suggested Smith should have been arrested. 'I'd have announced this morning that I was suing Will for $200 million because that video's gonna be there forever. It's gonna be ubiquitous. That insult is gonna last a very long time,' Carrey said. The Mask actor seemed to indicate that expressing disapproval of the joke, saying something on Twitter or even yelling from the audience wasn't beyond the pale - but what Smith ended up doing crossed the line. 'You do not have the right to walk up on stage and smack somebody on the face because they said words,' Carrey said. The Ace Ventura star suggested that something was 'going on' inside of Smith that caused him to do that, and that he acted selfishly. 'It didn't escalate, it came out of nowhere because Will has something going on inside him that's frustrated and I wish him the best, I really do,' Carrey said. 'I don't have anything against Will Smith, he's done great things. 'It cast a pall over everybody's shining moment, a lot of people worked really hard to get to that place,' The Truman Show star added. 'It is no mean feat to go through all the stuff you have to go through when you get nominated for an Oscar. It's a gauntlet of devotion. It was just a selfish moment.' Jim Carrey and Will Smith during Nickelodeon's 16th Annual Kids' Choice Awards 2003 Actor and comedian Jim Carrey slammed the audience at Sunday's Academy Awards for giving Will Smith a standing ovation following his now infamous slap of Chris Rock In his acceptance speech a crying Smith said: 'Love makes you do crazy things', as he clutched his Oscar statuette. 'You gotta be able to take abuse, and you gotta be able to have people talk crazy about you,' Smith said. 'In this business, you gotta be able to have people disrespecting you and you gotta smile and you gotta pretend like that's OK. 'Denzel (Washington) said to me a few minutes ago, he said, 'At your highest moment, be careful. That's when the devil comes for you.' 'It's like I want to be a vessel for love. 'I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena. I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena and the entire Williams family for entrusting me with your story. That's what I want to do. I want to be an ambassador of that kind of love and care and concern.' The actor went on: 'I want to apologize to the Academy, I want to apologize to all my fellow nominees. 'Art imitates life. I look like the crazy father, just like they said. I look like the crazy father just like they said about Richard Williams. But love will make you do crazy things'. He added: 'I'm hoping the Academy invites me back. Thank you'. Smith sobs as he accepted his best actor award, and apologized for the violence - but did not say sorry to Chris Rock at the time Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith showed a united front after the row with Rock overshadowed his Oscar win Shortly after the slap, Will added a comment to his own Instagram post, quipping: 'You can't invite people from Philly or Baltimore nowhere' Smith's relationship with his wife had been the butt of jokes during awards season. At the BAFTAs in London a fortnight ago host Rebel Wilson targeted the couple when he won won the Leading Actor award for his role in King Richard. The assembled audience at the Royal Albert Hall, which didn't include the star who stayed in LA, groaned as she said his 'best performance in the past year was being OK with all his wife's boyfriends' - a nod to Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith's open relationship. It came after he recently admitted his wife had 'never believed in a conventional marriage' and claims she had an affair. This may explain why he reacted so sensitively to Rock's joke about her. Journalists covering the awards ceremony from the press area were instructed not to ask any attendees about Smith slapping Rock, according to BBC correspondent David Sillito. Late Sunday night, the LAPD issued a statement saying that Rock had not filed a police report against Smith, but that if he chooses to do so, police will investigate. 'LAPD investigative entities are aware of an incident between two individuals during the Academy Awards program,' the statement said. 'The incident involved one individual slapping another.' But after the Oscars, the actor 53, did not appear to have a care in the world as he was seen grinning and dancing with his Oscar award Smith and other celebs partied through the night at post-Oscars events In a statement on Monday, the 9,900-member Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it 'condemns the actions of Mr. Smith at last night's show.' 'We have officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct and California law,' the academy added. The group's standards of conduct policy states it is 'categorically opposed to any form of abuse, harassment or discrimination' and expects members to uphold the values 'of respect for human dignity, inclusion, and a supportive environment that fosters creativity.' Violations may result in suspension or expulsion from the group, revocation of Oscars, or loss of eligibility for future awards, according to the policy. A full board of Governors meeting is set for Wednesday and the incident is expected to be the main topic. Several Hollywood celebrities denounced Smith's actions. Alec Baldwin posted to Instagram and Twitter his condemnation of Smith's behavior. 'I'm sorry the Oscars turned into the Jerry Springer Show,' he said. A school district in Washington state has passed a new policy that critics say encourages administrators to factor in race when disciplining students. The Clover Park School District board approved the new policy on a 3-2 vote on March 14, over the objections of board members who expressed concerns that it was ill-conceived. The district in the suburbs of Tacoma will now use 'culturally responsive discipline' that encourages school staff to impose disciplinary policies that 'may be adapted to individual student needs in a culturally responsive manner.' Critics say the new approach is in effect a race-based disciplinary policy that will encourage harsher or lighter punishments based on a student's race, with white students being disciplined more severely. But the district insists that it is following a state law passed in 2021 that compels districts to 'align with Cultural Competency, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion standards.' 'Contrary to recent inaccurate news coverage and social media posts, Clover Park School Districts Student Discipline Policy does not make race a determining factor for administering discipline. It contains no such provision,' said Board President Alyssa Anderson Pearson in a statement to DailyMail.com. The Clover Park School District board approved a new policy encouraging administrators to factor in race when disciplining students earlier this month 'The recent update of our policy is based on a Washington State School Directors Association model policy,' added Pearson. 'It has been adopted by multiple school districts and is in alignment with state law.' At the school board meeting earlier this month, board member Anthony Veliz, who ultimately voted in favor of the policy, asked for an example of what the so-called 'cultural discipline' might look like. Board President Pearson, who supported the measure, laughed and deferred to Acting Superintendent Brian Laubach. (A district spokeswoman said Pearson was 'annoyed' that board members were breaking policy for the meeting.) 'Essentially, they are referring there that you look at -- are you dispersing discipline across the ethnicities, the racial groups, equitably,' Laubach explained. 'So, are you disciplining African-American boys more than you're disciplining white boys?' John Arbeeny, a former deputy mayor of Lakewood, expressed skepticism at this explanation in a letter to the editor of the Suburban Times. 'So 'culturally responsive discipline' is merely a deceptive cover term for 'racially/ethnically based discipline' which seeks to 'even out' the numbers of disciplinary incidents based upon racial/ethnic populations or some other undefined criteria,' wrote Arbeeny. Board President Alyssa Anderson Pearson, who supported the measure, laughed and deferred to Acting Superintendent Brian Laubach when asked to define the policy 'It has little to do with group or individual cultural differences (the determination of which is problematic), discipline generally or creating a safe academic environment,' added Arbeeny. 'I wonder what the public would think if this were explained in plain language: 'a discipline policy based upon race/ethnicity'?' he asked. Jason Rantz, a conservative commentator, went even further in criticizing the policy, writing in a column for KTTH-AM: 'In practice, it means favorable treatment of racial minorities.' 'It would likely offer harsher punishments to white students, even if the conduct is identical to that of a Black or Hispanic student,' he argued. The district vehemently denied that race would be a determining factor in administering discipline under the new policy. 'Our district has high standards for student behavior. It is the intention of the school board that discipline policies and procedures be implemented in a manner that supports a positive school environment, maximizes instructional time and increases educational opportunity for all,' said Pearson in a statement. 'The student discipline process is a learning opportunity for students to improve behavior and contribute to a safe and respectful learning environment,' the statement added. Clover Park High School is seen above. The district's student body is is 35 percent Hispanic, 28 percent white, and 13 percent black, and 4 percent Asian The Clover Park School District, which is the 28th largest in the state with an enrollment of 12,022, is 35 percent Hispanic, 28 percent white, and 13 percent black, and 4 percent Asian. Board member Paul Wagemann, who opposed the policy, argued that it was poorly defined. 'Until we, the five of us, have discussed all these definitions at work, until we do that, I think we are negligent to send this forward,' Wagemann said at the March 14 meeting. A district spokeswoman told DailyMail.com that board policy does define 'culturally responsive practices' as 'teaching that recognizes the importance of including students' cultural references in all aspects of learning.' 'Characteristics of culturally responsive teaching include positive perspectives on parents and families; communication of high expectations; learning within the context of culture; student-centered instruction; culturally mediated instruction; reshaping the curriculum; and teacher as facilitator,' the definition adds. However, Wagemann expressed concerns at the meeting that the new policy would result in disparate punishments for the same rules violation. 'Let's say we both commit the same offense. Then the question should be what are the consequences of that offense, and how do we go through that process?' he said. 'And to be fair, if we both did the same thing, we should get the same consequence the way I see it,' added Wagemann. 'And I think that's how most children and playgrounds like to see it. Most of us as citizens in our community like to see it that way that it's equal.' She also cited his lone vote to block Jan. 6 committee from obtaining Trump White House documents She cited his failure to recuse himself from Jan. 6 cases, failure to disclose his wife's income from conservative groups AOC said that if Thomas does not resign, he could be impeached Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on Justice Clarence Thomas to resign from the Supreme Court, or if not then be impeached, taking Democrats' calls for recusal a step further amid texts revealing his wife's involvement in the election fraud claims that led to Jan. 6. 'Clarence Thomas should resign. If not, his failure to disclose income from right-wing organizations, recuse himself from matters involving his wife, and his vote to block the Jan 6th commission from key information must be investigated and could serve as grounds for impeachment,' the New York Democrat wrote on Twitter. Five House members have now called on Thomas to resign or be impeached - Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Hank Johnson, D-Ga., Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., and AOC. In 2011 watchdog group Common Cause found that the justice over the course of five years failed to disclose his wife's income from Heritage Foundation, where she was paid $686,589 between 2003 and 2007. Under the 'spousal non-investment income' section of his financial disclosure forms, he checked a box titled 'none.' Five House members have now called on Thomas to resign or be impeached, along with AOC (above) - Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Hank Johnson, D-Ga., Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y. And in a series of 29 messages first obtained by the Washington Post last week, following former President Trump's loss, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas, wife of the most senior Supreme Court justice, repeatedly asked then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to work to overturn the election results. Thomas has already voted in cases related to the election, and has so far shown no intention to recuse himself in light of the new report. In January he cast the lone dissenting vote in a case to allow the Jan. 6 committee access to former President Trump's White House records. But House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said said it's 'much too early' to talk about censure or impeachment, but he is 'very concerned' by the messages. 'I think we have to wait and see what the Jan. 6 committee finds.' The committee is looking to interview Ginni. It met Monday night to discuss their path forward with her. 'Based on the evidence we have in our possession, I feel very confident about inviting her to the committee,' select panel chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said. 'And if she refuses, issuing a subpoena.' Thomas attended the 'Save America' rally, but got cold and left early. She said she does not involve her husband in her work. "Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America," Thomas told the Washington Free Beacon. "But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn't discuss his work with me, and I don't involve him in my work." President Biden refused to weigh into the debate over whether Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases involving the Jan. 6 riot due to his wife's involvement in the events that led to that day. Asked if the justice should recuse himself in cases involving Jan. 6, Biden said at a news conference Monday: 'I leave that to two entities ... one the Jan. 6 committee and two the Justice Department. That's their judgment, not mine, to make.' 'I told you I would not tell the Justice Department what to take or not take. I'm not going to tell Congress either,' he added. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a member of the Judiciary Committee, on Sunday joined the calls for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from matters involving the 2024 election or the fight for Trump documents, after his failure to recuse from the most recent ruling. President Biden refused to weigh into the debate over whether Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases involving the Jan. 6 riot due to his wife's involvement in the events that led to that day In a series of 29 messages following former President Trump's loss, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas, pictured above with Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly asked then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to work to overturn the election results Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a member of the Judiciary Committee, on Sunday joined the calls for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from matters involving the 2024 election or the fight for Trump documents, after his failure to recuse from the most recent ruling 'The facts are clear here. This is unbelievable. You have the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice advocating for an insurrection, advocating for overturning a legal election to the sitting president's chief of staff and she also knows this election, these cases, are going to come before her husband,' Klobuchar said. She told ABC's This Week: 'This is a textbook case for removing him, recusing him from these decisions.' Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., have issued similar calls. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., had a different take. He told CNN it is 'kind of misogynistic' to ask Justice Thomas to recuse on behalf of his wife's behavior, noting that Ginni Thomas is a 'private citizen.' 'She's an independent, adult woman, it just seems a little strange to me all of these calls for her husband to be what, like, minding her better? Frankly, I think it's kind of misogynistic.' 'She's a private individual. He's a justice on the US Supreme Court, but I think this idea that he is somehow automatically responsible for everything he says what does that mean? Does she have to get his permission?' he added. 'We ought to leave family members out of all of all of this. Its ridiculous to attack members of a public figures family,' Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said, asked about the recusal calls. 'It is what it is. I just think piling onto family members of public figures is just an unfortunate development.' Sen. Corey Booker also called for Justice Thomas' recusal on Sunday. He noted that Justice Elena Kagan has recused herself numerous times, 'not necessarily because she was conflicted, but because she understood that even the appearance of impropriety would delegitimize the court.' The Supreme Court 'needs that legitimacy in this nation,' Booker said. 'So clearly, Justice Thomas should have recused himself. That's not even at question here.' Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy last week both defended Thomas's ability to remain impartial, as did Sen. Rick Scott on 'Fox News Sunday.' 'Clarence Thomas in my opinion will always do the right thing. So, I've not seen in my I've watched Clarence Thomas for years and I've always seen him do the right thing,' Scott said. Ginni Thomas's correspondence with Mark Meadows, above, included a Nov. 10th text where she called Joe Biden 's election win 'the greatest Heist of our History' Ginni Thomas's correspondence with Meadows included a Nov. 10th text where she called Joe Biden's election win 'the greatest Heist of our History.' The texts, which may not represent the entire universe of her communications with Meadows, show Ginni Thomas to be embracing hard-line tactics and conspiracy theories, and boosting the 'Kraken' lawsuits claiming election fraud that were tossed out of court. 'Mark (don't want to wake you) ... Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,' she wrote in one Nov. 19th, 2020 message, in reference to lawyer Sidney Powell. The texts suggest Thomas even had a hand in crafting Powell's message -- and that she pushed that message to more members of the Trump White House than just Meadows. 'Just forwarded to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am. Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved,' Thomas reportedly wrote to Meadows on November 13. That could be a reference to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. She also called for Powell to be 'the lead and the face' of Trump's legal effort. Meadows tried to console her in one Nov. 24 message. 'Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it,' Meadows wrote. Thomas replied: 'Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!' She also fumed at former Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump was demanding refuse to count votes certified by states. 'Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams. Those who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!!' she wrote Meadows after the election. First Lady Jill Biden was prevented from teaching classes at Northern Virginia Community College on Tuesday after a bomb threat was reported on campus. Biden was warned about the threat of the Alexandria campus before she left the White House to teach her classes. She was never in danger, her spokesman said, and the campus has been evacuated closed for the day. The First Lady teaches classes on the campus every Tuesday morning. It is not year clear where the threat came from and if it was related to the First Lady. Jill Biden's spokesman Michael LaRosa said in a statement: 'The First Lady was informed about a bomb threat at Northern Virginia Community College prior to departing the White House for class this morning. 'At no point was she in any danger. All questions about the incident should be referred to Northern Virginia Community College. 'All questions about security should be referred to the United States Secret Service.' First Lady Jill Biden was prevented from teaching classes at Northern Virginia Community College on Tuesday after a bomb threat was reported on campus On February 8, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff was rushed out a Washington D.C. by his Secret Service detail because of a bomb threat. Emhoff was at Dunbar High School in Washington D.C. for a Black History Month event when agents pulled him from the room at 2:18 pm. The agent said something like 'We have to go' and led Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, from the room. He had been in the school's museum for about five minutes when he was pulled. He was taken to his motorcade outside and rushed away. Two days later, a sixteen-year-old boy was arrested and charged with making terroristic threats in connecting with the threat during Emhoff's visit and similar messages to six other schools in the D.C. area. Federal agents said it was likely Tuesday's call to Dunbar High School, where the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris was visiting to honor a Black History Month event, was made by a 'punk kid' who had no large motive The First Lady teaches classes on the campus every Tuesday morning. Her office says she was never in danger Russia is accusing the U.S. of leading a massive campaign of 'cyber aggression' to counter its Ukraine invasion as Kremlin mouthpiece Dmitry Peskov said relations were being harmed by 'personal insults' and called for more security dialogue. The attacks came even amid signs of potential progress in talks between Ukraine and Russia taking place in Turkey setting up conflicting signals on the prospects for diplomatic advancements amid Russia's brutal war in Ukraine. 'One way or another, sooner or later, we will have to speak about questions of strategic stability and security and so on,' said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov Tuesday. Russia announced it will 'radically reduce' military activity outside Kyiv and Chernihiv after 'meaningful' negotiations were held in Turkey Tuesday, days after signaling it was changing its military objectives after completing the initial phase of its 'operation' in Ukraine. Amid the swirling events, President Biden began a call with top European allies about Ukraine. Taking part in the call, which began in the morning Tuesday, were French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi. They were to 'discuss the latest developments regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine,' according to a brief White House statement. President Joe Biden said Monday he was expressing his 'personal feelings' when he spoke about Putin and said he 'cannot remain in power.' He repeatedly declined to answer questions about meeting with Putin Macron has kept up communications with Putin and has been seeking to broker a cease fire. He told broadcaster France 3 on Sunday following Biden's comments that, 'If we want to do that, we can't escalate either in words or actions.' Russia accused the United States on Tuesday of leading a massive campaign of 'cyber aggression' that was behind hundreds of thousands of malicious attacks a day while Russia has troops in Ukraine. The foreign ministry said media, critical infrastructure and life support systems had been targeted, with the unprecedented scale pointing at U.S. and NATO-trained special forces as well as hackers acting on behalf of Kyiv's western sponsors. The accusations come days after the White House said Russia had been making preparations for cyber attacks, and warned U.S. business and infrastructure to step up their own security precautions. 'The sources of attacks will be identified and the attackers will inevitably be held accountable for their actions in accordance with the law,' the Russian statement said. TABLE TALK: Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Presidential Grants Foundation CEO Ilya Chukalin at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 29, 2022 'One way or another, sooner or later, we will have to speak about questions of strategic stability and security and so on,' said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov French President Emmanuel Macron called out 'escalation' after Biden's comment that Putin cannot remain in power British PM Boris Johnson was also taking part in the Biden call. He spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Monday NBC News reported last month that U.S. President Joe Biden had been presented with options that included disrupting Russia's internet, power and railroad switches. But the White House said that was 'wildly off base.' The foreign ministry said it believed Ukraine's government, which in February announced the formation of an 'IT army', was involved and had launched an 'offensive cyber force'. The cybersecurity arm of Russia's telecoms firm Rostelecom and Russia's digital ministry have both reported cyber attacks. Peskov's complaint about insults came after Biden called Putin a 'butcher' after meeting with Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw. He has also called Putin a 'killer' amid Russia's invasion, which has resulted in millions of refugees, flattened buildings, and civilian casualties. Biden also wrapped up his Warsaw speech on Saturday by saying: 'For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power.' 'Personal insults cannot but leave their mark on relations between heads of state,' Peskov told reporters Tuesday. However, he said: 'One way or another, sooner or later, we will have to speak about questions of strategic stability and security and so on.' Biden said Monday he was expressing his 'personal feelings' when he spoke about Putin, and was not setting a policy of regime change. 'I was expressing the moral outrage I felt towards this man,' he said. He also rejected the idea his words complicated diplomacy with Russia. 'I don't think it complicates it at all,' he said. Biden also declined repeated direct questions about whether he would meet with Putin again. 'The question is: Is there something to meet on that would justify him being able to end this war and be able to rebuild Ukraine. That's the issue,' Biden said. A wealthy French family who had become survivalists obsessed with Covid conspiracy theories jumped one after the other to their deaths from their seventh-floor apartment in the Swiss town of Montreux, police have revealed. Eric David, 40, his wife Nasrine Feraoun, 41, and her twin sister Narjisse, and the couple's eight-year-old daughter were found dead at the bottom of a seven storey building on Thursday - just 45 minutes after police knocked on their door. The couple's 15-year-old son survived the fall but remains in a stable condition in a coma in hospital. The Vaud regional police said on Tuesday they are working on a theory of 'collective suicide' with evidence 'all the victims jumped from the balcony one after the other'. Police do not believe anyone else was involved in their deaths. All five family members had 'withdrawn from society' and jumped more than 65ft to their deaths moments after police attempted to execute an arrest warrant on the father over his decision to home-school one of his children, police said. The four victims, identified as a 40-year-old man, his 41-year-old wife, her twin sister and the couple's eight-year-old daughter, died at the scene, police said. The couple's 15-year-old son was seriously injured and has been hospitalised The four victims were found dead at the foot of a seven-story building in Montreux A forensic officer from the Vaud cantonal police investigates at the scene of the tragedy where four people died and one was seriously injured after falling from their flat in Montreux, Switzerland Police said the deaths happened after two officers arrived at the apartment at 6.15am to execute a warrant for the father in connection with the home-schooling of one of the couple's children on Thursday. The officers knocked on the door and heard a voice ask who they were. But when they answered, the apartment went quiet. After failing to make contact, the officers left. Shortly before 7am, all five family members jumped from the balcony within the space of five minutes. A step-ladder was found on the balcony, but there was no signs of struggle, police said. 'Before or during the events, no witnesses, including the two police officers present on the spot from 6:15 am and the passers-by at the foot of the building, heard the slightest noise or cry coming from the apartment or the balcony,' police said. 'Technical investigations show no warning signs of such an act,' they added, noting however that 'since the start of the pandemic, the family was very interested in conspiracy and survivalist theories'. Police officers take samples on a balcony after five people appeared to have jumped from their apartment, in Montreux, Switzerland, on Thursday Flowers and candles are seen next to the building where the five members of a French family jumped one after another from the seventh floor The family lived in virtual self-sufficiency with a well-organised stockpile of various foods that took up most of the living space in the apartment. Only the mother's twin sister worked outside the home, while neither the mother nor the eight-year-old girl, who did not attend school, were registered with the local authorities. 'All these elements suggest... fear of the authorities interfering in their lives,' the police statement said. Neighbours said the family was quiet and kept to themselves. 'We heard nothing from their home, the father never said hello in the hallway and ordered many packages almost daily,' neighbour Claude Rouiller told Swiss newspaper Le Temps. France's Journal du Dimanche newspaper said the father, Eric David, grew up in a wealthy part of Marseille and attended the Ecole Polytechnique, one of the most prestigious schools in the country. The twin sisters, Nasrine and Narjisse Feraoun, grew up in a family of five children who were all educated at the elite Lycee Henri-IV in Paris, the weekly said. The mother was a dentist and her sister an ophthalmologist. The newspaper also said the twins were granddaughters of Algerian novelist Mouloud Feraoun. A close friend of the French philosopher Albert Camus, Feraoun was assassinated in Algiers in 1962 by a far-right French pro-colonial group. Montreux, a bucolic lakeside city, is best known as a tourist hot spot and in particular for its annual jazz festival. A Metropolitan Police officer who headbutted a member of staff at a cocktail bar after he was accused of breaching Covid restrictions has avoided jail. PC Luke Wilson, 28, was previously found guilty of assaulting Johnny White while out for drinks with fellow officers at the Be At One bar in King William Street, near Monument, London, on July 2 last year. Westminster Magistrates' Court heard that Wilson, based in Lewisham but from Gravesend, Kent, was breaking Covid rules at the time as he and other members of the group moved between tables around the venue. Met Police officer PC Luke Wilson, 28, pictured leaving Westminster Magistrates Court after he was found guilty of assault by beating A judge heard Wilson said he and the others were police officers when asked by Mr White and when the victim challenged the group Wilson headbutted him. The court was told the assault left the Mr White with 'reddening' of the skin. Wilson still claims his innocence but was remorseful for breaching Covid rules, the court heard. District Judge Briony Clarke on Tuesday passed a sentence of 10 weeks in prison, suspended for 12 months. She also ordered Wilson to carry out 80 hours of unpaid work and pay 200 in compensation to the victim, as well as 775 in court costs and a 128 victim surcharge. Passing sentence, she said anyone who saw CCTV footage of the incident, played during the trial, would have been 'shocked'. CCTV footage showed PC Luke Wilson headbutt City bar manager Johnny White on July 2 last year after he and his group of officers were confronted over breaking Covid rules Tom Bushnell, representing Wilson, told the court the assault was 'out of character' and a 'moment of madness', adding that it 'pales' in comparison with his 'brilliant career' as a police officer. The Metropolitan Police said Wilson had remained on restricted duties since his conviction and misconduct proceedings would take place as soon as possible. Chief Superintendent Trevor Lawry, in charge of policing for Lewisham, Bexley and Greenwich, said: 'Whether on or off duty, police officers are expected to uphold the high standards we expect as an organisation. 'However, PC Wilson's behaviour fell far below this and it is right that following a police investigation he has had to face up to his actions in court.' A theatregoer walked out of a Shakespeare play and demanded a refund because the cast had Yorkshire accents - in York. Theatre company Northern Broadsides performed 'As You Like It' at the York Theatre Royal last week in what they advertise as 'bold, accessible and unapologetic Northern voices'. The touring company, based in Halifax, West Yorkshire, has been performing on stages across the country for 30 years - but claims it has never received a complaint about accents before. The theatre's chief executive Tom Bird poked fun at the complaint on social media, saying the customer had bemoaned 'Yorkshires accents right here in Yorkshire'. Social media users were also left bemused by the complaint, with one questioning: 'Surely in the top 10 of ridiculous complaints?' Northern Broadsides performed 'As You Like It' (pictured above) at the York Theatre Royal last week in what they advertise as 'bold, accessible and unapologetic Northern voices' The touring company, based in Halifax, West Yorkshire, has been performing on stages across the country for 30 years - but claims it has never received a complaint about accents before. Pictured: An advert posted by York Theatre Royal for 'As You Like It' In a tweet to his followers, Mr Bird confirmed they had received a complaint and reassured followers the complainant had 'no chance' of a refund. He said: 'We've got a complaint this morning @YorkTheatre from someone who left after an hour of @NBroadsides #AsYouLikeIt last week, because it had "Yorkshire accents" in it. 'That's Yorkshire accents, right here in Yorkshire. They want a refund.' The post has since attracted more than 116 retweets and 1,146 likes from other baffled social media users. Northern Broadsides marketing and communications manager, Jess Rooney, added: 'It's made us all chuckle - I'll be honest. 'I'm not sure who the complaint applied to specifically but pretty much all of the actors have a Northern accent. They don't hide them. 'Our whole selling point and what we do differently is Shakespeare in northern voices. We were just quite bemused by it at first. 'We've been working on platforming northern voices on stage for the last 30 years. In my time, I've never seen this complaint.' The production, which states it is performed by '12 Northern actors' on its posters, ran from March 23 to March 26 - with theatre critic Mark Fisher describing one performer's accent as 'gorgeous'. But despite the company being complimented for its Northern accents, one theatregoer felt drawn to file a complaint. The theatre's chief executive Tom Bird poked fun at the complaint on social media, saying the customer had bemoaned 'Yorkshires accents right here in Yorkshire' The production, which states it is performed by '12 Northern actors', ran from March 23 to March 26 - with theatre critic Mark Fisher describing one performer's accent as 'gorgeous' Ms Rooney said: 'It's a normal thing to hear northern voices and Yorkshire accents on stage these days. 'We were one of the first to do this 30 years ago and since then I think a lot of people have taken it on board. 'It's more of a thing people enjoy to hear. It makes the [characters] sound like them and people can relate to it a little bit more. 'A lot of Shakespearian language is hard to get used to anyway so if you hear it in your own voice, it makes the experience a lot more accessible. 'A lot of our actors are from Manchester. Bailey trained at Manchester School of Theatre, Isabel is from Lancaster, Shaban is from Manchester, Gemma is from Leeds, Terri is from Manchester. We've got someone from Wirral and someone from Hull. 'We have it on the York Theatre Royal website. On all our posters and flyers it says "performed by 12 Northern actors." It's everywhere, basically. Social media users were left bemused by the complaint, while Mr Bird reassured followers the complainant had 'no chance' of a refund 'I think they were expecting a more traditional approach to the text, maybe. It's done us a world of good this complaint.' Responding to Mr Bird's post, one social media user said: 'Yorkshire accents, in Yorkshire, from a Yorkshire-based theatre company, that was SPECIFICALLY created to showcase Yorkshire accents in all roles? Heaven forbid.' Another added: 'This makes me soooo angry! Bored of this narrative that people shun northern accents because they're 'not supposed to be on stage or represented because it's not [received pronunciation]'. 'Keep representing Northern accents. They are real, deserve to heard and are just as important as standard receive pronunciation or other more commonly comfortably heard southern accents.' A third wrote: 'Northern broadsides are a Yorkshire gem. 'I saw them in Manchester and will see them in Leeds next - shocked some theatre goers are so ignorant!' And a fourth commented: 'I once had an audience member write to me personally at a theatre I had performed at, because she didn't appreciate my foul language/attitude on stage, in character, delivering the lines as written. 'Wow. These people don't deserve it.' In Defence of Marxism is committed to safeguarding your privacy. At all times we aim to respect any personal data you share with us, or that we receive from other organisations, and keep it safe. 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Please let us know if you have any queries or concerns whatsoever about the way in which your data is being processed by emailing the Data Protection Manager at webmaster@marxist.com Feared Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov took his rifle-toting son, 14, to war when he lead Russia's bloody assault on Mariupol, it has emerged. The boy, named Adam, is seen in video footage donning military clothing while being given a tour of a hospital by his autocrat father - a close ally of Vladimir Putin - in the ravaged Ukrainian port city. Kadyrov, 45, said he wanted his son, who is one of 12 children, 'to learn first hand about the successes and needs of our comrades-in-arms', and also made clear he disagrees with Russia's move to lessen the military pressure on Kyiv, instead vowing to lead an invasion of the capital. In one sequence the child, dressed in dark green military fatigues, is shown with his father visiting the hospital bedside of Kadryrov's henchman commander Ruslan Geremeyev. Geremeyev is a suspect in the murder of Russian liberal politician Boris Nemtsov, a leading Putin foe and former deputy prime minister, gunned down close to the Kremlin in 2015. Ramzan Kadyrov (pictured) said he wanted his son, who is one of 12 children, 'to learn first hand about the successes and needs of our comrades-in-arms' The boy, named Adam, is seen in video footage donning military clothing while being given a tour of a hospital by his autocrat father (pictured together) - a close ally of Vladimir Putin - in the ravaged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol In one sequence the child, dressed in dark green military fatigues (pictured), is shown with his father visiting the hospital bedside Kadryrov's henchman commander Ruslan Geremeyev. Ruslan Geremeyev (pictured) is a suspect in the murder of Russian liberal politician Boris Nemtsov, a leading Putin foe and former deputy prime minister, gunned down close to the Kremlin in 2015. Kadyrov was seen introducing the boy (pictured) to the Russian army general, saying: 'Here is my Adam'. Even the Russian FSB - once headed by Putin - has been unable to locate and quiz Geremeyev over the political assassination, say reports. Geremeyev sustained relatively minor injuries in fighting Ukrainian defenders, according to Chechen TV. Kadryrov - accused of using medieval torture on his enemies in Chechnya - has been called 'the son Putin never had' for his devout loyalty to the Kremlin leader. The Chechen supremo - this week promoted to the rank of Lt-General in the Russian national guard - for the second day claimed that he had met and been briefed by Andrey Mordvichev, one of the senior commanders that the Ukrainians claimed to have killed earlier this month. Kadyrov was seen introducing the boy to the Russian army general, saying: 'Here is my Adam'. Mordvichev replies: 'Hi, well done!' Kadyrov tells him: 'Adam is 13.' Ramzan Kadyrov performs a prayer at a petrol station during a visit to war-torn Mariupol Ramzan Kadyrov visits Mariupol with Lieutenant General Andrey Mordvichev, Commander of the 8th Guards All-Army of the Southern Military District Kadyrov poses with the head of Donetsk People Republic Denis Pushilin 'Kremlin's dragon': Chechnya's Ramzan Kadyrov is a fierce Putin ally who rules his home territory with an iron fist Ramzan Kadyrov, 45, is supreme leader of Chechnya, a region situated in Russia's North Caucasus. He is often referred to as Kremlin's Dragon due to his loyalty to Russian president Vladimir Putin, while his paramilitary force has been accused of unleashing terror in Chechnya where he rules with an iron fist. Kadyrov, the son of former Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov - who was assassinated in 2004 - officially took over the presidency in 2007 and has since been blacklisted by Western nations. The father-of-twelve has reportedly treated Chechnya as his own private fiefdom since inheriting power from his late father, and is regularly accused of heavy handed tactics and mistreatment of the LGBT+ community - including rounding them up and placing them in concentration camps. Kadyrov denied the claims, insisting that 'gay people do not exist' in Chechnya. Advertisement However, records of the boy's age show him to be 14. Adam was earlier at the centre of controversy over his expensive watch collection - including a Richard Mille original reported to cost more than 263,000. 'I met with the commander of the 8th Guards Combined Arms Army, Lieutenant General of the Russian Armed Forces Andrey Mordvichev,' said Kadyrov. '[Mordvichev] reported on the significant successes of the fighters in critical areas and mentioned the approximate dates for the capture of Mariupol by the Russian army.' As well as his son Adam, other Kadyrov relatives are in Ukraine in his entourage, several of them ministers in his government in the oil rich region in the TransCaucasus. 'A special military operation in Mariupol to cleanse the city of Bandera [Ukrainian nationalists], Nazis and rabid shaitans without family or tribe is proceeding in accordance with the developed plan.' He vowed to fully bring Mariupol to heel before seeking to grab the Ukrainian capital. 'We will honourably carry out the order of our Supreme Commander-in-Chief, Russian President Vladimir Putin,' he said. 'He entrusted us with one of the most important and difficult areas, and we will justify his trust 100 percent. 'Very soon we will complete the assigned tasks in Mariupol and report to the President of the Russian Federation on our readiness to take Kyiv.' In Chechnya, Kadyrov is accused of human rights abuses and torture against his political opponents and LGBT+ activists and citizens. Adam (circled) is one of Kadyrov's 12 children, pictured here in a family photo In Chechnya, Kadyrov (pictured with Putin), 45, is accused of human rights abuses and torture against his political opponents and LGBT+ activists and citizens It was unclear how Geremeyev was wounded. Earlier Kadyrov had posted: 'The most difficult section in Mariupol was assigned to him, and the commander coped with the task brilliantly. 'In the same way, he always showed himself during the Chechen campaign in battles with shaitans - he was the first to ask for battle and perform the most difficult task. 'This time too he justified his name as an experienced and fearless commander.' Newspaper tycoon Evgeny Lebedev blasted Labour today over its attempts to discover why the security services tried to block his peerage. Lord Lebedev, who owns the Standard and Independent newspapers, insisted he has 'nothing to hide' as he backed the publication of security advice linked to his appointment to the House of Lords. In a series of tweets the Russian-born businessman, whose father was a KGB agent, criticised the opposition for attacking him based on 'no facts and pure innuendo'. And he revealed 'in the spirit of transparency' that party leader Sir Keir Starmer has congratulated him on his peerage in a text message in 2020. His remarks came as Labour tabled a House of Commons motion in a bid to force the Government to release documents about Boris Johnson's involvement in the appointment. The Prime Minister's former aide, Dominic Cummings, has claimed he was in the room when Mr Johnson was told by Cabinet Office officials that the 'intelligence services and other parts of the deep state' had 'serious reservations' about the PM's plan to appoint the media mogul to the Lords. They want Cabinet Office minister Steve Barclay to put all relevant information provided to the House of Lords Appointments Commission (HOLAC) before the Commons by no later than April 28. The Tories also attacked Labour over its own links to Mr Lebedev tonight. MP Peter Gibson has written to Labour asking Sir Keir to disclose his meetings with 'media proprietors, editors and senior executives. In his letter, the Darlington MP claims Labour has failed to honour a 2012 pledge made by former leader Ed Miliband, by not releasing the information for six years. Lord Lebedev, who owns the Standard and Independent newspapers, insisted he has 'nothing to hide' as he backed the publication of security advice linked to his appointment to the House of Lords. In a series of tweets the Russian-born businessman, whose father was a KGB agent, criticised the opposition for attacking him based on 'no facts and pure innuendo'. Lord Lebedev wrote on Twitter: 'Openness and transparency are pillars of our democratic system, so I welcome the call for security advice about me provided to Holac (House of Lords Appointments Commission) to be released. 'I have nothing to hide.' In separate tweets, Lord Lebedev added: 'And in the spirit of transparency here is a text to me from @Keir-Starmer: 'Congratulations on your elevation to the House of Lords. All best wishes, Keir.' 'There's a war in Europe. Britain is facing the highest cost of living since the 1950s. And you choose to debate me based on no facts and pure innuendo. What's become of you @UKLabour #shadowofyourformerself.' Labour tonight dismissed Lord Lebedev's attempt to draw them into the row over his peerage, with a source saying: 'It was Boris Johnson who secretly overruled the security services to give Lord Lebedev a seat in our parliament. None of this was publicly known at the time.' They called on the peer to also release his text messages with the Prime Minister. Mr Johnson has previously denied reports he influenced the intelligence services after they advised against giving a Lords' seat to Lebedev, who also denies any wrongdoing. Reports claimed MI5 and MI6 warned that granting the peerage in 2020 posed a risk to national security. But they are said to have withdrawn their opposition after the direct intervention of Mr Johnson, who accused them of 'anti-Russianism'. Lebedev, 41-, whose father is the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev, took his seat in December 2020 as Baron Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia. He is a friend of the PM and was part of a peerages list which included the Conservative leader's close political allies, party donors and his own brother, Jo. He moved to London aged eight to be with his billionaire father, Alexander, and has remained in the UK ever since. In 2009, the pair bought a 65 per cent stake in the Evening Standard. A year later, he bought The Independent and launched the i newspaper. It is expected Conservative MPs will abstain if Labour presses its motion to a vote. Opening the debate, Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner spoke of 'serious questions' over Lord Lebedev's peerage. She said: 'The commission concluded it could not support his nomination. Forty-eight hours later, the Prime Minister visited Lebedev at his home in London. 'Details of that meeting have never been released to the public and questions remain about whether the security services knew about this meeting or whether their assessments show that the Kremlin were keeping tabs on these activities.' In July 2020, Lord Lebedev's appointment as a peer was announced, she said, adding: 'So the question is this, what changed between the security warning and the appointment? 'The British public have a right to know if and how an individual of apparent concern to our intelligence services was granted a seat at the heart of Parliament by personal order of the Prime Minister. 'Whether the Prime Minister was aware of that security advice but chose to ignore it, overrule it, or even demand that be changed.' But Cabinet Office minister Michael Ellis accused Labour of seeking to 'whip up anti-Russian feeling'. He said: 'Not all Russians are our enemy. Many British citizens of Russian extraction came to this country with a view to an opposition to President Putin. People cancelling Tchaikovsky concerts is not appropriate and Labour seeking to whip up anti-Russian feeling, casting all persons of Russian extraction in a negative light is wrong.' President Joe Biden welcomed Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to the White House Tuesday amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's growing influence in Asia. The president and Lee both agreed to take one question during a 'press statement' after their meeting Tuesday afternoon, with Biden being asked by the Associated Press about his take on Russia's announcement it would pull back forces from Ukraine's capital, Kyiv. 'We'll see, I don't read anything into it until I see what their actions are. We'll see if they follow through with what they're suggesting,' Biden answered. He noted that negotiations were continuing throughout Tuesday, as he spoke with European leaders, including U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi earlier in the morning. 'There seems to be a consensus that - let's just see what they have to offer,' Biden said. 'We'll find out what they do, but in the meantime we're going to continue to keep strong the sanctions, we're going to continue to provide the Ukrainian military with their capacity to defend themselves, and we're going to continue to keep a close eye on what's going on.' Biden's comments to the press came one day after he tried to explain what he meant when he said Saturday in Warsaw that Russian President Vladimir Putin 'cannot remain in power.' That Q&A session led to more head-scratching, as Biden said he was expressing his 'moral outrage' when he made the unscripted remark, but clarified he wasn't calling on regime change. President Joe Biden took one question from a reporter during a 'press statement' he made alongside Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (left) and President Joe Biden (right) participated in a press statement event Tuesday afternoon at the White House Reporters pointed out that Biden's comments could inadvertently be used by Russia to justify further escalation. 'Nobody believes I was talkinga bout taking down Putin ... nobody believes that,' Biden answered Monday. 'I was expressing my outrage at the behavior of this man.' Biden kept his appearance alongside Lee Tuesday in the Oval Office short and scripted, keeping a notecard balanced on his lap. 'The rules-based order is facing unprecedented challenges,' Biden said, seated alongside the Singaporean leader. 'Russia's unprovoked and unjustifiable war against Ukraine is an urgent threat to both Europe and I believe the Indo-Pacific as well.' Biden noted that 'borders can't be changed by force' and said every nation, large and small, had the 'rights to their sovereignty.' 'I want to thank you, Mr. Prime Minister, for Singapore's principled leadership in supporting the people of Ukraine,' the American president continued. 'I know it's not easy, but I want to thank you for it. You're a man of principle and you've stepped up every time that you've had to.' Singapore stands out in the region by joining the United States and Western allies in sanctioning Russia for its actions against Ukraine. Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (left) meets with President Joe Biden (right) Tuesday in the Oval Office President Joe Biden (pictured) entertains Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on an unseasonably cold day in March Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore speaks at the top of his meeting with President Joe Biden Tuesday in the Oval Office Biden - sitting in front of a blazing fire, as Tuesday was an unseasonably cold day for March in D.C. - said the two leaders would discuss the U.S.-ASEAN relationship, 'freedom of the seas' - code for China's claims in the South China Sea - promoting a return to democracy in Burma and sustainable economic growth between the two nations. Lee thanked Biden for receiving him at 'this special moment in world affairs.' 'I'm sure you're completely seized with what's happening in Europe right now,' Lee said. Lee called Singapore a 'very good partner' to the United States. 'And our relations are doing very well,' the prime minister added. 'We will, of course, exchange views also on Ukraine and what that means for Asia Pacific region,' Lee said. After the meeting, as they appeared together in the East Room, the leaders made clear that Ukraine and Russia dominated the conversation, but other issues -including North Korea's latest weapons testing - were also discussed. 'Today with the prime minister's visit and Singapore's strong leadership on this issue, it's clear that Putin's war is unacceptable to nations in every region of the world - not just Europe but every region of the world,' Biden said. 'We cannot condone any country arguing that another country's independence is a result of historical errors and crazy decisions,' Singapore's Prime Minister Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said Tuesday from the East Room He also said of Lee: 'Both you and Singapore punch way above your weight - way above your weight.' In return Lee thanked Biden for the 'very warm welcome.' 'Singapore's a staunch supporter of international law and the U.N. charter, which prohibits acts of aggression against a sovereign state. And that's why we've strongly condemned the unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine,' Singapore's prime minister said. He called Russia's intrusion into Ukraine 'unacceptable.' 'We cannot condone any country arguing that another country's independence is a result of historical errors and crazy decisions,' Lee said. Lee also talked about how the conflict in Ukraine could have repurcussions in the Asia-Pacific, where certain territorial disputes could 'escalate to open conflict.' 'Countries with interests in the region need to pursue all efforts to settle disagreements through peaceful means so that we can avoid reaching a point of no return,' Lee said, encouraging 'open chanels of dialogue' between countries, including at the leader level. To Biden he said there were 'many friends in the region who want you to stay actively and consistently engaged.' Lee was the first leader of a member nation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to visit Biden's White House. Biden was supposed to travel to Asia later this spring for an ASEAN meeting, but that trip is now delayed due to scheduling conflicts. 'We're disappointed but we are very committed to looking for ways in which we can find a good time to schedule this,' the official said. Biden will, however, host a summit of ASEAN leaders at the White House later in the spring. Vice President Kamala Harris visited Singapore in August. Lee will also visit with Harris Tuesday. Lee spent time Monday at the Pentagon with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Biden and Lee last met on the sidelines of the G20 in Rome in October. NYC Mayor Eric Adams was seen dancing on-stage next to supermodel Cara Delevingne and hitting up a red carpet just hours after two more horrific assaults in the crime-ridden city he's repeatedly vowed to clean-up. Adams was pictured partying it up with British supermodel Cara Delevingne and rapper A$Ap Rocky at a swanky event held inside the One Vanderbilt skyscraper on Monday night. A clip of the ex-cop mayor, who began his first term in January, showed him dancing gently while posing next to Delevingne, who clutched a bottle of bubbly. The mayor also was able to squeeze a red carpet appearance to his busy schedule, appearing in a tan suit for the opening night for Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick's Neil Simon Broadway play Plaza Suite which debuted on West 44th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Adams' glitzy night out with celebrities raised eyebrows as it emerged he'd hit the tiles just hours after NYC was hit by another two shockingly violent assaults. NYC Mayor Eric Adams was seen partying it up with British supermodel Cara Delevingne and rapper A$Ap Rocky at a swanky event held inside the One Vanderbilt skyscraper Supermodel Cara Delevingne sips from a champagne bottle and dances alongside NYC mayor Eric Adams Monday night Mister Mayor: New York City mayor Eric Adams attends Plaza Suite opening night At 7:30am a 53-year-old man placing an order at a kiosk in a Midtown Manhattan McDonalds was caught on camera getting beaten and robbed. His attacker was captured coming up behind the victim before striking him in the back of the head and knocking him to the ground, the New York Post reported. As the victim attempts to get up the suspect pushes him and demands his wallet before he throws him on the ground again and kicks him in the head before making off with the victims phone and wallet, the Post reported. Another customer was captured nearby as the attack unfolded but no one came to the victims aide and the suspect fled to a nearby train station, the Post reported. The victim was transported to a local hospital where he is being treated for a severe head injury, the Post reported. And just a few hours later, at 1 pm, the 60-year-old owner of a Queens pawn shop had his head so badly beaten in with a metal rod that responding officers initially believed he suffered a gunshot wound, the New York Post reported. Earlier in the day at 7:30 am a 53-year-old man placing an order at a kiosk in a Manhattan McDonalds was caught on camera getting beaten and robbed Another customer was captured nearby as the attack unfolded but no one came to the victims aide and the suspect (pictured) fled to a nearby train station Police say an unidentified suspect walked into the pawn shop and struck him multiple times before fleeing the scene. Police say the motive behind the attack is unclear as they search for the suspect and in the meantime the victim remains at a local hospital in critical condition, the Post reported. The incidents come days after Adams himself said the spike in crime across New York City has made the Big Apple a 'laughing stock' in need of a 'wartime general' to tackle the ongoing problem. The MTA subway system has been ground zero for New York City so far this year, after an alarming 73.3 percent increase in underground incidents - including 182 in February alone. Hate crimes also have doubled since last year with anti-Asian attacks more than tripling and anti-Semitic attacks complaints up by a whopping 54 percent over the same time last year, from 134 to 207 incidents. Robberies saw the largest uptick with 3,351 cases reported so far this year, a 45.6 percent rise from last year. Rapes have also seen a dramatic spike with 360 cases reported compared to 247 during the same time last year, a nearly 31 percent jump. Police say an unidentified suspect (pictured) walked into the pawn shop and struck him multiple times before fleeing the scene Later in the day the owner of a Queens pawn shop had his head so badly beaten with a metal rod that responding officers believed he suffered a gunshot wound The number of shooting victims continues to go up as well, with 284 cases were reported so far this year - a 17.4 percent increase compared to the same period last year. Adams, speaking at the annual NYPD Holy Name Society communion Mass and breakfast on Sunday, condemned the lawlessness throughout the city and blamed petty crime and homelessness as contributing factors to the widespread 'dysfunction.' 'Anything goes in the City of New York,' Adams said, according to The New York Post. 'The most important city on the globe has become the laughingstock of the globe. And the dysfunctionality of our city has cascaded throughout the entire country.' His push to combat crime also comes as the NYPD's February crime statistics showed an almost 60 percent increase in felonies compared to the same time last year. Meanwhile, a recent poll of more than 9,000 employees revealed that 40 percent of those working in Manhattan wanted to move away due to rising crime. About 48 percent of those working in the other four boroughs agreed. The Morning Consult poll, conducted for Partnership for New York, surveyed 9,386 adults working in New York City from February 17 to March 11, with many voicing their frustration over the soaring crime and homelessness that has gripped the streets and subways. According to the poll, 74 percent of respondents said that safety has gotten worse in the city since the start of the pandemic lockdowns in March 2020, with 82 percent saying homelessness has also worsened. Overall, 84 percent of respondents said conditions in the city have gotten worse over the past two years, with more than half agreeing that conditions have greatly deteriorated. 'Safety, homelessness, and mental illness rank as top issues for New York City's private sector employees,' Morning Consult wrote in its findings to Partnership, whose more than 300 members employ more than 1 million people in the city. 'They are resisting return to the office until something is done to address them, particularly on public transit.' In all, 40 percent of those who live in Manhattan want to move away while 48 percent who live in the other four boroughs are also looking for an exit plan. Advertisement Women now earn as much or more than men in 22 US cities and metro areas, but the gender pay gap still persists for the average female worker, research has found. According to a Pew Research Center study published Monday, women under 30 who work full-time in the New York City and Washington DC metro areas are earning 102 percent of what their male colleagues are making. And in the Los Angeles metro area, women are earning the same as men. But the gender pay gap still persists, with the average woman now earning 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man. In total, the study found, 16 percent of all young women who are working full time are living in one of 22 cities where they make the same - or even more - than their male counterparts. The reverse-gender pay-gap is highest in Wenatchee, Washington, a city of just 32,000 where women earn 20 percent more than men. Wenatchee is famed for its apple orchards and wineries, and also has a large tourism economy. Morgantown in West Virginia comes second, with women there earning an average of 14 percent more than men. The city is home to a respected university, which has helped drive-up wages. Barnstable Town on Massachusetts' ultra-exclusive Cape Cod is in third place, with women earning 12 percent more than men. Florida holds the fourth and fifth places, with women in Gainesville earning 10 percent more than men, while women in Naples earn eight percent more than male colleagues on average. This map shows the areas where the gender pay gap is worst - and other cities and metro areas where American women earn more than their male counterparts on average These cities, experts say, are drawing more highly educated young women who are beginning to better understand their worth in the workforce as they graduate from college at higher rates than men of their age. 'When we're talking about major cities, they tend to be places where women with higher education levels - and possibly higher professional ambitions want to be,' Gloria Blackwell, chief executive of the American Association of University Woman told the Washington Post. But, she cautioned: 'Those cities are the exception, and not the rule.' In most major cities, the Pew Research Center study found, men continue to outpace women when it comes to wages, and the same problem persists across the wider United States. The Center analyzed US Census Bureau data for 250 major metropolitan areas from 2015 to 2019 and found that in 107 cities, where nearly half of young women working full-time live, women are making between 90 to 99 percent of what their male colleagues are making. In another 103 cities, where 17 percent of young women lived full-time in 2019, young women are earning 80 to 89 percent of what their male coworkers make. Fourteen other cities saw women earning between 70 to 79 percent of what their male colleagues made in 2019. And in four cities women younger than 30 were earning between 67 to 69 percent of what their male coworkers made. Most of the cities with the greatest disparity were in the Midwest and South, with the Elkhart-Goshen area of Indiana reporting that women are making 67 percent of what men make. The so-called Rust Belt of the Midwest has been hit hard by the manufacturing downturn, with the economic crisis there making the gender pay gap even more pronounced. Elkhart-Goshen area is known for manufacturing RVs and musical instruments. Nationally, the study found, women 30 and younger are still making 93 cents for every dollar made by a comparable man, and when accounting for all men and women - regardless of age - that number dropped to 82 cents. Still, that is a 6 percent increase over what it was a decade ago - when women famously made 77 cents for every dollar a man made. This table shows the areas of the US where women earn more than men on average - and the other places where they earn least by comparison to their male counterparts The wage disparities between young men and women was greatest in the Midwest and South Much of the discrepancy between young men's and young women's wages could be attributed to the different types of jobs men and women typically take, experts say. Men tend to go into fields such as heavy industry or technology, according to the Washington Post, which offer competitive wages. Women, however, tend to favor industries such as health care, education and hospitality, which tend to pay less. The wage gap only increases over time, experts claim. 'The older a woman is, the more time she has had to have been passed up for a promotion, to have gotten a smaller raise compared to an equivalent male colleague or to have made a career sacrifice for her family,' Betsey Stevenson, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan said. As Alexandra Kalev, an anthropology professor at Tel Aviv University explained, women are less likely to be mentored at work and are less likely to receive management training. At the same time, she said, they are driven more into less valued jobs, even if they have much sought after technical skills. 'In short, because companies' career systems are such that they offer more opportunities to men, men get more opportunities to advance and to keep their jobs longer - and this translates to growing pay gaps as the years pass.' But the Pew Research Center study suggests more young women are becoming aware of their worth, as they perform better in college admissions and graduations, with 14 percent more women earning bachelor's degrees in 2019, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Their wages have increased proportionally, the Washington Post reports, and women are now able to remain in the workforce even during times of economic downturns - like during the 2020 COVID pandemic when female and male college graduates stayed in their jobs at the same rate. 'I think there's some encouraging news in here that men and women are finally in many places starting out their careers with the same wages,' Debra Lancaster, director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University, told the Post. 'But I don't know if that would even impress my nieces; I think they expect that.' Cathay Pacific will set a new world record for the longest commercial flight route after tweaking its New York to Hong Kong journey to avoid Russian airspace. Hong Kong's national flag carrier will now send jets journeying between JFK in New York and Hong Kong International (HKG) around Russia rather than through it. It will also cross over the UK, much of mainland Europe and central Asia, also avoiding Ukraine. That means a journey of 10,326 miles rather than the previous 8,072. It will become the first ever regular passenger flight to exceed 10,000 miles. And for passengers, it means a flight of almost 17 hours rather than 15. The new flight path new crosses the UK, mainland Europe and central Asia to avoid Russia Hong Kong flag carrier Cathay Pacific is headquartered at Hong Kong International Airport Dozens of Asian carriers have been forced to amend flightpaths to avoid Russia and Ukraine Patient passengers must now spend an extra two hours onboard to travel 2,254 miles further Cathay revealed its plan in a company memo sent to flight crews today, Bloomberg reported. The new route overtakes Singapore Airlines' 9,537-mile flight from New York to Hong Kong, which takes a tad longer at 17-and-a-half hours, according to FlightRadar 24. Airlines have made efforts to avoid Russian and Belarussian airspace since the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. It is now a criminal offence for Russian aircraft to enter UK airspace - with violating vessels seized. Cathay said its fleet of Airbus A350-1000s can complete the longer New York-Hong Kong route safely without needing to refuel on the way. However, the route may change again in the summer as tailwinds over the Atlantic become less powerful - making the Pacific a better option. A spokeswoman said: 'We are always running contingency routings for potential events or scenarios. 'The Transatlantic option relies on the facilitation of strong seasonal tailwinds at this time of the year in order for the flight time to be between 16 and 17 hours, thereby making it more favorable than the Transpacific route.' Other airlines which have tweaked flight routes to avoid Russia include Japan Airlines, which crosses Alaska and Canada on its way between Tokyo and London Heathrow. The route formerly included passing over much of Siberia, a saving of almost five hours. Meanwhile British Airways has warned it will have to cancel hundreds of flights scheduled over the next few weeks. Passengers have been left waiting in hours-long baggage return queues due to persistent IT issues. In an internal message to staff, BA chief executive Sean Doyle admitted passengers and employees are 'fed up' with the recent issues but said there were 'no quick fixes'. That came after the airline - which announced it was scrapping masks on flights - reversed the plan and warned people they must wear them on journeys to 50 destinations. Places affected include Greece, Italy, the United States and Germany. Jada Pinkett Smith has finally broken her silence days after her husband Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars over an alopecia joke the comedian made about her shaved head. 'This is a season for healing and I'm here for it,' the actress posted to Instagram Tuesday, two days after the incident that stunned Hollywood A-listers and millions of viewers. Pinkett Smith, 50, posted the words on a pink background, but did not share a caption. She has remained quiet since the dramatic events involving her husband unfolded Sunday night. Later Tuesday, the couple's daughter Willow, 21, posted to her Instagram story a message that read, 'You know who's going through a lot right now? Literally everyone. Just be kind.' The separate posts from mother and daughter, which both appear to address the incident and its aftermath, come less than a day after Will Smith issued an apology for slapping Rock. Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith react to Chris Rock's alopecia joke about Pinkett Smith's shaved head at the Oscars Sunday, seconds before Smith marched on stage and slapped Rock Two days after the incident, Pinkett Smith, who has been open about her struggle with alopecia, broke her silence with a post on Instagram 'This is a season for healing and I'm here for it,' the actress posted to Instagram Tuesday, two days after the incident that stunned millions of viewers 'Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive,' the actor wrote. 'My behavior at last night's Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable. Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada's medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally. 'I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.' Rock, 57, has not responded to Smith's apology, or commented on the Sunday night incident. Smith, 53, also apologized to the the organizers and the producers of the show. The Academy condemned Smith's actions and launched a formal review of the incident on Monday. A full board meeting to discuss the incident will be held Wednesday. Will and Jada's daughter Willow, 21, shared a snap of herself holding her dad's Oscar after his now-infamous slap of Chris Rock and his best actor win on Sunday On Tuesday, Willow posted to her Instagram story a message that read, 'You know who's going through a lot right now? Literally everyone. Just be kind' Will Smith's mother, Carolyn Smith, 85, said she was shocked by her son's behavior, describing it as entirely out of character. 'He is a very even, people person,' she said on Monday on a local news station, Action News. 'That's the first time I've ever seen him go off. First time in his lifetime. 'I've never seen him do that.' Carolyn said she spoke to the actor on Monday, amid the drama, and told him to get some rest, and go on vacation. She said that she knew he would ride out the controversy. 'I am proud of him being him,' she said, adding that she had desperately hoped her son would win the best actor award. Will Smith's younger sister Ellen Smith, 50, who was with their mother, sister Pam, and others at the family home, agreed that she was confident he would overcome the current drama. 'I've had conversations with him, and it like really kind of broke my heart listening to the things he's said he had to go through to get to where he is,' she said. Carolyn Smith, 85, is seen on Monday speaking to Action News from her home in Philadelphia about her son Will Smith's behavior at the Oscars Smith's punishment will likely be decided at Wednesday's meeting held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors - where the incident is expected to be the main topic. Disciplinary action could include anything from forcing him to hand back his Oscar to the most severe punishment - suspension from the Academy - which would put Smith among the ranks of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, who were both expelled for sexual misconduct. A post-Oscars board meeting is always held to discuss the ceremony and address any concerns, but does not usually happen this soon, the Hollywood Reporter learned. The decision to hold the meeting was made after the Academy met for an emergency call Monday night about the incident and released a statement announcing a launch of a formal review. 'The Academy condemns the actions of Mr. Smith at last night's show. We have officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct and California law.' It appears that Smith may face some type of disciplinary action or sanction, though it's unlikely he will be made to forfeit his prize, Variety reported. While many are calling for Smith's Oscar to be rescinded, guidelines in the Academy's Code of Conduct - rewritten in 2017 during the height of the Me Too Movement - outline even more severe consequences. A more severe punishment would be expulsion from the Academy, putting the 'King Richard' actor in a small group of people who have been expelled, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Roman Polanski. Weinstein was expelled 'for 'sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment' and Cosby and Polanski were expelled 'in accordance with the organization's Standards of Conduct' after they had been convicted of sexual assault. Weinstein and Polanski's Oscars were never rescinded. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars on Sunday, after the comedian made a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith. On Monday, Smith apologized On Monday's airing of 'The View,' host Whoopi Goldberg, who is also a member of The Academy's board of governors, defended the actor and said, 'We're not going to take that Oscar from him. There will be consequences, I'm sure, but I don't think that's what they'll do.' Goldberg doubled down on her promise to punish Smith during Tuesday's show, saying, 'There are consequences. There are big consequences because nobody is OK with what happened.' 'Nobody, nobody, nobody,' she added. Many Hollywood celebrities denounced Smith's actions and called for his Oscar to be rescinded. Marshall Herskovitz, president emeritus of the Producers Guild of America, was among the first to condemn Smith, tweeting shortly after the attack that Smith had 'disgraced our entire community'. He said: 'I call upon the Academy, of which I am a member, to take disciplinary action against Will Smith. He disgraced our entire community tonight.' Herskovitz accused those who defended the actor of 'moral cowardice'. In one of the most shocking moments in the history of the vaunted awards show, Smith strode on stage Sunday and slapped Rock in the face after the comedian made a joke about the appearance of Smith's wife. Smith's meltdown continued when he returned to his seat as he repeatedly screamed: 'Keep my wife's name out of your f***ing mouth'. The crowd then fell into stunned silence - and any questions over whether the altercation was genuine were answered when just over half an hour later Smith was given the Best Actor award and apologized for the assault. The actor released a statement on Monday, saying his behavior was 'unacceptable and inexcusable' and left him 'embarrassed'. The actor released a statement on Monday, saying his behavior was 'unacceptable and inexcusable' and left him 'embarrassed' He wrote in an Instagram post that he was 'embarrassed' by his actions, which shocked the ceremony attendees, producers and viewers. 'Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive,' he wrote. 'My behavior at last night's Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable. Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada's medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally. 'I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.' The View host and Academy governor Whoopi Goldberg on Tuesday's show, said, 'There are consequences. There are big consequences because nobody is OK with what happened' Could Will Smith be stripped of his Oscar? Academy faces pressure to respond after disgraced star broke Code of Conduct drawn up in wake of MeToo Movement The Academy tweeted its disapproval of 'violence of any form' late on Sunday night There are calls for the Academy to strip Will Smith of his Best Actor Oscar after he walked on stage and slapped comedian Chris Rock who was presenting an award on stage, after making a joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith's hair. The Academy, in its code of conduct, is known to take a very a dim view of violence of any kind. After the award ceremony was over it tweeted: 'The Academy does not condone violence of any form. Tonight we are delighted to celebrate our 94th Academy Awards winners, who deserve this moment of recognition from their peers and movie lovers around the world.' The Academy reestablished its Code of Conduct in 2017 during the Me Too Movement. 'Academy membership is a privilege offered to only a select few within the global community of filmmakers,' AMPAS CEO Dawn Hudson wrote to members following various scandals in the industry. On Sunday night, in the Dolby Theatre, there was complete bewilderment in the moments after the assault with took place with those present initially wondering if the punch was part of a stunt. It took a few moments for the normally unflappable Rock to process but the colorful language from Smith quickly confirmed it wasn't any kind of joke at all. The punch threw the entire Oscars broadcast into chaos as producers were frantically forced into deciding how to deal with the on-air assault, with Smith still yet to receive his Best Actor statuette. Advertisement The actor released a statement on Monday, saying his behavior was 'unacceptable and inexcusable' and left him 'embarrassed'. He wrote in an Instagram post that he was 'embarrassed' by his actions, which shocked the ceremony attendees, producers and viewers. 'Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive,' he wrote. 'My behavior at last night's Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable. Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada's medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally. 'I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.' Rock has not responded to Smith's apology, or commented on the Sunday night incident. Smith also extended his apology to the family of Venus and Serena Williams. Shortly after slapping Rock, Smith won the best actor award for his portrayal of their father Richard - but the story of their family was overshadowed by Smith's attack. Richard Williams - who the Oscar-winner portrays in King Richard - said after the attack that he condemns violence. Chavoita LeSane, Williams' son, told NBC: 'We don't know all the details of what happened. But we don't condone anyone hitting anyone else unless it's in self-defense.' Smith said: 'I would also like to apologize to the Academy, the producers of the show, all the attendees and everyone watching around the world,' Smith continued. 'I would like to apologize to the Williams Family and my King Richard Family. 'I deeply regret that my behavior has stained what has been an otherwise gorgeous journey for all of us.' The Philadelphia-born actor concluded: 'I am a work in progress. Sincerely, Will.' His apology came as the group that hands out the Oscars on Monday condemned Smith's actions and said it had started a formal review of the incident that cast a shadow over the film honors. The crowd then fell into stunned silence as it became clear the attack was genuine, and not staged. Rock replied to him saying: 'I'm going to, okay?' He then laughed uncomfortably, saying: 'That was the greatest night in the history of television'. Smith's rant was muted by directors because the show's live broadcast is slightly delayed in the US. But it was aired in full to some international audiences with the uncut clip already been viewed more than a million times on social media and YouTube in the first few hours. Any questions over whether the altercation was genuine were answered when just over half an hour later Smith was given the Best Actor award and apologized for the assault. After smacking Rock, a visibly fuming Smith returned to his seat and began repeatedly yelling: 'Keep my wife's name out of your f***ing mouth'. Lupita Nyong'o' was among those baffled by what happened with many initially believing that an act so outrageous must be part of the show Smith and Pinkett-Smith held hands throughout the ceremony after the shock slap. Denzel Washington was acting as peacemaker In his acceptance speech a crying Smith said: 'Love makes you do crazy things', as he clutched his Oscar statuette. 'You gotta be able to take abuse, and you gotta be able to have people talk crazy about you,' Smith said. 'In this business, you gotta be able to have people disrespecting you and you gotta smile and you gotta pretend like that's OK. 'Denzel (Washington) said to me a few minutes ago, he said, 'At your highest moment, be careful. That's when the devil comes for you.' 'It's like I want to be a vessel for love. 'I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena. I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena and the entire Williams family for entrusting me with your story. That's what I want to do. I want to be an ambassador of that kind of love and care and concern.' The actor went on: 'I want to apologize to the Academy, I want to apologize to all my fellow nominees. 'Art imitates life. I look like the crazy father, just like they said. I look like the crazy father just like they said about Richard Williams. But love will make you do crazy things'. He added: 'I'm hoping the Academy invites me back. Thank you'. Smith's relationship with his wife had been the butt of jokes during awards season. At the BAFTAs in London a fortnight ago host Rebel Wilson targeted the couple when he won won the Leading Actor award for his role in King Richard. The assembled audience at the Royal Albert Hall, which didn't include the star who stayed in LA, groaned as she said his 'best performance in the past year was being OK with all his wife's boyfriends' - a nod to Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith's open relationship. It came after he recently admitted his wife had 'never believed in a conventional marriage' and claims she had an affair. This may explain why he reacted so sensitively to Rock's joke about her. Smith sobs as he accepted his best actor award, and apologized for the violence - but did not say sorry to Chris Rock Will and Jada's relationship has been the butt of jokes during awards season after he recently admitted she had 'never believed in a conventional marriage' and claims she had an affair Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith celebrated his Oscar win at an exclusive after party hosted by Vanity Fair - while Chris Rock attended a separate event In a statement on Monday, the 9,900-member Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it 'condemns the actions of Mr. Smith at last night's show.' 'We have officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct and California law,' the academy added. The group's standards of conduct policy states it is 'categorically opposed to any form of abuse, harassment or discrimination' and expects members to uphold the values 'of respect for human dignity, inclusion, and a supportive environment that fosters creativity.' Violations may result in suspension or expulsion from the group, revocation of Oscars, or loss of eligibility for future awards, according to the policy. A full board of Governors meeting is set for Wednesday and the incident is expected to be the main topic. A total of 43 Russian diplomats have today been expelled from four different European countries - Ireland, The Netherlands, Belgium and the Czech Republic - in coordinated action taken in the shadow of Moscow's war in Ukraine. The Dutch Ministry announced the expulsion of 17 diplomats that it said were 'secretly active' as intelligence officers. Belgium's government followed suit, announcing the expulsion of 21 diplomats on suspicion of spying in what it said was in coordination with the Dutch. The diplomats were given two weeks to leave the country. One member of the diplomatic staff at Russia's embassy in Prague was then expelled from the Czech Republic, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. '(The person) was requested to leave Czechia within 72 hours,' the ministry said on its Twitter account. 'Together with our Allies, we are reducing the Russian intelligence presence in the EU,' it added. Ireland also announced that it had requested four senior Russian officials to leave the country on account of their activities not being 'in accordance with international standards of diplomatic behaviour', the Government said. A total of 43 Russian diplomats have today been expelled from four different European countries - Ireland, The Netherlands, Belgium and the Czech Republic. Pictured: Mainly Russian nationals participate in a peaceful protest outside the Russian embassy to show support for Ukraine on March 5, 2022 in The Hague, The Netherlands In total, the four countries expelled 43 diplomats in the latest in a snowballing series of tit-for-tat expulsions of Russian diplomats by Western countries and retaliatory measures by Moscow, which have intensified since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 'Today, the ambassador of Russia was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' and informed of the expulsion, The Netherlands' Hague-based foreign ministry said in a statement. 'The reason is that there is information... showing that the persons concerned, accredited as diplomats, are secretly active as intelligence officers,' it said. 'The cabinet has decided to do this because of the threat to national security posed by this group,' the statement added, saying the intelligence threat against the Netherlands remained high. The 'current attitude of Russia in a broader sense makes the presence of these intelligence officers undesirable,' the ministry said. The government said it took the decision in consultation with 'a number of like-minded countries,' citing similar expulsions by the United States, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Montenegro. Poland last week expelled 45 Russians whom the government identified as intelligence officers using their diplomatic status as cover to operate in the country. This prompted Moscow to accuse Warsaw of embarking on 'a dangerous escalation'. One member of the diplomatic staff at Russia's embassy in Prague has been expelled from the Czech Republic, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said today. Pictured: Activists pour red paint on the stairs of the Russian Embassy in Prague on early March 26, 2022 In Ireland, the Russian ambassador was summoned to a meeting at the Department of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday. Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney said: 'This afternoon, the Department of Foreign Affairs summoned the Russian ambassador to Iveagh House to advise him that four senior officials have been asked to leave the state. 'This is because their activities have not been in accordance with international standards of diplomatic behaviour.' He went on to stress that diplomatic channels between Ireland and Russia would remain open 'in the interest of our citizens'. 'This channel of communication has been important in the context of conveying our strong views on the Russian Federation's war against Ukraine, which we regard as a serious breach of international law,' he added. Pictured: People placed support messages at the Ukrainian Embassy to the Belgium Kingdom, on March 8, 2022, in Brussels, Belgium. Belgium expelled 21 diplomats on Tuesday Speaking on Tuesday, Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said he was prepared for a similar retaliation from Moscow seen after others took similar measures. 'Experience shows that Russia does not leave these kinds of measures unanswered,' he said. 'We cannot speculate about that, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is prepared for various scenarios that may arise in the near future.' That was demonstrated earlier Tuesday, when Russia said it expelled a total of 10 diplomats from the three Baltic EU states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in retaliation for those countries expelling Russian diplomats earlier this month. The Russian Foreign Ministry said it was cancelling the accreditation of four Lithuanian diplomats, three Latvians and three Estonians and they would be required to leave the country. That corresponds to the number of Russian diplomats each country previously expelled. On March 18, the three Baltic countries ordered the expulsion of 10 Russian embassy staff members in a coordinated action taken in solidarity with Ukraine. Moscow called that move 'provocative and entirely baseless' and that it had summoned the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian ambassadors in Moscow for an official protest. The expulsions announced Tuesday ratcheted up Western blows directed at Russia following its February 24 invasion of Ukraine. Already several rounds of sanctions engineered mainly by the EU and the US have severely sapped Russia's economy. Pictured: Protesters gather outside the Russian Embassy in south Dublin to mark one month since the invasion of Ukraine. The embassy has become the focal point for Irish anger over the war raged by Vladimir Putin. Picture date: Thursday March 24, 2022 As a result, Russia now considers all EU countries, along with the United States and allies including Japan, Britain and Australia, to be 'hostile' countries. In the wake of Russia's invasion, the United States in early March kicked out 12 Russian diplomats based in New York it deemed to be 'intelligence operatives'. Russia retaliated last week by handing the US a list of American diplomats declared 'persona non grata'. Poland, an EU country neighbouring Ukraine, last week expelled 45 Russian diplomats over alleged espionage, prompting Moscow to accuse Warsaw of embarking on 'a dangerous escalation'. Russia was left virtually isolated in the United Nations' General Assembly on March 2 when an overwhelming majority of countries - 141 in total - voted to adopt a non-binding resolution demanding a halt to Moscow's war in Ukraine. Just five countries voted against the resolution: Russia, Syria, North Korea, Belarus and Eritrea. Another 35 abstained, including China. Two days later, on March 4, the UN Human Rights Council voted to trigger an investigation into violations committed in the war in Ukraine. Thirty-two of the council's 47 members voted in favour, with just Russia and Eritrea voting against. Two weeks ago, Russia announced it was quitting another international rights forum, the Council of Europe - just before the pan-European body based in Strasbourg said it was kicking Russia out. In total, the four countries expelled 43 diplomats in the latest in a snowballing series of tit-for-tat expulsions of Russian diplomats by Western countries and retaliatory measures by Moscow, which have intensified since Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Pictured: Putin meets with Presidential Grants Foundation CEO Ilya Chukalin at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 29, 2022 The expulsions came as Russia's defence minister said that 'liberating' the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine is the main goal of Moscow's military operation, underlining a possible shift in strategy announced last week by another Russian military official. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whose few public appearances this month raised questions about his health and whereabouts, held a meeting with top military officials on Tuesday and said that 'overall, the main tasks of the first stage of the operation have been completed.' He said that 'the combat potential of the Ukrainian armed forces has been significantly reduced, which makes it possible to focus the main attention and main efforts on achieving the main goal - the liberation of Donbas.' The minister stressed that the Russian military will continue the operation until 'the set goals are achieved.' Shoigu also offered an assurance that Russia will not send conscripts recruited in the upcoming April draft to Ukraine. Earlier this month, the Russian military admitted that a number of conscripts ended up in Ukraine and were even captured there. Last week, a senior NATO military officer said the alliance estimates that Russia has suffered between 30,000 and 40,000 battlefield casualties in Ukraine through the first month of the war, including between 7,000 and 15,000 killed. A married police officer who had sex with a vulnerable domestic abuse victim after looking up her details on the force's computer has today been jailed for nine months. Darren Thorn, 44, pleaded guilty at Reading Crown Court to corruption, computer misuse and misconduct in a public office. The charges centred on an 'inappropriate sexual relationship' that Thorn, who now lives in Devon, began with a vulnerable woman he met while on duty. The court heard how, a few months after he first met her as part of his duty, he accessed the police database to find her phone number and made the first unauthorised contact with her. Shortly afterwards, the two became a couple until 2018, when she suffered a miscarriage and the relationship fell apart. Thorn, who worked as a response officer in Swindon, was arrested in 2018 when the allegations came to light and suspended from Wiltshire Police. Darren Thorn (pictured), 44, who worked as a response officer in Swindon, pleaded guilty at Reading Crown Court to corruption, computer misuse and misconduct in a public office The investigation was carried out by the force, supervised by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC). A gross misconduct panel sacked him from the police in December last year after considering the evidence. Prosecuting, Christopher Wing said: 'This case arises in 2016 when Thorn attended the address of the complainant following a domestic violence incident in which she was involved. 'As a result, he formed a personal relationship with her, then used information obtained during the incident to send her a text message. He messaged her first. This became a sexual relationship and he visited her on personal visits on eight occasions while on duty. 'The fact of the matter was he was on duty and he should not have been there on personal matters. That relationship went on until June 2018, because the partner fell pregnant and suffered a miscarriage. She said he wasn't being supportive and she said the relationship was over. 'She sought counselling and during this counseling the relationship was revealed and this case came to light. Thorn was arrested on September 24, 2018, and he asked to use the toilet. While he was in the bathroom he tried to hide an iPhone. 'When it was accessed it was found to have 6,000 texts during the time of the relationship.' The prosecutor also went into detail about three occasions where he had illegally accessed the police database regarding information - on two occasions making searches regarding his partner's mother and on one occasion passing on the police information to his partner. A gross misconduct panel sacked him from the police force in December last year after considering the evidence. Pictured: file photo of Wiltshire Police headquarters Defending Thorn, Christopher Saad said: 'Mr Thorn was a married man who lived with his wife and three children. He had a job that was very much a source of pride for him. He had much to lose and he has lost it. 'He comes before you as a 44-year-old man. It has been over 30 months since he was arrested. He has apologised to his ex-partner and he has apologised to the Wiltshire Constabulary. 'In relation to the computer offences, in two of the incidents no information was passed on. In my submission, that is to be in the lowest end of offending severity. 'In regards to the other computer offence, that was passed on to comfort the partner - he told his partner to say her mother had not been raped. Again, usually it is police officers passing on information to criminals to assist offenders, but that is not this case.' Sentencing, Judge Paul Dugdale said: 'We can all look back and say 'that was a catastrophic mistake', and this was one of those. Darren Thorn is a 44-year-old man, of effectively good character. He has spent his life serving his family and community. 'This is a tragic case to deal with and it was a sad case. Darren Thorn has expressed clear remorse for what he has done. This was a mistake in his life, which he regrets. One of the great conditions of being human is that we make silly mistakes. 'There is no doubt the custody threshold has been crossed in this case. It is quite clear the only sentence that can be passed is an immediate custodial sentence.' Thorn, now of Braunton, South Devon, was sentenced to nine months imprisonment. He will have to serve half of this sentence before he is eligible for parole. The court heard how, a few months after he first met her as part of his duty, Thorn accessed the police database to find her phone number and made the first unauthorised contact with her (file photo of Reading Crown Court) Wiltshire Deputy Chief Constable, Paul Mills, said: 'We have been clear throughout this process that Thorn's actions were not only illegal, but were a significant and sustained breach of the very highest standards that the public and we expect from all our police officers and staff. 'We welcome today's sentencing and, alongside Thorn's earlier dismissal for gross misconduct from Wiltshire Police, I hope this acts as a strong deterrent for those who consider abusing the trust the public place in them. 'I would like to pay tribute to the female witness involved in this case, who not only had the courage to report this matter to us, but has also fully cooperated with us throughout this lengthy investigation. 'Every person who has an interaction with a representative of Wiltshire Police should have the confidence that they will be treated with care and professionalism, and it is completely unacceptable when these high standards are not met.' He added: 'Thorn's crimes will have harmed public confidence in policing and undermined the work of the vast majority of our police officers and staff who are committed to providing the very highest levels of service to our communities in Swindon and Wiltshire. 'Furthermore, if any member of the public has concerns relating to the professionalism of any officer or staff member, we would urge them to contact us in confidence so we can address the concerns raised.' In the middle of Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine, Donald Trump's priority on Tuesday was urging Vladimir Putin to hand over any documents he may have about Hunter Biden's dealings with Russian oligarchs. The ex-president said he was particularly interested in an alleged $3.5 million payment from the former mayor of Moscow's widow to a company co-founded by Hunter Biden, according to an excerpt from a new interview with Just The News. 'Why did the mayor of Moscow's wife give the Bidens -- both of them -- $3.5 million? That's a lot of money,' Trump in a 30-second clip on the Voice of America program. 'She gave him $3.5 million. So now I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it. I think we should know that answer.' Trump was referring to a 2020 report by Senate Republicans that claimed Yelena Baturina, one of Russia's billionaire oligarchs, gave the hefty sum to a company called Rosemont Seneca Thorton as part of a 'consultancy agreement.' Earlier this month, Trump accused Biden of a 'conflict of interest' after the president was sanctioned by Moscow along with a host of other US officials, as well as his son Hunter and Hillary Clinton. He suggested Biden failed to more strongly react to Putin's invasion of Ukraine because of the alleged payments from the late Moscow mayor's wife. Donald Trump called on Vladimir Putin to release any information he may have about Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine -- as Russia's brutal and unprovoked invasion of the country goes on for more than a month 'Breaking News: Russia just sanctioned Joe Biden. While that is a terrible thing, in so many ways, perhaps it will now be explained why the Biden family received 3.5 million dollars from the very wealthy former Mayor of Moscow's wife,' Trump said in a March 15 statement. Days later, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was grilled over why Baturina had not yet been sanctioned by the US over Russia's attack despite her apparent ties to the Kremlin -- and whether Biden indeed was conflicted. Psaki replied that there was 'no confirmation' of Senate Republicans' allegations and pointed out that the president has 'continued to sanction oligarchs more than we've ever sanctioned in the past, so I'm not sure that's a conflict of interest.' GOP lawmakers said the firm which received Baturina's money was co-founded by Hunter Biden. But an attorney for the president's son previously claimed he never received the funds and was not involved in the company. Hunter Biden is currently the subject of a federal investigation into his foreign business dealings, including his time serving on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Hunter Biden is the co-founder of Rosemont Seneca Advisors, and it's not clear what if any connection the two companies share. The Russian oligarch's payment was reportedly made while Hunter's father was vice president. The September 2020 Senate report, released just weeks before the presidential election, also found no wrongdoing on President Joe Biden's part. But that hasn't stopped Trump from accusing his Democrat rival of being influenced by foreign powers. And while Biden himself was not implicated, the report did argue that Hunter Biden's time working on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma did present a conflict of interest for the Obama administration, at a time when then-Vice President Biden was leading anti-corruption efforts in Kyiv. However it notes 'the extent to which Hunter Bidens role on Burismas board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear.' It also failed to support Trump's accusation that Biden pressured Ukraine's government to fire a corrupt top prosecutor in an effort to shield his son. Hunter was on Burisma's board from 2014 to 2019 and received about $50,000 a month. The new Trump interview comes as a federal probe into Hunter Biden's overseas business dealings in the country picks up speed. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that prosecutors from the US attorney's office in Delaware are interested in funds the first son received from the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma and how he used that money to pay debts. A source also told the Journal that one person was extensively questioned in front of the grand jury in February on Hunter Biden's drug and alcohol use, spending habits and mental state. That line of questioning suggests prosecutors are exploring whether the younger Biden could use his history of addiction as a defense against a potential criminal tax case. 'It doesnt necessarily mean an indictment is imminent, but it is indicative of trying to lock in testimony with an eye towards a potential trial someday,' former federal tax prosecutor Matt Mueller told the Journal. Mueller isn't working on the case. Sources talked to the Journal about some of the lines of questioning prosecutors have used when talking to a number of associates and witnesses before the grand jury. Widow Yelena Baturina and daughter Yelena Luzhkova after a farewell ceremony for Yuri Luzhkov, who served as mayor of Moscow in 1992-2010, at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour Prosecutors are looking into whether Biden violated tax or other laws, including laws that guide working as a lobbyist for a foreign government, with his business dealings in Ukraine, China and Kazakhstan. Prosecutors have particularly focused on payments Biden received from Burisma - which flowed into a company called Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC before being directed to Hunter Biden. Trump's Tuesday interview is not the first time he's publicly called on the Kremlin to come up with dirt against a political opponent. In a July 2016 press conference during his first presidential race, he infamously called on Moscow to hack then-opponent Hillary Clinton. 'Russia, if youre listening -- I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Lets see if that happens,' Trump told reporters. He walked the comments back years later during a rally in Pennsylvania, insisting the comments were a 'joke.' An October 2021 report alleges that Hunter Biden once offered to sell a major US company information and analysis on Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch currently under federal investigation, emails from his abandoned laptop show. Hunter Biden once offered to sell a major US company information and analysis on Oleg Deripaska (above), the Russian oligarch currently under federal investigation, according to the New York Post The president's son made the offer in 2011 to aluminum giant Alcoa, saying he could provide the company 'with statistical analysis of political and corporate risks, elite networks associated with Oleg Deripaska,' according to New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. He wanted to charge Alcoa fees of $25,000 for 'phase one' of the project and another $55,000 for 'refined analysis', according to emails Devine cited from the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned in a Delaware repair shop in 2019. Deripaska is the founder of Russian aluminum giant RUSAL, with which Alcoa had recently entered into a two-year metal supply agreement at the time of the emails. Hunter Biden made the offer on behalf of Rosemont Seneca to an Alcoa executive, according to the Post. His father was vice president of the United States at the time, a fact which Alcoa executives took note of in assessing the proposal, the emails reportedly show. It's unclear whether a deal was ever reached to provide Alcoa the information on Deripaska, though the emails reportedly suggest that Rosemont Seneca lowered the proposed fee after hearing feedback from the prospective client. The top American commander in Europe on Tuesday said he believed the U.S. will have to add to the 102,000 troops in the region to bolster defenses against Vladimir Putin. And Gen. Tod Wolters told a Senate committee hearing that Russia had used multiple hypersonic weapons in Ukraine but that they had failed in their effort to spread fear among Ukrainians. The head of Europe Command also admitted that there could have been an intelligence gap that allowed Washington to overestimate Russia's military capabilities and underestimate the power of Ukrainian resistance. He appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on day 34 of the Russian invasion as Moscow announced it was scaling back its attempts to take the capital Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv. Wolters said the Russian invasion had already prompted the U.S. to increase troop numbers from 60,000 to 102,000. More could follow, he said in answer to a question about numbers of troops permanently stationed in Europe. 'I think what we need to do from a US force perspective is look at what takes place in Europe, following the completion of the Ukraine-Russia scenario, and examine the European contributions and, based off the breadth and depth of the European contributions, be prepared to adjust the US contributions,' he said. 'And my suspicion is we're going to still need more.' Gen Tod Wolders, head of Europe Command, told senators he believed the U.S. would have to send more troops to the region to bolster N.A.T.O. defenses against Russia The U.S. has already increased the number of troops in Europe from about 60,000 to 102,000 since Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine a month ago Six EA-18G 'Growlers' arrived in Germany on Monday. They are equipped with the very latest electronic warfare capability and can jam enemy communications and anti-aircraft defenses A day earlier, the Pentagon announced it was sending six naval aircraft, equipped for electronic warfare, to Germany to bolster N.A.T.O.'s eastern flank along with 240 personnel. In his opening statement Wolters said Russia's invasion had 'galvanized' N.A.T.O.s 30 members. And he described the 'unmatched' speed with which the Pentagon had able to deploy an entire armored brigade combat team to Germany in just a week. In comparison, he confirmed that Russia had used 'multiple' hypersonic weapons - capable of traveling at more than five times the speed of sound and able to outmaneuver missile defense systems - but they had failed in their primary objective. 'I think it was to demonstrate the capability and attempt to put fear in the hearts of the enemy and I don't think they were successful,' he said when asked why Russia had used one of its most sophisticated weapons. A Mig-31 jet carries a Kinzhal hypersonic missile during a military display. Russia says it has used at least two of the futuristic weapons against targets in Ukraine Hypersonic weapons can accelerate to high speeds in the upper atmosphere, before traveling back to earth. They are more maneuverable than conventional cruise missiles Russia said it has twice used its Kinzhal aviation missile system to strike targets during its war in Ukraine. Wolters said he believed Russia had deployed 70 to 75 percent of its entire military forces to the war in Ukraine. However, its main advances have been stalled since the early days of the invasion. Ukrainian hit-and-run tactics combined with anti-tank weapons sent by friendly nations were credited with halting the Russian assault on Kyiv. The success of the resistance meant Russian plans to seize the capital in two days had failed. Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, asked Wolters whether there had been intelligence failures in assessing the relative strengths of the two sides. 'There could be and as weve always done in the past, when this crisis is over with, we will accomplish a comprehensive after-action review in all domains and in all departments and find out where our weak areas were and make sure we can find ways to improve, and this could be one of those areas,' he said. A woman walks past a residential area which was destroyed as a result of a rocket strike in Kyiv as Ukraine makes military gains in the region An abandoned Russian armored vehicle with the Z war symbol emblazoned on it lies in the village of Mala Rogan, east of Kharkiv, after it was seized by Ukraine Earlier Russia announced Tuesday it would 'fundamentally' scale back military operations near Ukraine's capital and a northern city. Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said the change on the battlefield was meant to increase trust at the talks after several rounds of negotiations failed to halt what has devolved into a bloody campaign of attrition. The announcement was met with skepticism from the U.S. and others. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he had yet to see evidence of progress in talks. 'There is what Russia says and there is what Russia does, and we're focused on the latter,' Blinken said in Morocco. 'And what Russia is doing is the continued brutalization of Ukraine.' Even as negotiators from the two sides assembled in Istanbul, Putin's forces hit an oil depot in western Ukraine late on Monday and blasted a gaping hole Tuesday morning in a nine-story government administration building in the southern port city of Mykolaiv. At least seven people were killed in that attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said. Jackie Weaver did not have the authority to remove participants from Handforth Parish Council's hilarious 'worst Zoom meeting ever', an official council report has concluded. In February 2021 clips from the infamous Zoom meeting went viral with millions of views online. During the seven-minute edited highlights package of the December 2020 hearing, someone is heard exclaiming: 'f*** off' at the start, a toilet flushes and another person answers the front door as councillors from two rival factions struggled with the mute button. After receiving a series of complaints about the ill-tempered meeting, Cheshire East Council's Audit and Governance Committee launched a probe into what happened. Earlier this month it concluded with no formal findings made against any councillor - yet still costing the authority 85,716. The council has now published six reports, totalling 145 pages, which considered behaviour before and during the meeting. One report concluded Ms Weaver 'was not acting in an official capacity at these meetings', BBC News reported. Jackie Weaver (pictured) did not have the authority to remove participants from Handforth Parish Council's hilarious 'worst Zoom meeting ever', an official council report has concluded In response, Ms Weaver, of the Cheshire Association of Local Councils who represent town and parish councils, said she did not remove the councillors from the meeting but moved them to the waiting room before the remaining councillors voted to remove them. She said she welcomed the findings in the report but was 'deeply saddened that it took so long and cost so much to get there'. The Audit and Governance Committee was investigating 21 formal complaints from meetings which occurred between 2018 and November 2020, which was before the viral zoom video. It was decided all complaints should be probed by the same investigators but with six separate reports created. Three members were found to potentially be in breach of the Members Code of Conduct and issued with determination notices by Cheshire East's monitoring officer - but instead they all resigned. The committee's report said the resignations were part of several 'complications which prolonged the process and increased the total cost'. A joint statement from the three former councillors said they did not recognise the findings of the report as being valid. The hour-long meeting - which actually took place in December 2020 but only went viral in February, got off to a rocky start after the chairman Cllr Brian Tolver challenged the legitimacy of the meeting Chaos ensued as councillor Aled Brewerton reacted to Mr Tolver's expulsion by exclaiming: 'She's kicked him out.' He then attempted to commandeer the meeting as vice-chairman before, also being booted off, shouting: 'Read the standing orders - read them and understand them' In February 2021, Ms Weaver became an Internet sensation after the Handforth Parish Council planning committee meeting, in Cheshire, went viral. The parish council meetings had become so explosive Cheshire East Council official Jackie Weaver sat in to calm the waters. The hour-long meeting - which actually took place in December 2020 but only went viral in February, got off to a rocky start after the chairman Cllr Brian Tolver challenged the legitimacy of the meeting. It was being held due to complaints over who actually ran the council as aggrieved Mr Tolver had missed six months of meetings. The meeting was described online as 'British comedy gold' and 'like something out of the Thick of It'. As Mr Tolver became heated, Ms Weaver warned him: 'If you disrupt this meeting, I will have to remove you from it.' The meeting was attended by several other councillors (clockwise from top left: Susan Moore, Barry Burkill, John Smith, and Cynthia Samson) This prompted furious Mr Tolver to reply: 'You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver! No authority at all!' And chaos ensued as councillor Aled Brewerton reacted to Mr Tolver's expulsion by exclaiming: 'She's kicked him out.' He then attempted to commandeer the meeting as vice-chairman before, also being booted off, shouting: 'Read the standing orders - read them and understand them.' Jackie Weaver later admitted she was 'surprised' by her newfound fame. She said: 'Ninety nine per cent of council meetings are not like that. They're often less exciting than we might hope they were. 'Most of the time I'm trying to encourage people to get involved in parish councils to raise their profiles. 'The plus side of this is that it's certainly done that.' A one-year-old child who went missing in Florida over the weekend was yesterday found dead in a septic tank, police have said. Jose Lara is thought to have fallen into the tank in a 'tragic accident', the Putnam County Sheriff's Office said in a social media post. On March 27 the Florida Department of Law Enforcement issued a missing child alert for the one-year-old, but it was yesterday cancelled as the FDLE confirmed that the child 'has been found deceased'. Jose Lara (pictured) is thought to have fallen into the tank in a 'tragic accident', the Putnam County Sheriff's Office said in a social media post Jose had last been seen playing with his sister outside their house, south of Crescent City and just north of the Volusia County line. It is understood that the mother was inside the house with her other child, but it is not known for how long, Sheriff HD 'Gator' DeLoach told a press conference yesterday. The toy truck he'd been playing with was found outside, the Independent reports. DeLoach added there was no indication that Jose left the property, which was part of the reason why a decision was yesterday made to empty the septic tank. He said the toddler appears to have fallen in after stepping on rotted plywood, with the tank's opening covered by weeds and dirt, News4JAX reports. Jose's body was found in a septic tank. It is understood that the mother was inside the house with her other child, but it is not known for how long, Sheriff DeLoach told a press conference An active investigation is ongoing despite no suggestion of foul play. In a Facebook post, the sheriff thanked staff who 'tirelessly and seamlessly' assisted in the search for Jose, albeit him being found dead was the 'worst possible outcome'. In another online post the Putnam County Sheriff's Office said: 'Please keep the family of Jose Lara in your prayers as they grieve the loss of their son. 'Sheriff De Loach personally briefed search and rescue teams prior to notifying the public. 'Please keep them in your prayers as this was not the outcome we hoped for. Jose's body was recovered from a septic tank earlier today. 'While the investigation is ongoing it is believed this was a tragic accident and Jose fell into the tank.' We respond to misleading comments by one of the lawyers (John Cooper of Slater Gordon) representing families at the Manchester Arena Inquiry and by Dominic Scally of Counterterrorism (CT), reported in some media. 1. Whilst it is stated that Didsbury Mosque did not support violence or have anything to do with the attacks, their subsequent comments still attempt to associate Didsbury Mosque with extremism and radicalisation. We believe this is a diversion from focusing on the very real failings of those agencies with a duty to protect the public and prevent such attacks. We are further of the opinion that Didsbury Mosque has been continuously demonised to make the case for government measures that will securitize places of worship and believe the recommendations of Mr. Cooper are trying to influence the Inquiry in that direction. 2. It is open-source knowledge that one of the families, represented by Mr. Cooper has a relationship with the government, collaborating with them on the expansion of the Protect Duty. If this bill is passed, it would also apply to places of worship. We will be raising with the Inquiry the possibility of a conflict of interest and seeking reassurances that the Inquiry will remain independent of the government in making recommendations as far as Didsbury Mosque (mosques) and Muslim charities are concerned. 3. The comments reported in the media are from only one of the lawyers representing the families. We note and agree with the comments made by another lawyer representing the families which are less biased and more balanced. It is made clear Didsbury Mosque had no role in the radicalisation of Salman Abedi nor ignored violent extremism (point 126). This statement also more comprehensively reflects on the failings of government agencies. 4. Didsbury Mosque cannot be held responsible for the fallout of a decision of the British Government, working with some Libyan groups to remove the Gaddafi government, which encouraged some Manchester Libyans to go and fight in Libya, creating a radicalising environment and extremism among some in Manchester. Given that environment, the Didsbury Mosque believes we successfully kept Libyan politics out of the mosque. Didsbury Mosque has been aware of such overseas politics and tried its best to keep it out of the mosque since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Mosques are places of worship and should not become places where intelligence gathering on people's lives and politics should take place. 5. We observe that M15 and M16 have not provided a full account of any relationship they may have had with Ramadan Abedi. We will ask the Inquiry to investigate this further and consider if that in any way could have contributed to the failure to adequately monitor Salman and Hashim Abedi. 6. It is obvious that Abedi escaped the attention of all, and there must be better communication between all in the future. Didsbury Mosque will be writing to the Chairman of the Inquiry with our own recommendations of how we think such attacks may be avoided in the future. 7. It is disingenuous to try to give the impression Didsbury Mosque has not condemned the Manchester Arena attack, and bizarre that the Charity Commission should be asked to revoke our charitable status on that basis. We made it clear that this barbaric act had nothing to do with Didsbury Mosque, Islam, or the Quran, immediately after the attack. This was in front of the world's media which had a greater reach than the few people who visit our website. The main Imam of the mosque at the time also condemned it on his social media. On the day Mr. Haffar was giving evidence at the Inquiry he had prepared a statement of condolences and condemnation to be read out at the outset. Permission was not granted to do so. If the families wanted us to put a condemnation statement on our website, they could have simply written to us requesting it. Rather this appears to us to be a demand of Mr. Cooper. 8. The mosque has co-operated with and provided several detailed statements (with evidence) to the Inquiry which have not been made public. Mr. Cooper instead has focussed on the evidence given in person by Mr. Haffar. 9. Mr. Graf our former Imam, has already responded with his own statement to the allegations made against him and these are available on the Inquiry website. 10. We ask Dominic Scally to provide evidence to substantiate that Didsbury Mosque co-operated less than other mosques in Manchester prior to 2016 (when, where, what we did not do compared to others), not simply make assertions. We have had a close working relationship with the police for a very long time and will now provide evidence of that relationship to the Inquiry. In 2016, Imam Graf also arranged a Prevent training event for Muslims across Manchester at Didsbury Mosque. The truth is that according to our knowledge at no point has anyone from the police, CT, or M15 ever contacted us with concerns about the Abedi's. 11. We further point out that the smearing and demonisation of Didsbury Mosque by some at the Inquiry, and in the media, has put our mosque at risk from extremist elements. There has already been an attempted arson attack last year. After the recent media coverage, we became aware of discussions on social media about 'a solution' to the problem of Didsbury Mosque, namely, to blow it up. We have taken that seriously and reported it to the Police. 12. Mr. Wilkinson, (the Inquiry's radicalisation expert) has already concluded that Didsbury Mosque has not played any role in the radicalisation of Salman Abedi and that he was radicalised in Libya's civil war. We, therefore wonder what the purpose of continuous speculation about Didsbury Mosque in the context of the failure to prevent an attack, serves. Advertisement Haunting photos show a family-of-five just hours before a fatal crash on an Ohio highway claimed their lives. The shots, snapped by photographer Rhea Harris Saturday afternoon, show Ohio man Xavier Brown, 25, and fiancee Muriel Michael, 28, posing for professional photos in Delta, 30 miles outside Toledo, with Brown's three children, Deklin, 9, Aurora, 7, and infant Riggs. Less than ten hours later, the family was involved in a high-speed collision, on County Road 14 in Clinton Township, that police say occurred after another driver failed to yield to a stop sign. All five died as a result of the crash, which cops say occurred late Saturday night. The shots, snapped Saturday, show Ohio man Xavier Brown, 25, and fiancee Muriel Michael, 28, posing with their family less than 10 hours before a crash claimed their lives The couple, who both hailed from Ohio, were set to wed later this year, photographer Rhea Harris said Sunday after learning of the tragedy. The shoot was the first of many planned by the couple Headed southbound on the rural roadway at around 11:48pm, the family's vehicle was struck by a car driven by 21-year-old Zane Hull, police said Sunday. Hull, who only suffered minor injuries in the crash, was headed eastbound on intersecting road County Road H, police said, when the collision occurred. Cops said he failed to yield to a stop sign, causing the crash. Brown and his son Deklin both died at the scene, responding officers said after being called to the scene of the crash early Sunday morning. Aurora, a girl, and Riggs, a one-year-old boy, both died after being airlifted to a nearby hospital, lawmen further revealed. Michael, meanwhile, who was set to marry Brown later this year, survived the initial impact and was also rushed to the hospital. Tuesday morning, the Ohio State Highway Patrol announced that she, too, had succumbed to her injuries late Monday night. The incident remains under investigation. According to Harris, who specializes in family, newborn, and pinup-style photo shoots, Saturday's photo op was the first of many planned by the couple ahead of their upcoming wedding. Infant Riggs, 1, was airlifted from the wreckage early Sunday following the crash and rushed to a hospital, where he died later that day. 'He was so happy,' photographer Rhea Harris said of the tot, whom his father said 'well-behaved.' She recalled: 'He smiled on cue and even said "cheese" a few times!' Eldest Deklin, 9, along with his dad, died at the scene police said Sunday. Photographer Harris recalled the youth as 'adorable,' describing the youngster as a 'clear helper and protector' Middle child Aurora, 7, who was seated in the backseat with her two siblings, also survived the initial crash, but died after arriving at a nearby hospital. Harris, recalling the child's toothy grin, called her a 'delight' to deal with during the Easter-themed shoot. 'With missing teeth and her happy smile, it was hard not to be drawn to her,' she said of the youngster 'I always notice special things about each and every client or family that comes to work with me,' Harris told ABC-affiliate KTNV 13 Action News after learning of the tragedy Sunday morning. 'A lot of the time, they leave a lasting impression on me,' the professional snapper added, telling the Ohio news station that his brief interaction with the family Saturday afternoon was no different. 'I had such a fun time photographing this family,' said Harris. 'Muriel and Xavier were clearly in love, their happiness definitely came shining through in their photos.' 'She was so excited for their wedding and their future together as a family,' the photog said. 'I was just as excited to be a part of it with them. I never couldve imagined what would come next.' Police said Sunday that Michael had been driving the vehicle prior to the crash, with her to-be husband in the car's passenger seat. The three children were seated in the back. 'He was so happy,' Harris recalled of the one-year-old, whom she said his father said was 'well-behaved.' 'He smiled on cue and even said "cheese" a few times!' she told KTNV. The professional shots, snapped Saturday afternoon hours before the crash, serve as the final time the family was pictured together before their lives were snuffed out Harris, meanwhile, called eldest Deklin 'so adorable,' describing the youngster as a 'clear helper and protector' of the family. Aurora, meanwhile, was a 'delight' Harris said, recalling her toothy-grin. 'With missing teeth and her happy smile, it was hard not to be drawn to her,' she said. On Sunday, she posted the familys photos to Facebook, accompanied with a touching tribute, that has since garnered thousands of shares. 'This family came yesterday,' Harris wrote in a caption for the post. 'The mom, Muriel and I have been messaging for a while now. They were planning their wedding and she wanted family photos so badly. 'We talked about engagement photos, the wedding, family photos and even spoke about boudoir shoots for her fiances gift. I got to meet them all yesterday at our first shoot. Instantly loved them. The kids were just so well behaved and adorable, and the baby, Riggs, was the best one year old Ive ever had!' 'Such a pleasure to have met them and I looked forward to more sessions and getting to know them.' Hours after the shoot, the family was struck by another vehicle, driven by 21-year-old Zane Hull (not pictured), on County Road 14 in Clinton Township. The family had been headed southbound on the rural roadway at around 11:48pm, when their vehicle was struck Hull, who was headed east on County Road H and failed to yield at a stop sign 'Then, later last night they were in a horrific accident,' she remarked, noting the casualties suffered after the crash. 'Though I did not know them well, I am devastated by this news, so I cannot imagine what their family and friends are going through. 'My heart goes out to the family and friends of this family,' she said. 'I just feel honored to have been able to capture these beautiful memories for them to cherish forever.' Word of the heartbreaking tragedy has since spread across the country, with a GoFundMe created to cover the family's funeral expenses reaching $43,000 Tuesday - well past its $5000 goal. Of the crash, Ohio State Highway Patrol said Sunday that some of the family were not wearing seat belts at the time of the crash. Officers, however, did not specify who. Skid marks can be seen at the scene of the crash, off County Road 14 in Clinton Township, Monday As of Tuesday, police's investigation into the crash is currently ongoing. Hull, the driver of the other vehicle, has not been charged with a crime 'Its a tragic reminder of what can happen behind the wheel,' Sgt. Ryan Purpura said. 'Its a reminder to make sure you wear a seat belt and any kind of measures you can do yourself behind the wheel to make sure you are safe.' Police's investigation into the crash is currently ongoing. Hull, the driver of the other vehicle, has not been charged with a crime. Former Irish soldier Lisa Smith, who denies membership of so-called Islamic State, 'specifically assessed, analysed and ultimately answered the call to migrate' to Syria, a court has heard. A prosecutor in the trial of the former Defence Forces soldier told the Special Criminal Court in Dublin that it was not a case of a 'simple or innocent act of travel' at an unfortunate point in time when Ms Smith travelled to IS-controlled territory. Smith left the Irish military in 2011 after she converted to Islam, before travelling to a IS-controlled region in Syria where she married Sajid Aslam, the court heard. The prosecution says her husband, a UK national, carried out 'border patrol' work for ISIS, and that he 'had done a snipers course on her advice.' The Co Louth woman, 39, has pleaded not guilty to charges of membership of IS and providing funds to benefit the group. In his closing speech, prosecuting counsel Sean Gillane told the three-judge, non-jury court that the 'element of buyer's remorse' asserted was not a defence. Former member of the Defence Forces Lisa Smith leaving the Special Criminal Court in Dublin where she is facing terror-related charges. Picture date: Tuesday March 29, 2022 Smith left the Irish military in 2011 after she converted to Islam, before travelling to a IS-controlled region in Syria where she married Sajid Aslam, the court heard The prosecution says her husband, a UK national, carried out 'border patrol' work for ISIS, and that he 'had done a snipers course on her advice.' The Co Louth woman, 39, has pleaded not guilty to charges of membership of IS and providing funds to benefit the group 'Ms Smith is not being prosecuted for believing in Islam or following Islam, or for believing in a caliphate or a caliph,' Mr Gillane added. 'It's important to resist any attempt to conflate the nomenclature, she is being prosecuted for joining a terrorist group. 'There are many straw men in the case that obscure the real issue. To ask the court to consider the merits, legitimacy of a caliphate is about as valid as asking the court to pronounce on the existence of heaven or hell.' Gillane continued: 'The fact that followers of a religion do not have a monopoly on sincerity of belief, it hardly needs to be expressed. 'Belief is neither here nor there for the purposes of what is to be assessed. 'The suggested sincerity with which she holds those beliefs, her sincerity or otherwise is besides the central point. 'The self-declared caliphate is not a country, it is not a nation state, it is a proto-state created by an illegal organisation, a gang, which exists solely through its members with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared leader of that organisation.' The prosecutor said that Ms Smith's decision to travel to IS territory in 2015 did not 'involve some missing of a target on an otherwise lawful and wholesome journey'. 'It is not a case of a simple or innocent act of travel or near presence at a place in an unfortunate point in time,' Mr Gillane added. 'An element of buyer's remorse has been asserted, it is understandable, but that is not a defence. 'It is the case on the evidence that Ms Smith specifically addressed, assessed, analysed and ultimately answered the call to migrate to this place controlled by IS, and this is the Hijrah referred to in the context of the case.' Michael O'Higgins, defence counsel for Ms Smith, told the court that the evidence shows that his client had fully accepted before she travelled to Syria that there was 'no prospect' of her fighting. He said she believed she would go to Syria and marry and have an extended family and would continue to 'survive and prosper in Islam, which would not require her to go back to Ireland with her tail between her legs'. Mr O'Higgins said that was not consistent with her becoming involved in any form of combat. Former member of the Defence Forces Lisa Smith arriving at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin where she is facing terror-related charges. Picture date: Tuesday January 25, 2022 Michael O'Higgins, defence counsel for Ms Smith, told the court that the evidence shows that his client had fully accepted before she travelled to Syria that there was 'no prospect' of her fighting He said during her time in Syria, Ms Smith spent her time being a 'dutiful wife', and cleaned, washed, cooked and went food shopping. 'The only action which the prosecution has pointed to, was that by buying into maintaining a husband, if he is an Islamic State soldier, you are becoming a member of that organisation by virtue of that action and to my surprise through having babies as well,' he added. He described as a 'tall order' any claim that Ms Smith had a baby so the child could be raised to become an IS fighter. 'That is what you're being asked to convict. The fact she had children is an indicator she is a member of a terrorist organisation,' he added. 'My client crossed the desert with her baby under her arm and stayed in a camp and got nappies and milk powder from visiting FBI agents.' A drink-driver has been jailed for nearly eight years for killing a work friend who filmed him swigging lager while racing at 100mph moments before the fatal crash. Meirion Roberts, 26, was drinking at a work Christmas party with his colleague Lewis Morgan before the 20-year-old was killed. Despite having arranged a lift home from the pub in Carmarthenshire, Roberts decided to drive to Mr Morgan's house. Swansea Crown Court heard that Roberts had drunk five pints of cider at the party followed by a can of lager when he got to his friend's home in Carmarthen. The two men, who worked together at a building firm, then left, with Mr Morgan telling his brother they were 'going for a spin'. Mr Morgan filmed Roberts playing loud music and swigging from a bottle of lager bought from an off licence while hitting 100mph on a dual carriageway. He then sent the clip to friends via Snapchat minutes before the fatal crash on a 30mph road. Roberts was today jailed for seven and half years for causing death by dangerous driving by Swansea Crown Court. Meirion Roberts, 26, pictured filmed drinking by colleague Lewis Morgan on the afternoon of December 4 2020 moments before Mr Morgan died Mr Morgan, pictured, filmed Roberts playing loud music and swigging from a bottle of lager bought from an off licence while hitting 100mph on a dual carriageway. He then sent the clip to friends via Snapchat Roberts, pictured, has been jailed for seven-and-a-half years for causing death by dangerous driving The court heard the pair worked together at Fine-Edge Construction Ltd before the crash in December 2020.. Company director Philip Jones said the firm had booked two tables at The Cottage Inn for a three hour stay. He said he and his employees drank 'five or six pints with our food' - and added that Roberts drank cider. Mr Jones said: 'If I had known he was even considering driving I would have taken the keys off him. It's really tragic news and it's had a massive effect on us all.' The court heard Roberts was spotted on CCTV after 8pm when he went into to a Bargain Booze store to buy alcohol. Roberts was doing between 40mph and 50mph on the afternoon of December 4 2020 when he lost control on a bend and hit a telegraph pole and wall - with the Vauxhall Corsa ending up on its roof. Mr Morgan suffered fatal head injuries and died at the scene. Roberts, of Heol Las, Ammanford, had denied causing death by dangerous driving but was convicted by a jury. Pictured: The snapchat footage shown to the court Back calculation tests showed Roberts had a blood alcohol level of at least 101mg per 100ml of blood. The legal drink drive limit is 80mg per 100ml. Carina Hughes, prosecuting, said: 'The prosecution submits this encompassed driving that involved a deliberate decision to ignore the rules of the road, commencing when he got into the car having consumed alcohol. 'He also drove while under the influence of alcohol, drove while consuming alcohol, drove in excess of speed limits, including at one stage at 100mph and at another stage in excess of the 30mph speed limit for over a mile, all while participating in videos and listening to loud music. 'The prosecution say that level of poor driving shows a disregard for the great danger he posed to other road users.' Roberts, pictured, of Heol Las, Ammanford, had denied causing death by dangerous driving but was convicted by a jury In a victim impact statement, Mr Morgan's sister, Natalie, said: 'Losing Lewis has been the most painful experience of mine and my family's life. 'The sadness I face every day I cannot put into words. The first thought I wake with in the morning, my last thought at night and every moment in between, I think of Lewis.' Roberts, of Heol Las, Ammanford, had denied causing death by dangerous driving but was convicted by a jury. David Leathley, defending, said Roberts had made a mistake in deciding to drive. 'Notwithstanding the awful consequences of that social gathering and the moral turpitude which was going to bedevil the entire proceedings, Mr Roberts was not there for all-out wickedness, he was there out of good grace and sociability to his fellow man,' he said. 'It is a case of moral turpitude because the experience of society is that the consumption of any drink, however small, while putting yourself behind the wheel is crass, dangerous and morally and legally and reprehensible. 'From that point Mr Roberts goes from being an altruistic, affable, friendly, sociable individual - because of his moral turpitude and his decision to drive - into a killer.' In a victim impact statement, Mr Morgan's sister, Natalie, said: 'Losing Lewis (pictured) has been the most painful experience of mine and my family's life' Jailing the father-of-one, Judge Christopher Vosper QC said: 'You deliberately drove when you had consumed alcohol in such a quantity that you knew that you were over the limit for driving. 'You could have got home by the lift you had arranged but you deliberately avoided that lift and chose instead to drive in the opposite direction. 'Your purpose was to continue socialising and drinking.' The Snapchat footage shows Roberts going 100mph The judge said Roberts' (pictured) speed and alcohol consumption had caused him to lose control on the bend and crash The judge said Roberts' speed and alcohol consumption had caused him to lose control on the bend and crash. 'It is right that the driving on the A48 was not the direct cause of the death of Lewis Morgan, however, it seems to me that driving at 100mph on what is motorway standard road may well in fact be less dangerous than driving at speeds of 50mph on a B-road, which is restricted and has bends on it of the sort you failed to negotiate,' he said. 'I accept you are genuinely remorseful for what occurred and the guilt you feel bears heavily upon you and will always bear heavily upon you. 'I have to acknowledge too that no sentence the court can impose will reduce the grief which Lewis Morgan's family feel and will continue to feel at his loss.' Roberts was also banned from driving for six years and nine months. The former king of Spain wants Court of Appeal judges to step in after he was sued by an ex-lover. Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, a Danish businesswoman, has taken legal action against Juan Carlos I and is seeking damages for personal injury. She alleges he caused her 'great mental pain' by spying on and harassing her. German-born Danish entrepreneur Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, 57, is suing ex-lover Juan Carlos I, former king of Spain, for 'tens of millions of euros' in London's High Court, having accused him of 'unlawful covert and overt surveillance' Juan Carlos, 84, who ruled from 1975 until his abdication in June 2014 and the succession of his son King Felipe VI, denies any wrongdoing. Lawyers representing Juan Carlos argued he is 'entitled to immunity from the jurisdiction of the English courts in his capacity as a senior member of the Spanish royal family'. But after a recent hearing in London, High Court judge Mr Justice Nicklin ruled against the former king, saying the claim can go ahead. In a follow-up hearing on Tuesday, Juan Carlos's lawyers told the judge they want to go to the Court of Appeal. They will ask appeal judges to consider the case in the near future, they indicated. Mr Justice Nicklin rejected the argument that, despite his abdication, Juan Carlos remains a 'sovereign' and is entitled to personal immunity under the State Immunity Act 1978. 'There is only one king of Spain and head of state of Spain and, since June 19 2014, that has been his son, King Felipe VI,' he said. 'Whatever his special constitutional position following abdication, [Juan Carlos] is neither the sovereign nor the head of state of Spain.' The judge also said Juan Carlos is not a member of the current king's household within the meaning of the Act. He said his position under the Spanish constitution is 'entirely honorary' and provides him 'no continuing role'. His mistress is suing him for 'tens of millions of euros' in London's High Court, having accused him of 'unlawful covert and overt surveillance'. German-born Danish entrepreneur Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, 57, had an affair with the 83-year-old monarch - who is married to Queen Sofia, 82 - between 2004 and 2009. Their relationship was catapulted into the limelight in 2012 after he broke his hip during a safari trip to Botswana, on which she had accompanied him. Afterwards Corinna claimed Juan Carlos 'gifted' her 65 million (59 million) out of guilt for the 'intense pressure' she came under and as an expression of his love. It's believed the payment came out of funds that originated with a $100million gift to Juan Carlos when he was king from the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in 2008. Swiss prosecutors then opened an investigation into bank accounts Juan Carlos allegedly held in tax havens, leading to the royal, who abdicated the throne in 2014, fleeing to Abu Dhabi last year. Corinna, who lives in London, filed a claim in December 2020 accusing Juan Carlos of harassment 'from 2012 until the present time', including threats and defamation, as well as 'unlawful covert and overt surveillance' by agents of the former monarch and the Spanish intelligence service. Corinna and Juan Carlos' relationship was catapulted into the limelight in 2012 after he broke his hip during a safari trip to Botswana, on which she had accompanied him. Afterwards Corinna claimed Juan Carlos 'gifted' her 65 million (59 million) out of guilt for the 'intense pressure' she came under and as an expression of his love Corinna is reportedly seeking substantial damages and a restraining order. Juan Carlos has denied any wrongdoing, but his legal team is yet to file a defence. The case will likely face a jurisdiction battle due to the ex-king not living in Britain and being a former head of state of another nation. Corinna states in her claim that her former flame told her he 'wanted to ensure that she and her children would be provided for' but he was 'concerned that his family would challenge anything he left to her in his will, after his death'. She added that Juan Carlos asked her to return the sum of money or make it 'available for his use', which she declined. She then alleges that he falsely accused her of stealing the cash and defamed her to her family and business partners, as well as to King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, which resulted in a loss of income for her job working as a strategic consultant for 'high-net-worth individuals and with leading companies around the world'. As a result, she is now making a request for damages which are not specifically stipulated in the claim, but are believed to be in the region of tens of millions of euros. Corinna is also seeking an injunction that would prevent Juan Carlos and his agents from coming within 150m of her home, communicating with her, making defamatory statements about her or tracking and harassing her. She says the former head of the Spanish National Intelligence Agency (CNI) Felix Sanz Roldan, or people working for it or the ex-king, put her 'under physical surveillance which included vehicle and personal surveillance, trespassing on to her property at which she was residing and hacking into her/their telephones and computers'. Corinna is also seeking an injunction that would prevent Juan Carlos (pictured together in 2006) and his agents from coming within 150m of her home, communicating with her, making defamatory statements about her or tracking and harassing her Corinna previously alleged that the CNI has spent millions on a campaign of harassment in the apparent belief that she possesses state secrets. She has also claimed that a sustained attempt has been made to brainwash her children into believing she was corrupt, she has suffered a campaign of libellous 'fake news' coverage on the internet, all of which began following the public exposure of her five-year relationship with Juan Carlos. Last year Corinna's lawyers, Kobre & Kim, wrote to Home Secretary Priti Patel and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab to warn them of a potential diplomatic row. 'Discretion has been a watchword throughout my life with my family and my business,' Corinna told The Mail on Sunday. 'After eight years of abuse, which has also targeted my children, and given there is no end in sight, I reluctantly find myself with no other option but to pursue legal action.' Twice-divorced Corinna became a princess through her second marriage, to German aristocrat Prince Casimir zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn. Corinna had an affair with the 83-year-old monarch - who is married to Queen Sofia, 82, pictured together in May 2004 - between 2004 and 2009 She is a long-time friend of Lord Snowdon, Princess Margaret's son, has been a regular at Prince Charles's philanthropic occasions and was honoured at Buckingham Palace for her efforts in supporting the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Foundation. In the world of international finance, Corinna is known for brokering deals between major corporations and is said to include several heads of state in her contacts book. Prince Albert of Monaco was the guest of honour at Harry's Bar in London for her 40th birthday dinner other guests that night included members of the Astor, Spencer-Churchill, Goldsmith, Versace and Swarovski families. But this glamorous way of life came to a halt after it emerged she had conducted a five-year relationship with the married King of Spain, Juan Carlos. And from that moment on, she says, the Spanish secret service trained its sights on her. Soon after the affair was revealed she found herself trailed by a team of Spanish-speaking men while on business in Brazil. Later that same year she said her Monaco apartment was occupied for more than a month by French and Polish mercenaries. She was informed by the Spanish intelligence services that the mercenaries employed through a Monagesque security company were there for her protection, but she believes the real objective was to occupy her flat and remove documents. 'I was in constant danger,' she said. 'At first, I thought these men were going to throw me over the balcony.' Corinna says she was threatened by Juan Carlos who allegedly told her 'the consequences for her 'will not be good' if she failed to do what he wanted'. She also alleges that the Sultan of Oman bought a 50million flat in London's Knightsbridge for Juan Carlos' use, and that her ex-lover asked her to pay a 200,000 deposit for service charges, which she refused. Corinna has previously compared herself to Wallis Simpson, the American socialite who stirred controversy by marrying the Duke of Windsor, the former British king Edward VIII, arguing she was blamed for the scandal-hit king's downfall. She questioned why 'hostility is always channeled towards the woman' in an interview with The Telegraph. 'There is a tendency that when people cannot control a powerful man, they destroy the object of his affection,' she told the newspaper. 'This narrative still survives to this day. You can even see it with Meghan and Harry. 'The hostility always goes to the woman and the poor man is this helpless creature who has been horribly manipulated and it is the woman who has plunged the country into a huge crisis.' Juan Carlos has not been charged with any offence, but is facing three separate criminal probes in Spain. One is related to the use of credit cards linked to foreign accounts after his June 2014 abdication when he lost his constitutional protection against prosecution as a serving monarch. Prosecutors are trying to establish if the monarch accessed funds deposited in accounts held by a Mexican businessman and a Spanish Air Force official. Spain has also launched its own investigation based in part on information shared by Switzerland about cash Juan Carlos allegedly received as part of his involvement in a high-speed Saudi Arabia rail contract. In December, the ex-monarch's lawyer announced he had paid more than 600,000 in back-taxes with interest and surcharges for the years since his abdication. Spanish authorities responded by saying they were analysing the tax payments to see if they were 'spontaneous, truthful and complete.' Juan Carlos' shock departure from Spain at the start of August led to an intense questioning of the country's monarchy led by left-wing vice-president Pablo Iglesias. Spain's current king, Juan Carlos' son Felipe VI, made a veiled dig at his exiled father and the scandals surrounding his family in his Christmas speech. He said in a televised address that 'ethics are above family ties'. Authorities in Montana will not try to track down a grizzly bear suspected in the fatal mauling of a hiker last week because it did not appear to be a predatory attack, officials say. Father-of-four Craig Clouatre, 40, was found dead Friday, two days after he failed to return from an off-trail hike in densely forested mountains north of Yellowstone National Park. He was from the small city of Livingston, about 30 miles from the mauling site. Tracks left at the scene and the nature of the attack suggest that a grizzly killed him, Park County Sheriff Brad Bichler said Monday. But Bichler said there was no indication the bear sought out Clouatre, meaning it could have been simply an unlucky encounter. 'This doesn't appear to be an attack where the bear sought out the person,' Bichler said. 'It wasn't like the bear came down into a campground and nabbed someone.' A bear attack is considered predatory when the animal stalks the human or attacks a campsite unprovoked. Attacks by bears that are surprised or defending cubs are not considered predatory. Pictured: Craig Clouatre, 40, of Livingston, reportedly went missing after hiking in the Six Mile Creek area of Paradise Valley on Wednesday Clouatre leaves behind a wife, Jamie, and their four children, pictured above Pictured: the location of the deadly grizzly attack that reportedly took Clouatre's life in relation to Yellowstone National Park Fatal grizzly bear attacks on people are rare. Predatory attacks such as a 2010 attack near Cooke City in which a man was killed inside his tent at a campground are even less common. Wildlife officials are trying to confirm whether a grizzly was responsible for Clouatre's death through testing of animal hairs found at the site, said Morgan Jacobsen with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Jacobsen said the attack appeared to have been a chance encounter and agreed with Bichler that it was not a predatory attack. Clouatre, who was married with four children and originally from Massachusetts, was experienced in the backcountry, according to his friends and family. At the time of his death, he was in a remote area with lots of timber and ravines, searching for antlers shed by elk and other big game animals, Bichler said. It was unknown if Clouatre was carrying bear spray, which are pressurized canisters of pepper-like irritant that can deter charging bears. Clouatre's remains were discovered by Park County Search and Rescue near Yellowstone National Park on Friday. Bichler said in a Facebook post on Sunday that Clouatre was an experienced outdoorsman who knew the risks involved in backcountry hiking. 'I visited with Craig's wife this morning and she has [reiterated] to me that she and the family understand that Craig loved to be in wild places and was well aware of the risks involved with that,' wrote Bichler. Clouatre went missing after hiking in the Six Mile Creek area of Paradise Valley on Wednesday, according to The Living Enterprise. Park County Sheriff Brad Bichler (left) said Monday there was no indication the bear sought out Clouatre, meaning it could have been simply an unlucky encounter The father-of-four was killed in a suspected grizzly bear attack during a hike in a Montana park (file image) Sheriff Bichler confirmed Clouatre's death in a statement on Saturday. 'It is with a very heavy heart that I am writing this update. After an extensive search this morning we have located Craig,' Bichler wrote. 'It appears he had an encounter with a grizzly and unfortunately did not survive.' 'Please keep his family and all those involved in your thoughts and prayers.' Clouatre leaves behind a wife, Jamie, and their four children. A GoFundMe for his family raised over $55,000 out of a $75,000 goal as of Sunday morning. On Wednesday, search teams on the ground and in helicopters had been looking for Clouatre after he failed to return from hiking that morning. He had gone with a friend but the pair split up, possibly to hunt for antlers. 'They split up at some point later in the morning. When the other man returned to their vehicle and his friend wasn't there, he called us and we began searching Wednesday night.' The search began that night concentrated on the Six Mile Creek area of the Absaroka Mountains, located about 30 miles south of Livingston, Montana. 'We're fortunate to have a group of experienced volunteers on our SAR [Search and Rescue] team and we're thankful for the folks who have come to help,' Bichler told the paper. Authorities were working Friday to return Clouatre's body to his family, Bichler said in a social media post. Clouatre's father told The Associated Press that his son grew up in Massachusetts and moved more than two decades ago to Montana, where Clouatre met his future wife, Jamie, and decided to make a home. Clouatre grew up in Massachusetts and moved more than two decades ago to Montana, where Clouatre met his future wife, Jamie, and decided to make a home Jamie shared a tribute to her husband today saying she will have to 'relearn how to be and who I am... for our kids Clouatre and his family, pictured, had just suffered the burning down of their home two years ago, which the family was still recovering from at the time of Clouatre's death 'He was a joy to have as a son all the way around,' David Clouatre said. 'He was a good man, a good, hardworking family man.' Meanwhile, his wife, Jamie, said she will have to 'relearn how to be and who I am... for our kids.' 'I don't have many words really right now and I'm not reaching back out to everyone who has reached out to me...but I appreciate every one of the sentiments and memories of the most amazing person I have ever known, my husband,' she wrote on Facebook. 'I loved him with every single fiber of me....he was a vital part of me and our children and it is going to be a struggle for the rest of our lives. To say we are broken is an understatement. I have to relearn how to be and who I am and stay strong enough for our kids.' 'No easy way to put it, this is not fair, they don't deserve this. The support in this community is incredible and I know it comes from Craig...who he was, a joy, a truly kind, good, GOOD man. There is no one else like him in the entire world. Thank you all for everything! We all lost something and the world is a hell of a lot dimmer,' she went on to write. The mountains in the area where Craig Clouatre died rise steeply above the Yellowstone River as it passes through the Paradise Valley. Dense forests at higher elevations are home to bears and other wildlife, although dangerous encounters with people are relatively rare. Clouatre frequented those mountains and others around the park, hiking in summer and ice climbing in winter when he wasn't home with his wife and their four young children, said Anne Tanner, a friend of the victim. Tanner said she had known Clouatre for about a decade because he worked for commercial food companies and delivered to their restaurant, the Emigrant Outpost. The mountains in the area where Craig Clouatre, pictured, died rise steeply above the Yellowstone River as it passes through the Paradise Valley The restaurant held a benefit for the Clouatre family after their house burned down two years ago. Tanner said they had only recently recovered from the fire. 'He was finally just getting their house together,' she said. 'It just makes me angry that something like this could happen to such a good person...Of all the men I know, I can't believe he would die in the wilderness. He was so strong and he was so smart.' State wildlife officials were responding to the scene but Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokesperson Greg Lemon said he had no further information. Since 2010, grizzlies in the Yellowstone region have killed at least eight people. Among them was a backcountry guide killed by a bear last year along Yellowstone's western border. Guide Charles 'Carl' Mock was killed in April after being mauled by a 400-plus pound male grizzly while fishing alone at a favorite spot on Montanas Madison River, where it spills out of the park. Grizzlies are protected under federal law outside Alaska. Elected officials in the Yellowstone region are pushing to lift protections and allow grizzly hunting. The Yellowstone region spanning portions of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming has more than 700 bears. Fatal attacks on humans are rare but have increased in recent decades as the grizzly population grew and more people moved into rural areas near bear habitat. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy plans to sit down with 26-year-old GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn to talk about claims he made including that he was invited to orgies and cocaine use was rampant in Washington, D.C. Politico reported Tuesday that Cawthorn's Republican colleagues stood up and aired their grievances during a closed-door House GOP conference meeting earlier in the day, complaining that the North Carolina Republican made party members out to be sexual deviants and drug users. CNN reported that colleagues wanted Cawthorn to name names because his comments could otherwise unfairly malign the whole party. The 65-year-old Arkansas Rep. Steve Womack told the group that he rarely speaks up during the weekly meetings, but did so Tuesday because he's getting questions from constituents about Cawthorn's claims of orgies and drug use, Politico said. Womack remarked that many lawmakers go to bed at 9 p.m. and use flip phones and fax machines, calling it inappropriate that Cawthorn would paint his Congressional peers with a broad brush. Sen. Richard Burr, the senior Republican senator from North Carolina, was asked by CNN about Cawthorn's job performance. 'Thats for his constituents to figure out but clearly he's been an embarrassment at times,' Burr replied. Cawthorn was asked during an interview with Warrior Poet Society about how much D.C. resembles of Netflix show House of Cards, specifically its elements of 'corruption, power, money and perversion.' The North Carolina Republican replied that the 'sexual perversion' and drug use is just like what people saw on television. 'The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington ... being kind of a young guy in Washington where the average age is probably 60 or 70, I look at all these people - a lot of them who I've looked up to throughout my life ... then all of a sudden you get invited to like, "well hey we're going to have kind of a sexual get together at one of our homes. You should come," like, what did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize they're asking you to come to an orgy.' House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (pictured) plans to sit down with 26-year-old GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn to talk about claims he made including that he was invited to orgies and cocaine use was rampant in Washington, D.C. Cawthorn, 26, was asked during an interview with the Warrior Poet Society how closely his experience on Capitol Hill aligns with House of Cards, specifically its elements of 'corruption, power, money and perversion' Cawthorn said that he once heard a former president say the only thing that was unrealistic about the Netflix show was that Congress would ever be able to pass a piece of legislation that quickly, and he agreed with the sentiment 'There's some of the people that are leading the movement to try and remove addiction in our country and then you watch them doing, you know, a key bump of cocaine in front of you and it's like wow, this is wild.' Cawthorn in December announced the he and his wife of eight months were filing for divorce. The young congressman, a staunch conservative not known for his friends across the aisle, is seemingly accusing his fellow Republicans of the illicit behavior. The 'former president' Cawthorn seemingly referred to was Democratic President Bill Clinton. In 2015, actor Kevin Spacey, the lead on House of Cards, said that he and Clinton were close friends and play poker together. Spacey told Gotham Magazine at the time that Clinton had told him the show was accurate. Cawthorn, a staunch conservative not known for his friends across the aisle, is seemingly accusing his fellow Republicans of the illicit behavior. He has recently sparked controversy for calling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and 'alcoholic' and Ukrainian President Zelensky a 'thug' Cawthorn in December announced the he and his wife of eight months were filing for divorce 'Kevin, 99 percent of what you do on that show is real. The 1 percent you get wrong is you could never get an education bill passed that fast,' Clinton told Spacey, according to the actor's comments to the magazine. Earlier this month Cawthorn suggested that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is an alcoholic. Cawthorn said of the California Democrat at a campaign event: 'I'll tell you I have to work with her every single day so please do pray for me. The theories of alcoholism are very true and it's very sad,' he said, according to video posted by Patriot Takes. His line got chuckles during the event. Pelosi, 81, doesn't drink, and hasn't for years. Her daughter Christine attacked prior slurs about her mom's alleged alcoholism in 2019, tweeting: 'Republicans and their conservative allies have been pumping this despicable fake meme for years! Now they are caught. '#FactCheck: Madam Speaker doesn't even drink alcohol!' Also last month a video surfaced showing Cawthorn calling Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky a 'thug'. He said his government was 'corrupt, incredibly evil' and 'pushing woke ideologies'. He appeared to be discussing the US sending military aid to Ukraine before lashing out at leaders in Kyiv -- who refused to flee the country despite reports that many are on a Russian 'kill list' including Zelensky and his family. In December 2021, Cawthorn announced that he and his CrossFit athlete wife Cristina Bayardelle were getting a divorce after just eight months together. 'When Cristina and I were engaged, I was not a member of Congress. I felt called to serve and we both agreed that I should run. Our victory was unprecedented, but overnight our lives changed,' he said in a statement posted by his spokesman. 'That change has been both hectic and difficult, it's neither the pace nor the lifestyle we had planned for.' JK Rowling has turned out for the premiere of her latest film just days after hitting back at Vladimir Putin for comparing himself to her. The Harry Potter author posed for pictures on the red carpet ahead of the first showing of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore in London tonight. The 56-year-old, who has been accused of 'transphobia' after saying that only women experience menstruation, in remarks which created a firestorm and got her 'cancelled'. JK Rowling struck a relaxed figure as she made her way onto the red carpet for the premiere of her latest film, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore The author has been criticised by trans rights activists for her views on sex and gender, leading to her being 'cancelled' Following months of rows with trans rights activists, the situation took a bizarre turn last week when Russian president Putin compared himself to Rowling following his country's invasion of Ukraine. She promptly hit back, criticising him for 'slaughtering civilians' in the eastern European country, and poisoning and jailing his critics. However, she seemed to show no signs of this latest development worrying her at the premiere at Royal Festival Hall, smiling and laughing on the red carpet on Tuesday night, March 29. Rowling, pictured here in a form-fitting navy blue gown at the premiere in London tonight, has denied she is transphobic The Associated Press reported Rowling as saying at the time: 'At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it's hateful to say so' The film itself has had a troubled gestation with star Johnny Depp being dropped from the film in the wake of his libel woes and replaced with Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen. The third film in the Fantastic Beasts series sees Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) assemble a motley crew of wizards and witches to try and save the world. The team Newt and Dumbledore (Jude Law) have put together to include Newt's brother Theseus Scamander (Callum Turner), professor Eulalie 'Lallie' Hicks (Jessica Williams), Minerva McGonagall (Fionna Glascott), and Muggle baker Jacob (Dan Fogler). Leading men! Eddie Redmayne (left) was every inch the suave hero as he joined co-star Jude Law (right) leading the star-studded arrivals for the premiere of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore at London 's Royal Festival Hall on Tuesda The motley crew will be joining forces to take on the powerful dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Mikkelsen), who seeks domination over the wizarding world. Stars of the film, including Redmayne and Law appeared on the red carpet, where they posed for photos ahead of the premiere. Among those also in attendance was Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy in the original Harry Potter franchise. Former Harry Potter star Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy in the original franchise, made an appearance at the premiere tonight His former colleagues Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and Evanna Lynch, who recently reunited for the 20th anniversary of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone without Miss Rowling, are among those who have condemned her for her views. Miss Rowling has faced a continued onslaught of accusations of transphobia since publishing an essay on her website in July 2020 in which she argued that biological sex is real. She also revealed she was 'a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor'. She was labelled a TERF trans-exclusionary radical feminist after taking issue with the term 'people who menstruate'. In December she was once again forced to deny that she is transphobic as she argued for sex, not gender identity, to be the 'basis of decisions on safeguarding'. Last week war-mongering Putin attempted to compare himself to Rowling in an outrageous speech, claiming the western world was 'cancelling' Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. Putin spat out: 'They [the West] cancelled JK Rowling, the children's author her books are published all over the world all because she didn't satisfy the demands of gender rights. They are trying to cancel out country I'm talking the progressive discrimination of everything to do with Russia'. But responding to the childish Russian despot on Twitter, Rowling shared a BBC article about jailed Putin critic Alexei Navalny and wrote: 'Critiques of Western cancel culture are possibly not best made by those currently slaughtering civilians for the crime of resistance, or who jail and poison their critics'. She added the hashtag: '#IStandWithUkraine'. Responding to the childish Russian despot on Twitter, Rowling shared a BBC article about jailed Putin critic Alexei Navalny and wrote: 'Critiques of Western cancel culture are possibly not best made by those currently slaughtering civilians for the crime of resistance, or who jail and poison their critics'. She added the hashtag: '#IStandWithUkraine' Putin even tried to link modern-day cancel culture to Nazi book burnings of the 1930s, claiming such things would never happen in Russia even as his regime imposes a 'free speech lockdown' which can see dissidents who call the invasion a 'war' jailed for 15 years. The Russian despot has also spoken of 'cleansing' everyone from Russian society who is too Western or harbours western thoughts. Britain, the US and the EU have hammered Russia with sanctions in the wake of Putin's attack on Ukraine which have crashed the rouble, including cutting it off from banking systems and trade, while Western brands withdraw, leaving its economy in tatters. But Putin took take particular ire with the decision of some Western institutions to remove works by Russian artists, authors and composers in response to the war. Vladimir Putin has accused the West of trying to 'cancel' Russia in the same way it cancelled JK Rowling, complaining that authors and composers like Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky are being targeted over the war A desperate Ukrainian mother has spoken of her nightmare ordeal after bungling visa officials mistyped her information leaving her two daughters stranded and unable to reach Britain. MailOnline found Nadiia Boichuk, 32, and her husband Renaldas Rimkus, 40, at the Polish border with Ukraine last month as they waited for their children Yana, 13, and Anna, eight. The married couple hoped to bring their daughters back to Britain from Ukraine where the girls live with their grandparents, as both Nadiia and Renaldas have been granted settled status and live in the UK, but consular staff told them the children would need visas. So, Nadiia initially travelled to Lithuania where Renaldas is from, with the girls and on March 9 made a double visa application in the capital Vilnius, handing over documents and biometric data for the children. Two weeks later they were told the visas had been approved but they would have to travel 600 miles to the German capital Berlin to pick them up. However, when they arrived on Monday staff told them there had been a mistake as the wrong details had been inputted on the application and they would have to carry on waiting while it was re-examined. MailOnline found Nadiia Boichuk, 32, and her husband Renaldas Rimkus, 40, at the Polish border with Ukraine last month as they waited for their children Yana, 13, and Anna, eight The married couple hoped to bring their daughters back to Britain from Ukraine where the girls live with their grandparents, as both Nadiia and Renaldas have been granted settled status and live in the UK, but consular staff told them the children would need visas Nadiia, an assistant manager at a Holland & Barrett in Hammersmith, west London, has spent more than 5,000 in travel and hotels the last month and still doesnt know when they will get home. Devastated Nadiia said: The whole thing has been a nightmare for us. I appreciate there is a lot of demand, but we have travelled from London to Poland to Lithuania and Germany where we were told the visas would be ready and now, they are not because of a mistake. I couldnt believe it when the office in Berlin said the wrong information had been inputted in the application and we would have to wait for the correction. Nadiia and Renaldas moved to the UK six years ago, but their children remained in Ukraine with her parents at Ivan-Frankivisk. After the airport was hit by Russian missiles within hours of the war starting, Yana and Anna were taken to the Polish border where they were met by their relieved parents. Both children were in the process of making an application via the British Embassy in Kyiv but the process halted once the Russians invaded, and they are travelling without their passports. Earlier this week charities warned the visa application process was causing agony for thousands of Ukrainians. Home Secretary Priti Patel has insisted a visa scheme with vetting checks is essential to ensure national security and prevent Russian agents slipping into the country. But opposition MPs and charity groups have urged for a simpler system and even waive visas as has the European Union to make the process easier. Tearful Nadiia added: 'There seems to be a lot of miscommunications between various departments at the Home Office. I call one place and am then told to call another, or I write to one and they say email someone else. The UK Government says it wants to help and all Ukrainian people are grateful but surely there has to be a much easier system than this? People are seen waiting near a bus at Hala Kijowska Outlet Centre, which was turned into reception centre for the refugees We have spent more than 5,000 in travel and accommodation, you hear on the news about people who have made it to Britain but there are many, many more who are just stranded. Im with the children staying in hotels travelling across Europe when all we want is to be back home safe so I can get them into a school. No-one seems to be able to give me an answer about when and where I can collect our visas and this mistake has just added more stress to the situation. When I asked the guy in Berlin how long it would take, he said he didnt know and accused me of being rude. He said he would check but Ive heard nothing, the situation is ridiculous. I cant believe the British government cant find an easier way of doing all this. I have been away from work for a month, they have been very understanding but I dont know for how much longer we can do this and if I will have a job when I go back. Now I am stuck in Berlin with two children waiting to hear what will happen next but I have no idea when I will have news. My husband is back working with his building job and sending us money when we can but the whole situation is a nightmare for us. Clare Stafford, director of communications, for Holland & Barratt told MailOnline that Nadiia had worked for the health food firm since 2018. A general view of people at Hala Kijowska Outlet Centre, which was turned into reception centre for the refugees She added: All of us at Holland & Barrett have been horrified and upset by the war in Ukraine. This is a time of great concern for us all, and like many businesses in the UK we have a number of colleagues who are personally affected by the war, and we are doing all we can to support them including offering paid leave of absence so they dont have to use holiday, and support with any travel costs needed. Our thoughts are with Nadiia and her children and were all hoping to see them safely back in the UK very soon. We have already provided 550,000 of direct support to Ukrainian humanitarian aid, with a combination of food supplies and financial contributions, including 150,000 to DEC, and E50,000 to the Irish Red Cross. We are also fundraising in store and online for these charities and are matching donations up to 100,000. Nadiias local MP Labours Andy Slaughter told MailOnline: 'Its a very chaotic situation and we are trying to meet with the Home Office to sort some of these issues out. Ive been contacted by hundreds of constituents who are having problems with the visa system. A Government spokesperson said:We are moving as quickly as possible to ensure that those fleeing horrific persecution in Ukraine can find safety in the UK through the Ukraine Family Scheme and Homes for Ukraine. We have streamlined the process so valid passport holders do not have to attend in-person appointments before arriving in the UK, simplified our forms and boosted caseworker numbers, while ensuring vital security checks are carried out. We continue to speed up visa processing across both schemes, with more than 21,000 issued under the Ukraine Family Scheme. The evil mother of Baby P could be released from prison within weeks if a Parole Board decides she is fit to be freed. Tracey Connelly, who was jailed in 2009 following the death of her 17-month-old son Peter, will find out tomorrow if her fourth bid for freedom has been successful. The 40-year-old had been imprisoned indefinitely with a minimum term of five years in 2009 for causing or allowing her son's death and had been released 2013 on a lifelong licence. Tracey Connelly has made a fourth attempt to get released from prison after being jailed for her son's death in 2009 Peter, who was initially named in the press as Baby P, died after suffering more than 50 injuries including a snapped spine and eight broken ribs However, she was returned to prison two years later after she breached its terms by selling nude photographs of herself on the internet. Since then she has been turned down for release by Parole Board hearings in 2015, 2017 and 2019. Her latest parole hearing was earlier this month and a decision could be made to free her from prison within weeks if the board finds she doesn't pose a risk to the public, The Sun reports. It had previously been reported that Connelly was prepared to agree to a series of stringent conditions to make sure she doesn't reoffend in order to secure her freedom. These included wearing a 24/7 electronic tag, staying sober, undertaking lie detector tests and giving the authorities details of any new relationships she forms outside of prison. Peter, who was publicly known as Baby P, died in north London on August 3 2007 at the hands of his mother, her lover Steven Barker and his brother Jason Owen. He suffered more than 50 injuries, which included a snapped spine and eight broken ribs, despite being on the at-risk register and receiving 60 visits from social workers, police and health professionals over the final eight months of his life. Steven Barker was jailed in 2009 for a minimum of 32 years for torturing the 17-month-old to death and Owen received a six year jail sentence for allowing the toddler to die. Baby P, was tortured to death in 2007 by Connelly's lover Steven Barker (left) and his brother Jason Owen (right) at their home in Tottenham, north London Peter and three other children were sharing the four-bedroom house with their mother, her boyfriend and his brother when he died. Three of the children, including Peter, were on Haringey's Child Protection Register because of fears they were being neglected by the mother. Connolly, who covered up the abuse of her son, was jailed in 2009 for a minimum of five years after admitting causing or allowing the death of her son Peter. She was then freed on licence in 2013 but later recalled to prison in 2015 after it was found she had sent indecent images of herself to people obsessed with her notoriety. The Parole Board considered her case for a third time in November 2019, following previous reviews in 2015 and 2017, and refused to either release her or move her to an open prison. In 2019, the convict launched a bid to be freed from prison so she could try to spend Christmas with her lover. She became besotted with a 37-year-old insurance salesman named Paul and told fellow prisoners she want to move in with him in Reading. The abuser said she believed she was ready to leave prison a 'changed woman'. Connelly insisted her relationship was genuine because she had known him for many years. A porn star's dismembered body has been discovered by police in Brescia after being put in several bin bags and dumped by the side of the road. Mother-of-one Carol Maltesi, 26, who worked under the stage name Charlotte Angie, had starred in a number of erotic movies and had an OnlyFans adult site. She was last seen alive in January close to her home at Rescaldina near Milan, Italy, and today her neighbour, a food blogger named Davide Fontana, 43, was being questioned about her murder. Police found her dismembered body in several bin bags ten days ago at Borno near Brescia. It is believed the remains had been kept in a freezer before being dumped by the road as they had started to thaw in the warm spring sunshine. Detectives were able to identify her from six of the 12 distinctive tattoos she had on her body after releasing details earlier this week and a member of the public called in after recognising them from her adult work. Among the designs was a speckled leopard print on her upper right thigh, the words step by step on her right leg, wanderlust on her right shoulder, elegance is the on her back, te (you) on her left hand and be brave on her left elbow. Mother of one Carol Maltesi (pictured above), 26, was last seen alive in January close to her home at Rescaldina near Milan, Italy Cops arrested Fontana after traffic cameras picked up her car in the Borno area and he had then walked into a local police station offering information but which was so unconvincing it aroused suspicions. Carol, who had a six-year-old-daughter, had turned to adult work during lockdown to make ends meet and was said to earn up to 10,000 a month. She had started a relationship with her neighbour Fontana earlier this year but the two are said to have split up. Fontana told police her had killed her after a row and had burnt her face to hide her identity before dismembering her body and hiding it in bin bags in his freezer. Carol had been due to take part in an erotic festival in Milan earlier this month but failed to show up and her name was on advertising flyers for the show. After killing her Fontana had continued to use her phone and sent messages to his victims mother saying she had left porn but was too busy to explain why. He even responded to concerned fans who recognised the tattoos by sending them texts claiming to be from Carol saying: Yes, the tattoos look like mine but Im ok. Fontana told cops he had killed her with a hammer after having sex with her but they had rowed. Davide Fontana (pictured above), 43, was today in police custody being held on allegations of aggravated voluntary homicide, as well as destruction and hiding of a body Earlier this year she had posted a video online in which she spoke out against violence on women saying its not just a question of physical violence but psychological violence as well. Prosecutor Lorena Ghibaudo said: The supect confessed after being confronted with evidence which dismantled his claims. 'He had been using her phone and even paying her rent to make it look as if she was still alive but in reality he had killed her and dismembered her body. Fontana was today in police custody being held on allegations of aggravated voluntary homicide, as well as destruction and hiding of a body. Florida judge Keith Carsten has agreed to partially omit the confession of a physical therapist accused of murdering his wife and three children in 2020 at their home in a Disney town ahead of his trial because he hadn't been read his Miranda rights and was high on Benadryl. Anthony Todt, 45, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of animal cruelty in the fatal stabbings of his wife, Megan, 42, and their kids Alex, 13; Tyler, 11, and Zoe, 4. Their dog Breezy was also killed at the family's home in Celebration, Florida, in January 2020. Todt, who has pleaded not guilty, spoke to detectives after he was arrested at the hospital in January 2020. But he wasnt properly informed of his Miranda rights before the interview, according to a motion filed on August 31, 2021, by Assistant Public Defender Peter Schmer. It's unclear what part of his confession will be tossed out. Police are required by law to read the constitutional rights of people who are in their custody prior to questioning, a rule had established under the 1966 U.S. Supreme Court case 'Miranda v. Arizona.' If officers fail to do so, then prosecutors can't use any information the suspect says as evidence at trial. During his first interview with police, Todt initially confessed. It took a further two rounds of interrogation before officers realized that they hadn't read Todt's rights to him, according to the motion, before the former father-of-three repeated his involvement in the killings. Todt was also 'suicidal' and had diminished capacity because he was under the influence of a Benadryl overdose, the Orlando Sentinel reported. While being interviewed by officers, Todt told detectives that his heads spinning a little and said Im foggy, Im in a fog right now, the motion said. When they were found on January 13, 2020, Todt's wife and kids had been wrapped in blanket and drugged with Benadryl. They had also been suffocated, stabbed and left to rot for two weeks. Anthony Todt, 45, and who is accused of murdering his wife, three children and the family dog, was not read his Miranda rights when he initially confessed to the killings upon his arrest in January 2020 Todt (left) reportedly told a relative in a jailhouse phone call in March that his wife was responsible for her own death and killed their three children and the family dog Pictured (left to right): Alek, Zoe, Megan and Tyler Todt enjoying a day at the pool before they were discovered dead inside a Florida home in January 2020 The victims' decomposing bodies were found inside their Celebration, Florida, home only two weeks after they were fatally stabbed to death Florida Ninth Circuit Judge Keith Carsten Schmer said the combination of factors led to an invalid waiver of Todt's rights. The lawyer further argued that detectives may have been 'tempted to cut corners' to obtain a confession in their rush to solve the high profile murder 'with no available concrete evidence.' Before going on an alleged killing spree, Todt had been working in Connecticut and spent weekends in Florida with his family. At the time they discovered the murder, federal authorities and Osceola County Sheriff's deputies had gone to the family's home to arrest Todt on insurance fraud charges related to his physical therapy business. Since his jail confinement, Todt has blamed his wife for the slayings in a letter to his father and in a jailhouse phone conversation with his sister, claiming that it was Megan who killed their children and then herself after prior unsuccessful attempts, and that he could not stop her because he was not in the home at the time. 'There were multiple attempts, just so you know, multiple attempts in the last ... over a time frame, there's been attempts,' Todt told his sister Chrissy Caplet in the March call. 'Which is why this time I was stuck down here trying to handle things.' Todt has pleaded not guilty in relation to the four first-degree murder charges and one count of animal cruelty that has been charged with and blamed his wife for killing their children before taking her own life while he was away Pictured (left to right) : 13-year-old Alek Todt, four-year-old Zoe Todt and 11-year-old Tyler Todt Anthony Todt, pictured with his wife Megan, claimed that she would not let him reach out to his extended family for help in a phone call from a Florida jail with his sister in March Todt drugged his wife and children with Benadryl (pictured) before stabbing them to death several times Anthony Todt (pictured) also claimed in a letter to his father, Robert, that his wife was the one who murdered their three children Todt also told Caplet that he had trouble sleeping recently 'because I'm kind of upset emotionally ... Meg and the kids were everything to me, you know? I'm still madly in love with her. I'm still madly in love with the kids.' Caplet, who lives in Connecticut but was in Florida at the time of the call after assuming power of attorney over her older brother, asks Todt if he can remember speaking to her in December 2019, according to additional recordings obtained by the The Day. He said that he did not remember speaking to his family in Connecticut at that time. Authorities believe Todt killed his family some time after New Year's Day before remaining in the home with their bodies until their discovery two weeks later. Todt suggested to Caplet that his wife had prohibited him from speaking to his extended family there. In the April call, they also spoke about his health issues, with Todt insinuating that his wife would force him to avoid traditional medicine for his problems. He told Caplet about one day in October or August of 2019 when Megan had allegedly taken their two sons to get groceries and he passed out while watching their daughter. 'I looked at (Megan) like, "Can I go to the doctor now? We're trying all these things here, I need to find out what's going on."' He claimed he passed out through a combination of his blood sugar, his thyroid, hypertension and possibly low testosterone. The bed where police found the decomposing bodies of Megan Todt and her daughter, Zoe A knife stained with what appears to be blood is seen after being seized by deputies A T-shirt and boxer shorts belonging to Tyler Todt, 11, are seen stained with what appears to be blood after officials said the boy had been stabbed in the stomach This is not the only time Todt has made claims that his wife was guilty of the killings. In a June 19 letter to his father Robert Todt obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, he wrote that Megan had drugged the children and then stabbed and suffocated them. Todt wrote that his wife then drank a bottle of Benadryl and stabbed herself in the abdomen. 'Long story short, she gave them the Benadryl/Tylenol PM pie, separated them, woke up at 11:30 [p.m.], stabbed and then suffocated each one,' he wrote in the 27-page letter. 'At the news of this I ran to the bathroom and puked - I was weak.' He also claimed that he had wished to hold a press conference but that his lawyers had advised against it. Todt denied any wrongdoing in his letter and accused the Sheriff's Office of wanting 'to score a big win' with his arrest. He said he is '10000% INNOCENT of all these preposterous charges,' and wants to 'correct all inaccuracies' made by 'the creative writing machine,' in a reference to news organizations. Todt's trial is set to take place at the Osceola County Courthouse in a little over two weeks, on April 14. A $455 million superyacht allegedly linked to a Russian oligarch Dmitry Kamenshchik remains anchored in the Dominican Republic after the United States government requested an investigation into the vessel as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The Flying Fox has been prohibited from sailing from the Caribbean island after it arrived there from St. Barts on March 21. The luxurious vessel docked in the resort town of La Roma to refuel and restock on food supplies. It took off before it was stopped in Santo Domingo and forced to dock at the Don Diego Port. Agents with the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) visited the yacht last Friday as part of its investigation and were accompanied by officials from the Foreign Relations Ministry, General Directorate of Customs and Office of the Attorney General. DailyMail.com has reached out to HSI for comment. The Flying Fox, a $455 million yacht, which is reportedly linked to Russian billionaire Dmitry Kamenshchik, owner of Moscow's Domodedovo Airport, is currently anchored in the Dominican Republic following a petition from the United States government as it investigates any possible connections to President Vladimir Putin as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine Homero Figueroa, spokesperson for Dominican President Luis Abinader, said on Tuesday that the Attorney General's office has the results of an inquiry into the Flying Fox superyacht, which is anchored in Santo Domingo as U.S. and Dominican officials investigate whether it is linked to Russian oligarch Dmitry Kamenshchik The Flying Fox has 57 crew members but not passengers, according to Dominican Republic authorities Russian billionaire Dmitry Kamenshchik has not been sanctioned by the United Kingdom, European Union and United States. He is the owner of Domodedovo Airport, one of the biggest airports in Russia Homero Figueroa, press secretary for Dominican President Luis Abinader, appeared on Color Vision's Today morning show and revealed that the Office of the Attorney General had the results of its inquiry. 'If something is found that conflicts with the legal regulations in the Dominican Republic, we will proceed according to the law. If there is nothing irregular, the yacht will be released,' Figueroa said. Figueroa added that while there has been a joint collaboration with their U.S. counterparts, each agency has a 'different objective.' A helicopters on the deck of the luxurious Flying Fox yacht, which has been anchored in the Dominican Republic since March 21 U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents visited the Flying Fox yacht last Friday 'Dominican institutions act in the sphere that the regulations allow and the investigation carried out by the Dominicans obeys a totally different objective than the (United States) institution that was present in the Dominican Republic,' Figueroa added. 'We refer to the possible findings that the Dominican institution (Customs) may find in the raid of the yacht.' Kamenshchik's 466-foot long yacht, according to Dominican authorities, has 57 crew members but not passengers aboard. Considered the world's largest yacht available for charter it has hosted Jay-Z and Beyonce - the Flying Fox features stands 104 feet above the waterline, according to Boat International. The yacht features a pool, spa, gym and 11 cabins. Considered the world's largest yacht available for charter it has hosted Jay-Z and Beyonce - the Flying Fox features stands 104 feet above the waterline, according to Boat International. The yacht features a pool, spa, gym and 11 cabins Considered the world's largest yacht available for charter it has hosted Jay-Z and Beyonce - the Flying Fox features stands 104 feet above the waterline, according to Boat International. The yacht was built in 2019 and features a pool, spa, gym and 11 cabins for 25 passengers. The investigation into the yacht allegedly tied to Kamenshchik who owns Moscow's Domededovo Airport one of the largest in Russia comes as the European Union, United Kingdom and the United States have zeroed on in Russian billionaires and confiscated their vessels, homes and jets for bankrolling President Vladimir Putin. VesselsValue's head of superyachts, Sam Tucker, recently told Forbes that ownership of the massive vessels by the oligarch's 'is notoriously private.' The yachts are typically owned through offshore companies. There are at least 43 yachts are worth at least $5.4 billion. Sanctioned Russian billionaires possess 22 vessels that are worth $3.1 billion. 'Technically speaking, these yachts are owned by a special purpose vehicle, often being in a different jurisdiction to the beneficial owner,' Tucker said. 'There are also lease systems, which further distance the [owner] from the asset.' United Kingdom officials seized a Russian businessman's $49 million yacht on Tuesday. Officials boarded the Phi in Canary Wharf, east of London. The vessel is the first to be detained in the UK under sanctions imposed because of the war in Ukraine. 'It's just another indication that we will not stand by whilst Putin's cronies are allowed to sail around the world in these kinds of yachts and people in Ukraine are suffering,' Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said. 'When you see what he's doing to Ukraine, when you see what he's doing to people's lives, it can't be right to have a yacht like this here in London, able to just sail away, and that is why we've impounded it and denied its ability to go anywhere right now.' Finland last week seized 21 yachts as it investigated whether they were owned by Russian oligarchs. Western leaders have been warned against dropping their guard after Russia announced earlier today it intends to 'fundamentally scale back' military operations around the Ukrainian capital. The Kremlin's Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin said the change on the battlefield was meant to increase trust at peace talks, suggesting that the foundations of a ceasefire could be in play. His superior Sergey Shoigu meanwhile said Russian forces will now concentrate on the 'liberation' of the eastern Donbass region rather than attacking major Ukrainian cities, which represents a major tactical shift in the face of bitter resistance. But the announcement has been met with skepticism in Europe and the US, with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson today declaring Vladimir Putin could still seek to 'twist the knife' as the war enters a new phase. And Western officials have remained highly suspicious of Russia's true intentions, arguing that Russian attacks have continued despite the Kremlin's promise to scale back troops in major urban centres. One official speaking on condition of anonymity said: 'Nothing that we have seen so far has demonstrated to us that President Putin and his colleagues are particularly serious about [scaling back]. It is more of a tactical exercise playing for time. 'Even if they do do what they say they are going to do that is not in any shape or form a cessation of hostilities... I think we can continue to see continued death and destruction [in the Donbass].' Western leaders have been warned against dropping their guard after Russia announced earlier today it intends to 'fundamentally scale back' military operations around the Ukrainian capital. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (pictured) said Vladimir Putin could still seek to 'twist the knife' as the war enters a new phase Western officials have remained highly suspicious of Russia's true intentions, arguing that Russian attacks have continued despite the Kremlin's promise to scale back troops in major urban centres (Russian President Vladimir Putin and Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu pictured) The Kremlin's Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin (L) said the change on the battlefield was meant to increase trust at peace talks, suggesting that the foundations of a ceasefire could be in play. His superior Sergey Shoigu (R) meanwhile said Russian forces will now concentrate on the 'liberation' of the eastern Donbass region rather than attacking major Ukrainian cities Western skepticism to Russia's supposed de-escalation of the conflict emerged as Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met in Istanbul today for their first face-to-face talks in two weeks, in a further attempt to see if they can find sufficient common ground to end the fighting. Deputy Defence Minister Fomin's promise to reduce the Kremlin's military presence near the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv following today's talks appears to be the first major concession that Russia has made since the beginning of their invasion in Ukraine more than a month ago. The outcome of the face-to-face talks in Istanbul, at which Fomin himself was present, raised hopes that the conflict in Ukraine could soon be brought to an end, while the Ukrainian military's general staff said earlier it had noted troop withdrawals around the two cities in question. But London and Washington immediately cast doubt on Russia's words and, on the ground, Ukraine said seven people were killed by a Russian strike on a government building in the city of Mykolaiv. The Russian pullback is being offered as a goodwill tactic, but there are suspicions it is simply a way of saving face, given the invader's heavy losses of troops, tanks and armoured vehicles. Boris Johnson said Putin could well be preparing to further 'twist the knife' and insisted it was important to maintain both military and economic pressure on the Russian regime despite the supposed pullback. A spokesman for Johnson added: 'We will judge Putin and his regime by his actions and not by his words,' before saying the British government and armed forces were looking at 'all possible options' to ensure the Ukrainians had the equipment they needed while avoiding any 'escalatory effects'. Though there was positivity surrounding today's peace talks in Istanbul, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he had not seen anything to indicate that negotiations were progressing in a 'constructive way,' speculating Russia's pullback is likely an attempt to 'deceive people and deflect attention.' Russia's Deputy Defence Minister Colonel-General Alexander Fomin leaves after a meeting with Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul, Turkey March 29, 2022 The Russian pullback is being offered as a goodwill tactic, but there are suspicions it is simply a way of saving face, given the invader's heavy losses of troops, tanks and armoured vehicles (A Ukrainian soldier inspects a damaged Russian tank) A Ukrainian serviceman walks near a damaged Russian army tank in the northeastern city of Trostianets, on March 29, 2022 'There is what Russia says and there is what Russia does, and were focused on the latter,' Blinken said in Morocco. 'And what Russia is doing is the continued brutalisation of Ukraine.' Even as negotiators from the two sides assembled in Istanbul, Putin's forces hit an oil depot in western Ukraine late Monday and blasted a gaping hole Tuesday morning in a government administration building in Mykolaiv. While peace talks between Russia and Ukraine were conducted in Istanbul, US President Joe Biden consulted with Johnson and the leaders of France, Germany and Italy to discuss a potential new multimillion-dollar aid package to help Ukraine in light of the invasion. Biden spoke by phone for nearly an hour with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at 9:15 a.m. (1315 GMT), the White House said, though it was not immediately clear whether progress was made. Elsewhere, the Russian-backed self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic in eastern Ukraine announced today that it may consider joining Russia officially once it controls all of Ukraine's Donetsk region. Even as negotiators from the two sides assembled in Istanbul, Putin's forces hit an oil depot in western Ukraine late Monday and blasted a gaping hole Tuesday morning in a government administration building in Mykolaiv (pictured) 'There is what Russia says and there is what Russia does, and were focused on the latter,' US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. 'And what Russia is doing is the continued brutalisation of Ukraine.' Head of the Donetsk People's Republic Denis Pushilin (L) walks in downtown of Donetsk, Ukraine, 26 March 2022 'As for joining the Russian Federation, as for the wish and aspiration, they have been clearly traced since 2014 - the desire to be in Russia,' DPR leader Denis Pushilin was quoted by the Donetsk News Agency as saying. 'But now the main task is to reach the constitutional borders of the republic. Then we will determine that,' he said. The comments come two days after the leader of the other Russian-backed eastern Ukrainian rebel region Luhansk said it may hold a referendum on joining Russia. Kyiv said any such vote would have no legal basis and would trigger a stronger international response. Three days before ordering the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin recognised the breakaway territories in Luhansk and Donetsk as independent states, though the rest of the world considers them part of Ukraine. Ukraine, which says it is fighting for its existence against what it casts as an imperial-style land grab by Russia, has repeatedly said it will never agree to Russia's annexation of its territory - the hardest part of peace talks with Moscow. Advertisement Five people - including two Ukrainians - were shot dead in a Tel Aviv terror attack last night, before the Arab gunman was 'neutralised' by Israeli police. The attack was carried out in the ultra-orthodox Jewish town of Bnei Brak by a Palestinian man from the West Bank, and was the third fatal gun or knife attack in Israel in the past week ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Chilling video of the attack showed a gunman on a motorcycle methodically gunning down bystanders with an assault rifle in the middle of the suburban streets. 'An attacker armed with an assault rifle opened fire on civilians on HaShnayim Street in Bnei Brak, leaving several civilians in fatal conditions,' police said. 'From there he moved to Herzl Street, opened fire on civilians, and was neutralized by police force.' There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack in the coastal town. But Israeli media identified the perpetrator as 27-year-old Diaa Hamarshah, a Palestinian from the Israeli-occupied West Bank, who had spent four years in the Jewish state's prisons. The military raided the man's home early on Wednesday and arrested several of his relatives as part of its investigation, Israeli media said. 'Diaa Armashah, 27, a Palestinian from the West Bank village of Yabad, arrived at Jabotinsky Street in Bnei Brak armed with an M-16 assault rifle,' Israeli police said. Advancing to a nearby street, he shot dead two Ukrainian nationals aged 32 and 23, and then killed two Israelis before being confronted by police, with one of the officers dying in a gunfight that ensued, they added. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned of a 'wave of murderous Arab terrorism' ahead of the funerals on Wednesday for two of five people killed in the shooting. Pictures from the funeral of one of the victims - 29-year-old Avishai Yehezkel - in Bnei Brak this morning showed hundreds of ultra-orthodox Jewish mourners filling the streets as the body was transported. Chilling video of the attack showed a gunman on a motorcycle methodically gunning down bystanders with an assault rifle in the middle of the suburban streets. Israel police officials say one terrorist has been killed and another arrested Five people - including two Ukrainians - were shot dead in a Tel Aviv terror attack last night, before the Arab gunman was 'neutralised' by Israeli police. Pictured: A body lies covered on the ground at the scene of an attack in Bnei Brak on Tuesday Pictured: Israeli mourners attend the funeral of Avishai Yehezkel, one of the five people killed in yesterdays shooting attack in the ultra-Orthodoz town of Bnei Brak on March 30, 2022 Friends and family mourn at the funeral of Avishai Yehezkel who was killed during the Tuesday night attack. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned of a 'wave of murderous Arab terrorism' ahead of the funerals on Wednesday Two of the victims were identified as Yaakov Shalom, 36, and Avishai Yehezkel, 29, both ultra-Orthodox residents of Bnei Brak. Pictured: Ultra-orthodox Jewish mourners gather for the funeral of Yehezkel on Wednesday in the town Pictured: Men mourn the death of Avishai Yehezkel, 29, who was shot and killed in a terrorist attack in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, Israel Bennett, who heads an ideologically disparate coalition government ranging from Jewish nationalists to Arabs, said he would convene an emergency meeting with top security officials on Wednesday to review the situation. Police said its forces were put on the highest level of alert, and the army said it would deploy extra units in and around the West Bank. Israeli authorities have not yet determined whether the attacks were organised or if the attackers acted as lone wolves. Israel Defense Minister Benny Gantz wrote on Twitter that the security forces 'will work with all means to return security to Israeli streets and the feeling of security to civilians.' In a rare statement from the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack. He said the killing of Israeli or Palestinian civilians 'only leads to further deterioration of the situation and instability, which we all strive to achieve, especially as we are approaching the holy month of Ramadan and Christian and Jewish holidays.' He said the violence 'confirms that permanent, comprehensive and just peace is the shortest way to provide security and stability for the Palestinian and Israeli peoples.' Video of the attack, taken from a nearby window, showed the shooter standing outside a brightly-lit convenience store. The gunman hid behind pillars as he fired at passersby. One man could be seen running across the road for cover, while another - a cyclist - appeared to escape on his bicycle while coming under fire. A driver, who entered the scene from the same direction the cyclist left from, was not so lucky. The shooter could be seen firing the rifle through the windows before the car crashed. In a chilling moment, the gunman then appeared to fire a round through the window at point-blank range to make sure he had hit his target. Tuesday's shootings occurred at two locations in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox city just east of Tel Aviv. Police said a preliminary investigation found the gunman was armed with an assault rifle and opened fire on passersby before he was shot by officers at the scene. 'We unfortunately have to note that five people have died,' said Eli Bin, head of the Magen David Adom emergency responders, in the first official confirmation of the killings. Three of the victims were identified as Yaakov Shalom, 36, and Yehezkel - both ultra-Orthodox residents of Bnei Brak - and Amir Khoury, 32, an Arab Christian policeman from Nof Hagalil who had responded to the attack. The police later said that 'a foreigner from Ukraine, aged 23' and 'a foreigner from Ukraine, aged 32' were among the victims. They were named as two workers from Ukraine - Alexander and Dmitry. The Ukrainian embassy in Israel later confirmed two of the victims were Ukrainian citizens. 'With deep sorrow we confirm, that two citizens of Ukraine were among victims,' the embassy said in a statement of Facebook. 'We express our condolences and sympathy to the families of the deceased.' They 'used to sit here for hours each day after work' local Lior Rahimi told AFP news agency, pointing to a corner shop and cafe. He describing them as friendly and helpful men. Pictures showed the funeral of Yehezkel taking place on Wednesday morning. The funeral of Shalom was also set to take place this morning. Ultra-orthodox funerals can be attended by thousands of people, raising fears of more attack taking place. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men gather at the scene of the attack in which people were killed by a gunman on a street in Bnei Brak Emergency services attend the scene of an attack in which people were killed by a gunman on a main street in Bnei Brak Israeli security and medical personnel secure the scene of an attack in which people were killed by a gunman on a main street in Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, Israel Zaka volunteers, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish emergency response team in Israel, work at the scene of a shooting attack on March 29, 2022 in Bnei Brak Israeli security forces and emergency personnel gather at the scene of a shooting attack on March 29, 2022 in Bnei Brak, 4.5 miles east of Tel Aviv. Five people were killed in gun attacks n overturned vehicle lies on the road at the scene of a shooting attack on March 29, 2022 in Bnei Brak Mourners attend the funeral of Avishai Yehezkel, 29, in Bnei Brak Israel, Wednesday, March 30, 2022 Pictured: A group of women in Bnei Brak mourn the deaths of those killed in the terrorist attack on Tuesday night Mourners gather around the body of Avishai Yehezkel, 29, during his funeral in Bnei Brak Israel, Wednesday, March 30, 2022 Pictured: A man is comforted at the funeral of f Avishai Yehezkel, 29, in Bnei Brak Israel, Wednesday, March 30, 2022. Yehezkel was one of five people shot and killed in an over-night terrorist attack in the coastal town Earlier on Tuesday, Israeli security services raided the homes of at least 12 Arab citizens and arrested two suspected of having ties to the Islamic State group in a crackdown sparked by recent deadly attacks. Hours before the raid, Bennett said the recent assaults inside Israel marked a 'new situation' that required stepped-up security measures. Law enforcement officials said 31 homes and sites were searched overnight in northern Israel, an area that was home to the gunmen who carried out the Hadera attack. The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the two previous attacks. All of the attacks have come just ahead of Ramadan, which begins later this week and as Israel hosted a high-profile meeting this week between the foreign ministers of four Arab nations and the United States. Israeli police forensics experts at the scene of the attack in Bnei Brak Israeli security forces gather at the scene of an attack All four Arab nations - Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates - along with the United States, condemned the killings. Ramadan is expected to begin Saturday. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned the 'terrorist attack', calling the recent spate of violence 'unacceptable'. UN chief Antonio Guterres' spokesman said he 'condemns the recent terrorist attacks in Israel'. 'Such acts of violence can never be justified and must be condemned by all,' the spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said in a statement. Israel in recent weeks has been taking steps aimed at calming tensions and avoiding a repeat of last year, when clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian demonstrators in Jerusalem boiled over into an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas. But the new wave of violence is greatly complicating those efforts. Tuesday's shooting is the third deadly attack in Israel in a week, bringing the combined death toll to 11, excluding perpetrators. A shooting on Sunday killed two Israeli police officers - identified as Shirel Aboukrat, a French-Israeli citizen, and Yezen Falah - in the northern city of Hadera. That assault was later claimed by the Islamic State group - the jihadists' first claim of an attack on Israeli territory since 2017. Israeli police had said the two perpetrators of the Hadera attack were killed at the scene. Hamas, the Islamic Palestinian movement that rules the Gaza Strip, praised Sunday's attack as a 'natural and legitimate response' to Israeli 'crimes against our people'. It was also welcomed by the Gaza-based Islamic Jihad militant group and Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah movement. Israeli police search a car at the scene of a shooting attack Israeli security forces guard the scene of a shooting attack that took place earlier this evening Footage shows a gunman shooting at people walking by and vehicles Sunday's attack coincided with a landmark meeting bringing together Israel's foreign minister with those of four Arab countries with ties to the Jewish state, as well as Blinken. Last week, a convicted IS sympathiser killed four Israelis in a stabbing and car-ramming attack in the southern city of Beersheba. The attacks near Tel Aviv come as Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz visits Jordan, where he met King Abdullah II in a bid to ensure calm in the Palestinian territories during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Tensions flared last year during the fasting month, which starts in April, between Israeli forces and Palestinians visiting Al-Aqsa mosque in annexed east Jerusalem, feeding into 11 days of armed conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Jordan's king called on Gantz to 'lift all obstacles that could prevent (Muslims) from performing prayers' at Al-Aqsa and 'prevent any provocations that could lead to escalation'. Deadly attacks by IS inside Israel, and attacks by Arab citizens of Israel, are rare. The group operates mainly in Iraq and Syria, where it has recently stepped up attacks against security forces. It no longer controls any territory but operates through sleeper cells. IS has claimed attacks against Israeli troops in the past and has branches in Afghanistan and other countries. Free lateral flow tests will be scrapped for everyone except NHS workers, care home staff and vulnerable patients from Friday in England, ministers announced tonight. The general public will be told there is no need to take a test even if they are symptomatic, though they will be advised to isolate until they feel better. Rapid Covid tests are being massively scaled back on April 1 as part of the final phase of the Government's 'living with Covid' strategy. Asymptomatic tests will only be free for frontline NHS, social care and hospice staff during 'periods of high prevalence'. Lateral flows will also be funded for patients with Covid-like symptoms in hospital or who are eligible for antivirals because they have an underlying health conditions. People in 'high risk settings' will also be eligible for free tests if they are symptomatic, including prison officers or staff in homeless shelters. But routine tests for care home and hospice residents will no longer continue and will only be provided in the event of an outbreak or a resident being admitted. And visitors to hospitals and social care settings will 'no longer be required to take a test' upon arrival. Free lateral flow tests for all Britons are set to be scrapped in England on Friday for the vast majority of people Several scientists have expressed concern about the timing of the move, with cases quite high. But there are signs the latest surge may have already peaked Health Secretary Sajid Javid said: 'Thanks to our plan to tackle Covid we are leading the way in learning to live with the virus. 'We have made enormous progress but will keep the ability to respond to future threats including potential variants. 'Vaccines remain our best defence and we are now offering spring boosters to the elderly, care home residents and the most vulnerable please come forward to protect yourself, your family, and your community.' Free parking for NHS staff to end on Friday - as union brands move a 'sick joke' Free parking for NHS staff working in hospitals in England will end on Friday, the Health Secretary has said. Parking fees were waived during the Covid-19 pandemic, but Sajid Javid said that the benefit would end on Friday. In an update on Covid-19, Mr Javid wrote: 'Free parking in hospital car parks for NHS staff introduced during the pandemic will also come to an end on 31 March. 'However, over 93% of NHS trusts that charge for car parking have implemented free parking for those in greatest need, including NHS staff working overnight.' He added: 'On behalf of the Government, I would like to record my thanks to everyone who has worked tirelessly to keep people safe over the last two years and whose efforts have enabled us to move to the next stage of the Covid-19 response.' Rachel Harrison, national officer for the GMB union, told the PA news agency: 'Charging the NHS staff who've risked their lives during the pandemic to park at work is a sick joke. 'After the years of Tory cuts NHS trusts are struggling, we know. 'But scrabbling the money back off hard up workers is not the answer. 'The Government must now legislate for free hospital staff parking once and for all.' The Department of Health and Social Care said that the perk was 'temporary' and introduced in July 2020 'for the duration of the pandemic'. It said that the scheme had cost around 130 million over the past two years. Advertisement More details about exactly who will be eligible for tests is to be set out this Friday, the Department of Health said. It stressed ministers have a stockpile of lateral flow tests that it can roll out en masse again if a new variant of concern emerges. For the rest of the public, the advice is to 'try to' stay home and avoid contact with others for five days if they have a high temperature or 'feel unwell'. Those who are positive, or have symptoms, and need to leave home will be urged to wear masks, avoid crowded places and stay away from people with weakened immune systems. The law to self-isolate after a positive test expired on February 24 in England. Dame Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, warned the pandemic was not over. She said: As we learn to live with Covid, we are focusing our testing provision on those at higher risk of serious outcomes from the virus, while encouraging people to keep following simple steps to help keep themselves and others safe. 'The pandemic is not over and how the virus will develop over time remains uncertain. 'Covid still poses a real risk to many of us, particularly with case rates and hospitalisations on the rise. 'That is why it is sensible to wear a mask in enclosed spaces, keep indoor spaces ventilated and stay away from others if you have any symptoms of a respiratory illness, including Covid.' From 1 April, those working in adult social care services will also continue to receive free personal protective equipment (PPE). The quarantine time of entire care homes after a Covid case is also being shortened from 14 to 10 days. Britain's scramble for the last remaining free supplies of lateral flow tests has seen sales of the rapid devices soar five-fold in a week at High Street pharmacies. LloydsPharmacy is already selling the Covid tests, despite free ones being available on the Government's website until Friday. But scores of Britons have complained about being unable to get hold of any kits through the official ordering channel over the past fortnight. Struggles accessing the devices which formed a major part of the UK's Covid-fighting strategy have allowed major retailers to cash in. LloydsPharmacy told MailOnline sales in the week ending March 28 were 400 per cent up on the previous seven-day spell. It also announced it was slashing the price of lateral flows, reducing the price of a pack of five rapid swabs by 20p to 9.29 or 1.86 each making it the cheapest on the market. A single test sold on its own from the company will cost people 1.89, compared to 1.99 at rival Superdrug and 2 at Boots. Meanwhile Boots is selling its five-packs for 9.80 and Superdrug is offering them for 9.79. Meanwhile, free parking for NHS staff working in hospitals in England will end on Friday, the Health Secretary said. Parking fees were waived during the Covid-19 pandemic, but Mr Javid said that the benefit would end on Friday. High street pharmacists today continued their war of prices ahead of free lateral tests being scrapped from next week. Graphic shows: Different price options at Boots, Superdrug and LloydsPharmacy Lateral flow tests will be rationed to the elderly and vulnerable people as part of the final stage of No10's living with Covid strategy leading to fears people have been stockpiling the remainder of the free swabs in the meantime. Users have been unable to order tests on the Government's site today In a written statement, he said: 'Free parking in hospital car parks for NHS staff introduced during the pandemic will also come to an end on 31 March. 'However, over 93% of NHS trusts that charge for car parking have implemented free parking for those in greatest need, including NHS staff working overnight.' He added: 'On behalf of the Government, I would like to record my thanks to everyone who has worked tirelessly to keep people safe over the last two years and whose efforts have enabled us to move to the next stage of the Covid-19 response.' Rachel Harrison, national officer for the GMB union, told the PA news agency: 'Charging the NHS staff who've risked their lives during the pandemic to park at work is a sick joke. 'After the years of Tory cuts NHS trusts are struggling, we know. 'But scrabbling the money back off hard up workers is not the answer. 'The Government must now legislate for free hospital staff parking once and for all.' The Department of Health and Social Care said that the perk was 'temporary' and introduced in July 2020 'for the duration of the pandemic'. It said that the scheme had cost around 130 million over the past two years. A woman who lived with Sarah Lawrence 'cult leader,' Lawrence Ray and called herself his 'wife' can be seen wailing and begging him to 'help' her in disturbing video evidence in the sex trafficking trial. The harrowing footage shows a visibly distraught Felicia Rosario hysterically screaming and crying at Ray, 62, who is calmly sitting at a dining room table. Rosario, who is incoherent and babbling at times, can be heard repeatedly sobbing: 'Please! Please, Larry don't do this. Please. Larry, please!' and 'I don't want to leave!' as Ray comforts her in his arms. 'I'm gonna need you to calm down. I need you to calm down,' Ray tells her before she collapses into his lap. Rosario then continues: 'Call them and tell them not to take me, please. I don't want any more trouble for myself. Please Larry don't do this to me! Please! Please!' Later in the video, Ray can be seen following Rosario into the bathroom where she appears to have taken medication shortly after the emotional outburst. He immediately grabs her by the hair and shoves her head under the sink, in an apparent bid to make her throw up the drugs. Scroll down for video Disturbing video submitted into evidence shows alleged sex cult victim Felicia Rosario crying and begging accused 'leader' Larry Ray to 'help' her Rosario, who is incoherent and babbling at times, can be heard repeatedly sobbing: 'Please! Please, Larry don't do this. Please. Larry, please!' as Ray, 62, comforts her in his arms While it is unclear why Rosario was in such an emotional state, it her mental and physical decline while living with Ray is evident in the shocking video 'It's too late. I took Adderall,' Rosario tells him, referring to the stimulant used to treat ADHD. Still holding her head over the sink, Ray asks: 'How many?' to which Rosario replies: 'Just a half pill.' 'Why would you take my medication, come on?' Ray says. While it is unclear why Rosario was in such an emotional state, the extent of her mental and physical decline while living with Ray is evident in the footage. Rosario, who is testifying for the prosecution, took the stand for a second day Tuesday to share further details about her allegedly abusive 'relationship' with Ray. She told jurors that Ray convinced her that anything negative happening to him would be 'the apocalypse' and that she remains convinced he could retaliate against her 'wherever he is.' The 39-year-old was living with Ray and his so-called 'lieutenant' Isabella Pollok when Ray was arrested on February 11, 2020. Both women had referred to themselves as his wife. During her first day of testimony Monday, the Harvard and Columbia educated medic told the court how her romantic relationship with Ray, 62, quickly gave way to physical and mental abuse and coercion that led to her mental collapse. Rosario appears visibly distraught and heads to the bathroom shortly after the outburst Later in the video, Ray is seen grabbing Rosario by the hair before shoving her head under the sink, in an apparent bid to make her throw up the drugs she ingested shortly after the Rosario (pictured in a court sketch) took the stand for a second day Tuesday, telling jurors how she came to realize her 'romance' with alleged sex cult leader Larry Ray was a sham Continuing her account today, Rosario told how she had come to realize that their 'romance' was a sham and that she was the 'third party' in the relationship and that Ray's primary partner was his alleged co-conspirator, Pollok. 'I was just a tool. He tried to make Isabella and I compete for his attention [as if] Isabella was imposing on our relationship, when, in fact, he was already in a relationship with Isabella the whole time,' she told the court. 'The truth was I was the third party in this three-party situation. I didn't learn that until a few months ago, but it made everything make a lot more sense.' Rosario was a second-year resident working in a hospital in Los Angeles in the summer of 2012 when she met and fell in love with Ray. She told jurors that she had moved to the east coast in September that year by which time she was already 'unwell,' paranoid and mentally fragile. She was, she said, unhappy to find that Pollok would be sharing a bed with her and Ray a bed in which all three slept naked. Yesterday she told the court that Ray had coerced her into performing sex acts with both Pollok and him. Today she reflected: 'It wasn't actually a relationship [at all]. I was just a tool for him for whatever his agenda was. He didn't love me.' She described the belated realization as 'devastating.' Felicia Rosario (pictured in a court sketch) took the stand for a second day Tuesday, telling jurors how she came to realize her 'romance' with alleged sex cult leader Larry Ray (lower right) was a sham Rosario was a 29-year-old Harvard and Columbia medical graduate when she met Ray, 62, through her younger brother who was a student at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York Text message exchange between Rosario and Ray showed the two called each other 'honey' and 'husband' 'and wife' Rosario told Assistant US Attorney Mollie Bracewell that she remained 'terrified' of Ray and alleged that, following Ray's arrest, his biological father, Lawrence Grecco 'Pappi,' threatened her as she tried to 'disentangle' herself from the Ray family. In recorded audio of a conversation between Rosario and Grecco played in court, the older man can be heard stating: '[If] somebody turned on my son you don't want to know me. I got nothing to lose.' 'I'm 82 years old, they can lock me up afterwards for ten or twenty years. I don't care.' Rosario told the court she perceived this as a threat. For his part, she said, Ray had physically beaten her punching her in the eye with a closed fist and the stomach and kicking her in the legs just two weeks before his arrest. But under cross examination, defense attorney Marne Lenox attempted to paint Rosario as a woman scorned, one whose relationship had simply collapsed. 'You thought you were going to marry Larry, didn't you?' she asked. Rosario admitted: 'Yes.' 'You called him your husband and he called you his wife?' Again Rosario replied: 'Yes.' Lenox attempted to reframe all that the government presented as sinister pointing out that Rosario was a grown woman, many years graduated, living alone on the West Coast and working full time at the time when she alleged Ray began his campaign of coercion that robbed her of her sanity. According to Rosario, Isabella Pollok (left) was Ray's primary partner. Pollok and Ray's daughter Talia (pictured right with her father) have been named co-conspirators in the sex trafficking case The jury was shown a disturbing video in which Rosario can be seen wearing her graduation cap, which she testified was a repeated humiliation tactic of Ray who would make her wear it and mock her as stupid and a failure Lenox pointed out that Ray sent Rosario erotica only after eight months during which they were in a relationship and had declared love for each other. And as far as Rosario's claims that Ray had forced her into having sex with strangers, Lenox presented her as a woman who had an ability to make her own choices and chose to behave accordingly. As for Ray's 'abuse' of the students, Lenox suggested that this was, in fact, 'Aggressive Encounter Therapy' popularized in the 60s and 70s and that, by putting them in uncomfortable situations, Ray was trying to 'help'. She suggested: 'Just like a method actor Larry would do that and embody a person or a situation that would trigger or elicit that negative personal memory or experience [in order to purge it].' Rosario conceded only that Ray 'said that was his purpose.' In testimony that echoed that of alleged cult member Claudia Drury, 31, Rosario told jurors Monday how Ray set her challenges and asked her to have sex with strangers and record it for him. She also told how he would ask her to go to the mall, not wearing underwear with a short skirt and shop for shoes, and to flash the shoe salesman when he assisted her. 'He made these demands basically every weekend. Eventually he was so insistent, threatening to break up with me and leave me that I started to comply,' Rosario said. Ray's alleged campaign of control is said to have escalated during the summer of 2013, when Drury and several others travelled to Pinehurst, North Carolina, to help with yardwork at Ray's stepfather's property (pictured) Pictured: Larry Ray outside his stepfather's home in Pinehurst, North Carolina Rosario said she first had sex with a stranger for Ray in the summer of 2012, by which time she had left the west coast and moved in with Ray at his Upper East Side apartment. She told the court Ray and Pollok shared a bed and that all three slept naked together. Rosario said she 'wasn't happy' but that Ray convinced her he was doing this to 'help' Pollok, just as he was 'helping' the other students overcome their mental and emotional issues. In time, she said, Ray demanded that she perform sex acts on both him and Pollok. 'He called it the BPD Camp', Rosario said, explaining it stood for borderline personality disorder or, 'Bad Parenting Disorder', as Ray called it. The court saw disturbing video in which Ray filmed Rosario apparently asleep and with a black eye. Ray ultimately ingratiated himself with his daughter Talia's friends, Santos Rosario (left) Daniel Levin, Felicia Rosario (right) and Isabella Pollok Pictured: Alleged cult victims Claudia Drury (left) Dan Levin (right) in evidence photos submitted to the court Sarah Lawrence College is an elite liberal arts college in Bronxville, just north of New York City She can be seen wearing her graduation cap, a repeated humiliation tactic of Ray when, she testified, he would make her wear it and mock her as stupid and a failure. In audio played in court, Ray can be heard instructing another student to 'buy a pacifier' for Rosario because she is acting 'like a child' and 'subhuman.' On another occasion, Rosario told jurors he had Pollok buy diapers and put them on her, forcing her to sit on the floor and watch cartoons while wearing only them and a T-shirt. Rosario is one of at least five alleged victims of Ray's 'sex cult', which came about after the ex-convict ingratiated himself with his daughter Talia's friends - Claudia Drury, Daniel Levin, Santos Rosario, and Pollok - at the elite liberal arts college in Bronxville, just north of Manhattan. Ray is charged with sex-trafficking, extortion, money laundering, violent crime in aid of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy and forced labor. Search continues at China plane crash site after second black box found Xinhua) 09:27, March 29, 2022 Rescuers search the site of a recent plane crash in Tengxian County, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, March 28, 2022. Search work at the site of the recent plane crash in south China is continuing after the second black box was found on Sunday, an official said at a press briefing on Monday afternoon. (Xinhua/Huang Xiaobang) NANNING, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Search work at the site of the recent plane crash in south China is continuing after the second black box was found on Sunday, an official said at a press briefing on Monday afternoon. As of Monday noon, a total of 15,640 people had been sent to search the core site and surrounding areas of the plane crash, covering around 370,000 square meters, said Zhu Tao, head of the aviation safety office of the Civil Aviation Administration of China. A total of 36,001 pieces of plane wreckage and parts have been recovered, he added. At the exterior of the core site, five drone search groups have also been added to aid the search, covering an area of around 9.55 million square meters. The Boeing 737 aircraft, which departed from Kunming, capital of southwest China's Yunnan Province, and was bound for Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, crashed into a mountainous area in Tengxian County, Guangxi, at around 2:38 p.m. on March 21. All 132 people on board the plane were killed. Rescuers search the site of a recent plane crash in Tengxian County, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, March 28, 2022. Search work at the site of the recent plane crash in south China is continuing after the second black box was found on Sunday, an official said at a press briefing on Monday afternoon. (Xinhua/Huang Xiaobang) (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) Three people have been arrested after a man armed with a machete was seen running through the streets of Kingston-upon-Thames in southwest London. The Met Police said officers were called to Clarence Street at 4.15pm on Tuesday after an incident involving a group of males, at least one of which was seen armed with the large weapon. Video shared on social media appeared to show a man running Clarence Street armed with a machete, and was followed by three other men. Police said there were also reports that another male had been sprayed with a substance, which was later found to be water. He was not injured but had been taken to hospital for treatment. Three people have been arrested after a man armed with a machete was seen running through the streets of Kingston-upon-Thames in southwest London Specialist firearms officers were among those who responded to the incident. Police said all three arrested males were held on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon. The first arrest was made close to the scene, police said, while the second male was detained close to railway tracks. The third male was arrested later and also held on suspicion of affray. Police said enquiries to locate a number of other males are ongoing. There have been no reports of any injured persons and officers remain at the scene. A Met Police spokesman said: 'A Section 60 Order granting police additional stop and search powers has been authorised until 08:00hrs tomorrow morning for Grove Ward and Norberton Wards.' Top Military brass and administration officials contradicted Joe Biden's claim that U.S. forces are training Ukrainian troops in Poland as the president continues to face backlash following remarks claiming Vladimir Putin needs to be removed from power. 'I do not believe we are in the process of currently training military forces from Ukraine in Poland,' General Tod Wolters told the Senate Armed Services Committee during a Tuesday hearing. Wolters, the Commander of the U.S. European Command and North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) Supreme Allied Commander Europe continued: 'There are liaisons that are there. They're being given advice.' 'And that's different than I think [what] you're referring to with respect to training,' Wolters said during questioning from Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. During a press briefing proposing his Fiscal Year 2023 plan, Biden issued yet another gaffe when trying to recover from comments calling for Putin's ouster, which the White House quickly walked back on. White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfiled was asked twice during Tuesday's press briefing about Biden's comments that U.S. forces were training Ukrainians. She said there are 'frequent interactions' between U.S. and Ukrainian forces. Bedingfield made her rare public appearance to deliver the daily press event as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki remains on sick leave after contracting COVID-19 just before Biden's trip to Europe this month. She also said when asked about Biden referencing a note card with questions and answers during his briefing on Monday: 'Only President Biden decides what President Biden is going to say.' In the midst of that backpedal, the president said that he never suggested U.S. troops would go to Ukraine, instead claiming they would help train Ukrainian forces in Poland. This was the first time Biden revealed publicly that there was any sort of involvement with U.S. forces training Ukrainian troops for battle. But the White House and Pentagon officials have claimed and continue to claim that this statement is false. 'I was talking to the troops we were talking about helping train the troops in that are the Ukrainian troops that are in Poland. That's what the (sic) context,' Biden said. 'I sat there with those guys for a couple hours. That's what we talked about,' Biden said regarding comments he made to the 82nd Airborne Division on his trip to Europe on March 25. On Friday Biden told U.S. troops in Poland that they would see the courage of Ukrainians 'when you're there' - prompting a White House official to make clear to reporters that he was not suggesting Americans were about to be deployed to the war-torn country. 'I was referring to with (sic) being with and talking with the Ukrainian troops who are in Poland,' he said. General Tod Wolters, Commander of the U.S. European Command and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday: 'I do not believe we are in the process of currently training military forces from Ukraine in Poland' It contradicts President Joe Biden's walk back on Monday afternoon claiming that U.S. forces are training Ukrainian troops in Poland as he tried to backtrack his other comment saying Vladimir Putin 'cannot remain in power' Fox News' Peter Doocy insinuated that the president continuously backtracked comments. 'Are you worried that other leaders in the world are going to start to doubt that America is back if some of these big things that you say on the world stage keep getting walked back?' he asked. 'What's getting walked back?' Biden asked. 'It sounded like you told U.S. troops they were going to Ukraine. It sounded like you said it was possible the U.S. would use a chemical weapon. And it sounded like you were calling for regime change in Russia,' he listed. 'None of the three occurred,' the president insisted. 'You interpret the language that way. Regarding the president's Monday walk back, the White House said in a statement to Politico: 'There are Ukrainian soldiers in Poland interacting on a regular basis with U.S. troops, and that's what the president was referring to.' White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on March 22: 'We do not have U.S. troops currently training Ukrainians. We do not have U.S. troops on the territory of Ukraine.' Biden has faced widespread criticism for his public and frequent 'gaffes' during briefings, interviews and press conferences specifically those instances involving Ukraine and, most recently, when Biden said Putin 'cannot remain in power'. Biden met with troops in with the 82nd Airborne Division at the G2A Arena on Friday, March 25, 2022, in Jasionka, Poland. He told them that they would see the courage of Ukrainians 'when you're there' causing speculation that they were going into Ukraine Russia is in its second month of invasion of Ukraine after initially attacking on February 24, 2022 The president just spewed another gaffe Monday when trying to clarify his comments about not allowing Putin to stay in power, insisting he was expressing his outrage at the Russian leader's brutality in Ukraine rather than unveiling a new U.S. policy. The comments alarmed allies and partners on Saturday when he said at the end of a speech in Warsaw: 'For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power.' The White House quickly tried to walk back the comments, saying the president meant Putin could not continue to wield power over neighbors. And other Western leaders said they feared that any hint of regime change might make it harder for Putin to dial back his deadly war in Ukraine. Biden was asked about the comments after he unveiled his 2023 budget at the White House on Monday afternoon. 'Number one, I'm not walking anything back,' he said. 'The fact of the matter is, I was expressing the moral outrage I felt toward the way Putin is dealing ... and the actions of this man, which is just brutality.' The president on Monday was seen holding a cue card in his left hand as he addressed reporters. It included pointers that he used during questions, including saying his comments about Putin were sparked by his 'moral outrage' Biden, 79, said he was not concerned that his comments would escalate tensions over the war in Ukraine. 'This is just stating a simple fact, that this kind of behavior is totally unacceptable,' he said. But he faced a barrage of questions from reporters attempting to clarify his position and whether he had blundered. Biden's comments were seized on by Moscow and President Vladimir Putin's allies. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: 'This is a statement that is certainly alarming' He was asked whether he had misspoken repeatedly by at one stage sounding as if he was telling U.S. troops they were about to go to Ukraine, as if he was suggesting the U.S. might use chemical weapons, and as if he was calling for regime change. And last week, Biden said NATO would respond 'in kind' if Russian forces used chemical weapons - forcing another official to clarify that the U.S. had no intention of using chemical weapons. On Monday Biden also rejected the idea that his words could have escalated tensions over Ukraine. 'Nobody believes... I was talking about taking down Putin,' he said, adding: 'The last thing I want to do is engage in a land war or a nuclear war with Russia.' Instead he insisted he was expressing an 'aspiration' rather than a goal of American foreign policy. 'People like this shouldn't be ruling countries. But they do,' he said. 'The fact they do doesn't mean I can't express my outrage about it.' The White House had already tried clean-up. It said the crucial nine words were not part of his scripted speech. 'The president's point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin's power in Russia, or regime change,' a White House official said. Biden delivered his controversial remarks right at the end of his three-day trip to Europe, at the end of a speech in the Polish capital Warsaw on Saturday. The White House then had to walk back his comments and insisted he wasn't advocating for regime change And the issue dogged Secretary of State Antony Blinken during his trip to the Middle East, where he was trying to build U.S. relationships as Washington pursues a new nuclear deal with Iran. During a news conference in Jerusalem, he said: 'Putin cannot be empowered to wage war or engage in aggression against Ukraine or anyone else.' But his comments have provided ammunition for the Kremlin as it continues its war in Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: 'This is a statement that is certainly alarming.' He added that Russian officials would 'continue to track the statements of the U.S. president in the most attentive way,' Peskov added. French President Emmanuel Macron said the use of such inflammatory language would not help an already volatile situation. He said he would not have used Biden's words and that the focus had to be on finding a ceasefire and securing the withdrawal of Russian forces by diplomatic means. 'If we want to do that, we can't escalate in either words or actions,' he told broadcaster France 3. And United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres suggested that Biden's comments were unhelpful. 'I think we need de-escalation: We need military de-escalation and rhetoric de-escalation,' he said when asked about Biden's remarks. Firefighters work to extinguish a fire at a warehouse hit by Russian shelling on March 28, 2022 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. More than half Kharkiv's 1.4 million people have fled the city A bride suffered a head wound after an 'evil' Magpie attacked her and left her needing hospital treatment - just a day before her honeymoon. Amanda Doyle, 36, was not the first victim of the bird which has been terrorising a town in Scotland. The mother-of-two was picking up her son from nursery today when the bird swooped down and 'grabbed her head like a hat'. The Magpie then started pecking her head, which caused it to bleed in the bizarre attack. Luckily, her son Ronan escaped though it did look like it would also try to attack the three-year-old. She and her son were saved by a stranger who stepped in to help swat the beast away. The traumatised Mrs Doyle fears she may be left with an infection and has had the start of her honeymoon, due to begin in Cyprus tomorrow, well and truly ruined. The 'evil' Magpie, pictured, looks through the window waiting for another attack Amanda, pictured, from North Lanarkshire went to Hairmyres Hospital for treatment after the attack Mrs Doyle said: 'It looked so evil, the fear was so bad I couldn't move. 'I am scared to go outside if I'm honest. 'It held on to my head like a hat and pecked like mad. 'It bounced off my back, then my face around 10 times, then it grabbed my head before flying away. 'It came back and circled my son, then came for me again. 'A man hit it but then it came back and got in my head really bad. 'I am scared it will remember me, I'm going on my honeymoon tomorrow to Cyprus but I am so sore and upset.' Mrs Doyle, from North Lanarkshire went to Hairmyres Hospital for treatment. She added: 'The hospital went well, I was seen within two hours. 'I had to get a tetanus jag and a deep clean. 'The cut is not massive.' 'But I'm so scared because if the stranger didn't step in it would have been worse.' After the 'evil' Magpie pecked her until Mrs Doyle was bleeding, and had to have a tetanus jab and the wound deep cleaned when she was treated in hospital. (Pictured: Her wound) Mrs Doyle is now warning people to stay away from the area or be on alert if they are nearby. She posted on social media: 'Be careful around Bellshill on way to Bumblebee Nursey, and got attacked but a magpie, at lights at corner.' Several others came forward claiming also to be victims of the vicious magpie. One person said: 'Really hope you are ok! That's so scary. 'I was trapped in my car last week as one chased me, it kept pecking the window and windscreen, this is very worrying knowing they are attacking.' A second person added: 'Me and my boy were attacked last week and this morning.' A third person replied: 'Tried to attack my daughter last week too.' President Biden's budget calls for an undoing of the Trump corporate tax cut and a brand new 'billionaire's tax,' as well as increases on some making $225,000 or more. A top Trump economic adviser is predicting that the new 'billionaire' provision would eventually leads to higher taxes for ordinary Americans, while other taxpayer advocates say that the corporate tax increase would be passed onto workers and consumers. Biden in his nearly $6 trillion fiscal year 2023 budget calls for $2.5 trillion in revenue to be generated through new taxes and closing loopholes. He called for an increase in the top marginal tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent. The higher rate would be applied to married couples filing jointly who make over $450,000, single people who make over $400,000 and married people who file separately and make over $225,000. The plan also calls for closing tax loopholes, including the carried interest loophole, ending fossil fuel subsidies, changing rules for estate and gift taxation, measures to improve tax compliance and modernizing rules related to digital currencies. Congress is not required to take up any of the provisions in Biden's budget, and some have already declared it 'dead on arrival.' But the president's budget sets the table for the Democratic-controlled Congress to write its own budget for fiscal year 2023. Here is a breakdown of Biden's tax plan and how it could affect ordinary Americans: Billionaire's Tax It is the president's brand-new billionaire's tax that is garnering the most attention. The provision would impose a 20 percent minimum tax on income and unrealized capital gains for the top 0.01 percent - those worth over $100 million. A top former Trump economic advisor called the billionaire's tax the 'ultimate bait and switch.' He likened the provision to the first income tax in 1916. 'At the time that was only to what would be millionaires at the time. Then a few years later, it applied to virtually everyone.' He then noted that the federal government passed the 'alternative minimum tax, which at the time in the 1960s was meant to apply to the very rich, the 200 richest people in the country. Ten years later it applied to some 10 million people. 'The reason that happens is because most of the money in this country is still with the middle class,' he said. 'Does anybody really believe they're going to get all this much money out of, you know, George Soros and Warren Buffett and Bill Gates of course they're not they have tax accountants and tax attorneys and estate tax planners that will find ways around these taxes. So it's going to be very soon applied to the middle class because they want to get money out of this.' Alexander Hendrie, tax policy director for the Americans for Tax Reform, expressed a similar concern. 'I think this should be concerning to just ordinary middle class families and individuals just because of the precedent it sets where, you know, we typically tax income, but not assets.' He noted that both the income tax and the alternative minimum tax started at a 'vert high threshold' and eventually expanded to include the middle class. Biden in his nearly $6 trillion fiscal year 2023 budget calls for $2.5 trillion in revenue to be generated through new taxes and closing loopholes Hendrie noted what a headache it would cause to determine the value of assets for tax purposes. 'Take stocks, for example. You know, the way that this would be written is December 31, the value of that stock between January 1 and December 31, you pay tax on that, even though you have not sold the stock and you will do that basically every year.' 'We've had a lot of questions, I think, fundamentally on the fairness of that, given that you would have not existed in illiquid assets, and then the assets such as property, how do you how do you evaluate that value?' Hendrie said. 'How do you value the dozens of items that are far more difficult to value than stocks?' The Trump advisor said the only way to get the rich to pay more taxes is to institute a flat tax. 'Just get rid of all the deductions and loopholes you know, with a 9 percent flat tax, but everybody pays and then there's no deductions, there's no ways for these rich people to pay escape paying tax.' Though progressives have been pushing for a wealth tax, many have steered clear due to the 16th Amendment, which gives Congress 'power to lay and collect taxes on incomes.' Wealth is not income. This chart shows the hypothetical amount of taxes that the top nine US billionaires would have owed in 2021, if a 20% minimum tax rate had been in effect The world's ten richest people added $402 billion to their collective net worth in 2021, making it a banner year for the ultra-wealthy. Nine of the 10 were Americans Biden's plan gets around that rule by taxing only the increase in wealth - if a wealthy person's painting's value doubles, that increase can be thought of as income, just like wages, even if you don't sell the painting. Currently the owner would only pay taxes on the increase when they sell the painting. The White House estimates this would raise $360 billion in revenue over the next decade. The 'billionaire tax' is unlikely to pass, as Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., doesn't seem to be on board. You can't be taxed on 'things you don't have,' he said, according to Bloomberg. 'You might have it on paper. There are other ways for people to pay their fair share, and I think everyone should pay.' The votes of Manchin and fellow moderate Democrat Kirsten Sinema, Ariz., are key for any tax bill to be passed in the split 50-50 Senate. Richest 0.00001% in the US have seen their share of wealth increase tenfold since 1982: Group included just 18 individuals in 2021 In the United States, the share of total household wealth owned by the wealthiest 0.00001 percent has grown tenfold since 1982, according to a recent paper by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. 'Wealth concentration has increased particularly fast during the Covid-19 pandemic,' they write. The richest 0.00001 percent of the US consisted of 18 individuals with a net worth exceeding $50 billion in wealth in 2021, which was a banner year for the ultra-wealthy. In the United States, the share of total household wealth owned by the wealthiest 0.00001 percent has grown tenfold since 1982, rising especially quickly last year 'Top-end wealth is large relative to the economy, and therefore a sizable potential tax revenue source,' write Saez and Zucman, who argue in favor of a wealth tax like the one famously proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren. The economists argue that prior attempts at a wealth tax in Europe failed because they targeted the well-to-do instead of the extreme wealthiest. They also note that the taxes were easily evaded by moving abroad, as most European countries do not tax their citizens worldwide as the US does. In 2021, the world's 10 richest people added about $402 billion to their collective net worth. All but one of the top ten were Americans. Advertisement Corporate tax hike Taxpayer advocates said that workers, consumers and investors could bear the brunt of a seven percent corporate tax rate. Some 300 million small businesses would also be squeezed for the new tax. 'Biden says that this is only going to affect the wealthy corporations, that that's really gaslighting the American public because we all know that when you raise a tax on a business, they pass that along to the consumer,' David Williams, President of the Taxpayer's Protection Alliance, told DailyMail.com. 'This is just it's ridiculous to think that companies will absorb these taxes and not pass them on to consumers.' But the Trump advisor, who worked closely on writing the Trump 2017 tax cuts, disagreed, predicting that costs would instead be absorbed by workers. 'If you raise the corporate tax, it's not so much consumers that can pay the price. Its workers who you know, are going to see fewer jobs and lower wages.' 'Again, they should be eliminating loopholes and deductions in the tax system, not raising the rate. All raising the rate does is chase capital out of the U.S.' Biden budget's revenue generators $1.6 trillion in corporate tax increases $722 billion in tax increases for high earners $68 billion from closing tax loopholes; $47 billion from making changes to estate and gift taxes $15 billion from improving tax compliance $11 billion in relation to modernizing rules related to digital assets Advertisement He noted that Biden had called for a global minimum tax, essentially 'admitting' that raising corporate rates at home prompts business to establish itself elsewhere. 'We estimate we imported about $1 trillion dollars of new capital in the United States after the Trump tax cut. Think about how many jobs are associated with a trillion dollars.' Alex Muresianu, policy analyst for the Tax Foundation, predicted that the corporate hike would in the short term most especially hit middle class investors who own stock or retirement accounts. 'If you if you have a 401k or retirement plan or money in the stock market in some way that'll have an impact on you there. But in the sort of longer term to the corporate income tax will end up hurting lower income people by reducing investment, which in turn reduces reducing reduced productivity, reduce wages.' The corporate tax rate hike will also be difficult to push through, as Sinema has long expressed her opposition. Raised top marginal tax rate There was much debate last year over President Biden's often-repeated promise that he would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000, and whether that number applied to households or individuals. Eventually White House press secretary Jen Psaki clarified that that number would apply to families, not individuals. And again, married people who file separately but make over $225,000 will face a 2.6 percent increase. And while that income is still far above the average annual wage in the U.S., some taxpayer advocates do say that an increase could hurt small businesses. 'People who make $400,000 a year are hardly "rich." Many are hardworking small business owners who are pillars of their communities. These tax hikes will make it more difficult for them to create jobs, raise wages, and bring the economy back,' Alfredo Ortiz, President and CEO of Job Creators Network, told DailyMail.com. Sinema has also rejected any increases to the top bracket. Reducing fossil fuel subsidies The Biden White House said that it would eliminate subsidies for the fossil fuel industry to bring in $3.4 billion more per year and $43.6 billion over 10 years. At the same time, it would spend $3.3 billion on clean energy growth. Williams said eliminating the fossil fuel provisions would 'send the wrong signal' to the economy, especially at a time of sky-high gas prices in the aftermath of Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Ending the subsidies could decrease domestic production of oil. 'It's a really, really odd time to be proposing these kinds of policies given given the current climate over energy prices,' Hendrie said. Footage has emerged of a huge explosion in Belgorod, western Russia, at the site of a suspected arms depot which is believed to have been hit by a Ukrainian missile. The blast, which took place a mere 12 miles from the Russian-Ukrainian border near the village of Krasniy Oktyabr just outside the city of Belgorod, triggered a series of firework-like explosions which could be seen from Ukraine tonight. Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov claimed that the depot was destroyed by an OTR-21 Tochka-U ballistic missile fired by the Ukrainian 19th missile brigade, though this has not yet been confirmed by Ukrainian officials. If the missile strike is confirmed by Ukraine's armed forces, it will be just the second Ukrainian strike on Russian territory since the start of the war after the Millerovo airbase was attacked in late February. Footage has emerged of a huge explosion in Belgorod, western Russia, at the site of a suspected arms depot which is believed to have been hit by a Ukrainian missile. The blast, which took place a mere 12 miles from the Russian-Ukrainian border near the village of Krasniy Oktyabr just outside the city of Belgorod, triggered a series of firework-like explosions which could be seen from Ukraine The Governor of Belgorod Vyacheslav Gladkov confirmed reports of the explosion and said that no Russian citizens were hurt, but refused to shed any light on the reason for the blast. 'Explosions were heard on the territory of Belgorod and the Belgorod region,' Gladkov said. 'The incident took place near the village of Krasniy Oktyabr. The head of the village is in direct contact with me and has given me all the information. There are no casualties or injuries among the residents.' 'I'll post the reason for this later,' he added. However, Russian news agency TASS reported that four Russian military personnel were injured and said preliminary reports suggested the explosion was caused by a Ukrainian missile. 'The shell hit the territory of a temporary military camp in the Belgorod region. Four servicemen were injured,' an emergency services source told TASS. The suspected Ukrainian shelling of the target in Belgorod comes the same day that Russia announced it would begin pulling back troops from Kyiv and Chernihiv following peace talks with Ukrainian delegates in Istanbul. Ukraine's delegation at the conference laid out a framework under which the country would declare itself neutral and its security would be guaranteed by an array of other nations. Moscow's public reaction was positive, and the negotiations are expected to resume on Wednesday, five weeks into what has devolved into a bloody war of attrition, with thousands dead and almost 4 million Ukrainians fleeing the country. Amid the talks, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said Moscow has decided to 'fundamentally... cut back military activity in the direction of Kyiv and Chernihiv' to ''increase mutual trust and create conditions for further negotiations.'' The Kremlin's Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin (L) said the change on the battlefield was meant to increase trust at peace talks, suggesting that the foundations of a ceasefire could be in play. His superior Sergey Shoigu (R) meanwhile said Russian forces will now concentrate on the 'liberation' of the eastern Donbass region rather than attacking major Ukrainian cities Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, top military commander in charge of the defense of the Ukrainian capital, walks in a trench at a position north of the capital Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, March 29, 2022. The first face-to-face talks in two weeks between Russia and Ukraine began Tuesday in Turkey, raising flickering hopes there could be progress toward ending a war that has ground into a bloody campaign of attrition His superior Sergey Shoigu meanwhile said Russian forces will now concentrate on the 'liberation' of the eastern Donbass region rather than attacking major Ukrainian cities, which represents a major tactical shift in the face of bitter resistance. But the announcement has been met with skepticism in Europe and the US, with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson today declaring Vladimir Putin could still seek to 'twist the knife' as the war enters a new phase. And Western officials have remained highly suspicious of Russia's true intentions, arguing that Russian attacks have continued despite the Kremlin's promise to scale back troops in major urban centres. One official speaking on condition of anonymity said: 'Nothing that we have seen so far has demonstrated to us that President Putin and his colleagues are particularly serious about [scaling back]. It is more of a tactical exercise playing for time. 'Even if they do do what they say they are going to do that is not in any shape or form a cessation of hostilities... I think we can continue to see continued death and destruction [in the Donbass].' Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) got into a heated spat over the whereabouts of Hunter Biden's laptop during a House Judiciary hearing on oversight of the FBI's Cyber Division on Tuesday. The Republican firebrand used his allotted time to grill the division's assistant director Bryan Vorndran, who repeatedly told Gaetz he didn't have any information on where the hard drive belonging to President Joe Biden's son is currently located. At one point Gaetz tried to enter the hard drive into the Congressional record but was blocked by House Judiciary Chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), who changed his mind a short while later. 'Sir, I'm not here to talk about the laptop. I'm here to talk about the FBI's cyber program,' Vorndran told Gaetz after the lawmaker asked where it was. The congressman, visibly irritated, tries again. 'You are the assistant director of FBI cyber. I want to know where Hunter Biden's laptop is. Where is it?' he pressed. The FBI official replied, 'Sir, I don't know that answer.' Gaetz called Vorndran's claim 'astonishing.' 'Has FBI cyber assessed whether Hunter Biden's laptop could be a point of vulnerability, allowing America's enemies to hurt our country?' the lawmaker asked. Rep. Matt Gaetz, who is under investigation over sex trafficking allegations, demanded to know how Americans 'are supposed to trust' the FBI if one of its top officials in the Cyber Division could not say where Hunter Biden's laptop is during a heated House Judiciary oversight hearing Republicans have been demanding answers after the New York Times claimed to have authenticated a hard drive purportedly belonging to the president's only living son -- more than a year after the New York Post was widely criticized for reporting on the contents of that same computer. DailyMail.com had also authenticated the information at a time when many on the left wing were dismissing it as Russian disinformation. The hard drive came from a MacBook reportedly belonging to Hunter Biden, that was left in a Delaware repair shop but never recovered. Within it is a vast tranche of emails and other documents relating to Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings as well as lewd images depicting sex acts and drug use. Despite Vorndran on Tuesday insisting the laptop does not fall into his division's purview, Gaetz pressed on: 'I mean, Hunter Biden's password on his laptop was 'hunter02.' 'And now you're telling me right here that as the assistant director of FBI Cyber, you don't know where this is after it was turned over to you three years ago,' he added. Vorndran said that was an 'accurate statement.' 'How are Americans supposed to trust that you can protect us from the next Colonial Pipeline if you can't locate a laptop that was given to you three years ago from the first family potentially creating vulnerabilities for our country?' Gaetz thundered. He was referencing a massive cyberattack by a Russian-linked group that took down the largest fuel pipeline in the US in May 2021, temporarily leading to gas shortages and pain at the pump for much of the East Coast. Cyber Division Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran told Gaetz that his questions were 'not in the realm of my responsibilities' A frustrated Vorndran ended up telling Gaetz it was 'not in the realm of my responsibilities to deal with the questions you're asking.' 'We can do this back-and-forth for the next couple of minutes. I don't have any information about the Hunter Biden laptop,' the FBI official said. They also disagreed on whether the hard drive constituted a 'cyber asset.' Gaetz, who is currently being investigated for sex trafficking allegations, told Vorndran: 'You can't even sit here right now and say that you know there's not a point of vulnerability.' 'Is the first family sufficient cyber infrastructure to protect? You don't even know if they're compromised.' The Republican turned his attention to Nadler, holding up what he claimed to be a hard drive from the president's son's laptop, and asked for it to be entered into the record. Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), seated next to Gaetz, appeared to nod in approval. 'I'm not --' Nadler begins to say before conferring with an aide. The chairman then said he would object to Gaetz's motion. The laptop, which the New York Times recently authenticated long after right-wing media outlets were blasted for reporting about it, contains compromising and embarrassing images of Hunter Biden In some of the pictures, Hunter Biden is seen with a crack pipe hanging out of his mouth. His past struggles with drug addiction have been well documented 'What's the basis of that objection?' the Florida lawmaker challenged. Nadler, speaking over Gaetz's objections, said: 'It may very well be entered into the record after we look at it further.' After what Gaetz called a 'consultation with majority staff,' Nadler relented and allowed the hard drive to be entered into the record 'without objection. On the same day Gaetz introduced a resolution aimed at stripping the security clearances of 51 intelligence experts who branded the laptop a 'Russian disinformation' effort in a 2020 letter. The 'Spook Who Cried Wolf Resolution' would pull security clearances from former top government officials like ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director Leon Panetta -- both of whom signed onto the letter. The effort is also backed by Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). Last week House GOP Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the third-most powerful Republican in Congress' lower chamber, promised to subpoena Hunter Biden if her party took back control of Congress in November's midterm elections. 'The American people absolutely deserve answers,' Stefanik told the New York Post on Saturday. She said 'there is no greater ethical concern or frankly conspiracy' than 'whether this president is compromised because of his illegal ties to his family members.' Grace Tame has taken another hit at Scott Morrison just hours after he was blasted by an outgoing Liberal Senator who described him as unfit to be PM, a bully and an autocrat. Concetta Fierravanti-Wells laid into Mr Morrison during a late night appearance on the Senate floor on Tuesday evening, hours after the Budget was handed down. Speaking under the protection of parliamentary privilege, Ms Fierravanti-Wells said: 'He (the Prime Minister) is adept at running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds, lacking a moral compass and having no conscience. 'In my public life, I have met ruthless people. Morrison tops the list, followed closely by (party powerbroker and Immigration Minister Alex) Hawke. 'Morrison is not fit to be Prime Minister and Hawke is certainly not fit to be a minister.' The extraordinary attack on the PM quickly caught the attention of another of his most outspoken critics, Tame, who has repeatedly lambasted the leader since she was named Australian of the Year in 2021. The sexual assault advocate took to Twitter on Tuesday night to remind the Australian public of her campaign against Mr Morrison. The sexual assault advocate took to Twitter late on Tuesday night to remind the Australian public of her long-enduring spray campaign against Mr Morrison (pictured is her tweet) A user reposted footage of Ms Fierravanti-Wells with the caption: 'Why werent we (the Australian people) told this earlier about the character of our prime minister?' Tame simply replied to the tweet: 'Hi hello, it's me.' It comes just days after the 27-year-old took a swipe at the Prime Minister after his mentor Brian Houston resigned from Hillsong Church over inappropriate behaviour towards two women. Tame shared an image of Mr Morrison and Houston at the 2019 Hillsong Conference, and photoshopped herself into the photo, using the now infamous image of her tense meeting with the Prime Minister at Parliament House in February. She captioned it: 'He said we were going to see Hilltop Hoods.' Tame took a swipe at the prime minister after his mentor Brian Houston resigned from Hillsong Church over inappropriate behaviour towards two women (pictured is her tweet last week) Tame wrote: 'If youre prepared to use something to leverage your image, you also have to be prepared for when that thing blows up in your face,' referring to Morrison's appearance at the annual Hillsong conference. Earlier this month, she joked about the infamous 'side-eye' photo on Twitter after Mr Morrison posted a photo of himself with his cat on social media. The tweet, in which Tame comments, 'Pardon my Twitter absence, I've just been shape shifting', alludes to the now famous image of herself with the PM before Australia Day in which she is giving him a 'side eye' look. Ms Tame, an advocate for survivors of sexual assault following her own abuse as a schoolgirl at the hands of a male teacher, has endured a stream of public scrutiny since being appointed Australian of the Year. Earlier this month, Ms Tame joked about the infamous 'side-eye' photo (pictured) on Twitter after Mr Morrison posted a photo of himself with his cat on social media Ms Tame, an advocate for survivors of sexual assault following her own abuse as a schoolgirl at the hands of a male teacher, has endured a stream of public scrutiny since being appointed Australian of the Year (the 27-year-old is pictured at an event in Sydney earlier this month) Ms Fierravanti-Wells was recently dropped to an unwinnable spot on the Coalition's Senate ticket for the Federal election. The election date is expected to be announced in days, meaning her 17-year parliamentary career is rapidly coming to an end - at least for now. During her spray, the senator claimed Liberal supporters are despairing at the party's prospects, 'and they blame Morrison for this'. The senator's speech was an unwelcome surprise for Prime Minister Scott Morrison (above, watching Josh Frydenberg's Budget speech) 'It is his way or the highway - (he's) an autocrat, a bully who has no moral compass,' she said. The outgoing Liberal also told Parliament Mr Morrison made racist comments during his preselection for the seat of Cook in 2007. 'I'm advised that there are several statutory declarations to attest to racial comments made by Morrison at the time that we "can't have a Lebanese person in court".' Ms Fierravanti-Wells also claimed there is a 'putrid stench of corruption emanating from the NSW division' of the party. She alleged Mr Morrison and Mr Hawke had deliberately contrived a crisis in the NSW branch of the Liberal party for the past year so they could have their own candidates installed. 'I am appalled (party president Philip Ruddock) has allowed Morrison to bully his way to a situation where the next election has been put at risk all to save Hawke's career.' Mr Hawke was facing a preselection challenge for his own seat of Mitchell but was re-endorsed. Tasmanian Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson was left stunned by the MP's evening tirade. 'Holy smokes,' he said. Speaking under the protection of parliamentary privilege, Ms Fierravanti-Wells (pictured in 2018) said: 'He (the Prime Minister) is adept at running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds, lacking a moral compass and having no conscience' Senator Fierravanti-Wells' Senate spray cast a pall over the government on an evening where the federal budget was handed down with a focus on mitigating the cost of living Earlier this week, Senator Fierravanti-Wells took aim at the 'Liberal sisterhood' for failing to speak out against toxic parliamentary culture. She referenced the death of Labor senator Kimberley Kitching to a heart attack at age 52 and how she was ostracised by Labor's so-called 'mean girls'. 'We both had factional enemies who desperately wanted to see us defeated and they worked very hard at it,' she said. 'We were both outspoken and not constrained by prevalent groupthink within our political parties.' A Connecticut school nurse has been suspended over a Facebook post revealing that an 11 year-old at the school where she worked was on puberty blockers. Kathleen Cataford, who worked at the Richard J Kinsella Magnet School in Hartford, was axed from her role Monday over the post, which was branded transphobic. Writing on a local mom's group in response to a request for local school recommendations, the 77 year-old said: 'Investigate the school system curriculum...CT is a very socially liberal, gender confused state,' the post read. It continued: 'As a public school nurse, I have an 11yo female student on puberty blockers and a dozen identifying as non-binary, all but two keeping this as a secret from their parents with the help of teachers, SSW [social workers] and school administration. 'Teachers and SSW are spending 37.5 hours a week influencing our children, not necessarily teaching our children what YOU think is being taught.' Cataford went on to claim that 'children are introduced to this confusion in kindergarten.' DailyMail.com's attempts to contact her Tuesday were unsuccessful. Puberty blockers are used to delay puberty in transgender children, and are a current hot-button issue in the United States. Kathleen Cataford was suspended by the Hartford Public Schools School District after she posted comments containing specific and private details about students on the Connecticut Mom's Club Facebook group Supporters say it saves trans children from undergoing potentially traumatic changes to a body they already feel uncomfortable in. 'I have an 11yo female student on puberty blockers and a dozen identifying as non-binary, all but two keeping this as a secret from their parents,' Cataford wrote Opponents say that while billed as reversible, the blockers can have irreversible side effects which can cause serious harm to users' wellbeing later in life, such as sterility and the inability to achieve orgasm. The post came to the attention of Hartford School District Officials after the mother of the 11 year-old mentioned saw it, and flagged it to school officials. She confirmed its contents and the context in which the post was made to DailyMail.com on Tuesday, but did not wish to comment further, citing her child's privacy. The post came to the attention of officials at the Richard J. Kinsella Magnet School of Performing Arts after the mother of the 11-year-old mentioned saw the post when scrolling on Facebook Hartford Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Leslie Torres-Rodriguez issued a statement condemning Cataford's remarks, but did not name the nurse, citing privacy concerns. 'Hartford Public Schools strives to provide an inclusive environment where all students feel seen, valued, respected, and heard,' the statement read. Torres-Rodriguez added: 'We uphold all of our staff to a high standard, entrusting them to be caretakers and leaders in the community. 'We as a school district are responsible for the health, well-being, social and emotional development, and safety of ALL of the children entrusted to our care.' 'It is our responsibility to support our students' growth, personal experiences, and social-emotional development.' After learning about the post, the district launched an investigation to determine whether Cataford will remain working at the school. Hartford Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Leslie Torres-Rodriguez issued a statement condemning Cataford's remarks, but did not name the nurse, citing privacy concerns 'Hartford Public Schools strives to provide an inclusive environment where all students feel seen, valued, respected, and heard,' the statement read. The family of the student, who asked not to be identified to guarantee their privacy, said they were content with the way the school had responded to the complaint. 'As a family we are very happy with how thoroughly and quickly the school and the district has taken action to both ensure the nurse is fully investigated and ensure the safety and privacy of our child. They could not have done a better job,' relatives told local news station WSFB3 in a statement. 'It's clearly not a reflection of who we are,' Torres-Rodriguez also told the outlet. In addition to sharing specific and personal details about students on social media, Cataford has posted other links to stories addressing the current transgender debate on her Facebook profile. On February 27, the now-suspended nurse shared a FOX article about former USA swimming official Cynthia Millen, who resigned to protest University of Pennsylvania transgender student Lia Thomas' participation in the women's swimming team at Penn. More recently, Cataford shared a press conference of Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh entitled 'Here's why men don't belong in women's sports.' On February 27, the now suspended nurse shared a FOX article about former USA swimming official Cynthia Millen, who resigned to protest University of Pennsylvania transgender student Lia Thomas' participation in the women's swimming team at Penn More recently, Cataford shared a press conference of Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh entitled 'Here's why men don't belong in women's sports' She also stated support for the recent trucker's convoy protesting vaccine mandates, saying that while she supported vaccination, she also believes in personal freedoms. Other mothers whose children go to Hartford public schools voiced their concerns over Cataford's violation of students' privacy. 'I don't think that's right at all - everybody has their privacy- and especially when it comes to kids. If that was my child...I would be going crazy,' one concerned mother told WSFB3. 'I feel really bad because it's upsetting and I have a daughter who also goes to Heartfelt, and to know someone is sharing information about people's kids... it sucks,' another mother told the outlet through a translator. Cataford remains suspended pending an investigation by the school district into her Facebook comments. One of the wettest summers on record continues with more heavy rain forcing a new evacuation order for Lismore in northern NSW. Residents of the town along with those in surrounding Lismore Basin, East Lismore and Girards Hill have been urged to leave immediately. It is the second such order for the town in 24 hours after an all clear was issued to return with caution on Tuesday afternoon. Homes in Lismore were inundated with water during the floods just weeks ago, and are now set to be hit by another deluge (pictured on Tuesday) Although still within levee height, the local Wilsons River has exceeded its major flood level of 9.7 metres. The SES is directing people to evacuate via New Ballina Road, Bruxner Highway and Dalley Street before closures come into play. Flash flooding in the CBD as a result of heavy rainfall has inundated roads and an evacuation centre has again been set up at Southern Cross University. The Bureau of Meteorology says the potential remains high for wider heavy rain along the NSW coast and landslides are also possible with roads inundated. Forecaster Jonathan How says a low pressure system is expected to bring strong and gusty winds in the second half of the week to areas including Sydney, the Hunter and Illawarra. Fresh flooding will impact the mental wellbeing of northern NSW residents already devastated by the February floods, says University of Sydney mental health professor James Bennett-Levy. Another bout of flooding could seriously affect those in the middle of a long clean-up from the previous catastrophe, he told AAP on Tuesday. 'There is extreme distress because what it (the floods) does is re-trigger and re-traumatise people who have already been severely traumatised.' Dr Bennett-Levy, who directs the Centre for Rural Health in Lismore, said "very high levels" of post-traumatic stress disorder are expected. 'It is not just people directly affected, there is collective trauma because just about everyone in the community knows ... multiple people ... whose houses have been inundated,' he said. In a study conducted after the 2017 floods, Dr Bennett-Levy along with other researchers found 50 per cent of people displaced for more than six months in the same region had PTSD. The Wilsons River is seen in Lismore on Tuesday, with residents warned to evacuate as life-threatening floods hit the region yet again Debris sits piled up outside businesses affected by the recent floods in Lismore on Tuesday - with the weather set to take another turn for the worst Normally, a discreet word would ensure that there was no wardrobe clash between the senior royal ladies and the Monarch at a major state occasion. Not so yesterday. Very touchingly, it was a case of the opposite. For there, in the royal front row at Westminster Abbey, we saw the Princess Royal, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Queen herself all dressed in what is known as Edinburgh green. It had been the Dukes official colour on everything from staff liveries to cars (and even the old London taxi he used to drive around the capital). Here was just one of so many delightful homages to the great man yesterday as loved ones, friends and admirers from every facet of his extraordinary life were finally able to come together and pay the full tribute denied him at his funeral. Ahead of this service, there had been one question on all their minds: would Her Majesty feel up to joining them? Right on time came the answer as the state trumpeters of the Household Cavalry marched out on to the High Altar to announce that the Sovereign had drawn up outside. Front L to R: The Queen stands with Prince Charles, Camilla Duchess of Cornwall, Anne Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, Prince Andrew Duke of York, Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, his wife Sophie, Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor, James, Viscount Severn. Behind is L to R: Prince William, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall. They were attending a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh She entered by the shortest possible route, walking up the South Transept with the aid of a stick, as had been expected. What had not been expected was that, of all those to whom she might turn for support, she would be escorted by the Duke of York. He was making his first public appearance since paying off his US courtroom accuser and his subsequent ostracism from royal and public life. No one, of course, could begrudge him his place at the heart of a family service to salute his late father. However, despite the best efforts of senior royal officials to ensure that the Duke stuck to the original plan, arriving with his daughters and his siblings, he had apparently been dead set on this revised arrangement. If it was bound to distract attention from the main focus of the ceremony, no one was going to countermand what had clearly been agreed with the Queen. , As it was, she seemed in little need of physical support anyway. She moved at a stately pace up the aisle, before taking her seat next to the Prince of Wales. She then parked her stick to her right and her handbag to her left. During all the hymns, she rose unaided, knew all the words and, by the end, had dispensed with her spectacles. Gleaming out from her lapel was her beloved scarab brooch, the one the Duke gave her in 1966. Just behind her were five of her great-grandchildren, all enchantingly wide-eyed at their first experience of a state occasion. Historians may later record this as the first official greeting line for a future King. The Queen at her husband Prince Philip's memorial service Prince George and Princess Charlotte handled the long line of fully robed clergy with aplomb as well as a smile, eye contact and a firm handshake. To the Queens front and left were all those international royal houses to whom the Duke was not just a much-loved ally but, in many cases, directly related (as a former Prince of Greece and Denmark). Four kings, five queens (not including our own) plus assorted crown princes and princesses were a reminder of the old joke that the Duke was more royal than the royals. Opposite the royal pews were the Dukes more immediate family, the grandchildren of his sisters. They included Prince Philipp and Princess Xenia of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Bernhard, the Hereditary Prince of Baden and assorted members of the House of Hesse. Alongside them were British political leaders, including the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss. With the Defence Secretary on Ukraine duty, his place was taken by the MoD Minister of State, Jeremy Quin, who is also a member of the Admiralty Board. All in all, more than 1,500 guests packed the Abbey for the event that never was in 2021. They ranged from the Kings of Spain and Holland to representatives of bodies including the Scottish Youth Hostels Association, the Pakistan Society and the Caravan Club. The prevailing Covid restrictions, famously, had reduced last Aprils funeral to that majestically pared-down gathering of just 30 at St Georges Chapel, Windsor. It could include none of the 992 organisations from all over the world of which the Duke had been a proud patron or member. True, the Duke had never been keen on a memorial service, always believing that his achievements should be left to speak for themselves. However, the pandemic had also stripped his funeral of several important ceremonial elements which he himself had planned so carefully. It meant that some of his favourite music had been forcibly omitted, including one of his favourite hymns, Guide Me O Thy Great Redeemer. And it precluded any role for some of the local clergy at the royal estates, whom the Duke had come to know so well. So they were all thrown back in the mix, along with something the Duke had certainly not wanted but which the Queen most certainly did: a eulogy. In fact, there were two of them. The first was an upbeat and moving tribute from Doyin Sonibare, 28, whose life had been transformed thanks to the best-known of the Prince Philips many legacies. Doyin Sonibare, pictured, 28, who took part in the Duke of Edinburghs Award scheme Having embarked on the Duke of Edinburghs Award scheme as a 15-year-old East London schoolgirl, she had completed her gold award by 18. The experience, which included voluntary work in Gambia, had given her the self-confidence to aim high in the job market, despite not having a degree. On reflection, I never thought I could do half of the things I have done in the last decade, yet Ive been able to do so because of the opportunities presented to me, she explained. Today, she is not only an advertising account executive but also studying for a PhD at Brunel University. She was wearing the Gold Award brooch which she had received from the Earl of Wessex and was also loyally dressed in Edinburgh green, although she insisted afterwards that this was just a crazy coincidence. The formal address came from the Dean of Windsor, the Rt Rev David Conner. I am not sure that Prince Philip had much time for the theological controversies that divide people. His faith was a heartfelt trust in a loving God, he said, such trust, such hope, as could unite people in a common endeavour. The Duke had known successive Deans of Windsor as old friends. One of them, Robin Woods, had helped him build his theological retreat, St Georges House, in the heart of Windsor Castle. Another, Michael Mann, had enjoyed such enthusiastic theological jousting with the Duke that their long letters to one another were eventually published as a book called A Windsor Correspondence. Having been in post now for 24 years, David Conner could be said to have known the Duke as well as any of them. Like the rest of us, he went on, he was part of flawed humanity. Unlike most of us however, he was one of those rare people who remained true to, and guided by, what you might call an inner spiritual compass. Ms Sonibare talking to the Queen at Prince Philip's memorial service One of the first duties which the Queen had given the Duke on her accession was running all the royal estates. Though he never said so, he was always proud of the job he did with all of them. So, the clergy from all of them had been invited to say a prayer yesterday. Unfortunately, a last-minute Covid diagnosis meant that the poor rector of Sandringham was stuck at home. The music especially the hymns was every bit as sublime as the Duke had wanted. And afterwards, the Queen left in manifestly good spirits. She paused, with a big smile, to thank Miss Sonibare for her kind words before returning directly to Windsor, accompanied yet again by the Duke of York. The various family groups then boarded a fleet of buses. The European royals were taken to St Jamess Palace for a reception with the Prince of Wales and other members of the family. The German cousinhood who had assembled before the service at Buckingham Palace were bussed down to Windsor Castle for lunch with the Dean. The Dukes sisters, who had all married German nobility, had all been debarred from the Dukes wedding in 1947, on the grounds that it was too soon after the end of the Second World War. He had remained devoted to them and their offspring, however. All the royal children and grandchildren have grown up close to their network of little-known continental cousins. Just three representatives of this broad diaspora had been able to attend his funeral. Yesterday, there were 31. As well as lunch, they were all given their chance, at long last, to pay their respects at the spot where Uncle Philip now rests beneath St Georges Chapel. The Prince of Wales was then due to join them all for tea. Like everyone else in the Abbey, they found yesterday to be a glorious completion of that sad, unfinished business, left over from April 2021. A very special occasion beautifully enacted, reflected Commodore Anthony Morrow, the last captain of the Royal Yacht, on his way out of the Abbey. We all just felt very honoured to be a part of it.' A man with a history of schizophrenia has been charged with killing random strangers in three separate shootings in each month of this year in Oregon. Joseph Kelly Banks, 49, was charged in a 15-count indictment on Monday with the murders of Isaiah Hurst, Jeff Ramirez, and Mark Johnson in Portland. The killings, which respectively occurred in the first several days of January, February, and March, appear to be random, and court documents do not suggest a motive in the case. Banks had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder and was living in a group home for adults with mental illness, according to The Oregonian. On January 2, 39-year-old Isaiah Hurst was found shot dead in the driver's seat of a sedan that had crashed on the 100 block of North Morgan Street at about 9am On February 2, 35-year-old Jeff Ramirez was fatally shot inside his pickup truck on Southeast Start Street shortly before 4pm Banks was initially arrested and charged with two-nonfatal shootings that occurred just a few minutes apart on February 28. Police say that ballistic matches and other evidence later linked him to a string of fatal shootings that unfolded over the first three months of 2022. On January 2, 39-year-old Hurst was found shot dead in the driver's seat of a sedan that had crashed on the 100 block of North Morgan Street at about 9am. On February 2, 35-year-old Ramirez was fatally shot inside his pickup truck on Southeast Start Street shortly before 4pm. On March 1, 55-year-old Johnson was found dead next to his SUV on North Stanton Street shortly after noon. Banks was arrested March 2 and booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center, where he remains held without bond. On March 1, 55-year-old Mark Johnson was found dead next to his SUV on North Stanton Street shortly after noon Banks was arraigned on the new indictment on Tuesday. He is charged with three counts of second-degree murder with a firearm. He is also charged with attempted murder with a firearm, first-degree assault, second-degree assault and unlawful use of a firearm for each of the people hes accused of wounding who survived. His attorney has entered a not guilty plea on his behalf. In 2007, Banks was found not guilty by reason of insanity for illegal possession of a firearm by a felon. He spent at least a decade in federal custody under psychiatric care, much of it at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. Banks was released to a halfway house on a February 2021 court order after a judge found that his condition had improved and could be managed with medication. He is next due in court on May 9. The Ukrainian soldier who famously gave a expletive-laden statement of defiance in the face of near certain death amid Russia's attack on Snake Island has been awarded a civic medal. Roman Hrybov, a border guard on the island, boldly told a Russian warship bearing down on his position on the first day of the invasion to 'go f*** yourself', despite having no means of escape. He was feared dead along with 12 other guards when the warship rained fire down on the island, but it transpired days later the group had miraculously survived and were taken prisoner by Russian forces. Then on March 25, Hrybov and his comrades were released from captivity in return for several members of a Russian ship that had been captured by Ukraine after their vessel was sunk. Now, the man once thought killed on the first day of Russia's invasion is back home in the city of Cherkasy, and was presented today with a medal by the head of the region for his bravery in the face of Russian aggression. The now infamous phrase uttered by Hrybov became one of Ukraine's foremost symbols of patriotism and resistance, and has been shared online millions of times. Ukrainian soldier Roman Hrybov, whose viral statement of defiance in the face of near certain death as a Russian warship attacked Ukraine's Snake Island has been awarded a civic medal. Now, the man once thought killed on the first day of Russia's invasion is back home in the city of Cherkasy, and was presented today with a medal by the head of the region for his bravery in the face of Russian aggression A civil medal presented to Hrybov by Igor Taburets, the head of Cherkasy's regional administration Roman Hrybov, a border guard on Snake Island (pictured), boldly told a Russian warship bearing down on his position on the first day of the invasion to 'go f*** yourself', despite having no means of escape A video released earlier today by Cherkasy's Regional State Administration showed Hrybov, dressed in olive fatigues with a military style close shave, gratefully accepting his award from the head of the regional administration Igor Taburets. 'I want to say a big thank you to the Ukrainian people for such support,' Hrybov said following the award. 'We strongly feel this support, it inspires us.' A beaming Taburets said: 'I think that Ukraine should really know its heroes and Cherkasy should know its heroes.' 'The most important thing is that he survived, in spite of moral pressure, in spite of everything, and he will be an example for our Ukrainians and the people of Cherkasy.' Hrybov's declaration of defiance on the first day of Russia's invasion of his country is one of the most recognisable moments of the conflict for many around the world. It also became a rallying cry for Ukrainians in the early days of the war, and Hrybov's words were immortalised by the Ukrainian postal service on a commemorative stamp. The soldier was part of a small contingent of guards stationed on Snake Island in the Black Sea not far from the coast of Romania. They were defending the territory in the early hours of the Russian invasion when Russian warship the Vasily Byko, one of two vessels involved in the attack, radioed the island and said: 'This is Russian military warship. I suggest you lay down your weapons and surrender to avoid bloodshed and needless casualties. Otherwise, you will be bombed.' With no means of defence or escape, the Ukrainian guards were facing almost certain death, but one of them, now revealed to be Hrybov, picked up the microphone and responded emphatically: 'Russian warship - go f*** yourself!' Hrybov's declaration of defiance on the first day of Russia's invasion of his country is one of the most recognisable moments of the conflict for many around the world (Hrybov pictured receiving his medal) The Ukrainian Parliament confirmed sailors who were captured after telling the Russian military to 'go f*** yourself' over the radio as they defended a small island in the Black Sea have been freed in a prisoner exchange with Moscow The 13 border guards on the island were believed to have died in the bombardment which followed their message of resistance, with President Volodymyr Zelensky even announcing they would each be posthumously awarded the title 'Hero of Ukraine'. But it transpired days later the soldiers had survived the attack and were instead taken prisoner. One month after the start of the war, Hrybov and his comrades were returned to Ukrainian soil. The Ukrainian Parliament confirmed last week that the guards had been released along with several other Ukrainian prisoners as part of an exchange for 11 Russian sailors captured from a sunken ship. In a Twitter post, the Ukrainian Parliament wrote: 'The first exchange of war hostages occurred on President Zelensky's order. 'Additionally, today, Ukraine exchanged 11 Russian sailors we rescued from a sunken ship near Odesa for 19 Ukrainian sailors (authors of the legendary phrase 'Russian warship go f*** yourself').' The disgraced Duke of York also took pride of place in the front row after escorting his mother to her seat Advertisement The Royal Family was left 'dismayed' by Prince Andrew demanding to take centre stage at his father Philip's memorial service - amid suggestions The Queen was giving a sign of 'endorsement' in her son. The shamed royal insisted on accompanying the Queen from Windsor Castle to the thanksgiving event at Westminster Abbey. But to the shock of many in the congregation he then escorted his mother all the way to her front-row position in full view of the live broadcast cameras. It had been expected that the Dean of Westminster would take the Queen to her seat, with Andrew behind. The prince has been forced to step back from public life over his association with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Earlier this month he paid millions of pounds to Virginia Giuffre, who had accused him of rape. He has consistently denied her allegations. The Daily Mail can reveal that senior royals had 'reluctantly' accepted Andrew, 62, would travel with the Queen to London because they live so close to each other. But they had hoped 'common sense' would prevail and that Andrew would not seek to play a prominent role in his first public appearance since he struck the out-of-court settlement with Epstein victim Mrs Giuffre, 38. A family source said that senior royals including Prince Charles and the Duke of Cambridge were 'dismayed' by events and that Andrew's decision to put himself 'front and centre' of the service had caused 'consternation'. The Royal Family was left 'dismayed' by Prince Andrew taking centre stage at his father Philip's memorial service. Pictured: Andrew releases his mother from his arm as she walks the final steps to her seat unaided The Duke of York (centre) and the Earl of Wessex (right) during a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of the Duke of Edinburgh A family source said that senior royals including Prince Charles and the Duke of Cambridge were 'dismayed' by events and that Andrew's decision to put himself 'front and centre' of the service had caused 'consternation'. Pictured: Prince Charles and Camilla walk down the aisle at Westminster Abbey followed by Prince William, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and the Duchess of Cambridge The Daily Mail can reveal that senior royals had 'reluctantly' accepted Andrew, 62, would travel with the Queen to London because they live so close to each other. Pictured: Prince Andrew leaves after attending a service of thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey today But they had hoped 'common sense' would prevail and that Andrew would not seek to play a prominent role in his first public appearance since he struck the out-of-court settlement with Epstein victim Mrs Giuffre, 38. Pictured: The Queen walks towards her seat at Westminster Abbey after being accompanied down by the aisle by Prince Andrew today The monarch, 95, had been determined to make her appearance at yesterday's service in honour of the man she described as her 'strength and stay', and was joined by several members of the Royal family, dignitaries and friends The Queen goes to take her seat as Andrew goes towards his for the service at Westminster Abbey this morning Beatrice sheds tears for her grandpa Head bowed and then hidden behind her hymn sheet Princess Beatrice was overcome with emotion during the service. Surrounded by family and well-wishers, the mother-of-one could be seen taking deep breaths as she tried to hold back her tears for her late grandfather. Prince William and her sister Princess Eugenie sang beside her as Beatrice, 33, tried to keep her composure. Head bowed and then hidden behind her hymn sheet Princess Beatrice was overcome with emotion during the service Unable to contain her emotions any longer, she then raised her order of service sheet to hide her face, before taking her burgundy handbag from under her arm and searching for a tissue. Beatrice attended the service with her husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 38, wearing a burgundy headband and a tailored black coat. Eugenie, accompanied by her husband Jack Brooksbank, looked concerned as she glanced over at her older sister. Advertisement 'It would be a great shame if the service was overshadowed by all of this. There is a strong sense of regret that this has happened,' they said. Meanwhile, Royal experts suggested The Queen's decision to give Andrew a front-and-centre role at the service was a sign of 'endorsement' in her disgraced son. Former BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond told The Express: 'This was her way of quietly showing "OK, he messed up really badly, this was a disgrace, but he is my son".' Peter Hunt, another ex-royal correspondent for the broadcaster, said it was a sign of the Queen 'endorsing' Andrew, adding: 'It didn't happen by chance. He could have sat in the congregation with others, with his relatives, but they actively decided that he would have this role of supporting her. 'She's very clearly stating that he has a role at family occasions. 'It's one thing to accept that he should attend his father's memorial service, it's quite another thing to then give him quite a prominent role so it was an active choice to give him such a prominent role.' The service of thanksgiving saw around 1,800 people gather at Westminster Abbey, including many representatives of the hundreds of charities that Prince Philip championed, including the Duke of Edinburgh Awards. It was in marked contrast with his funeral last year, when Covid restrictions meant only 30 people could attend and the Queen was forced to sit alone and masked as she mourned. The monarch, 95, had been determined to make her appearance at yesterday's service in honour of the man she described as her 'strength and stay'. But her recent ill health and increasing frailty meant that it was confirmed by Buckingham Palace only yesterday morning. It was the Queen's first major official engagement outside one of her homes for nearly six months. She last appeared to open the Welsh Senedd in Cardiff on October 14. The Queen listened intently yesterday as the Dean of Windsor paid tribute to Philip's intellect, work ethic, sense of humour and devotion to his family. The Right Reverend David Conner pointed out that the duke could be 'abrupt', and suggested that at times he could forget 'just how intimidating he could be'. Philip's granddaughter Princess Beatrice was seen to give a small chuckle as the dean remarked: 'He could be somewhat sharp in pricking what he thought to be bubbles of pomposity or sycophancy.' But all eyes were on Andrew sitting in the front row with the other senior family members. It is understood that the 'issue' of his presence was being 'kicked about' by senior royals and their households at the end of last week. As there was such a strong family element to the service, there was an understanding and acceptance that he would attend as he had a right to both mourn, and publicly celebrate, his father. But it seems that the prince also pushed forward with his plan to accompany her as she left Windsor by car. Andrew lives only minutes from the Queen at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park. He departed shortly after 10am yesterday in a Range Rover with his mother, both sitting on the back seat together, for the 22-mile drive to Buckingham Palace. There they switched vehicles, travelling on to Westminster in the monarch's Bentley limousine. A guard of honour saluted as the Queen drove past the main west door, where she would normally enter, in favour of Poet's Yard. Staff parked the car as close as possible in order to minimise the distance she needed to walk. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the Abbey with two of their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte A sombre Prince Charles leaves the church with his wife Camilla, who also looked moved by the celebration of Prince Philip's life Timothy Laurence and Anne, Princess Royal, arriving ahead of the Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip Thousands of supporters gathered outside the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey Andrew is said to be determined to honour his father despite fears his presence could dominate coverage of the service Prince Andrew is seen driving near Windsor Castle yesterday morning ahead of the memorial service for his late father today A graphic shows the plan for the service to remember Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey taking place this morning She exited leaning heavily on her now familiar walking stick, holding onto her son's arm as they moved towards her seat in the abbey. They separated only at the end of the aisle, with Andrew giving a last glance at his mother as she turned right. He took his place in a front row seat as befitting one of Philip's four children but on the other side of the aisle from the Prince of Wales and Princess Anne, who was with her husband Sir Tim Laurence. Normally Andrew, who is still ninth in line to the throne, would have taken precedence over his sister. Sources said his decision to take such a central role in the event by walking in with his mother on his arm has caused 'consternation', although nobody was blaming the Queen herself for his actions. 'Some feel it was inappropriate,' said one. 'The issue of the duke's role had been aired and batted around late last week. It was accepted, perhaps reluctantly, that he would be accompanying her to the abbey from Windsor by car. It is fair to say there have been raised eyebrows at him being so front and centre.' Asked whether any members of the family knew Andrew would help his mother down the aisle, one insider said: 'There was no suggestion beforehand that he would be supporting her in that way. It hadn't been discussed specifically but it was hoped that common sense would intervene [and Andrew would not accompany her to the front of the abbey]. 'Clearly it didn't. There is dismay. I think people accept that this doesn't look good.' Another source revealed: 'No one was given a say. Andrew will have insisted and no one would have found out until it was too late. The Prince of Wales will be despairing at the decision. And I don't think the Duke of Cambridge will be too happy either. But that's Andrew all over.' Andrew also walked the Queen back out of the building after the service as other senior royals left by the front entrance. Among those attending were Charles, the Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Countess of Wessex, the Princess Royal, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie. Prince George and Princess Charlotte were also present in honour of their great-grandfather the first time they have attended a major public church service. The dignified Queen, who looked fragile and slightly watery-eyed but kept her composure throughout, was heavily involved in arrangements for the service, which featured elements Philip planned for his own funeral but were forbidden due to pandemic restrictions. A rousing rendition of the popular hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer also known as Bread of Heaven was one of his particular requests, but congregational singing was banned at the time of his death. Special arrangements were put in place for the Queen's comfort, with the service limited to 40 minutes and the monarch sitting in one of the familiar 'Canada' chairs but with an additional cushion. Afterwards the Queen drove with Andrew back to Windsor where she hosted a reception for members of her late husband's German family who had flown over for the occasion. She was expected to pop in briefly. Another reception was held in London for almost 30 foreign royals who had flown over to pay tribute to the duke. RICHARD KAY: Fears of Prince Andrew's 'mission creep' back to royal life In all her 70 years on the throne, was this perhaps the most challenging decision she has had to make as Queen? That it would have to be taken on a day brimming with such personal significance as the memorial service for her beloved Philip surely only added to its complexity. The question itself was a relatively simple one: should she take Prince Andrew's arm for the short walk from her car to her seat in Westminster Abbey's South Lantern? And if not Andrew's whose? Because for all the simplicity of her choice, the consequences would reverberate far beyond the perimeter of the ancient Abbey. That the Duke of York should have every right to pay homage to his father at yesterday's service was never in doubt. What was uncomfortable for other senior family figures, we understand, was how close he should be to the heart of the action. In all her 70 years on the throne, was this perhaps the most challenging decision she has had to make as Queen? That it would have to be taken on a day brimming with such personal significance as the memorial service for her beloved Philip surely only added to its complexity The question itself was a relatively simple one: should she take Prince Andrew's arm for the short walk from her car to her seat in Westminster Abbey's South Lantern? That the Duke of York should have every right to pay homage to his father at yesterday's service was never in doubt. What was uncomfortable for other senior family figures, we understand, was how close he should be to the heart of the action Sitting with his daughters in the largely anonymous second tier of family members was one thing, striding centre stage as his mother's liegeman was potentially perilous. Here, remember was a man who had been banished from royal life, stripped of his honorary military titles and other patronages, and forced to relinquish the style 'His Royal Highness' in any official capacity. Exiled, in effect, after reportedly paying 12million to settle his sex-abuse lawsuit. And as the Mail reports today, his proximity to the Queen at yesterday's thanksgiving has provoked dismay at the Palace. Officials are wary of any softening of the position of no return to royal duties for the Duke of York. One insider spoke of a fear of 'mission creep' that having taken so prominent a position at the memorial, Andrew might start appearing at other national events such as June's Jubilee celebrations. So what should we make of the prince's enhanced position yesterday? Certainly he appeared at times to cut an uncomfortable figure, jaw clenched and eyes flickering from side to side as he slowed to match the unhurried pace of the Queen. Officials are wary of any softening of the position of no return to royal duties for the Duke of York. One insider spoke of a fear of 'mission creep' that having taken so prominent a position at the memorial, Andrew might start appearing at other national events such as June's Jubilee celebrations Such a powerful and public endorsement would also suggest that she wanted to remind people he had not admitted any wrongdoing and, for all the repulsiveness of the Jeffrey Epstein affair, he had not been found guilty of anything but gross misjudgment On the surface it appeared the Queen had made a gesture of extraordinary maternal graciousness. It showed that her love for her favourite son was undimmed and that she believed in him. Such a powerful and public endorsement would also suggest that she wanted to remind people he had not admitted any wrongdoing and, for all the repulsiveness of the Jeffrey Epstein affair, he had not been found guilty of anything but gross misjudgment. Perhaps this was the Queen putting motherhood ahead of monarchy. Over the years she has been criticised for placing her duties to the Crown ahead of her family. Here then was the most powerful of reminders that, for all her devotion to service, being a mother is a higher purpose. But this does present a danger for the royals: one of misunderstanding. Andrew's appearance alongside his mother comes only weeks after the Queen publicly expressed her wishes that the Duchess of Cornwall should in time be made Queen Consort. People now know that the crowning of Camilla is the will of the Queen. It is entirely possible that, in the same way, people will accept her approval of Andrew. Naturally some wonder if this shows a road to a future redemption for Andrew. If, at her request, people can accept the idea of Camilla as Queen, was this the monarch's way of asking people to show a measure of forgiveness for her son? But the optics of the occasion yesterday have prompted some expressions of unease. After watching the duke accompany his mother, Nazir Afzal, former chief crown prosecutor for north-west England, bitingly commented: 'I'm all for rehabilitation but it starts with facing justice, accepting responsibility and working to rebuild victims' confidence. None of that is present here so far.' Perhaps, but this fails to take into account the special place Andrew has in the Queen's life and heart. Both she and Prince Philip were immensely proud of his long Royal Navy service and, in particular, his bravery in the Falklands War 40 years ago, when he flew helicopter decoy missions, luring Argentine missiles away from the British fleet. He has also been the most steadfast of sons. During the long months of Covid bubbles and the decline and death of Philip, Andrew was his mother's most consistent supporter. When her own health suffered, he was regularly in attendance at Windsor Castle, not far from his own home of Royal Lodge. For months his brothers and Princess Anne were grateful for his attentiveness and that his proximity to the castle meant he could spend time with their mother. There was one other significant factor in yesterday's royal tableau. Had it not been Andrew at her side, and the Queen wanted a family member to escort her, the choices were either Prince Charles, Prince William or Prince Edward. But all three princes had their own families at the Abbey, while the divorced Andrew in the absence of his ex-wife was unaccompanied. According to the order of service, he was due to take his seat alongside his daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, who arrived with their husbands. This indicates his role may not have been planned or even widely known. Aides suggested the Queen would have been content for a member of the Abbey clergy to guide her to her seat. But it is entirely characteristic of her to prefer the familiarity of her own family for such a task. What yesterday demonstrated above all was the Queen's remarkable will. Her will to be at the service, her refusal to use a wheelchair or to be hidden away from view. And if it was her will to have Andrew at her side, then so be it. In Edinburgh green they honoured Prince Philip through his official colour: ROBERT HARDMAN observes a poignant day as loved ones can finally pay tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh Normally, a discreet word would ensure that there was no wardrobe clash between the senior royal ladies and the Monarch at a major state occasion. Not so yesterday. Very touchingly, it was a case of the opposite. For there, in the royal front row at Westminster Abbey, we saw the Princess Royal, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Queen herself all dressed in what is known as 'Edinburgh green'. It had been the Duke's official colour on everything from staff liveries to cars (and even the old London taxi he used to drive around the capital). Here was just one of so many delightful homages to the great man yesterday as loved ones, friends and admirers from every facet of his extraordinary life were finally able to come together and pay the full tribute denied him at his funeral. Ahead of this service, there had been one question on all their minds: would Her Majesty feel up to joining them? Right on time came the answer as the state trumpeters of the Household Cavalry marched out on to the High Altar to announce that the Sovereign had drawn up outside. Front L to R: The Queen stands with Prince Charles, Camilla Duchess of Cornwall, Anne Princess Royal, Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, Prince Andrew Duke of York, Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, his wife Sophie, Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor, James, Viscount Severn. Behind is L to R: Prince William, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, Peter Phillips, Isla Phillips, Savannah Phillips, Mia Tindall, Zara Tindall and Mike Tindall. They were attending a service of thanksgiving for late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh She entered by the shortest possible route, walking up the South Transept with the aid of a stick, as had been expected. What had not been expected was that, of all those to whom she might turn for support, she would be escorted by the Duke of York. He was making his first public appearance since paying off his US courtroom accuser and his subsequent ostracism from royal and public life. No one, of course, could begrudge him his place at the heart of a family service to salute his late father. However, despite the best efforts of senior royal officials to ensure that the Duke stuck to the original plan, arriving with his daughters and his siblings, he had apparently been dead set on this revised arrangement. If it was bound to distract attention from the main focus of the ceremony, no one was going to countermand what had clearly been agreed with the Queen. , As it was, she seemed in little need of physical support anyway. She moved at a stately pace up the aisle, before taking her seat next to the Prince of Wales. She then parked her stick to her right and her handbag to her left. During all the hymns, she rose unaided, knew all the words and, by the end, had dispensed with her spectacles. Gleaming out from her lapel was her beloved 'scarab brooch', the one the Duke gave her in 1966. Just behind her were five of her great-grandchildren, all enchantingly wide-eyed at their first experience of a state occasion. Historians may later record this as the first official greeting line for a future King. The Queen at her husband Prince Philip's memorial service Prince George and Princess Charlotte handled the long line of fully robed clergy with aplomb as well as a smile, eye contact and a firm handshake. To the Queen's front and left were all those international royal houses to whom the Duke was not just a much-loved ally but, in many cases, directly related (as a former Prince of Greece and Denmark). Four kings, five queens (not including our own) plus assorted crown princes and princesses were a reminder of the old joke that the Duke was 'more royal than the royals'. Opposite the royal pews were the Duke's more immediate family, the grandchildren of his sisters. They included Prince Philipp and Princess Xenia of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Bernhard, the Hereditary Prince of Baden and assorted members of the House of Hesse. Alongside them were British political leaders, including the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss. With the Defence Secretary on Ukraine duty, his place was taken by the MoD Minister of State, Jeremy Quin, who is also a member of the Admiralty Board. All in all, more than 1,500 guests packed the Abbey for the event that never was in 2021. They ranged from the Kings of Spain and Holland to representatives of bodies including the Scottish Youth Hostels Association, the Pakistan Society and the Caravan Club. The prevailing Covid restrictions, famously, had reduced last April's funeral to that majestically pared-down gathering of just 30 at St George's Chapel, Windsor. It could include none of the 992 organisations from all over the world of which the Duke had been a proud patron or member. True, the Duke had never been keen on a memorial service, always believing that his achievements should be left to speak for themselves. However, the pandemic had also stripped his funeral of several important ceremonial elements which he himself had planned so carefully. It meant that some of his favourite music had been forcibly omitted, including one of his favourite hymns, Guide Me O Thy Great Redeemer. And it precluded any role for some of the local clergy at the royal estates, whom the Duke had come to know so well. So they were all thrown back in the mix, along with something the Duke had certainly not wanted but which the Queen most certainly did: a eulogy. In fact, there were two of them. The first was an upbeat and moving tribute from Doyin Sonibare, 28, whose life had been transformed thanks to the best-known of the Prince Philip's many legacies. Doyin Sonibare, pictured, 28, who took part in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme Having embarked on the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme as a 15-year-old East London schoolgirl, she had completed her gold award by 18. The experience, which included voluntary work in Gambia, had given her the self-confidence to aim high in the job market, despite not having a degree. 'On reflection, I never thought I could do half of the things I have done in the last decade, yet I've been able to do so because of the opportunities presented to me,' she explained. Today, she is not only an advertising account executive but also studying for a PhD at Brunel University. She was wearing the Gold Award brooch which she had received from the Earl of Wessex and was also loyally dressed in Edinburgh green, although she insisted afterwards that this was just a 'crazy coincidence'. The formal address came from the Dean of Windsor, the Rt Rev David Conner. 'I am not sure that Prince Philip had much time for the theological controversies that divide people. His faith was a heartfelt trust in a loving God,' he said, 'such trust, such hope, as could unite people in a common endeavour.' The Duke had known successive Deans of Windsor as old friends. One of them, Robin Woods, had helped him build his theological retreat, St George's House, in the heart of Windsor Castle. Another, Michael Mann, had enjoyed such enthusiastic theological jousting with the Duke that their long letters to one another were eventually published as a book called 'A Windsor Correspondence'. Having been in post now for 24 years, David Conner could be said to have known the Duke as well as any of them. 'Like the rest of us,' he went on, 'he was part of flawed humanity. Unlike most of us however, he was one of those rare people who remained true to, and guided by, what you might call 'an inner spiritual compass'.' Ms Sonibare talking to the Queen at Prince Philip's memorial service One of the first duties which the Queen had given the Duke on her accession was running all the royal estates. Though he never said so, he was always proud of the job he did with all of them. So, the clergy from all of them had been invited to say a prayer yesterday. Unfortunately, a last-minute Covid diagnosis meant that the poor rector of Sandringham was stuck at home. The music especially the hymns was every bit as sublime as the Duke had wanted. And afterwards, the Queen left in manifestly good spirits. She paused, with a big smile, to thank Miss Sonibare for her kind words before returning directly to Windsor, accompanied yet again by the Duke of York. The various family groups then boarded a fleet of buses. The European royals were taken to St James's Palace for a reception with the Prince of Wales and other members of the family. The German cousinhood who had assembled before the service at Buckingham Palace were bussed down to Windsor Castle for lunch with the Dean. The Duke's sisters, who had all married German nobility, had all been debarred from the Duke's wedding in 1947, on the grounds that it was too soon after the end of the Second World War. He had remained devoted to them and their offspring, however. All the royal children and grandchildren have grown up close to their network of little-known continental cousins. Just three representatives of this broad diaspora had been able to attend his funeral. Yesterday, there were 31. As well as lunch, they were all given their chance, at long last, to pay their respects at the spot where Uncle Philip now rests beneath St George's Chapel. The Prince of Wales was then due to join them all for tea. Like everyone else in the Abbey, they found yesterday to be a glorious completion of that sad, unfinished business, left over from April 2021. 'A very special occasion beautifully enacted,' reflected Commodore Anthony Morrow, the last captain of the Royal Yacht, on his way out of the Abbey. 'We all just felt very honoured to be a part of it.' The White House and Pentagon suggested Tuesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was bluffing after Russia announced a drawdown of troops near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. 'I think we should be clear eyed about the reality of what's happening on the ground and no one should be fooled by Russia's announcements,' said White House communications director Kate Bedingfield, standing in for press secretary Jen Psaki and deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who both tested positive for COVID-19. 'We believe any movement of forces around here is a redeployment and not a withdrawal, and the world should be prepared for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine,' Bedingfield added. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby sang a similar tune saying Tuesday, 'We ought not be fooling - and nobody should be fooling ourselves by the Kremlins now recent claim that it will suddenly reduce military attacks near Kyiv or any reports that its going to withdraw all of its forces.' Earlier, President Joe Biden asserted a wait-and-see approach when asked about Russia's announcement during a 'press statement' alongside Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. White House Director of Communications Kate Bedingfield said 'nobody should be fooled by Russia's announcement' as she subbed in at Tuesday's press briefing for press secretary Jen Psaki and her deputy Karine Jean-Pierre, who are both out with COVID-19 The Pentagon was also skeptical of Russia's announcement that there would be a drawdown of forces near Ukraine's capital of Kyiv. Russian President Vladimir Putin is photographed in Moscow last week Ukrainians wait to board a train as they leave the western parts of the country Tuesday, amid Russian President Vladimir Putin's assault on their country 'We'll see, I don't read anything into it until I see what their actions are. We'll see if they follow through with what they're suggesting,' Biden answered. He noted that negotiations were continuing throughout Tuesday, as he spoke with European leaders, including U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi earlier in the morning. 'There seems to be a consensus that - let's just see what they have to offer,' Biden said. 'We'll find out what they do, but in the meantime we're going to continue to keep strong the sanctions, we're going to continue to provide the Ukrainian military with their capacity to defend themselves, and we're going to continue to keep a close eye on what's going on.' Biden's comments to the press came one day after he tried to explain what he meant when he said Saturday in Warsaw that Russian President Vladimir Putin 'cannot remain in power.' That Q&A session led to more head-scratching, as Biden said he was expressing his 'moral outrage' when he made the unscripted remark, but clarified he wasn't calling on regime change. President Joe Biden took one question from a reporter during a 'press statement' he made alongside Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (left) and President Joe Biden (right) participated in a press statement event Tuesday afternoon at the White House Reporters pointed out that Biden's comments could inadvertently be used by Russia to justify further escalation. 'Nobody believes I was talkinga bout taking down Putin ... nobody believes that,' Biden answered Monday. 'I was expressing my outrage at the behavior of this man.' Biden kept his appearance alongside Lee Tuesday in the Oval Office short and scripted, keeping a notecard balanced on his lap. 'The rules-based order is facing unprecedented challenges,' Biden said, seated alongside the Singaporean leader. 'Russia's unprovoked and unjustifiable war against Ukraine is an urgent threat to both Europe and I believe the Indo-Pacific as well.' Biden noted that 'borders can't be changed by force' and said every nation, large and small, had the 'rights to their sovereignty.' 'I want to thank you, Mr. Prime Minister, for Singapore's principled leadership in supporting the people of Ukraine,' the American president continued. 'I know it's not easy, but I want to thank you for it. You're a man of principle and you've stepped up every time that you've had to.' Singapore stands out in the region by joining the United States and Western allies in sanctioning Russia for its actions against Ukraine. Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (left) meets with President Joe Biden (right) Tuesday in the Oval Office President Joe Biden (pictured) entertains Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on an unseasonably cold day in March Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore speaks at the top of his meeting with President Joe Biden Tuesday in the Oval Office Biden - sitting in front of a blazing fire, as Tuesday was an unseasonably cold day for March in D.C. - said the two leaders would discuss the U.S.-ASEAN relationship, 'freedom of the seas' - code for China's claims in the South China Sea - promoting a return to democracy in Burma and sustainable economic growth between the two nations. Lee thanked Biden for receiving him at 'this special moment in world affairs.' 'I'm sure you're completely seized with what's happening in Europe right now,' Lee said. Lee called Singapore a 'very good partner' to the United States. 'And our relations are doing very well,' the prime minister added. 'We will, of course, exchange views also on Ukraine and what that means for Asia Pacific region,' Lee said. After the meeting, as they appeared together in the East Room, the leaders made clear that Ukraine and Russia dominated the conversation, but other issues -including North Korea's latest weapons testing - were also discussed. 'Today with the prime minister's visit and Singapore's strong leadership on this issue, it's clear that Putin's war is unacceptable to nations in every region of the world - not just Europe but every region of the world,' Biden said. 'We cannot condone any country arguing that another country's independence is a result of historical errors and crazy decisions,' Singapore's Prime Minister Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said Tuesday from the East Room He also said of Lee: 'Both you and Singapore punch way above your weight - way above your weight.' In return Lee thanked Biden for the 'very warm welcome.' 'Singapore's a staunch supporter of international law and the U.N. charter, which prohibits acts of aggression against a sovereign state. And that's why we've strongly condemned the unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine,' Singapore's prime minister said. He called Russia's intrusion into Ukraine 'unacceptable.' 'We cannot condone any country arguing that another country's independence is a result of historical errors and crazy decisions,' Lee said. Lee also talked about how the conflict in Ukraine could have repurcussions in the Asia-Pacific, where certain territorial disputes could 'escalate to open conflict.' 'Countries with interests in the region need to pursue all efforts to settle disagreements through peaceful means so that we can avoid reaching a point of no return,' Lee said, encouraging 'open chanels of dialogue' between countries, including at the leader level. To Biden he said there were 'many friends in the region who want you to stay actively and consistently engaged.' Lee was the first leader of a member nation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to visit Biden's White House. Biden was supposed to travel to Asia later this spring for an ASEAN meeting, but that trip is now delayed due to scheduling conflicts. 'We're disappointed but we are very committed to looking for ways in which we can find a good time to schedule this,' the official said. Biden will, however, host a summit of ASEAN leaders at the White House later in the spring. Vice President Kamala Harris visited Singapore in August. Lee will also visit with Harris Tuesday. Lee spent time Monday at the Pentagon with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Biden and Lee last met on the sidelines of the G20 in Rome in October. Scott Morrison has been grilled in a tense interview on morning TV with Allison Langdon taking him to task over his big spending budget and accusations by one of his own female Senators that he's a 'bully'. The Today show host asked if last night's Budget is more about 'winning' the upcoming election than addressing skyrocketing cost of living pressures. The Prime Minister awkwardly fended off the pointed question as he gets set to call a federal election within days. At the centre of Mr Morrison's generous Budget was a major cut to fuel excise tax - set to save motorists about $300 on average over the next six months, a $420 handout for low and middle-income earners and a $1500 tax break for anyone earning under $126,000. The government is also shelling out about $21billion on extra road, rail, communications and business support for regional Australia. Scott Morrison has been grilled in a tense interview on morning TV with Allison Langdon (pictured) taking him to task over his big spending budget and accusations by one of his own female Senators that he's a 'bully' 'This is about the cost of living pressures that Australians are facing and they need support now,' Mr Morrison said on Wednesday. Langdon replied: 'With this budget are you addressing the cost of living or just the cost of winning?' 'These fixes are temporary,' she went on to say. 'Youve got this one-off payment and the six-month time frame on the fuel excise cuts. Are you expecting fuel and grocery prices to be affordable in six months time when the relief runs out? 'No. its about the cost of living,' the Prime Minister responded. At the centre of Mr Morrison's generous Budget was a major cut to fuel excise tax - set to save motorists about $300 on average over the next six months. Pictured: A Sydney motorists at the bowser 'The Treasury papers shows in the Budget 'we are expecting the cost of fuel to drop over that six months.' He said, it doesn't need to be election time for the government to offer economic relief, citing the implementation of the JobKeeper subsidy payment scheme to ease cost of living pressures during the Covid pandemic. 'Right now there is a need because of what has happened with fuel prices. When fuel prices go up, the cost of food goes up.' Mr Morrison was also put on the spot after a Liberal Senator launched an extraordinary attack on the nation's leader describing him as unfit to be PM, a bully and an autocrat. The Prime Minister said rising fuel prices are driving the cost of food up for Australians. Pictured: A Sydney shopper Concetta Fierravanti-Wells laid into Mr Morrison during a late night appearance on the Senate floor on Tuesday evening, hours after the Budget was handed down. 'One of your own slammed you last night.. Basically saying you're a bully,' Langdon said. The PM did his best to tip-toe around the 'brutal' claims. 'I dont agree with that. She has been similarly disappointed in the past with my predecessors,' Mr Morrison said. 'There were 500 people who turned up from the Liberal Party on the weekend who made their choice about who they wanted to endorse for their Senate ticket in NSW. 'She was disappointed and when people are disappointed they will say things and I understand that.' Mr Morrison was also put on the spot by Allison Langdon (left) after a Liberal Senator launched an extraordinary attack on Mr Morrison (right) describing him as unfit to be PM, a bully and an autocrat Speaking under the protection of parliamentary privilege, Ms Fierravanti-Wells said: 'He (the Prime Minister) is adept at running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds, lacking a moral compass and having no conscience. 'In my public life, I have met ruthless people. Morrison tops the list, followed closely by (party powerbroker and Immigration Minister Alex) Hawke. 'Morrison is not fit to be Prime Minister and Hawke is certainly not fit to be a minister.' Ms Fierravanti-Wells was recently dropped to an unwinnable spot on the Coalition's Senate ticket for the Federal election. The election date is expected to be announced in days, meaning her 17-year parliamentary career is rapidly coming to an end - at least for now. During her spray, the senator claimed Liberal supporters are despairing at the party's prospects, 'and they blame Morrison for this'. The senator's speech was an unwelcome surprise for Prime Minister Scott Morrison (above, watching Josh Frydenberg's Budget speech) 'It is his way or the highway - (he's) an autocrat, a bully who has no moral compass,' she said. The outgoing Liberal also told Parliament Mr Morrison made racist comments during his preselection for the seat of Cook in 2007. 'I'm advised that there are several statutory declarations to attest to racial comments made by Morrison at the time that we "can't have a Lebanese person in court".' Ms Fierravanti-Wells also claimed there is a 'putrid stench of corruption emanating from the NSW division' of the party. She alleged Mr Morrison and Mr Hawke had deliberately contrived a crisis in the NSW branch of the Liberal party for the past year so they could have their own candidates installed. 'I am appalled (party president Philip Ruddock) has allowed Morrison to bully his way to a situation where the next election has been put at risk all to save Hawke's career.' Mr Hawke was facing a preselection challenge for his own seat of Mitchell but was re-endorsed. Tasmanian Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson was left stunned by the MP's evening tirade. 'Holy smokes,' he said. Senator Fierravanti-Wells' Senate spray cast a pall over the government on an evening where the Earlier this week, Senator Fierravanti-Wells took aim at the 'Liberal sisterhood' for failing to speak out against toxic parliamentary culture. She referenced the death of Labor senator Kimberley Kitching to a heart attack at age 52 and how she was ostracised by Labor's so-called 'mean girls'. 'We both had factional enemies who desperately wanted to see us defeated and they worked very hard at it,' she said. 'We were both outspoken and not constrained by prevalent groupthink within our political parties.' A Russian-owned superyacht worth 38million was detained yesterday by the UKs anti-kleptocracy unit. The 192ft vessel, which boasts a freshwater swimming pool and an infinite wine cellar, was boarded by officers from the National Crime Agency hours before it was due to leave Canary Wharf, in east London. UK investigators believe the boat, called Phi, belongs to a Russian businessman named Sergei Georgievich Naumenko. The NCA said Phi, which was in London for an awards ceremony, is registered to a company registered in the Caribbean islands of St Kitts and Nevis, and carried Maltese flags to deliberately hide its origins. It is the first ever yacht to be detained in UK waters due to sanctions. Seized: Officials board Phi, pictured, in Canary Wharf yesterday, which is owned by a Russian businessman The 192ft vessel, pictured, which boasts a freshwater swimming pool and an infinite wine cellar, was boarded by officers from the National Crime Agency hours before it was due to leave Canary Wharf, in east London UK investigators believe the boat, called Phi, belongs to a Russian businessman named Sergei Georgievich Naumenko. Pictured: The National Crime Agency during the seizure Will it fit in my super marina? Price: 38million Delivered: December 2021 Length: 192ft Weight: 499 tonnes Decks: 3 Top speed: 25mph Range: 4,600 miles Guests: 12 Crew: 11 Features: 23ft 16-tonne capacity fresh-water pool 300-bottle infinite wine cellar, external lighting powered by lasers and a mile of optical fibre cables Two speedboat tenders and a Smart car carried on separate 118ft shadow vessel, Phi Phantom Advertisement Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said the move turned an icon of Russias power and wealth into a clear and stark warning to Putin and his cronies. She features a freshwater swimming pool and a 300-bottle infinite wine cellar, so-called because the reflection between two mirrors gives the effect of looking down an endless corridor of wine bottles. The Greek letter Phi is used to indicate a mathematical theory called the golden ratio, which is said to appear in nature and, some believe, represents beauty. But mystery remained over the precise reason Phi had been detained because Mr Naumenko does not appear on sanctions lists. Phi was first identified as being potentially Russian owned on March 13. Investigators were left questioning how the wealth of the small fry businessman, who is understood to work in property, matched the value of the custom-built superyacht. But a source said the boat had been impounded over concerns a wealthy oligarch was actually being shielded by a pretend owner. The boats captain Guy Booth, from Worthing, West Sussex, has previously said that the owner is an experienced yachtsman and told friends on Facebook that Phi did not have a Russian owner. A Government source said: This yacht detention is the product of weeks of enquiries, spanning the world. It is the oligarch equivalent of the Russian matryoshka doll where each layer conceals another, and then another. Yesterday officials in Sardinia seized a 500,000 bullet and explosive-proof Mercedes Maybach limousine, owned by Alisher Usmanov, the former Arsenal shareholder. A superyacht owned by sanctioned Russian Alexei Mordashov has sailed 5,000 miles from the Seychelles and will soon reach Russias eastern port of Vladivostok, 80 miles from the border with North Korea. White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said that the press office has no way of controlling what comes out of President Biden's mouth, prompting their efforts to backtrack after he said that Vladimir Putin 'cannot remain in power.' The president alarmed allies and partners on Saturday when he said at the end of a speech in Warsaw: 'For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power.' The White House quickly tried to walk back the comments, saying the president meant Putin could not continue to wield power over neighbors. Asked why the White House put out a statement walking back Biden's remarks just 45 minutes later, Bedingfield offered: 'I can tell you from working for President Biden for seven years that only President Biden decides what President Biden is going to say.' 'The statement was only a confirmation ... that that statement did not represent an official policy change,' she added. After Biden's shock remarks other Western leaders said they feared that any hint of regime change might make it harder for Putin to dial back his deadly war in Ukraine. Biden was asked about the comments after he unveiled his 2023 budget at the White House on Monday afternoon. 'Number one, I'm not walking anything back,' he said. 'The fact of the matter is, I was expressing the moral outrage I felt toward the way Putin is dealing ... and the actions of this man, which is just brutality.' Biden, 79, said he was not concerned that his comments would escalate tensions over the war in Ukraine. 'This is just stating a simple fact, that this kind of behavior is totally unacceptable,' he said. Asked why the White House put out a statement walking back Biden's remarks just 45 minutes later, Communications Director Kate Bedingfield offered: 'I can tell you from working for President Biden for seven years that only President Biden decides what President Biden is going to say.' But he faced a barrage of questions from reporters attempting to clarify his position and whether he had blundered. Eagle-eyed photo and video journalists spotted the president holding a cue card where anticipated questions and the appropriate answers had been typed up for him. The notes read: 'If you weren't advocating for regime change, what did you mean? Can you clarify? 'I was expressing the moral outrage I felt towards the actions of this man. 'I was not articulating a change in policy.' He was asked whether he had misspoken repeatedly by at one stage sounding as if he was telling U.S. troops they were about to go to Ukraine, as if he was suggesting the U.S. might use chemical weapons, and as if he was calling for regime change. 'None of the three occurred,' he said. Biden's cue card had also anticipated a question about the reaction from the French president, Emmanuel Macron. Macron said on Sunday that he would not have used Biden's words, adding that he saw his task as 'achieving first a ceasefire and then the total withdrawal of [Russian] troops by diplomatic means'. He told broadcaster France 3: 'If we want to do that, we can't escalate in either words or actions.' Biden's notes read: 'Is this now threatening to splinter unity with your NATO allies?' The president on Monday was seen holding a cue card in his left hand as he addressed reporters President Joe Biden refused on Monday to walk back his Saturday comments about not allowing President Vladimir Putin of Russia to stay in power, but faced a barrage of questions from reporters The answer Biden had ready stated: 'No. NATO has never been more united.' On Friday Biden told U.S. troops in Poland that they would see the courage of Ukrainians 'when you're there' - prompting a White House official to make clear to reporters that he was not suggesting Americans were about to be deployed to the war-torn country. Biden's comments were seized on by the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin's allies. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: 'This is a statement that is certainly alarming' And last week, Biden said N.A.T.O. would respond 'in kind' if Russian forces used chemical weapons - forcing another official to clarify that the U.S. had no intention of using chemical weapons. On Monday Biden also rejected the idea that his words could have escalated tensions over Ukraine. 'Nobody believes... I was talking about taking down Putin,' he said, adding: 'The last thing I want to do is engage in a land war or a nuclear war with Russia." Instead he insisted he was expressing an 'aspiration' rather than a goal of American foreign policy. 'People like this shouldn't be ruling countries. But they do,' he said. 'The fact they do doesn't mean I can't express my outrage about it.' The White House had already tried clean-up. It said the crucial nine words were not part of his scripted speech. 'The president's point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin's power in Russia, or regime change,' a White House official said. Joe Biden was mocked online on Monday for using a printed 'cheat sheet' of answers to expected questions when he faced the media to discuss the Ukraine war. Biden was in Poland on Saturday and declared in Warsaw that Vladimir Putin 'cannot remain in power' before flying back to Washington, DC. Asked on Monday about his remarks, which many saw as advocating for regime change, the 79-year-old president referred to a typed cue card for hints. He said he made 'no apologies' for his remarks, made off the cuff and not part of his prepared speech. 'It's more an aspiration than anything. He shouldn't be in power. There's no I mean, people like this shouldn't be ruling countries, but they do. The fact is they do, but it doesn't mean I can't express my outrage about it,' he said as he held the cheat sheet in his left hand. 'I was talking to the Russian people. The last part of the speech was talking to the Russian people, telling them what we thought.' The notes read: 'If you weren't advocating for regime change, what did you mean? Can you clarify? 'I was expressing the moral outrage I felt towards the actions of this man. 'I was not articulating a change in policy.' Biden had also anticipated a question about the reaction from the French president, Emmanuel Macron. Macron said on Sunday that he would not have used Biden's words, adding that he saw his task as 'achieving first a ceasefire and then the total withdrawal of [Russian] troops by diplomatic means'. He told broadcaster France 3: 'If we want to do that, we can't escalate in either words or actions.' Biden's notes read: 'Is this now threatening to splinter unity with your NATO allies?' The answer Biden had ready stated: 'No. NATO has never been more united.' Biden regularly uses cue cards, and was photographed frequently with them on the campaign trail and in office. He often took from his pocket the daily totals of COVID cases, which he referenced regularly. He also used them to give precise details at a Town Hall before the election, as he fielded a question about taxes. 'I carry this card with me,' Biden said, referencing the card. He used several cheat sheets during his first presidential press conference, including one with the headshots and names of reporters he planned to call on. Biden also utilized notes during a 2021 summit with Putin, while touring the damage of Hurricane Ida in Louisiana and while calling on reporters at the G20 summit in Rome. 'I'll take your questions, and as usual, folks, they gave me a list of the people I'm going to call on,' Biden told the assembled media at the November forum. Biden delivered his controversial remarks right at the end of his three-day trip to Europe, at the end of a speech in the Polish capital Warsaw on Saturday. The White House then had to walk back his comments and insisted he wasn't advocating for regime change On Monday, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul took issue with Biden's use of the cue cards, and his off-the-cuff remarks about Putin. Paul questioned Biden's acuity, saying the aging president's remarks were a threat to national security. 'A lot of times when you're around somebody who's in cognitive decline, you find yourself trying to help them with a sentence, trying to help them complete it - but we shouldn't have to do that for the commander-in-chief,' he told Fox News. 'And, it is actually a national security risk because he's sending signals that no one in their right mind would want to send to Russia at this point. 'We aren't trying to replace Putin in Russia. We aren't trying to have regime change. We're not sending troops into Ukraine, and we're not going to respond in kind with chemical weapons.' Some have fled the bombs while others have sheltered in basements, but when you have a disability, neither is an easy option. For wheelchair user Vitaly, getting to safety came with added challenges especially since he refused to leave his cat behind. But he has now escaped from the hell of Ukraine, with help from the Red Cross, whose work is partly funded by donations from generous Daily Mail readers. Vitaly, his fiancee Valentyna, her mother Svitlana and their cat Timosha come from the city of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine. Ukrainian wheelchair-user Vitaly, his fiancee Valentyna her mother Svitlana and cat Timosha (pictured together in Italy) found refuge in Italy with the help of the Mail Force Ukraine Appeal which has raised 9.1million They lived on the fifth floor but the electricity supply was cut, stopping the lifts from working. While other residents sheltered from bombardments in the basement, Vitaly was not always able to join them, although sometimes kind neighbours would carry him to the underground refuge. But with no water or heating, the family eventually decided it was too risky to stay in Chernihiv. Humanitarian groups helped them to move to Kyiv, where they spent two days, before moving to Lviv in western Ukraine. Firefighters putting out a fire after Russian missiles strikes to infrastructure including a fuel storage facility on the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on March 26 Ukrainian servicemen take cover behind a military armored vehicle as they walk towards the battlefield east of Kyiv From there, the Red Cross organised transport for evacuation to Italy. Millions of refugees, mostly women and children, have now fled Ukraine and are being given temporary new homes in countries across Europe. The Mail Force Ukraine Appeal was launched a month ago and has raised 9.1million. The first 500,000 came from a donation by DMGT, the Mail's parent company, at the request of Lord and Lady Rothermere. Since then, donations have flooded in from readers, firms and philanthropists. Stanley Solts, of Bromley, south-east London, wrote a cheque for 100, and wrote: 'I was horrified to see the children in the shelter. 'It reminded me of the time in my childhood when I was taken by my mother and grandparents to the London Tube to avoid the Blitz in 1940. Keep up the good works.' Senior ministers are to hold daily crisis meetings to get Britains beleaguered schemes for Ukrainian refugees back on track. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, and Michael Gove, the Communities Secretary, will chair the sessions with senior officials running the widely criticised Homes for Ukraine programme. More than 200,000 kind-hearted British families have volunteered to open their homes to Ukrainians fleeing the war, but many have been left angered and frustrated by swathes of red tape. Home Secretary Priti Patel will begin holding crisis meetings after UK's schemes to take in refugees from Ukraine have been constricted by red tape Michael Gove, the Communities Secretary, will chair the sessions alongside Priti Patel, after 200,000 families volunteered their homes to house Ukrainian refugees - but very few visa have been granted for them Although the number of completed applications is thought to have topped 30,000, just 2,000 visas have been handed out to Ukrainians by the Home Office, latest figures show. It comes as the new refugees minister Lord Harrington is due to appear before MPs in the Commons today with an update on progress. A Government source said that 300 officials were now working on processing the deluge of applications including night shifts and weekend working. Meanwhile, an extra 200 high-security Firecrest computer terminals needed to process the sensitive details have also been deployed. The process of approving applications has also been redesigned to make it quicker, Whitehall sources said. The Home Office is working flat out to streamline processes while maintaining vital security checks to make it easier for Ukrainians to come to the UK, the source said. The number of visas being granted under Homes for Ukraine should start to ramp up at the end of this week. New refugee minister, Lord Harrington (pictured) told MPs two weeks ago that he thought thousands of evacuees would have already arrived by now Combining Homes for Ukraine with a separate scheme for refugees who have family links to the UK, more than 25,000 people have now been offered sanctuary here. It means the Government has set up one of the fastest and biggest visa programmes in British history, the source said. Earlier this week the Daily Mail reported widespread frustration and growing panic in Whitehall at the slow pace of the Homes for Ukraine programme. Now most of that irritation is being directed at Miss Patels department, which processes refugees visas and oversees the vetting of applicants. One source said ministers were clear they have to start delivering on this, or risked alienating thousands of British voters who are desperate to help. Max Fox, 32, welcomed Ukrainian refugee Vlad, 26 - who he met while helping with humanitarian aid efforts in Poland - to the UK as he landed at Manchester Airport this week Lord Harrington told MPs two weeks ago that he expected thousands of evacuees would have arrived through the Homes for Ukraine scheme by now. The number to have actually made it here has not yet been released by the Government, but is thought to be in the hundreds. The Home Secretary has repeatedly stressed the importance of maintaining a rigorous visa application system for national security reasons. Although the vast majority of people fleeing Ukraine are women and children, Miss Patel has said that it would be naive and misguided to think Russian agents could not be among them. A full Government-backed system to match hosts with evacuees is due to be announced soon. But until then, volunteers can pair up informally with Ukrainians and include those details in the Homes for Ukraine online application form. Hosts have been offered a 350-a-month, tax-free thank you from the Government in exchange for taking in refugees for a minimum of six months. The UKs other visa programme, the Ukraine Family Scheme, allowing families to be reunited in Britain, saw a slow start but has now handed out more than 22,000 visas to evacuees. When Ukrainian forces won back control of Rudnytske, a small village 40 miles east of Kyiv, the Russians left them a gift: Three tanks and an armoured personnel carrier. On the other side of the capital, as Ukraines troops pushed to recapture the bitterly contested town of Irpin, they collected a highly-prized BMD-4M: An amphibious infantry fighting vehicle among the pride of Moscows military. The Ukrainians have bragged in recent days of also seizing a secretive advanced electronic warfare system, sophisticated missiles, tanks and other armoured personnel carriers, as well as rocket launchers and scores of rifles. President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russia has become one of the main suppliers of arms to their enemy We have a lack of supplies but the Russians are providing us with many weapons, said Mamuka Mamulashvili, leader of a group of foreign fighters who participated in Sundays Rudnytske assault alongside local forces. His words echo the mischievous claim of President Volodymyr Zelensky that Russia has become one of the main suppliers of arms to their enemy. They could not imagine such a thing in a nightmare, he said. In a weekend interview, he pleaded with Western allies for more aeroplanes, tanks and armoured personnel vehicles but admitted that his forces were taking a lot from the Russians. Mr Zelensky told The Economist that Ukraine had commandeered 12 or 17 tanks the previous day alone and astonishingly, thanks to this battlefield booty, the defenders may now have more tanks and armoured vehicles than at the wars outset despite their own heavy losses. Yuri Butusov, a well-known Ukrainian military journalist, believes the country is gaining more tanks than it is losing. Putin is supplying Ukraine with more military hardware than the West, he says. Butusov says Ukrainians have captured more than 1,000 pieces of military equipment, including at least 120 tanks, that were either undamaged or are reasonably easy to repair. Butusov says Ukrainians have captured more than 1,000 pieces of military equipment, including at least 120 tanks Some of the equipment needs small repairs, but a lot of the vehicles are fine and our soldiers just take them and drive away, said the journalist, who has posed on social media with a captured Kornet anti-tank guided missile. Other analysts documenting the conflict, using photographic or video evidence to verify equipment losses, believe that Ukraine is capturing almost three times as many tanks and armoured vehicles as the invading forces. But such data is difficult to confirm. And of course, Russia is also pushing propaganda about using weapons captured from Ukraine. Certainly, Ukraine is fighting back fiercely against an army that started with far greater firepower including more than four times as many tanks in its armoury. Ukraine is fighting back fiercely against an army that started with far greater firepower As part of the national resistance effort, from major industrial factories through to small car workshops, many Ukrainian companies are adapting sites and refocusing staff in order to repair and repurpose military equipment captured from Russian forces. To fight, the country has to work, everyone in their place, said defence minister Oleksii Reznikov. Then, finally, the enemy will be killed by their [own] weapons. Yesterday, state-owned defence firm Ukroboronprom claimed to have mastered the repair of Russian trophy equipment with factories now working around the clock to get anti-aircraft missile systems and multiple rocket launchers back onto the battlefield. It is also offering a $1million reward for any aircraft it receives. In cities such as Kyiv and Zhytomyr, mounted machine guns have been stripped from damaged armoured vehicles and handed to car repair shops for conversion into mobile weaponry that can be used by Ukrainian infantry troops. We will remake the weapons so the barrels will be directed at the enemys side, not ours, said Oleksandr Fedchecnko, a garage owner in the capital. A special unit of the territorial defence force is also repairing captured equipment in a Kyiv junkyard, painting the Ukrainian flag over Russian insignia. Yuri Golodov, the units deputy commander, claims to have been responsible for 24 Uragan missiles fired back at Russian forces. Everything that we take away from the Russian army, we transfer to the armed forces of Ukraine, he says. Such battlefield scavenging has long been a feature of wars. In both the Second World War and Falklands War, British soldiers turned captured heavy machine guns on the enemy. More recently, Islamic State captured substantial quantities of US-made equipment after the 2014 fall of Iraqs second-largest city, Mosul. Ben Barry, senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: The Ukrainian military seems to be celebrating their success at being able to seize armoured vehicles and rapidly press them back into service. Yuri Butusov, a well-known Ukrainian military journalist, believes the country is gaining more tanks than it is losing Barry, a former British army brigadier, says such tactics are common when troops in combat use the same equipment. Although Russia has spent heavily to modernise its military under Putin, both sides often still rely on Soviet-era equipment. Captured artillery and military vehicles can also be cannibalised for spare parts and ammunition, relieving pressure on hard-pressed supply chains. Ukrainians have also taken great delight in sharing videos of farmers towing away Russian tanks. Last week, meanwhile, it emerged that retreating Russian forces from Kyivs outskirts failed to destroy a Krasukha-4 command module, which can jam drones and low-orbit satellites as well as track Nato aircraft. Reports said it would be flown to the US for examination. The Ambassador of the European Union, Vincent Degert and a group of experts from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) currently in Mauritius have handed over the Regulatory Impact Assessment handbook to the Minister of Finance, Economic Planning and Development, Dr Renganaden Padayachy for consideration and approval by the Government. The handbook is a key document for an evidence-based approach to policymaking. The Ambassador of the European Union to the Republic of Mauritius, H.E. Mr Vincent Degert, said: The Regulatory Impact Assessment Handbook developed by the OECD will support the Government in enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of regulations assessing their effect and reinforcing their implementation. The RIA is a request from the public as well as from the private sector that will have to work together on this process. Last week, an OECD mission is in Mauritius, together with peers from the governments of Germany, Portugal and South Africa, for an extensive capacity-building exercise targeting public officers on how to undertake the Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) process. The mission have noted a strong interest and engagement from the public officers in this exercise that also includes peer review and exchanges of experience in implementing RIA systems. The OECD have now finalised their report with clear recommendations on establishing RIA in the national administration as well as a handbook containing practical guidance on how to implement RIA. The Government of Mauritius announced the intention to introduce a RIA framework in Mauritius in the 2019/2020 National Budget, with a view to improving the business environment and promoting Mauritius as an attractive base for trade and investment. The European Union (EU) in partnership with the Government of Mauritius entrusted the OECD with supporting the Government in the development of a Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) framework as part of the action under the Economic Partnership Agreement support programme funded by the EU. Consultations with the Government and private sector stakeholders started in early 2019. In order to provide strategic oversight of the project and ensure that the future RIA framework is embedded across the Mauritian administration, a Core Team was established at the outset of the project. The team consists of high-level experts from various ministries, regulatory organisations, public bodies as well as representatives from business and academia. The OECD has also facilitated several workshops to spread awareness amongst policy administrators about the need to develop a whole-of-government instrument for regulatory policy. Following the recommendations of the OECD, the Government announced the implementation of RIA in Mauritius and the setting up of a dedicated RIA Office in the 2021/2022 National Budget. The Honourable Minister of Finance, Economic Planning and Development, Dr Renganaden Padayachy, said: Government is working on the recommendations made by the OECD, including alternatives, and will propose the most appropriate mechanism for establishing a RIA system in Mauritius for better business-related rule making. Any system proposed will have to be approved by the Cabinet. The ultimate aim is to ensure that proper consultation mechanism is put in place and that several options are considered in the policy and rulemaking process, in the interest of the business community and the Mauritian economy. The final decision on Government policies, though, will always be that of the Cabinet. The Economic Partnership Agreement Support Programme : As part of its support programme for the implementation of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), the European Union is providing funding to the amount of EUR 11 million (approximately MUR 500 million) to reform and modernise the economy of Mauritius. Under this programme, several key activities have already been successfully launched: i) Set up of an electronic business licensing platform (NELS operated by the Economic Development Board) to allow the private sector operators to receive licenses and permits more quickly, in a single location and at lower costs; ii) Revision of the intellectual property framework that have resulted in the proclamation of the Intellectual Property Act in January 2022. Partager et informez vous aussi...... 0 shares Share Tweet LinkedIn Articles similaires In all her 70 years on the throne, was this perhaps the most challenging decision she has had to make as Queen? That it would have to be taken on a day brimming with such personal significance as the memorial service for her beloved Philip surely only added to its complexity. The question itself was a relatively simple one: should she take Prince Andrews arm for the short walk from her car to her seat in Westminster Abbeys South Lantern? And if not Andrews whose? Because for all the simplicity of her choice, the consequences would reverberate far beyond the perimeter of the ancient Abbey. That the Duke of York should have every right to pay homage to his father at yesterdays service was never in doubt. What was uncomfortable for other senior family figures, we understand, was how close he should be to the heart of the action. Sitting with his daughters in the largely anonymous second tier of family members was one thing, striding centre stage as his mothers liegeman was potentially perilous. Here, remember was a man who had been banished from royal life, stripped of his honorary military titles and other patronages, and forced to relinquish the style His Royal Highness in any official capacity. Exiled, in effect, after reportedly paying 12million to settle his sex-abuse lawsuit. Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Andrew, right, arrive for a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey in London on Tuesday And as the Mail reports today, his proximity to the Queen at yesterdays thanksgiving has provoked dismay at the Palace. Officials are wary of any softening of the position of no return to royal duties for the Duke of York. One insider spoke of a fear of mission creep that having taken so prominent a position at the memorial, Andrew might start appearing at other national events such as Junes Jubilee celebrations. So what should we make of the princes enhanced position yesterday? Certainly he appeared at times to cut an uncomfortable figure, jaw clenched and eyes flickering from side to side as he slowed to match the unhurried pace of the Queen. On the surface it appeared the Queen had made a gesture of extraordinary maternal graciousness. It showed that her love for her favourite son was undimmed and that she believed in him. Such a powerful and public endorsement would also suggest that she wanted to remind people he had not admitted any wrongdoing and, for all the repulsiveness of the Jeffrey Epstein affair, he had not been found guilty of anything but gross misjudgment. Perhaps this was the Queen putting motherhood ahead of monarchy. Over the years she has been criticised for placing her duties to the Crown ahead of her family. Here then was the most powerful of reminders that, for all her devotion to service, being a mother is a higher purpose. But this does present a danger for the royals: one of misunderstanding. Andrews appearance alongside his mother comes only weeks after the Queen publicly expressed her wishes that the Duchess of Cornwall should in time be made Queen Consort. People now know that the crowning of Camilla is the will of the Queen. It is entirely possible that, in the same way, people will accept her approval of Andrew. Naturally some wonder if this shows a road to a future redemption for Andrew. If, at her request, people can accept the idea of Camilla as Queen, was this the monarchs way of asking people to show a measure of forgiveness for her son? But the optics of the occasion yesterday have prompted some expressions of unease. After watching the duke accompany his mother, Nazir Afzal, former chief crown prosecutor for north-west England, bitingly commented: Im all for rehabilitation but it starts with facing justice, accepting responsibility and working to rebuild victims confidence. None of that is present here so far. Perhaps, but this fails to take into account the special place Andrew has in the Queens life and heart. Both she and Prince Philip were immensely proud of his long Royal Navy service and, in particular, his bravery in the Falklands War 40 years ago, when he flew helicopter decoy missions, luring Argentine missiles away from the British fleet. He has also been the most steadfast of sons. During the long months of Covid bubbles and the decline and death of Philip, Andrew was his mothers most consistent supporter. Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is helped into her car by her son Prince Andrew, right, after attending a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey in London When her own health suffered, he was regularly in attendance at Windsor Castle, not far from his own home of Royal Lodge. For months his brothers and Princess Anne were grateful for his attentiveness and that his proximity to the castle meant he could spend time with their mother. There was one other significant factor in yesterdays royal tableau. Had it not been Andrew at her side, and the Queen wanted a family member to escort her, the choices were either Prince Charles, Prince William or Prince Edward. But all three princes had their own families at the Abbey, while the divorced Andrew in the absence of his ex-wife was unaccompanied. According to the order of service, he was due to take his seat alongside his daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, who arrived with their husbands. This indicates his role may not have been planned or even widely known. Aides suggested the Queen would have been content for a member of the Abbey clergy to guide her to her seat. But it is entirely characteristic of her to prefer the familiarity of her own family for such a task. What yesterday demonstrated above all was the Queens remarkable will. Her will to be at the service, her refusal to use a wheelchair or to be hidden away from view. And if it was her will to have Andrew at her side, then so be it. Scotland Yards failure to investigate two serial liars who made false claims of sex abuse is to be probed by watchdogs. The move follows a Daily Mail investigation in January that revealed how the men escaped criminal charges despite clear evidence that they had made up stories about innocent VIPs. A 2016 review of the Mets shambolic Operation Midland sex abuse inquiry found that the pair known as Witnesses A and B should be considered for offences of perjury. Sal Naseem of the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) watchdog said: Our investigation follows the referral of complaints from two individuals who were adversely affected by the allegations made by Witnesses A and B. We have reviewed a report from Merseyside Police, who previously investigated a similar complaint and finalised its report in June 2021, but have decided it is still necessary to investigate these complaints. Given the significant shortcomings in Operation Midland... it is important for those affected to understand what steps were taken by the Met, following the recommendation that offences of perverting the course of justice be considered for Witnesses A and B. Last month the Mail revealed that former Tory Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken was targeted by Witness A, a fraudster and paedophile whose allegations were taken seriously by police as they desperately tried to prove VIP sex claims by the fantasist Carl Nick Beech. Last month the Mail revealed that former Tory Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken (pictured) was targeted by Witness A, a fraudster and paedophile whose allegations were taken seriously by police as they desperately tried to prove VIP sex claims by the fantasist Carl Nick Beech Mr Aitken, now an Anglican vicar, joined calls from across the political divide for an independent police probe into Operation Midland. He was not one of those who made complaints about A and B to the IOPC. He accused Metropolitan Commissioner Cressida Dicks force of an institutional cover-up. Witness A used Aitken family belongings believed to have been stolen in a burglary as proof of an underage gay assignation with the former MP. Scotland Yard did not tell Mr Aitken that he was under investigation. Nor have the stolen items, including his late fathers passport, been returned to him. Unlike Beech, who was jailed for 18 years, Witness A has not been prosecuted for perverting the course of justice. The Met has refused to say why. Westminster paedophile accuser Carl Beech, sentenced at Newcastle Crown Court, after being convicted in 2016 of 12 counts of perverting the course of justice and one of fraud Demanding a full inquiry into the scandal after being told by the Mail that false allegations had secretly been made against him, Mr Aitken said: This has been one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of modern policing. I am appalled to learn that the Mets cover-up is still continuing. His accuser, a paedophile with an appalling criminal record, told a tissue of lies about alleged abuse by the ex-minister in charge of defence procurement and by others including former PM Edward Heath, ex-Tory home secretary Leon Brittan and former Tory MP Harvey Proctor. Yet the Met failed to investigate Witness A and another VIP abuse fantasist known as Witness B, who also has a shocking criminal background and a history of telling untruths. This was despite being asked to do so by Sir Richard Henriques, the former High Court judge who wrote the damning 2016 report. Mr Aitken, now an Anglican vicar (pictured outside St Paul's Cathedral after being ordained as a Chaplin), joined calls from across the political divide for an independent police probe into Operation Midland. He was not one of those who made complaints about A and B to the IOPC Dame Cressida and her force have repeatedly refused to explain why the pair were not referred to another force as was the case with Beech, who is now serving 18 years in jail for his VIP abuse lies and other offences. Operation Midland is widely regarded as one of the worst police investigations in modern times but despite an official report identifying 43 major blunders, and alleging police searches broke the law, not one officer has been held to account. The probe was set up in November 2014 on the claims of paedophile Beech, who alleged that he was a child abuse victim of VIPs. His claims were lies and the 16-month, 2.5million police operation was closed in March 2016. Scotland Yard has declined to answer six questions from the Mail about the false allegations made against Mr Aitken, its failure to investigate A and B and Dame Cressidas role. The probe is expected to investigate the decision-making of ex-Met deputy assistant commissioner Steve Rodhouse. Patients are more dissatisfied than ever with GP services as appointments grow harder to secure, a study has found. Just 38 per cent are happy with the service from family practices with more unsatisfied than satisfied for the first time. The approval rating for GP services plummeted during the pandemic, from 68 per cent in 2019 to the lowest level since polling began in 1983. The findings come from the 2021 British Social Attitudes survey, which also found public satisfaction with the NHS as a whole has fallen to the lowest level in a quarter of a century. The above graph shows estimates of public satisfaction with GP services up to last year. It reveals a sharp drop off when the pandemic began, and there were more remote appointments The above graph shows estimates for satisfaction with the NHS in the UK, based on 3,000 interviews. It shows after a 'halo effect' at the beginning of the pandemic, satisfaction levels are plummeting while the proportion dissatisfied is rising rapidly The above graph shows the reasons people gave for being dissatisfied with the NHS. Top of the list was it taking too long to see a GP or hospital doctor More patients are dissatisfied than satisfied with their GP services for the first time ever as it has become increasingly difficult to get an appointment, a study has found (stock photo) GP receptions should be more welcoming, ministers urged GP receptions should be more user friendly and welcoming to patients, ministers were urged today. The call was made by former social services watchdog Lord Laming, who told Tory frontbencher Lord Kamall he would be 'hugely popular in the country' for taking action. It came as the minister acknowledged the return of health services, such as hospital visiting and doctors appointments, to pre-pandemic levels was 'very patchy'. Lord Kamall was responding to questions in Parliament on the restoration of NHS facilities to normal in the wake of the public health crisis. He told peers: 'NHS services are open to patients and numbers of general practice appointments have returned or are returning to pre pandemic levels.' But he added: 'We are very aware that this idea of returning to normal is very patchy in different parts of the country. 'Some people have told me to visit their GP or visit a hospital its fine. Others are telling me theyve had real trouble.' He said: 'Theres clearly an issue of capacity. But also some people are trying to get face-to-face appointments with their GPs. At the same time, some practices are trying to move to offering a more technology-based service.' Advertisement Polling of 3,112 adults reveals just 36 per cent of the public are satisfied with the health service down by a third since 2020 with more people now dissatisfied for the first time in 20 years. Dan Wellings, senior fellow at the Kings Fund, which analysed the results along with the Nuffield Trust think-tank, said the NHS enjoyed a halo effect during the pandemic with patients supportive but unsatisfied but this fell away last year as other parts of society opened up. Waiting lists stand at a record 6.1million after the public was told to limit its use of the health service so it could prioritise Covid patients. Swathes of operations were postponed and GPs slashed the number of face-to-face appointments, as consultations were largely switched to phone or video. GP surgeries are historically the NHS service with the highest patient satisfaction level. The top reasons for dissatisfaction in 2021 were concerns about waiting times (65 per cent), staff shortages (46 per cent) and inadequate government funding (40 per cent). Satisfaction with social care remains far lower at just 15 per cent. Professor John Appleby, chief economist at the Nuffield Trust, described the results as shocking. He said: Against a backdrop of record waiting lists for surgery, disruption to services and difficulties getting appointments with a GP, people are concerned about what the NHS can deliver. Mr Wellings said: People are often struggling to get the care they need and identified access to general practice, waiting times for hospital care and staff shortages as areas that need to improve. The public do not seem to want a different model they just want the one they have to work. Professor Martin Marshall, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said: We are extremely disappointed and saddened by these findings, which reflect a service working under crippling staffing and resource pressures during the pandemic. Professor Stephen Powis, national medical director of NHS England, said staff have worked flat out treating 300,000 patients in hospital with Covid, administering vaccines and delivering routine care for millions of people. This graph shows estimates of public satisfaction in the NHS by political party. It reveals support has plunged among both Conservative and Labour voters A glamorous Melbourne woman allegedly caught dealing methamphetamines, cocaine, speed and cannabis is hoping to avoid jail by dobbing on her boyfriend. Illi Glover, 25, appeared in the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Tuesday via videolink where it was revealed she had negotiated a plea deal that will see her plead guilty to just two out of 15 drug charges. Glover had been charged with trafficking a commercial quantity of the deadly drug ice and handling more than $300,000 in dodgy cash. Illi Glover was busted with a large amount of the deadly drug ice and wads of cash Illi Glover will plead guilty to drug possession and negligently dealing with the proceeds of crime in exchange for ratting on her partner in crime She was busted by Victoria Police detectives at Doncaster East, alongside partner Jonade Hamidi, 24, the Herald Sun reported on March 1. While those charges still remain, her lawyer Chris Hooper told Magistrate Donna Bakos his client had agreed to dob Hamidi in, in exchange for a deal that would see her plead guilty to drug possession and negligently dealing with $68,810 believed to be the proceeds of crime. Mr Hooper said Glover would only agree to the deal if her remaining two matters were dealt with in the magistrates' court rather than the County Court of Victoria, which has the power to impose harsher sentences. Drug squad detectives had originally alleged Glover had possession of $327,820 suspected of being the proceeds of crime. Illi Glover, 25, hopes to plead guilty to just two charges She had previously faced court alongside her co-accused Hamidi, who also faces charges of trafficking meth, cocaine, speed, cannabis and possessing dodgy cash. During that hearing, Hamidi's lawyer Richard Jakobson had suggested it was his client who had been in 'deep' resolution discussions with prosecutors. The court heard Glover had been quick to blow the whistle on her lover, with contents of a phone call between Glover and Hamidi gleaned from her police interview. However, criminal lawyer Zarah Garde-Wilson, who represented Glover during that hearing, suggested any deal between Glover and prosecutors would be unlikely. 'I would be optimistic that (Glovers) matter would resolve given the contents of her record of interview,' Ms Garde-Wilson said at the time. Glover remains free in the community on bail and will return to court on May 23. While most children stop napping at around the age of two or three, a new study suggests that a daytime snooze may be beneficial to children right up until the age of five. Researchers from Macquarie University in Australia found that daytime naps can benefit children's ability to map letters to sounds an important indicator of early reading skills. 'Having a nap after learning might facilitate the capacity to utilize newly learned information in a new task,' said Hua-Chen Wang, Lecturer in the School of Education at Macquarie University. 'We found a positive nap effect on children's learning of letter-sound mappings, and in particular, using that knowledge to read unfamiliar words.' Researchers from Macquarie University in Australia found that daytime naps can benefit children's ability to map letters to sounds an important indicator of early reading skills (stock image) Why are girls better than boys at reading? Research shows that girls typically score better than boys in standardised literacy tests. The trend is seen as early as age 10 and continues until the age of 18. Previous research has shown women and men use their brains differently. Girls use both brain hemispheres for reading and writing, while boys typically rely on just one. Boys are also exhibit more disruptive behaviours than girls in the classroom. They are more likely to be inattentive and interrupt teachers. Scientists also suggest that reading and language are seen as feminine skills, even from a young age. This means boys are less likely than girls to push to improve these skills. Advertisement While previous research has shown that letter-sound mapping in preschool is linked with later reading success, until now, little has been known about the relationship between sleep and literacy skills. In the new study, 32 three-to-five-year-old children from two daycare centres in Sydney were studied. The children napped regularly and were not formally taught letter names or sounds at the daycare centre. Each child participated in seven sessions over two to four weeks, starting with a pre-test to establish their baseline levels of letters and sounds. Following this initial analysis, the children were given letter-sound mapping training, held a week apart under both 'nap' and 'no-nap' conditions. To assess their learning, the children were tested both after a nap and following a period of wakefulness with questions such as 'Which sound does the letter C make?' and 'Here's Tav and Cav, which one is /kav/?' The results revealed that children performed better on the tests following a daytime nap, with the effect maintained through to the following day. While the study was carried out at daycare centres to make the children feel more comfortable, the researchers acknowledge that this does mean that they were unable to measure physiological factors, such as rapid eye movement (REM) in the youngsters as the slept. While previous research has shown that letter sound mapping in preschool is linked with later reading success, until now, little has been known about the relationship between sleep and literacy skills (stock image) In future studies, the team hopes to assess these factors to see how they are related to the sleep benefits. 'The research provides initial evidence that naps facilitate the acquisition and application of letter-sound mappings, abilities that are crucial to early reading development,' said Anne Castles, Professor of Psychological Studies at Macquarie University. 'These findings may have implications for creating the optimal conditions for the acquisition of this fundamental literacy skill in preschool children.' Advertisement Pompeii archaeological park has enlisted a four-legged robot called Spot to inspect the ancient Italian city's streets and tunnels instead of humans. Acting as a robotic guard dog, Spot will patrol Pompeii at nighttime or whenever the site is closed to tourists, providing a live feed for human officials situated off-site. Part of Spot's job is to investigate tunnels dug by illegal relic hunters, which are causing structural issues but would be dangerous or too tight for officials to access safely. Spot, which is the product of US firm Boston Dynamics, is using its cameras and sensors to provide a feed of hard-to-reach Pompeii structures. It's capable of inspecting 'even the smallest of spaces', gathering and recording data useful for planning interventions to fix safety and structural issues. Pompeii archaeological park has enlisted Spot the robot dog (pictured) to inspect the ancient city's streets and tunnels for safety and structural issues Spot, which is suited for indoor or outdoor use, can map its environment, sense and avoid obstacles, climb stairs and open doors Today, the ruins of Pompeii are a popular tourist attraction, drawing a million visitors a year. Located on the west coast of Italy, Vesuvius is the only active volcano in continental Europe SPOT THE ROBOT DOG Creator: Boston Dynamics Price: $75,000 (about 60,000) Length: 43.3 inches (100cm) Max speed: 1.6 metres per second Operating temperature: -4F to 113F (-20C to 45C) Battery capacity: 605 Wh Typical runtime: 90 minutes Cameras: 5 (frontleft, frontright, left, right, back) Advertisement Pompeii is an ancient city that was buried under volcanic ash and pumice by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Today, its archaeological ruins cover around 440,000 square meters, but they face degradation from natural forces and human activity. It's unclear what all the structural issues are that Spot is looking for, although one is related to the tunnels dug by illegal relic hunters. MailOnline has contacted Pompeii archaeological park for more information. 'We wish to test the use of these robots in the underground tunnels that were made by illegal excavators and which we are uncovering in the area around Pompeii,' said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of Pompeii archaeological park. 'Often the safety conditions within the tunnels dug by grave robbers are extremely precarious, as a consequence of which the use of a robot could signify a breakthrough that would allow us to proceed with greater speed and in total safety.' Spot, which is suited for indoor or outdoor use, can map its environment, sense and avoid obstacles, climb stairs and open doors. It can undertake hazardous tasks in a variety of inhospitable environments such as nuclear plants, offshore oil fields and construction sites. Spot isn't the only cutting-edge technology in use in Pompeii. Pompeii archaeological park is also using Leica BLK2FLY, a flying laser scanner capable of autonomously conducting 3D scans. Spot can undertake hazardous tasks in a variety of inhospitable environments such as nuclear plants, offshore oil fields and construction sites Spot will also investigate tunnels dug by illegal relic hunters, which would be dangerous for officials to access Today, Pompeii's archaeological ruins cover around 440,000 square meters, but they face degradation from natural forces and human activity, such as illegal digging Spot the robot dog was announced by Boston Dynamics back in 2016 but was under development for years before being released in June 2020 for a whopping $75,000 (about 60,000). Spot can be used for a range of heavy duty applications, including inspecting rocket launch test sites, as demonstrated by SpaceX. It's also being deployed in the French army, helping military school personnel to complete training scenarios. Spot has specifically been designed for business use in fact, when a business buys a Spot unit, they have to acknowledge a stipulation in the terms and conditions that 'it's not certified safe for in-home use or intended for use near children'. Pompeii, the preserved ancient Roman city, Italy, is situated 14 miles (23 km) southeast of Naples Spot was announced by Boston Dynamics back in 2016 and underwent various trials before being released commercially on June 17, 2020 However, Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert previously said that Spot will soon be available for home use. 'We also have a project that I'm sure many of you are going to be very interested in, and that's cleaning up your house,' he said in 2020. 'Now, Spot isn't available yet for home use, but someday it will be. 'I think you're going to love the idea that the robot can be put in a room and use its vision system to identify your kids' clothing that's been lying around.' The robot dog is also routinely featured in Boston Dynamics promotional videos dancing to musical numbers, such as 'Uptown Funk'. Last year, Spot even challenged K-pop boy band BTS to a dance-off. Giant 10ft-tall Mongolian camels were killed and eaten by archaic humans before going extinct 27,000 years ago, a study shows. Scientists have studied fossils of the extinct species (Camelus knoblochi) from Tsagaan Agui Cave in the Gobi Altai Mountains of southwestern Mongolia. One of the bones shows signs of both butchery by humans, likely to extract protein-rich marrow, and 'hyenas gnawing on it'. While the main cause of C. knoblochi's extinction seems to have been climate change, hunting by archaic humans may also have played a role. These archaic humans would not only have been Homo sapiens, but also Neanderthals and Denisovans. Standing nearly 10 foot tall and weighing more than a metric ton (2,200 pounds), Camelus knoblochi would have dwarfed Camelus ferus, a modern-day camel species. Standing nearly 10 foot tall and weighing more than a metric ton (2,200 pounds), Camelus knoblochi would have dwarfed Camelus ferus, a modern-day camel species Pictured are bones of the extinct giant Mongolian camel (Camelus knoblochi) from Central Asia A fragment of bone (proximal metacarpal) once belonging to Camelus knoblochi, found fromin Tsagaan Agui Cave, Mongolia THE EXTINCT GIANT MONGOLIAN CAMEL The giant Mongolian camel (Camelus knoblochi) is an extinct species of camel from the Pleistocene era (from about 2.6 million years ago to 11,700 years ago). It may have been double the size of the camels that exist today. Humans may have contributed to its demise about 27,000 years ago through hunting. In Mongolia, the last of the species coexisted with anatomically modern humans and maybe the extinct Neanderthals or Denisovans. Advertisement Neanderthals were a close human ancestor that lived in Europe and Western Asia from about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago. Less is known about the Denisovans, another population of early humans who lived in Asia at least 80,000 years ago and were distantly related to Neanderthals. 'Here we show that the extinct camel, Camelus knoblochi persisted in Mongolia until climatic and environmental changes nudged it into extinction about 27,000 years ago,' said study author Dr John W Olsen at the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona. 'C. knoblochi fossil remains from Tsagaan Agui Cave, which also contains a rich, stratified sequence of human Paleolithic cultural material, suggest that archaic people coexisted and interacted there with C. knoblochi. The new study describes five C. knoblochi leg and foot bones found in Tsagaan Agui Cave in 2021, and one from Tugrug Shireet in today's Gobi Desert of southern Mongolia. They were found along with bones of wolves, cave hyenas, rhinoceroses, horses, wild donkeys, ibexes, wild sheep and Mongolian gazelles. Today, southwestern Mongolia is home to Camelus ferus (pictured), one of the last two wild populations of the critically endangered wild Bactrian camel 'A C. knoblochi metacarpal bone from Tsagaan Agui Cave, dated to between 59,000 and 44,000 years ago, exhibits traces of both butchery by humans and hyenas gnawing on it,' said study author Dr Arina M Khatsenovich at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Archeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, Russia. 'This suggests that C. knoblochi was a species that Late Pleistocene humans in Mongolia could hunt or scavenge. 'We don't yet have sufficient material evidence regarding the interaction between humans and C. ferus in the Late Pleistocene, but it likely did not differ from human relationships with C. knoblochi as prey, but not a target for domestication.' Map shows the principal finds of fossilised camels in eastern Eurasia. The giant Mongolian camel (Camelus knoblochi) is marked in with red circles. Camelus ferus, which still exists today, is marked with black squares NEANDERTHALS AND DENISOVANS Neanderthals were very early (archaic) humans who lived in Europe and Western Asia from about 400,000 years ago until they became extinct about 40,000 years ago. Denisovans are another population of early humans who lived in Asia and were distantly related to Neanderthals. Much less is known about the Denisovans because scientists have uncovered fewer fossils of these ancient people. The precise way that modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans are related is still under study. However, research has shown that modern humans overlapped with Neanderthal and Denisovan populations for a period, and that they had children together (interbred). As a result, many people living today have a small amount of genetic material from these distant ancestors. Source: National Institutes of Health Advertisement The collection indicates that C. knoblochi lived in mountainous and lowland steppe environments less dry habitats than those of its modern relatives, such as the critically endangered wild Bactrian camel (Camelus ferus). The authors conclude that C. knoblochi finally went extinct primarily because it was less tolerant of desertification than C. ferus, as well as the domestic Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus) and the domestic Arabian camel (Camelus dromedarius). In the late Pleistocene era, much of Mongolia's environment became drier and changed from steppe to dry steppe and finally desert. 'Apparently, C. knoblochi was poorly adapted to desert biomes, primarily because such landscapes could not support such large animals,' say the authors in their study, published in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science. 'But perhaps there were other reasons as well, related to the availability of fresh water and the ability of camels to store water within the body, poorly adapted mechanisms of thermoregulation, and competition from other members of the faunal community occupying the same trophic niche.' Towards the end of C. knoblochi's existence, the last of the species may have lingered in the milder forest steppe grassland interspersed with woodland further north in neighbouring Siberia. But this habitat likely wasn't ideal either, so it could have sounded the death knell for C. knoblochi. C. knoblochi is known to have lived for approximately a quarter of a million years in Central Asia. The camel's last refuge was in Mongolia, until approximately 27,000 years ago. Denisovans are a group of extinct hominins that diverged from Neanderthals about 400,000 years ago. Pictured, a reconstruction of a juvenile female Denisovan who lived sometime between 82,000 and 74,000 years ago Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago but have a reputation as being hulking, brutish beings who were tough and fearless Today, southwestern Mongolia is home to C. ferus, one of the last two wild populations of the critically endangered wild Bactrian camel. The new results suggest that C. knoblochi coexisted with C. ferus during the late Pleistocene period in Mongolia. Competition between the two species 27,000 years ago may have been a third cause of C. knoblochi's extinction. Elon Musk-owned SpaceX has ended production of new Crew Dragon astronaut capsules, two years after the firm flew humans to space for the first time. There are now four Crew Dragons in the SpaceX fleet, primarily aimed at taking astronauts to the International Space Station, and then returning them to Earth. Crew Dragon was the first privately operated and built spacecraft to take humans into orbit, and the first to take astronauts to the ISS from US soil since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. Since its debut in 2020, the Crew Dragon spacecraft have taken humans into space five times, including the first fully commercial crew to orbit the Earth. Work will continue on building new components, and spare parts for the existing Dragon fleet, which includes: Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance and Freedom. SpaceX executives say the shift is to move resources into the next-generation spaceship program, known as Starship - that will include a lunar lander. Elon Musk-owned SpaceX has ended production of new Crew Dragon astronaut capsules, two years after the firm flew humans to space for the first time There are now four Crew Dragons in the SpaceX fleet, primarily aimed at taking astronauts to the International Space Station, and then returning them to Earth Starship's debut launch has been delayed for months by engine development hurdles and regulatory reviews, but the first orbital flight is due this year. It is the rocket, and spacecraft, that Elon Musk says will be used to make humanity a multi-planetary species, allowing for the establishment of a colony on Mars. The shift away from producing new Crew Dragon capsules poses new challenges for SpaceX, as the company learns how to maintain a fleet and quickly fix unexpected problems without holding up a busy schedule of astronaut missions. 'We are finishing our final (capsule), but we still are manufacturing components, because we'll be refurbishing,' SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said. She added that SpaceX would retain the capability to build more capsules if a need arises in the future, but contended that 'fleet management is key.' A key aspect of SpaceX success has been the ability to save money by re-using components, including the first stage of rockets, and it appears the spacecraft will become part of that frugal approach. Crew Dragon was the first privately operated and built spacecraft to take humans into orbit, and the first to take astronauts to the ISS from US soil since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011 Since its debut in 2020, the Crew Dragon spacecraft have taken humans into space five times, including the first fully commercial crew to orbit the Earth It was inevitable the company would cease production at some point, shifting to managing the fleet it had, and arranging launches around the four spacecraft. But the timing was not known, nor was his strategy of using the existing fleet for its full backlog of missions. SPACEX CREW DRAGON FLIGHTS PAST AND FUTURE Mission Spacecraft Launch Demo-2 Endeavour 30 May 2020 Crew-1 Resilience 16 November 2020 Crew-2 Endeavour 23 April 2021 Inspiration4 Resilience 6 September 2021 Crew-3 Endurance 11 November 2021 Axiom-1 Endeavour 3 April 2022 Crew-4 Freedom 19 April 2022 Crew-5 TBA 25 October 2022 Advertisement Crew Dragon has flown five crews of government and private astronauts to space since 2020, when it flew its first pair of NASA astronauts and became the U.S. space agency's primary ride for getting humans to and from the ISS. It ended nearly a decade of NASA's reliance on Russia to get its crew to the space station - flying on the Soyuz spacecraft from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. After each flight, the capsules undergo refurbishment at SpaceX facilities in Florida, which the company calls 'Dragonland.' 'There's lifetime cycle issues, where once you start using it the third, fourth, fifth time, you start finding different things,' said retired NASA astronaut and former SpaceX executive Garrett Reisman, who consults on spaceflight issues. 'SpaceX is really good about identifying these issues quickly and then acting quickly to fix them,' he added, giving the example of an investigation in 2021, in which SpaceX discovered and fixed within months a toilet leak aboard a Crew Dragon capsule that had flown humans twice. NASA has given SpaceX $3.5 billion to develop and use Crew Dragon for six flights to the space station. It added three more missions to fill in for delays with the Boeing Starliner capsule. When it awarded the contract to NASA, it also gave another contract to Boeing, and the two firms were scheduled to share ISS trips. So far only SpaceX has flown crew. SpaceX has flown four crews of astronauts to the space station under its NASA contract at roughly $255 million per flight. Work will continue on building new components, and spare parts for the existing Dragon fleet, which includes: Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance and Freedom The company carried out a fully private mission last year with four passengers, including a billionaire entrepreneur who funded the flight, for a three-day trip in Earth orbit, known as Inspiration4. At least four more private astronaut missions on Crew Dragon are planned with Houston-based space station builder and spaceflight manager Axiom Space. The first so-called Ax-1 mission is scheduled for April carrying four entrepreneurs to the space station to conduct scientific research. American real estate investor Larry Connor, Canadian businessman Mark Pathy, and Israeli former fighter pilot and entrepreneur Eytan Stibbe are paying to stay on the ISS, and will be joined by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria. SpaceX is placing its future on the massive Starship spacecraft and rocket, that it hopes will land humans on Mars by the end of the decade SpaceX is also developing a modified version of Starship that will dock with the NASA Orion capsule in orbit around the moon, and take astronauts to the surface The widely reported ticket price for the three business magnates is $55 million each, a figure that hasn't been disputed by Axiom Space. Musk, SpaceX's founder and chief executive, has focused intensely in recent years on the company's hasty development of a re-usable Starship, the centerpiece of Musk's aim to eventually colonize Mars. Like Crew Dragon, SpaceX's workhorse reusable rocket, the Falcon 9, and its more powerful variant Falcon Heavy are also refurbished after each flight, and not every component is able to fly to space more than once. 'The goal is to get more and more like aircraft operations, where you can take the vehicle after it lands, fill it back up with gas and oxygen, and go again very rapidly,' Reisman said. 'Starship, if it achieves its design objectives, would be able to affordably replace everything that Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Dragon can do. Many people believe they can easily spot fake news online, but a new report suggests we may not be as good at identifying misinformation as we think. Online regulator Ofcom surveyed more than 13,000 UK people who use the internet about their breadth of internet habits, device use and attitudes to social media. Although seven in 10 adults (69 per cent) said they were confident in identifying misinformation, only one in five (22 per cent) were able to correctly identify the tell-tale signs of a genuine post, without making mistakes. The pattern was even more striking among older children aged 12-17, with 74 per cent claiming they were confident but only 11 percent able to decipher fact from fiction. Overall, the study found that 30 per cent of UK adults who go online (14.5 million) are unsure about, or dont even consider, the truthfulness of the information they see online. A further 6 per cent, or about one in every 20 internet users, believe everything they see online. More than a third of internet users are unaware that online content might be false or biased, according to new Ofcom research (file photo) TIPS TO HELP SPOT MISINFORMATION 1. Check the source. This isn't necessarily who shared the information with you, but where it originated from. 2. Question the source. Are they established and trustworthy, or might they have a reason to mislead? 3. Take a step back. Before you take something at face value, think about your own motives for wanting to believe it. Source: Ofcom Advertisement Ofcom warned that the 'sheer volume' of information available online means having the critical skills and being able to identify information that may be false or biased has 'never been more important'. Every minute 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube, 5,000 videos are viewed on TikTok and 695,000 stories are shared on Instagram. Both adults and children overestimate their ability to spot misinformation on various social media platforms, Ofcom found. 'In a volatile and unpredictable world, it's essential that everyone has the tools and confidence to separate fact and fiction online whether it's about money, health, world events or other people,' said Ofcom chief executive Melanie Dawes. 'But many adults and children are struggling to spot what might be fake. So we're calling on tech firms to prioritise rooting out harmful misinformation, before we take on our new role helping to tackle the problem.' Ofcom has offered tips on what to consider when determining fact from fiction online, including, crucially, checking the source, and thinking about your own motives for wanting to believe it. For the research, Ofcom conducted three surveys of people aged 16 and over, each focused on different aspects of online use. One sample consisted of 3,660 people, another 6,566 people and another 3,095 people totalling 13,321 different people. For each survey response, percentages were calculated based on one of the three survey totals, rather than the cumulative 13,321 total. Ofcom has offered tips on what to consider when determining fact from fiction online, including, crucially, checking the source In one survey, participants were shown social media posts and profiles to determine whether they could verify their authenticity. Although 69 per cent of adults and 74 percent of children aged 12-17 said they were confident in identifying misinformation, only 22 per cent and 11 per cent respectively were able to correctly identify signs of a genuine post, without making mistakes. IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA VARIES ACROSS ADOLESCENCE The negative impact of social media on young people's mental health has long been known, but a new study suggests that the age at which they are most susceptible differs between girls and boys. Researchers asked adolescents about their use social media sites such as Instagram and Twitter and their level of 'life satisfaction', and then looked for a link between the two factors. They found girls experience a negative link between social media use and life satisfaction when they are 11-13 years old and boys when they are 14-15 years old. Sensitivity to social media use might be linked to developmental differences, like changes in the structure of the brain, or puberty, which occurs later in boys than in girls although the exact mechanisms require further research. Sadly, the team also found that lower life satisfaction can drive increased social media use, contributing to a viscous circle. Read more: Social media negatively affects female teens before males, study finds Advertisement Similarly, 24 per cent of adults and 27 per cent of children who claimed to be confident in spotting misinformation were unable to identify a fake social media profile. The study also found that 33 per cent of parents of five to seven-year-olds and 60 per cent of parents of eight to 11-year-olds reported their children having a social media profile, despite them being under the minimum age requirement of 13 for most sites. TikTok, in particular, is growing in popularity, even among the youngest age groups. Amazingly, 16 per cent of three to four-year-olds and 29 per cent of five to sevens using the platform, even though the app is supposed to be for people aged 13 and over. Ofcom warned that many children could be 'tactically' using other accounts or 'finstas' fake Instagrams to conceal aspects of their online lives from parents. The study found 64 per cent of eight to 11-year-olds had multiple accounts or profiles. Among these, 46 per cent have an account just for their family to see. More than a third of children (35 per cent) reported engaging in potentially risky behaviours, which could hinder a parent or guardian keeping proper checks on their online use. A fifth (21 per cent) used the internet in 'incognito mode' and 19 per cent deleted their browsing history, while 6 per cent circumvented parental controls put in place to stop them visiting certain apps and sites. Meanwhile, children are seeing less video content from friends online and more from brands, celebrities and influencers, according to Ofcom. 'Feeds full of slick professionalised content seem to be encouraging a trend towards scrolling instead of sharing,' the regulator said. TikTok is a Chinese social media app where users can live stream, create short videos and music videos and Gifs with a host of functions (file photo) Also, 88 per cent of adults and 91 per cent of children are three times as likely to watch videos online than to post their own videos (30 per cent and 31 per cent respectively). Meanwhile, 81 per cent of adult internet users want to see tech firms take responsibility for monitoring content on their sites and apps. Two thirds (65 per cent) also want protection against inappropriate or offensive content. Interestingly, children feel positive about the benefits of being online, and many use social media as a force for good. 53 per cent of 1317-year-olds said they feel that being online is good for their mental health, compared with 17 per cent of the same age range who didn't. As we make our way up the narrow, windowless, wooden stairway, we hear the jangly opening beats of The Rolling Stones' '2120 South Michigan Avenue' playing from a portable speaker behind us. Our tour guide encourages us to 'rub a little mojo' from the banister as we make our way up. We're visiting Chess Records on Chicago's South Side, climbing the same set of stairs Mick Jagger and the rest of the band ascended during two days of recording in June 1964. 'This place changed music and the world,' says Janine Judge, the 60-year-old executive director of Willie Dixon's Blues Heaven, the nonprofit foundation that owns and offers tours of Chess Records since it opened to the public in 1997. 'I still feel them all here every day.' By 'them all', Judge essentially is referring to the canon of Chicago blues. Pictured above is the back cover of the rare Rolling Stones album 'From 2120 To 1000', which shows the band in the studio at Chess Records. Track 16, '2120 South Michigan Avenue' was named after the address of the renowned studio and was reportedly recorded as an instrumental because Mick Jagger was so nervous performing in front of his musical idols that he forgot the lyrics Janine Judge, executive director of Willie Dixon's Blues Heaven, the nonprofit foundation that owns and offers tours of Chess Records, sits in the sound booth at Chess Records, overlooking the studio where some of the biggest names in blues recorded their hits Some of the biggest, most influential artists and hits were recorded at Chess: Muddy Waters, 'I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man'; Chuck Berry, 'Johnny B. Goode'; Bo Diddley, 'Who Do You Love'; and Howlin Wolf, 'Smokestack Lightning,' just to name a few. The blues originally moved north with Blacks fleeing the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration. The style found a home in this industrial, working-class city. Berry and Chess gave each other their first big break. Berry originally signed with Chess. Then, when he met Waters, he suggested he audition for Chess, and the label quickly rose to prominence as the go-to blues record label. The Stones, who named their band after a Muddy Waters song, were steeped in that history when they made the studio a mandatory stop during their first U.S. tour nearly 60 years ago. They recorded 14 songs here, including the hit 'It's All Over Now', the first-ever recorded acoustic version of 'Satisfaction', and '2120 South Michigan Avenue', which reportedly was recorded as an instrumental-only because Mick Jagger was so nervous performing in front of his musical idols that he forgot the lyrics. The Rolling Stones album 'From 2120 To 1000' (album cover pictured above) is a collection of three studio sessions recorded at Chess Studios between 1964 and 1965 LEFT: Blues legend Mckinley Morganfield, known as Muddy Waters, recording at Chess Records in 1952. RIGHT: The exterior of Chess Records on Michigan Avenue in Chicago as it looks today Judge weaves these and other stories into her nearly three-hour tour. On a recent crisp, mid-winter day, she was conserving by keeping the heat turned down low, nearly off. As a nonprofit, she primarily relies on tours and gift shop sales to keep the building, designated in 1990, operational. She urges visitors to wrap up. Polish-Jewish immigrant brothers Phil and Leonard Chess (born Fiszel and Lejzor Czysz) were drawn to gospel music at a young age - their dad caught them sitting outside Black churches listening to the choirs inside. As young entrepreneurs, they first bought a liquor store on Chicago's predominantly Black South Side and then, in 1946, they bought a nearby nightclub called the Macomba Lounge. They soon realised there was a huge and hungry market for recordings by these Black musicians, so they invested in and then bought Aristocrat Records. In 1950, they renamed it Chess Records. They were based at several South Side locations, but their most famous home was here at 2120 South Michigan, from 1956 until 1967. LEFT: Chuck Berry was among the many blues icons to record at Chess Records. He's pictured here in the Chicago studios in 1960. RIGHT: Judge (pictured) offers tours of Chess Records. As director of the nonprofit, she primarily relies on tours and gift shop sales to keep the building operational Much of the building itself remains unchanged. The front door, the lobby that served as a waiting room for musicians, the California redwood paneling it's all original. The front window needed replacing after Little Walter, Muddy Waters' harmonica player reportedly got angry and intentionally rammed his car into the front of the building, Judge says. The building changed hands a few times after the Chess brothers moved out, but Marie Dixon, the widow of bassist and songwriter Willie Dixon, bought it in 1993. She died in 2016. Willie Dixon, namesake of the foundation and the studio's longtime right-hand man who brought in many of the artists and set up recording sessions, died in 1992 at age 76. Much of the building remains unchanged, with original front door, lobby, and California redwood paneling. Pictured are framed album covers from some of the best-known artists to record at the studio The couple envisioned a space to house a museum, recording studio and classes for young people, Judge said. 'The foundation was set up to protect, promote and preserve the blues,' she added. Willie Dixon wrote about 6,000 songs, more than 600 for Chess Records. An entire second-floor room is set up to pay homage to Dixon. Hand-written lyric sheets, clothing, awards, even his beat-up bass is on display. But the highlight of the tour is the recording studio itself, which remains in use today. There's Dixon's baby grand piano, guitars and other equipment, but Judge's passion shines through when she explains the details included by 23-year-old engineer Jack Sheldon Wiener, who originally designed the space, and how she spent 15 years trying to figure out exactly how the acoustic panels were assembled. 'Not a day goes by that I don't recognise what an honour and a privilege it is to be here every day,' she says as she steps into the darkened sound booth. Muddy Waters, 'I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man'; Chuck Berry, 'Johnny B. Goode'; Bo Diddley, 'Who Do You Love'; and Howlin Wolf, 'Smokestack Lightning,' were all recorded at Chess Studios. Pictured is the piano and some framed album covers at the renowned studios She asks visitors to sit in one of the metal folding chairs and imagine a day in 1960 when a 23-year-old Etta James stepped up to a microphone. The Chess brothers believed her bluesy voice had crossover pop appeal, so they brought in an orchestra ensemble for her debut studio album. Judge requests that visitors not sing along, but she encourages dancing. As the lofty string intro of 'At Last!' fills the space, it's easy to feel transported back in time. 'It's the only song I play all the way through because she'd be p****d if I didn't,' Judge says. 'What would Chess Records have been without her?' Beginning April 1, Chess Records will be open for tours Tuesdays through Saturdays at noon, 1, 2 and 3pm. A donation of $15 (11.40) is suggested. Le ministre de LAgro-Industrie a repondu au depute de la majorite Salim Abbas Mamode sur ce sujet lors de la seance parlementaire du 29 mars 2022. The Honourable Second Member for Port Louis Maritime and Port Louis East (Mr Abbas Mamode) To ask the Honourable the Attorney-General, Minister of Agro-Industry and Food Security Whether, in regard to stray dogs, he will state if his attention has been drawn to a proliferation thereof in public places, including roads, beaches and hospitals and, if so, indicate if urgent remedial actions have been/are being taken in relation thereto? Mr Speaker, Sir, The overpopulation of stray dogs has indeed become an issue of serious concern for our countriy for many years now. I would like to reassure the House that remedial actions are being taken and I can inform the House as follows: Following various representations from a number of institutions, non-governmental organizations as well as individuals, both locally and internationally, the Mauritius Society for Animal Welfare (MSAW) has, since January 2021, moved away from the previous Catch and Kill policy to adopt a comprehensive nation-wide Dog Population Management Program. Mr Speaker, I am informed by the MSAW that more than 15,000 dogs have been sterilized since September 2015 and the MSAW is continuing the free mass sterilization program with the support of the National Environment and Climate Change Fund (NECCF). With a view to giving a boost to this program, the MSAW has had consultative meetings with private veterinary surgeons to find a sustainable dog population management program. I am informed that the MSAW has also had working sessions with the Beach Authority to look at sustainable solutions regarding control of stray dogs on public beaches. I am also informed that the MSAW has a continuous sensitization program whereby staff of institutions in strategic locations are kept informed about animal welfare including control of stray dogs. Mr Speaker, Sir, The House will appreciate that as responsible citizens, we are all concerned with the stray dog issue. I take this opportunity to invite the dog owners to have their dog sterilized. Partager et informez vous aussi...... 0 shares Share Tweet LinkedIn Articles similaires Aljaz Skorjanec has announced that he is set to leave Strictly Come Dancing following nine years on the show as a Professional Dancer. And his wife Janette Manra - who announced her own departure from the pro lineup last year as she moved into the presenter role for spin off show It Takes Two - has broken her silence following the news. The professional dancer, 38, who has been married to Aljaz, 32, since 2017, took to Instagram on Monday to express how much she 'admired him' and revealed she is 'excited' to see what his future holds. Strictly Come Dancing stars: Janette Manra, who has been married to Aljaz Skorjanec since 2017, took to Instagram on Monday to express how much she 'admired him' and revealed she is 'excited' to see what his future holds The reality TV host felt a mixture of emotions as her husband - who she met on the show - followed in her footsteps: Alongside a photo of her husband, Janette penned: 'I cannot express the sadness in my heart to see @aljazskorjanec say goodbye to @bbcstrictly, but at the same time there is so much joy in my heart for what he has brought to the show these past 9 years. 'I have admired him from the day I met him for his passion for dancing, but more than anything for his kindness towards anyone he encounters. 'As his wife and best friend, I could not be happier to know that he made so many smile during his time in Strictly; not just those who were watching from home, but also those who work behind the scenes. She added: 'He makes every single person he encounters feel absolutely special; ask any of his partners throughout the years. Unexpected news: Janette - who announced her own departure from the pro lineup last year as she moved into the presenter role for spin off show It Takes Two - has broken her silence following the news Sad news: The reality TV host felt a mixture of emotions as her husband - who she met on the show - followed in her footsteps Janette - who was a professional dancer on Strictly Come Dancing for eight years - went on to say: 'He IS STRICTLY and what Strictly is all about; taking someone who wants to learn to dance, and making them truly fall in love with it. 'All good things come to an end, but with every ending comes new beginnings. 'I cannot wait for the exciting adventures life will have for him in the future because I know at the center of all of his endeavours will be kindness and love for whatever he does. She finished off the lengthy post by thanking fans for their support and expressing how much she loves her husband: 'Thank you for giving him all of the love and support you have these past 9 years. 'And thank you @aljazskorjanec for always being my biggest inspiration in any and everything that I do. May that long continue. I love you, and you and I will forever and always keep dancing ' Saying goodbye: Aljaz has announced that he is set to leave Strictly Come Dancing following nine years on the show as a Professional Dancer In a statement released earlier this morning via social media, Aljaz said: 'On a beautiful sunny day in May 2013 one phone call changed my life forever!' It went like this... we would like to offer you a position on @bbcstrictly as a professional dancer. A dream became a reality and it was the biggest opportunity for a 23 year old boy from Slovenia' 'It didn't matter how many beautiful ballrooms I performed in during my competitive career, stepping onto the sacred Strictly floor was the most nervous I had ever been. A little while ago I made the tough decision that Strictly 2021 would be my last. The show has given me an opportunity and freedom to create and express myself in front of millions of people every weekend for the last 9 years. Popular: The pro dancer joined the show in 2013, with his most recent partner being Dragons Den star Sara Davies 'The love and support I got from the team of producers was second to none. Jason Gilkison, Sarah James, Kim Winston, Jack Gledhill are just a few of the unsung heroes behind the success of the show - I am forever grateful to them! 'Being a part of a group of professionals that inspire and push you to be better every step of the way is humbling and I will carry that inspiration with me forever. Every year the lineup of dancers would change but one thing stayed the same, WE WERE THE BEST! And this is one thing that I know will never change on Strictly!' 'Strictly also has the BEST backstage team - the hair and make-up team, costume department, lighting, sound, props and special effects, camera operators THANK YOU!' Couple: He follows in the footsteps of his wife Janette Manrara , who announced her own departure from the pro lineup last year as she moved into the presenter role for It Takes Two (pictured performing on the show in 2021) Alijaz, who won the Glitterball trophy in his first year on the BBC competition, went on to pay tribute to the nine celebrity partners he has danced with on the show, writing: 'My beautiful partners - Abbey Clancy, Alison Hammond, Helen George, Daisy Lowe, Kate Silverton, Gemma Atkinson, Emma Weymouth, Clara Amfo and Sara Davies. It's hard to put into words how many beautiful memories we have had. I LOVE YOU ALL!' He also had sweet words for his wife Janette, gushing: 'To my bucka.. from picking songs, creating stories and choreographing steps we always did it as a team. Your talent and selflessness knows no bounds.' 'We were dating when we started together on the show and now we are husband and wife. We got to perform with Andrea Bocelli, Michael Buble, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, BBC Symphony Orchestra.. moments I will keep in my heart forever. I LOVE YOU!' Jess and Eve Gale showcased their incredible figures as they stepped out for a girls' night on Monday evening. The Love Island duo, 22, looked sensational in their sizzling skintight ensembles as they headed to sophisticated Mayfair eatery Nobu hand-in-hand. Eve put on a busty display in a black bodysuit while Jess opted for a figure hugging high neck sleeveless top. Stunners: Jess and Eve Gale showcased their incredible figures as they stepped out for a girls' night on the town on Monday in sizzling skintight co-ords as they headed to sophisticated eatery Nobu in Mayfair Eve looked flawless in a pair of knitted high waisted leggings and transparent heeled sandals. She wore her long ombre tresses down in loose waves while upping the glam with a swipe of red lipstick and sported a radiant pallet of makeup The former Love Islander contestant carried a black Prada logo plaque chain shoulder bag and layered up with a faux fur coat to complete her look. Gorgeous: Eve looked flawless in a pair of knitted high waisted leggings and transparent heeled sandals Meanwhile, her twin Jess looked flawless in her nude co-ord. She wore her bright blonde locks in classy voluminous curls and added fluttery false lashes and a slick of pink lip gloss. The bombshell competed her look with a pair of clear heeled mules and a nude Dior saddle handbag. Beauty: She wore her long ombre tresses down in loose waves while upping the glam with a swipe of red lipstick and sported a radiant pallet of makeup Their outing comes after Jess and Eve were among six reality stars who have been named and shamed for breaking Instagram advertising rules. The Advertising Standards Authority revealed Anna Vakili, Belle Hassan, Jodie Marsh and Francesca Allen have also been reprimanded after ignoring 'repeated warnings and help and guidance on sticking to the rules'. Influencers who are paid to promote products on their pages are supposed to declare when it is an advertisement with #ad, to ensure consumers are not being misled. In a new approach, the ASA is now taking out their own ads against these influencers on Instagram, alerting consumers to their failure to follow the rules. Naming and shaming each celeb, the Instagram post reads: 'NAME has been sanctioned by the UKs ad regulator for not declaring ads on this platform. 'Be aware that products and services recommended or featured by this influencer may have been paid for by those brands. 'Our non-compliant social media influencer page at asa.org.uk is regularly updated to inform consumers of those who break these rules.' The nude photo scandal on Married At First Sight has escalated into a legal matter after Domenica Calarco spoke with NSW Police for several hours last Monday. The makeup artist, 29, was supported by her lawyer as she arrived at Newtown police station, where she is believed to have spoken to officers about her nudes being leaked and shared among her castmates during filming last year. Calarco, who dressed casually in a blue jacket and jeans, spent nearly three hours inside the station before emerging with her lawyer looking strained. The nude photo scandal on Married At First Sight has escalated into a legal matter after Domenica Calarco (right, with a lawyer) spoke with NSW Police for several hours last Monday She was supported by a lawyer as she arrived at Newtown police station, where she is believed to have spoken to officers about her nudes being leaked and shared among her castmates NSW Police last week confirmed two complaints had been made regarding incidents that allegedly occurred during production of MAFS in late 2021. The first complaint, made to Inner West Police on March 19, two days before Calarco was pictured at Newtown station, regarded 'the alleged distribution of an image without consent'. A second complaint was lodged on February 24 in relation to the 'glass-smashing' incident that occurred during the couples' retreat in Bargo, NSW, in November 2021 and aired on the show earlier this month. Calarco, 29, who dressed casually in a blue jacket and jeans, spent nearly three hours inside the station before emerging with her lawyer looking strained Calarco's lawyer placed his hand supportively on her back as they arrived at the police station NSW Police last week confirmed two complaints had been made regarding incidents that allegedly occurred during production of MAFS in late 2021 The first complaint, made to Inner West Police on March 19, two days before Calarco was pictured at Newtown station, regarded 'the alleged distribution of an image without consent' A NSW Police spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday 'investigations are continuing' into the report made regarding the intimate image. However, they said 'no further action will be taken' in regard to the Bargo incident. A Channel Nine spokesperson previously said of the investigations: 'Nine and Endemol Shine takes its obligations in respect to the safety, health and wellbeing of the participants of this program extremely seriously. 'We would always cooperate with any police matter.' Daily Mail Australia has contacted the network for further comment. A second complaint was lodged on February 24 in relation to the 'glass-smashing' incident that occurred in Bargo, NSW, in November 2021 and aired on the show earlier this month A NSW Police spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday 'investigations are continuing' into the report made regarding the intimate image. However, they said 'no further action will be taken' in regard to the Bargo incident A Channel Nine spokesperson previously said of the investigations: 'Nine and Endemol Shine takes its obligations in respect to the safety, health and wellbeing of the participants of this program extremely seriously. We would always cooperate with any police matter' Married At First Sight hit new levels of drama this month when Calarco smashed a wine glass in anger after clashing with Olivia Frazer, 28, at the couples' retreat. This altercation, also the subject of a police complaint, led to an even bigger scandal when Frazer got her revenge by 'outing' Calarco as an OnlyFans model. Frazer reportedly asked her friends to 'dig up dirt' on Calarco, which resulted in the discovery of a nude photo she had posted on Twitter on January 2, 2021. Married At First Sight hit new levels of drama this month when Calarco smashed a wine glass in anger (pictured) after clashing with Olivia Frazer, 28, at the couples' retreat This altercation, also the subject of a police complaint, led to an even bigger scandal when Frazer got her revenge by 'outing' Calarco as an OnlyFans model Calarco had shared the image on her public Twitter profile to promote her OnlyFans account, which has since been deleted. The photo quickly spread through the MAFS cast via WhatsApp, and was addressed at the first dinner party following the couples' retreat. Calarco was humiliated to learn her co-stars knew about her OnlyFans account and had seen her naked, and eventually broke down in tears. Frazer (pictured) reportedly asked her friends to 'dig up dirt' on Calarco, which resulted in the discovery of a nude photo she had posted on Twitter on January 2, 2021 The photo quickly spread through the MAFS cast via WhatsApp, and was addressed at the first dinner party following the couples' retreat. Calarco was humiliated to learn her co-stars knew about her OnlyFans account and had seen her naked, and eventually broke down in tears Frazer refused to apologise for discovering and sharing the photo. While the distribution of the image was described by many viewers on Twitter at the time as 'revenge porn', it does not appear to meet this legal definition because the nude photo was posted publicly on Twitter by Calarco for promotional purposes. Married At First Sight continues Tuesday at 7:30pm on Channel Nine and 9Now She broke up with her last boyfriend, Jay Bruno, in November. And former Home and Away star Sam Frost revealed on Tuesday she has a new man in her life. When asked about her love life on Nova FM's Fitzy and Wippa, the notoriously private actress, 32, said: 'Yeah, look I'm seeing someone.' She's taken! Former Home and Away star Sam Frost revealed on Fitzy and Wippa on Tuesday she has a new man in her life, about five months after her split from ex-boyfriend Jay Bruno 'You're about as red as a beetroot, so you must really like him,' radio host Ryan 'Fitzy' Fitzgerald replied, before asking her how she met her new boyfriend. 'I actually met him he's friends with my brother,' she said. Sam's brother Alex Frost, who was a contestant on Australian Survivor this year, is 26. 'I called my brother up and I said, "So, is he single or what?" He's like, "Oh, don't be weird that's so embarrassing,"' she added. Siblings: Sam's brother Alex Frost, who was a contestant on Australian Survivor this year, is 26 Meanwhile, Radio host Ryan 'Fitzy' Fitzgerald (pictured) then asked if her new man was the same age as her brother, to which she responded: 'He's younger!' Fitzy then asked if her new man was the same age as her brother, to which she responded: 'He's younger!' Sam's last known relationship was with Instant Hotel star Jay Bruno. They reportedly moved in together during Sydney's Covid lockdown, but had split by November last year, according to Emerald City. 'They are still close, Jay just lives in Melbourne and she is still in Sydney for work,' a spokesperson for Sam said at the time. Ex: Sam's last known relationship was with Instant Hotel star Jay Bruno (pictured). They reportedly moved in together during Sydney's Covid lockdown, but had split by November Before dating Jay, her last relationship was with navy diver Dave Bashford. Sam was briefly engaged to Blake Garvey after he chose her as his winner on The Bachelor in 2014, but things fell apart for them after a few months. She later dated Sasha Mielczarek, her winning suitor on The Bachelor 2015, for about 18 months. Nicole Kidman looked absolutely stunning as she stepped on the red carpet at the Oscars on Sunday dressed in a pale blue Armani Prive gown. But it seems Today Extra host Sylvia Jeffreys, 35, and media personality-turned-fashion commentator Accordian Hans were not fans of her look. During a 'fashion police' segment on the show, the pair laughed hysterically as they discussed her dress, comparing the peplum skirt to a 'lifebuoy for the Titantic' and a TV tray table. Scathing: Nicole Kidman looked absolutely stunning as she graced the red carpet at the Oscars on Sunday in Los Angeles, but it seems Today Extra host Sylvia Jeffreys, 35, and media personality-turned-fashion commentator Accordian Hans were not fans of her look 'I love the colour and the design of this? What do you think?' Sylvia's co-host David Campbell asked. Hans said he didn't like the peplum design of the dress. 'Look, I love the dress part of it. The lifebuoy I wasn't too sure about it. Are you going to the Oscars or trying to survive the Titanic?' he cheekily quipped. Snarky: During a 'fashion police' segment on the show, the pair laughed hysterically as they discussed her blue Giorgio Armani gown, comparing the peplum skirt to a 'lifebuoy for the Titantic' and a TV tray table 'If she did win, she would have had somewhere to place the award, which I like. Somewhere for the drinks, for the food,' he added as the hosts laughed. 'It's like one of those easy TV things, where you can eat your food,' David said. Sylvia added through laughter: 'A stable table! For your TV dinner... anyway!' Hans, whose real name is Matt Gilbertson, is best known for his appearance on America's Got Talent. He goes by the stage name and fake German persona, Accordian Hans. Savage: Sylvia added through laughter that Nicole's peplum skirt looked like a 'stable table! For your TV dinner' Nicole looked incredible in her classic-style frock, paying homage to old Hollywood glamour. The actress revealed that her custom Giorgio Armani Prive gown was dyed a special shade just for her, now referred to by the designer as 'Nicole Kidman blue'. 'They dyed it,' the 54-year-old told E! Online on Sunday. 'I was like, "I really want to wear blue.'" So this was the colour; They made this colour.' Nicole missed out on the Best Actress award at this year's Oscars for her role as Lucille Ball in Being The Ricardos. But the Boy Erased star was a winner on the night thanks to her show-stopping frock. Flawless: Nicole looked incredible in her classic-style frock, paying homage to old Hollywood glamour. The actress revealed that her custom Giorgio Armani Prive gown was dyed a special shade just for her, now referred to by the designer as 'Nicole Kidman blue' The beauty teamed the dress with stunning Harry Winston diamond jewels - including an intricate collar necklace with a rare yellow diamond. The piece is crafted from 33.42 carats and set in 18k yellow gold and platinum. It features a 5.87 carat pear-shaped fancy yellow diamond centre stone set as a necklace with winged detail made from 250 pear-shaped, marquise and round brilliant diamonds weighing a total of 27.55 carats. While Hollywood is still processing Will Smith slapping Chris Rock live at the Oscars, Entourage creator Doug Ellin is weighing in on the controversy. The 53-year-old writer-producer spoke about the controversy with TMZ, where he didn't pull any punches, calling Smith a 'classic narcissist.' He also added that he didn't think Oscar presenter Chris Rock knew that Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, suffered from the autoimmune disease alopecia that lead to her losing her hair. Speaking out: While Hollywood is still processing Will Smith slapping Chris Rock live at the Oscars, Entourage creator Doug Ellin is weighing in on the controversy Narcissist: The 53-year-old writer-producer spoke about the controversy with TMZ , where he didn't pull any punches, calling Smith a 'classic narcissist' Ellin made it clear he didn't think Chris Rock did anything wrong, adding, 'Chris Rock just did his job, whether you liked his joke or not.' He also admitted that he first thought it was 'fake,' adding, 'I'm watching this thing, I don't know what the hell is happening, the sound goes off and I think there's something very strange happening. The writer-director added he's, 'trying to be careful in 2022, because mental health is a real thing,' adding that Smith, 'needs help.' Nothing wrong: Ellin made it clear he didn't think Chris Rock did anything wrong, adding, 'Chris Rock just did his job, whether you liked his joke or not' Help: The writer-director added he's, 'trying to be careful in 2022, because mental health is a real thing,' adding that Smith, 'needs help' 'If you're that out of control at the Oscars on the biggest night of your career, there's something severely wrong,' Ellin added. He also admitted that he didn't know Jada Pinkett Smith suffered from alopecia, and he believes that Chris Rock didn't know about it either. 'Chris Rock is one of the greatest comedians of the past 100 years and this show is the Oscars that is celebrating artistic expression... and you basically have Will Smith trying to cancel him live,' Ellin said. Out of control: 'If you're that out of control at the Oscars on the biggest night of your career, there's something severely wrong,' Ellin added Didn't know: He also admitted that he didn't know Jada Pinkett Smith suffered from alopecia, and he believes that Chris Rock didn't know about it either He added that Smith is 6'3" and he has fight training for his role in Ali and, 'he's smacking little 60-year-old Chris Rock,' though Rock's actual age is 57. Ellin also mentioned that Rock, 'didn't move, by the way,' adding he was, 'a little shocked that Will Smith didn't put him a little further back.' He also called out The Academy, stating he found it, 'horrifying' that they 'sat there' and did nothing, and then minutes later, 'gave him a standing ovation... the whole thing is horrifying to me.' Training: He added that Smith is 6'3" and he has fight training for his role in Ali and, 'he's smacking little 60-year-old Chris Rock,' though Rock's actual age is 57 Shocked: Ellin also mentioned that Rock, 'didn't move, by the way,' adding he was, 'a little shocked that Will Smith didn't put him a little further back' When asked why Smith, 'got the pass he did,' Ellin mentioned it was, 'a foregone conclusion that he was winning the Academy Award,' for his performance in King Richard, which he had already won the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, BAFTA and other awards for. 'I'm not condoning any behavior, but I think they were so stunned by what happened, nobody knew what the hell to do,' Ellin said. He added that if someone less famous had slapped somebody on live television like, 'a cinematographer or a makeup artist, they would have arrested them immediately or taken them out of there.' Conclusion: When asked why Smith, 'got the pass he did,' Ellin mentioned it was, 'a foregone conclusion that he was winning the Academy Award,' for his performance in King Richard, which he had already won the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, BAFTA and other awards for Stunned: 'I'm not condoning any behavior, but I think they were so stunned by what happened, nobody knew what the hell to do,' Ellin said Just minutes after the slap, Smith did in fact win Best Actor for King Richard, as he struggled through an awkward acceptance speech. 'I think his speech was even worse. The speech was worse than the slap, this gaslighting bulls**t about, "I'm a protector of people and a lover of people." Chris Rock was standing with his hands behind his back, and a guy twice his size slaps him across the face at the Oscars,' Ellin added. The slap happened just before Rock presented the award for Best Documentary, which Questlove won for his critically-acclaimed film Summer of Soul, with Ellin mentioning it was 'tragic' that his amazing speech will largely be forgotten. Awkward: Just minutes after the slap, Smith did in fact win Best Actor for King Richard, as he struggled through an awkward acceptance speech Tragic: The slap happened just before Rock presented the award for Best Documentary, which Questlove won for his critically-acclaimed film Summer of Soul, with Ellin mentioning it was 'tragic' that his amazing speech will largely be forgotten 'Questlove made this amazing speech about a movie that is so much more important than King Richard. That movie, Summer of Soul, is a really important documentary and Questlove gave a great speech that no one was listening to,' Ellin said. He also mentioned CODA star Troy Kotsur, who became just the second deaf actor to win an Oscar, adding, 'nobody's thinking about that.' 'I think it's really said and it's a classic narcissist who made the entire event about himself rather than anyone else,' Ellin concluded. She relocated from Los Angeles to Sydney last year with her billionaire husband Lachlan Murdoch and their children. And Sarah Murdoch was pictured boarding her AU$90million private jet on Monday as she prepared to travel to Canberra with News Corp heir Lachlan. The former Australia's Next Top Model host, 49, looked effortlessly chic in a black top and matching flared pants for the short-haul flight. High-flying chic: Sarah Murdoch (pictured) looked effortlessly stylish in an all-black ensemble as she boarded her $90million private jet with her husband Lachlan on Monday Sarah completed her look with a pair of black sandals and secured her blonde locks in a low bun as she boarded the plane. Lachlan also looked dapper in a navy tuxedo, white shirt and black shoes. The Murdochs relocated from Los Angeles to Sydney in March 2021. Style: The former Australia's Next Top Model host, 49, wore a black top and matching flared pants for the short-haul flight from Sydney to Canberra It seems the couple, along with their three children, sons Kalan Alexander, 16, and Aidan Patrick, 14, and daughter Aerin Elisabeth, 10, may be here to stay. In April last year, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the Murdochs will be in Australia 'for years, not months, as initially believed'. The family, who are based in their Bellevue Hill compound, known as Le Manoir, have settled into life in Sydney after Sarah was seen at the Royal Easter Show in Olympic Park with her children. Final touches: Sarah completed her look with a pair of black sandals and secured her blonde locks in a low bun as she boarded the plane Dapper: Lachlan also looked dapper in a navy tuxedo, white shirt and black shoes New home: The Murdochs relocated from Los Angeles to Sydney in March 2021 The publication also confirmed the Murdoch kids were enrolled in Sydney schools. While no reason was given for the family's return to Australia, a report claimed it was the political climate in the U.S. that inspired them to leave LA in favour of Sydney. Despite having spent years in LA, where Lachlan is Executive Chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation, the couple have always maintained their Bellevue Hill home. Relocating: In April last year, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the Murdochs will be in Australia 'for years, not months, as initially believed' It's hard to believe this weekend marks the first time he's played the the O2 arena. And Stormzy certainly didn't disappoint as he gave the home crowd a night to remember during his first time as a headliner at Londons iconic venue. The rapper, 28, put on a showstopping display as he took to the stage for his much-delayed Heavy is the Head Tour. Showman: Stormzy gave the home crowd a night to remember during his first time as a headliner at Londons O2 arena The Croydon-born star, real name Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr., made the very most of the opportunity, delivering a homecoming show to remember. Featuring crowd-pleasers including Know Me From and Audacity, the performer was typically incendiary on the night and delivered a blistering performance that was two years in the making. A giant crowd hovered over the stage throughout, as the one of the UKs most celebrated rappers put on a performance of a life time with his kinetic energy. Factual: This weekend marked the first time Stormzy played the the O2 arena On form: Featuring crowd-pleasers including Know Me From and Audacity, the performer was typically incendiary on the night Showman: The Croydon-born star, real name Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr., made the very most of the opportunity, delivering a homecoming show to remember Legend: A giant crowd hovered over the stage throughout, as the one of the UKs most celebrated rappers put on a performance of a life time with his kinetic energy The charismatic rapper gave a commanding performance Ready to go! He delivered a blistering performance that was two years in the making It comes after Stormzy's wealth shot up to 4.2 million despite the previous cancellation of his biggest tour to date. His firm Stormzy Limited rose 400,000 in value up to 3.4 million and the Hashtag Merky Touring Limited made a 860,000 profit in the 12 months up to the end of April last year. He paid himself 850,000 after the bumper year in dividend payments from the touring company. Showtime: It was a 'storming' performance Stormzy was due to play a massive month-long tour in April 2021 which was shelved because of lockdown restrictions. The Heavy is the Head Tour was rescheduled to begin in March this year. It includes three nights at the London O2 Arena as well as two nights in Dublin and other arenas around the UK. Revenue in Hashtag Merky Touring is believed to include earnings from the tour as the gigs were due to take place during the year covered by the accounts. The tour is to back up his best selling 2019 album Heavy is the Head, his second best-selling album release. Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Britain's Rape Crisis Rating: HMP Wakefield: Evil Behind Bars Rating: The BBC is routinely accused of flaunting a liberal metropolitan bias, and of missing no chance to give us the benefit of its opinions. But Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Britain's Rape Crisis (BBC1) showed that the corporation's journalists can still examine a highly charged and politically sensitive issue with rigour and detachment. This Panorama special set out to examine why only one per cent of reported rapes result in a conviction. There was no lecturing and no finger pointing, although the Crown Prosecution Service might be feeling a little uncomfortable today. The main obstacle to a higher conviction rate was identified early on by a Derbyshire detective, whose force gave the BBC access to a handful of investigations: 'You've got two people of good character. How are you expected to believe one over the other?' Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Britain's Rape Crisis set out to examine why only one per cent of reported rapes result in a conviction As if the crime itself were not bad enough, the investigation can also be painful and emotionally fraught. There was heart-breaking footage of a bespectacled little girl, ten or 11 years old, twisting her hand- kerchief nervously and weeping uncontrollably as she told officers how she'd been sexually abused by her father. Her sister had also been raped, but the CPS twice rejected the case because that sister initially denied that anything had happened. Thinking sex in families was normal, she didn't want to upset her dad. It took nearly four years from the initial claim before he was sentenced to 40 years. We also followed the case of Sam (not her real name) who reported in a tearful and distressing 999 call that she'd been raped on a canal path by a stranger. Yet a swab revealed no stranger's DNA, and CCTV footage of the scene showed no evidence of anybody else in the vicinity. 'We can never say it never happened,' said the officer in charge of the case, diplomatically, 'but we have no evidence to say it did.' It was powerful television, and perhaps some reassurance that the justice system has learned a thing or two since the early 1980s, when I heard an Old Bailey judge ask a young rape victim: 'Tell me, Miss, do you know what a penis is?' If you've ever complained that the prison system is soft, you might have been reassured by HMP Wakefield: Evil Behind Bars (C5). There were grim interior shots showing peeling paint, small airless cells, and gloomy corridors. It made Porridge look like the set of Downton Abbey. If you think that's bad, meet the neighbours. Wakefield is home to some of the most dangerous men in the country, including serial killers Jeremy Bamber and Robert Maudsley, who once murdered a fellow prisoner by stabbing him in the ear with a sharpened plastic spoon. Legend has it that the word 'nonce' was coined at Wakefield, where the initials were chalked outside the cells of sex offenders: 'Not On Normal Communal Exercise'. To lift the gloom, there were occasional moments of Porridge-like humour. Retired prison officer Mick O'Hagan was once in charge of F Wing, home to the prison's most dangerous residents. He recalled meeting 'incredibly arrogant' Jeremy Bamber for the first time. O'Hagan: What are you in for? (He already knew, of course.) Bamber said he had been convicted of killing five members of his family. 'Oh,' said O'Hagan. 'Think of the money you save at Christmas.' She's the Married At First Sight alumni who was once given the nickname 'Kmart Kim Kardashian'. But according to Martha Kalifatidis, she may very well have more in common with Kim's older sister Kourtney. Posting to her Instagram on Tuesday, the 33-year-old drew comparisons of herself and fiance Michael Brunelli to the Keeping Up With The Kardashians star and her Blink-182 rocker fiance, Travis Barker. High aspirations! Married At First Sight star Martha Kalifatidis has compared herself and fiance Michael Brunelli (left) to Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker (right) Martha proudly reshared a fan's post which showed the Hollywood stars at this year's Oscar Awards with the caption: '@marthaa__k @mbrunelli in 10 years.' Meanwhile, Martha wrote, 'Lol but go watch his stories.' In reference to Travis' stories, the couple can be seen enjoying decadent foods and taking lift selfies, proving uncanny similarities between the posts she and Michael share online. Travis, 46, and Kourtney, 42, are almost a decade older than the Australian reality TV stars. Do you see it? Martha proudly reshared a fan's post which showed the Hollywood stars at this year's Oscar Awards, captioning it: '@marthaa__k @mbrunelli in 10 years' Just like us! Martha wrote, 'Lol but go watch his stories'. In reference to Travis' stories, the couple can be seen enjoying decadent foods and taking lift selfies, proving uncanny similarities between the posts she and Michael share online Seeing double? Travis plants a cheeky kiss on her Kourtney's neck while getting ready for the Oscars (left). Martha and Michael posed for a similarly affectionate snap in September last year (right) The real deal: Martha and her fiance Michael regularly share PDA-filled Instagram photos The post comes three years after Martha addressed being compared to Kourtney's younger sister Kim. From their identical brunette waves to their plump pouts and bronzed complexions, the similarities between Martha and Kim are endless. 'At first I thought it (being likened to a Kardashian) was a compliment, but now I feel like everyone's saying it in a horrible way and I just think, like, "OK, so anybody with dark hair and dark eyes and that wears makeup is a Kardashian?"' Martha said in 2019. She continued: 'I'm a wog, I look like a wog, like any wog girl that wears makeup and is groomed now just wants to be a Kardashian, I don't get it, but it's a compliment I guess, sure.' 'At first I thought it (being likened to a Kardashian) was a compliment, but now I feel like everyone's saying it in a horrible way': The post comes three years after Martha (left) addressed being compared to Kourtney's younger sister Kim (right) 'I don't get it, but it's a compliment I guess, sure': From their identical brunette waves to their plump pouts and bronzed complexions, the similarities between Martha and Kim are endless Outside of her physical appearance, the MAFS bride also seems to take style cues from the famed American star. Martha appears to recreate many of Kim's iconic looks on social media, with the pair appearing so similar in some photos that it's often difficult to tell them apart. Speaking to NW magazine in the past, Martha revealed she has had extensive surgery including a boob job, nose job, Botox and fillers. Botox, fillers, a boob job and more: Martha (left) has previously revealed her plastic surgery transformation. Kim is pictured on the left 'I don't have fillers in my lips but I do have them in other places on my face... and I've had my boobs done ... like 10 years ago now,' said Martha. Martha, who is of Greek heritage, told A Current Affair in January 2019 that she was flattered by comparisons to Kim Kardashian. 'Everyone's inspired by Kim... She's hot!' she said. Karl Stefanovic and wife Jasmine Yarbrough are struggling to sell their sprawling pad in the idyllic Noosa. The couple's home was up for auction this week, but failed to sell. The home, dubbed Villa Isabelle, is located in Sunshine Beach, features five bedrooms and five bathrooms and has a huge $7million plus price tag. Still on the market! Karl Stefanovic and wife Jasmine Yarbrough's stunning $7million holiday house in Noosa has failed to sell at auction - despite its beach views, pool and wine cellar The Daily Telegraph reports that the pair were hoping to make a huge profit with the sale, having first purchased the stunning pad back in 2020 for $3.6million. Despite the home not selling, they still rent it out to holidaymakers for $3,700 per night during peak holiday periods. According to the publication, Karl and Jasmine don't use the pad as much as they hoped they would and will buy another property in Noosa soon. Still available: The couple's home was up for auction this week, but failed to sell Cashing in! The pair were hoping to make a huge profit with the sale, after first purchasing the stunning pad back in 2020 for $3.6million The home features a stunning pool, incredible beach views, a modern kitchen and even its own wine cellar. It recently had a chic makeover by Jasmine's sister Jade Yarbrough. Karl, 47, confirmed the listing of the property earlier this month. Paradise! The home features a stunning pool, incredible beach views, a modern kitchen and even its own wine cellar Luxe: It recently had a chic makeover by Jasmine's sister Jade Yarbrough 'The reality though is I can't get away from work in Sydney nearly enough and the logistics of coming in and out of Queensland have been challenging,' the Today show host told The Courier Mail. 'Eventually we will come back to Noosa when we have more time. If we can afford it. It's the best beach community anywhere,' he added. Karl said the couple had lovingly renovated the home to suit their needs. Time to sell: Karl, 47, confirmed the listing of the property earlier this month, revealing he and Jasmine weren't using it enough to justify ownership 'We've added a teenage retreat, a bathroom and a wine cellar. It's a really beautiful slice of Sunshine Beach paradise,' he said. Karl and Jasmine have strong links to Queensland and often celebrate important holidays with their families in Noosa. Karl studied journalism in the Sunshine State and started his career in Rockhampton. Meanwhile, Jasmine's family still lives in Brisbane. Channel Nine has announced Love Island Australia will be returning for season four. The network confirmed the news on Tuesday, and revealed it will be filmed in Mallorca, Spain, later this year. Sophie Monk is also set to return as host of the Channel Nine show. It's back! Channel Nine has confirmed Love Island Australia WILL return for season four - with Sophie Monk (pictured) coming back as host 'I'm so excited to be back as host of Love Island, and with overseas holidays finally coming into view I can't wait to return to beautiful Mallorca to see what's in store for our brand-new Islanders,' Sophie said. Last year, Love Island Australia was filmed in Queensland due to restrictions halting overseas travel and production. Its previous two seasons were filmed in Spain and Fiji. Coming soon: The network confirmed the dating series is returning on Tuesday, and revealed it will be filmed in Mallorca, Spain, later this year Casting is now open for hopeful singles wanting to find 'the one' in the luxurious villa on 9Now. Sophie shot to fame in 2000s girl band Bardot, and went on to feature in Hollywood films before returning to Australia to host Love Island and Beauty and the Geek. After failing to find love on The Bachelorette, Sophie became engaged to Joshua Gross in December 2020 but they waited until January the next year to announce the news. 'I'm so excited to be back as host of Love Island, and with overseas holidays finally coming into view I can't wait to return to beautiful Mallorca to see what's in store for our brand-new Islanders,' Sophie said The couple met in August 2018 when they were seated together on a flight. In July, Sophie lifted the lid on her baby plans, telling The Sunday Telegraph: 'We would love a family if we are lucky enough. 'You just never know but we would love to.' Cara Delevingne let loose on Monday night as she attended the Bilt Rewards x Wells Fargo Private Launch Event party at One Vanderbilt in Manhattan. The 29-year-old model was spotted gripping a bottle of Della Vite Prosecco which she and her sisters Poppy and Chloe partner with as she danced up a storm and hung out with New York City Mayor Eric Adams and A$AP Rocky, among other stars. The Suicide Squad star pulled a series of animated facial expressions on the night, with the worse for wear star showing off her dance moves in the club. Not holding back: Cara Delevingne, 29, was partying hard on Monday night at the Bilt Rewards x Wells Fargo Private Launch Event party in Manhattan, New York Cara opted for an edgy all-black ensemble, teaming a skintight base layer with a cropped blazer featuring wide lapels. She paired the jacket with high-waisted leggings held up with slim suspenders that crisscrossed her torso. The model stayed on theme with a figure-hugging black top, and accessorized with several necklaces, statement rings and bracelets. After plenty of partying and dancing, the catwalk star's honey brown shoulder-length hair got progressively dishevelled. But she didn't seem to mind as she had a blast while imbibing from her personal Prosecco bottle, along with other beverages. Friends in high places: Cara was seen partying alongside New York City mayor Eric Adams Pour it up: The model was never without a drink in her hand as she hit the dancefloor Simple: Cara paired the jacket with high-waisted leggings held up with slim suspenders that crisscrossed her torso All over the place: After plenty of partying and dancing, the catwalk star's honey brown shoulder-length hair got progressively dishevelled Having a blast: But she didn't seem to mind as she had a blast while imbibing from her personal Prosecco bottle, along with other beverages A video of Cara dancing next to Adams while A$AP Rocky could be heard rapping for the crowd, was a hit on social media. She grinned ear-to-ear and even flashed her tongue playfully while showing off her sleepy eyes. During the party, which was a promotional event for a Wells Fargo credit card, Mayor Eric Adams took to the microphone to urge people who had moved away from New York City in recent years to return to the Big Apple. 'So everyone who moved to Florida, get your butts back to New York City because New York City is where you want to be,' he said, according to the New York Post. The Wells Fargo credit card, which offers reward points when using it for paying rent, is an attempt to move Americans away from paying rent via checks, Bloomberg reported. Contrast: A video of Cara dancing next to Adams while A$AP Rocky could be heard rapping for the crowd was a hit on social media She's dancing for two: Several users joked about how animated Cara was, whereas the mayor was reserved and merely bobbed his head while she was dancing all about Family label: Cara and her sisters introduced their Prosecco to the UK last year after partnering with the Biasiotto family, a third-generation winemaking family, according to Forbes Della Vite Prosecco Cara Delevingne and her sisters Poppy and Chloe are partners of the drink brand. They introduced their Prosecco to the UK last year after partnering with the Biasiotto family, a third-generation winemaking family, according to Forbes. Based in Northern Italy's Prosecco region of Valdobbiadene, the Biasotto's winery, Foss Marai, grows the Glera grapes on 40-year-old vines that are hand-picked to produce every bottle of fizz. Della Vite Prosecco is the Italian term for of the vine. The alcoholic beverage is notable for following sustainable practices and producing a 100 percent vegan product. The Treviso bottle of Della Vita Prosecco has an RRP of 19.95 while the Superiore variety retails at 25.95. Advertisement Cara and her sisters introduced their Prosecco to the UK last year after partnering with the Biasiotto family, a third-generation winemaking family, according to Forbes. The alcoholic beverage is notable for following sustainable practices and producing a 100 percent vegan product. It's just one of many ventures for Cara, who remains an in-demand model. She's also ventured into acting, with roles in Suicide Squad and the romance Paper Towns, along with a recently announced guest role on Hulu's acclaimed comedy series Only Murders In The Building. Throwing shapes: Cara was seen dancing up a storm with Wyclef Jean inside the club Loving life: She seemed in high spirits as she cosied up for snaps with entrepreneur Ankur Jain Actor Ezra Miller is in trouble with the law once again, following a late Sunday evening arrest in Hawaii. The 29-year-old Fantastic Beasts actor was at a karaoke bar in Hilo on Sunday evening, where they were harassing a number of patrons with belligerent behavior. The police were called at 11:30 PM on Sunday evening and arrested the actor on charges of disorderly conduct and harassment. Mug shot: Actor Ezra Miller has found themself in trouble with the law once again, following a late Sunday evening arrest in Hawaii The incident happened at a karaoke bar on Silva Street in Hilo, where Miller was reportedly hurling obscenities at a 23-year-old woman singing karaoke. The actor also tried to grab the microphone from the woman while she was in mid-song. Later on in the night, they lunged at a 32-year-old man who was playing darts at the bar. Incident: The incident happened at a karaoke bar on Silva Street in Hilo, where Miller (seen above in 2017) was reportedly hurling obscenities at a 23-year-old woman singing karaoke The bar owner reportedly asked them to calm down numerous times, though that tactic seemingly didn't work, when the police were called. The police arrived at the karaoke bar around 11:30 PM and placed Miller under arrest and took them into custody. It's unclear how long Miller was in custody for, though they posted $500 bail and was ultimately released. Calm: The bar owner reportedly asked them to calm down numerous times, though that tactic seemingly didn't work, when the police were called This isn't Miller's first brush with the law, or controversy, with the actor having been arrested for drug possession in June 2011. The actor was the passenger in a vehicle in Pittsburgh, when they were pulled over and cops discovered 20 grams of marijuana. A judge would later drop the drug possession charge, but they were charged with two citations of disorderly conduct and ordered to pay a fine of $600. Not the first: This isn't Miller's (seen above in 2019) first brush with the law, or controversy, with the actor having been arrested for drug possession in June 2011 The actor found themselves in hot water once again in April 2020 when a video surfaced of them appearing to choke a woman and slam her to the ground in Reykjavik, Iceland. A bar employee identified the person in the video as Miller and they were removed from the premises. He also made headlines this past January, when they posted a video on Instagram that was later deleted, where they threatened members of the Ku Klux Klan operating in Beulaville, North Carolina. Advertisement The Real Housewives of New Jersey stars Melissa Gorga and Jackie Goldschneider looked absolutely incredible as they arrived to the Bilt Rewards x Wells Fargo Private launch event in New York City on Monday evening. While Gorga, 43, flashed her toned midriff in chic two-piece jumpsuit, her 45-year-old castmate opted to wear a skintight black latex jumpsuit with a silver belt, a Chanel handbag and a number of silver bangles. The TV personality, married to Evan Goldschneider, completed her sexy ensemble with a pair of sky-high booties, diamond earrings and a glossy nude lipstick. Bravo stars: The Real Housewives of New Jersey's Melissa Gorga and Jackie Goldschneider looked absolutely incredible as they arrived to the Bilt Rewards x Wells Fargo Private launch event in New York City on Monday She wore her golden blonde tresses in loose beachy waves and sported a natural makeup look, consisting of a luminizing foundation that gave her a gorgeous glow, blush and lavender smokey eye. Dorinda Medley, who starred on six seasons of The Real Housewives of New York City, was also in attendance. The 57-year-old Manhattanite wowed in a plunging shiny cream jumpsuit, which she styled with a colorful layered necklace. Glamorous: Gorga commanded attention in her midriff-baring look, which she paired with several gold necklaces and dramatic eyelash extensions Smiling: The mother-of-three appeared in high spirits as she shot a peace sign at the camera Wild side: Meanwhile Margaret Josephs wore a low-cut black cheetah print blouse with a risque keyhole in the front and leggings Meanwhile Margaret Josephs wore a low-cut black cheetah print blouse with a risque keyhole in the front and leggings. The fashion designer, 54, also rocked a pair of sparkly silver open-toed pumps, drop earrings and 'upgraded' wedding ring. Writer Carrie Berk and Wyclef Jean also made appearances at the bash, where model Cara Delevingne partied and ASAP Rocky performed. Cool girl: Writer Carrie Berk also made an appearance at the bash, where model Cara Delevingne partied and ASAP Rocky performed Quit the fashion statement: Wyclef Jean cut an edgy figure in a distressed black leather jacket, red trousers and a matching pair of sneakers Happy couple: Later, Melissa Gorga was joined by her husband Joe Gorga White hot: After getting her photo taken, Melissa bundled up in a grey and white patterned jacket and cork heels Delevingne seemed to be having a blast as she held onto a bottle of Della Vite, created by her and sisters Poppy and Chloe as the Everyday hitmaker, 33, hit the stage. ASAP Rocky, who is expecting his first child Rihanna, sang into a microphone while rocking a patterned hoodie under a varsity jacket. Following his performance, he was seen mingling and posing for photos with Floyd Mayweather Jr and NY Mayor Eric Adams. Popping bottles: Delevingne seemed to be having a blast as she held onto a bottle of Della Vite, created by her and sisters Poppy and Chloe as the Everyday hitmaker, 33, hit the stage Partying it up: During the star-studded bash, the Paper Towns star commanded attention in a pair of black suspenders and cropped jacket Performer: ASAP Rocky, who is expecting his first child Rihanna, sang into a microphone while rocking patterned a hoodie under a varsity jacket Pleasing the crowd: A$AP Rocky played a number of his hits for the audience Rapping: A$AP Rocky got the crowd on their feet while performing Chatting away: ASAP Rocky mingled with Floyd Mayweather Jr during the event Advertisement Betty White's longtime home has been put on the market for quite a heavy-price just three months after her death at 99. The comedy legend and her husband Allen Ludden had originally built the three-story beach-front home in Carmel Valley, California together, in the early eighties. Unfortunately Ludden died shortly after the property - which is built in a village north of Los Angeles and south of San Francisco - was completed in 1981. Simply stunning: Betty White's longtime home has been put on the market for quite a heavy-price just three months after her death at 99 Views: Betty's home can be seen in an aerial view from over the Pacific Ocean Icon: White died as a result of a stroke she suffered on Christmas Day, according to her death certificate The 3,600-square-foot-property includes four bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms and has been set at the asking price of $7.95million. The power couple had only paid $170K originally for the then-empty quarter-acre plot according to Dirt. Nicole Truszkowski of Truszkowski Freedman & Associates, Sotheby's International Realty - Carmel Brokerage, who holds the listing alongside Zak Freedman, told People on Monday: 'The home embodies the spirit of Betty and Allen. It was eloquently understated with the focus on nature and the natural beauty surrounding the home. Stunning: The 3,600-square-foot-property includes four bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms and has been set at the asking price of $7.95million Gorgeous: No doubt sunrises and sunsets look incredible Comforts of home: The primary bedroom is shown as the future homeowner can enjoy the epic ocean views Bond: The comedy legend and her husband Allen Ludden had originally built the three-story beach-front home in Carmel Valley, California together, in the early eighties (The couple are pictured together in 1974) 'Spending time in Carmel was one of Betty's favorite things to do. She enjoyed many treasured moments with her family and close friends.' The town of Carmel, which is also known as Carmel-by-the-sea, is situated near other celeb-favorite enclaves like Monterey and Big Sur. Truszkowski said that despite Betty being one of the most well-known comediennes in the world 'she was a private person. Betty's home in Carmel was her special sanctuary and it was one of her favorite places to recharge and rejuvenate.' Tragic: Unfortunately Ludden died shortly after the property - which is built in a village north of Los Angeles and south of San Francisco - was completed in 1981 Whoa: The power couple had only paid $170K originally for the then-empty quarter-acre plot according to Dirt Nicole Truszkowski of Truszkowski Freedman & Associates, Sotheby's International Realty - Carmel Brokerage, who holds the listing alongside Zak Freedman, told People on Monday: 'The home embodies the spirit of Betty and Allen. It was eloquently understated with the focus on nature and the natural beauty surrounding the home' The property also features panoramic ocean views of the Point Lobos Nature Reserve, Ribera Beach, and Monastery Beach from nearly every room. According to the listing, the home was designed by architect Richard Hicks, as he 'Infused with an effervescent energy, this three-story manor offers a parade of serene moments from outdoor decks, discrete spaces lush with blooms, and through generous windows that showcase the majesty of land meeting sea.' White died as a result of a stroke she suffered on Christmas Day, according to her death certificate. The beloved Golden Girls and Mary Tyler Moore Show actor died six days later on December 31 at her home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles as the result of the stroke, according to the LA County death certificate. Never get sick of that: The property also features panoramic ocean views of the Point Lobos Nature Reserve, Ribera Beach, and Monastery Beach from nearly every room Comfortable: The town of Carmel, which is also known as Carmel-by-the-sea, is situated near other celeb-favorite enclaves like Monterey and Big Sur The 99-year-old was cremated and her remains were given on Friday to Glenn Kaplan, the man in charge of Whites advanced health care directive. Jeff Witjas, Whites long-standing agent and friend, who first confirmed her death to the AP, said she had been staying close to her Los Angeles home during the pandemic. The document lists Whites legal name of Betty Marion Ludden. She took the last name of her husband Allen Ludden. She was married to him from 1963 until his death in 1981. Truszkowski said that despite Betty being one of the most well-known comediennes in the world 'she was a private person. Betty's home in Carmel was her special sanctuary and it was one of her favorite places to recharge and rejuvenate' Interesting: According to the listing, the home was designed by architect Richard Hicks He 'Infused with an effervescent energy, this three-story manor offers a parade of serene moments from outdoor decks, discrete spaces lush with blooms, and through generous windows that showcase the majesty of land meeting sea' Simply stunning: The beach looks absolutely gorgeous by the property The information from Whites death certificate was first reported by TMZ. White, whose comic skills and up-for-anything charm made her a television mainstay for more than 60 years, died less than three weeks before her 100th birthday. US president Joe Biden, director Mel Brooks and many other celebrities and prominent leaders paid tribute to the star after her death. Amanda Holden has revealed her daughter Lexi, 16, will finish her education first before she emarks on her burgeoning modelling career. The Britain's Got Talent judge, 51, revealed earlier this month that her eldest daughter has signed with Storm modelling agency as she follows in her mother's showbusiness footsteps. Speaking to The Sun, Amanda, revealed Lexi wants to balance her modelling career with university and has 'so many ambitions'. Future: Amanda Holden has revealed her daughter Lexi, 16, will finish her education first before she emarks on her burgeoning modelling career She said: 'Lexi was approached last year and obviously we were waiting until she was 16 to sign anything. It's something she actually wants to do, so I'm taking the lead from her. 'She's a very quiet girl but she knows her own mind. She's very bright and wants to continue her studies. 'There's no pressure and we'll just see what happens. But finishing her education is very much her plan, she'll have our support whatever she decides to do.' It comes after Amanda, who is also mother to Hollie, 10, with husband Chris Hughes, 49, previously spoke to MailOnline about Lexi signing with Storm, the agency that represented Kate Moss for 28 years. Career: The Britain's Got Talent judge, 51, revealed earlier this month that her eldest daughter has signed with Storm modelling agency She said: 'They came after her and they're very lovely and nurturing and it will be a soft, slow thing and she won't do anything until she's 18 but they want her and that's what she wants to do. 'I have to say there was quite a number of them and there's such a different mindset to how you might think modelling agencies look after the young, but they are very nurturing and very caring, all of them. 'They came after her and they're very lovely and nurturing and it will be a soft, slow thing and she won't do anything until she's 18 but they want her and that's what she wants to do. 'I have to say there was quite a number of them and there's such a different mindset to how you might think modelling agencies look after the young, but they are very nurturing and very caring, all of them.' She said: 'Lexi was approached last year and obviously we were waiting until she was 16 to sign anything. It's something she actually wants to do, so I'm taking the lead from her' Lexi's beautiful looks have been inherited from her TV star mum, who says maintaining her glamorous appearance even now she's in her 50s is 'part of her DNA.' She said: 'It's rare that I've not got any makeup on. 'It's self-preservation, dignity, pride in how you look, and I've never knowingly been understated in any situation. Whenever I have been photographed or on a run or anything like that, I will always have mascara and a lip on, if not a lash, always. 'When I'm on holiday I will strip it back a little bit but even then I'll have a tinted moisturiser on and some sort of shimmery body lotion so I still look half decent while I'm roasting in the sunshine, which I love. 'I don't get sick of it it is part of my DNA I have to say that.' The Coronation Street characters broke up last year. And in scenes filmed for a future episode, Fizz Stape (played by Jennie McAlpine) showed ex Tyrone Dobbs (played by Alan Halsall) around the house that she's considering moving into with her new boyfriend. Fizz was photographed on set with Tyrone and boyfriend Phill Whittaker (played by Jamie Kenna) as they took a look around up-market the property. While the new couple might be moving away from the cobbles, Coronation Street denied recent reports that Jennie is set to leave the soap, telling MailOnline: 'Her character is still very much in the show.' Big move! In scenes filmed for Coronation Street, Fizz (Jennie McAlpine) showed ex Tyrone (Alan Halsall) around the new house she's considering moving into with her new boyfriend Fizz looked stylish in a black dress covered in sketches of leopards all over, and she teamed it with a burgundy cami beneath. She went property hunting in black leggings and heeled ankle boots, while keeping warm with an indigo denim jacket. Tyrone wore a green 'Michigan State' T-shirt and dark purple hoodie with his dishevelled jeans, to see where his ex might be moving to. Fizz's boyfriend Phill was also with the pair on the set location to film scenes for Corrie, looking smart in a shirt and grey suit jacket. House hunting: Fizz looked stylish in a black dress covered in sketches of leopards all over, and she teamed it with a burgundy cami beneath Wow! Their faces spoke a thousand words after looking around inside the house Soap style: Fizz went property hunting in black leggings and heeled ankle boots, while keeping warm with an indigo denim jacket, while Tryone wore jeans and a T-shirt Good times: Fizz's boyfriend Phill was also with the pair on the set location to film scenes for Corrie, looking smart in a shirt and grey suit jacket Cobbles long-timer Jennie McAlpine, 38, Fiz made her first appearance in the soap 21 years ago as Roy and Hayley Cropper's foster daughter. And as rumours of her new home storyline emerged, reports also began swirling that the actress may be leaving Coronation Street. However, when contacted by MailOnline, ITV confirmed: 'Jennie is absolutely not leaving the soap. People have reported that her character Fiz is leaving the street as in she may be moving away from the street as part of a storyline but her character is still very much in the show.' Happy lady: Fiz looked delighted as she strolled around outside the swanky house Keeping it casual: Tyrone wore a green 'Michigan State' T-shirt and dark purple hoodie with his dishevelled jeans, to see where his ex might be moving to Loving it: Fiz and Tyrone flashed a wide smile after showing her ex around the property A word in progress: The property was in the middle of a renovation Last summer, Jennie McAlpine admitted on This Morning that she was 'gutted' her character Fizz broke up with Tyrone [Alan Halsall] earlier in the year. She said: 'It gutted me and Alan because we love working together,' she explained before likening their familiar working relationship to 'putting on a nice comfy pair of slippers'. She continued: 'The thoughts of not seeing him was awful. But then we got the script and all the scenes of the family breaking up they were gorgeous and chuffed the writers gave us that to do.' So, what d'ya think? Fizz and Tyrone chatted about the place after having a nosey around The boyfriend and the ex: Fiz stood between her boyfriend Phill and her ex Tyrone Different reactions: At one point, Fiz looked pensive while Tyrone seemed impressed Wow! The semi-detached red brick property had scaffolding outside What could have been: If Tyrone hadn't cheated on Fiz with Alina, perhaps they would be house hunting for a place for themselves Fiz and Tyrone split after he had an affair with Alina Pop, played by Ruxandra Porojnicu. After the two characters kissed, Tyrone dumped his long-term partner and declared his love for Alina - but that relationship didn't last long. Hour long episodes of Coronation Street air on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 8pm on ITV. The old and the new: Fiz used to be with Tyrone but is now in a relationship with Phill Animated: The exes had a lively conversation outside the property Quick check: The pair checked messages on their mobile phones Taking a moment: Tyrone leaned onto the blue car as they chatted For weeks Married at First Sight's Tamara Djordjevic has been accused of belittling her groom Brent Vitiello's career after she told her co-stars he just 'waits tables'. And now footage of her husband, Brent, 33, serving drinks at Sydney hot spot Sinaloa has gone viral. In the video shared to TikTok, the tattooed hunk is seen working his day job walking over a tray of what appears to be alcoholic drinks for a group of girls. Cheque, please! Married At First Sight groom Brent Vitiello has gone viral on TikTok after footage emerged of him waiting tables in Sydney 'This is a happy birthday message to Emma from Jane all the way from Melbourne,' he says in the footage before placing a tray of drinks on the table. 'Throwback to my birthday when Brent served us birthday shots! He's way too good for Tamara,' the fan captioned the video, which has amassed over 187,000 views. 'Hey Tamara - he's not just a waiter!' the fan cheekily commented under the video before adding: 'He's also a bartender by the looks of it.' Fans were quick to flood the post with comments supporting Brent's decision to work in hospitality. 'Maybe now Tamara will understand this work,' another commented. Another chimed in, 'Wishing I lived in Sydney so I could support where he works.' Spotted: In the video shared to TikTok, the tattooed hunk is seen working his day job Daily Mail Australia understands that while Brent occasionally tends to orders, he acts as the venues day-to-day manager while assisting with their marketing, social media and PR. It comes after Tamara and Brent clashed at the final dinner party after he learned that she was telling her fellow brides that he was 'just a waiter'. 'I have no f**king idea. I think he makes s**t up to sound good, to be honest. I'm so over it. I have no idea,' she told Ella. Ouch: Tamara took a swipe at 'husband' Brent's work during a girls' night out last week Her revelation left both Ella, 27, and Domenica Calarco shocked, as Tamara laughed it off and made a comment about his 'ego'. Both Ella and Domenica, 29, stared wide-eyed at Tamara as she continued to complain about Brent. 'I honestly have no idea what he does. Nah, no idea. I think he's just a hospo [hospitality] person,' she continued. Married At First Sight continues Sunday at 7pm on Channel Nine An Australian TV and radio host has revealed what really happened after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars in Los Angeles on Sunday. Hit FM's Dean McCarthy was at the awards show, and described the mood in the room moments after the now infamous incident. 'How I would describe it, you know when you're at school and the teacher goes really angry at a student, and then everyone's really quiet afterwards, it's like that,' he said. Behind the scenes: An Australian TV and radio host has revealed what really happened after Will Smith (right) slapped Chris Rock (left) at the Oscars in Los Angeles on Sunday 'Everyone went quiet, everyone's super freaking out, in total disbelief. Bodyguards came running out, the energy shifted, everyone was in pure shock.' Will, 53, stunned the star-studded audience and movie fans alike when he walked onto the stage and smacked Chris, who was presenting the award for Best Documentary. The 57-year-old comedian had made a joke about Will's wife of 25 years, actress Jada Pinkett Smith, suffering alopecia and losing her hair when the actor took offence. On the ground: Dean McCarthy (pictured) was at the awards show, and described the mood in the room moments after the now infamous incident 'Jada, I love ya. G.I. Jane 2, can't wait to see ya,' Chris told the crowd, referring to the 1997 film, G.I. Jane, which starred Demi Moore with a shaved head. As Will turned and made his way back down to his seat in the front row, a shell-shocked Chris told the audience: 'Oh, wow. Will Smith just smacked the s**t out of me.' After sitting down again, a furious Will repeatedly warned Chris to 'keep my wife's name out your f**king mouth,' as the audience sat in stunned silence. 'How I would describe it, you know when you're at school and the teacher goes really angry at a student, and then everyone's really quiet afterwards, it's like that,' he said A happier Will later returned to the stage to accept the award for Best Actor for his role in King Richard, in which he portrayed Venus and Serena Williams' father. The tearful actor apologised for his earlier behaviour without directly addressing Chris in his acceptance speech. 'I want to apologise to the Academy. I want to apologise to all my fellow nominees. This is a beautiful moment and I'm not crying for winning an award,' he began. Smackdown: Will, 53, stunned the star-studded audience and movie fans alike when he walked onto the stage and smacked Chris, who was presenting the award for Best Documentary He added: 'I'm being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people. 'I know to do what we do, you got to be able to take abuse. You got to be able to have people talk crazy about you. 'In this business you got to be able to have people disrespecting you. And you got to smile and you got to pretend like that's okay.' Taking out the prize: A happier Will later returned to the stage to accept the award for Best Actor for his role in King Richard, in which he portrayed Venus and Serena Williams' father Will addressed the attack on Instagram a day later, where he issued an apology to Chris and admitted he was 'embarrassed' by his behaviour. 'Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive. My behaviour at last night's Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable,' he wrote. 'Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada's medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally. 'Everyone went quiet, everyone's super freaking out, in total disbelief. Bodyguards came running out, the energy shifted, everyone was in pure shock,' said Dean 'I would like to publicly apologise to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be.' He added: 'There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.' The Aladdin actor then went on to apologise to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hosts the Oscars. What just happened? As Will turned and made his way back down to his seat in the front row, a shell-shocked Chris told the audience: 'Oh, wow. Will Smith just smacked the s**t out of me' Will also acknowledged that his actions had 'stained' the prestigious awards show. 'I would also like to apologise to the Academy, the producers of the show, all the attendees and everyone watching around the world,' he continued. 'I would like to apologise to the Williams Family and my King Richard Family. I deeply regret that my behaviour has stained what has been an otherwise gorgeous journey for all of us. I am a work in progress.' Storming the stage: The 57-year-old comedian had made a joke about Will's wife of 25 years, actress Jada Pinkett Smith, suffering alopecia and losing her hair when the actor took offence Meanwhile, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said they would launch a formal review into the incident amid speculation Will could be stripped of his Oscar. 'The Academy does not condone violence of any form,' The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences wrote on Twitter on Monday. 'Tonight we are delighted to celebrate our 94th Academy Awards winners, who deserve this moment of recognition from their peers and movie lovers around the world.' Advertisement Will Smith slapping Chris Rock after he poked fun at the actor's wife Jada Pinkett Smith is no doubt the most talked about moment of the Oscars on Sunday - however it has emerged he once vowed to never joke about his pals. But it seems the trio's 26-year friendship is more turbulent than fans initially realised, with Jada, 50, having worked alongside her new foe in the Madagascar trilogy. The comedian, 57, also appeared in a 1996 episode of The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, in which Will, 53, starred, and years later joked that The Matrix star hadn't even received her own invite to the Academy Awards, which he was hosting in 2016. Wow! Chris Rock's turbulent 26-year friendship with Jada and Will includes co-star billings in Madagascar and The Fresh Prince before making digs at her fame... despite vowing to NEVER joke about the power couple (Chris and Jada are pictured at the 2005 Kids' Choice Awards) The physical assault occurred after he quipped about the 'GI Jane' shaven haircut of Jada - who suffers from alopecia - leading her husband to furiously stride on-stage and slap him. Only years prior to the humiliating dig, Chris and Jada appeared to be close friends as they travelled the world together for press junkets, movie premieres and red carpet appearances to promote three Madagascar films between 2005 and 2012. Hopes of a fourth installment, which was set to be released in 2018 before being postponed, appear to have been shattered by the public brawl at the Oscars. Chris lent his voice to Marty the Zebra while Jada became Gloria the Hippo in the animated franchise, and although they didn't physically feature together on-screen, they certainly put on friendly displays while promoting their movies. Hilarious: The comedian, 57, (right) also appeared in a 1996 episode of The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, in which Will, 53, (left) starred The pair even presented the gong for Favorite Voice From An Animated Movie at the 2005 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, where Will also performed. During the promo tour for Europe's Most Wanted, the Grown Ups star complimented Will and Jada's daughter Willow's 2011 track, 21st Century Girl. He told the couple, according to Fuse, 'Hey, my kids listen to your kids!' In the previous decade, the former SNL star worked with the Gettin' Jiggy Wit It hitmaker for the very first time in his NBC sitcom. Throwback: His appearance included cameos as a fictional comedian named Maurice Perry as well as his sister Jasmine, who soon enjoyed a date with Will (pictured in 1996) His appearance included cameos as a fictional comedian named Maurice Perry as well as his sister Jasmine, who soon enjoyed a date with Will. Chris' friendship with the power couple was so firm that he once claimed his near-the-mark jokes would never be directed towards Will, as well as Barack Obama and Brad Pitt. He told CNN in 2009: '(Obama's) just one of those guys, you know, like Will Smith. There's no Will Smith jokes. There's no Brad Pitt jokes. 'You know, what are you going to say? "Ooh, you used to have sex with Jennifer Aniston. Now you have sex with Angelina Jolie. You're such a loser." The feud appears to have begun during Chris' Oscars hosting gig in 2016 when Will and Jada skipped the ceremony. Pals: But it seems the trio's turbulent 26-year friendship is more turbulent than fans initially realised, with Jada, 50, having starred alongside her new foe in the Madagascar trilogy It marked the second consecutive year where people of colour had not been nominated, which sparked the #OscarsSoWhite movement hashtag. Chris joked on stage of Jada being her husband's plus-one: 'Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna's panties. I wasn't invited.' Two years later, when Will posted an Instagram birthday tribute to his ex-wife Sheree Zampino, Chris continued the feud by commenting: 'Wow. You have a very understanding wife.' He did not receive a reply. Will slapping Chris around the face for making a joke about his wife Jada's bald head at the Oscars sent shockwaves around the world on Sunday. The jaw-dropping moment took place moments after Rock arrived on stage to present the award for Best Documentary Feature. Former pals: Chris and Jada travelled the world together for press junkets, movie premieres and red carpet appearances to promote three Madagascar films (pictured in 2008) It all kicked off when Chris pointed to Will and his wife, quipping: 'Jada, I love ya. G.I. Jane 2, can't wait to see it.' The joke was in reference to the 1997 film G.I. Jane, a role that actress Demi Moore famously shaved her head for. At that point, the camera turned to Smith, who at first was seen visibly laughing at the gag and even clapped his hands, a gesture that seemed to suggest he saw the funny side. But as Smith laughed while still seated, Pinkett Smith - who has been open about her struggle with hair loss and alopecia - visibly rolled her eyes, looking furious. 'That was a nice one!' Rock then said on stage, justifying his joke as a mild one. Happier times: Chris' friendship with the power couple was so firm that he once claimed his near-the-mark jokes would never be directed towards Will (Jada and Chris pictured in 2012) However, in the seconds that the camera had cut-away, Smith then jumped from his seat and stormed the stage as Rock was heard saying: 'Uh-oh...' This is when the world saw King Richard star Smith - who would later collect an Oscar for Best Actor - approach Rock and promptly slap him across the face. 'Wow,' Rock could be heard saying after the assault. 'Will Smith just smacked the s**t out of me.' In footage that had been uncensored, Smith was heard saying: 'Keep my wife's name out your f***king mouth.' Actress Lupita Nyong'o, who was sitting near Smith, could be seen visibly confused at what had just happened as some audience members were left wondering if it had been part of some pre-arranged skit. Throwback: Chris lent his voice to Marty the Zebra while Jada became Gloria the Hippo in the franchise, and they put on friendly displays while promoting their movies (pictured in 2008) But as Will made his foul-mouthed tirade, Nyong'o's expression quickly turned serious. The exchange was muted on a delayed telecast in much of the US, but was aired in full to some international audiences. After being slapped, Rock appeared shocked and flustered as he tried to resume presenting the best documentary feature category. 'That was the greatest night in the history of television,' Rock said, before awkwardly returning to presenting best documentary, which went to Questlove's 'Summer of Soul (...or When the Revolution Was Not Televised).' Rapper Diddy was the next person on stage to acknowledge the fall-out as he said: 'Will, Chris, we are gonna solve that like a family at the gold party. For now, we will move on with love.' Ouch: Years later, Chris joked that The Matrix star hadn't even received her own invite to the Academy Awards, which he was hosting in 2016 Later, Smith opened his acceptance speech with an emotional defense of his assault on Rock for mocking the short hair of Pinkett Smith, who suffers from a medical condition that causes hair loss. 'Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family,' Smith said in his first remarks. He continued: 'I'm being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people.' Smith went on to issue a tearful partial apology for his emotional outburst, but did not apologize to Rock. 'I want to apologize to the Academy, I want to apologize to all my fellow nominees. This is a beautiful moment,' he said. 'Art imitates life. I look like the crazy father' said Smith. 'But love will make you do crazy things.' Late Sunday night, the LAPD issued a statement saying that Rock had not filed a police report against Smith, but that if he chooses to do so, police will investigate. 'LAPD investigative entities are aware of an incident between two individuals during the Academy Awards program,' the statement said. 'The incident involved one individual slapping another.' It was not immediately clear whether the Academy would penalize Smith in any way for his outburst. Holby City fans were left devastated when it was revealed the show had been axed after 23 years. Now David Ames - who plays Dominic Copeland in the Casualty spin-off - has revealed not even the cast were aware the show was coming to an end before the announcement was made. Speaking on Tuesday's episode of Lorraine, the actor, 38 admitted he had 'absolutely no idea' the series was coming to an end. End of an Era: David Ames,38, who plays Dominic Copeland in the Casualty spin-off, has revealed the actors had 'absolutely no idea' the series was coming to an end When asked on if the cast got a 'feeling' it was going to happen, the actor - who joined the soap in 2013 - said: 'We had absolutely no idea. Absolutely none. 'I remember I had a brief text chat with Russell T Davies about this, and he said, "Normally you hear a little rumbling somewhere. Somebody will know something." No one knew a thing. It was just one of those things.' Show host Lorraine Kelly admitted the Holby's axing 'doesn't make any sense whatsoever', but she suggested the show could be re-run from the beginning after the final episode. Shock: When asked on if the cast got a 'feeling' it was going to happen, the actor said: 'We had absolutely no idea. Absolutely none (pictured in character) Sad: Show host Lorraine Kelly admitted the Holby's axing 'doesn't make any sense whatsoever', but she suggested the show could be re-run from the beginning after the final episode David also revealed Tuesday night's final episode will be a 'massive tribute' to the NHS, saying: 'Loose ends will be tied, stories will be rounded off nicely. 'What we can look forward to is a really heartfelt... just a massive tribute to what it's about, which is the NHS and what they do for us.' Since he finished filming the medical drama, David has been starring in play Steve in the West End, but he has also set his sights on TV presenting. Thank you: David admitted Tuesday night's final episode will be a 'massive tribute' to the NHS: 'Loose ends will be tied, stories will be rounded off nicely Your job please: Since he finished filming the medical drama, David has been starring in play 'Steve' in the West End, but he has also set his sights on TV presenting When asked by Lorraine if he has ever thought about presenting, he said: 'I have absolutely thought about things like that. 'I'm friends with Gok [Wan] and Richard Arnold, and I admire what they do massively. And you, but the whole live thing kind of scares me.' David also admitted it would be 'a dream' to take part in Strictly Come Dancing, but he has 'two left feet'. Dancing shoes? David also admitted it would be 'a dream' to take part in 'Strictly Come Dancing', but he has 'two left feet' This revelation comes after David's co-star Jaye Jacobs revealed the extent of her despair as the 'most diverse show on terrestrial TV' coming to an end. The actress, 39, who joined the medical soap as Donna Jackson in 2004, has revealed she had always been a fan and watched the show 'for the black and brown faces'. Jaye, who left the show between 2011 and 2017 to star in Waterloo Road, told The Mirror: 'Holby changed my life'. Tragic: This revelation comes after David's co-star Jaye Jacobs revealed the extent of her despair as the 'most diverse show on terrestrial TV' coming to an end 'My agent called me, and he said, 'Where are you? Because you will remember this moment.' Holby was massive then. It was the most diverse show on terrestrial TV. 'That's why I watched it, because there were so many black and brown faces in it. It was brilliant in every way.' Jaye's character enjoyed her own set of scandals, including sleeping with her friend Mickie Hendrie [Kelly Adams], an affair with Michael Spence [Hari Dhillon] and taking cocaine with Mark Williams [Robert Powell]. Talented: Jaye, who left the show between 2011 and 2017 to star in Waterloo Road, said: 'Holby changed my life (pictured in-character) Meanwhile Rosie Marcel, who has played Jac Naylor for 16 years, confessed she would 'love to be the next Ann Widdecombe' on Strictly. She claimed that she will 'absolutely stay in contact' with her co-stars, adding that she 'thought she would be playing Jac for the rest of her life'. The BBC announced it would scrap Holby City last year as it continues its drive to appear more northern, sparking a furious backlash among fans. Weeping: Meanwhile Rosie Marcel, who has played Jac Naylor for 16 years, confessed she would 'love to be the next Ann Widdecombe' on Strictly (pictured in 2019) The long-running medical drama has been filmed at the corporation's London Elstree Studios for the last 22 years. 'I find the BBC axing Holby City so they can have a soap in the north ridiculously misguided,' wrote one fan. They added that the north of England already has three of the country's biggest soaps with Hollyoaks, set in Chester, Coronation Street in Manchester, and Emmerdale in Yorkshire. They added: 'To make out that representation is part of the decision when you are now leaving only one soap in the south is so hypocritical.' Tobias Oliver added that Holby City already has big diversity credentials 'championing the NHS, a show that had a history of strong roles for LGBT and BAME actors and could reflect all corners of the UK through challenging storylines.' The final episode of Holby City airs on BBC One at 7.50pm Danniella Westbrook kept up with her fitness routine as she went for an outdoor workout in London on Monday. The former EastEnders star, 48, displayed her fit figure as she donned a blue crop top along with a pair of matching joggers. The actress also sported a pair of dark trainers as she was seen stretching ahead of her workout in a park. Casual: Daniella Westbrook displayed her fit figure as she donned a blue crop top as she went for a workout in London on Monday The former Celebrity Big Brother star styled her blonde locks into a bob while she also wore a pair of sunglasses. The outing comes after Danniella showed off the results of a year's worth of face surgery, filler and Botox in a glamorous snap as it's revealed she's set to go under the knife to have part of her rib put in her cheek. The actress opened up on her upcoming operation which she hinted may take its 'toll' on her, with the star having the procedure after her cheek was left damaged by botched dental work. Danniella, who looked amazing in new images, also shared that she's currently going through 'a lot of operations at the moment' as she told of her ongoing treatments to restore her face. Outfit: The actress also sported a pair of dark trainers as she was seen stretching ahead of her workout in a park The mum-of-two had previously undergone the rib procedure in 2018, after osteoporosis rotted away her cheekbones and gums. Speaking to OK! magazine about her latest bout of facial reconstruction, she explained: 'I'm going through a lot operations at the moment. They're good but they're very hard.' She continued: 'The first two of my operations haven't taken a toll on me but the next lot will do. I'm seeing a bone surgeon next who is going to be removing a rib.' MailOnline have contacted Danniella's rep for further comment. The actress has spent the last year getting lip filler and Botox, in addition to surgery on her face as she works hard to get back to her best. And it appears the hard work has paid off as Danniella looked stunning in glamorous new snaps. Transformation: The outing comes after Danniella showed off the results of a year's worth of face surgery, filler and Botox in a glamorous snap as she's set to go under the knife to have part of her rib put in her cheek The former Celebrity Big Brother star sported a white robe and a sleek palette of make-up as she lay down on a fancy bed in lovely new images. She was seen smiling away while posing for the camera, no doubt excited for what's to come in 2022. Last month, Danniella revealed that she was looking forward to her upcoming set of surgery. Sharing a throwback snap of herself on Instagram, she penned: 'Cant wait for all my surgery to be done will be back too my best and fighting fit and next year I will be 50! Bring it on Im ready. More than ready , Im ready for a full transformation physically. Danniella previously discussed first undergoing the procedure four years ago during an appearance on Good Morning Britain. The way she was: The actress' battle with drugs has been well-publicised, and she famously had her nose reconstructed after her septum collapsed from excessive cocaine use in 2002 She explained: 'When I was doing excessive amounts of drugs and lost my nose I would have got it then, not after being 13 years clean. I wouldn't have just got it in the last three years." On her dental work that went wrong, she said: 'The screws, which they have left in, the bone didn't close around them when I had implants, which led to blood getting into the bone so it just died. 'That gave me the septicaemia which gave me the bone disease and started rotting away and it's all down to that. 'They were going to have to take some of my skull but they're going to use a floating rib.' Surgery: Danniella opened up on her upcoming operation which she hinted may take its 'toll' on her, with the star having the procedure after her cheek was left damaged by botched dental work 9pictured in 2021) Touching her cheek, she went on: 'I have no cheek bone here at all where it's just gone from osteoporosis, nothing to do with cocaine at all. 'If it was I would openly say that it was, like I did before with my nose.' The news of her upcoming procedure comes months after she underwent surgery for a sinus infection. The actress previously told her fans that she was waiting to go to theatre at Aintree University Hospital, after doctors feared the nasty infection, which saw her end up in ICU, could 'reach her brain'. The following day, the former EastEnders star announced that the surgery had been a 'huge success' and she came bearing more good news for her concerned Twitter followers. Looking ahead: Last month, Danniella revealed that she was looking forward to her upcoming set of surgery as she shared a throwback snap from 2009 (pictured) Open: Danniella previously discussed first undergoing the procedure four years ago during an appearance on Good Morning Britain She wrote in November: 'Thanks for all the messages of support for my operation. It was a huge success and Im so happy thank you to @LivHospitals and the best staff surgical team and cleanest hospital ever x #NHS #Liverpool,' she said. Her hospitalisation comes after she vowed to turn her life around following years of drug abuse and relapsing onto 'cocaine and champagne' earlier in 2021. The actress' battle with drugs has been well-publicised, and she famously had her nose reconstructed after her septum collapsed from excessive cocaine use in 2002. At the height of her use, it was reported she would take up to five grams of cocaine a day, blowing close to 250,000 on the drug. The star has since embarked on multiple rehab stints in order to battle her demons - and revealed she was finally clean in June 2020, after attending a clinic in Mijas, Spain. Recovery: The news of her upcoming procedure comes months after she underwent surgery for a sinus infection Matt Smith has been seen filming scenes for his anticipated new movie Starve Acre. The British actor was spotted shooting in the Yorkshire countryside on Monday, where crew members had to fake stormy weather during the sunny day. Leading man Matt was seen getting soaked by a hose to simulate rain as filming got underway under blue skies. Action! Matt Smith has been seen filming scenes for his anticipated new movie Starve Acre in the Yorkshire countryside this week The actor, dressed in black, dried himself off with a towel after the soaking from the crew. During a break from filming a driver was seen bringing Matt his pet dog out of a car before the actor enjoyed a brisk walk along the fields. The movie was announced in January with BAFTA-nominated writer and director Daniel Kokotajlo at the helm. The thriller is based on Andrew Michael Hurley's novel of the same name. Leading man: Matt was seen enjoying a brisk walk with his pet dog during a break from filming According to Variety the film explores 'inherited trauma and loss within a world ruled by supernatural folklore.' Matt and Lord Of The Rings actress Morfydd Clark play a disconnected couple worried about their son. Set in their family estate, Starve Acre, in 1970s England, Richard (Smith) and Juliette (Clark) find their family life shattered when their son Ewan starts acting strangely. Why does it always rain on me? Leading man Matt was seen getting soaked by a hose to simulate rain as filming got underway under blue skies on Monday Soaked: The actor was soaked from head to toe whilst the crew around him basked in the sunshine New project: According to Variety the film explores 'inherited trauma and loss within a world ruled by supernatural folklore' The couple grow farther apart when Richard buries himself in local folklore including the myth that an ancient tree set on their estate possesses mystical powers while Juliette seeks comfort in their local community. While Matt keeps busy with his latest movie project, it has also been reported this month that he could make a Doctor Who comeback for a special 60th anniversary celebration of the show. Rumours have been rife amongst fans that the current Time Lord, Jodie Whittaker, 39, is set to hand the baton back to David Tennant, 50, who played the 10th incarnation of the Doctor from 2005 to 2010, when she leaves the sci-fi series after three special episodes air this year. Drying off: Matt clutched a towel in between takes of the action scene Star: Matt was helped by wardrobe as he dried off before later donning a brown waistcoat for another scene Action scene: Matt was also seen collapsed on the grass behind a stone wall Horror: Matt and Lord Of The Rings actress Morfydd Clark play a disconnected couple worried about their son But, when the programme returns in 2023, David and Matt, 39, who himself appeared from 2010 to 2014, as well as Christopher Eccleston, 58, who starred in 2005, and Peter Capaldi, 63, who played the title role from 2013 to 2017, could all appear again if showrunner and dedicated Doctor Who fan Russell T Davies, 58, realises his dream. A TV insider told The Sun: 'The BBC wanted something unique to mark six decades of Doctor Who and while getting all the former time lords together will be a challenge, its one Russell might just achieve. Thriller: Set in their family estate, Starve Acre, in 1970s England, Richard (Smith) and Juliette (Clark) find their family life shattered when their son Ewan starts acting strangely 1970s set: The couple grow farther apart when Richard buries himself in local folklore including the myth that an ancient tree set on their estate possesses mystical powers Stunning setting: The production has set up home in the Yorkshire countryside for the shoot Man's best friend: Matt's beloved pet pooch has joined him for the shoot 'After all, he was the man responsible for signing up Christopher and David back in 2005, and he is one of the few people who might convince them to be a part of the show again. 'It remains to be seen if he can achieve an exact copy of The Five Doctors, but he will certainly want to capture some of the spirit of that landmark episode in these specials.' MailOnline has contacted the BBC for comment. All go: Crew members milled around with one in charge of the powerful hose Getting stuck in: The production did its best to simulate rainy weather during the sunshine Domenica Calarco and Jack Millar got their happily ever after on Tuesday's episode of Married At First Sight. The Sydney-based makeup artist, 29, admitted that she wouldn't be able to forgive herself if she didn't give her relationship with Jack, 26, a shot on the outside world. As the rain fell, an ecstatic Jack began: 'I think it's safe to say that throughout all this, I felt pretty much felt every emotion possible.' So sweet! Married At First Sight's Domenica Calarco and Jack Millar appeared to get their fairytale ending on Tuesday night 'I knew that no matter what you were there by my side, you have shown me time and time again. 'You have made this experiment one of the most incredible experiences of my life. Not anything else.' 'Domenica. I would love to continue this relationship on the outside world because I truly do believe we have something great,' he said with a smile. As the rain fell, an ecstatic Jack began: 'I think it's safe to say that throughout all this, I felt pretty much felt every emotion possible' Domenica couldn't contain her excitement as she revealed she wanted to also give their experiment a go on the outside world. 'Jack, what a bloody incredible journey it is that we've been on from day one,' she said. 'We bonded. It was instant chemistry, You said in your wedding vows that you wanted a challenge. And I know I did just that. 'There was never a point in the experiment where I gave up.' Cute! Domenica couldn't contain her excitement as she revealed she wanted to also give their experiment a go Taking a chance: Domenica explained that while she hoped her feelings towards her partner would be much more stronger than they are, she was willing to give it a go Domenica explained that while she hoped that her feelings towards her partner would be much more stronger than they are, she was willing to give it a go. 'I know what it feels like to walk away,' she said. 'It's a consuming decision that can completely change the course of your life throughout the entire experiment. 'I never gave up hope even through the toughest of times because I wanted to believe that the chemistry was shared from day one meant something. 'I don't want to walk away from you leaving any stone unturned. You are a one in a million guy.' Fairytale ending: 'I don't want to walk away from you leaving any stone unturned. You are a one in a million guy,' she said It comes after Jack confirmed he and Domenica don't make it after he was spotted eating at a chicken shop on January 13. The financial worker was photographed looking downcast without his wedding ring just hours before filming the show's anticipated reunion episode. Jack was spotted spending time with co-stars Ella Ding and her 'husband' Mitch Eynaud in Sydney's Coogee, and his bride was nowhere to be seen. Trouble in paradise? Jack Millar has all but confirmed he and bride Domenica Calarco don't last after he was spotted eating at a chicken shop without his wedding ring. Pictured with Ella Ding Alec Baldwin has been pictured preparing for a new movie, five months on from the death of Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer who was shot and killed on the set of his film Rust. The actor was seen studying a script for a new movie he is due to start filming in Rome in the coming days. Sitting outside a bar in the Italian city, Alec, 63, looked disheveled as he ate alone while reading his annotated script. Working: Alec Baldwin has been pictured preparing for a new movie, five months on from the death of Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer who was killed on the set of his film Rust Alec wore an oversized black t-shirt, with a mask around his chin and sunglasses on top of his greying hair. In between studying his lines, he was seen sharing a conversation with a group at a neighbouring table, cheerfully showing them something on his phone. He was later spotted being collected by a female member of staff to head to rehearsals. Alec is working on two Italian films, Kid Santa and Billie's Magic World, according to Variety. Back to movies: The actor was seen studying a script for a new movie he is due to start filming in Rome in the coming days The films, which are being produced by Alec and his brother Daniel Baldwin, who is also starring in the two movies, will soon begin shooting in Rome. Kid Santa and Billie's Magic World are both by Italian director Francesco Cinquemani, who previously worked with Alec on the 2015 film Andron. He also directed the 2021 film The Christmas Witch, which starred Alec's brother William Baldwin. The two films are being billed as 'live-action/animation family Christmas comedies', according to Variety. Solo lunch: Sitting outside a bar in the Italian city, Alec, 63, looked disheveled as he ate alone while reading his annotated script Smiling: He was later seen being collected by a female member of staff to head to rehearsals, looking in good spirits as he prepared for a day at work Calling home? At one point the star was joined by a male friend as he studied his phone intently Gianluca Curti, the chief of Italy's Minerva Pictures, told the site the Baldwin brothers will be in Rome for four weeks shooting the two movies' live action scenes. Curti also said Alec's participation in the two films preceded the fatal shooting on the set of Rust. Deadline, meanwhile, reports the brother working with Alec is not Daniel but William. According to the site, the brothers will be doing both live-action acting and voice work. In Rome: Alec wore an oversized black t-shirt, with a mask around his chin and sunglasses on top of his greying hair Leading man: Alec was seen reading a heavily annotated script over his lunch Back to back movies: Alec is working on two Italian films, Kid Santa and Billie's Magic World, according to Variety Back at work: The Hollywood star has taken on the heavy workload just months after the tragic shooting on the set of his movie Rust Alec has been dealing with an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit over the on-set shooting death of Hutchins. The cinematographer, 42, died on October 21 last year when a prop gun used in the film Rust was fired by Alec after he was told it wasn't loaded, shooting her in the chest. Director Joel Souza was also injured from Baldwin's prop gun, though he survived his injuries. Family affair: The films, which are being produced by Alec and his brother Daniel Baldwin, who is also starring in the two movies, will soon begin shooting in Rome Intense shoot: It's been reported Cuti that the Baldwin brothers will be in Rome for four weeks shooting the two movies' live action scenes. Committed: Alec's participation in the two films preceded the fatal shooting on the set of Rust Earlier this month, lawyers for the film's armorer, Hannah Gutierrez, released a statement condemning the actor for pointing his firearm at crew members despite that being a violation of safety protocol. 'Mr. Baldwin knew that he could never point a firearm at crew members under any circumstances and had a duty of safety to his fellow crew members,' attorney Jason Bowles said in a statement obtained by ABC. 'Yet he did point the gun at Halyna before the fatal incident against all rules and common sense.' Bowles added that the monitor on set was broken on the day of the fatal shooting which 'further prevented Hannah from knowing what was going on inside the Church,' ABC reported. This statement was in response to new documents in the wrongful death lawsuit against Baldwin and the production filed by Hutchins family. Popular: At one point during his meal Alec was seeing sharing something on his phone with the table behind his Keeping busy: The actor has left wife Hilaria and their children behind in the US to head back to work in front of the camera Tough time: Alec has been dealing with an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit over the on-set shooting death of Hutchins Baldwin appeared to pass the blame onto the victim in an arbitration demand and claimed that his contract shielded him from any financial responsibility related to Hutchins' death. Despite the tragedy, Baldwin had attempted to convince cast and crew to finish filming Rust in Hutchins' honor in the weeks after the shooting and have the proceeds from the movie go toward a settlement with the woman's husband, Matthew Hutchins, and nine-year-old son, according to the filing. The filing also revealed that Baldwin and Matthew had been exchanging text messages. The Hutchins lawyer, Brian Panish, hit back at the actor: 'Alec Baldwin once again is trying to avoid liability and accountability for his reckless actions before and on October 21st that resulted in the death of Halyna Hutchins,' Panish told Deadline. Shooting: The cinematographer, 42, died on October 21 last year when a prop gun used in the film Rust was fired by Alec after he was told it wasn't loaded, shooting her in the chest 'Baldwin's disclosure of personal texts with Matt Hutchins is irrelevant to his demand for arbitration and fails to demonstrate anything other than Hutchins' dignity in his engagement with Baldwin. 'It is shameful that Baldwin claims Hutchins' actions in filing a wrongful death lawsuit derailed the completion of Rust,' Panish added. 'The only action that ended the film's production was Baldwin's killing of Halyna Hutchins.' The Emmy-winning actor also claimed that he was following Halyna Hutchins' directions when he pointed what turned out to be a gun loaded with live rounds at her on the set of the movie Rust and pulled the trigger, killing the cinematographer. Blame: Earlier this month, lawyers for the film's armorer, Hannah Gutierrez, released a statement condemning the actor for pointing his firearm at crew members Staying busy: Alec has been keeping a low profile in recent weeks after an intirial burst of interviews and public discourse after the shooting Baldwin has been named as a defendant in multiple lawsuits that have been filed in connection with the fatal shooting. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos for ABC, the actor claimed the gun went off while he was practicing his blocking for the scene, with Hutchins instructing him to point the gun to the side of the camera in her direction. 'And I cock the gun, I go, 'Can you see that? Can you see that? Can you see that?' And she says ... and then I let go of the hammer of the gun, and the gun goes off. I let go of the hammer of the gun, the gun goes off,' he said. The shooting is currently under investigation, and a search warrant was issued in late December for Baldwin's cellphone, which he was seen talking on shortly after the shooting. The warrant give police permission to go through all text messages and photos he might have, along with stored location data. His latest court filings doubled down on his assertion that, while the death was tragic, he is not responsible. Legal matters: Baldwin has been named as a defendant in multiple lawsuits that have been filed in connection with the fatal shooting 'This is a rare instance when the system broke down, and someone should be held legally culpable for the tragic consequences. That person is not Alec Baldwin,' according to the filing. 'October 21 was also the worst day in Alec Baldwin's life. That day has and will continue to haunt Baldwin.' The filing repeatedly argued that the actor was not responsible for the cinematographer's death because he had been assured that the gun he was using in the scene did not contain live bullets, and also because he was not responsible for checking the ammunition, as New York Times first reported. 'An actor cannot rule that a gun is safe,' the filing said. 'That is the responsibility of other people on the set.' According to the document, Hutchins instructed Baldwin how to hold the gun. His say: In an interview with George Stephanopoulos for ABC, the actor claimed the gun went off while he was practicing his blocking for the scene 'She directed Baldwin to hold the gun higher, to a point where it was directed toward her,' the filing stated. 'She was looking carefully at the monitor and then at Baldwin, and then back again, as she gave these instructions. In giving and following these instructions, Hutchins and Baldwin shared a core, vital belief: that the gun was 'cold' and contained no live rounds.' Baldwin then asked Hutchins if she wanted him to pull back the hammer on the Colt, and she allegedly said yes. The actor pulled back the hammer 'but not far enough to actually cock the gun,' the filing said. When Baldwin let go of the hammer, the gun discharged. Betty White championed for animals throughout her decades long career, and her legacy lived on Sunday evening when John Travolta's son, Ben, adopted the dog that was brought on stage by Jamie Lee Curtis at the Oscars during White's moving tribute. Travolta shared an adorable snap of Ben cradling the cute puppy and wrote: 'Ben adopted this dog from last nights Oscar tribute to Betty White.' He tagged Jamie Lee Curtis and the Paw Works rescue organization. Curtis first brought the pup adorably named Mac N Cheese in her arms onto the Dolby Theatre stage at the 94th Academy Awards during the in memoriam segment where she gave a few words about the on-screen legend and highlighted her work for the rescue animal community. Happy home: Betty White championed for animals throughout her decades long career, and her legacy lived on Sunday evening when John Travolta's son, Ben, adopted the dog that was brought on stage by Jamie Lee Curtis at the Oscars during White's moving tribute Sweethearts: Curtis first brought the pup adorably named Mac N Cheese in her arms onto the Dolby Theatre stage at the 94th Academy Awards during the in memoriam segment where she gave a few words about the on-screen legend and highlighted her work for the rescue animal community Travolta proudly stood behind his youngest son in the social shared posted to his nearly four million followers, which garnered more than 214,000 likes in less than 24 hours after it was published online. 'On a night of winners and losers, we think Mac N Cheese is the biggest winner of all,' the nonprofit wrote while sharing the same picture of John and Ben. 'We know @BettyWhite was shining down last night. Happy life little lady.' The Travoltas' smiled while showing off the newest addition to the family, who joins a host of well-loved and taken care of pets which are regularly seen on the Grease star's Instagram account. On Sunday night, Jamie sparkled wearing a gorgeous Stella McCartney gown as she brought the golden brown pooch with her to memorialize the comedian, who died at 99 on New Year's Eve. Star of the show: On Sunday night, Jamie sparkled wearing a gorgeous Stella McCartney gown as she brought the golden brown pooch with her to memorialize the comedian, who died at 99 on New Year's Eve Best co-star: Curtis couldn't help but brag about the beautiful puppy before taking the stage for a moving tribute to Hollywood icon Betty White, who was known just as much for her comedic presence as she was for tireless campaigning for animal rescue organizations 'She was a woman who cared so much for not just her two-legged friends but for animals just like this one,' she said. 'So, the greatest gift you could give Betty White is to open your heart and your home and adopt a rescue dog just like Mac N Cheese from Paw Works' 'She was not only a Golden Girl, she was a legend,' Curtis said of White. 'She brightened every room she walked in and brought a smile to all who watched her on the screen day in and day out, for almost a century.' 'She was a woman who cared so much for not just her two-legged friends but for animals just like this one. So, the greatest gift you could give Betty White is to open your heart and your home and adopt a rescue dog just like Mac N Cheese from Paw Works. She gave a nod to the iconic Golden Girls theme song and said: 'Thank you, Betty, thank you for being a friend to us all.' 'Thank you, Betty, thank you for being a friend to us all,' Jamie said while paying tribute to the Golden Girls theme song Later on Instagram, Jamie wrote of 'A MAGICAL ending to the story from last night. At the Oscars I reconnected with my friend, John Travolta' She added: 'We starred together in the movie PERFECT back in 1984. I had already left the Dolby theater last night after honoring Betty White and was on my way home when someone texted me a photo of John holding little mac & cheese in the green room before his presentation of the best actor Oscar. Later on Instagram, Jamie wrote of 'A MAGICAL ending to the story from last night. At the Oscars I reconnected with my friend, John Travolta.' She added: 'We starred together in the movie PERFECT back in 1984. I had already left the Dolby theater last night after honoring Betty White and was on my way home when someone texted me a photo of John holding little mac & cheese in the green room before his presentation of the best actor Oscar. 'I thought it was so beautiful to see him with her and then today I found out that he and his son, Ben have adopted beautiful little mac & cheese and are taking her home today. It is an emotional end and a perfect tribute to Betty White and it shines a light and AMPLIFIES the message that heroes who, like Betty, and Chad from @pawworks and Nancy from @perfect_pet_rescue and the team at @maedayrescue and the hundreds of thousands of other rescues, who love and support ANIMALS, that rescuing animals and offering them shelter from the storm of life and a warm and loving home is one of life's most important actions we humans can take!' The reunions were plentiful on Sunday evening as John presented the Best Actor award with the cast from the classic '94 Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction, and even reenacted an all-time favorite dance scene with Uma Thurman as Samuel L. Jackson pretended to play the keys to Chuck Berry's You Never Can Tell. He's understood to be a single man after dumping fiancee Katie Price over allegations of infidelity. And Carl Woods appeared to be taking his mind off the former glamour model following a two hour gym session in Hertford on Monday. The luxe car dealer, 33, chatted on his phone while dressed casually in a blue and black tracksuit, rounded off with white Nike trainers. Time for himself: Carl Woods de-stressed with a two-hour gym session in Hertford on Monday, amid dumping Katie Price 'in a string of angry texts' after accusing her of cheating On Sunday, it was reported that reality star Carl allegedly sent former glamour model Katie, 43, a string of angry text messages calling her 'a cheat and a player'. A source claimed Carl ended his 11-month engagement to Katie as he could no longer trust her, adding to The Sun: 'Carl believes Katie went behind his back with another man. 'He lashed out in a series of texts and accused her of lying to him and using her pals to hide the phone number of the man he thinks shes been seeing. 'He branded her "a cheat and a player" and told her he has had enough. He feels he can no longer trust her and its the end of the road.' Self-care: The luxe car dealer, 33, looked as though he was taking his mind off recent relationship woes Keeping busy: Carl dressed casually in a dusty blue and black tracksuit, which was rounded off with white Nike trainers Call: The star maintained on the phone after grabbing a reenergising coffee Speaking out? At times, the conversation appeared tense as Carl walked and talked Leaving: Carl was then seen getting into his car MailOnline has contacted representatives for Katie and Carl for comment. The split comes just a day after Katie ditched the engagement ring which Carl gave her, while he has now deleted all trace of their romance from his social media account. Sources told The Sun: 'Katie and Carl have decided to split up. It's been a difficult couple of months and their ongoing court cases have just added even more stress to the situation. Drama: On Sunday, it was reported that reality star Carl allegedly sent former glamour model Katie, 43, a string of angry text messages calling her 'a cheat and a player' Disloyal? A source added to The Sun: 'Carl believes Katie went behind his back with another man' 'It really seems to be over for now and they are both very sad about it. But of course no one would be surprised if they got back together.' While Carl deleted all photographs of the pair from his Instagram account, he and Katie still follow each other on the social media platform. It comes after Carl appeared before Colchester Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after being charged with 'abusive and threatening behaviour'. Turbulent: 'He lashed out in a series of texts and accused her of lying to him and using her pals to hide the phone number of the man he thinks shes been seeing,' the source said Trouble in paradise: The reported split comes just a day after Katie ditched the engagement ring which Carl gave her, while he has now deleted all trace of their romance from his social media account The court case was referenced in the comments section of one of Carl's social media posts, as one follower questioned: 'Thought you said you didn't hit her? But up in court today.' While Carl, who was charged with threatening behaviour, replied: 'Why don't you read what the charge is ACTUALLY for.' One fan who was heavily defensive of Carl, wrote: 'He's in court for being threatening, not violence. Price admitted she lied about the bruise and getting punched. She should be charged for lying and wasting police time. Charges: Carl appeared before Colchester Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after being charged with 'abusive and threatening behaviour' 'It's disgusting to falsely accuse a man (or woman) of domestic violence, makes a mockery of the whole system and genuine victims. They added: 'I feel sorry for Carl Woods he has been tangled into such a horrible mess. If he leaves her, we all know how vindictive she is and she could lie again to the police. 'If he stays, it's a permenant reminder of being with the person who falsely accued you and dragged your name through the mud. Romance: Carl was arrested after Katie was allegedly punched in the face on August 22, 2021 'People are even questioning his dog owning skills because of HER track record with animals, even though it's clear he looks after Sid very well. 'Guilt by association and all that. Wouldn't want to be in his shoes, I tell you. Appearing to appreciate the supportive comments, Carl tagged the user and posted a couple of praising hands emojis. The male model was seen arriving at court hand-in-hand with Katie after the pair recently returned from their recently holiday in Thailand. Carl was arrested last year after Katie was allegedly punched in the face on August 22, 2021. He was subsequently charged under Section 4 of the Public Order Act following an incident at his home in Little Canfield, Essex last year. The maximum sentence he faces is up to six months. Video has resurfaced of Will Smith slapping a reporter who attempted to kiss him on the red carpet during the Moscow premiere of Men In Black 3 in 2012. Ukrainian prankster Vitalii Sediuk embraced Smith on the red carpet and kissed him on both cheeks. Smith, 53, promptly pushed Sediuk away and then slapped him on the cheek. 'What the hell is your problem?' Video has resurfaced of Will Smith slapping a reporter who attempted to kiss him on the red carpet during the Moscow premiere of Men In Black 3 in 2012 'Hey man, what the hell is your problem?' Will asked Sediuk. Recounting the incident as he approached the next reporter moments later, Smith said: 'He tried to kiss me on the mouth. 'He's lucky I didn't try to sucker punch him... Sorry, I said that on camera,' he added. Smith addressed the kissing incident during an interview on The Late Show With David Letterman where he called it 'awkward.' Smith turned his cheek to both kisses, promptly pushed Sediuk away and then slapped him on the cheek 'He's lucky I didn't try to sucker punch him... Sorry, I said that on camera,' he added 'We're doing an interview. He's a reporter, he says, "I'm your biggest fan, can I have a hug?" So I go to give this joker a hug and he tries to lean in to kiss me... it's just awkward Dave!' Smith said. 'That's what they were saying, they were like "Oh no, we're sorry, it's just his schtick." And I said that's why his a** got schtuck!"' he added. Sediuk, who has pranked a slew of celebrities, later apologized for kissing Will and admitted it was 'too much'. 'I apologise for my behaviour... I think it was too much. I just wanted to do something extraordinary to impress him,' he said in a video on Hip Hollywood. Sediuk, who has pranked a slew of celebrities on the red carpet including Kim Kardashian and Madonna, later apologized for kissing Will and admitted it was 'too much' Smith, 53, promptly pushed Sediuk away and then slapped him on the cheek Meanwhile, back in November, Smith taught a young boy how to do a fake slap for the camera during a Q&A at a Variety-sponsored King Richard screening. The youngster, named Chris, wanted to know exactly how Will 'fakes being hit and beat up' in the movies. 'Alright, come here. C'mon. Come on up!' Smith said. 'I'm going to [clap my hands together] and you just turn your head when I go. And don't fall down the steps.' Will also demonstrated his slapping technique on a little boy named Chris during a Q&A at a Variety-sponsored King Richard screening back in November After a practice run of the fake slap, Smith said: 'And then you just put it in a scene. So I need you to say, "Man, where's my money?"' The child repeated: 'Man where's my money?' Smith then pretended to slap Chris and then gave him a high five and a fist bump. Controversy erupted over the weekend after Will smacked Chris Rock on stage after the comedian cracked a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith's appearance. After a few times practicing the stage combat, Smith said: 'And then you just put it in a scene. So I need you to say, "Hey man, where's my money?"' Smith's meltdown continued when he returned to his seat as he repeatedly screamed: 'Keep my wife's name out of your f***ing mouth'. The crowd then fell into stunned silence - and any questions over whether the altercation was genuine were answered when just over half an hour later Smith was given the Best Actor award and apologized for the assault. The actor released a statement on Monday, saying his behavior was 'unacceptable and inexcusable' and left him 'embarrassed'. Scandal: Will smacked Chris Rock on stage after the comedian cracked a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith's appearance He wrote in an Instagram post that he was 'embarrassed' by his actions, which shocked the ceremony attendees, producers and viewers. 'Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive,' he wrote. 'My behavior at last night's Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable. Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada's medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally. 'I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.' Smith then went on to say sorry to the organizers and the producers of the show. Rock has not responded to Smith's apology, or commented on the Sunday night incident. They have been a rumored couple for several months and now Kate Bosworth and Justin Long have taken their romance public. The 39-year-old Blue Crush star was spotted out in Los Angeles riding shotgun with her 43-year-old actor beau on Monday. Kate and Justin - who are reportedly already living together - appear to have gotten quite comfortable with one another as they ticked items off their to-do list while running errands. It's official: Kate Bosworth and Justin Long have taken their romance public after months of dating speculation and were spotted out in Los Angeles running errands Stepping out at Whole Foods, Justin was seen in black slacks, a T-shirt and an army green bomber jacket with a facemask. He scoped out a display of fresh greenery and selected a small potted plant to bring home. After picking up provisions, Long headed back with a bag of groceries to meet Kate who was waiting in the passenger seat of her Audi SUV. Their outing comes several months after the He's Just Not That Into You actor revealed that he was off the market, gushing about his mysterious new girlfriend on a podcast. Casual day: The 39-year-old Blue Crush star was spotted out riding shotgun with her 43-year-old actor beau on Monday Rumor has it: Kate and Justin reportedly got together in 2021 after they met filming a movie together and have been quietly dating ever since Shortly after, PageSix uncovered that the new lady in his life was actress Kate Bosworth, whom he made a movie with in 2021. Earlier that year, the blonde beauty announced her split from 51-year-old husband Michael Polish. PageSix said that 'the two met while filming a movie in Fayetteville, Ark., [in 2021]' In May she talked up Justin on Instagram when they wrapped the movie: 'Holy moly @justinlong you are a truly spectacular / fun / funny / kind / rare / thoughtful / totally. f*kn. rad human being.' To do list: Stepping out at Whole Foods, Justin was seen in black slacks, a T-shirt and an army green bomber jacket with a facemask Easy breezy: After picking up provisions, Long headed back with a bag of groceries to meet Kate who was waiting in the passenger seat of her Audi SUV In love: Their outing comes several months after the He's Just Not That Into You actor revealed that he was off the market, gushing about his mysterious new girlfriend on a podcast She added, 'THANK YOU for lifting us up you kept it light & full of laughter daily, even through the toughest moments. You gnome how much I love ya (sorry had to ;).' And an insider told the site that this autumn he went with the beauty on her trip to Padaste Manor in Estonia. They reportedly had a 'romantic weekend.' Justin then confirmed his relationship status during his podcast a in December while discussing the controversial pizza topping of pineapple with comic Fortune Feimster. Speaking on his 'Life is Short with Justin Long' podcast, the 41-year-old actress said when asked to give her favorite topping: 'This is controversial: pineapple.' So cute: PageSix said that 'the two met while filming a movie in Fayetteville, Ark., earlier this year.' In May she talked up Justin on Instagram when they wrapped the movie: 'Holy moly @justinlong you are a truly spectacular / fun / funny / kind / rare / thoughtful' To which, Justin replied: 'People have been saying that lately. It's funny, my girlfriend said hers is she loves the pineapple, too. I've never been with anyone who likes pineapple on pizza.' A source later told Us Weekly: 'They've been dating for a few months now. They secretly have been on a few getaways together. They both love to travel.' Adding that the couple is 'not hiding the fact that they're together', rather they're 'just staying low-key and private about their relationship.' Long has previously been linked to Amanda Seyfried, Kirsten Dunst and Drew Barrymore. Kate and her ex Michael were last photographed together in January of 2021. The couple met in 2011 during the making of the adventure drama Big Sur, which she starred in and he directed. Kate and Michael announced their engagement in August 2012 and married on August 31, 2013 at The Ranch at Rock Creek in Philipsburg, Montana. Advertisement Eddie Redmayne was every inch the suave screen hero as he led the star-studded arrivals for the premiere of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore at London's Royal Festival Hall on Tuesday. The actor, who plays the heroic wizard Newt Scamander in the Harry Potter spin-off series, cut a dapper figure as he graced the red carpet alongside his co-stars Jude Law and Mads Mikkelson. Fantastic Beasts' release has been marred by a string of controversies in recent months including Johnny Depp being dropped from the film in the wake of his legal woes, writer JK Rowling facing heavy criticism for her comments about the transgender community, and star Ezra Miller's arrest at a bar in Hawaii. Leading men! Eddie Redmayne (left) was every inch the suave hero as he joined co-star Jude Law (right) leading the star-studded arrivals for the premiere of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore at London 's Royal Festival Hall on Tuesda Eddie opted for a sharp black suit with a slightly longer jacket, teamed with a crisp white shirt and an enlarged white flower pinned on his lapel. The star was accompanied by his wife Hannah Bagshawe for the red carpet, with the brunette opting for a dramatic pale blue dress with a layered skirt, teamed with chunky black lace-up boots. Meanwhile Jude opted for a more casual ensemble, opted for a pale pink suit jacket and grey trousers, teamed with a camel scarf and a white t-shirt. Date night: The star was accompanied by his wife Hannah Bagshawe for the red carpet, with the brunette opting for a dramatic pale blue dress with a layered skirt, teamed with chunky black lace-up boots Smart: Eddie opted for a sharp black suit with a slightly longer jacket, teamed with a crisp white shirt and an enlarged white flower pinned on his lapel Jovial: After arriving for the red carpet, both Eddie and Jude were seen chatting and posing for snaps together, as fans await the moment they team up on-screen to fight the villainous Grindewald Simple: Meanwhile Jude opted for a more casual ensemble, opted for a pale pink suit jacket and grey trousers, teamed with a camel scarf and a white t-shirt The NEW leading man! Mads Mikkelson, who has taken over the role of Grindewald from Johnny Depp, was seen posing up a storm as he made his way along the red carpet Ready to see the film? Dressed in Giorgio Armani, the Danish star was in high spirits as he posed for photographers on the red carpet Dapper: Mads looked ready to continue the evening's celebrations as he rocked for the after party at Somerset House The third film in the Fantastic Beasts series sees Newt Scamander assemble a motley crew of wizards and witches to try and save the world. The team Newt and Dumbledore have put together to include Newt's brother Theseus Scamander (Callum Turner), professor Eulalie 'Lallie' Hicks (Jessica Williams), Minerva McGonagall (Fionna Glascott), and Muggle baker Jacob (Dan Fogler). The motley crew will be joining forces to take on the powerful dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald, who seeks domination over the wizarding world. Exciting: Eddie is set to reprise his role as the titular hero Newt Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts film series Jovial: He and Jude were in high spirits as they posed on the red carpet together Standing: Meanwhile the film's female cast members didn't disappoint, with Katherine Waterstone, who plays witch and Newt's love interest Porpentina 'Tina' Goldstein, opting for a sartorial chic-inspired two-piece SO much colour! Fiona Glascott opted for a fun pink and red jumpsuit with an oversized bow detailing as she arrived for the premiere Flawless: The actress, who plays a younger incarnation of Professor Minerva McGonagall in the series teamed the playful look with pointed-toe black heels While The Secrets Of Dumbledore's male cast certainly caught fans' attention thanks to their beloved roles, the film's leading ladies didn't disappoint with their glamorous red carpet looks. Leading the pack was Katherine Waterstone, who plays witch and Newt's love interest Porpentina 'Tina' Goldstein, and she opted for a sartorial chic-inspired two-piece, consisting of a sophisticated peplum top and flared trousers. The star styled her glossy brunette tresses into a sleek up-do as she showed off her simple and stylish ensemble. Fiona Glascott, who plays a younger incarnation of Professor Minerva McGonagall, in the series, opted for a fun pink and red jumpsuit with an oversized bow detailing. Busty: Maria Fernanda Candido, who stars as Brazil's Minister Of Magic Vicencia Santos, put on a busty display in a plunging black silver and gown Bring the drama! She styled her brunette tresses into a voluminous half-up half-down style as she arrived at the famous London venue for the premiere Maria Fernanda Candido, who stars as Brazil's Minister Of Magic Vicencia Santos, put on a busty display in a plunging black silver and gown. Alison Sudol, who has played Queenie Goldstein in the Fantastic Beasts series, was a vision in an eye-catching yellow gown that boasted an array of dramatic frills. The American actress' Regency-inspired dress boasted an eye-catching print with a matching sheer scarf, puffed sleeves and belted waist. Sweeping her blonde tresses into a sleek updo, Alison added to her look with a slightly darkened lip as she arrived for the premiere. Hard to miss! Alison Sudol, who has played Queenie Goldstein in the Fantastic Beasts series, was a vision in an eye-catching yellow gown that boasted an array of dramatic frills What a colour! The American actress' Regency-inspired dress boasted an eye-catching print with a matching sheer scarf, puffed sleeves and belted waist Bringing the drama! Jessica Williams, who plays Professor Eulalie 'Lally' Hicks, donned a dramatic pink frilled gown adorned with an oversized black frill and a floral overlay, which she paired with Vince Camuto shoes The premiere comes mere hours after the film's star Ezra Miller was arrested at a karaoke bar in Hilo on Sunday, where they were harassing a number of patrons with belligerent behaviour. The police were called at 11:30 PM on Sunday evening and arrested the actor on charges of disorderly conduct and harassment. The incident happened at a karaoke bar on Silva Street in Hilo, where Miller was reportedly hurling obscenities at a 23-year-old woman singing karaoke. Elegance! Maja Bloom left little to the imagination in a perilously plunging pale blue gown with a floral overlay, teamed with sparkly silver heels Afterparty: Maja looked just as sensational for the celebrations post premiere, which were held at Somerset House Dramatic: The third film in the Fantastic Beasts series sees Newt Scamander assemble a motley crew of wizards and witches to try and save the world Anticipated: Jude will once again reprise his role as a younger incarnation of Dumbledore Moving on: Mads Mikkelsen (left in the film's trailer) is set to replace Johnny Depp (right) in the film series as the villainous Grindewald, after the actor was dropped from the series in the wake of his legal battle with ex-wife Amber Heard The police arrived at the karaoke bar around 11:30 PM and placed Miller under arrest and took them into custody. It's unclear how long Miller was in custody for, though they posted $500 bail and was ultimately released. Tom Felton was among one of the first stars arriving on the red carpet, as he hosted proceedings. The actor, best known for his role as Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter film series, grabbed a quick selfie with fans as he arrived to front the red carpet coverage. Sporting a midnight blue suit from Giorgio Armani, Tom was greeted by an army of fans as he arrived to present the star-studded red carpet event, briefly pausing to snap a selfie with a fan. Suited and booted: Tom Felton was among one of the first stars arriving to host the premiere for Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore on London's Royal Festival Hall on Tuesday Entrance: The actor, best known for his role as Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter film series, took to the red carpet as he prepared to host the star-studded event Dapper: Ahead of the premiere, Tom was seen making his way to the red carpet to host the live launch for Harry Potter fans Say cheese! Sporting a midnight blue suit from Giorgio Armani, Tom was greeted by an army of fans as he arrived to present the star-studded red carpet event, briefly pausing to snap a selfie with a fan Safety first: Tom sported a face covering as the evening progressed to the after party at Somerset House Also in attendance was JK Rowling, who penned the iconic book series which sparked the Fantastic Beasts spin-off series, and she cut a glamorous figure in a form-fitting navy blue gown. The dress boasted a sparkling silver diamante neckline and a dramatic thigh-high split, and flowed into a matching cape, with JK among the first stars to arrive for the red carpet. In recent months, JK's statements on transgender issues were branded transphobic by some fans. Stunning: Also in attendance was JK Rowling, who penned the iconic book series which sparked the Fantastic Beasts spin-off series, and she cut a glamorous figure in a form-fitting navy blue gown Stunning: The dress boasted a sparkling silver diamante neckline and a dramatic thigh-high split, and flowed into a matching cape, with JK among the first stars to arrive for the red carpet Outrage: In recent months, JK's statements on transgender issues were branded transphobic by some fans Backlash: The controversy surrounding her began after she tweeted about biological sex, criticising an opinion piece that used the term 'people who menstruate' instead of women The controversy surrounding her began after she tweeted about biological sex leading to backlash and a subsequent 'cancellation' from the trans community. In June 2020, she took to Twitter to criticise an opinion piece that used the term 'people who menstruate' instead of women. She then continued with a thread discussing biological sex. She later clarified that she respects 'every trans person's rights to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them,' and went on to say she would march 'if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. Speaking out: She later clarified that she respects 'every trans person's rights to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them,' and went on to say she would march 'if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans' Claims: 'At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female,' she said, the Associated Press reported at the time. 'I do not believe it's hateful to say so' 'At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female,' she said, the Associated Press reported at the time. 'I do not believe it's hateful to say so.' Then, in September 2020, she faced renewed calls of transphobia after it was revealed the the villain in her latest book, Troubled Blood - written under Rowling's pseudonym Robert Galbraith - is a male serial killer who dresses as a woman to slay his victims. In the wake of these remarks, Harry Potter actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma and Eddie Redmayne, who stars in her Fantastic Beasts films, criticised the author. Sharp: The Secrets Of Dumbledore's director David Yates also put on a sharp display as he arrived for the star-studded red carpet launch, ahead of the film's UK release on Friday, April 8 Family trip: Producer David Heyman was joined by his wife Rose Uniacke, and their son, for the film's premiere In December, Rowling was once again forced to deny that she is transphobic as she argued for sex, not gender identity, to be the 'basis of decisions on safeguarding'. Last week, Rowling also accused Labour of cancelling women on International Women's Day after their Shadow Equalities Minister refused to give the Party's definition for 'female'. Anneliese Dodds said it 'depends on what the context is' when asked for the definition by BBC presenter Emma Barnett on Woman's Hour. Reacting to the comments, Rowling, 56, posted: 'Someone please send the Shadow Minister for Equalities a dictionary and a backbone. #HappyInternationalWomensDay' She continued in a series of tweets: 'Apparently, under a Labour government, today will become We Who Must Not Be Named Day.' Alongside criticising Dodds' comment, Rowling also tweeted a picture of SNP MP Joanna Cherry alongside the caption: 'This is what a woman who owns a dictionary and a backbone looks like.' Marilyn moment! Tallia Storm channelled her inner Hollywood starlet by donning a dangerous high-split red gown with a plunging front and black platform heels Flaunt it! The singer showed off her cleavage in the perilously plunging red gown Family: Phillip Schofield cut a dapper figure on Tuesday evening as he joined a string of showbiz stars, arriving with his oldest daughter Molly and her boyfriend Will Grieveson Dapper: Phillip posed up a storm for the cameras in a light grey wool blazer which he teamed with a navy top and black trousers Mads Mikkelsen is set to take over the villainous role of Grindewald after replacing Johnny Depp. It was announced in 2020 that the 56-year-old Danish actor would be replacing Johnny, 58, as the dark wizard after he was denied permission to appeal his libel loss in the High Court, after they found a story that he assaulted ex-wife Amber Heard to be 'substantially true.' Masrecently admitted he regrets not speaking to Johnny before taking over the role, adding that he didn't know if his treatment had been fair. Dapper: James Argent continued to exhibit his astonishing 13 stone weight loss, flashing a thumbs up to evidence his good spirits at the premiere All smiles: The former Only Way Is Essex star showed off his finery on the red carpet, getting suited and booted in a grey buttoned-up blazer, white shirt and black tie Couples night! Josh Denzel looked dashing on Tuesday evening as he attended the red carpet with his girlfriend Ruby Wong Stylish: Josh dressed to impress in a velvet burnt orange blazer while Ruby wowed in a vibrant green coat In an interview with The Sunday Times, he said: 'I don't know what happened [in his private life] and I don't know if it was fair, him losing the job, but I just knew that the show was going on. 'And I would've loved to have talked to him about it if I had the chance, but I just don't know him in that sense.' Going on to reveal he would be putting his own spin on the iconic role, he added: 'My take is different, and the look is a little different, but we'll have to wait for the film's release to find out.' The Danish star officially replaced Johnny as Gellert in the third Fantastic Beasts movie after the latter took to Instagram to reveal he had 'been asked to resign by Warner Bros'. Chic: Vicky Pattinson looked effortlessly chic for the evening, teaming her beaded corset dress with silver strappy heels Poser: The former Geordie Shore star looked stunning in a beaded corset dress from Suzanne Neville as she posed up a storm for the cameras All smiles: She accessorised with elegant earrings and a tasteful bracelet as she flashed a fresh manicure Date night! Love Island couple Faye Winter and Teddy Soares enjoyed a couples' outing together at the Fantastic Beasts premiere Queen of style: Love Island star Faye, 26, flashed her toned midriff in a black cropped blazer and a matching pair of cut-out trousers as she hit the red carpet Flawless: Faye looked incredible as she opted for a bronzed palette of makeup with a glossy nude lip while letting her blonde locks fall in loose curls to her shoulders Stunner: Lady Amelia Windsor put on a stunning display in a glamourous glittering gown with a 90s-inspired neckline and towering golden heels just hours after she attended the memorial service for Prince Philip Mads was said to be the top choice of director David Yates as the studio had waited to see how Johnny's defamation lawsuit against The Sun would pan out. When a British judge ruled in favor of the publication - which Johnny had sued for referring to him as a 'wife-beater' in regards to his relationship with ex-wife Amber Heard - Warner Bros. decided to sever ties with the veteran actor. The Edwards Scissorhands star had only shot one scene of the sequel, though his 'pay-or-play' contract allows him to keep the full $10 million he was paid for the role. The actor also has a defamation lawsuit against Amber in Virginia, which required him to be in court for three consecutive days in November, and would have also altered the project's shooting schedule. The studio notified the production that the Kentucky-native was taken off the schedule on November 5, according to The Hollywood Reporter, a day before Depp made his resignation public. The studio released a brief statement shortly thereafter, indicating that the role of Gellert Grindelwald will be re-cast. Suited and booted: Suki Waterhouse's sister Maddi flashed a hint of her cleavage in a perilously plunging red blazer and matching oversized trousers Perfection: The blonde beauty accessorised her look with chunky gold earrings Stars in attendance: Robert Rinder (left) attended the red carpet following his trip to Poland in the midst of Ukraine's war with Russia, while Jordan Stephens (right) was also among the celebrities at the premiere 'Johnny Depp will depart the Fantastic Beasts franchise. We thank Johnny for his work on the films to date,' the statement began. 'Fantastic Beasts 3 is currently in production, and the role of Gellert Grindelwald will be recast. The film will debut in theaters worldwide in the summer of 2022,' the statement concluded. Johnny debuted as Grindelwald with a surprise cameo at the end of 2016's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. He returned to star alongside Eddie Redmayne's Newt Scamander and Jude Law's Albus Dumbledore in 2018's Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is set to hit UK cinemas on April 8, 2022 with a US release following a week later on April 15. Miles Teller was put through 'Tom Cruise boot camp' for his role in Top Gun: Maverick. The 35-year-old actor plays Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw in the long-awaited sequel to the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun and revealed how the Oscar-nominated actor put all of the cast through intense training to help them prepare for the project. 'We were all mini Toms making this movie. He put us through... I'll just call it a "Tom Cruise boot camp". We were getting in killer shape,' he told Total Film magazine. Boot Camp: Miles Teller was put through 'Tom Cruise boot camp' for his role in 'Top Gun: Maverick'. The Only the Brave star said, 'We were all mini Toms making this movie. He put us through... I'll just call it a "Tom Cruise boot camp". We were getting in killer shape' Almost here: A new poster was shared on Tuesday for the May 25 film The Offer star explained there was a lot of detail going into the performance: 'For the stunts and stuff that Tom does in movies, it's usually a very specific type of training.' 'You're not just going into the gym and lifting some weights. We did flight training for three months before we started filming... We got put through the wringer.' Tom, who will reprise his role as Captain Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell in the movie, said the goal was to help his co-stars learn to get in the cockpit of the Boeing F/A-18 Superhornet jets. Put through the wringer: The 35-year-old actor says he and all his co-stars endured a specific kind of training to prepare for the highly anticipated film The Mission: Impossible actor, who is known for his in depth preparation, said, 'I developed a program for the actors, and how we could get them in the fighter jets. It was every step of the way.' The action star created his own sort of flight school. 'I had to teach them how to fly. I had to teach them how to handle Gs (acceleration forces). I had to get them confident in the airplane.' Picture perfect: The Oscar nominated actor said when he originated the role of Maverick in the 1986 film he wanted to make the fighter pilot experience as authentic as possible for movie goers and was determined to replicate it for the sequel, which will be released May 27 The big screen icon recalled how he wanted to make the fighter pilot experience as authentic as possible in the original Top Gun and was determined to replicate it for the sequel, which will be released May 27. The 59-year-old star recollected, 'When I first committed to the first Top Gun, I did it based on the fact that I'd be filmed in the F-14, and I'd get to fly in the F-14. 'I wanted to give the audience that experience of what it's like being a fighter pilot, and what that world is like, and the culture of it.' Josh Denzel looked dashing on Tuesday evening as he attended the Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore premiere with his girlfriend Ruby Wong. The former Love Island contestant, 30, dressed to impress in a velvet burnt orange blazer as he hit the red carpet at The Royal Festival Hall. The influencer looked dapper in a black shirt and trousers which he teamed with a pair of stylish loafers as he put his harm around Ruby. Looking good: Josh Denzel looked dashing on Tuesday evening as he attended the Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore premiere with his girlfriend Ruby Wong Meanwhile, Ruby showcased her sensational sense of style in a vibrant green trench coat which she donned over a black minidress. The model teamed the outfit with a pair of fishnet tights and heels while accessorising with a simple silver necklace. The natural beauty wore her short caramel tresses pinned back and sported a glam makeup look with a glossy nude lip. Stylish: Josh dressed to impress in a velvet burnt orange blazer while Ruby wowed in a vibrant green coat as they hit the red carpet at The Royal Festival Hall Couple goals: Josh surprised his influencer girlfriend with the luxury getaway as they posed in front of a private jet. Ruby captioned the snap: 'Very special surprise from my very special someone' It comes after the loved-up couple - who went Instagram official back in August 2020 - recently returned from a ski trip in the French Alps. Josh surprised his influencer girlfriend with the luxury getaway as they posed in front of a private jet. Ruby captioned the snap: 'Very special surprise from my very special someone' The LADbible star rose to fame on the 2018 edition of the ITV2 dating series, where he forged romances with Georgia Steel and Kaz Crozzley. Josh made his relationship with Ruby public 18 months after splitting from his ex girlfriend Kaz - who he came third with in Love Island's 2018 series. Cute: The loved-up couple - who went Instagram official back in August 2020 - recently returned from a ski trip in the French Alps Ex: The LADbible star rose to fame on 2018's Love Island, where he forged romances with Georgia Steel and Kaz Crozzley (pictured), dating the latter from July 2018 until January 2019 Also in attendance was JK Rowling, who penned the iconic book series which sparked the Fantastic Beasts spin-off series, and she cut a glamorous figure in a form-fitting navy blue gown. In recent months, JK's statements on transgender issues were branded transphobic by some fans. The controversy surrounding her began after she tweeted about biological sex leading to backlash and a subsequent 'cancellation' from the trans community. In June 2020, she took to Twitter to criticise an opinion piece that used the term 'people who menstruate' instead of women. She then continued with a thread discussing biological sex. She later clarified that she respects 'every trans person's rights to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them,' and went on to say she would march 'if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. Stunning: Also in attendance was JK Rowling, who penned the iconic book series which sparked the Fantastic Beasts spin-off series, and she cut a glamorous figure in a form-fitting navy blue gown In the wake of these remarks, Harry Potter actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma and Eddie Redmayne, who stars in her Fantastic Beasts films, criticised the author. The third film in the Fantastic Beasts series sees Newt Scamander assemble a motley crew of wizards and witches to try and save the world. The team Newt and Dumbledore have put together to include Newt's brother Theseus Scamander (Callum Turner), professor Eulalie 'Lallie' Hicks (Jessica Williams), Minerva McGonagall (Fionna Glascott), and Muggle baker Jacob (Dan Fogler). The motley crew will be joining forces to take on the powerful dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald, who seeks domination over the wizarding world. Mads Mikkelsen is set to take over the villainous role after replacing Johnny Depp. Advertisement Rose-Ayling Ellis, Nikki Sanderson and AJ Odudu led the glamour at The Royal Television Society Programme Awards on Tuesday evening. Strictly Come Dancing's 2021 champ, 27, and the Hollyoaks actress, 37 took Mayfair's Grosvenor House Hotel by storm as they stunned in their respective attire. Rose, who plays Frankie Lewis in EastEnders, looked sensational in a white cut-out dress, which she vibrantly teamed with orange heels. Event: Rose-Ayling Ellis (left) Nikki Sanderson (centre) and AJ Odudu (right) led the glamour at The Royal Television Society Programme Awards on Tuesday evening at Mayfair's Grosvenor House Hotel Smiling wide for the cameras, Rose exuded radiance owing to her bold eyeliner and swept back locks. She was accompanied by her Strictly dance partner Giovanni Pernice, who looked typically dapper in a fresh suit complete with a bowtie. Nikki, who plays Minnie Minniver in the Channel 4 soap, cut a sophisticated figure in a gorgeous gold gown, which hugged her frame and boasted a plunging neckline. They're back! Rose was accompanied by her Strictly dance partner Giovanni Pernice, who looked typically dapper in a fresh suit complete with a bowtie Simply stunning: Strictly Come Dancing's 2021 champ, 27, looked sensational in a white cut-out dress Looking good: Rose, who plays Frankie Lewis in EastEnders, vibrantly teamed her dress with orange heels Playful: The glitterball holders put on an animated display for the cameras and looked as though they were having a whale of a time The gown also boasted asymmetrical and draping features, with Nikki parting her chocolate tresses to one side for an elegant coiffure. Her makeup was applied effortlessly, with a generous sweep of blush giving her a glow in the blue carpet snaps. Nikki was joined by a string of Hollyoaks stars including Emma Lau, Matthew James Bailey, Harvey Virdi and Kelle Bryan. Making her own entrance at the event, AJ Odudu stunned in a glittering silver dress that accentuated her slender physique as she made her way across the blue carpet. She added to her look with a pair of black strappy heels, while statement earrings rounded things off. Glowing: Hollyoaks actress Nikki, 37, cut a sophisticated figure in a gorgeous gold gown, which hugged her frame and boasted a plunging neckline Glam: Nikki, who plays Minnie Minniver in the Channel 4 soap, parted her chocolate tresses to one side for an elegant coiffure Leggy: BBC Radio 1 star Vick Hope, 32, paraded her lithe legs in a striking black mini dress, which featured long sleeves, a pleated skirt and lace detailing on the back Beauty: Like Nikki, she too styled her ringlets to one side and kept some strands back with a pearl turquoise clip Soap cast: Nikki was joined by a string of Hollyoaks stars including (from second left to right: Emma Lau, Matthew James Bailey, Harvey Virdi and Kelle Bryan) Showstopping: Kelle looked magnificent in an off-the-shoulder ensemble which included standout elements Meanwhile BBC Radio 1 star Vick Hope paraded her lithe legs in a striking black mini dress, which featured long sleeves, a pleated skirt and lace detailing on the back. Like Nikki, she too styled her ringlets to one side and kept some strands back with a pearl turquoise clip. Embracing coordination, the Amnesty International Ambassador wore complementary earrings and carried her belongings in a sparkling clutch. Also in attendance were Strictly stars Claudia Winkleman and Shirley Ballas, with runner-up John Whaite also hitting the blue carpet. Speaking to MailOnline at the event, John admitted he may well be reuniting with ballroom partner Johannes Radebe for a holiday when they both have a gap in their schedules. He said: 'Johannes and is my best friend. Well Ive not seen him for a while because hes doing his own tour now. We went for dinner a couple of weeks ago in London. I saw rehearsals for his tour, it looks amazing. 'I think were gonna have a little holiday together at some point in the next few months, well be friends for life now.' Here they are! Also in attendance were Strictly stars Claudia Winkleman (right) and Shirley Ballas (left) Awards: Last year's Strictly runner-up John Whaite also hit the blue carpet Look at her go! AJ Odudu put on a glittering display in a tasselled dress Strictly stars: Rhys Stephenson (left) and Kai Widdrington (right) also arrived in support of the BBC dancing show Elegant: Gaby Roslin looked wonderful in white, which comprised a blazer, subtly bejewelled top and trousers Photo central: Elsewhere, Keeley Hawes (l) and Steph McGovern (r) added splashes of colour with their chosen dresses Sweet: John and Steph embraced for a fun snap on the blue carpet Elsewhere, Keeley Hawes and Steph McGovern added splashes of colour with their chosen dresses, with Packed Lunch Steph going all out in a pair of neon yellow heels. BBC veteran Graham Norton also rocked up, wearing a bold gold suit with coordinating shoes. And Chelsee Healey - aka Hollyoaks' Goldie McQueen - left little to the imagination in a cut-out black dress which flashed her taut tummy. What an entrance: BBC veteran Graham Norton also rocked up, wearing a bold gold suit with coordinating shoes Jaw-dropping: Chelsee Healey - aka Hollyoaks' Goldie McQueen - left little to the imagination in a cut-out black dress Standing out: The Hollyoaks star made a bold statement with her racy look Captivating: Sophie Willian wore an eye-catching shade of royal blue Amazing: Haiesha Mistry had lace and velvet incorporated within her ensemble From the cobbles to the carpet: Mollie Gallagher (left) and Tanisha Gorey (right) stopped for a photograph together Debonair: Melvin Odoom (left) and Tom Allen (right) got suited and booted for the celebratory evening The RTS Programme Awards span all the genres of television programming, from soaps to history, children's fiction to comedy performance. They recognise exceptional actors, presenters, writers and production teams as well as the programmes themselves. The BBC leads the way with 30 nominations across the 24 categories, followed by Channel 4 with 28, Sky with 10 and ITV with eight. Big night: The RTS Programme Awards span all the genres of television programming, from soaps to history, children's fiction to comedy performance (Lorraine Ashbourne and Andy Serkis pictured) Faye Winter and her boyfriend Teddy Soares put on a stylish display on Tuesday evening as they attended the Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore premiere in London. Love Island star Faye, 26, flashed her toned midriff in a black cropped blazer and a matching pair of cut-out trousers as she hit the red carpet at The Royal Festival Hall. The blonde beauty donned a pair of small heels with a bow details and beamed as she cosied up to boyfriend Teddy. Adorable: Faye Winter and her boyfriend Teddy Soares put on a stylish display on Tuesday evening as they attended the Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore premiere in London Faye looked incredible as she opted for a bronzed palette of makeup with a glossy nude lip while letting her blonde locks fall in loose curls to her shoulders. Meanwhile, Teddy showcased his quirky style in a taupe utility vest which he wore over a beige t-shirt and matching cargos. The Love Island contestant, 26, stood out from the crowd as he sported a pair of black wellies on the red carpet. The couple came second on last year's series of the ITV2 dating show and have been inseparable ever since they moved in together after just three months of dating. Stunning: Faye flashed her toned midriff in a black cropped blazer and a matching pair of cut-out trousers as she hit the red carpet at The Royal Festival Hall The blonde beauty donned a bronzed palette of makeup with a glossy nude lip as she beamed and cosied up to boyfriend Teddy The outing comes after the couple recently revealed they had to quit Instagram due to receiving vile racist abuse from online trolls. Teddy opened up about why the couple had to come off Instagram for a while during a recent episode of Vicky Pattinson's The Secret To podcast. During the conversation with the Geordie Shore host, Teddy said: 'She [Faye] gets quite a lot of racism thrown at her for being with me. 'And I was experiencing the same thing, over a kind of Q&A I think, but not to go into too much detail there, it was just something that I've never really expected to have any kind of trolling at all. Meanwhile, Teddy stood out from the crowd as he sported a pair of black wellies on the red carpet He added: 'It's just there. You delete it, but you've got so much coming your way and I think any kind of hate, any kind of jealousy, any kind of toxicity in the world is just nasty. 'I like to keep it positive, I love to keep good energy, always. So when I saw it, it was like, 'What am I supposed to do?' The couple had no option but to take a break from social media. Teddy said: 'I just came off Instagram, Faye did the same, and we just went to Devon. Love Island: The influencers came second on last year's series of the ITV2 dating show and have been inseparable ever since they moved in together after just three months of dating JK Rowling was also at the premier, who penned the iconic book series which sparked the Fantastic Beasts spin-off series, and she cut a glamorous figure in a form-fitting navy blue gown. In recent months, JK's statements on transgender issues were branded transphobic by some fans. The controversy surrounding her began after she tweeted about biological sex leading to backlash and a subsequent 'cancellation' from the trans community. In June 2020, she took to Twitter to criticise an opinion piece that used the term 'people who menstruate' instead of women. She then continued with a thread discussing biological sex. She later clarified that she respects 'every trans person's rights to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them,' and went on to say she would march 'if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. Stunning: Also in attendance was JK Rowling, who penned the iconic book series which sparked the Fantastic Beasts spin-off series, and she cut a glamorous figure in a form-fitting navy blue gown In the wake of these remarks, Harry Potter actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma and Eddie Redmayne, who stars in her Fantastic Beasts films, criticised the author. The third film in the Fantastic Beasts series sees Newt Scamander assemble a motley crew of wizards and witches to try and save the world. The team Newt and Dumbledore have put together to include Newt's brother Theseus Scamander (Callum Turner), professor Eulalie 'Lallie' Hicks (Jessica Williams), Minerva McGonagall (Fionna Glascott), and Muggle baker Jacob (Dan Fogler). The motley crew will be joining forces to take on the powerful dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald, who seeks domination over the wizarding world. Mads Mikkelsen is set to take over the villainous role after replacing Johnny Depp. She has been having a ball in Dubai during a loved-up trip with her boyfriend Conner Thompson. And the fun times kept on rolling for Married At First Sight star Jessika Power on Tuesday. The 30-year-old Australian TV star went sandboarding in the desert and even got to hold a falcon. Surf's up! Married At First Sight's Jessika Power goes braless in tight activewear as she goes sandboarding and holds a falcon during trip to Dubai with boyfriend Connor Thompson The blonde bombshell wore revealing activewear for the day trip. She went braless in a crop top by popular label Stax, along with matching bike pants. Makeup free, she also wore a scarf wrapped around her head. Dressed for the occasion: The blonde bombshell wore activewear for the day trip. She went braless in a crop top by popular label Stax with matching bike pants British hunk Connor, host of the Erasing the Bar podcast, got behind the wheel of a sand buggy during the day trip while Jessika filmed the excursion with a GoPro on her head. It comes after Jessika sparked speculation that she faked being single in order to appear on series 10 of Celebs Go Dating, after she recently moved in with her boyfriend Connor. Jessika - who is said to have signed a 40,000 ($70,227 AUD) deal to be on the E4 dating series - has reportedly enraged bosses for 'wasting everyone's time'. Wheelie good time! British hunk Connor, host of the Erasing the Bar podcast, got behind the wheel of a sand buggy during the day trip while Jessika filmed the excursion with a GoPro on her head A source told The Sun: 'Everyone thinks Jessika has been with Connor the whole time. She has now moved him into her apartment and they are no longer hiding their romance. 'The whole 'split' was very convenient so she could cash her cheque but not surprisingly she didn't meet anyone on the show. It's wasted everyone's time really and bosses aren't happy.' Stars who sign up for the show have contracts which stipulate they must be single throughout the process. Stacking it! Jessika stacked it in the sand as she took to the board with bare feet It was previously claimed that Jessika moved to the UK for Conner back in October, but split after just eight days when she signed up to do the reality show. Just last month, Jessika was claiming to be single while going on dates with numerous men while being filmed for the E4 show. The former Married At First Sight Australia star even took one potential love match away on the mini-break, before heading straight back to podcaster Connor. Still going strong: It was previously claimed that Jessika moved to the UK for Conner back in October, but split after just eight days when she signed up to do the reality show, but the pair are still clearly together I'm A Celebrity winner Georgia Toffolo was said to have split up with financier 'Posh George' Cottrell, who was once jailed for fraud. But I can reveal that the pair are very much back together. Former Made In Chelsea star 'Toff', 27, is pictured here enjoying a long, leisurely lunch at Italian restaurant Scalini in West London, with the 28-year-old who was an aide to Nigel Farage when he was the UKIP leader. A fellow diner tells me: 'They sat at a table in the street and chatted to passers-by.' Former Made In Chelsea star 'Toff', 27, is pictured here enjoying a long, leisurely lunch at Italian restaurant Scalini in West London Posh George is said to have a 300 million fortune. But he played up to his wide-boy reputation by paying for lunch with a wad of notes. Georgia has always been cagey about her relationship with Cottrell, who spent eight months in jail in the U.S. in 2016 in connection with a money-laundering conspiracy. Earlier this year, she came under fire herself for a new partnership with a controversial cryptocurrency business. Posh George is said to have a 300 million fortune. But he played up to his wide-boy reputation by paying for lunch with a wad of notes Toff, who is a friend of senior Conservative figures including the Prime Minister's father Stanley Johnson, announced a tiein with fintech group Mode, which was criticised for allegedly misleading investors. She told her Instagram followers that she had been investing in cryptocurrency for 'quite a long time'. Mode claimed it had affiliate tie-ins with companies including Boots, Ocado and Homebase. But all three swiftly denied having anything to do with the company, and shares in Mode plummeted by 14 per cent. Posh George is said to have a 300 million fortune. But he played up to his wide-boy reputation by paying for lunch with a wad of notes Fracking is the future, says MP Former Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom says she's in favour of fracking as a solution to the energy crisis only don't call it that. 'I am a big fan of shale gas extraction, because 'fracking' sounds like something you wouldn't do at home,' she says. 'I'd hope the Government would look kindly on communities who want to in return for free gas enjoy shale gas extraction.' Incidentally, wouldn't she boost her green credentials by changing her name from Leadsom to Leadfree? Talk about the houses of Windsor! An 'exciting new opportunity' has arisen for an experienced lettings manager on the Queen's private Sandringham Estate in Norfolk. The successful applicant will be paid a 'competitive' salary for the position, which includes undertaking annual property inspections and rent reviews 'on our 370 residential let properties'. It also includes overseeing the lettings of the estate's holiday cottages. Mother of God! Audience members at an arts event got a surprise when the daughter of Line Of Duty star Adrian Dunbar started breastfeeding her baby while she was on stage. Madeleine Dunbar breastfeeding onstage 'Here I am breastfeeding and hosting at the same time,' explained Madeleine Dunbar, who compered the Mum's The Word show in South London which featured live music, poetry, and DJs. The actress, 34, (pictured left with her dad), who gave birth to daughter, Zephyr, before Christmas, did put her baby down before launching into a particularly energetic dance number. The Great British Bake Off's former presenter Mel Giedroyc is worried she didn't bring up her teenage daughters well because they have tattoos but now she's getting one herself. Talking about her girls, she says: 'They've both got tattoos. That's probably bad somewhere along the line I didn't do my job correctly. But I'm going to have one done [a seahorse] in two weeks, bigger and better than theirs.' Dancer Neil Jones, who was partnered with Mel for last year's Strictly Christmas Special, is training to be a tattoo artist and she has agreed to be his guinea pig. A controversial former boss of the Royal Mail has won the stamp of approval for his new 5 million dream mansion. Adam Crozier, 58, who oversaw the closure of 5,800 Post Office branches, spent 3 million on a five-bedroom house on a private estate in Surrey. The 700,000-a-year chairman of BT has just been given local council permission to demolish the 1960s-built property and build a five-bedroom 'Arts & Crafts'-style mansion with special provision for his learning disabled adult daughter. The house will also feature a snug, verandah, and a comms and electrics room. The day Joanna gave the Queen Ab Fab surprise Dame Joanna Lumley is used to receiving an absolutely fabulous welcome wherever she goes. But the actress, who was a friend of Prince Philip, was thrilled when the Queen recognised her at a boat party for yachtsman Pete Goss. Joanna Lumley had a surprise encounter with the Queen Speaking at an event at Mayfair bookshop Heywood Hill to mark the publication of A Queen For All Seasons, her biography of Elizabeth II, the Ab Fab star reveals: '[Goss] invited me to be a part of this line-up. This is what astonished me: she came down the row and looked at me and said: 'What are you doing here?' 'I muttered my excuse of why I was there, but inside I was thinking: 'She knows I shouldn't be here.' ' Americana Festival returns in 2022plans to expand with more live music, street vendors and family-friendly experiences. Americana Festival Celebrates 50 Years, Returns with Expanded Event Vendors Encourage to Apply Online Now through Updated Website The Centerville-Washington Township Americana Festival will return to the streets of Centerville on Monday, July 4, 2022! This years festival will be an expanded event including more live music, street vendors and family-friendly experiences. After the pandemic impacted the festival for the past two years and forced us to cut back on activities, we are excited to be back with a full festival. We are seeing great response from our vendors and sponsors and look forward to "Celebrating 50 Years of Americana" with the biggest and best festival ever. The Street Fair has been the heart and soul of the Americana Festival for 50 years, and we have really missed it, Americana Festival Committee Executive Director Keith Weiskittle said. This years Americana Festival celebrates 50 years and looks ahead to the future of this rich tradition. The festival is proudly Ohios largest one-day festival, boasting more than 75,000 guests each year. Interested food and craft vendors are encouraged to register now. For the first time, the Americana Festival Committee is accepting applications online, making it more convenient to sign up. Follow the new Americana Festival website and social media pages (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) for new details as theyre planned. A water cannon salute is given to an Indigo flight on its arrival at Mangaluru International Airport. (Photo by arrangement) Mangaluru: The maiden IndiGo flight from Pune arrived at the Mangaluru International Airport at 12.42 am on Monday. The inaugural flight with 82 passengers landed 38 minutes ahead of its scheduled arrival of 1.20 am, marking the entry of Pune as the newest destination to be ever served from this coastal city. The flight departed for Pune with 124 passengers at 2.40 am. The introduction of this flight saw a late-night buzz at the Mangaluru Airport. The airline held small celebration with passengers and other stakeholders, the airport spokesperson said. As the aircraft landed and taxied into the parking stand, the airport arranged for a traditional water cannon salute. Captain Aman Gupta acknowledged the gesture by making an onboard flight announcement to this effect on behalf of his six-member crew. The passengers have expressed their happiness at the beginning of the flight. The flight that leaves Mangaluru reaches Delhi at 6.55 am after a layover of half an hour. The other option to fly to Delhi is a time-consuming one as of now, S N Bhat, a senior professional working in Delhi and a native of Mangaluru said. The flight starts from Delhi and flies to Mangaluru via Pune. Hyderabad: London-based art expert Dr Cleo Roberts-Komireddi has a strong India, and in particular Hyderabad, connection, through marriage with the author and critic Kapil Komireddi, but her interest in art from Asia at large, and specifically India, stretches further back. This interest pushed her to undertake her PhD in 2013, a joint project between the universities of Liverpool and Jadavpur in Kolkata with a research stint at Cambridge, on Indian arts. My first trip had me travelling straight away to Kolkata for my research, said Dr Roberts-Komireddi, on a Zoom call from her London home-office. I was struck by the proliferation of art and artists and at Jadavpur my colleagues combined exceptional intelligence with artistic inclinations. I spent the next three years visiting India, with a base in Delhi, but traveling to Goa, with a strengthening interest in contemporary art. I value rigour, and so to further my understanding of art away from libraries and archives, I began working with the School of Design, Sushant University, Delhi. We organised an art exhibition at one of Delhis most prominent malls, Select CityWalk. It was an unusual context, with the work shown right in the centre so no one could miss it. The exhibition closed with an awards ceremony where the prizes were judged by a board of artists, academics and curators from England and India. Im interested in the possibility of bridging art worlds and creating visibility for artists in a field that is dominated by the markets overseas, she said. Before she went back to England to finish her PhD, Dr Roberts-Komireddi met several artists in India, including Nikhil Chopra at his performance residency space, Heritage Hotel. On returning home, she began chronicling her observations and interactions, and writing about Indian arts and artists. The intense writing resulting from conversations and interactions led to a mission to help make art more accessible, and increase awareness of art among non-specialist audiences. She began reaching out to artists across south Asia, which she described as an exciting and varied art scene but sadly and mystifyingly not necessarily as well known in the west. How is South Asian and Indian art different, what are its peculiar characteristics, I ask. It is for instance, more political, I offer to point out. I have always been struck by how politically aware people in India are. The artists here are unapologetically engaged either with politics directly, or with how it influences or affects the lives of people. But when you try to understand or study contemporary Indian art and artists, however tempting, it is unproductive and artificial to try to find a single grand common theme. Artists are individuals after all, she reflected. They have a holistic view of the world and are often critical about the workings of the world, but there is more to their art than politics or a solitary specific theme, she explains. Expounding on the evolution of Indian art, she says, the art before Independence was predominantly shaped by pressure from a colonial sense of aesthetics. And Indianor so-called nativeartists were, in the large part, undervalued. The slew of Company School images without a named artist speaks to this. In Kolkata, Rabindranath and Abanindranath Tagore recognized that artistic agency, and recognition had to be fought for. And so The Bengal School reclaimed Indian culture and creativity. We can see that this was a precursor to post-independence art, which would bring out aspirations of a new nation. Today, Indian art continues to thrive. Isnt art rather abstract and elite? Does it have any meaning or pragmatic purpose, I quiz. She acknowledges the perception of art as a somewhat elitist preoccupation. Art needs certain resources at your disposal, including financial soundness. For a young person to go to an art school, he or she needs a certain financial ability. But art and creativity are important for every individual. For humanity as a whole, historically art has mattered. Theres been a visceral human need to be creative, whether it is a tool for social cohesion in the Upper Paleolithic or used to articulate faith. Artists are indispensable for their ability to expose the cracks and gaps in society and to bring them to the publics notice. I tend to think that artists think sideways. Of course, it is important to make efforts to enhance engagement with art and make it reach, and speak to, more people. Speaking of her own preferences, Dr Roberts-Komireddi says, I enjoy art which sees and projects stories we miss, work that supplies provocative ideas and draws out different ways of understanding the world. This isnt to say I dont find pleasure in art works that are, in my opinion, aesthetically beautiful. Her own role, she sees as straddling two diverse positions; where on one dimension she tries to understand art and artists, and strives to penetrate their abstract theoretic language, and on the other, to make it easily available to people. India is such a visually complex and rich country. And in its diverse images, which can cut across a formidable range of barriers, art is a great unifier, she explains. Currently, besides her podcasts on Asian art (@artworldspodcast), she is involved with the Museum of Art and Photography in Bengaluru who are compiling an innovative new encyclopedia of Indian art. As a member of the advisory board for the project, she is aiding the ambitious task of creating a compilation in simple language of an otherwise unfathomable volume of information on Indian art. Its a challenge but perhaps the biggest challenge and most exciting part remains informing people about how important art can be, how intrinsic it is to society and therefore how valuable artists are, she says passionately. In a larger way, every bit of human art is connected to some degree, but within those different histories, contexts and underlying motivations make the difference. I constantly explore the nuance and I am reticent to use catchall terminology, she said. There is a danger of people, especially those from the art world, using a standard or evaluation in one country or society and imposing that to other regions and countries. There is absolutely no need for Indian art to seek western validation, she says. Art has gone beyond the traditionally defined art world of galleries and institutions she says. Digital technologies have recalibrated the arts. Instagram is now at the forefront and a platform she herself uses engagingly, connecting with artists around the world. Let us celebrate this democratization of art, with people spreading awareness using social media over those sitting in old school ivory towers. Art needs a lot more fluid conversations about itself, involving those who are not artists but love art. Are there great artists today, I question, a bit naively, a bit churlishly. The only good artists are the dead ones, she says in jest and laughs. I was very taken by Mrinalini Mukherjee, an amazing artist based in New Delhi who worked with jute and hemp to create astounding biomorphic hanging sculptures. Only now, post her death is she becoming a more internationally known name. Henri Matisses work was originally considered shockingmost critics were repulsed by his colour paletteand now he is hugely revered. This is to say that opinions change, were fickle. We would have to travel to the future in a time machine in that sense to discover the greatest artists of our times. But let us brush aside hyperboles and focus on the art we have today, the artists of today, and understand, if not appreciate, their work, she said. Dismissing the commercial appraisal of value of art as a measure of intrinsic artistic worth, she said, prices of a piece or collection of art in London or Delhi or Hyderabad may not always reflect the truest artistic worth. Artists, like everyone else, need commercial success but that is just one criteria. Art is more than its price label. How should a common man buy art? She smiles before explaining, the commercial side of art is very important, especially for an artist to keep producing art. The purchase of art is therefore very important. Today, online portals like Artsy sell a lot of art. Beyond exhibitions and museums, there are initiatives like Art Chain India so people can buy directly from artists, and they have an income that helps them keep the focus on the art. But how should one appraise art? It is hard to judge art, there is not an easy formula. Like music, theres a kind of alchemy. Look at as much art as possible and see whose works speak to you. Build your own taste. I must be having a quizzical look, because she further explains, it is not very different from other arts, like reading a book or listening to a song. Certain words, sentences or tunes may appeal to you more, or maybe certain moods. Something will resonate, if not today maybe later. Some aspects of the visual will leave an effect. Maybe it is the different angles and perspectives explored, or the light, or shading, some moments, mood or emotion. In summation, when asked about some of the exciting Indian artists on the scene, she says, there are many. Shilpa Gupta is a very established name. Others I appreciate and admire would be Sajan Mani, and Priyanka D'Souza. Nikhil Chopras work is perpetually fascinating, his work enthrals. Speaking on the need for formal recognition for artists, she adds, artists are tenacious people, with lots of patience. It is needed to make it to this world. Grants and awards, and other forms of public recognition, are rare. For example, Feroze Gujral, who heads the Gujral Foundation, is introducing an art prize in India. Hopefully it will help throw light on and bring fame to some. Inviting artists and art enthusiasts to connect with her best on her instagram (@cleo__robertskomireddi), she ends the conversation by sharing news of many exciting projects ahead in India next month, where she hopes to tour different art centers to discover more artists. When asked about advice to artists, she says, keep your day job and let some money flow in to supplement your art career. For example, Agnes Martin had multiple jobs to support her in the early days. Cindy Sherman was a receptionist, while Claes Oldenburg, an important artist of our times, was a library assistant. But since there is no clear success path in this area, just keep the faith in what you are doing, apply for residencies and fellowships, meet people, talk about your art and keep working. The world needs you. Vijayawada: The Special Enforcement Bureau sleuths carried out raids on places where cheap liquor was being brewed illegally under Operation Parivartan 2.0 in the state and booked 3,403 cases and arrested 2,066 people from March 10 to 26. The SEB which was formed in October, 2020 has been carrying out raids in coordination with local police, excise and revenue officials in the state to identify places where ID liquor was being brewed to book cases under relevant laws and provide counselling to the bootleggers to give up such illegal practice. The SEB authorities seized 44,058 litres of ID liquor, 155 vehicles, seized 73,734 kg of black jaggery and destroyed 16,04,741 litres of fermented jaggery wash. They also booked four persons under Preventive Detention Act in which three were from West Godavari and one from Guntur. In total, 17 people were booked under PD Act in the state with five from West Godavari, four from Chittoor, three each from Krishna and Guntur and two from Anantapur. Hyderabad: In a special drive, the Nalgonda police seized 15 bags of gutka worth Rs 5 lakh and 30 kilos of cannabis worth Rs 3.5 lakh from interstate smuggler gangs in raids at different places. Nalgonda SP Rema Rajeshwari said cops have been conducting the drive as directed by state DGP Mahender Reddy to prevent the smuggling of illicit tobacco, gutka and pan masala. Surveillance was kept on gangs dealing with banned substances. On Monday morning, the Kethepalli and Kattangur police teams seized a stock of marijuana and caught two persons one from Uttar Pradesh and a transgender from Odisha. Police said ganja smuggler Katravath Raju alias Shiva of Mahabubnagar got in touch with Abu Bakar, a native of Bijnor, UP. On word from Shiva, Abu went to Malkangiri, Odisha and purchased ganja. He was transporting it to Hyderabad and aiming to go to Uttar Pradesh for further sale. In the early hours, during a vehicle check at Korlapad toll plaza, police caught him. Shiva is absconding and a search is on to arrest him. In the second case, transgender Govardhan Darli alias Sonali alias Sonu form Bodigada, Malkangiri, was caught. She used to purchase marijuana from her native place in Malkangiri and sold it in Hyderabad for a higher rate. During one such trip, she was caught by the police near Nalgonda cross road in Kattangur area. In another case, on Tuesday, the Nalgonda task force, in coordination with Nalgonda II Town Police, nabbed Bapanapally Anjaneyulu and seized 15 bags of banned gutka. He admitted that he was taking gutka from Irlapati Yadagiri. The two said a consignment was dumped in Tata water godown. The taskforce and local police seized 15 bags of banned gutka worth about Rs 5 lakh and the two are being sent to judicial remand, the SP said. VIJAYAWADA: From November 2021 to March 2022, Andhra Pradesh has witnessed 9,412 fire incidents within its forests, which have burnt 4,606.45 hectares of jungles. Forest authorities say in March alone, 7,466 fires have been reported due to scorching heatwave conditions, mainly in Kadapa, Anantapur, Atmakur, Markapur, Giddalur, Proddatur, Nandyal, Rajampet and other forest divisions of Rayalaseema area. Officials say as several regions, including Anantapur, Kadapa and other areas in the Rayalaseema region, witnessed heavy rainfall last year; it resulted in heavy growth of grass. With the rise in day temperatures, this grass has dried up and caught fire, burning down huge swathes of forest cover. Authorities fear forests in parts of East and West Godavari and Visakhapatnam districts may witness fire incidents in ensuing April and May. Fires subside once monsoon enters the state in June. Rains also help regenerate forest cover. Officials say firelines of three-meter width have been formed in vulnerable areas based on five-years of experience. These will serve as fire barriers in case accidental fires break out. Controlled burning of dried vegetation is also undertaken in early hours of the day for a few hours to control spread of forest fires. Trenches of varied sizes are dug based on need, which serve as breakers of forest fires. These turn into percolation tanks to help boost up groundwater tables when it rains. Forest authorities say with help of AP State Disaster Management Authority and NGOs, they are taking up awareness drives among villagers within and around forests to sensitise them about fires. Rallies are taken out and Burra Katha and folk songs sung on preventing and controlling forest fires. Foresters say the biggest threat emerges from local villagers, who collect firewood from forests and also cattle grazers. These people tend to be careless about throwing burning cigarette and beedi butts, which end up causing forest fires. Some people even deliberately light fires to clear forest areas for cultivation of the burnt-down land subsequently. AP Fire Monitoring Cell nodal officer and DFO M. Ravi Shankar Sharma said, Though the number of fire incidents being reported this season is relatively less when compared with the last season, scorching heat is causing more fire incidents; mainly in parts of Rayalaseema region as of now. We are fully geared up to control and prevent fire incidents in the state by all means. The reluctance of schools has hit the districts coverage of vaccination in the age group. PTI Hyderabad: Several private schools are resisting vaccines for students and not letting health officials conduct vaccination drives for the 12-14 age group fearing untoward incidents. As a result, the District Medical Health Officer (DMHO), Hyderabad, asked officials from the education department to convince schools to allow vaccination drives on campus. The reluctance of schools has hit the districts coverage of vaccination in the age group. As on Monday, the coverage for teens in the 12-14 age group in the district with the first dose is 33 per cent. In comparison, the average coverage in the state is 56 per cent. Among all districts, Hyderabad has the third lowest coverage, with only Kumaram Bheem (28 per cent) and Medchal (25 per cent) districts recording lower figures. Hyderabad DMHO J. Venkati said managements of many private schools want to first check with the parents of students on giving the jabs for their wards. To resolve the issue, a meeting was held on Friday attended by the DMHO, District Education Officers (DEOs), Deputy DEOs, Additional Collector and Collector of Hyderabad. During the meeting, Venkati submitted a list of schools that did not allow the drives. The DMHO also pointed that even in schools allowing the drives only 40-50 per cent students were getting the jabs. The state had issued an order to regularise the services of contract employees in February, 2016. (Representational image) Hyderabad: The finance department has initiated the process to regularise the services of contract employees in various departments. Over 11,000 contract employees are all set to be regularized, officials said. Special chief secretary, finance, Ramakrishna Rao issued an order on Tuesday to all departments to forward names of eligible persons by duly following rules of reservation and roster points. This follows an announcement made by chief minister Chandrashekar Rao in the recent budget session of the assembly to fill over 91,000 vacancies in various departments. These included 81,000 posts through direct recruitment and 11,000 posts through regularisation of contract employees, officials said. The state had issued an order to regularise the services of contract employees in February, 2016. The process got stuck after petitions were filed against this in the high court and it stayed the order, in 2017. The high court dismissed the petition in December 2021. Adilabad: The Narepa tree that grows straight to a long height without curves is considered sacred. It was used as the Dwajasthambham erected at Yadadri Narasimha Swamy temple. Narepa tree wood is considered top-quality, pest resistant and highly sustainable. It grows straight. These trees are found in the forests of Kotapalli and Vemanpalli mandals in Chennur area of Mancherial district. Locals say temple priests recommend Narepa trees for Dwajastambham and people from across the state come and take these for the purpose. However, the number of Narepa trees has drastically come down due to deforestation. Locals of Chennur area have appealed to the state government to protect the sacred Narepa trees for the purpose of future temple rituals. Its not the ghar wapsi that some Indians love to celebrate. Archbishop Visvaldas Kulbokas, the papal envoy to Kyiv, is urging suffering Ukrainians to convert not to a religion but to a cause. Conversion means to become a real human person, living the solidarity and fraternity among people. That includes the followers of all religions as well as the thunderingly aggressive Russians who are now devastating Ukraine. Mikhail Gorbachev, who started it all, lamented 10 years after the Cold War that the opportunity of building a new world order had been squandered. He squarely blamed the United States. Every US President has to have a war. The question now is: Will Joe Bidens need to prove himself prevent Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelenskyy making peace as the Turkish and Israeli mediators grapple with Vladimir Putins demand for a neutral, demilitarised Ukraine that abjures Nato membership, recognises the fait accompli in Crimea, makes concessions to Russophile Donbass and agrees to de-Nazification? What cannot be overlooked is that despite the nostalgia for Catherine the Greats Greater Russia in Mr Putins essay On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians, Ukraine has always been fiercely independent. Waiting at Kiev (as it was spelt then) airport in the Soviet era, I had to suffer a lecture from a man who had stopped to admire my elastic-sided boots -- a luxury in the USSR -- because I assumed he was Russian. Russians, he repeated, placing both palms side by side on his left, Ukrainians, and he repeated the gesture on his right. I had forgotten my fathers friend Obaidur Rahman, whose Russian wife always insisted that she was something called Ukrainian which no one in Calcutta (as it was then) had heard of, and whose daughter, I learnt accidentally many years later, had married the well-known journalist Willie Lazarus. Mr Bidens For Gods sake, this man cannot remain in power only confirmed that, like George W. Bush and Saddam Hussain, he seeks regime change. As for evidence of Mr Putins misdeeds, one recalls US secretary of state Colin Powell solemnly telling UN Security Council members of incontrovertible proof about Saddams nuclear bomb. The frantic denials of White House officials only mean he hopes God will be the executioner. We dont know what God thinks of the assignment but an exhausted Almighty supposedly murmured during the Second World War: God save England, God save the King. God this and God that, and God the other thing. Oh God! says God, my works all cut out! Its the Cold War all over again, the Great Game that never ceases day and night. The silver double-headed eagle stopper of a cut-glass bottle that I picked up in a European antique shop says it all. The 15th century Tsar Ivan III had adopted the design as his coat of arms. Russias Presidents, ardent nationalists and monopoly capitalists, made it their own in 1992. Republican qualms obliged them to first plead the emblem was unofficial; then, that the imperial crown joining the two eagles would be removed. However, it became official and the crown in all its glory is Mr Putins insignia. He, too, has a penchant for larger-than-life statuary and has promised Muscovites a giant figure of Volodmyr the Great, the Kyivan Rus monarch whose 988 baptism was an epochal event in Slav history. US Presidents have nursed hopes of regime change ever since the Soviet Unions collapse prompted Richard Nixon to crow that the time had come for America to reset its geopolitical compass because we have a historic opportunity to change the world. The attempts to grab that opportunity by drawing Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the European Union turned the Breadbasket of Europe into a haggling bazaar. When the EU dangled a $838 million loan, Russia promised Ukraine $15 billion. When the EU demanded major changes in rules and regulations, Russia offered cheaper gas. When Nato made overtures, Russia invaded Georgia. Coups, mass demos, revolutions and leader-toppling, the Crimeas annexation and Moscows recognition of breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk warned of the perils ahead. Used to Arab and Asian refugees, Europe is for the first time besieged by destitute white, Christian women and children. God not having helped out, the US in its lofty concern for democratic government and human rights turned to the probably more powerful and certainly more amenable Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Forgotten is the American intelligence report that he personally approved the 2018 murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Forgotten, too, is the March 12 execution of 81 people -- the largest mass execution in modern history -- provoking worldwide outrage. The revered Franklin D. Roosevelt had famously made it obligatory to treat our son of a bitch differently from anyone elses. Saudi Arabias oil and gas will reduce dependence on Russian fuel as another coalition of the willing challenges the evil empire, this time from a safe distance. The Crown Prince has already promised to invest even more in American arms so that the US doesnt feel the pinch of imposing sanctions. Mr Biden restored relations with Venezuela (oil again) and upped ties with Cuba. True, Saturdays tirade dredged up Tiananmen Square, but an awareness that sanctions against China would hurt American voters far more than the Chinese persuades him to look away while Xi Jinping plays footsie with Mr Putin. With the Crown Prince and God on his side, Mr Biden might even accuse Prime Minister Narendra Modi of being more than somewhat shaky if he doesnt reciprocate Chinese foreign minister Wang Yis recent overtures. Sadly, some dyed-in-the-wool pseudo-secularists in the Madras high court may have cramped Gods style with a recent judgment cutting divinity down to size. Courts cannot be hoodwinked by encroaching and constructing a temple in the name of God, intoned the learned judge, whose literal interpretation of the injunction to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars, and unto God the things that are Gods ignored Winston Churchills warning that every law has loopholes. Any rustic mahant knows that the trick is to parcel property into little plots and register each in the name of the 33 million deities in the Hindu pantheon. Gods in His heaven, (and) alls right with the world!, as Browning said, when land ceilings are respected. But even God knows that peace will remain elusive until Russian demands are conceded. Ukraines Russian-speaking Jewish President may not have too much difficulty agreeing to most of them. But his mentors? After topping the Indian smartphone market, it expanded successfully to smart TVs, smart wearables; but, for reasons unknown, the Chinese company never really tried to tap the potential of the tablet segment. Currently, Samsung and Apple dominate the lucrative tablet business and reportedly made a good fortune during the Covid-19 pandemic, as online classes became the norm around the country. Now, Xiaomi, though a bit late to the party, has posted a teaser hinting at the imminent launch of the new tablet. It has even opened a webpage with a countdown but does not mention any details of the tablet. However, rumour has it that Xiaomi may launch the affordable Mi Pad 5 series. The latter actually made its global debut way back in September 2021 in China and in India, it will be retailed as Xiaomi Pad 5. It should be noted that the company let go of the 'Mi' branding with Xiaomi 11 series phones in late 2021. Xiaomi Pad 5 is said to come with 11-inch WQXGA(2560 x 1600p) LCD display with support 120Hz refresh rate, and 240Hz touch sampling rate. Xiaomi Pad 5 series tablet. Credit: Xiaomi Inside, it is expected to feature a 7nm class 2.96GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 860 chipset with Adreno 640 GPU, Android 11-based MIUI 13 OS, 6GB LPDDR4X RAM with 128GB / 256GB UFS 3.1 storage, main 13MP on the back, an 8MP sensor on the front and an 8,720mAh battery with 33W charger support. It can power up the device from zero to 100 per cent in around 90 minutes. Depending on the RAM + storage configuration, Xiaomi Pad 5 is expected to price around Rs 23,000 and Rs 28,000. Xiaomi is slated to reveal more details on the new tablet on April 1. No, it is unlikely to be an April fool's day prank. The new device is coming. Get the latest news on new launches, gadget reviews, apps, cybersecurity, and more on personal technology only on DH Tech. Explosions rocked Ukraine's Lviv, which borders Poland, amid a recent visit by US President Joe Biden and Poland's suggestion to send a NATO peacekeeping force to Ukraine. The war of words between the White House and Kremlin intensified as Biden called Putin a 'butcher' and called for his removal. The Kremlin responded swiftly saying that Russians decide on their leader and it was not for Biden to decide. Stay tuned to DH for live updates. Pakistan's embattled Prime Minister Imran Khan on Tuesday strictly directed his party lawmakers to either abstain or not attend the National Assembly session on the day of voting on the no-confidence motion against him, which is likely to be held in the first week of April. The instructions came a day after Pakistan's opposition on Monday tabled the no-trust motion in the National Assembly against Khan, who is facing his toughest political test since assuming office in 2018 as defections in his party and cracks in the ruling coalition appeared to have made his position fragile. In a letter to the PTI lawmakers, Prime Minister Khan, who is the party's chairman, said: "All the members of the (PTI) in the National Assembly shall abstain from voting/not attend the meeting of the National Assembly on the date when the said resolution is set out on the agenda," Geo News reported. Also Read | Voting on no-confidence motion by Opposition against Pakistan PM Imran Khan to be held on April 3: Minister All members are "required to adhere to his directions in true letter and spirit" and should keep in mind the "intention behind the provision of Article 63(A) of the Constitution of Pakistan," he said. Khan also warned the party lawmakers that "every or any" violation of the directions would be treated as an "express defection" in terms of Article 63(A). No prime minister in Pakistan's history has ever been ousted through a no-confidence motion, and Khan is the third premier to face the challenge. The lower house will convene on Thursday to debate the motion. Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid has said that the voting on the no-confidence motion will be held on April 3. "There will be a debate on the no-confidence motion on March 31, followed by voting on April 3," he said, adding that Khan would emerge victorious. Also Read | Time has come for the final push: Maryam Nawaz to Imran Khan Prime Minister Khan needs 172 votes in the house of 342 to foil the bid to topple his government. Since Khans allies are still not committed to support him and about two dozen lawmakers from within the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf have revolted, the situation was still fluid. Meanwhile, the government said on Tuesday that it was willing to share a "letter" with the chief justice of the country which the prime minister waved at a rally as proof of a foreign "conspiracy" to topple him. In a massive show of strength, Khan on Sunday addressed a mammoth rally in the national capital where he claimed that foreign powers were involved in a conspiracy to topple his coalition government. He pulled a document from his pocket to exhibit it for the charged crowd, saying it was the letter sent to threaten him. Addressing a press conference along with Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry, Minister for Planning Asad Umar claimed that he saw the letter himself and said that the prime minister was ready to share with the chief justice. "Obviously, it is the highest office of justice in Pakistan, it is a huge position that has respect in this country. Personally too, the chief justice has a very good reputation. The prime minister said that if necessary, and for the people's satisfaction, he is ready to present the letter to the chief justice of the Supreme Court," Umar said. Umar said that the letter was written before the no-confidence motion submitted against the prime minister on March 8 but it clearly mentioned the no-trust move which makes it a matter of concern. "So it is clear that the foreign hand and no-confidence motion are linked. These are not two separate things and we see a clear connection between them," said Umar. He, however, refused to make the contents public and even sharing it with the opposition as demanded by its leaders. But he said that the letter had been shared with the top civil and military leadership and a few members of the cabinet. Umar also said that former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who is living in London, was one of the "characters" mentioned in the letter that was a testimony of the conspiracy to topple the government. Information minister Chaudhry claimed that Sharif had held meetings with Israeli diplomats. "This is why I was saying that he should not be allowed to go abroad, because when such people go abroad they become a stooge, a weapon of the international establishment," he said. The presser by the two ministers came after the opposition accused the prime minister for faking up the letter and asked the government to share it. "If there is real threat from abroad to the security of the country, then we are with the government," Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Ahsan Iqbal said. Former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi asked the government to summon a session of parliament on Wednesday and share the letter with the lawmakers. "A threat has been made to our country and we have to respond to it collectively. This is not just about Imran Khan and his two ministers, he said. He asserted that the prime minister should either take the parliament into confidence over the letter or apologize. The development comes a day after the opposition alliance in a power show on Monday night vowed to bring down the government of Khan. The Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), which among others include PML-N and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl (JUI-I), organised a big rally on the Srinagar Highway in Islamabad. PML-N vice president Maryam Nawaz, daughter and heir of former premier Nawaz Sharif, accused Khan of putting down his most trusted Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar to save his power after the government decided to replace him with Chaudhry Pervez Elahi to win the support of his Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid party, which has five lawmakers in the lower house. Khan came to power in 2018 with promises to create a Naya Pakistan but miserably failed to address the basic problem of keeping the prices of commodities in control, giving air to the sails of opposition ships to make war on his government. No Pakistani prime minister has ever completed a full five-year term in office. Check out DH's latest videos: The voting on the no-confidence motion against Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan will be held on April 3, Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid said on Tuesday. Rashid was addressing the media here in the federal capital over the latest political situation after the Opposition parties submitted a no-confidence motion against Khan on Monday during a session of the National Assembly. There will be a debate on the no-confidence motion on March 31, followed by voting on April 3, he said, adding that Khan would emerge victorious. Also Read | Time has come for the final push: Maryam Nawaz to Imran Khan He predicted that all estranged allies would come back to support the government headed by Khan as already done by Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q). He also said all roads have been cleared and there was no blockade in part of the city after the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and the Opposition parties held separate political rallies on Sunday and Monday. Rashid also said at least four terrorists were arrested by the security agencies, saving the capital from a huge disaster. The remarks came as the Pakistan opposition alliance in the last midnight power show vowed to bring down the beleaguered government of Prime Minister Khan. Also Read | PML-N president Shehbaz Sharif tables no-trust motion against PM Khan in Pakistan Parliament The Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), which among others include Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl (JUI-I), organised a big rally on the Srinagar Highway in Islamabad. PML-N vice president Maryam Nawaz and leader of the opposition in Punjab Assembly Hamza Shehbaz who had started the rally from Lahore on March 26, arrived two days later in Islamabad to join the supporters of JUI-F and other PDM parties who had already set up a camp. Maryam, daughter and heir of former three-time premier Nawaz Sharif, castigated incumbent premier Khan for using the religious card to save his tottering throne. I challenge you to have 172 MNAs with you on the voting day on the no-trust motion, she said. She accused Khan of putting down his most trusted Punjab Chief Minister, Usman Buzdar, to save his power after the government decided to replace him with Chaudhry Pervez Elahi to win the support of his Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid party. You pushed your most trustworthy man [Buzdar] into the water to save your own rule. We have not seen such an ungrateful man in our whole lives, she said. She also said that Khan claimed a foreign conspiracy to topple him and blamed him for showing a fake letter at the rally a day earlier. She said Khan had lost peoples confidence, as proved by the ruling partys defeat in 15 out of 16 by-elections in recent months. Several other PDM leaders also addressed the gathering and they also announced to change their rally into a sit-in and the workers would be camping until the vote of no-confidence was held. Khan, 69, is heading a coalition government and he can be removed if some of the partners decide to switch sides. The PTI has 155 members in the 342-member National Assembly and needs at least 172 lawmakers to retain power. Khan came to power in 2018 with promises to create a Naya Pakistan but miserably failed to address the basic problem of keeping the prices of commodities in control, giving air to the sails of opposition ships to make war on his government. Check out latest DH videos here West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday wrote to all Opposition leaders and chief ministers "expressing concern over BJP's direct attacks on democracy" with the use of central agencies. "Central agencies are jolted to action when elections are round the corner," Mamata wrote. "I urge that all of us come together for a meeting to deliberate on the way forward at a place as per everyone's convenience and suitability," she said in her letter to Opposition leaders. Our Hon'ble Chairperson @MamataOfficial writes to all Opposition leaders & CMs, expressing her concern over @BJP4India's direct attacks on Democracy. BJP has repeatedly attacked the federal structure of our country and now, it's time to unitedly fight this oppressive regime. pic.twitter.com/Ib3VbuSdbK All India Trinamool Congress (@AITCofficial) March 29, 2022 She called on all "progressive forces" to join hands to fight the "oppressive BJP regime". "I am writing to you to express deep concern over direct attacks on this country's institutional democracy by the ruling BJP," the letter dated March 27 said. It was shared with the media on Tuesday morning. "Let us commit to the cause of a unified and principled opposition that will make way for the government that our country deserves," she added. Check out the latest DH videos here: Profile: Chinese translator conquers bipolar disorder with undaunted spirit Xinhua) 09:28, March 29, 2022 HANGZHOU, March 28 (Xinhua) -- In the face of critical health challenges such as visual impairment and bipolar disorder, Jin Xiaoyu has remained unfazed, translating 22 foreign-language works into more than 6 million Chinese characters over a decade. The 50-year-old translator lives with his father Jin Xingyong who is 86 years old. Jin's heart-wrenching yet inspiring story, which was recently published online by Hangzhou Daily, has touched the hearts of millions of Chinese. "I felt very lonely and hoped that someone would hear our story," the father said reacting to the news article that gained widespread attention, adding that he lost his wife recently. The article captured Jin's emotional tale in great detail, describing how his parents created a safety net to assure his proper upbringing. CONQUERING ADVERSITIES The family has lived in a 60-square-meter apartment since 1988 in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province. Jin's bedroom is narrow, with books and dictionaries scattered on the shelves. The average-looking man, with black-rimmed glasses and a sparse beard, spends most of his time on the computer, hammering the keyboard incessantly. Jin's right eye crystal sustained damage in an accident when he was six. He later dropped out of high school and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a mental illness characterized by extreme mood swings. His mental health deteriorated to the point where he attempted suicide for many times. Almost every year since 1992, Jin has had to go to the hospital for treatment. Losing an eye severely dented his confidence as a child, and he became reserved, confining himself to reading books at home. He even refrained from taking the national college entrance examinations. With the advent of adult life, Jin took up work at a factory and used to work part-time at bookstores. He avoided speaking with people and would bury himself in books to learn foreign languages on his own. In 2017, Jin's mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and after a prolonged illness she passed away recently. TRANSLATION AS A PROFESSION Bipolar disorder can trigger bouts of extreme anger in Jin to the extent that he would go around smashing things in the house. Surprisingly, even during such frantic moments, he won't harm his computer -- for he understands its significance. Early this year, when Jin was undergoing treatment in the mental hospital his father gave him a Chinese-version sample copy of the book "The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin." He spent two years translating the German book, writing with 530,000 Chinese characters. Jin taught himself German and Japanese and he believes that the experience of learning languages is the same. He read German language textbooks first, then professional books related to translation, and finally, original novels. "I read at least 20 original novels to learn a foreign language," Jin said. One of his most frequently visited places is the library of Zhejiang University. He has read almost all the textbooks on German and Japanese learning available in the library. Jin takes translation seriously. During the translation work of "Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema," he watched every film of the director at least twice and would compare repeatedly the details of the film mentioned in the book. He can work some eight hours a day, swinging into action straight away after breakfast. To maintain good physical strength, he walks for an hour every day as his daily exercise. Complimenting Jin's work one of his readers said, these words are "accurate and delicate, even better than the original text." Jin's father is always the first reader of his manuscripts. And he has only discovered one error to date. The 22 books that Jin translated cover different genres including novels, movies, music and philosophy, among others. The translation fee is not high -- usually 50 or 60 yuan (about 8 or 9.5 U.S. dollars) for 1,000 words. "If I was not sick, I might waste my time. I will do translation job well, so don't feel sorry for me," Jin told his father, assuring him that he enjoys his work. MOTHER -- THE "WHEELBARROW" OF LIFE "My mother played a big role in my translation career," said Jin, adding that it was she who first found him a translation opportunity on a trial basis. Jin's elder brother graduated from Shanghai's Fudan University and currently lives in Australia. So, naturally, Jin became the reason for concern of his parents owing to his health condition. Jin said his mother was strict with him and, like most Chinese parents, always kept a close eye on his studies. Jin's translated books are stacked on a sewing machine that belonged to his mother in the living room. Reminiscing about the bygone days, Jin deems the clothes made by his mother as the coziest and likens her stepping on the sewing machine pedal to a lullaby. Neither the sewing machine nor the clothes were touched by Jin when he was "out of control." During the three years of his mother's battle with Alzheimer's disease, Jin never lost his temper with her. He would bring her food, wash her face and help his bedridden mom use the toilet. "Keep pushing a wheelbarrow as long as it does not turn over," Jin always bears this Chinese adage in his mind and deems his mom the wheelbarrow in his life. FATHER -- THE GUIDING FORCE Jin's father gave the editor his own suggestions on the sample of "The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin" -- in terms of wording, binding design and the size of the format. "My father is a very patient man and has played a significant role in my life. He helped me contact the editor of the publishing house and proofread my manuscripts very carefully," Jin said. His father, a former pharmaceutical researcher, is also a bibliophile who loves the works of the legendary Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. The news article has suddenly brought the father and son under huge public attention. A motorcade volunteered to provide free rides for the elderly, but the father declined the offer, expressing his gratitude and saying that he was used to taking the bus. "I have enough to eat and drink, and I'm satisfied. I'm not in a difficult state so I won't ask others for help. I feel comfortable this way," he said. Jin values his bond with his dad. He hopes to complete the translation of Walter Benjamin's "The Arcades Project" before his father reaches 88. Following that, he intends to take a break from work and devote himself to learning Spanish. "I'm not a genius, and I have to work hard," Jin said, while his father chimes in to say "Love is the most precious thing." (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) What are some of the highlights of your professional life? After qualifying to practice law in Ireland, I worked as a solicitor in the Private Client department of a corporate law firm in Dublin. My work included advising clients on trusts, estate planning, tax planning, and non-profit law. After 10 years abroad, I moved home to eastern Iowa in 2009, where my sister had recently taken a faculty position at St. Ambrose University. I initially worked as an AmeriCorps volunteer in the service learning office at St. Ambrose. I then stepped into the International Student Advisor role on campus. I quickly realized that I'd found my professional home! St. Ambrose had a small international student population, and I was responsible for advising international students from their initial admission inquiries all the way to graduation. It was a remarkable opportunity to combine my interest in law with my love of international education, and I appreciated the opportunity to make an impact in students' lives. After a few years at St. Ambrose, I moved to the University of Iowa, where I worked with a much larger international student population at the Tippie College of Business, creating programming and initiatives to support international students and connect the international and domestic student populations. Again, the students were a tremendous source of energy and inspiration. What brought you to your new role at Miami? Over the years at Iowa, my work evolved from direct work with international students to more academic advising for both international and domestic students. I was delighted to have the opportunity to return to work focused on international students on the ISSS team at Miami. It was also a chance to jump back into immigration regulation advising, which I had really enjoyed at St. Ambrose. Regulation advising is really a world unto itself, and I appreciate the chance to be challenged by my work and to gain knowledge that helps students navigate the complicated immigration system in the US. Painting mugs at exchange student orientation, Jan. 2022 What are some of the things you like about working with international students at Miami? In addition to international student advising, I oversee the admissions process for our exchange students and provide support to them while they are here. It's a relatively small number of students, and I enjoy the opportunity to get to know them and learn from their unique perspectives. I recently completed mid-semester check-ins with them and am so impressed with all they have done so far this semester - from joining Global Buddies and Global Neighbors programs to trying out an escape room in Cincinnati. A number of them have just returned from a spring break trip to New York City. Their enthusiasm is infectious! Do you have any "fun facts" to share with us? When I moved home to Iowa in 2009, I had a strong desire to reconnect with home. While living abroad, I found that I spent lots of time reflecting on my culture and thinking about what made me "me." In April 2009, I started at the Missouri River on the western side of Iowa and walked across the state in 28 days, averaging about 12 miles per day. I ended at the Mississippi River in Muscatine. I camped, stayed in strangers' homes, and met up with family along the way. Except for the perpetual blisters, it was a remarkable opportunity to live life at a slower pace, talk to people without any sense of urgency, and appreciate the understated beauty of the Midwest. Renewing attempts for a common front against the BJP, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has written to Opposition Chief Ministers and leaders, seeking a meeting to "deliberate on the way forward" to hold the ruling party accountable for their actions and resist the "stifling" of voices of dissent. The Trinamool Congress chief said the meeting could be organised "at a take place as per everyone's convenience and suitability", as the need of the hour is for all progressive forces in the country to come together to fight the "oppressive force". In the letter, she expressed "deep concern over the direct attacks" on the country's institutional democracy and the use of central investigating agencies like ED, CBI, Central Vigilance Commission and Income Tax Department to "target, harass and corner the political opponents across the country for vendetta". Let us commit to the cause of a unified and principled Opposition that will make way for the government that our country deserves, she said. Also read: Democracy being 'murdered' under Mamata's rule, alleges BJP Sources said the meeting could take place only after the Budget Session of Parliament concludes. NCP supremo Sharad Pawar said he and his party associate with the issues raised by the party. "We are yet to decide the venue and date for when this meeting will be. It is likely to be in Delhi or Mumbai," he said. Mamata's letter to Opposition leaders came a fortnight after she accused the Congress, after the latter's poor show in the Assembly elections, of not being interested in Opposition unity and said that they cannot depend on the Grand Old Party as it is losing credibility. In the letter to the leaders and Chief Ministers, she reminded the leaders about the Modi government passing bills to extend the tenure of Directors of the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate in "blatant violation" of a Supreme Court order. "We all must resist the ruling BJP's intention to misuse these central agencies with the sole intent of suppressing Opposition leaders. Central agencies are jolted to action just when elections are round the corner. It is amply clear that the BJP-ruled states get a free pass from these agencies to paint a rosy picture of their hollow governance, she said. Time and again, the BJP is trying to attack the federal structure of this country by attempting to influence a certain section of the judiciary. As the Opposition parties, it is our Constitutional responsibility to hold this government accountable for their actions, to resist the stifling of voices of dissent, she said. Mamara said the entire Opposition believes in transparency and accountability in governance but they would not tolerate the vindictive politics of the BJP that has led to a political witch-hunt. It pains me to see that the Chief Ministers of the BJP-ruled states have been consistently flouting directives of the judiciary, she said. Check out DH's latest videos In early 2020, Italy was the first member of the European Union to suspend flights to and from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. At the time, relations between Italy and China were at an all-time high, hence this decision was followed by appeasing gestures by the Italian leadership towards the Chinese. One of these included the Hug a Chinese campaign announced by the Mayor of Florence on February 1, 2020. This was a well-intentioned campaign calling for Unity in this common battle! Many Italian netizens responded by posting photos of themselves hugging a Chinese national. It was to have a disastrous fallout as this led to the rapid spread of the virus. This is an example of what happens when government decisions involving public health are taken without understanding the nuances of a subject matter as complex and technical as health. India had an Indian Medical Service in British-ruled India, a military medical service, which was abolished when India got independence in 1947. Ever since, multiple committees and commissions have recommended the re-introduction of this service. In fact, the All-India Service Act of 1951 mentions The Indian Medical and Health Service as an All-India Service, but for some reason, it was never implemented. Given the inter-State disparity in the availability of health resources, the plethora of healthcare schemes, the need for uniformity of implementation of these flagship schemes across the country, national health programmes management, organ transplant management, pandemic management, to quote a few, not to mention the fast-evolving nature of the subject per se, it is essential to constitute an All-India Medical and Health Service, as is envisaged under Section 2A of the All-India Services Act, 1951. The 15th Finance Commission has also recommended that an All-India Medical and Health Service be established. Furthermore, the Covid pandemic has led to a renewed demand for the constitution of the Indian Medical & Health Service (IMHS). A purely generalist service like the IAS, or a purely technical service like a pool of doctors (like the central pool of doctors selected through the combined medical service exam, or the state-level cadres of doctors), may have outlived their roles in managing healthcare in todays environment. However, a word of caution here. It may be pedestrian to think that an All-India Medical Service can be like the IAS or the IPS in its structure and functioning. The IAS and IPS are services that have no formal specialisation within them. This may not work in the Indian Medical Service. To explain this point further, note that in India, there are not just allopathic doctors but also doctors of the alternative systems of medicine, commonly known as AYUSH doctors. In fact, there is also a separate Ministry of AYUSH, and even Indian missions abroad have AYUSH facilitation centres. These systems of medicine have entirely different concepts of disease causation and cure. Further, within each of these systems of medicine, there will be graduates in medicine and post-graduates in medicine. The point here is that a common entrance exam to the Indian Medical Service will lead to the selection of a very diverse group whose existing skillsets will have to be fully utilised, and new skillsets added, if the true potential of such a service is to be realised. So, while we can select IAS and IPS officers through a competitive exam and after two years of training, they are all set to handle their job (with periodic refresher courses), we may have to structure the selection, training, and deployment of an Indian Medical Service differently. It may also be worthwhile to consider the existing services in the states and the central government and their integration into IMS and eventual phasing out. The training of such officers, selected through a competitive exam, should include an intensive hands-on module to hone clinical skills in a high-occupancy hospital in their zone/state of allocation. Top clinicians from the private sector could also be roped in for this. Additionally, the curriculum should include healthcare and general management. They should also be taught by the leading healthcare management faculty. Case study-based approach should also be included in their training, as also the latest developments in medical jurisprudence, ethics, telemedicine, artificial intelligence, soft-skills training. General management training with a focus on healthcare administration would be ideal. Periodic refresher trainings are imperative as healthcare management is a fast-evolving field. These should form part of performance reviews. These officers should be responsible for healthcare delivery in the public sector hospitals, for implementation of the various healthcare schemes, for healthcare administration, and policy inputs. Administrative posts of public hospitals, government medical colleges and public health institutes should be manned by officers of the health management stream of the Indian Medical Service. The health secretaries of the state and the central governments may be officers of such a service. There should be a strict cooling-off period in case an officer of the IMS wants to resign and go into private practice; s/he should not be allowed to practice in the last two areas of posting for a period of two years. The remuneration and service conditions should be attractive to draw the best talent to this service. It is time to rethink how we administer healthcare in the country. In the current scheme of things, neither the career bureaucrats (even if some of them have a medical degree) nor the career government doctors have the requisite training or insight into the myriad hues of the complex issues that healthcare throws up. Perhaps creating a cadre of technically qualified and well-trained force will help to overcome that. We must look at the idea of an IMS with fresh eyes. The world is changing very fast, and we cannot explore a new world with old maps. (The writer is Senior Consultant, Niti Aayog, Government of India. Views expressed are personal) A few Muslim girls who wished to appear for their Class 10 board examination wearing hijab were denied entry in Karnataka on Monday citing the recent High Court verdict. However, a majority of Muslim students chose to write the exam without hijab, saying that the exam was more important for them than wearing the headscarf in exam halls, sources said. Authorities of an exam center in a school in Hubballi sent back Muslim girls, who came to write exams sporting the hijab. A similar scene was witnessed in a government school in Ilkal town of Bagalkote district where Muslim students were denied entry to write the SSLC board exams. Also Read | 'Travesty of justice': Muslim Personal Law Board moves Supreme Court against Karnataka HC verdict on hijab In Bengaluru, a Muslim supervisor was suspended for wearing a hijab on duty. The full bench of Karnataka High Court had recently ruled that hijab is not an essential religious practice and everyone should abide by the uniform dress rule. The Karnataka government had made it clear that everyone has to follow the High Court ruling or else they will not be allowed to write the exam. According to the Karnataka Secondary Education Examination Board (KSEEB), over 8.69 lakh students had enrolled for the exam but 20,994 students did not turn up. Last year, the absentees were only 3,769. Last year, the attendance was 99.54 per cent, which came down to 97.59 per cent this year. Among the 8.48 lakh students who appeared for the exam, 8.11 lakh were fresh candidates, 35,509 were private fresh ones and 1,701 were repeaters. Karnataka Primary and Secondary Education Minister B C Nagesh said the exam took place smoothly in the state. After two years, full-scale SSLC exams took place. Children came to the exam centers excited and wrote the exam. Parents too happily sent their children to write the exam while teachers too were happy to conduct the exam, Nagesh said in a statement. Check out the latest videos from DH: Social Democratic and Labour Party Leader, Colum Eastwood MP, has welcomed 3 million in funding from SDLP Infrastructure Minister, Nichola Mallon, for City of Derry Airport. Mr Eastwood said the money would secure the airports future and help to facilitate growth. Mr Eastwood said: Far too often in recent years doubt has been cast over the future of City of Derry Airport. "This merry-go-round not only causes serious worry for staff about their futures, but the uncertainty scares off potential investment in the airport and airlines are hesitant to commit to new routes in the absence of guarantees. This funding from SDLP Infrastructure Minister Nichola Mallon will help to secure the airport's future and allow it to make concrete plans going forward. "There is huge potential for City of Derry to expand and grow, it is the only major airport in the entire north-west of this island and we need to focus on attracting new routes and airlines so that it can establish itself in its own right as a choice for travellers alongside Belfast and Dublin. For decades Derry and the wider north-west has suffered from a lack of investment and one of the reasons most often cited for this is the lack of proper transport links. "A properly resourced airport would make it easier for people to visit our city and create new opportunities for Derry. Id like to thank SDLP Minister Mallon for her efforts in securing City of Derrys future. "This is the latest in a long line of positive announcements she has made for our city including a fleet of zero emissions buses and progress on upgrading the Derry to Coleraine train line. "Throughout her time as Minister she has shown a real determination to deliver on the projects that matter to local people. Please allow ads as they help fund our trusted local news content. Kindly add us to your ad blocker whitelist. If you want further access to Ireland's best local journalism, consider contributing and/or subscribing to our free daily Newsletter . Support our mission and join our community now. Irish Foreign Minister and Mayors of Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region look forward Press release Irish Foreign Minister and Mayors of Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region look forward to strengthening cooperation during major mission to Dublin Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney, TD, Mayor Andy Burnham and Mayor Steve Rotheram agreed to further develop the partnership between Ireland and the Manchester and Liverpool city regions during a meeting in the Department of Foreign Affairs, Dublin, on 29 March. The meeting was part of major joint mission to Ireland led by the two mayors, involving business delegations and civic leaders, which is backed by the UK Department of International Trade. The mission will advance the respective International Strategies of Liverpool City Region and Greater Manchester Combined Authorities, both of which identify Ireland as a priority strategic partner and commit to strengthening mutually beneficial trade and innovation linkages, centred on the Irish Sea. The mission to Dublin also supports Irelands objective of developing its partnership with the North of England. It follows the official opening by Minister Coveney of Irelands new Consulate General for the region in October 2021, recent visits to the region by Ministers Robert Troy and Sean Fleming and the establishment of an Enterprise Ireland Office in Manchester in 2019. In welcoming the mayors, Minister Simon Coveney spoke of his determination to continue to build up Irelands engagement with the North of England: The development of our partnership with the North of England is a key part of Irelands strategy for strengthening relations with Great Britain post-Brexit. We have unique heritage and community ties right across the North of England and there is great potential for Irish firms to develop partnerships with the dynamic Northern Powerhouse region. I know from Team Irelands Consulate General and Enterprise Ireland operation on the ground that our commercial, environmental, civic and cultural objectives are aligned with those of many of the regions powerful new Combined Authorities. Mayor Andy Burham and Mayor Steve Rotherham worked with me on the opening of our Consulate General for the North of England last year and this weeks mission is another important step forward. Our respective commitments to the relationship are clear. As part of our strategy for the North of England, my Department and our new Consulate will continue to explore opportunities for further strategic engagement in the tourism, academic, sustainability, cultural and sporting sectors, and in particular promote two-way commercial opportunities across the Irish Sea. We will encourage greater collaboration between town, city and other local, regional and community organisations on areas of shared interest for the mutual benefit to our people and places. High-level visits such as these are important and will continue to be supported. Mayor of the Liverpool City Region Steve Rotheram said: It is fantastic to be in Dublin, where we have been given a typically warm Irish welcome. It is clear from our conversations so far that our regions special relationship with our nearest neighbour is as strong as ever. Andy and I arrived here with the ambition to lay the foundations to ensure that the latest chapter in our long shared history is a prosperous one. All the conversations we have had so far this week indicate that this feeling is very much mutual. The North West has enjoyed a long, successful trading partnership with Ireland. Looking to the future, we share many of the same aims in things like renewable energy, innovation, trade, and manufacturing. There is still so much potential to unlock and we want Ireland to be near the front of that queue. Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham said: Ireland holds deep significance for people across the North West which is why Im so pleased to be leading this first joint Mayoral mission, together with Mayor Steve Rotheram. There are so many opportunities for us to work together on vital issues like recovering from the pandemic and cutting emissions to meet our net zero goals. Together our businesses can grow, invest, and create good jobs on both sides of the Irish Sea Minister Coveney shares our determination to deepen collaboration and cooperation between our places and this agreement will help us to take that next step forward. ENDS Press Office 29 March 2022 Notes to editors The partnership between Ireland and the North of England has intensified significantly in recent years. In 2019, the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, undertook an official visit to Liverpool, the then-Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, TD, visited Manchester, and Enterprise Ireland opened an office in Manchester. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney, TD, officially opened Irelands new Consulate General for the North of England in October 2021, during a visit to Manchester and Liverpool. In the course of their visit to Dublin this week, the two mayors have called on the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, at Aras an Uachtarain. They were joined by UK Minister for Exports, Mike Freer, MP, for discussions with the Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise Trade and Employment, Leo Varadkar, TD, and in hosting a Greater Manchester Liverpool City Region Business and Innovation Summit in Dublin. Irelands Minister for Financial Services Sean Fleming, TD, addressed the Summit and the Mayors are also meeting with Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Minister Darragh OBrien during the visit. Irelands new Consulate General for the North of England is led by Consul General Sarah Mangan. She is accompanying the mayors during this weeks visit. The new Consulate General is helping Ireland to upgrade partnerships with regional and local Governments in the North West, the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber. The North of England is a dynamic region of one million businesses. There is great potential for building up commercial ties between this region and Ireland. The scale and enduring influence of Irelands diaspora in the North of England is well known. It is said that approximately 35% of population of the City of Manchester has some Irish ancestry, while Liverpool claims to have the strongest Irish heritage of any British city. The Department of Foreign Affairs provides over 1 million annually to 26 organisations serving the Irish community in the North of England though its Emigrant Support Programme. Previous Item | Next Item Minister Coveney meets Mayors of Manchester and Liverpool Press release Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney, TD, Mayor Andy Burnham and Mayor Steve Rotheram agreed to further develop the partnership between Ireland and the Manchester and Liverpool city regions during a meeting in the Department of Foreign Affairs, Dublin, on 29 March. The meeting was part of major joint mission to Ireland led by the two mayors, involving business delegations and civic leaders, which is backed by the UK Department of International Trade. The mission will advance the respective International Strategies of Liverpool City Region and Greater Manchester Combined Authorities, both of which identify Ireland as a priority strategic partner and commit to strengthening mutually beneficial trade and innovation linkages, centred on the Irish Sea. The mission to Dublin also supports Irelands objective of developing its partnership with the North of England. It follows the official opening by Minister Coveney of Irelands new Consulate General for the region in October 2021, recent visits to the region by Ministers Robert Troy and Sean Fleming and the establishment of an Enterprise Ireland Office in Manchester in 2019. In welcoming the mayors, Minister Simon Coveney spoke of his determination to continue to build up Irelands engagement with the North of England: The development of our partnership with the North of England is a key part of Irelands strategy for strengthening relations with Great Britain post-Brexit. We have unique heritage and community ties right across the North of England and there is great potential for Irish firms to develop partnerships with the dynamic Northern Powerhouse region. I know from Team Irelands Consulate General and Enterprise Ireland operation on the ground that our commercial, environmental, civic and cultural objectives are aligned with those of many of the regions powerful new Combined Authorities. Mayor Andy Burham and Mayor Steve Rotherham worked with me on the opening of our Consulate General for the North of England last year and this weeks mission is another important step forward. Our respective commitments to the relationship are clear. As part of our strategy for the North of England, my Department and our new Consulate will continue to explore opportunities for further strategic engagement in the tourism, academic, sustainability, cultural and sporting sectors, and in particular promote two-way commercial opportunities across the Irish Sea. We will encourage greater collaboration between town, city and other local, regional and community organisations on areas of shared interest for the mutual benefit to our people and places. High-level visits such as these are important and will continue to be supported. Mayor of the Liverpool City Region Steve Rotheram said: It is fantastic to be in Dublin, where we have been given a typically warm Irish welcome. It is clear from our conversations so far that our regions special relationship with our nearest neighbour is as strong as ever. Andy and I arrived here with the ambition to lay the foundations to ensure that the latest chapter in our long shared history is a prosperous one. All the conversations we have had so far this week indicate that this feeling is very much mutual. The North West has enjoyed a long, successful trading partnership with Ireland. Looking to the future, we share many of the same aims in things like renewable energy, innovation, trade, and manufacturing. There is still so much potential to unlock and we want Ireland to be near the front of that queue. Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham said: Ireland holds deep significance for people across the North West which is why Im so pleased to be leading this first joint Mayoral mission, together with Mayor Steve Rotheram. There are so many opportunities for us to work together on vital issues like recovering from the pandemic and cutting emissions to meet our net zero goals. Together our businesses can grow, invest, and create good jobs on both sides of the Irish Sea Minister Coveney shares our determination to deepen collaboration and cooperation between our places and this agreement will help us to take that next step forward. ENDS Press Office 29 March 2022 Previous Item | Galaxy A73 5G starts at 41,999 the Galaxy A33 5G India pricing is yet to be revealed. Update: Samsung Galaxy A73 5G pricing in India has been announced at 41,999 for the 8+128GB model and 44,999 for the 8+256GB unit. Galaxy A73 5G and Galaxy A33 5G are the new Samsung Galaxy A-series phones in the Indian market. They were announced globally a few weeks back along with Galaxy A53 5G. Although the latter phone has already launched earlier last week, the A73 5G and A33 5G have come out today. Similar to the A53 5G, the Galaxy A33 5G is also running on an Exynos 1280 chip, a 5000 milliamp battery, an FHD+ AMOLED screen, and Android 12 with OneUI 4.1 software. There is the promise of 4 years of OS updates on the Galaxy A73 5G and 3 years on the Galaxy A33 5G. Well, the Galaxy A73 5G also shares some of these perks but has got a Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G 5G engine inside. Samsung Galaxy A73 5G Specs and Features Samsung has outfitted the Galaxy A73 with a 6.7-inch FHD+ 120Hz sAMOLED+ panel with an Infinity-O cutout. Within this punch hole lies a 32MP selfie camera. The back cameras of the A73 5G are a 108MP main sensor (OIS), a 12MP ultrawide, a 5MP depth shooter, and a 5MP macro module. Its internal anatomy consists of Snapdragon 778G 5G, up to 8GB RAM, 256GB storage, and a 5000mAh battery. There is support for 25W fast charging but the charger is sold separately. Speaking of which, there is no bundled earphones or even a 3.5mm jack for the same on the phone. Anyways, the phone also packs Android 12 based One UI 4.1 software with 4 years of platform upgrades and 5 years of security updates. It also comes with 5G, USB-C 2.0, up to 1TB micro-SD card slot, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, and IP67 dust and water resistance. Samsung Galaxy A33 5G Specs and Features Galaxy A33 5Gs front is a 6.4-inch 90Hz FHD+ AMOLED screen with Gorilla Glass 5 protection and an Infinity-U notch for housing a 13MP camera. Flip to the other side, and there you find a 48MP primary shooter, an 8MP ultrawide snapper, a 5MP macro clicker, and a 2MP depth sensor. The processor is Exynos 1280 aided by 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. A 5000mAh battery keeps the lights on with support from a 25W charging brick, although this adapter has to be purchased separately. No 3.5mm port or bundled earphones. What you get though are Android 12 based One UI 4.1 software with 3 years of OS upgrades, 4 years of security patches, WiFi, Bluetooth 5.1, USB-C 2.0 port, and IP67 ingress protection. Galaxy A73 5G, A33 5G India Price and Availability Samsung Galaxy A73 5G pricing in India is set at 41,999 for the 8+128GB variant and 44,999 for the 8+256GB unit. There is an introductory discount offer of up to 3000 if you use ICICI debit/credit cards, SBI credit card, or Samsung Finance+. The company is also offering the Galaxy Buds Live worth 6,990 for 499, if you pre-book the Galaxy A73 5G. Moreover, you may check out a live Samsung event on April 8 to know about other benefits assosiated with the device purchase. Samsung hasn't disclosed the pricing and the exact sale date of Galaxy A33 5G yet. It just tells that the Galaxy-A series handset will go on pre-booking in the coming days through Samsung.com, major online and offline outlets. * 25W travel adapter sold separately; # In-box travel adapter with 15W support Meanwhile, the Galaxy A53 5G is available in India at 34499 for 6GB+128GB and 35,999 for the 8GB+128GB model. Then there is Galaxy A23 costs 19,499 for a 6GB+128GB unit and 20,999 for an 8GB+128GB model. Finally, the Galaxy A13 is priced at 14999 for 4GB+64GB, 15,999 for 4GB+128GB and 17,499 for a 6GB+64GB unit. For more news, reviews, feature stories, buying guides, and everything else tech-related, keep reading Digit.in. Subscriber content preview KITTERY, Maine (AP) Maines congresswoman is a member of a new caucus that will focus on the countrys public shipyards. Democratic Rep. Chellie Pingree said Friday the caucus was created to provide support to the nations four public shipyards, including Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine. The others are Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility in Washington and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility in Hawaii. . . . Subscriber content preview DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) A fire broke out Monday at an under-construction new terminal at Kuwait International Airport, authorities said, causing damage but no casualties. Firefighters struggled to control the flames for hours in Kuwait City, Interior Ministry spokesman Tawheed al-Kandari told The Associated Press. . . . KAMPALA, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Having taught at Uganda's prestigious Makerere University for decades, retired Andrew Tumusiime made a bold decision to enter forestry business in his hometown in the southwestern part of the country. Returning to Kabale, Tumusiime planted a bamboo nursery bed, hoping that people would buy the seedlings from him. However, finding clients was challenging, so he decided to plant the seedlings himself. "At first, I took it as a joke, but then I realized it was good business. I turned my energy to researching until I landed on websites which explained the impact of bamboo growing in China," Tumusiime told Xinhua in a recent interview. To obtain further information about bamboo planting, Tumusiime joined the Uganda Bamboo Association, some of whose members had acquired knowledge about bamboo farming from China. The association, according to one of its leaders Flavia Munaba, brings related organizations and community members together to share information, resources and technology in growing and adding value to bamboo. Munaba, who joined the bamboo industry after a trip to China in 2011, said the association has more than 300 members. The association organizes demonstrations for members on how to plant bamboo and also sensitizes them about the economic benefits of the plant. "This association of bamboo growers has great people. They are not selfish when it comes to sharing the great knowledge they learnt from China," Tumusiime said. After a decade-long endeavor, Tumusiime's bamboo business has thrived. He was one of the exhibitors at the Harvest Money Expo 2022 in Kampala, one of Uganda's largest agricultural exhibitions. During the expo, Tumusiime's booth showed various bamboo products such as toothpicks, chairs, tables, mortars and pestles. He said many customers who came to his exhibition stand were awed by the products made out of bamboo. "This is amazing. The toothpicks I have known all my life are made in China. I like innovation and maybe in the future I will consider planting bamboo," Ritah Nanyonjo, one of the customers told Xinhua after visiting Tumusiime's stall at the expo. "I have also seen some liquid soap and other herbs made out of bamboo. This is great news for our country," Nanyonjo said. James Kariuki, a Kenyan national who attended the exhibition, said he was inspired by Tumusiime's work. "He has told us that once you plant bamboo, you can start harvesting after three to four years. This harvesting goes on for the next 50 years and even more," Kariuki said. "I will definitely use part of my land to grow bamboo. Tumusiime has also referred me to some websites which talk about the importance of bamboo and how the Chinese have done wonderful things out of this plant," Kariuki added. In those years Bologna was going through an unparalleled season of social change and creativity, the culmination of an artistic zeitgeist that saw the city become an open-air laboratory of post-77 Italy. It was home to the collective squathouse Traumafabrik, to the raw and hallucinated comics of Andrea Pazienza, and to the impossible hairstyles of Orea Malia. The city, though, was also a hub where the New York street art avant-garde introduced by Francesca Alinovi flirted with the No Wave sound of Italian Records, while on the riviera the clubs pulsated to the beat of Italo Disco. Two books capture the disillusionment mixed with the neon-lit hedonism of this new generation: A Post-Modern Weekend by Pier Vittorio Tondelli where Kinki is mentioned and Fluo by Isabella Santacroce, on whose cover one can spot Micaela herself posing as part of a group of girls with sonic outfits. Dundalk Institute of Technology are absolutely thrilled to report two prestigious wins for their BA(Hons) Film and Television Production students at the 2022 Royal Television Society Awards. The Royal Television Society is a world-renowned educational charity for the discussion, and analysis of television in all its forms, past, present, and future. It is the oldest television society in the world and this years awards which were attended by DkIT students and staff were held in the famous Studio 4 in RTE this week. Bullet Casings in The Graveyard won the prominent Best Factual Film Award. This film was created in 2021 during the students final year and was made as part of their 4th year Major Project module on the BA (Hons) in Film & Television Production in DkIT. The students who were involved in this production were Kate Breen Director, Adam Daly & Lauren Reilly - Co-Producers & Product Designers, Ciara Lawe -Director of Photography, Philip Clarke - Sound Editor. All development and pre-production on this film was carried out remotely as there were no on campus classes for most of the academic year 20/21. This included weekly production meetings, fund raising, sourcing & organising locations, casting, sourcing props, dressing, costumes, script readings, risk assessments, etc. The Film was shot over 6 days at the end of April/start of May 2021 under strict Covid 19 filming protocols and was completed with a mix of on campus and remote activity to complete the project by mid-June 2021. Chloe O'Reilly was the second winner of the night for DkIT and won an award for Best Editing for the film Unravel which was also created in 2021 under the same challenging Covid 19 restrictions. Both awards were an amazing achievement and testament to the DkITs students dexterity and resilience during such unprecedented times. Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT) have been granted planning permission for redevelopment at the former Carroll's Factory Building on the Dublin Road campus. The former PJ Carroll's Factory Building is a protected structure, listed as reference number D182 in Louth County Council's Record of Protected Structures. The planned development consists of the conversion of part of the building and the associated former Energy Centre building into 1,231 square metres of Apprenticeship Teaching Facilities. The planned works in the Carroll's building include modifying the interior, stripping out of internal walls and the formation of plumbing and electrical apprenticeship areas and a new mezzanine office area. It also includes the removal of two brick faced bays on the south facade and insertion of new glazing, doors and ramps. The works to the Energy Centre building works consist of striping off the existing roof covering and replacing with new membrane roofing system; new fall arrest system; access hatch and services; insertion of new entrance doors; exit doors; new ramps; stripping out of redundant services; modification to floor; and new roof access ladder. Brickwork walls to the refurbished area are to be cleared and a cill added below glazing. The application includes plans for works to the Research Lab, which include a 2.4m high partition. Works in the service compound area include installation of a 4.2m high tank. Permission was also granted for eight cycle parking spaces and all associated site development works. A Dublin man who was convicted in his absence, after Dundalk district court was told he had used abusive language towards a Garda after being informed that his vehicle was about to be seized, was last week sentenced to two months. Jim Cash (37) of Boot Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 22 was charged with using threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour on June 22nd 2020. In February, when Mr. Cash failed to appear for the case which was listed for a contested hearing, the garda involved told the court the defendant had been a passenger in the vehicle in the car park at Lidl, St. Helenas, Dundalk . After he was informed that it was going to be seized, he allegedly told the garda Get out of the way you big f***ing thick you. The Garda also claimed the accused told him You look like Supermans son and added "F*** off guard Im leaving". The court heard when the public order charge was put to him after caution Mr. Cash replied I did no such thing and I have it on video. A bench warrant was issued for sentencing after Judge Eirinn McKiernan was told he had 84 previous convictions including 12 for public order offences. Last Wednesday the defence solicitor explained that the married father of five had been confused about the adjourned date and added without prompting he had apologised to the garda that morning. He acknowledged his clients extensive previous convictions but stressed that Mr. Cash has been engaging with the Coolmine treatment centre and has been undergoing weekly urine tests. However, Judge McKiernan said the defendant had taken a hearing date and didnt turn up and had been very abusive to the garda. She imposed a two month sentence but fixed recognizance in the event of an appeal. Minister for Public Expenditure Michael McGrath has said the costs of housing Ukrainian refugees will be "high", with estimates claiming it could cost close to 2.5bn next year. The Government estimates that this will be the cost to look after 100,000 Ukrainian refugees in 2023. Minister for Public Expenditure Michael McGrath is due to brief the Cabinet this morning on the projected expenditure of hosting refugees from Ukraine. "The costs will be high, but these are costs that have to be met. It is the right thing to do," Minister McGrath said on his way to that meeting earlier this morning. "Much depends on the nature of the accommodation that is provided," Minister McGrath said. Initially, accommodation will be provided in hotels "and there is a certain level of cost associated with that," Minister McGrath said. "It is the case, to cater for 100 refugees, the cost to cater for all their needs over the year is 4-500 million," Minister McGrath said. "We do anticipate that many refugees coming here will want to work, and there are many opportunities in the Irish economy," Minister McGrath said. He added that some refugees will want to return to Ukraine as soon as they can. "There will be some high costs but there is also a degree of uncertainty on how many refugees will come here, how many will stay, and how many will want to work," he said. He said they will fund these costs through the contingency reserve which had been put aside for Covid. Thubten Gyaltsen (R) talks with his family in Xigaze, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region on May 11, 2021. (Xinhua/Sun Ruibo) LHASA, March 28 (Xinhua) -- On a moonless night, two scrawny, exhausted boys frantically escaped their fates of becoming Nangsans, or house slaves, by slipping out of Shannan, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, and journeying to the present-day regional capital Lhasa. The orphaned boys, 13-year-old Thubten Gyaltsen and his younger brother, staggered on blistered feet and begged for three days to reach Lhasa. "What I thought then was to live on," said the now 82-year-old man. Although the escape took place 69 years ago, the night is still burned into Thubten Gyaltsen's memory. Years after their escape, democratic reform led by the Communist Party of China (CPC) was launched and feudal serfdom was finally abolished in Tibet. A million serfs and slaves including Thubten Gyaltsen were emancipated and started to embrace a new life. Thubten Gyaltsen and his family now live in a two-story house with 13 rooms and a garage in the city of Xigaze. Five in his family of six enjoy wages or pension, and three have college degrees. Ahead of Serfs' Emancipation Day, which falls on Monday, Thubten Gyaltsen looked back on the extraordinary history he has witnessed in Tibet. HELL ON EARTH Thubten Gyaltsen hailed from the present-day Nedong District, Shannan City, which was once a manor owned by a feudal lord. Serfs here could barely fill their stomachs, wore tattered clothes and engaged in a life-and-death struggle. "My parents were serfs. My mother died when I was 9, and my father passed away when I was 12," he recalled. "As orphans, we could not afford to pay the head tax, and were forced to be Nangsans in the manor." In old Tibet, governmental officials, aristocrats and senior lamas, who represented merely 5 percent of the population, had a monopoly on almost all cultivated land, pastures, mountains, rivers and most livestock. The other 95 percent, comprised of serfs and slaves, had no personal possessions nor personal freedom, let alone human rights. Nangsans were the most miserable of serfs and could be sold by their owners as cattle. Thubten Gyaltsen's uncle was a Nangsan. He delivered a message to his nephew: "If you become a Nangsan, your life will be hell on earth. Try to escape." Thubten Gyaltsen and his younger brother fled for their lives in April of that year. Life in Lhasa was not much better. They slept on the streets and had no one to depend on. To survive, Thubten Gyaltsen became a servant for a wealthy family. "I was 13 years old then. The steward made me work as an adult. I did not have enough to eat, and slept beside an earthen stove at night," he said. Two years later, he decided to return to Shannan to look for his uncle. "I heard that my uncle was not a Nangsan anymore, and he worked for the CPC. I was looking forward to finding him." SECOND CHANCE AT LIFE Once Thubten Gyaltsen finally joined his uncle, a CPC official told him: "You have suffered a lot. If you want to lead a happy life, you must learn to read and be literate." He was then sent to a cadre academy in Lhasa to study. "I was full of excitement. I did not feel like a human being during serfdom. The CPC gave me a second life," he said. The second time he visited Lhasa, he wore new clothes, a pair of leather shoes and rode in on the back of a horse. On March 28, 1959, the central government led the people in Tibet to launch the democratic reform, abolishing Tibet's feudal serfdom under a theocracy. Thubten Gyaltsen returned to Lhasa from a school in Xianyang City of northwest China's Shaanxi Province and participated in the campaign. The democratic reform gave new life to Tibet. Serfs and slaves were given land, domestic animals and houses of their own. They have become the masters of the nation, Tibet and their own fates, and turned themselves into grassroots cadres, students, teachers and doctors. Thubten Gyaltsen became a local cadre in Xigaze and joined the CPC in 1980. He spent most of his time serving people at the grassroots level. Today, hunger and poverty are a thing of the past for people of all ethnic groups in Tibet. By the end of 2019, all registered poor residents in Tibet had shaken off poverty, marking the elimination of absolute poverty in the region for the first time in history. "Our lives couldn't be happier, and we are experiencing a totally different world compared with the old days," Thubten Gyaltsen said. "I have no regrets following in the steps of the CPC, and luckily, my choice was correct." The Taoiseach has said the UK Government should honour its commitment to introduce new legislation around the Irish language in Northern Ireland. During leaders questions in the Dail, Micheal Martin also said that respect and esteem for the Stormont institutions had been weakened because of the repeated collapse of the powersharing Executive. There had been an expectation that the Westminster Government would introduce cultural legislation for Northern Ireland before the elections in May. It fell to the Northern Ireland Office after the Stormont parties were unable to agree to introduce cultural and language legislation in the Northern Ireland Assembly which was part of the New Decade New Approach (NDNA) deal. The plans include an Office of Identity and Cultural Expression to promote respect for diversity as well as an Irish Language Commissioner and a commissioner to develop language, arts and literature associated with the Ulster Scots/Ulster British tradition. Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis said this week he did not believe it would be right to introduce Irish language legislation during an election period However, Northern Ireland Secretary of State Brandon Lewis told the Northern Ireland Affairs committee this week he did not believe it would be right to introduce legislation during an election period. The Taoiseach was questioned on the issue on Tuesday by Aontu leader Peadar Tobin, who said the Good Friday Agreement had been gutted. He added: Brandon Lewis has said he will not bring forward Irish language legislation at Westminster before Mays assembly election. The Irish Language Act has been promised for 15 years. Sinn Fein returned to Stormont in January 2020 after previously collapsing it, because they said, they had achieved an Irish Language Act. In a combination of bad faith by London and naivety from Sinn Fein, we find out that that commitment was hocus pocus all along. Aontu leader Peadar Tobin said the Good Friday Agreement had been gutted Mr Martin said: The Secretary of State did commit to Sinn Fein that he would bring it in in the Westminster parliament. It is my view that promise should be fulfilled. When agreements are made, agreements should be honoured. The Stormont powersharing Executive collapsed earlier this year when the DUP withdrew Paul Givan as First Minister in protest at the post-Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol. Mr Martin said a lot of work would be needed to restore the institutions following the Stormont elections in May. He added: The institutions should never be undermined, they should never be collapsed by any political party. If the people elect you to an Assembly, one should discharge your duties on behalf of the people for the full duration of that parliamentary cycle. Unfortunately the history of the Good Friday Agreement and of the Assembly and Executive is too often the default position has been to either withdraw from the Executive, to collapse the Executive when different crises emerges. That, I think, has been a fairly significant problem in terms of the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement which in turn has weakened peoples respect and esteem for the institutions. If you compare consistent surveys in terms of opinion of the Assembly versus the Scottish Assembly, there is a marked difference. I put forward the basis of that is that in Scotland there hasnt been a similar interruption; the government is perceived to be working for its people. In the north it has just been interrupted too much by collapse and this recent collapse is unacceptable. Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Minister has expressed gratitude towards Ireland for taking care of Ukrainian citizens. Minister Dmytro Kuleba made the comment yesterday evening (Monday March 28) through social media after speaking with Irish Minister for Defence and Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney. Ireland has provided millions of euro in humanitarian assistance to war-torn Ukraine as well as non-lethal resources since the beginning of Russia's invasion. Minister Kuleba stated, "Spoke with Irish [Foreign Minister] SimonCoveney. Ireland remains our dedicated partner and friend. Grateful for Irelands active stance and comprehensive support within the EU, as well as taking care of Ukrainian citizens. Discussed efforts to put an end to Russias brutal war against Ukraine." Spoke with Irish FM @SimonCoveney. Ireland remains our dedicated partner and friend. Grateful for Irelands active stance and comprehensive support within the EU, as well as taking care of Ukrainian citizens. Discussed efforts to put an end to Russias brutal war against Ukraine. Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) March 28, 2022 Minister Coveney confirmed he had spoken to Minister Kuleba and said, "Good conversation with [him] this morning. He updated me on the current situation and the new round of Peace talks in Turkey. He thanked Ireland for our ongoing strong support on all levels." Minister Coveney released a statement this afternoon (Tuesday March 29) confirming four senior Russian officials have been asked to leave the State. This is reportedly due to activities "which have not been in accordance with international standards of diplomatic behaviour". The Russian Ambassador to Ireland, Yury Filatov, was informed of same by the minister at Iveagh House today. In the statement, the government re-iterated their stance that diplomatic channels between Ireland and Russia should remain open. Around 750,000 employees, aged between 23 and 60, will be automatically enrolled into a national retirement fund after the Government cabinet signed off on the pension plan. The auto-enrolment pensions plan will see those who earn more than 20,000 automatically signed up to make contributions for their retirement fund. The automatic enrolment scheme is a new savings and investment scheme for employees which will see the State and employers contribute towards employee pensions. Approximately 750,000 employees who are aged between 23 and 60, earning over 20,000 across employments, and who are not already enrolled in an occupational pension scheme will be affected. Matching contributions will be made by employers to those contributions made by employees up to a maximum of 80,000 of earnings. For every 3 saved by a worker, a further 4 will be credited to their pension savings account, including a government top up. The auto-enrolment was initially meant to start this year but due to the pandemic the roll out was delayed. The scheme is now set to come into effect in January 2024. The final infrastructure is expected to be in place in late 2023. Minister for Social Protection Heather Humphreys said: "We all know that people are living longer. While this is very positive, we also want people to be able to enjoy their retirement years with some financial security. "However, for many people retirement seems a long way away and they think they have a lot of time before they need to think about a pension," she said. SHANGHAI, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The number of 5G connections in China is expected to reach 892 million by the end of 2025, according to a recent analysis by GSMA, an international association of mobile operators. This figure is higher than GSMA's forecast around half a year ago at the World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit, despite the fact that some Chinese provinces and cities are currently combating COVID-19 outbreaks. Strong 5G demand on the Chinese mainland has made it the single largest 5G market in the world, with 5G connections accounting for over 75 percent of the global total at the end of 2021, according to the association's latest report "The Mobile Economy China 2022." "China is one of the leading markets for 5G and has been playing an important role in accelerating the digital transformation of industries," said Sihan Bo Chen, head of Greater China for GSMA. By early March, China had around 1.43 million 5G base stations and over 500 million 5G users. The country will work to ensure the number of 5G base stations tops 2 million this year, official data showed. PHNOM PENH, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) has helped bolster the economies and social development of the sub-regional countries and enhance the well-being of their people, Cambodian officials said on Tuesday. Kem Gunawadh, secretary of state at the Ministry of Information, said the six LMC countries, namely China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, share cultural similarities, enjoy profound traditional good neighborliness and friendship, and have closely intertwined security and development interests. "The LMC has also supported the building of the ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) community and promoted the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development," he said during the opening ceremony of a hybrid forum on the Role of Journalists on Shared River, Shared Future. The LMC focuses on three cooperation pillars, namely public policy and security, economic and sustainable development, and people-to-people exchanges, Gunawadh said, adding that the LMC's five priority areas are connectivity, production capacity, cross border economic cooperation, water resources, and agriculture and poverty reduction. Mam Dathalineth, an advisor to the Ministry of Information, said 2022 marks the sixth anniversary of the LMC and that this regional mechanism has played an important role in building a community with a shared future of peace and prosperity in the sub-region. Sponsored by the LMC Special Fund, the half-day forum was physically and virtually attended by some 50 people. Originating from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China, the river is called the Lancang River in China and the Mekong River when it flows through the lower reaches before emptying into the sea. Consolidated financial statement of the Eurosystem as at 25 March 2022 In the week ending 25 March 2022 the net position of the Eurosystem in foreign currency (asset items 2 and 3 minus liability items 7, 8 and 9) increased by EUR 0.3 billion to EUR 328 billion. As a result of the Eurosystems open market operations and standing facilities, net lending to credit institutions (asset item 5 minus liability items 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5 and 4) decreased by EUR 176.7 billion to EUR 1,434.9 billion. This was due primarily to the change in the level of the deposit facility (liability item 2.2). Claims on non-euro area residents denominated in euro (asset item 4) rose by EUR 1.8 billion to EUR 12.4 billion, mainly owing to Eurosystem operations providing euro liquidity to non-euro area central banks (further details can be found on the ECBs website under Central bank liquidity lines). Base money (liability items 1, 2.1 and 2.2) increased by EUR 26 billion to EUR 6,174.5 billion. The table below provides the detailed breakdown of securities held for monetary policy purposes (asset item 7.1) into the different portfolios. All portfolios are accounted for at amortised cost. FORMER Ireland rugby prop Mike Ross has conquered a six-day Arctic survival challenge but said it was trivial compared to the struggles of those battling a horrific skin disease. The Cork man endured temperatures of -27C and had no electricity or running water during the trek in aid of Butterfly Skin charity, Debra Ireland. It supports people in Ireland living with epidermolysis bullosa (EB), a condition where the skin blisters at the slightest touch, requiring excruciating bandage changes which can last hours. Ross was among 18 people to face the wilderness challenge deep inside the Arctic Circle, learning the skills necessary to survive in one of the worlds harshest environments. The aspect of life I missed most was definitely running water - you dont appreciate the benefits of it until you dont have it, said the 42-year-old. But his temporary break from home comforts made him realise that every challenge they faced was fairly trivial compared to living with EB. After two days training, the group headed off on a two-day trek into Finlands Yllastunturi National Park, where they camped outdoors overnight. Their initial accommodation was a woodcutters lodge with no electricity or running water. Ross, who retired at the end of 2017 after a 12-year professional career, said that using the skis on the trek was the most difficult part. For those who donated to help me with the fundraising for this trip, the impact of their donation is massive. Theres so much cost associated with EB, every cent counts and there is also some very promising research into treatments that the donations will directly impact. There is no known cure for the genetic condition and the only treatment is the constant, bandaging of the skin. Money raised from the challenge will be used to continue increasing the quality of care Debra Ireland provides to patients as well as funding critical medical research. Each Arctic Challenge participant had to raise a minimum of 5,500 and Rosss fundraising page is still open for donations at: https://justgiving.com/fundraising/debrairelandarcticmr By Neil Lancefield and Nina Lloyd, PA A second P&O ferry is being detained, the UK's Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) has said after undertaking a safety inspection. The firm sparked outrage after sacking 800 seafarers without notice on March 17th, amid plans to bring in cheaper agency staff. P&O boss Peter Hebblethwaite will appear before a Scottish parliament committee on Tuesday, after he was heavily criticised over the job cuts. The MCA said it was in the process of holding The Pride of Kent on Monday. A spokesperson for the MCA said: Our surveyors are in the process of detaining the Pride of Kent. We are awaiting confirmation of all the detainable items. UK transport secretary Grant Shapps confirmed the news in a tweet, adding that the ship was being held following an inspection and that safety will not be compromised. UPDATE The @MCA_media have informed me tonight that they have carried out an inspection on a ship belonging to P&O Ferries. As a result, the #PrideOfKent ship has now been detained. Safety will not be compromised & further checks will continue. Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP (@grantshapps) March 28, 2022 It follows the detention of another P&O vessel which was held in the Northern Ireland port of Larne on Friday due to failures on crew familiarisation, vessel documentation and crew training. The Rail, Maritime and Transport union said it believed the MCA acted because of multiple safety and operational breaches, including the wearing of breathing apparatus. The union repeated its demand that the government seize P&Os entire fleet and take action to get them back in service with the sacked crew reinstated. General secretary Mick Lynch said: The seizing of the Pride of Kent by the MCA this evening should be adequate evidence for the government that the gangster capitalist outfit P&O are not fit and proper to run a safe service after the jobs massacre. Its rare enough for the MCA to impound a ferry, but P&O have now had two in a week after the jobs carve up which speaks volumes about the dire state of their operation. Its now high time for these important vessels to be taken over under public control with the sacked crews reinstated as the only way to get these crucial ferry routes back running safely. The MCA said another of the firms vessels, European Causeway, remains under detention in Larne. Mr Shapps wrote to Mr Hebblethwaite earlier on Monday threatening to bring a package of measures to parliament to block the company from paying below minimum wage. Through that package, I intend to block the outcome that P&O Ferries has pursued, including paying workers less than the minimum wage, he said. The measures could be unveiled on Wednesday. The minimum wage in the UK for people aged 23 and above is 8.91 (10.60) per hour. Mr Hebblethwaite, whose basic annual salary is 325,000, told MPs on March 24th the average pay of the agency crew is 5.50 per hour. He will face the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee on Tuesday after he appeared before a Westminster committee last week. Peter Hebblethwaite, Chief Executive, P&O Ferries whose basic annual salary is 325,000 told MPs on March 24 the average pay of the agency crew is 5.50 per hour (House of Commons/PA) Irish Ferries began operating on the Dover to Calais route in June 2021 in competition with P&O Ferries. Irish Ferries did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on Monday. A P&O Ferries spokesman said: We fully welcome the governments commitment to increasing the minimum wage for all seafarers working in British waters. From the outset, we have called for a level playing field when it comes to pay and conditions on British ferry routes. Our announcement is not about reducing seafarers wages, it is to enable us to have a fully flexible crewing model that allows us to meet the demands of our customers. The predicted savings we announced are not solely coming from the reduction in wages, but from removing job duplication and the benefits we will see from increased flexibility. The UKs loudest bird is making a vocal comeback. Bitterns are a type of marsh bird in the same family as herons and egrets, according to the Natural History Museum. They were driven to extinction in the UK in the 1870s when their habitat was drained for agriculture, according to BBC News. Hunting put additional pressure on the birds. However, the species was reintroduced, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) announced they had a record-breaking year in 2021, with 228 males counted. Bitterns are one of [the UKs] most charismatic birds, RSPB senior conservation scientist Simon Wotton told the Natural History Museum. Their astonishing recovery from the brink of extinction is a real conservation success story and example of what is possible through targeted efforts to restore wildlife habitat. Bitterns are famous for being hard to see but easy to hear. Their speckled brown coloring camouflages them easily in the reeds where they live, according to The Guardian. However, the males make a booming call that can be heard from three miles away. In fact, the noise is as loud as a jet taking off, the Natural History Museum said. The males make the foghorn-sounding noise during their breeding season, which is how scientists are able to count them, according to BBC News. The birds make this noise by using the muscles around their windpipe to puff up their gullets into an echo chamber. Its a delight to hear their distinctive booming call echoing across the reedbeds every year as more and more bitterns are making new or restored wetlands their home, Wotton told the Natural History Museum. The species current success is hard won. After going extinct in the late 19th century, the birds returned to Norfolk in the early 1900s and there were around 80 males by the 1950s, according to the Natural History Museum. However, when annual surveys started in 1990, the number of the birds was once again low, BBC News reported. In 1997, their numbers dipped to 11. However, wetland restoration enabled them to recover in the decades since, and their population has more than doubled in the last 10 years. The restoration of wetlands has been a boon to other species as well. Weve invested millions in restoring and creating wetlands and thats meant species like cranes, spoonbills, little egrets and great egrets have returned too, ornithologist Dr. Alex Lees told BBC News. Wetland birds are probably the biggest conservation success story of the last 40 years its the group of species thats really bucking the trend of nature loss. Today, there are bitterns all over England in Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, East Anglia, Kent, the West Country and London, according to The Guardian. In 2020, the first breeding pairs in at least 200 years were sited in Wales. They now visit Scotland and Ireland in the winter on an occasional basis and may settle there permanently as their recovery continues, the Natural History Museum said. RABAT, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The Moroccan navy has foiled an attempt to smuggle more than 12 tonnes of cannabis off the Atlantic coast of El Jadida, the military said Tuesday. The operation on Monday led to the arrest of six smugglers, including three Spanish citizens, according to a statement by the Moroccan Armed Forces. The smuggling operation was foiled after a maritime surveillance plane spotted artisanal fishing boats suspected of illicit trafficking transferring their cargos onto three other boats offshore, according to the statement. The smugglers, equipment and cargos were handed over to the Royal Gendarmerie at the port of El Jadida, it added. Despite efforts to crack down on cannabis cultivation during the past decade, Morocco remains one of the world's largest producers of the narcotic plant, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. A judge has ordered Activision Blizzard to pay $18 million to settle a federal lawsuit accusing the company of fostering a sexist, discriminatory workplace. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed the suit in September and that same afternoon, Activision Blizzard agreed to set up an $18 million fund for employees who experienced sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination at the studio. Today's ruling approves this plan. The fund will be distributed among people who worked at Activision Blizzard from September 1st, 2016, to today. Eligible employees and former employees have to opt-in to receive a payout, and they can submit claims relating to sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination and retaliation. Today's ruling isn't the end of the legal issues for Activision Blizzard, and it may even complicate efforts still underway by other agencies. California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing first sued the studio in July 2021 following a two-year investigation into allegations that sexism, gender-based harassment and a "frat boy culture" pervaded the Activision Blizzard offices. That state-level lawsuit is still in progress, while the $18 million ruling today applies only to the federal case filed by the EEOC. Anyone who signs on as a claimant in the EEOC suit will not be eligible to participate in the state's case, at least when it comes to harassment, retaliation or pregnancy discrimination. If they have additional claims, such as pay inequities, they can bring those to the DFEH lawsuit. The DFEH and EEOC have been battling for dominance with their lawsuits against Activision Blizzard. Lawyers for the California agency have expressed concern that a federal settlement might prevent them from pursuing additional damages at a state level. The DFEH case is scheduled to go to trial in February 2023. "The DFEH will continue to vigorously prosecute its action against Activision in California state court, spokesperson Fahizah Alim said last week. Additionally, the DFEH, activists and Activision Blizzard employees have argued the $18 million figure is far too low to properly compensate all potential claimants, which could add up to hundreds of people. Communications Workers of America, the labor union backing Activision Blizzard employees during this time, called the sum "woefully inadequate" in a letter to the EEOC in October. "This would provide the maximum settlement for only 60 workers," the CWA letter reads. "If any significant number of workers received the maximum under federal law, there would be little available for many other workers adversely affected. We are concerned about how the EEOC got to that number and how it believes that number will be fairly distributed. Please explain." California's DFEH fought against a similar ruling in the case of Riot Games. Following a 2018 class-action lawsuit claiming rampant sexual harassment and discrimination at the studio, Riot was originally ordered to pay $10 million to eligible employees. The DFEH blocked that payout, arguing it was much too small, and the amount was eventually increased to $100 million. A spokesperson for the EEOC provided the following statement to Engadget following today's federal ruling: "We are pleased that the judge has indicated her intent to sign the consent decree. The consent decree not only provides monetary relief to potential claimants that were impacted by sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination and related retaliation at Activision Blizzard throughout the United States, but also puts in place significant injunctive relief at Activision Blizzard to prevent and address discrimination, harassment, and retaliation." French audio maker Devialet is best known for speaker collaborations, unique designs and often heady prices. Having experimented with UK broadcaster Sky, the sound company is ready to launch its first solo soundbar for TVs, the Dione. And its huge. Devialet pitches the Dione as a high-end soundbar, offering Dolby Atmos 5.1.2, as well as the ability to upscale stereo content into an approximate 5.1.2 audio signal, offering a richer sound stage and augmented spatial effect even if what youre watching isnt primed for Atmos. During a preview event in London, I got to listen to the new soundbar, with its eye-catching orb detail and well, it sounds deeper, crisper and outright louder than the mid-range soundbars Ive owned myself. And pretty much any other soundbar Ive heard. Theres also the reality that its likely as wide as your new 4K TV. And as deep too. Thats because it houses 17 speaker drivers including eight subwoofers, all custom-built to Devialets specifications. This means, according to the company, that theres enough oomph to sidestep a separate subwoofer unit, with the built-in woofers reaching bass levels as low as 24Hz, and attempting to fill the companys aim of, as CEO Franck Lebouchard told me, bringing everything to one object. As is the case for most modern soundbars, there are increased processor demands, and Devialet is using a Qualcomm SoC (System on a chip), which helps with room calibration and several of the companys proprietary sound engineering features, like adaptive volume level (AVL), which automatically adjusts sound levels to help you hear speech, or avoid getting blasted by loud ads in the middle of quieter programs. The most impressive trick is still the upmixing. I watched a nature documentary, first in stereo, then in Devialets SPACE upmixed mode, which attempts to add the richness and breadth of 5.1.2 audio to stereo audio. It works even if this might not be true 5.1.2 audio. I could hear a richer soundstage, with the background rustles of the jungle, and the separate tweets of two birds in the midst of a courtship dance. Switching back to stereo, and everything sounds narrower, tighter. Besides this movie mode, which is available when connected through HDMI or optical input, theres also spatial mode, which attempts to upgrade audio from wireless sources (Spotify Connect, AirPlay or Bluetooth) and a voice mode which boosts, well, voices. This is aimed at news programming and podcasts. You can switch between the modes through the companion app, as well as use the app for volume controls. Theres also a standalone controller from Devialet sold separately which looks like a smart thermostat. Because of course. Mat Smith/Engadget The companys new Advanced Dimensional Experience (ADE) is its take on beamforming audio. According to the companys white paper on the tech, this helps to optimize the surround audio, boosting soundwaves from certain angles and rejecting other soundwaves in an attempt to optimize audio for the listener in front of the soundbar. The Dione can be laid beneath a TV or mounted on the wall. The aforementioned orb rotates to match this, but the bar can detect its orientation with its built-in gyroscope. The soundbar has specific audio profiles for either orientation. The orb, a nod to its Phantom speaker, also houses one active speaker and two passive radiators. Devialet wants the attention of audiophiles as well as those not looking to place multiple speakers around their living space. Its difficult to compare to most of the smaller, cheaper products. The best comparison may be Sennheisers Ambeo, a $2,500 6.1.2 Atmos bar with plenty of tricks of its own. The Dione is a substantial investment, priced at $2,400 in the US, or 1,800 in the UK. Its another all-in-one solution, but at these specs, size and price, its for those interested in upgrading their entire viewing experience. Whats the point of a 4K OLED TV if everything doesnt sound as good as it looks? MOMBASA, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Sub-Saharan African countries that have enacted policies and legislation to boost sustainable use of dryland plant species have been able to cope with climatic stresses better in addition to creating new revenue streams for indigenous communities, experts said Tuesday. Ben Chikamai, the executive secretary of the Network for Natural Gums and Resins in Africa, said the continent's vast dryland resources have been at the heart of its transition to a climate-resilient future. "The vast Africa's dryland ecosystem, if sustainably managed, has the potential to accelerate green growth while providing employment and incomes to communities," said Chikamai at an African Forest Forum conference underway in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa. Citing a study that was conducted recently by international scientists in partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Chikamai said that robust resins and gum value chains contribute about 0.1 percent to the gross domestic product (GDP) of several African countries. In addition, value addition on the two dryland tree species has provided new revenue streams for nomadic women and youth, besides promoting cross-border trade, said Chikamai. He believed that communities in the Sahel and Horn of Africa regions require capacity development, training, awareness and enhanced market linkages to ensure they benefit from harvesting dryland plant species that have aesthetic and medicinal value. Chikamai said that value addition on dryland species like gums, resins, myrrh and frankincense will boost their demand in the local and overseas markets besides strengthening the resilience of communities affected by climate change. He called for fiscal incentives, sensitization, research and adoption of innovations to help regenerate dryland resources amid threats linked to climatic stresses, over-exploitation, pest infestation and invasive species. Charity Munyasya, the deputy chief conservator of forests at Kenya Forest Service, said that the enactment of policies to guide prudent utilization of dryland resources has revitalized action on Africa's climate crisis while tackling rural poverty, food insecurity and desertification. Xiaomi has come a long way since the launch of its budget Redmi line back in 2013, and while the latter has since extended its coverage across a wider price range, it isn't about to abandon the budget market. Ahead of its 12th anniversary on April 6th, Xiaomi announced a new Redmi 10 5G which, starting from $199, happens to be the company's and some markets' cheapest 5G smartphone to date. To put things into perspective, the OnePlus Nord N200 5G costs $240, and Samsung's recently-launched Galaxy A13 5G is priced at $250. The Redmi 10 5G not to be confused with the 4G-only Redmi 10 or 10A is powered by an octa-core MediaTek Dimensity 700 processor with dual 5G standby, and it runs on MIUI 13 based on Android 11. You get a reasonably-sized 6.58-inch 2,408 x 1,080 LCD with up to 90Hz refresh rate, along with a generous 5,000mAh battery which supports 18W fast charging (interestingly, the phone comes with a 22.5W charger), a side-mounted fingerprint sensor and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Redmi 10 5G in "Aurora Green." Xiaomi There's not much going on in terms of design just a plastic body with a grooved concentric circle texture and flat edges. Likewise with photography: just a 50-megapixel main camera paired with a 2-megapixel depth camera on the back, plus a 5-megapixel "dot drop" selfie camera above the screen. As with all Xiaomi phones these days, the Redmi 10 5G won't be headed to the US, but a spokesperson confirmed that we can expect it to land in most of Xiaomi's global markets, including the UK, Europe, South East Asia, Middle East and more. You'll have two options: the $199 model comes with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, whereas the $229 version bumps the storage up to 128GB. These will come in "Graphite Gray," "Chrome Silver" and "Aurora Green." Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G in "Forest Green." Xiaomi Also announced for the international markets are the higher-end Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G and Redmi Note 11S 5G, both of which also pack a MediaTek processor (Dimensity 920 and Dimensity 810, respectively) with dual 5G standby, a side-mounted fingerprint reader, an IR blaster, a 3.5mm headphone jack and dual speakers (with JBL tuning on the Pro+). The Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G has been available in China since October, and it's all about its 15-minute fast charging on its 4,500mAh dual-cell battery, thanks to Xiaomi's 120W HyperCharge tech. You also get a 6.67-inch 2,400 x 1,080 AMOLED screen, which delivers up to 120Hz refresh rate and up to 360Hz touch sampling rate for some slick scrolling, as well as a high brightness mode of up to 700 nits for outdoor usage. With its 108-megapixel main camera (Samsung HM2 sensor), 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera, 2-megapixel telemacro camera and 16-megapixel punch-hole selfie camera, you should be able to get some nice photos out of this device. Prices range from $369 (6GB + 128GB) to $449 (8GB + 256GB), and you can pick "Graphite Gray," "Star Blue" or "Forest Green." Redmi Note 11S 5G in "Midnight Black," "Twilight Blue" and "Star Blue." Xiaomi The marginally cheaper Redmi Note 11S 5G is a slight variant of China's earlier Redmi Note 11 5G, with the main difference being the extra 2-megapixel macro camera on the back. The rest appears to be identical: 6.6-inch 2,400 x 1,080 LCD (90Hz refresh rate, 240Hz touch sampling rate), 5,000mAh battery with 33W fast charging, 50-megapixel main camera, 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera and 13-megapixel punch-hole selfie camera. Prices range from $249 (4GB + 64GB) to $299 (6GB + 128GB), with color options including "Midnight Black," "Twilight Blue" and a sparkly "Star Blue." If a startup from New Jersey has its way, the next Ray Kroc will be a robot. In the last week, a company called RoboBurger installed an autonomous burger chef in Jersey Citys Newport Centre Mall. Over on its website, RoboBurger breathlessly describes its vending machine as the biggest innovation in hot food vending since the invention of the microwave. Inside of a frame that occupies about 12 square feet, the RoboBurger features everything it needs to make a complete if somewhat visually unappealing burger in approximately six minutes. And while there may not be any humans involved, the machine uses the same five-step cooking process employed by many quick-service restaurants. An automated griddle grills the patty at the same time the machine toasts the bun. When you order your burger, you can decide whether you want ketchup, mustard and cheese on it. Theres even a built-in cleaning system that is up to the standards of the National Sanitary Foundation. Oh, and you can pay for your burger with both Apple Pay and Google Pay. Handy that. And while we cant speak to the taste of the burger, RoboBurger claims it only uses the best ingredients possible. The patty is made from grass-fed Angus beef that isnt subjected to antibiotics. As for the bun, its a potato one that comes from a local bakery. If you cant make it to New Jersey for a taste test, fret not. RoboBurger says it plans to bring its automated burger chef to airports, malls, colleges and other similar venues across the country in the coming weeks and months. Your TikTok habits may vary, but Ive sometimes pulled myself out of a fugue of lengthy viewing, hopping and browsing on the social app, barely recalling what I just spent 15 minutes doing. For me, and possibly you, a new watch-history feature could offer some insight to exactly what were wasting our time on. According to Hammond Oh, TikTok is testing a watch-history tool to show you a list of videos that previously appeared in your For You feed, making it easier to rediscover clips (and creators) you may have not liked or followed. There are other ways to seek out your TikTok watch history, but theyre not exactly easy to use. One method involves navigating to the Discover page, tapping search, entering an asterisk and toggling on the watch videos option in the search filters tab. As is the case with random feature tests on TikTok, Instagram and others, this might not make its way to all users, but keep an eye on your For You feed just in case. Mat Smith The biggest stories you might have missed The company is chasing mainstream appeal. OnePlus began as a startup making smartphones with high-end specs at relatively reasonable prices. In an age of black slabs, the company was able to forge an identity for itself, backed by devoted fans and a strong online presence. But now, after 10 generations of flagship phones, Sam Rutherford feels like the OnePlus we knew is gone, and it's probably not coming back. Continue reading. You can control smart home devices using the 32-inch 4K display. Samsung Samsung's latest Smart Monitor is now available to pre-order. The kinda-familiar-looking Smart Monitor M8 has support for streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV, as well as cloud gaming platforms. You won't necessarily need to connect to external speakers, with two built-in 5W speakers and a tweeter that delivers 2.2-channel audio. The Smart Monitor M8 starts at $700 for the white model. The spring green, sunset pink and daylight blue models will cost you a little extra at $730. Continue reading. Just after finally achieving some success with 'Lost Ark' and 'New World.' The Amazon Games struggle bus was finally going somewhere, but now studio head Mike Frazzini is stepping down. On LinkedIn, Frazzini cited the desire to spend more time with family. "While theres never really a perfect time to step away from a great role, now is a good time," he wrote. Amazons MMORPG New World was one of 2021's biggest moneymakers on Steam. Continue reading. This follows the drama with Joe Rogan's podcast. Getty Spotify has finally acted on its promise to add a COVID-19 content advisory label. You'll now see a tab for a COVID-19 Guide when you visit podcasts and other content discussing the coronavirus. Tap it and you'll visit a section that points you to authoritative sources (such as the World Health Organization and the UK's National Health Service) as well as trustworthy content from the likes of The Guardian and the BBC. Continue reading. Guess the speed force couldn't get Ezra Miller out of trouble this time. The star of the upcoming The Flash movie landed himself in a bit of hot water on Sunday when he was arrested for Disorderly Conduct and Harassment while drinking at a bar in Hawaii. As per a statement released by police, "On Sunday, March 27, at 11:30 p.m., South Hilo patrol officers responded to a report of disorderly patron at a bar on Silva Street. During the course of their investigation, police determined that the man, later identified as Ezra Miller, became agitated while patrons at the bar began singing karaoke. Miller began yelling obscenities and at one point grabbed the microphone from a 23-year-old woman singing karaoke (disorderly conduct offense) and later lunged at a 32-year-old man playing darts (harassment offense). The bar owner asked Miller to calm down several times to no avail." Miller was arrested and booked on the two charges only to later be released on $500 bail. This isn't the first time Miller has shown erratic behavior for the public to see. Back in January, the 29 year old actor took to Instagram in order to send a threat to the members of The Ku Klux Klan with the message, "This is a message for the Beulaville chapter of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan," Miller said in the video, which was uploaded to Instagram. "Hello, first of all. How are y'all doing? It's me. Look, if y'all wanna die, I suggest just killing yourselves with your own guns, OK? Otherwise, keep doing exactly what you're doing right now -- and you know what I'm talking about -- and then, you know, we'll do it for you if that's really what you want. OK, talk to you soon, OK? Bye!" The post has since been removed. A staff member tests samples of the COVID-19 inactivated vaccine at a vaccine production plant of China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm) in Beijing, capital of China, April 11, 2020. (Xinhua/Zhang Yuwei) by Xinhua writer Yuan Quan BEIJING, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Many clinicians have referred to a COVID-19 drug developed by Zhang Linqi as a "miracle medicine" after seeing their patients' lasting fever symptoms diminish quickly following an injection of the drug. A virologist at China's Tsinghua University, Zhang led his team to create a cocktail therapy of monoclonal antibodies BRII-196 and BRII-198, which cut hospitalizations and deaths by 80 percent in human trials and appears to work well against all existing variants. It took just 18 months for the Chinese drug to be developed and receive regulatory approval. "In less than two years, we finished a job that would otherwise take at least 10 years," Zhang said. His latest research uses a deep learning approach to help his team obtain antibodies that can neutralize the coronavirus and its variants at a faster pace. Zhang Linqi introduces his research to Xinhua reporters at Tsinghua University on March 2, 2020. (Xinhua/Meng Jing) Anti-COVID-19 research results from Chinese institutes, universities and enterprises have been published in international academic journals every two or three days since January. Chinese scientists are contributing their wisdom, experience and painstaking efforts to enhance the human capacity to cope with the deadly virus. While the Academy of Military Medical Sciences presented an mRNA COVID-19 antibody that provided lasting immunity in mice, Fudan University created an adenovirus vaccine candidate designed to give dual protection against both COVID-19 and influenza viruses. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China's top academic institute, are working on an inhalable antibody with low cost and large-scale production advantages, while pharmaceutical companies in Shanghai and Suzhou have commenced global trials of a co-developed oral drug for moderate and severe COVID-19 cases. Speaking to press at the fifth session of the 13th National People's Congress earlier in March, Minister of Science and Technology Wang Zhigang said that China has had fruitful beginning to its development of COVID-19 vaccines and drugs, with several candidates being granted market approval or undergoing clinical trials. "The more tools to tackle COVID-19 that science and technology can provide, the better our anti-pandemic measures can become," the minister said. None of this progress has come easily. China's impressive pace of medical research is the result of the long-term hard work of Chinese scientists. Wang Qihui is a CAS virologist. Since January 2020, when Wang first volunteered to work on COVID-19, she has been racing against the clock to find ways to defeat the virus. Tasked with finding effective antibodies in a short time, Wang led her team to conduct experiments day and night. She once stayed in her laboratory for two weeks, sometimes forgetting food and sleep. Five months after the initial outbreak of the novel coronavirus, her team announced that JS016, a COVID-19-neutralizing antibody that they had developed, could be administered to healthy people in clinical trials. In November last year, the antibody was granted emergency-use authorization in 15 countries, including the United States and several European countries. Lots of sacrifices were made in this process. Right before the results of the COVID-19 antibody study came out, Wang Qihui experienced neurological deafness because of high stress, which led to temporary hearing loss in her left ear. She was hospitalized for five days after a doctor warned her that, in the absence of timely treatment, she could develop permanently impaired hearing. Wang Qihui carries out experiments at a lab in the Institute of Microbiology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. (Chinese Academy of Sciences/Handout via Xinhua) The scientist has since recovered and is determined to make greater contribution to the fight against the pandemic. She has resumed her COVID-19 research, working to develop a nasal spray antibody drug and an mRNA vaccine. Wang Qihui attributes her achievements largely to her previous experience in the field of viral infectious diseases, such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and the Zika virus. Zhang Linqi and his team, like Wang, have used their determination and wealth of experience in responding to new pathogens to deal with the pandemic. Zhang has devoted 30 years to the study of HIV-1 pathogenesis and vaccine development, and to emerging and re-emerging human viral pathogens such as MERS, Ebola and the Zika virus. "The development of a treatment drug and a vaccine sounded lighting fast, even to me, but it benefited from years of research on antibody drugs and HIV vaccine development," Zhang said when asked how the COVID-19 antibody drug he developed was created so quickly. Inspired by the "AIDS cocktail," a combination treatment of three or four different medicines for people with HIV/AIDS, Zhang and his team selected 206 monoclonal antibodies and whittled the number down to two, creating their COVID-19 cocktail therapy. It has demonstrated an improved performance in resisting virus mutations and maintained longer activity in the human body compared to similar therapies consisting of only one antibody. Xiamen University, which has also accumulated significant experience in vaccine development, is a major research force in the fight against COVID-19. It was also one of the first institutions to receive global virus research donations. Staff members work at the inactivated COVID-19 vaccine quality inspection lab of Sinovac Life Sciences Co., Ltd. in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 23, 2020. (Xinhua/Zhang Yuwei) Emerging technologies are involved in COVID-19 research. Tech giant Baidu has licensed its mRNA sequencing algorithm to French vaccine maker Sanofi for use in the design of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutic products. According to the Chinese company, the algorithm can accelerate the research. Zhang also stressed that interdisciplinary collaboration is very important in his work. He collaborated with Tsinghua biologists to decipher the structure of the virus, and with Shenzhen clinicians to isolate monoclonal antibodies in convalescent patients. These partnerships accelerated the development of China's first COVID-19 antibody drug. "Scientific research is to explore the unknown in blind zones. We scientists not only need strong hearts and big brains, but also partners to support us. Even if we fail, we are not alone, as there are many people supporting us," Zhang said. Zimbabwean Gideon Chinamatira, grantee of the Lightsources for Africa, the Americas, Asia, Middle East and Pacific (LAAAMP) project, has spent two months on beamline BM05 learning all the ins and outs of working on a beamline. And all that, with a croc in tow. Wow, I am really going to the ESRF now, thought Gideon Chinamatira when he finally got his visa to fly from South Africa. It had been a complicated process due to COVID-19 and all the variants that kept locking the world down in the last months. But finally, he was on his way. And with him, a unique crocodile specimen from the Early Jurassic, protected inside a box. You walk around airports with this case and every time you get stopped you need to explain that you are carrying a precious fossil and that you are going to scan it at the ESRF. It makes you feel special, says Chinamatira. Chinamatira is a post-graduate student at Wits University (South Africa) and a LAAAMP grantee. LAAAMP aims to train scientists from countries where synchrotron sources are not available in the use and applications of synchrotrons. The ultimate goal is that whenever there will be a light source available in their area, they will be key to its construction and development. The LAAAMP FA-ST grant was requested by Kudakwashe Jakata, post-doctoral researcher in tomography at beamline BM05 and originally from Wits University. He supervised Chinamatira during his stay at the ESRF. The LAAAMP project is great for allowing students to discover what a synchrotron is and how it differs from a lab-based computed-tomography apparatus, explains Jakata. When you get here, you realise this is the next step of tomography, adds Chinamatira, who, is in charge of the CT-lab at Wits University in an acting capacity. When I go back, Ill be able to better guide the scientists that come to the lab on proposal applications to take their samples to the ESRFs tomography beamlines. The aim of LAAAMP is to open exciting research and training opportunities in crystallography and utilization of synchrotron light sources in developing regions of the world. Sekazi K. Mtingwa, member of the LAAAMP executive committee, explains: "Since 2017, LAAAMP has awarded 102 researchers with the opportunity to train for two months at many of the world's leading synchrotron light source facilities. This will prove particularly impactful for Africa, which is currently experiencing a movement to construct a synchrotron light source somewhere on the continent as a Pan-African facility, using the models of the ESRF and SESAME in the Middle East". South Africa is an Associate Member of the ESRF and contributes to the budget in 1%. This enables the scientific community to apply for beamtime and do experiments at the facility. Text by Montserrat Capellas Espuny Russian President Vladimir Putin has brought Europe back to a place we thought had been consigned to an unrepeatable past. We find ourselves confronting an irrational leader whose foreign policy has been degenerating since the day, in 2001, when US President George W. Bush looked him in the eye and said he had found a man he could trust. The risk of a third world war is no longer within the realm of the impossible. Russia is now staging attacks just a few kilometers from NATOs borders, and, given Putins unpredictability, we cannot dismiss the possibility of a direct confrontation between Russia and the Alliance. That would raise the almost unimaginable possibility of a nuclear conflict, which our leaders have the duty to avoid. Because Russia and Europe are part of an uninterrupted land mass, stability at the edge of the continent is fundamental to regional peace. But diplomatic barriers between Russia and NATO are multiplying. Rarely have the post-World War II international organizations been so absent, or even helpless, in the face of conflict. Even the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was established with the aim of guaranteeing stability between Russia, the United States, and Europe, is proving to be inadequate to todays challenge. The European Union has responded firmly to Russias aggression, demonstrating its unity by imposing severe financial and economic sanctions. But the war in Ukraine has shown that Europe is insufficiently prepared to address its most immediate challenges. The EU must now sharpen its focus on four priorities. First, the EU must expand its security and defense capabilities, and the Strategic Compass currently being drawn up should serve to guide policy in this domain. While Europe clearly must invest in its military capabilities, this means not only spending more money but also undertaking such efforts as Europeans rather than as individual states. According to the European Defense Agency, EU member states spend a total of about 200 billion annually on defense, more than India, Russia, and the United Kingdom combined. The task now is to improve efficiency rather than merely increasing military spending at the national level. And this requires adopting a European vision in national military planning. Second, the EU must rethink its energy dependence on Russia. Europe has been relying on Russian gas for too long and may have to pay a price for turning off the tap, as Germany has begun to do by suspending the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. As Nathalie Tocci of the Istituto Affari Internazionali says, no economic calculation should trump what is needed for European unity. Third, Europe must develop a common migration policy with a geographic division of responsibility for accepting refugees from our respective neighborhoods to the east or south. Starting in 2015, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel unilaterally accepted hundreds of thousands Syrian refugees, while the rest of Europe mostly looked the other way. Today, EU member states must show a common willingness to help those fleeing war. The exodus of two million Ukrainians to Poland since the war began has highlighted the incongruities of European migration policy. Europes solidarity with the Ukrainian refugees is a positive gesture that has shown our citizens at their best; but it should also make us reflect on our far less welcoming attitude toward refugees from other parts of the world. Lastly, Europe must help to mitigate the wars effects on global food security. Because Ukraine and Russia together supply 19% of the worlds barley, 14% of its wheat, and 4% of its corn, the conflict is also affecting many other economies. For example, Kenya, with a population roughly the same size as Ukraines, sources half of its wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine. With 276 million people globally suffering from severe hunger, poorer regions in particular will suffer as a result of the current conflict. As the EU tackles these immediate priorities, the Unions founding mission of building peace and preventing war must remain at its core. A world that is still suffering from the Covid-19 pandemic and its fallout, and currently seems unable to reverse the consequences of climate change, cannot afford a conflict of this type. Europe must therefore use the means at its disposal, including sanctions, to try to change Putins behavior. Above all, it must play a key role in preventing the hostilities in Ukraine from escalating into a war between major powers. The role of China, which is allegedly considering selling arms to Russia to help Putins war effort, will likely be crucial to averting a global conflict. The most recent meeting between Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, on the eve of this years Winter Olympics in Beijing, seemed to suggest a near-alliance between the two powers. Many have drawn parallels with US President Richard Nixons 1972 visit to China, which heralded a Sino-American rapprochement aimed at countering the threat posed by the Soviet Union. But while China may be tempted to form an alliance with Russia, a world war would not suit Xi, and becoming part of such a conflict even less so. Preventing a China-Russia alliance from taking root is fundamental to preserving the current balance in international relations. Europe can and must urge China to play a role in seeking a negotiated end to the Ukraine conflict. To that end, it is vital that the US, the EU, and NATO not be perceived as weak and divided in either domestic or foreign policy. Despite the tragedy of the Ukraine war, I feel proud of what Europe has done over the past few weeks. The responses in Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, and Madrid have been unanimous: Putins aggression must not go unpunished. A more assertive, decisive EU must reflect not only resonance between national governments, but also citizens awareness that their security, interests, and principles are being threatened. Only with this mindset will Europe realize its aims. Europe Must Sharpen Its Aims Commentary by Javier Solana Project Syndicate. The Commentary can be downloaded here Moda Olga Moreno, el extravagante look con el que ha sorprendido en la Feria de Abril: "Estoy como una tabla" In todays edition of the e4m Pride of India series, Abhinav Tyagi, SVP-Marketing, Urban Company, shares with us the firms vision, expansion & advertising strategy It took just six years for Urban Company to expand its operations not only across the country but also to Australia, Singapore, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. We at, exchange4media, caught up with Abhinav Tyagi, SVP Marketing, Urban Company, to trace the firms journey as part of the e4m Pride of India series. Abhinav Tyagi The Beginning Launched in Delhi in November 2014 as UrbanClap, the company was started with a handful of service professionals. Over the past 7 years, it expanded to 5 countries, built a fleet of 32,000+ trained professionals and served over 5 million households. Two years ago, it was rechristened Urban Company. The new umbrella brand captures the companys ambition to be a horizontal gig marketplace, with a global footprint and leadership position across service categories, beauty & wellness, and home repairs & maintenance. As part of the new branding, Urban Company took a step closer towards its vision - empowering millions of professionals worldwide to deliver services at home. Working on Visibility We use a mix of channels to reach out and engage with our consumers - each channel playing a different role. Advertising on digital or TV, and increasingly on OTT, has always played a big role in driving salience and consideration of our services. It is particularly useful in visually demonstrating the way our services are delivered as well the impact they can make in the consumers lives, Tyagi said. Performance marketing plays a key role in informing and attracting consumers to the companys latest offerings and sale campaigns, he noted. We do not use performance marketing to drive app installs but actual conversions. The companys strategy for Instagram, YouTube and Twitter has been unique to each platform. On Instagram, we curate multiple interest-based handles. For those interested in beauty content, we have the Urban Company Beauty handle that showcases our services, beauty hacks and curated content. For those interested in interior decor, we have Urban Company Homes, a community-led handle that champions people and the way they style their homes. On YouTube, we have the brand handle for showcasing our service professionals, TV ads, and services. We have also collaborated with established and upcoming influencers to create slice-of-life content channel The Urban Guide. We use Twitter to disseminate information with respect to company developments. We do, however, often engage in conversations on Twitter. Urban Company recently roped in IPG Media to manage its branding responsibilities. We reach out to our target audience through a mix of traditional and digital mediums. Our TVCs are supported by digital campaigns on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Being the best Tyagi also spoke about focusing on delivering superior experience and outcomes for consumers and not denting or hurting someone elses revenue. We want to outdo, rethink, reimagine all our services and push the envelope when it comes to service experience and customer delight, he asserted. Investments in tech According to Tyagi, Urban Company is a tech-first company and is constantly innovating and investing in tech. It is essential to better customer experiences, app experience or making the business scalable. Tech enables us to be data-driven and get insights about accurate consumer data, behaviour, and customer expectations, he further said. Organizations can leverage tech to enhance and improve their businesses, optimize resources and grow their business. Long-term Goals Enumerating Urban Companys vision, Tyagi said: Our main aim is to empower millions of professionals worldwide to deliver services at home like never experienced before. We are constantly striving towards this. Read more news about (internet advertising India, internet advertising, advertising India, digital advertising India, media advertising India) Commentary From Crisis Management Expert Edward Segal, Bestselling Author of the Award- Winning Book "Crisis Ahead: 101 Ways to Prepare for and Bounce Back from Disasters, Scandals, and Other Emergencies " (Nicholas Brealey) The discovery this month of the EnduranceAntarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's ship that sank almost two miles beneath the ice more than 100 years agoreminds us of Shackleton's leadership lessons that resonant with and are still relevant for today's business executives. As recounted by the New York Times, Shackleton "never made it to the pole or beyond, but his leadership in rescuing all his crew and his exploits, which included an 800-mile open-boat journey across the treacherous Southern Ocean to the island of South Georgia, made him a hero in Britain." Michael Smith is an authority on the history of polar exploration. He recalled on a website about Shackleton that his "skills as a leader were best demonstrated during the Endurance expedition when his management was crucial in saving the lives of the 28-strong party after the ship was crushed by ice. "He was an inspiration who instilled a belief that the marooned men would survive and get home. It was a simple message that Shackleton frequently reinforced to ensure the men never lost sight of the goalsafety and survival," he said. Assume Responsibility In a New York Times essay, Harvard Business School professor and historian Nancy Koehn observed that, "Shackleton assumed ultimate responsibility for his team. Perhaps he recognized that he was partly to blame for the crisis that befell the Endurance. Perhaps his naval training instilled in him a deep sense of loyalty and obligation to his fellow crew members. The men themselves understood this, and most, in turn, offered him their commitment. "Shackleton's sense of responsibility and commitment came with a great suppleness of means. To get his men home safely, he led them across ice, sea and land with all the tools he could muster. This combinationa credible commitment to a larger purpose and flexible, imaginative methods to achieve a goalis increasingly important in our tumultuous times," she said. Provide Encouragement David Reid, sales director for VEM Tooling, said that "Constant tumult seems to be a new reality, and strong leadership is key to management. The toughest aspect of leadership is providing ideas and encouragement to the team and self. Shackleton rose above significant challenges to reach his goal. "When his mission ran into serious problems, he had to reassess the team's objectives. This trait is especially important in our age when leaders must frequently alter the direction in the middle of a project, discarding previous benchmarks of success and redefining their goals and strategies," he commented. Defy Challenges Entrepreneur and travel blogger Jenny Ly pointed out that, "Shackleton managed to defy the physical and mental challenges that he and his team faced. His ability to push through and guide the souls responsible under his doomed expedition, his unshakable faith in his abilities managed to keep confidence high and the fear away. "In this time of crisis and whatever we face ahead, having a leader like Shackleton can be the difference between sinking with the ship or surviving against all odds," she concluded. Lead In Trying Times Jawad Nayyar is the co-founder and chief vision officer of DAO PropTech. He said that "Shackleton, like most disruptors, bootstrapped his way through Antarctica and chose courageous actions in the midst of a crisis, highlighting the skills all leaders need to guide themselves and others through challenging times. "He faced an inhospitable landscape, limited resources, a shifting landscape, and limited visibility. Yet he chose to stay the course, adjust to paths that made the most sense for his final goal and made the tumultuous journey to save the lives of all his crew. He [is] remembered today for saving lives in the face of impossible odds, despite his failed expeditions." Michael Miller, CEO of VPN Online Multimedia, thought that one of the key leadership lessons business leaders can learn from Shackleton "is to never ask your people anything you wouldn't do yourself. As the leader, you need to be willing to put in the same effort as everyone else on the team and lead by example." "Shackleton was known for his self-sacrifice and dedication to his crew. He never gave up, even when things were at their worst. And his philosophy was that if he could keep going, so could they. This attitude helped him inspire his team and kept them going through thick and thin." Have The Right Priorities Matthew Paxton, founder and owner of gaming company Hyperni said that "Simply put, he knew his men's talents and shortcomings, as well as what drove them. "He also possessed an unusual ability to detect danger and always minimized risk. Perhaps his most admirable trait was that he prioritized the welfare of his men above all else," he commented. Turn Lemons Into Lemonade "Great leaders always know how to turn lemons into lemonade," according to Josh Pelletier, the chief marketing officer of Bar Bend. "When faced with unbelievably difficult challenges, they find a way to rise to the occasion and get the job done. "Ernest Shackleton was one of the greatest explorers of all time, and he provides us with plenty of leadership lessons that we can apply in our own lives." Maintain A Positive Attitude Pelletier said that "One of the most important leadership lessons that business leaders can learn from Shackleton is the importance of having a positive attitude in times of adversity. "When his ship was crushed by pack ice, and his crew was stranded in the middle of nowhere, he refused to give up. He kept everyone's spirits high by telling them jokes and stories and making sure they never lost sight of their ultimate goal." Be Optimistic Moshe Cohen is a senior lecturer at Boston University's Questrom School of Business where he teaches Shackelton's story. He said that "Throughout the many months on the ice, Shackleton never showed disappointment, despite being denied his goal of crossing Antarctica and facing terrible odds. "Optimism is a choice and a lifestyle, and Shackleton was the quintessential optimism. Optimism doesn't mean pretending that everything's okay when it's not, but instead examining the terrible reality of the situation and believing that you might still win against all odds. "Shackleton's optimistic resilience and calm manner built trust and loyalty with his team. They followed his lead and remained hopeful for survival, even when things looked very grim. They executed his plans and worked collaboratively to survive. To them, he was 'The Boss.' Leaders need to remember that their teams are looking to them not just for vision but also as role models and that their demeanor impacts their organizations," Cohen counseled. Plan And Delegate Dmitriy Bobriakov is the founder and CEO of the media company SEO Analytics Pro. He said that "Shackleton was an expert in planning, and he always made sure that his team was well prepared for whatever challenges they might face. "He also believed in delegation and letting his team members take on responsibilities according to their skillsets. This allowed him to focus on the big picture and keep everyone moving forward towards their goals." ### Tuesday, March 29, 2022 Insurgent Strategy at War I've told you (over and over and over, I'm sure) how important insurgent strategic principles are in thinking, planning and acting in our information economy. For thirty-some years I've been preaching the effectiveness of insurgent strategy in business and politics, particularly against entrenched incumbents in markets or in government. Every year, I claim those principles are more important now than ever before. And for thirty-some consecutive years of this information age year after year I've been right (along with the many others who have supported this doctrine, most importantly for me Steven Jobs and Mike Murray at Apple Computer). Now, in vivid reality and with still untold humanitarian consequences, we are seeing the effects of entrenched incumbent versus relentless insurgent in Ukraine on a digital world stage. The Strategic Context of this War. I want to address the overarching strategic contrasts and I'll be as brief as I can; I just want to offer a framework through which to view the daily events in Ukraine and Russia. And this framework may reinforce your own strategic instincts. To be clear, "entrenched incumbent" is not only a definition of a leadership position (the political context), but also a matter of mindset, values and institutional religion summed in the incumbent exhortation: "Think Big!" Indeed, in most global markets, in addition to the one or two market leading businesses, we see scores more who act like/quack like the entrenched incumbent as if imitating them were the path to success. In NASCAR slip-streaming the leader benefits the following car, allowing it to save gas in the wake of the leader. In business slip-streaming the leader has the effect of pushing the leader ahead by narrowing the differences in consumers' decisions. Sameness in any category makes the leader's brand definition the category definition. Think different! This war is a classic a case of insurgent versus entrenched incumbent. It's David versus Goliath once again. And once again, there is predictability in the entrenched incumbent's actions. The insurgent's actions seem unplanned, yet they follow the form of successful insurgents through the ages. The entrenched incumbent believes in the inevitable force of its power, scope and superior material resources. The insurgent necessarily puts its faith in speed, mobility and its moral/emotional resources. Putin was sure that the intimidation of 150,000 Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border and his own vicious Chechen thug battalions as the point of the attacking spear would freeze the Ukrainians in fear and convince them to fold early in the fight. This is typical of the entrenched incumbent. They always believe that bigness will decide the contest. For starters, Putin has vastly overestimated the power of his Russian army. After all, though, he's not a military leader but a murderous spook. While he may have dedicated ten billion dollars to military modernization, credible western sources estimate that about 75% of that money was swallowed up by corruption it was basically stolen. As a result, his is an army of confused and poorly trained conscripts with iffy weaponry and tangled supply lines. Further, Putin vastly overestimated the military prowess of the Chechen mercenaries he had intended to lead the invasion. In attempting to take control of Antonov International Airport northwest of Kyiv as a key staging area in the first days of the invasion, a battalion of Chechen fighters were almost immediately wiped out by the Ukrainians and the Chechen General Magomed Tushayev was killed. At first, the Chechens predictably denied Tushayev's death. Then their terrorist leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, posted a video of him and fellow henchmen laughing and saying they would soon be, "Knocking on your door in Kyiv." The Ukrainians quickly posted proof that the bravado was actually posted to Telegram from the safety of a bunker in Chechnya. In its use of broad-scale force, the incumbent often loses its sense of moral authority. The insurgent must use moral force to compromise the incumbent's size and resource advantages. And the world loves the underdog. The incumbent's actions, because they are so broad, speak much louder than words (the value of propaganda communications, or fake news, in this digital age is still overestimated by strategists, pundits and the media). The world, outside of Russia and China, is watching the wanton destruction of Ukraine's cities and towns and murder of civilians. And the watching world is not stupid. The moral call for action for this war was not made by Putin or his generals. It was made by Volodymyr Zelenskyy in rebuffing President Biden's offer of sending a rescue plane for him as the Russians poured over the border. "I don't need tickets. I need ammunition." It was a moral take-down of the attacking Russians and establishing the fierce insurgent spirit of the Ukrainians not as victims, but rather as freedom fighters, spoiling for this fight. It had a magnetic effect on those who would have sympathized with the Ukrainians, but now could be cheering them on, joining in emotionally. Indeed, the Zelenskyy presidency has been an assault on the incumbent corruption in his government and the existing image of the country. One of his first acts was to remove the immunity from legal prosecution government members had previously enjoyed. A next measure was for all cabinet members to remove his portrait from their office walls and replace them with pictures of their kids: "This is who we're fighting for!" This is a war for Ukraine to redefine itself for its own citizens and for the world. And, as Napoleon said, "Moral resources are three times as important as material resources in war." For his part, Putin made a meandering speech about his personal view of Russian history as a mandate for this "special military operation" that left most people scratching their heads. When was Ukraine ever a part of Russia? Khrushchev was too much of a softie? Huh? Incumbents are heritage-driven. Their future strategy and sense of destiny are set in the past and in their past glory ("That's the way we do it, because that's the way we've always done it."). Insurgents are vision-driven with strategy designed to attain that vision of a better world. In an autocracy, as Russia has been for at least twelve of Putin's twenty-two years in power, the leader grows more and more impatient with disagreement. It's an irritant. So, the autocrat winnows down his advisory circle to the "yes men," the sycophants who will not only agree with but celebrate his every idea and action. We've all seen this same situation elsewhere in politics and in business over the years. Of course, eliminating contrarian thought creates incredible vulnerability for any institution. Clarity seldom emanates from a bunker. Unadulterated bad news seldom finds its way safely to the BIG GUY's office. The autocrat is eventually surrounded by dimwits and removed further and further from reality. In an autocracy and in most entrenched incumbencies, attitudes and values trickle down from the ultimate leader. Vladimir Putin has stolen more money than anyone in the history of the world. Therefore, Russia has a kleptocratic culture that permeates government and society. At every step down the precisely-defined organizational lines of the bureaucracy, Russian "leaders" aim to get their share of the goods. Through this disastrous war, the Russian army has relied more and more on mercenaries. This rent-an-insurgent concept has failed throughout history true insurgents require a just fight, a moral war. The stunningly high mortality of Russian commanders in the first month of the war can be first attributed to this lack of moral purpose for their army. Russia's conscripts are kept in the dark about their commanders' objectives and strategies rather, they are expected to carry out every order without question. In autocratic organizations workers at the lowest level seldom understand the institution's overall goals or strategies or their role in them. Those young soldiers have had no idea what they were getting into or how to get out. That draws their commanders dangerously closer to the front lines to provide the intimidation to keep them in the fight. These conscripts had been picked for this war from disparate and distant parts of Russia, so that the country wouldn't suffer the same degradation of public morale and support as in the Afghanistan debacle as the body bags came home (part of the "modernization" of the military has also been deployment of mobile crematoriums no body bags). The entrenched incumbent uses the bureaucracy as a form of institutional religion charting the precise steps to advance, but also putting too much time and distance between detecting problems and devising solutions. Insurgents create an organization that is as flat and fast as possible, contributing to the insurgent advantages of speed and mobility. The bureaucratic maze of the Russian army is such that all strategic decisions must be passed up through the system; many, all the way to Putin. Ukrainian troops can generally make important spot decisions to answer to quickly arising challenges or opportunities. When they see a tank convoy, trap it and kill it. When they saw a tank transport ship portrayed on Russian TV as news of Russian advances in Berdyansk, they promptly set out to successfully sabotage and sink it. Although Russia has invaded Ukraine, a sovereign nation, the autocrat Putin believes this is fighting to rid mother Russia of a separatist insurgency and a key step in the restoration of Imperial Russia. This is the mindset of the classic incumbent domination is its heritage and, therefore, its destiny. The belief is what was, will be. "We are better than you. That's why we will win." It is fair to say that the United States has suffered this incumbent hubris a few times in its recent history. And each time, it has led to failure and humiliation. That is where Putin and Russia are headed now; and they don't have the U.S.' Scrooge McDuck vault of vast piles of gold to absorb the losses. The Russian economy, even pre-Ukraine war, was no larger than that of Italy. Putin continues to define this war as not a war, but a "special military operation" to restore Ukraine to Russia; in his mind, "Back to the Future." The ferociously courageous Volodymyr Zelenskyy sees this as a definitive battle between two systems: democracy and autocracy. He is vision-driven. He refuses to let this be seen as a "proxy war" of the great powers. Rather, he defines this battle as the first front of a new war for the survival of European democracy and the survival of Western political order and liberal democratic values. He is fighting for the future, not for the past. The most fundamental contrast between entrenched incumbent and determined insurgent is the attitude toward change. Incumbents hate change. They see it as a threat and work to stamp it out internally and externally. True insurgents love change. Change means opportunity with the molecules of the current order heated up and in motion. As I write this, Russia is making a pivot in the form of restating its goals for the invasion, a tactical retreat. Now, they see "victory" as securing their already established gains in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine. Of course, these changes destabilize Putin. I know, I know, this cornered rat is desperate and has a nuclear arsenal at hand. Still this particular rat is a narcissist and unlikely suicidal. It is impossible to say what the Ukrainians will do now and how or how much the West will help them. Still, I hope and fervently pray that they can hold out for the unconditional surrender of Russia in this war. If they can last, they will win. God help them to last. SM 33,000 Feet Over Somewhere: Preaching and Practicing the Discipline of Insurgent Strategy Scott Miller 1-888-882-8499 This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate The owners of downtowns historic Aztec Theatre want to turn several floors of long-vacant offices into a boutique hotel and add a rooftop restaurant and bar. Aztec Family Group LLC, which includes local restaurateur Sam Panchevre, has a 40-year lease agreement with Dallas-based Shreem Capital, an investment firm that focuses on buying, developing and managing hotels. They would turn four floors of current office space at the live music and event venue into about 77 guest rooms and suites, according to materials submitted to the citys Historic and Design Review Commission. The roof would get a kitchen, bar and outdoor dining area overlooking the River Walk. On ExpressNews.com: Former CPS Energy building to undergo multimillion-dollar renovation Courtesy of Overland Partners The HDRC recently gave conceptual approval to the designs, which would have to go back to the commission for a final green light. Panchevre said the designs, hotel brand and concept were still being finalized and declined to discuss the plans further. He said he expects to return to the HDRC in late April or May. The theater opened in 1926. The next year, it showed San Antonio its first talking picture, Don Juan with John Barrymore. The Aztec has changed hands and undergone multiple renovations since then and at one point was at risk of being razed. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. Aztec Family Group LLC bought it in 2014. Its previous plans for the underused offices have included apartments and a hotel. Demand for office space downtown has declined during the coronavirus pandemic as companies have adopted remote and hybrid work models. Hotels have also struggled due to the areas reliance on business travel and conventions. Courtesy of Overland Partners Apartments with services Two complexes will offer lower-priced apartments along with food pantries, parenting classes and financial literacy assistance. Cohen-Esrey is partnering with the San Antonio Housing Trust and SA Hope Center to build 212 units at 363 N. General McMullen Drive, across from Rosedale Park on the West Side. All units at the $42 million complex will be for residents earning up to 60 percent of the area median income, which is $31,140 annually for one person and $44,460 for a family of four. SA Hope Center will provide a food pantry, parenting classes, case management and workforce development and financial literacy services. Providing transformational programs in close proximity to affordable housing creates direct access for those seeking to become economically mobile and build strong healthy families, said Megan Legacy, the nonprofits CEO. Prospera Housing Community Services is also working with the housing trust to reconstruct and renovate 234 apartments at 3815 West Ave. on the North Side. Courtesy San Antonio-based Prospera will combine two complexes into one dubbed Arbors at West Avenue, a $51.2 million project that will include 43 units using housing assistance payments, according to the housing trust. Ninety-eight units will be for residents earning up to 50 percent of the area median income, or $25,950 a year for one person and $37,050 for a family of four. Sixty units will be for residents earning up to 60 percent of the area median income and 33 units for residents making up to 80 percent of the area median income, or $41,520 annually for one person and $59,280 for a family of four. Prospera will offer services that address social determinants of health factors such as food insecurities, economic stability, health and wellness programs, educational programs for youth resident(s) and social and community engagement, said Scott Ackerson, executive vice president at Prospera. Under state law, apartments built with a public facility corporation arm of the housing trust receive a full property tax exemption and developers also do not have to pay sales tax on construction purchases. In exchange, at least half of the units must be reserved for people with below-median incomes. Another arm of the trust also issues bonds for housing projects. madison.iszler@express-news.net This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate The son of deceased trucking magnate Bill Hall Jr. lost a court battle to wrestle control of his fathers estate away from his estranged mother, whos serving a two-year prison sentence for murdering her late husband. Justin Hall, 30, asked Bexar Probate Judge Tom Rickhoff to give him and his sister, Dominique Hall, their fathers half of the couples estate. Bill died without a will, so his share of the estate passed to his wife Frances A. Hall. Dominique, 34, sided with her mother in opposing Justins request to place their fathers share of the business in constructive trust. Rickhoffs ruling confirms Frances claim to 100 percent of the Bill Hall Jr. Trucking companies and other assets. Dominique has been running the trucking empire while Frances, who co-owned the businesses with her husband, serves out her remaining time in prison. She is scheduled to be released in September. At a court hearing Thursday, Mark Braswell, a lawyer for Justin, argued that Frances should be disqualified from receiving Bills half of their estate because she shouldnt benefit financially from her criminal act. A Bexar County District Court jury in September 2016 found Frances guilty of murder and aggravated assault. Prosecutors said Frances wanted to kill her husbands longtime paramour for ruining her marriage but ended up killing her husband instead. Frances, 54, was accused of killing Bill by knocking his motorcycle off the road with her Cadillac Escalade, then hitting another SUV driven by his lover, Bonnie Contreras all in a highway chase Oct. 10, 2013, 2013, on South Loop 1604. Bill was 50. The jury, though, handed Frances the lightest possible murder sentence, agreeing with her defense lawyers that she acted out of sudden passion. The jurys finding of sudden passion thus negates the intent necessary to establish the willful taking of a life under the Texas Estates Code provisions dealing with forfeiture of property, said Keith Miller, a probate lawyer for Frances. Its a shame that Frances Hall, after suffering the loss of her husband, is now being sued by her son. Rickhoff agreed in a brief written ruling denying Justins request to put his fathers half of the estate into a constructive trust. The conviction relied upon by (Justin) does not meet the predicate for imposing a constructive trust, Rickhoffs ruling reads. Ronald S. Schmidt, who represents Dominique, who also is the estates independent administrator, said she opposed Justins legal fight even though she could have financially benefited. Shes always believed that her mother is the rightful heir and beneficiary, having survived her husband and not having been involved in an intentional act that ended her husbands life, Schmidt said. Braswell said he disagrees with the judges ruling. We will decide our next step after we finish reviewing his decision, Braswell said. Bill and Frances estate was valued at $15.5 million in a 2014 court filing in the probate case. At one time, Bill Hall Jr. Trucking had a fleet of more than 100 trucks. Bills share, which was about $7.7 million, has dwindled by $6 million, Braswell has said, blaming Dominique for selling off assets and ruining the businesses. Two of the family trucking companies are in bankruptcy. Rickhoff has previously awarded the proceeds from multiple life insurance policies on Bills life to Frances after Justin indicated he wanted the money to go to his mother. Braswell said Justin was being advised at the time by a lawyer who was conflicted because he also was representing Frances, Dominique and the estate. Justin is suing the lawyer for legal malpractice. Patrick Danner is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | pdanner@express-news.net | @AlamoPD This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate The May death of 79-year-old W. Marvin Rush II, the founder of what is today the largest commercial truck dealership chain in North America, has sparked a new feud this one between one of his sons and his widow. Son W.M. Rusty Rush III, the chains chairman, CEO and president, and Marvins third wife, Barbara Rush, have filed dueling wills over the family patriarchs estate. Among the assets at stake is most of Marvins stock in New Braunfels-based Rush Enterprises Inc., the business he started, expanded and later took public. The company now has more than 100 Rush Truck Centers in 22 states. The shares in question were worth almost $74 million at the close of the stock market Friday. Rusty, 60, contends those shares belong to him based on his fathers wishes memorialized in a 2006 will. Barbara, 58, says that her husband of 26 years revoked that will when he made a new one in May 2013 and then another in November 2013. The 2013 wills contain no specific bequest of Marvins shares. Therefore, Barbara says, the shares are part of Marvins residuary estate of which shes the sole beneficiary. Rusty is opposing both wills even though Barbara is only asking the court to declare the November 2013 will valid. He alleges that Marvin suffered from dementia when he signed the 2013 wills. Barbara disagrees. The drama has just begun to unfold in Guadalupe County Court of Law, where Judge Robin Dwyer will oversee the contested probate case. The value of Marvins entire estate has yet to be determined. The new battle follows a lawsuit Rusty filed against his father in 2016 accusing him of reneging on an oral agreement to give him all of his company stock in Rush Enterprises. A judge in February refused Marvins request to toss the case. That case had been set to go to trial Sept. 10 in Bexar County District Court but was postponed due to Marvins death. A representative for Marvins estate will have to be appointed so the case can proceed. While the amount of stock in dispute is significant, its not enough to sway control or impact the operation of Rush Enterprises which has a market value of about $1.7 billion. The two sides, though, even disagree on the reason for the squabbling. Joyce Moore, Rustys lawyer, called it a family fight over Marvins stock. Ricardo Cedillo, Barbaras lawyer, said the fight is about defending and honoring Barbaras husbands name and legacy. Rusty has made disparaging and hurtful allegations about his fathers capacity in the probate case that malign Marvins integrity, generosity, and hard-earned reputation, Cedillo said in an email. Marvin deserves far better treatment after all he accomplished and provided to his family, friends and community in his lifetime. Moore countered, This is purely a fight over Marvins stock. Its what Marvin had promised his son his entire life. We do not wish to malign Mr. Rushs name. Rusty loved his dad. I dont think theres anything, quite frankly in my (court papers) that has disparaged him, Moore added. We tried to be very accurate and careful about the condition he was suffering from. We actually got that information from Barbara and Mr. Cedillo. The probate fight Marvin Rush, who lived in Seguin, died May 17. Rush Enterprises roots sprang from a GMC truck dealership Marvin launched in 1965 in Houston. Marvin eventually bought out two partners, expanded the business and in 1996 made it the first automotive or truck dealership to trade its shares on the open market. The company posted $172 million in profit on $4.7 billion in revenue last year. It employed 6,875 workers as of Dec. 31. Marvin served as Rush Enterprises president until 1995, when he became chairman and CEO. He resigned as CEO in 2006 and Rusty took over. Marvin kept the chairmans title until 2013, when he became chairman emeritus essentially an honorary post that he held until August 2016. Though his affiliation with the company eventually ended, Marvin continued to own Rush Enterprises shares both individually and with Rusty through a partnership called 3MR Partners. Marvins obituary revealed that in his last few years he battled Lewy Body Dementia. The disease can present a range of symptoms, including problems with thinking, memory, moving, and changes in behaviors, according to the Lewy Body Dementia Associations website. On June 4, 18 days after Marvins death, Rusty filed court papers in Guadalupe County seeking to validate the will his father executed in 2006. The will gives Rusty all of Marvins Rush Enterprises Class B shares and his partnership interest in 3MR Partners which was formed decades ago for the purpose of owning and holding certain assets, including shares in Rush Enterprises. The companys latest proxy statement lists Marvin and Rusty as the general partners of 3MR Partners, which held almost 30 percent of the Class B shares voting power. Then, on June 29, Marvins widow Barbara entered her opposition to Rustys application to probate the 2006 will. She says her husband redid his will twice in 2013 revoking the 2006 will. Barbaras filing included a copy of the November 2013 will, which was water-damaged by a flood that inundated the file room of the Houston law firm FizerBeck during Hurricane Harvey. The will was professionally restored, Barbaras filing says. Marvin completely disinherited Rusty in the 2013 wills. I do not wish to make any provision hereunder for my son William Maurice Rush, III, or any of his descendants, Marvin states in both 2013 wills. The November 2013 will indicates Marvin had set up trusts for the benefit of some of his other children and his grandchildren. Even before Marvin made the new wills, he signed a First Codicil in late 2012, according to a copy of the document filed by Barbara in the probate case. In the document, Marvin struck from the 2006 will his intentions to bequeath $2 million to each of four of his other children, citing gifts he had made to them during his life. Marvin was survived by six children. Barbara was named the executor of Marvins estate in the 2006 will and in each of the 2013 wills. Mental capacity On July 9, Rusty filed his opposition to probating either of the 2013 wills arguing that the onset of his fathers dementia was at least five to eight years prior to his death, thus placing Mr. Rushs mental capacity in doubt from May 2010 onward. Cedillo, Barbaras lawyer, disagreed with Rustys assertion that Marvin lacked testamentary capacity. I think his family, friends and business associates who knew him and cared about him would disagree, Cedillo said in an email. But, I also think people who didnt know him personally but had the opportunity to interact with him would disagree. Cedillo provided a link to a YouTube video of a March 22, 2013, presentation Marvin gave to business students at Texas Lutheran University in Seguin. Adjunct professor Dave Sather, who invited Marvin to speak to the students, didnt notice anything wrong with the businessman. I think Marvin was well aware of his surroundings, Sather said in a phone interview. Not only was the presentation clear and well-presented, I think he answered the (students) questions very well. Marvin came back to the university a couple of months later around the time he executed the May 2013 will to have lunch with some of the students, Sather said. He recalled Marvin driving his Rolls Royce on campus. Marvin let my student drive his Rolls Royce down I-10, Sather said. And Marvin goes, Quit driving it like an old woman. Get on it. Marvin was just very engaging that way. Rusty, though, remembers his father differently in his final years. In his July court filing, Rusty says his father ceased being involved in the day-to-day business of Rush Enterprises in 2010. Marvin complained of not being able to concentrate and was often unable to remember recent events. Marvin told the companys board that he intended to step down as its chairman in favor of Rusty in 2011, but subsequently changed his mind, Rusty says in the filing. But in late 2012 and early 2013, it was made clear to (Marvin) by the Board that his resignation was required. The two 2013 wills, which cut Rusty out of any inheritance, represented a dramatic departure from (Marvins) long-standing estate plan of leaving his shares of Stock in Rush Enterprises to his son Rusty, Rustys filing adds. These wills were also executed shortly after Mr. Rush, apparently with the encouragement of his wife, Barbara, had formed an irrational belief that his son Rusty was somehow at fault when the Board of Directors insisted that Mr. Rush step down as Chairman of the Board in May of 2013, Rustys filing continues. Barbara disputes Rustys take, noting the 2013 wills were prepared by the FizerBeck law firm and signed by two witnesses. Jerry Scroggins, one of the FizerBeck lawyers involved, did not respond to a request for comment. If Marvin lacked capacity or was susceptible to undue influence at the time the May 2013 will was made, Barbara wonders how Rusty as Rush Enterprises CEO and president could have entered into a Retirement and Transition Agreement with his father just four days later. Rustys own course of conduct lends itself to the conclusion that (his father) did not lack capacity and was not susceptible to undue influence in 2013, Barbara says in her filing. Otherwise, it means that (Rusty) knowingly engaged in conduct designed to take advantage of his fathers alleged condition to a gross degree. Moore had no comment on the allegation. According to the retirement agreement, Rush Enterprises agreed to pay Marvin $8 million in severance and allowed him free use of the corporate jet and company ranch for four years. He also was provided an office at Rush Enterprises headquarters and an administrative assistant for four years. Dueling wills Dueling wills are not uncommon, according to Dayla S. Pepi, a St. Marys University clinical professor of law who has practiced in estate-planning. She is not involved in Marvins probate case. The court is going to presume that the most recent will from November 2013 is the valid, controlling will, Pepi said. But then the court will make an inquiry into whether Marvin had capacity to execute the will. Just because someone has dementia does not mean they lack capacity, she added. She said its her practice to videotape a client with diminished capacity at a will-execution ceremony. She asks a slew of questions to determine whether the client is competent. If I have that video, it will stave off allegations that he was incapacitated and he didnt know what he was signing, Pepi said. Cedillo did not say whether Marvin was recorded signing the 2013 wills. Moore is expecting a contentious battle over Marvins estate. I imagine it will be a pretty tough fight in probate court, she said. Im assuming it will be. Whatever the outcome, the skirmish may not end in probate court given the pending litigation in Bexar County. I cannot predict what ends Rusty will go to oppose his fathers express testamentary intent, but I am currently left to assume that he will continue the district court lawsuit he filed against his father regardless of the outcome of the probate case, Cedillo said. Moore, though, said she was unsure whether the lawsuit would proceed if Rusty prevails in the probate case. We dont want to get more than what his daddy promised him, she said. Patrick Danner is a staff writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD Click here to read the full article. Diddy told Page Six that Will Smith and Chris Rock settled their feud after an altercation at the 94th Academy Awards. Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smiths bald head while presenting the documentary feature category (the comedian said he could not wait to see Pinkett Smith star in G.I. Jane 2, a reference to the 1997 film where Demi Moore appears with a shaved head), which resulted in Smith taking to the stage to slap Rock. Smith returned to his seat and yelled at Rock, Keep my wifes name out of your fucking mouth! Thats not a problem, Diddy told Page Six, referencing Smith and Rocks feud. Thats over. I can confirm that. Its all love. Theyre brothers. Diddy was the presenter who appeared on the Oscar telecast right after the altercation between Smith and Rock. Diddy took the stage to introduce the Oscars celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Godfather and addressed the situation that had just played out. Will and Chris, were going to solve this like family, Diddy said on stage. Right now were moving on with love. Everybody make some noise. TMZ spoke to an alleged close friend of Rocks who said the comedian was unaware that Pinkett Smith had alopecia. The source also said that Rock and Smith had not settled their feud and that there has been no communication between them. Smith was spotted after the ceremony at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party dancing with his Oscar statue in hand. Smith was given the Academy Award for best actor thanks to his performance in King Richard. As reported by Variety: The DJ played a medley of Smiths biggest 90s hits while the actor sang along to Gettin Jiggy Wit It and Miami. He shimmied in the middle of a mosh pit of his fans at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, swinging his gold statue in the air. Varietys senior culture and events editor Marc Malkin asked Will Smith how he was doing after the slap and his Oscar win, to which the actor replied, Its all love. During his best actor acceptance speech, Smith apologized to the Academy and his fellow nominees for his behavior. Smith did not apologize to Rock during the speech. The Academy issued its own statement following the ceremony in which it said it does not condone violence of any form. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Photo taken on March 9, 2022 shows people at the China-Laos Railway's Muangxay Station in Muangxay, northern Laos. (Photo by Kaikeo Saiyasane/Xinhua) The fourth doses will be offered to frontline workers, people with immunodeficiency or chronic disease, and people over the age of 60 in Laos. VIENTIANE, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The Lao Ministry of Health plans to offer fourth doses of COVID-19 vaccines to healthcare workers and people at risk of serious illness starting in April to shield vulnerable groups from the Omicron variant. Booster shots will be used to ramp up levels of antibodies to the virus, which will reduce the risk of severe illness, the local daily Vientiane Times reported on Monday. The fourth doses will be offered to frontline workers, people with immunodeficiency or chronic disease, and people over the age of 60, according to the report. A man receives a dose of China's Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination center in Vientiane, Laos, June 17, 2021. (Photo by Kaikeo Saiyasane/Xinhua) Additional vaccinations will also be rolled out in provinces that are heavily reliant on tourism or where infection rates are high. The Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines will be offered to people who received their third dose at least three months ago. Second in line for a fourth vaccination will be police, officials working at border crossings, diplomats, and incoming workers. The next group to get booster shots will be people working in crowded places such as banks, tourism-related businesses and factories, followed by the general public. People who have already contracted COVID-19 can get a first, second or third vaccination two months after recovery. A fourth dose will be given to people who had a first booster shot more than three months ago. The health authorities are concerned that the Omicron may spread throughout the country, especially among the unvaccinated 12 to 17-year-olds. According to the Center of Information and Education for Health, 75.72 percent of the eligible population have had a first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, 60.4 percent have had a second dose, and 16 percent have had three doses. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Let me be clear: Will Smith was wrong, and love likely had nothing to do with it. The star of King Richard won the Oscar for best actor for his portrayal of the tough father of tennis greats Venus and Serena Williams on Sunday night. But hell probably be remembered for slapping Chris Rock in the face onstage after the comedian made a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smiths bald head. Rock said he was excited to see her in a potential sequel of the movie, G.I. Jane, in which the lead character has a shaven head. Pinkett Smith has alopecia and has been open about her hair loss journey, sharing it on her popular Facebook Watch series, Red Table Talk, in 2018. She completely shaved her head in December. A few days before the Oscars, Pinkett Smith talked about her hair loss on TikTok: I feel the freedom today. I don't give two craps what people think of this bald head of mine. Because guess what? I love it. When the cameras panned to the couple at the Oscars, Smith initially laughed at Rocks joke, while Pinkett Smith rolled her eyes. 'IT COMES WITH THE TERRITORY': A timeline of Will Smith and Chris Rocks beef What happened on the Oscar stage Sunday night isnt just about Pinkett Smiths hair loss. It also isnt about Smiths professed love for his wife that he spoke of in his tearful apology while accepting the Oscar. Rock has declined to press charges, according to Los Angeles Police Department. There are many layers, some of which we may never know, to what triggered Smith to walk onto a very public stage and slap a Hollywood colleague. An ongoing beef between Smith and Rock? Maybe. Defending his wifes honor? Possibly. A boiling point after years of jokes about his marriage with Pinkett Smith, who has admitted to having an entanglement with her sons 22-year-old friend in 2015? Perhaps. But lets not forget that Smith grew up in a household of extreme domestic violence, watching his father beat his mother. He talks about it in his best-selling memoir, Will, which published in November and quickly became a New York Times best seller. Humor became his way of coping. Its one of the major defense mechanisms in dealing with trauma, says Dr. Kathy Flanagan, a psychiatrist in private practice. Domestic violence can manifest itself in so many ways in a childs development into adulthood, she says. Sometimes those who have been traumatized have a basic mistrust of others. We also can see mental conditions that can develop, like bipolar, substance-use disorder and clinical depression and anxiety. There are many layers and complexities to domestic violence. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, nearly 20 people every minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the U.S., totaling more than 10 million and women. For an adult who experienced domestic violence as a child and likely felt unprotected, there can be a hyper-sensitivity to protecting his own family. In his apology, Smith used that as the reason for his violent act. HE COULD HAVE KILLED HIM': Celebrities weigh in on Will Smith slap Perhaps he was triggered from his childhood trauma and the feeling of not being protected as a child in a household with violence, Flanagan says. Some on social media claim that if Rock had been a white comedian, Smith would not have acted in such a manner in a public forum. Some say the incident between two Black men might set the Oscars back. In 2015, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite began trending and ultimately forced the award show to make a concerted effort to be more inclusive. Sundays night awards roster seemed to represent strides. Then others claim had it been two white men, it would be viewed as an altercation between men, not an implication about a race of people. Still, a night that should have been a celebration for Smith, King Richard, the Williams sisters and the Black actors involved in the award-winning movie was overshadowed by violence. Also lost in the chaos of the night was a celebration for Samuel L. Jackson, who received his first ever Oscar - an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement. Smith apologized to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and his fellow nominees for the disruption. I look like the crazy father, just like they said about Richard Williams, Smith said, referring to the character he played in King Richard. But love will make you do crazy things. Love doesnt make you do crazy things. But being a victim of domestic violence with unresolved healing might. Two Fort Hood soldiers were sentenced to prison for their roles in a human smuggling operation involving several military members, the Department of Justice said. U.S. Army soldiers Isaiah Gore, 21, and Denerio Williams, 22, pleaded guilty in December 2021 to conspiring to transport undocumented individuals. Gore was sentenced to 30 months in prison, and Williams received a 24-month sentence. Both will serve three years of probation after their sentences. Fellow soldier Ivory Palmer, 21, pleaded guilty on Jan. 10 to participating in the human smuggling operation, and soldiers Emmanuel Oppongagyare and Ralph Gregory Saint-Joie pleaded guilty in August 2021. All three are awaiting sentencing. On ExpressNews.com: Authorities arrest 9, discover 15 immigrants near Somerset amid uptick in violent crime in the area Homeland Security Investigations agents were alerted to the smuggling scheme on June 13, 2021, after Oppongagyare and Saint-Joie were arrested at the Hebbronville Border Patrol checkpoint for transporting two undocumented people. When questioned by authorities, the two said that Gore recruited them to smuggle the people for $2,000 per person. Authorities learned that Gore had approached numerous people with the same offer: to pick people up from the border while wearing their Army uniforms to avoid detection and drive them to Gore in North Texas, a federal complaint said. Williams participated in a smuggling run on June 11 with Oppongagyare. Authorities said they picked up someone in McAllen and drove the person, in the trunk of their vehicle, to an apartment complex in the San Antonio area. Also on June 11, Palmer and Saint-Joie made another trip south from Fort Hood in Killeen before they were informed that there was no longer anyone to pick up. On ExpressNews.com: Police detain more than 20 people seen exiting 18-wheeler parked at Westover Hills shopping plaza Gore later told authorities that he was recruited by members of a human smuggling operation and was paid on delivery. Gore and Williams were permitted to surrender voluntarily to a U.S. Bureau of Prisons facility at a later date. Gore has since been discharged from the Army. U.S. District Judge Marina Garcia Marmolejo, who sentenced the two soldiers, said that as military members, they were not the average citizen, which justified a tougher sentence, the DOJ said. taylor.pettaway@express-news.net | @TaylorPettaway When the recent wildfire in Medina County crept up on the High Mountain Ranch neighborhood on Saturday, Eric Collins was taking a nap with his five dogs and one cat. His wife was out of the house, so when a neighbor called to tell him what was heading their way, he leaped up and started packing the car. He crammed his three German shepherds, one border collie, one wiener dog and a cat named Milkshakes into his Chevrolet EV Bolt, and peeled out of the driveway. Smoke and ash clouded the sky, and the glow from the fire was just over the bend. The exit was blocked by emergency vehicles, so a first responder led him to the opposite side of the neighborhood to wait in his car. I had terrible (phone) reception, and so did my wife, so I knew she was safe and out of the neighborhood, but she didnt know I was OK, the 39-year-old said. It was really stressful. His pets reacted to that stress. The wiener dog vomited in his lap, the German shepherds barked, and the cat meowed anxiously. It was nearly two hours before he could leave and find his wife, Amy. Meanwhile, the fire got right up to our fence, Collins said. It was so close to burning it down. At 9 a.m. Tuesday, people like the Collinses who evacuated while firefighters battled the blaze were able to return home to scorched land and empty houses. The Medina County Office of Emergency Management opened County Road 2615, which had been blocked due to the fire, while the entrance to High Mountain Ranch, a development that was most severely affected by the fire, was opened for residents only. Some people who were evacuated were able to return home over the weekend, but emergency management personnel instructed others to wait until the county road was cleared. Im feeling much better today than this weekend. Thats for sure, Amy Collins said. Itll be really nice to go home finally. On ExpressNews.com: Medina fire largely contained after burning nearly 1,100 acres The wildfire, which officials are calling the Das Goat Fire, ripped through nearly 1,100 acres after a car caught fire. Dry conditions and wind fed the fire until it blazed out of control Saturday afternoon, prompting the county to issue an evacuation alert at 4:40 p.m. Most evacuated families were able to go to familys or friends homes on short notice, while 10 to 15 people found shelter at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Helotes. Collins and his wife were able to stay with her sister in Devine, Texas, 45 minutes south of their home. But while the fire is controlled, high winds and dry conditions will increase this week, and officials are advising residents to stay cautious and vigilant about fire starters. Cigarettes, metal and any kind of flammable liquid should be properly discarded, and residents should report any unattended fire. A red flag warning was in effect through 8 p.m. Tuesday for much of South and Central Texas, with another issued for 10 a.m. through 8 p.m. Wednesday. Dry periods like this could also be more prevalent in the future. John Nielsen-Gammon, a climatologist with Texas A&M Universitys department of atmospheric sciences, said the last time wildfires occurred this frequently was in 2011, but this year is even drier than that year. Humidity will increase as we get into the summer, but it could indeed be a relatively dry summer, Nielsen-Gammon said. It really depends on how much rain we get over the next few months, but as the summer goes on, things tend to get drier. West Texas is far drier than San Antonio, but fires in grasslands tend to be easier to contain than fires in forests and woodlands because of how accessible they are. In Texas Hill Country, there is more fuel for wildfires, which humidity usually prevents. Under normal circumstances, Hill Country gets enough moisture that fires arent a problem, Nielsen-Gammon said. But this year, weve got the dry conditions to start with, and then its a matter of whether you get the weather and wind, which can allow for rapid fire spread. Laura, an area resident who declined to give her last name, was evacuated from her home in Mico, a town by Medina Lake, on Saturday and returned Tuesday morning with her husband and two children. Their quickly packed bags, which included sentimental items and important documents, will remain ready to go this week in case the fire reemerges. While their home wasnt too close to the fire, she said it was hard to breathe when they left. Her children reacted to the ash and smoke. We want to be prepared because what if we have to leave like that again, Laura said. You have to think about whats important in such a short amount of time. In the High Mountain Ranch neighborhood, large swaths of woody areas were burned, leaving white ashy cedar and oak trees and charred cacti. Three homes were destroyed in the fire, and others were damaged. One family lost part of its deck and a chunk of their yard. Another came home to a devastated storage garage and a melted metal shed. Some power lines were torn down, and fire retardant easily spotted by its pink color layered homes and streaked gravel driveways. But the damage could have been a lot worse, said Clint Cooke, Medina Countys fire chief. This is going to be a dry year, he said. But Id like to think we are always prepared and will be ready for it. Wildfires and charred neighborhoods may become more common in the San Antonio area. Extreme weather due to climate change will cause more intense weather patterns in Texas during the next few decades, Nielsen-Gammon said. We are seeing gradual increases in temperature, which means that things dry out faster when it doesnt rain, he said. Itll be drier longer than it used to be on average. But rainfall can be so variable, so the next decade is still uncertain. For now, families are happy to be home again. Collins, who is selling his home at the ranch neighborhood, was cheerful as he packed his chair to head back four dogs in one car, two dogs and a cat in the other. He tossed a ball with the border collie for a bit. Theyll be happy to be home, he said. Elena Bruess writes for the Express-News through Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. ReportforAmerica.org. elena.bruess@express-news.net A known San Antonio gang member was convicted of multiple federal drug and firearm charges, the Department of Justice said. Kenton Maurice Haynes, 27, after a four-day jury trial, was found guilty of one count of receipt of a firearm under indictment, one count of possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime and one count of possession with intent to distribute. Police arrested Haynes on March 26, 2020, after they observed him and 29-year-old Kevin Johnson Jr. driving in circles in an empty parking lot in San Antonio. Officers watched Haynes park and reposition the vehicle several times before another car parked next to Haynes. On ExpressNews.com: Leader of violent drug cartel indicted in San Antonio; arrest is one of the most important ... of the past decade When the other driver got into Haynes backseat, officers arrested all three for a drug transaction taking place, the DOJ said. Haynes had a loaded handgun with a high-capacity magazine and $2,700 in cash. Johnson also had a loaded handgun and $10,000 in cash. Almost 3 pounds of marijuana, ecstasy and cocaine were also in the car. At the time of the arrest, Haynes was a known member of the Bloods and Neighborhood Piru gangs, the DOJ said. He was also wanted on multiple felony warrants for drug and weapons offenses and was under a felony indictment for state charges. On ExpressNews.com: Authorities bust meth network stretching from Hondo to Mexico He is scheduled to be sentenced in August. He faces up to five years in prison for the receiving a firearm under indictment and drug charges, as well as a mandatory minimum of five years for the firearm possession charge. Johnson, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to multiple drug and weapons charges and will be sentenced in July. taylor.pettaway@express-news.net | @TaylorPettaway The San Antonio area remains under a red flag warning as weather conditions heightened the risk of fire across the region. The National Weather Service has issued the red flag warning until 8 p.m. Tuesday, in addition to a wind advisory from 1 p.m. Tuesday through 4 p.m. Wednesday. The warning and advisory are likely to continue Wednesday. As court fights continue over the constitutionality of Gov. Greg Abbotts mass arrests of migrants at the Texas-Mexico border, new legal filings describe an ongoing and consistent pattern of men being illegally detained for a month or more as their cases stagnate in overwhelmed courts. Nearly eight months after the state began arresting migrants and prosecuting them on trespassing charges under Abbotts order, a group of defense attorneys told the states highest criminal court that some men are still locked up for months before the courts give them an attorney or prosecutors file misdemeanor charges against them, in violation of state laws. Texas laws require that criminal defendants be assigned an attorney within three days of asking for one, and misdemeanor defendants be released from jail pending trial if prosecutors do not file charges within 30 days after arrest. Those deadlines are regularly surpassed, according to the legal briefing from Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, which represents hundreds of migrant men accused of trespassing on private property. Two men were detained in a state prison for nearly five months, unable to post bonds of $1,500, without being assigned lawyers or having any charges filed against them, defense lawyers said. And efforts to fix the due-process violations and get the men out of prison, attorneys say, have been met with further delay by court officials in rural Kinney County, where the majority of Abbotts trespassing arrests have occurred. Those unlawfully incarcerated in Kinney County have become pawns in the larger political debate about whether the Biden administration is adequately addressing border crossings, defense attorney E.G. Morris wrote to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals last week. The claims were raised in a legal fight now before the Court of Criminal Appeals, in which Kinney County is seeking to prevent a Travis County judge from ruling on the legality of hundreds of migrants trespassing arrests. The same judge in January found one migrants arrest under Abbotts Operation Lone Star border initiative unconstitutional, and defense attorneys are hoping to leverage that ruling to help more than 400 other men. Kinney County is asking the high court to find that Travis County courts have no jurisdiction over Kinney County cases. It is apparent that these, and other, applicants are foregoing the functioning courts of Kinney County and seeking more agreeable counties and/or courts for their complaints, David Schulman, acting assistant Kinney County attorney, wrote to the high court. In legal briefings, Kinney County representatives did not respond to the allegations of unlawfully detained migrants and instead focused on the jurisdiction challenge. Neither the Kinney County judge nor the county attorney, who prosecutes misdemeanor crimes, responded to questions about the defense attorneys filings. In July, Abbott ordered state troopers along parts of the border to arrest men suspected of crossing into the country illegally on state charges, most often trespassing on private property. The aggressive law enforcement tactic was the governors latest response to a rise in illegal border crossings. But the new arrests quickly resulted in a flurry of legal missteps as Kinney County officials failed to keep up with the flood of defendants. By September, a local state district judge had ordered the release of nearly 250 men after they sat in prison for more than a month without having any criminal charges filed against them. Dozens had not been assigned a lawyer. There wasnt the prosecutorial capacity to keep up with the number of arrests that DPS was making, plain and simple, Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw said at a legislative hearing on the operation three weeks ago. Its one thing to say, Oh yeah, we can handle that. Its another thing all of a sudden when youve got large numbers being booked into jail. The state brought in judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys to help with the caseload, and court hearings soon picked up speed. From October to February, Kinney County reported holding nearly 1,700 court hearings for the trespassing cases, resulting in nearly 500 men pleading guilty. But the problem, the defense attorneys say, is far from over. DPS has reported more than 3,000 criminal trespassing arrests, the large majority of which have occurred in Kinney County. Those who cant afford to post bond still typically linger in prison between three and four months before they are able to go before a judge, the legal aid group said. At this first court hearing, men are offered immediate release from prison in exchange for a guilty plea. If they plead not guilty, they remain in jail indefinitely. The county has yet to schedule a trial for a trespassing arrest. And getting courts to release men who have been detained beyond legal deadlines is hard to do in the conservative border county, the lawyers said. Such delays have only worsened, they said, after Kinney County Judge Tully Shahan dismissed state-assigned judges who had been hearing such cases and releasing unlawfully imprisoned men, swapping them out with five judges of his own choosing. The legal group said the new judges either simply refuse to hear the cases now or do so with lengthy delay. In late February, the lawyers filed for the release of men held too long. Attorneys were told it would be late April before a hearing was held. The delays, defense attorneys argue, are what prompted the men to seek relief from their due-process violations outside of Kinney County, the focus of the lawsuit before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. County representatives call the move forum shopping, as the defense groups sought out more liberal counties to rule against arrests ordered by the Republican governor, and asked the high court to halt other counties from ruling on their arrests. The migrants lawyers counter that the move was necessary to follow Texas laws on due process, a constitutional right that applies to migrants as well as U.S. citizens. Once they start watering down these protections, theyre watered down for all of us, Kristin Etter, an attorney with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, told The Texas Tribune. Its designed to safeguard individual freedoms over overreaching government power, and its a sacred pillar of jurisprudence. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. Nearly 500,000 people have traded in a different states license and registered as a Texas driver since the pandemic began suggesting that hundreds of thousands of people moved to Texas since March 2020. Specifically, 468,426 people from the other 49 states and the District of Columbia have registered a drivers license in one of Texas 254 counties as of January 2022. About 20% of these people are from California. More than 92,560 former Californians forfeited their drivers license in Texas during the pandemic. Thats nearly three times the number of Floridian drivers the second largest group. In Bexar County, 19% of surrendered licenses were from California, followed by Florida at 8.4%. This is in line with state trends. Travis County home to Austin attracted the largest group of Californians. Comal County had the highest ratio of licenses surrendered compared to population. This is aligned with U.S. census data that show the population in that region exploding in recent years. The number of surrendered licenses peaked in October 2021 when 29,555 people officially became Texas residents. That doesn't necessarily mean they moved in October, however many people blow past the state's 90-day deadline to surrender. Only 40 people surrendered a license in Bexar County during April and May 2020, which drops the monthly average during COVID to 1,441 people every month. But in 2021 alone, an average of 1,695 people forfeited their previous states license in Bexar County every month. About the data The Texas Department of Public Safety requires new Texas drivers to register their vehicle within 30 days of moving to the state and get a new drivers license within 90 days. Of course, not all new residents complete this task. The data does not account for new residents who do not drive or those who have opted to keep their license from a previous state. The data includes people whose previous states drivers license has expired, and though they may have lived in Texas for years, they were late to obtain a Texas driver's license. Work on China-funded auditorium building begins at Cambodia's Army Institute Xinhua) 09:29, March 29, 2022 KAMPONG SPEU, Cambodia, March 28 (Xinhua) -- The construction work of a China-funded auditorium building began at the Army Institute here in Phnom Sruoch district on Monday. Vong Pisen, commander-in-chief of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, and Colonel Zhu Shuaifei, deputy military attache of the Chinese Embassy to Cambodia, presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for the five-story building, which was attended by hundreds of military students and teachers. Speaking at the event, Pisen thanked China for its assistance to Cambodia's socio-economic development, saying the building caters to Cambodia's need for a better training facility. "When completed, this auditorium building will be an important venue for training human resources in the national defense," he added. Zhu said the building will not only provide a better training facility for military students, but also contribute to further deepening the fraternal friendship between the two armies. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) People wearing face masks get off a train at Union Station in Chicago, the United States, on Feb. 28, 2022. (Photo by Vincent D. Johnson/Xinhua) The seven-day average of vaccine doses of all types given in the United States fell to 127,000 per day this week, according to data tracked by The Hill. That marks a steady decline since January, when more than 1 million shots per day were being administered. LOS ANGELES, March 28 (Xinhua) -- The number of COVID-19 vaccinations per day in the United States has fallen to the lowest level since the early days of the inoculation campaign in 2020, while new Omicron subvariant led to rise in infections in country. The seven-day average of vaccine doses of all types given in the country fell to 127,000 per day this week, according to data tracked by The Hill. That marks a steady decline since January, when more than 1 million shots per day were being administered. The seven-day average number of administered vaccine doses over the past week was a 27.1 decrease from the previous week, according to data of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As of March 23, about 255 million people, or 76.8 percent of the total U.S. population, have received at least one dose of vaccine. About 217.2 million people, or 65.4 percent of the total U.S. population, have been fully vaccinated, CDC data show. However, less than half of the total booster-eligible population has not yet received a booster dose. About 96.9 million booster doses have been reported in people who have been fully vaccinated, according to CDC data. Experts said booster shots are particularly important in the face of the Omicron variant, which has a greater ability to evade the protection from two doses of the vaccine. The lagging rates in COVID-19 vaccinations and boosters left the United States more vulnerable to a potential new increase in cases, as is starting to happen in Europe, even with higher booster rates in many countries. A woman jogs by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., the United States, on March 4, 2022. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua) "Periodic reminder that U.S. booster coverage is terrible, especially considering most in this group are not opposed to vaccines in general and many are high risk (age or otherwise)," tweeted Jason Schwartz, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health. Amid the slowdown in vaccinations, the BA.2 sub-lineage of the Omicron variant is steadily gaining its ground in the country, with infections almost doubling each week in February, CDC data show. The BA.2 variant now makes up over one third of new COVID-19 infections in the United States. This data is up from 22.3 percent a week prior, and 15.8 percent two weeks before. In the northeastern part of the country, BA.2's prevalence has surpassed 50 percent in the latest week. The rapid spread of the variant coincided with the start of the allergy season, which may complicate symptoms and delay timely distinction. With COVID-19 cases rising in parts of Europe and Asia due to BA.2's rapid spread, scientists worry that the variant may soon push cases up in the United States too. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said he expects "an uptick in cases" due to BA.2, but not necessarily a massive surge like other variants have caused. A snarling pack of white male Republicans ripping apart a poised, brainy Black woman at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, using sordid innuendoes and baseless claims about race and porn to smear her as her pained family sat behind her. It has been 31 years since I watched this scene, disgusted, when Anita Hill was questioned during confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas. Now Ketanji Brown Jackson has been cast into the same medieval torture chamber on Capitol Hill, with Democrats once more struggling to shield their witness from being mauled. This time, the male Torquemadas were joined by a female inquisitor, Marsha Blackburn. The Tennessee Republican is all magnolia Southern charm until she spits venom. Can you provide a definition for the word woman? Blackburn asked Judge Jackson, invoking the controversy over a transgender swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania. Blackburns question inspired Tucker Carlson to later hold up a graphic of a womans reproductive system, along with a silhouette of a woman so shapely that Roger Ailes would have approved. What is a woman? Jackson shows that a woman is someone who stays cool in the face of calumny and is headed for the Supreme Court. And that will be justice for Justice Jackson. A better question might be: What is a senator? Is it a dolt who cares more about boosting unrealistic presidential ambitions with distorted information than making the Senate, for once, look like a dignified body? Feral Republicans took an exemplary record and twisted it to make Jackson look like an enabler of pedophiles. Tom Cotton all but accused her of lying, just as Arlen Specter accused Hill of perjury based on nothing. Less than a year ago, Lindsey Graham voted to confirm Jackson for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, calling her qualified. Now he berates her with odd questions and seems to blame her for Brett Kavanaughs grilling. If only John McCain could appear to him like Hamlets fathers ghost and slap him into shape. Perhaps Joe Biden sees his selection of Jackson as a sort of expiation for his dismal performance as committee chair for the Hill-Thomas hearings. Biden allowed the Republicans to run wild, and then he shut down the hearings before Hills backup witnesses testified. He cleared the path for Clarence Thomas, a liar and sexual harasser, to ascend to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court and impose his far-right views on the country. As Jill Abramson wrote in the Times Opinion section, the courts 6-3 majority now seems to be reshaping itself in Justice Thomas image. In a speech at Notre Dame last year, Thomas lamented, We have lost the capacity, even I think as leaders, to not allow others to manipulate our institutions when we dont get the outcomes we like. And yet manipulating institutions is exactly what his wife, Ginni, tried to do. As Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in a Washington Post-CBS News bombshell, the conservative activist worked frantically to overturn the results of the 2020 election, calling it an obvious fraud, as Donald Trump and his allies were vowing to go to her husbands court to nullify Bidens win. Ginni Thomas has had a chip on her shoulder since the Hill-Thomas hearings she shamelessly left Hill a voice message in 2010 asking for an apology and no doubt she thought if she could help claw back the presidency from Biden, that would be sweet revenge. In a cascade of text messages, she urged Trumps chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to get Trump back into the Oval. Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! she pleaded, adding, The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History. Ginni who attended the Jan. 6 rally before the raid on the Capitol started urged Meadows to Release the Kraken. The Republicans badgering Jackson arent asking a single question about the explosive revelations regarding Ginni Thomas and nor are the rest of their party. Did the justice know what his wife was doing? Was he OK with it? Does he accept that he must recuse himself from cases dealing with Jan. 6 and the election? Apparently not. Justice Thomas has already participated in two cases related to the 2020 election and its aftermath, despite his wifes direct involvement in the so-called Stop the Steal efforts, Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker. When the court rejected Trumps request to prevent the Jan. 6 committee from getting his records relating to the attempt to overturn the election results, Thomas was the sole dissenter. Do the records implicate Ginni? Stephen Gillers, a judicial ethicist, told Mayer that it was Clarence Thomas duty to know about Ginnis crusade: Dont ask, dont tell is not an acceptable strategy for the Thomases marriage. Thomas should never have been on the court. Now that we know his wife was plotting the overthrow of the government, he should get off or be thrown off. You cant administer justice when your spouse is running around strategizing for a coup. Homeowners dread going to the mailbox in the first quarter of the year and seeing that letter from the Bexar Appraisal District because that means its property tax season. Every year we are shocked at how much our property taxes have increased. Property taxes are the largest tax assessed in Texas. They are critical to help pay for police, firefighters, EMS and other municipal needs, but we must strike a balance that does not further burden homeowners. In 2017, I spearheaded the first-ever city homestead tax exemption, and in 2019 it became reality. The exemption was for the states minimum allowed $5,000. While this was a milestone to provide property tax relief to San Antonio homeowners, more should be done. Bexar County just followed the citys lead and passed a $5,000 homestead exemption, and I challenge other taxing authorities to enact or increase a homestead exemption to provide real relief to homeowners. City Council will debate raising our homestead exemption as we begin our annual budget discussions. During last years budget discussions, Councilman John Courage and I proposed an increase but were not supported by our colleagues. While council members agreed we need to provide relief to homeowners, they ultimately were concerned with the potential impact on the citys operating budget. One of the arguments against increasing the homestead exemption was that the savings a homeowner would receive were not worth the revenue the city would forgo. Opponents are quick to state that this loss in revenue would impact our emergency services budget, but that is not the case. Every year our budget increases by approximately $15 million due to increasing property taxes. To move to a 5 percent exemption would only cost an additional $8.6 million, which is well within the total property tax increase for the city. The goal is to eventually reach the states maximum allowed amount of 20 percent, similar to what other Texas cities provide. City Council recently passed a CPS Energy rate increase with the justification that it was only a few dollars extra to the ratepayer. Why is it when we speak about saving homeowners a few dollars, it is dismissed? New census data shows that San Antonio is among the poorest cities in the nation. We cannot allow San Antonians to be priced out of their homes. A recent letter from the Texas Association of Appraisal Districts stated that regions around the state have seen increases in values between 20-50 percent since last year. Based on the repeat home sale index in the San Antonio-New Braunfels metropolitan area, housing prices have risen 18.37 percent. With such astronomical increases, we cannot solely rely on the Legislature to provide relief. We must do our part. Our community continues to suffer and needs tax relief now. Council will continue this conversation during the budget goal-setting session April 13. If you think the city and other taxing authorities should do more to help our residents, I urge you to contact your council member to express concerns over rising taxes and encourage increasing the homestead exemption. Then call all the other taxing entities such as school districts, Alamo Colleges District and the San Antonio River Authority and tell them the same. This is a community effort. The homestead exemption is not the only solution; however, it is a tool we have available to keep our neighbors in their houses. Now is the time to make this happen. City Councilman Clayton Perry represents District 10. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate As oil production is booming in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday was putting a big focus on the states growing renewable energy sector during a speech in Austin. You can have fossil fuels while at the very same time be leaders in renewable energy, Abbott told a group with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, touting the states growing wind and solar energy production. Weve got to be very clear that all forms of energy are essential. Abbott called Texas an international leader in wind power and predicted it will be the No. 1 state for solar energy by the end of the year. It was a very different tone from a year ago when Abbott appeared to blame renewable energy sources specifically wind turbines for failing during the 2021 winter storm that left millions of Texans without power and resulted in more than 200 cold-related deaths. This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America, Abbott said in an interview on Fox News Channel with host Sean Hannity last February. Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis. While some wind farms were down, others remained in operation. The states bigger problem during the 2021 winter storm was fossil fuel disruptions and electricity providers that had not winterized their facilities as detailed by a Houston Chronicle investigation. FAILURES OF POWER: Texas politicians knowingly blew 3 chances to fix the failing power grid It wasnt just Abbott. Republicans in the Texas Legislature have loudly criticized federal policies in the aftermath of the storm for giving tax incentives to solar and wind production that they say have tilted the energy market too much to benefit renewables. But Abbott on Monday sounded more like an advocate for the states growing renewable energy sector. Oil and gas are going to continue to remain necessary for national security, for daily usage, but at the same time you can promote renewables, which Texas is both a national and international leader in, he told the U.S. Chamber of Commerces Committee of 100. Abbott also touted the states booming oil industry, which will help cut prices at the pump. And he pushed back against those who have tarnished fossil fuels. ALSO MONDAY: Texas oil and gas jobs make biggest leap in over a decade Abbotts focus on renewable energy comes as his Democratic opponent for re-election, Beto ORourke, has been talking about the same issue. Just moments before Abbott spoke in Austin, ORourke was on social media talking about the need for diversifying the energy sector. Texas can leverage our oil and gas expertise to lead on new energy sources like geothermal power, offshore wind and hydrogen, he said. We can create jobs and make America more energy independent. Climate scientists have said the world must shift quickly away from fossil fuels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. But 60 percent of U.S. electricity still comes from carbon-based fuels. Some estimates show the nation would have to double or triple wind and solar capacity over the next few years to meet aggressive fossil fuel reduction plans touted by the Biden administration. jeremy.wallace@chron.com NFU Scotland is calling on the Scottish government to increase the agri-environment budget to fund the levels of investment required for farmers to comply with new slurry storage rules. The Scottish governments Water Environment Amendment Regulations 2021 came into force on 1 January 2022. The rules require minimum slurry storage of 22 weeks for housed cattle and 26 weeks for housed pigs across Scotland. But NFU Scotland said the the regulations "deliver nothing" for the Scottish economy or for rural communities dependent on agricultural production. Funding for slurry storage investment must be ring-fenced within the Agri-Environment Climate Scheme (AECS), the union said. The grant rate available per project must also be increased and for the funding to be made more widely accessible. From a total AECS budget of some 290m since 2016, figures show that less than 2% has been allocated to slurry storage, with only 134 slurry storage applications approved. In addition, while the focus of investment through the Sustainable Agricultural Capital Grant Scheme (SACGS) has shifted to precision slurry applications and slurry store covers, NFU Scotland said the limited 5m earmarked for this year "falls short of the funding required". To be effective in reducing emissions and enhancing the environment, the union said SACGS must be expanded in terms of overall available funding, eligible expenditure, funding per business and grant rates. NFU Scotland President, Martin Kennedy said: Transformational funding needs to be made available in addition to the backstop of regulatory compliance. The financial impacts of compliance with new regulations on slurry on some farms and crofts may threaten their economic viability. "A proportionate solution is required that delivers the desired environmental outcomes without excessive or business threatening costs to individual farms and crofts." He added: A significantly enhanced support package is crucial to delivery of the new regulations and vital if production levels from some Scottish livestock farms is to be maintained. Farmers have been urged to turn their farms into 'fortresses' to protect against diesel and fertiliser thieves amid a surge in prices. Concerns have been raised due to a combination of high prices and shortages which could lead to a surge in farmers red diesel tanks and fertiliser stores becoming targets. Despite reductions in fuel duty following the Chancellors spring statement last week, white diesel is still costing over 1.75 a litre at many service stations. Farmers are also chasing supplies of red diesel to keep their tractors working. Although it is subject to lower tax, the fuel is almost double the cost it was a year ago. Meanwhile, fertiliser prices have increased up to four-fold in the last year and supplies have dried up as high gas prices mean it is not economic for manufacturers to keep production going. While some farmers are unable to get hold of fertiliser and others are refusing to order stocks at current prices, others who bought early have increasingly valuable stocks in their farm buildings. Responding to these issues, NFU Mutual said over the years it had found that criminals 'react very quickly' to target goods which have become expensive and in short supply. Rebecca Davidson, rural affairs specialist at the insurer said: Together the price rises and shortages are threatening future food supplies. Police are reporting an increase in thefts from fuel tanks. We are urging farmers to review security measures and make plans to reduce the risk of diesel being taken, when tractors and combines are left out in the fields." She added: In the past, fertiliser thefts have been rare and farmers havent needed to put security in place to protect stocks. "However, the huge swing in prices makes it possible that thieves will be on the lookout for stored fertiliser and may even try to use farms own machinery to load it up to lorries. Every farm is different, and needs security measures appropriate to its location, layout and operation but with normal trading hugely disrupted, everyone needs to up their game. In recent weeks, some farmers have started to plan increased on-farm red diesel storage tanks because of fears of shortages and even higher prices through harvest. Over the last decade, many farmers have reduced the amount of fuel they store on farm because of the theft risk. Ms Davidson said: "If its now good planning to keep more diesel on farm, care needs to be taken to place the tanks out of public view and put security measures in place. As well as the loss of expensive fuel, thieves often damage tanks leaving fuel running into the ground where it can cause horrendous pollution." How can I bolster security? NFU Mutual has issued security tips for farmers with fuel tanks: Record the number, location, tank storage capacity and the date/times when tanks are filled and regularly check levels. Where possible locate the tank where it can be viewed from the farmhouse. Ideally tanks should be within an enclosed compound with secured access. Fit a fuel tank alarm to notify you of an attack on fuel tanks. Make sure that the tank is suitably bunded to prevent release into the ground, causing pollution. And for fertiliser stores: Keep field and farmyard gates closed and locked, and block exit points that arent used. Install and use intruder alarm systems, which may have a local sounder or remotely monitored signalling. Install security lighting to illuminate any suspicious activity and consider CCTV. Keep fertiliser stocks out of sight in locked buildings. If storing of AN exceeds 25 tonnes, display appropriate warning signs and notify the HSE and Fire Authority. Only subscribers with PAID Print or E-Edition subscriptions please enter here to gain access. If you are not already a Paid subscriber do not go through this portal. Please return to the subscription page to purchase one of our offers. Thank you! Medical workers from Zhejiang Province carry out nucleic acid tests for residents at a COVID-19 testing site in Pudong District of east China's Shanghai, March 28, 2022. A team of testing personnel from neighboring province of Zhejiang on Monday arrived in Shanghai to support a new round of nucleic acid testing in the city. (Photo by Jiang Aishan/Xinhua) A medical worker from Zhejiang Province takes a swab sample from a resident for nucleic acid test at a COVID-19 testing site in Pudong District of east China's Shanghai, March 28, 2022. A team of testing personnel from neighboring province of Zhejiang on Monday arrived in Shanghai to support a new round of nucleic acid testing in the city. (Photo by He Zhongming/Xinhua) A medical worker from Zhejiang Province takes a swab sample from a resident for nucleic acid test at a COVID-19 testing site in Pudong District of east China's Shanghai, March 28, 2022. A team of testing personnel from neighboring province of Zhejiang on Monday arrived in Shanghai to support a new round of nucleic acid testing in the city. (Photo by Jiang Aishan/Xinhua) A medical worker from Zhejiang Province takes a swab sample from a resident for nucleic acid test at a COVID-19 testing site in Pudong New Area of east China's Shanghai, March 28, 2022. A team of testing personnel from neighboring province of Zhejiang on Monday arrived in Shanghai to support a new round of nucleic acid testing in the city. (Xinhua) Medical workers from Zhejiang Province prepare to carry out nucleic acid tests for residents at a COVID-19 testing site in Pudong New Area of east China's Shanghai, March 28, 2022. A team of testing personnel from neighboring province of Zhejiang on Monday arrived in Shanghai to support a new round of nucleic acid testing in the city. (Xinhua) A medical worker from Zhejiang Province takes a swab sample from a resident for nucleic acid test at a COVID-19 testing site in Pudong District of east China's Shanghai, March 28, 2022. A team of testing personnel from neighboring province of Zhejiang on Monday arrived in Shanghai to support a new round of nucleic acid testing in the city. (Photo by Jiang Aishan/Xinhua) A medical worker from Zhejiang Province takes a swab sample from a resident for nucleic acid test at a COVID-19 testing site in Pudong District of east China's Shanghai, March 28, 2022. A team of testing personnel from neighboring province of Zhejiang on Monday arrived in Shanghai to support a new round of nucleic acid testing in the city. (Photo by Jiang Aishan/Xinhua) Next Story : Celebrating The Art & Business Of Indian Hairdressing At IHA 2021 Megan Thee Stallion, the American rapper, made her Oscars debut at the 94th Academy Awards today. She wore an icy-blue gown with a sweetheart neckline bodice, featuring rows and rows of intricately embroidered tube beads and a bottom half consisting of structured ruffles that trailed behind her for at least 4 feet. One has to be far removed from the world of fashion and maybe even social media itself to not recognise the leitmotif and know that it is the signature of designer Gaurav Gupta. I had tears of joy. That was my first reaction when I saw the dress on the red carpet, says the designer and creator of the now-iconic dress that will forever be associated with Megans first Oscars red carpet appearance.Megans stylist, Eric Archibald, was on the hunt for something that would shake things out of predictability for the rapper on the red carpet. He wanted something extremely out of the ordinary, to make a proper statement for Megans Oscar debut, says Gupta. They approached our PR, Hemakshi Bose, in Los Angeles with just 10 days to go for the Oscars, and they always want something new but also something that reflects the brands sensibilities of making art couture.Gaurav Gupta thinks of Megan Thee Stallion as almost other-worldly. So when it came to inspiration for her outfit, the designer married figments of his imagination with his love for the ocean and the fantastical animals it houses in its depth (for the uninitiated, his demi-couture collection at last seasons Lakme Absolute Grand Finale was inspired by the underwater world in Andamans) . We call it the Fantasy Biomorphic Gown that is inspired by a mystical sea creature. The dress, especially at the back, sculpts the body just hugs it and then opens out in multiple fins, he says, talking about his design that has brought biomorphism to life.Between the sketching, discussions with Megans team, and finally zeroing in on the concept, Gupta and his team only had five days to make the outfit. To ensure there are no unwarranted delays, the gown, once ready, was flown with members of Guptas team and hand delivered. It was only after the fittings were done that he felt at peace.On a red carpet usually dominated by actresses in Valentino, Versace, Gucci, and Armani, Megan Thee Stallion turned up in a dramatic Gaurav Gupta number and made it to best-dressed lists not only in India but across the world. For the first time, the Gaurav Gupta brand is on the Oscars red carpet, and so is she. I loved the joining together of these two forces to create concept couture and newer cultural movements, says the designer whose hyper-structured ecru-coloured gown was worn by Cardi B for her new music video, No Love, not too long ago. It is really nice that Indian couture is being represented in such a beautiful global way, he adds. We couldnt agree more.Also Read: We're Obsessed With Megan Thee Stallion's Next Level OTT Nail Art Looks Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release SubCategory Select Sub-Category WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Luxury electric car maker Tesla Inc. (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk said on Monday that he has 'supposedly' tested positive for Covid-19 for the second time, but has no major symptoms. 'Covid-19 is the virus of Theseus. How many gene changes before it's not Covid-19 anymore? I supposedly have it again (sigh), but almost no symptoms,' he tweeted on Monday. The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The concept is one of the oldest in Western philosophy, having been discussed by Heraclitus and Plato by c. 500-400 BC. Several coronavirus variants have emerged throughout the world since the coronavirus first emerged in 2019 in Wuhan, China. According to Johns Hopkins University, over 976,000 people have died in the US from Covid-19. Last year, Musk had questioned the accuracy of Covid-19 tests after claiming results showed he tested positive twice then negative twice on the same day. However, Musk has been in support of vaccination. 'To be clear, I do support vaccines in general & covid vaccines specifically. The science is unequivocal,' he tweeted back in April of last year. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - Japan will on Tuesday release February figures for unemployment, highlighting a light day for Asia-Pacific economic activity. The jobless rate is expected to hold steady at 2.8 percent, while the jobs-to-applicant ratio is also expected to be unchanged at 1.20. Australia will provide preliminary February numbers for retail sales; in January, sales were up 1.8 percent on month. Singapore will see February data for import, export and producers prices. In January, import prices were up 15.7 percent on year, while export prices rose an annual 21.0 percent and producer prices spiked 22.7 percent on year. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) praised today President Biden's steadfast support for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria following the release of the President's fiscal year 2023 budget request to Congress. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220328005907/en/ (Graphic: Business Wire) The Administration has pledged $6 billion for the approaching Global Fund Seventh Replenishment in October, which covers three years. As part of that commitment, President Biden has asked Congress to appropriate $2 billion for the upcoming fiscal year. "Given the Global Fund's track record of saving millions of lives while doing so in a transparent and accountable manner, the US investment in the Fund is some of the best development dollars spent on global health security and public health in terms of effectiveness," said AHF's Chief of Public Affairs and General Counsel Tom Myers. "We thank President Biden for this request and hope Congress will meet or exceed it in appropriations." Because pledges to the Global Fund are made in three-year increments, the rest of the pledged funds will need to be appropriated by Congress in subsequent years. Traditionally, the United States matches $1 for every $2 committed to the Global Fund by other donor countries. The overall target for the Seventh Replenishment has been set at $18 billion. AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global AIDS organization, currently provides medical care and/or services to over 1.6 million clients in 45 countries worldwide in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, the Asia/Pacific Region and Europe. To learn more about AHF, please visit our website: www.aidshealth.org, find us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/aidshealth and follow us on Twitter: @aidshealthcare and Instagram: @aidshealthcare View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220328005907/en/ Contacts: US MEDIA CONTACT: Ged Kenslea,Senior Director, Communications, AHF +1.323.308.1833 work +1.323.791.5526 mobile gedk@aidshealth.org Denys Nazarov, Director of Global Policy Communications, AHF +1 323.308.1829 denys.nazarov@ahf.org Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific deployed Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management to streamline ADA's financial processes and support its digital transformation initiatives to boost business expansion. KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific (HSAP), a leading provider of global industry solutions powered by Microsoft Azure, is delighted to highlight its successful D365 Finance and D365 Supply Chain Management (SCM) implementation with Axiata Digital Advertising (ADA). ADA is a Malaysia-based data and artificial intelligence company known for developing and executing integrated digital, analytics, and marketing solutions with operations across ASEAN and South Asia. To help ADA achieve its strategic growth in the region, they realized the need to replace their legacy ERP systems. Previously using Dynamics NAV on-premises, the company has long outgrown the capabilities of the platform and had to heavily customize it just to suit their business needs. Other legal entities were also using different legacy systems or manual operations. ADA partnered with HSAP to implement D365 Finance and SCM across 11 legal entities in 9 countries within South and Southeast Asia. HSAP developed a global template and rolled out the new system in a big bang approach unifying ADA's business financial practices into one platform. Dynamics 365 Finance helped enable its users to seamlessly work on their day-to-day activities and has improved financial consolidation and month-end close processes. ADA is now able to complete closing faster as compared to the previous 12 to 15 days after month-end close, audit requirements are satisfied. Utilizing Azure cloud, ADA plans to further expand their use of D365 Finance and SCM as they gear for business expansion, both in terms of geography and scope of business. "Dynamics 365 armed us with all the necessary capabilities to help simplify our operations and eliminate manual processes across our entities," said Stephen Tan, ADA's Head of Program Management. "Our partnership with Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific and Microsoft enabled us to remain competitive in this rapidly evolving industry landscape by helping us better serve our clients while empowering our employees in utilizing a powerful cloud ERP platform." This deployment displayed HSAP's established partnership with ADA by swiftly delivering value through its best practices and expertise despite the pandemic. The project also marks a huge milestone for HSAP as this is its first implementation in the advertising industry and the team's first ERP project in newly touched base regions such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, and South Korea. "Our team is thrilled to support ADA in digitizing its financial processes with D365 which resolved its business pains in the best way possible," said Bimal Pandya, Vice President of Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific. "With this successful implementation, we continue to provide ADA impactful guidance in helping its operation thrive towards transformation." About Axiata Digital Advertising ADA is a data and artificial intelligence company that designs and executes integrated digital, analytics, and marketing solutions. Operating across 10 markets in South and Southeast Asia, ADA partners with leading brands to drive their digital and data maturity and achieve their business goals. ADA complements its unique digital expertise with deep proprietary data of 375 million consumers. About Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific helps its customers successfully compete with the largest global enterprises using powerful, easy-to-use, and affordable industry solutions built on the Microsoft Cloud. Hitachi Solutions provides global capabilities with regional offices in the United States, Canada, Europe, India/Middle East, Japan, and Asia Pacific. For more information, please visit: https://global.hitachi-solutions.com/. Media Contact: Nina Gonzales Associate Director - Marketing Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific info@hitachisolutions.com Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1774643/Hitachi_Logo.jpg LONDON, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sungrow, the global leading inverter solution supplier for renewables, announced that the Company partners with Statera Energy, a market leader in the provision of flexibility to the UK grid, to supply a 362 MW/391 MWh energy storage project in the UK. The first phase of the project was grid-connected in Q1, 2022, while the rest will be brought online this year as well. The independent power producer Statera Energy will adopt Sungrow's ST3727kWh-3450UD-MV high-efficiency turnkey energy storage system solution with enhanced safety to develop subsidy-free energy storage capable of discharging power at times of peak demand or under-production in multiple suburbs across the UK. More importantly, the project will help the UK meet its Capacity Market objective of achieving long-term security of supply and contribute to the offsetting of the risk of its increasing reliance on wind generation by strengthening the National Grid's Dynamic Containment frequency response service. With UK's electricity system currently experiencing lower inertia and larger, more numerous losses than ever before. Faster acting frequency response products are needed because system frequency is moving away from 50 Hz more rapidly as a consequence of imbalances. On January 27 of 2021, UK electricity system operator National Grid began allowing the stacking of revenues in parts of the Balancing Mechanism which has been of significant importance to battery asset owners. The National Grid expects the additional flexibility and revenue stacking to increase the efficiency of battery assets delivering the service, and increase competition which would, in turn, reduce costs to the consumer. "We have partnered with Sungrow because of its proven track record, the quality and the integrated nature of its product offering. Statera believes that battery storage will play a pivotal role in facilitating the transition to low carbon generation and will continue to work with Sungrow on coming projects in the UK in 2022," said Tom Vernon, Managing Director of Statera Energy Limited. Since opening its Milton Keynes branch in 2014, the local team of Sungrow UK, a subsidy of Sungrow, has realized significant traction in the United Kingdom with tens of energy storage applications. In addition, Europe's largest energy storage project, the 100 MW/100 MWh Minety plant with Sungrow's 1500V energy storage system solutions has been operating stably and efficiently for about one year. About Sungrow Sungrow Power Supply Co., Ltd. ("Sungrow") is the world's most bankable inverter brand with over 224 GW installed worldwide as of December 2021. Founded in 1997 by University Professor Cao Renxian, Sungrow is a leader in the research and development of solar inverters with the largest dedicated R&D team in the industry and a broad product portfolio offering PV inverter solutions and energy storage systems for utility-scale, commercial & industrial, and residential applications, as well as internationally recognized floating PV plant solutions, NEV driving solutions and EV charging station solutions. With a strong 25-year track record in the PV space, Sungrow products power installations in over 150 countries. Last year, Sungrow shipped 3 GWh ESS worldwide, ranging from islands and high altitude plateaus to ports and residential installations. Learn more about Sungrow by visiting: www.sungrowpower.com. About Statera Statera Energy Limited, is market leader in the provision of flexibility to the UK power market. It develops, owns, and operates assets that will are required to balance a future high renewables electricity system. To date that has been via the development of over 500 MW of battery storage and 150 MW of flexible gas generations projects. Going forward, it has a pipeline of 2.5 GW under-development which includes batteries, thermal generation, pumped storage and hydrogen technologies. Statera Energy Limited is majority owned Infrared Capital's Infrastructure Fund V and its offices are located in Notting Hill, London. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1774587/image.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1344575/Logo.jpg by Xinhua writers Li Rui, Tian Ye CAIRO, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar, key members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), have remained hesitant to increase oil and gas exports, though the United States and the European Union (EU) are urging the Gulf states to do so. The West's move is aimed at stabilizing the global energy market, as energy prices remain high with the U.S. and EU ban on Russia's energy exports following the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Analysts say that the Gulf states are trying to strike a balance between the United States and Russia, as their relations with the United States are tested by the impending revival of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which may pose a threat to them, while they are unwilling to cut off ties with Russia, as the military and energy ties with Russia have become stronger in the past few years. U.S., EU MOVES The United States recently sent a large shipment of Patriot anti-missile interceptors to Saudi Arabia, which the kingdom had requested since late last year to counter drone and missile attacks by the Houthi militia in Yemen, according to U.S. media. The move came as the Biden administration tries to convince Riyadh to pump more crude oil to help contain soaring prices spurred by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Prices of fuel oil and gas have skyrocketed in the EU after the United States and some EU countries imposed sanctions on Russia's exports. Senior British and German officials recently traveled to the Gulf countries to persuade the oil-rich nations to expand their spare energy capacity to fill the void left by Russia's import ban. On March 16, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited the UAE and Saudi Arabia to discuss the stability of the global energy market. Johnson's tour to the Middle East was followed by Germany's Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck, who visited Qatar and the UAE last week to search for alternatives to the Russian gas supply following the U.S.-led sanctions on Russia. GULF RESISTING INCREASING EXPORTS Although leaders of the UAE and Saudi Arabia have reiterated the importance of global energy security and energy market stability, they have not increased output. On March 23, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan once again emphasized that "the UAE is keen on global energy security and the stability and balance of the energy market." On March 24, the Saudi government said in a statement that the OPEC+ agreement has an essential role in maintaining the balance and stability of the oil market. Neither country, however, has increased its output. "It is in the Gulf states' interests to keep energy costs high," said Sun Xia, associate researcher with the Institute of International Relations at China's Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Since 2017, the Gulf states and Russia have forged a stable energy alliance under the umbrella of OPEC+. After their successful collaboration in stabilizing oil prices, the Gulf states no longer want to be led by American politicians and financial elites, Sun noted. STRIKING BALANCE BETWEEN U.S., RUSSIA The Biden administration has been disregarding the Gulf states' biggest security concern -- Iran's Shiite-dominated government, Sun said. If Washington and Tehran clinch a nuclear deal, Iranian oil will return to the international market and compete with Gulf oil. Moreover, expanding Iranian influence in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria would pose a severe danger to the Sunni sphere of influence, Sun added. The Gulf states' strategy to strike a balance between the United States and Russia reflects their attitudes toward the two countries' dominance in the Middle East, said Zou Zhiqiang, researcher of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at China's Fudan University. The United States retains a great influence in regional politics in the Middle East with the help of its allies. However, its recent strategic withdrawal from the Middle East, as well as a series of irresponsible behaviors, has made some of its allies nervous and start to question the U.S. capability to ensure their safety, said Zou. The U.S. geopolitical retreat has stood in sharp contrast with Russia's active involvement in the Middle East, said Zheng Rong, associate researcher of the Center for Arab Studies at China's Zhejiang International Studies University. Russia has carried out cooperation with the Gulf states in oil and gas exploitation, military equipment technology, use of nuclear energy and other fields, and has also become an indispensable force to solve the crises in Syria and Libya, making it a strategic partner for several countries in the Middle East, Zheng added. When it comes to financial interests and vital national interests of oil and gas, the Gulf states won't budge easily, Sun said. The Gulf states will not cooperate with the United States in a meaningful way if the Biden administration does not change its Middle East policy, Sun added. Fort St. John, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 28, 2022) - MACRO ENTERPRISES INC. (TSXV: MCR) (the "Corporation" or "Macro Enterprises") is providing the following update on its previously announced going private transaction (the "Transaction" or the "Arrangement") whereby each common share in the capital of Macro Enterprises (a "Macro Enterprises Share") would be acquired by 1325996 B.C. Ltd. ("AcquireCo") for consideration of $4.00 per share, in accordance with the terms of an arrangement agreement dated February 14, 2022 among Macro Enterprises, AcquireCo, Frank Miles, Jeff Redmond and Ken Mastre (the "Arrangement Agreement"). Update to Transaction As announced on March 20, 2022, Mr. Ken Mastre ("Mastre"), the former Vice-President, Pipelines of Macro Enterprises suddenly and unexpectedly passed away in hospital recovering from an operation. Mr. Mastre, along with Frank Miles, the President, Chief Executive Officer and director of Macro Enterprises ("Miles") and Jeff Redmond, the Chief Financial Officer of Macro Enterprises ("Redmond" and together with Mastre and Miles, the "Participating Shareholders") had proposed to effect the Transaction through AcquireCo, an entity jointly owned by such persons and to be controlled by Mr. Miles. As a result of Mr. Mastre's passing, AcquireCo has requested that the Corporation and AcquireCo amend the Arrangement Agreement and plan of arrangement to provide that Mastre's estate will not be a "Participating Shareholder", a "Participating Class B Shareholder" or a "Participating Incentiveholder", but that the estate will participate in the Transaction on the same terms as the non-participating holders of Macro Enterprises Shares ("Macro Enterprises Shareholders") who are not Participating Shareholders and holders of options to purchase Macro Enterprises Options ("Macro Enterprises Optionholders") who are not Participating Incentiveholders. In addition, Mr. Mastre would be removed as a party to the Arrangement Agreement and would no longer be a "Guarantor" pursuant to the Arrangement Agreement. Upon careful consideration and in light of the circumstances, the Corporation has agreed to proceed with such amendments and the parties are preparing an updated version of the Arrangement Agreement and plan of arrangement to be approved by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in connection with the Final Order. All other terms and conditions of the Arrangement Agreement, including the transaction price of $4.00 per Macro Enterprises Share, remain the same. As a result of the amendments to the Arrangement Agreement, all securities of Macro Enterprises owned by Mr. Mastre (or his estate) will participate in the Transaction in the same manner as all other Macro Enterprises securityholders, other than the remaining Participating Shareholders and Mr. Mastre (or his estate) will no longer be a "Participating Shareholder" or "Participating Incentiveholder" for the purposes of the Arrangement. The text of the special resolution proposed to be considered by Macro Enterprises Shareholders and Macro Enterprises Optionholders at the special meeting (the "Meeting") of Macro Enterprises Shareholders and Macro Enterprises Optionholders to be held on Monday, April 4, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. (Vancouver time) will be remain the same as set forth in Appendix "A" to the management information circular of Macro dated February 28, 2022 (the "Circular") and available under Macro Enterprises' SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com,. Background to the Transaction As a result of the matters set forth above, below is a summary of the background to the Transaction, which is substantially as set forth in the Circular, and updated for certain other developments and matters, including for those matters described above. Capitalized terms used below and not otherwise defined have the meaning ascribed thereto in the Circular. In recent years, changes in the commercial landscape in which the Corporation operates, due in part to COVID-19, the fluctuation of oil and gas prices and the cancellation of a major pipeline project, have had an impact, directly and indirectly, on the Corporation's business. In addition, the pipeline industry has also faced uncertainty due to ongoing environmental, Indigenous and political matters in Canada, the United States and internationally. Given the evolving commercial landscape and competition in its industry, the Board has engaged in regular discussion and evaluation of the strategic outlook of the Corporation. The Corporation is primarily in the business of providing pipeline and facilities construction and pipeline maintenance services to companies in the oil and gas industry in Western Canada through its wholly owned subsidiaries, Macro Industries Inc. ("Macro Industries"), Macro Pipelines Inc. ("Macro Pipelines") and Macro Pipeline Joint Venturer Inc. ("MPJV") and their respective subsidiaries. In February 2021, the Corporation (through Frank Miles and Bob Fedderly) was approached by Redmond and Mastre to seek the provision of certain non-public information to their advisors and potential financiers regarding a potential transaction involving the Corporation. At this time, Mr. Fedderly (an independent director of the Corporation and ultimately the Chair of the Special Committee) and Frank Miles, on behalf of the Corporation, retained independent legal counsel in order to negotiate the terms of such agreement. On April 5, 2021, the Corporation entered into a confidentiality agreement (the "Confidentiality Agreement") with Redmond and Mastre pursuant to which such individuals were entitled to share certain non-public confidential information pertaining to the Corporation with third party financing sources for the purposes of facilitating a potential purchase of Macro Enterprises as part of a potential going-private transaction. Following the entering into of the Confidentiality Agreement, in the summer of 2021 Redmond and Mastre held discussions with Miles regarding a potential transaction and were advised that Miles was not at that time interested in participating in such a transaction. Following those initial discussions, Redmond and Mastre continued to explore the possibility of a proposed transaction with their financial advisors and financing sources. In October, 2021, Miles advised that he had given additional consideration to the opportunity and was open to considering the possibility of taking part in a potential transaction, subject to finalization of terms. Following such discussion, Redmond and Mastre continued to explore opportunities and, taking into account the best interests of the Corporation, including all stakeholders of the Corporation, Redmond and Mastre prepared an expression of interest which included a conceptual rollover of a portion of Miles' interest in Macro. Following discussions between Redmond and Mastre and Miles, Miles indicated that subject to the receipt of support from the Board, he would be willing to proceed as suggested. On October 8, 2021, the Board received an unsolicited non-binding expression of interest (the "EOI") from AcquireCo with respect to a potential acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of the Corporation, excluding certain shares held by the Participating Shareholders, at a price per Macro Enterprises Share of $3.75. The EOI was delivered and signed by Redmond and Mastre (but not Miles as his participation was contingent on the support of the Board) and at such time Redmond and Miles were the sole directors, officers and shareholders of AcquireCo. Immediately following receipt of the EOI, the Board sought the advice of legal counsel on the appropriate steps to be taken and then held a meeting of the Board at which Miles disclosed his potential interest and the interest of the other Participating Shareholders (being Redmond and Mastre) in the proposed transaction to the Board and the Board acknowledged the potential conflicts of interest arising from the participation of the Participating Shareholders in the proposed transaction. While Mr. Fedderly was aware of the existence of the Confidentiality Agreement (and the context to the same), none of the other directors of the Corporation, including Miles, were apprised of the same at the time it was entered into, and accordingly, on the receipt of the EOI the other directors of the Corporation expressed their initial surprise to the EOI. However, they agreed that if the transaction had merit, it would be worth investigation and consideration, and, following a discussion regarding the best course of action and in light of the conflicts of interest, the Board determined that it was appropriate to establish the Special Committee, comprised of Robert (Bob) L. Fedderly and William McFetridge, each of whom are non-interested directors with respect to the proposed transaction and independent directors of the Corporation (as determined in accordance with MI 61-101), to evaluate and consider whether such proposed transaction was in the best interests of the Corporation, including the effects of the proposed transaction on Macro Enterprises Shareholders and other stakeholders of the Corporation. At the meeting, the Board authorized the Special Committee to engage independent counsel to the Special Committee. Following the formation of the Special Committee, on October 14, 2021, the Special Committee engaged Burnet, Duckworth & Palmer LLP ("BD&P") to act as independent counsel to the Special Committee. Following the engagement of BD&P, the Special Committee conducted a series of interviews with potential financial advisors to assist the Special Committee in evaluating and, if deemed advisable, negotiating the proposed transaction and considering alternatives. Following a comprehensive assessment of such advisors, the Special Committee determined that it would be appropriate for the Special Committee to engage CIBC World Markets Inc. ("CIBC") to provide financial advice in connection with its consideration of the proposed transaction. Concurrently with the assessment of the financial advisors, the Special Committee, together with BD&P, carefully considered and prepared and considered a broad mandate for the Special Committee authorizing the Special Committee to, among other things, review and consider the proposed transaction, and make recommendations to the Board on whether such proposed transaction, or other transactions, is in the best interests of the Corporation and fair to Macro Enterprises Shareholders and other stakeholders of the Corporation. After the receipt of the EOI, counsel to the Special Committee sent correspondence to counsel to AcquireCo seeking further details and clarifications on the proposal reflected in the EOI. As part of such inquiries, the correspondence sought to confirm, among other things, the identity of any director, officer, shareholder of Macro Enterprises or other party with an interest in, or acting as a financing party to, the proposal or the pro forma entity, and provide details of that interest or involvement. Counsel to AcquireCo in turn responded through email correspondence on November 3, 2021 confirming that, in addition to Redmond and Mastre, Miles had expressed his intention to participate in the transaction with the bidding group through AcquireCo, thus officially confirming to the Special Committee his involvement in the proposed transaction. Notwithstanding the Special Committee formally being apprised of this development in November 2021, no discussions, proposals or other correspondences were had between the bidding group (being Redmond, Miles and Mastre) and the Corporation (including the Board) from the time of entering into the Confidentiality Agreement and the receipt of the EOI, and immediately upon receipt of the EOI, the Special Committee was formed. Accordingly, all matters, discussions and negotiations in respect of the Transaction were conducted at arm's length, without any prejudice to the integrity of the process by the Special Committee. At no point in time after the execution of the Confidentiality Agreement and the receipt of the EOI were strategic matters (such as acquisitions, dispositions, financings or otherwise) discussed or considered by the Board (including with Miles). During this time, the Board only discussed and considered the ongoing operations of the Corporation and its quarterly financial results. Miles had no involvement or presence in any of the discussions and deliberations by the Special Committee after its formation. As part of preparing and considering the Special Committee mandate, and with the input and advice of BD&P and CIBC, the Special Committee determined that any decision as to whether the potential transaction, or any strategic alternative to the potential transaction (including maintaining the status quo or seeking other transactions that would enhance value to minority securityholders of the Corporation), is in the best interests of the Corporation should be preceded by an analysis of the relevant facts, issues and potential alternatives available to the Corporation. Following the selection of CIBC and the preparation of the mandate, the Board approved the mandate prepared by the Special Committee, without modification, and authorized the Special Committee to engage financial and other advisors on the terms negotiated by the Special Committee. As part of such approvals, Mr. Fedderly was appointed to act as Chair of the Special Committee. On November 4, 2021, the Corporation formalized the engagement of CIBC by entering into an engagement letter with CIBC pursuant to which CIBC agreed to provide financial advice to the Special Committee in connection with its consideration of the proposed transaction and if requested, to provide an opinion as to the fairness of the consideration to be received by Macro Enterprises Shareholders in connection with a transaction. Following the engagement of CIBC, the Special Committee, together with CIBC, conducted a comprehensive assessment of reasonable alternatives to the proposed transaction and engaged in ongoing negotiations with AcquireCo and its financial advisor. As part of its engagement, CIBC undertook an evaluation of the Corporation, including conducting a comprehensive review of the Corporation's budgets, forecasts and other financial and business information. As part of such inquiries, representatives of CIBC met numerous times with management of the Corporation and the Participating Shareholders' financial advisor. On November 15, 2021, after completing its detailed financial review and analysis of the Corporation, CIBC made a presentation to the Special Committee with respect to a preliminary analysis, strategic considerations and the scope of other potential counterparties in the context of a change of control of the Corporation. After careful consideration of the analysis and information provided by CIBC, a thorough discussion and review of the terms of the proposed transaction and after receiving advice from its legal and financial advisors, the Special Committee noted that they considered the price noted in the initial offer to not adequately reflect the value of the Corporation's current business, operations and prospects, and, accordingly, were not in a position to support proceeding with a transaction on such terms. Subsequent to such meeting, the Special Committee informed the Participating Shareholders of their position. As a result, between mid November 2021 and early December 2021, further discussions took place between the Corporation and AcquireCo and their respective legal and financial advisors. During this period, the Participating Shareholders and the Special Committee had various discussions on price and value, and the Special Committee, with the assistance of CIBC, and based upon their collective knowledge of the business, operations, financial condition, earnings and prospects of the Corporation, as well as their collective knowledge of the current and prospective environment in which the Corporation operates (including economic and political conditions), continued a dialogue with the Participating Shareholders with respect to a potential improved offer. During such period, the Special Committee continued to consider alternatives to the proposed transaction (including the status quo) and also considered the effects of potential business development activities with respect to the Corporation, including with respect to winning construction services contracts from new and existing clients, in each case considering the overall benefits to stakeholders, adjusted for time value, risk and various other factors. In addition, the Special Committee continued to negotiate the price offered by AcquireCo and to seek a means to compare the benefits of the proposed transaction against other alternatives. On November 24, 2021, the Special Committee received correspondence on behalf of AcquireCo which confirmed that AcquireCo was not prepared to participate in an auction process (and would revoke their bid in such an event), but was prepared to increase the offer price to $4.00 per Macro Enterprises Share, representing a 6.7% increase to the original offer price of $3.75 per Macro Enterprises Share previously offered in the EOI, provided that such offer was AcquireCo's final offer. As part of such discussion, Miles, also confirmed that (in his capacity as a shareholder) he would be unwilling to support any alternative transaction. After receipt of the revised offer, members of the Special Committee met with representatives of CIBC and its legal advisors and considered and deliberated over the revised offer. As part of such process, CIBC provided financial advice as to their assessment of the revised offer and, subsequently, after careful consideration of the relevant circumstances and facts, the Special Committee determined it would be appropriate to proceed to negotiate a non-binding letter of intent with AcquireCo that set out the revised offer price, as well as other proposed terms and conditions of a potential transaction. As part of this process, the Special Committee, with the assistance of its legal advisors, provided comments on the EOI initially submitted by AcquireCo, in the form of a letter of intent, reflecting the revised offer price of $4.00 per Macro Enterprises Share, as well as various other proposed deal terms, including providing for an "expense reimbursement" concept (subject to maximum amounts) in the event of a termination of the Arrangement Agreement, as opposed to the payment of a break fee, which was expected to be for a higher amount than an expense reimbursement. Furthermore, as part of their negotiations in respect of the Transaction, the Special Committee sought to negotiate a "go-shop" provision, where the Corporation could solicit and entertain alternative transactions after the Transaction was announced. As part of this, the Special Committee was again advised that Miles would not support an alternative transaction (in his capacity as shareholder) which would effectively preclude the ability of the Corporation to complete an alternative transaction as a result of his significant shareholdings, and such a construct was refused. On December 7, 2021, after the various negotiations and discussions between the Special Committee on behalf of the Corporation and AcquireCo, and their respective financial and legal advisors, the final terms of the letter of intent (the "Proposal Letter") were finalized and agreed to. Pursuant to the Proposal Letter, AcquireCo proposed to acquire (directly or indirectly) all of the outstanding Macro Enterprises Shares, other than certain Macro Enterprises Shares owned or controlled by the Participating Shareholders, for the increased consideration of $4.00 per Macro Enterprises Share (the "Common Share Cash Consideration"). As a result of the Arrangement, the Corporation would become a wholly owned subsidiary of AcquireCo and de-list from the TSXV. The Proposal Letter contained confirmation that the entering into of the definitive Arrangement Agreement would be subject to AcquireCo obtaining binding commitments for the requisite financing in respect of the proposed transaction. The Proposal Letter also contained certain customary terms and conditions, including a binding period of exclusivity until January 20, 2022, and the entry into of Support Agreements by certain directors and officers of the Corporation, as well as the Participating Shareholders. The Proposal Letter also provided for the Macro Enterprises Expenses Reimbursement, the AcquireCo Expense Reimbursement and that AcquireCo would be responsible for expenses incurred relating to the Valuation, up to a maximum of $125,000. In determining the $4.00 per share consideration prior to the receipt of the Valuation, the Special Committee considered a number of factors including that CIBC, the financial advisor to the Special Committee, was mandated to, if requested by the Special Committee, provide an opinion as to the fairness, from a financial point of view, of the consideration to be received by disinterested shareholders in connection with the Transaction (or any alternative transaction, if applicable). With this in mind, prior to agreeing to the $4.00 share price, CIBC noted to the Special Committee that it would be reasonable to continue to proceed with the proposed transaction at a price of $4.00 per share (it being noted that CIBC did not render any opinion or complete any valuation at this time) and with the understanding that the Special Committee would engage an independent valuator to complete a formal valuation. With the benefit of this, the Special Committee agreed to explore the transaction and negotiate the definitive agreement based on an offer price of $4.00 per share and this price was reflected in the non-binding Proposal Letter. The Proposal Letter noted that, as a condition to proceeding with the Transaction (including entering into a definitive agreement with respect to the same), the Special Committee was required to be satisfied with the conclusions set out in both the fairness opinion and the formal valuation that it intended to receive prior to making its recommendations with respect to the Transaction. In the event the formal valuation concluded a valuation range above the price of $4.00 per share, the Special Committee would be unwilling to proceed with the legally binding definitive agreements or otherwise proceed with and support the Transaction. Following an assessment of the terms and conditions of the Proposal Letter, upon the recommendation of the Special Committee, the Board (with the abstention of the Miles (in such capacity, the "Participating Director")) authorized the Corporation to enter into the Proposal Letter with AcquireCo with respect to the Arrangement. On December 9, 2021, the Corporation entered into the Proposal Letter with AcquireCo. Subsequent to the execution of the Proposal Letter, throughout December 2021, the Special Committee conducted a series of interviews with potential valuators to assist the Special Committee in conducting the Valuation. The Special Committee determined that, notwithstanding any exemptions from the requirements to obtain a formal valuation for the transaction that may be available to the Corporation under MI 61-101, the Special Committee concluded it would be advisable to obtain a formal valuation, and that the proposed offer price would need to be within the ranges set forth in any valuation in order to proceed with any definitive agreement. In early January 2022, following the Special Committee's assessment of potential valuators, the Special Committee engaged Deloitte LLP ("Deloitte") to act as independent financial advisor and to prepare an independent fairness opinion and a formal valuation in the manner prescribed by MI 61-101 (the "Valuation"). Pursuant to the engagement agreement with Deloitte, Deloitte would be compensated based on time spent, subject to an agreed upon cap, for the preparation of the Valuation and an independent fairness opinion. No part of any fee payable to Deloitte is success-based or based on the conclusions reached in the Valuation. From January 2022 through to signing of the Arrangement Agreement, Deloitte undertook extensive due diligence investigations regarding the Corporation, including its assets, business and operations, its existing business plan, the Proposal Letter and relevant industry and economic factors. Deloitte was given full access to members of the Special Committee, the Corporation's management and confidential information, including management's forecast of future financial performance. As part of its independent review, Deloitte made certain adjustments to management's forecasts based on its own independent analysis and professional judgment. During this period, the Special Committee met on multiple occasions to discuss Deloitte's analysis. For further details regarding the Valuation, see "The Arrangement - Independent Valuation and Deloitte Fairness Opinion" in the Circular. In the afternoon of December 31, 2021, Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP ("Fasken"), legal counsel to AcquireCo, circulated an initial draft of the Arrangement Agreement to Norton Rose Fulbright and BD&P. In the afternoon of January 11, 2022, Fasken circulated an initial draft of the voting support agreements (the "Support Agreements"). Norton Rose Fulbright and BD&P, with input from the Special Committee by video conference and written comments, reviewed the draft Arrangement Agreement and the Support Agreements during the course of the following weeks and ultimately provided comments back to Fasken in the early morning of January 13, 2022. Over the course of the following weeks, the Parties continued to negotiate the draft Arrangement Agreement, the Plan of Arrangement and the terms of the Support Agreements. The Special Committee met regularly with legal counsel and CIBC to discuss the terms and conditions of the Arrangement Agreement and, in connection with such meetings, continued to assess the relative benefits and risks of various alternatives to the Arrangement, including continued execution of the Corporation's existing strategic plan. In considering potential alternatives, the Special Committee concluded that the Common Share Cash Consideration is likely to represent greater value than would reasonably be expected from the continued execution of the Corporation's existing strategic plan, in light of the ongoing uncertainty surrounding energy infrastructure construction projects, including pipeline construction projects, and it was not reasonable to expect that the Corporation could consummate an alternative change of control transaction on terms that were more favourable to Macro Enterprises Shareholders than the Arrangement, including given that the Participating Shareholders (and specifically Miles) control a sufficient number of Macro Enterprises Shares to effectively resist any alternative transaction, combined with the indication that he will not support any alternative transaction. The Special Committee continually assessed each of these alternatives throughout the process of evaluating and negotiating the Arrangement and, ultimately, concluded that entering into the Arrangement Agreement was the most favourable alternative reasonably available. Throughout the entire process, many discussions ensued with CIBC, counsel and the Special Committee, including with respect to the potential to canvass the market to consider alternative transactions to the insider proposal and, as part of this, CIBC initially identified a group of potential third parties. However, upon confirming the role of Miles in the bidding group including being advised that he would not support an alternative transaction (in his capacity as a shareholder) and after being advised by the bidding group that they would revoke their offer in the event alternative transactions were explored, the Special Committee determined that canvassing the market for alternative transactions would not be in the best interests of the Corporation, as the Special Committee believed that the proposal presented by the bidding group had merit and was worth exploring and pursuing on appropriate terms. In addition, the Board would not be precluded from accepting a Superior Proposal at any time prior to obtaining the approval by Macro Enterprises Shareholders and Macro Enterprises Optionholders of the Arrangement Resolution and, in the view of the Special Committee and the Board, the AcquireCo Expense Reimbursement (based on actual reasonable expenses and costs incurred by AcquireCo in connection with the Arrangement) would not preclude the possibility of a third party making a Superior Proposal. See "Considerations of the Special Committee and the Board in Making their Recommendation - Reasons for the Recommendation" in the Circular. Commencing on January 13, 2022, Norton Rose Fulbright and the Special Committee commenced an in-depth review of the Financings. With input from CIBC, Norton Rose Fulbright and BD&P, the Special Committee conducted an assessment of the Financing Agreements. The Corporation and Norton Rose Fulbright conducted a comprehensive review of the Financing Agreements and entered into negotiations with the Financing Sources and their legal advisors. On January 20, 2022, the Parties entered into an extension letter to the Proposal Letter to extend the exclusivity period until January 28, 2022, in order to provide the financial advisors time to adequately prepare, as applicable, the Fairness Opinions and the Valuation. Deloitte, at various stages, provided updates with respect to its investigations in preparing the Valuation. The Parties and their respective legal counsel continued to concurrently negotiate the terms of the Financings. On January 26, 2022, AcquireCo received draft binding letters of commitment from the Financing Sources, subject to a number of conditions, including the completion of the Arrangement. During the week of January 23, 2022, the respective legal counsels to the Parties continued to negotiate the draft Arrangement Agreement and members of the Special Committee continued discussions with the Participating Shareholders, both with and without their respective legal and financial advisors, to discuss the terms and conditions of the Arrangement Agreement. During this time, the Parties further agreed: (i) with respect to certain tax treatment relating to the sale of the Macro Enterprises Shares pursuant to the Arrangement; (ii) the terms of the Financings (including the removal of certain conditions included in the Financing Agreements); and (iii) to certain other concessions. Over the course of January 2022, the Special Committee became aware of certain operational challenges facing the Corporation. These challenges included unforeseen costs and possible delays under one of its ongoing construction contracts that were anticipated to have a negative impact on the financial results of the Corporation. On January 28, 2022, the Special Committee continued consultation with CIBC and Deloitte. Later that day, the Corporation (and, through it, the Special Committee) was informed of a new potential construction services contract award to Macro Pipelines (the "February Pipeline Construction Services Contract"), with the estimated gross revenue of the construction services to be provided under the Contract being $160 million. Given the potential effect of the February Pipeline Construction Services Contact and certain operational challenges on the valuation of the Corporation, the Special Committee requested that both Deloitte and CIBC conduct additional analysis to incorporate the possibility that the February Pipeline Construction Services Contract would be awarded, as well as the impacts of unforeseen costs and delays under the Corporation's other services Contracts. On January 28, 2022, the Parties entered into a second extension letter to the Proposal Letter to extend the exclusivity period until February 3, 2022, to allow CIBC and Deloitte to conduct additional financial analysis with respect to the Corporation's financial position as a result of the February Pipeline Construction Services Contract as well as other recent negative developments in respect of the Corporation's business, which could mitigate certain of the potential positive financial effects of the February Pipeline Construction Services Contract. At the same time, the Parties settled on the form of the Support Agreements. On January 31, 2022, CIBC, Norton Rose Fulbright and BDP met with the Special Committee to discuss the potential impact of the February Pipeline Construction Services Contract, certain other recent negative developments in respect of the Corporation's business and overall timing considerations. During the week that followed, the Parties and their respective advisors continued to contemplate and analyze the impact of the February Pipeline Construction Services Contract and the other recent negative developments on the value of the Corporation and the proposed Arrangement, and the Special Committee authorized continued negotiations among the legal and financial advisors of the Parties. As the week progressed, it became reasonably apparent that the Corporation would enter into the February Pipeline Construction Services Contract and the Special Committee instructed CIBC and Deloitte to account for this and other recent negative developments in their respective analysis, including, in the case of Deloitte, the Valuation. On February 3, 2022, the Parties entered into a third extension letter to the Proposal Letter to extend the exclusivity period until February 11, 2022. During such period, CIBC and Deloitte continued to review and consider the potential impact of the February Pipeline Construction Services Contract and other recent negative developments in respect of the Corporation's financial position and outlook, and as part of the same, reviewed and considered the Corporation's updated budgets and forecasts and met with the Corporation's senior management to further understand and consider the impact of the same. On the evening of February 7, 2022, Deloitte verbally delivered its preliminary valuation assessment with respect to the Macro Enterprises Shares. After market hours on February 8, 2022, the Corporation entered into the February Pipeline Construction Services Contract and before the opening of markets on February 9, 2022, the Corporation publicly announced it had entered into the February Pipeline Construction Services Contract. In early February 2022 through to the signing of the Arrangement Agreement, as part of the Special Committee's review process, the Special Committee specifically considered a number of matters as its relates to proceeding with the Arrangement, including whether the Common Share Cash Consideration is likely to represent greater value than would reasonably be expected from the continued execution of the Corporation's existing strategic plan, in light of the ongoing uncertainty surrounding energy infrastructure construction projects, including pipeline construction projects, and whether it was reasonable to expect that the Corporation could consummate an alternative change of control transaction, on terms that were more favourable to Macro Enterprises Shareholders than the Arrangement, including given that the Participating Shareholders (and specifically Miles) control a sufficient number of Macro Enterprises Shares to effectively resist any alternative transaction to the Arrangement. See also "The Arrangement - Considerations of the Special Committee and the Board in Making their Recommendations" in the Circular. As of February 11, 2022, AcquireCo entered into the Financing Agreements with the Financing Sources. Late in the morning of February 12, 2022, the Special Committee met with representatives of each of Norton Rose Fulbright, BD&P, CIBC and Deloitte. Norton Rose Fulbright reviewed the proposed final terms of the Arrangement Agreement, the Arrangement, the Financings and related matters. At such meeting, Deloitte and CIBC each delivered to the Special Committee the applicable verbal Fairness Opinions. Deloitte also delivered the verbal Valuation, which valuation is in the range of $3.75 to $4.65 per Macro Enterprises Share. See "The Arrangement - Independent Valuation and Deloitte Fairness Opinion" and "The Arrangement - CIBC Fairness Opinions" in the Circular. Having undertaken a thorough review of, and having considered, the Arrangement, following the Special Committee's review and assessment of the Arrangement Agreement and the Arrangement and the receipt of advice from legal counsel, CIBC and Deloitte, including the receipt of the verbal Fairness Opinions and the Valuation, and, after considering the potential benefits and risks in proceeding with the Arrangement (including as further described under "The Arrangement - Considerations of the Special Committee and the Board in Making their Recommendations" in the Circular) the Special Committee unanimously recommended that the Board approve the entering into of the Arrangement Agreement and proceed with the proposed Arrangement on the basis that the Arrangement is fair, from a financial point of view, to the Macro Enterprises Shareholders (excluding the Participating Shareholders) and the Macro Enterprises Optionholders (excluding the Participating Incentiveholders) and is in the best interests of the Corporation. The Board subsequently met in the evening of February 12, 2022, following the Special Committee meeting and engaged in a discussion of the Arrangement and the terms and conditions of the Arrangement Agreement. Following the Board's discussion, and the receipt of the recommendation of the Special Committee, the Board, with the abstention of the Participating Director, following careful consideration of the recommendation of the Special Committee, among other things, unanimously determined that the Arrangement (including the Common Share Cash Consideration) is fair to the Macro Enterprises Shareholders (excluding the Participating Shareholders) and the Macro Enterprises Optionholders (excluding the Participating Incentiveholders) and that the Arrangement is in the best interests of the Corporation; unanimously authorized the Corporation to proceed with the Arrangement and enter into of the Arrangement Agreement, and determined to unanimously recommend that Macro Enterprises Shareholders (excluding the Participating Shareholders) and the Macro Enterprises Optionholders (excluding the Participating Incentiveholders) vote in favour of the Arrangement Resolution. See "The Arrangement - Considerations of the Special Committee and the Board in Making Their Recommendation" in the Circular. Before the opening of markets on February 14, 2022, the Parties entered into the Arrangement Agreement and AcquireCo entered into the Support Agreements with parties holding or controlling approximately 31.8% of the total number of issued and outstanding Macro Enterprises Shares, 32.0% of the total number of issued and outstanding Macro Enterprises Shares and Macro Enterprises Options, 31.9% of the Macro Enterprises Shares and 97.3% Macro Enterprises Preferred Shares, and the Parties publicly announced the execution of the Arrangement Agreement and the transactions contemplated by the Arrangement. On March 20, 2022 the Corporation announced the passing of Mr. Mastre, one of the Participating Shareholders and the Vice-President, Pipelines of the Corporation. As a result of Mr. Mastre's passing, the parties were required to confirm and review certain details of the Transaction, including (upon consultation with Mr. Mastre's family) to exclude the securities held by Mr. Mastre from the Transaction as a "Participating Shareholder" and "Participating Incentiveholder" and accordingly, on March 28, 2022, the parties agreed to amend the Arrangement Agreement and plan of arrangement. As a result of the amendments to the plan of arrangement, all securities of Macro Enterprises owned by Mr. Mastre (and his estate) would participate in the Transaction in the same manner as all other Macro Enterprises securityholders, other than the remaining Participating Shareholders and Participating Optionholders and Mr. Mastre (and his estate) will no longer be a "Participating Shareholder" or "Participating Optionholders" for the purposes of the Arrangement. Description of Collateral Benefits Macro Enterprises is a reporting issuer or equivalent in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario and, accordingly is subject to Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"). MI 61-101 is intended to regulate certain transactions to ensure equality of treatment among securityholders, generally requiring enhanced disclosure, approval by a majority of securityholders excluding certain interested or related parties and their joint actors and, in certain instances, independent valuations and approval and oversight of the transaction by a special committee of independent directors. The protections of MI 61-101 apply to, among other transactions, "business combinations", as defined in MI 61-101. A "business combination" includes, for an issuer, a transaction (including an arrangement) (a) as a consequence of which the interest of a holder of an equity security of the issuer may be terminated without the holder's consent, and (b) where a person who is a "related party", as defined in MI 61-101, of the issuer at the time the transaction is agreed to is entitled to receive, directly or indirectly, as a consequence of the transaction, a "collateral benefit", as defined in MI 61-101. The Arrangement is a business combination under MI 61-101 since, as described below, certain related parties of Macro Enterprises, at the time the Arrangement was agreed to (a) would, as a consequence of the Arrangement, directly or indirectly acquire Macro Enterprises or the business of Macro Enterprises, or combine with Macro Enterprises, through an amalgamation, arrangement or otherwise, whether alone or with joint actors, or (b) will be entitled to receive a "collateral benefit" as a consequence of the Arrangement. A collateral benefit includes any benefit that a related party of Macro Enterprises (which includes the directors and "senior officers", as defined under MI 61-101, of Macro Enterprises) is entitled to receive, directly or indirectly, as a consequence of the Arrangement, including, without limitation, an increase in salary, a lump sum payment, a payment for surrendering securities, or other enhancement in benefits related to past or future services as an employee, director or consultant of Macro Enterprises or another person. However, MI 61-101 excludes from the meaning of collateral benefit certain benefits to a related party received solely in connection with the related party's services as an employee, director or consultant of an issuer or an affiliated entity of the issuer or a successor to the business of the issuer if, among other things, (a) the benefit is not conferred for the purpose, in whole or in part, of increasing the value of the consideration paid to the related party for securities relinquished under the transaction; (b) the conferring of the benefit is not, by its terms, conditional on the related party supporting the transaction in any manner; (c) full particulars of the benefit are disclosed in the disclosure document for the transaction; and (d)(i) at the time the transaction was agreed to, the related party and its associated entities beneficially own or exercise control or direction, over less than 1% of the outstanding securities of any class equity securities of the issuer, or (ii) an independent committee, acting in good faith, determines that the value of the collateral benefit, net of any offsetting costs to the related party, is less than 5% of the value of the consideration the related party expects to receive under the terms of the transaction and this determination is disclosed in the disclosure document for the transaction. The Participating Shareholders, being Miles, Redmond, and, prior to his passing, Mastre, were "related parties" of the Corporation pursuant to MI 61-101. AcquireCo is also a "related party" of the Corporation pursuant to MI 61-101 because Miles, Redmond and Mastre, each a "related party" of the Corporation, beneficially own, in the aggregate, more than 50% of the securities of AcquireCo. Pursuant to the terms of the Arrangement, each of the Participating Shareholders will continue to have an interest in the amalgamated entity formed through the amalgamation of AcquireCo and the Corporation following the completion of the Arrangement and is entitled to receive shares of such amalgamated entity in connection with the Arrangement. As noted above, it is the intention of the parties to amend the Arrangement Agreement and the plan of arrangement provide that Mastre will no longer be treated as a Participating Shareholder or Participating Incentiveholder. Additionally, the Macro Enterprises Options are held by certain related parties of Macro Enterprises, including each of the directors of Macro Enterprises. In connection with the Arrangement, (a) the Macro Enterprises Options held by Miles and Redmond (as Participating Incentiveholders) will be terminated immediately prior to the Effective Time in accordance with his Macro Enterprises Participating Incentiveholder Option Agreement; and (b) as approved by the Board (subject to the abstention of the Participating Director), (i) the vesting of all outstanding Macro Enterprises Options will be accelerated to immediately prior to the Effective Time, subject to, and conditional upon, completion of the Arrangement, and (ii) each Macro Enterprises Option will be surrendered by the Macro Enterprises Optionholders to Macro Enterprises in consideration for such Macro Enterprises Optionholders receiving the Option Consideration from Macro Enterprises. See "The Arrangement - Treatment of the Macro Enterprises Options" in the Circular. Accordingly, the directors and senior officers of Macro Enterprises may have interests in the Arrangement that are, or may be, different from, or in addition to, the interests of other securityholders of Macro Enterprises. The Board is aware of these interests and considered them, among other matters, when recommending that Macro Enterprises Shareholders and Macro Enterprises Optionholders vote FOR the Arrangement Resolution. Each of the related parties of Macro Enterprises and their respective associates and affiliated entities beneficially own, or exercise control or direction over, less than 1% of each class of voting shares (assuming in each case the exercise of Macro Enterprises Options held by them), other than: Miles, who beneficially owns, or exercises control or direction over, approximately 29.4% of the outstanding Macro Enterprises Shares, Mike Nielson, who beneficially owns, or exercises control or direction over, approximately 1.2% of the outstanding Macro Enterprises Shares and Bill McFetridge, who beneficially owns, or exercises control or direction over, approximately 1.0% of the outstanding Macro Enterprises Shares. As at the date of the Arrangement Agreement, each of Mr. Nielsen and Mr. McFetridge, are each entitled to receive a cash payment in exchange for the surrender of their "in-the-money" Macro Enterprises Options which will be cancelled in connection with the Arrangement. The cash payment will be equal to the difference between the exercise price and the $4.00 per share to be paid in connection with the Arrangement and could be considered to be a "collateral benefit" as each of Mr. Nielsen and Mr. McFetridge beneficially own or exercise control or direction over 1% or more of the Macro Enterprises Shares. However, in accordance with the provisions of MI 61-101, the independent directors, acting in good faith, has determined that the value of the benefit to each of Mr. Nielsen and Mr. McFetridge (i.e., the cash payment in respect of their Macro Enterprises Options), net of any offsetting costs, is less than 5% of the value of the consideration that each of Mr. Nielsen and Mr. McFetridge, respectively, is expected to receive under the terms of the Arrangement in respect of their Macro Enterprises Shares. Consequently, neither Mr. Nielsen nor Mr. McFetridge is entitled to receive a "collateral benefit" in connection with the Arrangement and Miles is the only related party to receive a "collateral benefit" in connection with the Arrangement. The following table sets out the names of the directors, officers and insiders, the number of outstanding securities of the Corporation beneficially owned, or over which control or direction is exercised, by each of them and, where known after reasonable inquiry, by their respective associates or affiliates, as of the Record Date, and the estimated consideration to be received in respect of such securities as a result of the Arrangement: Name Securities Consideration Frank Miles Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Director 9,253,428 Macro Enterprises Shares $23,013,712 (in exchange for 5,753,428 Macro Enterprises Shares) 14,000 Amalco Class A Shares (in exchange for 3,500,000 Macro Enterprises Shares) 2,100 Macro Enterprises Preferred Shares $5,600,028 $2,991.78, representing the accrued cumulative dividend to be paid on the Macro Enterprises Preferred Shares in accordance with the Plan of Arrangement(2)(5) 70,000 Macro Enterprises Options $0 Jeff Redmond Chief Financial Officer 115,000 Macro Enterprises Shares 460 Amalco Class B Shares 30,000 Macro Enterprises Options $0 Michael Nielsen Director 376,100 Macro Enterprises Shares $1,384,400 330 Macro Enterprises Preferred Shares (1) $880,004.40 $470.14, representing the accrued cumulative dividend to be paid on the Macro Enterprises Preferred Shares in accordance with the Plan of Arrangement(3)(5) 40,000 Macro Enterprises Options $34,000 William McFetridge Director 244,700 Macro Enterprises Shares $980,000 50 Macro Enterprises Preferred Shares (1) $133,334 $71.23, representing the accrued cumulative dividend to be paid on the Macro Enterprises Preferred Shares in accordance with the Plan of Arrangement(4)(5) 50,000 Macro Enterprises Options $42,500 Robert (Bob) L. Fedderly Director 13,000 Macro Enterprises Shares $65,000 50,000 Macro Enterprises Options $2,500 Kenneth Mastre Vice President, Pipelines 35,000 Macro Enterprises Shares $140,000 100,000 Macro Enterprises Options $85,000 Notes : Following the conversion of the Macro Enterprises Preferred Shares into Macro Enterprises Shares. Represents accrued cumulative dividends for the period of April 1 to April 8, 2022, based on: (i) an assumed Effective Date of April 8, 2022; and (ii) the anticipated payment on March 31, 2022 of accrued cumulative dividends in the amount of $34,125.00 for the period of January 1, 2022 to March 31, 2022. Represents accrued cumulative dividends for the period of April 1 to April 8, 2022, based on: (i) an assumed Effective Date of April 8, 2022; and (ii) the anticipated payment on March 31, 2022 of accrued cumulative dividends in the amount of $5,362.50 for the period of January 1, 2022 to March 31, 2022. Represents accrued cumulative dividends for the period of April 1 to April 8, 2022, based on: (i) an assumed Effective Date of April 8, 2022; and (ii) the anticipated payment on March 31, 2022 of accrued cumulative dividends in the amount of $812.50 for the period of January 1, 2022 to March 31, 2022. Should the Effective Date occur following the assumed Effective Date of April 8, 2022, additional dividends will accrue in accordance with the terms of the Macro Enterprises Preferred Shares. Voting at Meeting of Securityholders The special meeting of Macro Securityholders at which Macro Securityholders will consider and, if deemed advisable, pass, with or without variation, a special resolution to approve the Arrangement in the form attached as Appendix "A" to the Circular will be held on Monday, April 4, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. (Vancouver time) at the offices of Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP at 510 West Georgia Street, Suite 1800, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6B 0M3. Pursuant to MI 61-101, the Macro Enterprises Shares and the Macro Enterprises Preferred Shares held by each of Miles, Redmond and the estate of Mastre, together with the Macro Enterprises Shares held by each of their respective associates and affiliated entities, being 9,403,428 Macro Enterprises Shares and 2,100 Macro Enterprises Preferred Shares, will be excluded in determining whether minority approval has been obtained in accordance with MI 61-101. For details of such parties ownership of securities of Macro Enterprises, please see "Description of Collateral Benefits" above. Macro has sent the Circular and other Meeting materials to Macro Securityholders. These documents contain comprehensive information with respect to how Macro Securityholders may vote in advance of the Meeting. The Circular is also available on the Company's profile at www.sedar.com and on its website at http://www.macroindustries.ca. The record date for determining Macro Securityholders eligible to vote at the Meeting is February 23, 2022. Recommendations In view of the advice from Acquireco that it remains fully committed to complete the Transaction and on the basis that the transaction price of $4.00 per Macro Enterprises Share will remain the same, that requisite financing arrangements are still expected to be in place to fund the full cash consideration of the Arrangement and that, as a result of the minimal securityholding of Mr. Mastre (and his estate) and Mr. Mastre ceasing to be a "Participating Shareholder" or "Participating Incentiveholder", the likelihood of completing the Arrangement will remain the same as before the amendments, the Special Committee has unanimously reconfirmed their recommendation to the Board, and the Board, upon the recommendation of the Special Committee, subject to abstention by Miles, has unanimously determined that the Arrangement is fair to the holders of Macro Enterprises Shares (excluding the Participating Shareholders), Macro Enterprises Preferred Shareholders (excluding the Participating Shareholders) and Macro Enterprises Optionholders (excluding the Participating Incentiveholders) and is in the best interests of Macro Enterprises. The Board, subject to abstention by Miles, has unanimously reconfirmed its recommendation that the holders of Macro Enterprises Shares and Macro Enterprises Preferred Shares (other than the Participating Shareholders) and Macro Enterprises Optionholders (other than Participating Shareholders) vote in favour of the Arrangement Resolution. About Macro Enterprises Inc. Macro's core business is providing pipeline and facilities construction and maintenance services to major companies in the oil and gas industry in northeastern British Columbia and northwestern Alberta. The Company's corporate office is in Fort St. John, British Columbia. Macro's common shares are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "MCR". Information on the Company's principal operations can be found at www.macroindustries.ca. For further information, please contact: Frank Miles President and C.E.O. Phone: (250) 785-0033 Bob Fedderly Special Committee Phone: (250) 787-0398 Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/118476 Boca Raton, Florida--(Newsfile Corp. - March 28, 2022) - Sanctuary Healthcare , Florida's premier psychedelic therapy clinic and clinical research organization, will be participating in the Benzinga Psychedelics Capital Conference, which will take place on April 19 at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach. Dr. Evan Peskin will be speaking at 4:20 PM ET on April 19th. Interested parties can register to attend here. Members of the Sanctuary Healthcare management will also be holding one-on-one investor meetings throughout the day. "We're glad to welcome the burgeoning psychedelics industry into Benzinga's growing ecosystem of events. We've seen cannabis businesses raise hundreds of millions of dollars at our Cannabis Capital Conferences and it's our pleasure to open this possibility to businesses working to develop and establish psychedelics as the new paradigm-shift in mental health treatment," said Chief Zinger Jason Raznick. To register and access please follow this link. About Sanctuary Healthcare Sanctuary Healthcare is a fully-accredited and AHCA-licensed psychedelic therapy clinic and clinical research organization located in Boca Raton, Florida. Our healing sanctuary is designed to optimize your mindset and provide the best setting for your psychedelic experience! Our world-class team consists of physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, advanced practice nurses, integration specialists, former special forces operators, clinical researchers, chemists, pharmacists, and health-tech software engineers - all dedicated to advancing the field of psychedelic medicine and improving lives! Visit SanctuaryHealthcare.org to learn more, today. About The Benzinga Psychedelics Capital Conference The premier gathering of psychedelic entrepreneurs and investors in North America is debuting in Miami. The debut of the Benzinga Psychedelics Capital Conference will gather the biggest players in the psychedelics industry on April 19 in Miami. Attendees can expect a full day of company presentations, insider panels and networking. The Benzinga Psychedelic Capital Conference is guaranteed to offer participants a chance to connect with the people driving the psychedelics industry forward. Join live in Miami or online anywhere to participate in this Psychedelics industry conference with top industry players. For further information: Andy Edelson Chief Development Officer 18473379436 andy@findyoursanctuary.org Sydney, Australia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 28, 2022) - Austral Gold Limited (ASX: AGD) (TSXV: AGLD) ("Austral" or the "Company")is pleased to announce the positive results of updated Mineral Reserve and Mineral Resource Estimates prepared by SLR Consulting (Canada) Ltd. ("SLR") in accordance with CIM Definitions 2014, National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") and Joint Ore Reserves Committee Code, 2012 (JORC 2012) for the Company's 100% owned Guanaco-Amancaya Operation in Chile. The Guanaco-Amancaya Operation consists of the Guanaco Mine (Guanaco) and Inesperada satellite deposit (Inesperada), the Amancaya Mine (Amancaya), and the Guanaco heap leach pads (Heap Reprocessing project). The updated Mineral Reserve and Mineral Resource estimates will be supported by a technical report prepared in accordance with NI 43-101 that will be filed on SEDAR (www.sedar.com) within 45 days of this news release (the "Technical Report"). Highlights: Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves for the Guanaco-Amancaya Operation are estimated to be 12.1 Mt grading 0.84 g/t Au and 4.89 g/t Ag and containing 0.326 million ounces (Moz) Au and 1.91 M oz Ag. The Heap Reprocessing material provides the majority of the increase from previous estimates. Measured and Indicated Mineral Resources for the Guanaco-Amancaya Operation are estimated to be 14.9 million tonnes (Mt) grading 1.03 g/t Au and 5.89 g/t Ag Inferred Mineral Resources are estimated to be approximately 2.4 Mt grading 1.18 g/t Au and 3.93 g/t Ag After-Tax Net Present Value (NPV) at 6.89% discount rate is US$77.0 million Undiscounted pre-tax free cash flows of US$132.7 million (post tax US$102.6 million) All-in Sustaining Cost (AISC): US$1,050/oz Au The mine life is 12 years, based on Mineral Reserves. Combined estimated annual average production of 17,400 ounces recovered for gold and 52,800 ounces recovered for silver Mine life capital totals US$20.9 million, consisting of installation of a new crusher and heap leach pad for heap reprocessing, capitalized waste stripping, and closure costs (offset by salvage value). Average operating cost over the mine life is $17.51 per tonne milled. Metallurgical recovery averages 60.4% for gold and 31.7% for silver over the LOM (the average is highly influenced by the Heap Reprocessing material, higher-grade feed has higher recoveries). Metal prices: Life of Mine ("LOM") average of US$1,686/oz gold and US$22.88/oz silver, based on consensus of independent forecasts for annual prices. *See tables below for assumptions used in the estimates. Chief Executive Officer of Austral, Stabro Kasaneva, commented, "We are excited at the prospect of continuing to increase shareholder value by extending the mine life of Guanaco-Amancaya. The Heap Reprocessing project is expected to utilize excess processing capacity to provide a solid long-term basis for mine operations, covering costs and providing a return at current financial inputs. Opportunities for higher-grade ore sources from exploration or acquisition could be easily integrated into the Life of Mine plan, and would benefit from lower unit costs." The updated estimates are based on Company infill drilling and exploration activities since the December 31, 2016 Technical Report filed on SEDAR, as well as metallurgical testwork and engineering studies on the Heap Reprocessing project. Mining at Guanaco was discontinued in February 2020. Amancaya is currently in production, while Guanaco Heap Reprocessing and Inesperada are new projects that are anticipated to commence operations in 2023. Amancaya's Mineral Reserves are expected to be exhausted in 2023 when Inesperada commences production. It is anticipated that the Inesperada open pit Mineral Reserves will be exhausted by the end of 2025. Reprocessing of the heaps is scheduled to commence in 2023 and continue through to the end of mine life in 2033. Heaps I, II, and III are expected to be reprocessed in reverse order of their numbering, beginning with Heap III, continuing with Heap II, and finishing with Heap I. Approximately 15% of the Mineral Reserve contained ounces comes from Amancaya, 68% from Heaps Reprocessing, and 17% from Inesperada. Summary of Mineral Resources - December 31, 2021 Austral Gold Limited- Guanaco-Amancaya Operation Classification Tonnes (000 t) Grade Contained Metal (g/t Au) (g/t Ag) (000 oz Au) (000 oz Ag) Guanaco Underground Measured 581 2.61 12.67 48.7 236.6 Indicated 868 2.31 17.67 64.5 492.9 M + I 1,448 2.43 15.67 113.3 729.5 Inferred 250 3.42 6.26 27.6 50.4 Amancaya Underground Measured 49 7.96 16.60 12.6 26.4 Indicated 249 6.32 15.96 50.6 127.9 M+I 299 6.59 16.06 63.3 154.3 Inferred 61 5.05 11.02 9.9 21.5 Amancaya Julia and Cerro Amarillo Projects Underground Measured - - - - - Indicated 72 5.36 9.50 12.4 21.9 M+I 72 5.36 9.50 12.4 21.9 Inferred 91 5.80 13.04 16.9 38.0 Inesperada Open Pit Measured - - - - - Indicated 1,682 1.05 14.38 56.7 778.0 M+I 1,682 1.05 14.38 56.7 778.0 Inferred 74 0.91 12.40 2.2 29.5 Heap Leach Pads Measured 11,417 0.67 3.10 247.5 1,139.1 Indicated - - - - - M+I 11,417 0.67 3.10 247.5 1,139.1 Inferred 1,907 0.55 2.64 33.6 161.8 Total Measured 12,047 0.80 3.62 308.9 1,402.1 Total Indicated 2,871 2.00 15.39 184.2 1,420.7 Total M+I 14,918 1.03 5.89 493.0 2,822.8 Total Inferred 2,383 1.18 3.93 90.1 301.3 Notes: Mineral Resources followed CIM (2014) definitions and are compliant with the JORC Code. Mineral Resources are reported on a 100% ownership basis. Mineral Resources are inclusive of Mineral Reserves. Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. Mineral Resources are estimated at the following cut-off grades: Amancaya and Guanaco underground Mineral Resources: 2.90 g/t AuEq and 1.50 g/t AuEq, respectively. Inesperada open pit Mineral Resources: 0.38 g/t Au. Heap Leach Pads Mineral Resources: zero cut-off grade - the entire volume is included. Mineral Resources at Guanaco and Amancaya are estimated using a long-term gold price of US$1,750/oz and a silver price of US$22/oz. Mineral Resources at Inesperada and Heap Leach Pads are estimated using a long-term gold price of US$1,750/oz. Gold equivalency (AuEq) was calculated as follows: Guanaco: AuEq = Au + 0.0106 x Ag based on a gold and silver price of $1,750/oz and $22/oz respectively and recoveries of gold and silver of 95% and 80%, respectively. Amancaya: AuEq = Au + 0.0107 x Ag based on a gold and silver price of $1,750/oz and $22/oz respectively and recoveries of gold and silver of 93% and 79%, respectively. Metallurgical recoveries are 93% for gold and 79% for silver for Amancaya, 95% for gold and 80% for silver for Guanaco, 80% for gold for Inesperada, and 54%, 70%, and 46% for gold for Heaps I, II, and II, respectively. A minimum mining width of 1.5 m is used for resource underground shapes for the Amancaya and Guanaco mines. Bulk densities are 2.5 t/m3 for Amancaya and Guanaco, 2.44 t/m3 for Inesperada, and 1.77 t/m3 for Heap I, 1.50 t/m3 for Heap II, and 1.70 t/m3 for Heap III, respectively. Numbers may not add due to rounding. Guanaco-Amancaya Operation Mineral Reserves - December 31, 2021 Austral Gold Limited- Guanaco-Amancaya Operation Category Tonnes (000 t) Grades Contained Metal (g/t Au) (g/t Ag) (000 oz Au) (000 oz Ag) Underground (Amancaya) Proven 47 5.74 11.51 9 17 Probable 251 5.01 12.95 40 105 Subtotal Underground 298 5.13 12.72 49 122 Open Pit (Inesperada) Proven - - - - - Probable 1,607 1.05 14.39 54 744 Subtotal Open Pit 1,607 1.05 14.39 54 744 Guanaco Heap Leach Pads Proven 10,240 0.68 3.17 223 1,043 Probable - - - - - Subtotal Heap Leach Pads 10,240 0.68 3.17 223 1,043 Total Proven Total 10,287 0.70 3.21 232 1,060 Probable Total 1,859 1.58 14.2 95 848 Total Proven + Probable 12,146 0.84 4.89 326 1,909 Notes: Mineral Reserves follow CIM (2014) definitions and are compliant with the JORC Code. Mineral Reserves are reported on a 100% ownership basis and estimated at the following cut-off grades: Amancaya: break-even cut-off grade of 3.04 g/t AuEq, and marginal cut-off grades of 2.37 g/t AuEq and 1.37 g/t AuEq for SLS stopes and drifts respectively. Inesperada - pit discard cut-off grade of 0.40 g/t Au. Heap Leach Pads - Marginal cut-off grades for Heap Reprocessing have been estimated as 0.20 g/t Au and 0.15 g/t Au for Heaps I and Heap II respectively, and at zero cut-off for Heaps III. Mineral Reserves are estimated using an average long term gold price of US$1,700/oz and silver price of US$22/oz. Amancaya AuEq was calculated as AuEq = Au + 0.0110 x Ag, based on prices of US$1,700/oz Au and US$22/oz Ag and recoveries of Au and Ag of 93% and 79%, respectively. The following parameters were used for the Amancaya Mineral Reserve estimate: A minimum mining width of 1.5 m was used for SLS stopes and 3.5 m for drifts. Stope dilution: 0.5 m in the hanging wall and 0.5 m in the footwall (1.0 m total). Drift dilution: 0.25 m in each of the side walls (0.5 m total). Metallurgical recovery is 93% for gold and 79% for silver. Bulk density is 2.5 t/m3. The following parameters were used for the Inesperada Mineral Reserve estimate: Dilution and mining recovery factors of 0% and 100% respectively were applied. Metallurgical recovery is 80% for gold. Bulk density is 2.44 t/m3. The following parameters were used for the Mineral Reserve estimate for the Guanaco Heaps: Heap Leach Pad I: maximum of 5% dilution. The average dilution over the LOM is 3.5%. Dilution grades are 0.18 g/t Au and 1.50 g/t Ag. Heap Leach Pad II: maximum of 5% dilution. The average dilution over the LOM is 2.5%. Dilution grades are 0.13 g/t Au and 1.40 g/t Ag. Heap Leach Pad III: All internal dilution within the heap limits was included. Metallurgical recoveries for Heaps I, II, and II are 54%, 70%, and 46% for gold respectively. Bulk density is 1.77 t/m3 for Heap I, 1.50 t/m3 for Heap II, and 1.70 t/m3 for Heap III. Numbers may not add due to rounding. There are no known legal, political, environmental, or other risks that could materially affect the potential development of the mineral resources or mineral reserves. TECHNICAL CONTENT AND QUALIFIED PERSONS The Technical Report for the Guanaco-Amancaya Operation referenced in this news release was prepared under the supervision of the following persons, each an Independent "Qualified Person" as defined by NI 43-101: Orlando Rojas, MAIG, SLR Associate Principal Geologist, Rodrigo Barra, MAIG, SLR Associate Principal Geologist, Stephan R. Blaho, MBA, P.Eng., SLR Principal Mining Engineer, Varun Bhundhoo, ing., SLR Project Mining Engineer, Andrew P. Hampton, M.Sc., P.Eng., SLR Principal Metallurgist, and Luis Vasquez, M.Sc., P.Eng, SLR Senior Environmental Consultant and Hydrotechnical Engineer The technical content of this news release has also been reviewed and approved by the above Qualified Persons. The Technical Report to support the updated Mineral Reserve and Mineral Resource estimates for the Guanaco-Amancaya Operation, prepared in accordance with NI 43-101, will be filed on SEDAR (www.sedar.com) within 45 days of this news release. About Austral Gold Austral Gold Limited is a growing gold and silver mining, development and exploration company whose strategy is to expand the life of its cash generating assets in Chile, restart its Casposo mine in Argentina and build a portfolio of quality assets in Chile, the USA and Argentina organically through a Tier 1 or 2 exploration strategy and via acquisitions and strategic partnerships. Austral owns a 100% interest in the Guanaco/Amancaya mine in Chile and the Casposo Mine (currently on care and maintenance) in Argentina, a non-controlling interest in the Rawhide Mine in Nevada, USA and a non-controlling interest in Ensign Gold which holds the Mercur project in Utah, USA. In addition, Austral owns an attractive portfolio of exploration projects in the Paleocene Belt in Chile (including those acquired in the 2021 acquisition of Revelo Resources Corp), a non-controlling interest in Pampa Metals and a 100% interest in the Pinguino project in Santa Cruz, Argentina. Austral Gold Limited is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV: AGLD) and the Australian Securities Exchange. (ASX: AGD). For more information, please consult Austral's website at www.australgold.com. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Release approved by the Chief Executive Officer of Austral Gold, Stabro Kasaneva. For additional information please contact: David Hwang Company Secretary Austral Gold Limited info@australgold.com +61 (2) 9698 5414 Ben Jarvis Director Austral Gold Limited info@australgold.com +61 413 150 448 Forward-Looking Statements Statements in this news release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical and consist primarily of projections - statements regarding future plans, expectations and developments. Words such as "expects", "intends", "plans", "may", "could", "potential", "should", "anticipates", "likely", "believes" and words of similar import tend to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this news release include the intention to file the Technical Report within 45 days of the news release; the expectation of increased shareholder value from the extension of mine life; the expectation that the Heap Reprocessing project is expected to utilize excess processing capacity for stated benefits; and that stated opportunities can be integrated into the Life of Mine plan that would benefit from lower unit costs. These forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ from those expressed or implied, including, without limitation, business integration risks; uncertainty of production, development plans and cost estimates, commodity price fluctuations; political or economic instability and regulatory changes; currency fluctuations, the state of the capital markets especially in light of the effects of the novel coronavirus, uncertainty in the measurement of mineral reserves and resource estimates, Austral's ability to attract and retain qualified personnel and management, potential labour unrest, reclamation and closure requirements for mineral properties; unpredictable risks and hazards related to the development and operation of a mine or mineral property that are beyond the Company's control, the availability of capital to fund all of the Company's projects and other risks and uncertainties identified under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's continuous disclosure documents filed on the ASX and on SEDAR. You are cautioned that the foregoing list is not exhaustive of all factors and assumptions which may have been used. Austral cannot assure you that actual events, performance or results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements, and management's assumptions may prove to be incorrect. Austral's forward-looking statements reflect current expectations regarding future events and operating performance and speak only as of the date hereof and Austral does not assume any obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's beliefs, expectations or opinions should change other than as required by applicable law. For the reasons set forth above, you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/118479 Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 28, 2022) - Railtown Capital Corp. (TSXV: RLT.P) ("Railtown" or the "Company") and Selten Metal Corp. ("Selten Metal"), an arm's length private company incorporated under the laws of British Columbia, announced today that they have signed a non-binding letter of intent dated March 17, 2022 to effect a transaction that will result in a reverse takeover of Railtown by Selten Metal (the "Transaction"). Trading in the common shares of the Company (the "Common Shares") has been halted in accordance with the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "TSXV") and will remain halted until such time as all required documentation has been filed with and accepted by the TSXV. The Transaction is not a Non-Arm's Length Qualifying Transaction under TSXV Policy 5.4. Accordingly, Railtown will not be required to obtain shareholder approval of the Transaction. About Selten Metal Corp. Selten Metal was incorporated in May of 2021 and, pursuant to an option agreement (the "Option Agreement") with NexOptic Technology Corp. ("NexOptic") dated December 15, 2021, as amended on February 17, 2022 and March 17, 2022, holds an option to acquire up to a 100% interested in the THOR heavy and light rare earth project ("THOR" or the "THOR Project"), consisting of roughly 2,170 hectares located in Clark County, Nevada. German for "rare," the word "Selten" represents Selten Metal Corp's desire to become a leading producer of heavy and light rare earth elements in the United States-as US sourced rare earths are becoming increasingly critical to the climate economy, modern technologies and for global geopolitical stability. The THOR Heavy & Light Rare Earth Project The THOR Project is situated 120km from Las Vegas in an active mining region in Southern Nevada, 26 kilometres from what was once the largest rare-earth element ("REE") mine in the world, Mountain Pass. In 2017, Mountain Pass reopened as the largest REE mine in the Western Hemisphere, and the only REE mine in North America (operated by MP Materials Corp). Reference to mineralization on any properties beyond THOR isn't necessarily indicative of mineralization on the THOR Project. Selten Metal is focused on sustainable exploration and development for the THOR Project. Selten is in the process of having a current technical report on the THOR Project commissioned and further and more fulsome disclosure will be provided in subsequent news releases. The technical report will be filed on the Resulting Issuer's (as defined below) SEDAR profile on completion of the Transaction. Pursuant to the Option Agreement, in order for Selten to acquire an initial 75% interest in and to the THOR Project, Selten must: (a) make a cash payment of $1,100,000 to NexOptic by May 15, 2022 (the "Option Cash Payment"), (b) issue to NexOptic such number of common shares in its capital as will represent 9.5% of the issued and outstanding Selten shares post-issuance (on a pre-Transaction basis), (c) issue to NexOptic an additional 500,000 shares on the date which is 12 months following the date on which Selten is listed on a Canadian securities exchange (the "Listing Date") and (d) issue to NexOptic a further additional 500,000 shares on the date which is 24 months following the Listing Date. If a Listing Date does not occur within 24 months of the date of the Option Agreement, the option contemplated thereunder will terminate. The Option Agreement provides that, upon the exercise of the initial option, Selten Metal will have the right (the "Second Option") to acquire the remaining 25% interest in the THOR project, by issuing to NexOptic an additional 5,000,000 common shares, which issuance shall occur upon the date which is either 36 months following the Listing Date or 48 months following the Listing Date, at the discretion of Selten. For greater certainty, any and all share issuance obligations of Selten Metal under the Option Agreement will be satisfied through the issuance of an equal number of common shares of the Resulting Issuer, in the event the Transaction is consummated. Resulting Issuer Board of Directors and Management Upon completion of the Transaction, the board of directors and senior management of the Resulting Issuer is expected to be drawn largely from the current Selten Metal team and will be comprised of individuals with extensive experience in the development, financing and growth of public resource companies. The following sets out the backgrounds of the persons who are currently expected to be directors and officers of the Resulting Issuer following completion of the Transaction. Jenny-Claire M. Ganasi, CEO and Director, is a Chartered Professional Accountant with more than 15 years experience working with public companies. Prior to joining Selten Metal, Jenny-Claire spent six years on secondment in Norway supporting Teekay Offshore Partners (L.P. (now Altera Infrastructure L.P. owned by Brookfield Business Partners) (NYSE: ALIN) with corporate, management reporting and finance, planning and analysis for the executive leadership team and board of directors. Prior to this, Jenny-Claire spent four years with Teekay LNG Partners (NYSE: TGP) in Vancouver in corporate reporting and four years with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in Vancouver in both audit and assurance and tax groups. Jenny-Claire holds a bachelor of Technology in Accounting and a diploma in Financial Management, Advanced Taxation from British Columbia Institute of Technology, and a certificate in Sustainability Management from University of British Columbia. Paul McKenzie, Director, is the CEO and a director of NexOptic and was the CEO of NexOptic's predecessor Elissa Resources, the company that made the original rare earth discoveries on the THOR Project. Paul's experience includes founder, co-founder, CEO, CFO and director roles for several successful public companies in the strategic minerals sector (including discoveries through to feasibility stage, green energy, and battery metals) and the technology sector (including software solutions and artificial intelligence). Paul has assisted in raising approximately USD $120 million in working capital for his affiliated corporations and has managed subsidiaries and projects in Canada, the United States, South Korea, Mongolia, and China. Paul has been directly involved in partnerships, joint ventures, asset sales, license agreements and mergers and acquisitions between his companies and numerous corporations ranging from start-ups to multinationals with market capitalization exceeding USD $600 billion. Jim Guilinger, Director and Lead THOR Consultant, is a geologist with extensive REE expertise spanning more than 40 years. This includes project management and being a technical lead on rare earths projects throughout the USA including Wyoming, Nevada, and Arizona. Jim has completed numerous industrial and strategic minerals market studies, analysis, and investigations for clients and companies around the world. Jim is the Chief Operating Officer at Bradda Head Lithium and has been a private consultant for more than 20 years through World Industrial Minerals ("WIM"). Prior to forming WIM, Jim was a director of Exploration and Development in Mexico for Eldorado Gold and managed numerous industrial minerals, precious and base metal projects. Jim is a "qualified person" as such term is defined by National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. Jessie Friend, Director, has overseen brand and business direction from start-ups to divisions of multinationals including Panavision and has assembled sales and marketing teams that continue to work globally. Jessie is also a fleet advisor for Boom & Bucket, a modern marketplace for everything heavy equipment for the mining industry, renewable energy companies, pipelines and more. Jessie brings to Selten Metal exceptional negotiating, business management, budgeting, financial reporting, and team building skills. Jason Felsman, THOR Project Manager, is a geologist with over a decade of experience working as a consulting geologist and project manager to companies such as Agnico Eagle (NYSE: AEM), Newmont (NYSE: NEM) and others. His extensive REE experience includes senior geologist with Rare Element Resources (OTCQB: REEMF). Jason is an expert in project management including drill program planning and management and has extensive skills and experience in mineral property evaluation, project mapping and sampling. Jason is highly proficient in GIS: ArcGIS & QGIS and experienced in Petrographic and Micro-Analytical Techniques (SEM, LA-ICPMS, CL). Jason completed his geological studies at University of Arkansas: B.S., and University of Idaho: M.S. James Clark, Senior Project Consultant, has more than 30 years of experience as an exploration geologist for a variety of commodities, including REE's, industrial minerals, precious, base, and other specialty metals. James has extensive REE experience that includes working on 33 REE prospects across three continents. In 1998, James founded Applied Petrographics to provide petrographic and microanalytical services to the mining industry and clients include Barrick Gold (NYSE: GOLD), Newmont (NYSE: NEM), Hecla (NYSE: HL), AngloGold (NYSE: AU), CVRD, Quest Rare Minerals, and Rare Element Resources. Prior to this, James worked for a variety of mining companies, including Molycorp, Hecla, Newmont, and Rare Element Resources. During his time at Hecla he played a key role in identifying Rare Element Resources' current Bear Lodge rare earth resource and the property's underlying gold mineralization potential. While at Rare Element Resources, James served as VP of Exploration. In addition, it is also anticipated that one of the current directors of Railtown will be appointed to the Resulting Issuer's board of directors and a CFO and a corporate secretary will be appointed for the Resulting Issuer. Once determined, the identify of these individuals will be disclosed in a subsequent news release. The Transaction It is intended that the Transaction will constitute the "Qualifying Transaction" of Railtown, as such term is defined in the policies of the TSXV. Upon completion of the Transaction, the shareholders of Selten Metal will become shareholders of Railtown, a publicly traded company listed on the TSXV. The resulting company after completion of the Transaction (the "Resulting Issuer") will carry on the current business of Selten Metal and intends to be listed on the TSXV as a Tier 2 resource issuer. The Transaction is proposed to be effected by way of a "three-cornered" amalgamation under which securityholders of Selten Metal will exchange their shares of Selten Metal for Common Shares. Shareholders of Selten Metal will be issued one Common Share at a deemed price of $0.20 per share for each common share held of Selten. In addition, upon completion of the Transaction, the Resulting Issuer will assume Selten Metal's obligation to issue common shares to NexOptic pursuant to the terms of the Option Agreement. On completion of the Transaction, Selten Metal will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Resulting Issuer. On closing (the "Closing") of the Transaction, the Resulting Issuer's name will be changed to "Selten Metal Corp." or another name acceptable to Selten Metal. Closing of the Transaction is subject to certain conditions, including but not limited to: (a) the completion of satisfactory mutual due diligence; (b) the receipt of all necessary approvals of the boards of directors of Railtown and Selten Metal; (c) the receipt of all required consents and approvals, including without limitation, approval of the Transaction by the TSXV as Railtown's Qualifying Transaction; (d) the Resulting Issuer satisfying the initial listing requirements set by the TSXV for a Tier 2 mining issuer; (e) the entry into of a definitive agreement; (f) approval of the shareholders of Selten Metal; and (g) the completion of the Financing (defined below). The Company also intends to issue 475,000 Common Shares to Canaccord Genuity Corp. at a deemed price of $0.20 per share in connection with the Transaction. The payment of the finder's fee is subject to TSXV acceptance. Further details regarding the Transaction and any finder's fees payable will be included in a subsequent news release once additional details become available. Sponsorship Railtown will be seeking an exemption from the sponsorship requirements of the TSXV pursuant to the provisions of section 3.4(a)(ii) of TSXV Policy 2.2. Proposed Financing In connection with the Transaction, Selten Metal intends to complete a private placement (the "Financing") of 15,000,000 common shares at a price of $0.15 per share, for aggregate gross proceeds of $2,250,000. Finder's fees may be paid to qualified finders in accordance with the Financing. It is anticipated that $1,100,000 of the net proceeds from the Financing will be used towards the Option Cash Payment. Further details regarding the Financing will be included in a subsequent news release once additional details become available. Pro Forma Share Capital of the Resulting Issuer Assuming the sale of all 15,000,000 shares pursuant to the Financing, it is anticipated that, on Closing of the Transaction, there will be 50,911,602 common shares of the Resulting Issuer issued and outstanding (52,711,602 common shares on a fully diluted basis), assuming the exercise of all outstanding options and warrants. It is expected that following the completion of the Transaction and the Financing, but assuming no exercise of the Second Option, existing Railtown shareholders will hold approximately 25.5% of the common shares of the Resulting Issuer, former shareholders of Selten Metal will hold approximately 35.5% of the common shares of the Resulting Issuer and NexOptic will hold approximately 9.5% of the common shares of the Resulting Issuer. It is anticipated that a portion of the issued and outstanding Common Shares of the Resulting Issuer will be subject to the escrow and resale restrictions pursuant to the policies of the TSXV. Selected Financial Information The following table sets out selected financial information with respect to Selten as at and for the period noted. This information information has not been audited, and may be subject to adjustment: As at December 31, 2021 and for the period from incorporation on May 26, 2021 to December 31, 2021 (unaudited) Total Revenues Nil Net Income (Loss) $(117,842) Total Assets $130,305 Total Liabilities $28,147 Further financial information will be included in the listing application to be prepared in connection with the Transaction. About Railtown Railtown is publicly listed on the TSXV under the symbol RLT.P. Railtown was formed as a Capital Pool Company in accordance with policies of the TSXV in order to identify and evaluate businesses and assets for acquisition and financing. The address of the Company's registered and records office is 2200 - 885 West Georgia St., Vancouver, BC, V6E 3E8. For further information, please contact: Railtown Capital Corp.: Cameron White, Chief Executive Officer Phone: 604-765-2601 Email: railtowncapital@gmail.com Selten Metal Corp.: Jenny-Claire Ganasi, Chief Executive Officer Email: invest@seltenmetal.com www.seltenmetal.com Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements" under applicable Canadian securities legislation that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results, performance, prospects, and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the terms and conditions of the proposed Transaction; the Company's objectives, goals or future plans; Selten Metal's objectives, goals or future plans; statements regarding issuing subsequent news releases; completion of the Financing; payment of the Option Cash Payment; statements regarding the Second Option; the composition of the board of directors and management of the Resulting Issuer; statements regarding obtaining a waiver to the sponsorship requirements of the TSXV; further financial information being included in the listing application to be prepared in connection with the Transaction; the receipt of the requisite approvals with respect to the Transaction and the business and operations of the Resulting Issuer following the completion of the Transaction. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based on a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: general business, economic and social uncertainties; litigation, legislative, environmental and other judicial, regulatory, political and competitive developments; delay or failure to receive board, shareholder or regulatory approvals; those additional risks set out in Railtown's public documents filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com; and other matters discussed in this news release. Although Railtown believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing the forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on these statements, which only apply as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. Except where required by law, Railtown and Selten Metal disclaim any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Reader Advisory Completion of the Transaction is subject to a number of conditions, including but not limited to TSXV acceptance and, if applicable pursuant to TSXV requirements, majority of the minority shareholder approval. Where applicable, the Transaction cannot close until the required shareholder approval is obtained. There can be no assurance that the Transaction will be completed as proposed or at all. Investors are cautioned that, except as disclosed in the management information circular or filing statement to be prepared in connection with the Transaction, any information released or received with respect to the Transaction may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon. Trading in the securities of a capital pool company should be considered highly speculative. The TSXV has in no way passed upon the merits of the proposed Transaction and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility of the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Not for distribution to U.S. news wire services or dissemination in the United States To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/118485 Ad hoc Announcement pursuant to Art. 53 LR NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AUSTRALIA, CANADA, JAPAN, OR THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA, OR IN ANY OTHER JURISDICTION IN WHICH SUCH PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION WOULD NOT BE IN COMPLIANCE WITH APPLICABLE LAWS AND REGULATIONS. BAAR, Switzerland, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Talenthouse facilitates collaboration between its community of +14m members with some of the world's leading brands, including the United Nations (UN), Facebook, Snapchat, Warner Bros, Bacardi and Universal Music members with some of the world's leading brands, including the United Nations (UN), Facebook, Snapchat, Warner Bros, Bacardi and Universal Music Talenthouse drives the distribution of quality, on-demand creative content, through its platforms globally Talenthouse empowers its Creatives by providing the necessary tools and services to build and monetise their creative businesses Talenthouse AG ("Talenthouse" or "the company"), a leading technology platform connecting creatives and brands globally, has today listed 418,337,210 registered shares on SIX Swiss Exchange (ticker THAG) in response to an exceptional demand for digital content creation1. Talenthouse, with its operational headquarters in London, captures the "zeitgeist" of a new era of diverse, decentralised, international, creative content. As leaders in the global Creator Economy, it empowers and connects its community of over 14 million members with world-renowned brands including Warner Bros., Snapchat and the UN to develop authentic culturally-relevant digital content. The Creator Economy generates US$2,250 billion annually, employing 30 million people worldwide, according to UNESCO. It is an ecosystem that comprises a wide range of occupations distinguished by the generation of wealth and jobs through individual creativity. It is seeing huge demand as audiences are increasingly requesting quality, unique, engaging creative work that resonates with them. Smartphone usage, streaming and social media have revolutionised digital photography and videography consumption, while digital games and the metaverse have led to a demand for augmented reality (AR) and 3D graphic content. With its skilled international community, Talenthouse is well positioned to provide its clients with this dynamic fresh content. The company's business model, which is built on the two current pillars of content creation and content monetisation, has been strongly underpinned by both acquisitive and organic growth through product development. A third pillar, community empowerment, is expected to be built up in 2022. With pioneering, robust and diversifiable patented technology, Talenthouse has a strong history of innovation. As the business expands, its goals are to democratise and nurture the creative community and to upskill individuals enabling them to better source additional, flexible income through the platform. The company is focussed on empowering creatives and providing them with the tools to grow, learn and promote themselves. Meanwhile, the company's core blue chip clients are seeking to develop bespoke, authentic, culturally-nuanced content for each region in their worldwide operations. Having a truly global community of creatives in 195 countries, Talenthouse's community is well-placed to develop this content. This was recently highlighted by the company's groundbreaking work with the UN . In this campaign Talenthouse received over 16,700 submissions from 142 countries, verifying over 4,000 for all to share to help fight the Covid-19 pandemic. Roman Scharf, Co-Founder of Talenthouse says, "We set up Talenthouse with the goal of democratising economic opportunity for creatives whilst improving and authenticating brand messaging. Around the world there are abundantly talented people looking for better ways to earn a living and through our diverse offerings they can work for some of the world's most influential brands. The public listing enables us to further grow our community; to nurture and develop our creative members, so that we can provide our brand partners with an even more complete, international and bespoke content service. With our highly-skilled management team, supported by an experienced Board, I am confident that we will continue our strong growth and allow many more creatives to participate in the networks which define the outcome of their lives." Clare McKeeve, CEO of Talenthouse says,"Our community is at the heart of everything we do. At Talenthouse our goal is more than just offering creatives access to incredible household brands, we want to empower our community and set each and every creative up for success. We've acquired and developed brilliant companies within our portfolio so that our creatives have the tools to be part of an active community whilst successfully monetising their skills. Ultimately they are the lifeblood of Talenthouse - the brilliant minds that constantly inspire our clients and build relevant, authentic content." The company also announces that yesterday its board of directors has adopted a stock option plan and approved to grant an aggregate of 69,035,000 options to certain employees, members of the board of directors and consultants to purchase the same number of shares in Talenthouse AG at an exercise price of CHF 0.10 per share. The options include new options and legacy options of former option-holders in group companies of Talenthouse AG. The new options are subject to a tranched vesting over four years and, as concerns Talenthouse AG's board and executive team members, the shares received upon the exercise of new options are subject to a holding period (lock-up) of 5 (five) years upon granting of the options. The shares received upon the exercise of legacy options are, as a rule, subject to a holding period (lock-up) of 3 (three) years upon granting of the options. The stock option plan provides incentives for high levels of performance and encourages long term stock ownership in Talenthouse AG. Furthermore, Talenthouse AG was informed by its chairman that he intends to further commit to Talenthouse AG and purchase additional shares on the market in the coming days. Stock exchange listing: SIX Swiss Exchange (www.six-swiss-exchange.com) Ticker symbol: THAG (CH) Security number: 1 081 986 ISIN: CH0010819867 Contact: Talenthouse AG, Zugerstrasse 8a, CH-6340 Baar, Switzerland Media Relations: Brigitte Kaps Phone +41 43 344 38 38 or Mob +41 79 289 2042 Brigitte@talenthouse.com About Talenthouse AG Talenthouse AG is a technology platform company, working with the world's largest creative community of over 14m members, to produce the highest quality digital content for many of the largest companies globally, including Netflix and Nike. Talenthouse AG, which unites the creative platforms of Talenthouse, EyeEm, Ello, Zooppa and Jovoto, is leading a structural shift in the way that creative content is produced, employing a platform business model to source content at the scale and quality required to keep pace with consumer demand in the digital age. In doing so, it is also opening up opportunities for a much larger pool of creative talent. The company is registered in Switzerland and operationally headquartered in London with offices in LA, NYC, Berlin, Milan and Philadelphia. For more information visit: www.business.talenthouse.com 1. Note to editors The listing of shares of Talenthouse AG takes place in the context of the concurrent change of the company's name from New Value AG to Talenthouse AG, with a related amendment of company purpose from an investment to an operating company, with the creation of a single class of shares, with the change of the symbol "NEWN" to "THAG" and with the change from the Investment Company Standard to the International Reporting Standard on SIX Swiss Exchange, i.e. with the implementation of the conditional resolutions of the shareholders' meeting of 24 November 2021. As from today, 421,624,443 registered shares with a nominal value of CHF 0.10 each are listed. For details see the prospectus in accordance with Article 35 et seqq. of the Swiss Federal Act on Financial Services which is available on invest.talenthouse.com. Disclaimer This media release serves informational purposes and constitutes neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation or an advertisement to buy any shares of Talenthouse AG in any jurisdiction. This media release does not constitute a prospectus within the meaning of Article 35 et seqq. of the Swiss Federal Act on Financial Services. Such prospectus is published exclusively for the purposes of the listing of shares of Talenthouse AG on SIX Swiss Exchange. Such prospectus is not published for the purposes of a share offering. It can be downloaded on invest.talenthouse.com or is available free of charge at Talenthouse AG, Zugerstrasse 8a, 6340 Baar, Switzerland (e-mail: invest@talenthouse.com; phone: +41 43 344 38 38). This media release and the information contained therein are not being issued in the United States of America, Australia, Canada, Japan, or the European Economic Area and must not be distributed within or to such countries or via publications with a general circulation in such countries. In the United Kingdom, this media release is only directed (i) to investment professionals falling within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (the "Order"), or (ii) high net worth entities, and other persons to whom it may lawfully be communicated, falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) of the Order. This media release contains forward-looking statements such as projections, forecasts, and estimates. Such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties which may cause actual results, performance, or events to differ materially from those anticipated in this media release. The forward-looking statements contained in this media release are based on the views and assumptions of Talenthouse AG as of this date and Talenthouse AG does not assume any obligation to update or revise this media release. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1774373/Talenthouse_CEO.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1774374/Talenthouse_AG_Logo.jpg Solutions30, the European leader in solutions for new technologies, today announced LightSpeed Broadband, a full fibre internet service provider based in Lincolnshire, has selected the company for a second phase of ultra-fast roll out. The need to reduce the digital divide is greater than ever in the UK. LightSpeed are on a mission to bring ultra-fast 1 gigabit full fibre connectivity to homes and businesses throughout the East of England. Following an initial rollout of its full fibre network across 10 towns in South Lincolnshire and West Norfolk, this second phase aims to address a further 22 towns in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. In this context, LightSpeed has awarded Solutions30 UK a large part of its second phase deployment contract. . Having already partnered in phase one, this new contract is a recognition of the productivity and professionalism of the Solutions 30 UK Teams. Dave Axam, Chief Operating Officer, at LightSpeed Broadband stated: "Our ambitious plans for 1 gigabit full fibre connectivity in the East of England means that finding trusted partners is vital. Having worked with Solutions30 in our first phase, we had seen their efficiency, quality and speed firsthand, and knew we wanted to expand our collaboration." Paul Garston, CEO of Solutions30 UK, applauded this new contract: "We've thoroughly enjoyed working in collaboration with LightSpeed, and are pleased that this new contract has come to fruition as a direct result of our performance and commitment. The UK is a high-potential market for Solutions 30 where we intend to play a key role in supporting our clients deploying fibre networks." About LightSpeed Broadband LightSpeed Broadband is based at?Fulney?Hall in Spalding, South Holland, Lincolnshire, creating 55 locally based jobs. Managed by a highly experienced team of broadband experts from across the telecoms industry, including BT and TalkTalk, LightSpeed's mission is to unlock the full digital potential of communities underserved by their existing broadband infrastructure. It plans to bring its fibre network to 200,000 homes and businesses across the?East of England by 2022 expanding to reach 1 million homes by 2025 to become a leading provider in the market. LightSpeed Broadband is backed by 115 million investment with the opportunity to raise 300 million. Investors include AtmosClear?Investments, Kompass?Kapital, Sequoia and Thesaurium who focus on economic infrastructure debt and sustainable infrastructure projects.??? To find out more about LightSpeed Broadband, visit www.lightspeed.co.uk About Solutions 30 SE The Solutions 30 group is the European leader in solutions for new technologies. Its mission is to make the technological developments that are transforming our daily lives accessible to everyone, individuals and businesses alike. Yesterday, it was computers and the Internet. Today, it's digital technology. Tomorrow, it will be technologies that make the world even more interconnected in real time. With more than 30 million call-outs carried out since it was founded and a network of more than 15,700 local technicians, Solutions 30 currently covers all of France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Iberian Peninsula, the United Kingdom, and Poland. The share capital of Solutions 30 SE consists of 107,127,984 shares, equal to the number of theoretical votes that can be exercised. Solutions 30 SE is listed on Euronext Paris Contact Individual Shareholders: Investor Relations - Tel: +33 1 86 86 00 63 | shareholders@solutions30.com Analysts/Investors: Nathalie Boumendil - Tel: +33 6 85 82 41 95 - nathalie.boumendil@solutions30.com Press - Image 7: Leslie Jung - Tel: +44 7818 641803 - ljung@image7.fr Charlotte Le Barbier - Tel: +33 6 78 37 27 60 - clebarbier@image7.fr Attachment NEW YORK, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, ritestream, the NFT content funding platform, has signed a deal with Stealing McCloud, the upcoming heist movie based on controversial U.S. tech tycoon John McAfee, to create and issue the film characters' NFTs. ritestream users will be able to purchase these unique NFT's using their RITE coin, the platform's new crypto currency for investing in Hollywood productions from the comfort of their living room. As global NFT sales hit $25 billion last year, the spectacle of non-fungible tokens is revolutionizing the film industry. Every day, customers can become film financiers by acquiring a share in a film or series through pre-sale NFTs. Today, the films' characters of Ian, played by Alex Hgh Andersen (Vikings), Javier, played by Darko Peric (Money Heist) and Elin played by Alex Essoe (Doctor Sleep) have agreed to be released as NFTs. The upcoming film, in collaboration with Samizdat Pictures, charts the fictional escape to freedom of John McAfee, after his imprisonment in Spain. Filming in Barcelona in April, the movie will be shopped to buyers at Cannes International Film Festival in May, before its widespread release. Riaz Mehta, founder and CEO of ritestream, comments: "This deal signifies an awesome moment in history where we will give fans the opportunity to own a piece of the movie as an NFT even before its release. " Riaz continues: "John McAfee is an icon amongst the crypto community and with NFTs booming in popularity, I believe the NFT's from Stealing McCloud will become a treasured collectible for any NFT aficionado. This partnership marks the beginning of a string of amazing film and TV projects that we are bringing to the ritestream platform and connecting fans with their favorite content." ritestream ritestream is the platform for the creation and monetization of film and TV NFTs from allrites, the global marketplace. As a curated filmverse in Web3, it acts as a launchpad for film and TV content. The ritestream ecosystem encompasses an existing content marketplace for global film, TV, and live sports rights that provides streaming platforms flexible access to thousands of hours of content at a low monthly subscription fee. The ritestream launchpad provides creators with a revolutionary platform to fund, monetize and distribute content leveraging the technology of NFTs. The ritestream app provides a distribution mechanism for consumers to watch and interact with content, in addition to supporting their favorite celebrities and actors by purchasing limited edition NFTs. The entire ecosystem is fuelled by RITE coin, a native token used to invest in independent film projects, purchase NFTs and watch content. Consumers can earn RITE coins by rating content on the ritestream app. Thousands of Leading Experts on Thrombosis and Hemostasis Expected to Convene Onsite at Annual International Meeting Hosted by the ISTH to Present Latest Science and Research CHAPEL HILL, N.C., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis (ISTH) announces today that the ISTH 2022 Congress will move forward as planned on July 9-13, 2022 at ExCel London in the U.K. with the first in-person component, in addition to hybrid and virtual options, since 2019 due to the two-year long Covid-19 pandemic. For over 50 years, this international meeting hosted by the ISTH has been attracting thousands of the world's leading experts on thrombosis, hemostasis and vascular biology to come together to present the most recent advances, exchange the latest science, learn about the diagnostic advances, therapeutic solutions and discuss the newest clinical applications designed to improve patient care. More than 8,000 clinicians, researchers and educators are expected to participate in an extensive 5 day lineup of educational sessions, poster and oral presentations, state-of-the-art lectures, medical industry exhibits, Scientific and Standardization Committee (SSC) subcommittee sessions, and professional networking opportunities. The ISTH Congress, the largest in the field of thrombosis and hemostasis, promotes important scientific discourse and advancement to improve the lives of patients in more than 110 countries around the world. The meeting will also feature a large scientific exhibition with industry sessions by prominent pharmaceutical, laboratory equipment manufacturers, diagnostic and biotechnology companies to share important updates about their latest products, treatments and solutions. "The local organizing committee is really excited to welcome those working in the field of thrombosis and hemostasis from around the world to join us in-person for the first time since 2019 and online at the global leading scientific event in this area," said Prof. Beverley Hunt, M.D., O.B.E., Chair, ISTH 2022 Local Organizing Committee (LOC)."The ISTH 2022 Congress will be a must-attend international meeting that features groundbreaking research and innovative advancements, as well as provides invaluable professional connections for those attending. While we were very successful in facilitating virtual education and scientific exchange during the pandemic, we are looking forward to incorporating in-person interactions again as they provide an addition level of engagement that we have all come to value as an important part of accelerating research." In addition to the in-person meeting, ISTH 2022 will feature a robust online platform for those unable to join onsite in an effort to include global participation. Hosted live from London, it will feature all aspects of the Congress both live and recorded for virtual attendees. "We are excited to engage and connect clinicians, scientists and researchers from around the world with an interest in thrombosis and hemostasis as part of the in-person ISTH 2022 Congress," said ISTH President Jeffrey Weitz, M.D. "We are proud of our scientific community that has continued to make ground breaking discoveries and advances even through the pandemic, which will be shared during the ISTH Congress in London. We look forward to seeing and connecting will all of our colleagues from around the world as we encourage everyone to register to participate." ISTH 2022 received more than 2,035 scientific abstracts that cover the most important scientific topics in thrombosis and hemostasis such as arterial thromboembolism, coagulation and natural anticoagulants, diagnostics and OMICs, fibrinolysis and proteolysis, hemophilia and rare bleeding disorders, pediatric bleeding and clotting disorders, platelets and megakaryocytes, role of the hemostatic system in cancer, inflammation and immunity, thrombotic microangiopathies, vascular biology, venous thromboembolism, and women's health. The ISTH is continually evaluating global events and the state of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world, and updating the safety and security protocols as needed. To ensure the safety of all in-person attendees, proof of COVID-19 vaccination will be required. Registrants will be able to conveniently upload their documentation prior to attending the meeting. Additional information about vaccination verification, onsite safety protocols and travel tips will be posted as they become available. To learn more about the ISTH 2022 Congress, please visit www.isth2022.org to get started. About the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis (ISTH) Founded in 1969, the ISTH is the leading worldwide not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing the understanding, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of conditions related to thrombosis and hemostasis. ISTH is an international medical-scientific professional membership organization with more than 7,500 clinicians, researchers, and educators working together to improve the lives of patients in more than 110 countries around the world. Among its highly regarded activities and initiatives are education and standardization programs, research activities, meetings and congresses, peer-reviewed publications, expert committees, and World Thrombosis Day on 13 October. Visit ISTH online at www.isth.org. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/454627/ISTH_Logo.jpg Investment at its German plant will establish new decoration hub and increase production capacity International beauty packaging manufacturer and provider Quadpack is investing over 6 million at its German manufacturing facilities in Kierspe, to meet increased market demand. The investment will go towards the creation of a decoration centre and the expansion of its injection-moulding and assembly capacity. Already a reference in thick-walled PET injection, Quadpack aims to become an industry standard for sustainable manufacture and decoration. Skincare is predicted to grow 10% in 2022, amid signs of optimism across the industry. Market studies indicate growth potential in 'clean beauty' skincare and haircare, and business segments like dermocosmetics. Quadpack's Kierspe plant is being expanded to meet increased demand, in particular for airless packaging, while bringing decoration services in-house to accelerate time to market. 2022 sales from the plant are expected to increase in line with 2021, which was up 25% over the previous year. The investment is dedicated to staff expansion, new moulds, and injection machines and assembly equipment optimised through Industry 4.0. A manufacturing enterprise system (MES) is being installed to improve lead times, efficiency and supply chain agility, while gaining greater control of manufacturing operations. The MES will connect to SAP S4/HANA Cloud in 2023 as part of the company's digital transformation. Once complete, production capacity will grow across all popular product categories, with airless capacity receiving the biggest boost. With the acquisition of decoration specialist Stefan Wicklein Kunststoffveredelung GmbH in Steinbach am Wald in 2021, Quadpack will be able to offer specialist decoration services and know-how at both the Steinbach and Kierspe plants, where a 900m2 facility will be dedicated to decoration. To ensure sustainable production, Quadpack's manufacturing facilities run on 100% renewable energy and operate a continuous programme to reduce waste. The Kierspe plant holds an EcoVadis Silver Medal and is ISCC-certified. SAN and SMMA production is being gradually shifted to PET and rPET for greater recyclability. Quadpack is also testing different decoration techniques and working with ink, varnish and foil suppliers to research more sustainable materials. "Our Kierspe plant is already a centre of expertise for PET injection to meet our sustainability goals. Now, we can add decoration expertise, cutting down on transportation, improving Scope 3 CO2 emissions and speeding up lead times," said Quadpack COO Fabrice Revert. "As the market recovers and environmental consciousness grows, there is greater demand for our 'Made in Europe' solutions. Our investment in Germany brings production closer to home for the majority of our client base. Our goal is always to improve our service to customers, while ensuring a positive impact on the planet." -ENDS- ------------------------ This publication embed "Actusnews SECURITY MASTER ". - SECURITY MASTER Key: m5yfZZRnYpqVmW5plJdpb2KVmptox5KblmmammSdlsyUaGmWlG+Xm5acZnBknGds - Check this key: https://www.security-master-key.com. ------------------------ Copyright Actusnews Wire Receive by email the next press releases of the company by registering on www.actusnews.com, it's free Full and original release in PDF format:https://www.actusnews.com/documents_communiques/ACTUS-0-73726-qp-german-factory-expansion.pdf Ranking calculated on cost and time efficiencies United States most efficient jurisdiction on speed of business Brazil, South Korea and China score less favorably The Netherlands has been identified as the best jurisdiction to base pharma-industry entities when taking into account cost and time efficiencies, according to data compiled by the global entity portfolio management (GEPM) leader Mercator by Citco, in its Pharmaceutical GEPM: Special Report. The pandemic has accelerated the way pharmaceutical companies streamline their operations and Mercator's granular data found that most of the businesses it looked at were organizationally agile with robust business continuity plans in place. The figures show the United States is the most efficient jurisdiction for the timely completion of tasks and Luxembourg the most cost effective but, when combining these factors together, the Netherlands had the best metrics on cost and completion time. The country's status as a European financial center and its historic links to international trade have created an environment that allows multinational pharmaceutical companies to manage entities there with relative ease. Singapore and Belgium both scored highly when combining the two characteristics, while Brazil, South Korea and China had the lowest ranking overall. Europe remains the hub for a significant portion of pharmaceutical companies outside of North America, primarily led by renowned life sciences hubs in Switzerland, Germany and France with India performing a similar role within the APAC region. Kariem Abdellatif, Head of Mercator, said: "The world is a global village, but this report shows that there are still huge differences between countries. However, the insights revealed by this report are not a recommendation of where pharmaceutical multinationals should base their entities or subsidiaries as that will always be driven by demand and necessity. Rather, it is an exercise in setting expectations and providing pharmaceutical General Counsels and Company Secretaries with foresight on the relative cost and time it takes to manage entities and their activities in each jurisdiction. "It is interesting to see the Netherlands top the rankings in this instance, but forward-thinking multinational companies should be embracing technology platforms that let them do business seamlessly across borders and jurisdictions." Many of the projects Mercator helped facilitate for its pharma clients over the past two years have involved high-impact corporate initiatives to optimize value chains, minimize the commercial impacts of the ongoing disruptions and control costs. To read the full report, please visit: https://mercator.net/our-thinking/publications/pharmaceutical-gepm-special-report/. This report follows the Mercator Entity Management (MEM) Report which outlined the challenges that multinationals across a variety of sectors face when managing a global portfolio of entities. - ENDS - Notes to editors: This report provides direct insight into the practice and dynamics of Global Entity Portfolio Management (GEPM) within the pharmaceuticals sector based on real-life data when these businesses have been at the epicenter of one of the most significant global disrupters in modern times. This data is drawn directly from Mercator's proprietary GEPM technology platform Entica which individually records all the activities undertaken for clients. Mercator's data from the pharmaceutical sector represents more than $600bn in market capital, with entities spread across 70 jurisdictions worldwide. As such, Mercator is uniquely positioned to analyze data on a highly detailed level; unlike survey-driven reports, this analysis is specific to the overseas entities of multinational pharmaceutical companies. About Mercator by Citco A pioneer in Global Entity Portfolio Management (GEPM), Mercator creates lasting partnerships with its clients to understand their individual needs and offer ease, efficiency and visibility through a clear layer of oversight. Mercator's unrivalled knowledge of GEPM and proprietary technology Entica is evolving the way companies view and manage their portfolio of entities, helping them navigate an increasingly complex regulatory environment. Mercator is named after Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), a cartographer most famous for the "Mercator Projection" regarded as the greatest advance ever made in marine cartography; it facilitated navigation on trans-oceanic voyages and played a significant role in shaping global trade today. As the trans-oceanic merchants of the past are the multinational conglomerates of the present, Mercator aims to provide them with the metrics they require to manage their global portfolio of entities. About the Citco group of companies (Citco) The Citco group of companies (Citco) is a network of independent companies worldwide. These companies are leading providers of asset-servicing solutions to the global alternative investment industry. With over $1.8 trillion in assets under administration and 8,200 staff deployed across 40 countries, Citco's unique culture of innovation and client-driven solutions have provided Citco's clients with a trusted partner for more than four decades. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220323005663/en/ Contacts: Barney McCarthy Mike Nicholls: Instinctif Partners: Mercator@instinctif.com Airport workers unload the packages of Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine from a plane at the Phnom Penh International Airport in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on March 29, 2022. A plane carrying another batch of China-donated Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine arrived in the capital of Cambodia on Tuesday amid the country's booster shots vaccination drive. (Photo by Ly Lay/Xinhua) PHNOM PENH, March 29 (Xinhua) -- A plane carrying another batch of China-donated Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine arrived in the capital of Cambodia on Tuesday amid the country's booster shots vaccination drive. The arrival of the new batch was livestreamed on Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen's official Facebook page, the state-run National Television of Cambodia (TVK), and the country's online news provider Fresh News. Ministry of Health Secretary of State Yok Sambath and Wu Guoquan, economic and commercial counselor of the Chinese Embassy in Cambodia, welcomed the arrival at the Phnom Penh International Airport. "Today, we received more than 1.5 million doses of Sinovac vaccine, and tomorrow (Wednesday), another batch of nearly 3.5 million doses will arrive in Cambodia through two planes," Sambath told reporters. Sambath expressed her profound gratitude to China, saying that the new donation was another testament to the ironclad friendship between Cambodia and China. "China is our major vaccine supplier," she said. "This new vaccine will be used to support our booster shot campaign and to vaccinate our children aged from 3 to 5 years old." She said vaccines are highly effective against both infection and serious illness as well as death. Wu said the donation highlights the ironclad friendship and all-weather relationship between China and Cambodia. "As long as COVID-19 is not over, China's support for Cambodia's fight against the pandemic will not end," he said. The southeast Asian nation has so far received a total of almost 50 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from three sources through bilateral procurement, the World Health Organization (WHO)'s COVAX Facility, and donations. Of the total, about 84 percent were bought from or donated by China. To date, Cambodia has administered one dose of COVID-19 vaccines to 14.8 million people, or 92.5 percent of its 16-million population, the Ministry of Health said. Of them, 13.99 million, or 87.4 percent, have been fully vaccinated with two required shots, 7.91 million, or 49 percent, have taken a third dose or booster shot, and 1.15 million, or 7.2 percent, have got a fourth dose, the ministry added. Director-general and spokesman of the Health Ministry Hok Kim Cheng said Chinese vaccines have helped Cambodia to achieve strong herd immunity and to revive its economy. "Chinese vaccines are essential for Cambodia to save people's lives and to stabilize our health system," he told Xinhua. With its high vaccination rates, Cambodia has fully resumed its socio-economic activities and reopened its borders to vaccinated travelers without quarantine since November last year. An airport worker transports the package of Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine at the Phnom Penh International Airport in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on March 29, 2022. A plane carrying another batch of China-donated Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine arrived in the capital of Cambodia on Tuesday amid the country's booster shots vaccination drive. (Photo by Ly Lay/Xinhua) Airport workers upload the package of Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine onto a refrigeration vehicle at the Phnom Penh International Airport in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on March 29, 2022. A plane carrying another batch of China-donated Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine arrived in the capital of Cambodia on Tuesday amid the country's booster shots vaccination drive. (Photo by Phearum/Xinhua) Photo taken on March 29, 2022 shows packages of Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine at the Phnom Penh International Airport in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. A plane carrying another batch of China-donated Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine arrived in the capital of Cambodia on Tuesday amid the country's booster shots vaccination drive. (Photo by Ly Lay/Xinhua) Second Ireland site to support care initiatives with Expanse integrated patient record Mater Private Network (Dublin, Ireland) has selected MEDITECH Expanse to provide a connected Electronic Health Record (EHR) throughout its hospitals, departments, and care settings. The new system will integrate care by replacing the organisation's current combination of paper records and systems used across its specialties and locations. Mater Private Network includes two acute hospitals (Dublin and Cork), two Day Hospitals in North and South Dublin, two advanced specialist Radiotherapy Centres in Limerick and Liverpool (UK), and several regional outpatient clinics. The organisation is recognized as a national leader in cancer and cardiac care. "The successful implementation and rollout of our Electronic Health Record across Mater Private Network is a key pillar of our digital strategy," said Mater Private Network CEO John Hurley. "The ultimate beneficiary is the patient, and building our system around patient's needs. The Electronic Health Record will provide an extra level of seamless care for our patients, as well as the unique opportunity to increase patient safety and outcomes. We will also be able to optimise operational benefits, providing a solid foundation for the growth of our network." Mater Private Network plans to leverage Expanse as part of their focus on patient-centred care. Tools such as Expanse's ePrescribing, real-time decision support, and analytics will help reduce many patient safety risks like medication errors and hospital-acquired conditions. The organisation is also looking to Expanse to improve its management of chronic disease protocols as well as early identification and treatment of sepsis. Additionally, the efficiencies of the system will help to reduce documentation time, so physicians and nurses will be able to focus more on the needs of their patients. "Our Electronic Health Record will have a significant impact on efficiency, quality of care and most importantly patient safety, with particular advantages to clinicians practicing across multiple sites," said Prof. Robert Byrne, Director of Cardiology, Mater Hospital. "What's exciting is that patient information can be shared across multiple systems, bringing all patient information together and making it accessible in real time, in one place." As part of the implementation, Mater Private Network will also launch Expanse Oncology. This full outpatient solution enables oncologists to use specialty-specific workflows that provide mobile access to patient data, decision support, and one centralized patient record for safer, more coordinated care. "The introduction of a fully integrated Electronic Health Record is a hugely important development for theMater Private Network both in terms of patient care, and the staff who work here," said Dr. Jerome Coffey, Oncology. "It will benefit patients and staff through immediate access to clinical information. In addition, it will support and facilitate our clinical pathways and workflows, and it will provide a platform for mobile devices withoffsite and cross site access." "Mater Private Network is a leader in leveraging technology and innovation to provide exceptional care in Ireland," said Helen Waters, MEDITECH Executive Vice President and COO. "We are honoured that they have selected Expanse as the foundation for the next phase of their digital journey. It will be very exciting to see how they benefit from a one patient, one record web-based system." Find out more about MEDITECH customer successes in Ireland and the United Kingdom. About MEDITECH MEDITECH has driven EHR innovation during every stage of the industry's evolution. Today, our Expanse EHR is setting new standards for usability, efficiency, and clinician satisfaction. Our software is deployed in numerous private healthcare facilities in Ireland and the UK as well as NHS Trusts, paediatric, women, and cancer centre speciality facilities. Our EHR is used in 23 countries, nearly half of all Canadian hospitals, and in a quarter of all US facilities. We help power the best care possible in every setting, from acute Trusts and clinics, to general practitioner and community environments. See why KLAS rates MEDITECH Expanse the #1 EHR in three categories, and the #2 Overall Software Suite. Visit ehr.meditech.com, find MEDITECH Podcasts on your favorite podcast app, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005115/en/ Contacts: Media Contact Robin Montville, public and media relations manager, MEDITECH rmontville@meditech.com 29 March 2022 Not for distribution, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States or any jurisdiction in which such distribution would be unlawful. EFSF /ISIN TBD Pre-stabilisation Period Announcement Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg (contact: Torsten Zittlau; telephone: +49 711 74640) hereby gives notice, as Stabilisation Coordinator, that the Stabilisation Manager(s) named below may stabilise the offer of the following securities in accordance with Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/1052 under the Market Abuse Regulation (EU/596/2014). Securities Issuer: European Financial Stability Facility ("EFSF") Moody's: Aa1 (stable) / S&P: AA (stable) / Fitch: AA Guarantor(s) (if any): Unconditionally and irrevocably guaranteed by the Guarantors, on a several basis as specified in the Deeds of Guarantee Aggregate nominal amount: EUR Benchmark Description: []% Sep-2028 EUR BMK, RegS, Bearer, off the EFSF Debt Issuance Programme, Regulated Market of Luxembourg Stock Exchange Offer price: [XX.XXX] Other offer terms: NA Stabilisation: Stabilisation Manager(s): BNPP, Deutsche Bank and LBBW Stabilisation period expected to start on: 29 March 2022 Stabilisation period expected to end no later than: 30 days after the proposed issue date of the securities Existence, maximum size and conditions of use of over?allotment facility: The Stabilisation Manager(s) may over?allot the securities to the extent permitted in accordance with applicable law Stabilisation trading venue(s): Over the counter (OTC) In connection with the offer of the above securities, the Stabilisation Manager(s) may over?allot the securities or effect transactions with a view to supporting the market price of the securities during the stabilisation period at a level higher than that which might otherwise prevail. However, stabilisation may not necessarily occur and any stabilisation action, if begun, may cease at any time. Any stabilisation action or over?allotment shall be conducted in accordance with all applicable laws and rules. This announcement is for information purposes only and does not constitute an invitation or offer to underwrite, subscribe for or otherwise acquire or dispose of any securities of the Issuer in any jurisdiction. This announcement and the offer of the securities to which it relates are only addressed to and directed at persons outside the United Kingdom and persons in the United Kingdom who have professional experience in matters related to investments or who are high net worth persons within Article 12(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 and must not be acted on or relied on by other persons in the United Kingdom. If and to the extent that this announcement is communicated in, or the offer of the securities to which it relates is made in, any EEA Member State before the publication of a prospectus in relation to the securities which has been approved by the competent authority in that Member State in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 (the "Prospectus Regulation") (or which has been approved by a competent authority in another Member State and notified to the competent authority that Member State in accordance with the Prospectus Regulation), this announcement and the offer are only addressed to and directed at persons in that Member State who are qualified investors within the meaning of the Prospectus Regulation (or who are other persons to whom the offer may lawfully be addressed) and must not be acted on or relied on by other persons in that Member State. This announcement is not an offer of securities for sale into the United States. The securities have not been, and will not be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933 and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an exemption from registration. There will be no public offer of securities in the United States. GDANSK, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- SentiOne , an AI-company specializing in social media listening, analyzed over 57 million online opinions to rank 345 brands and products to release the 2021 Social Index Report . It includes key data on trends and consumer preferences and brands popularity based on online reach and discussion sentiment. Five sectors -automotive, consumer electronics, e-commerce, fashion, finance and banking- were analyzed by the online listening company to find out which brands perform best online. Out of all 345 brands Apple became the most popular, with second and third place taken by Amazon and SONY. Samsung or Apple? The eternal battle in consumer electronics The most popular brand of consumer electronics is Apple, which not only dominates this category but is also the most popular out of all 345 brands SentiOne monitored. Sony is in second place and Nintendo is in third. The most popular topic in the field of consumer electronics revolves around gaming. Continued interest in VR gaming and the Metaverse space contributed to a strong showing from Oculus, which landed at sixth place. The unusual marriage of fashion and gaming At the forefront of fashion is Nike, with Gucci in second place, and Adidas in third. High fashion loves K-pop and K-pop loves high fashion. Brands like Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Gucci all collaborated with various Korean stars this year. The latter brand is also not afraid of mingling with the video game world - in January, Pokemon Go players could dress up their in-game characters in several North Face x Gucci clothes for a limited time. Automotive industry, K-pop and Twitter The most popular brands online are Tesla, Toyota, and BMW. Collaborating with Korean stars is also beneficial to the car industry. The top hashtag last year was carofinstagram, yet Instagram wasn't become the number one platform in the automotive sector. Why? This year, car brands emphasized collaborations with K-pop idols and their fans prefer Twitter. Fintech over traditional banks PayPal became the most popular brand in the finance sector. It is followed by CashApp and then by Deutsche Bank. The news.bitcoin.com has become one of the most popular discussion hubs in the field of finance and banking. It is clear that online discussions are dominated by emerging fintechs and cryptocurrencies, not traditional banks. Pandemic and DIY in E-commerce It has been growing steadily for some time, but online shopping started soaring in the last two years. Amazon is still the most popular online platform. Etsy - in third place - proves that there is still a great deal of interest in craft stuff. Etsy's domination of the e-commerce sector is also confirmed by its Community Forum being the top source of discussions in the entire category - Organic growth and the incorporation of the French group Allard Emballages have been key factors in the 50% increase in turnover compared to 2020. VALENCIA, Spain, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Hinojosa Packaging Group has closed 2021 with a turnover of 644 million, 49.7% higher than the previous year, when the company achieved sales of 430 million. Increased demand for consumer goods, customer preference for sustainable packaging and the steady rise of e-commerce have been key factors in this year. In a year characterised by significant cost increases in all industries and economic recovery, Hinojosa has continued to stimulate specialisation, innovation and sustainability, the key drivers of its growth. Commitment to international expansion One of Hinojosa's main milestones in 2021 is the progress of its international expansion with the acquisition of the French group Allard Emballages. This will bring 4 new plants and more than 400 employees to the group, which will contribute to covering most of the demand of its customers in France, ensuring a flexible, agile and close service. In addition to Graphicsleader joining the group in 2020, this milestone is part of the group's international vocation to become a major player in the sustainable packaging sector in Southern Europe. Sustainability throughout the value chain Hinojosa promotes a positive impact on the environment and the communities in which it operates through a Circular Economy model. In 2021, the company reduced its carbon footprint by 40%. The installation of the first solar photovoltaic plant for self-consumption at its Cordoba plant and the implementation of a biogas treatment system and a biomass boiler at its paper mill in Sarria de Ter contributed to this. Hinojosa was also the first Spanish company in both the packaging and paper sectors to receive 'Zero Waste' certification in two of its plants: Hinojosa Paper Alqueria and Hinojosa Packaging Xativa, whose waste recovery is over 98%. The group is moving to extend its decarbonisation and certification programme to other plants. Innovation as a response to uncertainty Hinojosa Packaging Group endured its commitment to innovation during 2021, with the development of Barket, a heat-sealable cardboard tray for the agricultural market recognised by the WorldStar Awards for the lower environmental impact it offers; and Ecogrip, an alternative corrugated cardboard solution to the plastic wrap used to bundle bottles. The group has also innovated in promoting a pioneer Dual Professional Training Course specialising in Graphic Printing in Spain. This initiative aims to professionalise the packaging sector through specific training and to promote the immediate employment of the 25 students currently enrolled in the course. 75 years adding value to what we carry inside us In 2022, Hinojosa will celebrate 75 years of history with a commitment to sustainable excellence with each customer, providing packaging solutions with flexibility and agility, adding value to their business and maximum satisfaction with their products. Hinojosa's shared purpose is to increase the common welfare with sustainable packaging solutions, driven by values such as a commitment to continuous innovation, closeness and a relationship of trust with the customer and excellence in all its activities. Further information: Maria de los Angeles Besoain Public Affairs Experts abesoain@paeconsultoria.com (+34) 683505648 Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. LONDON, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Craft Irish Whiskey Co. has been crowned World's Best Irish Single Malt across all categories at The World Whiskies Awards with its inaugural release, The Devil's Keep. The industry's finest gathered together at the Honourable Artillery Company in London on Thursday, 24 March to celebrate the 2022 Whisky Magazine Awards. Returning to London as an in-person event, the global awards ceremony saw the announcement of the World Whiskies Awards and the Icons of Whisky global winners, as well as four new inductees to Whisky Magazine's renowned Hall of Fame. The Whisky Magazine Awards seek to honour the very best in the industry, across its people, places and products. The Devil's Keep beat off stiff competition from five other Irish Single Malt whiskeys across five different categories including Teeling Whiskey 30 Years Old Single Malt in the 21 years and over category, Knappogue Castle 12 Years Old in the Single Malt 12 years and under, Teeling Whiskey Brabazon Series 4 in the Single Malt 13-20 year category, Clonakilty Distillery O'Hara's Cask Finish Special Limited Edition in the Small Batch Single Malt category and The Irishman 17 Years Old in the Single Cask Single Malt 13-20 years category. Jay Bradley, Founder and CEO of The Craft Irish Whiskey Co., is a true student of whiskey and spent years researching the chemistry of what separates good from great in the category. Resting in the cask, the liquid is a living, breathing organism which peaks and troughs repeatedly through the year. A standout whiskey, he found, isn't determined by an arbitrary measurement of age. It's arrived at only by quality cooperage and precise organoleptic observation. With The Devil's Keep, Bradley would carefully pull samples each day as the expression matured in a finish of fine Hungarian Oak. Ultimately, he opted to bottle it at 29.9 years-just shy of a coveted 30 year age statement-because from a taste perspective he knew the time was right. Commenting after being crowned winner of Best Single Malt across all categories in Ireland, Jay Bradley, Founder and CEO of The Craft Irish Whiskey Co. said: "I am ecstatic and equally humbled that The Devil's Keep was crowned World's Best Irish Single Malt, beating some fantastic competition including two stellar whiskeys from the Teeling stable. For the first whiskey we ever entered to go on to be crowned best single malt in all of Ireland in year one-that's unheard of and an amazing achievement. After years of research devoted to building more flavour into our whiskeys, The Devil's Keep is the culmination. And this accolade reinforces to me that what we are doing is working and that the critics and experts are enjoying what we are creating. We have so much more to do and winning this award makes me hungrier than ever to keep this momentum going and to bottle more phenomenal whiskeys." This is the ninth award for The Devil's Keep 2020 Inaugural Edition, a rare triple distilled, Single Malt whiskey and one of the finest whiskeys that Ireland has ever created. The launch of The Devil's Keep in November 2020 saw just 333 bottles released. It was the most expensive inaugural first release in history, selling at auction for USD $60,000 (almost 46,000 and 51,000 Euros), and the oldest triple distilled Irish whiskey in existence, only to be topped by The Craft Irish Whiskey Co.'s second release in February 2021 of the 30-year-old The Emerald Isle Collection. Amongst its other accolades is a Gold award from the world-renowned International Wine & Spirit Competition (IWSC) 2021 and a Gold from the Global Luxury Spirit Masters 2021. The 2022 Second Edition release of The Devil's Keep is due very soon but The Craft Irish Whiskey Co. only releases a whiskey when it has reached perfection in the barrel, so the number of bottles and date of release is still to be determined. As with all of the company's rare releases, this second edition will be available to loyal clients before being released to the general public. For something truly special, Bottle number 88 of the 2020 Inaugural Edition of The Devil's Keep will be auctioned at Bonhams on 20 May 2022. For more information on The Devil's Keep and other whiskeys from The Craft Irish Whiskey Co. visit www.craftirishwhiskey.com Click here for supporting imagery of Jay Bradley (Founder & CEO of The Craft Irish Whiskey Co.& Ian Duignan (Managing Director) as well as some imagery of The Devil's Keep Interviews with Jay Bradley available on request For further information, please contact: Sharon McHugh - sharon@craftirishwhiskey.com / +44 7881 248 215 About The Craft Irish Whiskey Co. The Craft Irish Whiskey Co. is on a mission to reinvent Irish whiskey, elevating its potential as a luxury product and restoring Ireland's reputation for crafting the finest whiskeys in the world. Formed in 2018 by Irish entrepreneur Jay Bradley, The Craft Irish Whiskey Co. was born from a desire to return Irish whiskey to the heights it once enjoyed. To achieve such a goal has taken a complete reimagining of the craft; honouring centuries of tradition but questioning convention and adding scientific understanding to reinvent the maturation of the whiskey. No expense is spared, no corners are cut. To elevate Irish whiskey's potential, The Craft Irish Whiskey Co. has looked to the past, revisiting the art of whiskey-making perfected by the country's master distillers. While the rise of mass production and blends has pushed this art to one side, the company is invested in restoring it by adding scientific knowledge and a willingness to push boundaries. Underfilling the barrels allows maturation to start at once. Adding water before maturation, or before finishing, allows the water and whiskey to marry over time and avoids the need to dilute the single malt before bottling. The whiskeys are bottled at cask strength to preserve the complex flavour profiles and rich viscosity. Using ultra-premium finishing barrels to mature the single malt delivers rich, rounded notes, while a deep understanding of barrel craft ensures the barrels are moved, rotated and the whiskey disgorged into new ones to create a bespoke journey. The whiskeys are accompanied by skilfully designed and scientifically-perfected accessories that deliver a whiskey experience worthy of the liquid. In 2021, The Craft Irish Whiskey Co. became the most awarded new company of the year amassing a total of seventeen awards across both Taste and Design for four of its ultra-rare whiskey releases. The Craft Irish Whiskey Co. is the exclusive Michelin Plaque Distribution Partner for The Michelin Guide Star Revelation Great Britain and Ireland 2022. For more information visit www.craftirishwhiskey.com The Devil's Keep - Tasting Notes Colour: 1.4 Tawny Characterised by its distinctive tawny, amber colour Nose: The Devil's Keep opens with a nose of the rich aromas of a traditional Christmas cake and Vermont maple syrup, followed by powerful notes of ripe banana, sherry-soaked raisins and hints of 70% dark chocolate adding depth. Palate: The sweetness of golden honey combines with Amarone and accents of dark cherries to add a velvet softness balanced beautifully by a dusting of rich dark chocolate to round off the palate. Rich and warming yet fresh and well-balanced, with supple sweetness and a rich texture. Finish: Beautifully constructed, long and viscous with remanence of maple syrup and chocolate which opens up the liquid to a fine balance of smooth and rich flavours. Rich and oily on the palate, but not overwhelmingly so, and underpinned with a slightly dry finish, providing an indulgent and inimitable taste that will remain on the taste buds. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1775179/The_Craft_Irish_Whiskey_Co.jpg DER applications, including storage, solar, and EV charging infrastructure, will enable companies in the region to meet their sustainability goals, finds Frost & Sullivan SAN ANTONIO, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Frost & Sullivan's recent analysis of the Asia-Pacific power and energy market reveals that a growing number of traditional utilities and oil & gas companies will venture into distributed energy resources (DER) applications over the next five to 10 years. DER applications, including storage, solar, and EV charging infrastructure, and the hydrogen economy are expected to accelerate the energy transition toward net-zero emissions. Most countries in the region, such as Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, and Australia, have initiated their energy transitions and show significant potential to scale up renewables. In line with these trends and the rising demand for power, overall investments in power generation capacities are expected to grow from $59.66 billion in 2021 to $73.26 billion in 2030. For further information on this analysis, Asia-Pacific Power and Energy Outlook, 2022, please visit: https://frost.ly/75n "Oil incumbents are venturing into the power sector through partnerships and acquisitions of renewable energy companies, DER companies, and utilities," noted Rajalingam Arikaarampalayam Chinnasamy, Industry Principal, Energy & Environment at Frost & Sullivan. "They are also likely to leverage their offshore expertise to tap into the offshore wind market in Asia-Pacific." Chinnasamy added, "The rapid expansion of power generation capacities will drive strong investments in transmission and distribution networks. Among the emerging energy technologies, Japan, South Korea, and Australia have identified hydrogen as the most promising in accelerating their net-zero energy transition." Companies looking to invest in the regional energy and power market can seize growth opportunities by: Adopting the everything-as-a-service (XaaS) model for accelerated DER uptake : Manufacturers and solution providers need to develop comprehensive plans that cover data access and gathering, flexibility, and innovation. : Manufacturers and solution providers need to develop comprehensive plans that cover data access and gathering, flexibility, and innovation. Partnering with strategic competitors to leverage market synergies : Global OEMs can collaborate with local partners that specialize in the local production of components or with well-established domestic suppliers to penetrate public utility projects and commercial and industrial (C&I) customer segments. : Global OEMs can collaborate with local partners that specialize in the local production of components or with well-established domestic suppliers to penetrate public utility projects and commercial and industrial (C&I) customer segments. IoT-enabling generation and grid equipment to strengthen power network resilience and reliability: Solution providers have to create comprehensive plans and innovation roadmaps for customers to leverage the data generated from digital systems. Asia-Pacific Power and Energy Outlook, 2022 is the latest addition to Frost & Sullivan's Energy & Environment research and analyses available through the Frost & Sullivan Leadership Council, which helps organizations identify a continuous flow of growth opportunities to succeed in an unpredictable future. About Frost & Sullivan For six decades, Frost & Sullivan has been world-renowned for its role in helping investors, corporate leaders and governments navigate economic changes and identify disruptive technologies, Mega Trends, new business models, and companies to action, resulting in a continuous flow of growth opportunities to drive future success. Contact us: Start the discussion Asia-Pacific Power and Energy Outlook, 2022 PCAC Contact: Melissa Tan Corporate Communications T: +65 6890 0926 E: melissa.tan@frost.com http://www.frost.com Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1775552/Transition_to_Net_Zero_Emissions_Catalyzes_Asia_Pacific_Utilities__Adoption_of_Distributed_Energy_Re.jpg BioCred listed among devices in compliance with the federal agency's most demanding fingerprint-related standard Panini S.p.A., a global payments technology provider, has received certification from the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI to the Next Generation Identification (NGI) Image Quality Specifications (IQS), according to the Appendix F standard, for its new fingerprint-based biometric authentication system. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005053/en/ Panini's fingerprint biometric system obtains Appendix F certification from the FBI. (Photo: Business Wire) Appendix F, according to the Bureau's Electronic Biometric Transmission Specification (EBTS), is the most demanding standard for fingerprints issued by the FBI. It requires rigorous image quality conditions, focusing on the human fingerprint comparison and facilitating one-to-many matching operations by large-scale machines. Appendix F certified fingerprint scanners must meet and exceed stringent specifications in reproducing the fingerprint pattern, such as gray range, signal-to-noise ratio and geometric accuracy. The certification ensures that certified products meet or exceed minimum FBI interoperability standards meaning that fingerprints collected by using one device can be compared with those collected on another certified device and will work with the NGI System, considered the world's largest and most efficient electronic repository of biometric and criminal history information. More specifically, Panini has chosen this technology for in-person customer authentication, to guarantee secure transactions while meeting user expectations for speed and convenience. Appendix F FAP 45 level allows the detection of multiple fingerprints simultaneously, reducing the likeliness of possible sequencing mistakes. The process also certifies that the scanner has successfully tested the sunlight effect on image quality. The achievement of this certification is a strategic initiative for Panini, who has been broadening its focus from check imaging (and related anti-fraud elements) to secure identity applications. This accomplishment is a milestone in the R&D team's journey to advance new technologies which can be integrated into future products, as testified by the BioCred concept unveiled in late 2021 in Trustech (Paris). With a unique and patented approach, BioCred combines convenience, security and privacy, and does not force users to hastily discard any identification and authentication methods they may have been previously using. "Our company is positioned to address a growing market opportunity with innovative applications, so we are working closely with certification bodies, making sure we do things the right way from the very start to quickly earn the legitimacy our brand deserves. The FBI certification ensures that our upcoming solutions in fingerprint biometrics comply with the highest standards and fully meet market expectations in terms of quality and reliability" states Pierpaolo Bubbio, R&D Director at Panini. About Panini Founded in Turin, Italy, Panini has enabled clients to capitalize on shifts in the global payments processing market for over 75 years. Panini has a rich history of innovation, resulting in market leading solutions based on state-of-the-art engineering and ISO 9001 quality certified production. Panini improves customer efficiency and fraud prevention via trusted and innovative technologies for check truncation and secure identity. The company's scalable check imaging systems address the complete range of distributed capture opportunities, resulting in the world's largest deployed base of scanners, and their expanding portfolio of secure identity technologies includes reliable, user-friendly options for identity verification and authentication. Panini operates on a global scale and has a direct subsidiary in Dayton (OH), USA to cover strategic North American markets. For more information visit: www.panini.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005053/en/ Contacts: Chiara Mattone, Marketing Communications chiara.mattone@panini.com 1 +39 011 8176011 The partnership will empower students with on-the-job training through internships and facilitate industry-academia collaboration DUBAI, UAE, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Bahwan CyberTek (BCT) Group, a global provider of digital transformation solutions announced that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with BITS Pilani, Dubai. Under the strategic partnership, BCT and BITS Pilani will work together to expand their understanding of digital technologies and collaborate to build future-fit solutions. The MoU opens avenues for students of BITS Pilani to explore internships at BCT helping them curate EdTech solutions. Additionally, the partnership promotes joint seminars and workshops, knowledge sharing, and review of academic materials. Welcoming the MoU, Mr. Vish Srinivasan, Executive Vice President, BCT, said, "We are excited about this partnership and looking forward to deepening our ties with the student community in the Middle East. We're always exploring ideas, insights, and innovation that help our clients build future-fit businesses equipped with solutions for better experiences. This MoU is a step forward in that direction, sharing knowledge and transforming abstract ideas into reality." Dr. Srinivasan Madapusi, Senior Professor Director, BITS-Pilani Dubai Campus, said, "This MoU will strengthen collaboration between industry and academia. Both parties aim to bring together their respective capabilities, resources and expertise and collaborate on advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Our primary focus will be on developing applications that will aid in the resolution of real-world problems. We look forward to a mutually beneficial and synergistic partnership between the two institutions." BCT has played an active role in creating knowledge pools to tackle the growing demands for emerging technologies like AI, ML, and IoT. In the past, BCT partnered with Anna University, Chennai, and set up the AU-BCT Kalam Centre of Excellence in the university's campus to train students in emerging technologies. About Bahwan CyberTek Established in 1999, Bahwan CyberTek (BCT) is a global provider of IP-based digital transformation solutions leveraging its portfolio of innovative IP in the areas of Digital Experience, Predictive Analytics, and Digital Journey Management across North America, the Middle East, Far East, Africa, and Asia. Driving innovation through outcome-based business models, proven and powerful IP solutions, BCT is a trusted partner for over 1000+ customers, including Fortune 500 companies. With strong capabilities in digital technologies, BCT has over 3,000 associates with technical and domain expertise, delivering solutions to the Oil & Gas, Telecom, Power, Government, Banking, Retail, and SCM / Logistics verticals. Learn more about Bahwan CyberTek at www.bahwancybertek.com About BITS Pilani BITS Pilani, Dubai Campus, established in the year 2000, is the only offshore campus of Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani), India, the most reputed and top ranking private university in India. It also has campuses at Goa and Hyderabad, apart from the flagship campus at Pilani, Rajasthan. BITS Pilani is identified and recognized by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development (MHRD) of Govt. of India as an Institute of Eminence (IOE) in 2018. BITS Pilani is accredited by National Assessment & Accreditation Council (NAAC) in 2016 with 'A' Grade. The Institute offers Bachelors of Engineering (B.E.) Degree in Computer Science, Civil Engineering, Electrical & Electronics Engineering, Electronics and Communications Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Biotechnology. It also offers post-graduate degrees in Microelectronics, Electrical Engineering with specialization in Power Electronics & Drives, Design Engineering, Software Systems, and MBA, and Doctoral degree in all disciplines. The department of Biotechnology, established in 2007 at Dubai Campus, offers B.E. Biotechnology and doctoral degree program. Learn more about BITS Pilani, Dubaihttps://universe.bits-pilani.ac.in/dubai/ Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1775579/Bahwan_CyberTek_signs_MoU.jpg LHASA, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Despite compelling and apparent evidence of widespread progress in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, naysayers continue to level groundless, and sometimes even fictitious, accusations involving the plateau region. Out of ulterior motives, some Western media and individuals have launched unscrupulous attacks on Tibet over so-called human rights and other issues, based on what appeared nothing but rumors and lies. The latest examples include a report published by the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Asia news service accusing China of "rights violations" in Tibet. Such acts can be dubbed a "political virus" and are sometimes even more detrimental than the raging novel coronavirus that has already infected hundreds of millions worldwide. Tibet's effective COVID-19 containment exemplifies how it is upholding human rights. There have been no new confirmed or suspected cases for more than two years, with the region reporting only one case and zero deaths from the coronavirus in total. Despite that, there's no room for slacking. The region, with a population of just 3.65 million, has been constantly widening its coverage of COVID-19 vaccination with more than 8 million vaccine doses having been administered as of mid-January. It is fair to say that Tibet is one of the world's safest places on the planet, if not the most. Such an achievement in protecting people's health and safety is merely one of the examples of China's respect for human rights, and its efforts to improve the well-being of all people, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. Remarkable feats have been achieved in Tibet over the past decades. Since its peaceful liberation in 1951, Tibet has embarked on a path from poverty to prosperity, from autocracy to democracy, and from isolation to openness. Under the strong leadership of the Communist Party of China, hunger and poverty have become a thing of the past with Tibet's regional GDP soaring. People are seeing fatter wallets, with the per capita disposable income of rural residents maintaining double-digit growth for 19 consecutive years. Average life expectancy in Tibet has increased from 35.5 years in 1951 to 72.19 years last year, and Tibet is the first provincial-level region in China to provide 15 years of publicly funded education, from kindergarten to senior high school. The population of ethnic Tibetans has been on the rise. Official data show that the permanent population of Tibetans in Tibet stood at 3.14 million in 2020, up nearly 16 percent from 2010, or 30 percent from 2000. Meanwhile, the freedom of religious beliefs is fully protected in Tibet, just like anywhere else in the country. All religions and sects, as well as believers and non-believers, are equal in Tibet. There are more than 1,700 sites for Tibetan Buddhism activities, four mosques and one Catholic church. Lies will forever be without any shred of reality, and people can always distinguish right from wrong. While a few Western countries have been obsessed with interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and stifling their development under the pretext of human rights, all such attempts are doomed to fail. Slanders and falsehoods will never stop the all-around progress in Tibet, but will only expose the hypocrisy of certain Western countries, institutions and individuals. It is high time for such forces to look squarely at the plain facts and truth about Tibet and the rest of China, as mud-slinging and buck-passing tricks will not solve their domestic woes -- particularly those induced by the pandemic. PAFnow Capabilities to Debut in Celonis Experiences at the Celonis World Tour 2022 Celonis, the global leader in execution management, announced the acquisition of Process Analytics Factory GmbH (PAF), a leading provider of process mining insights for Microsoft Power BI. This acquisition will enable millions of Microsoft Power Platform users to utilize Celonis' market leading Execution Management System (EMS) for process mining, automation, and collaboration. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005245/en/ Celonis acquires PAF to support Execution Management Everywhere. (Graphic: Business Wire) The acquisition of PAF is part of Celonis' strategy to enable companies everywhere and in all industries to use process mining within the Celonis EMS to reveal and fix process inefficiencies. Celonis is committed to empowering users of the top automation, collaboration, and workflow platforms to run their businesses using Celonis' unique process insights and intelligent, targeted actions. The PAFnow process mining product is completely integrated into Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Office 365 for the analysis, visualization and optimization of almost any process. 97 percent of the Fortune 500, and over 260,000 companies globally, use Microsoft Power BI. The Celonis EMS combines, in one integrated cloud platform, real-time data, process intelligence, and targeted action to impact top, bottom, and greenline business performance at speed. Customers looking to get full clarity on how their business processes are running whether across supply chains, shared service centers, or system landscapes can now benefit from the unique and advanced capabilities of the Celonis EMS within their familiar Microsoft environments. Maximilian Gerbert, project lead at Mercedes-Benz Management Consulting, said: "We the Digital Accelerator of Mercedes-Benz are a data-driven department with a business intelligence strategy built over years, but once we brought process mining into our BI infrastructure we were able to see the full picture and identify process inefficiencies throughout our company that we never could before. When supply chain issues come up, we use insights from process mining within BI to pinpoint the bottlenecks and take action to fix them before they impact our cash flow and our customer experience. We are excited by the news of the Celonis acquisition and the ability to leverage the powerful capabilities of the Celonis EMS within our Microsoft environment." "It's great to see Celonis and PAF join forces," said Linus Linder, Head of IT at Muller Die lila Logistik Service GmbH. "Now we can benefit from the real-time data, process intelligence, and targeted action in the Celonis EMS within our familiar Microsoft Power BI environment." The rapid adoption of the Celonis EMS comes on the heels of a generational shift to use process insights and intelligence to change how businesses are run. According to Gartner the market for hyper-automation software will reach nearly $860 billion by 20251. But many businesses do not maximize the value of their digital investments because they lack insight into outdated processes holding back business operations. According to a Forrester report commissioned by Celonis, process mining has hit an inflection point in 2022 as decision makers demand better execution by finding and fixing process inefficiencies. "Since we started 11 years ago, the Celonis mission has always been the same to help our customers reach the full potential of their business performance by removing process inefficiencies and that requires Celonis to be everywhere," said Alex Rinke, co-CEO and co-founder of Celonis. "The PAF acquisition enables the millions of users of the Microsoft Power Platform to use Celonis' unique data and intelligent insights to power analytics, automation, and collaboration." "This combination leverages the strength of Celonis market leadership with the foundation that PAF has created in the Microsoft Power Platform. This allows our companies to build the bridge between the Microsoft Power Platform and the Celonis Execution Management System," said Tobias Rother, CEO and founder of PAF. "We are thrilled to help put Celonis into the hands of such a large and fast-growing community of business leaders." "In our inaugural HFS SaaS XXV 2022 report we ranked Celonis as the top private SaaS company in Overall Rank, Business Value Creation, Partner Engagement, and OneOffice Alignment," said Phil Fersht, CEO and Chief Analyst of HFS Research. "The acquisition of PAF demonstrates why Celonis is ranked alongside Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, Adobe, and Google for shaping the future of native automation, data, and process design. Celonis is strategically moving its unique process data and intelligent insights into the world's largest work, automation, and analytics platforms." "The purpose of process mining is to gain a fact-based understanding of business process variance and inefficiency to systematically improve processes to maximize performance while aligning with the overall goals of a business. Embedding process mining into common analytics platforms makes it easier for teams to work together using familiar tools," said Maureen Fleming, Program Vice President for the IDC Intelligent Process Automation Market Research and Advisory Service. The PAFnow software capabilities will debut in Celonis Experiences at Celonis World Tour 2022. Celonis Experiences will showcase how customers can seamlessly integrate Celonis EMS with Microsoft Power BI reporting, collaborate with Microsoft Teams, and trigger flows in Microsoft Power Automate. About Celonis Celonis helps organizations to execute on their data. Powered by its market-leading process mining core, the Celonis Execution Management System provides a set of applications, a developer studio and platform capabilities for business executives and users to eliminate billions in corporate inefficiencies, provide better customer experience and reduce carbon emissions. Celonis has thousands of implementations in global customers and is headquartered in Munich, Germany and New York City, USA with 20 offices worldwide. 2022 Celonis SE. All rights reserved. Celonis, Execution Management System, EMS and the Celonis "droplet" logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Celonis SE in Germany and other jurisdictions. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. 1 Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Hyperautomation of Enablement Software, Worldwide, Cathy Tornbohm, Fabrizio Biscotti, Rachel Chippendale, March 22, 2021. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005245/en/ Contacts: Isabell Horvath, VP, Comms press@celonis.com Newly announced ESG sessions feature industry leaders from Kerlink, Microshare, Microsoft, CBRE and the EU Commission; Speakers also added from Tata Communications and the Helium Foundation (Helium) The LoRa Alliance, the global association of companies backing the open LoRaWAN standard for the internet of things (IoT) low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs), today announced the expanded program for the LoRaWAN World Expo, taking place at the Palais des Congres in Paris, July 6-7, 2022. New additions to the program focus on why LoRaWAN is the leading LPWAN to support businesses' environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices while delivering a strong return on investment (ROI). This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005269/en/ (Graphic: Business Wire) "Global demand for LoRaWAN solutions has exploded-in part to address ESG requirements," said Donna Moore, CEO and chairwoman of the LoRa Alliance. "Automated alerts triggered by analysis of the data LoRaWAN collects is creating significant opportunities for resource conservation, predictive maintenance, and safety, as well as waste reduction, to improve efficiencies and effectiveness of our resources. LoRaWAN is the most widely deployed LPWAN solution because the market trusts the technology, which has global network availability, the ability to roam globally, and delivers considerable cost savings." LoRaWAN's growth has been driven in large part by the acceleration of digital transformation, which moved from nice-to-have to a necessity among enterprises and cities globally, spurred on by the lessons learned from COVID-19. In short, digitization has become critical to providing safe environments, for the health welfare and safety of our citizens and planet. Moore continued, "Whether you are just starting your IoT journey or deeply engaged in deployments, join us to see how LoRaWAN positively impacts our lives and the health of the planet, and drives businesses' efforts in these areas. The LoRaWAN World Expo is the best opportunity in 2022 to hear from the brightest minds in the IoT industry and network with LoRaWAN market leaders. With a focus on social responsibility, attendees will discover how LoRaWAN is profitable for their companies, beneficial to the global community, and a means to become better corporate citizens." While LoRaWAN is already supporting people, planet, and profits, the LoRa Alliance recognizes its growth potential and is excited to have leveraged this theme across many of the sessions during the Expo. According to the World Economic Forum's Internet of Things Guidelines for Sustainability report, 84% of IoT deployments currently address, or have the potential to address, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Expo's environmental sustainability sessions cover a broad range of topics around smart agriculture and irrigation, smart buildings and cities, climate change and its environmental impact, disaster prevention and the green new deal, as well as wildlife preservation. A number of sessions will focus on societal considerations, such as healthcare, elder care, workforce safety, heritage preservation and more. Finally, representatives from think tanks and governmental organizations like Arcep, ITU-T and the European Union Commission for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth will address key considerations for LoRaWAN and how it relates to governance. New featured speakers and sessions announced today include: Daniel Mes, Member of the Cabinet of Executive Vice-President on the European Green Deal Laure de la Raudiere, Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications, Postal and Print Media Distribution Mariya Gabriel, EU Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth Scott Sigel, Helium Foundation, The Value of Community Networks Sandra Lopez, GM/VP/CMO of Microsoft Advertising, on Inclusive Product Design: At the Center of a Better World Mysore Madhusudhan, Executive Vice President, Collaboration and Connected Solutions, Tata Communications, Scaling Hyperconnectivity with LoRaWAN William Gouesbet, Kerlink, LoRaWAN-enabled IoT use cases driving sustainability and CSR Ulrich Rousseau of Wi6labs, The Smallest Smart City in the World Najwa Hamzeh, Red Sea Development Project, Red Sea Giga Project Speakers from the WBA, DLMS on multi-RAN Approaches to IoT Speakers from Microshare, Microsoft, CBRE discuss How Smart Building solutions bring sustainability and ESG data metrics to the Built World Speakers from GetWireless and Oxit on Going to Market with LoRaWAN Speakers from Actility; Birdz; Helium; NNNCo, Semtech and SenRa on the Diversity of Network Business Models Speakers from MachineQ, a Comcast Company, on Enterprise LoRaWAN Adoption Speakers from EDF, Nortegas, Semtech and Veolia on LoRaWAN for Utilities Premier Sponsors Platinum Level: Semtech Silver Level: Actility, Birdz, Kerlink, RAKwireless, STMicroelectronics Bronze Level: Browan Communications, ControliX, Digi, Ivanti, MultiTech, MClimate, Murata Manufacturing, OrbiWise, TEKTELIC Speaker Sponsor: Kiwi technology; MachineQ, a Comcast Company Don't miss out on your chance to experience the LoRaWAN World Expo Sponsorship and exhibition opportunities are still available; contact events@lora-alliance.org for details. Book your exhibition space Register now Media and analysts are invited to attend LoRaWAN World Expo at no cost. Contact lora-alliance@kiterocket.com for registration details. About LoRa Alliance The LoRa Alliance is an open, nonprofit association that has become one of the largest and fastest-growing alliances in the technology sector since its inception in 2015. Its members closely collaborate and share expertise to develop and promote the LoRaWAN standard, which is the de facto global standard for secure, carrier-grade IoT LPWAN connectivity. LoRaWAN has the technical flexibility to address a broad range of IoT applications, both fixed and mobile, and a robust LoRaWAN Certification program to guarantee that devices perform as specified. The LoRaWAN standard has been deployed by more than 165 major mobile network operators globally, with connectivity available worldwide. More information: lora-alliance.org LoRa Alliance, LoRaWAN and LoRaWAN CertifiedCM are registered marks. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005269/en/ Contacts: Kiterocket Stephanie Quinn, LoRa Alliance PR +1 408 529 9685 squinn@kiterocket.com BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT/PARIS (dpa-AFX) - U.K. stocks rose on Tuesday, with commodity and consumer staple stocks gaining ground amid hopes for Russia-Ukraine peace talks. Negotiators began face-to-face talks in Istanbul today after Ukraine said it is willing to become neutral and compromise over the status of the eastern Donbas region as part of a peace deal. The benchmark FTSE 100 jumped 70 points, or 0.9 percent, to 7,543 after declining 0.1 percent the previous day. AstraZeneca advanced 1.4 percent after the European Commission granted marketing authorization to Evusheld, a Covid-19 vaccine alternative. Bellway fell 2.4 percent. After reporting increases in revenue and profit, the housebuilder has warned over potentially significant costs on building safety. Mulberry Group shares surged 4.2 percent. After a solid trading update for the second half, the luxury handbag maker said that full-year profit and revenue were set to be 'moderately ahead' of expectations. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Kingfisher Metals Corp. (TSXV:KFR)(FSE:970)(OTCQB:KGFMF) ("Kingfisher" or the "Company") announces results from its 100% owned Thibert Project. Thibert is located 50 km north-northwest of the town of Dease Lake and west of the Stewart-Cassiar Highway 37, British Columbia. Highlights The 130 km 2 Thibert Project has seen placer gold production since the 1870s with ~200,000 oz of gold production within the Thibert-Dease Placer Camp. Placer gold is typically sourced from nuggety high grade gold in veins. Thibert Project has seen placer gold production since the 1870s with ~200,000 oz of gold production within the Thibert-Dease Placer Camp. Placer gold is typically sourced from nuggety high grade gold in veins. Kingfisher completed a property-wide (688-line km) airborne magnetic and radiometric survey which highlights the northwest trending crustal scale Thibert Shear Zone as well as easterly and northerly trending cross structures which may be responsible for gold mineralization. Property-wide stream sediment sampling (n = 103) was completed to infill gaps in historical and government RGS sampling. Stream sediment sampling identified highly anomalous streams up to 1535.5 ppb Au (1.53 g/t Au) in the headwaters of two placer bearing streams. Highly anomalous stream sediments (26.9 and 243.3 ppb Au) from an area with no placer production identifies a new area prospective for bedrock hosted gold. The Company is operating under a communications agreement with the Tahltan Central Council and intends to renew the agreement this spring. "Although Goldrange remains our near-term priority, we are very encouraged by the prospectivity of the Thibert Project. The geological, geochemical, and geophysical signatures of this historical placer camp support our hypothesis that Thibert has the potential to host significant orogenic gold systems. This, coupled with historical placer gold production and anecdotal highlights, increases our confidence in this exciting project." Stated Dustin Perry, CEO, who explains the contents of this release in more detail in video format. The 130 km2 Thibert Project covers an area of significant historical and contemporary placer gold production from Thibert Creek and several tributaries for which the bedrock source has not yet been discovered. The majority of placer production from Thibert and its tributaries occurred in the late 1800's to early 1900's with ~200,000 ounces of gold estimated to be produced from Thibert-Dease placer district. The Thibert Project spans 27 km of strike length along the Thibert Shear Zone - a major crustal scale terrane bounding fault system separating the island arc Quesnel and oceanic Cache Creek Terranes. The project is prospective for Cretaceous-aged mesozonal orogenic gold mineralization similar to that found within the Juneau Gold Belt in Alaska and the Motherlode District in California. While no bedrock source to the placer gold has been discovered through drilling, records from historical work provide compelling clues that it may be within in the current tenure: Keystone Prospect: in 1931 stripping and open cutting exposed a zone of quartz stringers in quartz porphyry returned 9.1 g/t Au over 12.2 m. This exposure was believed to have been covered by placer workings and has not been exposed since (BC Annual Mines Report, 1931).* Ficklin Prospect: anecdotal reports of prospector Homer Ficklin discovering a 100 lb angular quartz boulder from which he recovered ~60 oz Au (J.E. Wallis, 1989).* Defot Creek Placer Prospect: reports of multiple gold nuggets over 10 oz and up to 22 oz (BC Annual Mines Report, 1878).* *Historical results from the Keystone, Ficklin, and Defot Prospects has not been verified by the Company and should not be relied upon. Figure 1: Thibert Project location, placer workings, and gold occurrences. In 2021, 103 stream sediment samples were collected across the Thibert Project (Figure 2). The goal of property-wide geochemical sampling program was to infill gaps within the project not covered by the BC Regional Geochemical Survey or sampling from historical assessment reports. Combined 2021 and historical stream sediment samples total 131 (Table 1). GOLD (ppb) All Data (n = 131) 2021 Data (n = 103) Min. Value 1 0.8 Max. Value 1535.5 1535.5 Ave. Value 24 22.4 Median Value 3.8 3.5 75th %tile 7.2 5 90th %tile 12.6 9.9 95th %tile 51.5 25.4 Table 1: Summary statistics for the 2021 and historical stream geochemistry. Several new anomalous drainages were identified by the 2021 stream sediment survey. Additionally, some of the anomalous drainages identified by the historical stream sediment surveys are strongly supported by the 2021 survey. The most significant 2021 sample assayed 1535.5 ppb Au and was collected from Defot Creek, a productive placer drainage. This sample was collected in close proximity and slightly down stream from the historical Ficklin Prospect where anecdotal reports describe 60 oz of "spectacular free gold" coming from an angular 100 lb boulder. This site was located in the pass separating Defot Creek from Porcupine Creek where Homer Ficklin built a cabin and dug trenches in an attempt to locate the source of this boulder in the late 1920s (J.E. Wallis, 1989). Additionally, BC Annual Mine Reports from several years note the presence of large gold nuggets up to 22 oz in this area. Two of the 2021 samples and two of the historical samples draining into Adsit Lake (Figure 2) at the Thibert Project are highly anomalous in Au. The 2021 samples assayed 26.9 and 243.3 ppb Auand are located at Adsit Lake (26.9 ppb Au) and at a drainage located northwest of the lake (243.3 ppb Au). A 2021 sample collected from a tributary draining into Mosquito Creek (Figure 2), an area of placer production, assayed 47.8 ppb Au. Northeast of Mosquito Creek an anomalous sample was collected that assayed 32.1 ppb Au. Figure 2: Thibert Project stream geochemistry and magnetic susceptibility. Precision Geosurvey Ltd. was contracted to fly a heliborne magnetic and radiometric survey during summer 2021 (Figure 3). Lines were flown at a 200 m spacing across the Thibert Project for a total of 688-line km surveyed. The magnetic survey was successful in providing a structural framework for the 27 km-long project. The crustal scale Thibert Shear Zone is highlighted by a series of mapped ultramafic intrusions that have exploited the favourable pathway of this terrane bounding fault. Magnetic anomalies stretch across the length of the project that correlate with mapped ultramafic intrusions. A large percentage of the project is masked by glacial till and therefore ultramafic intrusions have only been mapped where they outcrop. The results of the magnetic survey indicate that these favourable host rocks may be more extensive than was previously known. One significant area of interest outlined in the magnetic survey occurs near the Keystone Prospect where carbonate altered and serpentinized ultramafic rocks have been observed. This area is located on a significant flexure point within the regional structural trend. Inflections in structural trends are known to be important locations for orogenic gold mineralization. Another broad area of interest is the northwestern portion of the project where ultramafic rocks have been mapped but are associated with a subdued magnetic response. Given the consistency of highly anomalous gold in stream sediment samples, there is potential for a large-scale magnetically destructive alteration system. Further geophysical analysis and ground truthing will be required to further this target area. Figure 3: Thibert Project magnetic susceptibility and geology. Future Work The Company continues to analyse data collected in 2021 and is in the process of formulating plans for a field program that will be completed in early fall 2022. With a previously completed surficial geology map as well as the geochemical and geophysical programs detailed in this news release, the Thibert Project is now ready for more focused exploration work. The targets that will be the focus of future work include the Adsit Lake area, the Porcupine and Defot drainages, and the Keystone Prospect further down Thibert Creek. Future programs will likely include more focused soil and till geochemical programs as well as ground-based geophysical programs. The objective of these programs will be to further refine targets for initial scout drilling. Sampling Protocol Transported silt often found in side pools and back eddies were targeted for stream sediment samples. Silt was collected from moss matts where no side pool or back eddies were readily accessible. Samples were collected in labelled cloth Hubco bags, which also contained an analytical tag with the sample ID. Stream sediment samples weighing approximately 1000 grams per sample were delivered by Company personnel to Acme Labs located in Vancouver, BC, an ISO9001:2008 accredited laboratory. The stream sediment samples were prepared using the SS80 method by drying them at 60C and sieving to less than 180 m (80 mesh). A 30 gram split of the sieved stream sediment sample was then subjected to a modified aqua regia digestion (1:1:1 HNO3:HCl:H2O) and analyzed for 37 major and trace elements using ICP-ES/MS (method code AQ252). Qualified Person Dustin Perry, P.Geo., Kingfisher's CEO, is the Company's Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects, and has prepared the technical information presented in this release. About Kingfisher Metals Corp. Kingfisher Metals Corp. (https://kingfishermetals.com/) is a Canadian based exploration company focused on underexplored district-scale projects in British Columbia. Kingfisher has three 100% owned district-scale projects that offer potential exposure to high-grade gold, copper, silver, and zinc. The Company currently has 84,673,300 shares outstanding. For further information, please contact: Dustin Perry, P.Geo. CEO and Director Phone: +1 236 358 0054 E-Mail: info@kingfishermetals.com Neither the TSX-V nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX-V) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Mineralization hosted on adjacent and/or nearby properties is not necessarily indicative of mineralization hosted on the Company's property. This news release contains forward-looking statements, which relate to future events or future performance and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements or information. Forward-looking statements or information in this news release relate to, among other things: formulation of plans for drill testing; and the success related to any future exploration or development programs. These forward-looking statements and information reflect the Company's current views with respect to future events and are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions that, while considered reasonable by the Company, are inherently subject to significant operational, business, economic and regulatory uncertainties and contingencies. These assumptions include; success of the Company's projects; prices for gold remaining as estimated; currency exchange rates remaining as estimated; availability of funds for the Company's projects; capital, decommissioning and reclamation estimates; prices for energy inputs, labour, materials, supplies and services (including transportation); no labour- related disruptions; no unplanned delays or interruptions in scheduled construction and production; all necessary permits, licenses and regulatory approvals are received in a timely manner; and the ability to comply with environmental, health and safety laws. The foregoing list of assumptions is not exhaustive. The Company cautions the reader that forward-looking statements and information involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or information contained in this news release and the Company has made assumptions and estimates based on or related to many of these factors. Such factors include, without limitation: risks related to the COVID-19 pandemic; fluctuations in gold prices; fluctuations in prices for energy inputs, labour, materials, supplies and services (including transportation); fluctuations in currency markets (such as the Canadian dollar versus the U.S. dollar); operational risks and hazards inherent with the business of mineral exploration; inadequate insurance, or inability to obtain insurance, to cover these risks and hazards; our ability to obtain all necessary permits, licenses and regulatory approvals in a timely manner; changes in laws, regulations and government practices, including environmental, export and import laws and regulations; legal restrictions relating to mineral exploration; increased competition in the mining industry for equipment and qualified personnel; the availability of additional capital; title matters and the additional risks identified in our filings with Canadian securities regulators on SEDAR in Canada (available at www.sedar.com). Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated, described, or intended. Investors are cautioned against undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and, except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. SOURCE: Kingfisher Metals Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695022/Kingfisher-Highlights-High-Grade-Gold-Potential-at-Thibert-Project-with-Airborne-Geophysical-and-Property-Wide-Stream-Sediment-Surveys-Returning-Anomalies-up-to-15355-ppb-Gold The funding will accelerate the AI-driven healthcare company's market expansion into the global market and support new product development COPENHAGEN, Denmark and MUMBAI, India and NEW YORK, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Qure.ai (Qure) one of the leading health tech firms using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for medical imaging diagnostics, today announced that it has secured $40 million in a funding round led by Novo Holdings and HealthQuad, supported by existing investor MassMutual Ventures. Qure.ai will use the new investment to extend and strengthen its global reach, especially in the US and Europe, and intensify product development for critical care and community diagnostics. Qure.ai has created a niche for itself with advanced technology that reads and interprets medical images like X-rays, CTs, and Ultrasounds in less than a minute, making equitable and high-quality healthcare a reality across the globe. Qure's AI solutions are FDA-approved, CE-certified, and evaluated by the World Health Organization. Qure.ai's automated medical imaging tools can shorten the time to diagnosis while enabling physicians to triage medical cases more effectively, especially in time-sensitive situations. This helps healthcare providers identify critical scenarios within minutes - versus hours - to avert fatalities and improve the quality of patient care. In other settings, where adequate, skilled specialists may not be available, Qure's technology is used as the first level of screening for many infections and non-communicable conditions. Dr Amit Kakar, Senior Partner, Head of Novo Holdings Equity Asia, said: "We are very pleased to join the outstanding team at Qure.ai and to contribute to their efforts of providing world-class AI solutions in the imaging space, for the benefit of patients worldwide. Qure.ai is at the forefront of transforming diagnostics in both acute and chronic ailments, which is fully aligned with our mission of advancing high-quality and accessible healthcare using innovation and digitization. Further, we are excited to connect Qure.ai to our portfolio partners as we see several promising synergies." Novo Holdings is a world-leading healthcare and life sciences investor with a focus on creating long-term, sustainable value. Headquartered in Copenhagen, with offices in San Francisco, Boston, London and Singapore, Novo Holdings has a portfolio of more than 150 companies. Charles - Antoine Janssen, Chief Investment Officer, HealthQuad said: "We are thrilled to be part of the Qure team. Their world-class AI technologies adhere to the most stringent international standards, and have made high-quality, accessible care a reality. We remain committed to collaborating with innovative firms that work to improve global healthcare infrastructures." "It's no accident that Qure is one of the leading startups thriving in the health tech sector. Through noteworthy collaborations with ministries of health and government entities like the NHS, pharmaceuticals like AstraZeneca, and international advocacy groups like StopTB, amongst others, Qure has already built a network of global commercial partnerships. The pandemic has also accelerated the shift to digital transformation, and we are proud to back their growth," added Ajay Mahipal, Director, HealthQuad. HealthQuad is India's leading digital health focused venture capital fund with assets under management of USD 200 Mn across two funds. Its focus is to nurture innovative models which radically improve healthcare access and affordability leveraging technology. Prashant Warier, CEO and Founder, Qure.ai, said: "Every year our technology helps more than four million people across 50 countries. Our goal is to continue being bullish in our market expansion, especially in the US and Europe. We are committed to aiding healthcare professionals in diagnosing illnesses faster and with more detail and accuracy while automating most of the routine work. This is a win for all involved in healthcare, especially for patients across the globe who will benefit from vastly improved health outcomes." Ryan Collins, Managing Director, MassMutual Ventures said: "We have been incredibly impressed with Qure's progress since we first invested over two years ago. The team is exceptional and the progress on product development, now across many different imaging modalities and use cases, as well as global expansion, has been outstanding. We are very happy to continue supporting Qure and welcome Novo Holdings and HealthQuad as partners." Existing investors include Fractal analytics and Sequoia Capital. About Qure.ai Qure.ai is a breakthrough Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution provider that is disrupting the radiology 'status quo' by enhancing imaging accuracy and improving health outcomes with the assistance of machine-supported tools. Qure.ai taps deep learning technology to provide automated interpretation of radiology examinations like X-rays, CTs, Ultrasounds and MRI scans for time and resource-strapped medical imaging professionals-enabling faster diagnosis and speed to treatment. Qure.ai is helping to make healthcare more accessible and affordable to patients worldwide. About Novo Holdings A/S Novo Holdings A/S is a private limited liability company wholly owned by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. It is the holding company of the Novo Group, comprising Novo Nordisk A/S and Novozymes A/S, and is responsible for managing the Novo Nordisk Foundation's assets. Novo Holdings is recognised as a leading international life science investor, with a focus on creating long-term value. As a life science investor, Novo Holdings provides seed and venture capital to development-stage companies and takes significant ownership positions in growth and well-established companies. Novo Holdings also manages a broad portfolio of diversified financial assets. About MassMutual Ventures (MMV) MMV is a multistage, global venture capital firm investing in digital health, financial technology, enterprise software, and cybersecurity companies. We help accelerate the growth of the companies we partner with by providing capital, connections and advice. MMV's sole limited partner is MassMutual, a Fortune 500 financial services company with assets under management of $460 billion (Dec. 2021). WHITE ROCK, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / TDG Gold Corp. (TSX-V:TDG) (the "Company" or "TDG") is pleased to report a 34.0 metre ("m") drill intercept of 7.19 grams per tonne ("g/t") gold ("Au") and 105 g/t silver ("Ag") [8.49 g/t AuEq*] in hole SH21-040B (Figure 1) located in the Creek Zone, contained within a broader interval of 76.3 m of 3.33 g/t Au and 51 g/t Ag [3.97 g/t AuEq*] at TDG's former producing Shasta project in the Toodoggone District, B.C (Figure 2). DDH SH21-040B intersected: 34.0 m of 7.19 g/t Au and 105 g/t Ag from 59.0 m depth Figure 1. Schematic Cross section of Drillhole SH21-040B. *Gold equivalent (AuEq) is used for illustrative purposes, to express the combined value of Au and Ag as a percentage of Au. Calculations are uncut and no allowances have been made to accommodate potential recovery losses that would occur in a mining scenario. AuEq is calculated using 80:1 silver to gold ratio. Composite results were built using a 0.1 g/t AuEq cut-off, although there are intervals within the composites below 0.1 g/t AuEq. Figure 2. Plan view of drillholes SH21-040 and SH21-040B, Creek Zone. Steven Kramar, TDG's Senior Geologist and B.C. Program Lead, commented: "SH21-040 and SH21-040B were designed to drill into the central part of the mineralized target area within the Creek Zone, stepping back away from the historical mine workings. These results demonstrate that high-grade material has been left in situ by previous operators. It also gives us the opportunity to track this style of grade and thickness at Shasta to the west of SH21-040B and parallel along strike of the Shasta Fault." SH21-040 was originally designed to confirm continuity of grade in historical holes in proximity that were drilled to shallow depths and under-assayed. Hole SH21-040 was not completed to depth as it terminated in a void, interpreted to be mine workings likely due to inaccurate information from a series of historical collar locations, and which hole SH21-040 has now helped to rectify. Hole SH21-040B was drilled ten degrees steeper and achieved the objective of passing through to the target depth of 120 m. Assay results returned precious metal concentrations significantly higher than anticipated based on historical neighbours, with mineralization persisting beyond the modelled target depth. Other key intercepts in the 2021 drilling within the section window (+/- 10 m slice) are summarised in Table 1 and presented on section, along with drillholes SH21-040 and SH21-040B; Figure 3. Drill results for remaining 2021 drillholes are pending analytical results. Table 1. Significant Results from the 2021 Drilling within the Creek Zone. Drillhole From To Length Au Ag AuEq* (m) (m) (m) (g/t) (g/t) (g/t) SH21-040 47.9 63.3 15.4 3.35 104 4.65 incl 55.5 60.0 4.5 8.61 215 11.30 SH21-040B 50.7 127.0 76.3 3.33 51 3.97 incl 59.0 93.0 34.0 7.19 105 8.49 and 142.6 149.9 7.3 0.57 3 0.61 *Gold equivalent (AuEq) is used for illustrative purposes, to express the combined value of Au and Ag as a percentage of Au. Calculations are uncut and no allowances have been made to accommodate potential recovery losses that would occur in a mining scenario. AuEq is calculated using 80:1 silver to gold ratio. Composite results were built using a 0.1 g/t AuEq cut-off, although there are intervals within the composites below 0.1 g/t AuEq. **Intervals are core-length weighted. True width is estimated between 75 to 95 % of core length, and core recovery is estimated to be > 90 %. ***Calculated composites are truncated to significant 2 digits for Au/AuEq and the nearest whole number for Ag. Photo 1 presents an example of near-surface vein style and mineralization; in this case, higher concentrations of precious metals correlate to intensity of quartz veining/brecciation (from 88.5 m to 93.0 m; 13.22 g/t Au and 34 g/t Ag; 13.66 g/t AuEq*). Photo 1. Mineralization encountered in drillhole SH21-040B from 89.53 - 95.75 m; calculated composite (absolute, no cut off) through 88.5 to 93.0 m (4.5m) 13.22 g/t Au and 34 g/t Ag [13.66 g/t AuEq*] . Mineralization occurs in SH21-040B as disseminated sulphides (pyrite) and quartz-carbonate vein/stockwork and vein-breccia hosted acanthite in potassic/sericite/chlorite altered plagioclase phyric crystal and ash volcaniclastic rocks. Generally, increasing potassic alteration and quartz-carbonate vein density is indicative of increased precious metal concentrations, but is not diagnostic in all cases. All 2021 drillholes were HQ sized drill core, and historical core are NQ/BQ core size. Particulars for 2021 drillholes (location, depth, etc.) are presented in Table 2. Assay results were received from SGS Labs Canada ("SGS"). Internal QA/QC review by TDG, working with Moose Mountain Technical Services ("MMTS"), is ongoing and therefore results are still considered preliminary. Figure 3. Cross section of Drillholes SH21-040 and SH21-040B. Table 2. 2021 Drillhole Particulars. HOLE UTME (NAD83) UTMN (NAD83) Azimuth() Dip() Final Depth (m) SH21-040 620,910 6,347,429 90 -70 57 SH21-040B 620,910 6,347,429 240 -80 177 QA/QC Samples for the Shasta 2021 drill program followed chain of custody between collection, processing and delivery to an SGS laboratory in Burnaby, B.C. The drill cores were delivered to the core shack at TDG's Baker Mine site, and processed by geologists who inserted certified reference materials, blanks and duplicates (pulp and coarse) into the sampling sequence. The 2021 drill core was cut in half (1/2 HQ core) and placed in zip-tied polyurethane bags, then in security-sealed rice bags before being delivered directly from the Baker Mine site, to Bandstra Transportation Systems in Prince George, B.C., and ultimately to the SGS laboratory in Burnaby, B.C. Samples were prepared and analyzed following procedures summarized in Table 3, where information about methodology can be found on the SGS Canada Website, in the analytical guide (here). Table 3. Au and Ag Analytical Methods. Drillhole Prep Method Au Method Ag Method Au-Overlimit Method Ag-Overlimit SH21-040 PRP89 GO_FAI50V10 GE_IMS40Q12 N/A N/A SH21-040B PRP89 GO_FAI50V10 GE_IMS40Q12 N/A GO_FAG37V Quality assurance and control ("QAQC") is maintained internally at the lab through rigorous use of internal certified reference materials, blanks, and duplicates. An additional QAQC program was administered by TDG Gold through the use of certified reference materials ("CRMs"), duplicate samples and blank samples that were blindly inserted into the sample batch. If a QAQC sample returns an unacceptable value an investigation into the results is triggered and when deemed necessary, the samples that were tested in the batch with the failed QAQC sample are re-tested. For the purposes of this press release, results are 'preliminary' and thus have not undergone TDG's comprehensive QAQC investigations. Qualified Person The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Steven Kramar, MSc., P.Geo., a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. This news release includes historical drilling information that has been reviewed by the Company's geological team. The Company's review of the historical records and information reasonably substantiate the validity of the information presented in this news release; however, the Company cannot directly verify the accuracy of the historical data, including the procedures used for sample collection and analysis. Therefore, the Company encourages investors to exercise appropriate caution when evaluating these results. Further data review is underway, in order to verify the validity of the data for the anticipated NI 43-101 compliant mineral resource estimate. About TDG Gold Corp. TDG is a major mineral claim holder in the historical Toodoggone Production Corridor of north-central British Columbia, Canada, with over 23,000 hectares of brownfield and greenfield exploration opportunities under direct ownership or earn-in agreement. TDG's flagship projects are the former producing, high grade gold-silver Shasta, Baker and Mets mines, which are all road accessible, produced intermittently between 1981-2012, and have over 65,000 m of historical drilling. In 2021, TDG advanced the projects through compilation of historical data, new geological mapping, geochemical and geophysical surveys, and, for Shasta, drill testing of the known mineralization occurrences and their extensions. TDG currently has 78,361,085 common shares issued and outstanding. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD Fletcher Morgan Chief Executive Officer For further information contact: TDG Gold Corp., Telephone: +1.604.536.2711 Email: info@tdggold.com Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on the Company's current expectations and estimates. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "suggest", "indicate" and other similar words or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from estimated or anticipated events or results implied or expressed in such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others: the actual results of current exploration activities; conclusions of economic evaluations; changes in project parameters as plans to continue to be refined; possible variations in ore grade or recovery rates; accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry; delays in obtaining governmental approvals or financing; and fluctuations in metal prices. There may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein. SOURCE: TDG Gold Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695033/TDG-Gold-Corp-Intersects-340-Metres-of-849-GT-Gold-Equivalent-in-the-Creek-Zone-Shasta-Project-Toodoggone-District-BC HIGHLIGHTS 2022 drill program at Elizabeth to focus on expansion of Blue Vein as well as the development of other vein targets including the Main Vein, West Vein and Ella Zone The 2022 drill program builds on the success of initial 39 drill-hole (9,826 metres) Phase 1 program completed by Tempus at the Elizabeth project since drilling began in November 2020 The 2022 program is planned to include approximately 30 drill-holes (for approximately 8,500 metres) including: Blue Vein - the Blue Vein was discovered in 2021 (EZ21-12 including 1.0m at 33.7g/t Au) with a total of 7 holes intersecting the vein to date (including three holes with 'bonanza' grade intersections, i.e., greater than 1oz per tonne), high-grade gold mineralisation identified over a strike length of over 80 metres (see Figure 1 and Figure 3) Approximately fifteen (15) holes have been planned to target the expansion of the Blue Vein high-grade gold mineralisation along strike and depth. The drilling will test the Blue Vein gold mineralisation over a total strike length of approximately 300 metres and to a depth of approximately 150 metres Main and West Veins - the West and Main Veins have minimal historic drilling and high-grade gold mineralisation was identified in surface trenching completed in 2003 (West Vein 55g/t Au over 20 metres and Main Vein 14g/t over 20 metres) Approximately ten (10) holes have been planned to target the potential extension of the Main and West Veins to the south of the surface trenching (see Figure 4 and Figure 5). Drilling will test the potential veins to a depth of approximately 200 metres Ella Zone - identified by trenching completed in 2003, Tempus completed one drill hole in 2021 (EZ21-21 with intersected 1g/t gold mineralisation over 2 metres within a 4 metre vein system) Three (3) holes have been planned to test the potential of the Ella Zone Exploration Holes - An additional 2 to 5 holes have been planned to test for the discovery of additional vein sets Potential for new vein discoveries north east of the Blue Vein and in the unexplored zone between the South West Vein and the West Vein (see Figure 1) Tempus targeting the completion of an updated NI43-101 Resource estimate for the Elizabeth project following the completion of the 2022 drill program PERTH, AUSTRALIA / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 /Tempus Resources Ltd ("Tempus" or the "Company") (ASX:TMR)(TSX.V:TMRR)(OTCQB:TMRFF) is pleased to announce the 2022 exploration plan for the Elizabeth Gold Project located in Southern British Columbia. Tempus President and CEO, Jason Bahnsen, commented "The 2022 exploration program at Elizabeth will focus on further delineation of the new Blue Vein and the expansion of the overall mineralisation for the project in advance of preparing a resource estimate. We have executed a contract with our drilling contractor, Full Force Drilling, and we plan to begin mobilisation to the site in May with drilling targeted to begin early June." Elizabeth Gold Project - 2022 Exploration Program The 2022 exploration program at Elizabeth will build on the success of the 2021 drill program and focus on expansion of the overall resource for the project. A total of 28 drill diamond core drill holes (approximately 7,820 metres) were completed at the Elizabeth Gold Project in 2021. Combined with drilling completed in 2020, Tempus has now completed 39 drill holes (approximately 9,826 metres) in total on the Elizabeth Gold Project. In 2022, Tempus is planning to complete an additional 25-30 diamond core drill holes (approximately 8,500 metres) at the Elizabeth Gold Project. The key target areas in the 2022 drill program include the Blue Vein, West and Main Veins, the Ella Zone. The overall exploration drilling strategy for the Elizabeth Project is focused on increasing the size and confidence level of the historic inferred resource of approximately 206,139 ounces of contained gold (522,843 tonnes @ 12.26 g/t gold - SRK 2009). Apart from a few infill drill holes intended to convert inferred resources to the indicated category, the majority of the drill holes completed by Tempus to intersect the gold vein structures are outside of the 2009 resource block model. The results of the 2022 drill program will contribute to the completion of an updated NI43-101 Resource estimate for the Elizabeth Project. The Company is not currently planning to do any exploration field work at the Blackdome Gold Mine in 2022. Blue Vein The Blue Vein is located approximately 150 metres to the northwest, near vertical in dip, and parallel, to the SW Vein (See Figure 1). This previously unknown vein has now been intersected by 7 drill-holes (EZ-21-09, EZ-21-12, EZ-21-19, EZ-21-24, EZ-21-25, EZ-21-26, EZ-21-27) demonstrating an initial strike length of 380 metres (see Figure 3). The Blue Vein structure has been intercepted to approximately 100 metres depth and remains open along strike and down dip. (See Figure 1, Figure 3). Three of the seven drill holes completed at Blue Vein intersected grades of greater than 1 oz per tonne of gold. The high-grade mineralization at the Blue Vein has been delineated over an initial strike length of approximately 80 metres within the overall 380 metre of vein structure that has been identified through drilling. Highlights from the Blue Vein drilling completed in 2021 include. Drill hole EZ-21-12 with an intersection of visible gold returning 33.7 g/t gold over 1.0 metre from 117.8 metres Drill hole EZ-21-25 with an intersection of quartz veining that assayed 13.4 g/t gold over 2.7 metres from 111.0 metres including 71.3 g/t gold over 0.50 metres from 111.5 metres Drill hole EZ-21-26 intersected 9.13 g/t gold over 1.25 metres from 121.5 metres, including 45.1 g/t gold over 0.25 metres from 121.5 metres Drill hole EZ-21-27 intersected 14.3 g/t gold over 1.4 metres from 152.2 metres, including 19.2 g/t gold over 1.00 metres from 152.2 metres The strike distance of high-grade results from the Blue Vein between drill-holes EZ-21-27 and EZ-21-25 is approximately 80 metres and encompasses the discovery hole EZ-21-12 and EZ-21-26 (See Figure 3). Assay grades for these holes range from 9.13 g/t gold to 71.3 g/t gold over widths ranging from 0.50 m to 2.70 metres. These results show the continuity of the high grades within the Blue Vein over a strike distance of more than 80 metres. The Blue Vein structure has been identified over a total strike length of 380 metres. The 2022 drill program will target the southern and northern extension to the current high grade gold mineralisation. A total of 15 drill holes are planned that target the Blue Vein (see Figure 3). South West Vein Tempus has completed a total of twenty three (23) drill holes that have intersected the South West Vein (SW Vein). The gold mineralisation of the SW Vein has now been defined to extend approximately 400 metres in strike and up to 200 metres in depth. The SW Vein remains open at depth and along strike. The drilling results to date are showing consistent structure. Tempus has drilled deeper at Elizabeth than any of the historic drilling completed on the project. The deep intersections of the SW Vein are encouraging and geologically very significant as the vein continues at depth, as does the alteration and associated mineralization as identified in other high-grade intercepts from the SW Vein. This mineralization at depth is consistent with typical Mesothermal/Orogenic gold deposits, such as the Bralorne-Pioneer Gold mine 30km to the south of Elizabeth and is confirmed with the ICP-OES assay analysis which indicates elevated arsenic, antimony, silver, and mercury when intersecting the SW Vein at depth. Significant intersections from the SW Vein include: EZ-21-04 - 31.2 g/t gold over 4.00m from 122.0m, including; 52.1 g/t gold over 1.50m from 123.0m, and including; 72.0 g/t gold over 0.50m from 124.0m EZ-20-06 - 61.3 g/t gold over 5.0m at from 116.5m, including 186.0 g/t gold over 1.5m from 118.0m EZ-20-10: 28.1 g/t gold over 3.2m from 184.0m, including 178.0 g/t gold over 0.5m from 184.5 EZ-21-23 intersected a 4.10 m quartz vein zone at 1.83 g/t gold from 145.0m, including 4.98 g/t gold over 0.70m from 147.5m. Drilling completed in 2021, completes the initial phase of drilling on the SW Vein. Mineralisation remains open at depth and along strike. Tempus will plan to complete future drilling on the SW vein from the underground portal access that is pending permitting. Main Vein / West Vein Zone The Main Vein and the West Vein are largely unexplored and no drilling has been done to the southern extension of these vein structures. Historic trenching at Elizabeth on the West Vein (above the West Vein underground drift) in 2003 returned 55.1 g/t gold over a strike length of 20.0m and 14.2 g/t gold over a strike length of 20.0m and from the Main vein (above the Main Vein underground drift). Note, historic trenching results are historic in nature and are not compliant with NI 43-101 standards and should not be relied upon and are to be used as a reference only. In 2021, Tempus completed one drill hole intersecting the West Vein (EZ-21-05). The vein was intersected at 554.8m downhole depth with mesothermal type mineralization and anomalous gold. Drill hole EZ-21-05 was a sizable ~450m step out to the SW, along strike from any previous drilling on the West Vein. Tempus is planning to complete ten (10) drill holes targeting the Main and West Veins in the 2022 exploration drill program at Elizabeth. Ella Zone In 2021, Tempus completed one exploration drill hole at the Ella Zone (EZ-21-21) targeting quartz veining identified from 2003 trenching in the area. This first drill hole in this target returned encouraging results with up to 1.03 g/t gold over 2.0m from 184.0m within a 4.0m veining zone. The geochemistry supports a mesothermal style mineralized vein with assay results retuning highly anomalous arsenic and antimony. At least two drill holes are planned to target the Ella Zone in 2022 Elizabeth drill program. Other Exploration Targets The Elizabeth project is a multi-vein epithermal/orogenic system with historic 'bonanza' grade intercepts in drill core and surface trenching. There are more than 9 known vein systems on the property hosting gold mineralisation. There is potential for new vein discoveries north east of the Blue Vein and in the unexplored zone between the South West Vein and the West Vein (See Figure 1). Figure 1 - The Elizabeth Project - Plan View Showing 2022 Proposed Drill Holes Figure 2 - Southwest Vein Drill Hole Intersections Figure 3 - Blue Vein Longitudinal Section Showing 2022 Proposed Drill Holes Figure 4 - West Vein Longitudinal Section Showing 2022 Proposed Drill Holes Figure 5 - Main Vein Longitudinal Section Showing 2022 Proposed Holes This announcement has been authorised by the Board of Directors of Tempus Resources Limited. Competent Persons Statement Information in this report relating to Exploration Results is based on information reviewed by Mr. Sonny Bernales, who is a Member of the Engineers and Geoscientists British Columbia (EGBC), which is a recognised Professional Organisation (RPO), and an employee of Tempus Resources. Mr. Bernales has sufficient experience which is relevant to the style of mineralisation and type of deposit under consideration and to the activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a Competent Person as defined by the 2012 Edition of the Australasian Code for reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves, and as a Qualified Person for the purposes of NI43-101. Mr. Bernales consents to the inclusion of the data in the form and context in which it appears. For further information: TEMPUS RESOURCES LTD Melanie Ross - Director/Company Secretary Phone: +61 8 6188 8181 About Tempus Resources Ltd Tempus Resources Ltd ("Tempus") is a growth orientated gold exploration company listed on ASX ("TMR") and TSX.V ("TMRR") and OTCQB ("TMRFF") stock exchanges. Tempus is actively exploring projects located in Canada and Ecuador. The flagship project for Tempus is the Elizabeth-Blackdome Project, a high-grade gold past producing project located in Southern British Columbia. Tempus is currently midway through a drill program at Elizabeth-Blackdome that will form the basis of an updated NI43-101/JORC resource estimate. The second key group of projects for Tempus are the Rio Zarza and Valle del Tigre projects located in south east Ecuador. The Rio Zarza project is located adjacent to Lundin Gold's Fruta del Norte project. The Valle del Tigre project is currently subject to a sampling program to develop anomalies identified through geophysical work. Forward-Looking Information and Statements This press release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Such forward-looking information and forward-looking statements are not representative of historical facts or information or current condition, but instead represent only the Company's beliefs regarding future events, plans or objectives, many of which, by their nature, are inherently uncertain and outside of Tempus's control. Generally, such forward-looking information or forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or may contain statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "will continue", "will occur" or "will be achieved". The forward-looking information and forward-looking statements contained herein may include, but are not limited to, the ability of Tempus to successfully achieve business objectives, and expectations for other economic, business, and/or competitive factors. Forward-looking statements and information are subject to various known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the ability of Tempus to control or predict, that may cause Tempus' actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied thereby, and are developed based on assumptions about such risks, uncertainties and other factors set out herein and the other risks and uncertainties disclosed under the heading "Risk and Uncertainties" in the Company's Management's Discussion & Analysis for the quarter and half-year ended December 31, 2021 dated February 14, 2022 filed on SEDAR. Should one or more of these risks, uncertainties or other factors materialize, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking information or statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein as intended, planned, anticipated, believed, estimated or expected. Although Tempus believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing, and the expectations contained in, the forward-looking information and statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on such information and statements, and no assurance or guarantee can be given that such forward-looking information and statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information and statements. The forward-looking information and forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, and Tempus does not undertake to update any forward-looking information and/or forward-looking statements that are contained or referenced herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. All subsequent written and oral forward-looking information and statements attributable to Tempus or persons acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in its entirety by this notice. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Appendix 1 Table 1: Drill Hole Collar Table Hole ID Target UTM Easting (NAD83 Z10) UTM Northing (NAD83 Z10) Elevation (m) Length (m) Azimuth Dip EZ-21-01 SW Vein 531203 5653771 2400 105 121 -52 EZ-21-02 SW Vein 531203 5653771 2400 132 146 -55 EZ-21-03 SW Vein 531203 5653771 2400 111 158 -47 EZ-21-04 SW Vein 531203 5653771 2400 135 168 -58 EZ-21-05 SW Vein 531078 5653776 2400 561 123 -48 EZ-21-06 SW Vein 531078 5653776 2400 255 110 -55 EZ-21-07 SW Vein 531203 5653771 2400 126 115 -75 EZ-21-07b SW Vein 531203 5653771 2400 186 115 -75 EZ-21-08 SW Vein 531195 5653839 2427 231 115 -68 EZ-21-09 SW Vein 531200 5654020 2330 360 120 -48 EZ-21-10 SW Vein 530953 5653772 2390 354 127 -50 EZ-21-11 SW Vein 530953 5653772 2390 381 136 -50 EZ-21-12 SW Vein 530953 5653772 2390 375 125 -45 EZ-21-13 SW Vein 530919 5653596 2300 261 94 -45 EZ-21-14 SW Vein 530919 5653596 2300 261 108 -55 EZ-21-15 SW Vein 530919 5653596 2300 330 100 -55 EZ-21-16 SW Vein 530919 5653596 2300 330 83 -48.5 EZ-21-17 SW Vein 530919 5653596 2300 414 98 -63 EZ-21-18 SW Vein 530919 5653596 2300 351 128.5 -63 EZ-21-19 SW Vein 530953 5653772 2390 417 129 -58 EZ-21-20 SW Vein 530849 5653432 2260 300 129 -45 EZ-21-21 East Veins 531695 5653463 2120 357 90 -45 EZ-21-22 SW Vein 531195 5653839 2427 188 75 -45 EZ-21-23 SW Vein 531695 5653463 2120 165 91 -45 EZ-21-24 Blue Vein 530953 5653772 2390 219 84 -54 EZ-21-25 Blue Vein 530953 5653772 2390 201 105 -58 EZ-21-26 Blue Vein 530953 5653772 2390 198 95 -45 EZ-21-27 Blue Vein 530953 5653772 2390 195 150 -60 EZ-21-28 No.9 Vein 530953 5653772 2390 321 300 -55 Table 2: Significant Interval Table Hole ID From (m) To (m) Interval (m) True Thickness (m) Gold Grade MET Screen Grade Vein EZ-21-01 94.00 96.60 2.60 2.21 4.60 5.12 SW Vein and 83.50 84.00 0.50 0.43 20.50 pending SW Vein EZ-21-02 102.40 109.00 6.60 5.61 8.40 pending SW Vein including 105.40 106.50 1.10 0.93 46.30 pending SW Vein EZ-21-03 88.60 95.00 6.40 5.44 7.22 pending SW Vein including 89.30 91.90 2.60 2.21 11.80 pending SW Vein and 90.00 91.30 1.30 1.11 19.80 pending SW Vein and 34.70 35.20 0.50 0.43 3.15 pending SW Vein EZ-21-04 122.00 126.00 4.00 3.40 31.20 34.40 SW Vein including 123.00 124.50 1.50 1.28 52.10 68.30 SW Vein including 124.00 124.50 0.50 0.43 72.00 87.30 SW Vein EZ-21-05 134.00 135.00 1.00 0.85 1.38 Not Preformed 7 Vein 217.55 218.25 0.70 0.59 1.74 1.67 SW Vein and 256.00 256.50 0.50 0.43 1.03 0.89 SW Vein and 554.85 555.35 0.50 0.43 0.24 Not Preformed West Vein EZ-21-06 134.50 136.00 1.50 1.28 1.10 1.71 7 Vein and 245.00 246.00 1.00 0.85 2.05 2.45 SW Vein EZ-21-07 Hole lost EZ-21-07B 40.10 41.10 1.00 0.85 4.88 Not Preformed 7 Vein and 51.50 52.20 0.70 0.60 9.06 Not Preformed 7 Vein and 160.00 165.75 5.75 4.89 0.53 0.70 SW Vein EZ-21-08 196.25 202.40 6.15 5.23 0.65 0.66 SW Vein and 226.60 227.10 0.50 0.43 1.54 1.85 SW Vein EZ-21-09 58.60 59.10 0.50 0.43 0.31 Not Preformed Blue Vein and 270.90 272.90 2.00 1.70 2.56 Not Preformed SW Vein and 355.88 357.00 1.12 0.95 0.85 Not Preformed SW Vein EZ-21-10 223.00 223.50 0.50 0.43 4.04 Not Preformed 7 Vein and 347.70 349.20 1.50 1.28 0.22 0.21 SW Vein EZ-21-11 326.90 327.40 0.50 0.43 0.55 0.44 SW Vein EZ-21-12 117.80 118.80 1.00 0.85 47.6 33.7 Blue Vein and 130.70 131.20 0.50 0.43 26.4 Not Preformed Blue Vein and 163.90 164.40 0.50 0.43 5.50 8.41 Blue Vein and 344.90 347.00 2.10 1.79 0.78 1.22 SW Vein EZ-21-13 230.70 232.60 1.90 1.62 0.76 0.71 SW Vein Hole ID From (m) To (m) Interval (m) True Thickness (m) Gold Grade MET Screen Grade Vein EZ-21-14 224.00 224.90 0.90 0.77 1.63 1.15 SW Vein EZ-21-15 318.40 320.80 2.40 2.04 0.31 Not Preformed SW Vein including 320.30 320.80 0.50 0.43 1.14 Not Preformed SW Vein EZ-21-16 305.00 306.90 1.90 1.61 0.55 Not Preformed SW Vein EZ-21-17 171.00 171.50 0.50 0.43 0.14 0.57 Vein and 204.00 204.60 0.60 0.51 0.53 Not Preformed vein and 254.60 256.85 2.25 1.91 1.40 1.58 7 Vein and 350.13 350.75 0.62 0.53 1.01 Not Preformed SW Vein and 379.47 382.00 2.53 2.15 0.63 0.64 SW Vein EZ-21-18 299.50 299.90 0.40 0.34 1.53 Not Preformed SW Vein EZ-21-19 127.50 128.00 0.50 0.43 4.52 Not Preformed Blue Vein and 129.00 130.50 1.50 1.28 4.25 Not Preformed Blue Vein and 167.80 168.70 0.90 0.76 4.50 6.14 Blue Vein and 351.80 354.90 3.10 2.63 0.34 Not Preformed SW Vein EZ-21-20 NSI** EZ-21-21 184.00 186.00 2.00 1.70 1.03 Not Preformed unknown and 263.45 264.30 0.85 0.72 1.34 Not Preformed unknown EZ-21-22 175.55 176.70 1.15 0.98 1.60 2.50 SW Vein EZ-21-23 145.00 149.10 4.10 3.48 1.11 1.83 SW Vein including 147.50 148.20 0.70 0.59 1.08 4.98 SW Vein EZ-21-24 139.80 141.00 1.20 1.02 0.58 0.58 Blue Vein and 181.70 182.65 0.95 0.81 0.85 0.84 Blue Vein EZ-21-25 111.00 113.70 2.70 2.30 13.4 Not Preformed Blue Vein including 111.50 112.00 0.50 0.43 71.3 Not Preformed Blue Vein EZ-21-26 121.45 122.70 1.25 1.06 9.13 Not Preformed Blue Vein including 121.45 121.70 0.25 0.21 45.1 Not Preformed Blue Vein and 159.06 160.25 1.19 1.01 1.35 1.45 Blue Vein EZ-21-27 152.20 153.60 1.40 1.19 12.1 14.31 Blue Vein including 152.20 153.20 1.00 0.85 16.3 19.19 Blue Vein and 157.00 157.40 0.40 0.34 1.27 1.28 Blue Vein EZ-21-28 245.60 246.85 1.25 1.06 0.67 Not Preformed No.9 Vein Appendix 2: The following tables are provided to ensure compliance with the JORC Code (2012) requirements for the reporting of Exploration Results for the Elizabeth - Blackdome Gold Project Section 1: Sampling Techniques and Data (Criteria in this section apply to all succeeding sections.) Criteria JORC Code explanation Commentary Sampling techniques Nature and quality of sampling (eg cut channels, random chips, or specific specialised industry standard measurement tools appropriate to the minerals under investigation, such as down hole gammasondes, or handheld XRF instruments, etc). These examples should not be taken as limiting the broad meaning of sampling. Include reference to measures taken to ensure sample representivity and the appropriate calibration of any measurement tools or systems used. Aspects of the determination of mineralisation that are Material to the Public Report. In cases where 'industry standard' work has been done this would be relatively simple(eg 'reverse circulation drilling was used to obtain1 m samples from which 3 kg was pulverised to produce a 30 g charge for fire assay'). In other cases more explanation may be required, such as where there is coarse gold that has inherent sampling problems. Unusual commodities or mineralisation types (eg submarine nodules) may warrant disclosure of detailed information. HQ (63.5 mm) sized diamond core using standard equipment. Mineralised and potentially mineralised zones, comprising veins, breccias, and alteration zones were sampled. Samples were half core. Typical core samples are 1m in length. Core samples sent to the lab will be crushed and pulverized to 85% passing75 microns. A 50g pulp will be fire assayed for gold and multi-element ICP.Samples over 10 g/t gold will be reanalysed by fire assay with gravimetric finish Drilling techniques Drill type (eg core, reverse circulation, open-hole hammer, rotary air blast, auger, Bangka, sonic, etc) and details (eg core diameter, triple or standard tube, depth of diamond tails, face-sampling bit or other type, whether core is oriented and if so, by what method, etc). Diamond Drilling from surface (HQ size) Drill sample recovery Method of recording and assessing core and chip sample recoveries and results assessed. Measures taken to maximise sample recovery and ensure representative nature of the samples. Whether a relationship exists between sample recovery and grade and whether sample bias may have occurred due to preferential loss/gain of fine/coarse material. Detailed calculation of recovery was recorded, with most holes achieving over 95% No relationship has yet been noted between recovery and grade and no sample bias was noted to have occurred. Criteria JORC Code explanation Commentary Logging Whether core and chip samples have been geologically and geotechnically logged to a level of detail to support appropriate Mineral Resource estimation, mining studies and metallurgical studies. Whether logging is qualitative or quantitative in nature. Core (or costean, channel, etc) photography. The total length and percentage of the relevant intersections logged. Detailed geological and geotechnical logging was completed for each hole. All core has been photographed. Complete holes were logged. Sub- sampling techniques and sample preparation If core, whether cut or sawn and whether quarter, half or all core taken. If non-core, whether riffled, tube sampled, rotary split, etc and whether sampled wet or dry. For all sample types, the nature, quality and appropriateness of the sample preparation technique. Quality control procedures adopted for all sub- sampling stages to maximise representivity of samples. Measures taken to ensure that the sampling is representative of the in situ material collected, including for instance results for field duplicate/second-half sampling. Whether sample sizes are appropriate to the grainsize of the material being sampled. Half core was sampled, using a core saw. Duplicate samples of new and historical core are Quarter core or half core where not previously sampled Sample sizes are considered appropriate for the grain size of the material being sampled. It is expected that bulk sampling will be utilised as the project advances, to more accurately determine grade. Quality of assay data and laboratory tests The nature, quality and appropriateness of the assaying and laboratory procedures used and whether the technique is considered partial or total. For geophysical tools, spectrometers, handheld XRF instruments, etc, the parameters used in determining the analysis including instrument make and model, reading times, calibrations factors applied and their derivation, etc. Nature of quality control procedures adopted (eg standards, blanks, duplicates, external laboratory checks) and whether acceptable levels of accuracy (ie lack of bias) and precision have been established. Core samples that have been sent to the lab for analysis include control samples(standards, blanks and prep duplicates) inserted at a minimum rate of 1:5 samples. In addition to the minimum rate of inserted control samples, a standard or a blank is inserted following a zone of mineralization or visible gold Further duplicate samples were analysed to assess variability Verification of sampling and assaying The verification of significant intersections by either independent or alternative company personnel. The use of twinned holes. Documentation of primary data, data entry procedures, data verification, data storage (physical and electronic) protocols. Discuss any adjustment to assay data. Re-assaying of selected intervals of historic core have been sent for analysis. Criteria JORC Code explanation Commentary Location of data points Accuracy and quality of surveys used to locate drill holes (collar and down-hole surveys), trenches, mine workings and other locations used in Mineral Resource estimation. Specification of the grid system used. Quality and adequacy of topographic control. All sampling points were surveyed using a hand held GPS. UTM grid NAD83Zone 10. A more accurate survey pickup will be completed at the end of the program, to ensure data is appropriate for geological modelling and Resource Estimation. Down hole surveys have been completed on all holes. Data spacing and distribution Data spacing for reporting of Exploration Results. Whether the data spacing and distribution is sufficient to establish the degree of geological and grade continuity appropriate for the Mineral Resource and Ore Reserve estimation procedure(s) and classifications applied. Whether sample compositing has been applied. Most drilling is targeting verification and extension of known mineralisation. It is expected that the data will be utilised in a preparation of a Mineral Resource statement. Additional drilling is exploration beneath geochemical anomalies, and would require further delineation drilling to be incorporated in a Mineral Resource. Orientation of data in relation to geological structure Whether the orientation of sampling achieves unbiased sampling of possible structures and the extent to which this is known, considering the deposit type. If the relationship between the drilling orientation and the orientation of key mineralised structures is considered to have introduced a sampling bias, this should be assessed and reported if material. In general, the aim was to drill perpendicular to the mineralised structures, to gain an estimate of the true thickness of the mineralised structures. At several locations, a series (fan) of holes was drilled to help confirm the orientation of the mineralised structures and to keep land disturbance to a minimum. Samples Security The measures taken to ensure sample security. Samples from Elizabeth were delivered to the laboratory by a commercial transport service. Audits or Reviews The results of any auditor reviews of sampling techniques and data. An independent geological consultant has recently visited the site as part of preparing an updated NI43-101Technical Report for the Project. Section 2: Reporting of Exploration Results (Criteria listed in the preceding section also apply to this section.) Criteria JORC Code explanation Commentary Mineral tenement and land tenure status Type, reference name/number, location and ownership including agreements or material issues with third parties such as joint ventures, partnerships, overriding royalties, native title interests, historical sites, wilderness or national park and environmental settings. The security of the tenure held at the time of reporting along with any known impediments to obtaining a licence to operate in the area. The Blackdome-Elizabeth Project is comprised of 73 contiguous mineral claims underlain by 14 Crown granted mineral claims and two mining leases. The Property is located in the Clinton and Lillooet Mining Divisions approximately 230 km NNE of Vancouver Tempus has exercised the option to acquire the Elizabeth Gold Project and has completed an addendum to the original Elizabeth Option Agreement (refer to ASX announcement 15 December 2020) A net smelter royalty of 3% NSR (1% purchasable) applies to several claims on the Elizabeth Property. No royalties apply to the Blackdome Property or Elizabeth Regional Properties. There are currently no known impediments to developing a project in this area, and all tenure is in good standing. Exploration done by other parties Acknowledgment and appraisal of exploration by other parties. In the 1940s, placer gold was discovered in Fairless Creek west of Blackdome Summit. Prospecting by Lawrence Frenier shortly afterward led to the discovery of gold-bearing quartz veins on the southwest slope of the mountain that resulted in the staking of mining claims in 1947. Empire Valley Gold Mines Ltd and Silver Standard Resources drove two adits and completed basic surface work during the 1950s. The Blackdome area was not worked again until 1977 when Barrier Reef Resources Ltd. re-staked the area and performed surface work in addition to underground development. The Blackdome Mining Corp. was formed in 1978 and performed extensive surface and underground work with various joint venture partners that resulted in a positive feasibility study. A 200 ton/day mill, camp facilities and tailings pond were constructed and mining operations officially commenced in 1986. The mine ceased operations in 1991, having produced 225,000oz of Au and 547,000oz of Ag from 338,000tons of ore (Godard et al., 2010) After a period of inactivity, Claimstaker Resources Ltd. took over the project, reopening the mine in late 1998. Mining operations lasted six months and ended in May of 1999. During this period, 6,547 oz of Au and 17,300 oz of Ag were produced from 21,268 tons of ore. Further exploration programs were continued by Claimstaker over the following years and a Japanese joint venture partner was brought onboard that prompted a name change to J-Pacific Gold Inc. This partnership was terminated by 2010, resulting in another name change to Sona Resources Corp. Gold-bearing quartz veins were discovered near Blue Creek in 1934, and in 1940-1941 the Elizabeth No. 1-4 claims were staked. Bralorne Mines Ltd. optioned the property in 1941 and during the period 1948-1949, explored the presently- named Main and West Veins by about 700 metres of cross-cutting and drifting, as well as about 110 metres of raises After acquiring the Elizabeth Gold Project in 2002, J- Pacific (now Sona) has conducted a series of exploration programs that included diamond drilling 66 holes totalling 8962.8 metres (up until 2009) Other exploration work by Sona at the Elizabeth Gold Project has included two soil grid, stream sediment sampling, geological mapping and sampling, underground rehabilitation, structural mapping and airborne photography and topographic base map generation Geology Deposit type, geological setting and style of mineralisation. The Blackdome property is situated in a region underlain by rocks of Triassic to Tertiary age. Sedimentary and igneous rocks of the Triassic Pavilion Group occurring along the Fraser River represent the oldest rocks in the region. A large, Triassic age, ultramafic complex (Shulaps Complex) was emplaced along the Yalakom fault; a regional scale structure located some 30 kilometres south of the property. Sediments and volcanics of the Cretaceous Jackass Mountain Group and Spences Bridge/Kingsvale Formations overlie the Triassic assemblages. Some of these rocks occur several kilometres south of Blackdome. Overlying the Cretaceous rocks are volcanics and minor sediments of Eocene age. These rocks underlie much of Blackdome and are correlated with the Kamloops Group seen in the Ashcroft and Nicola regions. Geochemical studies (Vivian, 1988) have shown these rocks to be derived from a "calc-alkaline" magma in a volcanic arc type tectonic setting. Eocene age granitic intrusions at Poison Mountain some 22 kilometres southwest of Blackdome are host to a gold bearing porphyry copper/molybdenum deposit. It is speculated that this or related intrusions could reflect the source magmas of the volcanic rocks seen at Blackdome. There is some documented evidence of young granitic rocks several kilometres south of the mine near Lone Cabin Creek. The youngest rocks present are Oligocene to Miocene basalts of the Chilcotin Group. These are exposed on the uppermost slopes of Blackdome Mountain and Red Mountain to the south. Transecting the property in a NE-SW strike direction are a series of faults that range from vertical to moderately westerly dipping. These faults are the principal host structures for Au- Ag mineralisation. The faults anastomose, and form sygmoidal loops. The area in which the Elizabeth Gold Project is situated is underlain by Late Paleozoic to Mesozoic rock assemblages that are juxtaposed across a complex system of faults mainly of Cretaceous and Tertiary age. These Paleozoic to Mesozoic-age rocks are intruded by Cretaceous and Tertiary-age stocks and dykes of mainly felsic to intermediate composition, and are locally overlain by Paleogene volcanic and sedimentary rocks. The Elizabeth Gold Project is partly underlain by ultramafic rocks of the Shulaps Ultramafic Complex, which include harzburgite, serpentinite and their alteration product listwanite. The gold mineralisation found on the Elizabeth Gold Project present characteristics typical of epigenetic mesothermal gold deposits. The auriferous quartz vein mineralisation is analogous to that found in the Bralorne- Pioneer deposits. Gold mineralisation is hosted by a series of northeast trending, steeply northwest dipping veins that crosscut the Blue Creek porphyry intrusion. The Main and West vein systems display mesothermal textures, including ribboned-laminated veins and comprehensive wall rock breccias. Vein formation and gold mineralisation were associated with extensional- brittle faulting believed to be contemporaneous with mid- Eocene extensional faulting along the Marshall Creek, Mission Ridge and Quartz Mountain faults Criteria JORC Code explanation Commentary Balanced reporting Where comprehensive reporting of all Exploration Results is not practicable, representative reporting of both low and high grades and/or widths should be practiced to avoid misleading reporting of Exploration Results. Where broader low-grade intervals are reported the high-grade intercepts are reported as 'including' within the reported interval Other substantive exploration data Other exploration data, if meaningful and material, should be reported including (but not limited to): geological observations; geophysical survey results; geochemical survey results; bulk samples - size and method of treatment; metallurgical test results; bulk density, groundwater, geotechnical and rock characteristics; potential deleterious or contaminating substances. Tempus recently completed an airborne magnetic and radiometric survey over the Elizabeth Gold Project (refer to ASX announcement 02 August 2021) by completing 97 lines for a total of 735 line-kilometres. Flight lines are oriented east-west with north-south tie lines and spaced 200 metres across the entire 115km2 Elizabeth property. Line spacing of 100 metres was flown over the Elizabeth Main and Elizabeth East Zones. The airborne magnetic survey data was reviewed and interpreted by Insight Geophysics Inc. using 3D magnetization vector inversion (MVI) modelling. The geophysical surveys identified the Blue Creek Porphyry, which is the known host of the high-grade Elizabeth gold-quartz veins, as a relative magnetic low anomaly within the Shulaps Ultramafic Complex. From this correlation of geology and geophysics it was determined that the Blue Creek Porphyry, originally explored / mapped to approximately 1.1km2 in size, is likely much larger. The airborne magnetic survey and MVI 3D modelling interpret the Blue Creek Porphyry to be at least four-times the size at approximately 4.5km2. This interpretation of the Blue Creek Porphyry is also extensive at depth extending to at least 2km deep Further work The nature and scale of planned further work (eg tests for lateral extensions or depth extensions or large- scale step-out drilling). Diagrams clearly highlighting the areas of possible extensions, including the main geological interpretations and future drilling areas, provided this information is not commercially sensitive. Tempus plans to update historical NI43-101 foreign resource estimates to current NI43-101 and JORC 2012 standards Tempus is also seeking to expand the scale of the mineralisation at the project through further exploration. SOURCE: Tempus Resources Ltd View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695002/Elizabeth-Exploration-2022-Focus-on-Mineralisation-Expansion Education is one of the core pillars of our Erbe Group vision. The Erbe Academy program is one of our company's success stories. It provides a network for doctors, nurses and our company's global sales team to gain new knowledge and experience and share it with peers. In addition, we qualify our employees to act as reliable partners for healthcare professionals and institutions worldwide. We do not merely want to offer products, but also holistic solutions for our customers. Now we are taking the next step and starting to enhance the success story of the Erbe Academy. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005477/en/ Erbe Academy in Singapore (Photo: Business Wire) "Expanding our network of academies and partner centers is an important milestone and a crucial step in our efforts to enlarge knowledge and confidence for better patient outcomes and to facilitate exchange of experience between experts and users," Mariuccia Zambelli, Vice President Global Marketing, explains. Erbe launched its second hub of the Erbe Academy at the German Centre in Singapore with an opening ceremony on March 11th, 2022. The German Centre offers us the flexibility we require to adapt our office space needs to our business development. The intent of the Erbe Academy is to qualify and empower Erbe sales teams worldwide and to support physicians and OR nurses through hands-on training on high-end applications and comprehensive lectures on Erbe technologies. Our company contributes to patient safety and to the exchange of experience among experts and users in this way. Christian O. Erbe: "At the Erbe Academy, we offer many courses and trainings. We share our experience and our know-how and train the participants in using our technologies. We do this for our own employees in sales, technical service and marketing. And we do this for external parties like doctors, nurse technicians and many others working in various medical disciplines. Erbe Academy in Singapore will be the first academy abroad and the German Centre is the perfect place for it." About Erbe Erbe Elektromedizin GmbH develops, manufactures and distributes surgical instruments and devices worldwide, while providing services for professional use of these products in a diverse range of medical disciplines. Surgeons, OP teams and patients around the world rely on Erbe medical technology. The surgical instruments and devices find use in almost all specialist areas. They are based on electrosurgery combined with other Erbe technologies. Hybrid solutions enable us to provide new, innovative applications in medicine. Fields of activity Imaging Endoscopy Electrosurgery Plasma surgery Thermofusion Hydrosurgery Cryosurgery An international network 16 subsidiaries in Europe, America and Asia 1 representative office Erbe is active in 110 national markets The Erbe workforce Over 1,200 employees worldwide Some 700 of them in Germany View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005477/en/ Contacts: Erbe Elektromedizin GmbH David Malecki Tel +49 7071 755-316 david.malecki@erbe-med.com info@erbe-med.com www.erbe-med.com MOSCOW (dpa-AFX) - As the next round of ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine kicked off in Istanbul Tuesday, Ukrainian forces have started counterattacks in parts of Kyiv in response to overnight shelling of reclaimed territory of Irpin. It marks the first face-to-face talks in more than two weeks, but hopes of progress are reportedly slim. Addressing the delegates, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the talks need to yield 'concrete results'. In an appeal he made overnight, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on world powers to toughen sanctions on Russia, including an oil embargo. A senior US defense official confirmed that Ukraine has managed to retake the town of Trostyanets near the northern region of Sumy and that Russia's advance on Kyiv has stalled amid a shift in focus towards the eastern Donbas region. The British Defense Ministry said in its latest assessment of the fighting that Ukrainian forces have conducted localised counter attacks north west of Kyiv with some success, forcing the Russians to step back from multiple positions. 'In Kyiv region, after the village of Lukianivka, where there were very fierce battles a few days ago, we liberated Rudnytske village,' Vadym Denysenko, an adviser to the Interior Minister of Ukraine, said on television. Meanwhile, talking to the media after presenting the Fiscal Year 2023 Budget, President Joe Biden said he is not trying to walk back on the remarks he made about Vladimir Putin, but was expressing the moral outrage he felt toward the way the Russian leader is dealing the war in Ukraine. 'I want to make it clear: I wasn't then, nor am I now, articulating a policy change. I was expressing the moral outrage that I feel, and I make no apologies for it,' he told reporters. Biden's earlier statement that Putin should be removed from power had turned controversial. 'I just was expressing my outrage. He shouldn't remain in power. Just like, you know, bad people shouldn't continue to do bad things. But it doesn't mean we have a fundamental policy to do anything to take Putin down in any way,' Biden added. In another development, the U.S. Navy has sent six EA-18G Growler aircraft to the Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany. Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby clarified that they are not being deployed to be used against Russian forces in Ukraine. 'They are being deployed completely in keeping with our efforts to bolster NATO's deterrence and defense capabilities along that eastern flank.' Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de KABUL, March 29 (Xinhua) -- A batch of humanitarian supplies, provided by China's South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund, in cooperation with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), was handed over to Afghanistan on Sunday. Speaking at a handover ceremony in Kabul, Chinese Ambassador to Afghanistan Wang Yu said the Chinese government has been highly concerned about the Afghan people who are suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic, unrest and drought. Last year, the South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund approved in time a request from the UNHCR on providing the vulnerable groups in Afghanistan with emergency shelter supplies and education support, and offered fund support, the Chinese ambassador said. With the efforts from the UNHCR, all the supplies have been purchased, and now are distributed in Kabul, Kandahar, Baghlan and Nangarhar provinces, among others, Wang said, adding the needy Afghans will get relief with the supplies. The UNHCR's acting representative in Afghanistan Yumiko Takashima appreciated the South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund for providing the fund support, saying the timely assistance will benefit more than 90,000 displaced Afghans and school children. Produced by Xinhua Global Service Only vendor to get a 100% recommendation rating for the second year in succession BANGALORE, India, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Indusface, a Tata-funded Application Security SaaS company, has been recognized as a Customers' Choice globally. It is the only vendor to also be a Customers' Choice in all the segments of the Gartner Peer Insights 'Voice of Customer': Web Application & API Protection (WAAP) report. Indusface has also achieved the rare feat of becoming the only company to get a 100% recommendation rating from the customers for the second consecutive year. This reaffirms the reputation and place that Indusface has built in the WAAP market globally. The "Voice of the Customer" is a document that synthesizes Gartner Peer Insights' reviews into insights for IT decision-makers. This aggregated peer perspective, along with the individual detailed reviews, is complementary to Gartner's expert research and can play a key role in your buying process, as it focuses on direct peer experiences of implementing and operating a solution. In this document, only vendors with 20 or more eligible published reviews during the specified 18-month submission period are included. Reviews from end-users of companies with less than $50M in revenue are excluded from this methodology. See the full "Voice of the Customer" methodology here. Having topped all the segments is an unprecedented feat for an Indian SaaS Company, and it augurs well for the sector's rise as a global supplier of top-quality technologies. "Our cutting-edge solutions, round-the-clock monitoring, and management of application security needs ensure complete peace of mind for clients and the freedom to scale their business. It is this unmatched combination that has led Indusface to be acknowledged as the only vendor to be named Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice' in all the 7 segments for Web Application and API Protection," said Ashish Tandon, CEO and Founder, Indusface. "We remain committed to protecting our clients through our constant innovation and ability to understand and resolve the application security needs of enterprises across the world." Indusface achieved the stellar position of being the only vendor to be a Customers' Choice in all the 7 segments of the Gartner VOC 2022 Peer Insights WAAP report: Gartner Peer Insights "Voice of the Customer" Web Application and API Protection 1. Global Deployment Region Segment 2. Asia Pacific 3. Europe, the Middle East and Africa 4. North America Company Size Segment (by Annual Revenue) 5. Large Enterprises (1B - 10B USD) 6. Mid-Market Enterprises (50M - 1B USD) Industry Segment 7. Services Venkatesh Sundar, CMO and Co-Founder, Indusface, said, "To be ranked as a customers' choice in all the segments in the report is a matter of great pride for us. As a company, Indusface has always innovated and built its product roadmap by taking a customer-first approach and it is quite encouraging and humbling to get this acknowledgement from clients across the world. We are grateful and reassure all our clients with consistent and superior tech support and we will strive even harder to sustain and get better in the years to come with our product capabilities." Indusface serves diverse and renowned clientele globally and a sample of end-user reviews submitted includes: "Complete Peace Of Mind For Application Security" - Global Head Infra & Security in the Travel industry. (Full Review) "Application Context-Specific Bot Mitigation Was Provided By AppTrana" - GM Applications in the Services industry (Full Review) "Proactive And Fully Featured API Protection" - Product head in the Finance Tech industry (Full Review) "Excellent Service That Allows A Transparent And Easy Implementation Of WAF In A Short Time" - Manager in the Media and Publishing industry (Full Review) "Excellent Product That We Want To Use Multi-Year - CIO in the Healthcare industry (Full Review) About Gartner Peer Insights: Gartner Peer Insights is an online platform of ratings and reviews of IT software and services that are written and read by IT professionals and technology decision-makers. The goal is to help IT leaders make more insightful purchase decisions and help technology providers improve their products by receiving objective and unbiased feedback from their customers. Gartner Peer Insights includes more than 350,000 verified reviews in more than 340 markets. For more information, please visit www.gartner.com/reviews/home. Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end-users based on their own experiences with the vendors listed on the platform, should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in this content nor makes any warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this content, about its accuracy or completeness, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Gartner and Gartner Peer Insights are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. About Indusface: Indusface is a leading application security SaaS company that secures critical Web, Mobile, and API applications of 3000+ global customers using its award-winning fully managed platform that integrates web application scanner, web application firewall, DDoS & BOT Mitigation, CDN, and threat intelligence engine. Indusface has been funded by Tata Capital Growth Fund II, is the only vendor to be named Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice' in all the 7 segments for Web Application and API Protection Report 2022, is a "Great Place to Work" certified SaaS product company, is PCI, ISO27001, SOC 2, GDPR certified and has been the recipient of many prestigious start-up awards such as the Economic Times Top 25, NASSCOM DSCI Top Security Company, Deloitte Asia Top 100, among others. Contact: Venkatesh Sundar venkatesh.sundar@indusface.com Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1598108/Indusface_Logo.jpg VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Orchid Ventures, Inc. (the "Company" or "Orchid") (CSE:ORCD)(OTC PINK:ORVRF), a multi-state cannabis innovation company, announced today it has terminated a licensing agreement for Orchid Essentials with Orechid, LLC, also known as Tine Trading Co., signed on May 11, 2020 with cause. Immediately thereafter, Orchid has entered into a new licensing deal with JHMR, Inc., also known as Nimble Distribution, signed on March 15, 2022. Per the terms of the contract, JHMR, Inc. will pay Orchid a $0.75USD royalty on all cartridges sold and a $0.50USD royalty on all batteries sold. JHMR, Inc. must purchase all vaporizer hardware and terpenes from Orchid, as well as maintain strong brand standards and elevate the brand within the Oregon market. JHMR, Inc. must also meet minimum monthly sales and quarterly sales growth requirements to maintain exclusivity within the Oregon market. "We are excited to announce that Nimble Distribution will be our new licensee for the Orchid Essentials brand in the state of Oregon. Nimble is highly respected in the industry and has had tremendous success with their KITES brand and business portfolio. Though our previous licensee was unable to deliver on growth objectives, the Orchid brand remains well positioned in the market and the opportunity to accelerate growth is significant. The leadership team at Nimble is extremely passionate about the Orchid brand, as they've been loyal customers over the years and have followed the brand's progress. They are a high growth operator in the state and we've been impressed with their leadership and the quality of their operations." said Rick Brown, President of Orchid Ventures. "We are confident that the Orchid Essentials brand will be well positioned to fully realize its growth potential under the leadership of the Nimble team." "All of us at NIMBLE are passionate about the Orchid brand. As consumers over the years, the NIMBLE team has enjoyed Orchid products and been excited to see the brand and products in the market. NIMBLE believes that Orchid's products and technologies will be a great fit with Nimble's growth plans. The two companies have many similarities, with the same standards for excellence, a clear passion for the business and the discipline and professional leadership necessary to win. We are confident that this partnership will enable both Nimble and the Orchid Essentials brand to flourish and reach their combined potential in the Oregon market." said Joy Hudson , Founder and COO. ABOUT JHMR, INC. JHMR, Inc (Nimble Distribution) is an Oregon based, industry leading, cannabis product developer, manufacturer and distributor that also offers contract manufacturing and co-packing. Its underlying focus on social justice provides a unique incentive to build consumer engagement and sales. With NIMBLE's commitment to mechanization and efficiency, the company has seen benefits to quality, consistency, and COGS while dramatically increasing production volumes. NIMBLE launched its signature house pre roll brand, KITES, in September of 2021. KITES has grown to 70 points of distribution in its first 6 months and has donated $10,494 to NuProject. NuProject programs increase success outcomes for cannabis entrepreneurs and professionals of color. NIMBLE represents a catalog of indoor farms as well as product offerings beyond flower and pre-rolled cannabis to include Oshihana, a line of cannabis-infused skincare products. Plans for a premium single-packed pre-roll and an edible product, are also underway. https://www.nimbledistro.com/ ABOUT ORCHID VENTURES Orchid Ventures is a California-based cannabis innovation company that has developed a mass-market brand and loyal consumer following with its premium cannabis products and unique vape hardware delivery systems. Orchid also owns 100% of PurTec Delivery Systems, a company that produces, markets and sells clean vaporizer hardware that has been emissions tested against the most stringent standards in the world set forth by the EU, and has unrivaled product quality and value pricing. Orchid's management brings significant branding, product development and distribution experience with a proven track record of scaling businesses and building sustainable revenue growth through value-generating partnerships and innovation that creates enterprise value. Learn more at https://purtecdesigns.com/ ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS - ORCHID VENTURES, INC. Corey Mangold Founder, CEO and Chairman investors@orchidventures.com Investor Relations Corey Mangold 1-949-357-5818 corey@orchidventures.com The CSE does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Safe Harbor Statement Except for historical information contained herein, statements in this release may be forward-looking and made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect", "intend" and similar expressions, as they relate to Orchid Ventures, Inc. and Orchid Essentials any of its affiliates or subsidiaries (collectively, the "Company") or its management, identify forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations, estimates and projections about the Company's business based, in part, on assumptions made by management. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Therefore, actual outcomes and results may, and probably will, differ materially from what is expressed or forecasted in such forward-looking statements due to numerous factors, including those described above and those risks discussed from time to time in the Company's Canadian securities regulatory filings with sedar.com, Factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements include such factors as (i) the development and protection of our brands and other intellectual property, (ii) the need to raise capital to meet business requirements, (iii) significant fluctuations in marketing expenses, (iv) the ability to achieve and expand significant levels of revenues, or recognize net income, from the sale of our products and services, (v) the Company's ability to conduct the business if there are changes in laws, regulations, or government policies related to cannabis, (vi) management's ability to attract and maintain qualified personnel necessary for the development and commercialization of its planned products, and (vii) other information that may be detailed from time to time in the Company's Canadian securities regulatory filings with sedar.com. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. SOURCE: Orchid Ventures, Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695014/Orchid-Ventures-Announces-Termination-and-Signing-of-a-New-Licensing-Agreement-for-Orchid-Essentials-in-Oregon TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Forward Water Technologies Corp. ("Forward Water" or the "Company") (TSXV:FWTC) announces that Mr. Howie Honeyman, President and CEO will be a panelist at the upcoming 57th Central Canadian Symposium on Water Quality Research at York University, Toronto, Ontario on April 4th. Date: April 4, 2022 - April 5, 2022 Location: York University, Toronto, Ontario Link: https://www.cawq.ca/en/ The Company has been invited to sit on a panel at the 57th Central Canadian Symposium on Water Quality Research 2022. The 2-day symposium will promote the research and expertise of those engaged in water quality research in Canada. The CAWQ is a non-governmental, non-profit organization focused on water quality research and on the control or treatment of water pollution. The mission of the CAWQ is to establish and maintain a national network, composed of scientists, engineers, technologists, administrators, practitioners, and students, dedicated to the development and communication of knowledge to preserve, and enhance the water quality environment. The Company is proud to attend the event as a panel member, President and CEO, Mr. Honeyman commented "I am excited and humbled to participate in the CAWQ panel discussions and share my passion and vision for the water industry with some of the future leaders of the water treatment sector". About Forward Water Technologies Corp. Forward Water Technologies Corp. is a publicly traded Canadian company dedicated to saving the earth's water supply using its patented Forward Osmosis technology. The Company was founded by GreenCentre Canada a leading technology innovation centre, supported by the government of Canada. The Company's technology allows for the reduction of challenging waste streams simultaneously returning fresh water for re-use or surface release. The Company's mandate is to focus on the large-scale implementation of its technology in multiple sectors, including industrial wastewater, oil and gas, mining, agriculture and ultimately municipal water supply and re-use market sectors. For more information, please visit www.forwardwater.com . About CAWQ The Canadian Association on Water Quality is a non-governmental, non-profit organization, volunteer organization for scientists, engineers, technologists, administrators, practitioners, and students engaged in or interested in research on water quality or on the control or treatment of water pollution. The mission of the Canadian Association on Water Quality (CAWQ) is to create and foster a nationwide network of professionals dedicated to the development and communication of knowledge to preserve and enhance the water quality environment. For more information, please visit https://www.cawq.ca/en/. Mr. Howie Honeyman, Ph.D., President & Chief Executive Officer Forward Water Technologies Corp. howie.honeyman@forwardwater.com 416-451-8155 For further information please contact: Kayla.ferderber@forwardwater.com Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. Forward Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this news release constitute "forward-looking information" as such term is used in applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information is based on plans, expectations and estimates of management at the date the information is provided and is subject to certain factors and assumptions, including, that the Company's financial condition and development plans do not change as a result of unforeseen events and that the Company obtains any required regulatory approvals. Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause plans, estimates and actual results to vary materially from those projected in such forward-looking information. Some of the risks and other factors that could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements include but are not limited to the need to obtain required approvals from regulatory authorities; stock market volatility as well as the other risks and uncertainties applicable to the Company as set forth in the Company's continuous disclosure filings filed under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. The Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, other than as required by applicable law. SOURCE: Forward Water Technologies Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/694889/Forward-Water-Technologies-to-participate-as-panelist-in-CAWQ-Symposium-in-Toronto-ON BOSTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Nurse-1-1 , the first conversational marketing company for healthcare, today announced the close of its $2.3 million seed funding round led by Argon Ventures with participation from York IE and Hyperplane . The company will use the financing to expand its team, accelerate its go-to-market efforts, and scale its current partnerships with publicly traded and nationwide digital health, at-home testing, and pharma companies. Through a nationwide network of over 2,000 NPs, RNs, PAs, and MDs and a complete customer service platform, Nurse-1-1 educates patients and drives adherence at all patient touch points within the digital health and pharma markets. Embedding its HIPAA-compliant live chat widget into any digital health experience allows Nurse-1-1's network of nurses and advanced practice providers to proactively engage and influence patients to make the right health decisions and properly utilize digital health offerings. In 2021, Nurse-1-1 had over 10,000 patient consultations through its partnerships with digital health, at-home testing, and pharma companies. Medication adherence is a public health concern. Pre-pandemic, non-adherence to medications cost the healthcare system $300 billion annually, according to Healthcare Finance Report . Out of every 100 prescriptions sent, only 50 to 70 are ever picked up and paid for at the pharmacy, 25 to 30 taken properly, and about 15 to 20 refilled as prescribed. OMJ reports that the biggest barriers that patients face when using their medications effectively include poor provider-patient communication, inadequate knowledge about a drug and its use, not being convinced of the need for treatment, and fear of adverse effects of the drug-all topics that nurses are uniquely positioned to address. "Non-adherence not only costs the healthcare system, but also can cause long-term health effects to the patient," said Kimberly Liner, Chief Nurse Practitioner at Nurse-1-1, RN, MSN, CPNP. "Nurse-1-1 provides reliable sources of information from credible, trusted nurses." For each of the past 20 years, the Gallup poll has rated nursing as the most trusted profession in America. Nurse-1-1 is bringing this trust into the growing digital health market, pioneering a new category in healthcare with its patient-centric and dialogue-driven approach to care. Nurse-1-1 also works with many at-home testing companies, navigating their patients through their at-home testing journey. In recent years, at-home testing has become a key tool in early detection of many health care issues, and studies have shown that testing adherence jumps significantly when a patient has a provider they can talk to. "Patient adherence-whether to medications, at-home testing, or other digital health treatments-is a major issue to tackle," said Michael Sheeley, Co-founder and CEO of Nurse-1-1. "Our embedded nurse chat provides an on-demand experience with patients waiting fewer than 8 seconds on average to connect with a nurse-bridging an essential gap in care when patients need it the most." "As more and more of our healthcare transitions to digital, we can't lose the thing that really works in the current system: patients interacting with nurses," said Joe Raczka, Managing Partner, York IE. "Mike, Kimberly and the whole crew at Nurse-1-1 are the right team to bring nurses to the front lines of digital healthcare - a mission that will have a positive impact on all of our lives." Interested in helping Nurse-1-1 achieve this mission? Visit nurse-1-1.com/careers to learn more. About Nurse-1-1: Nurse-1-1 is the first conversational marketing company for healthcare. Through a growing nationwide network of over 2,000 nurses and a HIPAA-compliant complete customer service platform, Nurse-1-1 offers a live nurse chat tool that can be embedded directly into other digital platforms. As a result, clients receive data-driven insights, improve adherence, and help their patients where they need extra support. Nurse-1-1 is based in Greater Boston and founded by Michael Sheeley, who previously founded RunKeeper, and Kimberly Liner, a pediatric nurse practitioner formerly of Boston Children's Hospital. Today, the Nurse-1-1 platform is embedded into the patient experience with publicly traded digital health companies and nationwide telemedicine provider groups. We're hiring! If you're passionate about building a world where every human has the right to easily accessible, compassionate healthcare, we'd love to hear from you. You can check out open roles at nurse-1-1.com/careers or feel free to reach out to us at careers@nurse-1-1.com. About Argon Ventures: Argon Ventures is a venture fund with a mission to amplify the energy of founders to launch breakthrough products to build impactful, global businesses. The firm's Intelligent Industry Solutions investment thesis is centered on cutting-edge software platforms that accelerate productivity & drive top-line revenue, transform markets through radical efficiency and create enterprise value through data at scale. Argon's portfolio spans a number of markets, including digital health, future of work, manufacturing, and others. The founding General Partners collectively bring over four decades of experience as successful operators, investors, advisors, founders and C-level executives of global companies. About York IE: York IE is a vertically integrated strategic growth and investment firm helping reshape the way companies are built, scaled and monetized. Through Fuel, its SaaS platform for market and competitive intelligence, hands-on advisory services and selective early stage B2B SaaS investments, York IE supports ambitious entrepreneurs, operators and investors on their quest to scale startups and disrupt markets. Play the long game at York.IE . About Hyperplane Venture Capital: Hyperplane Venture Capital is an early stage investment firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm partners with exceptional founders who are harnessing machine intelligence, sensor technology, and cloud computing to design solutions at the nexus of perception, communication, and insight. Hyperplane's portfolio covers a wide array of industries including financial technologies, robotics, digital health, industrial automation, and others. Media Contacts: Bailey Carroll Nurse-1-1 bailey@nurse-1-1.com Kate Campbell York IE Kate@york.ie SOURCE: York IE View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/694936/Nurse-1-1-Raises-23-Million-in-Seed-Funding-Pioneering-Conversational-Marketing-for-Healthcare Cypherpunk Realizes 268% profit in 5 months Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 29, 2022) - Cypherpunk Holdings Inc. (CSE: HODL) (OTC Pink: CYFRF) ("Cypherpunk" or, the "Company"), a sector leader for blockchain, privacy and cryptography focused investments, is pleased to announce that it has disposed of further shares of Animoca Brand Corporation Limited ("Animoca Brands"), through secondary market trades. To date, Cypherpunk Holdings has sold 1.5M shares in Animoca Brands for a VWAP of CAD $3.81 ($4.05 AUD). This translates to a 268% ROI over a 5 month holding period and total proceeds of CAD $5,401,149 from the sales. Cypherpunk retains 500K ordinary shares in Animoca Brands which it expects to hold leading into the company's anticipated IPO. About Cypherpunk Holdings Inc. Cypherpunk was established to invest in currencies, companies, technologies and protocols, which enhance or protect privacy. Its strategy is to make targeted investments in businesses and assets with strong privacy attributes, often within the blockchain ecosystem, including select cryptocurrencies. Current equity investments include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Samourai Wallet, Wasabi Wallet, Chia, NGRAVE, and Animoca Brands. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Generally, any statements that are not historical facts may contain forward-looking information, and forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or indicates that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be" taken, "occur" or "be achieved". Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to the Company's expectation or belief regarding its investment in shares of Animoca Brand and Animoca Brand's future performance or business. There is no assurance that the Company's plans or objectives will be implemented as set out herein, or at all. Forward-looking information is based on certain factors and assumptions the Company believes to be reasonable at the time such statements are made and is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. There can be no assurance that such forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements are made based on management's beliefs, estimates and opinions on the date that statements are made and the Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change, except as required by law. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. Officer/Director Contact: Jeffrey Gao Chief Executive Officer jeff@cypherpunkholdings.com Office: 1-647-946-1300 Investor Relations Contact: Veronika Oswald Investor Relations veronika@cypherpunkholdings.com Office: 1-647-946-1300 To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/118399 Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 29, 2022) - NINE MILE METALS LTD. (CSE: NINE) (the "Company" or "Nine Mile") is pleased to announce it has signed an agreement to engage industry leading EarthEX Geophysical Solutions Inc. ("EarthEX") of Selkirk, Manitoba, utilizing their proprietary technology and methodology for a complete reprocessing and 3D interpretive analysis of the flagship Nine Mile Brook VMS Project and the 100% owned Canoe Landing Lake West VMS Projects in the world-famous VMS Bathurst Mining Camp, New Brunswick. EarthEX is an industry leader in this cutting-edge field in defining targets in the exploration of VMS (Copper-Lead-Zinc-Silver & Gold) projects around the world. Figure 1: (Nine Mile Brook Project) Plan view with Anomaly Axes overlying EM response. To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7335/118428_4a551a6a643a2952_002full.jpg Figure 2: (Nine Mile Brook Project) 3D Inclined Overview displaying target zones with VMS-style Conductive signatures detected in the MegaTEM Data, overlying 3D magnetic models. To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7335/118428_4a551a6a643a2952_003full.jpg The wealth of public MegaTEM data in the Bathurst Mining Camp ("BMC") coupled with other high resolution historical surveys available on the properties make for an ideal candidate for this type of analysis. EarthEX will be reprocessing and interpreting all available geophysical data including the use of new proprietary algorithms for both projects (Nine Mile Brook & Canoe Landing Lake West), including the regional Aerodat and MegaTEM surveys conducted over the BMC. This data output, when modeled and interpreted with the geological and geochemical data will allow us to identify and prioritize target areas, streamlining the exploration process. Upon receipt of the 3D model, the technical committee, working with EarthEX, can finalize the second phase of exploration program including survey grids for proprietary cutting-edge UAV (Drone Technology) magnetics and ground-based Time Domain Electro-Magnetics ("TDEM") over priority conductors. The aim is to define and prioritize all Volcanogenic Massive Sulphide ("VMS")(Cu-Pb-Zn-Ag & Au) targets, in addition to locating the primary source of the Willett Lens mineralization and any related satellite deposits along trend. Of the targets generated, their priority ranking is primarily based on the results of the TDEM surveys, and magnetic domain. Conductors that exhibit favourable geological and magnetic settings, as well as late time conductance, which is a common signature of VMS mineralization, will be top priority for drilling. In comparison, early and mid-time signatures which may still be prospective, but have a larger range of potential geological sources, will be treated as second-priority follow-up targets. Patrick J Cruickshank, MBA, Director, states, "We look forward to receiving this proprietary cutting-edge technology analysis, over our two VMS Projects. The source deposit of our High-Grade Willett VMS Lens should not be far and, if typical of other VMS deposits, may consist of multiple stacked Lens'. The EarthEX proprietary technology will identify the possible hosts, which we believe is up ice in the Spruce Lake Formation of the California Lake Group where a majority of the BMC Deposits are hosted. This area has been underexplored and is a terrific section of the Spruce Formation without a deposit. There are 95 VMS occurrences and 46 Deposits in the BMC and we believe we are in the prime location of the folding geology. We look forward to our analytical results shortly." The disclosure of technical information in this news release has been prepared in accordance with Canadian regulatory requirements as set out in National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") and reviewed and approved by Gary Lohman, B.Sc., P. Geo. who acts as the Company's Qualified Person and as the COO of Fiddlehead Mining Corp. and is not independent of the Company. About Nine Mile Metals Ltd.: Nine Mile Metals Ltd. is a Canadian Public Mineral Exploration Company focused on VMS (Cu, Pb, Zn, Ag and Au) exploration in the world-famous Bathurst Mining Camp. The Company's primary business objective is to explore its two properties located in Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada: 100% owned Canoe Landing Lake West and 50% owned Nine Mile Brook. Nine Mile is Focused on Exploration of Minerals for Technology (MFT), positioning for the boom in EV & Green Technologies requiring Copper Silver Lead & Zinc with a hedge with Gold. ON BEHALF OF NINE MILE METALS LTD. "Charles MaLette" CEO, President, Director & Secretary T: 604-428-5171 E: info@ninemilemetals.com Forward-Looking Information: This press release may include forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation, concerning the business of Nine Mile. Forward-looking information is based on certain key expectations and assumptions made by the management of Nine Mile. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the use of words such as "will," "may," "would," "expect," "intend," "plan," "seek," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "predict," "potential," "continue," "likely," "could" and variations of these terms and similar expressions, or the negative of these terms or similar expressions. Forward-looking statements in this press release include that (a) . EarthEX is the industry leader in this cutting-edge field in defining targets in the exploration of VMS (Copper-Lead-Zinc-Silver & Gold) projects around the world, (b) EarthEX will be reprocessing all available geophysical data with New Proprietary Algorithms for both projects (Nine Mile Brook & Canoe Landing Lake West), (c) data output, when modeled with the geological and geochemical data will allow us to identify and prioritize target areas, streamlining the exploration process, (d) the technical committee can finalize the second phase of exploration program including survey grids for magnetics and ground-based TDEM over priority conductors, (e) the source deposit of our High-Grade Willett VMS Lens should not be far and, if typical of other VMS deposits, may consist of multiple stacked Lens', (f) the EarthEX proprietary technology will identify the possible hosts, which we believe is up ice in the Spruce Lake Formation of the California Lake Group where a majority of the BMC Deposits are hosted, and (g) there are 95 VMS occurrences and 46 Deposits in the BMC and we believe we are in the prime location of the folding geology. Although Nine Mile believes that the expectations and assumptions on which such forward-looking information is based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking information because Nine Mile can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. The Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or the accuracy of the contents of this release. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/118428 Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 29, 2022) - ALX Resources Corp. (TSXV: AL) (FSE: 6LLN) (OTC: ALXEF) ("ALX" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that a diamond drilling program is underway at its Electra Nickel Project located 35 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. 2022 Exploration Program On March 10, 2022 ALX received an exploration permit from the Ontario Ministry of Energy, Northern Development and Mines for a diamond drilling program consisting of eight holes totaling approximately 1,750 metres, good until March 2025. The duration of the 2022 winter drilling program is weather dependent; however, the network of established forestry roads within Electra provides good access to the drill sites. Certain of the drill sites may be accessible for drilling in the spring or summer of 2022. Electra 2022 Drill Hole Plan with Down Hole EM Loops To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3046/118465_ae6180ae5441f991_001full.jpg To view maps and photos of Electra click here About Electra Electra is located near Thunder Bay, Ontario, in a fertile exploration district well-linked to highways, roads and trails, and lies near a powerline and the Canadian National Railroad. The Project consists of 190 cell units totaling approximately 4,066 hectares (10,047 acres) and is prospective for nickel-copper-cobalt, platinum group elements, and gold. ALX has the option to earn a 100% interest in Electra after fulfilling payment obligations of cash and common shares, and exploration expenditures (see ALX news release dated December 31, 2020 ) . In the fall of 2021, ALX developed new drill targets at Electra from the integration of the results of a 2021 VTEMTM airborne survey with a follow-up prospecting and geological mapping program. Geophysical programs consisting of downhole and ground electromagnetic surveys remain in application. The Company is pleased with the successful engagement that occurred with local First Nations and Metis communities during the permitting process and looks forward to a good working relationship with stakeholders in the Project area. The technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Jody Dahrouge, P.Geo., a Director of ALX, who is a Qualified Person in accordance with the Canadian regulatory requirements set out in National Instrument 43-101. About ALX ALX is based in Vancouver, BC, Canada and its common shares are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "AL", on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol "6LLN" and in the United States OTC market under the symbol "ALXEF". ALX's mandate is to provide shareholders with multiple opportunities for discovery by exploring a portfolio of prospective mineral properties, which include uranium, nickel-copper-cobalt and gold projects. The Company uses the latest exploration technologies and holds interests in over 200,000 hectares of prospective lands in Saskatchewan, a stable Canadian jurisdiction that hosts the highest-grade uranium mines in the world, a producing gold mine, and production from base metals mines, both current and historical. ALX is an active explorer with interests in a number of uranium exploration properties in northern Saskatchewan, including 100% interests in the Gibbons Creek Uranium Project, the Sabre Uranium Project and the Javelin and McKenzie Lake Uranium Projects, a 40% interest in the Black Lake Uranium Project (a joint venture with UEX Corporation and Orano Canada Inc.), and a 20% interest in the Hook-Carter Uranium Project, located within the uranium-rich Patterson Lake Corridor with Denison Mines Corp. (80% interest) as operator of exploration since 2016. ALX also owns 100% interests in the Firebird Nickel Project (now under option to Rio Tinto Exploration Canada Inc., who can earn up to an 80% interest), the Flying Vee Nickel/Gold and Sceptre Gold projects, and can earn up to an 80% interest in the Alligator Lake Gold Project, all located in northern Saskatchewan, Canada. ALX owns, or can earn, up to 100% interests in the Electra Nickel Project and the Cannon Copper Project located in historic mining districts of Ontario, Canada, the Vixen Gold Project (now under option to First Mining Gold Corp., who can earn up to a 100% interest in two stages), and in the Draco VMS Project in Norway. For more information about the Company, please visit the ALX corporate website at www.alxresources.com or contact Roger Leschuk, Manager, Corporate Communications at: PH: 604.629.0293 or Toll-Free: 866.629.8368, or by email: rleschuk@alxresources.com On Behalf of the Board of Directors of ALX Resources Corp. "Warren Stanyer" Warren Stanyer, CEO and Chairman FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Statements in this document which are not purely historical are forward-looking statements, including any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Forward-looking statements in this news release include: ALX's plans to undertake exploration activities at the Electra Nickel Project, and to expend funds on the Project. It is important to note that the Company's actual business outcomes and exploration results could differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties include that ALX may not be able to fully finance exploration on our exploration projects, including drilling; our initial findings at our exploration projects may prove to be unworthy of further expenditures; commodity prices may not support further exploration expenditures; exploration programs may be delayed or changed due to any delays experienced in consultation and engagement activities with First Nations and Metis communities and the results of such consultations; and economic, competitive, governmental, societal, public health, environmental and technological factors may affect the Company's operations, markets, products and share price. Even if we explore and develop our projects, and even if nickel, uranium, gold or other metals or minerals are discovered in quantity, ALX's projects may not be commercially viable. Additional risk factors are discussed in the Company's Management Discussion and Analysis for the Nine Months Ended September 30, 2021, which is available under the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. Except as required by law, we will not update these forward-looking statement risk factors. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/118465 MINNETONKA (dpa-AFX) - Optum and LHC Group (LHCG) have reached an agreement which calls for the acquisition of LHC Group's common stock for $170 per share in cash. LHC Group is a national patient-focused provider of in-home health care services. Optum is an information and technology-enabled health services business which is part of UnitedHealth Group (UNH). The LHC leadership will continue forward as part of Optum Health. Co-founders Keith and Ginger Myers will personally invest $10 million in UnitedHealth Group stock following the close of the merger. The acquisition is anticipated to be neutral to UnitedHealth Group's outlook for adjusted net earnings per share in 2022, modestly accretive in 2023, and advancing strongly in subsequent years. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 29, 2022) - Viscount Mining Corp. (TSXV: VML) (OTCQX: VLMGF) ("Viscount Mining") announces it has received approval from the State of Colorado for the fourth phase drill program at their Silver Cliff property in Colorado. Viscount has commenced drilling at Silver Cliff, Colorado. The aim of this phase is to increase the defined resource available at the Kate Deposit. Tenneco Minerals leased the Kate property in 1987. They had previous drill data available to them, which was the results from 11,930 meters in 249 drill holes that had been done since 1968.The following two years Tenneco drilled an additional 143 holes totaling 7,949 meters. Based on the accumulated data and feasibility study, Tenneco Minerals made the decision with silver at $5.00 USD an ounce to construct at that time a $35,000,000 USD milling operation for the extraction of the silver reserves at Silver Cliff as an open pit mine. The primary deposit, Kate Silver Resource (KSR), hosts a historical estimate of 50M oz silver (not NI 43 - 101 compliant). Shortly thereafter Tenneco's parent company was sold, and the planned milling operation was abandoned. Jacob Hooker, Viscount Exploration Manager, commented: "The fourth phase of this year's exploration program is heavily weighted towards expanding the current mineral resource at the Kate. The previous drill results from the Kate East Zone has demonstrated the deposit to be open ended in all directions. This next phase of drilling will allow us continue to step out drilling on two sides of the deposit which will allow us to expand NI 43-101 resource." The success of phase 2 and 3 in terms of expanding the previous Kate Silver Resource has prompted Viscount Mining to conduct another round of drilling with the intention again of increasing the known ore body size. As shown on the map below, phase 4 includes ten expansion drill holes, with six positioned to the west of the current KSR boundary. The other four drill holes are located vastly to the northeast and will test the areas extension of the drilling closer to the KSR that was done during phase 3. Part of the strategy behind Viscounts' drill campaigns is to confirm historic drilling in the KSR and use the results of Viscount's drilling, soil, geophysical and rock chip surveys to expand the KSR. This was necessary, since the core and RC chips from the previous drilling had been lost, and only incomplete assay results are known. While historic drilling near the northeast target locations has been sparse, soil samples collected during phases 2 and 3 display strong trends to the northeast. Two surface samples gathered in the vicinity during phase 3 tested at 98 G/T and 1330 G/T silver, prompting the placement of the final four phase 4 drill hole locations. Jim MacKenzie, Viscount CEO, stated: "As Viscount transitions into the fourth phase of the drill program, we will focus on testing the limits of the previously defined ore body in promising directions. The success of the step - out drilling since 2020 has given us the indication of a much larger resource at the KSR. Our next NI 43-101 in Q2 2022 will contain an updated resource calculation based on the drilling done by Viscount, and selected historic drilling documents. After compiling all drill results, an updated 3D drilling model will be created, depicting a more accurate version of the KSR." Fig 1. The 10 Planned Drill Hole Locations for Phase 4 of Viscount's 2020/2022 Program To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/2736/118425_9614a887e4c159ba_002full.jpg Table 1 To view an enhanced version of Table 1, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/2736/118425_table1.jpg The report titled Mineral Resource Estimate for the Silver Cliff Property, Custer County, Colorado, USA dated April 15, 2018 was prepared by Dr. Gilles Arseneau, Ph.D., P. Geo of Arseneau Consulting Services ("ACS") in accordance with the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum ("CIM") Definition Standards incorporated by reference in National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") for its Silver Cliff property in Colorado. Quality Assurance/Quality Control ("QA/QC") Measures, Chain of Custody: All Viscount's drilling to date has been core. The company has implemented a rigorous quality assurance/quality control program at the Silver Cliff project. Core is retrieved from the drill site to a locked storage facility, where it is logged and then cut by independent geologists. Half of the core is bagged, and standards, blanks and duplicates are frequently inserted in to the sample stream. These are then boxed and then shipped via USPS to Skyline Labs in Tucson, Arizona. Pulps and rejects will then be retrieved, and stored with the split core at our locked facility. Qualified Persons The scientific and technical information contained in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Harald Hoegberg PG, an independent consulting geologist who is a "Qualified Person" (QP) as such term is defined under National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"). About Viscount Mining (TSXV: VML) (OTCQX: VLMGF) Viscount Mining is a project generator and an exploration company with a portfolio of silver and gold properties in the Western United States, including Silver Cliff in Colorado and Cherry Creek in Nevada. The Silver Cliff property in Colorado lies within the historic Hardscrabble Silver District in the Wet Mountain Valley, Custer County, south-central Colorado. It is located 44 miles WSW of Pueblo, Colorado, and has year-around access by paved road. The property consists of 2,319.48 hectares where high grade silver, gold and base metal production came from numerous mines during the period 1878 to the early 1900's. The property underwent substantial exploration between 1967 and 1984. The property is interpreted to encompass a portion of a large caldera and highly altered sequence of tertiary rhyolitic flows and fragmental units which offers potential to host deposits with both precious and base metals. This has been demonstrated in the mineralization historically extracted from the numerous underground and surface mining operations. Drilling in the 1980s by Tenneco resulted in a historical pre-feasibility study on which basis it was planned to bring the property to production. The plan was abandoned following a takeover by another company. The Cherry Creek exploration property is in an area commonly known as the Cherry Creek Mining District, located approximately 50 miles north of the town of Ely, White Pine County, Nevada. Cherry Creek consists of 578 unpatented and 17 patented claims as well as mill rights. Cherry Creek includes more than 20 past producing mines. In January 2021, Viscount entered an exploration earn - in agreement with a wholly owned subsidiary of Centerra Gold Inc. Centerra Gold Inc. is a Canadian-based gold mining company focused on operating, developing, exploring and acquiring gold properties in North America, Turkey, and other markets worldwide. For additional information regarding the above noted property and other corporate information, please visit the Company's website at www.viscountmining.com ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS "Jim MacKenzie" President, CEO and Director For further information, please contact: Viscount Investor Relations Email: info@viscountmining.com FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS This news release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to Viscount Mining's operations, exploration and development plans, expansion plans, estimates, expectations, forecasts, objectives, predictions and projections of the future. Specifically, this news release contains forward looking statements with respect to the potential of the Kate Deposit and the success of the Phase 4 drill program as its relates to a new resource found in a 43-101. Generally, forward-looking statements can be identified by the forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "projects", "intends", "anticipates", or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or "variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "can", "could", "would", "might", or "will" be taken", "occur" or "be achieved". Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Viscount Mining to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, including but not limited to: risks related to the exploration and development and operation of Viscount Mining's projects, the actual results of current exploration, development activities, conclusions of economic evaluations, changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined, future precious metals prices, as well as those factors discussed in the sections relating to risk factors of our business filed in Viscount Mining's required securities filings on SEDAR. Although Viscount Mining has attempted to identify important factors that could cause results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause results to be materially different from those anticipated, described, estimated, assessed or intended. There can be no assurance that any forward-looking statements will prove accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Viscount Mining does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that are incorporated by reference herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE INC. HAS NEITHER APPROVED NOR DISAPPROVED THE CONTENTS OF THIS PRESS RELEASE. NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/118425 Song Bao (front) and Song Chen return to the watchtower after cleaning the snow in its yard on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Aerial photo taken on March 19, 2022 shows Song Chen up for work at the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Song Bao (L) and Song Chen prepare dinner at the kitchen in the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 18, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Song Bao observes the forest on the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Song Chen has his finger accidentally slashed by a snow shovel while cleaning the snow in the yard outside the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Song Chen (L) checks his cellphone while Song Bao watches television at the dormitory in the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 18, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Aerial photo taken on March 19, 2022 shows the watchtower blanketed with snow on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Aerial photo taken on March 19, 2022 shows the watchtower perched on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Song Bao (front) waves goodbye to Song Chen as he departs for patrolling the forest at the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Song Bao cleans the snow in the yard outside the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 18, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Song Chen (1st R) shows tourists the way in front of the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Song Chen cleans the snow in the yard outside the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Photo taken on March 18, 2022 shows the night view of the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Song Bao walks back to the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain after patrolling the forest in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Song Chen (R) writes a log at his dormitory in the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 18, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Song Bao patrols the forest on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 29, 2022) - PesoRama Inc. (TSXV: PESO) ("PesoRama" or the "Company"), a Canadian company operating single price-point dollar stores in Mexico under the JOi Canadian Stores brand, announces that it has received approval by the TSX Venture Exchange (the "TSXV") for the listing of up to 13,904,858 of its previous issued common share purchase warrants (the "Warrants"). These Warrants are expected to commence trading on the TSXV effective at market open on Wednesday, March 30, 2022 under the ticker symbol "PESO.WT". The Warrants are governed by supplement warrant indenture (the "Supplemental Indenture") between the Company and TSX Trust Company dated March 21, 2022, which amends: (i) the Company's supplement warrant indenture between the Company and TSX Trust Company dated March 8, 2022 amending the warrant indenture between the Company and TSX Trust Company dated February 8, 2022; (ii) the Company's supplemental warrant indenture between the Company and TSX Trust Company dated February 8, 2022 amending the second amended and restated warrant indenture dated March 30, 2021; and (iii) the Company's supplemental warrant indenture between the Company and TSX Trust Company dated February 8, 2022 amending warrant indenture between the Company and TSX Trust Company dated November 19, 2021. Each Warrant issued pursuant to the Supplemental Indenture shall bear the ISIN CA7157921155. For further information regarding the Warrants, the holders of the Warrants shall refer to the Supplemental Indenture on the Company SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. About PesoRama Inc. PesoRama, operating under the JOi Canadian Stores brand, is a Mexican value, single price-point dollar store retailer. PesoRama launched operations in 2019 in Mexico City and the surrounding areas targeting high density, high traffic locations. PesoRama's 18 stores offer consistent merchandise offerings which include items in the following categories: household goods, pet supplies, seasonal products, party supplies, health and beauty, snack food items, confectionery and more. For further information please contact: Rahim Bhaloo Founder & Executive Chairman rahim@rahimbhaloo.com 416-816-3291 Erica Fattore President & Chief Executive Officer erica@joi.mx Alyssa Barry Investor Relations investors@pesorama.ca Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/118467 New line of credit will be used for future acquisitions, scaling up operations and growing the Business Warrior team PHOENIX, AZ / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Business Warrior Corp. (OTC PINK:BZWR), the source for small businesses in America to get more customers, today announces it has signed a letter of intent for a $25 million equity line of credit with Keystone Capital. The Company expects to use the funds from the line of credit to facilitate future acquisitions, continue to scale operations, and contribute to more growth opportunities. "We are very grateful for the support we've received from the financial community for Business Warrior's long-term vision," states Company CEO Rhett Doolittle. "Thanks to this new line of credit, Business Warrior is well-positioned to support small businesses and local communities with our products and solutions." Keystone Capital has agreed to enter into a $25 million equity line of credit agreement with the Company to further support its growth strategy. The equity line agreement will allow Business Warrior to draw up to $25 million over 24 months. The Company will file a registration statement on Form S-1 to register its common shares under the equity line. "This equity line of credit represents the investment community's long-term belief in the value of what we're doing at Business Warrior," explains Doolittle. "More importantly, it's a win-win-win situation; a win for us, a win for our investors, and a win for small businesses across the United States." About Business Warrior Business Warrior is an open source technology company providing Small Businesses in the United States with a suite of data driven marketing and next-generation funding solutions to boost local market dominance. Founded in 2014, Business Warrior is singularly focused on offering locally-targeted lead generation marketing and funding solutions that fuel small business growth. By using next generation machine-learning and native software, Business Warrior has made growth funding and conversion marketing accessible for thousands of under-resourced and under-funded small business owners. For more information, visit BusinessWarrior.com. Forward Looking Statements: This press release and the offering materials may contain forward-looking statements and information relating to, among other things, the company, its business plan and strategy, and its industry. Forward-looking statements are neither historical facts nor assurances of future performance. They are based on the current beliefs of, assumptions made by, and information currently available to the company's management regarding the future of the company's business, future plans and strategies, anticipated events and trends, the economy and other future conditions. When used in the offering materials, the words "aim," "estimate," "project," "believe," "anticipate," "intend," "envision," "estimate," "expect," "future," "goal," "hope," "likely," "may," "plan," "potential," "seek," "should," "strategy," "will" and similar references to future periods are intended to identify forward-looking statements, which constitute forward looking statements. These statements reflect management's current views with respect to future events and are subject to inherent risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict (many of which are outside of the company's control) and could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date on which they are made. All subsequent written and oral forward-looking statements concerning the company, the offering or other matters, are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statements above. The company does not undertake any obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after such date or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. Investor Relations: Tanner Otts Investors@BusinessWarrior.com (855) 884-5805 SOURCE: Business Warrior Corporation View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695024/Business-Warrior-Secures-25-Million-Equity-Line-of-Credit-from-Keystone-Capital NOT FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE U.S. OR THROUGH U.S. NEWSWIRES VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Franchise Global Health Inc. ("Franchise Global" or the "Company") (TSXV: FGH) is pleased to announce that the Company's shares will commence trading at market open today on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "FGH". In addition, Clifford Starke, Executive Chairman and CEO of Franchise Global and his team will celebrate the Company's new listing on the TSX Venture Exchange and open the market. Franchise Global Executive Chairman and CEO, Clifford Starke, said: "We are extremely pleased to have successfully completed the Company's Qualifying Transaction last week and to be opening the TSX Venture Exchange today. After an extensive period of preparation, we are now a publicly-traded, fully-integrated cannabis company which has a clear focus on the European opportunity. "As we enter this next stage of growth as a public company, we are confident in the prospects of the business. We would like to thank our shareholders for their continued support and we look forward to the road ahead and continued shareholder value creation." The listing of the common shares of the Company follows the completion of its "Qualifying Transaction", as such term is defined under the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange, on March 25, 2022. About Franchise Global Franchise Global, through its subsidiaries, is a multi-national operator in the medical cannabis and pharmaceutical industries, with principal operations in Germany and with operations, assets, strategic partnerships and investments internationally. Franchise Global's business objective is to develop a fully-integrated, leading European medical cannabis business, with the goal of providing high-quality pharmaceutical grade medical cannabis to distribution partners and, ultimately, to patients, at competitive prices. For further information, please contact: Franchise Global Health Clifford Starke, Executive Chairman and CEO Via Buchanan www.franchiseglobalhealth.com Media Enquiries Buchanan Jamie Hooper / Ariadna Peretz Tel: +44 (0) 20 7466 5000 FGH@buchanan.uk.com NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS PRESS RELEASE. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities in any jurisdiction, including in the United States. The securities described herein have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available. Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including without limitation statements regarding the business of Franchise Global and its prospects. Often, but not always, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", or "believes" or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases, or statements formed in the future tense or indicating that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" (or other variations of the foregoing) be taken, occur, be achieved, or come to pass. Forward-looking information is based on management's current expectations, estimates, beliefs and/or opinions and is based on information currently available to them (including information obtained from third party industry analysts and other third-party sources) and on assumptions they believe not to be unreasonable in light of all of the circumstances. By its nature, forward-looking information is subject to both known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. Such risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, risks relating to general economic conditions, counterparty risk, regulatory factors, the financial markets generally and risks associated with growth and competition. Accordingly, readers are cautioned to not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Please refer to the filing statement of the Company available on the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com for more details on the risks and uncertainties faced by Franchise Global. Any and all forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement, and the Company undertakes no obligation, and does not intend, to update any forward-looking information contained in this news release, whether as a result of new information, future developments, or otherwise, except as otherwise required by applicable law. This information is provided by Reach, the non-regulatory press release distribution service of RNS, part of the London Stock Exchange. Terms and conditions relating to the use and distribution of this information may apply. For further information, please contact rns@lseg.com or visit www.rns.com. SOURCE: Franchise Global Health Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695052/Franchise-Global-Health-Inc-Announces-First-Day-of-Trading-Market-Opening Known for its cloud innovation MariaDB has earned Database of the Year in the LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards MariaDB Corporation today announced that MariaDB has received recognition as "Database of the Year" in the LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards poll. This marks the ninth consecutive year MariaDB has earned this recognition. Additionally, MariaDB has been named a finalist for Cloud Product of the Year by the UK National Technology Awards for its cloud database SkySQL. LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards recognize Linux open-source vendors, solutions, and products voted as top performers by end users. Receiving almost half of all votes, MariaDB led the pack of nine top databases, outstripping its nearest competitors by a wide margin. The National Technology Awards, organized by National Technology News, are "the most comprehensive celebration of technology in the year." Shortlisted for the Cloud Product of the Year, SkySQL is capable of scaling to millions of transactions per second with ease and can deploy modern data warehouses for interactive, ad hoc analytics on massive data sets to meet enterprise demands, while saving customers up to 90% of their legacy database cost. "MariaDB SkySQL has been rock solid for us since day one," said Sasa Skoko, CTO at Campus Cloud. "We used to self-host on multiple servers. But as our business grew, we started experiencing performance issues and found it very difficult to handle the failovers. We offer all of our customers 100% uptime at any given time. Since migrating to SkySQL on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), we've ditched our own servers completely. It has worked beautifully for us. We've never experienced any issues, no downtime or latency issues." MariaDB SkySQL has received additional recognition, earning a spot on the: InsideBIGDATA IMPACT 50 List, for companies that exhibit technology leadership, the strength of offering, proven innovation, and more; and 2022 Constellation ShortList for Hybrid-Cloud and Multicloud Analytical Relational Database Management Systems, marking its second consecutive year of recognition. Additional Resources Explore MariaDB SkySQL and get started now Learn about SkyDBA benefits Visit mariadb.com Follow @mariadb on Twitter Read MariaDB's blog Earlier this year MariaDB announced the intent to become a publicly traded company via combination with Angel Pond Holdings Corporation (NYSE:POND). To learn more, go to https://mariadb.com/IPO. About MariaDB Corporation MariaDB frees companies from the costs, cloud lock-in, constraints, and complexity of proprietary databases, enabling them to reinvest in what matters most rapidly developing innovative, customer-facing applications. MariaDB uses pluggable, purpose-built storage engines to support workloads that previously required a variety of specialized databases. With complexity and constraints eliminated, enterprises can now depend on a single complete database for their needs, whether on commodity hardware or their cloud of choice. Deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical, or hybrid use cases, MariaDB delivers unmatched operational agility without sacrificing key enterprise features, including real ACID compliance and full SQL. Trusted by organizations such as Bandwidth, DigiCert, InfoArmor, Oppenheimer, Samsung, SelectQuote, SpendHQ MariaDB meets the same core requirements as proprietary databases at a fraction of the cost. No wonder it's one of the fastest-growing database management systems companies. Real business relies on MariaDB. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005530/en/ Contacts: James Meredith pr@mariadb.com Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 29, 2022) - Ophir Gold Corp. (TSXV: OPHR) (OTCQB: KPZIF) (FSE: 80M) ("Ophir" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Jeffrey Reeder as a Technical Advisor for the Company's Breccia Gold-Silver Property (the "Property"), Idaho. "Jeff brings decades of experience as an advisor in conceptual geological modeling, as well as planning exploration programs for resource companies. Jeff is a great fit for Ophir, as we continue to unlock the gold and silver potential at Breccia. 2022 should be a very exciting year for Ophir, as we build upon the data collected from the 2021 high-grade gold-silver drill results and CSAMT survey," comments Shawn Westcott, CEO of Ophir Gold Corp. Jeffrey J. Reeder, P. Geo., has a B.Sc. from the University of Alberta and since 1992 has been registered as a professional geologist with the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia. Mr. Reeder has over 30 years of exploration experience both in British Columbia and Latin America. Mr. Reeder has spent most of his career working and managing junior resource companies. Early in his career, he worked on all the major porphyry deposits explored and developed by the HDI group. These deposits included Mt. Milligan, Fish Lake, Kemess, and the Casino Cu-Au deposit in the Yukon. Mt. Reeder later relocated to Latin America and worked in Venezuela, Peru and Brazil. He was responsible for identifying and acquiring both Aguila Copper-Moly being developed by Mexican mining company Industrias Penoles and Pinaya Copper-Gold project currently being explored by Kaizen Discovery. Mr. Reeder also identified a new style of gold mineralization in the Tapajos Region in Brazil previously not recognized by previous operators and regional geologists. Mr. Reeder is currently the CEO of Peruvian Metals which successfully achieved positive cash flow from its operations in 2020. Mr. Reeder is responsible for acquiring all the Peruvian assets by application and continues to acquire new properties in South America. Mr. Reeder's conceptual modeling and geological theories attracted and successfully negotiated several joint ventures with companies such as Silver X Mining, IAMGOLD, Rio Alto Mining, Rio Tinto, Cambior, and First Quantum. Ophir also announces that, pursuant to its stock option plan, it has granted an aggregate of 200,000 options to purchase common shares in the capital of the Company to certain consultants of the Company, exercisable at a price of C$0.10 per share for a period of five (5) years from the date of grant. About the Breccia Gold Property The Breccia Gold Property consists of 102 claims covering approximately 1,836 acres (743 ha) within the Blackbird Mining District, in Lemhi County, approximately 40 kilometres southwest of Salmon, Idaho, USA. The Property is accessible by paved highway and a network of well-maintained gravel roads and is host to the historical Gahsmith Gold Mine. Exploration and development activity on the Property dates back to the 1930's and has been exploited by at least eight adits, with several thousand tons of mineralized quartz veined material extracted. In the 1980s, a bulk sample of 4,621 tons was completed with an average grade of 0.335 oz/t Au reported. The current Property includes the Meadows Fault Zone and the lesser explored, parallel Musgrove Mine Trend. Recent exploration carried out in 2018, 2019, and 2020 included the remapping and sampling of the Meadows Fault Zone and the results are suggestive of the existence of a significant low-sulfidation, epithermal gold system. Surface results include 57.6 g/t Au and 19.6 g/t Ag in outcrop, and 69 g/t Au and 27.5 g/t Ag in float. About the Company Ophir Gold Corp. is a gold exploration company focused on the exploration and development of its flagship property, the past producing Breccia Gold Property located in Lemhi County, Idaho. The Company has an option to earn a 100% interest in the Property over a three-year period from Canagold Resources Ltd. (formerly Canarc Resource Corp.) and DG Resource Management Ltd. On behalf of the Board of Directors "Shawn Westcott" Ophir Gold Corp. For further information, please contact: Shawn Westcott, CEO Phone 1 (604) 365 6681 swestcott@ophirgoldcorp.com Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Note The information contained herein contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements relate to information that is based on assumptions of management, forecasts of future results, and estimates of amounts not yet determinable. Any statements that express predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements." Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: risk related to the failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and on acceptable terms; risks related to the outcome of legal proceedings; political and regulatory risks associated with mining and exploration; risks related to the maintenance of stock exchange listings; risks related to environmental regulation and liability; the potential for delays in exploration or development activities or the completion of feasibility studies; the uncertainty of profitability; risks and uncertainties relating to the interpretation of drill results, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; risks related to the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses; results of prefeasibility and feasibility studies, and the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations; risks related to commodity price fluctuations; and other risks and uncertainties related to the Company's prospects, properties and business detailed elsewhere in the Company's disclosure record. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Company's expectations or projections. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/118483 LONDON, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Den in Tokyo has secured the No.1 spot at the Asia's 50 Best Restaurants 2022 awards ceremony, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna. The prestigious list was revealed today at simultaneous events across Asia in Bangkok, Macau and Tokyo. For the full 1-50 list, please view here. Now in its 10 th year, the 2022 list welcomes a record 16 new entries. Japan leads with 11 entries, followed by Thailand with nine and Singapore with seven year, the 2022 list welcomes a record 16 new entries. leads with 11 entries, followed by with nine and with seven Debuting on the list at No.14, Villa Aida in Wakayama, Japan , claims the Highest New Entry Award, sponsored by Aspire Lifestyles in Wakayama, , claims the Rising 14 places to No.13, Ode in Tokyo wins the Highest Climber Award in wins the David Lai of Hong Kong's Neighborhood claims the peer-voted Inedit Damm Chefs' Choice Award of claims the peer-voted Odette in Singapore is this year's recipient of the Gin Mare Art of Hospitality Award in is this year's recipient of the Mume in Taipei wins the Flor de Cana Sustainable Restaurant Award in wins the Maira Yeo from Cloudstreet in Singapore earns the title of Asia's Best Pastry Chef, sponsored by Valrhona In claiming the No.1 spot, Den earns the dual titles of The Best Restaurant in Asia, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna and The Best Restaurant in Japan. Opened in 2007, Den reflects the personality of its chef-owner, Zaiyu Hasegawa. Taking a playful, personal approach to kaiseki cuisine, Hasegawa and his team delight diners with creative presentations and surprising twists on traditional dishes. After entering Asia's 50 Best Restaurants list in 2016 at No.37, Den first appeared on The World's 50 Best Restaurants list the following year, rising to No.11 in 2021. Den is joined in the top three by Bangkok'sSorn (No.2), which claims the title of The Best Restaurant in Thailand for the first time, and Florilege (No.3) in Tokyo, Japan. After taking the No.1 spot in 2021, The Chairman in Hong Kong moves to No.5, retaining the title of The Best Restaurant in China for a third year. William Drew, Director of Content for Asia's 50 Best Restaurants, says: "This year, Den has been crowned No.1 in Asia in recognition of its unique blend of tradition, innovation and playfulness. We are delighted to showcase all the restaurants on the 2022 list and the individual award winners, who inspire us with their creativity, resilience and skill." Media Centre: https://mediacentre.theworlds50best.com/ Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1775729/50_Best_Zaiyu_Hasegawa.jpg PDF - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1773495/50_Best_Asia.pdf Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1746199/50_Best_Asia_2022_Logo.jpg Johannesburg, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Team South Africa celebrated their overall success by hosting the last National Day at the World Expo 2020 Dubai. Expo 2020, which started in October 2021, saw almost 200 countries come together to display their offerings, while scouting networking opportunities, drawing investments, and solidifying relationships and future partnerships. The Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (dtic), together with MultiChoice as the official broadcast partner, set out to introduce the diverse economic value that South Africa has to offer. The six-month participation was closed out with a national ceremony hosted by the Honourable President Cyril Ramaphosa, followed by a high-level panel discussion on the successes of Team SA's participation - most notably the MultiChoice Accelerator Programme. In partnership with the dtic, social enterprise agency, C3 (Companies Creating Change), and financial advisory firm, Galelo Africa, the MultiChoice Accelerator Programme initially identified 20 promising South African start-ups for participation in a business incubator. Six finalist companies then had the opportunity to participate in an intense virtual bootcamp and pitch to venture capitalists in the UAE. "Through Team SA's participation at Expo 2020, we have built lasting relationships, partnerships and networks by taking South Africa to the world. The most tangible success can be seen through our Accelerator Programme where our finalists have gone on to secure more than USD10 million in investment from the UAE," said Imtiaz Patel, MultiChoice Non-Executive Chairman. Speaking at the Accelerator Programme Roundtable, President Cyril Ramaphosa, addressed the entrepreneurs saying: "You are truly trailblazers, and are flying our flag high here at Dubai Expo 2020. What is most energising about this programme is that you are showing the world that South Africa has a vibrant start-up culture, as well as advanced innovation ecosystems. "Innovation in science and tech is key to our country's industrialisation, especially in the post-COVID-19 recovery period," the President added. Team South Africa participated in the Expo under the theme Think South Africa, Think Opportunity. Attachment Firm has hired recognized leaders from Jefferies, Fidelity Investments, and Credit Suisse NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Clear Street , a fintech building better access to capital markets, today announced its expansion into the Dallas market. The expansion will complement Clear Street's growing Prime Brokerage Sales & Trading team currently led by industry veteran and Head of Sales & Trading at Clear Street, Joseph Ricciardi. The following seasoned professionals join the Sales & Trading team: Dan Mele, Managing Director, Sales & Trading (Dallas Branch Manager) Mele joins Clear Street after more than four years as an equity trader at National Securities Corporation. He previously held roles in trading at Jefferies, WFG Investments, Inc, and Esposito Securities, LLC. Mark Hall, Managing Director, Sales & Trading Hall brings more than 27 years of experience to Clear Street, previously serving as an equity trader at firms including Fidelity Investments, Capital Institutional Services, WFG Capital Markets, and National Securities Corp. Danny Shapiro, Director, Sales & Trading Shapiro joins Clear Street with more than seven years of experience in equity sales. Prior to his role at Clear Street, Shapiro held roles in equity sales at Citi, Credit Suisse and Stephens Inc. These new hires will report directly to Ricciardi. With more than two decades of experience in equity trading for both buy-side and sell-side clients, Ricciardi continues to oversee the Sales & Trading team's growth across the U.S. "We are pleased to welcome Dan, Mark and Danny to the Clear Street team as we build our presence in the fast-growing Dallas metro area," said Ricciardi. "We are at a pivotal moment in Clear Street's journey as we expand our network and bring new products and services to market. Bringing on top sales and trading talent is essential in helping us continue to provide exceptional service to our diverse customer base." "In the past 12 months, we have made significant strides in building out our prime brokerage platform, providing a best-in-class, technology-first experience to our clients," said Chris Pento, Co-Founder and CEO of Clear Street. "Expanding our operations into Dallas, and bringing on top industry talent, continues to give Clear Street an edge in supporting our rapidly growing roster of prime brokerage clients." Most recently, Clear Street announced the addition of prime services expert Patrick Travers as the company's new Head of Distribution, among seven additional hires to its sales team strengthening the company's commitment to deliver a best-in-class experience for its clients well into the future. About Clear Street: Launched in 2018 by industry veterans, Clear Street is a financial technology company building better infrastructure for capital markets. Clear Street's first offering is its proprietary, cloud-based prime brokerage platform, which offers institutions, professional traders, and brokerages everything they need to trade U.S. equities and options. The platform is built on native cloud infrastructure that is flexible, scalable, secure, and reliable. Clear Street clients are able to trade sooner and smarter - processing more than $3 billion in trades every day. In the future, Clear Street will offer a suite of services to meet the needs of all market participants, across geographies and asset classes. For more information visit https://clearstreet.io/ . Press Contact: Elizabeth Connerat press@clearstreet.io Clear Street does not provide investment, legal, regulatory, tax, or compliance advice. Consult professionals in these fields to address your specific circumstances. These materials are: (i) solely an overview of Clear Street's products and services; (ii) provided for informational purposes only; and (iii) subject to change without notice or obligation to replace any information contained therein. Products and services offered by Clear Street LLC, member FINRA and SIPC. Additional information about Clear Street is available on FINRA BrokerCheck (https://brokercheck.finra.org/firm/summary/288933), including its Customer Relationship Summary. Copyright 2022 Clear Street LLC, all rights reserved SOURCE: Clear Street View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695006/Clear-Street-Expands-North-American-Operations-to-Dallas-Area-in-Support-of-Growing-Sales-Trading-Team VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Lucky Minerals Inc.(TSX-V:LKY)(OTC PINK:LKMNF)(FRA:LKY) ("Lucky" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has received Terraspec analysis results for the soil samples from its ongoing work at the Wayka high sulfidation epithermal gold discovery at its 100% owned Fortuna Property ("Fortuna") in southern Ecuador. A total of 1,027 soil samples were taken along a 50 x 50 metre grid at Wayka. The total grid area covered approximately 2.43 km2. Alteration at surface now identified over a kilometric scale Soil samples were submitted for Terraspec analysis. This work was done in order to complement the information from the alteration mapping of rock chip samples. It is important to note that outcrop availability is relatively low over the area. The added information from the soil alteration mapping now confirms that the scale of the system at surface is approximately 2.4 km by 1.4 km at surface along a northeast trend. If we include the areas where only rock chip sampling was done, the scale expands to 3.2 km by 1.8 km which is also along a northeast trend. Surface alteration mapping - Wayka Francois Perron, CEO of Lucky Minerals comments, "Wayka's alteration footprint at surface continues to expand and confirms the significant potential of the project. Our team of geologists is integrating all this information with the balance of the data that it has been gathering over the recent months. There are still a few pieces of information to integrate, and we expect target definition to be ready in the coming week or two. While the target areas are being defined by the geology team, work on logistics and socialization continues in order to start the drilling program." Wayka - Next Steps Work including drill hole targeting continues in preparation for the upcoming first 3,000 m phase of drilling. Targeting will be informed by the following: Soils (just completed); Alteration mapping of Wayka project area (just completed); Geophysics (just completed, finalizing inversions); Trenches (ongoing); Structural analysis of Wayka area (field work completed awaiting final report); Prospecting on anomalous areas. Preparation work for mobilization of drilling equipment is underway. QA/QC Protocols All exploration work is completed following QA/QC protocols and include the insertion of a coarse blank, a standard and duplicate sample on every batch of 25 samples. A total of 191 soil samples were submitted to ALS Chemex Labs in Quito for preparation work, and the analytical work was completed at their lab facility in Lima, Peru. ALS Chemex is an ISO certified and accredited laboratory. A total of 836 soil samples were submitted to Bureau Veritas Labs in Quito for preparation work, and the analytical work was completed at their lab facility in Lima, Peru. Bureau Veritas is an ISO certified and accredited laboratory. Further analytical results will be released as they are received. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD "Francois Perron" Chief Executive Officer About Lucky Lucky is an exploration and development company targeting large-scale mineral systems in proven districts with the potential to host world class deposits. Lucky owns a 100% interest in the Fortuna Property. The Company's Fortuna Project is comprised of twelve contiguous, 550 km2 (55,000 Hectares, or 136,000 Acres) exploration concessions. Fortuna is located in a highly prospective, yet underexplored, gold belt in southern Ecuador. COVID-19 Safety Protocols Lucky has strict rules in place for all workers arriving to and from field sites. All personnel are tested upon arriving and leaving and are tested every two weeks. All personnel are following COVID protocols with permanent disinfection procedures in place and are following correspondent social distancing while being isolated from the surrounding communities. Qualified Person Victor Jaramillo, M.Sc.A., P.Geo., Lucky's Exploration Manager and a qualified person in accordance with National Instrument 43-101, is responsible for supervising the exploration program at the Fortuna Project for Lucky Minerals and has reviewed and approved the technical information contained in this news release. Further information on Lucky can be found on the Company's website at www.luckyminerals.com and at www.sedar.com, or by contacting Francois Perron, President and CEO, by email at investors@luckyminerals.com or by telephone at (866) 924 6484. Or by contacting: Renmark Financial Communications Inc. Kerry Schacter: kschacter@renmarkfinancial.com Tel: (416) 644-2020 or (514) 939-3989 www.renmarkfinancial.com Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Statement Regarding Adjacent Properties and Forward-Looking Information This news release contains forward-looking statements relating to the future operations of the Company and other statements that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as "will", "may", "should", "anticipate", "expects" and similar expressions. All statements other than statements of historical fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding the future plans and objectives of the Company are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: uncertainties related to exploration and development; the ability to raise sufficient capital to fund exploration and development; changes in economic conditions or financial markets; increases in input costs; litigation, legislative, environmental and other judicial, regulatory, political and competitive developments; technological or operational difficulties or inability to obtain permits encountered in connection with exploration activities; and labor relations matters. This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect the Company's forward-looking information. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations also include risks detailed from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulators. The reader is cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of any forward-looking information may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, as a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release and the Company will not update or revise publicly any of the included forward-looking statements unless required by Canadian securities law. SOURCE: Lucky Minerals Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695016/Soil-Alteration-Mapping-Expands-Southern-Alteration-Zone-at-Wayka SHERMAN OAKS, CA / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Petroteq Energy Inc. ("Petroteq" or the "Company") (TSXV:PQE)(OTC PINK:PQEFF)(FSE:PQCF), an oil company focused on the development and implementation of its proprietary oil-extraction and remediation technologies, announces that it has been advised by its Founder, Former Chairman and CEO, Mr. Alex Blyumkin, that he has tendered shares in respect to the tender offer (the "Offer") by 869889 Ontario Inc. (the "Offeror"), an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Viston United Swiss AG ("Viston"), to purchase all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Petroteq. The Offer remains open for acceptance until 5:00 p.m. (Toronto time) on April 14, 2022, unless the Offer is further extended, accelerated or withdrawn by the Offeror in accordance with its terms. Recognizing that Mr. Blyumkin holds a significant number of shares, his tender will assist the Offeror with acquiring the majority needed to complete their Offer. The Board of Directors has already recommended to shareholders to tender to the Offer. For More Information and How to Tender Shares to the Offer Shareholders who hold Common Shares through a broker or intermediary should promptly contact them directly and provide their instructions to tender to the Offer, including any U.S. dollar currency election. Registered shareholders that hold Common Shares in their own name need to complete a Letter of Transmittal and send, along with share certificates or DRS statements to the Depositary at the address listed on the Letter of Transmittal. For assistance or to ask any questions, Shareholders should visit www.petroteqoffer.com or contact Kingsdale Advisors, the Information Agent and Depositary in connection with the Offer, within North America toll-free at 1-866-581-1024, outside North America at 1-416-867-2272 or by e-mail at contactus@kingsdaleadvisors.com. The value of the Company has been thoroughly examined this year by third parties and appropriate news releases have been issued, and the Company wishes to reiterate the results from those studies. The details of those studies are shown below, and investors can refer to the original series of news releases on these items. The Company believes it has established a strong and substantial value for its shareholders. On December 23, 2021, Petroteq issued a news release regarding a reserve and economic evaluation report (the "Chapman Report") which defines bitumen reserves on the bitumen properties covered by three Utah state mineral leases located in the Asphalt Ridge Northwest area of Uintah County, Utah (the "Asphalt Ridge NW Leases"). The Company's acquisition of the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases is pending completion. The Company's acquisition of the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases is pending completion. As disclosed in its news release dated November 29, 2021 and described in more detail in its most recent annual report on Form 10-K, Petroteq, acting through its subsidiaries, Petroteq Oil Sands Recovery, LLC ("POSR") and TMC Capital, LLC ("TMC Capital"), has entered into an agreement with Valkor Energy Holdings, LLC ("Valkor") dated October 15, 2021 (the "Exchange Agreement"), under which (a) TMC Capital/POSR agreed to assign to Valkor all of their respective rights and interests in the certain oil sands leases collectively referred to as the "Temple Mountain Leases", and (b) Valkor agreed to assign to TMC Capital all of its rights and interests in the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases, which cover or encompass approximately 3,458.22 acres. The Chapman Report was prepared by Chapman Petroleum Engineering Ltd. ("Chapman") of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, an independent qualified reserves evaluator, with an effective date of November 30, 2021. Portions of the Chapman Report (the "Canadian Evaluation") were prepared in accordance with definitions, standards, and procedures contained in the Canadian Oil and Gas Evaluation Handbook ("COGE Handbook") and National Instrument 51-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Oil and Gas Activities ("NI 51-101"). Portions of the Chapman Report (the "US Evaluation") were also prepared in accordance with Rule 4-10(a) of Regulation S-X, as adopted by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Both the Canadian Evaluation and US Evaluation were calculated in United States dollars. Based on the Chapman Report, the reserve profile of the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases as at November 30, 2021 is summarized below: Canadian Evaluation : 26 million stock tank barrels ( "MMSTB" ) of Proved Undeveloped bitumen reserves ) of Proved Undeveloped bitumen reserves 82 MMSTB of Proved Plus Probable Undeveloped bitumen reserves US$265 million before-tax net present value ( "NPV" ) of future net revenue for Proved Undeveloped bitumen reserves, discounted at 10% ) of future net revenue for Proved Undeveloped bitumen reserves, discounted at 10% US$1,017 million before-tax NPV of future net revenue for Proved Plus Probable Undeveloped bitumen reserves, discounted at 10% US Evaluation : Proved Undeveloped valuation US$213 million at 10% discount (BIT) Proved Plus Probable valuation US$790 million at 10% discount (BIT) The bitumen reserves for the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases were evaluated using Chapman forecast pricing as at December 1, 2021. The NPV is prior to provision for interest, debt service charges, and general and administrative expenses. It should not be assumed that the NPV of future net revenue estimated by Chapman in the Chapman Report represents the fair market value of the reserves. The bitumen reserves for the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases were evaluated using Chapman forecast pricing as at December 1, 2021. The NPV is prior to provision for interest, debt service charges, and general and administrative expenses. It should not be assumed that the NPV of future net revenue estimated by Chapman in the Chapman Report represents the fair market value of the reserves. The difference between the Canadian Evaluation and the US Evaluation is the oil price used, which under the Canadian Standards price forecasts are the norm compared to the SEC Standards where a specified procedure is used to determine the appropriate Constant price for the project life. Accordingly, the Canadian evaluation uses escalated operating and capital costs and the US evaluation does not. All other technical factors in the Chapman Report are identical for the Canadian and US evaluations. Under the terms of the Exchange Agreement, Valkor has executed an assignment to TMC Capital of the record lease title and all of the operating rights (working interests) under the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases, and TMC Capital has in turn executed assignments transferring to Valkor all of TMC Capital's rights and interests in the Temple Mountain Leases. However, the reciprocal assignment under the Exchange Agreement of certain leases under the jurisdiction of Utah's School and Institutional Trust Land Administration ("SITLA"), including the assignment of the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases to TMC Capital, will not constitute final and completed transactions until the assignments have been reviewed and approved by SITLA. The Company filed a statement of reserves data and other oil and gas information (the "Statement") on www.sedar.com on December 14, 2021 as required by NI 51-101. The effective date of the Statement is August 31, 2021. As of August 31, 2021, there were no oil or natural gas reserves attributed to the Company's properties. As such no reserve report was prepared for the year ended August 31, 2021, and no bitumen reserves were disclosed in the Company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K. The Statement included an updated evaluation of, among other things, estimates of the Company's contingent resources, effective August 31, 2021, for its working interest in all of its properties located in Utah, USA, including (A) the Asphalt Ridge area and (B) the PR Springs area. The Statement did not include an evaluation of the reserves or resources of the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases. If the Company had completed the acquisition of the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases on or prior to the effective date of the Statement (which acquisition is still pending completion, as described above), the Company's reasonable expectation of how such acquisition would have effected such Statement is that the estimates related to resources for its Asphalt Ridge area and PR Springs properties would have remained unchanged and the estimates related to reserves for the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases would have been included. On February 14, 2022, Petroteq Announced Peak Value IP, LLC Valuation of Company's Intellectual Property (IP) A valuation study (the "Valuation Study") prepared by Peak Value IP, LLC ("Peak Value") of Petroteq's CORT indicated a fair market value (FMV) ranging from $229 Million to $326 Million. The analysis of investment value (IV) ranging from $598 Million to $850 Million. The analysis assumed a proposed production facility to be operated in Utah that produces 5,000 barrels of oil per day. The Valuation Study also encompasses the value of the separated sand as salable to third-parties, providing additional value to the IP beyond the market of oil. The valuation conclusions are based on certain practices, methods and assumptions as detailed in the Valuation Study. Peak Value utilized data provided by Petroteq, along with public information and industry knowledge of intellectual property licensing. In addition, Peak Value reviewed the historical costs as well as expected future revenue as it relates to the assets. On February 15, 2022, Petroteq Announced Economic Evaluation of Sands By-Product from Oil Extraction Petroteq announced the completion of a third-party economic evaluation report dated February 10, 2022 (the "Broadlands Report") in relation to sands anticipated to be produced as by-products of petroleum products from oil sands at the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases. The Broadlands Report was prepared by Broadlands Minerals Advisory Services Ltd. ("Broadlands"), a U.S. based, independent mineral advisory company, with input from Q4 Impact Group, LLC ("Q4 Impact"), under engagement to Broadlands, on markets and prices for the sand products. The Broadlands Report is premised on the completion by Petroteq of an extraction plant capable of producing 5,000 barrels of high-grade oil per day (bpd) on the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases. The Company believes that the sands are suitable for use as (a) silica flour, (b) fracking sand, and (c) bulk construction sands and aggregates (including road base). Accordingly, Broadlands economic analysis focused on the markets available for the sale of the three categories of by-product sands. Broadlands noted that an extraction plant producing 5,000 bpd is estimated by Petroteq to be capable of yielding 6,000 tons of sand per day or 1,860,000 tons per year (based on 310 operating days per year and operating 24 hours per day), and that silica flour is postulated to be 15 percent of the saleable product, fracking quality sand 55 percent, and bulk sand 30 percent. The economic forecast is based on 20 years of sales from such a 5,000 bpd operation, following two years for construction and start-up of the extraction plant and sands processing facility and related infrastructure. The cash flow analysis was run on a pre-income tax basis, at discount rates of 0.0, 7.5 and 15 percent; the results show potential economic benefit in the base case of a Net Present Value (NPV) of $1,285, $602, and $341 million, respectively. The base case cash flow used a selling price of $40 per ton for the unprocessed dry, clean by-product sand. Q4 Impact provided market sale price analysis to arrive at a reasonable selling price for the cash flow forecast. Broadlands notes the economic model and base case numbers may not be realized due to market factors. Broadlands based their economic analysis on information orally conveyed to them and no testing of sands from the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases has been performed by Broadland or by the Company. Broadlands confirmed that they performed their analysis in general accordance with acceptable mineral industry standards, and that technical issues discussed in the Report are in accordance with the standards of Subpart 1300 of Regulation S-K ("SEC S-K 1300") promulgated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In particular, Broadlands confirmed that they consider the sands at the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases to be Material of Economic Interest, as defined in SEC S-K 1300, and that Broadlands is required to expressly note that, as such, there is no assurance that the sands at the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases will be converted to saleable material. Broadlands also indicated that they have relied on reports prepared for Petroteq by other parties, discussions with Petroteq and Valkor, reviews of publicly available information, and information gathered during a visit to the oil sands around Venal, Utah on December 21, 2021, which, due to illness of the party that Broadlands was to meet, was perfunctory and limited in scope. Broadlands also visited Petroteq's existing plant and examined stockpiles of raw material. Meanwhile, the Company continues with business as usual, awaiting the results of the Offer. About Petroteq Energy Inc. Petroteq is a clean technology company focused on the development, implementation and licensing of a patented, environmentally safe and sustainable technology for the extraction and reclamation of heavy oil and bitumen from oil sands and mineable oil deposits. The versatile technology can be applied to both water-wet deposits and oil-wet deposits - outputting high-quality oil and clean sand. Petroteq believes that its technology can produce a relatively sweet heavy crude oil from deposits of oil sands at Asphalt Ridge without requiring the use of water, and therefore without generating wastewater which would otherwise require the use of other treatment or disposal facilities which could be harmful to the environment. Petroteq's process is intended to be a more environmentally friendly extraction technology that leaves clean residual sand that can be sold or returned to the environment, without the use of tailings ponds or further remediation. For more information, visit www.Petroteq.energy. Unless otherwise specified, all dollar amounts in this press release are expressed in U.S. dollars. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Oil and Gas Advisories The reserves estimates contained in this news release represent the net reserves of the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases as at November 30, 2021. The acquisition of the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases is pending completion, as described above. Reserves included herein are stated on a company net basis (working interest share after deducting the amounts attributable to royalties owned by others). Reserves are estimated remaining quantities of crude oil and natural gas and related substances anticipated to be recoverable from known accumulations, as of a given date, based on the analysis of drilling, geological, geophysical, and engineering data; the use of established technology; and specified economic conditions, which are generally accepted as being reasonable. Reserves are classified according to the degree of certainty associated with the estimates as follows: Proved reserves ("1P") are those reserves that can be estimated with a high degree of certainty to be recoverable. It is likely that the actual remaining quantities recovered will exceed the estimated proved reserves. Probable reserves ("2P") are those additional reserves that are less certain to be recovered than proved reserves. It is equally likely that the actual remaining quantities recovered will be greater or less than the sum of the estimated. Each of the reserves categories (proved, probable and possible) may be divided into developed and undeveloped categories. Developed reserves are those reserves that are expected to be recovered from existing wells and installed facilities or, if facilities have not been installed, that would involve a low expenditure (e.g., when compared to the cost of drilling a well) to put the reserves on production. Undeveloped reserves are those reserves expected to be recovered from known accumulations where a significant expenditure (e.g., when compared to the cost of drilling a well) is required to render them capable of production. They must fully meet the requirements of the reserves category (proved, probable, possible) to which they are assigned. It should not be assumed that the present worth of estimated future net revenues presented in the above represents the fair market value of the reserves. There is no assurance that the forecast price and cost assumptions will be attained and variances could be material. The recovery and reserves estimates of the bitumen reserves for the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases provided herein are estimates only and there is no guarantee that the estimated reserves will be recovered or the acquisition of such leases will be completed. Actual bitumen reserves may be greater than or less than the estimates provided herein. All future net revenues are estimated using forecast prices arising from the anticipated development and production of reserves, net of the associated royalties, operating costs, development costs, and abandonment and reclamation costs and are stated prior to provision for interest and general and administrative expenses. Future net revenues have been presented on a before tax basis. Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this press release contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. and Canadian securities laws. Words such as "may," "would," "could," "should," "potential," "will," "seek," "intend," "plan," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect" and similar expressions as they relate to the Company, including: statements concerning SITLA's pending review and approval of the assignment of the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases to TMC Capital; and management's expectation that the reserves identified in the Chapman Report should help to unlock access to funding from investors and financial institutions; the plan to proceed with construction of a 5,000 bpd extraction plant sands processing facility and related infrastructure; the expectation that the plant, once completed would be capable of yielding 6,000 tons of sand per day or 1,860,000 tons per year; the expectation that the Company will be successful in developing sales channels for sand for as silica flour, fracking sand, and bulk and aggregate sand, with a view towards maximizing the value of the clean sand tailings; and that the projected prices for the sand by-products on which the economic analysis are premised are achievable and sustainable; are intended to identify forward-looking information. Readers are cautioned that there is no certainty that SITLA will approve the assignment of the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases to TMC Capital, or that it will be commercially viable extract oil from the identified reserves. All statements other than statements of historical fact may be forward-looking information. Such statements reflect the Company's current views and intentions with respect to future events, based on information available to the Company, and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation: the technology performing as expected; availability of labor and parts; adequate capital raising efforts; and Petroteq's ability to execute on its operational plans. Material factors or assumptions were applied in providing forward-looking information. While forward-looking statements are based on data, assumptions and analyses that the Company believes are reasonable under the circumstances, whether actual results, performance or developments will meet the Company's expectations and predictions depends on a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results, performance and financial condition of the Company to differ materially from its expectations. Certain of the "risk factors" that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's forward-looking statements in this press release include, without limitation: the risk that SITLA will not approve the assignment of the Asphalt Ridge NW Leases to TMC Capital; that full scale commercial production may engender public opposition; changes in laws or regulations; the ability to implement business strategies or to pursue business opportunities, whether for economic or other reasons; status of the world oil markets, oil prices and price volatility; oil pricing; litigation; the nature of oil and gas production and oil sands mining, extraction and production; uncertainties in exploration and drilling for oil, gas and other hydrocarbon-bearing substances; unanticipated costs and expenses; loss of life and environmental damage; risks associated with compliance with environmental protection laws and regulations; and directors; risks related to COVID-19 including various recommendations, orders and measures of governmental authorities to try to limit the pandemic, including travel restrictions, border closures, non-essential business closures, quarantines, self-isolations, shelters-in-place and social distancing, disruptions to markets, economic activity, financing, supply chains and sales channels, and a deterioration of general economic conditions including a possible national or global recession; and other general economic, market and business conditions and factors, including the risk factors discussed or referred to in the Company's disclosure documents, filed with United States Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov (including, without limitation, its most recent annual report on Form 10-K under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended), and with the securities regulatory authorities in certain provinces of Canada and available at www.sedar.com. Should any factor affect the Company in an unexpected manner, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking information prove incorrect, the actual results or events may differ materially from the results or events predicted. Any such forward-looking information is expressly qualified in its entirety by this cautionary statement. Moreover, the Company does not assume responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such forward-looking information. The forward-looking information included in this press release is made as of the date of this press release, and the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking information, other than as required by applicable law. CONTACT INFORMATION Petroteq Energy Inc. Vladimir Podlipsky Interim Chief Executive Officer Tel: (800) 979-1897 SOURCE: Petroteq Energy Inc View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695048/Petroteq-Announces-That-Its-Founder-Former-Chairman-and-CEO-Mr-Alex-Blyumkin-Supports-the-Takeover-Bid-and-Has-Tendered-Shares-To-Takeover-Bid-From-Viston-Swiss-United-AG Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi holds a video conference with Josep Borrell, the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, in Tunxi, east China's Anhui Province, March 29, 2022. (Xinhua/Zhou Mu) HEFEI, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Tuesday held a video conference with Josep Borrell, the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, in Tunxi, east China's Anhui Province. Wang said that China and the EU, as two major forces in a multipolar world, should maintain regular strategic communication, keep enhancing mutual understanding, constantly expand cooperation consensus, and jointly address various global challenges. He called on the two sides to make good preparations for high-level exchanges so as to provide strategic guidance for bilateral cooperation and send a positive signal to the world. Borrell said the EU remains committed to improving bilateral relations with China. He reiterated the EU's adherence to the one-China principle, noting that the EU as a whole and all member states will not and should not deviate from this position. On the Ukraine crisis, Borrell said it has brought severe impact on the EU as well as on the world, and the EU is calling for an early ceasefire. For his part, Wang said China is ready to work with the international community to continue to call for a ceasefire and peace talks, avoiding a large-scale humanitarian crisis, and opening the door to peace. TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / (CSE:ROO) (OTC PINK:JNCCF) (Frankfurt:5VHA) - RooGold Inc. ("RooGold" or the "Issuer"). RooGold is pleased to announce that it has signed Land Access Agreements at its top two ranked concessions, the Gold Belt (EL9226) and Gold Star (EL9215) properties that cover numerous historic gold workings, which are located adjacent to the Peel-Manning Suture Zone. Highlights Land Access Agreement (LAA) signed with NSW Forestry permitting exploration prospecting within areas of State Forest at Gold Belt (EL 9226). Land Access Agreement (LAA) signed with landholder permitting exploration prospecting at the northern end of Gold Star (El 9215). Landholder negotiations at other properties including Trilby (EL9242) and Lorne (EL9232) are continuing. Strategic field sampling to commence in the near term at historic mine workings. Carlos Espinosa, Chief Executive Officer and a Director of RooGold comments, "obtaining land access at Gold Belt and Gold Star is a key step in the progression of Roo Gold's exploration work. Access has been granted over key areas of historic gold mining activities. Exploration reconnaissance work will commence soon." About RooGold Inc. ROOGOLD is a Canadian based junior venture mineral exploration issuer which is uniquely positioned to be a dominant player in New South Wales, Australia, through a growth strategy focused on the consolidation and exploration of high potential, mineralized precious metals properties in this prolific region of Australia. Through its announced acquisitions of Southern Precious Metals Ltd., RooGold Ltd. and Aussie Precious Metals Corp. properties, RooGold commands a portfolio of 13 high-grade potential gold (9) and silver (4) concessions covering 1,380 km2 which have 137 historic mines and prospects. For further information please contact: Ryan Bilodeau 416-910-1440 info@roogoldinc.com Forward-Looking Statements This press release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. Although the Issuer believes that the expectations reflected in applicable forward-looking statements are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or developments to differ materially from those contained in such statements. NEITHER THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE. SOURCE: RooGold Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695050/Roogold-Signs-Land-Access-Agreements-At-Gold-Belt-And-Gold-Star BUFORD, GA / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / MasterBeat Corporation (OTC PINK:MSTO), a company specializing in hard, tangible asset acquisitions with an intense focus on real estate, collectible classic automobiles, and other tangible assets, is pleased to announce that it is commencing its Multi-Family Unit strategy as part of its real estate business model. The Company is evaluating qualified potential building sites to develop its initial 300-unit multi-family asset. Back in 2019, the Company launched SBQ Holdings, LLC to acquire, build and develop multiple types of real estate assets, including multi-family rental units. Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic and government backed rental payment abatement and eviction moratoriums, SBQ and several of its partners decided to place the multi-family segment of its business model on the back burner. Now that things are getting back to normal, SBQ has been diligently working to restart the multi-family segment to further expand and diversify its real estate model. SBQ Holdings, LLC is currently evaluating multiple real estate market locations for its multifamily developments. This secondary element of SBQ's model will include land parcel acquisitions, similar to its vacation rental asset strategy, but for larger multi-family unit developments. SBQ will leverage its broad range of experience and relationships, of the Company and its CEO, to significantly help with the acquisition, construction, development, management, and future placement / divestment of these assets. SBQ plans to continue its focus on the Florida market due to the growth the state is experiencing. Florida is expected to have an additional 8 million people moving to the state by the year 2030 which will further increase demand for housing in an already supply-strained Florida real estate market. SBQ's first multi-family land acquisition is being completed utilizing company funds, strategic investors and traditional bank financing. Similar to its Vacation Rentals business segment, the land acquisition will go towards the equity portion requirement to secure the construction loan. This financing model is not only scalable, but sustainable and allows responsible growth while mitigating risk. SBQ plans to develop multi-family assets with approximately 300 units with amenities such a resort style pool, clubhouse, garages, etc. Its goal is to build, develop, lease up with the option to sell the asset to a REIT, private equity group or similar. The ideal number of units for this model divestiture is about 300 units. An all-in build cost on a project this size is estimated to be around $60M total with a future sale target in the $90-100M range. The development time is approximately 18 months once ground is broken with a 6-12 month lease up period. SBQ has willing and eager equity, financing, construction, development and management partners to start its 300-unit multi-family asset development. The diversity of SBQ's assets, traditional, vacation rentals and multi-family developments, will help to mitigate seasonality and ensure consistent, sustainable revenue and income streams, in addition to asset appreciation. The diversification of these elements in SBQ's business model and asset portfolio, delivers comfortability and demonstrates strength for its shareholders, traditional lenders and investors. "Now that our vacation rental business segment is off and running with proven asset development complete with revenues and significant realized gains, combined with the waning of the COVID restrictions and uncertainty, we know this is the right time to diversify our business model to include multi-family assets. Since the beginning, we intended and identified the multi-family development to be an integral part of the SBQ model," stated Mr. Tannariello, Masterbeat's CEO. "Our diversified, targeted aggressive but structured business model utilizes substantial experience, relationships, traditional bank financing and equity risk mitigation. We believe our model will create rapid, but responsible, growth and deliver value, including dividends, to our shareholders." About MasterBeat Corp. MasterBeat Corporation (OTC: MSTO), incorporated under the laws of Delaware, is a publicly traded company specializing in hard, tangible asset acquisitions with an intense focus on real estate, precious metals, and other tangible assets. The company believes its progressive approach to an old school model, especially in this market based on fragile earnings multiples and uncertainty, to acquire hard, tangible assets will not only offer long term capital appreciation but also deliver revenues, profits, and self-sustainability. www.masterbeatcorp.com info@masterbeatcorp.com Safe Harbor Statement This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Act of 1934 that are based upon current expectations or beliefs, as well as a number of assumptions about future events. Although we believe that the expectations and assumptions upon which they are based are reasonable, we can give no assurance that such expectations and assumptions will prove to have been correct. Some of these uncertainties include, without limitation, the company's ability to perform under existing contracts or to procure future contracts. The reader is cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as these statements are subject to numerous factors and uncertainties, including without limitation, successful implementation of our business strategy and competition, any of which may cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the statements. We undertake no obligation and do not intend to update, revise or otherwise publicly release any revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of any unanticipated events. Although we believe that our expectations are based on reasonable assumptions, we can give no assurance that our expectations will materialize. Many factors could cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. Contact: Josh Tannariello 561-570-7050 josh@masterbeatcorp.com SOURCE: MasterBeat Corporation View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695058/SBQ-Holdings-LLC-Evaluating-Locations-to-Build-300-Unit-Multi-Family-Development-with-100-Million-in-Revenue-and-Resale-Potential Clients will realize enhanced performance, innovation and management in their contingent workforce programs through the combined global companies PRO Unlimited, an Integrated Workforce Management (IWM) platform provider, today announced that it will acquire Geometric Results, Inc. (GRI), a leading independent, outsourced workforce management expert, owned by funds managed by Bain Capital Private Equity Europe. This acquisition will increase the value of PRO's IWM platform by adding GRI's proven Managed Services Program (MSP) capabilities to its robust portfolio of SaaS, Talent Intelligence and Professional Services solutions. The proposed GRI transaction continues PRO's organic and M&A growth journey. The addition of GRI's services includes SOW optimization, proactive sourcing, market intelligence, and supplier engagement. This will reinforce PRO's offering for customers including Fortune 1000 and mid-market organizations across multiple industry verticals. It will further enhance the PRO client experience by broadening and deepening the services it offers companies in the areas of strategic talent acquisition, cost savings and growth goals related to their contingent workforce management programs. "Our number one priority is providing organizations with the most innovative and client-centric solutions to accelerate how they acquire, manage and optimize talent," said Kevin Akeroyd, CEO, PRO Unlimited. "GRI shares this same strategic approach for its customers. Combining two leading contingent workforce management companies allows us to reimagine and transform the future of work." Akeroyd added, "With GRI's team of experts and ours, we have a new opportunity to innovate, anticipate and solve future workforce management challenges. Our existing and new clients will be able to rely on us for greater management, performance and financial control over their workforce and talent supply chains." GRI is currently owned by MSX International, a portfolio company of funds managed by Bain Capital Europe that provides technology-enabled business process outsourcing. GRI offers customized MSP solutions to over 150 global clients, with over $4 billion in spend under management. Its presence in both the UK and India further extends PRO's established operations in these countries and increases its vast supplier network of over 10,000 agencies. With the proposed acquisition, the combined client spend under management for PRO will reach over $22 billion. "GRI continues to exceed growth expectations due to the contributions of our team and partners at Bain Capital Private Equity, our ability to remain aligned with clients and our commitment to over-deliver with a broad suite of capabilities," said Mike Wachholz, CEO of GRI. "Their strategic and operational expertise has helped us build a highly scalable model to support further market penetration and diversification, and we're incredibly excited to continue our growth journey in concert with PRO Unlimited." "PRO is set to be a great home for the future of our employees and our customers, who will now benefit from a broad portfolio of services via the comprehensive PRO platform," said Fred Minturn, Chairman of MSX International. "Over the last five years, the business has grown tremendously under Mike and Fred's leadership through the introduction of new services (including Statement of Work and Direct Sourcing), investment into its state-of-the-art EnvisionTM analytics platform and transformative M&A. We want to thank the whole team for the shared success," said David Danon, a Managing Director at Bain Capital Private Equity Europe. The transaction is subject to customary conditions and approvals. Sidley Austin LLP, Morgan Lewis, PwC and Alvarez and Marsal advised PRO Unlimited. William Blair served as exclusive financial advisor, Kirkland Ellis LLP served as legal advisor and PwC served as accounting and tax advisor to GRI and Bain Capital Private Equity. About PRO Unlimited Serving hundreds of the world's most recognizable brands, PRO Unlimited offers modern workforce management and a partner ecosystem supported by data, software, intelligence and services to meet your flexible workforce needs. PRO's Integrated Workforce Management platform can adapt quickly to regional or industry economic shifts, and provides the speed, scale, flexibility, transparency and expertise to serve as the holistic platform for the modern workforce. Headquartered in Burlingame, California, PRO has helped global brands and organizations achieve operational and financial success for more than 30 years. http://www.prounlimited.com About Geometric Results, Inc. (GRI) GRI, a portfolio company of funds managed by Bain Capital Private Equity Europe, manages billions of dollars of contingent workforce spend across the globe. They provide cost-effective, innovative Managed Services Program (MSP) solutions to drive workforce visibility, deliver material cost savings and attract better talent. With over two decades of experience supporting some of the world's most recognized brands, GRI's model is proven and forward thinking. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005258/en/ Contacts: Media: PRO Unlimited Christian Barbato, Vice President of Corporate Marketing cbarbato@prounlimited.com 215.527.6616 GRI MSXI Bain Capital Julia Tilley Violet Wilson baincapital@camarco.co.uk +44 (0)7815 068 387 +44 (0)7875 841 477 LAS VEGAS, NV / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Triad Pro Innovators, Inc. (OTC PINK:TPII) is delighted to provide a status update on the ongoing EEL Diesel Hybrid Genset field tests. As the company has detailed recently, a test unit is currently with a major oil company undergoing rigorous field testing with a view to replacing the oil company's current fleet of diesel generators. Oil sands operator sees immediate maintenance benefits Central to the EEL Diesel Hybrid Genset is the control circuitry. This is primarily involved in regulating the charge and discharge of the company's ultra-rapid charging eCell energy storage units. In addition to this, the control circuity is also responsible for checking the system's overall health and stability, including external components on which the EEL Genset depends. Already, throughout the oil sands trial, the EEL's control circuitry has proved its value, saving the operator considerable costs by alerting it to critical preventative maintenance needed in a battery system external to the EEL Diesel Hybrid Genset. "We're pleased to see the EEL is delivering added value beyond its stated features. It's a real credit to the company's engineers that, in addition to the EEL's fuel and maintenance savings, it is also able to deliver early warnings about the health of an operator's overall power generation and supply systems," said TPII CEO, Murray Goldenberg. New operators lined up for EEL Diesel Hybrid Genset tour The current EEL Diesel Hybrid Genset tour comes on the back of demonstrations conducted in partnership with Frontier Power Products in Canada. The demonstrations were held in November and December of last year and saw company representatives from companies like Syncrude, Ledcor, Westgen Technologies, Surepoint Group, Proline Pipe Equipment, CEDA, Cermaq Canada, Ekati Mines, and Cooper Rentals. Several of these companies have requested TPII deliver demonstration units for independent field tests and application-specific evaluation. Delivering these units forms the next phase of the tour and the company will continue to provide updates as new operators accept test units. About Triad Pro Innovators, Inc. (OTC PINK:TPII): Triad Pro Innovators, Inc. has developed a proprietary device to be utilized in a variety of circumstances to store electricity. The newly developed Triad Pro power supply provides our storage system with tremendous operational flexibility. Using our propriety hardware and software solution, our eCell can be configured to store energy at a rate limited only by the network providing it, and then release that energy in a regulated way based upon the application, which allows for flexibility unknown in current chemical battery-based storage systems. Triad Pro creates and designs renewable energy solutions including Co-Generation and the patent pending eCells that can be used stand alone or modular as energy demands increase. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS The statements contained in this release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "may," "will," "could," "should," "expect," "plan," "project," "intend," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "predict," "potential," "pursuant," "target," "continue," and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. The statements in this press release that are not historical statements, including statements regarding TPII's plans, objectives, future opportunities for TPII's services and products, future financial performance and operating results and any other statements regarding TPII's future expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, financial conditions, assumptions or future events or performance that are not historical facts, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to numerous risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, many of which are beyond TPII's control, and which could cause actual results to differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict, and include, without limitation, results of litigation, settlements and investigations; actions by third parties, including governmental agencies; volatility in customer spending; global economic conditions; ability to hire and retain personnel; loss of, or reduction in business with, key customers; difficulty with growth and integration of acquisitions; product liability; cybersecurity risk; anti-takeover measures in our charter documents; and, the uncertainties created by the ongoing outbreak of a respiratory illness caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus that was recently named by the World Health Organization as COVID-19. These and other important risk factors are described more fully in our reports and other documents filed with OTC Markets Group in satisfaction of the company's obligations as an alternative reporting company. Undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements in this press release, which are based on information available to us on the date hereof. Except as otherwise required by applicable law, we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. Investor Relations Contact: info@triadpro.com 714.790.3662 SOURCE: Triad Pro Innovators, Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695047/TPII-EEL-Diesel-Hybrid-Genset-Continues-to-Deliver-in-Independent-Field-Tests Andersen Global continues to cultivate its platform in East Asia through a Collaboration Agreement with Eiger, a full-service law firm headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan. Founded in 2003, Eiger has expertise in areas including tax, corporate, employment, dispute resolution, intellectual property and energy matters. With offices in both Taipei and Shanghai, Eiger advises clients at the local and international levels. The firm is consistently recognized by Chambers Asia-Pacific, The Legal 500 Asia Pacific and IFLR 1000 as a top-performing law firm. "Our team understands the needs of our clients and is committed to providing best-in-class service," said Partner and Office Managing Director John Eastwood. "Collaborating with Andersen Global will allow us to drive our firm's development efforts forward as we continue to build long-lasting client relationships and deliver comprehensive, integrated solutions." "John and his team have a strong reputation in the market and their addition is part of our strategy to build out our presence in the region and enhance our global capabilities," said Mark Vorsatz, Andersen Global Chairman and Andersen CEO. "The firm's service offerings complement the services provided by our existing member and collaborating firms, and allow us to best serve clients with operations in Taiwan." Andersen Global is an international association of legally separate, independent member firms comprised of tax and legal professionals around the world. Established in 2013 by U.S. member firm Andersen Tax LLC, Andersen Global now has more than 10,000 professionals worldwide and a presence in over 336 locations through its member firms and collaborating firms. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005035/en/ Contacts: Megan Tsuei Andersen Global 415-764-2700 - Connected Capital leads investment in Creative Automation platform that saves graphic design professionals time and brings agencies and tech partners new business CHICAGO and BRUSSELS, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- CHILI publish, the Creative Automation software market leader, today announces it has raised 10 million in a new round of funding led by Connected Capital with participation from existing investors Group MC, Pamica, and PMV. The new financing will be used to accelerate solution and community development, attract new talent, and boost the company's go-to-market and sales operations in the United States and Europe. CHILI publisher is a cloud-based Creative Automation platform that enables brands and agencies to create, edit, and share visual content through secure graphic templates - in accordance with brand guidelines - that can be used across in-house teams and agency partners. Agencies large and small and such Fortune 500 brands as Carrefour, Coca-Cola, and Mars in a variety of industries such as retail, FMCG, real estate, automotive, and more depend on CHILI publisher to streamline automated personalization at scale. CHILI publisher is also utilized by MarTech vendors like Sitecore, 4AllPortal, Akeneo, Horizontal, Pimcore, and others to create new revenue streams and offer new value-adding connectors between content platforms. Creative Tech - future-proofing visuals designed by professionals for professionals "Consumers increasingly look for compelling visual content across touchpoints, as they navigate through online, social, and on-site marketplaces. Brands and agencies struggle to reach the right people with the right content on the right channel because all too often their design adaptation process takes time, is error-prone and not data-driven," said Kevin Goeminne, CEO at CHILI publish. "CHILI publisher lets brands and agencies simplify and automate on-brand graphic production at scale, saving them time and money in the end-to-end production of that content for both online and offline channels. This investment allows us to grow our solution, team, and community so every professional in any market can create and repurpose professional, on-brand visuals." "Creative tech is the rapidly evolving space to watch. Brands and agencies are striving to become more productive, adaptive, and scalable. CHILI publish delivers just that by empowering them with a powerful and tailored platform. It gives brands the control and the speed they need to rapidly react to consumer demand trends, both in-store and online," said Geert van Engelen, Managing Partner at Connected Capital, who will join CHILI publish's board of directors. "CHILI publish's relationships with MarTech integration partners and creative service providers, their attention to data security with recent ISO 27001:2017 certification, and a result-focused, solution-driven team makes us excited to contribute to their accelerated expansion." Read the complete press release at www.chili-publish.com/press/10M-investment About CHILI publish CHILI publish was founded in 2010 with a single vision: make graphic versioning productive, adaptable, and scalable. Today, hundreds of customers around the globe use CHILI publisher to produce digital and print content at scale and create better customer experiences. With a team of over 75 people, a global ecosystem of integration partners, and offices in Aalst, Belgium, and Chicago, USA, CHILI publish is succeeding in becoming a trusted innovation partner in building the future of creative technology for brands and agencies worldwide. About Connected Capital Connected Capital is a leading investor in growth and buy-out stage European B2B SaaS companies. It provides capital and expertise in pure-play SaaS to entrepreneurs in order to accelerate the growth of their businesses. Based in Amsterdam and backed by institutional investors, Connected Capital operates across Europe with over 200 million of capital under management. For more information, please visit www.connectedcapital.nl. More information at: www.chili-publish.com Press contacts Laura Baxter VP Marketing T: +32 2 888 65 11 E: laura@chili-publish.com Maya Staels PR Manager M: +32 477 49 24 26 E: maya@chili-publish.com Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1773164/CHILI_publish.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1773166/Kevin_Goeminne_and_Bram_Verniest.jpg Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1773165/CHILI_publish_Logo.jpg VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Silver Elephant Mining Corp. ("Silver Elephant" or "the Company") (TSX:ELEF)(OTCQX:SILEF)(Frankfurt:1P2N) announces diamond drilling results from the Paca deposit ("Paca") within its 100%-controlled Pulacayo silver project ("Pulacayo") in the Potosi department of Bolivia. A total of 8 holes were drilled at Paca, totaling 1,717 meters. PND 119, 120, 121 & 122 were drilled to test induced polarization ("IP") geophysical anomalies located to the east of the current Paca resource. PND 123, 124, 125 & 126 were drilled to test potential northern extension of the Paca resource. The results are summarized in the following table: Paca East Discovery Hole ID From To Width (m) Ag (g/t) Pb % Zn % AgEq (g/t) PND119 360.0 399.0 39.0 5 0.40 0.49 37 incl 377.0 379.0 2.0 31 1.14 1.15 112 PND120 39.0 75.0 36.0 12 0.08 0.51 33 incl 68.0 75.0 7.0 14 0.21 0.94 56 PND120 184.0 187.0 3.0 28 2.18 0.64 126 PND120 280.0 284.0 4.0 6 0.52 0.60 46 PND121 50.0 68.0 18.0 2 0.65 0.81 56 incl 57.0 59.0 2.0 1 1.25 2.64 147 PND121 75.0 79.0 4.0 56 0.16 0.12 60 PND122 34.0 56.0 22.0 1 0.56 0.46 38 Paca North Oxide Discovery Hole ID From To Width (m) Ag (g/t) Pb % Zn % AgEq (g/t) PND123 3.0 30.0 27.0 159 0.28 0.05 154 incl 7.5 9.0 1.5 565 0.30 0.08 518 PND123 37.5 45.0 7.5 68 0.11 0.07 67 PND124 0.0 28.5 28.5 22 0.42 0.73 63 incl 15.0 27.0 12.0 21 0.54 1.29 88 PND125 0.0 18.8 18.8 33 0.20 0.52 56 incl 10.4 15.4 5.0 80 0.40 1.13 130 PND126 0.0 31.0 31.0 31 0.22 0.09 39 incl 29.0 31.0 2.0 78 0.27 0.08 82 Note: Reported widths are intercepted core lengths and not true widths, as relationships with intercepted structures and contacts vary. Based on core-angle measurements, true widths range from 75% to 85% of the reported core length. Please see note on AgEq calculation in preceding paragraphs. Sulphide zone metal recoveries of 89.2% for Ag, 91.9% for Pb, and 82.9% for Zn were used in the Silver Equivalent (Recovered) equation and reflect metallurgical testing results disclosed previously for the Pulacayo Deposit. Silver equivalents are noted where "AgEq"=Silver Equivalent (Recovered) and is equal to (Ag g/t*89.2%)+((Pb%*(US$0.95/lb. Pb/14.583 Troy oz./lb./US$17 per Troy oz. Ag)*(10,000*91.9%))+((Zn%*(US$1.16/lb. Zn/14.583 Troy oz./lb./US$17 per Troy oz. Ag)*(10,000*82.9%)). Notable results include PND 123, collared at the northern edge of the Paca resource and drilled further to the north. The hole intercepted 27 meters of 159 g/t silver from near-surface, including 1.5 meters of 565 g/t silver. PND 123, 124, 125 & 126 are step-out holes and all intercepted silver mineralization demonstrate the northern extension of Paca oxide resource that is open to the north and to the northeast by at least 100 meters. The company plans to conduct further drilling to expand the Paca oxide resource in 2nd half of 2022. Paca north's shallow oxide expression and flat-tabular morphology may be well suited for a potential open-pit operation, which the company will announce the commissioning of a prefeasibility study shortly and provide an update on its environmental permitting efforts enabling an open-pit mining, leach processing operation at Paca. John Lee, the Company's Chairman, states: "Silver Elephant's 2022 priority is all about Paca: expanding oxide resource, completing environmental permitting and a prefeasibility study. Our goal is to accelerate Paca development to reach a mine construction decision in early 2023." PND 119, 120, 121 & 122 are exploration holes that tested IP anomalies located east and southeast from the Paca resource. All 4 holes encountered metal-bearing sulphide mineralization and the results confirm Paca hydrothermal mineralizing systems continue eastward beyond what was previously known. The Company is incorporating all available drill data, mapping, sampling, and geophysical data to better understand the geological and resource models to generate new drill targets. The Paca resource was prepared by Mercator Geological Services Limited with an effective date of October 13, 2020 with details provided in the Company's news release dated October 13, 2020. Paca Deposit Pit-Constrained Mineral Resource Estimate - Effective Date October 13, 2020** Cut -off Grade Zone Category Rounded Tonnes Ag g/t Zn % Pb % Ag Moz Zn Mlbs Pb Mlbs *AgEq Moz *AgEq g/t 50 Ag g/t Oxide In-Pit Indicated 1,095,000 185 6.5 Inferred 345,000 131 1.5 30 *AgEq g/t Sulfide In-Pit Indicated 20,595,000 46 1.07 0.67 30.5 485.8 304.2 70.2 106 Inferred 3,050,000 46 0.76 0.65 4.5 51.1 43.7 9.2 94 Total: Indicated 21,690,000 37 485.8 304.2 70.2 Inferred 3,395,000 6 51.1 43.7 9.2 Paca Deposit Pit-Constrained Cut-Off Grade Sensitivity Report for Oxide Zone Cut -off Grade Category Rounded Tonnes Ag g/t Ag Moz 30 Ag g/t Indicated 1,805,000 128 7.4 Inferred 500,000 102 1.6 45 Ag g/t Indicated 1,225,000 170 6.7 Inferred 375,000 124 1.5 90 Ag g/t Indicated 800,000 231 5.9 Inferred 235,000 159 1.2 200 Ag g/t Indicated 420,000 311 4.2 Inferred 55,000 285 0.5 400 Ag g/t Indicated 80,000 493 1.3 Inferred 5,000 459 0.1 Note: Cut-off grade for pit-constrained oxide Mineral Resources is 50 g/t Ag. Summaries of each hole and their target rationale are provided in the discussion below. Paca East Discovery PND119 was the first hole to test a large semi-circular IP anomaly approximately 160 meters southeast of the known Paca resource. The hole was planned to intercept the anomaly and also drill under a historic artisanal mining trench. The anomaly was targeted between 325-350 meters downhole. The hole encountered 2 meters of 31 g/t Ag, 1.14% Pb, 1.15% Zn, 112 g/t AgEq within a larger interval 39 meters of 5 g/t Ag, 0.40% Pb, 0.49%, 37 g/t Ag. PND120 was designed to test a potential down-dip extension of the 39 meters of mineralization encountered in PND119 and to ascertain any potential increase in concentration of this mineralization. A 36 meter interval was intercepted from 39-75 meters of 12 g/t Ag, 0.21% Pb, 0.08%, 0.51% Zn, 33 g/t AgEq including 7 meters of 14 g/t Ag, 0.21% Pb and 0.94% Zn, 56 g/t AgEq and encountered sulphides from 184-187 meters at 28 g/t Ag, 2.18% Pb, 0.64% Zn, 126 g/t AgEq. Both these intercepts precede the expected down dip portion of PND119. An intercept in the target area at 280-284 meters returned 6 g/t Ag, 0.52% Pb, 0.60% Zn, 46 g/t AgEq. PND121 was planned to test strong IP anomaly 280 meters south of the Paca resource and cross cut faulted structures indicated from surface mapping. A 2 meter interval of sulphide mineralization was encountered at 57-59 meters grading 1 g/t Ag, 1.25% Pb, 2.64% Zn, 147 g/t AgEq nested within a wider interval of 18 meters (50-68 meters) of 2 g/t Ag, 0.65% Pb, 0.81% Zn, 56 g/t AgEq. Another 4 meter interval shortly downhole of this interval from 75-79 meters grades 56 g/t Ag, 0.16% Pb, 0.12% Zn, 60 g/t AgEq. PND122 was designed to test an IP anomaly 240 meters southeast of the Paca resource. Disseminated sulphides were encountered from 34-56 meters (22 meters) grading 1 g/t Ag, 0.56% Pb, 0.46% Zn, 38 g/t AgEq, and a silver-bearing interval from 66-69 meters (3 meters) grading 76 g/t Ag, 0.03% Pb, 0.09% Zn, 72 g/t AgEq. Lightly mineralized sulfide bearing sediments were encountered at a depth ~200m redefining the shape of previously interpreted andesite dome and significantly extending the area of exploration interest. Paca North Oxide Discovery PND123 was drilled immediately outside of the resource limits to the north and encountered 27 meters of 159 g/t Ag, 0.28% Pb, 0.05% Zn, 154 g/t AgEq starting at 3.0 meters depth, including 1.5 meters of 565 g/t Ag, 0.30% Pb, 0.08% Zn, 518 g/t AgEq. A second 7.5 meter interval at 37.5-45.0 meters with 68 g/t Ag, 0.11% Pb, 0.07% Zn, 67 g/t AgEq was encountered. PND124 was drilled 80 meters north of the resource and hit mineralization starting at surface encountering 28.5 meters of 22 g/t Ag, 0.42% Pb, 0.74% Zn, 63 g/t AgEq. PND125 was drilled 25 meters east of the resource and also encountered mineralization starting at surface to 18.8 meters of 33 g/t Ag, 0.2% Pb, 0.52% Zn, 56 g/t AgEq including 5.0 meters of 80 g/t Ag, 0.40% Pb, 1.13% Zn, 130 g/t AgEq from 10.4-15.4 meters. PND126 was collared just outside the resource drilling west into the resource and encountered mineralization from surface to 31.0 meters of 31 g/t Ag, 0.22% Pb, 0.09% Zn, 39 g/t AgEq, including 78 g/t Ag, 0.27% Pb, 0.08% Zn, 82 g/t AgEq. Please visit www.silverelef.com to see maps pertaining to this release. Qualified Person The technical contents of this news release have been prepared under the supervision of Danniel Oosterman, VP Exploration. Mr. Oosterman is not independent of the Company in that he is employed by it. Mr. Oosterman is a qualified person as defined by the guidelines in NI 43-101. Quality Assurance and Quality Control Silver Elephant adopts industry-recognized best practices in its implementation of QA/QC methods. A geochemical standard control sample and a blank sample are inserted into the sample stream at every 20th sample. Duplicates are taken at every 40th sample. Standards and duplicates, including lab duplicates and standards, are analyzed using scatterplots. Samples are shipped to ALS Global Laboratories in Ururo, Bolivia for preparation. They are then shipped for analysis to ALS Global laboratories in Lima, Peru. Samples are analyzed using Intermediate Level Four Acid Digestion. Silver overlimits ("ore grade") are analyzed using fire assay with a gravimetric finish. ALS Laboratories sample management system meets all the requirements of the International Standards ISO/IEC 17025:2017 and ISO 9001:2015. All ALS geochemical hub laboratories are accredited to ISO/IEC 17025:2017 for specific analytical procedures. All samples are taken from HQ-diameter core were split in half by a diamond-blade masonry saw. One half of the core is submitted for laboratory analysis and the other half is preserved for reference at the Company's secured core facility. All the core is geotechnically analyzed and photographed and then logged by geologists prior to sampling. About Silver Elephant Silver Elephant Mining Corp. is a premier silver mining and exploration company which also owns 39% of Battery Metals Royalties Corp. Further information on Silver Elephant can be found at www.silverelef.com. SILVER ELEPHANT MINING CORP. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD "John Lee" Executive Chairman For more information about Silver Elephant, please contact: +1.604.569.3661 ext. 101 info@silverelef.com www.silverelef.com Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Toronto Stock Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this news release, including statements which may contain words such as "expects", "anticipates", "intends", "plans", "believes", "estimates", or similar expressions, and statements related to matters which are not historical facts are forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Such forward-looking statements, which reflect management's expectations regarding Company's future growth, results of operations, performance, and business prospects and opportunities, are based on certain factors and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors should be considered carefully, and readers should not place undue reliance on the Company's forward-looking statements. The Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements contained in this news release and the documents incorporated by reference herein are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct. In addition, although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events, or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events, or results not to be as anticipated, estimated, or intended. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly release any future revisions to forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this news or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as expressly required by law. SOURCE: Silver Elephant Mining Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695073/Silver-Elephants-Paca-North-Discovery-Drills-27-Meters-of-159-gt-Silver-from-Near-Surface-Oxides-Including-15-Meters-of-565-gt-Silver-in-Bolivia VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Silver Elephant Mining Corp. ("Silver Elephant" or "the Company") (TSX:ELEF)(OTCQX:SILEF)(Frankfurt:1P2N) announces regional exploration drilling results from its 100%-controlled Pulacayo silver project in the Potosi department of Bolivia. A total of 9 holes were drilled, totaling 3,251 meters to test several induced polarization ("IP") geophysical targets within a 3km radius from the San Leon tunnel entrance accessing the east-west trending Tajo Vein System ("TVS") that comprises the Pulacayo deposit. The TVS is where all of the historic Pulacayo silver production took place from the early 1800's until 1952. This modest drill program covering an area of 3.5km by 2km is the largest regional drill campaign outside of the Pulacayo and Paca deposits (Paca is 7km north of Pulacayo). 3 of the 9 holes encountered multiple intersections of mineralization, including 2 meters grading 299g/t silver, 0.75% lead and 0.44% zinc at PUD292 (Pacamayo target). PUD291 and PUD292 prematurely ended in mineralization at depths of 717meters and 562 meters respectively due to drill rig capability, while PUD 293 was abandoned due to poor ground conditions. The results demonstrate that silver and base metals have been deposited in areas distant to the main TVS, providing encouraging signs of possibly existing, yet-to-be-discovered, parallel or conjugate vein systems to TVS, which was formed in a large hydrothermal system given its depth extends to 1,000 meters or more from surface. Also notable are the similarly strong IP signatures exhibited at the TVS versus the drilled targets. The TVS (i.e. Pulacayo deposit) features increasing grades and thickness with depth that may be related to lithological contrasts with changing structural behaviour where these contrasts occur. This combination may have led to dramatic changes in the pressure-temperature conditions that induce precipitation of favorable metals. The Company plans to further rehabilitate the San Leon tunnel and adits to provide a platform for future underground drilling to reach deeper targets beneath the pyrite caps while conserving drill meterage. The Company will examine the drill assays and core to reconstruct the geological model for the district where no information other than surface mapping was previously available. Incorporating these results with isopach and isochore modeling, geological mapping, geochemistry and geophysics will enhance the Company's understanding in order to refine and inform the next round of exploration drill targets towards the end of 2022. The results are summarized in the following table: Hole ID Target From To Width (m) Ag (g/t) Pb % Zn % AgEq (g/t) PUD 291 El Abra 391.0 393.0 2.0 6 0.14 0.36 24 PUD 291 426.0 428.0 2.0 7 0.39 0.81 51 PUD 291 628.0 636.0 8.0 2 0.08 0.27 16 PUD 291 693.0 699.0 6.0 4 0.22 0.50 31 PUD 291 711.0 717.5 6.5 10 0.29 0.56 41 PUD-292 Pacamayo 38.0 52.0 14.0 6 0.13 0.23 19 PUD-292 86.0 98.0 12.0 2 0.06 0.27 14 PUD-292 151.0 173.0 22.0 2 0.06 0.21 11 PUD-292 175.0 212.0 37.0 2 0.06 0.24 13 PUD-292 291.0 303.0 12.0 6 0.05 0.14 12 PUD-292 356.0 364.0 8.0 3 0.13 0.39 23 PUD-292 486.0 520.0 34.0 22 0.26 0.22 37 Incl 495.0 497.0 2.0 299 0.75 0.44 310 PUD-292 526.0 537.0 11.0 2 0.09 0.50 25 PUD-292 541.0 562.0 21.0 4 0.11 0.53 28 PUD 293 Pero 114.0 123.0 9.0 12 0.17 0.42 33 PUD 293 165.0 171.0 6.0 18 0.09 0.06 22 Note: Reported widths are intercepted core lengths and not true widths, as relationships with intercepted structures and contacts vary. Based on core-angle measurements, true widths range from 75% to 85% of the reported core length. Please see note on AgEq calculation in preceding paragraphs. Sulphide zone metal recoveries of 89.2% for Ag, 91.9% for Pb, and 82.9% for Zn were used in the Silver Equivalent (Recovered) equation and reflect metallurgical testing results disclosed previously for the Pulacayo Deposit. Summaries of each hole and their target rationale are provided in the discussion below. Silver equivalents are noted where "AgEq"=Silver Equivalent (Recovered) and is equal to (Ag g/t*89.2%)+((Pb%*(US$0.95/lb. Pb/14.583 Troy oz./lb./US$17 per Troy oz. Ag)*(10,000*91.9%))+((Zn%*(US$1.16/lb. Zn/14.583 Troy oz./lb./US$17 per Troy oz. Ag)*(10,000*82.9%)). The Pulacayo project consists of the Pulacayo and Paca deposits which received over 94,000 meters of drilling since the late 1990's with a combined indicated mineral resource of 106.7 million oz of silver, 1,384.7 million pounds of zinc, and 693.9 million pounds of lead, and an Inferred Mineral Resource of 13.1 million oz of silver, 122.8 million pounds of zinc and 61.9 million pounds of lead (prepared by Mercator Geological Services Ltd, details provided in the Company's news release dated October 13, 2020.) The Pulacayo deposit mineral resource estimate is provided in the following tables. Pulacayo Deposit Combined Pit-Constrained and Out-of-Pit MRE - Effective Date October 13, 2020 Cut -off Grade Zone Category Rounded Tonnes Ag g/t Zn % Pb % Ag Moz Zn Mlbs Pb Mlbs *AgEq Moz *AgEq g/t 50 Ag g/t Oxide In-Pit Indicated 1,090,000 125 4.4 Inferred 25,000 60 0.0 30 *AgEq g/t Sulfide In-Pit Indicated 24,600,000 76 1.63 0.70 60.1 884.0 379.6 123.4 156 Inferred 745,000 82 1.79 0.61 2.0 29.4 10.0 3.9 164 100 *AgEq g/t Sulfide Out-of-Pit Indicated 660,000 268 1.35 0.44 5.7 19.6 6.4 6.5 307 Inferred 900,000 179 2.14 0.42 5.2 42.4 8.3 7.4 257 Total: Indicated 26,350,000 70.2 903.7 386.0 133.4 Inferred 1,670,000 7.2 71.8 18.4 11.4 Pulacayo Deposit Pit-Constrained Cut-Off Grade Sensitivity Report for Sulfide Zone Cut -off Grade Category Rounded Tonnes Ag g/t Zn % Pb % Ag Moz Zn Mlbs Pb Mlbs *AgEq Moz *AgEq g/t 30 AgEq g/t Indicated 24,600,000 76 1.63 0.7 60.1 884 379.6 123.4 156 Inferred 745,000 82 1.79 0.61 2 29.4 10 3.9 164 45 AgEq g/t Indicated 23,715,000 78 1.67 0.72 59.5 873.1 376.4 122 160 Inferred 735,000 83 1.81 0.61 2 29.3 9.9 3.9 166 90 AgEq g/t Indicated 13,700,000 121 2.17 0.99 53.3 655.4 299 100 227 Inferred 290,000 154 3.62 0.97 1.4 23.1 6.2 2.9 312 200 AgEq g/t Indicated 5,385,000 249 2.75 1.54 43.1 326.5 182.8 66.3 383 Inferred 180,000 230 4.57 1.22 1.3 18.1 4.8 2.5 426 400 AgEq g/t Indicated 1,860,000 387 3.62 2.25 23.1 148.4 92.3 33.8 565 Inferred 105,000 297 5.29 1.46 1 12.2 3.4 1.8 521 Summaries of each hole and their target rationale are provided in the discussion below. PUD288 was a hole completed in early 2021 in conclusion of a drilling program at the Pero area, southeast of the TVS. This program successfully identified mineralization in that area, including encountering 4 meters of 518 g/t AgEq (PUD286; 393 g/t Ag, 0.88% Pb, 3.79% Zn; see Company's press release dated January 27, 2021). No significant results are reported from PUD288. PUD289 was drilled 330 meters north of the western TVS trend to test a shallow IP anomaly. No significant silver mineralization was encountered, and the anomaly was explained by the presence of pyrite in the hole which is a highly chargeable iron-sulphide. PUD290 was drilled to test an IP anomaly drilling north-to-south in what is called the El Abra area. The El Abra area is host to a weakly mineralized hydrothermal breccia pipe on the property approximately 900 meters north of the TVS on the western side. An IP anomaly at depth was noted as a target that may have represented an increase in the amount of mineralization observed at surface at the noted target depth. The hole encountered 6 meters of weak mineralization from 270 to 276 meters grading of 8 g/t AgEq (1 g/t Ag, 0.04% Pb, 0.15% Zn). PUD291 was designed to test IP targets on the south portion and directly underneath the El Abra breccia. The first target was projected between 375 and 425 meters, the second target at 575-625 meters The hole encountered silicified pyrite-bearing rocks early in the hole and encountered 24 g/t AgEq mineralization at 391-393 meters (6 g/t Ag, 0.14% Pb, 0.36% Zn) and 51 g/t AgEq at 426 to 428 meters (7 g/t Ag, 0.39% Pb, 0.81% Zn). For the second target, three mineralized intervals were encountered (8 meters from 628-636 meters @ 2 g/t Ag, 0.39% Pb, 0.89% Zn, 16 g/t AgEq; 6 meters from 693-699 meters @ 4 g/t Ag, 0.22% Pb, 0.50% Zn, 31 g/t AgEq; 6.5 meters from 711-717.5 meters @ 10 g/t Ag, 0.29% Pb, 0.56% Zn, 41 g/t AgEq). The hole ended in this mineralization at 717.5 meters. PUD292 was drilled to test the Pacamayo area (approximately 1.5 km north of the TVS), the most prospective and advanced target of this campaign underneath the northern portion of the San Leon tunnel, which is the adit for the historic Pulacayo mine. This underground area was mapped by Silver Elephant in 2020 which discovered a strong alteration envelope coinciding with chips samples of 0.6-1m intervals that returned high-grade assays of over 1,500 g/t Ag (beyond detection limit), up to 3.1% copper, up to 17.6% lead and up to 6.9% zinc. PUD292 tested an IP target below this zone. A total of 9 mineralized intervals were encountered in the hole with varying amounts of modest grades with the exception of a 2 meter interval of 299 g/t Ag, 0.75% Pb, 0.44% Zn, 310 g/t AgEq from 495-497 meters, nested in a wider interval of 34 meters of 22 g/t Ag, 0.26% Pb, 0.22% Zn, 37 g/t AgEq from 486-520 meters. The hole ended in modest mineralization at 562 meters. PUD293 and PUD294 were both designed to test IP anomalies in and around the Pero area, below what is believed to be a thrusted block of sandstone. Holes were designed to test several clustered anomalies. PUD293 was abandoned at 233 meters due to ground conditions and tested the shallower portion of this anomaly. Several intervals of mineralization were encountered including 9 meters of 12 g/t Ag, 0.17% Pb, 0.42% Zn, 33 g/t AgEq from 114-123 meters, and 6 meters of 18 g/t Ag, 0.09% Pb, 0.06% Zn, 22 g/t AgEq from 165-171 meters. No significant results are reported from PUD294 which tested the deeper portions of the same anomaly and crossed several smaller anomalies at depth. Maps are available at www.silverelef.com Qualified Person The technical contents of this news release have been prepared under the supervision of Danniel Oosterman, VP Exploration. Mr. Oosterman is not independent of the Company in that he is employed by it. Mr. Oosterman is a qualified person as defined by the guidelines in NI 43-101. Quality Assurance and Quality Control Silver Elephant adopts industry-recognized best practices in its implementation of QA/QC methods. A geochemical standard control sample and a blank sample are inserted into the sample stream at every 20th sample. Duplicates are taken at every 40th sample. Standards and duplicates, including lab duplicates and standards, are analyzed using scatterplots. Samples are shipped to ALS Global Laboratories in Ururo, Bolivia for preparation. They are then shipped for analysis to ALS Global laboratories in Lima, Peru. Samples are analyzed using Intermediate Level Four Acid Digestion. Silver overlimits ("ore grade") are analyzed using fire assay with a gravimetric finish. ALS Laboratories sample management system meets all the requirements of the International Standards ISO/IEC 17025:2017 and ISO 9001:2015. All ALS geochemical hub laboratories are accredited to ISO/IEC 17025:2017 for specific analytical procedures. All samples are taken from HQ-diameter core were split in half by a diamond-blade masonry saw. One half of the core is submitted for laboratory analysis and the other half is preserved for reference at the Company's secured core facility. All the core is geotechnically analyzed and photographed and then logged by geologists prior to sampling. About Silver Elephant Silver Elephant Mining Corp. is a premier silver mining and exploration company which also owns 39% of Battery Metals Royalties Corp. Further information on Silver Elephant can be found at www.silverelef.com. SILVER ELEPHANT MINING CORP. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD "John Lee" Executive Chairman For more information about Silver Elephant, please contact Investor Relations: +1.604.569.3661 ext. 101 info@silverelef.com www.silverelef.com Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Toronto Stock Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this news release, including statements which may contain words such as "expects", "anticipates", "intends", "plans", "believes", "estimates", or similar expressions, and statements related to matters which are not historical facts are forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Such forward-looking statements, which reflect management's expectations regarding Company's future growth, results of operations, performance, and business prospects and opportunities, are based on certain factors and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors should be considered carefully, and readers should not place undue reliance on the Company's forward-looking statements. The Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements contained in this news release and the documents incorporated by reference herein are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct. In addition, although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events, or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events, or results not to be as anticipated, estimated, or intended. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly release any future revisions to forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this news or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as expressly required by law. SOURCE: Silver Elephant Mining Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695071/Silver-Elephant-Drills-2-Meters-of-299gt-Silver-15km-North-of-Tajo-Vein-System-at-Pulacayo-Project-in-Bolivia The SEMI Foundation partners with Foothill College, Ignited Education, and Krause Center for Innovation to develop microelectronics career training program. MILPITAS, Calif., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- SEMI, the global industry association representing the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, today announced that, in partnership with Ignited Education, Foothill College and Krause Center for Innovation, it has won a $1 millionCalifornia Apprenticeship Initiative (CAI) New and Innovative Grant for the development of a semiconductor pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship program to expand the pathway to careers in the microelectronics industry. The SEMI Foundation and its partners will develop the industry career training program to be offered by California community colleges and ultimately schools in other states. The program will connect CAI partners with SEMI member companies to define job competencies that shape the coursework. The CAI funding will support the SEMI Foundation's work to build the SEMI Career and Apprenticeship Network (SCAN), aimed at helping overcome the U.S. microelectronics industry's talent shortage as the federal government continues to invest in apprenticeships. The grant also supports the foundation's efforts to promote a more inclusive workforce. SCAN will offer training that equips workers with the technical skills needed to enter high-demand, entry-level jobs in the microelectronics industry. It will also expand the pool of skilled workers for hiring companies. "Securing the CAI funding is a key step in building out SCAN as we work to develop a national apprenticeship network, recruit more people of color and women to the industry, and create industry credentials recognized nationwide," said Shari Liss, executive director of the SEMI Foundation. "We look forward to continuing the vital work with our partners to expand access to jobs across the semiconductor industry and enable more people to enter rewarding careers." CAI New and Innovative Grants fund the development of pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs to strengthen sectors that drive economic growth while creating opportunities for workers in underserved communities to enter high-wage professions. CAI funds workforce development projects across 20 sectors including advanced manufacturing, global trade and logistics, agriculture, energy and life sciences to help build connections between students and employers. Foothill College will develop coursework covering the competencies for various high-need positions in the microelectronics industry. Complementing the work of Foothill College to reach students early in their education, Ignited and the Krause Center for Innovation will create middle school foundations and high-school pathways pre-apprenticeship programs featuring engaging student experiences and teacher-training workshops. The SEMI Foundation will ensure the programs meet the industry's workforce needs. "Talent pipelines are powerful," said Jeff Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Ignited. "They open new doors, offer experiences that shape us, and provide role models that inspire our career choices. SCAN will build a strong, compelling pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship pipeline that will change the lives of students and families that need it most. We're proud to support the SEMI Foundation and this amazing group of partners who are doing such critical work for the microelectronics industry." "Foothill College is proud to partner with SEMI," said Chris Allen, Dean of Apprenticeship Programs at Foothill College, based in Los Altos Hills, Calif. "This is an exciting opportunity for our faculty to collaborate with the microelectronics industry to help align work competencies with curriculum development. We look forward to building this new and innovative apprenticeship pathway at this crucial time in the redevelopment of the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry." SEMI member companies, government agencies and other industry stakeholders interested in developing or participating in microelectronics apprenticeship programs can contact the SEMI Foundation at semifoundation@semi.org. About the SEMI Foundation The SEMI Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization founded in 2001 to support economic opportunity for workers and the sustained growth of the microelectronics industry. The Foundation works to attract, develop, and retain a well-trained and innovative workforce through educational programs, diversity initiatives to support women, veterans, and people of color, and member engagement. The Foundation's longest-running program, SEMI High Tech U, inspires high-school students to pursue STEM college educations and careers. Since 2002, High Tech U programs in Austria, France, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Singapore, Taiwan and the United States have directly influenced and inspired more than 8,200 students and teachers. About SEMI SEMI connects more than 2,500 member companies and 1.3 million professionals worldwide to advance the technology and business of electronics design and manufacturing. SEMI members are responsible for the innovations in materials, design, equipment, software, devices, and services that enable smarter, faster, more powerful, and more affordable electronic products. Electronic System Design Alliance (ESD Alliance), FlexTech, the Fab Owners Alliance (FOA), the MEMS & Sensors Industry Group (MSIG) and SOI Consortium are SEMI Strategic Technology Communities. Visit www.semi.org to learn more, contact one of our worldwide offices, and connect with SEMI on LinkedIn and Twitter . Association Contact Michael Hall/SEMI Phone: 1.408.943.7988 Email: mhall@semi.org Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/469944/Semi_Logo.jpg HONG KONG, Mar 29, 2022 - (ACN Newswire) - Genertec Universal Medical Group Company Limited (the "Company" or "Universal Medical", and together with its subsidiaries, the "Group"; Stock Code: 2666.HK) is pleased to announce annual results for the year ended 31 December 2021.FINANCIAL HIGHLIGHTS-- For the year ended 31 December 2021, the revenue amounted to approximately RMB9,914.3 million, representing an increase of 16.3% as compared with that of approximately RMB8,521.2 million for 2020.-- For the year ended 31 December 2021, the profit before tax amounted to approximately RMB2,691.8 million, representing an increase of 13.8% as compared with that of approximately RMB2,365.0 million for 2020.-- For the year ended 31 December 2021, the profit for the year attributable to owners of the parent amounted to approximately RMB1,835.2 million, representing an increase of 11.4% as compared with that of approximately RMB1,647.5 million for 2020.-- As at 31 December 2021, the total assets amounted to approximately RMB69,899.8 million, representing an increase of 13.6% as compared with that of approximately RMB61,511.0 million as at 31 December 2020.-- As at 31 December 2021, the equity attributable to owners of the parent amounted to approximately RMB13,104.0 million, representing an increase of 21.7% as compared with that of approximately RMB10,770.5 million as at 31 December 2020.-- For the year ended 31 December 2021, the return on equity was 15.37%, and the return on total assets was 3.09%.2021 was the opening year of the "14th Five-Year Plan". The Group fulfilled the responsibilities as a central enterprise, adhered to serving the "Healthy China" strategy, and firmly moved forward in the field of medical and healthcare. In 2021, the Group steadily promoted business and improved overall operating performance with a revenue of RMB9,914.3 million, representing an increase of 16.3% as compared to the previous year; net profit of RMB2,030.5 million, representing an increase of 11.9% as compared to the previous year; net profit attributable to owners of the parent of RMB1,835.2 million, representing an increase of 11.4% as compared to the previous year; return on total assets (ROA) of 3.09%, and return on equity attributable to ordinary shareholders (ROE) of 15.37%.Hospital Group Improved Quality and Efficiency, with Net Profit Increasing by 39.5%.In 2021, the Group continued to consolidate the accounts of medical institutions into its own hospital group, and in the context of normalized pandemic prevention and control, the Group orderly advanced the post-investment management of medical institutions, and continuously enhanced the three core capabilities of "discipline", "operation" and "service", to build the overall advantages of the hospital group in terms of safety, effectiveness, accessibility, and humanities as a way to achieve steady progress in operating efficiency. As of 31 December 2021, the number of consolidated medical institutions increased to 45 (including 3 Grade III Class A hospitals and 20 Grade II hospitals), with a total of 10,376 beds. The hospital group launched a total of 372 construction projects, including 10 new outpatient and inpatient multifunction building projects, with a planned number of new beds exceeding 4,000 in total. In 2021, the hospital group contributed a revenue of RMB4,608.4 million to the Company, representing an increase of 27.2% as compared to the previous year, and its proportion in the total revenue from the business of the Group increased from 42.5% in 2020 to 46.5%. Without taking into account the hospital investment platform, the hospital group achieved a total gross profit of RMB585.0 million, representing an increase of 53.9% as compared to the previous year, a total net profit of RMB214.3 million, representing an increase of 39.5% as compared to the previous year, a gross profit margin from operations of 12.7% and a net profit margin of 4.65%.From the perspective of operation, in the post-pandemic era, the number of beds and the overall operation of its medical institutions have shown a recovery growth. Meanwhile, with the implementation of group management and control of hospitals, the core capabilities of disciplines, operations and services have been gradually improved to lay the groundwork for sustainable growth trends in the healthcare business. Income per bed steadily increased from approximately RMB380,000 in 2019 to approximately RMB420,000 in 2021, and the efficiency of bed use was further improved; the volume of outpatient and emergency businesses increased significantly, overall outpatient and emergency visits in 2021 increased by 945,800 as compared to that of 2019, with a growth rate of 19.9%, which exceeded the market average rate; the structure of hospital expenses was optimized, and the average inpatient expenses of Grade II hospitals increased organically, with an increase of 10% as compared to that of 2019.The Expansion of the Industrial Chain Achieved Initial Results, and the Advantages of Large-scale Development was Gradually EstablishedFocusing on the core resources of the hospital group, the Group consolidated the business foundation in various fields such as Internet-based healthcare, equipment maintenance, and medical testing over the past year. While efficiently serving the Group's internal hospitals, the Group actively expanded external customers and gradually established advantages from scalable development. For instance, in terms of Internet-based healthcare, the Internet-based healthcare platform "Universal Healthcare" became a unified Internet portal for the healthcare group, the core carrier of the healthcare industry chain business, and provided support and assistance for the digital management of specialties. As of 31 December 2021, "Universal Healthcare" was officially launched for 34 internal and external medical institutions with more than 3,000 online doctors and 750,000 registered users, and served more than 2 million people. It has developed an online + offline service model, and realized a one-stop medical treatment for patients covering the whole process; in terms of equipment maintenance, the Group actively promoted an advanced business model of "managing medical equipment for a full life cycle" to provide hospitals with standardized maintenance service and comprehensive equipment operation and management services. As of 31 December 2021, the Group maintenance business recorded an annual revenue of RMB36.96 million, representing an increase of 194.8% as compared to 2020; in terms of medical testing, relying on clinicians and medical teams from subordinate medical institutions, the Group has carried out medical testing business to provide more accurate and professional testing services to local medical institutions nearby. Among them, the testing center of Xi'an XD Group Hospital recorded an annual revenue of RMB89.96 million, representing an increase of 48.3% as compared to 2020.Financial Business Developed Steadily, with an Increase of 15.6% in Gross Profit of Interest MarginWith years of experience in the industry, the Group has built efficient market capabilities, flexible financing capabilities, and professional risk control capabilities to provide customers in public hospitals, public utilities and other fields with comprehensive financial solutions centered on financial leasing, as well as industry, equipment and financing consulting, department upgrade and other services, which has fully guaranteed the continuous profitability of the Group as the hospital group grows. In 2021, as the regulatory system for the financial business of central enterprises was further improved, we further enhanced operation and management capabilities on the basis of sound risk prevention and mitigation to steadily advance financial business. The Group recorded interest income of finance services of RMB4,469.0 million, representing a year-on-year increase of 8.3%, and the gross profit of interest margin of RMB2,640.6 million, representing a year-on-year increase of 15.6%. The net interest spread was 3.56%, and the net interest margin was 4.05%. All of the aforesaid business indicators remained at a leading position in the industry.While its financial business continues to expand steadily, the asset quality remains at an industry-leading level. As of 31 December 2021, its net interest-earning assets reached RMB61,127.6 million, representing an increase of 11.9% from the beginning of the year; the non-performing asset ratio was 0.98%, representing a decrease of 0.02 percentage point from the end of 2020; the overdue ratio (30 days) was 0.76%, representing a decrease of 0.18 percentage point from the end of 2020; and the provision coverage ratio was 238.29%, representing an increase of 32.77 percentage points from the end of 2020.Prospect for the FutureIn next year, following the overall deployment of the "14th Five-Year Plan", the Group will continue to actively carry out the mission of safeguarding life and health with quality medical care, give full play to the advantages of group-based management and control to comprehensively improve the lean management, and build a digital hospital management group. The Group will build core capabilities in pursuing integrated development of featured specialties such as oncology and nephrology, and extend industrial chain services around the core resources of the hospital group to make breakthroughs in the high-quality development of the entire group, and create greater returns for all Shareholders!About Genertec Universal Medical Group Company Limited (2666.HK)Genertec Universal Medical Group Co., Ltd ("Universal Medical") is a publicly listed state-owned enterprise committed to China's healthcare industry. China General Technology (Group) Holding Co Ltd., one of the backbone SOEs directly supervised by the central government is the controlling shareholder of the Company. Universal Medical focuses on the fast-developing healthcare industry in China, with medical services as the core and financial business as the foundation. The Company harvests modern management concepts, professionals, quality medical resources with solid financial strength, and an inclusive corporate culture. Altogether strives to build a reliable healthcare conglomerate and develop a healthcare ecosystem that all can mutually share and benefit. The Company owns 62 medical institutions, distributed in 14 provinces and municipalities such as Shaanxi, Shanxi, Sichuan, Liaoning, Anhui, Hebei, Beijing, and Shanghai, including 5 Grade III Class A hospitals and 30 Grade II hospitals, with a total of more than 16,000 beds. In the future, Universal Medical will continue to grasp opportunities posed by China's healthcare sector, actively respond to the "Health China" program and make contributions to China's public health industry. www.universalmsm.com.This press release is released by PEANUT MEDIA LIMITED on behalf of Genertec Universal Medical Group Company Limited.For further information, please contact:PEANUT MEDIA LIMITEDLu Jing / Jing GaoDirect Line: +0755-61619798+8210Email: hswh@czgmcn.comSource: Genertec Universal Medical Group Company LimitedCopyright 2022 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved. UNITED NATIONS, March 29 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy on Tuesday warned that indiscriminate sanctions over the Ukraine conflict will bring about new humanitarian problems. "The ever-escalating sweeping and indiscriminate sanctions have hit global energy, food, economics and trade, and financial markets, and will continue to do so, affecting the lives and livelihoods of the general public, and giving rise to new humanitarian problems," Dai Bing, China's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, told a Security Council meeting on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine. Developing countries, which make up the majority of the world, are not parties to this conflict, and should not be drawn into the confrontation and forced to suffer the consequences of geopolitical clashes and sparring among major powers, he said. Right now, global food security is being seriously challenged, which warrants due attention. Sanctions and economic blockades will only artificially exacerbate food shortages and price distortions, further disrupt food production and food supply chain across the world, push up food prices, and put burdens on developing countries, he said. "We call for enhanced international coordination to stabilize food supply and food prices, refrain from unjustified export restrictions, keep the market working in a stable manner, and ensure global food security." The United Nations, the World Food Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Trade Organization and other agencies should actively contribute to coordinating food production and trade among countries, and helping developing countries tide over the shocks, said Dai. As the conflict in Ukraine is persisting, effectively protecting civilian lives and meeting their humanitarian needs is a must. China calls for respect for international humanitarian law to avoid civilian casualties, protect civilian facilities, provide safe passage for evacuation and humanitarian access, and ensure a continuous supply of basic necessities. Protection of vulnerable groups such as women and children must be strengthened, he said. If the crisis continues and escalates, further damage is on its way, a situation not in the interests of any party. The most conclusive way toward a cease-fire to end hostilities is dialogue and negotiation, he said. The international community should encourage and support continued direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine until a positive outcome is achieved and peace is restored, he said. Security is indivisible. Seeking absolute security by pitting one bloc against another is the recipe for insecurity. The United States, NATO and the EU should also engage in dialogue with Russia, accommodate the legitimate security concerns of all parties, and build a balanced, effective and sustainable regional security architecture. China will continue to work toward and play a constructive role in easing the situation and resolving the crisis, he said. GURNEE, IL / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Brightrock Gold Corp. (OTC PINK:BRGC) the purchaser of 100% interest in the Midnight Owl Mine is delighted to announce its strategic location. Approximately 13 miles east of Wickenburg, Arizona, our past producing lithium property sits dormant. This positioning was nearly perfect as Arizona welcomes both KOREPOWER and LG Energy Solutions a mere one hour from our mining property. KOREPOWER located in Buckeye, Arizona approximately 45 miles from our mine continues the construction of their KOREPlex facility. This will be the first US owned lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility and it's right in our backyard. "The KOREPlex facility will be a sizable one million square feet in size, capable of producing up to 12 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of battery cell production to suffice the clean energy needs of the US. KOREPlex will be able to power around 3.2 million households annually, with KORE Power planning to start the facility's construction by the end of the year, with KOREPlex estimated to commence production in early 2023." https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/koreplex-the-first-us-owned-lithium-ion-battery-manufacturing-facility/13741/ In addition, LG Energy Solutions (373220.KS) (LGES), a supplier for electric car makers Tesla and Lucid, said on Thursday their plans for a 1.4 billion dollar investment in Queen Creek, Arizona approximately 70 miles from our mine. Their plans include the first-ever cylindrical-type battery manufacturing plant in North America : "Construction on the plant is expected to begin in the second quarter, the South Korean company announced, and mass production will begin in the second half of 2024. Batteries produced at the plant will be supplied to electric vehicle manufacturers. The facility will have the production capacity of 11 gigawatt hours." https://www.abc15.com/news/business/lg-confirms-queen-creek-facility-will-be-battery-plant-for-electric-vehicle-industry Mr. Mac Shahsavar, President of the Company is quoted in saying, "This is an exciting moment for us, a confirmation that our new corporate vision and direction for Brightrock Gold Corp. is gleaming with potential. Two industry giants in battery production within a short driving distance of our lithium target. Our doors will be open for both companies as we progress the revival of the historic Midnight Owl Mine." CONTACT: BrightRock Gold Corporation Phone 866-600-5444 FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS: This press release contains forward-looking statements as defined within Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These statements relate to future events, including our ability to raise capital, or to our future financial performance, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements since they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which are, in some cases, beyond our control and which could, and likely will, materially affect actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. Any forward-looking statement reflects our current views with respect to future events and is subject to these and other risks, uncertainties and assumptions relating to our operations, results of operations, growth strategy and liquidity. We assume no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. For a discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please see our filings with the OTC Markets Group Inc. Our public filings with the OTC Markets Group Inc are available from commercial document retrieval services and at the website maintained by the OTC Markets at https://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/BRGC/disclosure SOURCE: BrightRock Gold Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/694970/BrightRock-Gold-Corp-Announces-Strategic-Location-as-Arizona-Welcomes-Two-Industry-Leaders-in-Battery-Production City of Bristol selects Ameresco and subcontractor Vattenfall Heat UK, for large multi-pronged approach to build the city's future smart energy system Ameresco, Inc., (NYSE: AMRC), a leading cleantech integrator specializing in energy efficiency and renewable energy, today announced that its subsidiary, Ameresco Ltd., has been selected as a partner in the Bristol City Leap project, a 20-year concession to decarbonize the city. In partnership with numerous City of Bristol stakeholders, Ameresco, in collaboration with Vattenfall Heat UK, will work through a unique public private partnership structure to provide services including energy efficiency upgrades, wind and solar services, project financing, long-term operation and maintenance and more. The Bristol City Leap project is intended to operate over a 20-year term, targeting net zero goals through a series of energy and infrastructure investment opportunities, attracting approximately 1 billion of inward investment. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005416/en/ City of Bristol selects partnership with Ameresco for large multi-pronged approach to take action on climate change and achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. (Photo: Business Wire) The project will span the 34 ward areas that make up the City of Bristol. Services will address all sectors of the built environment, including public sector facilities like hospitals, universities, and schools, as well as industrial, commercial and residential buildings throughout the Bristol community. The City Leap program is designed to enable Bristol to experience lower energy costs, cleaner air, improved energy infrastructure and a boost to the local economy through the city-wide decarbonization effort. Councillor Craig Cheney, Deputy Mayor with responsibility for Finance, Governance and Performance said: "City Leap means large investment in Bristol's energy systems and our ambitious carbon targets. We are creating a long-term partnership on a scale that will bring investment into the much-needed decarbonization of our energy system." "City Leap will have a real impact for Bristol residents including the way people move around the city and the ways that we power and heat our homes. It will help us to move much more quickly towards carbon neutrality, creating a cleaner, greener and healthier city that is truly fit for the future. With City Leap, Bristol will become a focal point for new low carbon technologies and smart energy systems whilst creating thousands of jobs and ensuring a just transition. I'm pleased to see a potential partner that shares our vision for a better, zero-carbon Bristol." Ameresco, in partnership with Vattenfall, will work with energy groups, city stakeholders and local Bristol businesses to install a full range of technologies aimed at optimizing city-wide electrical infrastructure. Over the first five years of the partnership, the project is expected to deliver c140,000 tonnes of carbon savings, and c182MW of zero-carbon energy generation. Additionally, the partnership is expected to deliver a wealth of social and economic benefits for the residents and businesses of Bristol, including c61m of estimated social value, c55m of contracts to be delivered by local suppliers including an increase in local jobs, apprenticeships and work placements. The development and implementation of ongoing low-carbon, energy resilient investments will help Bristol reach its carbon neutrality goals. "Our team is thrilled to be a part of such an incredible initiative taken by the City of Bristol that will hopefully open the eyes of neighboring areas to the possibilities that exist within city-wide decarbonization projects," said Britta MacIntosh, Senior Vice President of Ameresco. "The announcement of the Bristol City Leap project is the first time that a UK city has embarked on such a comprehensive, transformative plan to decarbonize an entire city's energy system by 2030. We applaud their leadership, innovation and steadfast focus on this plan." Mike Reynolds, Managing Director of Vattenfall Heat UK said, "We are very excited to be able to build upon the strong foundations established by Bristol City Council in getting the first district heating networks installed in Bristol. We have big plans to roll out the heat network quickly and at scale to serve the people of Bristol with reliable, affordable low carbon heat. Our partnership with Ameresco means we are able to apply the right technology in the right area of the city-bringing district heating to where it is best suited, as well as individual heat pumps where they are more cost-effective." The final award is subject to approval by the City of Bristol Mayor and Cabinet, which is expected on April 5, 2022. To learn more about the energy efficiency solutions offered by Ameresco, visit www.ameresco.com/energy-efficiency/. About Ameresco, Inc. Founded in 2000, Ameresco, Inc. (NYSE:AMRC) is a leading cleantech integrator and renewable energy asset developer, owner and operator. Our comprehensive portfolio includes energy efficiency, infrastructure upgrades, asset sustainability and renewable energy solutions delivered to clients throughout North America and the United Kingdom. Ameresco's sustainability services in support of clients' pursuit of Net Zero include upgrades to a facility's energy infrastructure and the development, construction, and operation of distributed energy resources. Ameresco has successfully completed energy saving, environmentally responsible projects with Federal, state and local governments, healthcare and educational institutions, housing authorities, and commercial and industrial customers. With its corporate headquarters in Framingham, MA, Ameresco has more than 1,000 employees providing local expertise in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit www.ameresco.com. About Vattenfall Heat UK Vattenfall Heat UK delivers on low-carbon heating, cooling and power solutions through a commitment to enable fossil free living within one generation. We're an energy partner at the forefront of affordable and reliable low-carbon heating in the UK. The growth of our district heating business is accelerating in line with our purpose of powering climate smarter living. Vattenfall Heat UK is part of the wider Vattenfall Group, one of Europe's largest producers and retailers of electricity and heat with approximately 20,000 employees. heat.vattenfall.co.uk www.vattenfall.com/uk About Bristol City Leap City Leap is a long-term (20 year) partnership between the Council and a private sector organization to accelerate green energy investment in Bristol and help the council achieve its net zero carbon ambitions. City Leap's projects and investments will have an impact on many aspects of life for Bristol residents including the way people move around the city (e.g. EV charging points) and the way we power and heat our homes (e.g. mass roll out of solar panels, expanding the city's heat network and decarbonizing our social housing stock). Our partner will bring investment into the city to deploy solutions which are (or become) commercially viable and deliver significant social value for Bristol's communities. For initiatives which require government funding, City Leap will demonstrate the ability to move at pace, making Bristol a natural partner to government and an example for other cities and regions to follow. For the citizens of Bristol, City Leap has the potential to deliver a better quality of life by improving the warmth and comfort of homes, improving air quality and creating thousands of jobs in energy and related supply chains. For investors and partners, City Leap will offer a competitive return on investments, the chance to create and test new energy propositions and business models which are replicable at a national and international scale. Like all cities Bristol's energy system is set to undergo a transformation. City Leap has the potential to facilitate this change by use of real time data, investment in energy storage and distributed energy generation to create a genuinely smart energy system for Bristol. The council has delivered over 92m worth of low-carbon projects in the last five years and City Leap takes this learning to date, leveraging our expertise to create a much larger and more ambitious program. Forward Looking Statements Any statements in this press release about future expectations, plans and prospects for Ameresco, Inc., including statements about the future award of and metrics for the Bristol City Leap project and other statements containing the words "projects," "believes," "anticipates," "plans," "expects," "will" and similar expressions, constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward looking statements as a result of various important factors, including whether the Bristol City Leap project is finally awarded to Ameresco and whether Ameresco can reach agreement governing the project on favorable terms (or at all) and other factors discussed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on March 1, 2022. The forward-looking statements included herein represent our views as of the date hereof. We anticipate that subsequent events and developments will cause our views to change. However, while we may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any date subsequent to the date hereof. The award was received after December 31, 2021, but this award is not expected to have a material impact to Ameresco's financial results for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2022. Ameresco is evaluating the expected effect of the agreement on its future financial results and will provide an update on impact of this program as it is contracted over the coming years. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005416/en/ Contacts: Media: Ameresco: Leila Dillon, +1 508-661-2264, news@ameresco.com Vattenfall: Emily Faull, +447816060507, emily.faull@vattenfall.com City of Bristol: James Sterling, +447772441759, james.sterling@bristol.gov.uk Always available, always the right version, ready to be used at scale: More and more companies are aiming to introduce cloud-based data management to get data on the fly and make decisions based upon it. Now, Stibo Systems offers the solution for these enterprises: Data as a Service (DaaS). The Danish software company, a global leader with its innovative Multidomain Master Data Management (MDM) solutions, launches DaaS as a cloud-based data distribution service focused on the delivery of data to high-volume data-consuming applications. Through its configurable API and serverless architecture, Stibo Systems Multidomain MDM features a DaaS extension that delivers a near real-time version of master data. This data can be used for numerous applications like websites, call centers, and at the point of sale. "As a single, centralized master data service, the DaaS extension removes the need for companies to create multiple copies of data for each application to deliver data at scale to applications," explains Neda Nia, Chief Product Officer of Stibo Systems. "Our Data as a Service is offering always-on data delivery. The "as a service" also means that companies are not required to build an API to deliver the data. All this means that they save time for maintenance and don't need to worry about duplicate databases becoming inconsistent. Instead, they can just let their applications look up data synchronously or receive events on data asynchronously." One of the first companies to test the new Stibo Systems offering has been Danfoss, a leader in heating and cooling technology. "In Danfoss Digital Customer Experience we are applying an API-first strategy to all data integrations," explains Bent Werner Laursen, Head of Product Information Digital Asset Management at Danfoss. "Stibo Systems' DaaS will help us apply the API-first strategy to integrations for internal data consumers and, going forward, we will be able to offer our external data consumers the same smooth API integration. In the first project phase, DaaS will deliver real-time data synchronization to our B2B product store and our public product websites." About Stibo Systems Stibo Systems, the master data management company, is the trusted enabler of data transparency. Our solutions are the driving force behind forward-thinking companies around the world that have unlocked the strategic value of their master data. We empower them to improve the customer experience, drive innovation and growth and create an essential foundation for digital transformation. This gives them the transparency they require and desire a single, accurate view of their master data so they can make informed decisions and achieve goals of scale, scope and ambition. Stibo Systems is a privately held subsidiary of the Stibo A/S group, founded in 1794, and is headquartered in Aarhus, Denmark. More at stibosystems.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005692/en/ Contacts: Katherine Hahn Stibo Systems Public Relations Manager (North America) khah@stibosystems.com Cloud DX chosen as Virtual Care Platform for the Ontario Paramedical Service provider, replacing existing hardware and services KITCHENER, ON / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Cloud DX (TSXV:CDX)(OTCQX:CDXFF) is pleased to announce a new 24-month contract with an Ontario Paramedic Service Provider enabling the client to provide Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) across its serviceable area. Cloud DX will provide its award-winning Connected Health platform and support the client as it transitions from its previous remote care tools to Cloud DX's Virtual Care Platform. The client showcases how beneficial 'Remote Care Monitoring' is for Paramedical Service providers, enabling providers to establish deeper community roots and maintain funding levels, while community members benefit from greater access to much-needed care. The client has purchased 223 Connected Health kits totalling ~$145,000 CAD with additional recurring fees for subscription software services. Funding for the program comes from the $82.5M Community Paramedicine for Long-Term Care program announced by the Ontario government on October 22, 2021. The Paramedical client will provide Cloud DX's biometric monitoring equipment to clients in their homes to monitor vital signs including weight, blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen level, temperature, and blood glucose. Daily monitoring allows the client and health care providers to make informed decisions and enables the Paramedic to connect with the client if a metric is out of range. The paramedical care provider seeks to keep individuals on the long-term care bed waitlist and individuals who are medically complex or isolated comfortable and safe in their homes. In turn, Remote Care Monitoring is expected to reduce 911 calls, emergency room visits, and hospital admissions. Cloud DX COO and co-founder, Anthony Kaul, states "At-home remote monitoring is critical to improving the health of vulnerable populations, such as community members with chronic conditions or seniors who wish to live independently for as long as possible. By bringing Remote Care Monitoring directly to the community our client is forging a new path in paramedicine. This modern approach improves community health and enables significantly earlier intervention for those with deteriorating health, in turn reducing hospitalizations. Cloud DX is well known for our high user satisfaction ratings, so we are confident this initiative will be well received by the community. Of course, with our Headquarters in Ontario, we're always extremely happy to support our neighbouring communities." About Cloud DX Accelerating virtual healthcare, Cloud DX is on a mission to make healthcare better for everyone. Our Connected Health TM remote patient monitoring platform is used by healthcare enterprises and care teams across North America to virtually manage chronic disease, enable aging in place, and deliver hospital-quality post-surgical care in the home. Our partners achieve better healthcare and patient outcomes, reduce the need for hospitalization or re-admission, and reduce healthcare delivery costs through more efficient use of resources. Cloud DX is the co-winner of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, a 2021 Edison Award winner, a Fast Company "World Changing Idea" finalist, and was named a "New Innovator 2022" by Canadian Business magazine. Cloud DX is an exclusive virtual care partner to Medtronic Canada and Equitable Life. Cloud DX Investor Site https://ir.clouddx.com/overview/default.aspx Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Social Links Twitter https://twitter.com/CloudDX Facebook https://www.facebook.com/clouddxinc/ LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/cloud-dx/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cloud.dx/ For media inquiries please contact: Janine Scott Marketing Lead 888-543-0944 janine.scott@CloudDX.com For investor inquiries please contact: Jay Bedard Cloud DX Investor Relations 647-881-8418 jay.bedard@CloudDX.com SOURCE: Cloud DX Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695075/Cloud-DX-Signs-Contract-with-Paramedical-Service-Provider-for-Remote-Patient-Monitoring Worldwide Partners and Members join in supporting their colleagues in need SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, March 29, 2022has provided over $1 million in aid through its Ukrainian Relief program, giving direct economic assistance to its Ukrainian Partners and Members. In addition to the company donation, contributions have been received from fellow Partners, Members, and Employees worldwide. One hundred percent of these donations provide immediate financial support for Ukrainian colleagues to purchase food, secure transportation and lodging, buy medicine and other necessities. To ensure the money was dispersed immediately to those in need, the inCruises team worked around the clock to fulfill requests. "The foundation of inCruises is our valued Members and Partners in over 190 countries. We've come together to help our Ukrainian colleagues with urgent humanitarian support," said inCruises Co-CEO Frank Codina. "Our hearts are with everyone impacted by the war in Ukraine, and we admire all those trying to assist them. We pray for peace, love, and understanding." "We stand with the people of Ukraine as their lives are being torn apart. We applaud our colleagues' actions. We know our financial contributions and our team's efforts will directly help the people of Ukraine during this humanitarian crisis," said inCruises Co-CEO Michael Hutchison. About inCruises International Since launching its flagship membership in 2016, inCruises International has become the premier cruise membership club with Members and Partners in over 190 countries. inCruises is making a measurable difference in its Members' lives and is committed to ethically providing a business ownership opportunity to its growing Partner team. The company is also committed to positive global corporate citizenship by supporting Mercy Ships, 4Ocean, and the Make-a-Wish Foundation. To share the experience, please visit our Business and Membership opportunity at https://www.incruises.com . The "Deodorant and Antiperspirant Market, By Product Type, By Region Size, Share, Outlook, and Opportunity Analysis, 2021 2028" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. This report provides in-depth analysis of the deodorant and antiperspirant market, and provides market size (US$ Million Million Units) and compound annual growth rate (CAGR%) for the forecast period (2021-2028), considering 2020 as the base year Deodorant and antiperspirant are commonly confused with each other. However, they are actually two separate products. The purpose of a deodorant is to cover up bad smells from the body's sweat or perspiration and prevent body odor from being detected by others. The second class of deodorant, also known as antiperspirants, prevents sweating by blocking sweat pores themselves, usually by physically blocking sweat glands. Growing awareness regarding personal hygiene and increasing disposable income of the consumer is driving growth of the deodorant and antiperspirant market. Moreover, rapid urbanization and the increasing launch of the innovative product by key players to cater to growing demand is again fostering growth of the market. For instance, in February 2019, Unilever Launches Deodorant Wipes. Its new deodorant wipes offer people a smart way to stay feeling fresh as they go from one activity to the next. However, environmental concerns and slowdown of the economy due to pandemic is expected to restrict growth of the market. Key features of the study: It elucidates potential revenue opportunities across different segments and explains attractive investment proposition matrices for this market This study also provides key insights about market drivers, restraints, opportunities, new product launches or approval, market trends, regional outlook, and competitive strategies adopted by key players It profiles key players in the global deodorant and antiperspirant market based on the following parameters company highlights, products portfolio, key highlights, financial performance, and strategies Key companies covered as a part of this study include Unilever Company, Procter Gamble Company, Godrej Consumer Products Ltd., Beiersdorf AG, Avon Products Inc., Henkel AG Company, KGaA and CavinKare Pvt. Ltd. Insights from this report would allow marketers and the management authorities of the companies to make informed decisions regarding their future product launches, type up-gradation, market expansion, and marketing tactics The global deodorant and antiperspirant market report caters to various stakeholders in this industry including investors, suppliers, product manufacturers, distributors, new entrants, and financial analysts Stakeholders would have ease in decision-making through various strategy matrices used in analyzing the global deodorant and antiperspirant market Detailed Segmentation: Global Deodorant and Antiperspirant Market, By Product Type: Antiperspirant Aerosol Sticks or Solid Antiperspirants Roll On Deodorant Aerosol Sticks or Solid Antiperspirants Roll On Cream Wipe Deodorant Global Deodorant and Antiperspirant Market, By Region: North America Canada U.S. Europe U.K. France Germany Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China India ASEAN Australia Rest of Asia Pacific Latin America Brazil Argentina Mexico Rest of Latin America Middle East Africa By Sub-Region Middle East Africa Company Profiles Unilever Company Company Overview Product Portfolio Key Strategies Recent Developments Future Plans Procter Gamble Company Godrej Consumer Products Ltd. Beiersdorf AG Avon Products Inc Henkel AG Company, KGaA CavinKare Pvt Ltd. For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/xigixs View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005794/en/ Contacts: ResearchAndMarkets.com Laura Wood, Senior Press Manager press@researchandmarkets.com For E.S.T. Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 Regulatory News: Ikonisys SA (ISIN Code: FR00140048X2 Mnemonic: ALIKO) (Paris:ALIKO), a company specializing in the early and accurate detection of cancerous diseases with a unique fully automated solution for medical analysis laboratories, announces its participation in the Investor Access forum in Paris on April 4, 2022. Alessandro Mauri, Chief Financial Officer of Ikonisys, will represent the company at this event. Investor Access events bring together more than 150 companies to foster and maintain strong relationships with investors. This will be an opportunity for Ikonisys to meet new investors but also to meet again with investors met during the IPO. For more information on Investor Access: click on this link About Ikonisys Ikonisys SA is a cell-based diagnostics company based in Paris (France), New Haven (Connecticut, USA) and Milan (Italy) specialized in the early and accurate detection of cancer. The company develops, produces and markets the proprietary Ikoniscope20 platform, a fully-automated solution designed to deliver accurate and reliable detection and analysis of rare and very rare cells. Ikonisys has received FDA clearance for several automated diagnostic applications, which are also marketed in Europe under CE certification. Through its breakthrough fluorescence microscopy platform, the company continues to develop a stream of new tests, including liquid biopsy tests based on Circulating Tumor Cells (CTC). For further information, please go to www.Ikonisys.com Disclaimer This press release contains forward-looking statements about the Company's prospects and development. These statements are sometimes identified by the use of the future tense, the conditional tense and forward-looking words such as "believe", "aim to", "expect", "intend", "estimate", "believe", "should", "could", "would" or "will" or, where appropriate, the negative of these terms or any other similar variants or expressions. This information is not historical data and should not be construed as a guarantee that the facts and data set forth will occur. This information is based on data, assumptions and estimates considered reasonable by the Company. It is subject to change or modification due to uncertainties relating to the economic, financial, competitive and regulatory environment. This information contains data relating to the Company's intentions, estimates and objectives concerning, in particular, the market, strategy, growth, results, financial situation and cash flow of the Company. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is made only as of the date of this press release. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release, except as required by applicable law or regulation. The Company operates in a competitive and rapidly changing environment and therefore cannot anticipate all of the risks, uncertainties or other factors that may affect its business, their potential impact on its business or the extent to which the materialization of any one risk or combination of risks could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in any forward-looking information, it being recalled that none of this forward-looking information constitutes a guarantee of actual results. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005755/en/ Contacts: Ikonisys Alessandro Mauri CFO investors@ikonisys.com NewCap Olivier Bricaud Louis-Victor Delouvrier Investor Relations Ikonisys@newcap.eu Tel.: +33 (0)1 44 71 94 92 NewCap Nicolas Merigeau Media Relations Ikonisys@newcap.eu Tel.:+33 (0)1 44 71 94 98 Experienced Digital Executive to Drive Next Phase of XWP's Global Growth Plans MELBOURNE, Australia, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- XWP, a global web development provider, announces the appointment of Myles Lagolago-Craig as its new global chief executive. Lagolago-Craig will guide Melbourne-headquartered XWP in its mission to tackle the biggest technological challenges in digital publishing, onboard digital and engineering talent from around the globe, and enable the business' industry-leading clients to tell their story in new and exciting ways. The experienced digital leader has worked at News Corp Australia for the past 20 years and served as the Director of Publishing Technology and Services since June 2020. During his tenure, he led the development of the platforms that enabled some of Australia's most high-traffic websites, including brands such as news.com.au, Fox Sports, and The Australian. He also delivered the largest WordPress enterprise installation in Australia to more than 15 News Corp websites, involving more than 1,000 internal staff. Lagolago-Craig was also responsible for the development of numerous technical projects with key partners including Google, Facebook and Apple. Speaking on the appointment, founder of XWP Dave Rosen said, "For some time now, we've been looking at taking XWP to the next level and, after a period of unprecedented growth, we're delighted to have Myles on board as CEO. The breadth of his experience really speaks for itself, having worked on some amazing projects that have dramatically shaped the landscape of the web over the course of his career. I look forward to XWP's continued growth under his direction." "The global talent at XWP combined with the world-leading projects we deliver around the world for great brands is why I'm excited to be joining XWP as CEO," says Lagolago-Craig. "The opportunity is to build on the phenomenal growth over the past few years, bring my passion for scaling high-performing digital teams, and continue XWP's commitment to building an open and performant web." Lagolago-Craig said he was looking forward to the challenge of accelerating the growth of XWP, founded in 2013 by Dave Rosen. The company has employees in more than 30 countries, and its customers include notable brands such as Automattic, Rolling Stone, Google,and many more. "I have worked with XWP as a partner for many years and I have always been impressed with their culture and expertise in digital publishing," said Lagolago-Craig. "Storytelling has never been more important for brands and publishers. Enterprises rely on experts to navigate this at scale and this is what XWP is positioned for." About XWP XWP is a fully remote web agency, with a team of experts around the globe. Together, they work with the biggest names in technology, publishing, and media to make storytelling easier with modern editorial tools, improve ownership through cleverly personalized workflows, boosting conversions with lightning-fast user experiences. Through the power of reliable tooling, and the elimination of technical debt, XWP helps businesses to own their platform and their goals, smashing KPIs and enabling their digital teams to go further. As outspoken advocates for the open web, they actively contribute to a number of the technologies that underpin their offering. With a team of experienced experts spanning every touchpoint of the development lifecycle, they create digital opportunities that have an international impact. For more information about how XWP is creating the tools for businesses to do more, visit www.xwp.coor follow @XWP on Linkedinand Twitterfor the latest news and updates. Contact Information for further comments or an interview with a representative from XWP: Scott Batchelor scott.batchelor@xwp.co Related Images Image 1: Myles Lagolago-Craig XWP, a global web development provider, has announced the appointment of Myles Lagolago-Craig as its new global Chief Executive. This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. Attachment CAMBRIDGE, MA / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / IIOT-OXYS, Inc. (OTC PINK:ITOX) (the "Company") announces the execution of a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with an EU based Electrical Technology Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). This NDA is the first step of the engagement process with this strategic partner. "This private EU-based OEM has a decades-long reputation for supplying high quality electrical & electronic components and systems for the automation industry. They are an excellent technology partner candidate for our Smart Manufacturing industry business. This potential partner has interesting power sensing technology combined with integrated edge-based computing capability that is particularly suited for distributed AI and Machine Learning enabled Smart Manufacturing applications," Cliff Emmons, CEO of the Company, stated. Several business texts and industry reports on AI & Machine Learning propose they are transforming all industries and all functions within corporations. It's also creating a new generation of corporate leaders and laggards. The leaders have similar best practices, such as focusing on similar use cases, including Predictive Maintenance and Process Optimization in their Manufacturing Operations. "Our goal is to democratize these business accelerators for small and medium sized enterprises in the Biotech, Pharma, and Medical Device industries, and their associated supply chains," stated Mr. Emmons. The worldwide Industry 4.0 market was estimated at $64.9 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow at 20.6% CAGR to $165.5 billion by 2026.1 "Our success in this market will come from leveraging sensor and edge computing technology from partners like this, combined with our proprietary AI and Machine Learning algorithms. In the coming months we'll explore prototype evaluations and collaborate on specifications for commercial versions with this potential technology partner. With our strong technology & business partnerships, successful pilots and use cases, and extensive network and prospects, we expect these agreements and new technology will lead to new business in due time," continued Mr. Emmons. 1https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/industry-4-market-102536746.html About IIOT-OXYS, Inc. IIOT-OXYS, Inc. (OTC PINK: ITOX) is a technology company at the intersection of IIoT, AI & Machine Learning, Edge Computing and Manufacturing Operations. We provide actionable mission-critical insights for the Medical/Pharmaceutical, Manufacturing, Agriculture, Defense, and Structural Health, and other industries. IIOT-OXYS's edge computing open-source hardware and proprietary ML algorithms employ our Minimally Invasive Load Monitoring (MILM) technology to simply gather data and gain insights to monitor, scope, move from preventive to predictive maintenance, and even optimize development and manufacturing processes. For additional information visit www.oxyscorp.com. Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements that reflect Management's current views about future events and financial performance. Forward-looking statements often contain words such as 'expects,' 'anticipates,' 'intends,' or 'believes.' Our forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results and events to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties that could adversely affect us include, without limitation, the loss of major customers, our failure to obtain new contracts, our inability to patent products or processes, our infringement of patents held by others, our inability to finance our business and the other risks and uncertainties that are discussed in our most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements in this news release are made only as of the date of this news release. We undertake no obligation to update our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Contact Information: IIOT-OXYS Inc. Clifford L. Emmons CEO contact@oxyscorp.com www.oxyscorp.com SOURCE: IIoT-OXYS Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695091/IIOT-OXYS-Inc-Signs-NDA-with-EU-Electrical-Technology-Original-Equipment-Manufacturer Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid (L) welcomes Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani in Sde Boker, southern Israel's Negev desert, on March 27, 2022. (Ilan Assayag/JINI via Xinhua) The first gathering of Israel-Arab foreign ministers has helped boost Israel's ties with certain Arab countries as they share concerns about reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, said experts. by Tamara Traubmann-Santos JERUSALEM, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The first gathering of Israel-Arab foreign ministers has helped boost Israel's ties with certain Arab countries as they share concerns about reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, said experts. The two-day conference that ended on Monday brought together Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and his counterparts from four Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt, to the Israeli resort of Sde Boker in the southern Negev desert. "What we are doing here is making history. Building a new regional architecture based on progress, technology, religious tolerance, security, and intelligence cooperation," said Lapid, who initiated the meeting which was also attended by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Lapid announced that the conference would become a yearly event in the future, hosted by the participating countries in turns every year. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid (L) welcomes Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry in Sde Boker, southern Israel's Negev desert, on March 27, 2022. (Ilan Assayag/JINI via Xinhua) "Just a few years ago, this gathering would be impossible to imagine," Blinken said, hailing the meeting as the latest indication of how the new ties could expand across the region. UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan praised the strengthened ties between his country and Israel. "If we are curious sometimes, and we want to know things and learn, it's because although Israel has been part of this region for a very long time, we've not known each other. So it's time to catch up," he said. LANDMARK MEETING "The most important achievement of the summit was the fact that it took place," said Yoel Guzansky, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv-based think tank. When Israel signed in 2020 the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords with the UAE and Bahrain, and later with Morocco, it was unclear how substantial the ties could be. In less than two years, the first summit of top diplomats became a symbol of unity. Egypt, the first Arab state which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, also took part in the conference, though Jordan, the second Arab state which made peace with Israel in 1994, was absent. Jordan declined the invitation. During the six-party conference, Jordanian King Abdullah II chose to visit Ramallah in the occupied West Bank to meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, underscoring his solidarity with the Palestinians. Guzansky said that the conference highlighted the "importance of Israel" in the region and sent signals to Israel's enemies, mainly Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas which rules the Palestinian enclave of Gaza Strip. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid (L) welcomes Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita in Sde Boker, southern Israel's Negev desert, on March 27, 2022. (Ilan Assayag/JINI via Xinhua) He noted that the regional defense system, which is "gradually being built," is heavily reliant on Israel and the Gulf Arab countries. "However, there are pieces missing in this puzzle -- mainly Saudi Arabia, which is unlikely to normalize ties with Israel before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved," Guzansky said. EMERGING NUCLEAR DEAL Israel initiated the gathering amid tensions between the U.S. and its Middle Eastern allies. Israel and the Gulf Arab countries share concerns over the possible revival of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, under which the U.S. eased sanctions in exchange for Iran's commitment to curb its nuclear program. The previous U.S. administration under President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the pact in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran. However, the current U.S. government under President Joe Biden seeks to restore the deal through talks held in the Austrian capital of Vienna. The Vienna talks, which have been held for eight rounds so far, are reportedly nearing an agreement. Israel, Iran's arch foe in the region, has been steadfast against renewing the deal, fearing that it would enable Iran to obtain nuclear weapons without the burden of U.S. sanctions. In a bid to soothe the worries of Israel and Arab states, Blinken vowed that the U.S. will continue to work together with its allies to confront "common security challenges and threats, including those from Iran and its proxies." Ori Goldberg, an Israeli expert on Iran from the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Reichman University in Herzliya, said that the U.S. intention to restore the nuclear deal prompted Israel to hold the meeting. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid (R) welcomes Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Sde Boker, southern Israel's Negev desert, on March 27, 2022. (Ilan Assayag/JINI via Xinhua) "Israel wants a gesture of keeping the option for a regional action (against Iran)," Goldberg said, adding that Israel practically has no tangible support for such an action as the conference issued no clear statement on the Iranian issue. Chen Kertcher, a lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the Ariel University in the West Bank, said the meeting came amid growing discontent between the U.S. and Gulf Arab countries. Gulf Arab countries wish to receive more support from the U.S. in countering the attacks from the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, while Washington urges them to produce more oil to calm the oil market following the Russia-Ukraine conflict, said Kertcher. So far, the Gulf Arab states, mainly Saudi Arabia and the UAE which boast spare capacity, have given Washington the cold shoulder by refusing to abruptly increase oil output. Instead, they insist on sticking to the plan for slowly increasing oil production as set by the OPEC+, of which Russia is a part. Guzansky believed that, in view of the rising tensions, Israel "is emerging as the go-between for the United States and Gulf countries." Finsbury Growth & Income Trust Plc - Transaction in Own Shares For immediate release 29 March 2022 FINSBURY GROWTH & INCOME TRUST PLC (the "Company") MARKET PURCHASE OF COMPANY'S OWN SHARES The Company announces that it has today purchased 25,000 of its own shares ("Ordinary Shares") at a price of 840.82p per Ordinary Share. Such shares will be held in treasury by the Company. The transaction was made pursuant to the authority granted at the Annual General Meeting of the Company held on 9 February 2022. Following this transaction, the total number of Ordinary Shares held by the Company in treasury is 1,560,421; the total number of Ordinary Shares that the Company has in issue, less the total number of Ordinary Shares held by the Company in treasury following such purchase, and therefore, the total number of voting rights in the Company is 223,430,882. The figure of 223,430,882 may be used by shareholders as the denominator for calculations of interests in the Company's voting rights in accordance with the FCA's Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules. For and on behalf of Frostrow Capital LLP Company Secretary For further information, please contact: Victoria Hale Frostrow Capital LLP Tel: 020 3 170 8732 ODD follows positive results in two compassionate use cases Published data from compassionate use cases demonstrated for the first time that bio-HDL therapy can reduce lipid deposits in the kidney, slow the decline of kidney function while eliminating the need for dialysis, beneficially remodel lipoproteins, and improve visual impairment due to corneal lipid deposits Orphan designation provides a new strategy for clinical development of bio-HDL in kidney diseases and ophthalmologic diseases in the US Regulatory News: ABIONYX Pharma (FR0012616852 ABNX PEA PME eligible) (Paris:ABNX), a new generation biotech company dedicated to the discovery and development of innovative therapies for patients, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted orphan-drug designation (ODD) to the Bio-HDL CER-001 for the treatment of lecithin-cholesterol acyltransferase (LCAT) deficiency. The designation covers both partial LCAT deficiency, presenting as Fisheye Disease, and complete LCAT deficiency presenting with renal symptoms and corneal opacities. Progression of LCAT deficiency, for which there is no approved treatment, can ultimately lead to renal failure requiring dialysis or kidney transplant, and/or to complete corneal opacification requiring transplant. The European Medicines Administration (EMA) granted ODD status to CER-001 for the treatment of LCATdeficiency in July 2021. Positive clinical results from CER-001 in LCAT disease have previously been published. In the Annals of Internal Medicine in March 2021, a case study of a patient who was about to undergo dialysis due to the rapid decline in renal function was described. The patient was able to avoid the need for dialysis during her treatment with CER-001 and in addition, lipid deposits in her corneas which had caused significant visual blurring, improved with treatment. The improvement in visual function was still observed after 1 year of follow-up. A second case was described in the Journal of Internal Medicine in November 2021 and showed that CER-001 reduced glomerular lipid deposits and slowed the patient's decline in renal function. Furthermore, CER-001 remodeled his plasma lipoproteins by reducing the level of LpX, large abnormal lipid complexes known to be renally toxic. "We are pleased to have received ODD for CER-001 just eight months after the ODD in Europe and one week after the first positive clinical results in COVID-19. These OD designations from the FDA underscore the importance of bringing this important therapeutic option to patients with LCAT Deficiency both as a kidney disease and as an ophthalmic disease," commented Cyrille TUPIN, CEO of ABIONYX Pharma. "We look forward to presenting new clinical results in the coming months and providing additional insight into the potential of our Bio-HDL therapy platform in both kidney diseases and ophthalmologic diseases. The ODD paves the way for ABIONYX Pharma to launch a new strategic clinical development of the bio-HDL in kidney diseases and ophthalmologic diseases in the US." Orphan-drug designation is granted by the FDA to a drug or biologic intended to treat a rare disease or condition, which generally includes a disease or condition that affects fewer than 200,000 individuals in the U.S. Supporting the development and evaluation of new treatments for rare diseases is a key priority for the FDA. The designation is granted based on the mechanism of action of the drug or biologic taken into consideration with the pathogenesis of the disease or condition, its course and prognosis as well as the availability of treatments and/or resistance to available treatments. Orphan drug designation qualifies sponsors for incentives including: tax credits for qualified clinical trials, exemption from user fees, and a potential for seven years of market exclusivity after approval. Next financial press release : Annual Results, April 28th 2022 About the Bio-HDL CER-001 CER-001 is the first-in-class bio-HDL mimetic that directly targets a key underlying metabolic defect of LCAT deficiency. The bio-HDL is one of the most advanced biomedicines and is a potential novel treatment for kidney diseases, sepsis or COVID-19, but also for ophthalmologic diseases involving lipid abnormalities. These abnormalities could be modified by pharmacological agents that increase plasma ApoA-I and HDL levels, but more importantly increase the number of functional HDL. The antiinflammatory properties and/or the increase in the Reverse Cholesterol Transport (RCT) of CER-001 can prevent decline in kidney function and improve vision in LCAT patients. Bio-HDL as a biomedicine was found to be completely safe and very well tolerated by more than 600 patients involved in all previous clinical studies. About ABIONYX Pharma ABIONYX Pharma is a new generation biotech company that aims to contribute to health through innovative therapies in indications where there is no effective or existing treatment, even the rarest ones. Thanks to its partners in research, medicine, biopharmaceuticals and shareholding, the company innovates on a daily basis to propose drugs for the treatment of renal and ophthalmological diseases, or new HDL vectors used for targeted drug delivery. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005838/en/ Contacts: NewCap Investor relations Louis-Victor Delouvrier abionyx@newcap.eu +33 (0)1 44 71 98 53 NewCap Media relations Arthur Rouille abionyx@newcap.eu +33 (0)1 44 71 00 15 Now accepting nominations of homegrown business leaders in the Gulf who perform well in the media Supported by the Dubai chapters of the Asia Pacific Association of Communications Directors (APACD), and the Public Relations Communications Association (PRCA) DUBAI and MANAMA, Bahrain, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Exceptional and impactful storytelling and communication skills are being recognised through a new award. The Media Savvy Awards will recognise business leaders within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for their excellent traditional and new media skills. The Awards recognise GCC business leaders who take a proactive, strategic and targeted approach, and deliver their message with impact and clarity. It showcases best practice examples of customer, shareholder, staff, supplier and other stakeholder communication. "We want to recognise those business leaders who through their presentation style are able to attain and retain their audience's attention, and inspire them to act, interact and transact," said Mark Laudi, Awards Convenor, former CNBC anchor and Managing Director of Hong Bao Media. The Media Savvy Awards are endorsed and supported by the Dubai Chapters of the Asia Pacific Association of Communications Directors (APACD), and the Public Relations Communications Association (PRCA). "You cannot lead in a communications vacuum, and we must recognize and applaud executives who are able to communicate effectively with the public and other key stakeholders," said Alex Malouf, APACD's Gulf Co-Chair and PRCA MENA Board Member. "The Media Savvy Awards are an opportunity for the industry to push home the message that clear, impactful communications helps organizations build relationships and fosters trust. "We should encourage executives and officials to better communicate with their stakeholders, especially in a region where everyone is online and always looking to engage with brands and organizations," he said. The Awards are celebrating their fifth year in Singapore and Malaysia, adding a new Best Webcast/Hybrid Event Presentation category, in line with the changing times. "As economies reopen post-COVID, communication skills are now more important than ever. We forecast senior business leaders will not go back to an offline environment, presenting only to audiences physically present before them - nor are they going to remain in a purely virtual environment where they speak to audiences only through a video conferencing platform. We will see a hybrid model emerge where both face to face and virtual communication skills are essential," Mr Laudi said. "Storytelling skills, the ability to inspire and motivate as well as crisis communications will be critical as this hybrid environment poses even more challenges for senior business leaders." "Our new category of Best Webcast/Hybrid Event Presentation recognises those business leaders who retain the attention of both in-person and virtual audiences, and get their message across." This is in addition to the existing criteria of Best Broadcast Interview for interviews first carried on traditional radio and television stations, and Best Online Interview for interviews posted on the websites and channels of online-only and traditional print publications. "Internal communications, sales briefings, and conference presentations have all moved to video conferencing platforms. Together with virtual Annual General Meetings, live webcasting has become the norm and brought exceptional talent to the fore," Mr Laudi concluded. Nominations are now open at www.mediasavvyawards.com until Saturday, April 30, 2022. Video resources: Past winners include Tony Fernandes , CEO of AirAsia, who gave this interview to accept the award: https://vimeo.com/658053737/59ce020d34 Ms Maryam AlJowhari (+973) 3689 8916 maryam.aljowhari@mediasavvyawards.com Mr Mishal AlNajjar (+973) 3384 5638 mishal.alnajjar@mediasavvyawards.com Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1774364/Mark_Laudi_Studio_2019.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1774363/Alex_Malouf_high_res.jpg Christchurch, New Zealand--(Newsfile Corp. - March 29, 2022) - The Ruby Play Network is pleased to announce the launch of staking and farming opportunities for the RUBY token, in partnership with blockchain gaming counterparts - Strawberry. The $RUBY token can now be staked and farmed through a variety of third party platforms, with attractive APR and APY available, depending on number of coins, staked terms and the users' staking platform of choice. At time of writing, the current APY for Rubies on ApeSwap is 281%. The partnership with Strawberry allows for defi and blockchain gaming opportunities to be realised, with Strawberry providing liquidity to all DeFi markets. With how compliant the initial RUBY private sale needed to be, the opening of DeFi markets through Strawberry provides further passive income options for investors, without the Ruby Play Network offering the staking facility directly. Ruby Play Network partner Strawberry launches Staking & Farming Options To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/8342/118490_7b75eae0548aeaee_001full.jpg Ruby Vault, ApeSwap & ACY: RUBY Staking Options The $RUBY token is a decentralized cryptocurrency that relies on Proof-of-Stake consensus in order to facilitate the movement of money on the blockchain. Therefore, staking tokens can be a way for investors to "lock" up their tokens for a chosen period of time, and earn crypto rewards based on the amount of transactions their tokens have helped facilitate. The Ruby Vault provides a staking option within the platform interface. Users are given the ability to connect their chosen wallet, and then choose from a variety of staking periods. There are a few options available here, with staking APY doubled for the first 30 days on the platform. Further staking periods of 90, 180 and 360 days can be selected in line with user choice. Although the terms are in place, users can unstake at any time with complete flexibility. ApeSwap Finance, provides more a "degen" option, with some decent APYs available through its Jungle Farms. Using these options, users can either stake RUBY tokens, or LPs. In terms of centralized exchanges, Bitrue is offering 8% APR through its PowerPiggy proposition - allowing users of the CEX to stake a certain amount of RUBY per day before the cap is fulfilled. The 8% APR offered on Bitrue is one of the highest APR's amongst the staking offerings on Bitrue Power Piggy at present. Why does Strawberry provide Staking and Farming for $RUBY? Whilst having a plethora of crypto casino-style games and features ready-to-play, Strawberry Sweeps is also a vital partner to the Ruby Play Network within DeFi markets. When looking at compliance, and particularly, securities offerings, a lot of legal precedent whereby projects are caught foul of securities law is due to direct staking offerings. Think Coinbase Lend, whereby the platform itself offered the staking facility. Enter Strawberry, who have provided liquidity to both PancakeSwap and Apeswap, in order to give further accessibility to the $RUBY token. This allows the Ruby Play Network to comply with the New Zealand Government rules, as it does not directly offer staking of its token. Strawberry purchased a large amount of RUBYs, with the view to then use these RUBYs as liquidity for DeFi markets. Post Launch Plans for the Network Since its launch on the 15th of March, the $RUBY token has seemingly found support at around the 0.0068 mark. Going forward, major focus will be placed into establishing daily utility of the $RUBY token - outside just buying and selling. The staking and farming options should be just the start, with further gaming options including the rollout of Strawberry Sweeps to international markets - soon to take place. In line with this, the website will be refreshed with user-focused content, moving away from the institutional and platform-based messaging from months prior. New pages for staking, farming, how to buy, and a complete homepage redesign are soon-to-be released, as driving holders and volume is now the main aim. Notable success has already been achieved in a short time, with the Ruby Play Network now appearing on Page 1 of Google Search for "Play To Earn" searches. The Ruby Play Network will soon be upgraded to feature new games, some P2E and some pay to play, as the proposition looks to increase its gaming offering to international markets. Twitter: https://twitter.com/RubyPlayNetwork Telegram: https://t.me/RPNDiscuss_Public Discord: https://discord.com/invite/dr3tntuwNh Media Contact: Liam Quinlan-Stamp info@coinpresso.io To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/118490 Researchers to receive mentoring support from AstraZeneca Life science researchers can explore new ideas for genome engineering technology through a newly announced post-doctoral research program launched by Promega with mentoring support from AstraZeneca. The program gives researchers the unique opportunity to work on groundbreaking projects in an emerging field while collaborating with scientists at a global pharmaceutical company and a manufacturer of life science research tools. "At AstraZeneca we are committed to accelerating innovation in targeted genome editing," says Steve Rees, Vice President of Discovery Biology at AstraZeneca. "As part of our mentoring role in this exciting post-doctoral research program, we will welcome researchers to our labs who combine natural curiosity with technical ability to generate fresh ideas and challenge the way things are traditionally done." Genome editing is a powerful tool for studying endogenous biology in physiologically relevant systems. With access to the genome editing capabilities of AstraZeneca and the bioluminescent reporter technology at Promega, these researchers will aim to develop new technologies for understanding and modulating cellular physiology in a multitude of clinically significant cellular backgrounds. Their work will support global efforts to detect, cure and treat disease. Initially the researchers will collaborate to develop the technology recently published by Perterka et al., in Nature Communicationsto enable the highly efficient precise insertion of DNA sequences into the genome, expanding into other aspects of genome engineering as the projects progress (Nat. Comms 13, 1240; 2022). "These researchers will enhance our ability to look inside living cells," says Thomas Machleidt, Director of Research in the Promega Advanced Technologies Group. "We're thrilled to invest directly in people dedicated to outcomes beneficial to science and human health. The collaborative approach allows us to leverage our respective strengths alongside our colleagues at AstraZeneca and provide unparalleled access to tools and expertise that will expand what is possible with genome editing." The researchers will begin their work with the Genome Engineering team at the AstraZeneca R&D Center in Gothenburg, Sweden. They will later move to the Kornberg Center in Madison, Wisconsin to join the Advanced Technologies Group at Promega. Applications are open for the first position, Postdoc Fellow Development of advanced genome editing methods at AstraZeneca. About Promega Corporation Promega Corporation is a leader in providing innovative solutions and technical support to the life sciences industry. The company's portfolio of over 4,000 products support a range of life science work across areas such as cell biology; DNA, RNA and protein analysis; drug development; human identification and molecular diagnostics. For over 40 years these tools and technologies have grown in their application and are used today by scientists and technicians in labs for academic and government research, forensics, pharmaceuticals, clinical diagnostics and agricultural and environmental testing. Promega is headquartered in Madison, WI, USA with branches in 16 countries and over 50 global distributors. For more information, visit www.promega.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005881/en/ Contacts: Penny Patterson VP, Corporate Affairs Promega Corporation Phone: (608) 274-4330 E-mail: penny.patterson@promega.com Regulatory News: Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (LN:PSH) (LN:PSHD) (NA:PSH) (the "Company") today issued the PSH annual report and financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2021, which are now available on PSH's website, https://www.pershingsquareholdings.com/company-reports/financial-statements/. PSH also announced that its Annual General Meeting of Shareholders ("AGM") will be held on Thursday, May 5, 2022, at 9:00 AM BST. Although the States of Guernsey removed all travel restrictions on February 17, 2022, visitors to Guernsey are still advised to test before travel, and there are reporting and isolation requirements should one develop symptoms or test positive for COVID-19 while in Guernsey. The board of directors of PSH therefore encourages shareholders to submit proxy votes in electronic form. The results of the voting will be announced as soon as practicable after the conclusion of the AGM. At the AGM, shareholders will consider the receipt of the annual report and the financial statements, the renewal of PSH's share buy-back authority, the re-appointment of PSH's auditor, the approval to disapply pre-emption rights for any share issuance of 10% or less, and the re-election of PSH's current directors. The specific resolutions can be found in the Notice of Annual General Meeting available on PSH's website, https://www.pershingsquareholdings.com/company-reports/notices-shareholders/. About Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (LN:PSH) (LN:PSHD) (NA:PSH) is an investment holding company structured as a closed-ended fund. Category: (PSH:FinancialReporting) This is a disclosure according to Article 17 of the EU Market Abuse Regulation (Regulation 596/2014/EU). The document will shortly be available for inspection on the National Storage Mechanism website: https://data.fca.org.uk/#/nsm/nationalstoragemechanism. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220328005888/en/ Contacts: Media Camarco Ed Gascoigne-Pees Julia Tilley +44 (0)20 3781 8339, media-pershingsquareholdings@camarco.co.uk SHENZHEN, China, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ICCPP, producer of the globally renowned vape brand VOOPOO, and a global leader in vaping technology solutions, has announced it will invest CNY200 million to upgrade its factory automation this year. Building on current automatic production strengths, ICCPP's investment will bolster the upgrade and transformation of equipment automation while integrating advanced technologies, new materials, streamlined processes and refreshed standards. This strategic investment is based on ICCPP's long-term development plans to promote the development of diversified cooperation with customers. At the same time, it is also a symbol of pushing ICCPP's modern manufacturing strengths to even greater heights. The Company's factory automation construction upgrade will create an efficient and high-quality "ICCPP Intelligent Production System." The investment will be used to realize automatic production for the whole chain, covering multiple automatic production lines, while eliminating ineffective labor and waste, and excessive production. Resources will be fully and effectively utilized, costs will be significantly reduced, and quality will continue to improve. ICCPP hopes to bring higher quality products and services to market and strives to reach the top level of the industry within six months. ICCPP's existing smart factory that covers a total area of over 120,000 square meters is equipped with six production workshops, top-level production hardware and a Good Manufacturing Practices(GMP) standard production environment. This is supported by a 7S management model, an ISO9001 quality management system, integrating an advanced supply chain software system, so as to realize quality traceability and intelligent control of the complete production process. ICCPP has full ownership of its advanced R&D technology, strong manufacturing capacity, product design, and sales and service system and is a top science and technology enterprise in China and a key manufacturing enterprise. It ranks among the top 300 manufacturing enterprises in Guangdong Province, China, together with Huawei, GREE, Foxconn and other enterprises. VOOPOO has also won "best brand" and "best pod" awards. Presently, ICCPP has a complete set of industry-leading disposable vaping solutions including automation of the atomizer core and coated cotton, automated atomizer assembly, and outer box packaging automation. ICCPP's Disposable product has attracted a lot of attention in the market as it adopts VOOPOO's Mod products' unique production technology, and successfully transfers the ultimate taste of VOOPOO's Mod products to the Disposable product. Additionally, the Pod system and GENE TREE Nano-Microcrystalline Ceramic Core also establishes a complete set of vaping solutions. About ICCPP ICCPP is a global technology group with nearly a decade of experience in technology research and development, product design, manufacturing, brand building and other fields. Its products and services are distributed in more than 70 countries and regions, with approximately 30 million users. Contact: Website: www.iccpp.com Email: odmbusiness@voopoo.com Address: 19/F, Block A, Coolpad Building, High-tech Industrial Park (North Zone), Nanshan District, Shenzhen Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1775611/VOOPOO_Vape_Brand_Owner_ICCPP.jpg Founded by Ukrainian-born London -based entrepreneur Irra Ariella Khi Volunteer-led organisation providing on-the-ground support, tech and operational expertise Sunflower will plug the gap in citizen access to urgent services and aid LONDON, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Tech entrepreneurs, tech investors and creative industry leaders have come together to launch Sunflower Relief, a not-for-profit social enterprise founded to provide essential humanitarian relief in Ukraine. Connecting the immediate needs of the Ukrainian people to the practical solutions at hand, the organisation is working to facilitate and link foreign aid looking for a way deeper into Ukraine, while supporting the current on-the-ground relief efforts. Spearheaded by Ukrainian-born, London-based entrepreneur Irra Ariella Khi, CEO of Zamna and backed by an extensive network of entrepreneurs, tech investors and organisations, Sunflower Relief is a grassroots, volunteer-led network focused on providing Ukrainian locals with humanitarian relief. Directing humanitarian relief more effectively Sunflower Relief aims to help direct and distribute Ukrainian humanitarian relief more effectively - from providing logistics assistance to foreign aid agencies trying to reach deeper into Ukraine beyond the border, to getting medical supplies, hygiene products, camping equipment and food out to the millions of citizens who remain stranded or displaced in a war zone, as the Russian invasion continues. To co-ordinate its efforts, the organisation has partnered with operations and logistics personnel in Ukraine to connect with local support organisations. Alongside this, it is organising a tech team of Ukrainians both on the ground, and abroad to source and share eyewitness accounts from citizens. This team will also moderate local language communication channels with real-time intelligence and information sharing. Elsewhere, Sunflower Relief is building a network of Ukrainian, Russian and Polish speakers to help coordinate the efforts between regions. It has already signed up more than 200 part-time, and four full-time volunteers based in Ukraine, London and across Europe. It is now on a global recruitment drive to encourage further Ukrainian and Russian speakers to join its network, particularly those who can commit six or more hours a day in its West London HQ, as well as recruiting dedicated full time support in order to ensure process integrity across the organisation, and effectively coordinate volunteer shifts. Irra Ariella Khi was compelled to launch Sunflower Relief after hearing about the challenges on the ground in a series of eyewitness accounts, since the day the war started, from her immediate family in Ukraine. She realised foreign organisations were struggling to communicate with local networks already serving their own communities, leading to unhelpful assumptions about the type of aid and direction of support needed. This was also causing logistical difficulties getting supplies beyond the border or major cities, and into the depths of Ukraine. "Most Ukrainians don't want to get up and leave," said Khi. "They've lived in these modern cities and built beautiful homes spending their lives in a culture they love, but with a lengthy and protracted conflict now highly likely, and with limited humanitarian corridors available, it's crucial they have immediate access to supplies, services and support in their precise location. "We're rapidly scaling our grassroots operation to ensure that this support doesn't just stop at the Ukrainian border, while we're also making a huge communications effort to ensure citizens understand how and where support can be accessed. This can only be achieved through a combination of local language capabilities, deep local networks and local knowledge." Collective action Sunflower Relief is backed by partners including Phoenix Court Works, Seedcamp, Point 9 Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, UKBAA, Firstminute Capital, Founders Forum and Accel. Commitments of more than 300,000 initial funding have been secured from companies and individuals across the tech sector, with more support coming from the creative and tech communities. Sherry Coutu, serial entrepreneur and tech investor; Samir Desai,founder of Funding Circle; Mei Wen founding partner at Yinvest, Check Warner partner at Ada Ventures, Ella Goldner co-founder and general manager at Zinc VC, Paul Murphy, partner at Lightspeed; Ben Marrel, managing partner at Breega, Jenny Tooth OBE chief executive at UKBAA, Lyuba Guk, founding partner of Blue Lake VC; Grace Cassy and Jonathan Luff cofounders at CyLon/Epsilon; Rajeeb Dey MBE CEO of Learnerbly; Gary Stewart, founder and CEO of FounderTribes and Brent Hoberman, co-founder and chairman at Founders Factory/Founders Forum are also supporting Sunflower, either financially or with resources and access to their networks. Sunflower Relief is currently speaking with other VCs and partners to secure additional financing for its operations. The organisation is also partnering with initiatives and events to augment its support efforts. The first of these initiatives was Night for Ukraine, a collaboration with Secret Cinema founder Fabien Riggall. Night for Ukraine was held at London's Roundhouse on Wednesday 9 March. The live event showcased artists from Ukraine and the wider world, with the aim of kickstarting an ongoing events programme that keeps humanitarian efforts top of mind in the months ahead. Irra Ariella Khi, CEO of Zamna and founder of Sunflower Relief says: "I felt a moral imperative to act when I heard first hand about how organisations were struggling to communicate with locals in Ukraine. If not me, then who? Through immediate family and the network of personal contacts on the ground, myself and the volunteers at Sunflower Relief are able to connect people in need with the organisations and groups best suited to help. This means that useful aid stands a chance of getting into the right hands. The grass-roots, local-level support Sunflower Relief can provide is there to complement the astounding and unrelenting work of the large aid agencies to ensure everyone who needs support gets access to it." Remus Brett, Partner at LocalGlobe & Latitude, says: "The impact Irra has made since the invasion began has been phenomenal. When you apply tech knowhow and an entrepreneurial mindset to a crisis, you can drive instant support to those who need it most. This is why I am so passionate about backing people like Irra and her network of partners, who have direct insight into what's happening on the ground, along with the necessary skills and connections to make an immeasurable difference. We're working to ensure Sunflower has the right people, operational prowess and grassroots connectivity to positively affect the lives of citizens across Ukraine. If we can provide one person with resources to get out of a war zone, or give supplies and shelter to one person whose home has been destroyed, then what we are doing is 100% worth it." Brent Hoberman, Executive chairman and co-founder, Firstminute Capital, says: "It is a privilege to be able to support founders delivering real impact, and rarely more so than in the case of Irra and the team of volunteers at Sunflower Relief, carrying out urgent work in Ukraine. We look forward to helping scale this with full support from Founders Forum and Firstminute capital." Anyone interested in joining Sunflower Relief as a volunteer or making a donation can contact Irra and her team at www.sunflower.in.ua or complete the Sunflower volunteer form at the following link. About Sunflower Relief Sunflower Relief is a London-headquartered not-for-profit social enterprise committed to connecting the immediate needs of Ukrainian locals with immediate local solutions, supplies and support. Through a 200+-strong volunteer network of operations and logistics personnel, translators, media and tech experts, and fundraisers, Sunflower Relief exists to align ongoing humanitarian efforts with the specific needs of citizens living in, or attempting to exit Ukraine. Sunflower Relief was founded by Ukrainian-born, London-based Irra Ariella Khi, an entrepreneur based in London. The organisation is supported by Phoenix Court Works, Seedcamp, Point9 and Founders Forum amongst others. More can be found at: www.sunflowerrelief.org Additional Quotes: Julia Morrongiello, Venture Partner at Point Nine said: "The Ukrainian humanitarian crisis is of utmost importance to the team at Point Nine. Sunflower has a key role to play in this context and we are proud to support it by committing our time and resources." The Seedcamp team added: "At this point in time, it is critical we leverage the resources of the entire startup community to assist those affected by the crisis. We are supportive of the effort led by Irra and her team to bring assistance to the Ukrainian people, and look forward to continuing to help where we can." Penny McCormick, CEO of MyHealthChecked Plc commented: "We were keen to help Irra in her efforts to support at ground level, and have seen from collaborating with Irra and the team how advanced digital platforms can create accessibility and connection at pace, and overcome significant logistical barriers. We are fully behind Irra and the team in supporting humanitarian relief at pace, whilst channelling funds and essential suppliers right into the heart of the community." Flair Airlines, Visit Tucson, and Tucson International Airport announce long-term partnership to connect more Canadians to Arizona Service to Tucson begins in November and December from five Canadian airports, including Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Lethbridge, Prince George, and Windsor The Tucson winter base furthers Flair's mission of providing affordable leisure travel to Canadians To celebrate its first week of sales, one-way fares on Flair flights to Tucson, including taxes and fees, begin at $99 EDMONTON, AB / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / Flair Airlines, Canada's everyday low fare airline, is excited to announce a long-term partnership with Tucson, Arizona to connect underserved Canadian communities with affordable, non-stop, winter flights to sunshine and warmth. As the first step in the partnership, Flair will overnight an aircraft in Tucson next winter and today is opening sales for five new routes: Edmonton International Airport, Fort McMurray International Airport, Lethbridge Airport, Prince George Airport, and Windsor International Airport to Tucson International Airport. "Basing winter operations in Tucson, Arizona offers an exciting new option for Canadians. We know that Canadians in communities across the country will be keen to soak up the winter sun in Tucson. With consistent service for years to come, we think this is the beginning of an excellent yearly tradition for Canadians," said Garth Lund, Chief Commercial Officer, Flair Airlines. "For too long, many communities in Canada have been without service to warm weather destinations. Flair is looking forward to stimulating new demand with our everyday low fares." Tucson, Arizona "We are excited about the many benefits to our community through this relationship with Flair," said Danette Bewley, President and CEO of the Tucson Airport Authority. "Not only have we found a way to achieve a long-time goal of adding nonstop flights to and from Canada, TUS will be the only Arizona - or U.S., for that matter - destination from four of those airports. We look forward to welcoming and introducing Canadians to our beautiful region." Bewley added, "In addition to new air service, there is tremendous added economic potential for Southern Arizonans and Canadians to develop new connections and relationships." Edmonton, Alberta "Flair's continued growth and success is a great story for aviation and for the Edmonton Metropolitan Region. Adding another non-stop sunny destination and a US winter base in Tuscon is a great complement to Flair's headquarters at Edmonton International Airport," said Myron Keehn, Vice President, Air Service and Business Development, Edmonton International Airport. "Congratulations on your continued growth and we look forward to the service starting later this year." Fort McMurray, Alberta "This announcement is one we're extremely excited about, and are confident the community will be too," said RJ Steenstra, President & CEO, Fort McMurray Airport Authority. "We're pleased to welcome back Flair Airlines to YMM and will continue exploring new destination opportunities as we work to rebuild route capacity." Lethbridge, Alberta "The City of Lethbridge has been proactively investing in our Airport to position us for an opportunity just like this and we are thrilled to welcome Flair Airlines to our community," said Lethbridge Mayor Blaine Hyggen. "We've heard from our residents that they want a sun destination from the Lethbridge Airport and Arizona was one of the top places they want to visit. I'm excited for this new partnership and I'm certain this will be a hot ticket for all southern Albertans." Prince George, British Columbia "We are very excited to see this air service option for both Canadian and American travelers" says Prince George Airport Authority's President and CEO Gordon Duke. "Tucson offers a warm getaway for Canadians during the winter and also provides an opportunity for Americans to experience 'Bucket List' winter activities here in and around Prince George. We are looking forward to continuing to develop our relationship with Flair and connecting the world to our region." Windsor, Ontario "We are excited to welcome Flair Airlines to YQG - Windsor International Airport," said Mark Galvin, CEO, Windsor Airport "and are thrilled to add a direct flight from Windsor to the Sun Corridor of the United States." All flights to Tucson are non-stop and offer a quick and easy way to explore Arizona. There is no shortage of national parks, such as Saguaro National Park, and natural attractions to explore around Tucson, as well as vibrant nightlife and trendy restaurants. To celebrate its first week of sales, one-way fares on Flair flights to Tucson, including taxes and fees, begin at $99 from Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Lethbridge, Prince George, and Windsor. There are limited seats and availability for the fares. All routes are available for booking at https://www.flyflair.com. Flair looks forward to further connecting communities in Canada with non-stop service to exciting leisure destinations. Stay tuned as Flair releases further information about its upcoming winter schedule. About Flair Airlines Flair Airlines is Canada's leading low-fare airline and its greenest airline, on a mission to provide affordable air travel that connects them to the people and experiences they love. With an expanding fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft, Flair is growing to serve over 30 cities across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. For more information, please visit www.flyflair.com. Media enquiries, please contact: Flair Airlines Jamina Kotak 780.887.9209 Jamina.kotak@flyflair.com New Winter Routes Tucson (TUS) - Edmonton (YEG): 2x weekly, effective November 30, 2022 - March 24, 2023 Tucson (TUS) - Fort McMurray (YMM): 2x weekly, effective November 30, 2022 - March 22, 2023 Tucson (TUS) - Lethbridge (YQL): 1x weekly, effective December 1, 2022 - March 23, 2023 Tucson (TUS) - Prince George (YXS): 1x weekly, effective December 2, 2022 - March 24, 2023 Tucson (TUS) - Windsor (YQG): 1x weekly, effective December 1, 2022 - March 23, 2023 SOURCE: Flair Airlines View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695118/Flair-Airlines-Establishes-Winter-Base-in-Tucson-Arizona-Bringing-Non-Stop-Sun-at-Affordable-Prices-to-Underserved-Canadian-Markets HOUSTON, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Ascend Performance Materials has reached an agreement to acquire the compounding division of Formulated Polymers Limited, a leading engineered materials manufacturer in Chennai, India. This acquisition will establish Ascend's first manufacturing base in the subcontinent and strengthen Ascend's global reach in the electrical and e-mobility application space. The deal includes a world-scale manufacturing facility in Chennai as well as warehouses throughout India. Formulated Polymers, which has operated over three decades as a polyamide compounder in India, is currently a licensee of Ascend's Starflam flame-retardant polyamides. "Demand for our materials in India is strong and growing," said Phil McDivitt, Ascend's president and CEO. "The team at Formulated Polymers has built an excellent, diversified business with a proven track record of technology development in polyamides. We are excited to build on their expertise to drive additional value-added growth in India and beyond." Ascend, a fully integrated producer of durable engineered materials, has grown its global production footprint with five acquisitions over the last four years, each focused on specific synergies with the company's core business. This acquisition provides a significant growth opportunity for Ascend in India, one of the highest growth economies in the world. "Being customer-focused is one of our values," said John Saunders, Ascend's vice president for Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and India. "We look forward to supporting our customers in a fast-growing market by continuing to invest in capacity, technical resources and product development to meet their needs." The deal is expected to close on May 1, after receiving necessary approvals. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. About Ascend Performance Materials Ascend Performance Materials makes high-performance materials for everyday essentials and new technologies. Our focus is on improving quality of life and inspiring a better tomorrow through innovation. Based in Houston, Texas, and with regional offices in Shanghai, Brussels and Detroit, we are a fully integrated material solutions provider with global manufacturing facilities in North America, Europe and Asia. Our 2,800-person global workforce makes the engineered materials, fabrics, fibers and chemicals used to make safer vehicles, cleaner energy, better medical devices, smarter appliances and longer-lasting apparel and consumer goods. We are committed to safety, sustainability, inclusion and diversity, and to the success of our customers and our communities. Learn more about Ascend at www.ascendmaterials.com. Contact: Alison Jahn, +1 713-210-9809 ajahn@ascendmaterials.com Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1775982/FPL_plant_crop.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1326397/ASCEND_Logo.jpg Washington should not dump Cold War garbage in the Pacific Ocean By Global Times editorial (Global Times) 09:38, March 29, 2022 Indo-Pacific Illustration: Liu Rui/GT The US and the Philippines kicked off their 12-day "shoulder-to-shoulder" joint exercises across the Luzon island on Monday, involving nearly 9,000 troops. This year's exercise is "one of the largest-ever iterations," the US Embassy in the Philippines said in a news release. In this regard, the US side is particularly excited. Maj. Gen. Jay Bargeron, 3rd Marine Division Commanding General, said the drills will "strengthen our response capabilities and readiness for real-world challenges." Western media said the exercises will "show off the two countries' strong defense ties in the face of growing Chinese assertiveness." But it was also noted that the Philippine side only emphasized the bilateral security relationship with the US before the exercise started. It is in stark contrast to the US' high-profile manner. This joint military exercise, which was announced long ago by the US and dubbed the "largest-ever" in history, has greater political significance than a military one. Before the pandemic, about 8,000 soldiers participated in the exercise in 2018. The figure was 7,500 in 2019. The number this year, 9,000, is thus not a breakthrough. It is however the first time in many years that the number of US military personnel (5,100) exceeds that of the Philippines (3,800). This mirrors US eagerness to stage a "big show" to make itself look good. The reason behind it is easy to understand. The US attempts to realize what Kurt Campbell, the US National Security Council's coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs said: The US will keep its focus on the Indo-Pacific despite the Ukraine crisis. Yet as the situation in Ukraine has been stuck in a stalemate and the energy of the US is inevitably distracted by it, Washington can realize its so-called "focus" on the Indo-Pacific region through provoking controversial topics and launching joint military exercises, moves that are provocative at relative low cost. Washington is so good at such moves to fan the flame. From the "Asia-Pacific rebalancing strategy" under the Obama administration, to the "Indo-Pacific strategy" under the Trump and Biden administrations, Southeast Asia has been seen as a strategic pivot for the US to play geopolitics. But Washington simply does not understand the logic of development here. ASEAN countries have a larger population than the EU, but most of them have a weak economic base and face urgent development tasks, while some of them have not yet escaped from the turmoil. Their thirst for peace and development is overwhelming, which is highly compatible with China's attitude, but the opposite of the path the US takes. On the same day that the US-Philippine military exercises began, China announced that at the invitation of Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the foreign ministers of the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar will each visit China between March 31 and April 3. Meanwhile, the US-ASEAN special summit, scheduled for March 28 in Washington, has been postponed indefinitely, with the White House unilaterally announcing the date and then changing the date proposed by ASEAN leaders again and again. It is not difficult to see who respects ASEAN countries, and who is using Southeast Asian countries as pawns. Since Ukraine crisis broke out, there are some voices of reflection in the Philippines. They argue that the country needs to avoid the fate of Ukraine, reject Washington's warmongering, and avoid at all costs becoming a "proxy" or a pawn of any major power to encircle another one. The recent situation in Ukraine is a warning to the rest of the world that the security of one country cannot be guaranteed at the expense of undermining security of others, and that regional security cannot be guaranteed by strengthening or even expanding military blocs. Asian countries are not willing to repeat the troubles Washington made in Europe. Peace and stability in Asia are hard-earned and cannot be sabotaged by extraterritorial countries. Washington wants to forcefully peddle its old security concept in Asia, dumping "Cold War garbage" into the Pacific Ocean, even trying to create an "Indo-Pacific version of NATO." In the end, its dream will be crushed by the hard rocks of the Pacific Ocean. (Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun) LAGOS, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Nigeria is becoming safer every day with the string of successes being recorded in the fight against Boko Haram, bandits, and other criminal elements, according to the country's information minister Lai Mohammed. Addressing a news conference Monday in Abuja, the nation's capital, Mohammed said the security forces had taken the battle to the bandits and put them on the run, and their ranks were being decimated. "I am proud of our security forces, our men and women in uniform. Despite a myriad of security challenges, they are living up to the billing," Mohammed told reporters. "As the terrorists and their camps are being decimated, thousands of terrorists and their families are surrendering in droves," he said. The minister attributed the success to the procurement of modern platforms for the armed forces. He said the modern platforms had gone a long way in raising the level of their operational readiness and efficiency, in addition to boosting their capabilities. The minister also commended the implementation of the community policing initiative, which he said led to the training of 25,000 constabularies in several police colleges across the country. He said the administration approved the review and upgrade of police personnel's salaries by 20 percent and enhanced the duty tour allowance of police officers to boost their morale. SEOUL, South Korea, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NEXEN TIRE, a leading global tire manufacturer, recently unveiled a commemorative 80th Anniversary emblem to observe the Company's eight decades in the tire manufacturing sector. The new commemorative emblem incorporates NEXEN TIRE's legacy and history, symbolizing the importance of the Company's long-term commitment to its consumers. The overall design of the emblem resembles a moving tire, demonstrating NEXEN TIRE's initiatives of meeting the different mobility needs of its consumers. NEXEN TIRE will celebrate its formal 80th anniversary on May 1, 2022, which will mark the company's incorporation. Founded in 1942, NEXEN TIRE has played a pivotal role in the tire manufacturing business. Eight decades later, the Company is still a cutting-edge brand known for its quality, innovative products, and, manufacturing competitiveness. "I'm honored to introduce this commemorative emblem and kick off our 80th anniversary celebration," stated Travis Kang, Global CEO of NEXEN TIRE. "I am truly proud of what we have accomplished. The significance of this milestone demonstrates that our clients and workers value our efforts. I've also had the good fortune to work with a remarkable group of colleagues that have been making great strides toward ensuring the Company's success." Through the end of the 2022 anniversary year, the new 80th Anniversary emblem will be used across marketing and communications. The NEXEN TIRE 80th Anniversary commemorative emblem can be found at www.nexentire.comor follow us on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/nexen-tire. About Nexen Tire Nexen Tire, established in 1942, is a global tire manufacturer headquartered in South Korea. Nexen Tire, one of the world's fastest growing tire manufacturers, currently interacts with approximately 150 countries around the world and owns four manufacturing plants - two in Korea (Yangsan and Changnyeong) and one in Qingdao, China. Another plant in Zatec, the Czech Republic has also begun operation in 2019. Nexen Tire produces tires for passenger cars, SUVs, and light trucks with advanced technology and excellence in design. Nexen Tire supplies OE tires to global car makers in various countries around the world. In 2014, the company achieved a grand slam of the world's top 4 design awards for the first time amongst the various tire makers in the world. For more information, please visit http://www.nexentire.com/international/ A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/bc750b8e-880e-464b-93b0-56269423eaba JACKSONVILLE, FL / ACCESSWIRE / March 29, 2022 / ParkerVision, Inc. (OTCQB:PRKR) ("ParkerVision"), a developer and marketer of technologies and products for wireless applications, today announced results for the year ended December 31, 2021. Year End 2021 Summary and Recent Developments Patent license and settlement agreements were reached with Zyxel Communications Corporation and Buffalo, Inc. in 2021, resulting from the Company's patent enforcement campaign initiated in the Western District of Texas in 2020. The U.S. District Court in the Middle District of Florida (Orlando Division) issued a summary judgment order on March 22, 2022 ruling that Qualcomm does not infringe the claims of the three patents in ParkerVision's patent case against Qualcomm. ParkerVision intends to appeal this ruling along with the same court's March 9, 2022 ruling excluding the opinions of ParkerVision's experts regarding infringement and validity issues. Two infringement cases against Intel in the Western District of Texas were reconfigured to include cellular products in the first case and WiFi and Bluetooth products in the second. First Intel trial date against cellular products was moved from June 2022 to October 2022 as a result of this case reconfiguration and subsequently moved to December 5, 2022 due to discovery delays. Second Intel trial date against Intel WiFi and Bluetooth products currently scheduled for May 2023. Favorable Markman decisions received in both Intel cases during 2021. One of the two IPRs filed by Intel related to patents in these cases was decided in the Company's favor by the PTAB in January 2022. Third IPR filed by Intel pertaining to patent in second case is awaiting PTAB decision. Additional enforcement actions pending in the Western District of Texas also include Hisense, TCL and LG with trials scheduled in December 2022 and April 2023. Favorable Markman recommendations issued in Hisense and TCL cases in October 2021; Markman hearing scheduled for April 2022 in LG case. IPR petitions were filed by Hisense and TCL against two of the ten patents asserted in these cases; LG has filed a request to join these pending proceedings. Decisions expected in November 2022. Infringement cases against Qualcomm and Apple in the Middle District of Florida (Jacksonville) and LG in the District of New Jersey are stayed pending outcomes in other cases. Jeffrey Parker, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, commented, "We are pleased to have resolved our outstanding patent actions with Zyxel and Buffalo aslicensees of our technologies. We are hopeful that additional parties will join Zyxel and Buffalo and become licensees of our patented technologies in the near future under comparable royalty rates. The Texas court continues to move efficiently, and we believe the claim construction rulings to date demonstrate the merits of our claim construction positions. Our first of two infringement actions against Intel is scheduled for trial in approximately eight months and three additional trials are scheduled in Texas within five months following this first Intel trial. We look forward to presenting the facts of our cases to Texas juries." Mr. Parker continued, "Recent rulings from the district court in Orlando are substantial blows to our pending action against Qualcomm as the court first excluded the opinions of our experts and subsequently issued a summary judgment ruling of non-infringement on the three remaining patents in the case. The next step is an appeal that we intend to vigorously pursue. We are hopeful that the appellate court will give proper weight to our positions which we feel are strongly supported by legal precedence. At a recent public hearing in the Orlando case against Qualcomm, I was surprised to hear the court comment, 'We all know the jury isn't going to follow 99% of what you all are talking about in this trial. They're going to come up with a rough idea of who deserves to win, but the nuances of a patent case, there's no way a jury understands this which is why this shouldn't be tried to a jury, in my opinion. They will never understand. It should be PTAB 100%.' The fact is that district courts with Article 3 judges represent the only venue available to patent holders for enforcing our patented rights. This case has been pending in the district court in Orlando since 2014. It has survived multiple IPR challenges, a motion to move venue to California, and numerous other delays. We are disappointed with the additional delays these recent rulings will create; however, we remain confident in the merits of our case, and we are steadfast in our goal to hold Qualcomm accountable for their unauthorized, and we believe willful, use of our technologies." Financial Results Net loss for 2021 was $12.3 million, or $0.17 per common share, compared to a net loss of $19.6 million, or $0.42 per common share for 2020. The 37% decrease in year-to-date net loss is a primarily the result of a $2.3 million decrease in litigation fees and expenses largely related to our case against Qualcomm in Jacksonville, Florida which is currently stayed. the recognition in 2020 of approximately $2.2 million in noncash charges related to the modification of equity-related agreements with third parties. a $4.0 million decrease in the loss related to the change in fair value of our contingent payment obligations. An offsetting $2.1 million increase in share-based compensation expense. We used cash for operations of approximately $7.7 million in 2021 compared to approximately $4.8 million in cash used for operations in 2020. The increase is the result of a significant decrease in accounts payable and other current liabilities in 2021, resulting in a $3.7 million improvement in working capital. Our use of cash in 2021 was funded by $6.2 million in net proceeds received from the sale of debt and equity securities and $1.0 million in proceeds received from the exercise of outstanding options and warrants. About ParkerVision ParkerVision, Inc. invents, develops and licenses cutting-edge, proprietary radio-frequency (RF) technologies that enable wireless solution providers to make and sell advanced wireless communication products. ParkerVision is engaged in a number of patent enforcement actions in the U.S. to protect patented rights that it believes are broadly infringed by others. For more information, please visit www.parkervision.com. (PRKR-I) Safe Harbor Statement This press release contains forward-looking information. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements, each of which speaks only as of the date made. Such statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that are disclosed in the Company's SEC reports, including the Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those currently anticipated or projected. Cindy French Chief Financial Officer ParkerVision, Inc. cfrench@parkervision.com (TABLES FOLLOW) ParkerVision, Inc. Balance Sheet Highlights December 31, (in thousands) 2021 2020 Cash and cash equivalents $ 1,030 $ 1,627 Prepaid expenses and other current assets 599 607 Intangible assets, net 1,785 2,170 Other noncurrent assets, net 26 52 Total assets 3,440 4,456 Current liabilities 1,646 5,989 Contingent payment obligations 43,063 38,279 Convertible notes 2,895 3,018 Other long-term liabilities 613 991 Shareholders' deficit (44,777 ) (43,821 ) Total liabilities and shareholders' deficit $ 3,440 $ 4,456 ParkerVision, Inc. Summary Results of Operations Year Ended (in thousands, except per share amounts) December 31, 2021 2020 Licensing revenue $ 144 $ - Cost of sales (5 ) - Gross margin 139 - Selling, general and administrative expenses 8,088 10,664 Total operating expenses 8,088 10,664 Interest and other income 242 - Interest expense (251 ) (547 ) Change in fair value of contingent payment obligations (4,372 ) (8,367 ) Total interest and other (4,381 ) (8,914 ) Net loss $ (12,330 ) $ (19,578 ) Basic and diluted net loss per common share $ (0.17 ) $ (0.42 ) Weighted average shares outstanding 71,299 47,019 ParkerVision, Inc. Summary of Cash Flows Year Ended (in thousands) December 31, 2021 2020 Net cash used in operating activities $ (7,702 ) $ (4,777 ) Net cash used in investing activities (3 ) (1 ) Net cash provided by financing activities 7,108 6,348 Net (decrease) increase in cash & cash equivalents (597 ) 1,570 Cash & cash equivalents - beginning of year 1,627 57 Cash & cash equivalents - end of year $ 1,030 $ 1,627 SOURCE: ParkerVision, Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/694891/ParkerVision-Reports-2021-Results A new dawn for peace in the Middle East dominated talks at the World Government Summit 2022 (WGS2022) today as the UAE president's diplomatic adviser stressed the need to work with all countries in the region. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005967/en/ H.E. Dr. Anwar Gargash said the UAE was promoting regional prosperity and stability at WGS 2022 (Photo: AETOSWire) The UAE will work with all nations to promote prosperity and stability in the Middle East, His Excellency Dr. Anwar bin Mohammed Gargash, Diplomatic Advisor to the UAE President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, said. "We are reaching out to friends and also adversaries and rebuilding bridges. We are not going to agree with everything they want to do," he said on the first day of WGS2022. Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said Russia has not been suspended from the IMF. Speaking at a plenary session at WGS 2022, she said: "The board can only suspend them if the membership of the Fund says we do not recognise this particular government anymore. There has to be dialogue." Umm Al Quwain launched the Sustainable Blue Economy Strategy, which aims to contribute 40% to the emirate's GDP by 2031. This includes meeting a net-zero emissions target by 2031 and dedicate a fifth of Umm Al Quwain's land area to nature reserves. His Highness Sheikh Majid bin Saud bin Rashid Al Mualla, Chairman of the Umm Al Quwain Department of Tourism and Archaeology, announced the intention to establish the Umm Al Quwain Centre for Entrepreneurship and the Blue Economy that will deliver eight transformative projects. Umm Al Quiwain has seen GDP rise by 34% in the past decade, foreign direct investment nearly double in eight years, and exports increase threefold since 2017. With "astronomical" demand for flights, Emirates President Sir Tim Clark promised renovation of the airline's iconic fleet of A380s, which have produced 80% of the Dubai carrier's profits. "We're going to refurbish them, refresh them, put more innovation into them, and they're going to be something really special," he said. *Source: AETOSWire View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005967/en/ Contacts: Raneen Nasrallah rnasrallah@apcoworldwide.com MOUNTAIN VIEW (dpa-AFX) - The U.S Justice Department is supporting a bipartisan Senate Bill, which would prevent big tech companies like Apple and Google from favoring their products over competitors'. This latest move is being seen as an effort to control the power and clout enjoyed by Big Tech firms. In a letter addressed to top lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, a senior most Department of Justice official extended support for the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and its companion bill in the House. In January, the Senate panel had voted to send the bill for a full-floor vote, inspite of there being stiff opposition from the tech leaders, who were of the opinion that the Bill could have inadvertent consequences. In the letter signed by Acting Assistant Attorney General Peter S. Hyun, the Justice Department said, 'The Department views the rise of dominant platforms as presenting a threat to open markets and competition, with risks for consumers, businesses, innovation, resiliency, global competitiveness, and our democracy.' The Senate bill is mostly likely to target biggest tech firms like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, based on market valuation and user base. The bill will prevent tech companies from promoting their own products and services in search results. These are some of the other protective measures the Bill suggests with the aim of promoting competition. The letter said, 'If enacted, we believe that this legislation has the potential to have a positive effect on dynamism in digital markets going forward. Our future global competitiveness depends on innovators and entrepreneurs having the ability to access markets free from dominant incumbents that impede innovation, competition, resiliency, and widespread prosperity.' Even though President Joe Biden has always supported action against companies, which are engaged in anti-competitive business practices across several sectors, the letter is the first time his Government has supported a certain legislation against major tech companies. The companies are of the opinion that the anti-trust bill and other proposals may have negative impact on national security and user privacy. According to reports, before the panel vote in January, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai had personally talked with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in a move to stop the Bill. While the panel voted to send the bill forward, many senators said that the final legislation will need changes before they put their approval stamp on it. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 29, 2022) - Los Andes Copper Ltd. ( TSXV: LA) (OTCQX: LSANF) ("Los Andes" or the "Company") provides the following update on its Vizcachitas Copper project in Chile and provides corporate milestones for 2022. Summary Milestones -Report assay results from the completed 8,297 meters of drilling April to June 2022 -Updated Resource Estimation including 2022 drilling results August 2022 -Continued drilling operations, provided injunction is lifted Q3 2022 -Completion of a Pre-Feasibility Study ("PFS") Q4 2022 R. Michael Jones, CEO, said: "We have sufficient new drill intercepts completed that a resource update is warranted as soon as the assays are in, and we can finalize an updated mine plan and the Pre-Feasibility Study in the next few months There is further resource potential from additional step out drilling which is planned for a further 10,000 meters." The Company estimates that the current resource and additional intercepts are sufficient for a full PFS mine plan. The Company's plan is to resume drilling as soon as possible since a number of areas are not closed off. A request to lift the injunction for drilling to stop (announced recently) is being prepared. Details Los Andes Copper has completed 8,297 meters of diamond drilling and has reported the results for the first hole, CMV-001B, of 1,177 meters of 0.50% copper equivalent near the northwest edge of the deposit. Two further holes have been completed approximately 100 meters west and 200 meters west of the CMV-001B intersection. A total of 4,221 meters in 5 holes are sampled and awaiting assay results and a further 2,811 meters of drilling from 5 holes are in the logging and sampling process. Results are expected to become available in the coming weeks. Los Andes Copper sees significant exploration potential at Vizcachitas and believes that further drilling to define the full potential of the property will benefit all stakeholders. Considerable work has been completed over the past two years towards a PFS, including updates in metallurgy and engineering designs, capital and operating cost estimates. The final parts of the PFS are the updated resource model and the mine plans. The completed drilling will allow for this to be finalized with a focus on optimizing the initial years of the mine plan. Further, the Company announces the appointment of Eduardo Covarrubias as Executive Chairman of the Company with immediate effect. Mr. Covarrubias is the representative of Turnbrook Mining Ltd. that owns 53% of the company's common shares and he has been involved in the project for decades. Fernando Porcile, the former Executive Chairman of the Company, has announced his retirement effective as of 25 March 2022, and will be devoting his time to personal matters. Mr. Covarrubias and the Board of Directors and management of the Company thank Mr. Porcile for his years of invaluable contribution directing the advancement of the Vizcachitas Copper project to a Tier 1 Copper mining project. About Los Andes Copper Ltd. Los Andes Copper Ltd. is an exploration and development company with an 100% interest in the Vizcachitas Project in Chile. Los Andes Copper Ltd. is listed on the TSX-V under the ticker: LA. The Project is a copper-molybdenum porphyry deposit, located 120 kilometres north of Santiago, in an area of very good infrastructure. The Company's Preliminary Economic Assessment (the "PEA"), delivered in June 2019, highlights that the Project has a post tax NPV of $1.8 billion and an IRR of 20.77%, based on a $3 per pound copper price. It also has a Measured Resources of 254.4 million tonnes having a grade of 0.439% copper and Indicated Resource of approximately 1.03 billion tonnes having a grade of 0.385% copper. Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. Please refer to the technical report dated June 13, 2019, with an effective date of May 10, 2019 and titled "Preliminary Economic Assessment of the Vizcachitas Project", prepared by Tetra Tech. The PEA is preliminary in nature, it includes inferred mineral resources that are considered too speculative geologically to have the economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as mineral reserves, and there is no certainty that the PEA will be realized. Qualified Person ("QP") and Quality Control and Assurance Antony Amberg CGeol FGS, the Company's Chief Geologist, is the qualified person who has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information contained in this news release. The QP has validated the data by, supervising the sample collection process, through chain of custody records and inspecting the detailed technical data and quality control and assurance information. For more information please contact: R. Michael Jones , P.Eng CEO rmj@losandescopper.com Tel: +44 203 4407982 BlytheRay, Financial PR Megan Ray Rachael Brooks Tel: +44 207 138 3203 E-Mail: info@losandescopper.com or visit our website at: www.losandescopper.com Follow us on twitter @LosAndesCopper Follow us on LinkedIn Los Andes Copper Ltd Certain of the information and statements contained herein that are not historical facts, constitute "forward-looking information" within the meaning of the Securities Act (British Columbia), Securities Act (Ontario) and the Securities Act (Alberta) ("Forward-Looking Information"). Forward-Looking Information is often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "seek", "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect" and "intend"; statements that an event or result is "due" on or "may", "will", "should", "could", or might" occur or be achieved; and, other similar expressions. More specifically, Forward-Looking Information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company, or industry results, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such Forward-Looking Information; including, without limitation, Spinnaker's ability to raise capital, target and attract institutional and retail investors and focus on developing and expanding the network of investors, analysts and financial intermediaries who are interested in Los Andes. Such Forward-Looking Information is based upon the Company's assumptions regarding global and Chilean economic, political and market conditions and the price of metals and energy, and the Company's production. Among the factors that have a direct bearing on the Company's future results of operations and financial conditions are changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined, a change in government policies, competition, currency fluctuations and restrictions and technological changes, among other things. Should one or more of any of the aforementioned risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from any conclusions, forecasts or projections described in the Forward-Looking Information. Accordingly, readers are advised not to place undue reliance on Forward-Looking Information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise Forward-Looking Information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/118546 St. Paul, Minnesota--(Newsfile Corp. - March 29, 2022) - PolyMet Mining Corp. (TSX: POM) (NYSE American: PLM), today announced the resignation of Richard Lock, senior vice president and project director, who was appointed chief executive officer of Canadian-based Oroco Resource Corp. "We are grateful for Richard's leadership and technical contributions in advancing studies and optimizing NorthMet's mine plan, positioning the project to be a safe, efficient, productive and profitable operation," said Jon Cherry, chairman, president and CEO. "We wish him well in his new endeavor." Mr. Lock joined the company in January 2020. A search for his successor is underway. In the interim, he will continue to provide advisory services to PolyMet. * * * * * About PolyMet PolyMet is a mine development company that owns 100% of the NorthMet Project, the first large-scale project to have received permits within the Duluth Complex in northeastern Minnesota, one of the world's major, undeveloped mining regions. NorthMet has significant proven and probable reserves of copper, nickel and palladium - metals vital to infrastructure improvements and global carbon reduction efforts - in addition to marketable reserves of cobalt, platinum and gold. When operational, NorthMet will become one of the leading producers of nickel, palladium and cobalt in the U.S., providing a much needed, responsibly mined source of these critical and essential metals. Located in the Mesabi Iron Range, the project will provide economic diversity while leveraging the region's established supplier network and skilled workforce and generate a level of activity that will have a significant effect in the local economy. For more information: www.polymetmining.com. For further information, please contact: Media Bruce Richardson, Corporate Communications Tel: +1 (651) 389-4111 brichardson@polymetmining.com Investor Relations Tony Gikas, Investor Relations Tel: +1 (651) 389-4110 investorrelations@polymetmining.com PolyMet Disclosures This news release contains certain forward-looking statements concerning anticipated developments in PolyMet's operations in the future. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimates," "potential," "possible," "projects," "plans," and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions or results "will," "may," "could," or "should" occur or be achieved or their negatives or other comparable words. These forward-looking statements may include statements regarding the ability to receive environmental and operating permits, job creation, and the effect on the local economy, or other statements that are not a statement of fact. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore involve inherent known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements due to risks facing PolyMet or due to actual facts differing from the assumptions underlying its predictions. PolyMet's forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, expectations and opinions of management on the date the statements are made, and PolyMet does not assume any obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's beliefs, expectations and opinions should change. Specific reference is made to risk factors and other considerations underlying forward-looking statements discussed in PolyMet's most recent Annual Report on Form 40-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021, and in our other filings with Canadian securities authorities and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Annual Report on Form 40-F also contains the company's mineral resource and other data as required under National Instrument 43-101. No regulatory authority has reviewed or accepted responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/118548 The Prize's 44th session awards eminent figures in each of its Arabic Language & Literature and Service to Islam categories Riyadh, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Two mathematicians and a scientist were among this year's King Faisal Prize's seven laureates who received their prizes on 29 March in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for having enriched humanity with key and invaluable achievements and discoveries, and excelled in the fields of Medicine, Science, Arabic Language & Literature, and Serving to Islam. The Medicine Prize was awarded to Professor David Liu, Richard Merkin Professor and Director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, who invented the first gene "base editor" in 2016. This technology laid the foundation for possibly treating thousands of genetic diseases like sickle cell disease and muscular dystrophy. Professor David Liu used "base editors" in mice to correct the genetic mutation behind progeria, a rare condition characterized by premature aging, retarded development, and early death. Still, more work needs to be done before gene "base editors" can be used in humans. Initiating a revolution in genome editing, "base editors" have received great global demand. They were distributed over 9,000 times to more than 3,000 laboratories around the world. Scientists were able to publish more than 300 papers on this technique, used in different organisms ranging from bacteria to mice. "Base editing" is a precise genome editing method; like a genetic pencil, that rewrites DNA base letters, which cause genetic mutations and potentially genetic diseases. This technology, which is in constant development, chemically rewrites one DNA base to another by rearranging the atoms of one DNA base to resemble a different base. In 2019, Professor David Liu created with his team "prime editing" which offers more targeting flexibility and greater editing precision. With over 75 issued U.S. patents, Professor Liu was referred to as the "Gene Corrector" by Nature magazine topping its list of "Ten People Who Mattered This Year" in 2017 and was included in the "Foreign Policy Leading Global Thinkers list". He is also a biotech entrepreneur, cofounding "Editas Medicine", which uses CRISPR therapies (tool for editing genomes) to "discover, develop, manufacture, and commercialize transformative, durable, and precise genomic medicines for a broad class of diseases". The Science Prize (Mathematics) was awarded jointly to Professor?Martin Hairer, Chair in Probability and Stochastic Analysis at Imperial College's Department of Mathematics, and to Professor?Nader Masmoudi, a distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the New York University of Abu Dhabi and head of his Research Center on Stability, Instability and Turbulence. Professor Martin Hairer developed the theory of regularity structures which gave a precise mathematical meaning to several equations that were previously outside the scope of mathematical analysis. He published his theory in 2014 providing tools and manuals for solving many previously incomprehensible equations called the stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). These equations involve chance and describe how randomness throws disorder into different phenomena like coin tossing, stock price changes, wind movement in a tunnel, or forest fire growth. He transformed the area of SPDEs by introducing fundamental new techniques and was able to solve equations like KPZ equation which describes the evolution of the boundary at which two substances meet over time. Professor Hairer is a world leader in probability theory and analysis and has authored a monograph and over 100 research articles. His work has been distinguished with several prizes and awards, most notably the LMS Whitehead and Philip Leverhulme prizes in 2008, the Fermat prize in 2013, the Frohlich prize and the Fields Medal in 2014, a knighthood in 2016, and the Breakthrough prize in Mathematics in 2020. As for Professor Nader Masmoudi, he was able to unlock the mystery around many physics problems which remained unsolved for centuries. He found a flaw in "Euler's" mathematical equations which for more than two centuries described the motions of fluids under any circumstance. He discovered that Euler's equations do not apply to all circumstances, as previously thought, and proved that they could break or fail under certain conditions related to fluids. His work helped solve and understand many problems related to fluid-modeling like weather predictions and airplane turbulence. For the past 20 years, Professor Masmoudi's research has been at the forefront of Partial Differential Equations, Fluid Mechanics, and Dynamical Systems. He has been cited by more than 8000 papers for his works in pure and applied mathematics. He has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Best Scientific Paper Award in Annales de l'Institue Henri Poincare, a Chair from the Fondation Sciences Mathematiques de Paris, The Fermat Prize, and the Chair Schlumberger from the IHES in Paris. In addition to Medicine and Science, King Faisal Prize recognized this year the achievements of outstanding thinkers and scholars in the field of Arabic Language & Literature, and honored exemplary leaders who played a pivotal role in serving Islam, Muslims, and humanity at large. The Arabic Language and Literature Prize about "Arabic Literature Studies in English" was awarded to Professor Suzanne Stetkevych, Chair of the Department of Arabic & Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, and to Professor Muhsin Al-Musawi, Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literary Studies at Columbia University. Professor Suzanne Stetkevych was awarded the prize for her extensive research and work analyzing Arabic literature with unmatched depth from the pre-Islamic period to the revivalist period. Her research approach resulted in the renewal of the critical perspective and methods of studying classical Arabic poetry. Professor Muhsin Al-Musawi received the prize for being a well-established authority in the field of Arabic literature demonstrating his encyclopedic knowledge in both classical and modern Arabic literature. His research and studies have made great impact on students and researchers in the field of Arabic studies, both in the Arab world and the West. He handled Arabic literature as a world literature. The Service to Islam Prize was awarded to the former Tanzanian President His Excellency Ali Hassan Mwinyi and to Professor Hassan Mahmoud Al Shafei. His Excellency Ali Hassan Mwinyi actively participated in Islamic advocacy, spreading the spirit of religious tolerance, educating Muslims, and translating many Islamic resources and references into Swahili language. In parallel, Professor Hassan Mahmoud Alshafei served Islamic sciences through teaching, writing, authenticating, and translating, and has contributed to the establishment of the International Islamic University in Islamabad and the development of its colleges' curricula. The Islamic Studies Prize for this year on "Islamic Heritage of Al- Andalus" was withheld because the nominated works did not meet the criteria of the prize. Since 1979, King Faisal Prize in its 5 different categories has awarded 282 laureates from 44 different nationalities who have made distinguished contributions to different sciences and causes. Each prize laureate is endowed with USD 200 thousand; a 24-carat gold medal weighing 200 grams, and a Certificate inscribed with the Laureate's name and a summary of their work which qualified them for the prize. Attachments Credit cards are useful, and many adults have one, if not several. You can use them to purchase services and goods all over the world. However, credit card breaches sometimes occur. A breach is when a hacker gets ahold of your credit card information. They can use that to commit identity theft or fraud. There are ways to protect yourself from credit card breaches, though, and well talk about some of them right now. Before we jump into these though, its important to mention that you should always try to use credit cards responsibly. Theyre just tools, like finance software or a debt consolidation loan calculator. Youll get the most out of them if you dont misuse them. 1. Check Your Account Daily Now, on to our tips for how to protect yourself from credit card breaches. The first thing you might do is to get in the habit of checking your credit card accounts daily. You can do it in the morning before you leave for work or in the evening before you go to bed. If this is a habit for you, youll immediately recognize it when you see a charge that you didnt make or dont remember making. If you see one, it doesnt necessarily mean a breach has occurred. It could be a mistake. Either way, checking your credit card account status every day means youll notice if anything looks out of the ordinary. 2. Report Unauthorized Transactions The next thing youll want to do is report any unauthorized transactions without delay. Again, seeing a charge you dont recognize doesnt always mean theres something fraudulent going on. You wont know until you look into it, though. You can reach out to the credit card company and ask them to look into the matter for you. They can launch an investigation and get back to you with the results. If you dont feel like the results of their investigation are satisfactory, you can also get your bank involved. If the credit card company seems unable to help you, the bank to which you attached the payment account might be able to assist you. 3. Monitor Your Credit Report Monitoring your credit card accounts can tell you whats happening with them, but you can also watch out for fraud by monitoring your credit report. Lets say that you suspect someone hacked your credentials. Maybe your login and password showed up on a report of a larger data breach. If so, its possible that fraudsters could try to purchase things in your name. You can combat this by contacting credit agencies and asking them to freeze your credit report. You can take this temporary action until you order new credit cards and change the passwords on all your bank accounts. Even once you have new cards and passwords, you should still monitor your credit report for a while afterward to make sure no one is impersonating you. Protecting Yourself from Breaches is Possible Protection from credit card breaches can start when you get in the habit of checking your accounts every day. Doing so is like an early warning system so that you can detect any potentially fraudulent charges and contest them immediately. If you see any unauthorized transactions on your account, contact the credit card company and ask them to investigate. If their investigation doesnt satisfy you, you can reach out to the bank to which youve attached that card. You should also ask for a temporary freeze of your credit report if your name shows up as part of a larger company data breach. Sometimes, nothing will come of these breaches, but its best to order new credit cards and change your bank account login information, just in case. These actions can protect you from possible credit card breaches and minimize any damage if one occurs. Cloaked, a Boston, MA-based consumer-first privacy company, raised $25M in Series A funding. The round was led by Lux Capital and Human Capital. Bilal Zuberi, Partner at Lux Capital, will be joining the board. The company intends to use the funds to continue to improve its technology and exit beta, scale its team, and establish meaningful partnerships within the industry. Founded by two brothers, Arjun and Abhijay Bhatnagar, Cloaked is a consumer-first privacy company dedicated to enabling individuals to take control of their personal data in real time with unlimited, unique identities. Through Cloaked, individuals can choose when, where and with whom they share personal data from their browser extension or mobile device. Instead of sharing personal information like a phone number, email, or credit card with websites, the app and browser extension enables individuals to use unlimited, unique identities. Cloaked creates instant identifiers and smart settings to make it easy for individuals to choose what, when, where and with whom they share information. When browsing online or in-person, the system automatically generates unique email addresses, phone numbers, credit cards, passwords, and other account information. FinSMEs 29/03/2022 QunaSys, a Tokyo, Japan-based developer of algorithms in chemistry focused on accelerating the development of quantum technology applicability, raised $10M in Series B funding. The round was led by JIC Venture Growth Investments, with participation from ANRI, Fujitsu Ventures Fund, Global Brain, HPC Systems, JST SUCCESS Program, MUFJ Capital, Shinsei Corporate Investment Limited, and Zeon Corporation. The company intends to use the funds to accelerate the development of more usable quantum computing chemical software and expand current business overseas to open a European base. Led by Tennin Yan, CEO, QunaSys enables maximization of quantum computing through Qamuy, its cloud-accessible quantum computing development software solution, which runs on multiple platforms with applicability in all chemical-related industries. Since 2019, the company has grown its R&D and business development activities and achieved record business growth. In July 2020, QunaSys established QPARC, a Japanese consortium to study quantum computing applicability of quantum computers. Since then, more than 50 companies have participated in QPARC and the consortium has explored different quantum computing use cases, such as new energy analysis, molecular structure optimization, or sustainable material manufacturing, from ENEOS Holding and JSR Corporation. In conjunction with the funding, QunaSys has announced that it has come to an agreement with Zeon Corporation, Fujitsu Limited, and HPC Sytems Inc. for a capital tie-up and a business alliance. FinSMEs 29/03/2022 JAKARTA, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Two new bird species have been identified in the forest of the isolated Meratus mountains range at Indonesia's second-largest island of Kalimantan, the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) said on Tuesday. The BRIN recommends that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List classify both species as "vulnerable." A researcher from the BRIN's Biosystematics and Evolutionary Research Center, Mohammad Irham, said that one of them is Zosterops Meratusensis, with the local name Kacamata Meratus, in olive green with a yellowish pattern on the lower body. The other one is Cyornis Kadayangensis, or locally known as Sikatan Kadayang, in a blue upper body and a combination of brown, orange, and white on the bottom. Surrounded by lowland secondary forests that were degraded by land conversion for agriculture, the isolated Meratus mountains range forms a unique fauna community as seen in bird groups, Irham said. He emphasized the importance of conserving animals in the Meratus mountains range, which are threatened by extinction due to habitat changes and hunting activities by humans. ANKARA, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday he will meet with the negotiation teams of Ukraine and Russia on Tuesday before their next round of talks in Turkey's Istanbul city. "We will have a short meeting with the delegations tomorrow morning," Erdogan said at a press conference after a cabinet meeting. Turkey is "almost the only country that makes sincere efforts to resolve the ongoing crisis between Ukraine and Russia through dialogue," he said. Erdogan emphasized that his talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky are "progressing positively." He also suggested that some circles were trying to make Turkey a side of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. "One will not be able to prevent Turkey, which has fair and sincere stance, from becoming a bridge of peace, tranquility and trust in its region and the world," Erdogan said, without naming any party or country. "We know that those who work to make our country a side of the war in the Russia-Ukraine crisis are watching the bridge of peace we have built with a squeeze of heart," he added. In a phone call on Sunday, Erdogan and Putin agreed to hold the next round of Ukrainian and Russian talks in Istanbul. The delegations will hold the face-to-face negotiations on March 29-30, Vladimir Medinsky, head of Russia's negotiation team, said on Sunday. Since Feb. 28, Russia and Ukraine have held three rounds of face-to-face peace talks and then a series of online discussions but have failed to reach a major agreement. AT least 100 Zimbabweans are stranded in Oman after being trafficked to the Middle East country on false job promises, a top government official has said. Secretary for Home Affairs, Aaron Nhepera told a media briefing in Harare yesterday that 18 cases had been reported so far. This followed reports that several Zimbabwean women were trapped in the Middle East after going there in search of jobs as domestic workers under the Kafala visa sponsorship in Oman and other countries. Reports showed that the Kafala system of employment ties domestic workers to employers who facilitate their travel to Oman and ensure that they do not move to other jobs before the end of their contracts. The female domestic workers are also allegedly sexually abused and treated as slaves, while their passports are withheld to stop them from escaping. Our prosecution pillar which involves the police and the courts were handling 18 cases. But we do know that there could be more people that have not reported, but by way of estimation, we think we could be having as many as 100 people in Oman currently, Nhepera said. He said government was in the process of engaging the Oman government over the issue. He, however, could not disclose the exact date when the 18 victims, whose cases were reported, would be repatriated to Zimbabwe. We are just starting our engagement with the government of Oman. We are doing that through the Foreign Affairs ministry which happens to be part of our committee. The other resolution we have made is to dispatch an investigation committee to Oman as soon as possible so that they can talk to the 18 victims. As soon as we have engaged the Oman government to deliberate on these issues, we will start repatriating our people home. I cannot give you a date. It depends on the progress we make through the engagements. Nhepera said the 18 victims were still stranded at their workplaces despite reporting their ordeals. They are in their respective workplaces. What they have done is to communicate with their relatives here about their situation and through their relatives, we have come to know that there are such people who are there and need our assistance. Nhepera admitted that government was to blame for the trafficking of its citizens. The reason why our people are in this situation is because of poverty, not having good jobs and not being well settled in their housesothers are going there because they would have heard of good job opportunities without necessarily scrutinising these places. We urge Zimbabweans to scrutinise job offers from abroad so that they cannot fall victim to human trafficking. We also urge citizens to consult our law enforcement agents with regards to information about foreign countries that would have offered jobs to them, he said. Newsday Sweet Home is set to receive more than $30 million in federal funds to bring its aging wastewater treatment plant in line with federal law. The city's current system dates back to the 1940s, and the construction of a new wastewater treatment plant is slated to start soon. The city has been cited by Oregon Department of Environmental Quality a number of times over the years for violating the federal Clean Water Act. U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, whose district includes Sweet Home and Linn County, announced on Monday, March 28 that the city of Sweet Home will receive the $30.06 million to help the plant comply with the federal law. "Clean water is a basic, human right," DeFazio said in a statement. "I'm proud to help secure funding to enhance water infrastructure and better health in our community." Sweet Home was cited for various violations of the Clean Water Act on Oct. 13, 1998, based on a state Department of Human Services letter. The city received two administrative orders and multiple extensions to comply with the law, which it finally did on Dec. 2, 2009. Sweet Home was under orders to develop a plan to upsize and improve its wastewater treatment plant. A plan was drawn up in 2015, and the city has spent years finding a contractor and budgeting for the project. Built in the 1940s, the Sweet Home wastewater treatment plant has been upgraded several times in its history. It's needed dozens of renovations to better serve the city of 10,000 people and meet air quality regulations. In 2020, the Sweet Home City Council voted to stop outsourcing and bring overplant operations in-house to save taxpayers some $176,000 per year. The costs of the wastewater plant's major renovations totaled $28.2 million in 2019, millions of which would have come from state grants and city coffers. Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Corvallis Gazette-Times. According to Sweet Home Public Works Director Greg Springman, the plant has struggled with managing excess capacity during rainy seasons. He said the federal funds allow the city to avoid taking out a loan and burdening taxpayers. "It's not just about we're going to fix this. We're going to build this new plant that we've been designing for three years, and it's going be paid for, and the customers don't have to pay for" it, Springman said. Springman said the city plans on breaking ground as soon as late July or early August. Portland-based Murraysmith & Associates Inc. has the contract. The new money comes from the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Water State Revolving Fund program, a federal-state partnership offering low-cost financing to communities for water projects. Tim Gruver covers the city of Albany and Linn County. He can be contacted at 541-812-6114 or Tim.Gruver@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter via @T_TimeForce. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. TEACHERS Unions yesterday scoffed at President Emmerson Mnangagwas promise to reintroduce free basic education in public schools next year, describing it as vote-buying gimmick. Mnangagwa claimed in his weekly column in The Sunday Mail that his government would roll out the programme starting next year. Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (Artuz) president Obert Masaraure said State-funded education was already a constitutional mandate, which Mnangagwa was supposed to implement since 2018. The provision of State-funded education is a constitutional obligation on the shoulder of every government of the day. The politician in Mnangagwa should not appear to be doing anyone a favour by promising to move in that direction, his government should be ashamed for failing to adhere to the Education Act and section 75 of the Constitution. Zimbabwe Teachers Union (ZTU) chief executive officer Manuel Nyawo said: We raise the question of commitment which demands a practical and pragmatic approach to achieving these earmarked developments on the part of government. We also wonder how this is going to be achieved when government is failing to pay its workers reasonable salaries. Manuel Nyawo-general Tapedza Zhou said: The cost of providing free education will be largely felt by teachers and the rest of civil servants. The reality then is that in an attempt to provide free education, teachers will demand payment for extra lessons. It will be made more expensive as the burden will finally be shouldered again by parents, who had been promised free education. Political analyst Vivid Gwede said Mnangagwa was not selling the free education mantra for the first time, describing it as a hopeless gimmick. If allocation of resources to education was prioritised, free primary and secondary education would have been achieved as part of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), Gwede said. During the run-up to the 2018 general elections, Mnangagwa promised free education but failed to deliver. Another political analyst Effie Ncube said: Although free education is desirable and necessary, it is not sustainable under an economy that is in a vegetative state and bleeding under the weight of corruption and mismanagement. Therefore, for Zanu PF, which has been in power for 42 years, this is another electioneering gimmick. Newsday Welcome to my genealogy blog. Genea-Musings features genealogy research tips and techniques, genealogy news items and commentary, genealogy humor, San Diego genealogy society news, family history research and some family history stories from the keyboard of Randy Seaver (of Chula Vista CA), who thinks that Genealogy Research Is really FUN! Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2006-2021. New Delhi, March 28, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rising technological advancement in diagnostic devices, automation, rising companion animal population, coupled with the increasing trend of pet insurance, is the key factor anticipated to propel the demand of the veterinary infectious disease diagnostics market in the forecast period A recent study by the strategic consulting and market research firm; BlueWeave Consulting revealed that the Global Veterinary Infectious Disease Diagnostics Market was worth USD 1,552.8 million in 2021 and is projected to reach up to USD 2.636.8 million by the year 2028, growing at a CAGR of 8.7 % over the analysis period of 2022-2028. Rising technical advancement in diagnostic instruments, automation, rising companion animal population, and the increasing trend of pet insurance are expected to drive demand for the veterinary infectious disease diagnostics market during the forecast period. Furthermore, rising investment in animal healthcare, rising zoonotic disease incidence, and rising disposable income in emerging nations would drive the worldwide veterinary infectious disease diagnostics market. Increase in Incidence of Rabies Across Some Nations is driving the Global Veterinary Infectious Disease Diagnostics Market There is a growing incidence of people getting infected with rabies worldwide. The disease, which has been found to have a 100% mortality rate, is rising. Dogs and bats happen to be the main source of human-led rabies deaths and contribute to more than 99% of all transmissions that were carried forward to humans. According to the National Travel Health Network and Centre, By 2019, Over four imported rabies cases got reported across European travelers. In May 2019, Norway announced its confirmation for one rabies-related mortality, followed by an infection in the Philippines. In December 2019, over three fatalities associated with rabies were confirmed. Since rabies has been found to have an incubation period of 2-3 months, it spreads slowly but reduces the chances for that particular infected human to survive. As a result, these cases have spurred a growing demand for diagnosis and disease prevention across some nations, positively impacting the growth of the infectious disease diagnostics market. Request for Sample Report @ https://www.blueweaveconsulting.com/report/veterinary-infectious-disease-diagnostics-market/report-sample Higher costs across some middle- and low-income nations are hindering the growth of the Global Veterinary Infectious Disease Diagnostics Market Although the number of pet ownership has been on the rise, there is an equal if not a better upward trend in the costs associated with the veterinary treatment of domesticated animals. Some of the primary services offered by vets include clinical services (treatment-related to diseased animals and controlling production), preventive services (averting any disease outbreak), provision of drugs, vaccines, and other pharmaceuticals, and human health protection (comprising inspection of animal products). Such high costs with some amounting close to the annual per capita of some middle and low-income countries demonstrate the higher costs of veterinary service prices around the world, which have kept the diagnostic test and routine checkup of animals out of the picture for a long time, negatively contributing to the demand of veterinary infectious disease diagnostics, thereby hindering the growth of the market. Impact Of COVID-19 On The Global Veterinary Infectious Disease Diagnostics Market The advent of newer biotechnological techniques, including gene cloning, immunohistochemistry procedures, and immunogen overexpression assays, has demonstrated that it is becoming increasingly possible to generate specific spike proteins, which could revolutionize the present generation of immunoassays. The techniques could augment the sensitivity and specificity capabilities of assays by offering an improved antibody binding target and reducing volatility found across intra-kit incorporation. For instance, In April 2020, IDEXX Laboratories, Inc. announced that the company is making its IDEXX SARS-CoV-2 RealPCR Test available for pets. IDEXX stated that they were launching the test regarding the growing customer demand and evidence found across pets living with COVID-19 positive owners. The test was only made available for veterinarians across the North American region; however, it was made available to the rest of the world in the next few months. Please visit press release of Veterinary Infectious Disease Diagnostics Market: https://www.blueweaveconsulting.com/press-release/veterinary-infectious-disease-diagnostics-market-projected-to-reach-worth-usd-2-636-8-million-in-2028 Europe is Growing at a Significant Rate in The Global Veterinary Infectious Disease Diagnostics Market. In terms of regional analysis global veterinary infectious disease diagnostics market is classified into North America, Europe, The Asia Pacific, Latin America, The Middle East, and Africa. The growing number of Zoonoses in the region, rising awareness towards regular checkups of poultry and pets, and growing penetration of animal insurances has supported the growth of the veterinary infectious disease diagnostics market in the European region. Additionally, the support from the government to control the frequent outbreaks of veterinary infectious disease in the region has further supported the growth of the market. The advancements in the ELISE tests and PCR tests is expected to present growth opportunities during the forecast period. Competitive Landscape The Global Veterinary Infectious Disease Diagnostics Market is characterized by the presence of many local, regional, and global vendors. The market for veterinary infectious disease diagnostics is partially consolidated, with fierce competition among the leading players. The leading market players of the global veterinary infectious disease diagnostics market are Biomerieux S.A., Heska Corporation, IDEXX Laboratories, Inc., IDVet, Neogen Corporation, Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica, Inc., Dechra Pharmaceuticals PLC, Ceva Sante Animale, Bayer AG, Vetoquinol S.A, HESKA Corporation, Demeditec Diagnostics GmbH, and other prominent players. Dont miss the business opportunity of the Global Veterinary Infectious Disease Diagnostics Market. Consult our analysts to gain crucial insights and facilitate your business growth. The report's in-depth analysis provides information about growth potential, upcoming trends, and the Global Veterinary Infectious Disease Diagnostics Market statistics. It also highlights the factors driving forecasts of total market size. The report promises to provide recent technology trends in the Global Veterinary Infectious Disease Diagnostics Market, along with industry insights to help decision-makers make sound strategic decisions. Furthermore, the report also analyses the market's growth drivers, challenges, and competitive dynamics. Scope of Report: Attribute Details Years Considered Historical data 2018-2021 Base Year 2021 Forecast 2022 2028 Facts Covered Revenue in USD Million Market Coverage United States, Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, South Africa Product/Service Segmentation By Technology, By Animal Type, By End-Users, By Region Key Players The leading market players of the global veterinary infectious disease diagnostics market are Biomerieux S.A., Heska Corporation, IDEXX Laboratories, Inc., IDVet, Neogen Corporation, Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica, Inc., Dechra Pharmaceuticals PLC, Ceva Sante Animale, Bayer AG, Vetoquinol S.A, HESKA Corporation, Demeditec Diagnostics GmbH, and other prominent players. By Technology Immunodiagnostics Lateral Flow Assays ELISA Tests Other Immunodiagnostic Technologies Molecular Diagnostics Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) Tests Microarrays Other Molecular Diagnostic Tests Others By Animal Type Companion Animals Food Producing Animals By End-User Reference Laboratories Veterinary Hospitals and Clinics Point of Care / In House Testing Research Institutes and Universities By Region North America Europe Asia Pacific Latin America Middle East and Africa Please Find Below Some Related Report: Sustained Release Coatings Market, Opportunity and Forecast, 2018-2028 Oxygen Therapy Device Market, Opportunity and Forecast, 2018-2028 Oxygen Conserving Device Market, Opportunity and Forecast, 2018-2028 Pulse Oximeters Market, Opportunity and Forecast, 2017-2027 Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADC) Market, Opportunity and Forecast, 2017-2027 About Us Blue Weave Consulting provides all-inclusive Market Intelligence (MI) Solutions to businesses regarding various products and services online & offline. We offer comprehensive market research reports by analyzing qualitative and quantitative data to boost your business solution's performance. BWC has built its reputation from the scratches by delivering quality inputs and nourishing long-lasting relationships with its clients. We are a promising digital MI solutions company providing agile assistance to make your business endeavors successful. Contact Us: BlueWeave Consulting & Research Pvt. Ltd +1 866 658 6826 | +1 425 320 4776 | +44 1865 60 0662 info@blueweaveconsulting.com Mount Juliet, March 28, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mount Juliet, Tennessee - Nashville, TN based Real 3d Space is pleased to offer their community a comprehensive suite of photography services designed specifically for real estate projects. The company has utilized the advantages of modern technology and marketing techniques to create an all-inclusive solution for virtually every challenge the real estate industry could present. To anyone keeping up with the breakneck pace of the modern world, Real 3d Space states, it is obvious that marketing tools are fast becoming more accessible for businesses and members of the general public alike. However, realizing this is not the same as being able to identify which aspects are able to work synergistically and then putting in the work to create said solution. Fortunately for our clients, Real 3d Space has done just that. The result of the agencys work is that anyone involved in the real estate industry can boost their marketing efforts by using Real 3d Spaces solution and the company has taken several measures to ensure that adoption is an extremely painless process. Their goal was to make marketing as simple as possible without nullifying any of the tools capabilities, and they have largely succeeded at this goal. With Real 3d Spaces help, a real estate agent can successfully list and sell any property as well as improve their brand and grow their business all at a highly affordable price. To begin with, the agency deploys a professional real estate photographer (outfitted with the latest capture technology) to record the site in question. The data they collect will eventually be compiled into floor plans, listing presentations, 360 photos, print-ready flyers and more. Real 3d Space will also create a customized website that hosts all relevant information, such as a comprehensive online gallery. However, Real 3d Space points out that these options pale in comparison to their most popular products: Immersive 3d and Drone Video. As the company explains, Matterport 3d virtual tours are fast becoming a staple of the real estate industry thanks to their unparalleled ability to give buyers a virtual tour of the property without even having to visit in person. Since scheduling conflicts, travel expenses and even simple inconvenience may deter some buyers from giving a property the attention it deserves, these virtual tours can be used to host an open house around the clock and multiple viewings can be conducted simultaneously. Previously, the closest analog to this product was the video walkthrough, but this was often a limited affair that did not allow the customer to explore in such a dynamic fashion. The versatility of the virtual tour, it then follows, also serves to build excitement about the property, thereby increasing the odds of a successful sale. Similarly, drone video can give buyers an immediate overview of the property as a whole from a variety of vantage points, and there are few types of media as spell-binding as those taken by drone. The companys clients have already discovered how much easier it is to work with these tools, and they tend to appreciate the lengths the Real 3d Space team goes to provide assistance. James P. says in their Google review that the company is, Always helpful, punctual and professional. Real 3D Space is the best value around, the quality of work done and the minimal amount of time needed to produce the product is quite amazing. The price is perfect for new agents in the industry, and the process is streamlined for seasoned agents with multiple properties. Reviews generally praise how many services are attached to each package, giving clients across a range of budgets access to virtually every service they need to market themselves effectively. The company explains that each package was designed to suit a certain aspect of the market, and this effectively means that clients will always find they have everything they need for the property in question. Larger properties, for instance, require a great deal of work to document all their features and be made presentable, and Real 3d Space has taken the time to ensure clients will receive all the coverage they want with a correspondingly expansive package. https://youtu.be/PyMvhxstBRI Those interested in learning how real estate photography can be combined with digital marketing may direct their inquiries to Shane Atwell of Real 3d Space. Further details, along with samples of the products and tools on offer, can be found on the companys official website. ### For more information about Real 3d Space, contact the company here: Real 3d Space Shane Atwell (615) 355-1000 info@real3dspace.com 30 Burton Hills Blvd STE 400, Nashville, TN 37215 SOLDOTNA, Alaska, March 28, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On Wednesday, March 30 at 7:30 AM, Alaska Grand Jury Rights supporters will rally at the Kenai Courthouse to protest public officials attempting to stop Grand Juries from investigating evidence of systemic crime and corruption by public officials. Alaska's Constitution guarantees that Alaskan citizens can report such evidence to the Grand Jury and that the Grand Jury can investigate and write a report with recommendations on such evidence. The Kenai Peninsula Borough, City of Homer, and local community councils support this issue through unanimously approved Resolutions. See Resolutions and evidence here: https://alaskagrandjuryrights.com Alaska Constitution, Article 1, Section 8 The power of grand juries to investigate and make recommendations concerning the public welfare or safety shall never be suspended. AS 12.40.030 Duty of inquiry into crimes and general powers. The grand jury shall have the power to investigate and make recommendations concerning the public welfare or safety. AS 12.40.040 Juror to disclose knowledge of crime. If an individual grand juror knows or has reason to believe that a crime has been committed that is triable by the court, the juror shall disclose it to the other jurors, who shall investigate it. Alaska Constitutional Convention (1307-1409): The grand jury is preserved, for all purposes, particularly for investigation of public officials. The grand jury can be appealed to directly, which is an invaluable right to the citizen. Alaska Grand Jury Handbook, Page 16: Can a grand juror ask the grand jury to investigate a crime that the district attorney has not presented to them? Yes. The Alaska Statutes state: "If an individual grand juror knows or has reason to believe that a crime has been committed that is triable by the court, the juror shall disclose it to the other jurors, who shall investigate it." Alaska Grand Jury Handbook, Page 26: It will be up to the grand jury to decide whether to investigate. Evidence that public officials are violating the law and constitutional rights can be viewed at: https://alaskagrandjuryrights.com Demonstrate at the Kenai Courthouse on Wednesday, March 30 at 7:30 AM to demand that Grand Juries be allowed to see and lawfully act on evidence of felony crimes and corruption by public officials. Alaska Grand Jury Rights David Haeg 907-398-6403 cell/text haeg@alaska.net https://alaskagrandjuryrights.com Related Images Image 1 This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. Attachment Washington, D.C., March 28, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- President Joseph R. Biden released his FY 2023 budget request today, seeking to make good on his State of the Union promise to sufficiently fund historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). After studying the budget, UNCF (United Negro College Fund) announces its support, and on behalf of all our member-institution HBCUs we ask Congress to accept the HBCU investments wholly, making no reductions in their annual appropriations process this year. We made this request on the first day of the week-long series of meetings where HBCU leaders joined with the Bipartisan HBCU Caucus co-chaired by Rep. Alma Adams, UNCF and Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) officials to ask for Congress' support for their priorities via the HBCU STEAM Days of Action. "Once again, I note President Biden following up on his intentions," said Dr. Michael L. Lomax, president and CEO of UNCF. "For the second year in a row, the president's budget to Congress makes strong investments in HBCUs and the students that we serve. I call on every congressional leader who values education to take every single investment proposed by the president and make sure it is included in the final law. These investments are needed, and it is past time they should be signed into statute." "For the second year in a row, President Biden has asked that the Department of Education dedicated funding to HBCUs is well funded," said Lodriguez V. Murray, UNCF senior vice president for public policy and government affairs. "Earlier this month when Congress passed its FY 2022 appropriations bills, many HBCU and UNCF priorities were increased, but Congress did not meet President Biden's aspirational increases. We were on the path to finally receiving our long due and proper level of Education funding last year; and despite the congressional increase we did receive, we did not meet the mark in President Biden's budget for FY 2022. We are asking Congress to make no reductions but live up to the President's funding numbers this year. Our institutions deserve it, and so do our students. "UNCF supports the President's call to increase the Department of Education by 15%," Murray continued. "As part of that, the administration is calling for the HBCU funding which all 100-plus HBCUs share to be increased by $65 million to finally meet the authorized level of funding. This is UNCF's top priority. Additionally, the request for the Pell Grant to be increased by $2,000 in the upcoming year is nothing short of landmark. If Congress follows through on President Biden's UNCF supported request, it would be the largest single year increase to the Pell Grant, put us on course to double the Pell Grant this decade, and be one of the biggest game changers for low to moderate income students in our country in modern times." UNCF and their HBCU presidents met today with House Majority Whip James E. "Jim Clyburn as part of the STEAM Days of Action. This week other meetings will include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro and many more. The goal will be to ensure congressional leaders understand the needs of HBCUs from a funding perspective as well as how the chambers can better equip the institutions to respond to the bomb threats which have plagued them in 2022. ### About UNCF UNCF (United Negro College Fund) is the nations largest and most effective minority education organization. To serve youth, the community and the nation, UNCF supports students education and development through scholarships and other programs, supports and strengthens its 37 member colleges and universities, and advocates for the importance of minority education and college readiness. UNCF institutions and other historically Black colleges and universities are highly effective, awarding nearly 20% of African American baccalaureate degrees. UNCF administers more than 400 programs, including scholarship, internship and fellowship, mentoring, summer enrichment, and curriculum and faculty development programs. Today, UNCF supports more than 60,000 students at over 1,100 colleges and universities across the country. Its logo features the UNCF torch of leadership in education and its widely recognized trademark, A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Learn more at UNCF.org or for continuous updates and news, follow UNCF on Twitter at @UNCF. Washington, March 28, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In its FY23 budget proposal, President Biden and his administration have once again demonstrated their commitment to investing in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in an historic fashion. The Presidents FY23 recommended budget includes a record total $2,175 increase to the maximum Pell award, setting it on a path to meet the Presidents goal of doubling Pell by 2029; significant increases Title III funding to HBCUs, Predominantly Black Institutions (PBIs) and other Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), and includes $450 million for four-year HBCUs, PBIs and MSIs to expand research and development infrastructure at these institutions. Increasing research capacity and opportunity at our schools is of critical importance to the long-term sustainability and growth of our institutions, and to the overall research capacity of our nation as a whole. We are delighted that President Biden has recognized the importance of schools having an active role in this effort as was first demonstrated in the American Jobs Plan, then in the Build Back Better Act and now in the Presidents FY 23 recommended budget. TMCF looks forward to working with Congressional leadership, the Congressional Black Caucus and the Bipartisan HBCU Caucus to adopt these historic proposals for the betterment of our institutions and their students. English French QUEBEC CITY, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- LeddarTech, a global leader in providing the most flexible, robust and accurate ADAS and AD sensing technology, is pleased to announce its participation at Automotive Tech.AD Berlin at the Titanic Chaussee Hotel Berlin as an exhibitor and keynote speaker. April 4-5, 2022: LeddarTechs LeddarVision Demonstrator Space (live and virtual) Join the LeddarTech team for real-world demonstrations of LeddarVision. The only sensor fusion and perception software using raw data fusion that simplifies complex sensor sets eliminates the dependency on hardware and provides customers the flexibility to quickly scale solutions across vehicle models, delivering greater ADAS and AD performance. Meet the CTO of LeddarTech, Pierre Olivier, a pioneer in sensing with over 30 years of experience presenting at these events during the conference: Sunday, April 3, 2022, 19:45 23:00 CET: Icebreaker Session Topic: The Road to Full Automation - Progress and Challenges Monday, April 4, 2022, 10:00 10:30 CET: Presentation Topic: Sensing and Perception Technology Solutions That Solve Critical Sensing Challenges Learn about LeddarVision, a raw-data sensor fusion and perception platform that generates a comprehensive 3D RGBD environmental model with multi-sensor support for camera, radar and LiDAR configurations. This software-centric solution delivers superior perception performance exhibited through path planning, free space detection and enhanced object detection, tracking and classification. About Automotive Tech.AD Berlin Tech.AD Europe fuels you with new ideas, connections and inspiration. This event is directed at advanced engineers and automotive experts from OEMs, Tier 1s, automotive suppliers, solution providers and leading research institutes focusing on AI + machine learning, sensor and perception technologies, software architectures and AV platforms, testing and validation, commercial vehicles and early deployment, connectivity and 5G, infrastructures and smart cities, safety and security and more. Join over 500 of the most influential technical autonomous vehicle experts and executives in Berlin and online! Join LeddarTech either in person or digitally by registering today at https://www.autonomous-driving-berlin.com/ . About LeddarTech Founded in 2007, LeddarTech is a comprehensive end-to-end environmental sensing company that enables customers to solve critical sensing, fusion and perception challenges across the entire value chain. LeddarTech provides cost-effective perception solutions scalable from Level 2+ ADAS to Level 5 full autonomy with LeddarVision, a raw-data sensor fusion and perception platform that generates a comprehensive 3D environmental model from a variety of sensor types and configurations. LeddarTech also supports LiDAR manufacturers and Tier 1-2 automotive suppliers with key technology building blocks such as LeddarSteer digital beam steering and the LiDAR XLRator, a development solution for automotive-grade solid-state LiDARs based on the LeddarEngine and core components from global semiconductor partners. The company is responsible for several innovations in cutting-edge automotive and mobility remote-sensing applications, with over 100 patented technologies (granted or pending) enhancing ADAS and autonomous driving capabilities. Additional information about LeddarTech is accessible at www.leddartech.com and on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Contact: Daniel Aitken, Vice-President, Global Marketing, Communications and Investor Relations, LeddarTech Inc. Tel.: + 1-418-653-9000 ext. 232 daniel.aitken@leddartech.com Investor Relations contact : InvestorRelations@leddartech.com https://investors.leddartech.com/ Leddar, LeddarTech, LeddarSteer, LeddarEngine, LeddarVision, LeddarSP, LeddarCore, LeddarEcho, VAYADrive, VayaVision, XLRator and related logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of LeddarTech Inc. and its subsidiaries. All other brands, product names and marks are or may be trademarks or registered trademarks used to identify products or services of their respective owners. English French Solutions30, the European leader in solutions for new technologies, today announced LightSpeed Broadband, a full fibre internet service provider based in Lincolnshire, has selected the company for a second phase of ultra-fast roll out. The need to reduce the digital divide is greater than ever in the UK. LightSpeed are on a mission to bring ultra-fast 1 gigabit full fibre connectivity to homes and businesses throughout the East of England. Following an initial rollout of its full fibre network across 10 towns in South Lincolnshire and West Norfolk, this second phase aims to address a further 22 towns in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. In this context, LightSpeed has awarded Solutions30 UK a large part of its second phase deployment contract. . Having already partnered in phase one, this new contract is a recognition of the productivity and professionalism of the Solutions 30 UK Teams. Dave Axam, Chief Operating Officer, at LightSpeed Broadband stated: Our ambitious plans for 1 gigabit full fibre connectivity in the East of England means that finding trusted partners is vital. Having worked with Solutions30 in our first phase, we had seen their efficiency, quality and speed firsthand, and knew we wanted to expand our collaboration. Paul Garston, CEO of Solutions30 UK, applauded this new contract: Weve thoroughly enjoyed working in collaboration with LightSpeed, and are pleased that this new contract has come to fruition as a direct result of our performance and commitment. The UK is a high-potential market for Solutions 30 where we intend to play a key role in supporting our clients deploying fibre networks. About LightSpeed Broadband LightSpeed Broadband is based at Fulney Hall in Spalding, South Holland, Lincolnshire, creating 55 locally based jobs. Managed by a highly experienced team of broadband experts from across the telecoms industry, including BT and TalkTalk, LightSpeeds mission is to unlock the full digital potential of communities underserved by their existing broadband infrastructure. It plans to bring its fibre network to 200,000 homes and businesses across the East of England by 2022 expanding to reach 1 million homes by 2025 to become a leading provider in the market. LightSpeed Broadband is backed by 115 million investment with the opportunity to raise 300 million. Investors include AtmosClear Investments, Kompass Kapital, Sequoia and Thesaurium who focus on economic infrastructure debt and sustainable infrastructure projects. To find out more about LightSpeed Broadband, visit www.lightspeed.co.uk About Solutions 30 SE The Solutions 30 group is the European leader in solutions for new technologies. Its mission is to make the technological developments that are transforming our daily lives accessible to everyone, individuals and businesses alike. Yesterday, it was computers and the Internet. Today, its digital technology. Tomorrow, it will be technologies that make the world even more interconnected in real time. With more than 30 million call-outs carried out since it was founded and a network of more than 15,700 local technicians, Solutions 30 currently covers all of France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Iberian Peninsula, the United Kingdom, and Poland. The share capital of Solutions 30 SE consists of 107,127,984 shares, equal to the number of theoretical votes that can be exercised. Solutions 30 SE is listed on Euronext Paris (ISIN FR0013379484- code S30). Indexes: MSCI Europe Small Cap | Tech40 | CAC PME | SBF 120 | CAC Mid 60. Visit our website to learn more: www.solutions30.com Contact Individual Shareholders: Investor Relations - Tel: +33 1 86 86 00 63 | shareholders@solutions30.com Analysts/Investors: Nathalie Boumendil - Tel: +33 6 85 82 41 95 - nathalie.boumendil@solutions30.com Press - Image 7: Leslie Jung - Tel: +44 7818 641803 - ljung@image7.fr Charlotte Le Barbier - Tel: +33 6 78 37 27 60 - clebarbier@image7.fr Attachment NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES TORONTO, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Water Ways Technologies Inc. (TSXV: WWT) (FRA: WWT) ("Water Ways" or the "Company"), a global provider of Israeli-based agriculture technology, providing water irrigation solutions to agricultural producers, announces that the Companys Chinese subsidiary (in which the Company hold 73% interest), IRRI-AL TAL (Shanghai) Agriculture Technology Company Ltd. ("IAT Shanghai"), has received an order to install a 250,900 Square Meters (2,700,000 Square Feet) turnkey blueberries irrigation project in the People's Republic of China. IAT Shanghai is expected to deliver and install the project during Q3 of 2022. The total value of the project is approximately C$730,000. The order was received from a Chinese blueberries cultivator following the successful implementations of several blueberries irrigation projects in China and Mexico. The Company expects to recognize revenues from the project during Q2 and Q3 of 2022. Ohad Haber, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, commented: "We focus our business on high value crops given that the profits to the Company are higher especially in the growing worldwide blueberries business. We are developing a reputation for being a leader in delivering irrigation systems that are tailor-made for enhancing yield and crop quality for high value crops. This is our third project in China, and our fourth blueberries irrigation project". About Water Ways Technologies Inc. WWT through its subsidiaries, is a global provider of Israeli-based agriculture technology, providing water irrigation solutions to agricultural producers. WWT competes in the global irrigation water systems market with a focus on developing solutions with commercial applications in the micro and precision irrigation segments of the overall market. At present, WWTs main revenue streams are derived from the following business units: (i) Projects Business Unit; and (ii) Component and Equipment Sales Unit. WWT is capitalizing on the opportunities presented by micro and smart irrigation, while also making a positive mark on society by making these technologies more widely available, especially in developing markets such as Africa and Latin America and developed markets such as China and Canada. WWTs irrigation projects include vineyards, Cotton fields, Apple and Orange orchards, Blueberry, Medical Cannabis growers, fresh produce cooling rooms and more, in over fifteen countries. For more information, please contact Ronnie Jaegermann Dor Sneh Dr. Eva Reuter Director CFO Investor Relations - Germany T: +972-54-4202054 T: +972-54-6512500 +49 69 1532 5857 E: ronnie@waterwt.com E: dor@irri-altal.com E: e.reuter@dr-reuter.eu https://www.water-ways-technologies.com/ https://www.hg-wwt.com/ Twitter: @WaterWaysTechn1 Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this press release constitute "forward-looking information" as such term is defined in applicable Canadian securities legislation. The words "may", "would", "could", "should", "potential", "will", "seek", "intend", "plan", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect" and similar expressions as they relate to Water Ways Technologies Inc. (Water Ways). All statements other than statements of historical fact may be forward-looking information. Such statements reflect Water Ways' current views and intentions with respect to future events, and current information available to Water Ways, and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Material factors or assumptions were applied in providing forward-looking information. Many factors could cause the actual results, performance or achievements that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking information to vary from those described herein should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize. Should any factor affect Water Ways in an unexpected manner, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking information prove incorrect, the actual results or events may differ materially from the results or events predicted. Any such forward-looking information is expressly qualified in its entirety by this cautionary statement. Moreover, Water Ways does not assume responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such forward-looking information. The forward-looking information included in this press release is made as of the date of this press release and Water Ways undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking information, other than as required by applicable law. Water Ways' results and forward-looking information and calculations may be affected by fluctuations in exchange rates and its own share prices. All figures are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/6c3480ac-1709-4cfd-b588-c86426e5074a NEW YORK, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, sparks & honey, Omnicoms (NYSE:OMC) cultural intelligence consultancy, known for its global network of culture and trend experts, announced the newest members of its Advisory Board. Three new professionals have been added to the fold, Aspen Institutes Judy Samuelson, Gen-Z Historian Kahlil Greene, and youth culture expert Maarten Leyts. They join over 67 seasoned leaders including Indra Nooyi, former CEO and Chairman of PepsiCo, Dr. Brian Pierce, former Director Information Innovation Office of DARPA and Lynne Greene, former Group President of Estee Lauder across technology, organizational development, education, retail, government, media and more that form the consultancys now 70-person strong brain trust. The newest Board members introduced themselves at the companys special 10th Anniversary Culture Briefing last week titled, Cultivating a Cultural Brain Trust. The briefing discussed sparks & honeys unique Learning Organization model through the lens of the Advisory Board. Their expertise will guide sparks & honey work and perspective on emerging trends, especially as it relates to the companys two new consulting practices that have been rolled out this year tied to Youth Culture and Policy & Philanthropy. For example, they will help brands understand how Gen Z shape the futures consumer and political landscapes. We curate our Board of Advisors very deliberately for depth and breadth of experience, commercial acumen and a range of diversity factors and we are so thrilled that these three exceptional thought leaders will add tremendous range to our new practices, says Annalie Killian, sparks & honeys Vice President of Strategic Partnerships. Judy Samuelson is the founder and executive director of the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program and a vice president at the Aspen Institute. Signature programs under Samuelsons leadership include a ten-year campaign to disrupt Milton Friedmans narrative about corporate purpose, a multi-year dialogue to produce the Aspen Principles of Long-Term Value Creation, and a partnership with Korn Ferry to rethink executive pay. "I couldn't be more excited to join sparks & honey's advisory board at this critical juncture. I've long admired sparks & honey for having a finger on the pulse of trends in business and society, and that's especially been the case during the extraordinary disruptions of the pandemic. Samuelson continues, "There's so much important work to be done on addressing the inequities laid bare by recent years, and I'm thrilled to roll up my sleeves and get to work with sparks & honey." Kahlil Greene, also known as the Gen-Z Historian, is a New York Times recognized digital educator with over 500,000 followers and 15mm views across his TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles. One week after his 19th birthday, he was elected the first Black student body president in Yale's 318-year history. Working as an independent consultant, Greene uses his unique leadership experiences and Gen-Z perspective to provide a youthful, forward-looking, and much-needed intervention to antiquated workplace strategies, with a focus on what young employees need to succeed. Greene says, "sparks & honey is at the forefront of uncovering and analyzing culture that drives trends across industries. As a young person investigating culture and how it shapes society, I'm excited to both advise on and learn from their wealth of data." Maarten Leyts is a pioneer in studying youth culture, creators, and emergent trends. With Trendwolves, the company he founded in 2006, he has been translating insights around youth trends and young families into products, strategies and value for European brands - from banking to the cultural investments of the European Union. The immense strength of an organization such as sparks & honey lies in its unconditional eagerness to continuously reinvent itself and thereby be miles ahead as a strategic intelligence partner. Collaborating with incredible knowledge experts from very different sectors is an enormous added value for any company, brand or government. Leyts continues, I am particularly happy to add my nearly 20 years of knowledge of youth culture, marketing and communication and am confident that together with the experienced and driven sparks & honey group, we can tackle the most complex challenges. These new collaborators will help sparks & honey answer the questions that are on the minds of every executive right now. How should my company show up? Are we relevant to young consumers? How do we function in a more equitable fashion? This work will be reflected sin new practice areas, intelligence reports, client work, culture briefings and more. For more information on sparks & honey, its Advisory Board and work, visit: https://www.sparksandhoney.com/. About sparks & honey sparks & honey is a cultural intelligence consultancy helping organizations understand explosive and immediate cultural shifts, as well as cultural movements that develop over time. They leverage their custom SaaS platform, called Q, in combination with a powerful human network to quantify culture, decode the future, and ignite transformation for brands and their consumers. Produced in conjunction with the World Economic Forum, sparks & honeys recent intelligence report, Precision Consumer 2030, was presented from the stage at Davos in 2020. sparks & honey is a part of the Omnicom Precision Marketing Group. About Omnicom Group Inc.: Omnicom Group (omnicomgroup.com) is a leading global marketing and corporate communications company. Omnicom's branded networks and numerous specialty firms provide advertising, strategic media planning and buying, digital and interactive marketing, direct and promotional marketing, public relations and other specialty communications services to over 5,000 clients in more than 70 countries. Follow us on Twitter for the latest news. Media Contact: Courtney Sims DiGennaro Communications courtney.sims@digennaro-usa.com Photos accompanying this announcement are available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/dd9b3eab-3fea-4c3d-a66f-5db512e51ce2 https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/cdbb04f4-ce58-4d05-991d-8e60f56617b1 https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/a05b7728-6f4d-49ed-b878-1a07109008f3 Dallas, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The national corporate defense law firm Oberheiden P.C. is expanding to include crisis management to its suite of legal services. The addition fills an important need for corporate clients who are facing potential legal action. By providing crisis management services, the crisis management lawyers at Oberheiden P.C. can help their clients in the immediate aftermath of a crisis. Whether a top executive is being accused of wrongdoing, an investigation into the company has been announced, or a business investment has publicly gone sour, crisis management attorneys from Oberheiden P.C. can be on the ground to deal with the fallout from the news within 24 hours. As Dr. Nick Oberheiden, the law firms founding partner, explains, When there is a potential crisis or a crisis occurs, companies need to respond quickly. Since these situations can happen suddenly or without warning, it is generally best to get outside crisis management attorneys on call sooner rather than later. Having a team of experienced lawyers on hand in the moments after a crisis occurs not only helps to mitigate the short-term damage of the situation; it also puts the business in a better position to control the long-term effects, as well. This is especially important when the story will likely get picked up by local or national media. After years representing clients facing federal investigations, expanding the firm to include crisis management services was an easy one to make for Oberheiden P.C.: It had already been providing them for clients accused of wrongdoing or fraud. These allegations were a crisis of their own, and part of Oberheiden P.C.s defense strategy included managing and mitigating the fallout from the investigation. In many cases, this has included public relations work revolving around the media coverage of the event. The crisis management lawyers at Oberheiden P.C. have been able to ensure that the coverage is fair and that the target of the scrutiny has had the opportunity to present its side of the story. In some cases, Oberheiden P.C. has been able to persuade major media outlets not to cover the story at all. Oberheiden P.C.s status as a national law firm helps to bring these crisis management services to the client immediately. The firms national footprint means that attorneys from a local law office can be on site within 24 hours in many cases. These are the most crucial hours in the crisis, and Oberheiden P.C. can be there for them. For more information about Oberheiden P.C.s expansion to become a crisis management law firm, in addition to a defense firm for corporations and white collar defendants, call them at 888-680-1745. https://thenewsfront.com/leading-corporate-defense-firm-will-now-provide-crisis-management-services/ ORLANDO, Fla., March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- For years, Shay Rowbottom has helped her legions of followers on LinkedIn and Instagram learn the broad strokes and finer points of digital marketing. Dom Leroux, founder of Venice, Florida's Lucky Penny Candles, credits his success in part to Shay's insights, and sponsoring her Orlando appearance was a natural way to express his gratitudeand to show Shay how far he's run with her words of wisdom. The event highlighted Lucky Penny's recently launched line of corporate gifts. To mark the occasion, Dom designed a custom candle and a special scent to match. Attendees received a free #shayshine candle as a memento of their experience, and as a way to remember what they learned at the event every time they turned down the lights and warmed up a room with the soft glow of a natural, eco-friendly Lucky Penny candle. "Corporate gifts reinforce people's opinion of your company one way or another," notes Dom. "If they are cheap and cliched, that's what people will remember about you. If they're well crafted and thoughtfully customized, though, they make recipients proud to be associated with your brand. That's what we set out to do with our corporate line, and that's why Shay's event was the perfect time to launch it to the world." When Dom learned that Shay was scheduled to appear in Orlando, he immediately reached out to her event-marketing agency, Foureva Media. Their conversation quickly blossomed into a full-fledged sponsorship, and Dom got a direct impression of how Shay's insights translated into business practice. "Jamar Jones, who owns Foureva Media, and Randy Wilinski, the project manager we worked with, are absolutely amazing. The entire team at Foureva was completely dedicated to making this event a success, and it felt great to sponsor a team that's as hard-working and focused as we are here at Lucky Penny Candles." The sponsorship included more than 100 candles customized with Shay's logo and brand color scheme. The candles were a major hit, and compliments poured in from attendees, along with Shay, Jamar, and their team. Lucky Penny is already keeping an eye out for future sponsorship opportunities. In the meantime, Lucky Penny's corporate-gifts division is off to a flying start, thanks in part to the exposure made possible by Shay's Orlando appearance. For a video overview of Lucky Penny's participation at the event, please visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJM_u3pGh6s. To learn more about Lucky Penny Candles, please visit luckypennycandles.com. For press-related inquiries, please email the shop at hello@luckypennycandles.com. ### Lucky Penny Candles Lucky Penny Candles crafts unique, personalized, eco-friendly candles in the United States and distributes them through its online store. Shay Rowbottom Shay Rowbottom is a LinkedIn influencer and digital marketing entrepreneur, specializing in creating social media video content to attract attention and bring more eyeballs to businesses. To learn more Shay Rowbottom visit: https://www.shayrowbottom.com Foureva Media Foureva Media has divisions that specialize in different areas in our agency including sales and marketing, video production, and speaker agency. Our team is results and we make all our decisions to drive revenue and brand awareness. To learn more about Foureva Media visit: https://www.fourevamedia.com Related Images Image 1: Lucky Penny Candles is proud to celebrate its sponsorship of Shay Rowbottom's recent 2's Day event From left to right: Shay Rowbottom, Jonathan Palmar, Dom LeRoux, Jamar Jones This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. Attachment London, United Kingdom, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NewMediaWire -- Argentum 47, Inc. ( www.arg47.com ) (OTC: ARGQ) is extremely delighted to announce that management have fully executed a legally binding letter of intent to acquire UK based company, The Data Source (UK) Limited (TDS). Management has been in negotiations with several parties since late 2021 in order to bring value and a long-term future to the Company and its shareholders by way of a merger or acquisition. The basis of the proposed transaction is for Argentum 47 Inc. to acquire 100% of The Data Source (UK) Limited ( https://www.thedatasource.co.uk/ ) by way of management relinquishing their personal right, title and interest in (i) 40,000,000 shares of Argentums issued and outstanding Series B Preferred Stock, (ii) 4,378,888 shares of Argentums issued and outstanding Series C Preferred Stock and (iii) 21,500,000 shares of Argentums issued and outstanding Common Stock, which shares of Series B and C Preferred Stock and Common Stock constitute precisely 51% of the voting stock of Argentum on fully diluted and converted basis (Control Block). Additional shares of Argentum 47, Inc. Common Stock will be issued to the TDS shareholders post-closing. TDS is a data driven B2B and B2C solutions provider utilizing artificial intelligence with lead generation, automation, and analytics. TDS provides its clients with world class data with the aim of becoming a one-stop-shop for all things data. Reuters, Vodafone, Revolut, Honda and American Express are just a few of the companies they have worked with. The next stage of development for TDS is within North America, where they are already making inroads into the real estate and capital markets sectors, offering services including business intelligence and research, demographic, market data and public data. TDS is also examining several complimentary acquisitions in Europe and in the United States and sees the potential acquisitions as a defined path for the combined companies in the years to come; hence, TDS is poised to increase its organic revenue substantially in the coming 12 months. Management of Argentum 47, Inc. expects to close the acquisition of The Data Source (UK) Limited in April 2022. Mr. Peter Smith, sole Director of Argentum 47, Inc., said: This has been a long road for us at Argentum and I know it has been a long road for many of our shareholders too. This agreement with TDS is a major milestone for the Company and all of its shareholders, as the agreement sees TDS become the controlling element of the Company with a new and exciting direction. TDS has many blue chip clients and a phenomenal amount of activity within the artificial intelligence sector. They are a well managed company with a seasoned board of high profile people. We have been very impressed with TDS from the outset and look forward to supporting them through this exciting transaction. About Argentum 47, Inc. and Subsidiaries. Argentum 47, Inc. (Argentum) is a full service Financial Intermediary, Corporate Consultancy, Retail and Corporate Financial Services Company. Through its wholly-owned foreign subsidiaries, it advises both business and retail customers with their most critical decisions and opportunities pertaining to growth, capital needs, structure and the development of their financial plans. With offices in the United Kingdom, Argentum has developed significant relationships in the U.S., U.K., Central Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia to assist clients in realizing their full value and potential. Bringing business to external capital and resources, and retail customers to a suite of secure effective financial solutions. Furthermore, as Argentum has offices in key financial centers of the world, they are able to introduce their clients to the right financial partner without geographical constraints. Safe Harbor Statement This press release may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements related to anticipated revenues, expenses, earnings, operating cash flows, the outlook for markets and the demand for products. Forward-looking statements are no guarantees of future performance and are inherently subject to uncertainties and other factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. Such statements are based upon, among other things, assumptions made by, and information currently available to, management, including managements own knowledge and assessment of the Companys industry and competition. The Company refers interested persons to its most recent Annual Disclosure and other disclosure documents uploaded to OTC Markets for a description of additional uncertainties and factors, which may affect forward-looking statements. The Company assumes no duty to update its forward-looking statements. Contact details: Mr. Peter Smith Sole Director of Argentum 47, Inc. Tel. + (44) 1482 289 591 Email: peter@arg47.com Washington, DC, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- This Wednesday at 12:00 EDT, EMET is hosting Gabriel Noronha to speak. Noronha previously served on the Iran desk at the State Department and maintains contacts there and in the National Security Council and European Union who are directly involved in the negotiations. His colleagues were so appalled at the concessions the US gave Iran that they asked him to leak details, about which his Twitter thread can be found here. During the webinar, he will go over what we know so far and what this new agreement would look like. Register for the event here. Bipartisan opposition to returning to the nuclear deal is growing. It is clear that this new deal is shorter and weaker, giving huge concessions to Iran. Recently, a bi-partisan letter from House members highlighted these concerns. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has also been extremely vocal, giving an hour-long presentation in the Senate in February regarding the threat of an Iranian nuclear program and urging the administration not to allow Iran to force us into a deal. In Menendezs own words: Our goal must be the right deal, not just any deal. 49 Republican senators signed a letter expressing their disapproval of the new deal and reiterating that this new deal was far weaker, did not solve the Iranian nuclear problem, and would perpetuate their violent activity in the region. A similar letter in the house led by Rep. Gallagher (R-Wisc.) gathered around 200 signatures. Here is some background information: This is a recent interview with Russias lead negotiator in the Vienna talks, who also served as the water carrier between the US and Iran. LIMERICK, Pa., March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Victory Bank is proud to announce the promotion of Shelly Stockmal to Senior Vice President. Stockmal has over 30 years in the banking industry with 21 years in consumer and commercial lending and nine years in Human Resources. She has been an essential part of Victory Banks team from the very beginning, joining the Bank in 2008 and moving to the Banks leadership team in 2013. Through those years, Shelly demonstrated her commitment to our clients, employees, and the community. She has consistently and admirably represented Victory Bank in every facet of her responsibilities. Shelly recently managed the challenges of keeping the Bank open and keeping our clients and team members safe from COVID. She has worked long hours, made countless decisions, large and small, and adapted to changing conditions in doing her various jobs, stated Joseph W. Major, Bank Leader and CEO of The Victory Bank. In January 2020, Stockmal completed the SHRM-SCP (Society for Human Resource Management Senior Certified Professional) Certification and completed the Certified Professional Certification in July of 2019. Stockmals many duties include managing retail banking delivery, leading all HR functions, including hiring and training, serving as a critical community liaison, and analyzing a broad list of performance metrics. She also serves as Treasurer to the Board of the Greater Pottstown Society for Human Resources Management (GPSHRM), which holds monthly meetings focused on educating local professionals involved in Human Resources. GPSHRM recently won the prestigious EXCEL Platinum Award for its accomplishments in 2020. She also serves as Vice-Chair of the Board of the Bankers Health Care Consortium of PA, which provides unique health care funding for banks and affiliate members. Stockmal has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to her community, including over fifteen years of service as a Girl Scout Leader. She was honored as the Volunteer of the year in 2016 by the Manatawny Service Unit. The Victory Bank is a locally owned and operated commercial bank headquartered in Limerick, Pennsylvania. The Bank was founded to optimize the financial lives of businesses, professionals, government/public entities, and consumers. For more information, call 610-948-9000 or visit VictoryBank.com. Member FDIC. About SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management, creates better workplaces where employers and employees thrive together. As the voice of all things work, workers, and the workplace, SHRM is the foremost expert, convener, and thought leader on issues impacting todays evolving workplaces. With 300,000+ HR and business executive members in 165 countries, SHRM impacts the lives of more than 115 million workers and families globally. Learn more at SHRM.org and on Twitter @SHRM. Media Contact: Kelly Taylor Executive Assistant Investor Relations 610-948-9000 ktaylor@victorybank.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9ffb9f08-a9fa-45c6-8309-f2569c7cd836 Dublin, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Europe Online Payment Fraud and Security 2022" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. Fraudulent digital banking transactions in many different forms are more frequent across Europe As online payment transactions become more numerous, so do the forms of potential fraudulent activities. B2C E-Commerce losses due to online payment fraud were expected to increase by over 10% worldwide in 2021. Card fraud in E-Commerce comprises more than two-thirds of all card fraud in the UK, and many institutions are implementing increased online security precautions to address consumer concerns. For example, payment habits in the UK and Germany have been influenced by this need for more security and its lack of security discourages many Spanish shoppers from making purchases on social networks. Online-payment-related fraud on the rise Losses incurred from online payment fraud are on the rise worldwide and are projected to have more than doubled in the five-year span between 2018 and 2023. In the European region, and most prominently in the UK, consumers are altering their payment habits post-COVID-19 in search of greater security. In Germany, two out of every three E-Commerce companies have identified a noticeable rise in fraudulent activities. Over 85% of online retailers in Switzerland reported having been victims of fraud. Countries Covered: Austria France Germany Italy Spain Switzerland United Kingdom Key Topics Covered: 1. Management Summary 2. Global Developments Overview of Online Payment Fraud Trends, February 2022 Overview and Updates of Payment Authentication Solutions, February 2022 Breakdown of Digital Banking Fraudulent Transactions, by Channel, incl. Mobile App, in %, Q3 2019 - Q2 2021 Value of B2C E-Commerce Losses to Online Payment Fraud, in USD billion, 2020 & 2021e Value of Consumer Losses To Fraudulent Robocalls, in USD billion, 2021e & 2022f Top Important Factors in Consumers' Online Experience, in % of Consumers, September 2021 Number of Users Making Online Payment With Facial Recognition, in billions, 2020 & 2025f Number of Users Who Will Be Confirming Transactions With Voice Recognition, in millions, 2020 & 2025f Attitudes Towards Interaction With Business Online, incl. Purchasing, in % of Adult Consumers, January 2021 3. Regional Reasons for Changed Payment Habits During COVID-19, in % of Consumers, by Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy and the UK, April 2021 Share of Online Retailers Who Experienced Fraud/Attempted Fraud in the Past 12 Months, in %, March 2021 4. UK E-Commerce Fraud Loss on UK-Issued Cards, in GBP million, and Share of Total Card Fraud, in %, 2015 - 2020 Value of Fraud Losses Committed on a UK-Issued Credit, Debit or Charge Card, by UK and International Location, in GBP million, H1 2018 - H1 2021 Top Reasons For Changes in Payment Method Habits Changes Amid COVID-19, in % of Consumers, April 2021 Share of Adult Consumers Who Use More Security Steps While Online, in %, January 2021 5. Germany Share of E-Commerce Companies Who Stated that Fraud Had Risen Sharply/Very Sharply, in %, March 2021 Share of E-Commerce Companies Who Stated That Fraud Had Risen Due To COVID-19, in %, March 2021 Top Reasons For Payment Method Habits Changes Amid COVID-19, in % of Consumers, April 2021 6. France Most Trusted Payment Methods, by Degree of Confidence, in % of Adults, October 2021 Fraud Risks in Payment Methods, by Type, and by Importance Degree, in % of Adults, October 2021 Top Situations of Being a Victim of Fraud, by Degree of Fear, in % of Adults, October 2021 7. Spain Breakdown of Reasons for Never Purchasing on a Social Network, in % of Online Shoppers, 2020 & 2021 8. Italy Top Reasons For Payment Method Habits Changes Amid COVID-19, in % of Consumers, April 2021 9. Austria Share of Respondents Who Have Been Victims of Internet Fraud, in %, November 2020 Top Internet Fraud Types Experienced, in % of Respondents, November 2020 Top Important Factors When Shopping Online, in % of Respondents, September 2021 Top Reasons For Payment Method Habits Changes Amid COVID-19 Pandemic, in % of Consumers, April 2021 10. Switzerland Share of Online Retailers Who Have Been Affected by Fraud, in %, 2021 Companies Mentioned American Express Discover Financial Services JCB Mastercard Inc UnionPay Visa Inc For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/flvmrm TORONTO, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dickeys Barbecue Restaurants, Inc. CEO Laura Rea Dickey announced today that the worlds largest barbecue concept has signed a franchise agreement with operators Anand Desai and Sharmistha Ghosh to bring the brands Legit. Texas. Barbecue. to Toronto! With this addition, Dickeys Barbecue continues to move Texas-style BBQ into the international cuisine category. This announcement comes on the heels of Dickeys recent agreement to open its first Canada location in Alberta. Torontos first Dickeys is slated to open this summer, bringing Texas-style BBQ further across the northern border. Anand Desai, a 15-year veteran in the governance, risk and control space, was driven towards the restaurant business by his passion to serve the members of his local community. Anand is joined by his partner, Sharmistha Ghosh, who brings a plethora of experience managing and running a successful restaurant in Toronto. Currently, Sharmistha works for a local brand in the city, where she is responsible for day-to-day operations and serves as a franchise coordinator. The duo credits their decision to partner with Dickeys to the tremendous support system offered during the initial phases of franchise operations along with the brands proven success with international franchising. Were excited to partner with Anand and Sharmistha to help grow our presence in Canada, Laura Rea Dickey said. Toronto has an amazing dining scene, but it lacks a true, authentic barbecue experience, which we cant wait to provide. Its always exciting to debut our Legit. Texas. Barbecue. in a new community, but its particularly exciting when our brand crosses borders. We look forward to introducing our tastes of Texas to Toronto and more Canadians across the country. To learn more about Dickeys, follow Dickeys Barbecue Pit on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Download the Dickeys Barbecue Pit app from the Apple App Store or Google Play. About Dickeys Barbecue Restaurants, Inc. Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants, Inc., the worlds largest barbecue concept, was founded in 1941 by the Dickey family. For the past 80 years, Dickeys Barbecue Pit has served millions of guests in 44 states Legit. Texas. Barbecue. At Dickeys, all our barbecued meats are smoked onsite in a hickory wood burning pit. Dickeys proudly believes theres no shortcut to true barbecue and its why our name isnt BBQ. The Dallas-based, family-run barbecue franchise offers eight slow-smoked meats and 12 wholesome sides with 'No B.S. (Bad Stuff)' included. Dickeys Barbecue has 550 locations across the United States and eight other countries. Dickeys was named to Newsweeks 2022 Americas Favorite Restaurant Chains list and USA Today 2021 readers choice awards. Dickeys won first place on Fast Casuals Top 100 Movers and Shakers list, been named a Top 500 Franchise by Entrepreneur and named to Hospitality Technologys Industry Heroes list. Led by CEO Laura Rea Dickey, who was named among the countrys 50 most influential women in foodservice in Nations Restaurant News, was recognized by Fast Casuals Top 100 Movers and Shakers list and honored by Dallas Business Journal. Dickey's Barbecue Pit has also been recognized by Fox News, Forbes Magazine, Franchise Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine and QSR Magazine. Dickeys Barbecue is part of Dickeys Restaurant Brands which has more than 700 restaurants nationwide including brands Wing Boss, Trailer Birds, Big Deal Burger and bbqathome.com. DRB is led by CEO Roland Dickey Jr. For more information, visit www.dickeys.com. # # # Attachment Chicago, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to Ariztons latest research report, incorporation of big data across Europe events and exhibitions market is gaining high traction. Big players in the market are establishing their businesses by using big data as their core asset. For instance, Cvent, one of the leaders in meetings, events, and travel technology, has launched a free tool called Group Business Trends to provide a customizable, in-depth report by benchmarking the performance of business with qualifying competitors using their big data. Europe Events and Exhibitions Market Report Scope Report Attributes Details Market Size (Revenue) $10 Billion (2027) Market Size (Unit Shipment) 296 Million Sq. Ft (2027) CAGR (2022-2027) 3% Base Year (2021-2027) 2021 Forecast Year 2022-2027 Market Segments Exhibition Type, Revenue Stream, Industry Type, and Country Geographical Analysis Europe Countries Covered Germany, France, UK, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Russia, Sweden, and Netherlands Click Here to Download the Free Sample Report Rising Demand for Digital Marketplace During COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibitions and events industry paused globally. In 2020 and 2021, exhibition companies in the European region canceled numerous in-person events and alternatively explored digital platforms. Around 69% of exhibition organizations in Spain and 56% in UK upgraded their existing exhibition to digital platforms. Businesses in Europe are anticipating that events would integrate more digital fundamentals in the coming years to meet consumer and industry requirements. It is an opportunity for the enterprises and trade promotion organizations to leap forward the method of offline entity promotion and expand the market with new intellectual and new means. Emerging Trend of Big Data Exhibition organizers are looking for big data to provide valuable business intelligence to help them stay ahead in the competition by delivering better logistics planning, increasing sponsorships and exhibition participation. Several event and exhibition organizations are increasing efficiency and reducing the cost of acquiring information by using big data. Exhibitors can identify various mediums that are best suited for reaching their target audience. It even allows them to check advertisements that have worked for them in the past, thereby increasing their return on investment. Analytics is increasingly being used to improve revenues and attendance at exhibitions, and this has given rise to companies such as SmartXpo, which offer solutions to provide actionable insights. Reed Exhibitions is one of the worlds leading trade show companies, which uses big data analytics to identify the unique needs of exhibitors and find innovative ways of enhancing customer experience and retention. Success Of Covid-19 Vaccination Programs Within the admittance to COVID-19 tools accelerator (ACT Accelerator), WHO partners, together with vaccine manufacturers, formed the COVAX facility, focusing on quickening reasonable access to COVID-19 vaccines. Due to high success rate of vaccination campaign in Europe, the region has announced new measures to lessen and streamline COVID restrictions. Events and exhibitions in Barcelona have revitalized with a boom after the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Swedish Exhibition & Congress Center and Gothia Towers, the countrys largest trade fair organizer has taken a certification procedure to protect the superiority of their infection control procedures for COVID-19. The ease in COVID-19 restrictions and the increasing number of vaccination doses administered are anticipated to accelerate the exhibitions and events market during the forecast period. Fairs have been a very important part of European trade B2B exhibition has developed from a long historical tradition, which mainly influenced the economic rise of modern Europe and the increase of trade between Europe and the East. Companies are widely using B2B fairs for marketing their products and services around the world. Which in turn, has helped them to expand their business domestically and internationally. Governments in open economies are encouraging trade between countries, and this is the best platform to showcase what they have for other countries. Moreover, companies can establish strong networks, which can help them in the future. The B2B exhibitions & events market in Europe is expected to reach $5 billion by 2027. Competitive Analysis In recent years, the economic situation in exhibition market in Europe is intensified. Rapid competitive development and new entrants are adversely affecting the competitiveness of the existing vendors. The current scenario is pushing vendors to adapt and improve their unique value propositions and deliver competitive contracts to their customers to maintain a strong market presence. Large vendors are actively fighting for the leading position in the market, with sporadic competitive spurts coming from other local vendors. Arizton believes global players will inorganically develop in the future by acquiring national or local players. Also, rivalry among enterprises is anticipated to intensify in the future. These players will compete on various factors such as size, quality of service, availability of capacity, and brand. Click Here to Download the Free Sample Report Read some of the top-selling reports: About Arizton: Arizton Advisory and Intelligence is an innovation and quality-driven firm, which offers cutting-edge research solutions to clients across the world. We excel in providing comprehensive market intelligence reports and advisory and consulting services. We offer comprehensive market research reports on industries such as consumer goods & retail technology, automotive and mobility, smart tech, healthcare, and life sciences, industrial machinery, chemicals and materials, IT and media, logistics and packaging. These reports contain detailed industry analysis, market size, share, growth drivers, and trend forecasts. Arizton comprises a team of exuberant and well-experienced analysts who have mastered in generating incisive reports. Our specialist analysts possess exemplary skills in market research. We train our team in advanced research practices, techniques, and ethics to outperform in fabricating impregnable research reports. Click Here to Contact Us Call: +1-312-235-2040 +1 302 469 0707 Jerome, Idaho, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Idaho Milk Products will present Episode 5 in their Formulating with Milk Proteins webinar series on High Protein Yogurts: Principles, Challenges & Options. In this upcoming free webinar, attendees will delve into the importance of taste, texture and how to use the different components of milk to maximize consumer preference. They will gain knowledge on how to choose the best proteins for their products, and what equipment and expertise are available to help formulate set, stirred and drinkable yogurts. Guest speakers will be Hari Meletharayil, PhD., Vice President of Product Research at Dairy Management, Inc., Florian Middelhuis, MBA, Vice President of Sales & Marketing and Pratishtha Verma, Research and Development Scientist at Idaho Milk Products. Hari Meletharayil leads product research programs in cheese, fermented products and dairy beverages. Hari coordinates activities across different innovation labs as part of the nationally coordinated network of technical centers to drive dairy innovation. Florian Middelhuis joined the Idaho Milk Products team in 2020 as Vice President of Sales & Marketing. Florian came to Idaho Milk Products from Meggle in Germany, as Business Unit Manager for their Dairy Ingredients group. Previously he was working with Friesland Campina, where he was based in Singapore as Regional Sales Manager for the Asia Pacific market. Florian received his bachelor's degree in Marketing and International Trade from Hogeschool Enschede and an MBA from the University of Liverpool. Pratishtha Verma joined Idaho Milk Products in 2020 as Research & Development Scientist. She is working on ingredient applications aimed at increasing the protein load as well as developing new application areas for milk ingredients. Pratishtha completed her MS in Dairy Manufacturing at South Dakota State University. This fifth webinar will be cast on April 14, 2022, and be hosted by Global Food Forums, Inc. Those wishing to register can contact our team at marketing@idahomilk.us. ### About Idaho Milk Products Idaho Milk Products is a privately held, vertically integrated international milk processing leader, supplying Milk Protein Isolate (MPI), Milk Protein Concentrate (MPC), Milk Permeate, and Cream derivatives to customers around the globe. Owned by local Idaho dairy farmers, Idaho Milk Products has a dedicated consistent milk supply and delivers reliable, quality dairy ingredients. For more information, visit idahomilkproducts.com. Attachments HARTSVILLE, S.C., March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sonoco (NYSE: SON), one of the largest global sustainable packaging companies, announced that Ernest Haynes has been appointed to the role of President of Sonoco Metal Packaging, one of the leading manufacturers of sustainable metal packaging for food and household products and the largest aerosol can producer in North America. In this new role, Haynes will lead Sonocos newly acquired Metal Packaging business, reporting directly to Howard Coker, Sonoco President and CEO. Haynes will replace Jim Peterson who will be transitioning from the business after more than 15 years of leadership. Haynes will work closely with the Metal Packaging team to continue delivering best-in-class solutions for customers and with the integration team to ensure the business achieves its financial and operational goals. Our Metal Packaging business is positioned for future success with Ernest at the helm, said Coker. We are working to ensure the integration of the Metal Packaging business will be a seamless transition for all stakeholdersand we are committed to maximizing continuity for our teams, customers and suppliers. We congratulate Ernest on his new role, and we also thank Jim Peterson for his leadership and his continued support during the transition. Haynes previously served as Division Vice President and General Manager of Rigid Paper Containers, North America since 2018. Prior to that, he served as Division Vice President of Operations, Tubes and Cores, U.S. and Canada since 2015. He is an alumnus of The Wharton Schools Executive General Management Program (WMP20) and a 1997 graduate of Clemson University with a B.S. in Industrial Engineering. In his 25 years with Sonoco, hes held numerous leadership roles within both the Consumer and Industrial segments. Haynes also leads Sonocos Corporate Quality Council. He joined the Company in 1997. I feel honored to accept this exciting role leading Sonoco Metal Packaging. In my 25 years at Sonoco, I have had the opportunity to hold leadership roles across the organization, and I look forward to this new opportunity, said Haynes. I have already had a chance to travel to many Metal Packaging locations and meet the teams, and it is really the people who make this business so special. Together, I am confident we will achieve great success. About Sonoco Founded in 1899, Sonoco (NYSE: SON) is a global provider of consumer, industrial, healthcare and protective packaging. With net sales of approximately $5.6 billion in 2021, the Company has 20,500 employees working in approximately 300 operations in 32 countries, serving some of the worlds best-known brands in some 85 nations. Sonoco is committed to creating sustainable products, services and programs for our customers, employees and communities that support our corporate purpose of Better Packaging. Better Life. The Company ranked first in the Packaging sector on Fortunes Worlds Most Admired Companies for 2022 as well as being included in Barrons 100 Most Sustainable Companies for the fourth consecutive year. For more information, visit www.sonoco.com . A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/45ba39a6-552e-4906-9ce0-d4a1007ff712 Bellevue, Washington, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Seattle Humanes new Chief Operations Officer Libby Jones is helping the 125-year-old nonprofit realize its five-year strategic vision developed last year, which relies heavily on first investing in the people that power the organizations mission and purpose. I went to school for zoology and wildlife conservation, said Jones, who recently relocated to the Pacific Northwest from North Carolina with her family and two rescue dogs. Ive always been passionate about animals and their wellbeing. Seattle Humanes five-year strategic vision, which was spearheaded by CEO Christopher Ross shortly after joining the organization in January 2021, reflects the evolving landscape in animal welfare and recognizes a community-focused approach is necessary in supporting pets and their owners. Libbys record of building and elevating teams in the animal welfare space and her focus on maximizing operational excellence made her an obvious choice for this critical role within Seattle Humane, Ross says. We are excited to see how she applies her skills and experience to set Seattle Humane up for another 125 years of success. Jones joins Seattle Humane after three years as Vice President of Operations at the Humane Society of Charlotte. Prior to her work in Charlotte, Jones was a veterinary hospital manager at Battleground Veterinary Hospital in Greensboro/Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and then shelter manager for Guilford County. Operation management just became my passion, it became something that Im deeply invested in, Jones says, and I want to make sure that our teams grow and thrive and experience all of the wonderful things that the organization can provide to them. Seattle Humanes strategic vision rests in five key pillars, one of which is to invest in their people by promoting fulfilling careers and livable wages in animal welfare. Lifting up the staff at the forefront of serving pets inside the shelter and out in the community is just the beginning of executing this ambitious five-year strategy. The people who are dedicated to animal welfare are passionate, lovely, strong people, but they have never really had the support system that they need in order to thrive, Jones said. And so, really supporting our people, our veterinarians, our technicians, our care staff and helping them thrive, not only here at work, but also in their lives, is just so critical, and its critical to the success of animal welfare organizations. Jones will also oversee investments across multiple departments in order to continue offering critical programs and services as Seattle Humane provides not only access to adoptable pets, but also support systems that keep them happy and healthy with their people for a lifetime. About Seattle Humane Seattle Humane is celebrating 125 years of proudly promoting the human-animal bond by saving and serving pets in need. We are more than a shelter Seattle Humane is a community resource center, providing adoption services, a pet food bank and support for pet owners, low-cost spay/neuter surgeries and wellness exams, humane education for all ages and more. Visit Seattle Humane at 13212 SE Eastgate Way in Bellevue or SeattleHumane.org. Attachment Beverly Hills , March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In this interview, Tricia Turner talks with Mission Matters about her journey in the real estate industry and her thoughts on how to ensure success in a competitive environment. Listen to the complete interview of Tricia Turner with Adam Torres on the Mission Matters Money Podcast. What mission matters to you? Turner says her mission revolves around building better lives by building better agents. A self-proclaimed optimist, she says the real estate industry is a tough one in which you have to have self discipline, grit, and be hungry to achieve success. Thats why, she explains, shes passionate about developing fellow real estate agents to their fullest potential. How did you get into real estate? Realizing early on that college wouldnt fulfill her goals, Turner went straight into apartment management at a young age as a leasing agent. She eventually got her real estate license and married a real estate agent as well, but in 2008, that marriage ended. Raising three small children on her own led her into what she calls some of the darkest days of her life, but her own focus and determination led her to pull herself through those challenges, obtaining her brokers license and opening her own brokerage, Tricia Turner Properties, to ensure more long-term success and economic stability. Tell us more about your company, the Tricia Turner Group with eXp realty. Turners company, Tricia Turner Properties, joined EXP Realty in 2018 and is now classified as a mega team within the brokerage. The Tricia Turner Group is a group of real estate professionals selling a high volume of homes all over the greater Houston area with their main office located in Fulshear Texas. She says her vision is to reach $135 million in sales volume and complete 400 transactions in 2022. Whats your advice for people just starting their careers in the field? Turner says she believes the real estate industry will continue to be disrupted, which is why you always need to pay attention to who youre paying attention to. In other words, Align (yourself) with people who are out to make a difference and then go all in, she advises. Many believe that 2022 will be defined in the real estate industry as survival of the fittest and that is because the market is extremely difficult and has been now since the pandemic. With fewer homes on the market to sell, the average agent that typically only sells a couple of homes a year, may find themselves looking for a new path within the next 12 -24 months. Turner believes in working hard, living in abundance and building a life on purpose. Her vision to teach others and help them to rise up, is only a fraction of what she plans on doing in the future. She believes that we are better togetheralways. To learn more about Tricia Turner and her vision, visit http://www.triciaturner.work Media Communications Inquiries: adamtorres@missionmatters.com Publicist for Adam Torres and Mission Matters Media KISS PR Brand Story PressWire Brand Publicity Partners KissPR.com For more details, visit Kisspr.com. KISS PR Digital PR & Marketing powers the Mission Matters Business podcast with brand storytelling. T: 972.437.8942 Via KISS PR Distribution - Media Contact: Az@kisspr.com Attachment Riyadh, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Two mathematicians and a scientist were among this years King Faisal Prizes seven laureates who received their prizes on 29 March in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for having enriched humanity with key and invaluable achievements and discoveries, and excelled in the fields of Medicine, Science, Arabic Language & Literature, and Serving to Islam. The Medicine Prize was awarded to Professor David Liu, Richard Merkin Professor and Director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, who invented the first gene base editor in 2016. This technology laid the foundation for possibly treating thousands of genetic diseases like sickle cell disease and muscular dystrophy. Professor David Liu used base editors in mice to correct the genetic mutation behind progeria, a rare condition characterized by premature aging, retarded development, and early death. Still, more work needs to be done before gene base editors can be used in humans. Initiating a revolution in genome editing, base editors have received great global demand. They were distributed over 9,000 times to more than 3,000 laboratories around the world. Scientists were able to publish more than 300 papers on this technique, used in different organisms ranging from bacteria to mice. Base editing is a precise genome editing method; like a genetic pencil, that rewrites DNA base letters, which cause genetic mutations and potentially genetic diseases. This technology, which is in constant development, chemically rewrites one DNA base to another by rearranging the atoms of one DNA base to resemble a different base. In 2019, Professor David Liu created with his team prime editing which offers more targeting flexibility and greater editing precision. With over 75 issued U.S. patents, Professor Liu was referred to as the Gene Corrector by Nature magazine topping its list of Ten People Who Mattered This Year in 2017 and was included in the Foreign Policy Leading Global Thinkers list. He is also a biotech entrepreneur, cofounding Editas Medicine, which uses CRISPR therapies (tool for editing genomes) to discover, develop, manufacture, and commercialize transformative, durable, and precise genomic medicines for a broad class of diseases. The Science Prize (Mathematics) was awarded jointly to Professor Martin Hairer, Chair in Probability and Stochastic Analysis at Imperial Colleges Department of Mathematics, and to Professor Nader Masmoudi, a distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the New York University of Abu Dhabi and head of his Research Center on Stability, Instability and Turbulence. Professor Martin Hairer developed the theory of regularity structures which gave a precise mathematical meaning to several equations that were previously outside the scope of mathematical analysis. He published his theory in 2014 providing tools and manuals for solving many previously incomprehensible equations called the stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). These equations involve chance and describe how randomness throws disorder into different phenomena like coin tossing, stock price changes, wind movement in a tunnel, or forest fire growth. He transformed the area of SPDEs by introducing fundamental new techniques and was able to solve equations like KPZ equation which describes the evolution of the boundary at which two substances meet over time. Professor Hairer is a world leader in probability theory and analysis and has authored a monograph and over 100 research articles. His work has been distinguished with several prizes and awards, most notably the LMS Whitehead and Philip Leverhulme prizes in 2008, the Fermat prize in 2013, the Frohlich prize and the Fields Medal in 2014, a knighthood in 2016, and the Breakthrough prize in Mathematics in 2020. As for Professor Nader Masmoudi, he was able to unlock the mystery around many physics problems which remained unsolved for centuries. He found a flaw in Eulers mathematical equations which for more than two centuries described the motions of fluids under any circumstance. He discovered that Eulers equations do not apply to all circumstances, as previously thought, and proved that they could break or fail under certain conditions related to fluids. His work helped solve and understand many problems related to fluid-modeling like weather predictions and airplane turbulence. For the past 20 years, Professor Masmoudis research has been at the forefront of Partial Differential Equations, Fluid Mechanics, and Dynamical Systems. He has been cited by more than 8000 papers for his works in pure and applied mathematics. He has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Best Scientific Paper Award in Annales de lInstitue Henri Poincare, a Chair from the Fondation Sciences Mathematiques de Paris, The Fermat Prize, and the Chair Schlumberger from the IHES in Paris. In addition to Medicine and Science, King Faisal Prize recognized this year the achievements of outstanding thinkers and scholars in the field of Arabic Language & Literature, and honored exemplary leaders who played a pivotal role in serving Islam, Muslims, and humanity at large. The Arabic Language and Literature Prize about Arabic Literature Studies in English was awarded to Professor Suzanne Stetkevych, Chair of the Department of Arabic & Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, and to Professor Muhsin Al-Musawi, Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literary Studies at Columbia University. Professor Suzanne Stetkevych was awarded the prize for her extensive research and work analyzing Arabic literature with unmatched depth from the pre-Islamic period to the revivalist period. Her research approach resulted in the renewal of the critical perspective and methods of studying classical Arabic poetry. Professor Muhsin Al-Musawi received the prize for being a well-established authority in the field of Arabic literature demonstrating his encyclopedic knowledge in both classical and modern Arabic literature. His research and studies have made great impact on students and researchers in the field of Arabic studies, both in the Arab world and the West. He handled Arabic literature as a world literature. The Service to Islam Prize was awarded to the former Tanzanian President His Excellency Ali Hassan Mwinyi and to Professor Hassan Mahmoud Al Shafei. His Excellency Ali Hassan Mwinyi actively participated in Islamic advocacy, spreading the spirit of religious tolerance, educating Muslims, and translating many Islamic resources and references into Swahili language. In parallel, Professor Hassan Mahmoud Alshafei served Islamic sciences through teaching, writing, authenticating, and translating, and has contributed to the establishment of the International Islamic University in Islamabad and the development of its colleges curricula. The Islamic Studies Prize for this year on Islamic Heritage of Al- Andalus was withheld because the nominated works did not meet the criteria of the prize. Since 1979, King Faisal Prize in its 5 different categories has awarded 282 laureates from 44 different nationalities who have made distinguished contributions to different sciences and causes. Each prize laureate is endowed with USD 200 thousand; a 24-carat gold medal weighing 200 grams, and a Certificate inscribed with the Laureates name and a summary of their work which qualified them for the prize. Attachments Beverly Hills , March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dara Wheeler talks with Mission Matters about the growing demand for employee holistic health and safety. Listen to the complete interview of Dara Wheeler with Adam Torres on the Mission Matters Innovation Podcast. What mission matters to you? Driven by a passion for keeping people healthy, Wheeler says shes committed to delivering the tools and resources necessary to ensure employees are mentally, physically, and financially supported. "When we listen carefully to our employees - we find out where their true passion lies and how we can inspire them," she adds. How did it all start? Wheeler is a veteran of the healthcare industry; although her first ambition was to be a teacher, after spending some time in the business world, the trajectory of her career changed dramatically. She pursued and earned an MBA and spent time in a variety of roles spanning HR, business development and finance. Today, shes a tenacious Chief Marketing Officer and has been with Axiom Medical for 16 years. Tell us about Axiom Medical. Axiom Medical specializes in providing complete occupational health services for the total life cycle of its clients employees. Axiom Medical employs experts in the fields of workers compensation, disability case management, and OSHA-mandated medical programs. While the companys competitors may manage programs using inexperienced associates, Wheeler says Axiom guarantees the most qualified, top-level professionals to perform the work. Axiom Medical partners with large and medium-sized companies to create systemic programs, managing employee health through a user friendly tech ecosystem paired with compassionate nurse case managers. What are some takeaways for employee health? "Recognizing where we can grow as an organization and have opportunities to encourage and maintain optimal employee health in the entire workplace," Wheeler says, noting that most industries only pay attention to employees' physical health and injuries, disregarding internal factors like mental wellness and behavioral health. Mental health IS health. Embracing innovation in the employee health space, makes holistic health manageable and efficient for the employer, and boosts employee wellbeing. she says. Whats next? Axiom Medical is dedicated to creating a company culture and environment that normalizes the importance of employee mental health, furthering its mission to provide outstanding, innovative, and effective work-related healthcare services to employees, positively impacting their lives, and providing meaningful return on investment to employers. As for the prospect of employers considering something akin to first aid for mental health in the same way they accept the importance of first aid for physical injuries and ailments, she says, "This would be a total game-changer and would provide an opportunity to see (employee wellness) from a more holistic perspective. Its our responsibility as business leaders to create an environment where our employees can thrive knowing that they are fully supported in their well-being." To learn more, visit https://www.axiomllc.com/ online. Media Communications Inquiries: adamtorres@missionmatters.com Publicist for Adam Torres and Mission Matters Media: KISS PR Brand Story PressWire Media Relations for Dara Wheeler and Axiom Medical: autumn.brennan@axiomllc.com Brand Publicity Partners KissPR.com For more details, visit Kisspr.com. KISS PR Digital PR & Marketing powers the Mission Matters Business podcast with brand storytelling. T: 972.437.8942 Via KISS PR Podcast Distribution - Media Contact: Az@kisspr.com Attachment VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gold Standard Ventures Corp. (NYSE AMERICAN: GSV) (TSX: GSV) (Gold Standard or the Company) announces the Company's audited consolidated financial results for the year ended December 31, 2021. For details of the audited consolidated financial statements, Management's Discussion and Analysis, Annual Information Form, and Form 40-F for the year ended December 31, 2021, please see the Company's filings on SEDAR and EDGAR. Jason Attew, President and CEO, commented, "Gold Standard had a very productive year in 2021, culminating in the recent release of the South Railroad Project Feasibility Study last month. The study outlined peer leading returns for undeveloped gold projects, and we are excited to continue de-risking the asset in 2022 with an exploration program focused on oxide resource expansion at Pinion, oxide definition drilling at the LT target, sulphide resource step out drilling at North Bullion, and inaugural drilling at the Ranch sulphide target to the north of Dark Star. Our exploration program, combined with the advancement of our permitting application and commencement of our construction capital financing process, will lead to plenty of news flow in 2022 as we advance towards our goal of becoming Nevadas low-cost junior producer of choice. 2021 and Recent Highlights At the end of 2021, Gold Standard staff had worked 3,627 consecutive days without a lost time accident. On January 5, 2021, announced the reconstitution of the senior leadership team with the appointments of a Chief Operating Officer; a new Chief Financial Officer; and a Vice President, Corporate Development & Investor Relations. Combined with the CEO change, four senior executives were appointed, and four senior executives departed. On February 1, 2021, announced the Companys Plan of Operations had been deemed complete by the BLM. On February 17, 2021, completed a bought deal financing of 39,215,000 common shares at a price of C$0.88 per share for gross proceeds of C$34.5 million. On March 9, 2021, engaged Cutfield Freeman & Co. as construction capital financial advisor to assess all avenues of construction funding for the South Railroad Project (SRP). In April, August, September, and November 2021, announced drill results at the Pinion, Dark Star and POD / Sweet Hollow deposits, as well as the LT target. Highlights included step out drilling at the Pinion SB Zone with the goal of expanding mineralization at Pinion to support mine life extension, deeper RC drilling at Dark Star to define the transitional and sulphide ore directly below the contemplated oxide pit boundary, and definition drilling at the near-surface oxide gold LT target located near the Plan of Operations boundary of the SRP. On November 10, 2021, announced an update to the SRP permitting process, including the engagement by the BLM of SWCA Environmental Consultants to manage the Environmental Impact Statement process. On February 23, 2022, announced the results of the Feasibility Study for the SRP outlining a 10.5-year operating life producing an after-tax NPV 5 of US$315 million, an IRR of 44%, and a 1.9 year payback period at a gold price of US$1,650 per ounce. At Spot Gold Price of US$1,899 per ounce as of February 18, 2022, after-tax NPV 5 increases to US$487 million, IRR increases to 62%, and the payback period drops to 1.6 years. of US$315 million, an IRR of 44%, and a 1.9 year payback period at a gold price of US$1,650 per ounce. Financial Results for the Year Ended December 31, 2021 The Company reported a net loss of $11.0 million for the twelve months ended December 31, 2021, compared to a net loss of $10.7 million for the twelve months ended December 31, 2020. Form 40-F The Companys Form 40-F has been filed with the SEC on EDGAR (www.sec.gov) together with the Companys Audited Consolidated Financial Statements, Managements Discussion and Analysis and Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2021. The Companys shareholders may, upon request, receive a hard copy of the Companys complete audited financial statements free of charge. To review these documents on the Companys website, please see www.goldstandardv.com/investors/filings-financials/financial-statements/. Qualified Persons Richard Yancey, Geology Manager of the Company, is the Companys Qualified Person (QP) as defined by National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical contents of this news release. About Gold Standard Gold Standard is developing the South Railroad Project, an open pit, heap leach gold project located in Elko County, Nevada. The project is part of a +21,000 hectare land package on the Carlin Trend, and is 100% owned or controlled by Gold Standard. The goal of the Company is to become the low-cost junior producer of choice in Nevada, one of the premier mining jurisdictions in the world. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements, which relate to future events or future performance. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, statements regarding the SRP project economics, including NPV, IRR and payback of the SRP; the timing and availability of construct financing for the SRP; the ability of the Company to extend mine life and expand the Mineral Reserves and Resources at the SRP; the timing and completion of the permitting process; and the goal of becoming a low-cost producer in Nevada. Such forward-looking statements reflect managements current beliefs and are based on assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company, including that that the geology of the ore in the area of Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves at the SRP will conform to that set out in the Feasibility Study for the SRP; that operations at the SRP will conform to the mine plan and schedule set out in the Feasibility Study for the SRP; that the Company will be successful in the financing and construction of the SRP; that the Company completes the necessary permitting process; and that operating and capital costs, and commodity prices, will conform to the costs and prices set out in the SRP. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause our actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks, uncertainties and other factors include, among others: that the pit and the area of demonstrated Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves at the SRP will be different than that set out in the Feasibility Study for the SRP, that the Company may not be successful in financing and constructing the SRP; that the SRP may never be placed into production; global financial conditions and volatility of capital markets, uncertainty regarding the availability of additional capital, fluctuations in commodity prices; title matters; and the additional risks identified in our filings with Canadian securities regulators on SEDAR in Canada (available at www.sedar.com) and with the SEC on EDGAR (available at www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml). These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and, except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. For further information contact: Michael McDonald Vice President, Corporate Development & Investor Relations Phone: 1-604-687-2766 E-Mail: info@goldstandardv.com RADNOR, Pa., March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The law firm of Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP (www.ktmc.com) informs investors that a securities class action lawsuit has been filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc. (New Oriental) (NYSE: EDU). The action charges New Oriental with violations of the federal securities laws, including omissions and fraudulent misrepresentations relating to the companys business, operations, and prospects. As a result of New Orientals materially misleading statements to the public, New Oriental investors have suffered significant losses. Kessler Topaz is one of the worlds foremost advocates in protecting the public against corporate fraud and other wrongdoing. Our securities fraud litigators are regularly recognized as leaders in the field individually and our firm is both feared and respected among the defense bar and the insurance bar. We are proud to have recovered billions of dollars for our clients and the classes of shareholders we represent. CANNOT VIEW THIS VIDEO? PLEASE CLICK HERE CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT YOUR NEW ORIENTAL LOSSES. YOU CAN ALSO CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING LINK OR COPY AND PASTE IN YOUR BROWSER: https://www.ktmc.com/edu-class-action-lawsuit?utm_source=PR&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=edu LEAD PLAINTIFF DEADLINE: April 5, 2022 CLASS PERIOD: April 24, 2018 through July 22, 2021 CONTACT AN ATTORNEY TO DISCUSS YOUR RIGHTS: James Maro, Esq. (484) 270-1453 or Email at info@ktmc.com NEW ORIENTALS ALLEGED MISCONDUCT New Oriental provides educational programs, services and products to students across the Peoples Republic of China (China) and delivers online courses through its online learning platforms. On June 1, 2021, Chinese regulators announced they had fined 15 off-campus training institutions, including New Oriental, for illegal activities such as false advertising and fraud. Among the violations were reportedly fabricating teacher qualifications, exaggerating the effects of training, and fabricating user reviews. Following this news, the price of New Oriental American Depository Shares (ADSs) dropped from $11.09 on June 1, 2021, to $9.32 on June 3, 2021, a 16% decline over the two-day period. Then, on July 23, 2021, China unveiled a sweeping overhaul of its education sector, banning companies that teach the school curriculum from making profits, raising capital or going public. This drastic measure effectively ended any potential growth in the for-profit tutoring sector in China. Following this news, the price of New Oriental ADSs fell from $6.40 on July 22, 2021 to just $1.94 by market close on July 26, 2021, a nearly 70% decline. WHAT CAN I DO? New Oriental investors may, no later than April 5, 2022 seek to be appointed as a lead plaintiff representative of the class through Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP or other counsel, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP encourages New Oriental investors who have suffered significant losses to contact the firm directly to acquire more information. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR THE CASE WHO CAN BE A LEAD PLAINTIFF? A lead plaintiff is a representative party who acts on behalf of all class members in directing the litigation. The lead plaintiff is usually the investor or small group of investors who have the largest financial interest and who are also adequate and typical of the proposed class of investors. The lead plaintiff selects counsel to represent the lead plaintiff and the class and these attorneys, if approved by the court, are lead or class counsel. Your ability to share in any recovery is not affected by the decision of whether or not to serve as a lead plaintiff. ABOUT KESSLER TOPAZ MELTZER & CHECK, LLP Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP prosecutes class actions in state and federal courts throughout the country and around the world. The firm has developed a global reputation for excellence and has recovered billions of dollars for victims of fraud and other corporate misconduct. All of our work is driven by a common goal: to protect investors, consumers, employees and others from fraud, abuse, misconduct and negligence by businesses and fiduciaries. At the end of the day, we have succeeded if the bad guys pay up, and if you recover your assets. The complaint in this action was not filed by Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP. For more information about Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP please visit www.ktmc.com. CONTACT: Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP James Maro, Jr., Esq. 280 King of Prussia Road Radnor, PA 19087 (484) 270-1453 info@ktmc.com Marijuana plants on Nov. 11, 2021. The cannabis industry has ramped up to meet demand in Illinois. Cannabis production in Illinois is dominated by several large, wealthy multistate operators that obtained medical licenses years ago. After a dramatic race in Bahrain, Red Bull Racing was able to smile again in Saudi Arabia after Max Verstappen' s win and Sergio Perez's pole position. Red Bull does have stiff competition from Ferrari, but according to Helmut Marko the RB18 will improve from Imola. Red Bull gets a lot lighter In the program Talk im Hangar-7 on Austria's ServusTV, Helmut Marko is the guest to talk about the battle between Red Bull and Ferrari. The Red Bull advisor sees a Ferrari that is fast in all conditions, regardless of temperature or tires. Even when it comes to the engine, the Italians have an advantage according to the Austrian. From Imola onwards, however, Red Bull should start to gain the upper hand, Marko reveals. This is because the team is working on a number of new parts that will significantly reduce the weight of the car. "This should result in a significant gain in lap times," the 78-year-old reveals. Melbourne similar to Jeddah Before Formula 1 heads to Imola, the Australian Grand Prix will be held. For that race, Marko predicts another exciting battle between Ferrari and Red Bull. "I think Melbourne will be about the same as Jeddah," he said. Earlier, Marko revealed that the RB18 is a "Prima Donna. A more difficult car, but if you can manage it there is potential in it. Chinese FM to chair 3rd meeting of foreign ministers of countries neighboring Afghanistan Xinhua) 09:39, March 29, 2022 BEIJING, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will host the third meeting of foreign ministers of the countries neighboring Afghanistan in Tunxi, Anhui Province, from March 30 to 31. Foreign ministers or representatives of Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will attend the meeting, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin announced on Monday. Later, Wang will chair the "Afghanistan's neighbors + Afghanistan" foreign ministers' dialogue. Acting Foreign Minister of the Afghan Interim Government Amir Khan Muttaqi will be invited to attend the dialogue. The foreign ministers of Indonesia and Qatar will be invited as guests, the spokesperson said. By hosting this third foreign ministers meeting, China hopes to build further consensus among Afghanistan's neighboring countries on the Afghan issue, discuss the "neighbors' plan" to jointly promote the stability of the situation in Afghanistan, support the Afghan people, and convey the voices of Afghanistan's neighbors to the international community, the spokesperson said. "We hope that by hosting the 'Afghanistan's neighbors + Afghanistan' foreign ministers' dialogue, we can better understand the difficulties and appeals of the Afghan people, convey the concerns of Afghanistan's neighboring countries about the Afghan issue, encourage Afghanistan to build an open and inclusive political architecture, pursue moderate and prudent domestic and foreign policies, and effectively combat terrorism," Wang said. "At the same time, we hope the international community will provide greater support to Afghanistan, and we call on the United States to take the primary responsibility for Afghanistan's economic reconstruction," Wang said. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) LG Energy Solution will invest 1.7 trillion won (US$1.39 billion) in Queen Creek, Arizona to build a new cylindrical battery plant with a total capacity of 11 GWh. Construction is scheduled to start in the second quarter of this year and mass production is targeted for the second half of 2024. The Arizona plant will be LGES second standalone facility in the US after one in Holland, Michigan. LGES earlier announced $1.7 billion to quintuple the capacity of its base plant in Holland by five times. (Earlier post.) Among Korean battery makers, LG Energy Solutions is the first to build an independent production plant for cylindrical batteries in the North American market. LG Energy Solution plans to supply major customers such as electric vehicle startups that have adopted cylindrical cell formats and power tool companies in the United States through the new plant. LGES is a supplier to Tesla and Lucid. In October 2021, LGES also signed a long-term battery supply contract with Nikola, which has an electric truck factory in Coolidge near Phoenix. With LGs plant in Michigan and JV plants with GM (earlier post, earlier post) and Stellantis (earlier post), the companys total capacity in North America will reach more than 200 GWh. NEW HAVEN Federal investigators probing a $40 million embezzlement scheme at Yale School of Medicine discovered an administrator used thousands of orders to circumvent a $10,000 purchasing cap so she could buy electronics that she later sold, court documents show. Jamie Petrone, 42, of Naugatuck, appeared Monday in federal court where she admitted to wire fraud charges stemming from scheme, officials said. Petrone, who was director of finance and administration for the schools Department of Emergency Medicine, has accepted responsibility for her actions, her attorney, Frank Ricco, said. In announcing the guilty plea, federal authorities said the prestigious medical school lost more than $40 million in computers and electronics that Petrone used to purchase luxury cars, fund real estate improvements and pay for travel. Court documents show that an anonymous tip alerted Yale officials to the scheme. The person reported a suspiciously large amount of computers being ordered by Petrone, who was also seen loading some of the electronics into her personal car, according to court documents. While a full extent of the scheme was not highlighted in arrest documents, federal authorities used a series of laptop and tablet purchases to show how Petrone diverted those items to another business to make money, records show. Since 2018, Petrone drafted thousands of purchase orders, each less than $10,000, which was the amount at which additional management approvals wouldve been required, according to court records. The amount of the purchases is estimated by investigators to be in the tens of millions of dollars. Since January 2021, court records show, Petrone arranged for Yales purchase of about 8,000 iPads and Surface Pro tablets. Court records indicate that between May 27, 2021, and Aug. 19, 2021, Petrone ordered about $2.1 million in computer equipment on behalf of Yale. She placed an additional order on Aug. 24, 2021, for equipment that investigators said totaled $144,000. On May 26, 2021, Petrone asked her assistant to prepare documentation for an order of 100 Microsoft Surface Pro tablet computers, which she claimed were for a new study to be launched during Memorial Day weekend. Her assistant prepared 12 purchase orders for eight Surface Pros, totaling over $9,000, and one purchase order for four Surface Pros, totaling over $4,500, documents showed. Documents said that many of the devices Petrone purchased with Yale money were sold and shipped to a purported business in New York. Emails revealed transactions between Petrone and various entities that purchased the items, court documents showed. When investigators traced the tracking numbers on the packages, they determined they were shipped from Orange on June 3, 2021, and delivered to a Williston Park address in New York on June 4, 2021. In one of Petrones emails, she attached bank statements from a business located at her residential address in Naugatuck, documents showed. State records list the status of the business as dissolved due to failure to file annual reports. Bank statements from February through May of last year show hundreds of thousands of dollars in incoming wire transfers to Petrone from entities that purchased the computer equipment, according to the court documents. In early June 2021, documents showed, Petrone applied for a PayPal business loan and was asked to submit four months of bank statements. Courts records show Petrone sent bank statements to PayPal using her Yale email address, which law enforcement reviewed. Yale officials notified law enforcement on Aug. 25, 2021 after they received an anonymous tip about the apparent embezzlement scheme, documents showed. Court documents indicate the tip was received by word of mouth sometime over the last year. Its unclear when exactly Yale officials were alerted, but court documents indicated the university was not able to mount a concerted investigative effort until about July 1, 2021, for various reasons. Those reasons were not detailed in the court documents. Yale officials did not respond Tuesday to questions about the tip and the schools investigation. In a statement, Karen Peart, director of university media relations at Yale, said the school alerted authorities to evidence of suspected criminal behavior last year and fully cooperated throughout the investigation. Unrelated to the anonymous tip, court documents show, Petrone was questioned in June 2020 about a budget variance and a high volume of computer equipment purchases for her department. The documents do not state who questioned Petrone. During that inquiry, court records show, Petrone said her department was updating its equipment and was working with Yale New Haven Health on a new program. During the week of Aug. 16, 2021, Yale auditors inquired with a high-ranking Yale School of Medicine official, who court records indicate had no knowledge of the program Petrone referenced. Yale auditors reviewed purchase orders and Petrones school emails, among other things, and reported their findings to law enforcement, court documents show. Investigators said in court records that Petrone used the funds obtained through the scheme to pay for home improvements for her Connecticut residence and to buy about $25,000 in jewelry. On Aug. 31, 2021, law enforcement executed a federal seizure warrant on her account, seizing $560,421.14. Investigators also seized a 2014 Mercedes-Benz G550, a 2017 Land Rover/Range Rover, a 2015 Cadillac Escalade Premium, a 2020 Mercedes-Benz E450A, a 2015 Cadillac Escalade and a 2018 Dodge Charger, federal prosecutors said. Officials said three properties in Connecticut were also liquidated. Petrone, who is free on a $1 million bond, is scheduled to be sentenced June 29. Asus expects GPU prices to fall by up to 25%, UK retailer also predicts prices will go down Finding a graphics card at MSRP has been basically impossible for the last couple of years, but there are signs that the GPU drought is coming to an end. According to 3DCenter, GPUs are the cheapest they have been since it started tracking their prices in January 2021 (note: 3DCenter focused on prices in Germany and Austria). Nvidia RTX 3000 and AMD RX 6000 cards are just 25% over MSRP. It doesnt sound great, but this is the lowest level in the last 15 months. And there are encouraging comments from OEMs and retailers. 3DCenter's price chart for GPUs over the last 15 months (in Germany and Austria) Asus told PCGamer that it has already started dropping its MSRPs across all SKUs. This may be an attempt to get ahead of other OEMs and secure orders as the average prices of cards start to drop. Thats not all, TechRadar spoke with a representative of one of the UKs biggest retailers, Box, who said By the end of April, beginning of May, we should start to see things return to a more attractive price. Things are looking up in the US as well. During the US-China trade war, taxes were slapped on imports from China, though GPUs were given an exemption. That expired at the beginning of 2021 and brought on a 25% tax. The US is reinstating the exemption until the end of this year, which should help bring prices back down. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition and OEM versions As a result of all this, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition launched at $2,000. This number would have been higher if the 3090 Ti launched earlier this year as originally planned. Of course, the 3090 Ti will be the last hurray for the 3000 series and the RTX 4000 generation is on the horizon. This means that cards currently in stock will soon become a generation older, making them less attractive to buyers. GPU prices have also been affected by crypto mining. To combat this, Nvidia released GPUs whose mining abilities have been intentionally cut down. These Low Has Rate (LHR) cards saw low demand initially, but it soon picked up. The Box representative explains this as a combination of actual demand from gamers as well as crypto miners thinking they can circumvent the hash rate restrictions. Even so, GPU prices are expected to keep falling. Long story short, this spring may be the best time in two years to buy a new GPU. Source 1 (in German) | Source 2 | Source 3 | Source 4 | Source 5 The island's indoor mask mandate will continue for at least 28 days after our community COVID level is rated as "low," the governor announced in an executive order Tuesday. The community level, which takes into account new cases, hospital admissions and the number of staffed hospital beds occupied by people with COVID, is currently "moderate." The executive order states that 14 days after the "low" rating is recognized by the Department of Public Health and Social Services and certified by the governor, people will not have to wear masks outdoors. Fourteen days after the outdoor mask requirement is lifted, masks will no longer be required indoors. However, Public Health guidance will specifically address restrictions on facilities and activities including schools, sports, and graduations. Businesses can also impose tougher restrictions, including requiring masks and social distancing. Under guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, community risk level is "low" when, in the last seven days, the number of new cases is below 200 per 100,000 people, there are fewer than 10 new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people, and on average, fewer than 10% of hospital beds are occupied by people with COVID-19. The CDC does not recommend masks be worn indoors by everyone when the community level is medium, which corresponds to Guam's moderate level. However, local and state governments are able to set stricter requirements. The governor's executive order also states that the public health emergency will not be lifted. Students dont have to be enrolled in a public school in order to learn about CHamoru language and culture the lessons go on in both private and charter schools on Guam. Although not all Catholic private schools require students to take CHamoru language, two teachers have made it their goal to continue the survival of the CHamoru language and culture. Mount Carmel At Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic School, CHamoru language teacher Ryan Leon Guerrero said he uses whats called the sandwich method a way of teaching in which he introduces a word or phrase in CHamoru, says it again in English, and then repeats the phrase back in CHamoru. The reason I do it that way is because my students are in the middle school level, and theyre not accustomed to speaking or hearing the CHamoru language very often. Really, its a support system because English is their first language, and theyre fluent in English, Ryan Leon Guerrero said. I utilize the dominant language in the sandwich method to introduce Chamorro phrases and sentences and words. Ryan Leon Guerrero also explained that he encourages his students to practice what they learn with family members, school staff and especially amongst their peers, as he believes it is one of the best ways to learn the language. Father Duenas Memorial School For Cody Lizama, who teaches CHamoru language at Father Duenas Memorial School, he incorporates family involvement and even technology. One assignment Lizama has for his students is to text CHamoru words and phrases to grandparents and family members and take screenshots of responses. Lizama said some students family members reply in CHamoru while others say, Sorry I dont speak CHamoru. Guahan Academy Charter School And beyond private schools, local charter schools also are engaging students in the CHamoru language. Dominic Leon Guerrero not only teaches the class but has started a dance group at his school, Guahan Academy Charter School called Aniten I Pution Tasi. As an active member of the cultural dance group, Guma Aniten I Taotao Tano, Dominic Leon Guerreros background in the arts helped him integrate his knowledge with the way he conducts his lessons. It helped give the kids a more centered cultural identity ... I have students who are not even CHamoru that take so much pride in learning the cultural language that it brings a warmth to my heart, Dominic Leon Guerrero said, explaining that his lessons about CHamoru legends involve chants and songs. While these teachers are proud to keep the CHamoru language alive, they also stress that they want all students from all cultures to remember and practice their native languages as well. Residents can weigh in on legislation that would end Guam's public health emergency after more than two years. A public hearing is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Guam Congress Building for Resolution 291, which would terminate the public health emergency. Senators have the power to end the emergency by majority vote at any time, under the 2003 Islan Guahan Emergency Health Powers Act, provided the illness that caused the emergency no longer poses a high probability of a large number of deaths a large number of incidents of serious permanent or long-term disability or a significant risk of substantial future harm. More Information To provide written or verbal testimony contact the Office of Speaker Therese Terlaje at 671-472-3586 or senatorterlajeguam@gmail.com. Hearings broadcast on GTA TV Channel 21, Docomo Channel 117/112.4, and the Guam Legislature Media YouTube channel. Resolution 291 was introduced this month by Republican minority leader Sen. Chris Duenas with the support of Sens. James Moylan, Frank Blas Jr., Tony Ada, Joanne Brown and Telo Taitague. The measure states that since Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero invoked the emergency health powers through executive order on March 14, 2020, she has promulgated 33 more executive orders and has unprecedented authority over procurement and hiring during an election season. The governor and officials from the Department of Public Health and Social Services have said that the state of emergency is needed to access certain resources from the federal government, such as payment of National Guard troops assisting with COVID response and the recruitment of off-island nurses. If the emergency ended, treatments that fight COVID infections, like monoclonal antibodies and antiviral pills, could not be used because they only have emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. Haiti - Politic : Fed up of Civil Society, petition sent to the PM Different sectors of civil society, representing the living forces of the Nation, in a non-partisan citizens' initiative, sent a petition to Prime Minister Ariel Henry to protest against the taking of the population on hostage by criminal organizations, and the inaction of authorities. They propose a roadmap with recommendations that are simple to implement, effective in the short term and likely to contain insecurity in the medium term, all of these measures being able to be taken immediately. Civil Society Petition to the Prime Minister "Mr. Prime Minister, This petition is a citizen initiative, non-partisan, by which we, the undersigned representatives of different sectors of Haitian society, signify to you once again the deep dismay of all social strata of national life in relation to the accelerated degradation of the security situation in Haiti. We strongly protest against the taking on hostage of the entire population by criminal organizations, and the inaction or even tolerance of the authorities who are failing in their primary obligation to ensure the safety of citizens. Cases of murder, kidnapping against ransom, rape, armed robbery and organized looting are countless. Businesses close, families live with lumps in their throats, everyone waiting in terror for their turn. The National Police, for lack of visibility of its action and support from the political authorities, gives the image of a weakened institution with insufficient staff. This situation makes the Police appear as accomplices and infiltrated by the gangs. Although declaring that it wants to do everything possible to protect and serve the population, it lacks adequate means. The customs service, the first point of entry into the territory, is unable to curb the scourge of arms and ammunition smuggling and allows other goods to pass without the checks and taxation necessary to finance public expenditure. This situation causes a deep deficit for the coffers of the State and contributes to feed the gangs across the country. While the state of emergency, the mobilization of public resources to fight organized crime, and austerity measures should have been in force, as required by the standards of good governance and transparency, equipment orders necessary for the Forces of Order, sleep in the drawers of the Ministries concerned. The latter declare that they do not have the means to acquire it and prefer to beg for help from international organizations and embassies of friendly countries. However, useless expenses are incurred, further draining the scarce resources of the State. Public funds finance futile trips and ceremonies and acquisitions that in no way alleviate the misery of the people. This administrative mismanagement is unacceptable. The country is in the process of suffocating economically. Generalized insecurity does not benefit the country and plunges it into indescribable chaos. Some even suggest that the team in place seems to prolong the illegitimate enjoyment of power without control, and this, in defiance of the suffering of the population. Prime Minister, the entire Nation is fed up ! Public security experts have clearly established a roadmap with recommendations that are simple to implement, effective in the short term and likely to stem insecurity in the medium term, all of these measures can be taken immediately, namely: 1. Declare a state of emergency; 2. Declare war on armed gangs who sow mourning and desolation in the population; 3. Crack down on customs fraud to prevent the diversion of revenues and impose control measures to eliminate the trafficking of arms and ammunition; 4. Classify armed gangs as terrorist organizations; 5. Adequately equip, as a priority, the Armed Forces of Haiti and the National Police, including the Scientific Police; 6. Recruit experts to supervise the PNH in its efforts to track down and put out of harm's way all bandits; 7. Isolate criminal groups and besiege them in their entrenchment; 8. Publicly identify and prosecute all persons and entities that finance and supply these gangs with weapons and ammunition; 9. Adopt a decree ordering the immediate freezing and confiscation of the assets of all persons and entities who finance and supply these gangs with arms and ammunition; 10. Require telephone companies to provide mandatory identification for any mobile number operating in the territory and disconnect any unidentified telephone number within a reasonable time; 11. Cancel and promptly return all old plates IT or SE or LOCATION in circulation. These plates are used by gangs. Strictly control new license plate issues; In a second phase: 12. Check the records of all police officers (vetting), including investigations for cases of illicit enrichment or money laundering; 13. Modify the uniforms of all Police units; 14. Clearly identify the vehicles assigned to the service of the State in relation to the institutions to which they belong; 15. Occupy the reconquered territories by ensuring an effective socio-political and administrative presence of the State at all levels. Mr. Prime Minister, it is imperative to adopt these urgent measures without delay. Any delay in the implementation of this plan will have serious consequences that could culminate in a desperate and blind popular revolt that could sweep away everything in its path. History and the Nation will hold you, as well as your Government and your collaborators, mainly responsible for the descent into hell of our Country. The signatories are ready to meet you as soon as possible for the follow-up. List of Signatories: Caroline Hudicourt, Executive Director Consortium of Private Sector Education Organizations (COSPE), bringing together 12 organizations and 8,000 member schools; Marie Alice BELISAIRE, Lesly ALPHONSE, President, Vice-President Union of Notaries of the Jurisdictions of Haiti (SNJH) bringing together 186 members and 7 Chambers; Marie Marguerite B CLERIE, President Professional Association of Private Schools APEP/ FEV 44 member schools; Laurent SAINT-CYR, Chairman of the Board of Directors Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Haiti, representing the 9 departmental Chambers of Commerce of the country; Wilhelm LEMKE, Chairman of the Board of Directors Association of Industries of Haiti (ADIH, 90 companies; Jean Philippe BOISSON Chairman of the Board of Directors American Chamber of Commerce in Haiti (AMCHAM HAITI) 120 Members; Raina FORBIN President of the Board of Directors Tourist Association of Haiti (ATH) 56 Members; Rosny DESROCHES Executive Director Civil Society Initiative (ISC); Carl Fred BEHRMANN President Association of Motor Vehicle Importing Agents (AAIVM) 11 Members; Rudolf DEROSE coordinator National Network of Solidarity Tourism Promoters (RENAPROTS) 20 members spread over the 10 departments; Christon SAINT-FORT, Executive Director Federation of Protestant Schools of Haiti (FEPH) 3,000 affiliated schools; Michelle MOURRA, President Canadian-Haitian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCICH); Marie France PETOIA, President Haitian Association of Travel Agencies (ASHAV) 12 members; Pierre Hugues SAINT JEAN President Association of Pharmacists of Haiti (APH) 305 members; Regine ROCHE, President Haitian Society for Training and Pain Management (SOHAD) 84 member health professionals; Myriam GOUSSE, President Haitian Association of Surgery ASCHAC more than 80 members; Jean Jumeau BATSCH, President Haitian Society of Obstetricians Gynecologists (SHOG); Richard HASPIL, President National College of Haitian Engineers and Architects (CNIAH); Natacha ANTOINE, Secretary General Association of former students of the Faculty of Medicine of Notre Dame University of Haiti (AFMU) 251 members; Dimitri HENRYS, President Haitian Society of Emergency Medicine and Disaster (SHAMUC) 34 Members; For the transport sector comprising 31 organizations: Mehu CHANGEUX, General Coordinator Association of Haitian Owners and Drivers (APCH); Benissoit DUCLOS, General Coordinator United Movement of Haitian Transporters (MUTH); Montes JOSEPH, General Coordinator United Front of Transporters and Workers of Haiti (FUTRAH). This petition, shared on social networks, collects other signatures. She was received on March 28 by the Primature. HL/ HaitiLibre Haiti - NOTICE : Mobile consulate in Mexicali, documents and service fees The Embassy of Haiti in Mexico informs the compatriots living in the Mexicali region (Baja California) that consular services through a mobile consulate will be offered in this region on April 9, 2022. Compatriots may request the following administrative documents : Haitian passport (valid for 10 years) adults: US$145.00 Passport (valid for 5 years) minors: US$120.00 Certificate of Nationality: US$ 20.00 Identity certificate: US$ 20.00 Mandates: US$ 70.00 Certificate of celibacy: US$ 40.00 Note that charges for these services will only be received in US dollars. See alos : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27150-haiti-mexico-successful-haitian-migration-integration-in-tijuana-and-mexicali.html HL/ HaitiLibre Haiti - Environment : La Francophonie grants 260,000 euros for 79 projects of young Haitians The Institute of La Francophonie for Sustainable Development (IFDD), a subsidiary body of the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF), will finance 79 projects of young Haitians at the service of public governance of the environment and sustainable development in Haiti. These excellent projects were selected by a jury made up of multidisciplinary experts and professionals, following a call for proposals. "IFDD is convinced that young people are the spearhead of growth that is inclusive, sustainable and resilient to climate change and natural disasters. We are delighted with the commitment and the spirit of innovation shown by young Haitians through these funded projects and hope that they will stimulate a favorable ecosystem for participation in the governance of sustainable development," said Cecile. Martin-Phipps, director of the IFDD. The 259,500 euros financial support granted will make it possible to support : 10 youth organizations committed to the protection of the environment, to structure the participation of young people within the framework of the national mechanisms of governance of sustainable development in Haiti for an amount of 10,000 euros each; 4 media managed by young people for the dissemination of content in favor of citizenship, the environment and sustainable development for an amount of 10,000 euros each; 65 self-employment projects in favor of environmental protection and sustainable development for an amount ranging from 500 to 3,000 euros each. Set up within the framework of the Action "Objective 2030 - Support for the participation and action of Haitian youth in favor of the environment and sustainable development", financed by the Delegation of the European Union in Haiti, the financial mechanism will be supplemented by technical support measures for the beneficiaries. This national approach is implemented by a multidisciplinary team within the OIF composed of the IFDD, the Youth, Sport and Citizenship Unit (UJSC) and the Regional Representation in the Caribbean and Latin America (REPCAL). This approach aims to support the participation of Haitian youth in a targeted manner in the public governance of sustainable development and also contributes to improving the employability of young people through non-formal education, vocational training, guidance, and support for innovation and entrepreneurship. A second call for projects, which will aim to select 35 new entrepreneurship projects, will be organized in the summer of 2022 HL/ HaitiLibre Haiti - Diaspora Covid-19 : Daily Bulletin #739 GLOBAL SITUATION 2019-2022: Tuesday March 29, 2022 the number of people infected worldwide with the Covid-19 coronavirus and its variants since the start of the pandemic (March 11, 2020) amounts to 483,830,677 cases (+1,643,654 in 24 hours ), the day before (+881,743) Number of infected countries: 225 *Healings: 418,034,671 people have been cured of Covid-19 worldwide (+1,419,643), the day before (+1,088,686) *Deaths: 6,152,218 people have died of Covid-19 worldwide since the start of the pandemic (+3,701 in 24 hours), the day before (+2,122) *Active cases (less deaths and recoveries) in the world is currently 59,643,788 cases (-220,310 in 24 hours), the day before (+209,065) Average cure rate in the world: 86.40% (=) Average mortality rate in the world: 1.27% (=) World: Active cases trend: (minus recoveries and deaths) (Day-1) Vaccination: 11.26 billion doses of vaccine injected (+20 million doses injected in 24 hours. Update March 28, 2022 (latest data available). HAITI: Warning: The Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP) did not make available after March 22, 2022 daily data on the Covid-19 situation in Haiti. Accordingly, the data below on the situation in Haiti are the latest available. According to the Ministry of Public Health, +13 new cases of Covid-19 and its variants have been confirmed in Haiti as of March 22, 2022 (latest partial data available ) for a total of 30,522 confirmed cases throughout the national territory (48.7% women and 51.3% men), since the first case (March 19, 2020 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30319-haiti-health-origin-of-the-first-2-cases-of-covid-19-in-haiti.html ). Previous update (+15 cases as of March 18, 2022). Healings: 27,960 (+468) Cure rate: 91.60% (+) Deaths: 833 deaths (+6) (West +2, Center +1, South-East+1, Artibonite +2) Death rate: 2.72% (+) 5th Wave (Omicron Dominant): Total of the 5th wave (starting December 27, 2021) 4,528 confirmed cases and 67 deaths Haiti: Active Cases Trend: (less recoveries and deaths) Screening since the start of the pandemic: 186,638 tests (+1,350 in 4 days) since March 19, 2020, latest data available. Note that the very small number of people screened every day at the national level out of a population estimated at 11.6 million citizens, does not statistically allow us to make a representative estimate of the situation in Haiti, which translates into a < B>number of daily confirmed cases largely underestimated. TOP 5 of the most affected municipalities in the West (2022): Delmas: 739 (+1); Petion-ville 620 (+2); Port-au-Prince 406 (+0); Tabarre 287 (+0); Cross-Bouquets 238 (+1) Confirmed cases by department (2022 / 2021 / 2020): West: 2022: 2,546 cases; (2021: 9.890); (2020: 6,945 cases) North: 2022: 267 cases; (2021: 664); (2020: 677 cases) Center: 2022: 226 cases; (2021: 1.001); (2020: 508 cases) Artibonitis: 2022: 181 cases; (2021: 855); (2020: 593 cases) Northeast: 2022: 148 cases; (2021: 404); (2020: 314 cases) Southeast: 2022: 254 cases; (2021: 768); (2020: 274 cases) South: 2022: 214 cases; (2021: 891); (2020: 262 cases) North West: 2022: 249 cases; (2021: 383); (2020: 229 cases) Grand'Anse: 2022: 173 cases; (2021: 861); (2020: 176 cases) Nippes: 2022: 39 cases; (2021: 249) (2020: 149 cases) Cumulative deaths by department (2022-2021): West: 295 deaths (2020: 104 deaths) North: 54 deaths (2020: 34 deaths) Center: 79 deaths (2020: 13 deaths) Artibonite: 42 deaths (2020: 39 deaths) North East: 7 deaths (2020: 6 deaths) South: 51 deaths (2020: 6 deaths) Southeast: 15 deaths (2020: 9 deaths) North West: 15 deaths (2020: 12 deaths) Grand'Anse: 7 deaths (2020: 13 deaths) Nippes: 27 deaths (2020: 5 deaths) Distribution of deaths by age (since the start of the epidemic): 0-9 years: 15 deaths 10-19 years: 10 deaths 20-29 years: 31 deaths 30-39 years: 56 deaths (+2) 40-49 years: 80 deaths (+2) 50-59 years: 134 deaths (+1) 60-69 years: 187 deaths (+1) 70-79 years: 183 deaths 80 years and over: 137 deaths Vaccination: 163,369 Haitians (1.4% of the population) +2,205 in 6 days have received a 1st dose of vaccine since July 16, 2021, date of the first injection through 149 open vaccination centers and 111,914 Haitians are fully vaccinated (2 doses, 0.96% of the population) +1.585 in 6 days. Update March 22, 2022 latest information available (source MSPP). List of the 149 Vaccination Centers open in Haiti (and hours) by department: (updated October 20, 2021, latest information available) https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35051-haiti-covid-19-list-of-149-vaccination-centers-open-in-the-country.html DIASPORA: Epidemiological situation: USA: *Cases since the first case (February 29, 2020): 81,658,973 cases (+37,085 in 24 hours), the day before (+4,952) *Healings: 64,683,169 healings (+226,143), the day before (+188,050) National Cure Rate: 79.21% (+) *Deaths: 1,004,244 deaths (+777), the day before (+42) National death rate: 1.22% (=) *Active cases (minus deaths and recoveries): 15,971,560 (-189,835), yesterday (-183,140) USA: Trend active cases: (minus recoveries and deaths) (Day-1) Vaccination: 560.13 million doses of vaccine injected since December 14, 2020, date of the first injection in the United States (+160,000 doses in 24 hours). Updated March 28, 2022 (latest data available). DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Confirmed cases since March 1, 2020: 577,880 cases (+39 in 24 hours) the day before (+100 in 24 hours). First case (March 1, 2020) Healings: 573,254 healings (+48 in 24 hours), the day before (+165) National Cure Rate: 99.19% (-) Deaths: 4,375 deaths (+0), previous (+0) Death rate: 0.75% (=) Positivity rate over 4 epidemiological weeks: 1.12% (+) Active cases: (excluding deaths and recoveries) 251 cases (-13 in 24 hours) the day before (+35) Dominican Republic: Trend of active cases: (minus recoveries and deaths) (Day-1) TOP 5 Provinces with the most new cases in the last 24 hours: La Altagracia: +23 new cases in 24 hours () Santiago: +12 new cases in 24 hours (+) Maria Trinidad Sanchez: +2 new cases in 24 hours () Santo Domingo: +1 new cases in 24 hours (-) Peravia: + 1 new cases in 24 hours () Vaccination: 15.48 million doses of vaccine injected since February 16, 2021, date of the first injection in the Dominican Republic (+10,000 doses injected in 24 hours). Updated March 27, 2022 (latest data available). QUEBEC: Confirmed cases since the first case (February 27, 2020): 959,212 (+5,714 in 72 hours), previous (+2,203 in 24 hours Healings: 926,395 people (+3,997 in 72 hours) previous (+1,458 in 24 hours) Cure rate: 96.57% (-) Deaths: 14,325 (+25 in 72h) previous (+12 in 24h) Death rate: 1.49% (=) Active cases: (excluding death and recovery) 18,492 cases (+1,692 in 72 hours), previous (+733 in 24 hours) Quebec: Trend of daily confirmed cases: (average weekly trend) Vaccination: 18,617,904 doses of vaccine injected since December 14, 2020, date of the first injection (+25,755 doses in 72 hours), latest data available - MSSS as of March 28, 2022) FRANCE: *Confirmed cases since the first case (January 24, 2020): 25,059,028 cases (+29,455 cases in 24 hours), previous (+110,174) *Healings: 23,023,051 healings (+92,901), previous (+14,388) National Cure Rate: 91.87% (+) Deaths: 141,821 (+149 in 24h), previous (+41) Death rate: 0.56% (=) Active Cases: 1,894,156 (+63,595), previous (+95,745) France: Trend of active cases: (minus recoveries and deaths) (Day-1) Vaccination: 141.67 million doses of vaccine injected since December 27, 2020, date of the first injection in France (+30,000 doses injected in 24 hours. Update March 28, 2022 (latest data available) Previous bulletin : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-36289-haiti-diaspora-covid-19-daily-bulletin-738.html See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30319-haiti-health-origin-of-the-first-2-cases-of-covid-19-in-haiti.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30165-haiti-flash-first-case-of-covid-19-in-the-dominican-republic.html HL/ HaitiLibre Published on 2022/03/28 | Source Actors Lee Min-ho and Gong Hyo-jin have confirmed their appearance in Seo Sook-hyang's new drama "Ask the Stars". Advertisement "Ask the Stars" is a full-fledged space romantic comedy between the space station and the Earth. It is written by Seo Sook-hyang and directed by Park Shin-woo. The shooting will begin next month. It is Korea's first drama set at a space station with a five-year production preparation period. In the drama, Lee Min-ho plays the role of Gong Ryong, a missionary obstetrician and gynecologist who leaves for the space station as a space tourist, and Gong Hyo-jin plays the role of Korean-American astronaut Eve Kim, giving an unprecedented chemistry. Against the new backdrop of 'universe' the two are highly anticipated among K-drama fans around the world as well as domestic fans to see what kind of fateful encounter they will draw. With the news of Lee Min-ho and Gong Hyo-jin's confirmation of appearance, "Ask the Stars" which has signaled full-fledged production, will begin filming in earnest with the aim of simultaneous air on domestic channels and global OTT in 2023. Published on 2022/03/28 | Source New posters added for the upcoming Korean movie "Take Care of My Mom" (2021) Advertisement Directed by Park Kyung-mok With Kim Young-ok, Kim Young-min, Park Sung-yeon, Kim Hye-na, Lee Jung-eun, Kim Tae-baek,... Synopsis Stranger like family, family like stranger What is 85-year-old Mrs. Jeong Mal-im's choice? Mrs. Jeong Mal-im, an 85-year-old lady enjoys living alone with her longtime friend's dog in an old Western-style house in Daegu. Her only son, Jong-wook, will visit from Seoul after a long time, and while preparing here and there, her arm broke, and through the accident, a caregiver named Mi-seon was hired. She really hates being indebted to her children, and she doesn't feel comfortable with others so she insists on sending Mi-seon away, and Jong-wook who installed CCTVs due to his worries for her mother is frustrated at what's happening. Meanwhile, Mrs. Jeong seems to disappear from objects and side dishes after Mi-seon came, but there is no physical evidence, and Mi-seon, who takes care of her more gently than her real son, is proud of her, and the two become like real mothers and daughters. Then, one holiday, when Jong-wook's family suddenly visited, the conflict in the relationship that had been buried, bursts when they saw Mi-seon wearing the clothes of Mrs. Jeong, which was a gift from her daughter-in-law Yoo-jin... What's wrong with this family? We'll live together now so "Take Care of My Mom". Release date in Korea : 2022/04/13 Overall, 51% of Hawaiis public school graduates from the Class of 2021 went on to college in the first fall after graduation. This is a slight increase from the 50% enrollment rate seen from the Class of 2020, but is still down from the pre-pandemic rate of 55%. The Class of 2021 enrolled in four-year institutions at rates comparable to pre-pandemic levels, but enrollments at two-year institutions remained stagnant. The Class of 2021 also matched the all-time high on-time graduation rate of 86%, with more students achieving honors in academic achievements, STEM, career and technical education (CTE), and in earning the Seal of Biliteracy. More DOE graduates entered the University of Hawaii (UH) enrolling in college-level English and mathematics or having already earned these credits. "It's encouraging to see our college enrollment rates starting to recover and our graduation rate hitting an all-time high. This is a testament to the resiliency of our students who continue to prioritize their education and strive for excellence," Interim Superintendent Keith Hayashi said. "We know there is more work to do to support our future graduates. Hawaii P-20's report is a vital assessment tool for our public schools to identify strengths and areas for improvement to equip our students with the knowledge and skills theyll need to be successful in their futures after high school. Erika Lacro, Vice President of Community Colleges at UH noted, We see some positive trends and some that are concerning. Dual credit has opened doors for our high school students to continue to develop the knowledge and skills needed for our workforce. At the same time, we must systematically improve connecting students with programs at the community colleges that can lead to new opportunities in Hawaiis workforce. The seven community colleges are excellent options to meet students needs within their communities and provide pathways to high-wage and high-demand careers. Data published in the College and Career Readiness Indicators (CCRI) Report also identified areas where support and monitoring will be needed in upcoming years. Statewide Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBA) data had plateaued and began showing a downward trend prior to the pandemic. Due to disruptions in 2020, the SBA in English/Language Arts and Mathematics were not administered. The lack of data underscores the need for close monitoring of these indicators in coming years to identify trends and to plan possible interventions. Consistent with trends across the United States, enrollment in two-year colleges for the Class of 2021 fell to the lowest levels in recent years. The Youth Voice Hawaii Report from the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation offers insights and may provide some context for these trends. The report summarizes the thoughts and impressions shared by students and staff on their views of education and aspirations for the future. Academic relevance, life skills preparation, and exposure to pathways and access to information were three areas highlighted in the core findings as highly important areas where school system partners have a lot of influence. Industry is eager to support our students through education and workforce training partnerships and collaboration to leverage resources that will benefit our states economic and workforce needs. The College and Career Readiness Indicators give everyone timely access to quality information that can be used to prepare our students to take their next steps into the workforce of Hawaii, said Leslie Wilkins from the Maui Economic Development Board. This is an opportunity for all stakeholders to continue supporting the creation and alignment of CTE programs, career pathways that start in high school and lead to meaningful credentials offered at our Hawaii colleges; continued creation and coordination of dual credit door-opener opportunities that expose students to the benefits of post-secondary training in all forms, and continued investment in opportunities for students to be ready to succeed once they arrive in college. It is an opportunity to reflect on the work that has been done and use data to identify additional need areas to best prepare students for continued success on the pathway from high school into the workforce. LIGHTNING EDITORIAL: Cawthorn defames area's version of apple pie If everyone who supports the Ecusta Trail votes against Madison Cawthorn in the May 17 primary, maybe thatll mean curtains for the 26-year-olds audacious performance as a congressman. The latest startling statement by our colorful freshman came last week at a Buncombe County Republican gathering when he suggested the Hendersonville-to-Brevard greenway is some kind of communist plot. The comment came after Chad Nesbitt, a right-wing podcaster from Asheville, surprised state Sen. Chuck Edwards with a question about why he supports a communist organization." I refuted that it was a communist organization, Edwards said in an interview. That sparked Cawthorns unsolicited seconding of Nesbitts baseless assertion. I was looking at (Cawthorn) in the eye when he said, It is, it is. Its super communist, Edwards told the Lightning. I was looking at him in the eye as he said those words. (After the Lightning published the story about the remark, Cawthorn's office said the congressman "criticized the organization 'Rails to Trails,' not the Ecusta Trail project. His office said he supports bike paths and parks but is concerned about a report alleging that the rail-trail program confiscates private land.) Wild comments and conspiracy theories are not unusual from the mouth of Cawthorn, a Trump champion for the Turning Point USA demographic. At Saturdays Republican forum for the 11th Congressional District, Cawthorn pledged that his party when it retakes the House will use the Jan. 6 committees investigative power to expose the FBIs role in fomenting the insurrection, promised to throw Anthony Fauci in jail and vowed to work for a forensic audit to figure out what really happened in the 2020 election. A serial violator of state laws against carrying weapons on school property in Cawthorns case a hunting knife the congressman draws headlines but no negative consequences from his loyal base for his unorthodox behavior. He announced in November he was moving east to run in a newly draw district that was even safer than the reliably red 11th Congressional District, then demurred when the Legislature transformed it into a swing seat. Next, a state Supreme Court-ordered map eliminated it altogether. In saner times Cawthorns flipflop would be a risk but in our hyper-partisan era probably wont matter. His loony condemnation of the rails to trails program was all the more startling because it, too, marked a flipflop. Last July, Cawthorn pledged his support for the trail during a meeting with Brevards city manager, its mayor and a council member and Sen. Edwards. He actually said make sure that we let him know when there would be the ribbon cutting so he could be there and celebrate it, Mac Morrow, the council member, told the Lightning. He was just animated about it, you know, the way he is. How can you trust somebody that tells you hes all in, that Brevard and Hendersonville are his two favorite places and connecting them with a trail was fantastic? Contrary to being a communist project, the Ecusta Trail is starting to look more like a capitalist plot to generate economic development. Major signs are emerging already that the trail is going to draw bigtime private investment in Henderson and Transylvania counties, as this weeks Page 1 story reveals. The greenway is endorsed by many businesses and business organizations in the two counties and by the all-Republican Henderson County Board of Commissioners and has support in the Republican-controlled General Assembly. By needlessly casting it in a false light, Cawthorn doesnt help himself in any way we can fathom. Whats more, by making the spurious comment he ill-serves the economic interest of the 11th District and disrespects the many constituents across party lines who have worked hard to make the trail a reality. Tibet to maintain prolonged stability, high-quality development: official Xinhua) 09:40, March 29, 2022 A flag-raising ceremony is held to celebrate the Serfs' Emancipation Day at the square in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, capital of southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, March 28, 2022. (Xinhua/Jigme Dorje) LHASA, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Tibet will maintain prolonged stability and high-quality development, said Yan Jinhai, chairman of the people's government of southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region. Over the past 63 years, Tibet has witnessed great progress after suffering so much, which fully demonstrates the incomparable superiority of the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, said Yan on Sunday night during a local televised speech to mark the anniversary of emancipation of 1 million serfs. In 1959, the magnificent democratic reform completely destroyed Tibet's feudal serfdom under theocracy and liberated over 1 million serfs in the region. Those serfs gained freedom and dignity, becoming masters of the country, region and their own destiny, he said. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has united and led the people of all ethnic groups in Tibet in founding the Tibet Autonomous Region, establishing the socialist system, carrying out socialist construction, reform and opening up, and eliminating absolute poverty, he added. Official data shows that in 2021, the GDP of Tibet exceeded 200 billion yuan (about 31.4 billion U.S. dollars), an increase of about 7 percent over the previous year. Urban and rural per capita disposable personal incomes in Tibet increased by 13 percent and 14 percent respectively in 2021. A total of 693,300 local farmers and herders found jobs in 2021, generating overall incomes of 5.81 billion yuan. The average life expectancy in Tibet in 2021 rose to 72.19 years, and as of last year, the total length of operational roads in the region exceeded 120,000 km. The region will continue to give high priority to ecological conservation and boost green development, he added. Implementing the guidelines of the CPC for governing Tibet in a new era and the decisions and plans of the central authorities, Tibet is certain to embrace a brighter future through concerted efforts, innovation and reform, the regional chairman said. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) Set i n an enviable location on the edge of Vienna's famous Leopoldstadt district Radisson RED Vienna is a new-build, design-focused hotel and home to Istros, a unique rooftop bar overlooking the city and the Danube Canal. Radisson RED Vienna is the first Radisson RED hotel in Aust ria as Radisson Hotel Group introduces the city to this upscale, art and design-focused brand . A full-service hotel with a twist on the conventional, Radisson RED Vienna occupies a landmark building whose white metal facade, gold-tinted windows and glass house on the rooftop set it apart from the rest of the buildings in the neighborhood. The hotel's 179 rooms and suites feature a modern design with exposed-concrete ceilings, a series of paintings with red highlights, and large bay windows that double as comfortable seating where guests can enjoy the view of the canal and the inner city. Housed in a greenhouse-like structure with its terrace cantilevering over the floor below, the hotel's Istros rooftop bar is set to become Vienna's new place to be for drinks with a view. The exceptional space offers a cozy yet extravagant lounge feel, which blurs the boundaries between indoors and outdoors with a 360-degree panoramic view of Vienna. Viennese locals and hotel guests alike can enjoy expertly crafted cocktails, a great selection of wines and spirits, beer on tap and barista coffees while watching the sun set over the bustling city below and the Vienna Woods in the distance, listening to the DJ playing smooth tunes. The ground floor of Radisson RED Vienna is home to Sarai restaurant and its eclectic cuisine inspired by the Silk Road offering dishes from East Asia, India, the Middle East and Europe. Sarai is the social hub of the hotel with co-working spaces, a bar, and a comfortable lounge where guests and locals meet, work, eat and drink. On warm days, the inner courtyard offers al-fresco dining beneath the giant eye-catching mural by Viennese visual artist David Leitner, which mirrors the district's urban surroundings. Flexible meeting spaces include a fully-equipped meeting room with natural light, and a private boardroom with video-conferencing technology which connects to the courtyard and Sarai restaurant, extending the options for interactive and creative meetings. Radisson RED Vienna's location makes the hotel a great base for business and leisure travelers with easy access on foot or by public transport to the Schottenring metro stop just outside the hotel. Situated just outside the busy inner city, Radisson RED Vienna offers easy and convenient connections to the city's business hubs, the main station, and the airport. Vienna, the home of the Habsburg monarchy for more than six centuries, boasts an immense variety of palaces, museums, musical venues, gourmet destinations and shops to enjoy the finer things in life. From the Habsburg Palace complex in the center to the sprawling Schonbrunn palace, from the grand collections of the former emperors to the innovative MuseumsQuartier, cultural highlights abound. The 'City of Music' was home to composers like Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss and Haydn, and is still to this day a thriving live-music stage for the Vienna Philharmonic, the State Opera and the Musikverein concert hall. Radisson RED Vienna is the fourth hotel of the group in Vienna, joining Radisson Blu Style Hotel, Vienna in the first district, Radisson Blu Park Royal Palace Hotel, Vienna near Schonbrunn Palace and Hotel Rathauspark, a member of Radisson Individuals close to Vienna City Hall. Hotel website BWH Hotel Group announced today that it has promoted Ron Pohl to serve as the company's President of International Operations and President of WorldHotels. Pohl joined the organization in 2007 and previously served as Senior Vice President and Chief Operations Officer. In his new role, Pohl will be responsible for further strengthening the organization's presence around the world and enhancing the company's operations on a global level. With the acquisition of WorldHotels in 2019, BWH Hotel Group expanded the company's global offerings and reach, adding brands in the upper upscale and luxury segments in key destinations. WorldHotels is comprised of four unique collections, each with its own personality and style to appeal to the needs of the modern traveler. The collections include: WorldHotels Luxury, WorldHotels Elite, WorldHotels Distinctive and WorldHotels Crafted. As President of WorldHotels, Ron will be responsible for ensuring the organizations strategic goals are met to include increasing scale, driving exceptional revenue to hoteliers, and enhancing the brand's image. Prior to joining Best Western, Pohl spent 25 years with Boykin Management Company and Marriott Corporation. With Boykin, he served in a number of senior-level positions and, ultimately, Senior Vice President of Operations. He currently serves on the American Hotel & Lodging Association's Board of Directors, the Advisory Board for Grand Canyon University and previously served on the board of directors for the Convention & Visitors Bureau of Greater Cleveland. Throughout his career, Pohl has earned a number of awards. In 2017, he was named a silver winner in the Executive of the Year - Large Companies category by the Best in Biz Awards. Pohl received the award as result of his commitment to excellence, innovative vision, and investment in employees' professional development. Pohl was also named the 2017 gold winner in the Executive of the Year category by One Planet Awards, the world's premier awards program honoring the best in business and professional excellence in every industry from around the globe. Finally, Pohl received the prestigious American Hotel & Lodging Educational Institute Arthur Landstreet Award in 2016. Accor, the largest hotel operator in Australia and New Zealand with over 380 hotels, apartments and resorts, is delighted to announce the appointment of Shelley Perkins to the role of Senior Vice President of Talent and Culture, from 28th March 2022. With over two decades of experience, Shelley joins Accor Pacific from the Rosewood Hotel Group, where she was based in Hong Kong for the past three years as Chief Talent and Culture Officer. Prior to this role, Shelley worked for Accor in Paris as Global Senior Vice President-Talent Management, with a focus on global talent acquisition and development for Fairmont, Raffles and Swissotel (FRHI). This followed her position as Vice President at FRHI from 2014; where Accor retained Shelley's services after acquiring the group in 2016. Shelley previously spent 18 years with The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, where she started her career in operational roles, before she moved across into human resources and was appointed as Group Director of Human Resources for Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts in 2011. Shelley holds a graduate certificate in management from Central Queensland University and is a member of the Society of Human Resources Management. National real estate investment, management and development firm Lowe today announced that Terri A. Haack has been named Senior Vice President of Lowe and CoralTree Hospitality. Haack, a 20-year veteran of the firm and a member of its shareholder group, will continue to play an integral role in the senior leadership of Lowe and its operating company, CoralTree Hospitality, as she works with the firm's hospitality teams on their many new ventures around the country. Haack's experience in the firm and multiple hospitality industry leadership roles will assist Lowe in the pursuit of acquiring and developing luxury resort and hotel assets and will benefit CoralTree Hospitality's hotel, resort and vacation rental portfolio across the country. For the last15 years, Haack has served as President of Terranea Resort, a 102-acre Southern California coastal resort developed and co-owned by Lowe and managed by CoralTree Hospitality. Haack led Terranea through predevelopment to its 2009 opening and on to national recognition as one of the premier resorts in America. She was instrumental in fostering Terranea's commitment to the environment and the community. Under her leadership, the resort and its team have garnered an extensive list of awards, recognitions and accolades. An active industry and community leader Haack serves on the board of several organizations and has garnered numerous awards. Haack is currently a board member of the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA), was the first woman to receive its coveted "Resort Executive of the Year"award, was recognized with AHLA's 2020 Stars of the Industry "Paving the Way" Award and with its national award for General Manager of the Year. Haack was the 2019 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award by Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI) Los Angeles and nationally recognized by HSMAI as one of the Top 25 Minds in Sales, Marketing, and Revenue. She is Chairman of the AHLEF Educational Foundation Scholarship Committee, Past Chairman and Member of the Board of the California Hotel & Lodging Association (CHLA) and a founding Board Member and Past Chairman of the ForWard Executive Council. Haack is also a member of the strategic planning board for Marymount California University, member of the President's Advisory Council of Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy, on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee for Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles, and Past Chairman and Board member for the Palos Verdes Chamber of Commerce. With a distinguished career spanning more than 40 years in hotel and resort operations management, prior to Terranea, Haack was Executive Vice President and Managing Director at Lowe's Wild Dunes Resort in Charleston, SC. Prior to joining the company, Haack was Executive Vice President and Managing Director of Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, VA. Haack holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration and a Master of Arts in Organizational Management Self-service technologies (SSTs) have simplified many aspects of everyday life. However, their relatively recent introduction means that the pros and cons of SST adoption in the hotel industry are still being explored. The potential advantages of SSTs notwithstanding, hotels in China seem to have some reservations, say Professor Kam Hung of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and her co-researcher. Without a clear understanding of how preferences for SSTs over human staff are formed, hoteliers are perhaps right to be wary. Moving beyond previous work, this ambitious study integrates individual-level and organisational-level data on the construction of SST preferences. The researchers comprehensive findings offer a starting point for hoteliers wishing to effectively introduce SSTs. SSTs allow customers to enjoy services completely free of interaction with service providers. They are high-tech and low-touch interfaces, explain the researchers, in contrast with traditional interpersonal encounters, which are generally high-touch and low-tech. Self-check-in systems, robots, smart speakers and self-ordering gadgets are becoming increasingly common in hotels. Some are even testing AI-based SSTs such as facial recognition check-in kiosks. In China (and beyond), the pandemic has undoubtedly also accelerated hotels SST adoption in attempts to limit customeremployee contact. As of October 2020, more than 3000 hotels in China were equipped with robots from Yunji Technology, a service robot provider, report the authors. SST interfaces allow hoteliers to provide services in the physical absence of service employees, with the clear benefits of reducing operating costs and increasing profits. Whilst some have predicted a continuing boom in these technological trends, SST adoption in hotels has remained surprisingly low, perhaps because it all but eliminates customeremployee interaction. As a people-oriented service industry, hotels face difficult decisions regarding whether to introduce SSTs, say the researchers. For hotels to make more informed decisions, it is crucial to discover what influences SST preferences. This new knowledge could in turn help ease the technological transition to SSTs for both hoteliers and guests. Most research on SST adoption has focused on the individual-level factors that underpin technology acceptance, such as a persons thoughts, feelings and behaviours. However, this completely overlooks the possible consequences of external or managerial actions. Most technology adoption situations involve phenomena at multiple levels, including individuals, organisations, industries, and societies, stress the authors. Yet theories based on individual-level data have often been applied to organisational contexts. To tackle this problem, the researchers built a hierarchical framework to better reflect the multi-level situation of SST adoption and bridge the micromacro divide. The researchers conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 30 hoteliers who had implemented innovative SSTs in their hotels and 29 customers who had used hotel SSTs. The SSTs discussed included robots, check-in and check-out kiosks, mobile tablets, and smartphones. The majority of the 59 face-to-face interviews were conducted in Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Hong Kong. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed, allowing the researchers to conduct a thorough content analysis to identify and categorise major themes contained within the interviews. The four major themes that influenced customers and hoteliers SST preferences were environmental factors, the organisational context, service task attributes, and customer experiences. Environmental factors included public familiarity with SSTs, government regulations, and concerns about environmental protection. The organisational context included the relationships between hotels, technology companies, and other hotel stakeholders. The theme of service task attributes reflected how customers co-produced services with the service channel, be that SSTs or service employees. Finally, customer experiences during service encounters included aesthetic, affective, cognitive, actional, and social experiences. As an initial finding, the interviews revealed that for both hoteliers and guests, the preference for SSTs was swayed by the belief that SSTs are environmentally friendly. However, another environmental factor posed a problem for hoteliers. The Chinese government mandates that hotels upload guests identifying information in real time, the researchers explain, making self-check-in impossible without government approval. Both the hoteliers and the customers were sceptical about introducing technologies to the service industry. Many commented that hotel service is a human-oriented business, say the researchers. The use of emotionless technologies may result in indifference. Within the theme of organisational context, both hoteliers and customers spoke of the economic benefits of SSTs for hotels, such as decreased workload and enhanced efficiency. They considered SSTs to be better suited to new, business-focused and non-luxury hotels with more rooms, especially in the case of check-in and check-out kiosks. Moreover, SSTs were seen as conducive to brand marketing, report the researchers. For example, both hoteliers and customers agreed that innovative SSTs such as robots can be a selling point to attract guests. Concerning service task attributes, both hoteliers and customers criticised SSTs for their lack of customisation and personalisation. Both groups also noted instances in which SSTs fell short of human-delivered services, largely owing to the lack of any two-way communication. That said, both groups regarded SSTs as reliable, punctual, available 24/7, and less likely to make mistakes than service employees. Hoteliers stated that SSTs do not need rest, cannot fall ill, and cannot resign; rather, they are always on call, enabling hotel guests to receive service at any time, add the researchers. Within the theme of customer experiences, the preferences of both hoteliers and customers were influenced by whether the SST experience was superior to that of human services. Customers preferences were also guided by the devices appearance and voice, its usefulness, convenience, and cleanliness, as well as its ability to evoke pleasure, surprise, and relaxation. Respect, trust, safety, and privacy were also major contributors to SST preferences in both groups, although customers opinions on this were more divergent. In some cases, they felt relieved and safer when tackling problems on their own rather than depending on service employees, the researchers explain. Others, however, worried about their personal safety or the privacy of their information. In pinpointing differences between customers and hoteliers, the researchers were able to provide critical observations that might be instrumental for efficient SST introduction. In some cases, hoteliers placed importance on factors not even mentioned by customers. Moreover, hoteliers paid more attention to environmental and organisational factors, such as incompatibility with existing features and technology company contributions. Guests tended to focus on customer differences and the importance of consistency far more than hoteliers did. Hoteliers wishing to deliver desirable consumer experiences should pay more attention to guests' opinions, the authors conclude. Armed with this formidable body of data, the researchers then developed a hierarchical framework that integrated both individual- and organisational-level variables to explain the development of SST preference. This framework reflected the interplay between the external environment, the organisational context, internal service encounters, and core customer experiences in the development of preferences for SSTs over human staff. The findings can help hotel practitioners make more rational SST adoption decisions, conclude the authors, such as collaborating with technology companies, involving other hotel stakeholders in SST promotion, thoroughly testing SSTs before procuring them, and giving consideration to the time needed to introduce SSTs. This innovative study could support the introduction and implementation of SSTs in the hospitality industry in China. Its findings call for hoteliers to promote SST features that are desirable and important to their guests. The novel framework presented by the authors provides a springboard for hotel managers to better market SST-infused hospitality services and promote customer acceptance. Certainly, if service management can successfully consider customers SST-based experiences, this will contribute to organisational profitability and success in a competitive marketplace, note the authors. Beyond that, the proposed hierarchical framework is the first attempt to explain the multi-level determinants of technology adoption, and could potentially be adapted to specific innovations and individual or organisational situations. Liu, Chun and Hung, Kam (2021). A Multilevel Study on Preferences for Self-service Technology versus Human Staff: Insights from Hotels in China. International Journal of Hospitality Management, Vol. 94, 102870. About PolyU's School of Hotel and Tourism Management For over 40 years, PolyU's School of Hotel and Tourism Management has refined a distinctive vision of hospitality and tourism education and become a world-leading hotel and tourism school. Rated No. 1 in the world in the "Hospitality and Tourism Management" category according to ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2020, placed No. 1 globally in the "Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services" category in the University Ranking by Academic Performance in 2019/2020 and ranked No. 1 in the world in the "Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism" subject area by the CWUR Rankings by Subject 2017, the SHTM is a symbol of excellence in the field, exemplifying its motto of Leading Hospitality and Tourism. The School is driven by the need to serve its industry and academic communities through the advancement of education and dissemination of knowledge. With a strong international team of over 70 faculty members with diverse cultural backgrounds, the SHTM offers programmes at levels ranging from undergraduate degrees to doctoral degrees. Through Hotel ICON, the School's groundbreaking teaching and research hotel and a vital aspect of its paradigm-shifting approach to hospitality and tourism education, the SHTM is advancing teaching, learning and research, inspiring a new generation of passionate, pioneering professionals to take their positions as leaders in the hospitality and tourism industry. The School is driven by the need to serve its industry and academic communities through the advancement of education and dissemination of knowledge. With more than 70 academic staff drawing from 21 countries and regions, the SHTM offers programmes at levels ranging from undergraduate degrees to doctoral degrees. Through Hotel ICON, the School's groundbreaking teaching and research hotel and a vital aspect of its paradigm-shifting approach to hospitality and tourism education, the SHTM is advancing teaching, learning and research, inspiring a new generation of passionate, pioneering professionals to take their positions as leaders in the hospitality and tourism industry. Pauline Ngan Senior Marketing Manager +852 3400 2634 Hong Kong Poly London - Bourne Leisure, the leader in the UK domestic holiday market, today announces that its brands Butlins, Haven, and Warner Leisure Hotels, have partnered with fast-growing talent attraction technology provider, inploi, as it upgrades its recruitment marketing function and enhances the applicant experience. Competition for workers in the hospitality sector is at an all-time high, due to a decrease in the workforce supply as a result of the recent pandemic and other market pressures. Lou Thomas, People Director for Haven commented on the partnership saying that It has become more important than ever to be able to not only reach the hospitality workforce, but also retain their engagement when it comes to the application process. Having that visibility of the hiring pipeline, and ensuring that the applicants are nurtured from first interaction with a brand to completed application, is now possible thanks to inplois data-driven approach to reaching these key audiences. Anne Blyth, Talent Director at Haven, also noted that our partnership with inploi has been crucial in accelerating our recruitment strategy at Haven. We have seen a real increase in our ability to attract the best talent, underpinned by inplois excellent real-time data and reporting, which allows us to directly measure return on investment. The tailor-made campaigns they have built for Haven are testament to their ability to really understand our recruitment needs. Liz Lloyd, People director at Butlins commented working with the team at inploi has been an amazing partnership which has really helped us develop our reach externally through targeted recruitment campaigns and utilising other paid media and social platforms. They are a creative fast-paced business which goes out of their way to innovate and bring new ideas and approaches in a challenging recruitment market. inploi co-founder and CTO Alex Hanson-Smith adds, Our ability to access and monitor key data from the initial candidate pool to a completed hire allows us to offer our clients unparalleled visibility when it comes to the recruitment process. In the current competitive landscape, it is vital to be able to add real value when it comes to the cost - and time - of talent attraction, and we are excited to be continuing our partnership with Butlins, Haven and Warner Leisure Hotels to help them attract talent and enhance their existing recruitment marketing processes. We continue to attract high-profile clients with our unique SaaS platform that integrates seamlessly with the systems they already have in place. Were thrilled to be renewing and expanding our work together with Bourne Leisure in 2022. About Bourne Leisure Bourne Leisure is a leader in the UK domestic holiday market, employing over 16,000 team members, hosting 25,000 holiday-home owners, and attracting 4.5 million guests to 56 sites across the UK every year. It operates through its three brands, Haven, Butlins and Warner Leisure Hotels. Haven is the largest UK caravan operator with 41 holiday parks and 2.5 million visitors a year. About inploi inploi is uk-based talent attraction technology startup, on a mission to rebuild the infrastructure of online talent attraction. inploi's suite of SaaS products delivers candidate journey modernisation as a service, seamlessly integrating with existing HR systems to help companies attract, engage, and convert the future of their workforce, with extensive data and reporting underpinning their solutions. OTAs showed welcome recovery in 2021, buoyed by continued strength in domestic travel. After ending 2020 down 58%, U.S. OTA bookings nearly doubled despite the ups and downs of another pandemic year. According to Phocuswrights latest travel research report on the segment U.S. Online Travel Agency Market Report 2021-2025, OTAs delivered $65.2 billion in gross bookings in 2021, reaching 82% of pre-pandemic levels (2019). Three key developments in the U.S. OTA market: Full-service stands alone no more Expedia has long offered a near-full spectrum of travel products via its flagship Expedia.com site, allowing customers to book multiple products for a trip, while its U.S. competitors have heavily skewed toward one product line. Booking.com and HotelTonight have been rooted in accommodations, Hopper and CheapOair in flights. However, Booking.com and Hopper both made great strides in expanding into full-service OTAs, putting new pressure on Expedia. Money talks: sales, acquisitions and investments 2021 was a year for OTAs to examine portfolios and either slim down or supplement their offerings. For Expedia Group, the focus was simplifying business to operate more efficiently as a family of brands, and investing in businesses where they are best positioned to win. Conversely, Booking Holdings opened its wallet wide, spending more than $3 billion on acquisitions and investments in 2021. Hopper, which plays on a much smaller scale compared to Expedia and Booking but has big ambitions, also joined in the acquisition game, while raising $345 million in 2021 between its March Series F and August Series G rounds. Tours, activities & attractions: the remix Not long ago, the tours, activities and attractions segment was dubbed the next big source of growthin the travel industry. The category flourished in 2018, and OTA giants, including Booking and Expedia, were vying to position themselves as leaders. Since then, both OTAs have changed their approach to offering activities. Rather than sourcing all supply directly, Expedia and Booking have largely turned to partnerships with activities-focused travel companies. While changes had already been in play pre-pandemic, the OTAs have further enforced the partnership approach in 2021. Hopper, in contrast, entered into the space with its PlacePass acquisition. PlacePass was most notable as the supply source of Marriott's tours and activities booking platform, which Hopper will now power. OTAs continue to regain share of the total online market during travel's recovery in 2021. However, its important for travel companies to know that supplier websites maintained their majority stake in the U.S. online travel market with a 63% share of online gross bookings. This report helps companies understand how suppliers and OTAs compete, differentiate themselves and offer new value for travelers. Phocuswrights U.S. Online Travel Agency Market Report 2021-2025 provides a comprehensive view of the U.S. OTA landscape, including detailed market sizing and projections, distribution trends, key developments and more. For further intelligence for you and your entire company, subscribe to Phocuswright Open Access. This subscription puts the entire Phocuswright research library and powerful data visualization tools at your fingertips. Theres a reason executives around the world trust and reference Phocuswright research and data on a daily basis. See the benefits here. ABOUT PHOCUSWRIGHT INC. Phocuswright is the travel industry research authority on how travelers, suppliers and intermediaries connect. Independent, rigorous and unbiased, Phocuswright fosters smart strategic planning, tactical decision-making and organizational effectiveness. Phocuswright delivers qualitative and quantitative research on the evolving dynamics that influence travel, tourism and hospitality distribution. Our marketplace intelligence is the industry standard for segmentation, sizing, forecasting, trends, analysis and consumer travel planning behavior. Every day around the world, senior executives, marketers, strategists and research professionals from all segments of the industry value chain use Phocuswright research for competitive advantage. To complement its primary research in North and Latin America, Europe and Asia, Phocuswright produces several high-profile conferences in the United States and Europe, and partners with conferences in China, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. Industry leaders and company analysts bring this intelligence to life by debating issues, sharing ideas and defining the ever-evolving reality of travel commerce. The company is headquartered in the United States with Asia Pacific operations based in India and local analysts on five continents. Phocuswright is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Northstar Travel Media, LLC. (116 32nd Street, 14th Floor, New York, NY 10001 United States). www.phocuswright.com ABOUT NORTHSTAR TRAVEL GROUP Northstar Travel Group is the leading provider of business-to-business news, information, data, transactions and custom content solutions for the travel, meetings and hospitality industries. Brands under the Northstar umbrella include Travel Weekly, Travel Weekly China, Travel Weekly Asia, TravelAge West, Business Travel News, Phocuswright, Meetings & Conventions, M&C China, Web in Travel and Inntopia. Northstar is the industry leader in marketing solutions, custom content communications, content licensing and database management serving the travel and meetings industries. The company produces more than 52 face-to-face events, taking place in North and South America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Northstar is based in Secaucus, NJ, and is a portfolio company of EagleTree Capital. www.northstartravelgroup.com J. Scott Applewhite/Pool/AFP, HO / TNS Oil slumped as Russia said it was taking steps to de-escalate the conflict in Ukraine, while floating the possibility of a meeting between Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy. West Texas Intermediate erased earlier gains to trade down as much as 7.1 percent, below $100 in New York. Moscow said it would sharply cut military operations near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, though troops had already been bogged down there for weeks. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate People age 50 and older now are eligible to get a second COVID-19 booster, following authorization by federal regulators on Tuesday. But the action poses a tricky question for millions of Americans: Should they get that fourth shot and when? Until now, the recommendation of public health officials has been straightforward: Get all three shots two vaccinations and a booster as soon as you can. But now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given older adults the option of a second booster of Pfizer-BioNTech or the Moderna COVID-19, it is suddenly up to people and their doctors to decide what to do. The new step also expands on earlier federal approval of that added protection just for certain immunocompromised individuals, who under the action Tuesday were made eligible for a fifth shot. Current evidence suggests some waning of protection over time against serious outcomes from COVID-19 in older and immunocompromised individuals, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDAs Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement explaining the FDAs action. He noted that a second booster could help increase protection levels for these higher-risk individuals. A fourth dose now can be administered to people over 50 at least four months after receipt of a first booster dose of any authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccine, the FDA announced. But with coronavirus infections down in the Bay Area, and with recognition that vaccines power wanes over time, its up to individuals to calculate the most strategic time to get that next jab once the four months are up. Its very likely that a fourth dose will be needed not if, but when, said Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley said in advance of Tuesdays announcement. As for when to get it, he said, Im not sure. Fortunately, the third jabs immunity is waning when the number cases is going down. So the urgency is not there. The vaccine will become available after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gives guidance on who should get it. The CDC typically does that within a couple days after the FDA acts. This time, the agency may not issue a formal recommendation on whether to get a fourth dose, but rather state it as an option, according to news reports. In its decision, the FDA, which typically authorizes vaccines after hearing expert testimony before an advisory panel, skipped that panel in greenlighting a fourth dose for older adults and fifth dose, or third booster, for people whose immune system is compromised by a conditions that reduce the effectiveness of the vaccine, such as an organ transplant or cancer. Public health experts in the Bay Area say they were neither surprised nor alarmed by the idea that FDA would bypass the advisory-panel in its decision. Consider the annual flu shot, which is reconfigured each year and doesnt go through a full approval process, said Arnab Mukherjea, chair of Cal State East Bays Department of Public Health. If we use that framework, and weve gone through two rounds of the (COVID) vaccine, plus the booster, its not likely the safety profile of the fourth shot would change, he said. Mukherjea said trying to properly time a fourth shot is not worth stressing over. Just get it when you can, he said, because a new, dangerous variant can emerge at a moments notice. He pointed to the fast-spreading omicron variant, which showed up in the U.S. less than two weeks after it surged in South Africa. Other experts advise playing it more strategically. On Monday, Dr. Bob Wachter, UCSFs chief of medicine, posted a question on Twitter that he said was typical of those hes been asked lately: I'm over 50, had my 3 shots, AND had Covid in past 3 months. Should I get 2nd booster? In this case, with little data to go on, Wachter said hed hold off and rely on any immunity the persons past infection might provide, then get the second booster in a month or two if cases climb. Yet Wachter who turns 65 this year and has not had COVID also tweeted Monday that hell get the second second booster when he can, citing a new Israeli study of more than half a million people. The study, not yet peer reviewed, showed the COVID death rate falling 78% in people 60 to 100 years old who got a fourth Pfizer shot. The FDA in its announcement Tuesday cited the Israeli study to underpin its decision, saying it had revealed no new safety concerns with the fourth dose. Of course, in people who already had a single booster, the 78% represented a decline from one very low death rate to an even lower one, less than 0.1%, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at UCSF. Because another surge can show up suddenly, Chin-Hong said it was a good idea for the FDA to approve the second booster for older adults. Having all the ducks in a row by allowing a fourth shot now in those under 50 years old is reasonable, he said. Not everyone agrees. Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and editor at Kaiser Health News said the Israeli study offers no evidence for how long the extra protection lasts. From a scientific perspective, we still don't have definitive evidence that giving a second booster dose is the right way to go in older people, she told NPR this week. In any event it is unlikely that year after year additional boosters will be necessary for everyone, according to Dr. Monica Gandhi, a UCSF infectious disease expert. Thats because COVID vaccines generate something called cellular immunity, which is much longer lasting and protect many in an enduring fashion against severe disease, Gandhi wrote in an opinion piece last week for The Chronicle. COVID vaccines have so far shown that their greatest strength is in protecting people from severe illness and death, and that most people hospitalized for COVID are unvaccinated. Yet, most people arent racing to the vaccination clinic for the initial booster. Just 39% of eligible Californians have gotten their third shot, according to a new analysis from Dr. George Lemp, a retired University of California epidemiologist who regularly analyzes state coronavirus data. Jeffrey Anderson, a retired maintenance manager for the San Francisco Water Department is one of those who not only got a third shot, but also a fourth. I think its prudent of me to get as many vaccines as I can, said Anderson, who said hes mystified by peoples reluctance to protect themselves. He got his fourth shot on Thursday, qualifying because hes got a cancer called multiple myeloma that attacks the immune system. Im kind of obsessed with not getting COVID, he said. Meanwhile, the fate of $15.6 billion for pandemic needs including vaccination is in question after Democrats pulled it from a $1.5 trillion spending package approved by the House last week amid Republican objections. The idea that Congress would pull back on funding for vaccines, testing, treatment and fighting coronavirus variants just when the country may be getting the upper hand on COVID leaves California health experts shaking their heads. We have an opportunity now to prepare for the unknown and to not prepare for it because things are unknown would be foolhardy, said Swartzberg of UC Berkeley. Without funding to ensure availability of vaccines, all of this discussion will be moot, said Chin-Hong of UCSF. This will ensure that pandemic disparities will only widen in our country. As people continue to debate whether and when to continue with booster shots against COVID, the vaccine itself may change. By the winter, we may have an alternative, universal COVID vaccine available that may be more potent against future variants, Chin-Hong said. Many are working on this at this time. Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Jay L. Clendenin, MBR / TNS Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Evan Agostini, INVL / Associated Press Show More Show Less 3 of 3 Frazer Harrison, Staff / Getty Images Show More Show Less A disease that causes hair loss is at the center of the most talked-about moment at Sundays Oscars ceremony. Actress Jada Pinkett Smith disclosed four years ago that she has alopecia and its the reason she has shaved her head or worn turbans in public. Its unclear if comedian Chris Rock knew that when he joked about her baldness during Sunday nights ceremony, but Smith grimaced and her husband, actor Will Smith, strode to the stage, smacked Rock in the face and profanely told him not to talk about his wife. Two Fort Hood soldiers were sentenced to prison for their roles in a human smuggling operation involving several military members, the Department of Justice said. U.S. Army soldiers Isaiah Gore, 21, and Denerio Williams, 22, pleaded guilty in December 2021 to conspiring to transport undocumented individuals. Gore was sentenced to 30 months in prison, and Williams received a 24-month sentence. Both will serve three years of probation after their sentences. Fellow soldier Ivory Palmer, 21, pleaded guilty on Jan. 10 to participating in the human smuggling operation, and soldiers Emmanuel Oppongagyare and Ralph Gregory Saint-Joie pleaded guilty in August 2021. All three are awaiting sentencing. Homeland Security Investigations agents were alerted to the smuggling scheme on June 13, 2021, after Oppongagyare and Saint-Joie were arrested at the Hebbronville Border Patrol checkpoint for transporting two undocumented people. When questioned by authorities, the two said that Gore recruited them to smuggle the people for $2,000 per person. Authorities learned that Gore had approached numerous people with the same offer: to pick people up from the border while wearing their Army uniforms to avoid detection and drive them to Gore in North Texas, a federal complaint said. Williams participated in a smuggling run on June 11 with Oppongagyare. Authorities said they picked up someone in McAllen and drove the person, in the trunk of their vehicle, to an apartment complex in the San Antonio area. Also on June 11, Palmer and Saint-Joie made another trip south from Fort Hood in Killeen before they were informed that there was no longer anyone to pick up. Gore later told authorities that he was recruited by members of a human smuggling operation and was paid on delivery. Gore and Williams were permitted to surrender voluntarily to a U.S. Bureau of Prisons facility at a later date. Gore has since been discharged from the Army. U.S. District Judge Marina Garcia Marmolejo, who sentenced the two soldiers, said that as military members, they were not the average citizen, which justified a tougher sentence, the DOJ said. taylor.pettaway@express-news.net | @TaylorPettaway A Houston Police Department officer chasing a vehicle linked to a catalytic converter theft collided with another car early Tuesday, injuring the driver, authorities said. An officer in the North Shepherd area observed a suspicious vehicle around 1 a.m. and ran its license plate, linking it to prior catalytic theft case, according to Houston police. The officer initiated a traffic stop after the driver ran a red light, HPD added. After the driver pulled over, he rolled his windows down partially but fled when the officer approached him. More on HoustonChronicle.com: Houston to consider ban on e-cigarettes, vaping and hookahs in public areas After a six-minute chase, the police cruiser struck a sedan traveling northbound at the intersection of West Little York and Fairbanks North Houston roads, Houston police said. The officer received minor injuries and the 53-year-old woman driving the sedan was taken to Ben Taub Hospital. She is expected to survive. The cruiser caught on fire after the collision and the officer was able to get out, according to HPD. Investigators are attempting to locate the vehicle involved in the chase and are reviewing body camera footage, HPD added. Police are not releasing the description of that vehicle, saying it would jeopardize the investigation, according to HPD Asst. Chief Thomas Hardin. Anyone with information should contact HPD at 713-247-4072 or Crimes Stoppers at 713-222-8477. No other information is available at this time. This scene is breaking and updates will be added. Joel.Umanzor@chron.com A business owner was shot in the head Monday night during a home invasion in east Houston. The man was shot about 11:10 p.m. at his home in the 12700 block of Coulson Street near the Greens Bayou community. Police said they believe the man, who operates a trucking businesses, was targeted. He was taken to a local hospital in an unknown condition but was still conscious, police said. Four attackers kicked in the front door of the man's home while he was with his teenage son, HPD Lt. Ronnie Willkens said. More on HoustonChronicle.com: Houston to consider ban on e-cigarettes, vaping and hookahs in public areas The attackers put the son into the shower while they demanded money from his father before four shots rang out, HPD added. The attackers fled through the back of the home, taking expensive items. Detectives were attempting to gather video footage from the area late Monday to identify the attackers and find a motive, HPD said. Anyone with information on the shooting is encouraged to contact Houston police at (713) 884-3131 or Crime Stoppers at 713-222-8477. No other information is available at this time. Joel.Umanzor@chron.com A Klein Oak High School student has won a $90,000 settlement from a former teacher following a lawsuit in which she said several teachers harassed and disciplined her for sitting out the Pledge of Allegiance, according to a Tuesday release from the civil rights organization American Atheists. The nonprofit Texas Association of School Boards, which has a fund that provides liability coverage for member school districts, paid to resolve the case before it went to trial in Houston federal court, per the release. The student also sued the district but a representative said the district was was dismissed from the case, a decision that was later affirmed by a federal appeals court. LAWSUIT: Klein ISD staff failed to report sexual assault of sixth-grader by a classmate to police The 2017 suit brought by an attorney from American Atheists and a Houston civil rights lawyer says a minor identified by the initials "M.O." endured discrimination and harassment for declining to participate in the pledge because she objected to the words under God and believed that liberty and justice for all is not guaranteed for people of color. She said several Klein Oak teachers harassed her over several school years for failing to stand for the pledge and that several counselors, administrators and then-Principal Brian Greeney failed to take adequate measures to protect her rights. M.O. also states that she was repeatedly bullied by other students. Most of the teachers and administrators M.O. sued were dismissed based on qualified immunity, her lawyer said. The court found Klein ISD was not liable for the wrongful acts of its employees because it had not shown deliberate indifference to the students rights. TASB issued a statement Tuesday stressing that it was not involved in the settlement of the case, but noting that it oversees a risk management fund that provides liability coverage for member districts such as Klein ISD. In that capacity, the Fund helped Klein ISD and their employee, Mr. Arnold, with a legal defense when they were sued, TASB said. Its notable that most of the claims filed against the district were dismissed. The defendant who settled is sociology teacher, Benjie Arnold. He is accused of repeatedly harassing the student during two consecutive school years. Arnold threatened he would fail students who refused to participate in the pledge, telling them, What youve done is leave me no option but to give you a zero, and you can have all the beliefs and resentment and animosity that you want, according to the release. Arnold was also reportedly captured on audio offering to pay for students to move to Europe if they didnt like living in the U.S. Emotional distress caused by the harassment led the student to withdraw from Klein ISD. She returned to the district after being homeschooled for some time, but the discrimination continued and intensified, the suit says. The harassment led the student to suffer panic attacks that greatly interfered with her education. Her family invested more than $10,000 in costs related to homeschooling, the lawsuit states. On HoustonChronicle.com: Civil rights case by Cy-Fair student expelled after sitting for Pledge of Allegiance gets nod for trial A key decision on this matter is West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, a 1943 case in which the Supreme Court ruled students who objected to the pledge for religious reasons could not be forced to participate. Students may opt out of standing or reciting the pledge if their parent requests it in writing, according to Geoffrey Blackwell, of American Atheists, who represented M.O. in the lawsuit. He added that exempted students must stand or sit quietly during the pledge and must not disrupt the classroom in any way. Representatives for the former student said the financial settlement is a reminder that all students have a First Amendment right to free speech. It is incredible the time and money spent by the Klein Independent School District to stop a students free speech, Texas civil rights attorney Randall Kallinen said in a statement. School staff need to teach the Constitution not violate it. rebecca.hennes@chron.com This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate The gag order restricting some communications in litigation surrounding the fatal Astroworld festival came front and center Monday as lawyers argued whether the courts decision should stand. Concerns over the publicity order signed last month by 11th District Court Judge Kristen Hawkins surfaced soon after rapper Travis Scott in early March publicized the debut of Project HEAL, a nonprofit partially aimed at addressing security at large-scale events. The initiative is also expected to fund scholarships at historically Black colleges and mental health treatment in low income communities of color. Plaintiff lawyers in early March argued for more restrictions and said that while Scotts project is designed to garner goodwill, it could prejudice the family of Astroworlds youngest casualty: 9-year-old Ezra Blount. He was among 10 people who died from compression asphyxia following a crowd surge at the NRG Park festival. Blount and the other plaintiffs herein do not have the high profile ability to sway public opinion as Defendant Scott an international music star and his sophisticated media team do, Texas-based lawyer Robert Hilliard wrote in a motion. Plaintiffs lawyers do, but they are prohibited from doing so under the Publicity Order as currently worded. Hawkins issued the gag order Feb. 15, preventing attorneys on both sides from making extrajudicial statements, soon after hundreds of Astroworld cases were consolidated into one filing. In a recent court setting, the civil jurist said attorneys were allowed to discuss the court proceedings and filings in the case. Lawyers for ABC News Laura Lee Prather and former U.S. Attorney Ryan Patrick asked Hawkins in the ceremonial courtroom to either clarify the order or vacate it entirely. To date, litigants and participants in this proceeding have treated the Order as a complete prohibition against talking to the media even about the underlying events that transpired that are of grave concern, stated Prather and Patricks letter to the judge. Hawkins ultimately asked lawyers on both sides to work together to propose changes if any to the publicity order. She would make a decision at a later conference, she continued. There does not have to be an agreement, Hawkins said. In court, Neal Manne for Live Nationthe concerts promoter said the judges publicity order is not as restrictive as interpreted. Theres nothing that prevents the public from attending or reporting on what happens in the courtroom, Manne said. The media is free to report on anything they want. Besides the gag order, the judge on Monday approved a motion sealing the autopsy reports of those killed during the concert. In addition to Blount, the others killed in the concert are Mirza Baig, 27; Rodolfo Pena, 23; Madison Dubiski, 23; Bharti Shahani, 22; Franco Patino, 21; Jacob Jurinek, 20; John Hilgert, 14; Axel Acosta, 21; and Brianna Rodriguez, 16. nicole.hensley@chron.com This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate City Council on Wednesday will consider a proposal to bar the use of e-cigarettes and any kind of vaping in public spaces under Houstons smoking ordinance. The move would update the citys rules for public smoking, which were written before electronic cigarettes existed, Health Department spokesman Porfirio Villarreal said. Houston currently bars tobacco smoking in enclosed public places and seating areas and within 25 feet of any building. Smoking in covered bus stops and light rail stops also is prohibited. The proposal would add all forms of vaping including electronic cigars, pipes and hookahs to the smoking ban, enacted in 2007 to reduce public secondhand smoke exposure. It would not affect hookah bars or other private areas where smoking is permitted, Villarreal said. On HoustonChronicle.com: Council OKs new Houston police contract that gives officers 10.5 percent raises E-cigarettes, sometimes called e-cigs, vaporizers or vape pens, are filled with a liquid nicotine derived from tobacco that becomes an aerosol when the user inhales. Some also contain flavorings that critics say are aimed at attracting kids and teenagers. Health Department officials began researching the possibility of including e-cigarettes in the citywide smoking ban last year and brought the proposed amendment to the councils Quality of Life Committee, which took up the cause. The amendment arrives before the council at a time of rising e-cigarette use among middle and high school students, with Health Department data showing that as many as 1 in 10 Houston middle school students vape. The committee chairman, District I Councilmember Robert Gallegos, on Tuesday urged his colleagues to support the proposal Wednesday. While scientists do not have a full picture of the long-term health effects of using e-cigarettes, research suggests the ultra-fine particles within the vapor can increase a persons risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer, said Ronald Peters Jr., a retired professor at the University of Texas at Houstons School of Public Health who studied teen vaping behavior. Banning public e-cigarette use is a common-sense way to reduce the risk of exposing children and vulnerable people to those potentially harmful vapors, he said. In addition to removing vaping aerosols from public settings, the ban would have the added benefit of reducing kids exposure to all forms of nicotine use, he said. I think it makes a lot of sense because of the social norms involved, Peters said. Some people may say, Whats the harm in vaping in front of kids? The bottom line is, kids watch adults. If they see people vaping, they may want to do it, too. A growing body of evidence shows vaping as a teen can be a gateway to developing a lifelong nicotine addiction. Dr. Lindy McGee, a pediatrician and assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine, said local smoking ordinances can and should play a major role in preventing kids from getting hooked on the stimulant. Ten years ago, all of us in public health were celebrating the decline of cigarette use in teens, she said Tuesday during City Councils public comment session. Little did we know the vaping industry would emerge and, using social media, youth-enticing flavors and highly addictive nicotine, they hooked this new generation on their product. On HoustonChronicle.com: Mayor Turner names new Houston housing director after contract scandal Under the citys smoking ordinance, businesses are required to post no smoking signs and enforce the ban on their premises, with violations fined up to $2,000. Most restaurants support including e-cigarettes in the ban, said Melissa Stewart, executive director of the Greater Houston Chapter of the Texas Restaurant Association. Health officials consulted the chapter on the proposed amendment in December, she said. Many restaurants have already been enforcing a no-vaping rule at their own discretion, Stewart said Tuesday. Overall, what we have seen is most restaurants have treated vaping like cigarettes. They have not allowed it. Where others see a public health opportunity, Lisa Aburumman, the owner of Union of Humanity Smokeshop, sees the ban as a frivolous local ordinance unlikely to deter vape users. These laws are for optics, said Aburumman, 55. What ends up happening is the laws are primarily enforced on poor people taking buses and standing in public places next to buildings. Aburumman, whose customers primarily are students at the nearby University of Houston, said vaping is too discreet and too widespread to regulate. Despite suffering from asthma, she believes smoking and vaping should be a matter of personal choice. I dont smoke and I dont advocate for smoking, she said. I advocate for adults doing what they want. Many vape users seemed not to know about the proposal. Ron Obert, an employee at Eado Glass and Smoke, said he had not heard about the upcoming vote, but he questioned the wisdom of limiting vaping, which he said is less harmful than traditional smoking. If its all really about health, just let people keep doing the healthier option, Obert said. nora.mishanec@chron.com Several weeks after severing ties with Russia, Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp has offered direct aid to current students from Ukraine. The system has identified at least 14 students who will qualify for free tuition, fees and limited living expenses, Associate Vice Chancellor Tim Eaton said. Those students will receive funding under the Regents Grant Program, which was created after Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and is offered to students who have significant hardships. Sharp said he is also opening some university facilities for displaced professors and students from Ukraine to continue their research in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of their country. We must strive to help those at our universities who have been affected by Putins abhorrent actions, Sharp said in a letter Tuesday to presidents across the system. Our students from Ukraine are in a unique, sad and difficult position as their homeland is under attack, their family members are either fleeing to safety or fighting to save their countrys sovereignty. In many cases, our students from Ukraine will no longer have homes to return to, and their parents remain unable to work or worse. By this author: Texas A&M students to weigh in on newspapers future as some raise censorship concerns Serhii Kryvenko, a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in petroleum engineering, said his family has been fortunate compared with other Ukrainians. He is from Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine not in the border regions where many of the Russian attacks have been centered and some of his family members have remained home while his mother, younger brother and grandmother fled to Austria. But he has still heard from friends who sat in basements as Russian bombardments sounded overhead, and others whose homes were destroyed, Kryvenko said. Its sometimes a little bit hard to focus, because this occupies all of your mind, he said. Im trying to basically distract myself, not to even read news because sometimes its very terrifying. Kryvenko said he is encouraged by the unity of the Ukranian people and support from the U.S. But he said he hopes the aid to Ukraine will continue, even if news coverage eventually dwindles. The economic boost is a relief, he said. Its definitely very helpful, and Im very grateful to Texas A&M, he said. Hopefully they can be a good example to other universities. The Texas A&M University System has 11 campuses, eight state agencies, a health science center and a research campus in Bryan. In early March, Sharp directed school leaders to sever ties with Russian entities by immediately dissolving all agreements related to academics, research and intellectual property. Sharp has now asked the presidents to compile lists of students who can apply for the hardship grant. Tuition would cover the next semester and potentially more if the war continues. samantha.ketterer@chron.com Nearly 500,000 people have traded in a different state's license and registered as a Texas driver since the pandemic began suggesting that hundreds of thousands of people have moved to Texas since March 2020. Specifically, 468,426 people from the other 49 states and the District of Columbia have registered a driver's license in one of the 254 Texas counties, as of January 2022. About 20% of these people are from California. More than 92,560 former Californians forfeited their driver's licenses in Texas during the pandemic. That's nearly three times the number of Florida drivers, the second largest group who surrendered their licenses. The largest percentage of people (14.9%) who surrendered their licenses in Harris County are from California. Similar to state trends, the next highest group of people were former Floridians. They made up about 9.5% of new Harris County residents during the pandemic. Throughout all of Texas, the largest percentage of new residents surrendered their licenses in Harris County. Although Travis County had only 41,375 people trade in their old driver's licenses, 20,000 fewer people than in Harris County, the highest percentage of Californians who traded in their licenses (around 12.5%) did so in Travis County. Comal County, located just north of San Antonio, had the highest ratio of licenses surrendered in the county to the county population. The number of surrendered licenses peaked in October 2021, when 29,555 people officially became Texas residents. Though they surrendered their licenses in October, they did not necessarily move to Texas in October or within 90 days of the date they traded in their licenses. Only 13 individuals surrendered their licenses in Harris County during April and May 2020, which drops the monthly average during Covid to 2,616 people every month. But in 2021 alone, an average of 3,371 people forfeited their previous state's licenses in Harris County every month. About the data The Texas Department of Public Safety states that new Texas drivers register their vehicle within their first 30 days in the state and get a new driver's license within the first 90 days. Though people who do not meet this deadline may go scot-free, obtaining a Texas driver's license (rather than keeping their old one) can help the new resident vote in the state. Not all new residents may complete this task, but those who do must prove their residency in the state and are likely new residents. The data could also include people whose previous state's driver's licenses have expired, and though they may have lived in Texas for years, they must now have a license in the state in which they reside. The United States Postal Service also provides data on moving based on people who arrange to forward their mail to a specific location. However, not all people who move complete this task and their forwarding information may not address every member of their household. Plus, in a state where about 79% of workers drive to work by themselves and 10% carpool, new residents likely need to drive and choose to certify residency and ability to vote by securing a license. The data does not account for new residents who do not drive and thus have no need for a license nor does it account for people who have opted to keep their licenses from a previous state. During a rush of travelers returning from spring break and other major weekend events, lines at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport wrapped outside the entrance, and rental cars were left abandoned at the drop-off area Monday morning. Never seen anything like this, said Kelly Williams Nagel, who posted an image of a long line of abandoned rental cars at the airport. TSA lines are 3K deep, wrapped outside ridiculous. On HoustonChronicle.com: We dont want people to needlessly kill them: Texas park officials urge people not to kill rattlesnakes In an emailed statement, an airport spokesperson said the rental car issue began with one stalled-out car blocking the drop-off curb. Rental car staff instructed the customer to go ahead and leave the vehicle with the keys in it, the spokesperson said. This caused other passengers with rental cars to follow suit, and leave their rental cars alongside the curb. Regarding TSA security lines, the spokesperson said more travelers were attempting to fly out of Austin than normal before 8 a.m. Security officials screened 8,252 passengers before 8 a.m., well above their typical 6,600 passenger screening level. The higher follow likely came from spring break travelers leaving Texas and others who attended events such as the Texas Relays, Dell Masters and NASCAR over the weekend. Passengers took to social media to express their frustration. Joey Dillion, who posted about his experience on Twitter, called his experience leaving Austin Monday morning an apocalypse. Dillion included an image that showed several travelers unloading suitcases from their vehicles well ahead of the drop-off gate. Closer to the security checkpoint, and a day earlier, Alex Wild said on Twitter that he spent 90 minutes at the TSA checkpoint on Sunday. He shared photos of the line snaking around outside the terminal. Made my flight by just 2 minutes but there were a lot of ppl in line with me who missed theirs, he said in his tweet. To address the issue, the spokesperson said the airport would work to fill staff vacancies and help expedite future airport expansion plans. While operations have returned to normal, we continue to ask passengers to arrive a minimum of two hours in advance now through early April, the spokesperson said. timothy.fanning@express-news.net A 21-year-old man is facing multiple charges after an alleged hours-long crime spree ended in a physical altercation with the owner of a pickup truck he was trying to take from a Buc-ee's in New Braunfels. Austin Graham Neely attempted to take two vehicles from the Buc-ee's parking lot in the 2400 block of Interstate 35 North after 2 a.m. on Sunday, according to police spokesman David Ferguson. Ferguson said that after Neely's first attempt to steal a vehicle was unsuccessful, he then went inside the store and took two bottles of energy drinks and a soda. On HoustonChronicle.com: Klein ISD student wins $90K settlement after being harassed for sitting out the Pledge of Allegiance He then wrestled away a set of keys from a man at a gas pump and tried to ride off in the man's pickup, Ferguson said. The owner of the truck, however, managed to open the passenger-side door and get inside the vehicle. The pair fought inside the pickup truck before Neely exited the vehicle and attempted to flee, Ferguson said. The truck's owner, however, tackled Neely and held him down until police arrived. During their investigation, Ferguson said they found a damaged 2016 Nissan that had been taken from a nearby home Friday night. Police believe Neely was responsible for burglarizing a home from which he took the Nissan. On HoustonChronicle.com: See Houston as it was 30 years ago in photos of celebrities, AstroWorld and the Goodyear blimp Police said Neely was taken to a local hospital to treat his injuries from the fight. Ferguson said the 21-year-old also attempted to fight investigating officers. According to Comal County Jail records, Neely has been charged with burglary, robbery three counts of vehicle theft and assault on a peace officer. His bail has been set at $45,000, records show. timothy.fanning@express-news.net This article was originally published by The Texas Tribune. NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico The COVID-19 vaccine shot that went into Nohemi Lima Eusebios arm as she sat on a dusty yellow school bus at the U.S. border checkpoint in Laredo was just days away from going in the trash in Dallas. The dose had been in a batch earmarked for Texas residents, but it was about to expire at a clinic nearly 500 miles away because nobody used it. Instead, it turned out to be a potential lifesaver for Lima Eusebio, a 44-year-old single mom whose job in the close quarters of a factory across the border in Nuevo Laredo put her at risk for the virus and made her fear for the safety of her loved ones. I was worried a lot because my elderly mom lived with me, and I was worried that going to work was a risk of contracting the virus, and I would infect my mom and my [15-year-old] daughter, she said. Getting a shot in her hometown where persistently high demand and low supply meant long lines at places that had vaccines took hours and made her miss too much work. Thats how Lima Eusebio wound up in a secure area of the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge on a cloudy weekday morning earlier this month, sitting on the bus with her sleeve rolled up, surrounded by her factory coworkers. As the bus idled on the Laredo side of the bridge, Mexican and U.S. health care workers traipsed down the aisle carrying vaccine doses stacked in buckets hanging around their necks the kind that children use to sell gum to tourists on the corners near the mercado in downtown Nuevo Laredo. They injected Lima Eusebio, signed her vaccine card and then the bus turned around and took them all back into Mexico. The dose Lima Eusebio received, flown down on a private plane piloted by the attorney son of Laredos local top health official, was among nearly 200,000 that have been administered to Nuevo Laredo residents since last summer part of a unique binational vaccination program thats credited with bringing up vaccine rates and fighting the virus on both sides of the Rio Grande. This is a very essential humanitarian effort because, in order to get herd immunity in our area, we need to make sure everybody's vaccinated to avoid variants and to avoid cross-border transmission, said Victor Trevino Jr., who oversees the program and whose father, Dr. Victor D. Trevino, is the Laredo Health Authority. Launched last June as the state grappled with both a rising wave of deaths related to the delta variant and a sharp drop in demand for the vaccine in Texas and nationally, the cross-border vaccination program aimed to address a dismally low vaccine rate an estimated 7% at the time in Nuevo Laredo that was creating problems in highly vaccinated Laredo, which was reporting 10 times that vaccination rate, among the highest in the state. It was also a good way, organizers said, to use up doses that had suddenly become a surplus in the U.S., where nearly 50% of the population were fully vaccinated by the time the Laredo program was up and running. Meanwhile, Mexicos early vaccine rollout was painfully slow because the countrys government had prioritized people in rural areas where social distancing was easier. The rollout was also hampered by logistical issues, with some people reportedly waiting in line for up to 12 hours for their first dose. By the time the cross-border vaccination program launched in June, Mexico was reporting only a 10% vaccination rate. About 10 months after its launch, the program is still giving about 2,000 doses per day, Trevino Jr. said which means the buses going back and forth across the bridge represent roughly 10% of the total doses being administered across Texas on a daily basis. Nuevo Laredo, which has nearly half a million residents, has seen its vaccination rate soar to about 50% now, by most estimates still far below Laredos 96.5% rate but seven times more than when the program began. Its now one of the most highly vaccinated cities in Mexico, Trevino Jr. said. Shots arrive by car, plane and 18-wheeler The doses used by the Laredo program are donated by providers like doctors, hospitals and pharmacies who would rather give away their excess supplies than throw them out, the senior Trevino said. Theyre picked up by car, plane and truck any secure way they can find, organizers said. Sometimes there are 18-wheelers that are coming from other states passing through Dallas or San Antonio or somewhere, and we coordinate with trucking companies and if they can pick them up, they do that, Trevino Sr. said. So its quite a show. But its worth the effort. A provider that donated nearly 20,000 doses this week had initially tried to give them back to the state because they said demand completely stopped, said Trevino Jr., who frequently picks up the doses in his plane or car. But they said to use them or transfer them. The state stopped warehousing doses months ago after supplies exceeded the demand, so providers now order them directly from the federal government, which purchases them and allocates them at no cost to the providers. Its a bedrock public health principle that reducing an infectious disease on one side of a border will help reduce that disease on the other side, especially when there is a lot of cross-border traffic, said Chris Van Deusen, spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services. Texas health officials say the state is not directly involved in the program, other than to track the doses donated by Texas providers to the binational effort. But they say that addressing the virus on both sides of the border is an effective approach for this vibrant and close-knit border community. The program is slated to continue at least through April, when it will be reevaluated to see if its still needed. A look at the numbers shows that theres still very much a demand: Last week, Trevino Jr. said he picked up 10,000 doses in his car from a provider in San Antonio. This week, hell be picking up 17,000 more. A spin class sparks a solution Laredo and Nuevo Laredo have been linked for the better part of two centuries, their downtowns separated by only a narrow slice of river. Its one city. It just happens to be in two countries, said state Rep. Richard Pena Raymond, a Laredo Democrat and early proponent of the program. Adults and children in Nuevo Laredo often go to work and school every day in Laredo, and a large number of Laredoans have family on the other side of the river. Traveling back and forth for shopping, medical care and celebrations is the norm. We work hand in hand, and we feel like we have the same purposes because we cross the bridge daily, said Estefania Araiza, a Nuevo Laredo nurse who administers doses on the bus for the program. Last summer, Trevino Sr. was disturbed by the vaccination numbers. Laredo had one of the highest vaccination rates in the state, but the hospitals were still getting patients every day who were close to death, many of them Nuevo Laredo residents. Trevino, who is also a family doctor, said he had patients from Nuevo Laredo whose family members weren't yet vaccinated. Doctors and nurses across the river were dying at an alarming rate, he said, because they couldnt get vaccinated. Trevino knew that there was no way to truly protect both cities unless both sides of the border were highly vaccinated. One day in late May, Trevinos son was brainstorming the problem with a friend while they pedaled side by side in a spin class at a Laredo gym. They talked about collecting expiring doses and delivering them to Nuevo Laredo, but that idea came with a raft of logistical issues, the biggest of which was that the U.S. government had no authorized program to donate those doses. And even if the U.S. government approved cross-border donations, the doses would likely end up mired in the same kinds of logistical problems that were bogging down Mexicos vaccination effort. It was almost impossible to get a shot in Mexico at the time, recalled Araiza, the nurse who helps administer the vaccine on the buses. Trevino Jr. and his friend discussed administering the shots to Mexican citizens in Laredo, but dismissed the idea because at the time, the bridge was closed to all but essential workers from Nuevo Laredo. What if we vaccinate them on the bridge? Trevino Jr. suggested. That way, people who did not have essential worker status wouldnt technically be entering the U.S. as long as the buses didnt leave the secured checkpoint area, which would work as long as border officials agreed to the plan. The friend was enthusiastic and, while they pedaled in the spin class, placed a call to Carmen Lilia Canturosas, a relative who was running for mayor of Nuevo Laredo at the time she won the election a few weeks later. She used her connections to get the program rolling her father and brother were both former mayors, so she knew everyone, Trevino Jr. said. After winning her election, Canturosas called the Mexican Consulate in Laredo, who reached out to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which runs the checkpoints on the U.S. side of border bridges. CBP officials agreed to let them vaccinate people in the secure area of the bridge only if the Nuevo Laredo residents stayed on the buses. A few weeks later, the factory workers and their families arrived at the bridge on factory-owned school buses for shots. Trevinos father, meanwhile, reached out to a prominent doctors association in Nuevo Laredo and began getting groups of front-line health workers vaccinated on buses owned by hospitals. Modern buses owned by Mexican bus lines soon joined the effort as more people signed up for shots. Then in November, the international bridges reopened to all visitors on the U.S.-Mexico border just in time for the Christmas holiday, and popularity of the program exploded, Trevino Jr. said. For Fabiola Escobar, a 32-year-old factory worker, getting the opportunity to get her booster shot on the bus with her coworkers rather than miss another day of work trying to get one in Nuevo Laredo was a game changer. She can be less fearful, she said. And she can start getting back to normal life. When the pandemic first started, we were all worried wed get sick and for it to get more serious, Escobar said. But now that we have our boosters, I feel like we can be less worried and work more comfortably. In late November, Nuevo Laredo city officials honored the senior Trevinos efforts to vaccinate their residents, which included several programs in addition to the buses, by awarding him the keys to their city in a unanimous decision. It is a monumental effort were doing, Trevino Sr. said. And hopefully itll go down in history. Sergio Flores and Uriel J. Garcia contributed to this story. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department WICHITA, Kan. (AP) One of two flamingos that escaped from a Kansas zoo during a storm 17 years ago has been spotted on the coast of Texas, wildlife officials said. The Coastal Fisheries division of Texas Parks and Wildlife confirmed Tuesday to The Associated Press that the African flamingo known as No. 492 because of the number on its leg band was captured on video shot March 10 by an environmental activist near Port Lavaca, Texas, at Rhodes Point in Cox Bay. Officials were able to make out the bird's leg band on the video. Over the next seven days, around 2,000 tenants and their families in Houston are at risk of being evicted in court. The vast majority of these residents will not have a lawyer or even a volunteer knowledgeable about tenants rights by their side when the justice of the peace rules on their case. That ought to change, and it has begun to, thanks to a pandemic-era order by the Texas Supreme Court that has since September 2021 required justices of the peace to permit tenants to bring legal representation or volunteers from legal aid groups to their eviction trials. Not every tenant has that help available, thanks mostly to funding challenges, but prior to the Supreme Courts rule, it was up to each JP whether they allowed the representation even when it was available. Thats a problem because some of the most consequential decisions being made in Harris County happen in JP courtrooms, where JPs have an incredible amount of discretion. Evictions can mean a lot more than having to simply pack up and find a new home. Sociologist Matthew Desmond has spent years detailing how eviction sets off a hard-to-escape cycle that harms children and adults and can serve as a cause, and not merely a symptom, of poverty. Landlords have a right to collect the rents owed to them, but when a tenant is facing a consequence as serious as eviction, no court should disallow as much help as possible to navigate the often tangled legal proceedings. Before someone is set to lose [their] housing, I think its a basic right for them to be able to represent themselves in court, and not just on their own, but with legal representation, explains Dana Karni, managing attorney for Lone Star Legal Aids Eviction Right to Counsel Project. Its different than: Theres a form at the end of the hallway, go fill it out and good luck, adds Karni. We actually argue before a judge for our clients. The Supreme Courts order is set to expire in May, and after that it will be up to the justices of the peace to decide on a courtroom-by-courtroom basis whether to permit tenants or landlords, for tht matter - to bring counsel to the hearings. The court should extend the order, as it has other pandemic protections and gives justices of the peace time to formalize a policy for Harris County that will welcome legal representation indefinitely. Texas has comparatively few protections for tenants. But the pandemic changed that, thanks to rental assistance programs and measures meant to prevent or mitigate the impacts of eviction. Though many tenants and landlords struggled to access assistance, at least in Harris County the numbers suggest that these measures had a collective impact. After a steep drop in eviction filings in the early months of the pandemic, the numbers have crept steadily upward. In February 2020, just before the pandemic hit, there were some 5,556 eviction cases filed in Harris County compared to 1,894 one year later. Now, two years on, cases are up above pre-pandemic levels, with 6,833 cases filed in February 2022. And the total amount of rent being requested has jumped as well, from $7,460,957 for the month of February 2020 to $18,714,346 for February 2022, according to a dashboard created by data science firm January Advisors. Its no surprise that evictions are back up. Pandemic housing assistance has mostly dried up, and even the landlords who were most patient during the worst of the COVID lockdowns, have begun to seek back rent and evict those who cant or wont pay. But with the number of cases rising, theres never been a more important time to allow tenants who have access to legal help to use it when they need it most. The help has been effective for those who got it. Of the 1,788 clients helped by Lone Star Legal Aid since the pandemic began, 80 percent remained housed. When cases did go to litigation, the majority were dismissed, according to Lone Star. Avoiding an eviction doesnt suddenly create a stable housing situation, though. Howard Bookstaff, general counsel for the Houston Apartment Association, said generally tenants are given plenty of time before evictions are begun. And he said the association welcomes the role lawyers can play in helping establish errors in the record that could mean the difference between an eviction or remaining in ones home. Lawyers can present evidence to show tenants did, in fact, pay rent, or that they completed repairs that should be deducted from their rent. We applaud that, thats good, Bookstaff said. But if the tenant remains in arrears, or fails to pay new rent, he adds, the landlord will simply refile meaning that the eviction was delayed but not prevented. Even so, days can make a difference for tenants living paycheck to paycheck, for example, or working to secure a stable place to live. Requiring JPs to let lawyers or other help in the room wont address the underlying issues that have so many local households on the brink of eviction in the first place. But it will help make sure that the system is as fair as possible. Regarding Sorry, Ted. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson weathered storm of inane questions, insinuations from GOP, (March 24): In the summer of 1967, I was an 18-year-old in Beaumont, getting ready for my first year of college. That summer, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall as a justice to the U. S. Supreme Court. Overjoyed, I discussed this with attorney Elmo Willard. Willard had served as a student aid for Marshall's team as they prepared their presentation for the Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. He told me stories about their trials and tribulations in preparing the case. Willard encouraged me to go to law school and to be ready when and if my time to stand up came. Each evening during Justice Marshall's confirmation hearing, I would consume all the reports from the three national news networks and read all the articles from the Houston Post and Chronicle and the Beaumont Enterprise and Journal. For the last two days, I have watched the confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. It made me recall the confirmation hearings of Justice Marshall. Dixiecrats (Anti-civil rights southerners, conservatives and their sympathizers) tried to paint Justice Marshall as soft on crime and as someone whose thoughts and beliefs were out of line with most Americans. The same tactics used against Justice Marshall are being regurgitated at Judge Brown Jacksons confirmation hearing. I am proud that Judge Jackson went high with her responses when her detractors went low. As Black Americans, we must continue to believe in the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and not let pessimism win. We must not let these new Dixiecrats steal our joy, as the nation moves forward. Clayton E. Mayfield, Beaumont Having been alive long enough to experience 10 presidents, Ive certainly seen changes in our country. The influence on the evolution of our government that each of these presidents and their political parties has had has been extensive. Personal opinion aside, its safe to say that in todays climate, the general public would say the effectiveness of our government is at a low point, maybe more than ever before. Todays political processes and politicians do not inspire trust. That is, with one glowing exception: the Supreme Court. I think it remains a beacon of honesty and fair play. I still believe it fully maintains its original design and intention. Before we talk about Ketanji Brown Jackson, we must hold a mirror up and view the quality of the questions asked. Few questions havent been completely self-serving. Im shocked at what comes out of the mouths of some of our elected politicians. Instead of complaining about computerized sentencing for crimes, a better suggestion might be a computerized report card for politicians. What, if anything, have they achieved during their tenure? Id like to see that each year. Now to Ketanji Brown Jackson. She has done a remarkable job. The definition of grace under fire. The quality of her answers were not only bright, fair, completely knowledgeable and honest but easily demonstrated her strength of character as well. I would be proud to have her be part of the last bastion of honesty and integrity in American government. Keep up the good work. Keep our countrys moral standards high. Martin Weiner, Houston Watch your tone, Cruz Regarding Ted Cruz shouts in SCOTUS hearing, asks Ketanji Brown Jackson to define woman, (March 23): Sen. Ted Cruz is too young to have been exposed to World War II-era racism against Asians, which Broadway famously staged in its 1950 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, South Pacific. Hearing its brutal lyrics You've got to be taught to hate and fearbefore its too lateTo hate all the people your relatives hate You've got to be carefully taught! as a teenager in the 1960s, helped me understand the careful teachings of the Southern Baptist Church to love, not hate, your neighbor as yourself; to be kind to one another; and to be forgiving (seventy times seven) in our living. The Texas junior senator is right to pose every possible question to Judge Jackson, but a kinder, gentler tone would have honored the Republican traditions of presidents Bush and Reagan. Yolanda Ramirez Moore, Humble Regarding Editorial: Ted Cruz leads pack of presidential preeners in spectacle at Supreme Court hearings, (March 25): During the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sen. Cruz repeatedly interrupted Judge Jackson as she attempted to respond to his comments, at times cutting off her responses mid-sentence. I hope Judge Jackson knows (and I imagine she does) that Cruzs interruptions had both everything to do and nothing to do with her brilliant, succinct responses throughout the hearings. I hope all the young people watching the hearings to learn about civics and our system of government recognize what Cruzs interrupting says about his character, and they vote accordingly. I also hope all the interrupters take stock and realize that interrupting is not persuasion: its total jackassery (to borrow from Sen. Ben Sasse talking about mugging for the cameras during the hearings). Maxine Goodman, Houston Texas taxpayers are on the hook for more than $43,000 so far in legal defense for Attorney General Ken Paxton as he attempts to ward off multiple complaints to the State Bar over his failed lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election at the U.S. Supreme Court. Paxton faces at least three professional misconduct complaints that have been filed against him since the December suit, which the high court swiftly dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. The election case involved disputed presidential election ballots in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. Two complaints one filed in June by a Democratic Party activist, consolidated with a few others, and another in July filed by the nonprofit Lawyers Defending American Democracy and 16 Texas lawyers, including four former presidents of the State Bar alleged the Supreme Court suit was frivolous and that it included pleadings that Paxton knew to be false. The Lawyers Defending American Democracy complaint is moving forward and will be heard by either a district court judge or an administrative panel, the complainants say. Another complaint filed in February took issue with a pressure campaign by Paxton to sway appellate court judges in his favor on a major case involving election fraud prosecutions. The state constitution does not make bar membership a requirement to hold the office. This is about his individual license, which is irrelevant to his position in office, so why shouldnt he pay for it? said Jim Harrington, one of the lawyers who filed a complaint against Paxton and a retired founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit that advocates for voting rights. He gets to do this game on Jan. 6, this unconstitutional Supreme Court action, and then turn around and have us pay twice for it? Its outrageous. TEXAS TAKE: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox Records obtained by Hearst Newspapers through an open records request show the office hired outside counsel to handle the bar complaints at least in part. Everyone including Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Patrick knows that this witch hunt is a sham, Paxton said in a statement. So Im fighting back. And Im authorized to do so by law: The acts that the bar and the liberal complainers are crying about were done in my official capacity as Texas Attorney General, and I may use state resources to defend my and my teams state actions. Period. Attorneys with the Austin-based Gober Group and College Station-based West, Webb, Allbritton & Gentry billed almost 90 hours at various rates for work related to the bar complaints. Chris Gober, a GOP election lawyer known for his work defending the states political maps, had the highest rate at $525 an hour. Some of the work described in the invoices included reviewing documents related to the complaints, discussing strategy and considering options, preparing for meetings with the Texas State Bar and reviewing and revising correspondence with the agency. However, a response to the June batch of bar complaints against Paxton, which the office posted on its website, was signed by Deputy First Assistant Attorney General Grant Dorfman; none of the outside attorneys names appear on the filing. Its unclear why both in-house and outside counsel appear to have been engaged in Paxtons defense. Paxton has been in this position before: In 2015, after the Supreme Court made its landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalizing same-sex marriage, he faced a State Bar complaint for issuing a legal opinion that said Texas county clerks, charged with officiating over weddings, could refuse to do so for gay couples if the clerk had religious objections to them. The bar tossed the original complaint and again dismissed it when complainants appealed the decision, finding no professional misconduct occurred. It is clear that taxpayers also provided at least some of Paxtons defense in that case. The response filed by the attorney generals office at the time was also signed by state lawyers, though its unclear whether outside attorneys may have provided additional legal services. Paxtons spokesman did not respond to questions asking for clarification. Steve Fischer, elected State Bar director for the Western District of Texas and one of the attorneys who filed the 2015 complaint, said Paxtons remedy is that he would recoup legal fees if a complaint eventually went to district court and he won. In the meantime, taxpayers shouldnt have to bear the cost, he said. People elect an attorney general to do child support, whatever not for that, Fischer said. To turn his office into his defense team, it just doesnt sit right with me. According to a response to some of the latest complaints by the Attorney Generals Office in July, the State Bar Disciplinary Counsel received 81 grievances against Paxton and three against First Assistant Brent Webster related to the 2020 Supreme Court suit. All were dismissed upon initial review. Some were reinstated after appeals. The second-term Republican in recent years has warred with the State Bar, as he repeatedly accuses it of partisan overreach in legal filings and public statements. In July, in response to the latest bar complaints, he condemned the agency for convening a partisan panel comprised of six unelected, left-leaning lawyers and non-lawyer activists strategically drawn from Travis County. A spokeswoman for the agency declined to comment. It is no surprise that a cabal of President Biden donors and voters are finding a way to retaliate against the work of my office for the State of Texass challenge to the constitutionality of the 2020 elections, Paxton said in a statement at the time. Nearly half the nation joined Texass cause and two Supreme Court Justices voted to take up the case. I stand by our lawsuit. This is a total misuse of the Bars power and responsibility. While the Attorney Generals Offices role in fighting bar complaints may be a legal gray area, the agency is statutorily required to defend state officials and state agencies in court. Yet Paxtons office has declined to represent those state agencies on several recent occasions, typically when it conflicts with his political inclinations. In 2018, for example, his office refused to defend the Texas Ethics Commission as one of his largest political donors sued to dismantle the agency. Then again, in January 2020, the office abandoned the State Commission on Judicial Conduct when it was sued by a Waco judge whom the agency disciplined for refusing to perform same-sex marriages. taylor.goldenstein@chron.com Court-appointed monitors of Texas foster care system say the state rushed its investigation into The Refuge, a Bastrop facility where employees were accused of sex trafficking foster kids, and produced an exonerating report that was at best, premature. The monitors found ample evidence of abuse, neglect and exploitation at the state-contracted center, which was established to care for survivors of sex trafficking. The accusations of misconduct at the facility surfaced in court documents earlier this month, as state officials detailed multiple reports of abuse and a January incident in which a former employee allegedly sold nude photos of two residents in exchange for drugs. Gov. Greg Abbott immediately ordered the Texas Rangers to investigate the facility. Steve McCraw, the director of the Department of Public Safety, penned a letter to Abbott six days later confirming the photo allegations and describing additional claims that staff members helped two residents escape from The Refuge. Still, the Rangers initial investigation found no evidence that any of the residents at the Refuge shelter have ever been sexually abused or trafficked while at the shelter, McCraw wrote. BACKGROUND: Texas foster care home was supposed to help sex trafficked kids. Instead it was trafficking them. Now, the court monitors say that probe was incomplete, and their own review came to the opposite conclusion. The watchdogs found that DPS officials had not interviewed one of the reported victims until well after the DPS letter became public, and the girl was upset by the Rangers conclusions. The evidence of serious risks to child safety at The Refuge includes, but is not limited to, a strong possibility of human trafficking based on staffs inducement of children to see nude photographs in exchange for drugs, the monitors wrote in a Monday night memo. The managerial lapses at The Refuge which permitted serious risks to child safety to recur over time were not isolated and require a comprehensive, monitored plan to address safety threats. The monitors said they also found evidence that The Refuges leaders failed to report separate accusations of abuse in January 2021. A DPS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment; Abbotts office deferred to the agency. At a state House hearing last week, McCraw said he believes the nude photo incident absolutely constitutes sexual abuse, but the legal terminology muddles the issue. He said the department investigated the allegations in the context of rape, of trafficking for pay or rape of the minors at the particular facility. In a Tuesday statement, DPS stressed that its findings were preliminary, and they remain the same, as we have not identified any additional evidence of sexual abuse or human trafficking occurring at The Refuge. The investigation by the Texas Rangers is still ongoing, and they are committed to pursuing each and every allegation to its end and interviewing all persons necessary before concluding the investigation, an agency spokeswoman said. Brooke Crowder, the founder and CEO of The Refuge, said the monitors report seems to consist largely of allegations from former employees, many of whom were terminated for behavior that violated our standard. She denied that the organization failed to report any allegations to state officials. The Refuge has fired all employees involved in the photo and escape allegations, and local law enforcement officials are still pursuing multiple criminal investigations. At least one former employee has been arrested in relation to the escape incident and is accused of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As multiple parallel investigations advance with our full transparency and cooperation, were confident their conclusions will reveal that weve continually adhered to the highest standard of care for the girls in our care as they advance toward healing from the trauma of trafficking, Crowder said in an email. IN-DEPTH: Texas agency faulted over handling of abuse claims at foster care facility The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has also terminated multiple employees who handled the abuse accusations at The Refuge. Commissioner Jaime Masters said mid-level managers failed to elevate the allegations, creating a six-week gap between the initial outcry and the removal of the girls from the facility earlier this month. State officials are scheduled to discuss The Refuge situation and other foster care issues at a court hearing Wednesday at 9 a.m. Texas has been embroiled in a decade-long lawsuit over its foster care conditions, and the monitors assess compliance with court-ordered safety reforms. cayla.harris@express-news. School funding will remain level for the school year, Gov. Greg Abbott said Tuesday, allaying fears from many districts that their budgets would shrink because of pandemic-caused attendance declines. The amount of money that public schools receive from the states is based on their attendance and enrollment numbers. Funding is calculated based on dividing the actual attendance and enrollment by the minimum standard set by the state. The Tuesday adjustment moves the minimum standard downward, pushing the overall funding upward. Schools were initially insulated from COVID-19-related drops. State lawmakers added back financial penalties last year to incentivize getting students back to class. Providing this adjustment to the 2021-22 school year will ensure school systems have the funding they need to retain the best and brightest teachers and provide quality education to all public school students across Texas, Abbott said in a statement. We have made tremendous strides to return more of our students back to the classroom, and will continue in our efforts to do so. RELATED: Amid Texas teacher shortage, experts point to better pay, benefits There have been about 700,000 students and school staff infected with COVID-19 this school year, with infections peaking in September and January during the waves caused by the delta and omicron variants. Those numbers dont include absences from COVID-19 exposures, which were particularly high before vaccines became available for children in the fall. Schools have also faced teacher and staff shortages, which began before the pandemic but were exacerbated by it. News reports have highlighted struggles across Texas for schools to find substitute teachers or bus drivers. This led to the TEA founding a task force to study the issue and seek ways to recruit and retain more teachers. Dax Gonzalez, a spokesman for the Texas Association of School Boards, said the announcement will help schools teach all students who come to class. When attendance drops in an emergency, he said, classrooms still need teachers. Cutting funds just hurts their ability to reach students when they eventually return, he said, and it makes the teacher shortage harder to handle. Theres a new normal at some point, and the Legislature maybe wanted it to be last year, but because of the different resurgences of variants of COVID, I think just the reality was that were not there yet, Gonzalez said. Districts had been especially worried that they could lose funding this school year because the state had not announced an adjustment when classes returned last fall. Gonzalez said the delay could have pushed school districts to boost their numbers. Attendance declines amid the pandemic have been a problem nationwide, with many students struggling from family illnesses or financial stress. edward.mckinley@chron.com Mayor's Office PRess Release City of Houston Invites the Public to Attend Annual National Vietnam War Veterans Day Ceremony March 29, 2022 -- The Mayor's Office of Veterans & Military Affairs (MOVMA) and Mayor Pro-Tem Dave Martin will host the Vietnam War Veterans Day ceremony at 11 a.m., Tuesday, March 29, 2022, at Houston City Hall. National Vietnam War Veterans Day is observed annually on March 29 and is an opportunity for all to thank and honor the nation's Vietnam veterans and their families for their service and sacrifice. The event is open to the general public, active-duty personnel, veterans, and elected officials. This year's guest speaker, a decorated Vietnam veteran, will share his experience about his service in Vietnam and his journey through life post-military duties. Active-duty military personnel will present an official Vietnam Veteran lapel pin to each Vietnam War veteran in attendance who served on active duty from November 1, 1955, to May 15, 1975. If you have any questions, please contact the MOVA office at 832.393.0992 or MOVMA@houstontx.gov. As an existing print subscriber it is easy to get FREE access to all our online content. When you click get started below it will walk you through creating an online account to attach your print subscription number to. After your account is created it will ask you to either add a subscription for online access or click on the print subscriber button. Click the print subscriber button header and it will open a dropdown, now click on get started. The page will reload and you will be prompted to enter an account number and a zip code. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO USE THE NUMBER OFF OF THE MOST RECENT ISSUE OR ANYTHING AFTER JANUARY 28, 2019 TO GAIN ACCESS! OLD ACCOUNT NUMBERS WILL NOT WORK The account number and zip code are easily available on your most recent issue of the High Plains Journal or Midwest Ag Journal in the address fields as is shown here. Sometimes the account number has extra zero's in front of it, just ignore those. Subscribing to our services is a three step process. First you have to create an account and then you have to pick if you want to subscribe to digital and or print. Some people only want to be a digital subscriber to get access online and others want to also receive the print edition. If you are already a print subscriber and want online access, it is free, you simply have to create an online account and then attach your print subscription account number to the online account you create. iciHaiti - Justice : Dominicans arrest an escapee from Croix-des-Bouquets Members of the intelligence service of the General Directorate of Migration of Dajabon intercepted and detained a Haitian who escaped from the Prison of Croix-des-Bouquets in 2021, who was the subject of a wanted notice from the National Police of Haiti and of the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL). The detainee identified as Jameson Dorestant aka "Ti Tonton", holder of passport R10938695, with Dominican visa B01708837, with which he attempted to enter Dominican territory was spotted by immigration control inspectors and the intelligence personnel from Dajabon, following an arrest warrant issued by INTERPOL in April 2021. Jameson Dorestant, who was in prison for assault and death threats, was handed over to the Haitian authorities under certification, by the head of immigration control Hipolito Alcantara and the corvette captain of the Dominican navy Manuel Garcia Monterero in charge of the security. S/ iciHaiti US increases presence in S. China Sea By Zhang Zhihao (China Daily) 10:34, March 29, 2022 Fishing boats sail across the Qiongzhou Strait as the summer fishing moratorium ended in the South China Sea, Aug 16, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua] Drills expand in scale and frequency, focus on preparing for real combat, report says From massive military drills to record spy plane activities, the United States military drastically intensified its presence in the South China Sea last year, which serves to undermine China's security interests and increase the risk of friction in the region, according to Chinese experts. A report published on Sunday by the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative, a Beijing-based think tank tracking US military operations with open source data, said the US carried out at least 95 military exercises in the South China Sea last year, 10 more than in 2019. In August 2021, the US, along with Australia, the United Kingdom and Japan, carried out "Large Scale Exercise 21", its largest naval exercise in 40 years, involving around 25,000 military personnel operating across 17 time zones from Europe to Asia. Hu Bo, director of the think tank, said the US military has maintained a fairly strong presence near China since 1949, but in recent years it has considerably ramped up its operations in the region and made them more public. These US military drills not only saw expanding scale and frequency, but also focused on preparing for real combat, with China being the clear target, according to the report. Around 1,200 sorties of maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft conducted close-in intelligence gathering over the South China Sea last year, the report said. The US set multiple records in November, including 94 sorties, the greatest number in a single month, and 10 flights, which was the highest number in a single day. In addition, November also saw the US reach its closest surveillance distance to China's territorial water baseline at 15.9 nautical miles, or around 29 kilometers, said the report. Twelve nautical miles outward from this baseline is China's territorial sea, while water inside the baseline is considered inland waters. "The US is continuously setting records in terms of the distance between its reconnaissance aircraft and China's territorial sea baseline, which poses increasingly high military risks," the report said. Meanwhile, US ocean surveillance ships and maritime survey vessels carried out operations for a total of 419 sea days. A sea day is a day spent in transit between port calls. This meant that there was always at least one of these vessels operating in the South China Sea throughout the entire year, according to the report. Regarding activities by strategic military forces, the US sent amphibious landing and carrier strike groups to the South China Sea on 12 occasions in 2021, nearly double the previous year's total. Nuclear submarines also made at least 11 transits through the waters, along with 22 sorties by B-1B and B-52H strategic bombers. Hu said the US' "Indo-Pacific strategy" is deeply related to geopolitics and its desire to maintain maritime dominance in the region. As a result, the US will most likely continue to intensify its military activities near China, such as in the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the Taiwan Straits, he added. Meanwhile, the US is also encouraging and coordinating its allies, including Japan and Australia, to bolster their military capabilities and continue to stir up trouble in the South China Sea, he said. This trend is already in motion given the fact that Japan took part last year in 61 joint military drills with the US, while Australia announced it would acquire eight nuclear submarines with help from the US and the UK. "Japan has become the vanguard of the US' 'Indo-Pacific strategy', which will further support US military operations in the South China Sea," the report said. Australia's acquisition of a nuclear submarine capability will "very likely induce a new round of arms race in the region or even across the globe, and cast a shadow over peace and stability in the South China Sea". Hu said one of the ramifications of Washington's drastically increased military activities is that its military hardware and personnel would be severely stretched, leading to a greater risk of accidents and friction in the South China Sea. Recent examples include the USS Connecticut nuclear submarine colliding with an uncharted seamount in the South China Sea last year, and an F-35C fighter jet crashing on an aircraft carrier operating in the region in January. "In an era of peace, if one country maintains such a powerful military presence close to another country, it is hard for the former to convince people that it is doing it for peaceful purposes," Hu said. Washington's increased military operations pose a serious threat to China's sovereignty and national security, he said, China will therefore be forced to take necessary measures in response. Xia Liping, dean of the Institute of International and Public Affairs at Tongji University in Shanghai, said that even as the Ukraine crisis unfolds, the US military has not scaled down its activities in the South China Sea, highlighted by frequent transits of its carrier strike groups and drills in January and February. "The US views China as a long-term competitor, therefore it is willing to focus its maritime forces in the Asia-Pacific region," Xia said, adding that the increased military activities and the subsequent reporting and hype by US officials and media are also aimed at painting China as a regional threat. (Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun) Australian journalist Cheng Lei will be tried in Beijing on March 31 after being detained for 19 months on national security charges. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its Australian affiliate, Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA), call on the Chinese government to drop its accusation against Cheng and release her immediately. Cheng, who served as an anchor of the Chinese state media China Global Television Network (CGTN) for eight years until her arrest in August 2020, has been accused of supplying state secrets to an overseas organisation or individual. On March 26, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Paynes office confirmed that Cheng would face trial on March 31, adding we expect basic standards of justice, procedural fairness and humane treatment to be met, in accordance with international norms. It is reported that Chengs case will be heard in a closed court at Beijing No.2 People's Intermediate Court. According to China's criminal law, an individual found guilty of providing state secrets or intelligence overseas faces a sentence of five to ten years, and even life imprisonment if the offence is considered serious. Cheng was born in Yueyang, Hunan Province, in 1975 and emigrated to Australia with her parents at the age of ten. She has two children aged ten and twelve. Both returned to Australia at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and are currently being cared for by Chengs family in Melbourne. A member of Chengs family in Australia previously told the media that they believed Cheng would not have done anything intentionally to harm China's state security. The journalists case came at a time of heightened tension between Australia and China, after the Australian government in 2020 called for an independent probe into the origin of Covid-19. Beijing responded by imposing restrictions and punitive measures on Australian exports. The MEAA, which has campaigned for the release of Cheng, an MEAA member since 2009, said her arrest, her detention, and the accusations against her have never been explained. The MEAA said, We urge the Chinese government to drop the charges against our colleague, and to show compassion by allowing her to return home to Australia to be with her young family. The IFJ said, Cheng Lei has been placed under detention for 19 months, and the authorities have not revealed any details of the allegation against Cheng to date. The IFJ expresses concern over the lack of transparency over the case and demands that the Chinese government drop its arbitrary charge against Cheng and release her immediately so she can return home to Australia. New research by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) reveals that Beijing had stepped up its efforts to influence international perceptions about China through the means of expanding Chinese media networks in international markets. The IFJs new report, The China Network: Inside Chinas Global Media Mission in Asia, Africa and Latin America, seeks to measure Chinas global media outreach based on the findings of an international survey conducted by the IFJ with journalists in Kenya, Peru, and the Philippines three countries where China has had a strong presence with investment and infrastructure projects in recent years. Media engagement and influence is not a new strategy. It remains a popular tool deployed by many major powers globally. But compared to its international peers, Chinas approach is idiosyncratic and subject to unpredictable pivots. For journalists and media workers, this fast-changing approach by China presents critical professional challenges, the report said. Some 90 percent and 83 percent of survey respondents in Kenya and the Philippines, respectively, agreed that China has a visible presence in their media, while only half of the Peruvian journalists polled perceived a visible media presence of China in their country. Despite the high visibility, 88 percent of Philippine journalists viewed Chinas presence in their countrys media as negative, which is significantly higher than those from Peru (54%) and Kenya (16%). Approximately 16 percent of Kenyan respondents said their own media organisations were supported or funded by Chinese capital, according to the report. In the Philippines and Peru, roughly 5 percent and 2 percent, respectively, of journalists reported Chinese interests in the operations of their media organisations. Chinese ownership and financial support to the media sector is a growing area of Chinese influence in Kenya, Peru, and the Philippines, the report noted. The survey data on which the report was based reveals this support took many different forms, including monetary support, training programs, equipment and technical support, and content sharing partnerships. A small portion of journalists noticed changes in the coverage of China from journalists who have participated in trips sponsored by Chinese partners, the report added. The report follows the IFJs previous research released in March 2021, The Covid-19 Story: Unmasking Chinas Global Strategy, which found that China successfully activated existing media infrastructure networks to disseminate positive narratives globally amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The IFJ said, As China has adopted new measures to approach journalists and media organisations in Kenya, Peru, and the Philippines, it is important that journalists in these three countries are supported to identify and mitigate risks intended to influence or pervert professional and ethical journalism. Read the report here. It has been more than two years since the pandemic pushed businesses to transform digitally. However, thriving in the digital world is not an easy feat. As a result, organizations accelerate their digital initiatives to greater heights, making them more vulnerable to cyber threats. Fortinet shares how the Fortinet Security Fabric can address enterprises cybersecurity challenges What are the current trends businesses face in their digital acceleration efforts? And how can they secure their complex and distributed networks from cybercriminals? In a recent webinar, Secure Your Digital Acceleration with Fortinet Security Fabric, organized by Fortinet, a global leader in comprehensive, integrated, and automated cybersecurity solutions, Fortinet Philippines discussed why businesses must leverage a cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA) for their digital acceleration initiatives. Trends across organizations amid the pandemic According to Fortinet Philippines, the closures of most workplaces amid the pandemic catapulted employers to adopt a work-from-anywhere setup for their employees. A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group and The Network revealed that this setup is expected to continue as 89 percent of the 208,807 respondents across 190 countries prefer remote or hybrid work post-pandemic. To support this new working environment and even cater to their consumers digital needs, businesses accelerated their digital transformation. For instance, organizations began migrating the applications inside their on-premises data centers onto the cloud environment and so on. Such initiatives further expand digital attack surfaces, increase sophisticated cyber threats, and provide a complex ecosystem for every organization. It puts the cybersecurity skills gap as one of the main concerns of businesses in todays world. Meanwhile, in a report published by Gartner, organizations will spend an estimated $170 billion on cybersecurity by 2022. However, Cybersecurity Ventures revealed that the costs of cybercrimes worldwide will reach $10.5 trillion every year by 2025. Challenges of best-of-breed point products Due to businesses digital acceleration efforts, networks are becoming more complex and distributed. For that reason, detecting and responding to threats is a challenge for organizations. And while businesses can enhance their security posture and strategy with the best-of-breed security tools, it is not enough to secure them. According to Louie Castaneda, country manager of Fortinet Philippines, These point products work in silos and represent a center of focus and expertise. Without integrating these security tools, it can lead to security sprawl that makes management difficult, disrupts visibility, and impedes an organizations ability to act effectively to cyber threats. The webinar discussed that businesses could get solutions, such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), to integrate these best-of-breed security tools. For instance, FortiSIEM unifies data collection and analytics from diverse information sources, including logs, performance metrics, security alerts, and configuration changes. Meanwhile, FortiSOAR centralizes tools and amplifies the efforts of security teams, empowering them to respond rapidly, automate tasks, and execute actions across the businesses security stack. In the advent of more advanced and sophisticated threats, businesses need to adopt a broad, integrated, and automated cybersecurity mesh platform for robust, scalable, and manageable security deployments. Adopting a CSMA According to Gartner, the cybersecurity mesh is defined as a modern conceptual approach to a security architecture that enables the distributed enterprise to deploy and extend security where it is most needed. Elaborating on the mesh concept, Fortinet Philippines explained that the CSMA is not a solution or a product to be integrated. It is an architectural approach that organizations can adopt. It tries to solve long-standing challenges of distinct security tools by integrating them so they can collaborate and dynamically respond to cyberattacks. CSMA has three characteristics. It is agile as it provides a composable architectural approach to integrate security controls. It is distributed because it encourages and enables decentralized security controls to protect all attack surfaces while being collaborative, allowing for an environment to integrate composable security services and teams to interact and work with each other. During this session, CSMA was also described to have four layers to enable collaborative and agile cybersecurity for businesses. The first one is security analytics and intelligence, a layer that combines different security tools data and insight to deliver deep threat analyses and the correct response to cyberattacks. Then, distributed identity fabric, a layer that provides critical identity services to manage increasing assets, devices, and identities. Next is consolidated policy and posture management, a layer enabling organizations to translate central policies to the native configurations of security tools. Finally, it also has consolidated dashboards, a layer that provides a single-pane-of-glass security system. Make CSMA possible with the Fortinet Security Fabric All these are aligned with the Fortinet Security Fabric, the industrys highest-performing cybersecurity mesh platform that integrates all cybersecurity solutions to reduce management complexity and share threat intelligence. It provides broad visibility and protection of all digital attack surfaces to manage risks and delivers automated self-healing networks with AI-driven security for fast and efficient operations. Fortinet provides a wide array of solutions across the Fortinet Security Fabrics four pillars. It includes security-driven networking, zero-trust access, adaptive cloud security, and AI-driven security operations. It has FortiGuard Security Services that enables sharing and distribution of threat intelligence across Fortinets solutions and third-party technology partners. Due to its Fabric Management Center, the security fabric also allows centralized management, logging, and reporting. And as Fortinet has more than 450 third-party technology partners that can integrate with its security fabric, it gives and supports a broad and open ecosystem, which breaks down technology and vendor silos. The CSMA is the proposed strategic security platform of Gartner. At Fortinet, we call this the Fortinet Security Fabric that enables deep visibility across all edges, centralized management of distributed solutions, consistent enforcement of policies, real-time global threat intelligence, automated responses, and open ecosystem, Castaneda concluded. In what's being seen as one of the worst spells of terror attacks - anywhere in the world in recent times - at least five persons were shot dead by a gunman in central Israel late Tuesday. This is the third such attack on Israeli Jews in the past one week. According to reports, the shooter was killed by police on the spot. Israeli media reports suggest that the attacker was a Palestinian from the Occupied West Bank area. The incident took place at two locations in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox city just east of Tel Aviv. Police told AP that a preliminary investigation found the gunman was armed with an assault rifle and opened fire on passersby before he was shot by officers at the scene. AFP Condemning the latest attack, Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, who is currently suffering from Covid told mediapersons, "Israel is facing a wave of murderous Arab terrorism. The security forces are operating. We will fight terror with perseverance, stubbornness and an iron fist." A video footage aired on Israeli television appeared to show the gunman in a black shirt armed with an assault rifle. #Israel Moment of the attack. Israeli police believe the shooting in Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, is a terrorist attack. At least 5 Israelis killed in the attack#TelAviv #BneiBrak #Terrorists #Terrorism pic.twitter.com/qmCaQPl3RG Agencia AJN (@AgenciaAJN) March 29, 2022 Israel Defense Minister Benny Gantz wrote on Twitter that the security forces, "Will work with all means to return security to Israeli streets and the feeling of security to civilians.'' . . - . - ", " - . - Benny Gantz (@gantzbe) March 29, 2022 Palestine condemns the attack Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack. "The killing of Israeli or Palestinian civilians only leads to further deterioration of the situation and instability, which we all strive to achieve, especially as we are approaching the holy month of Ramadan and Christian and Jewish holidays," he said. Abbas said that the incident, "Confirms that permanent, comprehensive and just peace is the shortest way to provide security and stability for the Palestinian and Israeli peoples.'' Meanwhile, Palestinian militant group Hamas praised the attacks as "heroic". Previous two attacks Israel has seen similar recent incidents where several persons were killed in separate attacks. BBC reported that the first such attack was carried out by an Israeli Arab who had planned to join the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria and had served a jail sentence for security crimes. According to reports, he ran over a cyclist then stabbed three people to death outside a shopping centre in the southern city of Beersheba. Later, two other Israeli Arabs opened fire at a bus stop in the northern city of Hadera, killing two 19-year-old police officers. ISIS claimed responsibility of the attack. All three assailants were shot dead. AFP More such attacks are feared in the month ahead, when the Muslim festival of Ramadan, the Jewish festival of Passover and the Christian festival of Easter coincide in a rare convergence. Israel has just finished a high-profile meeting this week between the foreign ministers of four Arab nations and the United States. All four Arab nations - Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates - along with the United States, condemned the killings. For more on news and current affairs from around the world please visit Indiatimes News. A 226-kg bear seen moving about near a university in Tennessee, U.S., was finally captured and relocated by forest officials. The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency had their hands full on Wednesday (March 23) when they were involved in evicting a massive bear from its 'home' near Tusculum University, CNN reported. Facebook/Greeneville Fire Department The bear was knocked unconscious before being taken to a remote area of Cherokee National Forest. The forest is near Great Smoky Mountains National Park, along the North Carolina state line. In a Facebook post, the agency said: "A 500-pound black bear living near Tusculum college in Greeneville had become habituated to human and unnatural foods and was relocated to a remote area of the Cherokee National Forest." The bear had regular access to garbage, birdseed, and pet food and had been in the area for a few years. (It) ramped up its activity and property damage last year," they said. The bear was eventually located on one of the empty lots of a nearby residential neighbourhood, and subdued with a tranquiliser dart. The bear was so large that the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency had to seek help from Greeneville Fire Department in transporting the behemoth. The Wildlife agency said that the fire department was glad to help and even offered some of their gear to help get the job done. The statement concludes by saying that the bear has been relocated to a designated release site in Cherokee National Forest. Reports of bears getting too close to human property or becoming used to eating human food - tend to rise in April, as the bears emerge from their winter dens and search for food, the agency said. For the latest from trending, click here. The world's richest person, Elon Musk, has revealed three 'existential threats' to humanity, as he outlined his biggest fears about the future. In an interview with Mathias Dopfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, Musk spoke extensively about what he believes are the gravest issues that the planet currently faces. Reuters Musk said religious extremism, a declining birthrate, and 'artificial intelligence going wrong', are the biggest threats to humanity's survival. He said the falling birth rate has been troubling [him] for many years, adding that he drives his friends crazy by bringing it up so often. I spent a lot of time talking about the birthrate thing. That might be the single biggest threat to the future of human civilization," Musk said in the interview, as reported by Business Insider. Most people in the world are operating under the false impression that weve got too many people. This is not true. The birth rate has been dropping like crazy. Unfortunately, we have these ridiculous population estimates from the UN that need to be updated because they just dont make any sense," he added. Reuters Musk identified two other leading existential threats: religious extremism and artificial intelligence (AI) spiralling out of control. His fears about AI are well-documented. "As AI gets probably much smarter than humans, the relative intelligence ratio is probably similar to that between a person and a cat, maybe bigger, Musk stated back in 2017. I do think we need to be very careful about the advancement of AI. Meanwhile, Musk has continued to throw gauntlet after gauntlet at Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last Week, Musk responded to those questioning his fighting skills and doubting if he can really take on Russian President Vladimir Putin in single combat. He shared a picture of himself sumo wrestling. Ever since the SpaceX and Tesla boss posted a tweet challenging the Russian president to single combat for Ukraine, he has been sharing his thoughts on how he can really beat Putin. His tweet came in response to Changpeng Zhao, the chief executive of crypto platform Binance. Brother, I wish for you to win of course, but the reality is [a laughing crying emoji]... I havent seen your kong fu videos," he wrote. Musk responded by sharing the image of himself fighting a sumo wrestler. For more trending stories, click here. Yesterday was wild - Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars for cracking a joke on Jada Pinkett Smith's alopecia. The Men In Black actor walked up on stage and slapped the comedian in front of a live audience, and millions of online viewers. YouTube Now, just like with everything else, Twitter has a theory about what caused Rock's bad luck. No, it isn't toxic masculinity at its finest (Yes, it is.) According to Twitter users, the Madagascar actor said, "Macbeth". Now, what is the deal with that word? Turns out that according to an old superstition, one must never utter the name of the Shakespeare character in a theatre, except to perform or rehearse a line from the play. Instead, the monarch must be addressed as "the Scottish King" or "the Scottish Lord", and the work itself as "the Scottish play". If these rules are not followed, destruction follows. According to multiple viewers, the moment when Smith slapped Rock (almost sounds like a Friends episode name), happened almost immediately preceded by the comedian mentioning Macbeth. Denzel! Rock said from the stage to Denzel Washington, who appeared last year in Joel Coens film adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy. Macbeth! Loved it! Will Smith was awarded his first Oscar win moments after the slap for his performance in King Richard. The incident has been the only topic trending on social media since yesterday. While some people condemned Smith for choosing violence, others supported him for defending his wife's honour. Some users on Twitter said that Rock did this to himself. This is why you don't say Macbeth in a theater, @chrisrock. #oscars Jen Crittenden (@JenCrittenden) March 28, 2022 To be fair, Chris Rock put a hex on himself by saying Macbeth in a theater, wrote one user. To be fair, Chris Rock put a hex on himself by saying "Macbeth" in a theater. David Gordon (@MrDavidGordon) March 28, 2022 Keep Macbeths name out of your F***ING mouth, another tweeted. Keep Macbeths name out of your FUCKING mouth pic.twitter.com/T1WOPkxsjo James Topham (@JamesTophamWord) March 28, 2022 Chris Rock has reportedly declined to press charges. CNN The Scottish play has proven to be responsible for a long history of mishaps - in 1849, the audience at one performance in New York City broke into a violent riot and killed at least 20 people. In another fateful incident in 1937, Laurence Olivier was playing the monarch when a weight somehow got loose and fell on the stage, crashing just inches from him. In 1953, Charlton Heston was performing the Scottish King's role, and his tights caught fire, ending in severe burns. For more trending stories, click here. An 'apocalyptic' wildfire has engulfed an uninhabited Scottish island, which was formerly used as a bio-weapon experiment site. Pictures and videos going viral on social media showed flames raging on the island on Saturday night, with a large plume of smoke rising from the blaze, The Independent reported. Twitter/@GairlochMarine The island was used to carry out secret anthrax experiments during World War II before being declared free of it by the Ministry of Defence in April 1990. Witnesses described the scene as 'apocalyptic' as flames ravaged Gruinard Island, off Scotlands northwest coast. "It spread across really slowly, it started on one end until the whole island was engulfed. It looked volcanic," Donna Hopton, who runs Gairloch Marine Wildlife Centre, told The Independent. "Its quite sad theres a lot of wildlife on that island, theres white-tailed eagles, oystercatchers, lots of bird life nest on that island. I could smell the smoke, it was the smell of wood burning, you could see it in the air, it was a really red glow," she added. Taking to Twitter, the Gairloch Marine Wildlife Centre said that the island has never looked like this before after a massive wildfire. Those that visit regularly Gruinard Island (Anthrax Island) will be a familiar sight but its never looked like this before! Muirburn or Arson? We dont know yet, but sad and destructive for the wildlife either way! @BBCNews @BBCNewsScotland #fire #anthraxisland #gruinardisland pic.twitter.com/qeUtjHR4Ch Gairloch Marine Wildlife (@GairlochMarine) March 27, 2022 "Those that visit regularly Gruinard Island (Anthrax Island) will be a familiar sight but its never looked like this before! Muirburn or Arson? We dont know yet, but sad and destructive for the wildlife either way!" they tweeted. The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service said the island did not fall under its remit as it is uninhabited. However, firefighters earlier warned of an increased risk of wildfires in Scotland over the following days. For the latest from trending, click here. From self-driving cars to dancing robots in Super Bowl commercials, artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. The problem with all of these AI examples, though, is that theyre not really intelligent. Rather, they represent narrow AI an application that can solve a specific problem using artificial intelligence techniques. And that is very different from what you and I possess. Humans (hopefully) display general intelligence. We are able to solve a wide range of problems and learn to work out those problems we havent previously encountered. We are capable of learning new situations and new things. We understand that physical objects exist in a three-dimensional environment and are subject to various physical attributes, including the passage of time. The ability to replicate human-level thinking abilities artificially, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), simply does not exist in what we today think of as AI. Thats not to take anything away from the overwhelming success AI has enjoyed to date. Google Search is an outstanding example of AI that most people regularly use. Google is capable of searching volumes of information at an incredible speed to provide (usually) the results the user wants near the top of the list. Similarly, Google Voice Search allows users to speak search requests. Users can say something that sounds ambiguous and get a result back that is properly spelled, capitalized, punctuated, and, to top it off, usually what the user meant. How does it work so well? Google has the historical data of trillions of searches, and which results the user chose. From this, it can predict which searches are likely and which results will make the system useful. But there is no expectation that the system understands what it is doing or any of the results it presents. This highlights the requirement for a huge amount of historical data. This works pretty well in search because every user interaction can create a training set data item. But if the training data needs to be manually tagged, this is an arduous task. Further, any bias in the training set will flow directly to the result. If, for example, a system is developed to predict criminal behavior, and it is trained with historical data that includes a racial bias, the resulting application will have a racial bias as well. Personal assistants such as Alexa or Siri follow scripts with numerous variables and so are able to create the impression of being more capable than they really are. But as all users know, anything you say that is not in the script will yield unpredictable results. As a simple example, you can ask a personal assistant, Who is Cooper Kupp? The phrase Who is triggers a web search on the variable remainder of the phrase and will likely produce a relevant result. With many different script triggers and variables, the system gives the appearance of some degree of intelligence while actually doing symbol manipulation. Because of this lack of underlying understanding, only 5% of people say they never get frustrated using voice search. A massive program like GPT3 or Watson has such impressive capabilities that the concept of a script with variables is entirely invisible, allowing them to create an appearance of understanding. Their programs are still looking at input, though, and making specific output responses. The data sets at the heart of the AIs responses (the scripts) are now so large and variable that it is often difficult to notice the underlying script until the user goes off script. As is the case with all of the other AI examples cited, giving them off-the-script input will generate unpredictable results. In the case of GPT-3, the training set is so large that eliminating the bias has thus far proven impossible. The bottom line? The fundamental shortcoming of what we today call AI is its lack of common-sense understanding. Much of this is due to three historical assumptions: The principal assumption underlying most AI development over the past 50 years was that simple intelligence problems would fall into place if we could solve difficult ones. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a false assumption. It was best expressed as Moravecs Paradox. In 1988, Hans Moravec, a prominent roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University, stated that it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or when playing checkers, but difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility. In other words, often the difficult problems turn out to be simpler and the apparently simple problems turn out to be prohibitively difficult. The next assumption is that if you built enough narrow AI applications, they would grow together into a general intelligence. This also turned out to be false. Narrow AI applications dont store their information in a generalized form so it can be used by other narrow AI applications to expand the breadth. Language processing applications and image processing applications can be stitched together, but they cannot be integrated in the way a child effortlessly integrates vision and hearing. Lastly, there has been a general feeling that if we could just build a machine learning system big enough, with enough computer power, it would spontaneously exhibit general intelligence. This hearkens back to the days of expert systems that attempted to capture the knowledge of a specific field. These efforts clearly demonstrated that it is impossible to create enough cases and example data to overcome the underlying lack of understanding. Systems that are simply manipulating symbols can create the appearance of understanding until some off-script request exposes the limitation. Why arent these issues the AI industrys top priority? In short, follow the money. Consider, for example, the development approach of building capabilities, such as stacking blocks, for a three-year-old. It is entirely possible, of course, to develop an AI application that would learn to stack blocks just like that three-year-old. It is unlikely to get funded, though. Why? First, who would want to put millions of dollars and years of development into an application that executes a single feature that any three-year-old can do, but nothing else, nothing more general? The bigger issue, though, is that even if someone would fund such a project, the AI is not displaying real intelligence. It does not have any situational awareness or contextual understanding. Moreover, it lacks the one thing that every three-year-old can do: become a four-year-old, and then a five-year-old, and eventually a 10-year-old and a 15-year-old. The innate capabilities of the three-year-old include the capability to grow into a fully functioning, generally intelligent adult. This is why the term artificial intelligence doesnt work. There simply isnt much intelligence going on here. Most of what we call AI is based on a single algorithm, backpropagation. It goes under the monikers of deep learning, machine learning, artificial neural networks, even spiking neural networks. And it is often presented as working like your brain. If you instead think of AI as a powerful statistical method, youll be closer to the mark. Charles Simon, BSEE, MSCS, is a nationally recognized entrepreneur and software developer and the CEO of FutureAI. Simon is the author of Will the Computers Revolt?: Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, and the developer of Brain Simulator II, an AGI research software platform. For more information, visit https://futureai.guru/Founder.aspx. New Tech Forum provides a venue to explore and discuss emerging enterprise technology in unprecedented depth and breadth. The selection is subjective, based on our pick of the technologies we believe to be important and of greatest interest to InfoWorld readers. InfoWorld does not accept marketing collateral for publication and reserves the right to edit all contributed content. Send all inquiries to newtechforum@infoworld.com. PORTLAND, Maine (AP) A trucker was streaming Netflix when his tractor-trailer struck a car, killing a retired couple in Maine, according to a police report. The truck driver acknowledged streaming a Netflix show on his cellphone, but said he was only listening through the trucks audio system before the crash that killed Geoff and Elizabeth Betsy Gattis, of Falmouth. He wasnt watching Netflix. He was listening to audio, defense attorney Robert Andrews said Thursday. The truck driver was not distracted by Netflix, but by a vehicle directly in front of him that abruptly slowed and exited the Maine Turnpike in January 2021 near the Kittery-York town line, Andrews said. The trucker then saw other vehicles had slowed, but it was too late to stop, he said. The Portland Press Herald first reported the driver was streaming a Netflix show about teenage magicians. The drivers story has been consistent from the time of the crash, when he spoke to a state trooper. He said that the screen of his phone was turned away to avoid being a distraction, the newspaper said. The truck driver was indicted on a manslaughter charge last summer. Andrews said hes going to file a motion to dismiss the charges. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Auto Trucking Maine New Hampshire is looking for a commercial insurance carrier to fully insure and administer the Granite State Paid Family and Medical Leave Plan. The plan provides participating employees in New Hampshire with 60% of their average weekly wage for up to six weeks per year for specified leaves of absence from the workplace. The plan affords an alternative to a mandatory program by providing voluntary access to a benefit for all employees working for a business in New Hampshire. An employer of any size may elect to participate and a business enterprise tax credit equal to 50% of the premium paid by those sponsoring employers is available. A statewide, private-market, truly voluntary paid leave plan does not exist in any other state, and New Hampshire is leading the way, said Governor Chris Sununu as the state released a request for proposal (RFP). After years of talk, we are finally moving forward with a viable paid leave product that is available to anyone who wants it and forced upon no one who does not. With this voluntary plan, New Hampshire has once again shown how innovative approaches to public policy issues can provide viable solutions, said Deputy Insurance Commissioner DJ Bettencourt. Details about the RFP: The winning carrier shall provide coverage to all three participant groups: the state as an employer, private and other public employers of any size and the individual group. Once approved by the Governor and Executive Council, the contract term will extend through December 31, 2027, a period of approximately five years, and may be extended for up to two additional years. Proposals submitted in response to this RFP must be received by the Division of Procurement and Support Services (DPSS) Bureau of Purchase and Property no later than May 9, 2022. The Request for Proposals can be accessed here. Topics Carriers New Hampshire In a high-tech lab on Johns Hopkins Universitys Homewood campus in Baltimore, engineers have been building a robot that may be able to stitch back together the broken vessels in your belly and at some point maybe your brain, no doctor needed. The robot has a high-tech camera on one arm and a high-tech sewing machine on a second arm. Its already reattached halves of a pigs intestines. Its like park-assist in a car, said Axel Krieger, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering. Performs the procedure autonomously. This kind of suturing is performed more than a million times a year in surgeries around the country, said Krieger, part of a team developing the robot and senior author on a recent paper describing the technology in Science Robotics. The goal is to develop in the next several years a robot that makes the intricate and delicate work of suturing more consistent. Missing a stitch or doing one awkwardly could cause a catastrophic complication for a patient. The robotic procedure is also less invasive as its performed laparoscopically, through small holes in the skin rather than a large opening. The Hopkins engineers expect the robot to be cheaper than existing robotic technology and more portable. They want to develop a mobile version. The Hopkins engineers expect the robot to be cheaper than existing robotic technology and more portable. They want to develop a mobile version that eventually could be used on an ambulance or in the field for emergencies, such as stitching up a major artery to stop bleeding. The robot would advance technology currently in wide use in operating rooms. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration calls them robotically assisted surgical devices. The best known is the da Vinci robot federally approved for general laparoscopic surgical use in 2000. The device has a console where a surgeon can see a 3D image and move several arms with surgical instruments, essentially becoming an extension of the doctor. The device is not actually a robot because it cannot perform surgery without direct human control, the FDA says. The da Vinci robot is now commonly used in gallbladder removal, hysterectomies and prostate removals because it works best on complex tasks in confined areas, according to the FDA. Other robotic machines assisted in surgery before da Vinci was developed but required far larger incisions. The new robot being developed by Hopkins engineers along with collaborators at the Childrens National Hospital in Washington, D.C., known as Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or STAR, is different. It does have computer monitors that offer a 3D view, but it doesnt have a joystick or other controls. The STAR is run by a highly advanced, and adaptable-on-the-fly computer program. The algorithm sees and feels through cameras that create 3D images with lasers and sensors that detect pressure from breathing, bleeding and soft tissue. The robot completes about a stitch a minute, a conservative pace slightly slower than a human surgeon. The tests so far have shown more consistency than the humans. How long it takes the public and surgeons to accept such technology remains to be seen. Like autonomous cars. Thats been an issue with robotic technology now in the operating rooms. The current robotic-assisted technology is better at some surgical tasks than others. And outcomes arent always an improvement even if things appear to go smoothly. Such machines also add significantly to the expense of surgery because the cost of the equipment reaches into the millions, though some of that can be made up through shorter hospital stays and fewer complications. But many smaller hospitals and those in less affluent regions or other countries cant afford upfront expenditure. Jin Kang, another STAR developer and a professor in the Hopkins department of electrical and computer engineering, said the STAR requires less machinery and would be cheaper, though the ultimate cost is not determined. It was designed with input from surgeons, who often choose to use technology because it can help them withstand the rigors of their job. Long hours of traditional surgery can cause human hands to twitch and fatigue. He said surgeons and other surgical staff still would perform procedures, such as removing diseased tissue, before handing off to STAR, and would stay in the room in case of an emergency as the robot reconnected intestines or other vessels. Doctors are not being replaced, Kang said. Dr. Michael Awad, the director of the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Comprehensive Robotics Program in St. Louis, was not involved in STARs development but has been following the work at Hopkins. He did his surgical residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital and trained on the first generation of da Vinci robot there. Awad said its still early in the process, but he believes autonomous robots are inevitable in the operating room and the Hopkins researchers work could be a big step forward. How long it takes the public and surgeons to accept such technology remains to be seen, he said. He views it like those autonomous cars. People are ready to adopt the park-assist technology Krieger referenced and other technology to keep people from drifting into other lanes. The fully self-driving cars will prove trustworthy eventually, as well. While driving is high stakes and can result in injury or death, I think people are even more sheepish when it comes to surgery on the human body, he said. There are a lot more variables that make the task more challenging in itself. There is a higher bar to leap. Awad, who is also director at the Washington University Institute for Surgical Education, said there is a lot of training that goes into using existing robotic equipment. Doctors have to learn to use other senses such as their eyes on computer screens, rather than the touch of human tissue, when they use technology. He said the machines are especially helpful in getting to tight and sensitive spots in the body such as the esophagus, behind the rib cage and near the heart. An autonomous robot could advance what doctors are able to do for patients. There also may be less training needed for autonomous robots in the operating room. But that doesnt mean surgeons wont have to know how to perform the same procedures, Awad said. If a human needs to intervene, they need to know how to, he said. But anything that can lessen the learning curve would be welcomed. A position paper from the American College of Surgeons says surgeons need to be appropriately educated and their skills assessed prior to using any new technology. The group also calls for evaluation to establish the value and safety of the technology before wide adoption. The Hopkins team plans to continue perfecting the robot and assessing what it could do beyond connecting two ends of a blood vessel, an intestine or other channels, called anastomosis. Work on the robot has been supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. A next step is seeking a commercial partner to bring the technology through the development process and approvals from federal regulators to begin testing the robot on humans. We really want to push the boundaries, Krieger said. Top Photo: Jin Kang, from left, professor of electrical and computer engineering, Justin Opfermann, PhD student, Axel Krieger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and Michael Kam, PhD student look at a SMART robot (Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot) on March 17, 2022, in Baltimore, Md. A team of mechanical engineers from Johns Hopkins University are developing a SMART robot that can perform soft tissue surgeries such as intestinal reconnections. The robot is fully autonomous and can perform delicate suturing of small vessels and nerves. (Barbara Haddock Taylor/The Baltimore Sun via AP) Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. All Irish lessors terminated their Russian airline leases by Mondays European Union sanctions deadline and have so far had limited success in recovering their aircraft, the representative body for the sector in Ireland said. Aircraft Leasing Ireland (ALI), members of which include SMBC Aviation Capital, Avolon, Aircastle and AerCap Holdings, which is the worlds biggest aircraft leasing company, said that all of its members have complied fully with the sanctions. Analysis Aircraft Lessors Lose Hope of Getting Back Russian Planes Worth $10B Brussels gave lessors until Monday to wind up current rental contracts in Russia under tough sanctions imposed after Moscows invasion of Ukraine, leaving them facing heavy potential writedowns or a long insurance battle. Irish lessors own more than 60% of the worlds fleet of leased aircraft, according to its representative body. The events in Russia are unprecedented and continue to evolve, ALIs statement said. It said that recent weeks have been challenging for aircraft leasing companies seeking to recover aircraft and that they had achieved limited success to date. AerCap, which has said that 5% of its fleet by net book value was leased in Russia at the end of 2021, had the largest exposure to Russia when the sanctions were introduced. When the sanctions were imposed, AerCap accounted for 142 of the 515 jets Russian carriers had leased from abroad, consultancy IBA said. A total of 78 planes leased to Russian carriers had been seized while abroad and would not fly back to Russia, Interfax news agency reported last week, quoting Transport Minister Vitaly Savelyev. (Reporting by Padraic Halpin; editing by David Goodman) Topics Russia Aviation Denmarks Orsted said on Monday it had agreed to sell half of the Hornsea 2 project in Britain, which will become the worlds biggest offshore wind farm, to a French consortium for 3 billion pounds ($3.94 billion). The deal is consistent with the Danish energy giants strategy of selling off large stakes in operational wind parks to invest the capital in new projects. AXA Consortium in Talks to Buy Stake in Orsteds UK Offshore Wind Farm The French consortium comprises AXA IM Alts, a unit of Frances biggest insurer AXA, and Credit Agricole Assurances, which will each own 25%, it said. Renewable and low-carbon energy businesses are attracting high valuations from cash-rich investors who expect steady growth in the market as policymakers seek alternatives to fossil fuels. The stake will be funded through a combination of equity and a senior multi-tranche staple financing package, which has been structured by Orsted and is provided by 30 banks including Denmarks export credit agency. Hornsea 2 is located 90 kilometers (56 miles) off the Yorkshire coast in the North Sea with a capacity of 1.3 gigawatts (GW), providing power to more than 1.3 million homes. The park is due to become fully operational in 2022. ($1 = 0.7608 pounds) (Reporting by Stine Jacobsen; editing by Edmund Blair, Kirsten Donovan) Topics Mergers & Acquisitions Agribusiness AXA XL France Russian tankers carrying oil chemicals and oil products are increasingly concealing their movements, a phenomenon that some maritime experts warn could signal attempts to evade unprecedented sanctions prompted by the invasion of Ukraine. In the week ended March 25, there were at least 33 occurrences of so-called dark activity operating while onboard systems to transmit their locations are turned off by Russian tankers, said Windward Ltd., an Israeli consultancy that specializes in maritime risk using artificial intelligence and satellite imagery. Thats more than double the weekly average of 14 in the past year. The dark operations occurred mainly in or around Russias exclusive economic zone, according to Windward, which conducted the research at Bloombergs request. The ships engaging in dark activity include vessels connected to big corporations and multinational shipping firms, as well as small businesses, according to Windward. Commercial vessels are required by international maritime law to have their automatic identification system, or AIS, turned on while at sea. Disabling or manipulating a ships identification system is at the top of deceptive shipping practices cited by the U.S. Treasury Department in an advisory last May to curb illicit shipping and sanctions evasions. Theres no reason why they should have their AIS turned off, said Gur Sender, Windwards program manager who specializes in compliance and risk issues. Investigating if a vessel is engaged in deceptive shipping practices related to specific regimes is crucial to protect your business from dealing with sanctioned entities. Since the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, the U.S., UK and other allies have ramped up sanctions against the Kremlin. U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order on March 8 banning imports of Russian oil and gas, while on the same day, the UK said it will phase out oil imports by the end of the year. Both countries, along with Canada, have also barred Russian ships from accessing their ports. As more countries and businesses shun commerce with Russia, the countrys fleet will be under pressure to conduct dark activity and even engage in illicit shipping to stay afloat, said Ian Ralby, chief executive of I.R. Consilium, a maritime law and security consulting firm that works with governments. Russia has quickly become a pariah state so they are obscuring some of their activities because a lot of people on both ends of a transit dont want any association to Russia, said Ralby. Anywhere that Russia appears in the overall management or operation and ownership of the vessel, there are concerns about dark activity right now. Almost anything that they are going to be doing is gaining scrutiny and legal concerns because of all the various sanctions. If the isolation of Russian ships and crew continue, they will have little choice but to take offers that are given to them, making them susceptible to all sorts of criminal and nefarious manipulation, said Ralby. We may see a parallel global market emerge where there is internal trading among all these sanctioned states and their enablers, he said. Satellite Imagery In many of the cases of dark activity, operations are conducted between a Russian-flagged or owned ship and non-Russian vessels, according to Windward. Ships that conduct operations side-by-side exhibit tell-tale patterns of movements and speed, even if their transponders are off. Satellite imagery can also reveal operations. Windwards data shows that the number of ship-to-ship meetings that lasted at least three hours between Russian oil tankers and non-Russian vessels has remained relatively normal. Thats enough time to allow oil tankers to transfer their goods to a third vessel thats not affected by sanctions or bans, said Sender. The occurrences are also happening close enough to ports where ships can potentially load up on clean fuel products, he said. Removing sanctioned vessels & those owned or operated by sanctioned companies = 50 vessels. ESG restrictions = 300 Russian-affiliated tankers off-limits. 1,350 oil/chemical tankers are suspected of #deceptiveshippingpractices + those mentioned in regulatory reports#maritime pic.twitter.com/CTOwo4AZqB Windward (@WindwardAI) March 15, 2022 Windward has also detected some vessels entering Russian territorial waters and visiting its ports for the very first time, even as the overall number of ships making a maiden voyage to Russia falls. Since the outbreak of the conflict, 22 unique vessels some of which are owned or operated by companies registered in the UK, U.S. and Germany have entered Russian territorial waters for the first time, according to Windward. Since the outbreak of the conflict, 22 unique vessels have entered Russian territorial waters for the first time (according to our data). The vessels represent different classes: 12 cargo vessels, 1 container vessel, 6 tankers, 1 service vessel & 6 commercial fishing vessels. pic.twitter.com/25BMjC0rBz Ami Daniel (@AmiDaniel1) March 21, 2022 In one instance, a tanker managed by an American company departed from the Chinese city of Dongying on Feb. 25 and entered Russian waters on March 3, making its first-ever Russian port call in Nakhodka. The tanker departed the port and drifted in Russian waters before calling port on March 19 in a tanker terminal in Vladivostok. The U.S. ban on Russian oil came into effect March 8 for new purchases, but provides a 45-day window for U.S. buyers to wind down their existing contracts. While this voyage is not considered illegal or a violation of sanctions, it still raises questions given current U.S. policies, according to a Windward AI Insights note. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues and how many companies will view these new regulations and restrictions as mere recommendations. Photograph: An ice-class tanker used for shipping liquefied natural gas sit in Sabetta sea port near the Yamal LNG plant, operated by Novatek PJSC, in Sabetta, Russia, on Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2018. Novatek is one of the largest independent natural gas producers in Russia. Photo credit: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg. Copyright 2022 Bloomberg. Topics Russia This edition of International People Moves details appointments at the brokers Willis Towers Watson (WTW) and Miller, along with the MGA Tamesis DUAL. A summary of these new hires follows here. WTW Promotes Richardson to Europe Leader for Insurance Consulting & Technology WTW, a leading global advisory, broking and solutions company, announced the appointment of Tammy Richardson as Europe Regional Leader for its Insurance Consulting and Technology (ICT) business. Richardson most recently served as UK & Ireland leader for the same business. In her new role, Richardson will lead a team of over 500 colleagues with responsibility for P&L management and strategy. In addition to becoming the newest member of WTWs global ICT leadership team, Richardson is already a member of its GB Inclusion and Diversity Council and Executive Sponsor of the Young Professionals Network. Richardson has over 30 years of experience in the insurance industry with a diversified background in finance, risk, strategy, sales and business development, leadership and P&L management. Prior to joining WTW in 2012, Richardson held executive and board-level roles at Genworth Financial and GE Capital. *** Miller Launches French Cargo Team Miller, the London-based independent specialist re/insurance broker, announced the expansion of its cargo capabilities across Europe with the launch of a new French team. Nicolas Juge, who brings 30 years shipping and marine experience, is appointed head of Cargo, France, with Gaelle Besnardeau appointed account executive. Murielle Ducamp, who brings significant claims expertise, assumes the role of claims executive, while Melissa Oddoze will take the role of account handler. The new team, which will be based in Marseille, join from Forseas, a Swiss broker company created by Nicolas Juge in 2010. As the growing complexity of modern supply chains increases, the new French team will work closely with colleagues across London, Geneva, Paris and Brussels to broaden Millers European presence and deepen its Cargo capabilities. It is a privilege to have the opportunity to lead this highly skilled team, which will form a core part of a truly integrated European Cargo effort, commented Juge. Miller has established a reputation for excellence in this specialist field and has made a clear commitment to invest in deepening and broadening these core capabilities both technically and geographically. This offers clients access to a unique combination of skills, experience and expertise. Jamie Kearney, head of Cargo at Miller, said the new team is highly complementary to Millers broader cargo presence across Europe. We have outlined Europe as an important part of Millers overall growth objectives and, as we expand our offering across the continent, I am looking forward to working with our teams to take our ability to serve our clients to even greater heights, Kearney said. This investment in France is a clear signal of Millers commitment to deepen its expertise in areas such as commodities, which complement the deep rooted skills we have in areas such as credit and political risks, said Arnaud Froideval, head of CPRI, Europe and Switzerland. *** Tamesis DUAL Hires Argentas Toth as Director of Underwriting Tamesis DUAL announced the appointment of Nicholas Toth as director of Underwriting. Toth will join the business in April 2022, reporting to Tony Lovett, managing director and founder of Tamesis. Based in London, Toth will lead the underwriting, claims and compliance teams and will be responsible for positioning the business for further success as it expands its global footprint. He will work directly with underwriters to develop and manage the companys overall product offerings to support growth. Toth brings a broad knowledge of the reinsurance treaty market, having held a mixture of underwriting roles throughout his 25-plus-year career. He joins Tamesis after five years as head of Treaty and Outwards Reinsurance Manager at Argenta Syndicate Management Ltd. Prior to that, Toth spent 15 years at QBE Reinsurance as a senior underwriter in London, and two years at GE Reinsurance as an underwriter in Munich. Tamesis DUAL Ltd., incorporating Tamesis DUAL Americas LLC, is a global specialty excess of loss treaty reinsurance business operating in the London market, Miami and Cologne. Tamesis offers reinsurance solutions, including blended or composite and retrocessional products, across all asset based classes including marine, offshore energy, onshore energy, property, aerospace, terrorism, and war and political risks. Established in 2011, Tamesis was the first treaty reinsurance MGA and underwrites net written premium in excess of US$250 million. Tamesis is part of DUAL Corporate Risks, a subsidiary of the DUAL Group, a specialist underwriting agency. Topics InsurTech Tech Europe Willis Towers Watson Leadership Trucking France Russian airlines could be frozen out of the aircraft leasing market well beyond the Ukraine conflict, one of the industrys biggest players warned on Tuesday, blaming what executives have described as a default involving hundreds of Western jets. Global leasing companies had until Monday to sever ties with Russian carriers under Western sanctions imposed over Moscows invasion of Ukraine, but executives say only a fraction of the more than 400 jets directly involved have been returned. Analysis Aircraft Lessors Lose Hope of Getting Back Russian Planes Worth $10B Domhnal Slattery, chief executive of Dublin-based Avolon, the worlds second-largest leasing firm, told Reuters its own risk is limited, with a net exposure of below $200 million on 10 jets still blocked in Russia after it recovered four aircraft. But the mainly Ireland-based leasing sector, which accounts for about half of the worlds airline fleet, will be in no hurry to reset relations with Russian airlines even if sanctions against Moscow are lifted, he predicted. From an Avolon perspective it is not material; from a sector perspective it is a problem, unquestionably, Slattery added. In terms of future appetite in a post-war scenario for further business in Russia, I think all players in our sector will think long and hard about the risks of that jurisdiction and the appetite for going back in, he said in an interview. Moscow earlier this month introduced a law allowing airlines to re-register leased planes locally in a move widely seen as encouraging airlines to hold onto planes and avoid a collapse of Russias airline sector, which relies heavily on leasing. Until now, aircraft leased to Russia have been registered in Bermuda or Ireland under an agreement designed to provide security to leasing firms already worried about the willingness of Russian courts to uphold the rights of foreign lessors. Avolon, controlled by Bohai Leasing, a majority-owned subsidiary of Chinas HNA Group, has a gross exposure of just under $400 million to Russia, Slattery said. After deducting the value of four jets that have been recovered, as well as security and letters of credit that have been drawn down, Avolons net exposure is below $200 million. Given our scale that puts it in the realm of a headache rather than a migraine, Slattery said. We believe our aircraft are all appropriately insured, all the leases are terminated and we will continue to try to get them back, he added. Russias airline industry, the worlds 11th largest, had 980 aircraft in its fleet on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, of which 777 were leased rather than owned by the carriers. Of these, 515 were leased from foreign firms and about 400 of those worth up to $10 billion were most immediately at risk from the crisis, according to aviation data firm Cirium. (Reporting by Tim Hepher; editing by Kirsten Donovan and Alexander Smith) Topics Russia Aviation Ukraine POWERS Insurance & Risk Management Promotes Kate Murphy and Shari Smith at VIAA POWERS Insurance & Risk Management recently promoted Kate Murphy to licensing coordinator and Shari Smith to account manager for sister company Valley Insurance Agency Alliance (VIAA). Murphy will be responsible for licensing and compliance needs across the country. She will handle carrier appointments, license renewals, and arranging continuing education for the companys associates. Murphy previously served as an Administrative Assistant at POWERS for the past four years. Smith was promoted to a newly created position at VIAA where she will manage both commercial and personal lines accounts. She also will assist with quoting and issuing new business policies, as well as work with commercial book roll transfers. Prior to her promotion, Smith served as a commercial account manager at POWERS. She has more than 20 years of customer service experience and is a certified insurance service representative. St. Louis, Missouri-based POWERS provides personal and business insurance, surety, and risk management. TigerRisk Partners Names Bill Tuttle as Partner, Senior Reinsurance Broker TigerRisk Partners LLC, a leading risk, capital and strategic advisor to the global insurance and reinsurance industries, has announced the appointment of Bill Tuttle as partner, senior reinsurance broker. Tuttle will be responsible for guiding key clients through complex property placements in this difficult time in the market cycle. He has over 35 years experience in the Property & Casualty casualty, and joins most recently from Aon, where he was managing director with a focus on property catastrophe clients. Based in Minnesota, Tuttle will report to Dan Miller. Tuttle began his career at E.W.Blanch Co. in 1985, working as a reinsurance broker, where he was also involved in the development of new catastrophe models. He then moved to Risk Management Solutions, Inc. (RMS) in 2000 as Vice President of Product Marketing, helping to improve catastrophe modeling products and develop new exposure management solutions. TigerRisk is a risk, capital and strategic advisor to the insurance and reinsurance industries founded in 2008. Topics Minnesota The Chicago City Council has voted to pay nearly $1.7 million to five people, including a Black woman who said police dragged her from a car by her hair at a shopping mall amid unrest following George Floyds 2020 killing. The council voted 34-13 last week to approve the $1.67 million settlement of a federal civil rights lawsuit Mia Wright and four relatives filed against the city. Wright was a passenger in a car that arrived at the Brickyard Mall on May 31, 2020, amid widespread looting in the days after Floyd, a Black man, was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer. Wright said she and four relatives drove to the mall to go shopping and did not realize it was closed due to the unrest. The lawsuit alleges police officers suddenly surrounded their car, broke the windows with their batons and pulled Wright out of the vehicle by her hair. Wright alleged that the confrontation left her blind in one eye from flying glass caused by police breaking the car windows. Officers said they thought some members of Wrights group were attempting to break into a store at the mall to steal goods, city lawyer Caroline Fronczak has said, but the officers also acknowledged nobody in the group matched the descriptions of the suspected looters. After an investigation, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability recommended eight officers face discipline for their actions in the incident, ranging from firing to reprimands, and Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown agreed with the recommendations, Fronczak said. Under terms of the settlement, Wright will receive $650,000 in damages, while the other four people who were in the car with her will get $243,750 each, WBBM-TV reported. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Lawsuits A national consumer rights group on Thursday called on state insurance commissioners to investigate racial bias in claims handling after the New York Times reported on discrimination lawsuits filed against State Farm by a Chicago policyholder and a former employee assigned to the insurers special investigations unit in Michigan. The Consumer Federation of America specifically urged regulators to look into whether the algorithms that insurers used to flag potential fraud produce biased results because of racism. Doug Heller, director of insurance for the consumer group, said his organizations research has already shown that insurance pricing models have the effect of discriminating against communities of color. Theres no reason to suspect that systemic bias would somehow stop at the claims handling door, he said. State Farm denied charges that racial bias impacts its claims decisions and said it will vigorously defend itself in court. We will not attempt to litigate these issues in the media, the company said in a statement. At State Farm we believe in fostering an inclusive environment where everyone including our customers feels respected and valued. Well continue to engage in open, honest dialogue to find actionable and meaningful ways to continue advancing diversity and inclusion at State Farm and in neighborhoods and communities. A spokeswoman for the Association of Property and Casualty Insurers said the industry as a whole is proactively committed to promoting and creating a more diverse, equitable and inclusive industry through its employment practices. A March 18 article in the New York Times reported on a lawsuit filed by Carla Campbell-Jackson, a Black woman living in Kalamazoo, Michigan who worked for State Farm for 28 years before she was fired in 2016. The insurer says Campbell-Jackson shared confidential information outside the company, but she denies that charge. Campbell-Jackson filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission saying that her termination was part of a campaign by State Farm to discredit her after she raised concerns that the insurer was using fraud as a pretext to deny claims by Black policyholders. Her lawsuit alleges that State Farm managers urged investigators to regularly meet with claims adjusters and encourage them to refer more claims to the fraud unit. She says they used the term fill the cups as a means of increasing the number of SIU investigations as a means of denying more claims. Jones said State Farm offered a $175,000 severance payment if she agreed not to discuss her experience with the company. She refused. Last year, the EEOC agreed that State Farm had discriminated against Campbell-Jackson because of her race. The agency recommended that State Farm pay $300,000 in punitive damages, plus back pay, according to her court filing. The EEOC was unable to reach an agreement with State Farm and issued a right-to-sue letter to Campbell-Jackson last year. The Times report noted that one of State Farms policyholders, Darryl Williams of Chicago, had also filed a lawsuit in 2019 accusing State Farm of discrimination. Williams, who is Black, is the former owner of the Connectors Realty Group in South Chicago. He says he filed a claim with State Farm after a pipe burst in a six-unit apartment building in January 2017, forcing him to foot the bill for hotel rooms for his displaced tenants. Williams filed claims seeking more than $400,000, of which State Farm paid only $56,000, the Times reported, citing court filings. Campbell-Jackson has agreed to testify as a witness in Williams lawsuit. State Farm has objected to a discovery request by Williams attorneys that specifically requests emails and documents that use the term fill the cup. The insurers filing says Williams has a personal ax to grind and was not working for State Farm at the time Williams filed his claim, so her deposition has no bearing on the lawsuit. State Farm said the term fill the cup which is no longer used referred to a method of effectively allocating referrals among claim-handling teams. There is nothing nefarious about the fact that State Farm engages in efforts to identify and investigate potentially fraudulent claims, and that those efforts include assigning such claims to a Special Investigations Unit and ensuring that the resources available to that unit are fully utilized, the filing states. State Farms press office did not respond to a request for comment. The Times reported that it had received a video of a presentation that State Farm managers gave to employers. Discrimination played no role in Campbell-Jacksons termination, Michael Trout, the chief human resources officer of State Farm, said in the video, according to the Times. Campbell has filed one other racial discrimination suit. She and her sister, Lisa Campbell, sued the Radisson Hotels & Resorts in 2005, alleging that the chains hotel in Bloomington, Ill. refused to provide proper accommodations to her and other African-American guests when she hosted a womens conference for the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority in 2001. The case was settled in April 2007. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday authorized a second booster dose of the two most commonly used COVID-19 vaccines for people age 50 and older, given data showing waning immunity and the risks posed by Omicron variants of the virus. The agency said the new boosters a fourth round of shots for most vaccine recipients of the Pfizer Inc/BioNTech and Moderna Inc vaccines are to be administered at least four months after the previous dose. They are intended to offer more protection against severe disease and hospitalization. The FDA also authorized the second booster dose of the vaccines for younger people with compromised immune systems those aged 12 and older for the Pfizer/BioNTech shot and 18 and older for Modernas. The authorization comes as some scientists have raised concerns about the highly contagious and newly predominant BA.2 Omicron subvariant, which has driven new spikes in COVID-19 cases in other countries. COVID-19 cases in the United States have dropped sharply since a record surge in January, but have seen a small uptick over the past week, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Based on an analysis of emerging data, a second booster dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine could help increase protection levels for these higher-risk individuals, top FDA official Dr. Peter Marks said in a statement. The FDA said it had looked at data from a relatively small, ongoing clinical trial in Israel to help make its decision. In addition, safety data from more than 700,000 people who received second boosters in Israel revealed no new concerns, the agency said. Scientists and officials have debated for months if and when an additional booster shot would be needed as they parsed data on how long protection from the vaccines and boosters would last. Read full story Its not clear that now is the right time for people to get a fourth dose, Dr. William Moss, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said. If there is a surge in cases in late fall or early winter, as is typical for respiratory viruses and influenza, an additional boost may then be needed, he said. The bodys neutralizing antibodies spurred on by a fourth booster given now may decline in just a few months, he said. It is also unclear whether young, healthy people will need a fourth shot. The study of Israeli healthcare workers cited by the FDA suggested that the fourth dose added little additional protection in the age group. Biden administration officials have said that the U.S. government currently has enough doses of the vaccines to meet the demand for another round of booster shots in older Americans, even as funding for the U.S. pandemic response has all but run out. They say that unless Congress approves more spending, the government will not be likely to be able to be pay for future inoculations, if they are needed, particularly if the vaccines need to be redesigned to target new variants. Around two-thirds of fully vaccinated Americans over the age of 65 and just over half of people between the age of 50 and 64 have gotten their first booster dose so far. Photograph: Courtesy of University of Maryland School of Medicine via AP, File Topics COVID-19 A wildfire has burned more an 1,000 acres in South Texas forcing some people to evacuate, destroying three homes and knocking out power to more than 100 others, officials said on March 27. Gov. Greg Abbott declared a disaster in Medina County during a news conference and said the blaze thats forced 40 households to evacuate was only 10% contained. The fire has not caused any reported injuries or deaths, but officials in the county west of San Antonio warned residents remaining in the area that there was still high risk the flames could spread. The wildfire began late afternoon on March 25 and worsened on March 27 because of strong winds and low humidity. More than 200 firefighters are working to combat the blaze and Medina County Judge Chris Schuchart said that they are praying rain. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Texas Wildfire NFP has acquired Achilles & Associates, an Austin, Texas-based P&C broker that provides customized commercial P&C, personal lines P&C, and benefits insurance solutions to individuals, small businesses and middle market clients. The acquisition strengthens NFPs capabilities and product offerings in its Central region. Firm principals Jerry Achilles and David Achilles will join NFP as vice presidents and report to Kevin Brown, managing director, Corporate Services. NFP provides specialized property and casualty products, corporate benefits, retirement, and individual coverage through licensed subsidiaries and affiliates. It has some 6,600 employees around the world. Source: NFP Topics Mergers & Acquisitions Texas The Louisiana Department of Insurance (LDI) announced it has established an open-door insurance resource center in Arabi to assist those affected by the tornado that struck the area last week. Meetings will be held at Patricia Park in the Louisiana Workforce Commissions Mobile Workforce Center. The resource center will be open Tuesday, March 29; Thursday, March 31; and Friday, April 1 from 9:30 a.m. 4:00 p.m Trained specialists from the LDIs Office of Consumer Advocacy will offer one-on-one consultations to answer individual questions, help constituents understand their insurance policies and assist them with filing complaints through the LDI. The LDI asks all constituents to bring copies of their insurance policies to the meetings. Navigating the claims process can be difficult for anyone, especially in the aftermath of a devastating storm, said Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon. If you have questions for the LDI, please grab your insurance policy and come see us. Source: LDI Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Louisiana Windstorm Lexington Insurance, an AIG company, is pulling out of the Florida homeowners market, leaving an estimated 8,000 affluent customers looking for coverage. And those homeowners likely wont be able to turn to Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-backed insurer of last resort, which insures homes only up to $700,000 in much of the state, the South Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper reported. The Boston-based Lexington, classed as a surplus lines carrier in Florida, specializes in homes with replacement values of $1 million or more. The company appears to be discontinuing its personal lines division nationwide on Aug. 1, the news site said. AIG said in February it plans to move high net worth homeowners to excess and surplus lines in multiple states. The Lexington announcement to local agents may be seen as the latest marker for Floridas struggling property insurance market, beset by hurricane losses, roof claims and litigation. At least six other insurers have stopped writing new homeowner policies in the state or have non-renewed thousands of policies. Two of those companies, St. Johns and Avatar, have been deemed insolvent this year and more liquidations are expected, despite rising premiums for policyholders. A number of stakeholders in Florida have urged the governor and top lawmakers to convene a special session of the Legislature soon to tackle reforms that could limit losses and litigation costs, before many insurers must purchase reinsurance on June 1. Reinsurance costs are expected to increase sharply then, jeopardizing more carriers. The governor has said he is not opposed to a session if legislative leaders will call one. So far, House and Senate leaders have not indicated their intentions. Topics Florida Georgias insurance commissioner has issued a directive to auto insurers to include the full amount of sales tax when settling a total-loss vehicle claim. When calculating taxes to be paid to an insured on a first-party auto claim, insurers should base the tax payment on the agreed-upon cash value of the vehicle, Commissioner John King wrote in the recent directive. An Atlanta TV news report noted that some drivers felt that they had been shorted a few hundred dollars on claim payments after their cars were totaled in accidents. Georgia law requires insurers to pay the vehicles negotiated value, along with 6.6% ad valorem taxes, tag and fees. But one motorist reported that Progressive Insurance paid $25,000 for a 2020 Toyota Corolla, totaled in a collision, but paid only $1,118 in taxes about $500 less than the 6.6%. The reason is that, for the tax amount, the insurer used the state Department of Revenues web-based calculator and estimated the cars value by combining retail and wholesale prices, CBS46 TV news reported. While the insurer and the insured agreed on a $25,000 replacement value, Progressive used the lower value of $16,950 to calculate the tax amount due in the claim. There might not have been clarity in the past, but there is absolute clarity now. And if they continue to engage in this practice, they (the insurance companies) are going to be sanctioned, King told the news outlet. Kings March 11 directive can be seen here. Topics Carriers Georgia Some residents living near an Anchorage suburb were ordered to evacuate Sunday over fears of another avalanche after a slide last week cut off about 100 homes from a main road. Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson issued the evacuation order for an area near the community of Eagle River, which is within the municipality of Anchorage, the Anchorage Daily News reported. About half a mountains snowpack came down in an avalanche late Thursday. The Anchorage Office of Emergency Management said the slide is up to 450 feet wide and up to 80 feet deep. Officials said it appears no one was trapped in the slide and no homes were destroyed. The mountains remaining snow was in danger of also coming down, and officials were trying to get residents along a 1-mile stretch to evacuate so the city could begin mitigation efforts to bring down the rest of the snowpack. We have to evacuate the area: We cannot perform mitigation if one person remains because were not willing to risk human life, municipal manager Amy Dembowski said. If somebody decides to stay, the road will remain closed until it is safe which could be well into the summer. The city planned to begin mitigation efforts Sunday night, and the process could take several days. Part of the process would include the placement of explosives by helicopters, officials said. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. The cause of an explosion and fire at an ExxonMobil refinery in southern Montana is under investigation, company officials said Sunday. The fire began at about 10 p.m. Saturday at a refinery in Lockwood, a suburb of Billings. It was extinguished at about 1:15 a.m. Sunday. There were no injuries and all employees and contractors were accounted for, ExxonMobil spokesperson Dan Carter told The Billings Gazette. We are sorry this incident has occurred and apologize for any disruption or inconvenience, Carter said. It isnt clear how much damage was done and ExxonMobil officials didnt respond to questions about how the fire might affect production. A full assessment of any damages and an investigation of the cause will be taking place, Carter said Sunday. The plant can refine up to 2.5 million gallons of crude oil per day and produces about 600 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel each year. Other products include asphalt, butane and propane. The refinerys emergency response team fought the fire along with crews from Lockwood, Billings and other area refineries, Yellowstone County officials said. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. A convicted murderer who dragged his wife by her hair, hit her head off a table, punched her, kicked her and tried to pull her eyelashes off, before finally attempting to suffocate her has once again avoided further time in custody even though the Court of Appeal on Tuesday ruled his original suspended sentence had been unduly lenient. Marius Rucinskas, 45, formerly of Lithuania but now residing in Cork City, had received an 18-month suspended sentence for the three-hour attack, which took place on January 1, 2020, at a house he shared with Renata Rucinskeine on Main Street, Castletownbere, Co Cork. The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) later appealed the sentence handed down by Judge Sean O Donnabhain on the grounds it was unduly lenient. In papers submitted to the Court of Appeal, the DPP said Rucinskas pleaded guilty to a Section 3 assault causing harm against Ms Rucinskeine and a count of criminal damage when he appeared before Judge O Donnabhain at Cork Circuit Criminal Court in September 2021. Brendan Kelly BL, for the DPP, yesterday told the three-judge court that Rucinskas had waited until the day of his trial before entering his guilty pleas. Mr Kelly said the respondent had carried out a sustained assault in a domestic setting which involved punching, kicking, dragging the victim by the hair, hitting her head off a table, and trying to pull her eyelashes off as well as threats to kill against Ms Rucinskeine. When Ms Rucinskeine tried to raise the alarm and phone gardai, Rucinskas grabbed the mobile out of her hand and smashed it, counsel said. Mr Kelly also told the court that Rucinskas had previously served 15 years for murder in his native Lithuania and moved to Ireland in 2015 on his release. Looking at the entirety of the sentence imposed, it was unduly lenient, he said. Delivering judgment, Ms Justice Isobel Kennedy sitting with Court President Mr Justice George Birmingham and Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said the Court of Appeal agreed with the DPP and was quashing the original sentence. Ms Justice Kennedy said the offending had been at the upper end of the scale. It must have been terrifying for the victim in question, she said. But although the judge increased Rucinskas sentence from 18 months to three-and-a-half years, she suspended the final two years in a judgment which allowed the respondent to leave the court after entering a good behaviour bond, as a result of time previously served in custody. During submissions, Mr Justice Birmingham noted Judge O Donnabhain had imposed sentence on someone who had spent 13 months in custody, which he said was the equivalent of an 18-month sentence at that time. Mr Justice McCarthy, however, said Rucinskas murder conviction meant you couldnt have a worse record for violence. Dermot Sheehan BL, for the respondent, told the court his client was now living in Cork City where he worked in a meat processing plant. Counsel said his client had previously worked as a fisherman and in a fish-processing plant but had left these jobs as result of the adverse publicity surrounding this case. Mr Sheehan added in his submission that Judge O Donnabhain had not erred with his sentence. It was clearly a lenient sentence. I am not saying it wasnt. But there was not an error in principle, Mr Sheehan said. Gardai have launched an investigation following the discovery of the body of a male cyclist in "unexplained circumstances" on a roadside in Co Kerry. The man, aged in his 50s, was found unresponsive at the side of the road at Ardywanig, Milltown near Castlemaine at approximately 10.30am this morning. Gardai and emergency services were alerted and attended the scene, but the cyclist was pronounced dead at the a short time later. His body has since been moved to the mortuary at University Hospital Kerry, and the local coroner has been notified. A garda spokesperson told the Irish Examiner that the results of a post-mortem examination will determine the course of the garda investigation. The road was closed for a time to allow for a technical examination by garda forensic collision investigators, but it has since reopened. Investigating gardai have issued an appeal for witnesses to come forward. Any road users who may have camera footage, including dash-cam, and were travelling between 10am and 10:40am on any local routes around Ardywanig, Milltown, have been asked to make this footage available to gardai. The road in question is a minor road from the junction off of the main Castlemaine to Firies Road (R561) at Rushen heading towards Ardywanig. Anyone with any information has been asked to contact Tralee Garda Station (066) 710 2300, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111 or any Garda station. If we accept the commentary surrounding the apparent collapse of support for Fine Gael as expressed in the most recent opinion poll, which suggested an approval rate of just 19%, then those critics who say that the party has become too Dublin-centric now have the upper hand. In the online Red C poll carried out for the Business Post, which surveyed 1,001 adults aged over 18 between March 18-23, Sinn Fein remained the most popular party by a considerable distance, coming in at 33%. Support for Fianna Fail sits at 16% and the Green Party, led by Eamon Ryan, remains at 5%. Independents have an 11% share. Gulf Arab states are holding a summit about the war in Yemen but the countrys Houthi rebels are boycotting the talks because they are taking place in Saudi Arabia, their adversary in the conflict. The decision by the Iranian-backed Houthis to skip the summit called by the Saudi-based Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has immediately called into question the effectiveness of such a gathering. The United Nations, diplomats and others have been pushing for another potential ceasefire to mark the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, similar to efforts for a truce over the past years. Ramadan is likely to start this weekend, depending on the sighting of the new crescent moon. The GCC a six-nation bloc including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates was to hold closed-door talks on Tuesday in Riyadh. On Monday, the GCCs secretary-general Nayef al-Hajraf held talks with British Ambassador to Yemen Richard Oppenheim and Yemeni officials allied with its internationally recognised but exiled government. A passenger airplane flies over a smoldering fire at a Saudi Aramco oil depot after a Yemen Houthi rebel attack, ahead of the Formula One race in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia (AP) Those talks saw Mr al-Hajraf, a Kuwaiti politician, discuss efforts to stop the war and ways to achieve comprehensive peace to alleviate the human suffering witnessed by Yemeni people, according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency. The Houthis, meanwhile, have rejected the summit because of its venue in Saudi Arabia, as well as the continuing closure of Sanaas airport and restrictions on the countrys ports by the Saudi-led coalition that is waging war on the Houthis. The rebels, who over the weekend attacked an oil depot in the Saudi city of Jiddah ahead of a Formula One race there, have called for the talks to be held in a neutral country. Houthi spokesman Mohammad Abdul-Salam wrote on Twitter: The Saudi regime must prove its seriousness towards peace by responding to a ceasefire, lifting the siege and expelling foreign forces from our country. Then peace will come and it is time to talk about political solutions in a calm atmosphere away from any military or humanitarian pressure. Irans foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh supported the Houthi position in a statement on Tuesday. He also noted Ramadan was soon and that a possible prisoner swap could help ease tensions. The plan proposed by Sanaa in good faith carries a strong message suggesting robust determination to end the war, lift the cruel blockade on people and resolve the Yemen crisis through political means, Mr Khatibzadeh said. Yemeni police inspect a site of Saudi-led airstrikes targeting two houses in Sanaa (AP) US secretary of state Antony Blinken spoke late on Monday with Saudi foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan. The US state department said the two discussed support for the UNs proposal for a Ramadan truce in Yemen and efforts to launch a new, more inclusive and comprehensive peace process. The US under President Joe Biden has pulled back from the Saudi campaign while still supplying the kingdom new air defence missiles. Yemens war began in September 2014, when the Houthis swept into the capital, Sanaa, from their north-western stronghold in the Arab worlds poorest country. The Houthis then pushed into exile the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, elected in 2012 as the sole candidate after the long rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh. A Saudi-led coalition, including the UAE, entered the war in March 2015 to try and restore Mr Hadis government to power. But the war stretched into long bloody years, pushing Yemen to the brink of famine. More than 150,000 people have been killed in the warfare, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. Those include both fighters and civilians. The most-recent figure for the civilian death toll in Yemens conflict stands at 14,500. Also, Saudi air strikes have killed hundreds of civilians and targeted the countrys infrastructure. The Houthis have used child soldiers and indiscriminately laid landmines across the country. Meanwhile, gunmen shot and killed a security officer in Yemens southern port city of Aden on Tuesday, security officials said. They identified the slain officer as Capt Karam al-Mashraqi, with the UAE-backed Security Belt militia. Capt al-Mashraqi was the second senior security official killed this month in Aden, the seat of Hadis government. No-one immediately claimed responsibility for the killing. Interview Karen Ethnic Armed Group Tells Myanmar Govt Employees in Its Area to Quit KNLA troops / The Irrawaddy District level Karen National Union (KNU) offices recently called on non-striking government employees working for the regime in KNU-controlled areas to resign. The Papun District KNU, in the area where Battalion 5 of the organizations armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), is based, was the first to issue the notice, followed by Thaton District KNU, where Brigade 1 is based, and Dupalaya District KNU, where Brigade 6 is based. Padoh Saw Taw Nee, the KNUs head of foreign affairs, recently talked to The Irrawaddy about why the KNU is asking government employees to resign and what consequences they will face if they refuse to do so. The Dupalaya District KNU released a notice on March 17 asking regime employees to resign. Why did the KNU release such a notice? It was issued by the Kawkareik Township KNU on March 17. We are pushing to overthrow the military dictatorship, and we cant rely on only one measure. Militarily, we have been fighting them every day. But we also have to target its administrative mechanism. It is collapsing, but it is important to get rid of the entire administrative mechanism if we are to topple the military dictatorship. So, the township and district [KNU branches] are taking their own initiative to implement our policy. This is happening in many places [under the KNUs control]. In some places [local KNU offices] may not release notices, but they are also working in a similar way. The notice says government employees will face consequences if they fail to follow the order. What does that mean? Will they be targeted militarily? We dont have plans to go that far. It is up to them; we just made public our policy. They are our brethren and we would like to urge them to do their fair share in ending the military dictatorship. Even if they can do nothing big, their resignation will be a boost to the people. This is the message I want to send to them. What impact do you think it will have on the ground? Will it really work? We can see clearly that the administrative mechanism has been collapsing since the coup. The regimes administration is not functioning, especially in rural areas. And our three districts have officially issued notices, and we can say that it has had an impact. As far as I know, there are no government employees in Papun now. The administrative mechanism has collapsed there and only junta troops are left. Even the family members of junta troops have fled. What I can say is it is becoming clearer that its administrative mechanism is weakening in all our districts, including those that have not issued warnings to non-striking government employees. What is the situation on the ground in terms of fighting? Do you think the statement of the Dupalaya District KNU will further intensify the fighting in the district? Compared to the military situation before the issuing of the notice on March 17, the fighting has not de-escalated in Kawkareik. On March 7, we issued a statement and asked the regime to withdraw their troops from Lay Kay Kaw so that local people could return home. They responded to our request by heavily reinforcing their presence. So, the fighting has continued. And the Kawkareik Township KNU asked the government employees to resign, 10 days later. Junta troops did not withdraw [from Lay Kay Kaw] but were looting houses there, and people dare not return to their homes. So, we asked them to withdraw. But they did the opposite and reinforced their presence. So, clashes are happening daily. How many people have been displaced by the fighting in Karen State, and what difficulties are they facing now? It is difficult to make an estimate because the situation is not stable. For example, in Lay Kay Kaw, we estimate that around 6,000 to 7,000 people have been displaced. The number could be higher. Some are taking shelter at the houses of their relatives, but some are staying in forests and they might have a hard time because of the rain. Nearly 70,000 have been newly displaced [in KNU-controlled areas] since the coup. Before the coup, we were a signatory to the ceasefire but there were sporadic clashes between us and the military. So, people could not return to their homes and we could not build infrastructure for them. The combined number of internally displaced people from before and after the coup will be more than 200,000 people in all the seven districts controlled by the KNU. The Karen State military regime has formed a negotiation team to prevent fighting in Karen State, and it has invited the KNU to join the team. What is the KNUs response? There have been many ceasefire agreements, [as well as a] bilateral and nationwide ceasefire. [The military] does not follow those agreements, which were signed before international dignitaries, and is doing as it pleases. So, my point is the regime is sending heavy reinforcements while talking about a ceasefire. This is why fighting is taking place. It is totally unacceptable. Far from a ceasefire, it does not even withdraw its troops. It has stopped none of its various forms of violence against the people, like killing innocent civilians and torching their homes. These things are happening across the country, and we are asking it to stop those things. But it has stopped none. Again, we cant just look out for ourselves. We live in the same country. We cant accept their bad habit of ceasing fire only here, and going on the rampage elsewhere in the country. If they want a ceasefire, they should express clearly how they will stop fighting. But they keep on sending reinforcements all the time while speaking of a ceasefire. It appears as if we have to keep our finger on the trigger whenever they talk about a ceasefire. The level of trust is that bad. My understanding is that we should not observe a ceasefire at this time, in this situation. Our objective is clearto overthrow the military dictatorship. And we are undertaking all means toward that end. You may also like these stories: Myanmar Junta Troops Kill Villagers; Hold Schoolkids Hostage Myanmar Democracy Activists Hold Rallies in Support of Ukraine Ukraine Vows No Capitulation at Talks; Putin Orders Nuclear Alert Burma In Solidarity with Coup Leader, Myanmar Ex-Generals Appear at Armed Forces Day Event Coup leader Min Aung Hlaing salutes and his wife pays respect to ex-president U Thein Sein on Sunday. The appearance of ex-generals from the previous Myanmar military regime at the Armed Forces Day commemoration and subsequent ceremony hosted by the current regime on Sunday proves that they are all in solidarity with junta leader Min Aung Hlaing, who staged a coup that has so far killed 1,700 people. As part of events to mark Armed Forces Day, the coup leader paid respects to 25 retired senior military officials who attended the anniversary of the founding of the Myanmar military. Most of the aging former soldiers were senior officials in the former Myanmar military regime that oppressed the country from 1988 to early 2011, when the regime handed over power to a proxy so-called civilian government. At that point, some generals faded from public view while others took higher positions in the proxy administration, fooling the world into thinking that they were reformists who had left military dictatorship behind. Among the 25 attendees to which Min Aung Hlaing paid his respects at the gathering were U Thein Sein, the president of the quasi-civilian government that relinquished power to the Daw Aung San Suu Kyi-led National League for Democracy after his huge loss in the 2015 general election. His appearance at the ceremony hosted by Min Aung Hlaing on Sunday proved that the former general was not a genuinely reform-minded president when he was internationally praised for the democratization process in Myanmar during his presidency from 2011 to early 2016. As if to underscore the point, the former president was among two attendees who gave words of advice to coup leader Min Aung Hlaing, his wife and audience. What he advised on the day is unknown. Pictures of the event show Min Aung Hlaing clasping his hands together and kneeling in front of U Thein Seina traditional Myanmar way of paying respect to eldersbefore giving him some honorary presents. Though the event is said to be held annually, this years one turned out to be significant because Min Aung Hlaing personally attended the gathering, after being absent last year, and due to the former presidents appearance and his words of advice to the coup leader. The ceremony may well have been a way for Min Aung Hlaing to make a pretense of unityeven if only with the old soldierswithin the army, which has been demoralized in the face of public denunciation and growing defections since the coup. Noticeably absent from the event were Myanmars ex-dictator Than Shwe and his former No. 2, Vice Senior General Maung Aye. The duo have rarely appeared in public since their retirement in 2011, not even attending Armed Forces Day commemorations as honored guests. They probably either cant be bothered acknowledging any respect from Min Aung Hlaing, whom Than Shwe picked as his successor, or think the event is beneath them. A few hours before the gathering, retired military officials gathered as VVIPs or VIPs for the Armed Forces Day event in Naypyitaw. Apparently proud of their service during the oppressive former military regime, as the pictures show, the beaming old soldiers clad in their uniforms seemed to be pleased with Min Aung Hlaings coup against the democratically elected NLD government in February last year. Among them, no one seemed happier than U Soe Thane, an ex-admiral under the Than Shwe regime and a powerful minister in the Thein Sein administration, who openly praised the February coup in his book. The other retired military officials present included, unsurprisingly, the chairman of the military proxy Union Solidarity and Development party (USDP), U Than Htay. After the USDPs embarrassingly heavy loss to the NLD in the 2020 general election, he was among those who sought Min Aung Hlaings intervention. The partys former chairman U Htay Oo, who is also a former military officer, appeared too. Other attendees included ex-General U Tin Aye, who used to be the chief of the union electoral body under the U Thein Sein administration, as well as U Nyan Tun, the former commander-in-chief of the Myanmar Navy-cum-vice president from 2012 to 2016. Former USDP lawmakers U Ohn Myint, U Maung Myint, U Hla Htay Win and U Wai Lwinall retired military officersappeared too. Probable new faces at the event were the family of Myanmars first dictator Ne Win, who ruled the country from 1962 to 1988. Daw Khin Sandar Win, the dictators daughter, attended in a military uniform as she used to serve in a medic battalion. She appeared with her three sons Aye Ne Win, Kyaw Ne Win and Zwe Ne Win. They were jailed with their father for high treason for plotting to overthrow Senior General Than Shwes regime in 2002 and released in 2013. You may also like these stories: Myanmar Junta Troops Kill Villagers; Hold Schoolkids Hostage Myanmar Democracy Activists Hold Rallies in Support of Ukraine Ukraine Vows No Capitulation at Talks; Putin Orders Nuclear Alert Burma Myanmar Junta Enacts Law Allowing It to Deploy Police to Front Lines Police are deployed in downtown Yangon amid anti-regime protests in February 2021. / The Irrawaddy The Myanmar military regime has enacted a new law making it compulsory for law enforcement officers to fight alongside soldiers on the front lines, while expanding their powers to restrict citizens civil liberties. The law comes at a time when regime forces are sustaining huge casualties in both urban and rural areas amid fierce anti-regime civilian armed resistance following the coup last year. At the same time, the regime has been struggling with a mounting number of defectors as well as a drop in recruitment as it becomes an object of popular hatred due to the armys brutal crackdowns on anti-regime protesters. So far, the junta has killed more than 1,700 people. The enactment of the Myanmar Police Act could be seen as a sign of desperation by the regime as it resorts to legal measures to solve the armys human resource problems. The fifth provision of the law states: At the necessary time, police must be involved in the states defense and security affairs. Myanmars previous police laws were the Rangoon Police Act, 1899; the Police Act 1945; the Karen State Police Act 1959; and the Kayah State Police Act 1959. There was no word about defending the state in any of these laws, or in the list of the Myanmar Police Forces duties on the website of the Ministry of Home Affairs, which oversees the force. The new Myanmar Police Act abolishes the four previous laws, according to the regimes statement. A striking police officer said the new police law exposes the militarys lack of manpower. So, they are trying to use police to send to the battlefields. After the police, will they use firefighters and civil servants who have completed basic military training? he said. Law enforcement personnel have on occasion been used in non-policing roles: The military used police officers to attack the Arakan Army (AA), an ethnic armed group in Rakhine State, a few years ago. Customarily, the ex-police officer said, it is understood that police should cooperate with the military during state emergencies, but this has always been taken to refer to situations such as civil defense during a foreign invasion. Now, they have enacted a new law so that they can openly use police officers, said the ex-officer, who is among members of the police force taking part in the Civil Disobedience Movement. Furthermore, in attempt to suppress civil liberties like freedom of expression, the new police law gives authority to law enforcement officers to take action without warrant against anyone who bangs pots and pans. The practice of beating pots and pans at night emerged last year as a popular collective method of protesting against the regime. After the military council brutally cracked down on peaceful protesters last year, many people opted to engage in armed revolution, leading to intense fighting between regime forces and a growing resistance, particularly in Chin and Kayah states and Sagaing and Magwe regions. From July 1, 2021 to March 20, 2022, a total of 2,193 battles erupted in parts of Karen State, Kachin State, Kayah State and Chin State, according to ISP Myanmar, an independent monitor group. The growing number of dead and wounded soldiers and defectors has prompted the military to train and arm pro-military militias known as Pyu Saw Htee. A total of 9,008 regime soldiers were killed and about 3,158 injured from June 1, 2021 to Feb. 21, 2022, according to the parallel National Unity Government (NUG)s of Ministry of Defense. The number of army defectors is also increasing, and is believed to number close to 3,000 including some battalion commanders. About 7,000 police officers have defected, according to Myanmar Police CDM channel. Amid these challenges, coup leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing vowed on Armed Forces Day on Sunday to annihilate the opponents of Myanmars military. You may also like these stories: Junta Forces Massacre 14 People in Upper Myanmar Myanmar Junta Sentences Veteran Activist on his Birthday Junta Court Charges Myanmar Journalist With Incitement Burma Myanmar Junta Helicopter Crashes in Chin State The crashed military helicopter in Hakha on Tuesday. / MRTV A military helicopter crashed and injured five people onboard at Hakha, Chin States capital, on Tuesday morning, according to Myanmars junta. It is the third air force crash since June. Myanmars air force is known for frequent deadly crashes, even during training exercises, due to its largely outdated fleet. The regime blamed Tuesdays crash on instability in the air while the helicopter tried to land at a battalion headquarters in Hakha. Pictures show the tail broken from the body. The regime said the helicopter was carrying exam papers for Thursdays school tests. All three civilian staff and two military personnel on board were injured but not seriously, it added. The junta regularly uses airstrikes to attack resistance forces in Sagaing and Magwe regions and Chin, Karen and Kayah states. The crash was warmly received on social media with comments saying it was one fewer helicopter available to use against resistance fighters. In June last year, 12 people, including one of Myanmars most influential Buddhist monks and several military officers, were killed when a military airplane crashed near Anisakan Airport in Pyin Oo Lwin Township, Mandalay Region. Last month, a jet fighter pilot was killed when his plane crashed into a lake in Sagaing Region due to a technical failure. In 2017, a military plane crashed into the Andaman Sea, killing all 122 people on board. The authorities blamed bad weather. SEO: Chin State, airstrikes, air force, helicopter, peoples war, political prisoners, Peoples Defense Force, PDF, junta, National Unity Government, civilian deaths, crackdown, military regime, State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, coup, military in politics, rule of law, Tatmadaw, National League for Democracy, human rights, democracy, November 8 general election, Min Aung Hlaing, State Administrative Council, civil disobedience movement You may also like these stories: Myanmar Junta Troops Kill Villagers; Hold Schoolkids Hostage Myanmar Democracy Activists Hold Rallies in Support of Ukraine Ukraine Vows No Capitulation at Talks; Putin Orders Nuclear Alert Burma Myanmar Junta Tortures Civilians to Death in Magwe Villages, including Myauk Khin Yan in Gangaw Township, were torched by junta troops in January. / CJ Junta soldiers and allied Pyu Saw Htee militia fighters tortured two civilians to death this month in Gangaw Township, Magwe Region, according to Gangaw Peoples Defense Force (PDF). A Myauk Khin Yan villager on March 18 was doused with hot water before being chained to a vehicle by his neck and dragged around the village until he died. The village is a Pyu Saw Htee stronghold. And Mwe Lel villager on March 24 had his limbs fractured and an eye gouged out before being stabbed to death, said Gangaw PDF on Sunday. They are killing arbitrarily and brutally, said a resident. A resistance fighter was killed by an artillery strike while rescuing more than 300 civilians trapped in villages. Daily clashes have been reported in rural Gangaw this month. Five junta privates were killed and a captain was injured in the fighting on March 21, according to the PDF. Six resistance fighters died the following day when the junta used artillery and snipers. Apart from killing civilians, junta soldiers have vandalized and torched their houses and looted valuables, said Gangaw villagers. Around 150 junta troops in two groups raided villages in Gangaw and have recently merged into a single force. Troops are holding two civilians as human shields, according to residents. You may also like these stories: Funding Revolution Important for the Victory: Prominent Myanmar Activist Regime Artillery Strikes Kill Children and Senior Citizens in Upper Myanmar Yangon Suffers Water Shortages Amid Rolling Blackouts in Myanmar A Miami Federal judge has found that four cruise lines engaged in prohibited tourism to Cuba, profiting billions in doing so. According to a CBS4 News report, first published in the Miami Herald, the four cruise lines are Carnival, Norwegian, Royal Caribbean, and MSC SA. U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom ruled in favor of Havana Docks, ruling that by using the terminal, or one of its piers, the cruise lines committed trafficking acts. For the complete CBS4 News report, click here. Finnish telecommunications equipment provider Nokia has termed as "misleading" claims made by The New York Times about the company's role in Russia's lawful intercept system. The NYT story is a rehashing of a story published by the American tech website TechCrunch back in 2019, where the reporter, Zach Whittaker, said it offered "new insight into the scope and scale of the Russian surveillance system... and how Russian authorities gain access to the calls, messages and data of customers of the countrys largest phone provider, Mobile TeleSystems". A Nokia spokesperson said, in a detailed rebuttal, that the NYT had confirmed that the documents used as source material for the story were the same as those used by TechCrunch. NYT reporters Adam Satariano, Paul Mozur and used emotive language, writing that the system was "most likely being employed at this moment as President Vladimir V. Putin culls and silences anti-war voices inside Russia" although it had no hard evidence to prove this. The Russian lawful intercept system is known as System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM. Nokia said the NYT had suggested that its networks play an active part in enabling equipment used for SORM. "This is incorrect. Like any other network infrastructure supplier, Nokia is required to ensure that the networking products we sell have passive capability to interface with lawful intercept equipment of law enforcement agencies," the company said. "This is governed by internationally recognised standards, as well as local regulations. All Nokia deals go through a strict human rights due diligence process that has been externally assessed and vetted by the Global Network Initiative. "We are the first and only telecommunications equipment vendor to have this external assessment in place." The NYT headline was: "When Nokia Pulled Out of Russia, a Vast Surveillance System Remained", but it did not outline whether other companies that had pulled out of war zones in the past had taken their installed equipment with them. The Nokia spokesperson said: "The information that was already published by TechCrunch in 2019 does not show anything more than Nokias product interfaces meeting the standards-based, legal requirements related to lawful intercept. The same standards and legal requirements have governed every other infrastructure supplier which has supplied equipment in Russia. "In fact, Nokia is not even permitted to access SORM equipment or systems whether sitting on an operator or relevant authoritys premises. Additionally, it is a third party which converts the standards-based interface in Nokias products to fit with the legal intercept requirements a fact which is also reflected in the 2019 documents." The Finnish company, one of four that is able to supply end-to-end 5G networks, added: "As Nokia has made clear to The New York Times, Nokia does not manufacture, install or service SORM equipment or systems. Any suggestions that we do, are incorrect. "Lawful intercept is a standard capability that exists in every network in almost every nation. It provides properly authorised law enforcement agencies with the ability to track and view certain data and communications passing through an operators network for purposes of combatting crime." The NYT story was claimed to have been put together after vetting more than 75,000 documents for the story. Aruba, a division of HPE, has unveiled news of Aruba Central NetConductor to automate and simplify the creation, deployment, and management of wired, wireless, and WAN networks all from one place, as well as news about GPS-enabled Aruba WiFi access points to provide greater location capabilities. Aruba South Pacific (ANZ) director Pat Devlin and Aruba category manager Darren Smith spoke to iTWire to explain what the news means. In reality, while today's news offers amazing capabilities for enterprises of all sizes, Aruba has been building to this point for some years with its previous decision and work to relaunch its switching platform to use a single unified operating system end-to-end all the way from devices for small offices to data centres. This unified platform made Aruba the only networking equipment vendor with a single API-driven operating system over its entire spectrum. Aruba Central NetConductor - which will be included in the Central subscription - now places all the device management - whether wired, wireless, or WAN - into one place, allowing administrators to configure all their hardware as if it was one single lump of infrastructure. In fact, some of the enablement is based on the VX LAN standard and, Devlin states, could propagate to handle any VX LAN-compliant connected device, irrespective of it being an Aruba device or not. While it sounds simple - a single pane to manage all your Aruba functionality in one place - Aruba has loaded features and functionality to streamline network administration processes and add smarts. For example, the product can automate actions based on security insights received from something at the edge of the network like, say, a Palo Alto firewall. A firewall rule being triggered can enforce a policy in Aruba Central NetConductor. Or, you might create policies so when a device joins your network Aruba Central NetConductor identifies and opens up ports as appropriate. It could be an IP camera, a smart lightbulb, or an end-user device. Whatever it is, NetConductor can identify the device, confirm its the regular type you use, and configure the device and firewalls so all you need to do is plug it in and let NetConductor handle the rest. Or, perhaps your policy might be to quarantine a new network device so it cannot use the network until youve identified and categorised it. Or, perhaps you may allow it guest Internet access but not corporate network access to start but revoke even the guest access should a firewall or IDS identify its doing bad things. In fact, the product comes with signatures for millions of devices from hardware vendors around the world so the platform can categorise new devices based on what it thinks, allowing you to review later and only need to act if you want to treat something as a special case. There is a lot to like, and Devlin and Smith credit the achievement to Aruba's prior work in unifying its operating system, and to its DevOps culture and agility. Additionally, Aruba has announced GPS capabilities being unlocked in its WiFi access points. Every day companies are installing Wi-Fi access points and struggle enough with channel management, let alone having to deal with installing client devices in proximity to an AP. Devlin explains network administrators and Aruba service and support teams alike are working to optimise configurations based on where the client says the physical location is. If its the wrong information, or devices move, it could well be wrong and provide a bad experience. In fact, Devlin says, some large companies with thousands upon thousands of access points have even lost track of where their assets are located. Another problem is devices may be able to identify where they are in relation to a beacon, but that doesnt identify where it really is. For instance, in a shopping centre, you might receive directions to the wrong store. Or a defibrillator might identify itself as being located outside the wrong operating theatre. GPS location will resolve these and other concerns. It will provide a highly accurate reference point from which many other things can flow - tuning, asset data, site health, and anything based on location. It's not simply a GPS antenna stuck into the AP, Devlin says, but a special version of their chip designed to get better location data over time using GPS data plus information from other devices and combining all this with location policies to share back out using OpenLocate. Aruba has deliberately chosen an open protocol to help improve the community and enable other devices - from other vendors - to similarly benefit from OpenLocate data. The tech does not require new hardware, Smith says. Aruba Wi-Fi 6/6E APs already have this tech on them and it will be only a software update for customers to take advantage of them, and both GPS- and non-GPS APs will benefit from the location data. Aruba Central NetConductor services are available for early access now and will be generally available in July 2022. Central NetConductor services are part of Aruba Central, and are available with an Advanced license. Aruba Wi-Fi 6/6E APs include self-location and are currently shipping, and GPS capabilities are included in existing Aruba Wi-Fi 6E APs and pricing. The Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) has praised the Federal Governments commitment to invest in the digital economy and support skills in the Federal Budget, but what are its 24 recommendations? The 2022-23 Federal Budget highlighted the Morrison Governments strong focus on the technology sector, bringing in appropriate policy and measures across cyber security, business, digital economy, skills, innovation and low-emissions technologies. A range of other 2022-23 Budget Commentary from some top tech companies is also available here, and more is likely to come. The AIIA CEO, Ron Gauci said: The Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) welcomes the Federal Government 22-23 Budget announcements. The significant investments in innovation technology proposed by the Government are recognition of the AIIAs previous calls that technology is an essential driver to economic growth creating employment opportunities, improving services, and becoming globally competitive. With one of the Governments previously stated objectives to be a leading digital economy by 2030, the AIIA notes this years budget saw further movement to making this a reality, with technology infrastructure, digital ID and e-invoicing all benefiting as a result. Gauci continued: It is pleasing to see technology take a prime spot on the main stage in this years budget with a broad range of policies and strategies including the release of the Digital Economy Strategy 2022 Update which supports our progress to become a top 10 digital economy by 2030 as we called for in our 2020 White Paper. The AIIA notes its Federal Government Pre-Budget and Pre-Election Policy Submission 2022 details 24 key recommendations, with several of these recommendations included in this years Budget, including investment in the digital economy, ICT skills and technology infrastructure. While the $7 billion total investment in skills and training is welcome, the AIIA would have liked to see more clarity around its allocation to ensure a heavier focus and funding allocation towards Australias ICT industry and business - this is the area that is suffering severely when it comes to skills shortage and is going to be the driver for economic recovery. The AIIA is very pleased, however, to see $3.9M to support women in mid-career transitions to the tech workforce, continued Gauci. Small business is supported in the budget with a bonus 20% tax rebate for investment in digital technology, along with skills and training of staff. Additionally, the AIIA notes the Morrison Government also announced employee share reforms in which people working in start-up businesses will be able to receive more incentives and bonuses. The new form will hope to encourage further innovation in Australia. Employees will be eligible for up to $30,000 in shares per year. Gauci added: The employee share reforms will help skilled innovators attract talent and see innovations move from the R&D stage to commercialisation. Australia is very good at supporting R&D, but we must make steps to improve support to commercialise brilliant Australian IP. We risk continuing to see brilliant Australian innovations sold overseas without better support. Policies such as the changes to the employee share scheme are a great step to supporting Australias future economic prosperity. National security was another major topic addressed in last nights announcement, with cyber security seeing significant investment - with the 1900 new jobs being created leading to extended calls for the industry to work with government on training to fill these highly-skilled and critical roles that are already in high demand. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg referred to the world being a far more dangerous place than it ever has been and the significant investment in cyber shows that the digital dangers are understood by the government and will support national security and see jobs created as a further consequence. The AIIA would also like to see the Cybersecurity measures extended to the SME sector to protect their businesses as well, Gauci concluded. The AIIA reminds us it is a "not-for-profit organisation aimed at fuelling Australias future social and economic prosperity through tech innovation and remains committed to working with all levels of Government to secure Australias digital future." We've already heard from the AIIA, but what is the reaction from a range of top tech companies in Australia? There's money in this year's Australian Federal Budget to skill up Australians, and while only 70,000 skilled migrants have arrived since the borders opened, despite a cap of 160,000, the global competition for talent is sure to continue unabated. The AIIA has also shared its views on the budget, which you can read here. In the budget summary, we read of the Federal Government's desire to connect regional Australians to the "digital economy," stating "Reliable telecommunications are essential to thriving regional and remote communities. Thats why the Governments plan for a stronger future includes $1.3 billion for improved telecommunications. "A $480 million investment will upgrade the NBN Fixed Wireless and Satellite networks, which enables up to one million households and businesses in regional, rural, remote and peri-urban areas to access better quality internet services. This means faster upload and download speeds for fixed wireless users and increased data allowances for satellite users. "A new $811.8 million Connecting Regional Australia initiative will expand mobile coverage, support technology improvements, improve accessibility, and resilience to natural disasters." We're told "these reforms will help regional businesses access global markets, provide greater employment opportunities, improve access to education, and help friends and families stay connected." There's plenty more, and no doubt more commentary will arrive throughout the day, but what are some of the initial takes from top tech leaders? 1. Annie Sheehan, ANZ Lead at the Project Management Institute (PMI) noted: Apprenticeships The $365 million extension of the Boosting Apprenticeship Commencements program and the $2.8bn investment into apprenticeship programs reflects the enormous benefits of upskilling young people and the key role that this plays in addressing chronic workforce shortages, in the long term. The future of Australia relies on upskilling todays youth for the range of jobs that they will undertake in the future. As businesses across all industries become increasing projectised, it is important to ensure that training the future workforce includes a focus on key project management skills such as communication, leadership, time and budget management, empathy and resilience. Upskilling With 75% of Australian CEOs concerned about the availability of key skills, Labors commitment to offer free TAFE places, extra university courses and government support for start-ups demonstrates the urgent need to address the skills gap and introduce new skilled workers to the tech sector. Project management and collaboration between federal and state government, TATE schools, universities and small businesses is essential to ensure that businesses now and in the future are equipped with a strong and skilled workforce. The tech and innovation sector is rapidly growing and boosting jobs to 1.2m by 2030 has the potential to have a significant positive impact on the wider economy. Upskilling young people The federal governments $1.2bn investment into the existing Transition to Work scheme for unemployed young people will be hugely important in addressing the current skills gap and mitigating against this issue in the future. Ensuring that young people are equipped with skills and capabilities for the range of jobs that they will undertake in the future is essential in Australias recovery and building a strong economic future. The future of work is becoming increasingly projectised and an estimated 25 million project professionals will be required by 2030. As such, project management certifications and short courses are some of the best ways for Australians to upskill for a range of jobs. 2. Garry Valenzisi, VP & GM ANZ at Iron Mountain. said: Digital transformation Like many technology vendors, digital transformation is the fastest-growing space in our business and we applaud the government for providing a $120 tax deduction for every $100 small businesses spend on digital technologies. This will help Australia to take important steps towards becoming a leading digitally-driven nation taking the much-needed step in helping Australia become a leading digitally-driven nation. As SMEs, which account for half of Australias workforce, may lack the skills and resources to utilise these emerging technologies and effectively manage the digital transformation and resiliency gap, particularly following the rapid digital transformation of the sector post-pandemic. Whilst its positive to see the government recognise the importance of a national unified digital approach, its critical that the private and public sector assist businesses that struggle with their digital assets, so they can protect and unlock value from their information, which, in turn, will drive meaningful transformation, knowledge and advantage. The government must do its part to empower these vulnerable businesses, as we shift from physical to digital. Tech sector low emissions The federal government's investment from this years Budget into transforming Australias local technology sector to produce the best talent, innovation and new technologies is critical in building the digital economy of tomorrow. But businesses must not lose sight of the environmental impact of digitised data. Todays demand for electronic devices is creating the worlds fastest growing waste stream, e-waste, of which Australia is the fifth highest producer. While we support the governments $60m boost to reduce plastic waste announced in this year's Budget, as well as the recent establishment of the $1b Low Emissions Technology Commercialisation Fund, more government and business support is needed to facilitate extended lifecycles of consumer and business technology devices, driven by appropriate incentives and regulation. 3. Michael Bodle, COO, Mantel Group said: Tech talent shortage "Its no secret there are labour shortages across almost every sector in Australia. For us, the tech talent squeeze is very real and the closure of Australias borders for the past couple of years has only exacerbated this problem. "Whilst weve implemented our own training programs at Mantel Group and are actively widening our pool of talent, taking men and women on from all industries, the government should be investing more in education if Australia is going to be a top ten data and digital economy by 2030. Business and consumer confidence "This years Budget should deliver confidence to businesses and consumers so we can embrace a post Covid world. Many businesses have closed, and people have lost jobs. Now is the time to give the Australian public some confidence, to take on those additional staff or start that business. Its good to see some support for SMEs. It would be great to see more incentives for people to take that leap and start a business." The Australian Attraction Factor "It would have been nice to see the Australian Government make it easier for companies to hire people from overseas. Currently, its too complicated, drawn out, and expensive. Australia needs a marketing campaign to not only get people to come and visit again, but to live and work here. The competition for tech talent is global what will make skilled people come to Australia rather than the U.S or Europe? We must remember that were also going to lose some of our talent to the U.S. and Europe, now our borders are open, so it would be great to see the Budget helping to not only attract skilled people to come and live in Australia but keep them here, over the long-term." 4. Pete Murray, MD, Veritas, believes that the issue of cyber security is not being addressed holistically. He has quoted the below based on the Budget: On security: Given that we have seen many instances in Australia where cyber security has failed, wed like to see greater collaboration between the public and private sectors to increase the ability of businesses to protect their data and their applications once a hacker is in. In the current world of when not if an organisation is going to suffer from ransomware, protecting the front door simply isnt enough. On skills: While the skills incentives will primarily boost young people reskilling and entering tech, we are missing the opportunity to target an enormous untapped talent pool of people those between 40 and 60 who grew up when IT was really taking off and seen as an exciting career choice, but may have been frightened away from the industry by the shadow of outsourcing. Our industry hasnt done enough to educate and excite this group, or the younger technology students of tomorrow, about the value of being part of the IT industry. Theres often a misconception that a career in technology comes with a risk of becoming offshored, when in reality, the technology sector is an incredibly secure and flexible line of work. As an industry, we need to collaborate and get closer to tertiary education institutions to make IT an appealing career path for the youth of today. While a renewed investment in local tech infrastructure such as the $243m in grants for manufacturing projects is strengthening Australias on the map in technology innovation, theres no point if we dont have a local talent pool to get these projects off the ground. The pandemic has been the biggest lesson on IT business agility since the turn of the millennium. Many businesses were unprepared for the sudden need to move employees and operations at the start of the pandemic, and are now scrambling to play catch up as hybrid working is a much required corporate infrastructure capability today. Veritas Technologies, which has approx. 80,000 customers including 87% of the Fortune Global 500, recent research reveals: - Just 43% of Australian leaders believe their current teams have the skills needed to protect organisations in the current cyber environment - Australian organisations now need an additional $2.3m and 27 new IT staff each to shorten the vulnerability lag brought on by COVID and hybrid working, and ensure protection in the next 12 months - 63% of Australian IT leaders say security gaps exist in their technology strategy due to COVID-19 transformation - The average Australian enterprise has been the victim of 1.14 ransomware attacks - Only half of Australian businesses who have been attacked have managed to avoid paying a ransom to the criminals that initiated it. More budget commentary from top tech leaders to come! Smith Brothers Media is a full-service digital agency that is passionate about helping great businesses grow and improve. CEO James Smith spoke with iTWireTV about how businesses of all sizes can make their communication channels work at peak efficiency. James Smith spoke with iTWireTV to explain why - even in this modern age - the telephone is still such an important means of communication and why phone calls are important to businesses in its mix of channels. Yet, many businesses allow their phone to go unanswered which can erode the value of your brand and certainly the value of your marketing spend. James has sage advice for businesses on how they can measure the effectiveness of their communication channels and how they can make their communication channels operate at peak efficiency, particularly on the back of media spending. See James' advice here: Smith Brothers Media has almost 50 staff along with three office dogs. Projects include promoting the Australian marketing campaign for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, from Disney, as well as work for Bosch, the Italian tourism board, Compton Green, Gut Smart, and more. The company has appeared on the popular Gruen television show. GUEST OPINION: With data dependency at an all-time high for businesses, almost every company is looking to establish themselves as a technology-first company, similar to Amazon or Netflix. Organisations have pushed the button on their digital transformation journey, and now understand that they need to be mindful of how they integrate and manage enterprise data that is distributed, still easily accessible, trusted, and governed. In fact, Gartner predicts a 6.5% growth rate across the board for the IT sector in Australia, with the biggest growth expected to come from the IT services sector. Coupled to that growth, organisations are placing emphasis on their back-end systems in order to get their customer-facing assets working better. In many cases this means migrating to more efficient data solutions, removing siloes, cleansing data and generally making better use of the data assets the company has. This has prompted the advent of modern data integration styles like data virtualisation, as industries of all kinds and sizes look to accelerate change and leverage data more effectively. Expect to see the following five trends make their mark in 2022: 1. Data fabric becomes the foundation for the distributed enterprise. As digital businesses and online sales channels proliferate and remote work becomes the norm, it creates a complex and diverse ecosystem of devices, applications, and data infrastructure. In particular, data infrastructure can span on-premises, single cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, or a combination of these, spread across regional boundaries with no single solution to knit all this data together. In 2022, organisations will create a data fabric to drive enterprise-wide data and analytics and to automate many of the data integration, preparation, exploration tasks. Data Fabric unifies the data assets distributed across disparate location, format, and latency using logical, physical, or hybrid approaches. By enabling organisations to choose their preferred approach, these data fabrics will reduce time-to-delivery and make it a preferred data management approach in the coming year. In fact, according to a recent TEI study by Forrester, Data fabric technology takes data virtualisation a step further by automating data management functions using artificial intelligence/machine learning and providing additional semantic capabilities through data catalogue, data preparation, and data modelling. 2. Decision intelligence makes inroads for enterprise-wide decision support. Organisations have been acquiring vast amounts of data and need to leverage that information to drive business outcomes. Decision intelligence is making inroads across enterprises, as regular dashboards and BI platforms are augmented with AI/ML-driven decision support systems. Decision intelligence is the combination of regular BI dashboards enhanced with AI/ML, whereby enterprises can make predictions of outcomes for certain sets of actions and recommend one action over the other, thus helping decision support systems. In 2002, decision intelligence has the potential to make assessments better and faster, given machine generated decisions can be processed at speeds that humans simply cannot. The caveat - machines still lack consciousness and do not understand the implications of the decision outcome. Look for organisations to incorporate decision intelligence into their BI stack to continuously measure the outcome to avoid unintended consequences by tweaking the decision parameters accordingly. 3. Data mesh architectures become more enticing. As organisations grow in size and complexity, central data teams are forced to deal with a wide array of functional units and associated data consumers. This makes it difficult to understand the data requirements for all cross functional teams and offer the right set of data products to their consumers. Data mesh is a new decentralised data architecture approach for data analytics that aims to remove bottlenecks and take data decisions closer to those who understand the data. In 2022 and beyond, larger organisations with distributed data environments will implement a data mesh architecture. As different functional units or domains within larger organisations have a better understanding of how their data should be used, letting the domains define and implement their own data infrastructure results in fewer iterations until business needs are met and are of high quality. This also removes the bottleneck of the centralised infrastructure and gives domains autonomy to use the best tools for their particular situations. Data mesh will create a unified infrastructure enabling domains to create and share data products while enforcing standards for interoperability, quality, governance, and security. 4. Organisations embrace composable data and analytics to empower data consumers. Monolithic architectures are already a thing of the past but we can expect even smaller footprints. As global companies deal with distributed data across regional, cloud and data centre boundaries, consolidating that data in one central location is practically impossible. Thats where composable data architecture, whereby organisations can pick and choose certain tools to build parts of or the entirely of their data infrastructure, becomes paramount and brings agility to data infrastructure. One good example of a composable architecture is a data fabric, which can be created using a data catalogue tool, a semantic tool, a data integration tool and a metadata tool put together. Data management infrastructure is extremely diverse and usually every organisation uses multiple systems or modules that together constitute their data management environment. Being able to build a low-code, no-code data infrastructure provides flexibility and user friendliness, as it empowers business users to put together their desired data management stack and makes them less dependent on IT. In 2022, expect organisations to accelerate building composable data and analytics environments, whereby they can avoid vendor lock-in and attain more flexibility as they put together a data infrastructure stack that meets their needs. 5. Small and wide data analytics begin to catch on. AI/ML is transforming the way organisations operate, but to be successful, it is also dependent on historical data analytics, aka big data analytics. While big data analytics is here to stay, in many cases this old historical data continues to lose its value. In 2022, organisations will leverage small data analytics to create hyper-personalised experiences for their individual customers to understand customer sentiment around a specific product or service within a short time window. While wide data analytics, which entails combining structured, unstructured and semi-structured data from various data sources for analytical purposes, is a comparatively new concept and yet to find widespread adoption - given the pace at which organisations are making use of geospatial data, machine generated data, social media data and various other data types - expect to see small and wide data analytics gaining better traction across organisations as we enter into the New Year. Johnson City, TN (37604) Today Variable clouds with strong thunderstorms. Damaging winds, large hail and possibly a tornado with some storms. High 73F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%.. Tonight Rain showers early becoming a steady light rain overnight. Low 53F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 90%. The fire burning on Buffalo Mountain was up to 75% contained Monday evening, and fire crews have pulled off the scene for the day, according to James Heaton, a forestry technician with the Tennessee Division of Forestry. Heaton said earlier Monday that crews from the state Division of Forestry and the U.S. Forest Service were working to clear pockets of unburnt fuel and snags dead, standing trees without leaves or needles. An interactive map of forest fires in the state operated by the Division of Forestry incorrectly listed the fire as 100% contained overnight, but was updated to show it as 40% contained as of 11:12 a.m. Monday. Were just working those areas, making sure that we have a good solid containment line around the fire, and right now we have a dozer line and hand line in place, were not at 100% containment, said Heaton said Monday morning. Heaton said he was not overly concerned about any potential threat to structures or residences in the area, though there were points on Sunday where the fire was threatening structures near Bill Garland Road. There was also a point where firefighters were concerned about the fire damaging the towers on top of the mountain, but they managed to prevent it. They are forecasting low humidity and high winds today, not as high as yesterday, but still high winds, Heaton said. Theres still a chance that something could happen and, you know, the fire could escape but were not anticipating that but we do need to plan for it. Heaton said the fire was burning within containment lines as of 5:45 p.m. Monday, and said people can expect to see smoke until the fire exhausts all the fuel within those lines. Sign up to Johnson City Press Today! Top stories, delivered straight to your inbox. The National Weather Service in Morristown forecasted low relative humidity at 22% for Johnson City on Monday, with wind gusts possible up to 22 miles per hour. While a red flag warning was not issued for Northeast Tennessee, those conditions are close to meeting the threshold for one. Carter County Emergency Management Agency Director Billy Harrell said state forestry firefighters were brought back to the scene around 11 a.m. Harrell said most of the firefighting wrapped up around 10:30 p.m. Sunday, and said at its peak firefighters from four fire departments were on the scene, including 20 members of the Johnson City Fire Department, 15 members of the West Carter County Volunteer Fire Department, eight members of the Unicoi Volunteer Fire Department and six members of the Central Volunteer Fire Department. That was in addition to state forestry assets, which included two helicopters and two bulldozers. Also taking part in the effort were two deputies from the Carter County Sheriffs Office, the Carter County Emergency Management Agency and the Unicoi County Emergency Management Agency. Harrell said he was also providing updates to the Washington County Emergency Management Agency. The fire is the largest one Buffalo Mountain has seen in nearly 14 years. In May 2008, a fire atop the mountain, fueled by strong winds, burned about 1,500 acres over several days before firefighters were able to gain control of the fire. Portions of Buffalo Mountain Park were closed for months as a result. FOR THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS AND UPDATES, DOWNLOAD THE JOHNSON CITY PRESS APP Today Variable clouds with strong thunderstorms. Damaging winds, large hail and possibly a tornado with some storms. High near 75F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Tonight Thunderstorms during the evening will give way to partly cloudy skies after midnight. Low near 55F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Tomorrow Cloudy in the morning, then off and on rain showers during the afternoon hours. High 66F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%. Chinas quest for new ways to handle Omicron By Chen Qingqing, Zhao Yusha and Yu Xi (Global Times) 11:13, March 29, 2022 On Kangding road, Jing'an district of Shanghai, street barriers are placed to manage traffic outside the neighborhood communities. Some residents were jogging, while sanitation workers were busy collecting garbage. Photo: Hu Gong/Global Times As the highly transmissible Omicron variant continues to pose risks and concerns over the social and economic costs of the protracted epidemic grow, several major Chinese cities have embarked on a quest for an improved anti-epidemic approach that can both ensure dynamic zero-COVID targets and minimize disruptions to social and economic activities, with the latest approach of phased closed-off management - instead of citywide measures - imposed by Shanghai, the country' financial hub, starting on Monday. Shanghai's move to divide the city into two parts and impose strict closed-off management in one part first is clearly aimed at minimizing social and economic disruptions, given the city's special status as a main economic, trade and financial hub in China. Shanghai's approach came one day after the tech hub of Shenzhen announced the resumption of normal life and work on Sunday after "hitting the slow button" to stem the spread of the COVID-19 for one week, when differentiated measures were taken in various parts of the city. Meanwhile, Northeast China's Jilin Province, where strict prevention measures have been adopted, continued recording surging infection numbers, underscoring a series of loopholes seen in the city as it handles the latest outbreak. The varying approaches of the country's dynamic zero-COVID strategy by the different cities underlined China's continuous efforts to improve the efficiency and reduce the costs of the anti-epidemic measures, even as many countries around the world have basically given up their efforts. With China's extensive successful experience and its relentless efforts for improvement, the country will be able to adjust its strategy to maximize results and minimize costs in combating the coronavirus, analysts said. Shanghai carried out a staggered seal-off starting from Mondayin Pudong and key areas of Puxi (divided by the Huangpu River) and mass nucleic acid tests will be conducted in the city covering over 6,340 square kilometers and with a population of over 24 million to cut hidden transmission routes in communities. By carrying out China's dynamic zero policy, Shanghai had earlier implemented it in a precise way by allowing the majority of residents to maintain normal life and by targeting only a small part for mass screening for confirmed cases. Zhang Wenhong, one of the Shanghai-based prominent experts, also indicated that a long-term lockdown and seal-off management create trouble to people's daily lives that should be tackled. When local officials explained why Shanghai can't be locked down, Wu Fan, an expert from the city's anti-epidemic leading expert team, highlighted the city's crucial role in the country's and world's economy. And by carrying out a combination of mass nucleic acid tests and antigen self-testing in key areas and non-key areas, local authorities ensured that many residents still could carry out a normal life, enjoy coffee time with their friends and ride bicycles during the weekend. However, new ways have been introduced starting from Monday, as some loopholes have been exposed during the process of implementing precise anti-epidemic measures. Wu told a press briefing on Monday that the current resurgence in COVID-19 cases in Shanghai is characterized by the coexistence of regional clusters and sporadic cases distributed across the city, and "it's necessary to conduct strict measures to reduce people flow and find the hidden transmission routes." Did Shanghai fail in carrying out its precise dynamic zero approach and explore a new way for China to fight Omicron? Is the city re-adopting the strict lockdown and seal-off management measures like Shenzhen? How can Shanghai's experience help China deal with future COVID-19 flare-ups? Shanghai residents were seen buying vegetables at Xikang Road grocery market in Jing'an District, Shanghai on Monday.Photo: Hu Gong Exploring new ways Some senior Chinese experts who closely follow the country's handling of the COVID-19 outbreaks over the past years consider Shanghai's exploration a courageous and necessary one, especially when more suggestions were made by epidemiologists in China and overseas to adjust China's zero tolerance strategy in a more dynamic way in lowering the costs on social development and people's livelihood, striking a balance between the regular anti-epidemic work and economic growth. "There's no such thing as the best method," an expert close to China's CDC who preferred not to be named told the Global Times, noting that what matters is the proper timing for implementing the dynamic zero approach and fixing the loopholes. "Considering the surge in daily infections, which could have spread to neighboring regions, Shanghai is adopting more strict measures, which does not mean its previous precise anti-epidemic work failed," Tao Lina, a Shanghai-based medical expert on vaccines, told the Global Times on Monday. The proper timing of controlling the flare-up could be identifying infections earlier than the severe management loopholes exposed in the city's quarantine hotel Huating Hotel, and when there were fewer cases, the precise anti-epidemic measures could work in fending off the resurgence, Tao noted. While the city could have responded more decisively to nip off earlier infections, it accumulated experiences for other cities including the fast mass screening by antigen self-testing, which helped handle the small-scale Omicron flare-up without heavily weighing on medical resources, experts said. "To some extent, Shanghai conducted a necessary test," Zhuang Shilihe, a Guangzhou-based immunologist, told the Global Times on Monday. As the Omicron sub-variant BA.2 changes, there were secondary issues caused by the anti-epidemic measures. As China's economic center, Shanghai had to strike a balance between economic and social development in anti-epidemic work, so it was necessary to think of a way to lower the cost and achieve the highest benefits, Chen Xi, an associated professor of public health at Yale University, told the Global Times on Monday. Though there have been public debates in China about different anti-epidemic measures, cities across the country have been adopting different approaches, vastly different from the strict lockdown imposed at the early stage of the epidemic in Wuhan. Shenzhen has returned to normal after seven days of strict prevention and control measures that included placing all residential communities under closed management, suspending public transportation and closing stores and businesses, which was seen as much more efficient than previous city lockdowns in the early stages of the pandemic with the much lower social and economic cost. Though many do not agree with an immediate reopening with the world considering the severe rampage of the COVID-19 overseas, almost no one would still prefer major lockdowns and strict measures until the virus is wiped out," Zhuang said. Lessons accumulated While experts agreed that both Shanghai and Shenzhen are accumulating the experiences for China's future handling of the COVID-19 outbreak as they fight the new flare-up, the county indeed has been adjusting its anti-epidemic strategy, for example, recently, by updating its COVID-19 playbook by placing COVID-19 patients with mild symptoms in centralized quarantine facilities instead of in hospitals, and lowering the bar for patients to be discharged from hospital. Some Shanghai residents told the Global Times on Monday that although the city has been making efforts to contain the virus spread, some things still need to be fixed on a community level to ensure that the policy is effectively implemented. For example, a 41-year-old resident surnamed Pan living in Meilong of Minhang district in Shanghai, where three COVID-19 medium-risk areas were classified so far, said the neighborhood committee workers have been working hard including organizing nucleic acid tests as they have been put under closed-loop management for 17 days. "We are concerned if there will be more cases detected in our community. The related information should be announced in a timely manner to mitigate our concerns," Pan said. Several residents in severely-hit Jilin Province told the Global Times there have been problems such as chaotic management in quarantine places as staff workers there have not been properly trained and the daily necessities are not being timely dispatched to each household. "As it's also a long-term test for local officials and the health system, cities should learn from each other on how to be well-prepared in fighting the prolonged epidemic," Chen said, noting that being well-prepared psychologically is equally important. (Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun) Law enforcement agencies of Ukraine did not need to spring into action in the wake of Russias invasion on 24 February 2022: it had already accumulated the experience and know-how of investigating and prosecuting conflict-related crimes in its territory over the preceding eight years. Ukraines General Prosecutors Office (GPO) has set up an online portal to be used for submitting the information about most recent alleged crimes. As of 28 March 2022, it has registered 3,085 crimes involving at least 205 suspects from among Russian ministers, parliamentarians, army high command, state officials, law-enforcement officers, and most notorious Kremlin propagandists. Abhorrent images and footages recorded by the authorities, civil society actors, reporters, and eyewitnesses on the ground and circulating widely on the social media attest to an unimaginable scale of destruction and human suffering. The blitzkrieg has now exceeded tenfold the time its authors thought the installation of a puppet government in Kyiv would take. As the hostilities became protracted, the Russian armed forces turned to the military tactics tested and tried over two decades ago in Grozny, Chechnya and more recently in Aleppo, Syria: laying siege to strategic towns, systematic shelling by heavy artillery of civilian objects and infrastructure (hospitals, schools, and makeshift shelters) and deliberate targeting of ambulances, rescuers, and journalists in double tap strikes. The use of imprecise weapons such as unguided missiles, cluster munitions and, as alleged most recently, phosphorus bombs or incendiary submunitions, in urban settings has reduced the suburbs and residential neighborhoods in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Mariupol, Volnovakha, Irpin, Mykolaiv, and countless other cities and towns to rubble. The death toll among civilians is on the rise. The besieged Mariupol has been described as a hell on Earth. Over three million of Ukrainians became refugees elsewhere and this number will grow exponentially. Ukraine takes centre-stage Ukraines judiciary intends to investigate violations of the laws and customs of war, planning, preparing or unleashing, and waging an aggressive war, and incitement to war. Via her social media, the Prosecutor-General Iryna Venediktova has highlighted the ongoing investigations into the forcible transfer, under the guise of evacuation, of the Ukrainian civilian population including children from the partly occupied Mariupol, the use of civilians as human shields, and the causing of environmental damage. As the territorial state, Ukraine is best placed to carry out investigations and prosecutions in the cases involving low- and mid-level perpetrators on the ground, insofar as it has access to crime scenes, evidence, and suspects it can apprehend. Some evidence will be located outside of its borders but can be obtained in due course by directly interviewing witnesses from among the refugees or through mutual legal assistance. Although any evidence and suspects located in Russia remain out of reach for the time being, Ukraine can count on evidentiary and operational support by a growing number of other states. Russias aggression has triggered a uniformly strong reaction in the capitals across Europe and beyond. Projections of individual responsibility for conflict-related crimes have been part and parcel of that response from the start and have galvanized practical measures undertaken by states on multiple fronts. National investigations in Europe and beyond The prosecution services in at least eleven other European statesEstonia, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland and Swedenhave announced investigations into war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine based on the principle of universal jurisdiction. The list of these countries will grow and soon encompass not only most of the European Union and associated states but also spill over beyond Europe. As the Ukrainian refugees and, at some point, potential suspects from among the former Kremlin functionaries and Russian servicemen settle down elsewhere (think of former USSR states in the Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkey, Israel, US, and Canada), those receiving states may also be prodded to experiment with universal jurisdiction prosecutions of the Ukrainian conflict-related cases the political will, legislative arrangements, and prosecutorial ingenuity and resources permitting. In case of Poland, the current investigation covers the crime of initiation or waging of a war of aggression and war crimes. Rather than looking into specific reported incidents and individuals, Swedish, German and Spanish prosecutors have announced structural investigations into the serious violations of international law in Ukraine. Those do not target specific persons from the outset but are meant to gather evidence in relation to the conflict generally. Thus, the investigators can construct a solid evidentiary foundation to anticipateand pro-actively buildcases for the benefit of future criminal proceedings in domestic, foreign, or international courts, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC). The states in the business of structural investigations have been able to quickly step up to the plate and capitalize on their recent experience of carrying out similar investigations and providing legal assistance in connection with cases involving former members of the Syrian regime, ISIS/Daesh and other categories of perpetrators. States with high intelligence capacity, including non-parties to the ICC Statute ready to support the ongoing accountability efforts, could play a vital role in helping build cases and have some of the suspects arrested in due course. The US State Department has already qualified the conduct of Russias forces in Ukraine as war crimes and pledged to keep tracking reports and pursu[e] accountability using every tool available. As of 28 March, Ukraines General Prosecutors Office has registered 3,085 crimes involving at least 205 Russian suspects during the first month of the war. Ukraines Prosecutor Generals office The unprecedented support for the ICC Many more states have quickly expressed their commitment to criminal accountability through showing support to the ICC. By now 41 States Parties to the Rome Statute the founding treaty of the ICC have referred the situation in Ukraine to the ICC Prosecutor. Such express and wide state support for an ICC investigation is unprecedented, and this time it is more than a symbolic gesture: states have proved eager to commit funds and second national personnel the ICC Prosecutor asked for in his repeated calls for assistance. Lithuaniathe first State Party to refer Ukrainealso became the first to declare its intention to allocate funds (100,000) to support the ICC probe. Several states followed suit soon enough. The UK will donate an additional 1 million and provide military experts in intelligence-gathering. It will also task the war crimes team in the Metropolitan Polices Counter-Terrorism Command with bolstering the ICC efforts. France has announced that it will second magistrates, investigators and experts to the ICC and commit an initial amount of 500,000. Time will tell how many (and how soon) other State Parties will put their money where their mouth is and alleviate the ICCs resource constraints in tangible ways. Focus on and strengthen existing mechanisms The plurality of initiatives to bring the authors of core crimes in Ukraine to justice raises not only the familiar operational questions but also the more fundamental dilemmas of prioritization and coordination among the extant (and any future) accountability avenues with a view to maximizing their overall effectiveness. In an emerging multipolar, multi-tiered and highly dynamic accountability landscape, the success of their shared mission will depend on whether states, international organisations, and advocacy groups will set the right priorities and pursue them in a principled and dogged manner. Moreover, the quality of cooperation between different accountability actors, the degree of interlacing and cross-pollination among the parallel efforts will prove the key determinants of success. They will need to use the full potential of existing mechanisms of cooperation in international crimes cases combined with novel and creative approaches. In terms of prioritization, the issue of a separate international (super ad hoc) aggression tribunal for Ukraine has been widely debated. So much so that it has become something of a red herring in the ongoing road-mapping exercises, even though both the legitimacy and expediency of this option are bound to be questioned. As noted elsewhere, before we venture and invest in a wholly new institution and spread the already limited resources and political attention span even thinner, the option of strengthening the current international and domestic accountability mechanisms must be preferred instead. Much attention has beenand continues to bepaid to the ICCs role in advancing accountability. Its investigative team has been working in the region since early March 2022, and the OTP operates a secure portal through which anyone can contact and provide relevant information to ICC investigators. The ICC Prosecutor undertook a visit to Poland and Ukraine. The presence of his Office in the region and the flurry of activity backed by extraordinary multilateral support cannot but create expectations on the part of Ukrainian citizens and government. One should be careful, however, not to oversell the ICC as the prime accountability avenue. Even with the benefit of seconded staff and extrabudgetary contributions, completing investigations in the fog of war and building credible trial-ready cases will take more time and effort than may be desirable. In its investigation, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor will rely on the information and leads provided by the partners, not least the Ukrainian authorities. In honoring the complementarity principle, it should refrain from taking on cases that Ukraine or other jurisdictions are willing and able to deal with themselves. Instead, the ICC Prosecutor should rather focus on figures from the top political and military echelons of Russia and confidentially seek (sealed) arrest warrants for the time when executing them becomes a possibility. Solidarity justice The fact remains that (much of) the future of international criminal law is domestic and Ukraine is no exception. The accountability record in this situation will consist mostly of cases prosecuted in Ukraine and in other countries where victims and perpetrators will find themselves in the coming years. This is not just new wine in old skins. The situation in Ukraine will become the breeding ground for innovating forms of international cooperation in war crimes cases a coordination framework that can be called solidarity justice. A broader justice coalition of states is being forged to work in concert with partner organisations such as the ICC and Eurojust. The coalition members will not only coordinate their investigative activities, but they will operate together through joint investigative teams. On 25 March 2022, the chief prosecutors of Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland and their Eurojust representatives signed an agreement establishing a joint investigative team (JIT) to collect evidence relating to Russias aggression and war crimes in Ukraine (Lublin Justice Triangle). Although Ukraine is not (yet) a member of the European Union, it has an Agreement with and a Liaison Prosecutor at Eurojust. It has also been involved in the recent consultations within its Genocide Network. Eurojust has been assigned a key coordinating role in part of European Union and partner states investigations into the core crimes in Ukraine, and such coordination will be done in close cooperation with the ICC. In fact, the first JIT team has been put together with the support of Eurojust and is open for participation to other parties. This modality presents major efficiency gains as evidence can be collected by and on behalf of all members to then be placed at the disposal of the represented forum states and shared with other accountability actors. The exact contours of accountability solutions for Ukraine await to be delineated and their outcomes are the known unknowns. But what is certain is while Ukraine cannot and will not be left to travel this road alone, in the spirit of solidarity justice, it will also be firmly at the helm of this quest for accountability. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday the Russian siege of the port city of Mariupol constituted a crime against humanity. What the Russian troops are doing to Mariupol is a crime against humanity, which is happening in front of the eyes of the whole planet in real time, Zelensky told the Danish parliament in a video address. He accused Russian forces of blowing up shelters despite knowing that civilians were hiding in them. The presidents comments came as Ukrainian and Russian negotiators held face-to-face talks in Istanbul, under the shadow of shock allegations that delegates were poisoned at a previous round of negotiations. Russian forces have encircled the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol and have embarked on a steady and indiscriminate bombardment, trapping an estimated 160,000 people with little food, water or medicine. At least 5,000 people have already died, according to one senior Ukrainian official who estimated the real toll may be closer to 10,000 when all the bodies are collected. During his address to Danish parliamentarians, Zelensky also said more deaths had been confirmed after a Russian strike hit the regional government building in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv. As far as we know now seven people were killed, 22 were wounded, and people are still going through the rubble, Zelensky said. There were no military ambitions in Mykolaiv, the people in Mykolaiv presented no threat to Russia. And even then, like all the Ukrainians, they became the targets for the Russian troops, he said. Earlier on Tuesday, AFP journalists on the scene in the aftermath of the attack said the bodies of two people were pulled from debris. The International Criminal Court on March 3 opened an investigation into war crimes in Ukraine. The conditions for carrying out a humanitarian operation sought by France to help citizens in the besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol are not met at this stage, President Emmanuel Macrons office said after the French leader spoke by telephone with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. Macron outlined to Putin details of the mission that France, Turkey and Greece would oversee, but the Russian leader replied that he was going to think about it before responding, an Elysee Palace official said. In the meantime, relaxing our efforts is out of the question because the situation is catastrophic for Mariupol and its residents, the official said. According to the Kremlin, however, Putin told Macron that Ukrainian nationalists in Mariupol would have to lay down their arms before Russian forces allow any emergency humanitarian assistance. It was the ninth telephone call between the two leaders since Russia invaded its neighbour on February 24, as Macron presses to keep a diplomatic line open in hopes of ending the conflict. He sees his task as achieving first a ceasefire and then the total withdrawal of (Russian) troops by diplomatic means, he told broadcaster France 3 at the weekend. Ukrainian authorities say at least 5,000 people have died in Mariupol since the invasion began, with Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelensky calling the siege of the city a crime against humanity. The Elysee official declined to comment on the latest round of cease-fire talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, which raised hopes of progress after previous rounds of talks failed to produce any breakthrough. We wish to consult first with the Ukrainians, the source said. For now the war continues and our demands remain the same. Canadian police said Tuesday a new arrest warrant has been issued for a priest accused of sexually abusing Inuit children in the countrys far north decades ago before fleeing to France. Renewed focus was placed on Johannes Rivoire, 93, this week when an Inuit delegation to the Vatican asked Pope Francis to personally intervene in the case, which has remained unresolved for nearly 30 years. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in an email to AFP that last September it received a complaint of sexual assaults that occurred approximately 47 years ago, involving a female victim. The RCMP said the warrant for his arrest was issued last month. Rivoire, a priest with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, had spent three decades in Canadas far north, before returning to France in 1993. He now lives in Lyon. Canadian police had sought to arrest him in the 1990s on at least three other charges of sexual abuse in the Nunavut communities of Arviat, Rankin Inlet and Naujaat. But those charges, according to Canadian media, were eventually stayed when it became clear to prosecutors that France was unlikely to extradite him. Natan Obed, president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, told a news conference Monday that he raised the legacy of sexual abuse in the church and asked the pope if he would intervene directly in the Rivoire case. He said he asked the pontiff to press Rivoire to return to Canada to stand trial for the harms he has done, or face a trial in France. The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Obed said, have invited him to discuss the case at a meeting at its office in Rome on Thursday. The 32-member Indigenous, Inuit and Metis delegation was invited to meet with Pope Francis over the recent discoveries of more than 1,300 unmarked graves at Church-run schools in Canada attended by Indigenous children as part of a government policy of forced assimilation. Some 150,000 Indigenous, Metis and Inuit children were enrolled from the late 1800s to the 1990s in 139 of the residential schools across Canada, spending months or years isolated from their families, language and culture. Many were physically and sexually abused by headmasters and teachers, and thousands are believed to have died of disease, malnutrition or neglect. A truth and reconciliation commission concluded in 2015 the failed government policy amounted to cultural genocide. U.S. regulators on Tuesday authorized another COVID-19 booster for people 50 and older, a step toward providing additional protections for the most vulnerable in the event of a resurgence of the coronavirus. The FDA decision provides these people with a fourth dose of Pfizer or Modernas vaccine, which is at least four months after the previous booster. So far, the FDA has only approved a fourth dose for those 12 and older Severely weakened immune systemThis particularly vulnerable group also gets an additional booster, a fifth shot, the agency said. The latest expansion, regardless of peoples health status, presents additional opportunities for millions of Americans the question is whether everyone who qualifies should rush out to receive it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to be involved. The move comes at a time of uncertainty.After winter surge, COVID-19 cases have dropped to low levels Hyperinfectious omicron variantsCDC data shows that two doses of the vaccine plus a booster dose are still effective in preventing serious illness and death. but an omicron sibling is causing a worrying surge in infections in Europe and spread in the US even if vaccinations have stalled. About two-thirds of Americans are fully vaccinated, while half of those eligible for the first booster immunization are not. Pfizer has asked the FDA to clear the fourth shot for people 65 and older, while Moderna has asked for flexibility for all adults so the government can decide who really needs a shot. There is limited evidence of how much benefit another booster can provide now. FDA made the decision without receiving input from its independent panel of experts wrestling How much data is needed to enlarge the lens. Download the Modern Healthcare app to stay informed as industry news emerges. For older adults and people with other health conditions, there may be reasons to top up the gas tank a bit, said E. John Wherry, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the administrations decision. But while he encourages older friends and relatives to follow the advice, Wherry, 50 who is healthy, vaccinated and boosted isnt about to get a fourth shot right away. With protection against serious illness still strong, Ill wait until it looks like I need it. No COVID-19 vaccine is as resistant to omicron mutants as it is to earlier versions of the virus. Also, protection against mild infections naturally wanes over time. But the immune system builds up a multi-layered defense that prevents the type of serious illness and death that is being held back. The CDC recently reported that during a U.S. omicron wave, two doses were nearly 80 percent effective against needing a ventilator or death, while a booster boosted that protection to 94 percent. The vaccine was least effective (74%) in the immunocompromised population, the vast majority of whom had not received a third dose. U.S. health officials are also concerned about Israel, where a fourth dose was prescribed to people 60 and older at least four months after the last shot during the omicron surge. Preliminary data published online last week showed some benefits: Israeli researchers tallied more than 328,000 people who received the extra vaccine, 92 of whom died, and 232 of the 234,000 who skipped the fourth dose. Whats unclear is how long any additional benefits of another booster will last, and when youll get it. Dr William Moss, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said: When is a very difficult part. Ideally we would time the booster dose before the surge, but we dont Always know when that will be. In addition, longer firing intervals help the immune system build stronger, more cross-reactive defenses. If the booster gets too close, it doesnt do any harm you dont get much out of it, Wherry said. The latest booster expansion may not be the last: Next week, the government will hold a public meeting to discuss whether everyone will eventually need a fourth dose (possibly in the fall) of the original vaccine or an updated vaccine. As for the newer vaccine, ongoing studies in humansusing omicron-targeted injections alone or in combination with the original vaccineare underway. The National Institutes of Health recently tested monkeys and found no significant advantage to using a booster that only targeted omicron. PLDT Home Biz Awards Gawad Madiskarte 2022 Mompreneurs No word better can describe moms pouring out their resourcefulness, creativity, and heart to provide their families the best life possible than madiskarte. The pandemic only saw more of our madiskarte moms, many of whom have ventured into online businesses to augment their household income. Recognizing these moms and their invaluable entrepreneurial spirit, PLDT Home Biz held the inaugural Gawad Madiskarte online on March 8, 2022 just in time for International Womens Day. Hosted by PLDT Home Biz ambassadors Dominic Roque and Roxanne Montealegre, with performances from Jed Madela, Fana, and Gigi de Lana and the Gigi Vibes band, the event awarded six mompreneurs whose stories of hard work, tenacity, and success stood out among 327 entries from all over the Philippines. PLDT Home Biz Awards Gawad Madiskarte 2022 Mompreneurs Each Gawad Madiskarte winner received a P100,000 cash prize, a brand-new laptop, and a one-year PLDT Home Biz Asenso Fiber Plan among other major prizes to help further her online business. What turned out to be an unexpectedly emotional tribute to Filipino moms who have moved past adversities and written their own success stories of online entrepreneurship, Gawad Madiskarte 2022 is a landmark project of Madiskarte Moms PH (MMPH) a community of mompreneurs for mompreneurs created in the thick of the pandemic. Providing Filipinos, especially mompreneurs, with the confidence to reach for their dreams and make a difference not only for their families, but also in the community, has always been our mission in Madiskarte Moms PH and PLDT Home Biz," said Patrick S. Tang, Vice President and Head of PLDT Home Customer Management. "We're honored to share the inspiring stories of our Madiskarte Moms and we strive to be their steadfast ally through every challenge and in every success." With hundreds of entries received for this first awarding, Gawad Madiskarte followed a meticulous selection process and commissioned a group of reputable judges to help choose the winners. The judges boasted industry leaders and master entrepreneurs: Butch Jimenez of PLDT Inc., Undersecretary Blesila A. Lantayona of the Department of Trade and Industry, Annette Gozon-Valdes of GMA Films, Prep Palacios of Google Philippines, Issang Ceballos of Facebook Philippines, restaurateur and chef Happy Ongpauco-Tiu, and Potato Corner and Tokyo Tempura founders Jorge and Jenny Wieneke. PLDT Home Biz Awards Gawad Madiskarte 2022 Mompreneurs Meet the Gawad Madiskarte Winners Diskarteng Digital (Best Multi-channel Business) awardee Theresa Carbonel-Buenaflor was already a seasoned entrepreneur even before joining MMPH during the pandemic. She had been running Ellana Mineral Cosmetics a beauty and personal care brand known for its clean, vegan, and cruelty formulas and came to realize the need to pivot digitally given the threat of the pandemic. With the support of fellow mompreneurs and MMPH, Mommy Theresa was able to expand and sell her products across different platforms including physical stores and e-commerce stores. She has now amassed more than 300,000 followers on her online pages, earning her the aforementioned Gawad Madiskarte recognition. This award is so dear to my heart because I joined this group when I was feeling lost doing business during the pandemic. It has not been easy, and Ive been looking for a community to lift my spirit up. Sharing my story in MMPH was very therapeutic. It renewed my hope and it made me realize that I can inspire other mompreneurs, Mommy Theresa said, upon accepting the award. Mommy Lou NeriaPutian of skincare brand SY Glow, winner of Diskarteng Angat (Fastest-Growing Business), shares a similar story. An entrepreneur advocating effective but affordable beauty products, Mommy Lou started her business from scratch and then scaled up her business to include distributors and resellers from the MMPH community. She now registers an average sales revenue of P1.6 million a month. For her efforts toward helping the environment while providing employment in communities across Laguna, Mommy Rosanna Dela Cruz Kabiling of waste management company Something Nice Environmental Corp. won the Diskarteng May Puso award (Best Social Enterprise). With the Gawad Madiskarte prize and recognition, Mommy Rosanna is poised to transform her company into a world-class brand that promotes sustainability. Winning the Diskarteng Eco-friendly (Most Green Business) award, Mommy Kaylynn Adolfo owns The Asian Mommy Facebook page where she sells a variety of reusable cloth diapers. Armed with a background in public health and using her page as a platform to share other parenting tips and tricks, she has made it her advocacy to redirect fellow parents to more eco-friendly household alternatives. MMPH as a community is such a big help because opportunities like these are where we can inspire and motivate other moms to reach for their dreams. To all mommies out there, this is the sign that you can do it, Mommy Kaylynn said at the event. Meanwhile, Diskarteng Solid (Strongest Start-Up Business Model) awardee Mommy Abigael Madrigal started out her online bed linen shop Mommy Matters by selling bedsheets her mother had sewn. With the help of MMPH, she was able to get her first customers and eventually expand her brand. Mommy Matters now boasts more than 100 bed linen designs and keeps a loyal customer base, earning Mommy Abigael the Gawad Madiskarte honors. As the owner of CLARA, an online clothing store whose Filipiniana designs feature detachable butterfly sleeves, Mommy Rachelle Patalud has shown how creativity and flexibility makes a good fashion statement. For her modern and casual take on a formalwear classic, she has earned the Diskarteng Malikhain (Most Innovative Product) trophy awarded to creative minds breathing life to fresh and unique products and services. On top of the winners, PLDT Home Biz also honored Mommy Lou Neria Putian of skincare brand SY Glow with Diskarteng Home Biz (Mompreneurs Choice Award). The brand awarded the special prize to the madiskarte mom, hailed for having the most potential for success in a voting poll among MMPH members on its Facebook community page. Each Gawad Madiskarte awardee also took home a KalyeNegosyo Scholarship courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. KaAsenso - Jorge and Jenny Wieneke and a trophy handcrafted by award-winning sculptor Glenn Cagandahan. Nominees, meanwhile, each won a P25,000 cash prize as consolation. Madiskarte Moms PH, beyond educating moms and equipping them with business tools and resources, has evolved into a support group of women, inspiring and encouraging each other as they tread through their digital adventures together. Were nothing but proud of what MMPH has accomplished in just 17 months, and so we look forward to what more we can accomplish together in the future! Tang shared. Believe me, Madiskarte Moms PH is just getting started. And Gawad Madiskarte 2022 is just the start of a bigger campaign by us here at PLDT Home Biz all in celebration of the Filipinos exceptional entrepreneurial spirit, he added. Giving viewers a glimpse of their much-awaited romance in the upcoming drama "Shooting Stars," Lee Sung Kyung and Kim Young Dae looked daring and sweet in new magazine photos. Lee Sung Kyung and Kim Young Dae for Elle Korea's April Issue Elle Korea collaborated with K-drama stars Kim Young Dae and Lee Sung Kyung for their upcoming April magazine issue. The two who have been exposed to various fashion features and editorials. But, they posed together for the first time in a pictorial. Elle Korea captured the drama's lead stars' chemistry. Now, this is ready to be featured in the magazine's April issue. They also have solo shots where both celebrities introduce their colors. They are enveloped in pieces of branded clothes. YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Kim Young Dae Shows Off Natural Allure As Top Actor in New Drama With Lee Sung Kyung Apart from the fun shoot, the magazine will never be complete without the interview portion. The two stars sat down for a short solo interview. Going first, Kim Young Dae started by promoting his forthcoming series "Shooting Stars," where he plays the role of top star Gong Tae Sung. A Sneak Peek in Kim Young Dae and Lee Sung Kyung's Drama He described his character as a silly person. He has high expectations for his drama because it will be his first time portraying such a challenging role as a real celebrity in the story. Lee Sung Kyung, on the other hand, is Oh Han Byul, a PR team leader of a management company. She also has excellent skills in speech and crisis management. They also spoiled each other with compliments about their acting. The "Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo" star shared, "I and Young Dae have good energy on the set. I am more of an energetic person, while Kim Young Dae likes to joke around, which lessen the tension while the camera starts to roll." For the "Penthouse" actor, he chose "Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo'' as his favorite drama among Lee Sung Kyung's masterpieces. He added, "She's quite easygoing and fun to be with." Kim Young Dae revealed that his new on-screen partner always takes good care of the people around her. The "Shooting Stars" couple also opened up about their problems and worries. Lee Sung Kyung said that though he may have a hard time working, she feels healthy when she continues to work. In addition, tvN's Popular drama also stars CN BLUE's Lee Jung Shin, Kwon Han Sol, Na Hee Do, Baek Yi Jin, Safeguard, Lee Seung Hyub, Ha Do Kwon, Kim Yoon Hye, and more. Furthermore, you can watch "Shooting Stars" starting from April 22 at 10:40 p.m. ( KST) IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Kim Young Dae Names Which Character of Lee Sung Kyung Resembles Her Real Personality Are you excited for Kim Young Dae and Lee Sung Kyung's team up in "Shooting Stars"? Share your comments with us! For more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news and updates, keep your tabs open here at Kdramastars. Kdramastars owns this article. Written by Shai Collins. Amid the hype from the critics and viewers, "Pachinko," which stars Lee Min Ho and newcomer Kim Min Ha sparks doubts due to one particular scene. Premiered globally on March 25, the Apple TV+ series is based on the best-selling 2017 novel written by Min Jin Lee. It boasts a roster of talented stars from South Korea and Japan, including Oscar winner Youn Yuh Jung, Anna Sawai, Jin Ha, Kaho Minami and more. "Pachinko" follows the Korean immigrant Sunja, played by Youn Yuh Jung, who encountered a challenging life during the Japanese occupation in the early 1900s. Another highlight of the series is the star-crossed lovers. Ko Han Su is a wealthy Japanese merchant played by Lee Min Ho. He fell in love at first sight with the young and beautiful Sunja, portrayed by Kim Min Ha. After the first part was released, a particular scene immediately went viral. It showed a love scene between two lead stars. The said part was featured in "Pachinko" episode 2. Han Su and Sunja's passionate lovemaking is set in the woods. Although the scene was delivered in a cinematic way, some viewers were stunned to see Lee Min Ho portraying a daring scene. Due to this, others doubt if the Hallyu star was the one who did it or if he hired a double. Did Lee Min Ho Hire a Stuntman in 'Pachinko'? Over social media, netizens expressed their mixed reactions to Lee Min Ho's intimate scene in "Pachinko." Some viewers pointed out that the side angle does not seem like the actor. According to an outlet, fans think that the production hired a stuntman to perform the particular scene. They noted that the actor looked different from Lee Min Ho. On the other hand, some viewers argued that the Hallyu star does not need a double to perform such passionate and romantic scenes. In addition, others pointed out the extreme chemistry of Lee Min Ho and Kim Min Ha that was illustrated throughout the series. #LeeMinHo is an excellent actor and he doesn't need to prove anything to anyone, his career speaks for itself, for me the repercussion of his performance in #pachinko is enough slap in the face of people who underestimate him, unjustifiable hatred will not change reality pic.twitter.com/l9kHJIblGh RiL (@Rivertinger) March 29, 2022 The chemistry though Soo Hugh was so right about Minho and Minha!#Pachinko #LeeMinHo #KimMinHa pic.twitter.com/KyAUbLfNkR LeeMinHo Hansu Pachinko (@miminholee) March 27, 2022 To recall, Lee Min Ho, who starred in an action K-drama "City Hunter," reportedly refused to hire a stunt double for his action scenes. At the time, he was unbothered despite encountering minor injuries while filming. According to an outlet, the drama's martial arts director Yang Kil Young shared that the actor "puts in a lot of effort" on his scenes despite his height being a disadvantage, adding "his agility and reflexes help him create superb action scenes." Kim Min Ha Admits' Intense scenes' with Lee Min Ho was Quite Challenging During the lead stars' interview with EW, Kim Min Ha spoke about how they delivered emotional and heavy scenes. She explained that they "had a lot of intense scenes that were very emotional, but it's our job to tell the stories to the audience." Moreover, she gets honest and says that it came to a point where it was hard for her to "carry these emotions for a whole day, but I just tried to focus... and be present" by trying "to get rid of that emotion right away." IN CASE YOU MISSED: Youn Yuh Jung Is Taken Aback When Asked to Audition for Pachinko KDramastars owns this article Written by Geca Wills Tracy Striebichs journey to getting an MBA went differently from how she initially imagined it and she wouldnt change a thing. I was thinking about an MBA many, many years before I applied, and I think it just never felt like the right time, she said. I came much later than I thought, and I think it was the perfect timing. A native Midwesterner, Tracy grew up in Cincinnati and obtained her undergraduate degree from Miami University of Ohio, where she studied supply chain management and marketing. She quickly developed a passion for leadership in her early career working in the food and beverage industry, while simultaneously making time to play volleyball, sing a cappella, do community service, and even run an Instagram account where she eats and reviews nachos. Living in Seattle and working for Starbucks, Tracy was initially hesitant to uproot her busy life and leave the job and city she loved; however, she knew that the right MBA opportunity would be an essential asset to her career development. Kellogg was the only school Tracy applied to, and she says the One-Year MBA Program was what truly attracted her. With a degree already under her belt and a desire to remain in the food and beverage industry, the focused one-year program perfectly suited her goals. "You're not trying to squeeze everything into one year. They actually time it out very appropriately," she said. "It was the perfect program for me." Past experience, future goals and where Kellogg fits in Before coming to Kellogg, Tracy worked for Kimberly Clark on the sales team supporting Costco, as well as for Starbucks in a brand manager role. After her years of experience in the food and beverage space, Tracy developed a passion and expertise for the industry that she will continue to pursue after graduation. Healthy, sustainable and convenient food that trifecta is so hard to find. And so my plan is to find a company that is looking to close that gap and scale it, Tracy said. I want to join a small-to-midsize company that shares my same passion in that space. Tracy says with her experience and future plans in mind, she has two main priorities with her studies at Kellogg: gaining a strong technical skill set and becoming more strategic in how she thinks through projects. Shes taken analytics and finance classes that have taught her how to code, and an experiential learning course where she partnered with a client as a consultant to help them expand a new portfolio. She says the One-Year MBA Program has pushed her to maximize her opportunities, both in and out of the classroom. Making Kellogg feel like home Outside of her studies, Tracy has integrated herself into the Kellogg community in a myriad of ways. She has leadership positions in the Retail Club and Kellogg Cares, and she says both organizations have pushed her to think outside the box and helped her meet like-minded peers. This past summer, she participated in a KWEST (Kellogg Worldwide Exploration and Service Trip) trip, where she says she fell in love with Kellogg people. On the trip, participants don't share their backgrounds, which she says helped them form deep bonds over the course of the week. With her fiance here in Evanston and her sister graduating from Kelloggs MMM Program in 2022 alongside her Tracy has truly made the Kellogg family her own. FILE - Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki conducts the Sinfonia Varsovia orchestra during a special concert in memory of the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., at Warsaw's Holy Cross church, Sunday, Dec. 2, 2001. The ashes of Polands award-winning composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki were rest during a state funeral Tuesday, March 29, 2022, after a two-year delay brought on by the pandemic. (AP Photo/Alik Keplicz, File) The Most Magical Place on Earth was full of music earlier this month, with school music groups from around the country coming to perform and enjoy the Disney World resort. That included the Central High School Band, which netted several awards for their performance, including the Golden Mickey. The Westosha Central High School Band participated in the Festival Disney competition on March 18-19, performing two pieces before a panel of three adjudicators. They received a rating of Superior, the highest possible, a Best in Class award for their division based on school size and a Golden Mickey for receiving the highest overall band score. They did really well, they seemed to be a lot more prepared, said Adam Scheele, band director at the high school. It was probably the best Festival Disney performance any of my bands have done. During their more than week-long trip to Florida, the group got to enjoy all that Walt Disney World resort had to offer. They also got to go to Universal Studios and spend time at Cocoa Beach. Things went really well, Scheele said. It was probably the best trip weve ever had. Scheele said the group has participated in the competition every other year since 2012, although the 2020 trip had to be cancelled due to the pandemic. He expressed his gratitude for the fantastic behavior by his students and the amazing chaperones who came along. Although Scheele said he was proud of the band for performing so exceptionally this year, what he valued more was the enjoyment the kids got from the trip. The overall reward was seeing the students smiling and having a great time; thats better than any award, Scheele said. Seeing them have a great time was well worth it. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The University of Wisconsin-Parkside will receive more than $40,000 from the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin to enhance its water-related academic programs. Funding at UW-Parkside includes support for the following projects: Freshwater Camp (Freshwater Career Related University-Introduction Summer Experience) Student Experience for High School Juniors The Root Magazine WATER issue Human Interactions with Lake Michigan Coastal Ecosystems Field-Study Course Principles of Freshwater Informatics Laboratory and Field-Study Course FCW funding is part of a statewide initiative, backed by the Wisconsin State Legislature and Gov. Tony Evers, to tackle 10 grand water challenges and support curriculum development, undergraduate research opportunities, career development, and field-training experiences for students interested in studying water-related subjects at the 13 UW schools. Water is a such a relevant topic across academic disciplines, said Lesley Walker, dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at UW-Parkside. For example, UW-Parkside students who produce The Root magazine may not typically be taking advanced courses in biology or environmental science. Working on the stories, they become more aware of water-related issues and might pursue additional education in these fields. At the same time, the magazine draws in a more diverse community of readers. The Freshwater Camp: The Freshwater Career Related University-Introduction Summer Experience is designed to enrich students understanding of the natural sciences and local environmental issues. Connecting high school students to the Great Lakes and local waterways is particularly important, said Jessica Orlofske, associate professor of biological sciences at UW-Parkside. With partners at UW-Whitewater, the Freshwater Camp will help students become familiar with careers in freshwater, develop scientific skills, and learn about real-world issues with local impact. Human Interactions with Lake Michigan Coastal Ecosystems: A nine-day field study explores the land-sea interface with a focus on urban vs. rural changes. Students will engage with local practitioners and community partners to become more familiar with local Great Lakes water-resource management along the western shoreline of Lake Michigan. Principles of Freshwater Informatics: This is the century of big data, and the water sector is no exception. Technological innovations have made it easier than ever to collect massive amounts of data, said Orlofske. The next generation of freshwater professionals needs to be prepared to make the most of these data. The freshwater informatics course will help address this urgent need. According to Christopher Tyrrell, curator of botany at the Milwaukee Public Museum, the Freshwater Collaborative made this course possible by encouraging new partnerships like the one formed between UW-Parkside biological sciences faculty and the Milwaukee Public Museum research staff. This funding provides an opportunity for UW-Parkside and the Milwaukee Public Museum to develop and deliver a course aimed at teaching students how to use and handle big data as it relates to freshwater, Tyrrell said. This course prepares students for the big-data work environment with the background and skills they need to develop and effectively manage a wide range of data sources. Throughout the UW System, the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin will support 42 grants to further develop water science programs, internships, and research opportunities. High school and undergraduate students will have opportunities to participate in hands-on field and research experiences with faculty throughout the state, allowing them to develop a diverse range of skills. The Collaborative is also partnering with industry, nonprofits, and community organizations to increase career development opportunities for students. Grant descriptions are available at freshwater.wisconsin.edu. Water is one of the fastest growing sectors of our economy, said Marissa Jablonski, executive director of the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin. With these funds, the 13 UW universities can expand training opportunities for students and prepare them to meet the needs of Wisconsins workforce and address our states biggest water challenges. Wisconsin has abundant water resources; however, factors such as invasive species, pollution and climate change could significantly impact water safety and economic growth. The State of Wisconsin and the Freshwater Collaborative have identified 10 grand water challenges facing the state and are currently focusing research efforts on the top two: Agricultural Water Management and Water Quality Safety/Emerging Contaminants. Startup funding for the Freshwater Collaborative was provided in 2019 by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation and the UW System. In July 2021, the Wisconsin State Legislature and Evers approved $5 million in the current biennial budget to expand the Collaborations ability to train water professionals and establish Wisconsin as a leader in water-related science and economic growth. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The Court of Appeal has ruled that a consultant gynaecologist who had been suspended from his job over two years ago following allegations of misconduct can immediately return to work. The CoA, however, upheld the lower court's findings that the HSE was entitled to recommend that Prof Ray O'Sullivan be dismissed from his job at St Luke's Hospital in Kilkenny. An investigation into those allegations, which are denied by Prof O'Sullivan, by a committee established by the Minister for Health remains ongoing. Prof O'Sullivan was placed administrative leave on full pay in August 2019, by his employer, the HSE, after complaints were made against him by other members of staff. He allegedly carried out unauthorised and unapproved actions and procedures on five female patients in September 2018. None of the patients were informed about the research or consented to the procedure, nor were they aware of it until afterwards, it is claimed. The court heard the women were not physically harmed by the procedures but on learning what happened were psychologically injured. It is also alleged that Prof O'Sullivan did not obtain clearance from the hospital's ethics committee and had sourced the instruments for the procedures outside of the hospital's usual procurement channels with his own funds. Following an investigation into the complaints Prof O'Sullivan was placed on administrative leave. The HSE's CEO Paul Reid recommended to the ministerial committee that Prof O'Sullivan be dismissed from his role. Prof O'Sullivan has strongly rejected all allegations of wrongdoing against him and says that a report conducted on the HSE's behalf states that he does not pose any risk to patient health and safety. He claims the investigations against him were flawed because he has been an 'outspoken advocate for patients' rights and in particular pregnant women' and has made public remarks critical of St Luke's management. He also claimed that proper reasons had not been given by the HSE why the recommendation that he be dismissed was made. He further claims the recommendations is irrational and unreasonable. Represented by Eoin Clifford SC and Frederick Gilligan Bl Prof O'Sullivan brought judicial review proceedings seeking to have the decision to suspend him and the recommendation quashed. In a judgement last year Mr Justice Anthony Barr dismissed Prof O'Sullivan's action, after holding that the HSE as entitled to take the decisions it had regarding the consultant. That ruling was appealed to the CoA and was opposed by the HSE. In its decision the CoA comprised of Mr Justice Seamus Noonan, Ms Justice Mary Faherty and Mr Justice Brian Murray ruled that Prof O'Sullivan's suspension should be lifted immediately. Giving the court's unanimous decision Mr Justice Noonan said Prof O Sullivan had been suspended for some time, and the process of investigation would 'a considerable' number of months to complete. "By any reasonable standard, this could not conceivably be considered to be an investigation that is taking place expeditiously or with all practicable speed," the judge said. The judge said that the suspension should have been lifted when the HSE received a report in late 2019, which identified no patient safety concerns regarding Prof O Sullivan. "I am quite satisfied, for the reasons I have explained, that the applicant is entitled to an order terminating his suspension and reinstating him with immediate effect." The court also noted the reputational damage that can occur when a suspension gains high profile in the media. In this case the judge said the damage to Prof O'Sullivan by the 'deliberate leaking' of confidential information to the media about the disciplinary process had been 'amplified'. The CoA was not prepared to quash the HSE's recommendation to the Minister. He agreed with the High Court that quashing that decision would be premature and that Prof O'Sullivan's rights will be fully respected protected by the committee. The Ministerial committee he added was not bound by any findings made by Mr Reid and it is 'entirely at large to its own conclusions on these issues', he added. The CoA said that Prof O'Sullivan was entitled to his costs of both the High Court and CoA hearings. The outcome of the CoA's judgement will impact on a second set of judicial review proceedings commenced by Prof O'Sullivan earlier this week. In that action he seeks orders against a decision made by the HSE keeping him on administrative leave. He had asked the HSE to review his suspension. However, the HSE decided last December that Prof O'Sullivan should remain on leave pending the conclusion of a process being currently undertaken by the Ministerial Committee. He claims that decision is flawed and that no proper reasons were given as to why his suspension should be continued. That action, which is aimed at quashing the HSE's decision in December, will return before the High Court in May. [TAP 'NEXT>' ARROW ABOVE FOR NEXT PIC] A spring clean was held in Mullinavat on Saturday last, March 26, with the support of An Taisce and Kilkenny County Council. The initiative, organized by Mullinavat Matters (name adopted by the working group to promote the regeneration of Mullinavat and Bigwood) and blessed by glorious weather conditions, was a huge success. Over thirty groups, including people of all ages from all corners of Mullinavat and Bigwood, came out early on Saturday morning and collected litter off the roadways, retrieved materials indiscriminately dumped and organized their collection at one location to be taken away by the Environment Section of Kilkenny County Council. The turn-out surpassed expectations, showcased Mullinavat and Bigwood at their best and was a great example of civic engagement, community spirit and the pride of place felt locally. By the end of the evening over 90 bags of refuse were collected together with a wide variety of materials including bulky waste, tyres, toilet, cooker, timber, glass, plastics, masonry, furniture, equipment, metal and clothes. Chairperson of Mullinavat Matters, Sarah Dermody, expressed the anger felt locally at the amount of illegal dumping that volunteers came across over the course of the clean-up and stated that Mullinavat Matters would work in partnership with Kilkenny County Council to eliminate dumping black-spots and she encouraged people locally to report any incident of illegal dumping they came across to the free phone number 1800 200 156. Mullinavat Matters would like to thank everyone who participated in the clean-up, those who collected bags of rubbish at various collection points along local roads and who facilitated the storage of the material until its removal by Kilkenny County Council. The next meeting of Mullinavat Matters will be held in the meeting room of Mullinavat GAA Centre at 8.00pm on Tuesday, April 26. The agenda will include a review of the Spring Clean and discussion of other ideas to promote the regeneration of Mullinavat into the future. All welcome to attend. Rabat, Morocco (PANA) - The preparatory meeting of Ambassadors, Permanent Representatives and experts of the 21st Ordinary Session of the Executive Council of the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD) opened on Monday in Rabat Geneva, Switzerland (PANA) - Officials of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) have expressed deep concern over the deteriorating security situation in Ituri province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where an escalation in violence has led to the killing of an estimated 400 civilians and the displacement of over 83,000 people since 1 January 2022 At least 25 vehicles were involved in a crash on a major highway in eastern Pennsylvania during a snow squall on March 28. A serviceman of Ukrainian military forces holds a FGM-148 Javelin, an American-made portable anti-tank missile, at a checkpoint, where they hold a position near Kharkiv on March 23. If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this Got news tips, gossip, suggestions, complaints?E-mail us: progressivecharlestown@gmail.com We strive to avoid errors in our articles. Our correction policy can be found here North Korea's state media reported that the country conducted a test-firing of a Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on March 24, as seen in this Pyeongyang-distributed photo. Yonhap North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched last week is assessed to be the same type it test-fired in 2017, Seoul's defense ministry told lawmakers here Tuesday, formally dismissing Pyongyang's claim that it was a brand-new one. In a briefing to the National Assembly, the ministry said the ICBM in question is more similar to the Hwasong-15 missile than the newest Hwasong-17. It cited an analysis of the missile's flight characteristics and footage released by the North's state media. The North has claimed success in launching the Hwasong-17 an ICBM dubbed a "monster" for its size. The new missile is known to have a range of around 15,000 kilometers, about 2,000 km longer than the Hwasong-15. "Although the projectile fired on March 24 looks like the Hwasong-17 due to the increase in its top altitude and flight time, our assessment is that it is more similar to the Hwasong-15 than the Hwasong-17," the ministry said. The ministry provided evidence suggesting the North disguised the latest launch as that of the newest missile. It said that directions of shadows seen in the North's footage of Thursday's launch indicated the footage was taken in the morning though the actual launch took place in the afternoon. The ministry also pointed out that the North's photos showed the missile test was conducted under clear weather though it was mostly cloudy at the launch site in Pyongyang at the time of the test. In addition, the ministry said that it would have been difficult to carry out a successful new ICBM test following a botched test eight days earlier. The South Korean military presumes the North's failed projectile launch on March 16 involved the Hwasong-17. Commenting on the North's intentions behind the launch, the ministry said that the North needed to deliver a "message of success" after citizens in Pyongyang witnessed an earlier failure in firing the Hwasong-17. The North also appears to have sought to show progress in its ICBM capabilities, secure status as a military power and raise its leverage in future peace negotiations, the ministry said. The Hwasong-17 was fired from Sunan International Airport in Pyongyang and exploded in midair over the capital. An opposition lawmaker who attended the session said debris of the missile fell in Pyongyang and caused civilian damages. "(The missile) exploded several kilometers above Pyongyang, so it was visible to the naked eye, and debris fell like rain over Pyongyang. Human casualties have not been confirmed, but civilian damage occurred," Ha Tae-keung of the main opposition People Power Party told reporters citing the ministry. The firing of the Hwasong-15 was aimed at assuaging public discontent following the incident, he added. Meanwhile, the ministry reportedly told a closed-door parliamentary session that Seoul is considering "strong" steps to take in the event of another North Korean ICBM launch, including the deployment of U.S. strategic military assets. (Yonhap) President Moon Jae-in, left, and first lady Kim Jung-sook move to their limousine after arriving at Oslo Airport in June 2019. Yonhap Cheong Wa Dae denies allegation that first lady used public funds for clothing By Ko Dong-hwan First lady Kim Jung-sook has been hit with accusations of abusing public funds for clothing and accessories, and for instances of acting as a tourist rather than participating in the customary official events of Korean first ladies during state visits. The sudden emergence of a "wardrobe scandal" has prompted people to scramble online to gather photos of Kim at public events. With the photos showing her in an array of outfits, some raised questions about whether she purchased the clothes using her personal funds. The allegation was first stoked by a March 25 Facebook post made by a lawyer named Shin Pyeong. The lawyer said he had supported President Moon Jae-in's candidacy for the 2017 presidential election, but then turned his back on President Moon later and joined President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol's election camp earlier this year. In the post, Shin raised the allegation that Kim's wardrobe has a jaw-dropping monetary value, and urged her to return her clothes when Moon's tenure ends in early May. Later on the day of the post, a civic group filed a complaint against Kim with the National Police Agency accusing her of embezzlement from the national coffers. On March 2, Cheong Wa Dae appealed a Seoul administrative court decision that had ruled against the presidential office. The court had ordered the presidential office to disclose financial transaction records for Kim's formal participation at public events using Cheong Wa Dae's special activity budget. The Feb. 10 decision was a result of the court's partial acceptance of a 2018 petition by the civic group Korea Taxpayers' Association, which had requested the court to order the presidential office to reveal the details of nominal financial expenses for special activity purposes by the first couple. The association, before petitioning the court, had requested Cheong Wa Dae disclose the information. But the presidential office had declined, saying that the information contained confidential data involving national security and that disclosing it might "compromise the country's critical benefits." First lady Kim Jung-sook and Egypt's first lady Entissar Amer move to a reception hall inside the presidential palace in Cairo, Egypt, Jan 20. Korea Times The court, upon deciding to order Cheong Wa Dae to disclose the details of the transactions related to Kim's formal participation at public events, said it is "illegal for Cheong Wa Dae to hide the information." But Cheong Wa Dae's declining to disclose the information and appeal only prompted more disclosure requests. One of the petitions posted on the presidential office's website has drawn approximately 41,000 signatures as of Tuesday. If the number reaches 200,000 within a month of the posted date of March 15, the presidential office will be required to respond officially. Cheong Wa Dae's appeal has bought some time until Moon's term ends on May 9. After that day, all transaction records related to Cheong Wa Dae's special activities will become part of the presidential archives and be stored undisclosed for as long as 15 years. The appeal has drawn questions about whether the presidential office is reluctant to reveal the information in question. Shin, in his latest Facebook post on March 28, denounced Cheong Wa Dae's appeal as a "sly trick" to keep the information hidden from the public. Main opposition People Power Party member Chung Mi-kyung also added criticism the same day, bringing up a rumor that a Cartier brooch Kim used to wear in public is worth 200 million won ($164,000). "Are the price tags of the first lady's clothes really confidential information of the state? If that's so, then she must return all the clothes, handbags and shoes after Moon's term ends." These allegations against Kim are different from the case of Michelle Obama, the former first lady of the United States (2009-17) who was famous for her style and fashionable clothing worn in public. The White House and Obama's personal aides, according to CNBC's 2014 report, stated that the first lady's formal outfits, some of which were valued at "astronomical prices," were either purchased by her at discounted prices or donated as gifts. The U.S. first lady's press secretary Joanna Rosholm said in a report that for official events of public or historical significance, Obama's clothes were given as gifts by the designers and accepted on behalf of the U.S. government, and then stored by the National Archives. In this photo from Sept. 22, 2015, then-U.S. first lady Michelle Obama (center), then-U.S. President Barack Obama (second from right), their daughters Malia (left) and Sasha (second from left) welcome Pope Francis to the United States upon his arrival at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington, D.C. AFP-Yonhap By Athur Laffer and Patrick Giordano Two recent events have been incredibly troublesome but have finally brought home the energy and climate crises that are plaguing the planet. Russia's unprovoked attack on Ukraine has exposed two follies: Europe's deep dependence on Russia for oil and natural gas and U.S. imports of Russian oil. Meanwhile, the United Nations' recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report has expertly documented the dramatic adverse impacts of climate change on people throughout the globe. With bipartisan support, President Joe Biden announced a ban on U.S. imports of Russian energy. But he still continues to demonize North American fossil fuels. After decades of dependence on foreign sources of energy, we achieved energy independence in 2019 and 2020 but have now lost this independence. Recently, Biden acknowledged that we must again achieve energy independence. Biden should eliminate the moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal lands. Additionally, the U.S. should approve the Keystone XL pipeline so we can significantly increase imports from friendly Canada and thereby limit imports from foreign actors such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and Iran. These actions are necessary for national security. The U.S. also must implement all policies necessary to dramatically increase liquefied natural gas exports to Europe. We must approve additional export terminals, as well as additional gas pipelines to transport natural gas for processing into its liquefied form. These measures will help expedite Europe's ability to eliminate its reliance on Russia for 40 percent of its natural gas. The European Union and the newly installed German government, with the support of Germany's Green Party, have recently declared that they want to use much more liquefied natural gas and adopt policies to accomplish this. To totally eliminate Russian natural gas without wrecking their economies, however, European countries also should allow fracking. It is undeniable that fracking of natural gas, coupled with deregulation of gas and electricity markets, has enabled the U.S. to keep natural gas and electricity prices very low in comparison to European prices. European natural gas prices have consistently been at least five times higher than U.S. natural gas prices for the past 12 months. These high prices have hammered European consumers and enabled Russia to fund its unconscionable war in Ukraine. Fracking bans also have led to greater European carbon emissions because the high natural gas prices have stymied natural gas replacement of far dirtier coal in their electricity generating plants. In fact, many European power plants have recently switched from natural gas back to coal due to Europe's incredibly high natural gas prices. In contrast, the U.S. has substantially reduced carbon emissions by replacing coal with natural gas at more than 100 power plants. The burning of natural gas for electricity generation produces only half as many carbon emissions as coal burning. At the same time the U.S. and Europe are taking all necessary actions to reestablish U.S. energy independence and eliminate European dependence on Russian energy, all reasonable steps to fight climate change also must be taken. These actions are not inconsistent and are both necessary for the economic and environmental health of the U.S., Europe and the world. Significant strides against climate change are being made in the U.S. thanks to the bipartisan infrastructure law. For example, $65 billion is being spent to support enhancements of the electricity grid, which will allow transmission of electricity produced by renewable energy sources from where it can be produced most cost-effectively. The bipartisan infrastructure law also provides $7.5 billion to accelerate the build-out of a national network of electric vehicle charging stations, and $9.5 billion for green hydrogen initiatives using renewable energy for conversion of water into hydrogen. As Sen. Joe Manchin, chair of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, recently said: "We must commit to once again achieving energy independence by embracing an all-of-the-above energy policy to ensure that the American people have reliable, dependable and affordable energy without disregarding our climate responsibilities." The same approach to energy and climate policy must be used in Europe. As former world chess champion and Vladimir Putin critic Garry Kasparov succinctly stated in a recent Tribune op-ed: The U.S. should "replace Russian energy exports by increasing production and opening new sources, from fracking to nuclear to renewables. Giving authoritarians so much leverage for extortion is unacceptable. There's no point in saving the planet if you don't save the people on it." Now that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has united Americans, Europeans and many others, let's quickly act together to save the people and the planet. Arthur Laffer is chairman of Laffer Associates, an economics consulting firm. Patrick Giordano is managing director of Giordano & Associates, an energy law firm. This article was published by Chicago Tribune and distributed by Tribune Content Agency. By Lee Sun-ho A gala luncheon forum held at the Westin Josun Seoul Hotel grand ballroom on March 25, organized by the Island Resort The Heaven and co-sponsored by the Far East Broadcasting Company and the Korea Peace Foundation, was an invaluable opportunity for me to listen to a lecture entitled, "Current International Affairs and the ROK-U.S. Alliance." The invited lecturer was Michael Pence (Republican), the 48th U.S. vice president under former President Donald Trump. The timing of his visit to Korea was curious, I thought, because it was during the two-month transitional interval of Korea's president from Moon Jae-in of the ruling liberal Democratic Party of Korea to Yoon Suk-yeol of the main opposition conservative People Power Party, following the presidential election on March 9. Turning to the international front, Russia's brutal attack on Ukraine initiated by autocratic Russian President Vladimir Putin has lasted already over one month since its outbreak on February 24. Threats from North Korea, which has consistently tested missiles eight times during the first quarter of 2022, including the latest suspected first Hwasong-17 ICBM on March 24 (the day before the Pence lecture), breaking its self-imposed moratorium, aiming not only at South Korea but also at the United States, whose troops have been stationed at Camp Humphreys and elsewhere in South Korea. At the forum Pence stressed the importance of freedom, peace, security and human rights in the global village against North Korea's bellicose provocations, Russia's illegal new Cold War invasion of Ukraine, and China's ambitions of invading Taiwan, as Putin has attempted for over a month now on Ukraine. Pence's impressive faith could be felt when he condemned Russia's savage aggression on Ukraine and supported Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's undaunted fighting spirit. Pence visited the Poland-Ukrainian border on March 9, and examined the ongoing situation in which Ukrainians, with unbroken resolve, were bracing for the barbaric Russian invasion, making almost 10 million Ukrainian refugees flee to five neighboring countries other than Belarus and Russia. These unfortunate Ukrainian asylum seekers are now having to escape from their war-ravaged hometowns, even though the demoralized Russian soldiers leading the assault didn't appear too motivated, as Putin's unpopular war crimes have continued and worsened. The lecturer's vision for Korea was encouraging for me to hear. Pence argued that North Korea's capabilities are on the brink of various limitations. Pence reiterated the significance of the 69-year-old ROK-U.S. military alliance "forged in blood." Furthermore, he predicted a prosperous future path for South Korea, anticipating an upgraded and enlarged pivotal role and functions for it in Asia and the Indo-Pacific. As shown by Russia's reckless acts of destruction in Ukraine, I am concerned about the possibility that Xi in China might do the same as Putin (whom Pence met as the U.S. vice president), not only to Taiwan but also to the Korean peninsula the North first and then the South. How terribly the inhabitants of the enemy-occupied regions would suffer in such a case, due to the use of digital weapons. I was fortunate to be persuaded in person by the U.S. ex-vice president's firm conviction regarding the importance of humanitarian efforts and peaceful strategies for humanity at-large. By extending my sense of gratitude to the hosting sponsors of the forum, on their warm hospitality of inviting me, as one of around 300 honored guests to the meaningful Pence lecture program, I wish good luck and blessings to the lecturer couple, Karen and Mike Pence, and mature steps in the foreseeable years to come. The writer (wkexim@naver.com) is a freelance columnist living in Seoul. By Joschka Fischer BERLIN War has returned to Europe. One month ago, a European great power attacked its smaller neighbor which it claims does not have the right to exist as a sovereign nation-state and even threatened to deploy nuclear weapons against those that challenge it. With that, the world was fundamentally changed. Europe must change with it. With his unprovoked aggression against Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin deliberately destroyed the underpinnings of European peace and, to some extent, of the entire post-Cold War international order. Not only has the West's diplomatic and economic relationship with Russia been decimated; direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia is a distinct possibility. The world now must contend with the risk once thought to have been overcome that a war in Europe could quickly escalate into a global conflagration. If World War III were to erupt, it could entail an unprecedented level of destruction, even by European standards, owing to the likelihood that weapons of mass destruction would be used. To be sure, Putin has made some serious miscalculations. His blitzkrieg was supposed to decapitate the democratically elected Ukrainian government and replace it with a puppet regime. But he seems to have overestimated the Russian military's prowess and underestimated Ukrainians' willingness to fight for their country and their freedom. Putin also seems to have underestimated NATO and the European Union. While some pushback was undoubtedly expected, he probably did not anticipate the West's swift, determined, and unified response. Beyond welcoming a large share of the roughly 3.5 million Ukrainians who have been forced to flee their homeland since the start of the invasion, Western countries have sent Ukraine billions of dollars' worth of weapons and other materiel. And they have imposed stringent and intensifying financial and economic sanctions on Russia, Putin, and his supporters. For Europe, this response reflects just how close to home Putin's war of aggression hits. Day after day, on television and social media, Europeans are inundated with stories and images of decimated cities, packed bomb shelters, and ordinary Ukrainians courageously coping with their new reality. This, together with the arrival of refugees in virtually every country across the continent, has made the war a defining feature of Europeans' everyday lives. But the connection runs even deeper. Europeans inside and outside the EU understand that Putin's aggression is not directed only toward Ukraine. Russia has launched an assault on our most deeply held values: democracy, the rule of law, peaceful coexistence, and the inviolability of borders. If the war on Ukraine is an attack on all of us, the only appropriate response is a united one. Yet, while Europe's unity so far merits praise, much more will need to be done. It is not yet clear how the war in Ukraine will unfold, or even whether Ukraine will survive as an independent country. But there is little doubt that Putin's war will have profound longer-term consequences potentially even more profound than those of the watershed years when the Cold War order came crashing down. For starters, mistrust of Russia will be enduring. Given that the West's relationship with Russia has long been a pillar of European peace, this implies that Europe will need to transform its approach to security. In particular, NATO's eastern flank and the EU's eastern border will remain vulnerable, requiring a higher level of military protection. This task, which must be shared equally by NATO and the EU, should transform the EU into a geopolitical player. Until now, the only geopolitical instrument the EU had at its disposal was the promise of membership and the prospect of peace, prosperity, and respect for the rule of law that accession implied. But, as the EU's eastern enlargement at the beginning of this century showed, accession alone is not enough to guarantee that a country will complete the expected geopolitical transformation. Faced with the aspirations of the Western Balkan countries, as well as Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, the EU needs to develop a more flexible, responsive, and nuanced system or risk collapse. The EU's development into a political, security, and defense union, rather than just an economic and monetary union, offers an ideal opportunity. As this new Europe takes shape, a new journey to EU membership can be mapped out, consisting of several phases, each with its own criteria, rights, and obligations. To move to the next phase, a country must meet pre-determined standards relating to the economy, the rule of law, security, and other domains. Some countries might progress quickly, while others may never reach the highest level of EU membership. But all would benefit from their ties with the bloc. Putin's war has made Europe more united than it has ever been. The challenge now is to uphold this sense of common purpose, and build a stronger, more resilient, and more self-sufficient EU capable of advancing its geopolitical interests in a world of renewed great-power rivalry. Alliances will, of course, be essential, particularly with the United States and Canada. But, as Europeans marvel at the Ukrainians' bravery and mettle, we must also absorb from them a crucial lesson: no one will fight for you for your family, your country, and your future as hard as you will. Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005, was a leader of the German Green Party for almost 20 years. His article was distributed by Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org). POSCO Chemical is increasing its battery material production capability after securing a stable supply of lithium, an essential material for producing cathodes for electric vehicle (EV) batteries, the company said, Tuesday. The company, which produces cathode and anode materials, said it has greatly increased its battery material business competitiveness thanks to POSCO Group's lithium investment. POSCO Group will secure 93,000 tons of lithium hydroxide per year, which can be used in 2.2 million EVs by 2024. The group's lithium hydroxide plant in Argentina, for which it held a groundbreaking ceremony on March 23, plans to secure an annual production capacity of 50,000 tons by 2024. Also the group's ore lithium plant in Gwangyang, South Jeolla Province, will have an annual production capacity of 43,000 tons as of 2023. With the supply of lithium produced by POSCO Group, POSCO Chemical will be able to procure all 91,000 tons of lithium needed to produce 225,000 tons of cathode materials annually in 2024. The company said its self-sufficiency rate of lithium is expected to reach 102 percent. With the explosive growth of EV market, the price of lithium is also soaring. According to the government's data, the lithium price in the global market was increased to 90,000 won per kilogram this month from 16,000 won last March. Lithium accounts for the largest part when making cathodes; in fact, about 0.46 tons of lithium is needed to produce 1 ton of cathode material. As POSCO Group is the only global cathode material group that has both lithium mining rights and mass production systems of lithium, POSCO Chemical expects it will have unrivaled business competitiveness in the battery materials business. "The winner of raw materials will be the winner of the battery materials business," Min Kyung-joon, CEO of POSCO Chemical, said. "Based on our raw material procurement capability, supported by POSCO Group, we will actively promote our materials production capability to global battery companies." A building destroyed in the course of Ukraine-Russia conflict is seen in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, March 28. Reuters-Yonhap Ukraine warned Monday that the humanitarian crisis in the pulverized city of Mariupol was now "catastrophic," with thousands dead, as fighting surged around Kyiv ahead of new face-to-face peace talks with Russia in Turkey. A senior Ukrainian official told AFP Monday that around 5,000 people have been buried in the besieged city of Mariupol. But the burials stopped 10 days ago because of continued shelling," Tetyana Lomakina, a presidential adviser now in charge of humanitarian corridors, told AFP by phone, adding that as many as 10,000 people may have died since the start of the Russian invasion. Russian attacks near Kyiv cut power to more than 80,000 homes, officials said, underscoring the peril facing the capital despite an apparent retreat in Moscow's war aims to focus on eastern Ukraine. "The enemy is trying to break through the corridor around Kyiv and block transport routes," Ukraine's deputy defense minister Ganna Malyar said. "To capture Kyiv is essentially a captured Ukraine, and this is their goal." UN chief Antonio Guterres said Monday the global body is seeking a humanitarian ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, as the civilian toll continues to rise a month after Moscow's invasion of its neighbor. Guterres told reporters he had asked UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths "immediately to explore with the parties involved the possible agreements and arrangements for a humanitarian ceasefire in Ukraine." He said he hoped Griffiths would go to both Moscow and Kyiv as soon as possible after he returns from a mission to Afghanistan. About 20,000 Ukrainians have been killed in Russia's month-old invasion and 10 million have fled their homes, according to Kyiv, and several cities are still coming under withering bombardment. Ukraine Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said Monday there was proof that Russian forces have used banned cluster bombs in the southern Odessa and Kherson areas. Humanitarian needs are direst in the southern port city of Mariupol, where Ukraine said that about 160,000 civilians remain encircled by Russian forces, desperate for food, water and medicine. Ukraine's foreign ministry said the situation there was "catastrophic" and Russia's assault from land, sea and air had turned a city once home to 450,000 people "into dust." The Ukrainian government also estimated Monday that the economic damage from the Russian invasion had reached nearly $565 billion, including immediate damage plus expected losses in trade and economic activity. Buildings damaged in the course of Ukraine-Russia conflict are seen in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, March 28. Reuters-Yonhap Ukraine says that one Russian strike on a theatre-turned-shelter in Mariupol is feared to have killed some 300 people. Unburied bodies line streets and residents cowering in basement shelters have been forced to eat snow to stay hydrated, local lawmaker Kateryna Sukhomlynova told AFP. France, Greece and Turkey are hoping to launch a mass evacuation of civilians out of Mariupol within days, according to French President Emmanuel Macron, who is seeking agreement from Russia's Vladimir Putin. Macron warned that any escalation "in words or action" could harm his evacuation efforts, after U.S. President Joe Biden's shock declaration in Poland that Putin "cannot remain in power." Biden himself rowed back on Sunday, denying to reporters that he had been calling for regime change. He said Monday the remark was personal "outrage," not policy. Butler, IN (46721) Today Rain showers early will evolve into a more steady rain for the afternoon. High 53F. Winds ENE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Higher wind gusts possible.. Tonight Rain showers this evening with overcast skies overnight. Low 47F. Winds NE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 60%. Angola, IN (46703) Today Rain showers early becoming a steady light rain for the afternoon. High 54F. Winds ENE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Higher wind gusts possible.. Tonight Showers early, then cloudy overnight. Low 46F. Winds NE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 60%. Kendallville, IN (46755) Today Rain showers early will evolve into a more steady rain for the afternoon. High 53F. Winds ENE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Higher wind gusts possible.. Tonight Rain showers this evening with overcast skies overnight. Low 46F. Winds NE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 60%. Auburn, IN (46706) Today Rain showers early will evolve into a more steady rain for the afternoon. High 53F. Winds ENE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 70%.. Tonight Showers early, then cloudy overnight. Low 46F. Winds NE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 50%. BLACKPINK member Rose greeted Lisa late for her birthday and even greeted someone else before her! Keep on reading to learn why. BLACKPINK Rose Greets Lisa Late for Her Birthday On March 27, BLACKPINK's youngest member, Lisa, officially turned 25! Lisa shared photos from her birthday celebration in Thailand to celebrate her birthday. The female idol shared several images of her in a fluffy two-piece outfit, flaunting her Barbie-like visuals. Because it was Lisa's birthday, BLACKPINK's fanbase, BLINKs, eagerly waited for the members' lovely interactions with Lisa. However, people recently discovered that Rose wished another friend happy birthday on her Instagram Story before greeting Lisa. ALSO READ: BLACKPINK Rose Gets Spotted at Dua Lipa Concert With Mystery Man BLACKPINK's main vocalist, Rose, posted a happy birthday message for famous model Park Soo Joo on her Instagram Story. It is known that Rose is exceptionally close with the famous model. It is not surprising that she sent birthday wishes to the model on her social media. Because it was also Lisa's birthday, people patiently waited. However, Rose was a day late to post a greeting for Lisa! ALSO READ: BLACKPINK Rose Draws Attention After Being Spotted Using THIS Item Rose made a birthday post for Lisa on March 28. She shared a photo of them when they were younger alongside the caption, "Happy Birthday, Lisa. Forever my sister from another mis... lol. Love you so so much." Why Did BLACKPINK Rose Greet Lisa Late for Her Birthday? Rose greeted Lisa a day late because she is currently abroad. The time zone is different from Korea. In fact, Park Soo Joo was born on March 26, meaning she was technically also a day late to greet her supermodel friend under the Korean timezone. However, if going by the American timezone, where Rose is now, she greeted the right person on the right day! BLACKPINK is currently one of the most prominent K-pop girl groups globally. They have a considerable fanbase. However, there are often internal fights between BLINKs due to the many "Akgae fans," or BLINKs who only support one member and scrutinize the others. Because of that, many are critical of BLACKPINK members' interaction on their birthdays. Therefore, every move is considered controversial. However, since Rose was only considered late due to timezone difference, many were understanding of the timing of the greeting. What do you think of the situation? Tell us in the comments below! For more K-Pop news and updates, always keep your tabs open here on KpopStarz. KpopStarz owns This Written by Alexa Lewis These 10 K-pop idols looked stunning with pink hair! 1. Girls' Generation Taeyeon Taeyeon had dyed her hair pink two to three times she debuted. Although she has dyed her hair pink several times, she becomes a hot topic every time. One South Korean internet user even said, "Taeyeon looks like she was born with pink hair. She looks like a fairy, so it suits her." One notable time she dyed her hair pink was for her "Weekend" comeback. Taeyeon exuded princess vibes! 2. (G)I-DLE Yuqi Yuqi recently dyed her hair pink for (G)I-DLE's "TOMBOY" comeback. Although it is her first time with pink hair, it definitely suits her style! Paired with the smokey make-up for "TOMBOY" promotions, her hair has made Yuqi a hot topic among internet users. With pink hair, Yuqi looks both cute and charismatic! 3. (G)I-DLE Minnie Minnie, who is also a member of (G)I-DLE, dyed her hair pink for the group's "DUMDi DUMDi" promotions. Because she dyed her hair pink for the summer, Minnie looked as fresh and sweet as strawberry juice! As her hair was dyed rose gold rather than just pink, the hair shined even under harsh lighting. What a beauty! 4. BLACKPINK Lisa Any hair color is suitable for Lisa, but pink is one of the best! Though she dyed her hair pink during a period when she had no musical activities, Lisa still shared several photos of her with the new color. Lisa opted for pastel pink. This is the best shade for those who want to try dying their hair pink as it complements most skin tones. 5. BLACKPINK Rose For BLACKPINK's "Lovesick Girls" promotions, Rose dyed her hair pink! For most of her time as an idol, Rose has stuck with light colors for her hair. The soft pink definitely captivated the audience, causing Rose to stand out among the members. The hair proved to be versatile. Depending on how her hair was styled and what make-up look she wore, Rose would exude different auras. 6. TWICE Nayeon TWICE member Nayeon only dyed her hair pink once, and that was for "SIGNAL" The color did not even last long. In fact, Nayeon only kept the pink hair for a week before going back to her signature brown hair. Although the hair color was shortlived, it left a deep impression on the K-pop community, Many are hoping Nayeon makes a comeback with pink hair again. JYP, let Nayeon dye her hair other colors! 7. TWICE Sana Sana has dyed her hair several colors, but pink left the most lasting impression. The Japanese idol dyed her hair pink for TWICE's "Feel Special" promotions. The color allowed Sana to stand out among the group's nine members. People claimed the pink color made Sana look like a princess! The shade Sana dyed her hair is not easy to pull off, but she did it flawlessly. 8. LESSARAFIM Sakura Just like her name, Sakura dyed her hair the same color as Sakura blossoms during her time in IZ*ONE! Sakura is known for her pink hair, and during her time with the "Produce 48" winner group, she dyed her hair several shades of pink. The color makes Sakura look sweet and dreamy. Even when she returned to Japan, she often kept her hair different shades of pink. It is her representative color! 9. f(x) Sulli Sulli, who is known as "K-Pop's Peach," dyed her hair pink for her solo debut, "Goblin." With her pink hair, Sulli's fairy-like beauty was able to shine even more. The color perfectly matched her plump lips and milky white skin. She looked out of this world! We miss you, Sulli! 10. Red Velvet Yeri During Red Velvet's "PSYCHO" era, Yeri dyed her hair pink. However, the hair color did not last long, as pink is notoriously hard to maintain. As a result, the idol could only have pink hair for teaser photos and a few scheduled activities. After that, her hair faded to a brown. Though short-lived, the color caused a storm among ReveLuvs. People believed the 'do made Yeri look high-class and extravagant. Did we miss anybody? Tell us in the comments below! ALSO READ: 6 Girl Crush Female Idols Who Brought Back Smokey Makeup Trend For more K-Pop news and updates, always keep your tabs open here on KpopStarz. KpopStarz owns This Written by Alexa Lewis BTS fans, ARMYs, are left confused after the group's hashtag became different. Keep on reading to know more. ARMYs Express Confusion After Unknown Box Began Appearing on BTS' Hashtags on Twitter Ahead of the 64th Grammy Awards in Las Vegas on April 4, K-Pop superstars BTS boarded a flight at the Incheon International Airport recently on March 28 to head to the United States. Since then, BTS fans, ARMY, have been expressing their excitement for the seven-member group's appearance at the highly-acclaimed awards ceremony. They will not only perform, but are also nominated for the second time in a row for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance with their 2021 summer single "Butter." IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: BTS Jungkook Departs Ahead of Group to Las Vegas - Why Did He Leave First? ARMY took to social media to show their support for each of the members. Over on Twitter, several keywords and hashtags related to BTS and its members began trending around the world and topping the worldwide trends. However, not long after, ARMYs began noticing an unusual change in several of BTS' hashtags. In particular, many have come to notice that in front of BTS' hashtag, there is a box that goes through BTS, ARMY, and each of the members' Korean names. While on browser, this appears as a crossed out box. In addition, some of the hashtags are also appearing in the color purple for some. This is BTS' representative color. Twitter's hashtags or links are usually in the color blue. Eventually, this addition to BTS' related hashtags has caused a frenzy among ARMY, who took to Twitter to express how confused they are. ARMYs Unable to Find Meaning Behind Hashtags While some usually make theories to explain certain things happening around BTS, it seems fans this time are left clueless as to what the hashtags could possibly mean. It came as a surprise to many. IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: BTS Makes Surprise Appearance at Oscars 2022 - Here's What the Group Did In addition, some have also revealed that it does not appear as a box or crossed out box to them, but their boxes include a question mark in it. Some comments from ARMYs read, "NOBODY!!! LITTERLY NOBODY KNOWS WHY THEIR NAMES ARE IN TV SHAPES RN?!?!!!!! SOLVE THE MYSTERY PLZ!!!!!!," "LMAO what's this ARMY?? Why that box around it. Twitter is drunk or are we clowns????," "Waiting for someone to explain what's happening. Everybody asking what's happening but no one knows what it is actually.. whoever started this please explain..," and similar others. Meanwhile, BTS are currently in Las Vegas for their U.S. activities. What do you think this could mean? For more K-Pop news and updates, always keep your tabs open here on KpopStarz. KpopStarz owns this article. Written by Robyn Joan Feature: Retired Ugandan has his way with bamboo farming after acquiring Chinese knowledge Xinhua) 11:35, March 29, 2022 KAMPALA, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Having taught at Uganda's prestigious Makerere University for decades, retired Andrew Tumusiime made a bold decision to enter forestry business in his hometown in the southwestern part of the country. Returning to Kabale, Tumusiime planted a bamboo nursery bed, hoping that people would buy the seedlings from him. However, finding clients was challenging, so he decided to plant the seedlings himself. "At first, I took it as a joke, but then I realized it was good business. I turned my energy to researching until I landed on websites which explained the impact of bamboo growing in China," Tumusiime told Xinhua in a recent interview. To obtain further information about bamboo planting, Tumusiime joined the Uganda Bamboo Association, some of whose members had acquired knowledge about bamboo farming from China. The association, according to one of its leaders Flavia Munaba, brings related organizations and community members together to share information, resources and technology in growing and adding value to bamboo. Munaba, who joined the bamboo industry after a trip to China in 2011, said the association has more than 300 members. The association organizes demonstrations for members on how to plant bamboo and also sensitizes them about the economic benefits of the plant. "This association of bamboo growers has great people. They are not selfish when it comes to sharing the great knowledge they learnt from China," Tumusiime said. After a decade-long endeavor, Tumusiime's bamboo business has thrived. He was one of the exhibitors at the Harvest Money Expo 2022 in Kampala, one of Uganda's largest agricultural exhibitions. During the expo, Tumusiime's booth showed various bamboo products such as toothpicks, chairs, tables, mortars and pestles. He said many customers who came to his exhibition stand were awed by the products made out of bamboo. "This is amazing. The toothpicks I have known all my life are made in China. I like innovation and maybe in the future I will consider planting bamboo," Ritah Nanyonjo, one of the customers told Xinhua after visiting Tumusiime's stall at the expo. "I have also seen some liquid soap and other herbs made out of bamboo. This is great news for our country," Nanyonjo said. James Kariuki, a Kenyan national who attended the exhibition, said he was inspired by Tumusiime's work. "He has told us that once you plant bamboo, you can start harvesting after three to four years. This harvesting goes on for the next 50 years and even more," Kariuki said. "I will definitely use part of my land to grow bamboo. Tumusiime has also referred me to some websites which talk about the importance of bamboo and how the Chinese have done wonderful things out of this plant," Kariuki added. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) Welcome Guest! You Are Here: A veteran board chair facing child porn charges resigned from his post Monday amid repeated calls for his resignation from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers administration and Republican gubernatorial candidate Kevin Nicholson. Prosecutors in Milwaukee charged Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs Board Chair Curtis Schmitt Jr. on Jan. 23 with three felony counts of possession of child pornography. Schmitt, whom Evers appointed in 2019 and the Senate unanimously approved, has pleaded not guilty. According to a criminal complaint, investigators discovered two photos and a video of child pornography had been uploaded to a Dropbox account associated with Schmitts email in December. Schmitt told police that he was addicted to adult pornography and sometimes received and downloaded child pornography. In a letter to Evers on Monday, Schmitt said, It has been an honor to serve on the Board of Veterans Affairs for the past three years. Please let this letter serve as my official resignation, according to a copy Evers spokesperson Britt Cudaback provided to the Wisconsin State Journal. The day after Schmitt was charged in January, an attorney for Evers asked him to do that which is in the best interest of the Board of Veterans Affairs by immediately resigning your unpaid, part-time, citizen-appointment position. He didnt respond, Cudaback said. On Monday morning, Nicholson sent Evers a letter to jump-start the removal process after Schmitt ignored calls to resign. Nicholson laid blame on Evers for not removing Schmitt sooner. Because the Senate confirmed Schmitt, Evers could not simply rescind his appointment. Instead, a taxpayer Nicholson in this instance had to file a complaint to trigger a process through which Evers can remove Schmitt for inefficiency, neglect of duty, official misconduct or malfeasance in office. In his letter sent Monday, Nicholson said Evers dishonored the reputation of the Wisconsin Board of Veterans Affairs and displayed an incomprehensible lack of leadership by refusing to be more proactive in removing Schmitt. After Schmitts resignation, Nicholson said, Schmitt Jr. should have been removed from the Wisconsin Board of Veterans Affairs months ago. Im glad that hes finally resigned, but it should have never come to this. A judge last month bound Schmitt over for trial. Hes due back in court Tuesday for a scheduling conference. The veterans board works with the WDVA secretary to shape benefit programs for Wisconsin veterans by adopting administrative rules. It also approves resolutions and recommendations from state veterans organizations. The nine members serve four-year terms with no pay. Nicholson is facing Republican gubernatorial candidates former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and Rep. Timothy Ramthun, R-Campbellsport, in a contest to oust Evers. The Associated Press contributed to this report. A Dane County sheriffs deputy who was fired for undisclosed reasons in November a month after saying she shot at a man who stabbed her in Festge Park likely caused her own injuries with a box cutter while she was intoxicated, according to her termination letter. The Wisconsin Department of Justices Division of Criminal Investigation originally reported the deputy, Sarah Bortz-Rodriguez, said she saw a suspicious person while on routine patrol at the park in the town of Berry near Cross Plains at about 8:15 p.m. on Oct. 21. And Bortz-Rodriguez initially told authorities she approached a man who stabbed her with an edged weapon. The action caused her to fire her gun, and she was later taken to a hospital for treatment. Throughout that night and into the morning, police searched for the alleged assailant. Residents in the immediate area were on lockdown. The investigation turned up no answers, but rather factual inconsistences in Bortz-Rodriguezs initial statement about the incident, according to a nine-page letter the Wisconsin State Journal obtained from the Sheriffs Office about her firing. Bortz-Rodriguez later told authorities after they pointed out the inconsistencies that following an earlier critical incident review at the precinct she drove around to try and calm herself emotionally, according to the letter. The deputy told authorities she then returned to the precinct and traveled to an area near Rileys Tavern where she later consumed a substance that is blacked out in the letter. Bortz-Rodriguez afterward decided she was going to ride out the rest of her shift, the letter states. After not notifying a supervisor of her condition, Bortz-Rodriguez told authorities that upon arrival to Festge Park, she felt the substance she consumed take effect. You stated that you attempted to clear the park and while driving through ... believed you may have seen someone, according to the letter. You stated you believed you really did see someone there but now believe you may have hallucinated this stuff. Despite her impaired condition, Bortz-Rodriguez told authorities that she discharged her firearm once, later thinking she may have shot herself. After authorities asked if she had also caused some cuts to her arm, Bortz-Rodriguez said it was possible, the letter states. Authorities also asked her if a box cutter police found on the ground the night of the incident was likely department-issued from her squad bag and not owned by the alleged assailant. You asked if the box cutter found at the scene was the box cutter from your squad bag, according to the letter. You stated if its not in my squad bag, then its probably on the one on the ground. There was not a box cutter in your squad bag when it was examined after the incident. The letter states Bortz-Rodriguez was found to have violated several policies outlined in the Sheriffs Office Code of Conduct those surrounding truthfulness, unbecoming conduct, ethical behavior, conformance to laws, insubordination and work performance. The deputy also violated work rules surrounding the use of property, work performance and personal actions and appearance. Bortz-Rodriguez, 30, had been with the Sheriffs Office since May 2014. In a separate letter to the State Journal explaining why portions of a 100-page case report about the incident and termination letter are blacked out, the Sheriffs Office said it was not disclosing what the deputy consumed because of the sensitive nature of the investigation and the number of current employees who were interviewed. Release of these records without redactions would undermine the departments ability to manage its workforce and to conduct its business, particularly with respect to investigating future internal matters of a confidential or sensitive nature, the letter from Sheriff Kalvin Barrett and Lt. Brian Hayes states. Certain medical information provided by the deputy has also been redacted. Kochi (Kerala) [India], March 29 (ANI): Crime Branch of Kerala Police interrogated Malayalam actor Dileep for nine and a half hours on Tuesday in the 2017 actress assault case. Dileep, who is the eighth accused, was interrogated for seven hours on Monday. Also Read | Andhra Pradesh Shocker: 3-Month-Old Girl Sold Seven Times in Three Months in Guntur; Eleven Arrested. The Crime Branch also interrogated Malayalam film director Balachandra Kumar, who is the witness in this case on Tuesday. Crime Branch Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) S Sreejith confirmed that they interrogated Dileep and Balachandra Kumar together on Tuesday. Also Read | Rajnath Singh Talks With Israel Defence Minister Benjamin Gantz, Condoles Loss of Lives in Terror Attack. The Crime Branch ADGP said, "The interrogation of Dileep is over now. He will be called later if further clarification is required. Important people will not be questioned tomorrow. Dileep will be questioned again if necessary." Balachandra Kumar, film director and witness said, "I can not disclose the facts that are part of the investigation. They said they would call me again. I think things will go to the steps of questioning Dileep and me together. The police have various evidence that people are unaware of. I believe the investigation can be completed on time." Earlier in November, Balachandra Kumar had leveled a series of allegations against Dileep in connection to the case. He had shared audio recordings which led to new conspiracies in the case against actor Dileep. Further, Dileep was accused of conspiring with others to murder police officials who have been investigating the actor assault case. The actress, who worked in Tamil and Telugu films, was allegedly abducted and molested inside her car by a group of men, who had forced their way into the vehicle on the night of February 17, 2017. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Agartala, Mar 29 (PTI) A 26-year-old man was lynched on Tuesday morning in Tripura's Sepahijala district on the suspicion that he was a cattle thief, police said. Two people were arrested in connection with the killing of Litan Miah, a resident of Tarapukur in Jatrapur police station area of Sonamura subdivision, they said. Information was received in the morning that villagers have detained a youth in Baramura, police said. Also Read | Amazon Glow Now Available for All Customers in the US. A police team rushed to the spot and found him critically injured after being thrashed by a group of youths who claimed that he was a cattle thief, they said. "He was first taken to a local hospital. From there he was referred to GBP Hospital in Agartala as his condition was critical. On the way to that hospital, he died," Officer-in-Charge of Jatrapur police station Nandan Das told PTI. Also Read | Realme Pad Mini Listed on Lazada, Likely To Debut in India Soon. As the news of the incident spread, hundreds of locals blocked the road at nearby Dhanpur -- the constituency of Leader of Opposition Manik Sarkar, demanding immediate arrest of the killers. Union Minister of State for Social Empowerment and Justice Pratima Bhoumik is also a resident of Dhanpur. The father of the deceased, Jamal Miah, lodged a police complaint, following which two people were arrested. Those arrested were Sentu Debnath and Amar Chandra Das, police said. A case has been registered under relevant sections of the IPC, including 302 (murder), they said. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi [India], March 29 (ANI): Uttar Pradesh Government told the Supreme Court that the state has taken all efforts to protect the witnesses and families of victims of the Lakhimpur Kheri incident. Uttar Pradesh government said that all the witnesses are also regularly contacted by the police for appraisal of their security conditions. Also Read | Higher Attrition Rate in Indian Companies Driving Increments, Says Report. The submission of the Uttar Pradesh government came in an affidavit as a reply to the petition seeking to cancel the bail of Ashish Mishra, the son of Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Ajay Mishra Teni. The state government told the Supreme Court that it had opposed the bail plea of Ashish Mishra in the Allahabad High Court and the submission of the petition that the state did not effectively oppose the bail application of the accused Ashish Mishra is completely untrue. Also Read | Russia-Ukraine War: Russia Would Not Supply Gas to Europe for Free, Says Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. "That at the very outset, the Answering Respondent (Uttar Pradesh) takes exception to the averments in the SLP to the effect that State did not effectively oppose the Bail Application of the Accused Respondent No 1 (Ashish Mishra). The same is completely untrue, as is also borne out from a perusal of the Impugned Order itself...." read the affidavit. The affidavit also stated that the same clearly demonstrates that Ashish Mishra's bail application was vehemently opposed by the State in the Allahabad High Court and any averments to the contrary in the special leave petition (SLP) are completely false and merits to be rejected. Uttar Pradesh Government further said that as per the Allahabad High Court's order of February 10, 2022, the limitation period against the same is still running, and the decision to file SLP against the same is pending consideration before the relevant authorities. The government also said that the investigation revealed that the altercation between a witness and the opposite party took place over the throwing of Gulal. Earlier, it was alleged that one witness was attacked by some miscreants. The alleged attackers threatened the witness that Mishra is out on bail and the ruling party had also won the election and they would see to him. According to the affidavit, all the witnesses are also regularly contacted by the police for appraisal of their security conditions. "The witnesses were interviewed telephonically most recently on March 20 2022 and expressed satisfaction with the security provided to them and were informed that if they required any help in relation to their security, they should immediately contact the Superintendent of Police of their respective districts and would receive prompt assistance," UP government assured in the affidavit. Earlier, the Supreme Court had issued notice to Uttar Pradesh Govt and others on plea seeking to cancel bail to Ashish Mishra. On the last hearing advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the petitioner, said that one of the prime protected witnesses was brutally attacked, a few days after bail was granted to Ashish Mishra. Family members of the victims of the Lakhimpur Kheri incident have moved Supreme Court challenging the Allahabad High Court order, which granted bail to Ashish Mishra. In the Special Leave Petition, family members of the deceased have challenged the Allahabad High Court order dated February 10 2022, wherein Ashish Mishra was granted regular bail. The petitioner said that Allahabad HC's order is unsustainable in law. They also said that they have approached the apex court as the State of Uttar Pradesh has failed to prefer any appeal against the impugned order. Ashish Mishra was released from jail in February followed by Allahabad High Court granting him bail. Eight people, including four farmers, had died in violence on October 3, 2020, in Lakhimpur Kheri. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi [India], March 29 (ANI): Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Tuesday said that the signing of the inter-state agreement between Assam and Meghalaya to resolve the pending border dispute is a "historic day for the northeast" and congratulated the two chief ministers. "Today is a historic day for the northeast. Since 2014, PM Modi has made numerous efforts for the development and promotion of the cultural heritage of the northeast region. Today, I congratulate Assam CM and Meghalaya CM and their teams on the signing of the agreement to resolve their boundary dispute," the Home Minister said. Also Read | Andhra Pradesh Shocker: 3-Month-Old Girl Sold Seven Times in Three Months in Guntur; Eleven Arrested. The Home Minister said that he is assured that in the coming days GDP of the northeastern states will increase and there will be peace, prosperity and development. He said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has continuously worked for the welfare of the people of the northeast. Also Read | Rajnath Singh Talks With Israel Defence Minister Benjamin Gantz, Condoles Loss of Lives in Terror Attack. Amit Shah said that looking at the journey from 2019 to 2022, there have been many big achievements in establishing peace in the northeast. "First of all, in 2019, there was an NLFT agreement. The Bru Reang Agreement was signed on January 16, which benefited more than 34,000 people. Then on January 27, 2020, the historic Bodo Accord was signed. We ended the 50-year-old problem by creating the original form of the state without disturbing the Assam model," he said. The Home Minister said that the Karbi Amlang agreement was signed in 2021 and an agreement had been reached today. Amit Shah said that he had gone to Meghalaya in July last year and met all the chief ministers of the northeast region. "We are continuously moving forward on the path of resolving the border dispute. Today, a 50-year-old pending boundary dispute between Assam and Meghalaya has been resolved. Six out of 12 points of the dispute have been resolved, which comprises nearly 70 per cent of the boundary. The remaining six points will be resolved at the earliest," the minister said. Assam and Meghalaya governments on Tuesday signed a historic agreement here in the national capital to resolve their 50-year-old pending border dispute. The agreement was signed between Assam and Meghalaya two months after a draft resolution was submitted by the chief ministers of the two states to Amit Shah on January 31 for examination and consideration by the MHA. The governments of Assam and Meghalaya had come up with a draft resolution to resolve their border disputes in six of the 12 "areas of difference" along the boundary. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, Mar 29 (PTI) The defence ministry on Tuesday sealed a contract with state-run Bharat Electronics Ltd for the development of an electronic warfare equipment for the Indian Air Force at a cost of Rs 1,109 crore. The ministry described the contract for the development of the Instrumented Electronic Warfare Range (IEWR) as a "significant step" toward enhancing the capabilities of the IAF to prepare for future warfare. Also Read | Cryptocurrency Tax Rules in India: Crypto Assets to be Taxed From April 1; Heres All You Need to Know. "The Ministry of Defence (MoD) of India and Bharat Electronics Ltd, Hyderabad signed a contract for Instrumented Electronic Warfare Range (IEWR) for the Indian Air Force, here today," the ministry said. "The contract is a significant step towards enhancing the capabilities of the IAF to prepare for future warfare. The overall cost of the contract is estimated to be Rs 1,109 crore," it said in a statement. Also Read | Amazon Smbhav Summit 2022 to Be Held on May 18-19. The ministry said the IEWR will be used to test and evaluate airborne electronic warfare (EW) equipment and validate their deployment in an operational scenario. "The project essentially embodies the spirit of Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) and will help facilitate realising the journey towards self-reliance," it said. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, Mar 29 (PTI) A thick blanket of smoke engulfed east Delhi's Ghazipur dumping yard as a fire that broke out on Monday continued to rage on in some pockets even after 19 hours. Two fire tenders have been stationed at the spot, an official of the fire department said. Also Read | Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad: 7.8 Lakh Students Dropout From Class 10 and 12 Examinations in 4 Days. Chief Fire officer Atul Garg told PTI that the firefighting operations are still underway and it might take a few more hours to complete the cooling process. According to the fire department, a call was received at around 2.30 pm about the fire in Khatta at Ghazipur on Monday. No casualty was reported. Also Read | WhatsApp To Soon Allow Users To Share Media Files Up to 2GB in Size: Report. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi [India], March 29 (ANI): India has logged 1,259 new COVID cases in the last 24 hours, Union Health Ministry informed on Tuesday. Following a continuous downward trend, as per the Ministry, India's active caseload has declined to 15,378 today. It constitutes 0.04 per cent of the country's total positive cases. Also Read | Intel Launches Core i9-12900KS Processor, Price Starts at $739. "There has been a sustained fall in the weekly and daily positivity rates too," the Ministry said in an official statement. The weekly positivity rate in the country currently stands at 0.25 per cent and the daily positivity rate is reported to be 0.22 per cent. Also Read | Tina Dabi Engaged: IAS Officer Announces Engagement With Fellow Officer Pradeep Gawande, To Marry on April 22. In the last 24 hours, 1,705 patients have recovered from the virus, taking the cumulative tally of recovered patients since the beginning of the COVID pandemic to 4,24,85,534. Consequently, India's recovery rate stands at 98.75 per cent. As many as 5,77,559 COVID-19 tests have been conducted in the last 24 hours, taking India's cumulative COVID tests to 78.79 crore (78,79,32,913). The provisional reports till 7 am today, show that India's COVID-19 vaccination coverage has exceeded 183.53 crore (1,83,53,90,499). In the COVID-19 vaccination drive for the age group of 12-14 years, which began on March 16, 2022, so far, over 1.36 crore (1,36,84,215) adolescents have been administered the first dose of the vaccine. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi [India], March 29 (ANI): The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on Tuesday informed the Lok Sabha that it has rejected a total of 466 licenses of institutions under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) since 2020. Union Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai informed the Lower House while responding to a query of Congress leader Suresh Kodikunnil. Also Read | The #Kerala Unit of the #CPIM on Tuesday Expressed Its Displeasure over the Latest Tweet by IANS India. On being asked about details of institutions that were refused the renewal of registration under FCRA during the last two years and the current year, Rai said a "total of 466 renewal applications refused under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, 2010 (FCRA, 2010) since 2020". Giving a detailed report, the Minister said the number of renewal applications refused in 2020 was 100. Also Read | Hyderabad Shocker: 89-Year-Old Alzheimer Patient Spends 18 Hours in Banks Locker Due to Staff's Negligence. In 2021, the number of refusals of similar licenses increased to 341, said the Minister, adding as of March 21 this year, a total of 25 licenses have been refused. Informing the reason for their rejection, the Minister said, "The refusal of these applications was due to not fulfiling the eligibility criteria in accordance with the provisions of the FCRA, 2010 and rules made thereunder". On being asked "whether the government intends to review the registration guidelines," Rai said, "there is no such proposal". (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, Mar 29: Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked BJP MPs on Tuesday to undertake various programmes as part of "samajik nyay pakhwada" (fortnight dedicated to social justice) from its foundation day on April 6, and also asserted that it is the only ruling party which has recognised contributions of every prime minister by building a museum to honour them. With the birth anniversary of B R Ambedkar, architect of the Constitution, falling on April 14, Modi at the BJP's parliamentary party meeting asked party MPs to reach out to people, especially the disadvantaged sections of society like Scheduled Castes, to highlight various government programmes for their welfare. PMAY-G Scheme: PM Narendra Modi to Participate in 'Grih Pravesham' of Over 5 Lakh Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana Beneficiaries in Madhya Pradesh Today. Quoting him, Union Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal told reporters that Modi asked parliamentarians to work to spread awareness about the central government's welfare schemes for housing, nutrition and free grains among others. With a museum dedicated to all former prime ministers of India set to be inaugurated on April 14, Modi noted his address from the ramparts of Red Fort on August 15 in which he had lauded their contributions. "He said we are the only ones to have acknowledged former prime ministers' contributions irrespective of the party they came from," a BJP MP said. The BJP has often accused the Congress, which has ruled the country for much of the period since Independence, of glorifying the prime ministers from its ruling Nehru-Gandhi family while ignoring others. "This is essentially democratisation of national recognition and articulation of popular gratitude towards all of our former prime ministers," BJP MP Vinay Sahasrabuddhe said. That the museum is being inaugurated on Ambedkar's birth anniversary is a recognition of the democratic architecture he bequeathed to the country, another party leader said, referring to Modi's speech. Modi also noted that the birth anniversary of noted social reformer Jyotirao Phule falls on April 11. An exhibition on the movement for India's Independence was also held at Ambedkar International Centre, the meeting's venue, where Modi arrived earlier than its scheduled beginning. The prime minister asked them to hold different measures to help people during the fortnight. He suggested that MNREGA funds can be utilised to build ponds in dedication to the ongoing 'Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav'. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Gurugram, Mar 29 (PTI) At least 123 workers of a company were taken into custody on Tuesday after they went berserk and set fire to a bus and damaged others in Manesar town here, police said. Workers of JNS instruments limited, a manufacturer of the parts for Maruti, have been on protest for the last few days against the alleged sacking of some of their co-workers by the company and demanding that they be taken back. Also Read | Andhra Pradesh Shocker: 3-Month-Old Girl Sold Seven Times in Three Months in Guntur; Eleven Arrested. Authorities had imposed section 144 of CrPC and barred entry of any protester within 500 meters radius of the company. However, the protesting workers blocked the entry of the company early in the morning, police said, adding they also allegedly threatened other employees of the company. Also Read | Rajnath Singh Talks With Israel Defence Minister Benjamin Gantz, Condoles Loss of Lives in Terror Attack. Police and the duty magistrate reached the spot and warned the protestors of action. As the workers did not leave the premises, the duty magistrate ordered action against them, they said. Subsequently, an FIR was registered against the protesters under sections 147 (riots), 149 (unlawful assembly), 341 (wrongful confinement), 506 (criminal intimidation) of the IPC at IMT, Manesar police station, police said. A police team reached the spot and again asked the workers to leave the spot. When some workers were taken into custody, the others ran away, the police said. It was around 7 pm when they again gathered outside the company and not only damaged windowpanes of a bus but also set another to fire. The fire brigade was called which controlled the flames. After this police nabbed 123 workers, including 70 women, they said. We arrested 123 protesters. We let them off on police bail with a warning, said inspector Subhash Kumar, Station House Officer of IMT, Manesar police station. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Helsinki [Finland], March 29 (ANI): Seems like HMD Global is ready to provide an Android 12 update to its Nokia XR20 smartphone, which launched last summer with Android 11 on board. According to GSM Arena, reports suggest that users in Finland have received the coveted update to the latest version of Google's mobile operating system. Also Read | Andhra Pradesh Shocker: 3-Month-Old Girl Sold Seven Times in Three Months in Guntur; Eleven Arrested. Labelled V2.300, the new build seems to be rolling out over the air already in some parts of Europe at least. Upon installation, the Nokia XR20 will run Android 12 with the March 2022 security patch level, which is still current for a few more days. Also Read | Alaya F Looks Like the Perfect Bridesmaid in Her Powder Blue Anita Dongre Outfit (View Pics). GSM Arena suggests that this might be a staged rollout, so it could take days (or even weeks) for the notification to pop up on all Nokia XR20 units out there in the wild. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Mexico City, Mar 29 (AP) Gunmen burst into a clandestine cock fight and opened fire, killing 20 people and wounding four, prosecutors in Mexico's western state of Michoacan said Monday. Three women were among the dead after the attack late Sunday near the town of Zinapecuaro. Also Read | China Reports 1,293 New COVID-19 Cases in Past 24 Hours. The attackers apparently planned the attack, and entered in a stolen truck owned by a snack food company, according to prosecutors. The snack food company truck arrived, and several armed people in camoflauge clothing got out, a prosecutors' statement said. At the same moment, a bus that was outside the building was used as a blockade, apparently to prevent victims from escaping or calling for help, it said. Also Read | Joe Biden Proposes USD 1.8 Billion for Indo-Pacific Strategy. Investigators found 15 vehicles that apparently belonged to the victims, one of which bore stickers with the logo of a criminal gang. Prosecutors said drug cartels and other criminal gangs had been fighting in the area. There are indications that the attack involved a confrontation between criminal groups, the federal Public Safety Department said in a statement. It added that a team of federal investigators had been sent to the scene. Michoacan has been the scene of a longstanding turf battle between local cartels and the Jalisco cartel, from the neighboring state of Jalisco. The fighting has included the use of bomb-dropping drones, landmines and home-made armored cars. Cock fighting, while illegal in many areas, remains a popular pastime in parts of Mexico, though the fights are usually held clandestinely. (AP) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Brussels [Belgium], March 29 (ANI): The European Union on Monday condemned the Taliban's decision to ban girls from receiving secondary education and believes that this lowers the movement's chances to gain the "desired" legitimacy, Sputnik reported. Earlier, on Wednesday, the Taliban regime issued a decree banning female students above grade six from participating in their classes. The girls were further told to stay home until the Islamic Emirate announces its next decision. Also Read | Russian Oligarch Roman Abramovich Experienced Symptoms of Poisoning During Peace Talks in Kiev. "The European Union and its member states, together with international partners, have condemned the decision of the Taliban to deny until further notice secondary level education for over one million Afghan girls. This is a blatant violation of the fundamental right to education for all children, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and several international human rights instruments, of which Afghanistan is a state party," Sputnik quoted the EU Council statement. The decision by the Islamic Emirate has drawn severe backlash across the world with the Foreign Ministers of Canada, France, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the High Representative of the European Union issuing a joint statement on Friday to condemn the Taliban's decision to deny so many Afghan girls the opportunity to finally go back to school. (ANI) Also Read | Shahbaz Sharif Tables No-Confidence Motion Against Pakistan PM Imran Khan. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Beijing [China], March 29 (ANI): The special envoys of Russia, the US, Pakistan and China to Kabul are scheduled to hold a meeting in Beijing this week in the 'extended troika' format, on the sidelines of the Third ministerial conference on Afghanistan, the Chinese Foreign Ministry informed. The 'troika plus' group or the extended troika is a multilateral grouping on Afghanistan consisting of the US, Pakistan, Russia and China. Also Read | Russia-Ukraine War: Russia Would Not Supply Gas to Europe for Free, Says Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. "By agreement of all parties, within the framework of the third meeting of foreign ministers of countries neighbouring Afghanistan, which will be held on March 30-31 in the Tunxi region (Huangshan city) of Anhui province, a meeting of the consultation mechanism of the expanded 'troika' on Afghanistan will be held," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a briefing on Tuesday, reported Sputnik News Agency. According to Wang, the special envoys of Russia, the United States and Pakistan in Afghanistan will take part in the consultations, which will be chaired by the special envoy of the Chinese Foreign Ministry for Afghanistan Yue Xiaoyong. Also Read | Worlds Largest White Diamond Ever, The Rock To Appear at Auction: Top 5 White Diamonds Offered at Christie's. Notably, in November last year, Islamabad had hosted a meeting of the extended Troika. China is hosting the third regional meeting between the Foreign Ministers of the neighbouring countries of Afghanistan at the end of this month in Beijing. The meeting will also witness the presence of the acting Foreign Minister of the Taliban regime, Amir Khan Muttaqi. The meeting was discussed during Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's visit to Kabul where Wang met with the acting Taliban Foreign Minister. Earlier this month, the Taliban regime had confirmed its participation in the meeting after a meeting between Muttaqi and China's ambassador to Afghanistan Wang Yu. The first and second rounds of the meeting were hosted by Islamabad and Tehran respectively. The meeting in Islamabad was held in a virtual format. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind. New Delhi, March 29: The visit of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to India has been postponed and will be rescheduled, Muhamed Heib, spokesperson of the Israel Embassy in India said on Tuesday. On Monday, it was reported that Naftali Bennett had tested positive for COVID-19. Also Read | Dmytro Khilyuk, Ukrainian Journalist, Abducted by Russian Forces: Media Watchdog. Israel had earlier announced Bennett's first India visit after assuming office as Prime Minister last year. Bennett was scheduled to visit India during April 3-5, on the occasion of the commemoration of 30 years of diplomatic relations between India and Israel, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had said in an official statement. Also Read | Taliban Prevents Beardless Government Employees Entry to Offices in Afghanistan. Bennett had planned to visit India from April 3-5 at the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had said in the official statement. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Israeli counterpart had earlier met on the sidelines of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) in Glasgow in November last year. They also had a telephonic conversation on August 16, 2021. India and Israel elevated their bilateral relationship to a strategic partnership during the visit of Prime Minister Modi to Israel in July 2017. Since then, the two countries have continued to deepen their strategic partnership, with a focus on innovation and research, read the statement. "The visit by the Prime Minister of Israel is expected to further strengthen our excellent bilateral cooperation in diverse areas, including agriculture, water, trade, education and science and technology," the statement had said. Israel is experiencing a modest increase in COVID-19 infections as an omicron spreads there as in many other countries. Bennett and nearly half of Israel have received three vaccinations, according to the Washington Post. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi [India], March 29 (ANI): The Union Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan on Tuesday met Bahraini Undersecretary for Political Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sheikh Abdullah bin Ahmed Al Khalifa and discussed bilateral relations and welfare of Indian community. "Happy to receive H.E. Dr Sheikh Abdullah bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, Undersecretary for Political Affairs, MoFA, Bahrain. Discussed various aspects of bilateral relations and the welfare of the Indian community. Thanked Bahrain for taking care of the Indian community," tweeted Muraleedharan. Also Read | Dmytro Khilyuk, Ukrainian Journalist, Abducted by Russian Forces: Media Watchdog. He also received Bahrain's Instrument of Ratification of International Solar Alliance (ISA) from Dr Sheikh Abdullah. MOS thanked the Leadership and Government of Bahrain for taking excellent care of the Indian community, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. "Glad to receive an instrument of ratification from Bahrain for joining the International Solar Alliance. 86 countries including Bahrain have signed and ratified the ISA Framework Agreement so far," tweeted Muraleedharan. Also Read | Taliban Prevents Beardless Government Employees Entry to Offices in Afghanistan. India and Bahrain celebrated the Golden Jubilee of the establishment of diplomatic relations in October 2021. Both sides are looking forward to an early visit of His Royal Highness the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Bahrain to India. Dr Sheikh Abdullah arrived in New Delhi on March 27 and is scheduled to depart today. He came to attend the fifth India - Bahrain Foreign Office Consultations (FOC). During the FOC, both delegations discussed all areas of bilateral cooperation and reviewed the progress made since the 3rd High Joint Commission meeting co-chaired by EAM and FM of Bahrain in April 2021 in New Delhi, read the Ministry of Foreign Affairs press release. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi [India], March 29 (ANI): Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday spoke to his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Gantz and wished for the speedy recovery of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett who recently tested positive for COVID-19. Taking to Twitter, the Defence Minister through telephonic conversation shared his condolences on the loss of innocent lives due to terror attacks in Israel. Also Read | Russia-Ukraine War: Russia Would Not Supply Gas to Europe for Free, Says Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. "Had a telephonic conversation with the Defence Minister of Israel, Mr Benjamin Gantz. Shared my condolences on loss of innocent lives due to terror attacks in Israel. Terrorism is a global menace which has no place in today's civilised world," he Tweeted. "Also, I wished for the speedy recovery of Israeli Prime Mr. Naftali Bennett who recently tested positive for Covid," he said in another Tweet. Also Read | Worlds Largest White Diamond Ever, The Rock To Appear at Auction: Top 5 White Diamonds Offered at Christie's. On Monday, Naftali Bennett had tested positive for COVID-19. The visit of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to India has been postponed and will be rescheduled, Muhamed Heib, spokesperson of the Israel Embassy in India said on Tuesday. Israel had earlier announced Bennett's first India visit after assuming office as Prime Minister last year. Bennett was scheduled to visit India during April 3-5, on the occasion of the commemoration of 30 years of diplomatic relations between India and Israel, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had said in an official statement. Bennett had planned to visit India from April 3-5 at the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had said in the official statement. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Israeli counterpart had earlier met on the sidelines of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) in Glasgow in November last year. They also had a telephonic conversation on August 16, 2021. India and Israel elevated their bilateral relationship to a strategic partnership during the visit of Prime Minister Modi to Israel in July 2017. Since then, the two countries have continued to deepen their strategic partnership, with a focus on innovation and research, read the statement. "The visit by the Prime Minister of Israel is expected to further strengthen our excellent bilateral cooperation in diverse areas, including agriculture, water, trade, education and science and technology," the statement had said. Israel is experiencing a modest increase in COVID-19 infections as omicron spreads there as in many other countries. Bennett and nearly half of Israel have received three vaccinations, according to the Washington Post. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Washington [US], March 29 (ANI/Sputnik): US Special Envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking is visiting Gulf states to discuss diplomatic efforts toward a durable and inclusive resolution of the Yemen conflict, the State Department said on Tuesday. "Special Envoy Lenderking will prioritize his engagements in the region on mobilizing additional life-saving humanitarian assistance for Yemen," the statement read. Also Read | Pakistan Authorities See No Evidence of 'Foreign Funded Plot' To Topple Imran Khan Govt Through No-Confidence Motion. Although the US has provided an additional $585 million to Yemen, the country's humanitarian response remains just 30% funded, it added. In addition, the Middle Eastern nation is facing a lack of wheat supplies caused by the crisis in Ukraine. The latter has accounted for over 30% of Yemen's wheat imports, the statement noted. Also Read | Taliban, UN Officials Meet on Humanitarian, Development Assistance for Afghanistan. While in Saudi Arabia, Lenderking will participate in intra-Yemeni dialogue facilitated by the Gulf Cooperation Council. "The United States welcomes opportunities for Yemenis to come together, to represent their diverse experiences and perspectives, and to identify solutions and reforms that can improve the lives of citizens," the statement said. Yemen has been gripped by an internal conflict between the government forces and the Houthi movement. Since 2015, the Saudi-led coalition fighting on the Yemeni government's side has been conducting air, land and sea operations against the rebels. The Houthis often retaliate by firing projectiles and drones toward Saudi territory. (ANI/Sputnik) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Washington [US], March 29 (ANI): US lawmakers are trying to resolve entrepreneur Elon Musk's business ties to China, which they fear may include the Beijing connections to SpaceX, said a recent Wall Street Journal report. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced legislation aimed at rectifying the problem, according to The Hill, telling the Wall Street Journal that "any company operating in China is going to be pressured and exploited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)." Also Read | Dmytro Khilyuk, Ukrainian Journalist, Abducted by Russian Forces: Media Watchdog. Elon Musk comes under criticism early this year for showcasing his new Tesla showroom in the Xinjiang region where China keeps millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps. A major Muslim civil liberties organization in the US had called on Tesla motors CEO Elon Musk to close a recently-opened showroom, saying no American corporation should be doing business in a region that is the focal point of a campaign of genocide targeting a religious and ethnic minority. Also Read | Taliban Prevents Beardless Government Employees Entry to Offices in Afghanistan. The problem is that all Chinese entities are legally obligated to spy for their government, a practice codified in China's National Intelligence Law of 2017, The Hill reported, adding that this may be hard for some Americans to imagine, but it is not insignificant. "No American corporation should be doing business in a region that is the focal point of a campaign of genocide targeting a religious and ethnic minority," said CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. "Elon Musk and Tesla must close this new showroom and cease what amounts to economic support for genocide." According to media reports, Tesla has said it has begun operations in a showroom in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. This has drawn widespread criticism. US lawmakers accuse China of imprisoning as many as 1.8 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and members of other Muslim minority groups in a system of extrajudicial mass internment camps, where they are forced to produce textiles, electronics, food products, shoes, tea, and handicrafts. Beijing, on the other hand, has repeatedly denied all accusations of being engaged in abuses in Xinjiang. Meanwhile, the White House has urged private companies to oppose the human rights abuses and genocide by China in Xinjiang. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) London, Mar 29 (AP) Western officials say Russia is building up troops in eastern Ukraine, but it's too soon to say whether Moscow's claim to be scaling back operations around Kyiv is true. Officials familiar with the intelligence picture said Tuesday that Moscow is reinforcing troops in the Donbas in an attempt to encircle Ukraine's best-trained and best-equipped forces, which are concentrated in the eastern region. Also Read | Pakistan Authorities See No Evidence of 'Foreign Funded Plot' To Topple Imran Khan Govt Through No-Confidence Motion. Moscow has said gaining control of the Donbas is now its main military goal in Ukraine. A Western official speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence said it's clear that Russia's tactics and strategies are changing but it's not yet clear what that prefigures. Also Read | Taliban, UN Officials Meet on Humanitarian, Development Assistance for Afghanistan. The British government also expressed scepticism about Russia's claims to be scaling back and its commitment to ending the war through talks. We will judge Putin and his regime by his actions, not by his words, said Max Blain, spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson. --- Washington: The White House is rejecting as false and disinformation assertions by Russia that the U.S. government is launching cyber operations against Moscow that include the theft of personal data and the spreading of false information about the Russian military. The Russian Foreign Ministry made the assertions in a statement Tuesday. It alleged that the U.S. and other NATO members had trained Ukrainian hackers and blamed what it said was an effort by Ukraine to recruit international hackers. Emily Horne, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, responded by calling the claims false and said the U.S. government has not engaged in the activity described by Russia. She says Moscow's statements to the contrary amount to disinformation. (AP) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Indian Naval Air Squadron 316, the second squadron of P-8I maritime reconnaissance aircraft - which were also deployed during the peak of India- China dispute in Ladakh region in 2020 - was commissioned into the Indian Navy on Tuesday. Life as one of Chinas industrial worker ants did not suit Liu Xu: waking up early in factory accommodation, working for 11 hours operating a machine in the tool-making factory, eating all his meals in the factory canteen and going to bed, only to wake up and do it again. His parents spent most of their lives in deadening jobs his father on construction sites and his mother in factories but 23-year-old Liu Xu lasted just a year in a factory in the southern China city of Dongguan. Half of that was the time his company invested in training him to work the machine before he up and quit. Like Liu, a generation of young Chinese is turning its back on the factory jobs that once fueled Chinas growth and they are helping to transform the economy by doing it. Life in the factory was really boring and repetitive, Liu said. Every day I walked into the factory, I felt like this was all there was to my life. I was going to end up in that factory forever. You felt trapped, just walking between three places your whole life: work, the accommodation and the canteen. I couldnt get used to the working conditions. I had to wear a uniform every day. Advertisement Factory bosses, for their part, disparage Chinese millennials as a lazy, coddled generation, more interested in leisure and material goods than their factory fodder forefathers. The bosses complain it is difficult to find enough new young workers to replace the old even as China moves from being the worlds cheap low-wage factory capital to a post-industrial economy based on high-tech industries and consumer-driven services. With an aging population, the workforce is predicted to shrink rapidly by 100 million every 15 years from 2020 according to National Committee of Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference. In the meantime, factory bosses are caught short in finding adequate employees, as some factories automate more quickly than others. In an automotive components factory in Taishan city, southern China, the hot, muggy air smells of paint. Vice President Li Na walks briskly, her heels tapping on the factory floor like an efficient machine, passing a small glass-walled room where a worker sits on an upturned bucket, spray-painting metal car components on a trundling conveyor belt. He is an older man, staring out over his breathing mask with dull, bored eyes before turning back to the line. Loyal older workers are becoming harder to find, Li says, as the spoiled children of the past one-child policy generation turn their backs on factory jobs. If they complain to their parents that they dont like working in a factory, their parents just tell them to leave the job, says Li, a perky woman in her 30s whose fingers dance incessantly on her smartphone between answering questions. She says that young workers rarely remain long. Bosses complain that spoiled young Chinese are turning their backs on jobs in factories like this, in Hangzhou eastern China photographed last June. (AFP/Getty Images) For generations, low-skilled factory jobs were the lifeblood of Chinas incredible growth. That improved living standards but also saw changing job expectations. As the government fosters high-tech industries to tackle U.S. global dominance, cheap, high-volume manufacturers are caught facing higher wages and labor shortages, struggling to compete with nations like Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Its almost impossible to find someone born after the 1990s to come and learn how to do the work, said Dai Wei Yan, recruiting for a garment manufacturer at a job fair in Dalang, a city 14 miles southwest of Dongguan. Two decades ago, nearly all its staffers were in their 20s. Now almost none are. Younger people are getting better jobs through higher education, or they are learning specific skills like cooking, or starting up their own businesses, he said. His company now sends products to factories in Vietnam and Cambodia for finishing, to cut labor costs. Dongguan is a sprawling manufacturing hub in the heart of the Pearl River Delta that churns out electronics, computer parts, shoes and furniture, exporting $104 billion in products a year. Red LED signs outside box-like factories beam out siren calls to try to attract workers: We are actively hiring and Join us. Older male job-seekers from out of town squat on the sidewalk outside factories with their bags and suitcases. Some ply the streets dragging their wheeled suitcases, looking for the best wages and conditions. At noon, they throng to cheap cafes with low plastic stools for hot soupy noodles. But while most older workers are looking for permanent work, millennial job-seekers acknowledge they are looking for only a few months of work as a stepping stone to something better such as a start-up small business of their own. Some of the factories are like small towns, with workers accommodations strung with row after row of drying laundry. Others are just small family-run affairs but all are struggling to find enough willing laborers. Chinese workers scan listings at a job fair in Tengzhou, eastern China, as factories struggle to find young workers. (STR / AFP/Getty Images) On a street corner in Dongguans industrial zone, a young couple peppers recruiting agent Huang Wen Cheng with questions about conditions in the factories he represents. You have to stand for 12 hours. You cant sit down. You get used to it after the first week, and then you will be fine, he urges them, but they drift away. Workers are getting really picky. They are asking if they have to stand or if they can sit, Huang says. As far as I know, almost all the factories around here you have to stand at the production line, and its really long hours, from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. The term millennials often conjures up the privileged, upwardly mobile university-educated youth of Chinas big cities. But lower-skilled, less-educated young workers are equally important to Chinas shift to an economy geared to domestic consumption and services. Chinese millennials are often surveyed by business consultants and marketers eager to figure out the secrets of the generation driving Chinese consumption: They tend to be entrepreneurial; happiness seekers; and want fulfillment, not just financial stability, in their work. According to business consultancy Brunswick, 97% of Chinese millennials would prefer to work for a company whose values were similar to their own. They live on their smartphones, online shopping, playing video games, browsing social media, ordering e-restaurant deliveries and livestreaming videos. Liu graduated after three years of technical college, and is happy to do low-skilled work as long as he does not have to work in a factory hence his decision to give up his factory job despite six months training to operate precision metal production equipment. He grew up the son of impoverished, rural farmers who left their home village to find work. His father was a construction site laborer, and his mother was a factory worker. The pay was low, but they worked hard and sacrificed everything for him. When he told them he hated his Dongguan factory job, they supported his decision to quit, because no parents want their kids to work in a factory for someone else their whole lives. I felt I was capable of doing something better, he said. Liu sits behind a counter in a courier company, surrounded by stacks of boxes and parcels. The business is piggybacking on Chinas gargantuan, fast-growing online shopping industry. His job, packing and sending parcels, is easy compared with operating a precision metal machine. It pays him $820 a month $74 more than the factory paid. Here, I dont feel so much pressure. The job is really simple, he says. The hours are still long, but he can relax and spend time surfing the internet on his smartphone when its quiet. He sleeps in a room above the shop. If you work in a factory, there are so many tiny rules and regulations you have to obey, he says. This is freedom. Lius shift reflects the growing role that the service sector is playing. The government says that growth in services like e-commerce and finance will flip the nations primary reliance on labor-intensive heavy industry, a tectonic shift already seen in the numbers: Manufacturing accounted for 47% of GDP in 2010 but only 40% in 2017 when services accounted for more than 50%. In the first half of 2018, services contributed 60.5% of Chinas economic growth and accounted for 45% of employment, according to state-owned news agency Xinhua. Liu aims to start his own small business. I want to learn how to do barbecue or how to cook because Im a foodie. Id love to have my own little restaurant. Workers assemble LED lights at a Yushan county factory in central China, the kind of job younger Chinese are increasingly shunning. (Associated Press) Ma Jinhang, 45, resigned his job at a provincial electricity company in Xining city in Qinghai province, central China, drawn by a shoe factory in distant Dongguan advertising jobs at $615 a month. He traveled 36 hours on the slow train, only to find the salary was actually $450. He quit after two months and now hangs disconsolately around outside a low-cost, multistory migrant hostel where small children totter, kittens gambol and a handful of migrant workers chatter. Theyre all liars, Ma says angrily, railing at the shoe factory bosses. I left because the salary was so low too low. It was unbearable. And it was 13 hours a day. The supervisors were always bothering you, Work faster, work faster. The meals were terrible. I felt as if they were raising livestock. Im going back to Xining, he says. Id rather be a street cleaner in my hometown than work in this inhuman environment. Chinas service sector is growing fast, offering new jobs in e-commerce, e-restaurants and the nations gargantuan delivery industry. (STR / AFP/Getty Images) Yang Qiang, 24, zips along on a motor scooter, wearing a yellow helmet, one of an army of deliverymen in a $35-billion e-commerce and food delivery business. He grew up as a farmers son in rural Hunan and arrived in Dongguan after graduating high school, at first working in a shoe factory, pairing and packing shoes for $447 a month. The pay was terrible, he says. It was so repetitive and soul-destroying and boring. If you stayed for a long time in the factory, you might as well be dead. Youd have given up your life for the company. Around him were older workers who did not have the guts to leave, despite the bad working conditions. There was no freedom. As a motorcycle deliveryman, he more than doubled his factory pay, earning $1,194 a month. He is saving to start a business. A job in Chinas $35-billion delivery industry is more attractive to many young unskilled Chinese than the factory jobs their parents did. (Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images) Manufacturing wages in China have increased five-fold since 2005 according to the Deloitte 2016 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index, while wages remain much lower in nations like Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. Lis factory cut staff from 400 workers to 300 through automation last year. Labor costs are high in China these days, Li says. In the future, greater automation is a must if our company is to continue to grow. Well spend more on new machinery. Our workforce will shrink further. Many other companies in the region are also doing the same. Zhou Qiyin, 33, worked his way up to manager in a large precision tools factory, and started his own small factory two years ago. He cannot interest young people in learning how to operate his precision metal machines. There are many families who are not willing to let their kids work in a factory, he said. Kids these days dont want to work too hard because they can have an easy life and go out for meals. But for China, its all part of the plan. Let someone else be the worlds cheap factory. Its 400-million-strong millennial generation, with better pay and more free time to spend money, is driving the transformation of the economy. Because of the economy going up in recent decades, every family is rich enough to give their one child a good life. Now, young kids want to play, Hayes Lou, head of the Taiwan Business Assn. of Dongguan, says of millennials. They want an easy life, easy money. They dont want to work in a factory. Gaochao Zhang from the Times Beijing Bureau contributed to this story. Talks with China may lead to long-promised deal or all-out trade war robyn.dixon@latimes.com Twitter: @RobynDixon_LAT Will Smith's Oscars win could be asked to be handed back to the Academy, after he slapped Chris Rock on the stage of the awards ceremony when the comedian made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith. A source confirmed to New York Post on Monday that what Smith did was assault and that everyone in Dolby Theaters in Los Angeles was shocked and felt uncomfortable. The source also predicted what Smith will do once the Academy required him to return his Oscars. "I think Will would not want to give his Oscar back, but who knows what will happen now," the insider noted. Following the slapping incident between Smith and Rock, the Academy took to Twitter to comment on the violence that was witnessed on its stage. The Academy does not condone violence of any form. Tonight we are delighted to celebrate our 94th Academy Awards winners, who deserve this moment of recognition from their peers and movie lovers around the world. The Academy (@TheAcademy) March 28, 2022 "The Academy does not condone violence of any form," the Academy said. It also congratulated the winners whom they call are deserving of recognition from their peers and movie lovers around the globe. READ NEXT: Oscars 2022: This Could Be the Reason Why Will Smith Was Pissed at Chris Rock Oscars 2022 Organizers Condemn Will Smith's Action On Monday, the organizers of the prestigious award ceremony issued a statement condemning Smith's action on Sunday, according to CNN. The Academy also said that it started to formally review the incident and will explore actions based on its Bylaws and Standards of Conduct and California law. A source also revealed to CNN on Monday that they considered doing preemptive measures following Smith's violent reaction to Rock's joke. The insider noted the Academy considered removing Smith from the broadcast last night after what he did. However, the decision-makers of the Academy were seated in different places in the theater, which is why they were not able to agree on what to do. It is known that the Academy has strict guidelines when it comes to its code of conduct. New York Post noted that the Oscars' code of conduct was released in 2017 in light of the sexual misconduct scandal that hit the industry. During that time, AMPAS CEO Dawn Hutson said in a statement that membership in the Academy is a privilege and only offered to a select few within the community of global filmmakers. Hutson also highlighted in the statement that members of the Academy must behave ethically and uphold the organization's values for respect for human dignity, inclusion, and a supportive environment that fosters creativity. Artists, Filmmakers, React to Will Smith's Action in Oscars 2022 Several celebrities and film entities reacted after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock while presenting an accolade at the event on Sunday. In a since-deleted tweet, "Knocked Up" director Judd Apatow said that Smith could have killed Rock, and what he did was out of control rage and violence, per the Post. Let me tell you something, its a very bad practice to walk up on stage and physically assault a Comedian. Now we all have to worry about who wants to be the next Will Smith in comedy clubs and theaters. Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) March 28, 2022 Comedian Kathy Griffin also condemned Smith's action, claiming that they now have to worry about who will be the next Will Smith in comedy clubs and theaters. Meanwhile, Director Rob Reiner said that Smith owes Rock an apology claiming that there is no excuse for what he did and that he is lucky because Rock did not file charges against him, per Evening Standard. Meanwhile, Los Angeles Police Department said that there was no police report filed in connection to Chris Rock and Will Smith's incident at the Oscars 2022. However, the department noted that they will be available to complete an investigative report once the involved party files a police report. READ NEXT: Oscars 2022 Highlights: Megan Thee Stallion Wows the Crowd Over Surprise Appearance on Stage Performing 'We Don't Talk About Bruno' With Encanto Cast This article is owned by Latin Post. Written By: Joshua Summers WATCH: Jeremy Piven DEFENDS Chris Rock After Will Smith Oscar Moment - From extratv One Mexico shooting has occurred in a cockfighting pit in Michoacan state, with authorities saying that at least 20 people have been killed and several others wounded. Authorities described the Mexico shooting incident as one of the deadliest attacks in recent years, according to an Aljazeera report. The details of the motive behind the attack were not immediately released. Local media reports noted that gunmen stormed a cockfighting pit and shot at the attendees. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said that it was a massacre of one group by another, expressing his regret at the deaths. Lopez Obrador blamed criminal gangs for the shooting, adding that a team was dispatched to investigate the Mexico shooting incident. Violent attacks on gatherings of rivals have become increasingly usual. Gunmen in various areas of Mexico have attacked funerals and wakes, as well as bars and clubs in attempt to take out as many of their rivals at one time, according to a BBC News report. Forensic experts noted that all the victims in Las Tinajas were 17 men and three women. READ NEXT: El Chapo Case: Wives of Chicago Twins Who Helped Convict the Sinaloa Cartel Boss Used Drug Money on Lavish Trips, J.Lo Show Michoacan State Violence Michoacan has taken the brunt of the drug war when then President Felipe Calderon's fight against drugs and traffickers started in December 2006, according to a Reuters report. Calderon sent in some 5,000 troops into the state, focusing on Apatzingan. Two years after, the military arrested a suspected La Familia cartel boss Alberto Espinoza Barron. In May 2009, 27 public officials in Michoacan, including 10 mayors, are arrested and accused of having connections with the drug trafficking industry. It was the biggest coordinated crackdown on elected officials during Calderon's drug war. However, judges threw out the charges in 2010. Activists from Michoacan clamored for the government to fight all drug cartels equally and return land to an estimated 35,000 people displaced by fighting. Hipolito Mora, a founder and former leader of the 2013-2014 vigilante self-defense movement, noted that the place is worse than ever in terms of safety, according to an ABC News report. Mora said that a group of activists met with senior government officials and told them that "they have to fight all the cartels, not just one." In addition, the group demanded the authorities take into account the advice and opinions of Michoacan residents in creating a new strategy. Rev. Gregorio Lopez said that drug cartels now essentially control parts of the state. Lopez is a priest once known for wearing a flak vest while celebrating mass, according to an ABC News report. Lopez said that at least 35,000 people have been forced to flee their homes and farms in recent years, adding that the government should return their land and reimburse their losses. The priest noted that warring drug cartels extort money from almost all merchandise passing through Michoacan. Michoacan's armed civilian "self-defense" vigilante movement lasted from 2013 to 2014. However, many vigilante forces were later infiltrated by the cartels. READ MORE: El Chapo's Wife Emma Coronel Could Dismantle Sinaloa Cartel by Cutting Deal With U.S.: Report This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Mary Webber WATCH: Cartel violence leaves a trail of ghost towns in Mexico - from Al Jazeera English Peru President Pedro Castillo on Monday faced the members of the country's Congress, ahead of the impeachment votes that can cost him his post. According to France 24, Castillo was not present at the debate, but he was represented by his lawyer. However, he still appeared before and expressed his thoughts among the members of the Peruvian Congress before the debate took place, Bloomberg noted. "I am subject to democratic due process... (and) I will always squarely face the nation," Castillo said at the opening of his hearing. Castillo added that he hoped the issue about his impeachment will be closed today. "We have been democratically elected and in that regard, we are not going to disappoint," Peru's president said earlier on Monday. Al Jazeera noted that lawmakers would need at least 87 votes out of the 130-seat lower house for Pedro Castillo's ouster. However, Norma Yarrow from the Advance Country party, a group that sponsored Castillo's impeachment, said that they currently do not have the votes they need to oust the current Peruvian president, claiming that they only have 76. The voting for Castillo's impeachment is slated to happen after midnight on Monday, per Al Jazeera. READ NEXT: El Salvador Declares State of Emergency After Gangs Killed 62 in Just 24 Hours Peru President Pedro Castillo Defends Himself Ahead of Impeachment Votes Peruvian President Pedro Castillo also defended himself when he spoke before the lawmakers ahead of the debate. Al Jazeera noted that Castillo argued that the motion to impeach him as the president of Peru was baseless. He also added that the accusation slammed against him was only speculation, and he also blamed the biased media for the issue. "Everybody knows that it doesn't contain one element to sustain it," he said of the motion," Castillo pointed out, adding that the allegations against him do not have any "corroboration." The impeachment that Castillo faces came after he was caught in corruption allegations earlier in March. According to France 24, the opposition accuses Castillo, a former rural teacher, of moral incapacity and tolerating alleged corruption in his circle. Castillo denied the said allegation slammed against him and blamed them on the economic groups seeking a "coup" against his administration. Castillo also faced a similar impeachment attempt in December in which he was triumphant against the opposition. Peru: Protests Erupt Ahead of Pedro Castillo's Impeachment Vote The Impeachment debate came a day after thousands of people filled the streets of Lima calling for Castillo to be ousted from his position. Al Jazeera mentioned that protesters held signs with the statements "national embarrassment" and "power based on lies is illegitimate." "People can't take it anymore. We are fed up, the people demand justice and all the corrupt people to be gone," one protester said. On Monday, about 500 protesters also gathered outside the hearing. The said protesters also support Castillo's removal from his post. According to reports, impeachment proceedings are common in Peru due to its constitution that allows one to be brought against a president based on a subjective issue rather than legal wrongdoing. Al Jazeera highlighted that every president in Peru in the last 36 years was caught in corruption allegations, with some of them left imprisoned. READ NEXT: Is Will Smith's Oscars 2022 Best Actor Award Going to Be Taken Back? It's Possible This article is owned by Latin Post. Written By: Joshua Summers WATCH: Peru Congress to Hold Impeachment Trial for President - From Al Jazeera English The Texas wildfire continues to burn with one particular fire named Das Goat Fire, prompting Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of disaster. Abbott said that the wildfires pose an imminent threat of widespread or severe damage, according to an ABC News report. The Republican governor said that 19 state agencies and over 200 firefighters were currently responding to the disaster. Abbott said that the state of Texas continues to collaborate with local officials on the ground and respond to fire activity to keep Texans safe. Many areas throughout Texas will remain under a high extreme elevated fire risk due to the high winds, dry heat, and drought conditions. There is a shelter currently at Loma Alta Middle School with more shelters soon to be announced for those who may have been displaced or evacuated due to the fire. READ NEXT: Texas Wildfire Destroys 50 Homes, Prompting Evacuation as Severe Fire Continues Texas Wildfire State and local fire officials are currently working on 12 active wildfires in Texas as the possibility of more wildfires this week may hinder suppression efforts. The Texas Wildfire Incident Response System showed a dozen active fires in the state ranging from the Texarkana area and into the Rio Grande Valley, according to an NBC DFW News report. The largest active fire is the Eastland Complex fire, which started burning more than a week ago. The fire has consumed more than 54,000 acres since that time. It is currently 90 percent contained. The Crittenburg Complex fire near Fort Hood is the next largest fire on the list, with the wildfire burning more than 33,000 acres in Coryell County. It is contained 45 percent as of 3 p.m. on Monday. Rich Gray, Texas A&M Forest Service Chief Regional Fire Coordinator, said that state, local, and federal firefighters have been extremely busy attending to the increased wildfire activity. Fire resources are mobilized to areas of concern for quick response to any requests for assistance, according to Gray. The National Weather Service said smoke from the Crittenburg Complex fire was pushing north into DFW. The forest service cautioned that nine out of 10 wildfires in Texas are human-caused, urging the public to avoid outdoor activities that cause a spark while warm, dry, and windy conditions are observed. Texas Wildfire Evacuation Orders The town of Flat, Texas was subjected to evacuation orders earlier. Kiley Moran, Wildland Urban Interface Coordinator with the Texas A&M Forest Service, said that additional evacuation orders were not expected, according to a Fox News report. NASA said last week that the fires are being fueled by "favorable weather conditions" to spur more fires. Last week, evacuation orders were released in parts of Hood, Erath, and Eastland counties. Officials earlier said that two firefighters have been injured since Sunday in Hood County. Hood County Sheriff's Department deputies knocked on every house to advise residents to leave Lipan. One resident, Arnold Thedford, said that the sheriff just come up and said that there was a fire on the way. Thedford said that he has got no place else to go, with his sister being up in Oklahoma. READ MORE: Caldor Fire Moves Closer to Lake Tahoe as Blaze Continues to Spread in Northern Part of California This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Mary Webber WATCH: South Texas wildfire destroys 3 homes, Abbott declares disaster - from KXAN January 6 House Panel investigating the Capitol riot on Monday voted to hold former aides of ex-President Donald Trump in Contempt of Congress. The said former aides were identified as Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino, according to New York Post. The House Select Committee voted 9-0 on Monday to issue sanctions on the two former Trump aides after they refused to comply with the subpoenas issued against them. The Post noted that the committee now needs approval from the full House of Representatives before the Justice Department could consider criminal charges against the duo. According to The Daily Mail, Navarro's subpoena was announced on February 9. The subpoena revealed that Navarro worked with Steve Bannon to develop and implement a plan to delay the certification of Congress and change the results of the 2020 presidential elections. Meanwhile, the committee's letter to Scavino accused him of being with former President Trump when he was deliberating on how to pressure members of Congress into objecting to Biden's election. The letter also mentioned that Scavino has materials relevant to his videotaping and tweeting messages on January 6. "In short, these two men played a key role in the ex-president's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election," House committee Chairman Bennie Thompson said during the session. Thompson added that Scavino strung the committee for months before he made clear that he is above the law. The committee chairman also noted that Navarro also stonewalled the panel, even though he was able to share relevant details on television, podcasts, and his book. According to Representative Jamie Raskin, Navarro indicated in his book "In Trump Time: My Journal on America's Plague Year," how he supported and tried to stop former Vice President Mike Pence from certifying the elections, per the Post. READ NEXT: U.S. Capitol Riots Trial: Rioter Guy Reffitt Guilty, Proud Boys Leader Enrique Tarrio Arrested for Conspiracy in Attack Ex-Donald Trump Aide Claims Executive Privilege 'Tied His Hands' From Participating in the January 6 Probe Earlier in March, Navaro cited executive privilege as the reason why he was not able to participate in the investigation of the House Panel committee on the January 6 riot, per The Daily Mail. "My hands are tied in this matter as the Executive Privilege asserted by President Trump is not my privilege to waive," Navarro pointed out. The former aide then pointed out that the committee should talk to his attorneys before they "bully" and coerce him to cooperate in the bipartisan effort. "If the president waives privilege, I will appear." Navarro underscored. To date, New York Post mentioned that a hundred have already testified before the House panel, including more than a dozen members of Donald trump's staff. Other Donald Trump Aides Who Ignored January 6 House Panel's Subpoena According to the Post, Former White House strategist Steve Bannon and former chief of staff Mark Meadows have also been subject to a House contempt vote, when they ignored the subpoenas issued against them by the panel. In December, the House Select Committee issued a letter to Mark Meadows, saying that they were left with no choice but to advance contempt proceedings against the former official. It can be recalled that Meadow's also used the executive privilege as a reason to not answer the question from the House Select Committee. READ NEXT: Peru: President Pedro Castillo Faces Impeachment Debate Ahead of Votes That Could Oust Him From Office This article is owned by Latin Post. Written By: Joshua Summers WATCH: Jan. 6 Panel Votes To Recommend Contempt Charges For Trump Aides Scavino, Navarro - From MSNBC Do you remember when Republican Sen. Ted Cruz made the headlines after he flew to Cancun, Mexico, with his wife Heidi Cruz, while his home state, Texas, was hit by a huge winter storm that caused freezing temperatures and days-long power outages? At the time, Cruz and his wife were also with their two daughters at Houston International Airport, boarding a flight to a Mexican resort destination, according to Business Insider. Heidi is no stranger to the scrutiny and sacrifices of being a politician's spouse in the public eye. Cruz has been a staunch critic of President Joe Biden. Heidi has talked about her marriage and career during a 2018 interview with The Atlantic. READ NEXT: Salma Hayek Husband: Who Is Francois-Henri Pinault and How Much Is His Net Worth? Ted Cruz's Wife: Heidi Cruz Ted Cruz and Heidi Cruz met while working on George W. Bush's presidential campaign when Heidi was on break from Harvard Business School. In January 2001, they had their first date at a bar in Austin. Heidi said that Cruz asked her a lot of questions about her background, goals in life, 10-year plan, and 20-year plan. They got married that May and the Republican senator's wife said Cruz insisted they play the children's song, "A Whole New World," from the Disney movie "Aladdin" at the end of their wedding ceremony. Heidi objected and wanted to hire a professional violinist instead, but the senator's idea still prevailed. Heidi was born in San Luis Obispo, California in 1972 to two Seventh-day Adventist dentists who worked as missionaries in Kenya, Nigeria, and throughout Asia. She graduated from a liberal arts college, decided to attend Harvard Business School, and worked as a U.S. trade deputy in the White House. Heidi also worked as a director of the Treasury's Latin American desk, wherein she taught herself Spanish, according to the Independent. Heidi has been a managing director at Goldman Sachs since 2012. Reporter Elaina Plott reported earlier that Cruz's wife was working "70-hour weeks not only because she wants to, but also because she has to," Quartz reported. In 2018, Heidi Cruz said her husband's career as a politician, with a public servant's salary, posed financial constraints on their family's lifestyle. Ted Cruz and Heidi Cruz's Earnings Heidi Cruz likely earns over $300,000 a year as a managing director at Goldman Sachs. The earnings do not include an additional bonus yet. On the other hand, Ted Cruz earns an annual salary of $174,000 for his work as a public servant, placing him in the top three percent of American earners. Cruz also had other means of income, which include royalties from his book "A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America." It came to a minimum of $318,750 in royalty payments in 2015. He was then reported making between $100,001 and $1 million in royalties for the book that year. The couple has assets ranging between $2 million and $5 million from stocks, mutual funds, and his law firm retirement plan. According to Roll Call, Ted Cruz's personal wealth made him the 332nd wealthiest of 530 Congress members. It's unclear whether this includes his wife's earnings. READ MORE: 4 Texas Grid Board Members to Resign After Winter Storm Leaves Millions Without Electricity This article is owned by Latin Post Written by: Mary Webber WATCH: Ted Cruz's Wife Heidi Cruz: 'Ted and I Are Doing This as a Partnership' - From ABC News A Florida toddler was found dead inside a septic tank on Monday, a day after he was reported missing by his family. According to People, the child, identified as one-year-old Jose Lara, went missing while playing in the family's backyard in Crescent City at Putnam County on Sunday afternoon. In a press conference on Monday night, Putnam County Sheriff Gator DeLoach confirmed that the toddler's body was found in the septic area of the property. Wesh 2 reported that authorities looked around an area covered in some brush near where the clean-out for the septic tank was located. Police noted that the Lara was not quickly found because dirt, weeds, and plywood covered the opening to the septic tank. "It's not an uncommon practice in a situation like this when there's a child missing to search the septic tank as well," DeLoach said. The sheriff noted that one of their leadership team members suggested draining the septic tank, and "it was unfortunately when we discovered the child's body." Police said the septic tank was covered with a piece of plywood that was already rotten. DeLoach noted that the Florida toddler may have accidentally stepped on the plywood, prompting him to fall on the septic tank where he met his demise. The sheriff said the investigation is still ongoing. However, he noted that nothing appeared suspicious or indicated foul play in connection to Lara's death. READ NEXT: Donald Trump Ex-Aides Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino Held in Contempt of Congress by January 6 House Panel Florida Toddler Went Missing Before He Died in the Septic Tank Putnam County Sheriff's Office chief deputy, Col. Joseph Wells, said the Florida toddler was playing with his sister in the family's backyard at about 1:15 p.m., Crime Online reported. Authorities said their mother took the girl inside to wash her up, and when she returned, the 18-month-old boy was gone. Reports said the sheriff's deputies have sent out bloodhound tracking teams, search crews, and aviation units to look for Jose Lara. Police also deployed thermal cameras to detect heat as the temperature drops in the area. Crime Online reported that the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, an aerial crew from Volusia County, and a K-9 unit from St Johns County assisted the Putnam County police in searching for the toddler. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) has canceled the missing child alert after the Florida toddler was found dead. The FDLE also expressed sympathy to the bereaved family. "Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and the Putnam County community," the FDLE noted. This is a cancellation to the Florida Missing Child Alert. With sadness, the child has been found deceased. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and the Putnam County community. If you would like further info, please call the Putnam County Sheriff's Office, 386-329-0801. https://t.co/199YnXDof3 FDLE (@fdlepio) March 28, 2022 Florida Native Claims Adults Also Fall in Septic Tanks A Florida native claimed that the Florida toddler was not the only one who fell in a septic tank. "We've had adults fall in, people riding lawn mowers fall in. Different things like that," Mike Jones told First Coast News. Jones, the owner of Duck Duck Rooter offering septic tank inspections, said plywood and other materials used to temporarily cover the tanks become soft and brittle over time. He then urged the Florida community to be familiar with their septic tank system, adding that the cost of fixing things is cheaper than losing a life. READ MORE: Peru: President Pedro Castillo Faces Impeachment Debate Ahead of Votes That Could Oust Him From Office This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Joshua Summers WATCH: Florida 1-Year-Old Found Dead, Appears to Have Fallen Into Septic Tank - From 10 Tampa Bay At least 35 asylum seekers from Russia have been secretly allowed to cross into the U.S. from Mexico following their country's invasion of Ukraine. According to Daily Mail, the Russians were escorted to the border in the predawn hours of March 20 following a deal between Mexican and U.S. authorities. They reportedly crossed at a section of the border where they would not be seen. Mexican immigration officers handed the Russians directly over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. The deal was reportedly put together with the help of officials at the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana and Mexican officials at different levels of government after an encampment of displaced Russians started increasing on the streets near the Tijuana-San Diego border crossing. The group, which included children and a pregnant woman, slept in a makeshift encampment on the street of Tijuana for a week. The site was in full view of a passageway reserved for people who regularly cross the border from Mexico into San Diego on foot every day. READ NEXT: Brent Renaud, U.S. Journalist and Filmmaker, Killed by Russian Forces in Ukraine Russia's Refugees in Mexico Admitted to the U.S. Two days before they were allowed to cross into the U.S., the Russians in Mexico had received an offer from a Russian-speaking man who introduced himself as an American diplomat. According to Vice News, the diplomat told Russia's refugees that they would be taken across the border only if they broke up their growing encampment on the pedestrian crossing. The secret agreement reportedly bypassed Title 42, which allows U.S. officials to send back migrants to Mexico without having a chance to seek asylum or other protections in the U.S. The Title 42 policy has left tens of thousands of migrants stranded on the Mexican side of the border. Some of Russia's asylum seekers were active in opposition to the war in Ukraine and fled the political persecution under Russia's President Vladimir Putin. The group waited for days to enter the U.S. to start their proceedings for asylum. One of the asylum seekers, Irina, was arrested for protesting the war and spent several days at the encampment. Irina, a math teacher from Moscow, told VICE World News that she was grateful for the opportunity to seek asylum in the U.S. However, she was also surprised by the arbitrary and complex nature of the process she and the group experienced. She said it was "completely unpredictable" and was like "Russian roulette." She added that after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, they do not know if they will be detained and for how long. Refugees From Russia and Ukraine Seek Asylum in the U.S. According to New York Post, more than 30,000 Russians arrived in Mexico during the first two months of the year. The outlet reported that it was nearly 2.5 times the full-year average from 2017 to 2021. According to Wall Street Journal, more than 10,000 Ukrainians visited Mexico as tourists over the same period compared to a full-year average of more than 4,000. Ukrainians do not need a visa to directly fly to Mexico, making it a common stopover point while traveling to the U.S. As Russia planned to invade Ukraine, reports said thousands of citizens of both Russia and Ukraine left Eastern Europe for Mexico with the ultimate goal of claiming asylum in the U.S. The administration of President Joe Biden said earlier that it is planning to welcome up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, with those who already have family in America receiving priority for resettlement. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has already issued guidance reminding authorities that Ukrainian nationals "and everyone else" making so-called "credible fear" claims at the U.S.-Mexico border are exempt from Title 42. Last week, there were reports that Ukrainian migrants were being dealt with haphazardly at the border, with some officials using the Title 42 health protocol to turn asylum-seekers away. READ MORE: Russia-Ukraine Crisis: WHO Advises Ukraine to Destroy Health Lab Pathogens to Curb Spread of Disease This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Mary Webber WATCH: Anti-War Russians Gather At U.S.-Mexico Border Seeking Asylum - From NBC News One of the lawyers of Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera said they will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case. In an interview with Milenio, Mariel Colon Miro, one of the lawyers who handled the cases of El Chapo and his wife Emma Coronel Aispuro, said they have until next month to file their petition for review in the Supreme Court. After reviewing his case, Colon Miro said they hoped that the high court would overturn the Mexican drug kingpin's conviction. Last January, a federal appeals court in New York has upheld the life sentence of El Chapo after his request for a new trial was dismissed. In their decision, the three judges rejected some of El Chapo's arguments, including jury bias, "deplorable" jail conditions, and the U.S. government selectively targeting him for prosecution. However, Colon Miro noted that the high court should review the case as they believed that El Chapo was really treated unfairly. "They don't take him out into the open air. They don't take him out for a single day. We have a lot of problems because they don't treat him medically if he gets sick," Colon Miro told Milenio. "Requests were ignored. He can't have two 15-minute calls a month... The government claims that they need to have him under those restrictions because he can pass some message," the Puerto Rican lawyer added. Colon Miro further noted that some basic rights, like access to water and toothache treatment, were also violated inside the prison. READ NEXT: Leader of El Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel, 2 Narco Women, Arrested in Mexico's Tourist Paradise of Quintana Roo Sinaloa Cartel Boss 'El Chapo' Appeals 2019 Conviction El Chapo, 64, is serving a life sentence in prison after being found guilty in 2019 of all 10 federal charges he faced. He was accused of illegally importing millions of kilos of cocaine from Mexico to the U.S., along with significant quantities of heroin and marijuana. According to prosecutors, El Chapo allegedly used murder, torture, kidnapping, bribing officials, and "other illegal methods to control territory throughout Mexico and to subdue opposition." El Chapo is currently being held in Colorado's Supermax, the most secure federal prison in the U.S. During oral arguments last October, El Chapo's defense team argued that the conviction of the Sinaloa Cartel boss should be sent back to lower courts for further evaluation or overturned completely for two reasons. First was the conditions and treatment that El Chapo experienced inside the prison. And second was a news report that during deliberations, jurors were exposed to salacious claims barred from the trial. It included a claim that El Chapo had drugged and sexually abused teenage girls he referred to as "vitamins" that gave him energy, which the Sinaloa cartel leader's lawyer, Marc Fernich, has denied. El Chapo's lawyer noted that the Vice News article also mentioned an unnamed juror who said at least five fellow jurors followed media coverage of the trial and lied about it to presiding judge U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan. Fernich said the court should order a new trial or call for a hearing on the alleged jury misconduct. He asked the judges to resist any "punitive impulse" toward a person who was cast as a "public enemy," like gangster Al Capone. As they face the Supreme Court judges soon, Colon Miro noted that the "last card will be played" so El Chapo would avoid spending the rest of his life in prison. Sinaloa Cartel Boss 'El Chapo' Is Very Respectful, Lawyer Says Despite "suffering" inside the prison, Mariel Colon Miro said El Chapo remains very strong. The lawyer noted that the Sinaloa cartel boss now dedicates himself to reading a lot and is optimistic about his last chance to improve the conditions of the remaining years of his life. According to Colon Miro, El Chapo was "very nice and very respectful." "We talk for hours because we both love to talk, so imagine... I'm still with him as a lawyer, so I think he likes me," the lawyer noted. Colon Miro said even El Chapo's wife became her friend. "Mrs. Coronel is not only a client. I consider her a friend. We never imagined that she would be in that situation. And since we are almost the same age, obviously we talk and share many common ideas and spend a lot of time together," the lawyer added. Emma Coronel Aispuro was sentenced to three years in prison on November 30 for helping her husband run his multibillion-dollar drug empire. According to her lawyers, El Chapo's wife could get out of prison four months earlier or in May 2023, as she is allowed by law to serve at least 85 percent of her sentence and has the option to serve the remaining 10 percent of her sentence at home or a place that will help her rejoin society. They added that Coronel Aispuro would also be credited for the months she had already served. The Sinaloa cartel is considered to be one of the most powerful drug-trafficking syndicates in the world. The Mexican drug cartel has been known for carrying out assassinations, murders, and torture to protect its turf. The group was founded in the late 1980s and headed by El Chapo. The Mexican drug kingpin was arrested and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison in 1993. El Chapo escaped from prison in 2001 and was apprehended again in 2014 in Sinaloa, Mexico. The Sinaloa cartel boss again escaped from prison through a tunnel the following year. In January 2016, Mexican officials announced that El Chapo has been captured again. He was extradited to the U.S. the next year. El Chapo was sentenced to spend the rest of his days in the ADX Florence "supermax" prison after being sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019. READ MORE: El Chapo Son's Turf Is Being Invaded by El Mayo's Hitmen as They Battle for Control of Sinaloa Cartel This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Adrianna Grant Covid-19 has returned with a vengeance in Laois with the latest figures confirming that there have been more than 1,800 cases of the virus in the county in the past two weeks. The latest official 14 day figures show that there have been 1,807 confirmed cases of the virus in the county up to and including Sunday, March 27. The rate of Covid-19 per 100,000 people in Laois in the past fortnight has surged to 2,133.50 per 100k. There were 96 cases of Covid-19 reported in Laois on Sunday, March 27. The figures put Laois as having the seventh highest infection rate in Ireland. Offaly has the second highest rate behind Sligo. These latest infection rates for Laois and other counties are only based on PCR test results and not antigen test figures. The sharp and rapid rise in cases is confirmed when the March 27 figures are compared with the two weeks to March 22 when there were 1,545 confirmed cases. This gave a rate of Covid-19 per 100,000 people in Laois over the past 14 days of 1,824.1. This is more than double the rate of infection recorded on March 9 when it was 871.3 per 100 k. The rate of infection per population peaked during the Omicron phase at a massive 4,700 per 100k on January 31. It had been falling since until March 9 when cases began to rise again rapidly. The total official number of cases in Laois is 23,752. The official figures show that the total number of Covid-19 confirmed cases in Laois have increased by 3,000 since the start of March. There were just over 21,800 officially recorded cases at the start of the month. The figures for each Local Electoral Area in Laois only run to March 14. In the first two weeks in March there were 403 positive PCR tests in the Portlaoise area with 432 confirmed in the Portarington Graigucullen Municipal District. The Borris-in-Ossory Mountmellick District returned 284 cases. Laois could be getting more high rise apartments but less new rural houses and housing estates, with the intervention of national planners in drawing up the new five year Laois County Development Plan. Laois councillors had changed their plan, going against national policies on housing density and town planning. They had set a limit of three storeys on new apartment blocks on greenfield sites, while many sites around Portlaoise and the county had been zoned for housing by them. Just before the deadline, the Office of the Planning Regulator has informed Laois County Council that it intends to request a Ministerial Direction to reverse many of the changes to the 2021 - 2027 county plan. They said that housing lands zoned were in excess for what is needed in Laois. They intent to revert three sites in Portlaoise from R2 New Residential Development, back to Not Zoned, Strategic Reserve and Transport and Utility, and one in Stradbally to Not Zoned. A two week public consulation on their requested changes ends on April 4, after which CEO John Mulholland will send the OPR his report including public and councillor views. The OPR will then made a recommendation to Minister for Housing Daragh O'Brien on whether to forcibly change back the plan. Director of Service for housing and senior planner is Angela McEvoy. "It is your plan to make but we have to ensure it is consistent with national policy. The only thing is there will be new population statistics for Laois later this year from the Census so it could all change," she said. Laois councillors were disappointed to have their decisions possibly reversed. "It looks like all the ones we wanted didn't go in. It's not the councillors' plan. If it is we should be given professional advice like the executive gets. It's scuppered. We're elected to do a job and then our hands are tied behind our backs," Cllr Willie Aird said. Cllr Caroline Dwane Stanley welcomed just one reversal sought, a piece of land zoned for housing at Rathevan by councillors not from Portlaoise. The zoning is unwanted by residents and by the council. "It's not that we don't want housing, we want the infrastructure in place. "I know areas in Dublin with massive high rise flats and there are so many issues around them. We are dealing with people in two storeys and bungalows who are opposed to high rises looking in on them. You might get away with three or four of them but if we take our foot off the pedal we are looking at serious high rise developments. Who'll live in them? No-one with children will want to live in them," she said. Cllr Aisling Moran said it is unfair. "I don't think they have a right. We are not going to adhere to all the rules they're going to send down. It should be down to us," she said. Cllr James Kelly urged a strong CEO's report. "We voted to ensure we meet our target for Housing for All. Less supply, greater demand, higher prices. I hope the chief executive makes a very strong report, it's very worrying for the supply to Portlaoise and the county," he said. Last January, Laois councillors voted against the OPR's recommendation when drafting up their changes. They also went against Laois County Council CEO John Mulholland's advice and against national planning guidelines. Over 300 generous Laois homeowners have registered to take in Ukrainian refugees. So far 338 people and families in the county have pledged through the Red Cross to give emergency accommodation to the war displaced women and children. Laois County Council has also sent a list of accommodation that may be suitable to the Government. These include hotel beds, empty banks and vacant properties around the county. "There is potential for 150 people on the list of properties we identified. There are 30,000 people expected to arrive to Ireland by the end of April. A lot of families are arriving with only the clothes on their back. It is a dire situation. We are doing what we can for them," Director of Services for housing Angela McEvoy said at the March council meeting. The council has formed a temporary Ukraine Crisis Response Forum to co-ordinate Laois efforts. It includes Laois Partnership, community Gardai, the HSE and a local charity group. She confirmed that these families are not being added to the council's housing waiting list which has some 1,700 names. "We already have a full housing programme. We don't want there to be a displacement effect," she said. Efforts will be made to provide the families with jobs, medical care, dental care, counselling, clothes and food. Council staff worked over the St Patrick's Bank Holidays and on weekends to help people arriving, an effort that was praised by councillors. "I thank the council for their work behind the scenes. It is a dreadful situation these people find themselves in, fleeing their country because of war. Hopefully we will see a cease fire, I have no doubt they will want to return and rebuild their country," said Cllr Caroline Dwane Stanley. Two councillors raised motions about the crisis at the meeting. Cllr Thomasina Connell had asked for the forum to be reestablished and welcomes it. "I suggest that the chamber of commerce might also be a support. These are hugely qualified people able to work immediately," she said. Cllr Padraig Fleming's motion asked that vacant banks in Laois be used as accommodation. "We have seen Bank of Ireland close three branches in Laois, in Mountrath, Rathdowney and Durrow. Ulster Bank are withdrawing from Ireland in the months ahead. I call to them to make these buildings immediately available. It is the least they can do since they made their profits here. Slide show 4 photos "This is an illegal and immoral war. Thousands are arriving in Ireland, mainly women and children. A third of the children are at schoolgoing age. None of us have seen a war in Europe of this scale, it's horrific. I thanks all who donated, people in Laois have thrown open their doors to Ukraine, the least we can do is provide emergency accommodation without delay," he said. The Director Ms McEvoy confirmed that those buildings are on their list sent to the department for possible use. The council Cathaoirleach is Conor Bergin. "We had our first meeting and in fairness all the agencies are involved and very well prepared, there is an eagerness in people to help. I am sure the council won't be found wanting," he said. For answers on Ukraine people coming to Ireland read the Government's factsheet here. Weeks before inauguration of Pradhan Mantri Sangrahalaya, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the government has taken measures to recognise the contribution of all the former Prime Ministers. Speaking at the BJP parliamentary party meeting here, Modi talked about the Pradhan Mantri Sangrahalaya (PM Museum), which is likely to be inaugurated on April 14. It is learnt that the Prime Minister said that his government has ensured to recognise the contribution of all the former Prime Ministers. "The Prime Minister told us that the BJP government has ensured that the contribution of all the former Prime Ministers must be recognised. He (Prime Minister Modi) also said that it is only the NDA government that has taken necessary steps to recognise the contribution of former Prime Ministers," a BJP MP said. The PM Museum will showcase life and times of all 14 former Prime Ministers of the country so far. Sources said that equal space and importance has been ensured for all the former Prime Ministers as per the duration of their tenures. "The Prime Minister's Office wants this place to celebrate the country's history, irrespective of whichever party is in power," sources said. American comedian Kevin Hart has delighted fans in Belfast with an impromptu walkabout in the city centre. The Philadelphia funnyman is in the Northern Ireland capital to film the new Netflix heist comedy Lift. He has also caused excitement during his stay in the region by announcing a last-minute gig at The Limelight in the city tomorrow night (Wednesday March 30) for which tickets appeared to have sold out within hours on Monday. Earlier this month, Hart caused a stir by taking to the floor during a programme of comedians at another venue, Laverys, before putting on an intimate gig at The Limelight. Yesterday morning (Monday March 28) he was spotted outside the Europa Hotel, a venue at one time notorious as the most bombed hotel in Europe. He took the time to chat to several people as he walked to the nearby Crown Bar. The historic pub, which dates to Victorian times and has welcomed royal visitors in the past, is serving as one of the sets for Lift, which will principally be filmed at Belfast Harbour Studios. It is being directed by F Gary Gray, best known for films including Straight Outta Compton, The Italian Job and Men In Black: International. While no release date for Lift has been announced, it is expected to reach cinemas in early 2023. Minister of Education Norma Foley has announced a significant reform of the Leaving Certificate on Tuesday afternoon. The Education Minister declared that all subjects will be reviewed with 60% of marks awarded for the exam and 40% for continuous assessment. The revision will also include two new subjects - 'Drama, Film and Theatre Studies' and 'Climate Action and Sustainable Development' with fifth years able to partake in these new topics in 2024. Under the new system, other changes will include: An updated curriculum from 2024 with a new marking scheme in the optional subjects of Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Business. Students entering 5th year in September 2023 will sit Paper 1 in English and Irish at the end of 5th year. Oral examinations and the Music practical performance will take place during the first week of the Easter break of 6th year as is the case this year. Leaving Certificate Applied (LCA) students will have improved access to Mathematics and Modern Foreign Languages from September 2022, broadening the options for LCA. A new qualification will be introduced at level one and two on the National Qualification framework to provide an appropriate level of assessment to some students with special educational needs, building on the equivalent programme at Junior Cycle level. A revised Transition Year programme will be established, and greater access to Transition Year for all students will be encouraged. Minister Foley said: "Today I am setting out a new plan for Senior Cycle education in Ireland. "This is an ambitious programme of reform. It will enrich students educational experience by increasing their choices to match their interests and enhancing teaching and learning. "It will reduce the pressure on students that comes from final assessments based primarily on examinations. We will move to a model that uses other forms of assessment, over a less concentrated time period, in line with international best practice." She added: "It will enable us to maintain the high standards and quality that we need to continue to achieve in our schools to serve our students well and support them to take the next steps in their career journey, whatever that may be. "Our current system has many strengths. But we know that it can be improved, to better support our students, to reduce pressure while maintaining standards, to keep pace with the changes in practices internationally and to meet the needs and expectations of our students and of our society in preparing our young people for the world ahead." Four senior Russian officials have been asked to leave Ireland because their activities have not been in accordance with international standards of diplomatic behaviour, the Government has confirmed. It follows security advice received on Monday. The Russian ambassador was summoned to a meeting at the Department of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday. Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney said: This afternoon, the Department of Foreign Affairs summoned the Russian ambassador to Iveagh House to advise him that four senior officials have been asked to leave the state. This is because their activities have not been in accordance with international standards of diplomatic behaviour. This action is being taken under Article 9 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The Government continues to believe that diplomatic channels between Ireland and the Russian Federation should remain open. This is in the interests of our citizens as well as to ensure that we can continue to have a diplomatic channel of communication between Ireland and the Russian Federation in the future. This channel of communication has been important in the context of conveying our strong views on the Russian Federations war against Ukraine, which we regard as a serious breach of international law. A HIGH Court action brought by convicted murderer Charlotte Mulhall over her inability to have visits from close family after her transfer to Limerick Prison from Mountjoy woman's prison has been resolved. Mr Justice Anthony Barr was informed by Mulhall's lawyers, this Tuesday, that it was no longer necessary to bring the action as she had received several visits with close family in recent months. She had brought High Court judicial review proceedings against the Irish Prison Service, the Governor of Limerick Prison, the Minister for Justice & Equality, Ireland, and the Attorney General claiming that the transfer, in 2018, had adversely impacted visits from family members. Lawyers representing Ms Mulhall had argued that due to the transfer close family, who are based in Dublin, were unable to visit her. In her action, she had sought a mandatory order from the Court requiring the prison service to transfer her to Dublin so she could receive familial visits when necessary. Represented by Conor Power SC, with Cian Kelly Bl, Ms Mulhall claimed that situation had amounted to a disproportionate interference with her family rights. On Tuesday Mr Power said that since the matter was last before the court the situation has changed. Commencing last October, his client had been facilitated with three visits, after being transferred to neutral venues by the prison authorities. The court also heard that another visit has been arranged for an undisclosed location sometime next month. Mr Power said that the practical reality of the situation was that his client had got what she wanted out of the proceedings and that the action did not need to proceed. Counsel submitted his client should be awarded the legal costs of her action. He argued that it was necessary to bring the proceedings for the visits to be arranged. She had received such visits up until mid-2019 but had originally claimed that those were ended without any apparent formal notification to Ms Mulhall. The visits did not resume until last October, well after the proceedings had been commenced, counsel said. The application for costs was opposed by the State bodies. Anne-Marie Lawlor SC, for the respondents, said Limerick Prison had made its facilities available for those wishing to visit the applicant and that the application for costs was based on several misconceptions. Counsel said that it was not responsible for the inability of close family to visit her in Limerick, which she said was due to external factors beyond either of the party's control. Ms Mulhall had been afforded the same rights as every other prison in Limerick Prison, and her rights which the prison authorities were keenly aware of, had not been breached. The respondents did not accept that the bringing of the proceedings had resulted in the prison services making arrangements for Ms Mulhall to visit close family. Counsel said that the issues raised by Ms Mulhall in the action were very significant for her clients, and they opposed the making of any mandatory order compelling the prison service to transfer Ms Mulhall back to Mountjoy women's prison to facilitate visits. Counsel said the established case law in this area is that the courts should "not attempt to micromanage prisons." Visits to prison had also been curtailed over the last two years due to the covid-19 pandemic, counsel added. Following the conclusion of submissions in relation to the issue of costs Mr Justice Barr in adjourned proceedings, said that he would rule on the costs issue on Wednesday. In her action launched two years ago Ms Mulhall claimed she was transferred to Limerick two days after she was seen by a prison officer sitting on another prison officer while performing a beauty treatment. She had always disputed any allegation that anything inappropriate occurred or that she was in an allegedly compromising position with the female prison officer in question. She also claimed she was never given the opportunity to address the prison authorities over what she claimed occurred. She further claimed that the transfer prohibited close family from visiting her. Last year the High Court ruled that Mulhall was not entitled to leave to challenge the decision to transfer her to Limerick, as her action had been brought out of time. However, the court said she was entitled to bring an action over her visiting arrangements. Known as the 'scissors sisters' Charlotte, and her sister Linda Mulhall, were convicted in 2006 of the killing of their mother's boyfriend Farah Swaleh Noor, in March 2005. The dismembered body of Noor, who had a history of being extremely violent towards women, was found dumped in the Royal Canal, near Croke Park, some days afterwards. Following a high-profile trial at the Central Criminal Court Charlotte, who was aged 21 years at the time of the killing, was found guilty of murder. Linda was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years in prison. and has subsequently been released from custody. THE LIMERICK and Clare Education and Training Board has welcomed the announcement that more multi-denominational schools will be available across the country. The reconfiguration process announced by the Department of Education involves existing schools changing their patron and may also mean a change of ethos, for example, a change from a denominational (religious) ethos to a multi-denominational ethos. When a school transfers from one patron to another, the school retains the same roll number with staff and pupils remaining in place. Commenting on the announcement, George OCallaghan, Chief Executive of Limerick and Clare Education and Training Board, said: "The ETB already operates Community National Schools at primary level at three sites in the region. "These are state, co-educational, multi-denominational primary schools underpinned by the core values of Excellence in Education, Care, Equality, Community and Respect. Community National Schools teach the national primary school curriculum as set out by the Department of Education and have a multi-denominational ethos." Mr O'Callaghan continued: "They also celebrate events that are important to the school community such as Christmas, Eid, and Diwali throughout the school year." Ciaran Crowe is the former principal of Patrickswell National School. He currently provides support to the growing network of Limerick and Clare Education and Training Board Community National Schools. He said: "I am very impressed with the structures and procedures in place from the ETB to provide support and advice to CNS school principals, staff, pupils and Boards of Management." A fire broke out in Rajasthan's Sariska Tiger Reserve following which the Indian Air Force (IAF) sent two helicopters to bring the blaze under control, officials said on Tuesday. A fire broke out in Rajasthan's Sariska Tiger Reserve following which the Indian Air Force (IAF) sent two helicopters to bring the blaze under control, officials said on Tuesday. The IAF said that on a request from the Alwar district administration for assistance in controlling the fire that has spread over large areas in Sariska Tiger Reserve, it has deployed two Mi 17 V5 helicopters for the Bambi Bucket operation. "The operation is underway," the IAF said. The fire began on Monday evening. The cause of the fire is yet to be ascertained. Villagers residing in the periphery of the fire-affected areas have been moved to safety. A SECOND Pride Rainbow crossing has been unveiled in Limerick . The new crossing on the Dooradoyle Road, next to the Ballykeefe Roundabout, stretches across both the outbound and inbound lanes. The new crossing comes just six weeks after the first crossing was unveiled on Bridge Street in the city centre by Limerick City and County Councils Active Travel team. Given its prominent position next to the Crescent Shopping Centre, the new crossing will be seen by thousands of people every day. Mayor of the City and County of Limerick, Cllr Daniel Butler said: "I was heartened to see the positive feedback to our first Pride Rainbow crossing on Bridge Street next to Merchants Quay. "A number of people asked at the time why we were doing it. For me, this is about celebrating Limericks diversity and it sends a message to our LGBTQ+ community that Limerick is an inclusive place to live and work." Lisa Daly, Chairperson of Limerick Pride said: "We are really excited to have worked with Limerick City and County Council behind the scenes on providing not one, but now two historic moments with the first rainbow crossing in Limerick near Merchants Quay where our pride parade gathers, and now another has been added. "This is a great moment for our community and county with Limerick showing equality for all, which I am personally proud to see happening and hope it brings as much joy to others. "We are very excited to have a physical Parade this year and welcome everyone in Limerick to come out and fly their colours in support of Pride in Limerick from 4-10 July with our parade taking place Saturday 09 July." FORMER Ryanair executive Conal Henry is set to become the new chairperson of the Shannon Group, Transport Minister Eamon Ryan has announced. Mr Henry, pictured, is expected to be formally appointed to the role following an appearance before the joint Oireachtas committee on transport and communications, which is hoped can be arranged at the earliest opportunity. The founder and chair of telecommunications provider Fibrus, Mr Henry also served as chief executive of infrastructure firm enet. Among the other roles he has held was that of a non-executive director of the Shannon Foynes Port Company. His impending appointment follows the departure of former Senator and Aer Arann chief Padraig O Ceidigh. Mr Ryan said: "Given the important role of Shannon Group to the economy of the Mid-West region and nationally, I am pleased that Conal Henry is willing to accept the position of chairperson of Shannon Group. Conal has 15 years experience at board level in both executive and non-executive positions and his career spans the aviation, telecoms, retail and banking sectors. I am confident that he will play a key role in leading Shannon Group in its continued recovery." The Green Party leader also paid tribute to Mr O Ceidigh, whose departure was confirmed last week. "I have accepted the resignation of Mr OCeidigh and wish to thank him for his dedication and engagement as Chairperson of Shannon Group, particularly given these challenging times for the aviation sector. I would like to wish Mr OCeidigh the best with his future endeavours," he said. Over 1,600 people with Covid-19 are in hospitals across Ireland, fifty of whom are in ICU. That's according to the latest report from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) on Tuesday, March 29 which confirmed 1,605 Covid-positive patients are hospitalised nationwide. HSE boss Paul Reid called on the public this week to "repeat doing the basics" such as mask-wearing due to the rising number of Covid cases. A total of 5,962 PCR-confirmed cases of Covid-19 were registered today, with 8,587 people registering a positive antigen test through the HSE portal yesterday (Monday March 28). According to the HPSC, 51,197 positive cases have been recorded in the last seven days, with 89,102 in the last two weeks. 1,625 Covid positive patients in hospital now is causing huge stress on the healthcare system. We need to turn this tide again asap & repeat doing the basics. Please wear your mask appropriately, come forward for your booster or primary vaccine & isolate if symptoms. @HSELive Paul Reid (@paulreiddublin) March 28, 2022 Fifty four people have died with Covid in the last fourteen days, making up a total of 6,730 across Ireland since the pandemic began. In a tweet yesterday evening, Mr Reid said, "1,625 Covid positive patients in hospital now is causing huge stress on the healthcare system. We need to turn this tide again asap and repeat doing the basics. Please wear your mask appropriately, come forward for your booster or primary vaccine and isolate if symptoms." The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) has recently called on the government to re-instate Covid measures - which were scrapped at the start of March - such as mask-wearing and the cancellation of elective procedures. The situation in our hospitals is chaotic. ICU numbers arent increasing but we have a high levels of hospital admission that we simply cant cope with and that requires public health measures, to ensure those who are so sick, that are being admitted, can actually get treatment. pic.twitter.com/f8dB5tysBQ Irish Nurses & Midwives Organisation (@INMO_IRL) March 28, 2022 The group tweeted yesterday and called the situation in Irish hospitals "chaotic". The tweet said, "The situation in our hospitals is chaotic. ICU numbers arent increasing but we have a high levels of hospital admission that we simply cant cope with and that requires public health measures, to ensure those who are so sick, that are being admitted, can actually get treatment." Air raid sirens sounded across Ukraine before dawn on Tuesday as Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Turkey for the first face-to-face talks in nearly three weeks, with Kyiv seeking a ceasefire without compromising on territory or sovereignty. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan welcomed delegations from both sides saying that "stopping this tragedy" was up to them. Ukrainian television reported the talks had begun with "a cold welcome" and no handshake between the delegations. Ukraine and the United States hold little hope of an immediate breakthrough. But the resumption of face-to-face talks is an important first step towards a ceasefire in a Russian invasion that is stalled on most fronts but inflicting horrible suffering on civilians trapped in besieged cities. More than a month into the war, the biggest attack on a European nation since World War Two, more than 3.8 million people have fled abroad, thousands have been killed and injured, and Russia's economy has been pummelled by sanctions. In the besieged southern port city of Mariupol nearly 5,000 people have been killed, including about 210 children, according to figures from the mayor. Such figures cannot be verified. Countrywide air raid sirens acros Ukraine were the latest sign of Russia's increasing reliance on long-range strikes, hitting targets far from front lines to try to cripple Ukrainian supply lines. Russia's defence ministry said on Tuesday it had struck a large fuel depot in the Rivne region of western Ukraine overnight, a long distance from any fighting. Ahead of the talks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said his country is prepared to declare its neutrality, as Moscow has demanded, and is open to compromise on the fate of the Donbas, the contested region in the countrys east. The United Nations chief has launched an initiative to immediately explore possible arrangements for a humanitarian cease-fire in Ukraine" in order to allow the delivery of desperately needed aid and pave the way for serious political negotiations to end the monthlong war. The Pentagon may have to ask Congress for additional money to support Ukraines battle against Russias invasion, including to replenish Americas arsenal for weapons sent to Kyiv, officials said Monday. Rolling out the Defense Departments $773 billion request for fiscal 2023, Pentagon leaders said the budget was finalized before the invasion so it has no specific money for the war. Congress approved a $13.5 billion emergency funding package in early March. Western sanctions have disrupted nearly every part of Russias financial system, but there is one big exception. The domestic-payments system continued to work smoothly after Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. pulled out earlier this month. While the card giants exit from Russia was viewed as a significant move by many in the West, the reality on the ground was anything but. Most Russian consumers never lost the ability to use their Mastercard- and Visa-branded cards to pay for things within the country. There were roughly 197 million Mastercard or Visa cards in Russia at the end of 2020, according to the Nilson Report, a trade publication. But behind the scenes, the cards dont rely on the U.S. networks systems to process payments in Russia. For years, they have used a homegrown system overseen by Russias central bank. The National Payment Card Systemknown by its Russian initials NSPKruns the financial plumbing that underpins card transactions in Russia, even for cards bearing Visa and Mastercard logos. The system was part of Moscows eight-year effort to insulate the Russian economy from Western financial pressure. The Kremlin also has aggressively promoted Russias own card company, called Mir, which is built on NSPKs infrastructure. More than 100 million Mir cards have been issued since its launch in 2015, according to Mirs website. The resilience of Russias payments system is a rare win for President Vladimir Putin in his financial war with the West. Russia failed to break its dependence on Western imports, leaving the country in dire need of key parts for manufacturing. Before the war, Russia amassed $630 billion in reserves to ensure it could protect the ruble, but that effort was undermined when the U.S. and European Union froze Russian central-bank assets. We provided for our national security in the payments space," said Alma Obayeva, head of the National Payments Council, a Russian trade association. The retreat of Visa and Mastercard did have one big consequence for Russians: In many cases, their cards now dont work outside the country. The Mir network extends only to a small number of countries besides Russia, most of which are former Soviet republics. Russian officials have been in talks in recent days to expand it to Venezuela and Iran, according to reports from the TASS state news agency. Some Russian banks have said they are exploring partnerships with Chinas UnionPay to issue cards that their customers can use more widely. Still, Russians inability to use their cards to withdraw cash or make purchases abroad is aligned with the Kremlins goal to keep assets in the country. Some Russians who have fled have said Visa and Mastercards cutoff played into Mr. Putins hands. On a February call to discuss potential Russia sanctions, executives from Visa, Mastercard and other payments companies told Treasury Department officials that banning U.S. networks from handling Russian bank transactions wouldnt be especially painful, according to people familiar with the matter. Sanctions, they said, would simply push more transactions onto Mir. Representatives for Visa and Mastercard declined to comment. More countries have developed their own payments infrastructure, limiting the clout of Visa and Mastercard and, by extension, the ability of the U.S. to influence countries behavior through sanctions that target their banking systems. Chinas state-owned UnionPay handles most domestic transactions on cards issued by Chinese banks. Turkey and India started their own networks in recent years to wean the countries banks off Visa and Mastercard. Russia tried to reduce its vulnerability to Western financial pressure after it was stung by sanctions over its 2014 annexation of Crimea. Visa and Mastercard at the time accounted for nearly all card network activity in Russia. Their networks serve as a link between merchants and banks that issue debit and credit cards, and they handle the routing of card transactions. In March 2014, hundreds of thousands of Russians discovered that their cards had been rendered useless overnight. U.S. sanctions over Crimea had prompted Visa and Mastercard to block services to several banks linked to associates of Mr. Putin. For Russian officials, the move highlighted a vulnerability. Within months, Mr. Putin signed a law establishing NSPK. A later amendment to the law effectively forced Visa and Mastercard to transfer processing of transactions to NSPK. The two U.S. companies at first opposed the law and suggested they might leave Russia. But by early 2015, both had agreed to use NSPKs system. Later that year, NSPK launched Mir. The name means both world" and peace" in Russian. It was chosen after an internet naming contest, in which some of the rejected alternatives were Kometa" (Comet) and Patriot." Initially, Russians saw little reason to swap their Visa- and Mastercard-branded cards for Mir cards. Then the Kremlin put its thumb on the scales. In 2017, Russia passed a law requiring banks that handle pensioners payments and salaries of public-sector employees such as teachers and military personnel to make those funds available through Mir cards. Mir usage surged, with card issuance rising to 95 million by the end of 2020 from about 2 million in 2016, according to NSPK. The law also mandated that Mir be accepted at point-of-sale terminals used by many merchants. NSPK invested heavily in marketing Mir, sponsoring the Russian national soccer team and promoting incentives such as cashback programs. By taking over payment processing, NSPK became a moneymaker for Russias central bank, collecting fee revenue that otherwise would have flowed to Visa and Mastercard. In 2020, the payments system earned 8.2 billion rubles in net profit, or about $87 million at current exchange rates, according to its annual report. Issuance of Mir cards has boomed in recent weeks after the exit of the foreign card giants. Russian lender Rosbank has reported that demand for debit cards that run on Mirs network more than doubled between January and March from the same period last year. There is simply a huge, frenzied demand for Mir cards," Ms. Obayeva said. There is a long queue." Click here to read the full article. What hooks and disarms audiences minutes after clicking play on Better Nate Than Ever is its infectious energy. George Bensons funk cover of On Broadway, used decades earlier in All That Jazz, makes for a lively introduction to a spirited, small-statured youths big personality. Writer-director Tim Federle welcomes us into this world with the tantalizing promise of major things to come in a semi-biographical tale of an underdog chasing his dream of becoming a Broadway sensation. But before that can happen, a series of hapless, comedic misadventures has to occur. Funny, vibrant, yet schmaltzy to a fault, this Disney Plus family film can carry a tune, but falters in crafting a runaway hit. Thirteen-year-old Nate (Rueby Wood) loves musicals. That much is clear from the Music Man and Redhead posters that line the walls of his bedroom and the Wicked references he drops in casual conversations with cool-tempered best friend Libby (Aria Brooks). He even keeps a bucket list that features climbing down a fire escape like in West Side Story. He lives and breathes Broadway, which annoys his older jock brother Anthony (Joshua Bassett) and dad Rex (Norbert Leo Butz), though his frazzled working mom Sherrie (Michelle Federer) tolerates it. However, our hero begins to spiral when, due to never having headlined a musical before, hes passed over for the lead role in his middle schools upcoming stage show. Hoping to quell her besties angst, Libby suggests Nate audition in the open casting call for a new musical based on Lilo & Stitch. At first reluctant to travel as unaccompanied minors to Manhattan, Nate reconsiders once the opportunity of a lifetime arises: His parents are going on a weekend trip and Anthony will be gone overnight at a track meet. Under the guise of sleeping over at Libbys, the pair hightail it to New York City. Once there, they must contend with a few conundrums, like navigating demanding tryouts and attempting to rope Nates estranged cool Aunt Heidi (Lisa Kudrow), a struggling actress, into their scheme. Their situation is further complicated when Nate gets an unexpected callback, leaving the two at a crossroads in their friendship. Though the title touts a singular protagonist, and his struggles do take narrative priority, the film also builds out Libby into a three-dimensional character, giving her well-conceived conflicts and clever, clearly-defined stakes, which Brooks plays with assured aplomb. Initially, it seems her characters purpose is both to aid the male arc and to represent a series of sticky tropes. But midway through, her identity blossoms and begins thriving, blessedly uprooting any preconceived notions of the characters development. The end credits finale, which utilizes rousing, radio-friendly single About to Go Awf sung by Brooks and Wood, vacuum-seals the duos rootable interests. That said, Federle struggles to flesh out other character conflicts properly, most notably the familial drama between Sherrie and Heidi, whove let a long-standing feud fracture their sisterly bond. Both pay lip service to it in clunky expository speeches that conveniently arise. While the emotional pull is full of poignant commentary that spite, jealousy and regret lead to major misunderstandings, the film has trouble making this land in the third-act climax. Any resolution is handled off-screen by the time the closing credits run and a reconciliatory hug comes. Other conflicts are forgotten about completely. The father-son strife and cavernous distance between Rex and Nate, lightly hinted at early on, are nonexistent by the climax though there was no opportunity for either to heal from their division. Its left aching, as Wood and Butz are capable performers who could land the drama. Visually, there are many highlights. Federle and editor Katie McQuerrey show great craft and care instilling the picture with a snappy sense of brightness and flexibility. Quick cuts and whip pans help to convey the perspective of the perky protagonist. The filmmakers have clear gifts for mining the most out of a scenes comedic timing. Transitions between sequences that get the characters from point A to point B (like getting to school, New York City and the Natural History Museum) spotlight a witty visual dexterity, while Declan Quinns saturated cinematography shows notable depth. Nates grandiose Guys and Dolls-inspired dream sequences and fantastical asides are polished and pristine. Handheld camerawork during Nates first audition adds to the immediacy, speaking to the pressure hes feeling. Camera positioning and framing, specifically when Nate feels intimidated, also aesthetically augment the subtext. As far as sentiments go, the films heart is in the right place. Its LGBT-positive in terms of representation and acts as a love letter to musical artistic expression. Taking a few tonal cues and ingredients from Ferris Buellers Day Off and Billy Elliot helps guide the narrative without becoming a reductive rehash. Its heaping doses of sincerity make platitudes about finding your light and being true to yourself go down easy, giving hope to those who may be struggling with self-acceptance. Still, without some of the bigger ideas combining perfectly into a powerful crescendo, the song it sings sounds pitchy. Reviewed online, March 27, 2022. Running time: 91 MIN. Running Time: Running time: 91 MIN. MPAA Rating: PG Production A Disney Plus release of a Marc Platt Production. Producer: Marc Platt, Adam Siegel. Executive producers: Tim Federle, Pamela Thur. Crew Director: Tim Federle. Screenplay: Tim Federle, based on his book. Camera: Declan Quinn. Editor: Katie McQuerrey. Music: Gabriel Mann. With Rueby Wood, Aria Brooks, Lisa Kudrow, Joshua Bassett, Michelle Federer, Norbert Leo Butz. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. Blue Note New York has announced the 11th Annual Sony Presents Blue Note Jazz Festival. The festival kicks off on June 1 with a free show in Washington Square Park headlined by Robert Glasper who performed on the Oscars Sunday night in association with Washington Square Park Conservancy. Taking place at major venues across New York City, including Blue Note New York, Sony Hall, The Town Hall, and SummerStage in Central Park, this years festival features performances from George Clinton & Parliament-Funkadelic, Chris Botti, Charles Lloyd, Macy Gray, Kenny G, Jason Moran, Al Di Meola, Madeleine Peyroux, Dave Holland & Kenny Barron, Robert Cray, Kenny Garrett, Jose James, Chief Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott), Bilal, DOMi & JD Beck, Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, Theo Croker and so many more legends, with a major headliner announcement on April 26. The European Sounds Series also returns to the Blue Note Jazz Festival this summer, with weekend brunch shows at Blue Note New York, featuring international acts representing Switzerland, Estonia, Romania, Spain, France, Poland, Austria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and Finland. The series will kick off with Gregoire Maret and Romain Collin. The European Sounds Series is presented in partnership with the European Union Delegation to the United Nations. Music is an integral part of what makes Washington Square Park so special, says WSPC Deputy Director, Sheryl Woodruff. Generations of New Yorkers have flocked to the Park to listen and play. Were incredibly excited to partner with a beloved Village institution such as the Blue Note on this not-to-miss concert. And theres no better artist to headline than Robert Glasper, who spent his formative years in this very community. We couldnt imagine a better way to celebrate our 10th Anniversary year than to help bring Jazz Fest to Washington Square Park! Blue Notes Steven Bensusan says, The Greenwich Village Jazz Festival was a big part of growing up in New York City, not only for me but for many New Yorkers. Bringing jazz music back to Washington Square Park after so many years under the Blue Note Jazz Festival name is an honor, Im greatly looking forward to a renewed partnership with the Washington Square Park Conservancy and presenting Robert Glasper together in this historic location. Blue Notes Alex Kurland adds, This years Blue Note Jazz Festival in New York presents an unparalleled range and depth of artistry and musical integrity. Were excited and proud to present a diverse lineup of artists in different settings and venues featuring the most established, iconic and influential artists as well as the next generation of cutting edge progressive artists from Washington Square Park, Central Park to the Blue Note Jazz Club in Greenwich Village and more. We are grateful again to bring a tasteful city-wide music festival to the culture of New York City. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. By Jennifer Egan Scribner. 334 pp. $28 - - - Even in an era of boundless hype, Jennifer Egan's "The Candy House" has a legitimate claim on the title of Most Anticipated Book of the Year. This is, after all, a sequel to "A Visit From the Goon Squad," Egan's astonishing demonstration of literary bravado that swung through 2010, grabbing a Pulitzer Prize, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. The Washington Post named "Goon Squad" one of the best books of 2010, and, later, other publications called it one of the greatest novels of the decade. Egan's creativity was so magnificent that commentators focused not on the storyline of "Goon Squad" but its multifarious forms, her confident array of perspectives - first, second and third - ranging through time and around the world, crescendoing with a 70-page PowerPoint presentation! It was a novel of such peacocking swagger that only its knockout triumph saved it from looking obnoxious. Well, here we are more than a decade later, and even if you were a fan - as I was - the intervening years are likely to have beaten those characters from your memory. As someone in that earlier novel observed, "Time's a goon," and unfortunately, Egan is in no mood to help out, which means you're likely to be as baffled as dazzled by "The Candy House." The music that ran through "Goon Squad" and gave the novel its melody is far harder to hear in these new chapters. Also, 12 years later, readers are less likely to be awed by literary experimentation. A chapter of tweets earns no now. A second-person narrator? You shouldn't have. But if "The Candy House" is less uniformly successful than "A Visit From the Goon Squad," it still contains terrific parts. The opening story reintroduces us to Bix Bouton, now a tech mogul whose social media company has made him very rich. Exploiting the discoveries of an anthropologist name Miranda Kline, Bix monetized "algorithms that explained trust and influence" to build a "luminous sphere of interconnection." Now, in his early 40s, despite his fame and vast wealth, Bix worries that he has "no vision beyond the one he'd nearly exhausted." It's a fear that gives him "a haunted, hunted feeling" as he struggles to divine "what should happen next." We eventually learn that Bix went on to invent a program with the ironic name Own Your Unconscious, which completely reshaped human culture. Egan explains: "By uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online 'collective,' you gained proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same." It's a clever parody of the Faustian bargain we've made with social media, relinquishing our privacy for access to the comments, likes and images of others. "The Candy House" ties this sci-fi brain technology back to Napster, that revolutionary - largely illegal - peer-to-peer file-sharing platform that let people share their song files and their most intimate musical tastes with everyone. "Who," Egan asks, "could resist gaining access to the Collective Consciousness for the small price of making our own anonymously searchable?" In the world she imagines, most people sit down for a painless mind-dump on their 21st birthday, "never fully reckoning, in our excitement over our revelatory new freedom, with what we surrendered by sharing the entirety of our perceptions to the Internet." It's the candy house from Grimms' fairy tales: the sweet, free bounty that comes with a horrible, unforeseen cost. That's the last time we see much of Bix, which is a shame, because he's a singularly fascinating character. Making him a Black man was an interesting element of "Goon Squad," but it's one that Egan seems uninterested in pursuing. What, after all, might America be like if our all-pervasive social media were shaped by the dreams of an African American? Much of "The Candy House" takes place in a future influenced by Bix's revolution, but the novel rarely contends with the implications of that premise for Bix's life, the tech industry or the world shaped by it. Instead, Bix's skin color remains about as relevant as his hair color. Partly, this is simply a matter of the book's structure, which insists on constantly fracturing and abandoning its forms, themes and characters. But as other chapters leap to other lives, we see people who do resist the Web's mind-absorbing candy. Alfred Hollander, for instance, is so desperate for authenticity that he randomly screams just to discombobulate passing strangers for a moment. There's also a whole cadre of "eluders." They're "separatists bent upon hoarding their memories and keeping their secrets." And radicals who can afford it hire fiction writers to impersonate them on the Web so that they can live outside this sphere of supposedly benevolent surveillance. Miranda Kline, the anthropologist whose research on affinity and trust laid the foundations for Bix's social media revolution, may be one of those mysterious radicals. In a chapter narrated in the plural first person, one of Kline's daughters explains, "The omniscience of the Collective Consciousness is what the eluders want to escape so desperately that they're willing to leave their identities behind. Some liken eluders to trapped animals gnawing off their own legs as the price of freedom." While "Goon Squad" gave readers the celebrated PowerPoint chapter, "The Candy House" offers a spy thriller conveyed in aphorisms tweeted in the second person. A decade ago, Egan actually posted this whole thing on Twitter, and then she published it in the New Yorker. The chapter contains such observations as, "The fact that you feel like you're dying doesn't mean that you will die," which reassured me during some particularly frustrating sections of this book. Somewhat more effective is a chapter constructed from a great thicket of nested email conversations. But here again Egan presumes a lot on her readers' ability to know what she's talking about. It would have taken so little additional information to make this more inviting that I can't help feeling the author was overindulged by her editor. The chapters that work best embrace their radical forms more gently - or even mock them. One of the best is about Chris, the adult son of Bennie Salazar, the music producer who served as the axle of "Goon Squad." Now an adult, Chris works at a shadowy software company trying to translate every element of every story into a mathematical formula. Through a series of awkward encounters, Chris falls into a cerebral comedy of absurdity in which he realizes that he has shifted from being the Protagonist to being an Enabling Sidekick: i < (a, b, c . . . ). It's a witty deconstruction of the presumptions of algorithmic insight and a brilliant demonstration of the unquantifiable pleasures of great fiction. Toward the end of "The Candy House," we come back to Bix's 28-year-old son, who rejected his father's work and wealth. He's a struggling fiction writer who knows that we don't need some new development of social media to access each other's minds. We already have these ancient things called books that allow us to feel "the collective without any machinery at all." - - - Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post. Meet "I2-U2", the latest entry into the international alphabet soup of acronyms, which stands for India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the US. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken used the I2-U2 moniker on Sunday for the four-member grouping that was launched last October at a virtual meeting comprising himself, India's External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and Foreign Ministers Yair Lapid of Israel and Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the UAE. I2-U2 even has a populist ring rhyming with R2-D2, a robot in the Star Wars movie franchise. "We have something, for example, called I2-U2, which we launched last October, together with our Emirati and Indian counterparts," Blinken said at a news conference in Jerusalem, referring to the four-member grouping that could be the beginning of a Middle East Quad, but now has an acronym of its own. Blinken praised Lapid for his "remarkable leadership" in "spearheading new areas of cooperation" like the I2-U2. At their I2-U2 meeting, the Ministers had discussed "future opportunities for collaboration in the region and globally" and "expanding economic and political cooperation in the Middle East and Asia, including through trade", according to a US statement after their talks. The group does not have a military angle to it and the Minister only spoke of cooperation in maritime security, which is mostly about preventing piracy and terrorism. It mirrors the beginnings of the Quad, the Indo-Pacific grouping of India, the US, Japan and Australia in the Indo-Pacific region, which has now matured. The I2-U2 meeting had followed the Abraham Accords, through which Israel normalised relations with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. The Abraham Accords takes its name from the Jewish Patriarch Abraham who is claimed by Judaism, Christianity and Islam as their spiritual fountainhead. India has backed the Abraham Accords reached in the final days of the administration of former President Donald Trump through the efforts of his son-in-law Jared Kushner. President Joe Biden is continuing that diplomatic effort and Israel hosted this week a meeting of the top diplomats of the US, the UAE, Egypt, Morocco and Bahrain. Blinken, Lapid, bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Foreign Ministers Morocco's Nasser Bourita, Abdullatif bin Rashid Alzayani of Bahrain and Sameh Hassan Shoukry of Egypt met for what is called the Negev Summit in the Israeli town of Sde Boker to build a "new architecture" of capabilities, as Lapid described it. But showing a rift with the US that is trying to revive the Iran nuclear deal, Lapid said that it "intimidates and deters our common enemies, first and foremost Iran and its proxies". Israel and the four Sunni states are opposed to Shia Iran and the nuclear deal. Trump had pulled out of the agreement, which was meant to limit Tehran's nuclear weapons capabilities while loosening some of the sanctions imposed on it. Another area of difference also surfaced at the Negev meeting with US and the Arab states pressing Israel to make a deal with Palestinians. Blinken said: "We have to be clear that these regional peace agreements are not a substitute for progress between Palestinians and Israelis." Click here to read the full article. London-based documentary specialists Dogwoof and Danish production company Elk Film have revealed a commercial partnership to develop and produce documentary projects. The deal will involve a project slate of eight to 10 feature documentaries and documentary series where Dogwoof, Elk Film and the Danish Growth Fund Vaekstfonden will co-fund development. This will be The Danish Growth Funds first venture into documentary film development and production. Dogwoof and Elk will co-produce the projects, with Dogwoofs fund T-Dog also acting as financiers on some of them. Dogwoof and Elk previously worked together on The Lost Leonardo, which Elk produced and Dogwoof acted as financiers, EPs, sales agent, striking a multi-territory deal with Sony Pictures Classics, and also distributed the film theatrically in the U.K. Dogwoof CEO Anna Godas said: Dogwoof has been aggressively growing its financing and production arm in the last few years. Elk is the first of several production partnerships were working on. The purpose here is to partner with like-minded entrepreneurs with growth ambitions, open to looking beyond the usual commissioning or co-production models. Its about finding the optimal balance between traditional models and more innovative funding approaches. Oli Harbottle, head of distribution and acquisitions at Dogwoof, said: Our objective is to curate commercial, top quality, truly global projects without being tied to a specific formula. One of our top priorities is to nurture talent and develop stories we believe in. Market demand for documentary content is growing and buyers are increasingly looking for projects that work for audiences across the globe. We are ideally positioned for that. Andreas Dalsgard, CEO, Elk Film, said: With a strong public funding system behind us in Scandinavia, Elk Film has a proven ability to bridge the best of both private and public funding in the rapidly expanding market for reality based storytelling. Dogwoofs position and experience with talent, sales, financing and distribution is a great match with Elk Films extensive experience in developing and producing creative content. Development is high risk, and were proud that Dogwoof and The Danish Growth Fund are ready to bet on Elk Film. Trine Lve, senior relationship manager at Vaekstfonden, added: When Vaekstfonden finances Danish companies, it also has to create a return to society. And creative companies and projects contribute with a return in form of both jobs and cultural value. At the same time, they put Denmark on the world map. A financial return is also a key factor for us in any project, but when both cultural and financial value can be created in combination, it provides an excellent business case. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It wasnt long ago that Lara Logan was a correspondent for CBS News, which is a little hard to believe considering the types of conspiracy theories shes been pushing since she left the network. The latest came during an appearance on the right-wing podcast And We Know, during which Logan suggested that the theory of evolution is the result of a wealthy Jewish family paying Charles Darwin to devise an explanation for what gave rise to humanity. Does anyone know who employed Darwin, where Darwinism comes from? Logan, now with Fox News streaming service Fox Nation, asked. Look it up: The Rothschilds. It goes back to 10 Downing Street. The same people who employed Darwin, and his theory of evolution and so on and so on. Im not saying that none of that is true. Im just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory based on evidence, OK, fine. Logan rambled for a bit longer, but her point was that evolution is a chicken or the egg debate and you cant answer it scientifically and, while were here, Jews are trying to control the world with their money. Media Matters caught the claim on Monday: Fox Nation host Lara Logan appeared on the QAnon-promoting show And We Know and asked: "Does anyone know when, who employed Darwin? Where Darwinism comes from? Well, I mean, you know, look it up. The Rothschilds." pic.twitter.com/iegwAkByIV Eric Hananoki (@ehananoki) March 28, 2022 The Rothschilds, who Logan says is responsible for the theory of evolution, are a Jewish family that often shows up in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) famously wrote on Facebook that the Rothschilds funded a space laser that started the California wildfires. Logan and Greene share more in common than anti-Semitic comments. Both the Fox Nation host and the bigoted, virulent conspiracy theorist lawmaker have pushed Russian propaganda since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine last month. Greene has blamed Ukraine for the invasion, while suggesting the nations military is rife with Nazis. Greene, however, at least made some sort of superficial effort to insist shes not a Putin supporter. Logan made no such effort. Whether you like Putin or dont like him, Putin is not willing to be a part of whatever global governing structure is coming our way, Logan said last week on a right-wing podcast. Vladimir Putin has been very calculating, hes been very careful hes said for 15 years that he would not tolerate NATO expansion. Hes the man standing between us and this New World Order, she added after rambling about Ukrainian biolabs funded by Hunter Biden. The idea of a New World Order constructed by Jews is a trope of anti-Semitic rhetoric. Were starting to notice a pattern in Logans conspiracy theorizing. Click here to read the full article. The sudden passing of the Foo Fighters Taylor Hawkins sent shock waves around the rock world, and radio immediately rose to the occasion in paying tribute to the beloved drummer by playing music, sharing old interviews and airing calls from grieving fans. SiriusXM host Howard Stern honored Hawkins on his channel Monday morning by playing old interviews and clips not only of Hawkins live drum solos, but his vocal performances, particularly his recent rendition of Queens Somebody to Love. Stern took calls from listeners remembering Hawkins performing in his solo band and looked back on interviews that brought Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl and Hawkins friendship into focus, which he called one of the great partnerships in music. He was a supportive guy, Stern remembered. He wasnt a jealous guy He looked like a rock star. He had everything. He had the talent, he was an excellent drummer [and] had that long blonde hair like a surfer. Hes gone and Im sad. I havent stopped thinking about it. Just a sweetheart, Stern said of Hawkins, who had just appeared on the show one month earlier with Grohl to talk about the movie Studio 666 and the bands recent induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Other stations, like Meruelo Medias KLOS (95.5) and Audacys KROQ (106.7), both in Los Angeles, switched to all-Foo Fighters playlists with tributes interspersed throughout the weekend. When the news broke on Friday night, KLOS sprang into action with hosts Greg Beharrell, Matt Pinfield and Stew Herrera sharing stories, interview clips and audio from Hawkins and his numerous in-studio visits. Taylor became a friend 27 years ago, so for me and so many of us in the rock community, it was a crushing tragedy, PInfield tells Variety. But on the radio, I wanted to celebrate his life, legacy, music spirit and influence. He was one of a kind a bright light with unparalleled energy. We will miss him terribly. KLOS Program Director Keith Cunningham talked of Hawkins and his special relationship with KLOS. He often told us stories about growing up in Southern California and listening to KLOS. And while he was a frequent in-studio guest or even guest host, it was the charitable things he was always willing to help with that show you what a great man he was, like helping us to raise money each year for St. Jude or donating his time and playing for free to raise money to fight cancer in honor of KLOS DJ Bob Coburn, he said. Cunningham said that Hawkins was always in touch. I remember I got a text from Taylor one day because he was so stoked we were playing Van Halens Mean Street. Taylor loved Van Halen, and when Eddie passed, he was the first to call in and share emotional memories of one of his favorite guitar players of all time, he said. The radio station also posted a few videos on social media of when he was at the station, one of which shows him playing a kids drum set and jamming with Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones. Who else but Taylor Hawkins would bring a kids drum set to jam on? Cunningham said. KROQ as well as all of Audacys alternative stations, including Alt 923 in New York City spread Foo Fighters songs throughout the weekend as well, and directed listeners to listen to the Foo Fighters station on the Audacy app for more content. KROQ also removed all commercials for an all-hands-on-deck situation with morning host Kevin Klein, KROQ afternoon host Megan Holiday and KROQ MD Miles Anzaldo going live until Saturday. Veteran KROQ midday host Nicole Alvarez played Foo Fighters music, which also included live performances from KROQ and concerts in Los Angeles through the years. That night at 7 p.m., KROQ replayed the Foo Fighters 2017 KROQ Sound Space performance. Sunday night, the station hosted a Locals Only edition of all Taylor Hawkins projects, and Monday morning the Klein and Ally show took calls and played nothing but Foo Fighters music, including an encore of the Foo Fighters 2017 KROQ Sound Space. Im trying not to stay in the sad part of it, Alvarez said on-air Saturday afternoon. I just want to celebrate the fact that we got to share some time on earth with somebody as magnetic and just magnificent as Taylor Hawkins. Immediately after the news broke, KYSR (ALT 98.7) PD Lisa Worden had on-air personalities Booker and Stryker turn their cars around and head back to the radio station. Oddly, I was still in Burbank and turned around when I got the text, Booker said. Stryker and I met up to go live until midnight talking to some very emotional callers, reading their texts and also sharing our interactions with and our own memories with him. We just wanted to be there with the fans that weve stood with at shows countless times. Adds Worden: They played nonstop Foo Fighters music until midnight while taking calls and reading texts from listeners. Stryker has a 20-plus-year history with the band so he had some great personal stories to tell. She continued, The response from listeners was overwhelming; they were thankful to have a place to express their grief and share their own personal stories with people who could relate. We then continued to be live all weekend long while playing tons of Foos music, interview clips, etc. honoring Taylor all weekend long. Tonight we are rebroadcasting their performance from our iHeartRadio ALTer Ego 2021 concert across all iHeartMedia Alternative and Rock stations (about 90 radio stations). On the east coast, iHeartRadios Q1043 aired a produced sweeper honoring Hawkins, playing plenty of music as the news broke and tracks throughout the weekend. Like all iHeartRadio stations, the radio station will replay the Foo Fighters iHeartRadio ALTer Ego 2021 show on Monday night. In Philadelphia, Beasley Broadcast Groups WMMR launched a nearly three-hour tribute hosted by Ryan Shuttleworth and Sydney Taylor, with veteran mid-day jock Pierre Robert dedicating two hours to the drummer Monday. Other stations honored Hawkins as well, including iHeartMedias WXTB Tampa (97.9),WEBN Cincinnati (102.7) and KEGL Dallas (97.1) Cumulus Medias Rock 100.5 WNNX Atlanta, Beasleys WRIF in Detroit, Hearst Televisions WIYY Baltimore, Audacys WXRT (93.1) and Beasleys 95.9 The Rat, Belmar. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The Slap discourse continues, as late-night hosts weighed on the shocking Oscars moment between Will Smith and Chris Rock. The responses to the incident at Sunday nights Academy Awards varied in tone, with some, like The Late Late Show, offering a lighthearted take on the Best Actor winners gaffe. Host James Corden parodied Encantos chart-topper, We Dont Talk about Bruno, with a song called, We Dont Talk About Jada. In the clip, Corden and his writers brainstorm what to cover from the Oscars ceremony. Timothee Chalamets shirtless suit is deemed fair game but under no circumstances should anyone write a bit about Jada Pinkett Smith. Jimmy Kimmel also took a comedic approach, delivering a full segment breaking down what took place on the Oscars stage. The old Hitch slap, Kimmel said. Its now a part of our lives forever. We will never stop talking about this. It was shocking. The only thing I can really compare it to is when Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfields ear. Other late night shows treated the incident like pure news, with Stephen Colbert reacting to Smith slapping Rock as part of his monologue on The Late Show. Jimmy Fallon also opened his monologue on The Tonight Show by addressing the televised moment. America may be divided, but it was kind of nice for all of us to come together and say Holy crap! at the same time, Fallon quipped before also highlighting Questloves win for Best Documentary for Summer of Soul. Smith has since apologized to Rock. Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive, the actor wrote in a statement posted to social media Monday night. My behavior at last nights Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable. Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jades medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally. Some Academy members, meanwhile, are outraged over the incident, with Producers Guild of Americas president emeritus Marshall Herskovitz saying Smith disgraced our entire community. Click here to read the full article. Plaza Suite practically demands to be played straight. Neil Simons look at three romantic couples facing down the passage of time is sharp and knowing, but it is, crucially, earnest. Each character gives direct and explicit voice to whats on their mind; relationship dynamics are explored with an openness of heart that isnt remotely trying to be cool or distanced. While the emotional truths of this plays trio of vignettes, all set in a single apartment within the Plaza Hotel, can still resonate, the particulars would be impossible to make current without wrecking the whole enterprise. So thank goodness for Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick the two contemporary stars perhaps most apt for an exercise in squareness. To call their work in the new Broadway revival of Plaza Suite at the Hudson Theatre diligent is to suggest a leaden night out. But the real-life married couple bring a serious commitment to the spirit of the work, allowing their own personas to throw some metatextual sparks without overtaking the spirit of Simon. As directed by John Benjamin Hickey, Parker and Broderick provoke, alienate and woo one another, and provide a strong argument for a playwright whose work seems next-to-impossible to subvert. The two stars real-life connection adds extra dimension to Plaza Suites central concern the passage of time. Over the course of three one-acts all set in the late 1960s, Parker and Broderick play, in order, a married couple who have grown apart, high-school sweethearts who reconnect years after graduation, and a married couple who have grown apart. The nature of the separations at either end of the play differ in degree (one is melancholy, the other fractious); in between, theres the pleasure and disorientation of seeing a memory from ones past in the flesh again. In the first part, Parkers Karen is attempting to celebrate an anniversary with her increasingly distant husband Sam (Broderick, of course), having made a special effort to book the suite in which the pair spent their honeymoon. The pair go on to play Muriel, a suburban housewife whos starry-eyed over the success of her old boyfriend Jesse, now a movie producer, as well as Norma and Roy, a married couple attempting to salvage their daughters wedding day even as she wont cooperate. We move from outright sorrowful to farcical to a mixture of the two Norma and Roy have tough things to learn about why their daughter feels the way she does about marriage, and do so through moments of sublime physical comedy. Indeed, a part of the suites floor seems waxed to an ice-rink smoothness, so effortlessly do Parker and Broderick both, at various points, slide across it. Theres a literal-mindedness to the production that grounds its eventual flights of fancy. The set, designed by John Lee Beatty, is a faithful recreation of midcentury glamour as expressed through tasseled lampshades and crystal light fixtures. Its fustily gorgeous, realistically upscale in a way that can alternately seem like an indulgent treat or like a well-upholstered prison cell. Jane Greenwoods costumes are similarly era-appropriate, with one attention-getting hat worn by Parker in the third act splitting the difference between realism and farce. And even as he sends his stars to emotional (and physical) extremes, Hickey keeps them grounded in the characters reality. Broderick, for instance, in both marriage-themed sections plays characters who struggle to express their emotions, or even to understand them; one never senses Brodericks own innate intelligence as a performer getting him ahead of where his character is meant to be. The three pieces vary in tone, but throughout, the two stars share not merely an unmistakable chemistry but a shared willingness to dig into the work on its own terms. They almost entirely resist looking at Plaza Suite through a 2022 lens. That almost is crucial. While neither performer ever winks at the audience, the plays second act features Parker playing a character whos all too aware that her old flame is wooing her but cant admit it for proprietys sake; Parker plays this with a shrewd awareness of just how silly self-delusion can look. (This segment of the play, with Parkers gift for ego-puncturing humor, will likely be the most satisfying for ticket buyers who came to see Parker in Carrie Bradshaw mode.) In the shows two vignettes about married couples, though, the comedy tends to emanate from the ways husbands and wives speak to each other, then and (perhaps) now. The thrill we get from the particular husband and particular wife being these two performers helps buoy moments when the misunderstandings can feel rote, or the scaffolding of the first and third acts arguments, building to one big reveal, can feel too visible. The mere fact that this play is a hard needle to thread that Parker and Broderick stand out among 21st century stars in their ability to conjure the Neil Simon sensibility, with truisms wrapped up in semi-corny patter to which an actor must commit fully or not at all partly accounts for why Plaza Suite hasnt been more frequently revived. Another is that the work itself is uneven, with certain revelations coming long after the audience has gotten there and with both actors occasionally selling material that isnt quite clicking. (The physical comedy in the third act is indeed remarkable. It also comes to feel a bit too load-bearing in a scene with too little else going on.) As a reclamation project for a playwright who, a generation ago, was a defining voice in the American theater, Plaza Suite has mixed results; its perhaps challenging news for the Simon legacy that this production, about as successful as one could hope for, makes it over the line by embracing its identity as a period piece. But as a double act for two talented performers with whom the audience has a long and deep relationship, Plaza Suite can hardly have been better chosen. The show itself is somewhat lost in time. But Parker and Brodericks chemistry, expertly honed, makes it feel timeless. Helen Hayes Theatre; 975 seats; $229 top. Opened March 28, 2022. Reviewed March 25. Running time: 2 HOURS, 45 MIN. Production An Ambassador Theatre Group Productions, Gavin Kalin Productions, Hal Luftig, James L. Nederlander, Douglas L. Meyer, Elizabeth Armstrong, Hunter Arnold, Caitlin Clements, Eilene Davidson Productions, Jeffrey Finn, Terry Schnuck, Smith and Brant Theatricals, Sherry and Kirk Wright and Mike Isaacson presentation of a play in three acts by Neil Simon. Music By Marc Shaiman. Crew Directed by John Benjamin Hickey. Sets, John Lee Beatty; costumes, Jane Greenwood; lights, Brian MacDevitt; sound, Scott Lehrer; hair and wig, Tom Watson; production stage manager, Jason Hindelang. With Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, Danny Bolero, Molly Ranson, Eric Wiegand, Cesar J. Rosado, Laurie Veldheer, Bryan Eng, Olivia Hernandez. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. Of all this seasons limited series based on high-profile incidents of chicanery, The Dropout stands out. More than Showtimes Uber show, Apples WeWork show, or Netflixs Anna Delvey show, Hulus look at the life and career of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes feels as though it has a certain point-of-view on its subject. And that subject Holmes, as played by Amanda Seyfried, and the culture that made her finds brilliant expression in the series music choices, overseen by music supervisor Maggie Phillips. Rarely in recent memory has a pop soundtrack been leveraged so effectively, and so eerily, to underscore points the show is making. Consider, for instance, a scene in which a pre-fame Holmes is waiting outside the Apple Store on the day of the iPhones release. Holmes, who idolized Steve Jobs, is in a giddy reverie as Feists 1234 plays; the song will, for a certain subset of viewers, instantly conjure memories of the Apple ad campaign in which it featured. Its the theme song of the Apple lifestyle, and recognizing it is a sort of coded handshake between Jobs devotees. Later in the series, Holmes welcomes potential partners from Walgreens to Theranos headquarters while KT Tunstalls Suddenly I See a somewhat vacuous melody of empowerment familiar from its use in The Devil Wears Prada plays. (It had been on the Walgreens executives car radio in-universe, and carries over to underscore their first meeting). Holmes, here, is presenting herself as the star of her own movie, and is about to uncork on the pharmacy execs a pitch that relies vastly more on the charm of an inspiring story (wouldnt it be great if Holmes had the sort of protagonist qualities of a person who could change the world?) than on scientific data. And theyre open to it. The Walgreens episode is a clever depiction of the ways in which Holmes particular characteristics worked on a community of investors hungry for a good narrative; Alan Rucks character, the corporate VP who ends up striking the deal between Walgreens and Theranos, is shown early in the episode listening to Katy Perrys Firework, the inspirational song that, in being about everything, is about nothing at all. Hearing it, by chance, after Holmes has told both Walgreens and fellow potential partner Safeway that they dont understand her vision, Rucks character suddenly attempts to salvage the deal. Wouldnt it be nice to believe Holmes invention could work that, indeed, she was a firework of potential? The crumminess and disposability of much of the music underscoring the series lends a sense of the culture through which Holmes moved, and her fundamental lack of sensibility or taste. In a scene where Holmes is attempting to get back in the good graces of her boyfriend (Naveen Andrews), she cues up Lil Waynes adult contemporary junk-classic How to Love and dances to it. Seyfrieds performance of Holmes ungainly physical presence in this scene is moving and strange all on its own. Holmes, here, is urgently seeking reassurance, expressing her insecurity through an attempt to be endearing for she doesnt trust herself to be seductive that lands in extreme oddity. But the song, with its slightly off vocals and its lyrics about alienation and loneliness, compounds meaning, too, showing Holmes ability to find within the prosaic and the artless a deep human strangeness. Elizabeth Holmes, here, is proudly corny: She wants to be loved, so she plays How to Love (and mimes some vaguely hip-hop-inflected dance moves, making herself the butt of the joke). In another dance she shares with Andrews Sunny Balwani, both parties don paper masks of Holmes face, left over from a party, and rage to Nick Jonas Jealous. The psychodrama of envy for the way Holmes presents as a youthful genius is always implicit between them, but they lean on music to literalize it. Earlier, Holmes is inspired by the music of Alabama and listens, in her teen years, to Steal My Sunshine, and in young adulthood to Passion Pit. Theranos parties play Keshas sleaze anthem Die Young, or MC Hammer. Shes a literalist thinker for whom the world is a place to be conquered, making her an ideal listener for the silliest sort of pop music. Holmes was, from her earliest moments in the public eye, more of a pop figure than a scientist: The thrilling story of her having potentially achieved something was more attention-getting than the boring fact of her not having done so. And The Dropout uses music to depict the vapidity of her world, the blunt-force power of platitudes. Often, so-called needle drops on television can stand in for emotional texture or character development; here, they work in tandem with the rest of what the show is up to. Much about The Dropout is exceptional, starting with Seyfried, who is simply on another level: The star doesnt merely transform but excavates, finding sorrow and loneliness and need within a figure whose obviously outre personal presentation would be where many actors might stop. The writing and direction is clever and deft, avoiding making sweeping statements about What Theranos Means For Our Economy and allowing us to come to those conclusions ourselves. But Phillips a prolific supervisor whos worked on everything from Mr. Robot to Normal People deserves special mention for conjuring a moment, a mood, and a sense of Holmes, all without distracting us from the show Seyfried is putting on. The music here does what its supposed to, drawing out and deepening whats already happening onscreen. The Dropout sidesteps and evades cliche at every turn. Its soundtrack embraces it, to show us the mind of someone who can only understand herself through fiction. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. A man is facing an array of charges after he taunted Laredo police officers while holding a knife, according to an arrest affidavit. On March 18, Jerry Lewis Johnson Jr., 37, was arrested for allegedly impersonating a security officer outside a local bar. Thats when he was served with multiple arrest warrants in relation to a domestic disturbance reported in January. Regarding the domestic violence incident, officers were dispatched at about 7:16 a.m. Jan. 8 in the 2900 block of East Clark Boulevard. A woman stated that her boyfriend, Johnson, arrived home drunk and that he broke her cellphone while she was calling 911. She met with police officers in the 2200 block of North Arkansas Avenue. She told police that Johnson woke her up. She added that Johnson gets crazy when he drinks. To avoid problems, she called 911 to get Johnson out of the house but the call got cut off. Johnson allegedly told her not to call the police. She told him she only wanted him out of the residence. When Johnson noticed that she was going to call police again, he took the phone away and broke it, according to court documents. Johnson then slapped her on the left side of her face. She stated she did not want to file charges but wanted Johnson out of the residence. Officers went to the apartment on East Clark, where Johnson was in the porch area. He was uncooperative. Johnson locked the gates to prevent officers from getting inside the property. Asked if he had weapons, Johnson allegedly replied, I have a lot of weapons. He then took out a knife and refused to put it down, according to police. Officers drew their service weapons while Johnson kept saying pop it pop it as he was walking toward the officers, court documents state. Johnson continued taunting officers on the street with the knife on his right hand. He then threw the knife to the ground following several commands. Johnson then turned around to walk back toward the residence. Thats when a police officer deployed her Taser, but the Taser failed. Johnson would lock himself inside the home. Mr. Johnson was arguing with us through a black metal door stating he was ready to die today and asked us if we were ready to die today, an officer wrote in the affidavit. Meanwhile, his girlfriend decided to leave him there saying she would go to her parents residence. She further stated that Johnson is a very different person once he is sober up. Officers decided to leave Johnson at the residence because he was by himself and no one was in danger. Police did recover the knife Johnson used to taunt the cops. Authorities presented their case to an assistant district attorney, who approved the issuance of warrants for Johnson. He was charged with three counts of aggravated assault against a public servant, assault family violence, criminal mischief and interference with an emergency request for assistance. A man en route to Guanajuato, Mexico was arrested for attempting to smuggle nine firearms and various ammo magazines, according to an arrest affidavit. Ramiro Garcia Rivera was charged with export and attempt to export from the United States firearms and ammunition. At about 1:30 a.m. March 19, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers working outbound operations at the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge inspected two vehicles that were traveling together. The first vehicle was a maroon Dodge Ram pulling a utility trailer. Authorities identified the driver as a legal permanent resident. The driver gave a negative declaration for weapons, weapon parts and ammo. The driver stated that they were traveling from Austin to Guanajuato, Mexico. The driver stated that Garcia Rivera was the owner of the Dodge Ram. CBP officers referred the vehicle and trailer to secondary inspection. CBP officers then inspected the second vehicle which was described as a Chevrolet van. Its driver was identified as Garcia Rivera. He also declared he had no weapons, weapon parts, ammo or more than $10,000 in cash. Garcia Rivera was also referred to secondary inspection. During secondary inspection, (CBP officers) discovered in the utility trailer a blue bin that contained six disassembled AR-15 rifles, three pistols and 13 various caliber magazines, states the arrest affidavit. Homeland Security Investigations special agents responded to the alleged smuggling attempt. In a post-arrest interview, Garcia Rivera stated he was the registered owner of the Ram and claimed to have been traveling together from Austin to Laredo. Garcia Rivera stated he was aware the blue bin contained firearms. Garcia Rivera stated he picked up the blue bin and the firearms near his ranch in Martin Mills, Texas from an unknown person. Garcia Rivera stated he was going to deliver the firearms in Guanajuato, Mexico. Garcia Rivera stated he charged the unknown person $170 to transport the blue bin to Mexico, the affidavit states. China builds solid wall of defense against COVID-19 to protect people's lives, health 13:33, March 29, 2022 By Zhong Sheng ( People's Daily A new batch of medical staff from the Chinese mainland to support the COVID-19 control efforts of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region arrives in south China's Hong Kong, March 14, 2022. (Xinhua/Li Gang) The Omicron variant of COVID-19 is spreading fast globally. Some U.S. media outlets recently sighed in articles that the pandemic is "still killing 1,200 Americans a day," worrying there might be "another surge." However, in a cynical tone, they said the Chinese mainland the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) are having a "bad year", just to smear China's pandemic response policies and achievements, and even defame China's political system. Such a narrow and evil view is a total disregard of facts. It turns the pandemic into a tool and weapon out of ulterior political motives. Facing the pandemic unseen in a century, the Chinese government has always put the Chinese people and their lives in the first and highest place. It has tailored science-based and targeted pandemic control policies according to the spread of the pandemic and the features of the virus, so as to maximumly safeguard people's lives and health, maintain a normal pace of work and life, and ensure the safety of industrial and supply chains. China is in a leading position globally in economic development and pandemic control, which fully demonstrates the strong ability of the country to control the virus and the obvious advantages of the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the socialism with Chinese characteristics. On the contrary, as the world's largest economy and a country that boasts rich and advanced medical resources, the U.S. has seen rounds of serious COVID-19 resurgence, setting new records in a number of indexes, such as newly confirmed cases, hospitalized cases and children's infections. Nearly a million people have died in the country because of the pandemic. The unscientific, unequal, and irresponsible pandemic response led by the White House, prejudices held by political parties, as well as the reckless dissemination of fake information have traumatized the credibility of the U.S. government, and the rights to life and health of Americans, whose trust in their government has been "bankrupt." This clearly shows who's the top scorer and who's the underachiever in terms of pandemic response. Facing the highly transmissible Omicron variant, the HKSAR experienced a drastic surge in newly confirmed cases and was put in a grave situation. At the critical moment, the HKSAR government acted responsibly and launched a tough battle to safeguard people's lives and health under the assistance from the Chinese central government. Expert teams and nucleic acid testing teams were quickly established and dispatched to Hong Kong. A Fire Eye Laboratory, nucleic acid testing vehicles, and quick testing kits were immediately put into use. The first makeshift hospital of Hong Kong was built within a week, and another six with 20,000 beds in less than a month. New waterways were constantly opened for material supply and freight trains were designated to carry assistance materials from the mainland to the HKSAR. The people in the Chinese mainland, sharing the concerns of their compatriots in Hong Kong, assisted the special administrative region with the fastest speed, highest intensity and widest coverage, to ensure the implementation of the assisting policies of the central government. It has significantly enhanced the Hong Kong citizens resolution and confidence in fighting and defeating the virus, and basically contained the rising trend of the pandemic in Hong Kong. The ongoing battle against the pandemic in Hong Kong vividly mirrors the institutional advantages of China. However, some U.S. media outlets are always making a fuss about the resurgence in Hong Kong, distorting the meaning of "dynamic zero-COVID approach." They said China should relax its pandemic control measures and choose to "coexist with the virus", but this only reflects their evil intentions. Hong Kong is a city with high population density and high passenger mobility, and it's also bothered by an aging society. "Laid-back" approaches will only make the virus spread faster there and seriously threaten the lives and health of the Hong Kong citizens, thus crushing the hope of restoring normal economic and social operation. The Guardians recently pointed out that "We all want the disruption and anxiety to stop, but we wont achieve that with policies that pretend the pandemic is over when it isnt. It said to stop the pandemic, we must learn to spot and contain worrying outbreaks. China's pandemic control practices fully prove that the "dynamic zero-COVID approach" is science-based, necessary, effective and feasible. It is something that must be done by a major country with more than 1.4 billion people, as well as an obligation of a responsible government and society. It puts into practice the people-first philosophy and contributes to the world's efforts to fight the pandemic. According to a recent poll published by Hong Kong-based think tank Bauhinia Institute, over 65 percent of the Hong Kong citizens believe that the "dynamic zero-COVID approach" is in line with the general interests of the Hong Kong society, and more than 80 percent are supportive of the goal raised by the expert team dispatched by the central government to reduce the numbers of deaths, critical cases and infections. The poll also indicated that over 80 percent of the Hong Kong citizens are more confident in defeating the virus because of the central government's assistance. After directing a documentary recording Wuhan's battle against the pandemic, British director Malcolm Clarke said he and his team have witnessed the invincible state strength of China during the pandemic. He said in China, the whole nation fights as one when it wants to achieve something, which is incredible when measured with Western standards. Over the past two years and more, China's institutional advantages and powerful state strength have withstood the test of the pandemic, and will keep contributing to the country's fight against the virus. China will build a solid wall of defense against COVID-19 with utmost confidence and achieve a final victory. The U.S. media and politicians that are always defaming China, sowing discord, mongering panic and singing the blues are destined to be disappointed again. (Zhong Sheng is a pen name often used by People's Daily to express its views on foreign policy and international affairs.) (Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun) Visiting Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishnakar on Tuesday offered assistance to a Sri Lankan government hospital which had to halt all surgeries due to lack of medicines. Disturbed over the news that the Peradeniya Teaching Hospital in Kandy has halted all surgeries, Jaishnakar directed the Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, Gopal Baglay to find out how New Delhi could assist in resolving the issue. Subsequently Indian envoy contacted senior medical officials attached to the hospital and had inquired about the required medicines that are needed to continue regular surgeries. At a meeting by hospital authorities on Monday, a decision had been taken to suspend all surgeries due to the severe shortage of drugs including anesthesia drug, Neostigmine used to reverse the effects of anesthesia medication used during surgery. The severe dollar crisis has led Sri Lanka to curtail purchase major imports including essential medicines leading shortage of essential medicines both in state hospitals and private pharmacies. Since January, India has offered Sri Lanka nearly $2.5 billion financial assistance, including $1 billion credit line on March 17, to buy medicine, food and other essentials. A man has been arrested in relation with a maquinitas raid that occurred in mid-January, according to Laredo police. On Thursday, Juan Alfredo Cervantes-Andrade, 22, was served with an arrest warrant charging him with gambling promotion. Furthermore, authorities seized 53 slot machines and $17,867. In January, police received information regarding illegal payouts to customers taking place at Fuego Amusement on 815 Park Street. The Laredo Police Department Narcotics and Vice unit launched an investigation. Authorities recorded an illegal payout on Jan. 6 during an undercover operation. The undercover officer entered Fuego Amusement and played a machine called Ultimate Fire Link. Police said the undercover cop inserted $5 and won $10. A second illegal payout occurred on Jan. 10. The undercover officer inserted $5 in a Life of Luxury Machine and won $25. Authorities said employees did not offer to pay the undercover officer with any other type of merchandise other than an illegal cash payout. Police also noticed that throughout the business, there were multiple signs of No Cash Payout along with signs reading Match Play, a term used at an eight-liner establishment that doubles the face value inserted by a customer into a slot machine. There were 53 gaming machines inside the establishment. On Jan. 13, the narcotics and vice unit along with the patrol division, the Crime Against Property division and the Webb County District Attorneys Office executed multiple search warrants throughout the city. At Fuego Amusement, authorities encountered Cervantes-Andrade, who appeared to be a floor attendant. In an interview with police, Cervantes-Andrade stated his title at Fuego Amusement was a floor manager. He would provide change to customers and handle the match play. He added he was paid $9.50 per hour and that he would pay himself weekly from the business earnings. Cervantes-Andrade stated the highest he has paid a customer was $650. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Courtesy /Texas DPS Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Courtesy /Texas DPS Show More Show Less 3 of 3 State police are releasing more information regarding the human smuggling attempt that ended in a rollover crash that killed two people north of Encinal over the weekend. The crash was reported at about 2:07 p.m. March 26 on Interstate 35, about half a mile north of Encinal. A preliminary investigation revealed that a black 2002 GMC sport utility vehicle was evading law enforcement, traveling south on the northbound access road of I-35. Courtesy /U.S. Border Patrol A veteran truck driver arrested at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint said he did not know he was transporting 49 migrants, according to an arrest affidavit. A white tractor towing a white trailer arrived at the Interstate 35 checkpoint at about 6:44 a.m. March 24. An agent noticed the company logo decals appeared to be falling off and looked recently placed. The driver was identified as Julian Aguirre, of Houston. Pakistan Interior Minister Sheikh Rasheed announced on Tuesday that voting on the no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Imran Khan will take place on April 3, Geo News reported. Addressing a press conference in Islamabad, he revealed the much-awaited date, adding that debate on the motion, tabled by Leader of the Opposition in National Assembly Shahbaz Sharif on Monday, will begin on Tuesday. Rasheed said that the final decision would be taken at the last hour, adding that PM Imran Khan will "play"till the last ball. Reiterating his support for the PTI-led government, he stated: "I stand with Imran Khan" and hoped that voting will be held peacefully on April 3. He also said that the official notification will be issued after the PM accepts the resignation of Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar. "In politics, some people win even after losing," he said. Following the power shows of the government and the Opposition, he said that all containers have been removed in Islamabad and all roads are clear. The Minister said that as he mentioned earlier Chaudhry brothers are with PTI. He, however, hoped that the MQM-P will soon announce their decision in favour of the government. "Their decision will be a decisive one," he added. "All those who have planned international conspiracies to remove PM Imran Khan will fail miserably," he said, adding that all eyes are on the Supreme Court's decision, Geo News reported. If you do not have a current print subscription to the Lodi News-Sentinel, but want to view unlimited articles for the month, please choose this option. Teenage entrepreneurs from Cnoc Mhuire, Granard and Moyne Community School will represent Local Enterprise Office Longford at this years Student Enterprise Programme National Finals. Preliminary judging will take place on May 3 from which five mini businesses from each category will go forward to a live final on Wednesday, May 18 in The Helix in Dublin. The students all took part in the County Longford Student Enterprise Programme Final on Tuesday, March 15, which was held virtually. An estimated two hundred students from seven schools took part in the programme locally. In the Senior Category, Longford will be represented at national level by Elaine Tully and Aibhe Brady from CMG Skinny Bottoms & Halfzips at Cnoc Mhuire, Granard. In the Intermediate Category, Moyne CS student Saoirse OToole from Saoirses Bakes & Cakes will be going forward to the national preliminaries. In the Most Creative Business Idea section open to senior students, Aoibhe Beatty, Cnoc Mhuire, Granard emerged on top. Her idea Naddy Bot, a wearable device which monitors blood sugar levels, goes forward. Special guests at the Longford virtual final included local athlete, European U20 Champion and former Student Enterprise Programme participant, Cian McPhillips and Cllr Peggy Nolan, Cathaoirleach, Longford County Council. Longford has a successful track record in the student enterprise competition. Recent awards won by local secondary schools have included Best Commercial Potential in 2021 for Handy Hooks from Ballymahon Vocational School, Best Commercial Potential award 2018 for Reel Easy from Moyne Community School and 2nd place in the Senior Category in 2017 for J & S Kitchen Aid from Mercy Secondary School in Ballymahon. Michael Nevin, Head of Enterprise of the Local Enterprise Office Longford congratulated the students, saying, We have a very successful student enterprise programme here in Longford, with approximately 200 students from seven local schools taking part this year. Our national finalists are excellent ambassadors for the programme and we wish them the very best of luck going forward. In what has been a particularly challenging couple of years for students the programme has offered them an outlet outside of the usual school demands. What our students are learning from the programme is that with the right support and encouragement, they can take an idea from the classroom and develop it into a real-life business. The skills they learn along the way, such as business planning, market research, selling and team-work, will help them become more entrepreneurial throughout their future careers. Further information around the Student Enterprise Programme is available from www.studententerprise.ie and by searching #studententerprise on social media. The Longford winners Senior Category Overall Winner: CMG Skinny Bottoms & Halfzips (Elaine Tully & Aibhe Brady), Cnoc Mhuire, Granard Runner Up: Allora Artwork (Naida Daugelaite), Mean Scoil Mhuire, Longford Intermediate Category Overall Winner: Saoirses Bakes & Cakes (Saoirse OToole), Moyne Community School Special Awards - Seniors Special Merit Team Development: Bait Box (Ashleigh Cullen, Cian Monaghan & Chloe Hopkins), Ballymahon Vocational School Special Merit Marketing: Beam Engraving (Maria Farrell, Breyana McCormack, Eabha Nevin & Anna Hutchinson), Mean Scoil Mhuire, Longford Special Merit Innovation: Our Book (Larah Mulligan, Leah Farrell Malone & Jessica Flynn), Ardscoil Phadraig, Granard Special Merit Environmental: Air Bee+Bee (Aoife O'Hara), Moyne Community School Most Creative Video Competition: Naddy bot (Aoibhe Beatty), Cnoc Mhuire, Granard A midlands man, who as a teenager, abused two boys in foster care in his family home has been given a four year prison sentence with the final two and a half years suspended. The 42-year-old man was convicted after a trial at the Central Criminal Court of four counts of oral rape on various dates between May 1995 and December 1998. Pensioner in 'serious' condition in hospital after being knocked down by car in Longford town A pensioner is in a serious condition in hospital tonight after he was struck by a car earlier this evening in Longford town. The accused, who was aged between 15 and 18 at the time, was also convicted of eight counts of sexual assault of the victim, who was then aged between 11 and 14. He was further convicted of four sexual assaults of the victim's older brother on dates in 1995 and 1996. The child in that case was aged from 12 and 13 at the time. The offending took place in the accused mans family home in a town in Co Offaly. The court heard the man now accepts the verdicts of the jury and said he is sorry. Ms Justice Deirdre Murphy noted the court must sentence the man not as an adult but as the 15 to 17 year old who committed the offences. She said the fact of him being a juvenile at the time and the fact of his intellectual functioning being in the low range reduced culpability. The judge said the acknowledgment of guilt even post conviction had some mitigating weight as there could be no whispering that the jury got it wrong or some mistake had been made. She noted he had also led a productive and useful life for the last 22 years since the offending and had indicated a willingness to engage with the Probation Service and rehabilitation. The judge said the court considered there to be a further mitigating factor in the failure of the authorities to deal with the matter when a complaint was first made to the HSE by one of the victims in 2001. She said it would have spared the victim distress which led to him feeling unable to go to gardai until 2014. The judge said this failure by the authorities to address the matter in 2001 not only caused distress to the victim but has also caused prejudice to the accused. Justice delayed is justice denied, she remarked. She said as a consequence the man was now facing the court as a 42 year old man with family responsibilities when it should have been dealt with in 2001. Ms Justice Murphy imposed a sentence of four years on each of the rape counts and 18 months on the sexual assault offences. In light of the mitigation she suspended the final two and a half years on strict conditions. Russia has agreed to meet Kiev half-way and will allow a meeting of its leaders to be held on the same day that the final version of a peace treaty is pre-approved by the two nation's foreign ministers, Moscow's top negotiator said on Tuesday, after a new round of talks in Istanbul. Previously, Moscow had insisted that a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky could only be set after the deal would be finalized, RT reported. Vladimir Medinsky described the talks in Turkey as "constructive" and said his delegation had received a clearly outlined position on what Kiev sought to achieve. The written proposal, which includes Ukraine's pledge to remain a neutral nation and that it will not try to obtain any weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, will be relayed to Putin, he said. Coinciding with Medinsky's statement to the press, the Russian defense ministry announced it was drastically reducing its military operations in some parts of Ukraine, including near the capital, Kiev. The ministry cited "the talks moving into the practical dimension," as the reason for the change, RT reported. David Arakhamia, Medinsky's opposite number in the Ukrainian delegation, said Kiev had sought a security guarantee from a number of nations that would work not unlike NATO's mutual self-defense commitment. He named the UK, China, the US, Turkey, France, Canada, Italy, Poland and Israel as possible guarantors, and claimed some of them have given their preliminary agreement to serve in that capacity. The proposed security pledge will not apply to the parts of Ukraine whose status remains in dispute, Arakhamia said. These include Crimea, which Russia considers its territory, and the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, which Russia recognized as sovereign states and whose forces are taking part in ongoing hostilities. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu remarked that he hoped that the outcome of the negotiation would soon lead to a ceasefire and a sustainable political resolution of the crisis Local News By Chris Boyle Published: March 29 2022 As someone who lives in this great Suffolk County community, I can attest that the Forge River Sewer Project is critical to our quality of life," Zeldin said. Congressman Lee Zeldin (R, NY-1) applauded the beginning of construction of the Forge River Sewer Project. In January, Congressman Zeldin joined Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, state and local officials, labor leaders, environmental stakeholders and residents at the Mastic Fire Department Substation to mark the groundbreaking of this long awaited infrastructure improvement. As someone who grew up and still lives in this great Suffolk County community, I can personally attest to the fact that the Forge River Sewer Project is critical to our quality of life. Dating back to my time in the New York State Senate, its been a long and hard-fought journey to reach this latest milestone, said Congressman Zeldin. I was honored to do my part to save this project with legislation I got passed by Congress and signed into law in December 2020. This project is a product of all levels of government working together across party lines to get this done. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic put Forge River, along with two other local sewer projects, in serious danger of not meeting their original deadlines for all the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds to be spent. Working closely with the White House and congressional leadership, Congressman Zeldin had language included in December 2020 government funding legislation to extend the deadline for the use of these CDBG-DR funds. The project could not be completed without this necessary federal action. Kavango Resources PLC - mining company focused in Botswana - Identifies 12 geophysical structures at the Ditau Camp project in Botswana, which the company believes could host carbonatites. Nine of these structure are particularly well defined, and Kavango is now starting a diamond drill campaign to test three of the targets, by drilling up to 2 holes in each targets. The primary target at rare earth elements mineralisation in possible carbonatites, or secondary REE deposits derived from the primary source. "Drill testing the ring structure targets should be relatively straightforward. While the geophysical signatures are complex and varied, confirming the presence of carbonatite/mafic bodies would be the first step towards defining the potential for REE and base/precious metal mineralisation. We will release more results from this in the coming weeks, as we progress through the drill campaign," says Chief Executive Officer Ben Turney. Current stock price: 3.00 pence 12-month change: up 1.7% By Dayo Laniyan; dayolaniyan@alliancenews.com Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved. (Sharecast News) - London stocks rose in early trade on Tuesday amid hopes of progress in Russia-Ukraine peace talks. At 0910 BST, the FTSE 100 was up 0.7% at 7,526.55. Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said: "Having tripped over on Monday afternoon amid concern about China lockdowns and the conflict in Ukraine the FTSE 100 sprang back to its feet on Tuesday on hopes the latest round of peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv might yield tangible progress. "Suggestions the Russian side are softening some of their previous demands raised spirits, but the market is unlikely to take anything for granted when it comes to the machinations of Vladimir Putin. "The resilience of global stocks given the cocktail of risks facing the global economy is truly impressive but this stoicism is likely to face continuing tests as the impact of mounting prices and the actions of central banks continue to feed through, not to mention the ongoing geopolitical concerns. "The FTSE 100 has proved to be better placed than most thanks to relatively cheap valuations, strong income credentials and exposure to surging commodity markets, however it is not immune to the current pressures." In equity markets, Admiral was up after Barclays upgraded the stock to 'overweight' from 'equalweight' and said it was turning more optimistic following its share price underperformance. Russia-focused miner Polymetal International surged after saying it was considering changes to its corporate structure including "distinct ownership in various jurisdictions" where the company operates. Polymetal said deliberations were at an early stage. Currys rallied after markets blog Betaville suggested potential takeover interest in the electricals retailer. On the downside, Barclays shares slumped after a share placing. According to terms seen by Bloomberg, 575m shares in the bank were placed via Goldman Sachs, at a range of between 147.50p and 150.75p a share. A trader said it was "unconfirmed whether it was Qatar Investment Authority" who sold the shares. Royal Mail was dented by a downgrade to 'sell' from 'hold' at Deutsche, which also slashed its price target to 275p from 680p. Bellway was on the back foot even as the housebuilder announced a big increase in its dividend and a reduction in dividend cover as it reported an 8.9% jump in underlying first-half profit. Market Movers FTSE 100 (UKX) 7,526.55 0.71% FTSE 250 (MCX) 21,206.08 0.65% techMARK (TASX) 4,348.18 0.61% FTSE 100 - Risers Airtel Africa (AAF) 143.80p 3.08% Prudential (PRU) 1,108.50p 3.07% Fresnillo (FRES) 747.00p 3.01% Scottish Mortgage Inv Trust (SMT) 1,036.00p 2.73% Ocado Group (OCDO) 1,118.50p 2.66% Coca-Cola HBC AG (CDI) (CCH) 1,630.50p 2.58% Rightmove (RMV) 657.40p 2.27% Croda International (CRDA) 7,688.00p 2.18% International Consolidated Airlines Group SA (CDI) (IAG) 142.88p 2.12% Admiral Group (ADM) 2,583.00p 1.85% FTSE 100 - Fallers Barclays (BARC) 153.06p -4.62% Royal Mail (RMG) 344.20p -2.96% British American Tobacco (BATS) 3,243.50p -1.68% BAE Systems (BA.) 722.40p -1.26% Avast (AVST) 569.20p -0.80% B&M European Value Retail S.A. (DI) (BME) 555.60p -0.61% Imperial Brands (IMB) 1,651.00p -0.54% Hargreaves Lansdown (HL.) 1,029.00p -0.44% Severn Trent (SVT) 2,967.00p -0.34% London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) 7,838.00p -0.33% FTSE 250 - Risers Polymetal International (POLY) 335.80p 38.19% Currys (CURY) 102.10p 9.96% Bridgepoint Group (Reg S) (BPT) 332.00p 4.90% Vesuvius (VSVS) 348.80p 4.56% IWG (IWG) 269.30p 3.82% Wood Group (John) (WG.) 172.40p 3.79% Liontrust Asset Management (LIO) 1,278.00p 3.73% Tullow Oil (TLW) 53.00p 3.60% Euromoney Institutional Investor (ERM) 956.00p 3.35% Aston Martin Lagonda Global Holdings (AML) 959.40p 3.14% FTSE 250 - Fallers Babcock International Group (BAB) 332.50p -3.62% HGCapital Trust (HGT) 424.00p -1.85% Bellway (BWY) 2,555.00p -1.73% Chemring Group (CHG) 322.00p -1.23% Investec (INVP) 490.90p -0.85% VinaCapital Vietnam Opportunity Fund Ltd. (VOF) 502.00p -0.79% Ashmore Group (ASHM) 233.40p -0.77% International Public Partnerships Ltd. (INPP) 170.60p -0.70% Clarkson (CKN) 3,865.00p -0.64% Vistry Group (VTY) 943.40p -0.57% March 29 (Reuters) - Russian hydroelectric power generation firm RusHydro said on Tuesday its Eurobond coupon payment was blocked by a bank. RusHydro requested permission from the UK sanctions office, the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI), to proceed with the payment, it said in a statement. Last week, RusHydro transferred a coupon payment of 812.5 million roubles ($9.3 million) on its rouble-denominated Eurobond to an agent. The payment on the 2022 Eurobond was planned for March 28. ($1 = 87.4000 roubles) (Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Chris Reese) LONDON, March 29 (Reuters) - Britain said on Tuesday that healthcare workers, social care staff and the most vulnerable will still get COVID-19 tests without any charge when it ends free testing for the general public next month. When he announced all coronavirus restrictions would be scrapped in February, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said free tests would end on April 1, saying the country could not afford their cost. Health minister Sajid Javid said people at risk of serious illness from COVID-19 would continue to get free tests if they developed symptoms, along with National Health Service staff, those working in social care and those in other high-risk jobs. COVID cases and hospitalisations have risen in recent weeks, but the government said more than 55% who tested positive in hospital for the virus had been admitted for other ailments. Meanwhile, booster vaccine shots are being rolled out for older and immunosuppressed people. Under the guidance from April 1, people who develop symptoms such as a high temperature or other respiratory infections will be advised to stay at home and avoid contact with other people until they feel better and no longer have a fever. Those who test positive for COVID will be advised to stay at home for five days and avoid any contact with other people for five days. "We have made enormous progress but will keep the ability to respond to future threats including potential variants," Javid said. (Reporting by Michael Holden Editing by Bill Berkrot) Scientists from Monash University and elsewhere have sequenced and assembled the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes of the helmeted honeyeater (Lichenostomus melanops cassidix), an emblem of the Australian state of Victoria. The helmeted honeyeater is a small woodland bird in the superfamily Meliphagoidea. Distinguished by its characteristic helmet of crown feathers, it is one of four subspecies of the yellow-tufted honeyeater (Lichenostomus melanops). Endemic to the state of Victoria, Australia, the helmeted honeyeater was declared Victorias bird emblem in 1971. It has been classified as Critically Endangered, and its sole population consists of just 250 individuals inhabiting the Yellingbo Nature Conservation Reserve. The helmeted honeyeater has been subject to intensive conservation management, including captive breeding. Despite this, the species population exhibits a small effective size, low genetic variation, and strong inbreeding depression. To increase the genetic health of the helmeted honeyeater, Monash University researcher Alexandra Pavlova and her colleagues are working together to create a genetic rescue program by introducing genes from a subspecies outside the small gene pool of the endangered population. Because the helmeted honeyeater is the last of its kind, genetic augmentation must come from a different subspecies, Dr. Pavlova said. However, this kind of genetic mixing is not common: conservation managers generally avoid crossing subspecies for fear of losing local adaptation and distinctiveness. These issues can now potentially be avoided given the availability of the birds first chromosome-length genome sequence that is, the quality of the data is so high that the assembled sequences of the genetic letters cover entire chromosomes rather than the more commonly available genome sequences that are less complete and continuous. In addition, the researchers also produced a high-density genetic map, which includes more than 50,000 marker positions. A genetic map with this many markers allows the scientists to follow exactly which part of every chromosome in an individual was inherited from each parent. The genome sequence and the genetic map will be used to get the right balance between rescuing the helmeted honeyeater from extinction through inbreeding, while retaining unique features that make it a helmeted honeyeater, said Dr. Diana Robledo-Ruiz, a researcher at Monash University. Having such exceptional genomic resources now available begins a new chapter for rescuing the helmeted honeyeater. However, without the passion, commitment, and work of hundreds of people and many organizations, the helmeted honeyeater would already be extinct. The results appear in the journal GigaScience. _____ Diana A. Robledo-Ruiz et al. 2022. Chromosome-length genome assembly and linkage map of a critically endangered Australian bird: the helmeted honeyeater. GigaScience 11: giac025; doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giac025 Press Release 16 March 2022 Genflow Biosciences Plc ("Genflow" or "the Company") Genflow Receives Non-Dilutive Grant Research Award from the Wallonia Region Genflow (LSE: GENF) is pleased to announce that its subsidiary, Genflow Biosciences SRL ("Genflow BE"), has received a non-dilutive research grant award of up to 3.375m from the regional government of Wallonia in southern Belgium SPW ("Service Public de Wallonie"). Genflow is a UK-based biotechnology company focused on longevity and the development of therapies to counteract the effects of aging and diseases associated with advanced age. Genflow will use the grant to expedite its planned research and development activity. The substantial grant funding is non-dilutive to Genflow shareholders and is a significant benefit to the Company alongside the relatively low operating costs that Genflow BE benefits from. The grant will cover two years of costs of the pre-clinical research and development program 'AAV/SIRT6 Gene Therapy for the Treatment of Progeria' conducted by Genflow BE within the European Community. The total financed program is for up to 3,375,770 covering 70% of the Group's EU research and development. These funds are in addition to the placing monies the Company received from its oversubscribed placing at Admission. Genflow BE will receive its first half yearly tranche of 767,252.61 immediately which will put the Company ahead of its planned research and development schedule and will accelerate Genflow's development of novel gene therapies for improving healthy aging. Subsequent tranches will be released every 6 months and a review will take place with SPW every 6 months to update on Genflow BE's research progress. Dr Eric Leire, Founder and CEO of Genflow Biosciences, said: "We are incredibly delighted and honoured to receive this grant which will expedite the research and development programme Genflow conducts in the EU. I congratulate the team at Genflow for securing this supportive funding which validates the belief in our company and our long-term vision. This grant will enable Genflow to further expand its research which is designed to allow people to live longer, healthier lives. "Access to non-dilutive public funding is highly prized and much sought-after, the support from SPW is a significant advantage to Genflow and will support our R&D efforts while helping us to maintain relatively low operating costs." For further information please contact: Genflow Biosciences Dr Eric Leire Chief Executive via Tancredi +44 203 434 2330 Clear Capital Markets Ltd Corporate Broker Jonathan Critchley Keith Swann +44 203 869 6086 +44 203 897 0981 Tancredi Intelligent Communication Media Relations Salamander Davoudi Helen Humphrey Benedetta Negri da Oleggio +44 7957 549 906 +44 7449 226 720 +44 7838 029 970 genflowbio@tancredigroup.com About Genflow Genflow is a UK-based biotechnology company established in 2020. The Company is developing gene therapies designed to target the aging process and to reduce and delay the incidence of age-related diseases. This will be done through novel therapeutics targeting aging in humans by using adeno-associated virus ("AAV") vectors to deliver copies of the Sirtuin-6 ("SIRT6") gene variant that is found in centenarians into cells. Its mission is to increase understanding of the factors that control and impact lifespan. Genflow researches, develops, and commercialises therapeutic solutions to lengthen health span, the amount of time we live in good health, creating biological interventions that enable longer and healthier lives. Genflow is dedicated to the development and commercialisation of novel therapeutics targeting aging in dogs and humans. By treating aging, Genflow Biosciences can contribute to a decrease in healthcare costs and lessen the emotional and societal burden that comes with an aging population. To learn more visit https://genflowbio.com/ For consumers in Spain, a headline measure announced by Prime Minister Sanchez on Monday and due for cabinet approval on Tuesday is a twenty cent per litre cut in the price of fuel. Initially, this reduction was only for the transport sector, but it is to be extended to all consumers and will be in effect until at least June 30, once the official announcement is made. It is expected to come into force from the first of April. Responding to the Spanish government statement on Monday, Balearic government spokesperson Iago Negueruela said that the regional administration would be studying the measures in order to see ways in which these can be complemented. In the Balearic parliament on Tuesday, President Armengol is expected to announce additional measures to support sectors most affected by rising prices. The Balearic government, employers associations and unions have all welcomed the Sanchez announcement, but it is felt that measures are insufficient for the Balearics. Negueruela noted on Monday that the Spanish government has included "urgent and necessary" measures proposed by the Balearic government, such as limiting increases in rents and extending tax cuts for electricity bills. Joan Laporta has declared that he fully believes Barcelona can secure this season's LaLiga Santander title, should they maintain their current run of form. The Barcelona president discussed his side's current form and a range of other topics in a radio interview on Monday night and he reflected on the title race, with his side currently 12 points behind but with a game in hand. "I am not ready to accept just winning the Europa League and finishing second in LaLiga Santander," he said in that interview with RAC1. "I want to win LaLiga Santander. I truly believe in it, we have the team to win it and we have reached the final stretch playing well. "The team is working well and they believe even more than I do that we can win LaLiga Santander. "If we keep it up, we will be champions." Laporta also stated that there are no plans in place for a return to the Camp Nou for Lionel Messi. "I haven't received any messages from Leo [Messi] or from his close circle to return to Barcelona," he said. "We are not considering it. We are building a new team, with new people, together with experts in the field. There is symbiosis. "But Leo is Leo. The best player in the world, the Ballon d'Or winner. "It is not a step back. We are not considering it, but he deserves respect." The Barcelona president commented on Ousmane Dembele's contract situation, and stated that it is no closer to being resolved. "I like [Dembele] a lot," he said. "He is a fantastic player. However, his situation is similar to that of Sergi Roberto. "Although we like him and how he plays, there are wage limits. "With his agent, no one knows. He is a box of surprises." Laporta also stated that the European Super League project is far from over. "The relationship with Florentino [Perez] is cordial and civil," he said. "We are in contact about the Super League, and the project continues. "I believe that there will be a constructive dialogue with UEFA." It was a moment where you had to ask those sitting beside you whether it actually just happened as your eyes perceived it to, yet in the aftermath of Will Smith's slap on Chris Rock, there are serious questions over whether the former's Oscar should be taken away. Smith won the Best Actor award at Sunday's ceremony, however before he was even presented with the trophy he made his way onto the stage. Will Smith: I want to apologize to the Academy" A joke made by Rock towards the haircut of Jada Pinkett-Smith angered the Men in Black star, with it later emerging that his wife is battling a hair-loss condition called alopecia. "The Academy does not condone violence in any form," an organisation statement read shortly after. "Tonight we are delighted to celebrate the winners of the 94th Academy Awards, who deserve this moment of recognition from their peers and film lovers around the world." Celebrity reaction to Smith slap Many have taken to Twitter following the incident and Judd Apatow was highly critical of Smith's behaviour. "Knocked Up" Apatow said in a now-deleted tweet. "He could have killed him. That's pure out of control rage and violence. They've heard a million jokes about them in the last three decades. They are not freshman in the world of Hollywood and comedy. He lost his mind." Stars react on social media to Will Smith hitting Chris Rock at Sunday's Oscar ceremony Meanwhile comedian Fortune Feimster tweeted: "Someone in the audience charged the stage Friday night during my opener's set and attempted to throw the speaker, started taking swings at the people trying to stop her and pushed down a security guard. It's scary times. So, no, I don't find someone getting hit on stage amusing." How could the Academy act? Whilst most have laughed the incident off, or even suggested Smith's actions were valid, there are calls for the Academy Awards to uphold their own code of conduct and take back the award given to Smith. Will Smith arrives at the Vanity Fair party after slapping Chris Rock during the Oscars ceremony AP "There is no place in the Academy for people who abuse their status, power or influence in a way that violates recognised standards of decency, the academy categorically opposes any form of abuse," explained the Academy Awards conduct charter written by CEO, Dawn Hudson. The charter came into being in 2017 after a string of sexual scandals within Hollywood were exposed, although in basic linguistic terms, Smith's act towards Rock was a form of abuse. An obvious pattern emerges here. A brutal and endemic scheme of torture that is used indiscriminately by US imperialism against its detainees guilty or otherwise. by Oliver Brotherton While the US and its allies decry Russias brutality in Ukraine, a recently declassified report has shed light on some of the practices of western imperialism. It has been revealed that the CIA spent three years using a detainee in Afghanistan as a puppet to train interrogators in torture methods. This individual was subject to senseless brutality, despite providing no useful intelligence. Ammar al-Baluchi, a Pakistani national with links to the 9/11 attacks, was held in the so-called Salt Pit: an extralegal detention centre or black site from 2003 to 2006. There, he faced all kinds of physical and psychological torment, before being moved to the infamous Guantanamo Bay, where he has been held without trial ever since. Anmars ordeal has left him with potentially severe brain damage. A school for torture The descriptions of Ammars handling by US agents paint a grim picture. Sleep and food deprivation were standard, often lasting several days at a time. Whilst sleep-deprived, Ammar would be forced to remain standing, sometimes for up to 82 hours, before being taken in for interrogation. Here, the horrors only continued. Enhanced interrogation techniques (a euphemism for torture methods) employed by the CIA included repeatedly slapping his face and chest, forcing his body into uncomfortable stress positions for long periods of time, shackling him naked to the floor while 12 or 13 agents threw buckets of icy water over him, and walling covering his head in a towel before hitting it against a plank of wood. These barbaric methods were, and likely still are, common practice in the secret detention facilities of US imperialism around the world. Most disgusting of all is the fact that Ammar was not just being abused to extract information from him. His torture chamber was a classroom for aspiring CIA interrogators. The report describes the agents present as students doing on-the-job training. One CIA agent interviewed for the report, noted he needed to do substantial learning on the job and felt behind the curve, in part because he needed to practice interrogation techniques. This practice involved lining up to take turns beating and walling Ammar. Sickeningly, when trainee torturers did not get the method quite right, they would have to continue assaulting Ammar until they could be certified by an expert. One trainee had trouble doing the facial slap correctly and was too much into it, with his arm too far extended to do the slap correctly. These merciless beatings were not conducted by a few bad actors. This was all a standard part of the certification process for aspiring interrogators irrespective of the damage it was doing to Ammar. The report also states that CIA agents probably made the decision to use enhanced measures on Ammar before the detainee arrived at [the black site]. This means that the use of torture methods had nothing to do with Ammars willingness to cooperate or the information they wished to gather from him, as is often the justification given by apologists of reactionary governments employing such methods. Rather, he was most likely singled out arbitrarily to be a training dummy for the CIA before he had even begun interrogations. Crimes swept under the carpet Predictably, while the declassified report is critical of some of the more extreme techniques employed by agents, it finds that, for the most part, nothing in Ammars case was out of the ordinary. Walling, for example, was found to be completely legitimate, and Ammars permanent brain damage was merely the result of a few agents [applying] some of the measures exuberantly. The reports convoluted defence of the CIA attempts to minimise the extreme violence perpetrated. One interviewed agent states, Ammar could have thought the facial and belly slaps were beatings, even though they were approved EITs. Similarly, the report states: A session in which several interrogators had to take turns walling the much smaller detainee because they became fatigued suggests that Ammar might reasonably feel that he was beaten. Here, we are supposed to take solace in the fact that while Ammar may have felt like he was beaten, this is merely a factual error on his part, since the methods were simply approved interrogation techniques. This is cynical wordplay worthy of George Orwells 1984: It is not torture until we say it is! But the apologists for torture do not stop there. The experiences of one CIA agent are elaborated in detail: All the detainees who she met at [the black site] told her they were tortured... She said she does not recall Ammar being unique from other detainees in his complaints about torture; she heard those complaints every day. She later described Ammar as a little bit of a hypochondriac [!] These remarks show the callous disregard that US imperialism has for human life. The CIA agent airily dismisses Ammars savage treatment because all extra-legal black site detainees make that complaint, suggesting that Ammars sense of being grievously assaulted is probably just down to a bit of hypochondria! Interrogation without information Ammars guilt or connection to terrorism notwithstanding, the torture he faced was completely useless in terms of yielding information: Agency officers focused more on whether Ammar was compliant than on the quality of the information he was providing Ammar fabricated the information he provided while undergoing [torture]... he was terrified and lied to get Agency officers to stop the measures. This lines up with the findings of other reports into advanced interrogation: prisoners subject to torture will ultimately say anything in order to put a stop to their ordeal, making any intelligence they provide worthless. In addition, the report raises doubts that Ammar ever knew anything in the first place: Ammar lacked knowledge of imminent threats, but Agency interrogators and analysts were convinced he was withholding information based upon their analysis of Ammars connections to Khalid Shaykh Muhammad [a key architect of 9/11] and what they assumed Ammar could have known. Not only did CIA agents make little to no attempt to gather reliable information from Ammar, it is unclear whether he even knew anything at all. The CIA carried out three years of brutal torture on the basis of their assumption. A history of torture Ammars case is only the latest revelation in the litany of US imperialisms crimes in the Middle East. A well-known example is the human rights abuse that took place in Abu Ghraib, the US prison maintained in Iraq during the War on Terror. US soldiers were found to have shackled detainees to corpses, kept them naked and in disgusting conditions for long periods of time, as well as a host of other physical, sexual and psychological abuses. At least one man was killed under torture. In addition to the systemic and widespread use of torture, a Red Cross report at the time found that 70-90 percent of those being held at Abu Ghraib had been mistakenly arrested. Similar reports arose of US soldiers transferring thousands of prisoners to Iraqi security facilities, where torture methods such as beating, lashings and even burnings were known to take place. There are countless other accusations of torture that have been levelled against the US in recent years. An obvious pattern emerges here. A brutal and endemic scheme of torture that is used indiscriminately by US imperialism against its detainees guilty or otherwise. What is clear is that no inquiry and no amount of scandal will put a stop to the cruelty at the heart of US imperialism. Likewise, the hollow reforms suggested by government reports and capitalist politicians will not end the barbarism of the CIA and the capitalist state in general. US imperialism is the most reactionary force on earth, responsible for the most heinous crimes imaginable. There are no depths the capitalists will not plumb to defend their profits and spheres of interest. We must banish this war, torture and savagery to humanitys dim and distant past, by overthrowing the system that gives rise to them. 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Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 125 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 157 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x55e83830c780)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 948 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x55e83824bb60)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/2011159162/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x55e83830c780)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1302 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 955 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x55e83824bb60)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x55e8385c86a0)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1300 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 433 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x55e83824bb60)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x55e83824bb60)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x55e8346cef10)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x55e8382237c0)') called at (eval 592) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x55e8382237c0)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0 Advertisement In addition to analyzing the TG of four human donors, the researchers examined two mouse models of headache.This gave the researchers new ideas on which cells should be study further." said Jochen K. Lennerz, MD, PhD, of the Center for Integrated Diagnostics in the Department of Pathology at MGH. Lennerz's lab performed the complex tissue-harvesting procedures needed to extract TG, which is located inside the skull but contains neurons that stimulate the teeth, eyes and other facial systems. "The information in the researchers' atlas, which is generally available online, will trigger new investigations based on the molecular nature of different types of pain, such as tooth pain.Going forward, the researchers plan to improve the current atlas by deploying additional human tissue. Through genetic therapies, they hope atlas will help researchers target specific cells they have identified and develop more selective pain treatment methods." Renthal said. "Renthal received a research funding from Teva Pharmaceuticals and is a member of the AbbVie Scientific Advisory Board and funding for this work was primarily provided by the Migraine Research Foundation and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Researchers are also supported by grants from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and National Institute of Drug Abuse, and by Teva Pharmaceuticals and Brigham and Women's Hospital Women's Brain Initiative and Neurotechnology studio.Source: Medindia Another day, another Lock Upp controversy! If you've been keeping a close watch on Bollywood star Kangana Ranaut's new reality show, you'd know that it's almost like Big Boss' little brother in many respects. Backed by Ekta Kapoor, the show began with a total of 16 contestants who are locked together in a jail-type house. MX Player The contestants include names like Poonam Pandey, Shivam Sharma, Payal Rohatgi, Saisha Shinde, and Tehseen Poonawalla. The show's viewership must have scintillated in recent times due to its list of controversies, with Tehseen once revealing that he was once asked to sleep with a big Indian industrialist's wife. From what we've seen so far, the show has everything to satisfy the appetite of India's masala gossip cravers. Now, in what was something even more controversial on the show, Bollywood's Iranian actress Mandana Karimi accused contestant Ali Merchant of masturbating on the show. Mandana Karimi MX Player As you'd know, Karimi, who is a former Big Boss contestant made her wild card entry in the show after a series of evictions. However, it looks like she's already in the mix of things on the show as she made some shocking accusations against Ali Merchant. The actress, who starred in Kya Kool Hai Hum 3 complained to Kangana that Ali had masturbated in the washroom. So, the other day, I went to the washroom first. After me, Saisha had to go to the washroom. She was really upset the whole day. After me, when she went to the washroom, there was only one person who used the bathroom It was Ali. And someone mas******ed. And it was there. said Mandana. To this Ali could be seen saying, Can somebody please check the timing? This is the most disgusting thing ever seen yaar. With there being no proof of either, Kangana decided to intervene and invariably had something to say to Mandana. MX Player Look, when you all share a house together, there is only one toilet. I am no insaaf ka taraazu. For me, if you encounter anybody's fluid, be it saliva, spit, nasal, or sexual genitals, aap uss insaan ko request karo to clean it. Even if it is sh*t stain. You are saying he has traumatized you. Your mental stability is shaken. This is your judgment. Isme kitni sachhai hai, we have to give the benefit of doubt to Ali. There are so many contestants using the bathroom and you are only targeting him, I can also say this is a kind of harassment. Also, whatever is said and done, mas******ion is something people openly discuss. Contestants are living here for so many days, I thought Ali might have seriously done something. You are doing so much of ho-halla around it. It doesnt work like that Mandana. We are all adults, we all know what body fluids are. I dont know why whatever I am saying its being taken as if I am shaming someone. I am trying to have a conversation. Kangana replies, You are trying to have a conversation, but I have to see a democratic way for all the people to exist. We use public restrooms and there is so much stink and things we see and think of as the person using the bathroom before us. But the stink might already be there. So you have to give the benefit of the doubt. said Kangana. Wow! By the looks of things, Lock Upp looks to be getting into the same zone as Big Boss. Source: Koimoi John Abraham, who was last seen in Satyameva Jayate 2, is all set to entertain fans with his next release, Attack. Featuring Rakul Preet Singh and Jacqueline Fernandez as the leading ladies, the film promises to deliver an action-packed spectacle never-seen-before in Indian cinema. As the movie is only a few days away from its release, the team is currently busy promoting it. Recently, during a promotional event for Attack, John got irritated when a journalist asked about the unrealistic action sequences in his films and reacted aggressively. The Batla House star called the reported "dumb" and told him that he left his brain at home. Yes, you read that right! It all started when the journalist asked, "Aapke films mein action hota hai, lekin action ke overdose ho jaati hai, aap 4-5 logo ke saath fight karte hai accha lagta hai, lekin 200 logo ke saath fight kar rahe hai, bike ko hawa mein uda rahe hai, chopper ko haath se rok rahe hai, toh aisa lagta hai zyada ho jaata hai (Theres action in your movies, but sometimes theres an overdose of the same. We like when you fight with 4-5 people, but sometimes you fight with 200 men, throw away bikes and stop chopper with your hands, that looks like a little too much)". After hearing this, the actor intervened and cleared if he was talking about Attack, but the journalist emphasized that the question was about Satyameva Jayate 2, which was released last year. John replied, "Main toh Attack ki baat kar raha hu, agar aapko isse problem hai (I am talking about Attack. If you have problem with this), toh I am sorry. I really offended you". The Dhoom actor again mocked the journalist while answering another question about his fitness and that's when the conference took an ugly turn. John said, "More than physically fit, I am trying to be mentally fit to answer some crazy questions as people are so dumb. Sorry sir, aap dimaag chod kar aa gaye (You left your brain at home). I apologise for you. On behalf of everyone, main aapke liye apologise karta hu, koi baat nahi, youll do better next time". While answering the third consecutive question, the Bollywood star again took a swing at the reporter and called him "uncle" this time. He said, "If you ask the same ghisa-pita question like uncle, youll have a problem. Youll have to ask the questions of today". You can watch the video below: Looks like the debacle of Satyameva Jayate 2 has really affected John as he couldn't move on since the journalist mentioned the film at the event. All we can say is, he should have handled the situation more gracefully instead of making some nasty comments. Do you agree? Share your views about the incident in the comments below. Coming back to Attack, the film has been directed by Lakshya Raj Anand and is all set to hit the theatres on April 1. The 94th Academy Award was supposed to be memorable for Will Smith as he won his first Best Actor trophy and became only the fifth black actor in history to win in the category. However, a few minutes before his Best Actor win, the King Richard star courted controversy when he stepped onto the stage unannounced and slapped presenter Chris Rock for cracking a joke on Wills wife and actress Jada Pinkett Smith. The Academy Unfortunately, the slap controversy hijacked the ceremony itself as it became the talking point all over the world and continues to be one. Hours after the slap row and Wills Oscar win, a lot of Indians on social media were reminded of Karan Johars 2019 dud Student of the Year 2 starring Tiger Shroff, Ananya Panday, Tara Sutaria and Aditya Seal. Many joked that it is because of Will Smiths weird cameo in the film that he has behaved in such a way at the Oscars. Others quipped that a Dharma Productions actor is now an Oscar winner. Clearly, an attempt at trolling. One user wrote, I feel Will Smith has become overdramatic after working in 'Student Of The Year 2'. #WillAndChris #WillSmith. Another wrote, Will Smith hasn't been himself since the Student of the Year cameo. One tweet read, Will Smith did a cameo in the movie Student of the Year 2, if his temper for cheapness is that high , there would have been a bloody brawl for even offering him the cameo. This Oscar thing was scripted. One user also pointed out that Will Smith needed therapy since he danced in the Puneet Malhotra directorial, Will Smith needed therapy well before today. Precisely when he decided to fly down to Mumbai just to dance in student of the year 2. Dharma Productions Check out some of the reactions below: Will Smith hasn't been himself since the Student of the Year cameo Vivek Mani (@vivek__mani) March 28, 2022 I feel Will Smith has become overdramatic after working in 'Student Of The Year 2'. #WillAndChris #WillSmith Dhiraj Sagar (@Dhiriously) March 28, 2022 Will Smith did a cameo in the movie Student of the Year 2, if his temper for cheapness is that high , there would have been a bloody brawl for even offering him the cameo. This Oscar thing was scripted Beer me (@bagalwalanerd) March 28, 2022 I already knew Will Smith is a bit crazy when he agreed to dance in Student of the Year. Vinayak Poudel (@poudelvinayak) March 28, 2022 Will Smith of Student of the Year 2 slaps the mosquito from Bee Movie at the #Oscars name cannot be blank (@italiantata) March 28, 2022 does anyone rmr when will smith was in student of the year two karishma (@dreamlabpdf) March 28, 2022 I can't believe someone from Student of the Year 2 won an Oscar Melanie Easton (@MelanieJEaston) March 28, 2022 Say what you want about Will Smith's behaviour at Oscars 2022, that #SOTY2 cameo will still remain his lowest moment! Sreeju Sudhakaran (@sree_thru_me) March 28, 2022 That's just Karan Johar spotting talent but y'all keep insisting he hires only star kids. https://t.co/HgOeRo4AFv pic.twitter.com/EYRSrmSpkG Faraz Mir's public record of thoughts (@MillenialB00mer) March 28, 2022 Never thought someone from Student of the year 2 will ever win an Oscar.#WillSmith pic.twitter.com/xD4o9Jg2iE Parth Parekh (@Parth__Parekh) March 28, 2022 Will Smith appeared in a random cameo during a dance competition sequence in the film. He danced with the lead stars and left the scene. Back in 2018, when IAS topper Tina Dabi announced her wedding to fellow officer Athar Amir Khan, the two became internets favourite couple in no time. While she was all India topper, he was rank 2 and their love story was nothing short of a movie script. The short lived marriage ended in over two years but today, Tina announced her engagement to 2013batch IAS officer Pradeep Gawande and shared a happy picture of both of them. Tina and Athars interfaith wedding was a cause of celebration of love for them, but post their divorce it opened a can of opinions on social media where the couple received a lot of backlash over Love Jihad and some people calling out the woman for making the wrong decision for marrying a Muslim man. Sadly, the same divide seems to have come back this time around when she posted about her new beginning with Dr Pradeep. Social media is abuzz with terms like love Jihad and ghar wapsi all over again. This is the perfect meltdown movement for Liberandus. Congrarulations #TinaDabi for ur new chapter in personal life after getting divorced from Athar Amir Khan pic.twitter.com/RNP12aEhgM Nikita Dhyani (@MeDhyani) March 29, 2022 We welcome Tina Dabi decision to marry a Hindu #pradeepgawande . Hindu girls must expose love jihad. #TinaDabi #LoveJihad pic.twitter.com/YcKBKvid80 Nandini Das (@DasNandini97) March 29, 2022 Welcome Back to Real Life I wish every Hindu Girl learn from your past#LoveJihad #TinaDabi #LoveJihad pic.twitter.com/h4TY4CDuo7 Vishal Sharma (@thatrealvishal) March 29, 2022 While a part of the countrys youth is hailing her decision to marry simply because she is marrying a Hindu man and its being welcomed as a ghar wapsi , some people are thankfully congratulating her simply for marrying a human of her choice, which is what is important. Marrying a younger or an older one is completely a personal choice but marrying a right person is more important... #TinaDabi Palvi Prajapati (@PalviPrajapati) March 29, 2022 #breaking : UPSC Topper #tinadabi remarried to Dr #pradeepgawande 13yrs older. I wish for their love and successful life ahead pic.twitter.com/hL30mWM3Bk lydiaapynz (@ludiaapynz) March 29, 2022 Age is no barrier in love. IAS Pradeep Ganwade is 13 years senior to #TinaDabi. Many congratulations to Tina, a youth icon and best wishes for a new innings. pic.twitter.com/I2kuCDO6iG (@ecT7ir6wjuGEPiM) March 29, 2022 Dr Pradeep completed his MBBS before sitting for the UPSC exams. At present, he is serving as the Director of the Archaeology & Museums, Rajasthan and this will also be his second marriage. In a democracy where on one hand we are trying to move forward in terms of our liberal thoughts, a part of our society can still not let go of the religious propagandas associated with ones surname. However, we hope their love story survives the test of time and Tina Dabi's decision to remarry is considered to be nothing out of the ordinary. Heres wishing the couple a life full of love. In 2021, the Sulli Deals controversy started surfacing where an app of the same name was being used to auction Muslim women. Despite much outrage, no arrests were made. Another app called Bulli Bai used pictures of more than 100 Muslim women (many of whom were influential personalities from media and civil society). It was then the police arrested the accused. Niraj Bishnoi was nabbed on 6th January and the creator of Sulli Deals, Aumkareshwar Thakur was arrested three days later. Indian Express After almost two months, the Delhi Court granted bail to both accused, who are students, on humanitarian grounds'. The court said that the culprits are first-time offenders and continuing imprisonment will be detrimental to their future and well-being. Rediff However, the judgement is not sitting well with some people and they are expressing their disappointment on social media. While some are calling it unfair to the Muslim women of India who were publicly auctioned and humiliated, others said that the court is biased toward the preparators. Here is how people reacted to the decision of the Delhi HC granting bail to the two accused. "Bulli bai, Sulli deals" creator gets bail on humanitarian ground! Selling muslim women online is indeed humane in india. Gabbar (@Gabbar0099) March 29, 2022 Where that Humanitarian Grounds disappear when it comes to a minority? Why that did not apply to old & ailing Stan Swamy or pregnant Safoora Zargar? https://t.co/0IlLPVOEIL via @ndtv Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) March 29, 2022 Bulli Bai' app case accused Niraj Bishnoi and 'Sulli Deals' app creator Omkareshwar Thakur have been granted bail on humanitarian grounds. 83 years old Stan Swamy, suffering from medical condition, was denied straw and sipper. Cryptic Miind (@Cryptic_Miind) March 29, 2022 After doing an inhuman act, getting bail on humanitarian grounds! Gaurish (@Kamal07683466) March 29, 2022 Its hard to overlook the fact that if the Sulli Deal culprit had been arrested and punished in time, then Bulli Bai would not have happened because the creator would have known the consequences and thought a million times before objectifying and demeaning Muslim women online like that. iStock People can make this about religion, as they are on Twitter and other social media platforms where they are claiming that if the boys were from any other faith, they would not have been spared, but, ultimately, its the women who have been wronged, not one religion. Both accused being granted bail within two months of committing the heinous cybercrime further shakes our faith regarding the security of women and the crimes against them. System error error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. context: ... 21: 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: 28:
29: ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25 /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:948 /var/cache/mason/obj/2011159162/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17 /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149 Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 125 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 157 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x55e838827388)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 948 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x55e838dfb468)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/2011159162/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x55e838827388)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1302 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 955 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x55e838dfb468)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x55e83882c8e0)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1300 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 433 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x55e838dfb468)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x55e838dfb468)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x55e8346f3b68)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x55e838debf40)') called at (eval 592) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x55e838debf40)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0 New arrival of China-donated jabs helps Cambodia's COVID-19 vaccination Xinhua) 14:24, March 29, 2022 PHNOM PENH, March 29 (Xinhua) -- A plane carrying another batch of China-donated Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine arrived in the capital of Cambodia on Tuesday amid the country's booster shots vaccination drive. The arrival of the new batch was livestreamed on Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen's official Facebook page, the state-run National Television of Cambodia (TVK), and the country's online news provider Fresh News. Ministry of Health Secretary of State Yok Sambath and Wu Guoquan, economic and commercial counselor of the Chinese Embassy in Cambodia, welcomed the arrival at the Phnom Penh International Airport. "Today, we received more than 1.5 million doses of Sinovac vaccine, and tomorrow (Wednesday), another batch of nearly 3.5 million doses will arrive in Cambodia through two planes," Sambath told reporters. Sambath expressed her profound gratitude to China, saying that the new donation was another testament to the ironclad friendship between Cambodia and China. "China is our major vaccine supplier," she said. "This new vaccine will be used to support our booster shot campaign and to vaccinate our children aged from 3 to 5 years old." She said vaccines are highly effective against both infection and serious illness as well as death. Wu said the donation highlights the ironclad friendship and all-weather relationship between China and Cambodia. "As long as COVID-19 is not over, China's support for Cambodia's fight against the pandemic will not end," he said. The southeast Asian nation has so far received a total of almost 50 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from three sources through bilateral procurement, the World Health Organization (WHO)'s COVAX Facility, and donations. Of the total, about 84 percent were bought from or donated by China. To date, Cambodia has administered one dose of COVID-19 vaccines to 14.8 million people, or 92.5 percent of its 16-million population, the Ministry of Health said. Of them, 13.99 million, or 87.4 percent, have been fully vaccinated with two required shots, 7.91 million, or 49 percent, have taken a third dose or booster shot, and 1.15 million, or 7.2 percent, have got a fourth dose, the ministry added. Director-general and spokesman of the Health Ministry Hok Kim Cheng said Chinese vaccines have helped Cambodia to achieve strong herd immunity and to revive its economy. "Chinese vaccines are essential for Cambodia to save people's lives and to stabilize our health system," he told Xinhua. With its high vaccination rates, Cambodia has fully resumed its socio-economic activities and reopened its borders to vaccinated travelers without quarantine since November last year. 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Midland County Sheriff Myron Greene and City of Midland Police Chief Nicole Ford discussed that particular challenge with residents Wednesday at Riverside Place as they celebrated Law Day. The duo made their remarks while chatting with about 75 residents in the newly-redone dining room of Riverside on a gray, rainy day, advising about technical, personal and financial problems among Midland County's approximately 85,000 residents that might arise, and whom to contact if they do. While coming into their Midland positions differently, and with different backgrounds, the duo shares common enforcement goals, common problems and recognize that personal and not legal remedies are sometimes the answer for running afoul of laws. An elected county official, Greene is a lifelong resident of Midland County. He graduated from Midland Public Schools, attended Delta College, the Northeastern Basic Police Academy and later Ferris State University. Greene has been employed with the Sheriffs Office for over half of his life. He began his career in 1992 when he was hired as a Marine Patrol deputy and over the course of his career has worked in nearly every division; mainly Road Patrol. Sheriff Greene was successful in the August 2020 Primary Election with 59% of the vote and was unopposed in November, becoming Midland Countys 32rd Sheriff on Jan. 1, 2021. Ford was sworn in as Midland's first female chief of police in February 2020, bringing 22 years of law experience, varied experience she needed to help deal early with state and national emergencies on a local level. The product of a national search, she held the interim and the police chief jobs in Flat Rock, Michigan, and has unique experience with the Huron Clinton Metroparks Police Department and as a sergeant and patrol officer with the Northfield Township Police Department. She said that police working in the same facilities here with the county is unique for her. It makes communication better. Not anticipating the complete failure of four dams on the Tittabawassee River two months later, nor a national isolation mandate due to the pandemic shortly thereafter, Ford tackled those problems head-on while temporarily working on department challenges as time permitted. The chief and the sheriff did not address specific frauds, instead telling the mostly senior group of citizens that they might have to be more alert and less trusting than in prior years, since in this electronic age getting people and money to separate from each other is easier than ever. Greene began the hour-plus session with moderator and resident John Ruppel, by saying that if someone calls asking for money, make sure of their identity and why they are calling. "Don't assume if someone calls with an emergency asking for a plane ticket or to bail money that they are that person. We grew up in a different age," he said. "Check it out." Ford said that goes for other personal things too, such as who you encounter on trails, including who you meet on the trails downtown and the type of charity requests one receives. Greene and Ford left some pamphlets outlining what to do in situations including numbers and people you need to know with the residents and told them that they are available at the Midland Law Enforcement Center, 2727 Rodd Street. Telephone numbers are listed on city and county websites online. Ralph E. Wirtz is retired Managing Editor for the Midland Daily News and Riverside resident. Metro Creative Graphics A Caro man will spend between five and 30 years in prison after he was convicted of second-degree criminal sexual conduct in Huron County Circuit Court. William Gerald Diehl, 27, was charged with three counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct with a person under the age of 13 a 15-year felony. A habitual offender, third notice, had been added to the charges. MECOSTA COUNTY Deputies with the Mecosta County Sheriffs Office responded to the following calls from March 24-29. All calls may not be reported. All suspects are assumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Deputies responded to two car-deer crashes. A report of unlawfully driving away of an automobile was made in the 8000 block of 80th Avenue in Morton Township. A male left the keys in his 2002 Black/Silver GMC pickup. The vehicle was taken the night before and then found abandoned the following morning in Isabella County. A report of larceny of catalytic convertors was made in the 22000 block of Northland Drive. Incident occurred at the County Parks maintenance building. Someone stole two converters off from the county parks pickup trucks between January and March 24. A report of abuse was made in the 800 block of West Avenue in Big Rapids Township. An 87-year-old female allegedly tried to bite a 77-year-old female. Both are in the dementia ward. A suspicious incident was reported in the 11000 block of 55th Avenue in Wheatland Township. A 2012 Gray Volkswagen was parked on the property. The vehicle had a busted out front windshield and had damage from a fire. It was unknown how long the vehicle had been parked on the property. A report of a run away juvenile was made in the 200 block of Water Street in Paris. A juvenile did not ride the bus home from the Big Rapids Middle School. The juvenile was later located at his uncle's girlfriends house. A report of harassment was made in the 100 block of South First Street in Mecosta Township. A female reported that she and her boyfriend broke up in October 2021 and he has continued to contact and harass her via texts and social media despite her efforts to block him. Deputies provided assistance in the 200 block of South Sheridan Avenue in Remus. According to deputies, a female had been kicked out of Our Brother's Keeper earlier in the day and was dropped off in Remus by MOTA. The female had been waiting for a ride from Muskegon for over four hours. A female called Community Mental Health crisis line stating she was suicidal. Female was located near Morley Motel and she stated she was suicidal and suffering from bipolar and psychosis. She wanted to go to Spectrum Health Big Rapids and was transported without incident. Deputies responded to a car-deer crash. A turfing complaint was made in the 19000 block of 14 Mile in Big Rapids Township. The incident occurred March 19. A civil matter was reported in the 14000 block of 110th Avenue. The landlord reported that tenants did damage to the residence. Landlord was advised that it was not a police matter and to sue them. A domestic issue was reported in the 11000 block of Northland Drive in Mecosta Township. A verbal domestic only occurred between a boyfriend and girlfriend. The male went voluntarily to Community Mental Health to talk with a case worker. A warrant arrest was executed in the 20000 block of Waterway Drive in Chippewa Township. A male was arrested on his original felony DV warrant at his residence. Lodged without incident. Deputies responded to a property damage accident near Northland Drive and 18 Mile Road in Green Township. A female driver allegedly missed the curve and took out some mailboxes and reflectors. She then left walking southbound on Northland Drive where deputies located her by 205th Avenue. She was subsequently arrested for operating while intoxicate. SPDX Contest 2022 cancelled After careful deliberation, the SP DX Contest Committee, together with Polish Amateur Radio Union (PZK) and the SP DX Club, has decided to cancel the 2022 SP DX Contest Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Poland has so far taken in more than 2 million refugees. Polish radio amateurs offer Ukrainian refugees accommodation in their homes and their help and services in any way they can. Under these exceptional circumstances, the organisers have decided that this years SP DX Contest will be cancelled. Source IARU Region 1 https://iaru-r1.org/ After the acrimonious departure of previous Huron County Director of Assigned Counsel Diana Kessler, her replacement has been named. Walt Salens, of the Salens & Salens, P.C. law firm in Bad Axe, has been named to fill the role, replacing the departed Kessler. A lawyer with 34 years of experience, Salens works as a general practitioner as a retainer and in court appointed roles. He has handled murder trials in Huron, Tuscola, and Sanilac counties. Ive tried just about every case there is in circuit and district court, Salens said. Salens was one of the county defense lawyers who worked to establish program protocols and guidelines when it started in 2018, with Huron County being one of the first counties in the state to have a director of assigned counsel. He also applied for the position the first time it was available to applicants. The commissioners asked members of the Huron County Bar Association to make a recommendation for who they think should fill the role. The association recommended Salens and Andrew Lockard, another lawyer based in Bad Axe, as candidates, though they recommended the commissioners go with Salens. We believe that both candidates possess the necessary experience, skills, and demeanor to serve as the director of assigned counsel and are highly qualified for the position, the associations members wrote in a letter to Commissioner John Bodis. Salens said the concern of local lawyers was that when the county hired Kessler, it did not consult with the association on that decision, so this was the commissioners way of trying to right that wrong. The director of assigned counsel is a part-time independent contractor responsible for operating Huron Countys indigent criminal defense program to ensure that adult defendants receive competent legal representation in criminal proceedings. The director monitors appointed defense attorneys representing indigent defendants at first appearance and will represent those defendants if no panel arraignment attorney is available. The director is also responsible for other tasks like screening, selecting, and maintaining a roster of eligible attorneys for case assignment, evaluating attorney performance, implementing a mentorship program for attorneys with less than two years of experience, and performing other duties associated with the provision of competent and consistent legal representation. For his services during the current county fiscal year, which is until Sept. 30, 2022, Salens will receive compensation of $32,475. Because this is an independent contractor role, the county will not provide additional benefits. More News Huron County, independent contractor cut ties over tensions Salens said this new role will not interfere with his law firm work, saying he would be in an office at the county building on a daily basis for a few hours before returning to his practice. He added that he will always be accessible to attorneys, and they know where to find him. The county voted to sever ties with Kessler during its March 8 meeting. That decision likely had to do with Kessler's heated reply to an email forwarded by the Criminal Defense Attorney's of Michgan that called for members to join a diversity, equity and inclusion commission. Kessler responded to the email with numerous claims that the DEI committee was a "Marxist" move. MIAMI A Venezuelan political strategist allegedly threatened to shoot a gun through the door of his luxury Miami condo to avoid being served a lawsuit by a former U.S. Green Beret he hired as part of a plan to oust President Nicolas Maduro, according to a court hearing Monday. Jordan Goudreau in October 2020 sued JJ Rendon for $1.4 million, alleging breach of contract, after Rendon walked away from a plan he briefly pushed on behalf of the Venezuelan opposition to depose Maduro with the help of the three-time Bronze Star recipient and Iraq war veteran. Goudreau nonetheless plowed ahead, traveling to Colombia to help train a ragtag army of volunteers at secret camps set up by deserters from Venezuela's military. Operation Gideon or the Bay of Piglets, as the bloody fiasco came to be known ended with six insurgents dead and two of Goudreaus former Special Forces buddies behind bars in Caracas. Rendon denied making any such threats to avoid being served the complaint, saying that his door to his apartment is bulletproofed and he doesnt possess any guns. Its another crazy, delusional and baseless claim inside an originally baseless lawsuit, he told The Associated Press in a brief statement. Goudreau and his Florida-based company, Silvercorp USA, accuse Rendon of defaulting on an agreement they had signed earlier to detain, capture or remove Maduro and install in his place Juan Guaido, who the U.S. and dozens of allies recognize as Venezuela's legitimate leader. The case has been dormant since Goudreau filed his 133-page complaint, which reads like an intrigue-filled Netflix series involving everything from clandestine airstrips to aides to former Vice President Mike Pence. At a hearing on Monday in Miami, Goudreau's attorney asserted that the reason the case hasnt moved forward is because Rendon has repeatedly and intentionally refused to accept the summons a basic first step in any civil lawsuit. According to Goudreau, a court certified server attempted to personally deliver a summons on seven occasions starting in August 2021 almost 10 months after the lawsuit was filed by knocking unsuccessfully on the door of Rendon's downtown Miami apartment. During the last attempt, at 8:30 p.m. on Oct. 25, he was informed by the buildings front desk that Rendon had called down to say he would shoot through the door if he ever attempted to knock again, according to a sworn affidavit filed ahead of Monday's hearing. My process server at that time decided to do a strategic withdrawal, attorney Gustavo Garcia-Montes said during Monday's brief, one-minute hearing, which ended with Judge Carlos Lopez granting Goudreau's request that Rendon be formally notified through alternative means available to the court, such as certified mail or an advertisement in a newspaper. Rendon has questioned Goudreau's motives for bringing a lawsuit he considers frivolous. He's asserted that the agreement they signed, for which he reimbursed Goudreau $50,000 to cover expenses, was exploratory in nature and in any case nullified months before he launched the ill-fated raid on his own. In his lawsuit, Goudreau claims that that what was known as the Alcala plan for one of its ringleaders, former Venezuelan Army Gen. Cliver Alcala had been approved by the U.S. government. To back his claim, Goudreau cited three meetings he had with a former aide to Pence named Drew Horn, who went on to serve as a senior adviser to the Director of National Intelligence. During those meetings, Goudreau said he was assured by Horn that licenses from the U.S. government regarding the procurement of weapons for the coup effort were forthcoming, although there's no evidence anything came of those discussions. U.S. officials have repeatedly denied any involvement in the failed plot. Still, the U.S. has long encouraged efforts to unseat Maduro, including by offering a $15 million reward for his arrest on U.S. drug charges and support for a failed barracks uprising that preceded Operation Gideon. In most of the 16 sites where Wright-Patterson Air Force Base environmental engineers are investigating the presence of PFAS and PFOA chemicals, those substances were found in amounts above EPA-recommended lifetime health advisory levels, base staff members said in a virtual public meeting Monday. But those levels have been found in either groundwater or surface water, not drinking water, said Raymond Baker, environmental branch chief at Wright-Patterson. Thirteen of the 16 sites are on the base's Area A, with two on Area B and one off-base to the northeast of the installation. "Right now there are no unsafe levels of PFAS in treated drinking water here at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base or the city of Dayton," Baker said. "This is in ground water," he said. "It's not in the drinking water at levels above the LHA (lifetime health advisory)." Wright-Patterson's environmental restoration team identified priorities and tasks ahead in a virtual public session Monday evening, updating viewers on efforts to detect and treat chemicals in base soil and water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has established advisory levels at 70 parts per trillion when it comes to PFOA (Perfluorooctanoic acid) and PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl) chemicals in drinking water. These chemicals, sometimes called "forever chemicals," are human-produced substances found in some fire-suppression foams, nonstick cookware and industrial products. Firefighters sprayed the suppressant, known as Aqueous Film Forming Foam, to fight aircraft fires and used it in training for decades on the military installation. Wright-Patterson shut down two drinking production wells in Area A in May 2016. In June 2016, Dayton shut down seven water production wells closer to the base at Huffman Dam as a "precautionary measure." Base officials said they haven't used the problematic fire suppression foam since 2016. But the substances have been linked to cancer and other health issues, and have become a local and national concern. As of Sept. 30, 2021, base officials said they had pumped 7.8 billion gallons "7,836,784,305 gallons was the number given from one extraction well, collecting influent and effluent samples. Two former munitions sites on the base, including a former skeet range, are also being investigated. In all, more than 100 monitoring wells are to be installed, with more than 372 soil samples collected in addition to other work, listeners were told at the Microsoft Teams meeting. John Crocker, a remedial project manager at the base, said sampling in the proximity of fire training areas and elsewhere will document the effectiveness of different water treatment systems. "We'll be collecting samples at 21 locations, upstream and downstream," prior to and after treatment, he said. With Army engineers, the base last year launched a $26.5 million effort to deal with PFAS chemicals. Two areas on base sites the base said were found to have the "greatest potential to impact public drinking water sources" were an area of initial focus. Last summer's remedial work started about two months after Dayton city government sued Wright-Patterson and the U.S. Department of Defense in federal court, alleging the base failed to stop PFAS chemicals from entering city water. A base representative told the Dayton Daily News last year the remedial work was not a response to the suit. In mid-August, the suit was transferred to a federal court in South Carolina. Wright-Patt and DoD officials have denied the city's allegations in the lawsuit, saying they have followed federal guidelines to ensure contaminants migrating from the base remain below federal recommended levels. By the city's own admission, base representatives have maintained, Dayton's water is safe to drink. "We've been reengaging recently with the city of Dayton and the regulators to get more communication going back and forth with everybody," Crocker said Monday. A message seeking comment was sent to a city representative. ___ (c)2022 the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) Visit the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) at www.daytondailynews.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Marines will now be among the thousands of U.S. troops who have been deployed to Europe and the eastern edge of the NATO alliance in response to Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. About 200 Marines from a command-and-control unit for Marine Air Control Group 28 based at Cherry Point, North Carolina, were sent to Lithuania, following a cold weather exercise in Norway, the Pentagon said Tuesday. A couple of Marine Corps C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and 10 Marine F-18 Hornet fighter jets from Beaufort, South Carolina, will be repositioned to Eastern Europe. The latest deployment comes as Russia appeared to be pulling back and repositioning its invasion forces following weeks of stiff resistance by Ukraine, and the Pentagon claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin had "failed" in his effort to seize the capital Kyiv. Read Next: Top General Believes US Will 'Still Need More' Troops in Europe after Ukraine War The Pentagon has 14,000 troops already deployed to Europe, positioned with allies such as Poland, Germany and the Baltic states, or on high-alert for possible deployment. On Monday, it announced that six Navy EA-18G Growler aircraft based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington state were sent to Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany. "It's not about a number goal, it's really about capabilities and it's based on constant conversations with our NATO allies on the eastern flank," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said during a briefing on Tuesday. The Marine and Navy deployments were done unilaterally by the U.S. and were not part of the NATO Response Force, which is an elite multinational force of 40,000 troops that includes the U.S. and was recently activated by the alliance. Marines are arriving to bolster the NATO alliance, and like all the U.S. troops now in the region will not fight the Russians in Ukraine. President Joe Biden has made clear that the U.S. will not get involved militarily unless a member of NATO is attacked, but his administration has sent over $1 billion in weapons and military support to Ukrainian forces amid the Russian onslaught and imposed heavy sanctions. The Russians said on Tuesday they were withdrawing troops from around Kyiv amid peace talks with Ukraine aimed at ending the unprovoked invasion that began on Feb. 24. But the Pentagon was skeptical of the claim. "We believe that this is a repositioning, not a real withdrawal, and that we all should be prepared to watch for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine. It does not mean that the threat to Kyiv is over," Kirby said. "Russia has failed in its objective of capturing Kyiv, it has failed in its objective of subjugating Ukraine, but they can still inflict massive brutality on the country, including on Kyiv." -- Travis Tritten can be reached at travis.tritten@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Tritten. Related: More US Troops Deploy Overseas in Wake of Ukraine Invasion Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pledged Tuesday to bring a massive veterans toxic exposure bill to a vote this year, saying the legislation is needed to ensure that veterans sickened by environmental exposures get health care and disability compensation before they die. Speaking at a press conference alongside lawmakers, advocates and affected veterans, Schumer said the bill would deliver care and compensation without requiring veterans to "hire a lawyer." "Veterans deserve a hell of a lot better than to have to claw their way through government bureaucracies just to get the basic benefits to treat conditions they incurred in their service," Schumer said. Read Next: Top General Believes US Will 'Still Need More' Troops in Europe after Ukraine War The $208 billion Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics, or PACT, Act, passed the House on March 3 in a 256-174 vote. But it faces tough opposition in the Senate, where a $1 billion bill already has passed that would immediately provide health care to post 9/11 veterans who were exposed to burn pits and other toxins but doesn't include many of the automatic benefits and additional requirements of the PACT Act. The PACT Act would designate 23 diseases as presumed to be linked to burn pits and other airborne pollution, and it would extend coverage to veterans exposed to other pollutants such as radiation, as well as Vietnam veterans suffering hypertension and those exposed to Agent Orange while serving in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. It could affect up to 3.5 million veterans in the coming years. During a hearing on the topic Tuesday, members of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee sought to find common ground on the proposal, questioning VA Secretary Denis McDonough on his priorities in the bill. McDonough said the VA supports the legislation but has some concerns, particularly over the impact of an influx of claims on the health-care system. The secretary said the VA will need to hire more personnel to handle potentially as many as 1.5 million new claims, the additional patient load and possibly require building extra "physical infrastructure" that would increase cost estimates. Still, McDonough said, President Joe Biden "has made it very clear, though. We support the PACT Act." "We support the bill for many reasons, but the first is that it helps VA accomplish a primary goal of getting more veterans into VA care because study after study shows that vets in VA care do better," McDonough said. Among the concerns voiced by members of the committee were the potential influx of so many new claims from veterans and the impact on health-care services overall of a sudden surge of patients. The department currently has a backlog of 240,000 claims -- filings they are working to review, having hired new personnel and automating some of the processes -- that would grow with new claims. The PACT Act "includes provisions that will perhaps stretch the VA beyond its operational capacity, effectively providing no guarantee that veterans will be able to access benefits," said Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, the committee's highest-ranking Republican. Bill supporters say the legislation in some form must be passed as a cost of war. Committee Chairman Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, who introduced a bill late last year that included expanded health coverage similar to the PACT Act, said as the committee considers crafting its own version of the legislation, that hes committed to finding a way to expand care for affected veterans. "As we consider the reforms in this bill, we should be very clear about our goals. We're here to do right," Tester said. Neither Tester nor Moran gave a timeline for crafting a new version of the bill. McDonough promised that he would provide the committee with additional data they requested as part of the effort by late spring. -- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Monster.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime. Related: Sweeping Toxic Exposure Bill Passed by House Those who serve in the U.S. military pick up a number of skills before joining the civilian world. It's one of the biggest benefits of serving. Every skill they pick up in military training not only makes for good resume fodder, it can completely change the course of their professional future. Even small parts of a military job can turn into careers -- or business ventures. Tom Lix, founder of Cleveland Whiskey, first learned the distilling process while in the U.S. Navy. Now, he's created a business around distilling and is winning awards with his products. Lix first joined the Navy in 1972, at a time when Americans were still being drafted for service in the Vietnam War. He had a high draft number but saw many of his friends being called up. He dropped out of college and joined, a move he says he never regretted. "I classify as a Vietnam-era vet," Lix told Military.com. "I didn't get shipped over. I became a machinist's mate and learned to make fresh water out of salt water on an old destroyer." Cleveland Whiskey founder Tom Lix during his Navy career. (Courtesy of Cleveland Whiskey) As a young sailor, he also learned to make distilled hooch from an older chief petty officer using a similar process. As the chief's apprentice, he watched the older noncommissioned officer use fermented fruit juice from the ship's galley. "He was making booze, not just for our ship, but for all the surrounding ships," Lix said. "He had quite a thriving business." In 1978, Lix left the Navy and went back to college using his GI Bill benefits. His college career eventually led to a doctorate in business from Boston University. He worked as a consultant over the next few years, and started a few businesses along the way. In 2009, he began what would become Cleveland Whiskey. "I always thought it would be interesting to go back to that thing I learned in the Navy," he said. "We started running a series of experiments and developed a technology that gives us some real competitive advantages. For the first few years, we just focused on the technology." When first starting the distillery, he was able to get grant money to further develop that technology. He wasn't able to sell the output, but he was allowed to experiment and develop the products. As a machinist's mate, Lix was a jack-of-all-trades when it came to installing and repairing equipment. His work fashioning parts for pumps, engines and other equipment was useful when he was in his basement, developing the tech for what would become award-winning whiskeys. Cleveland Whiskey's first bottles shipped in 2013, and the business has only grown since then. The process they use not only allows them to create the smoothness and flavor that comes with an aged whiskey in a fraction of the time, it also allows the company to use various kinds of wood to create different flavors. When first distilled, a spirit is clear and flavorless. To make it a whiskey, it typically goes into an oak barrel, where it gets its color and flavor from the wood. Most other woods are too porous to hold a liquid. For Cleveland Whiskey, Lix developed a steel vessel capable of withstanding pressure to hold liquids and different woods to create new flavors in a short amount of time. (Courtesy of Cleveland Whiskey) "If you used these other woods, the liquid would flow out of them like a sieve," Lix said. "So although we like the flavor of oak, other woods don't have the right pore structure to hold liquid. So we create whiskeys that have that oak flavor, but we also have the flavors from black cherry wood, hickory, sugar maple ... all sorts." The distilling world is taking notice of Lix and Cleveland Whiskey's flavors and processes. It has won some 50 platinum and golden distilling awards, including a Double Gold at the prestigious San Francisco World Spirits Competition. It's also selling in 16 states and just shipped to South Korea for the first time. "We're doing pretty well," Lix said. "It's a thriving business with five years of double-digit revenue growth and three years of profitability. For the last five or six years, we've been focused on consumer feedback, growing and becoming profitable." For any veteran or military member who has a good idea and wants to start a business, the Navy veteran-turned-business expert-turned serial entrepreneur has one piece of advice: just get started anywhere you can. "Most people don't start businesses because they never finish writing their business plan," he said. "People get caught up in having everything in place: the business plan, enough money and all the things that stop you. But the only way to see if it works is to do it." To learn more about Cleveland Whiskey, its unique products or where you can buy them, visit the Cleveland Whiskey website. -- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook. Want to Know More About Veteran Jobs? Be sure to get the latest news about post-military careers, as well as critical info about veteran jobs and all the benefits of service. Subscribe to Military.com and receive customized updates delivered straight to your inbox. Vietnam War Veterans Amateur Radio Event 2022 The Amateur Radio Alliance (ARA) has been accepted as one of the non-profit organizations that will be observing and honoring veterans of the Vietnam War. National Vietnam War Veterans Day is observed every year on March 29 and is a way to thank and honor our nation's Vietnam veterans and their families for their service and sacrifice. There are 5 goals with the Vietnam Commemoration and the other four are: Highlight the service of our Armed Forces and support agencies during the war Honor wartime contributions at home by American citizens Highlight the technology, science, and medical advances made during the war Recognize contributions from our (military) Allies The Amateur Radio Alliance will be recognizing Vietnam veterans and everyone who contacts our KP4ARA club will receive a commemorative QSL. More information at KP4ARA QRZ.com. Email: kp4ara@gmail.com Answers Supply High Purity Spherical Molybdenum Powder powder 3D Printing Mo Powder Price Australian alumina ban disrupts Rusal production -- Australia's ban on exports of alumina and aluminium ore to Russia, including bauxite, will further disrupt supply chains and production at leading aluminium producer Rusal, consultancy Wood Mackenzie said on Monday. 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Particle size: 15-45 micron, and so on.Color: Gray black.Application: 3D printing Prior to the impact of COVID-19 on the chemicals and materials industry and the price of the Spherical Molybdenum Powder, many industry observers expected low to flat growth in 2021 in all regions outside Asia, with many countries seeing slower growth compared to recent years. Operational excellence has long been a hallmark of the Spherical Molybdenum Powder chemical industry, and many companies are financially able to withstand short-term dips in end-market demand due to rapid leverage from reduced capex on hand. The analysis shows that, whatever the final course of the pandemic, we can expect the inevitable long-term effects. Workplaces are expected to slowly return to pre-COVID-19 practices. Companies investing in enterprise-wide digital initiatives saw these "payoffs" in the early pandemic environment. For more information about Spherical Molybdenum Powder, please feel free to contact us. Inquery us MARCH 30: St. Louis announced that Quezada has cleared outright waivers and been assigned to Double-A Springfield (h/t to Jeff Jones of the Belleville News-Democrat). He doesnt have the requisite service time to refuse an outright assignment, so hell remain in the organization. MARCH 29: The Cardinals have designated right-hander Johan Quezada for assignment, tweets Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His roster spot will go to Albert Pujols, whose one-year deal to return home to St. Louis is now official. Originally an international signee with the Twins back in 2012, Quezada didnt surface in the Majors until 2020, after hed signed with the Marlins as a minor league free agent and found himself selected to the MLB roster that summer. He tallied just three innings of work and yielded three runs all coming on one swing of the bat from Rafael Devers. Hes since bounced to the Phillies and the Cardinals via waivers. Although its been nine years since the now 27-year-old Quezada signed his first professional contract with the Twins, hes been limited to just 207 innings between the minors and the big leagues. Thats partly due to his work in short relief stints but also due to various injuries and the absence of a 2020 minor league season. Quezada averaged better than 97 mph on his heater in his brief Major League look with Miami, but command issues have plagued him throughout his minor league career, where hes walked more than 16% of his opponents. Last season, Quezada split his time between the Cardinals Triple-A, Double-A and Rookie-level affiliates while spending considerable time on the minor league 60-day IL. He logged 24 innings when healthy but posted just a 6.38 ERA in that time. That said, Quezada fanned a quarter of his opponents, walked a much-improved 8.0% of them and posted huge ground-ball rates that generally align with his career mark of 56.7%. The Cardinals will have a week to trade Quezada, place him on outright waivers, or release him. The Mets have claimed reliever Yoan Lopez off waivers from the Marlins, according to announcements from both teams. To clear space on the 40-man roster, New York placed left-hander Joey Lucchesi on the 60-day injured list. Lopez continues to bounce around the league and more specifically, the NL East via waivers. Designated for assignment by the Braves early in the offseason, he was claimed by the Phillies just before the lockout. Since the work stoppage, hes gone from Philadelphia to Miami and now to Queens on the waiver wire. Despite having been a member of four NL East teams within the past six months, the only big league club for which Lopez has ever suited up is the Diamondbacks. A high-profile signee by Arizona out of Cuba, he was one of the better pitching prospects in the D-Backs system for the next couple years. Lopez reached the big leagues briefly in 2018 and found a bit of success early in his career. He pitched to a 3.41 ERA over 60 2/3 innings during his second MLB campaign, but an underwhelming 17.1% strikeout rate indicated he might have trouble continuing to keep runs off the board. That proved to be the case, as hes posted a 6.19 mark in 32 innings over the past two years. His 19.6% strikeout percentage and 10.1% walk rate in that time are both worse than average. That said, the 29-year-old has actually had some success missing bats on a pitch-by-pitch basis. Hes generated swinging strikes on nearly 13% of his offerings in each of the past two years, about a point above the 11.7% league average for bullpen arms. Lopez has also averaged north of 95 MPH on his fastball and has posted slightly better than average ground-ball marks. Traded from Arizona to Atlanta in May, Lopez spent the majority of last season with the Braves top affiliate in Gwinnett. He had much better results there than hes had in the big leagues, posting a 3.03 ERA with a 26.7% strikeout rate in 32 appearances. Between his Triple-A performance and pair of remaining minor league option years, Lopez has clearly piqued the interest of a handful of teams. None have yet been willing to devote him a permanent spot on the 40-man roster, but the Mets can stash him at Triple-A Syracuse as a depth option for the next couple years were they to keep him on the 40-man. Lucchesis 60-day IL placement was an inevitability whenever New York needed a roster spot. The southpaw underwent Tommy John surgery last June and will miss most or all of the upcoming season recovering. Renowned Ghanaian actress Pascaline Edwards has expressed her feelings for award-winning musician Kofi Kinaata. According to the actress, she has for some time fallen for the musician as a result of his lyrical dexterity. She stated in an interview that anytime she listens to Kofi Kinaatas songs, she cant get enough of his lyrics as they contain a lot of wisdom and creativity. I really love Kofi Kinaata so much, especially his 'Behind the Scene' songs and I beg him to re-compose the song and dedicate it to me. I will die with him, she said during an interview on Kessben FM. Indicating music as one thing that motivates her in life, she added that Daasebre Gyamenah and Kofi B are also her favourites. Five days after business mogul, Kojo Jones Mensah, hosted a colourful and rich traditional marriage ceremony in Kumasi tagged Jonesbond22, on March 27, 2022, the couple had a luxurious beach wedding at Labadi Beach. Kojo Jones and his partner Rachel Osei tied the knot in a white wedding that saw the business magnate gilded in an expensive white tuxedo suit with his wife, Rachel, fitted in a beautiful white beaded dress. While showing class and wealth, Kojo Jones, on his way to his beach wedding, drove in a classy black open-top car similar to a 1950 Cadillac Series with one of his best men seated beside him. The wedding that had many A-listers in attendance is tagged as the most expensive wedding currently in Ghana. Social media has since gone frenzy after the videos shared by some bloggers, like GHhyper, suddenly rallied social commentators to share their thoughts on the luxurious wedding ceremony that had dollars raining on the couple at their reception. Just like in 2020 and 2021 respectively, Kency, Ciri2020, and the Adinkra couple had one of the biggest known weddings in Ghana. A wedding where class, wealth, celebrities, and the best artistes performed, Kojo Jones's wedding was no different from the creme de la creme of the society, showing up at his wedding ceremony to share in his happiness. So who is Kojo Jones? The man of the moment, Emmanuel Kojo Jones-Mensah, is an Anlo man, specifically from Keta, Dzelukope in the Volta region. He is the son of the late Justice (rtd) Emmanuel Kofi Jones-Mensah and Rev. Dr. Gifty Lamptey of the Sidalco Group of companies. Kojo Jones father grew up in Cameroon where his father (Kojos grandfather) Livingstone Emmanuel Akakpo Jones-Mensah, worked as the chief financial controller of the Cameroonian Development Corporation (now Unilever). Kojos father was an Attorney-General of Cameroon at the tender age of 28 years before he later relocated to Ghana and joined the bench as a justice of the superior courts of Ghana. In addition, he was a politician, an entrepreneur, and a hotelier. Keta Beach Hotel, located in his hometown. He was also once the PNC partys vice-presidential candidate. Before he passed away in 2016, Justice Jones-Mensah had retired from the bench and established a successful law practice. A source also said that Kojo Jones inherited some of his wealth from his legal colossus fathers estate. Apparently, good looks and law runs in their family. Weve gathered that Kojo Jones is the younger brother of the elegant former Beauty Queen, Penelope M. Jones-Mensah, who is also a lawyer and a women and childrens rights activist. Whilst he is currently running a successful real estate business, Empire Domus Ltd, were reliably informed that Kojo Jones himself has bagged both a first degree and a masters degree in law. He also has a heart of gold and has undertaken several philanthropic ventures with his KJM Foundation. An impressive man with an impressive lineage! We wish Kojo Jones and his beautiful bride all the very best in their marriage and future endeavours. Kumawood actress Rose Mensah has opened up on events that led to her sudden hiatus from the movie scenes. Popularly known as Kyeiwaa, the actress stated in a recent post on her Instagram page that she was blacklisted from the industry after she traveled to the United States. According to her, rumors had spread that she had made some negative utterances against movie producers. This she said led to a lot of filmmakers sidelining her from their productions. She added that no one had contacted her to hear her side of the story, making her lose her only source of livelihood. Kyeiwaa said she decided to travel overseas for greener pastures since she was been paid peanuts in Ghana. Upon arrival, she got a job in an eatery that sold Ghanaian food where she cooked Banku for a living. She said some persons in the movie industry back home in Ghana mocked her and her new job in US. Kyeiwaa added that industry players in Ghana, who declined to give her any movie role, discussed her on national radio as a failed actress. However, the actress stated that her job with the eatery in the US save her from the financial struggles she endured in Ghana. Mr. Abraham Koomson, Secretary-General, the Ghana Federation of Labour (GFL) has described the GHC0.15 pesewas per litre reduction of the price of fuel as inadequate and drop in the ocean and called on the government to undertake pragmatic measures to mitigate the suffering of the people. Mr. Koomson, told the media in an interview in Tema that "reduction GHC0.15 pesewas is a drop in the oceans judging from the increment of petroleum product consistently this year which has affected the price of other commodities in the market. The high prices of goods and services in the country has eroded the benefits of negotiated salaries and working conditions with employers, there must be more pragmatic interventions by the government to mitigate the impact on workers." Mr Koomson said it was really difficult to understand the 'strategic' measures being applied by the government through the Finance Minister to save the ailing economy to alleviate the escalating high cost of living. The GFL Secretary-General said We expect a significant reduction in the multiple taxes afflicting the fuel price determinant; a drastic cut in the number of Ministers and Presidential staffers to free up the loaded budget of the Executive. The GFL added that they also consider that in the medium term an absolute need for the government to focus attention on enhancing, and enriching the environment for local raw materials production for the manufacturing of goods. The Federation stated for instance that the government could revive the cotton production in the country to feed the textile manufacturing industry, as well as consider other agricultural products for consumption and local processing instead of dependence on expensive imported raw materials for local processing. "We observe that the interests of workers are being sacrificed under the government austerity due to hasty actions by some Ministers and appointees. A classic example resulting in financial loss to the state and creating unemployment is the unilateral decision of the Roads Minister to close down the Toll Booths across the country." The GFL expressed the hope that the government would revisit the measures being adopted aimed at addressing the challenges facing the Ghanaian economy, and fix the enormous financial waste to be able to achieve results that the Federation believed would impact positively on the lives of workers. Asante Akim South Constituency First Vice Chairman hopeful, Nana Kwadwo Agyei Yeboah (Nana Kay), has rallied members of his party to work tirelessly to set the new record of 'breaking the 8' in the political history of Ghana. He further stressed that 'breaking the 8' agenda of the party will only become a reality through loyalty, commitment and discipline to the course of the party. 2024 elections is unique in that for the first time, a party in power has a chance to break the 8 years jinx because the party has worked hard for it and thus deserves it. Is for the NPP to break the 8. This is the time for Ghanaians to maintain NPP in power beyond the 8 years. Yes, Time Asoo because we have done the job and still doing more, Nana Kwadwo Agyei Yeboah (Nana Kay) exclusively told Accra-based Kingdom FM. He continued, As promised in our manifesto, we have constructed the roads, we have set up the factories, we have digitized the economy, we have created the jobs, we have stabilized the power sector, we have provided the free SHS, we have provided the infrastructure, and we have done our part. So it is time for the NPP to continue its good work, and it will take hard work from all of us here. In a meeting with constituency executives in the Asante Akim South Constituency, he admonished them to join his team as they worked together for the betterment of the party. Nana Kay said he has the experience and the maturity to steer the affairs of the party in the right direction for victory in 2024 and beyond. The Member of Parliament for Damongo, Samuel Abdulai Jinapor, has said he wants to set a high standard for anybody who will become a Member of Parliament for the constituency and in the Savannah Region as a whole. He said this is one of the reasons why hes spearhearding a lot of development projects in the constituency in less than two years into his first-term. Mr. Jinapor said this at a ceremony to donate ten motorbikes to the Municipal Health Directorate of West Gonja. The motorbikes are to be distributed to selected health centers and CHIP compounds in the municipality to aid nurses and midwives in their outreach activities. Samuel Abdulai Jinapor, who is also the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources at a short ceremony to hand over the bikes said the health sector is one of his priority sectors in the constituency. He said education, health, and the provision of social amenities such as water will continue to be his priority. We are building a STEM school in Busunu, a TVET school will be built in Larabanga, so is a University going to be built here in Damongo, so are we going to have a regional hospital here in Damongo, we are working for you. The point is simple, my dream and my goal are to and by your support when I am done as the Member of Parliament of this constituency, the bar will be set so high so that anybody who wants to be a Member of Parliament for this constituency and for that matter the Savannah Region will be held to the highest standard of delivery. There is so much that we are doing to augment the central governments efforts, and I felt that to be able to reach the nooks and crannies of the municipality and get into the hinterlands and get into the deprived communities of the municipality, you need transport, he said. Hardworking staff of the Ghana Health Service like you have to travel far to be able to reach pregnant women to give them vitamins, to give them vaccines and to educate them and to teach them how to look after themselves, and you cannot do that if you dont have transportation. Mr. Jinapor said the motorbikes are the beginning of more to come, including pickups for the Municipal and regional offices of the service. He said there is a lot being done by the government, and assured that the age-long water problem of the Damongo township will be fixed. The West Gonja Municipal Director of the Ghana Health Service, Gertrude Yentumi, said transport is a vital and essential resource for the delivery of health service adding that universal health coverage cannot be achieved without effective transportation. That is why we as health staff do not take this gesture by our honorable MP lightly. We are so grateful to our Member of Parliament, and we know that whatever that he has promised us, the projects that he has spoken about, they are all going to be fulfilled. The Chief Chancellor of the Indian Africa Trade Council (IATC) in-charge of West Africa, Dr. James Rajamani has praised the government for opening the country's land borders. President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo addressing the nation on measures against the spread of COVID-19 on Sunday, March 27, 2022 announced the re-opening of Ghanas land and sea borders, effective Monday (28 March). The closure of Ghanas borders on Saturday 21 March 2020 by Akufo-Addo affected trading between Ghana and her three closest neighbours Togo (to the east), Burkina Faso (to the north) and Cote dIvoire (to the west of the country), and the other countries in the region. As from tomorrow, Monday, 28th March, all land and sea borders will be opened. Fully vaccinated travellers will be allowed entry through the land and sea borders without a negative PCR test result from the country of origin. Citizens and foreign residents in Ghana, who are not fully vaccinated, will have to produce a negative 48-hour PCR test result, and will be offered vaccination on arrival, he said. Dr. James Rajamani who could not hide his joy stressed that Im very excited. Business will come back. People have more jobs and people will be much happier and can see their cousins and relatives. Its very exciting. This is good news, He said the decision will rekindle their investment spirit. According to Dr. James Rajamani, the action by government attests to the current administrations priority for the welfare and security of the citizens. Dr. James Rajamani who gave the commendation in an interview with OTECNEWS on Monday, March 28, 2022 said It is very commendable. We commend the government for being listening and working one. He added, The reopening of the borders is a commendable effort that shows that the government is listening, monitoring and taking into consideration the welfare and security of Ghanaians." Charles Tetteh Dodoo, a defence witness in the case involving Dr Stephen Opuni and others, has presented an excuse duty letter to an Accra High Court, seeking permission to treat a spinal problem. Mr Samuel Codjoe, Counsel for Dr Opuni, who presented the excuse duty letter on behalf of the witness, told the Court that Dr Dodoo informed him on Friday, March 25, 2022, about his illness. The Counsel said the witness had been complaining consistently in the cause of giving his evidence in chief. He got somebody to send me the excuse duty issued by a Medical Officer, who attended to him, he added. Dr Opuni and Mr Agongo are facing 27 charges, including defrauding by false pretences, willfully causing financial loss to the State, money laundering, corruption by a public officer and contravention of the Public Procurement Act. They have both pleaded not guilty to the charges and are on a GH300,000.00 self-recognizance bail each. Mr Codjoe said he tried getting in contact with his learned friends; the prosecution and Mr Nutifafa Nutsukpui for Seidu Agongo, the CEO of Agricult Ghana Limited to inform them about the date of facts but unfortunately, he could not get to them. This explains why I did not give them prior notice, he said. Asked, whether he was on admission, the Counsel answered in the negative, saying the witness had been advised to go for physiotherapy. Mrs Evelyn Keelson, the Chief State Attorney, said she had seen the excuse duty letter but her only concern was the fact that it did not have enough details, except to indicate an illness and an excuse of two weeks. Mr Nutsukpui said they could only wish the witness a speedy recovery for him to be fit for cross- examination. The Court, presided over by Justice Clemence Honyenuga, a Justice of the Supreme Court, sitting as an additional High Court Judge, said it was unfortunate that the witness was unwell and therefore the Court could not continue with the hearing. He said the excuse duty letter was scanty, stating only the illness and the duration of the excuse, and stated that though the court was not bound on the advice, we will give the witness the benefit of doubt. The Judge had earlier stated that he would not tolerate delays and unnecessary adjournment of the four-year-old criminal case. He said if at the next adjourned date, the witness did not appear for cross-examination, the Court would take further steps to ensure that the case proceeds. The trial was adjourned to Friday, April 8, 2022. GNA The Ghana Medical Association (GMA), has welcomed President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addos decision to ease Covid-19 restrictions in Ghana. The General Secretary of the GMA, Titus Beyuo, said the Presidents move is in order as Ghana is better placed to handle negative implications associated with the relaxation of Covid-19 restrictions. We welcome the statement and the announcements made by the President. We think the easing of these restrictions is justified by our current situation and so we welcome it. If you look at the science and data available to us, I do not see any reason why we should not ease restrictions and also bearing in mind that it is possible that we will live with the virus for sometime. As of now we do not have any pressing danger for which reason we need to continue with all the restrictions as they were before, he said on Eyewitness News. President Akufo Addo during his 28th address to the nation on measures taken to prevent the further spread of Covid-19 on Sunday night said the wearing of nose masks is no longer mandatory. Travelers who are also fully vaccinated will no longer be required to provide a negative PCR test and will also not be tested again at the airport. Justifying the decision, Mr. Beyuo said Ghanas handling of the second wave of the covid-19 pandemic offers enough justification to ease some restrictions. Our current understanding of this virus was not the same at the time when it came. At the time even when we only had one case, we did not understand how it will work in the society. At the time we did not have a vaccination in force. If we have been able to bring a wave down successfully and we are also doing vaccinations, I do not see why we cannot ease restrictions he argued. ---citinewsroom At the conclusion of a virtual Ministerial Meeting held on 26 and 27 March within the framework of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), senior government officials from Africa and Japan agreed that strengthening international partnerships is key to accelerate robust, sustainable and inclusive development, as the continent begins to recover from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its economic and social progress. Japanese and African ministers present at the meeting, and other high-level officials, noted that for the first time in 25 years, Africa is experiencing a devasting recession after nearly three decades of relatively consistent development gains. The socio-economic shocks sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic brought Africas GDP to fall by over 3% in 2020 and plunged more than 40 million Africans into poverty. The COVID-19 pandemic starkly highlighted that the economies focused on exporting raw materials are extremely vulnerable to external shocks, as well as damages their ecosystems, said Ms. Ahunna Eziakonwa, UNDP Assistant Administrator and Regional Director for Africa, during the Ministerial Meeting. We are concerned about the ongoing war in Ukraine, which could further increase food insecurity, slow down economic growth, cause macroeconomic instability, affect democratization and undermine peace across Africa, she remarked. Partnerships are beneficial to all, and working closer together is the only way forward. No region, no country in the world can be resilient on its own. Three key areas to support Africas development plans in a post COVID-19 era came under the spotlight during the ministerial discussions: achieving sustainable and inclusive growth to reduce economic inequalities; achieving sustainable and resilient societies based on human security; and building long-lasting peace and stability. High-level participants acknowledged the importance of promoting private investment by focusing on businesses that solve social issues through innovation, such as digital transformation, as well as greater emphasis on energy transition as well as developing the green and blue economies in Africa. Ms. Eziakonwa noted that the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement is a key instrument that can potentially boost intra-African trade by up to 33% and cut the continents trade deficit by 51%. Maximizing its potential could unlock significant growth opportunities, provide the chance for countries to diversify their economies, scale production capacity and widen the range of manufactured products made in Africa, she said. Turning to the myriad impacts of the pandemic on African societies, including increased malnutrition, deepening food shortages, and the toll the pandemic has taken on already fragile health systems, participants stressed that resilient and sustainable societies should be seen within the concept of human security, with a view to achieving universal health coverage. Given current projections of population growth on the continent, strengthening health systems is paramount. In this regard, Japans efforts toward equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines in Africa, including its vaccine provision and financial contribution to COVAX facility, was highly appreciated. Highlighting continental efforts to bring about lasting peace and stability, participants underscored the need to address the root causes that hamper the achievement of long-lasting peace and stability in Africa. The consolidation of democracy and good governance under the rule of law remains a pressing priority, as well as increased efforts to build institutions and capacity. Co-organized by the Government of Japan, the United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on Africa, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) the World Bank, and the African Union Commission, the two-day high-level meeting served as an important step ahead of the 8th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD8), which will take place on 27-28 August 2022. For nearly 30 years, the Government of Japan through the TICAD process has contributed to mainstreaming human security and human-centered approaches to development. TICAD has grown into a major forum on African development and has been a pioneer in advocating for the importance of African ownership and international partnership to address the continents developmental challenges. The upcoming TICAD8 Summit will be an ideal opportunity for African leaders and their counterparts from Japan to scale-up existing partnerships by building a stronger, smarter, fairer, and more sustainable Africa, concluded Ms. Eziakonwa. Source: UNDP Madam Abla Dzifa Gomashie, Member of Parliament (MP) for Ketu South in the Volta Region, says the opening of the country's land borders would ease the hardship of traders and many others. The reopening of the country's borders will definitely alleviate the suffering women and youth, in particular, have endured for the last two years, she said. The lawmaker, who last year joined demonstrators to demand that government opens the borders, explained that many relied on trading activities along the borders to fend for themselves and the opening of the frontiers would bring a lot of hope for progress to them. Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Madam Gomashie said the development would enable the local Assemblies at the frontiers to collect the needed Internally Generated Funds (IGF) for the development of local communities. The former Deputy Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts, also noted that the opening of the borders would enable hotels and other hospitality players to operate at full capacity, especially during the Easter season. This would contribute to revenue generation to support national development and enhance the living condition of people in the border communities, who were affected negatively during the two-year closure. Madam Gomashie urged the government to find a solution to the porous nature of Ghana's entry points to preserve the territorial integrity of the country and the protection of citizens and foreigners, who patronized those crossings. She also called for a congenial atmosphere for people in those localities to interact with and provide timely information to the security agencies to aid their work. The MP stated the need for cross border collaboration between Ghana and its neighbours- Togo, Cote d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso- to ensure that there were no repercussions from the opening of the frontiers. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) last December urged members who had closed their land borders due to the COVID-19 pandemic to have them opened from January 1, 2022. The ruling military government in Burkina Faso opened its land borders with Ghana, but that of Togo and Cote d'Ivoire are shut. Madam Gomashie encouraged people to continue to observe the various safety protocols despite the lifting of restrictions, saying, We are not completely out of the woods yet even though I admit we are in a better place than before. President Akufo-Addo Sunday night lifted all COVID-19 restrictions and reopened the country's land and sea borders to enable Ghana's economy to recover from the ravages of the pandemic. Dr Joseph Obeng, the President of the Ghana Union of Traders' Association (GUTA), had also requested the President to leverage his influence as the ECOWAS Chairman to get other countries in the region to open their borders for trading. Dr Obeng said the reopening of the borders would facilitate the movement of people and goods, enhance cross border trade and curtail revenue losses, occasioned by the smuggling of goods along the border regions and support the country's post-COVID-19 economic recovery process. GNA An Adentan Circuit Court has sentenced a 28-year-old Community Police Assistant to four years imprisonment over charges of impersonation and defrauding by false pretences. Mark Apiu is said to have collected GHC12,000 from a finance officer to enlist the officer's sister into the Ghana Police Service but failed to do so. Apiu pleaded guilty to both charges. The court presided over by Mrs Sedinam Awo Balokah, convicted Apiu on his own plea. Prosecuting, Chief Inspector Maxwell Lanyo said the complainant (name withheld) was a finance officer of a hospital in Tamale whiles the convict was stationed at Walewale. He said the complainant got to Know Apiu when he brought a patient to the hospital in 2016. The prosecution said Apiu introduced himself to the complainant as a police officer and they became friends. In November 2021, the complainant called Apiu and informed him that she has secured a job for her sister with the Ambulance Service. The prosecution said the convict questioned the complainant as to why she did not enlist her sister into the Ghana Police Service. Apiu then assured the complainant that he could assist to get her sister enlisted in the Police Service. Apiu then gave her the phone number of one Nelson, a supposed senior police officer, to call him so he could assist with the enlistment. He cunningly demanded and collected various sums of money from the complainant from December 2021 to March 18, 2022, all totalling GHC12,000. The prosecution said on March 18, one General Sergeant Aglago received a call from the complainant that she had arrived for the enlistment in Accra. Police intelligence led to the arrest of Apiu and during interrogation, he admitted the offence and pleaded for leniency. GNA The opposition National Chairman of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Samuel Ofosu Ampofo, has said the party is not interested in overthrowing the government of Nana Akufo-Addo. According to him, the NDC will not support any coup attempt in Ghana. Some Ghanaians have in recent times warned against a possible coup in Ghana following developments in the West Africa sub-Region. Speaking at a meeting with NDC supporters in the USA, Samuel Ofosu Ampofo said the NDC only believes in the democratic removal of a government through elections. We birthed that constitution and for that matter, we will be the last to do anything to undermine that constitutional order. We are not interested in coup detat. We are interested in using the democratic process of using the thumb of the people to remove Nana Akufo-Addo and incompetent Bawumia from office, Mr. Ofosu Ampofo said. Coups became topical in Ghana after Mali, Guinea, and most recently, Burkina Faso saw the overthrow of governments by the military. Currently, there are two different trials ongoing against persons charged with treason-related offenses because of alleged coup plots. #FixTheCountry convener, Oliver Barker-Vormawor, was charged with treason felony after he made comments on social media that have been deemed to be a coup threat. Ten persons including three civilians, six military personnel, and a senior police officer are also facing charges of treason felony and conspiracy to commit treason felony. ---citinewsroom Member of Parliament for North Tongu, Mr Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, has said Frontiers Healthcare Services Limited, the company contracted by the government to offer compulsory coronavirus testing at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA) made a staggering profit of US$130 million (GHS984.7 million) over the last 18 months. Until President Akufo-Addo, on Sunday, 27 March 2022, cancelled the compulsory Covid-19 test regime at the airport, any Ghanaian abroad returning into the country had to pay $50 for a compulsory covid test while foreigners were made to pay $150. The Minority in parliament, including former President John Dramani Mahama, recently called on the government to scrap the compulsory testing, describing it as an extortionist scheme. Mr Ablakwa, in a Facebook post, alleged that Frontiers Healthcare Services Ltd was awarded the contract after the company was hurriedly put up in less than two months. He noted that the majority of Ghanaian companies doing legitimate business for decades have never seen that kind of balance sheet in their entire corporate life. Per the unpatriotic nepotistic agreement, the Ghana Airport Company which belongs to all 30.8million Ghanaians made a paltry US$8 million. Dont be surprised, therefore, that Ghana Airport cannot pay their electricity bills, he added. He stressed that Frontiers and a few nation-wrecking cronies they are fronting for, have made an inhumane booty of US$130million from a pandemic which claimed countless lives. Imagine how GHS1billion could have transformed our foremost institutions whose scientists sacrificed greatly to fight the pandemic I am referring to the globally acclaimed: Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, the National Public Health and Reference Lab, Korle-Bu and the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP), he bemoaned adding that we are, quite clearly, our own enemies. Source: Classfmonline.com Countries have proposed to hold an extra biodiversity meeting in Nairobi in June as talks in Geneva tasked with saving nature entered their final day Tuesday without an agreement. Negotiators from across the world are meeting in Geneva to thrash out details of a sweeping plan to "live in harmony with nature" up until mid-century, with key milestones in 2030. But after two years of pandemic delay, negotiations are trying to pack in both technical scientific work as well as high-level policy negotiations. Delegates have concluded they need more time to agree on a draft text set to be adopted at the United Nations COP15 meeting in Kunming, China later this year. In a document uploaded on the conference website, dated Monday, countries suggest holding a new meeting in the Kenyan capital between June 21 and 26 to "continue negotiations" on the document and other issues. The decision is subject to official approval by the Geneva meeting before it wraps up later Tuesday. Conservation groups hope the COP15 can reinvigorate efforts to halt the devastation of the world's nature, after countries failed to meet almost all of their biodiversity goals for the last decade. The Vice President of the Republic, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has rubbished claims he has lost touch with the economy as head of the economic management team. The Minority in Parliament has been asking the Vice President to break his silence on the countrys ailing economy which needs better solutions. Reacting to the claim during a meeting with participants of the Agric Bootcamp at the Jubilee House on Monday, March 28, 2022, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia said the allegations are false. According to him, he has been focused on digitalisation to build strong pillars to support the countrys economy to stand firm. Sometimes people say, well, we thought you were an economist, but youre doing so much in IT space. Have you left economics behind? No, no, not at all. In fact, it is because of the economy that Im focusing on digitising because without building those pillars, our economy will just not be able to stand on its own feet, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia shared. The Vice president continued, We need to build those pillars to allow all our sectors in the economy to be able to compete and so we decided to address some of the major bottlenecks that businesses face in the Agric sector through digitalisation. Coming into government and heading the Economic Management Team, the President gave me that mandate and opportunity to focus on how best we can transform and modernise Ghana to make sure that some of the challenges, some of the risks that, you know, people just want to operate in our economy are facing, how we mitigate those risks, how we make this economy an efficient economy and this is why I have focused on digitalisation." Bawumia is now scheduled to deliver a speech on the economy on April 7, 2022. The communications director of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), Yaw Buaben Asamoa has lambasted John Dramani Mahama over his recent comments on the Supreme Court ruling on the rights of a deputy speaker in Parliament to vote while presiding. Engaging some supporters of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the USA over the weekend, the former President reiterated his position that the decision of the apex court is absurd. Speaking to Asaase Radio on the matter, Yaw Buaben Asamoa has urged all not to take John Dramani Mahama seriously. According to the communications director of the NPP, the NDC leader is a desperate individual with nothing better to offer. He said Mahama only knows how to make demeaning statements in his quest for power. This is a desperate individual who is seeking a position without any new policies or options to offer. I find his comments demeaning of a statesman who seeks to lead the country. Because youre [Mahama] denigrating the countrys image abroad and yet you seek to lead it. Youre not just denigrating in charge; youre attacking the basic of every democracy; thats the judiciary, Yaw Buaben Asamoa shared. According to Mr. Asamoa, ex-President Mahamas continuous allegations against the Supreme Court have become frustrating and he must put a stop to it. We [NPP] have consistently rebutted and its sad that we have to keep coming back to this same old funny allegation which makes no difference to our political wellbeing and he keeps going about it, its frustrating, the NPP Director emphasised. The best farmer for the Sekyere Afram Plains District in the Ashanti region, Rev. Michael Opoku, has appealed to government as well as the District Chief Executive (DCE), Mr. Sulemana Hamidu, to come to their aid over recurrent attacks on them by Fulani herdsmen in the area. According to him, the herdsmen are using their cattle to destroy their farm produce as well. He complained that the illegal activities of the herdsmen are taking a toll on their farming activities. Speaking with the media in an interview, Rev Opoku said his 10-acre farm of various crops was destroyed by the herdsmen this year. The herdsmen, he noted, resort to gun threats anytime the farmers confront them about the destruction. He said but for the restraint of the farmers, the situation would have escalated in the area. He, however, warned that if care is not taken and the situation not addressed immediately, the farmers would be forced to retaliate if provoked again. Source: Classfmonline.com Yaw Buaben Asamoa 29.03.2022 LISTEN Communications Director of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mr. Yaw Buaben Asamoa has accused John Dramani Mahama of using lies and half-truths to push his agenda of becoming president again. Speaking to Asaase Radio in an interview, Mr. Asamoa stressed that although the former President wants to lead the country again, he has no agenda and continues to find fault with everything since he has nothing better to offer the country. He wants to be President without an agenda, he wants to be President without a well-thought-through process that defines him better than before. He wants to be a President but he doesnt have a platform. So, he is seeking to use lies and half-truths to establish a platform but those things dont go far, the NPP Communications Director stated. Yaw Buaben Asamoa said this while reacting to former President Mahamas latest comments on the Supreme Court ruling on the Deputy Speakers right to vote while presiding. Engaging some followers of NDC in the USA over the weekend, the former President noted that he finds the ruling of the SC absurd. But according to Buaben Asamoa, Mahama is a desperate individual who is seeking to become President again without any new policies or options to offer. I find his comments demeaning of a statesman who seeks to lead the country. Because youre [Mahama] denigrating the countrys image abroad and yet you seek to lead it. Youre not just denigrating in charge; youre attacking the basic of every democracy; thats the judiciary, Yaw Buaben Asamoa emphasised. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday visited Morocco, where he discussed regional security and met the United Arab Emirates' de facto leader Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. His trip comes in the shadow of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which along with sanctions against Moscow has sent wheat and fuel prices soaring in a serious blow to import-dependent North African countries. Speaking to journalists in Rabat, Blinken said the US recognised the "disaster" the supply crunch had caused. "We're discussing concrete steps we can take ... to help reduce the impact, particularly on the most vulnerable populations," he said. Map of northern Africa locating Algeria and Morocco.. By AFP Blinken also said he was "encouraging partners to speak out against Russian aggression" and said he doubted Russia's "seriousness" in talks with Ukraine held in Turkey. Washington's top diplomat had flown into Rabat late Monday from Israel where he met his counterparts from the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain and Egypt, underlining a seismic shift in relations between Arab countries and the Jewish state. On Tuesday, he met Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita for discussions including on the Western Sahara dispute and security cooperation. The same subjects will loom large in meetings the following day with Morocco's regional rival Algeria, after months of deteriorating relations between Rabat and Algiers. Tensions with UAE Blinken also met Tuesday evening with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed -- often dubbed "MBZ" -- at the Emirati leader's Moroccan residence, an encounter that comes as Washington warily watches its longtime Gulf ally diverging from many of its policies. Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, seen on February 4, 2022 in Beijing, at the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games. By WANG Zhao AFPFile The UAE has refrained from criticising Russia, even sending its top diplomat to Moscow, and recently hosted Russia-backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But MBZ welcomed Blinken warmly. Just ahead of their meeting, the US top diplomat emphasised that "the partnership between our countries really matters". "At the same time, we have real challenges to confront together in the region and beyond," said Blinken, singling out the "terrorist attacks against the UAE" and Saudi Arabia by Yemen's Huthi rebels. Their meeting comes amid an escalation in cross-border missile and drone attacks by the Iran-backed Huthis against infrastructure in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, allies in a grinding seven-year war that has laid waste to impoverished Yemen. "We're determined to do everything we can to help you defend yourselves effectively" against the Huthis, Blinken added. Blinken said he and the crown prince would also discuss the war in Ukraine and efforts to restore the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which aimed to limit the Islamic republic's nuclear development in exchange for loosening sanctions. Former US president Donald Trump unilaterally walked out on that multilateral deal in 2018 and reimposed biting sanctions, provoking Iran into rolling back on its nuclear commitments, but months of negotiations in Vienna have sought to revive the pact. Western Sahara US Secretary of State Antony Blinken L shakes hands with Morocco's Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita R during their meting in the capital Rabat on Tuesday. By - AFP Blinken also discussed with his Moroccan counterpart the status of Western Sahara, a phosphate-rich former Spanish colony with a vast Atlantic coastline home to rich fisheries. Morocco controls 80 percent of it, including a key highway towards West Africa, while the rest -- a desert area bordering Mauritania and Algeria -- is run by the Polisario Front independence movement. Trump in 2020 recognised the region as sovereign Moroccan territory in a break with decades of US policy, after Rabat agreed to re-establish relations with Israel. President Joe Biden's administration has been tight-lipped on how it will follow up on the move, which came just weeks after the Polisario declared a 1991 ceasefire null and void, sparking fears that the long-frozen conflict could flare up again. Bourita on Tuesday called on European states to follow Spain in backing a Moroccan plan for autonomy there under Rabat's sovereignty. "We think it's time for Europe ... to get out of this comfort zone where people are just supporting a process that doesn't mean supporting a solution," he said. Demonstrators wave Western Sahara flags during a protest against the Spanish government support for Morocco's autonomy plan for Western Sahara, in Madrid, on March 26, 2022. By Pierre-Philippe MARCOU AFPFile "There is a consensus that the solution should be within Moroccan sovereignty and the Moroccan plan of autonomy." Blinken said Washington continues "to view Morocco's autonomy plan as serious, credible and realistic". Blinken's visit to Rabat also comes as the US seeks stronger support for Ukraine from a region where many countries have been reluctant to criticise Moscow. They include Morocco, which has declined to condemn Russia at the United Nations, frustrating both Washington and European capitals. The Ghana Airport Company Limited (GACL) has revised its guidelines at the Kotoka International Airport after the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, announced the easing of coronavirus restrictions and safety protocols on Sunday, March 27, 2022. The President noted that fully vaccinated persons arriving at the Airport will no longer have to present a negative PCR COVID-19 test from the country of embarkation. From Monday, March 28, 2022, the President also said such travellers, will also not be tested on arrival at the controversial $150 fee being charged by Frontiers Healthcare Solution Services Limited for rapid COVID-19 tests. The 30-minute PCR COVID-19 test initially attracted a $150 fee, but was subsequently reviewed. Persons who have not been vaccinated will have to provide a negative PCR COVID-19 test in addition to an antigen test. Find below the full guidelines ---citinewsroom David Ampofo CEO of Ghana Upstream Petroleum Chamber 29.03.2022 LISTEN On the 23rd of March 2022, the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) held a lecture on the topic Ten Years of the management and use of the petroleum revenues in Ghana: The way forward. The event held at the Cedi Conference Centre attracted many from the petroleum industry. Speaking after the event Mr. David Ampofo, CEO of the Ghana Upstream Petroleum Chamber stated that the report was good and provided a timely assessment of Ghanas management of petroleum revenue. He commended the PIAC for its time and effort in preparing the report which was delivered by Dr. Theophilus Acheapong. He noted that in terms of production, the report pointed out a decline. Reacting to the report that oil resources delivered a total of about $31bn of which $6.5bn was allocated to government, Mr. Ampofo explained, All of this feeds into our local content machinery and one can only imagine how much industry can deliver once the necessary regulatory attractions are in place. He added that Major investments must be paid back, in order to attract further investments. To capture a revenue of say $32Bn from the three producing fields is commendable. He quickly added, However it's important that we dont look at that figure as profit for the International Oil Companies (IOCs), but rather total revenue generated. It includes cost of operations, government earnings and earnings for the IOCs. The CEO of GUPC stated that Ghana can double these earnings. But without further explorations, growth is not possible. We really must be doing all in our power to increase production - working hand-in-hand with our current partners. He also encouraged further cohesion between government and operators of the three oil fields; Jubilee, TEN and Sankofa. How can we get them to do more? Mr. Ampofo quizzes. We must work with them in communicating Ghanas investment climate, because they are here. Speaking on his expectations from the PIAC report, David Ampofo said he had looked forward to a breakdown that outlines the reasons for Ghanas oil production decline. A continued decline means less revenue for the government and investors. The ripple effect is obvious. He mentioned the urgency with which Ghana must monetize its gas resources, improve energy availability and address energy poverty. Things like firewood and struggling for energy, we really need to put behind us, he said. Several famous generals were known for their speed. Alexander the Great and Napoleon and are some of the well-known generals who were associated with high-speed warfare. The speed of thought and movement were clearly keys that brought them victory. Look carefully and you will see how nations like Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore have caught up with western nations like Germany, England, Holland and Italy. How did they do it? By COPYING and EMULATING those ahead! Copying, emulating, learning to be like someone are keys to rapid movement. All the poor nations which have caught up with the rich nations did so by copying. All the nations which were two hundred years behind moved faster when they began to copy the richer nations. Instead of spending your life discovering things that have already been discovered, you can humbly use the existing discovery and surge forward into something new. The key to achieving fast church growth is to copy those who have been able to build big churches. It may sound absurd to you, but I can assure you that great things are really very simple. The key to speed is copying. I have tried copying men of God I look up to and it made me move fast. I have copied the fathers God gave to me and it has given me great speed. Do you want to spend your life as a discoverer? Perhaps in Heaven you can sit by David Livingstone and share your discoveries with each other! You must catch the anointing quickly, learn how to preach quickly, master the art of shepherding quickly, learn how to pray for the sick quickly and understand the ministry quickly! None of these things should be done slowly. There is a lot to be done, and there is a devil who is trying to outpace and outrun you. What is the master key to increasing your speed and achieving lightning strikes? The answer to speed is copying! Alexander the Great and Lightning Speed In the Bible, Alexander the Great is depicted as a swift goat that came out of Greece. The shaggy male goat represents the king of Greece, and the large horn between his eyes represents the first king of the Greek Empire, (Daniel 8:21, NLT). In the Bible, Alexander the Great is depicted as a goat that appeared from the western world (Greece) attacking the Persians (the ram) who were led by Darius the Great. Alexander displayed quickness of mind by turning his army around and arriving at the battleground before the enemy had fully prepared his defences. While I was watching, suddenly A MALE GOAT APPEARED from the west, CROSSING THE LAND SO SWIFTLY THAT HE DIDN'T EVEN TOUCH THE GROUND. This goat, which had one very large horn between its eyes, headed toward the two-horned ram that I had seen standing beside the river, rushing at him in a rage. The goat charged furiously at the ram and struck him, breaking off both his horns. Now the ram was helpless, and the goat knocked him down and trampled him. No one could rescue the ram from the goat's power. The goat became very powerful. But at the height of his power, his large horn was broken off. In the large horn's place grew four prominent horns pointing in the four directions of the earth Daniel 8:4-8 (NLT). The verses above show how the goat moved; crossing the land so swiftly that it did not even touch the ground. Such was the speed of Alexander the Great! He became the ruler of the known world. At the height of his power, when he was just thirty-three years old, he died suddenly, and his kingdom was divided among his four generals. The Scripture shows how the large horn was broken and it was replaced with four prominent horns. The ram butted everything out of his way to the west, to the north, and to the south, and no one could stand against him or help his victims. He did as he pleased and became very great. Germany and Lightning Speed During the Second World War, the German army was well known for moving with lightning speed. Its lightning strikes were called blitzkrieg a German word that means lighting strikes. This tactic depended on speed and surprise and needed the military force to be based along light tank units supported by planes and foot soldiers. Fighting with the speed of lightning was so successful that it resulted in the British and French armies being defeated in the first few weeks of the Second World War. Several famous leaders have moved with lightning speed, surprising their enemies and winning wars. You must have speed! It is time to stop giving excuses and calling for more meetings! It is time to stop planning for things to be done next week and the week after. If it must be done, it must be done now! It must be done with speed! Culled from A Good General [email protected] BY Dag Heward-Mills Traders in the Ho Municipality of the Volta region have extolled the government for opening the land borders. The traders, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) said they buy their goods from Togo, hence welcomed government's decision to open the borders. The government had announced the re-opening of the country's land borders after two years of closure. President Akufo-Addo, in his 28th National address on measures taking by the government to address the devastating effects of COVID-19, announced that effective March 28, all land and sea borders would be opened. The borders were closed in March 2020, as a measure to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic in the country. The traders said though it had taken the government too long to open the borders, the decision was appropriate as it would help facilitate their businesses and allow them to engage in full and effective operation. Madam comfort Oklu, a businesswoman said the closure of the borders compelled her to buy her goods from Accra, but the prices were extremely high, describing the opening of the borders as good news. We don't get enough profit when we buy goods from Accra because they are very expensive, so I'm very happy that the borders are opened, she said. She, however, appealed to the government to take necessary steps to reduce the barriers on Ho-Aflao road. On the ease of the COVID-19 protocols, Madam Oklu said, this would allow businesses to operate at full capacity and maximize profits. Promise, another trader, said the COVID-19 restrictions had negatively affected most businesses, leading to low income and that the ease of the restrictions would propel businesses to bounce back. She was thankful to the President for the decision and urged the government to continue with the good works. GNA Residents of Kadjebi, in the Oti Region have expressed excitement over the re-opening of Menuso Border Post for commuters. They said the move would help revive business activities between Ghana and Togo, hence improving their living conditions. Mr Abdul Rahman Ibrahim Baba, the Assemblyman for Menuso Electoral Area, said the closure of the Menuso Border Post had affected his electorate's businesses and economic lifestyle and now that the border had re-opened, trading activities would improve in the area. He said they were happy and thanked the President for opening the border since his electorates in both Togo and Ghana would bounce back to their trading activities, hence life perk-up in the area. Mr Divine Quarshie, a Port Health Officer at Menuso Border Post, said the re-opening of the border was good news because business activities within the border enclave would thrive and life would get better. An official with Ghana Immigration Service at the Menuso Border Post, who wanted to be anonymous, said they re-opened the border following the President's directive. He said commuters were freely moving to the Togo side without any hindrance from them excepts from Togo side that were yet to re-opened. Mr Agbeko Akoete, an Immigration Officer at Danyi-Nkwanta Border Post in Togo, said they were yet to re-open their land borders, but hoped it would be re-opened on Tuesday, March 29. Mr Agbowadi Koffi, a Police Officer at Danyi-Nkwanta Border Post also reiterated that they had not re-opened the border but it was likely to be re-opened within the week. GNA Residents of Ketu South, particularly, Aflao have expressed reservations on the border reopening taking effect March 28. The country's land and sea borders had been reopened two years since they were shut to human traffic following the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. Some residents who spoke to the Ghana News Agency in an interview welcomed the announcement on the reopening saying, it held hopes of a return to their normal business activities but wished more was done to make long held dream come to pass quickly. They said the reopening of the border by both Ghana and Togo through bilateral negotiations would have offered them the relief they needed for their businesses to bounce back. A head potter, Madam Dona Agbogbo, said she was grateful to God for the reopening of the border but wondered its impact on her business explaining, she might encounter difficulties attempting to cross into the neighbouring Togo to ply her trade. A bread seller at the border, Madam Georgina Atsu, said she stayed on, on Sunday to watch the President deliver the announcement with hopes that their woes were going to be over but said, it's clear to me now that the Aflao Border is only partly open. Though the border is open, its' not truly open because you cannot cross into Togo freely. We have a President who is also the ECOWAS Chairman. I'll plead with him to do something, so we don't get stranded at the Togo side of the border which is still closed to human traffic, Madam Juliana Afedo, another resident appealed. GNA Freetown, March 28, 2021 ECOWAS through the Department of Industry and Private Sector Promotion has convened a meeting of stakeholders from Liberia and Sierra Leone on the ECOWAS Green Enterprise Village Project. The meeting held at the Bintumani Hotel in Freetown, Sierra Leone from 24th to 27th March 2022 was aimed at sensitizing the two countries on the concept and modalities for establishing the ECOWAS Green Enterprise project which seeks to unlock the potentials of the zone towards creating employment and jobs as well as contribute to the local economic transformation. Addressing the opening session, the ECOWAS Commissioner for Industry and Private Sector Promotion, Mr. Mamadou Traore, represented by the Acting Director, Private Sector, Dr. Tony Luka Elumelu, recognized the presence of the Head of the Traditional Council of Liberia, Chief Zanzar Karwar and espoused the importance and timeliness of the meeting. He called on the stakeholders to take ownership of the project and work towards exploiting the situation for the development of appropriate technology that will provide sustainable energy for enterprises, create jobs for the youths, strengthen regional integration and cooperation between the two countries as well as prepare the region for competitiveness in the continental free trade regime. Explaining the details of the project to the meeting, the Head of Division, Business and Enterprise Promotion, Dr. Enobong Umoessien noted that the project was conceived to solve the twin challenges of poor enterprise capacity and value chains development occasioned by poor energy access in the ECOWAS region. He said that the project will produce independent renewable energy from livestock (poultry) biomass to power enterprises who will be the main residents in the village. He noted that the project is expected to be sited at the border zone to serve the population of the two countries primarily and ECOWAS population generally. He further added that the project is intended as a Private Public Partnership (PPP) which will stimulate multiple value chains and supply chains development to reduce risk and promote competitiveness as well as attractiveness to investors and the business community. In their remarks, the leaders of the delegations from the two countries, Mr. Benedict Roberts, Head of ECOWAS National Unit Liberia and Madam Mamie-Miatta Kallon, Head of the Sierra Leone National Unit, thanked the ECOWAS Commission for the choice of Liberia and Sierra Leone for the Pilot Scheme and recalled the various interventions of the ECOWAS Commission in the zone that has yielded positive results. They especially welcomed the idea that the project will be a stand-alone sustainable enterprise community due to the biogas renewable energy source which will guarantee uninterrupted business operations. 29.03.2022 LISTEN Accra, March 15, 2022 Our societies and states are undergoing rapid digital transformation which harbors great opportunities for economic prosperity, equal access to knowledge and efficient governance. However, digitalization also poses risks such as the misuse of cyberspace by malicious actors for criminal purposes and the risk of manipulation to digital public services. To provide a more secure digital ECOWAS, the ECOWAS Commission and Germany have engaged to conduct a series of workshops to develop an action plan to support the G7-ECOWAS cyber cooperation initiative. The first G7-ECOWAS workshop on Cyber diplomacy and Critical Infrastructure protection held on 15 March 2022 in Accra, Ghana, brought together representatives from ECOWAS Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFA) to build cyber diplomacy and technical capacities, as well as representatives of Ministries responsible for ICT and officers from national CERTs/CSIRTs. Dr Kouame Raphael Koffi, the ECOWAS Commissions Ag. Director, Digital Economy & Post stated that cybersecurity and cybercrime are major issues for any nation, businesses and individuals. This he indicated justifies the implementation of the ECOWAS Cybersecurity Agenda which aims to support the facilitation of a secure ECOWAS cyber space. To facilitate the ongoing G7-ECOWAS initiative, a participative and inclusive approach is vital for the ownership by the Member States and for more efficiency during the implementation of the initiative. Mr. John Reyels, Head of the Cyber Policy Coordination Staff of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany stated that the G7 presidency under Germany, Cybersecurity is a top priority. He outlined that cybersecurity is about protecting data sovereignty, freedom online and todays realities of international conflicts. As such, the initiative between ECOWAS and Germany and its G7 partners is initiated to strengthen the cooperation in the cyber space domain because challenges of cyberspace are still novel and constantly evolving and can only be tackled successfully through international cooperation. The Acting Director General of the Cybersecurity Authority (CSA) of Ghana, Dr Albert Antwi-Boasiako, commended the ECOWAS leadership on cybersecurity as the regional block has developed and adopted two important regional instruments the ECOWAS Regional Cybersecurity and Cybercrime Strategy and Regional Critical Infrastructure Protection Policy. Equally, he stated that Germanys recognition of Cybersecurity as a priority as part of its leadership of the G7 nations is heartwarming. He rounded off by affirming Ghanas committed to support regular engagements towards improving global norms, cyber diplomacy and capacity building efforts in the region to protect ongoing digital developments in the ECOWAS region. While dozens of world leaders have pledged to halt the devastating destruction of biodiversity across the planet, observers say political momentum has yet to filter into negotiations that will set the stage for a major UN meeting later this year. Countries have proposed to hold an extra biodiversity meeting in Nairobi in June as talks in Geneva involving nearly 200 countries -- although without the United States -- entered their final day Tuesday without fully discussing some major topics. Negotiators have held talks since March 14 to thrash out details of a sweeping plan to "live in harmony with nature" by mid-century -- with key milestones in 2030 -- that will be adopted at the United Nations COP15 conference in China later this year. The task is a daunting one because biodiversity is undermined by a host of human activities from intensive agriculture and overfishing, to mining and rapid urbanisation. "Biodiversity is not restricted to one place, it is everywhere, it is life," said Ghanaian academic Alfred Oteng-Yeboah, who has played a key role in international efforts to protect wildlife and species diversity. The imperative to set goals that will be acted upon is even more urgent because the world missed almost all the targets that were set for the last decade. "We think that this is the last chance that we have and if we miss it we don't know what is going to happen," said Oteng-Yeboah. After two years of pandemic delay, the in-person negotiations seek to pack in both technical scientific work as well as high-level negotiations on the overarching targets. Delegates have concluded they need more time and a document uploaded on the conference website suggests a new meeting in the Kenyan capital between June 21 and 26 to "continue negotiations" on the draft text and other issues. The decision is subject to official approval by the Geneva meeting before it wraps up later Tuesday. Funding question While more than 90 nations have signed up to a pledge to halt biodiversity loss by 2030, delegates said the weight of that political will has not been felt at the negotiations in Geneva. "There's a disconnect between the lofty rhetoric and actions we're seeing in the negotiations," said Brian O'Donnell, director of Campaign for Nature. Ten days of intensive work allowed the delegations to put their ideas on the table, without managing to wrangle a consensus. The UN's Convention on Biological Diversity has "gone through an unprecedented period in its history with the impact of the pandemic", said the organisation's executive secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema. While the priority is to reach an ambitious agreement at COP15, several delegates said the negotiations had not yet wrestled with the most difficult issues. "We have not talked a lot about the transformation of production, agriculture, urban planning," said one. The most emblematic goal in the draft text is the protection of 30 percent of land and oceans by 2030 globally. It is supported by a growing number of countries, but delegates cautioned that even that cornerstone target was not yet certain to be part of the agreement in Kunming. Experts say that while the major targets are important, they will not achieve much without effective and fair implementation -- and sufficient funding. Developed countries accept that more money is needed -- from national, international and private sources -- but they have baulked at increasing funding to the level sought by poorer nations. Since most of the world's remaining biodiversity is in the developing world, there is a need for richer countries to step up their financial help, said one delegate from Latin America. But for real progress there needs to be greater political momentum going into COP15, which is expected to take place in late August. "We need to make sure that the negotiators are getting clear instructions from the capital," said Marco Lambertini, WWF director general. At least 40 African countries print their money in the UK, France and Germany decades after independence, raising questions about self-sufficiency. DW examines what prompts them to outsource their currency production. Last July, a delegation from The Gambia visiting the Nigerian Central Bank asked if the Gambian dalasi could be ordered from its West African neighbour. The Gambia's central bank governor, Buah Saidy, said the country was running low on its national currency. The tiny West African country had to redesign its currency after the defeat of former President Yahya Jammeh, who ruled The Gambia from 1994 until he was forced into exile after refusing to accept defeat in the 2016 elections. Jammeh, who is accused of human rights violations and killings of political opponents during his 22-year reign, had images of himself on the nation's banknotes. After his ouster, the Gambian Central Bank set about destroying those images. Now, the dalasi notes have images of a fisherman pushing his canoe out to sea, a farmer tending to his rice paddy, and a spattering of colourful, indigenous birds. Outsourcing the cash One issue remains, however: The Gambia doesn't print its own currency. It places orders with UK companies, resulting in a shortage of liquid money. And The Gambia is not alone in having its money printed in another country. More than two-thirds of Africa's 54 countries print their money overseas, mostly in Europe and in North America. It comes at a time when the African Union is trying to usher in a golden, made-in-Africa age that should see Africa beef up production and enjoy greater profits. Among the top firms that African central banks partner with are British banknote printing giant De La Rue, Sweden-based Crane, and Germany's Giesecke+Devrient. How transparent is the process? It is perhaps surprising that almost all African countries import their currencies. The practice could even raise questions of national pride and national security. For richer countries, like Angola and Ghana, there's also the issue of real autonomy and economic sufficiency. Most countries are tight-lipped about their currency-printing processes likely for security reasons. The printing firms are even less transparent. None of the firms DW contacted responded to requests for a list of African countries that print with them. Counting the cost Ethiopia, Libya and Angola along with 14 other countries place orders from De La Rue, writes Ilyes Zouari, who studies African countries. Six or seven other nations including South Sudan, Tanzania and Mauritania are said to print theirs in Germany, while most French-speaking African countries are known to print their money with France's central bank and with the French printing company Oberthur Fiduciaire. It's not clear how much it costs to print African currencies like the dalasi, although the US dollar costs between 6 and 14 cents. But it is likely that the cost of printing for over 40 African currencies is significant. In 2018, a central bank official in Ghana complained to local journalists that the country spends huge amounts for its UK orders of the Ghanaian cedi. And since countries usually order millions of notes to be carted in containers, they usually have to pay hefty shipping fees. In The Gambia's case, officials say shipping costs rack up a bill of 70,000 (84,000, $92,000). High demand Still, while it may sound odd, analysts say that African countries printing much of their currency abroad is not unusual. Many countries around the world do it. For example, Finland and Denmark outsource their money-making, as do hundreds of central banks around the world. Just a handful of countries, like the US and India, produce their own currencies. Mma Amara Ekeruche from the African Center for Economics Research told DW that when a country's currency is not in high demand and not used globally like the US dollar or the British pound it makes little financial sense to print it at home due to the high cost involved. Money printing machines usually churn out millions of notes at a time. Countries with smaller populations, like The Gambia or Somaliland, would have more money than they needed if they printed their own. "If a country prints one banknote for 10 at home and sees that it can print it for about 8 abroad, then why would they incur more costs to do that? It won't make sense," Ekeruche explained. Some countries like Liberia don't attempt to print their own money because they don't even have a printing press it is costly to set up and requires special technical capabilities. Only a handful of African countries, like Nigeria, Morocco, and Kenya have enough resources to print their own currencies or mint their own coins, and even they sometimes supplement production with imports. Is third-party printing secure? Ekeruche said some individual countries attempting to produce their own currencies could fall victim to corrupt officials or hackers who might attempt to forge or manipulate them. In many cases, outsourcing is more secure. Even with importing, there can be challenges. Containers of Liberian dollars shipped from Sweden disappeared in 2018, although the government later accounted for it. Meanwhile, firms like De La Rue have existed for hundreds of years, mass-producing for central banks across the world. They have the tools and experience to keep up to date with currency innovations, such as polymer which is considered cleaner, more durable and more secure than paper, with the plastic material allowing the inclusion of more sophisticated features to protect against counterfeits. But outsourcing is not without disadvantages. Some countries could find themselves on the receiving end of economic sanctions. In 2011, for example, the UK withheld orders for Libya's dinar from De La Rue, after the UN-sanctioned the late leader, Moammar Gadhafi. Why not print the notes in Africa? African countries have been formulating plans to boost intra-African trade. There is currently more trade with Western and Eastern countries than there is within the continent. Printing banknotes in Africa would boost profits on the continent and, at least theoretically, African countries could choose those with printing capabilities since there's likely some idle capacity. But that is not happening in practice. "Thats due to trust issues between the countries," said Emmanuel Asiedu-Mante, a former deputy chief with the Ghanian central bank, and because many have been printing with overseas firms for years. And there's the complicated case of Francophone Africa the countries using the Central African CFA franc and the West African CFA franc. The currencies are tightly pegged to the euro because of colonial relations and are produced in France. Still, there's hope that change could be on the horizon. With The Gambia's central bank, officials proposing a possible partnership with Nigeria, countries could start to look inwards for their currency orders. If that happens at scale, it could cut shipping costs drastically. Parliament is currently debating a motion moved by the Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, on the electronic transfer levy despite initial objections raised by the Minority. The Minority in Parliament objected to the motion on Tuesday, March 29, 2022, because it was not captured in the business of the week. Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu reiterated the Minority's stance on the E-levy. When the business statement was presented last week, it [E-levy] was not part of the business approved for the house. We have warned time and again and cautioned that we do want to be taken by surprise on a major economic policy of government. Parliament cannot be that when a side is convenient with its number, then business can go on. It cannot be. We will not accept that culture. So when they [Majority] did not have the numbers, they werent ready. Now, that they have the numbers, then you say we should do business. Despite the objection, the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta was allowed to move the motion in Parliament. Although the bill was not captured in the business statement of the house for this week, it was enlisted for the second reading and consideration on Tuesday. This comes at a time the house is filled to capacity by both members of the Minority and Majority. The object of this bill is to broaden the tax base of this country by imposing the levy on electronic transfer and enhance government's drive for revenue mobilization. The levy which is expected to raise GH6.9 million in 2022 is a key mechanism that the government will use to ensure Ghanaians contribute their fair share towards the development of the country. In the spirit of cooperation, government has decided to reduce the rate of the levy from 1.75 to 1.5 percent of the transfer. At the consideration stage, I will bring the necessary amendments to reflect the changes, the Finance Minister moved. The E-levy was introduced by the government in the 2022 Budget on basic transactions related to digital payments and electronic platform transactions. The rate will apply to electronic transactions that are more than GHS 100 on a daily basis. This is different from the 1% telcos charge on transactions. The levy has sparked controversy because of its impact on mobile money transactions and poor Ghanaians that use it. The Minority in Parliament has been resisting the levy ahead of the debate on the Bill in Parliament. Minority's opposition to E-levy scared investors, worsened economic woes Ofori-Atta Already, Ken Ofori-Atta, has blamed the minority in parliament for partly contributing to the current economic woes. He said the minority's lack of support for the E-levy scared investors and triggered the downgrade of Ghana's economy by various international rating agencies. Addressing the public on the decisions taken by the government towards reviving the economy, the Minister said the government did not anticipate the decision of the minority and so their decision not to support the levy threw its plans off-balance . [We didn't expect] that parliament would approve government's 2022 budget statement, appropriation, and its expenditure plans and then turn around to vote against one of the key revenue generation measures that were being introduced, the E-levy. The unyielding stance of the minority in parliament against the levy gravely affected investor confidence in our capacity to implement our programs and settle our debts, triggering the downgrading by credit agencies and now leaving the cedi vulnerable as we cannot access the international capital market, he said. ---citinewsroom Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta moved a motion on Tuesday, 29 March 2022 for the e-levy bill in parliament much to the anger of the Minority Caucus, who accused government of smuggling the bill through. The object of this bill is to broaden the tax base of this country by imposing the levy on electronic transfer and enhance governments drive for revenue mobilization, Mr Ofori-Atta said on the floor, adding: The levy, which is expected to raise GH6.9 million in 2022, is a key mechanism that the government will use to ensure Ghanaians contribute their fair share toward the development of the country. In the spirit of cooperation, the government has decided to reduce the rate of the levy from 1.75 to 1.5 per cent of the transfer, he told parliament. Mr Ofori-Atta noted: At the consideration stage, I will bring the necessary amendments to reflect the changes. Minority Leader Haruna Iddrisu, however, stressed his sides objection to the bill and accused the government of sneaking it in. When the business statement was presented last week, it [e-levy] was not part of the business approved for the house, he observed. We have warned time and again and cautioned that we do not want to be taken by surprise on a major economic policy of the government. Parliament cannot be that when a side is convenient with its number, then business can go on. It cannot be. We will not accept that culture. So, when they [Majority] did not have the numbers, they werent ready. Now, that they have the numbers, then you say we should do business, Mr Iddrisu protested. Source: Classfmonline.com The Ministry in charge of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) has rubbished claims that Ghana imported cassava from China in 2019. This is contained in a press release reacting to claims by a Member of Parliament for Asunafo South, Hon. Eric Opoku. The Ministry wishes to state emphatically that the claim by the NDC MP is false and pure fake news. First of all, Hon. Eric Opoku failed to quote the source which forms the basis of his claims. This can only be the trademark of a person who engages in propaganda and misinformation for political expediency, part of a press release from the Ministry has said. According to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Ghana has become a net exporter of cassava products and no permit was issued by the Plant Protection and Regulatory Services Directorates of the Ministry for the importation of cassava into Ghana in 2019. Perhaps drenched in his own propaganda, which is typical of him and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Hon. Eric Opoku failed to appreciate the fact that such claims are easily verifiable from institutions in charge of collecting data of all items imported or exported into and from the country. We wish to call on the public to treat the claims by the Honourable Member with all the contempt it deserves, the release from MoFA concludes. Below is a copy of the release: The attention of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture has been drawn to a very wild and outrageous claims by a Member of Parliament for Asunafo South, Hon. Eric Opoku, that Ghana imported cassava from China in 2019. The Ministry wishes to state emphatically that the claim by the NDC MP is false and pure fake news. First of all, Hon. Eric Opoku failed to quote the source which forms the basis of his claims. This can only be the trademark of a person who engages in propaganda and misinformation for political expediency. Secondly, to openly deceive the people of Ghana, he gave the clear impression that the cassava imports he referred to was freshly harvested raw cassava crop. However, empirical data from various sources, including the Ghana Statistical Service, Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), The Ministry of Trade and Industry (MoTI), Ghana Shippers Authority, and the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), specifically refer to processed industrial cassava such as starch, gari, cassava flour, tapioca, etc. In actual fact, Ghana is a net exporter of cassava products. The table below gives a summary of volume and value of exports and imports of Cassava Products traded in the years 2019 and 2020 VOLUME AND VALUE OF EXPORTS AND IMPORTS OF CASSAVA PRODUCTS (PROCESSED) 2019 AND 2020 2019 2020 1 Volume of Exports (MT) 4,709 6,444 2 Volume of Imports (MT) 747 562 3 Value of Exports (GH Million) 13.7 10.4 4 Value of Imports (GH Million) 2.5 1.5 Source: Ghana Statistical Service The table shows that the value of exports of processed cassava in 2019 was of GH 13.7 million compared to GH 2.5 million of imports. In the same vein, in 2020, processed cassava export was GH 10.8 million compared to GH 1.5 million of import. Total production of cassava in Ghana in 2019 was 19.4 million metric tonnes. Beside this, the Plant Protection and Regulatory Services Directorates of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, which is the agency responsible for issuing permit for importation of agriculture produce, did not issue any permit for the importation of cassava into Ghana. The NDC Honourable Member of Parliament, in his desperate attempts to discredit this governments enviable record in agriculture, failed to avert his mind to the fact that some of the derivatives from cassava used for other purposes, including manufacturing of drugs, textiles, amongst others, are not manufactured locally and therefore have to be imported. Is this what Hon. Eric Opoku terms it as importation? How pathetic! Then we can as well say that Ghana imports cocoa because there several cocoa products that are imported into the country. Perhaps drenched in his own propaganda, which is typical of him and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Hon. Eric Opoku failed to appreciate the fact that such claims are easily verifiable from institutions in charge of collecting data of all items imported or exported into and from the country. We wish to call on the public to treat the claims by the Honourable Member with all the contempt it deserves. Ghana has since the rollout of the flagship Planting for Food and Jobs programme in 2017, been touted as the bread basket of West Africa; a feat we will continue to pride ourselves with thanks to the outstanding commitment of the President, His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo and the Sector Minister, Hon. Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto. MTN Ghana has been inducted into the African Human Resources Innovation Awards (AHRIA) Hall of Fame at a ceremony held over the weekend in Accra. In addition, MTN won six other prestigious awards, the highest of awards received by any nominee at the event. The awards MTN received were: HR Hall of Fame - MTN Best Organization in Employee Benefits Most Innovative Work from Home Plan Policy Employer Brand of the Year HR Team of the Year (Gold) Employer of the Year Africa Top 50 HR Leader Amma Benneh-Amponsah The Chief Human Resources Officer at MTN Ghana, Amma Benneh-Amponsah was named among the Africa Top 50 HR Leaders. This is the third time Amma has been recognized for her exceptional contribution to people/human capital strategies in Africa. Speaking at the Awards, Amma Benneh-Amponsah, expressed gratitude to the organizers and dedicated the awards to MTN Employees. She said, As an organization, MTN enables an environment that allows Employees to thrive in positivity and live inspired. The Chief Executive Officer of MTN Ghana Mr. Selorm Adadevoh congratulated Amma and the HR team for the excellent work done over the years, especially during Covid to ensure Employees are well informed, safe and energized to work anywhere and anytime which is the new normal. He also commended the human resource practices and interventions put in place to ensure productivity and innovation that continues to impact our valued customers and stakeholders. The Africa Human Resources Innovation Awards formerly called Ghana Human Resources Innovation Awards is an annual celebration of leading Human Resource Practitioners and organizations with Top-notch HR models who have made sterling contributions to the corporate sector over the years. MTN has won over 20 awards since the inception of the Africa Human Resources Innovation Awards in 2018. President Nana Akufo-Addo has commissioned the newly-constructed Tamale Interchange. Delivering an address during the commissioning on Tuesday, the President said several road projects across the country will begin in the second quarter of the year under the second phase of the Sinohydro agreement. Apart from the construction of the interchange, the government has undertaken critical road projects to improve urban mobility across the country which will reduce travel time on our highways. The Tamale Interchange is an integral part of comprehensive measures by the Akufo-Addo government to address the issues of congestion in urban centers and to help improve travel times on major arterial roads. Sod was cut for the project on April 10 as part of the $2 billion SinoHydro Master Project Support Agreement. The Master Project Support was agreed upon between Ghana and Sinohydro Corporation Limited in 2018 to address major infrastructure challenges in the country. Under the overall $2 billion deal, the Sinohydro Group Limited of China will provide the infrastructure of the government's choice in exchange for Ghana's refined bauxite. Ghana will establish a refinery and select a partner to undertake the refining of the bauxite in line with the deal. The President also expressed satisfaction with the work done so far and charged the urban roads and other relevant departments to ensure maintenance of the project. The Tamale South Member of Parliament, Haruna Iddrisu, had called for a structural audit to be conducted on the project. However, the Ministry of Roads and Highways had insisted that the interchange is in accordance with the standards and specifications of the Ministry. ---citinewsroom 29.03.2022 LISTEN Member of Parliament for Tamale North Constituency, Alhassan Suhuyini, has alleged that President Akufo-Addo is bent on getting the Electronic transfer Levy (E-Levy) passed today, Tuesday, March 29, 2022, as his birthday present. The President turns 78 years today. Parliament is currently debating a motion moved by the Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, on the controversial electronic transfer levy despite initial objections raised by the Minority. Earlier, the Minority in Parliament objected to the motion because it was not captured in the business of the week. Despite the objection, the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, was allowed to move the motion in Parliament. Although the bill was not captured in the business statement of the house for this week, it was enlisted for the second reading and consideration on Tuesday. This comes at a time the house is filled to capacity by both members of the Minority and Majority. The Tamale North MP in a Facebook post said he is reliably informed that the President, whose 78th birthday is today, has requested for the passage of the Levy as a birthday present. Well, I said it last night. Our president doesn't seem to be interested in a Black Stars victory as a birthday gift. I'm informed he requested the passage of E levy as a birthday gift. Almost all of his MPs are here in the House. Well the Minority MPs are here too. So the Black Stars are on their own in faraway Nigeria. The President is leading us to focus on E Levy. So we move, he added. The E-levy was introduced by the government in the 2022 Budget on basic transactions related to digital payments and electronic platform transactions. The rate will apply to electronic transactions that are more than GHS 100 on a daily basis. This is different from the 1% telcos charge on transactions. The levy has sparked controversy because of its impact on mobile money transactions and poor Ghanaians that use it. The Minority in Parliament has been resisting the levy ahead of the debate on the Bill in Parliament today. Meanwhile, the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, has announced that the government has decided to reduce the rate of the controversial Electronic Transfer Levy by 0.25 percent. ---citinewsroom The Minority in Parliament claims some New Patriotic Party (NPP) lawmakers are against the proposed E-levy but are afraid to show up. Yapei-Kusawgu Member of Parliament John Jinapor said in Parliament on Tuesday March 29 while contributing to a debate on the E-levy in Parliament on Tuesday March 29, Mr Jinapor said he is aware that some NPP lawmakers are even concerned about the hardship the E-levy will bring on their constituencies hence they do not want the policy to be approved. I know some of you are concerned about your constituents. Be bold and come out to be counted, he said while opposing the E-levy. He further accused the Akufo-Addo administration of poor performance which he said is leading the NPP to opposition. Mr Jinapor said the performance of the Akufo-Addo government is the worst by any government in the Fourth Republic. Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah while contributing to the debate on the E-levy dismissed claims that it will kill the Mobile Money (MoMo) industry. He noted that this same argument was made when the Communication Service Tax (CST) was introduced to the effect that it was going to kill the telecom industry. Speaking on the floor of Parliament on Tuesday March 29, the Ofoase Ayirebi lawmaker said contrary to the fears, the telecom industry has grown even with tax. He said Mr Speaker, there is a claim that has been made that it will kill the MoMo industry so don't tax MoMo. This same claim was made when the Communications Service Tax was being introduced, it has never killed ] the industry. In fact the industry has grown. Mr Speaker, finally, the poor have been taken out of it with the threshold implemented so that those who transfer less than 100 cedis a day will not pay this levy. Deputy Finance Minister, Abena Osei-Asare, also argued for the passage of the E-levy in Parliament on Tuesday, March 29. She assured that revenue to be generated from the E-levy will be used in proving the needs of Ghanaians. Speaking on the floor of the House she said the E-levy is not MoMo tax, it is Electronic Transaction Levy. This was after a Former Deputy Minister of Finance, Cassiel Ato Forson, had told Parliament that the E-levy should not be passed. ---3news.com It's not a small responsibility to assume the leadership of a nation. For one's primary duty is to ensure the safety of millions of people, the great majority of whom may not even have had a direct say in one's accession to power. In return for the privilege of being the nation's top person, a leader must be wiser than an owl and craftier than a serpent. Has the Ukrainian President, Mr Volodymyr Zelensky, displayed the leadership qualities that could have saved his nation from the brutal pulverisation to which it has been subjected by Russia? I do not think so. It is now reported that QUOTE Ukrainian president Zelensky says Ukraine is ready to accept a neutralstatus as part of a peace deal with Russia. [He said this] on Sunday [27 March 2022] in an interview with Russian independent journalists. "Security guarantees, and the neutral, non-nuclear status of our state: we are ready to accept this," Zelensky said. Zelensky further told the journalists that, "This was the first point of principle for the Russian Federation, as I recall. And as far as I remember, they started the war because of this." UNQUOTE He did not say that this was a change in his position, but he did stipulate that Any agreement would have to be put to the Ukrainian people in a referendum. And he once again stressed his desire to reach a concrete peace agreement [with Russia] He added QUOTE: "So this clause is a security guarantee clause for Ukraine. And since they [the Russians] say it's for them [security guarantees] as well, it's understandable to me, and it's being discussed. It's in-depth, but I'm interested in making sure that it's not just another piece of paper.... So we're interested in having that paper turned into a serious treaty to be signed..." The issues of Donbas and Crimea must be discussed and solved [in the peace talks, as well.] UNQUOTE President Zelensky's comments came as the Turkish presidency announced that the next round of the talks the Turks have been superintending between Russian and Ukrainian delegates, would be held in the Turkish city of Istanbul on Tuesday, 29 March 2022. The question is: why hasn't Mr Zelensky made this offer of Ukrainian neutrality until now? Such a declaration may not have deterred President Vladimir Putin of Russia from brutally invading Ukraine, but Mr Zelensky would have scored more points against Putin had he done so. It is, in fact, ironical that it is the Turks who are featuring so prominently in efforts to get the Russians and the Ukrainians to try and reach agreement. For it was Turkey which, in 1962, nearly brought a Third World War between the USSR and the USA about! Such a war would have meant the end of the world, of course, since it would have been carried out with thermonuclear weapons. This is how declassified US national security archives outline the situation that faced the USSR and the NATO nations at the time : QUOTE: If the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dangerous passage of the Cold War, the most dangerous moment of [that] Crisis was the evening of Saturday, 27 October 1962, when the resolution of the crisiswar or peaceappeared to hang in the balance. While Soviet ships had not attempted to break the U.S naval blockade of Cuba, Soviet nuclear missile bases remained on the island and were rapidly becoming operational. And pressure on President Kennedy to order an air strike, or invasion, was mounting, especially after an American reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba that Saturday afternoon, and its pilot killed. Hopes that a satisfactory resolution to the crisis could be reached between Washington and Moscow had dimmed, moreover, when a letter from Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev arrived Saturday morning demanding that the United States agree to remove its Jupiter missiles from TURKEY in exchange for a Soviet removal of missiles from Cuba.... On Saturday evening, after a day of tense discussions within the ... Executive Committee of [his] senior advisers, President Kennedy decided on a dual strategya formal letter to Khrushchev accepting the implicit terms of his October 26 letter (a U.S. non-invasion pledge in exchange for the verifiable departure of Soviet nuclear missiles), coupled with private assurances to Khrushchev that the United States would speedily take out its missiles from TURKEY, but only on the basis of a secret understanding, not as an open agreement.... The U.S. president elected to transmit this sensitive message through his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who met in his office at the Justice Department with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. That meeting has long been recognized as a turning point in the crisis, but several aspects of it have been shrouded in mystery and confusion. One concerned the issue of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey.... The first important Soviet account of the event to emerge was contained in the tape-recorded memoirs of deposed Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, which were smuggled to the West and published in 1970 (after Khrushchev's death)..... The second volume of Khrushchev's memoirs (Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament), published posthumously in 1974,... included the flat statement . that "President Kennedy said that in exchange for the withdrawal of our missiles [from Cuba] he would remove American missiles from TURKEY AND ITALY." UNQUOTE Has President Zelensky taken the trouble to become thoroughly conversant with the secret Russian reports on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which resembles the current Ukrainian-Russian-NATO tug-of-war in so many respects? If he had done so, I doubt whether he would have been seemingly playing with fire by making public, his desire to take Ukraine into NATO! The point is that Zelensky should have realised that President Putin, a former KGB officer, has a visceral, emotional antipathy to NATO, having personally experienced life under the full rigours of the Cold War, when he was the KGB's top man stationed in East Germany. When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, ex-KGB high-echelon officers like Putin would have taken it like a blow to the solar plexus! For it's no exaggeration to say that they counted their lives by the minute, whilst they were fighting the Cold War at its front. Now, there is an African proverb which says that There is always blood in the head of a tsetse fly, which is to say that it would be extremely unrealistic, and dangerous so, for anyone to imagine that Putin and hard-boiled intelligence apparatchiks like him, with the bitter experience of the Cold War behind them, would allow opportunistic politicians like Zelensky (whom they considered as re amateurs, anyway, to conduct NATO right to the doorsteps of Russia. The fruits of that mistake can be seen on television in news bulletin after news bulletin. Yes, there is no doubt that the Ukrainians are putting up a very courageous and even ingenious battle to safeguard their country's independence. But isn't the price they are being made to pay too high? So many innocent men, women and children killed; so many buildings utterly destroyed; and millions of refugees uprooted from their lives in Ukraine. As they seek new and hardship-laden lives in neighbouring countries, aren't they going to regret having had to suffer so much without being asked whether they were willing to exchange their peace for Ukrainian national pride? A writer called Carl von Clausewitz once published a book that has become something of a bible on the origins of war. In the book, Vom Kriege [On War]he says: War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means For political aims are the end and war is the means, and the means can never be conceived without the end. I submit that the end, in this (as in many other instances) must be to better the conditions of existence of all the inhabitants of a given country in this case, Ukraine. By CAMERON DUODU Yapei-Kusawgu Member of Parliament, John Jinapor, says the NPP governments push for the passage of the controversial Electronic Transfer Levy (E-levy), will have a huge impact on its fortunes in the next general election. He believes the tax policy is not in the interest of Ghanaians and that, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) will lose the next general election considering the resistance by the citizenry. Partaking in the debate on the E-levy Bill on the floor of parliament on Tuesday, March 29, the MP particularly took on the Finance Minister for introducing policies that worsen the plight of already suffering Ghanaians. I want to tell the Finance Minister that, managing this economy is not about quoting Bible verses or wearing white. Thank you very much for the Bible quotations but when you quote the Bible, you must follow that with actions, principles, programs and projects. I am even more convinced that whether the E-levy is passed or not, you are on the way to opposition come 2024, John Jinapor said. The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, on Tuesday, moved the motion in Parliament for the E-levy bill to be considered. The bill has been amended to revise the rate from 1.75% to 1.5%. The government is hoping that the bill will this time get Parliament's endorsement as its previous efforts have seen the bill rejected. Isaac Adongo, one of the vociferous opponents of the bill said President Akufo-Addo chose a very memorable day [His birthday] to punish citizens with E-levy. John Jinapor accused government of being insensitive and unwilling to bring reprieve to the populace. It is clear that, the centre cannot hold. The Economic Management Team under President Akufo-Addo has been the worse in the history of Ghana. The failure on the part of this country is legendary because putting three-square meal on the table is a major challenge. The ordinary Ghana is suffering and if you look at the true state of the economy and instead of government to think of how to cushion Ghanaians, it is main principle is to tax. citinewsroom The Member of Parliament (MP) for the Yapei-Kusawgu constituency, John Abdulai Jinapor has taken a swipe at Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta. He said managing the economy is not about quoting Bible verses and wearing clothes. The Finance Minister stormed Parliament on Tuesday, March 29, 2022, to push for the passing of the controversial Electronic Transaction Levy (E-Levy). During his address to the house, Ken Ofori-Atta is said to have quoted some bible verses in his bid to woo members of the Minority. Speaking on the floor of Parliament, John Jinapor used the opportunity to throw jabs at the Minister for Finance. He said the Finance Minister should note that managing Ghanas economy is neither about quoting verses nor is it about always dressing up in white. I want to tell the Finance Minister that, managing this economy is not about quoting bible verses or wearing white. Thank you very much for the Bible quotations but when you quote the Bible, you must follow with actions and principles, the Yapei-Kusawgu said in Parliament today. According to John Abdulai Jinapor, he has no doubt the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) government will be booted out of government in the next general elections. I am even more convinced that whether the E-Levy is passed or not, you are on the way to opposition come 2024, Mr. Jinapor stressed. Meanwhile, the Majority in the absence of the Minority has this afternoon voted to approve the Electronic Transaction Levy Bill. The Minority has since held a press conference accusing the Majority of engaging in illegality, arguing that they did not have the numbers to come to that conclusion. Scenes at the Danyi-Nkwanta Market in the Republic of Togo was spectacle due to human traffic following the recent re-opening of Menuso Border Post to travelers and businessmen and women. Danyi-Nkwanta Market Day falls on every Monday with travelers coming from Kadjebi, Dzindziso, Poase-Cement, Ahamansu, among other communities in the Kadjebi District visiting the market to trade with their wares to other traders from Badou, Atakpame, Wawa, among other communities in the Republic of Togo. A visit by the Ghana News Agency (GNA) to the market following re-opening of land borders on Monday saw people busily selling and buying items on display in the market. Madam Fasilatu Tijani, a market woman said the border closure had affected their lives as their business partners from Ghana could not come to patronise their goods thus, affecting them economically and financially. She said life had become unbearable for them, and they found it difficult to make ends meet during the border closure and thanked President Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo Addo for re-opening the borders. Madam Comfort Agboga, a footwear seller said, the border closure had affected them negatively as the border served as economic life wire for the people in the area and now that it had been opened; their living standards would improve. Madam Agboga, who also deals in clothes hoped to make some good sales now that the market had come to life after two years of it being dead due to the border closure. GNA Rice farmers in the Upper East Region have expressed optimism about the Warehouse Receipt System (WRS) project of the IFC World Bank Group. The rice farmers who described the WRS project as an initiative to improve livelihood, also observed that the project activities would not only help them to produce quality grains but offer them opportunities to access credit to expand their agricultural business as they store their grains in certified and secured warehouses. At the end of a training session on post-harvest management, Madam Doris Adda, a rice farmer at Navrongo disclosed that the WRS project initiatives would enable them to benefit from access to credit as they store their grains in a secured warehouse whilst waiting for better prices. We did not know how and where to store our rice, the WRS project is a good project for us. At first, the market women will come for our rice, sell it before returning our money but now with the WRS project, we can use our receipts to get loans before selling our produce and the future will be great, she said. This WRS project is really for us, at least, there is a system that enables farmers to get loan whilst keeping the produce for a better price, this would help us to get loan and invest more into our farming business, Mr. Justice Ayine, a rice farmer and the Assembly Member for Nyariga Electoral Area within the Bongo District of the Upper East Region disclosed in an interview. Mr. James Bawa, a rice farmer at Navrongo, within the Kassena Nankana District of the Upper East, on his part disclosed that the training has exposed him and his colleague farmers to the structured trading systems that enable farmers to get value for their efforts. It has been a very good eye-opener for me and my colleague farmers. Before todays training, we have been hearing about commodity storage and exchange on the radio, but this training has brought a lot of information that has given us hope for the future. This training has taught us about marketing which has been a major challenge for our farming activities, so this WRS system will give us more stabilized or guaranteed prices and we are no longer forced to sell at the farm gate at whatever prices they offer but this system will help us to sell at a good price, he said. The IFC Ghana WRS Project is being implemented in nine regions of the country with financial support from Switzerlands State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO). It is a technical assistance and advisory services project aimed at setting up a well-functioning regulated WRS that is expected to facilitate increased access to better storage facilities to reduce post-harvest loses, access to credit, and structured markets for smallholder farmers and the supply chain. The Project is working in partnership with participating financial institutions to grant better financial inclusion for farmers, traders, and small-medium enterprises (SMEs). About IFC: IFCa member of the World Bank Groupis the largest global development institution focused on the private sector in emerging markets. We work in more than 100 countries, using our capital, expertise, and influence to create markets and opportunities in developing countries. In fiscal year 2021, IFC committed a record $31.5 billion to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries, leveraging the power of the private sector to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity as economies grapple with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. For more information, visit www.ifc.org. The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) EU funded West Africa Competitiveness Programme Ghana supports nine selected quality experts from Ghana to be IRCA Certified ISO 22000 Lead Auditors. The support is part of WACOMPs effort to contribute to building local competence and a pool of national experts to backstop and handhold MSMEs in Ghana to meet quality requirements, gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace and avoid export product recalls. The experts were selected from the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA), Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) and other private institutions. A brief graduation ceremony was held for the successful candidates on Thursday at the WACOMP Project office in Labone. In his opening remarks, Mr. Charles Kwame Sackey, Chief Technical Advisor of WACOMP Ghana, stated that the support is part of WACOMP's mandate to train a pool of national experts and build their competencies on topics/practices such as quality management, product quality, manufacturing, and food safety in Ghana. Mr. Sackey said: WACOMP Ghana continuously builds up the competency of experts in system audits and management system implementation since it is strategic for Ghana, European Union and UNIDO, as it ensures that the number of certified auditors increases in the country, which should, in turn, make businesses more competitive. Mr. Sackey added, "WACOMP Ghana will continue to build the capacity of local experts to strengthen their confidence, skills, and knowledge in the discharge of their duties in supporting MSMEs to develop a culture of quality' and to increase the number of certified auditors in the country to support 1D1F to be more competitive." Mr. Fakhruddin Azizi, the UNIDO Representative to Ghana and Liberia congratulated the graduates and encouraged them to apply their skills as part of capacity building and to support the country in its industrialization drive. Mr. Azizi said: Use the skills acquired in your respective workplaces and support MSMEs especially to be quality competitive to support Ghana in her industrialization drive. ISO 22000 is a Food safety management system that provides requirements for any organization in the food industry to help to improve overall performance in food safety. Last year, UNIDO and the European Union through WACOMP supported 10 experts from Ghana to receive IRCA ISO 9001:2015 lead auditor certification. The redevelopment of the Tema Meridian enclave roads has started which forms part of the Tema Metropolitan Assembly (TMA) commitment to reshape the enclave to fulfil the Make Tema Shine agenda. Mr Frank Asante, the TMA Public Relations Officer told newsmen in Tema on Tuesday that the current state of the roads of the enclave which serve as the business centre for the Metropolis was worrying. The enclave hosts several banks, freight forwarding companies, and some state institutions is in a very deplorable state as the once tarred roads have been left to bear with deep galleys which collect water whenever it rained. Mr Asante indicated that the government was supporting the Assembly to bring back the shine in the enclave through the redevelopment of the roads which, he said would also help boost business transactions in the Metropolis. He said the MCE also used the visit to interact with the business community in the area and traders to give the needed cooperation to the contractors to ensure that they did their work within the stipulated time. The PRO further said improvement in the various infrastructure was very important in achieving the dreams of the Assembly, therefore, their resolve for the redevelopment. He said the Assembly had also started fixing all the non-functional streetlights in the communities. Mr Asante added that streetlights on major roads especially the critical ones such as the General Hospital stretch had been done as that was the only way to access the referral hospital during emergencies without encountering any mishaps. He said the lights on the Tema Harbour to Newtown road was also being fixed as the town was heavily populated and situated next to the port, a national asset. Mr Asante said in light of that Mr. Yohane Amarh Ashitey, TMA Metropolitan Chief Executive, accompanied by engineers of the Assembly had visited the area with the contractors to look at the scope of work. Ghana needs 10 billion dollars to implement a modern and robust railway system to move people and goods across regions, Mr Kwaku Asante-Boateng, the Deputy Minister of Railway Development, has said. He is therefore calling on development partners to fund Ghana's Railway Master Plan to reduce emissions in the transport sector and meet her climate obligation under the Paris Agreement. In the railway sector not much work has been done due to financial constraints although there is a good plan. We required some investment to develop the sector in order to realise the intent of the plan, he said. Mr Asante-Boateng made the appeal at the launch of Ghana's Roadmap for Resilient Infrastructure, saying said the country was looking for partners to fund the implementation of railways master plan. The Ghana's Roadmap for Resilient Infrastructure is the culmination of a 21-month partnership between the Government of Ghana, GCA, the University of Oxford, the United Nations Office for Project Services and the United Nations Environment Programme to identify and propose solutions to address priority adaptation needs in Ghana. Using modelling and assessment tools, and through an extensive stakeholder consultation process, it provides an assessment of risk of climate hazard on national infrastructure systems. Mr Asante-Boateng stated that the study revealed that flooding threatened critical passenger and freight transport services, including major highways and the Western and Eastern rail lines. Infrastructure provision in most countries, especially Africa, is a necessary factor in achieving sustainable development, but their provision has been delayed due to challenges in financing and calculating funding needs. he said. Mr Asante-Boateng said, It takes longer hours for people living in Kasoa, Adenta and Tema to get to the business centres in Accra due to the congestion in traffic. If we have a highly effective rail system from Adenta to Accra, Tema to Accra, Kasoa to Accra, carbon emissions in the environment will be reduced and the system will be more efficient and reliable. He noted that a railway system would take the burden off the road network, and provide efficient and sustainable alternatives to ensure longer lifespan for existing roads and those yet to be constructed. Dr Kwaku Afriyie, the Minister of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, said the resilient infrastructure roadmap had presented 35 project concepts in the built, natural, or enabling environment to provide prioritised adaptation options. He noted that the interconnected dimensions of the infrastructure system would enable and deliver development benefits linked to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, and gender and inclusion. The roadmap also defines actions for implementation, a key one being financing, by highlighting a total of 82 funds (worth approximately US$274 billion) with the potential to finance infrastructure in Ghana. Of the 82 funds identified, the Government has an existing relationship (over the last 10 years) with 44% of the funds. This means 46 new funding opportunities exist that can increase the range of options for infrastructure financing available to the Government of Ghana. GNA The Importers and Exporters Association of Ghana (IEAG) is upset about the passage of the electronic levy (E-Levy) stressing that the timing was not the best. Times are hard as the price of goods and services kept increasing in the country, and the ordinary Ghanaian complained of difficulty in making a living. Mr. Samson Awingobi Asaki, IEAG Executive Secretary said this in reaction to the passing of the bill on Tuesday by the majority side after members of the minority side had staged a walkout. He said the passage would even make it very difficult to send some money to friends and relatives using mobile money to alleviate the hardship they go through, as according to him, sending such monies would now have additional charges which would be a deterrent to the sender. Mr Asaki expressed worry that the e-cash system that the Bank of Ghana was about to introduce would die a natural death following the e-levy passage as many would shy away from it to avoid payment of the tax. He further observed that the various mobile banking applications being used by the commercial banks to facilitate easy and quick banking for their clients would also be affected. He urged members of the public especially importers and exporters to resort to the use of cheques and cash for the payments of goods instead of the use of electronic payments, adding that he had been reliably informed that paying taxes with mobile money would not be affected by the passage of the bill. The e-levy bill was passed after being considered under a certificate of urgency which allowed for it to go through the second and third reading. The bill attracted a lot of controversy and agitations from the general public when it was first laid before parliament as part of 2022 budget which required that e-transactions would attract a levy of 1.75 per cent. The amount to be deducted was subsequently reduced to 1.50 per cent while the government held a number of town hall meetings to educate the public on the importance of passing the e-levy bill. A nationwide self-placement exercise under the Computerized School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) successfully started yesterday for 187,542 candidates for their choice of schools. The exercise which is being done in all the 16 regions across the country will allow the students to select new schools after they could not get placed during the automatic placement. Briefing the media in Accra on Tuesday, Nana Afrah Sika Mensah, Deputy Coordinator for the Free Senior High School (FSHS), said a total of 75 personnel of the FSHS secretariat have been trained on good customer service skills to assist parents and students with challenges. The Coordinator said the call centres were being managed by 75 trained personnel with good customer service skills so they could assist parents and other guardians to resolve various admission issues such as change of school, changing of sex, change of programme and status among others. She urged parents to take a keen interest in resolving issues at their various regional resolution centres themselves instead of engaging agents or people at the internet cafe who would not get them the right answers to their questions. Nana Afrah Sika Mensah also cautioned parents not to pay money to anyone who comes to them to offer such a service at a fee since the CSSPS does not charge anything for such a service. Background The Ministry of Education through the FSHS secretariat over the weekend announced the release of the school placement for qualified candidates who will be attending either SHS or any TVET institution in the country. A total of 571,892 candidates wrote the 2021/2022 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE), after which 555,353 candidates qualified to further their education at the second cycle level. Out of the number who qualified, 367,811 were automatically placed in their school of choice leaving only 187,542 to do self-placement. The establishment of a national and regional resolution centre across the country is helping to offer a face-to-face opportunity to parents, students, the media and other stakeholders to meet the technical team from the CSSPS and Free SHS Secretariat to address their peculiar issues instantly. Apart from the national teams, four-member teams have been formed at each of the centres in the 16 regions to collate and send to the national technical team issues compiled for redress. The present economic hardships caused by the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic is hitting hard on the private orphanages in the country. Most of the orphanages are unable to get three square meals to feed their inmates, pay their utilities, buy drugs and other essential items needed for the proper upkeep of the inmates. Madam Christiana Jim Konadu, Deputy Director of Ashan Children's Home at Denase in the Afigya Kwabre South District of Ashanti region, revealed this when the Oforikrom branch of the Christ Apostolic Church of Ghana donated an amount of GH5,000.00 to the Home. This was after the church organized a party for the inmates of the Home as well as elders and widows of the church. Madam Konadu said the global pandemic and its subsequent economic hardships had directly affected their operations and support received from individuals and groups. She explained that due to the economic hardships people were no more paying them regular visits with donations and support, as it used to be. Madam Konadu said most private orphanages depended largely on the benevolence of individuals and philanthropic groups and since these were no more coming, their operations had been seriously affected. She, therefore, appealed to the government and private organisations to extend their support to enable the orphanages to cater for these under privileged children in their care. Elder Sampson Kofi Wiredu, Presiding Elder of the Church, said, it was time the government came in to support deprived private orphanages as it was doing to the public ones, to enable them to cater effectively for the children in their care. He said it was sad to see some of these private homes struggling to pay utility bills and buy essential items to fend for these poor children who were under their care. Elder Wiredu underscored the key role being played by these orphanages to help reduce streetism and its potential dangers on society and called on individuals and corporate organisations to assist these orphanages. He said it was the duty of everyone to visit and take care of these vulnerable children in society. Pastor Isaac Kofi Hughes, Oforikrom Area Head Pastor of the Apostolic church Ghana, charged Christians to always show love to those in need. GNA Mr Nelson Bonsu, the Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the National Youth Authority (NYA), has called for concerted efforts to tackle the growing and disturbing trend of streetism among children in the country. He expressed worry that the influx of foreign nationals from neighbouring Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, flooding the streets of Kumasi, Accra and other urban centres remained a serious national security threat. Mr Bonsu made the call at the opening session of a day's stakeholders' national consultative forum on reproductive health education for young people, held at Abesim, near Sunyani. It is very disturbing that some parents pushed their children to beg for alms on the street. The sad aspect is that many of these innocent children are born and raised on the street, and we must take decisive action to reverse the trend, he stated. The NYA in collaboration with the Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana (PPAG), with funding support from the West African Health Organisation (WAHO) organised the forum. It was attended by representatives from the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVSSU), Ghana Health Service (GHS), Ghana Education Service (GES), Department of Gender, Traditional Authorities and Religious Bodies and aimed at identifying and tackling challenges confronting adolescent people in the country Some foreign nationals keep arriving on the streets of Accra and Kumasi, due to political instability and other reasons in their countries. A new generation of Ghanaian people are being born and raised on the street. We must therefore come together, share and collect views to enable the nation to tackle this menace proactively. These are young people born and developed on the street and in fact the government is much concerned about this disturbing phenomenon, Mr Neslon indicated. In a speech read on her behalf, Mrs Abena Adubea Amoah, the Executive Director of the PPAG, said the world's population was at an all-time high with 1.8 billion people aged between 15 and 29 years. Yet the potential to reap the demographic dividend and secure a happy, healthy and prosperous future for all could be dashed by challenges like unequal access to health and education, including reproductive health, she added. Mrs Amoah regretted that the young people of today were faced with more difficult conditions of life, which had worsened with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. The youth are faced with limited access to services that enhance the quality of reproductive, less empowered with self-esteem and confidence to demand their rights, challenged with many socio-cultural practices that reinforce patriarchal structures and practices that are inimical to the realisation of their full potential, she said. Mr Emmanuel Akoto, the Director of Programmes and Service Delivery of the PPAG said young people needed a nationally acceptable programme that would enable and empower them to access age appropriate and culturally sensitive and scientific accurate reproductive health information and education with improved channels of linkages to service. GNA 29.03.2022 LISTEN President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo will sign into law the controversial Electronic Transfer Levy (E-levy) policy document later this week. Mr Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Majority Leader, disclosed this at a press conference in Accra on Tuesday. When assented to by the President, the E-levy would become a law that binds every electronic money transaction to attract a 1.5 per cent charge. Parliament approved the bill after amending portions of the document on Tuesday, despite a walkout staged by the Minority Caucus. "President Nana Akufo-Addo will assent the bill by the close of the week, Mr Kyei -Mensah said in a response to a question at the press conference. He explained that a parliamentary committee was supposed to fine-tune the approved bill to ensure that all the necessary clauses were properly captured before the policy was presented to the President for his approval. Today, because of the Black Stars match, I am not sure that the committee can meet. I am sure in the week, it will be ready for the President's assent, the Majority Leader said. The E-levy law has witnessed a long rejection from the Minority in Parliament and some stakeholders in the telecommunications space, but the government insisted the bill would restore confidence in the economy. After the bill was presented to Parliament under the certificate of urgency, some months back, Minority and Majority Members of Parliament took turns debating on the subject with the usual hard-core positions. During the second reading on Tuesday, the Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu, noted that his side would have nothing to do with E-levy in any form or shape. "Mr Speaker, the Minority led by me will not be associated with any further proceedings on E-levy," he said. Soon after Mr Iddrisu's comments, the Minority then, staged a walkout in protest, which went in favour of the Majority to duly undertake the second and third readings of the bill and subsequently passed it into law. The levy, which was amended from 1.75 per cent to 1.5 per cent on Tuesday, March 29, 2022, and passed under a certificate of urgency, would be a tax on electronic transactions, which includes mobile-money payments. The charge would apply to electronic transactions that are more than GH100 daily. While critics of the proposal have warned that this new levy would negatively impact the financial technology space, as well as hurt low-income people and those outside the formal banking sector. The government has, however, argued the levy would widen the tax net and that could raise an extra GH6.9 billion in 2022. The levy has been the source of tension in Parliament since it was introduced in the 2022 budget. GNA 29.03.2022 LISTEN The controversial E-levy has been passed today awaiting presidential assent. The bill was read for the second time in parliament after Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta stormed the house by surprise. Subsequently, the Minority Caucus walked out while the debate was still ongoing leaving the Majority to pass the bill unopposed. Reacting to the news, social media users have termed the passage as a birthday gift to the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo wo celebrates his 78th birthday today. Many have called the President wicked while others hold the view that the new taxation would amount to nothing. The Deputy CEO of the National Youth Authority also received backlash from social media users after she lauded the passage of the E-levy and called today a good day. Meanwhile, Gabby Otchere Darko, an NPP stalwart and a cousin to the President tweeted that the passing of the E-Levy was not a bad way for the President to celebrate his 78th birthday. However, the Minority in Parliament has vowed to fight tooth and nail against the bill which according to them, was done without a quorum in Parliament. Minority Leader Haruna Iddrisu indicated that the Majority did not have the numbers as MP for Dome-Kwabenya Sara Adwoa Sarfo was not present. He added that an ambulance supposedly conveying sick Ahanta West MP, Ebenezer Kum was seen however, the MP himself was not seen in the chamber making the Majority short of another member to form a quorum. In a press conference earlier today, Minority Leader Haruna Iddrisu stated that the Caucus has already filed a stay of execution on the bill and will ensure that like in the Justice Abdulai case, the affirmation of the Supreme Court on Article 104 (1) is upheld. Christopher Dapaah, Project Coordinator, Tax Justice Coalition has recommended that Ghana should start reducing some of the exemptions package given to corporate organizations under the excuse of attracting Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs), which has not benefited the nation. According to him, the country's oil finds in addition to other resources and capacities as well as the peaceful democratic system should serve as bargaining points for the nation to attract investors and not only incentives. Ghana is of age now, and we should be able to reduce some of the incentives and exemptions in the previous excuse of attracting foreign direct investments. Now, we have oil in addition to other resources and additional capacities as well as peaceful governance system should be our bargaining point for us to be able to get investors and not only incentive and exemptions. Mr Dapaah made the recommendation when the Tax Justice Coalition- Ghana engaged the Parliamentary Press Corps on Ghana's Exemption Bill, 2022 in Accra. The seminar, which was on theme: Sustainable financing of Ghana's Development: Domestic revenue mobilization and the Exemptions Bill in Ghana, is intended to promote the passage of the Exemptions bill in Ghana The Exemptions Bill is a bill proposed by government through the Ministry of Finance to bring all incentives, exemptions, reliefs, and other tax regime under one umbrella or single coordinating point to ensure effective monitoring and better oversight of all the incentives and exemptions regimes that has been granted. Mr Dapaah explained that currently, there was no uniform exemptions policy giving room for both Parliament and Ministers to grant some exemptions as well as Presidency. He said, the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), which is supposed to coordinate the process, found it a bit difficult because sometimes, the information is not readily available to them to even track them to ensure effective implementation of the incentives and exemptions. He said Exemption Bill, 2022 is therefore intended to bring all the exemption regimes under the GRA to enable monitor properly its effectiveness. Mr Dapaah explained that there were clauses within the Bill that mandated the Minister of Finance to report periodically in details on all the exemptions and incentives granted to be able to do cost benefit analysis and ensure accountability and the efficient use of that policy. The Tax Justice Coalition, he explained, supported the Exemptions Bill because they considered it a good policy and would advocate for it to be passed as early as possible. If we use it judiciously, it will be able to potentially increase domestic revenue. The possible loss of revenue that is coming through the shadows that are within exemptions regimes would be reduced or taken off so as the illicit financial flows and other abuses of these regimes will also be reduced. In so doing, there is the likelihood that Ghana may generate a little more revenue from these incentives within, he added. GNA Women in Public Relations Ghana has outdoored the Top 10 Public Relations (PR) women in Ghana for the year 2021. The list includes Praise Nutakor (Head of Communications and Partnerships of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Ghana), Shirley Tony Kum (Corporate Communications Manager, Vivo Energy Ghana), Sophia Kudjordji (Group Head, Communications, Jospong Group of Companies), Cynthia Ofori Dwumfuo (Group Head, Marketing and Corporate Affairs, Hollard Ghana), Veronica Ofosuhemaa Owusu-Ansah (Head of Brand Communications and Business Development for Quick Angels Limited), Joyce Ahiadorme (Transformation and Internal Communications Manager, FanMilk- Danone), Afia Drah (Communication and Business Development Manager, The Trust Hospital), Mina Okuru (Communications Manager, Ghanaian-German Centre for Jobs, Migration and Reintegration), Josephine Appiah-Nyamekye Sanny (Knowledge Translation Manager, Afrobarometer), and Akosua Kwafo Ogyiri (Communication & Media Manager, WaterAid Ghana). Women in PR explained that the main objective behind these listings is not to just celebrate PR women but to continue to highlight the growing importance of female presence in leadership and by way of their contribution to achieving gender equality in the PR industry. In this 2021 edition of our Top 10 Women in PR Ghana, we added a new element which allowed the PR community to nominate their top PR women for the year 2021 via google forms. We received entries after which a 3-member jury was tasked to review and shortlist the entries based on a set of criteria, it noted. One of the awardees, Praise Nutakor, Head of Communications and Partnerships of UNDP Ghana, who is being listed for the third consecutive time among the top 10 women in PR in Ghana thanked the Women in PR for the recognitions and noted that this is yet another big challenge to continue to pursue excellence to uplift the face of the communications industry. According to Women in PR, among Praises accomplishments, she was recently awarded by UNDP for her outstanding leadership in communicating on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She is also passionate about media capacity development where she organized various trainings for the media across the country in different SDGs areas, recently on data storytelling to empower Journalists to advocate more on SDGs issues with evidence. As a leader with outstanding track record, Praise affectionately called the SDG woman, has led multinational projects including the YouthConnekt Africa ; a youth led conference which brought together over 2000 young delegates with high profiles from across the continent, organized strategic communication training for district assemblies, also led a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) training for journalists and many more, the announcement stated. The seeming recovery process from a global pandemic such as COVID-19 has been quite a challenge for many organizations and industry professionals. For Public Relations practitioners, organizations all over the world are constantly relying on them to showcase the value their organizations are providing towards their internal and external stakeholders. To be successful, PR professionals are to demonstrate their value, agility, and digital savviness in order to project their contribution to the industry as well as their individual organizations. Our goal as Women in PR Ghana is to create role models who would inspire the next generation of women in PR to excel as female leaders. To the above listed women in PR, we salute your contribution to this objective and encourage many others to take inspiration, the announcement added. Women in Public Relations Ghana is a professional networking organization committed to educating, mentoring and empowering female PR professionals and students. It was established as a not-for-profit organization by Faith Senam Ocloo, a Fashion PR Specialist and Founder of eapril Public Relations. MBABANE - The British High Commission, in partnership with the UKs Trade Forward Southern Africa (TFSA) Programme and the EIPA, is hosting an online UK-Eswatini Trade Indaba on Thursday. EIPA is the Eswatini Investment Promotion Authority. The theme of the indaba is, Growing Opportunities for Eswatini to Trade with the World. According to a correspondence from the British High Commission here in Eswatini, representatives from the public and private sectors (UK and Eswatini), as well as national business support organisations; will be discussing the opportunities to grow trade between Eswatini, the United Kingdom (UK) and the wider southern Africa region. The key objective is to use the Trade Indaba to increase awareness of the range of trade development assistance programmes and tools on offer from a variety of State agencies and trade promotion bodies. Small business owners, particularly women entrepreneurs, are invited to join the discussion online to learn more about the TFSA programme, which is already supporting Eswatini businesses. The TFSA programme works through local business support organisations in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) countries and Mozambique, to address the main barriers firms face when venturing into export trade. Support and services are targeted at firms that are already exporting, or near export ready, with an emphasis on women in business. Support As companies, especially women-led firms, get support to expand their trade horizons in the region and internationally, they will not only emerge better-prepared from the economic downturn, but also be able to benefit from wider growth opportunities. Working with the private sector, customs and trade facilitation officials, the TFSA programme aims to ensure the provision of information and tools that will help manage export and import procedures and other challenges as effectively as possible, His Excellency Simon Boyden, the British High Commissioner to Eswatini said. The High Commissioner urged entrepreneurs, especially women in export-focused businesses to register by sending an email to thembinkosi.maduna@fdco.gov.uk to receive a link to the Virtual Trade Indaba. Julie Nixon, Swaziland Fair Trade (SWIFT) Country Director, said: Swaziland Fair Trade is incredibly grateful to be working with Trade Forward Southern Africa (TFSA). Our partnership with TFSA has allowed us to build the capacity of 14 local food producers and 11 regional enterprises, helping them to improve their export readiness. As an organisation, we are also learning and building our own capacity through TFSA, allowing us to offer better services to micro and small enterprises. Our team is also part of the Future Females Project with TFSA, aiming to develop the next generation of female exporters in Eswatini. Trade, not aid, is the key to unlocking the potential of enterprises in Africa to create new sustainable jobs and overcome poverty in our region. For media enquiries, please contact: Teetee Zwane - Political, Trade Policy & Communications Officer Mobile: +268 7806 8807 Email: tsenjwako.zwane@fcdo.gov.uk March 29, 2022 Ukraine SitRep - Part II Of Russia's Military Operation Unfolds This map of the situation in Ukraine on March 29 is provided by the French Ministry of Defense. It is likely the most realistic and neutral one available. It comes with short notes about the numbered theaters. Here are my own situation report notes: Overview: The Russian military operation in Ukraine began with a rather small force of some 150.000+ men against a much larger (including reservist and territorial forces) Ukrainian force of some 400.000. The Russian force used maneuver warfare to fix the larger Ukrainian forces into place. It attacked on a large front and threatened major population concentrations, i.e. cities. The Russian operations started with the destruction of the Ukrainian command and control network. Over the last four weeks the Ukrainian navy, its airforce, its radars and air defenses and a huge number of its armored vehicles were destroyed. Throughout the last week fuel depots all over the Ukraine were attacked and destroyed over night. Ukraine's large ammunition depots are gone. Military production and repair facilities have likewise been destroyed. The Ukraine is no longer able to move large numbers of troops between the various fronts. Its army has lost its mobility. While this was ongoing threats to Kiev, Odessa and other large Ukrainian cities have held significant numbers of Ukrainian troops in place and prevented reinforcements to move to the east. There units from the Donetsk and Luhansk republics attacked the 60,000 strong main force of the Ukrainian army to keep it in place. This allowed Russian forces from Crimea and from the Russian border in the north to move into positions that will now enable them to envelope the east. Details: The move east and west of Kiev was, as I have said for a while, a feint to fix mobile Ukrainian units around their capital city. The feint is no longer needed as the Ukrainian army has now lost its mobility. The Russian troops around Kiev and Chernigov will be mostly withdrawn probably up to Chernobyl where a part of them may take defensive positions while most of the units deployed around Kiev will be moved back to Belarus and Russia for new operations in eastern Ukraine. Fighting around Kharkiv is ongoing. Ukrainian counterattacks on that front have failed and the next phase of the war will see increased activities there. The move on the west side of the Dnjepr river towards the important industrial area of Kryvyi Rih and on to Dnipro has been relatively slow. The move on the eastern side of the Dnjepr towards Dnipro has been at the same speed. Note that the western and eastern parts of those fronts are at the same level. They are well coordinated. The next phase will probably see more movement on the eastern side of the river. There are still a few pockets of Azov fighters in Mariupol with the main units encircled in the vast Azovstal steelworks. They have little food and ammunition and the Chechen unites of the Russian army and national guard are working to dig them out. The Russian forces that encircled and stormed Mariupol are now freed up and will be moved to attack further north. Ukrainian forces at Mykolaiv have attempted counterattacks in the direction of Kherson. These have failed. Prospects: The Russian command has decided to now concentrate on enveloping and destroying Ukraine's main forces at the Donetsk front. These are the most heavy equipped and most experienced units of the Ukrainian army. Since last fall some 60,000 men had been assembled there for a full fledged war on Donetsk, an attack that the Russian operation successfully preempted. It will probably take a few days for the Russian forces to regroup and resupply for that next phase of the war. I expect it to start around the end of this week. The U.S. and Polish military are helping to smuggle small arms stuff through the western Ukrainian boarder. These are anti-tank missiles, old short range anti-air missiles as well as machine guns, mortars and ammunition. This is equipment for a guerilla war against an occupation force. But except for the east and maybe some parts in the south the Russian forces do not plan to occupy anything. Those regions are steppe, very flat with little woods, where one can see an approaching enemy from miles away. It will be extremely difficult for a guerilla force to survive there. That is likely the reason why the Russian forces have done little to interrupt the arms smuggling into western Ukraine. (Those smuggled weapons will for years haunt the 'western' Europeans as they are certain to proliferate to right-wing extremist groups all over the continent.) The general task for the whole military operation as set out by the Russian command was to de-militarize and to de-nazify the Ukraine. The material de-militarization of the Ukraine is mostly done. During the next few weeks the Russian air and long range artillery forces will finish that task. The Ukraine would have to completely rearm, starting at about zero, should it want to regain significant military capabilities. It is hard to see how it will ever be able to finance that. The de-militarization of the main forces of the Ukrainian army will happen in the Donbas cauldron. The units there will have to give up or they will be destroyed by the materially vastly superior Russian forces. The de-nazification of the Ukraine has proven to be more difficult. The main fascist units of the Azov regiment were caught up in Mariupol where several thousand of them have been or will be eliminated. More fascist units at the Donetzk front will also soon be taken out. But during the eight years since the U.S. managed anti-democratic coup in Kiev the fascist ideology has deeply infiltrated all Ukrainian government structures. It will be hard for the Ukrainians to remove it even as its failures become obvious. The Russian forces will probably take another four weeks to destroy the Ukrainian units at the Donetsk front. The Russian command will then have to decide which parts of the Ukraine it will want to keep under control. Next to Donetsk and Luhansk the region north of Crimea is a likely candidate. Odessa and Dnipro may also be still on the menu. The regions can be kept as statelets under local control or form a confederation that may well institutionalize a new country. Anything beyond that depends on the willingness of the U.S. proxy government in Kiev to submit to Russia's demands. Russia can leave it at that or it can continue to mow the grass until none is left. Posted by b on March 29, 2022 at 17:55 UTC | Permalink Comments next page Courtesy photo Odessa Arts in partnership with Sewell BMW will launch the first Permian Basin Fashion Week from Wednesday to Sunday. Fashion Week will kick off with a welcome reception at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Odessa Marriott Hotel and Conference Center for designer Daniel Esquivel of Austin. Esquivel is a well-known figure in the Texas fashion community and was a contestant on Project Runway season 11 and Runway All Stars season three. Javier Saenz, 20, was arrested Friday for spitting at a Midland police officers face. Saenz is being charged with harassment of a public servant, a third-degree felony charge. He is also charged with resisting arrest/search/transportation, possession of marijuana under 2 ounces and public intoxication, all misdemeanor charges. Midland police officers were dispatched to the Whataburger on North Midkiff Road in reference to a disturbance. The caller advised that a male inside a white truck had punched a Whataburger employee through the window. The suspect was described as wearing red and black pants. Officers made contact with three males who were involved in the disturbance. The male in a black shirt and red pants was identified as Saenz. During the investigation, one of the males stated Saenz tried to fight with a member of the group and then a Whataburger employee, according to the affidavit. He also stated Saenz was underage and highly intoxicated. During the investigations, MPD officers found a small clear bag underneath a patrol car, directly behind where Saenz was standing, according to the affidavit. Based on how it looked and smelled, officers believed it to be marijuana. After Saenz was placed under arrest for public intoxication of a minor and possession of marijuana, he began pulling back from the officers and attempting to resist arrest, according to the affidavit. Once in the patrol car Saenz spit on an officer's face, according to the affidavit. Saenz has been released on bond. Dedication, team work boost China's COVID-19 research Xinhua) 14:24, March 29, 2022 BEIJING, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Many clinicians have referred to a COVID-19 drug developed by Zhang Linqi as a "miracle medicine" after seeing their patients' lasting fever symptoms diminish quickly following an injection of the drug. A virologist at China's Tsinghua University, Zhang led his team to create a cocktail therapy of monoclonal antibodies BRII-196 and BRII-198, which cut hospitalizations and deaths by 80 percent in human trials and appears to work well against all existing variants. It took just 18 months for the Chinese drug to be developed and receive regulatory approval. "In less than two years, we finished a job that would otherwise take at least 10 years," Zhang said. His latest research uses a deep learning approach to help his team obtain antibodies that can neutralize the coronavirus and its variants at a faster pace. Anti-COVID-19 research results from Chinese institutes, universities and enterprises have been published in international academic journals every two or three days since January. Chinese scientists are contributing their wisdom, experience and painstaking efforts to enhance the human capacity to cope with the deadly virus. While the Academy of Military Medical Sciences presented an mRNA COVID-19 antibody that provided lasting immunity in mice, Fudan University created an adenovirus vaccine candidate designed to give dual protection against both COVID-19 and influenza viruses. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China's top academic institute, are working on an inhalable antibody with low cost and large-scale production advantages, while pharmaceutical companies in Shanghai and Suzhou have commenced global trials of a co-developed oral drug for moderate and severe COVID-19 cases. Speaking to press at the fifth session of the 13th National People's Congress earlier in March, Minister of Science and Technology Wang Zhigang said that China has had fruitful beginning to its development of COVID-19 vaccines and drugs, with several candidates being granted market approval or undergoing clinical trials. "The more tools to tackle COVID-19 that science and technology can provide, the better our anti-pandemic measures can become," the minister said. None of this progress has come easily. China's impressive pace of medical research is the result of the long-term hard work of Chinese scientists. Wang Qihui is a CAS virologist. Since January 2020, when Wang first volunteered to work on COVID-19, she has been racing against the clock to find ways to defeat the virus. Tasked with finding effective antibodies in a short time, Wang led her team to conduct experiments day and night. She once stayed in her laboratory for two weeks, sometimes forgetting food and sleep. Five months after the initial outbreak of the novel coronavirus, her team announced that JS016, a COVID-19-neutralizing antibody that they had developed, could be administered to healthy people in clinical trials. In November last year, the antibody was granted emergency-use authorization in 15 countries, including the United States and several European countries. Lots of sacrifices were made in this process. Right before the results of the COVID-19 antibody study came out, Wang Qihui experienced neurological deafness because of high stress, which led to temporary hearing loss in her left ear. She was hospitalized for five days after a doctor warned her that, in the absence of timely treatment, she could develop permanently impaired hearing. The scientist has since recovered and is determined to make greater contribution to the fight against the pandemic. She has resumed her COVID-19 research, working to develop a nasal spray antibody drug and an mRNA vaccine. Wang Qihui attributes her achievements largely to her previous experience in the field of viral infectious diseases, such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and the Zika virus. Zhang Linqi and his team, like Wang, have used their determination and wealth of experience in responding to new pathogens to deal with the pandemic. Zhang has devoted 30 years to the study of HIV-1 pathogenesis and vaccine development, and to emerging and re-emerging human viral pathogens such as MERS, Ebola and the Zika virus. "The development of a treatment drug and a vaccine sounded lighting fast, even to me, but it benefited from years of research on antibody drugs and HIV vaccine development," Zhang said when asked how the COVID-19 antibody drug he developed was created so quickly. Inspired by the "AIDS cocktail," a combination treatment of three or four different medicines for people with HIV/AIDS, Zhang and his team selected 206 monoclonal antibodies and whittled the number down to two, creating their COVID-19 cocktail therapy. It has demonstrated an improved performance in resisting virus mutations and maintained longer activity in the human body compared to similar therapies consisting of only one antibody. Xiamen University, which has also accumulated significant experience in vaccine development, is a major research force in the fight against COVID-19. It was also one of the first institutions to receive global virus research donations. Emerging technologies are involved in COVID-19 research. Tech giant Baidu has licensed its mRNA sequencing algorithm to French vaccine maker Sanofi for use in the design of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutic products. According to the Chinese company, the algorithm can accelerate the research. Zhang also stressed that interdisciplinary collaboration is very important in his work. He collaborated with Tsinghua biologists to decipher the structure of the virus, and with Shenzhen clinicians to isolate monoclonal antibodies in convalescent patients. These partnerships accelerated the development of China's first COVID-19 antibody drug. "Scientific research is to explore the unknown in blind zones. We scientists not only need strong hearts and big brains, but also partners to support us. Even if we fail, we are not alone, as there are many people supporting us," Zhang said. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) May I start by extending my sincere condolences to the Bhembe family, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Energy, government, Their Majesties and all emaSwati for the loss of Minister Peter Bhembe. We have been robbed of a good man at a very critical time. The question of electricity supply post 2025 is at the back of the mind of every liSwati. We have done so well in the electrification of the country, particularly rural electrification, but it would be a shame to find, come 2025, that we have no electricity supply. Eswatini must be very worried about our electricity supply come 2025. Any investor has to ask the same question before investing or expanding. I am sure a lot has been done but the information is slow in coming. A renewal of the Eskom contract would have to have started already and what are the terms. I believe this is the single most important job for government and Parliament as the consequences of failure are too great to even contemplate. The discussions about building new Parliament, ICC and new airline mean nothing if there is no reliable electricity supply. Politically, government and the monarchy can fall if this is not handled well. Lubhuku Coal Thermal Power The Lubhuku Coal Thermal Power Project has been on the cards for some time now and the nation has not been given a clear answer as to its progress. The Eswatini Electricity Company (EEC) website states; EEC endeavors to provide base-load power for the Kingdom of Eswatini using available natural resources. The goal is to increase power generation within the Kingdom of Eswatini, bolstered by a feasibility study towards a thermal power project earmarked to produce about 300 megawatts. EEC has committed funds towards this project and is currently procuring the consulting firm that will undertake the feasibility study. The revised project plan indicates that the project will be completed in November 2019. This is clearly an outdated report as it ends with November 2019 and no indication on what has happed since. The question is why would EEC feel its not important to update their website on such a critical matter as energy security, given the widely published 2025 shutdown. Investors refer to this website before making decisions. There are organisations such as the Eswatini Climate Coalition, who oppose the Lubhuku Coal Thermal Power plant because of climate concerns. The global warming phenomenon is real, and we must be concerned as Africa because we have had the worst effects of global warming through droughts and floods. However, the reality is that we cannot achieve the levels of industrialisation the developed countries have achieved with only renewable energy given its present efficiency and prohibitive cost. US$73 trillion is the price tag for global renewable energy globally. What is even more disturbing is the fact that the Paris Climate Agreement, which has been signed by most of the developed countries, excludes China, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. America also has large thermal power plants still fully operational and generating cheap energy, but we must stop. A small country like Eswatini is expected to stop building its first and only tiny 300MW plant to sustain its very existence. We cannot develop with expansive energy when the rest of the developed world uses cheap energy to develop. Eswatini is but a drop in the ocean with very little effect in the bigger skim of things. Botswana has a thermal plant already because they take and act on decisions immediately. China, including Taiwan, has large coal plants The Datang Tuoketuo Power Station in China is the largest operational coal power plant in the world. As of 2021, the power station has a capacity of roughly 6.7 gigawatts. Ranking second and third, Taean Power Station and Dangjin Power Station had a gross generating capacity of 6.4 and 6.04 gigawatts, respectively. Six out of the 10 largest coal power plants in the world are in China including Taichung located in Taiwan our partner. Eswatini sitting on 143 million tons of mineable coal deposits The Independent News Eswatini reported that, according to a report compiled by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Energys Geological Survey and Mines Department, Eswatini has 143 million tons of mineable coal deposits, which are currently unexplored. Areas with coal deposits in the country are Mhlume (area 1, area 2-Mpaka, area 3 Sumcor), Maloma and Lubhuku. According to the report, the mineable but unexplored coal deposits can be mined over a period of 205 years combined. Paris climate agreement The delay in exploration of coal is slowly but surely rendering the valuable stones worthless. With the United Nations Climate Action pushing for countries to reduce fossil fuel emissions and reach the ambitious target of carbon neutrality by 2050, under the Paris climate agreement, countries are expected to commit by 2020 to more aggressive climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), than those they set in 2015 when the agreement was signed. Conclusion Eswatini must take all possible steps to establish the Lubhuku Thermal Power Station within the next two remaining years. Our partner and friend Taiwan should please assist with funding the E12 billion required and make available the green coal technology they have acquired over the years. The reality is that fossil fuel energy is not going away anytime soon and if we miss this opportunity we will never develop. What is more likely to happen is that the green coal technology will improve and become more ecofriendly with time. The clean energy mix should be encouraged but gradually over time. Solar power technology costs and wind power technology indeed continue to drop but the efficiency still cannot be matched by coal power technology. The erratic weather patterns make dependence on renewable energy sources of power dangerous. The solar panels and windmills could easily be damaged by the unpredictable storms from global warming. The hydro-electric dams are at great risk from the frequently occurring droughts and the flooding. Unfortunately, nuclear energy has not been spared as Chancellor Angela Merkels coalition announced a few years ago that Germanys 17 nuclear power stations will shut down by 2022, in a policy reversal following Japans Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Coal remains the only viable option to reliable energy sustainability. To be totally honest, as emaSwati we need the 20 000 jobs coal mining can generate and the billions of dollars in coal revenue while we can still sell it. septembereswatini@gmail.com Executives from some of the nations largest oil companies have refused a request by House Democrats to testify on sky-rocketing gasoline prices. The chief executive officers of EOG Resources Inc., Devon Energy Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp. declined to participate in a hearing planned next week by the House Natural Resources Committee, the panels chairman, Representative Raul M. Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, said in a statement Tuesday. I invited these companies to come before the committee and make their case, but apparently they dont think its worth defending, Grijalva wrote. Their silence tells us all we need to know -- that cries for more drilling and looser regulations are nothing more than another age-old attempt to line their own pockets. The hearing was scheduled to examine the fossil fuel industrys failure to help stabilize American gasoline prices, Grijalva said. Devon, EOG, and Occidental are among the most significant oil and gas operators on public lands and waters, according to the committee, and combined hold over 4,000 leases covering nearly 1.5 million acres (607,000 hectares) of public land and over 2,800 approved and unused drilling permits. Representatives of the companies didnt immediately respond to a request for comment. The hearing is among three planned by congressional Democrats amid rising voter anger over near record-level gasoline prices ahead of the midterm elections. Democrats have sought to shine a spotlight on the oil and gas industry as oil prices have surged over $100 a barrel following Russias invasion of Ukraine. The industry has dismissed those complaints as political grandstanding. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is also seeking the testimony of executives from BP Plc, Chevron Corp., Devon Energy, Exxon Mobil Corp., Pioneer Natural Resources Co. and Shell Plc for a hearing planned April 6 on their business practices and the industrys impact on consumers. And the Senate Commerce Committee has invited executives from Exxon Mobil, Pioneer Natural Resources, and BP for a future hearing it is planning on The Corrosive Effect of Elevated Petroleum Prices on American Commerce and Consumers. Representatives of both committees didnt immediately respond to a query if the companies plans to testify. West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, was hovering around $100 a barrel as of 9:30 a.m. in New York after falling as much as 7.1% after Russia said it was taking steps to de-escalate the war in Ukraine. The national average for unleaded regular gasoline was $4.24 a gallon Monday, according to the automotive club AAA. MBABANE The common law rule, whereby a husband obtains the marital power over the property of his wife will soon be a thing of the past. This is because two important pieces of legislation to regulate marriages and matrimonial issues have been gazetted by government. These are the Marriages Bill No.8 of 2022 and the Matrimonial Property Bill No.9 of 2022. It is stated in the Marriages Bill that the effect of the abolition of the marital power was to do away with the restrictions which marital power placed on the capacity of a wife to contract and to litigate. Abolished Worth noting is that in 2019, the High Court was called to issue a ruling to decide whether certain sections of the existing legislation on marriage should be abolished or not. At the time, legal representatives from the Women and Law of Swaziland (WLSA), were in court where they presented their arguments on why they felt certain sections were unconstitutional as they gave more power to men than women. The matter was before the High Court full bench and was heard by Principal Judge Qinisile Mabuza, Judge Nkululeko Hlophe and Judge Titus Mlangeni and the judgement ruled in favour of the applicants. The two new bills were made known through a government gazette dated March 22, 2022. As per the procedure, the two bills are expected to be tabled by the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Pholile Shakantu and debated in Parliament before they are enacted into a law. It should be noted that plans to enact the Marriage Bill became in limbo in 2020 after the Marriages Bill No.23 of 2019 was withdrawn in Parliament. Legislation This was after Members of Parliament (MPs) advised that three other pieces of legislation had to be drafted in order for the Marriage Bill to work. These are the Matrimonial Property Bill, Administration of Estates (Amendment) Bill and Intestate Succession Bill, all of which have to do with family law. At the time when the Marriages Bill of 2019 was withdrawn, Chairperson of the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, House of Assembly Portfolio Committee member Kwaluseni MP, Mabhanisi Dlamini stated that when it was handed over to the portfolio committee and alternate members for scrutiny, however, during the workshops to familiarise themselves with it, was discovered that it could not be a stand-alone. It needed a lot of other provisions, which unfortunately, were not contained in the Bill which was why the decision was taken that the ministry goes back to the drawing board, he said at the time. Property He stated that there was a need for the MPs to incorporate Section 34 of the Constitution into the Marriages Bill as that section spoke to the property rights of spouses. According to Section 34, a surviving spouse is entitled to a reasonable provision out of the estate of the other spouse, whether the other spouse died having made a valid will or not and whether the spouses were married by civil or customary rites. Previous Parliaments have missed the opportunity to fulfil this requirement, which states that Parliament shall as soon as practicable after the commencement of the Constitution enact legislation regulating the property rights of spouses including common-law husband and wife. The Constitution was passed in 2005. Meanwhile, one of the provisions in the proposed Marriages Bill of 2022 touches on the act of cohabitation by couples. The bill provides that cohabitation shall not, by itself, constitute a marriage or give raise to a presumption of marriage. It provides that certain provisions shall have effect in relation to the rights of the parties to the relationship of cohabitation one of them being that one or both of the parties may, during the subsistence of the cohabitation register the particulars of any monetary and non-monetary contribution each party may have made during the cohabitation with the office of the registrar. Where the parties cease to cohabit, a court order on application by either or both of the parties, shall distribute the property in accordance with the registered amounts of contribution made by either party, reads part of the Bill. Cohabitation It also has a provision that failure to register shall not affect the rights of the parties but the burden to prove the facts of cohabitation or any contributions made shall be on the party alleging the existence of those facts. Where the court is satisfied that the parties cohabited, and that there was some contribution, the court may distribute the property equitably between the parties, the bill provides. It also contains provisions regarding when marriages become void. According to the bill, where one of the parties to a marriage is pregnant or is expecting a child with another person at the time of the ceremony, and the fact is unknown to the other party the injured party may apply to court to nullify the marriage. A party may also apply to the court to nullify a marriage if the other party refuses to consummate the marriage for a period of three months from the date of the marriage and when the other party is permanently impotent. The bill states in Section 37 (1) that, Within three months (3) after the completion of the ceremonies of a customary marriage, the chief or indvuna or marriage officer of the place where the marriage was celebrated or solemnised shall complete a prescribed form and present it for registration of the marriage or the issuance of a certificate to the Registrar. The bill classifies a marriage that has not been registered within the stipulated period as voidable. A marriage contracted in terms of this Act shall be voidable by virtue of non-registration within the period prescribed under the law applicable to registration of marriages. The Marriage Bill of 2022 seeks to replace the Marriage Act No.47 of 1964. Meanwhile, the Matrimonial Property Bill of 2022 has an objective to regulate the property rights of spouses, in particular, to provide for equal access to the property of spouses jointly owned or acquired during the subsistence of a marriage. It also aims to provide for such things as the equitable distribution of matrimonial property between the two spouses, abolition of marital power, agreements regulating property rights of cohabitees, accrual system in out of community of property and protection of matrimonial home and incidental matters. Provisions Section 3 of the Matrimonial Property Bill of 2022 contains the provisions of the abolition of marital power. The bill defines matrimonial property as the matrimonial home or homes, household goods and effects in the matrimonial homes, or any other immovable and movable property jointly owned and acquired during the subsistence of the marriage. It provides that trust property, including the property held in trust under the customary law does not form part of matrimonial property. Where immovable property has been ascertained as matrimonial property, it is not already registered, it shall be registered in the names of the husband and wife, but where that property was registered in the name of one spouse, then not withstanding any law to the contrary, it shall be deemed to be matrimonial property, reads Section 4 of the bill. MANZINI - Eswatini Posts and Telecommunications Corporation (EPTC) has incurred a loss as one of its base stations at Ekukhulumeni, Ntondozi, was torched on Sunday morning. Investigations into the arson attack are still ongoing and no arrests have been made yet. The cost of the damage has not been ascertained. Clients were not affected by the incident as there was minimal damage inside the station, save for the entrance. It was gathered that the arsonists pounced on a security guard, whom they tied up and took his cellphone. The arsonists are said to have then proceeded to petrol-bomb the main entrance. Attack According to a source, the security guard was released after the attack and his cellphone was later found some kilometres away from the site, where the incident happened. EPTC Corporate Communications Manager Nqobile Magagula confirmed the arson attack at the Ekukhulumeni Base Station. Magagula revealed that the entrance of the building was extensively damaged, as well as the back-up batteries for the systems house were also destroyed by the fire. However, she said there was minimal damage inside the base station. The team is still on the ground trying to assess the financial damage to the company. The communication systems are still running so our customers were not affected, she said. Reported The telephone companys spokesperson added that the matter was reported to the police. When drawn for comment, Chief Police Information and Communications Officer Superintendent Phindile Vilakati said the police had not received the report at the time of compiling this article. Recently, the National Agricultural Marketing Board (NAMBoard) incurred a loss of E65 000 due to a suspected arson attack. The incident happened between 11pm and 11:45pm at Ncabeni Fresh Produce Market at Nokwane, where the storeroom building housing a finance department and other rooms, was torched by unknown people. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Brown County was an oasis in a population desert in 2021, the only county in west-central Illinois and among just 21 statewide to see an increase in people calling it home. Annual estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau of resident population between April 1, 2020, and July 1, 2021, projected 177 more people lived in Brown County during that period than when the 10-year Census was conducted in 2020. That took the county population to 6,421 from 6,244, according to the U.S. Census Bureau estimate. Like the majority of Illinois counties that experienced a rise in population largely clumped in east-central, southeast or northern parts of the state Brown County's growth spurt was attributed to domestic migration. That term is used for the movement of people within locations in the United States. While 58% of the counties nationwide had population growth, smaller counties saw more net domestic migration last year than metropolitan areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The remainder of west-central Illinois's eight-county fingerprint lost population last year as did 81 counties total in Illinois. Scott County was among them, but its loss stands out from others as an outlier because its drop of 113 residents, to 4,836, was attributed to migration loss. While there were 42 more deaths than births in the county last year, the most significant loss was from 71 people moving from the county, the estimates show. Other west-central Illinois counties' declines were driven more by natural change. In short, the number of births did not outpace the number of deaths. That dynamic, combined with migration, resulted in a population decline in Morgan County of 309, to 32,606. Cass County fell 269, to 12,773, and Greene County by 142, to 11,843, according to the Census Bureau figures. Morgan County, for example, recorded 422 births but 600 deaths during the period a difference that far out-paced its growth of new residents. Other west-central Illinois population drops by county were: 68 in Calhoun, to 4,369; 179 in Jersey, to 21,333; 561 in Macoupin, to 44,406; 121 in Pike, to 14,618; 1,609 in Sangamon, to 194,734; and 59 in Schuyler, to 6,843. The counties were among 2,297 nationwide 73% of the 3,143 in the U.S. that experienced natural decreases last year, according to the Census Bureau. That percentage has risen sharply, from 45.5% in 2019 and 55.5% in 2020. The agency concludes that fewer births, an aging population and increased mortality intensified by the pandemic contributed to that growth. Statewide, Cook County saw the biggest percentage decline, 1.7%, last year. Downstate counties averaged 0.4% losses. That shows "Illinois is still bleeding people from every corner of the state," said Ted Dabrowski, president of Wirepoints, an independent organization that researches the state's government and economy. "The states 81 shrinking counties lost 121,000 people, while the 21 counties that grew gained just 7,400 people." While pandemic restrictions may have played a part in the decline, it's hard to determine how significant an effect they had, according to Wirepoints. "But what we do know is that Illinois lawmakers have made no effort to make Illinois more livable," Dabrowski said. The Illinois Policy Institute, a Libertarian-leaning think tank, said population declines can contribute to lower economic prospects for the state, which can lead to a continuous downward spiral. "Illinoisans have historically chosen to leave the state for better housing and employment opportunities, both of which have been made worse by poor public policy in Illinois, said Bryce Hill, a senior research analyst at Illinois Policy Institute. Douglas Sacha/Getty Images A Chapin Police officer seriously wounded after a pursuit ended with gunfire Saturday remained in the hospital Monday. The unidentified 39-year-old officer, who has been on the police force for seven years, was among law enforcement authorities who pursued a car into Brown County after the driver fled from a traffic stop in Meredosia. The driver wrecked on Illinois Route 107 and fired at officers when they approached the disabled vehicle, according to Illinois State Police, which is investigating. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will soon be the newest member of the Supreme Court, and she is almost certain to get a handful of votes from Republican senators. So if last weeks hearings are scored on the did the nominee get confirmed standard, they were a big win. But if you are keeping score on the politics of President Bidens pick and her performance, then by nearly every measure Jacksons nomination has been a disaster for the Democrats. Worse? They dont seem to know it. The reasons are obvious to the typical American as obvious as the answer to the question, What is a woman? But they are utterly lost on the progressive elites of politics, punditry and pop culture. Which, as more and more Democratic strategists point out, is their partys fundamental problem. Nobody is debating Jacksons qualifications or intelligence or integrity. The problem is the president who picked her and the progressives whose politics to which she must answer. And the problem started long before Jackson became the nominee. On Feb. 25, 2020, presidential candidate Joe Biden promised South Carolina Democratic congressman James Clyburn and the rest of America Im looking forward to making sure theres a Black woman on the Supreme Court. It may have been smart politics for a presidential candidate who desperately needed a big win in the Palmetto States primary, but polls have consistently shown Americans dont like the idea of picking people for jobs because of their race or sex. A recent ABC News/IPSOS poll found just 23% of Americans supported Bidens pledge to exclude all candidates except Black women for the Supreme Court vacancy. Instead, 76% of voters including a majority of Democrats wanted Biden to consider all possible nominees. The left-leaning media presented this as a reflection of American racism Stark Racial Gap In Views on Black Woman on High Court read an Associated Press headline but thats not true. Most Americans agree with John Novak, a 52-year-old white Wisconsinite quoted by the AP: It should have been stated that were going to pick the best candidate who is going to follow the Constitution, Novak said. And then throw in that wed like her to be a woman and woman of color. And so the very first takeaway for the typical American from Jacksons nomination is a confirmation of their view that Democrats are obsessed with the issues of race and identity. And according to Democratic strategists, that is a huge problem for the party. The cultural left has managed to associate the Democratic Party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, free speech and, of course, race and gender that are quite far from those of the median voter, Democratic political guru Ruy Teixeira told The New York Times. Thats a success for the cultural left, but the hard reality is that its an electoral liability for the Democratic Party. The second takeaway from Jacksons hearing was the debate over her sentencing in child pornography cases. Most cable news pundits believe Republicans wildly overplayed their hand and that Jackson gave cogent, reasonable answers to increasingly over-the-top questions. Conservatives like National Reviews Andy McCarthy criticized the GOPs attacks on the sentencing issue. But most Americans didnt watch the hearings or analyze the nuance. They took away the impression that Jackson reflects the Democratic Partys overall soft-on-crime stance. After three years of defund the police rhetoric and progressives appearing on TV defending rioters bashing in store windows, Jackson fed the pre-existing narrative on Democrats and crime. The made-for-TV antics of Republican senators with 2024 on their mind may have been painful to sit through, but they pushed out the message to casual voters that, yes, Democrats arent with you when it comes to crime and punishment. The worst moment, however, was the woman question. If you missed it and if you get your news only from left-leaning media, you probably did Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked Bidens nominee about the Virginia Military Institute case, a major gender-parity ruling by the court striking down VMIs males-only admissions policy. Blackburn quoted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgs majority opinion: Supposed inherent differences are no longer accepted as a ground for race or national origin classifications. Physical differences between men and women, however, are enduring. Blackburn then asked Jackson if she agreed with Ginsburg. Jackson claimed she wasnt familiar with the case which was almost certainly untrue and after receiving several non-responsive answers, Blackburn asked the nominee the now-infamous question: Can you provide a definition for the word woman? Jackson claimed again, falsely that she could not. Im not a biologist, she said. To which the typical voter responds, Who has to be a biologist to know what a woman is? Worse for Democrats, anyway is that progressives responded with, Being a woman has nothing to do with biology! The problem isnt that Jackson isnt smart enough to answer the what is a woman question. The problem is that, in the current progressive-dominated Democratic Party, shes not allowed to. American politics is fundamentally binary, and Democratic analysts like Dartmouth Colleges Sean Westwood understand that. Misguided focus on unpopular social policies are driving voters away from the Democratic Party and are mobilizing Republicans, he told the New York Times. Democrats used to be the party of the working class, but today they are instead seen as a party defined by ostensibly legalizing property crime, crippling the police and injecting social justice into math classes. Jacksons hearing just made the problem worse. How is that not a disaster? NHLANGANO Yesterday, armed robbers hijacked and robbed Buy Cash Builders Hardware Mashayekhatsi Branch employees along their way to the bank. It has been gathered that the female and male employees were from the store heading to Nhlangano town to bank the store takings. The amount of cash that the robbers took could not be ascertained at the time of compiling this report. The incident allegedly occurred at around 8am while the employees were on board a truck when the thugs appeared from nowhere along the road and stopped the truck, forcing the employees out and taking the bag carrying the money from the female employee. Abandoned It was further gathered that the thugs drove off in the truck for some kilometres and later abandoned it in a forest. This branch is among the many Buy Cash stores that were torched during the unrest last year. As a result, the store was operating in a temporary structure built with corrugated iron sheets whereas the damaged structure remained as is after the arson attack. Chief Police Information and Communications Officer Superintendent Phindile Vilakati confirmed the incident. Vilakati said in as much as the police still had scanty details about the said crime, they had launched an investigation to ascertain what transpired and perhaps apprehend the culprits. When asked about the amount of money that was taken from the employees, Vilakati said the police did not have the exact figure as yet as they would receive full report later on the day (yesterday). When contacted at around 8pm, Vilakati could not be reached as her phone rang unanswered. Efforts to get more information from the Buy Cash managers proved futile as the Branch Manager, Mfanimpela Lushaba, repeatedly declined to comment. When this publication arrived at the store at around noon, the manager said he was still waiting for the police so as to give more information based on the police report. He was later called at around 4:26pm and he insisted that there was nothing much to say because police had not come to the store. He later said he would only be able to comment today after the concerned employees had arrived and reported to him on what really transpired. Department of Justice View Photo Wallace, CA The US Department of Justice announced today that a central valley man has pleaded guilty to burglarizing a Calaveras County Post Office. The incident happened at the Wallace Post Office back on July 2 of 2020. Thomas Patrick Day, 41, of Modesto, was charged with forcibly breaking into the post office building. The court documents detail he used a glass breaker tool to shatter the glass on the door to the lobby area of the post office and then stole packages and keys to post office boxes belonging to other people and businesses. The case is was investigated by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service with Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Barton prosecuting the case. Day is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Dale A. Drozd on June 21, 2022. He faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine at the discretion of the court after consideration of any applicable statutory factors and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which take into account a number of variables. The Wallace post office branch is located at 8271 Camanche Parkway South approximately 40 miles to the north of Modesto. Sacramento, CA Noting that upon returning home, Vietnam veterans were not met with the gratitude, respect and care befitting of their heroism and sacrifices, Governor Gavin Newsom proclaimed Wednesday, March 30, Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day in California. While many of the soldiers bear lifelong physical and mental scars, Newsom shared that California is proud to stand by our veterans and remains steadfastly committed to connecting them and their families with the benefits they have earned and deeply deserve. The day will honor the brave servicemen and women who selflessly answered the nations call at a time of great turmoil and strife, including 5,822 Californians that lost their lives in the war, relayed Newsom. View the entire proclamation by clicking here. MBABANE - Government reportedly owes over E5 million in respect of car rental services. African Hire Swaziland (PTY) Limited, trading as EUROPCAR, which is a company carrying its business as a car rental, has now taken the Government of Eswatini to the High Court where it is demanding a total of E5 066 963.65. Some of the cars that were allegedly offered to government for rental were Toyota Fortuner, Prado SUVs eight-seater kombi, single and double cab vans with canopy, Mercedes Benz C Class, BMW 3 and 7 Series, to mention a few. Some of the owing departments, according to documents annexed to the court papers, are the Kings Office, Eswatini Government and Correctional Services. Vehicles In its particulars of claim, the plaintiff (African Hire Swaziland (PTY) Limited trading as EUROPCAR) submitted that on July 9, 2019, it was awarded Tender No.12 of 2019/2020 for hire of vehicles by Eswatini Government, through the Ministry of Public Works and Transport. According to the company, on or about August 12, 2020, the government, through a letter, allegedly granted an extension of Tender No.12 of 2019/2020 for the period from August 12, 2020 to March 31, 2021. The plaintiff further alleged that on April 14, 2021, it purportedly entered into a written car rental agreement with government. It was the companys contention that the aforementioned agreement was pursuant to the extension of Tender No.12 of 2019/2020. A copy of the agreement was annexed to the summons issued by the companys lawyer from RJS Perry. At the conclusion of the agreement, the plaintiff was represented by Thandi Bhembe in her capacity as Regional Manager, while the Eswatini Government was represented by Khangeziwe Mabuza in her capacity as principal secretary, reads part of the combined summons. Mabuza is now with the Ministry of Tourism and Environmental Affairs. The material terms of the agreement, according to the plaintiff, were that; the government through the Ministry of Public Works and Transport would hire vehicles as described by the tender award list on behalf of various ministries, departments or any other government offices. Agreed It was also one of the plaintiffs submissions that according to the agreement, the extension of the rental period was deemed to have commenced on August 12, 2020 to March 21, 2021. Government is alleged to have agreed to pay the plaintiffs rates in terms of the price list attached to the tender awards. As per the agreement, the parties allegedly agreed that payments were to be made in terms of clause three of the agreement. These are allegations contained in an affidavit whose veracity is still to be tested and the defendant (government) is yet to file its papers in the event it is disputing the claim against it. The plaintiff averred that pursuant to the award of Tender No.12 of 2019/2020, dated July 9, 2019 and to the extension of same on August 12, 2020 and the written contract, it hired out vehicles for use to the following renters; His Majestys Correctional Services (HMCS), Kings Office, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Ministry of Information and Technology, Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Royal Eswatini Police Service, Eswatini Government and the Ministry of Defence. Through its attorneys, the plaintiff alleged that the aforesaid renters failed to pay the rental fees for the cars. The plaintiff claimed that in terms of the agreement, it sought to engage the government to pay all outstanding amounts, which failed to result in amicable settlement. The plaintiff alleged that on October 1, 2021, it duly made a demand to the attorney general and despite same, the Eswatini Government failed and/or ignored to settle such due amount. The matter is still pending in court. Meanwhile, in his Financial Audit Report for the year ended March 2021, the Auditor General (AG) Timothy Matsebula, noted what he termed exorbitant expenditure of close to E20 million on vehicle rentals. Expenditure In the report, the AG stated that he drew the attention of the controlling officer that he observed an exorbitant expenditure in respect of vehicle rentals (cars) amounting to E18 919 074.10 incurred by the Ministry of Public Works and Transport instead of procuring new vehicles since the ministry had an adequate budget. Matsebula said he was concerned about the fact that the ministry opted to spend the aforementioned amount on car rentals instead of procuring new vehicles with the value equivalent to the leasing price. I am not aware of any constraints by government to the ministry for procuring the cars other than leasing them, and the justifications on why the controlling officer opted to hire vehicles as some of them incurred extra costs, damages costs and exceeded the authorised kilometres, which increased the prices even more and drained more of the public funds. I am not aware of whether the option to buy new vehicles was weighed against the option to rent them. This would enable the ministry to identify the best balance of cost, benefits and risks, and consider value for money, he stated in his report. The AG lamented that value for money was one of the key considerations of any decision involving the use of public funds across government. He explained that the Five Case Model was a decision-making tool used by developed governments to make informed strategic, economic, commercial, and financial and management decisions. In terms of value for money, the AG said he did not think that the costs of the rentals would be sustainable and affordable in the foreseeable future due to the declining trend in government revenue streams. He said he, therefore, considered that value for money was not exercised by the controlling officer when making the rental decision. This rental decision was a violation of Section 0401 of the Financial and Accounting Instruction, which states that; Money must not be spent merely because it has been authorised by Parliament. Controlling officers should encourage economy recovery by the careful distribution of funds, the AG said. Concerned Matsebula said he was extremely concerned about such non-economic behaviour of the ministry in such trying times whereby the government was trying to revive the economy as it had been impacted immensely by the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a clear indication of wasteful and fruitless expenditure incurred by the ministry. I advised the controlling officer that in all procurement activities, value for money and competitive prices should be opted for, especially in the use of public funds. The controlling officer should ensure that wasteful and fruitless expenditure is avoided at all cost, he stated. Matsebula also mentioned that he reported that after re-calculations of the invoice summary sheets attached to some of the payment vouchers, he discovered that there were overpayments of invoices amounting to E66 891.45 made to Woodford Car Hire and Capital Car Hire. Such an act, he said, was a clear indication of negligence and wasteful expenditure. Image Source/Getty Images/Image Source Everyone enjoys a good crime show to some extent. There's just something about the suspense and the mystery as to how everything will play out. Yet some shows are more popular in other places, some types of crime shows have more interest with audiences compared to others that may have a touch of comedy or even a forensic or political angle. Nonetheless, the audience is most definitely searching for a good watch. pabst_ell/Getty Images/iStockphoto More than 1.75 million animals were killed across the country by the department in 2021, about 200 creatures every hour, according to the latest annual toll of animals killed by Wildlife Services, a department within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Wildlife Services says it "provides wildlife damage management assistance to protect agriculture, natural resources, property and health and safety" through the implementation of "integrated wildlife damage management programs." The department says the killing and euthanizing of animals is necessary to protect agricultural output, threatened species and human health. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Kevin Igo and Nancy Stukey were named Plainviews Man and Woman of the Year on Friday during the annual Chamber of Commerce Banquet. Tammy Robinett was also named The Doris McDonald Ambassador of the Year. The recognitions are awarded to outstanding Plainview citizens who have shown a dedication to their community. Stukey is a lifelong Plainview resident who has spent much time serving the community as a Rotarian and a member of the Plainview Area United Way. She has also served the Covenant Hospital Plainview Advisory Board and as a board member of the Plainview Chamber of Commerce. Igo is an active Plainview citizen involved in multiple Hale County organizations and nonprofits. He is a member of the Hale County Stock Show Board, is a Hale County 4-H Adult Leader, is a founding Hope House founding board member, and is a Garland Street Church of Christ elder. He is also spent time as a member of the Hale County Hospital Authority Board, Texas 4-H Foundation, OGI Wheat Board, and Halfway Water Authority. Kevin has a heart for service and those in need, notes his nomination form by Frances Barrera. He is the epitome of the adage where theres a will, theres a way. During the Chamber banquet on Friday, both Stukey and Igo joined an elite group of Plainview citizens who were granted the same title by their peers in years past. The Man and Woman of the Year are typically Plainview residents who have shown dedication and love to their community. Every year, nominations are submitted to the Chamber and then presented to former Men and Women of the Year. They vote and select the winners. Both of these fine people have made Plainview a better place to live, noted Mayor Charles Starnes in a Facebook post recognizing both individuals. The Doris McDonald Ambassador of the Year Award, which was also awarded that night, differs in that it is awarded to active and devoted Chamber ambassadors. They earn credits for every event they attend. Robinett attended almost every Chamber function throughout the last year. Click here to read the full article. New York University will award Taylor Swift an honorary doctorate of fine arts May 18, and will speak at commencement at Yankee Stadium, the institution announced Monday. Swift will deliver her address and receive her honors from NYU along with the class of 2022 at the stadium on the morning of May 18. Three graduating classes will be honored that day. Swift will be part of what is described as a traditional ceremony for the current graduating class on the morning of May 18. Separately, in the evening, the university will also be holding a double-header commencement for the classes of 2020 and 2021, who werent able to have a traditional ceremony earlier due to the pandemic.. The official title that will be bestowed on Swift is Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa. Swift has previously been associated with NYU, as the university has conducted a class in her work, although she played no direct role in that particular curriculum. Disability rights activist Judith Heumann will address the graduates at Yankee Stadium at the evening ceremony. Heumann was featured in the film Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, which was nominated fo best documentary at last years Oscars. She is the author of the 2020 book Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist and produces the podcast The Heumann Perspective, which features members of the disability community. Other honorary degree recipients include Lonnie Bunch III, Susan Hockfield, Jill Lepore, and Felix Matos Rodriguez. I cannot overstate how thrilled I am to be coming together in person with graduates, parents, faculty and honorees for NYUs commencement, said NYU President Andrew Hamilton in a statement. Since 2019, we have been deprived of commencements festive, communal joy, and its absence has been keenly felt. Few groups of graduates are more deserving of a celebration than these classes: their pursuit of their studies disrupted, isolated by a daunting pandemic, these classes2022, 2021, and 2020have distinguished themselves with their grit, grace, and forbearance. We reconvene at Yankee Stadium with a renewed sense of appreciation for the act of celebrating together in person, a recognition of our graduates enormous achievements, and a respect for their character and perseverance. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. At 4 p.m. on Tuesday, March 22, a new era at W.D. Deli began as the restaurant changed hands. After more than 30 years, Wayne D. Beers and Michael Bobo sold the beloved Broadway restaurant to Steve Clemens and Kelly Palubiak. The San Antonio sandwich staple has been around since 1990, when Beers opened the original location in Olmos Park. In 2002, W.D. Deli found its current place, a two-story home near the Witte Museum. The property and sandwich shop sat on the market for two years before Clemens and Palubiak came around. Palubiak says she and her husband, who both have careers in restaurants, had been looking for a place of their own after moving to the city from St. Louis. Courtesy, Kelly Palubiak Clemens has been in San Antonio for 25 years and Palubiak moved here in 2007. They didn't know each other when they relocated though they're from the same zip code in St. Louis but met in the Alamo City. Clemens has always worked in steakhouses and is affectionately known as "Steakhouse Steve." He's currently the director of operations for Bob's Steak & Chop House in San Antonio and Austin. Palubiak's experience comes from building and running the catering program for Saltgrass Steakhouse and in consulting for restaurants. The new owners understand the importance of W.D. Deli and want to maintain its connection to the city. Both owners will work alongside its staff, managed by Randi Pipkin. "We were looking for a restaurant and we were looking for something that had roots and spoke to us," Palubiak says. "So when we saw this listing and we came in and met with Michael and Dwayne one Saturday, it was a just a perfect match. We love sandwiches, we're just sandwich people." She says Beers and Bobo are planning a semi-retirement on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta. Mike Sutter /Staff Palubiak, who has a lifetime passion for baking, was also excited by the desserts. W.D. Deli serves a menu of sweets, from classic chocolate chip cookies to orange cream cake. "It's just kind of magical how it all came together," she says. Mike Sutter /Staff file photo The couple is vowing to keep the classics of the menu the same. Palubiak says the recipe for the legendary spinach chicken salad will go untouched. Rather than subtracting any aspects of the beloved restaurant, the new owners are planning additions, like breads made in house, adding Saturday hours, and a breakfast menu. Her current favorite is the Italian panini and cranberry orange oatmeal cookie. She also raves about the staff. The employees from the Beers-Bobo era are staying on. "Our manager Randi (Pipkin) is phenomenal and the staff is so friendly and just absolutely incredible," she says. "So we were very blessed." Beers gave the new couple his blessing via Facebook and encouraged the clientele to share their support for Palubiak and Clemens. "We are so happy for Kelly and Steve! Please continue to support them as you have supported us during the 32 years we were fortunate to have W.D. Deli," his post says. "The experience changed our lives! I wish for them the same success we had! This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Mike Sutter /Staff Photographer Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Mike Sutter /Staff file photo Show More Show Less 3 of 3 Now that the new owners are settling in, they're looking forward to meeting more of the W.D. Deli regulars. Palubiak says the mission of inclusivity and support of the LGBTQ community will also remain. "We want everyone to keep coming here and say 'Hello,' and let us know who they are. We want to hear their stories," Palubiak adds. "We're just really excited to be part of the community. We feel like we've adopted Wayne and Michael's baby." You can find W.D. Deli at 3123 Broadway. Hours are 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. Starting Wednesday, March 30 Kim Wolfe will be knocking down walls and letting San Antonio shine via home renovations. The San Antonio resident and Survivor winner is the star of HGTV's new show Why the Heck Did I Buy This House?, in which she helps homeowners with buyer's remorse transform their space into something they're proud to own. While the focus is on the houses, Wolfe says the national show will give HGTV audiences a true look at the Alamo City. Wolfe grew up in Midland, but says San Antonio is home. "I just love the city. We've been here 15 years now, it's the longest I've ever lived anywhere in my entire life," Wolfe says. "I'm a big fan of San Antonio." She says the authenticity of San Antonio was a priority of early talks with HGTV. Wolfe wanted viewers to know there's more to the city than tourist attractions. She says the show is a full Alamo City-grown production, with local crews and contractors. "It's just a real San Antonio feature," Wolfe adds. "I'm excited about that, getting to see all the familiar faces and people that we work with day in and day out, and then get to see the city highlighted and all the local businesses and vendors that we worked with." Wolfe will see the final product with the rest of the HGTV audience when the show premieres. She's hoping some of the beauty shots of businesses on Hildebrand, like San Antonio favorite Las Nieves Fruit Cups, and The Junction on Blanco make it in the final cut. Wolfe and her team completed major renovations on seven homes in a 24-week period, from March to September 2021. All but one of the homes are located within Loop 410. She updated homes that were built between the 1960s and 1970s. "These were massive remodels. We had additions, garage conversions, they were really big projects," she says. "It was definitely not a cosmetic show, this is a major overhaul show." While HGTV fans and San Antonio wait to see the city and Wolfe shine, this is not her first television appearance. She won Survivor in 2012 and then returned to the franchise for Survivor: Winners at War. Wolfe describes her life away from the camera as a "work vagabond," with a resume that includes work as a raft instructor and a bridal shop owner. Her work in design started "organically" about 10 years ago. Rather than working with the original layout of a home, Wolfe encourages reimagination, like a dining room reworked into an office space. "If you allow yourself the freedom and the creativity to just really reimagine what's there, you can really create, whatever it is that you want for your home and for your family," she says. See Wolfe's ingenuity in action when the first episode "Dream Yard, Nightmare Home" premieres on HGTV at 8 p.m. local time. Sen. Ted Cruz was dining near the Capitol on the evening of Dec. 8, 2020, when he received an urgent call from President Donald Trump. A lawsuit had just been filed at the Supreme Court designed to overturn the election Trump had lost, and the president wanted help from the Texas Republican. "Would you be willing to argue the case?" Trump asked Cruz, as the senator later recalled it. "Sure, I'd be happy to" if the court granted a hearing, Cruz said he responded. The call was just one step in a collaboration that for two months turned the once-bitter political enemies into close allies in the effort to keep Trump in the White House based on the president's false claims about a stolen election. By Cruz's own account, he was "leading the charge" to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president. An examination by The Washington Post of Cruz's actions between Election Day and Jan. 6, 2021, shows just how deeply he was involved, working directly with Trump to concoct a plan that came closer than widely realized to keeping him in power. As Cruz went to extraordinary lengths to court Trump's base and lay the groundwork for his own potential 2024 presidential bid, he also alienated close allies and longtime friends who accused him of abandoning his principals. Now, Cruz's efforts are of interest to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in particular whether Cruz was in contact with Trump lawyer John Eastman, a conservative attorney who has been his friend for decades and who wrote key legal memos aimed at denying Biden's victory. As Eastman pushed Vice President Mike Pence not to certify Biden's election, Cruz crafted a complementary plan in the Senate. He proposed objecting to the results in six swing states and delaying accepting the electoral college results on Jan. 6 in favor of a 10-day "audit" - thus enabling GOP state legislatures to overturn the result. Ten other senators backed his proposal, which Cruz continued to advocate on the day rioters attacked the Capitol. The committee's interest in Cruz is notable as investigators zero in on how closely Trump's allies coordinated with members of Congress in the attempt to block or delay certifying Biden's victory. If Cruz's plan worked, it could have created enough chaos for Trump to remain in power. "It was a very dangerous proposal, and, you know, could very easily have put us into territory where we got to the inauguration and there was not a president," Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., a Jan. 6 committee member, said earlier this year on the podcast "Honestly." "And I think that Senator Cruz knew exactly what he was doing. I think that Senator Cruz is somebody who knows what the Constitution calls for, knows what his duties and obligations are, and was willing, frankly, to set that aside." The Jan. 6 committee's investigators have recently focused on Eastman's efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to declare Trump the winner, but there has been little public notice that Cruz and Eastman have known each other since they clerked together 27 years ago for then-U.S. Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig. Cruz's proposal ran on a parallel track to Eastman's memos. Luttig told The Post that he believes that Cruz - who once said that Luttig was "like a father to me" - played a paramount role in the events leading to Jan. 6. "Once Ted Cruz promised to object, January 6 was all but foreordained, because Cruz was the most influential figure in the Congress willing to force a vote on Trump's claim that the election was stolen," Luttig said in a statement to The Post. "He was also the most knowledgeable of the intricacies of both the Electoral Count Act and the Constitution, and the ways to exploit the two." Eastman, asked in an inquiry by a lawyer for the Jan. 6 committee whether he had "any communication with Senator Ted Cruz regarding efforts to change the outcome of the 2020 election," declined to answer by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Eastman and his lawyer, Charles Burnham, declined a request for comment. (Thus far, the Jan. 6 committee has not subpoenaed Cruz, or asked for his voluntary cooperation, according to a source familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential matters. The committee has not announced the subpoena of any member of Congress as it deliberates how aggressively to pursue that line of inquiry.) Cruz, after initially agreeing to an interview with The Post at his Senate office, canceled shortly before it was to begin and declined to speak to a reporter. The Post then submitted a lengthy set of written questions, only some of which were addressed directly by Cruz's spokeswoman. Asked whether Cruz had communicated in any way with Eastman about challenging the election, the senator's spokeswoman, Maria Jeffrey Reynolds, did not respond directly. "Sen. Cruz has been friends with John Eastman since they clerked together in 1995," Jeffrey Reynolds said via email. "To the best of his recollection, he did not read the Eastman memo until months after January 6, when it was publicly reported." As for Cruz's effort to fight the election results, the spokeswoman said: "He has repeatedly observed that, had Congress followed the path he urged and appointed an Election Commission to conduct an emergency 10-day audit and consider on the merits the evidence of voter fraud, the American people would today have much greater confidence and trust in the integrity of our elections and our democracy." As Cruz fought to keep Trump in the White House, he frequently noted that this was not the first time he had played a leading role in trying to turn a contested election in favor of the Republican presidential candidate. Indeed, he had laid the groundwork 20 years earlier. Shortly after the 2000 presidential contest between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, Cruz - then a 29-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School - received an urgent request: There was going to be a recount of the Florida vote and Bush's campaign wanted his help. Cruz rushed to Tallahassee and arrived that afternoon, and he said he believed that after a "quick, perfunctory legal proceeding," Bush would be declared the winner. But there were serious questions about who had received the most votes in Florida. By Cruz's account, he played a pivotal role, rewriting briefs and sleeping for "a total of seven hours" in his first six days in Florida. He wrote in his memoir that he and others on Bush's team were convinced Gore "was trying to steal the presidency." Cruz wrote that he was "astonished" at Gore's move to contest the outcome, recalling how Richard M. Nixon had lost to John F. Kennedy amid fraud allegations but had "resisted the urge to contest the results and divide the country indefinitely. I thought it was a rather petulant display by Vice President Gore." Five years after writing those words in his 2015 memoir, it would be Cruz leading the charge to challenge a presidential election in an effort that continues to divide the country. Two days after the 2020 election, as absentee ballot counts in swing states piled up in Biden's favor, Trump tweeted the falsehood that "I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!" Around the time he sent that tweet, the president talked with Cruz on the phone, the senator from Texas has said. Trump's call underscored their remarkable reconciliation. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump had called Cruz "the single biggest liar I have ever dealt with in my life" and attacked Cruz's wife and father. Cruz called Trump an "arrogant buffoon," and refused to endorse the nominee at the Republican National Convention, which got him booed off the stage. But in September 2016, Cruz offered a quid pro quo: He would back Trump if the candidate agreed to select a Supreme Court justice from a Cruz-approved list. "The price of my endorsement was explicit," Cruz later wrote in his book "One Vote Away." Trump agreed, Cruz wrote. The nominee switched from calling Cruz "Lyin' Ted" to "Beautiful Ted," while the senator stood by Trump after The Post revealed the "Access Hollywood" tape in which Trump talked in vulgar terms about women. Cruz became a staunch ally during Trump's presidency. When Trump talked to Cruz two days after the 2020 election, the senator's allegiance was tested anew. That night, to the shock of some of his aides, Cruz amplified Trump's stolen-election claims on the Fox News show hosted by Sean Hannity, who moonlighted as one of Trump's most influential advisers. He told Hannity's millions of viewers that Democrats were "defying the law" because they didn't want GOP observers to see ballot counting. "They are setting the stage to potentially steal an election not just from the president but from the media," Cruz said. (The allegation that Republican observers were kept from seeing the vote count was rebutted by those who ran the ballot operation and rejected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.) In the weeks that followed, as Trump allies lost a string of election cases, Cruz began suggesting he could lead a more effective legal strategy. He talked about his success in helping Bush's legal team, and how he had argued a total of nine cases before the Supreme Court, mostly as the Texas solicitor general. Two days later, he announced he had agreed to represent Pennsylvania Republicans in their effort to block certification of that state's presidential results. The Supreme Court rejected that request, though, a near-fatal blow to efforts to overturn the election in the courts. But the next day, Trump and Cruz focused on another avenue to put the matter before the Supreme Court: a case filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who argued his state had standing to ask the court to throw out election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. When Trump called on Dec. 8 as Cruz dined out, the president asked whether he was surprised about the loss of the Pennsylvania case, Cruz later recalled on his podcast, "Verdict with Ted Cruz." Cruz said he was unhappy but "not shocked" that the federal court did not take a case about state law: "That was a challenging hurdle." When Cruz agreed to Trump's request to argue the Texas case, it shocked some who knew him best. One adviser said he called Cruz to express dismay, telling the senator it went against the principles on which he built his political brand. "If you're a conservative federalist, the idea that one state can tell another state how to run their elections is outrageous, but he somehow contorted in his mind that it would be okay for him to argue that case," said the adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who had served as Cruz's chief of staff and was a former first assistant attorney general in Paxton's office, tweeted that the case "represents a dangerous violation of federalism" that "will almost certainly fail." He did not respond to a request for comment. Cruz's spokeswoman said that he agreed to Trump's request because "he believed Texas deserved to have effective advocacy" but said that "he told President Trump at the time that he believed the Court was unlikely to take the Texas case." Cruz's cooperation was seen as crucial by Trump's allies. They believed his experience and standing as a senator brought credibility in comparison to the much-criticized work of Trump's other attorneys, like former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who would later have his New York state license suspended for making "demonstrably false and misleading statements" about the election. (Giuliani could not be reached for comment.) With Cruz's commitment secured, Trump tweeted the next morning: "We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!" But the Supreme Court rejected the case - the second straight decision in which it turned down Trump's allies. So Cruz focused on a congressional plan. At least one member of the U.S. House and Senate was needed to contest a state's presidential results. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., had announced his intent to do so, and he found his Senate partner on Dec. 30 when Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., volunteered. That got Cruz's attention because Hawley is viewed as a possible competitor in the 2024 presidential contest they both might enter, especially if Trump doesn't run. Cruz didn't want to be outflanked on his right by Hawley, a Cruz adviser said. Eastman and Cruz's actions soon began to directly complement each other. Eastman wrote in the first of his two memos about overturning the election that his plan relied on a senator delaying certification - and he specifically mentioned the possibility that Cruz could do it. A second version of that memo doesn't mention Cruz, but the first line in the six-page document still argues that state legislatures have the power to choose electors - mirroring Cruz's plan. Cruz's role in the Senate was crucial because it was not clear that any other senator would join Hawley, a freshman who had campaigned as an outsider without Washington relationships. On Jan. 2, 2021, Cruz unveiled his plan for states to start an "emergency 10-day audit," backed by 10 other senators. The idea was met with ridicule even from some of Trump's most vociferous supporters. "Proposing a commission at this late date - which has zero chance of becoming reality - is not effectively fighting for President Trump," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on Twitter. The conservative magazine National Review lambasted the idea in an article headlined: "The Folly of the Cruz Eleven." Cruz nonetheless pushed forward. Trump promptly tweeted his delight that the effort was "led by Sen. Ted Cruz." Eastman, meanwhile, met at the White House on Jan. 4 with Trump and Pence to discuss his plan. The next evening, Cruz appeared on Hannity's show. Without noting that he had played a key role in spreading Trump's false election claims on the same show two months earlier, Cruz told Hannity: "We have an obligation to the country. You know, you look at polling right now that shows that 39 percent of Americans believe the election was rigged. That's heartbreaking." The next morning, at 8:17 a.m. on Jan. 6, Trump tweeted his support for the proposal that had been put forward by Cruz, without mentioning his name. He called for Pence to send the matter back to the states, which was in line with the senator's proposal for a 10-day audit. "States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval," Trump tweeted. Cruz's advisers were conflicted. Some supported making every effort to overturn the election, but a number of them directly urged him not to support Trump's false claims. One adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential conversation, asked Cruz to certify Biden's election by citing a Post report about Trump's phone call urging Georgia's secretary of state to find enough votes to declare him the winner. An even stronger rebuff came from one of Cruz's most important allies: Chad Sweet, the former chairman of his 2016 presidential campaign. Sweet had known Cruz since they worked together on Bush's reelection campaign in 2004. They had talked and debated countless times over the prior 16 years. Now, just before the events of Jan. 6, Sweet urged the senator not to challenge the results. Sweet had helped create a nonpartisan group in 2020 called Citizens for a Strong Democracy, which focused on strengthening public confidence in election systems. So he was intimately familiar with how falsehoods were being used to try to overturn Biden's win. Sweet told Cruz "that if he proceeded to object to the Electoral count of the legitimate slates of delegates certified by the States, I could no longer support him," Sweet later wrote on his LinkedIn page. But Cruz rejected his friend's advice. Eastman, meanwhile, appeared at the Jan. 6 "Save America" rally at the Ellipse, where he in effect embraced the Cruz plan. "All we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at one o'clock, he let the legislatures of the states look into this," Eastman said. Trump later took the same stage, saying falsely in his noon speech that he "won this election by a landslide" and told supporters, "We're going to the Capitol." Cruz, who had been in his suite at the Russell Senate Office Building, walked via an underground tunnel to the Capitol, going first to a joint session in the House and then to a debate in the Senate chamber. Pence had already said he didn't have "unilateral authority" to reject electoral votes, but Cruz was pinning his hope on Pence sending the matter back to state legislatures. Cruz would become the first senator to object to the electoral college results, which were being tallied in alphabetical order. He joined with Rep. Paul A. Gosar, R-Ariz., to challenge the Arizona vote. That was in line with the plan that Peter Navarro, director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, had helped promote called the Green Bay Sweep. Cruz "started the Green Bay Sweep beautifully," Navarro later said in an interview with MSNBC. Navarro did not respond to a request for comment. Cruz's spokeswoman said that the senator "does not know Peter Navarro, has never had a conversation with him, and knew nothing about any plans he claims to have devised." In his Senate speech, Cruz stressed that he objected to "all six of the contested states" and urged approval of his audit plan. As he spoke, rioters were already storming the outer barricade west of the Capitol. He based his plan on a provision in the Constitution that says, "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors." While legislatures previously had determined electors based on the popular votes, legal scholars said it was notable that the Supreme Court, in the 2000 Bush v. Gore case in which Cruz participated, said that a state legislature "may, if it so choose, select the electors itself." Austin Sarat, a professor of law and politics at Amherst College, said Cruz's plan had a deeper constitutional underpinning than Eastman's push for Pence to overturn the election himself, although Sarat stressed he didn't agree with it. "I think that Cruz thing was much more dangerous because it has the kind of `constitutional plausibility' that the Pence thing never had," Sarat said. "Not because it was well-grounded, but one could make the argument the Constitution provides for it." In fact, there was no evidence of widespread fraud that would have changed the results in any of the six states that Cruz said he contested. Soon after Cruz finished speaking, rioters began breaking into the Capitol, and he went to a secure location. Hours later, after the rioters were removed and the Senate returned to its session, Eastman emailed Pence's lawyer, Greg Jacob, at 9:44 p.m., to plead for one last effort. Eastman suggested a "minor violation" of the law to enable a 10-day delay for legislatures to conduct an audit, according to a document released by the Jan. 6 committee - again mirroring Cruz's plan. Cruz's effort to reject the Arizona results failed by a vote of 93-to-6. It seemed clear his path to overturn the election was over, and he huddled with his staff about whether to proceed with his plan to object to the Pennsylvania results. For months, one of those staffers, communications director Lauren Bianchi, had promoted Cruz to the press as a smart and savvy constitutionalist. But now, in a telephone conference call with the senator and other aides, she pleaded with Cruz to stop. At that moment, she said in an interview with The Post, "I felt like he wanted to hear what I wanted to say." So she spoke up. "My message to the senator, after reflecting on the day and seeing how the country was being torn apart, was: `We're going to live to fight another day. There are concerns about election integrity. Let's keep fighting but today is no longer the day to fight. You need to be a unifier.' " "Senator," Bianchi said she told Cruz, "you need to be the adult in the room." As she hung up the phone, Bianchi said, "I felt very alone" and she wasn't sure what Cruz would do. He rejected her advice. Cruz went to the floor and voted to object to the Pennsylvania results, an effort that failed by a vote of 92 to 7. In the days that followed, some of those who had been closest to Cruz severed their ties to him. Bianchi submitted her resignation. Sweet wrote in his LinkedIn post that "Donald Trump and those who aided and abetted him in his relentless undermining of our Democracy - including Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz - must be denounced." Carly Fiorina, who Cruz said he would have picked as his 2016 running mate, tweeted on Jan. 8, 2021, that "we must hold people to account," not just those who stormed the Capitol, but also "those who actively enabled this clearly unacceptable behavior like Senators," including Cruz. Asked in an interview with Washington Post Live in May 2021 why she thought Cruz had spread unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, Fiorina said of Cruz and others who aided Trump, "My only explanation is they're focused on short-term political gain, political expediency and clinging to power." The Jan. 6 committee has asked a number of people about the senator's actions in the lead-up to the insurrection. Among the questions the committee may address is whether Cruz talked with Trump or the president's lawyers and aides as the events unfolded on Jan. 6. Luttig has been interviewed by the committee; he declined to say what, if anything, he said about Cruz. Eastman is fighting efforts by the committee to obtain emails that contain the word "Cruz," among other search terms. In a filing, Eastman's lawyer wrote that the committee's subpoena of such records represents an effort "to sift through several months of Dr. Eastman's political and personal communications which may have no connection to January 6." While Cruz failed to overturn the election, his focus on the power of state legislatures to determine the results has foreshadowed efforts by Republicans across the country to influence the way votes are tallied. To Luttig, Cruz's actions underscore the need to overhaul the 1887 Electoral Count Act so that a single senator cannot play such an outsize role in potentially altering the results of a presidential election. Luttig also has proposed that the act be revised so that federal courts, not legislatures, are the final authority to resolve disputes over the selection of electors. "Such is Republican politics of the moment, that presidential and congressional aspirants will purchase the former president's blessing and approval at any price," said Luttig, who was nominated to the bench by a Republican, President George H.W. Bush. Cruz, meanwhile, is making all the moves of a likely 2024 presidential candidate appealing to the Trump base. He went on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show to apologize for calling Jan. 6 "a violent terrorist attack," saying his "frankly dumb" language referred only to those who attacked police officers, not "peaceful protesters supporting Donald Trump." He played up claims that the government was somehow involved in the attack on the Capitol, asking an FBI official at a Senate hearing, "How many FBI agents or confidential informants actively participated in the events of Jan. 6?" Last month, he visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and tweeted a photo of the meeting. He rode shotgun in the lead vehicle in a trucker convoy protesting pandemic-related mandates in a March 10 event. Asked recently by an online site called the Truth Gazette whether he is considering seeking the presidency again, he responded: "Absolutely, in a heartbeat." - - - The Washington Post's Alice Crites contributed to this report. Photo by Gabriel Romero H-E-B is expanding in New Braunfels with the construction of a new store to replace the city's first H-E-B that was built in 1994. The replacement H-E-B in New Braunfels is set to open to the public on April 29 following the demolition of the original H-E-B, according to the San Antonio Express-News. The new store will be in the same parking lot as the original H-E-B, public affairs manager Julie Bedingfield said to the Express-News. She added that 150 new jobs will be created by opening the store. Sujata Jana / EyeEm/Getty Images/EyeEm An 18-year-old woman arrested in San Antonio owned the vehicle involved in a hit and run collision that killed a Galveston doctor last week. San Antonio police arrested Cianna Mims on Friday, March 25, who was then transferred to Galveston County Jail. Mims was booked on a misdemeanor charge of failure to report a felony in which serious injury or death occurred, according to Galveston County Jail records. Mims was later released on bond, Houston station KPRC reports. By Lambert Strether of Corrente Bird Song of the Day Thanks to alert reader Lena, this is Northern Bobwhite week at Naked Capitalism! * * * Politics But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? James Madison, Federalist 51 They had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Hunter Thompson Capitol Seizure Judge finds Trump more likely than not committed felony obstruction in effort to overturn election [ABC]. U.S District Judge David Carter said in the ruling that Trumps former lawyer John Eastman must turn over most documents he is withholding from the Jan. 6 House committee investigating the attack on the U.S Capitol. Based on the evidence, the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021, Carter wrote. The judge, who reviewed Eastmans documents, ordered Eastman to turn over all but ten that the court found privileged. In his ruling, Judge Carter, a Clinton appointee, provided a summary of several documents Eastman has sought to block. The eleventh document is a chain forwarding to Dr. Eastman a draft memo written for President Trumps attorney Rudy Giuliani, Carter wrote. The memo recommended that Vice President Pence reject electors from contested states on January 6. This may have been the first time members of President Trumps team transformed a legal interpretation of the Electoral Count Act into a day-by-day plan of action.' Biden Adminstration Former CIA chief and Obama Defense Secretary explains away Bidens fiery unscripted remark calling for Putins removal on president being IRISH weeks after Biden made a joke about it [Daily Mail]. Panetta: I happen to think that Joe Biden, you know, hes Irish, really has a great deal of compassion when he sees that people are suffering. And I think it overwhelmed him in the sense of seeing all of the horrors that were resulting from this war. So, you know, from a personal point of view, I understand why he said it. But at the same time, when youre President of the United States, you just have to be disciplined to make sure you dont make comments that ultimately have to be clarified by the White House. Commentary: "To comprehend why Panetta made a vaguely racist orientalism remark like that, you must first understand the Italian mind." Kevin Adams (@KvnJAdms) March 28, 2022 Also, @BidenInsultBot getting a good workout: I've had enough of you, ya pink-eyed wagon wheeler Joe Biden Insult Bot (@BidenInsultBot) March 29, 2022 Saving Ukraine vs. Defeating Russia [Spencer Ackerman, Forever Wars]. Already, unchastened Iraq invasion advocates like Eliot Cohen are quoting gangster movies about how you need to put one of their guys in the morgue when they put one of your guys in the hospital. It is easy to see Ukraine becoming a battlefield upon which its supposed allies will be eager to fight to the last Ukrainian so long as it means deepening Putins chosen quagmire. Same goes for Biden describing the war as a new battle for freedom while standing on the soil of Poland, whose current government is the scene of substantial democratic backsliding of its own. Then theres Americas own retreat from even the flimsy bourgeois democracy weve had since 1965. Atlanticist America is really high on its own supply at the moment. Yep. Now that Ukraine is a pipeline war with regime change as the goal this seems strangely familiar youve got to wonder how many chancelleries, world-wide, are wondering whether they ought to have signed up for it. Moral clarity from a former Bush operative is always so amusing: If FDR said in '41 on Hitler "My god, this man cannot remain in power", would you agree? If Truman said in '47 on Stalin "My god, this man cannot remain in power", would you agree? If Carter said in '77 on Idi Amin "My god, this man cannot remain in power", would you agree? Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) March 27, 2022 Whatever, whatever, whatever.. Democrats en Deshabille I have moved my standing remarks on the Democrat Party (the Democrat Party is a rotting corpse that cant bury itself) to a separate, back-dated post, to which I will periodically add material, summarizing the addition here in a live Water Cooler. (Hopefully, some Bourdieu.) It turns out that defining the Democrat Party is, in fact, a hard problem. I do think the paragraph that follows is on point all the way back to 2016, if not before: The Democrat Party is the political expression of the class power of PMC, their base (lucidly explained by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal!). It follows that the Democrat Party is as unreformable as the PMC is unreformable ; if the Democrat Party did not exist, the PMC would have to invent it. If the Democrat Party fails to govern, thats because the PMC lacks the capability to govern . (PMC modulo class expatriates, of course.) Second, all the working parts of the Party reinforce each other. Leave aside characterizing the relationships between elements of the Party (ka-ching, but not entirely) those elements comprise a network a Flex Net? An iron octagon? of funders, vendors, apparatchiks, electeds, NGOs, and miscellaneous mercenaries, with assets in the press and the intelligence community. Note, of course, that the class power of the PMC both expresses and is limited by other classes; oligarchs and American gentry (see industrial model of Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Jie) and the working class spring to mind. Suck up, kick down. * * * I have always hated that need to locution: Often forgotten is the role that Albright played in the destruction of Yugoslavia. In an off-record session with the media, Albright said, "we intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and thats what they are going to get. Danny Haiphong (@SpiritofHo) March 23, 2022 Womens March pushes for impeachment of Justice Thomas over wifes texts [The HIll]. Its certainly been awhile since weve heard from the Womens March. How are they doing these days? 2022 The Corporate Threat In Dems Must-Win Senate Race [The Lever]. The super PAC, Penn Progress, says it is supporting conservative Democratic Rep. Conor Lamb in the Pennsylvania race because he represents the partys strongest chance to flip the seat despite the groups own polling data finding that Fetterman, the lieutenant governor, is trouncing Lamb in the primary and performing better than Lamb against at least one top Republican candidate, according to reporting by Politico. While Fetterman might actually be Democrats best chance to take the seat, Politico obtained a slide deck prepared for donors showing that Penn Progress is preparing to attack Fetterman as a socialist who supports a government takeover of health care. These are standard talking points used by Republicans and corporate health care propagandists which makes sense, given the super PACs ties to the industry. Penn Progress executive director, Erik Smith, leads a communications firm that works for Cigna, one the nations largest health insurers, according to a corporate financial filing. Shocking! How Fetterman is pulling away in Pennsylvania [The Hill]. The gloves have yet to come off against Lt. Gov. John Fetterman in Pennsylvanias Senate Democratic primary and those waiting for a blue-on-blue bloodbath arent likely to get it. Tatted up with an outsized personality, a pile of cash and a playbook that mirrors past populist campaigns, Fetterman is pulling ahead in the partys nominating contest. If he wins, hell face off against a Republican for an open seat in a state that could decide who controls the Senate. Liberals say he can do it. They see the over six-and-a-half-foot-tall Fetterman bald, straight-talking, with a semi-permanent scowl as an outsider capable of wooing voters in the battleground Joe Biden and Donald Trump each won by less than 2 points. On policy, he leans mostly to the left. But dont call him Bernie Sanders, a socialist or even a progressive. Hes hard to brand, and thats part of the appeal, some Democrats say. ;He is not adopting a lot of the litmus tests that you have seen progressives try to urge upon candidates, said Adam Jentleson, executive director of Battle Born Collective and former deputy chief of staff to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). ;Hes managing to cross over into normie world in a way that I dont think youve seen from other so-called progressives, he said. Thats why I think the label doesnt quite fit. An iconoclast he is not. Fetterman plays well with the establishment and holds some of their views. He propped up President Bidens bipartisan infrastructure plan and helped Terry McAuliffe try to win Virginias governorship. Hes against expanding the Supreme Court and supports fracking. He hasnt criticized the party. He even gets the occasional retweet from White House chief of staff Ron Klain. Hes not trying to check all of the boxes, Jentleson said. Thats not to say hes a centrist, either. Fetterman, pro-union with a rotation of rolled up shirts to match, wants higher wages for workers and likes small-dollar donations for his own bid. His campaigns average contribution is $28, just one dollar higher than the $27 that fueled Sanderss first presidential run. He wants more government involvement on things like Medicare for All, the universal health care proposal where even some progressives are divided [lol]. He sees climate change as a racial justice issue. He also wants weed to be legal, full stop. I suppose one thing to watch, if he wins, is whether Democrat loyalists gang up with Republicans to try to defeat him. Im guessing yes. And speaking of Pennsylvania Republicans Pennsylvania Senate primaries get personal [The Hill]. Senate primaries in Pennsylvania are getting nastier by the day, with Republicans launching personal attacks in a race to the right and Democrats seemingly laying the groundwork for assaults over electability. The battles are only expected to get tougher ahead of the May 17 primaries, when Republicans and Democrats will choose their nominees for a race that will help determine who controls the Senate. Unfortunately, negative campaigning works or people wouldnt do it, said Sam DeMarco, the chair of the Allegheny County GOP. Theres two ways to win. One is to boost your positives. The other is to boost your opponents negatives. And these folks on all sides are using both methods to try to make their case. The top two front-runners in the GOP primary, former hedge fund manager Dave McCormick and celebrity cardiothoracic surgeon Mehmet Oz, have been at each others throats for weeks with accusations of insufficient conservatism or loyalty to former President Trump. But the recent back-and-forth over foreign entanglements has escalated the campaign to scorched earth. Oz has thrown barbs McCormicks way over his former hedge funds ties to China, a top boogeyman in U.S. politics, and released ads highlighting past comments praising Beijing. McCormick and his allies have deflected the charge, claiming the business experience makes him better able to tackle issues surrounding Beijing, and ramped up his criticism of China. On the flip side, McCormick has made hay of Ozs dual citizenship with Turkey, suggesting he could have split loyalties. 2024 Ron DeSantis Isnt a Trump Clone. Hes Just a Republican [Bloomberg]. The accusation that DeSantis is an enemy of democracy rests heavily on exaggerated claims about an election law he signed; a sweeping voter suppression law, the liberal Brennan Center calls it. Its true that the law includes new restrictions, such as requiring that county employees oversee ballot drop-boxes. But its also true that the law leaves Floridians with greater ballot access, in key respects, than a lot of states run by Democrats. Florida has no-excuse absentee voting, unlike Delaware and New York. Finally, theres the matter of DeSantiss lib-owning style. He is obviously happy to annoy liberals for no reason other than pleasing conservatives, as when he smirked his way through a bill-signing in Brandon, Florida. But its absurd to take DeSantis to illustrate that Republicans now think smiting the left matters more than achieving policy objectives, as one journalist put it. Even the culture-war legislation DeSantis has backed, regulating classroom instruction on sexual orientation and on race relations, has been about more than upsetting his political opponents. Agree or disagree with those bills, they are a response to concerns some parents have about contemporary educational trends. And his administration has an extensive policy record beyond those issues. He has cut taxes, expanded school choice, spent money on protecting the Everglades and legalized medical marijuana. Its not a record that appeals to most Democrats, of course, and they are entitled to make their case against both the substance and the style of DeSantis. They may find, though, that the Trump-clone attack falls flat and that not every voter who disliked Trump disliked him for the same reasons they do. Questions abound as Trump raises and hoards huge sums of 2024 cash [Guardian]. Donald Trumps ferocious money-raising machine, powered in equal measure by grassroots giving and large individual and corporate donations, has never really stopped turning and it is currently raising huge sums of cash. As of this month, Trump has $108,046,100 saved in his Save America political fund, more than the Republican and Democratic national committees combined, and 12 times as much as the fund Pac for the Future for the Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. And all of that has been raised while Trumps own ambitions remain unclear. Though his grip on the Republican party remains tight and he has waged an endorsement war against his opponents the big question over whether Trump will run again for the White House remains unanswered. Without any declared candidacy, his war chests purpose and thus also that of its master, is unclear and deliberately so. Thats a lot of money! RussiaGate The return of Hunter Bidens laptop [Vox]. There is no obligation for media outlets to run with conveniently timed opposition research pushed by one presidential candidates team shortly before an election. Oh, hell no. Remember when the New York Times suppressed James Risens story on Bushs (felonious) program of warrantless surveillance until after Bush was safely re-elected? This Vox explainer explains a lot, but perhaps not what Vox thinks it does. The sheer quantity of special pleading and rationalization is really impressive. Realignment and Legitimacy My heavens! Representative Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. (D-NY) pic.twitter.com/Q92S8bDmaf Dripped out Politicians (@PoliticDrip) March 29, 2022 Explains a lot. * * * #COVID19 If you missed it, here is yesterdays post on my queasiiness with CDC numbers, especially case count, which I (still) consider most important, despite what Walenskys psychos at CDC who invented community levels think. But these are the numbers we have. Case count by United States regions: Fellow tapewatchers will note that up like a rocket, down like a stick phase is done with, and the case count such as it is is now leveling out. At a level that, a year ago, was considered a crisis, but were over Covid now, so I suppose not. I have added a Fauci Line. Perhaps this says more about my temperament than it does about the data, but occasionally I watch Japanese tsusami videos. The first signs, at least in the videos Ive watched, are not roaring sounds or giant waves, but strange ripples in the water, boats rocking when they should not, and so on. And so, for those inclined to pick up on creepy little signals, we seem to be getting rather a lot of them, even leaving Europe out of the equation. The official narrative is Covid is Over. In the fall, the official narrative was Covid is behind us, and that the pandemic will be over by January (Gottlieb), and I know some people seem to not want to give up on the wonderful pandemic, but you know what? Its over (Bill Maher). That narrative was completely exploded. What a surprise! This time, it may be different. But who knows? NOTE I shall most certainly not be using the CDCs new Community Level metric. Because CDC has combined a leading indicator (cases) with a lagging one (hospitalization) their new metric is a poor warning sign of a surge, and a poor way to assess personal risk. In addition, Covid is a disease you dont want to get. Even if you are not hospitalized, you can suffer from Long Covid, vascular issues, and neurological issues. For these reasons, case counts known to be underestimated, due to home test kits deserve to stand alone as a number to be tracked, no matter how much the political operatives in CDC leadership would like to obfuscate it. MWRA (Boston-area) wastewater detection: The MRWA is divided into two sections, North and South. North is distinctly up, South is rising slowly. The rise has visibly affected this chart, which aggregates them. The aggregate of the enormous Omicron spike conceals change, but change there is. Of course, its a very small rise. Maybe this time the movie will end differently. The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) service area includes 43 municipalities in and around Boston, including not only multiple school systems but several large universities. Since Boston is so very education-heavy, then, I think it could be a good leading indicator for Covid spread in schools generally. From CDC Community Profile Reports (PDFs), Rapid Riser counties: Every so often I think of doing away with this chart. Then another state flares up, today upstate New York (Remember that these are rapid riser counties. A county that moves from red to green is not covid-free; the case count just isnt, well, rising rapidly.) The previous release: Here is CDCs interactive map by county set to community transmission: Continuing slow improvement, assuming the numbers arent jiggered. Hospitalization (CDC Community Profile): Again, I dont like the sudden effloresence of yellow and orange. I dont care that the baseline is low. From the point of view of our hospital-centric health care system, green everywhere means the emergency is over (and to be fair, this is reinforced by case count and wastewater). However, community transmission is still pervasive, which means that long Covid, plus continuing vascular damage, are not over. (Note trend, whether up or down, is marked by the arrow, at top. Admissions are presented in the graph, at the bottom. So its possible to have an upward trend, but from a very low baseline.) Death rate (Our World in Data): Total: 1,004,244 1,001,175 . We did it. Break out the Victory Gin. Fortunately, the numbers are headed downward. I have added an anti-triumphalist Fauci Line. Covid cases in top us travel destinations (Statista): Stats Watch Employment Situation: United States Job Openings [Trading Economics]. The number of job openings in the United States was 11.266 million in February of 2022, little changed from an upwardly revised 11.283 million in January and compared with market expectations of 11 million. The number of available jobs remained near a record high of 11.448 million set in December as companies continued to struggle to find scarce workers. Housing: United States House Price Index YoY [Trading Economics]. The average prices of single-family houses with mortgages guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the United States jumped 18.2 percent year-on-year in January 2022, the most in five months and following a 17.7 percent gain in December. * * * Shipping: Shipping container maker Singamas rides pandemic demand boom to post record 40-fold surge in profit [South China Morning Post]. Singamas sold some 347,000 twenty-foot equivalent units for dry freight, more than triple the 112,000 units sold in 2020. Net profit jumped over 40 times to US$186.8 million last year, from US$4.57 million a year earlier. Supply Chain: The number of boxships waiting outside the ports of Shanghai and nearby Ningbo have increased considerably. @LLIntelligence data shows containerships at anchor outside Shanghai and Ningbo ports have risen to 146 compared to 120 recorded on March 25https://t.co/7ApMkP5x8e Lloyd's List Editorial (@LLEditorial) March 29, 2022 * * * Todays Fear & Greed Index: 52 Neutral (previous close: 49 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 44 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Mar 29 at 1:32pm. Rapture Index: Closes unchanged [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 188. (Remember that bringing on the rapture is a good thing, so higher is better.) The Stage At last, a new take on Rock v. Smith: The devil works hard but the updater of the Macbeth Wikipedia page works harder pic.twitter.com/c7QaLTS7So hannah strong (@thethirdhan) March 28, 2022 Games Elden Ring: The Kotaku Review [Kotaku]. Ive long since made peace with the fact that reviewing Elden Ringthat is, providing an adequately thorough accounting of my time with the gameis nigh impossible, at least with my limited skillset. How do I make you feel the way I felt every time I encountered a merchant or enemy creating the most mournful diegetic music Ive ever heard in a video game? What words can I use to bestow the same soothing nostalgia that rushed over me the first time I hit a wall with my weapon and it finally faded away to reveal a hidden path? How do I spell out the perfect onomatopoeia to capture my reflexive groan when I was ambushed by a nest of smoke-spewing basilisks, immediately aware of their dangers from encounters in previous Souls games? Everything in Elden Ring comes bundled with its own kind of friction, designed to rub you the wrong way until, finally, it rubs you the right way. And those rough edges cannot be sandpapered down without fundamentally changing the games entire raison detre. Souls fans often make hay over the feeling of accomplishment that comes from overcoming the genres much-vaunted challenges, but its more than that. Its like when my dad recently greased the hinges of an old screen door in my childhood home. The first time I opened it following his turn as a handyman, I fumbled with a brief weightlessness when I wasnt greeted by the exact sound and sensation I expected. I heard nothing. I felt nothing. It was like I was in a void. All the texture, all the personality that door previously clutched in its creaking joints was gone, replaced by a whispery smoothness that hid its existence rather than adding flavor to the world. Thats Elden Ring without the learning curve, a process that sees FromSoftware essentially throw players into the deep end and encourage them to swim for safety. Any Elden Ring players care to comment? Our Famously Free Press Interview: The Sleuths Corner' [Matt Taibbi, TK News]. The first thing the members of the Sleuths Corner (colloquially, the Corner) want you to know is theyre not zealots, at least not in the way you think. Despite only being mentioned as a group in passing in a few traditional press treatments (a multi-page section in Meiers book is the closest thing to a full profile), the Corner has broken numerous major stories in the Trump era, specializing in putting names to unnamed figures in news stories. Among others, they identified Igor Danchenko, the primary source of the infamous Steele Dossier, as well as Eric Ciaramella, the alleged whistleblower in the Ukrainegate case, and Rodney Joffe, also known as Tech Executive-1 in Special Counsel John Durhams indictment of former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. In return, theyve been denounced as anti-vaxxers, QAnon adherents, Trump operatives, conspiracy theorists, and Russian spies, and thats just for starters. When @Hmmm57474203, the blogger who outed Brookings fellow Danchenko as Steeles primary sub-source, confronted New York Times national security reporter Charlie Savage on Twitter, Savage* answered with a reply that suggested Hmmm was a foreign plant. This is very good reporting by Taibbi, well worth reading in full. Guillotine Watch Inflation Stings Most If You Earn Less Than $300K. Heres How to Deal [Bloomberg]. The headline is wprse than the body: Economists say the overall share of income spent on gas is lower than it used to be, and despite the increases, prices are still relatively low by historical standards. Thats true, but it offers little consolation these days for someone on the lower end of the income distribution who drives to work. Food prices are also up, posting their biggest monthly increase since April 2020. There, too, those making less than $19,000 spend much more of their income almost 15% compared with higher earners, whose total food spending is just 4% of their income. Households with income of about $50,000 spend 8.5% of it on food. The most recent barometer of consumer sentiment showed the highest-ever share of Americans expecting their finances to worsen in the coming year. About 54% think their incomes will lag behind inflation in the year ahead a pretty high percentage historically. But then: When it comes to food, dont be afraid to explore. No mention of bugs? Class Warfare The Truth About Bama Rush Is Hiding in Plain Sight [New York Magazine]. A 2014 study from Cornell University found that despite the fact that only 2 percent of Americans join a fraternity, 80 percent of Fortune 500 executives and 76 percent of U.S. senators and congressmen were fraternity members. Ive always hated fraternies. Now I really know why. What is it really like to be a digital nomad? [Sifted]. The life of a nomad has gotten considerably easier since Danchuk first packed his bags. When he first started out, there was no Airbnb, no Facebook groups, no Tinder, and Google Translate wasnt as effective as it is today. The expat hubs of young, digital professionals that have sprung up in major cities such as Berlin, New York and Chiang Mai also didnt exist back then, he says. Not clear to me if this will continue in Bidens New World Order. Interesting til it comes to the authentic relating part. News of the Wired Genetic Link to Fear Memories Found Hiding Within Mices Junk DNA' [Science Alert]. Using a powerful new sequencing technique researchers have tracked down genes within mice that work towards soothing fear-related memories. These genes are hidden within relatively unknown regions of the mammalian genome wed written off as junk DNA. Our findings suggest that long non-coding RNAs provide a bridge, linking dynamic environmental signals with the mechanisms that control the way our brains respond to fear, [University of Queensland neuroepigeneticist Timothy Bredy] explained. With this new understanding of gene activity, we can now work towards developing tools to selectively target long non-coding RNAs in the brain that directly modify memory and hopefully, develop a new therapy for PTSD and phobia.' Or other things. Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. Via TH: I love poppies, but they I have never been able to photograph them properly! They catch the slightest breeze so easily, and Im not willing to completely surrender depth of field for shutter speed. This poppy seemed quite cooperative, however! * * * Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the recently concluded and thank you! successful annual NC fundraiser. So if you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldnt see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form. Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know Im on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for five or ten days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals: Here is the screen that will appear, which I have helpfully annotated. If you hate PayPal, you can email me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, and I will give you directions on how to send a check. Thank you! Dear patient readers, Lambert and I, and many readers, agree that Ukraine has prompted the worst informational environment ever. We hope readers will collaborate in mitigating the fog of war both real fog and stage fog in comments. None of us need more cheerleading and link-free repetition of memes; there are platforms for that. Low-value, link-free pom pom-wavers will be summarily whacked. And for those who are new here, this is not a mere polite request. We have written site Policies and those who comment have accepted those terms. To prevent having to resort to the nuclear option of shutting comments down entirely until more sanity prevails, as we did during the 2015 Greek bailout negotiations and shortly after the 2020 election, we are going to be ruthless about moderating and blacklisting offenders. Yves P.S. Also, before further stressing our already stressed moderators, read our site policies: Please do not write us to ask why a comment has not appeared. We do not have the bandwidth to investigate and reply. Using the comments section to complain about moderation decisions/tripwires earns that commenter troll points. Please dont do it. Those comments will also be removed if we encounter them. P.P.S. One of our mods is on holiday till the end of the month, so comment liberation may take longer than usual. We are very sorry! Please be patient. * * * Are Humans the Only Animals That Lie? Discover Magazine (Dr. Kevin). I thought it was pretty well established that crows engage in deception. WATCH: How do geckos hunt deadly scorpions? Haaretz. Furzy: This is how my Lab Claire killed King Cobras. Moi: Never try it with a much faster viper. Floridas Starving Manatees Ate Every Scrap of Food in Trial Feeding Program EcoWatch (furzy) Of Drugs and Monkeys Wall Street Journal (Dr. Kevin) Killing Wolves to Own the Libs? New Yorker (furzy) We Are Made of Plasticstuff: Scientists Find Microplastics in Human Blood The Wire (J-LS) The Few Body Problem & the Metaphysics of Stupidity notesfromdisgraceland (resilc) #COVID-19 Science/Medicine Idiot. Covid is nothing like flu. The 950 covid patients who died last week were not safe The cancer patients having their treatment postpone because so many staff have Covid don't feel safe. The rest of us covering for absent colleagues are feeling a bit near the edge too. https://t.co/7f2OZtVe4w Dr Helen Salisbury (@HelenRSalisbury) March 27, 2022 Imaging the Brain: What Brain Scans Reveal About the Consequences of Covid-19 Forbes (resilc) Airlines should not be allowed to fly with an APU failure and only 1 PACK operational during COVID times. This is reckless. https://t.co/GzXtR5GgEI C Pita (@CPita3) March 28, 2022 Asia Chinas quest for new ways to handle Omicron Global Times. Lotta hand-waving. US Climate/Environment China? Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare insulted by reaction to security treaty with China ABC Australia (Kevin W) India The India Fix: Why Delhi hosting the Chinese foreign minister is a worrying sign for Indian power The Scroll (J-LS) Old Blighty New Not-So-Cold War Syraqistan Imperial Collapse Watch Biden The Bottomless Corruption of Ginni and Clarence Thomas New Republic. Resilc: There is a lot of bottomless corruption to go around in deecee. Big Pharma Is Betting on Bigger Political Ambitions From Sen. Tim Scott KHN Colorado officials declare year-round fire season The Hill (resilc) Cuomo Set Out to Transform Mental Health Care for Kids. Now They Cant Get Treatment. THE CITY Supply Chain A World Thats More Expensive Is Starting to Destroy Demand Bloomberg (resilc) What To Expect From This Weeks OPEC+ Meeting OilPrice (Kevin W) Are Americans Unhappy? FiveThirtyEight (resilc) Class Warfare Antidote du jour. Josh D: Its turkey mating season, and the toms are showing off. See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here. Yves here. Wolf does not set a timeline on when more shale gas output and LNG transport and harbor facilities can be built to fill Europes energy gap. However, some readers suggested another potential choke point, and Id be interested in a sanity check: those LNG-carrying ships. Apparently the big spherical storage chamber is particularly fussy to build. Note Wolf does not display that type of tanker, so I wonder if the lower-slung designs will prevail. From Wolf Richter, editor at Wolf Street. Originally published at Wolf Street There has been a lot of talk about the US supplying more liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe to replace a portion (a small portion) of pipeline natural gas from Russia. Tankers with US-produced LNG are already plying that route. But LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast are running near capacity, and it takes time to build new liquefaction trains at existing export terminals and to build new export terminals and the pipeline infrastructure to supply them. So those ideas, as good as they may be, are getting complicated in a hurry. The Status of US Natural Gas. The US is the largest consumer of natural gas in the world. For decades, natural gas production in the US wasnt enough to meet demand, and so the US imported natural gas via pipeline from Canada, and via LNG from other countries. Fracking changed the equation, natural gas production began to soar, and along the way the US became the largest producer of natural gas in the world. In December, US natural gas production hit a record 118.8 billion cubic feet per day, according to EIA data: As the price of natural gas in the US collapsed in 2008 amid surging production from fracking, the industry tried to find an outlet. Companies invested in building more pipelines to Mexico, and exports of pipeline natural gas to Mexico rose. And companies invested in large-scale LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast, and LNG exports from the first of those terminals took off in 2016. Total exports of natural gas via pipeline and LNG (red line) spiked by 26% in 2021 to a new record of 6.65 trillion cubic feet for the year. Total imports of natural gas, denoted by a negative number (purple line) has remained in the same range since 2013. In 2017, the US became a net exporter of natural gas, exporting more natural gas to the rest of the world than it imported: LNG imports essentially ceased, except during the coldest months in the winter in some New England regions that are not well connected via pipeline to producing regions in the US. The Canada trade: The US exports natural gas to Canada and imports from Canada due to the regional pipeline infrastructure in place. About 30% of US pipeline exports go to Canada. On net, the US imports more from Canada than it exports to Canada. The Mexico trade: The US does not import natural gas from Mexico; this is a one-way trade, with the US supplying Mexico with ever larger amounts of pipeline natural gas. About 70% of US natural gas pipeline exports go to Mexico. Exports via LNG (red line) in 2021 exceeded pipeline exports (purple line) for the first time: Here is our look at The Huge Ships for the Booming LNG Trade: Designs, Technologies, and Challenges for liquefied natural gas carriers. US LNG exports by country. The list below shows the largest 25 recipient countries in 2021, in billion cubic feet per year, according to EIA data. South Korea has been the largest buyer of US natural gas. China has now surpassed Japan as the second largest buyer. China was a large buyer but in 2019 essentially stopped as part of the trade war, but recommenced in 2020. Brazil has emerged as the fourth largest buyer in 2021. By comparison, in 2021, the US exported 2.16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas to Mexico via pipelines. This is about as much as the US exported in LNG to the top eight countries on this list combined. Also note the European countries that bought US LNG in 2021. US Export Volumes, by largest recipients in 2021, in billion cubic feet per year 2019 2020 2021 1 South Korea 270 316 453 2 China 7 214 450 3 Japan 201 288 355 4 Brazil 54 112 308 5 Spain 167 200 215 6 India 91 124 196 7 United Kingdom 118 160 195 8 Turkey 31 124 189 9 Netherlands 81 86 174 10 France 118 90 171 11 Chile 90 81 122 12 Taiwan 27 64 99 13 Argentina 39 15 83 14 Portugal 53 37 66 15 Poland 38 37 56 16 Dominican Republic 10 26 53 17 Pakistan 27 37 46 18 Greece 15 48 40 19 Bangladesh 3 11 38 20 Croatia 0 3 36 21 Kuwait 10 17 34 22 Italy 69 68 34 23 Lithuania 3 29 31 24 Jamaica 14 17 25 25 Singapore 31 28 25 In terms of the US as a bigger supplier of LNG to Europe, well, at the moment, there is not a lot of excess capacity left in the US to export more LNG to anywhere. Major additional LNG shipments from the US to Europe would largely be a shift away from other customers. LNG export capacity continues to be ramped up in the US, and even though its already in progress, it still takes time. And ramping up export capacity further than is already being planned will take even more time. Empowering the next generation of women leaders requires support from heads of state, said participants at the Women in Government Forum, highlighting the success of top-down policies, such as quotas and targets, in increasing womens participation in political life. In the closing session of the Forum, taking place at the World Government Summit (WGS2022) in Dubai, Amina Longoh, Minister of Women, Family and Child Protection of Chad, Sahar Albazar, President of the Forum of Young Parliamentarians and Deputy Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee at the Egyptian House of Representatives, and Sara Falaknaz, Member of the UAEs Federal National Council (FNC), explored the topic of Passing On the Baton: Empowering the Next Generation of Women Leaders. Opening the discussion, Amina Longoh called for governments to safeguard gender balance with legislation. She said: Governments must promote gender balance and equal opportunities. They have to not just bring women to the table to make decisions but also give them the means and support to deliver on their policies. For her part, Sahar Albazar highlighted the example of Egypt, whose president has played a crucial role in empowering women after they had been excluded from public life for decades. She said: Our president is a believer in the empowerment of women. In 2017, Egypt launched its first National Strategy for Empowering Egyptian Women, which brings together policy, legislation, initiatives such as capacity building programmes and other campaigns to enhance the role of women in Egypt. Egypts track record now speaks for itself women currently represent 28% in parliament, 14% in the Senate, 25% in the cabinet, 44% in the National Council for Human Rights, 56% in diplomacy roles, and 27% of deputy ministers. Sara Falaknaz highlighted the UAE governments support for the inclusion of women in public life, crediting the 50% female representation quota for her place on the FNC. She said: The right education system like the one we have in the UAE is fundamental to success and continued participation of women in society. Governments around the world should do more to create environments where women can succeed based on what is most appropriate for their cultures. This is what the UAE did, and all women in the country reap the benefits of this approach. The Women in Government Forum bringing together politicians, thought leaders, and practitioners to address the opportunities, challenges, and interventions needed to achieve gender parity in governments around the world. TradeArabia News Service (Natural News) 51 former intelligence officers teamed up with the mainstream media during the 2020 election to cast doubt on the Hunter Biden laptop stories. According to these officials, the stories were supposedly a Russian smear effort. (Article republished from En-Volve.com) However, we now know, without a doubt, that these intelligence officers who teamed up to send this letter casting doubt on the Hunter Biden laptop story were helping to push propaganda in an attempt to get Joe Biden elected president. And more than a year later, despite the fact that their Deep State sabotage has been repeatedly exposed as a falsehood, they refuse to accept responsibility for how they sabotaged an election. Per NYPost: The officials, including CNN pundit and professional fabricator James Clapper a man who was nearly charged for perjury for lying to Congress signed a letter saying that the laptop has the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation. What proof did they have? By their own admission, none. We do not know if the emails .?.?. are genuine or not, the letter said. Theyre just suspicious. Why? Because they hurt Bidens campaign, thats evidence enough. Keep in mind this was written Oct. 19, 2020, five days after The Post published its first story. Neither Joe Biden nor Hunter Biden had denied the story, they simply deflected questions. Didnt these security experts think that if this was disinformation, the Biden campaign would have yelled to the heavens that the story was false? Meanwhile, though the letter was advertised as being signed by people who worked for presidents of both political parties, a majority of the officials were Democrats. Politico picked up the letter and ran the false headline Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say. That headline is still online today, even though the letter clearly says they dont know if its Russian disinformation. That headline was tweeted out by legions of Democrats, including current White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, as proof that it was all a con. That tweet also is still up despite being proven false. Thus pure speculation by a group of biased officials became gospel among the media. This was fake news, and could be safely ignored. Keep in mind that Twitter already had banned The New York Post a few days before. The rationale was that this was hacked materials, even though it wasnt and Twitter had no evidence to think it was. A Facebook official, meanwhile, said it wasnt going to allow the sharing of The Posts story until it was fact checked by a third party a check that never happened. Thus, Big Tech, former government officials, and the media conspired together to bury a story. No, not just bury create a false narrative that flipped the script to make Joe Biden the victim of a conspiracy. In short, they peddled online disinformation to sway an election. No one actually proved The Posts reporting was wrong. Media outlets showed up at the doorstep of the computer repairman who had gotten the laptop, and he confirmed it. People who exchanged e-mails with Hunter Biden attested to their accuracy in the days and weeks that followed. Only after the election was safely over did Hunter tacitly admit the laptop was his. Last year, a Politico reporter confirmed that the laptops materials were real. And now, the coup de grace: The Times said its authenticated material from the laptop. There have been no consequences. Twitter and Facebook still censor information based on political bias, and Congress takes no action. Many of the letter signers continue to be used as experts by the media. Clapper, for instance, spent years on CNN calling Donald Trump a Russian asset, a lie invented and fed by political operatives of Hillary Clinton. Hes still there. Guess accuracy is not a condition of employment. Do the officials who tried to flip the 2020 election feel any regret for their actions? The Post reached out to those who signed the letter. Most would not answer the question. A few doubled-down, including Clapper. No remorse. No shame. And no apologies: Mike Hayden, former CIA director, now analyst for CNN: Didnt respond. Jim Clapper, former director of national intelligence, now CNN pundit: Yes, I stand by the statement made AT THE TIME, and would call attention to its 5th paragraph. I think sounding such a cautionary note AT THE TIME was appropriate. Leon Panetta, former CIA director and defense secretary, now runs a public policy institute at California State University: Declined comment. John Brennan, former CIA director, now analyst for NBC and MSNBC: Didnt respond. Thomas Fingar, former National Intelligence Council chair, now teaches at Stanford University: Didnt respond. Rick Ledgett, former National Security Agency deputy director, now a director at M&T Bank: Didnt respond. John McLaughlin, former CIA acting director, now teaches at Johns Hopkins University: Didnt respond. Michael Morell, former CIA acting director, now at George Mason University: Didnt respond. Mike Vickers, former defense undersecretary for intelligence, now on board of BAE Systems: Didnt respond. Doug Wise, former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director, teaches at University of New Mexico: Didnt respond. Nick Rasmussen, former National Counterterrorism Center director, now executive director, Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism: Didnt respond. Russ Travers, former National Counterterrorism Center acting director: The letter explicitly stated that we didnt know if the emails were genuine, but that we were concerned about Russian disinformation efforts. I spent 25 years as a Soviet/Russian analyst. Given the context of what the Russians were doing at the time (and continue to do Ukraine being just the latest example), I considered the cautionary warning to be prudent. Andy Liepman, former National Counterterrorism Center deputy director: As far as I know I do [stand by the statement] but Im kind of busy right now. John Moseman, former CIA chief of staff: Didnt respond. Larry Pfeiffer, former CIA chief of staff, now senior advisor to The Chertoff Group: Didnt respond. Jeremy Bash, former CIA chief of staff, now analyst for NBC and MSNBC: Didnt respond. Rodney Snyder, former CIA chief of staff: Didnt respond. Glenn Gerstell, former National Security Agency general counsel: Didnt respond. David Priess, former CIA analyst and manager: Thank you for reaching out. I have no further comment at this time. Pam Purcilly, former CIA deputy director of analysis: Didnt respond. Marc Polymeropoulos, former CIA senior operations officer: Didnt respond. Chris Savos, former CIA senior operations officer: Didnt respond. John Tullius, former CIA senior intelligence officer: Didnt respond. David A. Vanell, former CIA senior operations officer: Didnt respond. Kristin Wood, former CIA senior intelligence officer, now non-resident fellow, Harvard: Didnt respond. David Buckley, former CIA inspector general: Didnt respond. Nada Bakos, former CIA analyst and targeting officer, now senior fellow, Foreign Policy Research Institute: Didnt respond. Patty Brandmaier, former CIA senior intelligence officer: Didnt respond. James B. Bruce, former CIA senior intelligence office: Didnt respond. David Cariens, former CIA intelligence analyst: Didnt respond. Janice Cariens, former CIA operational support officer: Didnt respond. Paul Kolbe, former CIA senior operations officer: Didnt respond. Peter Corsell, former CIA analyst: Didnt respond. Brett Davis, former CIA senior intelligence officer: Didnt respond. Roger Zane George, former national intelligence officer: Didnt respond. Steven L. Hall, former CIA senior intelligence officer: Didnt respond. Kent Harrington, former national intelligence officer: Didnt respond. Don Hepburn, former national security executive, now president of Boanerges Solutions LLC: My position has not changed any. I believe the Russians made a huge effort to alter the course of the election . . . The Russians are masters of blending truth and fiction and making something feel incredibly real when its not. Nothing I have seen really changes my opinion. I cant tell you what part is real and what part is fake, but the thesis still stands for me, that it was a media influence hit job. Timothy D. Kilbourn, former dean of CIAs Kent School of Intelligence Analysis: Didnt respond. Ron Marks, former CIA officer: Didnt respond. Jonna Hiestand Mendez, former CIA technical operations officer, now on board of the International Spy Museum: I dont have any comment. I would need a little more information. Emile Nakhleh, former director of CIAs Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program, now at University of New Mexico: I have not seen any information since then that would alter the decision behind signing the letter. Thats all I can go into. The whole issue was highly politicized and I dont want to deal with that. I still stand by that letter. Gerald A. OShea, former CIA senior operations officer: Didnt respond. Nick Shapiro, former CIA deputy chief of staff and senior adviser to the director: Didnt respond. John Sipher, former CIA senior operations officer: Declined to comment. Stephen Slick, former National Security Council senior director for intelligence programs: Didnt respond. Cynthia Strand, former CIA deputy assistant director for global issues: Didnt respond. Greg Tarbell, former CIA deputy executive director: Didnt respond. David Terry, former National Intelligence Collection Board chairman: Couldnt be reached. Greg Treverton, former National Intelligence Council chair, now senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: Ill pass. I havent followed the case recently. Winston Wiley, former CIA director of analysis: Couldnt be reached. Read more at: En-Volve.com (Natural News) The likelihood of a nuclear exchange between the United States, the West and Russia is rising fast the longer the war in Ukraine drags on, according to a new assessment. Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, U.S. defense officials including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley have attempted to set up diplomatic phone calls with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Milleys counterpart, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, but thus far the latter two officials have so far declined to engage, according to retired Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagons spokesman. According to experts and former military commanders, the longer the U.S. and Russia dont talk, the more likely it will be that a nuclear exchange will occur due to an operational miscalculation as the Pentagon and NATO allies shore up member countries bordering both Ukraine and Russia. A nightmare scenario would be a Russian missile or attack aircraft that destroys a U.S. command post across the Polish-Ukrainian border, said James Stavridis, a retired admiral who served as the Supreme Allied Commander at NATO from 2009 to 2013, in an interview with the Washington Post. A local commander might respond immediately, thinking the event was a precursor to a wider attack. This could lead to rapid and irreversible escalation, to include potential use of nuclear weapons. CNN subsequently reported some details of a rare face-to-face meeting between Russian and American officials last week. According to the network, Washington believes that Moscows refusal to hold high-level talks are due to worries within the Kremlin that such meetings would show them that Russia is vulnerable because it risks a tacit admission that an abnormal situation exists, according to a readout of the meeting, an assessment noted. The assessment continued: Though the assumption of vulnerability appears misconceived considering while the Pentagon has allegedly attempted to maintain high-level contacts with Russian counterparts, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, since the start of the conflict last month. The real reason the Russian military leadership has allegedly shunned maintaining high-level contacts with the Pentagons top brass appears to be the duplicitous and treacherous role played by the transatlantic NATO alliance of significantly escalating the conflict by substantially increasing the NATO military footprint in Eastern Europe along Russias western flank, publicly providing billions of dollars worth of lethal weapons to Ukraines security forces and allied neo-Nazi militias while asininely claiming to be peacemakers extending chivalrous courtesies to the arch-rival. Ahead of last weeks NATO summit attended by President Biden (which turned into a gaffe-fest, the White House having to clarify or simply walk back a number of things the commander-in-chief said), NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that the alliance was planning to double the number of battle groups it had previously positioned in eastern Europe. The first step is the deployment of four new NATO battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, along with our existing forces in the Baltic countries and Poland, he said. This means that we will have eight multinational NATO battlegroups all along the eastern flank, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Following the emergency NATO session on Thursday, the alliance issued a statement. In response to Russias actions, we have activated NATOs defense plans, deployed elements of the NATO Response Force, and placed 40,000 troops on our eastern flank, along with significant air and naval assets, under direct NATO command supported by Allies national deployments, it said. We are also establishing four additional multinational battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. The troop build-up comes as the U.S. and NATO allies stuff billions of dollars worth of lethal military aid into Ukraine, including U.S.-made Javelin anti-tank missiles by the thousands, 100 Switchblade kamikaze drones, and 6,000 AT-4 anti-armor systems. The stage for a deadly and dangerous miscalculation has been set intentionally for a nuclear World War III. Sources include: ZeroHedge.com CNN.com WashingtonPost.com (Natural News) A new assessment of the nuclear deal the Biden regime is attempting to make with Iran has found that the current iteration is far worse than the one made during the Obama administration which was also bad. By every indication, the Biden Administration appears to have given away the store, says a statement signed by 49 GOP senators earlier this month. What is more, the deal appears likely to deepen Irans financial and security relationship with Moscow and Beijing, including through arms sales. The senators, as well as other experts who have been watching this atrocity, noted that as more money flows to Irans theocratic tyrants their human rights abuses domestically and throughout the region will only escalate, to include political crackdowns on dissidents within the countrys borders. Irans hardliners which is pretty much everyone in power will gain more control and authority as they increase theirs and their countrys wealth, thanks to Biden and the America last Marxists who are really running his regime. According to a published assessment, in terms of the region, the nuclear deal will no doubt help to increase Tehrans meddling in the domestic affairs of its neighbors, though advocates of the deal claim just the opposite. When his administration was working on the original agreement, then-President Barack Obama predicted that with a deal attitudes will change, but they only changed for the worse. Sanctions relief, as a consequence of a nuclear accord, will most likely finance Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Quds Force (the IRGC branch for extraterritorial operations) and buttress Irans terrorist proxies, including Lebanons Hezbollah, Yemens Houthis, Iraqs Shiite militias, and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the summary noted. The worst parts of the new deal are, of course, that it will enable the Iranian regime, repeatedly listed by the U.S. as a state sponsor of terrorism, to have full nuclear weapons capability, an unlimited number of nuclear warheads, and the intercontinental ballistic missile systems with which to deliver them, in contrast to what the Biden regime claims, the assessment continued. In addition, as a separate deal, the U.S. will reportedly release the IRGC from the US List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations in return for a public commitment from Iran to de-escalation in the region and a promise not to attack Americans,' it adds. The assessment goes on to point out an obvious, but often unspoken, truth: Irans leaders never honored the Obama deal, so anyone who actually believes they will honor the new Biden deal is fooling themselves. To that end, Iranian leaders responded by claiming publicly they didnt agree to the U.S. demand and suggested giving the U.S. a private side letter instead a fairly obvious sign they have no intentions of honoring the current agreement, either. Ended by former President Donald Trump, the Biden regime immediately set about trying to resurrect the deal following several peace deals involving Israel and surrounding Arab nations. As such, the assessment notes, One can only assume that just as the region has become relatively more peaceful and stable, the Biden administration would like to destabilize it. After surrendering to the Taliban in Afghanistan and failing to deter Putin from invading Ukraine, has the Biden administration not created enough destabilization? Why would a U.S. president want a legacy of three major destabilizations unless someone was interested in bringing down the West? the assessment notes. The fact that Iran was violating the first agreement isnt speculation, it is fact. In 2018, then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provided evidence gathered by his intelligence services that Iran was cheating on the agreement. In a special address, Newsweek reported, the Israeli leader gave a slideshow presentation while stating that Iran had secretly pursued Project Amad, a plan to design, produce and test five nuclear warheads, each with 10 kilotons of explosive yield that were all designed to be placed atop an intercontinental ballistic missile. He also said that his government had obtained. 100,000 exact copies of Irans atomic archive to prove his allegations. These files conclusively prove that Iran is brazenly lying when it says it never had a nuclear weapons program, Netanyahu said at the time. Bidens handlers hate America and everything good that our country stands for. If that werent true, they wouldnt be pursuing a deal that puts America and our allies in grave danger. Sources include: Newsweek.com ZeroHedge.com (Natural News) After a career of teaching nurses, Dr. John Campbell has turned to making videos discussing information about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19). Some of his videos have reached hundreds of thousands and millions of views. Since the beginning of the mass vaccination campaign spearheaded by Big Pharma and mainstream media, the medical researcher from England has been encouraging his around 2.3 million subscribers on YouTube to get vaccinated. But in February 2022, after reviewing the Pfizer documents released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Campbell realized that people should be given enough data to make an informed decision about COVID-19 vaccines. Last November, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a small batch of documents from Pfizer. According to the data, Pfizer received a shocking 42,086 adverse event reports that included 1,223 deaths in the first three months of the vaccine rollout. The data released by the FDA included nine pages of recorded side effects, with at least 158,000 different health problems. An initial review of case report forms (CRFs) also highlighted critical data collection errors and anomalies, such as missing sample barcodes; sick patients entered into the healthy population group; serious adverse event numbers left blank; at least one death of a patient the day before being listed as being at a medical check-up; second doses were administered after the three-week protocol window; and adverse events were listed as not serious even though they required an extended hospital stay. Additionally, there were also questions as to whether participants were properly observed for an adequate amount of time. A majority of the CRFs from the first batch of released data came from Ventavia-run trial sites. Ventavia is currently facing a lawsuit filed by Brook Jackson, a former Ventavia regional director. Jackson was fired immediately after she reported her concerns about potential data falsification and poor laboratory management to the FDA and higher-ups in the company. In September 2021, a group called Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FDA for the documentation used to approve Comirnaty or the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, including safety and effectiveness data, adverse reaction reports and lists of the vaccines active and inactive ingredients. The PHMPT sued the FDA after a month without getting a response. The agency asked the judge to give them 75 years to release all the documents, with a request to only release 500 pages per month. The judge ruled that the FDA should release the requested documents at a rate of 55,000 pages per month. Pfizer documents from the FDA convince Campbell to reconsider his vaccine recommendations In mid-November 2021, the FDA released the first 91 pages of the requested data. Upon inspection, it was discovered that the FDA has been aware of many shocking safety issues since April 30, 2021. The Pfizer documents served as a wake-up call for Campbell. In one of his videos, he acknowledged the possibility that the COVID-19 vaccines could be more dangerous than Big Pharma has claimed. In the video, Campbell reviewed the documents listed as 5.3.6. Postmarketing Experience, which were originally marked confidential. According to the data, Pfizer received 42,086 adverse event reports with 1,223 deaths reported through February 28, 2021. Campbell said the information would have been useful prior to the rollout of the coronavirus injections, especially since he was one of those who supported the safe and effective narrative. He added that the Pfizer documents destroyed trust in authority. People should take the Pfizer reports seriously, especially since having 1,223 fatalities and 42,086 reports of injury in the first three months is a cause for concern. In comparison, the 1976 swine flu vaccine was pulled after only 25 deaths. The number of COVID-19 doses shipped has been redacted under a FOIA redaction code that stands for Trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential. If the vaccines are allegedly safe for public use, why is the number of doses shipped confidential? (Related: Pfizer documents show COVID-19 vaccine accumulates in ovaries; UK data reveals cases of ovarian cancer in 2021 are at a record high.) Campbell himself is bothered by this redaction, especially since it is impossible to calculate the incidence rate of side effects if the denominator is unknown. He added that the number cannot be proprietary, and theres a chance that its being withheld for some other reason. Even without knowing the under-Dr. #JohnCampbell reconsiders #COVID #vaccine recommendation after looking at #Pfizer documentsreporting factor, Campbell is shocked by the number of reported Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine side effects. Visit Vaccines.news for more news related to the coronavirus vaccines. Watch the video below for an analysis of the recently released Pfizer documents. This video is from the BrighteonTV channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: CHD says Pfizer and FDA dropped data bombshell on COVID vaccine consumers. Pfizer panicking after judge orders accelerated release of COVID vaccine documents amid fears business will be harmed. Truth shall prevail: FDA begins (reluctantly) releasing Pfizers COVID-19 vaccine documents. Pfizers COVID vaccine causes miscarriages, stillbirths. Pfizers covid vaccine linked to 1,291 side effects. Sources include: TodayVille.com DailyExpose.uk Brighteon.com (Natural News) More evidence has come in confirming that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines do not work. Data from highly vaccinated countries like Canada and Israel shows that an overwhelming majority of new COVID-19 cases and deaths have come from their fully vaccinated populations. Canada and Israel are among the worlds most highly vaccinated nations. In Canada, 83 percent of the population is fully vaccinated and nearly half the population has received an additional dose. In Israel, 68 percent of the people are fully vaccinated and 58 percent have received a booster dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. None of the vaccines that flooded Canada have saved it from its current COVID-19 onslaught. Data provided by the federal government of Canada itself shows that seven out of every 10 COVID-19 deaths are among the fully vaccinated. The data was taken between Jan. 9 to 15. During that period, Canada had 683 COVID-19 deaths. Of those deaths, 22 were partially vaccinated, 194 were unvaccinated and 467 were fully vaccinated. This means that 68 percent of COVID-19 deaths are fully vaccinated. If the fully and partially vaccinated deaths are combined, 71.5 percent of deaths will come from the vaccinated. Previous data from the Canadian government confirms the fact that more vaccinated Canadians are dying from COVID-19. Israel also suffering as fully vaccinated flood hospitals According to the Israeli Ministry of Health, the country recorded 14,460 new COVID-19 cases on Monday, March 21. This is a nearly 12 percent increase from the number of new COVID-19 cases reported on Sunday, which was 12,929. (Related: Highly vaccinated Israel has the most COVID-19 cases per capita IN THE WORLD.) Of the 14,460 people diagnosed with COVID-19 on Monday, the Health Ministry reported that a vast majority of them were vaccinated. According to the data, 83.1 percent of the new COVID-19 cases that day were vaccinated and just 16.1 percent were unvaccinated. The remaining 0.8 percent had no listed vaccination status. Nearly 17 percent of all COVID-19 tests taken on Monday came back positive, a nearly two-time increase from a week ago, when just around 10 percent of COVID-19 tests came back positive. This is the highest infection rate increase in Israel in more than a month. The countrys infection coefficient, which gauges how infectious the current outbreak is, also rose to 1.33 a 33 percent rise from just a week ago when the coefficient was just 1.00. This means Israel is experiencing another wave of COVID-19 cases, and it is accelerating. Earlier last month, the medical director of one of the largest hospitals in Tel Aviv reported in an interview that between 70 to 80 percent of serious COVID-19 cases in their hospital were fully vaccinated individuals. Right now, most of our severe cases are vaccinated, said Dr. Yaakov Jerris, director of the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. They had at least three injections. Between 70 and 80 percent of the serious cases are vaccinated. So, the vaccine has no significance regarding severe illness, which is why just 20 to 25 percent of our patients are unvaccinated. Learn more about the deadly COVID-19 vaccines by reading the latest articles at VaccineDeaths.com. Watch this episode of The Ben Armstrong Show as host Ben Armstrong talks about how the COVID-19 vaccines have failed in Canada and Israel. This video is from The New American channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: Canadas Justice Center: Trudeaus travel ban on unvaccinated citizens is egregious. Government report: Almost 70 percent of recent COVID deaths, hospitalizations in Canada were among VAXXED people. Israel proves vaccines dont work: 80% of serious cases are fully vaccinated. Dr. Robert Malone: COVID mortality higher in highly vaccinated Israel than less vaccinated Palestine. Israel is overrun with COVID. The vaccines have failed. The experiment must stop. Sources include: Brighteon.com NYTimes.com DailyExpose.uk IsraelNationNews.com TheGatewayPundit.com (Natural News) Dr. Benjamin Marble branded Dr. Anthony Fauci as the greatest mass murderer in the history of the world for funding the creation of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) and manipulating the governments response to the ensuing pandemic. We know Fauci, Dr. Death Fauci, funded the creation of the virus, the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. We know he created this Frankenstein virus, its a man-made virus, Marble told host Alex Jones in the March 21 episode of The Alex Jones Show on InfoWars. He put together parts of SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] with parts of RSV [respiratory syncytial virus] and with parts of HIV [human immunodeficiency virus], and then put the spike protein poison bioterror weapon on top of it all, combined together. Thats why I call it a Frankenstein virus. As head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAD), Fauci used government resources to support the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through nonprofit non-governmental organization EcoHealth Alliance. (Related: Fauci is KILLING Americans by refusing them safe and effective covid remedies.) With millions of death directly attributed to COVID-19 and several millions more connected to it, Fauci already belongs in the company of notorious mass murderers like Chinese leader Mao Zedong, Mongol warrior Genghis Khan, German dictator Adolf Hitler and Russian tyrant Joseph Stalin. According to estimates Chairman Mao, founder of the Chinese Communist Party, may have been responsible for the death of at least 45 million to as many as 70 million people; Khan around 40 million, Hitler nearly 14 million, many of them Jews; and Stalin, over a million. Fauci, also the White House chief medical advisor, is bound to surpass them all if the COVID vaccines turned out to be bioweapons of destruction instead of the life-saving cure they were supposed to be. As Marble and other notable doctors like Peter McCullough and Robert Malone have been saying from the onset of the pandemic in 2020, Fauci and his ilk have been knowingly injecting unsuspecting humans with poison under the guise of protecting them from COVID-19. Every COVID death is a murder by Dr. Death Fauci So he paid for that and funded it. So basically, every COVID death is a murder by Dr. Death Fauci. So thats why I say hes the greatest mass murderer in the history of the world, Marble said. Thus far, COVID has claimed 6.1 million victims worldwide and the figure is rising every day. But thats not the main point why Fauci could be the ultimate madman, according to Marble and Jones. Its because Fauci has been deceiving mankind as to the need for more vaccines, which is deadlier than the virus itself per recent studies. Now, the problem is, theyve already given five billion doses of this poison. We know its poison, everybody knows it is poison. Everybody knows somebody, a friend or family member thats had a heart attack or a stroke or a blood clot by now that so many doses had been delivered, said Marble. So how do we put a stop to this? How do we get this poison banner now running ads everywhere? Oh, its normal for kids to have strokes and heart attacks, too, oh yeah, heart attacks and strokes your way up? Its normal. Yeah, its complete insanity. This is war. You know, if people dont realize that, this is the biological war, the bioterror war started in 2020. We know Dr. Death Fauci funded the creation of the COVID-19 virus promoted the poison. So this is bioterrorism. They unleashed bioterrorism on the world, we still have this denial. A lot of people just dont believe or understand that we are under a biological war and have been for two years. Jones concurred with Marble, who has treated tens of thousands in all 50 states by way of his telehealth provider, MyFreedom.Doctor.com. We need to understand, were all veterans of a bioweapon war, every man every woman, every child, black, white, old, young, Hispanic, Asian, gay, straight. You were all attacked by Fauci and the UN [United Nations] in the New World Order, said Jones. And Peter Daszak, Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, theyre bragging about it, they hit us with a bioweapon, and then they countered with another bioweapon. Thats not a game people. Marble and Jones should know. They both have been struck by COVID-19. In effect, Marble said, Fauci has tried to murder them. Listen, we arent literally living during a bioweapon attack, where they hit you with one part of it, and the binary attack completion is the shot, said Jones. Its on record, folks, you are all the victims of a bioweapon war, but were not gonna be victims, were gonna be overcomers. And were gonna bring them to justice. Jones wants the people who created and released the virus to be executed or be slapped with the death penalty. Fauci, in particular. They will pay for what theyve done, he said. Follow Pandemic.news for more news related to the coronavirus pandemic. Watch below the full March 21 episode of The Alex Jones Show on InfoWars. This video is from the InfoWars channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: Fauci, Walensky and Collins all conspired to commit mass murder with the plandemic: Dr. Naomi Wolf. Dr. Bryan Ardis tells Dr. Peter Breggin: Fauci is using remdesivir to mass murder Americans Brighteon.TV. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. warns that Fauci, Gates are committing mass genocide against humanity. Sources include: Brighteon.com GospaNews.net TheDesertReview.com (Natural News) Israel blocked the sale of what is considered to be the worlds most powerful cyberweapon to Ukraine and Estonia over concerns about how Russia would react. Known as Pegasus, this cyberweapon is widely considered as the most powerful piece of spyware technology ever made. Governments all over the world are scrambling to woo the Israeli government into providing them licenses to use the spyware, which was developed by an Israeli technology firm called the NSO Group. Pegasus is known as a zero-click hacking tool used for infiltrating smartphones. Once it has entered the target phone, it can turn it into a 24-hour surveillance device. Everything from messages, photos and video recordings that the smartphone sends or receives can be copied without the owner even knowing that their phone had been hacked. (Related: Authoritarian governments using spyware to keep an eye on enemies of their regimes.) If properly utilized, the Pegasus software can infect millions potentially billions of phones running either iOS or Android operating systems. Pegasus spyware is known to have been used by the Saudi Arabian government to spy on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and murdered dissident Jamal Khashoggi. More recently, the Israeli government itself has been accused of using Pegasus to carry out warrantless surveillance of its citizens. Israel prefers to preserve its relationship with Russia than provide Ukraine the cyber defense system Ukraine has reportedly been trying to get the Israeli government to allow the NSO Group to sell the Pegasus software since 2014, following the Russian invasion and occupation of Crimea and the declaration of independence of the pro-Russian breakaway states of Donetsk and Luhansk. Since then, Ukraine has increasingly become the favorite target of Russian cyberattacks. Fearing the strain the sale of the Pegasus to Ukraine would cause on Russian relations with Israel, the government at the time refused to budge. It even went so far as to impose a near-total embargo on selling any kind of weaponry and defense equipment to Ukraine. In the case of the Baltic nation of Estonia, the country started its process of trying to purchase Pegasus in 2018. The Israeli government at first agreed to allow Estonia to have the system. Negotiations went far enough that the Estonian government even approved a down payment of $30 million to the NSO Group. But the following year, a senior Russian defense official contacted Israeli intelligence agencies to notify them that Estonia planned to use the Pegasus system to hack into Russian phones. The Estonian government might have even considered using Pegasus on its citizens of ethnic Russian descent, who constitute nearly 24 percent of the population. Israeli officials who had control over the sale of defensive equipment, including Pegasus, hotly debated whether to allow the sale. The Israeli Ministry of Defense inevitably blocked the sale and returned the Estonian governments down payment. Western governments have strongly criticized Israels close relationship with Russia since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. Many Ukrainian officials have also publicly called out Israel for only offering limited support to Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself made a virtual speech to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, criticizing the country for not providing it with defensive weapons systems, including the highly admired Iron Dome antimissile system, and for not joining Western nations in imposing economic sanctions on Russia. Critics of the Israeli government have also pointed out that it was hypocritical when it blocked the sale to Ukraine and Estonia, who supposedly want to use the system as a means of defense. They noted that the Israeli government did not bat an eye when it sold the system to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Panama, Mexico, India and Hungary. These governments, led by corrupt or authoritarian rulers, have used the Pegasus to spy on dissidents and critics, including journalists, human rights activists and political opponents. Learn more about how Ukraine and Russia are escalating their conflict in cyberspace by reading the latest articles at CyberWar.news. Watch this episode of the Health Ranger Report as Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, talks about how people can survive a cyberattack designed to take down America. This video can be found in the Health Ranger Report channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: Ukraines digital government services app converted into an instrument of war. Israel declares state of emergency following CYBERATTACK on government websites. 21 Key U.S. natural gas producers were hacked just before Ukraine invasion: a warning shot? Cyber attacks now much more likely as Putin escalates ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Sources include: InfoWars.com TheGuardian.com NYTimes.com Brighteon.com (Natural News) The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is expected to deploy more troops to the alliances eastern flank composed of Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia as Ukrainian officials called for help to rescue around 100,000 people trapped in Mariupol amidst the war with Russia. I expect leaders will agree to strengthen NATOs posture in all domains, with major increases in the eastern part of the alliance on land, in the air and at sea, said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. He added that since the beginning of the Ukraine-Russia War, NATO has prepared more than 140,000 troops across the continent. (Related: ESCALATION: NATO deploys 30,000 troops, 50 warships for huge war games on Russias border) There is a new sense of urgency because we cannot take peace for granted, Stoltenberg said. He also warned Russia against employing nuclear weapons in Ukraine, calling for a stop to Moscows dangerous, irresponsible nuclear rhetoric. Stoltenberg added that any use of biological or chemical weapons would have far-reaching consequences while stressing that NATO was ready to protect and defend allies against any threat, any time. NATO considers permanently deploying troops on eastern flank The alliance is taking into consideration permanently deploying troops along the eastern flank, another NATO official stated. NATO is in the process now of stepping back and thinking more about a medium and longer-term force presence in NATO territory on that eastern flank, said U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith when she spoke to an Atlantic Council audience on March 23, noting that the move will deliver a pretty clear message to Moscow. Permanent stationing could be one solution, and persistent rotation is another option that could be on the table. So at this point, what we need to do is have our military commanders give us the best advice that they can come to us with specific proposals, and then as an alliance well look at what the security environment requires, Smith added. Until now, NATO and the United States have promised not to deploy troops to Ukraine or establish a no-fly zone over the country, warning that doing either would virtually intensify the conflict with Russia. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on March 23 that more than 100,000 civilians are trapped in the beleaguered city of Mariupol. As of today, there are about 100,000 people in the city, in inhumane conditions, in a complete blockade. No food, no water, no medicine. Under constant shelling, under constant bombing, Zelenskyy told Japanese officials while pleading for aid and sanctions against Russia. It is unclear how much of Mariupol remains under Ukrainian control with escaping residents saying that fighting continues in every street. In their latest update a week ago, Mariupol officials said no less than 2,300 people had been killed, but the real death toll is probably much higher. Airstrikes in the previous week destroyed an art school and a theater where civilians were taking shelter. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said following a careful review of available information, Washington concluded that Russian troops had committed war crimes by attacking civilians. In the past week U.S. President Joe Biden has pictured Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal. The comment has enraged the Kremlin, which displays no sign of backing down a month into the invasion. Follow WWIII.news to know more about NATOs troop movements in Europe. Watch the video below to know why a NATO-Russia conflict could lead to World War III. This video is from the the SBN News Clips channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: NATO calls up hundreds of thousands of troops ready to begin WWIII. NATO may have just declared war on Russia with latest move to counter Putins invasion of Ukraine. China slams US, NATO for provoking Russia to invade Ukraine. Dr. Francis Boyle: NATO and the West have used Ukraine to surround Russia with biological weapons. Sources include: TheEpochTimes.com BBC.com Middle East businesses see Africa as a major market for the future. However, the biggest challenge facing traders seeking to expand their business in Africa is access to finance the continents trade finance gap is estimated to be $120 billion. TradeArabia talks to Paul Jennings, Deputy CEO & Chief Banking Officer, BACB, a specialist trade finance bank, on various challenges facing businesses in Africa and the opportunities offered by the great continent. Specialist banks like BACB can help close the funding gap by leveraging extensive local networks and providing much-needed liquidity, says Jennings. Intra-African trade, which has been given a boost by the launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in 2021, will redefine Africas economic prospects for the future. By lowering barriers to trade in goods and services, the new free trade zone will provide great incentives for those looking to do business across the continent, he says. Excerpts from the interview: What are BACBs focus areas in Africa, particularly northern Africa? Why is it focused on these areas? BACB is a trade-focused institution, which sees its role as facilitating trade flows between Africa and the rest of the world. Historically, by virtue of its North African shareholders, the bank was focused particularly on North Africa and the Middle East, with a physical presence in Tripoli and Algiers. But the bank has now expanded its coverage to the rest of the continent and become a truly pan-African financial institution. Unlike other London banks, our area of expertise extends across the breadth of the African continent, reaching many smaller markets both Anglophone and Francophone which are often overlooked by other international banks. What are the key challenges facing Africa with the full impact of COVID-19 still to be overcome? The vaccine programme is still a challenge for much of Africa. Restricted travel means restricted trade. With a lower level of vaccination when compared with other regions, Africa may take longer to recover economically than more developed parts of the world. Naturally, this has implications for businesses on the ground, many of which thrive on face-to face interactions. Africa sometimes suffers from a perception problem the risk of doing business there is often perceived to be higher than it is in reality. Being able to visit, to put your feet on the ground and explore a new market, enables investors to build reassurance and break down barriers of perceived risk. The impact of travel restrictions hinders that. How can trade be increased between Africa and the Middle East, particularly the Gulf? The role of financial institutions in facilitating cross-regional trade cannot be understated. The biggest challenge facing traders seeking to expand their business in this part of the world is access to finance Africas trade finance gap is estimated to be $120 billion. Specialist trade finance banks like BACB can help close this gap by leveraging extensive local networks and providing much-needed liquidity. They are also able to engage in capacity building, creating additional risk appetite for specialist markets and ensuring that people on the ground have the resources to structure deals efficiently. What are the major opportunities and what are the impediments? Intra-African trade, which has been given a boost by the launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in 2021, is clearly set to redefine Africas economic prospects for the future. By lowering barriers to trade in goods and services, the new free trade zone will provide great incentives for those looking to do business across the continent. It therefore represents a significant milestone in the journey towards remedying Africas trade imbalance. Greater intra-regional trade would be a boon for African economies that could help offset uncertainty and build resilience the need for which has only increased amid the financial pressures wrought by the pandemic. But there are some obstacles to realising this more interconnected vision of Africas future. The lack of adequate cross-border infrastructure links remains one of the main barriers to the establishment of a thriving pan-African trade area. Financing the necessary infrastructural projects will require the wider international banking community to rethink their risk appetite. This acute need for financing is only set to increase as ESG considerations become ever more relevant to investment decisions. For example, all projects related to mining are now somewhat challenging from a sustainability point of view. But there are some significant infrastructure projects planned to improve connectivity within Africa the Algerian Trans-Sahara highway, for instance. How can Arab and African-owned banks, together with other international banks, help in Africas growth drive? In the context of Africas trade finance gap, it is crucial that specialist international banks deploy their risk appetite for the region in an optimal manner. By partnering with local banks and export credit agencies (ECAs), international financial institutions can effectively increase Africas access to liquidity. BACB has risk appetite for African markets, but there needs to be a stronger group of Arab and African-owned banks as well as other international banks to collaborate, share knowledge and convert expertise into opportunities. BACB, through its origination and distribution function, also shares African risk with the banking and insurance market increasing the pool of risk appetite and liquidity available for specialist markets. International banks can also act as trusted intermediaries to facilitate intra-African trade. If you're buying, say, a bunch of flowers in Nigeria, its likely that they were grown in Kenya but have been imported from the Netherlands. Linking up those markets directly, through an extensive network of partners, helps build trust between African markets and promotes further trade integration. What is something that the world can learn from Africa as countries move on the path to sustainability? African countries have demonstrated a huge amount of resilience throughout the pandemic. Many markets have shown a willingness to think outside of the box, often finding new ways to solve liquidity and financing issues. Digital payments, for instance, have become ubiquitous across East Africa where many people went directly from not having a bank account to handling all their personal finance needs through a mobile app. Of course, African communities need the finance to develop and support the community-led projects that underpin this resilience. In 2020 BACB worked with the Rwandan government to help finance an ambitious classroom-building project. As social distancing requirements increased the amount of space required by schools, the government built 22,500 new classrooms and other essential facilities for which BACB facilitated the importation of steel from Egypt. Our swift LC confirmation process helped enable a long-term solution to what is a short-term problem. Some more highly-developed countries, where decisions are often taken within five-year political cycles, have much to learn from Africas tenacity and its long-term thinking. Of course, beyond this, the West has a special responsibility to help finance development in Africa. Africa has a right to industrialise, and it is in the interest of the international community that this development is carried out in a sustainable way. And renewable energy is already gaining traction across the continent, most notably in North Africa and Ethiopia. If African markets can set a trend for sustainable development, the rest of the world will no doubt take notice. -TradeArabia News Service (Natural News) After legacy media outlets consistently dismissed the New York Posts bombshell story of Hunter Bidens laptop, frequently categorizing it as Russian disinformation The New York Times made waves by admitting on Wednesday the laptop and its scandalous contents were indeed authentic. (Article by Ashley Sadler republished from LifeSiteNews.com) The admission has generated considerable buzz among conservative commentators and politicians, with some arguing that the suppression of the story by legacy news outlets and social media companies is at least as newsworthy as the laptop itself, whose contents suggest that Hunter Biden was engaged in overseas influence-peddling schemes in countries including China, Russia, and Ukraine. FLASHBACK: Media pundits lied to you, falsely claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation. pic.twitter.com/fSmQgfIq0N MediaResearchCenter (@theMRC) March 18, 2022 In a Friday commentary published by The Federalist, writer Tristan Justice argued that news groups dedicated to discrediting misinformation actually have a history of amplifying it. In his piece, Justice highlighted the fact that news organizations which discredited the true Hunter Biden story continue to hold exceptional accuracy scores with NewsGuard, a prominent fact checking organization which analyzes news stories and organizations to determine whether they spread misinformation. According to the report, [n]early every outlet that opted to ignore or discredit the Posts reporting maintains a near-perfect rating from NewsGuards accuracy and credibility score, with Politico, NPR, and The New York Times holding a favorable 100/100 rating while CBS scores a 95/100. Meanwhile The New York Post, which broke the true story, holds a mere 69.5/100 rating. Why havent you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Posts Hunter Biden story? Read more in this weeks newsletter?? https://t.co/CJesPgmGvo pic.twitter.com/jAi7PnpbZf NPR Public Editor (@NPRpubliceditor) October 22, 2020 The New York Post published its bombshell report exposing Hunter Bidens laptop in October 2020, just ahead of the presidential election. The story was heavily censored and dismissed by social media platforms and mainstream outlets, and 50 former U.S. intelligence officers claimed the laptop was probably false information put forward by Russian propagandists. Twitter drew massive backlash when it locked the Posts account following the publication of the story. Many believe the throttling of the politically damning story, which suggests that Hunter Biden leveraged his fathers political influence for profit, unfairly tilted the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden. Read more at: LifeSiteNews.com (Natural News) A school district (SD) in Wisconsin argued that anti-discrimination laws do not protect white students, explaining that they are part of the majority and do not belong to any protected class. The argument emerged amid a complaint filed by a white mother against the Elmbrook SD in Wisconsin. Speaking to the Daily Caller on the condition of anonymity, she said her daughter enrolled in a school that was part of the SD was failing. The daughter was also suffering from depression, but had been working with health professionals. However, school administrators refused to communicate unless the mother allowed the school to access the students personal healthcare information and to conduct an open dialogue with medical professionals helping her daughter. The mother also revealed that in the course of attending school board meetings and the SDs teaching and learning committee meetings, the accommodations being refused to her daughter was advocated for students with non-white and low-income background leading her to file a complaint. Elmbrook SD Assistant Superintendent Tanya Fredrich responded to the complaint after an investigation. Despite claiming that the students race, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status played no role in the decision, she concluded that the student is not a member of any protected class defined by law. [The] student is not a member of any class that is legally protected from discrimination by state or federal law. To the contrary, the students race, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status are what are considered to be the majority status, and thus do not form a basis for claiming that the student is being treated or has been treated less favorably than persons not in the protected class, Fredrich wrote in her complaint response. (Related: Teachers union head defends indoctrinating children with critical race theory.) The mother who filed the complaint told the Daily Caller that the assistant superintendents response and Elmbrook SDs handling of her complaint are just one of many examples of how [their] district is being run. She continued: We feel that as an organization, the leaders of Elmbrook SD are either incompetent or intentionally creating a hostile environment for their students and within our community. WILL: All race discrimination is illegal race discrimination Fredrichs argument did not sit well with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), which expressed its condemnation in a March 9 letter. The letter addressed to Elmbrook SD Superintendent Mark Hansen slammed the districts legally and factually wrong stance on the issue, adding that it is frankly shocking that a public educational institution could hold such a view. All people are protected by federal and state non-discrimination laws. There is no such thing as a protected class in the sense that some races are protected, while others are not. Black and brown students do not have different rights. They have identical rights to white students and must be treated identically to white students. There is certainly nothing in the law concerning a diminished set of rights for those with majority status.' The WILL letter concluded: The laws mandate is that your teachers and staff are colorblind, and we hope you do the necessary work to have your staff embrace this non-negotiable principle. This is a real concrete example of how critical race theory (CRT) is actually put into practice. It means reverse discrimination is important and necessary, said WILL Deputy Counsel Daniel Lennington. The deputy counsel, who penned the letter alongside WILL President and General Counsel Richard Esenberg, heads the groups Equality Under The Law project. They think theres something called protected classes, where only certain people are in protected classes and that theres a majority class that does not benefit from these protections. Thats what CRT teaches, but thats not what the law is. Despite the letter, Lennington lamented that Elmbrook SD refuses to own up to their faulty view. It is disappointing that they will not simply admit their mistake. [Nevertheless,] we will continue to monitor the districts compliance with basic principles of equality and their administration of colorblind policies. Head over to RaceWar.news to read more stories like this. Watch the video of a father denouncing critical race theory during a school board meeting below. This video is from thedeadgene channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: ADL changes definition of racism so only Whites can be labeled as racist. Fairfax County high school forces students to play White Privilege Bingo Professor excludes white students from class discussion, reaps reams of inclusive support. HBO now pushing racist, bigoted Critical Race Theory as a central theme in its broadcast shows. I got over 1,000 soldiers ready to go, locked and loaded: Black militant threatens anti-CRT parents at Texas school board meeting. Sources include: WND.com Scribd.com Brighteon.com (Natural News) A Ukrainian male-to-female (MTF) transgender individual was enlisted into military service after soldiers at the Ukrainian border deemed her as male. Speaking to the Guardian, a transgender woman named Judis lamented how border guards pressed her into service. Ukrainian border guards undress you and touch you everywhere. You can see on their faces [that] theyre wondering what are you? like youre some kind of animal or something, Judis said. According to the British newspaper, Judis fled to Kyiv from her hometown of Svatove in the Luhansk region before Russian forces occupied it. Judis carried no money when she left Svatove, and was almost killed in a Russian missile attack. But the problems began when she arrived at the border with Poland. (Related: Poland defends itself against LGBT insanity while America surrenders its children to mentally ill perverts and pedophiles.) Two border guards accosted Judis and asked her to follow them to a room beside the customs office, where they conducted a physical examination. Afterward, one of the guards said youre a guy, so get out of here and told me that I should be grateful they didnt call the police, added Judis. Despite showing a birth certificate indicating her sex as female, the border guards refused to allow Judis passage to Poland and told her to go to the war. Twenty-four-year-old MTF transgender individual Alice, who hails from the town of Brovary near the Ukrainian capital, was also refused passage to Poland. Along with her 21-year-old partner Helen, Alice was deemed as male and told to return to the frontlines by border guards. They took us to a building near the border crossing. There were three officers in the room. They told us to take off our jackets. They checked our hands [and] arms, [alongside] my neck to see if I had an Adams apple. They [also] touched my breasts. After examining us, [the] border guards told us we were men. We tried to explain our situation, but they didnt care, recounted Alice. Biology does matter when defending your country According to LGBT activists who spoke to the Guardian, dozens of MTF transgender individuals have been turned away despite being legally recognized as women. Many are now fearing for their lives in the event that Russias transphobic regime takes over. Men have been prohibited to leave the country since Kyiv declared martial law on Feb. 24. Martial law says all males are obliged to serve in the military, so they cant leave the country, said Ukrainian transgender activist Olena Shevchenko. Technically, the law applies to trans people as well including both certified transgender men and transgender women who had not changed their documents. But it sounds like Ukrainian border guards are preventing even trans people with a valid certificate reflecting their new gender from leaving Ukraine, and nobody knows why. Isa Cox of the Western Journal gave her opinion on why Ukrainian border guards acted the way they did toward Judis, Alice and Helen in a March 24 op-ed. Heres the blunt reality: Men are men, plain and simple. Transgender women in Ukraine are getting a horrifically brutal reality check that when it comes down to defending ones country, biology really does matter, she wrote. The blunt, impolite, politically incorrect basic truth about gender identity and all gender politics [also] applies to Ukraines refusal to let men flee the country, even if they identify as women. This is why men simply cannot be women. She added: Transgender women fleeing Ukraine would be granted privileges that need to be reserved for women and children that is, the privileges of a protected, physically weaker class of humans biologically suited to better tend and protect the children they flee with to run to safety while men stay and fight. Its barbaric to pretend otherwise. War makes it impossible to deny the undeniable about gender. No matter how much it [hurts] men who identify as women, men can simply not be women and women sorely need men to remain men. Visit GenderConfused.com to read more stories like this. Watch the video below that talks about virtue signaling on the Ukraine issue. This video is from the CONSERVATIVE POLITICS & NWO channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: IMF: Russia-Ukraine war may FUNDAMENTALLY ALTER economic, political order worldwide. Alex Jones: War in Ukraine advances the GREAT RESET desired by globalists. Will the Russia-Ukraine conflict end with the collapse of Western civilization? Sources include: WesternJournal.com TheGuardian.com Brighteon.com BBC reports on the suspicious destruction of a theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol were co-authored by a Ukrainian PR agent tied to a firm at the forefront of her countrys information warfare efforts. (Natural News) (Article by Max Blumenthal republished from TheGrayZone.com) Before serving as a fixer and reporter for the BBC in Ukraine, Orysia Khimiak handled PR for a start-up called Reface which created what the Washington Post called a reality distorting app now serving as a kind of Ukrainian war-messaging tool. According to her Linkedin profile, Khimiak was the director of PR for Reface until October 2021. While working that job, Khimiak says she built long-term relationships with editors and media representatives. She has also overseen a PR course for the Kiev-based Projector Institute, whose website currently greets visitors with the slogan, Glory to Ukraine. We Will Win. With her wealth of media contacts, Khimiak now plays an instrumental role in shaping BBCs coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian war. She has even shared a byline with the networks Lviv-based correspondent, Hugo Bachega, co-authoring reports focused on demonstrating Russian culpability for the bombing of the Mariupol dramatic theater. Khimiak broadcasts her political bias in her Twitter bio, stating that she is a fixer in Lviv for journalists for reporters who show honest image of Russian war against Ukraine. Ukraine will resist. Khimiaks Twitter background references the Snake Island standoff which was widely reported by mainstream Western media outlets and heralded as a testament to Ukrainian military bravery. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, 13 Ukrainian border guards died heroically defending an island base against they Russian Navy. Russian warship, go fuck yourself! were the soldiers final words, or so the story went. The Ukrainian guards ultimately turned up alive as Russian captives. The entire story of courage under fire, including the Snake Island defenders famous last words, was a myth one of so many stories fabricated or heavily distorted by pro-Ukraine elements that they have become impossible to count. On the Twitter page of the PR agent-turned-BBC correspondent Khimiak, the phony Snake Island stand-off is still treated as a real historical event. On her Twitter timeline, meanwhile, Khimiak takes credit for the BBCs reports on the destruction of the Mariupol dramatic theater. She and her co-author, Bachega, have yet to respond to a request for comment from The Grayzone. The incident at the Mariupol theater represents one of the most suspicious events of the war, with both the BBC and CNN citing a claim by one local Ukrainian official claiming hundreds were killed inside the building, but producing no evidence to verify it. CNN, BBC rely on single official pro-Azov source for claim of hundreds dead Russian forces have caused widespread destruction across Mariupol, where they have been engaged in intense street-by-street fighting with Ukrainian forces led by the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. However, as this reporter detailed, the Mariupol theater was controlled by retreating Azov militants who were desperately appealing for military intervention by NATO. Several evacuees have claimed Azov detonated the theater to create the impression of a Russian attack that might draw the West into the war. Meanwhile, video of the alleged Russian attack on the theater has yet to materialize, and images of the supposed rescue of survivors or mass deaths at the scene remain unavailable. On March 25, nine days after the incident, CNN broadcast what it said was the first footage of the attack on the theater. The footage (seen below) was only 20 seconds long and showed a small group of civilians slowly ambling down a staircase to the ground floor of a building. A narrator can be heard behind the camera repeatedly referring to an airstrike but claiming that those on the first floor had survived. The video appeared to have been shot some time after the attack, as none of the smoldering present in video taken in the aftermath of the explosion could be seen. That video, seen below and taken on March 16, shows a smoking building with no rescuers or any people on site. CNN has also claimed that 300 civilians were killed inside the theater. The BBC also echoed the official Ukrainian claim of 300 dead, but acknowledged, Communication with Mariupol remains difficult so it is hard to independently verify information. Both networks relied on just a single source for the dramatic allegation: Petr Andryushchenko, an advisor to the mayor of Mariupol who recently saluted the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion as courageous defenders of his city. The officials evidence? According to the BBC, officials were able to check the death toll because they had a record of who was in the theatre before the missile strike and had spoken to survivors. Western media did not see fit to mention that Andryushchenko was likely far from Mariupol, as he recently acknowledged that we are forced to move in order to preserve our intelligence network. His boss, Mayor Vadim Boychenko, reportedly fled the city several days ago. Curiously, partisan Ukrainian reporters claimed a day after the attack that everyone sheltering inside the theaters basement had miraculously survived. Illia Ponomarenko, correspondent for the US and EU-sponsored Kyiv Independent, cited official sources a day after the theater incident claiming all had survived Also on March 17, Ukrainian government ombudswoman Ludmyla Denisova stated on Telegram: The (theatre) building withstood the impact of a high-powered air bomb and protected the lives of people hiding in the bomb shelter. Four days before the incident, Mariupol locals informed Russian media that the theater was to be the site of a false flag operation aimed at generating Western outrage and triggering NATO intervention. One day after the incident took place, civilians evacuated from Mariupol testified to Donbas-based media that Azov fighters blew the theater up as they retreated. They went on to detail how Azov used them as human shields throughout the fighting, even sniping at them as they tried to escape. Interview with #Mariupol refugee?? You know what happened at the drama theatre? They blew up the drama theatre So, it wasnt a bombing but an explosion? Nothing landed on it, it exploded from inside Did Azov let ppl leave the city? They didnt let anyone leave#Ukraine #Russia pic.twitter.com/jKQDj8BLWj Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli (@ProfessorsBlogg) March 22, 2022 Among the most curious aspects of the incident of the theater was the disappearance of all vehicles from the parking lot in front of the structure hours before the explosion occurred. It seems that though they had been removed in order to avoid being damaged by the expected blast. Photos and Maxar satellite images of the theater (above) on March 15 show vehicles parked immediately next to the building Photos and Maxar satellite images taken in the immediate aftermath of the explosion at the theater show no vehicles, as though they had been removed in expectation of the blast Ukrainian PR agent-turned-BBC fixer hand picks local sources Ignoring the accounts of evacuees from Mariupol who said Azov militants had destroyed the theater before retreating, the BBCs correspondent, Bechaga, and his fixer, Khimiak, initially turned to official Ukrainian sources and a resident who was not present at the theater on the day of the supposed attack. On March 17, the day after the theater incident, Bechaga and Khimiak reported that according to Ukrainian authorities, [the theater] was bombed by Russia Their only local source said she left the theater one day before the building was destroyed when most, if not all those on the grounds appeared to leave. We knew we had to run away because something terrible would happen soon, she told the BBC. The BBC reporter and PR agent-turned-fixer co-authored a March 22 follow-up article quoting two local witnesses who said they were near the theater when a massive blast occurred. Both delivered cinematic accounts which open source intelligence analyst Michael Kobs called into question. The really questionable part of the story is the step-by-step narration of a process that in reality lasts maybe a tenth of a second. Here, however, a man has the time to throw himself into the path of the blast wave and flying splinters. pic.twitter.com/FBIPLHwE9H Michael Kobs (@MichaKobs) March 23, 2022 The male witness said he saw plenty of people bleeding. However, in a time when nearly every person carries a smartphone, video of the harrowing scene he described has yet to surface. Finally, the BBC turned to McKenzie Intelligence, a private contractor founded by a former UK military intelligence officer, to hypothesize that a Russian 500-pound laser guided missile was used to destroy the theater. But as the open source analyst Kobs pointed out, the center of destruction sits right in the middle of the stage, so two dumb bombs cant possibly be to blame. While the BBC seems intent on legitimizing the official Ukrainian narrative of the theater incident, other mainstream outlets have quietly moved on. Even now, the fates of most of those people [inside the theater] remain unknown, the NY Times noted in passing on March 21. BBC fixer/correspondent worked for firm behind top Ukrainian-war messaging tool The BBCs choice of an overtly nationalist Ukrainian public relations agent to guide its coverage of the war highlights the networks absolute alignment with NATOs objectives. Before her gig with the British state broadcaster, Khimiak handled public relations for a Kiev-based start-up that created an AI app enabling users to superimpose their faces on the bodies of famous people. Called Reface, the app has become a kind of Ukrainian-war messaging tool disseminating anti-Russian push notifications to millions of users, the Washington Post reported. According to the Post, reality-distorting apps like Reface are a way for users to absorb messages they might otherwise tune out. People have their guards up with political news on those platforms But they lower them for an immersive experience like face-swapping. Reface now says it is engaged in a viral battle against #russianterrorists. Turned off the #Reface app in #russia. According to our analytics, its audience couldnt care less about the destroyed houses & women & children killed in #Ukraine. Read about our viral info battle against #russianterrorists & #StandWithUkrainehttps://t.co/aO8Skrfg35 Reface (@reface_app) March 17, 2022 As part of its efforts against Russia, Reface said it has blocked Russian users from accessing the app. Further, everyone who opens the app sees a message to support Ukraine along with a banner with information about the real losses of the Russian army. A watermark with the Ukrainian flag and the hashtag #StandWithUkraine is layered over each video that appears on the app. Reface says its employees have joined the territorial defense units and volunteers, and several teams have also joined the cyber troops to fight Russian propaganda. All Reface videos contain a watermark urging users to support Ukraines war effort For her part, the former Reface PR director Khimiak-turned-BBC correspondent/fixer has not been reticent about Ukraines Russian adversaries. I just cant accept opinion that not all Russians are bad. All I feel is pain and hate, because their silence is a consequence of this war, she declared on Twitter in reaction to a video depicting rescuers trying to save a young girl from rubble. Though BBC proclaims in its own statement of values, Trust is the foundation of the BBC. Were independent, impartial and honest, its hiring of a Ukrainian public relations specialist who has confessed to hatred of all Russians to arrange its coverage of the war in the country is hardly surprising. As The Grayzone reported in February 2021, the British broadcasters non-profit arm, BBC Media Action, participated in a covert UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) program explicitly designed to weaken Russia. As seen below, UK FCDO documents revealed that BBC Media Action proposed working through a private British contractor called Aktis to cultivate and grow pro-NATO media in conflict areas like the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, now the focal point of fighting between pro-Russian forces and the Ukrainian military. The BBCs secret information warfare initiative had turned the network into an arm of British intelligence, operating as an actor in a foreign conflict which its broadcast media arm was simultaneously claiming to cover in an objective manner. Now, the BBC has shed any pretense of objectivity by hiring an overtly nationalist Ukrainian public relations operative to shape its coverage of one of the most heavily disputed incidents in a war filled with cynical deceptions. Read more at: TheGrayZone.com (Natural News) It was obvious during the 2020 campaign that then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden was incapable of serving as president, much less a lower-ranking elected position because he had early-stage dementia. If Americas mainstream media was honest and not simply the propaganda division of the Democratic Party, there is no way he would have ever been elected as our president because the amount of cheating the deep state would have had to pull off would have been 10 times what was done to keep Trump out of office. No, the mainstream media either hid Bidens deteriorating mental condition or defended him by attacking anyone who dared to mention that he had gotten to the point where he could not be counted on to regularly speak clearly and coherently. But that was then. Now, Bidens condition is much worse, and he demonstrates it daily when he is allowed to be in and speak in public, like last week when he traveled to Europe to attend a NATO summit over what to do about Russias invasion of Ukraine. At one point, Biden who was addressing members of the U.S. Armys elite 82nd Airborne Division appeared to suggest that he would soon be ordering them into the embattled country, which would be tantamount to declaring war on Russia and triggering World War III for real. You know, with the Ukrainian people, Ukrainian people have a lot of backbone, they have a lot of guts and Im sure youre observing it, Biden said in Rzeszow, Poland. And youre gonna see when youre there, and some of you have been there. Youre gonna see, youre gonna see women, young people standing, standing in the middle, in front of a damn tank, just saying Im not leaving. Im holding my ground. Theyre incredible. But they take a lot of inspiration from us, he added, directly suggesting that they will see all of these things with their own eyes which implies, of course, that those troops would have to physically be in Ukraine. And, you know, the woman who just died, the secretary of state, used to have an expression, he said, appearing to forget the name of the late Secretary of State Madeline Albright. She said, we are the essential nation. It sounds like a bit of a hyperbole but the truth of the matter is you are the organizing principle around which the rest of the free world is, the free world is moving. WATCH: Biden tells the 82nd Airborne theyre going to Ukraine: Youre going to see when youre there, youre going to see women, young people standing in the middle, in the front of a damn tank saying Im not leaving.' pic.twitter.com/M2nu77yUw7 RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 25, 2022 Needless to say, the White House quickly went into damage control mode, informing reporters that no, there wont be any U.S. troops sent to fight in Ukraine. An administration official told reporter Andrew Feinberg of The Independent that The President has been clear we are not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position. UPDATE: A @WhiteHouse spokesperson tells me: The President has been clear we are not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position. Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) March 25, 2022 This wasnt the only gaffe that the White House was forced to walk back. Earlier, Biden appeared to suggest that the U.S. and NATO would use chemical weapons if Russia did, a complete violation of a number of international treaties. Asked on Thursday what the United States would do if Russia used chemical weapons in Ukraine, the president said, It would trigger a response in-kind, a report noted. Whether NATO would cross, he said. wed make that decision at the time. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan was forced to explain that the U.S. has no intention of using chemical weapons. Its one thing that this White House has to continually correct a sitting president. Its quite another that the usual suspects who were constantly screaming about how out of norm Donald Trumps presidency was are completely silent about Biden. If the 25th Amendment was not written for presidents like Biden, it should be repealed because its obviously worthless. Sources include: FoxNews.com ConservativeBrief.com (Natural News) A leaked email revealed that top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci last year flagged an article that denounced social distancing measures to curb the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19). The White House chief medical advisor cited in the email an op-ed by Dr. Vinay Prasad of the University of California, San Francisco and political science professor Vladimir Kogan of Ohio State University. The Feb. 20, 2021 piece published in STAT News argued that politics not science was behind the moves to delay school openings and implement social distancing in schools that did reopen. Greg Folkers, Faucis chief of staff at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), informed his boss of the STAT News op-ed. The NIAID director emailed Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shortly after getting word of the article. You probably have already seen this. But just in case, you should be aware of it, wrote Fauci. The chief medical advisor for the Biden administration highlighted several paragraphs in the piece by Prasad and Kogan. One such highlighted section stated: Schools should decide whether to open based on community transmission and students should strive to be spaced six feet apart arent supported by science. These two demands will keep schools closed much longer than necessary, harming kids, Prasad and Kogan wrote. The two also questioned the CDCs color-coded system which determines whether schools can open fully, follow a hybrid mode or remain closed for the time being. They pointed out that the most restrictive red category is characterized by having more than 100 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people weekly. By this metric, more than 90 percent of the country is currently in the most restrictive tier ruling out full-time, in-person learning for elementary-aged students and any sort of in-person school for older children without screening tests. Yet many schools in such communities already have in-person school, and have done so for months, without issue. COVID mandates driven by politics, not science Prasad and Kogan stressed that the CDC guidance appears to be based on decades-old research focusing on the travel distance of large respiratory droplets. The two op-ed authors mentioned that new evidence actually argues against the six-foot distancing rule. First, it is increasingly clear that transmission of COVID-19 is not explained by the droplet mode the idea that bigger drops of secretion fall in the first few feet around someone. Second, a meta-analysis on COVID-19 and other closely related coronaviruses showed that the benefits of increasing the distance from three to six feet is marginal in contexts where the risk of infection is low, as would be the case in a classroom with universal masking. Prasad and Kroger also mentioned that the CDC social distancing guidelines for schools will work to provide cover for interest groups and districts that want to delay in-person learning. Even the Brooking Institute, which espouses liberal views, was forced to acknowledge the roles of partisan politics and the influence of teachers unions in the decisions on when to reopen schools. Several school officials later lamented that the CDCs guidance for classrooms rendered them unable to fully reopen. They explained that if the guidance was followed, only a certain number of students could fit into a classroom. (Related: Public school union boss admits lazy teachers told the CDC to keep schools closed.) Ultimately, Prasad and Kroger said the public health agency only served to muddle things instead of moving the ball forward on [President Joe] Bidens goal of getting elementary and middle schools reopened as soon as possible. Visit FauciTruth.com for more stories like this. Watch Gabor Gabe Zolna talking about the CDCs three-foot social distancing rule for schools below. This video is from the zolnareport.com channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: Teachers union exposed for bullying CDC into keeping public schools closed for in-person learning. CDC director says its OK to reopen schools this fall amid coronavirus concerns Why have open borders but shut schools, businesses and restaurants? CDC drops indoor mask mandates for many areas in the US. Sources include: 100PercentFedUp.com Scribd.com TheEpochTimes.com Brighteon.com (Natural News) A Kansas state senator who is being harassed by the Board of Healing Arts for alleged misconduct during the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) plandemic has voted to allow doctors throughout the state to prescribe and dispense ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to patients. Sen. Mark Steffen proposed the bill, which passed in a 21-16 vote. In addition to allowing the off-label prescription of these drugs, the legislation also mandates that child care facilities and K-12 public schools accept without any inquiry or scrutiny religious exemptions presented by parents or guardians against forced vaccination for the Fauci Flu. Steffen, a Republican from Hutchinson, is a licensed anesthesiologist who wants to retroactively shield himself and other doctors and health providers who prescribed ivermectin and HCQ to patients during the plandemic. For doing this, Steffen is now being attacked by the Board of Healing Arts in Kansas. Thousands of Kansans and hundreds of thousands of Americans have died needlessly because of mainstream academic medicines shutdown of effective treatment protocols, Steffen said about the restrictions imposed by the federal government against ivermectin and HCQ. This fearful, greedy, political and incompetent shutdown of early treatment will be deemed a national tragedy in time, he added, noting that more than 19,000 Kansans were hospitalized throughout the plandemic, resulting in 8,000 deaths. Democrats dont want doctors to have the freedom to treat their own patients NPRs Wichita station, 89.1 KMUW, made Steffen sound like the problem in all this. The fake news outlet claims that Steffen has waged a protracted war of words with public health officials and medical professionals who insist that ivermectin and HCQ do not effectively treat the Wuhan Flu. Rather than let patients try these FDA-approved drugs for themselves if they so choose, NPR and the medical professionals it endorses want them to remain prohibited, and for patients to have to get vaccinated instead. It reminds us of the witch hunt against ivermectin at the onset of the plandemic. NPR also blasted Steffen for including the retroactive provision, calling it a conflict of interest for him, even though it would apply to all physicians throughout the state, protecting them from persecution for helping their patients against the wishes of the authorities. Last we checked, doctor-client privilege was supposed to allow physicians the freedom and privacy to prescribe whatever they decide is best for their patients, even if the prescription is politically incorrect. All of that changed, apparently, once the plandemic arrived. Now, the establishment wants to force everyone into a paradigm of medical fascism where corrupt officials like Rochelle Walensky from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Anthony Fauci from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) call all the shots. The hope is that Steffens bill gets signed into law because it will greatly expand medical freedom in the state of Kansas, and hopefully result in other states following suit. Kansas Democrats, meanwhile, including Sen. Pat Pettey of Kansas City, voted against Steffens bill because they do not like doctors have the freedom to prescribe drugs off-label unless, of course, those drugs are prescribed off-label for sex change therapy for children, in which case Democrats want them handed out like candy with taxpayers footing the bill. The bills definition of religious belief is defined as theistic and non-theistic moral and ethical beliefs as to what is right and wrong that are sincerely held with the strength of traditional religious views. The bill will also prevent local health officials from mandating any more tyranny in response to the alleged threat of disease, including capacity restrictions, isolation requirements and quarantine. The latest plandemic news can be found at Pandemic.news. Sources include: KMUW.org NaturalNews.com (Natural News) Russia is once again warning the world that it may use nuclear weapons in its invasion of Ukraine and experts say this threat should be taken very seriously. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly raised the possibility of firing nuclear weapons since the beginning of his countrys invasion in late February as a way of deterring the possibility of armed intervention from the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Recently, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council and former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev claimed that Russia has the right to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Medvedev said the Kremlin was within its right to strike against any enemy with nuclear weapons. He added that Russias nuclear doctrine does not require an enemy to use such weapons first. We have a special document on nuclear deterrence. This document clearly indicates the grounds on which the Russian Federation is entitled to use nuclear weapons, said Medvedev. There are a few of them, let me remind them to you. Number one is the situation, when Russia is struck by a nuclear missile. The second case is any use of other nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies. The third is an attack on a critical infrastructure that will have paralyzed our nuclear deterrent forces, he continued. And the fourth case is when an attack of aggression is committed against Russia and its allies, which jeopardized the existence of the country itself, even without the use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use of conventional weapons. Russia could use smaller tactical nukes to deter Western aggression Russia has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, with approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads at its disposal. Military analysts have warned that if Russia felt like it had no choice but to use a nuclear weapon, it could use a so-called tactical nuclear warhead. Such a warhead is generally less powerful than typical nuclear weapons, including strategic warheads carried on intercontinental ballistic missiles. Experts have warned that a tactical nuke fired into Western Ukraine could cripple infrastructure and army units and destroy the will of the Ukrainian people to fight while barely affecting Russian units in the country. (Related: Survey finds that more than one-third of Americans are willing to risk nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine.) We dont know exactly where it is, the red line where the Russian leadership considers using tactical nuclear weapons, said Petr Topychkanov, a researcher for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The Russian leadership knows the value of ambiguity. The biggest question is how rational the Russian leadership is right now, added Topychkanov. I dont know what kind of information he is getting. If Russia were to do the unthinkable and launch a nuclear warhead, former Defense Intelligence official Rebekah Koffler said the Biden administrations recent responses to Putins aggression instill little confidence that America is properly prepared for such an event. The fact that we have not responded in a methodical manner to any of Putins actions nor have we deterred any of his actions is reason to be concerned that the administration of President Joe Biden does not have a coherent plan in place to respond to a nuclear attack. Judging by our overall response and that we put all our eggs in one basket with sanctions and we were caught off guard regardless of the fact Putin never made it a secret what he was going to do yet we are grasping at straws, said Koffler. Given that, it doesnt seem that we are prepared for the possibility of him using nuclear weapons. Learn more about the possibility of nuclear war in Ukraine by reading the latest articles at Nuclear.news. Watch below to learn more about how Biden is threatening to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia. This video is from the InfoWars channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: Washington is driving the world to nuclear war. Even regular people are now constructing bunkers due to fears of a nuclear war. Heightened fears of nuclear war increase demand for potassium iodide worldwide. Steve Quayle tells Mike Adams: Globalists want to achieve the extermination of the human race through nuclear war. World War III will be nuclear and destructive, warns Russian foreign minister. Sources include: WSJ.com FoxNews.com TheGuardian.com Brighteon.com The scent of spring is in the air. Birds are chirping and constructing their nests. It happens every year on the same day. However, according to new research published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, several bird species are nesting and producing eggs nearly a month sooner than they did a century ago. Scientists were able to estimate that nearly a third of the bird species breeding in Chicago have shifted their egg-laying forward by an average of 25 days by comparing current data with century-old eggs kept in museum collections. And, as far as the experts can determine, climate change is to blame for this shift. Birds' early laying of eggs The aroma of spring pervades the air. Birds are singing and putting up their nests. Every year on the same day, it occurs. Several bird species, however, are nesting and laying eggs roughly a month earlier than they did a century ago, as per a new study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, as per Reuters. By comparing current data with century-old eggs housed in museum collections, scientists were able to calculate that roughly a third of the bird species mating in Chicago have pushed their egg-laying forward by an average of 25 days. Climate change, as far as researchers can tell, is to be responsible for this shift So far, scientists haven't discovered any distinct characteristics shared by these species, like size or migratory status, that may explain why they're shifting their timetables. However, "the bulk of the birds we looked at feed insects, and insects' seasonal behavior is likewise impacted by temperature," according to lead author John Bates, curator of the bird section at Chicago's Field Museum. Read more: Heatwave Prompted by Climate Change May Cause Shortage of Christmas Tree This Year They studied the eggs by collecting them through the years "Egg collecting is such a fantastic tool for everyone to learn from bird ecology across time," says John Bates, principal author of the research and curator of birds at the Field Museum. He likes how this work mixes earlier and current information to look at these changes across around 120 years and help answer really important issues about how climate change affects birds, as per ScienceDaily." Bates became interested in investigating the museum's egg collections after editing an egg-related book. "Once He got to know their egg collection, he realized how precious the data in that collection are, and how such data aren't mirrored in current collections," he adds. The egg collection itself is housed in a tiny room jammed with floor-to-ceiling cabinets housing multiple eggs, most of which were acquired over a century ago. The scientists then obtained two large sets of nesting data: one from around 1880 to 1920, and the other from roughly 1990 to 2015. "There's a gap in the center, which is where Mason Fidino comes in," Bates explains. Fidino, a statistical ecologist at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo and co-author of the paper, developed data-analysis algorithms that enabled them to bridge the gap in the mid-twentieth century, as well as the sampling disparities among early egg collectors and Whelan and Strausberger's research. The eggs themselves (or rather, merely their clean, dry shells, with the contents blasted out a century ago) are housed in little boxes and surrounded with labels, frequently written, stating what sort of bird they belonged to, where they came from, and when they were gathered, down to the day. The quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere throughout time easily maps onto greater temperature patterns, and the scientists observed that it also correlates with variations in egg-laying dates. Because the global temperature change has not been linear over this roughly 150-year period, species may not have moved their lay date non-linearly as well. Fidino adds that they had included linear and non-linear trends inside their model. "We discovered that the simulated data was highly comparable to the observed data, indicating that our model performed well." Related article: UN Report: Measures Against Climate Change and Global Warming not Sufficient While Boris Johnson made a new push for nuclear power, the 131 billion challenge of properly disposing of enormous quantities of radioactive waste generated by the previous British atomic energy program remained unanswered. Nuclear Legacy The costly and deadly legacy of the UK's nuclear revolution in the twentieth century is 700,000 cubic meters of toxic waste - nearly the volume of 6,000 double-decker buses. According to the Office for Nuclear Regulation, much of it is kept in Sellafield in Cumbria, one of the world's most complicated and dangerous nuclear power plants. There is currently no safe and permanent disposal option for this waste. A deep geological disposal facility (GDF) was proposed about 50 years ago, but the UK is still decades away from constructing one. According to experts, additional nuclear plants would further exacerbate the dilemma of what to do with nuclear energy's radioactive waste, and the "back end" issue of dangerous toxic waste from the technology must not be overlooked. As per Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), spent fuel from future nuclear reactors will be at such high temperatures that it will need to be kept on site for 140 years before being transferred to a GDF, assuming one is ever built in the UK. It is thought that the prime minister's nuclear ambitions are advanced modular reactors, which are even more sophisticated nuclear reactors. However, nuclear waste specialists claimed no one understands how to deal with their waste because such reactors are a novel technology. Also Read: Saved by the Bell: Illinois Nuclear Plant Approved by the Help of a Last Minute Vote Thinking About Nuclear Wastes When thinking about building new nuclear power plants, it's critical to talk about the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, said Claire Corkhill, a professor of nuclear material degradation at the University of Sheffield and a member of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, an independent advisory body to the government. "While we have a strategy to properly and safely dispose of the waste, it is unclear how this will be applied to the government's plans to build contemporary nuclear reactors." These reactors are considerably different from prior reactors, and they are still learning how to deal with the waste. She believed that no new nuclear reactors should be built until a geological disposal site is available. According to the current NDA annual report, the cost of decommissioning and disposing of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants built in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s has climbed to 131 billion. This is anticipated to climb much more when the cost of constructing a deep geological disposal site approaches 53 billion. Attempts to build underground nuclear waste disposal have so far failed. A proposal to build one in Cumbria was rejected nine years ago. Early Days A new attempt to locate a place is in its infancy, three Cumbrian sites and one in Lincolnshire are being investigated. If it goes through, it might take years for construction to begin, and the GDF would only be able to accept trash in the late 2040s. "In terms of nuclear waste, the quantity of legacy material is not modest," stated Corkhill. "It's costly to deal with. These materials are toxic, and we're talking about a 20-kilometer subterranean footprint at a depth of 200 to 1,000 meters. "So, in terms of future nuclear sites, we must consider whether it is conceivable to construct a GDF large enough to accommodate both historic and new nuclear waste." Previous Power Stations Eleven Magnox power stations were built between the 1950s and 1970s, including Dungeness A in Kent, Hinkley Point A in Somerset, and Trawsfynydd in north Wales, and seven advanced gas-cooled reactors built in the 1990s, including Dungeness B, which closed last year, Hinkley Point B, and Heysham 1 and 2 in Lancashire, are among the power stations that need to be decommissioned. Sizewell B, a pressurized water reactor in Suffolk, and two new EDF pressurized water reactors - Hinkley C, which is under construction in Somerset, and Sizewell C, which is proposed for development in Suffolk - will all need to deposit waste in a GDF. If a GDF is created, it will take until 2150 to deposit legacy garbage into it. A GDF would then be able to accept waste from future nuclear reactors. "Despite 65 years of utilizing nuclear power in Britain, we are still, at best, decades away from having facilities to dispose of the waste securely," said Steve Thomas, an energy policy expert at the University of Greenwich. "It is premature to begin on a significant new nuclear power plant development until we know this can be done." Volumes of Radioactive Waste According to NDA records, the volume of radioactive waste that must be permanently disposed of in a deep GDF is 773,000 cubic meters as of early 2019. 10% of the trash comes from new nuclear power plants, while the remainder is legacy waste. Plans for the Future According to a government spokeswoman, this is not an either/or scenario. Nuclear, together with renewables, will be a crucial element of our next energy security policy, as the prime minister stated. As seen by the development of Hinkley Point C, the first new nuclear power plant in a generation, we are dedicated to increasing our nuclear energy generating capacity and developing additional nuclear power here in the UK. In addition, they are working on a GDF to aid in the decommissioning of the UK's oldest nuclear power plants. Related Article: Oil, Gas, and Coal Mining Must be Regulated by 2050 to Avoid Catastrophic Global Warming For more news about making the environment sustainable, don't forget to follow Nature World News! The Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) has revised its Collective Investment Undertakings (CIU) regulations governing the mutual funds industry following a comprehensive review. The new framework acknowledges the demands placed by the fast-paced changes in the fund management industry and therefore aims at reducing the administrative processes and simplifying the authorisation requirements for establishing and marketing CIUs. The amendments focus on dividing CIUs into two broad categories. The first category targets retail investors and the second targets accredited and affluent investors. The regulations pertaining to the first category of CIUs contain details regarding the nature of investment in the CIUs and require receiving CBBs prior approval whereas the second category only requires notification to the CBB by the placement agent. The CIUs targeting retail investors are low risk with proper diversification and risk management, while CIUs targeted towards accredited and affluent investors contain high risk investments with the aim of delivering high returns. High standards of business conduct The new regulations emphasise on the importance of key areas such as the corporate governance requirements, high standards of business conduct, safeguarding and segregation of investors money, and disclosure standards in line with international best practices, said the statement. Bahrain has had a thriving funds industry since the 1980s. As at the end of February 2022, the number of mutual funds stood at 1,664, with a net asset value (NAV) of $10.6 billion. Ebtisam Al Arrayed, Director of Financial Institutions Supervision Directorate at the CBB, said: The funds industry in Bahrain has established a long-standing track record, and the CBB is fully supportive to the industry. The enhanced regulatory framework forms part of CBBs Financial Services Development Strategy (2022-2026) and will set the environment for the growth and progress of the industry. Local, Regional, and international fund operators and global investors will find the Kingdom attractive for fund domiciliation as well as for using Bahrain as a launchpad for serving global markets Shireen Al Sayed, Director of Regulatory Policy Unit at the CBB, said: The CBB embarked on a comprehensive revision of the CIU regulations under CBB Rulebook Volume 7 as part of a larger initiative to simplify and revise all the CBB Rulebook Volumes. The new CIU regulations are now combined under a single Module making it simpler and market friendly. They are largely principles-based leaving room for the industry to pave the way for building a sound funds ecosystem thereby boosting growth of the asset management industry. Musab Abdulla, Executive Director of Investment Development Financial Services, Technology & Innovation at the Bahrain Economic Development Board, said: Bahrains forward-looking regulations have always been a key competitive advantage that enabled our financial sector to expand and has always attracted new FS companies. These revised regulations are another step forward which will enable us to attract further investments into the Kingdom, in line with the strategies put forward under the Economic Recovery Plan. Najla Al Shirawi, Chief Executive Officer of SICO, has also commented on the enhanced regulations stating: "The updated collective investment undertaking regulations are a game changer for local, regional, and global funds seeking an international jurisdiction to domicile their structures with a very flexible framework yet still within a solid regulatory environment overseen by the Central Bank of Bahrain. Some of the benefits of these regulations include significantly reduced setup and ongoing processes which reduce operating costs, all factors that are prominent decision-making criteria in a manager's choice of domicile. Furthermore, the simplification of the regulations simultaneously provides a lot more flexibility on key fund terms including asset class, investor categories, service provider requirements and legal structure," she said. Brian Howard, Partner and Head of the International Funds Team at Trowers & Hamlins, said: Following market consultation, the Central Bank of Bahrains new collective investment undertakings regulations offer speed, simplicity and flexibility and should make Bahrain the leading jurisdiction of choice in the region for the establishment of investment funds. Bahrain now makes a wide spectrum of investment fund structures available to prospective managers following a simplified notification process to the Central Bank of Bahrain. TradeArabia News Service Atlantic volcanoes in the Azores archipelago are at risk of an imminent eruption due to the continuance of thousands of earthquake swarms or small quakes for more than a week. Volcanic activities are showing indications this may be the case, prompting local authorities to issue an emergency evacuation. Volcanologists are alarmed due to the threat posed by a major eruption or a powerful earthquake, local officials have been on high alert and are monitoring in case the situation gets worse, which can end the Azores' 204-year streak of having no major volcanic eruptions. Security Measures On Sunday, March 27, Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa visited Sao Jorge Island in the Azores archipelago to attend a briefing on the situation and as a means to calm the local population. President de Sousa also visited the town of Calheta where residents have the highest risk. Dozens of Portuguese soldiers have also been deployed to the island in preparation for a potential widespread evacuation. Large tents that can accommodate around 100 people have also been established. Municipalities on the island have also converted multiple facilities into temporary reception centers. Additional resources will be sent to the island next week to help the local populace, according to Major Rodolfo Romeiro of Portugal's armed forces, as cited by Reuters. The Azores islands are located in the Northern Atlantic Ocean, which is a territory of Portugal. Also Read: Recent Seismic Activities in Atlantic Ocean Feared to be a Developing Volcanic Eruption Risk of Small Earthquakes More than 14,000 small earthquakes have been rattling the archipelago since March 19, volcanologists have termed these tremors as earthquake swarms. Although they range from low to moderate intensity, experts fear that they can result in a single or cascade of catastrophic geological events, which can trigger an imminent eruption from Atlantic volcanoes and a major earthquake in the region. Earthquake swarms are weaker than a mainshock or an aftershock, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). However, these small quakes have the potential to cause significant volcanic activities due to their large number and frequent occurrence. Some of the tremors have reached a magnitude of up to 3.3 based on the Richter scale, as per Reuters. There is still no reported significant damage that could cause casualties or a tsunami in Sao Jorge and its surrounding islands in the Azores as of Monday, March 28. Notable Eruptions and Earthquakes In 2021, the nearby Spanish Canary Islands underwent a volcanic eruption from the Cumbre Vieja volcanic ridge which consists of the La Palma island. Since then, countries in the region, including Portugal, remained vigilant should a so-called mega-tsunami spread across the Atlantic Ocean. The eruptions yielded no casualties but they destroyed over 3,000 properties, including houses, churches, and schools on the island, as per the BBC. Thousands of residents were also forced to evacuate due to the flow of molten lava. In 1808, a colossal volcanic eruption occurred when the 'Bocas de Fogo da Urzelina' or Urzelina volcano triggered an explosion near the community of Urzelina in Sao Jorge Island in the Azores islands. The eruption emitted a large amount of ash and lava which affected a wide area, killing 30 people. In 1755, Portugal's capital city of Lisbon incurred a major earthquake known as the "Great Lisbon earthquake" that killed approximately 60,000 people. Frequent earthquakes do occur in Portugal and its surrounding regions in Europe since the country is situated above the Lower Tagus Valley (LTV) fault line zone characterized by increased seismic activities. Related Article: Around 2,000 Earthquake Swarms Struck the Azores Islands in Portugal Since March 19 Dindim the Magellanic Penguin travels approximately 8,000 kilometers each year to visit retired bricklayer Joao Pereira de Souza on the Proveta Beach in Ilha Grande, Brazil. The penguin and fisherman reunion had its roots back in May 2011 when Pereira de Souza took care of Dindim who has washed up ashore following an oil spill. 2011 Rescue Incident Dindim was starving and covered in oil when he was found by the part-time fisherman living on an island off the coast of Rio de Janeiro more than a decade ago. Pereira de Souza nursed the penguin for a week, where he cleaned and fed him fish, as per CNN. The rescuer attempted to set free Dindim to migrate once he was able to regain his health. However, it seemed like the Magellanic penguin is hard to get rid of as he kept coming back to the man who saved his life consistently each year. During his visits, the penguin sleeps in the fishermans backyard covered by a fence to avoid potential dog attacks. The Brazilian island where Pereira de Souza resides is also home to a breeding ground of other Magellanic penguins, but Dindim is a stranger to them. In a Facebook video posted by the BBC in April 2021, the elderly fisherman reportedly waits every June for his penguin best friend after being away for 11 months in the sea. Magellanic penguins are known for living in the seas of South America, yet they need to go back to Patagonia to breed, said the BBC. The coasts of Patagonia are located in the other side of South America, covering around 260,000 square miles from Argentina to Chile. Also Read: Extreme Heatwave Kills Large Number of Magellanic Penguins in Argentina Previous Speculations Rumors have come into play before about Dindim is being kept as a pet and is just part of the local penguin populace in the South American country. As a result, scientists placed a Global Positioning System (GPS) tag on Dindim to determine his origins and trajectory, as per CNN. It is for the first time that scientists have proven that Dindim is the same penguin who returns to the fishermans house annually since the tag is still placed onto his body. The scientific community reportedly believed this is a sign of the penguin species loyalty to its rescuer. Although Magellanic penguins are known for their loyalty to their partners and breeding site, the case of Dindim is considered to be rare given the distance he has to travel and other risks, including predators and natural weather hazards during travel. Animals and Short-Term Memory In 2015, the National Geographic cited an investigation on the short-term memory of animals by the Study for Cultural Evolution at Stockholm University in Sweden. The study suggested that animals are not capable of remembering specific events and only store information that could help them survive. Based on the findings, dogs forget an event within two minutes and chimpanzees for approximately 20 minutes, and this is the case for a myriad of animals, as per the study. In spite of the breakthrough discovery, the case of Dindim and his ability to remember his rescue event in 2011 challenges the theoretical underpinnings of studies on the short-term memory of animals. Following the story of the fisherman reunion, it seems that both wild animals and our pets have the potential to remember us for a long time after all. Related Article: Happy Feet! A Million Penguins Flock to Argentina to Eat [VIDEO] Cloud formation in the Arctic can be influenced by solid aerosols. Researchers predicted that as the Arctic loses ice, more of these unique particles will emerge from marine emissions coupled with ammonia from birds, affecting cloud formation and temperature. Understanding the features of aerosols in the atmosphere is also crucial for enhancing climate models' capacity to predict present and future climate in the Arctic and beyond. The Arctic is fast losing sea ice, which means deeper ocean. It also means more gas and aerosol releases first from sea into the sky, which warms the atmosphere and makes it cloudier. When University of Michigan aerosol scientist Kerri Pratt's team gathered aerosols from of the Arctic atmosphere in summer 2015, Rachel Kirpes, a doctorate student at the time, noticed something unusual: aerosolized ammonium sulfate particulates didn't seem like ordinary liquid aerosols. Kirpes found that ammonium sulfate nanoparticles, that should have been liquid, were really solid, while working alongside fellow aerosol scientist Andrew Ault. The findings of the group have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Solid aerosols have the potential to alter cloud formation in the Arctic. Researchers anticipated to see more of these unusual particles created from marine emissions coupled with ammonia from birds as the Arctic loses ice, which will have an influence on cloud formation and climate. Understanding the features of aerosols in the atmosphere is also important for improving climate models' capacity to predict present and future climate in the Arctic and beyond. "Because the Arctic is warming faster than anyplace else on the planet, these sorts of particles may become more relevant as we have more emissions from open water in the atmosphere," said Pratt, an associate professor of chemistry and earth and environmental sciences, as per ScienceDaily. The aerosols measured up to 400 nanometers in diameter, which is nearly 300 times lower than the width of a human hair. Aerosols within Arctic are typically thought to be liquid, according to Ault, an assistant professor of chemistry. The particle turnes liquid when the relative humidity of the atmosphere reaches around 80% of that on a humid day. When you dry the aerosol out again, it takes around 35% to 40% relative humidity to transform it into a solid. Scientists anticipated finding fluid aerosols since the air above the Arctic Ocean or any ocean is humid. Read more: Trace Gases Can Be Formed From Aerosol Particles That Seed Clouds How do aerosols affect climate? Incoming solar energy is scattered by all air aerosols, and certain aerosol forms may absorb solar light. The most essential of them is BC, although mineral dust and other OC elements may also absorb sunlight. By increasing the total reflected solar energy from the Earth, aerosols that primarily scatter solar radiation have a cooling impact. Aerosols that absorb a lot of light have a warming impact. There is a mix of scattering and absorbing aerosols in the atmosphere, and their overall influence on the Earth's energy budget is determined by surface and cloud properties. The most efficient methods are scattering aerosols over a dark surface and absorbing aerosols above a light surface. Because a subset of aerosols may act as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and ice nuclei, they are essential for cloud formation (IN). Increased aerosol concentrations may raise CCN numbers, resulting in more, but shorter, cloud particles for fixed liquid moisture content. The cloud albedo effect occurs when the albedo of the cloud is increased, resulting in increased reflection and cooling. Smaller droplets take longer to expand to the size where they may eventually fall as rainfall. This process, known as the cloud lifetime effect, can increase cloud cover and so add to the cooling impact. Related article: Edit Earth Literally: Aerosol and Solar Geoengineering to Solve Ozone Damage Earth will be seeing yet another approaching space rock this April Fools' Day on Friday, April 1. Astronomers called it the 2007 FF1 asteroid with a diameter between 360 feet and 656 feet (110 meters and 260 meters). Traveling at the speed of 47,950 kilometers per hour (29,800 miles per hour), there is a high chance that the space rock will not hit the planet. Over several months, Earth observed a number of asteroids flyby around its orbit. Some of these asteroids include the "fifth known Earth impactor" 2022 EB5, which struck off the coast of Iceland on March 11. 2007 FF1 The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) classified 2007 FF1 as an Apollo-class asteroid due to its very small size. The NASA JPL also classified the space rock as a potentially hazardous asteroid due to its predicted close approach to Earth, as cited by Space Reference.org. The asteroid was spotted by the Virtual Telescope Project on March 24 when its distance was approximately 11.6 million kilometers (7.2 million miles). However, its distance to Earth will be much shorter when it passes on Friday. Astronomers estimated that the space rock will have a distance of 7.4 million kilometers (4.6 million miles) during the flyby, as cited by Live Science. This means that its relative distance is dozens of times greater compared to how far the Earth is from the moon; which is around 380,000 kilometers (236,000 miles). Also Read: 2021's Largest Asteroid to Fly by Earth in March 21; What to Expect? Next Approaching Asteroids Prior to the asteroid flyby of 2007 FF1, the NASA JPL provided a list of other approaching asteroids during the remainder of March: 2022 FB2 - its closes Earth approach of 150,000 kilometers (93,400 miles) on Monday, March 28. It only has an approximate size of 15 feet compared with the size of a house. 2022 FE - the NASA JPL will pass the planet from a distance of 3.45 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) on Monday as well. The asteroid has also the size same as a house. 2022 FF1 - a car-sized asteroid will fly by Earth at a distance of around 1.49 million kilometers (927,000 miles) on Tuesday, March 29. 2022 FR1 - an eight feet asteroid the size of a standard bus will have a detour at a distance of 1.86 million kilometers (1.16 million miles) on Tuesday. 2022 EL5 - another bus-sized asteroid is set to pass on Tuesday at a distance of around 2.71 million kilometers (1.68 million miles). Asteroid Size and Frequency Regardless of the relatively small size of the next approaching asteroids, NASA continues to monitor all Near-Earth Asteroids. This is due to the parallel causal relation between the size and impact of an asteroid. Astronomers claimed the larger the space rock, the bigger the impact. The frequency of an asteroid hitting Earth is more common than previously thought. However, most of these asteroids are small and disintegrate upon entering the atmosphere. Still, the probability of a major asteroid impact is imminent. NASA is currently engaged in the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission as a form of planetary defensive measures against planet-killing space asteroids. In April 2029, the massive 99942 Apophis asteroid is set to approach Earth. Fortunately, estimates reveal it will safely pass by Earth. Related Article: Asteroid Hits Off the Coast of Iceland, Becoming the Fifth Known Earth Impactor Spanish infrastructure major Acciona is showcasing its expertise in sustainable infrastructure solutions and in creating unique cultural experiences at the Big 5 Saudi being held in capital Riyadh. The leading construction exhibition for the kingdom, Big 5 Saudi has attracted 400 companies from more than 30 countries showcasing their innovative products in Riyadh until March 31. During the event, Acciona will be hosting two keynote conferences that will put the spotlight on sustainable solutions for cities, and harnessing technology to create vibrant cultural spaces and experiences. Ahmed Sayed, Middle East Business Development Director for Accionas construction business, will address a panel session on Driving impact through sustainable development and environmental leadership in Saudi Arabia's built environment. He will also focus on low-carbon, climate-friendly solutions for Saudi Arabias construction sector. Daniel Orti, the head of Acciona Cultural Engineering in the Middle East, will participate in the Market Outlook talks on shaping the cultural scene in Saudi Arabia. Orti, an industry veteran with more than 18 years of experience in EPC projects, will focus on building cultural foundations based on historical heritage in his talks. He will also give tips on how to enhance storytelling through exhibits, museums and other cultural vehicles; and engaging communities through cultural projects. Acciona, a global infrastructure, water and renewable energy group with a history of more than 100 years on the five continents, develops sustainable and resilient solutions to allow societies to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change. The group sees itself as the first company in a new business sector focused on climate solutions. To do so, it draws builds and operates infrastructure that are needed to meet the UNs sustainable development goals. In the cultural sector, Acciona Cultural Engineering (ACE) are experts in harnessing technology to create modern, interactive cultural experiences at museums, art centres and major cultural heritage sites. Many of the cultural and branding projects undertaken by ACE apply the concept of cultural engineering, which is based on visual and sensory technology, said the statement from the company. Acciona uses this element to create unique, memorable and immersive experiences about the history and cultural heritage of a particular place. Sustainable projects and solutions in museums and art centers support local development in the regions where the company operates. A leader in the provision of regenerative solutions for a decarbonized economy, Acciona is involved in key sectors such as renewable energy, water treatment and management, eco-efficient transportation and mobility systems, resilient infrastructures. It has been carbon neutral since 2016.-TradeArabia News Service Profile: Pakistani volunteer joins forces to fight COVID-19 resurgence in Shanghai Xinhua) 15:28, March 29, 2022 SHANGHAI, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Braving the heavy rain, Pakistani businessman Habib Ur Rehman, 33, left home early in the morning to assist Shanghai's anti-epidemic efforts as a volunteer. The megacity, with a permanent population of more than 24 million and around 200,000 expats, is conducting rounds of nucleic acid testing to tackle a recent resurgence of COVID-19 infections. Donning full protective gear and a face shield, Rehman rendered his service in the Ronghua residential neighborhood in the city's Changning District, where residents had queued up to undergo testing. He is tasked with guiding people to registration and testing sites in an orderly manner, and during his shift, he serves over 100 expats from more than a dozen countries and regions. "My family and I have lived in Shanghai for a long time and witnessed China's efficiency and success in fighting the epidemic in Wuhan in 2020, which has given us a lot of confidence. Regarding the epidemic prevention, we have some experiences to share," Rehman said. Starting this month, several regions in China have seen a surge in newly confirmed cases and asymptomatic carriers. Meanwhile, frequent spells of rain and temperature fluctuations have posed challenges to Shanghai's nucleic acid screening efforts. Rehman regards himself as a Shanghai native. He was encouraged by his father to pursue studies in Shanghai and in 2008, he took up undergraduate study majoring in international economics and trade at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. After graduation, he joined his family business, trading Pakistani handmade carpets and other specialty goods with China. Expats who are new in Shanghai might be a little nervous during nucleic acid screening, Rehman said, adding that as a multilingual volunteer, he believes he can help such individuals with suggestions and other assistance. "As volunteers, we not only help maintain order in the queue but also solve other problems in a timely manner," he said. "Problems with health QR codes? No worries. Let me help you fix it," he said while volunteering. Prior to taking up the volunteering work, Rehman and his family had completed two rounds of nucleic acid testing. "Although standing in the queue is time-consuming and requires patience, the entire process was very smooth. If the weather was pleasant, people would have been in a better mood while queuing, and I would have spent more time speaking with them about my personal experience," he said. Rehman is enthusiastic about volunteering work. In 2016, he was in one of the first batches of expats to volunteer with Shanghai's public security department, assisting the police in managing traffic congestion and providing language translation services in the multilingual community. He believes that with the assistance of volunteers such as himself, expats can adapt much more easily to a new living environment. Rehman acknowledged that his family business has suffered short-term setbacks amid the pandemic, but they are optimistic. "The business has certainly taken some hits, but I think safety comes first. Without health, nothing else is meaningful." In 2021, Rehman and his family introduced Pakistani salt lamps into the Chinese market, which became popular at the fourth China International Import Expo (CIIE). He plans to participate in the fifth CIIE this year. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) After the restart edition in 2021 which saw the natural stone community come together in Verona after a two-year hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Marmomac - the most important world event for natural stone, granite, technologies, tools, applied design and services - is already hard at work organising the 56th edition scheduled for September 27 to 30 slot. With six months to go until the 2022 edition, registrations from international countries stand out: Asia returns with India, South Korea and Japan; Germany returns from Europe, excellent signals from Brazil and Egypt, said the event organisers. Marmomac has once again confirmed its status as the landmark trade fair for the international natural stone sector with an impressive list of big players. This year marks the return of several important absentees in 2021: Asia restarts with registrations from India, South Korea and Japan, as well as excellent signals from Brazil and, closer to home, from Egypt and Europe. In particular, welcome returns include confirmations by exhibitors from Germany, a country that last September suffered the first lockdowns caused by accelerating infection rates. Promotion efforts targeting visitors are also underway, with an Incoming programme implemented by Veronafiere network of delegates and the ICE Trade Agency. The trade fair attended in person is also flanked by digital events in the Marmomac Plus portal for the international natural stone community. "It is possible here to consult the company profiles of the top players in the sector, discover new products and trends in the stone market, as well as possible applications of natural stone in architecture and design. More than 800 companies from 35 countries have already renewed their subscriptions," said the organisers. Returning to the event attended in person, as always Marmomac will be backed up by experimental projects focusing on technologies and innovation, they stated. The exhibition layout will also be adapted to welcome and guide visitors along an exploratory path responding to the needs of architect and designers, as technicians and distributors, they added. Four cultural projects will welcome exhibitors and visitors to the Verona Exhibition Centre and, on the strength of success last year, many shows and exhibitions will be held again. Exhibition concepts will be developed, involving a number of important furniture brands, along lines taking in design, architecture, art and university experimentation. Close collaboration continues with ADI (Industrial Design Association) whereby the Veneto and Trentino Alto Adige delegation will organize "Etica-Litica": a challenge for companies to create prototypes from a single slab, including recycled materials, combining the creativity of industrial design with issues such as sustainability, mass production, ease of transport and placement. Saudi Araia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) has announced that five leading Saudi Arabian businesses have each signed separate non-binding memoranda of understanding (MoU) to become the first potential partners of the MENA regional Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM). The partners are Aramco, Saudia, ACWA Power, Maaden, and Enowa, a subsidiary of NEOM. The news follows the announcement of the VCM initiative by PIF and Tadawul in September 2021, where His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince, Deputy Prime Minister, Chairman of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs and Chairman of Board of Directors of PIF, highlighted Saudi Arabias leading role in contributing to the reduction of the impact of climate change, said a Saudi Press Agency report. HRH the Crown Prince has also announced during the Saudi Green Initiative Forum Saudi Arabias aim to reach Net Zero by 2060 through the Carbon Circular Economy approach, in line with its development plans and enabling its economic diversification. What will Voluntary Carbon Market do? As part of the agreement, the partners will support PIF in the development of the VCM through the supply, purchase and trading of carbon credits as the market is expected to be established in 2023. Additional partners will be announced in the coming months ahead of an initial round of auctions expected in the final quarter of this year. The VCM will connect the supply of carbon credits with demand from investors, corporates and institutions wanting to reduce their carbon footprint by offsetting carbon emissions they generate. While corporates internal decarburisation targets should remain the priority, the VCM can effectively complement their efforts until and when they reach net zero. The VCM will seek out carbon credits possessing the highest integrity and quality. Saudi Arabias companies and institutions are uniquely positioned to be carbon credit suppliers of choice as well as buyers of high quality, certified carbon credits. By connecting buyers and suppliers, the establishment of a VCM will enable investors and companies across the region to meet their ambitions to reduce and potentially neutralize their carbon footprint, said a statement. Support demonstrates potential Yasir Al-Rumayyan, Governor of PIF, said: We would like to thank our partners for their commitment to the Voluntary Carbon Market, the first of its kind in the MENA region. The support of Saudi businesses, which are world leaders in their fields, is a strong demonstration of the exciting potential of this market. PIF contributes to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabias efforts through driving the investment and innovation required to address the impact of climate change and achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2060. President & CEO of Aramco Amin H Nasser said: We are excited to be part of this groundbreaking initiative by PIF to establish a regional carbon market, which aligns with our net-zero ambition. Carbon credits complement our wider emissions reduction strategy and represent an important tool in the energy transition, as we continue to play our part in meeting the world's need for secure, affordable and ever more sustainable energy." Director General of the Saudi Arabian Airlines Corporation Eng. Ibrahim Al-Omar, said: Saudi Arabias national flag carrier, Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia) has a pivotal role in carbon off-setting and contributing to environmental sustainability. "The participation in the voluntary carbon market for the Middle East North Africa region is a landmark occasion in the national airlines history. With great anticipation, we look forward to collaborating on the Voluntary Carbon Market, an innovative future-forward new initiative created by PIF. ACWA Power Mohammed Abunayyan said: To meet global net-zero targets, considerable action must be taken in order to reduce carbon emissions. The launch of the MENA Voluntary Carbon Market will play a critical role in achieving this target and solving climate change challenges while allowing private investors, businesses, and NGOs to offset their emissions and ultimately position Saudi Arabia as a global hub for carbon trading. As a company that is driving the energy transition through the expansion of renewable energy, desalination, and green hydrogen, we have an important role to play. As such, we are privileged to be one of the first partners to be driving this visionary roadmap forward and help the Kingdom in realizing its ambitious efforts to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2060. Helping to solve climate change challenges CEO of Maaden Robert Wilt said: The plan to establish the MENA region carbon market is an important step toward enabling Saudi Arabia and the region to contribute to solving global climate change challenges. As the Kingdom of Saudi Arabias national mining champion, MaAden will actively cooperate with PIF and support the Voluntary Carbon Market by supplying carbon credits in support of Saudi Arabias broader climate ambitions and purchasing carbon credits to deliver on our goal to achieve net zero emissions from Maaden operations by 2050. Peter Terium, CEO of Enowa, said, NEOM was established with the promise to follow principles of environmental sustainability that promote regenerative and sustainable practices. Using today's technologies to reduce emissions has a high price tag, especially where certain sources of emissions cannot be fully eliminated in the near term, so a medium-term solution is needed. At NEOM, we are working to accelerate the progress of carbon reduction and removal technologies and support the Kingdoms transition to a more carbon-conscious market with limited to no impact on the environment. "NEOM's recently announced its subsidiary, Energy & Water company Enowa, which is taking the lead here. Today's announcement of the first Voluntary Carbon Market partnership in the MENA region is a natural fit with our business and sustainability objectives. We look forward to seeing how this pioneering initiative will inspire other regional leaders to support our efforts. Carbon markets have grown rapidly in recent years across the world, with a CAGR of 30% to reach a value of more than $1 billion of traded value as of November 2021, and could grow another 15x by 2030 according to the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets. DP World, a world leader in global supply chain solutions, has announced the launch of its wholesale e-commerce platform DUBUY.com in Tanzania. The online marketplace will give Tanzanian businesses better access to international markets. It will also provide a more secure and reliable supply chain, through DP Worlds worldwide ports and logistics network. The new platform enables Tanzanian businesses to buy wholesale products across a variety of categories both domestically and abroad. DUBUY.com offers users a unique combination of advanced technology and DP World physical infrastructure which includes the Port of Berbera in Somaliland to solve several key challenges facing the growth of e-commerce in Africa. This includes reliable fulfilment, secure financial transactions, and safe movement of goods. Expansion of DUBUY.com This latest expansion of DUBUY.com follows launches in Kenya and Rwanda last year, which created an online business community of more than 1,500 active merchants. The move into Tanzania demonstrates DUBUY.coms commitment to creating a strategic trading gateway into East Africa by working in partnership with the Chamber of Commerce. Speaking on the launch, Mahmood Al Bastaki, Chief Operating Officer of Dubai Trade World said: Dubuy.com presents an opportunity for homegrown businesses to transform into international enterprises by providing access to new markets in Africa, the Middle East and the rest of the world. We are thrilled to continue our expansion into East Africa with our launch in Tanzania, a key strategic market given its rapidly growing economy and under-served e-commerce marketplace. It is our hope that access to these new digital tools will enable local businesses to prosper. Adapting to the changing market Paul Koyi, President of Tanzania Chambers of Commerce, said: Tanzanias Development Vision for 2025 is to have a strong, diversified, resilient and competitive economy, one which is easily and confidently able to adapt to the changing market and technological conditions of the regional and global economy. We know that exciting opportunities such as those provided by our strategic partnerships with DP World and DUBUY.com will help us drive this vision forward. Further, it will allow us to increase our countrys trading connectivity, build an easy access market for Tanzanian entrepreneurs, and help us secure long-term, sustainable growth. With our local expertise, and DP Worlds global footprint and influence, we have a bright and prosperous future as part of a global market ahead of us."-- TradeArabia News Service Champaign, IL (61820) Today Rain likely. Thunder possible. High around 55F. Winds N at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 70%.. Tonight Rain showers this evening with overcast skies overnight. Low 46F. Winds N at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 50%. Champaign, IL (61820) Today Rain likely. Thunder possible. High around 55F. Winds N at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 80%.. Tonight Cloudy. Periods of light rain early. Low 46F. Winds N at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 70%. University of Virginia School of Medicine scientists have discovered a cluster of cells in the brainstem that controls the body's response to severe blood loss, a finding which could benefit efforts to develop new treatments for traumatic injuries. The discovery pinpoints a collection of neurons that drives a response that maintains blood pressure during blood loss. However, severe blood loss eventually causes cardiovascular collapse a condition termed "decompensated hemorrhage" marked by an abrupt and dangerous loss of blood pressure and the new results shed light on why that happens. During blood loss, the brain coordinates a cardiovascular response that supports blood flow to critical organs, like the heart and brain. Our study shows that the cardiovascular response to blood loss depends on changes in the activity of a few hundred neurons in the brainstem." George Souza, PhD, Researcher, UVA's Department of Pharmacology Under pressure The new results, from UVA's Stephen Abbott, PhD, and collaborators, shed light on an important process the body uses to maintain its blood pressure. The neurons Abbott and his team describe properly known as "adrenergic C1 neurons" monitor blood pressure and swing into action during blood loss. When the neurons detect blood loss, they increase nerve activity that constricts blood vessels and maintains proper blood pressure. The scientists were able to determine this using advanced imaging and a technique called optogenetics that allows for the remote control of neurons using light. Their research revealed that the C1 neurons are hyperactive during blood loss, and this maintains blood pressure. But these neurons become inactive with severe blood loss, resulting in cardiovascular collapse. Decompensated hemorrhage is the prelude to hemorrhagic shock, in which the body begins to shut down. But the scientists found that re-activating the C1 neurons in lab rats restored both blood pressure and heart rate. "Our study indicates that reactivating the brain pathways controlling blood pressure during decompensated hemorrhage effectively reverses cardiovascular collapse. We think this indicates that neuromodulation of the pathways described by our study could be a beneficial adjunct therapy for low blood pressure following blood loss," said Abbott, of UVA's Department of Pharmacology. The scientists note that there may be several factors that contribute to the decline in the activity of the C1 neurons during the onset of decompensated hemorrhage. More research on that front is needed. But the team's findings identify important new directions for that future research. "These findings illuminate the importance of the brain-body interactions during blood loss and provide a new perspective for the underlying cause of cardiovascular collapse," Abbott said. Blood loss findings published The researchers have published their findings in the scientific journal Cell Reports. The research team consisted of George M.P.R. Souza, Ruth L. Stornetta, Daniel S. Stornetta, Patrice G. Guyenet and Stephen B.G. Abbott. All are part of UVA's Department of Pharmacology. The work was supported by the American Heart Association, grant 19POST34430205, and the National Institutes of Health, grants HL148004, HL28785 and HL074011. The German National Tourist Board (GNTB) has been certified for the ninth year in a row as a Green Globe company for 2021/22, leading to GNTB retaining its gold status in the international programme. Petra Hedorfer, CEO of German National Tourist Board said: The successful recertification confirms our long-standing commitment to sustainability issues. The balance between economy, ecology and social responsibility has become an integral part of our daily work, be it in marketing or knowledge transfer with our partners in Germany, and in the international travel industry or in the internal sustainability initiative within our organisation. Environmentally friendly and inclusive travel is possible if we, as an industry, make the appropriate offers to our customers and share our expertise with our partners. As a company, we keen to continue to set a good example. In 2021, the GNTB further expanded its commitment to sustainability with numerous initiatives and projects. The tourism board expanded the sustainability campaign 'Feel Good', which was honoured at the "WTM World Responsible Tourism Awards 2021" and at the "Destination of Sustainable Cultural Tourism' Awards 2021" of the European Cultural Travel Network (ETCN). Holidays in rural regions and in the surrounding metropolitan regions were central elements of the campaigns German.Local.Culture.and German.Spa.Tradition. TradeArabia News Service In a recent early release Pediatrics journal study, researchers investigate the presence of antibodies against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in children between the ages of five and 19 after infection. Study: Durability of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies From Natural Infection in Children and Adolescents. Image Credit: Halfpoint / Shutterstock.com Background Since its emergence, SARS-CoV-2 has affected both adults and children of various ages. Initially, the number of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) COVID-19 cases was less in children than in adults; however, COVID-19 cases among children gradually rose over the course of the pandemic. In the United States, the prevalence of COVID-19 in children has exponentially increased, especially from December 2021, due to the emergence of various SARS-CoV-2 variants. In addition to the reopening of schools during this time, the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant, which is known to be highly transmissible as compared to other SARS-CoV-2 strains, has contributed to this rise in pediatric COVID-19 cases. Due to the widespread transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in children, it is crucial to better understand the duration of antibody persistence in this patient population. About the study In the current perspective and population-based study, a total of 218 children between the ages of five and 19 years were recruited. Child participants were screened from various platforms and healthcare systems. Over six to eight months, participants were offered SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests. All tests were based on SARS-CoV-2 antibody detection against their nucleocapsid proteins, with more than one value indicating the presence of antibodies. The test required blood samples from the participants, which provided excellent sensitivity and specificity. Moreover, during recruitment and prior to each blood sampling, all study participants were asked questions related to their symptoms while positive for COVID-19. A generalized additive model (GAMM) with a logit link was performed to demonstrate the relationship between the presence of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein antibodies over the three time points taken three months apart and predictors of interest. Study findings Of the 218 study participants, 96% tested positive for the presence of nucleocapsid antibodies at baseline, whereas 34% exhibited persistent anti-nucleocapsid antibodies for more than six months. Two participants seroconverted from a positive to negative COVID-19 status during their first and second antibody tests. Comparatively, 16 participants seroconverted from a negative to positive COVID-19 status during their first and second antibody test, while nine seroconverted between their second and third tests. Symptom severity, sex, age, and body mass index of the participants did not affect the presence of antibody status during all three tests. Immunoglobulin M (IgM), IgG, or IgA levels increased from baseline to test two and then marginally decreased by the third test. The potential bias of the current study was addressed by performing a sensitivity test, wherein the participants who completed all the three antibody tests were compared to those who failed to complete them. No differences in demographic variables were observed; however, Hispanic participants were more likely to have all three assessments completed as compared to non-Hispanic whites. Almost 58% of samples were negative for infection-induced antibodies at their third test assessment. This observation indicates that most children will remain naive to naturally induced SARS-Cov-2 antibodies. Conclusion The findings from the current study indicate that most children had active SARS-CoV-2 antibodies for more than six months, as assessed by three antibody tests taken after every three months of period. Furthermore, symptom severity, sex, age, and body mass index did not affect the antibody status of the participants. Although the current study provides insights on the antibody status in children for more than six months, several limitations with respect to the number of participants, COVID-19 status before the baseline test, and accountability for more than seven months should be noted. Taken together, the current study emphasizes the importance of vaccinating children against COVID-19. As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its third year, Northwestern Medicine scientists continue to help advance the understanding of the disease and its impact, from investigating antibody protection against COVID-19 reinfection to elevating women in academic research and highlighting racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 hospital mortality in Illinois. Previous SARS-COV-2 infection does not guarantee antibody protection Alexis Demonbreun, PhD, assistant professor of Pharmacology, was senior author of the study published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases. A team of Northwestern Medicine investigators found that among individuals with prior SARS-COV-2 infection, less than half had moderate to high enough levels of antibodies to protect them against reinfection. The findings, published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases, help dispel the myth that natural immunity after SARS-CoV-2 infection is more effective than vaccines in reducing hospitalization or mortality risk, according to the authors. "These results suggest that prior infection with SARS-CoV-2 does not guarantee a high level of antibody-mediated protection against reinfection," said Thomas McDade, PhD, professor of Medical Social Sciences and first author of the study. The investigators measured levels of antibody-mediated neutralization of the spike protein- ACE2 receptor which allows the SARS-COV-2 virus to infect healthy host cells in blood samples from participants previously enrolled in the Screening for Coronavirus Antibodies in Neighborhoods (SCAN) study. Participants were recruited to SCAN between June 24, 2020 and November 11, 2020. Overall, moderate to high levels of SARS-COV-2 protective antibodies were present in less than half of participants who required clinical care 41.3 percent. Additionally, protective immunity was present in just 7.9 percent of symptomatic infections and 1.9 percent of asymptomatic infections. "This information may be important for public health messaging to the large and growing proportion of the global population that has been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and remains unvaccinated, or only partially vaccinated," said Alexis Demonbreun, PhD, assistant professor of Pharmacology and senior author of the study. Co-authors of the study include Richard DAquila, MD, the Howard Taylor Ricketts, MD, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and associate vice president of research; Brian Mustanski, PhD, professor of Medical Social Sciences, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and director of Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing; and Elizabeth M McNally, MD, PhD, the Elizabeth J. Ward Professor of Genetic Medicine and director of the Center for Genetic Medicine. D'Aquila and Mustanski are members of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. This work was funded by the National Science Foundation grant 2035114, the National Institutes of Health grant 3UL1TR001422-06S4 and Northwestern University's Office of Research. Elevating women in academic research William Lowe, Jr., MD, the Thomas D. Spies Professor of Genetic Metabolism and a professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Molecular Medicine, was a co-author of the editorial published in Nature Medicine. The COVID-19 pandemic has continued to disproportionately impact certain demographic groups, particularly women. Since the beginning of the pandemic, women have left the workforce in greater numbers than men due to childcare and home care responsibilities and, for these reasons, many have still not yet returned to the workforce. In a recent editorial published in Nature Medicine, authors from academic medical centers across the United States discussed how the pandemic has created a negative long-term impact for women in academic research and how academia can help elevate and retain them. "Women in academia have fallen behind with publications and grant funding during the COVID-19 pandemic and risk dropping out of the research workforce altogether, unless urgent action is taken by institutes and funders," the authors wrote. William Lowe, Jr., MD, the Thomas D. Spies Professor of Genetic Metabolism and vice dean for Academic Affairs, was a co-author of the study. In the editorial, the authors suggest a framework for stakeholders, including academic institutions, foundations, professional organizations and federal funders, to retain women in academic research, calling for a commitment to specific financial, cultural and operational changes. "Finally, and perhaps most importantly, substantial national and global efforts to change societal norms that position women as the default responsible caregivers are critical to allow women to succeed in the workforce, including in academic research careers," the authors wrote. Continuing global surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 variants Egon Ozer, MD, PhD, '08 GME, assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and director of the Center for Pathogen Genomics and Microbial Evolution, was a co-author of the study published in Nature Communications. An international team of investigators found that the SARS-CoV-2 variant A.27, which was first identified in Germany in spring 2021, successfully evades currently available monoclonal antibody treatments. The findings, published in Nature Communications, emphasize the need for continued global monitoring of new SARS-COV-2 variant strains, as they continually demonstrate the ability to evade current therapeutic regimens. From phylogenetic analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence data obtained from the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, the investigators detected the presence of A.27 in 31 countries from December 2020 to June 2021, and determined it likely stemmed from separate introduction events out of Western Africa. "Thanks to our research collaborators in Nigeria, we were able to sequence examples of these viruses from samples collected from patients in Nigeria in January and February of 2021, suggesting this lineage may have arisen in Western Africa," said Egon Ozer, MD, PhD, '08 GME, assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, director of the Center for Pathogen Genomics and Microbial Evolution and a co-author of the study. They also found that A.27 has a specific mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which allows the virus to infect healthy host cells. The investigators also demonstrated that A.27 is less susceptible to SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies and that current COVID-19 vaccines and treatments may not fully protect patients against the infection. "The presence of concerning S mutations in an A-derived lineage supports the notion that the same escape mutations can appear in relatively distant genomic backgrounds with similar phenotypic consequences. Therefore, global molecular surveillance has to continue to detect novel variants and to support assessing their risk for the human population," the authors wrote. Racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 hospital mortality in Illinois Joseph Feinglass, PhD, research professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics and of Preventive Medicine in the Division of Public Health Practice, was senior author of the study published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. In Illinois hospitals, Hispanic patients with COVID-19 had higher risk of mortality compared to non-Hispanic white patients, while non-Hispanic Black patients had lower mortality risk overall, according to a Northwestern Medicine study published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. Our study adds to the evidence that there is a significant degree of variability in COVID-19 mortality rates between patients of different racial or ethnic groups and between hospitals even after adjusting for individual patient characteristics." Joseph Feinglass, PhD, research professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics, of Preventive Medicine in the Division of Public Health Practice and senior author of the study The study analyzed hospital data for adult patients diagnosed with COVID-19 who were discharged from acute care, in Illinois hospitals; overall, 14.5 percent of admissions resulted in death or discharge to hospice. After adjusting for patient- and hospital-level characteristics, the investigators found that Hispanic patients had higher mortality risk than non-Hispanic white patients, while non-Hispanic Black patients had lower mortality risk compared with non-Hispanic white patients. Additionally, safety net hospitals receiving disproportionate share hospital funds from Illinois Medicaid had higher mortality risk compared to other hospitals. "To achieve a more equitable pandemic response, policies to reduce repeated duress over pandemic surges will require ramping up support for safety net hospitals already under considerable resource constraint," the authors wrote. The art of nephrology during COVID-19 Susan Quaggin, MD, chief and the Charles H. Mayo, MD, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, wrote an editorial published by the American Society of Nephrology. In a recent editorial published by the American Society of Nephrology (ASN), Susan Quaggin, MD, chief and the Charles H. Mayo, MD, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension and president-elect of ASN, reflected on the impact COVID-19 has had on the field of nephrology while also applauding the field's leadership, innovation, research advances and commitment to patient care and advocacy. "We have witnessed firsthand the major impact of the acute infection and long-term complications from COVID-19 on kidney health. We also understand the increased kidney disease burden that the world will surely face in the coming years," wrote Quaggin, who is also director of the Feinberg Cardiovascular and Renal Research Institute. Quaggin wrote that the field should learn from the COVID-19 pandemic to transform and advance all aspects of nephrology, and noted two ways that the field is already improving: by prioritizing kidney health and disease prevention and committing to healthcare justice and access. "Let us continue to leverage these advances and build on what we've learned during the past two years," Quaggin wrote. "Responding successfully to major crises and being visionary at our core: these efforts represent the art of nephrology." In a recently published article in the journal eBioMedicine, scientists have demonstrated that critically ill coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients are capable of generating durable memory T cell response against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) for more than one year after hospital discharge. Study: T cell response against SARS-CoV-2 persists after one year in patients surviving severe COVID-19. Image Credit: Kateryna Kon Background Clinical presentation of critically ill COVID-19 patients is characterized by severe systemic inflammation and altered cellular and humoral immune responses against SARS-CoV-2. Both phenotypic and functional alterations in T cell response together with reduced levels of lymphocytes have been observed in COVID-19 patients who had been admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU). Activating the innate and adaptive immune systems is required to effectively eliminate the virus. In addition, the virus-specific B cells and T cells developed during acute infection persist for a long time to provide memory immune responses against future infections. Since severe COVID-19 is associated with altered immune system functioning, it is vital to understand whether critically ill COVID-19 patients are capable of inducing robust and durable memory immune responses against SARS-CoV-2. In the current study, the scientists have assessed anti-SASR-CoV-2 memory T cell response in critically ill COVID-19 patients during the course of recovery. In addition, they have characterized the immune dysfunctions observed in these patients during ICU stay. Study design A total of 16 critically ill COVID-19 patients who were admitted to the ICU with SARS-CoV-2 pneumopathy were included in the study. Blood samples were collected from the patients five times during ICU stay and 9 and 13 months after the discharge. The acute and long-lasting immune responses were assessed by measuring blood levels of lymphocytes, HLA-DR expression on monocytes, plasma levels of interleukins 6 and 10 (IL-6 and IL-10), blood levels of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, and T cell response to SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, nucleoprotein, and membrane protein. Important observations In the study cohort (16 patients), the average duration of symptoms before ICU admission was 9 days. During the first follow-up (9 months after discharge), persistent symptoms (pain, dyspnea, and neuropathy) were observed in 9 patients. During the second follow-up (13 months after discharge), persistent symptoms were observed in 10 patients. In both follow-up visits, all patients tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Innate immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection All critically ill patients showed decreased expression of monocyte HLA-DR, decreased blood levels of lymphocytes (B cells, natural killer cells, and CD4+ and CD8+ T cells), and increased plasma levels of pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines. These responses were highest at admission and gradually reduced during the ICU stay. Importantly, all parameters returned to normal physiological levels at follow-up visits. Presence of circulating virus, viral antigens, and anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies All patients showed high plasma levels of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid at ICU admission, which reduced rapidly afterward. In contrast, a gradual increase in anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody titers was observed during the first week of admission. Except for four patients, none showed detectable levels of viral RNA in the blood during their ICU stay. At follow-up visits, all patients remained seropositive, with significantly lower levels of antibodies compared to that during the ICU stay. A significantly elevated level of antibody was observed only in patients who had received the COVID-19 vaccine during the follow-up period. T cell response to SARS-CoV-2 infection Anti-SARS-CoV-2 T cell response was measured by measuring T cell proliferation against three viral antigens (spike protein, nucleoprotein, and membrane protein). The experimental controls included unexposed and unvaccinated donors, vaccinated but unexposed donors, and SARS-CoV-2-exposed donors. In unvaccinated donors without a history of SARS-CoV-2 infection, no T cell response was detected against any of the tested viral antigens. In contrast, fully-vaccinated donors without prior infection showed spike-specific T cell response after stimulation of the pre-existing T cell population with spike peptides. This indicates the presence of memory T cell response against the spike protein (vaccine immunogen) in vaccinated donors. In donors with a history of mild SARS-CoV-2 infection, a detectable T cell response was noted against all tested viral antigens. At follow-up visits, all critically ill patients showed detectable CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses against all tested viral antigens. The frequency of anti-SARS-CoV-2 T cells in critically ill patients was similar to that observed in vaccinated donors and those with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection. A significantly higher frequency of anti-SARS-CoV-2 T cell response was observed in patients who stayed longer in the hospital (30 119 days). In these patients, a more profound immune dysfunction was observed upon ICU admission compared to patients with shorter hospital stays (7 17 days). However, no difference in anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody response was observed between these two groups of patients. Study significance The study demonstrates that critically ill COVID-19 patients are capable of generating memory T cell responses against SARS-CoV-2, which remains detectable for more than one year after hospital discharge. Furthermore, the intensity of T cell response correlates with the length of hospital stay. Researchers at the UC Davis MIND Institute are launching a $4 million program to find transformative therapies for ADNP syndrome. The rare genetic condition causes developmental delays and can affect the brain, heart, gastrointestinal system and more. The ambitious three-year project is funded through a unique partnership between the ADNP Kids Research Foundation and international textile company Simba Global. The research will involve the MIND Institute's interventional genetics team, which includes internationally recognized experts in mouse models for therapeutic development and in gene therapy, including the use of the gene editing tool CRISPR. This is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary project. We are grateful to the ADNP Kids Research Foundation and Simba Global for investing in this research that we hope will have a meaningful impact on the lives of individuals with ADNP syndrome." Leonard Abbeduto, UC Davis MIND Institute Director What is ADNP syndrome? ADNP syndrome is a complex neurodevelopmental condition caused by a mutation or change in the ADNP (Activity Dependent Neuroprotective Protein) gene, which affects brain development, connectivity and function. The syndrome, first identified in 2014, affects males and females in equal numbers. Its core features include delays in development and growth, intellectual disability and autism or autistic characteristics. It is one of the top single-gene causes of autism. The impacts of ADNP syndrome can be profound and may include delayed speech, low muscle tone and sensory processing challenges. The brain, heart and musculoskeletal system are often affected. ADNP syndrome is also associated with distinctive facial features, including a prominent forehead, eyes that are farther apart and droopy eyelids. ADNP syndrome is estimated to affect 1 in 20,000 people in the U.S. and Europe. The incidence is likely higher due to children who've gone undiagnosed. Two families, one goal According to the ADNP Kids Research Foundation, about 400 children in the world have been diagnosed with the syndrome. The very first child in the U.S. to receive the diagnosis was Tony Sermone. "He lived in and out of the hospital for the first four years of his life," explained Sandra Bedrosian Sermone, Tony's mother and the founder of the ADNP Kids Research Foundation, which is based in the state of Washington. Tony, who was born in 2008, had two open heart surgeries, significant developmental delays, seizures and strokes. He was identified as autistic and had trouble eating, swallowing, walking and talking. He was diagnosed with ADNP syndrome at age 6. "A rare disease parent is the most motivated machine in medicine," said Bedrosian Sermone, who began researching the syndrome and formed the foundation to connect with other parents and fund studies. She has since published articles in scientific journals, discovered the syndrome's first biomarker in baby teeth and is running a drug trial for ADNP. "It has been my goal since I started the foundation to find treatments for all individuals with ADNP syndrome as fast as possible, and this collaborative project is a big step forward, one we could never had made without the generosity of the Somaia family, to whom we are so grateful," she said. Through the foundation, Bedrosian Sermone connected with the Somaia family in Melbourne, Australia, where 2-year-old Tye was recently diagnosed with ADNP syndrome. "Sandra is an absolute crusader and supermom," said Drish Ashar, an executive with Simba Global and Tye's cousin. "As a family, we wanted to see what we could do when we put more resources behind her and try to bring the entire community together." That's how the partnership between the foundation, the Somaia family, who founded Simba Global, and UC Davis began. "As much as this is about Tye and Sandra's son Tony, we also want to be able to help all of the ADNP families and to have an impact on other rare diseases because they're often the least - funded in terms of medical research," said Hiten Somaia, Simba Global co-founder. His sister, Lina, also a Simba Global co-founder, goes even farther: "I always say that if we can think of our own children as our biological children, but the rest of the world's children as our karmic children, that would be something magical," she said. The team science fast track The interventional genetics team includes three MIND Institute faculty members who are leading experts in their disciplines. Kyle Fink, assistant professor in the Department of Neurology, the UC Davis Stem Cell Program and the Gene Therapy Center. Jill Silverman, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and a well-known expert in the use of rodent models for therapeutic development. David Segal, member of the UC Davis Genome Center and professor in the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine and Pharmacology. The group excels in what's called "bench to bedside" research -; translating results from the lab directly into therapies for patients. Parallel projects The program will include two major phases. First, the team will use stem cell technology to create a human ADNP model in Petri dishes. They'll also characterize mice with ADNP mutations. That will involve looking at cognitive abilities, sleep changes, gait abnormalities and more. Finally, the team will do a deep molecular characterization of the cells in the mice. "That information will be useful to anyone who wants to study ADNP," Fink said. "We'll be able to say, 'in the mice at this age, there's this big effect, so if you have a drug, you can test it in this mouse at this age using these tasks.'" The second phase, the one that "everyone gets the most excited about," noted Fink, is evaluating therapies for ADNP. To fast-track progress, the team will work simultaneously on three different therapies. "We think of it as shots on goal," Fink said. "Time is of the essence with these conditions." They'll be evaluating a traditional gene therapy delivered using a virus - one that's been used in clinical trials and approved by the FDA for spinal-muscular atrophy. The team will also assess an ASO (antisense oligonucleotide) that modulates gene expression by binding to mRNA. The third is being developed using the gene-editing tool CRISPR. "When we use a form of deactivated CRISPR, we tell the cell how to regulate specific genes," Fink explained. The therapeutics get tested in mice, then in the cells, but rather than sequentially, they'll be characterizing the mice and cells on parallel tracks. That will enable them to move much more quickly. "We want to ensure we're putting the resources into therapeutics that we really think will make a significant impact in more than just one domain of these kids' lives. I think these three approaches really give us a great chance to find something that can move forward in a meaningful way," Fink said. A history of success The team has had previous success with their work on another rare genetic condition, Angelman syndrome. Their labs helped create and characterize the first rat model of the syndrome. The Segal lab also developed a protein therapeutic that could increase the level of the affected gene in mouse models of Angelman syndrome a major discovery. The group is also working on a similar project to develop molecular therapies for the genetic condition SYNGAP1. Additionally, Fink and Segal were part of a study that showed it was possible to reactivate a gene from the inactive X chromosome using epigenetic editing as a potential treatment for CDKL5 deficiency disorder, another rare neurodevelopmental condition. "Jill, Dave and Kyle have a proven track record and are doing extraordinary work," Abbeduto said. "This project is a perfect fit for them and the MIND Institute. There's great synergy in the fact that this is being funded by families, just as the MIND Institute was founded by families with the same goal: improving life for children." Fink, Silverman and Segal are already recruiting new researchers in their labs that will be devoted to this project. "We will train the next world leaders in ADNP research," Fink said. As the interventional genetics team builds on past success and fine-tunes its infrastructure for evaluating therapeutics, the researchers expect the work to reach far beyond ADNP. That's important to Bedrosian Sermone. "I'm a true believer that these rare diseases can be worked on at the same time. When you find something for one of us, you often find something for all of us." Tye's mother, Zuzana Horakova, is also thrilled about the possible impact. "I'm very hopeful and very positive about this project. If, in the future, we can open up the possibilities for all sorts of other rare diseases, too, that's mind-blowing," she said. It was about 1 a.m. on April 19, 2016, when a burglary alarm sounded at Dale Hollow Pharmacy in Celina, a tiny town in the rolling, wooded hills near the Kentucky border. Two cops responded. As their flashlights bobbed in the darkness, shining through the pharmacy windows, they spotted a sign of a break-in: pill bottles scattered on the floor. The cops called the co-owner, Thomas Weir, who arrived within minutes and let them in. But as quickly as their flashlights beamed behind the counter, Weir demanded the cops leave. He said he'd rather someone "steal everything" than let them finish their search, according to a police report and body camera footage from the scene. "Get out of there right now!" Weir shouted, as if shooing off a mischievous dog. "Get out of there!" The cops argued with Weir as he escorted them out. They left the pharmacy more suspicious than when they'd arrived, triggering a probe in a small town engulfed in one of the most outsize concentrations of opioids in a pill-ravaged nation. Nearly six years later, federal prosecutors have unveiled a rare criminal case alleging that Celina pharmacy owners intentionally courted opioid seekers by filling dangerous prescriptions that would have been rejected elsewhere. The pharmacies are accused of giving cash handouts to keep customers coming back, and one allegedly distributed its own currency, "monkey bucks," inspired by a pet monkey that was once a common sight behind the counter. Two pharmacists admitted in plea agreements they attracted large numbers of patients from "long distances" by ignoring red flags indicating pills were being misused or resold. In their wake, prosecutors say, these Celina pharmacies left a rash of addiction, overdoses, deaths, and millions in wasted tax dollars. "I hate that this is what put us on the map," said Tifinee Roach, 38, a lifelong Celina resident who works in a salon not far from the pharmacies and recounted years of unfamiliar cars and unfamiliar people filling the parking lots. "I hate that this is what we're going to be known for." Celina, an old logging town of 1,900 people about two hours northeast of Nashville, was primed for this drug trade: In the shadow of a dying hospital, four pharmacies sat within 1,000 feet of each other, at the crux of two highways, dispensing millions of opioid pills. Before long, that intersection had single-handedly turned Tennessee's Clay County into one of the nation's pound-for-pound leaders of opioid distribution. In 2017, Celina pharmacies filled nearly two opioid prescriptions for every Clay County resident more than three times the national rate according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Visitors once came to Celina to tour its historical courthouse or drop their lines for smallmouth bass in the famed fishing lake nearby. Now they came for pills. Soon after Weir's police encounter in 2016, the Drug Enforcement Administration set its sights on his two Celina pharmacies, three doors apart Dale Hollow Pharmacy and Xpress Pharmacy. Separately, investigators examined the clinic of Dr. Gilbert Ghearing, which sat directly between Dale Hollow and Xpress and leased office space to a third pharmacy in the same building, Anderson Hometown Pharmacy. Its owners and operators have not been charged with any crime. In December, a federal judge unsealed indictments against Weir and the other owners of Dale Hollow and Xpress pharmacies, Charles "Bobby" Oakley and Pamela Spivey, alleging they profited from attracting and filling dangerous and unjustifiable opioid prescriptions. Charges were also filed against William Donaldson, the former pharmacist and owner of Dale Hollow, previously convicted of drug dealing, who allegedly recruited most of the customers for the scheme. The pharmacists at Dale Hollow and Xpress, John Polston and Michael Griffith, pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy and health care fraud charges and agreed to cooperate with law enforcement against the other suspects. Ghearing was indicted on drug distribution charges for allegedly writing unjustifiable opioid prescriptions in a separate case in 2019. He pleaded not guilty, and his case is expected to go to trial in September. 'An American tragedy' The Celina indictment comes as pharmacies enter an era of new accountability for the opioid crisis. In November, a federal jury in Cleveland ruled pharmacies at CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart could be held financially responsible for fueling the opioid crisis by recklessly distributing massive amounts of pain pills in two Ohio counties. The ruling a first of its kind is expected to reverberate through thousands of similar lawsuits filed nationwide. Criminal prosecutions for such actions remain exceedingly rare. The Department of Justice in recent years increased prosecutions of doctors and pain clinic staffers who overprescribed opioids but files far fewer charges against pharmacists, and barely any against pharmacy owners, who are generally harder to hold directly responsible for prescriptions filled at their establishments. In a review of about 1,000 news releases about legal enforcement actions taken by the Department of Health and Human Services since 2019, KHN identified fewer than 10 similar cases involving pharmacists or pharmacy owners being criminally charged for filling opioid prescriptions. Among those few similar cases, none involved allegations of so many opioids flowing readily through such a small place. The Celina case is also the first time the Department of Justice sought a restraining order and preliminary injunction against pharmacies under the Controlled Substances Act, said David Boling, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Tennessee. DOJ used the civil filing to shut down Dale Hollow and Xpress pharmacies quickly in 2019, allowing prosecutors more time to build a criminal case against the pharmacy owners. Former U.S. Attorney Don Cochran, who oversaw much of the investigation, said the crisis in Celina was so severe it warranted a swift and unique response. Cochran said it once made sense for small pharmacies to be clustered in Celina, where a rural hospital served the surrounding area. But as the hospital shriveled toward closure, as have a dozen others in Tennessee, the competing pharmacies turned to opioids to sustain themselves and got hooked on the profits, he said. "It's an American tragedy, and I think the town was a victim in this," Cochran said. "The salt-of-the-earth, blue-collar folks that lived there were victimized by these people in these pharmacies. I think they knew full well this was not a medical necessity. It was just a money-making cash machine for them." And much of that money came from taxpayers. In its court filings, DOJ argues the pharmacies sought out customers with Medicaid or Medicare coverage or signed them up if they didn't have it. To keep these customers coming back, the pharmacies covered their copays or paid cash kickbacks whenever they filled a prescription, prosecutors allege. The pharmacies collected more than $2.4 million from Medicare for opioids and other controlled substances from 2012 to 2018, according to the court filings. Prosecutors say the pharmacies also paid kickbacks to retain profitable customers with non-opioid prescriptions. In one case, Dale Hollow gave $100 "payouts" to a patient whenever they filled his prescription for mysoline, an anti-seizure drug, then used those prescriptions to collect more than $237,000 from Medicare, according to Polston's plea agreement. Attorneys for Weir, Oakley, Donaldson, Spivey, Polston, and Griffith either declined to comment for this article or did not respond to requests for comment. Ronald Chapman, an attorney for Ghearing, defended the doctor's prescriptions, saying he'd done "the best he [could] with what was available" in a rural setting with no resources or expertise in pain management. Chapman added that, while he does not represent the other Celina suspects, he had a theory as to why they drew the attention of federal law enforcement. As large corporate pharmacies made agreements with the federal government to be more stringent about opioid prescriptions, they filled fewer of them. Customers then turned to smaller pharmacies in rural areas to get their drugs, he said. "I'm not sure if that's what happened in this case, but I've seen it happen in many small towns in America. The only CVS down the street, or the only Rite Aid down the street, is cutting off every provider who prescribes opioids, leaving it to smaller pharmacies to do the work," Chapman said. Donaldson, reached briefly at his home in Celina on March 9, insisted the allegations levied against Dale Hollow and Xpress could apply to many pharmacies in the region. "It wasn't just them," Donaldson said. The monkey and the monkey bucks Long before it was called Dale Hollow Pharmacy, the blue-and-white building that moved millions of pills through Celina was Donaldson Pharmacy, and Donaldson was behind the counter doling out pills. Donaldson owned and operated the pharmacy for decades as the eccentric son of one of the most prominent families in Celina, where a street, a park, and many businesses bear his surname. Even now, despite Donaldson's prior conviction for opioid crimes and his new indictment, an advertisement for "Donaldson Pharmacy" hangs at the entrance of a nearby high school. "Bill has always had a heart of gold, and he would help anyone he could. I just think he let that, well " said Pam Goad, a neighbor, trailing off. "He's always had a heart of gold." According to interviews with about 20 Celina residents, including Clay County Sheriff Brandon Boone, Donaldson is also known to keep a menagerie of exotic animals, at one point including at least two giraffes, and a monkey companion, "Carlos," whom he dressed in clothing. The monkey a mainstay at Donaldson Pharmacy for years both attracted and deterred customers. Linda Nelson, who owns a nearby business, said Carlos once escaped the pharmacy and, during a scrap with a neighbor's dogs, tore down her mailbox by snapping its wooden post in half. But the monkey wasn't the only reason Donaldson Pharmacy stood out. According to a DEA opioid database published by The Washington Post, Donaldson Pharmacy distributed nearly 3 million oxycodone and hydrocodone pills from 2006 to 2014, making it the nation's 20th-highest per capita distributor during that period. It retained its ranking even though the pharmacy closed in 2011, when Donaldson was indicted for dispensing hydrocodone without a valid prescription. Donaldson confessed to drug distribution and was sentenced to 15 months in prison. The pharmacy's name was changed to Dale Hollow and ended up with Donaldson's brother-in-law, Oakley. In 2014, Oakley sold 51% of the business to Weir, who also bought a majority stake of Xpress Pharmacy, three doors away, according to the DOJ's civil complaint. Under Weir's leadership, these two pharmacies became an opioid hub with few equals, prosecutors say. From 2015 to 2018, Dale Hollow and Xpress pharmacies were the fourth-and 11th-highest per capita opioid purchasers in the nation, according to the DOJ, citing internal DEA data. Many of these prescriptions were for Subutex, an opioid that can be used to treat addiction but is itself prone to abuse. Unless the patient is pregnant or nursing or has a documented allergy, Tennessee law requires doctors instead to prescribe Suboxone, an alternative that is much harder to abuse. But at the Celina pharmacies, prescriptions for Subutex outnumbered those for Suboxone by at least 4-to-1, prosecutors say. In their plea agreements, pharmacists from Dale Hollow and Xpress described stores that thrived on the trade in Subutex, and said Weir set "mandates" for how many Subutex prescriptions to fill and instructed them to "never run out." Griffith, the head pharmacist at Xpress, said the pharmacy in 2015 created flyers specifically advertising Subutex, then delivered them on trays of cookies to practices throughout Tennessee, including some hours away. In the following two years, the amount of Subutex dispensed by Xpress increased by about eightyfold, according to his plea agreement. Dale Hollow didn't need flyers or cookies. It had Donaldson. After getting out of prison in 2014, Donaldson was hired by the pharmacy he once owned, where he "recruited and controlled" about 50% to 90% of customers, according to the indictment filed against him. The pharmacy also enticed customers by distributing a Monopoly-like currency called "monkey bucks" an apparent callback to Carlos that could be spent at the pharmacy like cash, the indictment states. Prosecutors also allege that, from a desk inside Dale Hollow, Donaldson would sign customers up for Medicare or Medicaid, then use a vehicle provided by the pharmacy to drive them to a doctor's office to get opioid prescriptions, then back to Dale Hollow where he'd offer to cover their copays himself if they kept their business at the pharmacy. Sometimes, he would text the Dale Hollow pharmacist with instructions to fill specific prescriptions, or just to fill more of them, according to federal court records. "Y'all have got to get your numbers up. Fill fill," Donaldson texted Polston in 2018, according to his plea agreement. By then, however, all those prescriptions had drawn unwanted attention. In August 2018, Dale Hollow and Xpress pharmacies were raided by DEA agents, who brought with them Fox News' Geraldo Rivera and a television crew. Six months later, DOJ filed its civil complaint, persuading a federal judge to immediately close both pharmacies. Today, Dale Hollow Pharmacy sits shuttered, as it has been for the past three years, and a paper sign taped to the door says animals are not allowed inside by order of the DEA. The building that was once Xpress Pharmacy reopened this year as an unrelated pharmacy with a fresh coat of paint. Ghearing's clinic and Anderson Hometown Pharmacy are closed. Most of Celina's opioid prescriptions are gone, too. According to the latest available CDC data, Clay County reported about 32 opioid prescriptions per 100 residents in 2020 one-sixth the rate of 2017's. Researchers have shown a new compound delivered in a nasal spray is highly effective in preventing and treating COVID-19 caused by the Delta variant in mice. The researchers, including at UBC, Universite de Sherbrooke, and Cornell University, believe this is the first treatment of its kind proven to be effective against all COVID-19 variants of concern reported to date, including alpha, beta, gamma and delta. Published today in Nature, the research opens the door to developing a therapeutic spray for humans. Variants of concern, including the recent Omicron variants, have reduced vaccine effectiveness, but senior author Dr. Francois Jean, associate professor in the UBC department of microbiology and immunology, says early, still unpublished results from his team show promise that N-0385 is also effective at blocking Omicron variant infections in human lung cells. "Our unpublished results represent encouraging findings with the current rapid propagation of Omicron BA.2 around the world." "Unfortunately, with another wave of an Omicron variant hitting the U.K., Europe, and China and our knowledge of how these waves occur, this may be what we see in Canada in the near future. Once approved, this compound could be used in combination with already available drugs that inhibit the virus' replication, to provide a stronger defense against COVID-19 variants of concern," says Dr. Jean, founder of FINDER, the state-of-the-art level three biocontainment facility where the work on SARS-CoV-2 variants was conducted. The specially designed compound, named N-0385, blocks a particular human enzyme's activity, used by the virus to infect a host cell. The small molecule was developed by Drs. Richard Leduc, Eric Marsault, Pierre-Luc Boudreault and their team at Universite de Sherbrooke. UBC researchers tested four variants, including Delta, in human lung cells and organoids, tissue cultures that can mimic the organ they're taken from, and found that N-0385 inhibits infection, with no evidence of toxicity. The compound is unique because it blocks entry at the cell surface, without having to get into the cell, which prevents it from causing any detectable cell damage. As well, it's highly potent, in that it needs only a tiny amount to work very effectively." Dr. Andrea Olmstead (she/her), co-author, research associate in the department of microbiology and immunology In a preprint, the researchers at Cornell University led by Associate Professor Hector Aguilar-Carreno showed that genetically engineered mice infected with the virus causing COVID-19 and given a daily dose of the compound in a nasal spray for four days. All ten of the treated mice survived infection, compared with only 20 per cent of the untreated mice. In the newly published paper, N-0385 was tested against the Delta variant, and was found to not only help with prevention of COVID-19, but also treatment 12 hours after infection, including with infection-related weight loss, and levels of the virus in the mice lungs, compared with controls. The enzyme which N-0385 targets is present in nasal cells, where the virus tends to enter, making a nasal spray the most practical and effective way to administer the compound. In addition, no mutations relating to the virus which causes COVID-19 have been found in this enzyme's mechanism so far, as has occurred with other enzymes and COVID-19 variants, making it a useful target for defense against future strains of the virus, says Dr. Jean. The compound has the potential to be used as a broad-spectrum treatment against other viruses which use the same mechanism, Dr. Jean says, including influenza viruses such as influenza A, H1N1, and influenza C. "Even not knowing what you've been infected with during flu season, you could potentially be prescribed a nasal spray to treat coronaviruses and the flu." However, the spray should be used in combination with other drugs already on the market, he says, as the compound is an entry inhibitor, blocking entry of the virus to cells while other drugs reduce replication. "The big picture is, there are multiple steps in the life cycle of a virus. The first step is entering a cell to pass on genetic material, then it goes on to replicate. So you would use both drugs: N-0385 could block most of the virus' entry, making less work for the replicator drug." The project teams are working with Ebvia, a private company, to secure funding for clinical trials. Future avenues of research at UBC and Universite de Sherbrooke include optimizing N-0385 when used in combination with recently approved drugs to treat COVID-19. This work was partly funded by the Coronavirus Variants Rapid Response Network, CIHR's SARS-COV-2 variants supplement, Stream 2, CIHR COVID-Rapid Research Funding, and Genome BC Rapid Response Funding (RRF) for COVID-19 Research and Innovation Projects. In a recent study posted to the medRxiv* preprint server, researchers tracked the rapid shift from the new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variant of concern (VOC) Omicron BA.1 sub-variant dominance to BA.2 sub-variant dominance in Sweden between January and March 2022. The estimates revealed that during the Omicron wave of January 2022, the daily number of new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases surged to almost 50 million worldwide, far exceeding the daily peak of 14 million COVID-19 cases due to the Delta VOC during April 2021, representing an unprecedented transmission of Omicron. A reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay capable of genotyping Omicron BA.1 cases directly in primary SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR testing enabled the detection of BA.1-positives at a large scale in Sweden daily, which helped source data for the present study. About the study In the present study, researchers used an improved, more sensitive, multiplex-version of ribonucleic acid (RNA) extraction-free protocol of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR assay. This assay used an increased sample and reaction volume to enable simultaneous detection of general SARS-CoV-2 infection status, ribonuclease P (RNase P) sample integrity, and Omicron BA.1-variant status. The assay tracked Omicron BA.1 to BA.2 sub-variant transition by analyzing 174,933 nasopharyngeal samples collected from several districts of central Sweden between January 26 and March 8, 2022, on a day-to-day basis. The nasopharyngeal swab samples were anonymized and subjected to heat inactivation before RT-PCR testing. The Public Health Agency of Sweden provided in vitro expanded Omicron BA.1 reference sample, used for spike (S) BA1 primer-probe sets evaluation. The researchers performed RT-PCR in eight replicates per concentration of serially diluted (1:10) Omicron BA.1-positive clinical samples to determine the log-linear cycle threshold (C T ) range for the nucleocapsid (N1) and S BA1 primer-probe sets under assay conditions. Further, they performed the assay in the presence and absence of the S BA1 primer-probe set for 185 clinical samples to evaluate the probe effect on N1 C T values. Finally, they used whole-genome sequencing (WGS) for sequencing the whole SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Study findings Omicron BA.1 sub-variant was the dominant variant among COVID-19-positive cases during January 2022; however, the BA.1 fraction steadily decreased to 11% by March 2022, and Omicron BA.2 sub-variant eventually outcompeted BA.1 sub-variant across all healthcare districts of central Sweden. Furthermore, Omicron BA.2-infected samples had almost two-fold higher viral RNA than BA.1-infected samples, partially explaining how BA.2 sub-variant is currently outcompeting the BA.1 variant globally. The increased viral load in the upper respiratory tract (pharynx) of Omicron BA.2 case samples indicated its higher infectiousness compared to BA.1 sub-variant, but this was a surprising revelation. The researchers thus subjected 3,392 samples to N1/RP/S BA1 assay and an extraction-based assay targeting N and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp), located further 5 inside the open reading frame (ORF)1ab. RT-PCR assay for the N gene showed linear correlation for both N and RdRp in the extraction-based assay, confirming increased viral copy numbers in BA.1-negative COVID-19 samples in both the assays and genes probed. Furthermore, WGS confirmed that all 118 BA.1-negative samples were of BA.2 lineage in this analysis. All 698 samples testing SARS-CoV-2-positive in RT-PCR assay were genotyped Omicron BA.1 negative by whole-genome sequencing, demonstrating that Omicron BA.2 was the variant outcompeting BA.1 in the Swedish population. The authors also observed the BA.2-specific ORF3a: H78Y mutation in around 40% of BA.2 cases classified by WGS. These case samples belonged almost exclusively to the southern-most Swedish region, where they constituted 72% of COVID-19 cases (103/144). In striking contrast to previous reports from Southern Europe, WGS showed no COVID-19 cases due to Delta/Omicron recombination or co-infection. Conclusions The RT-PCR assay used in the current study robustly differentiated general COVID-19 status and Omicron BA.1 variant status in a single RT-PCR reaction, thus enabling real-time monitoring of Omicron BA.1/BA.2 transition in Sweden at a mass scale. Further, this assay could monitor the Omicron sub-variant transition where needed, saving time and challenges associated with genotyping by WGS sequencing due to its compatibility with the well-established CDC N1/RNaseP probe sets. *Important notice medRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information. IVCC welcomes the publication in The Lancet of the 24-month results of an epidemiological trial in Tanzania, conducted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in partnership with the National Institute for Medical Research, Kilimanjaro Christian Medical University College, and the University of Ottawa, to assess the public health value of two dual active ingredient nets compared to standard LLINs containing pyrethroids only. BASFs, dual active ingredient net, Interceptor G2 demonstrated a significant reduction in malaria prevalence compared to a pyrethroid only net, with an overall 44% reduction in malaria incidence in children 6 months to 10 years. In the RoyalGuard net study arm, while no effect was seen on incidence, there was an indication that the RoyalGuard net reduced prevalence, although not statistically significant in the Tanzania study. Our collaboration with BASF on Interceptor G2 goes back many years so we are delighted to see that our investment in early product development support/field testing, and the continued support of our funding partners, has helped deliver such impactful data. These results are a significant milestone in establishing the necessary evidence base needed to support an appropriate policy recommendation, and to make dual active ingredient nets a sustainable choice for countries looking for the best value for money in controlling malaria. Nick Hamon, CEO of IVCC Dr Keziah Malm, Programme Manager, National Malaria Control Programme, Ghana Health Service said: Having access to innovative tools to support insecticide resistance management is critical for countries like Ghana in the fight against malaria. Ghanas decision to deploy dual active ingredient nets as a pilot was based on our belief that these nets will help us address some of the challenges we were facing with the standard nets. I am very happy to know the study published in the Lancet has shown this: that there can be a significant impact on reducing malaria prevalence with these dual active ingredients nets compared to the standard insecticide-treated nets. I genuinely hope that all stakeholders will put in the needed efforts to get these effective tools deployed to those who need them. Dr Philippe Duneton, Executive Director of Unitaid said: We need better tools to combat mosquito resistance, a growing challenge in the fight against malaria in Africa. The strong performance of the new Interceptor G2 bed nets in Tanzania is a tremendous step forward, and we are hopeful that these findings, together with research Unitaid is co-funding through the New Nets Project, will bring a powerful new tool to the malaria fight. Peter Sands, Executive Director of the Global Fund added: The strong performance of these innovative insecticide-treated nets is a timely and promising breakthrough which speaks to the power of what public and private partners can achieve when they join forces. As disruptions to malaria services caused by COVID-19 have led to an alarming increase in malaria deaths and cases, these new nets, with other core malaria prevention tools like seasonal malaria chemoprevention, have the potential to help us protect people more effectively, reverse the negative trend and get back on track towards ending malaria by 2030. Helen Jamet, Deputy Director, Vector Control, Malaria at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said: The study results offer new evidence that we can save more children from malaria and help drive down malaria cases by giving countries additional and more effective tools, like the dual-insecticide Interceptor G2 net, and targeting them where theyre needed most. This also is critical because introducing new tools can help extend the effectiveness of insecticide-treated nets as a category, which prevented 68% of malaria cases in sub-Saharan Africa between 2000-2015. The results also serve as the latest example of how long-term and innovative public-private partnerships in R&D and financing can deliver high-impact, cost-effectiveand in this case, cost-savingoptions that are responsive to the needs of endemic countries at a district-by-district level. By using real-time data and improved surveillance to better target the use of new and existing tools and continuing investment in research and development, countries can stay ahead of growing resistance and rapidly drive down malaria cases and deaths to accelerate progress toward eradication. UK-based social finance company MedAccess is supporting access to Interceptor G2 nets in 14 African countries. The companys volume guarantee has enabled BASF to reduce the price procurers pay for the nets. Michael Anderson, CEO of MedAccess, said: These remarkable results from Tanzania are tremendously exciting for everyone who wants to reduce malarias burden in Africa. Interceptor G2s lifesaving impact, combined with impressive cost-effectiveness data, is a testament to years of partnership to develop, test and implement this effective new tool. We eagerly await the results from the Benin study, which we hope will lead to a WHO recommendation for wider Interceptor G2 use in Africa. 24-month data from a second trial in Benin, delivered through the IVCC led New Net Project (NNP), funded by Unitaid and the Global Fund, started one year after the trial in Tanzania, and is expected to be available for WHO review in mid-2022. Both studies will report additional data once the 36-month period is reached and, combined with New Net Pilot evidence pilots across 5 countries, will contribute to the understanding of both Interceptor G2 and RoyalGuards product performance over time, across various endemicities and resistance profile. insights from industry Maggie Vantangoli Policelli Director of Marketing Araceli Biosciences In this interview, we speak to Maggie Vantangoli Policelli, head of marketing at Araceli Biosciences, about their latest product the Araceli Endeavor, and how it's revolutionizing the field of high content screening. Please can you introduce yourself, tell our readers about your role at Araceli, and what inspired you to choose a career in the life sciences? My name is Maggie Vantangoli Policelli, and my role at Araceli is the Director of Marketing. I started with the company as a Product Manager before moving into this role. I am currently responsible for heading up all of our product development, outbound marketing, applications, and scientific development. My career in life sciences stemmed from inspiration in middle school. I had a phenomenal science teacher. He made up songs for every topic to make them memorable, and I was excited about going to his class every day. I think that excitement stayed with me throughout the rest of my training, and I decided to go to school and study biology. I went to graduate school thinking I would like to teach at college. I worked towards this, for a while but soon realized that it was not where I wanted to be. I ended up as an application scientist, traveling the Western part of the US, doing bits of teaching, science, and sales. Eventually, I fell into this role and this field. Image Credit: Araceli Biosciences You are currently exhibiting at the SLAS 22 conference. Can you tell our readers more about what youre exhibiting there? We are showcasing our new company Araceli Biosciences and our flagship product, the Araceli Endeavor a brand new high content screening instrument and our Voyager software. These products are designed around changing the high content space from something that can take hours to scan plates to something that we can do in 10 minutes or less for every single cell and every well in multi-well plates. Our team at Araceli has decades of experience in both high content screening and imaging. The high content screening space has been pretty stagnant, and there just has not been a big revolutionary product in this space so far. The Endeavor is that product. Why is the Endeavor platform critical for life sciences research? In my last job, I was a field application scientist. I supported the Western United States and Canada, working with all of the high content analysis platforms in terms of doing the demos, providing after-sales training, and then all of the ongoing customer support for the hardware side, the analysis side, and even some assay setup and downstream analytics that we did not necessarily sell, but I helped with. I was getting asked the same questions over and over again, prompting me to look at all the platforms I had used over the years for high content analysis and wonder why it is so hard to work with this process and get good quality data. There is such a steep learning curve for all of the different parts of the process you have to be an expert in image acquisition, an expert image analysis and in data visualization just to be confident in your results. When we started developing the Endeavor, every single step of the process of building the hardware and the software was based on questions around what we could do differently and whether we should do it differently. We were very fortunate to start with a team without preconceived notions about high content scanners or imaging platforms. Overall, these advances mean that what we can do on Endeavor in 10 minutes still takes some platforms from 8 up to 46 hours. What Endeavor brings to the industry and what our customers have been so excited about is not just its speed - the system is also straightforward to use. We have customers that do screening as a service, and they say that most of their employees are not able to work on their own on other platforms for up to a year. An intern who has never done high content screening before can be up and running on Endeavor in less than 30 minutes. This also links back to the question about sustainability because one Endeavor can do what four or more other systems can do in terms of throughput. This means it is not only transformative in terms of its footprint - because lab space is always at a premium - but we are also using fewer electronic components that rely on rare earth elements, and we are minimizing power consumption. All of this freeing up of capacity means that scientists can get back to doing science, understanding and advancing the literature, and pursing the next significant development. Araceli Endeavor: A New Generation of High Content Analysis Play Due to the ongoing pandemic, many in-person conferences and exhibitions have been put on hold. Why is it essential for researchers, companies, and organizations to collaborate and share ideas and innovations at exhibitions such as SLAS? In the last two years, everyone has learned how much we like being around people and how this is so critical to our work. Having conversations with people face to face, you come up with ideas that end up being the next groundbreaking technology. I started working to develop Endeavor literally as the world shut down, and I was remote working and spending this time on Teams with my soon-to-be team, trying to figure out what we were going to build. The most significant steps for this development happened when I drove down to the office and sat and worked with my team. People are designed to interact with other people, and this is critical for taking huge steps forward. The COVID-19 pandemic has also highlighted the importance of innovation and collaboration on a global scale. How important is innovation and collaboration to the life science sector, and what are the advantages of researchers and companies working together? Life sciences as a sector is made up of companies who are doing something really well. These companies meet at conferences and begin to collaborate unexpectedly, leading to massive steps forward. For example, the history of mRNA vaccines was filled with slow, little steps, building on top of ideas and working together. That is science in general - putting all of these disparate parts together into something. All it takes is one person or one collaboration to turn this industry on its head completely. I hate to use the cliche, but we are all standing on the shoulders of those before us. The life sciences sector has seen tremendous advancements in recent years and new technology. How has this technology transformed the life sciences sector? Advances in technology have led us to collaborate across the world through the internet and computing, to the advent of big data. For us at Araceli, the work we are doing with the Endeavor was not physically possible many years ago because the cameras were not available, and no one could handle the amount of data we are currently producing. All other high content platforms were limited by the triangle of compromise you can acquire data fast, but it wasnt full coverage or high resolution. You could acquire high resolution images, but you couldnt do it fast over the whole well. Endeavor has changed that because of the huge advances in computing technology in other sectors. Technology drives innovation in many ways, and now we are talking about companies, like Recursion, that are generating petabytes of data. That number was not something somebody thought of before, and now they are using that amount of data in drug development. Technology, in general, has flipped the life sciences industry on its head. I cant even think about where we are going to be in five years because were in such an exponential growth phase as a field. Image Credit: PopTika/Shutterstock.com One area of science to see particular growth is the use of artificial intelligence, with more and more companies looking to use AI to streamline their processes and speed up discoveries. Do you believe well see a continued interest in AI in the coming years, and what are your hopes for the future of AI? Are there any particular challenges that need to be overcome before its commonly used? AI is one of those jargon-based terms that everybody gets excited about, but not everybody knows what it means in practice. I think we are going to see continued interest in AI because, especially in the drug discovery space, it is already working. At Araceli, we are utilizing AI-based approaches because we, like many others, have seen massive improvements in image analysis compared to traditional methods. Weve also been able to harness these approaches in a way that even the most novice user can generate quality results quickly. There are companies out there putting massive amounts of targets on the map in terms of potential drug candidates, and without those AI-based approaches, it might have taken another 20 years to find them, if we had found them at all. I think the challenge with AI is the same challenge that you see everywhere else in science; reproducibility. It is about how you control what is going in, what is coming out, and how you know what is coming out can be validated. Years ago, in my previous job, when we started selling an AI-based software package, people were very standoffish. I think AI is becoming more and more prevalent in our day-to-day lives, and people are becoming more and more comfortable with it. However, we still have to put the controls in place to know that what is coming out is good quality data, especially when it is potentially a drug that can impact human life. Statistics show that for every person in the world, 270 gigabytes of healthcare and life science data will be created. We are currently seeing more and more companies and researchers adopting AI algorithms and cloud-based technologies to tackle the vast volumes of data produced in research. How beneficial are these tools for research? I think we are going to see increasing value put on that data. Whether it is images, language data, or biometric data, it is extremely valuable if we know where the data is coming from and it is well annotated. Being able to handle that data, store it, look at it and analyze it, is critical. I think we are seeing significant advances in technology that will make this data more accessible. That is the focus of what we at Araceli bring to the space. We can acquire large amounts of images, but we have to know what to do with them and move them from the system into other spaces where people can work with them. We think we have the solution with our platform for high content imaging, but its not just high content or even life sciences - everywhere has the same problem. As technology continues to advance, do you expect to see more and more breakthrough discoveries? Are there any specific sectors within life sciences that people should be paying particular attention to? I think breakthroughs are going to keep happening. I believe as we come out of COVID-19 and begin to better understand the value of human interaction and its importance to innovation, we will see massive breakthroughs. We have already seen, with the Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, just how fast these breakthroughs can come together. I think we will see a real acceleration of drug development and therapeutic development over the next several years. This pairs well with advances in big data. We are producing more data than ever before. If we can harness this alongside these collaborative efforts, we will be able to accelerate drug discovery pipelines. COP26 called attention to the importance of sustainability at every level, including science. Why is it important to adopt sustainable practices? And what are you doing as a company to help improve your carbon footprint? As a company, we started in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, so we were forced into a virtual environment with reduced commuting from the offset. We made the conscious decision to focus on doing virtual demos as shipping instruments and moving people unnecessarily around is terrible for the environment, for example, when driving a truck 1,000 miles to send an instrument for a two-day demo. We have flipped this process, and instead, we have people sending us samples to analyze, reducing our carbon footprint significantly. As a society, especially in the US, we need to do a lot more, a lot faster, regarding greenhouse gases. This may mean forcing companies to make changes and do what is right for the environment, not just what is right for their profits. I was trained as a toxicologist, and in Europe, a lot of animal testing is now prohibited on personal care products. People do not put a lot of thought into how much greenhouse gas that process produces. Moving to a more sustainable pipeline like a cell culture environment or in vitro environment can make a big difference in sustainability. There are so many opportunities to change and stop this. Image Credit: Romolo Tavani/Shutterstock.com What does the future of life sciences like to you? I think we will see continued acceleration across the board and developments that will be blockbusters and game-changers. Big data will have a significant impact, increasing virtual and in-person interaction. I also hope to see even more collaboration across the sector. I think we will continue to see large companies collaborating instead of trying to form a department for everything within one company, I think we will see increasing collaboration between experts across different organizations. Where can readers find more information? About Maggie Vantangoli Policelli Dr. Maggie Vantangoli Policelli is an experienced research scientist with a background in toxicology and fluorescent imaging. She earned her PhD from Brown University, developing and validating 3D culture models for phenotypic toxicity testing of endocrine disrupting compounds. Following completion of her PhD, Dr. Vantangoli Policelli moved into industry, supporting scientists across North America in the areas of fluorescent microscopy and high content analysis, particularly in the area of drug discovery and development. At Araceli Biosciences, she is driving the development and commercialization of new technologies to revolutionize drug discovery. Outside of work, she can be found spending time with her family, hiking, and running her cut flower farm. UW Extension Releases Potomac Horse Fever Awareness Poster These Park County horses owned by Jennifer Fernandez contracted Potomac horse fever in summer 2020. The foal survived, but the mare did not. UW Extension recently released a bulletin publication titled Potomac Horse Fever Is in Wyoming and Adjacent States that describes the disease, how it infects horses and what horse owners can do to prevent or treat the disease. (Jennifer Fernandez Photo) Scott Schell owns horses and has lived in Wyoming for 59 years. Until he met Jennifer Fernandez, a horse owner in Cody, Schell had never heard of Potomac horse fever (PHF) in Wyoming. After Fernandez lost a mare to the disease, she wanted to raise awareness among other horse owners to the hazard PHF poses. Schell, an entomology specialist in the University of Wyoming College of Agriculture and Natural Resources Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, agreed with her and started working on a UW Extension education effort to do it. UW Extension recently released an awareness poster titled Potomac Horse Fever Is in Wyoming and Adjacent States that describes the disease, how it infects horses and what horse owners can do to prevent or treat the disease. I think that, in the PHF-endemic region of the state, people who have had their horses get the disease or had a friends horse get it are very aware, Schell says. Additionally, many veterinarians in those known PHF areas recommend vaccination for the disease. However, I think many people from other areas of the state arent aware of PHF. PHF is a warm-season disease of equines. Horses, mules and donkeys contract PHF after accidentally eating adult aquatic insects, such as mayflies and caddisflies, infected with a bacterium. The disease begins with mild symptoms, usually one to three weeks after ingestion of the infected insects. According to the poster, symptoms horse owners should watch for are depression, lack of appetite, watery diarrhea -- mild colic, with watery but decreased gut sounds -- and laminitis symptoms on all hooves. If a horse is depressed, owners should check the animal for a fever ranging from 102 to 107 degrees. As PHF progresses, more severe symptoms such as acute laminitis can occur, and the disease can cause up to 30 percent mortality. Mares that are 100 to 160 days pregnant when infected with PHF may abort at 190 to 250 days in pregnancy after appearing to recover from the disease. It is part of good horse management to observe what is normal for your animals and then to watch for the abnormal every time you are around them, Schell says. Because PHF is a bacterium, it is treatable with the correct antibiotics, according to the poster. If a PHF infection in a horse is recognized, diagnosed and treated quickly, an animals prognosis is greatly improved. While he admits he is no veterinarian, Schell says, according to the literature he has read, initiating the intravenous antibiotic treatments before a horse exhibits the extreme diarrhea symptoms of the disease will reduce the probability of a bad outcome. Besides vaccinations, a good way to protect equines from becoming infected is to turn off barn lights during summer nights when aquatic insects are flying. This action can help prevent the insects from ending up in water troughs and food mangers, where they could be consumed by horses. Schell has a number of ideas as to where to release the poster. I think any place the horse-owning public may be visiting or spending time waiting at will be a good place for the poster -- so, veterinarian offices, feed stores, boarding stables, extension offices, etc., he says. I plan to get some printed; get them to the 4-H horse programs around the state; and have the members ask to post the posters in appropriate places around the state. I think the poster needs to go up in places where it is a known risk for horses; where there are horse owners new to an endemic area; or just visiting there to know what the symptoms are to watch for. Schell adds that horse owners from parts of Wyoming where PHF may not be present need to be aware of the symptoms in case the disease is spreading to other river basins. In 2002, PHF was diagnosed in the Big Horn Basin. Before then, the disease was only known to be present in the far southwestern part of the state. Hopefully, it doesnt spread everywhere, he says. But we need to determine PHFs current extent and monitor for expansion. PHF is currently known to occur in western Wyoming and adjacent areas of Idaho, Utah and Montana. PHF also occurs in parts of Nebraska and South Dakota. Schell hopes to develop a project in cooperation with some researchers to look at both the prevalence rate of PHF in the state and where the disease is present or absent. Information on this is important for improving PHF management and providing guidance to both veterinarians and horse owners. For example, if we randomly sample horses 5 years and older that have lived all of their lives in a PHF-endemic river valley and find that 95 percent have been previously infected, it will indicate that a new horse from a PHF-free area brought there will probably contract PHF, and vaccination to reduce the severity of the disease is a very good idea, Schell says. My hope is to involve 4-H members with their horses and make it a citizen science project. The poster can be found at www.wyoextension.org/publications/Search_Details.php?pubid=2091&pub=B-1375. For more information about the PHF awareness poster, call Schell at (307) 399-9344 or email sschell@uwyo.edu. (Newser) Chris Rock isn't pressing charges after being slapped by Will Smith at the Oscars on Sunday nightbut if the case went to a jury of the two men's celebrity peers, it would likely be very difficult to reach a verdict. Some, especially comedians, slammed Smith's behavior while some praised him for "standing up" for wife Jada Pinkett Smith after Rock joked about her baldnessand others, including director Sophia Bush, said both men were at fault. More: Smith "has real issues." "What you saw on TV was a guy with real issues. Thats crazy, thats crazy when you cant contain yourself," said Howard Stern, per the Hollywood Reporter. "What you saw on TV was a guy with real issues. Thats crazy, thats crazy when you cant contain yourself," said Howard Stern, per the Hollywood Reporter. "Ugliest Oscar moment." Mark Hamill called the incident the ugliest Oscar moment ever. "Stand-up comics are very adept at handling hecklers. Violent physical assault ... not so much," the actor tweeted. "The most beautiful thing I've ever seen." Tiffany Haddish, Pinkett Smith's co-star in Girls Trip, was among the most effusive of Smith's defenders. "Maybe the world might not like how it went down, but for me, it was the most beautiful thing Ive ever seen because it made me believe that there are still men out there that love and care about their women," she told People. Tiffany Haddish, Pinkett Smith's co-star in Girls Trip, was among the most effusive of Smith's defenders. "Maybe the world might not like how it went down, but for me, it was the most beautiful thing Ive ever seen because it made me believe that there are still men out there that love and care about their women," she told People. Pinkett Smith "can look after herself." Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski said Monday that the "strong, beautiful" Pinkett Smith does not need her husband to fight her battles, the New York Post reports. Pinkett Smith " is one of the most empowered, helpful to women, women that Ive ever, you know, seen out there in front, Brzezinski said. "She goes where no one has the guts to go. She can take care of herself, thank you, No. 1." "Now we all have to worry." Kathy Griffin was among the comedians who said they were worried about what the slap might lead to, the AP reports. "Let me tell you something, its a very bad practice to walk up on stage and physically assault a comedian, she tweeted. "Now we all have to worry about who wants to be the next Will Smith in comedy clubs and theaters." Kathy Griffin was among the comedians who said they were worried about what the slap might lead to, the AP reports. "Let me tell you something, its a very bad practice to walk up on stage and physically assault a comedian, she tweeted. "Now we all have to worry about who wants to be the next Will Smith in comedy clubs and theaters." "Bravo to Chris Rock." Rosie O'Donnell praised Rock for not escalating the incident, Deadine reports. "Bravo to Chris Rock for not eviscerating will smith which he could do any day of the week he walked away bravo from a sad display of toxic masculinity from a narcissistic madman," she tweeted. Rosie O'Donnell praised Rock for not escalating the incident, Deadine reports. "Bravo to Chris Rock for not eviscerating will smith which he could do any day of the week he walked away bravo from a sad display of toxic masculinity from a narcissistic madman," she tweeted. Nicki Minaj is Team Smith. The rapper expressed sympathy for both Smiths on Monday and slammed Rock for joking about the effects of alopecia. "Imagine what it must feel like to be losing your hair to the point where you have to shave it bald," she tweeted. "You think thats easy to deal with for anyone? You dont think shes cried about that many times?" (Read more Will Smith stories.) (Newser) In 2014, Bonnie Lee was treated by podiatrist Dr. Thomas Shock for an ingrown toenail. After the allegedly failed procedure, she ultimately had to have part of that same foot amputated, and in 2016, she died of a foot infection. Her husband, Robert Elmo Lee, blamed Shock for her deathand on Thursday, the 83-year-old was found guilty of hiring hitmen to murder Shock, who was fatally shot in his Northern California home in 2018, KCRA reports. Lee was convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances of murder for financial gain in the death of the 67-year-old doctor, who had been disciplined by the state's Medical Board over Bonnie Lee's procedure in 2016, prior to her death, the Sacramento Bee reports. Shock had retired in 2018. Per an arrest warrant, it was not clear whether the procedure Shock performed contributed to Lee's death, but after Shock was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds in the doorway of his Lodi home, a longtime friend of Robert Lee contacted police to tell them Lee had blamed the doctor, the Mercury News reports. A sheet from the Medical Board's investigation into the case was also found alongside Shock's body. Raymond Jacquett, Christopher Costello and Mallory Stewart were also arrested and accused in the murder-for-hire scheme; Jacquett, the getaway driver, was convicted of second-degree murder in 2019 and Costello, whose thumbprint was on the Medical Board document, was convicted of first-degree murder last year. Stewart, the gunman, pleaded guilty recently. He and Lee will be sentenced in May. (Read more California stories.) (Newser) Update: Police investigating a mass shooting in Mexico's Michoacan state that left 20 people dead say the gunmen staged their ambush by hiding in a fish-and-chips van, reports the BBC. The assailants drove to a ranch that was home to an illegal cockfighting ring in a food van that was stolen last week, say authorities, who blame a gang rivalry. "It was a massacre of one group by another," says Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Our original story from Monday follows: Gunmen burst into a clandestine cockfight and opened fire, killing 20 people and wounding six, prosecutors in Mexico's western state of Michoacan said Monday. Three women were among the dead after the attack late Sunday near the town of Zinapecuaro. Prosecutors said drug cartels and other criminal gangs had been fighting in the area, the AP reports. "There are indications that the attack involved a confrontation between criminal groups," the federal Public Safety Department said in a statement. It added that a team of federal investigators had been sent to the scene. Michoacan has been the site of a longstanding turf battle between local cartels and the Jalisco cartel, from the neighboring state of Jalisco. The fighting has included the use of bomb-dropping drones, landmines, and homemade armored cars. Cockfighting, while illegal in many areas, remains a popular pastime in parts of Mexico, though the fights are usually held clandestinely. Soldiers have been deployed to find the people responsible for the attack, per the BBC. (Read more cockfighting stories.) (Newser) Amnesty International is accusing Russia of committing war crimes in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol. The human rights organization will soon release an in-depth report on the devastation caused by Russia's assault on the city on the Sea of Azov, Amnesty's Secretary-General Agnes Callamard said at a press conference Monday. "The siege of Mariupol, the denial of humanitarian evacuation and humanitarian escape for the population, and the targeting of civilians, according to Amnesty International's investigation, amounts to war crimes," said Callamard, per the AP. "That is the reality of Ukraine right now." Callamard said "the crisis in Ukraine right now, the invasion ... is not just any kind of violation of international law. It is an aggression. It is a violation of the UN charter of the kind that we saw when the US invaded Iraq." On other topics addressed in Amnesty's annual report, with Callamard noting that, amid the pandemic, large corporations and wealthy countries had increased global inequality in 2021. "Noxious corporate greed and brutal national selfishness, as well as neglect of health and public infrastructure, deepened existing global inequalities," Callamard said. Vaccine inequity during the pandemic has entrenched racial injustice, said the report. By the end of 2021, only 8% of Africas population of 1.3 billion people had been vaccinated, far short of the World Health Organizations 40% vaccination target, it said. Participants in Africa's conflictsincluding ones in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, Ethiopia, and Malihave committed war crimes and other abuses, Amnesty said. The report said 2021 also saw continued attacks on journalists, activists, and human rights defenders, with some governments using COVID-19 regulations to suppress protests. (The US said last week that it had formally determined that Russia has committed war crimes.) (Newser) Nazi Germany considered homosexual people "socially aberrant," and they were persecuted harshly during the Holocaust. Tens of thousands were arrested or deported, hundreds of those in France, and the numbers are believed to be vastly under-reported. But according to far-right French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, all of that is a myth. Zemmour, a TV pundit and author running in next month's election, is now being sued by six LGBTQ organizations for his views, which they allege amount to Holocaust denial, NPR reports. Zemmour is himself Jewish. In his most recent book, La France n'a pas dit son dernier mot ("France has not said its final word"), published last year, Zemmour referred to the idea of homosexual French citizens being deported due to sexual orientation as a "legend." In response to the lawsuit, Zemmour's team points out that Zemmour is actually quoting someone else's ideas in that portion of the bookthough the book makes clear Zemmour agrees with the politician he's quoting, France24 reports. Zemmour, 63, who is currently polling at 11%, has previously been convicted of hate speech twice and is appealing a third conviction. Those cases had to do with remarks he made about immigration (he has referred to unaccompanied child migrants as "thieves, killers, ... rapists") and Islam. (Zemmour has been compared to former President Trump.) (Newser) School custodians probably wouldn't want to add "empty litter boxes" to their daily to-do list, and luckily they don't have tobecause students using litter boxes in school is not an actual thing. One Nebraska lawmaker is finally acknowledging that, and offering a public apology, after spreading a debunked rumor involving how students self-identify and their supposed bathroom habits while they're in school. Per News Channel Nebraska, the strange incident involving Bruce Bostelman started Monday, when the Republican state senator spoke on the floor of the Nebraska Legislature to rail about school officials who were reportedly accommodating students who are "furries"individuals who enjoy dressing up as animals, often with an underlying sexual componentallowing them to identify "as cats and dogs," communicate using animal noises, and heed Mother Nature's call in litter boxes. Bostelman, a Republican, said he'd been told by one parent that when one student who identified as a cat asked for a litter box and had their request rebuffed, that student took care of business right on the goings-on. "How can schools allow this to happen?" The senator then went on to say he planned to take the matter up with the head of the state's Department of Health and Human Services, reports the AP. It turns out, however, schools in Nebraskaand across the entire Midwest, where the false claim has been circulating, per school officialsare not allowing this to happen, because it's not true. "Ridiculous," the superintendent of Seward Public Schools tells the Nebraska Examiner. "It's an ugly rumor," sighed the superintendent of the Adams Central District, which had to put out a statement about the hubbub last month. It's not clear where the conspiracy theory, which has been inflaming conservative pushback around gender identity, originated from, but the AP notes it's been going around since at least December, when a parent spoke up about it at a school board meeting in a district north of Detroit. It's also been repeatedly addressed in a Facebook group called Protect Nebraska Children. After the video of Bostelman's speech went viral and he learned the rumor wasn't true, Bostelman apologized for buying into it and for bringing it up at the legislative gathering. "I felt that if this really was happening, we needed to address it and address it quickly ... to make sure it wasn't happening here," he said Monday night, per News Channel Nebraska. (Read more strange stuff stories.) (Newser) The first face-to-face talks between Russian and Ukrainian diplomats in more than two weeks was underway Tuesday morning in Turkey, though expectations of a major breakthrough were small. "The whole world is waiting ... for good news from you," said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as he opened the talks in Istanbul, reports the Washington Post. The two sides did not exchange handshakes in what Ukrainian media described as a "cold welcome," per Reuters. Still, the latter outlet describes the very existence of the negotiations as an "important first step" toward a potential ceasefire. A counter to that: British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said she thought Vladimir Putin was not serious about talks," per the AP. In its coverage, the New York Times sees this as a "critical moment" in the war, because even though Ukrainian forces have had success on the battlefield, Russian troops "continue to try to cut off eastern Ukraine and are exacerbating a humanitarian disaster with attacks against critical infrastructure across the country." In his video address to the nation Monday night, Ukraine President President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukrainian troops had retaken the key suburb of Irpin, northwest of Kviv, but that Russia was regrouping for a counterattack. We still have to fight, we have to endure, Zelensky said. This is a ruthless war." (Read more Russia-Ukraine conflict stories.) We use cookies. By Clicking "OK" or any content on this site, you agree to allow cookies to be placed. Read more in our privacy policy (Newser) Clarence Thomas is back to his Supreme Court duties after a hospital stay, but if progressives have their way, his days on the court will be numbered. A number of lawmakers on the Democrats' left flank have raised the prospect of impeachment over the newly revealed texts of Ginni Thomas, though Politico reports that most mainstream Democrats are not on board. "Clarence Thomas should resign," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Tuesday. "If not, his failure to disclose income from right-wing organizations, recuse himself from matters involving his wife, and his vote to block the Jan 6th commission from key information must be investigated and could serve as grounds for impeachment." In suggesting that impeachment is a possibility following an investigation, AOC isn't going as far as others. Rep. Ilhan Omar, for example, says impeachment proceedings are warranted already. By the count of Fox News, they are among five lawmakers who have so far called for Thomas' resignation or impeachment. The Politico story, however, makes clear that most Democrats (including Nancy Pelosi) at this point are taking a less controversial stance: They say Thomas should recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 election, given his wife's strong advocacy of efforts to keep Donald Trump in office after the vote. The Hill notes the case that has drawn the most criticism is from January, when Thomas was the court's sole dissenter in a ruling that gave a House panel investigating the events of Jan. 6 access to White House records. "All options have to be on the table," said Rep. Mondaire Jones, vice chair of the Judiciary subcommittee overseeing federal courts, tells Axios in regard to impeachment. "There is a robust, distinct role for the Judiciary Committee to do its own investigation." Only one Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached, notes KXTV. That would be Samuel Chase in 1805. However, after the House impeached, the Senate acquitted, and he remained on the bench. (Read more Clarence Thomas stories.) (Newser) FedEx Corp. said Monday that Fred Smith will step down on June 1 as CEO of the package-delivery company he started a half-century ago, per the AP. Smith, 77, launched FedEx in 1973, delivering small parcels and documents more quickly than the post office could. Over the decades, he oversaw the growth of a company that combined air and ground service and became something of an economic bellwether because of its service to other companies. Smith informed FedEx employees of the news in a memo that retraced some of the Memphis-based companys history. He recalled that FedEx started with 14 planes and 389 team members, who delivered 186 packages on the first day of operations. We were a small startup and had our share of skeptics, Smith said. He boasted that the company went on to become a "global connector of people and possibilities that would change our world for the better. FedEx and rival UPS have benefited in recent years from the boom in online shopping, which has meant more parcels for its drivers to deliver to customers' doorsteps. In 2019, as Amazon.com built up its own delivery business, FedEx dropped a contract to provide express delivery for the retail giant, and stopped ground deliveries for Amazon soon afterward. FedEx was hurt by the trade war with China, and Smith frequently used forums such as the quarterly earnings call to rail against tariffs, making him one of the few CEOs of a large US corporation to challenge then-President Trumps trade policies. Smith and a firm bearing his name own more than 19.2 million shares of FedEx, according to FactSet. They are worth more than $4.4 billion at Monday's closing price. Raj Subramaniam, the current company president, will serve as both CEO and president, and Smith will become executive chairman to focus on issues including sustainability, innovation, and public policy. (Read more FedEx stories.) (Newser) A town in New Jersey is suing one of its own senior citizens, accusing her of filing too many requests for public records. Irvington Township accuses Elouise McDaniel, 82, of harassment and defamation, and a big reason is that she filed 75 requests for information about Mayor Tony Vauss and his administration over three years, reports NJ.com. In the lawsuit, the town says McDaniel has filed her requests "with the sole purpose and intent to harass, abuse and harm Plaintiffs and employees of the Township, including its Mayor," per NBC4 New York. It adds that trying to fill the "voluminous OPRA requests has been unduly burdensome, time consuming, and expensive." But McDaniel calls the suit "ridiculous" and says that as a taxpayer and homeowner, she is "entitled to know how my hard earned tax dollars are being spent." The state's Open Public Records Act does not put a limit on requests. And a New Jersey attorney who specializes in the area finds it "especially ludicrous" that the town views 75 requests over three years as burdensome. "Thats the equivalent of two a month," CJ Griffin tells NJ.com. "You could file two OPRA requests a month just for the meeting minutes, so its in no way harassing." What do the mayor and town say about all this? Not much. In fact, nobody seems to want to claim ownership of the suit. Mayor Vauss says he is not behind the litigation. "I did not file the lawsuit against Elouise McDaniel," he tells NBC. "Harold Wiener is the plaintiff." But Wiener, who is Irvington's municipal clerk, says he didn't request the suit. "She does file a lot of OPRAs," he adds of McDaniel. "That comes with the territory, my territory. I know Ms. McDaniel. I don't have a problem with her." He later emailed NBC to say he could not comment on pending litigation, and the town's attorney says the same. As for McDaniel: "I want to live out my last days in peace. I don't need this." (Read more New Jersey stories.) / Some See Strategy in Russia's Promise to Ease Up on Kyiv Others can't hold back their skepticism (Newser) The Foo Fighters have decided to cancel their upcoming tour dates instead of trying to replace one of rock's most charismatic drummers at the last minute. Taylor Hawkins, 50, was found dead in a hotel room in Bogota, Colombia on Friday, shortly before the band was due to perform at a festival. The band confirmed the cancellation of their remaining tour dates in a statement posted on Twitter Tuesday, reports Fox. They said there were calling off the shows "with great sadness" in light of "the staggering loss of our brother Taylor Hawkins." "Were sorry for and share in the disappointment that we wont be seeing one another as planned," the band said. "Instead, lets take this time to grieve, to heal, to pull our loved ones close, and to appreciate all the music and memories weve made together." Hawkins, was the most prominent member of the group apart from frontman Dave Grohl. Before his death, the Foo Fighters had a busy year of touring planned, including festival dates in the US, Canada, and Europe, the AP reports. They were also scheduled to perform at Sunday's Grammy Awards in Las Vegas. The death of Hawkins, who had been the band's drummer for 25 years, brought tributes from many prominent rockers, including fellow drummers, Rolling Stone reports. "Your phone call a week ago touched and inspired me and I will always be appreciative for you championing our community as in your parting words. 'Drummers stick together!'" tweeted Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich. "Damn right brother. Except now the community is lesser without you." (No cause of death has been confirmed, but Colombian authorities say Hawkins had drugs in his system including antidepressants and opioids.) Alaska_news Former Sen. John Coghill adds his name to a growing list of candidates seeking Don Young's House seat News-Miner photo Voters cast their ballots in Fairbanks during municipal elections in 2021. This year, voters will head to the polls in a special election to fill a vacated House seat, as well as a regularly scheduled election to decide congressional and state races. John Coghill William Hibler Al Gross Christopher Constant Gov. Mike Dunleavy issued a proclamation calling for a special U.S. House election. Former state Sen. John Coghill, R-North Pole, a constitutional conservative, said he filed on Monday to finish the late Don Youngs term in Congress. The 71-year-old is one of two hopefuls so far from the Fairbanks area as the list of candidates grows. The other local candidate is Bill Hibler, a left-of-center retired professor. The deadline to file for the special primary election for U.S. Representative is 5 p.m. Friday. Multiple well-known Alaskans are pondering a run, according to media reports. Republican Nick Begich, whose grandfather preceded Young in Congress, and Democrat Christopher Constant, who belongs to the Anchorage Borough Assembly, plan to run as candidates for the remaining term plus another full two-year term, according to the Associated Press. The campaign of Al Gross, who was defeated in 2020 after challenging U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, confirmed that he will also seek to replace Young, according to KINY radio. Coghill is not committed to run for the full term in Congress but rather the remainder of the current term, which ends in January, he said. Since leaving the Alaska Legislature in 2020 after being defeated in the Republican primary following 22 years of service, Coghill has sold a house, built a house, had two knees replaced and started a new job at the Fairbanks Rescue Mission, he said. You feel responsible for what you know, and I know Alaska well, said the son of a constitutional convention delegate who grew up in Nenana. Coghill wants to make sure the batch of candidates includes a constitutional conservative with extensive knowledge of Alaska. I am going to bet there will be a lot of people like me up there, but if not, I want to be there, he said. Hibler was also defeated in a primary election in 2020 after unsuccessfully seeking the Democratic party nomination to challenge Young. He has lived in Alaska for almost 50 years. The self-identified Bernie Sanders Democrat and professor emeritus ran on climate change saying, I believe we cannot conserve our way out of climate change; we must science our way out. According to the Alaska Division of Elections, the lineup so far also includes Gregg Brelsford, undeclared, of Anchorage; Bob Lyons, Republican, of Houston; J.R. Myers, Libertarian, whose address is listed in Cut Bank, Montana; and Stephen Wright, Republican, of Wasilla. remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. The Public Safety Report is compiled from criminal complaints filed in state and federal courts, as well as some police blotter information, trooper dispatches, fire department reports and interviews with public safety officials. Individuals named as arrested and/or charged with crimes in this report are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Japanese companies will be asked to refuse Russias demand that energy payments be made in roubles, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said on Tuesday. Russia demanded last week that unfriendly countries must pay in roubles, not euros, for its gas in the wake of the United States and European allies teaming up on a series of sanctions aimed at Russia. Japanese Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki last week told a parliamentary session the government did not understand Moscows intentions or how they would do this. Japan has imposed a raft of punitive measures on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, including sanctions targeting the deputy chiefs of staff for President Vladimir Putins administration, the head of the Chechen Republic, and executives of companies with close ties to the Kremlin. A private university in Tokyo has decided to accept Ukrainian students who want to evacuate to Japan. The International Christian University says it will solicit applications with refugee support group Pathways Japan. Eligible applicants should be students at universities in Ukraine who have remained in the country or fled to another country since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24. They also need to have studied the Japanese language. Information will be available on the group's website in Japanese and English. The university plans to accept several students at first. University officials say they will provide successful applicants with travel expenses to Japan, accommodations on campus and living expenses. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 6 1 of 6 H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 2 of 6 H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 3 of 6 4 of 6 H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 5 of 6 H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 6 of 6 DANBURY Gracing a wall at Keystone Place at Wooster Heights are the photographs of men and women who served their country. The wall at the new senior living community is meant to honor veterans who live there or residents relatives who have served in the military. BEACONSFIELD, QC, March 29, 2022 /CNW Telbec/ - Beaconsfield Council is launching a fundraising campaign to help with the dire humanitarian crisis unfolding in Ukraine. Beaconsfield residents are invited to donate to this fundraiser by Interac, credit card or cheque payable to the City of Beaconsfield. Tax receipts will be emitted for donations of $20 and more. Business hours at City Hall are Monday to Thursday, from 8 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. and Friday from 8 a.m. to noon. The deadline for donating is Thursday, April 14, 2022. For its part, the City will donate $10,000 and match donations made by individual citizens, at City Hall, up to a maximum of $20,000 to help meet the tremendous needs of people and communities in Ukraine and provide aid for displaced persons in neighbouring countries. Funds collected will be donated to the Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal established by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the Canada-Ukraine Foundation. The devastating reality of Ukraine is that the needs are growing every day. We know that many of our residents are looking to help. Your donation helps deliver aid to affected populations in all corners of Ukraine, including some of the hardest hit cities in the north, east and south of the country," states Georges Bourelle, Mayor of Beaconsfield. It is also possible to contribute to an online fundraiser set up by the Canada-Ukraine Foundation to help millions of Ukrainian families displaced by the crisis, at canadahelps.org/en/dn/70605 (Canada-Ukraine Foundation). In line with best practices, citizens are encouraged to donate money to reputable humanitarian organizations instead of sending relief items, as this allows these organizations to quickly purchase supplies based on the specific needs of the people affected by the conflict. SOURCE City of Beaconsfield For further information: Mayor's Office, [email protected], beaconsfield.ca Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, assigned responsibilities to his 53-member team on Monday, keeping 34 critical ministries such as home, personnel, and vigilance. Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, assigned responsibilities to his 53-member team on Monday, keeping 34 critical ministries such as home, personnel, and vigilance. Brajesh Pathak, the new deputy chief minister, has been assigned the departments of medical education, medical and health, and family welfare. Keshav Prasad Maurya, who remained as deputy chief minister, had his former portfolio of public works replaced with additional ones like as rural development, food processing, public businesses, and national integration. Former bureaucrat AK Sharma, who worked under Prime Minister Narendra Modi in both Gujarat and Delhi, has been appointed as a cabinet minister for urban development and electricity. Shrikant Sharma was the electricity minister in Adityanaths first cabinet, while Ashutosh Tandon Gopal was in charge of urban development. Both havent found a seat this time around, however Shrikant is running for state BJP leader. Sharma was involved in numerous of Modis favourite projects in Gujarat, including organising the Vibrant Gujarat summit, and his nomination as urban development minister was intended to exploit his planning and inventiveness, according to a BJP senior acquainted with the allocation process. Sanjay Nishad, the head of the Nishad party, has been appointed as fisheries minister, while Ashish Patel, the spouse of Apna Dal (Sonelal) leader and Union minister Anupriya Patel, has been appointed as technical education minister. Ashish, a civil engineer and former executive engineer of UP Jal Nigam, is a former executive engineer of UP Jal Nigam. Many departments have been delegated to specialised ministers. For example, the minister of technical education is an engineer, the minister of fisheries represents the community, and the minister of urban development is a successful bureaucrat. The health ministry to deputy CM Brajesh Pathak could be seen as an acknowledgement of the work he did in Covid times, getting admissions, beds, and oxygen cylinders, and the rural department to Keshav Maurya could be seen as a decision with an eye on the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, political analyst AP Tiwari said. While Suresh Khanna, a nine-term member, held his ministries of finance and legislative affairs, agriculture was retained by five-term MLA Surya Pratap Shahi. Swatantra Dev, the UP BJP president and an OBC politician, has been appointed Jal Shakti and flood control minister. Baby Rani Maurya, a Jatav Dalit, was assigned the portfolio of womens welfare and child development. Jitin Prasada, a former Union minister, will be the new PWD minister. Yogendra Upadhaya has been appointed as minister of higher education, while Nand Gopal Nandi, who served as minister of minorities in the previous Yogi administration, has been handed crucial ministries of industrial development, export promotion, NRIs, and investments. Bhupendra Singh Chaudhary, a Jat politician, kept the Panchayati Raj post, while Rakesh Sachan was appointed minister for MSMEs and khadi. Anil Rajbhar was appointed by the Labour Ministry. Asim Arun, the former head of the anti-terrorist unit, has been appointed as the next social welfare minister. Sandeep Singh, the grandson of former UP chief minister Kalyan Singh, has been appointed as the basic education minister, while Gulab Devi has been appointed as the secondary education minister. Dharamvir Prajapati will be the minister in charge of jails and home guards, while Narendra Kashyap will be in charge of backward welfare. Arun Kumar Saxena has been appointed as the new Forest Minister, while Daya Shankar Mishra Dayalu has been appointed as the Ayush Minister. Roopa Ganguly of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said on Monday that the Trinamool Congress-led West Bengal State administration is not ready for debates on the Birbhum violence in the state legislature. Roopa Ganguly of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said on Monday that the Trinamool Congress-led West Bengal State administration is not ready for debates on the Birbhum violence in the state legislature. She alleged that BJP MLA Manoj Tigga had been seriously hurt in a scuffle between BJP and Trinamool Congress Party MLAs. Earlier in the day, the West Bengal Assembly saw a commotion as MLAs from the ruling Trinamool Congress and the BJP clashed over the Birbhum violence case. Five Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLAs including the Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari were suspended from the West Bengal Assembly on Monday following a clash with TMC MLAs on the floor of the House over Birbhum violence. The other BJP MLAs who have been suspended include Manoj Tigga, Shankar Ghosh, Narahari Mahato and Dipak Barman. The MLAs were suspended until further notice. The BJP MLAs further held a protest march outside the Assembly. The identical scenario that Anarul Hussain generated in Rampurhat was witnessed inside by TMC MLAs and their cops. We will protest this at 2 p.m. today. I will file a formal complaint with the Speaker, requesting that action be taken in accordance with the rules. We want the assistance of the Centre Suvendu Adhikari revealed this to ANI. The opposition wanted a discussion about law and order on the last day, but the government refused. They sent civil-dressed Kolkata police officers to brawl with 8-10 of our MLAs Hed said. On Tuesday, at least eight people were killed in the Rampurhat region of West Bengals Birbhum when a crowd allegedly set fire to buildings following the death of TMC leader Bhadu Sheikh. The Central Bureau of Investigation is now investigating the matter (CBI). DERBY The citys police department is considering hiring an accreditation manager at $42 an hour. The position is considered part time, although the listed hours are Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The possible creation of this position is as a result of the Police Accountability Act, which was passed into law in 2020. The law mandates local police departments obtain Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies accreditation by 2025. But Police Chief Jerry Narowski, who spoke at a recent meeting of the Board of Aldermans operations and procedures committee meeting, said the related costs of getting accredited will force the department to hire a part-time staffer. The process to become accredited will cost $179,710 in total according to the city. Its an extremely long, cumbersome, complicated and costly process, he said at the March 25 meeting. He said there are some bills circulating at the state level to try and lower the cost of earning accreditation, but it doesnt look like those are going to be successful with the current party thats pushing this agenda. The CALEA certification is an indication that the department adheres to high policing standards, according to John DeCarlo, former Branford police chief and director of the criminal justice program at the University of New Haven. The certification process includes policies and procedures and regular reviews to ensure compliance with CALEA standards. Currently, 24 municipal police agencies in the state have achieved CALEA accreditation, ranging in size from Coventry (21 officers) to East Hartford (163). The Connecticut State Police, with a staff of 1,784, is also CALEA certified. Seven other departments, including Branford, Shelton and the Southern CT State U. police, are currently in the self assessment phase of accreditation, according to CALEA. On the positive side, accreditation leads to high standards and greater transparency, DeCarlo said. One of the standards is they set up a whole complaint system for the public and so, even if the complaints are the same, theres an open door to receive complaints. Thats a very positive and transparent step in one of the CALEA policies, he said. The downside, he said, is expense. Narowski said the same. I think I have $117,000 for the process or more, and then now we have to throw in software on top of that. Its a big deal, Narowksi said. Literally, its $11,000 to get them down here. We have to pay for them to come on site We have to pay their room and board. And its not a one and done. Its a constant annual deal. So it requires a full-time accreditation manager. And what were trying to do is make it happen with a part time accreditation manager. The position itself is a civilian one and is largely administrative. According to the city, the position will oversee the accreditation process, plan out exams, write and review policies, ensure the department adheres to standards and direct on-site compliance. While Narowski said the position is part time, the job description states the position is from Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. CALEA is a national police accreditation organization founded in 1979. The organization gives accreditation to local and international police forces. The purpose of the organization is to standardize training for local police departments throughout the country. Membership, depending on the department is voluntary, but the recent accountability law requires departments to obtain CALEA certification by 2025. The new law also has led to some politicians complaining that it alienates police departments and drives officers from the profession. Former Derby Mayor Anita Dugatto, now an alderwoman representing Ward 1, said she understands the exodus. I mean, its happening, and its a reality, Dugatto said. Russia, Ukraine start new round of peace talks: media Xinhua) 16:46, March 29, 2022 ISTANBUL, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Russia and Ukraine kicked off a fresh round of face-to-face peace talks here on Tuesday, aiming to achieve substantial progress for a ceasefire, according to media reports. Since Feb. 28, Russia and Ukraine have held three rounds of face-to-face peace talks and a series of online discussions, failing to reach a major agreement. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) Chinese FM to chair 3rd meeting of foreign ministers of countries neighboring Afghanistan 00:00:00 Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will host the third meeting of foreign ministers of the countries neighboring Afghanistan in Tunxi, Anhui Province, from March 30 to 31. Foreign ministers or representatives of Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will attend the meeting, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin announced on Monday. Later, Wang will chair the "Afghanistan's neighbors + Afghanistan" foreign ministers' dialogue. Acting Foreign Minister of the Afghan Interim Government Amir Khan Muttaqi will be invited to attend the dialogue. The foreign ministers of Indonesia and Qatar will be invited as guests, the spokesperson said. By hosting this third foreign ministers meeting, China hopes to build further consensus among Afghanistan's neighboring countries on the Afghan issue, discuss the "neighbors' plan" to jointly promote the stability of the situation in Afghanistan, support the Afghan people, and convey the voices of Afghanistan's neighbors to the international community, the spokesperson said. "We hope that by hosting the 'Afghanistan's neighbors + Afghanistan' foreign ministers' dialogue, we can better understand the difficulties and appeals of the Afghan people, convey the concerns of Afghanistan's neighboring countries about the Afghan issue, encourage Afghanistan to build an open and inclusive political architecture, pursue moderate and prudent domestic and foreign policies, and effectively combat terrorism," Wang said. There are many people who consider Wooster Street to be the embodiment of Wooster Square and, to a certain degree, that may be true. At one time, it was filled with activity families who lived in the multifamily buildings, all the small stores that lined the street-level entrances, and, of course, the burgeoning business of creating, perfecting and selling New Haven apizza. But Wooster Square was more expansive. It spread from Grand Avenue to Water Street, and East Street to Olive Street. It encompassed a large area with a mostly Italian immigrant population. Perhaps no other neighborhood in the city had ever housed such a large, homogeneous gathering of arrivals who came here to find the dream of America and found it in Wooster Square. The sheer force of that gathering resulted in the development of a mini-society in which the residents strove to be self-sufficient while isolating and protecting themselves against the common prejudices of the time. This all served to remind everyone that, if they were to succeed, they would have to work hard, live together harmoniously, be conscientious about adopting the new social expectations, and understand that everything needed to be earned. Yet they managed to maintain a strong connection to those things that were embedded into their own rich cultural and ethnic traditions. That was accomplished by developing a dual system that included an American yet Italian way of life. In the neighborhood, people could speak the language and use the familiar and friendly colloquialisms that they were fond of, but at work or in school or when shopping downtown, they needed to try to fit in as much as possible. Residents were able to enjoy a familiar lifestyle because of the special shops scattered throughout the neighborhood. The many small markets offered food-related items that allowed customers to cook the familiar foods that they loved. Sometimes they were imported from Italy, such as olive oil and canned tomatoes, but after a short time local entrepreneurs began to produce local versions, such as macaroni and the crusty bread that was a staple in every town and village in Campania. Local farmers were able to produce crops of dandelion greens and escarole, so prized by home cooks, and even finocchio or fennel and cavolo verzo or Savoy cabbage could be purchased. Other warm climate goods were imported from California and Florida, so that figs and prickly pears, pomegranates and persimmons could be enjoyed in season. And local cheese mongers began to produce ricotta and mozzarella and all of the related cheeses that are so integral to the Italian cucina. My uncle Joe Prodigo began making cheese on Wooster Street in the thirties. It was really wonderful, carrying on a trade that he learned in Pontone, outside of Amalfi. All of these foods that are now so universally enjoyed were virtually unknown to non-Italians at that time. There was a plethora of dry goods stores, scattered throughout, catering to those seeking simple clothing or linens. A housewife would find the cotton dresses that were generally worn in the house and the ever-present aprons, which were easily washed. Underwear and socks, shirts and work clothes were available. You might also purchase a tablecloth for a special occasion, or serviceable sheets and towels to add to the hope chest for a daughter of marriageable age. The deep black clothing that was worn during the one-year period of mourning as a sign of respect after the death of a close relative was also available. Women would wear black dresses and stockings and men wore black ties. It wasnt uncommon for a widow to wear black for the rest of her life. These everyday items were purchased locally, with downtown shopping being reserved for special purchases. These shops very often were run by women or families in a venue close to home. The approach of Easter was usually announced by the appearance of cured meats in the stores and butcher shops. These meats were important ingredients in the classic Easter delicacy, pizza chiena or pizza rustica, which graced every table on Easter Sunday. Everything that was denied during Lent was included in this delicious pie or torte. The double-crusted pie was filled with cured meats, sausages, cheeses, eggs, and other ingredients specific to a family recipe. Nothing is more evocative of the holiday than this simple but elegant melange of everything Italian. Palm Sunday was a special event in the midst of Lent. We all looked forward to the blessed palm fronds that were distributed at all the Masses and kept in the home. Everyone followed the Italian custom of exchanging palm with family members, and children were very often given a coin in return. The exchange of palm was a powerful reminder of the family connection and the respect that was evidenced through this gesture. The week leading to Easter, Holy Week, was filled with religious ceremonies. All the religious statues in the church were draped in purple so as not to distract from the solemnity of the services. The most widely attended event was the visitation of the churches on Holy Thursday, where special altars were erected to display the Blessed Sacrament. The custom was to visit three churches to pray at these altars. For us, in our end of Wooster Square, St. Michael, St. Louis and St. Casimir were our three. The streets were alive with neighbors making their way from one to the other. It created a sense of solidarity and community, and connection to our common heritage. Everyone respected Good Friday as a day of reflection, and children were expected to maintain a quiet demeanor throughout the day. Easter Sunday was the culmination with crowds attending the many Masses at St. Michael, with children relegated to the basement chapel so as to make room for adults in the main sanctuary. The festive dinner brought family together and always ended with sweet pies from the bakery, cream and grain or wheat berry, la pastiera, or pizza di grano, a tradition that dates back to the Romans, were the most traditional, with a casatella for the children, a circle of sponge, frosted and covered with sprinkles and candy, with a marzipan lamb in the center. Everything was family-oriented, everything was simple yet rich with tradition. Frank Carrano lives in Branford. Contact him at f.carrano@att.net. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate NEW HAVEN Members of Newhallville-Hamden Strong say they want to make sure that any new organizations in the upper Dixwell Avenue neighborhood are positive additions. While they are just beginning to look at a proposal for a Resilience Academy at 794 Dixwell Ave., it would be a better fit than the APT Foundations planned methadone clinic, they say. Jeanette Sykes, chairwoman of the groups steering committee, said they are working to maintain a positive focus as they work to improve the area on both sides of the New Haven-Hamden border, which has suffered from the pandemic, on top of poverty and a too-high crime rate. Residential is not a good fit for us, when it comes to locating a methadone clinic, Sykes said. Our goal is not to bash anyone. We just dont feel like it would be a good fit for our community. The partnership that includes the Rev. Boise Kimber, senior pastor of First Calvary Baptist Church, and Clifford W. Beers Guidance Clinic, is on Fridays state Bond Commission agenda for a $2 million grant to buy the former Achievement First Elm City College Preparatory School from the APT Foundation. The APT Foundation bought the property for $2.45 million in December and planned to move its headquarters, a methadone clinic and other facilities from 1 Long Wharf. Mayor Justin Elicker said Friday the foundation has agreed to hold off on its plans for now, but the new proposal would depend on the foundation finding another site. The new proposal would turn the former school into a community wellness and education center focused on youth and families, with a focus on recovering from trauma, Clifford Beers Chief Executive Officer Alice Forrester said. Right now, were researching on the proposal, said Sykes, a Newhallville resident. We want proposals that are going to be positive for our community. We are certainly open for other proposals if anyone wants to put a positive proposal out there that will improve our community. Once Newhallville-Hamden Strong vets the proposal, it will go to the Newhallville Community Management Team, Sykes said. She said Newhallville needs services to heal the community around grief and loss, the food-distribution, having the COVID testing very close to our community. Any proposal should recognize the diversity of the area as well, she said. Barbara Vereen, Ward 20 co-chairwoman and member of the group, said while people are just beginning to discuss the proposed alternative, I dont think its a bad idea for our neighborhood. I think the community will have more discussions about it. Vereen said the neighborhood needs services such as before- and after-school child care, but we need more details. There is going to be a meeting with the community about it because that is the proper thing to do. Residents were angered by the APT Foundations purchase of the onetime school without notice to the neighborhood. An online meeting in January brought out a lot of anger and complaints about litter and loitering around the foundations clinic at 495 Congress Ave., its largest. APT Foundation CEO Lynn Madden did not return a request for comment. Were trying to rebuild our community back too, Vereen said. We have small businesses that survived the pandemic. Our neighborhood has suffered great trauma and were rebuilding from that. Forrester said the Resilience Academy would provide early intervention, prevention, parenting support and educational after-school, before-school support. I think we can bring resources to the community that weve been able to do in Fair Haven at the Farnam Neighborhood House, which joined Clifford Beers last July. Clifford Beers is constantly looking for ways to serve the community within the community, as opposed to the typical medical appointment once a week, Forrester said. The agency had a respite care site in Science Park but due to COVID and the high rent expense we had to leave there, she said. This community-based location would just be ideal for extending our services within the Newhallville community. edward.stannard@hearstmediact.com; 203-680-9382 Multiple new and successful building projects including the Hotel Marcel and The Elm have been completed in New Haven and point to the coming transition from fossil fuel to electric-based energy. These projects represent the idea of an electric future, and our community needs to be implementing the same electric technology for everyday life in our homes and cars. The New Haven Electric Future campaign is encouraging the transition away from fossil fuels to a community solely reliant on electricity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as air pollution and noise, and to increase efficient use of energy. Doing so is necessary for the health of the planet and ourselves. Electrification is the transition away from fossil fuel-reliant technology. A transition to electric devices would allow for the functioning of a modern society without the negative environmental and health impacts that come from fossil fuels. Gas-powered technology is everywhere, and many are unaware of the risks such devices pose. One example, the gas stove, has been repeatedly shown to release toxic chemicals into the home. Even when turned off, these gas-powered appliances leak methane into the environment. Another ubiquitous machine, the gasoline-powered car, has a better-known reputation for spewing toxic chemicals. Transportation-related gasoline power is a huge contributor of toxic waste anywhere there are cars. Electric energy mitigates the negative health effects that come with fossil fuel consumption. When considering air quality and the public health impact of breathing cleaner air, the American Lung Association found that, in the United States, a full electrification model would avert $72 billion in health care costs. Though the effects that fossil fuels have on the environment are widely known, our community response has lagged. To reduce emissions, we need to switch as many systems as possible from natural gas to the Connecticut grid, which continues to include more and more renewable energy sources. Zero-carbon and nuclear resources now make up nearly 65 percent of electricity consumed, and this percentage is expected to increase to 91 percent by 2025. Electrification just makes sense. Natural gas and its consumption are detrimental to the health of the planet and ourselves, and prompt community action in transitioning to healthy alternatives is needed. Electrification is possible in any community that is committed to change. Early strides towards an electric future can serve as a framework for other locations. Ithaca, N.Y., has approved a plan to decarbonize the citys entire building stock through the electrification and retrofitting of 6,000 buildings. Berkeley, Calif., became the first U.S. city to require that all new construction be electric in 2020. In our own community of New Haven, several successful projects have already been established. The Hotel Marcel, formerly known as the historic Pirelli Building, became the first all-electric, net-zero emissions hotel in the United States when it opened this past year. The hotel gets its energy from roof solar panels and high-efficiency heat pumps. Another electrical success in the area, The Elm, is entirely electric-powered. Its high-efficiency heat pumps allow for a system that is less expensive to install, and will result in energy and emissions savings. These larger projects, as well as many others, demonstrate that an electric future can be successful in our backyard. The recent passing of an electrification resolution by the city of New Haven Board of Alders in March 2021 demonstrates an existent commitment to an electric future in New Haven: The City of New Haven recognizes the broad benefits of accelerating the transition to electric buildings and transition to electric buildings and transportation throughout the city. Prompt action in our own community will serve as a guide for the state of Connecticut and beyond. What can an individual do? Share what you know with your family, friends, coworkers, landlords and the like. Those in charge of energy allotment also need to know that electrical energy is the future, so share your concern with local elected officials and state government. The wide benefit that an electric future can bring to New Haven within the next few years is truly something to get excited about. Alex Murphy is a member of New Haven Climate Movements Electric Future campaign. Bandits on Sunday, invaded Hayin Kanwa village, Yakawada ward in Giwa Local Government Area of Kaduna State, and killed 15 people. A resid... Bandits on Sunday, invaded Hayin Kanwa village, Yakawada ward in Giwa Local Government Area of Kaduna State, and killed 15 people. A resident in the community, Alhaji Mohammed Buwala told newsmen in Kaduna on Monday, that the 15 people killed were buried early morning on Monday. According to Buwala, Killings and kidnapping in Giwa are getting out of hand, as people are being killed and kidnapped daily. The situation is terrible because 15 more people were killed at Hayin Kanwa just yesterday (Sunday) night by bandits. Since Thursday, these bandits have been attacking villages killing people, he said. Meanwhile, Giwa Local Government Chairman, Abubakar Shehu, could not be reached on phone. Also, Kaduna Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Mohammed Jalige did not pick his calls. It can be recalled that bandits attacked nine villages in Giwa Local Government on Thursday last week, and burnt several houses, including a church after killing over 50 residents. The cult killings in Ogun State might have spread from Abeokuta, the State capital, to Sagamu, where no fewer than eight persons were repor... Recall that about ten persons were killed in Abeokuta in the past one week as members of Eiye and Aiye confraternities engaged in a supremacy battle. The clash between the rival cult groups got to its peak following the gruesome murder of an area boy popularly known as Tommy in Oluwo, Abeokuta. Since the death of Tommy, residents of Abeokuta have been leaving under fear of possible escalation of the crisis. As of Sunday evening, locals in Panseke, Onikolobo, Oluwo, Adigbe fled for dear lives as gunshots rent the air. Though the police said 18 persons have been arrested, calm seems not to have been restored as the crisis has now escalated to Sagamu, Remo axis of Ogun. As early as 7am on Sunday, sources revealed that some young men stormed the town, killing their targets. While a few of the victims were picked up by the police, others were said to have been taken away by their parents. A source stated that one Akeem, an electrician was killed at the Ajegunle area of Sagamu around 7am. Akeem did not die immediately, but when they were rushing him to the hospital, another bike hit them and he fell from the bike. That was how he died eventually. His intestines were coming out because he was shot in the stomach, the source, who pleaded anonymity said. It was also gathered that some of the victims were murdered in places like Soyindo, Ijagba, Ajegunle and Sabo; all in Sagamu. Theres this pain of praying for the same thing for years and not getting a response because were channelling our energy in the wrong direction. We want peace in the State, to bring an end to these lingering cult clashes, it affects everybody. Every street in Sagamu is literally empty, Awoyemi Michael stated. At the moment, residents of Sagamu are calling on the police to put the situation under control. When contacted, the Ogun State Police Spokesman, Abimbola Oyeyemi, promised to revert with more details on the killings. However, he did not pick his calls when our correspondent called him back after about an hour. Meanwhile, Oyeyemi had earlier threatened that the police would deal with all cultists in the state. He said the Command would also arrest and prosecute landlords harbouring cultists in Ogun, even as he charged parents to warn their children. Governor Dapo Abiodun had also assured residents of the State that he would not allow some hoodlums to truncate the peace in Ogun. Abiodun assured that the state would be peaceful for residents and investors alike. The cult killings in Ogun State might have spread from Abeokuta, the State capital, to Sagamu, where no fewer than eight persons were reportedly killed on Monday. There was tension in Enugu state as unknown gunmen, UGM, suspected to be enforcers of sit-at-home order struck around Colliery Hospital on... There was tension in Enugu state as unknown gunmen, UGM, suspected to be enforcers of sit-at-home order struck around Colliery Hospital on Monday, opened fire and allegedly killed some passengers going to their respective businesses. It was gathered that the passengers left their homes early to attend to their businesses when the bullets started raining on the commuter bus conveying them. The number of people killed has not been ascertained as at the time of filling this report, but our source claimed that at least two persons were killed while police said no death was recorded. Our source said the gunmen struck around Colliery Hospital on Monday, shot dead some passengers going out for their respective businesses. The police reportedly intervened and brought in two victims who sustained gunshot wounds to Parkland. The spokesman of Enugu Police command, ASP Daniel Ndukwe who confirmed the incident said there was no death recorded. His words, there was a shooting incident at Odegba, along Iva Valley Road, Enugu in the early hours of this morning, by yet-to-be identified armed men, which led to the injury of two persons. However, the victims are responding to treatment at the hospital where they were promptly taken to by Police Operatives, who swiftly responded to a distress call on the incident. Meanwhile, investigation has been launched to fish out the fleeing miscreants, please. Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo on Tuesday assured that the Nigerian government will fight and defeat bandits and terrorists. Osinbajo... Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo on Tuesday assured that the Nigerian government will fight and defeat bandits and terrorists. Osinbajo gave the assurance while condemning the banditry attack on a train along the Kaduna-Abuja route. Osinbajo expressed sadness over what he described as a terrorist attack on Nigerians. He spoke while visiting some victims of the incident at a hospital in Kaduna. Describing the bandits as cowards, Osinbajo said Nigeria would be secured. In a tweet, the Vice President wrote: I am saddened by another mindless terrorist attack on citizens. We must for our nation and their memories fight on and defeat the cowards who unleash terror on those not armed. They will not break our spirits and our resolve. We will prevail & our land will be secure. The Federated Correspondents Chapel (FCC) of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, NUJ in Bayelsa State has urged security agencies in Bayelsa ... The Federated Correspondents Chapel (FCC) of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, NUJ in Bayelsa State has urged security agencies in Bayelsa and Delta States to collaborate and ensure the release of Julius Osahon and all others abducted from a bus in the state. The call is contained in a statement signed by Christian Eze, Bassey Willie, Chairman and Secretary of the union respectively. The NUJ asked the Federal and State governments to ensure that there is adequate security on the highways especially, the Bayelsa and Delta axis of the East-West road. It was reported that the abduction of the Journalists and the others including the driver of Sunny Eru Motors by gunmen suspected to be Fulani herdsmen on Monday. Mr Julius Osahon, Bayelsa State Correspondent of the Guardian newspaper alongside others was abducted by unknown gunmen suspected to be kidnappers along Evwreni Community near Ugheli axis of Delta State while on transit to Warri. The NUJ said, Security situation in our nation is becoming worrisome on daily basis, innocent citizens are being killed, kidnapped and their valuables carted away by criminals, that is why we call on the government to discharge its responsibility of protecting citizens lives and property optimally. Journalists are not wealthy men in the society but just doing their duties to contribute to the growth and development of the nation, that is why we wonder where Mr Osahon will get N5 million demanded by the kidnappers to regain his freedom. We pray the Almighty God to protect his young family and give them the courage to manage the trauma and free him unhurt to reunite with his family. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has berated the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed over the performance claims All ... PDP in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Hon. Debo Ologunagba, Monday dismissed the press conference addressed by the Minister of Information and Culture, describing his claims as another anthology of lies. According to the PDP, the hurried press conference is another desperate and disoriented stunt by the APC administration to divert public attention from the exposed corruption records of the APC national leadership. The major opposition party also lambasted Minister over alleged attempts to divert public attention from the manifest collapse of security, command and control structure under President Muhammadu Buhari. It also lamented the alleged excruciating economic hardship, hunger and other life discounting experiences being faced by Nigerians daily because of severe food crisis, lingering fuel emergency, high cost of essential commodities and services, closure of schools, insecurity and mass killing, collapse of healthcare system and decayed public infrastructure under APC. The opposition party described as height of impunity and arrogance that the Minister of Information and Culture, could address the media to claim that the APC government has achieved food sufficiency, particularly in rice production. The statement partly read A bag of rice which sold for N7,500 under the PDP now sells for over N30,000, a measure of bean which sold for N350 under the PDP now sells for over N1000, a measure of garri which sold for N120 under the PDP now sells for N700, a bottle of palm oil which sold for N250 under the PDP now sells for over N1000. In the same vein, a kilo of meat which sold for N700 under the PDP now sells for N3000, a liter of petrol which sold for N87 under the PDP now sells for as high as N400 to N500 while a liter of diesel which sold for N110 under the PDP now sells for over N800, yet Lai Mohammed provocatively claims that Nigerians are better off under the APC. Nigerians know better and the question to ask is, Is your life better now in 2022 under the APC than it was in 2015 under the PDP? It is ludicrous and insensitive that the APC government went to the media to list non-existence roads, bridges, agricultural and health projects as achievements. More pathetic is the APCs attempt to claim credit for development projects initiated and implemented by successive PDP administrations including in our railways, aviation, agricultural, healthcare, education, telecommunications, banking and manufacturing sectors among others. PDP said it is laughable that the APC government was also claiming credit for critical projects in various parts of the country which are being funded by resources mobilized by the PDP administrations. It insisted that, the only legitimate achievements of the APC government include its corruption record (second most corrupt in West Africa and 154 out of 180 in Global Corruption Index), over 33 percent unemployment rate, a weakened currency at over N500 to a dollar, N33 trillion foreign debt and still counting and the siphoning of over N16 trillion by APC leaders. PDP cautioned the APC that its continued arrogance in failure is daily confronting Nigerians and the consequences are better imagined. People walk near the building of the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow March 28, 2022. North Macedonia has declared five Russian diplomats as personae non grata, the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Monday. (Xinhua/Bai Xueqi) SKOPJE, March 28 (Xinhua) -- North Macedonia has declared five Russian diplomats as personae non grata, the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Monday. In a press release, the ministry said it summoned on Monday Russian Ambassador to North Macedonia Sergey Bazdnikin and informed him of the decision. "According to the information received from the relevant authorities, the five Russian diplomats in question were engaged in activities contrary to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations," read the press release. The five Russian diplomats have to leave North Macedonia in the next five days. Pierce Bush choked up as he discussed his grandfathers harrowing service during World War II. The man he called Gampy volunteered to be a Navy flyboy right out of high school, Pierce Bush explained. Among the youngest pilots, Lt. George H.W. Bush flew 58 combat missions and somehow survived the war, eventually becoming the 41st president of the United States. Pierce Bush wrestled with his emotion as he addressed a gathering of dignitaries, including World War II veterans and Gov. John Bel Edwards, in a ceremony at the National WWII Museum, where the enormous aircraft display was christened the George H.W. Bush Aviation Gallery. A chubby blue aircraft called an Avenger, which hung from the ceiling above the audience, was the same sort of plane that George H.W. Bush flew. The Avenger was a light bomber that carried a crew of three. In 1944, while attempting to eliminate a Japanese radio tower, George Bushs Avenger, named the The Barbara for his future wife, was hit by anti-aircraft fire. The future president managed to bail out and was eventually rescued by submarine. The other two airmen died. Pierce Bush said his grandfather thought about the two men who didnt get out every day thereafter. In some way, he said, it impacted how he lived. Just doing his duty But the fragility of life wasnt the only lesson the future world leader learned while at war. As an officer, George H.W. Bush was called upon to censor the mail sent home by the sailors on the aircraft carrier where he was stationed. In the performance of that task, the 20-year-old lieutenant became aware of the perspectives and values of Americans from various regions and stations. For a kid whod grown up in a bubble in Connecticut, as Pierce Bush put it, it was a life-changing revelation. He was a young man born of privilege, Pierce Bush said, and it altered him for the rest of his life. Much later, as George H.W. Bush led the country during the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Gulf War, the presidents service certainly informed his decisions. But, Pierce Bush said, his grandfather was the last to congratulate himself for his service. I think hed be honored by this," Pierce Bush said, "but hed be quick to point out he just did his duty. Pierce Bush, 36, is the son of Neil Bush, the brother of former President George W. Bush. He is CEO at Big Brothers Big Sisters Lone Star, a Texas-based organization that provides youth mentoring. He ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 2020. World-class attraction George H.W. Bush, who died in 2018, was the last president to have served in World War II. From its start in 2000, he was a supporter of the D-Day Museum, which eventually became the National WWII Museum. The newly named George H.W. Bush Aviation Gallery, which includes six vintage aircraft, is housed in the cavernous US Freedom Pavilion: The Boeing Center, which has been part of the museum since 2013. Gov. Edwards, who also served in the military, described George H.W. Bush as a war hero and consummate public servant. He congratulated the WWII Museum for providing Louisiana with a truly world-class attraction, and lauded Jeffery and Mindy Hildebrand of the Hildebrand Foundation for contributing $3 million to the newly named George H.W. Bush Aviation Gallery. Edwards lent a contemporary context to the discussion of WWII when he gravely mentioned that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was the largest military conflict in Europe since 1945. Apparently, the governor said, were not smart enough to learn from generations that have seen war. The swooping 150-foot awning over the WWII Museum, called "The Bollinger Canopy of Peace," has recently been lit in Ukrainian colors. HONG KONG, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Carrie Lam said on Monday that the positive COVID-19 cases found from mandatory tests in Hong Kong has shown a downward trend. Lam told a press conference on Monday that the declining number of positive COVID-19 cases found via mandatory testing might be related to the fact that people who had previously been infected with the virus were exempted from mandatory tests. The proportion of preliminary positive COVID-19 cases found in mandatory tests has continued to drop in recent weeks, in which two positive cases were found among 549 people tested in a mandatory testing operation that started on Sunday with a positivity rate of 0.4 percent, the lowest rate recorded so far, she said. Lam stressed that as people who had been infected with the virus in the past three months do not have to be tested again, the declining number may not be 100 percent accurate. Since the fifth wave of the pandemic, the HKSAR government has carried out 287 rounds of mandatory testing operations, Lam said, adding that the experience gained from the testing operations would be of reference value to the future implementation of mass mandatory COVID-19 testing. Lam believes that an effect of universal screening can be achieved if rapid antigen tests were actively used by the public, calling on those who tested positive to actively report their test results to help the Department of Health learn about the situation. Lam also said that the recent increase in the flow of people in Hong Kong is worrying, adding that while it is understandable to have anti-pandemic fatigue, the public should comply with measures so that the measures can be gradually relaxed in an orderly manner. On Monday, Hong Kong registered 3,227 new COVID-19 cases by nucleic acid tests, and 4,458 additional positive cases through self-reported rapid antigen tests, official data showed. Two years ago, the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans was fast approaching opening night of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, a show scheduled to coincide with the 2020 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival. Within days, of course, anxious precautions gave way to a full-blown pandemic. The festival was canceled, the show like every other production planned for that fateful spring was canceled, and the set gathered dust for six months in the Lower Depths Theater at Loyola University. Now that the doors are unlocked and the lights are back on, the company has returned to the stage for this years festival with a new production that unleashes the pent-up frustrations of the last two years, making up for lost time with a mad jumble of Tennessee Williams characters, plots and one-liners that feels like a head-spinning fast forward through a half-dozen plays in just 90 minutes. 'FOR WHOM THE SOUTHERN BELLE TOLLS' WHEN: through April 9 WHERE: The Lower Depths Theatre, Loyola University New Orleans TICKETS: $32 (premium seating options and student discounts available) INFO: twtheatrenola.com For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls (through April 9) is a fast-paced trio of one-act plays that parody and poke fun at the Southern stereotypes and melodramatic tropes of Williams scripts. The show is a laugh-out-loud whirlwind of ridiculousness, which at first blush might seem off-brand for a company devoted to honoring New Orleans' favorite playwright. But TWTC has largely succeeded over the years by not treating William too preciously. Finding nuance Instead of handling Williams plays like white-gloved museum curators, the company embraces the writers dark humor and expressionist tendencies in order to dig beneath the surface of the work, discovering nuance thats sometimes drowned out in other productions by over-enthusiastic actors in undershirts shouting Stella! But this time around, the cast and crew get to ham it up with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink show that features molasses-thick Southern drawls, an ever-present fainting couch and plenty of inside jokes for anyone with a passing knowledge of Williams work. The triple bill features For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls and Desire, Desire, Desire by Christopher Durang (the former a send-up of The Glass Menagerie, the latter a mashed-up parody of Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), and Swamp Gothic by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, inspired by the old Swamp Thing comics and Williams Suddenly Last Summer. Director Augustin J. Correro, who co-founded TWTC alongside sound designer Nick Shackleford, oversees the seven performers who do double and triple duty as a diverse, gender-bending cast of kooks. Sass and smarm Southern Belle is the most successful of the three pieces, anchored by the always engaging Tracey E. Collins, all sass and smarm as Amanda Wingvalley, a fading beauty who has had it with her impossible kids. Lawrence (Roman Ellis) is a dim-witted hypochondriac obsessed with his collection of glass swizzle sticks, and Tom (Matthew Raetz) keeps dashing off to the movies in search of sailors on leave. When Tom brings home Virginia, a feminine caller (Mary Langley), Amanda hopes to unload Lawrence on the unsuspecting girl, but her plans go hilariously awry. The gags in Southern Belle are big and dumb (like the incessant shouting and misunderstandings from the hard-of-hearing Virginia), and the performers go all-in on the absurdities of the script, delivering something like a Mad Magazine version of Williams first big Broadway hit. Desire is even wackier, with more outlandish spoofs and a script that offers more silliness than plot. The show opens with Blanche Dubois (Breland Leon) and Stanley Kowalski (Langley) drinking Jax beer and waiting for Stella (Stelllaaa!) who left six years ago to get Blanche a lemon Coke and never returned. Cast of 'characters' The pair are continuously interrupted by two different Maggie the Cats (Lizzy Bruce and Jefther Osario, both in silky slips and stockings, one in drag), a hapless census taker (Raetz, playing the straight man in the midst of the chaos), an interloper from Eugene ONeills The Iceman Cometh (Bruce again), and a brief appearance by Big Daddy (Collins, in a cartoonish mustache) mumbling about mendacity. The piece is more rough around the edges, with rushed lines and a comically chaotic scramble of entrances and exits but nonetheless landed lots of big laughs on opening weekend. The show closes with Swamp Gothic, about a voodoo priestess (Leon) and a Tulane frat boy (Raetz) who has traveled to the swamp to find his lost lover (Osorio). This one is a visual stunner, thanks to Leons flora-and-fauna-inspired costume (by Baylee Robertson) and an alligator puppet (by Kenneth Thompson), but the script is mostly an easy set-up that rushes to a fizzled-out conclusion. Southern Belle benefits from the highbrow pedigree of Williams meaty source material, which serves as a foil to the production's endless parade of gutter jokes and flights of comic absurdity. Its a fun kickoff to TWTCs long-delayed sixth season, though Williams purists can rest assured that the remaining shows in this seasons lineup Williams Summer and Smoke and Clothes for a Summer Hotel, both scheduled for later this year will return to the companys mission of shedding light on lesser-known and underproduced works from Williams' extensive catalog. Brad Rhines writes about theater. Contact him at bradfordrhines@gmail.com. The 2022 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival scheduling cubes were out only a few minutes before they changed. Following a Tuesday afternoon press conference at the Fair Grounds Race Course, Jazz Fest director Quint Davis was taking questions from reporters when a staff member pulled him away. The staffer showed Davis a tweet from the Foo Fighters, the stadium-filling rock band scheduled to headline Jazz Fests main stage on Sunday, May 1. The tweet said the band had canceled all upcoming concerts following drummer Taylor Hawkins death last week. Apprised of the cancellation, Davis returned to the reporters and provided an update in real time, even as TBA replaced Foo Fighters on the festivals newly posted cubes. Its a horrible, sad situation, but thats the news, Davis said. Well be replacing them and well go on. The Foo Fighters bowing out under tragic circumstances was yet another twist for Jazz Fest after two years of plans being made, then dashed, by the coronavirus pandemic. Gov. John Bel Edwards commiserated with the festivals plight. Quint, I know the decision wasnt easy to cancel the 2020 and 2021 festivals, Edwards said during the press conference. But you did the right thing. Full speed ahead As Davis made clear Tuesday exactly 30 days before Jazz Fests scheduled opening on Friday, April 29 the 2022 festival is full speed ahead. We have an important message, Davis said at the outset of the press conference. Jazz Fest is back. The release of the cubes, with 13 performing areas arrayed across the top of each days schedule, made that clear. The names of some stages have changed. Acura is no longer sponsoring the festival's largest stage. So far, no other corporate sponsor has stepped in. For now, what was the Acura Stage is referred to as the "Festival Stage." Shell, the title sponsor of the entire festival, is also specifically sponsoring the Gentilly Stage. It is now the "Shell Gentilly Stage." Interviews to move The only significant format change for the first Jazz Fest since the start of the pandemic is that the Fair Grounds grandstand will not host its usual slate of musician interviews at the Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage. Instead, a handful of Music Heritage-style interviews will take place elsewhere. Such a move is not without precedent: after Hurricane Katrina damaged the grandstand, musician interviews temporarily moved to the Lagniappe Stage inside the paddock area. With COVID still in the ether, Davis was leery of filling the grandstands indoor bleachers with fans listening to interviews and unplugged performances. Bringing all those people into the grandstand.from the beginning, that wasnt really going on, to be inside, Davis said. So we just figured well wait a year and then bring that back. Its a lot of moving parts. Otherwise, Jazz Fest should look, sound, feel, smell and taste like Jazz Fest. Big drama The release of the cubes revealed a change at the Congo Square Stage. The rapper Ludacris has been replaced by fellow rapper Busta Rhymes as the Congo Square headliner on Friday, May 6. But the Foo Fighters bowing out literally as the cubes were posting online was the days big drama. The cancellation was not entirely unexpected. The Foo Fighters were on tour in Colombia late last week when Hawkins was found dead in his hotel room. His bandmates immediately canceled their remaining South American concerts and flew home to Los Angeles. They werent scheduled to perform again until an April 29 gig at the Beale Street Music Festival in Memphis. From Memphis, they would travel to New Orleans for Jazz Fest, then move on to other shows in America and then Europe. All that is off. Hawkins was Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohls main foil onstage and a major part of the show. In his recent memoir, The Storyteller, Grohl described Hawkins as one of his closest friends. Major act Hawkins sudden death at age 50 will be difficult for his bandmates to overcome. The statement they tweeted out Tuesday read, It is with great sadness that Foo Fighters confirm the cancellation of all upcoming tour dates in light of the staggering loss of our brother Taylor Hawkins. Were sorry for and share in the disappointment that we wont be seeing one another as planned. Instead, lets take this time to grieve, to heal, to pull our loved ones close, and to appreciate all the music and memories weve made together. Work commenced immediately to book another major rock band to close the main Jazz Fest stage on the first Sunday. Davis and his production partners at AEG Presents have close relationships with many band managers and agents. Theyll tap into those resources to find a new headliner. This isnt the first time theyve had to replace a major act. When the Rolling Stones canceled in 2019, the festival booked Fleetwood Mac to step in. When Fleetwood Mac subsequently canceled, they got Widespread Panic to fill in. Years earlier, Earth Wind & Fire saved the day as a last-minute replacement when Aretha Franklin canceled the day before her scheduled performance. Before and after Tuesdays press conference at the Fair Grounds, trumpeter Kermit Ruffins performed with the Kinfolk Brass Band. Late last week, Ruffins pregnant girlfriend was struck by a bullet while standing outside the house the couple shared on Treme Street. The baby was delivered by Caesarean section and remains hospitalized as doctors treat injuries caused by bullet fragments. In the wake of the tragedy, Jazz Fest staffers reached out to Ruffins to see if he still wanted to perform at Tuesdays event. He did. He wanted to be here, Davis said. Parish presidents from across the New Orleans metro area joined together Tuesday to raise alarm over the stupidity of new flood insurance rates starting to take effect this week that will lead to steep hikes for many, warning the changes could devastate communities and calling for a delay in implementation. Louisiana is set to see a major impact from the drastic overhaul of the nations flood insurance program, in part because it has the highest participation rate in the program of any state. The new rates begin to take effect for existing policyholders on Friday, though not all at once. The states roughly 500,000 policyholders - comprising 10% of the nations total will see the start of the change with their next renewal after March 31. Increases are capped at 18% annually, but many are expected to take years to reach their target rate at that percentage, and in those cases, compounded hikes will add up to large numbers over time. Sticker shock is already being seen with new policies, which began to be priced at the new rates in October and are not subject to the 18% limit. Residents, realtors and insurers are reporting major increases, with premiums at certain properties jumping from around $600 per year to $3,000 or more. Yet few understand the changes in the highly complex new system and that is a major point of contention. Parish leaders from Jefferson, Lafourche, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, St. Tammany, Tangipahoa, Terrebonne and St. Bernard, along with a representative from New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrells office and state Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon, gathered for a news conference in Metairie to issue the warning. Greater New Orleans Inc., the regional economic development group that has been working to raise awareness of the issue, organized the effort. The organizations CEO, Michael Hecht, said they are seeking a delay until further information is provided, plus assistance for those who cant afford the increases and more transparency. St. Bernard Parish President Guy McInnis pointed to rebuilding efforts since Hurricane Katrina, particularly fast growth in Arabi, where last weeks tornado hit. He said the new flood rates would be a reason to leave because of the added cost of buying a home. Its stupidity, and we need to fix that, he said. The new system, known as Risk Rating 2.0, marks the biggest change to how the National Flood Insurance Program sets rates in its history. Donelon said he does not understand how factors such as levees and elevations are being accounted for when setting rates in the new system. A complex algorithm is being used, and FEMA, which oversees the program, has been heavily criticized for a lack of transparency surrounding it. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up The states congressional delegation has long been seeking to delay the changes and further limit the cap on annual increases. Another bill was introduced this week, with Sens. Bill Cassidy and John Kennedy among the sponsors, that would allow policyholders to remain at their current rates until FEMA can provide further transparency and accountability. In the House, U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge, has been among those seeking to stop the increases. The idea behind the changes is to make the program fairer by accurately factoring in the risk of each individual property. While rates were set in the past based largely on a system of maps, Risk Rating 2.0 takes into account the individual characteristics of each home, including distance from water, construction type, elevation and cost to rebuild. FEMA says the existing system resulted in older, modest homes essentially subsidizing premiums for newer, expensive vacation houses, and Risk Rating 2.0 will correct that. It will also allow the deeply indebted NFIP to price policies more in line with private sector actuarial practices, helping it become more solvent. But the states political leaders, along with residents who have seen some of the increases, warn of unintended consequences for south Louisiana, where everyone lives near water of some kind. In certain cases, living near water may be a good thing in this part of the country, such as on the natural ridges near the Mississippi River. It is unclear how FEMA takes such characteristics into account. FEMA has only published data on monthly increases and decreases for the first year. That masks the long-term impact, because of the 18% cap. Using data provided so far, an analysis by The Times-Picayune | The Advocate shows that around half of the states policyholders are expected to see phased-in increases that will total more than 129%. About one in 10 could see their premiums jump by more than four times their current amount, while around 20% are expected to see decreases. People dont realize whats about to happen to them, said Jefferson Parish President Cynthia Lee Sheng, whose parish represents about 20% of the states policies. She said she believes many will simply drop coverage if they live in zones where it is not required. They're going to be going against their own financial interest, but because they can't afford it, said Lee Sheng. A woman who bonded out of St. Tammany Parish Correctional Center on Monday afternoon stole an idling car from outside a fast food restaurant within an hour of her release, the St. Tammany Parish Sheriffs Office said. A New Jersey resident, she sustained serious injuries after crashing the car during a police chase. Sarah Connors, 27, had been booked into jail by Mandeville Police on misdemeanor theft and drug charges. In 2019, Connors had pleaded guilty to possession of Schedule I, II, III and IV narcotics, according to New Jersey court records, and sentenced to no more than 364 days in prison. Connors was released from jail at 3:45 p.m. Monday. At 4:45, the St. Tammany Parish Sheriffs Office responded to a report of a red Chevrolet Camaro stolen near the intersection of U.S. 190 and La. 25 in Covington. They spotted the vehicle traveling south on U.S. 190 near Holiday Boulevard and gave chase, police said. Connors sideswiped another car and crashed the stolen vehicle off the Fairway Drive exit, police said. Police did not say how fast Connors was driving when she crashed. Emergency Medical Services took her to a hospital, where she remains. No updates about her condition were immediately available. Charges are pending. One day before the Orleans Parish School Board plans to name the new leader for New Orleans public schools, the three finalists for the superintendent's job answered questions Tuesday from the School Board and the public. Candidates Avis Williams, Marshall Tuck and Andre Wright were asked questions that touched on their vision for the future, leadership style, diversity, equity and inclusion and how they would work to overcome major issues that students in New Orleans face, such as poverty. The candidates were interviewed by the board earlier Tuesday. In the evening they attended a public meeting at George Washington Carver High School. Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr., who has led the school system since 2015, has announced he plans to leave when his contract expires at the end of the June. The three finalists were selected from 50 applicants. Williams, superintendent of Selma, Alabama, Public Schools since 2017, told the School Board she hopes to address equity issues so student performance is not predictable based on students' ZIP codes. "I want to make sure scholars [who] look like me know what their opportunities are," said Williams, who is Black. Williams is a former Army sergeant who taught English and physical education before moving into to administrative roles. She likened the struggles students face in Selma, including poverty and crime, to those in New Orleans. She said she hoped to prioritize mental health of students. She said she is a proponent of early childhood education, and that she instituted Born Ready University, a program that provided literacy assistance and books to parents of Selma children younger than 3 years. Williams also is a finalist for schools superintendent in Montgomery, Alabama. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Tuck leads Great Public Schools Now, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public schools in Los Angeles. He said his Catholic upbringing and decades spent working in public education serving low-income students and students of color in Los Angeles have largely influenced him to strive to bring quality education to all students in a system. He said no school system has met that goal, but that he thinks NOLA Public Schools could be the first. Tuck was head of Green Dot charter schools in Los Angeles from 2002 to 2006 and Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a nonprofit that took over low-performing public schools, from 2007 to 2013. He mentioned several successful programs he helped implement to support parents and students, including a Saturday "parent college." Tuck said that if New Orleans charters worked in a more unified way and shared resources, such as transportation and teacher recruitment, then more money could be put toward students and programming. "We can't just be a federation of schools," Tuck said. "We need to work collectively." Wright, senior vice president of educational transformation at MGT Consulting, a group that works with school systems and other agencies, said he has experience at all levels, from substitute teacher to principal and chief academic officer for Aurora Public Schools in Aurora, Colorado. I understand what impacts decisions have at every level, he said. Wright said he hopes to addressed inequalities in NOLA Public Schools through a more equitable allocation of resources, and he stressed the importance of communication between parents and schools. He said he can glean information about a school system from its calendar, as it shows whether teachers are given enough time to plan and develop professionally. When asked to describe a successful school, Wright said, One that provides every child [whom] it opens the door for just an educational experience that youd think you have to pay for anywhere else. Watch the full interviews. Hurricane forecasters on Friday morning were tracking four tropical disturbances, including the remnants of Tropical Depression Nicholas over Louisiana. Update: Hurricane forecasters tracking Peter, Rose and remnants of Odette Two of the disturbances in the Atlantic are likely to develop into tropical depressions within five days. It's too soon to if they could be a threat to the Gulf of Mexico. The next available storm name is Odette if any of the systems strengthen into a tropical storm. Here's what to know about the tropics as of 10 a.m. from the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center. Remnants of Nicholas What's left of Tropical Depression Nicholas was drifting over Louisiana on Friday morning. As of 10 a.m., the remnants were about 50 miles northwest of Alexandria and about 65 miles southeast of Shreveport. The system has picked up a little speed and is now moving north at 7 mph, forecasters said. It's moving northwest into western Louisiana, and it's expected to continue this motion into Saturday. It has winds of 15 mph and is expected to continue to degrade in the next 24 to 36 hours. Flash flood watch in effect A flash flood watch is in effect for south Louisiana through 7 p.m. Friday. A watch means conditions are favorable for flooding. It does not mean flooding will occur, but it is possible. A warning is issued when flash flooding is imminent or occurring. The storm is expected to produce an additional 1 to 3 inches of rainfall through the end of the weekend. In some storms, the rain could fall at 1 to 2 inches per hour. Read more about the flash flood watch. So far this week, southeast Louisiana has had five to 10 inches of rain, according to the National Weather Service, with pockets getting up to 12 inches. Some places across the Gulf coast could end up with 14 inches by the end of the week. Louisiana officials warned that debris from Hurricane Ida could block storm drains, so flooding could occur more easily than usual. Residents should check and clear their catch basins and gutters, officials said, and stay off the roads when a round of heavy rainfall is moving through. Read the 10 a.m. advisory. The next one is at 4 p.m. Live radar Several rounds of thunderstorms and showers are expected across the Gulf coast through the weekend. Tropical depression likely to form A tropical depression is likely to form this weekend or early next week from a system in the Atlantic, hurricane forecasters said. The system is between the Lesser Antilles and the Cabo Verde Islands and is moving northwest at 15 to 20 mph, forecasters said. It has a 70% chance of developing into at least a tropical depression within five days. Get hurricane updates in your inbox Sign up for updates on storm forecasts, tracks and more. e-mail address * Sign Up It's too soon to tell if it could be a threat to Louisiana. Tropical depression or storm possible A short-lived tropical depression or tropical storm is likely to form Friday or Saturday off the East Coast in the Atlantic, forecasters said. As of Friday morning, the system was about 150 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. It's moving northeast at 15 mph. It has a 70% chance of developing into at least a tropical depression within five days. Regardless of development, this system could bring high surf to portions of the southeast and mid-Atlantic U.S. coasts through the weekend, forecasters said. Disturbance in the Atlantic Forecasters are tracking another disturbance in the far eastern Atlantic Ocean. It's a couple hundred miles southeast of the Cabo Verde Islands. It's forecast to move northwest at 5 to 10 mph over the far eastern Atlantic. Environmental conditions are forecast to be marginally conducive, and development, if any, of this system should be slow to occur over the next few days, forecasters said. It has a 20% chance of developing into at least a tropical depression within five days. Read the full outlook. Next available name The next available names are Odette and Peter. Systems are named when they strengthen into tropical storms. Storms Ana, Bill, Claudette, Danny, Elsa, Fred, Grace, Henri, Ida, Julian, Kate, Larry, Mindy and Nicholas formed earlier this season. Elsa, Grace, Ida and Larry strengthened into hurricanes. Last year, there were so many storms that forecasters ran out of names and had to use the Greek alphabet. It's only the second time in recorded history that the Greek names had been used. Things have changed for this season. If needed, forecasters will use a list of supplemental storm names instead of the Greek names. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 through Nov. 30. Storm categories The categories, in order of increasing strength, are tropical depression, tropical storm and hurricane (categories 1 through 5). On the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, the wind categories are: Tropical storm: 39 to 73 mph Category 1 hurricane: 74 to 95 mph Category 2 hurricane: 96 to 110 mph Category 3 hurricane (major hurricane): 111 to 129 mph Category 4 hurricane: 130-156 mph Category 5 hurricane: 157 mph and higher Don't miss a storm update this hurricane season. Sign up for breaking newsletters. Follow our Hurricane Center Facebook page. ANKARA, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Turkish security forces have killed four members of the Kurdish militia People's Protection Units (YPG) in northern Syria, the Turkish defense ministry said Tuesday. The YPG members were "neutralized" when they were in preparation for an "attack" against Turkey's Operation Peace Spring zone in northern Syria, the ministry tweeted. Turkish authorities often use the term "neutralize" to imply terrorists are killed, wounded, or captured in security operations. Turkey's forces and the YPG members often exchange fire on the Syrian border, and the tension has increased in the region since early January when three Turkish soldiers were killed in a bomb explosion on Turkey's border with Syria. The Turkish army launched Operation Euphrates Shield in 2016, Operation Olive Branch in 2018, Operation Peace Spring in 2019, and Operation Spring Shield in 2020 in northern Syria. Turkish authorities say the operations aim to eliminate terror threats against Turkey and provide a safe zone that will facilitate the return of Syrian refugees to their homes. Ankara sees the YPG as the Syrian branch of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the EU, has been rebelling against the Turkish government for more than three decades. The fight has claimed more than 40,000 lives. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks to the press outside the Security Council at the UN headquarters in New York, on March 28, 2022. Guterres on Monday launched an initiative for a humanitarian cease-fire in Ukraine. (Xinhua/Xie E) UNITED NATIONS, March 28(Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday launched an initiative for a humanitarian cease-fire in Ukraine. "Today I am announcing that in the exercise of my good offices, I have asked Martin Griffiths, the coordinator of our humanitarian work worldwide, immediately to explore with the parties involved the possible agreements and arrangements for a humanitarian cease-fire in Ukraine," he told reporters. The one-month-old conflict between Ukraine and Russia has led to the senseless loss of thousands of lives, the displacement of 10 million people, the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure, and skyrocketing food and energy prices worldwide. This must stop, said Guterres. He stressed that there must be a political solution. "The solution to this humanitarian tragedy is not humanitarian. It is political. I am, therefore, appealing for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire to allow for progress in serious political negotiations, aimed at reaching a peace agreement based on the principles of the United Nations Charter," he said. A cessation of hostilities will allow essential humanitarian aid to be delivered and enable civilians to move around safely. It will save lives, prevent suffering, and protect civilians, he said. "I hope a cease-fire will also help to address the global consequences of this war, which risk compounding the deep hunger crisis in many developing countries that already lack fiscal space to invest in their recovery from the pandemic, and now face soaring food and energy costs." Guterres made a strong appeal to the parties to the conflict and the international community as a whole to work with the United Nations for peace in Ukraine. UN humanitarian agencies and partners have reached nearly 900,000 people, mainly in eastern Ukraine, with food, shelter, blankets, medicine, bottled water, and hygiene supplies in the past month, he said. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks to the press outside the Security Council at the UN headquarters in New York, on March 28, 2022. Guterres on Monday launched an initiative for a humanitarian cease-fire in Ukraine. (Xinhua/Xie E) Tesla owners at trafficked Supercharger network locations in Australia such as Broadway in Sydney Pacific Fair at Broadbeach on the Gold Coast, or Knockrow in the Northern Rivers region of NSW, have their battery charge level automatically set to 80%. They can still override and charge to full, though, as Tesla employed the measure to avoid congestion. 4 Reviews , News , CPU , GPU , Articles , Columns , Other "or" search relation. 3D Printing , 5G , Accessory , AI , Alder Lake , AMD , Android , Apple , ARM , Audio , Benchmark , Biotech , Business , Camera , Cannon Lake , Cezanne (Zen 3) , Charts , Chinese Tech , Chromebook , Coffee Lake , Comet Lake , Console , Convertible / 2-in-1 , Cryptocurrency , Cyberlaw , Deal , Desktop , E-Mobility , Education , Exclusive , Fail , Foldable , Gadget , Galaxy Note , Galaxy S , Gamecheck , Gaming , Geforce , Google Pixel , GPU , How To , Ice Lake , Intel , Intel Evo , Internet of Things (IoT) , iOS , iPad , iPad Pro , iPhone , Jasper Lake , Lakefield , Laptop , Launch , Leaks / Rumors , Linux / Unix , List , Lucienne (Zen 2) , MacBook , Mini PC , Monitor , MSI , OnePlus , Opinion , Phablet , Radeon , Raptor Lake , Renoir , Review Snippet , Rocket Lake , Ryzen (Zen) , Science , Security , Single-Board Computer (SBC) , Smart Home , Smartphone , Smartwatch , Software , Storage , Tablet , ThinkPad , Thunderbolt , Tiger Lake , Touchscreen , Ultrabook , Virtual Reality (VR) / Augmented Reality (AR) , Wearable , Wi-Fi 7 , Windows , Workstation , XPS , Zen 3 (Vermeer) , Zen 4 Ticker Tesla Australia has limited the use of its busiest Supercharger locations in a rather ingenious way by only allowing drivers to pump their battery full of electrons until an 80% level is reached. Modern Li-ion batteries can charge very quickly to that level, but from 80%-100% the charging speeds slow down to a trickle. That precaution is in order to avoid battery chemistry degradation or, worse, thermal runaway. That is why instead of waiting for the Tesla driver before them to spend their sweet time at the Supercharger getting their battery to full, at peak locations in the Australian network their cars default to an 80% battery level with the proper warning by Tesla. Here's a list of the Supercharger locations in Australia where the charging limitation has been spotted: Broadway in Sydney Pacific Fair at Broadbeach on the Gold Coast Knockrow in the Northern Rivers region of NSW Despite that the wait times for a new Tesla have now spanned all the way to 2023 in Australia, Elon Musk's brand is still the most popular EV maker there, accounting for 60% of electric vehicles on Australian roads. The Australian Supercharger network is thus quickly becoming heavily congested at the most popular locations and one solution that Tesla found was to simply limit the time spent by each diver at the most heavily trafficked charging stations. Tesla owners in Australia began getting the charge limitation warnings en masse just recently, and have been sharing it on social media every since. Some leaving on longer road trips balked at the limitation, while others addressed it with understanding; moreover, it turns out that the charging restriction can still be overridden should the driver choose to do so. Get the Tesla Motors 24' Cable Wall Connector on Amazon BEIJING, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday had an interview with media after concluding his trips to Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nepal. Wang said his trip to South Asia came at a time when the spillover effect of the Ukraine crisis has been constantly spreading and world peace and development are facing new challenges. The senior Chinese diplomat said China deeply felt the strong desire of South Asian countries to maintain the hard-won peace and tranquility in the region and accelerate post-pandemic economic recovery as well as their hope to strengthen strategic communication and deepen mutually beneficial cooperation with China. The visit consolidated the traditional friendship between China and South Asian countries, enhanced mutual understanding, deepened strategic mutual trust, clarified key cooperation directions and areas, and gathered broad consensus on solidarity, coordination and common development under new circumstances, he added. During his trip, Wang attended the Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the first time for a Chinese foreign minister to be invited for such a meeting, during which China and Islamic countries reached important consensus on a wide range of issues. The two sides agreed to deepen strategic communication and coordination, continue to work in solidarity in fighting against COVID-19, deepen cooperation in vaccine production and medicine research and development, jointly build the Belt and Road with high quality, and strengthen communication and coordination on implementing the Global Development Initiative, Wang noted. The two sides also agreed that it is of great urgency to promote a just settlement of regional hotspot issues and that the Palestinian question should not be forgotten or marginalized, he said, adding they both believe it is necessary to guide and promote the overall unity of developing countries, advocate true multilateralism, abandon the Cold War mentality, resist bloc confrontation and safeguard the common interests of developing countries. Wang also mentioned that he has reached important new consensus with the Pakistani government and military leaders on deepening strategic cooperation between the two countries under the current international and regional circumstances. China and Pakistan will carry forward their all-weather friendship, and their traditional friendship is unbreakable and rock solid, Wang said, adding the two countries also agreed to deepen all-round cooperation, and China welcomes Pakistan's deeper participation in China's new development pattern. They two countries vowed to safeguard international equity and justice, as well as agreed to practice true multilateralism, firmly oppose acts of bullying by powers, and resist the resurgence of the Cold War mentality. His visit to Afghanistan has three main objectives, including renewing the traditional friendship between the two peoples, observing the administration of the Afghan interim government, and promoting mutual understanding and building a foundation of mutual trust with the Afghan side through face-to-face exchanges, Wang said. The visit was intended to send a clear signal that the Afghan issue remains important on the current international peace and security agenda, especially for Afghanistan's neighboring countries, said the Chinese foreign minister, urging all parties to shoulder their due responsibilities and play a constructive role in this respect. In terms of China-India relations, Wang noted that the two countries are partners rather than rivals, and should help each other succeed instead of undercutting each other. As mature and rational neighbors, China and India should place the border issue in an appropriate position in bilateral relations, and should not let it define or even hinder the overall development of bilateral relations, he said. During his visit to India, Wang said he has most keenly felt that both sides agreed to adhere to the important consensus of "the two countries are not threats to each other but opportunities for each other's development" reached by the two heads of state, properly solve practical problems of common concern, handle and manage differences over the years, and promote the steady and sustainable development of bilateral ties. On his visit to Nepal, Wang said the two sides agreed that mutual understanding and support is not only a tradition of China-Nepal friendship, but also the underpinning of the strategic partnership of the two countries. The two sides also agreed to speed up the construction of the Belt and Road, ensure smooth access of points of entry by land between the two countries, discuss cross-border cooperation and gradually establish a multi-dimensional trans-Himalayan connectivity network, he continued. The two countries reiterated that they will uphold the principle of non-interference in internal affairs and the basic norms governing international relations, resist unilateralism and oppose power politics, Wang added. Noting the spillovers of the Russia-Ukraine conflict have been rippling across the globe, Wang said the general consensuses of relevant countries are as follows. Disputes should be settled peacefully through dialogue, and neither war or sanctions are good ways. The purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter should be upheld, and the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries should be safeguarded. All countries should advocate the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, safeguard the right of all countries to pursue an independent foreign policy, oppose political pressure and forced side taking, he continued, adding it is necessary to maintain the hard-won peace, stability and development in the region, resist the temptation to introduce bloc confrontation and create turbulence and tension in Asia. We use cookies to understand how you use our site and to improve your experience. This includes personalizing content and advertising. By continuing to use our site, you accept our use of cookies, revised Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Horizon Bank President James Neff will retire March 31 after 22 years with the company. The Michigan City-based bank is casting a nationwide search for his successor. Jim has been a valued leader since joining Horizon more than two decades ago and integral to our growth from just $400 million in assets in 1999 to the more than $7 billion-asset financial institution Horizon is today, Horizon Bank Chairman and CEO Craig Dwight said. Jims commitment to this company, his colleagues, customers and the communities we serve have been second to none. On behalf of all of us at Horizon, I thank him for his service, leadership and friendship. Neff was named president in 2018 and has more than 44 years of experience in the financial sector. He started his career as a banker in 1978 with First of America Bank in LaPorte. He went on to serve as vice president of mortgage warehousing for Civitas Bank, which was acquired by Cincinnati-based super-regional bank Fifth Third. He joined Horizon Bank in 1999 as senior vice president of mortgage warehouse lending. He was promoted to executive vice president in 2004. As president, he has overseen Horizon's retail banking, community reinvestment, retail mortgage, warehouse lending and consumer lending Horizon has completed 15 mergers and entered 12 new markets during his tenure. Last year, he led his team to record mortgage production. He's been honored with a Leaders in Banking Excellence Award from the Indiana Bankers Association. The Purdue University North Central graduate has been active with many community organizations, including the Purdue University Northwest Sinai Forum Advisory Board, the Michigan City Rotary Club, the Indiana Bankers Associations Forty Year Club and the Greater LaPorte County United Way. He plans to split time between Indiana and Florida during his retirement, during which he hopes to spend more time with family. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The business news you need Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. GARY After years of operating with a budget deficit, Gary Community School Corp. closed 2021 with an annual surplus. Gary was operating at a $1.7 million annual deficit at the end of 2020. One year later, it had a $2 million annual surplus. Total debt has decreased from $104 million in 2017 to $71 million in 2021. This represents the first step toward a stable foundation for financial sustainability, said Justin McAdam, chairman of the state's Distressed Unit Appeals Board, which oversees Gary's public schools. He noted the achievement at DUAB's Monday meeting. Reaching a surplus is quite an accomplishment, and you all should be proud of this," he told school administrators. "There are many who played a role in reaching this milestone, in particular the Gary community and voters who voted to raise their own taxes to provide greater financial support to this district. Gary Community School Corp. was taken over by the state five years ago, following severe financial issues. When we set out on this task in 2017 I dont know that anybody thought we could accomplish financial solvency at that point," McAdam said. "The picture was grim and the picture was daunting. It was unclear what the path forward was at that time. It is a tremendous achievement to have gotten there as fast as we have." Gary can shed the classification of distressed political subdivision if the school corporation maintains financial solvency for a period of at least two years, institutes a five-year fiscal plan that will maintain financial solvency and meet any other conditions defined by DUAB. Those standards follow pushes from legislators to move Gary back to local control. The school corporation regained local control of its special education services in September after nearly a decade of oversight by the Indiana Department of Education. The district saw increased enrollment in the 2020-21 academic year, bringing the total number of students to 4,445 as of February 2021. For the 10 years prior to state control, GCSC lost 699 students a year on average. However, the Indiana Department of Educations fall 2020-21 transfer report shows that 6,990 students in Gary attended a school outside of the public school system that school year. Of the 11,370 students who live in the district boundaries, 61% are at a charter school or other private school. During the DUAB meeting, several members expressed their concern about the state control of GCSC and how it is operated. One major concern was academics, as well as the conditions at West Side Leadership Academy, where students have been protesting over the school environment in the last few weeks. DUAB members did then discuss academic progress, emphasizing that without financial stability, it is difficult to see success. Their presentation said lacking financial stability made students and families hesitant to enroll, as well as hesitancy from staff to come. Vendors were unsure if they would be paid and did not want to partner with the district. And, the district could not update curriculum, and staff often had to bring their own supplies. In addition, they said support programs like services for students with special needs were unavailable. The districts action plan said they are focusing on several avenues, including instructional learning, a clear and focused mission, a safe and orderly environment, creating a climate of high expectations, the opportunity to learn, monitoring student progress and positive home-school relations. In reading, test scores show that as of fall 2021, 10% of students were at or above grade level at GCSC. In winter 2022, 20% were at or above grade level. In fall 2021, less than 10% of students were at or above grade level in math, and in fall 2022, nearly 10% were at or above grade level in math. GCSC has many goals it hopes to achieve academically. By spring 2023, it wants 80% of K-8 students to meet or exceed reading growth targets and 70% of K-8 students to meet or exceed math growth targets. It also wants 75% of 9-12 grade students to show growth on the reading common formative assessment in English language arts and 70% on the math common formative assessment. In addition, Garys ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funding primarily focuses on academics, with more than half of it being allocated toward instructional purposes. Expenditures include awarding staff for reaching performance related metrics, compensating staff to extend each school day by one hour, intensive professional development, a new science and social studies curriculum and extending summer school to serve students in K-12. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. MUNSTER A Munster High School senior was named Indiana High School Journalist of the Year by the Indiana High School Press Association. Atarah Israel is editor in chief of the Crier, Munster High Schools student newspaper. She has been on staff for all four years. The award recipient is selected from digital portfolios of work submitted to IHSPA. Israel earned a $1,000 stipend and is eligible for scholarship funds of up to $3,000 in the national competition, which concludes at the Journalism Education Association/National Scholastic Press Association Spring National High School Journalism Convention from April 7 to 9 in California. Israel was surprised to find out she had won the award. She said she was in class and IHSPA came in with a camera and a plaque. This is one of many awards Israel has won while in high school. She has won the ISPA Rowena Harvey Award in Division II for features coverage, honorable mention for design of the year from NSPA and division AA excellent feature story for the Ball State J-Day Student Contest. She is also a two-time winner of Excellence in Feature Writing from JEA. Israel said her time on the Crier has had a tremendous impact on her life. She said that she admired the student who was editor in chief her freshman year and that it led to her joining the staff. Israel said the Crier has had a big impact on her leadership skills and how she interacts with others. In the time since Israel has been on staff, the Crier has covered several major stories at Munster High School, such as the impacts of COVID-19 on students. They have also added a significant online presence, something that was not in place when Israel joined. Israel said she has really enjoyed being on the Crier's staff and still keeps in touch with a lot of former staff members, particularly from her sophomore year. I really enjoyed writing stories and continuing Criers legacy of putting out good stories and putting out good reporting, Israel said. She said that without the Crier, her experience in high school would have been completely different and that it helped mold her personality. Sarah-Anne Lanman, the publications teacher who is in charge of the Crier, said each editor in chief guides that years issues. Shes a super strong and kind leader. She knows what she wants and how to help people get there, Lanman said. She said Israel has led a lot of brave and strong reporting. Im just really grateful for the experience overall. Crier has really impacted me as a student, person and as a journalist, Israel said. Without it, my high school experience would have been less colorful. Next year, Israel will attend Northwestern University and plans to study journalism. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. BEIJING, March 29 (Xinhua) -- A meeting of the "China-U.S.-Russia +" consultation mechanism on the Afghan issue will be held during the third foreign ministers meeting among the neighboring countries of Afghanistan in Tunxi, Anhui Province. It will take place from March 30 to 31, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Tuesday. Spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a daily news briefing that Yue Xiaoyong, a special envoy for Afghan affairs of the Chinese foreign ministry, will chair the meeting. Special representatives for the Afghan issue of the United States, Russia, and Pakistan will attend the meeting. Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will collectively meet with representatives of all parties. "China, the United States, Russia, and Pakistan have a substantial influence on the Afghan issue," Wang Wenbin said. Wang noted that China hopes this meeting will work positively in concert with the third foreign ministers meeting among the neighboring countries of Afghanistan to consolidate the consensus of all parties on the Afghan issue. He added that China also hopes to encourage regional nations and the international community to increase support for Afghanistan's peaceful reconstruction to help it achieve peace, stability, and development soon. GARY A man fled on foot late Monday morning after attempting to rob the Centier Bank at 650 S. Lake St. in the city's Miller neighborhood, Gary police Cmdr. Jack Hamady said. The attempted robbery occurred shortly before 10 a.m. and the man left the bank without any money, Hamady said. A white male wearing dark jeans and Carhartt jacket entered the bank and pointed his finger during the robbery attempt, police said. He did not display a gun. The man fled to the west after leaving the bank. Come back to nwi.com for updates as they become available. Love 1 Funny 3 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 2 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. EAST CHICAGO A federal judge has sided with East Chicago firefighters in their dispute with the mayor over their work schedules. U.S. District Court Judge Philip P. Simon issued a preliminary injunction this week ordering city officials to return the fire department to a schedule of 24 hours on duty followed by 48 hours off duty. The judge concluded firefighters will likely prove Mayor Anthony Copeland imposed a punishing swing shift schedule on the firefighters in retaliation for their union endorsing his political opponents. The judge said the firefighters have tentatively proved the mayor was denying the firefighters their First Amendment right to lobby the Common Council into siding with the union. It is a victory for the International Association of Firefighters Local 365, who have been fighting the mayor for two and a half years over better working schedules, pay and benefits. The judge is giving city officials until April 18 to reinstate the 24 hours on/48 hours off schedule for the firefighters. Copeland couldnt be reached immediately for comment. Attorneys and firefighters union members embroiled in the lawsuit declined immediate comment. The judge stated in a 29-page opinion that he is returning the city to a 24/48-hour shift because that is the normal work schedule for most of the nation. It was for East Chicago, too, until 2019, when the mayor imposed a swing shift. It has required firefighters to be at their duty stations for eight hours each on three consecutive days, starting an early morning the first day, an afternoon the second day and then an evening shift, before getting their fourth day off. The judge said the firefighters union has been unsuccessful in negotiating better working hours, but the city has denied them a collective bargaining agreement. The firefighters then went to the Common Council to request an ordinance restoring their old work shift in late 2019. However, the mayor vetoed the ordinance, and his lawyers convinced a panel of state court judges in April 2021 that he, and not the council, had the sole authority to set the firefighters' work schedules. The firefighters union then sued the city in U.S. District Court in May 2021, arguing to Judge Simon that the mayors work schedule violated the union members' right to free speech and political activity. The union argues the mayor imposed the swing shift after they supported his opponent, John Aguilera, in the 2019 Democratic primary election. Although voters reelected Copeland that year to his third term in office, voters also elected six council candidates supporting the unions position for their old work schedule and better pay. The mayor counters that the 2019 swing shift schedule is needed to save city taxpayers the higher costs that the union pay demands would incur. The judge heard arguments and evidence from the two sides in early October 2021 before ruling this week that the city has offered no financial proof the mayors swing shift saves any money. He said the firefighters gave compelling testimony of the harm the swing shift imposes, depriving them of sufficient rest and imposing a nearly impossible burden of finding childcare. The new schedule has been deleterious to their health and well-being. Because the schedule changes each day, firefighters cannot get on a normal sleep schedule, the judge stated. The judge further said the firefighters proved the swing shift was the mayors political payback. The ruling stated that firefighters secretly recorded a 2019 meeting between firefighters union President David Mata and now-retired Fire Chief Anthony Serna. The judge said Serna warned the union at the meeting that the firefighters could only avoid the swing shift by halting their cooperation with the Common Council for higher pay. The firefighters said their department is now in the bottom half of firefighter pay throughout Northwest Indiana. Low pay and the swing shift have shrunk the department staffing from 66 to 44 line firefighters, the union argued to the judge. Judge Simon concluded, On this record, the firefighters have a high likelihood of success on the (cases) merits. The harm to the firefighters greatly outweighs any alleged financial harm to East Chicago. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 1 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. PORTER The new chairman of the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District's Board of Trustees led his first board meeting Monday as construction season ramps up on the district's South Shore Line Double Track and West Lake Corridor projects. Michael Smith, who automatically became NICTD chairman when he succeeded Joe McGuinness as commissioner of the Indiana Department of Transportation last month, thanked NICTD administrators for getting him up to speed on railroad operations and the capital projects as Double Track's impact begins to be felt along the line between Chesterton and Michigan City. The stretch between Dune Park Station and Michigan City is the focus of work in the project's first phase, railroad President and General Manager Michael Noland said. From Dune Park, "drive east towards Michigan City along the route. You will see construction equipment and activity up and down the right of way, all the way to Michigan Boulevard in Michigan City," he said. "There is a trailer city in the Pines on the old Illiana Block factory, 24-25 trailers, full of construction managers, engineers, construction personnel, where they mobilize every day to go out on the railroad." The work means "Dune Park is the hub of operations right now, rather than Michigan City," Noland said. Passengers are bused between those stations; any traveling farther east board trains in Michigan City to South Bend. Light maintenance can be performed at Dune Park and Gary Metro stations, with tracks available for the electric-powered cars to be pulled by diesel to the Michigan City maintenance yard for required work there. Preparatory work is continuing along the line, with site and utility work in station areas and along the streets in Michigan City. Design work on the West Lake Corridor project is about three-quarters done, with construction in the "next month or two," Noland said at Monday's meeting. The F.H. Paschen/Ragnar Benson joint venture managing the project has reported removal and salvage of existing Monon Railroad rail and ties started in February; initial substructure work for bridges began in February near the future Hammond Gateway Station; and earthwork and grading will begin in May near the future South Hammond and Hammond Gateway Stations. The current construction schedule calls for revenue service for Double Track to begin in spring 2024 and on the new West Lake line in spring 2025. Learn more about the Double Track NWI and West Lake Corridor projects online at doubletrack-nwi.com and nictdwestlake.com. Also at Monday's meeting, the NICTD trustees approved: the purchase of railroad ties for regular work this year for about $297,000 from Natural Wood Solutions of Nettleton, Mississippi. the purchase of high-speed turnouts to a project at the Hegewisch Station that will allow South Shore trains to cut about 1.5 minutes per stop. The turnouts will be purchased from Voestalpine Railway Systems Nortrak, which is also manufacturing turnouts for the Double Track and West Lake projects in Chicago Heights. a contract with Piper Networks of San Diego for just under $850,000 to assist in oversight of the Positive Train Control upgrades required by the Double Track project. That contract requires Regional Development Authority and Indiana Finance Authority approval as part of the Double Track governance agreement. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. PORTAGE A pastor who had just returned from Poland told of shedding a lot of tears during his first week on the border with Ukraine. Pastor John Lowe, of New Life Church in Warsaw, Indiana, had traveled to Warsaw, Poland, to do what he could to aid refugees from Ukraine. I spent two weeks on the border, he said during a prayer vigil held Monday night at City Point Church. Pastors from across Portage led prayers at the service. Lowe said he spent his time there helping people get food and shelter. On the border, he also was making sure people werent separated from their families by human traffickers. The enemy also takes advantage of anything and everything as well, he said. I think of myself as a tough guy, but I spent a lot of time crying that first week as Lowe held people seeking refuge, he said. Lowe offered encouragement to prayer warriors. Folks, when we stand together, miracles happen, he said. You and I make the difference when we give and when we love and when we pray." A week ago Saturday, Lowe received a phone call asking him to help free a pastor and his wife being detained and interrogated by Russians. Through his congressmans office, Lowe got an emergency phone number for the American embassy in Warsaw, Poland. Nine days later on Sunday, the pastor was finally released. He was arrested simply because he was a Christian pastor who was pro-Ukraine, Lowe said. Ukraine and Poland are the two most religious countries in all of Europe. Theyre jewels of Christianity, he said. When refugees flee their homeland, its because people are destroying everything youve ever known, he said. Anger is a natural reaction in that circumstance. I was getting pretty fed up, he said. But then he remembered the verse, Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. Jesus taught the importance of loving enemies, he added. Ill choose neighborly love over predatorial hate, he said. My faith isnt shaken, but my patience and kindness are, he said. City Point Church Pastor Mike Hendon was heartened by the turnout Monday night. We didnt come to pontificate. We came to pray, he said. The pastors meet here in this city every Thursday to pray over the city, he said. Along with Mayor Sue Lynch, the pastors planned Monday nights prayer vigil. I believe very strongly in the power of prayer. Its worked for me, she said. If youve been anywhere but a cave, youve seen the pictures. You know whats going on, Hendon said. "Refugees are leaving family members and homes, not knowing if theyll ever see them again." We feel sad. We feel emotional. Our hearts are very heavy with whats happening, Lynch said. Dima Sergiyenko left Ukraine in 1996 at age 5, just five years after Ukraine achieved independence. Hes now a Hoosier. His family succeeded in getting his grandmother here from Ukraine in December. Our (nations) history dates back over 1,000 years, to the ninth century, when Kyiv was founded, Sergiyenko said. In just the first four weeks of the war, entire cities have been wiped off of the map, he said. Close to 4 million people have fled the country. Over 10 million Ukrainians are now internally displaced, Sergiyenko said. Thats 1 in 4 Ukrainians. The Ukrainian people are resilient. The Ukrainian people are fighters, he said. Russian President Vladimir Putin expected to take Kyiv in 48 hours but has yet to do so. Retired grandmothers are picking up guns to defend their country. Thousands of Ukrainians have lined up to protect nuclear power plants from Russian troops. This is international terrorism, and we are all being held hostage today by Russias invasion, he said. We have been blown away by the support the world has shown us. Pastor Emeritus Jerry Martin, of Central Avenue Church of God, led prayers for the 30 nations that are members of NATO. I dont know who the leaders of those nations are. I dont know their political structure, but our Father in heaven does, he said. We pray, Lord, that you keep them on guard as they have established NATO for that purpose, that what happened in World War II will not happen again, Martin said. Let the nations become united, in this regard, Lord, to help the refugees of Ukraine. Hendon urged continued support for the people of Ukraine. This is not going to be fixed in a week or two weeks. This is going to be an ongoing need, he said. This is when we shine our brightest as a nation, Hendon added, helping people around world despite political, philosophical or religious differences. Love 2 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. THE EXHIBITION PRODUCER and private art dealer Olivier Renaud-Clement, 57, moved to New York City from Paris in 1988, never imagining that the lamps that lit his home and the chairs on which he sat might eventually become as important to him as the art that passed through his hands. Like many young creative types, he bounced from Manhattan apartment to apartment, accumulating few possessions, concentrating instead on running the Wooster Gardens gallery in SoHo with Brent Sikkema and later the photography department at the Robert Miller Gallery in Midtown. He understood the desire to own paintings, photographs and sculptures, but to covet tables and lighting? I never imagined it, he says. Then, in 1997, he and a friend, the French gallerist Lucien Terras, leased the former TriBeCa loft of the polymathic theater director and visual artist Robert Wilson, who had moved to a bigger space in the same building. Wilsons new apartment, which the duo visited occasionally during their time there (Renaud-Clement moved out in 2001 and Terras in 2006), was filled with striking objects from a vast array of periods and styles that the now-80-year-old best known for Einstein on the Beach, the 1976 opera he created with the composer Philip Glass had amassed over the years. Wilson was a particular fan of chairs and owned hundreds, including versions by the French designers Charlotte Perriand and Philippe Starck, as well as avant-garde seating he had fashioned in materials like metal, wood, plumbing tubes and neon. (Much of his collection is now held at the Watermill Center, the Long Island arts organization Wilson founded in 1992.) Living [there], I realized that there wasnt any difference between design and visual art it was the revelation that started it all, says Renaud-Clement. That, of course, and discovering Joe Colombo. Fifty years after he founded the company, Frederick Smith announced on Monday that he will step down as FedExs chief executive in June. Raj Subramaniam, the current president and chief operating officer, will succeed Mr. Smith, according to a news release from FedEx. FedEx has changed the world by connecting people and possibilities for the last 50 years, Mr. Smith, 77, said in a statement on the companys website. As we look toward whats next, I have a great sense of satisfaction. A former Marine officer who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, Mr. Smith came up with the idea for FedEx from a term paper he wrote in 1965 while he was an undergraduate at Yale University. The paper, which explained how companies could deliver items faster if they changed their shipping strategies, was given a C grade because Mr. Smiths professor didnt think the strategy was viable, according to Entrepreneur magazine. Last week, further juicing the conspiracy theory, the Russian government linked the alleged biolabs to Hunter Biden and George Soros. On Thursday, Tucker Carlson picked up the Hunter Biden story line. (America has funded programs in Ukraine to secure labs studying pathogens and toxins, sometimes for vaccine development, and to watch for disease outbreaks.) There is, said Leshchenko, a pattern to Russian disinformation campaigns. This one started, he said, with anonymous social media accounts. Then it was propagated by Russian propaganda outfits like Russia Today, followed by Russian officials like Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Vladimir Putin himself. Finally it went global. In information warfare, Leshchenko said, it helps to have international recognition of fictitious claims. Elements of the American right were happy to supply it. Russias war on Ukraine has for the moment led many Republicans to rediscover their inner Cold Warriors. But pro-Putin sentiment or, at least, anti-anti-Putin sentiment remains strong on parts of the right. As NBCs Ben Collins and Kevin Collier reported, The biolab conspiracy theory has taken over as the prevailing narrative on pro-Trump and QAnon websites like The Great Awakening and Patriots. With Trump out of power, it can be tempting to dismiss the import of such fantasies, but the Republican Party doesnt have a great record of standing up to its fringe witness the recent QAnon-inflected attempt to link the Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson to pedophilia. Having watched Trump try to extort Zelensky, Ukrainians know it can be geopolitically consequential when crackpot Russian conspiracy theories gain a foothold in American politics. Putin, presumably, knows this as well, which helps explain why hes appealing to Anglophone culture warriors. On Friday, Putin gave a speech in which he complained about cancel culture and compared Russias international isolation to denunciations of the Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling for her views on gender. It was preposterous, but it was also a signal to the Western right that his struggle is theirs. Its what Putin has been doing for years, particularly in the wake of the annexation of Crimea in 2014, when, as Casey Michel wrote in Politico, Moscow began forging a new role for itself at the helm of the global Christian right. Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine was, first and foremost, a crime indeed, the war crimes continue as you read this. But it was also a blunder. In less than five weeks Putin has destroyed Russias military reputation, battered his nations economy and strengthened the democratic alliances he hoped to undermine. How could he have made such a catastrophic mistake? Part of the answer, surely, is strongman syndrome: Putin has surrounded himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear. All indications are that he went into this debacle believing his own propaganda about both his armys martial prowess and the eagerness of Ukrainians to submit to Russian rule. But theres also reason to think Putin, like many of his admirers in the West, thought modern democracies were too decadent to offer effective resistance. And heres the thing: When I look at the United States, I worry that the West is, in fact, being made weaker by decadence but not the kind that obsesses Putin and those who think like him. Our vulnerability comes not from the decline of traditional family values, but from the decline of traditional democratic values, such as a belief in the rule of law and a willingness to accept the results of elections that dont go your way. Now Uber wants to join this experiment, with a twist: If San Francisco approves so-called third-party dispatch services like Uber to participate, the upfront cost that Uber charges customers to get a taxi through its app will not be required to be the same as a metered taxi ride. That means they could charge the same price as a typical UberX car ride, which is often cheaper than a taxi ride. That has some San Francisco taxi drivers concerned that they will be offered cheap rides that earn them only a few dollars. Others worry that surge pricing when Uber elevates rates at times of high demand could price current low-income taxi customers out of getting rides. Its just not right, said Evelyn Engel, an executive board member at the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance, which backs taxi drivers. She said she and other taxi drivers had heard from the citys transportation agency about Ubers involvement in the pilot program. Uber is going to get hundreds of full-time drivers on their platform, Ms. Engel said, but taxi drivers are not going to even get paid a per-ride fare that allows for a dignified living. Muwaffaq Mustafa, 53, who has been a taxi driver for decades and now also runs operations for Flywheel Taxi the company that once sued Uber said he thought the Uber partnership would enrich taxi drivers and could help save a floundering industry. The slightly cheaper rides, he said, would be offset by greater demand. Im optimistic if this deal goes through we will make up for all these years that were down, Mr. Mustafa said. More calls, more value, and its more money. The first thing you see when the curtain goes up on Plaza Suite is an aquatint image of that grand hotel in its antique glory. But when it comes to datedness, the faux-French pile that opened its doors in 1907 has nothing on the Neil Simon comedy itself a faux-French pile that debuted on Broadway in 1968. Despite the wearying efforts of a likable cast headed by Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, the passage of 54 years is more than enough to reveal the triptych of one-act plays as uninhabitable in 2022. That may be why the creative team, led by the director John Benjamin Hickey, has taken pains to set the revival, which opened on Monday at the Hudson Theater, so squarely in its period. The grand but dowdy decor of John Lee Beattys champagne-colored rooms, along with Jane Greenwoods transitional costumes (sometimes mod Pucci, sometimes seamed stockings) and Marc Shaimans groovy interstitial pop, put a velvet rope around the action to mark it off as a museum piece. But it would need something more like a cordon sanitaire to protect the audience from the trickle of smarm that leaks from the play. Structurally it barely stands, the three stories joined only by the setting they share Suite 719 and the two stars playing the leads in each. Beyond that, if you were looking for a theme, you would have to conclude that Simon, still early in his record-breaking career, was mostly interested in demonstrating that men may bluster, but women whether wives, mothers or sirens are dopes. The wife arrives first. In Visitor From Mamaroneck, Parker plays Karen Nash, a woman who does not know her age because she has not mastered basic arithmetic. (Shes 47.) On what she asserts is her 24th wedding anniversary but is really a day shy of her 23rd, she has arranged for a romantic evening with her husband in the suite she thinks they shared on their wedding night. But Sam Nash (Broderick) is in no mood for romance; as men in such stories always do, he has contracts to work on, with the audience meant to understand that by this he means having an affair with his secretary. (Molly Ranson gives the brief role more dignity than Simon did.) NANJING, March 28 (Xinhua) -- A total of 25 civil servants have been held accountable for a building collapse that killed 17 people in east China's Jiangsu Province last July, local authorities said. An investigation found that the deadly incident, in which a hotel annex collapsed in the city of Suzhou, was triggered by unauthorized renovation work. Another seven people responsible for the incident have been transferred to prosecutors in accordance with the law. The collapse took place on July 12, 2021, with 23 people trapped. Seventeen people were killed and five others were injured. During the Obama administrations first year in office, as it was developing the health care proposal that would become the Affordable Care Act, it also skipped including key policy details from its budget tables. Similarly, the Trump administrations first budget offered scant specifics about its ambitions for overhauling the tax code, a priority that came to fruition later that year. But both of those omissions occurred in the administrations early months, before White House policy officials or congressional negotiators had time to develop the finer points. Mr. Bidens domestic policy agenda, in contrast, has been the subject of extensive white papers, policy speeches and legislative text including a bill that passed the House in November. The tax overhaul and Obamacare were major projects for those administrations, but they did not represent the range of their domestic ambitions in quite the way that Build Back Better does for the Biden White House. The Biden administrations plan, drawn up as a single piece of legislation that could pass through a special process without requiring Republican votes, included a range of tax, social welfare and climate policy ideas, rolling in much of Mr. Bidens presidential campaign agenda. Depending on the details, the proposal is likely to increase both spending and revenues by $1 trillion or more over a decade. And while the Trump budget office declined to specify tax details in 2017, it did commit to including substantial cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act as part of its plan to repeal and replace the health law. Ironically, the Biden administrations budget does include proposals, like an increase to the corporate tax rate, that lawmakers have already trimmed from the legislation in their recent negotiations. Last years budget featured more of Mr. Bidens domestic policy plan, detailing programs to combat climate change and expand child care, for example, that did become a part of the Build Back Better proposal. WASHINGTON President Biden on Monday stood by his comment that Vladimir V. Putin should not remain president of Russia, but he said it was an expression of his own horror over the invasion of Ukraine and not a change in American policy aimed at seeking to remove Mr. Putin from office. I was expressing the moral outrage that I feel, and I make no apologies for it, Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House, rejecting criticism from around the globe in the last two days about the potential diplomatic consequences of his words. The president said no one should have interpreted his comments as calling for Mr. Putins ouster. Its ridiculous, he said of the questions about his speech in Warsaw on Saturday, when he said, For Gods sake, this man cannot remain in power. On Monday, Mr. Biden said: Nobody believes I was talking about taking down Putin. Nobody believes that. The fallout over Mr. Bidens words in Warsaw underscored the dilemma that he and the NATO allies face about how to condemn the war in Ukraine and pressure Russia without shutting down any relationship with Moscow that might help end the invasion. ATLANTA A year ago, when Georgia Republicans passed a mammoth law of election measures and voting restrictions, many local election officials felt frustrated and sidelined, as their concerns about resources, ballot access and implementation went largely ignored. This year, Republicans have returned with a new bill and the election officials are pushing back. A bipartisan coalition of county-level election administrators the people who carry out the day-to-day work of running elections is speaking out against the latest Republican measure. At a legislative hearing on Monday, they warned that the proposal would create additional burdens on a dwindling force of election workers and that the provisions could lead to more voter intimidation. Youre going to waste time, and youre going to cause me to lose poll workers, said Joel Natt, a Republican member of the Forsyth County board of elections, referring to a provision in the bill that he said would force workers to count hundreds of blank sheets of paper. I have 400 poll workers that work for our board. That is 400 people that I could see telling me after May, Have a nice life, and its hard enough to keep them right now. Among other provisions, the bill would expand the reach of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation over election crimes; limit private funding of elections; empower partisan poll watchers; and establish new requirements for tracking absentee ballots as they are verified and counted. WASHINGTON The Biden administration is requiring coronavirus vaccines for some undocumented migrants at the southwest border, a policy change that comes days before the administrations next review of a public health order that has limited immigration during the pandemic. Under the plan, officials will start vaccinating undocumented migrants without proof of vaccination who are apprehended by border officials, but not expelled under the public health order, in seven areas including San Diego, El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley. A description of the plan was shared with The New York Times. According to directions given to senior homeland security officials on Sunday, if single adults refuse to be vaccinated, they will be detained and put into deportation proceedings. If they request asylum and cannot remain in detention, they will be released with a monitoring device with stringent conditions. If migrant families refuse vaccination, they will also be given monitoring devices with the same conditions. The White House has said little about whether it will soon lift the public health order, which the Trump administration put in place at the start of the pandemic. The order, known as Title 42, gives border officials the authority to turn back migrants seeking to enter the United States so that they do not spread the coronavirus here, a precaution that public health experts have called unnecessary. Its characteristic of the Marvel Disney+ shows that the ability of the performers exceeds the inventiveness of the crew writers and directors seem to be hired for competence rather than distinctive vision. Jeremy Slater (The Umbrella Academy), the shows creator, and its director, Mohamed Diab (the Egyptian features Cairo 678 and Clash), are only fitfully successful at combining psychological drama, Raiders of the Lost Ark desert adventure and superhero origin story. A little more flair would help paper over the cracks; as it is, events and relationships arent easy to parse and characters actions (especially Stevens) can be inconsistent. It probably didnt help that nine writers are credited on the six episodes. You also could wonder how much focus was spent on navigating the hazards of orientalism and ableism present in the original material. The credits include consultants for Egyptology, Judaism and mental health as well as three general consultants from a company that promises on its website to flag potential concerns and provide advice on how to avoid or mitigate risk. (No Islam consultant is listed; the focus on ancient Egypt mitigates the risk of dealing with the countrys predominant contemporary religion.) We dont know what the consultants input was. But onscreen, presenting Cairo in a new light (in interviews, Diab has said this was a priority) seems to consist of making it look like every other world capital. A scene featuring Gaspard Ulliel, who died in January, uses what appears to be an Arab form of jousting as background exoticism; when the characters venture into ancient monuments and archaeological sites, the dangers they face are of a familiar silver-screen variety. None of that increases the viewers pleasure, but it doesnt necessarily diminish it, either, and you can always focus on Isaacs nervous fidgeting, shy stubbornness and dodgy accent in his scenes as Steven. (Convinced of his Britishness, Steven refers to Marc as the little American man living inside me.) THE CANDY HOUSE By Jennifer Egan 334 pages. Scribner. $28. Do you have to have a high I.Q. to be a good fiction writer? John Cheever worried about his, which was under 110 too low to qualify him for the Armys Officer Candidate School during World War II. Cheever took several I.Q. tests and read a book about how to improve his score, but it remained about the same. I tend to side with Barry Hannah, who said in his Paris Review interview, You dont have to be an intellectual to write, you just have to wonder about things and want to know. God knows the number of Mensa types who cant write their way out of a paper bag. Sometimes, though, you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle not necessarily because its a great novel qua novel, which you cant know until the end, but because of the velocity of its microperceptions. Youve entered elite head space of one kind or another. Jennifer Egans new one, The Candy House, is one of these novels. It makes you feel a bit high, drugged, and fitted with V.R. goggles, almost from the start. The Candy House is a sequel to A Visit From the Goon Squad, Egans Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 novel. That book tells more than a dozen interrelated stories and absolutely defies neat summarizing. Among its central characters is Bennie Salazar, a flailing record executive, and Sasha, his assistant. The novel is about music, New Yorks East Village, magazine journalism, San Francisco in the 1970s, Gen-X nostalgia, the digitalization of everything and the search, in the face of that vitality-sucking digitalization, for forms of authenticity. VAGINA OBSCURA An Anatomical Voyage By Rachel E. Gross Your vagina is a mystery, an enigma, a world that has been largely uncharted, underestimated and misunderstood since the start of humankind. It holds more secrets than the Sphinx and can seem more distant than Mars, more unfamiliar than the ocean floor. Because, until recent decades when people with vaginas have made painstaking headway into the realms of science and health the pursuit of such knowledge has been left to men. To put it lightly, they blew it. As Rachel E. Gross proves in Vagina Obscura, the impact of this neglect cannot be overstated. Taking readers on an expansive journey across continents, cultures, centuries and even species, Gross reveals a stunning disparity in Western medicine and academia: While huge amounts of money and dedication are poured into the understanding of penises, the female body is disregarded. Like lore, this misinformation and shame are still being passed down to girls today. Gross experienced this knowledge gap firsthand at 29, when she was prescribed what was basically rat poison to treat a bacterial infection in her vagina. It was then that she realized I knew almost nothing about how my vagina worked and that no one else really does either. Image She cites Darwins journal entry declaring that a womans purpose was to be a nice soft wife, an object to be beloved and played with. Better than a dog anyhow. Freud, who admitted he knew little about womankind (that little creature without a penis), would influence gynecology through the 20th century, and even today. Diplomatic talks break ground In the most significant sign of progress to date at talks in Turkey, Moscow promised to sharply reduce military activity near Kyiv, Ukraines capital, and Chernihiv, a besieged northern city. Russia said a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine could occur once a draft peace agreement was ready, though analysts said such talk may be just a tactic. The development comes as Russia is losing ground in the northeast and around the capital: A Ukrainian counteroffensive has pushed back Russian forces around Irpin, a strategic suburb, though Kyiv remains in play. Heres the latest. Ukraine also outlined for the first time potential concessions over territory that it is all but certain to have lost. It proposed a 15-year process of negotiations on the status of Crimea, opened the floor to negotiations over separatist regions and prepared to declare a permanent neutral status. History: The Timess Carlotta Gall covered the rebellion in Chechnya nearly 30 years ago. In Kyiv, she sees echoes in Russias brutal siege tactics and targeting of civilians. To a large extent, the diplomatic concessions reflect what is already the reality on the ground: Russias campaign to take Kyiv has stalled, and Russian forces have even been pushed back by Ukrainian counteroffensives. The Crimean peninsula has been under de facto Russian rule since it was annexed in 2014. Russia also said it was willing to prepare a meeting between its president, Vladimir Putin, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Zelensky has sought such a meeting for months. The fate of the eastern Donbas region, which Russia no longer recognizes as part of Ukraine, could be discussed during that meeting, an aide to Zelensky said. The key to a peace agreement appeared to be Ukraines willingness to adopt a neutral status including by not joining NATO or hosting Western troops in exchange for international security guarantees. Ukraines chief negotiator at the talks, David Arakhamia, said discussions were underway between Ukraine and other countries to create a working security mechanism that would help protect Ukraine. While there was no agreement on a cease-fire at the talks, the offers on the table marked the most progress yet in diplomatic efforts to end the war, now in its fifth week. Still, the U.S. was skeptical. There is what Russia says and theres what Russia does, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. And what Russia is doing is the continued brutalization of Ukraine and its people and that continues as we speak. This argument is a way for him to urge the world not to make the same mistake again. Ukraines allies should act pre-emptively, not after the situation becomes complicated, he said. 2. Politics as performance Its often naive to take the words of political leaders literally. The public speech of politicians tends to combine an honest expression of their views with an attempt to influence others. Zelensky, an actor by training, is well aware of the performative part of politics. Over the past few weeks, he has repeatedly asked for forms of help that he surely knows he will not get, my colleague Max Fisher says. The clearest example is a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Establishing one could require the West to shoot down Russian planes and even bomb air-defense systems inside Russia, potentially starting a world war. Still, making unreasonable requests has value to Zelensky. It signals to Ukrainians that he is doing everything possible to defeat Russia and also makes it harder for the West to say no to other requests. Hes asking for the moon, knowing hell get less, Eric Schmitt, a senior writer at The Times who has long covered military affairs, told me. But it keeps the pressure on the West to deliver the stuff he needs. 3. What Ukraine wants Another set of requests coming from Zelensky and his aides is more literal and realistic. The biggest is their plea for the kind of equipment that allows a smaller army defending territory to hold off a larger, attacking army. The U.S. and other allies have already sent a large amount of such equipment, like shoulder-fired rocket launchers, but Ukraine says that it needs more. So far, Ukraines military has performed better than most observers expected, preventing Russia from taking over most major cities while reclaiming a few towns in the northeast. Because Russia has an enormous military, however, a war of attrition tends to work to its advantage, Eric notes. Russia can continue to bomb Ukrainian troops and civilians and hope for eventual capitulation. CHONGQING, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Wen Guodong, former vice governor of northwest China's Qinghai Province, was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Tuesday for taking bribes. Wen was found to have taken bribes worth about 19.9 million yuan (about 3.13 million U.S. dollars), according to a statement by the Chongqing First Intermediate People's Court. Wen was also fined 2 million yuan and his illegal gains will be turned over to the state treasury, the court statement said. The court found that Wen took advantage of his various former positions in Qinghai to benefit relevant units and individuals in business operations and project contracting between 2009 and 2020. The court granted Wen a lenient sentence according to the law as he had turned himself in, confessed to his crimes and showed repentance, and all his illegal gains have been recovered, according to the statement. 1. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met face-to-face for the first time in more than two weeks. In Istanbul both sides put forward concessions that could be the first steps toward a draft peace agreement. Russia said it would drastically reduce its military activity around the capital, Kyiv, and the northern city of Chernihiv. The West greeted the pledge with skepticism. Ukraine for the first time proposed negotiations on the status of Crimea, which would take place over a period of 15 years. Ukrainian officials also outlined potential concessions over territory that Ukraine is all but certain to have lost to Russia, and a willingness to adopt a neutral status including not joining NATO or hosting Western troops in exchange for international security guarantees. And in Britain, a cut in fuel taxes and support for poorer households will cost $3.2 billion. The outlook is a change from October, when Rishi Sunak, Britains chancellor of the Exchequer, announced a budget for what he called an economy fit for a new age of optimism, with large increases in education, health and job training. In his latest update to Parliament, Mr. Sunak warned that we should be prepared for the economy and public finances to worsen potentially significantly, as the country faces the biggest drop in living standards it has ever seen. The energy tax relief was welcomed by the public, but the reduced revenues put even more pressure on governments that are already managing record high debt levels. The problem is that some countries have quite a big chunk of legacy debt in Italy and France, its over 100 percent of gross domestic product, said Lucrezia Reichlin, an economics professor at the London Business School, referring to the huge amounts spent to respond to the pandemic. That is something which is very much new for the economic governance of the union. European Union rules, which were temporarily suspended in 2020 because of the coronavirus, limit government debt to 60 percent of a countrys economic output. And the demands on budgets are only increasing. European Union leaders said this month that the bill for new defense and energy spending could run as high as $2.2 trillion. For Germany, Europes largest economy, the costs are enormous. The coalition government has committed $1.7 billion to buy more liquefied natural gas and is investing nearly as much in building a permanent L.N.G. terminal and renting several floating ones in order to reduce its dependence on Russian fuel. At the same time, it has agreed to keep coal-fired power plants in reserve, even as it earmarked nearly $220 billion over the next four years to revive the countrys transition to renewable energy sources. Hundreds of workers at the publishing giant Conde Nast, which owns titles like Vogue, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit and GQ, announced on Tuesday that they had formed a companywide union. The Conde Nast Union is affiliated with the NewsGuild of New York, which also represents editorial employees at The New York Times as well as other publications. The union will cover more than 500 employees from all of Conde Nasts brands, except for those from Ars Technica, Pitchfork, Wired and The New Yorker, which unionized separately with the NewsGuild in recent years. In a statement shared through the NewsGuild on Tuesday, the union said it had asked Conde Nast management for voluntary recognition. We plan to have productive and thoughtful conversations with them over the coming weeks to learn more, a Conde Nast spokesman said. The company has voluntarily recognized the four existing unions. The employees in the newly formed Conde Nast union, including editorial, video and production staff, said in a statement that they were pushing for better pay, increased job security, and a stronger commitment to diversity and equity. On Day 1 of his presidency, Joseph R. Biden Jr. brought the United States back into the global climate accord. His administration made bold pledges to cut emissions. It urged other countries to set ambitious climate targets of their own. Since then, politics and war have stood in the way of any meaningful climate legislation. Now the White House is taking another stab at advancing its climate agenda. In its $5.8 trillion budget request for fiscal year 2023, made public on Monday, it includes nearly $45 billion for several federal agencies to tackle climate change. It seeks to prepare us for the reality of life on a hotter planet. It does not include big-ticket items to enable the United States to pivot away from the combustion of fossil fuels, the main cause of climate change. As my colleague Coral Davenport pointed out, the presidents proposed expenditures say little about what the federal government will do to actually address the nations two largest contributors to climate change: greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and power plants. What the United States does to swiftly bring down its own emissions is critical for the rest of the world. The country is historys largest emitter; its current emissions are second only to China. Planet Word, the Washington, D.C., museum dedicated to inspiring a love of language, opened a new permanent exhibit called Lexicon Lane on March 26. A combination escape room and puzzle hunt, Lexicon Lane is designed to resemble an old village and offers 26 unique puzzle cases for visitors to solve. But before you even enter the museum, theres a tree in the way. It is virtually impossible to enter the museum without noticing the 18-foot Speaking Willow that is stationed in front of its K Street entrance. That is intentional. The museums founder and chief executive, Ann Friedman, wants the celebration of language to begin before visitors reach the front door. And Ms. Friedman is very passionate about her mission. (She is married to the New York Times Opinion columnist Thomas Friedman, who also sits on the museums board of directors.) Even if visitors somehow walked by the huge aluminum sculpture, the bell-shaped speakers hanging from its branches would be likely to stop people in their tracks. The Watches & Wonders fair in Geneva this week is usually all about new wristwatches but Jaeger-LeCoultre is embracing the wonders side of the fair by unveiling two special clocks alongside its watches. The clocks are part of the maisons Atmos collection, using technology invented in 1928 and famed for seeming to run on air. Fluctuations in temperature cause a gas inside a membrane to expand or contract, activating a chain that winds the clock. A change of just one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) can power the clock for 48 hours, Jaeger-LeCoultre said. In recent years, Atmos clocks have been made in tandem with the likes of the industrial designer Marc Newson and the fashion house Hermes, but this year, Jaeger-LeCoultre has created two new Atmos designs in-house at its headquarters in the Vallee de Joux, Switzerland, and which have an especially clean look compared with earlier examples. Its how Jaeger-LeCoultre sees the Atmos for today and in the years to come, Catherine Renier, the brands chief executive, said in a video interview. Its almost a new beginning. Dose matters a lot, said Dr. Krishna G. Aragam, a preventive cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an author of the study. Just realize that, as you go up beyond modest ranges, the risk goes up quite a bit. The study, which may help resolve medical disputes over the effects of alcohol on the heart, involved sophisticated analyses of the genes and medical data of nearly 400,000 people who participate in the U.K. Biobank, a British repository that investigators use to study genes and their relation to health. The average age of subjects selected for the alcohol study was 57, and they reported consuming an average of 9.2 drinks a week. Some researchers have reported that drinking modestly protects the heart because moderate drinkers as a group have less heart disease than those who drink heavily or those who abstain. Dr. Aragam and his colleagues also saw that effect. But the reason, they report, is not that alcohol protects the heart. It is that light to moderate drinkers those who consume up to 14 drinks a week tend to have other characteristics that decrease their risk, like smoking less, exercising more and weighing less than those who drink more heavily and those who do not drink. Its not known why moderate drinkers tend to be more healthy than nondrinkers, Dr. Aragam said. But the Biobank study did not ask why people drank or abstained. Instead, it attempted to tease apart the effects of alcohol on the heart from the effects of other habits, behaviors and characteristics. To do that, the researchers used a method called Mendelian randomization. Researchers have found genetic variants that predispose a person to heavier or lighter drinking. Because the variants are distributed randomly in a population, they can serve in a study as the equivalent of randomly assigning people to abstain or to drink at varying levels. Researchers can ask if those with variants that are linked to greater alcohol consumption have more heart disease and high blood pressure than those with variants linked to lower consumption. Credit goes to the Museum of the Moving Image for introducing me to Putins Witnesses, which it screened earlier in the month. In this eerie documentary, the director, Vitaly Mansky, who was born in Lviv, Ukraine; studied film in Russia; and now lives in Latvia revisits footage he shot during the first year of Vladimir Putins presidency, beginning with Boris Yeltsins resignation on Dec. 31, 1999, a decision that elevated Putin to the position of acting president. In narration, Mansky says he started shooting the movie as P.R. for Putins campaign in the March 2000 election although Putin portrays himself as being all-business, above doing the unsubstantive work of advertising or participating in a televised debate. At the same time, Mansky points out, he was always on TV. And part of what can be seen in Putins Witnesses is how people around him manufactured and softened his image. The director says he himself proposed that Putin pay a cuddly on-camera visit to an old schoolteacher in St. Petersburg. Yet Mansky sees things in the material that didnt jump out at the time. He reflects on watching Putin with then-Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain in the czars box at the Mariinsky Opera House: Its hard to picture the feelings of the guy raised in a St. Petersburg communal apartment, having joined the elite of the world at breakneck speed. Mansky also spends time with Yeltsin and his family on election night and on the subsequent New Years Eve. Yeltsin looks increasingly perturbed at how much distance his chosen successor has put between them. Elsewhere, Mansky introduces various movers and shakers at Putins campaign headquarters on election night, then notes that the majority eventually either joined Putins opposition or were dismissed. (One of them, Anatoly Chubais, left his post as Putins climate envoy last week, reportedly over the war in Ukraine.) During his first year as president, Putin continues to act vaguely chummy with Mansky even as the faint rumblings of autocracy begin to be felt. Late in the movie, Putin praises the concept of being an elected leader instead of a monarch because it means a person like him can serve as president, then retreat into civilian life. Everything you do with the state and the society today you will have to face in a few years as an ordinary citizen, he tells Mansky. It is a good thing to remember before taking a decision. Those are chilling words now. A decade after receiving an Oscar nomination for his documentary How to Survive a Plague, about the work of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power in the 1980s and 90s that led to the development of antiviral treatments for AIDS, the director David France returns with what we might depressingly call a sequel: How to Survive a Pandemic, about the global effort to develop and disseminate vaccines for the coronavirus. Unlike the retrospective perspective of the 2012 film, How to Survive a Pandemic unfolds in medias res which, given the immensity of the still-ongoing crisis, is both the films strength and weakness. In its first half, filmed in 2020, France follows the science journalist Jon Cohen as he interviews policymakers and researchers racing to create and approve Covid-19 vaccines. Marina Goldovskaya, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who exposed the harsh underbelly of the Soviet Unions labor camps and later chronicled the heady days that followed the states collapse days that promised democracy but bordered on anarchy died on March 20 in Jurmala, Latvia. She was 80. Her death was confirmed by her son, Sergei Livnev, who said she died at his home after a long illness. Ms. Goldovskaya, who often operated as a one-woman band, made some 30 documentaries as writer, director, cinematographer and producer and was a film professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, for two decades. Her wide-ranging films include a portrait of a Russian circus aerialist (Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress, 1970); a chronicle of six weeks in the life of a television journalist during the Soviet thaw known as perestroika (A Taste of Freedom, 1991); and the story of a Russian prince who returns to live in his familys former estate, now in ruins (The Prince Is Back, 2000). In a review of Solovki Power, her 1988 film about a Soviet labor camp in northern Russia, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the work first-rate film journalism and a remarkable documentary about the prison camp said to have been the prototype for all of the gulags that came after. Strong vehicle exports boost trade between China's Tibet, Nepal Xinhua) 16:47, March 29, 2022 LHASA, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The export of whole vehicles from China to Nepal via the ports in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region has emerged as a new growth engine for Sino-Nepalese trade, according to customs in Lhasa, the regional capital. In 2021, Lhasa customs supervised and examined 806 automobiles made in China for exports with a trade value of 145 million yuan (about 22.8 million U.S. dollars), up 760 percent year on year. Among them, 419 were new energy vehicles, marking an increase of 974 percent, said Yuan Jintao, a customs official. Li Chaohua, a businessman in Tibet, said that his company exported more than 500 cars to Nepal via ports in Tibet last year, adding that the figure is expected to double this year. Tibet serves as an important land route from China to South Asia. Despite the impact of COVID-19, Nepal has remained the largest trading partner of the region. According to Lhasa customs, the foreign trade between Tibet Autonomous Region and Nepal reached 1.8 billion yuan in 2021, up 69.4 percent year on year. Taking into account the local situation of epidemic prevention and control, Lhasa customs set up a special service window for automobile export and adopted a series of measures to streamline customs clearance. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) SAN SALVADOR, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Salvadoran police arrested 576 alleged gang members over the weekend, as part of its operations against a rising wave of homicides nationwide, the National Civil Police (PNC) said Monday. The alleged leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha gang in charge of selling drugs and ordering homicides, Carlos Mariano Aquino and Franklyn Yohalmo Alvarez have been arrested. The Central American country registered 87 violent deaths last weekend, according to official reports, prompting a state of emergency valid for 30 days from early Sunday morning, which allows both the PNC and the Army to take control of areas where violence has mounted. President Nayib Bukele has toughened prison conditions, banning prisoners from going outdoors and ordering food rations which allow only two meals per day. The most divisive issue in Albany is hardly a new one. In 2019, New York changed its laws so that fewer people arrested would languish in jail because they could not afford bail. A backlash led to a series of tweaks intended to toughen the law. Soon after, a pandemic-era rise in gun crime began. Gov. Kathy Hochul has now proposed a broad set of alterations to the states bail laws in her budget that would expand judicial discretion and effectively increase the number of crimes eligible for bail. The proposals have made many Democratic lawmakers furious: Assemblywoman Latrice Walker of Brooklyn is on a hunger strike to protest the governors plan. Ms. Hochul has sought to portray her changes as targeted fixes rather than a full rollback. Blaming bail reform for the increase in violence that cities across America are facing isnt fair and isnt supported by the data, she said in an op-ed published in The Daily News and co-written with her lieutenant governor, Brian Benjamin. Nonetheless, the two leaders said, the laws still needed changing. They cited rates of repeated offenses that they said were unacceptable, adding: These repeat offender rates were a failure before bail reform, and they remain a failure today. At this point, theres very little distance between the fringes of the modern Republican Party and the elites who lead it. Superficial differences of affect and emphasis mask shared views and ways of seeing. In fact, members of the Republican elite are very often the fringe figures in question. Take Virginia (known as Ginni) Thomas. She is an influential and well-connected conservative political activist who has been a fixture of Washington since the late 1980s. A fervent supporter of former President Donald Trump, she reportedly urged his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to do everything in his power to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election and keep Trump in power. And judging from her text messages to Meadows which include the hope that the Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators are awaiting trial before military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay she is also something of a QAnon believer, one of millions of Americans who embrace the conspiracy theory that Trump is fighting a messianic war against the deep state. Ginni Thomas is also, notably, the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. And while Justice Thomas is in no way responsible for the actions of his spouse, it does beggar belief to think he is unaware of her views and actions, including her work to keep Trump in office against the will of the electorate. But thats something of a separate issue. What matters here is that we have, in Ginni Thomas, a very high-profile Republican activist who holds, and acts on, fringe, conspiratorial beliefs. And she is not alone. To the Editor: Re Is This the End of the Movies?, by Ross Douthat (column, Sunday Review, March 27): Why are pundits so eager to write the obituaries of components of our culture that add so many enriching dimensions to our lives? The radio was supposed to kill books; the internet was supposed to kill the newspaper; television was supposed to kill theater; YouTube was supposed to kill television. All of these joyful, irreplaceable aspects of our culture have survived despite pundits best efforts to bury them, and so too will the movies. Like the novel, the newspaper, the play and television, the movies will survive. What will change is how we experience them. Daniel Ross Goodman Longmeadow, Mass. The writer is a movie critic for The Washington Examiner and the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema. To the Editor: I havent been to a movie in a theater for more than 20 years, way before Covid. Why? The interminable ads, the stink of fake butter on popcorn, the seats, the peering between people taller than me. Most of all, the ridiculously loud sound levels. I dont know how you move forward. I believe in prison abolition, so you cant say defund the police and abolish prison, and then say Will Smith should be arrested. So I hope that there is a space here for restorative justice, which Im still learning about, and I still wonder, is it something that can work? But I would like to believe that men of their means can find a way to use restorative justice to address the violence, to address the harm and to create repair. Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Charles and Esau, you both censured Will and said that his actions were difficult to watch and unacceptable, perhaps, in their execution. Id like to know if you think theres something that should be done about it. Charles Blow: Well, I want to broaden the conversation just a little bit. You may even think that this is a stretch, but I do not, because this is the context in which I view this. The protection of white women by white men has been such a feature in American society, and Black women were largely left well, not largely, completely left out of that equation. They could lynch because a white womans virtue or honor had been despoiled in some way. You could burn something down because it had happened, and that travels even until today. If a white girl or woman goes missing, well turn the world upside down, and every newscast will have it on ad infinitum, and that does not happen for Black women. Black women have been so left out of being honored in this society, because that was a primary position for white women. They were the ones who were honored. Even in films, white men would go to the ends of the earth to save the white women, and that was not something that was even allowed in Black film. Whatever you thought of Django [Unchained], it was one of the first modern films where the Black man went to all ends to save the Black woman. That was transformative and revolutionary, because its not a thing that gets greenlit in film that we see. But taking all of that into context, understanding that Black women have been left out of this idea that they are worthy of defense, I can understand how it can be fascinating and a relief to see even if you dont agree with the action to see somebody do the same thing for a Black woman. But I look at that at the same time and say, tread very carefully not to absorb the lessons of this violent society not to absorb the lessons that white supremacy taught, that you werent worth this, and that this becomes an example of you being worth it. Tread very carefully on that, because it is a dangerous place to be, and it is partly because of deprivation that I believe a lot of people see it as OK. Esau McCaulley: Its a totally different conversation if Will walks up and does the exact same thing, but instead of hits him, he takes the mic and says: Dont disrespect my wife. Dont disrespect Black women. I think that allows us to have this conversation in a much less complicated way. But Ill also say that, just to be honest, I cant imagine a scenario in which my actual life is in danger only in that context, I mean real danger that I would ever call the police on another Black man. I just cant imagine it. I mean I just dont live in a context where I would be in the Oscars. But if someone if a Black man hit me, Im not calling the police on him, because I dont know how thats going to go. Her paternal grandfather, Dumitru Lazareanu, had been jailed for several months in the late 1950s as part of an anti-communist resistance movement that began after World War II. His son (her father) Constantin Lazareanu, an engineer, had long been watched by Romanias secret service, Ms. Lazareanu said, after reporting that the housing destruction and death caused by two earthquakes (in 1977 and 1986) was partly because of state negligence. Image Ms. Lazareanu as a baby in an undated family photo. Credit... via Irina Lazareanu Ms. Lazareanu remembers waiting in lines constantly with her mother for rations. There was no food, no electricity, she said. The lights would just cut out. She said her parents would whisper with the water running because the house had been bugged. One night, her father didnt return home until right before dawn, and when he did there was blood on his face. My mother said that he had fallen on a sack of tomatoes, Ms. Lazareanu said. The following morning, they packed their bags and left their apartment in Ploiesti, outside of Bucharest, to drive to her maternal grandparents farm in Ratesti, to the north. Ms. Lazareanu remained with her grandparents while her parents crossed over into Serbia, where they had relatives. It was the last time my mother saw her father, Ms. Lazareanu said. But, since they left me behind, the state thought they would come back. Ms. Lazareanu spent the next 10 months with her grandparents, among chickens, cows and horses. They grew corn. Every once in a while guards would check in to make sure she was still there, she said. At the time, Serbia was part of Yugoslavia. And while people from Yugoslavia could travel freely, many with Romanian passports needed to resort to bribes in order to cross into other countries from Yugoslavia, Ms. Lazareanu said. The death of an Indian student in the fighting in Ukraine this month brought into focus Indias challenge of evacuating nearly 20,000 of its citizens who were in the country when Russias invasion began. Hundreds of Indian students remained stuck amid heavy shelling at the time. Indias prime minister, Narendra Modi, who has avoided condemning Russia, appealed to Mr. Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, President Volodymyr Zelensky, for help. Russias local embassy used Twitter to instruct Indian media outlets to not use the word war but to instead refer to it as a special military operation, as media outlets in Russia have been forced by law to do. Some Indian Twitter users responded by mocking the embassy, while others chastised local media outlets as inept and needing instruction from Russia. Pro-Russian sentiment has taken hold in right-wing circles in the United States, misinformation that has spread within Russia claims Ukrainians have staged bombings or bombed their own neighborhoods, and myths about Ukrainian fortitude have gone viral across social media platforms. But in India and other countries where social media users joined the hashtag, pro-Russian narratives have focused on ethnonationalism and Western hypocrisy over the war, themes that have resonated with social media users. There were dense clusters of communities engaging with it, many of which were based in India or based in Pakistan, said Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor of Middle East studies and digital humanities at Hamad Bin Khalifa University who analyzed the accounts using #IStandWithPutin. It was not clear whether the accounts promoting pro-Putin messages in India were authentic, although Dr. Jones said some of the most popular ones engaged in suspicious behavior, like using stock photos as profile pictures or racking up likes and retweets despite having few followers. LaTanya Richardson Jackson first saw August Wilsons The Piano Lesson in 1987 it was the original production, at Yale Repertory Theater, and of course she was going to see it, because her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, was in the cast. This fall, Richardson Jackson will direct a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, again with her husband in the cast, although in a different role. The Broadway revival the first since The Piano Lesson arrived there in 1990 will star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington as a sister and brother at odds over whether to sell a piano on which are carved the faces of their enslaved ancestors. Jackson will play their uncle, Doaker Charles (at Yale, he played the brother). Richardson Jackson will be the first woman to direct a Wilson play on Broadway. She is best known as an actress in 2018, she originated the role of Calpurnia in To Kill a Mockingbird, and in 2014, she was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as Lena Younger in a revival of A Raisin in the Sun. This will be her first time directing on Broadway, but she has directed elsewhere, including a production of Wilsons Two Trains Running at True Colors Theater in Atlanta. Mr. Dooley, the interim leader, said in an email to The Times through the church press office that he has been talking with members of our team around the world in what seems like a nonstop conversation since the revelations of Mr. Houstons behavior. He described the crisis as a challenging and emotional time for both members and leaders. This difficult season has sparked conversations that we should have been having as a church for a very long time, he said. He said the church is reviewing its policies and procedures to provide both health and accountability for leaders. Hillsong exercises some control over the financial operations of each member church, though congregations set their own budgets. Churches also pass on 5 percent of the contributions they receive to the global church. In return, they receive organizational and teaching resources, and what was at one time a straightforwardly valuable association with one of the most recognizable evangelical churches in the world. For some leaders of local Hillsong branches, the baggage has become too burdensome to be worth the benefits of affiliation. Last week, the lead pastor of Hillsong Atlanta, Sam Collier, emailed his church to inform them that he was withdrawing his church from Hillsong in the wake of consistent media attacks, slander, and accusations against Hillsong some of which, he acknowledged, were true. All the challenges and the speculation and the scandal and the articles and all of the above, it got to a point where the people in our church just did not want to deal with it anymore, Mr. Collier said in an interview. His hiring as Hillsongs first Black lead pastor was announced about a week before the news of Mr. Lentzs misconduct became public in 2020, meaning his entire tenure at the church has been clouded by scandal emanating from Hillsong entities far from Atlanta. Sundays service was the last for Hillsong Atlanta. We believe the Lord is calling us to move into the next season, Mr. Collier told his congregation. Mr. Collier is launching a new church on Easter Sunday, and expects much of his Hillsong congregation to migrate there. The press office for Hillsong said there were no plans to reestablish Hillsong Atlanta. Another branch, Hillsong Kansas City, which launched in 2019, quietly separated from Hillsong about two weeks ago and relaunched as Kingdom City Church. The press office for the global church said the two parties made a mutual decision to separate before Mr. Houstons departure. A person who answered the phone at Kingdom City last week said the church had no comment. With the midterm election cycle fast approaching, Republicans in the key states of Florida and Ohio have made critical progress in their push to add to their dominance on congressional maps by carving new districts that would be easier for G.O.P. candidates to win. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday vetoed congressional maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature and called for a special session to draw new maps in mid-April, a rare fracture between the Republican governor and state lawmakers. Mr. DeSantis had previously pledged to veto the maps and had pushed his own maps that would have given his party a stronger advantage in the states congressional delegation. In Ohio, a new map of congressional districts that is gerrymandered to heavily favor Republicans appeared highly likely to be used in the midterm elections after the State Supreme Court indicated on Tuesday that it would not rule on a challenge to the map until after the May 3 primary election. The Republican pressure comes as Democrats have fared better than expected in this years redistricting cycle. Democrats have drawn aggressive gerrymanders in states like New York, Oregon, Illinois and Maryland, while Republicans have sought to make their current seats safer in states like Texas and Georgia. Mr. Young moved to Alaska just after it became part of the United States and knew its needs long before he came to Capitol Hill. The only licensed mariner in Congress at the time of his death, he had piloted his own tug and barge as he delivered supplies along the Yukon River. He also tried fishing, trapping and construction, and taught Alaska Native students in Fort Yukon, using a wood stove to stay warm in the arctic. When he got to Capitol Hill, Mr. Young, known for his sometimes irascible manner, began muscling through legislation to benefit his state, largely by padding transportation and spending packages with earmarks. So devoted to the practice was he that he once famously held a knife to the throat of Representative John Boehner, who would go on to become speaker, after the Ohioan gave a speech on the House floor railing against earmarks for Alaska. Mr. Youngs projects were manifold and varied: millions of dollars for Covenant House Alaska, a youth homeless shelter that needed to upgrade its buildings; a forklift for a food bank operating in a broken warehouse; money for the Alaska Railroad. Former and current aides recalled Mr. Young interrupting meetings with local officials and Alaska Native leaders to phone the relevant lawmaker or staff aide to put in a request, as he solicited project ideas from around the state. It could come on a cocktail napkin, for all he cared, said Pamela Day, who left his office in 2020 after nearly two decades. And, she added, he would have flown them with a banner in the sky to take credit for it, if thats what it came down to, if it was required. Even as the Tea Party wave in 2010 prompted an anti-spending backlash against earmarking, he refused to abandon the practice until both parties agreed to ban it. Last year, when Democrats agreed to revive earmarks with stricter guardrails, Mr. Young celebrated with an announcement of his 10 requests. TEHRAN, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The Iranian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday welcomed a peace initiative recently put forward by Yemen's Houthi militia. "The plan conveys a strong message of firm determination to end the war, lift the oppressive siege on the people, and find a political resolution to the crisis in Yemen," Saeed Khatibzadeh, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, was quoted as saying by the ministry's website. Serious and positive interaction with the peace initiative can provide a good platform to end the current war, Khatibzadeh noted, referring to the latest proposal by the Houthi militia for a cease-fire with the Saudi-led coalition, a comprehensive prisoner swap deal, and lifting the siege on the Yemeni people. Yemen has been mired in a civil war since late 2014 when the Iran-backed Houthis seized control of several northern provinces and forced the Saudi-backed Yemeni government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa. On Sunday, the Houthis announced a three-day unilateral cease-fire with the Saudi-led coalition, voicing their commitment to a permanent truce if the coalition stops airstrikes and withdraws its forces. To convince soldiers to join that force and to ensure that soldiers in it would be willing to risk significant injury without hesitation, he said, Congress promised these soldiers that they would not be discriminated against on the basis of their military service or service-connected injuries. The federal government argued in support of Mr. Torres and in defense of the 1994 law. Christopher Michel, a Justice Department lawyer, said the court should account for the federal governments need to have a supply of forces to defend the nation. With respect to raising and supporting armies, the power of national survival, he said, the federalism principles really do apply differently. Justice Amy Coney Barrett said it was not hard to imagine a contemporary conflict between states and the federal government like the one over the Vietnam War. Lets say we get involved in Ukraine and states say that we shouldnt be, and so they use discrimination against veterans returning home to express their disapproval of our engagement, she said. The Supreme Court has imposed strict limits on Congresss ability to override states sovereign immunity. In a pair of decisions from the 1990s, the court said that the 11th Amendment banned lawsuits against states for money in federal courts even when Congress had authorized them. In 1996, for instance, in Seminole Tribe v. Florida, the court struck down a federal law authorizing Indian tribes to sue states over disputes concerning casinos. WASHINGTON Crossings at the southwest border have been peaking again in recent weeks, and homeland security officials are bracing for those numbers to rise much higher if the Biden administration decides to lift a public health order that has limited immigration during the pandemic. A decision about the order, put in place by the Trump administration two years ago this month, could come as early as Wednesday, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may decide whether to renew it for another 60 days. Homeland security officials on Tuesday described contingency plans for managing as many as 18,000 encounters a day at the border, regardless of the cause. Working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, other federal agencies, and state and local officials, the department is prepared to have on standby additional personnel, transportation and medical assistance, and temporary facilities for processing migrants. The stakes are high, from both a humanitarian standpoint and a political one. Democrats do not want the southwest border to appear out of control in the months ahead of the midterm elections, which would fuel more Republican attacks on the Biden administrations border policies. The next day, prosecutors say, Mr. Reffitt began to make arrangements to travel to Washington and arrive in time for Armageddon all day on Jan. 6, he wrote in the Three Percenters group chat. He told his compatriots that he planned to drive because flying was impossible with all the battle rattle he planned to bring a reference to his weapons and body armor, prosecutors say. Some in the group appeared to share his anger. On Dec. 22, one member wrote in the chat, The only way you will be able to do anything in DC is if you get the crowd to drag the traitors out. Mr. Reffitt responded: I dont think anyone going to DC has any other agenda. The House committee has also sharpened its focus on how the tweet set off a chain reaction that galvanized Mr. Trumps supporters to begin military-style planning for Jan. 6. As part of the congressional inquiry, investigators are trying to establish whether there was any coordination beyond the post that ties Mr. Trumps inner circle to the militants and whether the groups plotted together. That tweet could be viewed as a call to action, said Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California and a member of the committee. Its definitely something were asking questions about through our discussions with witnesses. We want to know whether the presidents tweets inflamed and mobilized individuals to take action. On the day of the post, participants in TheDonald.win, a pro-Trump chat board, began sharing tactics and techniques for attacking the Capitol, the committee noted in a report released on Sunday recommending contempt of Congress charges for Dan Scavino Jr., Mr. Trumps former deputy chief of staff. In one thread on the chat board related to the tweet, the report pointed out, an anonymous poster wrote that Mr. Trump cant exactly openly tell you to revolt. This is the closest hell ever get. Lawyers for the militants have repeatedly said that the groups were simply acting defensively in preparing for Jan. 6. They had genuine concerns, the lawyers said, that leftist counterprotesters might confront them, as they had at earlier pro-Trump rallies. Mr. Trumps post came as his efforts to hang onto power were shifting from the courts, where he had little success, to the streets and to challenging the certification process that would play out on Jan. 6. Finding a therapist let alone one who is a good fit can take time and determination, especially during the pandemic, when many therapists report they cannot keep up with demand and must turn away patients. When The New York Times surveyed 1,320 mental health professionals in November, nine out of 10 therapists said the number of people seeking care was on the rise. During a Senate committee hearing in February to address the nations growing mental health and substance abuse problem, Senator Patty Murray of Washington noted that nearly 130 million Americans live in places with less than one mental health care provider per 30,000 people. Even therapists can have trouble finding help. Thomas Armstrong, a clinical psychologist in eastern Washington, waited more than a year to get treatment for his youngest child, who was 2 when they started searching. And it took more than two years to get the treatment that proved most beneficial, found only after he tapped into his academic network through Twitter. All the stars had to align for me, he said. If you are looking for a mental health care provider, dont give up there are several strategies that can help. ABUJA, Nigeria Gunmen attacked a train near Nigerias capital on Monday night with explosives and gunfire, killing an unspecified number of the nearly 1,000 passengers on board, authorities and survivors told The Associated Press on Tuesday. The attackers used explosives to first blow up the rail track before opening fire on the train near Abuja in northwest Nigeria, according to Fidet Okhiria, chief executive of the state-owned Nigerian Railway Corporation. Many people are also feared to have been abducted, he said. Authorities could not immediately confirm the number of passengers on the train but local media reported that nearly 1,000 were on board. There were casualties but we have not been able to confirm the number, Mr. Okhiria said of the attack, the latest in a series of other train assaults. Abdulwadud Ahmad, a survivor, said he knew of several passengers killed including someone sitting close to him. Sitting on a boulder outside one mine, Zahir Kazimi, 33, said he could barely move his body after his first day at the mines in January. A tailor by trade, Mr. Kazimi went to work in sewing shops at the age of 13 determined to save up the money to marry a girl he liked. A decade later, he married and opened his own tailor shop. He was happy then, he said. But after the Taliban seized power, his once steady stream of clients dried up, and soon his savings did, too. So he took his brothers donkey to the mines and joined the throng of sweaty men with black dust caked into their skin. Twelve hours later, he returned home with his back aching and cursing himself for getting married at all if he were single, he would not have to earn so much to feed four mouths at home. If you come here and work, you can get some money to buy food for your family. If not, they will go hungry, Mr. Kazimi said. There is no other way to go. We must work. Standing outside a mines entrance, Mr. Hadi, the former soldier, wiped his hand on his shirt and looked at his calloused palm. His father, a farmer, always chided him to go to school as a child, dreaming that one day his son could become a district governor or a commander. For a while, Mr. Hadi hoped he could, too. At 18, he joined the Afghan National Army and earned a decent salary. Even before Shanghai imposed a lockdown to curb a rapidly spreading Covid outbreak, life for many in Chinas wealthiest city had been upended by the virus and the governments response. Residents raced to hoard groceries in case they were ordered to stay home. Some protested at the gates of housing complexes that were locked with little notice. Others, sent to government isolation facilities, were forced to sleep on the floor because of a shortage of beds. For still others, the citys Covid-19 restrictions have had life-threatening implications. Some residents have been confined at home, unable to get kidney dialysis or other urgent treatment. A nurse who suffered an asthma attack died after she was denied care by a hospital that cited Covid prevention protocols. Officials had tried to limit disruptions by confining buildings or neighborhoods, arguing that a full-scale lockdown in the city of 26 million was untenable. Officials said their more surgical approach would curb the outbreak while preserving economic life in Shanghai, a hub for international business. MELBOURNE, Australia In a fiery speech confirming that the Solomon Islands has drafted a security agreement with China, the island nations leader said on Tuesday that the deal was ready for signing and criticized as insulting concerns from Australia and New Zealand that the pact could destabilize the regions security. Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavares remarks to Parliament marked the first time he had addressed the leak last week of a draft of the security agreement. The draft which was shared by opponents of the deal and verified as legitimate by the Australian government spurred alarm in a region where concerns about Chinas influence has been growing for years. The draft suggests that Chinese warships could flow into the nation or Chinese troops could intervene domestically on the island in times of crisis putting them on Australias and New Zealands doorstep. The leaked document stated that Solomon Islands may, according to its own needs, request China to send police, armed police, military personnel and other law enforcement and armed forces to Solomon Islands to assist in maintaining social order, protecting peoples lives and property. It required secrecy, noting, Neither party shall disclose the cooperation information to a third party. LONDON Six weeks ago, Prince Andrew agreed to a multi-million-dollar legal settlement with a woman who accused him of raping her when she was a teenager. On Tuesday, he escorted his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, to a memorial service at Westminster Abbey to celebrate the life of her late husband, Prince Philip. The princes very conspicuous public appearance on the queens arm, his first since Philips funeral last April, sent an unmistakable message of support by a 95-year-old mother for her disgraced son. But it struck some royal watchers as incongruous, given that she stripped Andrew of his military titles and all but banished him from public life after he was engulfed in the sexual abuse lawsuit. Andrews sudden re-emergence came days after a trouble-prone tour of the Caribbean by Prince William and his wife, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, during which the couple confronted a backlash over issues of racial justice and rising sentiment to cast off the queen as head of state in Jamaica and other former colonies. It didnt happen by happenstance, Peter Hunt, a former royal correspondent for the BBC, said of Andrews role. There must have been thinking behind it. You have to come to the conclusion that it was an opportunity for her to actively endorse her son, to point out that he hasnt been found guilty of anything. LONDON It is called the Phi, and the sleek 192-foot-long superyacht worth about $50 million, which has a wine cellar and swimming pool, is a display of wealth that stands out even in a capital known for its ultrarich. On Tuesday, the Russian-owned vessel, which is docked at Londons Canary Wharf, was gaining notice for another reason: It had just been detained by the British authorities. The Phi is the first such vessel to be detained in British waters in what the government said was a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and his associates that Britain was going after those benefiting from their links to the Kremlin. Britains National Crime Agency said the yacht was owned by a Russian businessman, whom it did not identify. Photo taken on March 27, 2022 shows China-aided humanitarian supplies in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan. (Photo by Saifurahman Safi/Xinhua) With the efforts from the UNHCR, all the supplies have been purchased, and now are distributed in Kabul, Kandahar, Baghlan and Nangarhar provinces, Chinese Ambassador Wang Yu said, adding the needy Afghans will get a relief with the supplies. KABUL, March 29 (Xinhua) -- A batch of humanitarian supplies, provided by China's South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund, in cooperation with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), was handed over to Afghanistan on Sunday. Speaking at a handover ceremony in Kabul, Chinese Ambassador to Afghanistan Wang Yu said the Chinese government has been highly concerned about the Afghan people who are suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic, unrest and drought. Chinese Ambassador to Afghanistan Wang Yu (L, front) attends the handover ceremony of China-aided humanitarian supplies in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, March 27, 2022. (Photo by Saifurahman Safi/Xinhua) Last year, the South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund approved in time a request from the UNHCR on providing the vulnerable groups in Afghanistan with emergency shelter supplies and education support, and offered fund support, the Chinese ambassador said. With the efforts from the UNHCR, all the supplies have been purchased, and now are distributed in Kabul, Kandahar, Baghlan and Nangarhar provinces, among others, Wang said, adding the needy Afghans will get a relief with the supplies. The UNHCR's acting representative in Afghanistan Yumiko Takashima appreciated the South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund for providing the fund support, saying the timely assistance will benefit more than 90,000 displaced Afghans and school children. I have not seen such cynical behavior in my life, she said. So when the citys mayor, Vladyslav Atroshenko, urged those who could to get out and volunteers from a private bus company organized minibuses, dozens of people decided to risk it. Cars trying to escape had come under repeated fire and there was no guarantee of safe passage for civilians, but the situation inside the city was becoming increasingly precarious. A great number of cars came under fire and many people died, said Dr. Kaydashs husband, Mikhail, 68, who accompanied his wife and sister. He said he was surprised that they got through. We were lucky, it was quiet. They made a tortuous six-hour journey along back roads through woods and fields to avoid Russian positions, listening to the pounding of tank and mortar fire not far away. Ms. Shepetova left behind her husband since, she said, men between the ages of 18 and 60 were not allowed to board the buses. Dr. Kaydash left behind her daughter and family. Then three days after their escape, Russian planes bombed the only bridge leading out of Chernihiv, cutting the exit route for tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers still inside. There remains a pedestrian bridge across the river but it is damaged and exposed to Russian shelling and gunfire, the mayor said. He asked for help for his besieged city last weekend in a video call with journalists. We are looking for way to bring 44 seriously wounded people out, he said. They need urgent evacuation. The wounded were mostly military, he said, but included civilians and three children. BERLIN It was Chancellor Olaf Scholz who, three days after Russias invasion of Ukraine, broke with Germanys postwar pacifism, vowing to give his country the necessary resources and muscle to lead on security matters in Europe. Those now tasked with carrying out that change the biggest foreign-policy shift in Germany since World War II are women. Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht, who is in Washington this week, is overseeing a rearmament program of 100 billion euros, about $110 billion, for the German military. Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister, is devising Germanys first national security strategy. And Nancy Faeser, in charge of homeland security, is organizing the welcome for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees. As war rages in Ukraine, a mere 10-hour drive from Berlin, it is the first time that Germany has all three national security positions filled by women, putting them on the frontline of both a cultural and a strategic revolution in their country. ISTANBUL The first signs of significant progress in peace talks between Russia and Ukraine emerged on Tuesday, but there was no hint of an imminent end to the suffering, with Russia appearing determined to capture more territory in eastern Ukraine and officials predicting that weeks of further negotiation were needed. After three hours of talks in Istanbul, Ukrainian officials said their country was ready to declare itself permanently neutral forsaking the prospect of joining NATO, a key Russian demand and discuss Russian territorial claims in exchange for security guarantees from a group of other nations. An aide to Ukraines president called the Russian delegation constructive, while Russia said it would drastically scale back its military activity around Kyiv to increase mutual trust. Russias statement that it will de-escalate the fighting around Kyiv even as it keeps pounding other parts of Ukraine may be little more than putting a positive gloss on its military being stymied in its attempts to seize or encircle the capital. In recent days, Ukrainian counteroffensives around the city have forced back Russian forces in some of the fiercest street battles of the war, though they remain within striking distance of Kyiv. Now, Russian officials said, the goal will be to take more territory in Ukraines eastern Donbas region, where Russia has installed two separatist statelets that President Vladimir V. Putin recognized last month as independent, but that no other nation has formally acknowledged. ISTANBUL On Tuesday, for the first time in more than two weeks, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators came face to face. They did so over a white tablecloth at a long table inside a 19th-century Ottoman palace on the banks of the Bosporus, welcomed personally by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who greeted them in English with good morning. After more than a month of talks first in person in Belarus, then in recent weeks by video link the diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia running in parallel to their war entered a new phase on Tuesday. The fact that the negotiations had become more serious was reflected in the setting, the palace where Mr. Erdogan who has maintained ties with both Moscow and Kyiv often holds major government events when in Istanbul. As the members of the delegations, you have shouldered a historic responsibility, Mr. Erdogan told the delegates, addressing them from a podium before an artwork showing birds drifting over Istanbul landmarks. All the world is expecting good news from you. David Arakhamia, the head of the nine-person Ukrainian delegation, said that holding the talks in Turkey was a victory in itself, because Turkey is our friend and partner. The earlier in-person rounds of talks had been held in Belarus, Russias closest ally. Some senior Western officials agreed, saying that the Russians were badly short of artillery shells and other ammunition and needed to resupply. Nor will Mr. Putin easily end the war, Mr. Heisbourg said. If he takes the area east of the Dnieper, that may be enough for now, but he will rebuild his army and continue. For both sides, said Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House, the London research institution, the negotiations are not serious, in the sense that negotiations now for both sides are a continuation of the war, not a solution. Russia can concentrate on the east, and Ukraine will find it hard to move from its agile defense to serious counterattacks, he said. And Putin hasnt forgotten about Kyiv. Even if Mr. Putin can control and settle for another partition of Ukraine in the east, Ukraine has to sign up for it, and if not, I dont think we lift the sanctions, Mr. Niblett said. His colleague, Mathieu Boulegue, a French scholar who studies the Russian military, agrees that Russia is not negotiating in good faith, but testing the waters and applying for time, to regroup and re-equip militarily and make more gains on the ground. The Russian military appears to have taken control of what might be called Phase 2 of a botched operation, he said, which should have been Phase 1. Taking Mariupol, the land bridge and the Donbas would have been the grown-up military plan. Modern warfare is half information warfare, Mr. Boulegue said, and success is what you make of it, especially in a repressive media environment as in Russia now. The crime first came to light last week, when Ukraines prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said in a Facebook post that a Russian soldier had killed an unarmed civilian and then repeatedly raped his wife. Days later, the White House said it was concerned about emerging reports of sexual violence in Ukraine. Then on Monday night, The Times of London published the womans chilling account. Using the pseudonym Natalya, she told a reporter she had been in her home in a village near the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, when she heard footsteps and a shot rang out. Moments later her husband lay dead outside her front door, and two Russian soldiers were at her side, one holding a gun to her head. I shot your husband because he was a Nazi, the gunman told her, before he and the other soldier raped her, as her 4-year-old son sobbed in a boiler room next door, according to The Times. She said she was later raped a second time by the soldiers, and eventually managed to flee to western Ukraine with her son. I could have been silent, but when we got to the police, my husbands sister made me speak up, and there was no going back, she was quoted saying in The Times. I understand that many people who have been hurt would stay silent because they are afraid. Lots of people dont believe terrible things like this happen. JERUSALEM A Palestinian gunman killed five people in an ultra-Orthodox city outside of Tel Aviv on Tuesday night, the latest in a surge of attacks in Israel this month. The shooting was the fifth attack in less than two weeks, and brought the total death toll in recent days to 11 the most people killed by militants in such a short period in Israel, outside of a full-scale war, in several years. The spasm of violence heightened fears of an even more intense surge over the next month, when the rare convergence of Ramadan, Passover and Easter is expected to raise tensions further between Israelis and Palestinians. Magen David Adom, an Israeli emergency medical service, said that four victims were pronounced dead at the scene of the attack in Bnei Brak, a religious suburb on the eastern edge of Tel Aviv. A fifth was taken to the hospital where he died, according to a medic who was with him in the ambulance. Healthcare PR enjoyed robust growth in 2021 as the 80 firms ranked by ODwyers posted a 46.6 percent gain in total revenue to $1.3B, counseling clients on how to deal with the global COVID-19 crisis. Real Chemistry ($475M) Edelman ($208.9M) and Evoke Group ($181M) took the top three slots in the rankings. Michael Kempners MikeWorldWide (+116.3 percent to $7.5M), Tom Ryans ICR Inc. (+67.6 to $38.5M) and Scott Signores Matter Communications (+51.6 percent to $7.6M) posted the biggest gains of the Top 25 firms. Healthcare Becomes Edelman's Biggest Practice Courtney Gray Haupt Edelman Health in 2021 emerged as the largest practice at the firm for the first time in its 70-year history. The unit posted a 23.8 percent jump in revenues to $208.9M. Courtney Gray Haupt, US Health chair, said every region grew due to reprioritizing collaboration and building teams based on need, not geography. There was a 14 percent jump in new business wins, which includes a 49 percent increase in organic wins compared to 2020. The robust performance came as Edelman collaborated with clients to build trust across health communities, while combating misinformation about their businesses, products, science and research, according to Gray Haupt. Edelman Health forged new partnerships to deliver inclusive programming to multicultural communities and helped clients further their ESG policies to support and strengthen human and planetary health. The healthcare operation also protected and promoted corporate and brand reputations by meeting and exceeding the growing demands of internal and external stakeholders. Gray Haupt noted progress on Edelman Healths DEI commitments, including a 27 percent increase in female managers and a 10 percent jump in diverse leadership. It also solidified and scaled healthcare specialty teams in strategic planning, digital, creative, and data/analytics. It isnt just our approach to the work that has changed, but also how we engage together, said Gray Haupt. We have prioritized culture and continued to become more inclusive and specialized, guided more by expertise than geography in how we counsel our clients. She said Edelman Health is more united than ever around a shared purpose: to help clients act boldly to earn and keep trust. APCO Empowers Clients Evan Kraus APCO Worldwide, which showed a 12.4 percent revenue increase to $36.7M, helped clients deal with complex public and policy discussions, empowering them to deliver on their missions to promote health and advance health care equity globally, said Evan Kraus, president of the Washington-based shop. APCOs insight and health teams supported Pfizers corporate affairs and global security staff to raise public awareness of the risk of counterfeit medicines. The firm also helped Pfizer create a global, unified effort to emphasize the companys year-round dedication to patients, called Patients in Focus. Kraus said the program included 60 global and local events hosted by 25 countries, with participation by more than 340 patients and advocates, 1.15+ million social media impressions and more than 38,000 participating Pfizer colleagues. APCO also advised Roche in creating FutureProofing Healthcare, an interactive tool showcasing insights and data on health care systems across Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates turned to APCO to help reach its goal of becoming a COVID-19-free nation. APCOwith G42 Healthcaredesigned a public health campaign that has made the country the most vaccinated nation in the world today, with more than 90 percent of the population fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, the UAE tops Bloombergs Covid Resilience Ranking, proving its success in containing the pandemic and ensuring the safety of its residents. On the people front, APCO appointed health and public affairs expert Mathew Shearman to lead APCOs North America health team. JPA Health Expands Across Biopharma Sector Carrie Jones JPA Health, which has offices in Washington, Boston, New York and London, registered a 14 percent boost in revenues to $16.9M. Following a year like no other, we further expanded our work across the biopharma industry, winning major new accounts to drive awareness of new approaches to cancer treatment, educate on the need for innovation in the rare disease space, and introduce exciting new treatments to the market, said Carrie Jones, principal. JPA Healths medtech unit bloomed, picking up clients focused on robotic-assisted surgery, artificial intelligence in drug discovery and new technologies for patient engagement. Jones said the firm dealt with some of society's most pressing issues, which included spotlighting the mental health crisis among healthcare workers and supporting COVID-19 vaccination confidence in medically underserved communities. The firms life sciences and public health practices incorporated health equity principles from project planning to completion to create inclusive, culturally competent communications campaigns, said Jones. Finn Guides Clients Through Fragmented Ecosystem Gil Bashe Finn Partners pounded out a 28.6 percent rise in 2021 healthcare revenues to the $44.2M mark. Enabling clients to navigate the fragmented health ecosystem continues to be a winning recipe for success, said Gil Bashe, chair of global health & purpose. The healthcare unit has more than 200 clients throughout the patient advocacy, product marketing, policy communications and payer and provider sectors. It added new services in clinical trial recruitment, health IT marketing, and digital health and omnichannel communications during the past year. The Medika Life and Pharmacy Podcast Network acquisitions have given Finns clients an inside track to connect with other health thought leaders and the influential pharmacy community, said Bashe. Finn bolstered its healthcare unit with the appointment of Fern Lazar, managing partner, global health practice lead. Bashe said his partnership with Lazar and the rest of the leadership team positions the health unit for robust growth during the current year. The firm added senior partners Richard Hatzfeld, global public health; Bob Martineau, environment and sustainability; Ritesh Patel, global digital health; and Julian Tyndale-Biscoe and Beth Friedman through the acquisition of InHealth Communications and Agency Ten22, Bashe called Finn the the go-to agency in health informationthe glue that enables physicians, patients, pharma companies and payers to align around care and product access urgencies. He also noted that Finn has strong connections to advocacy and professional groups. Its leaders advise the Galien Foundation, Lets Win for Pancreatic Cancer, the Marfan Foundation, No More, Hip Hop Public Health, and the International Well Building Institute. Ruder Finn Focuses on the 'Digital-First Health Consumer' Christie Anbar Ruder Finn's healthcare revenues grew by 28 percent in 2021, hitting $45.4M and landing the firm at #5 on the O'Dwyer's healthcare list. The agency's managing director of healthcare, Christie Anbar, says that Ruder Finn's growth spurt was "built on connecting a new digital-first health consumer coming out of the pandemic with a wave of breakthrough science and health technologies coming to market." Ruder Finn's initiatives in 2021 included building awareness of the power of new mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and launching the first digital at-home COVID-19 test. Clients contributing to the hike in revenues included Pfizer, Biogen, Sanofi, Kite, Tempus, Idorsia, Merck, Harvard Precision Medicine Accelerator and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health. Anbar also says that Ruder Finn focused on advancing "awareness and uptake of multiple breakthrough cancer drugs, including immuno-oncology and CAR T therapies, while working with companies, government and non-profits to increase access to innovative cancer medicines and reduce disparities." Addressing the "full patient and theraptic journey" was also key to the firm's 2021 success, she adds. That effort extended from "communicating around critical milestones" and "digitally targeted clinical trial recruitment" to "attention-grabbing creative content such as serial podcasts and producing films for major streaming platforms." Matter Benefits from Demand from Emerging Verticals Scott Signore Matter Communications ranked among the fastest growing healthcare firms in the Top 25 group, driven by "a rapidly expanding client base and demand from emerging industry verticals," according to Scott Signore, principal & CEO. He said the firm more than doubled client roster and staff numbers over the past calendar year. "While last year we were laser-focused on helping our clients pivot strategies to fight the pandemic, were now guiding them through this intense period of demand and growth happening across the healthcare continuum," he said. As Matter and its clients emerge from the pandemic and face evolving economic and global events, Signore said: "Were helping to share the important messages of innovators making real differences in healthcare, ranging from technology to therapeutics, mental health and more." In supporting new growth verticals, Signore reports "a notable uptick in demand for PR and marketing services from biopharma and life sciences organizations. Crosby Handled Ups and Downs of Pandemic. Ray Crosby Crosby, which chalked up $28.5M in healthcare revenues, continued to be on the forefront of helping health care organizations navigate and communicate throughout the ups and downs of the pandemic, engaging all stakeholders from providers, payors, policymakers, patients and the public, according to CEO Raymond Crosby. In 2021, the firm landed new assignments from Kaiser Permanente, Shriners Hospitals for Children, Refuah Health, and expanded work for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Our campaign to drive increased use of the new Telehealth.HHS.gov website exceeded the goal by 273 percent, said Crosby. And through our work on behalf of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, we helped launch more than 25 new, evidenced-based clinical preventive guidelines to improve the health of people nationwide. On the nonprofit front, Crosbys PSA campaign for DAV (Disabled American Veterans) generated $98 million in donated broadcast, print and out-of-home media, and strong national news coverage. Crosby said its an honor to help more of Americas veterans get the health and disability benefits theyve earned and deserve. The firm enhanced its digital, UX and analytics capabilities, and invested in people and DEI initiatives to build its team. Its still hard to know what the new normal is, but 2022 is already shaping up to be another strong year of growth and success for Crosby and our health practice, said Crosby. For Gods sake, lets stop the nonsense about whether president Joe Biden committed a gaffe when he said Russian strongman Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power. Theres a war going on. Biden was on the mark. Hes talking about a guy who invaded a neighboring country without provocation, launched attacks on civilian targets, razed its cities, and kidnapped Ukrainians, dispatching them to exile in Russia. Shame on the GOP for trying to make political hay over the presidents Bidens deviation from his scripted speech, which rallied NATO to support Ukraine. Florida Congressman Michael Waltz said Bidens words damaged his credibility. I guess Waltz wasnt paying attention when Biden called Putin a butcher and war criminal. Georgia lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene said: The most needed regime change right now is the one in the United States for ruining our country. The only part of America in desperate need of a regime change is Georgias 14th congressional district. Ohio Senator Rob Portman fears that Bidens remark provides grist to the Russian propaganda mill. Where have you been, Rob? The Senator is obviously aware (or should be aware) that Russian propagandists have made the false claim that the US and Ukraine are working on a secret chemical or biological weapons program to be used on invading Russian troops. Putin and his state-run media have been saying for years that the US and the CIA are hellbent on removing him from power. Dmitri Peskov, Putins mouthpiece who is among the sanctioned oligarchs, said Bidens statement makes us worry. Theres much more to worry about, Dmitri. You should be worrying about the damage done to your master's reputation following the failure of Russias army to waltz into Kyiv and be hailed as conquering heroes by grateful Ukrainians. Pezkov said the Kremlin will closely monitor Bidens statements. He should closely monitoring Putins sanity level. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky told The Economist that he is baffled by Putins inhumanity to his own people. The invaders do not even mourn their own casualties. This is something I do not understand. Some 15,000 have been killed in one month. Vladimir Putin is throwing Russian soldiers like logs into a trains furnace. And, they are not even burying them. Their corpses are left in the streets. In several cities, small cities, our soldiers say its impossible to breathe because of the stench of rotting flesh. Biden simply expressed the opinion of millions of people across the world, including hundreds of thousands of Russians. More than 200K have fled their country since the beginning of the Feb. 24 invasion. Many more will follow in their footsteps as Russias economy collapses; and dead, wounded and demoralized soldiers return home to their families to face a desperate future. That upcoming horror may finally convince the Russian people: For Gods sake, this man cannot remain in power. They will owe a debt of gratitude to Americas president. Lets review Donald Trumps remarks made just prior to Putins invasion. He told radio hosts Buck Sexton and Clay Travis that Putin was a genius because he declared a big portion of Ukraine independent. Oh, thats wonderful, said Trump. That big portion is the Donbas region, where hundreds of Ukrainians have died battling the Russians since 2014. The disgraced American president told a fund-raiser in Mar-a-Lago: Id say thats pretty smart. Hes taking over a countryreally a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people and just walking in. Trump needs a new crystal ball. In todays depressing news scene, one finds humor in the darndest of places. The New York Times March 27 piece about Chris Wallace (74) leaving Fox News for CNN+ is one such place. The advanced ages of some of his early guestsJudy Collins (82) and William Shatner (91)also suggest that Mr. Wallaces program might complement more millennial-focused fare, wrote Michael Grynbaum. Ya think. The Offaly winner of the inaugural SEAI Electric Vehicle Dealership Awards has been announced. The award for Offaly went to Tullamore Motors. The awards recognise and reward excellence in the promotion and sales of electric vehicles (EV) in Ireland. Car dealerships are a vital part of the transition to clean and efficient transport. SEAI wants to recognise and award those dealerships who are working to increase consumers understanding and experience of EVs and their uptake on Irish roads. Commenting on the recent announcement, Declan Meally, Director of Business, Public Sector and Transport at SEAI said, SEAI recognises that EV car dealerships and their staff are a key set of enablers to EV uptake. I congratulate this years winners whose commitment and dedication are hugely inspiring. I would also like to thank those Dealerships for supporting the awards in such large numbers. Engaging and supporting EV dealers will help influence Ireland's transition to EVs. These new SEAI Dealership Awards provide additional incentives and opportunities to build capacity and competence in the supply chain and help to improve the overall public customer experience. There were 116 applications across 25 counties. Car dealers competed through a mystery shopping exercise where they were scored on a number of factors including how visible EVs were in the showroom, how knowledgeable their salespeople were on EVs, and their sales approach. Other evaluation areas included EV training, sales trends and the dealerships website. The winners announced are now on the shortlist for the national award which will be announced at this years SEAI Energy Show taking place in the RDS, Dublin on March 30 and 31. For full details on all winning dealerships, visit www.seai.ie. ISTANBUL, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Russia and Ukraine kicked off a fresh round of face-to-face peace talks here on Tuesday, aiming to achieve substantial progress for a ceasefire, according to media reports. Since Feb. 28, Russia and Ukraine have held three rounds of face-to-face peace talks and a series of online discussions, failing to reach a major agreement. A dangerous driver who, according to a judge, should never be allowed behind the wheel on a public road again after his vehicle crashed into oncoming traffic during a truly scandalous overtaking manoeuvre has failed in his bid to have his conviction quashed. When Martin Feehans Citroen Berlingo struck on-coming traffic, his passenger, 40-year-old Brid Hallihan, suffered a broken pelvis and spent months in hospital as she recovered from serious injuries sustained in the multiple-vehicle pile-up on the main Mallow-to-Cork road at Granagh, Co Cork, on February 16, 2015. Prosecutors claimed Feehan had been driving too fast when the overtaking lane he was travelling in merged with a slower lane and as a result he lost control of his vehicle, which then careered across the carriageway and into traffic travelling in the opposite direction. Feehan (42) of Killaltanagh, Banagher, Co Galway, was later charged with dangerous driving causing serious bodily harm, contrary to Section 53 of the Road Traffic Act 1961 a charge he had denied. A jury, however, found him guilty and he was given a three-year suspended sentence and a 20-year driving ban by Judge Sean O Donnabhain following a trial at Cork Circuit Criminal Court in February 2020. Sentencing Feehan, Judge O Donnabhain said: His misreading of the event was all but total. I think the public would be better served by a driving ban. It is my view that he should never drive on a public road again. Feehan later launched an appeal against the conviction on the grounds the judge had erred in law in his explanation to the jury of the difference between dangerous driving and careless driving. It was further claimed the judge had erred in fact and in law in failing to summarise the factual matters on relevant issues and had erred by in law in refusing the appellants application for a direction in the case. But the appeal has been dismissed on all grounds. In a written judgement delivered today (Tuesday), Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy stated that although Judge O Donnabhain had been criticised for his colloquial or homely answer to the jurys questions, it was clear to the appellate court he had been plainly attempting to further explain the level of fault required to prove the charge. The claim the judge had erred in his summary of factual matters was similarly dismissed after the court noted that Judge O Donnabhain was not required to accept counsels version of the evidence. Regarding the issue the defence had with the judges refusal of the appellants application for a direction to acquit, Mr Justice McCarthy noted that this ground related to availability of dashcam footage from another vehicle involved in the crash. The footage could not be viewed because the device which had recorded the material had become corrupted and the images could not be downloaded with the technology available to gardai, he observed. Rejecting this ground, Mr Justice McCarthy stated: Even if usable footage was recovered, what it might or might not show (if examined by a suitable expert) is entirely speculative. An appeal against Feehans driving ban and suspended sentence will be heard at a later date. A dramatic change is coming in the weather with Met Eireann forecasting colder temperatures and wintry showers in the coming days. According to Met Eireann, the weather in Ireland will get noticeably colder in the coming days with temperatures getting back into single digits with showers at times also, some wintry. However it is not all bad news as there will still with a good deal of dry weather with milder weather on the way again next week. According to the latest Met Eireann weather forecast for Ireland, mist and fog will clear will clear on Wednesday morning and there will be some sunshine. However it will become mostly cloudy with patchy rain or drizzle moving southwards. Colder, brighter weather following from the north later, with afternoon temperatures over most of the country of just 5 to 8 degrees, milder in Munster and west Connacht with highs of 8 to 11 degrees. According to Met Eireann, it will be largely clear overnight on Wednesday and it will be dry for most as showers become mostly confined to eastern parts, possibly turning wintry at times on high ground. Much colder than recent nights with lowest temperatures of -3 to +1 degrees with frost developing in mostly moderate northeasterly winds, fresher in the southeast. The latest Met Eireann weather forecast for Ireland for Thursday says that frost will clear in the morning to leave a day with good sunshine interspaced with well scattered light showers. Noticeably cooler throughout the country with highest temperatures of 5 to 9 degrees in mostly moderate northerly winds. It will be largely dry and clear on Thursday night though there will be some showers near coasts. Another cold night with lowest temperatures of -3 to 0 degrees, with frost developing again in light to moderate northerly breezes. According to Met Eireann, Friday will see a largely dry and bright start to the day but cloud will push in from the north through the day along with a few light showers. Highest temperatures of 6 to 9 degrees in light to moderate northerly breezes. Dry overnight with a mix of cloud and clear spells. Lowest temperatures of -2 to +2 degrees with light northerly breezes backing westerly. The latest Met Eireann weather forecast for the weekend says that there will be sunny spells and showers on Saturday with highest temperatures of 8 to 10 degrees. Some uncertainty for Sunday with the possibility of widespread rain. In its latest weather forecast for Ireland, Met Eireann adds that the weather will turning milder for early next week but continuing unsettled with rain and showers. GlobeNewswire 05 May 2022 These collaborative grants are part of the $50 million investment from the Sentara Healthier Communities Fund to address health.. Whose side are you on? Dissecting the moment that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock during the Oscars award ceremony. Elvira Nabiullina has one of the most thankless jobs in finance right now, and there are questions over how long she will allow herself to be associated with Putins war. The actor reportedly got thrown out of another bar not too long ago after getting physical with a woman. MACAO, March 29 (Xinhua) -- China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) will require vaccination against COVID-19 for in-bound visitors 12 years or older from outside the mainland, the Novel Coronavirus Response and Coordination Center of Macao said on Tuesday. Starting Sunday, those who fall into the above age category will have to present certificates of full vaccination before boarding means of transportation heading to Macao, the center said. Those aged 18 or above who completed the last dose of vaccination over seven months ago had to present certificates of at least one dose of booster jabs. Otherwise, visitors will have to present valid certificates proving they are unfit or unable to be vaccinated for longer than two consecutive months, the center said, stressing that violators are likely to take administrative or criminal responsibilities. The current quarantine policy for in-bound visitors from outside the mainland will remain unchanged, requiring the visitors to be quarantined at designated venues for 14 days, according to the center. Ukraine's leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces are still attacking the capital, despite being driven out of the suburb of Irpin. Meanwhile, another round of talks is expected in Istanbul. DW has the latest. War in Europe has become a reality for the first time in decades. German teens are concerned that Russia's aggression will spread beyond Ukraine. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators have concluded a round of peace talks, with both sides expressing cautious optimism. Russia says it will reduce some military activity "to increase mutual trust." DW has the latest. A 26-year-old Russian soldier was killed in the first days of the Ukraine war during an attack on the Hostomel airport near Kyiv. DW spoke with his grieving mother who still defends Russia's actions. Teachers in Florida have been banned from giving lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity to children under the age of nine. 2008-2022 One News Page Ltd. All rights reserved. One News is a registered trademark of One News Page Ltd. Newsy 27 Mar 2022 Watch Video"I can't believe a girl, 6-years-old, was walking with her mother and with her brother and the Russians just killed this.. Nepal has issued permits to nine Russian climbers despite a Ukrainian call for them to be banned. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach says the coronavirus situation in Europe is worse than people think and that people over 60 should get another booster shot. India has launched talks with countries such as Egypt that depend on Russian and Ukrainian wheat so that it can fill the gap created and at least double exports. While demand for Indian wheat has increased in the last few weeks, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal has also begun a dialogue with some prospective importers. UNITED NATIONS, March 28 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy on Monday called for the lifting of sanctions against Sudan as soon as possible. Following the withdrawal of the United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Sudan's Darfur region, the Sudanese authorities have assumed the primary responsibility of protecting civilians. It is, therefore, urgent to strengthen its security capacity, said Dai Bing, China's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations. "The arms embargo has negative impacts on Sudan's security capacity-building. The Security Council should adjust the sanction measures timely in light of the changed situation." Security Council Resolution 2620 adopted last month requires the development of benchmarks for adjusting Sudan sanctions by Aug. 31 this year. China hopes that this requirement can be effectively implemented, he told the council. It must be noted that unilateral sanctions are barriers to Susan's development. Unilateral sanctions often fail to solve problems, but may well create new troubles, worsening the food, energy, and economic crisis and harming Sudanese people's livelihoods and causing new humanitarian consequences, said Dai. He called on the relevant country to change course and try to treat other countries as equals and work together for win-win results. New Zealand soldiers and police officers will remain in the Solomon Islands as the Foreign Minister warns China's proposed security pact with the Pacific island nation risks "destabilising" the region. Nanaia Mahuta today announced... The Group of Seven major economies of the world, also known as the G7, have refused Russian President Vladimir Putin's demands of making gas export payments in rubles. The situation comes as Western sanctions have left Russia's economy in ruins. Florida lawmakers will hold a special session in April to redraw a new congressional map after Gov. Ron Desantis vetoed the one they had approved. We take a look at some of the best metal that will hit the streets over the next year and beyond You might still be.. Autocar 23 Mar 2022 New Zealand Herald 28 Mar 2022 President Joe Biden said Monday that he would make "no apologies" and wasn't "walking anything back" after his weekend comment that.. Arriving on a damaged bus with missing windows, Ukrainian villagers feel relieved as they get to Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine. They have fled their villages after spending days in their basements seeking refuge from Russian shelling. Some of them had to walk for hours until they arrived in a region where Ukrainian soldiers helped them escape to safe ground. (March 29) Oneindia 09 Apr 2022 On Friday, Will Smith was banned from attending the Oscars for the next 10 years. This comes two weeks after the actor slapped.. Ukraine made a series of proposals at talks in Turkey with Russia on resolving the month-long conflict, including abandoning its longstanding ambition to join NATO. The burnt wreckage of two Russian tanks with blown off turrets and several armoured personnel carriers attest the ferocity of last week's clashes in Lukyanivka village just outside Kyiv. The charred corpse of a Russian soldier lies in a field nearby. JERUSALEM, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Israel's High Court of Justice on Tuesday annulled the Israeli education minister's decision to deny awarding the national Israel Prize to a renowned computer scientist. In November last year, Education Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton decided to deny the prestigious prize to Oded Goldreich from the Weizmann Institute of Science for signing a petition calling on the European Union to boycott Ariel University, an Israeli university located in the Israeli settlement of Ariel in the West Bank. The Israel Prize is awarded annually on the state's Independence Day for special excellence, breakthrough, or contribution to Israeli society in a wide range of fields. Goldreich was supposed to receive the award back in May 2021, but then former Education Minister Yoav Galant overturned the prize committee's decision, claiming that the scientist supports the pro-Palestinian boycott movement against Israel, including a boycott against Ariel University. In August, two months after Galant was replaced, the Israeli court overturned his decision and passed the issue to the new education minister Yifat Shasha-Biton, who made the same denial decision in November before the prize committee appealed to the court again. "The Israel Prize over the years has been awarded on the basis of excellence and significant professional contribution and not on the basis of social-value considerations," the latest court ruling said. "I am sorry about the high court's decision, but I will respect it," Shasha-Biton responded. Russia said on Tuesday that it would significantly scale back its military activity around Kyiv and Chernihiv. Ukraine delivered a proposal for accepting a neutral and nonnuclear status. Bailey McCann, Opalesque New York for New Managers: Investment bank Rothschild & Co. has shuffled its leadership team. Javed Khan, Head of Merchant Banking, has been appointed as a Managing Partner of Rothschild & Co Gestion, the entity responsible for the management of Rothschild & Co. Marc-Olivier Laurent has stepped down as a Managing Partner. He will be proposed as a member of the Supervisory Board at the next Annual General Meeting to be held on 19 May 2022. Khan will work alongside Alexandre de Rothschild, Executive Chairman, and the other two Managing Partners, Robert Leitao and Francois Perol, Managing Partners. The firm has also hired Jaime Arrastia to the Global Advisory business as a Managing Director in the Consumer, Retail & Leisure group, and a Vice Chairman for the Global Advisory business in North America. Arrista joins from RBC Capital Markets where he was previously Managing Director in the Consumer & Retail Investment Banking Group. Arrastia will report to James Ben, North America Head of Consumer and North America Head of M&A, and work closely with Akeel Sachak, Global Head of Consumer, and Jimmy Neissa, Head of North America. "Jaime's extensive experience advising some of the world's largest consumer and retail companies will ensure we continue to provide highly informed counsel to our consumer clients while growing our presence in the sector and expa...................... To view our full article Click here Plainfield, IL - March 28, 2022 Self-published children's book author, Erika Bud, partners with New Orleans based ARtscapes to provide augmented reality (AR) technology in her first book, Travel Rangers: Mission to Australia. Readers will be the first to enjoy this amazing experience as ARtscapes has never provided this technology in a children's book. Created to ignite a passion for travel in both children and adults, the Travel Rangers book series People are seen in a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in Ituri, a northeastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, March 17, 2022. Hundreds of thousands of people, all survivors of bloodshed and militia attacks, are battling trauma and weaving life in camps for IDP in Ituri, a northeastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), following decades-long conflicts.(Photo by Alain Uaykani/Xinhua) BUNIA, DR Congo, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of thousands of people, all survivors of bloodshed and militia attacks, are battling trauma and weaving life in camps for internally displaced people (IDP) in Ituri, a northeastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), following decades-long conflicts. For decades, tensions and conflicts have been running high in this part of the country, where hundreds of thousands of people had no choice but to flee their homes and take refuge in IDP camps scattered across Ituri. According to a report released Monday by the United Nations, some 1.9 million people are displaced within Ituri, accounting for one-third of all people displaced in this central African country. Buma Annie, a 36-year-old girl who has been internally displaced since last year, now resides in the Kigonze camp in Bunia, capital of the Ituri province. Born and raised in a small village of the Djugu territory, home to the country's largest number of IDP, she recalled the day when she escaped by the skin of their teeth. "During the attacks in my village, the militiamen first raped me and then massacred the members of my family", she told Xinhua at the Kigonze IDP camp, located on the outskirts of Bunia. In trauma, she managed to crawl his away out despite her legs both brutally amputated. After months of medical treatment by humanitarian workers, Buma Annie is now able to move on her two knees, noting that battling the trauma now becomes the biggest hurdle of her life. "It is difficult for me to live with this trauma that remains permanently in my head after what the militia did to me. I have always felt alone in the absence of my family who has all perished in this situation of insecurity which unfortunately still does not end," confessed Annie. "The militiamen coldly killed my two children with machetes during the attack. These children meant everything to me," said Bernadette Ngadjoy, a 62-year-old mother, who lost both of her children in the attack, adding that she now needs to refind the strength to live in the IDP camp. Since the beginning of 2022, the escalation in violence in Ituri has led to the killing of an estimated 400 civilians and the displacement of over 83,000 people, said Monday the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). As some 80 civilians have been murdered in the second week of March alone, OCHA claimed to have observed an increase in attacks on IDP sites and in areas where displaced people are seeking shelter. In a recent exclusive interview with Xinhua, Lieutenant-General Johnny Luboya, Ituri's military governor noted that the recent flare-up of violence against civilians mirrors the pressure of the military operations by the DRC authorities, which would last "until the effective restoration of peace". "It is indeed the results of the pressure that our forces are exerting against the militiamen. This pressure will continue permanently until the effective restoration of peace," he said, calling on the population to be patient and trust the military operations in progress. Alongside the ongoing military operations in Ituri, the DRC presidency has also initiated dialogue with the cooperative group for the development of Congo (CODECO), who has been active in Djugu, in an attempt to try to find a peaceful solution. "We know the challenges are huge on many fronts, but we remain optimistic about the future of this province. We are appealing to our people to trust our ability to restore peace, and we will get there," said the military governor. Aerial photo taken on Feb. 4, 2022 shows a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in Ituri, a northeastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hundreds of thousands of people, all survivors of bloodshed and militia attacks, are battling trauma and weaving life in camps for IDP in Ituri, a northeastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), following decades-long conflicts.(Photo by Alain Uaykani/Xinhua) People are seen in a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in Ituri, a northeastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, March 17, 2022. Hundreds of thousands of people, all survivors of bloodshed and militia attacks, are battling trauma and weaving life in camps for IDP in Ituri, a northeastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), following decades-long conflicts.(Photo by Alain Uaykani/Xinhua) Courtesy photo/Networks Northwest LANSING A group of CASMAN Academy students recently was given an opportunity to meet with legislators in Lansing. Students in the Jobs for Michigans Graduates program, coordinated by Northwest Michigan Works!, attended the program's Legislative Day on March 9. The students met with Sen. Curt VanderWall and Rep. Jack OMalley to discuss issues that are important to them and their community. Another area program that has been on hold these past few years is coming back. The Harbor Beach Artist in Residence Program will return this fall, where artists are invited to stay in the community and create art inspired by the area. The last time the program hosted artists was from mid-October to mid-November 2019, when three Michigan artists were invited to live in the area. Janet Sloan, a program administrator, said the program would take place from Oct. 14 to Nov. 5, with artists staying in the Harbor Beach Marina Cottages with free lodging. "The only reason we didn't do the last couple of years is that it would have been irresponsible during the height of the pandemic," Sloan said. Sloan said the long-term goal of this program is to generate an appreciation for the value of art in life and the community and to encourage artists to come and work and participate in the areas community life. Other goals include creating new community events and promoting offseason tourism. It has been demonstrated that an artist colony enhances the economy of any area, increasing property values and encouraging tourism, as well as enhancing the quality of life in the community by engaging the whole population in the work of creativity, Sloan said in a statement. The chosen artists will also receive: A $300 stipend Use of a bicycle during residency A certificate for two kayak rentals when they come back in the summer. As part of this program, the organizers ask that artists be part of an art panel at the Harbor Beach Community House Theater where they can share their process and work with community while taking questions from the audience. The artists are also asked to allow some of the work created to be an exhibit during the summer season. Some of the art categories the program is looking for are paint, charcoal, textiles, writing, music, and digital arts. The artists featured in 2019 were Peter Acomb of Detroit, Nicholas James Thomasma of Grand Rapids, and Timothy Elliott of Marthas Vineyard. The program hosted two events during that time. The first was an open invitation Launch Party at Hooks Waterfront, where the artists introduced themselves and an estimated 145 people attended. There was also a post-program presentation at the Harbor Beach Community House Theater where artists discussed and presented their work, where between 35 and 40 people attended due to inclement weather. Those same two events will take place this year, with a meet the artists launch party planned for Oct. 15 at the North Park pavilion and the artist discussion/program wrap-up planned for Nov. 4 at the Harbor Beach Community Theater. During their month of residency, the artists shopped in town, engaged with area residents, and became regulars. In time, the community talked to the artists more and gained an appreciation of the work they do in being creative. The online application process is done through http://www.thumbartists.com, with applications accepted through July 17. The applicants will be notified no later than Aug. 21 if they have been selected. A jury made of local and regional representatives will select the finalists. Their decisions will be based on artistic integrity, a statement of purpose, and willingness to lend and/or donate or perform a finished piece of work inspired by or created during the time spent in Harbor Beach for an exhibit during the 2023 summer season. The program was made possible through grants from the Huron County Community Foundation and DTE. GUIYANG, March 29 (Xinhua) -- China's leading liquor maker Kweichow Moutai saw its net profit rise about 19 percent year on year to nearly 16.6 billion yuan (about 2.6 billion U.S. dollars) in the first quarter of 2022. It also generated an operating revenue of about 33.1 billion yuan, an annual increase of about 18 percent, the company said in its first-quarter earnings report. BIG RAPIDS At a ceremony held at Ferris State Universitys Big Rapids Campus on Monday, March 28, Bill Pink, president of Grand Rapids Community College, was officially named as the selected finalist to become the 19th president of Ferris State University by the Board of Trustees. The announcement comes after a comprehensive national search led by an advisory committee that included faculty, staff, student and community inclusion, and the trustees before the board unanimously selected Pink. The university received over 70 applications for the job, many of whom were sitting college presidents. During the hour-long announcement ceremony, several search committee members spoke on the selection process and Pinks credentials. Amna Seibold, chair of the Ferris Board of Trustees and the Presidential Search Advisory Committee, said the decision was a tight one. The entire board talked about how this is going to be the most important work we do as a Board of Trustees. and we wanted to make sure that we got it right, Seibold said. Pink has three-plus decades of professional experience as an educator, leader, and active community member. He served as Grand Rapids Community Colleges president since May 2017. Prior to becoming president, Pink served GRCC as a vice president and dean. Pinks education credentials include a Bachelor of Science in physical education and professional education from Oklahoma Christian University. In addition, he holds a Master of Education in physical education and secondary education from the University of Central Oklahoma and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oklahoma in instructional leadership, academic curriculum. Pink currently serves on the executive committee of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and the board of trustees of the Higher Learning Commission. He also serves on the boards of the American Council on Education, Spectrum Health West Michigan, Heart of West Michigan United Way, the Economic Club of Grand Rapids and the American Association of Community Colleges. Additionally, Pink is vice-chair of The Right Place, Economic Development, and will become chair in 2024. Michael Berghoef, program director at the Ferris school of social work, who served on the search committee, said he was confident in Pinks leadership. I'm thrilled with the prospect of working with Dr. Pink in the coming years to chart and manifest the best possible future for Ferris State University, Berghoef said. Dr. Pink will bring a wealth of new perspectives and experience the further Ferris's mission and vision and realize our core values. His leadership, his connections, his knowledge, his experience in West Michigan, in Michigan in general, and beyond, I'm confident will result in great benefits to our students, our alumni and other university stakeholders in this area, nationally and internationally. When Pink himself took to the stage, he spoke about his hopes for leadership with the university. The thing that excites me about this opportunity is that I believe that the place that higher education is in right now, across our country, I think is one of the most challenging places we've been in a long time, Pink said. We have to be in the room so that we can have the voice that says here is how we advance our citizenry, here is how we help create and build thriving communities. It is the work that we do every day. "It's not just about how we build that stack of students who want to advance to some of the programs that send them to work immediately and get them into skilled trades in the areas," he added. "It's also about how we continue just to enhance people. That is what higher education is all about. Last to take the stage was university President David Eisler, who took the moment to congratulate Pink on his nomination and shared some words of guidance. "Once in a while, something comes along that marks a moment we remember, as having forever changed our life. A door opens, we walk through, and when we turn and look back for that same opening, it no longer exists. We become different, Eisler said. "It's happening to you, and it will happen to this university under your leadership. Ferris State University is an extraordinary opportunity, it's an institution with a wonderful heritage, an exciting future. We were honored and humbled to be a part of this great university, and I hope you feel exactly the same way. "I believe under your leadership, we can and will create a truly extraordinary university of the future. Pink and his wife, Lori, have two children, Lance and Lydia. Lance is married to his wife, Kayla, and they have a son, Nathaniel. The Board of Trustees officially votes on the next president at its regular meeting scheduled for Friday, May 6, in Big Rapids. Upon this confirmation, Pink will succeed President David L. Eisler, who retires June 30, after serving 19 years as Ferris 18th president. WASHINGTON - Let me stipulate that, on balance, President Joe Biden probably should not have implied that the United States seeks to oust Russian President Vladimir Putin from office. Let me further stipulate that perhaps a White House sound engineer should cut Biden's microphone whenever he strays from prepared remarks. That said, the nine words about Putin that Biden ad-libbed into his speech in Warsaw on Saturday - "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power" - hardly constitute the massive "gaffe" his critics accuse him of committing. Yes, Biden was overly passionate. Yes, he was insufficiently diplomatic. But was he wrong? Putin is engaged in an unprovoked campaign of mass murder that borders on genocide. Fought to a standstill by Ukraine's brave and skillful defense forces, Putin's army, navy and air force have resorted to targeting defenseless civilians in apartment buildings, shopping centers, theaters and hospitals. The carnage is unspeakable, the devastation gratuitous. If and when the Russians finally enter Mariupol, the port on the Sea of Azov that remains under brutal siege, there literally will be no city left to occupy. We are witnessing a war crime on a massive scale, and one man is wholly responsible: Putin. He alone decided to attack a sovereign nation and he alone can decide when this obscene slaughter ends. Biden said what many people around the globe, including world leaders, are surely thinking. Putin has turned Ukraine into a charnel house and his own Russia into a pariah state. He has violated the principle of respect for internationally recognized borders that for more than seven decades has kept us from somehow stumbling into an unimaginable World War III. U.S. policy is not to seek regime change in Moscow, as the White House and the State Department quickly emphasized in clarifying Biden's remarks. But while it will never be possible for the United States and its European allies to ignore Russia, it is hard to imagine how Biden and future presidents will be able to constructively deal with Putin. Do Biden's words fundamentally change Putin's view of U.S. and Western intentions? I doubt it; Putin has long accused internal critics of playing into the West's hands by undermining his rule. Will the words change the way Putin is fighting this war? Again, I'm skeptical; Russia's tactics have been altered not by any leader's rhetoric (except Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's) but by the prowess and resolution of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. The Kremlin will be happy to use the "cannot remain in power" line as propaganda, perhaps as purported support for Putin's claim that Ukraine is not a "real" country but rather a tool of NATO "aggression" against Russia. But Putin's much bigger concern, if he is thinking logically, should be the military weapons and other gear that NATO and other Western nations are providing -- the Javelin missiles that have destroyed hundreds of Russian tanks, according to the Ukrainian government, or the Stinger missiles that have helped down dozens of Russian aircraft. It can be no surprise to Putin that Biden doesn't like him, or even that Biden wishes he were no longer leading Russia. If Putin wanted to cite "evidence" that the United States is trying to provoke regime change, he needed to look no further than the fact that so many of the toughest financial sanctions are aimed at him, his inner circle and the oligarchs who owe their great wealth to his patronage. It is almost amusing to hear Biden's critics at home accuse him of escalating the crisis. Sen. James E. Risch, R-Idaho, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the president's words a "horrendous gaffe" that is "going to cause a huge problem." A few days earlier, however, Risch effectively accused Biden of being too soft on Putin. He was among a group of 42 Republican senators who urged Biden to facilitate the transfer of Soviet-era MiG fighter jets from Poland to the Ukrainian air force -- a step the Biden administration believes would put NATO too close to being in combat with Russia. In Biden's words, I heard anger, frustration and resolve. But I did not hear -- even before the cleanup -- any change in U.S. policy toward Putin and Russia. It is not our place to decide who leads the Russian Federation. Nor is it within our power. In Warsaw, with the "cannot remain" phrase, Biden was giving voice to the victims and refugees of Putin's war-of-choice. "I was expressing moral outrage that I feel, and I make no apologies for it," Biden said Monday. His controversial words were not by any standard "horrendous." Perhaps to a fault, they were human. Eugene Robinson's email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com. Paducah, KY (42003) Today Thunderstorms this morning, then variable clouds during the afternoon with still a chance of showers. High around 65F. Winds W at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 80%.. Tonight Overcast. Slight chance of a rain shower. Low 54F. Winds NW at 10 to 15 mph. JERUSALEM, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Jordanian King Abdullah II and Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz discussed "regional security challenges" during their meeting in Amman on Tuesday, Israel's defense ministry said in a statement. The meeting at the king's palace focused on measures to safeguard freedom of worship, security coordination and improving the livelihood of the Palestinians, according to the statement. Gantz stressed the need of maintaining regional stability during the upcoming Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and the fight against terrorism. The meeting was also attended by Ayman Safadi, Jordan's deputy prime minister and foreign minister. Last week, Safadi met Israel's Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev in Amman to discuss the escalating tensions in the region. The Tuesday meeting came in the wake of a two-day conference in southern Israel, during which foreign ministers from four Arab countries, Israel and the United States met on regional security and cooperation. The Jordanian king on Monday travelled to Ramallah city in the occupied West Bank to show his solidarity with the Palestinians, who did not attend the conference in Israel. Israel witnessed two attacks over the past week, the latest being a shooting in northern Israel on Sunday that killed two Israeli police officers. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Sunday attack. Geneva, Switzerland (PANA) - The UN Refugee Agency warned on Tuesday that prolonged flooding and displacement in South Sudan is expected to worsen when the wet season begins in May and called for action to protect already vulnerable populations from its worst impacts Photo: (Photo : Julia Nastogadka via Unsplash) We all know many people in our lives who consume alcohol, perhaps even more than they should at times, but how many people do you know who admit to suffering from alcoholism? Would you be able to recognize the signs of the disorder to help that friend or family member get help? There doesn't seem to be a stigma around excessive drinking until you slap the label alcoholic on it, then it becomes something shameful and wrong. This can create many tense situations for you and your family or even cause the person suffering to ignore it and refuse help. Alcohol Awareness Month is recognized each April to increase awareness for and understanding of alcoholism or Alcohol Use Disorder. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 10% of children live with a parent who abuses alcohol - that's more than 7.5 million children! How do I know if my loved one is abusing alcohol? First and foremost, always go to a medical professional if you think your or your partner's drinking is beyond normal limits. Some signs listed by the American Addiction Centers include, being secret about drinking, diverting energy from other responsibilities to continue drinking, wanting to stop drinking but not being able to or engaging in risky behavior. Protecting your loved ones If your partner is on their recovery journey, it's not always a straight and easy road. How do you support them during this time and not let the past get in the way of the present? Family lawyer and mediator Susan Guthrie recommends using an accountability tool like Soberlink as it, "creates instant accountability and security for all involved. It's a simple and effective way to evidence your sobriety and to begin to build trust again." Trust. An essential part of any relationship and something you'll have to have in your partner if you're going to move forward with your relationship. Relationship expert Dr. Morgan Cutlip shares some tips on rebuilding that trust. "Rebuilding trust in a relationship involves effort from both partners. For the person who is in recovery, it requires openness to make shifts in the way the relationship functions so that greater levels of transparency can be afforded to their partner. For the partner who is trying to rebuild trust, they will have to take the difficult step in investing some amount of trust and then stepping back to observe what their partner does with it." If you or someone you know is suffering from Alcohol Use Disorder, call SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP. Photo: (Photo : Pierre Crom/Getty Images) A mother has given birth to a miracle baby after doctors found out she had been misdiagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy during surgery to remove the embryo. It was a stunning turn of events for 28-year-old Siobhan Webb, who at one point thought she had to terminate her pregnancy. Webb was rushed to the hospital when she was five weeks pregnant after she complained of severe cramping. Webb and her partner Lee Wellington received devastating news afterward when doctors notified the couple that she was suffering from an ectopic pregnancy. According to the Mayo Clinic, an ectopic pregnancy happens when a fertilized egg implants itself and grows outside the womb. This usually occurs in one of the pregnant mother's fallopian tubes, which carries eggs from the ovaries to the uterus. If an egg gets stuck in the fallopian tubes, it won't develop into a baby, and the mother's health may be at risk if the pregnancy is allowed to continue. Doctors get a huge shock during surgery Given that it is impossible to save such a pregnancy, the growing baby inside the mother usually has to be removed either by operation or using medicine to trigger a termination. Webb chose to terminate her pregnancy via surgery. Webb was warned by doctors before her operation that it was highly likely they would have to remove at least one of her fallopian tubes, thus reducing her pregnancy chances in the future. Doctors got a huge shock during surgery when they discovered there was no ectopic pregnancy. They immediately stopped Webb's operation, with further tests showing that she was indeed carrying a healthy embryo in her womb. Seven months after that close call, Webb and Wellington welcomed their newborn son Freddie. They know fully well that their child is a true fighter as he did not only survive the surgery but also managed to navigate the pre-op medication that could have caused Webb to miscarry baby Freddie. According to Yahoo! Life, Webb and Wellington still have not determined what caused the shadows that appeared on the scan of her right fallopian tube, which led doctors to diagnose her by mistake with an ectopic pregnancy. Read Also: Toddler Fights for Life After Swallowing a Rock While Playing at Daycare Webb wants to raise awareness of possible misdiagnosis of ectopic pregnancy Webb does not want other couples to suffer the emotional trauma they went through, saying that she and Wellington want to raise awareness about possible misdiagnosis of an ectopic pregnancy. Webb wants to inform other women that they can still have a viable pregnancy even with such a diagnosis and that choosing the wrong course of action could result in them losing their healthy babies. According to Webb, the doctor told her that her case was very unusual. Metro reported that Webb still cannot believe that her child is finally here after all the hardships, saying that Freddie is their little miracle and that she is so relieved that she now has two perfect, beautiful children. Related Article: Family Wants Answers for Delayed 911 Response That Could Have Saved Grandfather of 17 Photo: (Photo : Getty images ) Little Harley and Harry Crane, the babies conceived via In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) and were known as "U.K.'s most premature twins," are finally allowed to go home after staying five months in the hospital since they were born. The twins were born at 22 weeks and five days. According to Daily Mail, babies born at five months are legally classified as "not viable," and medical intervention is sometimes not offered, but the doctors were amazed that the twins clung to life. Doctors thought it was a miscarriage Jade and her husband tried to get pregnant for three years until Jade had an ectopic pregnancy. The couple decided to go through IVF in 2010 but experienced heartbreaking miscarriages. The couple spent 11 years trying to get pregnant through IVF. When Jade had a check-up on October 26, at 22 weeks of pregnancy, the doctors told her she was having another miscarriage. Jade insisted that she could still feel the babies moving. The nurse also explained why she could not hear the babies cry, and it was because they were born far too early. Later, the couple heard a little cry, and the cries sounded like a tiny kitten. The doctors told them that the twins would not survive, The Good News Network wrote. After the twins were born, Jade found a case in the U.S. who survived at 22 weeks and are now four years old. She said she connected with the mom on Instagram and the mom also guided her through her first days at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Read Also: Toddler Fights for Life After Swallowing a Rock While Playing at Daycare Most premature baby twins survive in the U.K. According to BBC, Harley and Harry were born at 22 weeks and five days at the Queen's Medical Centre (QMC) in Nottingham. Harry was discharged in the first week of March after almost five months in the neonatal unit, while his sister, Harley, was sent home after 140 days in intensive care. The parents, Steve and Jade Crane, are "ecstatic." According to Steve, it has been a long time and a treacherous journey, but they did not think they would get this far 140 days ago. When the twins were born, Harry only weighed 520g (1.14 lb), while Harley weighed 500 g(1.10lb), the size of Mars bars, as per the doctor's description. The babies were born with lung and serious gastrointestinal problems, which doctors warned the couple could be fatal. The doctors said that the twins have since suffered sepsis, eye problems, and brain and lung bleeding. The twins also survived six operations and 25 blood transfusions. The doctors expected that only one of the twins would survive. Hence, the babies were placed in a bereavement suite. The twins defied the odds, to the astonishment of the doctors and nurses. Medical personnel said that the twins would go down in medical history, and one of the wards may be eventually named after the twins because everyone is amazed by them. Jade said that it is hard to say goodbye to the dedicated doctors and medical staff who helped them through the 140 days, but she said she couldn't wait to bring them home where they belong so they can start a new life together. Related Article: UK Mother Gives Birth to a Baby Weighing More Than 11 poun Photo: (Photo : LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP via Getty Images) The woman who was kidnapped at birth in a hospital two decades ago is asking the court to reduce the sentence of her kidnapper because she was the "only mother she knew" for 18 years of her life. Kamiyah Mobley of Florida, who is now 23 years old, wrote the court to "have mercy" on Gloria Williams, who was convicted of kidnapping, per ABC 4 News. Williams was sentenced in December 2021 to 18 years in prison, but Mobley is supporting her plea to reduce the sentence to nine years due to her good behavior while incarcerated. Mobley wrote that she still loves her "mother" despite knowing the truth in the letter. Williams gave her a well-rounded life and even sent her to college. In short, Williams gave her a wonderful life despite their true connection. So, the young adult said that she would wholeheartedly support Williams because all she wants is for her to be back at home. Read Also: Teen Pregnancy: Young Grandma at 30 Says She Showed Love Not Anger for Daughter Who Got Pregnant at 14 Raising Kamiyah Mobley as Her Own Williams allegedly pretended to be a nurse at a hospital in Jacksonville when she kidnapped Mobley from her 16-year-old mother, Shanara, hours after her birth in 1998. Not long before that, Williams miscarried her own baby but didn't tell her family about the baby's loss. Thus, when Williams returned to her hometown in South Carolina, her family assumed that she had brought her own daughter, Alexis Manigo. She made them all believe that the baby's biological dad was Charles Manigo, who worked in a car dealership but split up with her before their "baby" was born. The kidnapping was not discovered until her daughter was in her late teens. According to Daily Mail, Williams raised suspicion when Mobley could not get a driver's license and a Social Security card under Alexis Manigo as she was set to apply for her first job. That's when Williams confessed to her daughter about her true background. After Williams' arrest for kidnapping, Mobley finally met and reunited with her biological parents. Mobley found out that her biological father, Craig Aiken, was in jail when she was born. Aiken's mother, however, was at the hospital and saw Williams taking the baby out of the hospital nursery. The grandmother said that the hospital staff frantically searched for the kidnapper, but they never found her. The next day, Shanara was crying on national TV and pleading for her baby back. Dad Says Daughter is Brainwashed Meanwhile, Aiken was not aware that his daughter had written the court to appeal for the freedom of the "only mother she knew." According to Crime Online, Mobley's biological family does not support Williams' plea for a reduced sentence. Aiken also said that whatever her daughter did won't stop him from loving her, but he believes her kidnapper brainwashed her. However, the judge assigned to Williams' case has not yet ruled on her motion as of press time. Related Article: Texas Mom Proves' Baby Switch' at Birth After DNA Test This service applies to you if your subscription has not yet expired on our old site. You will have continued access until your subscription expires; then you will need to purchase an ongoing subscription through our new system. Please contact the Parsons Sun office at (620) 421-2000 if you have any questions Pic story of forest rangers of Mangshan Mountain in Beijing Xinhua) 17:02, March 29, 2022 Song Bao (front) and Song Chen return to the watchtower after cleaning the snow in its yard on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Aerial photo taken on March 19, 2022 shows Song Chen up for work at the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Song Bao (L) and Song Chen prepare dinner at the kitchen in the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 18, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Song Bao observes the forest on the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Song Chen has his finger accidentally slashed by a snow shovel while cleaning the snow in the yard outside the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Song Chen (L) checks his cellphone while Song Bao watches television at the dormitory in the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 18, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Aerial photo taken on March 19, 2022 shows the watchtower blanketed with snow on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Aerial photo taken on March 19, 2022 shows the watchtower perched on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Song Bao (front) waves goodbye to Song Chen as he departs for patrolling the forest at the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Song Bao cleans the snow in the yard outside the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 18, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Song Chen (1st R) shows tourists the way in front of the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Song Chen cleans the snow in the yard outside the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Photo taken on March 18, 2022 shows the night view of the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Song Bao walks back to the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain after patrolling the forest in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) Song Chen (R) writes a log at his dormitory in the watchtower on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 18, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Li He) Song Bao patrols the forest on Mangshan Mountain in Beijing, capital of China, March 19, 2022. Coming from the same village in Yixian County of Baoding City in Hebei Province, Song Chen and Song Bao are currently working as forest rangers stationed at the watchtower of Mangshan Mountain in the forest adjacent to the Ming Tombs, a major tourist site in Beijing's suburb. The two forest rangers, grown up as childhood friends, are now work partners since they landed on this job a few years ago. They are collaboratively responsible for maintaining the 886.7 hectares of national key non-commercial forest. Working and living in the mountain all the time, Song Chen and Song Bao need to take turns to buy food and other daily supplies by riding an electric motorcycle down the hill. After work, they entertain themselves mainly with television and smartphones. They are also happy to chat with tourists who occasionally pop in at the observation tower. As the fire prevention and control work should never be taken lightly, Song Chen and Song Bao stay vigilant on guard all the time against any potential risks threatening the safety of the forest resources. (Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao) (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) KINSHASA, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) said Tuesday that it has lost contact with one of its helicopters on a reconnaissance mission in the Rutshuru territory of the northeastern North Kivu province. The cause of the disappearance remains unknown and search efforts are ongoing, MONUSCO said. In Microsofts words, Windows 11 enables security by designand I love to see that deliberate focus on protection from ever-increasing threats. The less we all have to worry about our sensitive information falling into the wrong hands, the better. But currently not all Windows 11 users have access to those higher safeguards. At least not when it comes to automatic device encryption, a feature that flips on by default for users signing on to their computer with a Microsoft account. (You want this feature active because it keeps your data scrambled when not in use and thus safer if it falls into the wrong hands.) Our breakdown of encryption in Windows 11 goes over the nuances, but basically if your Windows 11 Home computer doesnt qualify for automatic device encryption, you have to manually work out a way to get equivalent protection. Given that most people barely touch their settings, much less bother to think about encryption, this means Windows 11 isnt providing seamless defense against bad actors to everyone. That outcome doesnt have to be our reality, though. Microsoft already offers a form of device encryption with more flexibility. Heck, Windows 11 Homes Device Encryption actually runs off the technology. If youre familiar with the differences between Windows Home and Windows Pro licenses, you might already have guessedIm talking about BitLocker. BitLocker can be run on hardware without Modern Standby or even a TPM, two big tripping points for desktop PCs and some laptops when it comes to automatic device encryption. And because its integrated into Windows, technophobes will find it less intimidating than third-party software. Once BitLocker is turned on, you can manage it through the Control Panel. PCWorld But to get access to BitLocker, Windows Home users have to pony up another $99. Thats a hefty premium to get the same level of security as other Home users. If someone cant afford that amount and finds third-party software like VeraCrypt beyond their comprehension, they have no other choice but to go without encryption. And many people in this predicament will be laptop users, who face a higher risk of their device being lost or stolen. Have just one bad day, and there goes all your private infowhich could include passwords, tax info, and other vital details saved in regular documents and spreadsheets. A thief doesnt need to crack a password to get that data. Without encryption, combing through a PCs files is straightforward. A smart user can partially ward off this fate by using OneDrives Personal Vault feature, but unless youre a paid Microsoft 365 user, you can store only three files in this secure folder. (For the record, we dont recommend saving passwords in a plain document, even if you place it in an encrypted folder. A password manager is a better bet.) To truly ensure Windows 11 provides the strongest security possible to all users, BitLocker should be available to Windows Home licenses as well. The technology is already baked in and ready to go. More importantly, BitLockers more sophisticated settings would keep users from turning off automatic encryption because they dont know where the recovery key is saved and mistakenly believe they could become locked out of their own data. BitLocker allows manual saves of the encryption recovery key. Saving a copy of your encryption recovery key in BitLocker is extremely straightforward. PCWorld Even if Microsoft execs balk at the idea of losing out on revenue by making BitLocker widely available, at the very least, the feature should be accessible. I hate microtransactions in general, but paying $10 or $15 bucks to switch on BitLocker would be stomachable. Its still affordable enough for most people. But you know, Windows biggest rival doesnt charge a cent for device encryption, and the feature is presented in a simple, straightforward way. Theres something to be said for Apples mantra of It just works. Could we be finally seeing some relief in graphics card prices? With an official Asus price cut en route, perhaps so. Asus said Monday in an emailed statement that it was planning to cut the official price of its RTX 30-series cards beginning in April. The manufacturer didnt cite any change in demand or supply, however, just a change in how the U.S. applies tariffs to Chinese imports. As a result of the latest tariff lift on Chinese imports from the Office of the United States Trade Representative, Gamers and PC enthusiasts will see lower prices on Asus GeForce RTX 30-series graphic cards starting on April 1st, 2022, Asus said in a statement. Asus is among the first to pass these savings on to its consumers. Lower prices will affect entry level GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3060, mid-range RTX 3070 and high performance RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards. Even better, Asus actually told us how much it planned to cut prices: Consumers should expect prices to decline up to 25 percent on different models throughout the springtime, the firm said. Consumers will appreciate Asus decision to lower GPU card prices not only because GPUs have been almost impossible to come by, but also that the laptop manufacturer was one of the first companies to raise GPU prices in January 2021, followed by others like eVGA a week or two later. Now well have to see if other card makers follow suit or if theyll simply use the lower tariffs to squeeze even more profits out of the market. We also dont know whether the lower tariffs will make cards more accessible to end users. Nevertheless, the prices for graphics cards are officially falling, and thats a good thing. Armed Policemen have taken over Textiles Ghana Limited following protests Monday morning by workers against termination of appointments. The workers demonstrated against the MD of the company and demanded her sacking from the company in February over mismanagement. After securing orders from the National Labour Commission to resume work while investigating concerns raised by workers of the Textiles Ghana Limited, the Managing Director of the company, Fatoumata Doro, returned to work Monday while allegedly dismissing some workers of the company. This is despite the Employment and Labour Relations Ministers orders that directed management of GTP to ensure no worker is victimized either by query or any form for taking part in recent strike action. This is the situation at the factory this morning, armed police, new security company at the gate with the MD and the Technical Director of Uniwax (a sister company in Abidjan) issuing termination letters to some of the staff, a staff told Kasapafmonline.com It could be recalled that the petition by the workers to management asking for dismissal of the MD had concerns bothering on administrative issues and criminality. Source: kasapafmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Mr. Alex Dadey, Executive Chairman of the KGL Group and Board Chairman of Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC) has been adjudged the Overall Best Entrepreneur of the decade at the 12th edition of the Prestigious Ghana Entrepreneur & Corporate Executive Awards held at the plush Movenpick Ambassador Hotel in Accra. In a citation read in his honour, Mr. Alex Dadey was praised for his outstanding achievements in multiple industries and sectors across the globe including Fintech, Logistics, Agric, Property Development and Commerce in the United Kingdom and Ghana as well as his immense contribution to the Digitalization agenda championed by the Government of Ghana. Mr. Alex Dadey, a product of Mfantsipim School in Cape Coast is a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist with over 30 years experience serving in various c-suite capacities and serves on the boards of multiple institutions including Ecom Agro Industrial, Premier Textiles Group in the United Kingdom, Birchfield Investments Limited in Jersey, Channel Islands and Dubai, KGL Capital (UK) Limited and Dominion Direct (UK) Limited to name a few. Underpinning Mr. Dadeys three-decade track record of success is his commitment to building an inclusive financial environment that provides high-value partnerships for small businesses to thrive and succeed across Ghana. His work has continuously driven diaspora inclusion and fostered public-private sector partnerships and collaborations for collective growth. As a philanthropist, Mr. Dadey has been a strong advocate of giving back to the community, a belief he actions through his foundation, KGL Foundation. The KGL Foundation has over the last couple of years been at the forefront of providing social intervention programmes in the fields of sports, health and education in Ghana. Mr. Dadey is passionate about Youth Empowerment. His firm belief in nurturing the next generation of leaders is very evident in his ability to guide, teach and impart knowledge and experience to his energetic, young and vibrant teams he builds across multiple industries he has succeeded in. About KGL Group At The Forefront of Digitalization KGL Group is a wholly owned Ghanaian group of companies, with interests in Technology Innovation, Fin-Tech, Logistics, Trade, Property Development, Gaming and Commerce. The parent company commands a network of specialized business units that promote efficient solutions and effective tech-based related services to customers across Ghana and partner operating regions. KGL Technology Limited - Digital Innovation, Fintech KGL Capital Limited - Equity, Trade, Finance, Fund Management KGL Foundation - Social Accountability (CSR Division of Group) Keed Ghana Limited - Tech Solutions, E-Games Development Birchfield (Ghana) Limited - Logistics, Property Development Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video As businesses continue to experience a transition towards an all-digital world, with most consumer interactions being executed digitally, organizations must employ intentional approaches to be able to offer a great digital customer experience, financial and digital experts have said. They suggested that consumers are progressively shifting their emphasis away from products and services and toward the quality of the experience they receive. Meeting these new criteria will require firms to demonstrate unflinching commitment. They said this during a webinar organized by CWG Ghana and DigiD, themed Digital Customer Experience: A profitable Journey, where the industry leaders discussed how to engage the digital customer. Group Chief Information Officer (CIO), at I &M Bank-Kenya, Rohit Gupta stated, as businesses digitize their operations, in keeping with the times, they must also carry their employees along. He said, as businesses adopt technology, the staff must be technologically enabled for the skill sets needed for interacting with digital customers. Elaborating on the change in customer behavior and how businesses must adapt, Ramesh Kannan, founder of Digid, a digital onboarding, and identity verification system, said the financial services industry and other businesses must concentrate their effort on improving services through digitization. "In the previous 5-7 years, the internet purchasing experience has reached a mature stage.Online customers are now able to enjoy an immersive shopping experience that was previously only available in-person.Customers wanting to get financial services and products should also be provided with a comparable experience. They should be able to purchase their services from any location, at any time, and using any device "he said " A handful of the manual / semi-manual work processes that financial services companies are now using are unsustainable and needs immediate attention," he said, bringing the attention to the existing onboarding process in financial services firms. For Chief Information Officer (CIO) at First National Bank Ghana, Samuel Dakurah, as technology advances, it presents opportunities, which several industries can leverage for growth, explore advancement and improve on customer experiences. Major advancements in customer service have been driven largely by advancements in technology. A key driver has been the growth and accessibility of the internet which has opened up many opportunities for both organizations and customers. Communication is now timely and efficient. Also, advancement in areas such as cloud technology has helped address challenges such as scalability, availability, and uptime or platforms. Many solutions now have a software as a service offering that organizations can quickly leverage to serve their customers. The growth in fields such as machine learning and AI have also provided new avenues for engaging with customers such as intelligent chatbots., he said. Mr. Dakurah advised that, in the quest to satisfy the needs of the digital customer, businesses especially banks, must also ensure that they keep an eye on cyber security threats. Both customers and organizations are vulnerable now, more than ever to cyber security risks. This can potential destroy the customers trust if not properly addressed. Comfort Armoo, Head of Customer Experience at Fidelity Bank Ghana, said that all services must be relevant to the needs of the customers. She said that when it comes to digital services, , systems must be built client-centric. In general, every world-class service must be Reliable & Responsive, Empathetic, have a great Ambience, and provide Assurance. That being said, in order for us to proclaim a positive customer experience, service providers must make every effort to make all digital journeys and processes smooth and seamless, timely, emotionally rewarding, and successful.When all four of these critical imperatives are present , one had definitely engineeerd a powerful anacea for growth and customer loyalty, while improving organizations own efficiency, She said For his part, a digitalization expert at OSPBA NOVAT, Bismark Owusu-Prempeh said insurances companies, whose services he described as sensitive, must foster transformative and customer-centric cultures if they are to meet the demands of the new normal. Technology should be used to increase the value of services delivered to customers. For me, understanding who your digital customers are and how you affect their perception, and brand loyalty is critical, he said. There are basically 3 fundamental ingredients to a good digital customer experience: (SEE) 1. Success Whether the customer receive his/her preferred service/product. Did the customer complete their task and achieve their goal? 2. Effort The amount of efforts the customer had to put in to receive a service or product. Was the process smooth and easy? 3. Emotion The kind of impression/perception the customer is forming about your brand. did they come away from the interaction feeling good? In all of these, understanding your customer needs is the first step in redefining your business digital offerings. For example, what are the customer needs in the insurance industry? Can the customer enroll or buy insurance product, update his/her personal information, know his/her contributions, future benefits, etc. without visiting the brick-and-mortar office? Can I get these with less efforts? he added. Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The four policemen at the center of recent bullion van robberies in Accra have been remanded to police custody for one week by an Accra Circuit Court. This is the second time the court, presided over by Patricia Amponsah, is remanding the suspects. The suspects Constable Affisu, Yaro Ibrahim, Constable Richard Boadu, Constable Rabiu Jambedu, Constable Albert Ofosu who are in the dock with a civilian, Razak Alhassan, were first remanded on March 9 this year when they made their first appearance in court. Charges Ibrahim and Ofosu have been charged with an attempt to commit robbery while Boadu, Jamedu and Alhassan have been charged with abetment. Their pleas have not yet been taken by the court in respect of the charges against them. Update When the case was called at 12 noon today [March 28, 2022] the prosecutor, Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Sylvester Asare, who updated the court on status of police investigation said the police had made progress and had built four separate dockets involving the accused persons. He, therefore, prayed the court to adjourn the case to enable the police further its investigations. Admitting the accused persons to bail, he said, will hamper police investigations. Counsel for the accused persons opposed the prayer by the prosecution and appealed to the court to grant their clients bail on grounds that they were serving police officers who will not interfere with investigations when granger bail. Court The court after hearing both sides upheld prosecutions prayer and remanded the accused persons for one week. The accused persons are to re-appear on April 5 this year. On the said date, the court will take the pleas of the accused persons in respect of the charges. Source: graphiconline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Police in the Central region have arrested three members of one family, including a 70-year-old man, for allegedly burying a two-year-old boy alive on the shores of Dutch-Komenda in Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abrem (KEEA) Municipality. However, the timely intervention of the Police, the youth of the area and Mr. Cosmos Bassaw, the Assembly Member of Dutch -Komenda Electoral area, saved the victim, considered to be a spirit, from dying. Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Mrs Irene Serwaah Oppong, Regional Public Relations Officer (PRO) who confirmed the incident to the Ghana News Agency on Monday, said, the boys mother 29, father, 37 and the 70-year-old grandfather of the victim were the perpetrators of the crime. DSP Oppong, said about 23:45 hours on Saturday, March 26, the Elmina District Police Command received information that a male toddler with special needs had been buried alive. She said on receipt of the report, the Police proceeded to the crime scene and met the Assembly member for the area and some youth who have rescued the boy, whilst preliminary investigations revealed that due to the impairment of the boy, his parents consulted a spiritualist at Dutch-Komenda who might have advised them to get rid of the child. She said the suspects are in Police custody assisting in investigations while the victim was sent to the clinic and had been treated and discharged. DSP Oppong said frantic efforts were underway to apprehend Kweku Bar, the spiritualist who is currently on the run. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The government is fashioning out a programme to enrol school drop-outs and children of school age into schools to help expand education to cover under-privileged children. A Deputy Minister of Education, Rev. John Ntim Fordjour, who disclosed this, said an estimated 450,000 children would benefit from the initiative, with 30 per cent of them having never stepped in a classroom. We are poised to identify these children from poor households and hard-to-reach areas in many of our regions and reintegrate them into schools," he said. The deputy minister, who announced this at a World Vision Ghana educational forum in Accra, added that the programme would be undertaken as part of the World Banks education outcome funding (EOF) intervention. The forum was on the theme: "Bridging the learning gap at basic level and building a supportive learning environment through sustainable water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions". Rev. Fordjour said about 10,000 basic schools, representing 25 per cent of schools, did not have proper WASH facilities, a situation which he said impeded teaching and learning in those schools. He, therefore, called for a more collaborative effort between the government and key organisations, such as World Vision, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and Plan Ghana, to help alleviate hygiene challenges in schools across the country. He said his outfit was assessing the basic school system to understand why about 98 per cent of class two pupils could not read and understand basic letters. That was the outcome of an early grade assessment made by the ministry in 2013 and 2015. "Some 125 million pupils in sub-Saharan Africa, having gone through four-year basic education, still lack literacy and numeracy skills, according to a World Bank report in 2018. Also, 83 per cent of pupils in basic schools at age 10 are not able to read and understand simple text globally," he said. The deputy minister said the government intended to build a robust educational system to help expand tertiary education enrolment to 40 per cent by 2030, as well as reform the educational curriculum to build critical and creative minds to make graduates globally competitive. Commitment The Director of World Vision Ghana, Mr Dickens Thunde, expressed the commitment of the organisation to help transform literacy and numeracy challenges in basic schools across the country. He said the organisation had carried out an initiative, known as Unlock literacy project, in 77 communities in the Afram Plains, among a targeted group of 9,000 basic school pupils. Through the initiative, he said, literacy and numeracy skills had improved significantly in those areas from two per cent to about 40 per cent. He added that World Vision, which currently operates in 25 districts across 14 regions, had provided decent WASH facilities for many schools to help alleviate WASH facility challenges in those schools. Prioritising education For his part, the UNESCO Country Head, Mr Abdourahamane Diallo, said there was the need for the government to prioritise education, which is a key element in achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs). He lauded the government for the implementation of the free senior high school policy and urged it to continue making needful changes to improve the educational sector. Source: graphiconline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has tasked the management of the University of Ghana to collaborate with the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education to come up with a workable plan for the expansion of the Universitys Medical School (UGMS) The President has assured University authorities that the government will provide the necessary support for the expansion of the School. Speaking at the UGMS at 60 Anniversary lecture on Friday, March 25, 2022, Nana Akufo-Addo recognized the schools contribution to the growth of medical and health professional training in the country. He said that the government was bent on pursuing policies that will improve lives and help place the nation on the path of sustainable development, progress and prosperity. The President mentioned that the government was working on digitalizing all records in the hospitals through the Lightwave Health Information Management System (LHIMs). We started with the teaching hospitals and we plan to work in a phased approach to cover every health facility in Ghana, the President continued. Akufo-Addo said that it was time to deliberate on how best we can use technology to reach out to students across the country so that we do not have to bring all of them to Accra, to the few medical schools we have in the country, to impact knowledge in/to them. Virtual reality is increasingly becoming popular in the training of medical professionals because it allows for medical professional skills education, assessment, standardization, and knowledge sharing for better healthcare infrastructure. The President called for a second look at the curriculum of medical education in view of the digital revolution. He encouraged the Ministry of Education and Health to work together to leverage technology to increase access to the many students who, hitherto, have been denied the opportunity to follow their passion of studying medicine because of insufficient facilities and faculties Meanwhile, the President has donated 51-seater bus to the School. He said that the donation was necessary considering the Schools contribution to the country. To ease the transportation challenges confronting the school when it has to convey students on the Legon and Korle bu campuses to other health facilities for training and in recognition of the schools contribution, the growth of medical and health professional training in Ghana, I have presented a modest birthday gift of a 51-seater bus to the school, Akufo-Addo said. Source: universnewsroom.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Head of Psychology, Professor Joseph Osafo has admonished the authorities protecting Ghana's borders to heighten their work on the borders following President Nana Akufo-Addo's directive for the opening of the borders. Delivering a speech on Sunday, March 27, in his 28th update on the COVID-19 pandemic, the President declared that "from tomorrow, Monday the 28th March, all land and sea borders will be opened. Fully vaccinated travelers will be allowed entry through the land and sea borders without a negative PCR test from their country of origin". In addition, "citizens and foreign residents in Ghana who are not fully vaccinated will have to produce a negative 48-hour PCR result and will be offered vaccination on arrival". Speaking on Peace FM's ''Kokrokoo'', Prof. Joseph Osafo cautioned the authorities not to let their guard down because the borders have been opened but rather be on alert for any person entering Ghana by land or sea showing symptoms of the viral disease and act accordingly. ''There is a good intention behind what the government is saying but I think a little bit of caution is needed. So, the leaders in various organizations and schools should be careful the way they translate this into something workable in their settings.'' ''Those manning those borders should man the borders with integrity'', he stressed. Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Appiatse Support Fund Committee has on Monday, 28th March, 2022, received donations from the Volta River Authority (VRA), Mantrac Ghana Limited and Deputy Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, responsible for Mines, Hon. George Mireku Duker. The representatives from the VRA presented a cheque of 200,000 Ghana Cedis to the Fund as their contribution towards the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the Appiatse community. Speaking on behalf of VRA, Mr. Tutu Agyare, Board Chairman of VRA said their decision to contribute is not only for the short term of rebuilding the Appiatse Community but a long term commitment of investment to ensure that Appiatse township gets back on its feet. "VRA is one of the few institutions in the country which has a lot of experience in resettlement having to do with the lake, so the extent to which the Committee requires the leverage of our experience, we can also offer that as well". He said Mr. Tutu requested that the committee keeps VRA in the know of other activities leading to the reconstruction of the community, while pledging their unwavering support to the team. Mr. Emmanuel Antwi Darkwa, the CEO of VRA reiterated the Organisation's willingness to offer assistance anytime needed in addition to the financial contribution made. Addressing the team from VRA, the Chairman of the Appiatse Support Fund Committee, Rev. Dr. Joyce Rosalind Aryee expressed her appreciation on behalf of the Committee. "I'm glad that the Chairman mentioned that you would be willing to support us with all the knowledge that you have, not only about resettlement but also about being eco-friendly and that's what the President has instructed. VRA, we are so grateful for your generousity". She reecohed the President's plans to make the Appiatse township an eco-friendly community and hinted that her team will soon brief the media on the committee's recent activities so far . Dr. Sulemanu Koney, a member of the Appiatse Support Fund Committee and CEO of the Ghana Chamber of Mines, added his voice to appreciate the VRA team and hoped that beyond their contribution, the VRA will partner government and through the Appiatse Reconstruction Implementation Committee, help as the "energizer" of the nation to construct a sustainable community which will become "the Mecca of Mining Community development" Meanwhile, Hon. George Mireku Duker and Mantrac Ghana Limited donated cheques of 5,000 Ghana Cedis and 32,500 Ghana Cedis respectively. Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video With less than a week for the curtains to drop on Achimota Malls loyalty appreciation promotion, patrons say they hoped the campaign could be extended or repeated to sustain the thrills it has brought to the Centre during this past month. Management of Achimota Retail Centre (ARC) launched the month-long ARC Akyedie campaign in February to show appreciation to customers for their loyalty and consistency in choosing ARC as their preferred shopping destination. Over the past month, the Mall has been giving away special shopping vouchers to lucky customers to shop up to the tune of Ghc1,000 at any of the Malls shops. Accra now boasts of so many shopping centres at various locationsand for our patrons to constantly choose ARC over the others is a confirmation that this mall offers a menu of products and services which are unmatched anywhere else," Marketing Manager, Kobby Ampong said when he presented vouchers to some lucky shoppers over the weekend. We are so grateful to our dedicated customers; thats why management decided that a good way of showing appreciation for such unwavering loyalty is to enable them to do exactly what they love to do most - shop more, using our free loyalty shopping vouchers, Ampong said. Since February this year, shoppers who spent a minimum of Ghc 200 at any one or a number of ARCs stores, was entitled to fill out an entry slip, which, along with the purchase receipt, qualified the customer to enter a weekly draw for a Ghc 1,000 shopping voucher reward. Over the past few weeks there have been over 800 entries and some six lucky winners..and according to Ampong, by the end of March when the campaign is expected to end, the mall will fetch out the most regular customer over the one-month period for a special loyalty package. But over the weekend, several revelers and shoppers at the centre approached the Marketing Manager requesting a possible extension to the campaign to enable more people to have a taste of the fun. Located at Dome, off the Accra-Nsawam highway, Achimota Retail Centre, has, over the past six years, brought modern, secured retail shopping services and quality recreation to communities like Achimota, Dome, Tantra Hills, Taifa, Kwabenya, Ashongman, and the entire north-eastern quarter of the capital. ARC is anchored by the popular food store, Shoprite, and the general merchandise retailer, Game and offers its customers an exciting mix of tenants comprising both Ghanaian and international brands. Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Life is gradually picking up at the countrys land borders following their reopening yesterday. In anticipation of the frontiers becoming buoyant, the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) has deployed its personnel to the borders. At the Aflao Border in particular, where we were told about 400 officers have been deployed, business activities were at a slow pace. That is because Togo is yet to open its side of the border. Similar observations were made at the borders with Burkina Faso and Cote dIvoire, which are also yet to open their sides with Ghana. Yesterday, the Daily Graphic visited the border points at Aflao, Paga and Elubo to find out how people were responding to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addos directives last Sunday night for the borders to be opened, two years after they had been closed at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The reporters who conducted the monitoring were Alberto Mario Noretti, Aflao; Dotsey Koblah Aklorbortu, Elubo; Emmanuel Modey, Hamile, and Gilbert Mawuli Agbey, Paga, Kulungugu and Polimakom. Background ECOWAS member states, in December last year, proposed January 1, this year for the reopening of all land borders. ECOWAS sector ministers, in collaboration with the West African Health Organisation (WAHO), took the decision at a virtual meeting coordinated from Abuja, Nigeria. Among the factors informing the decision, the ministers took into consideration the fact that their economies lost $50 billion in value or 6.7 per cent of their cumulative Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between 2020 and 2021. However, the final decision was left with the respective member states, considering their peculiar conditions. Aflao There was little activity at the Lome-Aflao border post yesterday, as the Togo side of the border remained closed. The Daily Graphic, with assistance from officials from both countries, crossed over to Lome and found the border in the Togolese capital as silent as Aflao, with some of the streets devoid of the usual heavy traffic. Togolese security personnel at the border allowed the Daily Graphic reporter to enter Lome, after they had ascertained his identity as a correspondent of the Daily Graphic, but cautioned him not to go deep into the city. "The border here is still closed and we dont know when it will be opened," one of the Togolese border security personnel said. However, pupils and students who commute to school between Lome and Aflao are allowed to cross the border freely, and that sustained some light business by taxis and motorcycles. Border residents who were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 were also allowed the crossing when the Daily Graphic visited the border post before midday yesterday. Those who were not fully vaccinated were given their remaining jabs at the border post before they were allowed to cross. Logistics The metal gates between the two countries were swung wide open to allow trucks of goods and other logistics to cross the border, but the flow of goods between the countries was generally slow. Daily Graphic checks indicated that the Togolese President, Faure Gnassingbe, would address his country during the week and declare the borders open from Friday, April 1, this year. Back in Ghana, the Aflao Sector Commander of the GIS, Assistant Commissioner of Immigration (ACI) Fredrick Duodu, said the service was ready for the travellers expected to mass up at the border if the Togo side of the border was opened. Deployment of GIS personnel He said 400 officers of the GIS had been deployed at the Aflao Border Post to ensure the smooth movement of travellers. ACI Duodu said some of the inland GIS posts had been closed with the reopening of the countrys frontiers. For his part, the Ketu South District Chief Executive (DCE), Maxwell Lugudor, said adequate security measures were in place to forestall a possible surge in crime in Aflao when the Togo side of the border was opened. As of 1:45 p.m. yesterday, port health officials on the Aflao side had cleared 23 border residents to enter Togo. Shia At the border at Shia, near Ho, a female trader who was entering Ghana but had not been vaccinated, was initially asked to return if she was reluctant to take the shot. However, when she agreed she requested for prayer to be said for her before taking the jab. Her request was granted, she took the jab and crossed over. At this border, business activities were also slow but officials expressed optimism they would pick up. A few of the traders, who spoke to the Daily Graphic, called on the neighbouring sides of the borders to be opened to ensure smooth flow of goods and services. Shia is one of three border towns within the eastern Ho corridor. Western Region At Elubo, barely 24 hours after Ghana had reopened its border with Cote dIvoire, economic activities were yet to pick up at the border towns of Elubo and New Town, both in the Jomoro District in the Western Region. The low level of activities was attributed to the closure of the Cote dIvoire side of the border. Residents of Elubo and New Town said trading with their counterparts from Cote dIvoire used to be brisk before the pandemic and admitted that they had to wait until the Cote dIvoire side of the border was opened to enable them to assess and see what the future held for them. Officials of the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), the Ghana Shippers Authority, the GIS, the police, financial services, among others, were all at post. The DCE for Jomoro, Louisa Iris Arde, was at the entry points in the municipality to assess the situation and interact with the team at the border, during which she assured them of the assemblys commitment to support them with security. We in the municipal assembly are very happy that the borders are finally opened. The Presidents announcement was largely greeted with celebration, she said during a tour of some offices. The people of Jomoro, she said, were largely traders who transacted business with their counterparts from Cote dIvoire and said the closure did not only affect their livelihoods but also social activities. Mrs Arde urged border control and other security agencies at the entry points to work together as a team to deliver the best of service. Upper East Some residents of Paga, Kulungugu and Polimakom, which share borders with Burkina Faso and Togo, received the news of the reopening of the land and sea borders with excitement. Traders, drivers and other members of the public expressed gratitude to the President for reopening the borders. According to some traders, the reopening of the borders would bring back economic activities to the towns, which went dead during the closure of the borders. They said with the borders now reopened, they could enter Burkina Faso easily to buy foodstuffs for onward transportation to Accra. A pepper seller, who gave her name as Fatima Alhassan, said "since the closure of the borders, I have not been able to buy pepper in large quantities to transport to Accra". She said her business had been grounded, since she could not cross over to Burkina Faso to buy her commodities. "I am very elated that the borders have been opened, as it will bring back to life the once vibrant business activities at border communities," she said. A resident of Paga, Nouma Alhassan Bukari, said like many other businessmen and women, he was happy that the borders had been reopened, since their closure negatively affected businesses in the area. The Officer in charge of the Kulungugu border post of GIS in the Pusiga District in the Upper East Region, Chief Superintendent Ebenezer Arhin, said although the borders were reopened just after midnight, vehicular and human traffic, as well as commercial activities, had been slow. He said a lot of people might not be aware of the reopening or had not anticipated their reopening yesterday. He expressed optimism that commercial activities would pick up from next week, particularly on market days at Betu, one of the commercial towns in Burkina Faso, as the Ghana side of the border had now been reopened. Upper West Business activities at the Hamile border post in the Upper West Region have resumed with the reopening of the borders. During the period of the closure, the Hamile border post, which is one of the gateways to the Sahel region, was virtually at a standstill, with only a few articulated trucks carrying goods from the Tema Harbour through the border. But yesterday when a Daily Graphic team visited the place, it observed that business was picking up quickly, with a number of buses and people going through formalities to cross the border. The Sector Commander of the Customs Division of the GRA, Mr Gabriel Anokye, said information about the opening of the borders had just reached the people, prompting traders and business men and women to troop to the border post to commence their trips. Among the anxious business people were dealers in vegetables such as onions and tomatoes. Mr Anokye was optimistic that trading activities would pick up in a weeks time when people would have prepared adequately. The Hamile border post is the shortest route from Ghana to countries including Guinea, The Gambia, Burkina Faso, Mali and Mauritania. He gave an assurance that security persons on duty were ready for the growth in business in the coming few weeks. The sector commander said the security men would be on guard to forestall cross-border crimes. Source: graphiconline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) has mapped out new strategies, in collaboration with the Minerals Commission and the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, to tackle activities of illegal miners in the country. Details of the new strategies, which have not been disclosed, are being championed by the Central Command of the GAF in the Ashanti Region, the hub of illegal mining in the country. In line with that, the command and its partners have begun stakeholder engagements through sensitisation programmes such as seminars. One of such seminars was held in Kumasi last weekend to educate participants on the adverse effects of the heavy metal pollutants associated with uncontrolled small-scale mining on the environment. It also discussed the role of district assemblies, traditional rulers and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in checking the activities of small-scale miners in the communities. The General Officer Commanding (GOC) the Central Command, Kumasi, Brigadier-General Joseph Aphour, said the command, which had been part of the fight against illegal mining over the years, was scaling up its activities. That, he said, was because there was still more work to be done to clamp down on the activities of illegal miners to save water bodies and the environment from further destruction. Significance The Assistant Manager, Small-Scale Mining and Industrial Minerals of the Minerals Commission, Mr Eric Bukari, said the programme was to help the security agencies keep abreast of evolving trends in galamsey practice and how to check the activities. He said the commission was prepared to share information and internal strategies with relevant stakeholders to help stem the tide. He further called on individuals and groups to volunteer information on the operations of galamseyers in their respective communities to enable the commission and the security agencies to track and arrest perpetrators of the menace. He said currently, the commission had increased its district offices to 13, as well as opened 18 satellite and five inspectorate offices for people to volunteer information on the activities of illegal miners. Mr Bukari appealed to people who wanted to engage in small-scale mining to go through the proper procedure to obtain the necessary documentation to operate responsibly. Effects Despite efforts by the government in the fight against illegal mining practices, the people, especially the youth, are still engaged in it in areas such as Manso Abore and Tontonkrom in the Amansie District in the Ashanti region. The Ghana Water Company has said the illegal activities had contributed to the pollution of water sources with mercury and heavy metals across the country, raising the cost of water treatment and leading to water shortages. Source: graphiconline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Gunmen in Nigeria are reported to have abducted an unknown number of passengers from a train in the northern Kaduna state. The gang mined the track between the capital, Abuja, and Kaduna city and forced the evening train to a halt. Many of the nearly 1,000 passengers on board took shelter as shots were fired. One man is reported to have been killed after the gunmen boarded the train. The security forces have now intervened and taken those injured to the hospital. Following increased attacks and kidnappings on the main road between Abuja and Kaduna, many travellers now prefer to travel by train. This is the second time the railway has been attacked in the last six months. Kidnapping for ransom has become commonplace in northern Nigeria and the bandits, as they are known locally, are becoming increasingly bold. On Saturday they attacked Kaduna's international airport. Source: BBC Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video KINSHASA, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Two Rwandan soldiers were arrested and accused of supporting rebels of the March 23 Movement (M23) in attacks early Monday against military positions in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), said a spokesman of the DRC Armed Forces (FARDC). Several FARDC positions have been attacked during incursions launched by M23 rebels since 3:00 a.m. local time in Rutshuru territory, north of the city of Goma, capital of North Kivu province. At a press briefing, General Sylvain Ekenge, spokesman for the North Kivu governor, confirmed that two soldiers of the Rwanda Defense Forces (RDF) were arrested during the attacks, while accusing Rwanda of conspiring with M23 rebels. "The M23, supported by the Rwandan Defense Forces, conducted incursions and attacked FARDC positions" in the Rutshuru territory, he said. This is the third time since October 2021 that the FARDC has accused Rwanda of supporting the M23 in these attacks against its positions in the Rutshuru territory, said the DRC media outlet Actualite.cd. The M23 is a group of former rebels of the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP). The name came from the March 23, 2009, agreement between the CNDP and the DRC government. M23 leaders have accused the government of failing to respect that agreement. The Environmental Service Providers Association (ESPA), has called for an urgent review of its waste collection and management fees with Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) as fuel costs rise to unprecedented levels in recent times. The Executive Secretary to the ESPA, Madam Ama Ofori Antwi described the situation as dire and one requiring some urgency of the various district assemblies to address. According to her, members of the association are not only contending with a regular increase in fuel prices but also vehicular spare parts, which prices have seen astronomical increment due to the depreciation of the Ghanaian cedi against major foreign currencies particularly, the US dollar. An upward review of sanitation fees is urgently needed if we are to maintain the gains made in our environmental sanitation over the years. It is a no-brainer to state that the sanitation situation in most parts of the country is likely to deteriorate if urgent steps are not taken by the government to cushion environmental service providers who are battling rising fuel and vehicular spare parts to stay in business. She stated that the district assemblies have since 2016 been reviewing the rates. However, the escalation of prices on all operational items now calls for a renegotiation of the rates to address the rising cost of operations. The prevailing fees range from on an average GHC110 for first-class areas, GHC70 for second-class areas, GHC30 for third-class areas, and as low as GHC10 for slum areas. However, the realistic fee calculated in 2021 for residential areas were Ghc149.06 for first class, 94.85 for second class, and GHC30 for the residential category. That of the commercial and industrial ranges from GHC223.59 to GHC6,605.95. According to the ESPA, its calculation for this year demands that they charge GHC165, GHC105, and GHC45 for first class, second class, and third class respectively. For commercial and industrial, the range is GHC245 to 7,265. Under-recovery Currently, changes in operational costs do not warrant a corresponding increase in collection rates or processing fees, explaining that fees are enacted by the district assemblies in their by-laws, which now more than ever require an amendment to keep it abreast with the prevailing economic situation. According to her, the service fees approved by the MMDAs for second, third, and slum classes under the Franchise system or Polluter Pays Principle are very low due to the consideration that people living in prop poor communities are unable to pay realistic fees. Additionally, some beneficiaries in first-class areas also fail to promptly pay for services rendered to them worsening the already precarious financial challenges of service providers. Because environmental service providers use specialized equipment in their operations, it is critical that we recover cost. It is also important to note that the last time a major review was made regarding waste collection fees was in 2014, Madam Ofori Antwi further stated. The current system Madam Ofori Antwi, in sharing some historical analyses of the situation said, the financing of waste collection and management used to be the sole responsibility of the government through the MMDAs. However, due to the governments continued indebtedness to service providers, the burden of financing solid waste collection under the contract system was shifted from the MMDAs to the private sector under the current franchise system, in which the service providers collect service fees imposed by the MMDAs directly from beneficiaries of the service. Clean city agenda The ESPA Executive Secretary reiterated the support of members to the Presidents Cleanest City Agenda, which she said must be brought to the front burner again through appropriate policies and governmental support to the sector. She expressed an appreciation to the government for its current role in the countrys environmental sanitation drive but added that the governments commitment would be resounding if it ensures that service providers receive realistic fees for the services, they render to at least help them break even. Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Ghana Mine Workers Union Branch Executives in Ahafo, Akyem and Accra (Newmont Junior Workers) have debunked reports making rounds in the media that they have been prevented by the Ghana Mine Workers Union (GMWU) from denouncing their membership from the Union to join another group of their choice. According to the Executives, they are very content with the benefit they get from the Ghana Mine Workers Union, therefore have no intention to leave nor join another Union. It would be recalled that, the Extractive Industry Workers Union (EIWUG) recently in a press conference, addressed by the Executive Director, Victor Gyapong; revealed that about 500 workers of the Ahafo and Akyem branch of the Ghana Mine Workers Union seek to denounce their membership and join the Extractive Workers Union due to the mismanagement of the current executives of the Ghana Mine Workers Union but the GMWU are not allowing them. However, the branch executives of the Akyem, Ahafo and Accra led by the Ahafo Branch Chairman, Peter Baako Wilson in a press conference in Accra refuted are calling on all Ghanaians to treat it as ruse. They claim they are happy with the GMWU. The Newmont Akyem branch Chairman, Obed Osei Sarfo and the Newmont Ahafo branch secretary Abudu Moro both spoke to Peace News Pious Baidoo Banson. They reaffirmed their commitment to the GMWU, therefore its never true some of their members are willing to join another group. Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video AstraZeneca has announced a partnership with the Circular Bioeconomy Alliance (CBA) and local partners to establish the first Living Lab in Ghana. This community-led project aims to plant 4.5 million trees by the end of 2025, with the aim of acquiring over 3 million surviving trees, and establish circular business models for local communities. In projects co-designed with local stakeholders, the programme will restore 2,500 hectares of dry and savannah forest and demonstrate the benefits of biodiversity regeneration to the local economy through the creation of local jobs and training programmes. This initiative is a new addition to the AZ Forest programme which aims to plant and maintain 50 million trees worldwide by 2025, while making a positive contribution to communities and local economies. The natural forested land in the Atebubu and Wiase districts in central Ghana has been subjected to degradation and habitat change due to heavy encroachment by farmers and tree cutting for charcoal. Local communities face challenging economic conditions and a deteriorating natural environment. Integrating both traditional knowledge and innovative farming methods, the projects in Atebubu and Wiase place the local communities at the heart of landscape restoration. The programme will combine natural forest restoration, agroforestry and woodlots, which will benefit people, society and the planet. Project planting began in August 2021, with an initial trial of 100,000 trees. Further planting will take place over the next four years, beginning in May this year. Helping restore forests Commenting on the initiative, the Head of Environmental Protection, AstraZeneca, Jason Snape, said the company was committed to helping restore forests for the health of people, society and the planet. The Living Lab in Ghana is a unique public-private partnership working with local communities to build social and ecological resilience, while inspiring action towards a circular bioeconomy. As part of our AZ Forest programme, we are proud to support the restoration of biodiversity and local livelihoods, he stated. For her part, the Country President of AstraZeneca Africa, Barbara Nel, said the companys commitment to Africa extended beyond medicines and health access programmes. Through our AZ Forest programme in Ghana, in partnership with the CBA and in collaboration with government, we are firmly committed to supporting a healthy environment and improving socioeconomic development and livelihoods for Ghanaians, she noted. Source: graphiconline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Ms Diana Asonaba Dapaah, the Deputy Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, has asked students pursuing legal education to be open-minded. While learning rules constitute an important part of the legal training, you must note that it is far more important to learn to think like a lawyer - to break apart a problem into its essential parts and to see what is really at stake. It is almost impossible to have a deep understanding of law if you do not think about it critically, she said. Ms. Dapaah, who was interacting with newly-admitted students of the Faculty of Law, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in Kumasi, said: Law is powerful and has great capacity for good and for ill. Thus, if you are going to do a good job as a lawyer, you must always be prepared to question, criticize and look behind decisions made in the name of the law. That is the high calling of our great profession, she observed. The fresh students, numbering 247, are pursuing various courses under the Faculty, leading to a Bachelor of Law (LLB) certificates. The Deputy Attorney-General reminded the students that the Faculty and the University at large offered a community, in which every individual was valued, supported and encouraged to be the best. Therefore, they should be law-abiding and learn with zeal in order to achieve their educational goals. This Faculty, which you have joined, is founded on rules and values and these values we all stood by and you are expected to do same, Ms Asonaba Dapaah, an alumna, cautioned. According to her, the global world was ready for women and men who were creative and innovative and urged the students to make the most of their time on the campus. Professor Elis Owusu-Dabo, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor, KNUST, said from a humble beginning in the early 2000s, the Faculty of Law by dint of hard work had grown to become the preferred choice for legal education. He said the students should give a good account of themselves by embracing good practices in order to realise their dreams. The newly-admitted students were inducted under the supervision of Justice Kofi Akrowia, Ashanti Regional Supervising High Court Judge. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Attorney-General, the Godfred Yeboah-Dame, has lauded the cooperation of the Office of the Registrar of Companies with the government in its effort to root out corruption in the system. He said the passage of the new Companies Act 992 of 2019 had also helped to reduce the creation of shell companies and opaque financial systems, which provided an opportunity for money laundering and concealment of illicit wealth. I am of the firm conviction that, effectively managed, the Registrar of Companies can indeed be a strong partner for the government in the fight against corruption and the promotion of good governance in the country. the duty to provide particulars of beneficial owners under section 13 of Act 992 together with other provisions, including the ones alluded to provide a strong tool to aid in the fight against corruption, money laundering and ultimately, boost investor confidence in the Ghanaian economy. Mr Yeboah-Dame was speaking at the inauguration and swearing-in of members of the governing board of the Office of the Registrar of Companies in Accra. The establishment of the governing body of the Office of the Registrar of Companies is one of the innovations of the new Companies Act, 2019 (Act 992). The Office of the Registrar of Companies is vested with the important object of registering and regulating all types of businesses in Ghana as well as registering business names, partnerships and professional bodies in accordance with enabling statutes. It is also required to appoint inspectors, a receiver or manager to ensure effective compliance with Act 992, discharge duties and perform functions of the Official Liquidator under the Bodies Corporate (Official Liquidations) Act, 1963, Act 180 and also manage the finances and fixed assets of the Office of the Registrar. Mr Yeboah-Dame also stated that the development of the Registrar of Companies over the years and the broad array of functions thrust on the Office by Act 992 enjoined the relocation of the physical premises from which the office operated. He said the office accommodation had become too small and unfit for the attainment of the objects of the Office. He said the Ministry had assisted the Office of the Registrar of Companies to acquire a two-acre land at the University of Ghana for the construction of a new office for US$3.5 million. He explained that the Land Lease Committee set up by the University of Ghana, owners of the land, had agreed to the payment of US$1.5million as a deposit towards the acquisition, which has been done. Mr Yeboah-Dame also clarified that having regard to the capacity of the Registrar of Companies to rake in substantial internally generated funds, the time had come for the Office to be financially independent of government. He said section 352 of Act 992 required the Office to be financially autonomous. The sources of funds of the Office have been stated by section 364 of Act 994 to include monies approved by Parliament, fees accruing to the office in respect of services recorded by the Office. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, has announced that the earlier rate of 1.75% that the proposed Electronic Transfer (E-Levy) bill was pegged, has been reduced to 1.5%. The Finance Minister disclosed this on Tuesday in the chamber of Parliament where he moved the motion for the House to consider the E-levy Bill, hoping to push for its passage. The object of this bill is to broaden the tax base of this country by imposing the levy on electronic transfer and enhance governments drive for revenue mobilization. The levy which is expected to raise GH6.9 million in 2022 is a key mechanism that the government will use to ensure Ghanaians contribute their fair share towards the development of the country. In the spirit of cooperation, government has decided to reduce the rate of the levy from 1.75 to 1.5 percent of the transfer. At the consideration stage, I will bring the necessary amendments to reflect the changes, the Finance Minister moved. But prior to that, the Minority Leader, Hon Haruna Iddrisu questioned the rationale behind the Majority's attempt to smuggle into the Order Paper the consideration of the controversial Electronic Transaction Levy (E-levy). According to him, the E-Levy did not find expression in the business statement, as it was not enlisted in Parliaments business statement for this week. When the business statement was presented last week, it [E-levy] was not part of the business approved for the house. We have warned time and again and cautioned that we do want to be taken by surprise on a major economic policy bill of government. Parliament cannot be that when a side is convenient with its number, then business can go on. It cannot be. We will not accept that culture. So when they [Majority] did not have the numbers, they werent ready. Now that you think that you have some reasonable numbers then you say go to the business of item 27, he fumed. Although the bill was not captured in the business statement of the house for this week, it was enlisted for the second reading and consideration on Tuesday. Despite the objection, the Finance Minister was allowed to move the motion for the debate on the controversial bill. The reading of the motion comes at a time the House is filled to capacity by both members of the Minority and Majority. The Speaker, Rt Hon Alban Bagbin, then called for a 30minute recess. Members of Parliament returned to the House after the recess to continue with the business of the day which included the possible passage of the E-Levy. However, moments later, the Minority staged a walkout just as Parliament completed the second reading of the E-Levy Bill. Despite the walkout, a voice vote was called by the Speaker after Parliament resumed sitting; thus the second reading of the bill was approved. Thereafter, a Majority-sided House then considered some proposed amendments. More soon..... Source: Peacefmonline.com/GHANA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Deputy Local Government Minister, Martin Agyei Mensah Korsah, has taken a swipe at the opposition National Democratic Congress for what he claims are constant attempts by the latter to thwart government's effort at making the economy better. The deputy minister says he cannot wrap his head around the minority belief that they are better in governance than this current administration. Speaking on Okay FM's 'Ade Akye Abia' programme, Hon Korsah, who is also the Member of Parliament (MP) for Techiman South, recalled how Ghanaians suffered under the bad leadership of the NDC government, pointing out that it took the intervention of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to bring the economy to a sure footing. According to him, "a government that has weathered the storm of COVID-19 and the ongoing Russia-Ukrainian war cannot be compared to a government that had everything at their disposal yet they failed woefully against dumsor. "Look at what the hardship the NDC through their leader John Dramani Mahama made Ghanaians to go through over the past years, but they claim to be better than the Akufo-Addo led government," he said. He argued further that Ghanaians would have been more miserable if the NDC was to be in power in these difficult times of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukrainian war. "I believe government should be applauded for the various interventions it has provided to cushion the economy . . ., " he added. Watch Video Below Member of Parliament(MP) for Ajumako-Enyan-Esiam, Cassiel Ato Forson, has described as "cosmetic and empty" government's new measures to help fix the economy.Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta at a presser announced various measures the government is putting in place to address the challenges facing the economy.This includes a 10 percent additional cut in government expenditure, a 50 percent cut in fuel coupon allocations for all political appointees among others. Source: Isaac Kwame Owusu/Peacefmonline/[email protected] Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Former President John Dramani Mahama has stated that he filed the 2020 presidential election petition at the Supreme Court to calm the charged political atmosphere to avoid electoral violence. The petition, he said, was also to test the legal right of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC). The atmosphere was quite charged, a few of our people took to the streets. There was a threat of violence and we didnt want to go down that path, so it was better to use what the Constitution has given us. Once we filed the suit, I noticed that it calmed everybody and of course we went and got 7:0 on every issue that we raised, he stated. Mr Mahama stated this while addressing the United States Chapter of the NDC at Bentley University on Sunday [March 27, 2022]. Anomalies Touching on the conduct of the 2020 elections, Mr Mahama said a number of anomalies occurred in the elections which affected the results. That, he said, resulted in anger among supporters of the NDC. We have all done elections before and at the printing press, all the political parties are supposed to send agents to the printing press. We sit there from the time they start printing until we finish. When they finish, we all tally how many ballots they were asked to print. We all look at the numbers and everything and if we are satisfied, then all the agents sign a certificate of completion to say that we are satisfied, that it tallies with the number you were asked to print, he said. Mr Mahama said that was what happened at the printing press and all the agents left after the printing of the ballot papers. Extra ballot papers However, he said one of the NDCs agents had to go back for his laptop bag, only for him to see "millions" of ballot papers being printed. {teetme}When he asked why they were printing extra ballot papers, they said the EC had asked them to print. Out of frustration, they said they were doing that in case there was a second round. But seven people will not go for second round. Ballot papers for a second round is only for two people, the top two. No proper explanation on why those ballot papers were printed was given.{/tweetme} Some of the people were seen later carrying ballot papers and we reported them to the police. Up till date, nobody has been charged or prosecuted for carrying those extra ballot papers, he stated. These are the things that happened in the elections and so we thought the elections werent free and fair and so we went to the Supreme Court. One, to test our legal right and then second, to also calm the atmosphere, he added. Mr Mahama said he, therefore, decided to rely on the provisions of the 1992 Constitution by going to the apex court to resolve the matter. The seven-member panel of the Supreme Court, by a unanimous decision, dismissed the petition on March 4, 2021, on the grounds that it lacked merit, Mr Mahama said. Read also: Why the Supreme Court dismissed Mahama's 2020 presidential election petition (FULL JUDGMENT) Judicial reforms Mr Mahama alleged that the countrys judicial system was being manipulated by political powers and, therefore, called for judicial reforms. He stated that the NDC party had a problem with the Judiciary, hence the need for urgent judicial reforms. We do have problems with the Judiciary, I must say. I think that it is necessary for some internal reforms to take place there. It is necessary for the Chief Justice or whoever is responsible to make some reforms. Most of the governance institutions have been politicised. I give the example of the Judiciary. It is only in Ghana that a Supreme Court will make a decision that a birth certificate is not proof of citizenship, he said. There are many such funny judgements that have been given. I remember at one time, our colleague Professor Raymond Atuguba said that from research he had done, judges tended to give their judgements in favour of the political party or leader that appointed them. According to him, Prof. Atuguba was subjected to a whirlwind of indignation by the Judiciary, but if you bring it down to what is happening today, and you look at it and see who appointed who, you will find that there was some truth in the research. The thing is, our Constitution gives the security of tenure to judges. Once you have been appointed, you cannot be removed. That is why we give security of tenure so that you will have the courage no matter who appointed you to give judgement according to your conscience. That is what our judges should do. They must rise to the occasion, Mr Mahama stated. Judicial brushes In October last year, the former President alleged that the 2020 election verdict by the Supreme Court had been determined even before the case was presented. He said this in an interview as part of his Thank You tour of the Central Region on Cape FM<$> in Cape Coast. Again, after the Supreme Courts ruling on deputy speakers voting rights, Mr Mahama criticised the Supreme Courts unanimous ruling that deputy speakers could vote while presiding. He described the verdict by the court as shocking but not surprising, saying it set a dangerous precedent for the countrys parliamentary procedure. He said the ruling was an unfortunate interpretation for convenience that sets a dangerous precedent of judicial interference in parliamentary procedure for the future. Source: graphiconline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video A MEMBER of the Minority caucus in Parliament, Agnes Naa Momo Lartey, is objecting to salary cuts for Members of Parliament (MPs) in the wake of measures by the government to trim spending amid the global economic crisis. According to her, the move would impinge on their pockets since NDC MPs, unlike their Majority counterparts who obtain pecuniary benefits from their memberships on boards of state corporations and agencies, have nothing other than their salaries. Last week, the government announced measures to save 50million cedis mainly through a public sector wage cut targeting its appointees, to lower its deficit and address the current economic challenges facing the country. Among the list is a 50 per cent reduction of fuel allocation coupons for all government appointees, including heads of government institutions, and State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) starting April 1, 2022. This, Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta said, would ensure efficient use of energy resources and save the country about GH50million annually. Government has also imposed a complete moratorium on the purchase of imported vehicles for the rest of the year and affects all new orders, especially four-wheel drives. He explained that the moratorium on the purchase of imported vehicles is expected to reduce, by at least 50 per cent, the total vehicle purchases by the public sector. But speaking on Accra FM last Thursday, the NDC MP for Krowor in the Greater Accra Region said the government could go ahead to cut down on the salaries of Majority MPs and not Minority lawmakers. We cannot use our meagre salaries to support your profligate expenditures, she asserted. How does this government expect us to use our already-delayed salaries to support their lavish expenditures? she quizzed. Naa Lartey said NDC MPs would not accept any pay cut until the government stops its undue expenditure and accounts for funds it got in the name of COVID-19. If the government cares to know, we are using our meagre monthly delayed salaries to work in our various constituencies and see to the needs of our constituents, she noted. For her, members of the Majority caucus can go ahead to accept a pay cut since they enjoy the largesse. Ms. Lartey said she does not believe any such savings from pay cuts would yield benefit for the country, as the government would not use funds prudently. In this regard, no one dares to impose a decision like that on the Minority since the government has the penchant for profligacy, she stated. Source: Daily Guide Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, has responded to critics who have accused him of running away from the economy when "he is needed most". The Minority and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) especially has been accusing the head of the Economic Management Team of going into hiding because he has no clue on how to save the economy which has taken a nosedive. Addressing the media some few days ago, John Jinapor, Member of Parliament for Yapei-Kusawgu, questioned the loud silence of the Vice-President, most especially on economic issues saying, he has gone comatose; he is nowhere to be found. But addressing participants of an Agric students boot camp at the Jubilee House on Monday, the Vice President deflated those claims saying "No", he's not "left the economics behind". Sometimes people say we thought you are an economist but you are doing so much in the IT space, have you left the economics behind? No, no; not at all. In fact, it is because of the economy that I am focusing on the digitization. Because without building those pillars, our economy would not be able to stand on its own feet. We need to build those pillars to allow all our sectors in the economy to be able to compete," he said. Source: Peacefmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video DAR ES SALAAM, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The East African Community (EAC) heads of state summit on Tuesday admitted the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) into the regional bloc, making it the seventh member of the bloc. A communique issued by the EAC at its headquarters in Tanzania's northern city of Arusha said the DRC was admitted during the 19th extra-ordinary summit of the EAC heads of state that was held virtually. The communique said the DRC was admitted after the EAC heads of state had received and considered the report of the 46th extra-ordinary meeting of the EAC council of ministers that recommended on the admission of the DRC into the regional bloc. According to the communique, the summit directed the chairperson of the EAC, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, to sign the treaty of accession of the DRC into the EAC by April 14, 2022. Thereafter the DRC shall be required to deposit the instruments of ratification with the EAC secretary general before Sept. 29, 2022, it said. It added that the summit directed the EAC council of ministers to develop a roadmap for the integration of the DRC into the EAC and report progress to the next EAC heads of state summit. "The admission of the DRC into the EAC is historic not only for our countries but our continent at large," said President Kenyatta. DRC becomes the seventh member of the EAC, joining Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. The National Communication Officer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) Mr. Sammy Gyamfi has described the governments decision to reduce petroleum products by 15 pesewas as an insult to the people of Ghana. That is even an insult to Ghanaians. You have increased petroleum product by 70% just in three months, then when it is time for you to reduce it, you claim youve done it by 15 pesewas, Mr. Sammy Gyamfi said this in an interview with Adom TV monitored by MyNewsGH.com. Sammy Gyamfis comments come after the Minister for Finance Ken Ofori Atta on Thursday, March 24, 2022, announced that fuel prices in Ghana will go down by 15 pesewas per litre effective April 1, 2022. To mitigate the rising price of petroleum products at the pumps, for the next three months, the government has decided to reduce margins in the petroleum price build-up by a total of 15 pesewas per litre with effect from 1st April. Finance Minister Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta said. But speaking on the matter, the NDC National Communication Officer Mr. Sammy Gyamfi slammed the government saying it is an insult to its citizens. He also went further to chide the government saying the reduction wont bring any positive impact on the lives of Ghanaians. In practical terms, youve reduced it by 67 pesewas. What impact would that have on the lives of Ghanaians? How is it going to help us? Its a total insult, he said. Source: ghanaweb.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Former President John Dramani Mahama has stated that he filed the election petition at the Supreme Court to calm the charged political atmosphere to avoid electoral violence. The petition, he said, was also to test the legal right of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC). The atmosphere was quite charged, a few of our people took to the streets. There was a threat of violence and we didnt want to go down that path, so it was better to use what the Constitution has given us. Once we filed the suit, I noticed that it calmed everybody and of course we went and got 7:0 on every issue that we raised, he stated. Mr Mahama stated this while addressing the United States Chapter of the NDC at the Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts, on Sunday, March 27, 2022. Anomalies Touching on the conduct of the 2020 elections, Mr Mahama said a number of anomalies occurred in the elections which affected the results. That, he said, resulted in anger among supporters of the NDC. We have all done elections before and at the printing press, all the political parties are supposed to send agents to the printing press. We sit there from the time they start printing until we finish. When they finish, we all tally how many ballots they were asked to print. We all look at the numbers and everything and if we are satisfied, then all the agents sign a certificate of completion to say that we are satisfied, that it tallies with the number you were asked to print, he said. Mr Mahama said that was what happened at the printing press and all the agents left after the printing of the ballot papers. He, however, said one of the NDCs agents had to go back for his laptop bag, only for him to see millions of ballot papers being printed. When he asked why they were printing extra ballot papers, they said the EC had asked them to print. Out of frustration, they said they were doing that in case there was a second round. But seven people will not go for second round. Ballot papers for a second round is only for two people, the top two. No proper explanation on why those ballot papers were printed was given. Some of the people were seen later carrying ballot papers and we reported them to the police. Up till date, nobody has been charged or prosecuted for carrying those extra ballot papers, he stated. These are the things that happened in the elections and so we thought the elections werent free and fair and so we went to the Supreme Court. One, to test our legal right and then second, to also calm the atmosphere, he added. Mr Mahama said he, therefore, decided to rely on the provisions of the 1992 Constitution by going to the apex court to resolve the matter. The seven-member panel of the Supreme Court, by a unanimous decision, dismissed the petition on March 4, 2021 on the grounds that it lacked merit. Judicial reforms Mr Mahama alleged that the countrys judicial system was being manipulated by political powers and, therefore, called for judicial reforms. He stated that the NDC party had a problem with the Judiciary, hence the need for urgent judicial reforms. We do have problems with the Judiciary, I must say. I think that it is necessary for some internal reforms to take place there. It is necessary for the Chief Justice or whoever is responsible to make some reforms. Most of the governance institutions have been politicised. I give the example of the Judiciary. It is only in Ghana that a Supreme Court will make a decision that a birth certificate is not proof of citizenship, he said. Source: graphiconline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Minority in Parliament has refused to accept the passage of the E-Levy Bill on the floor of the August House today(Tuesday). The rubicon has finally been crossed with the passage of the controversial Electronic Levy (E-Levy) bill, despite a spirited attempt by the Minority caucus in Parliament to shoot it down, including their staging of a walkout. According to the Minority, the Majority pulled a surprise on them because E-levy wasn't listed in Parliaments business statement for this week. However, by a voice vote by the Majority caucus after the approval of second and third readings of the bill, Speaker of Parliament declared "the electronic bill duly read the third time and passed" meaning the contentious levy has been passed. Okudzeto Challenges E-Levy Bill But to the North Tongu MP, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, the E-Levy Bill hasn't been passed. Following their walkout from Parliament, the MP took to his Facebook to supposedly give hope to people stating categorically that ''what transpired today is a ridiculous nullity!'' ''You thought we will give you the pleasure of returning to court for a declaration that the Assin North MP shouldnt have been present in the Chamber to vote so that you can claim a 137-136 victory for the E-Levy. With our strategic walk out, you fall short of the required 138 quorum under article 104(1) of the 1992 Constitution and as affirmed by the Supreme Court in the recent Justice Abdulai case. "There can be no contention about Hon. Adwoa Safos absence from todays proceedings. Trust your NDC representatives, we have a conscience, and we know that the real power belongs to you. Going by the Supreme Courts decision, the E-Levy has not been passed. What transpired today is a ridiculous nullity!'', he posted. Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video FILE - Alabama fans react as they watch television coverage of the College Football Playoff national championship game against Georgia, Monday, Jan. 10, 2022, in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Brookfield Business Partners is boosting its buyout offer for Nielsen Holdings, Tuesday, March 29, 2022, to about $16 billion after the TV ratings and marketing data company rejected a $9 billion takeover bid. (AP Photo/Vasha Hunt, File) Marie-Anne Day Walker-Pelletier, retired chief of Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan, is shown in Rome, Italy, on Tuesday, March 29, 2022. Walker-Pelletier said after a tour of a Vatican museum that she wants the Roman Catholic Church to return Indigenous artifacts in its possession. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kelly Geraldine Malone Ontario Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy takes to the podium during a news conference in Toronto on Wednesday April 28, 2021. Ontario is increasing a speculation tax on non-resident homebuyers to 20 per cent and expanding it to cover the whole province.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young Malagasy President Andry Rajoelina (L, Front) attends a commemorative ceremony in downtown Antananarivo, capital of Madagascar, on March 29, 2022. Madagascar commemorated on Tuesday the 75th anniversary of its uprising against French colonizers almost everywhere in the country with ecumenical worship, wreath laying ceremony in front of commemorative steles or at martyrs' cemeteries, as well as various festivities. (Xinhua/Sitraka Rajaonarison) ANTANANARIVO, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Madagascar commemorated on Tuesday the 75th anniversary of its uprising against French colonizers almost everywhere in the country with ecumenical worship, wreath laying ceremony in front of commemorative steles or at martyrs' cemeteries, as well as various festivities. With the theme, "Ilo tsy very, tsy maty ao ampo, ny fanavotana ny firenena", widely translated into English as "the salvation of the country is an unquenched flame, alive in the heart", the commemoration events were notably remarkable in the capital of Antananarivo, in Moramanga (east) and in Manakara (south-east), where hundreds of Malagasy nationalists are buried in mass graves after being shot by the French. Accompanied by youths and survivors of the 1947 insurrection, Malagasy President Andry Rajoelina laid wreaths at the Mausole Avaratr'Ankatso in downtown Antananarivo on Tuesday before flying to Manakara. In Manakara, the centre of the celebration, the Malagasy president called for solidarity among Malagasy people. "Patriotism is the reason for the celebration of March 29 every year, it is the main message that we must transfer to our descendants," he said. "The struggle continues, we need a lot of effort to have real independence, food independence, the fight against corruption and independence for real development," he added. For his part, Prime Minister Ntsay Christian was in Moramanga to lay wreaths at the cemeteries where hundreds of martyrs are resting. "The struggle made by Malagasy nationalists is not in vain. The current government has done its best to fulfil the dreams of these nationalists. Despite the negative consequences of the COVID-19 and the crisis in Ukraine, the Malagasy government is making efforts to find solutions to the difficulties of Malagasy citizens," the Prime Minister said. On March 29, 1947, the uprising against France broke out throughout Madagascar. The most violent incident took place in Moramanga, where French soldiers shot hundreds of Malagasy demonstrators in a train. Madagascar was colonised by France from 1896 and gained its independence on June 26, 1960. Malagasy President Andry Rajoelina (Front) attends a commemorative ceremony in downtown Antananarivo, capital of Madagascar, on March 29, 2022. Madagascar commemorated on Tuesday the 75th anniversary of its uprising against French colonizers almost everywhere in the country with ecumenical worship, wreath laying ceremony in front of commemorative steles or at martyrs' cemeteries, as well as various festivities. (Xinhua/Sitraka Rajaonarison) Triton Poker Returns with Special Edition in North Cyprus from April 2-7 March 29, 2022 Matt Hansen Live Reporting Executive The Triton Poker Series returns to action at the Merit Royal Hotel Casino and Spa in North Cyprus from April 2-7 and they will join forces with PokerGO and the Super High Roller Series to add 10 more events to the slate, including the $250,000 Super High Roller Bowl on April 13. The action will be streamed live on Youtube and Twitch via Triton Poker. The North Cyprus stop marks the return of Triton Poker with the first event since London in 2019. The series returns after canceling a robust 2020 schedule in the wake of COVID-19, along with two postponed events earlier in 2022 in Bali and Russia. GGPoker Triton Poker Sponsorship In addition, GGPoker have been unveiled as an official partner of Triton Poker, with the two brands planning to collaborate on future live events, with exclusive online satellites made available on GGPoker. "Triton Series has striven to bring live poker to the next level" "Since its inception, the Triton Series has striven to bring live poker to the next level," said John Scanlon, Director of Sponsorships & Live Events at GGPoker. "Its not just about the size of the buy-ins or the big-name players, but the quality of production and level of engagement it receives from the poker community. "This partnership is the perfect synergy between two brands aligned with a common goal to bring poker to the masses through premium product offerings." Meanwhile, CEO of Triton Poker Series Andy Wong was thrilled to welcome GGPoker as a premium partner. "GGPoker brings a wealth of experience within the online gaming industry and is renowned for being at the forefront of developing innovative games and features. "Significant live coverage has always been the cornerstone of our business, and this partnership will further enhance the thrills and spills our fans have come to enjoy at our exclusive events." 2022 Triton Poker Cyprus Special Edition Schedule Date Local Time (GMT+3) Event Buy-in Starting Stack April 2 1 p.m. Event #1: NLH 6-Handed Day 1 $50,000 200,000 April 3 1 p.m. Event #1: NLH 6-Handed Day 2 April 3 4 p.m. Event #2: NLH 8-Handed Day 1 $100,000 200,000 April 4 1 p.m. Event #2: NLH 8-Handed Day 2 April 5 1 p.m. Event #3: Short Deck Day 1 $75,000 100,000 (3x Bullets) April 6 1 p.m. Event #3: Short Deck Day 2 April 6 4 p.m. Event #5: Short Deck Day 1 $125,000 100,000 (3x Bullets) April 7 1 p.m. Event #5: Short Deck Day 2 Justin Bonomo won the last Triton Main Event, taking 2,670,000 for winning the Short Deck finale in 2019 at the London Hilton on Park Lane. This years action begins in North Cyprus with six-handed play in the $50,000 NLH event on April 2. The second no-limit event kicks off the next day with a $100,000 buy-in on April 3. Triton Poker Series Cyprus will also offer two Short Deck events, with a $75,000 buy-in on April 5 and a $125,000 event on April 6. All four Triton tournaments will take place over two days, and each will feature live reporting from beginning to end by the PokerNews team. Once the Triton series wraps up, the Super High Roller Series opens with 10 more events from April 2-15 that have buy-ins ranging from $25,000 to the $250,000 Super High Roller Bowl. 2022 Super High Roller Series Cyprus Schedule Date Local Time (GMT+3) Event Buy-in April 7 2 p.m. Event #1: Pot-Limit Omaha $25,000 April 8 2 p.m. Event #2: No-Limit Holdem $25,000 April 9 2 p.m. Event #3: Short Deck $50,000 April 10 2 p.m. Event #4: Pot Limit Omaha $25,000 April 11 2 p.m. Event #5: No-Limit Holdem $50,000 April 12 2 p.m. Event #6: Short Deck $100,000 April 13 2 p.m. Event #7: Pot-Limit Omaha $25,000 April 13 5 p.m. Super High Roller Bowl $250,000 April 14 2 p.m. Event #8: No-Limit Holdem $50,000 April 15 2 p.m. Event #9: No-Limit Holdem $50,000 Be sure to keep it with PokerNews for live reports from all four events at Triton Pokers return to live poker at Merit Royal Hotel Casino and Spa in North Cyprus. Sharelines Check out details of the return of @tritonpoker with four tournaments in North Cyprus from April 2-7. China continues to parrot Russian talking points about the war against Ukraine. On the eve of U.S. President Joe Biden's trip to Europe over the weekend, the Chinese Communist Party-run Global Times claimed the Wests support for Ukraine is backfiring. "While Washington is obsessed with delaying Russia-Ukraine negotiations, Europe wants security and stability, the publication said in a March 23 editorial. There are emerging anti-war voices in Europe, and these voices include disapproval toward Washington's arms delivery to Ukraine. More and more Europeans realize that blindly sending arms to Ukraine is heading toward the opposite direction of the security goals they pursue." That is misleading. In fact, an overwhelming majority of United Nations members backed resolutions condemning Russias war. As for the issue of security, European countries on Ukraines flank fear that Moscow might eventually push the war westward. Europe does want stability, and the U.S. and European Union member states remain united in opposing Kremlin aggression with stiff economic sanctions, defensive military aid to Ukraine and help for the millions of refugees uprooted by indiscriminate Russian attacks. These sanctions include, among other steps, freezing assets controlled by Russian President Vladimir Putin, some of his top aides, Russian oligarchs, and companies and government agencies; closing airspace to Russian airliners; stripping Russias most-favored-nation trade status; and restricting exports of defense and other strategic technologies to Russia. Even Switzerland, a neutral country since 1815, has made an exception and joined the European sanctions against Russia. The strength of the alliance was affirmed at the recently concluded NATO, G7 and EU summits, attended by Biden, where more sanctions were promised. "Together, we should aim at holding accountable those responsible for the devastation and commit to imposing further costs on Russia until Putin ceases his aggression," Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a March 24 joint statement. The Global Times editorial echoes Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who in mid-March claimed Western weapons flowing to Ukraine are creating a colossal danger for their EU suppliers themselves. In fact, the danger is to Russian troops, which, according to numerous assessments, have been punished with surprisingly heavy losses. Those losses are largely unreported in Russias media thanks to Kremlin censorship and suppression of dissent. The 27-member European Union announced on February 27 that it would send some 500 million euros in military aid to Ukraine. As EU treaties prohibit its budgetary money from being used for weapons transfers, it employed its European Peace Facility, an off-budget financing instrument with a ceiling of 5 billion euros for the 2021-2027 budget cycle, for the aid package. The 500 million euros was, according to one diplomat, almost all what we can spend for this year, Politico reported. For the first time ever, the EU will finance the purchase and delivery of weapons and other equipment to a country that is under attack, von der Leyen said. This is a watershed moment." On March 23, the EU said it would double its military aid to Ukraine to 1 billion euros. On February 26, Germany reversed a longstanding policy of never sending weapons to conflict zones and pledged delivery of 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger surface-to-air missiles. It also approved the shipment of howitzers and ammunition originally from Estonia. Sweden, Finland, Austria and Ireland, which are Europes neutral countries, have also agreed to provide military aid to Ukraine. It's true that some in the West have expressed concerns that the arms deliveries could prolong the war and bloodshed. However, contrary to what the Global Times suggests, this appears to be a minority view in Europe. A survey released March 8 by Cygnal polling found that majorities of those responding in the EU and Britain support military aid for Ukraine, with 70% backing in the U.K. and 61% in the EU. The Global Times editorials assertion that the U.S. has somehow tried to stymie peace talks is belied by the record. In fact, U.S. and EU leaders continue to encourage talks and repeatedly pushed for a diplomatic solution as tensions rose in the months before the invasion. During that period, Russia massed troops along the Ukraine border, with the deceptive excuse that it was conducting military exercises, and repeatedly said it had no plans to invade. Chinese officials either bought Russias deceptive comments or went along with them, even though the U.S. said it had intelligence that Russia was planning to invade. Starting last November, U.S. officials quietly held talks with Chinese officials, including Chinas ambassador in Washington and foreign minister, to discuss intelligence showing the Russian troop buildup and persuade the Chinese to tell the Russians not to launch a war, The New York Times reported in February and March, citing unnamed U.S. officials. The Chinese officials rebuffed the Americans at every meeting and expressed skepticism that Mr. Putin intended to invade Ukraine, the U.S. officials said, the newspaper reported in March. "After one diplomatic exchange in December, U.S. officials got intelligence showing Beijing had shared the information with Moscow, telling the Russians that the United States was trying to sow discord and that China would not try to impede Russian plans and actions, the officials said," the Times reported in February. The U.N. General Assembly has twice passed resolutions overwhelmingly calling for Russia to stop the attack on Ukraine, but China abstained both times. Instead, the Chinese government insists it is neutral while basically siding with Russia on state media and censoring news that is sympathetic to Ukraine or negative toward Moscow. Ukraine has paid a heavy price. During the first four weeks of war, the Kyiv School of Economics reported, Russias attacks cost the Ukraine economy between $543 and $600 billion. The damage and destruction includes at least 4,431 residential buildings, 92 factories and warehouses, 378 learning institutions, 138 health care facilities, 12 airports, and seven power plants. The United Nations human rights office said on March 27 that 1,119 Ukrainian civilians had been killed and 1,790 wounded since the Russian invasion. The world body noted that the true casualty figures are expected to be "considerably higher", as reports are delayed in some regions where intense hostilities are going on. Would you like to receive breaking news notifications from The Post and Courier? Sign up to receive news and updates from this site directly to your desktop. Breaking News Columbia Breaking News Greenville Breaking News Myrtle Beach Breaking News Aiken Breaking News N Augusta Breaking News Click on the bell icon to manage your notifications at any time. Discussions around the potential use of Newberry Street for development continued to swirl into the night on Monday with more talks planned. A proposal to convey a portion of the 100 southwest block of the street to RPM Development Partners LLC for purposes of development with Project Pascalis, the downtown Aiken redevelopment project, was before Aiken City Council Monday night. The ordinance passed unanimously, 7-0. Council members said they would like to see more information before the ordinance comes before them for second reading, including a public input session. Councilwoman Kay Biermann Brohl emphasized that this is just a first step. "There's still going to be lots and lots of public input," Brohl said. Councilwoman Andrea Gregory echoed this point, saying that no final contracts have been signed and lots of things still need to happen. A traffic and parking study involving Newberry Street will be finished in draft form by Friday, said Tim O'Briant, Aiken's economic development director. This study will be available for public consumption and shown at a to-be-announced public presentation before the ordinance comes for second reading. A large contingent of residents attended the meeting, the vast majority of which were against the proposal. Several raised concerns over the historical charm of Aiken going away. "We have talked and spoke at length about what makes Aiken special, what makes Aiken authentic," said Mike Bedenbaugh, saying these plans would remove that aspect from the city. Bedenbaugh is a preservation development consultant with Preservation South Carolina, a statewide nonprofit that advocates for historic places around the state. The organization recently took an interest in Hotel Aiken after it saw activity on social media and heard from concerned residents. Dione Carroll, president and principal attorney at Carroll Law Offices in Aiken, said she's representing a group of concerned citizens that are "profoundly concerned" that decisions are being made too quickly. "If you don't know the answers to a lot of those critical questions, then it would be arbitrary and propitious and an abuse of discretion and therefore illegal to make this decision," Carroll said to council members. "If you were to close a southbound lane of a major street in the heart of Aiken, you will never get that back," said Jacob Ellis. Many of the comments made in opposition to the plans were met with loud rounds of applause from the audience. "What you have shared with me personally as a council member is that you were unaware of the discussions taking place and what we were planning," Lessie Price, councilwoman, said to the crowd. "That is not the way that we want to do business in this town. We want transparency, we want your input." This ordinance that is being proposed as one of the city's goals with Project Pascalis was to keep any structure from being built below the height limit of 55 feet, with City Manager Stuart Bedenbaugh saying "the community was very clear (of that) the last time this area was being discussed for redevelopment." "In order to accommodate that restriction while still creating a project containing space for the 100-key hotel, approximately 100 multifamily residential units, a municipal conference center of 25,000 to 30,000 square feet and an adequately-sized parking garage, additional space east of the subject parcels was needed," according to the City Council meeting agenda. The ordinance proposes conveying 0.6145 of an acre to the developers. In essence, the southbound lane of Newberry Street S.W. the side closest to The Alley connecting Richland Avenue W. and Park Avenue S.W. would be ultimately closed, according to the agenda. The northbound lane the side closest to The Pizza Joint and the Amentum Center for the Performing Arts would stay open and remain a one-way road, according to the agenda. In exchange for the city conveying the street parcel, Aiken Alley Holdings LLC, a related entity to RPM Development Partners, has agreed to contribute two parcels it owns to the Project Pascalis footprint, according to the agenda. These two parcels include the former home of Joe Harrison's State Farm Insurance agency and the parking lot fronting Bee Lane that is directly behind the former insurance building. The Project Pascalis footprint is bounded by Laurens Street, Richland Avenue and Newberry Street. The new hotel is proposed to be built at the former Hotel Aiken site after that building is demolished. The proposed apartments and parking garage would be located at the corner of Newberry Street and Richland Avenue. The potential conference center would be located between Newberry Street and Bee Lane. This proposed ordinance to convey the property is conditional, as no transfer of Newberry Street would take place unless a "master development agreement is in place between the Aiken Municipal Development Commission and RPM Development Partners LLC," according to the agenda. Residents who would like to watch a recording of the meeting can visit the city's YouTube page. They can also visit aikenmdc.org for information and documents relating to Project Pascalis. SEOUL, March 29 (Xinhua) -- A fire broke out at a maternity hospital in the South Korean central city of Cheongju, with no serious injury reported, Yonhap news agency said Tuesday. The flame started at about 10:09 a.m. local time (0109 GMT) from a parking lot on the first floor of one of the three maternity hospital buildings in Cheongju, about 110 km south of the capital Seoul. A total of 122 people, including 23 mothers and 23 babies, escaped on their own or with the help of rescue workers. Some were treated for smoke inhalation, but no one was seriously wounded. The mothers and babies were sent to nearby hospitals. The fire was put out about three hours later as 25 fire trucks and around 60 firefighting personnel were dispatched to the scene. The authorities were looking into the exact cause of the incident. COLUMBIA The United Nations World Food Programme is billions of dollars short of the funding it needs to feed the world's hungry as the invasion of Ukraine rages, according to the former South Carolina governor who now heads head the organization. That's why David Beasley is calling on corporations and billionaires to contribute to addressing food needs stemming from the war. "Were now looking at an additional 30 to 50 million people going into severe food insecurity around the world because of whats happening inside Ukraine," Beasley said speaking to home state crowds at the S.C. Statehouse and University of South Carolina. "It's so big this time." The organization has also upped its efforts on social media, encouraging everyone to give. Beasley said the program has raised $55 million from online donors in the last three weeks. That includes call outs like one from Lou Kennedy, chief executive of West Columbia's Nephron Pharmaceuticals, who took to Facebook to encourage donations. If not addressed Beasley warned Ukraine's crisis is not just a threat to that country but to the global food chain as well. Ukraine accounts for 20 percent of the worlds corn supply and 30 percent of wheat comes from Russian and Ukraine. Meanwhile disruptions due to the conflict means the 2022 corn crop has not been planted and the coming wheat crop could go unharvested. "The reverberation is going to be quite extraordinary," Beasley said. The World Food Programme is already facing decisions on cutting rations in half in places like Yemen and Ethiopia, something Beasley said he doesn't want to do. "As long as you have man made conflict you're going to have starvation, you're going to have destabilization," he said. "When food prices go up, children starve." The most recent reports estimate as many as 3.5 million people have fled Ukraine since the war began. But Beasley said an estimated 40 million are left behind in danger. So far, the World Food Programme has fed 1 million people from the country. It hopes to scale up to 6 million by June, which will cost the program between $200 million to $300 million per month, Beasley said. Beasley served as the states Republican governor from 1995 to 1999. He took over leadership of the World Food Programme in 2017, recommended by former Governor Nikki Haley, then the U.N. ambassador. When he joined the World Food Programme, 80,000 million people faced starvation globally. That grew to 135 million before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, 276 million people are hungry worldwide, Beasley said. SWANSEA Long after the former mayor of Swansea was suspended from office on charges of embezzlement, the new town council remains bitterly divided and cannot pass a budget nine months after the new fiscal year began. Swansea has been using the spending plan from a year ago, hurting the Lexington County town's ability to shift money to current priorities. With another impasse among Swansea's leaders, the Town Council unanimously passed a resolution this month to extend the current budget until June 30. Without a current budget, the police department of the town with a population of 725 is facing problems. Swansea Police Chief Earl Williams III told council that he cannot apply for certain grants. If we dont have a budget, they cant fund the department, Williams said. While one council member said Williams could use a proposed budget that won initial approval to apply for grants, the spat continues to roil the town 25 miles south of Columbia. Swansea cannot pass any of the proposed budgets because none of them have been balanced, and the town has $157,000 in debt, Councilwoman Doris Simmons said. The federal American Rescue Fund sent the town $239,000, which could be put towards canceling the towns debts, she said. However, the town has spent nearly $100,000 of that money on utilities, trucking services and insurance, according to public records that private consulting accountant Alberta Wasden obtained from the town. What led to the spending decisions remains unclear. Simmons and Councilman Mike Luongo said Swansea Mayor Viola McDaniel is in charge of dispersing the federal money. McDaniel declined comment, and repeated attempts to reach Mayor Pro-Tempore Linda Butler and Councilman Jerome Williams were unsuccessful. Luongo said he is flabbergasted that the mayor spent the money on bills rather than paying the towns debt. Theres a lot of good that could have been done, rather than catching up on bills that should have been paid, Luongo said. In a town nearly split evenly racially, the Swansea Town Council is split between Black councilmembers Butler and Williams and McDaniel, and White councilmembers Simmons and Luongo. They outvote us, Simmons said. Its disheartening, but its a 3-2, so you cant win. The latest in-infighting started when Jerald Sanders was mayor. Simmons and Luongo questioned Sanders' spending practices and said they were rebuffed in efforts to examine financial records. In July, then-mayor was indicted on accusations of having town checks totaling less than $10,000 written to him personally without authorization and cashing them. He was suspended from office. Sanders, who did not seek reelection, pleaded not guilty. No trial date has been set. Luongo and Simmons said they were hopeful about change in November when McDaniel, who promised transparency and unity, won the November election. But the financial problems and division continued, Luongo and Simmons said. She has been far from doing the unity part, Simmons said. If anything, she has pulled us further apart instead of closer together. Because the majority vote rules, Simmons and Luongo said they blame the mayor and other councilmembers for the lack of communications and inability to pass a balanced budget. Rather than taking up serious issues and actually logistically working them out between the five of us so we could actually start doing something good for this town, that's not happening, Luongo said. The town councils turmoil is frustrating some residents. Somebody needs to get on the ball and get a budget, Swansea resident Joe Phillips said after attending the council meeting. "They aint doing the job." Residents not having a chance to speak at council meetings also generated frustration in town. Though the March 21 agenda posted on the towns Facebook site said the public would be allowed to speak at the meeting, the one handed out to attendees did not include a public forum section. They make it harder by having meetings like this, to where on one site it says one thing, on one one site it says another, and you really have to go on a treasure hunt to find where its posted, Wasden said. That makes it hard for the public to even be aware. Recent interactions between council and the public has not always ended well. Because no public forum was held at a town council meeting March 1, Wasden said she felt the need to speak up about balancing the budget. McDaniel had the police escort her out of the meeting for speaking out of turn, Wasden said. Luongo and Simmons confirmed Wasden's account. (McDaniel) wouldn't let anybody in the audience speak, Wasden said. So, I stood I admit I did speak out of turn. I told her, 'You can't vote on this. It is illegal.' Well, she didn't like hearing that. She asked the police to escort me out and make sure I didn't come back in." Going to the meetings is the only way for residents to know what is happening on council. The 2021 and 2022 meeting agendas and minutes are not accessible online. A page with links do not lead to additional information. However, the March 21 meeting agenda was posted on Facebook prior to the meeting. John and Venetia Sharpe attended the March 21 meeting intending to learn about business regulations, but they were disappointed no public forum was planned. Venetia Sharpe is working with her husband to open a new coffee shop, Brewed Awakenings, in Swansea this summer. We would like to see Swansea grow, Venetia Sharpe said. We would like to see Swansea come back to be the booming town that it once was upon a time was. South Carolina wildlife officials are considering a special permit that would allow Charles River Labs to collect horseshoe crabs in areas of the ACE Basin that previously had been off limits. If approved, this unusual permit would add a new and secretive twist in the high-dollar race to collect horseshoe crab blood, a practice that yields a valuable medical extract for Charles River Labs. The crab harvesting has also spawned a federal lawsuit and cries of conflicts of interest. The S.C. Department of Natural Resources is considering the permit without any public notice or review. It comes on the heels of an earlier proposal by Charles River Labs to give DNR $500,000 for a special permit, an offer that DNR refused. DNR spokeswoman Erin Weeks confirmed the agency is in discussions about horseshoe crab harvest within the ACE Basin. "The Department has not issued any permits related to harvest on the currently prohibited islands (Otter, Warren, Big, Beet & Ashe Islands) in the ACE Basin Research Reserve," Weeks wrote in an email. "We'll be in touch if there is something to share." A Charles River Labs spokesman said the company would defer to DNR on any discussions of the topic. The ACE Basin, an estuary that includes the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto rivers, has long been celebrated as a conservation success story for protecting large expanses of public and private property. Several islands within that project area are off limits to horseshoe crab harvesting unless specified on the harvest permit, Weeks, the DNR spokeswoman, said. This includes Otter Island, part of the St. Helena Sound Heritage Preserve and a home to rare plants and endangered species. "For a long stretch of coastline, Otter is the only spot where wildlife species can rest, feed and reproduce without development pressures," according to a description on DNRs website. Conservationists are concerned about the permit and the secretive process in general. "Its like opening a national park to commercial activities without any notice to the public and behind closed doors," said Catherine Wannamaker, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. Opening up any part of the habitat there for horseshoe crab harvesting is "wholly irresponsible," added Emily Cedzo, the Coastal Conservation League's senior program manager. I think certainly any decision regarding a permit, if that is the mechanism by which DNR is going to consider doing this, must be a public process first and foremost, and should not be something that is taking place behind the scenes, which it sounds like that is the case at this point, Cedzo said. The revelation about the special permit comes just before horseshoe crabs begin to spawn off the East Coast. When this happens, fishers collect the crabs and take them to Charles River's laboratory in Charleston. There, technicians extract the crabs' blue blood, which is then turned into an extract used to detect toxins in everything from vaccines to medical equipment. A gallon can fetch $60,000. Charles River Labs then returns the crabs to the ocean. Between 6 and 30 percent die in the process, previous studies have shown. Horseshoe crabs have declined in some parts of the East Coast, but populations in South Carolina have shown mixed signals. Conservationists fear that biomedical harvesting of crabs not only affects that species but also threatens wildlife that feast on the crabs eggs. Three conservation groups recently sued DNR and Charles River in federal court. The groups Defenders of Wildlife, Coastal Conservation League and Southern Environmental Law Center allege DNR failed to properly regulate horseshoe crabs. They argued this failure also threatened the red knot, the endangered bird that feeds on horseshoe crab eggs. Previously, the groups sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, alleging Charles River illegally collected crabs in Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. A federal judge eventually ordered the practice stopped. A recent Uncovered investigation by The Post and Courier revealed how Charles River Labs pays DNR nearly $1.5 million a year to lease Morgan Island in the ACE Basin, often called Monkey Island. Charles River has a federal contract manage a breeding colony there of about 3,500 rhesus monkeys. But DNR uses this $1.5 million Morgan Island windfall to help pay salaries of employees, including some who regulate Charles Rivers horseshoe crab business. In addition to the $1.5 million, Charles River Labs secretly dangled a $500,000 offer for a special license, a finding first reported by The State newspaper. Officials with Charles River recently told The Post and Courier that they offered the money to help DNR study crab populations. It wasnt a pay-to-play, you know, Greg Marshall, a corporate vice president, said in an interview. We know they have limited resources. Weve been working with them for 25 years. They didnt accept. Thats fine." Critics say the cozy relationship between DNR and Charles River distorts the agencys priorities and taints its independence. They argue DNR cant properly regulate a $3.5 billion company that covers some of its paychecks, and DNR's top official acknowledged that he had concerns. After hearing about the newspapers findings last month, Robert Boyles Jr., DNRs director, said: Ill be blunt. It never crossed my mind that theres a conflict of interest or an appearance of a conflict. DNR's board held an executive session at a meeting on March 25 without explaining its purpose. The agency said The Post and Courier would need to file a Freedom of Information Act request for more information. A former logistics director for Charleston Wine + Food spearheads another epic weekend that will bring people together in the Lowcountry for a few days this summer. It's not to partake in wine and dinner experiences but, instead, to learn more about the industry that puts them on. FAB (Females and Business) is a national educational and inspirational hospitality workshop created by women, for women, in food and beverage. It covers topics from restaurant law to managing a work-life balance, and this year, it takes place June 5-7 at the William-Aiken House and American Theater downtown. In 2017, its inaugural year, FAB brought more than 230 attendees and 30 speakers representing a variety of areas of the hospitality industry to Charleston. Now going into its sixth year, after one virtual go-around, the conference will host more than 70 speakers and an estimated 350 attendees. Founder Randi Weinstein is a longtime food business veteran. She used to run operations at Butcher & Bee in addition to her stint at Wine + Food, and she's always tried to support women in the Charleston scene specifically. In 2015, she organized a seven-dinner series that showcased women's rise through the decades, with each starring a woman chef and representing an era from the 1950s onward, from music to food to decor. She helped raise $40,000 for the now-closed Center for Women to create scholarships for women in hospitality for pursuits like sommelier courses and national conferences, and continues to push that effort when it comes to FAB and beyond. This year, she's already been able to raise the money to provide 61 scholarships to FAB for women from as far away as Los Angeles. "I'd love to just have the workshop be scholarship-based and not sell any tickets," offered Weinstein, who has partnered with brands such as Chobani and Sanpellegrino to secure those funds. Without a scholarship, tickets for the three-day experience ring up at $600. That's so Weinstein is able to secure some top-notch talent when it comes to speakers and workshop leaders, she said. "The biggest failure in the business is not knowing enough about the industry," she said. "I wanted people to invest in themselves, and a lot of times women don't." She's curated a team of individuals who know a lot about a little bit of everything. The cumulative knowledge and mentorship that arises in just a matter of days is inspiring and powerful, she said. In a still male-dominated industry NPR reported in 2019 that 27 percent of women in the food industry are managers, while only 18 percent are executive-level managers it gives women the chance to have conversations they might be intimidated by in restaurant settings, said Weinstein. "Women like talking to other women," she said. "There are deeper answers to questions and more real, heart-to-heart conversations." In an industry that struggles with burnout, it's also a chance to feel refreshed and renewed in passion. The goal is for these women to go back to their respective restaurants and implement some of the things they've learned. Paula Kramer, co-owner of Baguette Magic with her sister Sam on Folly Road, presented at the conference in 2019 and months later purchased the bakery. "Our first year, I just remember my sister and I both being very star-struck," said Kramer. "So many accomplished, powerhouse women all in one place. Words can't describe the incredible energy you become immersed in during the event." Kramer said she and her sister learned invaluable lessons about managing people, human resources practices, balance sheets and logistics in a relatable and exciting way. "I truly believe there's no better way to learn than from those actually doing it, rather than from books or school," she said. As a restaurant owner, especially a female restaurant owner, Kramer said it can be so incredibly easy to get a bit bogged down in the day-to-day operations. "FAB is electrifying, sending shockwaves through us, igniting a spark of excitement and fresh perspectives," she said. "This can be an isolating industry ... and the opportunity to meet women who have so much in common with you, who have the experience you need and who can just say, 'I get it,' is validating and empowering, and I think that's what FAB is really about." This year, Kramer will be participating in a panel about construction and building spaces (as more of a cautionary tale, she warned), while Sam will be speaking on a panel about pop-up restaurants. "We also decided to send our general manager this year, and I am thrilled for her to get to experience this event," Kramer shared. One local panel leader at this year's upcoming event is Danielle Wecksler, senior manager of product and culinary marketing at French cookware brand Le Creuset. She will be leading lunchtime workshops on working with brands and will also be a part of a discussion on establishing and maintaining your own brand. "I'll be leveraging my experience at Le Creuset, but also previously consulting with companies in the culinary space," Wecksler said. She attended the virtual conference during the pandemic era, but said she's excited to be networking in person once again. "It's so important to have these opportunities for women," she said. "The food and bev/culinary world is so competitive and downright hard work. So it's nice to put that aside for a few days and really connect with other similarly minded women that can truly relate. I'm honored to be speaking alongside so many amazing women from all over, and more importantly, to be able to learn from them." For Weinstein, it's not about the "hokey" Instagram backdrops or shallow meet-and-greets that can easily permeate conference culture. It's about quality education and networking to help create a stronger and more well-rounded and passionate women-led work force. SUMMERVILLE An Upstate man has been arrested after his DNA was linked to the sexual assault and strangulation of a 42-year-old mother more than two decades ago in Dorchester County. Charles Edward Goodwin Jr. was arrested March 28 and charged with murder in the 1998 slaying of Stephanie Thompson, Dorchester County Sheriff L.C. Knight announced at a March 29 press conference. A squirrel hunter found Thompson's body the morning of Dec. 21, 1998, in the woods at the end of Franchise Street, an industrial area off Dorchester Road near North Charleston city limits, according to an incident report. Thompson was nude from the waist down, the report said. Knight confirmed that Thompson was sexually assaulted. Investigators collected DNA samples from her body, which were uploaded into the FBI's national DNA database, CODIS. An autopsy report revealed Thompson was strangled, The Post and Courier reported in 1998. Investigators believed at the time that the woman was killed elsewhere then dumped in the woods off the dead-end street. A sheriff's captain told the newspaper that detectives were talking to "anybody and everybody" who knew how the woman spent the last hours of her life. Thompson was seen earlier that morning leaving a North Charleston party with a man known only as "Little Jay," the captain said. The sheriff's office released a sketch of the man, but its unclear if he was ever identified. Almost eight months later, authorities told the newspaper detectives had interviewed people up and down the East Coast, but the case remained unsolved. Detectives said a person they believed knew the killer's identity was not cooperating, the newspaper reported. Goodwin, now 43, was a person of interest in the case, Knight said. He was previously questioned by detectives about the homicide, but it was not until his recent arrest on a felony drunken-driving charge that authorities obtained his DNA. People arrested on felony offenses in South Carolina are required to provide a sample of their DNA to authorities. The samples are then entered into CODIS, where it can be tested against DNA recovered from crime scenes across the nation. Knight said his office learned in December that Goodwin's DNA was a positive match for a sample collected from Thompson's body. Goodwin was 20 years old at the time of Thompson's killing. Authorities said he appeared to live a relatively quiet life after the mother of two young boys was found dead, most recently working as a supervisor for a landscaping company. Goodwin has a history of drunken driving and marijuana possession dating back to 2006, but no felony charges were filed against him until last year, according to a criminal background report. Mauldin police arrested Goodwin Oct. 23 on a charge of driving under the influence, fourth or subsequent offense, a report said. "He doesn't appear to be a typical guy we deal with every day," the sheriff said, meaning a repeat criminal offender. Lt. Rick Carson said Goodwin was arrested in Greenville on the murder charge. Detective Adam Wright, the most recent investigator on the case, said Goodwin simply responded "OK" when told he was informed of the charge. "And that was the last I heard from him for three hours on the drive down here," Wright said. Wright said Thompson's sons, now living out-of-state, were emotional upon hearing news of the arrest. They expressed gratitude to detectives for their work on the case, Wright said. Goodwin was denied bond at a court hearing March 28, authorities said. NORTH CHARLESTON Charleston County's new juvenile detention center will soon open its doors to youth inmates, making good on a decade-long promise. The 60,000-square foot complex is a far cry from its smaller predecessor, which was never renovated after being built in 1967. The new building's angular walls and large, glass windows differ from the old site, a dingy, squat brick building tucked off Headquarters Road. The $13.68-million Charleston County Juvenile Detention Center sits about a half-mile away, adjacent to the county jail on Leeds Avenue, but it may as well be a different world. Dozens of law enforcement agents, along with city and county government officials, gathered March 29 for the official ribbon-cutting ceremony and a tour. The Charleston County Sheriff's office will continue to operate the detention center, one of several agencies in the state that controls its own housing confinement. Up to 72 inmates ages 12 to 17 will be kept in the center which offers both minimum- and maximum-security dorms. Plastic furniture in bright blues, greens and yellows dot the largely windowless, cinder-block interior bathed in fluorescent lighting. Plans to build the new space have been in the works for over a decade, though construction didn't begin until October 2019. Republican former Sheriff Al Cannon moved all youth from the old center to the fourth floor in the adult jail in August 2020 after an advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit against him and other officials, claiming conditions at the detention center were medieval. Sheriff Kristen Graziano, a Democrat, inherited the project after taking office in early January 2021. She pledged the new building would be rehabilitative, not punitive, and fought to modify its design to be less jail-modeled. The finished product, funded by Charleston County, is a new way to house juvenile inmates, said Edward Lee, an architectural project manager for the county who oversaw the facilitys design and construction. The center has three minimum-security open-bay dormitories, each of which can sleep 12 people. The cell-less rooms look more relaxed than a jail, though residents sleep facing the open toilet and shower areas. Tables and chairs will take up the rooms center, providing space for youth to eat their meals. The center also has two high-security rooms, comprising 24 individual cells complete with bed, toilet and desk. The new space has a larger outdoor recreation area than the old center, as well as three classrooms and a library. Detention center staff members have a "new mindset" to accompany their new environment, the sheriff said during Tuesday's ceremony. I expect people to give these kids in our care a second chance, a better chance at the life that they have yet to live, Graziano said. Children are not born bad. Oftentimes they are a product of untreated trauma in their lives." Grazianos administration is already seeing success, she said. With the help of the Charleston County School District, the juvenile detention center has awarded more GEDs the equivalent of a high school diploma in the last six months than in the prior three years combined. In addition to ample classroom space, the new offering has a counseling area and medical wing. Juveniles previously had to be taken outside the jail for nearly all services except education a change Graziano hoped to make. Officials opted to lose an additional dorm in favor of having an open space for mental health programming or family counseling. Offices and two quiet rooms line the edges, which will serve as private areas for residents who are having a bad moment and need to decompress, said Maj. Dorothy Harris, who oversees the juvenile detention center. An infirmary will be staffed by a nurse 24 hours, seven days a week even on holidays, she said. Harris hopes juvenile residents will be moved into the new facility within the next two weeks. SUMMERVILLE For the first time in three years, spring is bringing with it the Flowertown Festival to downtown. This weekend, April 1-3, the historic district, including part of Main Street and Azalea Park, will be filled with flowers, festival attendees and fried food as thousands of people and dozens of vendors are expected to attend the annual event, which celebrates its 49th year. The Flowertown Festival is the largest fundraiser for the Summerville Family YMCA and is recognized as one of the premier arts and crafts festivals in the South. More than 200 vendors from the Lowcountry and elsewhere will be in attendance. YMCA Marketing Director Erika Stubbs said vendors are selected through a jury process. The festival will also feature numerous food trucks, food suppliers and dozens of booths by local businesses and civic clubs. Additionally, there will be Kids Fest area featuring activities like a train ride and Ferris wheel. The event is typically held in the spring, usually the same weekend as the Cooper River Bridge Run in Charleston. However, COVID-19 resulted in the festival's cancellation in 2020 and postponement to October in 2021. Stubbs said organizers are looking forward to a more normal event this year. Last year's attendees saw fewer vendors than normal, though she said it wasn't particularly noticeable. "(Attendees) can expect normalcy, and that's a beautiful thing," Stubbs said, adding "this year you can expect that every inch of the park and Main Street will be covered with vendors, as it always has been." The festival normally draws more than 230,000 people, both locals and out-of-towners. Stubbs said organizers with the YMCA estimate the influx of people over three days downtown has a $49 million economic impact on local businesses. The festival also raises around $250,000 in charitable dollars for the YMCA's programming, which Stubbs said is more than "a swim and gym." "Every dime of that is turned back into the Summerville community. We use that for swim lessons, for gymnastics, for programs such as blood pressure self-monitoring and diabetes prevention, community health initiatives," Stubbs said. "We never turn anyone away due to an inability to pay. That is a huge thing in our organization. It's to make sure than anyone that comes to our doors has access to all that we have to offer." 'A longstanding tradition' Longtime vendor Celia Mathews , who with her husband Steve and son Jay owns Ginny's Fudge & Nuts, has been taking her treats to arts and crafts fairs since 1994. Flowertown is one of the best organized she's seen. Because it's so well-known, it's a badge of honor for vendors and craftsmen to be included in the festival, Mathews said. Because of last year's schedule change, she wasn't able to attend the October event. Other than that, she has been present at each festival since 2007. She said it's a great way for the community to come together and that she looks forward to seeing regular customers, even though her business is based in Georgia. "It's a longstanding tradition," Mathews said. "We see new people and different people, of course, but imagine a whole year has passed and people are coming to your booth so regularly that once a year, and ordered through the year from you, that you know their name when they approach your booth." North Carolina diver Zack DeWitt has been bringing his Shark Teeth Mega Store booth to the festival for the past few years, and organizers say it's always a hit with kids especially. Like Mathews, DeWitt said the festival is well-organized, and the outdoor setting makes the event a great place for families and the community to gather and feel safe during COVID. If you go Festival hours 9 a.m.-5 p.m. April 1 9 a.m.-6 p.m. April 2 9 a.m.-4 p.m. April 3 Cost Free admission and parking Street closures South Main Street to West Carolina Avenue Secondary streets off South Main South Gum and South Magnolia diverted to one-way streets More information Download the Flowertown Festival app. Summerville Family YMCA Flowertown Festival Facebook page Summerville Family YMCA website at summervilleymca.org/flowertown "People really ... seem to be valuing the outdoor space more," DeWitt said. "Everyone can kind of find their safe space and for how long of a duration they want to go attend an event, or if they want to attend an event. It's all outdoors. Everyone who orchestrates just does an awesome job of keeping all the vendors together, organizing it all so it's well laid out and easy to understand and walk around." Even with a slightly smaller festival makeup last year, he said the festival drew a good crowd. People at the festival are always excited and eager to share stories of their own fossil-hunting expeditions when they stop by his booth, where he sells prehistoric shark teeth he's while found diving off the Carolina coasts. Though the town of Summerville is not an official organizer of the festival, Mayor Ricky Waring said he's glad to see a tradition like Flowertown continuing. This is a community event that many people look forward to every year," Waring said. "The festival is a great opportunity to showcase local businesses and activities while bringing people together to enjoy the charm Summerville has to offer. Stubbs said parking is available on a first-come, first-served basis throughout downtown. Handicapped parking is available at the garage on Central Avenue and First Citizens bank at the event entrance. She urged attendees to download the Flowertown Festival app, which provides further parking information, a map of the festival and information on food and crafts vendors, including in some cases links to their websites or social media pages. SYDNEY, March 29 (Xinhua) -- A koala with diverse genetics could turn around the fate of endangered koala colonies along Australia's east coast, researchers from the Living Koala Genome Bank pilot program told Xinhua. Jagger is the first koala to be bred as part of the pilot program, led by the University of Queensland, and was introduced to the public on Tuesday. The koala has been released into a colony at a conservation park on the Gold Coast, with the hope to improve the genetic diversity of the population in the long term. Researchers said as Jagger is now in a new wild population, it will bring new genetics into that population to help improve the genetic makeup of the population that researchers are trying to conserve. "The more diverse your genes are between animals, the more likelihood you have a greater number of unique genes in your population," one of the researchers from the program, Dr. Tamara Keeley from the University of Queensland, told Xinhua. Keeley said the smaller the number of koalas, the higher the risk of inbreeding. It will not only accelerate the reduction of genetic diversity but also heighten the risk of getting diseases. "When you have similar genetics between individuals, the animals within that population, they'll start to become more and more related to each other. Then you end up having cousins breeding with cousins, and you're reducing the genetic diversity," said Keeley. "It sometimes also reduces health, causing potential genetic abnormalities or deformities. They may not grow well." Keeley said they evaluated the genetics of a number of wild koalas and selected Jagger's parents who have the most different genetics, which would allow for the production of a young koala with quite diverse genetics. Researchers will also follow Jagger up in a couple of years, to see if it produced some offspring and see what the genetic makeup is of those offspring. With most east coast koalas now listed as endangered, Keeley added they will also further improve breeding techniques and continue to do genetic analysis of these populations. Charleston, SC (29403) Today Partly cloudy this morning, then becoming cloudy during the afternoon. A stray afternoon thunderstorm is possible. High around 85F. Winds SSW at 10 to 20 mph.. Tonight Scattered thunderstorms during the evening. Partly cloudy skies after midnight. A few storms may be severe. Low 66F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 70%. COLUMBIA Opposition to funding changes for South Carolina public schools prompted Gov. Henry McMaster to clarify that the plan advanced by the House does not provide every teacher a $4,000 raise, though he hopes districts choose to hike salaries on their own. The House's $14 billion state spending plan for the fiscal year starting July 1 boosts teachers' minimum salaries by $4,000. A first-year teacher, for example, could make no less than $40,000 in any district, up from the current floor of $36,000. The 26 school districts that already pay more than the proposed new minimums, including Charleston and Greenville, wouldn't have to increase their teachers' salaries at all. Beyond paying teachers a set minimum, there is no mandate on salary hikes under the plan sent to the Senate on March 15, the governor stressed in a March 28 press conference. For the 51 districts that pay less than the proposed minimum, they'd only be required to raise salaries to that new minimum, which could be as little as a $40 bump in the Chester County and York 1 school districts, where starting pay is $39,960, according to education department records. In South Carolina, teachers are paid according to their years of experience and college degree. While the state sets the salary floor for each so-called step, most districts pay more using local property taxes, creating wide disparities in pay across districts as they compete for teachers. "There's been some confusion," McMaster said at the media event, responding to opposition from some school districts complaining the new funding model shortchanges them. Standing beside him to help tout other key pieces of the plan, as McMaster recommended in January, were former GOP state superintendents Mick Zais and Barbara Nielsen. Nielsen noted lawmakers have been talking about the need to simplify South Carolina's overly complex funding system since she was in office in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the system has only gotten more complicated. She called the plan a good first step. The House put an additional $227 million into K-12 public schools through a new formula that tweaks the state's multi-layered, 45-year-old funding system. Changes include more than doubling the per-student funding for children in poverty, providing more for children with disabilities and giving districts greater flexibility in how they spend their state allotment. In return, districts must document online where the money goes. The House essentially adopted the formula changes McMaster laid out in January, while spending $107 million more than he recommended. The Senate is sure to make additional improvements in its budget proposal, the governor said. Patrick Kelly, with the Palmetto State Teachers Association, called the House's $4,000 increase in the state salary schedule a "huge game-changer" but said his group "wants the Senate to ensure there's sufficient money in the budget" to make it work. Superintendent Molly Spearman, who was in Washington to meet with other state education leaders and could not attend the news conference, said later a funding overhaul is long overdue. "A new modern streamlined funding formula to replace our current antiquated one is a worthy and needed endeavor, said Spearman, president of the Council of Chief State School Officers. "While I am grateful to see progress made, a lasting formula must include sufficient targeted dollars to address South Carolinas teacher shortage crisis." McMaster's news conference came days before a Senate budget hearing on K-12 spending. "Were at the beginning of some really remarkable and far-reaching improvements in the system that will make it simpler, better, with more accountability and better understanding," the governor said. No district would get less money under the House plan. On average, districts across the state would receive 5.6 percent more, McMaster said. He also countered claims the state is not covering increases in teachers' health care premiums and pension benefits. Those are covered in a different section of the budget proposal. The House plan would give Greenville County the biggest boost toward salaries, at nearly $20 million, followed by Horry County with $16.3 million, Aiken County at $7.2 million, and Charleston County at $6.1 million, according to an analysis by the state Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office. But that's not enough to cover anything close to a $4,000 raise for every teacher, say officials in some of the state's largest districts, including Greenville County. It pays the most of any district statewide, with first-year teachers starting at $41,640. Whether they raise their own salary schedules, and by how much, would be a local decision, McMaster said. Greenville County and other districts that already pay more than the proposed minimums could put their additional state dollars toward raising salaries higher, but they wouldn't have to adjust them a dime more. They'd have the freedom to instead hire more teachers or other employees with that money, for instance. But whatever they do with it must be publicly reported. However, the state does still require districts to pay teachers their mandated salary step for another year of experience. So even without an adjustment in their district's salary schedule, most teachers would get a roughly 2 percent boost, though that's another source of disparity. The state doesn't require a step beyond 23 years in the classroom, but most districts continue the pay bumps for their most veteran teachers. According to state fiscal experts, paying the mandated steps shouldn't cost districts more, as more experienced teachers paid at top scale are replaced by young teachers at the bottom rungs. If that turnover doesn't happen, the cost depends on how much the district pays above state minimums. McMaster added he does believe teachers should be paid more. Zais agreed. "Teachers are the single most critical component in education. If theres a silver bullet, its teacher quality not qualifications, quality. Teachers are to education what doctors are to medicine," he said. "Its important we pay our teachers a fair salary that will attract the best and brightest of our high school graduates into the teaching profession." Nielsen said the flexibility should help districts provide raises. No longer mandated to spend money on certain programs that may not meet local needs, districts can choose to instead put those funds into teacher salaries, she said. Last year, the Legislature funded a $1,000 raise for every teacher. Asked whether it would be better to again send districts enough to fund a set raise for every teacher, McMaster said that would negate the move toward a simpler, more flexible funding model. SUVA, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Fiji and New Zealand inked here on Tuesday a partnership agreement to further strengthen bilateral and regional cooperation between the two countries. According to the Fijian government, the Duavata (unity) Partnership was signed by Fijian Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama and visiting New Zealand's Minister of Foreign Affairs Nanaia Mahuta. Describing the agreement as a landmark achievement in the advancement of the two countries' s bilateral and regional collaboration, Bainimarama said that the signing illustrates a shared commitment and vision for regional solidarity, and the partnership between the two countries is the strongest it has ever been. "The Duavata partnership is a landmark achievement in the advancement of Fiji and New Zealand collaboration. We just continue to advance over the years. It also illustrates our shared commitment and vision for regional solidarity," he said. For her part, Mahuta said that New Zealand is committed to working alongside Fiji and supporting common goals, including those of the region - building on climate change, security and sustainable economic recovery from COVID-19. "It will anchor some of the learnings that we have experienced over the past two years in revelation to our response to the global pandemic as well as significantly trying to address the ongoing challenge of climate change, we will find ourselves in new space," she said. Prior to the signing, Bainimarama and Mahuta discussed a range of issues including climate change cooperation, and support for Pacific regionalism. The New Zealand foreign minister also met with Fiji's Minister for Health Ifereimi Waqainabete to discuss how the two countries can continue to strengthen their work together, and identify further areas for assistance. Mahuta, who arrived in Fiji on Monday, is here on her first official visit into the Pacific since announcing New Zealand's new Pacific Resilience approach to engagement in and with the region last year. Last week, New Zealand's Minister of Defence Peeni Henare also visited Fiji and both sides reaffirmed their shared commitment to improving security in the region. People vote most sincerely when they vote with their feet. One of the basic realities of our time, transcending and perhaps ultimately overwhelming many of our current political debates, is that people are fleeing blue states and moving to red states. What states are in decline? California, New York, Illinois, Minnesota. What states are prospering? Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah. And above all, Florida. Current Census Bureau data speak for themselves: Four of the nations top 10 metro areas with the highest population growth last year were in Florida more than any other state, according to new US Census data. *** In addition, two Florida counties qualified for the top 10 percentage population growth list. *** Eight of the top 10 counties with the steepest numerical population declines were either in New York and California, according to the Census data. *** Los Angeles County lost the most residents with 184,000, while New York County shed roughly 117,000, the numbers released last week show. Statewide, Floridas population increased by 211,000 between July 2020 and July 2021, according to the census report second only to Texas. California, Illinois and New York registered the sharpest overall population losses last year. Floridas growth isnt mainly retirees. It is a great place to do business: The US Census also revealed this month that the Sunshine State accounted for more new business applications than any other state. I have been to Florida four times in the last four months, and can attest that the state is booming. You pretty much have to see Naples, for example, to believe it. It isnt just economic prosperity, eitherFlorida has an atmosphere of fun, activity, and freedom that draws people from across the country. Florida benefits, obviously, from excellent leadership. Governor Ron DeSantis and the states Republican legislature have scored another win with the states anti-grooming law, which protects small children from being indoctrinated with LGBTQ+ theories in the public schools. Remarkably, liberals have chosen grooming as a hill to die on, as in the Oscars last night, even though polls show the Florida law is supported overwhelmingly by Florida Democrats, let alone Republicans and Independents. As usual, DeSantis gets the last word: During remarks ahead of the signing, DeSantis blasted Hollywood elites for repeatedly lying about the bill and claiming it is discriminatory. If the same Hollywood elites who upheld degenerates like Harvey Weinstein now oppose our efforts to protect parental rights, I wear that like a badge of honor, DeSantis said. The exodus of voters from blue states to red states is one of several demographic trends that bode well for conservatives in future decades. When philanthropist Tony Elumelu took the stage at Monday nights TIME100 Impact Awards and Gala, he spoke with a sense of urgency: The world is in need of people like usmore than ever before, he said to the crowd, which included celebrities, politicians and prominent business leaders. We should pull resources together, we should commit now to help in anyway possible in economically empowering others. Mr Elumelus plea is part of the reason he was on the stage at the Museum of the Future in Dubai in the first place. The TIME100 Impact Award recipient has spent his career advocating for economic empowerment in the less fortunate places in the world. The Nigerian entrepreneur paid tribute to the hard working young men and women in Africa who aspire to help their families and their communities. He shared his story of rising from a modest beginning to launching the Tony Elumelu Foundation in 2010, which is aimed at creating significant opportunities and economic hope for others while helping redefine how all of us need to work together to uplift through the message of entrepreneurship. The foundation has given $5,000 each to 15,000 young entrepreneurs from 54 African countries as part of his effort to grow the entrepreneurial spirit in Africa and encourage economic development. In addition to his philanthropic efforts, Mr Elumelu serves as chair of the United Bank of Africa, where his vision for securing long-term investments from the private sector to drive economic development in Africa has helped create new job opportunities and turn the continent into a hub for innovation. And Monday night, Mr Elumelu stressed that Africa, and the world, need investment and opportunities more than ever. In the 21st century, theres so much poverty, sickness, and bitterness in the world, he said. Our calling should be one that has to prioritize humanity. Iyiola Omisore, the man who has just been elected National Secretary of Nigerias ruling party, APC, has a chequered history. For over a decade, he was an outcast of the progressives, as members of Nigerias ruling party, APC, describe themselves. Although he has now become a darling of the progressives, for about 15 years, he was a subject of scorn and derision from the leaders of the ruling party, particularly those from the South-west where he is from. He was accused of murder and said to have a totally different ideology, guided by self-interest, different from that of the progressives. But Mr Omisore did not start Nigerias recent political journey in the bad books of the progressives. In fact, just as he is their lovely bride now, so was he 22 years ago, before the relationship went south. To understand Mr Omisores roller coaster ride with the progressives one has to go back to how it started. How It started The year was 1999. The progressives who had vehemently fought against military rule had finally agreed to take part in the general elections being superintended by Nigerias new military ruler, Abdusalam Abubakar. After a lot of politicking, they formed their own party, Alliance for Democracy (AD). The AD was one of the three major parties at the time and it was taking part not only in the presidential election but also in the local elections. In Osun, the AD had presented Bisi Akande as its governorship candidate. Mr Akande, a grassroots politician, considered prudent by many, had the backing of influential AD leaders like Bola Ige. But there was a problem. He had no political structure. Mr Akande and the AD leaders turned to Mr Omisore, a businessman, who, unlike the progressives, did not fight against military rule and had built a political structure by taking part in the previous controversial elections organised by late dictator Sani Abacha. I wanted to win election. He (Mr Omisore) had structure, I did not have structure. I was with Bola Ige; we were sit-down-look during the military, we did not believe in military governance at all and we didnt participate in politics then. We form a party, maybe in August or September 1999 and the election was to hold in December and we had no structure, particularly in Osun state. He had structure, he had boys and in addition to the credibility that we brought into governance, I wanted his structure to be part of me, Mr Akande told CityMirrorNews in 2016. The ADs popularity in the South-west, coupled with Mr Akandes reputation and Mr Omisores structure all combined to secure victory for the party in the Osun governorship election. Things, however, went south after they assumed office. Akande, Omisores relationship deteriorates Not long after they assumed office, Mr Akande started having problems with his deputy. The former governor believes their differences were largely ideological, especially due to Mr Omisores love for public funds. our sense of responsibility towards financing was not in the same direction: he was a spend-free person, I was being careful with the public money and I could not have approved all vouchers. I could not approve all requests and that was not going well with him, he said in the interview. While the relationship between Mr Akande and his deputy nosedived, a tragedy happened. Mr Akandes mentor and benefactor, Bola Ige, was killed and many Nigerians including among the progressives felt Mr Omisore was involved. Omisore and Bola Iges murder Apart from being Mr Akandes mentor, Mr Ige was also a presidential aspirant in the AD in 1999. He narrowly lost the ticket of the party to Olu Falae who went on to lose the election to Olusegun Obasanjo. After he assumed office, Mr Obasanjo appointed some members of the opposition, including Mr Ige, to his cabinet. Mr Ige was initially appointed power minister before he was made justice minister. While serving as justice minister, the Esa-Oke born politician was assassinated in his Ibadan residence on December 23, 2001. About a week before Mr Ige was killed, he was attacked by a mob led by a political thug popularly known as Fryo. This was during the conferment of chieftaincy title on some people at the palace of the former Ooni of Ife, Sijuade Okunade. Ife is the political base of Mr Omisore. Details of why Fryo, an ardent supporter of Mr Omisore, and others attacked Mr Ige remain sketchy. After the attack, Mr Omisore granted an interview to Tempo magazine where he verbally attacked Mr Ige for allegedly insulting him (Mr Omisore) and his family. Mr Omisore, at the time the deputy governor, gloated over the attack on Mr Ige in Ile-Ife. He (Mr Ige) was beaten yesterday; the people of Ife beat him up and he was crying like a baby as they removed his cap and his glasses, he said. Barely a week after the attack and Mr Omisores gloating in the media, Bola Ige was shot dead in his Ibadan home. Omisores impeachment, trial Although Mr Akande does not believe Mr Omisore had a hand in the murder of Mr Ige, his relationship with his deputy continued to deteriorate. Amid the allegations of financial impropriety and murder, Mr Omisore was impeached by the Osun State House of Assembly in December 2002. He was also arrested by the police and tried for his alleged role in Mr Iges murder. Advertisements While still in detention, Mr Omisore, who had defected to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) won the Osun East senatorial election. The Oyo State High Court eventually set him free on the grounds of a lack of evidence to link him to the murder. Mr Omisore not only completed his term as senator in 2007 but he was also re-elected in 2007 on the PDP platform. During this period, he was treated like an outcast by the progressives. Their party, AD, had over the years metamorphosed into different names: AC, ACN, and eventually APC. Through all its metamorphosis, some things remained constant: key members like Bola Tinubu, Bisi Akande and Rauf Aregbesola remained in the party while its dislike, at least publicly, for Mr Omisore remained. All that changed in 2018 Mr Omisore officially joined the APC from the fringe Social Democratic Party (SDP) in February 2021, PREMIUM TIMES reported. But his new relationship with the ruling party started in 2018. He was the PDP candidate in the 2014 governorship election in Osun. He lost to the incumbent, Rauf Aregbesola of the APC. In the build-up to the 2018 governorship election, it was clear to Mr Omisore that he would not secure the PDP ticket, so he defected to the SDP and became its candidate. He came a distant third in the 2018 election. But the APC was in a dilemma. Its candidate, Gboyeka Oyetola, was narrowly losing to PDPs Ademola Adeleke before a rerun election was declared in seven polling units in four local government areas: Osogbo, Orolu, Ife North and Ife South. Although Mr Omisore had come a distant third, two of the local government areas for the rerun, Ife North and Ife South, were considered his strongholds and had some of the largest votes. The controversial politician had become a beautiful bride, to be seduced by the two leading parties. High-powered delegations from both APC and PDP took turns at Mr Omisores house to beg him to back them. The PDP delegation was led by the then Senate President, Bukola Saraki, while that of the APC included Governors Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti and Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun State. Eventually, Mr Omisore backed the APC for the September 28 rerun, helping Mr Oyetola to breast the tape. He has since then been hobnobbing with the APC until he formally decamped last year. The Aggrieved Not all members of the progressives are happy with Mr Omisore. In fact, his re-entry into the Osun APC is believed to be one of the major reasons for the fallout between Mr Aregbesola and his successor, Mr Oyetola, as well as party leader Bola Tinubu. Mr Akande also does not hide his disdain for Mr Omisore. In his autobiography released to the public last year, Mr Akande described the Ife-born politician as a malignant cancer. Iyiola Omisore crept into my life like a silent malignant cancer. He came in full force. In a few months, I thought I knew him. I regret I did not know him in his true colours, Mr Akande wrote. I was quick to conclude, shortly after we came into office, that Iyiola Omisore would be a big problem for my government. His spending propensity was ravenous. His ambition was inordinate and he was prepared to go to any extent and employ any weapon no matter how dastardly or devilish to achieve his objectives. He showed his hands early enough during the transition period. For me, this was both a political and personal tragedy. Mr Akande was the first national chairman of the APC and remains one of its leaders. However, his views on Mr Omisore did not deter the party from handing the latter the position of national secretary. Sources in the party told PREMIUM TIMES that Mr Omisore was supported by the APC leadership in the South-west for the position based on the request of Mr Tinubu, who seeks to be Nigerias next president. The APC had zoned the position of national secretary to the South-west. Before Saturdays convention, Mr Omisore, who declared for the position about 10 days to the convention, had been seen around Mr Tinubu at different fora. At Saturdays APC convention in Abuja, other candidates for the position of national secretary were made to step down for Mr Omisore. Omisores promise to APC The position of national secretary is considered the second most important in a Nigerian political party after the position of national chairman. In his declaration letter posted on his social media handles, Mr Omisore promised an efficient and effective management of the National Secretariat for next level prosperity, Democracy deliverables for Nigeria and Nigerians in the atmosphere of peace, happiness, safety and plenty. In his agenda which was tagged New Era, the new APC scribe further promised to Institutionalise civility by leveraging technology for efficient party administration. I will create a people-driven political party that will deepen democratic norms across the board in administration and in capacity building not only to win the election but to be bonded as an institution whereby everyone will be recognised and respected for their many roles in aiding growth and development of the party from the grassroots, he said. Now that he is the darling of the progressives and, in fact, their national secretary, a new chapter appears to have been opened for the Ife politician to play another prominent role in Nigerian politics. Leading presidential aspirants in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have again met to discuss their options as debate on the partys zoning formula continues ahead of the 2023 General Elections. While the hurdle of selecting who leads the party to the general poll was eventually crossed in October 2021 after months of leadership turbulence, Nigerias largest opposition party, just like its ruling counterpart, APC, has not declared the zoning of its presidential ticket ahead of the polls. With the southern politicians clamouring for the ticket to be zoned to the region, their northern counterparts also want the ticket zoned to their region, a decision that may jettison the PDP rotation tradition. The party has over the years rotated the ticket for the top office between the two regions, a position its new leadership has promised to maintain as its gathered steam for the 2023 elections. The seat was last zoned to the northern region in favour of Nigerias former vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, who flew the partys flag in the 2019 election. Mr Abubakar lost to the incumbent, Muhammadu Buhari, of the APC. PDP has a history of rotating our offices. Anybody who doesnt get it this time should wait after the tenure of whoever will be our next president, the national chairman of the party, Iyorchia Ayu, strongly reiterated last week. Ignoring this position, the leading aspirants at a meeting attended by Mr Abubakar, a former Senate President, Bukola Saraki; Governors Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State and Bala Muhammmed of Bauchi, on Monday, discussed consensus building. The meeting was the second of its kind by the aspirants, with the exception of Mr Abubakar, in the last five days. A similar meeting with the trio in attendance was held last Thursday. I had a meeting tonight with @bukolasaraki, Tambuwal, @SenBalaMohammed and Hayatudden to discuss the future of our party and Nigeria. I look forward to continuing our dialogue and building #OneNigeria, Mr Abubakar posted on his verified Twitter account. With more details, the focus of the meeting was also shared by Messrs Saraki and Mohammed an hour after using the same social media platform. Earlier tonight, alongside Governor @AWTambuwal, Governor @SenBalaMohammed, and Alhaji Mohammed Hayatuddeen, we visited former Vice President Alhaji @Atiku Abubakar to consult with him on our ongoing discussions about consensus building in our great party, @OfficialPDPNig, the ex-Senate President also posted. While the PDP has not come to an agreement on where to zone the ticket, another former Senate president, Pius Anyim, who has shown interest in the position, said that the party must respect zoning if it wants victory in 2023. His comment came after the Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wikes attack other top contenders while declaring his ambition to run for president in 2023 on Sunday. He argued that he had contributed more to the party than any other aspirant in the race. Let these people who are interested in presidency in the PDP tell us their contributions. You claimed to be one of the founding fathers of the party, but you left and came back; you have become an ordinary person in the new PDP. If you form a company and run away because the company is not doing well, then you come back and found that it is now doing well, will you want to come and take over? Mr Wike carpeted the likes of Messrs Tambuwal and Saraki who at a point left the party in their quest for presidential ticket. Terrorists Monday night attacked a Kaduna-bound train in Northern Nigeria. The train left Abuja, the Nigerian capital, at about 6:00 p.m. and was heading to Kaduna when it was attacked between Katari and Rijana communities. The terrorists, also referred to as bandits in Nigeria, planted explosives on the train track and immobilised it before firing gunshots at passengers as they tried to open the doors. Both the Kaduna State Government and the Nigeria Railway Corporation have confirmed the attack. The exact number of people on the train at the time of the incident has yet to be confirmed but there are media reports that over 970 people were aboard the train. The Kaduna government has confirmed fatalities but did not say the number of people killed so far. In a Tuesday morning statement signed by Samuel Aruwan, the commissioner for internal security and home affairs, the state government said the evacuation of the trapped passengers has been concluded but search and rescue operations continued. A former Kaduna senator, Shehu Sani, wrote on Twitter, that not only were some people killed but many others were also kidnapped by the terrorists. As of Monday morning, the identity of one of those killed has been confirmed as Chinelo Megafu, a medical doctor. The Nigerian president has yet to speak on the attack as of 1:00 p.m. Tuesday. Follow our live updates of the unfortunate incident on this page. - A former Governor of Kano State, Rabiu Kwankwaso, has formally resigned his membership of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the second term he would do so in eight years. The former governor communicated the decision in a letter addressed to the PDP chairman of Kwankwaso Ward in Madobi Local Government Area of Kano State. He said he was resigning from the party over some serious and irreconcilable differences. Mr Kwankwaso had been having a running battle with the PDP over the leadership of the North-west zone of the party. The party had in April suspended the zonal congress in Kaduna after supporters of the Governor of Sokoto State, Aminu Tambuwal, clashed with those of Mr Kwankwaso at the event. They destroyed ballot boxes before voting could start, forcing observers and other officials to flee the scene. The main subject of the dispute was the position of zonal National Vice Chairman. Also, Mr Kwankwaso is in dispute with a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Aminu Wali, who leads a rival faction of the PDP in Kano. Both men presented candidates for the position of zonal vice-chairman. Mr Kwankwaso had announced his plan to join the New Nigerian People Party (NNPP) following which the Kano chapter of the party dissolved its executive committee and appointed Mr Kwankwasos ally as chairperson. History of defection Mr Kwankwaso had in November 2013 first left the PDP alongside the then governors Aliyu Wamakko of Sokoto, Abdulfatah Ahmed of Kwara, Murtala Nyako of Adamawa and Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers States. They joined the APC after staging a walk out from the PDP National Convention in Abuja. Mr Kwankwaso, however, in July 2018, rejoined the PDP alongside 14 APC senators and ran unsuccessfully for the PDP presidential ticket for the 2019 election. Mr Kwankwaso is leaving the PDP with some of his allies, including the PDP governorship candidate in Kano in 2019, Abba Kabir, who earlier announced his resignation from the PDP and has since joined the NNPP. The National Assembly has transmitted 44 Constitution Review Bills to the 36 State Houses of Assembly for further legislative work. The 44 bills were passed by the Senate and House of Representatives on March 1. Only the 44 bills were passed out of 68 considered by the lawmakers in the Constitution Amendment process. The Clerk to the National Assembly, Amos Ojo, on Tuesday, presented the legislations to Clerks of the 36 State Houses of Assembly, in Abuja. The Chairperson, Forum of Clerks of State Houses of Assembly, Lyna Ocholor, received the bills on behalf of 34 of her colleagues present at the ceremony. Ms Ocholor, who is the Clerk to the Delta State House of Assembly, pledged that her colleagues will carry out necessary legislative processes required for the bills to be considered by the various State Houses of Assembly. PREMIUM TIMES reported the voting process of the Constitution as well as how the lawmakers voted on each bill. This paper also reported how the lawmakers rejected all the five gender bills that sought to promote more opportunities for women in political parties, governance and the society at large triggering protests from over 200 women groups across the country. The Nigerian federal legislature had voted to deny citizenship to the foreign-born husband of a Nigerian woman and the ability to take indigeneship of their husbands state after five years of being together. They also voted against 35 per cent affirmative action in party administration and leadership as well as specific seats for women in the National Assembly. The women had accused the lawmakers of choosing to deny women the opportunity of inclusion and representation in governance by voting against the bills. The House of Representatives has, however, agreed to reconsider three of the bills. It is not clear if the Senate will reconsider the bills as well. With the 44 bills transmitted to the State Assemblies, each legislation will require at least two-thirds of the 36 assemblies and the presidents assent to become law. NEW DELHI, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Firefighting operations have been underway since Tuesday morning to contain a massive fire that broke out inside a tiger reserve in India's western state of Rajasthan. Local government authorities sought help from the Indian Air Force (IAF) to contain the raging fire, officials said. The massive fire, spreading over 10 square kilometers, broke out Monday evening inside Sariska Tiger Reserve in Alwar district, about 107 km east of Jaipur city, the capital of Rajasthan. Reports said two helicopters from the IAF have been scooping up water from Rajasthan's Siliserh Lake and dropping it over the forest fire in Sariska, 43 km from the lake. The fire has affected the movement of tigers in the affected area. The local administration has deployed around 150 to 200 people, including forest staff and fire brigade officials to contain the fire. Officials said locals residing in the peripheral area of the affected part have been asked to move to safer locations, and the cause of the forest fire was being ascertained. There is an outpouring of grief and anger by Nigerians on Twitter over the death of a medical doctor, Chinelo Megafu, who was aboard the ill-fated train. Ms Megafu had tweeted during the attack that she had been shot in one of the first messages from victims that conveyed the gravity of their situation. Im on the train. I have been shot. Please pray for me, she had tweeted. According to a report by Daily Trust, Michael Ajidahun, her colleague and friend, gave an update hours later that she did not survive the attack. Just woke up to a sad news My friend just woke up to losing a close friend who was shot at the Abuja Kaduna train incident by terrorists She tweeted yesterday that we should pray for her. Sadly she didnt make it. She was a Doctor Nigeria why..Im heartbroken, said Ajidahun better known as The Bearded Doctor on Twitter. Another friend said Ms Megafu had resigned from a popular hospital in Kaduna where she worked, ahead of her relocation abroad. According to her, the doctor was bound to leave Nigeria on Friday. Dr Chinelo was making an honest living, she was working at St Geralds hospital in Kaduna, she wanted more for herself and processed her papers to leave this hell-hole. She resigned last month to leave the country this Friday then this happened. Nigeria why???she tweeted. Another user, Emmaculate, whose tweet indicated he knew the late Ms Megafu wrote: May your gentle soul rest in peace Dr Chinelo. This is too much for me to bear. OmG He had earlier tweeted that Ms Megafu was not responding to messages, an indication that he had tried to reach her after she tweeted that she had been shot. Seems we arent sympathetic enough to a cause. Nobody knows what and where she is right now but the replies here are a little off points. She isnt responding to msg and see replies. Are we now inconsiderate and human feelings gone. We should be concerned that it may be anyone, he tweeted. According to Godspower on Twitter, she was his classmate at the University of Port Harcourt in Rivers State. I am pained. We trained together at Uniport and we were in the same study class at some point If you cant run from Nigeria please fly. The Nigerian Medical Association, Kaduna branch, confirmed in a statement that Ms Megafu worked at St Geralds Hospital. How Nigerians on Twitter reacted to Chinelos last wish Ms Megafu tweeted at about 09:43 p.m. on Monday when the news about the attacked train surfaced, notifying her followers that she had been shot in the attacked train asking for prayers. Im in the train . I have been shot please pray for me, she tweeted. While some Twitter users were empathising with Ms Megafu, most hurled vile comments at her, implying she was lying. Conserve your battery, text friends and family ur location; apply pressure to the site of the shot using other clothes Strap it on if you can. If possible, elevate the place where you have been shot. Try to drink water if you have access to it and stay calm as you can, Officiallorenzo advised. Sugabaddie suggested that she made a thick pad out of any clothing she could find and secure the gun wound using a belt. If you or anybody has a belt, make a thick pad from someones clothing or shirt and secure the pad to the gunshot wound using the belt. Pull the belt tight enough that the pad is putting heavy pressure onto the wound but not so tight that you feel its choking that area, she wrote. While the helpful comments were trickling in, there was a pouring of unkind comments. Are you dead now? one Abolore (@ysone2) asked mockingly. @yinkus772003 wrote, your shot isnt serious, otherwise youll be asking us to call the army, not pray for you. Advertisements @Ishakaa joining others to mock Ms Megafu wrote, you are shot and you can tweet. Please help us with the picture of your gunshot wounds. He went further to ask if she was travelling to Biafra through Kaduna. @Srereque, added that if she was truly shot at, she would be calling an ambulance or her family. And u had time to open ur phone, go to twitter n typed all that info shouldnt u be contacting police, ambulance or ur people? @Kailawalterr in response to Ms Megafus tweet insinuated that she was lying about being shot at. Let me get this straight, you got shot and the first thing you do is to tweet it? Like what should we do about it? let s be realistic please, you got shot and you still had the time to tweet it? Dont you have family to call or something? Wetin I no see for this app @Woye1 described Ms Megafus cry for help as fake. Fake. Shot and tweeting, abeg, he wrote. These insensitive comments led to an uproar on the social media platform on Tuesday with many Nigerian users cursing out popular Twitter handles who mocked Ms Megafu as she called for help last night. While most of them have locked their accounts, restricting access to their pages, others have bowed to pressure apologising for their insensitivity. I was reacting to @ishakaa s post as at the time the incident happened. I know about 20 people inside the train that gave me information. I can not celebrate someones misfortune. I am sorry for that indiscretion on my part. May her soul rest in perfect peace, Mr Woye wrote. Mr Woye on the same thread where his friend Mr Ishakaa was mocking Ms Megafu, typed hahaha indicating that he found Ms Megafus post funny as did his friend. Also, @Kailawalter in her apology wrote: to my previous tweet I made earlier, I realized it was insensitive, I shouldnt have tweeted that without getting full information of what had happened. I really didnt mean to be that insensitive I realised I messed up and did a very wrong thing. I apologise to everyone. Chiamaka Okafor is a reporter at Premium Times in partnership with Report for the World , which matches local newsrooms with talented emerging journalists to report on under-covered issues around the globe. President Muhammadu Buhari has met behind closed door with security chiefs after Monday nights terrorist attacks on Abuja-Kaduna bound train by bandits. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the train was conveying about 970 passengers from Abuja to Kaduna at about 7.45 p.m. on the fateful day. NAN reports that the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Faruk Yahaya, had on Tuesday visited the scene of the attack, where he ordered troops to intensify search and rescue operations as well as hunt down the terrorists. NAN also reports that Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo also visited hospitals in Kaduna on Tuesday where injured victims are being treated. Those at the meeting with the President include all service chiefs, Inspector-General of Police, Usman Baba and Director-General of the State Security Services, Yusuf Bichi. NAN reports that the Kaduna-bound train, which left Abuja 6 p.m, on Monday, was attacked by suspected terrorists around 7.45 p.m., with just 15 minutes drive before arriving Kaduna. Kaduna State Commissioner for Home Affairs and Internal Security, Samuel Aruwan, on Tuesday, said the train had been secured by military personnel, and that government had evacuated passengers on board. He said staff of Kaduna State Emergency Management Agency (KADSEMA) and Nigeria Red Cross, Kaduna chapter, conducted the evacuation. (NAN) Ranked the nation with the fifth most populous international students in Ukraine, Nigerians are said to be spending an estimated N14 billion annually to acquire degrees in the second largest country in Eastern Europe, findings have shown. According to the Ukraine Centre for International Education, there are 4,379 Nigerian students in the country, most of them studying medicine-related courses. The huge Nigerian population in the country is not unconnected to the instability in the countrys education system, especially with frequent industrial actions by the workers unions, both academic and non-academic. Since February 14, members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the umbrella for lecturers across public universities in the country, have embarked on an industrial action, which has now been extended for the next three months. While ASUU strike was yet to be suspended, other workers unions in the universities under the aegis of the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU) and the Non-Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU) on Monday commenced a two-week warning strike. Apart from industrial actions, Nigerian tertiary institutions also suffer from dearth of teaching and learning facilities, with the striking workers unions insisting that more than N1 trillion would be needed to fix the rot in the institutions. There is also the challenge of space with roughly 2 million candidates sitting university entrance examinations while less than 50 per cent of qualified candidates are admitted. Expenditure breakdown Based on the calculation by the Ukrainian centre, each international student in the country spends an average of 6,000 to 8,000 dollars annually, according to data compiled by Erudera, a higher education search platform. The platform further noted that based on the figure, Nigerian students in Ukraine spend annually between 26 and 35 million dollars, an equivalent of between N10.8 and N14.5 billion based on N415 per dollar exchange rate at Nigerias official market. According to Erudera, a huge number of Nigerian students study General Medicine MBBS, Dentistry, Doctor of Pharmacy, Nursing, and postgraduate studies in Medicine in Ukraine. It said Nigerian students are known to be among the best students, out of all foreign students studying general medicine programmes at national medical universities. International students in Ukraine The number of international students in Ukraine rose by 50 per cent from 53,664 in 2011 to 80,470 in 2020. Nigeria has the fifth largest number of international students in Ukraine, behind India 18,429; Morocco 8,233; Azerbaijan 5,470; and Turkmenistan 5,344 students. The director, Ukraine Center for International Education, Olena Shapovalova, said the country hopes to have attracted more than 100,000 international students by the year 2025. We are very pleased to note the rapid growth in the number of foreign students since 2011. In 2019, we reached a historic high 80,470 peopleI hope, by 2025 we will be able to reach the figure of more than 100,000, she said. In 2019 alone, it said: tuition costs, accommodation, food, transport, insurance and other expenses of international students in the country reached the amount of more than 570 million dollars. Ukraine as a choice of study One of the reasons Ukraine appears to be one of the top choice destinations for international students is that qualifications from Ukraine are well recognised all over the world, especially for medical science and engineering courses. Ukraine is also said to be one of the cheapest countries to live in, according to a report by Ceoworld magazine, a business magazine, which ranked Ukraine 107th of 132 most expensive countries in the world in 2020 cheaper than Australia, the US, Canada, and the UK, which ranked 16th, 20th, 24th, and 27th respectively. Other reasons include cheaper tuition fees compared to the UK, US and Canada, and absence of eligibility tests. According to StudyinUkraine.SITE, tuition fees for MBBS range from $4,000 to $5,000 per year in Ukraine; $15,000 to $60,000 in the UK; $15,000 to $75,000 in the US; $20,000 to $90,000 in Canada; and $25,000 to $75,000 in Australia. Russia-Ukraine war Meanwhile, with the latest aggression from Russia and a war that has lasted weeks, Ukraines huge income from the international students is already thrown into jeopardy, as students fled the country due to the ongoing war. On March 6, Nigeria received the fourth batch of evacuees from Ukraine at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja. A total of 306 evacuees were airlifted from Hungary where they had fled following the war in Ukraine. Advertisements PREMIUM TIMES had reported the arrival of 772 evacuees who arrived earlier through Max Air and Air Peace, the two airlines contracted to airlift Nigerians returning from Ukrain. The government also approved $8.5 million for the evacuation of 5,000 stranded Nigerians, with 100 dollars reportedly given to each of the evacuees to help them get to their relatives upon their arrival in the country Qosim Suleiman is a reporter at Premium Times in partnership with Report for the World, which matches local newsrooms with talented emerging journalists to report on under-covered issues around the globe. President Muhammadu Buhari has described the attack on the Kaduna-bound train as callous and a matter of grave concern. Mr Buhari was quoted as saying this in a statement by his spokesperson, Garba Shehu. No one should be allowed to hold the country to ransom, the Nigerian leader was quoted as saying. PREMIUM TIMES reported how terrorists Monday night attacked the Abuja-Kaduna train, first with explosives before shooting at passengers. At least eight people have been confirmed killed in the attack while many others are still missing, according to the Kaduna State Government. In his statement Tuesday evening, Mr Shehu said President Buhari has directed that a system be put in place to prevent such attacks in future. President Buhari has directed the immediate conclusion of all the processes for the implementation of the integrated security surveillance and monitoring solution for the Abuja to Kaduna railway line and that this be extended to cover the Lagos-Ibadan railway line, the spokesperson wrote. He also directed the Nigerian Railway Corporation management to speedily repair the damaged lines and resume normal service without delay. Mr Shehu said the president gave the directives at a meeting with security chiefs in Abuja Tuesday. Read the full statement by Mr Shehu below. STATE HOUSE PRESS RELEASE President Buhari has directed the immediate conclusion of all the processes for the implementation of the integrated security surveillance and monitoring solution for the Abuja to Kaduna railway line and that this be extended to cover the Lagos-Ibadan railway line. He also directed the Nigerian Railway Corporation management to speedily repair the damaged lines and resume normal service without delay. The President gave these directives in Abuja, Tuesday, after receiving briefs from the Service Chiefs led by the Chief of Defence Staff, General Lucky Irabor, with the Chief of Army Staff, Lt-General Faruk Yahaya, the Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Isiaka Amao, the Inspector General of Police, Usman Baba, as well as Major General Samuel Adebayo, the Chief of Defence Intelligence and the Director General of the Department of State Services, DSS, Yusuf Magaji Bichi in the State House. Additionally, the President charged the law enforcement chiefs to bring back all passengers kidnapped and ensure that each of the callous terrorists are hunted down and made to face justice for their heinous acts as no one or group should be allowed to make the country prostrate. President Buhari reiterated his earlier directive that the military should deal ruthlessly with terrorists. He asked them to be more decisive and not spare anyone unlawfully wielding the AK 47 weapon. No one should be allowed to hold the country to ransom, said the President. President Buhari strongly condemned the bombing of the passenger train, describing it as a matter of grave concern. According to the President, like most Nigerians, I am deeply pained by its occurrence, the second of its type, which has resulted in the death of a yet to be determined number of passengers and others who suffered injuries. The attack on the train, a safe means of transport to many, is callous; and our thoughts are with the families of the deceased and prayers for the injured, he said. The President commended the Law Enforcement agencies for their prompt response and emergency personnel who were responsible for the evacuation and treatment of the injured persons. Garba Shehu Senior Special Assistant to the President (Media & Publicity) Advertisements March 29, 2022 Abuja Electricity Distribution Plc (AEDC) has announced the appointment of Adeoye Fadeyibi as its new Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer. Mr Fadeyibi, a manager with over 20 years executive management experience, succeeds Akinwumi Bada, who served as the companys Interim Managing Director since last year and is now leaving to pursue other personal business aspirations. Prior to joining AEDC, Mr Fadeyibi was the Managing Director of Eko Electricity Distribution Company, (EKEDC) a Lagos based electricity utility company, and is credited to have turned around the fortune of EKEDC by significantly reducing the companys Aggregate, Technical, Commercial and Collection (ATC&C) losses, expanding its revenue base and delivering innovation in several aspects of the business. He was also the pioneer Managing Director at Transcorp Power Ltd, Ughelli, Delta State, where he ramped up the generating companys performance from 164MW to 634MW in 25 months. He joined Transcorp Power from General Electric where he had held several strategic roles with oversight for Middle East and Africa. A fellow of several professional bodies, Mr Fadeyibi obtained his Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from the State University of New York, SUNY Buffalo, New York and the General Electric Power Systems University in Schenectady, New York, where he completed his training in turbine power systems and applied knowledge obtained towards developing the Global Turbines/Generator Field resources. AEDC also announced the appointment of Kassim Abdulahi Burkullu as its new Chief Technical Officer (CTO), replacing Oluwafemi Zacchaeus who had served as the Interim Chief Technical Officer. Mr Burkullu, a seasoned engineer and energy industry expert, brings over 25 years cognate experience spanning several sectors. He joined AEDC from Kano Electricity Distribution Company (KEDCO) where he was Head, Corporate Technical Operations Services. The Chairman of the Board, AEDC, Victor Osadolor, who spoke on the new appointments said: We are very delighted that both Fadeyibi and Burkullu are joining our company and bringing with them exceptional abilities and invaluable industry expertise. They will effectively complement the component of management team already in place. These appointments are necessary steps in positioning AEDC towards efficiency in customer service delivery and ensuring the effectiveness of turn-around embarked upon by the new management of the company. We are convinced that with a combined industry experience of over five decades, the new executives are very capable of meeting the yearnings of millions of our customers who seek seamless power services, Osadolor said. Commenting on his appointment, Mr Fadeyibi said, I must commend the management of AEDC and the previous MD for the work done so far and for the confidence reposed in me to help achieve the goals of this great organisation. I have studied the strategic focus of this business and with the full support of the board, we are sure to meet and even surpass our expectations for this great company. The appointments are with immediate effect. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and his wife, Dolapo, have congratulated Bola Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos State, on his 70th birthday. Mr Osinbajo, in a statement he signed on Tuesday in Abuja, prayed that God would grant Mr Tinubu strength, wisdom and favour. Mr Tinubu, a presidential aspirant on the APC platform and first Governor of Lagos State in the present Fourth Republic, clocks 70 on March 29. It gives Dolapo and I great pleasure to send you our heartfelt birthday felicitations, said Mr Osinbajo, who served as the Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice when Mr Tinubu was the Lagos governor. And it is a unique one indeed; the Platinum Jubilee and the completion of yet another remarkable decade. It is also an opportune time to give thanks to God Almighty for your service to the nation as Senator of the Federal Republic, Governor of Lagos State and a founding leader of the All Progressives Congress. The vice president said that in confronting the many challenges which came with the transition to democracy in 1999, Mr Tinubu showed leadership and was always ready to push the boundaries. He said that Mr Tinubu not only queried the limitations which had beset Nigerias federalism, he actively encouraged the use of the legal process in clarifying the constitution. Asiwaju, your decades of sterling contributions in the public and political spheres are remarkable. In particular, your endeavours in the advancement of federalism, electoral reform, and party organisation have helped to enrich our democratic experience. We join your entire family, friends and associates to celebrate you on your 70th birthday and we pray that as your days, so shall your strength, wisdom and favour with God be. A master strategist Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State said the APC leader is visionary, consistent, loyal, enigmatic and a master strategist. In a statement by his Chief Press Secretary, Gboyega Akosile, Mr Sanwo-Olu said Mr Tinubus democratic credentials were scholarly materials for study in political economy. He stood firmly on the side of the Nigerian people, even at the risk of losing his life and personal belongings during the dark days of the military junta. He took a position along with other progressives during the annulment of the June 12 struggle that led to the end of the military interregnum and was replaced with normal government, which we all enjoy today. With the return to democracy, Asiwaju displayed political astuteness, courage and sagacity to save Nigeria from degenerating into a one-party state. His financial wizardry and economic intellect, which he put to good use as the Governor of Lagos State, has taken our dear state to a greater height. READ ALSO: Lagos Assembly holds special plenary for Tinubu ahead of 70th birthday Today, Lagos is the pride of Nigeria, occupying an enviable position as the fifth largest economy in Africa, he said. A living legend In his statement through his Chief Press Secretary, Richard Olatunde, Governor Oluwarotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State hailed Mr Tinubus resilience and commitment to creating standards in party politics and investments in political leadership. Jagaban, you remain a leader of leaders; a living legend bestriding our political firmament like a colossus. On this auspicious occasion of your 70th birthday, we salute your efforts and dedication to nation-building and national development. You are a man of many parts with legendary contributions to the development of our dear country. Your human capital development is alluring just as you have made personal sacrifices and deployed your political experiences for the benefit of the country. Advertisements Today, you are still standing tall, desirous to offer more. Today, we celebrate your selfless service to the nation. We salute your doggedness and exemplary leadership. (NAN) The ninth World Water Forum, a week-long series of conferences and workshops aimed at accelerating universal access to water and sanitation concluded during the weekend with several resolutions and action plans adopted and approved. The event closed with high hopes for ending the perennial challenge of water in Africa with the announcement of the creation of a high-level international panel on investment in water in Africa. The objective of the panel is to develop concrete ways to mobilise $30 billion per year until 2030 to implement the African Water Investment Programme and to close the existing water investment gap in the African continent, Senegals water minister, Serigne Mbaye Thiam announced at the closing ceremony of the event held between March 22 and 26th in Dakar. On behalf of the Head of State, President Macky Sall, Chairperson of the African Union, I hereby announce the official establishment of an international high-level panel on water investments in Africa, he announced. Held every three years, the World Water Forum which constitutes the worlds largest meeting around water took place in Sub-Saharan Africa for the first time since it was initiated in 1997. The forum, with the theme; Water Security for Peace and Development, featured multiple sessions throughout last week, around four priority themes of water security and sanitation, water for rural development, cooperation, means and tools. Global water challenge Water is the most essential human need yet one-quarter of the worlds population estimated 2 billion people, reportedly lack safe drinking water while half, 3.6 billion people, lack safe sanitation. The damage to human capital is staggering. In 2019, diarrheal diseases were ranked the 8th greatest cause of death in the world, claiming 1.5 million lives worldwide, mainly due to poor water and sanitation, according to World Bank statistics. For every $1 invested in basic drinking water, there are $3 in returns, and even higher figures for water investments in rural areas. But despite the proven benefits of investing in water for development, water security the availability of sufficient water is far from being realized in many countries. And The Covid-19 pandemic has further underscored critical gaps in water and sanitation services, with serious consequences for public health. This challenge is particularly acute in Africa, where poor water quality is the root cause of several diseases. Worlds largest water event It is against this backdrop, that the World Water Forum was convened for the first time on African soil. Officials of international institutions, government institutions, decision-makers and academics, participated at the forum. This years proceedings centered exclusively on the impact of COVID-19 on water supply and how to raise more funds for water security. In his opening speech, Senegalese president Macky Sall strongly insisted on robust investment on water conservation, hoping that the issue remains at the heart of the international agenda. Jakaya Kikwete, former President of Tanzania, stressed the need for more financing. We have heard numerous mentions of 114 billion dollars in global market capital investment, excluding maintenance, which will be needed annually to close the gap for the population using safely and managing drinking water and sanitation services. Speaking during a session organised by the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), Daouda Ndiaye, Lead Climate Adaptation Specialist at IsDB, stated that climate finance will contribute greatly to addressing challenges in the water sector because the two are linked. Encouraging more science-based decisions will be critical in addressing the challenges of water security in Member Countries, experts at the session agreed. The highlight of the event was the celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the African Ministers Council on Water (AMCOW). Former Nigerian leaders Olusegun Obasanjo and Shehu Shagari- were honored for their efforts towards the establishment and growth of AMCOW. Residents of Kaduna have called on the state and federal governments to declare three days of mourning nationwide over Mondays deadly attack by bandits on a train. The train had left Abuja, the Nigerian capital, at about 6:00 p.m. and was heading to Kaduna when it was attacked between Katari and Rijana communities. The terrorists also referred to as bandits in Nigeria, planted explosives on the train track and immobilised it before firing gunshots at passengers as they tried to open the doors. Both the Kaduna State Government and the Nigeria Railway Corporation have confirmed the attack. The (NRC) has since suspended train services between Abuja and Kaduna until further notice, over the incident. The exact number of people on the train at the time of the incident has yet to be confirmed but there are media reports that over 970 people were aboard the train. The Kaduna government has confirmed fatalities but did not say the number of people killed so far. In a Tuesday morning statement signed by Samuel Aruwan, the commissioner for internal security and home affairs, the state government said the evacuation of the trapped passengers have been concluded but search and rescue operations continued. Relatives have been announcing the demise of their family members in various posts on social media. Also, a resolution by the Senate on Tuesday called on the Army and Airforce to, as a matter of urgency, bombard terrorist enclaves with a view to restoring peace and stability in the country. The Senate also called on the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and other relevant government agencies to assist the affected communities with relief materials. While they urged Nigerians to remain vigilant and report any suspicious movements to security operatives, the lawmakers asked the military to put special focus on the vicinity of Nigerian airports, especially the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport. They also urged the relevant agencies of the government to step up their information-gathering mechanism to forestall such incidents in the future. Residents speak This is quite unfortunate. The government has failed us woefully. That is my take. I know somebody that we are still looking for or rather waiting to hear from the government about his whereabouts. The whole nation should be in mourning, a resident, Sani Abdu, said. Ummi Mohammed, a resident of Unguwan Dosa, also told PREMIUM TIMES that her aunty and husband were still missing. We have visited all the hospitals in Kaduna but we did not see them. We are assuming now they are among those kidnapped. The whole family is in turmoil. Another resident, Alkali Shafiu, said: I cannot believe that one cannot travel from Kaduna to Abuja safely again. This is not the first time and we are still witnessing it again. How do they want us to travel in Nigeria for Gods sake? Many residents who spoke to our reporter called on the government to declare three days national mourning. The police in Akwa Ibom State said they have rescued a four-year-old girl abducted from her school in the state. The police identified the girls school as Methodist Township Primary School in Ikot Ekpene Local Government Area of the state. The police spokesperson in Akwa Ibom State, SP Odiko Macdon, disclosed this at a news briefing on Tuesday in Uyo. He said the victim was abducted on January 18 and taken to a camp at Esighi in Akpabuyo Local Government Area in Cross River State before the police rescued her. He said the suspect, who was paraded before reporters, abducted the girl to replace her own daughter, who was allegedly stolen. According to Mr Macdon, after abducting the little girl, the suspect took her to her boyfriend, an ex-militant resident, in Esighi. He said the girls name was later changed by her abductors. Mr Macdon, who also announced the arrest of a fake female police constable on police uniform with identity card, said the suspects would be charged to court as soon as investigation was completed. He said the suspected kidnapper had confessed to the crime. Mr Macdon lauded the efforts of the Anti-Child Theft Section of the command for their intervention which led to the girls rescue. The victim, whose name was changed, had been with the said ex-militant until her rescue on March 17. Though she has since been reunited with her family, they are here with us at the headquarters, Mr Macdon said. He said the suspected fake constable allegedly defrauded two persons of N500,000 at a local market in the state. (NAN) The Federal High Court in Benin City, Edo State, on Tuesday, convicted a woman, Debest Osarumwense, for aiding and abetting his son accused of internet fraud. The judge, M. S. Shuaibu, in his judgement, convicted the mother on a charge of aiding her son, Endurance Osarumwense, to receive N91.2 million proceeds of internet fraud. Mr Shuaibu jailed the woman five years with an option of N1 million fine, the spokesperson for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Wilson Uwujaren, said in a statement on Tuesday. Mr Uwujaren said Mrs Osarumwense had pleaded guilty to the charge filed against her. In view of her plea, the prosecution counsel, I. K.Agwai, prayed the court to convict and sentence her accordingly. The judge, in her judgement, sentenced her to five years imprisonment with an option of fine, and ordered her to forfeit the balance in her bank account to the Federal Government of Nigeria. The charge against her reads: that you, Debest Osarumwense (f) sometime between 2nd January 2020 and December 2021 in Edo State within the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court did take possession of the total sum of N91,296,150.00(Ninety One Million, Two Hundred and Ninety-six Thousand, One Hundred and Fifty Naira) knowing that same represent proceeds of Endurance Osarumwense (your son) criminal conduct to wit: cybercrime and thereby committed an offence contrary to and punishable under Section 17(b) of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission Establishment) Act 2004. SHANGHAI, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Braving the heavy rain, Pakistani businessman Habib Ur Rehman, 33, left home early in the morning to assist Shanghai's anti-epidemic efforts as a volunteer. The megacity, with a permanent population of more than 24 million and around 200,000 expats, is conducting rounds of nucleic acid testing to tackle a recent resurgence of COVID-19 infections. Donning full protective gear and a face shield, Rehman rendered his service in the Ronghua residential neighborhood in the city's Changning District, where residents had queued up to undergo testing. He is tasked with guiding people to registration and testing sites in an orderly manner, and during his shift, he serves over 100 expats from more than a dozen countries and regions. "My family and I have lived in Shanghai for a long time and witnessed China's efficiency and success in fighting the epidemic in Wuhan in 2020, which has given us a lot of confidence. Regarding the epidemic prevention, we have some experiences to share," Rehman said. Starting this month, several regions in China have seen a surge in newly confirmed cases and asymptomatic carriers. Meanwhile, frequent spells of rain and temperature fluctuations have posed challenges to Shanghai's nucleic acid screening efforts. Rehman regards himself as a Shanghai native. He was encouraged by his father to pursue studies in Shanghai and in 2008, he took up undergraduate study majoring in international economics and trade at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. After graduation, he joined his family business, trading Pakistani handmade carpets and other specialty goods with China. Expats who are new in Shanghai might be a little nervous during nucleic acid screening, Rehman said, adding that as a multilingual volunteer, he believes he can help such individuals with suggestions and other assistance. "As volunteers, we not only help maintain order in the queue but also solve other problems in a timely manner," he said. "Problems with health QR codes? No worries. Let me help you fix it," he said while volunteering. Prior to taking up the volunteering work, Rehman and his family had completed two rounds of nucleic acid testing. "Although standing in the queue is time-consuming and requires patience, the entire process was very smooth. If the weather was pleasant, people would have been in a better mood while queuing, and I would have spent more time speaking with them about my personal experience," he said. Rehman is enthusiastic about volunteering work. In 2016, he was in one of the first batches of expats to volunteer with Shanghai's public security department, assisting the police in managing traffic congestion and providing language translation services in the multilingual community. He believes that with the assistance of volunteers such as himself, expats can adapt much more easily to a new living environment. Rehman acknowledged that his family business has suffered short-term setbacks amid the pandemic, but they are optimistic. "The business has certainly taken some hits, but I think safety comes first. Without health, nothing else is meaningful." In 2021, Rehman and his family introduced Pakistani salt lamps into the Chinese market, which became popular at the fourth China International Import Expo (CIIE). He plans to participate in the fifth CIIE this year. The Federal High Court in Abuja, on Monday, threatened to throw out a N2 billion money laundering case instituted against Rochas Okorocha, a former governor of Imo State. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) had, in April 2021, arrested the former governor over corruption allegations, and later granted him an administrative bail. It subsequently filed charges against Mr Okorocha, an incumbent senator, and others, but the arraignment had been stalled due to non-service of the charges on the former governor. At the proceedings on Monday which was meant for the arraignment of Mr Okorocha and his co-defendants before Inyang Ekwo, the EFCCs lawyer, Cosmos Ugwu, told the court that every effort to find Mr Okorocha and serve him with the charges had been futile. It was the second time the prosecuting lawyer had complained of his inability to personally serve Mr Okorocha with the charges as required by the law. He informed the court that he would continue to make efforts until he succeeds in serving the former Imo State governor with the court papers. Subsequently, Mr Ugwu applied for another adjournment to enable him serve the charges on Mr Okorocha, who represents Imo West senatorial district at the National Assembly. But, Mr Ugwus excuse for not serving charges on Mr Okorocha did not go down well with Mr Ekwo who reminded the lawyer that the same excuse had been given by the prosecution on February 22 when the defendants ought to have taken their pleas. In a bench ruling, the judge granted the request for the second adjournment and warned the anti-graft agencys lawyer to show seriousness or else, the case would be struck out. The judge said, Let me place on record, that this is the second time this flimsy excuse is being made to justify the absence of the 1st defendant (Okorocha) in court to take his plea. As the prosecutor, you must demonstrate seriousness in the discharge of your duties. This is the last adjournment I shall grant in this matter. If on the adjourned date, you come up with the same flimsy excuses, I shall have no option but to strike out the charges, Mr Ekwo warned, before adjourning the suit until May 30. Backstory The EFCC on January 24, 2022, filed 17-count charges involving criminal diversion of public funds and properties against Mr Okorocha and Anyim Nyerere Chinenye, Naphtali International Limited, Perfect Finish Multi Projects Limited, Consolid Projects Consulting Limited, Pramif International Limited, and Legend World Concepts Limited. Mr Okorocha, who has declared his interest to run for president in the 2023 general elections, is being put on trial by the Federal Government on 17-count charges involving criminal diversion of public funds and properties. At the last adjourned date, other defendants billed to be arraigned along with Mr Okorocha were present in court. The anti-graft agency in February obtained an interim forfeiture order for the purposes of confiscating the former governors assets in Abuja. Wilson Uwujaren, EFCCs spokesperson, had said the property located in the Garki area of Abuja is reasonably suspected to be proceeds of unlawful activities of Mr Okorocha. He gave the full address of the property as Plot 1032 & 1033 Cadastral Zone AO3, Takum Close, Off Michika Street, Ahmadu Bello Way, Garki, Abuja. The interim forfeiture order came just some days after the EFCC lamented its inability to serve the ex-governor with the corruption charges it recently filed against him. The anti-graft agency had in January filed a 17-count charge against Mr Okorocha over allegations that he conspired with others, including an APC politician and five companies, to steal N2.9 billion from public coffers. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has reacted to the acquittal of former Minister of Special Duties and Inter-Governmental Affairs, Kabiru Turaki, of money laundering charges involving N715 million. According to a statement signed by its spokesperson, Wilson Uwujaren, and made available to PREMIUM TIMES on Monday, the commission said it resolved to have the verdict overturned by pursuing lodging an appeal against it at the Court of Appeal. The commission said the trial judge erred in dismissing the testimonies of all 13 prosecution witnesses. The Federal High Court, Abuja, on Monday, discharged and acquitted Mr Turaki. The judge, Inyang Ekwo, acquitted the former minister, in a ruling on the no-case submission filed by the defence. He held that the EFCC failed to link Mr Turaki and his co-defendants with the offences contained in the 16-count charge. The judge added that the prosecution could not establish a prima facie case against them. The EFCC had in May 2020, arraigned the former minister alongside his special assistant, Sampson Okpetu, and two companies: Samtee Essentials Limited and Pasco Investment Limited. They are standing trial on a 16-count charge of fraud amounting to N714 million. Read EFCCs full statement below. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, is to approach the Court of Appeal to challenge the Federal High Courts decision to quash the 16 count criminal charge of corruption and money laundering to the tune of N715million brought against a former Minister of Special Duties and Inter-governmental Affairs, Kabiru Taminu Turaki, SAN, and three Others. ALSO READ: Judge threatens to strike out money laundering charges against Okorocha In a ruling delivered today Justice Inynag Ekwo upheld the no-case submission by the defendants. He held that it was unnecessary to ask the defendants to enter their defence, describing the evidence presented by the prosecution witnesses as tainted. He also stated that the fact that the prosecution did not honour the Attorney Generals request for information regarding the case file vitiated the charge. However, the Commission says the trial judge erred in dismissing the testimonies of all twelve prosecution witnesses and has resolved to file a notice of appeal at the appellate court, to set aside the ruling by Justice Ekwo. Fidet Okhiria, the managing director, Nigeria Railway Corporation (NRC), has confirmed the attack on the Abuja-Kaduna train by suspected bandits on Monday night. Mr Okhiria, however, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that information concerning the attack was still sketchy, and no concrete information could be given at the moment. We have confirmed the attack, but we cannot give you much information right now. From the reports we have gotten, most of the passengers have gone into hiding and the officials on board are yet to give us report of the situation. There are reports of gunshots and the train derailed due to the attack, Mr Okhiria said. NAN gathered that the incident happened between Katari and Rijana train stations, en route Kaduna from Abuja. (NAN) The Special Offences Court in Ikeja, Lagos, on Monday, reduced the bail conditions it earlier imposed on popular Nigerian internet socialite, Ismaila Mustapha, also known as Mompha, who is facing fraud charges. PREMIUM TIMES had reported how the judge, Mojisola Dada, granted bail to Mompha with tough conditions, including the sum of N200 million bail sum, with two sureties in like sum. The bail conditions also required one of his sureties to own a property within the jurisdiction worth N100 million. But ruling on an application filed by his lawyer lamenting his clients inability to meet significant aspects of the conditions, the judge, on Monday, reduced the bail sum from N200million to N25 million, but still with two sureties in like sum. According to a statement by the spokesperson for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Wilson Uwujaren, the judge also ordered, under the reviewed conditions, that one of the sureties must own a property worth N50 million in Lagos instead of N100 million worth of property earlier ordered. Mompha has had several run-ins with the EFCC in the last two years over allegations of fraud. He has denied the charges. On January 12, 2022, the commission arraigned him on eight counts of conspiracy to launder funds obtained through unlawful activity, retention of proceeds of criminal conduct, failure to disclose assets and property, possession of documents containing false pretence, and use of property derived from an unlawful act. Hearing Earlier at Mondays proceedings, the counsel for the defendant, Gboyega Oyewole, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, told the court that his client had remained in prison from where he attended trial, due to his inability to meet most of his bail conditions. He said the defendant had only been able to submit his passport to the Chief Registrar of the High Court, and had not been able to meet other bail conditions. Mr Oyewole, therefore, urged the court to grant his clients application for a variation of the conditions attached to the bail. He premised the grounds on the fact that the defendant was also standing trial at the Federal High Court and he never missed court for one day. Most important, my lord, is that the defendant wants to engage the prosecution on the charges, he added. EFCCs prosecuting counsel, Rotimi Oyedepo, acknowledged receipt of the said application, but opted not to categorically oppose it. He rather urged the judge to use her discretion to reach a decision on it. Im aware the defence is in discussions with the commission; so, I leave the decision to my lord s exercise of discretion, he said. The judge granted the application. She adjourned the case till April 6, 2022 for the continuation of the trial.. One of the counts against Mompha and his co-defendants is: Ismaila Mustapha, Ahmadu Mohammed (at large) and Ismalob Global Investment Limited, sometime in 2016, in Lagos, within the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court, conspired amongst yourselves to conduct financial transactions to the tune of N5,998,884,653.18 ( Five Billion Nine Hundred and Ninety-eight Million Eight Hundred and Eighty-four Thousand Six Hundred and Fifty-three Naira Eighteen Kobo) with the intent of promoting the carrying on of specified unlawful activities to wit: Obtaining by false pretence. The defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges. The Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) said on Monday that it has handed over a hospital worth N150 million to the Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu Alike Ikwo (FUNAI) in Ebonyi State. ICPCs spokesperson, Azuka Ogugua, disclosed this in a statement on Monday. The commission said the hospital, conceived as a medical outpost of the university in 2019, was unofficially taken over by the Ebunwana community in Afikpo South Local Government Area of Ebonyi State, upon being completed in 2020. ICPC said the project was facilitated by then senator representing Ebonyi South Senatorial District, Sonni Ogbuoji, appropriated for in 2019 and completed in March 2020, fully equipped with state-of-the-art medical facilities. It added that the Tracking Group of ICPC had in the course of the phase two of its tracking exercise traced the Constituency Project located at Ebunwana community in Afikpo South Local Government Area of Ebonyi State. The project has been recovered by the CEPTG team and handed over to the university community on March, 25, 2022. Meanwhile, investigations are ongoing to unravel how the local community got access and took control of the hospital without any official ceremony, the state added. But the details of the handing over, including names of officials of the parties involved, were not given. The ICPC only provided a picture of what appears to be showing one of its officials in an apron with the commissions name handing something to another person. Read ICPCs full statement below: Constituency Project: ICPC Hands Over Hospital Worth N150,000,000 to University Community The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), has handed over a hospital worth One hundred and Fifty Million Naira (N150,000,000) to the Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu Alike Ikwo (FUNAI). The Constituency and Executive Project Tracking Group of ICPC had in the course of the phase two of its tracking exercise traced the Constituency Project being a hospital located at Ebunwana community in AFIKPO SOUTH LGA of Ebonyi State. The hospital, which was fully equipped with state-of-the-art medical facilities was conceived as a Medical outpost of FUNAI and meant to serve as a teaching hospital for her medical students. The project, which was appropriated in 2019 and completed in March 2020 at the cost of the above sum, was facilitated by the then Senator representing Ebonyi South Senatorial District, Senator Sonni Ogbuoji. However, after the completion of the project, the local community unofficially took over the hospital even though it was not meant for it and went ahead to rename the facility and appoint a consultant to manage the hospital on a profit-sharing arrangement between the community and the consultant. Following the illegality that enshrouded the constituency project, the commission stepped in to ensure that the hospital was handed over to the institution for which it was appropriated and executed. The project has been recovered by the CEPTG team and handed over to the University community on 25th March 2022. Meanwhile, investigations are ongoing to unravel how the local community got access and took control of the hospital without any official ceremony. Signed: Mrs. Azuka Ogugua Spokesperson, ICPC The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) has supported that countrys government in the fight against al-Shabaab for the past 15 years. The operation was due to end in December 2021, and an agreement has finally been reached on what appears to be simply a name change and extension of the existing mandate. The African Union (AU), United Nations (UN) and Somali government decided that on April 1, AMISOM will be replaced by the AU Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS). The new mission will operate until the end of 2024, after which all responsibilities will be handed to the Somali Security Forces. ATMIS capacity of around 18,000 troops, 1,000 police and 70 civilians mirrors its predecessor, as does much of its mandate. So has anything changed that can help stabilise Somalia? AMISOMs work started in March 2007, to degrade al-Shabaab and build the capacity of the Somali Security Forces, military and police so that the mission could eventually withdraw in 2021. The exit did not happen though, as the security threats that necessitated the deployment in the first place, continue. To determine AMISOMs future, the AU and UN conducted independent assessments last year, and various options were proposed. An agreement was needed on a new missions mandate, composition, size, strategic and specific objectives and tasks of the military, civilian and police components. Somalias government wants ATMIS to focus on implementing the Somalia Transition Plan. The plan was developed in 2018 to transfer security responsibilities from AMISOM to the countrys security forces. It was recently revised and will be carried out over the next three years. The AU and UN agreed with this approach. Bankole Adeoye, AU Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, said ATMIS stabilisation and state-building objectives would fully align with the Somalia Transition Plan. The AU Peace and Security Council outlined a mandate for the new mission that included degrading al-Shabaab and other terrorist groups, providing security, developing the capacity of the security forces, justice and local authorities, and supporting peace and reconciliation. The UN Security Council is expected to approve the mandate and authorise ATMIS at its 30 March meeting. But AMISOMs mandate was also aligned with the Somalia Transition Plan, so there is nothing new about ATMIS in that regard. Omar S Mahmood, Senior Analyst at the International Crisis Group, told ISS Today he believed ATMIS would have only a few slight differences. The biggest change is perhaps that the idea of a transition is more thoroughly embedded within the rationale of the new mission, which has a four-phased timeline to work with the Somali government to implement the Somalia Transition Plan. Also, a few smaller adjustments are supposed to happen as well, such as re-alignment of AMISOMs sector structure and increased command-and-control authority under the missions force commander, but these are limited overall. In terms of operational changes, ATMIS will differ from AMISOM by developing more mobile and agile forces in each sector of the mission. The job of these quick-reaction forces with enabling capacities will mainly be to rapidly degrade al-Shabaab and other extremist militant groups. AMISOMs replacement comes at a critical time. Political tensions in the country still threaten the gains made over the years. Divisions among Somalias elites over the distribution of power and resources are at the centre of all the problems. Two peaceful power transitions occurred in 2012 and 2017, but the third faltered due to disputes over election management. President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, in power since 2017, is still in charge after his term expired in February 2021. Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble was tasked with reforming the election process, but progress has been slow. The countrys future is unpredictable, with the political impasse sometimes boiling over into armed clashes. Increasing attacks by al-Shabaab is another major challenge. Many assaults were reported in the past few months, with recent strikes in Mogadishu and Beledweyne resulting in over 53 deaths. Despite actions by AMISOM and the Somali Security Forces, the group still controls large territories in South and Central Somalia, and attacks are increasing. READ ALSO: African Union suspends Burkina Faso after military coup Al-Shabaabs financial and warfare capacity is also growing. The Hiraal Institute, a Mogadishu-based research group, reports that the group collected about US$180 million in revenue and spent US$24 million on weapons in 2021. ATMIS will also face the same financial woes as AMISOM. The UN provided the missions logistical support, with the European Union (EU) funding military and police personnel stipends. But the EU reduced its support over recent years, and its intentions for ATMIS are not yet clear. Tiina Intelmann, head of the EU delegation to Somalia, has said that The EU is ready to contribute and assure predictability of funding as long as the configuration plan is realistic, pragmatic and focused. So it seems that ATMIS will not differ fundamentally from AMISOM in its mandate. It will mostly be a continuation of the current military support which, while essential for the countrys security, wont be new. Since the political stalemate is at the centre of Somalias social and security problems, solving that should be the priority. If it is to differ from AMISOM, ATMIS mandate and force reconfiguration should include robust political engagement to support reconciliation among the countrys divided political groups. Otherwise, the exercise simply renames the mission which will not help the country much. Meressa K Dessu, Senior Researcher and Training Coordinator, Institute for Security Studies (ISS) Addis Ababa This article is published as part of the Training for Peace Programme (TfP) funded by the government of Norway. (This article was first published by ISS Today, a Premium Times syndication partner. We have their permission to republish). The Kaduna State Government has sent its condolences to victims of the terrorist attack on the Kaduna-Abuja train that occurred Monday night. The government, through a statement by Muyiwa Adekeye, the media aide to Governor Nasir El-Rufai, expressed its sympathy and solidarity with all the passengers, and extends its condolence to the families of the passengers that died in the attack. It said Mr El-Rufai and his deputy, Hadiza Balarabe, have visited the injured in hospitals. The governor prays for the peaceful repose of the souls of the deceased persons and wishes the injured persons speedy recovery. While the evacuation of passengers from the scene of the attack has been completed, efforts are still being made to account for all the passengers, crew and security officers that were on the train. The Kaduna State Emergency Management Agency has issued a contact number 09088923398 for inquiries and information from family members of the passengers. The government appeals to all citizens to uphold law and order, and promote peace and harmony in our communities. The state government continues to liaise with the Federal Government and security agencies to protect our people and defeat the terrorists and other criminals. It is imperative to stand together against those who threaten civilised order, the statement said. A Kaduna senator, Suleiman Kwari, has called on the National Assembly and the federal government to revisit talks of state police. The National Assembly had ignored the clamour for state police by some governors and many other Nigerians in the Constitution amendment conducted last month. The lawmaker, who represents Kaduna North senatorial district, made the call during a seemingly solemn plenary session on Tuesday as the Senate deliberated a motion on Mondays train attack. PREMIUM TIMES reported how bandits planted explosives on the train track and demobilised it around Kateri and Rijana around 8 p.m. Monday. Both the Kaduna State Government and the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) have confirmed the attack and evacuation of passengers. The (NRC) has since suspended train services between Abuja and Kaduna until further notice following the attack by bandits. The attack comes about seven months after bandits attacked the Nigerian Defence College in the state, killing two officers and abducting one. It also comes barely two days after suspected bandits attempted to attack the Kaduna airport. The motion At the start of plenary on Tuesday, another Kaduna senator, Uba Sani, raised a point of order on the continuing attacks on Communities and public facilities in Kaduna State. In his motion, he said terrorists have in recent times stepped up attacks on some communities and public facilities in Kaduna State. The lawmaker narrated how the incident took place at a quiet and gloomy audience of senators. The latest attacks, he said, took place in some communities in Giwa Local Government namely Angwan Sarki Yahya, Tashar Shari, Bare-Bari, Tsaunin Natal, Dillalai, Durumi and Jatin Kanwa, all on Yakawada Ward. Other places affected include Kaya community, Mai kyauro and Fatika where over 50 people were killed and over 100 kidnapped. Not done with their devilish acts, they made an attempt to penetrate the Kaduna International Airport. Although the attack was foiled by vigilant security operatives, one person lost his life. When people were trying to come to grips with a week-long wanton destruction of lives and property, the terrorists struck again. While the lawmaker complained that the attacks are aimed at instilling fear in the people and destroying economies, he questioned the strategies and tactics being adopted by security forces. He also said the advocacy for creation of state police would bring law enforcement closer to the people. Effective gathering of intelligence and sustained security operations at the local level will make life uncomfortable for terrorists. Need for state police In his contribution, Mr Kwari, who described the incident as pathetic, said state police would make the security of lives and properties easier. I think we need to look again, more closely to the call for state police because unless this is done, having a federal police policing our bushes and our roads is something that cannot stand, he said. He also complained that drones and other technical equipment that the National Assembly has asked the federal government to get for the military, have not been purchased. While he lamented the delay in response time by the military, he commended them for the last-minute intervention. On his part, Benue senator, Gabriel Suswam, blamed the recurring attacks on the failure of the leadership of the state. Advertisements He wondered why the Kaduna State government has done very little to stop the attacks and called on the leadership of the federal government to address the issue. Like his colleague, Danjuma Laah (PDP, Kaduna South) asked the state governor, Nasir El-Rufai, to speak up and call for help if he is overwhelmed. Resolutions After a lengthy debate which saw senators express different emotions ranging from anger, to frustration and fear, the Senate called on the Army and Airforce to, as a matter of urgency, bombard terrorist enclaves with a view to restoring peace and stability in the country. The Senate also called on the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and other relevant government agencies to assist the affected communities with relief materials. While they urged Nigerians to remain vigilant and report any suspicious movements to security operatives, the, lawmakers asked the military to put special focus on the vicinity of Nigerian airports especially the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport. They also urged the relevant agencies of the government to step up their information gathering mechanism to forestall such incidents in the future. The House of Representatives has urged the National Security Adviser (NSA), Chief of Defence Staff and the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) to set up special security task force at airports across the country. This followed the adoption of a motion by Nnolim Nnaji (PDP-Anambra) at the plenary on Tuesday in Abuja. In his motion, he said there was an urgent need to investigate the recent attack at the Kaduna International Airport and reinforce security surveillance and personnel in all Nigerian airports. The lawmaker recalled that about a year ago, bandits attacked the staff quarters of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) at the Kaduna International Airport and abducted about 12 persons. He said that on March 25, there was a banditry attack at the Kaduna International Airport, culminating in the death of a security guard of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency. He said that a combined detachment of the military and other security agencies were deployed to the airport to confront the heavily armed bandits, numbering over 100. Mr Nnaji said the military personnel at the airport were swift enough to repel the attack, chased away the bandits and seized some of their motorcycles. He said that unauthorised persons had been using the route behind the perimeter fence of the airport until the recent attack, which he said had resulted in the loss of a life. He expressed concern that the banditry attacks at Kaduna International Airport could escalate to other airports across the country, if not checkmated. No one is safe to travel by air if positive steps are not taken urgently to safeguard our airports from banditry attacks, considering the international standards on airport security management as outlined by International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). The House, therefore, urged the Aviation Ministry, Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and other security agencies to put in place a more proactive measure in securing the airports. The House added that modern security surveillance equipment on the perimeters in all the airports must be included. It also urged the leadership of the house and chairmen of relevant committees to invite all heads of security agencies, minister of aviation, heads of aviation agencies for an urgent meeting to tackle the current challenges at the airports. (NAN) A police inspector, on Tuesday, told the #EndSARS panel in Abuja, how an 83-year-old suspect, Samuel Adagbor, died during his seven-month detention in February 2021. The panel set up to investigate cases of police had, on Friday, summoned Sunday Sylvester, who was accused of complicity in the illegal detention of the suspect. The daughter of the deceased, Angela Benjamin, who petitioned the panel set up to probe cases of police brutality, had accused Mr Sylvester of extorting about N2 million from the family. She earlier testified that his father and his wife were arrested by the police sometime in August 2019 at their family house in Agbor, Delta State, on the allegation that they were running a baby factory. The family denied the charge. After one week in detention, the wife, who was said to have just had a baby through the cesarean section, was released, while Mr Adagbor was moved to Abuja, Mrs Benjamin had told the panel. In Abuja, she said, the police took advantage of the familys desperation to get the octogenarian released by continuing to keep him to create a room for extortion. She alleged that Mr Sylvester received over N2 million from the family and still refused to release the old man. The family would later hear seven months after the arrest that the man had died in custody, she said. Suspect died after health complications Appearing before the panel on summons on Tuesday, Mr Sylvester denied any wrongdoing in his handling of the case, but confirmed the death of Mr Adagbor in custody. Fielding questions under cross-examination by the complainants counsel, Gabriel Egbule, the police officer said the octogenarian died after developing health complications in custody. Mr Samuel (Adagbor) developed health complications and was taken to the police clinic but was transferred to Gwagwalada General Hospital (Abuja) when he worsened (sic), he said. He added that the suspect died later sometime in February 2021, seven months after his arrest on September 16, 2019. Why octogenarian was arrested Mr Sylvester told the panel that Mr Adagbor was arrested after the police received intelligence that he was selling human parts, contrary to the petitioners claim that her father was arrested on an allegation of running a baby factory. In his testimony, Mr Sylvester told the panel that the police had traced Mr Adagbor to his house in Delta State where they found two dead bodies. We went to his house in Delta State and met some of the children and we opened a door and saw two dead bodies. One was already tampered with and the other was fresh, Mr Sylvester told the panel. He said they took the suspect to Agbor police station and then proceeded to Agbor General Hospital to process a possible evacuation of the bodies. The hospital, he said, requested a formal letter since the police officers whom he said were from Abuja. We returned to Abuja to reinforce ourselves, but when we went back to Mr Samuels house, the bodies were no longer there, Mr Sylvester said. He said they asked Adagbors son, Peace Adagbor, where the bodies were, and he said the bodies had been handed over to the owners. He said Peace Adagbor had since been on the run after the police accused him of moving the bodies and tampering with evidence. But the petitioner had told the panel that Peace Adagbor died in 2020. The police officer said he had the case file and documents to back his testimony. Advertisements Cross-examination Mr Sylvester, who admitted under cross-examination that the alleged victim died after developing health complications in detention, also said the police could not charge the suspect in court seven months after his detention because investigation was still ongoing. The police officer was asked if he was aware that Mr Adagbor retired from the Nigerian Army and subsequently became a private mortician. Responding, Mr Sylvester said the suspect said he was not a mortician when asked during interrogation. He added that the police took him round the village to link the bodies found on his premises to any family but could not. On why the family was not contacted after the suspect died, Mr Sylvester said the mans son, Peace Adagbor, who had been the familys contact person stopped picking the calls from the police and nobody made a formal application for the release of the corpse. He also faulted the familys claim about Mr Adagbors age, saying there was no birth certificate to ascertain it. He insisted the deceased person did not look as old as the family claimed. Police officer denies extortion He said also denied extorting the family. He said he never collected any money from the family. He said he rather incurred debt feeding the man in custody. I spent close to N70,000 to feed Mr Samuel while he was in detention and I am still paying some of the debt to the woman who was providing the food, Mr Sylvester told the panel. Panels ruling The panel, chaired by Garba Tetengi who acted in the absence of the substantive chairman, Suleiman Galadima, ordered Mr Sylvester to produce the case file opened for Mr Adagbor, and other relevant documents. The panel also ordered that the body of the deceased be released to the family for burial. The panel adjourned the case until March 30, 2022. China sets energy targets for 2022 Xinhua) 17:18, March 29, 2022 BEIJING, March 29 (Xinhua) -- China's National Energy Administration has released a guideline on energy development for 2022, detailing targets for securing energy supplies and boosting energy efficiency. In 2022, annual domestic energy production capacity will amount to 4.41 billion tonnes of standard coal while crude oil output will reach around 200 million tonnes, according to the guideline. Natural gas output is expected to reach 214 billion cubic meters, the guideline specifies. It also seeks to steadily lower the nation's dependence on coal, pledging to increase the share of non-fossil fuel in China's overall energy consumption to around 17.3 percent. Wind power and photovoltaic power generation will account for about 12.2 percent of power consumption, the guideline notes. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) Photo taken on March 23, 2022 shows a view of the ports of Auckland, New Zealand. (Photo by Zhang You/Xinhua) New Zealand Trade and Export Growth Minister Damien O'Connor estimated that RCEP enforcement plus the upcoming entry into force of an upgraded free trade agreement between the two countries would directly benefit New Zealand's rural exporters to China, and is expected to result in additional savings of 180 million New Zealand dollars (125 million U.S. dollars) per annum at current export volumes. WELLINGTON, March 29 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand dairy companies Yashili and Fonterra are optimistic about China's market potential after the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world's largest trade deal, came into effect on Jan. 1, 2022. Wei Song, CEO of Yashili New Zealand Dairy Co., Ltd, told Xinhua: "China is a big consumer of dairy products and has strong market potential. New Zealand is recognized as a golden milk source and one of the largest dairy exporters in the world." "After RCEP came into effect, the certification and customs procedures are simplified and more convenient. The customs clearance time is shortened. It is more conducive to the circulation of goods between China and New Zealand, which greatly reduces the cost of enterprises," Song said. "On the other hand, consumers can also receive high-quality products faster." Song said that the past years witnessed continued revenue growth for the company despite the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting the supply chain severely, raising the input costs and squeezing the margin of most New Zealand exporters. Dairy export has been playing a crucial role in New Zealand's economy, especially in the past three years. According to figures released by Statistics New Zealand, although the overall volume of dairy export kept stable in the past three years, the value of dairy export to China kept rising significantly, from 5.3 billion New Zealand dollars (3.69 billion U.S. dollars) in the year of 2019 to nearly 7.3 billion New Zealand dollars (5.09 billion U.S. dollars) in 2021. New Zealand Trade and Export Growth Minister Damien O'Connor estimated in an earlier statement that RCEP enforcement plus the upcoming entry into force of an upgraded free trade agreement between the two countries would directly benefit New Zealand's rural exporters to China, and is expected to result in additional savings of 180 million New Zealand dollars (125 million U.S. dollars) per annum at current export volumes. Fonterra, the biggest New Zealand company as well as a global dairy giant, also highlighted the advantages of RCEP enforcement. Terry Lee, managing director of Milk New Zealand Dairy, who is participating in the China International Import Expo (CIIE) in Shanghai, speaks via video link during the China-New Zealand dairy products business matchmaking conference and signing ceremony held in Auckland, New Zealand, Nov. 10, 2020. (Photo by Sun Xueliang/Xinhua) Justine Arroll, Fonterra general manager of trade strategy, told Xinhua that RCEP and New Zealand-China FTA delivered a high-quality market access outcome for the dairy industry. In addition, "RCEP contains some useful trade facilitation and transparency measures and a common rulebook for New Zealand exporters in the region. More broadly, RCEP is a positive step forward for trade liberalization in the region, and underscores the commitment of members to regional and multilateral trade rules," she added. Fonterra next aims to promote its products by using the power of local social media as the company continued to see firm demand for dairy in the Greater China market, according to its latest interim reports. "This year marks the 50th anniversary of China-New Zealand diplomatic relations. Over the years, China and New Zealand have had close economic and trade relations. In this context, the implementation of RCEP will bring more possibilities to deepen and expand China-New Zealand relations," Song said. The decrease in import tariffs brought about by the entry into force of RCEP will help companies, such as Yashili New Zealand, to reduce the cost of exporting goods, make prices more competitive and drive the dairy industry to increase exports to China, he added. Fellow Nigerians, a few moments ago, I met with President Muhammadu Buhari. I informed him that I wanted to succeed him as the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Though it is not my life-long ambition, it has become imperative that to rescue Nigeria, we need someone to build on the achievements of President Buhari. I have looked around; I do not see anyone better suited to carry on that solemn assignment than my humble self. As a great father of the nation, which Buhari is, he wished me well. I took this bold step after a wide-ranging consultation with Nigerians of various ethnic, religious, and economic hues. I listened to market women and men, I sat down with the young and old, I heard from students and intellectuals, I broke bread with the unemployed and the underemployed, I accepted the counsel of traditional rulers and kingmakers across Nigeria, and more importantly, I weighed in the opinion of my wife and children. All the signals that I got were positive. Go PYO. Unlike all those who want to rule you as their subjects, I offer myself to serve our great country, Nigeria, with utmost humility. Growing up in Lagos, I did not know that I would be where I am today one heartbeat away from the presidency of this great country. Having been here, having seen all parts of Nigeria from a close range, having worked beside a great but humble leader, President Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR, for almost seven years now, having interacted with leaders at federal, state, and local government levels, I have a burning desire in me to continue with Buharis master-plan for Nigeria. The masterplan may not be clear to some of you, my compatriots, but there is a masterplan coming together. The worldwide economic downturn, COVID-19 pandemic, and decades of lack of investments in Nigerian infrastructure may have blurred what President Buhari has achieved. But trust me, he has taken Nigeria to a new height. Though you may not feel it, you may not honestly say that you are better off today than you were in 2015, but believe me, in things that matter most, values and sincere leadership, our country is in a better place. My fellow Nigerians, trust me when I say that no matter how dark it looks, we are on the right path. The temporary disruptions that we see today, the blurriness caused by the dust in the air should not blind us to the long time gains of our investments of this day. I share in your pains of this day of cultivation. Inshallah, we shall all smile soon as harvest time comes. The Nigeria of 2015 was an active erosion site, swallowing homes, roads, and farmlands. What we have done is to channel the floodwater away from the site. Though the gullies are still collapsing and expanding at some places, fundamentally, we have plucked the remote causes. I seek the presidency to begin the next level of the project, which is to fill up the gullies, recover our once lost land and begin reconstruction. In my time as president, you will see mansions rising in our fatherland once overrun by ugly gullies. I have looked around the field of those aspiring to be president. Though they may be honorable men and women in their own right, none of them has what it takes to complete the job that President Buhari started. This is not the time to bring in people who were not there when the corpse was buried and have them start digging from the legs. Those of you who watched with amazement what I accomplished in those few days that President Buhari handed power to me can attest that if I get only four years to be the steward of this great nation, I will turn Nigeria into what Ronald Reagan called a shining city on a hill. As we know, some people are born corrupt. Some people have corruption swimming all around them. I am clothed in a bright gown of integrity. Integrity is modest, integrity is humble and integrity never fails to accomplish and excel. I never have and will never steal from the Nigerian people. Those who steal are greedy. Period. They never change. Please do not believe them when they say they are born-again. I am vast in the rudiments of nation-building and sustainable economic growth. When I come into my own as president, that skill set will make all the difference. It helps that more than all the pretenders in the political arena, I am hardworking, I am committed to my stated goals and I am determined to rise above all my enemies and my competitors. My vision for Nigeria is clear and simple. I want Nigeria that is great but just, prosperous but fair and progressive but united. Justice, fairness and unity are very close to my heart. I have never cheated to be where I am in life. We are where we are as a nation because we have allowed some people to cheat and steal their ways to what we call success. I made myself what I am today by converting challenges into opportunities. That is the philosophy that I will bring to my presidency. I will deploy this philosophy to lure back our compatriots who have lost faith in the Nigerian project. They will give Nigeria a second chance when they see my sincerity of purpose. I understand the internal factors dragging down the economy of Nigeria. I have the foreign and nationwide connections that I need to speed up the economic renaissance of our nation. When it comes to security concerns, I will take decisive actions to quell the lingering security problems across Nigeria. As someone close to the beaming youth of this nation, I know how to inspire them to deploy their restless energy into productive ventures. I have done it on tiny scales in line with my limited portfolio as vice president. As president, I will multiply my effort by 100 million folds. Those who know me well will tell you that I am like water. I have no enemy. I will carry every part of the country along in the journey of Nigerias emancipation. Yes, that is what PYO stands for total and final emancipation of Nigeria. We are all children of God, and the God that I serve does not discriminate. I firmly believe that what is good for my children must be extended to the children of the lowest citizen of our country. I believe now is the time to reverse this current system where we leave a great majority of our people to wait for crumbs to trickle down to them from the table of the rich and mighty. When I am president, I will ensure that the least amongst us have the first choice before the mighty. Having run TraderMoni and school feeding programme, having worked with young entrepreneurs starting a business, I know the potential in them. I will not let that potential go to waste anymore. I know what most of you are waiting to hear. What about my great friend and benefactor, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu (aka BAT)? As you all know, I have tremendous respect for Asiwaju, Jagaban Borgu. But in matters of the fate of 200 million Nigerians, we cannot afford to let emotions rule us. The situation of Nigeria today is so critical. We need a healthy, vibrant, and untainted leader to handle the situation, now that we still can. The same goes for other aspirants from all the other political parties. We have no room to play around anymore. We have no space for people who will learn on the job. We have no patience for those carrying a truckload of toxic baggage. The urgency of our situation is palpable. For this and other reasons, I offer myself to serve our great nation by declaring my interest in running for president. It will be the greatest honor of my life to serve you all. May God bless you all. And may God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo teaches Post-Colonial African History at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is also the host of Dr. Damages Show. His books include This American Life Sef, Children of a Retired God, among others. EDITORS NOTE: This is a work of satire that should not be taken literally. When news filtered through that Governor Muhammadu Inuwa Yahaya of Gombe State had been nominated as Grand Ambassador of Security and Peace in Nigeria by the Peoples Security Monitor, the joy and excitement felt by the citizens of the state were palpable and sincere as he truly deserved the epochal honour, having worked tirelessly and relentlessly to entrench peace and security in the Jewel in the Savannah. By I visited Gombe before the coming on board of Inuwa Yahaya administration and I also had cause to visit a couple of times during his stewardship, my last visit was when the Sultan of Sokoto, His Eminence, Abubakar Saad chaired the national summit on peaceful coexistence and nation building. I have also read a lot about Gombe and its peaceful atmosphere, especially lately. Though visitors, tourists and foreign investors presently thronging Gombe might take the tranquility and serenity now prevailing in the state for granted, this was not the case in the previous years before Governor Inuwa Yahaya took office. Before he took over, political violence, electoral thuggery, armed banditry and even insurgency were the sorry lot of the Gombe people as the political leaders and their surrogates battled each other for dominance of state power. Indeed some of the political actors resorted to ethnic and religious baiting setting one group against the other while others armed thugs to harass, maim and even kill perceived opponents and adversaries. The infamous Kalere thugs were utilised by some self-styled political godfathers to engage in a brutal campaign of despotism, impunity and political oppression unprecedented in the annals of Gombe State. Communal crises, election violence and divide and rule tactics had set the state at boiling point and in several locations before the pacifist minded Governor Yahaya took office in May 2019. And he wasted little time in dousing tension and acrimony among the people. He first established the Ministry of Internal Security and Ethical Orientation, the first of its kind in the North East and convened series of meetings with traditional rulers, religious leaders and community leaders from all segments of Gombe society harping on the need to eschew violence, hate speech, religious acrimony and communal discord in order to achieve lasting peace and harmony among the people. Governor Yahaya also created a strong platform where community and religious leaders were enlisted to participate in the formulation and execution of security related policies. The astute Gombe helmsman also adopted dialogue and conciliation as an effective strategy for the settlement of communal disputes as in many instances ethnic,tribal or land disputes were settled through the engagement of traditional and community leaders. More practically, Governor Inuwa Yahaya adopted the community policing technique to fight crime and criminality seeing that the recruitment of special constables, vigilantes and local hunters with special knowledge of the community would boost the fight against hardened criminals while dedicated hotlines were provided to community policing committees to promptly report security breaches to the appropriate law enforcement agencies. The formal security agencies like the Army, Police, DSS, Civil Defence, Customs, Immigration, Prisons, FRSC etc were not left out as Governor Inuwa Yahaya holds regular meetings and briefings with their state commanders while their commands were assisted with funds and to boost their supplies, logistics and equipment. The Community Policing Advisory Commitee chaired by the Emir of Gombe, HRH Alhaji Abubakar Shehu Abubakar lll and the reconstituted Farmer-Herdersmen Prevention and Settlement of Disputes Commitee at the state and local levels have greatly contributed to enhancing security and settling land/grazing rights disputes. Governor Yahayas integrated approach to security has also involved the engagement of the youths through the establishment of a Citizenship and Leadership Training Centre in Yamaltu Deba for the regular training of youths in early warning systems and quick response to security breaches; the setting up of Gombe State, Security, Traffic and Environmental Corps( G-STEC) which has employed 2,000 youths in various public order operations and the engagement of over 27,000 youths to plant over 4 million trees across Gombe State to reverse deforestation and desertification under the Gombe Goes Green(3G) Project. With all these laudable projects, policies and initiatives geared towards fighting crime, promoting mutual dialogue and advancing peaceful cohabitation among the citizens of the state coupled with his unbiased, equitable and balanced approach to political and public service appointments as well as the siting of key projects in all the 11 local governments in Gombe State thus enthroning unprecedented peace and harmony, it is clear that Governor Inuwa Yahaya doubly deserves the Grand Ambassador Award of Security and Peace in Nigeria. No wonder, the Sultan of Sokoto once described Governor Inuwa as a truthful, passionate, accountable and steadfast leader with passion for peace, unity and development of his state and Nigeria. ***FADAHUNSI E. ABAYOMI, AN INTEGRATED SECURITY EXPERT WROTE IN FROM WUSE, FCT Nigerias Chief of Army Staff, Farouk Yahaya, has visited the site of the Abuja-Kaduna train attack which took place on Monday night. Army spokesperson, Onyema Nwachukwu, made this known in a statement on Tuesday. PREMIUM TIMES reported how bandits planted explosives on the train track and immobilised it around Kateri and Rijana at about 8 p.m. The Managing Director of the Nigerian Railway Corporation NRC), Fidet Okhiria, also confirmed the attack but said details were still sketchy. We have confirmed the attack, but we cannot give you much information right now. From the reports we have gotten, most of the passengers have gone into hiding and the officials on board are yet to give us a report of the situation. In the statement by the army, Mr Yahayas visit was to assess the security situation in the area and to evaluate the damage on the immobilised train. He was accompanied by some principal staff officers at the Army Headquarters and the General Officer Commanding 1 Division. Read full statement: COAS ON ASSESSMENT VISIT TO SCENE OF KADUNA-ABUJA TRAIN ATTACK Orders troops to intensity Search and Rescue Operations, Hunt down terrorists The Chief of Army Staff (COAS)Lieutenant General Faruk Yahaya has today 29 March 2022 visited the scene of Kaduna Abuja train attack. The COAS, who was accompanied by some principal staff officers of the Army Headquarters and the General Officer Commanding 1 Division, on arrival at scene, assessed the security situation around the general area of the attack and inspected the attacked train, as well as the rail track to evaluate the degree of damage. He ordered the troops of the NA and other security agencies to intensify their search and rescue operations to ensure that the kidnapped victims are rescued unconditionally. The COAS has also assured Nigerians that the troops will be undeterred and vehement in the fight against banditry and other forms of criminality. He urged members of the surrounding communities and all Nigerians to continue to avail troops with credible information to enhance their operations across the country. Gen Yahaya observed that the attack reverberates the need for critical stakeholders to review the security of railways across the country in order to achieve the desired security architecture for railway transportation. ONYEMA NWACHUKWU Brigadier General Director Army Public Relations 29 March 2022 The Village Head of Aka community, Aka Offot in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Francis Udo, has condemned the incessant damage of government properties in primary schools in the metropolis by hoodlums. Mr Udo said this while speaking with reporters in Uyo on Tuesday on the dilapidated state of the schools in his domain. He described the vandalism and rampant stealing of properties belonging to the schools as alarming. Mr Udo said at least two persons had been arrested in connection with the vandalism, while one was discovered dead inside the school ceiling after being suffocated while trying to escape. Though some of the suspects escaped by jumping through the school fence, the long arms of the law will one day catch up with all of them. The stealing and wanton destruction of school properties at government primary school, Aka Offot in Obio Imo is very pathetic. It has continued for a long time now, in spite of the governments intervention to salvage the situation. One thing is sure, those responsible will be apprehended and made to face the wrath of the law, he said. Mr Udo, however, appealed to the relevant authorities to come to their assistance. We have tried our best. Two have been jailed as a result of the vandalism, while one has also died as he tried to escape. We are calling on the state government to as matter of urgency erect high rise perimeter fence to reduce, if not eradicate future occurrences of such menace, he added. An official in the government primary school said the vandalism started since year 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. According to her, before the lockdown, the school was in order, as desks provided for the pupils were intact and the roofs were not removed. READ ALSO: Akwa Ibom teachers suspend strike She said almost all the desks, tables and chairs, including roofing sheets, were removed before they could resume after the lockdown. This room was full of windows and doors, but when we vacated around 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, before we resumed we did not see any window. The door and roofs were vandalised. The Commissioner for Education in the state, Idongesit Etiebet, when contacted, promised that the ministry would get the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) to intervene. She promised that SUBEB would look into the situation and address it appropriately. (NAN) The Anambra State Internal Revenue Service (AIRS) said it would commence enforcement of payment of all outstanding tax bills in the state from April 1. Richard Madiebo, the new chairman of AIRS, disclosed this in a statement from Sylvia Tochukwu-Ngige, deputy director/head, Taxpayer Education and Enlightenment Team, in Awka on Tuesday. Mr Madiebo said the enforcement would include social bills, including signage and waste management. NAN reported that the outgone chairman of AIRS, David Nzekwu, had disclosed that the state government had an outstanding bill of N513.9 billion payable by no fewer than 2.1 million taxpayers. Mr Nzekwu said this amount was captured in the database under the Anambra Social Service Identity (ANSSID) number. We have generated a total collectable bill of N513.9 billion as at January 2022 against 2.1 million taxpayers in the state. This means that if my successor can ensure payment of this bill by indebted individuals, and they begin to make payment, the government will have a lot of money, the former chairman had said. Mr Madiebo urged Anambra residents to check the ANSSID portal for their status and, thereafter, proceed with relevant actions of filing and payment. He said those who were yet to pay should go to the nearest commercial bank with their ANSSID number to pay their taxes and/or levies. The enforcement team from AIRS will be enforcing payment of taxes and levies, including Business Premises Permit, Waste Management, Signage and fire service compliance. Anambra residents are advised by this announcement to check their ANSSID status to confirm if they have paid. They can visit any commercial bank of their choice using their ANSSID number to pay, Mr Madiebo said. He advised payers not to leave the pay-point with evidence of payment alone, but to ensure confirmation that the money had dropped into Anambra Governments account. Be a partner in the development that Governor Charles Soludo is bringing to us, please, pay your tax, the AIRS boss urged residents. Mr Madiebo, who was appointed chairman of AIRS on March 21, holds BA and MBA from the Universities of Calabar and Lagos respectively. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria and Nigeria Institute of Management, and has over 25 years experience in tax and revenue administration. Mr Madiebo has attended various executive courses at Harvard Business School, Wharton and Northwestern University, and Kellogg School of Management, U.S. (NAN) Four persons have survived after a container fell off a trailer Monday night, along the LASU-Igando road in Lagos. The accident led to a fire outbreak and four vehicles were burnt, Ibrahim Farinloye, South West Coordinator of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) told PREMIUM TIMES on Tuesday. He said two persons were rescued by the residents in the area and taken to the hospital. while two others escaped. The container fell on two vehicles- a Sienna and a commercial bus with passengers inside in front of Omark School by Dapson Busstop, Akesan, Igando Lagos State, Mr Farinloye said in a statement on Monday. Mr Farinloye said that while efforts to mobilise responders were on, they received news of a fire outbreak at the scene. A third private car was discovered under the fire in the multiple crashes, he said. No death recorded. The national leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, on Tuesday, cancelled the 13th Tinubu Colloquium in commemoration of his 70th birthday. The event, which was holding at the Eko Hotel in Lagos on Tuesday, came to an abrupt end after Mr Tinubu informed the guests in the packed hall that he was shelving the celebration to honour those who died after gunmen attacked an Abuja-Kaduna train on Monday. At least 970 passengers were aboard the train when it was attacked between Katari and Rijana communities. The former governor of Lagos and APC presidential frontrunner called for a minute of silence in honour of those who lost their lives in the attack. Some of those who graced the event were Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos; Iyiola Omisore, the APC national secretary; Aliko Dangote; Femi Otedola, among others. The Tinubu Colloquium is a lavish, annual event held every March 29 to commemorate the APC leaders birthday. Olufemi Bamiro, former vice-chancellor of the University of Ilorin, was billed to deliver the keynote speech at this years event. I have just been informed of a very sad incident in our country. Very sad indeed. Over 60 people and many more were killed and bombed between Kaduna and Abuja just last night, Mr Tinubu said. That is a very serious incident about the security of lives in this country. And it calls for a very serious sober reflection. Mr Tinubu said as a statesman, the national tragedy is not a call for celebration. To be here celebrating, dancing and enjoying myself doesnt show enough concern for a statesman, as a senior citizen of this country. Mr Tinubu urged the Muslim and Christian clerics at the event to pray for the country to overcome its security challenges. To help us win the war of evil, set Nigeria on the right path, bless us and provide guidance to all of us in our various ways, he said. The event, which started around 3 p.m. came to an end an hour later. ISTANBUL, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Russia and Ukraine kicked off a fresh round of face-to-face peace talks here on Tuesday in yet another attempt to reach a ceasefire. Before the meeting, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the time had come for talks to yield concrete results. The Turkish leader called for an immediate ceasefire and said a prolonged conflict is not in anyone's interest. "The world is waiting for good news from you. We are ready for any contribution that can make your job easier," Erdogan said, adding that Turkey is ready to host a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders. Since Feb. 28, Russia and Ukraine have held three rounds of face-to-face peace talks and a series of online discussions, failing to reach a major agreement. Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific deployed Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management to streamline ADA's financial processes and support its digital transformation initiatives to boost business expansion. KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific (HSAP), a leading provider of global industry solutions powered by Microsoft Azure, is delighted to highlight its successful D365 Finance and D365 Supply Chain Management (SCM) implementation with Axiata Digital Advertising (ADA). ADA is a Malaysia-based data and artificial intelligence company known for developing and executing integrated digital, analytics, and marketing solutions with operations across ASEAN and South Asia. To help ADA achieve its strategic growth in the region, they realized the need to replace their legacy ERP systems. Previously using Dynamics NAV on-premises, the company has long outgrown the capabilities of the platform and had to heavily customize it just to suit their business needs. Other legal entities were also using different legacy systems or manual operations. ADA partnered with HSAP to implement D365 Finance and SCM across 11 legal entities in 9 countries within South and Southeast Asia. HSAP developed a global template and rolled out the new system in a big bang approach unifying ADA's business financial practices into one platform. Dynamics 365 Finance helped enable its users to seamlessly work on their day-to-day activities and has improved financial consolidation and month-end close processes. ADA is now able to complete closing faster as compared to the previous 12 to 15 days after month-end close, audit requirements are satisfied. Utilizing Azure cloud, ADA plans to further expand their use of D365 Finance and SCM as they gear for business expansion, both in terms of geography and scope of business. "Dynamics 365 armed us with all the necessary capabilities to help simplify our operations and eliminate manual processes across our entities," said Stephen Tan, ADA's Head of Program Management. "Our partnership with Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific and Microsoft enabled us to remain competitive in this rapidly evolving industry landscape by helping us better serve our clients while empowering our employees in utilizing a powerful cloud ERP platform." This deployment displayed HSAP's established partnership with ADA by swiftly delivering value through its best practices and expertise despite the pandemic. The project also marks a huge milestone for HSAP as this is its first implementation in the advertising industry and the team's first ERP project in newly touched base regions such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, and South Korea. "Our team is thrilled to support ADA in digitizing its financial processes with D365 which resolved its business pains in the best way possible," said Bimal Pandya, Vice President of Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific. "With this successful implementation, we continue to provide ADA impactful guidance in helping its operation thrive towards transformation." About Axiata Digital Advertising ADA is a data and artificial intelligence company that designs and executes integrated digital, analytics, and marketing solutions. Operating across 10 markets in South and Southeast Asia, ADA partners with leading brands to drive their digital and data maturity and achieve their business goals. ADA complements its unique digital expertise with deep proprietary data of 375 million consumers. About Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific helps its customers successfully compete with the largest global enterprises using powerful, easy-to-use, and affordable industry solutions built on the Microsoft Cloud. Hitachi Solutions provides global capabilities with regional offices in the United States, Canada, Europe, India/Middle East, Japan, and Asia Pacific. For more information, please visit: https://global.hitachi-solutions.com/. Media Contact: Nina Gonzales Associate Director Marketing Hitachi Solutions Asia Pacific info@hitachisolutions.com Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1774643/Hitachi_Logo.jpg SOURCE Hitachi Solutions REDDING, Calif., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a new market research report titled, "Diagnostic Specialty Antibodies Market by Type (Primary, Secondary), Clonality (Monoclonal, Polyclonal), Technique (WB, Rapid Test, IHC), Conjugate, and Application (Dengue, Malaria, Hepatitis, HIV, E. coli , Tuberculosis, Pneumonia)- Forecast to 2029", published by Meticulous Research, the diagnostic specialty antibodies market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.6% from 20222029 to reach $39.99 Billion by 2029. Download Free Sample Report Now @ https://www.meticulousresearch.com/download-sample-report/cp_id=5241 The diagnostic specialty antibodies market is growing on account of the high burden of infectious and chronic diseases globally, increasing funding for clinical trials and research, increasing use of immunoassays in oncology, technological advancements in immunology, and high adoption of self-testing pregnancy detection kits. Further, initiatives by public and private organizations to increase COVID-19 testing offered many opportunities for market growth. In addition, untapped opportunities in emerging economies also offer favorable opportunities for market growth. Based on the type, the primary antibodies segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the overall diagnostic specialty antibodies market in 2022. High preference for primary antibodies over secondary antibodies owing to their property to bind directly to the antigen of interest is the key factor driving its demand in the market. The adoption of conjugated primary antibodies is higher in clinical diagnostics than secondary antibodies for different assays such as western blotting, ELISA, and IHC. Further, conjugated primary antibodies are expensive as compared to unconjugated or secondary antibodies. Thus, the high adoption and high cost of the primary antibodies contribute to the largest share of the market. Based on clonality, the monoclonal antibodies segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the overall diagnostic specialty antibodies market in 2022. Monoclonal antibodies have enabled faster and more accurate clinical testing of numerous diseases. Monoclonal antibodies have become the intrinsic component in the over-the-counter pregnancy test kits. Further, the mAbs are also used in cardiac marker testing, blood screening for infectious diseases, and for blood and tissue typing. The sensitivity and specificity of monoclonal antibodies in the detection, the regulatory approvals, the introduction of new diagnostic kits containing monoclonal antibodies, and the new launches of monoclonal antibodies are some other factors driving its adoption. Quick Buy Diagnostic Specialty Antibodies Market - Global Opportunity Analysis And Industry Forecast (2022-2029) : https://www.meticulousresearch.com/Checkout/48285559 Based on the technique, the ELISA segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the overall diagnostic specialty antibodies market in 2022. ELISA test is sensitive and used in the detection of proteins using small amounts of samples. Technological developments in ELISA techniques and the regulatory approvals and launches of ELISA-based diagnostic kits are further driving the adoption of antibodies for ELISA. Based on conjugate, the unconjugated antibodies segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the market in 2022. The highest share of this segment is attributed to the high preference for unconjugated primary antibodies in assays owing to its property of specifically binding to the antigen of interest, less flexibility of conjugated primary antibodies in assays, and new product launches of unconjugated antibodies. Based on application, the infectious disease testing segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the overall diagnostic specialty antibodies market in 2022. The high prevalence of infectious diseases, government initiatives to improve diagnostic testing, and funding by the public and private organizations to improve early diagnosis are the key factors contributing to the largest market share of this segment. The infectious diseases segment includes parasitic infections, blood borne infections, GI infections, respiratory infections, and other infections like skin infections, group A streptococcal (GAS) disease, and meningitis. In the infectious diseases testing segment, the respiratory diseases segment is likely to account for the largest share of the market in 2022. The growing testing of COVID-19 using immunoassays is a key factor driving the growth of this segment. However, in terms of growth, the market size for respiratory infections is likely to decline by 2029, with a CAGR of 3.3%, over the forecast period. Further, the market size of the COVID-19 segment is projected to decline by 2029, with a CAGR of 16.4%, over the forecast period. With the growing administration of vaccines against COVID-19, the incidence of the same is likely to reduce over the period, negatively impacting the COVID-19 testing. The COVID-19 test kit manufacturers like Abbott (U.S) are projecting that the sales in the COVID-19 testing segment are likely to decline owing to the faster drop in the demand to a seasonal flu-like trend. Geographically, in 2022, North America is estimated to account for the largest share of the global diagnostic specialty antibodies market, followed by Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa. Regulatory approvals and launches of antibodies or test kits containing diagnostic antibodies for COVID-19 and high disease burden due to diseases like cancer, COVID-19, hepatitis, flu, and HIV are primarily driving the market growth. Moreover, the availability of research funding for the studies for the diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's, and COVID-19 is also supporting the market growth. Moreover, market developments like partnership agreements between the industry stakeholders for developing and increasing COVID-19 testing will further boost demand for diagnostic antibodies. Some of the prominent players operating in the global diagnostic specialty antibodies market are Abcam plc (U.K.), F. Hoffman La Roche Ltd. (Switzerland), Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (U.S.), Creative Diagnostics (U.S.), Merck KGaA (Germany), Agilent Technologies, Inc.( U.S.), Becton, Dickinson and Company (U.S.), Rockland Immunochemicals, Inc.(U.S.), Santa Cruz Biotechnology (U.S.), Novus Biologicals, LLC(U.S.), and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc . (U.S.) among others. Browse in-depth TOC on "Diagnostic Specialty Antibodies Market - Global Opportunity Analysis And Industry Forecast (2022-2029)" 246 Tables 39 Figures 290 Pages click here: https://www.meticulousresearch.com/product/diagnostic-specialty-antibodies-market-5241 Scope of the Report: Diagnostic Specialty Antibodies Market, by Type Primary Antibodies Secondary Antibodies Diagnostic Specialty Antibodies Market, by Clonality Monoclonal Antibodies Polyclonal Antibodies Recombinant Antibodies Diagnostic Specialty Antibodies Market, by Technique ELISA Lateral Flow Assay Immunohistochemistry (IHC) Immunoprecipitation (IP) Western Blot (WB) Immunocytochemistry (ICC) Other Techniques (Other techniques include immunofluorescence, flow cytometry, in situ hybridization, dot blot, radioimmunoassay, and others) Diagnostic Specialty Antibodies Market, by Conjugate Conjugated Antibodies Unconjugated Antibodies Diagnostic Specialty Antibodies Market, by Application Infectious Diseases Respiratory Infections COVID-19 Influenza Tuberculosis (TB) Pneumonia Other Respiratory Infections (Other respiratory infections include strep infections, pertussis, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), among others) Parasitic Infections Dengue Malaria Other Parasitic Infections (Other parasitic infections include leishmaniasis and zika, among others) (Other parasitic infections include leishmaniasis and zika, among others) Gastrointestinal Infections (GI Infections) Salmonellosis Coli Infections Other GI Infections (Other GI infections include cholera, Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), and campylobacteriosis, among others) Blood Borne Diseases Hepatitis HIV Other Blood-Borne Infections (Other blood-borne infections include syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea, among others) Other Infectious Diseases (Other infectious diseases include sepsis, rubella, impetigo, and others) Oncology Pregnancy Detection/Fertility Testing Other Applications (Other applications include Alzheimer's, autoimmune diseases and cardiac diseases, diabetes, and others) Diagnostic Specialty Antibodies Market, by Geography North America U.S. Canada Europe Germany U.K. France Italy Spain Rest of Europe (RoE) (RoE) Asia-Pacific (APAC) (APAC) China Japan India Rest of APAC (RoAPAC) Latin America Middle East & Africa Download Free Sample Report Now @ https://www.meticulousresearch.com/download-sample-report/cp_id=5241 Amidst this crisis, Meticulous Research is continuously assessing the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on various sub-markets and enables global organizations to strategize for the post-COVID-19 world and sustain their growth. Let us know if you would like to assess the impact of COVID-19 on any industry here- https://www.meticulousresearch.com/custom-research Related Reports: In Vitro Diagnostic (IVD) Reagents Market by Type (Antibodies, Oligonucleotide, Nucleic Acid Probe), Technology (Immunoassay, Hematology, Microbiology), Use (Research, Analyte Specific Reagent), End User (IVD Manufacturer, Clinical Laboratory) - Global Forecasts to 2027 https://www.meticulousresearch.com/product/in-vitro-diagnostic-reagents-market-5110 Research Antibodies and Reagents Market by Product {Antibodies [Type (Primary, Secondary), Production, Source, Research Area (Oncology, Neurology)], Reagents}, Technology (ELISA, Western Blot), Application, End User (Pharma, Academia) - Global Forecasts to 2027 https://www.meticulousresearch.com/product/research-antibodies-reagents-market-5055 Immunoassay Market by Product & Solutions (Immunoassay Kits {ELISA, Rapid Tests}, Immunoassay Analyzers, Software & Services), Platform (Chemiluminescence, Radioimmunoassay), Application (Infectious Diseases, Oncology, Allergy), End User - Forecasts to 2028 https://www.meticulousresearch.com/product/immunoassay-market-4982 Infectious Disease Diagnostics Market by Product and Solution (Consumables, System, Software and Services), Technology (Immunodiagnostics, PCR, INAAT), Disease (HIV, HAIS, Influenza), End User (Hospital, Reference Lab, Research) - Global Forecasts to 2027 https://www.meticulousresearch.com/product/infectious-disease-diagnostics-market-4976 About Meticulous Research Meticulous Research was founded in 2010 and incorporated as Meticulous Market Research Pvt. Ltd. in 2013 as a private limited company under the Companies Act, 1956. Since its incorporation, the company has become the leading provider of premium market intelligence in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa. The name of our company defines our services, strengths, and values. Since the inception, we have only thrived to research, analyze, and present the critical market data with great attention to details. With the meticulous primary and secondary research techniques, we have built strong capabilities in data collection, interpretation, and analysis of data including qualitative and quantitative research with the finest team of analysts. We design our meticulously analyzed intelligent and value-driven syndicate market research reports, custom studies, quick turnaround research, and consulting solutions to address business challenges of sustainable growth. Contact: Mr. Khushal Bombe Meticulous Market Research Inc. 1267 Willis St, Ste 200 Redding, California, 96001, U.S. USA: +1-646-781-8004 Europe : +44-203-868-8738 APAC: +91 744-7780008 Email- sales@meticulousresearch.com Visit Our Website: https://www.meticulousresearch.com/ Connect with us on LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/company/meticulous-research Content Source: https://www.meticulousresearch.com/pressrelease/462/diagnostic-specialty-antibodies-market-2029 Logo: https://www.meticulousresearch.com/download-sample-report/cp_id=5241 SOURCE Meticulous Market Research Pvt. Ltd - Full 2021 UK Flanders export figures released by Flanders Investment & Trade& Investment - Record high in 2021 for total Flanders exports as Flanders maintains its status as a key partner and powerhouse for commerce in Europe for UK businesses - Strong recovery in UK exports to Flanders following 15.8% fall in 2020 post-Brexit but some sectors continue to struggle - More uncertain road ahead in 2022 as businesses navigate further post-Brexit measures in 2022 and uncertain global outlook BRUSSELS, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Flanders Investment & Trade, the official government body for the Flanders region, has published its full-year trade figures for 2021, which reveal that UK exports to Flanders are showing signs of recovery from their post-Brexit decline but some sectors continue to struggle. While UK exports to Flanders initially slumped by 15.8% in 2020 following the UK's formal departure from the EU, UK exports to the region increased by a significant 18% in 2021 to a total value of 14,398,848,000. However, the outlook for 2022 looks more uncertain as UK businesses navigate new and far-reaching post-Brexit measures and global geo-political uncertainty. Flanders, the northern region of Belgium, has since established itself as an important gateway to the European single market for UK businesses following Brexit in January 2020. Many UK sectors, including precious stones and metals and jewelry (+169%) and plastics and plastic items (+70.96%) have seen exports to Flanders grow during 2021. In the food and drink sector, while meat and fish have seen a decline in exports, milk and dairy products have seen a 20% increase. In January 2021, Flanders announced record levels of investment from UK companies in the region. There has been a 63.33% increase in British companies investing in Flanders in 2021 vs 2020, the fourth consecutive annual increase. Many UK businesses have chosen to set up a base in the region as a strategic single-entry point to export to other EU countries, due to Flanders' excellent transport connections and location in the heart of Europe's commercial and industrial centres. Despite the overall improvement in exports to Flanders in 2021, some sectors of the UK economy have continued to see a decline in exports to Flanders, including the automotive sector (-11%) and the textiles sector, with clothing and accessories down 41.3%. However, these sectors have also been impacted by the pandemic and other global manufacturing trends. Astrid Geeraerts, Head of Investment at Flanders Investment & Trade (FIT) commented; "While Brexit immediately disrupted business on both sides of the Channel in 2020, British entrepreneurship has won out and exports to Flanders are recovering. "FIT has been actively supporting many UK businesses, with our partners in both Flanders and the UK, to help businesses navigate the many challenges that Brexit has presented to exporters to the EU over the past two years. We're proud that so many UK businesses are successfully exporting to customers in Flanders and Europe following Brexit." SOURCE Onyx Media With Australian wages and energy prices amongst the highest in the world, producing affordable medical cannabis locally has proven to be a challenge. This has become a big issue for patients who pay over 200 Australian Dollars for a monthly dose, available only under prescription. Unlike in Germany - where cannabis is covered by health insurance - patients "down under" pay for their medicine out of pocket. "This limits access to medical cannabis to the well-heeled or those willing to take the risk to buy more cheaply from the black market," says Zugel. Foliumed's shipment consists of pharmaceutical cannabis ingredients produced at its Colombian cultivation site at the foothills of the Andes. "With ideal climatic conditions, our energy consumption is minimal and we grow the plants organically," says FoliuMed co-founder and LATAM CEO Diego Felipe Navarro. "Our teams in Colombia and Germany have worked for over a year with our customer, the health authorities and the Colombian government to ensure we adhere to the strict quality standards imposed by the Australian drug regulator TGA." The TGA recently further increased the quality demands on medical cannabis imports making them comparable to how pharmaceutical products must be manufactured locally and in Europe. "Given our German operations are EU-GMP certified, we offer Australian importers a full range of affordable solutions compliant with the new regulations," explains Zugel. About FoliuMed FoliuMed is an international cannabis company with EU-GMP manufacturing operations in Germany sourcing cannabis ingredients from its organic cultivation in Colombia. It provides a broad range of affordable and efficacious pharma-grade cannabis medicines "made in Germany." The company is one of the few EU-GMP cannabis soft gel manufacturers in the world supplying customers in eight countries on three continents. Foliumed also works as a contract manufacturer and white label producer for some of the leading cannabis players in Germany, Australia, the US and South America. www.foliumed.com Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1764719/FoliuMed_Diego_Felipe_Navarro.jpg SOURCE FoliuMed Holdings Support to accelerate the pace of research and discovery LONDON, March 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Clarivate Plc (NYSE: CLVT), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, today launched a package of valuable Clarivate resources of software tools, information and insights to support displaced researchers from Ukraine. The resource center also contains news and content to help raise the profile, knowledge and understanding of Ukraine across the world. The launch of these resources follows the statement made by Clarivate, that it will cease all commercial activities in Russia, issued March 11. An online dedicated resource center will provide immediate access to the following solutions and content, as Ukraine seeks to accelerate the pace of their research and discovery. ProQuest Books curated 200+ titles focused on Ukraine , available now with unlimited access via the latest Open Access Complete collection on Ebook Central. This growing list of interdisciplinary titles covers subjects such as humanities, social science, business and STEM from a wide and growing number of supportive publishers including Taylor and Francis, McGill Queens, Greenhaven, Rosen, Springer Nature, Wolters Kluwer Law International, CEU Press, Cavendish Square, ABDO, Peter Lang , University of Nebraska Press, Harvard University Press, Jagiellonian University Press, L'Harmattan, and more. , available now with unlimited access via the latest Open Access Complete collection on Ebook Central. This growing list of interdisciplinary titles covers subjects such as humanities, social science, business and STEM from a wide and growing number of supportive publishers including Taylor and Francis, McGill Queens, Greenhaven, Rosen, Springer Nature, Wolters Kluwer Law International, CEU Press, Cavendish Square, ABDO, , Press, Press, Jagiellonian University Press, L'Harmattan, and more. A new displaced researcher program to ensure continued access to the Web of Science for researchers and students affiliated to Ukrainian institutions, who do not have their usual IP range access to the citation index. As the world's most trusted publisher-independent global citation database, it is home to an unrivalled breadth of world-class research literature linked to a rigorously selected core of journals. Continued access will enable Ukrainian researchers to track ideas across disciplines and time from almost 1.9 billion cited references from over 171 million records. Clarivate is providing extended roaming access and offering accounts for researchers to ensure continued access to provide immediate assistance to the Ukrainian research community. All higher education institutions in Ukraine will be able to freely access the RapidILL interlibrary loan system created by Ex Libris. It will enable all researchers to have the ability to access the collections of a global community of knowledge from more than 500 libraries. With many researchers, librarians and students unable to reach their university buildings; RapidILL will enable them to access materials quickly and easily from their new remote locations. will be able to freely access the created by Ex Libris. It will enable all researchers to have the ability to access the collections of a global community of knowledge from more than 500 libraries. With many researchers, librarians and students unable to reach their university buildings; RapidILL will enable them to access materials quickly and easily from their new remote locations. Clarivate is making its authoritative, editorially-independent news, analysis and commentary on the Ukraine crisis available to the global academic research community. Articles from journalists at Research Professional News will be free to read globally, to help the academic community understand the impact of Russia's invasion on international research partnerships and funding. It also includes guidance on how they can support researchers affected by the conflict, by Oksana Seumenicht , a co-founder of the Ukrainian Academic International Network. Jerre Stead, Executive Chair and CEO at Clarivate said, "I am extremely proud that Clarivate responded rapidly and decisively to join the wide international response to show support for Ukraine. We share the world-wide concerns for Ukraine, now and in the future, and recognize the role we can play in supporting them to accelerate the pace at which they can research and develop, in order to innovate." Clarivate continues to support calls for a cease-fire, the end to hostilities, the protection of civilians, and a negotiated settlement to peacefully resolve any differences and to avoid further needless devastation and loss of life for the Ukrainian people. About Clarivate Clarivate is a global leader in providing solutions to accelerate the lifecycle of innovation. Our bold mission is to help customers solve some of the world's most complex problems by providing actionable information and insights that reduce the time from new ideas to life-changing inventions in the areas of Academia & Government, Life Sciences & Healthcare, Professional Services and Consumer Goods, Manufacturing & technology. We help customers discover, protect and commercialize their inventions using our trusted subscription and technology-based solutions coupled with deep domain expertise. For more information, please visit clarivate.com. Media Contact: Lisa Hulme, Head of Global External Communications, [email protected] Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1159266/Clarivate_Logo.jpg SOURCE Clarivate Plc All American Label & Packaging has merged with Western Shield Label and Packaging, Expanding Product and Service Offerin Tweet this "We are excited to join forces with the deep bench of wonderful and talented people at Western Shield. We have evaluated several opportunities in the market, and none had the kind of sales and operational synergies we see here," commented Brad Brown, Founder, All American Label & Packaging. "We were pleased to support AALP and Western Shield with this transformational merger," said Demetrios Dounis, Managing Director, Heartwood Partners. "The combination of these businesses makes tremendous sense and creates a number of ways for them to win. Our unique equity-rich capital structure resonated with the management teams and owners of both AALP and Western Shield. Moving forward we anticipate the combined businesses will remain active acquirers in the pressure sensitive labels space." About All American Label & Packaging All American Label & Packaging was born in 1995 out of a need for a premier full-service label company committed to excellence in product and service. Headquartered in Dublin, CA with an additional manufacturing facility in Memphis, TN, AALP provides premium flexographic, digital, and offset labels as well as shrink sleeves, folding cartons, flexible packaging, and grand format signage. Learn more about AALP at www.allamericanlabel.net. About Western Shield Label and Packaging Since 1970, Western Shield Label Company has been providing high end, custom printed labels and packaging for manufacturers, distributors, and brokers in Southern California and throughout the United States, Mexico & Canada. Western Shield specializes in Expanded Content Labels, Instant Redeemable Coupons, and 10 color work. Western Shield has locations in Dallas, TX, Middletown OH, and is headquartered in Rancho Dominguez, CA. For more information on Western Shield Label Company, please call 1866-975-2235 or visit www.westernshield.com. About Heartwood Partners Heartwood Partners is focused on partnering with family and management-owners. Our strategy is focused on providing strategic and financial guidance, human resources development, marketing and eCommerce expertise, and operational assistance to support long-term growth, including organic and acquisition-driven expansion into new products, services, and end markets. Please visit the Heartwood Partners website at www.heartwoodpartners.com to review our approach and investment portfolio. CONTACT: Name: Nizar Elias Email: [email protected] Phone: 424-213-1400 SOURCE Heartwood Partners; All American Label & Packaging; Western Shield Label and Packaging A licensed social worker with extensive oncology experience, James will be a valuable resource for people living with lung cancer WASHINGTON, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- LUNGevity Foundation, the nation's leading lung cancer-focused nonprofit organization, welcomes Angela James, MBA, LMSW, MEd, as its Care Navigator. With over a decade of oncology counseling experience, James will be the first point of contact for those seeking support while offering comprehensive disease information to patients with lung cancer and their families and caregivers. Before joining LUNGevity, James served as a Care Coordinator for Wellthy, where she provided resources to address the various lifestyle and financial challenges often caused by illness. James also worked at AdventHealth as a hospital case manager, where she partnered with medical staff to ensure patients were given the tools necessary to maintain their well-being on discharge from the hospital. "We are excited that Angela is bringing her considerable skills to the Foundation," said Andrea Ferris, LUNGevity's president and CEO. "She understands that this position requires a balance of empathy and resource knowledge, and I know she will make a difference for the many people affected by lung cancer who trust us for assistance." James received a Bachelor of Science in psychology from the University of Southern Mississippi before earning a Master of Education from William Carey College. She also earned an MBA from Strayer University and a Master of Social Work from the University of Southern California. About LUNGevity LUNGevity Foundation is the nation's leading lung cancer organization focused on improving outcomes for people with lung cancer through research, policy initiatives, education, support, and engagement for patients, survivors, and caregivers. LUNGevity seeks to make an immediate impact on quality of life and survivorship for everyone touched by the diseasewhile promoting health equity by addressing disparities throughout the care continuum. LUNGevity works tirelessly to advance research into early detection and more effective treatments, provide information and educational tools to empower patients and their caregivers, promote impactful public policy initiatives, and amplify the patient voice through research and engagement. The organization provides an active community for patients and survivorsand those who help them live longer and better lives. Comprehensive resources include a medically vetted and patient-centric website, a toll-free HELPLine for support, the International Lung Cancer Survivorship Conference, and an easy-to-use Clinical Trial Finder, among other tools. All of these programs are to achieve our visiona world where no one dies of lung cancer. LUNGevity Foundation is proud to be a four-star Charity Navigator organization. Please visit www.LUNGevity.org to learn more. About Lung Cancer in the US About 1 in 16 Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer in their lifetime. More than 235,000 people in the US will be diagnosed with lung cancer this year. About 60%-65% of all new lung cancer diagnoses are among people who have never smoked or are former smokers. Lung cancer takes more lives than the next three leading cancers (colorectal, breast, and prostate) combined. Only 22% of all people diagnosed with lung cancer will survive 5 years or more, BUT if it's caught before it spreads, the chance of 5-year survival improves dramatically. SOURCE LUNGevity Foundation Leading crypto mining firm opens first ever customer centric turnkey operation in Belfry, Kentucky NEW YORK, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Blockware Solutions (BWS), an industry leader in blockchain infrastructure and cryptocurrency mining, is excited to announce the opening of its flagship facility in Belfry, KY. The new 20-Megawatt data center will facilitate professional mining that will give individual customers total control over their own mining activities. The data center, which has been testing with select customers since January 2022, will be one of the only locations that is built, operated, and managed for individual customers and not as just a self-mining enterprise. After working closely with the local and state government, Blockware Solutions' new location will help revitalize the Belfry community with well-paying jobs, generous benefit packages, and tap into unused electricity to ensure power is being efficiently utilized. "Since the company's founding in 2017, Blockware Solutions has seen tremendous growth. As we continue our journey, we are excited to open our new location that is going to help support the local Belfry community with impactful job opportunities in this new sector," said Mason Jappa, CEO and co-founder of Blockware Solutions. "Abandoned and forgotten by a once thriving coal industry, our new location will help tap into home-grown resources, as we look to help reinvigorate the community with a burgeoning industry. We are proud to unveil our new project as we stand alongside our local and state partners to bring the lucrative and emerging crypto mining market to Belfry." "It is my hope that a region known for mining coal will now benefit from this different type of mining," Kentucky State Representative Angie Hatton said. "It means a lot to see Blockware Solutions invest here and create these jobs, and I also hope that its significant electricity needs will help stabilize our steep residential rates. It would mean the world if our families could save money while Blockware Solutions is literally creating it." "The impact this facility will have on the local community and job creation is monumental," said Zach Staton, President of Cyber Innovation Group, a subsidiary of Blockware Solutions. "To have a large tech company invest capital into Belfry is paramount to combat the loss of the coal industry and the subsequent rampant poverty and job loss. With high paying jobs and a reliable industry, we are excited to welcome Blockware." The company's new location will allow people to co-locate rigs in a state of the art 20-megawatt center, with the potential to service up to 75 megawatts. This is the first of three planned Kentucky sites as the company is currently scouting additional locations to expand its presence in the state. Blockware Solutions has already locked down the power assets needed to continue growing and serving clients for long term, multi-year deals that gives them total control over their mining destiny. About Blockware Solutions Blockware Solutions is a first of its kind operation that gives global Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency miners a turnkey solution to access an emerging and fast-growing market. Blockware offers mining rig hardware procurement, mining rig colocation services (owned and operated by the firm), professional mining, pool operation, and staking / validator / master node operations. The company has sold over 250,000 mining rigs since its launch in 2017, placed over 250 MW's of hosting clients, mined thousands of Bitcoin, and publishes Proprietary Research through it's research arm Blockware Intelligence, which has been translated in over 15 languages and has garnished millions of views. For more information, visit: https://www.blockwaresolutions.com/. SOURCE Blockware Solutions MOSCOW, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova called Washington's military biological activities in Ukraine a "devil's plan," Russia's RIA Novosti news agency reported Sunday. "There are too many gaps in this diabolical plan that still have to be filled," Zakharova said. Russia's Defense Ministry said earlier that the United States invested more than 200 million U.S. dollars in Ukrainian biolaboratories, according to the report. In this context, Russia will not rule out the possibility of launching a verification mechanism under the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, Zakharova said earlier. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that the laboratories in Ukraine were only a small fraction of more than 300 U.S.-funded laboratories currently scattered all over the world, adding that Russia would reveal new documents on their activities, the report said. CoAdvantage now headquartered in Bradenton, FL, has continued to grow into one of the top PEO's in the nation under the leadership of CEO Clinton Burgess, who took over the role in 2017. In 2021, the company announced the launch of CoAdQuantum, the company's proprietary HR platform with a built-in payroll processing engine, and successfully completed their 7 th consecutive Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE) Type 2 SOC 1 examination in January of 2022. "As a leader in the industry for over two decades, CoAdvantage is proud to celebrate such a significant milestone," said Burgess. "We continue to push towards innovations that help the small business owner ease the burden of the complexity in areas of payroll, benefits, human resources, risk management, and data security." Coadvantage currently serves more than 4000 client companies with employees in all 50 states. The company continued the expansion of its national footprint with the opening of new locations in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Nashville, Tennessee while actively exploring new acquisition opportunities. About CoAdvantage CoAdvantage is a leading Professional Employer Organization (PEO) that offers small and mid-sized businesses a comprehensive package of human resource solutions, enabling them to reduce their administrative burden and access affordable employee benefits. The company integrates payroll and tax processing, employee benefit plan administration, risk management, government compliance, and other human resources services into a single vendor solution that is exceptionally efficient and effective. To learn more, visit www.coadvantage.com. CONTACT: Megan Wheeler, 205-868-1557, [email protected] SOURCE CoAdvantage Cortex Launches New User Interface Rooted in Behavioral Science to Accelerate Building Decarbonization Initiatives NASHVILLE, Tenn. , March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cortex Sustainability Intelligence has launched its newest in-platform update featuring a new user interface (UI), allowing users to more easily process and implement critical data-driven recommendations delivered by the decarbonization platform. The new UI's design is intentionally rooted in both behavioral science and machine learning a testament to their ever-deepening commitment to making it easier and faster for office buildings across North America to decarbonize. "Cortex truly believes that human intuition and engineering skill combined with hard data and machine-learning produces more meaningful results,"said Haris Shafiq, Head of Product at Cortex. "Our UI is a vehicle that bridges the gap between the expertise of our engineers' relationship with their building and the data our platform uses." The Cortex product and development teams worked diligently for months to test and collect feedback about how to design a more intuitive and effective in-app user experience. Users can expect a new navigation, added features such as proactive seasonal reminders for equipment updates and maintenance, and more. Creating Accessible Sustainability in the Built World In the crowded space of climate tech, Cortex understands that results matter most and that generating substantial results for their customers is the fastest way to accomplishing their mission of reducing 1 KwH of energy every year. "These platform updates encompass what we care about most as an organization: enabling our customers to decarbonize their office buildings. This new UI will give our engineers the easiest possible way to trust that they're doing the right thing," said Shafiq. "We're always striving to reinforce transparency and confidence in our platform's recommendations." The Cortex platform currently processes trillions of data points for their customers to provide actionable recommendations, tasks lists, and reports to building engineers to improve operating efficiency and reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. About Cortex Sustainability Intelligence: Cortex Sustainability Intelligence's machine learning platform enables CRE professionals to decarbonize their office buildings while improving GRESB scores, reducing operating expenses, and increasing asset value without the need to invest in new, costly equipment or hardware. To learn more about Cortex or to get a custom decarbonization plan for your portfolio, please visit: www.cortexintel.com. For more information, please contact Victoria O'Campo at [email protected]. Media Contact: Victoria O'Campo Cortex Sustainability Intelligence Content Marketing Manager [email protected] SOURCE Cortex Sustainability Intelligence MINNEAPOLIS, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Travel is coming back! After a long two years, it's finally looking like the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to recede. Americans are now starting to plan their " revenge travel." The experts at Yonder Travel Insurance, a travel insurance comparison website, review popular tourist destinations starting to ease their entry requirements for both vaccinated and unvaccinated travelers. Destinations for Vaccinated Travelers While more countries are dropping a negative COVID-19 test for entry, proof that you've been fully vaccinated is still required to enter a good number of countries. European countries continue to drop entry requirements for vaccinated travelers. Italy just announced that the mask mandates and green pass requirements in indoor settings will be lifted on May 1st, while Spain is indicating they will lift their COVID-19 restrictions and mask mandate soon after Easter (04/17). The Caribbean saw a huge boost in tourism in the past year, compared to other popular tourist destinations in previous years. "We've seen a dramatic increase in quotes for travel to Caribbean countries such as the US Virgin Islands and French Polynesia," says Terry Boynton, Co-Founder and President of Yonder. "In comparison to early 2020 and 2021 quote data, there are now 20x more quotes being run for these destinations thus far in 2022." Destinations for Unvaccinated Travelers There are still a limited number of countries that will allow unvaccinated travelers to enter without a negative COVID-19 test within 2-3 days of departure, but the list is growing. Starting April 1st, Costa Rica will drop almost all of their pretty intense entry requirements , including providing proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test. Other notable tourist destinations that no longer have entry requirements for unvaccinated travelers are Iceland, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. COVID-19 Specific Travel Insurance Coverage With a negative COVID-19 test still being required for re-entry to the United States, travel insurance is still more important than ever! Whether it be COVID-19 medical or quarantine expenses, travel insurance may help reimburse you for those unforeseen expenses if you test positive while on your trip. Run an instant travel insurance quote to compare the best policy options available for your trip. Contact: Beckah Morris, Operations & Marketing Director (855-358-6438) [email protected] SOURCE Yonder Travel Insurance WOONSOCKET, R.I., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- CVS Health and Fresno Housing have collaborated to build new affordable housing in Fresno, California. Through Red Stone Equity Partners, CVS Health will invest an estimated $18.4 million into the Arthur @ Blackstone, a new Fresno Housing development planning to break ground this spring. Twenty of the units at the Arthur @ Blackstone will be reserved for special needs tenants, specifically transition age youth considered to be chronically homeless, homeless, or at-risk of becoming chronically homeless. This includes youth who are aging out of the foster care system, transitioning from institutions, and youth with a history of involvement in the justice system. The remaining units will target low-income families. In addition, residents will benefit from comprehensive case management and full wrap around supportive services coordinated by the Fresno County Department of Behavioral Health and various contracted service providers. The Arthur @ Blackstone is part of CVS Health's commitment to addressing housing insecurities in the Fresno community and is one of three housing investments CVS Health has made with Fresno Housing over the past three years. Through investment funds sponsored by Red Stone Equity Partners, in 2019, CVS Health made a $4.6 million investment in Villages at Paragon and in 2020, announced it was investing $2.1 million in the Villages at Broadway. "To make a meaningful impact, we need to address social determinants of health at the local level and be intentional with our approach," said Jeff Hermosillo, California Market President, Aetna, a CVS Health company. "We're committed to investing in the Fresno community and meeting the needs of individuals and families by providing them with resources that enable equal opportunity for achieving good health." This investment will continue to deepen the successful collaboration between Fresno Housing and CVS Heath to reduce health disparities and advance health equity through quality, affordable housing. The Arthur @ Blackstone will consist of 41 housing units near Manchester Center in Fresno and will include a space where supportive services will be provided that aim to improve health outcomes for the residents. "We know that when families have access to affordable housing, they are better able to improve their physical, mental, and emotional health. That's why our partnership with CVS Health is exciting and innovative for the families we serve in our community. We are honored to be selected by CVS Health again to further our mission to provide affordable, healthy housing throughout Fresno County," said Tyrone Roderick Williams, Chief Executive Officer, Fresno Housing. Fresno Housing has been integrating the worlds of health and housing for the past 20 years by providing affordable housing and supportive services for over 4,000 families in Fresno County. Through CVS Health's new Health Zones initiative, Fresno Housing and other local partners, including Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission, Clinica Sierra Vista, and the Central California Food Bank, are helping to improve health outcomes and build healthier communities in Fresno by addressing social determinants of health, including housing, education, access to food, labor, transportation, and health care access. As part of CVS Health's overall commitment to advance health equity in America, it invested $185 million in affordable housing nationwide in 2021 and $1.3 billion over the past 20 years, including $37.2 million in affordable housing in Fresno. Through these investments, CVS Health has been able to provide underserved communities with quality housing based on the unique needs of the population. About CVS Health CVS Health is the leading health solutions company, delivering care like no one else can. We reach more people and improve the health of communities across America through our local presence, digital channels and approximately 300,000 dedicated colleagues including more than 40,000 physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and nurse practitioners. Wherever and whenever people need us, we help them with their health whether that's managing chronic diseases, staying compliant with their medications, or accessing affordable health and wellness services in the most convenient ways. We help people navigate the health care system and their personal health care by improving access, lowering costs and being a trusted partner for every meaningful moment of health. And we do it all with heart, each and every day. Learn more at www.cvshealth.com. Media contacts Monica Prinzing 831-241-8294 [email protected] Brandi Borboa Johnson 559-908-7269 [email protected] SOURCE CVS Health Organizations are moving to the cloud in record numbers, with 51 percent of IT spending expected to shift to cloud by 2025. However, at the same time, expanding data regulations and a worsening cyberthreat environment are exacerbating data risks in the cloud. Companies' data is typically housed across multiple environments and repositories, and firms are discovering just how complicated securing their most valuable asset is. Cloud security teams today have a huge blind spot - knowing what sensitive data they are collecting, where it is stored, who is accessing it, and whether it is secure. Current cloud security solutions are not fit-for-purpose as they only focus on infrastructure and identity layers and are data blind. New tools are needed for a new security paradigm and there is a multibillion dollar market opportunity as they are needed by every company using the cloud. Cyera is a cloud-native data security platform which instantly and automatically discovers all of a company's data, across clouds and datastores, and then determines which of that data is sensitive and where it's most at risk, empowering teams to remediate issues. Taking the guesswork out of growing and protecting organizations' single greatest asset, Cyera provides a continuous factual and complete recall of all their data. It is enabling a new Data Reality. Mike Towers, Chief Security Officer at Takeda Pharmaceuticals , said, "My team couldn't believe how easy it was to get Cyera up and running. It instantly discovers the vast amounts of data we have across AWS, assesses the associated risks, and drives swift remediation. It's become a crucial pillar of our cloud security projects." Doug Leone, global managing partner at Sequoia, said, "Cyera takes a new-age approach to solving the growing data security problem in the cloud. We believe Cyera's comprehensive data reality platform will have an incredible impact on securing the cloud, and we look forward to partnering with this world-class team." Cyera's platform can be connected to a company's cloud footprint in minutes, regardless of the underlying data technologies, and map all datastores in the cloud, shining a spotlight into places that CISOs and security teams may not have been able to see before. From there, Cyera parses and classifies this data (including PII) and then surfaces the highest priority risks for remediation with suggested courses of action. Where existing 'cloud security' solutions merely manage the security posture of cloud infrastructure, Cyera provides visibility, intelligence and actionable insights to remediate potential security risks. Cyera was co-founded in 2021 by Yotam Segev, CEO, and Tamar Bar-Ilan, CTO. The two met over a decade ago in the Israeli Defense Forces' (IDF) elite Talpiot leadership academy and served together in the IDF's Unit 8200 where they founded, built, and ran the cloud security division. With a best-in-class product and engineering team, Cyera has already made inroads with multiple Fortune 500 customers and has 50 employees worldwide, including Israel and the US. The investment will be used to develop the functionality and features of the market's leading cloud data security platform, incorporating feedback from customers over the following months. Yotam Segev, Cyera co-founder and CEO, commented, "The hands-on experience leading Unit 8200's cloud security initiative gave us a real sense of both the promise and the challenges in this space. We saw just how fast data moved, replicated, and multiplied in the cloud, and how traditional approaches simply couldn't keep pace." "What Yotam, Tamar and the team have managed to build in under a year is incredible," said Lior Simon, partner of Cyberstarts , which was the seed investor in the company. "Their focus on customers is admirable. Cyera is agentless as time to value is key. It supports AWS, Azure and GCP serving any type of customer including many which have become multi-cloud." Phillipe Botteri, partner at Accel , said, "Cloud data security requires a new approach to addressing the secular growth in data volumes, cloud migration, and risks posed by data regulation and cyber attackers. CISOs and security teams are in need of rapidly deployable, comprehensive and innovative solutions. Cyera is well-positioned to dominate this category with its best-in-class product and world-class team led by Yotam and Tamar, both veterans of the elite Talpiot academy, as they bring data reality to cloud security." About Cyera Cyera gives organizations instant Data Reality, taking the guesswork out of cloud data security. Now security teams have a complete, current, and correct picture of their data reality across all clouds and datastores. Running out-of-band and without agents, Cyera instantly provides companies a strong baseline for all security, risk management, and compliance efforts and ensures the entire organization operates with the same policies and guardrails. Backed by leading investors including Sequoia, Accel, and Cyberstarts, Cyera is defining the way companies do cloud data security. To learn more, visit cyera.io . Contact: Doug Fraim [email protected] SOURCE Cyera Now in its 10 th year, the 2022 list welcomes a record 16 new entries. Japan leads with 11 entries, followed by Thailand with nine and Singapore with seven year, the 2022 list welcomes a record 16 new entries. leads with 11 entries, followed by with nine and with seven Debuting on the list at No.14, Villa Aida in Wakayama, Japan , claims the Highest New Entry Award, sponsored by Aspire Lifestyles in Wakayama, , claims the Rising 14 places to No.13, Ode in Tokyo wins the Highest Climber Award in wins the David Lai of Hong Kong's Neighborhood claims the peer-voted Inedit Damm Chefs' Choice Award of claims the peer-voted Odette in Singapore is this year's recipient of the Gin Mare Art of Hospitality Award in is this year's recipient of the Mume in Taipei wins the Flor de Cana Sustainable Restaurant Award in wins the Maira Yeo from Cloudstreet in Singapore earns the title of Asia's Best Pastry Chef, sponsored by Valrhona In claiming the No.1 spot, Den earns the dual titles of The Best Restaurant in Asia, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna and The Best Restaurant in Japan. Opened in 2007, Den reflects the personality of its chef-owner, Zaiyu Hasegawa. Taking a playful, personal approach to kaiseki cuisine, Hasegawa and his team delight diners with creative presentations and surprising twists on traditional dishes. After entering Asia's 50 Best Restaurants list in 2016 at No.37, Den first appeared on The World's 50 Best Restaurants list the following year, rising to No.11 in 2021. Den is joined in the top three by Bangkok's Sorn (No.2), which claims the title of The Best Restaurant in Thailand for the first time, and Florilege (No.3) in Tokyo, Japan. After taking the No.1 spot in 2021, The Chairman in Hong Kong moves to No.5, retaining the title of The Best Restaurant in China for a third year. William Drew, Director of Content for Asia's 50 Best Restaurants, says: "This year, Den has been crowned No.1 in Asia in recognition of its unique blend of tradition, innovation and playfulness. We are delighted to showcase all the restaurants on the 2022 list and the individual award winners, who inspire us with their creativity, resilience and skill." Media Centre: https://mediacentre.theworlds50best.com/ Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1775729/50_Best_Zaiyu_Hasegawa.jpg PDF - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1773495/50_Best_Asia.pdf Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1746199/50_Best_Asia_2022_Logo.jpg SOURCE 50 Best TORONTO, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Diamond Therapeutics Inc., a drug development company focused on non-psychedelic doses of psilocybin for use in the treatment of mental health, announces the completion of last patient last visit (LPLV) in its Phase 1 clinical trial of low doses of psilocybin. LPLV is the date upon which the last subject completes a clinical study. The study's final patient follow-up visit was March 12, 2022. This randomized, double-blind trial is the first systematic, placebo-controlled, single ascending dose study to investigate very low doses of psilocybin in humans. The study assesses psilocybin's safety and tolerability. The aim is to identify an active, non-psychedelic dosage. For the trial, fifty-six persons were enrolled in seven separate cohorts over four and a half months. A panel of five senior, highly experienced physicians reviewed all safety data as it became available. "Before this study, little proper, controlled research had been done to investigate very low concentrations of psilocybin," says Dr. Michael B. McDonnell, Chief Medical Officer of Diamond. "Diamond's study is robust and well designed with controls for bias and expectancy. It will advance our understanding of the therapeutic potential of very low doses of psilocybin." The trial was conducted in Toronto under the supervision of principal investigator Dr. Isabella Szeto of BioPharma Services Inc., the contract research organization working with Diamond. Diamond anticipates topline results will be available by May 2022, with a complete analysis to follow. "We look forward to sharing the study data as soon as all analysis is complete," says Judy Blumstock, Diamond's founder and CEO. "The results from this landmark trial will catalyze our planned phase two studies. We are closer to achieving our goal of bringing new and better accessible alternative therapeutics to the millions of people struggling with mental health disorders. " About Diamond Therapeutics Diamond Therapeutics is a drug development company based in Toronto, Ontario. Our mission is to develop new and better therapies for mental health conditions by unlocking the promise of psychedelic compounds. Diamond is focused on sub-perceptual, non-hallucinogenic treatments that hold potential for use across a broad patient cohort maximizing the positive impact better drugs can have on global mental health. To learn more about Diamond, visit www.diamondthera.com. Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information This news release includes certain "forward-looking information" under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes statements other than statements of historical fact that can be identified by phrases such as "expects", "anticipates", "intends", "aims", "plans" and "believes", and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, the potential effects of low dose psilocybin and other psychedelic treatments, the potential use in treating mental health conditions and the timing and completion of Diamond's clinical programs and trials. Forward-looking information is necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; delay or failure to receive applicable regulatory approvals; that factors may occur which impede Diamond's future business plans; the results of continued development, marketing and sales; and other factors beyond the control of Diamond. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Diamond disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information in this news release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. SOURCE Diamond Therapeutics Inc. GES, a leading global provider of exhibition services and live event venue services introduces its newest venture Spiro , the brand experience agency for the NEW NOW. Spiro strengthens GES' abilities to manage traditional events and will offer a new set of capabilities that deliver heightened experience dividends for the ways events have now evolved. "The launch of Spiro comes at a very opportune time for our industry and clients," said Spiro's Global President, Jeff Stelmach. "The past two years have reinforced the critical value of events and experiences in connecting people. Now, some people might meet up in one place while others are joining online. Some interactions take place entirely online. It's not about meeting people with similar interests in a single location it's about people with similar interests meeting up in the mediums where they are. We see this not as a hurdle, but rather, as an opportunity to draw even bigger audiences and attract attendees who might never have been able to 'attend' live events before." Skilled in analytic, strategic event management, creative design and production, Spiro sees in-person, virtual and hybrid events alike as opportunities for immersive, interactive storytelling and brand loyalty-building. "There have never been so many ways for businesses to thoughtfully engage with their key audiences and gain access to new ones," said Spiro's Chief Marketing Officer, Carley Faircloth. "One of Spiro's key offerings is creating Communities of Practice a design approach that positions events as catalysts for ongoing community. Through this proprietary approach, experiences are elevated beyond the transactional, to pay dividends to the experience deficit global audiences now face." While Spiro expands capabilities for in-person as well as virtual, hybrid and integrated experiences, GES will continue as a leader in to providing its full spectrum of traditional exhibition services and tradeshows. For more about GES, visit GES.com. For more about Spiro, visit www.ThisIsSpiro.com. About GES GES, a Viad Corp (NYSE: VVI) company with a legacy spanning more than 90 years, is a global live events company providing exhibition services, brand experiences, and live event venue services throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the Middle East. GES offers the right blend of experience, fresh ideas, and deep industry knowledge. The company's award-winning services combined with accommodations, event technology, and innovative tools help you optimize your events - making all aspects of planning and execution simple and worry-free. GES' passionate team of highly skilled experts works side-by-side with you to deliver impactful, creative, and data-driven solutions to capture the full value of your shows. GES partners with leading brands and shows and has been recognized with many prestigious industry awards. For more information, visit www.ges.com. About Spiro Spiro, part of the GES collective and Viad Corp (NYSE: VVI), is a world-class brand experience agency that brings clients' visions to life by redefining human connections with innovation and immersive storytelling for live, virtual, and hybrid experiences all with global scale. Spiro serves some of the world's most valuable brands with a broad range of services, including brand and platform strategy & planning, content creation, exhibit & portfolio management, corporate meetings, conferences & events, product launches, sponsorship activations, and more. For more information on Spiro, part of the GES collective, visit www.ThisIsSpiro.com. Media Contact: Jenn Joseph, The Encore Agency 602-329-8040 [email protected] SOURCE GES MIAMI, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Free SkyTab, the socially-conscious POS company and the leading provider of point-of-sale solutions to tens of thousands of restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and more, is proud to assist restaurateurs and business owners in the collection of much-needed donations for the brave people of Ukraine. "We are proud to offer the Free SkyTab POS software and credit card processing for clients that are collecting donations for the people of Ukraine," stated Olivia Gibbons, Director of Giving for FreeSkyTab.com. "We love doing our part to help others," she concluded. Olivia Gibbons said: "We are helping small businesses, specifically restaurants, raise money for the people of Ukraine, and that's good for everyone." ABOUT FREE SKYTAB: Free SkyTab offers the best-in-breed, cloud-based POS solutions to restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and other retailers that demand the best POS software and hardware solutions. Technology can help improve the profitability of small businesses, facilitate transactions, and deliver change in the global marketplace. MISSION: Free SkyTab is a company with a conscience and is dedicated to offering businesses the best POS products and services, creating jobs in our communities, and creating more opportunities throughout the US, while also recognizing our commitment to our community and affecting positive change and justice by enabling 501c3 non-profit organizations. SOURCE Free SkyTab Proceeds to be used for a phase 3 registration enabling trial with Lybrido. Funding from existing and new investors, reflecting great confidence in the candidate to be evaluated. FSIAD is a type of sexual dysfunction and a recognized unmet medical need with very limited effective treatment options. AMSTERDAM, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Freya Pharma Solutions, a late clinical stage company focusing on the development of effective pharmaceutical therapies for women who have been diagnosed with Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder (FSIAD), today announced to have secured US$8.5 million in new funding from existing and new investors. The new funding will be used to carry out a pivotal phase 3 trial with its therapy Lybrido in 516 patients across Europe. Previously, Lybrido showed clinical relevance and statistical significance in a phase 2b clinical trial, clearly meeting the primary endpoints. The phase 3 trial will start in the second half of 2022, with interim results expected by the second half of 2023. Upcoming pivotal phase 3 trial Freya Pharma Solutions plans to conduct the pivotal phase 3 clinical trial to confirm the efficacy of Lybrido in women suffering from female sexual interest/arousal disorder (FSIAD). Clinical research Organization CR2O BV (www.CR2O.nl) is leading the preparation, execution and reporting of this Phase 3 clinical trial. CR2O is a full-service clinical contract research organization aimed at developing innovative treatments for unmet medical needs. Previous pre-clinical and clinical studies, manufacturing and development of Lybrido were performed according to EU GLP, GMP and GCP regulations. It is anticipated that a Scientific Advice Meeting with the EMA will be held before commencement of the phase 3 trial. The main objective of that meeting would be to confirm acceptability of the phase 3 trial design protocol, as well as the overall clinical development strategy. The phase 3 clinical trial will be conducted within the European Union in accordance with Good Clinical Practices and the ethical principles stated in the Declaration of Helsinki. It will comply with the EU Clinical Trial Regulation (No. 536/2014), all other applicable laws and regulations, as well as requirements of applicable Member States where the study is undertaken. Marcel Wijma, Executive Director of Freya Pharma Solutions comments, "We're delighted with the trust and confidence from our existing and new shareholders in the chances of advancing this groundbreaking therapy for women with FSIAD to the market in due course. And we're fully committed to bringing a therapy for FSIAD to a great number of patients around the world suffering from this distressing disorder." About FSIAD Low sexual desire is consistently reported as the most common sexual complaint in women. As a result, many women are dissatisfied with their sex lives, which often affects their social and emotional wellbeing. FSIAD is a sexual dysfunction that is defined in the 2013 version of the DSM-5 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a publication by the American Psychiatric Association, as a persistent lack or significant reduction of sexual interest and / or arousal. Persons can be medically diagnosed after having a well-defined number of symptoms causing clinically significant distress and which have persisted for a minimum of six months. The disorder is specified by severity level and subtyped into lifelong versus acquired, generalized versus situational. About Lybrido A total of 20 Phase 1 and Phase 2a trials and large-scale Phase 2b trials in 17 research sites in the US have been conducted to date to investigate the efficacy and safety of two novel on-demand pharmacological treatments that have been designed to treat two FSIAD subgroups: women with low sensitivity for sexual cues (Lybrido) and women with dysfunctional over-activation of sexual inhibition (Lybridos). Lybrido increases central sexual motivation and physiological sexual responses, such as swelling of vaginal erectile tissue and lubrication. The therapy can be taken 'on demand' and helps to increase central sexual motivation about 3 to 6 hours after intake. This treatment consists of a novel (dual-route, dual-release, fixed-dose) combination tablet consisting of a testosterone coating for sublingual administration and an inner-core component containing the phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitor sildenafil. The inner-core component is coated with a delayed-release matrix to ensure that the peak plasma concentration of the phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitor coincides with the window of increased sexual motivation induced by the sublingual testosterone. Thus, this combination enables an increase in genital arousal through an increase in responsivity to sexual stimuli. About Freya Pharma Solutions Freya Pharma Solutions is a late clinical stage company focused on developing effective pharmaceutical therapies for female sexual interest/arousal disorder (FSIAD), building upon fifteen years of solid research. The company has two compounds in development, Lybrido and Lybridos, to address the range of potential causes of FSIAD. Based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Freya aims to offer patients a convenient, personalized 'on demand' solution for this recognized unmet medical need. Contact: Freya Pharma Solutions, Amsterdam Marcel Wijma, Executive Director [email protected]. For media: LifeSpring Life Sciences Communication, Amsterdam Leon Melens T: +31 6 538 16 427 E: [email protected] SOURCE Freya Pharma Solutions MOSCOW, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are likely to meet only after an agreement is ready for signing, Vladimir Medinsky, the head of Russia's negotiation team, said Tuesday. Before the discussion of a possible meeting of the presidents, a treaty must be prepared and approved by the negotiators, and then endorsed by the foreign ministers, explained Medinsky, also an aide to the Russian president. This will be not simple especially because the meeting could be a multilateral one with the participation of state guarantors of peace and security to Ukraine, he said after a new round of Moscow-Kiev talks in Istanbul, Turkey. MILLBRAE, Calif., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Theo Chilicas and Michael Jimenez announced the launch of GoDocent Inc. (GoDocent.com), a new company that seeks to revolutionize how brands interact with consumers. According to the company's website, "GoDocent connects consumers to your brand in the most efficient and effective way possible bridging the gap between in-person and digital communication." Zero Code - Zero Hosting - 100% Delivered Any surface is a GoDocent location Unlike most QR code companies that only create QR codes that direct you to one action, GoDocent enables anyone to create a GoDo Pin Page which auto-generates an associated GoDo QR Code, allowing the visitor to take an unlimited number of actions. In essence, GoDocent allows brands to bypass programmers, designers and hosting websites when they want to create mini web pages that are connected to scannable QR codes. Your custom GoDo QR Code can be a simple sales page or a full event app! As Mr. Chilicas elaborated, "After a combined 50 years of experience developing communication vehicles and tradeshow experiences, we recognized a huge need. The need is for companies to be freed from the middlemen between their brands and consumers. For brands to truly be nimble, they would need a code-free, design-free, and affordable way to deliver useful and actionable information to their audiences, in real-time." This easy and effective way to create action-oriented single-page websites is so revolutionary, it's still to be determined how many different kinds of uses there will be for GoDocent. "GoDo QR Codes act as a digital docent, guiding users to branded GoDo Pin Pages," continued Mr. Jimenez "From these instantly created Pin Pages, consumers can view videos, slideshows, collateral, contact you, or whatever other actions and information brands want to deliver." He continued, "GoDocent is a Green-First company. Connections and decisions are all enabled instantly and digitally, from anywhere in the world to anyone in the world. So all the printing, shipping and delivery costs usually associated with collateral are saved by the companyand for the environment." The company offers any business a 14-day free trial of the service at GoDocent.com. The free trial includes full functionality. For more information, press only: Theo Chilicas CEO 415-948-7068 842 Murchison Drive, Millbrae CA United States [email protected] Michael Jimenez CFO (415) 298-7352 842 Murchison Drive, Millbrae CA United States [email protected] For more information on GoDocent www.godocent.com SOURCE GoDocent Inc. AUSTIN, Texas, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- GovOS, a leading provider of digital transformation solutions for local governments, announced today it is partnering with the Texas Travel Alliance (TTA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing Texas travel and tourism to its fullest potential. The partnership will provide TTA members with access to exclusive pricing on the GovOS Short-Term Rental (STR) Solution as well as additional services that help promote healthy communities. The announcement comes as many communities are increasingly focused on preserving a sense of community amidst the global increase in STRs. The GovOS STR Solution makes it easier for government agencies and property owners to communicate, and ensures responsible renting by streamlining permit applications, simplifying collection of taxes, and facilitating better communication on compliance with local ordinances. With this partnership, TTA members that utilize the solution will have access to resources focused solely on community preservation and education that promotes collaboration between all stakeholders within a community. "Our goal is to empower local governments in Texas with dynamic technology for short-term rental identification, compliance, business registration and lodging tax collection," said Kevin Lafeber, President, GovOS. "We have a commitment to serving local governments in the state of Texas, and always look for opportunities to further support our customers with the latest tools and technology to maximize the effectiveness of the community's STR efforts." Based in Austin, GovOS works with local governments throughout Texas and across the country to provide a wide range of services and solutions for every stage of digital transformation. Specifically, the GovOS STR solution helps government agencies better understand how STRs are impacting their communities. In addition to identification, compliance, and monitoring services, GovOS STR also offers registration, tax collection, and a 24/7 STR complaint hotline. GovOS is also forging strategic partnerships with leaders in the STR space, giving organizations more ways to work with property owners and management companies. In January, GovOS announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with NoiseAware, the global leader in privacy-safe noise monitoring. The partnership lets TTA members using GovOS STR offer property owners in their jurisdiction exclusive rates on NoiseAware noise monitoring solutions. Having NoiseAware in a home can help property owners detect and resolve noise issues before they get escalated. Texas communities interested in becoming a member of the TTA can learn more about these and other exclusive benefits at ttia.org/page/join. For more information on the GovOS STR Solution, visit: GovOS.com/products/short-term-rental/ About GovOS GovOS is the leading digital transformation platform for local governments. Headquartered in Austin, TX, GovOS serves government agencies of all sizes across the United States. Through its secure and integrated suite of cloud-based solutions, governments can automate and streamline operations, provide seamless access to resources and information, and deliver cutting-edge digital services to businesses, residents and agencies. For more information, visit GovOS.com About Texas Travel Alliance The Texas Travel Alliance is the primary advocate and voice for the Texas Travel Industry, representing a diverse membership of Texas travel destinations, accommodations, attractions, transportation and support businesses. The travel industry in Texas employs over 1.3 million Texans and has a $169 Billion-dollar economic impact to the Texas economy. The Texas Travel Alliance strives to offer members and employees industry-leading education and professional development, while advocating to strengthen travel in Texas. To learn more, visit ttia.org Media Contact: Karl Pawlewicz, [email protected] SOURCE GovOS OMAHA, Neb., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As the Russia and Ukraine War continues to escalate, Gun Made's annual survey seeks to gauge U.S. Voter sentiment around the current gun and political landscape. While gun and ammo sales are rising, Gun Made obtains people's opinions on the present war relating to the gun industry. With the spike in gun and ammo sales over the past month, Gun Made surveyed a randomly selected group of U.S. voters to gauge their feelings toward the current Biden Administration and the gun industry altogether. With the help of Pollfish, we surveyed four hundred randomly selected people: 44% male and 56% female. Of the four hundred respondents, 36% were Democrats, 37% were Independents, and 27% were Republicans. 43% of those surveyed also said they currently own a gun. This recent survey shows that regardless of political party or gun ownership status, people are unhappy with the current performance of President Biden. U.S. Voters are also highly concerned about the Russia/Ukraine war and want the U.S. Government to intervene. Furthermore, 76% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans we surveyed said that the US should send military supplies and money to Ukraine. But only 40% and 34%, respectively, said we should send troops. Results also showed that nearly 40% of Republicans and Democrats have purchased a gun since Biden was elected, and roughly one-third of U.S. voters intend to purchase a gun due to the Russia and Ukraine war. "It means people in the US value their ability to protect themselves from real or perceived threats," said Brady Kirkpatrick, founder of Gun Made. "And should conflict come to U.S. soil, they want the ability to defend themselves and their homes." In fact, we asked Democrats and Republicans why they own the guns they do, and 57% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans cited personal safety as the #1 reason. About Gun Made Gun Made is a firearms resource for beginners who seek to learn more about guns, ammo, the 2nd Amendment, and more. Time-saving recommendations are offered to help new shooters obtain the information they need to feel confident and safe at the gun range. Gun Made offers resources, history, and guides all on their online blog. Contact Information: Gun Made Brady Kirkpatrick [email protected] 402-210-7982 www.gunmade.com https://www.gunmade.com/2022-gun-survey/ SOURCE Gun Made Funding will be used to fuel the company's ability to help organizations assess and hire for every role and skill needed to build cutting-edge technology products MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- HackerRank , the developer skills company, today announced $60 million in Series D funding led by Susquehanna Growth Equity. Additional investors in HackerRank include JMI, Khosla Ventures, Randstad Innovation Fund and Recruit Holdings. To date, HackerRank has raised more than $115 million in total funding. HackerRank will use the funding to fuel continued growth and accelerate its ability to drive technical hiring for the most in-demand roles and skills at companies across the globe. The funding will also be used to expand the depth of services provided by its global team, invest in technical innovation and partnerships, and scale the team across all departments . "It's never been more critical to hire the right developer with the right skill set," said Vivek Ravisankar, CEO of HackerRank. "For more than a decade, HackerRank has helped growing organizations hire for the most in-demand technical roles on the market. This funding will help us expand our leadership position and support the most relevant skills in tech and expand beyond hiring into the post-hire journey, as well." Funding will be used to expand HackerRank's Developer Skills Platform to support screening and interviewing for technical skills in emerging areas like machine learning, blockchain, and crypto. The funds will also allow the company to support skill assessments beyond software development, including skills in hardware, design and QA, as well as soft skills to better evaluate attributes increasingly valued among distributed teams. Across the board, HackerRank will invest heavily in its technical platform, which supports customers in all stages of the developer lifecycle, from pre-hire through post-hire stages. Additionally, HackerRank will use the funds to invest in key growth strategies to support its global customer base. To bolster those initiatives, the company is scaling its Alliances, Global Services, and Customer Success teams. HackerRank will also invest in new integrations with mainstream systems that hiring teams regularly use, as well as enhancements to the platform experience for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers alike. As part of the investment, Susquehanna Growth Equity Managing Director Martin Angert will also join HackerRank's Board of Directors. "The technical hiring market is at a pivotal moment, as companies around the world struggle to scale recruitment efforts in one of the most competitive labor markets we have ever seen," said Martin Angert, Managing Director at Susquehanna Growth Equity. "Paired with the explosive growth of remote work, HackerRank has solidified itself as the gold standard for skills-based hiring in the developer community." More than 2,800 customers across all industries, including over 25% of the Fortune 100, and a community of 18 million developers rely on HackerRank to raise their hiring bars and test their skills. In the past 12 months, HackerRank has: Assessed software developers around the world with more than 188 million technical challenges and code submissions Introduced 10 new roles and 35 new skills to HackerRank's expanding content library, bringing its total to 27 roles, 100 skills and more than 3,100 questions making the company's assessment content library the largest in the world Introduced new machine-learning plagiarism detection tools to look beyond code similarity to ensure confidence in assessment scores Transitioned to a remote-first model with employees across 151 cities in five countries globally About HackerRank HackerRank, the developer skills company, helps businesses attract, evaluate and hire the best technical talent from around the world. More than 2,800 customers across all industries, including over 25% of the Fortune 100, rely on HackerRank to raise their hiring bars. More than 18 million developers (approximately 40% of the global developer population) trust HackerRank to learn and showcase their coding skills. Every second, two developers complete a HackerRank code submission, or 185,000 per day. For more information, visit www.hackerrank.com . About Susquehanna Growth Equity Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE) invests in growth stage companies in the software, information services, internet, and financial technology sectors. SGE is backed by a unique and patient source of capital which enables the firm to give management teams and entrepreneurs the freedom and flexibility to maximize long-term growth. Since 2006 SGE has invested $3 billion dollars in over 75 companies across the US, Canada, Europe, and Israel. For more information, visit https://sgep.com . Media Contact: Lucy Stenzel-Poore Mission North for HackerRank [email protected] SOURCE HackerRank SAN FRANCISCO and SUZHOU, China, March 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Innovent Biologics, Inc. ("Innovent") (HKEX: 01801), a world-class biopharmaceutical company that develops, manufactures and commercializes high-quality medicines for the treatment of oncology, metabolic, autoimmune and other major diseases, today announced the first patient dosing for its proprietary recombinant bispecific antibody targeting Claudin18.2 and CD3 (R&D code: IBI389) in a Phase I clinical trial for the treatment of advanced malignancies. The study (NCT05164458) is an open, multicenter Phase 1a/1b study evaluating the safety, tolerability and efficacy of IBI389 monotherapy or combination therapy in the treatment of advanced solid tumors. CD3-targeted bispecific antibodies (CD3-BsAbs) or T Cell Engager (TCE) are emerging novel therapeutic modalities in cancer immunotherapy in recent years. TCE redirects T cells to tumor cells by simultaneously binding tumor-associated antigen (TAA) expressed on tumor cells and CD3 expressed on T cells, thus inducing T cell killing of tumor cells. Differentiated from conventional immunotherapies, CD3-BsAbs provoke a stronger immune response through CD3-activated T cells without the binding of the T cell receptor (TCR) to the major histocompatibility complex (MHC)-peptide complex, and also do not rely on T cell-activated co-stimulatory signals.IBI389 has the potential to efficiently and selectively kill CLDN18.2-expressing tumor cells, increasing lymphocytic tumor infiltration and enhancing tumor immune response, while possessing a low risk of CRS (cytokine release syndrome). Preclinical results showed that IBI389 exhibited significant antitumor effects and could bound to tumor cells even in cell lines with low CLDN18.2 expression, and is promising to treat patient populations with low to moderate CLDN18.2 expression where conventional antibodies are found limited response. The principal investigator of the study, Professor Feng Bi, Director of the Department of Abdominal Oncology and Director of the Molecular Targeted Therapy Research Unit at West China Hospital of Sichuan University, pointed out: "In recent years, CLDN18.2 has become one of the most topical R&D areas in molecular biology, and preliminary efficacy results in some clinical studies demonstrated encouraging druggablity of this target. IBI389 bispecific antibody distinguishes itself from traditional monoclonal antibodies by encouraging T-cell infiltration and killing of tumors, thus enhancing the antitumor effect as a single agent. We are looking forward to the positive results of IBI389 in patients with CLDN18.2-expressing solid tumors." Dr. Hui Zhou, Senior Vice President of Innovent, said: " IBI389 marks an exciting start for Innovent in the TCE field. The scientists of Innovent Academy has accomplished sophisticated research, screen and design work in drug discovery stage, and the results of preclinical studies show that IBI389 has a potent anti-tumor effect with a good safety profile. We believe that as a differentiated molecule targeting CLDN18.2, IBI389 will bring benefits to patients with advanced gastric cancer and pancreatic cancer even with low CLDN18.2 expression." About IBI389 IBI389 is an anti-CLDN18.2/CD3 bispecific antibody discovered and developed by Innovent. It induces immune synapse formations by linking CD3 molecules in T-cell receptor complexes and CLDN18.2 antigens on the surfaces of tumor cells. Therefore IBI389 stimulates T-cell activation, resulting in cytolytic protein production, inflammatory cytokine release and further T-cell proliferation, which eventually leads to durable anti-tumor effects. About Claudin 18.2 Claudin protein is a critical component of tight junction complex molecules which play an important role in the life activities of the human body. Claudin18.2 is a member of the Claudin protein family, which is a highly tissue-specific protein expressed only in differentiated epithelial cells on the gastric mucosa under normal physiological conditions. Previous studies have revealed that Claudin18.2 is highly expressed in multiple types of cancer such as gastric cancer, pancreatic cancer, esophageal adenocarcinoma, and colorectalcancer. The unique feature of limited expression in normal tissues and highly specific expression in cancer makes Claudin18.2 an ideal target for developing the immunotherapeutic for solid tumors. Globally, there are many candidate therapies in clinical development. The drug modalities under development include monoclonal antibodies, bispecific antibodies, antibody-conjugated drugs and CAR-T cell products. However, currently no drug targeting Claudin18.2 has been approved. About Gastric and Pancreatic adenocarcinoma Gastric and pancreatic cancer are both malignant tumors of the digestive system that seriously endanger human life and health. The latest global cancer statistics show that there will be about 1.089 million new cases of gastric cancer worldwide in 2020, accounting for 5.6% of the global cancer incidence, and about 768,000 deaths, accounting for 7.7% of the global cancer deaths. There are about 495,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer, accounting for 2.6% of the global cancer incidence, and about 466,000 deaths, accounting for 4.7% of the global cancer deaths. According to the national cancer statistics released by the National Cancer Center of China in 2019, the incidence of gastric cancer in China in 2015 was about 403,000, accounting for 10.26% of the total cancer incidence, second only to lung cancer at 20.03%, with an incidence rate of 29.31/100,000 people, and about 291,000 deaths, accounting for 12.45% of the total cancer deaths, behind lung and liver cancer, with a mortality rate of 21.16/100,000 people. In 2015, the number of cases and deaths of pancreatic cancer nationwide were 95,000 and 85,000 respectively, ranking the 10th and 6th in the incidence and mortality of malignant tumors. The mortality ratio of pancreatic cancer was 0.89, making it a true "King of Cancer". Despite the treatment progress in recent years, drug resistance, recurrence and metastasis are still inevitable. The 5-year survival rate of patients with advanced gastric cancer is about 5-20%, and the median survival rate is about 10 months. Pancreatic cancer has a worse prognosis, with a 5-year survival rate of only 6 to 8%. About Innovent Inspired by the spirit of "Start with Integrity, Succeed through Action," Innovent's mission is to develop, manufacture and commercialize high-quality biopharmaceutical products that are affordable to ordinary people. Established in 2011, Innovent is committed to developing, manufacturing and commercializing high-quality innovative medicines for the treatment of cancer, autoimmune, metabolic and other major diseases. On October 31, 2018, Innovent was listed on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited with the stock code: 01801.HK. Since its inception, Innovent has developed a fully integrated multi-functional platform which includes R&D, CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls), clinical development and commercialization capabilities. Leveraging the platform, the company has built a robust pipeline of 32 valuable assets in the fields of cancer, metabolic, autoimmune disease and other major therapeutic areas, with 7 products approved for marketing in China TYVYT (sintilimab injection), BYVASDA (bevacizumab biosimilar injection), SULINNO (adalimumab biosimilar injection), HALPRYZA (rituximab biosimilar injection) , Pemazyre (pemigatinib oral inhibitor) , NAILIKE(olverembatinib) and Cyramza (ramucirumab), 1 asset under NMPA NDA review, 5 assets in Phase 3 or pivotal clinical trials, and an additional 19 molecules in clinical studies. Innovent has built an international team with advanced talent in high-end biological drug development and commercialization, including many global experts. The company has also entered into strategic collaborations with Eli Lilly and Company, Adimab, Incyte, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Hanmi and other international partners. Innovent strives to work with many collaborators to help advance China's biopharmaceutical industry, improve drug availability and enhance the quality of the patients' lives. For more information, please visit: www.innoventbio.com. and www.linkedin.com/company/innovent-biologics/. Note: TYVYT (sintilimab injection) is not an approved product in the United States. BYVASDA (bevacizumab biosimilar injection), SULINNO, and HALPRYZA (rituximab biosimilar injection) are not approved products in the United States. TYVYT (sintilimab injection, Innovent) BYVASDA (bevacizumab biosimilar injection, Innovent) HALPRYZA (rituximab biosimilar injection, Innovent) SULINNO (adalimumab biosimilar injection, Innovent) Pemazyre (pemigatinib oral inhibitor, Incyte Corporation). Pemazyre was discovered by Incyte Corporation and licensed to Innovent for development and commercialization in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Disclaimer: 1. This indication is still under clinical study, which hasn't been approved in China. 2. Innovent does not recommend any off-label usage. 3. For medical and healthcare professionals only. Forward-Looking Statements This news release may contain certain forward-looking statements that are, by their nature, subject to significant risks and uncertainties. The words "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect", "intend" and similar expressions, as they relate to Innovent, are intended to identify certain of such forward-looking statements. Innovent does not intend to update these forward-looking statements regularly. These forward-looking statements are based on the existing beliefs, assumptions, expectations, estimates, projections and understandings of the management of Innovent with respect to future events at the time these statements are made. These statements are not a guarantee of future developments and are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, some of which are beyond Innovent's control and are difficult to predict. Consequently, actual results may differ materially from information contained in the forward-looking statements as a result of future changes or developments in our business, Innovent's competitive environment and political, economic, legal and social conditions. Innovent, the Directors and the employees of Innovent assume (a) no obligation to correct or update the forward-looking statements contained in this site; and (b) no liability in the event that any of the forward-looking statements does not materialise or turn out to be incorrect. SOURCE Innovent Biologics DUBLIN, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Data Center Chip Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2022-2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The global data center chip market reached a value of US$ 9.56 Billion in 2021. Looking forward, the publisher expects the market to reach a value of US$ 14.11 Billion by 2027 exhibiting a CAGR of 6.40% during 2022-2027. Keeping in mind the uncertainties of COVID-19, we are continuously tracking and evaluating the direct as well as the indirect influence of the pandemic on different end use industries. These insights are included in the report as a major market contributor. A data center is a centralized facility that organizations use for retrieving, storing, and processing physical and virtual data. It consists of power distribution units, switches, servers, chips, and firewalls. Graphics processing unit (GPU), application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), central processing unit (CPU), and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) are some of the commonly used data center chips. The data center chip is an essential component that is usually found in the server area within a data center. It assists in improving energy efficiencies, redundancy, and flexibility, while enhancing operations and productivity. As a result, data center chips are widely used across various industries, such as manufacturing, transportation, information technology (IT) and telecommunication, and banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI). The increasing deployment of cloud computing and data storage solutions across organizations is creating a positive outlook for the market. With the continuous transfer of data from private servers and the integration of connected devices, such as autonomous vehicles, virtual reality (VR) systems, and personal computers (PCs), there is an increasing need for data centers to manage the large amounts of data generated. Moreover, rapid technological advancements in memory chips and programmable solutions are significantly improving access to large amounts of data and enhancing performance in connected devices and data centers, which, in turn, is providing an impetus to the market growth. Additionally, the advent of fourth generation (4G) and fifth generation (5G) networks, along with the large-scale integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology is also favoring the market growth. In line with this, the rising demand for smart computing devices, such as utility meters, home security, and navigation systems, is positively impacting the market growth. Other factors, including significant improvements in the telecommunication infrastructure and the implementation of various government initiatives regarding the localization of data centers, are anticipated to drive the market toward growth. Competitive Landscape: The competitive landscape of the industry has also been examined along with the profiles of the key players being Achronix Semiconductor Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Arm Limited, Broadcom Inc., Fujitsu Limited, GlobalFoundries Inc., Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Intel Corporation, Marvell Technology Inc., Nvidia Corporation and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited. Key Questions Answered in This Report: How has the global data center chip market performed so far and how will it perform in the coming years? What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the global data center chip market? What are the key regional markets? What is the breakup of the market based on the chip type? What is the breakup of the market based on the data center size? What is the breakup of the market based on the industry vertical? What are the various stages in the value chain of the industry? What are the key driving factors and challenges in the industry? What is the structure of the global data center chip market and who are the key players? What is the degree of competition in the industry? Key Topics Covered: 1 Preface 2 Scope and Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Introduction 4.1 Overview 4.2 Key Industry Trends 5 Global Data Center Chip Market 5.1 Market Overview 5.2 Market Performance 5.3 Impact of COVID-19 5.4 Market Forecast 6 Market Breakup by Chip Type 6.1 GPU 6.1.1 Market Trends 6.1.2 Market Forecast 6.2 ASIC 6.2.1 Market Trends 6.2.2 Market Forecast 6.3 FPGA 6.3.1 Market Trends 6.3.2 Market Forecast 6.4 CPU 6.4.1 Market Trends 6.4.2 Market Forecast 6.5 Others 6.5.1 Market Trends 6.5.2 Market Forecast 7 Market Breakup by Data Center Size 7.1 Small and Medium Size 7.1.1 Market Trends 7.1.2 Market Forecast 7.2 Large Size 7.2.1 Market Trends 7.2.2 Market Forecast 8 Market Breakup by Industry Vertical 8.1 BFSI 8.1.1 Market Trends 8.1.2 Market Forecast 8.2 Manufacturing 8.2.1 Market Trends 8.2.2 Market Forecast 8.3 Government 8.3.1 Market Trends 8.3.2 Market Forecast 8.4 IT and Telecom 8.4.1 Market Trends 8.4.2 Market Forecast 8.5 Retail 8.5.1 Market Trends 8.5.2 Market Forecast 8.6 Transportation 8.6.1 Market Trends 8.6.2 Market Forecast 8.7 Energy and Utilities 8.7.1 Market Trends 8.7.2 Market Forecast 8.8 Others 8.8.1 Market Trends 8.8.2 Market Forecast 9 Market Breakup by Region 10 SWOT Analysis 11 Value Chain Analysis 12 Porters Five Forces Analysis 13 Price Analysis 14 Competitive Landscape 14.1 Market Structure 14.2 Key Players 14.3 Profiles of Key Players 14.3.1 Achronix Semiconductor Corporation 14.3.1.1 Company Overview 14.3.1.2 Product Portfolio 14.3.2 Advanced Micro Devices Inc. 14.3.2.1 Company Overview 14.3.2.2 Product Portfolio 14.3.2.3 Financials 14.3.2.4 SWOT Analysis 14.3.3 Arm Limited 14.3.3.1 Company Overview 14.3.3.2 Product Portfolio 14.3.4 Broadcom Inc. 14.3.4.1 Company Overview 14.3.4.2 Product Portfolio 14.3.4.3 Financials 14.3.4.4 SWOT Analysis 14.3.5 Fujitsu Limited 14.3.5.1 Company Overview 14.3.5.2 Product Portfolio 14.3.5.3 Financials 14.3.5.4 SWOT Analysis 14.3.6 GlobalFoundries Inc. 14.3.6.1 Company Overview 14.3.6.2 Product Portfolio 14.3.6.3 Financials 14.3.7 Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. 14.3.7.1 Company Overview 14.3.7.2 Product Portfolio 14.3.8 Intel Corporation 14.3.8.1 Company Overview 14.3.8.2 Product Portfolio 14.3.8.3 Financials 14.3.8.4 SWOT Analysis 14.3.9 Marvell Technology Inc. 14.3.9.1 Company Overview 14.3.9.2 Product Portfolio 14.3.10 Nvidia Corporation 14.3.10.1 Company Overview 14.3.10.2 Product Portfolio 14.3.10.3 SWOT Analysis 14.3.11 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited 14.3.11.1 Company Overview 14.3.11.2 Product Portfolio For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/8zyiob Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets VIENNA, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- For artist Marcin Glod, inspiration can come from anywhere including the pandemic. Known as Glod in the Vienna art world, he uses everyday pop cultural references known by everybody in society with a mixture of styles to express current events. When Glod attended his first art show in Vienna in 2019, one of his first paintings sold for 14.000., or more than $15,000 U.S. It showed The Pink Panther in front of bricks of one-dollar bills conveying how society feels about money. One of his COVID-inspired pieces shows the iconic Disney scrooge character leaning on a cane flipping a coin and another shows the Venus de Milo inside the vial with German newspaper COVID headlines surrounding it. The pieces represent two viewpoints in society. When he attended his first art show in Vienna in 2019, one of his first paintings was sold for 14.000., or more than $15,000 U.S. It showed The Pink Panther in front of bricks of one-dollar bills conveying how society feels about money. Glod is popular with athletes, bankers, collectors, and investors all over the world, who value not just his unique artistic talents but see his paintings and prints, and NFTs as an investment increasing in value over time. "Tensions such as what we're seeing during COVID are my main source of inspiration allowing me to create a wide range of work. The pop-cultural references in my art are important tools for dealing with and questioning social developments, current events, and historical parallels," said Glod. Many people are struggling through the pandemic, and he incorporates their emotions and thoughts into some of his pieces. Three of his pieces displayed in Vienna show popular icons in the backdrop of vaccine vials that depict how people feel about our present situation. "The pandemic pieces will also be on display in the U.S. at the New York Art Expo from April 22-24 and in Los Angeles in June. I will also be at World Dubai Art March 16-19 and in the U.K. this summer," said Glod. One of his COVID-inspired pieces shows the iconic Disney scrooge character leaning on a cane flipping a coin, while another piece shows vulgar language from protestors written inside a vaccine vial. A third piece has the Venus de Milo inside the vial with German newspaper COVID headlines surrounding it. "It represents two sides of society. The anti-vaccers are angry and say it's all fake and costs too much money. While the other side is saying we better be calm and get the vaccine to save our lives," said Glod. Glod draws inspiration from artists that have lived from different historical eras, such as Michelangelo, Andy Warhol, or Banksy, and the urban environment. He refers to himself as a new modern culture artist who incorporates different art movements. He's also inspired by pop art, urban environments and uses numerous materials and tools. Some of the tools include stencils, spray paint, epoxy resins, oil paints, varnishes, and newspapers, to subversively depict various iconic pop culture characters. His work sits at the intersection of street art, graffiti, and painting. The 27-year-old's unique artistic style depicts culture by mixing a variety of mediums with everyday icons that tell a story of what society is experiencing at the moment. Glod's unique paintings combine vintage icons with new events that are today shaping our daily lives. His works are an exciting mixture of modern-day street art, graffiti, and painting and draws inspiration from different eras. Born in Poland, Glod started drawing when he was just four and won art competitions at seven. At 10, he moved to Vienna. Later, he studied communication design and performing arts at the Graphische in Vienna and describes himself as a "The New Modern Culture Artist". At the young age of 18, he started a branding agency in Vienna to help create branding concepts for RedBull, Uber, Deloitte, TEDx, and many other major companies. After exhibitions at the largest church in Austria called the Stephansdom in Vienna and Basel, Switzerland, and Hamburg, Germany last year, he decided to focus his career on creating works of art for a worldwide audience. He also collaborates with RedBull, the biggest company in Austria, Solebox, and Rauch, the largest Austrian juice company. "You can see my artwork on my website. If you're interested in one of my pieces or have a special request, please do not hesitate to contact me," said Glod. For further information or to schedule an interview contact Marcin Glod at +436606769657 or [email protected]. SOURCE Marcin Glod - Company's National Dispensary Franchise, Unity Rd., Named No. 6 in "Best Cannabis Dispensaries to Work For" Category - Item 9 Labs Corp. Recognized as One of Top Cannabis Dispensary and Cultivation Employers in Market PHOENIX, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Unity Rd., the national cannabis dispensary franchise from Item 9 Labs Corp. (OTCQX: INLB), has been named one of the 'Best Cannabis Companies to Work For' in 2022 by leading industry publication, Cannabis Business Times. This award identifies and recognizes the best employers in cannabis cultivation and dispensary markets, honoring cannabis companies that excel in creating quality workplaces for employees. Unity Rd. ranked No. 6 in the 2022 award selection for the "Best Cannabis Dispensaries to Work For" category, which was also featured in the March 2022 issue of the publication. The brand centers its workplace values around one theme encouragement. With its parent company, Item 9 Labs Corp., having teams across cultivation, manufacturing, production and dispensary-level tiers, the company provides seamless communication, coordination and functionality in operations while encouraging each other for all wins, no matter the size, in their day-to-day. "Our brands [Unity Rd. and Item 9 Labs] were built as a vehicle for others for team members, franchise partners, social equity partners, investors, guests and patients alike to succeed, grow and benefit from," said Mike Weinberger, co-founder and chief franchise officer of Unity Rd. "Our culture has been built from bottom to top by our people. As a result, we have created a company fueled by inclusion, innovation and vision. We have an extremely talented team from all walks of life, who see the value in what we are trying to accomplish and want to be part of our story." The 'Best Cannabis Companies to Work For' Awards Program is based on a comprehensive evaluation of each participating company's workplace policies, practices and demographics accounting for 25 percent of the evaluation. The remainder of the company's score was determined from a survey to all company employees that assessed individuals' experiences and attitudes with respect to the workplace topics included leadership and planning, corporate culture and communication, role satisfaction, relationships with supervisors, training and development, pay and benefits and overall engagement. "We strive to create a company that gives entrepreneurs the chance to operate their own business in an industry that matters and impacts many," shared Andrew Bowden, CEO of Item 9 Labs Corp. "The work we do day in, day out is truly gratifying we are making cannabis entrepreneurship a possibility for more people, offering local communities trusted neighborhood shops that are staffed with knowledgeable teams and setting the mark for high-quality cannabis products." Cannabis publications, Cannabis Business Times and Cannabis Dispensary developed the awards program in partnership with the Best Companies Group (BCG), a global research organization that conducts industry-leading employee survey engagement and satisfaction surveys. Through this work, Cannabis Business Times, Cannabis Dispensary and BCG identify and recognize the best employers in the cannabis cultivation industry and dispensary market and provide these organizations with valuable employee feedback. Unity Rd. is the first to truly franchise cannabis dispensaries on a national scale in the U.S. and was named as the first brand of its kind to join the International Franchise Association (IFA). Launched in 2018, the cannabis franchise has shops in operation in Boulder, Colorado and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma as well as multiple agreements signed with 20 entrepreneurial groups who are in various stages of development nationwide. The complexities of operating a cannabis business make it difficult for small, independent dispensaries to understand and stay on top of all the varying regulations and everyday challenges of managing and operating a compliant and successful dispensary. The Unity Rd. franchise opportunity provides a solution for industry newcomers and small, locally owned and operated dispensaries to compliantly thrive, thanks to the robust backing and support of a national franchise. The dispensary franchise is actively seeking qualified partners who would benefit from the systems, processes and ongoing support the franchise offers. To learn more about the Unity Rd. franchise opportunity, contact [email protected], call 720-923-5262 or visit unityrd.com. For those interested in a career opportunity with Item 9 Labs Corp. or its Unity Rd. brand, contact [email protected]. ABOUT ITEM 9 LABS CORP. Item 9 Labs Corp. (OTCQX: INLB) is a vertically integrated cannabis operator and dispensary franchisor delivering premium products from its large-scale cultivation and production facilities in the United States. The award-winning Item 9 Labs brand specializes in best-in-class products and user experience across several cannabis categories. The company also offers a unique dispensary franchise model through the national Unity Rd. retail brand. Easing barriers to entry, the franchise provides an opportunity for both new and existing dispensary owners to leverage the knowledge, resources and ongoing support needed to thrive in their state compliantly and successfully. Item 9 Labs brings the best industry practices to markets nationwide through distinctive retail experience, cultivation capabilities and product innovation. The veteran management team combines a diverse skill set with deep experience in the cannabis sector, franchising and the capital markets to lead a new generation of public cannabis companies that provide transparency, consistency and well-being. Headquartered in Arizona, the company is currently expanding its operations space up to 640,000-plus square feet on its 50-acre site, one of the largest properties in Arizona zoned to grow and cultivate flower. For additional information, visit item9labscorp.com. ABOUT UNITY RD. : Unity Rd. is bridging the two previously disconnected worlds of cannabis and franchising. The industry trailblazer is the first to bring the cannabis dispensary franchise model to the United Stateswith duality of prowess in both industries to back it up. Built up from a collective 200 years in the legal cannabis industry and franchising, the company helps eager operators enter the complex industry with ease. The marijuana franchise pioneer offers its partners the knowledge, resources and ongoing support needed to compliantly and successfully operate a dispensary. Launched in 2018, Unity Rd. has signed multiple agreements with 20 entrepreneurial groups across the country. In 2021, Unity Rd. became the first member of its kind to join the International Franchise Association (IFA), solidifying its position as the first true cannabis dispensary franchise. It was named one of the "Best Cannabis Companies to Work For" in the dispensary category for Cannabis Business Times' 2022 and 2020 lists. For more information, visit unityrd.com. MEDIA CONTACT: Anna Pool, Fishman PR, [email protected], 847.945.1300 SOURCE Item 9 Labs Corp. U.S. National Accounts leadership transition Paul Lavelle, who has been Zurich North America Chief Claims Officer since 2018, will move to Zurich's U.S. National Accounts business on April 1 as Head of U.S. National Accounts. Lavelle will report to Kristof Terryn, CEO of Zurich North America with dual reporting to Sierra Signorelli, CEO of Commercial Insurance for Zurich Insurance Group. Lavelle will be responsible for the direction, management and performance of all large commercial and specialties business in the United States. Lavelle has more than 30 years of insurance experience and has held Underwriting and Claims senior leadership and management roles, first for Allstate and later at American International Group, Inc. and National Union Underwriting. "I am excited about the next steps our U.S. National Accounts business will take under Paul's leadership, as all indicators point to a continued growth trajectory," said Terryn. "Our U.S. National Accounts business could not be in better hands." Paul Horgan will stay on through the next year to serve as a senior advisor to the Zurich North America CEO. His retirement will come after 30 years in the insurance industry, which includes 15 years of service to Zurich. "Paul's perspectives on the business and his unwavering commitment to our customers has meant a great deal to me personally and played a major role in bringing Zurich to its current leadership position," said Terryn. "I am especially pleased that Paul's retirement will be preceded by his role as a senior advisor." Claims leadership transition Succeeding Lavelle as Chief Claims Officer on April 1 will be Keith Daly, who has been President of Personal Lines for Farmers Insurance since 2018. Prior to that role, he served as Farmers Chief Claims Officer. Daly will be responsible for delivering transactional excellence in claims handling, serving Zurich customers with care during those critical moments that require swift action and targeted insights and building solid relationships to help achieve the best claims outcomes. Daly will report to Terryn. At Farmers Insurance, Daly has led product development, strategy and underwriting efforts for the Farmers Personal Lines, Bristol West and Foremost lines of business. His insurance career began in 1993 as a claims representative trainee at Progressive Insurance. In 2018, Daly received the Insurance Nexus Claims Innovation Award for Leader of the Year. "Keith is the right person for the right job," said Terryn. "Keith began his insurance career in claims and his decades of experience will serve our Claims organization well." About Zurich Zurich North America is one of the largest providers of insurance solutions and services to businesses and individuals. Our customers represent industries ranging from agriculture to technology. Zurich North America is part of Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich), a leading multi-line insurer serving more than 55 million customers both people and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories. Founded 150 years ago, Zurich is transforming insurance. In addition to providing insurance protection, Zurich is increasingly offering prevention services such as those that promote wellbeing and enhance climate resilience. Reflecting its purpose "to create a brighter future together," Zurich aspires to be one of the most responsible and impactful businesses in the world. It is targeting net-zero emissions by 2050 and is one of the world's most sustainable insurers, as shown by the S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment. In 2020, Zurich launched the Zurich Forest project to support reforestation and biodiversity restoration in Brazil. The Group has about 56,000 employees and is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. Zurich Insurance Group Ltd (ZURN) is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange and has a level I American Depositary Receipt (ZURVY) program, which is traded over-the-counter on OTCQX. Further information is available at www.zurich.com and www.zurichna.com. Visit us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and FutureOfRisk.com SOURCE Zurich North America Both All Good and Life is Good started as small brands that grew with grassroots efforts, and both dedicate time and resources to giving back and living more sustainably. The brands continue to encourage consumers to live in balance with nature and enjoy time outdoors with four new products - SPF 15 lip balm, SPF 50 sun butter, SPF 30 sun lotion, and spray hand sanitizer. All are plant-based, body and reef-safe, and made with organic ingredients. "Partnering with All Good is yet another way that we can support our outdoor and beach enthusiasts, by providing them with the best products that protect the environment, so they can keep doing what they love safely," said Bert Jacobs, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Optimist of Life is Good. "We love the mission behind All Good, and their attention to quality is something we can stand behind. We're proud to partner with a brand that is constantly making strides to protect our planet." All Good is a certified B Corporation and Climate Neutral Company dedicated to preserving the earth's resources. All Good directly supports environmental restoration and education projects through their partnership with 1% For the Planet. Additionally, All Good responded to the unique needs brought on by the global pandemic by donating more than 20,000 bottles of hand sanitizer to the Life is Good Kids Foundation. The hand sanitizer was distributed amongst various organizations around New England where the Foundation supports kids in need, including the Newtown Community Center, Horizons for Homeless Children, South Boston Neighborhood House, and others. "Business is now about reconnecting with humanity and establishing a practice that leads to good stewardship of both the public and the planet," said Caroline Duell, founder and CEO of All Good. "We are thrilled to partner with Life is Good, and share in their optimism, empowerment, and belief that we can all make the world a better place." As with all Life is Good products, the brand donates 10 percent of its annual net profits to the Life is Good Kids Foundation, which improves the quality of care for more than 1 million of the nation's at-risk youth each year. These new products can be found in Life is Good retailers and purchased online at LifeisGood.com. About Life is Good Life is Good is the original positive lifestyle apparel brand dedicated to spreading the power of optimism through art and messaging. The company donates 10 percent of its net profits to help kids in need through the Life is Good Kids Foundation. The Foundation's signature Playmaker Program provides teachers, nurses, social workers, and other childcare professionals with training, support, and workshops that help them understand trauma and compassion-informed care. Over 12,000 childcare professionals are engaged in the Playmaker Program, which improves the quality of care for more than 1 million kids each year. Life is Good is a registered trademark of The Life is Good Company. Visit LifeisGood.com for more details, and follow Life is Good on Twitter , Facebook , and Instagram . About All Good All Good is a lifestyle brand with a clear vision: to live and inspire others to live in balance with nature. We make organic body care products and reef-friendly sunscreens because we want you to feel amazing from the soothing natural benefits of botanical ingredients. The All Good team is headquartered in our Morro Bay, California eco-renovated warehouse for offices, inventory, and shipping. Just up the road is Four Elements Farm, where we grow organic food for the team and calendula for All Good products. Your purchase of All Good products directly supports environmental restoration and education projects through our partnership with 1% For the Planet. This year we are celebrating ten years as a Certified B Corporation as we continue to challenge ourselves to use business as a force for good in the world. All Good is helping consumers make coral reef-friendly choices in personal care products. Coral reefs around the world are in decline, and we have the potential to help them simply by avoiding ingredients that are known to be toxic to aquatic systems. We invite you to consider the entire watershed in your product choices. Clean ingredients are better for your body, too! See more details about our Reef Friendly Sunscreen Criteria in this catalog, and learn more at allgoodproducts.com/reeffriendly. Thank you for helping All Good make everybody better! PR Contact Life is Good Jessica Greenhalgh [email protected] SOURCE Life is Good HAVANA, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The Cuban government on Tuesday received a donation of 19 tons of powder milk from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). The consignment will benefit some 6,000 pediatric patients in health facilities in the provinces of Havana, Mayabeque, Artemisa, Matanzas and Pinar del Rio. "We reiterate our commitment to continue supporting Cuba's efforts in the fight against several challenges posed by the (COVID-19) pandemic," Alejandra Trossero, UNICEF's top representative in Cuba, said during the donation ceremony at the Juan Manuel Marquez Pediatric Hospital in Havana. Cuba's Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment Deborah Rivas thanked UNICEF for the donation, noting that the current U.S. administration has intensified the U.S. blockade against the island amid the health emergency. "Despite the difficult circumstances the Cuban economy is experiencing, we continue to maintain health indicators similar to those of developed nations," she said. "This year's historic community display will be a beautiful celebration of life and a recognition of the power of the Quilt today as a teaching tool for health and social justice," said National AIDS Memorial CEO John Cunningham. "The Quilt is an important reminder that the HIV/AIDS crisis is still not over and there is much work to be done, particularly in communities of color, where HIV is on the rise in many parts of the country." The two-day 35th Anniversary event, presented by Gilead Sciences, will feature 350 12'x12' blocks of the Quilt laid out on the ground, each consisting of eight 3'x 6' individually sewn panels that honor and remember the names and stories of loved ones lost to AIDS. Visitors will be able to walk through the display to experience each panel, remember the names, and see first-hand the stories sewn into each of them. Featured Quilt blocks will include many of the original panels made during the darkest days of the pandemic and panels made in recent years, a solemn reminder that the AIDS crisis is still not over. "The Quilt remains an important symbol of hope, activism and remembrance that reaches millions of people each year, opening hearts and minds," said Alex Kalomparis, Senior Vice President, Gilead Sciences, a long-time partner of the Quilt and its programs. The company provided a $2.4 million grant to the National AIDS Memorial in 2019 to relocate the Quilt from Atlanta back to San Francisco. "Through community displays such as this, the Quilt is connecting the story of HIV/AIDS to the issues faced by many people today, touching their lives in a very personal, compelling way." An opening ceremony and traditional Quilt unfolding will start at 9:30 am on the 11th, followed by the continuous reading of names of lives lost to AIDS aloud by volunteers, dignitaries, and the public on both days. There will be panel-making workshops, community information booths, stories behind the Quilt, displays of memorabilia, and the ability for the public to share their personal Quilt stories. Volunteer opportunities and community/corporate partnerships are available. The public is also invited to bring new panels that can be displayed in a special area to become part of the Quilt. More than 100 new panels will be seen for the first time at the San Francisco display. Many of them were made through the Memorial's Call My Name panel-making program, which helps raise greater awareness about the impact of HIV/AIDS in communities of color, particularly in the South, where HIV rates are on the rise today. Panel-making workshops are organized around the country, working with church groups, quilting guilds and AIDS service organizations to continue the Quilt's 35-year legacy of bringing people together and to serve as a catalyst for education and action by pulling the thread from then to now for justice. "The AIDS Quilt has always been an important part of Glide Memorial Church and many Black churches around the country. Throughout the years, we have made panels and displayed them from the pulpit as a backdrop to worship, with parishioners calling, singing, and preaching their names," said Marvin White, Minister of Celebration at Glide. "We are honored to be a community partner of this historic display, to celebrate their lives and to share their stories so future generations always remember." According to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, while new HIV infections in the U.S. fell about 8% from 2015 to 2019, Black and Latino communities particularly gay and bisexual men within those groups continue to be disproportionately affected. In 2019, 26% of new HIV infections were among Black gay and bisexual men, 23% among Latino gay and bisexual men, and 45% among gay and bisexual men under the age of 35. African American and Hispanics/Latinos account for the largest increases in new HIV diagnoses, 42% and 27% respectively. Disparities also persist among women. Black women's HIV infection rate is 11 times that of white women and four times that of Latina women. Racism, HIV stigma, homophobia, poverty, and barriers to health care continue to drive these disparities. The first panels of the Quilt were created in June of 1987 when a group of strangers, led by gay rights activist Cleve Jones, gathered in a San Francisco storefront to document the lives they feared history would forget. This meeting of devoted friends, lovers and activists would serve as the foundation for The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Each panel made was the size of a human grave and they saw the Quilt as an activist tool to push the government into taking action to end the epidemic. "What started as a protest to demand action turned into a national movement that served as a wake-up call to the nation that thousands upon thousands of people were dying," said Jones. "Today, the Quilt is just as relevant and even more important, particularly in the wake of Covid-19, and the fact that the struggles we face today that result from health and social inequities are the issues we will face again in the future if we don't learn from the lessons of the past." That year, the nearly 2,000 panels of the Quilt traveled to Washington, D.C. for its first display on the National Mall. It then traveled to several cities, including a large display at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to raise funds for AIDS service organizations. Today, the Quilt, considered the largest community arts project in the world, is under the stewardship of the National AIDS Memorial and has surpassed 50,000 individually sewn panels with more than 110,000 names stitched into its 54 tons of fabric. The Quilt continues to connect the history of the AIDS pandemic to the ongoing fight against stigma and prejudice through hundreds of community displays around the country and educational programs that reach millions of people each year. In 2021, an outdoor Quilt display system was constructed in the National AIDS Memorial Grove, located in Golden Gate Park, which allows for regular outdoor displays. "Golden Gate Park has long been a place where history is made and where people come together for change, to heal and express themselves," said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. "The National AIDS Memorial is an important part of that history, and we are honored to be part of this event that will bring thousands of people to our beloved park to honor a national treasure." A special web page at www.aidsmemorial.org has been created for the public to plan their visit to see the display that will be updated regularly with the latest details and information about this historic event. SOURCE The National AIDS Memorial SYDNEY, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Medical device company Baymatob has completed a placement of A$4.215 million, with proceeds used to continue in-human clinical trials for its AI-guided labor monitoring device, Oli. Cornerstoned by Australian Unity's Future of Healthcare Fund, the placement was strongly supported by institutional and high net worth investors, securing long-term capital partners to support Baymatob's ongoing clinical development and path to commercialization. Founded by engineer and mother Dr Sarah McDonald after her own traumatic birth experience in 2013, Baymatob's innovative wearable device Oli uses artificial intelligence to identify mothers during labor who are at high risk of developing abnormal postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) well before giving birth. Postpartum hemorrhage, or heavy bleeding after childbirth, is a serious complication of pregnancy and is the world's leading cause of preventable maternal death. One mother dies every seven minutes due to postpartum hemorrhage globally. Severe PPH cases can lead to debilitating outcomes for women, including emergency hysterectomy and death. Despite medical advancements, postpartum hemorrhage is responsible for around 11 per cent of all US maternal deaths and this has remained stagnant over the last forty years. Globally, postpartum hemorrhage is the primary cause of nearly one quarter of all maternal deaths. There has been little advancement in maternal and fetal monitoring technologies overall, with even less advancement to successfully detect PPH. Today's devices focus on maternal heart rate, fetal heart rate and contractions with no available technology to successfully detect PPH before significant blood is lost. Founder Dr Sarah McDonald said genuine innovation in the maternal-fetal monitoring space has not been seen since the 1960's, with latest advancements focused on repackaging old devices in a sleek wireless form that still have issues monitoring during labor. "It is a sad fact that mothers today are monitored with the same measures as their grandmothers. Postpartum hemorrhage is currently diagnosed by estimating blood loss after it has occurred by which point it is an emergency with damage done. There is clear evidence that devices used in labor monitoring are not helping us to improve outcomes for mothers and babies. Further they are increasing rates of unnecessary interventions and restricting mothers' comfort and movement during labor. Yet we continue to persist with these devices to best protect in cases of litigation should things go wrong. We need to do better for mothers, babies and clinicians." Baymatob's wearable device Oli uses innovative sensor technology and AI interpretation to detect a pending PPH during labor before postpartum bleeding starts. Current clinical evidence from Baymatob's pilot study suggests that 80 percent of mothers with PPH could have clinical attention before bleeding starts using Oli, improving health outcomes and decreasing risk. In August 2021, Oli received Breakthrough Device designation by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), granting the company an expedited regulatory review path and providing timely clinical access for select medical devices with potential to transform US clinical practice. Tara Croft, Baymatob CEO, said investor support for the placement and proceeds raised will be invaluable in progressing Oli's development, enabling Baymatob to complete its 500-patient pilot study on path to a pivotal study at Australian and US sites. "This capital raise represents an important stage of Baymatob's growth, providing sufficient funds to complete our Australian pilot study for PPH, advance toward a pivotal clinical study, while accelerating R&D in further capabilities. It is a strong validation to have the support of capital partners including Australian Unity during our next exciting phase of growth." "Baymatob's success to date has been largely supported by the NSW Medical Devices Fund, with the company having received ~A$4.4 million in grants since 2017", she said. Victor Windeyer, fund manager of Australian Unity's Future of Healthcare Fund, said the fund is proud to support the clinical development of Oli, which has the potential to improve outcomes and positively impact millions of women's lives globally. "Baymatob's Oli is revolutionising how mothers are monitored in labor, with an innovation that overcomes challenges that mothers, families and clinicians have had to accept for too long." "With maternity complications increasing, breakthrough technologies such as Oli have significant potential to reduce morbidity and mortality rates of women and ultimately transform the delivery of healthcare. Australian Unity's Future of Healthcare Fund is proud to partner with the team at Baymatob on its next phase of research and development." About Baymatob Baymatob was founded after a traumatic birth experience and aims to transform outcomes for mothers and their babies. The company's flagship product Oli is a platform technology that will provide world-first, definitive clinical diagnoses, that have never-before been seen within pregnancy and labor monitoring. The first of these being a post-partum hemorrhage advance diagnostic capability. Baymatob, with its Oli technology, holds a rare opportunity to truly and completely transform clinical practice, disrupting decades-old technologies, with completely novel and impactful predictive diagnoses. About the Australian Unity Future of Healthcare Fund The Australian Unity Future of Healthcare Fund makes purposeful investments designed to generate long-term capital growth and enhance the health and wellbeing of Australians. SOURCE Baymatob Fleet Studies Lab is an online learning hub, designed to help decision makers get the most out of their fleets. Tweet this EVs and Hybrids Data, Telematics and Logistics Sustainability HR and Safety Financial Matters TaaS (Transportation as a Service) and more Within each course are various "classes," each an informative, solutions-focused article, guide, or video with an emphasis on proven solutions and methods for lowering fleet costs and improving ROI. The Fleet Studies Lab is available to C-suite executives and other fleet decision makers. "In today's highly competitive environment, companies must do everything they can to make their fleets as efficient and effective as possible to positively impact the bottom line," said Jeff Hart, President of Mike Albert Fleet Solutions. "The Fleet Studies Lab is an excellent compilation of best practices and innovative approaches to help companies take their fleets to the next level." To learn more about the Fleet Studies Lab and to explore the course catalog, visit www.mikealbert.com/fleet-studies-lab. About Mike Albert Fleet Solutions Mike Albertheadquartered in Cincinnati, Ohiomade its initial, groundbreaking mark on the fleet industry in 1957 when it became one of the very first companies to lease vehicles to fleets. Since then, Mike Albert has grown into a national top ten, multimillion dollar fleet management company serving fleets in any industry, of any size, across the US and beyond. The fleet experts at Mike Albert pride themselves on learning everything they need to know about an organization and its fleet to match it with the right vehicles, truck and van equipment, funding, and services. The company partners with its clients for the long haul, helping them minimize their TCO, maximize their ROI, and free up their cash flow. Working closely with its clients, Mike Albert devises the best strategy for transforming fleets into a force that nails a company's business goals, elevates its customer service, and gives it a competitive advantage. Mike Albert offers a full line of best-in-class fleet services, including flexible, personalized leasing and financing; vehicle acquisition; upfitting; vehicle remarketing and disposal; electrification; maintenance management; fuel management; telematics; Albert IQ (aproprietary vehicle and driver monitoring platform); administrative and driver fleet management; toll management; risk management; registration renewals; and DOT compliance. For more information visit www.mikealbert.com. SOURCE Mike Albert Fleet Solutions TRENTON, N.J., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The highly regarded forensics lab, hired with New Jersey court approval to analyze key evidence linked to the 2015 suspicious death of 18-year-old Tiffany Valiante, has just concluded that the items including a blood-stained towel and a T-shirt - were so poorly handled by investigators that they were "of no scientific probative value", according to the final report of the Ohio-based DNA Diagnostics Center (DDC) released today by Paul R. D'Amato, the Valiante family's attorney. Julie A. Heinig, Ph.D., Laboratory Director of Forensics and DNA Technical Leader, said, "We have extensive experience over decades performing analysis on evidence with degraded DNA, however, in this instance, we were able to obtain very little DNA for comparison due to the manner in which the evidence was collected and maintained. This included storage of evidence in plastic, rather than a paper receptacle, which resulted in moisture-inducing bacterial contamination." She noted that a DNA blood card, containing a sample of Tiffany Valiante's blood, was verified only after paternity testing due to the improper chain of custody and contamination of the sample. Attorney D'Amato, who has been representing the Valiante family in the aftermath of her death, near midnight on July 12, 2015, after being struck by a New Jersey Transit train, along a secluded section of track less than five miles from her Mays Landing home, said the long-awaited report's findings are "immensely disappointing but also consistent with the view of other independent forensic professionals who collectively questioned the official investigation by New Jersey Transit Police and the NJ Medical Examiner's Office into Tiffany's death, and they disputed labeling it suicide. At minimum, they believed the cause of death should have been ruled 'undetermined'." Mr. D'Amato added, "This report by DDC reinforces our view that there was a gross rush to judgement by investigators, who hastily determined Tiffany's death was a suicide; they never treated the scene like a crime scene and, clearly, mishandled key evidence that we now conclusively learn was useless when finally subjected to DNA testing. It remains an outrage that the Valiante family had to obtain a court order and pay with their own savings - to have that DNA analysis performed." He said the evidence that DCC tested has now been returned to the New Jersey office of Attorney General along with a copy of the lab's report. Tiffany's parents, Dianne and Stephen Valiante, in a statement on the report, said, "We were hopeful for a miracle with the DNA testing, especially knowing Tiffany's death from the start was dismissed as a suicide without a proper investigation ever conducted. There's no excuse for evidence being mishandled, even lost as in the case of a bloodied axe and a keychain found at the scene. We know her killer or killers are still free and must be held accountable for Tiffany's death. We again appeal to the Attorney General to reopen this case and pray for justice for Tiffany." About DNA Diagnostics Center (DDC) Founded in 1995, DNA Diagnostics Center (DDC) is a world leader in private, certified DNA forensic testing. Dr. Michael Baird, DDC's Laboratory Director, was the first DNA expert to testify in a US court, in 1982, and has testified in hundreds of cases. Legal and law enforcement professionals regularly contact DDC's team of forensic scientists to assist them on the most challenging cases. The forensics team at DDC uses state-of-the-art methods to continually advance the science and to help to ensure the correct outcome. The laboratory works closely with The Innocence Project in Ohio and around the country, assisting in the pursuit of truth and justice. SOURCE D'Amato Law Firm WASHINGTON, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA has chosen two students as winners of the Lunabotics Junior Contest, a national competition for K-12 students featuring the agency's Artemis missions. Contestants were charged with designing a robot that can dig and move lunar soil, or regolith, from one area of the lunar South Pole to a holding container near a future Artemis Moon base. Fifteen-year-old Shriya Sawant of Cumming, Georgia, was the winner from grades 6-12 with her RAD: Regolith Accretion Device design. Nine-year-old Lucia Grisanti from Toms River, New Jersey, won for grades K-5 with her design of Olympus. Each robot successfully accomplished the task of collecting and transporting regolith across rugged lunar terrain. Through its Artemis Student Challenges, NASA is welcoming the next generation of explorers the Artemis Generation to learn more about the mission that will pave the way to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon. Together with commercial and international partners, NASA will establish a sustainable presence on the Moon to prepare for missions to Mars. "Looking at the designs these students submitted for Lunabotics Junior, it's impossible not to be excited about the future of the Artemis Generation," said Mike Kincaid, NASA's associate administrator for the Office of STEM Engagement. "Their creativity and enthusiasm shine through in their ideas for a robot capable of mining lunar regolith." One national winner from each grade division was selected from approximately 2,300 submitted designs. The two awardees earned a virtual chat for their classrooms with Janet Petro, director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the next astronauts to explore the Moon will launch. As NASA prepares to return to the Moon, lunar regolith will be needed for multiple purposes, such as building a Moon base using lunar concrete; harvesting water that also can be used for rocket fuel; and extracting possible metals or minerals. The contest asked students to consider factors unique to the lunar environment when imagining their designs. Sawant designed an autonomous robot that would utilize a bucket drum to excavate soil in a creative way. Her system addressed the challenges of reduced gravity on the Moon, lunar dust contamination, navigating rough terrain, and ensuring the robot stays balanced during excavation and transport. Grisanti's solar-powered robot would use spiked wheels to traverse the lunar surface and scoop regolith into a cone-shaped collector to separate large rocks from dust. She named it Olympus, after the home of Greek mythology's Apollo and Artemis, which also are the names of NASA's original and current lunar exploration programs. Nearly 500 educators, professionals, and space enthusiasts served as volunteer judges to review student submissions. On March 15, judges selected 20 semifinalists, each of whom won a Lunabotics Junior Prize Pack. On March 22, eight finalists were announced and will receive a virtual education session with a NASA expert. The contest semifinalists and finalists are as follows: Grades K-5 Grades 6-12 The Lunabotics Junior contest was a collaboration between Future Engineers, NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, and the Office of STEM Engagement. For more information on NASA's Office of STEM Engagement, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/stem SOURCE NASA PARSIPPANY, N.J., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Weinberger Divorce & Family Law Group is pleased to announce that five of the firm's attorneys have been named to the Super Lawyers and Super Lawyers Rising Stars lists for 2022. Honorees for these prestigious recognitions are firm partners Bari Weinberger and Robyn Howlett, George Chehanske, all named Super Lawyers; and Ryan Russell and Hillary Piedra, named Super Laywers Rising Stars. Fewer than 5 percent of attorneys in the state receive these elite distinctions. "We are incredibly honored. Super Lawyers is a peer reviewed award, and we truly feel the support and recognition from our family law community in being included. This recognition is incredibly meaningful to us," says certified matrimonial attorney Bari Weinberger, founder of Weinberger Divorce & Family Law Group. "We are incredibly honored. Super Lawyers is a peer reviewed award, and we truly feel the support and recognition from our family law community in being included. This recognition is incredibly meaningful to us," said certified matrimonial attorney Bari Weinberger, founder of Weinberger Divorce & Family Law Group. Super Lawyers, part of Thomson Reuters, is a rating service of outstanding lawyers from more than 70 practice areas, including family law, who have attained a high degree of peer recognition and professional achievement. The annual selections are made using a patented multiphase process that includes a statewide survey of lawyers, an independent research evaluation of candidates and peer reviews by practice area. The result is a credible, comprehensive and diverse listing of exceptional attorneys. Family law attorneys with Weinberger Divorce & Family Law Group have recently earned additional accolades for their exceptional legal work and client care. Among the firm's honored lawyers are: Robyn Howlett and Bari Weinberger , named Best Lawyers in America, 2022 Bari Weinberger , recognized as a Top Mentoring Attorney, New Jersey Law Journal Legal Awards, 2022 Carmela Novi (partner) and Bari Weinberger , named New Jersey's Best Lawyers for Families Mara Dooskin (partner), honored as a Top Lawyer for Bergen County , 2022 Mara Dooksin, named to National Academy of Family Law Attorney's Top 10 list for New Jersey Additionally, Weinberger Divorce & Family Law Group received the firm-wide distinction of being named a Best Law Firm in America for 2022. The award reflects both client and peer reviews of the firm. "Our attorneys and our firm put in tremendous effort and dedication to provide our clients with world class legal care in their New Jersey family legal matters. We are delighted and humbled to have our work, individually and together as a team, recognized in so many different ways this year. It's affirming that our approach to guiding our clients works," notes Weinberger. About Weinberger Divorce & Family Law Group With offices located in Parsippany, Bedminster, Freehold, Hackensack, and Mount Laurel, award-winning Weinberger Divorce & Family Law Group assists client throughout New Jersey in all their family law matters, including divorce, custody, alimony, domestic violence, adoption and all other family law matters. To experience the Weinberger difference, schedule an initial consultation with one of the firm's family law attorneys. Media contact: Bari Z. Weinberger [email protected] (888) 888 0919 SOURCE Weinberger Divorce & Family Law Group Leading carpet cleaning franchise's support has helped more than 22,000 people LAKEWOOD, Colo., March 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning, one of the nation's greenest and fastest-growing carpet cleaning franchises that aims to open 60 new locations in 2022, has donated over $192,000 to the non-profit Water.org since 2015. The company's contributions have helped more than 22,000 people get long-term access to safe water and sanitation solutions. Long-term access like this is key to helping families find the path to greater economic opportunity, education, and improved health. "We are a part of a global community that we want to make a difference in," said Oxi Fresh founder and CEO Jonathan Barnett. "We are proud of our contributions to such an important and worthwhile cause and are eager to continue making a difference in people's lives." Water.org is changing lives with every dollar donated. Through partnerships with in-country financial institutions, the organization connects people in need with small, affordable loans to get access to safe water at home. Water.org doesn't merely give out waterthey empower local people and communities so that they can have sustainable, long-term solutions. "They're a revolutionary organization," said Mr. Barnett. "We're amazed by what they've been able to accomplish." Oxi Fresh donates to Water.org with every appointment that customers schedule through the brand's Online Scheduler. The proceeds go towards Water.org's efforts to help families in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Water and Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning Even before they began working with Water.org, water was important to Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning. Through their low-moisture cleaning process, they've helped conserve tens of millions of gallons of water when compared to old-fashioned steam cleaning methods. The Oxi Fresh process requires only two gallons of water to clean a home instead of the 40-60 gallons required by many steam cleaners. "One of our goals at Oxi Fresh is to provide our clients with a world-class cleaning experience backed up by eco-friendly methods and convenience," said Mr. Barnett, "Many people expect their carpets to take forever to dry, but our water-conserving system dries quickly and greatly reduces water usageit's the perfect combo." About Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning Through innovative products and modern technology, Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning offers green carpet cleanings and exceptional results. The company's powerful combination of knowledgeable people, innovative technology, and strong processes has landed the brand in Entrepreneur magazine's Franchise 500, ranked in Inc. magazine's Inc. 500|5000, and saw them named as one of "America's Best Franchises to Buy," by Forbes magazine. Oxi Fresh has over 450 locations throughout the United States and Canada, with more locations currently in development. For more information, visit oxifresh.com. About Water.org Water.org is an international nonprofit organization that has positively transformed more than forty-three million lives around the world through access to safe water and sanitation. Founded by Gary White and Matt Damon, Water.org has been pioneering market-driven financial solutions to the global water crisis for decadesgiving women hope, children health, and communities a future. Learn more at http://water.org and www.facebook.com/water, or join them at www.twitter.com/water . SOURCE Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning "As a fiercely independent, women-founded agency, this is just the beginning." Allisha Watkins, Paradox Co-Founder Tweet this The WBENC standard of certification implemented by the Women's Business Council Southwest is a meticulous process including an in-depth review of the business and site inspection. The certification process is designed to confirm the business is at least 51% owned, operated, and controlled by a woman or women. By including women-owned businesses among their suppliers, corporations and government agencies demonstrate their commitment to fostering diversity and the continued development of their supplier diversity programs. To learn more about Paradox, visit www.paradoxretail.com or contact the team at [email protected]. About Paradox Retail: Founded in 2019, Allisha Watkins and Amanda Whittaker established their marketing agency in Rogers, Arkansas with proximity to the world's largest retailer and an ever-growing supplier community. Paradox employees a team of industry experts and creative thinkers to better evaluate each unique client opportunity. We believe our partnerships value an iterative marketing process in which together, we make better decisions, and win the hearts and minds of shoppers. About WBENC: Founded in 1997, WBENC is the nation's leader in women's business development and the leading third-party certifier of businesses owned and operated by women, with more than 17,000 certified Women's Business Enterprises, 14 national Regional Partner Organizations, and more than 350 Corporate Members. More than 1,000 corporations representing America's most prestigious brands as well as many states, cities, and other entities accept WBENC Certification. For more information, visit www.wbenc.org. CONTACT: Amanda Whittaker [email protected] 479-437-7323 SOURCE Paradox OSLO, Norway, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Photocure ASA (OSE: PHO), The Bladder Cancer Company, announces that President and Chief Executive Officer, Dan Schneider and Chief Financial Officer, Erik Dahl will present corporate overviews and host 1-on-1 meetings with investors at the DNB Small & Medium Enterprises Conference on April 7, 2022, and the 21st Annual Needham Healthcare Conference being held virtually April 11-14, 2022. For the Needham Healthcare Conference, Photocure's presentation is scheduled to take place April 14th at 8:00am ET (2:00pm CET) and can be accessed via the following link: https://wsw.com/webcast/needham117/pho.ol/2531984 About the conferences: Now in its 18th year, the DNB Small & Medium Enterprises Conference 2022 is a one-day conference that will include company presentations from various sectors. Before the pandemic, more than 500 investors, company representatives and other market participants from the Nordics, UK and Continental Europe attended the conference. The 21st Annual Needham Virtual Healthcare Conference will feature leading public and private companies in the Biotechnology, Specialty Pharmaceuticals, Medical Technology, and Diagnostics sectors. About Photocure ASA Photocure: The Bladder Cancer Company delivers transformative solutions to improve the lives of bladder cancer patients. Our unique technology, making cancer cells glow bright pink, has led to better health outcomes for patients worldwide. Photocure is headquartered in Oslo, Norway and listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE: PHO). For more information, please visit us at www.photocure.com, www.hexvix.com, www.cysview.com CONTACT: For further information, please contact: Dan Schneider President and CEO Photocure ASA Email: [email protected] Erik Dahl CFO Photocure ASA Tel: +4745055000 Email: [email protected] David Moskowitz Vice President, Investor Relations Photocure ASA Tel: +1 202 280 0888 Email: [email protected] Media and IR enquiries: Geir Bjrlo Corporate Communications (Norway) Tel: +47 91540000 Email: [email protected] This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com https://news.cision.com/photocure/r/photocure-to-participate-in-two-investor-conferences-in-april--dnb-small---medium-enterprises-and-ne,c3535021 The following files are available for download: SOURCE Photocure "This is such an upbeat story," says Jeff Schmitt, Poets&Quants' senior writer who launched the series in 2016. "We want to provide our readers with role models. Reading about these students, you can learn the types of activities that enriched their college experiences and the practices that have made them so successful. We want our readers that all this is within their reach. For the students chosen, it provides a positive social media footprint that goes beyond a LinkedIn profile. Obviously, the parents come away feeling gratified seeing their sons and daughters profiled like this." This year's 100 Best & Brightest feature gifted students like Sunjay Letchuman, a Texas A&M senior who has co-authored research papers with faculty that have appeared in the Harvard Business Review and Mayo Clinic Proceedings. At the University of Illinois, Alex Kogen has served as a course assistant in six courses. He was even elevated to associate instructor in one course where he helped author the textbook and ranked as "Excellent" in student evaluations. During the pandemic, Northeastern University's Eliana Berger founded a nonprofit accelerator, Envision, that helped 50 companies raise over $20 million dollars in funding. And Carolyn Zedalis made such an impact at the University of Pittsburgh that she was named to the Pitt Business [email protected], which honored the business school's 25 most influential faculty, alumni, and students on its 25th anniversary. To compile this year's Best & Brightest students, Poets&Quants reached out to the 50 highest-ranked schools in its 2022 Undergraduate Business School Ranking. Each school was asked to choose two students for inclusion, with suggested criteria including academic excellence, extracurricular leadership, personal character, and innate potential. All 50 schools participated, with representatives including the Wharton School, Notre Dame, University of Virginia, and New York University. Overall, this year's Best & Brightest included 58 women and 42 men. As part of this feature, each student is given an in-depth profile, which covers areas like their extracurricular activities and awards, proudest achievement, and favorite classmate. It also includes a testimonial from an administrator or faculty member. To read the Best & Brightest Business Majors of 2022, CLICK HERE. Poets&Quants for Undergrads is a leading news website dedicated to the coverage of undergraduate business education. Highlighting the content is the annual exclusive ranking of the best undergraduate business schools across the United States. Founded by John A. Byrne, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company magazine and Businessweek.com, Poets&Quants for Undergrads is the sister website to Poet&Quants, which concentrates on MBA programs. For more information, visit poetsandquantsforundergrads.com. Follow us on social #PQURankings, @PoetsAndQuantsU, Facebook.com/poetsandquantsforundergrads, and linkedin.com/company/poets-quants-for-undergrads. This press release was issued through 24-7PressRelease.com. For further information, visit http://www.24-7pressrelease.com. SOURCE Poets&Quants for Undergrads analysis Despite some limitations, the survey complements official crime statistics which are compromised by very low trust in police. South Africa's 2020/21 Victims of Crime Survey (VOCS) was published last month. Although its accuracy was affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the findings on experiences of crime and perceptions of safety and gender-based violence remain valuable. Although the South African Police Service has a well-established data-capturing and analytics capacity, these are only as effective as the information police receive and process. In South Africa, as elsewhere, much crime is never reported, and when it is, police don't always record it. So beyond murder figures, police crime statistics are limited as a measure of actual crime levels. This is one reason why victim surveys are valuable. In 2021 trust in police dropped to an all-time low of 27%. The VOCS is one of the best ways to determine how this loss of confidence impacts the reporting of crime to police. In general, crimes such as motor vehicle theft or hijacking are reported at higher rates than offences like house or street robbery. This is not because vehicle crimes are more important or traumatic. Instead, it's because the minority of South Africans who own vehicles are likely to have their property insured and so have a financial incentive to report. Poorer households could place greater value on kettles, cellphones or personal items stolen during home invasions. But they don't have insurance or believe the police will provide empathy or support if they report the offence to them. Although trust in police is low, the latest VOCS suggests increases in reporting of vehicle theft, street robbery and consumer fraud. This may partly be explained by the disruption of established crime and reporting patterns during South Africa's 2020 coronavirus lockdowns. The pandemic may also have affected the VOCS' valuable perception data, such as questions exploring feelings of safety. A five-year trend suggests a notable increase from 29% of people feeling safe at night in 2016/17 to 40% in 2020/21 (Chart 1). Some may have felt safer in their residential area if interviewed during a hard lockdown in 2020 when streets were busier and surveillance persistent. Asked if they had taken measures to protect themselves against crime, only a third of respondents said yes, with most of those saying they felt safer after changing their habits. The changes included walking during 'safer hours' (45%) and being 'more alert of my own surroundings' (22%). Again, the nature of public spaces changed dramatically during various phases of the pandemic, perhaps affecting these answers. 'Whites' or 'Indians/Asians' were more likely to have taken measures than were 'Coloureds' or 'Black/Africans'. This disparity may reflect how middle and affluent classes can opt out of public spaces and transport more easily than poorer South Africans. Another valuable set of questions explores gender-based violence - a significant problem in South Africa. Promisingly, 91% of respondents had been exposed to campaigns 'about violence against women and children'; 99% believed that all violence against women and children should be reported; and 93% thought people should call the police if they witnessed violence at a neighbour or friend's residence. What is less encouraging is that only 65% said people should intervene in such violence themselves. This implies an unsurprising disconnect between how South Africans think and feel about violence and how we act when faced with it. Asked how they would respond in the face of a male friend 'insulting or verbally abusing a woman he was in a relationship with,' most said they would feel uncomfortable but probably not say or do anything. Similarly, most respondents believed fathers should 'play a role in raising children;' that women and men should have the same chance of 'being elected to political office;' and that 'having an income is the best way for a woman to be an independent person.' Unfortunately however, 55% also agreed with the statement that, 'If a woman earns more money than her man, it is almost certain to cause problems.' This last finding undermines the sentiment of gender equality implied in previous answers. And the use of the phrase 'her man' by Statistics South Africa assumes a sense of ownership and power inequality between genders, possibly unconsciously held by the survey drafters. The same bias is apparent when asking whether it's acceptable 'for a man/husband to hit or beat his woman/wife.' Nearly 10% of respondents thought such violence was acceptable in specific contexts, such as sexual infidelity. That the question was framed in only one form and direction (a man assaulting a woman) embeds assumptions about domestic violence, intimate partnerships (that they are heterosexual) and sexual identity (that all people with male bodies identify as 'man'). While most survey respondents (83%-88%) said they 'were aware of' services available to victims of gender-based violence such as medical care, protection orders and counselling, only 47% knew of shelters and places of safety. Notably, the survey only asked about awareness of services, not whether people knew how to access them. Overall, most victims and perpetrators of all types of violence are men. As long as South African boys and men continue believing violence is a legitimate means to express authority and solve problems, it is unlikely that violence against women or children will decrease, despite some of the promising findings mentioned above. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines South Africa Legal Affairs By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. Public safety governance cannot be based on police statistics alone, and the government is to be commended for investing in a diversity of crime- and violence-measurement tools, including the VOCS. However, the VOCS, like police data, should be interpreted and acted on with caution - especially this latest iteration. Ideally, police and VOCS data should be compared to violence-related injury data from health facilities, bank and insurance data on property and financial crime, and other quality perception surveys. Alone, none of these data sets reveals 'the truth' about crime, violence or risk, but together they move us a little closer to it. Andrew Faull, Senior Researcher, Justice and Violence Prevention, ISS Pretoria Exclusive rights to re-publish ISS Today articles have been given to Daily Maverick in South Africa and Premium Times in Nigeria. For media based outside South Africa and Nigeria that want to re-publish articles, or for queries about our re-publishing policy, email us. Development partners This article was published with funding from the Hanns Seidel Foundation and the Bavarian State Chancellery. The ISS is also grateful for support from the members of the ISS Partnership Forum: the Hanns Seidel Foundation, the European Union, the Open Society Foundations and the governments of Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. DALLAS, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Puration, Inc. (USOTC: PURA) management today highlighted the potential benefits to the company in the event marijuana were legalized federally. The House is expected to vote this week on legalization: Under its new Farmersville Hemp Brand, PURA is working to introduce hemp as a multi-industry disruptor that can be a base of a better product or service contributing notably to the 2050 sustainability objectives. PURA recently announced a strategy targeted at disrupting the $600 billion global lumber market and the $200 billion steel rebar market. PURA management emphasizes that investment and financing for companies in the cannabis sector, hemp or marijuana, is complicated by the current federal prohibition of cannabis. Legalization could open up new resources that could drive exponential growth. PURA has initiated construction on a facility in Farmersville, Texas where the company will conduct consultative education customized for each corporate customer to hands on demonstrate how hemp can be utilized to improve the efficiency of existing products and services and meet 2050 sustainability targets. Read the company's latest comprehensive update on PURA's Farmersville Hemp Brand rollout. For more information on Puration, visit http://www.purationinc.com Disclaimer: This News Release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors that could cause our actual results, performance or achievements, or industry results, to differ materially from any these statements. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any those forward-looking statements. Except as otherwise required by the federal securities laws, we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements after the date of this news release. None of such forward-looking statements should be regarded as a representation by us or any other person that the objectives and plans set forth in this News Release will be achieved or be executed. For More Information Contact: Puration, Inc. Brian Shibley, [email protected] (800) 861-1350 SOURCE Puration, Inc. RENTON, Wash., March 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Radiant Logistics, Inc. (NYSE American: RLGT), a third-party logistics and multimodal transportation services company, today announced the expansion of its humanitarian aid and disaster relief efforts to include a service desk dedicated to the support of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. Radiant has most recently been working round the clock in response to the unfolding crisis in Ukraine with the delivery of vital medical supplies including oxygen concentrators and medical backpacks, as well as cold chain items including insulin and other urgently needed medicines. Within the past thirty days, more than 100 tons of emergency equipment and food have been moved into and around the region, with another 50 tons already on the ground and in the hands of those currently entrenched in war zone relief work. Radiant's Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Relief Team includes vital partners and competency centers that are geographically, culturally and strategically placed to best respond to these needs. Radiant has long held a strong presence working with U.S. government and NGO organizations in support of humanitarian aid and disaster relief. Over the past many years, Radiant has continuously provided mission support, including over 100 charters for Project Airbridge (the accelerated transportation project created in conjunction with FEMA and the Office of the White House to bring PPE and other critical medical supplies into the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic response), disaster relief missions for Saipan's Super Typhoon Yutu (including the movement of hundreds of thousands of pounds of building supplies, tents, MREs, water and more), along with countless other projects. The formalization of the Ukraine Service Desk will enable an even more streamlined response to such time-sensitive work. Says Arnie Goldstein, Chief Commercial Officer for Radiant: "With a team of dedicated experts in this important vertical we are continuing to make good on the trust placed in us and rise to the challenge of difficult and often unstable situations. The Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Relief Team and Ukraine Desk further solidify our continued and active participation with relief and recovery efforts for clients around the world." For further information or to engage with the Radiant Humanitarian AidDisaster Relief Team on either the ongoing Ukraine Response or other projects in this vertical, please reach out to Wiley Knight, Director of Humanitarian Relief via email or telephone: [email protected] or +1.704.806.8276. About Radiant Logistics, Inc. Radiant Logistics, Inc. (www.radiantdelivers.com) is a comprehensive North American provider of third-party logistics and multimodal transportation services. Through its comprehensive service offering, Radiant provides domestic and international freight forwarding services, truck and rail brokerage services and other value-added supply chain management services, including customs brokerage, order fulfillment, inventory management and warehousing to a diversified account base including manufacturers, distributors and retailers using a network of independent carriers and international agents positioned strategically around the world. SOURCE Radiant Logistics, Inc. MENLO PARK, Calif., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sameer Chopra, Head of Siri Data Science and Insights at Apple comes aboard Infinite Analytics (https://www.linkedin.com/in/choprasameer/).He will be guiding them as Infinite Analytics scales its SAAS AI platform, Sherlock (http://www.thesherlock.ai) to Small and Medium Enterprises, in the US and in India. At Apple, he led the group of Siri data scientists and has been instrumental in leveraging data as the 'voice of the user' to drive product insights and features for the voice assistant. Sameer Chopra Infinite Analytics He brings more than two decades of advanced analytics experience spanning Marketing, Product, and Customer Analytics. He is one of the foremost data scientists and a recognized thought leader in the space. He has led many established firms such as Orbitz/Expedia, GoDaddy, and ID Analytics (Symantec) as their Chief Analytics Officer. Sameer also advises startups in Silicon Valley and is also on the Advisory Board of universities such as Northwestern and UNSW Sydney (on the Marketing Leadership forum). Sameer Chopra - "I'm looking forward to working closely with Akash and the team at Infinite Analytics. I'm excited about the knowledge graph underneath Sherlock and its capabilities that can be extended. There is huge demand for actionable consumer insights in an easy-to-consume fashion -- and I find very promising the potential in Sherlock for just that! I look forward to taking us to higher growth levels by driving commercial impact within enterprises and SMBs." Akash Bhatia - "We are excited that Sameer has come onboard IA. Sherlock has gained lots of momentum with Enterprise and SMB clients in the last couple of years. We look to leverage his expertise in marketing analytics, consumer marketing and consumer insights from his experience at eBay, Orbitz/Expedia, and Apple, among others. Our enterprise clients have been getting an RoI that ranges from 10x - 38x, when they use Sherlock. We are scaling this up to Small and Medium enterprises so that even a neighborhood baker will be able to achieve such an impact, at a fraction of the cost required to build a data science and Ai infrastructure. Sameer's experience here will be extremely valuable for us to achieve this objective. We look forward to a great ride over the coming months." Media contact: Akash Bhatia [email protected] 650-789-0199 SOURCE Infinite Analytics, Inc. SODERTALJE, Sweden, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Scania's corporate venture capital fund announces an investment in UK-based Parcelly with growth plans for the US and Europe. Parcelly aims to resolve first and last mile delivery challenges with its proprietary mobile app. Parcelly was founded in 2014 and aims to revolutionise the world of urban logistics. It aims to resolve first and last mile challenges by activating excess or underutilised space in real estate for E-commerce and logistics through its proprietary mobile app technology. Parcelly's solution integrates retailers and carriers across all industries and of all sizes to a highly scalable and internationally growing platform of 'logistics hubs'. "Parcelly are on an exciting journey to change the way local warehouses are sourced and managed, enabling efficient last mile delivery and making most efficient use of existing space and resources in relevant demand pockets. The offering suits most retail markets and segments, and supporting Parcelly in their continued growth with both investment and the industry experience from Scania is a great strategic fit for the portfolio of Scania Growth Capital," says Christian Zeuchner, Partner at East Hill Equity, Investment Manager for Scania Growth Capital. In addition to the invested capital as such, the companies that Scania Growth Capital invests in also gain access to knowledge, know-how and industry insight from Scania. "We're super excited and proud to be on this journey and to welcome Scania Growth Capital on board as investors. Our focus to date has been on establishing our core product proposition with global clients, and this Series A round will help us fulfil our expansion plans, technology and team development. We are looking forward to disrupting new industry sectors with our unique omni-channel logistics platform," says Sebastian Steinhauser, CEO and Founder of Parcelly. About Scania Growth Capital Scania Growth Capital is a corporate venture capital fund that invests in growth companies within Scania's ecosystem of customers and partners. The fund is managed by an external management company - East Hill Equity with a team that has extensive experience in both investments and the mobility industry. Through Scania Growth Capital, Scania reaches a segment of complementing companies, giving Scania an opportunity to tap into early development and innovation that is relevant to the industry but outside Scania's own core operations. For more information, visit www.scaniagrowthcapital.com. For further information, please contact: Erik Bratthall, Corporate Public and Media Relations Manager, Scania Phone: +46 76 724 45 27 E-mail: [email protected] This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com https://news.cision.com/scania/r/scania-growth-capital-invests-in-carrier-agnostic-logistics-tech-platform-parcelly,c3534556 The following files are available for download: https://mb.cision.com/Main/209/3534556/1555487.pdf Scania Growth Capital invests in carrier agnostic logistics tech platform Parcelly https://news.cision.com/scania/i/parcelly-illustration-16x7,c3030706 parcelly-illustration 16x7 SOURCE Scania NEW YORK, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK), a leading global creative platform offering full-service solutions, high-quality content, and creative workflow solutions for brands, businesses and media companies, will report its first quarter 2022 business and financial results on Tuesday, April 26, 2022 before the market opens. The company will host a conference call at 8:30 a.m. ET to discuss the results. The conference call can be accessed in the U.S. at (844) 634-1442 or outside the U.S. at (615) 247-0239 with the conference ID# 9054804. A live audio webcast of the call will also be available on Shutterstock's website at http://investor.shutterstock.com . Following completion of the call, a recorded replay of the webcast will be available in the investor relations section of Shutterstock's website. A telephone replay of the call will also be available until May 3, 2022 in the U.S. at (855) 859-2056 or outside the U.S. at (404) 537-3406 with the conference ID# 9054804. ABOUT SHUTTERSTOCK Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK ), is a leading global creative platform offering full-service solutions, high-quality content, and creative workflow solutions for brands, businesses and media companies. Directly and through its group subsidiaries, Shutterstock's comprehensive collection includes high-quality licensed photographs , vectors , illustrations , 3D models , videos and music . Working with its growing community of over 2 million contributors, Shutterstock adds hundreds of thousands of images each week, and currently has more than 400 million images and more than 24 million video clips available. Headquartered in New York City, Shutterstock has offices around the world and customers in more than 150 countries. The Company also owns PicMonkey, a leading online graphic design and image editing platform ; Offset, a high-end image collection ; Shutterstock Studios, an end-to-end custom creative shop ; PremiumBeat, a curated royalty-free music library; Shutterstock Editorial, a premier source of editorial images and videos for the world's media; TurboSquid, a leading 3D content marketplace ; Amper Music, an AI-driven music platform ; and Bigstock , a value-oriented stock media offering. For more information, please visit www.shutterstock.com and follow Shutterstock on Twitter and on Facebook . SOURCE Shutterstock, Inc. Elements such as increasing demand for national security vigilance, criminal agencies and government institutions, growing demand from military systems and a rising number of intelligence equipment providers are boosting the market growth. JERSEY CITY, N.J., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Verified Market Research recently published a report, "Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Market" By Type (Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) and Communications Intelligence (COMINT)), By Application (Ground, Airborne, Naval, Space and Cyber), and By Geography. According to Verified Market Research, the Global Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Market size was valued at USD 13.3 Billion in 2020 and is projected to reach USD 17.2 Billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 3.3% from 2021 to 2028. Download PDF Brochure: https://www.verifiedmarketresearch.com/download-sample/?rid=50759 Browse in-depth TOC on "Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Market" 202 - Pages 126 Tables 37 Figures Global Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Market Overview Elements such as increasing demand for national security vigilance, criminal agencies and government institutions, growing demand from military systems and a rising number of intelligence equipment providers are boosting the market growth. Furthermore, greater adoption rates of electronic systems for intelligence are expected to fuel revenue growth. Additionally, more cost of equipment and the inability of these systems to track multiple threats at a single time is likely to hamper this market. The nations around the globe are analyzing and appealing to new alternatives to military systems to diminish costs. Besides, the signals intelligence (SIGINT) industry is transferred from defense suppliers to commercial providers. For instance, the decreased defence budgets of some major economies, such as France, Germany, Saudi Arabia and the UK would affect the demand for SIGINT systems in the near future, which in turn, is acting as a challenge for the growth of the SIGINT market. Being a capital-intensive market, the market in the emerging economies is not growing at the desired pace. The diversity of threats is a prime challenge for the SIGINT market. Key Developments In September 2020 , BAE Systems announced the newest addition to its Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (UUV) portfolio, the Riptide UUV-12. , BAE Systems announced the newest addition to its Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (UUV) portfolio, the Riptide UUV-12. In October 2020 , Raytheon Intelligence and Space launched a virtualized testing solution to assess cyber vulnerabilities. , Raytheon Intelligence and Space launched a virtualized testing solution to assess cyber vulnerabilities. In July 2020 , Saab created a new FCAS center in the UK as a hub for its participation in the Future Combat Air Systems (FCAS) program. The UK and Sweden signed an MoU on FCAS co-operation in July 2019 . Saab is leading Sweden's FCAS industrial participation in close co-operation with Sweden's Ministry of Defense. Key Players The major players in the market are Raytheon Intelligence., Elbit Systems Ltd., General Dynamics Corporation, Rheinmetall AG, Mercury Systems, Inc., Harris Corporation, BAE Systems., Thales Group, Northrop Grumman Corporation., Saab, among others. Verified Market Research has segmented the Global Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Market On the basis of Type, Application, and Geography. Industrial Robotic Motors Market, By Type Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) Communications Intelligence (COMINT) Industrial Robotic Motors Market, By Application Ground Airborne Naval Space Cyber Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Market by Geography North America U.S Canada Mexico Europe Germany France U.K Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China Japan India Rest of Asia Pacific ROW Middle East & Africa & Latin America Browse Related Reports: Managed Security Services Market By Type (Managed Identity And Access Management, Managed Firewall), By Security Type (Managed Application Security, Managed Cloud Security), By Organization Size (Large Enterprise, Small And Medium Enterprise), By Deployment Model (On-Premises, Cloud), By Vertical (BFSI, Retail), By Geography, Forecast, 2021-2028 Homeland Security Market By End-Use (Aviation, Maritime, Border, Cyber), By Geography, Forecast, 2021-2028 Intelligent Traffic Management System Market By Solution (Traffic Monitoring System, Traffic Signal Control System, Traffic Enforcement Cameras), By Spender Type (Infrastructure Enterprises & PPPs, Federal & Provincial Government, Industries & Commercial Enterprise), By Components (Traffic Controllers & Signals, Surveillance Cameras, Video Walls), By Geography, Forecast, 2021-2028 Aerial Survey Services Market By Type (Drone Platform Service, MRO, Training And Education), By Industry (Agriculture, Logistics, Media And Entertainment), By Application (Data Acquisition And Analytics, Mapping And Surveying, 3D Modeling), By Geography, Forecast, 2021-2028 5 Leading Perimeter Security Providers managing end to end security of networks Visualize Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Market using Verified Market Intelligence:-: Verified Market Intelligence is our BI Enabled Platform for narrative storytelling of this market. VMI offers in-depth forecasted trends and accurate Insights on over 20,000+ emerging & niche markets, helping you make critical revenue impacting decisions for a brilliant future. VMI provides a holistic overview and global competitive landscape with respect to Region, Country, and Segment, and Key players of your market. Present your Market Report & findings with an inbuilt presentation feature saving over 70% of your time and resources for Investor, Sales & Marketing, R&D, and Product Development pitches. VMI enables data delivery In Excel and Interactive PDF formats with over 15+ Key Market Indicators for your market. About Us Verified Market Research is a leading Global Research and Consulting firm servicing over 5000+ customers. Verified Market Research provides advanced analytical research solutions while offering information enriched research studies. We offer insight into strategic and growth analyses, Data necessary to achieve corporate goals and critical revenue decisions. Our 250 Analysts and SME's offer a high level of expertise in data collection and governance use industrial techniques to collect and analyze data on more than 15,000 high impact and niche markets. Our analysts are trained to combine modern data collection techniques, superior research methodology, expertise and years of collective experience to produce informative and accurate research. We study 14+ categories from Semiconductor & Electronics, Chemicals, Advanced Materials, Aerospace & Defense, Energy & Power, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Automotive & Transportation, Information & Communication Technology, Software & Services, Information Security, Mining, Minerals & Metals, Building & construction, Agriculture industry and Medical Devices from over 100 countries. Contact Us Mr. Edwyne Fernandes Verified Market Research US: +1 (650)-781-4080 UK: +44 (753)-715-0008 APAC: +61 (488)-85-9400 US Toll Free: +1 (800)-782-1768 Email: [email protected] Web: https://www.verifiedmarketresearch.com/ Follow Us: LinkedIn | Twitter SOURCE Verified Market Research The joint report presents first-hand testimony of 43 Haitian and other survivors who were trapped by U.S. immigration officials in a makeshift encampment under the Del Rio International Bridge, subjected to violence, racial slurs and intimidation, and denied sufficient access to food, water, and medical care. "The Del Rio crisis is a moment of national reckoning," said Kerry Kennedy, President of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. "Fathers, mothers, and children who risked everything because of their belief in the promise and compassion of America were met instead with extreme militarization, brutal violence, hostility, and racism. The U.S. government must be held accountable for its actions depriving thousands of the opportunity to apply for asylum and violating international law. We must end Title 42 and the deportation of Haitian asylum seekers immediately." Haitian Bridge Alliance v. Biden, a pending federal class action lawsuit, asserts that the U.S. government's actions at Del Rio were part of a larger strategy that was intentionally designed to send a message of deterrence to other Black immigrants: the United States will not protect you and will deport you back to danger. To perpetrate these human rights abuses, the U.S. used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext. Invoking an obscure public health statute called Title 42, the Biden Administration fully embraced a Trump-era policy that claimed the unprecedented authority to prevent the entry into the country of people seeking humanitarian protection. "As a Haitian-American woman, descendant of enslaved Africans in the Americas, I cannot disconnect this treatment of Black people in Del Rio from the historical treatment of Black people in the United States," said Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance. "The inhumane treatment while in CBP custody, including people shackled and forced on planes, is evidence that the entire system is deeply rooted in white supremacy. This mistreatment is not lost on the Haitian-American community as we remember how the United States dehumanized Haitians refugees fleeing persecution in the 1980s. We demand accountability and protection for all people in need of safety and to immediately end Title 42." The report includes testimonies and information obtained by the Haitian Bridge Alliance and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights through in-person and phone interviews with survivors and witnesses, detailing human rights abuses committed by the Department of Homeland Security and others against Haitian immigrants in the Del Rio encampment. It also documents continued abuses inflicted on Black immigrants after the U.S. government hastened to clear Del Rio and erase all evidence of wrongdoing. Among them: continued mass expulsions of Haitians fleeing persecution and torture; continued abuses in ICE detention centers; and continued separation of family members. A series of recommendations for the Biden administration to adopt to begin to rectify the harm it caused in Del Rio and beyond are also offered. They include immediately rescinding Title 42 and the Migration Protection Protocols, immigration policies that violate U.S. and international law and were designed to eliminate access to asylum for Black and brown people; providing increased funding and support for civil society organizations assisting asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border; ending all expulsions and deportations to Haiti; fulfilling the Administration's promise to investigate the human and civil rights abuses committed at Del Rio; providing humanitarian parole to those harmed; ending all ICE contracts with for-profit prisons and updating the Haiti's eligibility date for Temporary Protected Status. "The horrific images of Border Patrol on horseback at Del Rio attacking Black asylum seekers trying to bring food to their starving families rightfully shocked the collective conscience. But far from an isolated event, those images encapsulate the cruelty of our immigration system as a whole," Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Senior Vice President Wade McMullen said. "The violence and anti-Black racism on full display in Del Rio plays out every single day at ports of entry, in detention center centers, in immigration courts, and on deportation flights. Del Rio is every day." A copy of the report can be viewed in full here . Media contacts: Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights: Amy Zelvin Reid, [email protected] Anna TenBroek, [email protected] Haitian Bridge Alliance: Taisha Saintil, [email protected] SOURCE Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights This industry-first collaboration will see SMART Technologies apply its interactivity and engagement expertise to Kooth's clinically proven mental wellbeing content and activities, and embed it into SMART's digital learning tool, Lumio. In doing so, SMART will be able to provide teachers with readily available and digitally engaging lessons centered around mental wellbeing, connecting more educators and learners to Kooth's resources and community. This includes making Kooth's integrated platform - currently available to over 20,000 schools across the UK - available in North America, too. The partnership comes at a pivotal time for supporting mental wellness for students, with CDC data showing that rates of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse continue to rise. In the UK, data from NHS Digital finds that one in six, 6 to 16-year-olds in the UK now suffer from probable mental disorders up from one in nine in 2017. The importance of an integrated approach to early education and support for mental health has never been greater. Kooth is the UK's largest digital wellbeing mental health platform for 10-25 year olds, and delivers clinically proven, and research-evidenced therapies for those dealing with stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental health and wellbeing concerns. The strategic partnership will also see SMART help to propel Kooth's North American expansion and beyond by coupling Kooth's wellbeing expertise with SMART's global scale and reach to roll-out vital mental health lessons and support to schools and educators across the globe. Nicholas Svensson, CEO of SMART Technologies, said: "As a company, we have always worked to deliver technology platforms and solutions that boost student and teacher wellbeing and build connections that matter whether that's through creating engaging content where students can interact with one another, providing active, collaborative learning options, or supporting social and emotional learning (SEL)." "As a leader of wellbeing in education in the UK, Kooth can further improve our offering with its clinical expertise that's underpinned by extensive research and experience in supporting hundreds of thousands of students every year. Together, we're excited about what we can achieve as a collective unit in alleviating one of the most prevalent issues in classrooms today." Tim Barker, CEO at Kooth, said: "The pandemic accelerated mental health challenges amongst students, and as a result, educators are now working tirelessly to provide support where they can. Our collaboration with SMART leverages its trust and scale in education to make accessing our clinically developed content and platform easier for teachers and students across the US, UK, and beyond." Hear more from Tim Barker and Nicholas Svensson in this conversion from Bett: https://youtu.be/eIEjdi8Cncc About SMART Technologies Inc. SMART is a world leader in education technology, providing interconnected solutions to help every person discover and develop the greatness within them. The first SMART Board launched in 1991, and has continued to innovate through SMART Notebook, the world's most popular collaborative learning software, and through Lumio, the award-winning cloud-based learning software. With a full range of products used by millions of educators and students around the world, SMART creates connections that matter. To learn more, visit smarttech.com. About Kooth Kooth is the UK's leading digital mental health platform. Their mission is to provide accessible and safe spaces for everyone to achieve better mental health. Their platform is clinically robust and accredited to provide a range of therapeutic support and interventions. All of their services are predicated on easy access to make early intervention and prevention a reality. Kooth provides a pre-moderated community together with an extensive library of peer and professional created content, alongside access to experienced online counsellors; this is all delivered within a clinically robust safeguarding and governance framework. There are no thresholds for support and no waiting lists. Currently, Kooth sees over 4,000 logins a day. Kooth is the only digital mental health provider to hold a UK-wide accreditation from the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). In 2021, Kooth was named 'Best Newcomer' at the European Mediscience Awards, winner in the category of 'Tech for Good' at the UK Tech Awards and recognized as the 'HealthTech Pioneer of the Year' at the UK Business Tech Awards for its role in 'Supporting the Nation's Mental Health'. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1775328/SMART_Tech.jpg Contact: [email protected] SOURCE SMART Technologies "Mike is a results oriented, highly motivated, cultural, and transformational leader with a proven track record to build, grow, manage, and retain high performing teams," said Matt Warren, Steampunk's CEO. "Out of the gates, Mike will be focused on supporting our sales and delivery teams through new business opportunities, on-contract growth, and client intimacy. We are very fortunate to have Mike and his leadership as part of our team!" added Warren. Prior to joining Steampunk, Mike was the Global Vice President, Platform / Cloud at Splunk where he built and led their global industry & specialization organization. He led multiple global go-to-market field functions spanning cloud sales and services, platform, industry verticals, and value/technology advisory. Before Splunk, Mike spent 7+ years at Qlik and led their global Customer Success Management and Consulting Services organizations. He also held prior roles leading Qlik's Industry Solutions, Global Strategic Accounts, and Value Engineering organizations. Prior to Qlik, Mike was Business Unit Executive for Global Industry Solutions in IBM's Business Analytics division. He also worked six years at Cognos and consulted for Accenture on multiple projects. Mike holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering from Virginia Tech University. "I'm excited to leverage my broad technology experience to focus my energy on helping the Federal Government achieve meaningful mission outcomes," said Mike Saliter. "Making a positive difference is a passion for me and doing it at a company that has a people-first culture which aligns to my core values is incredibly motivating. I can't wait to roll up my sleeves and work alongside my fellow Steampunk employees to serve our clients," added Saliter. About Steampunk Steampunk is a Change Agent in the Federal contracting industry, bringing new thinking to clients in the Homeland, Federal Civilian, Health and DoD sectors. Through our Human-Centered delivery methodology, we are fundamentally changing the expectations our Federal clients have for true shared accountability in solving their toughest mission challenges. As an employee owned company, we focus on investing in our employees to enable them to do the greatest work of their careers and rewarding them for outstanding contributions to our growth. If you want to learn more about our story, visit http://www.steampunk.com. Media Contact: Robert Pearson, Chief Marketing Officer [email protected] | 571.344.5538 www.steampunk.com | @Steampunk_inc SOURCE Steampunk "Partnering with Stellar gives UNC Health Alliance an innovative edge in driving superior patient outcomes and rewarding our providers and care teams for their hard work," said Robb Malone, PharmD, Chief Operating Officer at UNC Health Alliance. "Using the Stellar platform, we can put dynamic, actionable information in the hands of our independent providers even with their varying staffing structures, electronic medical records and workflows." "Using the Stellar platform, we can put dynamic, actionable information in the hands of our independent providers." Designed to improve health outcomes, Stellar's web-based, point-of-care platform leverages historical patient information to prompt primary care providers and their care teams with granular action recommendations within their daily workflow. Stellar will support UNC Health Alliance to offer real-time incentives tied to the completion of these high-value actions, rewarding providers and care team members within their network that are going above and beyond to deliver exceptional care to thousands of patients. "The simplicity of the Stellar platform empowers our entire care team to deliver the best possible care while also increasing our monthly revenue," said Jonathan Fowler, VP of Operations for Generations Family Practice and Cary Medical Management, a large primary care group within UNC Health's network. "Partnering with UNC Health and Stellar aligns with our commitment to provide advanced technology to our independent primary care providers within their existing workflows." "UNC Health Alliance's historical results demonstrate they are already a leader in the industry," said Zack Caplan, Director of Provider Network and Strategy at Stellar Health. "This new partnership aims to help keep their hands on the wheel of performance as they take on even more advanced value-based arrangements across their network." The partnership aligns with the core of Stellar's mission, to empower primary care practices to deliver value-based care that always keeps the patient top of mind. "We're thrilled to kick off our partnership with a progressive health system like UNC Health," adds Michael Meng, CEO of Stellar Health. "We invite health insurers in the North Carolina market to join the collaboration, so we may continue to engage providers in value-based care initiatives that will improve the quality of care for their patients across the state." About Stellar Health Stellar Health ("Stellar") is a healthcare technology company focused on enabling success across the value-based care ("VBC") continuum by bridging the incentive gap between providers and payors. The Stellar solution is the first point-of-care, cloud-based platform that helps primary care providers continually engage with their patients by providing them real-time information and tangible action-based incentives for improving quality of care. With Stellar, providers can achieve a range of VBC goals, like improving quality scores and optimizing the patient care journey through transitions of care and high-value referrals, all with the objective of improving patient health. For more information on Stellar Health, visit www.stellar.health. About UNC Health UNC Health is an integrated health care system owned by the state of North Carolina and based in Chapel Hill. It exists to further the University of North Carolina's teaching mission and provide state-of-the-art patient care. UNC Health is comprised of UNC Hospitals at Chapel Hill, ranked consistently among the best medical centers in the country; the UNC School of Medicine, a nationally preeminent research institution; Pardee UNC Health Care in Hendersonville; Chatham Hospital in Siler City; Johnston Health in Clayton and Smithfield; UNC Lenoir Health Care in Kinston; Wayne UNC Health Care in Goldsboro; Caldwell UNC Health Care in Lenoir; Nash UNC Health Care in Rocky Mount; UNC Rockingham Health Care in Eden, Onslow Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville, UNC REX Healthcare and its provider network in Wake County; and the UNC Physicians Network. For more information, please visit www.unchealth.org. Contact: Genevieve Pasculli Stellar Health Telephone 516-457-4791 Email [email protected] Website www.stellar.health SOURCE Stellar Health Zimbabwes main opposition, the Citizens Coalition for Change, Nelson Chamisa, addressing his supporters after police blocked a rally in Marondera district, March 12 2022. Zimbabwe's newest opposition party, the Citizens' Coalition for Change (CCC) won 19 parliamentary seats out of 28 on the ballot in the by-elections last Saturday, as ruling party Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) took the remaining nine, according to state broadcaster ZBC-TV on Sunday evening. "Citizens came together and achieved a resounding victory for the movement," said CCC spokesperson Fadzayi Mahere after the results were announced. The long-awaited by-elections were held for parliamentary and local government seats to fill spots that had been vacant nearly two years. More than 100 local council positions were up on the ballot. The government had postponed the polls in 2020 due to Covid-19. The two months-old Zimbabwean main opposition Citizens Coaliton for Change led by Nelson Chamisa emerged from yesterday's critical by-elections as the biggest winner with 19 out of 28 parliamentary constituencies (67.9% of the vote) ahead of the ruling Zanu PF and MDC-T/Alliance. pic.twitter.com/Lw10NBQHfp -- TheNewsHawks (@NewsHawksLive) March 27, 2022 CCC party leader Nelson Chamisa set up his own party at the end of January after breaking with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in a legal battle over internal politics. The MDC gained no seats in the by-election. Intimidation, vote-buying Independent election observers assert that the by-elections were tainted by intimidation and vote-buying. CCC members allege that the ruling party had banned some rallies because there wasn't enough police to man the event. Chamisa also said that police had tried to intimidate supporters from going to rallies over the two-month campaign period. Zimbabweans barking up the wrong tree with 'silly' English names Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Zimbabwe Governance By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. Zimbabwe's health system is failing because of 'looted' funds, says journalist A CCC member was killed with a spear a few weeks ago while en route to a rally, while last month, 37 supporters were arrested. Intimidation did not stop people from flocking to CCC rallies, however. With a message that hearkened back to Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe, Vice President Constantino Chiwenga spoke of the opposition like lice that needed to be "crushed." Independent observers, such as Zimbabwe Election Support Network said some candidates' conduct amounted to vote buying, including food distribution to voters. Turn-out was higher than usual, especially in the rural areas, as observers noted that large numbers of people required assistance at the polls, which they believed was due to coercion. This weekend's polls are seen as a dry run for national elections next year, as the CCC is hoping to defeat the ruling party, lead by President Emmerson Mnangagwa, which has been in power since 1980. The final results for local government positions are expected to be announced later on Monday. Can training police officers in procedural justice reduce crime and improve the community's perceptions of the police? An intensive, randomized controlled trial conducted in high-crime places (or "hot spots") produced evidence that training officers to operate according to the principles of procedural justice changed officer behavior, reduced arrests, and reduced crime. Perceptions of the police on the streets where these officers worked also improved during the study. The findings are good news for police, community leaders, and others who seek ways to reduce crime while simultaneously improving police-community relations. Procedural justice is based on four components of fairness and equality: giving people a voice, showing neutrality, treating people with respect, and showing trustworthy motives. Observations of officer-community interactions found that trained officers were significantly more likely to behave in procedurally just ways. For leaders who are looking for ways to control crime while also improving relations between the police and the community, the study's findings provide important information about a strategy that can be implemented broadly. "This significant scientific experiment confirms that it is possible to simultaneously reduce crime and improve police-community relationships through improved training and supervision. Further, this interventionprocedural justice training to improve officers' community interaction skillsis especially powerful because it can benefit all officers and improve police-community interactions generally. We owe a debt of gratitude to the officers, supervisors and agency leaders in the study who cooperated fully with data collection and all the experimental conditions. Their willingness to engage and support the scientific process is emblematic of their commitment to improved policing," said Jim Burch, President of the National Policing Institute. "As our nation continues to grapple with the social impacts of the pandemic and a spike in homicides, it is critical that we build a body of evidence about what works to reduce community violence," said Walter Katz, Vice President of Criminal Justice at Arnold Ventures. "This research shows that public safety and policing that is respectful of all community members are interconnected goals. Police departments across the country should learn from these results and require high-quality procedural justice training as a core component of any hot spot crime reduction program." "The release of this research comes at an extremely pertinent time when many across the country are taking a closer look at police training," said Ann Ardis, Dean of George Mason University's College of Humanities and Social Sciences. "Professor Weisburd's work in partnership with the National Policing Institute and Arnold Ventures adds high-value scientific evidence to the national conversation around policing." "There are only a small number of randomized experiments examining the influence of police training, and even fewer that look at effects of training on both officer behavior and community perceptions. This study adds to the evidence base for procedural justice training and expands our understanding of how training impacts interactions between police and the public. We view our findings as important for efforts to enhance both fairness and effectiveness in policing," said Cody Telep, Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, and one of the authors of the study. The multi-year study was conducted in three cities: Tucson, Arizona; Houston, Texas; and Cambridge, Massachusetts. In those cities, more than 1,000 hours of observations and more than 1,500 surveys of residents helped to confirm how the training of officers impacted outcomes. Across the three study sites, 28 police officers were randomly assigned to two groups: the intervention group, which received 40 hours of intensive training in procedural justice concepts and the practical use of the approach, and the control group, which received no procedural justice training and followed standard operating procedures. The officers were allocated randomly to 120 crime hot spots in the three cities and studied for an average of 9 months in each site. The study team collected a variety of data: self-reports before and after the training to assess whether the training influenced officer attitudes; systematic observations of officers to understand how the training impacted officer behaviors while interacting with the community; arrest data to assess law enforcement actions; household surveys before and after the training to assess resident attitudes toward the police; and official crime reports. Read "Reforming the Police Through Procedural Justice Training: A Multicity Randomized Trial at Crime Hot Spots," by David Weisburd, Cody W. Telep, Heather Vovak, Taryn Zastrow, Anthony A. Braga, Brandon Turchan. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118780119. Contact Info: please contact Jane Mott-Palmer at [email protected]. SOURCE National Policing Institute Foreman previously led Optibus' presence in North America with offices across Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, NYC, Washington DC, Indianapolis, Vancouver and Toronto; Optibus has mass transit SaaS deployments in 1,000 cities around the world Brings 30 years of leadership, sales, software and mobility experience as Swvl sets sights on North American market Will reinforce Swvl's rapidly growing global SaaS business after signing the acquisition agreements for controlling stakes in SaaS platforms Shotl and door2door DUBAI, UAE, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Swvl Inc. ("Swvl" or the "Company"), a global provider of transformative tech-enabled mass transit solutions, today announced the hiring of Kevin Foreman as Global Head of B2G (business-to-government) offerings. Mr. Foreman will be based in the United States and will play a key role in driving organic and inorganic growth in North America, among other regions. Mostafa Kandil, Swvl Founder and CEO, said, "We are excited to welcome Kevin to Swvl's rapidly growing team. His deep experience working with SaaS, specifically within the mobility sector, will be invaluable as we expand our SaaS and B2G offerings, with a focus on North America. The addition of Kevin reflects the caliber of professionals that we are bringing on board as we drive our platform forward generating faster growth and ridership than any of our direct peers. As always, we are focused on providing proprietary, technology-based mobility solutions that empower people to go where they want, when they want." Youssef Salem, Swvl CFO, said, "Kevin is a leading SaaS expert in the mobility space with a strong track-record of improving the quality and efficiency of some of the most complex transportation operations in the world. His direct expertise is expected to provide us with a competitive advantage as we prepare to enter the North American market, building on Swvl's rapid global expansion and exponential growth to date, which has positioned the company as a leading provider of mass transit solutions across more than 100 cities in over 20 countries. We will continue to build out our team in North America and look forward to updating the investment community of our organic and inorganic milestones on the continent and beyond." Kevin Foreman, Swvl Global Head of Public Sector, said, "I'm very excited about joining the Swvl team. Swvl enables transit agencies with state-of-the-art software platforms; platforms that are cloud-based; platforms to update bi-weekly to reflect the rapid change that in ridership that agencies are seeing. Swvl is bringing and will continue to raise the bar for what is expected of transit software. Long gone are the days of "vendor lock-in" and annual upgrade and maintenance fees." About Kevin Foreman Mr. Foreman is a seasoned mobility and technology executive with over a decade of experience in the industry. He joins Swvl from Optibus, where he served as the General Manager, North America, and was responsible for leading the company's U.S. and Canada expansion. Mr. Foreman previously worked at INRIX, most recently as Vice President & General Manager, Enterprise Division, where he created mobility insights by using data from connected devices. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Marketing/Finance from the University of Calgary and an MBA from Harvard Business School. About Swvl Swvl is a global provider of transformative tech-enabled mass transit solutions, offering intercity, intracity, B2B and B2G transportation across more than 100 cities in over 20 countries. The Company's platform provides complimentary semi-private alternatives to public transportation for individuals who cannot access or afford private options. Every day, Swvl's parallel mass transit systems are empowering individuals to go where they want, when they want making mobility safer, more efficient, accessible, and environmentally friendly. Customers can book their rides on an easy-to-use proprietary app with varied payment options and 24 / 7 access to high-quality private buses and vans. Swvl was co-founded by Mostafa Kandil, who launched Carmudi in the Philippines, which became the largest car classifieds platform in the country in just six months. He then served as Rocket Internet's Head of Operations. In 2016, Kandil joined Careem, a ride-sharing company and the first unicorn in the Middle East, where he launched services in multiple new markets. For additional information about Swvl, please visit www.swvl.com. Media Contact Daniel Yunger Kekst CNC [email protected] 917-574-8582 Investor Contact Youssef Salem Swvl CFO Inve[email protected] SOURCE Swvl Inc. DALLAS , March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- TDIndustries, Inc. is proud to announce it has earned an Eagle Award, Pyramid Award and Safety Excellence Pinnacle Award from Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC). The awards were presented at the 32nd annual Excellence in Construction Awards during the ABC Convention 2022 held in San Antonio, Texas, on March 16. The Excellence in Construction awards honor all construction team members, including the contractor, owner, architect and engineer. The winning projects are judged on complexity, attractiveness, unique challenges overcome, completion time, workmanship, innovation and safety. "We're grateful to ABC for honoring and showcasing world-class, safe and innovative projects," says TD Chief Executive Officer Harold MacDowell. "We appreciate the judges' efforts and the recognition of our peers for the extraordinary projects at Globe Life Field and Moody Amphitheater that add life and economic value to our communities." Additionally, TD was ranked No. 12 on the Top 200 Performers List and also No. 1 in Plumbing/HVAC and No. 3 in Trade. The Eagle and Pyramid Awards are the top national awards for the specialty contractor categories. TD received the Eagle Award for work at the air-conditioned Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, home to the Texas Rangers. Work included 91 miles of piping, 450 restroom facilities and 9,000 tons of cooling power for the 1.8 million square foot facility that seats 41,000. TD won the Pyramid Award for work at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin, Texas. "TDIndustries invests in and attributes its successes to its people, and its value proposition gives its employees purpose, delivers quality to their clients and strengthens their bottom line," said ABC President and Chief Executive Officer Michael Bellaman. "Congratulations to TDIndustries for raising the bar in developing people, winning work and delivering that work safely, ethically and profitably." ABOUT TDINDUSTRIES Celebrating 75 years of servant leadership and excellence, TDIndustries, Inc. is the premier facilities service and mechanical construction company serving the Southwest. TD has been finding solutions for customers' needs with innovative ideas and cost-saving solutions since 1946. With offices in Arizona, Colorado and Texas, TD is well-positioned to meet customers' needs and exceed their expectations on any project regardless of size, complexity, or location, within budget, and on time. For more information, visit TDIndustries.com. SOURCE TDIndustries JAKARTA, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Republic of Indonesia (the " Republic ") is announcing the results of its invitation (the " Invitation ") to holders of certain series of its outstanding bonds (collectively, the " Old Bonds " and each, a " series " of Old Bonds) to submit offers (the " Offers ") to sell the Old Bonds to the Republic for cash, with the price of the Old Bonds (" Purchase Price ") determined by reference to the fixed spread specified for the applicable series, plus the yield of the specified Benchmark Reference U.S. Treasury Security, expressed as a percentage and rounded to the third decimal place (with 0.0005 being rounded upwards). The Invitation was conducted pursuant to the terms and conditions described in the Invitation for Offers dated March 22, 2022 (the " Invitation for Offers "). All capitalized terms used but not defined in this announcement have the respective meanings specified in the Invitation for Offers. The Invitation expired at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on Monday, March 28, 2022. The table below sets forth, for each series of Old Bonds accepted for purchase, the Purchase Price, the principal amount accepted for purchase, the Benchmark Reference Security Yield, the Repurchase Yield and where applicable, the proration factor: Old Bonds Series ISIN CUSIP Benchmark Reference U.S. Treasury Security Bloomberg Reference Page Fixed Spread (Basis Points) Purchase Price (per U.S.$1,000) Principal Amount Accepted for Purchase Benchmark Reference Security Yield Repurchase Yield Proration Factor 2.950% Global Bonds due 2023 SEC-registered US455780CC89 455780CC8 1.500% due February 29, 2024 PX1 -86 U.S.$1,011.57 U.S.$0.00 2.307% 1.447% N/A 3.375% Global Bonds due 2023 Regulation S USY20721BD05 Y20721BD0 1.500% due February 29, 2024 PX1 -49 U.S.$1,015.96 U.S.$0.00 2.307% 1.817% N/A Rule 144A US455780BL97 455780BL9 5.375% Global Bonds due 2023 Regulation S USY20721BH19 Y20721BH1 1.500% due February 29, 2024 PX1 -17 U.S.$1,048.92 U.S.$61,449,000.00 2.307% 2.137% 100.0% Rule 144A US455780BP02 455780BP0 5.875% Global Bonds due 2024 Regulation S USY20721BJ74 Y20721BJ7 1.500% due February 29, 2024 PX1 7 U.S.$1,060.87 U.S.$273,615,000.00 2.307% 2.377% 100.0% Rule 144A US455780BQ84 455780BQ8 4.450% Global Bonds due 2024 SEC-registered US455780CG93 455780CG9 1.500% due February 29, 2024 PX1 15 U.S.$1,036.01 U.S.$52,152,000.00 2.307% 2.457% 100.0% 4.125% Global Bonds due 2025 Regulation S USY20721BG36 Y20721BG3 1.500% due February 29, 2024 PX1 45 U.S.$1,036.45 U.S.$0.00 2.307% 2.757% N/A Rule 144A US455780BT24 455780BT2 4.750% Global Bonds due 2026 Regulation S USY20721BN86 Y20721BN8 1.875% due February 28, 2027 PX1 47 U.S.$1,061.63 U.S.$80,269,000.00 2.537% 3.007% 21.06% Rule 144A US455780BV79 455780BV7 4.350% Global Bonds due 2027 (the "January 2027 Bonds") Regulation S USY20721BQ18 Y20721BQ1 1.875% due February 28, 2027 PX1 53 U.S.$1,056.48 U.S.$0.00 2.537% 3.067% N/A Rule 144A US455780BX36 455780BX3 3.850% Global Bonds due 2027 Regulation S USY20721BT56 Y20721BT5 1.875% due February 28, 2027 PX1 60 U.S.$1,034.51 U.S.$0.00 2.537% 3.137% N/A Rule 144A US455780CA24 455780CA2 After review of all Offers submitted pursuant to the Invitation, the Republic has determined that the maximum cash consideration of U.S.$500.0 million is not adequate to purchase all of the Old Bonds offered. Accordingly, the Republic has determined that it will apply the proration factors indicated in the "Proration Factor" column in the table above. Where the proration factor is not applicable (N/A), no Old Bonds of that particular series were accepted as a part of the offer. Where proration applies with respect to an Offer of Old Bonds of a particular series (except for the January 2027 Bonds), the principal amount of such Offer accepted in the Invitation has been determined by multiplying the principal amount specified in such Offer by the applicable proration factor and rounding the resulting amount down to the nearest US$1,000. If, after such adjustment and rounding, any holder would be left with an aggregate principal amount of less than the specified denomination of U.S.$200,000 for all series of Old Bonds except for the January 2027 Bonds, either (a) validly offered for sale and accepted or (b) returned to a holder as a result of pro ration, the Republic has, in its sole and absolute discretion, accepted all of the Old Bonds the subject of such holder's relevant Offer. Old Bonds not accepted for purchase by the Republic will be returned to the originating clearing system accounts as soon as practicable on the settlement date, in accordance with the normal procedures of the relevant clearing systems. The date on which the Republic pays for the Old Bonds purchased pursuant to the Invitation is expected to be Thursday, March 31, 2022, or as soon as practicable thereafter. The settlement of the purchase of Old Bonds in the Invitation is subject to certain conditions described in the Invitation for Offers. The Financing Condition defined in the Invitation for Offers has been satisfied. This announcement is not an offer or a solicitation of offers. The Invitation is made solely by means of the Invitation for Offers. The Invitation does not constitute, and may not be used in connection with, an offer or solicitation by anyone in any jurisdiction where an offer or solicitation is not authorized or in which the person making such offer or solicitation is not qualified to do so or to any person to whom it is unlawful to make such offer or solicitation. THE OFFEROR Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Indonesia Gedung Frans Seda, 2nd Floor Jl. Dr. Wahidin No.1 Jakarta 10710 Indonesia DEALER MANAGERS Citigroup Global Markets Inc. Attention: Debt Syndicate Desk / Liability Management Group 388 Greenwich Street New York, NY 10013 United States Telephone: +852 2501 2692/ +1 212 723-0859/ +44 20 7986 8969 Email: [email protected] Deutsche Bank AG, Singapore Branch Attention: Global Risk Syndicate One Raffles Quay 17-00 South Tower Singapore 048583 Telephone: +65 6423 4229 Email: [email protected] Mandiri Securities Pte. Ltd. Attention: DCM Group 12 Marina View #19-06 Asia Square Tower 2 Singapore 018961 Telephone: +65 6589 3880 Email: [email protected] Societe Generale Attention: Liability Management Immeuble Basalte 17 Cours Valmy 92987 Paris La Defense Cedex France Telephone: +33 1 42 13 32 40 (Paris) +65 63 26 70 34 (Singapore) Email: [email protected] Standard Chartered Bank Attention: Capital Markets One Basinghall Avenue, London EC2V 5DD, United Kingdom Telephone: +65 65578289 (Singapore) +852 3983 8658 (Hong Kong) +44 20 7885 5739 (London) +1 212 667 0351 (United States) Email: [email protected] TENDER AND INFORMATION AGENT Morrow Sodali Ltd In Hong Kong: The Hive, 33-35 Hillier St, Sheung Wan Telephone: +852 2319 4130 In Stamford: 333 Ludlow Street, 5th Floor, South Tower, CT 06902 Telephone: +1 203 609 4910 Email: [email protected] Invitation Website: https://bonds.morrowsodali.com/roi In London: 103 Wigmore Street W1U 1QS Telephone: +44 20 4513 6933 SOURCE The Republic of Indonesia TEMPE, Ariz., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the latest Best Business Schools rankings released by U.S. News & World Report, the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University improved across three major MBA rankings. The W. P. Carey Full-time MBA ranked No. 29 nationwide, ahead of Pennsylvania State University, Ohio State University, and Michigan State University. The school also climbed to No. 13 among executive MBA programs and No. 18 among part-time MBA programs, making W. P. Carey the top-ranked MBA in Arizona. "We are thrilled to see our MBA programs continue to rise in the rankings," said Amy Ostrom, interim dean of the W. P. Carey School and PetSmart Chair in Services Leadership. "We are committed to providing an excellent business education to our graduates even and especially during tumultuous times. I'm proud that these rankings reflect that commitment." In addition to the MBA programs rankings, U.S. News ranked 10 W. P. Carey graduate business disciplines: No. 2 Project management No. 3 Supply chain management No. 11 Information systems No. 13 Business analytics No. 14 Accounting No. 16 Management No. 16 Production/operations No. 20 International business No. 20 Marketing No. 23 Entrepreneurship For the third consecutive year, U.S. News ranks 31 W. P. Carey programs and disciplines Top 25 the most of any business school in America. The school is currently ranked No. 1 for online undergraduate business programs, No. 7 for online graduate business programs, No. 7 for online MBA programs, and four online MBA specialties rank Top 3 in their disciplines. Our on-campus undergraduate business programs rank No. 23 in the nation. "Once again, the rankings show W. P. Carey as an excellent place for business leaders to take the next steps in their career at the most innovative university in the country," said Luiz Mesquita, associate dean of graduate programs. "These rankings indicate that our programs meet the demands of not just students but industry and hiring companies, as well." Other recent honors reinforce the U.S. News rankings. W. P. Carey was ranked No. 3 in the U.S. in Fortune magazine's list of Best Online Master's in Business Analytics Programs, and W. P. Carey was named one of "10 Undergraduate Business Schools to Watch in 2022" by Poets & Quants. In research, the University of Texas at Dallas Business School Research Productivity Rankings slots the school as No. 26 in the world. About W. P. Carey School of Business The W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University is one of the top-ranked business schools in the United States. The school is internationally regarded for its research productivity and its distinguished faculty members, including a Nobel Prize winner. Students come from more than 100 countries and W. P. Carey is represented by alumni in over 160 countries. Visit wpcarey.asu.edu. For more information, contact: Shay Moser, W. P. Carey School of Business [email protected] 480-965-3963 SOURCE W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University TOLEDO, Ohio, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As part of its ongoing efforts to protect nesting birds, Toledo Edison, a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp. (NYSE: FE), has teamed with Metroparks Toledo to donate and install a 55-foot wooden pole with a nesting platform at the Manhattan Marsh Preserve Metropark in North Toledo. This proactive work will provide a safe nesting location for the growing osprey population and promote osprey conservation efforts in the area. "With the significant spike in the osprey population over recent years, we have been fortunate to experience minimal nesting activity on our utility poles and equipment in the Toledo area," said Amy Ruszala, an environmental scientist and avian expert at FirstEnergy. "Partnering with Metroparks Toledo allows us to continue to proactively complete work to further discourage birds from nesting on or near our electrical equipment so that it doesn't become an issue in our area." The 79-acre Manhattan Marsh Preserve Metropark is home to frogs, toads and turtles, but is best known for birds. Positioned within one of North America's most significant migratory bird flyways, the marsh is an urban oasis that provides critical stopover habitat. More than 100 species of birds, including ospreys, use the marsh to nest, rest or re-fuel. Because ospreys prefer to nest near large bodies of water, the 5-square-foot wooden nesting platform was installed on top of a new wooden pole along the water. Toledo Edison donated the wooden pole and labor needed to complete the installation. "We are proud to partner with Toledo Edison to have a nest structure in place before the ospreys return to the area in full force later this month and take up nesting this spring," said Dave Zenk, executive director of Metroparks Toledo. "Our partnership is a win for everybody because it helps keep the nesting birds safe, benefits the electric company and allows park visitors to observe ospreys in their natural habitat." Birds of prey, like ospreys, often seek out tall structures including electric transmission towers and poles to build their nests, which can measure up to three feet in width. These nesting habits often place the birds near energized electrical equipment jeopardizing their well-being and potentially causing power outages. The newly installed platform will help discourage the birds from nesting on poles with energized equipment. The work builds upon Toledo Edison's efforts in recent years to protect nesting birds. Last spring, the company donated a nesting platform to the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge Complex and installed it along the lakeshore to provide a safe nesting site for ospreys. Toledo Edison has also worked closely with FirstEnergy's environmentalists and state wildlife officials to install nesting deterrents on utility poles and electrical equipment in the region. Large, bright line markers also have been installed on power lines to provide visual warnings of energized equipment to birds and low-flying aircraft. In addition, FirstEnergy deployed an app last spring that allows utility personnel to report avian issues in real time, streamlining the process to protect nesting birds and enhance electric service reliability. The app arms field workers with the ability to submit photos and answer key questions using a drop-down menu to report the locations of bird nests or other bird-related issues along the company's power lines, all from their mobile devices. Toledo Edison serves nearly 315,000 customers in northwest Ohio. Follow Toledo Edison on Twitter @ToledoEdison or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ToledoEdison . FirstEnergy is dedicated to integrity, safety, reliability and operational excellence. Its 10 electric distribution companies form one of the nation's largest investor-owned electric systems, serving customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York. The company's transmission subsidiaries operate approximately 24,000 miles of transmission lines that connect the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions. Follow FirstEnergy online at www.firstenergycorp.com and on Twitter @FirstEnergyCorp . SOURCE FirstEnergy Corp. Effectual, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, and Trace3 deliver services for migration, application development, and data & analytics projects JERSEY CITY, N.J. and IRVINE, Calif., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Effectual, a modern, cloud first managed and professional services company, announced a strategic partnership with Trace3, a premier provider of advanced technology consultation services and solutions. As an integral part of Trace3's growing cloud services, Effectual will provide access to their elite team of Modernization Engineers, holding over 200 AWS certifications. Over the course of the past year, Trace3 and Effectual have collaborated on several enterprise AWS Cloud engagements for Fortune 500 brands including leading healthcare providers, financial services, and manufacturing companies. These engagements showcased Effectual's ability to solve complex business problems creating strong synergy with Trace3, equally known for their commitment to elite consulting and engineering. "Certified AWS cloud professionals are a difficult resource to find, and keep, within the enterprise," said Rick Ruskin, Chief Sales Officer, Effectual. "The partnership between Trace3 and Effectual addresses this directly our teams like to be challenged, we thrive on solving the big problems, and this passion for innovation creates meaningful relationships with both our clients and our partners. Together, Trace3 and Effectual are a complete solution for enterprise IT transformation and modernization." "We put a great deal of emphasis on identifying like-minded partnerships," said Chris Nicholas, Vice President, Cloud Solutions Group, Trace3. "The Effectual team was the clear path forward as the AWS focused partner that will help us deliver the best possible outcomes for our clients, achieving a new level of scale, without sacrificing quality." A validated AWS MSP Partner, Effectual has achieved the AWS Migration Competency, AWS DevOps Competency, AWS Mobile Competency, AWS SaaS Competency, and AWS Government and AWS Nonprofit Competency designations. Effectual is also a member of the AWS Well-Architected and AWS Public Sector Partner Programs as well as the AWS GovCloud (US) and Authority to Operate on AWS Programs. In addition, Effectual is a VMware Principal Partner in VMware Cloud on AWS. "As a born in the cloud, channel first, managed and professional services organization, Effectual has the capabilities to deliver across the entire AWS portfolio of services," said Joe Langley, AWS Practice Lead, Trace3. "We are confident in Effectual's strong professional services practice for migrations, application development, and data & analytics combined with cloud-first managed services. In collaboration with Effectual, we can architect scaled solutions and engage on programmatic enterprise IT modernization challenges." About Effectual An AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Effectual is a modern, cloud first managed and professional services company that works with commercial enterprises and the public sector to enable digital transformation and full stack IT modernization. Effectual's deeply experienced and passionate team of problem solvers apply proven methodologies to enable positive business outcomes with Amazon Web Services and VMware Cloud on AWS. Effectual is a member of the Cloud Security Alliance, and the PCI Security Standards Council. About Trace3 Trace3 is a premier provider of advanced technology consultation services and solutions. Founded in 2002, Trace3 offers a broad mix of end-to-end technology services and solutions, ranging from artificial intelligence and data science to cloud computing and security consulting. The company also offers a venture capital briefing program, with a sharp focus on emerging technologies, and provides clients with extensive research focused on the latest IT trends. Trace3 is headquartered in Irvine, Calif. and maintains 25 office locations across the United States. For more information, visit trace3.com. SOURCE Effectual Inc. Timothy Dauber named as UTI-Orlando campus president; Campus footprint now optimized with UTI and MMI programs taught at the same location ORLANDO, Fla., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Universal Technical Institute (UTI) is pleased to welcome Timothy Dauber as the new Campus President at UTI-Orlando, just as the campus completes its optimization project by merging its motorcycle and marine (MMI) technician training programs with UTI's automotive and diesel technician training on site. Dauber comes to UTI with more than 25 years of education and management experience. UTI announced the consolidation of its Orlando and MMI locations (including both Motorcycle and Marine programs) in December 2020, optimizing the footprint of its training programs in the region. UTI-Orlando's former campus president, Sharon Taylor-Ellis, is now serving as UTI's Vice President of Advanced Training, joining the team managing the organization's original equipment manufacturer (OEM) relationships with UTI's industry brand partners. The reconfigured and optimized Orlando, Fla. campus at the West Taft Vineland Road location utilizes approximately 75 thousand square feet less than the previous combined space. At the campus, UTI will continue to offer basic and advanced automotive and diesel training modules, including: Daimler Truck North American (DTNA) Finish First, the recently launched BMW FastTrack, and Ford Accelerated Credential Training (FACT). The motorcycle training curriculum teaches the foundations of motorcycle, side-by-side, and ATV maintenance and repair, while the marine-specific curriculum teaches students the basics of the marine industry. Motorcycle and Marine technician students also have the opportunity for specialized training with individual, leading manufacturers like Harley Davidson, Mercury Marine, and others. "I couldn't be more excited to join Universal Technical Institute, particularly at a time when the organization is growing, diversifying and helping to meet the country's demand for skilled technicians," said Dauber. "UTI can offer students state-of-the-industry training aligned with the needs of prospective employers in the transportation industry. As campus president, I look forward to supporting the success of the Orlando campus, its current and future students as well as graduates." Dauber comes from Everglades University where he served as the Campus Vice President for four years, with impressive achievements in student growth, retention, and graduate placement rates. He holds an M.B.A. from Everglades University, with an undergraduate degree from DePaul University. His management experience includes several Fortune 500 companies such as Target, Best Buy and Lowe's. He also served in the Navy for four years. "Tim comes to us with an impressive resume and diverse experience that will surely benefit our students and staff during this exciting time at our Orlando campus," said UTI EVP of Campus Operations Sherrell Smith. "With our consolidated Orlando, Florida footprint, we're continuing to support all the UTI and MMI programs previously offered at that location in a more efficient layout, and which provide industry-aligned curriculum that supports the needs of our students and industry partners. We are proud of our student outcomes at UTI, and I'm looking forward to Tim's leadership to ensure our auto, diesel, motorcycle and marine tech students have an exceptional educational experience." For more information on UTI's programs at its Orlando campus, visit https://www.uti.edu/locations/florida/orlando-uti. About Universal Technical Institute, Inc. Founded in 1965 and headquartered in Phoenix, Universal Technical Institute's (NYSE: UTI) mission is to serve our students, partners, and communities by providing quality education and support services for in-demand careers. Approximately 250,000 students have graduated from one of UTI's 14 campuses located across Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Texas. UTI's campuses are accredited by the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges (ACCSC), while its employer-aligned technical training programs are offered under four brands: Universal Technical Institute, Motorcycle Mechanics Institute / Marine Mechanics Institute, NASCAR Technical Institute, and MIAT College of Technology. For more information and a complete list of all programs offered, please visit www.uti.edu or follow on LinkedIn @UniversalTechnicalInstitute and on Twitter @news_UTI. Media Contact [email protected] 480.710.6843 SOURCE Universal Technical Institute, Inc. Government reforms in some countries such as the Affordable Care Act in the U.S. to eliminate the cost of unnecessary readmission for patients is expected to elevate the adoption of population health management services Range of population health management tools that enable different patient-centric functions in diverse care settings to favor adoption ALBANY, N.Y., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Analysts at TMR estimate the population health management market to expand at a CAGR of 15.9% over the forecast period from 2021 to 2028. The rapid penetration of IT solutions for healthcare for benefits of remote patient monitoring, data storage, and data integration is fueling the growth of population health management market. The rising awareness of the benefits of population health management programs is likely to spur opportunities in the population health management market. The adoption of PHM tools has enabled medical professionals to improve the quality of care, bridge care management gaps by providing suitable healthcare services to patient population, and experience higher profitability. Request Brochure of Population Health Management Market Research Report - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=4174 North America is anticipated to stay at the forefront among all regions in the population health management market. The population health management market in Asia Pacific is anticipated to display fastest growth in the over the forecast period. This is due to the initiatives of government bodies to leverage population health and application of analytics tools for improved patient care management of population groups in the region. Population Health Management Market Key Findings of Report Government initiatives to adopt digital health products to reduce cost for patients and improve the quality of patient care services are spurring the adoption of population health management-based platforms. For instance, in the U.S., implementation of Affordable Care Act eliminates payments for unnecessary readmissions for hospitals to bear the financial burden for up to 30 days after the discharge of patients. Request for Analysis of COVID-19 Impact on Population Health Management Market https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=covid19&rep_id=4174 PHM tools are available in a wide range that have different functions for diverse care settings. Data collection, personalized medicine, assistance with healthcare finances for patients and payers are some offerings of PHM tools. Adoption of PHM programs ensure affordability of healthcare for population besides accessibility to healthcare. Of late, various population health management programs deployed by hospital administrators have found to be instrumental in reducing the overall cost of hospitalization, improving medication compliance, and testing new models in disease risk management. PHM tools facilitate non-profit hospitals to undertake mandatory routine community activity for their position. The task involves use of population health management tool to provide assessment of an investigating hospital's plan to address their identified needs. Non-profit hospitals seek assistance of community healthcare centers that usually purchase storage space for population health management applications and rent it to others. Utilization of population health management services using home monitoring and tracking applications is anticipated to reduce the need for hospitalization. Integration of multimedia functionalities in PHM tools could help consumers and patients to have increased access to physicians and nursing staff remotely without the need to visit a health center. Web-based mode of operation is anticipated to dominate the population health management market over the forecast period Get Exclusive PDF Sample Copy of Population Health Management Market Report - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=4174 Population Health Management Market Growth Drivers Key advantages of patient engagement through various IT forms and digital products fuel the growth of the population health management market. Utilization of patient-generated health data via m-health applications helps physicians to improve population health management. Technological advancements in analytics, electronic health records, and improved population education drive the demand for population health management platforms Make an Enquiry Before Buying - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=EB&rep_id=4174 Population Health Management Market Key Players Some of the key players operating in the population health management market are; Koninklijke Philips N.V. Health Catalyst Cerner Corporation United Health Group Persivia Lumeris McKessoon Corporation ZeOmega Healthgen International Business Machines Corporation The population health management market is segmented as follows; Population Health Management Market, by Mode of Operation Web-based Cloud-based On-premise Population Health Management Market, by Component Hardware Software Services Population Health Management Market, by End-user Health Care Providers Insurance Providers Pharmaceutical Companies Others Population Health Management Market, by Region North America U .S. Canada Europe Germany U . K . K France Italy Spain Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China India Japan Australia & New Zealand & Rest of Asia Pacific Latin America Brazil Mexico Rest of Latin America Middle East & Africa & GCC Countries South Africa Rest of Middle East & Africa Modernization of healthcare in terms of both infrastructure and services have pushed the healthcare industry to new heights, Stay Updated with Latest Healthcare Industry Research Reports by Transparency Market Research: Wearable Sensors for Animal Health Management Market: The prevalence of zoonotic diseases that is, the transmission of a disease from vertebrate animals to humans is increasing at a rapid rate. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are over 200 known types of zoonoses. To avoid the transmission of such diseases, the health monitoring of animals is an essential factor. To monitor a large swathe of animals is difficult manually. For this purpose, technologies like wearable sensors are gaining immense popularity. Home Diagnostics Market: The global home diagnostics market was valued over US$ 5.34 Bn in 2020. It is projected to expand at a CAGR of 4.4% from 2021 to 2031. Home diagnostics, also referred to as at-home diagnostics, enables patients or users to conduct different types of tests directly at home. These test kits are usually used to track a current health condition, diagnose a previously undiagnosed medical issue, or provide information on personal health traits. Healthcare Informatics Market: The global healthcare informatics market was valued at US$ 31 Bn in 2020 and projected to expand at a CAGR of ~12% from 2021 to 2031. Increase in technological advancements and rise in demand for lab automation are the major factors anticipated to propel the global healthcare informatics market during the forecast period. North America held a major share of the global healthcare informatics market in 2020 due to high awareness about pharmaceutical information systems and hospital information systems in the region. About Us Transparency Market Research is a global market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. Our experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports. For More Research Insights on Leading Industries, Visit Our YouTube Channel and hit subscribe for Future Update - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8e-z-g23-TdDMuODiL8BKQ Contact Rohit Bhisey Transparency Market Research State Tower, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany NY 12207 United States USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453 Email: [email protected] Follow Us: Twitter | LinkedIn Blog: https://tmrblog.com Browse PR - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/population-health-management-solutions-market.htm SOURCE Transparency Market Research LAS VEGAS, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As per DelveInsight Analysis, the Vascular Graft market size is expected to increase due to the factors such as the rising prevalence of lifestyle disorders such as hypertension and diabetes, growing geriatric population, technical innovation in product development such as the manufacture of coated vascular access graft with improved features among other. DelveInsight's Vascular Graft Market Insights report provides the current and forecast market, upcoming device innovation, individual leading companies market shares, challenges, market drivers, barriers, and trends, and key Vascular Graft companies in the market. Key Takeaways from the Vascular Graft Market Report According to DelveInsight analysis, North America is anticipated to dominate the global Vascular Graft market during the forecast period. is anticipated to dominate the global Vascular Graft market during the forecast period. The leading Vascular Graft companies with their various vascular graft surgery products such as BD, Getinge AB, Medtronic, B. Braun Melsungen AG, Cardinal Health, Terumo Corporation, W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc., JOTEC GmbH, LeMaitre Vascular, Inc., Perouse Medical, CryoLife, Inc, BIOVIC Sdn Bhd, Abbott, Bentley , BioIntegral Surgical, Cook, Merit Medical Systems, SCITECH., Vascular Graft Solutions , and others are currently dominating the Vascular Graft market. , and others are currently dominating the Vascular Graft market. As per DelveInsight estimates, the global Vascular Graft market size is expected to reach USD 3.82 billion by 2026. by 2026. In October 2021 , Terumo Aortic obtained regulatory approval and the commercial launch of the Treo abdominal aortic stent graft system in Japan . The Japanese Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA) the Treo device as the treatment for abdominal aortic aneurysms. obtained regulatory approval and the commercial launch of the in . The Japanese Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA) the Treo device as the treatment for abdominal aortic aneurysms. In August 2021 , Terumo Corporation received product approval from the FDA for their RelayPro Thoracic Stent-Graft System to be employed in the treatment of patients with thoracic aortic aneurysms (TAA) and penetrating atherosclerotic ulcers (PAUs). received product approval from the FDA for their to be employed in the treatment of patients with thoracic aortic aneurysms (TAA) and penetrating atherosclerotic ulcers (PAUs). In June 2020 , LeMaitre Vascular, Inc acquired the business and assets of Artegraft, Inc. for USD 90.0 million , thereby gaining access to Artegraft's portfolio of biologic vascular grafts. , acquired the business and assets of for , thereby gaining access to Artegraft's portfolio of biologic vascular grafts. In March 2020 , SCITECH received CE mark and regulatory approval for their vascular graft product SOLARIS which is a vascular endograft aimed at treating peripheral vascular disease. Interested in knowing how the Vascular Graft market size will be growing by 2026? Click to get a snapshot of Vascular Graft Market Growth Analysis Vascular Graft Vascular grafting (also known as vascular bypass graft) is a surgical procedure that reconnects blood vessels to direct blood flow from one area of the body to another. It is done by using vascular grafts that serve as channels for creating an alternate passage for establishing blood supply. Vascular grafts are categorized as big caliber, medium caliber, or small caliber grafts based on their size. Furthermore, synthetic vascular grafts materials are used to repair or replace damaged or diseased arteries, to replace whole segments of bigger arteries such as the aorta, and to make stitching cuffs. Vascular Graft Market Insights North America is predicted to account for the largest market share in the Vascular Graft market among all the regions. This domination is because of the rising prevalence of cardiovascular disorders such as peripheral artery disease and aortic aneurysms, rising prevalence of lifestyle disorders, surging geriatric population, and increased focus on product development activities in the region, North America is expected to account for the lion's share of the Vascular Graft market. Furthermore, considerable product development efforts in the area, particularly in the United States, contribute to the region's vascular access graft demand in the Vascular Graft market. For instance, Terumo Corporation gained FDA clearance in August 2021 for its RelayPro Thoracic Stent-Graft System to be used in the treatment of patients with thoracic aortic aneurysms (TAA) and penetrating atherosclerotic ulcers (PAUs). The FDA is regarded as one of the most attentive regulatory bodies in the world, and product approvals from the specific authority are highly valued globally, creating goodwill for products and manufacturing firms worldwide. Such factors also contribute to the regional expansion of the Vascular Graft market. To know more why North America is leading the market growth in the Vascular Graft market, get a snapshot of the report Global Vascular Graft Market Outlook Vascular Graft Market Dynamics One of the major factors driving the Vascular Graft market is the increasing number of dialysis operations as the frequency of renal failure rises. Diabetes is a major factor that contributes to renal failure. Another important factor driving the demand for vascular access graft is the rise of aortic aneurysms. As a consequence of the increased prevalence of aortic aneurysms caused by a growing population of smokers, the endovascular stent grafts market is predicted to rise in the next years, eventually propelling the Vascular Graft market growth. However, particular constraints associated with each types of Vascular Grafts, as well as potential procedural hazards and product recalls, may impede the expansion of the Vascular Graft market size. Get a sneak peek at the Vascular Graft market dynamics @ Vascular Graft Market Dynamics Analysis Scope of the Vascular Graft Market Report Coverage : Global Global Study Period: 2018-2026 2018-2026 Market Segmentation By Product Type - Endovascular Grafts (Abdominal And Thoracic), Access Grafts, Peripheral Grafts, and Others Endovascular Grafts (Abdominal And Thoracic), Access Grafts, Peripheral Grafts, and Others Market Segmentation By Type - Knitted, Woven, and Others Knitted, Woven, and Others Market Segmentation By Vascular Graft Materials - Synthetic (Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), Polyester Vascular Graft, Polyurethane), Biological vascular graft, and Others Synthetic (Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), Polyester Vascular Graft, Polyurethane), Biological vascular graft, and Others Market Segmentation By End-User - Hospitals, Ambulatory Surgical Centers, and Others Hospitals, Ambulatory Surgical Centers, and Others Market Segmentation By Geography - North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of World - , , , and Rest of World Key Vascular Graft Companies - BD, Getinge AB, Medtronic, B. Braun Melsungen AG, Cardinal Health, Terumo Corporation, W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc., JOTEC GmbH, LeMaitre Vascular, Inc., Perouse Medical, CryoLife, Inc, BIOVIC Sdn Bhd, Abbott, Bentley , BioIntegral Surgical, Cook, Merit Medical Systems, SCITECH., Vascular Graft Solutions among others BD, Getinge AB, Medtronic, B. Braun Melsungen AG, Cardinal Health, Terumo Corporation, W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc., JOTEC GmbH, LeMaitre Vascular, Inc., Perouse Medical, CryoLife, Inc, BIOVIC Sdn Bhd, Abbott, , BioIntegral Surgical, Cook, Merit Medical Systems, SCITECH., Vascular Graft Solutions among others Porter's Five Forces Analysis, Product Profiles, Case Studies, KOL's Views, Analyst's View DelveInsight Analysis: The Vascular Graft market size is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.38% during the forecast period from 2021 to 2026 to reach USD 3.82 billion by 2026. Which MedTech key players in the Vascular Graft market are set to emerge as the trendsetter explore @ Vascular Graft Manufacturers Table of Contents 1 Vascular Graft Market Report Introduction 2 Vascular Graft Market Executive summary 3 Regulatory and Patent Analysis 4 Vascular Graft Market Key Factors Analysis 5 Porter's Five Forces Analysis 6 COVID-19 Impact Analysis on Vascular Graft Market 7 Vascular Graft Market Layout 8 Vascular Graft Global Company Share Analysis Key 3-5 Companies 9 Vascular Graft Market Company and Product Profiles 10 Project Approach Learn more about the vascular implants and grafts available in the Vascular Graft market @ Tissue-Engineered Vascular Grafts Related Reports Vascular Grafts Pipeline Vascular Grafts Pipeline Insight and Competitive Landscape, 2022 report provides comprehensive insights about pipeline landscape. 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Childhood Atropine For Myopia Progression Market Childhood Atropine For Myopia Progression Market Insight, Epidemiology, and Market Forecast, 2032 report delivers an in-depth understanding of market trends, market drivers, market barriers, along with emerging drugs and key Childhood Atropine For Myopia Progression companies operating in the domain. Syncope Market Syncope Market Insight, Epidemiology, and Market Forecast, 2032 report delivers an in-depth understanding of market trends, market drivers, market barriers, and key Syncope companies such as Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, University of Alberta, CES University, among others. Related Healthcare Blogs Technologies in Diabetes Management Upcoming Cardiovascular Disease Drugs Evolution in Diabetes Management About DelveInsight DelveInsight is a leading Business Consultant, and Market Research firm focused exclusively on life sciences. It supports Pharma companies by providing comprehensive end-to-end solutions to improve their performance. Contact Us Shruti Thakur [email protected] +1(919)321-6187 https://www.delveinsight.com/medical-devices SOURCE DelveInsight Business Research, LLP The NDLEA opposed the request of Abba Kyari's defence team, arguing that the conviction of the two men should not be further delayed after their guilty plea to the cocaine charges. Abba Kyari's defence team, on Monday, urged the Federal High Court in Abuja to delay the conviction of two of his co-defendants who have already pleaded guilty in their joint cocaine-trafficking trial. The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) opposed the request, arguing that the conviction of the two men should not be delayed after their guilty plea. The anti-narcotic agency had, on March 7, arraigned the seven defendants, including Mr Kyari, on eight charges of conspiracy, illegal dealing in cocaine, importation of cocaine and obstruction. Four of the defendants are members of the Intelligence Response Team, which Mr Kyari headed until his suspension following his indictment for fraud in the United States last year. The two others, who are non-police officers, are Chibunna Patrick Umeibe and Emeka Alphonsus Ezenwanne, who were accused of importing 21.35kg of cocaine into Nigeria via the Akanu Ibiam International Airport, Enugu, Enugu State, on January 19, 2022.. At their arraignment on March 7, Mr Kyari and the four other police officers pleaded not guilty, but Messrs Umeibe and Ezenwanne, pleaded guilty to three of the charges that concerned them. The court subsequently slated March 28 (today) for review of facts to prepare the ground for the conviction and sentencing of the two self-confessed defendants. Monday's hearing As scheduled, NDLEA's lawyer, Joseph Sunday, applied for the court's leave to begin the review of facts for the two men on Monday. Reviewing the facts of the case is a pre-conviction and pre-sentencing hearing for defendants who have admitted their guilt. But Mr Kyari's lead lawyer, Kanu Agabi, opposed the prosecution's application, repeating the same points he raised when the idea of the review of facts was first mentioned on March 7. Addressing the judge, Mr Agabi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and erstwhile Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), said going on to review the facts in preparation of the ground for the conviction of the two defendants would jeopardise the defence of the other defendants. "All the counts in the charge are interwoven, and reviewing the facts of the case with a view to making findings is dangerous to our clients' defence," Mr Agabi told the court. He contended that the prosecuting lawyer, Mr Sunday, if allowed to proceed with the review of facts, would present facts over which the other defendants would not have the opportunity to cross-examine him. "Our contention is that if you review the facts of the case at this stage, you will make findings that will be prejudicial to our clients," Mr Agabi told the judge. He further explained that the term "cocaine" occurs in all the eight counts. "So, the facts are interwoven," the defence lawyer argued, urging the court to keep the request at bay pending the conclusion of his client's case. NDLEA fights back However, the prosecuting lawyer urged the court to dismiss Mr Kyari's attempt to delay progress of the case of the two defendants who had admitted their guilt. "The arguments of the defendants are speculative. They have not raised any facts or evidence indicating that reviewing the facts of the case will be prejudicial to their defence," Mr Sunday contended. "We urge the court to discountenance the defendants' objections and proceed with the review of the facts of this case," the prosecuting lawyer said. The prosecution's insistence on going on with the review of facts tallied with position of the lawyer to the two concerned defendants, E.U Okenyi, who had justified his clients' guilty plea. In a short argument that ensued after his clients pleaded guilty during the March 7 proceedings, Mr Ukenyi had rejected Mr Agabi's suggestion that the two defendents' decision to admit their guilt could have been based on ignorance. "My clients couldn't have pleaded guilty to charges in which they are legally represented in court," Mr Ukenyi had said while justifying his clients' decision. He did not oppose the request by the NDLEA to open the review of facts relating to his clients on Monday. Adjournment for ruling After listening to the prosecuting counsel and Mr Kyari's lawyer on Monday, the judge adjourned till April 28 for ruling on whether or not to delay the review of facts or order the prosecution to immediately go ahead with it. PREMIUM TIMES reported earlier that the judge on Monday rejected the bail applications filed by Mr Kyari and others. The judge then ordered Mr Kyari and the other four other police officers to be remanded in Kuje prison, in Abuja. He ordered Messrs Emeka and Ezenwanne who have pleaded guilty to be reminded at the correctional centre in Suleja, Niger State. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Nigeria Legal Affairs By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. Charges NDLEA prosecutors accused Mr Kyari and the four IRT members of illicit dealing in 21.35kg of cocaine between January 19 and 25, 2022, thereby committing an offence contrary to and punishable under section 11(c) of the NDLEA Act. In one of the charges, the anti-narcotic agency alleged that Mr Kyari and the four IRT operatives illicitly tampered with 21.35kg of cocaine by removing 17.55 kg of it and "substituting same with some other substance". The offence is said to be contrary to and punishable under section 14(b) of the NDLEA Act. The prosecutors also accused Mr Kyari, in a count which features only him as the sole defendant, of attempting to obstruct the NDLEA and its authorised officers by offering $61,400 to a senior anti-narcotic operative as inducement to prevent the testing of the 17.55kg of cocaine. In three of the counts, Messrs Umeibe and Ezenwanne were accused of importing the 21.35kg of cocaine into Nigeria via the Akanu Ibiam International Airport, Enugu, Enugu State, on January 19, 2022. They have since accepted their guilt and are now waiting for the legal process that will lead to their conviction and sentencing. HOUSTON, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Wag Tantrum's founders, Barbara and Lisa Marshall, are celebrating Women's History Month by reflecting on their partnership with The Women's Home, a long-term residential treatment program for women in Houston, TX. Wag Tantrum is an all-organic, human-grade dog food company that has been providing delicious and nutritious dog meals since 2016. Its core mission is to provide dogs with the highest quality food to keep them healthy, while also supporting the community. One way Wag Tantrum does this is by hiring clients from The Women's Home. Wag Tantrum's founders, Barbara (left) and Lisa (right) Marshall Wag Tantrum's dog food supports joint health, healthy skin, and luxurious coats in dogs "The Women's Home does amazing, life-changing work," says Barbara Marshall. "I have donated for many years, but any company can throw money at a good cause. I wanted to take that extra step and hire some of the women coming out of the program to show my dedication to their mission." The Women's Home provides long-term, safe living spaces and offers ongoing treatment to support emotional, mental, financial, physical, social, spiritual, and vocational success. The Marshalls admire the work done at The Women's Home and are proud to hire these women to help them get back on their feet. "I love working for Wag Tantrum for so many reasons," says a current client of The Women's Home who now works at the company. "One of them is that it supports The Women's Home, which not only saved my life, but gave me a future. This job has opened up so many doors for me and is something I never thought I would have access to. I actually feel excited every day to work for a company that cares about its community because not all businesses do. I believe good actions are contagious, so when a company like Wag Tantrum supports The Women's Home, it creates a cycle of opportunities for those who might not have had access to them before. I can't stress how appreciative I feel getting to work with positive people who want to make a difference in this world." Barbara Marshall founded the company after her dog, Lily, was diagnosed with cancer at six months old. Lily refused to eat traditional dog food, so Marshall began testing different recipes, and thus Wag Tantrum was born. Wag Tantrum is one of the few brands in its category that sells puppy food, and one of the only two brands in its category that is 100 percent organic. "When I learned about Lily's diagnoses, I read everything I could about animal nutrition. I quickly found out that, just like humans, dogs are what they eat. They need fresh, nutrient-rich meals, that don't contain all the byproducts and synthetic vitamins that regular pet food has," says Marshall. Wag Tantrum's food allows you to customize your dog's meal plan based on weight, age, activity level, and protein preference. Choose from Wag Tantrum's all-organic chicken, beef, or quinoa recipes, to give your dog the perfect balanced meal. You can mix it with your dog's current food, treat your pup to it a few times a week, or better yet, provide delicious nutrition at every meal. Either way, experts agree that even if it's not every day, good nutrition is beneficial for a happy dog. Wag Tantrum's products are made in small batches and sent right to your door, packaged with dry ice to ensure your furry friend's meal is fresh and ready to eat. Wag Tantrum knows that all a pet owner wants is a happy, healthy dog, and that is why it is committed to providing your dog with all the nutrients they need, in the tastiest way possible. About Wag Tantrum Wag Tantrum is on a mission to improve your dog's health with its 100 percent organic and human-grade recipes. Formulated with the help of veterinarians and dog nutritionists, Wag Tantrum holds itself to a high standard that exceeds the requirements set by The Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO). Wag Tantrum's locally sourced, all-natural products can help support joint health, healthy skin, luxurious coats, and improve energy levels in dogs. You can find your pet's new favorite food on Wag Tantrum's website, WagTantrum.com , or their Amazon store. About The Women's Home Founded in 1957, the mission of The Women's Home is to build communities that strengthen women and support families as they reclaim their stability. The Women's Home is not a shelter or a detox program. They provide safe living spaces and offer ongoing treatment of the whole person: emotional, mental, financial, physical, social, spiritual, and vocational. They also have a long-term residential treatment program in Montrose and 2 permanent supportive housing complexes along with a community center in Spring Branch. For more information, visit TheWomensHome.org. Media Contact Micaela Schuffman Firecracker PR 973-879-8706 [email protected] SOURCE Wag Tantrum Rise in disposable income, increase in housing requirements, and governmental initiatives to invest in construction-related activities drive the growth of the global windows and doors market. PORTLAND, Ore., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Market Research published a report, titled, "Windows and Doors Market by Product Type (Windows and Doors), Material (Wood, Metal, and Plastic), and Mechanism (Swinging, Sliding, Folding, Revolving, and Others): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 20212030". According to the report, the global windows and doors industry generated $217.9 billion in 2020, and is anticipated to generate $356.4 billion by 2030, witnessing a CAGR of 4.9% from 2021 to 2030. Prime determinants of growth Rise in disposable income, increase in housing requirements, and governmental initiatives to invest in construction-related activities drive the growth of the global windows and doors market. However, high price package of some ecofriendly materials hinders the market growth. On the other hand, rapid urbanization and industrialization in emerging countries present new opportunities in the coming years. Download Sample PDF: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/1957 Covid-19 Scenario: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic implemented a global lockdown, which had a negative impact on the growth of the global windows and doors market, especially during the initial phase. Manufacturing activities windows and doors were stopped or restricted to a huge extent. Construction and transportation activities, along with their supply chains hampered on a global level. The windows segment to maintain its leadership status throughout the forecast period Based on product type, the windows segment held the highest market share in 2020, accounting for more than half of the global windows and doors market, and is estimated to maintain its leadership status throughout the forecast period. This is owing to rise in consumer spending and increase in new construction activities. Moreover, the doors segment is projected to manifest the highest CAGR of 6.1% from 2021 to 2030. Rise in multi-family housing units is expected to increase the number of doors for different families, which in turn, drives the segment. Get detailed COVID-19 impact analysis on the Windows and Doors Market: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-for-customization/1957 The residential segment to maintain its lead position during the forecast period Based on end user, the residential segment accounted for the largest share in 2020, contributing to around three-fifths of the global windows and doors market, and is projected to maintain its lead position during the forecast period. Moreover, the same segment is expected to portray the largest CAGR of 6.7% from 2021 to 2030. This is due to increase in population, rise in disposable income, and rapid urbanization in developing countries. Asia-Pacific, followed by Europe and North America, to maintain its dominance by 2030 Based on region, Asia-Pacific, followed by Europe and North America, held the highest market share in terms of revenue 2020, accounting for nearly half of the global windows and doors market. This is owing to rise in government initiatives, and rise in spending in the construction sector in developing countries of the region. Moreover, the LAMEA region is expected to witness the fastest CAGR of 7.2% during the forecast period, owing to rapid urbanization and industrialization in the region. Leading Market Players Anderson Corporation Atrium Corporation Horton Automatics JELD-WEN Inc Lixil Group Corporation Marvin Windows and Doors, Inc. MI Windows and Doors Masco Corporation Pella Corporation YKK Corporation. Interested in Procure Data? Visit: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/1957 Access AVENUE- A Subscription-Based Library (Premium on-demand, subscription-based pricing model) at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/library-access Avenue is a user-based library of global market report database, provides comprehensive reports pertaining to the world's largest emerging markets. It further offers e-access to all the available industry reports just in a jiffy. By offering core business insights on the varied industries, economies, and end users worldwide, Avenue ensures that the registered members get an easy as well as single gateway to their all-inclusive requirements. Avenue Library Subscription | Request for 14 days free trial of before buying: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/avenueTrial Similar Reports We Have: Fire Rated Doors Market - Global fire-rated doors market is expected to reach $60,129 millionin 2027, growing at a CAGR of 6.1% from 2020 to 2027. Exterior Doors Market The Exterior Doors Market is expected to reach $107,954 million in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 7.5% from 2017 to 2023. Doors Market - Global doors market is projected to reach $182,072 million in 2026, growing at a CAGR of 5.1%. Roofing Market - Global roofing market is projected to reach $156.0 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 4.3% from 2021 to 2030. Bifold Doors Market - Bifold doors market is expected to reach $13,929 million in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 5.2% from 2017 to 2023. Pre-Book Now with 10% Discount: UPVC Doors and Windows Market: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 20212030 Plastic Door and Window Market: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 20212030 About Allied Market Research: Allied Market Research (AMR) is a full-service market research and business-consulting wing of Allied Analytics LLP based in Portland, Oregon. Allied Market Research provides global enterprises as well as medium and small businesses with unmatched quality of "Market Research Reports" and "Business Intelligence Solutions." AMR has a targeted view to provide business insights and consulting to assist its clients to make strategic business decisions and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain. We are in professional corporate relations with various companies and this helps us in digging out market data that helps us generate accurate research data tables and confirms utmost accuracy in our market forecasting. Allied Market Research CEO Pawan Kumar is instrumental in inspiring and encouraging everyone associated with the company to maintain high quality of data and help clients in every way possible to achieve success. Each and every data presented in the reports published by us is extracted through primary interviews with top officials from leading companies of domain concerned. Our secondary data procurement methodology includes deep online and offline research and discussion with knowledgeable professionals and analysts in the industry. Contact us: David Correa 5933 NE Win Sivers Drive #205, Portland, OR 97220 United States Toll Free (USA/Canada): +1-800-792-5285, UK: +44-845-528-1300 Hong Kong: +852-301-84916 India (Pune): +91-20-66346060 Fax: +1-855-550-5975 [email protected] Web: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com Follow Us on | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn SOURCE Allied Market Research Lyndi returns to Young Living, bringing wide-ranging talents creating brand, product, and communication strategies while directing award-winning marketing content LEHI, Utah, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Young Living, the world's leading provider of essential oils, today announced that Lyndi Smith has returned to Young Living in her new role as Chief Marketing Officer. Lyndi's role includes overseeing story, brand, and experience at Young Living by using communication strategies and creating marketing content. She is entrepreneurial-minded and has extensive experience in mentoring individuals and teams. Young Living Appoints Lyndi Smith as Chief Marketing Officer "We are excited to welcome Lyndi back to Young Living as a part of our creative marketing team," said Mary Young. "Lyndi is well integrated into our culture, and has a sound understanding of our legacy and brand. She has always been a fundamental part of our success" Lyndi has over 20 years of marketing and communications experience. She started at Young Living in 2001 and worked her way up to Senior Vice President of Global Marketing before leaving in 2021 to tend to family needs. She graduated from Utah Valley University in 2013 with her Bachelors of Science in Business Management. Lyndi will be working with the marketing team at Young Living to develop brand and creative services, global communications, global content marketing, and global events. She'll be in charge of developing and executing marketing strategies and vision to support Young Living's goals while driving brand awareness and revenue growth. "I am so thrilled to be returning to Young Living's marketing team and feel that sense of dedication, contribution, and positive spirit again," said Lyndi Smith. "There is so much creativity and energy within Young Living's mission and brand, and it feels like home to come back and be part of a company with such great values and impact." About Young Living Essential Oils Young Living Essential Oils is a world-leading essential oils company based in Lehi, Utah. Founded in 1994, the company provides the highest quality essential oils and oil-infused products available. Young Living's essential oils come from corporate-owned farms, partner farms, and certified suppliers and are rigorously tested for safety and quality. The company's products support a healthy lifestyle and provide opportunities for independent brand partners to share the unique benefits of essential oils with millions of customers worldwide. For more information, visit YoungLiving.com, follow @youngliving on Instagram, or like us on Facebook. SOURCE Young Living Essential Oils Ervin Cohen Jessup LLP won their client's dismissal from the case after six years of litigation LOS ANGELES, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge granted Ervin Cohen Jessup LLP's (ECJ) motion for summary judgment Tuesday, finding the plaintiff's claims of a contract breach were barred because the plaintiff itself had breached the contract. Led by Partner Peter S. Selvin, the firm represented a leading franchisor of cosmetology schools in litigation brought by a former vendor which sought damages in excess of $20 million. Suing for breach of contract, the vendor, which was represented by one of the top plaintiffs' firm in the state, claimed that ECJ's client had breached an alleged "lifetime contract" to be the exclusive supplier of cosmetology kits that were supplied to the schools. In prevailing on summary judgment, the ECJ team demonstrated that plaintiff itself had breached the contract by failing to pay the royalties due to ECJ's client. The ECJ trial team also demonstrated that plaintiff had continued to enjoy the economic benefits of the alleged contract after ECJ's client had told plaintiff that it would be taking the kit supply business in house. The ECJ team filed for a motion for summary judgment in December 2021. In a ruling granting the motion last week, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Teresa A. Beaudet highlighted the plaintiffs' retention of the contract's economic benefits after ECJ's client told them that the arrangement was coming to an end. "This conduct, treating the contract as binding after full knowledge of the breach, is a waiver of the right to rescind the contract for the material breach," wrote Beaudet. "Since plaintiff elected to treat the contract as still alive and viable and accepted further performance from defendantthe rule is well-established he waived the right to hold defendantfor damages for the breach." Selvin said his client was pleased to put an end to its involvement after nearly six years of hard fought litigation. "We gratified that our client can now put this matter behind them," said Selvin. Ervin Cohen & Jessup LLP is a full-service firm that provides a broad range of business-related legal services including corporate law; litigation; intellectual property & technology law; real estate transactions and finance; construction & environmental law; tax planning and controversies; employment law; health care law; bankruptcy, receivership and reorganization; and estate planning. For more information, visit http://www.ecjlaw.com/ SOURCE Ervin Cohen & Jessup LLP "The high demand for and acceptance of our product in the Mexican market confirms to us that our mission is important and that we are on the right track, but it also drives us to work harder to give access to more people while improving the experience and service for all our customers. None of this would have been possible without the talent, commitment and passion that characterizes the work of everyone at Stori." - Marlene Garayzar, co-founder of Stori The company has grown significantly in the last two years, thanks to a great team that is passionate about technology, innovation and financial inclusion. Huge thanks also go to the unconditional support of Stori's investors including Tresalia Capital, Lightspeed, GGV Capital, General Catalyst, GIC and Goodwater Capital, among other industry giants who are pushing to change the history of millions of Mexicans through Stori. The company is putting the $250 million raised so far to work by investing in our customers and the Mexican market. Behind one million users there was a lot of sweat, tears and hard work, so I would like to thank the current Stori team and anyone who once worked with us in the past. I would also like to thank our customers for all their trust, we are preparing more pleasant surprises to improve your experience." - Sherman He, co-founder of Stori After reaching the goal of one million customers, Stori continues to move forward to become a "unicorn" in the credit card world. Our next goal is to double our number of customers in the next several months to demonstrate that any Mexican can and should have access to a credit card with a responsible credit line that helps them to improve their credit bureau score. Anyone who is starting their financial journey or who wants to turn their financial life around, can apply for their Stori card with immediate approval, no history, no paperwork and without hassle, all directly through the Stori App. This future Super-App already facilitates the payment of services such as electricity, cable, internet, among others, and will be building more technical capabilities in the very near future. "We started building Stori because we had a dream that every working person deserves a fair chance at financial access. Myself and many of my colleagues come from low-income families and experienced the challenges firsthand. It is humbling that today we have reached such a significant milestone in our journey. " - Bin Chen, co-founder of Stori Stori is focused on providing financial inclusion for Mexicans, but will soon look to expand the opportunity throughout Latin America. The company was founded in 2018 and has made a big step by reaching one million customers. It is all thanks to the ownership taken by the teams working at the company who are focused on the most important objective: listening to and understanding the customer to improve their experience. Just a few months since Stori raised one of the largest Series C investment rounds in Latin America, the company is now focused on the next set of ambitious goals to achieve. Thanks a million! Follow us at: www.storicard.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Stori.MX Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stori.card/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Stori_MX TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@stori.card SOURCE Stori Exclusive innovative design combines 3 fashion staples: the cardigan, wrap and scarf into one versatile wardrobe essential Unique tunnel sleeves provide today's on-the-go woman the comfort and freedom she needs NEW YORK, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Adrianna Papell LLC, a leading brand in the occasion dress and bridal market, today announced the launch of S'HUG -- the new versatile cardigan wrap available exclusively at https://www.adriannapapell.com/pages/shug. The exclusive patented style, designed with a touch of cashmere for added softness, takes inspiration from three essentials in every woman's closetthe cardigan, wrap and scarfand transforms them into the first easy-to-wear, one piece wonder that is versatile, seasonless and can be worn dozens of different ways. The S'HUG utilizes a patented tunnel sleeve design, which allows for a seamless transformation from wrap to cardigan to scarf, while keeping the S'HUG comfortably hands free. When she is ready to slip out of the cardigan but still wants the comfort of a soft, cozy layer, she can simply drape the S'HUG into a stylish scarf or wrap. "Creating a simple, yet unique accessory that is also functional aligns with our mission of helping all women look and feel their best," said Jaynee Berkman, President, and Chief Creative Officer at Adrianna Papell. "Thanks to its integrated sleeves, wearing a light, stylish layer that stays in place without slipping or falling down as she transitions from one event to anotherfrom the office to dinner, from a beach vacation to a party and even taking a selfieis now possible. The S'HUG is the versatile cardigan wrap she never knew she needed." Kiyeon Nam, the inventor of the S'HUG, said she was inspired as a young mother and businesswoman who was constantly on the go to create the S'HUG to help women feel stylish and empowered. "Like so many women today, I found it challenging to stay fashionable while working, taking care of the children and the household," the inventor said. "The S'HUG is a symbolic inventionit's an encouraging hug from your inner self that every woman deserves." The S'HUG is available in extensive selection of colors and metallic detailing, with endless styling options that work 24/7 embracing those every day and special moments in a woman's life. The assortment is fully size inclusive, spanning sizes XS/S; M/L; XL/XXL and fits up to size 20. The S'HUG retails between $79-$119. Link to Lifestyle Imagery HERE About Adrianna Papell: "Wear Life Beautifully" For over 40 years, the Adrianna Papell Group, a New York City based occasions and bridal company, mission has been focused on being the style destination for every woman and every occasion. With an artisanal attention to detail and quality craftsmanship and fit, Adrianna Papell collections are infused with a timeless elegance and eclectic flair that empowers women of all ages and silhouettes to feel and look their best. Each piece is designed for the way women live todaytransitioning effortlessly from one occasion to the next. Today, the Adrianna Papell brand has a substantial market share in the dress business and is distributed to all leading retailers in the United States, across 27 countries and through the brand's direct to consumer ecommerce site. Adrianna Papell is fast growing its brand recognition in the wedding industry with a full complement of wedding attire for the bride and her bridal party from say "Yes" to "I do". Adrianna Papell strikes to celebrate the important moments of life by celebrating the women who experience them. About Kiyeon Nam Kiyeon Nam is an award-winning fashion innovator and the founder and chief executive of Baby De La Baye, Inc. and B'ZT, LLC., leading fashion and technology startups in NYC. Kiyeon's innovations have been recognized by a number of prestigious media outlets, including Time Magazine's Best 100 Inventions and the 50 Game Changing Inventions by Entrepreneur Magazine. She is the recipient of the Female Founders Award by TechCrunch, recognized by Insights Success as one of the top 10 successful entrepreneurs and was the gold winner of the prominent Edison Award. SOURCE Adrianna Papell NEW YORK, March 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Rowley Law PLLC is investigating potential securities law violations by Neenah, Inc. (NYSE: NP) and its board of directors concerning the proposed acquisition of the company by Schweitzer-Mauduit International, Inc. (NYSE: SWM). Stockholders will receive 1.358 shares of Schweitzer-Mauduit International common stock for each share of Neenah stock that they hold. Neenah stockholders are expected to own approximately 42% of the combined company. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2022. If you are a stockholder of Neenah, Inc. and are interested in obtaining additional information regarding this investigation, please visit us at: http://www.rowleylawpllc.com/investigation/np/. You may also contact Shane Rowley, Esq. at Rowley Law PLLC, 50 Main Street Suite 1000, White Plains, NY 10606, by email at [email protected] , or by telephone at 914-400-1920 or 844-400-4643 (toll-free). Rowley Law PLLC represents shareholders nationwide in class actions and derivative lawsuits in complex corporate litigation. For more information about the firm and its attorneys, please visit http://www.rowleylawpllc.com . Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. SOURCE Rowley Law PLLC -Industry leader demonstrates commitment to the future of aesthetics with forward-facing, trends report- -Meeting will signify the launch of HArmonyCa, hybrid injectable across Europe and in select EEMEA countries IRVINE, Calif., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Allergan Aesthetics, an AbbVie company, will join industry colleagues and healthcare providers from around the globe for the 20th edition of AMWC in Monaco, France. The meeting marks Allergan Aesthetics entry into the emerging category of Hybrid Injectables with the launch of HArmonyCa with lidocaine across Europe, specifically, in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Greece, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands and in select EEMEA countries such as South Africa, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania, as well as Brazil. The hybrid meeting will be held at Grimaldi Forum, Monaco March 31, 2022 April 2, 2022. The Allergan Aesthetics activity, presentations and poster sessions are as follows: HArmonyCa Symposium will be held at Salle des Princes on March 31, 2022 at 10:45am CET Allergan Aesthetics looks to further develop the Hybrid Injectables category by introducing its first dual-effect product, which combines the two active ingredients - hyaluronic acid (HA) - a well-known ingredient found in facial fillers and calcium hydroxyapatite (CaHA) - in one injection. Allergan Aesthetics will provide a range of in-person and virtual training packages to support appropriate medical professionals who wish to offer HArmonyCa with Lidocaine to their patients across Europe and in select EEMEA countries. Hosted by Allergan Medical Institute (AMI), the main stage symposium titled 'Face the Future' will focus on the aesthetic trends of the future with sessions exploring the changing face of beauty, diversity, gender-inclusive beauty and modern masculinity. April 1, 2022 at 9:45 AM 12:45 AM CET Poster Presentations Biological Response of the Combination Filler, HArmonyCa, in a Rodent Model Authors: Andre Braz, Artem Kutikov , Alexander Pierce , Alexandra Grond , Malka Salomon , Lauren Nakab Efficacy and Safety of 2 Doses of OnabotulinumtoxinA for the Treatment of Masseter Muscle Prominence: 6-Month Results From a Randomized, Phase 2b, Placebo-Controlled Study Authors: Sabrina Fabi , Derek Jones , Brian Biesman , Alexander Rivkin , Julia Garcia , Tanya Brandstetter , Grace Pan , Beta Bowen, Elisabeth Lee , Mitchell F. Brin Botulax Displays Lower Enzymatic Activity when Compared to OnabotulinumtoxinA in a Light Chain Activity Assay (presentation was previously presented at other congresses and will be encore presentations at AMWC) Authors: David Rupp , Celina Nino , Lance Steward , Mitchell Brin , Amy Brideau-Andersen About Allergan Aesthetics At Allergan Aesthetics, an AbbVie company, we develop, manufacture, and market a portfolio of leading aesthetics brands and products. Our aesthetics portfolio includes facial injectables, body contouring, plastics, skin care, and more. Our goal is to consistently provide our customers with innovation, education, exceptional service, and a commitment to excellence, all with a personal touch. For more information, visit www.AllerganAesthetics.com. About AbbVie AbbVie's mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people's lives across several key therapeutic areas: immunology, oncology, neuroscience, eye care, virology, women's health and gastroenterology, in addition to products and services across its Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com. Follow @abbvie on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. SOURCE AbbVie Banner's Snap Signal portfolio of modular, brand agnostic, plug-and-play IIoT solutions allows users to harvest both condition and process monitoring data from legacy equipment quickly, easily and economically without upgrading equipment or disturbing existing controls and transmit that insightful diagnostic data to any upstream system for data visualization and equipment and process improvements. FORT WORTH, Texas, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Electronics & Automation now offers Banner Engineering's Snap Signal portfolio of modular, brand agnostic, plug-and-play IIoT solutions, including the new Snap Signal DXMR90 industrial controller. Banner's Snap Signal solutions are designed to leverage machine data from automation islands scattered throughout the factory floor, convert disparate data signals from both condition monitoring and process monitoring solutions into a unified protocol and transmit that insightful diagnostic data to a dedicated PLC or SCADA control system for local processing or an edge device used to monitor equipment conditions in the cloud. Snap Signal solutions can also function as an overlay network, allowing users to tee into legacy sensors with a splitter, harvest data without upgrading equipment or disturbing the existing controls and transmit that data to any upstream system for data visualization and equipment and process improvements. The line currently offers IIoT solutions including in-line converters, adapters and filters and the new Snap Signal DXMR90 industrial controller. Banner's new Snap Signal DXMR90 industrial controller is the central component of the Snap Signal device monitoring system and, as such, is designed for compatibility with a wide range of serial devices. This configurable controller features a rugged housing optimized for space and weight savings, IP67/IP68 sealing to eliminate the need for a control cabinet and four dedicated Modbus ports that support concurrent communication with four independent networks for faster response times. It also features a processor that receives signals from sensors and other connected devices, combines the disparate signals into a single unified stream and transmits that actionable data to a local processing hub or cloud system via a standard Industrial Ethernet protocol. And its internal logic controller uses simple action rules for programming, logging and data manipulation. The DXMR90 is currently the only IIoT device to feature five configurable Modbus RTU masters in a single housing. Ideal applications for the DXMR90 include condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) analysis and tracking, lean manufacturing, data collection and performance metrics, diagnostics and troubleshooting, and edge processing. "In today's market, virtually every customer has an IIoT initiative directed at making data-driven decisions on the factory floor, and most already have equipment that generates condition and process data for local consumption; they just aren't able to unify the machines' various data signals and easily and economically transmit that data to the cloud. Our innovative Snap Signal product portfolio is based on standard M12 connectivity and can get your data where you want it regardless of which PLCs you use to control your machines, which signal types they generate, which IO types you use or which SCADA or cloud platform you want to use," said Luke Karnas, Director of Global Business Development at Banner Engineering. "Snap Signal solutions allow you to add intelligence to your equipment and gather insights from your existing IO without coding into a PLC and potentially disrupting the existing controls. They can also enrich data like discrete signals to give you information like count and rate instead of just indicating the presence or absence of a widget on your line. Additionally, these disruptive IIoT solutions are extremely flexible. Snap Signal solutions support a la carte IO implementation, enabling both right-sized systems and quick, easy and economical expansion." Banner's new Snap Signal DXMR90 industrial controller is rated for 1230 VDC and operating temperatures extending from -40C to +70C with a maximum of 90% relative, non-condensing humidity and is currently in stock at Allied Electronics & Automation. Available accessories also in stock at Allied include a mounting bracket, four-pin M12 D-Code to RJ45 shielded Ethernet cordsets, double-ended, four-pin, threaded M12 cordsets and single-ended, five-pin threaded M12 cordsets. For more information about Banner's Snap Signal portfolio of modular, brand agnostic, plug-and-play IIoT solutions, visit Banner's Snap Signal landing page and DXMR90 product page or contact Allied's technical support team. For more information about the other Banner Engineering products that Allied carries, please visit Allied's Banner Engineering manufacturer page. About Banner Engineering Every 3.5 seconds, a Banner product is installed somewhere in the world. Banner solves problems for most of the manufacturing companies in the Fortune 500, as well as the startups changing industry with leading-edge production. Banner technology supports manufacturing of the cars you drive, the food you eat, the medicine you take, and virtually every product in your daily life. Whatever the industry, Banner offers solutions to automate production, improve efficiency, and manufacture to the highest standard of quality. About Allied Electronics & Automation We are a part of Electrocomponents plc, an FTSE 100 global leader in the omni-channel distribution of products and services for industrial equipment and operations that also includes the RS Components, RS PRO, OKdo, DesignSpark, IESA, Synovos, Needlers and Liscombe brands. With sales offices across the Americas, a focus on digital customer experience and more than 3.5 million parts available for purchase online, engineers, designers, maintainers and purchasers trust Allied to provide a wide range of solutions across the entire product lifecycle. Connect with us at www.alliedelec.com or via social media on Facebook , Twitter , and LinkedIn . Image Download: https://bit.ly/3tZq5ow Media Inquiries: Karen Gavenda Allied Electronics & Automation [email protected] SOURCE Allied Electronics & Automation Innovative Worker-Owned Cooperative Resolves Healthcare Staffing Shortages with Career Pipeline, Flexibility, Benefits, and Ownership Stake for Workers ONTARIO, Calif., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As the COVID-19 pandemic creates havoc with patients, hospitals, and healthcare facilities nationwide, a new organization, AlliedUP, is implementing an innovative approach to hiring and retaining healthcare staff. This comes at a time when patients are feeling the results of the crunch among both medical and support staff. A CVS Health-Harris Poll National Health provided to Axios found that 80 percent of respondents are concerned about the shortage of health care workers. The poll found a significant number of Americans have been affected because of everything from canceled appointments to delayed surgeries and overcrowded hospitals. Axios reports that of the more than 2,000 adults polled Feb. 1015, 45% had trouble scheduling appointments since spots are limited, 36% said their physician's offices are operating on reduced hours, and 21% reported that their physicians stopped practicing. "The poll's findings are very consistent with what we know to be true: there is a severe shortage of healthcare workers exacerbated by the pandemic," said AlliedUP CEO Carey Carpineta, noting that AlliedUP provides workers with opportunities to work in their own communities with excellent pay, benefits, and flexibility, and they can become worker-owners. In less than two years, the healthcare sector has lost almost 500,000 workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of labor Statistics. And a survey by Morning Consult last fall underscored the ongoing healthcare worker crisis: since February 2020, their research found that 30% of U.S. healthcare workers have lost their jobs (12 %) or quit (18%). An additional 31% said they considered leaving their employers during the pandemic. "Although the U.S. economy has recovered faster than many others around the world, persistent labor-market problems lurk beneath the surface," said Lenny Mendonca, senior partner emeritus at McKinsey & Company and former chief economic and business adviser to California Governor Gavin Newsom. "Moreover, the deep class, race, and gender-based inequalities laid bare by the pandemic are getting worse, demanding investment in and support of the promising innovation that the AlliedUP Cooperative brings to the healthcare industry." As the world's first worker-owned healthcare staffing cooperative, AlliedUP has found a way to keep healthcare workers on the job. The cooperative just started and is on track to place nearly 1,000 new workers this year, and recruit another 3,000 by the end of 2023. It provides hospitals and health facilities with qualified, trained, and engaged workers. The cooperative works to solve many underlying issues that beset healthcare staffing even before the pandemic struck, including the critical need to: Address healthcare staffing shortages with high-quality talent Provide value-rich jobs in under-resourced communities Scale healthcare staffing in communities throughout the country Provide flexibility, benefits, education, and training to healthcare workers AlliedUP understands the financial and workplace challenges many healthcare workers encounter and seeks to improve their family health and financial security. It is the only union healthcare staffing company in the country, which helps ensure good wages, healthcare benefits, and work conditions. The owner-workers have access to training and education programs paid for by the cooperative. The workers - certified assistants to operations staff, clinical staff, and registered nurses - have the flexibility to choose full-time positions, short- or long-term assignments, or on-call shifts. "I am so grateful to be on the AlliedUP team," said David Ngo, a MedSurge registered nurse. "It's a refreshing, new approach to working in healthcare, and the caring culture really sold me. Because of the union-scale pay, full benefits, education, and an online support community, I have referred several of my travel-nurse friends who are joining the team too." ABOUT ALLIEDUP AlliedUP is a transformational employment ecosystem and support community for Allied Healthcare professionals serving the needs of workers first through a socially governed community rich in jobs and diversity while offering a culture of integrity, compassion, accountability, and value for all. The only Allied Healthcare cooperative in existence, AlliedUP provides higher wages, flexible schedules, full benefits, and ownership. Contact: Michael K. Frisby, [email protected] 202.625.4328 Joanne Krell, [email protected]. 269.753.9392 SOURCE AlliedUP The Kaduna State government and the military authorities, on Monday, said bandits did not shut down Kaduna International Airport as reported at the weekend. The military confirmed the bandits' attack but said the scene was six kilometers away from the Airport terminal and outside its parameter fence. However, according to the Military, 12 of the bandits were killed through airstrike. Kaduna State Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, Samuel Aruwan, Garrison Commander 1 Division Nigerian Army, Brig-General Uriah Opuene and Air Force Base Commander, Air Commodore, Ademuyiwa Adedoyin, led journalists on an assessment tour of the attack scene. Addressing journalists at the scene of the attack, Brig-Gen.Opuene said the Kaduna International Airport is very secure, adding that there are several layers of security at the Airport and that bandits could not have dared to attack it. He said preliminary investigations have revealed that the bandits were just passing through the back of the Airport towards Riyawa village when they sighted the security man engaged by the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) watching over their metrological equipment around the axis. Brig-Gen. Opuene said: "As you can see, this place is about six kilometers away from the Airport terminal. The bandits were only passing behind the airport perimeter fence when they saw the security man engage by NAMA and they fired at him. They just took advantage of that to pass a message that they have attacked the airport, not that they had the intention of attacking the Airport. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Nigeria Arms and Armies By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. "There are several layers of security at the Airport, this is the first layer and even this first layer was not breached, because from the moment of hearing that shot, it took our men just about three minutes to get here from the next layer of security. "On arrival, the bandits were already running away, so we engaged them through the use of ground forces. Then we called for air strike and an helicopter was deployed and from the air report, about 12 of the bandits were killed. "So, as you can see from the distance, the insinuation outside that the terrorists took over the Airport is not correct. If the terrorists had entered, they would have met us there." Also speaking, the NAF Base Commander, Air Commodore Adedoyin said security around the Airport general area has been beefed up since the security of the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) was breached last year, adding that bandits don't have the audacity to attack Kaduna Airport. For his part, the Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, Aruwan, while assuring that the Airport was safe and secured, said the state government was engaging citizens in communities around the Airport to scale up intelligence gathering. Innovative program offers solar energy, efficiency and technology to save on energy costs CALABASAS, Calif., March 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- American Homes 4 Rent (NYSE: AMH) ("American Homes 4 Rent"), a leading provider of high-quality single-family homes for rent, today announced a first-of-its kind partnership with Elevation, a fully integrated residential energy solutions company, to bring energy efficient technology to its residents and amenity centers. The partnership has begun with the integration of solar energy into American Homes 4 Rent's current and future amenity centers in its new single-family rental communities and will continue with the deployment of energy solutions in participating homes. "As one of the top homebuilders in the nation, we continue to build the future of America responsibly, prioritizing durability and efficiency and implementing a strategy for managing our carbon footprint," said Bryan Smith, Chief Operating Officer of American Homes 4 Rent. "This partnership with Elevation aims to reduce the environmental impact and energy costs for both American Homes 4 Rent and our residents, while aligning with our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) principles." Participating homes and amenity centers will benefit from solar energy, energy efficiency upgrades and smart energy technology that provides real-time, appliance-level consumption data. "Our vision is to bring this proprietary combination of software and renewable technology to scale," said Greg Fasullo, Chief Executive Officer of Elevation. "We see this as an incredible opportunity to make a real difference in how energy is being used at home. Historically, the rental market has not had access to energy solutions that can make a real impact, and we are excited to be the solution for this fast-growing market." About American Homes 4 Rent American Homes 4 Rent (NYSE: AMH) is a leader in the single-family home rental industry and "American Homes 4 Rent" is a nationally recognized brand for rental homes, known for high-quality, good value and resident satisfaction. We are an internally managed Maryland real estate investment trust, or REIT, focused on acquiring, developing, renovating, leasing, and operating attractive, single-family homes as rental properties. As of December 31, 2021, we owned 57,024 single-family properties in selected submarkets in 22 states. We are Certified as one of the nation's top employers by Great Place to Work, the global authority on workplace culture, were named one of America's Most Responsible Companies 2022 and one of America's Most Trusted Companies 2022 by Newsweek, and were recognized as being a top ESG Regional Performer by Sustainalytics. Additional information about American Homes 4 Rent is available on our website at www.americanhomes4rent.com. About Elevation Headquartered in Arizona, with offices in Dallas, Austin, and Las Vegas, Elevation is a fully integrated residential energy solutions company providing solar, energy efficiency, and smart energy management technology. A 2019, 2020, and 2021 Contractor of the Year award recipient by the U.S. Department of energy, Elevation has served thousands of families looking to make their homes more efficient and comfortable. Contacts: American Homes 4 Rent Megan Grabos Media Relations Phone: (805) 413-5088 Email: [email protected] American Homes 4 Rent Nicholas Fromm Investor Relations Phone: (855) 794-2447 Email: [email protected] Elevation Clayton Andersen President Phone: (801) 361-4864 Email: [email protected] SOURCE American Homes 4 Rent "We are thrilled to be honored once again as a company that devotes itself to a culture of health and wellness for our employees", said Vice President of Human Resources Kristin Bragg. "Our teams have exceeded expectations through the pandemic and have delivered on our goals for our clients, members, and employees. We're very proud of our team's efforts and determination to stay committed to our mission during a time of such uncertainty, and the ability of our workforce to pivot quickly while maintaining our ASH culture of hard work and well-being." San Diego isn't the only ASH office to achieve awards year after year. The company's headquarters in Indiana has been named a Top Workplace the last two years, the South Carolina office has been selected four years in a row by Best Places to Work, and the Fort Worth facility was also named a Best & Brightest worksite. National and regional awards like the Best and Brightest serve as evidence that employees, who had an opportunity to rate the company, really enjoy working at ASH. One of the reasons is ASH's innovative spirit, which led to the company shifting its focus to create more remote working opportunities in early 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 50% of ASH's 1,500-plus employees now exclusively work remotely, with many other employees working a hybridized schedule of in-office work only as needed. ASH has successfully maintained a positive, thriving culture throughout. "We're really proud of what we've been able to accomplish here," Bragg added. "It is wonderful to find the right synergy to create an environment where each employee can thrive as the company thrives." ASH was founded in 1987 with just $4,000 in seed money and has grown into a half-billion-dollar company dedicated to empowering individuals to live healthier lives. ASH accomplishes this by offering musculoskeletal health networks and programs, fitness center networks and exercise programs, and health management solutions for health plans, insurance carriers, employers, and others. About the Best and Brightest Companies Awards The Best and Brightest Companies to Work For competition identifies and honors organizations that display a commitment to excellence in their human resource practices and employee enrichment. Organizations are assessed based on categories such as communication, work-life balance, employee education, diversity, recognition, and retention. The Best and Brightest in Wellness is an initiative that recognizes and celebrates quality and excellence in health awareness. This program highlights companies, schools, faith-based groups, and organizations that promote a culture of wellness, and those that plan, implement, and evaluate efforts in employee wellness to make their business and the community a healthier place to live and work. About American Specialty Health American Specialty Health Incorporated (ASH) is one of the nation's premier independent and privately-owned specialty health organizations offering technology-enabled benefits management services, including musculoskeletal health provider networks and programs, fitness center networks and exercise programs, and health management solutions for health plans, insurance carriers, employers, and others. With offices in Carmel (Indianapolis), IN, San Diego, CA, Fort Worth, TX, and Columbia, SC, ASH has more than 1,500 employees. For more information about ASH, visit www.ashcompanies.com or call 800-848-3555. Follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter at @ASHCompanies. Contact: Lisa Freeman American Specialty Health 310-422-9200 [email protected] SOURCE American Specialty Health Incorporated Actor Ariana DeBose triumphantly won her first Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Anita in Steven Spielberg's adaptation of West Side Story after sweeping the rest of award season. She looked radiant with a fresh and modern take on Hollywood glamour in layered diamond line necklaces, a 3-row diamond bracelet and De Beers' Ellesmere Treasure high jewelry ring paired with a vibrant red ensemble. "Oscars night was spectacular in every way! When we chose the jewelry to wear for the big night, I put on the diamond necklaces from De Beers and the pieces immediately evoked light and music from within. Each one really spoke to me for this moment and it was the perfect way to celebrate this incredible evening. And I know De Beers is committed to sustainability which is a win for me," Ariana said of her De Beers Jewellers look for the evening. Zadrian Smith, half of Ariana's styling team Zadrian + Sarah said of the look, "As Ariana's Academy Awards look is so unique and individual, we needed jewelry that was going to stand apart as well. We chose stunning natural diamonds from De Beers, who had pieces that measured up to the magnitude of this moment." Sarah Edmiston added "And when we found out that the earrings and necklace she's wearing were named 'Drops of Light,' it felt serendipitous. Ariana is such a light, illuminating the spaces around her." Lupita Nyong'o looked like an embodiment of an Oscar statue as she took the stage wearing a glittering gold gown accentuated by De Beers 'Motlatse Marvel' earrings from the Reflections of Nature collection and a 'Light Rays' crown ring from De Beers' latest high jewelry collection, The Alchemist of Light. "We paired the most extraordinary De Beers jewelry with Lupita's gold fringe gown. The 'Light Rays' Crown ring from The Alchemist of Light collection could not be more perfect because it mimicked the detailing of the dress. The pink and yellow diamond earrings and statement ring from the Reflections of Nature collection added the perfect pop of color. You don't ever want your jewelry to compete with your dress, rather you want them to enhance each other. These pieces effortlessly did just that," said stylist Micaela Erlanger of Lupita's Oscars look. Following the Oscars ceremony, the stars continued the celebration at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party where De Beers diamond jewelry sparkled on Ariana DeBose, Hunter Schafer and Zoey Deutch. Ariana slipped into a black dress, dripping in diamond drop earrings, a diamond statement cuff bracelet and ring for her second De Beers look of the night. Actor and model Hunter Schafer attended the Vanity Fair soiree in a denim ensemble adorned in pieces from De Beers' latest high collection, The Alchemist of Light. The 'Light Ray's' diamond ear cuff paired with a matching collar necklace set in black rhodium plated 18K gold and titanium added to the edgy vibe of her overall look. Actor Zoey Deutch dazzled in De Beers diamonds as she walked the red carpet completing her glamourous color-blocked sequined gown with a pair of shoulder sweeping diamond earrings, a classic diamond line necklace and selection of diamond rings. De Beers Jewellers looks at the 94th Academy Awards include: Actor and Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winner Ariana DeBose for West Side Story De Beers Drops of Light Diamond Necklace set in Platinum, 20.73 carats Drops of Light Diamond Necklace set in Platinum, 20.73 carats De Beers Diamond Line Necklace set in Platinum, 41.29 carats Diamond Line Necklace set in Platinum, 41.29 carats De Beers Drops of Light Diamond Earrings set in Platinum, 4.21 carats Drops of Light Diamond Earrings set in Platinum, 4.21 carats De Beers Arpeggia Three Line Diamond Bracelet set in 18K White Gold, 9.50 carats Arpeggia Three Line Diamond Bracelet set in White Gold, 9.50 carats De Beers Reflections of Nature Ellesmere Treasure Diamond Ring set in 18K White Gold, 3.75 carats Reflections of Nature Ellesmere Treasure Diamond Ring set in White Gold, 3.75 carats De Beers Arpeggia One Row Diamond Ring set in 18K White Gold, 1.05 carats Actor and Oscar Presenter Lupita Nyong'o De Beers The Alchemist of Light 'Light Rays' Crown Ring with Fancy Vivid Orange and White Diamonds set in Titanium, 18K White and 18K Rose Gold , 2.93 carats The Alchemist of Light 'Light Rays' Crown Ring with Fancy Vivid Orange and White Diamonds set in Titanium, White and , 2.93 carats De Beers Reflections of Nature 'Motlatse Marvel' Earrings with Fancy Deep Orange, Pink and White Diamonds set in 18K White, Yellow & Rose Gold , 5.48 carats Reflections of Nature 'Motlatse Marvel' Earrings with Fancy Deep Orange, Pink and White Diamonds set in White, Yellow & , 5.48 carats De Beers Reflections of Nature 'Landers Radiance' Cluster Ring with Fancy Brown Orange, Yellow, Pink & White Diamonds set in 18K White, Yellow & Rose Gold , 7.24 carats De Beers Jewellers looks at the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscar Party include: Actor, Best Supporting Actress Winner for West Side Story, and attendee Ariana DeBose De Beers Adonis Rose Seven-Row Diamond Bracelet, 41.07 carats Adonis Rose Seven-Row Diamond Bracelet, 41.07 carats De Beers Phenomena Sirocco Diamond Earrings, 6.24 carats Phenomena Sirocco Diamond Earrings, 6.24 carats De Beers Arpeggia Three-Row Diamond Ring, 1.61 carats Actor & Model Hunter Schafer De Beers The Alchemist of Light 'Light Rays' Collar Necklace set in 18K Black Rhodium Plated White Gold Featuring a 4.22 Carat Fancy Brownish Yellow Radiant-Cut Diamond Surrounded by White Diamonds The Alchemist of Light 'Light Rays' Collar Necklace set in Black Rhodium Plated White Gold Featuring a 4.22 Carat Fancy Brownish Yellow Radiant-Cut Diamond Surrounded by White Diamonds De Beers The Alchemist of Light' Light Rays' Ear Cuff and Stud set in 18K Black Rhodium Plated White Gold featuring a Fancy Deep Brownish Yellow Radiant-Cut Diamond and Yellow Rough Macle Stud, 4.25 carats The Alchemist of Light' Light Rays' Ear Cuff and Stud set in Black Rhodium Plated White Gold featuring a Fancy Deep Brownish Yellow Radiant-Cut Diamond and Yellow Rough Macle Stud, 4.25 carats De Beers Reflections of Nature 'Okavango Grace' Medallion Ring set in 18K White Gold and Black Rhodium, 13.03 carats Reflections of Nature 'Okavango Grace' Medallion Ring set in White Gold and Black Rhodium, 13.03 carats De Beers Round Brilliant Diamond Eternity Band set in Platinum, 7.09 carats Round Brilliant Diamond Eternity Band set in Platinum, 7.09 carats De Beers Round Brilliant Diamond Eternity Band set in Platinum, 6.30 carats Actor and attendee Zoey Deutch De Beers Diamond Line Necklace set in 18K White Gold, 21.16 carats Diamond Line Necklace set in White Gold, 21.16 carats De Beers Arpeggia One-Line Diamond Earrings set in 18K White Gold, 4.69 carats Arpeggia One-Line Diamond Earrings set in White Gold, 4.69 carats De Beers Adonis Rose Cluster Ring set in 18K White Gold, 1.94 carats Adonis Rose Cluster Ring set in White Gold, 1.94 carats De Beers Round Brilliant Diamond Eternity Band set in Platinum, 7.55 carats Round Brilliant Diamond Eternity Band set in Platinum, 7.55 carats De Beers Five-Line Diamond Ring set in 18K White Gold, 1.72 carats Download Academy Award images here Download Vanity Fair Oscar Party images here About De Beers Jewellers Founded in London, with a flagship store on Old Bond Street and a presence in the most exclusive locations around the world, De Beers Jewellers is the pinnacle of luxury diamond jewelry. Building on De Beers' 130 years of expertise, the House glorifies the world's most beautiful diamonds through creativity and craftsmanship in bold, distinctive designs. De Beers is invested in ensuring all the diamonds it discovers create a lasting positive impact for people and the places where they are found. This comes with a pledge to build a better future one that is fairer, safer, cleaner and healthier, in which communities thrive, ethical practices are maintained, and the natural environment is protected. We call this long-term commitment Building Forever. De Beers Jewellers has 30 stores globally and ships to 15 markets via debeers.com. SOURCE DE BEERS NEW YORK, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As per Zion Market Research study, PVC industry gathered revenue worth about US$ 78.90 billion in 2021 and is slated to accumulate returns of approx. US$ 101.45 billion by 2028. In addition to this, Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) Market is set to register CAGR of nearly 5.6% in 2022-2028. Apparently, surge in PVC market size over forecasting timeline is due to massive use of PVC in packaging activities. In addition to this, use of PVC in carpet backing and biomedical applications will proliferate market size. Reportedly, PVC is third most extensively produced synthetic plastic polymer across globe with nearly 21 million tons of PVC produced annually. Since last five decades, PVC exhibited ability of fulfilling demand for single use pre-sterilized medical component in healthcare sector. Furthermore, use of PVC as substitute product for glass and rubber will drive business space. Massive use of PVC in construction activities will prop up progression of PVC market in upcoming years. Zion Market Research published the latest report titled as "PVC Market- By Product Type (Rigid PVC and Flexible PVC) and By Application (Pipes & Fittings, Wires & Cables, Films & Sheets, and Bottles): Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis, And Forecast, 20222028." into their research database. PVC Market: Overview Poly vinyl chloride is a polymer in which over half content by weight comprises of chlorine. The compound is manufactured by vinyl chloride monomer polymerization. It is available in rigid and flexible forms. Additionally, PVC is extensively utilized plastic resin in medical equipment and nearly one-fourth of all plastic medical components are made up from PVC. The compound exhibits high chemical resistance & stability and it is compatible with blood bag & drug delivery applications. The compound formulations demonstrate toughness and strength. Moreover, the product can be utilized in different kinds of temperatures and also maintains flexibility as well as durability at reduced temperatures. Get a Free Sample Report with All Related Graphs & Charts (with COVID 19 Impact Analysis): https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/sample/pvc-market Our Free Sample Report Includes: 2022 Updated Report Introduction, Overview, and In-depth industry analysis COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak Impact Analysis Included 166 + Pages Research Report (Inclusion of Updated Research) Provide Chapter-wise guidance on Request 2022 Updated Regional Analysis with Graphical Representation of Size, Share & Trends Includes Updated List of tables & figures Updated Report Includes Top Market Players with their Business Strategy, Sales Volume, and Revenue Analysis Zion Market Research methodology Industry Dynamics: PVC Market: Growth Dynamics Growth of PVC market over forecasting timeline is owing to reduced costs and high performance that it imparts to plastics. In addition to this, large amount of plasticizers are utilized for minimizing rigidity and this can result in massive market demand. Furthermore, PVC flooring is ease to deploy, can be recycled, can be easily cleaned, and has ability to improve visual appeal of room. Moreover, the compound is utilized in roofing across building & construction sector. Additionally, the compound is utilized in various sectors due to requirement of low maintenance and durability. Apparently, rise in spending capacity and increase in allocation of funds for construction sector will scale up size of PVC market in ensuing years. Large-scale use of poly vinyl chloride in selective packaging for medical equipment and apparatus will embellish market trends. Apart from this, bottle sleeving and electronic & consumer product packaging demand will boost scope of PVC industry in ensuing years. Directly Purchase a Copy of the Report @ https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/buynow/su/pvc-market Pipes & Fittings Segment To Lead Application Landscape By 2028 Growth of pipes & fittings segment over forecasting period is owing to large-scale usage of PVC in pipes & fittings in building constructions. In addition to this, thriving commercial & household sectors will boost segmental surge in upcoming years. Get More Insight before [email protected] : https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/inquiry/pvc-market List of Key Players of PVC Market: Occidental Petroleum Corporation Kem One Vinnolit GmbH & Co. KG Shin-Etsu Chemical Co. Ltd Xinjiang Zhongtai Chemical Co. Ltd. Mexichem S.A.B. de C.V. Formosa Plastics Group INEOS Group Ltd Solvay S.A. AXIALL Corporation. Key Industry Insights & Finding of the PVC Market Reports: As per the analysis shared by our research analyst, the PVC Market is expected to grow annually at a CAGR of around 5.6% (2022-2028). (2022-2028). Through the primary research, it was established that the PVC Market was valued approximately USD 78.90 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach to roughly USD 101.45 billion by 2028. billion in 2021 and is projected to reach to roughly billion by 2028. Giant manufacturers in Asia Pacific zone will promote growth of Asia Pacific PVC industry in ensuing years. Key questions answered in this report: What are the growth rate forecast and market size for PVC Market? What are the key driving factors propelling the PVC Market forward? What are the most important companies in the PVC Market Industry? What segments does the PVC Market cover? How can I receive a free copy of the PVC Market sample report and company profiles? Report Scope: Report Attribute Details Market size value in 2021 USD 78.90 Billion Revenue forecast in 2028 USD 101.45 Billion Growth Rate CAGR of almost 5.6% 2022-2028 Base Year 2020 Historic Years 2016 - 2021 Forecast Years 2022 - 2028 Segments Covered By Product Type, By Application, and By End Use Forecast Units Value (USD Billion), and Volume (Units) Quantitative Units Revenue in USD million/billion and CAGR from 2022 to 2028 Regions Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa, and Rest of World Countries Covered U.S., Canada, Mexico, U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, GCC Countries, and South Africa, among others Companies Covered Occidental Petroleum Corporation, Kem One, Vinnolit GmbH & Co. KG, Shin-Etsu Chemical Co. Ltd , Xinjiang Zhongtai Chemical Co. Ltd., Mexichem S.A.B. de C.V., Formosa Plastics Group, INEOS Group Ltd, Solvay S.A., and AXIALL Corporation. Report Coverage Market growth drivers, restraints, opportunities, Porter's five forces analysis, PEST analysis, value chain analysis, regulatory landscape, market attractiveness analysis by segments and region, company market share analysis, and COVID-19 impact analysis. Customization Scope Avail customized purchase options to meet your exact research needs. https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/custom/150 Free Brochure: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/requestbrochure/pvc-market Regional Dominance: Asia Pacific PVC Market To Expand Leaps & Bounds Over 2022-2028 Expansion of regional market in next six years is due to rise in production of compound in countries such as China. A prominent increase in population of sub-continent and surging urbanization will steer growth of regional market over forecasting years. Presence of giant manufacturers in Asia Pacific zone will promote growth of Asia Pacific PVC industry in ensuing years. Global PVC Market is segmented as follows: PVC Market: By Product Type Outlook (2022-2028) Rigid PVC Flexible PVC PVC Market: By Application Outlook (2022-2028) Pipes & Fittings Wires & Cables Films & Sheets Bottles PVC Market: By Region Outlook (2022-2028) North America The U.S. Canada Europe France The UK Spain Germany Italy Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China Japan India South Korea Southeast Asia Rest of Asia Pacific Latin America Brazil Mexico Rest of Latin America Middle East & Africa GCC South Africa Rest of Middle East & Africa Press Release For PVC Market: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/news/pvc-market-growth-to-reach-escalating-heights-through Browse Other Related Research Reports from Zion Market Research Picric Acid Market - Global Industry Analysis : The global picric acid market was worth around $3300 billion in 2021 and is predicted to grow around $7200 billion by 2028 at a CAGR rate of 8% over the forecast period. : The global picric acid market was worth around in 2021 and is predicted to grow around by 2028 at a CAGR rate of 8% over the forecast period. Hydrophilic Coating Market - Global Industry Analysis : The global Hydrophilic Coating Market accrued earnings worth approximately 12.85 (USD Billion) in 2021 and is predicted to gain revenue of about 18.59 (USD Billion) by 2028, is set to record a CAGR of nearly 5.8% over the period from 2022 to 2028. : The global Hydrophilic Coating Market accrued earnings worth approximately 12.85 (USD Billion) in 2021 and is predicted to gain revenue of about 18.59 (USD Billion) by 2028, is set to record a CAGR of nearly 5.8% over the period from 2022 to 2028. Graphite Market - Global Industry Analysis: The global graphite market was valued at $176 million in 2021 and is anticipated to surpass $198 million by the end of 2028. The market is projected to grow with a considerable CAGR of 2.3 % during the forecast period. Browse through Zion Market Research's coverage of the Global Chemical & Materials Industry Follow Us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/zion-market-research/ Follow Us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/zion_research Follow Us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/zionmarketresearch/ About Us Zion Market Research is an obligated company. We create futuristic, cutting edge, informative reports ranging from industry reports, company reports to country reports. We provide our clients not only with market statistics unveiled by avowed private publishers and public organizations but also with vogue and newest industry reports along with pre-eminent and niche company profiles. Our database of market research reports comprises a wide variety of reports from cardinal industries. Our database is been updated constantly in order to fulfill our clients with prompt and direct online access to our database. Keeping in mind the client's needs, we have included expert insights on global industries, products, and market trends in this database. Last but not the least, we make it our duty to ensure the success of clients connected to usafter allif you do well, a little of the light shines on us. Contact Us: Zion Market Research 244 Fifth Avenue, Suite N202 New York, 10001, United States Tel: +49-322 210 92714 USA/Canada Toll Free No.1-855-465-4651 Email: [email protected] Website: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/ Blog - https://zmrblog.com/ SOURCE Zion Market Research A sought-after enterprise workforce professional with more than twenty years of experience building business relationships, Sullivan brings her expertise to Escoffier's leadership team. She's charged with identifying real-world solutions to address short-term labor challenges including worker shortages and employee retention. Sullivan will enlist Escoffier partners to help develop clear-cut pathways to drive long-term employee engagement and acquisition; with a focus on workplace culture, fit, wellness and ongoing training and development. Sullivan will also play a pivotal role in the development of Escoffier's online marketplace, designed to match employers with career seekers looking for rewarding careers in the industry. The platform is scheduled to go live later this year. "With the appointment of Denise, we took a crucial step in deepening our role as a leader in the culinary and hospitality space to identify unique solutions to hiring, engaging, and retaining talented staff," said Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts CEO, Tracy Lorenz. "The aftershock of the pandemic was a wake-up call for employees in search of long-term job satisfaction beyond salary and benefits, and employers' need to match jobs with the right skillset. Denise is exploring partnerships to address how we can best make these connections," added Lorenz. Prior to joining Escoffier, Sullivan served in leadership roles, as director of strategic partnerships for Woz U Enterprise, the director of business development for The Haden Group LLC, a startup services firm, and as the director of business development for Wiley Workplace Learning. Sullivan also managed her own professional services company and held management positions with New Horizons Learning Center and Oracle Corporation. Denise received her Bachelor of Arts in Organizational Communication from Pepperdine University. More about Escoffier Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts is the largest accredited provider of online and campus-based culinary training and education in the U.S. (based on comparable student data reported in IPEDS ). With ground campuses in Boulder, Co. and Austin, TX, it is the only U.S. accredited institution, available through its Boulder campus, to offer 100% online culinary degrees which include culinary classes and real-world industry externships. Ranked in the top 10 culinary schools in the United States by USA Today and number one in the world by Chef's Pencil, the school's professional programs offer the proven combination of a classic and contemporary approach to modern industry skills training as well as sustainability-centered and business-focused curriculum. Escoffier offers professional programs in Culinary Arts, Pastry Arts, Plant-based Culinary Arts, Holistic Nutrition and Wellness, and Hospitality and Restaurant Operations Management. For details on programs offered online and on-campus, visit Escoffier.edu . Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts in Boulder, Colorado is nationally accredited by the Accrediting Council for Continuing Education and Training (ACCET). Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts in Austin, Texas is nationally accredited by the Council on Occupational Education (COE). Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts is a Great Place to Work-Certified institution, a Newsweek Top Online Learning School and its Boulder campus is designated as a Military Friendly School. Contact: Patti Thomas, 312.919.0898 SOURCE Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts Under the strategic partnership, BCT and BITS Pilani will work together to expand their understanding of digital technologies and collaborate to build future-fit solutions. The MoU opens avenues for students of BITS Pilani to explore internships at BCT helping them curate EdTech solutions. Additionally, the partnership promotes joint seminars and workshops, knowledge sharing, and review of academic materials. Welcoming the MoU, Mr. Vish Srinivasan, Executive Vice President, BCT, said, "We are excited about this partnership and looking forward to deepening our ties with the student community in the Middle East. We're always exploring ideas, insights, and innovation that help our clients build future-fit businesses equipped with solutions for better experiences. This MoU is a step forward in that direction, sharing knowledge and transforming abstract ideas into reality." Dr. Srinivasan Madapusi, Senior Professor Director, BITS-Pilani Dubai Campus, said, "This MoU will strengthen collaboration between industry and academia. Both parties aim to bring together their respective capabilities, resources and expertise and collaborate on advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Our primary focus will be on developing applications that will aid in the resolution of real-world problems. We look forward to a mutually beneficial and synergistic partnership between the two institutions." BCT has played an active role in creating knowledge pools to tackle the growing demands for emerging technologies like AI, ML, and IoT. In the past, BCT partnered with Anna University, Chennai, and set up the AU-BCT Kalam Centre of Excellence in the university's campus to train students in emerging technologies. About Bahwan CyberTek Established in 1999, Bahwan CyberTek (BCT) is a global provider of IP-based digital transformation solutions leveraging its portfolio of innovative IP in the areas of Digital Experience, Predictive Analytics, and Digital Journey Management across North America, the Middle East, Far East, Africa, and Asia. Driving innovation through outcome-based business models, proven and powerful IP solutions, BCT is a trusted partner for over 1000+ customers, including Fortune 500 companies. With strong capabilities in digital technologies, BCT has over 3,000 associates with technical and domain expertise, delivering solutions to the Oil & Gas, Telecom, Power, Government, Banking, Retail, and SCM / Logistics verticals. Learn more about Bahwan CyberTek at www.bahwancybertek.com About BITS Pilani BITS Pilani, Dubai Campus, established in the year 2000, is the only offshore campus of Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani), India, the most reputed and top ranking private university in India. It also has campuses at Goa and Hyderabad, apart from the flagship campus at Pilani, Rajasthan. BITS Pilani is identified and recognized by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development (MHRD) of Govt. of India as an Institute of Eminence (IOE) in 2018. BITS Pilani is accredited by National Assessment & Accreditation Council (NAAC) in 2016 with 'A' Grade. The Institute offers Bachelors of Engineering (B.E.) Degree in Computer Science, Civil Engineering, Electrical & Electronics Engineering, Electronics and Communications Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Biotechnology. It also offers post-graduate degrees in Microelectronics, Electrical Engineering with specialization in Power Electronics & Drives, Design Engineering, Software Systems, and MBA, and Doctoral degree in all disciplines. The department of Biotechnology, established in 2007 at Dubai Campus, offers B.E. Biotechnology and doctoral degree program. Learn more about BITS Pilani, Dubai https://universe.bits-pilani.ac.in/dubai/ Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1775579/Bahwan_CyberTek_signs_MoU.jpg SOURCE Bahwan CyberTek WESTMINSTER, Colo., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Ball Corporation (NYSE: BLL) announced today it earned the Aluminum Stewardship Initiative (ASI) certification for its 25 Beverage Packaging North and Central America (BPNCA) sites which includes 23 manufacturing facilities, one office, and one technical support center. The company received certification for the Performance and Chain of Custody Standards, further strengthening Ball's commitment to responsible production and sourcing practices. "Achieving ASI certification for BPNCA is a testament to our unwavering commitment to be part of a responsible and transparent value chain," said Kathleen Pitre, president of Beverage Packaging North and Central America at Ball Corporation. "We know that responsibly sourced, environmentally friendly products are important to consumers and our customers. We're proud that our aluminum packaging solutions, with aluminum's infinite recyclability, can meet consumer needs and help our customers meet their sustainability commitments." This distinction supports the company's goal of sourcing 100 percent of its aluminum needs from certified sustainable sources by 2030. Ball continues to work with its aluminum suppliers to achieve ASI certification for their operations as well as their upstream supply partners to create a stronger and more resilient supply chain and helps strengthen the company's roadmap to achieving its net zero carbon emissions goal prior to 2050. "ASI congratulates Ball Corporation on this significant achievement: dual ASI Certification at 25 Ball Beverage Packaging North and Central America sites," said Fiona Solomon, Chief Executive Officer at ASI. "Ball's recent combined business and sustainability report also highlighted its progress on supply chain uptake of ASI. The company is demonstrating strong leadership in sustainability for beverage packaging and support for a global circular economy." ASI aims to drive sustainability across the entire aluminum value chain and certifies a company's commitment to social, environmental and ethical standards. The Performance standard is a measure of how much effort a company is making to assess, manage and disclose its environmental, social and governance impacts. The Chain of Custody standard sets out requirements for the creation of a chain of custody throughout the entire value chain covering all areas from mining and re-melting to casting, rolling, can manufacturing and filling. Infinitely recyclable and economically valuable, aluminum is the most sustainable beverage packaging material and can be easily recycled. In fact, 75 percent of the aluminum ever produced is still in use today and aluminum cans and bottles can be recycled and back on a store shelf within 60 days. Ball was the first can maker to achieve ASI certification in 2020 for its facilities in EMEA and recently received certification for all facilities in South America and India. About Ball Corporation Ball Corporation supplies innovative, sustainable aluminum packaging solutions for beverage, personal care and household products for customers, as well as aerospace and other technologies and services primarily for the U.S. government. Ball Corporation and its subsidiaries employ 24,300 people worldwide and reported 2021 net sales of $13.8 billion. For more information, visit www.ball.com, or connect with us on Facebook or Twitter. Forward-Looking Statements This release contains "forward-looking" statements concerning future events and financial performance. Words such as "expects," "anticipates," "estimates," "believes," and similar expressions typically identify forward-looking statements, which are generally any statements other than statements of historical fact. Such statements are based on current expectations or views of the future and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied. You should therefore not place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements and they should be read in conjunction with, and qualified in their entirety by, the cautionary statements referenced below. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Key factors, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes and results to be different are summarized in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including Exhibit 99 in our Form 10-K, which are available on our website and at www.sec.gov. Additional factors that might affect: a) our packaging segments include product capacity, supply, and demand constraints and fluctuations and changes in consumption patterns; availability/cost of raw materials, equipment, and logistics; competitive packaging, pricing and substitution; changes in climate and weather; footprint adjustments and other manufacturing changes, including the startup of new facilities and lines; failure to achieve synergies, productivity improvements or cost reductions; unfavorable mandatory deposit or packaging laws; customer and supplier consolidation; power and supply chain interruptions; changes in major customer or supplier contracts or loss of a major customer or supplier; inability to pass through increased costs; war, political instability and sanctions, including relating to the situation in Russia and Ukraine and its impact on our supply chain and our ability to operate in Russia and the EMEA region generally; changes in foreign exchange or tax rates; and tariffs, trade actions, or other governmental actions, including business restrictions and shelter-in-place orders in any country or jurisdiction affecting goods produced by us or in our supply chain, including imported raw materials; b) our aerospace segment include funding, authorization, availability and returns of government and commercial contracts; and delays, extensions and technical uncertainties affecting segment contracts; c) the Company as a whole include those listed above plus: the extent to which sustainability-related opportunities arise and can be capitalized upon; changes in senior management, succession, and the ability to attract and retain skilled labor; regulatory actions or issues including those related to tax, ESG reporting, competition, environmental, health and workplace safety, including U.S. FDA and other actions or public concerns affecting products filled in our containers, or chemicals or substances used in raw materials or in the manufacturing process; technological developments and innovations; the ability to manage cyber threats; litigation; strikes; disease; pandemic; labor cost changes; inflation; rates of return on assets of the Company's defined benefit retirement plans; pension changes; uncertainties surrounding geopolitical events and governmental policies, including policies, orders, and actions related to COVID-19; reduced cash flow; interest rates affecting our debt; and successful or unsuccessful joint ventures, acquisitions and divestitures, and their effects on our operating results and business generally. SOURCE Ball Corporation Wilde Wealth Management ranked No. 2 on Arizona's list of top advisors LOS ANGELES , March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cetera Financial Group, one of America's largest networks of financial professionals, announced today that Trevor Wilde has earned a 14th consecutive ranking on Barron's list of America's Top 1,200 advisors. A Cetera-affiliated practice, Wilde Wealth manages $2.2 billion and holds an industry-leading 99% client retention rate. As co-founder and managing principal of Wilde Wealth Management, Trevor Wilde, AIF, leads one of the most dynamic and diverse wealth management firms in the nation. Based in Scottsdale, Arizona, Wilde Wealth is a holistic, full service advisory experience that incorporates legacy planning, tax planning and investment management services. Wilde's team prides itself on its exemplary client service, its best-place-to-work culture and commitment to the local community through its Wilde for Arizona Community Outreach Program. Team members are active volunteers and supporters of the Caring Cetera foundation, Child Crisis Arizona, Junior Achievement of Arizona, and the Boy Scouts of America, among other causes. "Trevor Wilde personifies Cetera's values and client-first mindset, and it is rewarding to see Barron's recognize his dedication to his clients and to our profession," said Brett Harrison, CEO of Cetera Advisors. "Trevor's team is the best in the business and I am confident that his client-centric practice will continue to earn this and other prestigious accolades for years to come. Congratulations to Trevor and his team for this well-deserved honor." "This recognition underscores the fact that we work with the best people in all aspects of our business," said Wilde. "Our team members, clients and the local community are the reason an award like this is possible, and I look forward to serving them and continuing to make Wilde Wealth a top firm in Arizona and in America. Thank you to Barron's for another acknowledgement of the extraordinary individuals and tireless work that takes place at Wilde Wealth." The Barron's recognition follows a successful 2021 for Wilde Wealth. The firm recruited $534 million in assets last year, attracting financial professionals from firms across the industry. Wilde Wealth structures affiliation uniquely based on the needs of financial professionals. Unlike many competitors, Cetera recruits financial professionals to large entities such as Wilde Wealth to help them build their enterprise value over time. More than 6,000 advisors apply to become a Barron's top advisor annually. The report ranks the top advisors in each state, with the number of ranking spots determined by each state's population and wealth. The rankings are based on assets under management, revenue generated by advisors for their firms, and the quality of the advisors' practices. In evaluating advisors, Barron's examined regulatory records, internal company documents, and more than 100 data points provided by the advisors. About Cetera Financial Group Cetera Financial Group (Cetera) is a leading financial services firm whose purpose is to enable the delivery of best-in-class financial advice to as many Americans as possible. Cetera empowers its financial professional communities to help clients achieve their version of financial wellbeing through the Advice-Centric Experience. Cetera proudly serves independent financial professionals, tax professionals, banks and credit unions in providing wide-ranging financial planning and wealth management services. Cetera oversees approximately $353 billion in assets under administration and $122 billion in assets under management, as of December 31, 2021. Visit www.cetera.com, and follow Cetera on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. "Cetera Financial Group" refers to the network of independent retail firms encompassing, among others, Cetera Advisors LLC, Cetera Advisor Networks LLC, Cetera Investment Services LLC (marketed as Cetera Financial Institutions or Cetera Investors), Cetera Financial Specialists LLC, and First Allied Securities, Inc. All firms are members FINRA/SIPC. Located at: 655 W. Broadway, 11th Floor, San Diego, CA 92101 Individuals affiliated with Cetera firms are either Registered Representatives who offer only brokerage services and receive transaction-based compensation (commissions), Investment Adviser Representatives who offer only investment advisory services and receive fees based on assets, or both Registered Representatives and Investment Adviser Representatives, who can offer both types of services. About Wilde Wealth Management Group Wilde Wealth Management Group provides comprehensive retirement, investment, real estate, insurance, legal and tax planning services all under one roof. A fee-based firm with in-house Investment Advisor Representatives, Certified Financial Planners, Certified Public Accountants, attorneys, and mortgage and insurance specialists all working together toward clients' diverse goals, the firm has been recognized by Forbes as among "Best-In-State Wealth Advisors" and has been named to Barron's "List of Top 1,200 Advisors" annually for 14 years, most recently ranking in the top five firms in Arizona. Currently, Wilde Wealth Management Group has seven offices across Arizona located in Scottsdale, Glendale, Mesa, Sedona, Tempe, Tucson and Payson as well as a branch in Terre Haute, Ind. and affiliate partners across the Southwest. For more information, visit www.wildewealth.com. Over 4,000 advisors who wish to be ranked fill out a 102-question survey about their practice, data is then applied to a ranking formula. The ranking reflects the volume of assets overseen by the advisors and their teams, revenues generated for the firms, and the quality of the advisors' practices. The scoring system assigns a top score of 100 and rates the rest by comparing them with the top-ranked advisor. Listing in this publication and/or award is not a guarantee of future investment success. This recognition should not be construed as an endorsement of the advisor by any client. SOURCE Cetera Financial Group ATLANTA, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Southern Power, a leading U.S. wholesale energy provider and subsidiary of Southern Company, today announced that battery-based energy storage projects at its Tranquillity and Garland solar facilities in California are now fully operational. "These co-located solar and storage projects are a first of their kind for Southern Power," said Southern Power President Bill Grantham. "We expect these new battery-based energy storage projects to enhance California's grid reliability. The combination of our solar technology and these new energy storage resources will further position Southern Power to meet our customers' needs as the energy industry continues to evolve." The battery-based energy storage additions will enhance California's grid reliability by providing Southern California Edison and the California ISO with additional flexible resource capacity that will assist in further integrating intermittent renewable energy into the grid. At peak capacity, the Garland Solar Facility Battery Storage project will add 88 megawatts (MW) and 352 megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy storage, while 72 MW and 288 MWh of energy storage will be added to the Tranquillity Solar Facility. The resource adequacy capacity benefits of both battery facilities are being sold under a 20-year power purchase agreement to Southern California Edison. The energy storage projects are owned in partnership with KKR and AIP Management (on behalf of Danish pension funds PKA and PenSam), each of which have existing ownership interests in the Garland and Tranquillity solar facilities. Rosendin Electric served as the constructor of the sites, and Mitsubishi Power Americas served as the equipment supplier utilizing Powin Energy Corporation batteries. Mitsubishi Power Americas will also service the projects under a 20-year long-term service agreement. These energy storage projects align with Southern Power's growth strategy of developing and acquiring projects covered by long-term contracts with strong credit-worthy counterparties. About Southern Power Southern Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company, is a leading U.S. wholesale energy provider meeting the electricity needs of municipalities, electric cooperatives, investor-owned utilities and other energy customers. Southern Power and its subsidiaries, some of which are owned in part with various partners, own or operate 55 facilities operating or under development in 14 states with more than 12,500 MW of generating capacity in Alabama, California, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Maine, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and West Virginia. About Southern Company Southern Company (NYSE: SO) is a leading energy company serving 9 million customers through its subsidiaries. The company provides clean, safe, reliable and affordable energy through electric operating companies in three states, natural gas distribution companies in four states, a competitive generation company serving wholesale customers across America, a leading distributed energy infrastructure company, a fiber optics network and telecommunications services. Southern Company brands are known for excellent customer service, high reliability and affordable prices below the national average. For more than a century, we have been building the future of energy and developing the full portfolio of energy resources, including carbon-free nuclear, advanced carbon capture technologies, natural gas, renewables, energy efficiency and storage technology. Through an industry-leading commitment to innovation and a low-carbon future, Southern Company and its subsidiaries develop the customized energy solutions our customers and communities require to drive growth and prosperity. Our uncompromising values ensure we put the needs of those we serve at the center of everything we do and govern our business to the benefit of our world. Our corporate culture and hiring practices have been recognized nationally by the U.S. Department of Defense, G.I. Jobs magazine, DiversityInc, Black Enterprise, Forbes and the Women's Choice Award. To learn more, visit www.southerncompany.com. SOURCE Southern Power Operating Cash Flow increases by 41%; Balance Sheet Strengthened Further as Plus Solutions Take Off VANCOUVER, BC, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - BBTV Holdings Inc. (TSX: BBTV) (OTCQX: BBTVF) (the "Company"), a media tech company that uses technology enabled solutions to help content creators become more successful, today announced financial results for Q4 2021 and full-year audited financial results for the period ended on December 31, 2021. The Management Discussion and Analysis ("MD&A"), along with full financial statements are posted and available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. All dollar amounts are expressed in Canadian currency and are in thousands of Canadian dollars except where otherwise indicated. "Q4 2021 results continued the trend set in previous quarters whereby our focus on higher margin Plus Solutions continued to drive overall margin improvement and cash flow generation. Our cash flow performance was among the highest in our company's history this in the face of some softness in the broader market as people generally watched less content as COVID restrictions eased around the world," said Shahrzad Rafati, Chairperson and CEO of BBTV. "Q4 2021 cash flow from operations was up over 41% year-over-year adding over $7 million to our balance sheet. The cash balance now stands at approximately $31 million. As we drive towards becoming a dominant Web3 platform, and we begin monetizing short-form video, we are confident we can not only drive profitability but also provide industry-leading solutions for creators making us the number one choice for top performing creators in the marketplace." Subsequent to Quarter End January's Plus Solutions revenue growth rate exceeded 60%, as a result of which we believe that Q1 2022 is looking like a strong quarter for Plus Solutions. Earlier this month we announced key hires with the onboarding of Erich Lochner as SVP, Creator Partnerships to help further expand to platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. Content Management is an important product in Plus Solutions, and we welcomed former Lionsgate executive Thomas Hughes to provide leadership to accelerate growth of this line of business. In addition, we recently announced a partnership with ConsenSys, the leading Ethereum software company, to support BBTV's development of Web3 NFT solutions for content creators. Q4 2021 Financial Highlights: Three Months Ended Years Ended Q4 2021(1) Q4 2020(2) $ Change % Change 2021(1) 2020(2) $ Change % Change Base Solutions revenue $127,316 $102,491 $24,825 24% $438,287 $102,297 $335,990 328% Pro-Forma Adjustment (if necessary) - $38,031 - $324,723 Base Solutions revenue, after adjustment (if necessary) $127,316 $140,522 ($13,206) (9%) $438,287 $427,020 $11,267 3% Plus Solutions revenue $11,473 $7,388 $4,085 55% $38,335 $7,388 $30,947 419% Pro-Forma Adjustment (if necessary) - $2,970 - $24,366 Plus Solutions revenue, after adjustment (if necessary) $11,473 $10,358 $1,115 11% $38,335 $31,754 $6,581 21% Total revenue $138,789 $109,879 $28,910 26% $476,622 $109,685 $366,937 335% Pro-Forma Adjustment (if necessary) - $41,001 - $349,089 Total revenue, after adjustment (if necessary) $138,789 $150,880 ($12,091) (8%) $476,622 $458,774 $17,848 4% Gross profit $2,926 $2,145 $781 36% $10,547 $1,951 $8,596 441% Gross margin 2% 2% 2% 2% Pro-Forma Adjustment (if necessary) - $2,029 - $4,917 Gross profit, after adjustment (if necessary) $2,926 $4,174 ($1,248) (30%) $10,547 $6,868 $3,679 54% Gross margin, after adjustment (if necessary) 2% 3% 2% 1% Net loss ($9,025) ($6,371) ($2,654) 42% ($32,840) ($7,359) ($25,481) 346% Pro-Forma Adjustment (if necessary) - $1,856 - ($24,683) Net loss, after adjustment (if necessary) ($9,025) ($4,515) ($4,510) 100% ($32,840) ($32,042) ($798) 2% Cash flow from (used in) operating activities $7,631 ($8,394) $16,025 (191%) $3,254 ($8,716) $11,970 (137%) Pro-Forma Adjustment (if necessary) - $13,791 - $15,706 Cash flow from (used in) operating activities, after adjustment (if necessary) $7,631 $5,397 $2,234 41% $3,254 $6,990 ($3,736) (53%) (1) These figures are derived from the Company's Annual Financial Statements and the financial statements filed for the periods ending in year 2021, which are presented in accordance with IFRS. (2) The comparative prior period figures are first presented in accordance with IFRS and are subsequently adjusted to present on Pro-Forma Basis to include BBTV Corp. consolidated results as if the Business Combination Transaction had occurred on January 1, 2019. The comparative prior period figures with Pro-Forma Adjustments are non-GAAP financial measures. Further details on these measures are included in the "Key Metrics" section of this press release. Three Months Ended Q4 2021(1) Q3 2021(1) $ Change % Change Base Solutions revenue $127,316 $104,079 $23,237 22% Plus Solutions revenue $11,473 $9,201 $2,272 25% Total revenue $138,789 $113,280 $25,509 23% Gross profit $2,926 $1,793 $1,133 63% Gross margin 2% 2% Net loss ($9,025) ($10,490) $1,465 (14%) Cash flow from (used in) operating activities $7,631 $10,279 ($2,648) (26%) (1) These figures are derived from the Company's financial statements filed for the periods ending in year 2021, which are presented in accordance with IFRS. Q4 2021 Operating KPIs: Three Months Ended Q4 2021 Q4 2020 Change % Change Views (billions)(1) 107 114 (7) (6%) RPMs(1) $1.19 $1.25 ($0.06) (5%) Three Months Ended Q4 2021 Q3 2021 Change % Change Views (billions)(1) 107 107 0 0% RPMs(1) $1.19 $0.99 $0.20 20% (1) The figures for the quarterly periods ended in year 2021 are based on the Company's operational and financial results while the figures for the quarterly periods ended in year 2020 are presented on Pro-Forma Basis to include BBTV Corp. consolidated results as if the Business Combination Transaction had occurred on January 1, 2019. Views are non-financial performance measures while RPMs are supplementary financial measures. Further details on these measures are included in the "Key Metrics" section of this press release. Adjusted Gross Profit, which is a non-GAAP financial measure and defined as Gross Profit excluding amortization associated with the purchase price allocation ("PPA") related to the initial public offering, for Q4 2021 was $10.4 million , a 9% decrease in comparison to $11.4 million reported for the same quarter last year. This was due to the decrease in revenue across Base Solutions. , a 9% decrease in comparison to reported for the same quarter last year. This was due to the decrease in revenue across Base Solutions. BBTV Share of revenue, which is a non-GAAP financial measure and defined as revenue less content creator and third-party platform fees, for Q4 2021 was $10.8 million , a 11% decrease compared to $12.1 million reported for Q4 2020. , a 11% decrease compared to reported for Q4 2020. Adjusted Gross Margin, which is a non-GAAP ratio and defined as Adjusted Gross Profit divided by BBTV Share, was 95.9% for Q4 2021, compared to 94.4% reported for Q4 2020. Adjusted Gross Margin should remain stable and above 90% for the foreseeable future. Gross Margin excluding PPA amortization, which is a non-GAAP ratio and defined as Adjusted Gross Profit divided by revenue, was 7.5% in Q4 2021 in comparison to 7.6% in Q4 2020. Plus Solutions should help contribute to margin expansion further in future quarters. In Q4 2021, about 20% of our views came from YouTube Shorts, which presents a significant upside for when that format becomes monetized, and we believe that this will begin soon. RPMs for monetizable content grew by 17% compared to Q4 last year. The continued growth of our Base Solutions business alongside the changing consumption landscape presents strong opportunities for RPM growth as monetization continues to mature across all key platforms. While micro content like YouTube Shorts isn't monetized today, once it becomes monetized across our entire library, it could represent incremental revenue of over $90 million annually across our Base Solutions at current market rates. We think investors should see this as a good sign for positive future performance for upcoming quarters. Outlook: Overall for the quarter, we achieved solid Revenue and Adjusted EBITDA performance, both of which were within the range of analyst consensus, and our ending cash balance significantly beat consensus. The Company recently announced a partnership with Consensys, a leading global Ethereum software company to support BBTV's development of Web3 NFT solutions for content creators. This deal marks a key foray into Web3, as BBTV will provide creative, marketing, and content management solutions for creators to enable them to expand, engage and monetize their fan communities outside of major social and video platforms leveraging blockchain technology. Call Details: Tuesday March 29, 2022, 2:15pm Pacific Time / 5:15pm Eastern Time. Participant Information: Access Code: 579627 United States: 1 844 200 6205 United States (Local): 1 646 904 5544 Canada dial-in number (Toll Free): 1 833 950 0062 Canada dial-in number (Local): 1 226 828 7575 All other locations: +1 929 526 1599 Please connect at least 15 minutes prior to the conference call. To coincide with the call, an Investor Highlights presentation will be available at: https://investors.bbtv.com/events-and-presentations/default.aspx Links to SEDAR filings, conference call recordings and press releases are available on the investor website at: https://investors.bbtv.com/ Telephonic Replay: Access Code: 329687 US (Local): 1 929 458 6194 US Toll Free: 1 866 813 9403 Canada: 1 226 828 7578 UK (Local): 0204 525 0658 All other locations: +44 204 525 0658 March 29, 2022 April 12, 2022 Pro Forma Basis The pro forma information and adjustments ("Pro-Forma Adjustment") contained herein combine the Company's financial results for the periods with results from BroadbandTV Corp. which was acquired by the Company on October 28, 2020 (the "Business Combination Transaction") as if the Business Combination Transaction had occurred on January 1, 2019 as well as adjustments for the effects of acquisition accounting, but does not include adjustments for costs related to integration activities, cost savings or synergies that might be achieved by the combined businesses. Management believes that reviewing the Company's operating results by combining actual BBTV Holdings and pro-forma business combination results is useful for comparative purposes as well as in reaching conclusions regarding the overall operating performance of the Company, as the Business Combination Transaction contributed less than three months of results to the results of operations for the prior year ended December 31, 2020. The sources of these pro-forma results are the Q4 2021 Financial Statements combined with the internal, unaudited financial information of the acquired business for the same periods. These pro-forma results are not specified, defined or determined under IFRS accounting rules. Pro-forma results presented are not necessarily indicative of what the Company's results would have been had BBTV Holdings completed the Business Combination Transaction on January 1, 2019, nor will the historical pro-forma results necessarily be indicative of future results. All pro-forma information or financial results with Pro-Forma Adjustment are non-GAAP financial measures. See also "Key Metrics" below for further information regarding the Company's non-GAAP and other financial measures. Pro Forma Income Statement Three Months Ended December 31, Years Ended December 31, 2021(1) 2020(1) Pro-Forma Adjustment Pro-Forma 2020(2) %(3) change 2021(1) 2020(1) Pro-Forma Adjustment Pro-Forma 2020(2) %(3) change Revenue $138,789 $109,879 $41,001 $150,880 (8%) $476,622 $109,685 $349,089 $458,774 4% Cost of revenue Content creator and other fees $128,108 $101,153 $38,020 $139,173 (8%) $437,261 $101,153 $320,538 $421,691 4% Amortization $7,755 $6,581 $952 $7,533 3% $28,814 $6,581 $23,634 $30,215 (5%) $135,863 $107,734 $38,972 $146,706 (7%) $466,075 $107,734 $344,172 $451,906 3% Gross profit $2,926 $2,145 $2,029 $4,174 (30%) $10,547 $1,951 $4,917 $6,868 54% Expenses Sales and marketing $6,449 $3,495 $1,542 $5,037 28% $27,487 $3,495 $19,217 $22,712 21% General and administration $4,101 $3,295 $864 $4,159 (1%) $16,498 $3,545 $9,191 $12,736 30% Research and development $1,046 $771 $303 $1,074 (3%) $4,614 $771 $4,009 $4,780 (3%) Amortization and depreciation $1,156 $830 $383 $1,213 (5%) $6,043 $830 $4,237 $5,067 19% Share-based compensation $256 $113 ($438) ($325) (179%) $1,183 $113 ($202) ($89) (1,429%) $13,008 $8,504 $2,654 $11,158 17% $55,825 $8,754 $36,452 $45,206 23% Operating loss ($10,082) ($6,359) ($625) ($6,984) 44% ($45,278) ($6,803) ($31,535) ($38,338) 18% Foreign exchange gain (loss) $222 $536 $1,021 $1,557 (86%) ($443) $526 ($150) $376 (218%) Interest expense ($2,230) ($756) ($290) ($1,046) 113% ($6,849) ($775) ($3,217) ($3,992) 72% Other income (expense) ($264) ($591) $481 ($110) 140% $2,800 ($607) $209 ($398) (804%) Transaction-related costs $- ($651) $- ($651) (100%) $- ($1,150) ($68) ($1,218) (100%) ($2,272) ($1,462) $1,212 ($250) 809% ($4,492) ($2,006) ($3,226) ($5,232) (14%) Loss before income taxes ($12,354) ($7,821) $587 ($7,234) 71% ($49,770) ($8,809) ($34,761) ($43,570) 14% Recovery of income taxes $3,329 $1,450 $1,269 $2,719 22% $16,930 $1,450 $10,078 $11,528 47% Loss ($9,025) ($6,371) $1,856 ($4,515) 100% ($32,840) ($7,359) ($24,683) ($32,042) 2% (1) These figures are presented in accordance with IFRS and are based on the Company's Annual Financial Statements and the financial statements filed for the periods ending in year 2021. (2) These figures are presented on Pro-Forma Basis to include BBTV Corp. consolidated results as if the Business Combination Transaction had occurred on January 1, 2019. The comparative prior period figures with Pro-Forma Adjustments are non-GAAP financial measures. Further details on these measures are included in the "Key Metrics" section of this press release. (3) The % changes are calculated based on the current period amounts minus the comparative Pro-Forma prior period amounts and then divided by the comparative Pro-Forma prior period amounts. Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin Three Months Ended Dec 31, Years Ended Dec 31, 2021(1) 2020(1) Pro-Forma Adjustment Pro-Forma 2020(2) 2021(1) 2020(1) Pro-Forma Adjustment Pro-Forma 2020(2) Net loss ($9,025) ($6,371) $1,856 ($4,515) ($32,840) ($7,359) ($24,683) ($32,042) Amortization and depreciation(3) $8,911 $7,411 $1,335 $8,746 $34,857 $7,411 $27,871 $35,282 Share-based compensation $256 $113 ($438) ($325) $1,183 $113 ($202) ($89) Unrealized and realized foreign exchange ($222) ($536) ($1,021) ($1,557) $443 ($526) $150 ($376) Interest expense $2,230 $756 $290 $1,046 $6,849 $775 $3,217 $3,992 Other expense (income) $264 $591 ($481) $110 ($2,800) $607 ($209) $398 Receivable factoring banking fees $145 $95 $40 $135 $602 $95 $456 $551 Transaction-related costs $- $651 $- $651 $- $1,150 $68 $1,218 Recovery of income taxes ($3,329) ($1,450) ($1,269) ($2,719) ($16,930) ($1,450) ($10,078) ($11,528) Adjusted EBITDA ($770) $1,260 $312 $1,572 ($8,636) $816 ($3,410) ($2,594) Total revenues $138,789 $109,879 $41,001 $150,880 $476,622 $109,685 $349,089 $458,774 Adjusted EBITDA Margin (0.6%) 1.1% 1.0% (1.8%) 0.7% (0.6%) (1) These figures are derived from the Company's Annual Financial Statements and the financial statements filed for the periods ending in year 2021, which are presented in accordance with IFRS. (2) These figures are derived from the Company's Pro-Forma financial statements, which include BBTV Corp. consolidated results as if the Business Combination Transaction had occurred on January 1, 2019. (3) Includes depreciation and amortization reported in cost of revenue and operating expenses for all periods. (4) Adjusted EBITDA is a non-GAAP financial measure while Adjusted EBITDA Margin is a non-GAAP ratio. Further details on these measures are included in the "Key Metrics" section of this press release. BBTV Share, Adjusted Gross Profit, and Adjusted Gross Margin Three Months Ended Dec 31, Years Ended Dec 31, 2021(1) 2020(1) Pro-Forma Adjustment Pro-Forma 2020(2) 2021(1) 2020(1) Pro-Forma Adjustment Pro-Forma 2020(2) Revenue $138,789 $109,879 $41,001 $150,880 $476,622 $109,685 $349,089 $458,774 Less: content creator and third-party platform fees ($127,988) ($100,920) ($37,868) ($138,788) ($436,760) ($100,920) ($319,166) ($420,086) BBTV Share(3) $10,801 $8,959 $3,133 $12,092 $39,862 $8,765 $29,923 $38,688 Gross Profit $2,926 $2,145 $2,029 $4,174 $10,547 $1,951 $4,917 $6,868 Add: amortization associated with intangible assets acquired as part of the Business Combination Transaction $7,428 $6,366 $869 $7,235 $27,563 $6,366 $22,657 $29,023 Adjusted Gross Profit(3) $10,354 $8,511 $2,898 $11,409 $38,110 $8,317 $27,574 $35,891 Adjusted Gross Margin(3) 95.9% 95.0% 94.4% 95.6% 94.9% 92.8% (1) These figures are derived from the Company's Annual Financial Statements and the financial statements filed for the periods ending in year 2021, which are presented in accordance with IFRS. (2) These figures are derived from the Company's Pro-Forma financial statements, which include BBTV Corp. consolidated results as if the Business Combination Transaction had occurred on January 1, 2019. (3) BBTV Share and Adjusted Gross Profit are non-GAAP financial measures while Adjusted Gross Margin is a non-GAAP ratio. Further details on these measures are included in the "Key Metrics" section of this press release. Free Cash Flow Three Months Ended Dec 31, Years Ended Dec 31, 2021(1) 2020(1) Pro-Forma Adjustment Pro-Forma 2020(2) 2021(1) 2020(1) Pro-Forma Adjustment Pro-Forma 2020(2) Cash flow from (used in) operating activities $7,631 ($8,394) $13,791 $5,397 $3,254 ($8,716) $15,706 $6,990 Purchase of property and equipment ($55) ($5) ($6) ($11) ($197) ($5) ($118) ($123) Purchase or development of intangible assets ($585) ($354) $1 ($353) ($1,804) ($354) ($1,625) ($1,979) Free Cash Flow(3) $6,991 ($8,753) $13,786 $5,033 $1,253 ($9,075) $13,963 $4,888 (1) These figures are derived from the Company's Annual Financial Statements and the financial statements filed for the periods ending in year 2021, which are presented in accordance with IFRS. (2) These figures are derived from the Company's Pro-Forma financial statements, which include BBTV Corp. consolidated results as if the Business Combination Transaction had occurred on January 1, 2019. (3) Free Cash Flow is a non-GAAP financial measure. Further details on this measure is included in the "Key Metrics" section of this press release. About BBTV BBTV is a global media and technology company headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. The Company's mission is to help content creators become more successful. With creators ranging from individuals to global media brands, BBTV provides comprehensive, end-to-end Solutions to increase viewership and drive revenue powered by its innovative technology, while allowing creators to focus on their core competency content creation. In December 2021, BBTV had the fourth most unique monthly viewers among digital platforms with more than 600 million globally, who consumed more than 35 billion minutes of video content [1]. ( www.bbtv.com ) [1] Calculations and classifications made by BBTV based on data from Comscore's "Top 12 Countries = December 2021 comScore Video Metrix Media Trend Multi-Platform Top 100 Video Properties Report"; Top 12 countries represent ~50% of world's digital population. Forward Looking Statements This press release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities laws (collectively, "forward-looking information"). Forward-looking information is not information about historical facts but instead represents the Company's intentions, beliefs, plans, goals, objectives and strategies regarding future events and results, and includes certain financial outlooks. Financial outlooks, in particular, are provided to aid in understanding management's goals and expectations regarding future financial matters, and, for all the reasons set out below, may not be achieved. Such financial outlooks may not be appropriate for other purposes. Forward-looking information contained in this press release includes statements that we are confident we can not only drive profitability but also provide industry-leading solutions for creators making the Company the number one choice for top performing creators in the marketplace; Q1 2022 is looking like a strong quarter for Plus Solutions; we engaged Thomas Hughes to provide leadership to accelerate growth of our Content Management line of business; the Company's Plus Solutions should help contribute to margin expansion further in future quarters; YouTube Shorts presents a significant upside for when that format becomes monetized, and we believe that this will begin soon; the continued growth of our Base Solutions business alongside the changing consumption landscape presents strong opportunities for RPM growth as monetization continues to mature across all key platforms; while micro content like YouTube Shorts isn't monetized today, once it becomes monetized across our entire library, and assuming the same views and the same RPMs on an annualized basis as we had for our Base Solutions in Q4 of 2021, it could represent incremental revenue of over $90 million annually across our Base Solutions at current market rates; we think investors should see this as a good sign for positive future performance for upcoming quarters; and our deal with Consensys marks a key foray into Web3, as BBTV will provide creative, marketing, and content management solutions for creators to enable them to expand, engage and monetize their fan communities outside of major social and video platforms leveraging blockchain technology. Forward-looking information is necessarily based on a number of estimates and assumptions that the Company considered appropriate and reasonable as of the date such information is given, including but not limited to the Company's assumptions that the Company will become a dominant Web3 platform, and will begin monetizing short-form video across the Company's entire library with at least the same views and the same RPMs on an annualized basis as the Company had for its Base Solutions in Q4 2021; that its current growth plans will not change in any material respect; that its internal financial forecasts and models, including its estimates of costs and revenue are accurate are accurate; that its assumptions regarding continued growth, changes and trends in the Company's industry and the global economy will be met; that the Company's NFT division and its foray into Web 3 will be successful; that the Company's Plus Solutions revenue will continue to grow and to show greater margins than its Base Solutions; that the Company's churn will continue to remain low; that the Company will continue to contract with new content creators and to continue to receive increasing Views; that the Company will enter into an increasing number of Direct Advertising Sales Deals, Content Management agreements and initiatives; that RPMs will continue to increase; the timely receipt of required regulatory approvals and strategic partner support; the absence of new laws, regulations, rules or policies of governments, platforms and other strategic partners, that may negatively impact the business of BBTV; our ability to build our market share, enter new markets and maintain and expand geographic scope; our ability to attract and retain key personnel and to execute on our growth plans; our ability to obtain and maintain financing on acceptable terms; as well as the Company's assumptions regarding foreign exchange rates. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control, that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to the risk that the Company's assumptions on which its forward-looking information is based may not be accurate; the effect of competition; that the Company has a history of losses and negative cash flow; that the Company's agreements with platforms, creators or others may terminate early or not be renewed either on similar terms or at all; that the Company's or its creators' NFTs may not realize significant revenue or at all; that the Company's Plus Solutions may not continue to be attractive to creators and may not realize our expectations; the Company's foray into Web 3 may fail; the regulatory environment and in particular, the fact that NFTs are a relatively recent concept and new regulations may be enacted with which the Company may not be able to comply, and government regulation of the Internet as well as privacy regulation which are both evolving and unfavourable developments could have an adverse impact on the Company's operating results; litigation risk; intellectual property risks; the Company's need for timely performance by its creators and strategic partners; the Company's significant reliance on its relationship with one digital platform; and the impact of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic; as well as the factors discussed under "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Information Form dated March 29, 2022 and its prospectus dated October 22, 2020, both filed on Sedar at www.sedar.com , and in the Company's other filings with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities at www.sedar.com . The Company does not undertake any obligation to update any forwardlooking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law. Links to SEDAR filings, conference call recordings and press releases are available on the investor website at: https://investors.bbtv.com/ Key Metrics The information presented within this press release includes certain financial measures such as non-GAAP financial measures, non-GAAP ratios, and supplementary financial measures, as well as a non-financial performance measure (collectively, "Key Metrics") to assist investors in assessing the overall operating performance of the Company. These measures are provided as additional information to complement IFRS measures by providing further understanding of our results of operations from management's perspective. Accordingly, these measures should not be considered in isolation nor as a substitute for analysis of our financial information reported under IFRS. They are not standardized measures under IFRS and do not have standardized meanings prescribed by IFRS, and might not be comparable to similar financial measures disclosed by other issuers. These Key Metrics are used to provide investors with supplemental information on our operating performance and thus highlight trends in our core business that may not otherwise be apparent when relying solely on IFRS measures. We also believe that securities analysts, investors and other interested parties frequently use Key Metrics in the evaluation of issuers. Our management also uses Key Metrics in order to facilitate operating performance comparisons from period to period, to prepare annual operating budgets and forecasts and to determine components of management compensation. The numbers for the Company's Key Metrics and related information are calculated using external industry data sources and/or internal company data. These measures may be different from non-GAAP financial measures or ratios or other metrics used by other companies and may not be comparable to similar meanings prescribed by other companies, limiting their usefulness for comparison purposes. Moreover, some of these adjustments or measures are provided for period-over-period comparison purposes, and investors should be cautioned that the effect of the adjustments provided herein is not indicative of the actual effect on the Company's operating results. Non-GAAP Ratios contained in this press release are: "Adjusted Gross Margin" means Adjusted Gross Profit divided by BBTV Share; and "Adjusted EBITDA Margin" means Adjusted EBITDA divided by revenue. "Gross Margin Excluding PPA Amortization" means Adjusted Gross Profit divided by revenue. Non-GAAP Financial Measures contained in this press release include all financial figures with a Pro-Forma Adjustment (see Pro Forma Basis) as well as the following: "Adjusted EBITDA" means net earnings or loss, as applicable, before finance expenses, income tax expense (recovery), amortization and depreciation, share-based compensation, unrealized and realized gains or losses due to foreign exchange, transaction-related costs, and certain other items as set out in the reconciliation table; "BBTV Share" means revenue less content creator and third-party platform fees; "Adjusted Gross Profit" means gross profit plus amortization associated with intangible assets acquired as part of the Business Combination Transaction; "Free Cash Flow" means cash flows from (used in) operating activities less purchases of property and equipment and purchase or development of intangible assets; See the financial tables above for a reconciliation of the non-GAAP ratios and non-GAAP financial measures. Supplementary Financial Measures Supplementary Financial Measures contained in this press release are: "Advertising Revenue" means the revenue generated from advertising sales from the Company's owned and licensed video on demand content across digital platforms, rights management revenue from advertising sales on video on demand content, and in-app advertising on Mobile Gaming Apps. "RPMs" or "Revenue per one thousand video Views" means the Advertising Revenues for every thousand Views generated by the Company's owned and licensed digital content. The Company does not provide a reconciliation for RPMs as there are no directly comparable IFRS measures for the components that make up RPMs. "Gross Margin" means gross profit divided by revenue. We monitor Advertising Revenue and RPMs to help us evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, formulate business plans and make strategic decisions. These measures are also used to provide investors with supplemental measures of our operating performance and thus highlight trends in our core business that may not otherwise be apparent when relying solely on IFRS measures. Unless the context otherwise requires, the Company believes that readers should consider the applicable metrics to be indicative of engagement and monetization trends that are key factors that affect the Company's revenue. The Company may or may not update these metrics based on the Company's determination of applicability, circumstance, relevance or other considerations. Non-Financial Performance Measures Views are one of BBTV's non-financial performance measures and are defined as the number of views, in billions, of the Company's owned and licensed digital video content on various platforms, notably YouTube, for the stated period. The presentation of Views is reliant on certain third-party industry data and therefore is not comprehensive and may exclude views of the Company's content on certain platforms or in geographies whereby such data sources are unable to or do not track such information. Trends in Views affect revenue and financial results by influencing the Company's volume of salable media inventory, RPMs, as well as its product offerings, expenses and capital expenditures. While Views are reported using reasonable judgments and estimates of the audience and its engagement with its content for the applicable period of measurement, there are certain challenges and limitations in measuring the usage of its content across its audience. Such challenges and limitations may also affect the Company's understanding of certain details of its business. For example, the methodologies used to measure the Company's Views and RPMs (see "Supplementary Financial Measures" above) may be susceptible to algorithm, calculation or other technical or human errors, and following an acquisition or strategic transaction, certain data may be, among other things, integrated, analyzed and reported differently by the Company than it was by the target or the strategic partner. Moreover, the Company's or its data provider's business intelligence tools may experience glitches or fail on a particular data backup or upload, which could lead to certain customer activity not being properly included in the calculation of Views and RPMs. Although the Company typically attempts to address and correct any such failures and inaccuracies relatively quickly, its reported Views and RPMs are still susceptible to the same and its estimations of such metrics may be lower or higher than the actual numbers. SOURCE BBTV Holdings Inc. opinion It's not very often that a sitting central bank governor is lauded by throngs of singing and dancing supporters, but backers of CBN governor Godwin Emefiele may have just made history at this weekend's APC national convention. The political theatre, whether organic or facilitated, is a quirky tribute to a technocrat whose celebrity status usually doesn't stretch past the Davos city limits. In a crowded field of candidates for the APC's presidential nominee, however, it's unsurprisingly necessary to pull out all the stops to get ahead of the pack. Emefiele, for his part, has so far kept silent on whether he will formally run. While others are quick to throw their hats in the ring, the CBN governor appears to be taking the route of a diligent-but-humble public servant who may be pressured into running. Although that path above the fray is well-trodden, Emefiele's powerful, current position has ruffled plenty of feathers. In February, Premium Times ran an editorial calling on Emefiele to either resign and run, or remain in his post and repudiate any electoral ambitions. Similarly, just days ago the main opposition party, the PDP, offered a 21-tweet salute accusing Emefiele of having "desecrated the sanctity of his office as CBN Governor." If the governor were to formally enter the arena of partisan politics, there would be intense pressure upon him to resign his tenure as the country's top banker. Aside from his powerful post, why does Emefiele draw so much lightning? The APC is expected to select a candidate from the South for the 2023 ticket (some say the south west, specifically, but that remains to be confirmed). Born in Delta state, Emefiele is described as having "a candidature with South South and Igbo background." His professional experience is also strong. He came to the apex bank with 20 years' of experience in the private sector, most notably as managing director of the household name Zenith Bank. Additionally, appointed under PDP president Goodluck Jonathan in 2014, Emefiele has worked with (and survived in his post under) governments led by both major parties. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Nigeria Governance By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. This mix of fortuitous zoning happenstance, noteworthy private sector experience, and political longevity at the height of national politics makes Emefiele a serious contender. But no one plays in the big league for that long without controversy. Over the years, Emefiele has faced accusations of impropriety, lawlessness, and mismanagement. And that's all before he was considered a potential presidential candidate. The glaring lacuna in Emefiele's resume is electoral success. Rotimi Amaechi and Nasir El-Rufai--potential rival candidates within the APC--have both proven that they can win elections at the state-level. Is it necessary? Well, both Umaru Yar'Adua (Katsina) and Goodluck Jonathan (Bayelsa) won gubernatorial elections before winning the presidency. But both Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari served in unelected national-level positions, before eventually prevailing in nation-wide polls. If the APC ticket will indeed be led by a candidate from the south, could Emefiele be the next Obasanjo? -Oliver McPherson-Smith, an Harvard Economist, writes from the USA BBTV Holdings Inc. Uniquely Positioned to Drive Web3 Creator Economy by Connecting Creators, Fans and Collectors VANCOUVER, B.C, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - BBTV Holdings Inc. (TSX: BBTV) (OTCQX: BBTVF) (Frankfurt: 64V) ("BBTV" or the "Company"), the leading creator monetization company, has entered into a partnership with ConsenSys, a leading Ethereum software company, to support BBTV's development of Web3 NFT solutions for content creators. "As home to almost 5,000 content creators, BBTV has been a driving force in Web2's $104 billion creator economy," commented Shahrzad Rafati, Chairperson and CEO, BBTV. "Since the beginning, we've been providing end-to-end solutions for creators to succeed, and with our scale and expertise we're uniquely positioned to empower the growth of Web3's creator economy." BBTV will be providing creative, marketing, and content management solutions to creators to enable them to expand, engage and monetize their fan communities outside of major social and video platforms by leveraging blockchain technology. ConsenSys NFT, led by Co-Heads Johnna Powell and Tyler Mulvihill , will provide co-development support for the backend of BBTV's NFT solutions. , will provide co-development support for the backend of BBTV's NFT solutions. BBTV reaches 600 million unique monthly viewers [1] generating more than 35 billion monthly views [2] , and the Company is uniquely positioned to leverage its scale, expertise and engagement in the creator economy to drive adoption of Web3 solutions by creators, fans and collectors. generating more than 35 billion monthly views , and the Company is uniquely positioned to leverage its scale, expertise and engagement in the creator economy to drive adoption of Web3 solutions by creators, fans and collectors. Through the Company's Web3 strategy, BBTV will help creators build their NFTs, track ownership of their content and impact across fans and collectors. Additionally, the Company will authentically connect creators to their fan-base and help creators retain ownership of that experience. This enables creators to monetize their intellectual property more effectively by activating their fans. Added Rafati, "Fans want to own a piece of their favorite creators' content and to feel part of a community beyond video platforms. This partnership will play a key role in BBTV's wider Web3 strategy alongside our community and metaverse initiatives, and ConsenSys provides additional strengths for us as we build something truly differentiated in the space." "The creator economy is a powerful ecosystem to drive mass adoption of blockchain and everything it has to offer for creators and their fans," commented Tyler Mulvihill, Global Co-Head of NFTs, ConsenSys. "As they are a standout leader in the space, we are proud to be working with BBTV to open this new frontier for Web3 and the creator economy." Web3 transactions such as NFTs are an addition to BBTV's Plus Solutions for content creators. Plus Solutions are an important pillar of BBTV's business, driving higher margin revenue as well as increased value for content creators and brands. This announcement closely follows BBTV's launch of its Pay To Crypto solution for creators in January, a component of the Company's Web3 solutions which enables creators to receive their earnings in a range of popular cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum and USD Stablecoin. For more information visit www.bbtv.com . About BBTV BBTV is a global media and technology company headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. The Company's mission is to help content creators become more successful. With creators ranging from individuals to global media brands, BBTV provides comprehensive, end-to-end Solutions to increase viewership and drive revenue powered by its innovative technology, while allowing creators to focus on their core competency content creation. In December 2021, BBTV had the fourth most unique monthly viewers among digital platforms with more than 600 million globally, who consumed more than 35 billion minutes of video content [1]. ( www.bbtv.com ) [1] Calculations and classifications made by BBTV based on data from Comscore's "Top 12 Countries = December 2021 comScore Video Metrix Media Trend Multi-Platform Top 100 Video Properties Report"; Top 12 countries represent ~50% of world's digital population. About ConsenSys ConsenSys is a leading Ethereum and decentralized protocols software company. We enable developers, enterprises, and people worldwide to build next-generation applications, launch modern financial infrastructure, and access the decentralized web. Our product suite, composed of Infura, Quorum, Codefi, MetaMask, Truffle, Diligence and ConsenSys NFT, serves millions of users, supports billions of blockchain-based queries for our clients, and has handled billions of dollars in digital assets. Ethereum is the largest programmable blockchain in the world, leading in business adoption, developer community, and DeFi activity. On this trusted, open source foundation, we are building the digital economy of tomorrow. To explore our products and solutions, visit http://consensys.net/. Forward Looking Statements This press release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities laws (collectively, "forward-looking information"). Forward-looking information is not information about historical facts but instead represents the Company's intentions, beliefs, plans, goals, objectives and strategies regarding future events and results. Forward-looking information contained in this press release includes statements that with the Company's scale and expertise the Company is uniquely positioned to empower the growth of Web3's creator economy; the Company is uniquely positioned to leverage its scale, expertise and engagement in the creator economy to drive adoption of Web3 solutions by creators, fans and collectors; and the Company's partnership with ConsenSys will play a key role in BBTV's wider Web3 strategy. Forward-looking information is necessarily based on a number of estimates and assumptions that the Company considered appropriate and reasonable as of the date such information is given, including but not limited to the Company's assumptions that the Company will empower the growth of Web3's creator economy; the Company will drive adoption of Web3 solutions by creators, fans and collectors; the Company will be successful, on a timely basis, in its development of Web3 NFT solutions for content creators and its partnership with ConsenSys will be successful; content creators will embrace and use BBTV's Web3 solutions at scale; the Company's current growth plans will not change in any material respect; its internal financial forecasts and models are accurate; its assumptions regarding continued growth, changes and trends in the Company's industry and the global economy will be met; that the Company's churn will continue to remain low; that the Company will continue to contract with new content creators and to continue to receive increasing Views; the timely receipt of required regulatory approvals and strategic partner support; the absence of new laws, regulations, rules or policies of governments, platforms and other strategic partners, that may negatively impact the business of BBTV; our ability to build our market share, enter new markets and maintain and expand geographic scope; our ability to attract and retain key personnel and to execute on our growth plans; our ability to obtain and maintain financing on acceptable terms; as well as the Company's assumptions regarding foreign exchange rates. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control, that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to the risk that the Company's assumptions on which its forward-looking information is based may not be accurate; the effect of competition; that the Company has a history of losses and negative cash flow; that the Company's agreements with platforms, creators or others may terminate early or not be renewed either on similar terms or at all; that the Company's or its creators' NFTs may not realize significant revenue or at all; that the Company's solutions may not continue to be attractive to creators and may not realize our expectations; the Company's foray into Web 3 may fail; the regulatory environment and in particular, the fact that NFTs are a relatively recent concept and new regulations may be enacted with which the Company may not be able to comply, and government regulation of the Internet as well as privacy regulation which are both evolving and unfavourable developments could have an adverse impact on the Company's operating results; litigation risk; intellectual property risks; the Company's need for timely performance by its creators and strategic partners; the Company's significant reliance on its relationship with one digital platform; and the impact of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic; as well as the factors discussed under "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Information Form dated March 29, 2022 and its prospectus dated October 22, 2020, both filed on Sedar at www.sedar.com, and in the Company's other filings with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities at www.sedar.com. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update any forwardlooking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law. For further information please contact: Media Relations: [email protected] Investor Relations: [email protected] BBTV-C SOURCE BBTV Holdings Inc. - The global bio-based epoxy resin market is likely to be driven by rise in demand and usage of bio-based epoxy resin in construction of residential buildings - Compared to petroleum-based resins, bio-based epoxy resins provide better performance, as well as no unpleasant odor, high strength, low VOC, and UV resistance ALBANY, N.Y., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The global bio-based epoxy resin market was worth more than US$ 4.8 Bn in 2020. The market is likely to rise at a CAGR of 5.5% during the forecast period, from 2021 to 2031. The global bio-based epoxy resin market is expected to reach the value of US$ 8.6 Bn by the end of 2031. The use of bio-based epoxy resins in the construction industry is increasing, which is likely to fuel growth of the for the global bio-based epoxy resin market. Plant-based sources are used to make bio-based epoxy resins. Bio-based epoxy resins provide a number of advantages to products made with low-energy procedures that generate less hazardous chemicals, hence lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Bio-based epoxy resins have a number of major advantages over petroleum-based epoxy resins, including high strength, superior performance, no unpleasant odor, UV resistance, and low VOC and odor to name a few. The global construction industry is predicted to rise significantly during the forecast period. As a result, the demand for bio-based epoxy resins is expected to rise over the forecast period due to increase in its usage of paints and coatings. Companies are centering their efforts on adhesives, paints & coatings, and laminates industries, since this segment's share of the bio-based epoxy resins market is expected to grow throughout the projected period. Get PDF Brochure for More Insights https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=78445 In comparison with fossil fuel-based epoxy resins, bio-based epoxy resins have lower malleability and tensile strength. As a result, firms in the global market are spending on R&D to develop high-tensile-strength bio-based epoxy resins that have the potential to outperform fossil fuel-based resins. The building & construction industry is increasingly making use of bio-based epoxy resin. The surface of numerous objects is coated with bio epoxy resin to safeguard it from corrosion, wear, as well as other environmental effects. Key Findings of Market Report In 2020, the global bio-based epoxy resin market was led by soybean oil-based epoxy resins. This is mostly due to rising demand for soybean oil-based epoxy resin in composites, adhesives, laminates, as well as other applications. Soybean oil-based epoxy resin was formerly one of the most widely utilized raw ingredients in the production of bio-based epoxy resin. When compared to other epoxy resins, the cost of production is extremely low. Food & drinks, adhesives & sealants, and healthcare & medicines are only a few of the businesses that use soybean oil-based resin. Bio-based epoxy resins are used for various purposes in residential constructions. Due to its strong adherence, bio-based epoxy resin is frequently used as a major binder in paints & coatings applications. It can be utilized to form a protective barrier on wood surfaces to keep moisture out. Bio-based epoxy coatings are also commonly ornamental, adding color as well as texture to a surface. Get Covid 19 Analysis - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=covid19&rep_id=78445 Epoxidation of renewable precursors such as rosins, unsaturated vegetable oils, terpenes, cardanol, tannins, saccharides, and lignin produces bio-based epoxy resin. Co-reactants, often known as hardeners or curatives, are used to treat them. The kind of curative is determined by the epoxy resin type and its application. It can also be bio-based. Europe controls a significant portion of the global bio-based epoxy resin market. The regional market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.2% during the forecast period. The bio-based epoxy resin market in Europe is being driven by rise in its demand for various applications such as paints and coatings. Request a Sample https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=78445 Global Bio-based Epoxy Resin Market: Growth Drivers Biological epoxy resins produced from various vegetable sources are gathering steam, due to benefits of lower greenhouse gas emissions and decreased likelihood of consumers being exposed to fossil fuel products. Bio-based epoxy resins are utilized to make paints, machine components, and varnishes, as well as stand-alone adhesive solutions. The Asia Pacific region is also a major player in the global bio-based epoxy resin market. In Asia Pacific , China dominated the regional market in 2020. The market in China is also being propelled by rise in demand for bio-based epoxy resin for use in various applications. Global Bio-based Epoxy Resin Market: Key Players Some of the key market players are Paladin Paints & Chemicals Pvt. Ltd. Sicomin Epoxy Systems Cardolite Corporation KUKDO Chemical (Kunshan) Co., Ltd Entropy Resins ECOPOXY Coatings Make an Enquiry Before Buying - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=EB&rep_id=78445 Global Bio-based Epoxy Resin Market: Segmentation Type Vegetable Oil-based Soybean Oil-based Cardanol-based Furan-based Lignin-based Others Application Paints & Coatings Adhesives Composites Laminates Others End Use Building & Construction Automotive & Transportation Wind Energy Consumer Goods General Industrial Others Chemicals & Materials Industry battles Tangible Impact of Economic and Cultural changes, Explore Transparency Market Research's award-winning coverage of the global Chemicals & Materials: Potassium Perchlorate Market - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/potassium-perchlorate-market.html Guanidine Nitrate Market - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/guanidine-nitrate-market.html About Transparency Market Research Transparency Market Research is a global market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. Our experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyse information. Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports. For More Research Insights on Leading Industries, Visit our YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8e-z-g23-TdDMuODiL8BKQ Contact Rohit Bhisey Transparency Market Research State Tower, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany NY - 12207 United States USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453 Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Press Release Source: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/biobased-epoxy-resins-market.htm SOURCE Transparency Market Research KIRYAT SHEMONA, Israel, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- FoodTech start-up, BioBetter, Ltd., has assigned a new role for the much-maligned Nicotiana tabacum plant upon discovering it can overcome the greatest hurdle in cultured meatthat of scaled production. Working behind the scenes of the emerging cultured meat industry, BioBetter is repurposing tobacco plants to create the growth factors necessary for the cellular development of cultivated meat. This landmark botanical breakthrough could significantly reduce the cost of cultivated meat and advance it rapidly to scale-up. BioBetter Breaks Bottleneck in Cultivated Meat with Tobacco Plants (Photo Credit: Alexander Seleznyov) No. 1 Cultivated meat challenge As numerous cultivated meat start-ups move beyond the proof-of-concept phase, they run against one of the biggest challenges facing this budding industry. Developing a scalable and cost-effective production platform to make cultured meat affordable for the mass market has proven to be a primary stumbling block. Cell-derived meat requires a culture medium composed of a mix of amino acids, nutrients, andmost importantlygrowth factors (GF's) without which cells cannot multiply. Currently, such media are costly due to the complexity of producing GF's. For example, insulin and transferrin GFs are collected from livestock, making it difficult to obtain large quantities. Some can be attained via fermentation of yeast or bacteria, but those methods require expensive facilities. The purification process also is complicated and expensive. "The Good Food Institutes determined that approximately a 100-fold reduction in insulin and transferrin costs is required to make cultivated meat economically viable," explains Dana Yarden, MD, co-founder of BioBetter. "It is estimated that growth factors and cell-culture media can constitute 55 to 95% of the marginal cost in manufacturing cell-based foods." Green, animal-free solution BioBetter harnessed the inherent advantages of tobacco plants by turning them into bioreactors for expression and large-scale production of the proteins. Plant bioreactors use renewable energy and fixate CO 2 . They are self-forming, self-sustaining, and biodegradable. BioBetter uses open-field plantations to enable fast, efficient, and flexible response to market needs. "There are multiple advantages to using Nicotiana tabacum as a hardy vector for producing GFs of non-animal origin," enthuses Amit Yaari, PhD, CEO of BioBetter. "It is an abundant crop that has no place in the food-and-feed chain due to its extremely bitter taste and content of undesirable alkaloids. The global trend for reducing tobacco smoking also is raising concerns among tobacco growers that the crop might eventually become obsolete. Yet the tobacco plant has huge potential to become a key component in the future of food." Tobacco plants can achieve up to four growth cycles annually and be harvested all year. This translates to more voluminous outputs per square meter of growing space. BioBetter's uniqueness lies in refining and highlighting the advantages of the tobacco plant platform for production on a huge scale. The start-up applies a proprietary protein extraction and purification technology that enables it to exploit nearly the entire plant, and at the same time deliver a high purity product at broad scale production. The company currently sources tobacco plants from local growers but the goal is to eventually source the raw material from tobacco growers globally. Based on cultivation in open fields and BioBetter's proprietary purification technology, the cost of growth factors production is dramatically reduced, finally bringing cost efficiency to cultured meat production. About BioBetter BioBetter was founded by Prof. Oded Shoseyov, a serial entrepreneur and researcher at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem; Dana Yarden MD, MBA, a biotech business expert; and Avi Tzur, an industrialist with an avid vision to put tobacco plant to positive use and who also was the first investor in the technology. One of the company's first tobacco plant-based creations was the drug "Humira," a monoclonal antibody used to treat autoimmune diseases. Realizing the great gap in the supply of GFs for the fast-growing cultivated food niche of the alt protein scene, the company shifted its focus to filling that gap. "BioBetter is pioneering a novel protein expression platform to address the fast-growing demand for complex recombinant proteins," notes Shoseyov. "Our GF technology will enable production of animal-free GFs at a scale of thousands of tons per year, and at a cost of US$1 per gram. This will alleviate one of the biggest bottlenecks in advancing cultured meat to mass production." The start-up already raised US$5M for its growth factor production platform from private investors, including Institutional VC and Alpha Capital Anstalt. The company participates in the Israel Innovation Authority program and the Good Food Institute, which also helps support the company's financing. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1775600/BioBetter_Cultivated_Meat.jpg For more information, contact: SOURCE BioBetter C-MOR will fight to protect its rights under the law and its valuable intellectual property. Tweet this The infringement of C-MOR's '016 Patent is alleged to be a result of Ensign's unauthorized manufacturing, installing, supplying and/or offering to sell or lease of a lighting system on rigs owned or operated by Ensign with a design that is the same as the patented Crown Jewel system. C-MOR asserts the infringement is willful, deliberate, and intentional as Ensign has or has had actual knowledge of the '016 patent as a customer of C-MOR and said infringement causes C-MOR to suffer irreparable harm which can only be remedied by the issuance of an injunction against Ensign. C-MOR further seeks damages to be determined at trial coupled with attorney's fees and costs. C-MOR further alleges Ensign is in breach of its contractual obligations to C-MOR which stem from Ensign's execution of a number of contracts. C-MOR alleges in the complaint that Ensign agreed not to engage in any business deemed similar to C-MOR's and not to use any Confidential Information or Intellectual Property of C-MOR to develop any product that would directly or indirectly compete with C-MOR. C-MOR, a privately held company headquartered in Cody, WY, has been dedicated to bringing safety to the oilfield by developing the Crown Jewel Lighting System since launching its first Crown Jewel Lighting System in early 2018 after spending considerable time, research, and financial investment to the development of the product in 2017. C-MOR's commitment to safety and ESG mandates has led to C-MOR's success in capturing nearly 30% of the U.S. oilfield market and has presented myriad of opportunities in other industries. While having strong working relationships with some of the world's largest operators and drilling contractors, this lawsuit is not the first time C-MOR has encountered industry leaders or customers violating proprietary and protected information. C-MOR has been forced to protect its intellectual property portfolio on prior occasions while maintaining its position as a steward of the transition to renewable energy. With C-MOR remaining committed to helping customers cut carbon emissions, lower operating costs, reach ESG goals, improve job site safety, and maximize energy efficiency, C-MOR will fight to protect its rights under the law and its valuable intellectual property. Updates on the lawsuit can be found at https://cmorenergy.com/news/ SOURCE JCA Companies "We are thrilled to announce the addition of these new decadent cakes to our existing lineup and our team has spent a significant amount of time experimenting with new flavor combinations to ensure the product captures the flavor and taste consumers are craving," said Brian Owens, chief executive officer of Cafe Valley. "Our new Swirled Bundt Cakes are pleasing to the eye and the taste buds. As consumers slice into and try each new cake, they will experience our unique flavor swirl and one-of-a-kind taste created by premium ingredients." The flavor and product profiles of Cafe Valley's newest Bundt cakes include: Triple Citrus Swirl : A refreshing flavor to enjoy on a sunny spring day, the Triple Citrus Swirl Bundt Cake features mandarin orange, key lime, and lemon batters with a rich yellow glaze. It's topped with white chocolate chips and orange accent icing. : A refreshing flavor to enjoy on a sunny spring day, the Triple Citrus Swirl Bundt Cake features mandarin orange, key lime, and lemon batters with a rich yellow glaze. It's topped with white chocolate chips and orange accent icing. Chocolate Espresso Swirl : Perfect for your next family gathering or dinner party, the Chocolate Espresso Swirl Bundt Cake includes chocolate and expresso batter with an elegant chocolate expresso glaze and an unforgettable caramel mocha icing accent. : Perfect for your next family gathering or dinner party, the Chocolate Espresso Swirl Bundt Cake includes chocolate and expresso batter with an elegant chocolate expresso glaze and an unforgettable caramel mocha icing accent. Raspberry White Chocolate Swirl: The Raspberry White Chocolate Swirl Bundt Cake melds white chocolate and raspberry batter, topped with a white glaze, white chocolate chips and delicious raspberry-colored icing. This flavor combination is the perfect treat for your next gathering. The new Swirled Bundt Cakes will join an existing array of specialty 16-ounce Bundt cakes from Cafe Valley, including Lemon, Triple Chocolate Fudge, Pumpkin Cream Cheese, All American and Christmas Chocolate Bundt Cakes. For more information on Cafe Valley products, please visit www.cafevalley.com. About Cafe Valley Founded in 1987, Cafe Valley produces high-quality bakery products for in-store bakeries, club stores, food service and convenience stores throughout the world. Their products include croissants, muffins, Bundt cakes, ring cakes, loaf cakes, turnovers and cafe bites. With facilities in Phoenix, Arizona and Marion, Indiana, Cafe Valley products are available to mass retailers throughout the U.S. They are committed to an extensive food safety program and have donated much time, money and gifts to communities across the U.S. Visit www.cafevalley.com to learn more. Contact: Abbey Leach [email protected] Lambert 321-626-4037 SOURCE Cafe Valley Bakery --Casual Dining Leader Accelerates International and Domestic Franchise Expansion Plans-- COSTA MESA, Calif., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- After a strong first quarter, California Pizza Kitchen, the creator of California-style pizza, announced the signing of two new international franchise agreements and plans to open seven international restaurants and two airport locations by year-end. These milestones follow the brand's development momentum in 2021 that included the launch of its domestic franchise program. Unveiled in December, California Pizza Kitchen's domestic franchise initiative marks the first-time that qualified candidates in the United States have an opportunity to own and operate restaurants in key markets nationwide. Casual dining leader California Pizza Kitchen signs two new international development agreements and accelerates its domestic franchise initiative, marking the first time qualified candidates in the U.S. have an opportunity to own and operate restaurants in key markets nationwide. Recently signed international deals include agreements in Costa Rica and Chile, bringing the brand's locations to approximately 50 overseas restaurants. Additionally, new locations are set to open in India, Chile, Costa Rica, Alberta, Canada, as well as in the Santiago, Chile and Costa Rica, San Jose airports. Leveraging its strong business model and cult-like pizza following that has fueled its growth since 1985, California Pizza Kitchen plans to continue to aggressively expand its footprint both domestically and internationally in 2022 and beyond. "We're proud of our first quarter achievements and are eager to continue building upon our success to drive our expansion in the U.S. Our California-Forward casual dining concept is unlike any other in the restaurant industry and we're ready to expand with new multi-unit restaurant operators," said Giorgio Minardi, Executive Vice President of Global and Franchise Operations. "Building on our steady presence overseas, we are optimistic about the possibility to strengthen our brand even further through our domestic franchise program. It's an exciting time at CPK, and we look forward to welcoming new franchisees to the team and bringing our own slice of California to new markets nationwide." California Pizza Kitchen provides franchisees flexibility with customizable menus, design layouts and multiple daypart offerings so that each location can individually align with its consumer needs and thrive within their market. These key differentiators, along with an average unit volume between $3 to 5 million, has positioned the brand as an attractive investment by experienced multi-unit franchisees. California Pizza Kitchen prioritizes catering to franchisees' needs, providing them with the tools and resources required, including expanding technology and mobile capabilities for each location, best-in-class training and development in all areas of the business. California Pizza Kitchen is amid an aggressive expansion in markets throughout the U.S. and is looking to add experienced, qualified multi-unit franchisees to grow the brand. Prospective franchisees must have a minimum net worth of $5 million, a minimum liquidity of $2 million and a commitment to open three-to-five restaurants during the first five years. To learn more about franchise development opportunities and available markets with California Pizza Kitchen, visit www.cpk.com/franchise. About California Pizza Kitchen In 1985, California Pizza Kitchen (CPK) opened its first restaurant in Beverly Hills and introduced diners to innovative California-style pizza. With a passion for combining fresh, seasonal ingredients with flavor inspirations from around the world, today CPK is a global brand serving creative California cuisine in nearly 200 restaurants in 8 countries and U.S. territories. From signature, hand-tossed pizzas and high-quality main plates to inventive better-for-you options, Lunch Duos, premium wines, and handcrafted beverages, CPK adds an imaginative twist to create a memorable dining experience. For more information, visit cpk.com. Chat with us on Twitter at @calpizzakitchen, Instagram at @cpk, and Facebook at facebook.com/californiapizzakitchen. Download the CPK Rewards app for iOS and Android to earn & redeem delicious rewards, order online, and enjoy exclusive pizza perks all year long. Contact: Jamie Avalon Fish Consulting 954-893-9150 [email protected] SOURCE California Pizza Kitchen GUANGZHOU, China, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Canton Fair's Intellectual Property Administration announced that this year the Fair will underline cloud-based IPR protection to provide exhibitors with more convenient online instructions and IPR protection services. The 131st Canton Fair is coming, and the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) services are in progress. The Canton Fair witnessed the birth of IPR protection in China. With raising awareness of IPR protection in the 1990s, complaints of patent infringement at the Canton Fair have risen rapidly. "Many Chinese exhibitors had weak IPR awareness at that time," said Junhong Cui, former Deputy Director General of China Foreign Trade Centre (CFTC). The exhibitors and the Fair suffered many negative impacts. To protect the legal rights and interests of all exhibitors, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation issued the Notice of Trademark Inspection at the 71st Canton Fair in 1992. The first special campaign was also organized at the Canton Fair, marking the start of IPR protection. In 1999, the 85th Canton Fair set up a Complaint Station and issued the Regulations on Handling Complaints during the Canton Fair. In 2002, the 91st Canton Fair firstly took the principle of "reverse onus" to increase the efforts to combat infringement cases, and achieved remarkable results. At the 92nd Canton Fair, the Interim Provisions on IPR Protection Management was amended as the Measures on Complaints of Suspected IPR Infringement and Handling. The "good practice of Canton Fair" has been recognized by the Chinese government and China's convention & exhibition sector. In 2021, the 130th Canton Fair IPR complaint module was launched on the official website to protect the IPR. "Only when IPR is protected can exhibitors feel more secure in showing their innovative products at the Canton Fair, and can we do justice better to the Intelligent Manufacturing in China", said Maggie Pu, Deputy Director General of the Foreign Affairs Office of Canton Fair. Through two decades of efforts, the Canton Fair has harvested increasing experience and developed a maturing mechanism in IPR protection. Canton Fair now serves as a model for IPR protection in the sector to guide independent innovation, create new competitive advantages, and promote high-quality development for Chinese enterprises. Even though IPR protection still has a long way to go, the Canton Fair will march on resolutely. Visit https://www.cantonfair.org.cn/en-US/register/index#/foreign-email for more opportunities. SOURCE Canton Fair GUANGZHOU, China, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- This April, Guangzhou will embrace the opening of the 131st Canton Fair.Committed to its motto of "Canton Fair, Global Share", the Fair, which has been held for 65 years and has witnessed the development of China's opening-up, will once again welcome guests from all over the world. The Fair was founded in 1957 when Premier Zhou Enlai proposed to abbreviate it to "Canton Fair". At that time, the Fair was the only channel for Chinese enterprises to trade with foreign companies. In the early 1970s, the ice-breaking diplomatic relations brought increasing influence to the Canton Fair. The world began to get to know China through the Fair, which has attracted some dignitaries, including George H.W. Bush and Edward Heath, to visit personally. Held every spring and autumn, the Fair has continued to evolve, contributing a lot to the trade cooperation and exchange between China and the world. In 2007, the 101st Canton Fair began to set up exhibition sections for imported goods, and the "China Export Fair" was officially renamed the "China Import and Export Fair", which reflected the surging tide of China's new round of opening-up. Relocated for four times, the Canton Fair Complex now sits alongside the Pearl River. Several exhibition halls and relocations are like milestones documenting the glorious history of the Canton Fair, from which China's resolve and history can also be seen for increasing opening-up and integration into the world economy. The 127th Canton Fair was held online from June 15 to 24, 2020, blazing a new path for online trading event. In the 130th session, Canton Fair made further innovations with an onlineoffline integration. "Along with the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) officially signed in early 2022, many exhibitors have been increasing their trade cooperation with Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Japan and South Korea. Many participants have expressed their desire to take advantage of the Canton Fair and catch the opportunities brought by the RCEP", said Alan Liu, Deputy Director General of Foreign Affairs Office of the Canton Fair. The Fair has developed into one of the top-ranking international trade events in China. The Canton Fair is expected by President Xi to further enlarge China's opening-up. Also, the Fair will continue to serve as a platform for China to share the beautiful vision of the future. Visit https://www.cantonfair.org.cn/en-US/register/index#/foreign-email for more opportunities. SOURCE Canton Fair Powered by Snowflake, Cart.com enables ecommerce businesses to gain seamless access to all their data through a single platform AUSTIN, Texas, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cart.com, the first end-to-end ecommerce platform that simplifies scaling for the world's greatest brands, today announced a partnership with Snowflake , the Data Cloud company. Powered by Snowflake, Cart.com's powerful unified analytics tools will allow merchants to connect their entire data universe, seamlessly turning cloud-hosted data into a centralized source of actionable insights. Cart.com partnered with Snowflake for its unique ability to meet the diverse demands of today's ecommerce merchants and for a shared vision to provide unified visibility into data across the entire ecommerce value chain. Bringing together Cart.com's unified analytics tools with the Snowflake Data Cloud will empower joint customers to leverage innovative machine learning algorithms that streamline decision-making and an advanced AI-driven attribution model that combines storefront, marketing, and clickstream data to help brands understand a channel or campaign's influence on purchase behavior. Cart.com's forecasting model will support profitable inventory management by anticipating SKU-level demand at each fulfillment center. In addition, as part of the partnership, Cart.com will leverage Snowflake's newly announced Retail Data Cloud , which unites Snowflake's integrated data platform, Snowflake- and partner-delivered solutions, and industry-specific datasets and models. Powered by Snowflake, Cart.com will provide merchants of all sizes with: Access to unified analytics tools . Cart.com customers can now easily access centralized dashboards that bring together commerce, marketing and cloud-hosted data to unlock data-driven automation and AI-powered analytics across their entire organization . Cart.com customers can now easily access centralized dashboards that bring together commerce, marketing and cloud-hosted data to unlock data-driven automation and AI-powered analytics across their entire organization Ability to securely unlock diverse datasets while maintaining a single source of truth. By using Cart.com's machine learning and AI-powered tools, customers can unlock the full power of their datasets, while ensuring that their original data remains completely secure, and can't be altered, corrupted, or overwritten. "Every retailer's goal is to connect with their customers in a more meaningful way in order to get products in their hands and engender loyalty," said Rosemary Hua, Global Head of Retail & CPG at Snowflake. "Together Cart.com and Snowflake bring the power of a single view of ecommerce data to customers, which provides unified visibility and ultimately connects business from end-to-end. Both companies believe that data is the key to allowing retailers to connect with their customers more deeply." "At Cart.com, we're democratizing ecommerce by giving customers unified visibility into and control over every aspect of the e-commerce value chain. Working with Snowflake, we're enabling ecommerce businesses to gain seamless access to all their data, across every part of their business, without ever leaving their centralized Cart.com dashboard," said Chase Zieman, Cart.com Chief Data Science Officer. "Ecommerce brands have data in their DNA. Using the combined power of Snowflake and Cart.com, they can now turn that data into actionable insights, creating value at every level of their operations." About Cart.com Cart.com is the first end-to-end ecommerce software and service provider built to help Brands find more customers, sell in more places, and deliver their products more easily. Cart.com provides tools that allow for a modular, data-rich, fully integrated approach to scaling up. We are on a mission to put Brands back in charge of their ecommerce journey and in control of their customer relationships. Cart.com exists to help Brands crush scale. For more info: Cart.com , LinkedIn . SOURCE Cart.com Cboe names Tim Lipscomb new Chief Technology Officer new Chief Technology Officer Cboe Europe CFO Stephanie Renner promoted to newly created role, SVP, International Finance CHICAGO and LONDON, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cboe Global Markets, Inc. (Cboe: CBOE), a leading provider of global market infrastructure and tradable products, today announced two senior executive promotions that will further accelerate the company's growth as it continues to advance on its global expansion strategy. These promotions include the appointments of Tim Lipscomb as Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, and Stephanie Renner as Senior Vice President, International Finance. As Chief Technology Officer, Mr. Lipscomb, currently Chief Operating Officer of Cboe Europe, will lead Cboe's technology strategy, innovation and integration efforts globally, including overseeing all of Cboe's exchange, data and clearing platforms. In her new role, Ms. Renner, currently Chief Financial Officer of Cboe Europe, will lead all of Cboe's non-U.S. finance functions, overseeing the company's Canadian, European and Asia Pacific financial operations, planning, analysis and reporting. Both executives will relocate from London to Kansas City to assume their new positions. Cboe's appointments of Mr. Lipscomb and Ms. Renner follow a series of recent senior leadership changes that reflect the company's ongoing global expansion. Together, these changes aim to further integrate and optimize the company's global teams, resources and operations to position Cboe for its future growth plans. Commenting on the appointment of Mr. Lipscomb, Chris Isaacson, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Cboe Global Markets, said: "This is an incredibly exciting time for Cboe as we continue to enter new markets and geographies, broaden investor access to our products and solutions, and execute on M&A and organic growth initiatives with the vision of becoming one of the world's largest derivatives and securities networks. As Cboe expands its presence globally, the world-class technology that underpins all aspects of our businesses will remain fundamental to our success and at the core of everything we do. Tim brings a wealth of strategy and technology leadership that will take our global teams and platforms to even greater heights as we enter our next phase of growth." Mr. Lipscomb said: "Cboe has built a reputation for its robust, scalable and highly reliable technology, and has a strong track record of delivering and operating best-in-class exchange and data solutions globally across multiple asset classes for our customers. The strength of our capabilities is testament to the exceptionally talented team that we have in place, and I look forward to playing a part in their continued success as we execute on our technology roadmap to drive Cboe's future growth." Commenting on the appointment of Ms. Renner, Brian Schell, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, said: "Our recent acquisitions and strategic initiatives have put into place the pieces to execute on Cboe's powerful global vision, and through these recent leadership changes, we will continue to position ourselves for growth and expansion globally. Stephanie has been integral to the success of our European business over the past few years, and we are excited to elevate her into a new role with broadened, global responsibilities. We look forward to leveraging her deep expertise to further strengthen and harmonize our financial operations to help enable Cboe's growth trajectory." Ms. Renner said: "Cboe is continuing to accelerate on its global expansion strategy, and I couldn't be more excited to take on increased responsibilities to help oversee our financial operations on an international scale spanning North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. I look forward to working with our finance teams to help ensure that Cboe is well-equipped for its next phase of growth as we continue to create value for our shareholders, customers and associates around the world." Biographies Tim Lipscomb Mr. Lipscomb brings more than 20 years of experience in financial markets technology. In his current role as Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Cboe Europe, he leads its software engineering, infrastructure and operational teams. During his tenure, he has helped oversee several key strategic initiatives, including Cboe Europe's Brexit transition, which involved the successful migration of liquidity in EU securities from its Cboe UK equities exchange to its Amsterdam-based Cboe NL equities exchange and the re-introduction of Swiss securities on Cboe UK, and the recent launch of Cboe Europe Derivatives, a new pan-European equity derivatives marketplace. Mr. Lipscomb joined Cboe Europe in October 2019. Stephanie Renner Ms. Renner currently serves as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Cboe Europe and is responsible for all financial control and human resources functions for the business, including financial planning and reporting. She assumed the position in June 2018, bringing nearly 30 years of experience in financial services and public accounting industries to the role. In her tenure as CFO, she has since been instrumental in the company's successful Brexit planning, overseeing hiring for its new Amsterdam office and leading its tax planning and compliance. She has also been instrumental to the founding of Cboe's Women's Initiative. Ms. Renner joined Cboe as Assistant Controller in 2013, based in Kansas City, a position she held until her move to Cboe Europe. About Cboe Global Markets, Inc. Cboe Global Markets (Cboe: CBOE), a leading provider of market infrastructure and tradable products, delivers cutting-edge trading, clearing and investment solutions to market participants around the world. The company is committed to operating a trusted, inclusive global marketplace, providing leading products, technology and data solutions that enable participants to define a sustainable financial future. Cboe provides trading solutions and products in multiple asset classes, including equities, derivatives and FX, across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. To learn more, visit www.cboe.com. CBOE-C Cboe, Cboe Volatility Index, VIX and Cboe Global Markets are registered trademarks of Cboe Exchange, Inc. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners. Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information Certain information contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements. We caution readers not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. SOURCE Cboe Global Markets, Inc. Lancang-Mekong Cooperation contributes to socio-economic development in sub-region: Cambodian officials Xinhua) 17:19, March 29, 2022 PHNOM PENH, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) has helped bolster the economies and social development of the sub-regional countries and enhance the well-being of their people, Cambodian officials said on Tuesday. Kem Gunawadh, secretary of state at the Ministry of Information, said the six LMC countries, namely China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, share cultural similarities, enjoy profound traditional good neighborliness and friendship, and have closely intertwined security and development interests. "The LMC has also supported the building of the ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) community and promoted the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development," he said during the opening ceremony of a hybrid forum on the Role of Journalists on Shared River, Shared Future. The LMC focuses on three cooperation pillars, namely public policy and security, economic and sustainable development, and people-to-people exchanges, Gunawadh said, adding that the LMC's five priority areas are connectivity, production capacity, cross border economic cooperation, water resources, and agriculture and poverty reduction. Mam Dathalineth, an advisor to the Ministry of Information, said 2022 marks the sixth anniversary of the LMC and that this regional mechanism has played an important role in building a community with a shared future of peace and prosperity in the sub-region. Sponsored by the LMC Special Fund, the half-day forum was physically and virtually attended by some 50 people. Originating from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China, the river is called the Lancang River in China and the Mekong River when it flows through the lower reaches before emptying into the sea. (Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Liang Jun) Cape Town A non-fungible token (NFT) created for the 1961 arrest warrant of anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela has sold for $130,000 at auction. The funds will help maintain the Liliesleaf Museum Heritage Site, a farm where Mandela and other leaders of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s hid from authorities. But the funds will not be enough to re-open the museum, which has been hit hard by the lack of tourism during the COVID pandemic. The founder of the Liliesleaf Museum, Nicholas Wolpe, says the museum still needs about $1.7 million (R25-million) before it can reopen. "Based upon all historical figures to clear all the debt and to provide for at least for the next year or two," he said. "There need to be repairs, exhibits need to be fixed, and then the day-to-day operations, paying for salaries and getting the place back on its feet." Wolpe says last year he was approached by one of the owners of Momint, the company that runs the NFT marketplace. They explained that the museum's artifacts could earn cash while staying on site for security purposes and preservation. Wolpe said he thought it was a perfect opportunity for Liliesleaf to create an alternative source of income. "He explained the process of NFTs to me and I said this is a wonderful opportunity for not only Liliesleaf but for historical sites around the world because we currently live in an environment where the reality is that government funding is not what it used to be," he said. Momint's CEO Ahren Posthumus explains that NFTs, which use blockchain technology, are a way of putting a value to content on the internet. The buyer of the warrant, he says, gets significant long-term benefits. "So, they are the only person in the world who will actually have the original of what's called the Alpha File of the scan of the document. So, you can view the document online and it's incredibly high detailed. You can see the ink bleeding through the paper but the owner of the document is the only one who will have the fully uncompressed version of this 3D file. It also gives the buyer access to the physical document as well as a five per cent royalty in perpetuity. So, as a buyer if they resell the piece and if the piece gets sold 10 or a hundred times, they will receive a royalty on the piece which is amazing. Liliesleaf Museum will equally be getting a royalty on the resale of the piece," he said. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines South Africa Entertainment By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. Mandela, who became South Africa's first democratically elected president, was released from prison in 1990. The auction of his arrest warrant followed the NFT auction of a gun pen owned by Mandela's fellow liberation leader Oliver Tambo. That NFT sale in November raised $50,000, also for the museum. Wolpe says the Momint team has photographed a number of other artifacts they believe are valuable. DALLAS, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Title Resources Guaranty Company ("TRG" operating as "Title Resources Group") today announced that it has received approval from the Texas Department of Insurance to form and fund its previously announced title underwriting joint venture with Centerbridge Partners, L.P. ("Centerbridge") and Realogy Holdings Corp ("Realogy"NYSE: RLGY). As part of the transaction the stock of TRG, which conducts underwriting operations, is being contributed to a new holding company that will be jointly owned by the joint venture partners. Realogy will retain its title agencies in its Realogy Title Group division. The joint venture will accelerate TRG's profitable growth trajectory and help build on the company's strong momentum to date. Over the past 12 years, TRG has achieved a compound annual growth rate of approximately 15% in title premiums and 19% in statutory net income, while delivering superior customer capabilities and outcomes. TRG will continue to be led by Scott McCall, President and CEO, a role he has served in since 2009. "Title Resources Group has grown through our dedication to providing knowledgeable and responsive underwriting solutions to support our network of title insurance agents across America, while maintaining quality through integrity and financial stability. We're thrilled to form this partnership, a testament to the top-quality people and operations at our firm, and accelerate our profitable growth trajectory," said Mr. McCall, adding: "With the support of our partners at Centerbridge, we're excited about the opportunity to broaden our reach and deepen our capabilities, through investment in our people and technology." "We're encouraged by the strong team and platform Scott has built," said Kevin Mahony, Managing Director at Centerbridge. "We look forward to accelerating the growth at TRG as an independent entity. The board of TRG will continue to prioritize investments in technology and new services, all with the goal of delivering value to all stakeholders, including agents and employees." As an independent entity from Realogy, TRG will have its own board of directors, chaired by Alan Colberg, former CEO of Assurant, Inc. Prior to Assurant, Alan was at Bain & Company for 22 years and served as the global practice leader for financial services. Additional independent board members will be added over the coming months. About Title Resources Group Title Resources Group the underwriter built for the real estate industry is one of the nation's largest title insurance underwriters, according to the American Land Title Association's 2021 market share data. Founded in 1984, it has expanded to serve title insurance agents in 37 states and the District of Columbia and continues to grow. With $163 million in liquid assets at year-end 2021, its financial strength and stability are rated A' (Unsurpassed) by Demotech, Inc., and B++ (Good) by AM Best Rating Services, and since its inception, the company has consistently operated profitably without a net operating loss in any fiscal year. With a mission to provide knowledgeable and responsive underwriting solutions, Title Resources Group is dedicated to growing lifelong relationships and maintaining quality through integrity and financial stability. For more information, please visit www.titleresources.com. About Centerbridge Partners, L.P. Centerbridge Partners, L.P. is a private investment management firm employing a flexible approach across investment disciplines private equity, credit and real estate in an effort to develop the most attractive opportunities for our investors. The Firm was founded in 2005 and as of January 31, 2022 has approximately $33 billion in capital under management with offices in New York and London. Centerbridge is dedicated to partnering with world-class management teams across targeted industry sectors and geographies. For more information, please visit www.centerbridge.com. Title Resources Group Contact: Centerbridge Partners Contacts: Jonathan McGrain Daniel Hoadley [email protected] [email protected] SOURCE Title Resources Group An accelerating client pipeline prompts CGT Staffing to expand its recruiting team. PITTSBURGH, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- CGT Staffing, formerly CompuGroup Technologies, today announced an initiative to expand its recruiting arm, prompted by an influx of new business from its client partners. Based in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, CGT Staffing specializes in IT and executive-level placements on a contract, contract-to-hire, and full-time basis. As a result of the growing regional and national demand for its services, the company's professional expansion now encompasses workforce and consulting solutions across numerous industries and for multiple new clients. The growing demand for staffing solutions has prompted the organization to expand the size and scope of its recruiting team. "It's a unique hiring environment right now," said Bill Welge, President and CEO. "While it's as simple as pairing candidates who need jobs with companies who need talent, it has become increasingly hard for many on both sides to find the right match. Unlike some of our competitors, our process revolves around identifying a mutual best fit, and our partners have acknowledged those efforts. We see a range of promising growth opportunities that necessitates further outgrowth of our team." The recruiting process at CGT Staffing revolves around balance matching robust employers with credible candidates and treating both with equal weight. A multi-point vetting process ensures clients are privy to the talent best suited to their organizations; likewise, each recruiter is empowered to act as an agent on behalf of his or her candidates, brokering a best fit for each over the long term. Engagement of regional freelance recruiters is underway to augment the current organization. "It's a great opportunity for those with prior staffing experience to hone their skills, work remotely, and supplement their primary income," said Welge. "We're always looking for talented individuals who share our passion for making a difference in the lives of the candidates and the companies we serve," said Welge. "It's profoundly satisfying, to put someone on the proper career trajectory, or to play a small role in helping clients realize their growth potential." Inquiries into independent recruiting opportunities at CGT Staffing may be directed to [email protected]. About CGT Staffing Founded in 2009, CGT Staffing, formerly CompuGroup Technologies, is a national full-service staffing firm based in the greater Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. Media Contact: Harton Semple 438 Division Street, Sewickley, PA 15143 (800) 813-4595 [email protected] SOURCE CGT Staffing CHILI publisher is a cloud-based Creative Automation platform that enables brands and agencies to create, edit, and share visual content through secure graphic templates in accordance with brand guidelines that can be used across in-house teams and agency partners. Agencies large and small and such Fortune 500 brands as Carrefour, Coca-Cola, and Mars in a variety of industries such as retail, FMCG, real estate, automotive, and more depend on CHILI publisher to streamline automated personalization at scale. CHILI publisher is also utilized by MarTech vendors like Sitecore, 4AllPortal, Akeneo, Horizontal, Pimcore, and others to create new revenue streams and offer new value-adding connectors between content platforms. Creative Tech future-proofing visuals designed by professionals for professionals "Consumers increasingly look for compelling visual content across touchpoints, as they navigate through online, social, and on-site marketplaces. Brands and agencies struggle to reach the right people with the right content on the right channel because all too often their design adaptation process takes time, is error-prone and not data-driven," said Kevin Goeminne, CEO at CHILI publish. "CHILI publisher lets brands and agencies simplify and automate on-brand graphic production at scale, saving them time and money in the end-to-end production of that content for both online and offline channels. This investment allows us to grow our solution, team, and community so every professional in any market can create and repurpose professional, on-brand visuals." "Creative tech is the rapidly evolving space to watch. Brands and agencies are striving to become more productive, adaptive, and scalable. CHILI publish delivers just that by empowering them with a powerful and tailored platform. It gives brands the control and the speed they need to rapidly react to consumer demand trends, both in-store and online," said Geert van Engelen, Managing Partner at Connected Capital, who will join CHILI publish's board of directors. "CHILI publish's relationships with MarTech integration partners and creative service providers, their attention to data security with recent ISO 27001:2017 certification, and a result-focused, solution-driven team makes us excited to contribute to their accelerated expansion." Read the complete press release at www.chili-publish.com/press/10M-investment About CHILI publish CHILI publish was founded in 2010 with a single vision: make graphic versioning productive, adaptable, and scalable. Today, hundreds of customers around the globe use CHILI publisher to produce digital and print content at scale and create better customer experiences. With a team of over 75 people, a global ecosystem of integration partners, and offices in Aalst, Belgium, and Chicago, USA, CHILI publish is succeeding in becoming a trusted innovation partner in building the future of creative technology for brands and agencies worldwide. About Connected Capital Connected Capital is a leading investor in growth and buy-out stage European B2B SaaS companies. It provides capital and expertise in pure-play SaaS to entrepreneurs in order to accelerate the growth of their businesses. Based in Amsterdam and backed by institutional investors, Connected Capital operates across Europe with over 200 million of capital under management. For more information, please visit www.connectedcapital.nl. More information at: www.chili-publish.com Press contacts Laura Baxter VP Marketing T: +32 2 888 65 11 E: [email protected] Maya Staels PR Manager M: +32 477 49 24 26 E: [email protected] SOURCE CHILI publish CHICAGO, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cision and Benzinga announced today they have entered into a strategic partnership on Cision PR Newswire's Homepage News product. Twenty-five million next generation investors rely on Benzinga for dynamic and innovative financial media access every month. This partnership will provide Benzinga's audience with additional high-value content while increasing the reach of designated press releases sent via PR Newswire. Brands that choose to amplify their press release with Homepage News will get direct placement on Benzinga's homepage within a widget dedicated to PR Newswire content. Luke Jacobi, Director of Operations at Benzinga, commented that "Benzinga was created to level the playing field for individual investors and connect investors with actionable information. Establishing a deep relationship with Cision helps us to bridge the gap between information flow and individual investors." Investors depend on Benzinga every day to power their investment decisions, understand why markets are moving and share ideas with a dedicated community. This new Homepage News distribution partnership will provide exposure to an audience of investors, influencers and the financial community. As a result, PR Newswire will be the only wire provider to offer premium homepage placements on Benzinga giving customers direct access to targeted audiences that matter most. "We are excited to partner with Benzinga. With this partnership, we will be able to amplify our clients' stories to audiences around the country," said Liam Power, SVP of Global Distribution at Cision. "We are delighted to increase market exposure for our clients by providing them with additional outlets to distribute their most important news." About Benzinga Benzinga is a dynamic and innovative financial media outlet that empowers investors with high-quality, unique content that is sought after by Wall Street's top traders. Benzinga provides timely, actionable ideas that help users navigate even the most uncertain and volatile markets in real-time with an unmatched caliber. Benzinga's flagship product is Benzinga Pro, a renowned real-time stock market information source providing intelligence that, until recently, was only available to institutional investors. Investors depend on Benzinga Pro every day to power their investment decisions, understand why markets are moving and share ideas with a dedicated community. About Cision As a global leader in PR, IR, marketing and social media management technology and intelligence, Cision helps brands and organizations to identify, connect and engage with customers and stakeholders to drive business results. Through a suite of IR services, PR Newswire helps companies meet their communications and disclosure needs. A network of over 1.1 billion influencers, in-depth monitoring, analytics and its Brandwatch and Falcon.io social media platforms headline a premier suite of solutions. Cision has offices in 24 countries throughout the Americas, EMEA and APAC. For more information about Cision's award-winning solutions, including its next-gen Cision Communications Cloud, visit www.cision.com and follow @Cision on Twitter. Media Contact [email protected] Aaron Bry Corporate Communications Benzinga [email protected] SOURCE Cision Ltd. WOONSOCKET, R.I., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- CVS Health (NYSE: CVS) and Fresno Housing have collaborated to build new affordable housing in Fresno, California. Through Red Stone Equity Partners, CVS Health will invest an estimated $18.4 million into the Arthur @ Blackstone, a new Fresno Housing development planning to break ground this spring. Twenty of the units at the Arthur @ Blackstone will be reserved for special needs tenants, specifically transition age youth considered to be chronically homeless, homeless, or at-risk of becoming chronically homeless. This includes youth who are aging out of the foster care system, transitioning from institutions, and youth with a history of involvement in the justice system. The remaining units will target low-income families. In addition, residents will benefit from comprehensive case management and full wrap around supportive services coordinated by the Fresno County Department of Behavioral Health and various contracted service providers. The Arthur @ Blackstone is part of CVS Health's commitment to addressing housing insecurities in the Fresno community and is one of three housing investments CVS Health has made with Fresno Housing over the past three years. Through investment funds sponsored by Red Stone Equity Partners, in 2019, CVS Health made a $4.6 million investment in Villages at Paragon and in 2020, announced it was investing $2.1 million in the Villages at Broadway. "To make a meaningful impact, we need to address social determinants of health at the local level and be intentional with our approach," said Jeff Hermosillo, California Market President, Aetna, a CVS Health company. "We're committed to investing in the Fresno community and meeting the needs of individuals and families by providing them with resources that enable equal opportunity for achieving good health." This investment will continue to deepen the successful collaboration between Fresno Housing and CVS Health to reduce health disparities and advance health equity through quality, affordable housing. The Arthur @ Blackstone will consist of 41 housing units near Manchester Center in Fresno and will include a space where supportive services will be provided that aim to improve health outcomes for the residents. "We know that when families have access to affordable housing, they are better able to improve their physical, mental, and emotional health. That's why our partnership with CVS Health is exciting and innovative for the families we serve in our community. We are honored to be selected by CVS Health again to further our mission to provide affordable, healthy housing throughout Fresno County," said Tyrone Roderick Williams, Chief Executive Officer, Fresno Housing. Fresno Housing has been integrating the worlds of health and housing for the past 20 years by providing affordable housing and supportive services for over 4,000 families in Fresno County. The investment in Arthur @ Blackstone builds on CVS Health's commitment to the Fresno community. Earlier this year, CVS Health introduced its new Health Zones initiative to Fresno. The initiative provides concentrated local investments to reduce health disparities and advance health equity in underserved communities across the country. In Fresno, CVS Health is working with Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission, Clinica Sierra Vista, and the Central California Food Bank, to help improve health outcomes and build healthier communities in Fresno by addressing social determinants of health, including housing, education, access to food, labor, transportation, and health care access. As part of CVS Health's overall commitment to advance health equity in America, it invested $185 million in affordable housing nationwide in 2021 and $1.3 billion over the past 20 years, including $37.2 million in affordable housing in Fresno. Through these investments, CVS Health has been able to provide underserved communities with quality housing based on the unique needs of the population. About CVS Health CVS Health is the leading health solutions company, delivering care like no one else can. We reach more people and improve the health of communities across America through our local presence, digital channels and approximately 300,000 dedicated colleagues including more than 40,000 physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and nurse practitioners. Wherever and whenever people need us, we help them with their health whether that's managing chronic diseases, staying compliant with their medications, or accessing affordable health and wellness services in the most convenient ways. We help people navigate the health care system and their personal health care by improving access, lowering costs and being a trusted partner for every meaningful moment of health. And we do it all with heart, each and every day. Learn more at www.cvshealth.com. Media contacts Monica Prinzing 831-241-8294 [email protected] Brandi Borboa Johnson 559-908-7269 [email protected] SOURCE CVS Health New product enhancement delivers more rapid, relevant insights into the private markets NEW YORK, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cyndx, the leading AI-enabled search and discovery platform that offers users unmatched reach and precision in discovering and connecting growth opportunities among global private market participants, has announced its new Explorer search tool that will help investors gain even deeper insights, enabling them to make smarter and faster investment decisions. Cyndx Explorer is an in-platform business intelligence suite that provides direct access to Cyndx's comprehensive dataset of over 16 million companies from approximately 240 countries. Cyndx's subscribers can now use the Explorer tool to create custom queries that easily track and identify relevant information associated with their investment mandates or areas of interest, and build their own shareable dashboards and data visualizations. The new tool complements Cyndx Finder, the AI-driven M&A deal origination and investment research engine, by providing investors with deeper insights and greater visibility into private markets. Jim McVeigh, CEO of Cyndx, commented: "When it comes to sourcing proprietary deals, efficiency and speed are crucial. Explorer allows our users to create custom, proprietary queries that address their specific needs while also accessing millions of additional data points that were previously not available. To us, it's just another step in the journey of bringing the power of our ever increasing data set to our users." Explorer allows users to easily track and identify relevant information on specific companies and verticals from their Analytics Dashboard, with queries such as companies who are 'projected to raise', CEO contact information, capital raised in the past thirty days, total acquisitions in the space by region, and much more. Queries are defined in three ways: Measures (quantitative values such as total number of funding rounds that occurred within a given time frame), Dimensions (qualitative values such as company or contact names), and Time (specific date ranges). These criteria can be combined and adjusted as needed to deliver a custom result. For example, if a user is looking for a CFO with experience working for a venture-backed company in a particular sector and located in a particular part of the world, Explorer rapidly delivers to that user a list of relevant CFOs and their contact information. Explorer is a valuable addition to Cyndx's suite of search and discovery solutions, which clients rely on for depth, accuracy, and reliability of private market data. To learn more about Explorer, please visit www.cyndx.com. About Cyndx Cyndx is the most powerful AI-enabled platform for discovering and connecting growth opportunities for companies and investors. The company's proprietary AI-based algorithms, combined with the most up-to-date and accurate data on more than 16 million private companies, deliver meaningful insights that enable successful growth decisions. For startups looking to raise capital, a venture capital or private equity firms looking to invest, or M&A specialists searching for the next acquisition targets for their clients, Cyndx surfaces strategic insights with unrivaled accuracy, speed, and relevance. Designed by bankers, investors, and data scientists, Cyndx's products include: Cyndx Finder, Cyndx Raiser, and Cyndx Owner. The company was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida. For more information, please visit www.cyndx.com or email [email protected]. Media Contacts Cyndx Julia Dehay [email protected] 917-476-9895 R.J. Walker & Co. Ryan Walker [email protected] 860-930-3611 SOURCE Cyndx WASHINGTON, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- DCI Consulting Group, Inc. (DCI) is pleased to announce that Andrew J. Cook, Ph.D. has joined DCI's HR and EEO Analytics team as a Principal Consultant. The addition of Dr. Cook is a strategic hire for DCI, enhancing their commitment to be a one-stop-shop for their clients in Human Resources and Equal Employment Opportunity analytics and expands their ability to assist organizations with wage and hour litigation matters. In this new role, Dr. Cook will provide consulting and expert witness testimony services for matters in advanced economic and statistical techniques. Dr. Cook is a labor economist bringing over 15 years of experience in quantitative methods, statistical studies, survey methodology, and econometric modeling. Prior to joining DCI, Dr. Cook held senior positions at various firms where he led class employment consulting audits and class action matters focused on developing and analyzing complex statistical models. Dr. Cook's work includes testifying expert work before the U.S. District Courts in California and Texas, the Superior Court of the State of California, the Office of Human Rights in Maryland, and the State Court of Texas. David Cohen, President of DCI, stated that "Dr. Cook brings extensive experience assisting Fortune 500 companies across a variety of workforce analytics and employment analyses. His hire enhances DCI's ability to provide the highest level of consulting and expertise to our clients". About DCI DCI is a human resources risk management consulting firm. Members of DCI's staff are recognized experts in a variety of spaces, including diversity, equity & inclusion metrics, pay equity, systemic compensation discrimination analyses, affirmative action plan development, employee selection and test validation, and OFCCP audit and litigation support. CONTACT: Amanda Beety, (202) 768-7786, [email protected] SOURCE DCI Consulting Group, Inc. TORONTO, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Denison Mines Corp. ("Denison" or the "Company") (TSX: DML) (NYSE: DNN) is pleased to report the discovery of multiple new high-grade intercepts of unconformity-hosted uranium mineralization in the final three drill holes completed during the winter 2022 exploration program on the Waterfound River property ("Waterfound"). The results were highlighted by drill hole WF-68, which returned a broad zone of uranium mineralization, including a peak interval of 5.91% eU 3 O 8 over 3.9 metres (0.05% eU 3 O 8 cut-off) with a sub-interval grading 25.30% eU 3 O 8 over 0.7 m, located approximately 800 metres west, along the La Rocque Conductive Corridor, of the previously discovered high-grade mineralization (including 4.49% U 3 O 8 over 10.53 metres) at the Alligator Zone. PDF Version Denison has an effective 24.68% ownership interest in the Waterfound River Joint Venture ("Waterfound JV") to which each of Orano Canada Inc. ("Orano Canada"), Denison, and JCU (Canada) Exploration Company, Limited ("JCU") are participants. Orano Canada has a 62.42% interest in the Waterfound JV and is the project operator. Andy Yackulic, P. Geo., Denison's Director, Exploration, commented, "We are excited to see additional high-grade mineralization discovered within the La Rocque corridor, which also hosts Cameco's La Rocque Lake Zone and IsoEnergy's Hurricane Zone. Not only has the drilling at Waterfound intersected high-grade uranium, but the mineralization remains open along strike in both directions." David Cates, Denison's President & CEO, added, "Denison is appreciative of the efforts of Orano Canada to breathe new life into Waterfound. Denison has a unique partnership with Orano as joint owners of the McClean Lake mill and the nearby Midwest project. This discovery at Waterfound is well situated relative to the McClean Lake mill and has the potential to translate into a further important source of future mill feed for the McClean Lake joint venture. Waterfound is also a good example of the significant, but often underappreciated, discovery potential associated with Denison's well situated and prospective exploration property portfolio." 2022 Waterfound River Winter Exploration Program Highlights Drill holes WF-67, WF-68, and WF-68-1 were all drilled on line 4000E, approximately 800 m along strike to the west of the Alligator Zone, to test the potential for uranium mineralization along the up-dip projection of a graphitic structure intersected at depth in historical drill hole WF-50. All three drill holes successfully identified high-grade uranium mineralization, highlighted by hole WF-68, which returned 5.91% eU 3 O 8 over 3.9 metres. The mineralized intersections are illustrated in Figure 1 and summarized in Table 1 below. Table 1 2022 Waterfound River Winter Exploration Drilling Highlights Drill Hole From (m) To (m) Length (m)(1) eU 3 O 8 (%)(2) WF-67(3,4) 474.1 488.3 14.2 0.73 WF-68(3,4) 459.7 462.0 2.3 0.66 WF-68(3,4) 467.1 470.3 3.2 0.97 WF-68(3,4) 473.7 477.6 3.9 5.91 including(5) 476.2 476.9 0.7 25.3 WF-68-1(3,4) 464.2 472.2 8.0 0.87 WF-68-1(3,4) 474.0 476.4 2.4 0.31 WF-68-1(3,4) 480.3 482.7 2.4 2.20 Notes: (1) Lengths indicated represent the down-hole length of mineralized intersections. (2) Radiometric equivalent U 3 O 8 ("eU 3 O 8 ") derived from a calibrated gamma downhole probe (3) WF-67 was drilled at an azimuth of 154 and a dip of -70.0, WF-68, was drilled at an azimuth of 154 and a dip of -71.5, and WF-68-1 was drilled at an azimuth of 154 and a dip of -73.5. (4) Mineralized interval is composited above a cut-off grade of 0.05% eU 3 O 8 (5) Mineralized interval is composited above a cut-off grade of 10.0% eU 3 O 8 The 2022 exploration program was designed to test for the potential expansion of previously discovered mineralization in the Alligator Zone, as well as to test for new mineralization in the surrounding area along the La Rocque conductive corridor (see Figure 2). The program was planned to occur during both the winter and summer drilling seasons with approximately 7,400 metres of diamond drilling in an estimated 12 drill holes. Six diamond drill holes, totalling 3,175.4 metres, were completed as part of the winter drill program. The first two drill holes of the winter program (WF-64 and WF-65) were completed on the eastern end of the property to test the D-1 conductor, located within the La Rocque conductive corridor. While each of these holes encountered elevated radioactivity at the unconformity, no mineralization above a 0.05% eU 3 O 8 cut-off was identified. WF-66, the third drill hole of the winter program, was drilled to test the D-1 conductor approximately 500 metres west of the Alligator Zone. WF-66 failed to intersect significantly elevated radioactivity. The final three drill holes (WF-67, WF-68, and WF-68-1), as described above, were successful in intersecting significant uranium mineralization associated with the D-1 conductor, which lies within the La Rocque conductive corridor. This newly identified mineralization remains open along strike in both directions. Additional drilling to test the extent of mineralization is expected to be completed during the planned summer exploration drilling program. Radiometric Equivalent Grades, Sampling, Analysis and Data Verification Following the completion of a drill hole, the hole is radiometrically logged using a downhole slimline gamma probe, which collects continuous readings of radioactivity along the length of the drill hole. Probe results are then calibrated using an algorithm calculated from the comparison of probe results against geochemical analyses in the area. The gamma-log results provide an immediate radiometric equivalent uranium value (eU%, then converted to eU 3 O 8 %) for the hole, which, except in very high-grade zones, is reasonably accurate. The Company typically reports eU 3 O 8 , as a preliminary result and subsequently reports definitive assay grades following sampling and chemical analysis of the mineralized drill core. Assay sample intervals are generally 50 centimetres long, except where higher or lower grade mineralization boundaries fall within the interval. In that case, two 25 centimetre samples are collected. Flank samples of 1.0 metre are always collected where mineralization is located. Systematic geochemistry samples are collected every 10 metres down the hole. All assayed core is split in half, with one half retained and the other sent to the SRC Geoanalytical Laboratory in Saskatoon for analysis. Control samples are routinely assayed with each batch of core samples analyzed. About Waterfound River The Waterfound River property is located within the eastern portion of the Athabasca Basin region of northern Saskatchewan, approximately 40 kilometres northwest of Denison's 22.5% owned McClean Lake mill. The Waterfound JV is an unincorporated contractual arrangement between Orano Canada (62.4223%), Denison Mines Inc. (11.7767%), and JCU (25.8010%). Denison holds an effective 24.6772% ownership interest in the Waterfound JV through its direct interest in the joint venture and its 50% ownership of JCU. About Denison Denison is a uranium exploration and development company with interests focused in the Athabasca Basin region of northern Saskatchewan, Canada. The Company has an effective 95% interest in its flagship Wheeler River Uranium Project, which is the largest undeveloped uranium project in the infrastructure rich eastern portion of the Athabasca Basin region of northern Saskatchewan. Denison's interests in the Athabasca Basin also include a 22.5% ownership interest in the McClean Lake joint venture, which includes several uranium deposits and the McClean Lake uranium mill that is contracted to process the ore from the Cigar Lake mine under a toll milling agreement, plus a 25.17% interest in the Midwest Main and Midwest A deposits, and a 66.90% interest in the Tthe Heldeth Tue ("THT," formerly J Zone) and Huskie deposits on the Waterbury Lake property. The Midwest Main, Midwest A, THT and Huskie deposits are each located within 20 kilometres of the McClean Lake mill. Through its 50% ownership of JCU, Denison holds additional interests in various uranium project joint ventures in Canada, including the Millennium project (JCU 30.099%), the Kiggavik project (JCU 33.8123%) and Christie Lake (JCU 34.4508%). Denison's exploration portfolio includes further interests in properties covering ~300,000 hectares in the Athabasca Basin region. Denison is also engaged in post-closure mine care and maintenance services through its Closed Mines group (formerly Denison Environmental Services), which manages Denison's reclaimed mine sites in the Elliot Lake region and provides related services to certain third-party projects. Follow Denison on Twitter @DenisonMinesCo Qualified Persons The technical information contained in this release has been reviewed and approved by Mr. Andrew Yackulic, P. Geo., Denison's Director, Exploration, who is a Qualified Person in accordance with the requirements of NI 43-101. Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Certain information contained in this news release constitutes 'forward-looking information', within the meaning of the applicable United States and Canadian legislation, concerning the business, operations and financial performance and condition of Denison. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as 'plans', 'expects', 'budget', 'scheduled', 'estimates', 'forecasts', 'intends', 'anticipates', or 'believes', or the negatives and/or variations of such words and phrases, or state that certain actions, events or results 'may', 'could', 'would', 'might' or 'will be taken', 'occur', 'be achieved' or 'has the potential to'. In particular, this news release contains forward-looking information pertaining to the following: the interpretation of exploration results and expectations with respect thereto, including the interpretation of the results from the Waterfound River exploration program undertaken by Orano Canada, underlying assumptions and the Waterfound JV's intentions with respect thereto; exploration plans and objectives; and expectations regarding its joint venture ownership interests and the continuity of its agreements with its partners. Forward looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made, and they are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Denison to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. For example, the modelling and assumptions upon which the interpretation of results are based may not be maintained after further testing or be representative of actual conditions. Denison believes that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be accurate and results may differ materially from those anticipated in this forward-looking information. For a discussion in respect of risks and other factors that could influence forward-looking events, please refer to the factors discussed in Denison's Annual Information Form dated March 26, 2021 or subsequent quarterly financial reports under the heading 'Risk Factors'. These factors are not, and should not be construed as being exhaustive. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. Any forward-looking information and the assumptions made with respect thereto speaks only as of the date of this news release. Denison does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking information after the date of this news release to conform such information to actual results or to changes in Denison's expectations except as otherwise required by applicable legislation. Figure 1 Location Waterfound River JV Figure 2 2022 Winter Exploration Drilling Alligator Extension SOURCE Denison Mines Corp. Honoring Dickies' blue collar, American roots that have made the brand readily adopted globally, the Made in Dickies campaign will kick off by debuting digital, social and short-form video content on multiple platforms throughout North America, Asia-Pacific and Europe. Content will feature four real world individuals that encapsulate the Dickies brand: Michelle Cross, long-haul truck driver; LuLu Salas, farmer; Colleen Winfough, restaurant server; Jo Limmori, electrician and Maurice Dedeaux, cleaner. The campaign's creative elements are geared toward celebrating 100 years of Dickies through the individuals that not only built the brand, but the world in which we live. "Reaching this major milestone has led us to evaluate and examine what has made Dickies a household name for 100 years," said Denny Bruce, Global Brand President, Dickies. "Dickies represents more than just clothing. The brand embodies hardworking people around the world and has transcended into a unique position of cultural relevance. This anniversary represents not only the evolution of Dickies thus far, but the people who've made the brand what it is today." To amplify the Made in Dickies campaign, Dickies will launch several global consumer activations throughout 2022, marking the brand's heritage in workwear and its adoption into the lifestyle market through a 100th celebratory collection, a documentary, a limited-edition collectible, and a premium digital shopping experience. The 100 th Collection: An apparel collection that revisits and reimagines Dickies' heritage pieces including denim overalls, pants and chore coat; a khaki matched set; and 100 th graphic t-shirts. An apparel collection that revisits and reimagines Dickies' heritage pieces including denim overalls, pants and chore coat; a khaki matched set; and 100 graphic t-shirts. Community-Focused Documentary: In partnership with VICE TV, Dickies will unveil a community-focused documentary profiling subcultures and communities across the U.S. that do not quite make into history books but actively honor their heritage while holding on to their legacy. In partnership with VICE TV, Dickies will unveil a community-focused documentary profiling subcultures and communities across the U.S. that do not quite make into history books but actively honor their heritage while holding on to their legacy. Special Edition Book: Artist and illustrator, Lucas Beaufort , has hand painted custom illustrations over top of archival imagery featuring iconic apparel, workers and vintage advertising for a limited-edition book celebrating Dickies from 1922 through today. Artist and illustrator, , has hand painted custom illustrations over top of archival imagery featuring iconic apparel, workers and vintage advertising for a limited-edition book celebrating Dickies from 1922 through today. Digital Maker Marketplace: Dickies will launch the brand's first ever digital maker marketplace, allowing consumers access to a curated selection of Dickies' most iconic products, reworked and reimagined by newly established creatives. Dickies has partnered with global creative agency This Here to produce Made in Dickies and the global amplification events supporting the 100th anniversary. More information regarding specific activations will be made available over the coming months. For more information on Dickies, follow the brand on Instagram and TikTok @dickies and visit the brand's website dickies.com. About the Dickies Brand Founded in 1922 in Fort Worth, Texas, Dickies has stood alongside generations of proud workers, equipping them with the tough, durable workwear that has enabled them to make and shape our world. A brand of VF Corporation, Dickies has grown to represent a global community of people who have taken inspiration from the traditional world of work and made it their own. For 100 years and available in over 100 countries, what began as a humble workwear company has grown into a worldwide force, weaving together cultural movements with a rigorous commitment to straightforward style and long-lasting ingenuity. For more information, please visit dickies.com. SOURCE Dickies 45th President says Biden Administration foreign policy decisions influenced by Hunter Biden's, President Joe Biden's financial interests CENTENNIAL, Colo., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- President Donald Trump accused the Biden family of corruption on Tuesday in an exclusive interview with investigative journalist John Solomon and Amanda Head that will air on the rapidly growing Real America's Voice network on Tuesday, March 29 at 6pm EST. Trump highlighted ties between Hunter Biden and Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina. "She gave him $3.5 million, so now I would think Putin would know the answer to [why]," said Trump. "I think he should release it." The 45th President also suggested that the Biden family's financial interests are driving foreign policy decisions regarding China. "Don't forget his son manages $1.5 billion of money, even though the biggest people on Wall Street can't do that," Trump said after Solomon raised President Biden's decision to end President Trump's counter-espionage program designed to protect America from Chinese spies. President Trump also stressed the importance of the upcoming midterm elections. "We don't have a free press, we really don't have free speech anymore, it's very bad," he said. "These elections are going to be absolutely critical for this country." WATCH the exclusive interview with PRESIDENT TRUMP on Tuesday, March 29 at 6:00 pm EST. Stream online at http://realamericasvoice.com or on DISH Ch. 219, Pluto TV Ch. 240, Samsung TV Plus Ch. 1029, The Roku Channel Ch. 175, SelectTV Ch. 106, as well as Apple TV, Fire TV, and Roku streaming devices. ABOUT REAL AMERICA'S VOICE Real America's Voice delivers exciting live-event coverage seven days a week across a growing list of powerful content distribution channels. You can watch all Real America's Voice programming at http://realamericasvoice.com/ or by downloading the app on Apple or Android . Real America's Voice is also available on DISH Network, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Pluto TV, Samsung TV Plus, SelectTV, and Roku. SOURCE Real Americas Voice IMF says such taxes are still in their infancy in most emerging market and low-income countries. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has urged Nigeria and other developing economies to raise significant amounts of revenue from personal income tax. The tax--levied on wages, salaries, and other income--is a suitable instrument for revenue generation in developing countries where many people earn a living at low incomes, the IMF said in a blogpost titled 'Personal Income Tax Has Untapped Potential in Poorer Countries.' The Washington-based lender added that PIT is a suitable instrument for countries aiming to achieve a durable economic recovery from the pandemic. In addition to bringing in revenue, the IMF said that tax "is progressive--imposing steeper rates on those with a higher income--and reduces inequality measurably." In most emerging market and low-income countries, the IMF said, such taxes are still in their infancy. "Revenue from this source averages only 2.5 percent of GDP in these countries, in part because of their narrow tax base, and it does little to lessen inequality," it said. "But gradual changes have been taking place. In the two decades preceding the pandemic, income tax revenue more than doubled in low-income countries, rising from the equivalent of 1 percent of GDP to 2.1 percent, while emerging markets saw an increase from 2.1 percent to 3.1 percent. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Nigeria Business By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. "These were also reflected in (the) share of the tax in overall tax intake, which went from 5 percent to 8 percent of total tax revenue in low-income countries and from 9 percent to 11 percent in emerging markets." The IMF said that policy changes have targeted top and bottom statutory rates as well as the level of exempt income, even though it hasn't contributed much to the increase in revenue in low-income countries. "And in emerging market economies, this shift has sometimes actually reduced revenue. This is the case in part because many emerging markets have introduced flat tax systems with low rates and those with progressive schedules have reduced rates over the last two decades," it said. "Economic variables, on the other hand, played a very important role. We looked at increases in per capita incomes and the size of the public-sector wage bill and the reduction in the size of the informal sector, as measured by the share of self-employed workers in the labor force and the share of agriculture in the economy. "These developments have clearly been the driving force behind the growth in personal income tax revenues. As economies develop, we can expect this tax to take on greater importance." The IMF added that improvements in tax administration also potentially play a role in boosting revenues, though that also extends to other taxes. The accelerated shift into digitalized services because of the pandemic can pave the way for better income tax design and enforcement, it added. Drinkable Gifts launches Spanish site plus more corporate gift options, including custom wine, champagne, and beer baskets to ensure customer inclusivity ARLINGTON, Mass., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In a recent announcement from Drinkable Gifts, the company has launched a new Spanish division of the popular international alcohol delivery service. With the ultimate goal of providing more inclusivity to their customers, DrinkableGifts.com now offers the availability for their Spanish-speaking customers to browse their site in their native language. Drinkable Gifts has always boasted a multi-lingual 24/7 support team. The launch of their Spanish site is proof to customers that the Drinkable Gifts brand delivers excellent quality spirits and an equally impressive user experience. The company states that this is just the start of its improvements for 2022. DrinkableGifts.com is an A-ranked, BBB-accredited company based in the United States, specializing in delivering high-quality alcohol gifts to over 175 countries. You get the fastest international alcohol delivery at Drinkable Gifts without dealing with customs. Gift Experts are ready 24/7 to help you with any question you might have about an order. Learn more at www.DrinkableGifts.com The highly requested Spanish Drinkable Gifts site was launched in 2021, making it easier for native Spanish speakers to ship gifts internationally for every occasion. The company even launched an accompanying Spanish Facebook and Spanish Instagram page to give customers content and contests in their language. Along with their new website launch, Drinkable Gifts has also announced their addition of custom wine, champagne, beer baskets. With the ability for companies to customize their gifts, corporate clients can now decide if they want to send a pre-made basket, or hand-select their recipient's gifts. Backed by a team with nearly two decades of international gift-giving experience, Drinkable Gifts is a leader in providing a unique shopping experience from beginning to end. Their mission is to help you impress VIPs with quality wine, beer, and spirits, anytime, while making the process of shopping for international gifts as easy as possible. DrinkableGifts.com boasts that it can deliver wine, beer, and spirits to 175 countries around the world. With a 5-star rating on Facebook, a 4.8-star rating on Google, and a 4.6-star rating on Trust Pilot, it seems clear that they can more than deliver. The most consistent feedback in these reviews is just how easy it is to send liquor gifts to friends, family, and business associates worldwide using the site. But good isn't good enough for DrinkableGifts.com. The company has also invested in creating new customizable baskets for their corporate clients, allowing customers to choose between already established options and create their own gifts. With fast and reliable delivery, corporate customers can send gifts around the globe in just a few days. With DrinkableGifts.com bulk order form, sending to multiple countries, addresses, and recipients is just as simple. Businesses big and small looking to send birthday or appreciation gifts to employees and VIPs can rest easy knowing that Drinkable Gifts has an Address Request feature . In short, the team at Drinkable Gifts will create a custom landing page for your company that you can then send to your recipient to collect everything needed to send them a gift. Including preferred delivery dates and allergies to avoid! So long as you know your recipients' cell phone number or email address, the team at Drinkable Gifts can help you send a bottle (or two) of their favorite wine, beer, or liquor right to their door. From rich beer and bubbly champagne to crisp bourbon, Drinkable Gifts makes it easy to send global liquor delivery at the click of a button. With a variety of deals, languages, and tools, ordering is both easy and seamless whether you need to order one person gift or hundreds for your company. About DrinkableGifts.com DrinkableGifts.com is an A-ranked, BBB-accredited company based in the United States, specializing in delivering high-quality alcohol gifts to over 175 countries. You get the fastest international alcohol delivery at Drinkable Gifts without dealing with customs. Gift Experts are ready 24/7 to help you with any question you might have about an order. Learn more at www.DrinkableGifts.com For more information, contact Shannon Youngblood at [email protected] or 1-855-210-6640. SOURCE DrinkableGifts.com She Previously Headed Company's Global Sales and Marketing Operations FREMONT, Calif., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Durabook, the global rugged mobile solutions brand owned by Twinhead International Corporation, announced today that Sasha Wang had been named President of Durabook Americas, Inc, the business division which specifically and exclusively serves the commercial sector of North America. Sasha Wang has been named President of Durabook Americas, Inc, the business division of Durabook which specifically and exclusively serves the commercial sector of North America. "It is always exciting to introduce a new and proven leader for our team," commented Fred Kao, CEO of Twinhead International Corporation, the parent company of Durabook Americas. "With her sales and marketing acumen, Miss Wang will take charge to further our progress in the commercial sector of North America as we continue to expand our presence. I am confident that Durabook America will be able to bring benefits of our superior products/services offering to even more customers under her watch." A seasoned veteran in the rugged-computer industry for 15 years, Miss Wang has been an integral part of the Durabook family since July 2018. Serving as Durabook's Director of Global Sales and Marketing while overseeing product-planning in the company's Taiwan headquarter, she has revamped Durabook's product line and spearheaded tremendous growth globally. "I am really excited for the opportunity to lead Durabook Americas, which is a vital part of our organization," Wang said. "My main focus at the current stage will be enhancing brand awareness and image, developing solutions suitable for the American vertical markets, building closer relationships with existing channels, and increasing activities with key industry partners." With the announcement, Durabook also pledged to continue providing top performance, high quality, and cost-effective ruggedized mobile systems to all American commercial customers to enhance productivity, eliminate downtime, and deliver unmatched total cost of ownership. ABOUT DURABOOK AMERICAS Durabook has been the core brand of Twinhead International Corporation in Taiwan, a world-renowned manufacturer of rugged mobile solutions for more than 30 years. All Durabook devices are designed, manufactured, and tested to the highest standards to ensure maximum quality and reliability. Committed to engineering and service excellence, Durabook products have been widely adopted by government and enterprise customers, including oil and gas, utilities, field service, military, and public safety for more than a decade. For more information, visit www.durabook.com/us. PR Contact: Rita Lee Copernio (714) 891-3660 [email protected] SOURCE Durabook Leveraging The Work Number Database to Deliver Digital Employment and Income Verifications for More Employers and Their Employees ATLANTA, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As a part of the company's continued effort to expand the benefits of automated verifications to businesses of all sizes, Equifax (NYSE: EFX) announced a new integration between The Work Number and Apex HCM , a leader in human capital management technology for payroll service bureaus. Business owners often must fulfill HR functions such as providing verifiers with employment and income history for current or past employees who are applying for a home mortgage, an auto loan, social service benefits, or other financial services. With the new integration between Apex and The Work Number, business owners can spend less time responding to requests from verifiers and more time growing their businesses. "Apex delivers great value to its customers by focusing on ease of use and efficiency," said Joe Muchnick, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Employer Services and Talent Solutions at Equifax Workforce Solutions. "Through this new integration with The Work Number, Apex payroll service bureau customers can now help their clients realize efficiencies in a whole new way, through employment and income verifications." The Work Number database is the industry-leading, centralized commercial repository of income and employment data in the United States, with 136 million active payroll records. Its streamlined, transparent and automated service helps credentialed verifiers with permissible purpose complete the instant verifications that employees count on when applying for financial services or social service benefits. "We're thrilled to provide our payroll technology to enable our service bureau customers in offering income and employment verifications to their employer customers," said Wes Muschara, Vice President of Product Management for Apex HCM. "The Work Number from Equifax is the type of value-added service that aligns with Apex principles of being the easiest to use and driving efficiencies for our service bureaus and their clients. The most important aspect of this partnership is the impact to the employee experience for all employees on our platform. They get the timely income and employment verifications needed to go about their personal financial lives." The integrated verification service is available at no cost to Apex HCM clients. More information on The Work Number service can be found here . About Equifax Inc. At Equifax (NYSE: EFX), we believe knowledge drives progress. As a global data, analytics, and technology company, we play an essential role in the global economy by helping financial institutions, companies, employers, and government agencies make critical decisions with greater confidence. Our unique blend of differentiated data, analytics, and cloud technology drives insights to power decisions to move people forward. Headquartered in Atlanta and supported by more than 13,000 employees worldwide, Equifax operates or has investments in 25 countries in North America, Central and South America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. For more information, visit Equifax.com . About Apex HCM Apex HCM is a market leader in licensing cloud-based payroll and HR software technology and over 300 payroll service firms and vendors nationally use Apex's technology as the core of their business foundation. Apex's customizable, comprehensive suite of products and services include payroll, payroll tax, human capital management, applicant tracking and onboarding, time and attendance, reporting, manager and employee self-service, ACA compliance, mobile apps, workers' compensation, payroll debit cards and other business management tools normally reserved for large enterprises, now available to any business size. Apex's cutting-edge, cloud-based technology allows its customers to effectively compete feature-for-feature with larger established firms while dramatically improving their workforce productivity. FOR MORE INFORMATION Daniel Jenkins for Equifax: [email protected] Visit https://apexhcm.com or call 877-750-APEX (2739). SOURCE Equifax Inc. "FCP is excited to partner with Crescent Communities on this exciting new development," said FCP's Bruce Gago , who heads the firm's Florida office. "Sarasota has experienced strong job growth and continued substantial in-migration that has only accelerated during the pandemic. The new apartments will help alleviate the significant housing shortage in Sarasota County, while providing its residents with a best-in-class living experience and amenities." "We are excited to continue the evolution of our multifamily products by introducing RENDER to the Florida market," said Tim Graff, Managing Director of Florida for Crescent Communities' multifamily business. "RENDER offers residents thoughtfully crafted communities that are rich in character at a more approachable price point. RENDER Legacy Trail will be part of a larger master-planned community with additional residential offerings, including the forthcoming HARMON Legacy Trail, Crescent Communities' BTR (build-to-rent) offering, and more than five acres of future retail space." RENDER Legacy Trail will provide residents with rapid access to the recreational and amenity features that have attracted so many people to the area. The property has direct access to the Legacy Trail, a continuous 20-mile recreational trail that connects downtown Sarasota with downtown Venice, and winds through Oscar Scherer State Park, a lush 1,400-acre nature preserve. Nokomis Beach, a tranquil white-sand seashore, is just a few miles from the community. The new 65-acre Sarasota Memorial Healthcare Venice Campus is less than five miles from the property and local arterials provide easy drives to many employment centers in the region. Community amenities will focus on delivering what matters most to residents and their needs and encouraging a highly social and energetic environment. Offerings will include a centralized lobby and leasing area, self-service package area, fitness center, and multipurpose rooms that can serve as coworking lounges. Abundant outdoor space will provide opportunities for residents to grill, dine, socialize, swim, and relax. Residences at RENDER Legacy Trail will feature functional design elements that will intentionally contribute to the space's overall feel of a home, rather than a typical apartment unit. These details will include entryway mudrooms with built-in storage, home office workspaces separate from the living room and kitchen, and enhanced closet systems to provide added in-home organization. Configurations from one- to three- bedrooms will be available. About FCP FCP is a privately held real estate investment company that has invested in or financed more than $9.3 billion in assets since its founding in 1999. FCP invests directly and with operating partners in commercial and residential assets. The firm makes equity and mezzanine investments in income-producing and development properties. Based in Chevy Chase, MD, FCP invests both its commingled, discretionary funds and separate accounts targeted at major real estate markets in the United States. For further information on FCP, please visit www.fcpdc.com. About Crescent Communities Crescent Communities is a nationally recognized, market-leading real estate investor, developer, and operator of mixed-use communities. We create high-quality, differentiated residential and commercial communities in many of the fastest growing markets in the United States. Since 1963, our development portfolio has included more than 74 multifamily communities, 24 million square feet of commercial space and 60 single family master-planned communities. Crescent Communities has offices in Charlotte, DC, Atlanta, Orlando, Nashville, Dallas, Denver, Phoenix and Salt Lake City. Our residential communities are branded NOVEL, RENDER and HARMON by Crescent Communities and our industrial developments are branded AXIAL by Crescent Communities. FCP Media Contact: Karen Widmayer KW Communications, LLC [email protected] 301-661-1448 SOURCE FCP The demonstrations involve surveillance of campus grounds, building monitoring and last-mile deliveries. EINDHOVEN, Netherlands, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- /PRNewswire/ -- Flying Forward 2020 (FF2020) , an innovation and research project focusing on Urban Air Mobility solutions and funded by the European Union, will initiate autonomous drone demonstrations on High Tech Campus Eindhoven (HTCE) . In the last year, FF2020 has been developing solutions that will be tested in five living labs, starting in Eindhoven and continued in Milan, Zaragoza, Tartu and Oulu enabling an open dialogue with stakeholders, end-users and citizens to improve upon processes, results and impact. Demonstrations on High Tech Campus Eindhoven will run from the end of March until September of this year. A campus-based ecosystem of over 250 high-tech companies, HTCE is one of twelve FF2020 consortium partners and is considered by many to be the smartest square kilometre in Europe. The organisation is home to more than 12,000 innovators, researchers, and engineers who develop new technologies and applications to help solve social problems and challenges and successfully bring them to the market. About the objective of their participation in the project, Paul van Son, Innovation Manager at High Tech Campus Eindhoven, stated: "As campus, we create the perfect environment for innovation for both our residents and our suppliers. With the Flying Forward 2020 project, we develop both: a living lab for high-tech companies related to the drone industry, and a pilot environment for our suppliers to experiment with the use of drones for the services they provide on campus. Besides this, it helps us create the digital infrastructure needed for the development of spacial web applications, an enabler for future Metaverse developments." Five use cases will be tested on campus. The first one focuses on security, for which drones will be used to conduct surveillance of the premises to assist security personnel. The second use case involves building monitoring by drones, which will scan and inspect buildings to assess their condition. The other three use cases relate to last-mile delivery of goods such as meals, packages and Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) to the rural part of campus. According to Ted van Hoof, Urban Air Mobility Project Manager at High Tech Campus Eindhoven: "HTCE is the first living lab in this research and innovation project to perform tests and demonstrations. It is also one of the first sites in Europe that is experimenting with Urban Air Mobility and experiencing multiple drones flying autonomously to perform specific tasks. At this point, any knowledge we gain from these tests will contribute to making a step forward that will benefit others in this field as well. I hope that the use cases on campus will help improve UAM solutions so that European citizens can see drones flying above them safely and the added value of these advancements to their everyday lives within the next decade or so." In June 2022, FF2020 will hold an event in the city of Eindhoven to showcase the results achieved by their first living lab. Members of the project will present the innovative solutions being developed within the consortium, and networking opportunities will be provided to a delegation of the Dutch Urban Air Mobility ecosystem and press. Ultimately, it will be a day to celebrate a vital project milestone made possible by the project partners, including High Tech Campus Eindhoven. To learn more about the FF2020 project, events or to become part of the UAM ecosystem, please visit www.ff2020.eu . For more information about the demonstrations taking place on HTCE, go to https://www.hightechcampus.com/ff2020 . For media inquiries about FF2020, please get in touch with Nathy Ercol at [email protected] . About Flying Forward 2020 Flying Forward 2020 (FF2020) is a three-year research and innovation project funded by the European Union, under grant agreement number 101006828. The project focuses on developing a new Urban Air Mobility (UAM) ecosystem by incorporating this new form of mobility within the geospatial data infrastructure of cities. FF2020 is creating an entire state of the art geospatial UAM ecosystem. It includes a governance model and framework, a regulatory framework, a geospatial digital infrastructure, a Digital Toolbox, an Identity of Things (IDoT) scheme, and several interoperability frameworks. The solutions developed during the project will be tested in five living labs across Europe: Eindhoven, Milan, Zaragoza, Tartu and Oulu. For more information, visit www.ff2020.eu . Media Contact: Nathy Ercol [email protected] +31 6 19807149 SOURCE Flying Forward 2020 RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Global aviation leaders will unite in Riyadh for Saudi Arabia's first-ever Future Aviation Forum. The two-day event, happening May 9th, will unite leaders from the public and business sectors, international CEOs, and regulators to shape the evolution of international air travel and drive forward solutions in a post-pandemic world. Hosted by the General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA), the Forum will feature more than 120 speakers, with over 2,000 attendees and representatives from every continent expected to attend. Delegates are invited to attend 40 sessions, focusing on three core thematic pillars: passenger experience, sustainability, and business recovery post-Covid. "The Future Aviation Forum will be a pivotal moment for the global aviation sector. We will bring together the brightest minds from around the world to forge solutions for how the sector can recover from the Covid-19 pandemic, transform the passenger experience, and invest in innovations that will lower carbon emissions and reduce environmental impact," said Saleh bin Nasser Al-Jasser, Saudi Arabia's Minister of Transport and Logistics. Saudi Arabia's transport and logistics sector, a major pillar of the Vision 2030 economic transformation plan, is undergoing rapid development. The Kingdom aims to generate 356 billion SAR or just under $100 billion USD in investment into its aviation sector by 2030 to make Saudi Arabia a global aviation hub. GACA's National Aviation Sector Strategy (NASS) aims to increase air connectivity to 250 destinations, reaching 330 million passengers, and to double air cargo capacity to 4.5 million tons. The Kingdom also has plans to launch a new national airline to complement its existing national carriers, Saudia, Flynas and Flyadeal, and to build a major new international airport in Riyadh, in addition to eight new regional airports. GACA is coordinating closely with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the Montreal-based UN agency responsible for fostering the planning and development of the air transport industry globally. ICAO Council President Salvatore Sciacchitano said the Forum comes at a critical time for the global aviation sector. "Global cooperation across the aviation sector is needed now more than ever. We must work together to build greater resilience to future health crises, to rethink and modernize every step of the passenger journey, and to ensure the sustainability of aviation in the face of the climate emergency. I look forward to the coming together of the industry's top leaders in Riyadh at the Future Aviation Forum, where we can collaborate to drive the ambition, innovation and policymaking needed to ensure a promising future for the industry," said Sciacchitano. As part of the broader transformation of its aviation sector, Saudi Arabia is also moving towards corporatizing its airports. Earlier this year, GACA and Matarat Holding Company announced the completion of an institutional transformation of 25 of the Kingdom's airports. This included the creation of the Airports Cluster 2 Company, which will manage and operate 22 airports, bringing oversight for construction, operation, and management under one roof. The goal is to improve service, integrate international best practices in airport management and increase competitiveness. Investment and commercial opportunities in the sector, including airports, freight, catering, maintenance and ground services, will be opened to local and foreign investors in the near future. "The scale of opportunity for the aviation world in Saudi Arabia is unprecedented. The Future Aviation Forum is an opportunity to participate from the outset in Saudi Arabia's rapid emergence as the Middle East's preeminent aviation hub," said GACA President Abdulaziz Al-Duailej. Al-Duailej said he hopes the Future Aviation Forum will facilitate business deals and mobilize the investment needed to propel the industry into the future. "The Forum will drive business deals and mobilize funding for innovation to make the industry economically and environmentally sustainable. We invite key players from the aviation world to Saudi Arabia so that together we can drive solutions that will allow the global sector to thrive in the years to come." You can find all the news of the General Authority of Civil Aviation in the media center on our website. SOURCE General Authority of Civil Aviation DUBLIN, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Biometrics for Banking and Financial Services - Global Market Trajectory & Analytics" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. Global Biometrics for Banking and Financial Services Market to Reach $8.9 Billion by 2026 The global market for Biometrics for Banking and Financial Services estimated at US$4.4 Billion in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$8.9 Billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 12.8% over the analysis period. The turn of next decade is expected to be more challenging for banks and financial institutions as security breaches become more sophisticated with technology advancements. Money laundering has become more widespread representing about 2%-5% of global GDP. One of the measures being actively pursued by banks is biometrics, since the technology assists in the creation of secure banking environment by reducing instances of identity fraud, establishing audit trail of transactions, and protecting financial data. The shift towards biometrics is also being driven by the inability of traditional security measures such as PINs, passwords and tokens to effectively offer protection, particularly against the growing sophistication of intruder attacks. The growing realization among banking customers about inadequacies of PINs and passwords in offering protection against sophisticated bank frauds and online threats is leading to high demand for strong security solutions such as those involving biometrics. Further, steady increase in the number of password hacks in recent times reflects inadequate security associated with the use of passwords as access method. Driven by the growing need to offer protection against the rising instances of fraudulent transactions and identity thefts along with the ever-widening scale of frauds, banks are opting to invest into strong authentication measures. Fingerprint Biometrics, one of the segments analyzed in the report, is projected to grow at a 13.4% CAGR to reach US$6.2 Billion by the end of the analysis period. After a thorough analysis of the business implications of the pandemic and its induced economic crisis, growth in the Face Biometrics segment is readjusted to a revised 11.6% CAGR for the next 7-year period. This segment currently accounts for a 22.8% share of the global Biometrics for Banking and Financial Services market. The U.S. Market is Estimated at $1 Billion in 2021, While China is Forecast to Reach $1.8 Billion by 2026 The Biometrics for Banking and Financial Services market in the U.S. is estimated at US$1 Billion in the year 2021. The country currently accounts for a 22.84% share in the global market. China, the world second largest economy, is forecast to reach an estimated market size of US$1.8 Billion in the year 2026 trailing a CAGR of 17.1% through the analysis period. Among the other noteworthy geographic markets are Japan and Canada, each forecast to grow at 7.6% and 9.9% respectively over the analysis period. Within Europe, Germany is forecast to grow at approximately 10.9% CAGR while Rest of European market (as defined in the study) will reach US$2.2 Billion by the close of the analysis period. Global market for biometrics in BFSI sector continues to grow at a robust rate driven by the increasing focus of BFSI companies on offering highest security to customer transactions through use of biometrics-based authentication measures. The use of biometrics technology has the potential to reduce instances of fraud attributed to identity duplication. As consumer preferences change and new payment methods are introduced, banks are being compelled to move towards digital transformation of payments and cards operations. Technology advancements are also leading to an increase in number of forgeries and frauds, whereby the need for solution that cannot be replicated is gaining prominence in the banking and financial services industry. In the financial sector, the rise in fraudulent access to account due to increasing use of mobile and online banking services is enhancing the importance of access and identity management; governance of information security; and information security roadmap as important security initiatives implemented for financial organizations. However, growing complexity of threats and the lack of adequate budgets are challenging effective implementation of such security programs. Face Biometrics Segment to Reach $1.9 Billion by 2026 Face Biometrics utilizes unique facial characteristics to recognize and identify individuals. Face recognition is the most successful form of human surveillance and it includes the measurement of eyes, nose, mouth, and other facial features. Commercialization of face recognition systems increased owing to an upsurge in the usage of multimedia video technology. This technology is generally used for applications such as surveillance, screening, criminal and law enforcement that include kiosks and booking stations. It could be also used in passport issuance applications, driver`s licensing and registration of voters. Global market for Face Biometrics is estimated at US$996.6 Million in 2020, and is projected to reach US$1.9 Billion by 2026 reflecting a compounded annual growth rate of 11.6% over the analysis period. Key Topics Covered: I. METHODOLOGY II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1. MARKET OVERVIEW Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic and a Looming Global Recession Rising Focus on Identity Amidst the Pandemic Drives Changes in Biometrics Field Contactless Biometric Technologies to Make Gains Amidst COVID-19 Outbreak An Introduction to Biometrics Technology Types of Biometrics Technologies Biometrics: A Growing Solution to Address Financial Fraud and Security Breaches Growing Role of Biometrics in Banking and Financial Institutions Application of Biometrics Technology in Financial Services Sector Global Market Prospects & Outlook Fingerprint Scan Technology Leads, Vein Recognition Gains Traction Developing Economies Spearhead Adoption of Biometrics in BFSI Industry Competition Recent Market Activity 2. FOCUS ON SELECT PLAYERS (Total 63 Featured) AllTrust Networks Cyber-SIGN, Inc. Fujitsu Frontech North America, Inc. HID Global Corporation IDEMIA Ingenico Group SA Nuance Communications, Inc. Precise Biometrics AB Thales Group Verint VoiceVault 3. MARKET TRENDS & DRIVERS Digitization of Banking Services and Need for Stricter Identification Protocols to Prevent Security Breaches Drives Market Unreliability and Vulnerability of Traditional Authentication Methods Fuels Adoption of Biometrics Solutions Biometric Technology Vs Conventional ID Authentication Methods Biometrics Enable Banks to Improve Customer Engagement Levels Growing Adoption of Mobile Banking Spurs Opportunities for Biometrics Increasing Availability of Biometrics-Enabled Smartphones Transforms Mobile Banking Services Expanding Social Network Footprint of Financial Organizations: Opportunities for Biometrics Technology Biometric Payment Cards Propel Biometrics Adoption in BFSI Sector Biometrics Technology Facilitates Financial Inclusion of Unbanked Population Biometrics-based Authentication at ATMs on the Rise Future Financial Transactions to be Password-less, Contact-less and Friction-less Amidst Digital Transformation of Banking Operations, Behavioral Biometrics Witnesses Growth Keystroke Dynamics Authentication Overcomes Challenges Related to Conventional Authentication Methods Multi-Modal Biometrics Gain Momentum Biometric Multi-Factor Authentication: Providing Greater Security to Transactions Digital Onboarding Initiatives of Banks Present Favorable Outlook for Biometrics Technologies Voice Biometrics Continues to Gain Growth Contactless Iris Biometrics Technology Poised for Strong Growth Facial Recognition Growing in Popularity Banks See More Deployment of Vein Recognition Biometrics Dual Biometrics Finds Acceptance among Banks Identity Verification: A Major Growth Area for Biometrics Use in Banks Access Control: A Potential Application Area Fintech Banking Addresses Drawbacks of Conventional Banking On-Cloud Biometrics Gain Popularity Innovations in Biometrics for Banking and Financial Services Sector: A Review Select Innovations in Banking Biometrics Space Partnerships: Order of the day for BFSI Regulatory Mandates Promote Adoption Biometrics Technology in Banking Sector Challenges Facing Banks in Implementing Biometric Security Systems 4. GLOBAL MARKET PERSPECTIVE III. REGIONAL MARKET ANALYSIS IV. COMPETITION For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/fdc293 Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets SEATTLE, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- According to Coherent Market Insights, The global bromobenzene market was valued at US$ 57.6 Mn in 2020 and is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 5.4% during the forecast period (2021-2028). Key Trends and Analysis of the Global Bromobenzene Market: Players operating in the bromobenzene market are focused on various growth strategies such as capacity expansion in order to strengthen their market position and meet the increasing demand for bromobenzene. For instance, in September 2020, Cambridge Isotope Laboratories, Inc. (a U.S.-based manufacturer of stable isotopes and stable isotope-labeled compounds) announced the capacity expansion for its deuterated benzene plant located in Xenia, Ohio. The capacity expansion includes the addition of two new reactors. The capacity expansion will help Cambridge Isotope Laboratories to meet the increasing demand for bromobenzene solvents from the electronic and pharmaceutical markets. Increasing demand for Bromobenzene-d5 is expected to drive the bromobenzene market growth during forecast period. Bromobenzene-d5 is used in the manufacturing of electronic components and OLED displays. Additionally, pharmaceutical companies and CMOs (contract manufacturing organizations) utilize bromobenzene-d5 to manufacture deuterated active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Request Sample Copy of this Report @ https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/4984 Key Market Takeaways The global bromobenzene market is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 5.4% over the forecast period (2021-2028). Bromobenzene is used as an additive in motor oil. Growth of the automotive industry across the globe is expected to drive the demand for motor oil, which in turn, is expected to drive demand for bromobenzene during the forecast period. For instance, according to European Automobile Manufacturers Association, in June 2021, passenger car registrations in the European Union (EU) increased by 10.4% compared to the same month previous year. Germany posted the biggest gain with a 24.5% increase, followed by Spain (+17.1%) and Italy (+12.6%). Over the first half of 2021, EU demand for new cars grew by 25.2% to reach almost 5.4 million units registered in total. Major players operating in the global bromobenzene market include CM Fine Chemicals GmbH, Hawks Chemical Company, Hebei Yingong New Material Technology Co., Ltd., Heranba Industries Ltd., Jiangsu Dacheng Pharmaceutical and Chemical Co., Ltd., Luyunjia Chemistry Xiamen Limited, Merck KGaA, Mody Chemi-Pharma Limited, RX MARINE INTERNATIONAL, and Yancheng Longsheng Chemical Co., Ltd. Major players are opting strategies such as mergers, acquisitions, and capacity expansion, owing to rising demand for global bromobenzene market. For instance, In April 2021, In April, Heranba Industries Ltd. opened its office in Titanning District, Changzhous, Jiangsu, China. The new office helped Heranba Industries Ltd. To establish its presence in China. Request for Customization @ https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-customization/4984 Detailed Segmentation: Global Bromobenzene Market, By Product Type: Phenyl Magnesium Bromide Phencyclidine Others Global Bromobenzene Market, By Application: Grignard Reagent Solvents Organic Chemical Synthesis Additives Pharmaceutical Intermediate Others Global Bromobenzene Market, By Region: North America By Country: U.S. Canada Europe By Country: U.K. Germany Italy France Spain Russia Rest of Europe Asia Pacific By Country: China India Japan ASEAN Australia South Korea Rest of Asia Pacific Latin America By Country: Brazil Mexico Argentina Rest of Latin America Middle East & Africa By Country: GCC Countries Israel South Africa Rest of Middle East & Africa Buy this Complete Report Now @ https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/buy-now/4984 About Us: Coherent Market Insights is a global market intelligence and consulting organization focused on assisting our plethora of clients achieve transformational growth by helping them make critical business decisions. We are headquartered in India, having sales office at global financial capital in the U.S. and sales consultants in United Kingdom and Japan. Our client base includes players from across various business verticals in over 57 countries worldwide. We create value for clients through our highly reliable and accurate reports. We are also committed in playing a leading role in offering insights in various sectors post-COVID-19 and continue to deliver measurable, sustainable results for our clients. Contact Us: Mr. Shah Senior Client Partner Business Development Coherent Market Insights Phone: US: +1-206-701-6702 UK: +44-020-8133-4027 Japan: +81-050-5539-1737 India: +91-848-285-0837 Email: [email protected] Website: https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com Follow Us: LinkedIn | Twitter SOURCE Coherent Market Insights DUBLIN, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Data Center Switch Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2022-2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The global data center switch market reached a value of US$ 14.78 Billion in 2021. Looking forward, the publisher expects the market to reach a value of US$ 20.37 Billion by 2027 exhibiting a CAGR of 5.10% during 2022-2027. Keeping in mind the uncertainties of COVID-19, we are continuously tracking and evaluating the direct as well as the indirect influence of the pandemic on different end use sectors. These insights are included in the report as a major market contributor. Data center switches refer to high-performance switches that connect multiple devices on the same network within the data center. They connect the servers and build a network of shared resources that serve as a controller and allow the connected devices to share information and communicate. They can be deployed throughout the data center or to attach a two-tier (leaf-spine) or one-tier flat mesh or fabric architecture. They improve security, streamline operations, automate processes, and help manage application traffic flows in the cloud network efficiently. As a result, data center switches are widely utilized in data centers by large enterprises and cloud providers that heavily rely on virtualization. The escalating demand for simplified data center management and automation and the rising workload in data centers represent the primary factors driving the market growth. Besides this, a significant rise in internet multimedia content and web applications and the growing need for connectivity between large numbers of servers over different tiers are augmenting the product demand. Additionally, there has been a substantial increase in the cloud and data traffic moving from and within the data centers. Along with this, with the increasing demand for data, there has been a rise in the need for data centers. As a result, cloud vendors are emphasizing on commissioning numerous data center projects with significant investments, which, in turn, is catalyzing the market growth. Furthermore, the leading players are launching innovative data center switches integrated with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to expand their product portfolio and gain a competitive edge. Moreover, several favorable initiatives undertaken by governments of various countries, such as the introduction of regulations regarding localization of data centers and heavy investments toward the development of green data centers, are propelling the market growth. Other factors, including the emerging trend of bare-metal switches, growing demand for data and cloud services, recent advancements in edge and cloud computing, extensive research and development (R&D) activities, and increasing bandwidth requirements, are also creating a positive market outlook. Competitive Landscape: The competitive landscape of the industry has also been examined along with the profiles of the key players being Arista Networks Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Dell Technologies Inc., D-Link Corporation, Extreme Networks Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Juniper Networks Inc., New H3C Technologies Co. Ltd. (Tsinghua Unisplendour), Nvidia Corporation, Silicom Ltd. (Rad Group) and ZTE Corporation. Key Questions Answered in This Report: How has the global data center switch market performed so far and how will it perform in the coming years? What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the global data center switch market? What are the key regional markets? What is the breakup of the market based on the type? What is the breakup of the market based on the bandwidth? What is the breakup of the market based on the technology? What is the breakup of the market based on the end user? What are the various stages in the value chain of the industry? What are the key driving factors and challenges in the industry? What is the structure of the global data center switch market and who are the key players? What is the degree of competition in the industry? Key Topics Covered: 1 Preface 2 Scope and Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Introduction 4.1 Overview 4.2 Key Industry Trends 5 Global Data Center Switch Market 5.1 Market Overview 5.2 Market Performance 5.3 Impact of COVID-19 5.4 Market Forecast 6 Market Breakup by Type 6.1 Core Switches 6.1.1 Market Trends 6.1.2 Market Forecast 6.2 Distribution Switches 6.2.1 Market Trends 6.2.2 Market Forecast 6.3 Access Switches 6.3.1 Market Trends 6.3.2 Market Forecast 7 Market Breakup by Bandwidth 7.1 7.1.1 Market Trends 7.1.2 Market Forecast 7.2 >1 Gbps to <_0 />7.2.1 Market Trends 7.2.2 Market Forecast 7.3 >10 Gbps to <_0 />7.3.1 Market Trends 7.3.2 Market Forecast 7.4 >40 Gbps 7.4.1 Market Trends 7.4.2 Market Forecast 8 Market Breakup by Technology 8.1 Ethernet 8.1.1 Market Trends 8.1.2 Market Forecast 8.2 Fibre Channel 8.2.1 Market Trends 8.2.2 Market Forecast 8.3 InfiniBand 8.3.1 Market Trends 8.3.2 Market Forecast 9 Market Breakup by End User 9.1 Enterprises 9.1.1 Market Trends 9.1.2 Market Forecast 9.2 Telecommunications Industry 9.2.1 Market Trends 9.2.2 Market Forecast 9.3 Government Organizations 9.3.1 Market Trends 9.3.2 Market Forecast 9.4 Cloud Service Providers 9.4.1 Market Trends 9.4.2 Market Forecast 10 Market Breakup by Region 11 SWOT Analysis 12 Value Chain Analysis 13 Porters Five Forces Analysis 14 Price Analysis 15 Competitive Landscape 15.1 Market Structure 15.2 Key Players 15.3 Profiles of Key Players 15.3.1 Arista Networks Inc. 15.3.1.1 Company Overview 15.3.1.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.1.3 Financials 15.3.2 Cisco Systems Inc. 15.3.2.1 Company Overview 15.3.2.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.2.3 Financials 15.3.2.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.3 Dell Technologies Inc. 15.3.3.1 Company Overview 15.3.3.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.3.3 Financials 15.3.3.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.4 D-Link Corporation 15.3.4.1 Company Overview 15.3.4.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.4.3 Financials 15.3.5 Extreme Networks Inc. 15.3.5.1 Company Overview 15.3.5.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.5.3 Financials 15.3.5.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.6 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP 15.3.6.1 Company Overview 15.3.6.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.6.3 Financials 15.3.6.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.7 Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. 15.3.7.1 Company Overview 15.3.7.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.8 Juniper Networks Inc. 15.3.8.1 Company Overview 15.3.8.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.8.3 Financials 15.3.8.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.9 New H3C Technologies Co. Ltd. (Tsinghua Unisplendour) 15.3.9.1 Company Overview 15.3.9.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.10 Nvidia Corporation 15.3.10.1 Company Overview 15.3.10.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.10.3 Financials 15.3.10.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.11 Silicom Ltd. (Rad Group) 15.3.11.1 Company Overview 15.3.11.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.11.3 Financials 15.3.12 ZTE Corporation 15.3.12.1 Company Overview 15.3.12.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.12.3 Financials For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/varx71 Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets DUBLIN, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Extended Warranty Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2022-2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The global extended warranty market reached a value of US$ 121.5 Billion in 2021. Looking forward, the publisher expects the market to reach a value of US$ 182.3 Billion by 2027 exhibiting a CAGR of 6.70% during 2022-2027. Keeping in mind the uncertainties of COVID-19, we are continuously tracking and evaluating the direct as well as the indirect influence of the pandemic. These insights are included in the report as a major market contributor. An extended warranty, or a service contract, refers to a policy that extends the warranty period offered to consumers on new items. It generally covers the costs of repair or replacement of the product if the damage is caused due to manufacturing defects or poor quality. It is usually provided by manufacturers, retailers, or third-party service providers for automobiles, electronics, and electrical appliances. While these goods typically come with a one-year manufacturer's warranty, an extended warranty can provide coverage against various product defects or normal wear and tear after the expiration of the initial warranty. In recent years, extended warranty solutions have gained traction due to their cost-effectiveness and additional protection, such as the mechanical and electronic breakdown of products that are not covered by the original warranty. Nowadays, extended warranty plans cover routine maintenance and accidental damages, including liquid spillage, thefts, or cracked screens. As a result, the rising concerns among consumers regarding the safety of their electronic devices after the original warranty has expired represent the primary factors driving the market growth. Besides this, the growing number of value-conscious customers and shifting consumer preferences toward a hassle-free post-sales experience are augmenting the demand for extended warranty solutions. Additionally, the surging sales of high-end vehicles and consumer electronics, such as smartphones, laptops, tablets, and wearables, are accelerating the product adoption rate. Furthermore, the leading players are offering value-added services, such as hassle-free replacements and on-site services, and digitizing extended warranty processes for faster claim settlements, which is catalyzing the market growth. Other factors, including the escalating demand for prolonged life and value of goods, inflating consumer disposable incomes and high repair and maintenance costs, are also creating a positive market outlook. Competitive Landscape: The competitive landscape of the industry has also been examined along with the profiles of the key players being Allianz SE, American International Group Inc, AmTrust Financial, Assurant Inc., Asurion LLC, Axa S.A., Carchex, CarShield LLC, Chubb Limited, Edel Assurance LLP, Endurance Warranty Services LLC, and SquareTrade Inc (The Allstate Corporation). Key Questions Answered in This Report: How has the global extended warranty market performed so far and how will it perform in the coming years? What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the global extended warranty market? What are the key regional markets? What is the breakup of the market based on the coverage? What is the breakup of the market based on the application? What is the breakup of the market based on the distribution channel? What is the breakup of the market based on the end user? What are the various stages in the value chain of the industry? What are the key driving factors and challenges in the industry? What is the structure of the global extended warranty market and who are the key players? What is the degree of competition in the industry? Key Topics Covered: 1 Preface 2 Scope and Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Introduction 4.1 Overview 4.2 Key Industry Trends 5 Global Extended Warranty Market 5.1 Market Overview 5.2 Market Performance 5.3 Impact of COVID-19 5.4 Market Forecast 6 Market Breakup by Coverage 6.1 Standard Protection Plan 6.1.1 Market Trends 6.1.2 Market Forecast 6.2 Accidental Protection Plan 6.2.1 Market Trends 6.2.2 Market Forecast 7 Market Breakup by Application 7.1 Automobiles 7.1.1 Market Trends 7.1.2 Market Forecast 7.2 Consumer Electronics 7.2.1 Market Trends 7.2.2 Market Forecast 7.3 Home Appliances 7.3.1 Market Trends 7.3.2 Market Forecast 7.4 Mobile Devices and PCs 7.4.1 Market Trends 7.4.2 Market Forecast 7.5 Others 7.5.1 Market Trends 7.5.2 Market Forecast 8 Market Breakup by Distribution Channel 8.1 Manufacturers 8.1.1 Market Trends 8.1.2 Market Forecast 8.2 Retailers 8.2.1 Market Trends 8.2.2 Market Forecast 8.3 Others 8.3.1 Market Trends 8.3.2 Market Forecast 9 Market Breakup by End User 9.1 Individuals 9.1.1 Market Trends 9.1.2 Market Forecast 9.2 Business 9.2.1 Market Trends 9.2.2 Market Forecast 10 Market Breakup by Region 11 SWOT Analysis 12 Value Chain Analysis 13 Porters Five Forces Analysis 14 Price Analysis 15 Competitive Landscape 15.1 Market Structure 15.2 Key Players 15.3 Profiles of Key Players 15.3.1 Allianz SE 15.3.1.1 Company Overview 15.3.1.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.1.3 Financials 15.3.1.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.2 American International Group Inc 15.3.2.1 Company Overview 15.3.2.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.2.3 Financials 15.3.2.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.3 AmTrust Financial 15.3.3.1 Company Overview 15.3.3.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.3.3 Financials 15.3.3.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.4 Assurant Inc. 15.3.4.1 Company Overview 15.3.4.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.4.3 Financials 15.3.4.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.5 Asurion LLC 15.3.5.1 Company Overview 15.3.5.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.6 Axa S.A. 15.3.6.1 Company Overview 15.3.6.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.6.3 Financials 15.3.6.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.7 Carchex 15.3.7.1 Company Overview 15.3.7.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.8 CarShield LLC 15.3.8.1 Company Overview 15.3.8.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.9 Chubb Limited 15.3.9.1 Company Overview 15.3.9.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.9.3 Financials 15.3.9.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.10 Edel Assurance LLP 15.3.10.1 Company Overview 15.3.10.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.11 Endurance Warranty Services LLC 15.3.11.1 Company Overview 15.3.11.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.12 SquareTrade Inc (The Allstate Corporation) 15.3.12.1 Company Overview 15.3.12.2 Product Portfolio For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/c6nagp Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Residents said at least nine people have been killed in the clashes that started on Friday. Guri Local Goverrnment of Jigawa State has shut down nomadic schools and local markets in the area following clashes between crop farmers and cattle herders. Residents said at least nine people have been killed in the clashes that started on Friday. PREMIUM TIMES reported how two people were killed and five others injured in one of the clashes in the area. The police later confirmed that another person was killed in neighboring Kirikasamma Local Government Area in the escalating hostilities. The police spokesperson in the state, Lawan Adam, said many other victims were receiving treatment in various hospitals in the state. He said 10 suspects had been arrested over the violence. The local government Information Officer, Sunusi Doro, told reporters that the Local Government Education Secretary, Sale Kaka, ordered the closure of the normadic schools in the council area, following threats to some of the teachers. Local sources said those who lost their lives in the clashes include four farmers and five herders. PREMIUM TIMES gathered that the area is on a standstill as farmers could not go to their farms while herders could not go to markets or towns in the area. The local authorities have also shutdown local markets in the area. A resident, Umar Yuguda, told reporters that the situation is pathetic. Mr Yuguda said farm produce worth millions of naira were destroyed by the cattle herders. Guri and neighbouring Kirikasamma in Jigawa have fertile land suitable for farming and grazing. Control of the land has led to bloody conflicts between farmers and herders over the years. Following incessant clashes between farmers and herders in the area, critics have accused the Jigawa government of handling the crisis with kids' gloves. NEW YORK, March 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Immigration Services Sourcing and Intelligence Report provides key information about the market. For instance, the Immigration Services Market will grow at a CAGR of 5.67% during 2022-2026. Key Players in the Immigration Services Sourcing and Procurement Market Include: Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, PricewaterhouseCoopers International, and KPMG International Registration Now Open for Three-Day National Conference in Orlando, Welcoming Attendees From Across the Globe NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- CureDuchenne, a leading global nonprofit focused on finding and funding a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, announced its FUTURES National Conference will be held from May 27-29, 2022 in Orlando, Florida. FUTURES is a three-day information packed event focused on bringing education, resources and connection to the Duchenne community. The annual event will take place as a hybrid event again this year, both online and in-person, at the JW Marriott Orlando, Grande Lakes. This year's conference agenda and special events will focus on Building Community. CureDuchenne will offer insightful and interactive presentations on a variety of relevant topics including the latest research and therapies for individuals with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, an exhibitor showcase, social events for the whole family, an e-gaming lounge, and more. "We're looking forward to reconnecting with the Duchenne community, both in person and virtually, to share valuable resources and help improve the lives of those affected by Duchenne," said Debra Miller, founder and CEO of CureDuchenne. "As an organization, we have made important progress in the last year and are eager to provide Duchenne families with the information, support and community they need to live the best and longest life possible." Keynote speakers Justin Skeesuck and Patrick Gray will kick off the event with the inspiring story of their 500-mile wheelchair journey across northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago, which was told in an extraordinary documentary titled I'll Push You. "We're so excited to be a part of this year's FUTURES National Conference," said Justin Skeesuck. "Our story is a testament to the power of community and the importance of relationships as we face the struggles of life. We hope to inspire those affected by Duchenne muscular dystrophy." Whether enjoyed virtually or in person, FUTURES attendees are guaranteed exclusive access to important updates on therapeutic research, thoughtful discussions on the emerging approaches to care that enhance quality of life, a wealth of valuable resources and time well-spent with the Duchenne community. The conference includes a special gene therapy brunch & learn, moderated by Dr. Jeffrey Chamberlain, a professor in the Departments of Neurology, Medicine, and Biochemistry, the McCaw Endowed Chair in Muscular Dystrophy at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and Director of the Senator Paul D. Wellstone Muscular Dystrophy Cooperative Research Center of Seattle. Dr. Chamberlain will be accompanied by a panel of specialists as they give a brief overview of the strategy guiding efforts in gene therapy and gene editing, as well as critical updates from the companies in this space, followed by a discussion. The symposium will be followed by an exclusive look at what's next for the gene therapy and gene editing pipeline. CureDuchenne will offer on-site childcare and activities for the whole family, and the Duchenne Family Assistance Program offers assistance in the form of travel grants for registration fees, hotel rooms and travel. View the full 2022 FUTURES National Conference schedule here. Registration for 2022 FUTURES is currently open. In-person registration fee is $100 per adult. Virtual attendance is free of charge. There is also no charge for adult individuals with Duchenne and children under 16 years of age. For registration information and details, please visit: cureduchenne.org/futures. About CureDuchenne CureDuchenne is recognized as a global leader in research, patient care and innovation for improving and extending the lives of those with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. As the leading genetic killer of young boys, Duchenne affects more than 300,000 individuals living today. CureDuchenne is dedicated to finding and funding a cure for Duchenne by breaking the traditional charitable mold through an innovative venture philanthropy model that funds groundbreaking research, early diagnosis, and community education. For more information on how to help raise awareness and funds needed for research, please visit www.cureduchenne.org . SOURCE CureDuchenne DUBLIN, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Precision Medicine Software Developers Market by Target Therapeutic Indication, Key Geographical Regions and Types of End Users: Industry Trends and Global Forecasts, 2021-2031" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The "Precision Medicine Software Developers Market, 2021-2031" report features an extensive study of the current landscape, offering an informed opinion on the likely adoption of precision medicine software in the healthcare industry, over the next decade. The report features an in-depth analysis, highlighting the capabilities of various stakeholders engaged in this domain. One of the key objectives of the report was to estimate the existing market size and future potential of precision medicine software developers, over the coming decade. Further, we have provided an informed estimate of the market's evolution, during the period 2021-2031 Scope of the Report Amongst other elements, the report features the following: A detailed overview of the current market landscape of precision medicine software developers, along with information on several relevant parameters, such as year of establishment, company size, location of headquarters, types of platforms (cloud-based and on-premises), purpose of software (diagnosis, analysis, treatment), type of data (genomic data, clinical data, image data and others), therapeutic area (oncological disorders, cardiovascular disorders, neurological disorders, metabolic disorders) and types of end users (healthcare providers, research and government institutes, pharmaceutical and biotech companies). Elaborate profiles of key players engaged in the development of precision medicine software applications. Each profile features a brief overview of the company, along with its information on technology / service portfolio, recent developments and an informed future outlook. A detailed analysis of the various patents that have been filed / granted within this domain, since 2018. It highlights the key trends associated with these patents across several relevant parameters, such as publication year, geographical location / patent jurisdiction, CPC symbols, emerging focus areas, type of organization, leading patent assignees and most active players (in terms of number of patents filed). In addition, it includes a patent benchmarking analysis and patent valuation. An analysis of the recent partnerships inked between various players engaged in this domain, during the period 2018-2021, based on several relevant parameters, such as year of partnership, type of partnership model adopted, regional distribution (continent and country-wise) and most active players (in terms of number of partnerships inked). A detailed analysis of various investments made by players engaged in this domain, based on several relevant parameters such as year of investment, number of funding instances, amount invested and type of funding (venture capital financing, debt financing, grants / awards, initial public offering (IPO)) undertaken by companies engaged in this domain, during the period 2018-2021. A detailed analysis based on a proprietary 22 representation, highlighting the current market scenario (in terms of existing competition and growth opportunities) across emerging and established market segments. A detailed discussion on affiliated trends, key drivers and challenges, under a SWOT framework, which are likely to impact the industry's evolution, along with a Harvey ball analysis. Key Questions Answered Who are the key players engaged in the development of precision medicine software applications? Which type of platform is more likely to outreach the market in the near future? Which companies are actively engaged in the development of precision medicine software applications? What are the major therapeutic areas targeted by various precision medicine software applications? What kind of partnership models are commonly adopted by industry stakeholders? Who are the key investors in this domain? Who are the target users of precision medicine software applications? What are the different types of data being handled by precision medicine software developers? What is the main purpose for using precision medicine software applications? How is the current and future opportunity likely to be distributed across key market segments? Key Topics Covered: 1. PREFACE 2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 2.1. Chapter Overview 3. INTRODUCTION 3.1. Chapter Overview 3.2. Overview of Precision Medicine 3.2.1. Evolution of Precision Medicine 3.2.2. Novel Approaches in Precision Medicine 3.2.2.1 Biomarkers 3.2.2.2. Metabolomics 3.3. Key Technology Platforms 3.3.1. Cloud Based 3.3.2. On-Premises 3.4. Key Challenges Faced by Precision Medicine Software Developers 3.4.1. Unprecedented Data Volumes 3.4.2. Interpreting Data Deluge at Individual Level 3.4.3. Incorporation of Solutions in the Clinic 3.5. Application Areas 3.5.1. Therapeutic Areas 3.5.2. Pharmacogenomics 3.6. Benefits of Precision Medicine over Traditional Treatment Modalities 3.6.1. Benefits to Patients 3.6.2. Benefits to Healthcare Providers 3.7. Future Perspectives 4. MARKET LANDSCAPE 4.1. Chapter Overview 4.2. Precision Medicine Software Developers: Overall Market Landscape 4.3. Key Insights 5. COMPANY PROFILES 5.1. Chapter Overview 5.2. Precision Medicine Software Developers 5.2.1. Ariel Precision Medicine 5.2.2. C2i Genomics 5.2.3. Genedata 5.2.4. Inspirata 5.2.5. IQVIA 5.2.6. SAP 5.3. Additional Profiles 5.3.2. GenomOncology 5.3.3. Human Longevity 5.3.4. SOPHiA GENETICS 5.3.5. Syapse 6. COMPANY COMPETITIVENESS ANALYSIS 6.1. Chapter Overview 6.2. Key Parameters 6.3. Methodology 6.4. Company Competitiveness Analysis: Precision Medicine Software Developers 7. PATENT ANALYSIS 7.1. Chapter Overview 7.2. Scope and Methodology 7.3. Precision Medicine Software Developers: Patent Analysis 8. PARTNERSHIPS AND COLLABORATIONS 8.1. Chapter Overview 8.2. Partnership Models 8.3. Precision Medicine Software Developers: Recent Partnerships and Collaborations 9. FUNDING AND INVESTMENT ANALYSIS 9.1. Chapter Overview 9.2. Types of Funding 9.3. Precision Medicine Software Developers: Funding and Investment Analysis 10. ATTRACTIVENESS COMPETITIVENESS MATRIX 10.1. Chapter Overview 10.2. AC Matrix: Overview 11. MARKET FORECAST 11.1. Chapter Overview 11.2. Forecast Methodology and Assumptions 11.3. Global Precision Medicine Software Developers Market, 2021-2031 11.5. Precision Medicine Software Developers Market, 2021-2031: Analysis by Geography 11.6. Precision Medicine Software Developers Market, 2021-2031: Analysis by Type of End User 12. SWOT ANALYSIS 12.1. Chapter Overview 12.2. Strengths 12.3. Weaknesses 12.4. Opportunities 12.5. Threats 12.6. Comparison of SWOT Factors 12.7. Concluding Remarks 13. CONCLUDING REMARKS 14. APPENDIX I: TABULATED DATA 15. APPENDIX II: LIST OF COMPANIES For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/pedwxi Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1904 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets NEW DELHI, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The study undertaken by Astute Analytica foresees a tremendous growth in revenue of the market for global single-walled carbon nanotubes market from US$ 191.1 Million in 2021 to US$ 1,014 Million by 2027. The market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 32.1% during the forecast period 2022-2027. Single Walled Carbon Nanotubes are defined as one dimensional, cylindrically nanostructure of carbon molecules which are shaped allotropes of carbon that have a high surface area and aspect ratio. Applications of single walled carbon nanotubes are widely used in various industries including aerospace & defense, polymers, electrical & electronics, energy, sports, automotive and chemicals among others because of their electrical, thermal and physical properties. CNTs or their derivatives exhibit excellent electrical properties for use in base materials such as polymers and reinforcement. Moreover, CNTs offer lucrative potential for use in electricals & electronics applications such as photovoltaics, sensors, semiconductor devices, displays, conductors and others. Request a Sample Report of Global Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market: https://www.astuteanalytica.com/request-sample/single-walled-carbon-nanotube-market Based on type, the armchair form carbon nanotube segment is estimated to have the highest market share during the forecast period. While, chiral form carbon nanotube is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during forecast period. Moreover, on the basis of synthesis process, chemical vapor deposition segment dominated the market in 2021. Whereas, high pressure carbon monoxide is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. Furthermore, in terms of application, the conductive polymer composites segment is estimated to have the highest market share during the forecast period owing to the growing demand for polymers across the construction as well as automotive industry. In addition to this, by end users, biomedical segment is projected to grow at the highest CAGR over forecast period due to the use of CNTs in biological systems that brings advancement in medical science especially in diagnostics, biosensing, drug delivery and disease treatments. Moreover, based on region, Asia Pacific is expected to project the highest share and CAGR in the global single-walled carbon nanotubes market. Market Dynamics and Trends Drivers Growth in demand of SWCNT in end-use industries and increase in demand for renewable energy sources will boost the market during forecast period. CNTs exhibit remarkable physio-chemical properties such as electrical, optical and thermal conductivity; high tensile strength; and chemical reactivity, which make them ideal for use in the aerospace & defense sector. Also, conductive plastics based on carbon nanotubes have been widely used in the electronic industry for electrostatic discharge protection and prevention. Moreover, rise in environmental concerns due to increase in use of petroleum products and coal as a major energy source has increased the adoption of renewable energy sources, thereby fueling the adoption of CNTs in these industries. Restraints Production scale-up challenges and the resultant high prices and increase in demand for inorganic and boron nitride nanotubes are the major restraining factors faced by SWCNT, which hamper the growth of the market. The high cost of preparing suitable conditions for carbon nanotube growth and its ultimate commercial scale-up constraints increase the production costs of carbon nanotubes. Therefore, high cost of SWCNTs has restricted their penetration in industries, which is estimated to adversely affect the growth of the global carbon nanotubes market. Moreover, the widespread adoption of inorganic and boron nitride is expected to restrict the growth of the carbon nanotubes market in future. Trends Factors such as biomedical applications of carbon nanotubes, commercial release of CNT transistors and increase in scope of applications for carbon nanotubes driven by R&D is projected to offer lucrative trends in the global carbon nanotubes market. Regional Analysis US holds a major share in term s of revenue in the North America Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market in 2021 U.S. dominated the North America single-walled carbon nanotubes market in 2021. Whereas, Mexico is expected to project the highest CAGR in the North America market during the forecast period. Based on end users, electronics & semiconductors segment generates majority of the revenue in the single-walled carbon nanotubes industry in North America in 2021 due to the use of SWCNT in energy sector. Moreover, conductive polymer composites application segment contributed the major share in the North American market in 2021. Poland is expected to project the highest CAGR in the Europe Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market during the forecast period Germany holds a major share in terms of revenue in the market in 2021. Whereas, Poland is expected to witness the highest CAGR during the forecast period. By end users, biomedical segment is projected to grow at the highest CAGR over forecast period due to the use of CNTs in biological systems that brings advancement in medical science especially in diagnostics, biosensing, drug delivery and disease treatments. Moreover, on the basis of synthesis process, chemical vapor deposition segment dominated the Europe single-walled carbon nanotubes market in 2021. China held the major share in the Asia-Pacific Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market in 2021 Based on country, China held the major share in the APAC market in 2021. Whereas, Japan is expected to project the highest CAGR in the APAC single-walled carbon nanotubes market during the forecast period owing to the presence of key market players and end use industries such as electrical & electronics and automotive in the marketplace. Moreover, based on type, the armchair form carbon nanotube segment is estimated to have the highest market share during the forecast period. South Africa is anticipated to hold the highest CAGR during forecast period in the MEA Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market Based on country, South Africa is expected to project the highest CAGR in the MEA single-walled carbon nanotubes market during the forecast period owing to the increasing construction activities in the region. Whereas, rest of MEA held the major share in the Middle East & Africa single-walled carbon nanotubes market in 2021. Moreover, sensor applications are expected to project the highest CAGR over forecast period. Brazil held the major share in the South America Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market in 2021 Argentina is expected to project the highest CAGR in the South America single-walled carbon nanotubes market during the forecast period. Whereas, Brazil dominated the market in 2021. Based on synthesis process, the chemical vapor deposition segment dominated the market in 2021. Whereas, high pressure carbon monoxide is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. Directly Purchase a copy of report with TOC @ https://www.astuteanalytica.com/request-sample/single-walled-carbon-nanotube-market Report Attribute Details Market Size Value in 2021 US$ 191.1 Million Market Outlook for 2027 US$ 1,014 Million Expected CAGR Growth 32.1% from 2022 - 2027 Base Year 2021 Forecast Period 2022-2027 Top Market Players OCSiAl, Thomas Swan & Co. Ltd, KH Chemicals, Cnano Technology Limited, Continental Carbon Nanotechnologies, Inc, Zeon and Chasm among others. Segments Covered By Type, By Synthesis, By Application, By End-User, By Region Geographies Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, South America Customization Options Get your customized report as per your preference. Ask for customization Competitive Insight Global Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market is highly competitive in order to increase their presence in the marketplace. Some of the key players operating in the global single-walled carbon nanotubes market include OCSiAl, Thomas Swan & Co. Ltd, KH Chemicals, Cnano Technology Limited, Continental Carbon Nanotechnologies, Inc, Zeon and Chasm among others. Segmentation Overview Global Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market is segmented based on type, synthesis process, application, end user and region. The industry trends in global single-walled carbon nanotubes market are sub-divided into different categories in order to get a holistic view of the global marketplace. Following are the different segments of the Global Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market: By Type segment of the Global Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market is sub-segmented into: Armchair Form Carbon Nanotube Zigzag Form Carbon Nanotube Chiral Form Carbon Nanotube By Synthesis Process segment of the Global Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market is sub-segmented into: Arc Discharge Laser Ablation Chemical Vapor Deposition High Pressure Carbon Monoxide Others By Application segment of the Global Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market is sub-segmented into: Conductive Adhesives Conductive Polymer Composites Fire Retardant Plastics Li-ion Battery Electrodes Metal Matrix Composites Structural Polymer Composites Sensor Applications Others By End User segment of the Global Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market is sub-segmented into: Aerospace & Defence Automotive Electronics & Semiconductors Energy Chemicals Sporting Goods & Leisure products Biomedical Other Industrial Applications By Region segment of the Global Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Market is sub-segmented into: North America The U.S. Canada Mexico Europe The UK Germany France Italy Spain Poland Russia Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China India Japan Australia & New Zealand & ASEAN Rest of Asia Pacific Middle East & Africa (MEA) UAE Saudi Arabia South Africa Rest of MEA South America Argentina Brazil Rest of South America Enquire more about this report before purchase @ https://www.astuteanalytica.com/request-sample/single-walled-carbon-nanotube-market For Additional Information OR Media Enquiry, Please Mail Us At: [email protected] About Astute Analytica Astute Analytica is a global analytics and advisory company which has built a solid reputation in a short period, thanks to the tangible outcomes we have delivered to our clients. We pride ourselves in generating unparalleled, in depth and uncannily accurate estimates and projections for our very demanding clients spread across different verticals. We have a long list of satisfied and repeat clients from a wide spectrum including technology, healthcare, chemicals, semiconductors, FMCG, and many more. These happy customers come to us from all across the Globe. They are able to make well calibrated decisions and leverage highly lucrative opportunities while surmounting the fierce challenges all because we analyze for them the complex business environment, segment wise existing and emerging possibilities, technology formations, growth estimates, and even the strategic choices available. In short, a complete package. All this is possible because we have a highly qualified, competent, and experienced team of professionals comprising of business analysts, economists, consultants, and technology experts. In our list of priorities, you-our patron-come at the top. You can be sure of best cost-effective, value-added package from us, should you decide to engage with us. Contact us: Aamir Beg BSI Business Park, H-15,Sector-63, Noida- 201301- India Phone: +1-888 429 6757 (US Toll Free); +91-0120- 4483891 (Rest of the World) Email: [email protected] Website: www.astuteanalytica.com Follow US: LinkedIn | Twitter SOURCE Astute Analytica VANCOUVER, BC, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Gold Royalty Corp. ("Gold Royalty" or the "Company") (NYSE: GROY) is pleased to announce that it has entered into a definitive agreement (the "Agreement") with Monarch Mining Corporation ("Monarch") (TSX: GBAR) (OTCQX: GBARF) to provide C$4.5 million in additional royalty financing by increasing the size of the Company's existing gold royalty interests. Gold Royalty will provide a further C$1.0 million in financing by participating in Monarch's C$12.0 million marketed private placement offering. The expanded royalties include: Increased Per Tonne Royalty ("PTR") : The existing C$2.50 PTR on material from the Beaufor Mine through the Beacon Mill will be increased to C$3.75 /t on material from the Beaufor Mine and C$1.25 /t on material from the McKenzie Break, Croinor Gold, and Swanson properties. : The existing PTR on material from the Beaufor Mine through the Beacon Mill will be increased to /t on material from the Beaufor Mine and /t on material from the McKenzie Break, Croinor Gold, and properties. Increased Net Smelter Return ("NSR") Royalties : The existing 2.50% NSR royalties on Monarch's McKenzie Break, Croinor Gold, and Swanson properties will be increased to a 2.75% NSR over the properties. : The existing 2.50% NSR royalties on McKenzie Break, Croinor Gold, and properties will be increased to a 2.75% NSR over the properties. Buyback Elimination : Monarch's existing 1.25% NSR royalty buyback rights on the McKenzie Break, Croinor Gold, and Swanson properties will be extinguished. : existing 1.25% NSR royalty buyback rights on the McKenzie Break, Croinor Gold, and properties will be extinguished. Pre-emptive Rights: Gold Royalty will retain pre-emptive rights on any future PTR's on the Beacon Mill and will retain a right of first refusal ("ROFR") on the creation of any additional NSR properties over the McKenzie Break, Croinor Gold, and Swanson properties. David Garofalo, Chairman and CEO of Gold Royalty stated: "We are excited to continue to support the team at Monarch as they work towards restarting production at Beaufor and the Beacon Mill. This acquisition further bolsters Gold Royalty's potential near-term cashflow with Monarch announcing that it expects to recommence production in June 2022. The buyback elimination and expanded NSR royalties to 2.75% over McKenzie Break, Croinor, and Swanson respectively, increase our exposure to high-potential exploration assets in tier-one jurisdictions, strengthening our already impressive long-term growth portfolio." The royalty properties are located near strategic infrastructure in the Abitibi region of Quebec, Canada and include: Beaufor Property / Beacon Mill The Beaufor mine and Beacon mill are located approximately 20 kilometers east of Val-d'Or, Quebec and have historically produced 1.1 million ounces of gold at an average grade of 7.50 g/t gold. In June 2021 , Monarch announced that it plans to restart the Beaufor Mine and the Beacon Mill by June 2022 . The Beacon mill is a 750 tonne per day facility that is fully permitted to process up to 1.8 million tonnes of tailings. Monarch announced exploration plans of an expected 25,000m drilling in 2022. The Beaufor mine and Beacon mill are located approximately 20 kilometers east of and have historically produced 1.1 million ounces of gold at an average grade of 7.50 g/t gold. In , announced that it plans to restart the Beaufor Mine and the Beacon Mill by . The Beacon mill is a 750 tonne per day facility that is fully permitted to process up to 1.8 million tonnes of tailings. announced exploration plans of an expected drilling in 2022. McKenzie Break The McKenzie Break property is an advanced exploration property located approximately 35 kilometers northeast of Val-d'Or, Quebec . The property consists of a 70 km 2 land package. Monarch announced exploration plans of an expected 20,000m drilling in 2022. The McKenzie Break property is an advanced exploration property located approximately 35 kilometers northeast of . The property consists of a 70 km land package. announced exploration plans of an expected drilling in 2022. Croinor Property The Croinor Property is a fully permitted past producing property located 55 kilometers east of Val-d'Or, Quebec . The project consists of a district-size land package of over 150 km 2 . The property is the subject of a January 2018 prefeasibility study. Monarch announced exploration plans of an expected 3,000m drilling in 2022. The Croinor Property is a fully permitted past producing property located 55 kilometers east of . The project consists of a district-size land package of over 150 km . The property is the subject of a prefeasibility study. announced exploration plans of an expected drilling in 2022. Swanson Property The Swanson Property is an earlier stage exploration property located approximately 12 kilometers northeast of Barraute, Quebec , covering 52.26 km2. Monarch announced exploration plans of an expected 10,000m drilling in 2022. To learn more about the royalty properties please visit: https://www.monarchmining.com. The transaction is subject to customary conditions and is expected to be completed in the first half of April 2022. Qualified Person Alastair Still, P.Geo., Director of Technical Services of the Company, is a "qualified person" as such term is defined under National Instrument 43-101, and has reviewed and approved the technical information disclosed in this news release. Glenn Mullan, a director of the Company, is a "qualified person" as such term is defined under National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical information pertaining to projects located in Quebec, Canada, disclosed in this news release. About Gold Royalty Corp. Gold Royalty Corp. is a gold-focused royalty company offering creative financing solutions to the metals and mining industry. Its mission is to acquire royalties, streams and similar interests at varying stages of the mine life cycle to build a balanced portfolio offering near, medium and longer-term attractive returns for its investors. Gold Royalty's diversified portfolio currently consists primarily of net smelter return royalties on gold properties located in the Americas. About Monarch Monarch Mining Corporation (TSX: GBAR) (OTCQX: GBARF) is a fully integrated mining company that owns four projects, including the Beaufor Mine, which has produced more than 1 million ounces of gold over the last 30 years. Other assets include the Croinor Gold, McKenzie Break and Swanson properties, all located near Monarch's wholly owned 750 tpd Beacon Mill. Monarch owns 29,504 hectares (295 km2) of mining assets in the prolific Abitibi mining camp that host a combined measured and indicated gold resource of 478,982 ounces and a combined inferred resource of 383,393 ounces Technical and Third-Party Information The information herein regarding Monarch's Swanson property has been derived from the technical report titled "NI43-101 Technical Report and Mineral Resource Estimate on the Swanson Project, Quebec, Canada" with an effective date of January 22, 2021. The information herein regarding Monarch's McKenzie Break property has been derived from the technical report titled "NI43-101 Technical Evaluation Report on the McKenzie Break Property" with an effective date of February 1, 2021. The information herein regarding Monarch's Croinor Gold property has been derived from the technical report titled "NI43-101 Updated Prefeasibility Study for the Croinor Gold Property" with an effective date of January 19, 2018. The information herein regarding the Beaufor has been derived from Monarch's press release dated March 17, 2022 as well as Monarch's February 2022 Corporate Presentation. For information with respect to each project, please refer to such documents as well as the applicable technical reports and other disclosure documents of Monarch that are available under its profile at www.sedar.com. Unless otherwise indicated, the technical and scientific disclosure contained or referenced in this press release, including any references to Mineral Resources or Mineral Reserves, was prepared by the operator in accordance with Canadian National Instrument 43-101, which differs significantly from the requirements of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") applicable to U.S. domestic issuers. Accordingly, the scientific and technical information contained or referenced in this press release may not be comparable to similar information made public by U.S. companies subject to the reporting and disclosure requirements of the SEC. Cautionary Statement on Forward-Looking Information: Certain of the information contained in this news release constitutes 'forward-looking information' and 'forward-looking statements' within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws ("forward-looking statements"), including but not limited to statements regarding: Monarch's expectations regarding the timeline for recommencing production at the Beaufor mine; the impact of the expanded royalties on the Company's cash flow profile in the future; the expected completion of the transaction; and the Company's future growth plans. Such statements can be generally identified by the use of terms such as "may", "will", "expect", "intend", "believe", "plans", "anticipate" or similar terms. Forward-looking statements are based upon certain assumptions and other important factors, including assumptions of management regarding the accuracy of the disclosure of the operators of the projects underlying the Company's projects, their ability to achieve disclosed plans and targets, macroeconomic conditions and commodity prices. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements including, among others, any inability of the operators to execute proposed plans, risks related to exploration, development, permitting, infrastructure, operating or technical difficulties on any such projects, the ability of the parties to satisfy the conditions to completion of the proposed transaction; the influence of macroeconomic developments, the impact of, and response of relevant governments to, COVID-19 and the effectiveness of such responses, the ability of the Company to carry out its growth plans and other factors set forth in the Company's publicly filed documents under its profiles at www.sedar.com and www.sec.gov , including its Annual Report on Form 20-F for the year ended September 30, 2021. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. SOURCE Gold Royalty Corp. VANCOUVER, BC, March 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Green Impact Partners ("GIP" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the signing of definitive agreements for its partnership in a dairy renewable natural gas ("RNG") project located in Iowa (the "Iowa RNG Project"). The Iowa RNG Project has secured long-term feedstock agreements with two dairies located in close proximity, and is expected to generate approximately 800 MMBtu per day of RNG. GIP is working to advance the final engineering, design and capital budget, as well as securing material permits, approvals, and financing. The Iowa RNG Project is similar in scope to GIP's RNG project located in Weld County, Colorado (the "GreenGas Colorado Project"). Later this year GIP anticipates an expansion to the Iowa RNG Project to include two additional sites, which will nearly double the size of the project. The Company expects to provide a further project update in the second quarter of 2022, including final size, capital costs and construction timeline. Construction is anticipated to start in the second half of 2022 and RNG production commencing in late 2023. "As we move towards a final investment decision of another RNG project later this year, we are on our way to reach our target of Cdn$1.5 billion in projects sanctioned by 2023," said Jesse Douglas, Chief Executive Officer. "We have ambitious growth plans with sector leading feedstock, technology, partners and projects within the RNG space, delivering a path to significant environmental, social and financial gains. GIP is committed to providing innovative solutions where RNG will play an integral role in near term and future decarbonization." The Iowa RNG Project is expected to be similar in size and scale, design and technology to the GreenGas Colorado Project, which continues to be on budget and schedule, with commissioning starting in July 2022 and $19 million to $21 million in annual EBITDA at full operation. The Iowa RNG Project will deliver its RNG into the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard ("LCFS") and Renewable Identification Number ("RIN") markets with similar economics. With robust project partnerships and debt, GIP does not anticipate the need to access the public market for any corporate equity to complete its growing current project pipeline of over $2 billion. Rebranding Initiative Today, Green Impact Partners launched a bold new visual identity which better reflects GIP's purpose and inspires action. In approaching this branding initiative, the new visual identity needed to embody the Company's commitment to equality, diversity, and the circular economy and a continued push to advance the future of decarbonization and energy. Jesse Douglas added, "As we developed our new identity, it became clear that our aspirational and unique company vision, with an exceptional commitment to a clean and inclusive world, needed to magically shine through. I couldn't be more pleased with the result a sophisticated, confident, trustworthy brand identity that we will proudly display on our world leading facilities for years to come." In April, Green Impact Partners will also be launching a new website as a central resource for engaging with partners, investors and employees. 2021 Year End Results Release GIP will be releasing its 2021 year end financial results on April 22, 2022 with quarterly and annual results in line with consensus estimates, continuing the Company's track record of positive EBITDA and growth. About Green Impact Partners Green Impact Partners is focused on creating a sustainable future and inclusive planet by developing clean energy, with a near term focus on RNG projects. GIP acquires, develops, builds, owns and operates RNG projects, and participates in a wide range of zero-carbon opportunities during any stage of the project lifecycle from idea generation through to operations. GIP has a growing portfolio of RNG projects under development, representing over $2 billion in capital expenditures over the next three years. In its pursuit of net zero earth impact, GIP is positioned to be a leading producer of decarbonizing energy in North America. GIP's shares trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol GIP.V. For more information about GIP and its projects, visit www.greenipi.com Cautionary Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements and/or forward-looking information (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable securities laws. When used in this release, such words as "would", "will", "anticipates", believes", "explores" and similar expressions, as they relate to GIP, or its management, are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements reflect the current views of GIP with respect to future events, and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Many factors could cause GIP's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any expected future results, performance or achievement that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to: the impact of general economic conditions in Canada and the United States, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic; industry conditions including changes in laws and regulations and/or adoption of new environmental laws and regulations and changes in how they are interpreted and enforced, in Canada and the United States; volatility of prices for energy commodities; change in demand for clean energy to be offered by GIP; competition; lack of availability of qualified personnel; obtaining required approvals of regulatory authorities, in Canada and the United States; ability to access sufficient capital from internal and external sources; many of which are beyond the control of GIP. Forward-looking statements included in this news release should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such forward-looking statements. Readers are encouraged to review and carefully consider the risk factors pertaining to GIP described in the filing statement of GIP dated May 17, 2021, which is accessible on GIP's SEDAR issuer profile at www.sedar.com . The forward-looking statements contained in this release are made as of the date of this release, and except as may be expressly be required by law, GIP disclaims any intent, obligation or undertaking to publicly release any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements contained herein whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, other than as required by applicable securities laws. Management of GIP has included the above summary of assumptions and risks related to forward-looking statements provided in this release in order to provide shareholders with a more complete perspective on GIP's current and future operations and such information may not be appropriate for other purposes. GIP's actual results, performance or achievement could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, these forward-looking statements and, accordingly, no assurance can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur, or if any of them do, what benefits GIP will derive therefrom. This news release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy the securities in any jurisdiction. SOURCE Green Impact Partners AACHEN, Germany and RALEIGH, N.C., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Grunenthal and NovaQuest announced today that they have entered into an agreement to advance the global clinical Phase III programme of Grunenthal's asset resiniferatoxin (RTX). The investigational medicine is being developed with the aim of providing patients suffering from pain associated with osteoarthritis with a well-tolerated, non-opioid therapy option that is intended to provide long-lasting pain relief and functional improvement of the affected joints. RTX is a highly potent Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) agonist with a well-validated mechanism of action. The Phase III trials will investigate the efficacy, safety and tolerability of RTX in patients with pain associated with osteoarthritis of the knee. The trials will start in 2022 and are designed to meet the requirements for marketing approval in the EU, the US, and Japan. "Globally, more than 300 million patients suffer from osteoarthritis1. For many of them, the available treatment options are not sufficient and they may at some point in time experience severe symptoms including pain", says Jan Adams, MD, Chief Scientific Officer Grunenthal. "We are delighted to partner with NovaQuest to invest into the development of this promising asset that may provide benefits to patients who suffer from pain associated with osteoarthritis. This agreement provides Grunenthal headroom for further investments in the execution of its growth strategy and the advancement of a promising pipeline into the clinic." Under the terms of the agreement, NovaQuest will reimburse Grunenthal's investments into the clinical phase III programme of RTX and share the clinical development and approval risks with Grunenthal. In case of successful development and marketing approval, NovaQuest receives one-time payments or milestones and revenue-based payments over the course of the commercialization. "NovaQuest is excited to partner with the leading company in the therapeutic area of pain to develop RTX, a promising asset that may enter the market as soon as 2025," says Ryan Wooten, Managing Director at NovaQuest. "We are confident that Grunenthal has the right capabilities in place to position RTX on the global osteoarthritis market and leverage the full potential of the asset for patients in need." Grunenthal holds the global rights for RTX and is well-positioned to tap into the global osteoarthritis market that is expected to exhibit strong growth from $7.3 billion in 2020 to approximately $11.0 billion in 20252, constituting a large global commercial opportunity. For the indication of knee osteoarthritis only, Grunenthal estimates potential peak sales to be above 1 billion in Europe and the United States. In addition, Grunenthal intends to explore the potential of RTX for the treatment of osteoarthritis-related pain in additional joints beyond the knee. Osteoarthritis is a progressive condition that currently cannot be cured. The inflamed, swollen, and painful joints limit the mobility of the affected patients and may impact their quality of life significantly. About Novaquest NovaQuest Capital Management, located in North Carolina's Research Triangle, is a life science investment firm with a specialization in biopharmaceuticals. Founded in 2010, and with more than $2.5 billion raised across four funds, NovaQuest provides tailored capital solutions that fund innovation in biopharmaceutical development and invests in compelling healthcare companies with products and technologies aimed at helping humans and animals live healthier, longer, more productive lives. Learn more at www.novaquest.com. About RTX RTX is an intra-articular injection of resiniferatoxin developed for the treatment of pain in patients with advanced knee osteoarthritis. Resiniferatoxin is a highly potent Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) agonist. Its administration can reversibly defunctionalise TRPV1-expressing nociceptors. This may result in long lasting pain relief. Initial data shows a long-lasting and significant analgesic effect and functional improvements compared to placebo, as well as a favourable safety profile. About Osteoarthritis Osteoarthritis (OA) can be defined as a group of distinct but overlapping diseases. They may have different etiologies, but similar biological, morphological, and clinical outcomes that affect the articular cartilage, subchondral bone, ligaments, joint capsule, synovial membrane, and periarticular muscles. OA is the most common joint disease in people aged 65 and over. Its etiology is not fully understood, although there are several related factors including female gender, genetics, metabolism, and excessive mechanical stress. The diagnosis of OA is primarily based on clinical history and physical examination. The cardinal radiographic features of OA are focal/non-uniform narrowing of the joint space in the areas subjected to the most pressure, subchondral cysts, subchondral sclerosis, and osteophytes.3 Osteoarthritis is a joint disease in which the tissues in the joint break down over time. Common symptoms of osteoarthritis include joint pain, stiffness and swelling, as well as changes in how the joint moves and feeling like the joint is loose or unstable. The most commonly affected joints include the hands, knees, hips, neck and lower back. Treatment of osteoarthritis usually includes exercises, maintaining a healthy weight, wearing braces to help with stability, and taking medication, if prescribed.4 Many patients will require joint replacement surgery. About Grunenthal Grunenthal is a global leader in pain management and related diseases. As a science-based, privately-owned pharmaceutical company, we have a long track record of bringing innovative treatments and state-of-the-art technologies to patients worldwide. Our purpose is to change lives for the better and innovation is our passion. We are focusing all of our activities and efforts on working towards our vision of a world free of pain. Grunenthal is headquartered in Aachen, Germany, and has affiliates in 29 countries across Europe, Latin America and the US. Our products are available in more than 100 countries. In 2020 Grunenthal employed around 4,500 people and achieved sales of 1.3 bn. More information: www.grunenthal.com Follow us on: LinkedIn: Grunenthal Group Instagram: grunenthal For further information please contact Florian Dieckmann Head Global Communication Grunenthal GmbH 52099 Aachen Phone: +49 241 569-2555 E-mail: [email protected] Brian Person Head of Investor Relations NovaQuest Capital Management, LLC 4208 Six Forks Road (Suite 920) Phone: +1 919-459-8628 E-mail:[email protected] NovaQuest Press Contact: Philip Nunes [email protected] 1 Cieza, A., Causey, K., Kamenov, K., Hanson, S. W., Chatterji, S., & Vos, T. (2020). Global estimates of the need for rehabilitation based on the Global Burden of Disease study 2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. The Lancet, 396(10267), 2006-2017. 2 MarketsAndMarkets Report; Osteoarthritis Therapeutics Market by Anatomy (Knee, Hand), Drug Type (NSAIDs, Analgesics, Corticosteroids), Route of Administration (Parenteral), Distribution Channel (Hospital Pharmacies),Purchasing Pattern (Prescription Drugs) - Global Forecast to 2025; 2020. https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/osteoarthritis-therapeutics-market-209565994.html 3 ICD-11 https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en#/http%3a%2f%2fid.who.int%2ficd%2fentity%2f558562409 4 National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases; What Causes Osteoarthritis, Symptoms & More | NIAMS (nih.gov) SOURCE Grunenthal Group Over four weeks ago, Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in an escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War that began in 2014. The largest conventional military attack on a sovereign state in Europe since World War II, millions of Ukrainian citizens have fled their homes with only their most precious possessions, including their beloved pets. Unfortunately, the safe-passage of furry friends is only one of many challenges Ukrainian animal-lovers are battling. Some pets have been lost in the scramble to escape the war-torn country; shelter volunteers have been killed in their attempts to care for the remaining shelter pets; food, money, and warmth are in desperate short supply; and Ukrainian shelters are facing destruction and violence. True to its mission of people helping animals and animals helping people, on March 10th, Helen Woodward Animal Center pledged $50,000 to the Ukrainian animal welfare efforts with a heartfelt plea to local animal-lovers to match the pledge for a total of $100,000 in assistance. In less than one week, the request to match the Center's $50,000 pledge surpassed $67,000. Famous Center friends like Academy Award winning actress Diane Keaton and social media-famous kitten Smush shared Helen Woodward Animal Center's campaign on social media with millions of followers and the donations began coming in, in an inspiring show of support. At the time of this release, the animal-loving community has donated over $124,000, totaling nearly $175,000 with the Center's original gift. Helen Woodward Animal Center has facilitated the transfer of these funds to both Ukrainian refugee pet owners, as well as shelters in need within Ukraine through both Tallinn City Government Chief Specialist Hellika Landsmann from the Estonia Animal Welfare Society and General Secretary TOZ Danuta Mikusz-Oslislo from the Polish Society for The Protection of Animals. Both are communicating with associates from UAnimals, a non-profit Ukrainian animal rights organization, working valiantly to help struggling animal welfare groups trapped in war-torn areas, as well as the pets of the Ukrainian refugees who are arriving in Poland, Latvia and Estonia with little more than a single suitcase and their furry friends. This weekend, Geit Karurahu from Estonia Animal Welfare Society reported the following: "Yesterday, we transferred half of the donation to UAnimals. The other half we used for shelter animals who need saving from Ukraine and for pets who have fled from Ukraine with their owners. We are working together with Lithuanian organizations to agree that their country will let animals in and they will keep the animals in quarantine. We will help them pay the transport, vaccinations and so on. Our Agriculture and Food Board are visiting pets who have fled here and we let them know that if the animals need more vaccinations or other help that we will help them pay the bill." Along with the updates, photos have been sent from both the Estonia and Polish animal welfare groups to show the set up at the border sites along with distribution areas to help Ukrainian pet-owners in need. Helen Woodward Animal Center is dedicated to sending more in the way of financial support as long at donations continue to come in. "It is important that donors understand that 100% of everything we have received has been sent directly to support the Ukrainian animal crisis," explained Helen Woodward Animal Center President and CEO Mike Arms. "The Center is even covering the cost of any bank fees charged in the wiring of funds so that animal-lovers donating to this cause can rest assured that their money is being utilized to assist with relief efforts and to ensure that loving pets are provided food, warmth and medical attention." To help or for more information head to www.animalcenter.org/ukraine. You can visit Helen Woodward Animal Center at 6461 El Apajo Road in Rancho Santa Fe. About Helen Woodward Animal Center Helen Woodward Animal Center is a private, non-profit organization where "people help animals and animals help people." Founded in 1972 in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., the Center provides services for more than 90,000 people and more than 10,000 animals annually through adoptions, educational and therapeutic programs both onsite and throughout the community. Helen Woodward Animal Center is also the creator of the International Home 4 the Holidays pet adoption drive, the International Remember Me Thursday campaign and The Business of Saving Lives Workshops, teaching the business of saving lives to animal welfare leaders from around the world. For more information, go to: www.animalcenter.org. SOURCE Helen Woodward Animal Center Hirado Castle Stay Kaiju Yagura is a private guestroom that can only be rented out by a pair of guests each night and features an interior design that blends traditional and modern elements. It has a bathroom with glass panes on three sides to give you a sweeping view of the ocean and Hirado Bridge below you. You can also enjoy French cuisine that is made using carefully-selected ingredients from Hirado for dinner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAxuYHZ-eG8 In addition to special experiences that are distinctive of Castle Stay, such as exclusive access to the castle tower and tourist experiences involving a kagura show and Japanese tea ceremony, this package also includes round trip travel from Fukuoka Airport in a limousine, offering guests a luxurious experience that gives the feeling as if one is the lord of Hirado Castle from airport arrival until take off on the return home. Hirado DMO and Noroshi developed this package out of a desire for the Castle Stay to serve as a catalyst for people to interact with the culture and nature of Hirado, which abounds with history, and to take in its charm without reserve. We would be delighted if we are able to share the charm of Hirado Castle and Hirado City to as many people as possible through this package. "Lord of Castle Stories" Package Overview Price: 1,100,000 yen per night per room (taxes and service fees are included) Reservations: Available starting Tuesday, March 29th, 2022 Package Details: Accommodation for 2 days and 1 night (including 2 meals: dinner and breakfast) Pickup and drop-off in a limousine (round trip from Fukuoka Airport to Hirado Castle) Lord of Castle tourist experiences (Hirado kagura show, Chinshin-ryu Japanese tea ceremony, and exclusive access to the castle tower at night) Package Information: https://www.castlestay.jp/news/61/ Details: https://www.castlestay.jp/ Hirado Castle Stay Kaiju Yagura Overview Name: Hirado Castle Stay Kaiju Yagura Address: 1446 Iwanoue-cho, Hirado, Nagasaki in Japan Guest Rooms: 1 Room Facilities: Area of 119.76 / Two-story building / Bedroom / Living and dining room / Traditional Japanese corner / Wooden deck / Double beds (2) / Wash basins (2) / Bathroom (with shower and floor heater) / Restrooms (2) / Wine cellar (small) / Refrigerator (small) / Coffee maker Access: About 2 hours by car from Fukuoka Airport Home Page: https://www.castlestay.jp/ Inquiries: Please reach out to us through the Inquiry form on the page linked in the above URL. Hirado City Overview Hirado City, where Hirado Castle is located, stretches thin and long from north to south across the Hirado Channel from the northwest corner of mainland Kyushu. When you cross over from the mainland on Hirado Bridge, which has a bright vermilion color, you enter a mystical land with an abundance of nature that has been certified as a World Heritage Site. Hirado, which has long prospered as a port town, is also a well-known gateway for foreign cultures and still has buildings and ruins that tell its history. Every year, many tourists visit this beautiful island that shows a different charm depending on the season. Given that it is surrounded by the sea, Hirado has many local specialty products. In addition to flounder, fan lobster, and other forms of seafood, Hirado is famous for its Hirado Beef, which has a distinct sweet flavor because of the effect that Hirado's sea breeze has on the cattle. Also, since Hirado is where the Sugar Road begins, you can enjoy casdoce and other sweets too. SOURCE Hirado Castle Stay Kaiju Yagura PR Office HKEX unveils vision to build the Marketplace of the Future 3 Strategic Pillars to drive HKEX vision: Connecting China and the World, Connecting Capital with Opportunities , and Connecting Today with Tomorrow , and HKEX senior executives present business updates and strategic priorities in virtual Corporate Day event HONG KONG, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) today (Tuesday) hosted its 2022 Corporate Day for investors, clients and market participants, with senior executives updating on Group strategy and setting out a blueprint to build the Marketplace of the Future. HKEX Chief Executive Officer, Nicolas Aguzin kicked off the virtual event, featuring presentations from 12 other senior company leaders and attended by participants from across the region and around the world. HKEX CEO Nicolas Aguzin said: "HKEX is a great and unique company which plays a special and vital role as core infrastructure in Hong Kong and globally. We have a long track record of successfully capturing growth opportunities, expanding the breadth and diversity of our offering, driving international market participation and building upon our exclusive connectivity with Mainland China." "And, as a purpose-led company we remain fully committed to the long-term sustainable development of our business by supporting the prosperity of our community as a whole," he said. "HKEX today operates in a highly competitive, dynamic industry, one that is rapidly transforming and being disrupted. We know that we need to continue doing what we are good at, but we also need to adapt and evolve, leveraging our strengths and ensuring that we are fully prepared for the future." "Our vision is to build the Marketplace of the Future. We will do this by strengthening Hong Kong as an international financial centre, facilitating the vital two-way capital flows between East and West, delivering vibrant, diversified markets, supporting the creation of great companies and putting our clients first. We will always seek to act in the interests of the market as a whole, preserving integrity, trust, transparency and connectivity. We know that if our community succeeds, we succeed," said Mr Aguzin. HKEX will deliver on its vision by building on three strategic pillars: Connecting China and the World, Connecting Capital with Opportunities, and Connecting Today with Tomorrow. Connecting China and the World Building on its unique China strength, HKEX will continue to both bring the China growth story to international investors and help Chinese capital access global opportunities. HKEX's goal is to be the go-to international market for capturing China-related flows and opportunities, by: Expanding and enhancing its Connect programmes; Becoming China's go-to offshore risk management centre; go-to offshore risk management centre; Solidifying its role as China's preferred offshore fundraising centre; and preferred offshore fundraising centre; and Growing its portfolio of China -related product offerings Connecting Capital with Opportunities HKEX will connect people, capital, companies, and markets to new ideas, focusing on the long-term sustainable development of its business, markets and communities. Through building a more client-centric organisation, HKEX commits to enhancing the attractiveness, depth, vibrancy and diversity of its markets, strengthening its position as a preferred capital raising, risk management and trading venue of choice. This will be driven by focusing on the following areas: Improving the Group's primary market attractiveness; Enhancing its market structures to enable more efficient trading, clearing, settlement and risk management; Expanding the Group's product ecosystem, with new and expanded offerings across asset classes, and introducing additional value-added services; and Growing HKEX's client ecosystem Connecting Today with Tomorrow HKEX is part of a global industry that is rapidly transforming and being disrupted by such things as digitisation, big data, personalised finance and ESG considerations. By developing an agile platform business that leverages modern and digitised infrastructure, this will allow the Group to connect today with tomorrow, supporting its vision for the future. HKEX will do this by: Modernising its infrastructure; Evolving from an infrastructure-led model to a client-led model; Developing digital capabilities, whilst exploring new opportunities in digital assets, ESG, private markets, and other emerging sectors; and Leveraging its data Mr Aguzin added: "Today, the team and I are excited to be setting out our path for the future, a multi-year journey that will transform every part of our business. Ultimately, our success in building the Marketplace of the Future will be measured against the performance of our business, the progress of our financial markets, and the success of our community." "I have every confidence that our strong and committed HKEX leadership team will, over the next few years, continue to build and shape our business, ensuring that Hong Kong continues to thrive as a world-class financial centre and that our communities continue to prosper." Please click here to view the Corporate Day webpage, which contains links to the Corporate Day webcast and speaker presentations. About HKEX Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) is one of the world's major exchange groups, and operates a range of equity, commodity, fixed income and currency markets. HKEX is the world's leading IPO market and as Hong Kong's only securities and derivatives exchange and sole operator of its clearing houses, it is uniquely placed to offer regional and international investors access to Asia's most vibrant markets. HKEX is also the global leader in metals trading, through its wholly owned subsidiaries, The London Metal Exchange (LME) and LME Clear Limited. This commodity franchise was further enhanced with the launch of Qianhai Mercantile Exchange (QME), in China, in 2018. HKEX launched the pioneering Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect programme in 2014, further expanded with the launch of Shenzhen Connect in 2016, and the launch of Bond Connect in 2017. www.hkexgroup.com SOURCE Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) Security agencies have reported to the Kaduna State Government that the military has secured the Kaduna bound train from Abuja trapped by terrorists on Monday evening. The State Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, Samuel Aruwan, disclosed this late Monday night in a statement obtained by LEADERSHIP. He noted that the Kaduna State Government earlier received multiple reports of an attack on the Abuja-Kaduna train service at around Kateri-Rijana general areas on Monday. "Relevant action agencies were urgently contacted, and robust deployments of personnel were swiftly made to the area to secure the passengers onboard. "Efforts are ongoing to convey the passengers from the location and others that sustained injuries have been rushed to hospitals for urgent medical attention," Aruwan said. The Commissioner added that the government of Kaduna State will be liaising with the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) to ascertain the list from the passengers' manifest for efficient tracking. "This is to acquire an accurate inventory of all passengers and their actual status. "Governor Nasir El-Rufa'i who has been in constant touch with the security forces, commended them for their prompt response, and thanked them for successfully securing the train and passengers on board," he stated. Aruwas further revealed that security forces have continue to comb the general area in additional rescue efforts, adding that "emerging developments will be communicated to the public." CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- HubSpot , the customer relationship management (CRM) platform for scaling companies, today announced its partnership with alternative financing platform Pipe in which Pipe will provide access to a total of $100 million in fee-free funding for HubSpot for Startups customers, while Pipe customers will receive a 30% discount on HubSpot's CRM Suite . The partnership enables startups to pursue business growth with HubSpot's market-leading CRM platform while accessing growth capital through Pipe. For founders who are looking to scale their businesses, the prospect of raising capital while managing the operations of their companies can feel especially daunting. The process often requires business leaders to take time away from their responsibilities to manage the logistics of fundraising, which can stifle productivity and inhibit growth. With its ability to reduce friction in this process, Pipe is at the forefront of alternative financing platforms by allowing startups to transform their recurring revenue into up-front capitalfreeing up executives' time to focus on growth. Just as HubSpot is helping millions of organizations manage their customer relationships and integrate their tech stack seamlessly, Pipe's platform helps companies finance growth on their own terms without restrictive debt or dilution. "At HubSpot, we know that growing startups need marketing, sales and service skills; the right tools to implement these skills; and the capital to invest in these strategies," said Andrew Lindsay, SVP of corporate & business development at HubSpot. "This new partnership with Pipe deepens our commitment to helping young startups via quick and easy access to the capital they need to scale." Startups can access this program in one of three ways: New and existing Pipe customers will receive 30% off HubSpot's CRM Suite to help expand their reach and build their brands. New and existing HubSpot for Startups customers will receive access to up to $100 million in fee-free financing on Pipe's platform to scale their businesses. in fee-free financing on Pipe's platform to scale their businesses. Interested startups that are not currently Pipe or HubSpot For Startups customers can still apply for the program after becoming a customer of any of the program's affiliated partners . "Pipe is committed to giving startup founders the resources to grow on their terms by giving them direct access to the capital markets," said Brad Coffey, Chief Customer Officer at Pipe. "By partnering with HubSpot, we're making access to growth capital available to millions of companies, along with the tools to help customers scale their businesses. It's a win-win for startups." This partnership is launching a year after HubSpot announced its investment in Pipe through HubSpot Ventures, which found a common focus in Pipe's ability to utilize ecosystem partnerships to drive growth. It adds to HubSpot's continued commitment to arming startups with the resources they need to be successful, which can be seen through its investments in programs like HubSpot Academy, HubSpot for Startups, and HubSpot Ventures. To learn more about this partnership or to apply, please visit https://www.hubspot.com/startups/partners/pipe. About HubSpot HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform that provides software and support to help companies grow better. The platform includes marketing, sales, service, operations, and website management products that start free and scale to meet our customers' needs at any stage of growth. Today, more than 135,000 customers across more than 120 countries use HubSpot's powerful and easy-to-use tools and integrations to attract, engage, and delight customers. Named Glassdoor's #2 Best Place to Work in 2022, HubSpot has been recognized for its award-winning culture by Great Place to Work, Comparably, Fortune, Entrepreneur, Inc., and more. HubSpot was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company's thousands of employees work across the globe in HubSpot offices and remotely. Learn more at www.hubspot.com . SOURCE HubSpot Agri-food group deploys Infor M3 at the heart of its IT infrastructure to help optimize management of its activities and support its international development RUEIL-MALMAISON, France, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Infor, the industry cloud company, today announced that the family-owned Triballat Noyal group, leader in organic ultra-fresh products and pioneer of soy in France, has deployed Infor M3. The adoption of a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution is part of a large-scale project to overhaul its information systems and its teams. Learn more about Infor for food & beverage: https://www.infor.com/industries/food-beverage The Triballat Noyal family group was founded in 1951, following the takeover of a small dairy company in Noyal sur Vilaine, near Rennes. Strongly rooted in pillar values for three generations, the company has been committed to organic, sustainable and local farming methods since the 1970s, and is a pioneer in the ethical and sustainable food industry. Today, the group has more than 1,300 employees spread across 17 sites in France and achieved a turnover of 335 million in 2020. Among the group's flagship brands are Sojasun, Vrai, Petit Billy, Merzer and Terres et Cereales. Due to the development of its activities in France and neighbouring Spain, Italy, Germany and England, the group questioned a large part of its business processes and decided to rationalize its activities using an IT solution capable of improving the steering of operations and the management of the production facilities, shortening the time required to close its accounts and supporting its international development. "Our growth ambitions have prompted an in-depth review of our organization's transformation, both in terms of tools and human capital," says Pierre Galeron, Triballat Noyal's information systems director. "Until recently, our operations were managed using an ERP system that was certainly efficient, but which, after 25 years of specific developments, had reached its limits. We chose to replace it with Infor M3, a modern solution designed for the requirements of the food industry and capable of supporting our future developments." The project to overhaul the ERP system was handled by Infor and its partner LTTD Consulting, whose teams supported the 30+ employees of Triballat Noyal's IT department. There were multiple challenges in terms of infrastructure as well as security, support, functionalities, business applications and data management. The requirements and specificities of the activities of the various business units and markets addressed by the Triballat Noyal group (desserts and sweet pleasures, beverages and cooking, catering, consumer cheeses and traditional cheeses) have all been taken into account in the project. "The choice of Infor M3 was made on the basis of dedicated food industry functionalities, of course, as the solution is very well referenced in the agri-food sector. In addition, the solution's ability to interface with our third-party solutions and to meet our requirements in terms of financial management, sales administration, logistics (transport and warehouse management) and production finally convinced us unequivocally," Galeron said. The project benefited from the support of all of Infor's teams in France and up to the highest levels of management internationally, as well as its integrator partner LTTD Consulting. "We accompanied Triballat Noyal to guarantee a total understanding of the stakes involved in the transformation project for each employee, while affirming at each step our continuous support and commitment to the success of the project," comments Thierry Bigot, LTTD Consulting's sales director. From Infor's side, satisfaction is high around this customer relationship, which commenced in June 2018 and, despite difficult conditions during the pandemic, was able to complete the project on time. "We are very happy to be associated with a brand that is known and respected by French consumers," says Jean-Lucien Meunier, Infor general manager in France. "The project mobilized our know-how in a food industry that is constantly under pressure and whose resilience we admire, especially in times of crisis. With this type of collaboration, we are able to integrate more functionalities and innovation into our solutions to best meet our customers' requirements." About Triballat Noyal Triballat Noyal is a French family business established in Brittany for three generations. The group is composed of many brands, such as Sojasun, Vrai, Sojade, Terre et Cereales and Petit Billy. The products are 100% made in France with 93% of ingredients from France. Rich in strongly affirmed pillar values, Triballat Noyal claims and illustrates on a daily basis a sustained commitment to pioneering innovation, respectful of both people and the environment. The company has been recognized at the Excellence level by the ISO 26 000 CSR standard since 2017. The Breton food group is chaired by Olivier Clanchin, who represents the third generation, and Solenn Douard, who is general manager. Visit https://www.triballat-noyal.com About Infor Infor is a global leader in business cloud software specialized by industry. We develop complete solutions for our focus industries, including industrial manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, food & beverage, automotive, aerospace & defense, and high tech. Infor's mission-critical enterprise applications and services are designed to deliver sustainable operational advantages with security and faster time-to-value. We are obsessed with delivering successful business outcomes for customers, and we are continually innovating to quickly solve emerging business and industry challenges. Over 65,000 organizations in more than 175 countries rely on Infor's 17,000 employees and their deep industry expertise to help overcome market disruptions and achieve their business goals. As a Koch company, our financial strength, ownership structure, and long-term view empower us to foster enduring, mutually beneficial relationships with our customers, employees and partners. Visit www.infor.com. Media contact: Richard Moore Infor PR Manager, EMEA +447976111243 [email protected] Copyright 2022 Infor. All rights reserved. The word and design marks set forth herein are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Infor and/or related affiliates and subsidiaries. All other trademarks listed herein are the property of their respective owners. www.infor.com SOURCE Infor Vendor Insights Infrastructure market share in Italy is fragmented and the vendors are deploying various organic and inorganic growth strategies to compete in the market. The growing competition in the market is compelling vendors to adopt various growth strategies such as promotional activities and spending on advertisements to improve the visibility of their services. Some vendors are also adopting inorganic growth strategies such as M&As to remain competitive in the market. Top Key players of Infrastructure Market In Italy covered as: ABB Ltd. Accenture Plc Architectural Projects Srl Atlantica Sustainable Infrastructure plc Bank of Italy Canella Achilli Architects SpA Euronext N.V. F2I SGR SpA RINA Spa Siemens AG The infrastructure market in Italy will be affected by the shortage of workers. In addition, increased investments in infrastructure will aid in market growth. An increase in exports and investors, growing urbanization will augment market growth over the forecast period as well. Get in touch for any queries before you make a call to purchase Infrastructure Market In Italy report: https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR72638 Infrastructure Market In Italy Split by Revenue Stream Direct Investment Indirect Investment Others Imperative Insights on the following aspects: What was the size of the global infrastructure in Italy industry by value in 2020? industry by value in 2020? What will be the size of the global infrastructure in Italy industry in 2026? industry in 2026? What factors are affecting the strength of competition in the global infrastructure in Italy industry? industry? How has the industry performed over the last five years? What are the main segments that make up the global infrastructure market in Italy ? Wish to Subscribe? Register for a 14 Day Free Trial Today! Download Free Sample Now! Infrastructure Market in Italy Value Chain Analysis Our study includes detailed information on the value chain analysis for the Italian infrastructure industry, which suppliers can use to gain a competitive edge during the projected period. The value chain of the construction and engineering market includes the following core components: Inputs Inbound logistics Operations Marketing and sales Service Support activities Innovation Browse Infrastructure Market In Italy related details: https://www.technavio.com/report/infrastructure-market-industry-in-italy-analysis Customize Your Report Don't miss out on the opportunity to speak to our analyst and know more insights about this market report. Our analysts can also help you customize this report according to your needs. Our analysts and industry experts will work directly with you to understand your requirements and provide you with customized data in a short amount of time. We offer USD 1,000 worth of FREE customization at the time of purchase. Speak to our Analyst now! Related Reports: Steel Building Market in MEA by Product, End-user, and Geography - Forecast and Analysis 2021-2025 Construction Market in South Korea by End-user and Type - Forecast and Analysis 2022-2026 Infrastructure Market In Italy Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 120 Base year 2021 Forecast period 2022-2026 Growth momentum & CAGR Decelerate at a CAGR of 3.59% Market growth 2022-2026 $ 19.78 billion Market structure Fragmented YoY growth (%) 3.97 Regional analysis Italy Performing market contribution Italy at 100% Key consumer countries Italy Competitive landscape Leading companies, competitive strategies, consumer engagement scope Companies profiled ABB Ltd., Accenture Plc, Architectural Projects Srl , Atlantica Sustainable Infrastructure plc, Bank of Italy, Canella Achilli Architects SpA, Euronext N.V., F2I SGR SpA, RINA Spa, and Siemens AG Market Dynamics Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID 19 impact and future consumer dynamics, market condition analysis for forecast period, Customization purview If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized. Table of Content: ***1. Executive Summary **1.1 Market Overview *Exhibit 01: Key Finding 1 *Exhibit 02: Key Finding 2 *Exhibit 03: Key Finding 5 *Exhibit 04: Key Finding 6 *Exhibit 05: Key Finding 7 ***2. Market Landscape **2.1 Market ecosystem *Exhibit 06: Parent market *Exhibit 07: Market characteristics **2.2 Value chain analysis *Exhibit 08: Value chain analysis : Construction and Engineering *2.2.1 Inputs *2.2.2 Inbound logistics *2.2.3 Operations *2.2.4 Marketing and sales *2.2.5 Support activities *2.2.6 Innovation ***3. Market Sizing **3.1 Market definition *Exhibit 09: Offerings of vendors included in the market definition **3.2 Market segment analysis *Exhibit 10: Market segments **3.3 Market size 2021 **3.4 Market outlook: Forecast for 2021 - 2026 *3.4.1 Estimating growth rates for emerging and high-growth markets *3.4.2 Estimating growth rates for mature markets *Exhibit 11: Global - Market size and forecast 2021 - 2026 ($ billion) *Exhibit 12: Global market: Year-over-year growth 2021 - 2026 (%) ***4. Five Forces Analysis **4.1 Five Forces Summary *Exhibit 13: Five forces analysis 2021 & 2026 **4.2 Bargaining power of buyers *Exhibit 14: Bargaining power of buyers **4.3 Bargaining power of suppliers *Exhibit 15: Bargaining power of suppliers **4.4 Threat of new entrants *Exhibit 16: Threat of new entrants **4.5 Threat of substitutes *Exhibit 17: Threat of substitutes **4.6 Threat of rivalry *Exhibit 18: Threat of rivalry **4.7 Market condition *Exhibit 19: Market condition - Five forces 2021 ***5 Market Segmentation by Application **5.1 Market segments *Exhibit 20: Application - Market share 2021-2026 (%) **5.2 Comparison by Application *Exhibit 21: Comparison by Application **5.3 Transportation - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 *Exhibit 22: Transportation - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion) *Exhibit 23: Transportation - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) **5.4 Social - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 *Exhibit 24: Social - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion) *Exhibit 25: Social - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) **5.5 Utilities - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 *Exhibit 26: Utilities - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion) *Exhibit 27: Utilities - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) **5.6 Manufacturing - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 *Exhibit 28: Manufacturing - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion) *Exhibit 29: Manufacturing - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) **5.7 Market opportunity by Application *Exhibit 30: Market opportunity by Application ***6.Market Segmentation by Revenue stream **6.1 Market segments *Exhibit 31: Revenue stream - Market share 2021-2026 (%) **6.2 Comparison by Revenue stream *Exhibit 32: Comparison by Revenue stream **6.3 Direct investment - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 *Exhibit 33: Direct investment - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion) *Exhibit 34: Direct investment - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) **6.4 Indirect investment - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 *Exhibit 35: Indirect investment - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion) *Exhibit 36: Indirect investment - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) **6.5 Others - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 *Exhibit 37: Others - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion) *Exhibit 38: Others - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) **6.6 Market opportunity by Revenue stream *Exhibit 39: Market opportunity by Revenue stream ***7. Customer landscape **7.1 Overview *Technavio's customer landscape matrix comparing Drivers or price sensitivity, Adoption lifecycle, importance in customer price basket, Adoption rate and Key purchase criteria *Exhibit 40: Customer landscape ***8. Drivers, Challenges, and Trends **8.1 Market drivers *8.1.1 Increased investments in infrastructure *8.1.2 Increase in exports and investors *8.1.3 Growing urbanization **8.2 Market challenges *8.2.1 Shortage of workers *8.2.2 Increase in labor costs *8.2.3 Fluctuation in the price of building materials *Exhibit 41: Impact of drivers and challenges **8.3 Market trends *8.3.1 Growing e-commerce industry *8.3.2 Government plans for infrastructure development *8.3.3 Emergence of automation in the construction industry ***9. Vendor Landscape **9.1 Overview *Exhibit 42: Vendor landscape **9.2 Landscape disruption *Exhibit 43: Landscape disruption *Exhibit 44: Industry risks **9.3 Competitive landscape ***10. Vendor Analysis **10.1 Vendors covered *Exhibit 45: Vendors covered **10.2 Market positioning of vendors *Exhibit 46: Market positioning of vendors *10.3 ABB Ltd. *Exhibit 47: ABB Ltd. - Overview *Exhibit 48: ABB Ltd. - Business segments *Exhibit 49: ABB Ltd. - Key offerings *Exhibit 50: ABB Ltd. - Segment focus **10.4 Accenture Plc *Exhibit 51: Accenture Plc - Overview *Exhibit 52: Accenture Plc - Business segments *Exhibit 53: Accenture Plc - Key offerings *Exhibit 54: Accenture Plc - Segment focus **10.5 Architectural Projects Srl *Exhibit 55: Architectural Projects Srl - Overview *Exhibit 56: Architectural Projects Srl - Product and service *Exhibit 57: Architectural Projects Srl - Key offerings **10.6 Atlantica Sustainable Infrastructure plc *Exhibit 58: Atlantica Sustainable Infrastructure plc - Overview *Exhibit 59: Atlantica Sustainable Infrastructure plc - Business segments *Exhibit 60: Atlantica Sustainable Infrastructure plc - Key offerings *Exhibit 61: Atlantica Sustainable Infrastructure plc - Segment focus **10.7 Bank of Italy *Exhibit 62: Bank of Italy - Overview *Exhibit 63: Bank of Italy - Product and service *Exhibit 64: Bank of Italy - Key offerings **10.8 Canella Achilli Architects SpA *Exhibit 65: Canella Achilli Architects SpA - Overview *Exhibit 66: Canella Achilli Architects SpA - Product and service *Exhibit 67: Canella Achilli Architects SpA - Key offerings **10.9 Euronext N.V. *Exhibit 68: Euronext N.V. - Overview *Exhibit 69: Euronext N.V. - Product and service *Exhibit 70: Euronext N.V. - Key offerings **10.10 F2I SGR SpA *Exhibit 71: F2I SGR SpA - Overview *Exhibit 72: F2I SGR SpA - Product and service *Exhibit 73: F2I SGR SpA - Key offerings **10.11 RINA Spa *Exhibit 74: RINA Spa - Overview *Exhibit 75: RINA Spa - Product and service *Exhibit 76: RINA Spa - Key offerings **10.12 Siemens AG *Exhibit 77: Siemens AG - Overview *Exhibit 78: Siemens AG - Business segments *Exhibit 79: Siemens AG - Key offerings *Exhibit 80: Siemens AG - Segment focus ***11. Appendix **11.1 Scope of the report *11.1.1 Market definition *11.1.2 Objectives *11.1.3 Notes and caveats **11.2 Currency conversion rates for US$ *Exhibit 81: Currency conversion rates for US$ **11.3 Research Methodology *Exhibit 82: Research Methodology *Exhibit 83: Validation techniques employed for market sizing *Exhibit 84: Information sources **11.4 List of abbreviations *Exhibit 85: List of abbreviations About Us Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contact Us: Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com/ SOURCE Technavio "Since beginning my first agency role over 20 years ago, I've been developing a point of view on how the creative model can evolve to better serve that ambition of business leaders," said Lindholm. "We've jump-started a new kind of creative approach; we look for innovative solutions that give the C suite the courage and support to make dramatic changes in their business. We do that with Grey Space thinkingour method of finding solutions in the spaces between obvious or black-and-white answers." "Before meeting Ryan I had been happily growing my own agency for 15 years," says Mark Riedy, Co-Founder and COO of InGoodTaste. "The opportunity to partner with an experienced leader and unique thinker like Ryan was absolutely a once-in-a-career chance and I jumped at it. In the past year we've built an outstanding team and have already engaged with incredible clients like 24 Hour Fitness, Spot Insurance, Canyon and Sustainable Ocean Alliance among many others." Lindholm, who lives and works in the Marin, CA and joins the creative organization that also features team members based in Portland, Oregon; Boulder, Colorado; and Park City, Utah. In order to predict what's ahead, the team at InGoodTaste lives in the future. To do this they deploy Grey Space Thinking as their guiding mindset--a way of being and thinking--rather than a specific tool or a method. Grey Space Thinking is the opposite of binary, black-and-white concepting; it's about accepting that we live in a complex, uncertain world and the opportunity is found in the places between extremes. Herkert will lead a creative team at InGoodTaste that believes that innovative solutions to the problems that exist is best done in the Grey Space. Problems that InGoodTaste likes to solve include business strategy, consumer research, brand positioning, creative potential, social impact, communications strategy and media relations. Clients of InGoodTaste include 24 Hour Fitness, Spot Insurance, Maxpro Fitness, Superpedestrian, asensei, Rapha, Goldwin, Canyon, Giro Sport Design, Zwift, Wahoo, ROKA, Kuat, and more. Contact information: Greg Fisher [email protected]; 1.707.495.3756 About InGoodTaste InGoodTaste is a creative consultancy focused on driving positive change in the world through Grey Space Thinking. We collaborate with our partners to solve their most essential challenges by dreaming up innovative solutions in the Grey Space. We solve problems for our partners, ranging from business strategy, consumer research, brand positioning, creative potential, social impact, and strategic communication. We are always seeking creators of change. If you're a creative, a storyteller, a project manager, a strategist, an experimenter, or a dreamer, send us your folio, resume or website [email protected] SOURCE InGoodTaste DUBLIN, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -The "Smart Pills Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2022-2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The global smart pills market reached a value of US$ 3.9 Billion in 2021. Looking forward, the publisher expects the market to reach US$ 6.3 Billion by 2027, exhibiting at a CAGR of 7.8% during 2022-2027. Keeping in mind the uncertainties of COVID-19, we are continuously tracking and evaluating the direct as well as the indirect influence of the pandemic on different end use sectors. These insights are included in the report as a major market contributor. Smart pills are ingestible medical devices comprising sensors, cameras, patches, and trackers to record various physiological measures. They help in accurate therapy and better diagnostics and monitoring while eliminating the need for invasive procedures. Presently, several manufacturers are coming with innovative variants with advanced batteries and onboard memory. They assist in remote patient monitoring and telemedicine, providing wireless transmission of information in real-time and measuring the effects of the medication. A considerable rise in the prevalence of cancer and malignant gastrointestinal (GI) disorders represents one of the primary factors driving the demand for smart pills over conventional diagnostic techniques, such as endoscopy. Endoscopy devices are inserted into the patient's esophagus for diagnosis of GI disorders. However, the risk of infection transmission and esophageal tearing is usually high with endoscopes. Consequently, smart pills are widely utilized as they provide multidimensional pictures of the internal parts of the body non-invasively. Moreover, the growing pediatric population, which is relatively more vulnerable to targeted diseases, along with the emerging trend of minimally invasive surgeries (MIS), is promoting the adoption of smart pills to diagnose and treat chronic diseases. Apart from this, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak and the consequent rise in the demand for telemedicine technologies for remote patient visits are contributing to market growth. Furthermore, they are employed in the defense and allied industries to monitor the core body temperature of soldiers in real-time. Besides this, market players are investing in research and development (R&D) projects that focus on effective localization, steering, and control of pills. This is projected to expand the applications of smart pills in the future. Competitive Landscape: The competitive landscape of the industry has also been examined along with the profiles of the key players being CapsoVision Inc., Check-Cap Ltd., General Electric Company, IntroMedic Co. Ltd., Jinshan Science & Technology (Group) Co. Ltd., Koninklijke Philips N.V., Medtronic plc, Olympus Corporation and PENTAX Medical (Hoya Corporation). Key Questions Answered in This Report: How has the global smart pills market performed so far and how will it perform in the coming years? What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the global smart pills market? What are the key regional markets? What is the breakup of the market based on the target area? What is the breakup of the market based on the disease indication? What is the breakup of the market based on the application? What is the breakup of the market based on the end user? What are the various stages in the value chain of the industry? What are the key driving factors and challenges in the industry? What is the structure of the global smart pills market and who are the key players? What is the degree of competition in the industry? Key Topics Covered: 1 Preface 2 Scope and Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Introduction 4.1 Overview 4.2 Key Industry Trends 5 Global Smart Pills Market 5.1 Market Overview 5.2 Market Performance 5.3 Impact of COVID-19 5.4 Market Forecast 6 Market Breakup by Target Area 6.1 Esophagus 6.1.1 Market Trends 6.1.2 Market Forecast 6.2 Small Intestine 6.2.1 Market Trends 6.2.2 Market Forecast 6.3 Large Intestine 6.3.1 Market Trends 6.3.2 Market Forecast 6.4 Stomach 6.4.1 Market Trends 6.4.2 Market Forecast 7 Market Breakup by Disease Indication 7.1 Esophageal Diseases 7.1.1 Market Trends 7.1.2 Market Forecast 7.2 Small Bowel Diseases 7.2.1 Market Trends 7.2.2 Market Forecast 7.3 Colon Diseases 7.3.1 Market Trends 7.3.2 Market Forecast 7.4 Others 7.4.1 Market Trends 7.4.2 Market Forecast 8 Market Breakup by Application 8.1 Capsule Endoscopy 8.1.1 Market Trends 8.1.2 Market Forecast 8.2 Drug Delivery 8.2.1 Market Trends 8.2.2 Market Forecast 8.3 Patient Monitoring 8.3.1 Market Trends 8.3.2 Market Forecast 9 Market Breakup by End User 9.1 Hospitals 9.1.1 Market Trends 9.1.2 Market Forecast 9.2 Diagnostic Centers 9.2.1 Market Trends 9.2.2 Market Forecast 9.3 Research Institutes 9.3.1 Market Trends 9.3.2 Market Forecast 10 Market Breakup by Region 11 SWOT Analysis 12 Value Chain Analysis 13 Porters Five Forces Analysis 14 Price Analysis 15 Competitive Landscape 15.1 Market Structure 15.2 Key Players 15.3 Profiles of Key Players 15.3.1 CapsoVision Inc. 15.3.1.1 Company Overview 15.3.1.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.2 Check-Cap Ltd. 15.3.2.1 Company Overview 15.3.2.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.2.3 Financials 15.3.3 General Electric Company 15.3.3.1 Company Overview 15.3.3.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.3.3 Financials 15.3.3.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.4 IntroMedic Co. Ltd. 15.3.4.1 Company Overview 15.3.4.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.4.3 Financials 15.3.5 Jinshan Science & Technology (Group) Co. Ltd. 15.3.5.1 Company Overview 15.3.5.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.6 Koninklijke Philips N.V. 15.3.6.1 Company Overview 15.3.6.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.6.3 Financials 15.3.6.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.7 Medtronic plc 15.3.7.1 Company Overview 15.3.7.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.7.3 Financials 15.3.7.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.8 Olympus Corporation 15.3.8.1 Company Overview 15.3.8.2 Product Portfolio 15.3.8.3 Financials 15.3.8.4 SWOT Analysis 15.3.9 PENTAX Medical (Hoya Corporation) 15.3.9.1 Company Overview 15.3.9.2 Product Portfolio For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/oxedm9 Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Today's announcement builds on the initial seed funding the Foundation provided CIERTO when it was first established in 2016 to help U.S. growers access foreign-born workers using a clean, transparent, and ethical recruitment model that ensures that workers know their legal rights for fair pay and working conditions. CIERTO initially focused on workers from Mexico who qualify for H-2A visas. Their goal was to demonstrate the model and market among employers and workers for recruitment practices that create a more stable, professional, and productive workforce. The new grant will allow CIERTO to expand its model to include workers from Guatemala. "Our food system, in all 50 states, is dependent on temporary workers, most of whom migrate from impoverished countries south of our border to work and improve their own livelihoods back home," said Howard G. Buffett, Chairman and CEO of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. "The more we can create legal pathways for these temporary workers to access the demand created by employers who cannot find the labor they need in the United States, the better we will be able to address some of the pull factors driving unlawful migration and the humanitarian issues that accompany it." Data shows that workers who come to work in the U.S. free of fear and undue debt burdens improve their productivity by over 18%. At the same time, growers who comply with H-2A requirements see benefit, as workers are eager to return to work at farms where their rights are safeguarded and their skills are valued. In addition, by working with growers in the U.S. to create rights-respecting opportunities for several thousand workers over the last 6 years, CIERTO has unlocked an estimated $98 Million in pre-tax income gains over the Mexican minimum wage, improving the livelihoods of participating workers. Demonstrating that agricultural work is skilled labor has been an important part of CIERTO's mission from the beginning, according to Joe Martinez, the company's co-founder and CEO. "Once we've established clean, ethical recruiting as a baseline, we have an opportunity to demonstrate that agricultural workers are professionals and that this is a skilled labor force. When workers are recognized for the knowledge they bring to the table regarding farming best practices and expertise in specific crops, that's when you'll start to see big improvements in the lives of H-2A farm workers. So, we're very excited to again work with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation to continue to grow the H-2A program and to establish our model in Guatemala. The creation of an ethical and fair H-2A recruitment process will benefit Guatemalan workers, families, and communities, as well as protect US farmers and safeguard our food supply chain." The grant provided by the Foundation is designed to support recruitment of up to 20,000 H-2A workers from Guatemala, individuals who might otherwise seek employment in the United States through exploitative, irregular, and unlawful channels. The Howard G. Buffett Foundation's mission is to catalyze transformational change to improve the standard of living and quality of life for the world's most impoverished and marginalized populations. CIERTO is one of North America's leading recruiters, dedicated to assisting employers with the federal H-2A visa program. We recruit, train, and place experienced workers on farms in the United States and Canada. Our mission is to actively develop and maintain a professional, career-oriented, agricultural workforce, committed to returning to farms year after year. SOURCE CIERTO DANVERS, Mass., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Insight Service Group (ISG), a national claim and litigation support provider to the insurance and legal communities, today announced the appointment of Tom Feeney to vice chairman of the ISG Board of Directors. Feeney has over 45 years of corporate experience with an acclaimed track record for creating momentum and growth. During his corporate tenure, Feeney served as the CEO of Safelite Group, a multi-faceted vehicle glass and claims management service. He introduced and implemented a highly engaged cultural transformation founded on the company's People Powered and Customer Driven strategies, yielding the company an industry-leading position that it currently maintains. "Tom's deep experience and corporate leadership in the insurance market will be invaluable to ISG as we expand our business and shape the future of the industry by delivering business solutions that add value to the insurance and legal communities," said Bob Reardon, chairman and chief executive officer of ISG. "I look forward to working closely with Tom and other members of the board to ensure that ISG leads from the front and delivers on our mission to assist our clients in achieving optimal claims outcomes." In addition to this new appointment as vice chairman of ISG's board of directors, Feeney serves as director for the Safelite Group Board of Directors and executive chairman of Belron North America. Philanthropically, he serves as president emeritus of the board of directors for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Central Ohio, is a board member for Champions of the Community Inc., a non-profit organization supporting Nationwide Children's Hospital, a member at the Ohio Business Roundtable, the Columbus Partnership and chairman emeritus for the American Red Cross of Greater Columbus Chapter. "I'm excited to assume the vice chairman position on the board of directors at a company known for its customer centricity and powerful technology solutions," said Feeney. "I look forward to collaborating with the team and participating in the company's continued success." About Insight Service Group (ISG) ISG is a national market leader and technology driven service provider. Our business solutions help organizations reduce claim costs and support successful claim closures for both the insurance and legal communities. The company's integrated solutions include investigation, medical, clinical and record management. With over twenty-five years of experience and a comprehensive understanding of the industry challenges, ISG offers targeted, adaptable programs that result in a reduction in unnecessary losses typically from fraudulent claim activity or inflated claim losses. We create impactful solutions and build partnerships based on trust, innovation, experience and accountability. More information about ISG services is available at isgvalue.com. Connect with us: https://www.linkedin.com/company/isg_2 https://www.facebook.com/ISGVALUE/ Media Contact: Joanna Gavriel | ISG [email protected] 800-278-0550 SOURCE ISG Powered by Juvare Exchange, CORES HAN will deliver high-volume mass notifications and alerts to intended audiences across one of the state's largest government agencies ATLANTA, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Juvare, the leader in critical incident preparedness and response technology, announced the successful implementation of the CORES HAN solution for the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS). Juvare's CORES HAN was selected by DSHS as its partner to streamline and deliver high-volume mass notifications and alerts to intended audiences quickly, reliably, and flexibly. Juvare's CORES HAN system will be used by DSHS to communicate information related to local, state, and federal public health matters with qualified stakeholders, and to send Public Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) compliant data and communications. Juvare was selected after a competitive bid process that evaluated Juvare's technology as well as its ability to deliver complex projects in a timely manner. The announcement builds upon a longstanding partnership between the Texas DSHS and Juvare as the agency further invests in public health to promote and protect the health of people, and the communities where they live, learn, work, worship, and play. "Maintaining situational awareness while keeping people abreast of developments pertaining to public health is essential in successful emergency management and response, particularly so in the misinformation age," said Sam Klietz, Chief Client Officer of Juvare. "Our partnership with the Texas DSHS represents an evolution in ensuring emergency preparedness and response professionals are provided pertinent information in a timely, reliable, and secure manner, a critical step in ensuring the public understands how to react. We are looking forward to bolstering our working relationship with the Texas DSHS through this new endeavor." CORES HAN (Health Alert Network) is a mass notification program with advanced 2-way notification capability to send messages via phone, SMS, fax, and email, supporting 24/7 emergency medical response operations, mass casualty aid, missing persons, bed and resource availability, and surge surveillance. The system supports closed-loop communications with audit trail, enabling public safety officials to track mass notifications. Public health agencies use CORES HAN to share health information and process related notifications throughout the state including state and local public health guidelines and notifications. CORES HANS also supports and integrates with IPAWS, the nation's alert system, providing public safety officials with an effective way to warn the public regarding emergencies, including CDC Health Alert Network notifications. Numerous organizations across the Lone Star State trust Juvare daily to enhance emergency preparedness and response. Juvare technology connects more than 80% of U.S. state public health agencies, 3,500-plus hospitals, more than 50 federal agencies, and more than 500 emergency management operations across the U.S., as well as a rapidly expanding international presence with offices in offices in Canada, Lithuania, and New Zealand. About Juvare: Juvare is a worldwide leader in emergency preparedness and critical incident management and response software. Juvare solutions empower government agencies, corporations, healthcare facilities, academic institutions, and volunteer organizations to leverage real-time data to manage incidents faster and more efficiently, protecting people, property, and brands. For more information, visit www.juvare.com. Public Relations Contact: Bryan Spevak Vice President anthonyBarnum Public Relations Office: 512-387-3703 [email protected] SOURCE Juvare Kevin brings more than two decades of financial services experience to the role. He joins BNY Mellon Wealth Management from Fidelity Family Office Services, where he served as vice president, business development. He provided custody, trading, technology and investment services to single family offices, ultra-high-net-worth families and their advisors. Prior to that, Kevin worked at Salient Partners as a divisional director, head of RIA and bank trust division. He also held various senior leadership roles at Orinda Asset Management, Sun Life Financial, ING, The Hartford and First Trust. "Kevin has a deep understanding of the complexities and needs of the wealthy, single family offices and the professionals that serve them in the Houston metro area," said Innerst. "His expertise marshalling teams that assist individuals and families with investment management, wealth planning, philanthropic initiatives and special financing will help reinforce our Active Wealth framework as we help new and existing clients protect and grow their wealth." Kevin earned a Bachelor of Arts from Trinity University. He is a CFP professional. Kevin also holds a Series 7 license and Series 63 license. ABOUT BNY MELLON WEALTH MANAGEMENT For more than two centuries, BNY Mellon Wealth Management has provided services to financially successful individuals and families, their family offices and business enterprises, planned giving programs, and endowments and foundations. It has $321 billion in total client assets as of December 31, 2021, and an extensive network of offices in the U.S. and internationally. BNY Mellon Wealth Management, which delivers leading wealth advice across investments, banking, custody, and wealth and estate planning, conducts business through various operating subsidiaries of The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation. A line of business within Wealth Management, BNY Mellon Investor Solutions includes the firm's institutional multi-asset solutions business. The Investor Solutions AUM/AUA is $31.3 billion as of December 31, 2021. For more information, visit www.bnymellon.com or follow us on Twitter @BNYMellonWealth. Media Contact: Ben Tanner 212-635-8676 [email protected] SOURCE BNY Mellon Wealth Management Fast Growing Franchise Brings Fresh Poke to Missouri ST. LOUIS, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Koibito Poke, the leading healthy fast casual concept known for its award-winning build-your-own Hawaiian poke bowls, announces the opening of two new locations in St. Louis, Missouri this summer. The new locations will be located at 13275 Manchester Road, Suite 103 in Des Peres and 9959 Manchester Ave. in Warson Woods and are expected to open by July 2022. Todd Stottlemyre, Co-Founder and CEO of Koibito Poke Koibito Poke is the leading healthy fast casual concept known for its award-winning build-your-own Hawaiian poke bowls "This expansion is a natural fit because of my roots of playing with the St. Louis Cardinals and our relationship with the area developer," says Todd Stottlemyre, Co-Founder and CEO of Koibito Poke, former MLB pitcher and three-time World Series Champion and two-time bestselling author. Both St. Louis locations will feature similar design elements of the flagship locations, with indoor and outdoor seating and the ability to accommodate takeout, dine-in and delivery options for guests. The franchise's open visibility model gives customers easy access to direct views of the menu and ready-to-serve ingredients. Koibito Poke offers a customizable build-your-own bowl experience that allows each diner to make every bowl to their liking with the freshest seafood, toppings and nine unique sauces. The award-winning concept also serves a handful of Signature Bowls for an easier selection. "I'm very excited to bring fast-casual healthy poke to the St. Louis area and I look forward to growing with Koibito Poke," says franchisee Shane Yearian, a land sales specialist in the Missouri area. Koibito Poke, which currently has four locations in Arizona, is actively franchising new locations across the country. The restaurant sets itself apart from other fast casual concepts by serving healthy food that has great advantages to building the body's immune system. The company is committed to creating a new standard of excellence in healthy, nutritious, and delicious dining in the Poke space. For more information on Koibito Poke and its franchise offerings, visit https://koibitopoke.com/franchise or follow them on social media @koibito.poke. About Koibito Poke: Founded in 2018, Koibito Poke is the leading Arizona poke restaurant influenced by traditional Hawaiian and Japanese flavors and ingredients. Koibito Poke (Koibito meaning "love" in Japanese) to show their bodies some love by providing them with fresh, clean whole foods that are good for them and taste good too. Koibito Poke is co-founded by former MLB Pitcher and three-time World Champion Todd Stottlemyre who has led the brand's expansion throughout Arizona. The restaurant is expanding its concept with franchises across the country. For more information, visit www.koibitopoke.com. Media Contact: Robyn Patterson 480-269-0140 [email protected] SOURCE Koibito Poke Following Saturday's incident where a local guard of the Kaduna International Airport was gunned down, Azman Airline, one of the carriers operating to the airport, has suspended its operation. The airline confirmed this in a notice posted on its Twitter handle. Daily Trust learnt that the airline stopped the operation on Monday, leaving many passengers stranded at the airport due to limited flight connectivity in and out of Kaduna. The airline said the suspension of operation to the airport was to re-evaluate security at the airport. It said, "The Management of Azman Air will like to inform the general public that we will be halting our operations into Kaduna Airport for a few days. "We understand the security situation around the airport has been handled and normalcy has been restored accordingly, but it is imperative for the Management to re-evaluate its operational procedures into the Airport to ensure maximum safety of Equipment, Staff and Passengers are fully guaranteed. "The bedrock of our operations is Safety and we will continue to explore every option to aid its delivery to the highest standard. Thanks for your usual cooperation." A Lagos-bound flight was delayed after gunmen and security operatives exchanged fire around the airport on Saturday. Company highlights long-standing commitment to responsible sourcing of pork products CINCINNATI, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Kroger Co. (NYSE: KR) today announced that Carl Icahn has submitted an intent to nominate two director candidates Alexis C. Fox and Margarita Palau-Hernandez to stand for election to the Kroger Board of Directors at the Company's 2022 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. The date for the Annual Meeting has not been announced. Kroger shareholders are not required to take any action at this time. The Company issued the following statement: The Kroger Board and management team maintain regular communications with shareholders and other stakeholders on a range of matters, including those related to environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters, and welcome open engagement. Kroger noted that it heard from Mr. Icahn for the first time on Friday, March 25, 2022, only days before he submitted his intent to nominate two director candidates. During this conversation, Mr. Icahn voiced his concerns regarding animal welfare and the use of gestation crates in pork production. As America's grocer, Kroger is committed to providing fresh, affordable food for everyone. Responsible sourcing throughout our supply chain is embedded in how we operate and is of the highest importance to our company. While Kroger is not directly involved in raising or the processing of any animals, we are committed to helping protect the welfare of animals in our supply chain. Kroger has an established Responsible Sourcing Framework to clearly define our policies, requirements and practices, including our Animal Welfare Policy, which articulates our expectation that all suppliers will have transitioned away from gestation crates by 2025. Our Board of Directors prioritizes ESG matters that affect people, our planet and the food systems on which we all depend. Our Board and its committees have direct oversight of key ESG topics, including animal welfare, which is overseen by our Public Responsibilities Committee (PRC). The PRC regularly discusses the topic of animal welfare, given the Company's commitment to source gestation crate-free pork and the need to provide affordable, fresh food to our customers. Kroger's Animal Welfare strategy and implementation is overseen by a multi-disciplinary internal Animal Welfare Management Committee with representation from our Corporate Food Technology, Ethics and Compliance, Meat, Dairy and Egg Sourcing, and ESG teams. Kroger regularly engages with key animal welfare groups, including the Humane Society of the United States. In early 2021, Kroger joined the Global Coalition for Animal Welfare (GCAW), the world's first industry-led collaboration aimed at advancing animal welfare standards throughout the global food supply chain. Kroger works closely with our key suppliers to understand animal welfare topics and make progress together toward our commitments. We also engage and solicit feedback from internal and third-party animal welfare subject matter experts, advocacy groups, and customers to support our goals. The Corporate Governance Committee of Kroger's Board will review the proposed nominees in accordance with its governance policies and practices, and the Board will present its formal recommendations in its preliminary proxy statement. About Kroger At The Kroger Co. (NYSE: KR), we are Fresh for Everyone and dedicated to our Purpose: To Feed the Human Spirit. We are, across our family of companies, nearly half a million associates who serve over 11 million customers daily through a seamless shopping experience under a variety of banner names. We are committed to creating #ZeroHungerZeroWaste communities by 2025. To learn more about us, visit our newsroom and investor relations site. This press release contains forward-looking statements, as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including the goals of our animal welfare policy. These statements are based on management's assumptions and beliefs in light of the information currently available to it. Such statements are indicated by the words "expect," "commit," "continues," "will," "strategy," and "goals." These forward-looking statements are subject to uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. We assume no obligation to update the information contained herein. Please refer to Kroger's reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a further discussion of these risks and uncertainties. Important Additional Information and Where to Find It The Company intends to file a proxy statement on Schedule 14A and WHITE proxy card with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") in connection with the solicitation of proxies for its 2022 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. SHAREHOLDERS ARE STRONGLY ADVISED TO READ THE COMPANY'S 2022 PROXY STATEMENT (INCLUDING ANY AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS THERETO), THE WHITE PROXY CARD AND ANY OTHER DOCUMENTS FILED WITH THE SEC WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. Shareholders may obtain a free copy of the 2022 proxy statement, any amendments or supplements to the proxy statement and other documents that the Company files with the SEC from the SEC's website at www.sec.gov or the Company's website at http://ir.kroger.com as soon as reasonably practicable after such materials are electronically filed with, or furnished to, the SEC. Certain Information Regarding Participants in Solicitation The Company, its directors, its executive officers and its nominees for election as director may be deemed participants in the solicitation of proxies from shareholders in connection with the matters to be considered at the Company's 2022 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. Information regarding the persons who may, under the rules of the SEC, be considered participants in the solicitation of shareholders in connection with the Company's 2022 annual meeting, and their direct or indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, which may be different from those of the Company's shareholders generally, will be set forth in the Company's definitive proxy statement for the 2022 annual meeting of shareholders and the other relevant documents to be filed with the SEC. SOURCE The Kroger Co. "Better enterprise search has been a goal for organizations for the last twenty years," said David Schubmehl, Research VP for Conversational AI and Intelligent Knowledge Discovery at IDC. "The use of AI and better natural language processing is now beginning to provide organizations with better products and techniques that improve the search experience, sometimes dramatically. Kyndi Natural Language Search appears to be one such product and IDC looks forward to its entry into the growing market for AI powered search." Today, individuals still spend at least 400 hours each year searching for information , resulting in millions of dollars in operational costs and lost business opportunities. Kyndi's Natural Language Search solution cuts down search time by half while delivering twice the information accuracy. This means customers and employees can use accurate business insights immediately to enhance customer engagement, reduce risk, and identify future business opportunities. Through Kyndi's Early Adopter Program, Kyndi customers have already started transforming into natural-language-enabled businesses. The Kyndi Natural Language Search Solution offers a number of cutting-edge capabilities, including: Kyndi Site Search: Powered by Kyndi's Natural Language Platform, Kyndi's Site Search solution simplifies digital content discovery, increasing engagement and conversion by helping customers quickly find answers to questions buried in digital content. Powered by Kyndi's Natural Language Platform, Kyndi's Site Search solution simplifies digital content discovery, increasing engagement and conversion by helping customers quickly find answers to questions buried in digital content. Unparalleled Natural Language Understanding (NLU): Built on top of a rich set of NLU capabilities are Kyndi's advanced cognitive abilities that can detect user intent, query variations, semantic similarity and more. Providing unmatched accuracy and speed, Kyndi delivers the most relevant, comprehensive answers to users every time they search. Built on top of a rich set of NLU capabilities are Kyndi's advanced cognitive abilities that can detect user intent, query variations, semantic similarity and more. Providing unmatched accuracy and speed, Kyndi delivers the most relevant, comprehensive answers to users every time they search. User-friendly Explanations: Kyndi's Explainable AI enables end-users to click-thru search results to see answers in context of the underlying data, while developers can tune and optimize the result with minimal effort. Kyndi's Explainable AI enables end-users to click-thru search results to see answers in context of the underlying data, while developers can tune and optimize the result with minimal effort. No-code Environment: Kyndi allows users of all skill levels to manage the set-up, language extension, testing, and benchmarking of a semantically tuned, searchable content volume without having to code. With Kyndi, users can dynamically extend their language model at runtime, saving time and resources for model re-training. Kyndi allows users of all skill levels to manage the set-up, language extension, testing, and benchmarking of a semantically tuned, searchable content volume without having to code. With Kyndi, users can dynamically extend their language model at runtime, saving time and resources for model re-training. Flexible and Fast Deployment: Deploy and launch Kyndi Natural Language Search into production in days or weeks instead of months or years . Kyndi can be run in a multi-tenant environment fully managed by Kyndi, or in a single-tenant VPC hosted by Kyndi or by organization's internal team. "Our goal has always been to amplify the productivity of the 230+ million business professionals that waste too much time looking for answers in text data," said Ryan Welsh, founder and CEO of Kyndi. "Kyndi's award-winning NLP platform was previously only available to the largest enterprises and government agencies in the world, but now it is obtainable to businesses of all sizes in the first end-to-end natural language search offering. This is a major leap forward in helping every business become natural-language-enabled." For more information, visit Kyndi's newly launched website here . Follow on LinkedIn and Twitter . Please Tweet: #ai powered #naturallanguageprocessing leader @kynditech unveils the Kyndi Natural Language Search Solution - enables enterprises to discover and deliver the most relevant, precise contextual business information at unprecedented speed About Kyndi Kyndi is a global provider of the Kyndi Platform for the Natural-Language-Enabled Enterprise, an AI-powered platform that empowers people to do their most meaningful work. Trusted by the world's most innovative organizations, Kyndi's platform delivers highly relevant and context-driven information at unprecedented speed, keeping humans at the heart of critical problem solving. Backed by leading venture investors including Intel Capital and PivotNorth, Kyndi was recently awarded the North America Entrepreneurial Company of the Year by leading research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, and was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. Customers include government agencies and enterprises across manufacturing, media, and hi-tech industries. Learn more at: https://kyndi.com/ or by following on LinkedIn and Twitter . Media Contacts Chris McCoin or Richard Smith McCoin & Smith Communications Inc. 508-429-5988 (Chris) or 978-433-3304 (Rick) [email protected] or [email protected] SOURCE Kyndi Bunny Cleo Almond Milk or Grand Cru ( $16.90 & $24.80 ) - The milk chocolate almond bunny Cleo is a sophisticated and a beautiful highlight of Easter baskets for all ages. Made of milk chocolate studded with caramelized almond bits, bunny Cleo is hand-decorated by Laderach's artisan chocolatiers in Switzerland . Cleo's ears are beautifully decorated with edible glitter dust, and her neck is adorned with a beautiful bow. The Grand Cru dark chocolate bunny Cleo is made of pure, fresh, single-origin 70% dark chocolate from Ecuador . & ) - The milk chocolate almond bunny Cleo is a sophisticated and a beautiful highlight of Easter baskets for all ages. Made of milk chocolate studded with caramelized almond bits, bunny Cleo is hand-decorated by Laderach's artisan chocolatiers in . Cleo's ears are beautifully decorated with edible glitter dust, and her neck is adorned with a beautiful bow. The Grand Cru dark chocolate bunny Cleo is made of pure, fresh, single-origin 70% dark chocolate from . Little Eggs Assorted 12 pieces ( $20.00 & $23.90 ) 12 speckled chocolate eggs are featured in a 12-piece box. The solid eggs come in three flavors: milk chocolate with rice crispies; white chocolate with strawberry and rice crispies; white chocolate with orange, mango and rice crispies. & ) 12 speckled chocolate eggs are featured in a 12-piece box. The solid eggs come in three flavors: milk chocolate with rice crispies; white chocolate with strawberry and rice crispies; white chocolate with orange, mango and rice crispies. FrischSchoggi Bunny Confetti Milk ( $23.90 & $24.50 ) This FrischSchoggi (fresh chocolate) bunny is made by delicately mixing fresh Swiss milk chocolate with colorful chocolate pieces. Hand-decorated with a cheerful spring ribbon, this bunny is a sweet addition to any Easter basket. & ) This FrischSchoggi (fresh chocolate) bunny is made by delicately mixing fresh Swiss milk chocolate with colorful chocolate pieces. Hand-decorated with a cheerful spring ribbon, this bunny is a sweet addition to any Easter basket. Hazelnut FrischSchoggi Egg ( $23.90 & $24.50 ) This Easter Egg is made of fresh Swiss milk chocolate mixed with whole caramelized hazelnuts from Piedmont, Italy . & ) This Easter Egg is made of fresh Swiss milk chocolate mixed with whole caramelized hazelnuts from . Large FrischSchoggi Sticks in Egg Box ( $44.00 & $52.00 ) Laderach's most popular FrischSchoggi varieties are offered in this attractive egg-filled box. "When it comes to elevating your Spring and Easter holiday, there's nothing better than experiencing the joy of fresh chocolate," said Brooke Messner-Sheldon, marketing director, Laderach North America. "That's why our team at Laderach has gone to great lengths to ensure our limited-edition chocolates are of the highest quality to engage and delight all five senses. From beautifully hand-decorated artisanal bunnies, eggs to our popular FrischSchoggi, each chocolate masterpiece features the finest ingredients combined with Swiss milk chocolate or single-origin dark chocolate from Ecuador." Just 2.5 years after arriving in North America, Laderach has nearly 40 premium fresh chocolate stores in California, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Toronto, and the Washington DC area. Laderach chocolate is also available online at laderach.com. About Laderach Chocolatier Suisse Operating since 1962, Laderach Chocolatier Suisse is a family-owned, premium Swiss chocolate company dedicated to creating sweet moments of joy in everyday life. As the largest chocolate retailer in Switzerland with approximately 1,300+ employees representing more than 50 nationalities and over 100 retail stores worldwide, Swiss quality is reflected in Laderach's control of the entire value chain from bean-to-bar-to-shop. Laderach uses only the best ingredients through strong relationships with the finest suppliers. Laderach produces over 100 varieties of chocolates, including over 20 varieties of FrischSchoggi (extra-large slabs of fresh chocolate), more than 50 different pralines and truffles, dozens of confectionery specialties, and a large selection of seasonal creations. To learn more about its stores, chocolate and careers, visit www.laderach.com. CONTACT: Ryan Bowling +1 650 245 7945 [email protected] SOURCE Laderach Chocolatier Suisse In remarks accompanying the award, the RUSA selection committee said that they selected Watson's "Bringing the Library to Transit Riders" program for "exceeding our expectations" in applying existing technologies in novel ways that benefit the library and its customers. The BETA recognition represents the third award in 2022 for this groundbreaking library outreach initiative, following the American Library Association's "Library of the Future Award," and the Urban Libraries Council's "Top Innovators Honorable Mention." "Bringing the Library to Transit Riders" is a unique partnership between the Library District and the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada (RTC), which enables transit riders to instantly sign up for access to library materials online using the RTC's free onboard WiFi. The program is available city-wide on the RTC's 400 transit buses, which serve the Las Vegas metropolitan area. Riders simply scan a QR code, featured inside the buses, to download the Library District's Libby app. The system then walks these new library customers through the sign up process using their mobile number, instantly verifying their new account. Riders can then immediately begin borrowing eBooks, eAudiobooks, magazines, and movies at no cost, on the bus, at home, or anywhere on the go. The program also allows temporary library access to transit riders who are visitors to Las Vegas via a seven-day pass to the Libby app. "(This program) shows a great commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives," stated the BETA selection committee, "most notably providing resources in multiple languages and removing barriers to access by ensuring that the landing page is accessible and compatible with assistive technologies. We were particularly impressed by the statistics you included, with 7,013 apps downloaded, 40,995 checkouts, 3,893 page views, and 1,938 users between September 2021 and your submission in January 2022. "This project has not only had a great impact on your local population and its visitors, but also sets a precedent for other major cities with active public transportation systems to partner with libraries and poses the potential for partnerships with other public spaces," the awards committee noted. "You have effectively pulled together vendor technologies, QR code technology, users' personal technologies, advertisement, and a city-wide initiative to have a valuable impact on your users." Information access, discovery, and delivery are at the heart of 21st century libraries and have been the core of Kelvin Watson's career. At each of the library systems that he has led, he has implemented a mobile-first, user-centered approach to delivering library content and services, to those we serve, beyond our buildings. This means providing easy access to the library's collections (both physical and digital) in places like parks, prisons, and hospitals, and to those without internet access. Regarded as one of the most highly respected thought leaders in the library industry, Kelvin Watson is credited with expanding his customer base in multiple library management roles, through outreach efforts to underserved and diverse populations. He brought transformative change to the communities in which he has served through ambitious and groundbreaking initiatives, such as streamlining access to resources, introducing new technology, and developing new collaborative partnerships. He was named the 2021 winner of the RUSA Margaret E. Monroe Library Adult Services Award, sponsored by Novelist, for his dedication to implementing new and innovative ways to meet customers both existing and new "where they are," with initiatives targeting non-traditional library users. About Las Vegas-Clark County Library District The award-winning Las Vegas-Clark County Library District is an independent taxing entity that serves a diverse community across 8,000 square miles. Through its 25 branches and website, the Library District offers a collection of 3.2 million items consisting of books, movies, music (including streaming and downloadable), online resources, as well as free programs for all ages. The Library District is a vibrant and vital member of the community offering limitless learning; business and career advancement; government and social services support; and best of all, a place where customers find a sense of culture and community. For more information, please visit LVCCLD.org. About the RTC The RTC is the transit authority, designated metropolitan planning organization, regional traffic management agency and administrator of the Southern Nevada Strong comprehensive regional plan for the Las Vegas valley. The RTC's vision is to provide a safe, convenient and effective regional transportation system that enhances mobility and air quality for citizens and visitors. The RTC encourages residents and visitors to use a variety of transportation choices to help reduce traffic congestion, clean the air and improve the quality of life in Southern Nevada. For more information about the RTC and its major initiatives or to download its transit app rideRTC, visit rtcsnv.com and stay informed by subscribing to our blog. Contact: Lisa Jacob, [email protected] SOURCE Las Vegas-Clark County Library District CHICAGO, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the new market research report "Lawn Mower Market by Type (Walk-Behind, Riding & Robotic), End Use (Residential & Commercial), Propulsion Type (ICE & Electric), Battery Type (Lithium-Ion, Lead-Acid), Lawn Size (Small, Medium & Large), Autonomy and Region - Global Forecast to 2027", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global Lawn Mower Market, by value, is projected to grow to USD 33.6 billion by 2027 from USD 23.5 billion in 2022, at a CAGR of 7.4% from 2022 to 2027. Increasing demand for lawn mowers in residential and commercial purposes accompanied with the popularity of robotic lawn mowers have contributed to the growth in demand for lawn mowers across the globe. Browse in-depth TOC on "Lawn Mower Market" 211 Tables 44 Figures 209 Pages Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id= 52805135 Robotic Lawn Mowers to be the fastest segment, by type The increase is construction of new residential properties will increase demand for landscaping services, which will increase the replacement of outdated lawn mowers, resulting in increased demand for robotic lawn mowers, which are among the most recent market trends. The robotic Lawn Mower Market is expected to grow in popularity over the projected period because they are environmentally friendly and require little human intervention. One of the major factors driving demand for robotic lawn mowers across the area, notably in Europe, is the growing convergence of automation and development of IoT, accompanied by avoiding the safety issues connected with traditional lawn mowers. Husqvarna is one of the largest players in the robotic lawn mower segment. Honda (Japan) launched its robotic model, Miimo lawn mower. Robomow (Netherlands) and iRobot Corporation (US) are investing heavily in the R&D of automated solutions for mowing operations. In June 2021, Scythe Robotics (US) introduced a fully autonomous, all-electric commercial mower. Electric lawn mowers is the fastest-growing segment, by Propulsion Type. Battery-powered/Electric lawn mowers are efficient as they have the advantage of lower installation and operational costs than conventional internal-combustion engine (ICE) lawn mowers. Electric mowers, including robotic ones, have a low operational noise compared to other available ICE engine options. These mowers do not burn gas, and no harmful emissions are released. Newer versions of electric mowers, such as the CEORA by Husqvarna & Miimo by Honda, have powerful batteries that cater to various lawn sizes with automation features. Thus, the electric Lawn Mower Market is expected to grow with increasing environmental concerns coupled with stringent government regulations, developments in battery driving ranges, and launches of various electric mower models. For instance, in December 2021, California regulators voted to ban the sale of new gas-powered leaf blowers and lawn mowers starting in 2024. Request FREE Sample Report: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestsampleNew.asp?id= 52805135 Americas to be the largest market for Lawn mowers The lawn mower industry in the Americas is one of the most advanced and product development-driven industries globally. It houses major OEMs such as John Deere (US), MTD Products Inc (US) (with major sub-brands like Cub Cadets, Troy-Bilt, Rover, Robomow, etc.), The Toro Company (US) along with several multinationals like Honda Motors Co. Ltd., (Japan) and Husqvarna (Sweden). The US, traditionally one of the global technological leaders, is the largest American Lawn Mower Market. The large customer base and high disposable income levels fuel the demand for lawn mowers resulting in increased manufacturing activities. The growth of the lawn care industry and a higher annual cost of landscaping services are the major factors for the growth in this region. The Canadian lawn care industry is huge because almost 75% of the residents in the country have a lawn, which subsequently needs a lawn mower for its maintenance, leading to growth in the demand for advanced models. Currently, the Mexican lawn care industry is at a nascent stage because of the comparatively lower family disposable income, but the walk-behind holds the largest share. The condition of the Brazilian Lawn Mower Market is similar, where walk-behind lawn mowers are largely preferred because of less price than riding and robotic mowers. Overall, it has been estimated that the demand for robotic lawn mowers would register the fastest growth during the forecast period. Key Market Players The Lawn Mower Market is primarily dominated by globally established players John Deere (US),Honda Motor Co Ltd. (Japan), The Toro Company (US), Husqvarna (Sweden), MTD Products Inc (US), and Kubota (Japan). These companies are consistently developing new products, adopted expansion strategies, and undertook collaborations, partnerships, and mergers & acquisitions to gain traction in this high-growth Lawn Mower Market across different regions. Browse Related Reports: Global Machine Tools Market by Product Type (Milling Machines, Drilling Machines, Turning Machines, Grinding Machines, Electrical Discharge Machines), Automation Type, Industry Segment, Sales Channel, and Region Global Forecast to 2027 Construction Equipment Market by Type (Excavator-Crawler & Mini, Loader-Backhoe, Skid-steer, Wheel, Dozer, Dump Truck), Electric Equipment, Propulsion, Power Output, Application, Rental, Aftertreatment Device, and Region - Global Forecast to 2026 About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 7500 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve. MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "Knowledge Store" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Aashish Mehra MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA: +1-888-600-6441 Email: [email protected] Research Insight: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ResearchInsight/robotic-lawn-mower-market.asp Visit Our Website: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com Content Source: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/robotic-lawn-mower.asp SOURCE MarketsandMarkets RESTON, Va., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Leidos (NYSE:LDOS), a FORTUNE 500 science and technology leader, today announced the appointment of Steve Cook as Dynetics Group President, effective April 1. Paul Engola will serve as Deputy Group President. Dave King will continue as part of the team in a consulting capacity, ensuring a smooth change to new leadership and continuing to advise on matters of strategic importance. "Dave King has been an invaluable member of our team for the last two years, and we are confident that Steve Cook will continue to deliver innovative solutions to our customers in his new role," said Leidos Chairman and CEO Roger Krone. "Steve's extensive expertise and background will provide a smooth transition and build upon the important work done by Dave King over the past several years. I'm excited to see Steve and Paul grow the company's footprint in the emerging national security space market, while delivering wins across the business." Cook, current Dynetics deputy group president and operations manager for the Leidos Innovations Center, joined the company in 2009 as director of space technologies. He led the company's efforts in launch systems, orbital spacecraft and analysis, planetary exploration and nanotechnology research until 2013. Cook was then promoted to lead Corporate Development and later served as President of Dynetics Technical Solutions subsidiary. In that role he led mechanical manufacturing and strategic programs, such as hypersonics and directed energy. Before joining Dynetics, Cook had a long and successful career at NASA. There he served as manager of the Ares Projects Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center where he was responsible for overall project management and direction of the Ares I and V launch vehicles. Prior to his new role, Paul Engola led the national security space business portfolio for Leidos and served as deputy group president for Leidos' former Defense and Intelligence Group. In this new role, Engola will focus on Dynetics key capabilities, including space surveillance, navigation and timing, missile warning and space situational awareness. This will also include advancing technologies related to the design and build of EO/IR payloads, advance signal and image processing algorithms and real-time embedded software. About Leidos Leidos is a Fortune 500 technology, engineering, and science solutions and services leader working to solve the world's toughest challenges in the defense, intelligence, civil, and health markets. The company's 43,000 employees support vital missions for government and commercial customers. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Leidos reported annual revenues of approximately $13.7 billion for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021. For more information, visit www.leidos.com. Melissa Duenas (571) 526-6850 [email protected] Thomas Doheny (571) 474-4735 [email protected] Kristina Hendrix (256) 713-5453 [email protected] SOURCE Leidos Holdings, Inc. ConcertAI SaaS and data solutions have rapidly emerged as the industry standard for accelerating clinical trials and patient outcomes CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ConcertAI, LLC (ConcertAI), the leader in enterprise AI and real-world data (RWD) solutions for life sciences and healthcare, announced the close of its $150 million Series C investment from Sixth Street, a leading global investment firm, at a $1.9 billion valuation. From its startup just five years ago, ConcertAI has emerged as one of the fastest-growing companies providing high-value software-as-a-service (SaaS) and data solutions to life sciences and biopharma companies, leading healthcare providers, contract research organizations, medical societies, and regulators in the US, Europe, and Japan. "Our Series C represents another milestone in our emergence as the leader in accelerating biomedical innovations through AI SaaS clinical trial solutions and improved patient outcomes through the generation of real-world evidence for peer-review publications, regulatory decisions, and clinical interpretation," said ConcertAI CEO Jeff Elton, PhD. "Our solutions now span the entire lifecycle of therapeutics with our data-as-a-service and AI SaaS solutions for biopharma through to our TeraRecon solutions for clinical decision support, confederating an ecosystem of leading biomedical innovators and healthcare providers all in assurance of best possible clinical outcomes for patients." In the past 36 months, the company has expanded its customer base and partnerships to more than 45 life sciences companies and contract research organizations (CROs) with SaaS solutions across the product lifecycle: supporting approximately 40 new product launches, improving time on therapy by 10%, and reducing time for study design and projected clinical trial execution times up to 25%. The leading oncology biopharma companies, including Janssen and BMS, are multi-product strategic partners. "ConcertAI has rapidly become the enterprise AI and RWD leader for life sciences and healthcare, delivering the highest customer value and most innovative technologies," said ConcertAI Executive Chairman Dr. Romesh Wadhwani. "The strong ConcertAI leadership team and 1,000 employees and their combined depth of subject matter expertise make ConcertAI's future look very bright. This Series C investment by Sixth Street focuses on the intersection of healthcare and technology and provides additional validation of the strength of our customer base, strategy, and performance." Through a "system of evidence" approach, ConcertAI is advancing data and technologies that underpin new models of clinical development, driven by the pandemic's acceleration to fully digital and AI-enabled solutions. This includes the industry's largest, independent oncology research database and patient data composed of clinical, molecular, medical claims, and imaging data. In the past two years, ConcertAI has worked closely with leading biopharma innovators, medical societies, the US FDA, and healthcare providers to advance these solutions for an array of regulatory and post-approval studies. The company has made a deep commitment to ensuring the leading research is available at the community and regional health system level, in assurance of representativeness and access. This ecosystem of leading life science companies with leading healthcare providers marks the first complete RWE-generation system that aligns retrospective and prospective approaches into a single system. "Bristol Myers Squibb is pleased to be one of the early partners of ConcertAI, utilizing their research data-as-a-service and software-as-a-service solutions deployed across multiple functions in our global enterprise," said Vice President R&D Business Insights & Analytics Marisa Co, PhD. "Over the past two years, we've focused on novel clinical research solutions with the potential to accelerate the time from study initiation to regulatory decision, increasing our overall innovation capacity. This will allow us to reach more patients and accelerate life-changing cancer therapies to benefit patients globally." "ConcertAI is at the forefront of connecting healthcare and data to improve patient outcomes. Its vision and roadmap make it a leader in AI SaaS solutions for biomedical innovators and healthcare provider networks," said Sixth Street Co-founding Partner Vijay Mohan. "The company has established transformational relationships with industry-leading biomedical innovators, medical societies, US FDA, CROs, and healthcare providers. Through highly focused execution and an ecosystem-centric approach, ConcertAI is poised to continue delivering for patients by speeding biomedical innovations with digital trial solutions and supporting precision medicine and AI-augmented decision support." Sixth Street Managing Director Adam Kaye will be joining ConcertAI's board of directors, with Managing Director Lee Mooney joining as a board observer. JP Morgan acted as sole placement agent to ConcertAI. About ConcertAI ConcertAI is the global leader in life sciences and healthcare enterprise AI and RWD SaaS solutions. Our mission is to broadly advance the goals of precision medicine, accelerate delivery of innovative new therapies, generate evidence in support of regulatory and reimbursement decisions, support provider clinical decisions, and improve clinical outcomes for patients. We work in partnership with the leading biomedical innovators, health care providers, and medical societies. For more information, visit us at http://www.concertai.com. About Sixth Street Sixth Street is a global investment firm with over $60 billion in assets under management and committed capital. Sixth Street uses its long-term, flexible capital, data-enabled capabilities, and One Team culture to develop themes and offers solutions to companies across all stages of growth. The firm's healthcare and life sciences team provides strategic capital and forms long-term partnerships with companies creating new technologies to address pressing healthcare challenges and improve patient care. Select Sixth Street investments include Biohaven, Caris Life Sciences, Datavant, DrFirst, Mammoth Biosciences, MDLIVE, and Visiquate. For more information, visit www.sixthstreet.com, follow Sixth Street on LinkedIn, or on Twitter @SixthStreetNews. Media contact: ConcertAI Megan Duero [email protected] Sixth Street Patrick Clifford [email protected] SOURCE ConcertAI Key Market Dynamics: Market Driver - The integration of advanced safety technologies in luxury cars to gain higher safety ratings is one of the key drivers supporting the luxury vehicle market growth. The automotive industry in the country is witnessing the development of safety technologies, which are making luxury vehicles safer and more reliable on roads. SUVs are known for reliability combined with the fuel efficiency and comfort of cars. The high fatality rates due to the growing number of accidents have pushed automotive OEMs to incorporate new safety features to make the crossovers safer to drive. The penetration rate of such advanced safety systems, such as emergency brake assist, lane departure warning system, and others, is found to be higher in sedans compared with SUVs. Such safety technologies are being introduced in crossovers on a larger scale will positively impact the market growth during the forecast period. - The is one of the key drivers supporting the luxury vehicle market growth. The automotive industry in the country is witnessing the development of safety technologies, which are making luxury vehicles safer and more reliable on roads. SUVs are known for reliability combined with the fuel efficiency and comfort of cars. The high fatality rates due to the growing number of accidents have pushed automotive OEMs to incorporate new safety features to make the crossovers safer to drive. The penetration rate of such advanced safety systems, such as emergency brake assist, lane departure warning system, and others, is found to be higher in sedans compared with SUVs. Such safety technologies are being introduced in crossovers on a larger scale will positively impact the market growth during the forecast period. Market Challenges - The decline in the automotive industry due to the global semiconductor chip shortage is one of the factors hindering the luxury vehicle market growth. For instance, the entire car industry is amid a severe parts shortage forcing carmakers to halt production and slash exports to Australia . Also, vendors such as Toyota were one of the worst affected in 2021, and thus, production slowed down in Australia . Moreover, Australian new-car buyers are being urged to get in the queue and order early to avoid delays, as data reveals the global semiconductor shortage could continue for 2022 as well. Moreover, the semiconductor chip shortage faced by American and European key vendors would negatively impact the market in focus during the forecast period. To learn about additional key drivers, trends, and challenges - Read our FREE Sample Report right now! Segmentation Analysis The luxury vehicle market report is segmented by Type (Passenger cars and Commercial vehicles) and Geography (Europe, APAC, North America, MEA, and South America). The luxury vehicle market share growth by the passenger cars segment will be significant for revenue generation. The growth of the global luxury vehicle market is expected to be in proportion with the growth of the luxury passenger cars market. The luxury passenger cars can be further sub-segmented into executive luxury cars and super luxury cars. The executive luxury cars segment is dominated by three German vehicle manufacturers: Volkswagen AG's subsidiary brand AUDI AG, Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW) AG, and Daimler AG's brand Mercedes-Benz Cars. Of five, four luxury cars sold globally are from one of these manufacturers. The demand for luxury cars is increasing globally, which pushes auto manufacturers to focus on their luxury segment. Such increasing demand is driving the segment growth. View our sample report for additional insights into the contribution of all the segments & regional opportunities in the report. Some Companies Mentioned The luxury vehicle market is fragmented and the vendors are deploying growth strategies such as quality, price, service, brand image, distribution, and marketing to compete in the market. Bayerische Motoren Werke AG Ford Motor Co. General Motors Co. Honda Motor Co. Ltd. Mercedes Benz AG Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. Stellantis NV Tata Motors Ltd. Tesla Inc. Zhejiang Geely Holding Group To gain access to more vendor profiles with their key offerings available with Technavio, Click Here Related Reports: The hybrid car marke t share is expected to increase by 1271.96 thousand units from 2021 to 2026, and the market's growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 8.41%. Download a free sample now! t share is expected to increase by 1271.96 thousand units from 2021 to 2026, and the market's growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 8.41%. The luxury car market in Australia is expected to increase by 27350.00 units from 2021 to 2026, and the market's growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 5.12%. Download a free sample now! Luxury Vehicle Market Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 120 Base year 2021 Forecast period 2022-2026 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 6.45% Market growth 2022-2026 3251.30 thousand units Market structure Fragmented YoY growth (%) 5.93 Performing market contribution Europe at 39% Competitive landscape Leading companies, competitive strategies, consumer engagement scope Companies profiled Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co., Honda Motor Co. Ltd., Mercedes Benz AG, Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., Stellantis NV, Tata Motors Ltd., Tesla Inc., and Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Market Dynamics Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID 19 impact and future consumer dynamics, market condition analysis for forecast period. Customization purview If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized. Key Topics Covered: Executive Summary Market Landscape Market ecosystem Value chain analysis Market Sizing Market definition Market segment analysis Market size 2021 Market outlook: Forecast for 2021 - 2026 Five Forces Analysis Five forces summary Bargaining power of buyers Bargaining power of suppliers Threat of new entrants Threat of substitutes Threat of rivalry Market condition Market Segmentation by Type Market segments Comparison by Type Passenger cars - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Commercial vehicles - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Market opportunity by Type Customer landscape Geographic Landscape Geographic segmentation Geographic comparison Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 MEA - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Key leading countries Market opportunity by geography Market drivers Market challenges Market trends Vendor Landscape Overview Landscape disruption Vendor Analysis Vendors covered Market positioning of vendors Bayerische Motoren Werke AG Ford Motor Co. General Motors Co. Honda Motor Co. Ltd. Mercedes Benz AG Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. Stellantis NV Tata Motors Ltd. Tesla Inc. Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Appendix Scope of the report Currency conversion rates for US$ Research methodology List of abbreviations About Us Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contact Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com/ SOURCE Technavio Speech-enabled Application Delivers Remarkable Accuracy Plus Human-like Interactions with Guests TOLEDO, Ohio, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Marco's Pizza, one of the nation's fastest-growing pizza brands, announced a 50-store pilot of its proprietary voice-to-text ordering system with the goal of a systemwide rollout by the end of 2022. The speech-enabled application uses conversational artificial intelligence (AI) which yielded 100% order accuracy in initial beta testing as well as increased employee and customer satisfaction. The initial voice-to-order beta test started in Summer 2021 before moving into the pilot. Designed to provide a seamless interaction with customers, the system receives phone orders via voice and automatically translates the order via text into the point-of-sale system alerting team members to begin filling the order saving time, decreasing call abandonment rates, and improving speed and order accuracy all to maximize the customer experience. Unique to this technology is the use of conversational AI, which simulates a human-like conversation and can convert voice across multiple digital channels and technology platforms. This technology creates a personalized experience for the guest and feels very different from a basic chatbot interaction. The technology understands both English and Spanish as well as a variety of accents, dialects, and colloquialisms. Despite technology advancements, many guests find it easier and more convenient to pick up the phone and place an order. This technology can accommodate those guests and create a much better experience using conversational AI. As Marco's digital sales continue to soar tripling over the past four years the adoption of this technology will play a significant role in growing the brand's digital presence to its target of 85%. "There are places where AI makes sense within the business where it creates a better experience for both team members and guests," said Rick Stanbridge, Sr. Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Marco's Pizza. "Not only does this technology offer franchisees a cost-effective, practical solution to reduce labor costs and drive results, but it provides support to team members while strengthening the guest experience." With the use of this technology, the guest experience is elevated first and foremost, and team members no longer have to deal with the frustrations that come with busy nights when there's an influx in orders, kitchen noise distractions, and the challenge of juggling multiple tasks. As a People-First organization, Marco's understands that when team members are satisfied, so are guests. The voice-to-text initiative is one of many projects Marco's is embarking on after announcing the investment of millions of dollars in technology innovations through the next few years as it grows to be the fourth largest brand in pizza. Such projects include the continued adoption of third-party delivery, in which Marco's has experienced 610% growth in just two years, utilizing AI for generating automated delivery promise times, vetting and testing robotic kitchen innovations, ghost kitchens, and new operational equipment. "There are a lot of technologies on our radar, but our strategy is to hotly pursue those that we can bring to market quickly and will have the biggest impact on customers, team members, and franchisees," said Stanbridge. The 1,000-plus unit brand continues to see record-breaking double-digit same-store-sales increases year-over-year and is on track to reach $1B in annual systemwide sales in 2022. As a result, eager and sophisticated entrepreneurs and multi-unit operators are flocking to the franchise opportunity. The brand continues to grow at a rapid pace, setting a development goal of 1,500 units open by the end of 2023. According to FRANdata, a leading research and advisory firm that analyzes the franchise market, Marco's 2021 FUND Score is in the top 1% of all evaluated franchise systems and is among the top three scores for all QSR brands. The Top 50% of Marco's franchised stores generated $1,059,574 AUV for 2020*. For more information on Marco's Pizza franchise opportunities, visit https://www.marcos.com/franchising/ or call 866-731-8209. ABOUT MARCO'S PIZZA Marco's Pizza is America's Most Loved and Most Trusted Pizza Brand, according to the 2019 Harris Poll EquiTrend Study. Headquartered in Toledo, Ohio, Marco's Pizza is one of the fastest-growing pizza brands in the United States. Marco's was founded in 1978 by Italian-born Pasquale ("Pat") Giammarco and thrives to deliver a high-quality pizza experience, known for its dough made from scratch and its three fresh signature cheeses. The company has grown from its roots as a beloved Ohio brand to operate over 1,000 stores in 34 states with locations in Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. Most recently, Marco's Pizza was ranked No. 2 in the Pizza category on Entrepreneur Magazine's 2022 "Franchise 500" ranking, and No. 4 in the Fastest Growing category on Restaurant Business' 2021 "Top 10 Fastest Growing Chains" ranking. Other recent accolades include a first-time presence on Newsweek's 2022 "America's Best Customer Service" in pizza chains list, ranked No. 42 on QSR's Top 50 and has been featured five consecutive years on Nation's Restaurant News' prestigious "Top 500" ranking. *Based on the Average Unit Volume of the top 50% of our Franchised Stores for fiscal year 2020. Based on fiscal year 2020, 142 of 369 Franchised Stores in the category (38%) met or exceeded this average. This information appears in Item 19 of our 2021 FDD please refer to our FDD for complete information on financial performance. Results may differ. There is no assurance that any franchisee will perform as well. SOURCE Marco's Pizza Headed by internationally renowned designer Mark Cheung, Mark Fairwhale is an original Chinese fashion brand founded in 2001. Brands under Mark Fairwhale include DEBRAND, RESHAKE, CAMEL ACTIVE, and 5th SPACE. Mark Fairwhale owns more than 2500 brick-and-mortar boutiques, online flagship stores and online-to-offline new retail stores. Mark Fairwhale has embraced a total digital transformation strategy, driven by a desire to turn data into assets that create value and realize the potential of in-house R&D and innovation. To achieve this, Mark Fairwhale selected Centric Fashion PLM in March 2021 and completed implementation just three months later. Mr. Ma Jun, Project Manager at Mark Fairwhale, says, "Implementing Centric PLM has enabled the digitalization of business units of planning, design, and supply chain, and the dots have been connected to transform the entire business. In the future, channel, sales, inventory, and external data will be introduced to support the network-level and ecology-level digitalization of Mark Fairwhale." With the PLM project, Mark Fairwhale has reorganized business processes, enhanced employees' digital mindset, standardized cross-departmental collaboration, and improved the ability of teams to anticipate demand and respond quickly to decisions. "Digitalization throughout the value chain is a massive project," explains Mr. Yang Kuntian, CEO of Mark Fairwhale. "We have now taken the first step of digitizing the links from product planning to supply chain, but we still have a long way to go. The future is promising. With the in-depth application of PLM and the implementation of more digital strategies, I believe Mark Fairwhale will unleash its unlimited potential at all levels; business, data and management." "We are delighted to announce that Mark Fairwhale has successfully implemented Centric PLM, and is experiencing the positive impact of digital transformation," says Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric Software. "Mark Fairwhale has made their end-to-end digitalization strategy a reality, and we look forward to working with them in the future to gain maximum efficiencies from everything Centric PLM has to offer." Read the success story Learn more about Centric Fashion PLM. Request a Demo Mark Fairwhale (www.markfairwhale.com) Founded in 2001, Mark Fairwhale has been promoting its "Born Trendy" philosophy for 20 years. Headed by internationally renowned designer Mark Cheung, Mark Fairwhale is an original Chinese fashion brand founded in 2001. Brands under Mark Fairwhale include DEBRAND, RESHAKE, CAMEL ACTIVE, and 5th SPACE. Mark Fairwhale owns more than 2500 brick-and-mortar boutiques, online flagship stores and online-to-offline new retail stores. The company draws inspiration from diverse cultures across time and space, and constantly innovates across boundaries using art from a contemporary perspective. Its approach meets the personalized needs of fashion trendsetters while leading the development of trendy Chinese brands. Centric Software (www.centricsoftware.com) From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides a Product Concept to Consumer Digital Transformation Platform for fashion, retail, footwear, luxury, outdoor, consumer electronics and consumer goods including cosmetics and personal care and food and beverage. Centric's flagship Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform, Centric PLMTM, delivers enterprise-class merchandise planning, product development, sourcing, quality and product portfolio optimization innovations specifically for fast-moving consumer industries. Centric Visual Innovation Platform (CVIP) offers highly visual digital board experiences for collaboration and decision-making. Centric Retail Planning is an innovative, cloud-native solution powered by Armonica Retail S.R.L., that delivers an end-to-end retail planning process designed to maximize retail business performance. Centric Software pioneered mobility, introducing the first mobile apps for PLM, and is widely known for connectivity to dozens of other enterprise systems including ERP, DAM, PIM, e-com, planning and more as well as creative tools such as Adobe Illustrator and a host of 3D CAD connectors. Centric's innovations are 100% market-driven with the highest user adoption rate and fastest time to value in the industry. All Centric innovations shorten time to market, boost product innovation and reduce costs. Centric Software is majority-owned by Dassault Systemes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), the world leader in 3D design software, 3D digital mock-up and PLM solutions. Centric Software has received multiple industry awards and recognition, including being named by Red Herring to its Top 100 Global list in 2013, 2015 and 2016. Centric also received various excellence awards from Frost & Sullivan in 2012, 2016, 2018 and 2021. Centric Software is a registered trademark of Centric Software Inc. All other brands and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners. SOURCE Centric Software A group of Nigerians under the aegis of Nigerians in Diaspora (ND) have condemned the suspension of capturing of biometrics for the new enhanced e-passport by the Nigerian High Commission in London. The enhanced e-passport operations were launched in London on 23rd November 2021 but the Nigeria High Commission in London had on Sunday suspended biometric capturing for persons interested in applying for the e-passport. This was contained in a statement the commission issued, saying the biometrics capturing was suspended after a meeting to deliberate on issues surrounding the assault of staff members. The enhanced e-passport was to address issues of forgery and improve the application process but in its statement Sunday, the commission noted that its suspension is effective from March 28. While reacting to the development, the group said it was a wrong signal to many Nigerians particularly those that have had to travel long distances from Scotland, Northern Ireland, Manchester, Cardiff, Birmingham, and so on to the Mission in London without positive resolution of their respective consular issues. The statement signed by one Mrs Ada Liwett, on behalf of the group and released to newsmen Monday in Abuja, recalled the deplorable situation of passport issuance and renewals after the lockdown and the then suspension of operations between December 2019 and April 2021 in a supposed attempt to address the issues responsible for the then anomalous situation. The group claimed that the compulsory 120 pounds fast track system for passports was the only one working at the Mission. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Nigeria Governance By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. According to the diaspora group, the continuous physical and verbal assaults of the staff of the Mission arising from the frustration many faces however led to a meeting of the Nigerian Community convened to find a solution to the challenges associated with passport issuance before it deteriorates into avoidable calamities. "The meeting took place on Tuesday, 22nd March 2022, at the Conference room of the Nigeria High Commission, London. "Apparently optimistic that the said meeting would yield positive results in finding a lasting solution to the yearnings of Nigerians in the UK, the shock news broke last night that the biometrics capture on the new Enhanced E-Passport at the Nigeria High Commission in London was suspended with effect from Monday, 28th March 2022," the group lamented. The group called on the Nigerian government to step in and resolve the situation before it deteriorated. Daily Trust called the phone number of the spokesman of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Amos Okpu, but he did not pick up the call. He also did not respond to a text message sent to his number. But a source at the Ministry of Interior told our correspondent that a meeting will be held soon to resolve all issues about passport issuance in the UK. HUNTSVILLE, Ala., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- On March 31, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama will host the 33rd Marshall Small Business Alliance meeting. The virtual event will take place 9 a.m.-4:15 p.m. via Webex. The event will feature presentations from NASA's Office of Procurement Transformation as well as updates on acquisition and agency product service lines from Marshall and other NASA centers. Other topics will include updates from Marshall's Office of Procurement and NASA's Office of Small Business Programs, an overview of the Office of Procurement, Doing Business with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a Human Landing System Overview. There will also be several afternoon breakout sessions: "NASA Office of Procurement Transformation"; "FY22 Priorities"; "Deep Dive on Select PSLs"; "Brief Overview of Remaining PSLs"; and "Communication, Outreach and Feedback Channels." Participants for the event include: Rae Ann Meyer , Marshall Associate Director , Marshall Associate Director Glenn Delgado , Associate Administrator, NASA OBSP , Associate Administrator, NASA OBSP Karla Smith Jackson , NASA Senior Procurement Executive, Deputy Chief Acquisition Officer & Assistant Administrator for Procurement , NASA Senior Procurement Executive, Deputy Chief Acquisition Officer & Assistant Administrator for Procurement Barbara Clouser , Industry Outreach and Competition Advocate, FBI , Industry Outreach and Competition Advocate, FBI David Brock , Marshall Small Business Specialist Media interested in covering the meeting should contact Janet Sudnik, Public Affairs Officer in the Marshall Office of Communications, at 256-544-0034 or [email protected] no later than 4 p.m. on Wednesday, March 30. The Marshall Small Business Alliance was created to provide industry with maximum exposure to the Marshall marketplace. This meeting is being held in conjunction with the NASA Office of Procurement, which oversees the acquisition process to support the successful accomplishments of the agency's current and future missions. It provides policy, oversight, and optimization of procurement resources and acquisition strategies to enable effective and efficient operations. For more on Marshall Space Flight Center, visit http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/about/business.html SOURCE NASA Mintegral's mobile advertising and monetization prowess has grown steadily over the past 3 years, with it now featuring 250 top 3 rankings and 50 number 1 rankings across all app verticals and regions. The Retention Index section is particularly important as it signifies the quality and strength of Mintegral's traffic across every genre and category. Retention measures how engaged mobile app users are over time and provides lifetime values (LTV) to optimize user acquisition. Mintegral remained a top ad network with strong rankings in all gaming genres including #1 globally on iOS for Simulation gaming, #3 globally for Hyper-casual gaming on Android and #2 globally on both Android and iOS for Midcore gaming. The Performance Index also included an in-app advertising (IAA) index which analyzes ad revenue generated from a single media source for which Mintegral ranked 4th for iOS and 5th for Android globally on the Volume rankings. As a subsidiary of a Hong-Kong listed Chinese marketing technology group Mobvista, Mintegral has been assisting Chinese developers succeed domestically and in global markets. Domestically, Mintegral received 12 #1 rankings in both gaming and non-gaming ad networks. The AppsFlyer Performance Index helps validate Mintegral's success in the global market and underscores the strength of its ad product. "The AppsFlyer Performance Index exemplifies Mintegral's continued growth across app genres and regions", said Erick Fang, Mintegral CEO. "Both our monetization and user acquisition performance are on full display within these rankings and it gives our team and clients a renewed sense of what is possible with Mintegral." About Mintegral Mintegral is a mobile advertising platform that provides user acquisition, monetization, and creative solutions for mobile advertisers and publishers around the world. Mintegral's AI-driven, programmatic ad platform aims to bridge the gap between East and West through innovative products that include SSP, DSP, DMP, ad exchange, an advertiser self-serve platform, and creative automation platform powered by Mindworks, Mintegral's Creative Studio. Learn more at www.mintegral.com. Media: [email protected] SOURCE Mintegral MirageOS core maintainers and the Linux Foundation announced the release of MirageOS version 4.0, the latest update since version 3.10 in December, 2020. SAN FRANCISCO, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The MirageOS Core Team is thrilled to announce the release of MirageOS 4.0. MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels for secure, high-performance, low-energy footprint applications across various hypervisor and embedded platforms. Since the first release of 2013, MirageOS has made steady progress towards deploying self-managed internet infrastructure. The project's initial aim was to self-host as many services as possible to empower internet users to securely deploy infrastructure to own their data and take back control of their privacy. MirageOS can securely deploy static website hosting with "Let's Encrypt" certificate provisioning and a secure SMTP stack with security extensions. MirageOS can also deploy decentralized communication infrastructure like Matrix, OpenVPN servers, and TLS tunnels to ensure data privacy or DNS(SEC) servers for better authentication. The protocol ecosystem now contains hundreds of libraries and millions of daily users. Over these years, major commercial users have joined the projects. They rely on MirageOS libraries to secure their product. For instance, the MirageOS networking code powers Docker Desktop's VPNKit, which serves the traffic of millions of containers daily. Citrix Hypervisor uses MirageOS to interact with Xen, the hypervisor that powers most of today's public cloud. Nitrokey is developing a new hardware security module based on MirageOS. Robur develops a unikernel orchestration system for fleets of MirageOS unikernels. Tarides uses MirageOS to improve the Tezos blockchain, and Hyper uses MirageOS to build sensor analytics and an automation platform for sustainable agriculture. We dedicate this release of MirageOS 4.0 to Lars Kurth. Unfortunately, he passed away early in 2020, leaving a big hole in our community. Lars was instrumental in bringing the Xen Project to fruition, and we wouldn't be here without him. What's new in MirageOS 4 The MirageOS4 release focuses on better integration with existing ecosystems. For instance, parts of MirageOS are now merged into the OCaml ecosystem, making it easier to deploy OCaml applications into a unikernel. Plus, we improved the cross-compilation support, added more compilation targets to MirageOS (for instance, for bare-metal Raspberry-Pi 4), and made it easier to integrate MirageOS with non-OCaml libraries. This release introduces a significant change in how MirageOS compiles projects. We developed a new tool called opam-monorepo, which separates package management from building the resulting source code. It creates a lock file for the project dependencies, downloads and extracts the dependency sources locally, and sets up a Dune Workspace, enabling dune build to build everything simultaneously. The MirageOS 4.0 release also contains improvements in the Mirage CLI tool, a new libc-free OCaml runtime, and a cross-compiler for OCaml. Finally, MirageOS 4.0 now supports familiar IDE tools while developing unikernels, making day-to-day coding much faster. Review a complete list of features on the MirageOS 4 release page. About MirageOS MirageOS is an open-source project created and maintained by the MirageOS Core Team, including contributors from the University of Cambridge, Tarides, Robur, Docker, Citrix, Jane Street, and many individual developers. Over the years, MirageOS was sponsored by generous institutional and grant support from the Horizon Digital Economy Research, EU FP7 User-Centric Networking, Contrive, and Databox projects, NGI Pointer and NGI DAPSI, the Tezos Foundation, and Jane Street. MirageOS is an incubation project of the Xen Project and the Linux Foundation, which provides basic infrastructure and marketing support to help the project progress. For more information about MirageOS and to participate, please visit https://mirage.io. Media Contact Thomas Gazagnaire [email protected] + 33 1 81 69 57 25 SOURCE Xen Project SAN JOSE, Calif., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Movellus, Inc, today announced a subcontractor agreement that will result in the BAE Systems' FAST Labs research and development organization having access to Movellus' Intelligent Clock Network IP. Recently BAE Systems announced a collaboration with several companies including Movellus to provide solutions under a contract from the Army Contracting Command Rock Island under the Cornerstone Other Transaction Authority. BAE Systems will include Movellus' TrueDigital IP with its rad-hard ASIC technologies and libraries to deliver a complete, advanced development solution for creating system-on-chip designs for its portfolio of rad-hard electronics for civil, commercial, and national security missions. Maintaining our country's technological edge requires the ability to quickly upgrade silicon platforms and speed-up the timetable for production of new defense applications. Military-grade technology requires domestically developed custom capabilities that often go beyond commercially available technology. For example, next-generation systems for aircrafts, satellites, space vehicles and other mission critical applications require radiation-hardened electronics. The design and implementation of rad-hard electronics platforms can be very time consuming and prohibitively expensive. Movellus' Radiation Hardened by Design (RHBD), process portable, all-digital Intelligent Clock Network IP eases the burden by simplifying the design process and enabling greater performance. BAE Systems will include Movellus' TrueDigital IP with its rad-hard ASIC technologies and libraries to deliver a complete, advanced development solution for creating system-on-chip designs for its portfolio of rad-hard electronics for civil, commercial, and national security missions. "We are excited to collaborate with BAE Systems and look forward to working with FAST Labs to upgrade and modernize silicon platforms used to protect national security, critical infrastructure, and vital information," said Mo Faisal, CEO and President of Movellus. BAE Systems' FAST Labs R&D group develops and delivers advanced technologies for the commercial and military electronics markets and aims to push the limits of what is possible. A key element of the group's strategy is to partner with academic and industrial leaders to develop new technologies to support future product initiatives. "Movellus' intelligent clock network IP is innovative technology that expands our rad-hard capabilities," said Chris Rappa, director at BAE Systems' FAST Labs. "We believe Movellus' silicon IP will facilitate upgrading and innovating silicon platforms while delivering significant size, weight and power (SWaP) advantages in a wide range of mission-critical military and commercial applications." About Movellus Movellus is the leader in Intelligent Clock Networks (ICN). Its Maestro ICN IP is integrated into a range of applications from power-sensitive voice recognition devices in smart speakers and cellphones, to FPGAs and AI devices in large data centers, to satellites orbiting the world providing communications. Headquartered in San Jose with R&D centers in Michigan and Toronto, the team has introduced numerous highly patented architectural solutions that significantly improve clock network performance, enabling a new wave of architectural innovation. Visit us at www.movellus.com. Media Contact: For Movellus Pauline Shulman [email protected] 415-375-0303 SOURCE Movellus, Inc. JERSEY CITY, N.J., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- InsightAce Analytic Pvt. Ltd. announces the release of a market assessment report on the "Global Mycelium Market- by Application (Food and Beverage Industry, Packaging Industry, Clothing and Apparel Industry, Animal Feed Industry, and Others By Application), Nature (Raw and Processed), Form (Pre-Formed Product, Powder, and Tablet And Capsule), Industry Trends, Competitive Landscape, Revenue and Forecast To 2030." Request for Sample Pages: https://www.insightaceanalytic.com/request-sample/1219 According to the latest research by InsightAce Analytic, the global mycelium market is valued at US$ 2.95 Billion in 2021, and it is expected to reach US$ 5.49 Billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 7.3% during a forecast period of 2022-2030. The mycelium can be found in single-celled and multi-celled organisms such as yeast and mushrooms. Mycelium is the root structure of mushrooms that comprises branch mass and hyphae. The pure mycelium materials are fully biodegradable and home-compostable, without plastic or fibre additives. These mycelium materials are sustainable alternatives to everything from plastics to leather. Factors such as the increasing demand for natural ingredients and flavours in food items, increasing government initiatives to innovate mycelium-based, green and eco-friendly products and packaging solutions is estimated to drive the growth of the Mycelium industry. Moreover, growing efforts towards minimizing the usage of non-degradable materials, rapid adoption of eco-friendly technologies, fast production of flavoured mycelium compared to traditional, time-consuming methods, and the high public preference for organic, natural, plant-based ingredients in food products are expected to offer lucrative market growth opportunities during the projected period. Due to the increasing demand for eco-friendly and sustainable products & packaging, industries look for generating novel biodegradable and recycled materials to sustain themselves in this competitive world of businesses. Thus, increasing the demand for mycelium, which in turn boost the mycelium market. North America is anticipated to be the major contributor to the mycelium market over the forecast years, followed by Europe due to the high demand for mycelium-based food products and the increasing efforts of companies for developing mycelium materials. In addition, the Asia Pacific regional market is expected to register significant growth during the estimated period owing to the increasing initiatives for innovating mycelium-based products and the rising demand for natural products and eco-friendly packaging solutions. Request for ToC/Proposal: https://www.insightaceanalytic.com/report/global-mycelium-market-/1219 Major market players operating in the mycelium market include Atlast, Chinova Bioworks, ENOUGH, Four Sigmatic, Forij.co., FreshCap Mushrooms LTD, Grown.bio, Mushlabs GmbH, Mycelia NV, Meati Inc., Monaghan Group, MycoTechnology, Inc., Mycotech Lab, MycoWorks, Ecovative LLC, eniferBio, Groundwork BioAg, MOGU, Mycorena, Norwegian Mycelium, Mycovation, Magical Mushroom Company, Mushroom Material, Nature's Fynd, PRIME ROOTS, Quorn, Biomyc, Mushroom Material, Bolt Threads, Paradise Packaging Co.Scelta Mushrooms, Changsha Botaniex Inc., Ecovative, KingHerbs Limited, Gurelan Cooperative, Innomy Labs, Life Cykel, Michroma, MUD/WTR, Mycovation among others. Recent collaborations and agreements in the market: In January 2022 , Ecovative, a mycelium materials company, launched Forager, a division focused on designing, marketing, and manufacturing vegan, plastic-free leather-like materials and fungi-based foams for the fashion and automotive industries. Ecovative, a mycelium materials company, launched Forager, a division focused on designing, marketing, and manufacturing vegan, plastic-free leather-like materials and fungi-based foams for the fashion and automotive industries. In March 2021 , MycoWorks partnered with luxury brand Hermes to make a version of the Victoria bag. It will be the first product with the use of a mycelium-based leather called Sylvania. MycoWorks partnered with luxury brand Hermes to make a version of the bag. It will be the first product with the use of a mycelium-based leather called Sylvania. In November 2020 , Bolt Threads partnered with Adidas, Kering, Lululemon and Stella McCartney to launch Mylo material products in 2021. Curious About Details @ https://www.insightaceanalytic.com/report/global-mycelium-market-/1219 Market Segments Global Mycelium Market, by Application, 2022-2030 (Value US$ Mn) Food and Beverage Industry Packaging Industry Clothing and Apparel Industry Animal Feed Industry Others Global Mycelium Market, by Nature, 2022-2030 (Value US$ Mn) Raw Processed Global Mycelium Market, by Form, 2022-2030 (Value US$ Mn) Pre-Formed Product Powder Tablet and Capsule Global Mycelium Market, by Region, 2022-2030 (Value US$ Mn) North America Europe Asia Pacific Latin America Middle East & Africa North America Mycelium Market, by Country, 2022-2030 (Value US$ Mn) U.S. Canada Europe Mycelium Market, by Country, 2022-2030 (Value US$ Mn) Germany France Italy Spain Russia Rest of Europe Asia Pacific Mycelium Market, by Country, 2022-2030 (Value US$ Mn) India China Japan South Korea Australia & New Zealand Latin America Mycelium Market, by Country, 2022-2030 (Value US$ Mn) Brazil Mexico Rest of Latin America Middle East & Africa Mycelium Market, by Country, 2022-2030 (Value US$ Mn) GCC Countries South Africa Rest of Middle East & Africa Why should get this report: To get a detailed analysis of the prospects for the global mycelium market To get a market overview and future trends of the mycelium industry To analyze the mycelium market drivers and challenges To get information on the mycelium market value (US$ Mn) forecast to 2030 Significant investments, mergers & acquisitions in the mycelium market industry For More Information @ https://www.insightaceanalytic.com/report/global-mycelium-market-/1219 Other Related Reports Published by InsightAce Analytic: Global Sustainable, Biodegradable and Eco-Friendly Packaging Providers Market Global Biodegradable Plastics Market About Us: InsightAce Analytic is a market research and consulting firm that enables clients to make strategic decisions. Our qualitative and quantitative market intelligence solutions inform the need for market and competitive intelligence to expand businesses. We help clients gain a competitive advantage by identifying untapped markets, exploring new and competing technologies, segmenting potential markets, and repositioning products. Our expertise is in providing syndicated and custom market intelligence reports with an in-depth analysis with key market insights in a timely and cost-effective manner. Contact Us: InsightAce Analytic Pvt. Ltd. Tel.: +1 718 593 4405 Email: [email protected] Site Visit: www.insightaceanalytic.com Follow Us on LinkedIn @ bit.ly/2tBXsgS Follow Us On Facebook @ bit.ly/2H9jnDZ SOURCE InsightAce Analytic Pvt. Ltd. GREENACRES, Fla., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- National Tax Group, a leading engineering tax firm, announced a partnership with Nimesh Zaver ahead of the American Asian Hotel Owners Association Conference. At the age of 22, Nimesh "Nick" Zaver built his first hotel. Now a brand owner with Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Best Western, and Choice Hotels, Nick brings his expertise in commercial real estate to the National Tax Group team. Nick Zaver was born and raised in London, England, and he immigrated to the United States with his family in 1981. After graduating from high school, Nimesh attended college-level courses in business and architecture at institutions including the University of Central Florida, the University of Arkansas at Monticello, and Louisiana Tech University. Before completing his college education, Nimesh opted to pursue a career in the hospitality industry with his parents Nimesh served as AAHOA Gulf Regional Director for 6 years and he's an AAHOA Lifetime member. He's also a longstanding member of LPS (the Leuva Patidar Samaj). He serves as a Board member for the Southwest Louisiana Convention and Visitors Bureau, Chamber Southwest, LTA Board member, a committee member of the Gulf Coast Gujarati Samaj, and served as Past President of the Southwest Louisiana Hotel & Lodging Association. Nimesh and his wife, Dipti, have two children, Ishan and Nakita. About National Tax Group National Tax Group offers an array of tax solutions associated with 179D, 45L, Cost Segregation, Employee Retention Credit, and Research & Development. With a combined 20 years of experience helping clients navigate complex tax incentive programs, our engineers and tax experts have helped thousands of businesses maximize the full potential of their available tax credits. Contact Information: Grace Dolen Director of Operations [email protected] SOURCE National Tax Group NCBE, which develops bar exam content for 54 US jurisdictions, has published content scope outlines for a new bar exam. Tweet this The work being done to develop and launch the next generation bar exam is a five-year process, based on input from legal educators, practicing attorneys, and members of the bar admissions community, that will deliver a reimagined bar exam by 2026. The most noticeable change to the content planned for the new exam is the number of subjects tested, which will decrease from 12 to 8: civil procedure, contract law (including Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code), evidence, torts, business associations (including agency), constitutional law (including proceedings before administrative agencies), criminal law and constitutional protections of accused persons, and real property. The new exam will no longer test conflict of laws, family law, trusts and estates, or secured transactions, and will test some legal concepts more deeply than others. The proposed subject matter outlines reflect the work of NCBE's Content Scope Committee, a group of 21 dedicated legal professionals, including legal educators, law school deans, practicing attorneys, and bar examiners. In considering the breadth of topics to be covered within each subject, the Content Scope Committee primarily considered the following three factors: Frequency : How often is a newly licensed lawyer (defined as one who has practiced for fewer than three years) likely to encounter the topic in general entry-level practice (loosely defined as solo practice or working at a full-service law firm)? : How often is a newly licensed lawyer (defined as one who has practiced for fewer than three years) likely to encounter the topic in general entry-level practice (loosely defined as solo practice or working at a full-service law firm)? Universality: How likely is a newly licensed lawyer to encounter the topic in more specialized types of entry-level practice? How likely is a newly licensed lawyer to encounter the topic in more specialized types of entry-level practice? Risk: How likely is it that there will be serious consequences if a newly licensed lawyer does not have any knowledge of the topic when it arises? The most significant change to the exam content, however, is the planned expansion of the skills to be tested. "Stakeholders have indicated that the bar exam should test fewer subjects in order to focus on testing more lawyering skills," said NCBE President Judith Gundersen. "The new bar exam will be administered on computers, which allows us to build more dynamic question sets and test skills beyond those included on the current exam. The addition of these essential skills is one of the most exciting and challenging changes planned for the new bar exam." The current bar exam already tests important lawyering skills in legal writing, issue spotting, and legal analysis. The skills to be assessed on the new bar exam have been expanded to include legal research, investigation and evaluation, client counseling and advising, negotiation and dispute resolution, and client relationship and management. The expansion of skills testing will require development of new question types; as a result, the current bar exam format will be retired in the coming years, and a new format, featuring integrated sets of questions (likely a combination of short-answer, multiple-choice, and longer legal drafting questions) is in development. The publication of the outlines is the latest milestone in a process that began in 2018, when NCBE embarked on a multiyear study of the current bar exam. During that study, nearly 15,000 practicing lawyers and stakeholders from bar admission agencies and the legal academy responded to a nationwide practice analysis survey to identify the knowledge and skills that are necessary for effective practice by newly licensed attorneys. "Members of the legal community from all US jurisdictions participated, making this a truly nationwide practice analysis survey of the opinions of the US legal community," said Hon. Cynthia L. Martin, who sits on the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, and chairs the committee charged with overseeing development of the new exam. In addition to the practice analysis survey, the study included listening sessions with stakeholders and collaborative input from committees composed of bar examiners and legal educators about possible changes to the bar exam. The study was built on the premise that "all options were on the table," said Martin. "Participants were given free rein to reimagine the bar exam to best reflect the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed by new attorneys in a changing profession." Notably, said Martin, "among several independent reports on the content best tested on the exam, there was significant consensus, regardless of the agency conducting the study." NCBE is asking members of the US legal community to review and comment on the Content Scope Outlines. The comment period will be open until April 18. To view the outlines and submit comments, visit NCBE's next generation bar exam website . About the Next Generation of the Bar Exam In 2018, the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) appointed a Testing Task Force charged with undertaking a three-year study to ensure that the bar examination continues to test the knowledge, skills, and abilities required for competent entry-level legal practice in the 21st century. In January 2021, NCBE's Board of Trustees approved the Testing Task Force's recommendations and began development of the next generation bar exam, with a timeline of five years for implementation. The new exam will place greater emphasis on assessment of lawyering skills to better reflect real-world practice and the types of activities newly licensed lawyers perform. NCBE is committed to ensuring a systematic, transparent, and collaborative implementation process, informed by input from and participation by stakeholders, and guided by best practices and the professional standards for high-stakes testing. For more information, visit https://nextgenbarexam.ncbex.org. About the National Conference of Bar Examiners The National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, is a not-for-profit corporation founded in 1931. NCBE promotes fairness, integrity, and best practices in bar admissions for the benefit and protection of the public, in pursuit of its vision of a competent, ethical, and diverse legal profession. Best known for developing bar exam content used by 54 US jurisdictions, NCBE serves admission authorities, courts, the legal education community, and candidates by providing high-quality assessment products, services, and research; character investigations; and informational and educational resources and programs. For more information, visit the NCBE website at https://www.ncbex.org. SOURCE National Conference of Bar Examiners Luxury retailer has begun decreasing fur inventory, reimagining fur salons, and investing in new sustainable products and services for customers DALLAS, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Last June, Neiman Marcus Group ("NMG" or the "Company") adopted a new Animal Welfare Policy and committed to eliminate fur products from its assortments by March 2023. Nine months later, the company shares its progress to apply these changes to all NMG brands, including Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman. To date, fur inventory levels across NMG have been reduced by more than half, and the Company plans to continue reducing receipts throughout the next year. To educate clients on fur alternatives, NMG has begun to introduce several new sustainable and ethical product alternatives in the luxury assortments intended to satisfy the discerning tastes of luxury customers. "It is clear the future is fur-free, and that includes the ultra-luxury space. As a leader in luxury retail, NMG has an opportunity to help build a better future for our industry," said Geoffroy van Raemdonck, Chief Executive Officer, Neiman Marcus Group. "Since our announcement, we've seen many of our brand partners join this movement, further assisting our efforts to implement this much-needed change and create a more sustainable future for fashion." NMG worked closely with the Humane Society of the United States in 2021 to create its Animal Welfare Policy. Over the last eight months, NMG has begun to implement its exit from fur, scheduled for March 2023, and 100% compliance with this new policy that aligns with the Fur Free Alliance guidelines. These important steps include reimagining the merchandising assortments and aligning on a plan for how fur salons will evolve. Introducing New Sustainable & Ethical Product Alternatives "Our Merchandising teams have begun asking brand partners to identify items with preferred product attributes that will power the new 'Fashioned for Change' and 'Conscious Curation' edits at Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, which launch this spring," said Chris Demuth, SVP of People Services, ESG, & Belonging, NMG. Both edits will feature products made with sustainable materials, including bio-based vegan leathers like Prota Fiori, a Certified B Corp founded by Jennifer Stucko who has pioneered the use of apple leather in women's footwear made in Italy, as well as products that are responsibly manufactured, give back philanthropically, are made by diverse-owned brands, or promote enhanced transparency through digital product passports. "We are bringing our brand partners and customers along with us and sharing educational resources every step of the way," said Lana Todorovich, Chief Merchandising Officer, Neiman Marcus. "We have several brand partners who are leaders in this space. And for some of our brand partners, they are just beginning their journey." NMG has proudly continued to partner closely with The Humane Society and Textile Exchange to inform its efforts and access reputable training for brand partners. "We will continue to sell products approved by The Humane Society, made from synthetic, faux fur materials, and traditional animal fabrics like cashmere, leather, shearling, mohair, down, wool, and silk," said Todorovich. "We will also continue to monitor animal welfare concerns associated with these materials and work with brand partners to promote best practices related to their sourcing, production, processing, re-use, and innovation over time, including through our Sustainability Edits that feature products with certified materials and other preferred product attributes for consumers." NMG's Animal Welfare Policy and the launch of its brands' new sustainable product edits will help the company meet its goal to increase revenue from the sale of sustainable and ethical products by 2025. Transitioning Fur Salons and Committing to Fur Services As shared last year, existing fur salons at Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman stores will be converted into spaces customized for modern luxury experiences. Over time, the salons will be converted into spaces featuring alterations, personalization, dining, and other experiential customer moments. "We intend to continue offering customers access to fur services, including storage, alterations, and repairs," said Demuth. "Our experts are trained on caring for, maintaining, and altering existing fur products, lowering the demand for new ones while driving progress toward our ESG goal to extend the useful life of 1,000,000 luxury items through circular services by 2025." For more information on NMG's Animal Welfare Policy, developed in cooperation with the Humane Society of the United States, please visit https://www.neimanmarcusgroup.com/Animal-Welfare-Policy. Read more about NMG's 2021 ESG report at www.neimanmarcusgroup.com/ESG. About The Neiman Marcus Group LLC Neiman Marcus Group is a relationship business that leads with love in everything we do for our customers, associates, brand partners, and communities. Our legacy of innovating and our culture of Belonging guide our roadmap for Revolutionizing Luxury Experiences. As one of the largest multi-brand luxury retailers in the U.S., with the world's most desirable brand partners, we're delivering exceptional products and intelligent services, enabled by our investments in data and technology. Through the expertise of our 9,000+ associates, we deliver and scale a personalized luxury experience across our three channels of in-store, eCommerce, and remote selling. Our NMG|Way culture, powered by our people, combines individual talents into a collective strength to make life extraordinary. Our brands include Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus Last Call, and Horchow. For more information, visit http://www.neimanmarcusgroup.com/. SOURCE Neiman Marcus Holding Company, Inc. Favor Repeal of Authorization to Use Military Force from 9/11 COLLEGE PARK, Md., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A new in-depth survey from UMD's Program for Public Consultation finds that bipartisan majorities favor several legislative proposals giving Congress greater authority over the use of military force and arms sales, as well as repealing the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), passed after the 9/11 attacks, which has been the primary basis for the uses of military force since then. Bipartisan majorities support a proposal contained in several bills that would increase Congress's role in the use of military force. Currently, according to the War Powers Act, if the president initiates the use of military force, after 60 days, Congress can vote to stop it. However, the president can veto the stoppage, which would require Congress to muster a supermajority to override the vetosomething Congress has never done. Bipartisan majorities support legislative proposals that automatically cut-off funding for a military operation initiated by the president after 60 days unless Congress acts to approve it. Congress could effectively stop an operation with a simple majority. After being briefed on the proposals and evaluating arguments pro and con, 58% favor an automatic funding cut-off after 60 days unless Congress acts. This garners support from 53% of Republicans, 62% of Democrats, and 58% of independents. Similarly, bipartisan majorities (61%, Republicans 56%, Democrats 68%, independents 61%) favor requiring that Congress actively approve arms sales over $14 million, giving Congress the power to stop arms sales with a simple majority not subject to a presidential veto. Consistent with the general support for a greater Congressional role, bipartisan majorities favor repealing the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that was passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which gave the president the authority to use military force against anyone involved in the attacks or any organization that helped those involved. Over the last two decades, the AUMF has been used as the legal basis for military force against organizations that were not involved with 9/11, but have similar beliefs and methods. All in all, nearly six-in-ten voters (59%) favor repealing the 2001 AUMF, including 65% of Democrats, 52% of Republicans, and 63% of independents. "We have been consistently finding bipartisan majority support for giving Congress greater say over the use of military force and arms sales," commented Steven Kull, Director of the University of Maryland's Program for Public Consultation (PPC). In this innovative survey by the Program for Public Consultation at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, respondents were given briefings on the proposals, and evaluated arguments for and against to ensure they understood the issues. The content was reviewed in advance by experts for accuracy and balance and to ensure the best arguments were being presented on both sides. The survey was fielded January 27 - February 28, 2022 online with a national representative sample of 2,702 registered voters provided by Nielsen Scarborough from its larger sample, which is recruited by telephone and mail from a random sample of households. There is a margin of error of +/- 1.9%. Download Full Report: https://vop.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/WarPowersReport031822.pdf Questionnaire with Frequencies: https://vop.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/WarPowers-AUMF-ArmsSales-Questionnaire0322.pdf Try the Policymaking Simulation: https://survey.alchemer.com/s3/6781296/WarPowers Media Contact: JP Thomas 617.899.8570 [email protected] SOURCE Program for Public Consultation CHICAGO, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Freedom of speech and expression are the hallmark of American values. Those ideals are why the Next News Network is proud to join Donald Trump's new venture, "Truth Social" and be welcome to the newest conservative social media platform. Next News Network Joins Truth Social By joining this social media platform, it will give the Next News Network the ability to present current news on a platform that values the First amendment and supports conservative views. Now Next News Network's more than 2 million subscribers can get unfettered access to the award-winning news channel that has proven to be a strong conservative alternative to the liberal mainstream media networks like MSNBC, CNN, and others. "The ease of banning President Trump from Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms had many conservatives worried they could end up in the same position simply for holding and espousing a conservative viewpoint that goes against the establishment's narrative of the day," said Gary Franchi, executive producer of the Next News Network. "Now former President Donald Trump has created an outlet that will let us engage our conservative audience as never before amidst an ever-changing political landscape." The Next News Network handle on Truth Social is @NextNewsNetwork. As one of the leading conservative media sites, the Next News Network is focused on creating high-quality journalism that has led to multiple awards in the last few years. Next News Network has won three Content Film Festival News and Journalism Awards. One for Best Overall Production Quality in 2020 and has won the Best Breaking News Program award the last two years. Next News Network also won two Youtube Creator Awards. The quality coverage of current events and breaking news has propelled the Next News Network's videos to amass well over 1 billion views since its founding in 2012. Confirming that Next News Network is a trusted source for conservatives. "Our focus has always been to find underreported stories and cover them from perspectives that mainstream media outlets seem to ignore," said Franchi. "Our audience appreciates the coverage we provide and we think that Truth Social will allow us to connect with an even larger conservative audience. We want to thank President Trump for this opportunity." About Next News Network Next News Network is an award-winning news channel winning awards for Best Breaking News Program and Best Overall Production Quality. Next News Network was created to ensure that free press would continue to thrive online by serving millions of Americans and viewers across the world every day. Next News Network has proven to be the conservative choice for news by surpassing over 1 billion views on YouTube. You can learn more about these awards and Next News Network by visiting https://youtube.com/NextNewsNetwork. The executive producer of the Next News Network Gary Franchi has a vast knowledge of news experience. Franchi served as an executive producer/news anchor for WHDT World News, executive producer/host of Reality Report, and managing editor of national distributed Republic Magazine prior to founding the Next News Network. Media Contact: Stacey Shelton [email protected] (702) 483-8094 SOURCE Next News Network The Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC), Monday night confirmed terrorists attack on Kaduna bound train and successfully immobilised it. Confirming the Incident to Journalist in Abuja, the Managing Director of Nigerian Railways Corporation (NRC) Fidet Okhiria said: "we can not give you much information now." Okhiria, who is already in Abuja, said: "Most of the passengers have gone into hiding and they can not be giving information, but there are reports of gun shots, continued gun shots as the train stopped," adding that the attack occurred at a point between Katari and Rijana. The NRC boss said some passengers could not leave the train ,which means nobody knows what might happen to them. One of the passengers who also confirmed the incident in a telephone call said the attackers had surrounded the train, shooting sporadically. "All the passengers are currently lying on the floor of the train. The bandits are shooting sporadically. We are in serious danger," said one of the panic-stricken passengers. Satellite map showing the location of the train as sent by one of the passengers Google map showing the location of the train as sent by one of the passengers There are at least 970 passengers onboard the train, according to official sources familiar with the train service. There had been several attempts by terrorists on the Abuja-Kaduna train service. In one of the attacks, just over three months ago, Sen.Shehu Sani was on board. HOLYOKE, Mass., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- NextMart, Inc. (the "Company" or "NXMR" - Pink Sheets Alternative Reporting Pink: NXMR) NXMR would like to announce that the "Shell Company" status from the Company's landing page with OTC Markets, Inc. ("OTC Markets") has been removed. Pursuant to Rule 405 as promulgated under the Securities Act of 1933 and Exchange Act Rule 12b-2, a Shell Company is a company, other than an asset-backed issuer, with no or nominal operations and either 1) no or nominal assets; 2) assets consisting of cash and cash equivalents; or 3) assets consisting of any amount of cash and cash equivalents and nominal other assets. The removal of the Shell Company warning on the Company's landing page with OTC Markets will not however allow the Company to utilize the safe harbor of Rule 144 to remove restrictive resale legends on restricted equity. William Bouyea (CEO of the Company), states"We no longer met the definition of a Shell Company with OTC Markets upon completion of our initial acquisition in January 2022. As required by OTC Markets, we filed a supplemental filing last week stating we were no longer a Shell Company and followed that up with the filing of the acquisition agreements for Emco Oilfield Services, LLC (January 2022) and Defender Contracting, LLC (March 2022). Now that this step is completed, we are going to focus on getting a Form 15c2-11 filed so our stock qualifies for proprietary broker-dealer quotation. Again, this is another huge step in our corporate cleanup of the Company as we move forward to a becoming a more transparent issuer for investors." A Form 15c2-11 approval will allow more market makers to quote the Company's stock which could lower the risk of wider bid/ask spreads, volatility, and price dislocations. Once the Form 15c2-11 is approved, brokers will be able to publish competing quotes and provide continuous market making. Forward Looking Statement Certain statements that we make may constitute forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The statements contained herein may contain certain forward-looking statements relating to NXMR that are based on the beliefs of NXMR's management as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to NXMR's management. These forward-looking statements are, by their nature, subject to significant risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements relating to the NXMR's business prospects, future developments, trends and conditions in the industry and geographical markets in which NXMR operates, its strategies, plans, objectives and goals, its ability to control costs, statements relating to prices, volumes, operations, margins, overall market trends, risk management and exchange rates. ABOUT US NextMart, Inc., a Delaware Corporation, is a public quoted Pink Sheet issuer under the ticker symbol "NXMR". Currently, NXMR currently is a shell company with a new management team with plans to become a current alternative reporting issuer with OTC Markets. The Company is currently looking for an appropriate business acquisition. CONTACT: 98 Lower Westfield Road Holyoke, MA 01140 Phone: (602) 499-6992 Company Web Site: https://nextmartcorporation.com/ Emco Oilfield Services, LLC Web Site: https://emcooilfield.com/ Twitter: @CorporationNxmr Company Email: [email protected] Contact: William Bouyea, CEO SOURCE NextMart, Inc. AMMAN, Jordan, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Nobles Properties has awarded 18 full university scholarships through the Jordanian Hashemite Charity Organization (JHCO) to outstanding secondary school students who wish to continue their education in the medical and technology fields. Omar Ayesh, Chairman of the Nobles Group (R) with Dr. Hussein Al-Shibli, JHCO Secretary General (L) Omar Ayesh, Chairman of the Nobles Group, presented the scholarships to Dr. Hussein Al-Shibli, JHCO Secretary General, during the signing of a memorandum of cooperation. Nobles will cover all tuition expenses for exceptional students who are financially unable to cover the fees under the auspices of the JHCO. The move is part of Nobles' drive to expand its corporate social responsibility program that already funds hundreds of students across 11 countries. "We have made a strategic commitment to help develop as many deserving individuals as possible through our community programs," Ayesh said. "We firmly believe that only through education can society enjoy constant renewal and prosper." Ayesh added that the Group chose the technology and medical fields as a reflection of current events, and the correspondent need for specializations in these sectors which provides students a competitive edge in the labor market. Dr. Al-Shibli emphasized: "We constantly strive to include education programs among our activities through partnering with the private sector. We take great pride in supporting exceptional students complete their learning journey; and we are both grateful and pleased with this new relationship we have established with Nobles." Al-Shibli emphasized the importance of local as well as international support for mentoring, training, and scholarship programs. Organizations such as JHCO have been integral to Jordan's efforts to make education accessible to a broad spectrum of the population. Nobles Properties is an international real estate developer that builds distinctive lifestyle developments. The company's CSR program includes over a thousand scholarships in 11 countries around the world, in addition to its strategic partnership with local charities and social development programs. Omar Ayesh, the company's founder, built one of the region's most iconic projects in Dubai, the Princess Tower, which reigned as the tallest residential tower in the world for years. Nobles Properties operates in North America, the Middle East and North Africa. Media Inquiries: Nobles Properties R. Jaraa +962 65546161 [email protected] SOURCE Nobles Properties ALPHARETTA, Ga., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Northpoint Commercial Finance (Northpoint) a diversified inventory finance company, celebrated 10 years of exceptional growth driving its customer's success with over $50 billion in dealer inventory financed since inception. From a start-up finance company with a team of 10, to an established lender with over 170 employees throughout North America, Northpoint has built a remarkable business focused on service delivery and process innovation. Dan Radley, President and CEO of Northpoint, states, "We founded Northpoint in 2012 with a private equity partner and were then acquired by LBC Capital a subsidiary of Laurentian Bank of Canada in 2017. The partnership with LBC Capital has helped strengthen our service execution that's led to the success of Northpoint's significant growth over the last ten years. I am proud of the Northpoint team for all their hard work throughout the years, especially their diligence and commitment to our customers during unprecedented times surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic." With customer service as the cornerstone of their value proposition, Northpoint prides itself on providing superior communication, speed of execution and state of the art systems to its customers. Service satisfaction is measured annually through a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. Northpoint distributed their most recent survey to active customers on November 8, 2021, using the online platform Qualtrics. They are proud to report a world class 2021 NPS score of 83, far exceeding the financial services industry average score of 441). NPS measures how likely a customer is to recommend a brand. About Northpoint Commercial Finance Northpoint Commercial Finance, with offices in Alpharetta, GA, and Burlington, ON, combines experience with advanced technologies, fresh ideas, streamlined processes, and a customer focus formed specifically for the varied needs and goals of each business. Northpoint's inventory finance offerings drive sales, enhance cash flow, and improve profitability for both manufacturer and dealers. More information about Northpoint and their offerings is available at www.northpointcf.com. About Laurentian Bank At Laurentian Bank, we believe we can change banking for the better. By seeing beyond numbers. Founded in Montreal in 1846, Laurentian Bank helps families, businesses and communities thrive. Today, we have more than 2,900 employees working together as one team, to provide a broad range of financial services and advice-based solutions for customers across Canada and the United States. We protect, manage and grow $46.1 billion in balance sheet assets and $30.2 billion in assets under administration. We drive results by placing our customers first, making the better choice, acting courageously, and believing everyone belongs. 1 Survey conducted in November 2021 among our customers. Industry average score from customergauge.com. Media contact: Jill Howell [email protected] SOURCE Northpoint Commercial Finance Founded in 1986 on the Westside of Indianapolis, BDA now operates out of Fishers, Indiana, under the leadership of Chief Executive Officer Bob Danielson and President Joe Azbell. "Team BDA is very excited to join the Oatey family," said Danielson. "Oatey is one of the premier brands in our industry, well-known for their quality and dependability. That is the same reputation that BDA strives to earn every single day. We look forward to growing Oatey's presence and market share in the state of Indiana." "BDA consistently demonstrates high standards for sales, service, professionalism and integrity," said Matt Foraker, National Sales Manager, Rough Plumbing at Oatey. "We eagerly anticipate their contributions and the opportunity to build a successful partnership together." ABOUT OATEY CO. Since 1916, Oatey has provided reliable, high-quality products for the residential and commercial plumbing industries, with a commitment to delivering quality, building trust and improving lives. Today, Oatey operates a comprehensive manufacturing and distribution network to supply thousands of products for professional builders, contractors, engineers and do-it-yourself consumers around the world. Oatey is based in Cleveland, Ohio, and has locations in the United States, Canada, Mexico and China. For more information, visit www.oatey.com, call (800) 321-9532 or follow Oatey on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. SOURCE Oatey Co A graduate of Stanford Law School and Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, Watson is the sister of OZY Founder Carlos Watson and played a critical role in the inception of OZY Media. Her voice was extremely influential in the company's forward-looking identity."As you can imagine, I love OZY and am so proud of what has been built. The smart, flavorful, and global stories that we tell have always stood out and had an impact. I am excited to help us tackle new topics in novel ways in this incredibly transformative time." Watson has held positions at the US State Department, Laureate Education, Shearman & Sterling LLP, and King Philanthropies, a grantmaking foundation that works to combat extreme poverty. Watson has already put her stamp on OZY with the launch of a new Sunday Magazine called Elevate the Conversation . The weekly issue tackles tough and nuanced conversations from critical race theory to addiction to loneliness to the next Zelensky's. "Beverly is a genius, and we are lucky to have her," said Michael Moe, Chairman of the OZY Media Board. "I love the global team she is assembling from Paris to Johannesburg and from Lagos to the Berkshires.OZY is a smart, important, and unusually inclusive voice in these transformative times, and I am excited to see how Beverly will serve ambitious Gen Z readers as well as Millennials and Gen Xers." OZY Media was an early adopter of editorial newsletters and over the years they have amassed a significant following reaching millions of readers every month. As Managing Editor, Watson intends to make OZY's premium newsletters more interactive, allowing readers to not only read the newsletters, but also encourage readers to weigh in and discuss the issues and articles. "As a black woman, new mother and global citizen, I am excited to be a part of this new era of media,"said Watson. "As our offering suggests, we aim to help elevate critical conversations." Watson has assembled a team of editors, freelance and full-time reporters and intends to continue to build a strong, diverse, global team as OZY further expands its editorial coverage. Watson is the fifth major team announcement from OZY Media in the last few weeks, following David Lawrence , former Goldman business intelligence chief and federal prosecutor, who joined the OZY Board as Senior Advisor; Michael Safran , former Time Inc, Gannett and Bloomberg executive, who joined the company as Chief Revenue Officer; Mukul Pandya , former Founding Editor-in Chief of Wharton's online Business Review and Executive Director of [email protected]([email protected]), who joined OZY as Senior Editor-at-Large; and Aparna Ranganathan who joined as Vice President of Human Resources. ABOUT OZY Launched in 2013, OZY has built a diverse and unique voice in media, including 5 newsletters , 12 tv shows , 9 podcasts , and 4 festivals . In 2020, OZY won an Emmy Award for its ground-breaking television program, Black Women OWN the Conversation. SOURCE OZY Media "Who hasn't dreamed of visiting Bora Bora? We're delighted to have Air Tahiti Nui join our array of global airline partners, further connecting the West Coast to the South Pacific," said Nat Pieper, senior vice president of fleet, finance and alliances at Alaska Airlines. "Our guests are going to love the convenience of a nonstop flight to this amazing destination on an airline that offers world-class service and amenities flying the beautiful Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner aircraft." "It is with great enthusiasm that we are launching this new direct service to the Pacific Northwest. This will help the further development of tourism to French Polynesia, including from the market of Western Canada. Alaska Airlines is the perfect partner for this, and we are looking with great excitement at the new commercial opportunities that lay ahead. This will strongly reinforce the position of Air Tahiti Nui as the leading airline for services to and from Tahiti," said Mathieu Bechonnet, managing director at Air Tahiti Nui. New Air Tahiti Nui service: Starts City Pair Departs Arrives Frequency Aircraft Oct. 4, 2022 Papeete Seattle 10:00 p.m. 10:25 a.m. +1 day Tues, Sat 787-9 Oct. 5, 2022 Seattle Papeete 12:40 p.m. 7:10 p.m. Wed, Sun 787-9 Air Tahiti Nui has existing daily nonstop service between Papeete and Los Angeles, an additional key Alaska hub airport on the West Coast. There's also another flight for our guests to get excited about: Air Tahiti Nui, with its historical connection to France, provides nonstop service between Los Angeles and Paris an extremely popular route between two world cities. Starting April 1, Alaska's Mileage Plan members can earn miles on all Air Tahiti Nui flights. (Please allow 6-8 weeks for miles to post in Mileage Plan accounts.) Mileage redemption for Air Tahiti Nui flights is expected to be available later this spring. Tickets for Air Tahiti Nui flights can be purchased now on the airline's website. Alaska is a member of the oneworld global alliance. With oneworld and our additional airline partners, our guests can earn and redeem miles with our highly acclaimed Mileage Plan program to fly on more than 20 oneworld and partner airlines all around the globe. Alaska remains committed to Next-Level Care for our guests and employees by implementing more than 100 ways to maintain the highest standard of safety from clean planes to clean air in the cabin with hospital-grade air filtration systems. For everyone's safety on board, Alaska continues to enforce the federally mandated mask policy, even for those who are fully vaccinated. About Alaska Airlines Alaska Airlines and our regional partners serve more than 120 destinations across the United States, Belize, Canada, Costa Rica and Mexico. We emphasize Next-Level Care for our guests, along with providing low fares, award-winning customer service and sustainability efforts. Alaska is a member of the oneworld global alliance. With the alliance and our additional airline partners, guests can travel to more than 1,000 destinations on more than 20 airlines while earning and redeeming miles on flights to locations around the world. Learn more about Alaska at news.alaskaair.com. Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air are subsidiaries of Alaska Air Group (NYSE: ALK). SOURCE Alaska Airlines TALLINN, Estonia, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Piixpay, an EU-regulated crypto payment provider known for crypto-to-fiat solutions, has rebranded as Swapin and announced its new product vision. Piixpay Rebrands As Swapin Swapin, the newly introduced brand name replacing Pixxpay, represents the company's growing ambitions and potential. The Swapin vision begins with product promotion focused on Europe, including Germany, France, and Nordic regions. A multilingual mobile app and localization of the Swapin website will support the initiative. Swapin will also expand its product range, providing added clarity between B2C and B2B services. Swapin Product Roadmap Revealed Releasing several new innovative solutions to empower businesses with reliable access to accepting payments in crypto is a top priority. CoinCollector is a convenient invoice issuing tool. Using a shareable link, businesses can invoice clients who pay in crypto yet receive fiat instantly instead. E-com allows online merchants to accept payments in crypto while receiving the exact amount of fiat deposited directly to an IBAN. Instabuy will broaden the possibilities for clients by adding a fiat-to-crypto purchasing tool. Swapin To Acquire EMI Licence "Operating since 2017, we have achieved a strong reputation among our clients as PiixPay. Today, we are taking a big step towards scaling the successful endeavor as Swapin," said Swapin CEO Evald Hannes-Kree. "Currently, many businesses are isolated from an audience that can significantly boost their sales, while crypto holders are still in need of reliable gateways to convert their funds into real goods and services. We here at Swapin see a big promise in filling this gap, and will do our best to make this a reality with support from our investors," Hannes-Kree added. Swapin seeks to acquire an Electronic Money Institutions license to further expand its list of products. A virtual IBAN release is scheduled for 2023. About Swapin Swapin is an EU-licensed, regulated crypto-to-fiat payment processing company. The company offers a complete set of turn-key solutions aimed at bridging the gap between digital assets and the banks. Swapin allows the conversion of crypto funds into fiat by direct deposit to a selected IBAN account, avoiding excessive accounting and legal compliance struggles. The variety of ready-to-go solutions, targeted both at individuals and businesses, allows for immediate fiat settlement in the desired fiat currency in only a matter of clicks. To learn more about Swapin, visit the official website . Follow Swapin on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram , and LinkedIn . SOURCE Swapin LANSING, Mich., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Robin A. Preston, a public healthcare professional with over 30 years of policy and operations experience in both the private and public sectors, has joined national healthcare consulting firm Health Management Associates (HMA) as its Eastern regional vice president. Preston most recently served as associate partner at IBM, where she led the company's Policy and Program Management Team for contract oversight and business development strategies in support of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and other U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Operating Divisions. In this role, she oversaw a dozen contracts and spearheaded strategy development to support an array of federal policy initiatives. At HMA, Preston will support HMA's offices in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Washington, D.C., where she will be based. "I am deeply thankful and extremely delighted to be joining the HMA leadership team," Preston said. "I look forward to working with this impressive group of policy experts as we serve our clients to advance access to publicly funded programs and services." Preston previously spent eight years at CMS, rising to acting group director of Intergovernmental and External Affairs and served in both Dallas and Baltimore. She oversaw three unique divisions in the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services: Tribal Affairs, Communications and Outreach, and State and Stakeholder Relations. Her work experience also includes various roles with both comprehensive and behavioral health managed care organizations. Founded in 1985, HMA is an independent, national research and consulting firm specializing in publicly funded healthcare and human services policy, programs, financing, and evaluation. Clients include government, public and private providers, health systems, health plans, community-based organizations, institutional investors, foundations, and associations. HMA has offices in 25 locations across the country and over 500 multidisciplinary consultants coast to coast. For more information about HMA, visit https://www.healthmanagement.com/. SOURCE Health Management Associates AUBAGNE, France, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- At today's combined Annual General Shareholders' Meeting of Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A., shareholders passed the resolution to pay a dividend of 1.26 euros per share for fiscal 2021. The total profit distributed will be 116.1 million euros. The previous year's dividend was 0.68 euros per share. The Annual General Shareholders' Meeting has granted discharge to all directors by a large majority and approved the renewal of the appointments as Directors of Pascale Boissel, Rene Faber, Lothar Kappich, Joachim Kreuzburg, and Henri Riey for a three-year term of office. This press release contains forward-looking statements about the future development of the Sartorius Stedim Biotech Group. Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. Sartorius Stedim Biotech assumes no liability for updating such statements in light of new information or future events. Sartorius Stedim Biotech shall not assume any liability for the correctness of this release. The original French press release is the legally binding version. ASM documents https://www.sartorius.com/en/company/investor-relations/sartorius-stedim-biotech-sa-investor-relations/shareholders-meeting Press images https://www.sartorius.com/en/company/newsroom/downloads-publications Financial calendar April 21, 2022 Publication of first-quarter figures (January to March 2022) July 21, 2022 Publication of the first-half figures (January to June 2022) October 19, 2022 Publication of nine-month figures (January to September 2022) A profile of Sartorius Stedim Biotech Sartorius Stedim Biotech is a leading international partner of the biopharmaceutical industry. As a total solutions provider, the company helps its customers to manufacture biotech medications safely, rapidly and economically. Headquartered in Aubagne, France, Sartorius Stedim Biotech is quoted on the Eurolist of Euronext Paris. With its own manufacturing and R&D sites in Europe, North America and Asia and an international network of sales companies, Sartorius Stedim Biotech has a global reach. The Group has been annually growing by double digits on average and has been regularly expanding its portfolio by acquisitions of complementary technologies. In 2021, the company employed more than 10,400 people, and earned sales revenue of around 2.89 billion euros. Contact Timo Lindemann Corporate Communications Spokesman +49 (0)551.308.4724 [email protected] www.sartorius.com Follow Sartorius on Twitter @Sartorius_Group and on LinkedIn. SOURCE Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A. Successful restaurant online ordering system eHungry launches exciting new features for the thousands of restaurant locations using their platform RALEIGH, N.C., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- eHungry, a popular private label restaurant ordering system, announces they have rolled out the latest version of their online ordering platform for their restaurant clients. The exciting update to their system includes a new customer-focused design and numerous new features: advanced prep times and throttling to help restaurants avoid being slammed with orders; integration with over 70 payment providers so restaurants can save on credit card fees; an enhanced mobile app for better order handling; and a free website builder for new restaurants that don't have a Web presence. The newest design and tech updates come as a response to both consumers and restaurants continuing to heavily lean on online ordering. Scott Arkin, CEO of eHungry "We are constantly evolving our ordering system to help restaurants and their customers have a great experience," says CEO and founder Scott Arkin. "With our new order throttling feature for example, our system can make sure the restaurant doesn't get too many orders too quickly when demand unexpectedly surges. Our platform can detect it and adjust the ready times as needed. The last thing a restaurant wants is an upset customer waiting for their order because the restaurant wasn't expecting a spike on a Monday night." eHungry has also integrated with over 70 payment providers including Authorize.Net, CardConnect, Elevon, Heartland, NMI, Payeezy, PayPal, Stripe, TransFirst, USA ePay and WorldPay. This means fast setup for restaurants and they can use their existing credit card processor to save on fees, which is critical with rising costs everywhere. "With eHungry, customers are paying the restaurants directly. There are no middlemen or delays in receiving their funds. Restaurants have complete control over their payments and customer data," says Scott. Additional new eHungry features include expanded iOS and Android Manager apps with live chat support and Star Micronics printer integration; better control of accepting orders and advanced prep times; custom order types for more unique setups such as curbside, drive-thrus, catering and room service; and a free Website builder so restaurants can control their own Web presence with a photo gallery, menu, reviews, coupons and more. Demand and challenges have been non-stop for the food service industry especially the past few years. eHungry has been there to help restaurants by offering direct mobile and online ordering solutions at an affordable cost. With eHungry there are no setup costs, no contracts, and no hidden fees just a small fee per order. Since 2003, the independent company has provided direct online ordering services for thousands of restaurants across the United States and Canada, specializing in private label and custom-designed solutions under the restaurant's own brand. The company has also donated over $100,000 to organizations that help in the fight to end hunger, including Feeding America, Rise Against Hunger, Food Banks Canada, and Action Against Hunger. Learn more about eHungry at www.ehungry.com About eHungry: eHungry, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, is one of the original online ordering platforms for the food service industry. Launched in 2003, eHungry provides direct online ordering services to thousands of restaurants across the United States and Canada. They build each restaurant's online ordering experience under their own brand and are proud to offer a low-cost, feature-rich platform that makes it easy for restaurants to offer mobile and online ordering to their customers. Media Contact: Bradley Public Relations & Marketing Bob Bradley (949) 274-9651 [email protected] SOURCE eHungry Mr Bello hails from the North-central zone as Mr Adamu, who was elected APC National Chairman at the party's convention on Saturday. Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State has said the All Progressives Congress (APC), as currently constituted, would not zone anyone out of the presidential race. Mr Bello said this in a statement by his Chief Press Secretary, Onogwu Mohammed, on Monday, in Abuja. The governor also stated that the party would poll over 41 million votes in the 2023 general elections if a generally acceptable candidate should emerge at the party's primary. He emphasised that the emergence of Abdullahi Adamu from the North-central geo-political zone of the country would not impede his decision to jostle for the presidential ticket of the party. Mr Bello hails from the North-central zone as Mr Adamu, who was elected APC National Chairman at the party's convention on Saturday. There are indications that since the party zoned the chairmanship position to the North-central, it would zone the presidency to the southern part of the country. The zones in the south are South-west, South-east and South-south. But Mr Bello noted that party administration was different from governance. "The type of leader the nation requires at this time is a competent, committed, young and vibrant individual, who will turn the tides of the nation. "Irrespective of his or her region, build bridges across ethnic, religious lines while ensuring the inclusion of youths, women, and people with disability in governance," Mr Bello stated. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Nigeria Governance By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. On the recently concluded convention of the ruling party, Mr Bello noted that the emergence of Mr Adamu was the choice of the party. He said the party went for an experienced party leader to manage its affairs, noting that the period it took to organise the convention was worth the wait. "The new party leader and the National Working Committee have great experience to lead the party into a strong and cohesive entity. "The option of consensus in selecting the majority of the party leaders was clearly in line with legal standing, although positions where there was no agreed consensus, contestants went through the polls," he added. Mr Bello gave assurance that in the forthcoming primaries, the party would go through a democratic process that would be accepted generally by all stakeholders, adding that he was not afraid of any mode chosen by the party. On women's inclusion in governance, Mr Bello revealed that he would not require legislative backing to include women in government, noting that Kogi, under his leadership, had performed tremendously well. "This is why women across the nation have been calling on me to run for president, considering the robust track record of giving women high-level inclusion in my administration," Mr Bello stated. NEW YORK, March 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Robert L. Wolski, MD, is being recognized by Continental Who's Who as a Top Pinnacle Healthcare Professional for his outstanding achievements in the fields of Psychiatry and Addiction Psychiatry. Robert Wolski With over 30 years of medical experience, Dr. Wolski prides himself on providing his patients with the highest quality of care possible utilizing the latest discoveries in psychotherapy and psychopharmacology. He specializes in Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), a highly focused psychotherapeutic technique to rapidly evaluate and resolve issues of psychological distress not requiring medications, such as loneliness, grief, underachievement of one's potential, and conflicts in relationships. Moreover, ISTDP is a powerful modality with or without medications in treating such psychiatric conditions as anxiety and mood disorders. In addition, Dr. Wolski subspecializes treating substance misuse and dependence, gambling disorders, and other impulse-control conditions related to addiction. Dr. Wolski graduated with a B.A. from Yale College. He then earned his Medical Degree, in 1989, from the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago, graduating as a member of the prestigious medical honor society Alpha Omega Alpha. He completed his Residency in Psychiatry at The Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic of The New York Hospital and two Fellowships in Addiction Psychiatry: a clinical fellowship at the Cornell University Medical Center and a research fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He is Board Certified in Psychiatry and Addiction Psychiatry through the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Dr. Wolski was the founding unit chief of the inpatient dual diagnosis unit at The Payne Whitney Clinic. He also served as unit chief for the inpatient alcohol unit at the Bellevue Hospital, New York City. He was on the clinical faculty at the New York University School of Medicine for over 20 years, providing resident teaching and supervision both in ISTDP and Addiction Psychiatry, before returning his focus full time to his private psychiatric practice in 2019. He continues to supervise colleagues learning ISTDP. Dr. Wolski has been a member of various school, regional, and national committees throughout his career, including the Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs of the American Medical Association. He is a member of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Association of Addiction Psychiatrists, the American Society of Addiction Medicine, the Association of LGBTQ+ Psychiatrists, and the International Experiential Dynamic Therapy Association. In his free time, Dr. Wolski enjoys attending concerts and plays in NYC, playing the piano, cooking, and spending time with his spouse and two sons, ages 12 and 14. Media Contact: Katherine Green 516-825-5634 [email protected] SOURCE Continental Who's Who "As part of our vision, we are now venturing into the three core pillars of our multidimensional growth plan, encompassing expanded manufacturing capacity, continued advancements in business portfolio, and greater global footprint," said John Rim, CEO of Samsung Biologics in an address to the shareholders. "As a leading CDMO service provider, we will continue to demonstrate our excellent business operations throughout our value chains to ultimately contribute to saving the lives of patients and build a better future for all." Same as last year, Samsung Biologics implemented an electronic voting system, and the meeting was made available for virtual participation via a live broadcast. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the company took precautionary measures throughout the meeting to ensure the health and safety of all attendees. Samsung Biologics' Plant 4 is currently under stable construction to begin operations by the end of this year, and the company is steadily securing pre-sales with clients. Upon the full completion of Plant 4 in 2023, the company is expected to hold the world's largest biomanufacturing capacity. The company is further looking into securing additional sites within Songdo for its second bio campus, and also overseas in multiple locations to expand its business in closer proximity to its global clients. For more details of the 2022 AGM, please see the reference material available under the following link. About Samsung Biologics Co., Ltd. Samsung Biologics (KRX: 207940.KS) is a fully integrated CDMO offering state-of-the-art contract development, manufacturing, and laboratory testing services. With proven regulatory approvals, the largest capacity, and the fastest throughput, Samsung Biologics is an award-winning partner of choice and is uniquely able to support the development and manufacturing of biologics products at every stage of the process while meeting the evolving needs of biopharmaceutical companies worldwide. For more information, visit samsungbiologics.com. Media Contact Claire Kim Senior Director Global Marketing Communication Team Samsung Biologics [email protected] SOURCE Samsung Biologics The Vietnam Outstanding Banking Award recognizes financial institutions with outstanding business performance, typically in outstanding products/services that have piqued the public's interest and contributed to the industry's development. For the financial solution package - Accompanying Vietnamese Women, SeABank competed in two categories and thrilled to be nominated in both categories. Identifying women as customers who need special service, SeABank has designed financial packages with products and services exclusively for female customers, including: SeALady Credit Card, Vietnam Women's Union loans (SeAWomen) and a version of SeAMobile digital banking application for women... The SeALady Cashback credit card is designed exclusively for women and offers a maximum cashback of up to 2% of all transactions. With each transaction from VND 1 million paid with SeALady Cashback card, SeABank will contribute VND 2,000 to the Supportive Fund for the Cancer Patients "Bright Future". SeABank has contributed roughly VND 2.1 billion to the "Bright Future" fund so far. SeABank also launched the SeAMobile digital banking application, a new version designed for women with several advanced features such as AI application, QR payments, bill payments, online gold purchases, eKYC identity technology... Simultaneously, SeABank has been working with Women's Unions across the nation to provide loans to members of the Vietnam Women's Union to meet their consumption requirements and strengthen the family economy. With the support of capital financing and advice on developing a loan portfolio for women-owned businesses from the International Finance Corporation and other international lending parties, SeABank has effectively implemented the program "Loans for Women-owned Businesses" and positioned itself as the bank of choice for women-owned businesses. In parallel with the goal of effective business development, with the operating principle "For the Community", in 2021, SeABank provides solutions to help the government and citizens in pandemic prevention, as well as aiding the impoverished and disadvantaged people. Until now, SeABank, BRG Group and its member entities have sponsored almost VND 200 billion in support of the government and individuals afflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic. SOURCE SeABank Dublin, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Search Engine Optimization Services Global Market Report 2022, By Type, Organisation, End-User Industry" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. This report provides strategists, marketers and senior management with the critical information they need to assess the global search engine optimization services market as it emerges from the COVID-19 shut down. Reasons to Purchase Gain a truly global perspective with the most comprehensive report available on this market covering 50+ geographies. Understand how the market is being affected by the coronavirus and how it is likely to emerge and grow as the impact of the virus abates. Create regional and country strategies on the basis of local data and analysis. Identify growth segments for investment. Outperform competitors using forecast data and the drivers and trends shaping the market. Understand customers based on the latest market research findings. Benchmark performance against key competitors. Utilize the relationships between key data sets for superior strategizing. Suitable for supporting your internal and external presentations with reliable high quality data and analysis Major companies in the search engine optimization services market include Axel Springer SE, Google, Bing, Baidu, Ask and Yahoo. The global search engine optimization services market is expected to grow from $51.74 billion in 2021 to $63.19 billion in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.1%. The growth is mainly due to the companies rearranging their operations and recovering from the COVID-19 impact, which had earlier led to restrictive containment measures involving social distancing, remote working, and the closure of commercial activities that resulted in operational challenges. The market is expected to reach $134.26 billion in 2026 at a CAGR of 20.7%. The search engine optimization services market consists of the revenues generated from sales of SEO advisory services by entities (organizations, sole traders, or partnerships) that provide advisory services for businesses to optimize their websites. Search engine optimization companies advise their clients in optimizing their websites and their content to enhance the websites' visibility in search results. The main types of search engine optimization services are agency SEO services and freelancer SEO services. An SEO agency is a business that specializes in search engine optimization. It benefits companies by increasing their web visibility. The different organizations include small and medium enterprises (SMEs), large enterprises and are used by various sectors such as professional services, IT services, e-commerce, hospitality, recreation, real estate, others. Asia Pacific was the largest region in the search engine optimization services market in 2021. Africa is expected to be the fastest growing region in the forecast period. The regions covered in this report are Asia-Pacific, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, South America, Middle East and Africa. Rising penetration of mobile, tablet and other electronics and rising data consumption will drive the web content, search portals, and social media market. Rising sales of electronics lead to an increased number of people that own internet-accessible devices and increasing access to digital platforms. For example, the average time spent on the internet by each person in the US is increased to 282 minutes per day in 2021, giving companies the opportunity to generate more revenue per user. This rising average internet use is expected to drive the search engine optimization services market. Government regulations may restrain the search engine optimization market's growth. For instance, the concept of net neutrality means internet service providers (ISPs) cannot block content based on its source or destination discriminate against certain applications (such as BitTorrent), or impose special access fees that would make it harder for small websites to reach their users. Regulations such as net neutrality arguably stop the market from acting freely and give preferential treatment to websites that pay internet service providers. The competition for search traffic is significant amongst major players like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Strategic partnerships are seen amongst the major competitors, contributing a large share to their revenues. For instance, Apple uses Google as its default search engine which has contributed as much as $8.8 billion to the annual revenues of Google, and Yahoo switched to Microsoft Bing. Key Topics Covered: 1. Executive Summary 2. Report Structure 3. Search Engine Optimization Services Market Characteristics 3.1. Market Definition 3.2. Key Segmentations 4. Search Engine Optimization Services Market Product Analysis 4.1. Leading Products/ Services 4.2. Key Features and Differentiators 4.3. Development Products 5. Search Engine Optimization Services Market Supply Chain 5.1. Supply Chain 5.2. Distribution 5.3. End Customers 6. Search Engine Optimization Services Market Customer Information 6.1. Customer Preferences 6.2. End Use Market Size and Growth 7. Search Engine Optimization Services Market Trends And Strategies 8. Impact Of COVID-19 On Search Engine Optimization Services 9. Search Engine Optimization Services Market Size And Growth 9.1. Market Size 9.2. Historic Market Growth, Value ($ Billion) 9.2.1. Drivers Of The Market 9.2.2. Restraints On The Market 9.3. Forecast Market Growth, Value ($ Billion) 9.3.1. Drivers Of The Market 9.3.2. Restraints On The Market 10. Search Engine Optimization Services Market Regional Analysis 10.1. Global Search Engine Optimization Services Market, 2021, By Region, Value ($ Billion) 10.2. Global Search Engine Optimization Services Market, 2016-2021, 2021-2026F, 2031F, Historic And Forecast, By Region 10.3. Global Search Engine Optimization Services Market, Growth And Market Share Comparison, By Region 11. Search Engine Optimization Services Market Segmentation 11.1. Global Search Engine Optimization Services Market, Segmentation By Type, Historic and Forecast, 2016-2021, 2021-2026F, 2031F, $ Billion Agencies SEO Services Freelancer SEO Services 11.2. Global Search Engine Optimization Services Market, Segmentation By Organisation, Historic and Forecast, 2016-2021, 2021-2026F, 2031F, $ Billion Small and Medium Enterprises (SMES) Large Enterprises 11.3. Global Search Engine Optimization Services Market, Segmentation By End-User Industry, Historic and Forecast, 2016-2021, 2021-2026F, 2031F, $ Billion Professional Services IT Services Ecommerce Hospitality Recreation Real Estate Others 12. Search Engine Optimization Services Market Metrics 12.1. Search Engine Optimization Services Market Size, Percentage Of GDP, 2016-2026, Global 12.2. Per Capita Average Search Engine Optimization Services Market Expenditure, 2016-2026, Global For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/w8qztj Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1904 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets The Trinias F12 incorporates Shimadzu's high speed SCORE PRO image processing technology, one of many features oriented towards workflow efficiency. Shimadzu's SMART Design delivers the intuitive functionality required to respond instantly to physician and operator commands. The Shimadzu SCORE software features allow patients the best outcomes possible, while maintaining ALARA dose considerations for all clinical staff. About Cardiovascular Experts of Central Pennsylvania , LLC Cardiovascular Experts of Central Pennsylvania, located in Camp Hill, PA, is the only independent physician-owned and operated cardiac and vascular practice in the metro Harrisburg/central Pennsylvania region. Our outpatient center combines state-of-the art technology with over 100 years of cumulative clinical experience in heart and vascular care. Dr. Rajesh Dave, MD, FACC, FACAI, is the founder and Chief Medical Executive for Cardiovascular Experts. In addition to caring for patients, he routinely trains physicians on advanced interventional techniques to help restore blood flow and hosts thousands of physicians annually at the C3 Conference, of which he is the director and founder. Dr. Dave has performed over 10,000 leg procedures sparing many patients from limb amputation. Patients are routinely referred to him for second opinions from all over the world. To request an appointment, call (717) 727-0480, email [email protected], or visit CardiovascularExperts.com. To learn about the C3 Conference, visit InterventionalAcademy.com. About Alpha Imaging Alpha Imaging LLC, headquartered in Ohio, is one of the largest independent sales and service providers of advanced medical imaging equipment in the United States. Alpha is celebrating over 30 years in the imaging industry and Alpha Imaging partners with leading global manufacturers to deliver state-of-the-art products and services that meet the clinical, operational, and economic needs of the U.S. healthcare market. One of Inc. Magazine's fastest growing companies for ten straight years, Alpha Imaging builds customer loyalty with a personal touch rarely seen in today's medical imaging marketplace. Visit: www.alpha-imaging.com About Shimadzu Medical Systems USA Shimadzu Corporation, founded in 1875 in Kyoto, Japan and the parent of Shimadzu Medical Systems USA (SMS), is a global provider of medical diagnostic equipment including conventional, interventional and digital X-Ray systems. Shimadzu Medical Systems USA is headquartered in Torrance, CA with Sales and Service offices throughout the United States, the Caribbean and Canada. Its sales and marketing office is located in Cleveland, OH, and has direct operations headquartered in Dallas, TX and Kenmore, WA. Visit Shimadzu Medical Systems USA at www.shimadzu-usa.com or call (800) 228-1429. For further information contact: Frank Serrao, Marketing Manager (800) 228-1429 [email protected] SOURCE Shimadzu Medical Systems USA Shipfusion expands West Coast footprint with a new 246,000 sqft temperature-controlled FDA registered eCommerce fulfillment warehouse in Las Vegas. LAS VEGAS, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Shipfusion opened its doors to clients this week, showcasing the eCommerce company's 246,000 square foot fulfillment warehouse . Powered by Shipfusion's custom-built warehouse management software, the new facility has the capacity to ship over 75,000 eCommerce orders daily and includes 50,000 square feet of temperature-controlled storage for sensitive cargo. This expansion is part of Shipfusion's mission to grow its operations across the globe and continue its role as a leader in the eCommerce fulfillment industry. "We are thrilled to be opening up in Las Vegas. This brand new facility extends our overall strategic fulfillment network and adds significant growth capacity on the West coast. Las Vegas is very well situated, with short transit times to the major population centers across the southwest," says Wojtek Gidzinski, Director of Sales. "This is a key part of our network expansion, and we are looking forward to welcoming many new and existing clients to Shipfusion Las Vegas." The new Las Vegas warehouse space will include a handful of advanced upgrades, including: 1-day ground shipping across Southern California 246,000 square feet with 50,000 square feet of temperature-controlled space Strategically located within 5 miles of FedEx, UPS, and USPS sorting facilities. Powered by Shipfusion's custom Warehouse Management Technology to optimize processing efficiency and output capabilities Full capability to support both direct-to-consumer (D2C) and B2B/wholesale orders "Our Las Vegas warehouse is an expansive quarter of a million square feet encompassing the latest version of our operations," says Jason Mandroc, Vice President of South West Operations. "We've done extensive planning to ensure that we are not only starting with the leading edge of all our tech but that we also have plenty of capacity to handle anything our clients can throw at us." About Shipfusion : Shipfusion gives brands the best tools possible for building a successful eCommerce operation. Their fully managed and operated warehouses, expert inventory management, and powerful real-time technology lets businesses focus on fast growth without the stress. 'Shipfusion combines flexible, reliable fulfillment with powerful, real-time technology. With warehouses located across the US and Canada to support eCommerce businesses.' SOURCE Shipfusion GOTEBORG, Sweden, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Victoria van Camp, CTO and Senior Vice President, SKF Technology Development will leave SKF to continue her career outside SKF. She will leave Group Management today but will remain in an advisory role during a brief transition period. Rickard Gustafson, President and CEO, says: "On behalf of SKF I would like to thank Victoria for her valuable contribution during many years of employment and I wish her all the best in future". The role as CTO and Senior Vice President, SKF Technology Development has been assumed on an interim basis by Andrew Bell, Director, Product Development & Engineering. A recruitment process to identify a new CTO and Senior Vice President has been initiated. Aktiebolaget SKF (publ) CONTACT: For further information, please contact: PRESS: Carl Bjernstam, Group Communication tel: 46 31-337 2517; mobile: 46 722-201 893; e-mail: [email protected] INVESTOR RELATIONS: Patrik Stenberg, Head of Investor Relations tel: 46 31-337 2104; mobile: 46 705-472 104; [email protected] This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com https://news.cision.com/skf/r/skf-announces-changes-to-group-management,c3534357 The following files are available for download: https://mb.cision.com/Main/637/3534357/1555411.pdf 20220329 SKF announces changes to Group Management SOURCE SKF Skimmer brings all of the complex functionality we need to run our business within a simple, intuitive interface... Tweet this Marcos Valdez, Riverbend Sandler's VP of Service & Maintenance explained, "The utilization of Skimmer into our weekly maintenance service allows us to optimize our routes to a more efficient level than ever before. We are now able to deliver our same high quality of services with fewer time and resources. Also, the auto notification to the customer of their maintenance, adds to the consistent effort of innovation we aspire to in order to create a better customer experience." Skimmer is attracting many large pool service and repair companies to adopt its platform. Kevin Embree, Skimmer's Chief Marketing Officer explained, "Having attended and exhibited at nine trade shows in the past few months, it is clear that large pool service and repair companies are searching for ways to reduce costs, optimize and scale their businesses, as well as attract, train, manage, and retain professional pool techs. The industry norms are changing rapidly, and the larger players in the industry are working hard to stay ahead of the curve. Skimmer provides an immediate ROI and is the logical solution". About Skimmer Skimmer's category-defining Pool Service Software Platform has helped over 3,300 pool service and repair businesses engage efficiently and professionally with over 940,000 pool and spa owners. The SaaS platform provides pool service and repair businesses of all sizes access to features that simplify work orders, route optimization, pool tech management, billing and invoicing, customer communication, and payments. Everything you need to run your pool service business, all in one app. Learn more at getskimmer.com SOURCE Skimmer AUSTIN, Texas, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- CareFlash and Snowline Hospice announced today that the organizations have entered into a collaborative partnership that leverages togetherness, empathy and nostalgia to enhance healing and aging journeys, chronic and cognitive illness, even in celebrating a loved one's memory. This agreement provides patients, families and communities access to CareFlash's signature platform, "The Careopolis, A Metropolis of Love and Empathy." Snowline Hospice Offers The Careopolis, "A Metropolis of Love & Empathy" Careopolis, A Metropolis of Love & Empathy. CareFlash, Community when it Matters Most. As described in the brief video on Snowline Hospice's website (https://snowlinehospice.org/our-services/careopolis), a Careopolis is an online "caring community," created and operated by a patient and/or family caretakers and invited friends and loved ones. Each Careopolis contains integrated components and content, conducive to enhancing the quality, depth and durability of supportive connectedness among patients and loved ones. These include: interactive voice-driven storytelling tools, collaboration calendar, community blog, photo-sharing capabilities and 3-D medical animations. It is invitation-only, multilingual, mobile-friendly and effective in enhancing how loved ones become and remain engaged: As a supportive fabric of empathy and quality-of-life More with empathy than sympathy In celebrating a loved one's life journey, memories and how they touched others "Snowline's capable and compassionate team values The Careopolis for the ways it enhances the 'Whole Person Care' we provide, by respecting patients and families' wishes as they navigate the final stages of life," adds Snowline Hospice CEO, Tim Meadows. "We offer The Careopolis at no cost to our community and see it as an engaging way for family and friends to connect online and celebrate their loved one's memory throughout the challenging time following a loss." "Each Careopolis enhances the respectful priority we place on leaning into listening, serving and being a resource for patients and families," adds Barbara Torres, Snowline's Director, Market Engagement. "This fits harmoniously into our Mind-Body-Spirit approach to nurturing end-of-life with comfort, respect, and dignity." "As the leading nonprofit, community-based hospice in our area, we promote a 'Patient and Family First' culture of educating people about the timeliness, accessibility and value of dying with dignity, peace and comfort," adds Teo Weldon, Snowline's Marketing & Communications Manager. "We view The Careopolis as part of a pervasive shift in the 'Standard of Care' in the hospice industry and holistic healing. Since November 2020 when Snowline began working with CareFlash, we have been pleasantly surprised by the growing numbers of families adopting and using the Careopolis tool. Seeing the impressive growth among families using it, we know people find this helpful and even needed." "CareFlash was founded in 2005 out of a lengthy caretaking journey surrounding a family member," adds Jay Drayer, CareFlash founder/CEO. "Throughout that experience, I learned that loved ones sincerely want to engage throughout healing and aging journeys. However, engagement is commonly complicated by people's busy lives, emotional barriers and concerns about intrusiveness. When this happens, the quality and durability of supportive engagement instead comes through as lots of well-wishes and sympathies. The Careopolis enhances the depth and durability of togetherness, empathy and quality-of-life." About CareFlash Now into its 18th year, CareFlash empowers organizations that place value on enhancing socialization, resilience and peace-of-mind. Likewise in strengthening community education/outreach, industry relations and competitive advantage. CareFlash's partners range broadly throughout acute, post-acute, chronic, cognitive, hospice/palliative, senior living, payer, home-care, faith-based, funeral and professional services organizations as in this small sample: Community Medical Centers, Texas Oncology, Austin Regional Clinic, Outcomes Physical Therapy, Butler Funeral Homes and Pariveda Solutions. https://careflash.com About Snowline Hospice As a community-based, not-for-profit since 1979, Snowline offers gentle support, care, and guidance to those facing life-limiting illness. We serve patients and families in the El Dorado, Sacramento and Placer counties of California. https://snowlinehospice.org/ On Behalf of CareFlash Jay Drayer 512-368-5421 [email protected] On behalf of Snowline Hospice Teo Weldon 530-621-7820 [email protected] SOURCE CareFlash LLC Download Now! Major Price Models in the Solid Waste Management Sourcing and Procurement Market The report discusses in detail each pricing model and the pros and cons attached to every pricing model prevalent in the market. Also, the report provides insights with respect to the category supply chain and the margins of various suppliers within the supply chain. The most widely adopted pricing models in the Solid Waste Management Sourcing and Procurement Market Fixed-fee pricing Volume-based pricing Learn about various other pricing models: Request for a FREE sample report Spend Growth and Demand by Region The Solid Waste Management Sourcing and Procurement market will register an incremental spend of about USD 100.2 Billion during the forecast period. However, only a few regions will drive the majority of this growth. Moreover, on the supply side, North America, Europe, and APAC will have the maximum influence owing to the supplier base. The growth is expected to be primarily driven by increasing demand and adoption of the category across those few regions. To get a detailed analysis of the regional factors driving the Solid Waste Management Sourcing and Procurement Report: Download the sample report now! Subscribe to our "Free Limited Period Starter Procurement Plan" to get the following: View 6 full reports View 800+ report samples Pre-order upcoming reports Dedicated account manager Subscribe Now for FREE! Most Adopted Procurement Strategies by Buyers Across the Solid Waste Management Sourcing and Procurement Market The report provides a detailed insight of the most adopted procurement strategies by buyers across industries and analysis of these strategies with respect to innovation, regulatory compliance, quality, supply, and cost. Adoption of these procurement strategies will enable the buyers to reduce category TCO and achieve cost savings, while sourcing for thermal equipment requirements. To get the exact information on various procurement strategies: Get the FREE Sample Report Now! This Solid Waste Management Sourcing and Procurement Market report answers help buyers identify and shortlist the most suitable suppliers, for instance: Am I engaging with the right suppliers? Which KPIs should I use to evaluate my incumbent suppliers? Which supplier selection criteria are relevant for? What are the workplace computing devices category essentials in terms of SLAs and RFx? Our Top Selling Procurement Reports: Asset Recovery Services - Forecast and Analysis: The asset recovery services will grow at a CAGR of 9.49% during 2021-2025. Asia Asset Recovery Pte Ltd., TES-Amm Singapore Pte Ltd., and Iron Mountain Inc. are among the prominent suppliers in asset recovery services market. Click the above link to download the free sample of this report. Vulnerability Management Sourcing and Procurement Report: Vulnerability Management Procurement Market, prices will increase by 4%-6% during the forecast period and suppliers will have a Moderate bargaining power in this market. Click the above link to download the free sample of this report. Celebrity Talent Management Services - Sourcing and Procurement Intelligence Report: This report offers key advisory and intelligence to help buyers identify and shortlist the most suitable suppliers for their celebrity talent management services requirements. Click the above link to download the free sample of this report. About SpendEdge: SpendEdge shares your passion for driving sourcing and procurement excellence. We are the preferred procurement market intelligence partner for 120+ Fortune 500 firms and other leading companies across numerous industries. Our strength lies in delivering robust, real-time procurement market intelligence reports and solutions. Contact SpendEdge Anirban Choudhury Marketing Manager Ph No: +1 (872) 206-9340 https://www.spendedge.com/contact-us SOURCE SpendEdge Ikengaonline, which is the media arm of the African Center for Transparency, also seeks to foster media independence and focus sufficient searchlight on the activities of political office holders in the South-east region. A new online newspaper, Ikengaonline, is set to be launched in Nigeria's South-east by two media experts to promote accountability and good governance in the region. Ikengaonline, which is the media arm of the African Center for Transparency, also seeks to foster media independence and focus sufficient searchlight on the activities of political office holders in the region. A statement by the two renowned journalists, Osmund Agbo and Chido Onumah, on Monday, said the paper, which is set for launch March 31, will focus on the five South-east states of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo. "The aim is to draw attention to the challenges facing the South-east, give voice to the citizens of the zone and highlight many issues that are underreported and misreported in the media," the statement read. It lamented that a lack of accountability and good governance has led to a deterioration of the security situation in the region. The statement revealed that renowned author and scholar, Okey Ndibe, will present a keynote address during the launch while Kole Shettima, Africa Director of MacArthur Foundation, and Motunrayo Alaka, Executive Director of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism, will deliver goodwill messages. Former Nigeria's Senate President, Adolphous Wabara, ex-United Nations special rapporteur, Joy Ezeilo, and a communication for development specialist, Abigail Ogwezzy-Ndisika, are some of the people expected at the virtual launch of the news platform, according to the statement. The newspaper, which will be edited by an experienced development journalist and political scientist, Uche Ugboajah, is supported by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation through the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism. Read the full Statement below: Press Release March 28, 2022 Ikengaonline Debuts to Promote Accountability and Good Governance in the South-East A new online newspaper, Ikengaonline, will debut on Thursday, March 31, 2022. Ikengaonline is the media arm of the African Center for Transparency (ACT), an organization dedicated to the promotion of accountability and good governance. Ikengaonline will focus on the five southeast states of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo. The aim is to draw attention to the challenges facing the southeast, give voice to the citizens of the zone and highlight many issues that are underreported and misreported in the media. The southeast has been punching way below its weight since Nigeria's return to democratic governance in 1999 and it is not hard to notice the correlation between lack of accountability and poor governance and the deteriorating security situation in the zone. Ikengaonline will maintain a healthy distance from the state in a way that will foster media independence and focus sufficient searchlight on the activities of political office holders in the southeast to promote accountability and good governance. As part of the official unveiling of Ikengaonline, there will be a virtual launch on Thursday, March 31, 2022, Renowned author and scholar, Professor Okey Ndibe, will present a keynote address during the launch while Dr Kole Shettima, Africa Director of MacArthur Foundation, and Motunrayo Alaka, Executive Director of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism, will deliver goodwill messages. Also expected at the virtual launch are Senator Adolphous Wabara, a former Senate President, Chief Mike Ahamba, SAN, Dr Joe Abah, Nigeria Country Director, DAI, Prof Joy Ezeilo, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur, and Prof Abigail Ogwezzy-Ndisika, communication for development specialist. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Nigeria Governance By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. Ikengaonline will be edited by Uche Ugboajah, an experienced development journalist and political scientist. Ikengaonline is supported by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation through the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism. Dr Osmund Agbo Chido Onumah, PhD For Management Funding will Accelerate Rensa Games' Development of Proprietary Real-Time and Transparent Build-to-Earn Platform for Gamers, Game Developers, and Content Creators; Reduces Payment Cycle from Weeks to Immediate HONG KONG and NEW YORK, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- SOMA Finance, LLC (" SOMA.finance "), the joint venture between MANTRA DAO and Tritaurian Capital, Incorporated ("Tritaurian Capital") that is building the critical infrastructure of compliant, decentralized finance (DeFi), announced today a strategic partnership with the video game distribution and development platform Rensa Games ("Rensa"). The partnership is planned to be one of the first tokenized Regulation Crowdfunding ("Reg CF") issuances on the SOMA.finance platform. Rensa is building "Steam for Web3." The platform uses smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain to create Game License Tokens. These "GLTs" enable players to launch games by holding the tokens in their digital wallets, and freely resell them in the same manner as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Game developers and content creators who host their games and assets on Rensa will receive payment for each sale in real-time, instead of waiting weeks or months for compensation. "With the help of SOMA.finance, we can expand play-to-earn into build-to-earn," said Anthony Apollo, Founder and CEO, Rensa Games. "Independent game developers and content creators have to wait far too long to receive compensation for their time, effort and creativity. Building a platform that performs real-time and transparent payment further legitimizes the blockchain gaming ecosystem. This partnership directly increases the prospects of decentralized intellectual property management and ownership through community funding." "SOMA.finance's native issuance platform will bring an entirely new class of compliant digital assets and products to gaming and other companies looking to benefit from DeFi without violating securities law and regulations," said William B. Heyn, Co-Founder, SOMA.finance and CEO of Tritaurian Capital. "We have worked closely with Rensa to ensure that they achieve their vision to reshape the foundations of gaming, and ultimately the value of decentralized game development, while remaining in compliance with the relevant securities rules and regulations." Rensa has a number of innovative features in its roadmap, designed to provide smaller developers access to funding opportunities and high-quality content through a decentralized asset marketplace. Ahead of a prospective Reg CF offering this year, Rensa's marketplace goes live on Wednesday, March 30 at 8am EDT / 8pm HKT. To celebrate this revolutionary step forward for the gaming community, a limited run of 10,000 GLTs will be issued as a "Launch Day Collection." The sale can be accessed from the Rensa Games website, where this collection of crypto-themed minigames can be purchased after connecting a compatible MetaMask digital wallet funded with ETH. In addition to taking part in gaming history, owning one of these GLTs will grant holders preferential access to the potential future Reg CF token sale (pursuant to all regulations and KYC / AML through SOMA). As the first United States compliant, global multi-asset decentralized exchange platform (DEX), SOMA.finance plans to offer the ability to list Regulation CF, Regulation D, Regulation S and Regulation A offerings that will be accessible by both retail and institutional investors alike, in addition to offering the compliant trading and issuance of tokenized equities, crypto assets, security token offerings (STOs), non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and more, all in a safe and secure environment. About SOMA.finance SOMA.finance is the world's first decentralized exchange and issuance platform for digital assets, compliant digital securities, and NFTs. As a joint venture between DeFi Platform MANTRA DAO and Tritaurian Holdings, Incorporated, owner of FINRA licensed broker-dealer Tritaurian Capital, SOMA will be a fully compliant DEX and suite of products for institutional and retail investors. SOMA will include features such as built-in KYC/AML, the ability to trade digital assets of all kinds, including STOs and NFTs, and permissionless regulated AMM. Website: www.soma.finance About Tritaurian Capital, Incorporated Tritaurian Capital, Incorporated ( https://www.tritauriancapital.com ) is a registered broker-dealer and member of FINRA and SIPC. Tritaurian Capital's BrokerCheck record is available at here. Tritaurian Capital is the first non-ATS broker-dealer to be approved for a license to sell digital private placement securities using distributed ledger technology, otherwise known as blockchain technology. Digital securities are an emerging, yet rapidly evolving, implementation of distributed ledger technology with the potential to increase access for investors and decrease cost for issuers. Tritaurian Capital believes that blockchain-based securities can improve transferability, transparency, increase security, and streamline regulatory compliance through the open and programmable nature of blockchain tokens. About Rensa Games The Rensa Games platform is owned and operated by Kyodai Technologies, Inc. Rensa Games is a new video game development and distribution platform, which uses blockchain to send real-time payments directly to game developers and content creators. More details about Rensa Games will be available soon. To stay up-to-date, you can register at the company's website (https://www.rensa.games ) and join the official Discord server (https://discord.com/invite/CqEtMeRcUK). SOURCE SOMA.finance OrbitSecure is SpiderOak's lightweight software-only solution for ground and space platforms to secure all data types over untrusted infrastructure, including both unencrypted networks and commercial operators. OrbitSecure is built on SpiderOak's Distributed Ledger Platform (DLP), a blockchain and encryption software development kit that allows space developers to embed zero-trust security at the application layer. DLP is the only blockchain implementation optimized for ultra-low power, making it particularly well suited for the new generation of small satellites. OrbitSecure will help advance the National Defense and Hybrid Space Architectures by allowing operators to traverse the same national and international horizontal supply chains driving the new space economy without sacrificing the assurances of authority, identity, and need to know that come with traditional vertically integrated infrastructures. Lockheed Martin will use its extensive experience with end-to-end mission operations for orbital satellite systems to support the full integration of the new OrbitSecure technology into practical satellite management. SpiderOak will work with Lockheed Martin in adapting SpiderOak's commercial technology to new uses for potential military and intelligence community satellite operators. The collaboration reflects a common vision for satellite operations in space in which zero-trust principles and next-level encryption ensure these customers have the greatest and most secure access to satellite data possible. "Relentless cyber security is critical for our customers and ensures that their national security and intelligence missions are robust and resilient. Lockheed Martin is always looking for innovative companies who can contribute increased capabilities and greater security to these important government missions. This U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract is a great example of how the government and both large and small companies can work together," said Joe Epstein, SBIR portfolio manager for Lockheed Martin Space. "We're excited to work with SpiderOak to explore the additional capabilities OrbitSecure can provide our customers." Charles Beames, Chairman of SpiderOak, remarked: "We are proud to be working with Lockheed Martin, the recognized leader in developing and fielding frontline military systems for the country. Working together, we can better protect the satellite systems that the warfighter depends on from vicious cyber threats and do so while increasing their flexibility to customers." Lockheed Martin Space's Mission Solutions line of business recognizes that space is a key enabler for many critical government missions that must be protected end-to-end. To ensure mission operations, Lockheed Martin uses an Intelligence Driven Defense approach to addressing cyber threats. The company also developed the Cyber Resiliency Level (CRL) model to better measure cyber resilience and guide improvements and prioritize investments to critical systems. About SpiderOak Mission Systems SpiderOak Mission Systems is a US-based software company that builds cybersecurity products and solutions for civilian, military, and commercial space operations. Our commercially available products leverage a unique combination of Zero-Trust encryption and private blockchain, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your most sensitive data in the space domain. For more information about SpiderOak and SpiderOak Mission Systems, check us out at https://spideroak.com/ or SpaceCyber.Com Media Contact: Andrew Friedrich (866) 432-9888 ext. 6 [email protected] SOURCE SpiderOak Mission Systems MIRAMAR, Fla., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Spirit Airlines (NYSE: SAVE) today announced the completion of its terminal move at LaGuardia Airport (LGA) with all Spirit flights now calling Terminal A home. Over the past year, Spirit maintained a split operation between Terminal C and Terminal A, also known as the Marine Air Terminal. The move has enhanced the LGA Guest experience with all flights now consolidated in one of the most convenient locations at LaGuardia. Additionally, the move also benefits Guests by streamlining Spirit's operation at the airport. "We sincerely thank all parties who helped make this terminal relocation a reality, especially the Port Authority of New York New Jersey who supported our transition between the two terminals," said Matt Klein, Spirit's Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer. "At Spirit, we are committed to our Invest in the Guest initiatives. The consolidation of our operations at LGA is yet another important achievement for our airline as well as our Guests. We are excited to see our brand continue to grow in New York and, most importantly, it's a true honor to now serve all of our Guests from the historic Marine Air Terminal." "As LaGuardia Airport continues its transformative redevelopment, we are delighted to welcome Spirit Airlines to Terminal A, the historic Marine Air Terminal," said LaGuardia General Manager Tony Vero. "We look forward to working with Spirit to provide best-in-class service to a growing number of air passengers." Spirit Airlines at LaGuardia Airport: Destination Frequency Nashville (BNA) 1x daily Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) 1x daily Detroit (DTW) 1-2x daily Fort Lauderdale (FLL) 4x daily Los Angeles (LAX) 1x weekly (Saturday only) Orlando (MCO) 1-2x daily Miami (MIA) 2x daily Myrtle Beach (MYR) 2x daily Phoenix (PHX) (Seasonal through 4/16/2022) 1x weekly (Saturday only) San Juan (SJU) 1x weekly (Saturday only) Tampa (TPA) (Seasonal through 5/4/2022) 1x daily The Marine Air Terminal was built in 1939 and is one of two passenger terminals in the country remaining from the first generation of air travel. The terminal is also home to a massive 12-foot-high, 235-foot-long mural "Flight" by James Brooks that encircles the interior wall of the terminal's rotunda and tells the story of human flight. About Spirit Airlines: Spirit Airlines (NYSE: SAVE) is committed to delivering the best value in the sky. We are the leader in providing customizable travel options starting with an unbundled fare. This allows our Guests to pay only for the options they choose like bags, seat assignments and refreshments something we call A La Smarte. We make it possible for our Guests to venture further and discover more than ever before. Our Fit Fleet is one of the youngest and most fuel-efficient in the U.S. We serve destinations throughout the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean, and are dedicated to giving back and improving those communities. Come save with us at spirit.com. SOURCE Spirit Airlines, Inc. State recognizes value in supporting student learning, aptitudes, and skill certifications to inform educational and career pathways for in-demand occupations AMERICAN FORK, Utah, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- YouScience , the only provider of a fully-integrated platform for aptitude-based assessments, personalized career guidance, and industry-recognized certifications, today announced that the Utah State Legislature has approved funding for the continued use of YouScience Discovery through the 20222023 school year. As part of Utah's Student Credential Account and Aptitude Assessment , nearly 300,000 middle and high school students as well as teachers, counselors, and administrators will have access to YouScience Discovery in addition to Precision Exams by YouScience . "College and career success starts with a student understanding their aptitude at an early age. This information can help eliminate biases and remove career exposure gaps impacting the trajectory of students today," said Edson Barton, Founder and CEO, YouScience. "We would like to thank the State of Utah for recognizing the importance of YouScience Discovery along with Precision Exams by YouScience. We are honored to continue our work together during the next school year to empower students throughout their academic journey." YouScience Discovery has been in use across Utah since the beginning of the 20212022 school year, and has already helped more than 35,000 middle and high school students better understand their own talents and identify future opportunities. The aptitude assessment, which is built on learnings from 50-plus years of scientific research, helps students identify where they have a natural talent, and matches these talents with in-demand careers and educational pathways. As a result, students are more aware of their natural strengths and the opportunities they may afford. "We look forward to continuing to work with YouScience to meet the needs of the students in Utah," said Thalea Longhurst, Director of Career and Technical Education at the Utah State Board of Education. "This funding helps students discover their natural talents and receive better direction toward meaningful CTE classes and pathways, and future education and careers." A recent analysis by YouScience highlighted the impact of YouScience Discovery in the state. The company analyzed the anonymized YouScience Discovery test results of more than 23,000 Utah middle and high school students. The findings of its Utah Talent Report showed that while students possess the necessary talents needed for the state's in-demand careers, many do not show interest in these areas in some cases due to lack of exposure to the career opportunities within the state. YouScience Discovery helps eliminate this career exposure gap and highlight students' college and career opportunities, connecting them to desirable and in-demand jobs. "Having spent many years of my career as a high school career counselor, I know the most important thing we can do is help our students recognize their natural aptitudes and envision the careers they can build from them," said Senator Derrin Owens, who championed the appropriation with the Utah Legislature. "As a state, we invest heavily into education with an eye on driving our economy now and in the future. We already see a significant return on our investment in the aptitude assessments and I expect that to grow as the program is fully integrated across Utah schools." In addition, YouScience has been the chosen provider of industry-recognized certifications, through Precision Exams by YouScience, in Utah since 2006. Since its deployment, more than one million certificates have been administered across the state. These certifications help students validate their skills and knowledge learned in career and technical education (CTE) and other elective courses, as well as showcase their soft skills. For more information on YouScience and its solutions, please visit www.youscience.com . About YouScience YouScience is the only provider of a fully-integrated platform that delivers highly accurate aptitude-based assessments, personalized career guidance, and industry-recognized certifications, empowering individuals in their educational and career pathways. Leveraging proven research and industry input, YouScience helps individuals identify their natural talents, validate their skills and knowledge, and get matched with real-world educational and career pathways in high-demand occupations. YouScience is the preferred choice of individuals, parents, educators, and counselors to guide and support educational and career pathways, currently serving more than 7,000 educational institutions and nearly one million users. SOURCE YouScience Neuro-Cells treatment aims to reduce irreversible damage to the central nervous system from secondary inflammation following trauma The randomized, placebo-controlled, international multi-center Phase II clinical trial will determine efficacy for treatment of Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury (TSCI) Spanish and Danish authorities approved a combined Phase II/III clinical trial that enables a faster development path towards the market Positive results from Phase I clinical trial provides a solid foundation for this first therapeutic indication in Europe Neuroplast aims to attract additional funding to expand to other geographies and leverage the potential of the Neuro-Cells technology platform for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) GELEEN, Netherlands, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Neuroplast, a Dutch clinical stage biotech, focusing on cell-based treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, has enrolled its first patient in a Phase II clinical trial to evaluate efficacy of its transformative Neuro-Cells treatment that aims to prevent further damage to the central nervous system after sustaining acute Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury (TSCI). The trial is conducted in collaboration with Hospital Nacional de Paraplejicos in Toledo, Spain. Recently, Neuroplast announced positive clinical Phase I results with Neuro-Cells for the treatment for TSCI and also secured 10 million (US$11.5M) for the path towards obtaining conditional EMA market approval. Annually, approximately 29,000 people across Europe and the USA suffer from acute TSCI, for which effective treatment is currently unavailable. Patients usually experience life-long disability and dependence, with a negative impact on quality of life. Furthermore, associated costs for society at large are estimated at over 11.4 billion ($13 billion) per year. With the aim of giving back perspective to people that suffer from neurodegenerative diseases, Neuroplast developed Neuro-Cells, a treatment that uses the patients own stem cells to prevent (further) loss of function during the acute phase after sustaining damage to the spinal cord, to preserve function, mobility and independence. Such combination of a) autologous treatment and b) intrathecal application in c) acute setting is what makes Neuro-Cells unique. Randomized, placebo-controlled international multi-center study The Phase II clinical trial is conducted by Principal Investigators Antonio Oliviero, MD, PHD and Prof. Jorg Mey from Hospital Paraplejicos in Toledo, Spain. The study is a randomized and placebo-controlled trial, with an early and late intervention cross-over design. The intervention group receives Neuro-Cells in the sub-acute phase after sustaining trauma, with six months follow-up to their primary endpoints. The placebo group will receive a placebo at first, but will be treated with Neuro-Cells after the initial six-month follow-up period. The multi-facetted follow-up for both groups include standardized and validated outcome measures on motor and sensory function and multiple blood and cerebrospinal fluid measurements. Antonio Oliviero, MD, PhD, Principal Investigator at Hospital Nacional de Paraplejicos de Toledo, Spain, states, "After having worked in the field of Spinal Cord Injury for almost twenty years, I am happy to contribute to establishing the role of cell transplantation in the functional recovery of individuals with Spinal Cord Injury. I am excited to be a part of this new step in research, together with Neuroplast." The trial will involve 16 patients that will be included six to eight weeks after sustaining trauma to the spinal cord. The trial is conducted under official approval from the Spanish and Danish medical ethical committees Comite de Etica de la Investigacion con medicamentos (CEIm) and National Videnskabsetisk Komite (NVK) and the competent authorities Agencia Espanola de Medicamentos y Productos Sanitarios (AEMPS) and the Danish Medicines Agency. These authorities approved a combined Phase II/III approach. This enables a faster path towards the market due to savings in time and a reduced number of required patients to study. Neuroplast CEO, Johannes de Munter, concludes: "The start of this Phase II trial marks another important milestone in our mission to bring back perspective to people who suffer from neurodegenerative diseases for which no effective treatments are available." Neuroplast has secured sufficient funding for the path towards obtaining conditional EMA market approval for the treatment of TSCI. The company is seeking additional funding for other geographies, and to explore broader potential of the Neuro-Cells technology platform for Traumatic Brain Injury and Frontotemporal Dementia. About Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury (TSCI) Acute TSCI causes incurable impairment to the spinal cord, affecting approximately 12,000 people across Europe and 17,000 across the USA annually. The damage or trauma interrupts communication of the brain with the body regions below the site of injury. Spinal cord injuries are mainly caused by accidents and - in most of the cases - result in life-long loss of control of motor functions and sensations. After the primary injury to the spinal cord, a cascade of events leads to progressive loss of tissue which may further deteriorate the patient's prognosis. Current treatment approaches for TSCI are only symptomatic, leaving the underlying pathophysiology unchanged. TSCI has a serious impact on the quality of life of patients, with severe implications on mobility and loss of independence. In addition, TSCI creates a lifetime financial burden for patients, payors, healthcare systems and societies at large. About Neuro-Cells Neuro-Cells is a transformative treatment under GMP in the crucial first phase after sustaining TSCI, during which the irreversible impact of TSCI can be radically reduced. It contains non-substantially manipulated bone marrow-derived hematopoietic and mesenchymal stem cells, manufactured from a patient's own bone marrow (donor and receiver are the same person). Inflammatory inducing components and pathogens are removed during this process. The combination of a) autologous treatment and b) intrathecal application in c) acute setting is what makes Neuro-Cells unique. About Neuroplast Neuroplast is a Dutch stem cell technology company focusing on fast-track development programs using autologous cell products for treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, with the aim of giving back perspective to people who suffer from those conditions. The company was founded in August 2014 by physician Johannes de Munter and neurologist Erik Wolters. Current funders are Lumana Invest, Brightlands Venture Partners, LIOF and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency. Neuroplast is located at Brightlands Chemelot Campus in The Netherlands. About Hospital de Paraplejicos, Toledo, Spain Hospital Nacional de Paraplejicos de Toledo is the reference public hospital in Spain for the treatment of spinal cord injury, recognized by the Ministry of Health of the Government of Spain. About Lumana Invest Investment company Lumana was established by entrepreneurs and unique due to not having a predetermined investment horizon. The Lumana founders showcase strong commitment to their portfolio companies by actively supporting management in strategic decision making. About Brightlands Venture Partners Brightlands Venture Partners (BVP) is the fund manager of Chemelot Ventures and is a so-called ecosystem investor. BVP invests in companies benefiting from and contributing to the Brightlands campuses in the south of The Netherlands. Other funds under management are BVP Fund IV, Brightlands Agrifood Fund and Limburg Ventures. The funds of BVP focus on sustainability and health; together the funds have made over 40 investments. About LIOF LIOF is the regional development agency for Limburg and supports innovative entrepreneurs with advice, network and financing. Together with entrepreneurs and partners, LIOF is working towards a smarter, more sustainable and healthier Limburg by focusing on the transitions of energy, circularity, health and digitalization. About The Netherlands Enterprise Agency The Netherlands Enterprise Agency operates under the auspices of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy. It facilitates entrepreneurship, improves collaborations, strengthens positions and helps realize national and international ambitions with funding, networking, know-how and compliance with laws and regulations. Forward looking statements All statements other than statements of historical facts, including the statements about the clinical and therapeutic potential and future clinical milestones of Neuro-CellsO, the indications we intend to pursue and our possible clinical or other business strategies, and the timing of these events, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements can be identified by terms such as "believes", "expects", "plans", "potential", "would" or similar expressions and the negative of those terms. These forward-looking statements are based on our management's current beliefs and assumptions about future events and on information currently available to management. Neuroplast B.V. does not make any representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the improper use of this article, accuracy, completeness or updated status of above-mentioned statements. Therefore, in no case whatsoever will Neuroplast B.V. be legally liable or liable to anyone for any decision made or action taken in conjunction with the information and/or statements in this press release or for any related damages. Contact: Neuroplast Johannes de Munter, CEO T: +31 (0)85 076 1000 E: [email protected] LifeSpring LifeSciences Communication, Amsterdam Leon Melens T: +31 6 538 16 427 E: [email protected] SOURCE Neuroplast MINNEAPOLIS, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- An investigational device called a brain-computer interface has been found safe in a small study of people with paralysis from ALS, and has allowed participants to use a computer to communicate by text and do daily tasks such as online shopping and banking, according to a preliminary study released today, March 29, 2022, that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 74th Annual Meeting being held in person in Seattle, April 2 to 7, 2022 and virtually, April 24 to 26, 2022. ALS is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. People with ALS lose the ability to initiate and control muscle movement, which often leads to total paralysis. "People with ALS eventually lose their ability to move their limbs, making them unable to operate devices like a phone or computer," said study author Bruce Campbell, MD, MS, of the University of Melbourne in Australia and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. "Our research is exciting because while other devices require surgery that involves opening the skull, this brain-computer interface device is much less invasive. It receives electrical signals from the brain, allowing people to control a computer by thought." For the study, four people with ALS underwent a procedure to have the device implanted within the brain. The brain-computer interface is fed through one of two jugular veins in the neck into a large blood vessel in the brain. The device, comprised of a net-like material with 16 sensors attached, expands to line the vessel wall. That device is connected to an electronic device in the chest that then relays the brain signals from the motor cortex, the part of the brain that generates signals for movement, into commands for a laptop computer. Researchers monitored participants for one year and found the device was safe. There were no serious adverse events that led to disability or death. The device also stayed in place for all four people and the blood vessel in which the device was implanted remained open. Researchers also examined whether participants could use the brain-computer interface to perform routine digital tasks. All participants learned how to use the device with eye tracking to use a computer. Eye-tracking technology helps a computer determine what a person is looking at. Researchers also report that a decoder developed during the study allowed one study participant to control a computer independently without an eye tracker. The machine-learning decoder was programmed as follows: when a trainer asked participants to attempt certain movements, like tapping their foot or extending their knee, the decoder analyzed nerve cell signals from those movement attempts. The decoder was able to translate movement signals into computer navigation. "Our research is still new, but it holds great promise for people with paralysis who want to maintain a level of independence," said Campbell. "We are continuing this research in Australia as well as in the United States in larger groups of people." A limitation of the research was the small size of the study. The study was supported by Synchron Inc., the maker of the device, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research, the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, the Australian Federal Government Foundation and the Motor Neurone Disease Research Institute of Australia. Learn more about ALS at BrainandLife.org, home of the American Academy of Neurology's free patient and caregiver magazine focused on the intersection of neurologic disease and brain health. Follow Brain & Life on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. When posting to social media channels about this research, we encourage you to use the American Academy of Neurology's Annual Meeting hashtag #AANAM. The American Academy of Neurology is the world's largest association of neurologists and neuroscience professionals, with over 38,000 members. The AAN is dedicated to promoting the highest quality patient-centered neurologic care. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as Alzheimer's disease, stroke, migraine, multiple sclerosis, concussion, Parkinson's disease and epilepsy. For more information about the American Academy of Neurology, visit AAN.com or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. SOURCE American Academy of Neurology This new feature results in increased visibility and placements for job ads. AUSTIN, Texas, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Talroo, the leading provider of technology to power the recruitment of essential workers, has released its latest innovation to connect job seekers with opportunities. With Smart Job Titles, employers within the Talroo ecosystem are able to differentiate their jobs beyond typical, often uninspired, titles. With enhanced and more varied verbiage, employers with no effort are able to present ads that stand out from their competitors. Their job ads are more eye-catching, appealing and relevant to job seekers. For recruiters, who are facing daunting hiring goals in this challenging environment, increased visibility and the resulting superior placements in search results means they'll receive more, and better qualified, candidates for their jobs. Candidates benefit from Smart Job Titles by being able to determine, at-a-glance, if a particular opportunity is right for them. By bringing features and benefits out of the job description and into the Smart Job Title, job seekers are able to make more efficient use of their time, quickly uncovering opportunities that align with their needs. Additionally, with Smart Job Titles that are generated from Talroo's Machine Learning (ML) engine, which interprets signals received from billions of searches across thousands of sources, candidates are presented with roles that they might otherwise never see. These complementary benefits to recruiters and job seekers, with the matching of relevant jobs to engaged individuals, means that Talroo Smart Job Titles increase the exposure of a position, while simultaneously enhancing candidate quality. "Given the number of job ads that candidates are seeing today, it's important to not only be in the right place at the right time, but also have the right message based on rich data from the job description," says Thad Price, CEO of Talroo. "With Talroo technology, we're communicating not just what the job is, but why it's valuable to a job seeker, while helping recruiters attract unique talent audiences. With hiring demands continuing to grow, and the attention span of job seekers continuing to shrink, ensuring that job ads stand out amongst the competition is more important than ever. With Smart Job Titles, Talroo provides a solution that benefits recruiters and the essential workers they need to attract." About Talroo Talroo is a data-driven job and hiring event advertising platform that helps businesses reach the candidates they need to build their essential workforce. Through AI, unique talent audiences, and a pay-for-performance model, Talroo enables companies to find their ideal candidates and reduce cost-per-hire. Talroo has earned a spot on the Inc. 500/5000 list of fastest-growing companies for six consecutive years. To learn how Talroo can help your organization hire better, visit https://www.talroo.com/ SOURCE Talroo CHICAGO, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Texas economic development leaders are in Chicago this week to meet with businesses and site section consultants eager to discuss the advantages of doing business in the Lone Star State. "Chicago is a national epicenter for corporate site selection consultants as well as home to Fortune 500 companies and the headquarters of U.S. and global businesses. Chicago is a key location for interest in Texas's business-friendly climate and other economic advantages," said Robert Allen, President and CEO of the Texas Economic Development (TxEDC). Texas has been outperforming other states in the nation with impressive post-pandemic growth on top of a decades-long history of economic strength and stability. Texas is the top exporting state in the United States for the 20th year in a row. Texas also managed the unprecedented with its win of Site Selection Magazine's 2021 Governor's Cup for the 10th year in a row. The Governor's Cup is considered to be the Heisman Trophy of economic development. "CEOs and site selection consultants across the country are interested in Texas as a location for their business relocation or expansion for a number of reasons: our reasonable regulatory climate and business friendly environment, our highly skilled and diverse workforce, a robust network of state-of-the-art infrastructure, and easy access to global markets," said Adriana Cruz, Executive Director of the Texas Economic Development & Tourism Office (EDT), within the Office of the Governor. In addition to TxEDC and EDT, the Texas delegation to Chicago includes representatives of regional economic development organizations such as, the Amarillo Economic Development Corporation, the Borderplex Alliance, Dallas Regional Chamber, Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation, Greater San Marcos Partnership, Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce, Guadalupe Valley Electric Coop (GVEC), Lubbock Economic Development Alliance, Round Rock Chamber, and the Temple Economic Development Corporation. The Texas Economic Development Corporation (TxEDC) is an independently funded and operated 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to economic development, business recruitment and job creation in the state of Texas. The public-private partnership of TxEDC and Texas Economic Development and Tourism Office in the Office of the Governor, markets Texas as a premier business destination to let corporate decision- makers and site selection consultants know that they can Go Big in Texas. For more information about TxEDC, visit www.GoBigInTexas.com. SOURCE Texas Economic Development Corporation WILTON MANORS, Fla., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The City of Wilton Manors is leaving the cool weather of winter behind and welcoming the fresh air of springtime with Spring Fest, a free family-friendly event sponsored by the Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital. Everyone is invited to spring into loads of fun on Saturday, April 9, 2022, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. at Hagen Park (2020 Wilton Drive, Wilton Manors, FL 33305). "Spring Fest is open to kids and adults of all ages," said Mayor Scott Newton. "It's a family-friendly event that is so representative of our small-town feel and I hope everyone will come out and enjoy the morning with their family, friends, and community." From music and crafts, to magic and pony rides, concessions, and more, Spring Fest will offer a wide range of interactive stations and activities. Free parking will be available in the Hagen Park/City Hall parking lot. For more information regarding Spring Fest, please contact the City's Leisure Services Department at (954) 390-2130, [email protected], or visit https://bit.ly/WMSpringFest2022. ABOUT THE CITY OF WILTON MANORS Wilton Manors was laid out in 1925 by Edward John "Ned" Willingham, a land developer from Georgia, as an upscale residential community. It was recognized as a village in 1947 and incorporated as a city in 1953. Today, the City of Wilton Manors offers all the benefits of a big city from shopping, to hip restaurants and bars, a burgeoning arts community and tons of community events, yet still maintains a cozy, community-feeling offering miles of natural waterways perfect for kayaking, paddle boarding and other outdoor activities. In 2018, Wilton Manors was named the "Second Gayest City" in the United States, celebrating a diverse population of approximately 12,000 residents. To learn more about the live, work and play opportunities in Wilton Manors call (954) 390-2100 or visit www.wiltonmanors.com. CONTACT: Aimee Adler (561) 302-6902 (or) [email protected] SOURCE The City of Wilton Manors New marketplace for one-of-a-kind images offers higher compensation for professional real estate photographers to "disrupt" the $4B stock photo industry CHERRY HILL, N.J., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A new non-fungible token or NFT marketplace for real estate images called "real" launched by HomeJab offers an innovative alternative to stock photo services. Participating professional real estate photographers receive 96 percent of all sales proceeds the highest compensation available from a major stock photo platform. Photographers currently earn as little as 2 cents to 25 cents per month per photo through stock photo agencies, according to Phototutorial. New NFT Marketplace launched by HomeJab aims to disrupt $4 billion stock photo industry. NFT marketplace for real estate images called "real" - launched by HomeJab - offers an innovative alternative to stock photo services throughout US - and beyond. "We're flipping the model upside down," said Joe Jesuele, head of HomeJab.com, who led the development of real estate's first NFT platform of images. HomeJab provides real estate agents on-demand professional real estate photography and other visual production services in every major US market and all 50 states. "Buyers such as real estate agents and their web and marketing agencies can purchase unique images with nearly all the compensation going to the artist the photographer. That's the way it should be," he added. Jesuele explains that one of the most significant advantages of this new NFT marketplace is its "real-world utility." "Too many NFT projects today are designed to help the founders make money. The real NFT marketplace supports the hard work and gives new visibility to professional real estate photographers' artistry while properly supporting their creative efforts," he explained. "By bridging the physical world and the metaverse, 'real' can help cut through the current clutter of NFT scams and pump and dumps of (worthless) coins that have no real utility. While other NFTs' value will collapse, we know from experience that good images will always have value and utility," Jesuele said. The new real NFT marketplace is designed for real estate agents and digital marketers to purchase one-of-a-kind iconic real estate images. The real platform also enables clients to order custom NFTs to be shot and produced by professional real estate photographers for their exclusive commercial use as they will own the image. Unlike images provided by stock photo agencies, which allows the same image to be used by anyone who pays a fee, images purchased on real are unique and owned by the buyer. Real estate agents and brokerages avoid having the same photos on their websites by purchasing one-of-a-kind images on the real NFT marketplace. If the NFT resells, royalties flow back to the original photographer. "Buying an NFT through real provides agents and brokers one-of-a-kind images that only you can use versus licensing a repetitive stock image that any of your competitors can use. Marketing agencies know that using unique imagery helps agents and brokers create stronger brand recognition and avoid brand confusion," he added. The real NFTs currently available include images of destinations in the public domain, such as historical landmarks, streetscapes, downtown areas, commercial hot spots, parks, bridges, buildings, and beaches. "Think of the one single image that best describes where you live. What image would that be? That's the type of NFTs we expect to be the most popular as we launch," Jesuele said. "We are disrupting the old, legacy stock image model to become a completely decentralized 'Web3' solution powered by NFTs with the financial benefits going back to the photographers," Jesuele said. To learn more about NFTs in real estate imaging, Jesuele published a blog explaining both the terms and the process here (https://homejab.com/blog/real-estate-photography-nfts). To learn more about the new real NFT marketplace, go to nft.homejab.com. About HomeJab HomeJab is America's most popular and reliable on-demand professional real estate photography and video service for real estate pros. Lightning-fast high-end visual production offerings also include immersive 3D interactive tours, floor plan creation, affordable virtual staging, and turnkey aerial services. Its efficient one-stop-shop for real estate listings at HomeJab.com features affordable and customizable shoots that create the most engaging visual content for faster home sales and enrich the listing agent's personal brand. HomeJab is available in every major US market in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Toronto. Learn more at HomeJab.com . Media contact: Kevin Hawkins (206) 866-1220 [email protected] SOURCE HomeJab "Out of 913,197 cases received by the commission in 2021 on women and children, 158,517 cases were on SGBV," the official The Executive Secretary of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Tony Ojukwu, has said the commission received 158,517 complaints of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) against women and children in 2021. Mr Ojukwu, represented by Harry Obe, the commission's director, women, children and vulnerable groups, said this at an event organised on Monday by ROOST Foundation in collaboration with the NHRC. The event was tagged, 'Roundtable on rising and pending cases of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and possible solutions in Nigeria'. "Out of 913,197 cases received by the commission in 2021 on women and children, 158,517 cases were on SGBV," the official said. Efforts of the commission to tackle the menace, according to him, include a formulation of a presidential panel on the investigation of SGBV cases, a declaration of one-week activism in the 36 states of the country, an automated toll free line, and 4-digit short code, amongst other things. Time to act - Minister Meanwhile, the minister of women affairs, Pauline Tallen, who spoke at the event, urged Nigerians to join the movement against all forms of violence against women and children. Mrs Tallen said the problem of gender-based violence has caused a lot of setbacks and destroyed a lot of homes and minds. "When you are abused or raped, your psychic is affected," the minister said. She described the abuse of children as the highest and the most wicked crime that can ever be done to children. She added that the perpetrators of SGBV cases going scot-free is unacceptable. She urged everyone to support the fight against SGBV by joining women in prayers, by speaking to their sons and brothers especially those in the positions of power. "Every Nigerian must join the army against SGBV to condemn all forms of violence against women. Join the army in prayers, by speaking to your sons and brothers especially those in positions of power," Mrs Tallen said. Convener The convener of the event, Julie Okah-Donli, said the aim of the event was to appraise efforts, identify grey areas and proffer solutions. She said the roundtable envisages justice and rehabilitation for victims as well as a deterrence to would-be perpetrators. She urged all stakeholders to come together and form a task force that will coordinate the statistic and data of the cases of SGBV. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Women Nigeria Legal Affairs By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. She added that the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) should take the lead in SGBV cases in the Federal Capital Territory. Other speakers at the event include, the president of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), Amina Agbaje; the president, Human Rights Committee of Nigerian Bar Association, Chioma Onyenucheya; and a representative of Network Against Child Trafficking, Abuse and Labour (NACTAL), Imaobong Sanusi. Mrs Onyenucheya talked about acts that are essential in the pursue of justice for victims of SGBV cases like the VAPP act and Child Rights Act. She added that every SGBV case is a crime against the state. "If a perpetrator chooses to settle out of court and the victim accepts, that is a personal choice and does not stop the state from prosecuting," Mrs Onyenucheya said. CHICAGO, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Designed by veteran teachers, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) authors, and nationally recognized literacy experts, ThinkCERCA is proven to help students achieve two years of reading growth in one school year. ThinkCERCA includes differentiated close reading and academic writing lessons that were built upon research-based methods for developing students' language and literacy skills. "After being inspired by teachers doing amazing work with NWEA MAP data in Chicago Public Schools, I left the district to make rigorous personalization and data-informed, student-centered learning doable for all teachers," said Eileen Murphy, ThinkCERCA's founder and CEO. "We're excited to partner with NWEA, one of the original advocates for supporting teachers in personalized literacy instruction." ThinkCERCA began working with leaders at NWEA earlier this year to develop a tool that would help users of NWEA's Measures of Academic Progress ( MAP ) assessment discover meaningful lessons for their students on the ThinkCERCA Platform. The resulting tool allows teachers to: Navigate the ThinkCERCA library by using search terms and language that mirror those used on NWEA MAP reports Correlate needs and strengths of students as seen on NWEA MAP reports with lessons inside the ThinkCERCA platform Choose the best ThinkCERCA lesson type in the targeted instructional area and level to best meet the needs of students This exciting tool will serve to support new and existing users of ThinkCERCA and the NWEA MAP assessments. With a strong shared commitment to personalization and instructional improvement, ThinkCERCA and NWEA are excited to deepen their relationship in support of districts, schools, teachers, and students. For information or support please contact: About ThinkCERCA ThinkCERCA's personalized literacy platform helps educators teach critical thinking skills through close reading and academic writing across subjects. With students and teachers using its platform in all 50 states, the company has partnered with prominent leaders in education, including Follett Corporation, and has been featured by The Atlantic, Tech & Learning, and EdSurge, among others. In a controlled study of 26 ed-tech tools by LEAP Innovations, ThinkCERCA was proven to help students achieve two years of academic growth per year on average. See our results here! ThinkCERCA's personalized literacy platform offers: Direct instruction and self-paced lessons that introduce students to the underlying skills needed to master literacy across 10 levels; Close reading and academic writing lessons that guide students through the process of analyzing content-rich texts and multimedia to construct cohesive argumentative, informational, or narrative writings; And CERCA Slides and Student Guides for helping teachers implement research-based literacy practices into their classrooms, regardless of technology access. About NWEA NWEA (formerly known as Northwest Evaluation Association) is a mission-driven, not-for-profit organization that supports students and educators worldwide by creating assessment solutions that precisely measure growth and proficiencyand provide insights to help tailor instruction. Educators in more than 10,000 schools, districts, and education agencies in 146 countries rely on our flagship interim assessment, MAP Growth; our reading fluency and comprehension assessment, MAP Reading Fluency ; our personalized learning tool powered by Khan Academy, MAP Accelerator ; and our state solutions that combine growth and proficiency measurement. Visit NWEA.org to find out how NWEA can partner with you to help all kids learn. ThinkCERCA Press Contact: Nicole Williams Marketing & Communications ThinkCERCA [email protected] NWEA Press Contact: Simona Beattie Sr. Manager, Public Relations NWEA [email protected] SOURCE ThinkCERCA ORLANDO, Fla. and ATLANTA, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In honor of the 110th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, E/M Group and RMS Titanic, Inc. have announced the TITANIC 110th Speaker Series. This two-day event will take place on the anniversary of the sinking, April 14-15, 2022, at the TITANIC: The Artifact Exhibition Private Event Space in Orlando. For two days, guests can enhance their experience to learn more about Titanic. Guest speakers include: Bill Sauder Director of Titanic Research, RMS Titanic, Inc. Mr. Sauder has spent more than 36 years contributing to the historical facts behind Titanic's construction, her builders, and the culture that created her. Charles Haas President, Titanic International Society Charlie is a co-founder of the Titanic International Society and a longtime trustee and a participant in three expeditions to the wreck site. Alexandra "Alex" Klingelhofer Conservator of Record, RMS Titanic, Inc. Alex Klingelhofer has overseen care of the Titanic artifact collection for 12 years. Jeffrey Taylor Director of Collections, E/M Group Jeff oversees the storage and handling of the Titanic artifact collection and enjoys all aspects of object and artifact care. Frank Goldsmith, Jr. Survivor Descendant Frank Goldsmith, Jr. was told the story by his grandmother and his father, both survivors of the tragedy that took the life of his grandfather. Bill Willard Titanic Researcher, Author Bill Willard has been a Titanic researcher for 48 years and was a member of the 1998 Titanic Expedition to raise the Big Piece. Paul-Henry (PH) Nargeolet Director of Underwater Research, RMS Titanic, Inc. P.H. is considered the leading authority on the wreck site having led several expeditions to Titanic, completed 35 dives in the submersible himself, and supervised the recovery of 5,000 artifacts. Rory Golden Diver, Speaker, Explorer Rory Golden became the first Irish diver to visit the wreck site in August 2000 leaving behind a memorial plaque on the wreck on behalf of the people of Ireland. William Lange Director Advanced Imaging & Visualization, RMS Titanic, Inc. Bill, a world-renowned expert in underwater imaging, was the first person to see the RMS Titanic wreck in 1985. Bill led the 2010 mapping survey which resulted in the first accurate map of the wreck site and the development of dozens of photomosaics. "We are so proud to be able to offer such an incredibly knowledgeable panel to the public in honor of the 110th anniversary of this tragic event. The series represents (what we hope to be) the first of many events in our Orlando venue." -Jessica Sanders CEO, E/M Group, President, RMS Titanic, Inc. Full details can be found at https://titanicorlando.com/titanic-110th-anniversary-conference/ Full Bios: https://www.emgroup.com/titanic-110th-anniversary-speaker-series/ Tickets available now! E/M Group's affiliate RMS Titanic, Inc. ("RMST"), serves as the salvor-in-possession of the wreck site of the RMS Titanic which tragically sank on April 15, 1912. The Company is dedicated to preserving the legacy of the Ship, wreck site and all her passengers and crew. For more information, contact: Press: Wendy Perez [email protected] General Event Inquiries: Gabrielle Hoover [email protected] SOURCE E/M Group, LLC VANCOUVER, BC, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Trilogy Metals Inc. (TSX: TMQ) (NYSE American: TMQ) ("Trilogy Metals" or "the Company") will hold the Company's 2022 Annual General Meeting of the Shareholders ("AGM") on Friday, May 13, 2022 at 10:00 am Pacific Time at the office of the Company, Suite 1150, 609 Granville Street, Vancouver, British Columbia. All current directors will stand for re-election at the AGM. Other items of business include the approval of amendments to, and unallocated entitlements under, the Company's Restricted Share Unit Plan ("RSU Plan") and Deferred Share Unit Plan ("DSU Plan"). The Company is asking shareholders to approve a change to the RSU Plan to remove the option for the Company to cash settle RSUs granted to Canadian resident directors due to potential Canadian tax restrictions. The Company is asking shareholders to approve a change to the DSU Plan to allow directors to elect to receive up to 100% of their annual compensation in DSUs. Both these amendments will provide the Company flexibility to pay our directors fees in the form of stock in an effort to preserve cash and build share ownership. All of our directors have indicated a willingness to receive their entire 2022 compensation in equity. The Company is also looking at other opportunities to reduce its cash spend for the year and will provide a further update when we release our quarterly financial results in April. Shareholders as of the record date of March 16, 2022 ("Record Date") will be eligible to vote at the AGM. The Company's 2022 Management Information Circular, which contains information about all director nominees and the amendments to the RSU and DSU Plans was filed today and is now available to the public. As always, we encourage you to vote your shares prior to the AGM. No presentations or updates on the Company's activities will be provided at the AGM. The Company's most recent investor presentation can be found on our website at www.trilogymetals.com. Any investor who would like further information on the items of business at the AGM or the Company's activities is welcome to contact us directly. Proxy Statement Filed with Regulators Additional information about the AGM can be found in the Company's 2022 proxy statement, which has been filed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") and the Canadian securities regulatory authorities. The Management Information Circular is available on the Company's website at https://trilogymetals.com/investors/proxy-circular and on the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on EDGAR at www.sec.gov; and has been mailed to all shareholders as of the Record Date. The Company, its directors and certain of its executive officers are participants in the solicitation of proxies from the Company's shareholders in connection with the Company's 2022 AGM. The Company has filed its definitive proxy statement with the SEC in connection with any such solicitation of proxies from the Company's shareholders. SHAREHOLDERS OF THE COMPANY ARE STRONGLY ENCOURAGED TO READ SUCH PROXY STATEMENT AND ALL OTHER DOCUMENTS FILED WITH THE SEC CAREFULLY AND IN THEIR ENTIRETY AS THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. About Trilogy Metals Trilogy Metals Inc. is a metals exploration and development company which holds a 50 percent interest in Ambler Metals LLC ("Ambler Metals") which has a 100 percent interest in the Upper Kobuk Mineral Projects ("UKMP") in northwestern Alaska. On December 19, 2019, South32 Limited, which is a globally diversified mining and metals company, exercised its option to form a 50/50 joint venture with Trilogy to form Ambler Metals. The UKMP is located within the Ambler Mining District which is one of the richest and most-prospective known copper-dominant districts. It hosts world-class polymetallic volcanogenic massive sulphide ("VMS") deposits that contain copper, zinc, lead, gold and silver, and carbonate replacement deposits which have been found to host high-grade copper and cobalt mineralization. Exploration efforts have been focused on two deposits in the Ambler mining district - the Arctic VMS deposit and the Bornite carbonate replacement deposit. Both deposits are located within land package that spans approximately 172,636 hectares. The Company has an agreement with NANA Regional Corporation, Inc., a Regional Alaska Native Corporation that provides a framework for the exploration and potential development of the Ambler mining district in cooperation with local communities. Our vision is to develop the Ambler mining district into a premier North American copper producer. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This press release includes certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein, including, without limitation, perceived merit of properties, the date and time of the AGM, the willingness of the Company's director to receive their compensation in equity, the Company's plans to look for opportunities to reduce its cash spend for the year and the Company's plans to provide further updates and the timing thereof are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "potential", "possible", and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions, or results "will", "may", "could", or "should" occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations include the uncertainties involving our assumptions with respect to the impact of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and other risks and uncertainties disclosed in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended November 30, 2021 filed with Canadian securities regulatory authorities and with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and in other Company reports and documents filed with applicable securities regulatory authorities from time to time. The Company's forward-looking statements reflect the beliefs, opinions and projections on the date the statements are made. The Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements or beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law. SOURCE Trilogy Metals Inc. The newest edition includes rankings in more than 200 subject areas. WASHINGTON, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- U.S. News & World Report, the global authority in education rankings, today unveiled the 2023 Best Graduate Schools rankings. Designed for prospective students looking to further their education beyond college, the rankings evaluate programs in a variety of disciplines, including business , education , engineering , law , medicine , nursing and science . In this edition: For the first time, U.S. News published a ranking of the Best Biostatistics Programs , evaluating 65 programs in total. , evaluating 65 programs in total. Within the Best Law Schools methodology , the bar passage rate indicator now accounts for bar passage performance in every state where a school's graduates first took the bar exam. Previously, this indicator only included the state with the most graduates taking the exam for the first time. , the bar passage rate indicator now accounts for bar passage performance in every state where a school's graduates first took the bar exam. Previously, this indicator only included the state with the most graduates taking the exam for the first time. For the second consecutive year in Best Law Schools, U.S. News included two indicators to measure graduate indebtedness: average debt incurred obtaining a J.D. at graduation and the percent of law school graduates incurring J.D. law school debt. These indicators can provide more context to prospective students, especially at a time of rising higher education costs. Also for the second year in a row, U.S. News published medical school rankings focused on underserved populations. Specifically, these rankings look at racial and ethnic diversity among medical school student populations, as well as which schools have the most graduates practicing in primary care, in rural areas, and in health professional shortage areas. "U.S. News continues to update the Best Graduate Schools methodology and add new programs to keep the rankings relevant and valuable for prospective students," said Robert Morse, chief data strategist at U.S. News. "Utilizing a robust data-collection process surveying more than 2,100 programs and more than 23,000 academics and professionals allows us to provide students with useful, quality data to determine the best program for their individual needs." Best Business Schools: Full-Time MBA The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School tied for the top spot among full-time MBA programs. Northwestern University's Kellogg School tied with Stanford University at No. 3. Best Law Schools The No. 1 Best Law School in this year's edition is Yale University . Stanford University and the University of Chicago come in at No. 2 and No. 3, respectively. Best Medical Schools: Research The top school among Best Medical Schools: Research is Harvard University , followed by New York University at No. 2. Tied for No. 3 are Columbia University , Johns Hopkins University and the University of CaliforniaSan Francisco . Additional rankings were updated in this edition, including biological sciences , chemistry , computer science , earth sciences , economics , mathematics , physics , psychology , public affairs , public health , social work and statistics . The full 2023 Best Graduate Schools rankings are available on USNews.com , with extended rankings and data exclusively in the U.S. News Graduate School Compass . Follow U.S. News on Facebook and Twitter for more information. About U.S. News & World Report U.S. News & World Report is the global leader in quality rankings that empower consumers, business leaders and policy officials to make better, more informed decisions about important issues affecting their lives. A multifaceted digital media company with Education, Health, Money, Travel, Cars, News and 360 Reviews platforms, U.S. News provides rankings, independent reporting, data journalism, consumer advice and U.S. News Live events. More than 40 million people visit USNews.com each month for research and guidance. Founded in 1933, U.S. News is headquartered in Washington, D.C. SOURCE U.S. News & World Report, L.P. "Volvo Trucks, in partnership with our dealer TEC Equipment, is excited to continue growing our collaboration with Maersk on its fleet sustainability goals and commends the organization's scaled investments in electromobility solutions," said Peter Voorhoeve, president of Volvo Trucks North America. "Incredibly, this is the second time in less than a year that Volvo Trucks has had the opportunity to announce that Performance Team A Maersk Company, has placed the largest order of Volvo VNR Electrics to date, which underscores their organization's firm commitment to reducing its carbon footprint." As the world's largest integrated container logistics company, Maersk is leading a variety of initiatives to improve supply chain sustainability throughout each of its business lines. The acquisition of zero-tailpipe-emission, Class 8 Volvo VNR Electric trucks is part of Maersk's environmental social governance (ESG) strategy to decarbonize logistics. "Our customers are looking for tangible actions on sustainable supply chains - not just conceptual. With this in mind we move decisively towards building an end-to-end, landside decarbonization offering for our customers in line with our target to extend Maersk net-zero efforts to all transport modes in our global operation. These investments in our North America network will generate valuable experience for the continued journey towards similar customer offerings across the globe," said Vincent Clerc, CEO of Ocean & Logistics at A.P. Moller - Maersk. The landmark order was facilitated in collaboration with TEC Equipment, Volvo Trucks' largest West Coast dealership and the first to achieve the Volvo Trucks Certified Electric Vehicle (EV) Dealer designation in North America in 2021. TEC Equipment's Fontana and La Mirada locations in Southern California will support Performance Team in maximizing the uptime of their Volvo VNR Electric fleets. As Volvo Trucks Certified EV Dealers, the two TEC Equipment locations have trained and equipped their service teams to safely perform battery-electric truck maintenance and repairs for customers. "Our excitement for this partnership with Performance Team continues to grow as we see their commitment towards offering more sustainable transportation solutions in Southern California accelerate. We stand ready to help all our EV customers maximize their uptime, and celebrate the advancement of electromobility," said David Thompson, founder and CEO of TEC Equipment. The Volvo VNR Electric model has been designed as a sustainable transportation solution for fleet operators supporting local and regional distribution, pickup and delivery, and food and beverage distribution. In January 2022, Volvo Trucks announced production plans for its next generation VNR Electric model with an operational range of up to 275 miles. The enhanced Volvo VNR Electric comes with state-of-the-art 250kW charging capability, enabling an 80% charge in 90 minutes for the six-battery package and 60 minutes for the four-battery version. To learn more about Volvo Trucks North America and the Volvo VNR Electric, visit the company website . For further information, please contact: Fredrik Klevenfeldt Director Brand Marketing Communications, Volvo Trucks North America [email protected] 336.543.3386 High-resolution images associated with this press release and others are available at www.volvomediabank.com . Volvo Trucks North America, headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, is one of the leading heavy-duty truck manufacturers in North America. Its Uptime Services commitment is delivered by a network of nearly 400 authorized dealers across North America and the 24/7 Volvo Trucks Uptime Center. Every Volvo truck is assembled in the Volvo Trucks New River Valley manufacturing facility in Dublin, Virginia, which meets the internationally recognized ISO 9001 standard for quality, 14001 standard for environmental care and holds a dual ISO 50001/Superior Energy Performance certification at the platinum level, indicating a sustained excellence in energy management. Volvo Trucks North America provides complete transport solutions for its customers, offering a full range of diesel, alternative-fuel and all-electric vehicles, and is part of the Volvo Trucks global organization. Volvo Trucks supplies complete transport solutions for discerning professional customers with its full range of medium- and heavy-duty trucks. Customer support is provided via a global network of dealers with 2,200 service points in about 130 countries. Volvo trucks are assembled in 13 countries across the globe. In 2021 approximately 123,000 Volvo trucks were delivered worldwide. Volvo Trucks is part of the Volvo Group, one of the world's leading manufacturers of trucks, buses, construction equipment and marine and industrial engines. The group also provides complete solutions for financing and service. Volvo Trucks' work is based on the core values of quality, safety and environmental care. SOURCE Volvo Trucks North America 40% of the population is foreign-born, with around 60% of children who have at least one parent who is an immigrant. Certified Welcoming is a formal designation by Welcoming America for cities and counties that have created policies and programs reflecting their values and commitment to immigrant inclusion. Since launching in 2017, Certified Welcoming and its operating framework, the Welcoming Standard , have served as a roadmap for local governments seeking to build truly welcoming communities. The process to become Certified Welcoming takes several years and requires a multi-sector effort involving not only the city manager's office, but also local organizations, law enforcement agencies, the education sector, and more. For San Jose, the Certified Welcoming designation reflects a culmination of immigrant inclusion efforts. In 2020, the city established the Office of Racial Equity within the city manager's office to recognize and address systemic racism as part of immigrant inclusion. Additionally, the city created online and in-person curricula on civic engagement to boost participation from immigrants and non-immigrants alike. "San Jose takes great pride in our shared immigrant heritage and longstanding history as a community where people from across the globe are celebrated," said San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo. "Our immigrant neighbors make enormous economic contributions to our community, enrich our culture, spur our innovation, and reinvigorate our collective passion for freedom." "While we celebrate the collective achievements of our community in gaining this recognition, we also recognize that it is merely an affirmation that we are on the right track and that there is much more work to be done to ensure that San Jose is truly a welcoming city in words, deeds, and actions," said Director of The Office of Racial Equity, Zulma Maciel. According to the city's welcoming plan , nearly 40% of the population is foreign-born, with around 60% of children who have at least one parent who is an immigrant. In a 2014 report by New American Economy, immigrants in Santa Clara County (of which San Jose serves as the county seat) contributed an estimated $77 billion to the county's economy. About Welcoming America Welcoming America is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that leads a movement of inclusive communities becoming more prosperous by ensuring everyone belongs. We believe that all people, including immigrants, are valued contributors and vital to the success of our communities and shared future. Learn more at welcomingamerica.org. About Certified Welcoming The Certified Welcoming program launched in 2017 by Welcoming America to establish a formal designation for cities and counties that have taken action on their commitment to welcoming and met the high bar set by the Welcoming Standard. Certified Welcoming communities gain a competitive advantage by using their designation for attracting and retaining a global workforce and businesses whose values align with welcoming and inclusion. Participants complete a rigorous independent audit to evaluate their compliance with the Standard. Both Certified Welcoming and the Welcoming Standard were designed following standards set by ISEAL . About the City of San Jose With more than one million residents, San Jose comprises the 10th largest city in the United States and one of its most diverse cities. San Jose's transformation into a global innovation center in the heart of Silicon Valley has resulted in the world's greatest concentration of technology talent and development. SOURCE Welcoming America Webcast and conference call at 7 a.m. PT (10 a.m. ET) SEATTLE, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Weyerhaeuser Company (NYSE: WY) will release first quarter 2022 results on Friday, April 29, before the market opens. The company will hold a live webcast and conference call at 7 a.m. Pacific (10 a.m. Eastern) the same day to discuss results. To access the news release, live webcast and presentation online, visit the Investor Relations section on www.weyerhaeuser.com on April 29. To join the conference call from within North America, dial 877-407-0792 (access code: 13724914) at least 15 minutes prior to the call. Those calling from outside North America should dial 201-689-8263 (access code: 13724914). Replays will be available for two weeks at 844-512-2921 (access code: 13724914) from within North America, and at 412-317-6671 (access code: 13724914) from outside North America. ABOUT WEYERHAEUSER Weyerhaeuser Company, one of the world's largest private owners of timberlands, began operations in 1900. We own or control approximately 11 million acres of timberlands in the U.S. and manage additional timberlands under long-term licenses in Canada. We manage these timberlands on a sustainable basis in compliance with internationally recognized forestry standards. We are also one of the largest manufacturers of wood products in North America. Our company is a real estate investment trust. In 2021, we generated $10.2 billion in net sales and employed approximately 9,200 people who serve customers worldwide. Our common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol WY. Learn more at www.weyerhaeuser.com. For more information contact: Analysts - Andy Taylor, 206-539-3907 Media Nancy Thompson, 919-861-0342 SOURCE Weyerhaeuser Company DUBLIN, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Data Center Cooling Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2022-2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The global data center cooling market reached a value of US$ 11.4 Billion in 2021. Looking forward, the publisher expects the market to reach US$ 26.5 Billion by 2027, exhibiting at a CAGR of 14.4% during 2022-2027. Keeping in mind the uncertainties of COVID-19, we are continuously tracking and evaluating the direct as well as the indirect influence of the pandemic on different end use industries. These insights are included in the report as a major market contributor. Data center cooling refers to equipment, techniques and processes employed for maintaining an ideal operating temperature within a data center facility. It assists in transferring heat energy into the external atmosphere and enhancing the overall performance of these facilities by reducing downtime caused by overheating. Moreover, as it is cost-effective, energy-efficient and environment-friendly, data center operators across the globe are adopting these cooling systems. Some of the technologies employed for data center cooling include evaporative cooling, immersion systems, free cooling, calibrated vector cooling (CVC), chilled water systems, direct-to-chip cooling and liquid cooling. With the rising data center density, numerous organizations are introducing innovative ways for cooling computer systems to improve efficiency and maximize uptime. For instance, Google is employing seawater to maintain the temperature in one of its data centers in Hamina, Finland. This system does not create carbon emissions as it uses cold water for cooling the devices and equipment. Similarly, Facebook is using captured rainwater for cooling data centers. Moreover, AdeptDC, a smart assistant, depends on machine learning to read CPU and GPU temperatures and aids data center managers in knowing when and how much cooling is needed. Furthermore, governments in various countries are mandating environmental regulations concerning the emission and power consumption efficiency of data center operations. This, in turn, is resulting in the rising demand for eco-friendly data center cooling solutions around the world. Competitive Landscape: The competitive landscape of the industry has also been examined with some of the key players being Airedale International Air Conditioning, Asetek, Black Box Corporation, Climaveneta Climate Technologies, Coolcentric, Emerson Electric, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Netmagic, Nortek Air Solutions, Rittal, Schneider Electric, STULZ GmbH and Vertiv, etc. Key Questions Answered in This Report 1. What is the expected growth rate of the global data center cooling market? 2. What are the key factors driving the global data center cooling market? 3. What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the global data center cooling market? 4. What is the breakup of the global data center cooling market based on the solution? 5. What is the breakup of the global data center cooling market based on the services? 6. What is the breakup of the global data center cooling market based on the type of cooling? 7. What is the breakup of the global data center cooling market based on the cooling technology? 8. What is the breakup of the global data center cooling market based on the vertical? 9. What are the key regions in the global data center cooling market? 10. Who are the key players/companies in the global data center cooling market? Key Topics Covered: 1 Preface 2 Scope and Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Introduction 4.1 Overview 4.2 Key Industry Trends 5 Global Data Center Cooling Market 5.1 Market Overview 5.2 Market Performance 5.3 Impact of COVID-19 5.4 Market Forecast 6 Market Breakup by Solution 6.1 Air Conditioning 6.1.1 Market Trends 6.1.2 Market Forecast 6.2 Chilling Units 6.2.1 Market Trends 6.2.2 Market Forecast 6.3 Cooling Towers 6.3.1 Market Trends 6.3.2 Market Forecast 6.4 Economizer Systems 6.4.1 Market Trends 6.4.2 Market Forecast 6.5 Liquid Cooling Systems 6.5.1 Market Trends 6.5.2 Market Forecast 6.6 Control Systems 6.6.1 Market Trends 6.6.2 Market Forecast 6.7 Others 6.7.1 Market Trends 6.7.2 Market Forecast 7 Market Breakup by Services 7.1 Consulting 7.1.1 Market Trends 7.1.2 Market Forecast 7.2 Installation and Deployment 7.2.1 Market Trends 7.2.2 Market Forecast 7.3 Maintenance and Support 7.3.1 Market Trends 7.3.2 Market Forecast 8 Market Breakup by Type of Cooling 8.1 Room-Based Cooling 8.1.1 Market Trends 8.1.2 Market Forecast 8.2 Row-Based Cooling 8.2.1 Market Trends 8.2.2 Market Forecast 8.3 Rack-Based Cooling 8.3.1 Market Trends 8.3.2 Market Forecast 9 Market Breakup by Cooling Technology 9.1 Liquid-Based Cooling 9.1.1 Market Trends 9.1.2 Market Forecast 9.2 Air-Based Cooling 9.2.1 Market Trends 9.2.2 Market Forecast 10 Market Breakup by Type of Data Center 10.1 Mid-Sized Data Centers 10.1.1 Market Trends 10.1.2 Market Forecast 10.2 Enterprise Data Centers 10.2.1 Market Trends 10.2.2 Market Forecast 10.3 Large Data Centers 10.3.1 Market Trends 10.3.2 Market Forecast 11 Market Breakup by Vertical 11.1 BFSI 11.1.1 Market Trends 11.1.2 Market Forecast 11.2 IT and Telecom 11.2.1 Market Trends 11.2.2 Market Forecast 11.3 Research and Educational Institutes 11.3.1 Market Trends 11.3.2 Market Forecast 11.4 Government and Defense 11.4.1 Market Trends 11.4.2 Market Forecast 11.5 Retail 11.5.1 Market Trends 11.5.2 Market Forecast 11.6 Energy 11.6.1 Market Trends 11.6.2 Market Forecast 11.7 Healthcare 11.7.1 Market Trends 11.7.2 Market Forecast 11.8 Others 11.8.1 Market Trends 11.8.2 Market Forecast 12 Market Breakup by Region 13 SWOT Analysis 14 Value Chain Analysis 15 Porters Five Forces Analysis 16 Competitive Landscape 16.1 Market Structure 16.2 Key Players 16.3 Profiles of Key Players 16.3.1 Airedale International Air Conditioning 16.3.1.1 Company Overview 16.3.1.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.2 Asetek 16.3.2.1 Company Overview 16.3.2.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.2.3 Financials 16.3.3 Black Box Corporation 16.3.3.1 Company Overview 16.3.3.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.4 Climaveneta Climate Technologies 16.3.4.1 Company Overview 16.3.4.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.5 Coolcentric 16.3.5.1 Company Overview 16.3.5.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.6 Emerson Electric 16.3.6.1 Company Overview 16.3.6.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.6.3 Financials 16.3.6.4 SWOT Analysis 16.3.7 Fujitsu 16.3.7.1 Company Overview 16.3.7.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.7.3 Financials 16.3.7.4 SWOT Analysis 16.3.8 Hitachi 16.3.8.1 Company Overview 16.3.8.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.8.3 Financials 16.3.8.4 SWOT Analysis 16.3.9 Netmagic 16.3.9.1 Company Overview 16.3.9.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.10 Nortek Air Solutions, LLC 16.3.10.1 Company Overview 16.3.10.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.11 Rittal 16.3.11.1 Company Overview 16.3.11.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.12 Schneider Electric 16.3.12.1 Company Overview 16.3.12.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.13 STULZ GmbH 16.3.13.1 Company Overview 16.3.13.2 Product Portfolio 16.3.14 Vertiv 16.3.14.1 Company Overview 16.3.14.2 Product Portfolio For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/ik0u1h Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets DUBLIN, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Size, Market Share, Application Analysis, Regional Outlook, Growth Trends, Key Players, Competitive Strategies and Forecasts, 2021 to 2029" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. Wide-scale implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) concept has the ability to transform the way we live. The emergence of new IoT products such as home automation components, internet-enabled appliances and energy management devices are changing the entire scenario of IoT industry. However, lack of security is still one of the most important concerns for people and enterprises that look to adopt IoT. Recent ransomware and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have made this concern even more viable. Cost barrier and infrastructure investment for hackers are quite low and they use inexpensive, mass-scale techniques such as automated bots, email and off-the-shelf exploit kits among others. However, the magnitude of damage of these techniques is quite high. The infection of just one device or network element can result in a successful network attack. Therefore, IoT security will be an important area of concern for any organization in the coming years in order to comfortably roll-out their IoT-based solutions. IoT has witnessed mass scale adoption across various application areas in recent years. In the manufacturing sector, its adoption is believed to significantly reduce bottlenecks, improve efficiency and increase profitability. Restaurant and retail chains could implement IoT to monitor customer movements, improve supply chain management and enhance the overall customer experience. In the healthcare sector, IoT could be implemented to more effectively manage staff, monitor patients and expensive medical equipment. The large scale adoption of IoT technologies across various verticals has made it vulnerable to cyber-attacks, thus arising the need for appropriate IoT security measures. The major factor driving the IoT security market growth is the rapid adoption of cloud-based services as well as connected devices on a very large scale. Confidential data such as biometrics information is often stored on clouds, making them vulnerable to theft and misuse. Thus, in order to protect these data from unauthorized access, IoT security is finding increased adoption in the IoT space. Moreover, improved IoT security handling skills and organizational changes are further expected to bolster the adoption of IoT security during the forecast period. With improving technical expertise for infrastructure handling, IoT security will find an increased adoption in organizations. In addition, various countries such as Japan, China, Germany and the U.S. among others have embraced the Industrie 4.0 (fourth industrial revolution). The Industrie 4.0 is sponsored by the German government with a vision for advanced manufacturing sector. It encompasses many business designs and technologies, including the IoT and digital business. This factor is expected to positively impact the IoT security market growth. Some of the major players profiled in the report are Verizon Enterprises Solutions, PTC, Inc., Check Point Security Software Technologies Ltd., Symantec Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Gemalto NV, IBM Corporation, Trend Micro, Inc., Hewlett Packard Development Company L.P., Intel Corporation, NSIDE Secure SA and AT&T, Inc. among others. On the basis of vertical, the global Internet of Things (IoT) security market is segmented into the following categories: Manufacturing Healthcare Utilities Retail Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) Government Others (Defense, Law Enforcement, etc.) In 2020, the Internet of Things (IoT) security market worldwide market was led by the manufacturing segment. Manufacturing companies are in the constant urge to enhance their production output and business process efficiency. Smart manufacturing in particular has been at the vanguard of introducing scalability, transparency and process defined architecture in manufacturing operations. Moreover, the implementation of Industrie 4.0, also referred to as the fourth industrial revolution in various countries such as the U.S., China, Japan and Germany among others is leading to the increased adoption of IoT technologies in the manufacturing sector and thus further arising the need for IoT security. These initiatives are contributing to the manufacturing segment growth. The Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) follow the manufacturing segment, in terms of value. Consumers are always in the lookout for convenient and personalized service whenever possible. This is evident from the growing popularity of mobile banking apps, online banking transactions, and contactless payment technologies. With added convenience they also want the highest levels of digital security from their banks. Security threats and data breaches often pose major problems to banks in the IoT era. Therefore, in order to ensure maximum security to its customers, the banking sector has been increasingly adopting IoT security measures. Based on the geography, the global Internet of Things (IoT) security market is segmented as per following regions and countries: North America U.S. Canada Europe U.K. Germany France Russia Rest of Europe Asia Pacific Japan China South Asia Rest of Asia Pacific Rest of the World (RoW) Middle East & Africa (MEA) & (MEA) Latin America The global Internet of Things (IoT) security market is dominated by the North American region. In 2020, the region accounted for more than 40% of the overall market revenue generated worldwide. The IoT security market here is majorly attributed to the U.S. and Canada being the early adopters of IoT technologies in various applications such as smart manufacturing and healthcare. The region has witnessed some major IoT security breaches in recent years. According to a survey conducted by Altman Vilandrie & Company, in the U.S., nearly 50% of firms using IoT have been a victim of security breaches. Moreover, presence of a large number of big players in the region such as Intel Corporation, IBM Corporation and Cisco Systems, Inc. has further contributed to the IoT security market growth. In the following years, Asia Pacific is set to register the highest growth. The market growth here is primarily driven by the growing mobile devices penetration, large number of business organizations and the unregulated usage of the Internet. Moreover, growing economic growth and social transformation in the region is further expected to create a favorable environment for the adoption of IoT technologies, thereby impacting the IoT security market growth positively. Key Topics Covered: Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Executive Summary Chapter 3 Market Dynamics 3.1 Market Overview 3.1.1 Global Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Revenue and Growth, 2019 - 2029, (US$ Bn) (Y-o-Y %) 3.2 Market Drivers 3.3 Market Growth Inhibitors 3.3.1 Impact Analysis of Drivers and Restraints 3.4 Key Market Trends and Future Outlook 3.5 Attractive Investment Proposition 3.6 Competitive Analysis 3.6.1 Market Positioning of Key Vendors 3.6.2 Key Strategies Adopted by the Leading Players Chapter 4 Global Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis, by Security Type 4.1 Market Analysis 4.2 Device 4.3 Cloud Infrastructure 4.4 Network Chapter 5 Global Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis, by Solution Type 5.1 Market Analysis 5.2 Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)/ Intrusion Defense Systems (IDS) 5.3 Identity Access Management (IAM) 5.4 Data Loss Protection (DLP) 5.5 Security & Vulnerability Management (SVM) 5.6 Unified Threat Management (UTM) 5.7 Network Security Forensics (NSF) 5.8 Security Analytics 5.9 Others Chapter 6 Global Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis, by Vertical 6.1 Market Analysis 6.2 Manufacturing 6.3 Healthcare 6.4 Utilities 6.5 Retail 6.6 Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) 6.7 Government 6.8 Others Chapter 7 North America Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis Chapter 8 Europe Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis Chapter 9 Asia Pacific Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis Chapter 10 Rest of the World (RoW) Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis Chapter 11 Company Profiles 11.1 Verizon Enterprises Solutions 11.2 PTC, Inc. 11.3 Check Point Security Software Technologies Ltd. 11.4 Symantec Corporation 11.5 Cisco Systems, Inc. 11.6 Gemalto NV 11.7 IBM Corporation 11.8 Trend Micro, Inc. 11.9 Hewlett Packard Development Company L.P. 11.10 Intel Corporation 11.11 NSIDE Secure SA 11.12 AT&T, Inc. For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/yhgozf Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1904 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets DUBLIN, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Single Trip Travel Insurance Market by Distribution Channel and End User: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021-2030" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. A single trip travel insurance policy provides coverage for one domestic or international trip. The policy will last until the traveler returns home from the trip. All insurance companies have a cap on the number of days that are to be counted as a single trip. The single trip insurance policy covers the costs and losses of an international trip or a domestic trip. Typically, the insurance policy covers 180 days. However, the period of coverage would depend on the insurance provider. Rapid growth in tourism and increase in use of digital distribution channel among insurance providers boost the growth of the global single trip travel insurance market. In addition, favorable government regulations regarding travel insurance positively impacts the growth of the market. However, lack of awareness regarding single trip travel insurance policy hampers the market growth. On the contrary, introduction of new products and services and new technological developments in travel insurance industry are expected to offer remunerative opportunities for expansion of the single trip travel insurance market size during the forecast period. The single trip travel insurance market is segmented into distribution channel, end user, and region. Depending on distribution channel, the market is bifurcated into insurance intermediaries, insurance companies, banks, insurance brokers, and insurance aggregators. In terms of end user, it is differentiated into senior citizens, education travelers, business travelers, family travelers, and others. Region wise, it is analyzed across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and LAMEA. Some of the key players operating in the global single trip travel insurance market include AGA Service Company, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company, Care Health Insurance, GeoBlue, HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company Limited, ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company Ltd., IFFCO-Tokio General Insurance Company Limited, Nationwide, Reliance General Insurance, and World Nomads Travel Insurance. These players have adopted various strategies to increase their market penetration and strengthen their position in the industry. Key Benefits The study provides an in-depth analysis of the global single trip travel insurance market forecast along with the current & future trends to explain the imminent investment pockets. Information about key drivers, restraints, & opportunities and their impact analysis on global single trip travel insurance market trends is provided in the report. Porter's five forces analysis illustrates the potency of the buyers and suppliers operating in the single trip travel insurance industry. The quantitative analysis of the single trip travel insurance market share from 2021 to 2030 is provided to determine the market potential Key Topics Covered: CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 2: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY CHAPTER 3: MARKET OVERVIEW 3.1. Market definition and scope 3.2. Porter's five forces analysis 3.1. Market dynamics 3.1.1. Drivers 3.1.1.1. Rapid growth in tourism 3.1.1.2. Increase in use of digital distribution channel among insurance providers 3.1.1.3. Favorable government regulations regarding travel insurance 3.1.2. Restraint 3.1.2.1. Lack of awareness regarding single trip travel insurance policy 3.1.3. Opportunities 3.1.3.1. Introduction of new products and services 3.1.3.2. New technological developments in travel insurance industry 3.1. COVID-19 impact analysis on single trip travel insurance market 3.1.1. Impact on travel & tourism industry 3.1.2. Impact on single trip travel insurance market size 3.1.3. Change in travelers trends, preferences, and budget impact due to COVID-19 3.1.4. Framework for solving market challenges faced by travel insurance providers and policy adopters 3.1.5. Economic impact on travel insurers 3.1.6. Key player strategies to tackle negative impact in the industry CHAPTER 4: GLOBAL SINGLE-TRIP TRAVEL INSURANCE MARKET, BY DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL 4.1. Overview 4.2. Insurance Intermediaries 4.2.1. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities 4.2.2. Market size and forecast, by region 4.2.3. Market analysis, by country 4.3. Insurance Companies 4.3.1. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities 4.3.2. Market size and forecast, by region 4.3.3. Market analysis, by country 4.4. Banks 4.4.1. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities 4.4.2. Market size and forecast, by region 4.4.3. Market analysis, by country 4.5. Insurance brokers 4.5.1. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities 4.5.2. Market size and forecast, by region 4.5.3. Market analysis, by country 4.6. Insurance Aggregators 4.6.1. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities 4.6.2. Market size and forecast, by region 4.6.3. Market analysis, by country CHAPTER 5: GLOBAL SINGLE-TRIP TRAVEL INSURANCE MARKET, BY END USER 5.1. Overview 5.2. Senior Citizens 5.2.1. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities 5.2.2. Market size and forecast, by region 5.2.3. Market analysis, by country 5.3. Education Travelers 5.3.1. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities 5.3.2. Market size and forecast, by region 5.3.3. Market analysis, by country 5.4. Business Travelers 5.4.1. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities 5.4.2. Market size and forecast, by region 5.4.3. Market analysis, by country 5.5. Family Travelers 5.5.1. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities 5.5.2. Market size and forecast, by region 5.5.3. Market analysis, by country 5.6. Others 5.6.1. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities 5.6.2. Market size and forecast, by region 5.6.3. Market analysis, by country CHAPTER 6: SINGLE-TRIP TRAVEL INSURANCE MARKET, BY REGION CHAPTER 7: COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE 7.1. Introduction 7.1.1. Market player positioning, 2020 7.2. Competitive dashboard 7.2.1. Top winning strategies CHAPTER 8: COMPANY PROFILES 8.1. AGA Service Company 8.1.1. Company overview 8.1.2. Company snapshot 8.1.3. Operating business segments 8.1.4. Product portfolio 8.1.5. Business performance 8.1.6. Key strategic moves and developments 8.2. Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company 8.2.1. Company overview 8.2.2. Company snapshot 8.2.3. Product portfolio 8.2.4. Key strategic moves and developments 8.3. Care Health Insurance 8.3.1. Company overview 8.3.2. Company snapshot 8.3.3. Product portfolio 8.4. GeoBlue 8.4.1. Company overview 8.4.2. Company snapshot 8.4.3. Product portfolio 8.5. HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company Limited 8.5.1. Company overview 8.5.2. Company snapshot 8.5.3. Operating business segments 8.5.4. Product portfolio 8.5.5. Business performance 8.6. ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company Ltd. 8.6.1. Company overview 8.6.2. Company snapshot 8.6.3. Product portfolio 8.7. IFFCO-Tokio General Insurance Company Limited 8.7.1. Company overview 8.7.2. Company snapshot 8.7.3. Product portfolio 8.7.4. Business performance 8.8. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company 8.8.1. Company overview 8.8.2. Company snapshot 8.8.3. Product portfolio 8.9. Reliance General Insurance Company Limited 8.9.1. Company overview 8.9.2. Company snapshot 8.9.3. Product portfolio 8.10. World Nomads 8.10.1. Company overview 8.10.2. Company snapshot 8.10.3. Product portfolio For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/788cto Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1904 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Imports and exports of private enterprises in East Chinas Anhui province increased 35.2 percent year-on-year to 58.61 billion yuan ($9.20 billion), or 52 percent of the provincial total, in the first two months of 2022,customs data showed. Exports reached 42.93 billion yuan, up 37.1 percent, while imports grew 30.2 percent to 15.68 billion yuan, according to Hefei Customs. Private firms import and export value of general trade rose 33 percent to 45.38 billion yuan between January and February, accounting for 77.4 percent of the total. Their bonded logistics trade rocketed 94.4 percent to 6.36 billion yuan, while the processing trade increased 11.9 percent to 4.82 billion yuan. The United States, the European Union and the ASEAN remained the three major trading partners of Anhui-based privately-run enterprises, posting year-on-year increases of 40.5 percent, 58 percent and 31.5 percent, respectively. Mechanical and electrical imports went up 47.1 percent to 9.97 billion yuan in the Jan-Feb period, making up 63.6 percent of private enterprises total foreign trade value. Meanwhile, mechanical and electrical exports stood at 24.44 billion yuan, accounting for 46.9 percent of the total. Former President of Nigeria and Chairman, Coalition for Dialogue on Africa (CoDA) Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo Monday, gave a damming verdict on the political instability in some African countries, declaring that the African continent is currently going through a perilous storm. Obasanjo and Osinbajo spoke in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, at the opening session of a high-level dialogue, organised by (CoDA) at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, Abeokuta. The two-day event, with the theme, 'West Africa: Rising to The Challenges of Consolidating Democratic Governance', is meant to deliberate on how to strengthen democracy in West Africa. Obasanjo, in his welcome address, condemned military takeover of democratically elected governments in some African countries, saying democracy in West Africa and indeed Africa requires urgent attention. The former president lamented that coup d'etat, election fraud, political violence and instability have crippled growth of Africa. He insisted that power grabbing and governance through the gun will not help Africa nor procure democracy through judiciary, stressing that the continent needs "a peaceful democracy that has respect for the will of the people and the future of our nations". Obasanjo said the only way African continent can develop is through peaceful democratic transition of governments. He said: "In recent years, we have witnessed a return of coup d'etat, election fraud and political violence resulting in instability and threatening the developmental gains we have made in the last couple of decades. "I feel very sad and it gives me great concern when I see the democratic system we have painfully built collapsing. And I believe there must be a solution because the problem is human and all human problems can be solved by human beings. That is why the Coalition for Dialogue on Africa (CoDA) under my chairmanship and the OOPL have brought all of us together today to discuss pertinent issues affecting governance in West Africa, including the challenges and then to seek the way forward. "Achieving this may not be easy but it is a must if we want our nation to make progress. It must entail responsible management of diversity which makes everyone feel a sense of belonging and be a significant part of the whole. "Peaceful co-existence has been a hallmark of Africans even before the emergence of colonial era and we cannot accept anything less in this modern age. "We need a stable environment to grow our economies and ensure that countries develop in a sustainable way. Such all inclusive democratic environment will fast-track developing our economy and will strengthen our security and promote general progress." While delivering the keynote address, Osinbajo bemoaned military incursion into democratic regimes of some African countries. He said: "This is a moment of peril for democracy in our region because we are navigating a perfect storm of adverse circumstances; a world economy that is reeling from recessional shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, price and supply disruption from the war in Ukraine, the emergency of armed non-state actors, poor challenges associated with catering for the youngest populations in the world." He called on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union (AU) and other African organisations to rise up to the challenge and do more in ensuring political and economic stability of West Africa and Africa at large. According to Osinbajo, "We must not allow our continent to become as it was in the cold war era. A fetter or proxy wars and great power conflict, we know from experience that this would result a deepening or the recession of democratic values in Africa. "The militarisation of civil society whether by local military regimes or rival foreign military industrial complexes can only set us back by several decades. "Our commitment to democrisation must be predicated on the aspiration of our people and not from the whims of foreign powers. "The recent spate of military coups across our continent and attempts at military coups not only potend the risk of a damaging democratic recession, but it also takes us back to the circles of extra constitutional disruptions that plagued us decades ago. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Africa Governance Nigeria By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. "Since 2017, there has been 12 military coups in Africa and half of them occurred since 2020. Two months ago, the democratically elected government of Burkina Faso was overthrown, while only in February, there was an attempted coup in Guinea Bissau which was thankfully repelled. "This much is clear, we know that we cannot secure the Africa that we want by turning back the hands of the democratic clock. "We have walked this thorny roads before, many decades worth of bitter experience and impeachable lesson of our history, a clear lessons of our history is that despotisms cannot guarantee the security and prosperity of our people. "No matter how dire our circumstances may be, we now have concrete proof that resort to extra constitutional regimes is not the way forward." In attendance were former President Goodluck Jonathan; former Vice-President of The Gambia, Fatoumata Tambajanb; former President of Sierra Leone, Ernest Bai Koroma; and Ogun State Governor, Dapo Abiodun, among others. BOSTON, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Yellow Wood Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm focused on investing in consumer brands and companies, today announced the closing of Yellow Wood Capital Partners III, L.P., at its target and hard cap of $750 million of limited partner capital commitments. The new fund was oversubscribed and included capital commitments from many of Yellow Wood's long-time limited partners as well as the addition of a small number of new investors comprised of university endowments, family offices and other institutional investors. Yellow Wood Fund III continues its strategy of partnering with management teams to grow and operate brands by applying its Consumer Operating DNA to transform brands and companies into category leaders within the consumer space. Dana Schmaltz, Partner at Yellow Wood, said, "We had very strong demand from investors in our previous funds who continue to support us with higher commitments and we are very pleased to complete Fund III with the addition of a small and select group of highly sophisticated new investors to the Yellow Wood family. Our investment focus remains the same as it has been for more than a decade as we seek to find and work with brands to help them grow. As we have done and continue to do with our existing portfolio of brands, this successful fundraise allows us to continue our pursuit of building a limited number of platforms where we can apply our intense operating focus in close collaboration with entrepreneurs and management teams to create value for our shareholders. We want to thank all of our LPs who support us." Yellow Wood recently completed its first investment from Fund III with the formation of sexual wellness platform Beacon Wellness Brands, which markets and sells sexual wellness devices under the PlusOne and Deia brands. The PlusOne brand is the leading brand in the retail channel, selling its products through retailers including, Target, Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens. Beacon Wellness also has a personal care division and manufactures facial skincare and grooming products sold under the Plum Beauty and Clio brands. Commitments to Fund III came from a small group of large, sophisticated university endowments, foundations, private pension funds, financial institutions and family offices. The Yellow Wood team is comprised of 14 investment professionals and seven operating partners. Tad Yanagi, Partner at Yellow Wood, added, "We invest in a dynamic consumer goods sector that continues to experience dramatic growth, even during the current challenging environment as the global pandemic has impacted consumer consumption of most brands. Our Yellow Wood team is well positioned to continue to identify high-growth companies as well as complex corporate carve outs where we can partner with management teams to build market leading brands into true global businesses." Yellow Wood's diverse portfolio of consumer brands includes leading global footcare brands Dr. Scholl's and Scholl, which Yellow Wood reunited as one entity after 30+ years of separate ownership and now combined generates annual retail sales exceeding $700 million. The firm's portfolio also includes Real Techniques and EcoTools, self-tanning brands Isle of Paradise, Tanologist and Tan-Luxe, and skincare brands Freeman Beauty and the recently launched BYOMA as well as the sexual wellness brands PlusOne and Deia, beauty brand Plum Beauty and personal care brand Clio. Yellow Wood completed its prior fund in 2017, which was oversubscribed with $370 million of limited partner capital commitments. Proskauer Rose LLP serves as legal counsel to Yellow Wood and advised the firm in its fundraise of Fund III. PJT Partners LP (Park Hill) served as placement agent for certain of the limited partner interests in Fund III. About Yellow Wood Partners Yellow Wood Partners is a Boston-based private investment firm that invests exclusively in the consumer industry in the middle market. The firm seeks to acquire branded consumer products that sell into a variety of consumer channels, including mass, drug, food, specialty, value, club and e-commerce. Yellow Wood's investment and operating strategy is based on utilizing the firm's Consumer Operating DNA strategy which brings functional operating resources to maximize brand performance by driving organic growth and increasing operating efficiencies in a limited number of platform entities which also incorporate highly accretive add-on acquisitions to drive growth and increased equity value. For more information, please visit www.yellowwoodpartners.com. ### Contact: Chris Tofalli Chris Tofalli Public Relations, LLC 914-834-4334 SOURCE Yellow Wood Partners Nairobi Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha and top education officials including those from the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) were set to meet President Uhuru Kenyatta on Monday to brief him on recently concluded primary level exams. The briefing session will precede the the release of the Kenya Certificate for Primary Education (KCPE) results for the year 2021. The exam were pushed forward to March 2022 as a result of pandemic-triggered disruptions on the academic calendar. Slightly over 1.2 million candidates sat for the national exams in 28,316 KCPE examination centres spread across the country. The anticipated release of the KCPE results comes at a time teachers marking the 2021 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) were set to report to marking centres to begin processing concluded papers. Designated marking centres include Sunshine High School, State House Girls, Moi Forces Academy, St Georges and Upper Hill in Nairobi. Markers will also assemble at Thika High, Buruburu High, Moi Girls Isinya, Loreto Girls Limuru, Lang'ata High and Kenya High,. Nairobi Three students from the Bridge Academy in Nairobi's Kwa Njenga have overcome all challenges of growing in one of city's largest slum, to score above 400 marks in the 2021 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE). With the marks, the three pupils are each set to secure a slot in a national school, where they pursue their secondary education. One of the students is Joyce Kemunto, who has scored 401 marks. The 15-year-old from Tassia Community and has been a pupil at Bridge Kwa Njenga, Nairobi County for 8 years. "I am very happy for these results," she told Capital News. While she worked hard to attain the marks, she said her teachers, whom she said very professional, friendly, and approachable, played a pivotal role. She lives with both her parents in one of the largest slums in Nairobi. Her father who works as a casual labourer is their main sole provider because her mother is unemployed. She had to walk to school every day for approximately one hour, just to secure herself quality yet affordable education. "I thank God for this. I did it," an excited Kemunto said. Her favourite subject is Science because it gives her the opportunity to understand nature. In preparation for her exams, she has been doing lots of revision and interaction with teachers to speculate where the KCPE questions are likely to come from. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Kenya Education By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. She hopes to join her dream school, the Alliance Girls High School. She hopes her dream of becoming a neurosurgeon will one day come to pass. "A lot of people incur heavy expenses going to India for treatment. If I become a neurosurgeon, I will help address that," she said. Florence Kwamboka was at the Bridge Kwa Njenga school and scored an impressive mark in the 2021 KCPE. Kwamboka lives with her mother who runs a shop. Her father, who is the main breadwinner, works as a security guard. "I am so happy to have made my parents and school proud. I thank God for the results," she said. She did not live far from the school as it only took her roughly 10 minutes to get there. She was the Vice President of her school. Her favourites subject was Mathematics. "I just love numbers and calculating," she told Capital News. She aspires to be an architect in the future, with one of her favourite building in the world being the Taj Mahal in Northern India. Their colleague, Edwine Oduory 402 marks in the 2021 KCPE. He has been a pupil at Bridge Majengo Mapya Academy Mombasa County for 7 years. The last born in a family of 6 children said Bridge has teachers who are more of mentors to him. "I attained quality education at Bridge," he said, adding that," I will now be able to pursue my higher education at a good school." He dreams of becoming a Medical Scientist because, "there are a lot of viruses breaking out these days that don't have a cure and I would love to be part of the research team and discover different medicines and vaccines." Nyeri Kenyans should brace for a serious food shortage following an admission by the Ministry of Agriculture that it cannot be able to raise Sh32billion to offer subsidised farm inputs ahead of planting season. The admission comes at a time thousands of farmers in the country's food basket are preparing to plant during this long rains season but are unable to purchase inputs such as fertilizers whose prices have rocketed. Speaking during a meeting with tea farmers at Gathuthi tea factory in Nyeri, Agriculture CS Peter Munya said that his Ministry requires Sh31billion to ensure inputs are brought to an affordable level but it can't raise the funds due to budget constraints. "At the moment we cannot be able to help our farmers due to the fact that a budget has not been formulated, we are stuck due to differences among MPs in the assembly so farmers should understand that our hands are tied," said Munya. Munya said that the high prices of farm inputs are a result of the Russian-Ukraine conflict and nothing can be done apart from offering subsidies to farmers to enable them to produce harvest enough for the country. On tea reforms, Munya said that a forensic audit of all tea factories will be completed in two months so that desired reforms are met. "At the moment we are almost finalizing audit reports however preliminary reports indicate that there was huge borrowing by previous directors in an underserving manner, in some instances, they borrowed while having their own money, a move that ate into farmers earnings," said Munya . Munya, however, said that they are in talks with Green fedha which is owned by farmers and other banks with a view of restructuring to ease debts that are a nuisance in the tea sector. The CS noted that the reforms are being frustrated by cartels in the sector through court cases that are still pending. "Many think that we are through with Cartels however this is not the case they are still there and that is why cases are dragging in court despite farmers through KTDA saying they do not want court cases," said Munya . Munya said that the hard-hit area by cartels is the coffee sector where ninety percent of issues are controlled by cartels. Mexico City, March 29 : At least 20 people were killed in an armed attack on Sunday night during a clandestine cockfight show in the municipality of Zinapecuaro in Mexico's Michoacan, local authorities reported on Monday. The state Attorney General's Office explained in a statement that the killings took place on Sunday night in the town of Las Tinajas, Xinhua news agency reported. A forensic services unit sent to the scene found 19 people dead of gunshot wounds (16 men and three women), while a 32-year-old man died on route to the hospital. In addition, several other injured people were transported to area hospitals. The Attorney General's Office said that an investigation has been opened to clarify what had happened. Michoacan state has been affected for at least a decade by violence from drug trafficking criminal groups. About 70 per cent of homicides registered in Mexico in 2021 were linked to organised crime, with record numbers in Michoacan, according to Mexico's Public Security Secretariat. Lucknow, March 29 : A young man has lodged a complaint with the police here after he was duped and blackmailed on a dating app. The man shared his number on the dating app and got a call from a girl who introduced herself as a nursing student. He started receiving video calls from the girl and some obscene talks with the victim was allegedly recorded by the girl. The victim then received a text message demanding Rs 10,000 and the girl threatened to upload his videos on the internet if he did not pay up. The terrified victim even paid Rs 3,000 online and said he will arrange more money later. Finally, the victim approached the cyber police and has lodged his complaint. Inspector Ranjeet Rai said a probe is on to identify the accused. "On some dating apps, miscreants ask users to share their phone numbers and then make sleazy video calls and record them. They then threaten to upload the videos on social media and demand money. A similar incident was reported from the Jankipuram area in December when a victim had approached the cyber cell after being blackmailed in the same way," the inspector said. Lucknow, March 29 : Nearly 7.8 lakh students have dropped out of the ongoing Class 10 and 12 examinations of the Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad (UPMSP), also known as the UP Board. On Monday, a whopping 2.9 lakh class 10 and 12 students skipped their exams. Class 10 and 12 students had Computer and Geography exams respectively on Monday. According to official sources, the 7.8 lakh figure surpasses the total dropouts recorded in 2020 (4.8 lakh) and 2019 (6.5 lakh). There were no exams in 2021 due to Covid-19 pandemic. The UP Board exams began on March 24. In fact, the number of students skipping the exam so far is the highest in almost a decade. In 2013, 5.6 lakh absentees were recorded by the UPMSP, which conducts exams. The UP Board 2022 examinations saw 4.1 lakh students missing the examinations on day one when Hindi exam was slated for both Class 10 and 12. The UPMSP saw over 70,200 students not attending their languages paper which was held on March 26. The languages include Urdu, Tamil, Bengali, Assamese, Gujarati, Punjabi, Nepali, etc. The high numbers have now forced officials to probe the reasons for dropouts. Additional Chief Secretary, Secondary Education, Aradhana Shukla has directed the UPMSP secretary to constitute a committee and involve the district inspector of schools to ascertain the circumstances that made students to leave their exams even after filling the forms. However, officials said they feel the high dropouts is due to Covid-19 pandemic that has affected people's financial situation. "This could be an important reason other than strict security measures which are in place to curb the cheating menace," said a senior official. New Delhi, March 29 : The Rajya Sabha on Tuesday will continue discussions on the 'Finance Bill 2022' and 'Appropriation Bill, 2022' moved by the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman the previous day. The two the bills were moved for consideration and also for it to be returned. "The Bill to authorise payment and appropriation of certain sums from and out of the Consolidated Fund of India for the services of the financial year 2022-23, as passed by Lok Sabha, be taken into consideration," said the Rajya Sabha business list. Regarding the Finance Bill, the list said: "That the Bill to give effect to the financial proposals of the Central Government for the financial year 2022-23, as passed by Lok Sabha, be taken into consideration." MPs Naresh Bansal and Vivek Thakur will lay on the table, a copy each (in English and Hindi) of the statements showing further action taken by the Centre on the observations, recommendations of the department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour, Textiles and Skill Development, contained in the different reports. Union Ministers Rao Inderjit Singh, Shripad Yessor Naik, Krishan Pal, Pankaj chaudhary, Rameshwar Teli, Bhagwant Khuba, Bhagwat Karad, Bharati Pravin Pawar, Shantanu Thakur and Munjapara Mahendrabhai will lay papers related to different Ministries. Nairobi Millions of dollars of public funds allegedly stolen by two of Kenya's richest men are being returned to the country to buy life-saving Covid-19 equipment following a landmark agreement signed in London. The deal with Jersey, a self-governing island in the English Channel, was hailed as "a victory for the people of Kenya" by its High Commissioner in the UK, Manoah Esipisu. The entangled web of connections that eventually ended in this deal first emerged following a divorce case. Back in 2006, Samuel Gichuru, the wealthy boss of Kenya's power company, and his wife Salome Njeri were divorced. When it came to splitting up their assets, Ms Njeri felt she was not getting her fair share. She alleged some of her husband's assets were being hidden from the proceedings and, in court, listed details of accounts she said belonged to Mr Gichuru in Jersey, which is often associated with secretive offshore banking and a low-tax environment. That sparked a nine-year investigation by the Jersey authorities across 12 jurisdictions. As part of that investigation, in 2011, they accused Mr Gichuru and former Finance Minister Chris Okemo of taking kickbacks from multinationals which were sent to a Jersey-registered company. The Jersey authorities issued arrest warrants for both men and have been waiting for their extradition from Kenya ever since. The economic crimes they were accused of included a deal with a Finnish firm to construct a power station near Mombasa, Kenya's second largest city, and taking millions of pounds in kickbacks from British, Norwegian and German engineering firms, as well as a US communications giant. Despite repeated attempts to contact them by the BBC, both men and their lawyers would not comment on the allegations levelled against them. However in 2016, the Jersey-registered company Windward Trading Limited pleaded guilty to four counts of money laundering in a Jersey court. The court ruled that the company, whose ultimate owner was Mr Gichuru, should be stripped of more than $4.9m (3.6m) in assets for money laundering. It is the majority of this money that allegedly came from corrupt activities in Kenya between 1999 and 2002 that is now being returned to the country. That was made possible by a 2018 agreement signed in Kenya by then UK Prime Minister Theresa May, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and the Swiss and Jersey governments. In the deal, it was established that allegedly stolen assets could be returned to Kenya, provided they were used exclusively for development projects. This arrangement, known as the Framework for the Return of Assets from Corruption and Crime to Kenya (Fracck), was hailed by the UN as "innovative" and "novel". It gives the Jersey authorities a licence to unfreeze money they believe was stolen and send it back before those accused of stealing it go on trial. "The question for us [in Jersey] was: should we wait for a convoluted judicial process based on the actions of two individuals, which... have been shown to be illegal in the Jersey court? Or should we allow the money to return for the benefit of the citizens of Kenya?" Senator Ian Gorst, Jersey's Minister for External Relations, explained. The handing over of Mr Gichuru's allegedly stolen millions back to ordinary Kenyans is Fracck's first test. Spending it in a transparent and accountable way is the job of Crown Agents, the not-for-profit international development company. Its boss Fergus Drake told the BBC that he was in contact with Kenya's health ministry to assess what was needed in the fight against Covid-19. He said it wanted "specific lab equipment to test for Covid-19" and ancillary equipment "like micro-tubes, PCR tests, and other kit". Mr Drake expects to deliver the vital equipment to half a dozen hospitals in around two months, subject to supply chain bottlenecks. He said boosting testing would allow Kenyans to better manage the pandemic and know which areas are in urgent need of vaccines. At present, less than 20% of Kenyans are fully vaccinated. Mr Drake acknowledged that the sum of money which he is disbursing - $3.5m - will not go "that far" in terms of a country's response to Covid-19, but he hoped this type of "targeted" help will have an "exponential impact" against the virus. Campaigners believe that the Fracck is a model for a new way that ill-gotten gains can be returned. The UK is also a signatory to another agreement - the UN Convention against Corruption - so is obliged to return criminal funds where conditions to do so are met. But according to Steve Goodrich, head of research and investigations at Transparency International (TI) UK, returns from the UK often do not go directly to development projects. He pointed to the return of money laundered by former Nigerian Delta state Governor James Ibori in 2012 which was given to the federal government there. And he was concerned that repatriated funds could get lost to corruption. So Mr Goodrich said this case was "a step in the right direction". But, he added, to have "a credible deterrent" against those looking to stash their stolen money in the UK, he said the government "really needs to up its game" on asset recovery. For example, he said the UK should start by looking at what he believed was "over 5bn-worth of British property bought with suspect funds". This episode also focuses attention on Kenya's fight against corruption at home. The country is ranked 128th in the world in TI's perceptions of corruption index, with public officials and business people open to bribery. There are just months left before President Kenyatta is due to stand down, having pledged to make fighting corruption part of his legacy. As part of that, politicians and public officials are currently being asked to declare their wealth, with anti-corruption auditing in place.BBCThese are funds looted from Kenyans and with this agreement, these funds are being returned to assist the Kenyan people"Manoah Esipisu Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Kenya Legal Affairs Europe and Africa By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. Kenya's High Commissioner, Mr Esipisu, who was once the president's spokesman, told the BBC the Fracck agreement was a "huge contribution" to the president's agenda as it sent a signal that "corrupt people will not be safe simply because they hide their money abroad". He added, passionately, that "these are funds stolen from Kenyans, looted from Kenyans, and with this agreement, these funds are being returned to assist the Kenyan people for whom they were meant in the first instance. So this is a victory for the Kenyan people." With the funds now on their way from Jersey to Kenya, the focus turns to the possible extradition from Kenya to Jersey of the two accused men. At the beginning of February, extradition proceedings finally got under way in Nairobi's City Magistrates' Court, after a 10-year legal battle over whether the government's chief legal officer or the public prosecutor should be leading the case. Kenya's department for public prosecution is now in charge of the process and its Deputy Director Victor Mule said the next hearing was expected in May. He believed it would not take another 10 years to resolve. Mr Gichuru's lawyer chose not to comment on the ongoing legal process when contacted by the BBC. Jersey Senator Mr Gorst concedes there were shortcomings which allowed this allegedly stolen money to enter the island in the first place. He warned any future perpetrators that its regulations had been tightened but that any ill-gotten funds which did get through would be located and "we will return it to the citizens to whom it belongs". Kiev, March 29 : Dmytro Khilyuk, a journalist working for the Ukrainian Independent News Agency (UNIAN), was abducted by Russian forces on March 4 from a village in the Kiev region, a media watchdog announced. In a statement posted on its website on Monday, the Media Initiative for Human Rights said on the eve of his disappearance, Dmytro wrote on Facebook that his village of Kozarovychi in Vyshhorod district, was "under occupation" and that there was no water, the shops were empty and the internet connection was very weak. He claimed in his post that Russian troops were "going from house to house", and people remained inside their homes as there were periodic shooting in the village. According to the watchdog, Khilyuk's disappearance was first reported by his friends in the media, who were unable to contact him. His friends "learned from neighbours that Khilyuk was detained by people in Russian military uniform", the statement said. First it was not known where he was take, but later it was revealed that the journalist was being held inside a building in Dymer, another village in the Kiev region. Local residents have said that Khilyuk might have been kidnapped on suspicion that he was in contact with the Ukraine military and law enforcement agencies, the Media Initiative added. According to Ukrainian authorities, at least 12 journalists, local and foreign, have been killed and 10 others injuried in Ukraine since the war began on February 24. The victims include US journalist and filmmaker Brent Renaud and Oksana Baulina, a Russian journalist reporting for investigative website The Insider. Local journalists Victoria Roshchyna and Oleh Baturin were also abducted by Russian forces, but have since been released. Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War Istanbul, March 29 : Delegations from Ukraine and Russia have arrived in the Turkish city of Istanbul to begin a new round of peace talks from Tuesday aimed at ending the ongoing war. The in-person talks slated to begin at 10.30 a.m. (local time, about 1 p.m. IST), will be hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Dolmabahce Presidential Working Office in Istabul's Besiktas district, reports Xinhua news agency. While Russian delegation has settled in the Ciragan Palace Kempinski Hotel, the Ukrainian delegation has checked in the Shangri-La Bosphorus, both very close to each other in the district. Media reports said the arrival of the Ukrainian delegation had been postponed to evening hours due to the closure of their country's airspace and some logistical problems. According to the NTV broadcaster, the Ukrainian delegates had to go to a neighbouring country by road to fly to Istanbul. "We will have a short meeting with the delegations tomorrow morning," Erdogan said at a press conference after a cabinet meeting in the Turkish capital Ankara on Monday. So far, Russia and Ukraine have held three rounds of in-person talks in Belarus, and their fourth session was in a video conference format. Among other things, Russia is demanding that Ukraine abandon any intention of joining NATO, an issue Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he is willing to compromise on. Other issues expected to be discussed include the fate of separatist-held regions in Ukraine's east, as well as the status of Crimea, which was formally annexed by Russia in 2014. Turkey, meanwhile, has increasingly accelerated its diplomatic efforts in the international arena, reiterating its policy that it is ready to play a mediator role for lasting peace in the region. In a phone call on Sunday, Erdogan told his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, that a ceasefire and peace between Moscow and Kiev must be achieved as soon as possible, and the humanitarian situation in the region should be improved. Erdogan repeated that Turkey would continue to contribute in every possible way during this process. The "phone traffic" that he has been conducting with Putin and Zelensky is progressing in a positive direction, the Turkish leader said on Monday. Turkey has been exerting significant efforts to resolve the crisis through agreement and dialogue, he said. Regarding the talks, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that "we are not trading people, land or sovereignty". "The minimum programme will be humanitarian questions, and the maximum programme is reaching an agreement on a ceasefire," the BBC quoted the Minister as saying in a televised address on Monday. But Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Vadym Denysenko said that he doubted there would be any breakthrough. Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said talks so far had not yielded any substantial progress, but it was important they continued in person. He declined to give more information. A senior US State Department official cast similar doubt on hopes for progress, saying Putin did not appear ready to make compromises to end the war. Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War Chandigarh, March 29 : Punjab has fixed a target of procuring 132 lakh tonnes of wheat that will begin on April 1 and culminate on May 31, officials said on Tuesday. The Centre has fixed the minimum support price (MSP) of wheat at Rs 2,015 per quintal, hiking it by Rs 40 from last year's Rs 1,975 per quintal. With the efforts of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government led by Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann for seeking Cash Credit Limit (CCL) from the Centre before the commencement of wheat procurement, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Monday cleared Rs 24,773.11 crore towards CCL up to April-end. Meanwhile, Mann expressed gratitude to the Centre for timely release of CCL, which would go a long way in ensuring seamless procurement of the wheat. He directed the state Food and Civil Supplies Department to ensure smooth and hassle-free procurement of wheat, besides making payment to them of their produce from April 1. Chennai, March 29 : Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, during his four-day visit to New Delhi from March 30, will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and take up a host of issues related to the development of the state with him. This will be his second meeting with the Prime Minister after he assumed office in May 2021 as the chief minister of Tamil Nadu. In a statement, the Chief Minister's office said that while the meeting with the Prime Minister on March 31 stands confirmed, that with Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari, and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh awaits comfirmation. Stalin is expected to take up several issues concerning the state, including pending bills with the Governor and other infrastructure and development issues. During his visit, the Chief Minister will inaugurate 'Anna Kalaignar Arivalayam', the DMK party office in New Delhi on April 2. DMK Parliamentary party leader and former Union Minister T.R. Baalu has met Congress president Sonia Gandhi, BJP president J.P. Nadda, and other senior leaders and extended the invitation of the DMK office inauguration. Notably, the DMK is trying to catapult Stalin to the national stage as an alternative to the BJP during the 2024 polls and the Delhi office inauguration is considered a major meeting point with senior regional chieftains and to take up the coordination for an anti-NDA front at the national level. While West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao had travelled across the country and met senior opposition leaders for a joint front, Stalin is more acceptable as he maintains an excellent relationship with the Congress, CPM, and CPI which will be of use for a national anti-BJP front. March 29 : Zack Synders directorial Army of the Dead won the Oscars Fan Favorite Award, which has been introduced for the first time this year. Huma Qureshi is overjoyed as she played a supporting role, Geeta, in the film. The newly-introduced unofficial award category Oscars Fan Favorite Award has been introduced for the first time by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in collaboration with Twitter to honour more mainstream, popular movies. As the award is an unofficial one, the winner does not get an Oscar trophy. Army of the Dead, which streamed on Netflix, bagged the award after beating Spider-Man: No Way Home, Cinderalla, Minamata, and Tick, Tick...Boom! Twitter users were allowed to vote up to 20 times a day during the 18-day voting period for their favourite movie. Huma took to her Instagram handle on Monday to celebrate the win. She shared a snapshot of a news article announcing the win, and thanked the voters. Omg! This just happened. We won an Oscar!! Thank you to the fans for voting. #ZackSnyder you are the boss @netflix Love to my cast mates and the whole crew!! #OscarFanFavorite #gratitude One step closer thank you 2022, Huma wrote as she expressed her happiness. Army of the Dead was released in the USA on May 14, 2021, and was digitally released on Netflix on May 21, 2021. The film is about a group of mercenaries who entered a quarantine zone in the hope to do a heist following a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas. Earlier, Huma had said in an interview, "Now that I'm in a way making my Hollywood debut, in a Zack Snyder film, it's a big ensemble film, it's a very acclaimed director. I have never in my career gone for length of character. It's always about what my character is doing in the film, she said. Zack had praised Humas work in the film, as he told a portal, "She was written as an Indian character, and Huma is a really amazing actress, no two ways about it." Image Source: IANS News Huma Qureshi shares funny stills from 'Army Of The Dead' set Meanwhile, on the work front, Huma Qureshi recently earned a lot of appreciation for her performance in H. Vinoths directorial Valimai, where she played a cop. Huma will next be seen in the second season of her hit web show Maharani, in a new OTT series Monica, O My Darling', and the film Double XL. March 29 : Deepika Padukone received the TIME100 Impact Award for the second time on Monday evening. The Chhapaak actress attended the prestigious ceremony held at the Museum of the Future in Dubai on Monday night with her husband Ranveer Singh. Deepika took to her Instagram Stories and shared several pictures and videos from the awards night and expressed her gratitude for the honour. The Gehraiyaan actor has received the TIME100 Impact Award for her work on mental health. Taking to social media on Monday morning, Deepika had shared a snapshot of the TIME feature, and wrote, "Pretty decent start to a Monday morning I would think#GRATITUDE @time." Image Source: Instagram/deepikapadukone Deepika Padukone receives TIME100 Impact Award at Dubai event In a video shared on her Instagram stories, Deepika was seen entering the event venue. She talked to the media at the gate and said she was nervous. "I'm nervous." I don't know why. I've written some stuff (she showed a piece of paper). I hope it's meaningful." Deepika continued, "But yes I'm nervous. You can see on my face no? But I'm gonna try and have fun. I want to have fun." Image Source: Deepika Padukone receives TIME100 Impact Award at Dubai event Deepika Padukone receives TIME100 Impact Award at Dubai event In one of her Instagram stories, the actress was seen getting her makeup done as she sat in a robe. She also shared her look for the event. For the event, Deepika opted for a shimmery silver saree, with a matching sleeveless blouse. She tied her hair in a messy bun and accessorised with pearl neckpiece and earrings to complete her look. Later, talking about her second time at the Time awards, Deepika said, "A lot more work. Couple of years, lot more work. And a little more confidence maybe." After receiving the award, Deepika posed with it. She also posed with Ranveer at the award function. He opted for a maroon sherwani, along with dark glasses. Deepika also spoke about what gives her hope about the future. She said, People and their resilience. I think the world has been through a lot and we continue to go through a lot, but to see the strength and resilience is what truly gives me hope. Sharing a video, posted by Time, she said, "So that's a wrap for tonight. Amazing evening. Great food great conversation. Incredible people. And see you guy soon." In the TIME100 feature, Deepika said, "I had such a deep experience with mental illness. Not talking about it felt dishonest." The actress LiveLoveLaugh Foundation works towards destigmatising mental health. Deepika is also known for openly talking about her own mental health, and also advocates "to live a life as honest and authentically as possible. TIME on Saturday revealed the honourees of the first-ever TIME100 Impact Awards, recognizing individuals who are using their influence to build a better future. Mental health has become somewhat of a calling for Padukone, who first spoke openly in 2015 about wrestling with depression, the TIME feature read. Thiruvananthapuram, March 29 : Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has convened an urgent meeting of the ruling CPI-M led Left Democratic Front on Wednesday in view of the massive protests against the state government's ambitious K-Rail project. So far, there has been not a whimper of protest against the project within the LDF, while the Congress-led UDF and the BJP-led NDA are opposing it vehemently. A media critic on condition of anonymity said Wednesday's meeting is crucial as fissures appears have surfaced between the CPI and the Kerala Congress(M) parties regarding the project. "The worst affected among the allies is the Kerala Congress(M) as it's in their heartland in Central Kerala districts that the protests have taken a centre stage. Moreover, various churches also have started to express their ire against the project. Apparently, in the CPI also, things seem fluid as the State Revenue Minister K.Rajan of the CPI spoke in a different tone recently. So all eyes are on tomorrow's meeting," said the critic. For Vijayan, he got a huge boost when the Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a bunch of petitions against the ongoing survey being conducted as part of the social impact assessment study for the project, which led to the uprising. Another party which is visibly upset with the CPI-M is the Loktantrik Janata Dal(LJD) whose nominee, media baron M.V.Shreyams Kumar whose Rajya Sabha term ends on April 2 was not given another term. Not long ago, when his party was an ally of the Congress, he had the tag of a 'green MLA' on account of his love for the environment. Now with the opposition claiming that the K-Rail project will lead to massive environmental damage, the party's stand is awaited. Recently, the party had taunted the CPI, when Kumar said the latter used its bargaining power to get a Rajya Sabha (his seat) and that it is keenly watching the CPI's position on issues like K-Rail, the tweaking of the Lok Ayukta rules and the liquor policy. Given the strong hold that Vijayan continues to have, any ally or any leader speaking up against him in Wednesday's meeting seems unlikely. New Delhi, March 29 : Delhi Police have busted an international narcotic drug cartel and arrested its two key members along with Heroin worth Rs 40 crore in the international market, an official said on Tuesday. The accused, identified as Dinesh Singh (57) and Nazir alias Nazim (28), were arrested on March 24. Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) said a team of Special Cell was working on information that an international narcotics cartel is active in the states of Manipur, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Delhi. The members of this cartel were involved in receiving supply of heroin smuggled from Myanmar and further supplied it to various parts of the country. "It took four months to develop this information and during this process, members of this cartel were identified," the DCP said. On March 24, the police received a tip-off that two members of this cartel -- Dinesh and Nazir -- have collected a big consignment of heroin from Jharkhand and would come to Delhi to deliver the supply of contraband to one of their contacts. Subsequently, a police team was constituted which laid a trap at T point Delhi-Meerut Expressway near ISBT Sarai Kale Khan and apprehended both the accused. "Six kg of heroin, i.e., three kgs each from bags of both the accused was recovered. During the search of the car, another four kg of heroin was found hidden in a cavity created in the bottom of the backside seat of the car," the official said. During interrogation, both the arrested drug suppliers revealed that they are members of a big international narcotic drug cartel and were involved in supplying drugs in Delhi-NCR and parts of Uttar Pradesh for the last 5 years. Chennai, March 29 : A 55-year-old teacher was arrested in Tamil Nadu's Vellore district after a 13-year-old girl student of his class attempted suicide accusing him of molesting her several times. The class 7 student had complained to her parents that D. Muralikrishna was touching her inappropriately and that despite being warned, he was continuing with his indecent behaviour. Instead of supporting the child, the parents told her that she must have felt so as the teacher was old enough to be her grandfather. Police said that the attitude of her parents pushed the girl into acute depression and she attempted suicide by drinking varnish at her home on Saturday. The parents then approached the police and the teacher was arrested on Monday. The SHO at Tiruvallam police in Vellore district booked the teacher under Sections 7 (Sexual assault), 8 (punishment for sexual assault), 9 (aggravated sexual assault), and 10 (punishment for aggravated sexual assault) of the Protection for Children Under Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act of 2012. Tiruvallam police also said that he was booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Harassment of Woman Act 1998 and arrested the teacher. Police said that the condition of the girl is stable and she was recovering at a private hospital. Kiev/Moscow, March 29 : Two top officials in Chechnya have claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin has promoted Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to the rank of a Lieutenant General and he is currently in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol. Russian media cited Mohammed Daudov, head of the Chechen Parliament, and Akhmed Dudayev, the Minister for National Policy, Foreign Relations, Press and Information, as confirming the development, reports Ukrayinska Pravda. In a statement, Daudov said that "the Chechen leader's contribution to the victory over international terrorism in the Chechen Republic, and to the preservation of Russia's integrity cannot be overestimated". "In the next few days the city will be taken and cleared of nationalists and Nazis," he said. Kadyrov, according to Daudov, "came to Mariupol to talk, to raise morale, to provide additional technical equipment, and to adjust and refine the strategy for further actions in the next couple of days". On March 14, the Chechen leader had published a video on social media, saying that it was taken in Hostomel near Kiev. On Sunday, he posted a video of Chechen involvement in the siege of Mariupol, featuring Ruslan Geremeyev, who is believed to have masterminded the murder of opposition Russian politician Boris Nemtsov. Mariupol has been under a continuous siege by the Russian military, Ukrayinska Pravda reported. Since the Russian blockade in the coastal city began on March 1, some 5,000 people have been killed, 170,000 others still remain under siege, while 150,000 were evacuated, according to preliminary estimates. Of the 5,000 victims, 210 were children. Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War Msambweni Deputy President William Ruto has said leaders should not use State House to sow seeds of discord. He said at no point had he thought of overthrowing a Government he played a central role to form. Dr Ruto challenged leaders to use State House as a symbol of uniting the country. "It [State House] should not be a field of planting the seeds of hatred that will divide Kenyans," he noted. The Deputy President said he had supported President Kenyatta unconditionally when his current friends were against him. "Even if you do not support my presidential bid, do not use falsehoods against me," he pleaded. He said the President knows the truth about the impeachment allegations. "You know those are lies. You are the leader of all Kenyans, please protect the State House from propaganda." Dr Ruto said State House should not be used as a theatre to divide Kenyans along ethnic lines. He spoke on Monday in Msambweni where he held a public rally and campaigned for Kenya Kwanza. He was accompanied by Governor Salim Mvurya, Deputy Governor Fatuma Achani, MPs Khatib Mwashetani (Lunga Lunga), Aisha Jumwa (Malindi), Faisal Abdalla (Msambweni), Kassim Tandaza (Matuga) and Benjamin Tayari (Kinango). Other leaders were Kithure Kindiki (Tharaka Nithi), Kimani Ichung'wah (Kikuyu), UDA Chairman Johnson Muthama and Tana River Senatorial Aspirant Danson Mungatana. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Kenya Governance By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. Compared to his competitors, Dr Ruto noted that he stood a huge chance to transform Kenya. "This is an economic moment that will see every ordinary Kenyan go up the ladder," he explained. He said it was backward that some leaders were still talking about the change of the Constitution. Kwale Governor argued that it is through Kenya Kwanza that the country would move forward. "The other political group has no agenda for Kenya," he noted. Prof Kindiki regretted that more than four years had been wasted in attempts to review the Constitution through the Building Bridges Initiative. "It [BBI] was the most useless project in the history of our country," said the Tharaka Nithi Senator. Jumwa said Kenyans had already made up their mind that "it is the reform of the economy and not the constitution". New Delhi, March 29 : The Jindal-Surana Conclave, "Moot at 25 Years", commemorated the 25th anniversary of the law firm Surana and Surana International Attorneys (SSIA) in association with Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU) last week. Driven by its commitment to nurture advocacy skills among law students, SSIA has been collaborating with many law schools in India for holding various moot court competitions. The Firm has also been conducting essay and judgment writing competitions for law students on areas like Corporate Law, Criminal Law, Environment and Energy laws, Social Justice and Public Empowerment, and Technology. The Conclave was inaugurated by Justice M. M. Sundresh, Judge, Supreme Court of India, the Chief Guest of the Conclave, who said: "A lawyer is called a social engineer. Law and society are intrinsically connected with each other. Law has to change according to the needs of the society and law would in turn facilitate the change in the society. When we speak of society, we have to think of the units attached to it: art, belief, culture, custom, tradition, language, cast, community, economy, polity; everything comes within the larger generation of society. As a student of law, the primary objective is to understand the functioning of the society and in my view, it is the most important aspect." Dr. Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India & Member of Parliament in his special address, said that "while learning the art of advocacy, young lawyers need to be reminded that law is a profession and not a business. "The spirit of public service is what underlies a profession as opposed to a business. It is true that certain structures within law are very business-like and commercial, it is not to decry, belittle or diminish them, but it is to say that the idea at the base should not be forgotten, that ultimately you are doing a public service for society, even though you are paid for that and this applies the most to litigation lawyers." Prof. (Dr.) C. Raj Kumar, Founding Vice Chancellor, O.P. Jindal Global University and Founding Dean, Jindal Global Law School, in his presidential address observed that, the academic engagement by Surana and Surana International Attorneys is a striking example of the social commitment of a law firm towards legal education and legal profession. Taking the collaborations with law schools to their fullest potential, under the able leadership of Dr. Vinod Surana, the Firm has played a huge role in the promotion and advancement of mooting culture in India. The Firm's engagement has left an indelible impact on many law schools and law students. Reflecting on the larger theme of the Conclave, Prof. Raj Kumar put forth his dream for the future of legal education and legal profession. "I have a dream that the future of legal education will have a strong and substantive impact on promoting research, knowledge creation and sharing big ideas that can help us address the significant problems of law in our society," Prof. Raj Kumar said. "Second, I have a dream that the emphasis in the future in law schools would be on speaking truth to power and law schools will be able to strengthen democratic institutions and create independent thinking to influence society. I have a dream that the law schools of the future in India would not be confined to the narrow proposition of studying law but also focus on stronger interdisciplinarity with strong focus on liberal arts, humanities and social sciences. "No student can aspire to be an outstanding lawyer or a judge without having strong grounding in history, philosophy and many other disciplines. The law schools of the future will embrace technology but not be reluctant to challenge the use of technology recognising issues related to ethics and privacy. The future law schools will emphasise more strongly on experiential learning." Dr Vinod Surana, Managing Partner & CEO, Surana & Surana International Attorneys said: "This is an occasion to mark 25 years of successfully administering and hosting what has evolved into the world's largest moot court programme. This is also an opportunity to reflect upon the transformative forces which are driving and influencing the learning, the teaching and practice of law." The panel on "Access to Justice and Information Technology" observed that justice is a common good and technology must serve this common good. Courts have a pivotal role to play in bridging the digital gap. The second panel, "Future of Legal Profession" deliberated on the transformation technology has brought into legal profession. Discussing the theory and practice of moot courts in the panel, "The Idea of Moot Court: Pedagogy, Practice, or Pride", speakers focused on the pedagogic utility of moot courts and the extent to which it is underutilised. Emphasising on the relationship between theory and practice in the panel, "Future of Legal Education", the speakers observed that there should be active and intense collaborations between law schools and legal profession. Unless students are made aware of the social changes and become adept in the use of technology, they will find it challenging to succeed in the profession. Moderating the panel on the Future of Legal Education, Prof. Dabiru Sridhar Patnaik, Registrar, O.P. Jindal Global University said, "There are external factors affecting legal education today due to the globalised world that we live in. Hence, it's very important to understand how legal education should be conducted. The pandemic brought in a new set of challenges. Virtual learning, which was a supporting mechanism, has now become a primary activity and also made us revisit the origins of the foundations of law as well as the functioning of law school." In the Valedictory Session, the Guest of Honour, Vikas Singh, Senior Advocate and Former Additional Solicitor General, and President, Supreme Court Bar Association said: "Mooting is a great way of giving practical experience to budding lawyers before they actually enter into the profession. It's one way for you to realise how good you are on your legs. Surana and Surana were probably the first to start institutional mooting in the country. I hope they are able to do more so that students can get a first-hand exposure of how to stand and think and think on their feet." New Delhi, March 29 : Abhishek Banerjee, the MP and the relative of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who was summoned by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to join the investigation on Tuesday, in connection with an alleged coal scam case, has sought time from the agency. As of now he hasn't joined the probe on Tuesday. He was questioned for eight hours by the ED officials last Monday (March 21). After the questioning, he was asked to join the probe again on March 29 for further interrogation. Banerjee had last Monday told the media that the BJP was misusing the agencies and he wasn't afraid. His wife Rujira Banerjee, who was supposed to join the investigation on March 22, failed to come due to some family issue. It was said that she had to look after her children. She had said that she would reply through email. Abhishek Banerjee, however, had joined the probe and had spoken to the media after the questioning was over. "I have told the agency that I am willing to cooperate but why here in Delhi. There are elections in Bengal. BJP can't fight democratically and thus they are resorting to this vengeance politics. I am not cowed down. Bjp lost in 2021 and will again lose in 2024. This washing machine tactic is not going to work for long. If you want to fight, fight it democratically. They have been harassing me by calling me so many kms away," he had said. He had alleged that the way these agencies have been functioning, showed the BJP's dictatorship. "I will bow down before the power of people not before the people in power. They can't scare me. They are living in fools paradise," he had said. The ED had asked Abhishek Banerjee and his wife to join the investigation on March 21 and 22. On Tuesday, the ED officials were supposed to record his statement once again. His wife will be questioned separately. Banejree had on September 6 last year recorded his statement before the ED officials. He was interrogated for around six hours then. But the probe agency was not satisfied with his answer and was summoned again along with his wife. In September last year Banerjee and his wife, through their counsel, had moved a plea before the Delhi High Court against the ED summons. But they didn't get any relief from the High Court, which dismissed the plea on March 11, 2022. They had said in their plea that they were residents of West Bengal and had sought relief on that ground. Their contention was challenged by Tushar Mehta, the Solicitor General, who was appearing for the ED. He told the court that ED was not confined by any area under the PMLA. This case is being probed by the CBI and the ED. Both the agencies are doing parallel investigation. The CBI filed the case in November last year. New Delhi, March 29 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday asked the BJP MPs to organise programmes to make people aware about the initiatives taken by the government to ensure social justice. He was addressing the BJP Parliamentary Party meeting at Ambedkar International Centre here with party chief J.P. Nadda and MPs in attendance. A BJP MP said that Prime Minister Modi asked all those present in the meeting to reach out to Dalits and other sections of society ahead of Dr B.R. Ambedkar's birth anniversary on April 14 from April 6 (BJP's foundation day). "The Prime Minister asked us to spread awareness about various schemes started by the government to ensure social justice through various programmes like press conference, seminars and small meetings at our parliamentary constituency," another BJP MP said. The BJP MPs thanked Prime Minister Modi for extending the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana by six months to ensure that no one starves in the country, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Arjun Ram Meghwal said after the meeting. Both Prime Minister Modi and party chief Nadda asked the MPs to hold programmes from April 6 to 14 and interact with the people. "MPs have been asked to hold programmes at booth level to tell people about various initiatives of the government for social justice like PM Awas Yojna, Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana, free Covid vaccine and other various schemes for social justice," Megwal said. Srinagar, March 29 : A soldier was injured on Tuesday in accidental fire in Jammu and Kashmir's Kulgam district. Police sources said the soldier belongs to the 34 Rashtriya Rifles. "The soldier was injured when his service rifle went off accidentally during cleaning in Behibagh camp in Kulgam district. "The injured soldier was removed to the Army's 92 base hospital in Srinagar for treatment," sources added. United Nations, March 29 : The Unicef announced a new contribution of $7 million by Saudi Arabia to support the Fund's education programmes in the war-torn Yemen. According to the Unicef, the monetary aid will help increase access to quality education for girls and boys through formal, non-formal and alternative education opportunities, reports Xinhua news agency. The project aims to reach 578,000 children, 7,000 teachers and 54,000 community members in Yemen, it added. The grant brings recent Saudi contributions to Unicef to $22 million. Earlier agreements provided quality maternal and newborn health services and access to safe water for thousands of children in Yemen, said the UN agency. Protracted armed conflict, widespread economic collapse and a breakdown in national systems and services have left 72 per cent of the population of Yemen, including 12.9 million children, in need of humanitarian assistance. Unicef requires $484.4 million to respond to the country's humanitarian crisis this year. Chennai, March 29 : The Sri Lankan Navy has apprehended four Indian fishermen in the wee hours of Tuesday near Katchatheevu for allegedly violating the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL). Fishermen organisations of Tamil Nadu alleged that the Sri Lankan navy also seized one mechanized boat used by the fishermen. Since January, 87 Indian fishermen from Tamil Nadu were arrested by the Sri Lankan navy. While 42 fishermen were released after the Government of India's intervention, the rest are still languishing in jails at Jaffna in Sri Lanka. Fishermen organisations and families of fishermen have been protesting for the past two days at Mandapam and Ramanathapuram against the arrest and detention of Indian fishermen from Tamil Nadu. S.J. Jesudas, a leader of the fishermen association of Tamil Nadu, told IANS, "The fishermen of Tamil Nadu are subjected to regular arrests by the Sri Lankan navy and both the Government of India and the Tamil Nadu government are keeping quiet. It is to be noted that Sri Lanka has taken Rs 100 crore loan from the Government of India for their survival, still, the island nation's navy is arresting our fishermen and keeping them in jail." He said that the Sri Lankan Navy has seized the mechanized boats of the fishermen on earlier occasions and now also one more fishing boat has been seized. The Fishermen's leader said that the boats are being auctioned by the Sri Lankan authorities after giving advertisement in local newspapers. Mary Joseph, a fisherwoman at Rameswaram told IANS, "The situation here is very bad and our fishermen are reluctant to go to the sea fearing attack from the Sri Lankan navy. A new situation has arisen wherein fishermen from Sri Lanka are begging from our fishermen for uncooked rice and liquor as the economic condition in the island nation is very bad. However, the arrogance of the Sri Lankan navy is unfounded and they are even assaulting our fishermen before taking them to the mainland and producing them in courts." She said that the Government of India must immediately act and put an end to this issue once and for all. Chennai, March 29 : The unit of director Mari Selvaraj's 'Maamannan', featuring actors Udhayanidhi Stalin, Keerthy Suresh and Fahaadh Faasil in the lead, has wrapped the first schedule of the film. Director Mari Selvaraj took to Twitter to make the announcement. He tweeted, "'Maamannan first schedule wrapped." The film, which is being produced by Udhayanidhi Stalin's Red Giant Movies, has music by A R Rahman and cinematography by Theni Eswar. Both of Mari Selvaraj's earlier films -- 'Pariyerum Perumal' and 'Karnan' -- were critically acclaimed superhits. Therefore, his third film 'Maamannan' has triggered huge expectations. One other reason why the film is garnering attention is because actor Vadivelu will be seen playing a prominent role in the film. This will be the first time that the popular comedian is working with director Mari Selvaraj. New Delhi, March 29 : DMK Member Tiruchi Siva on Tuesday urged the government to spread awareness about the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences(POCSO) Act in all schools across the country. Raising the issue during Zero Hour in the Rajya Sabha, Siva stated that according to the data of National Crime Records Bureau(NCRB), over 40,000 cases have been registered so far under this act. These incidents of sexual abuses on the children below 18 years leave them in a mental trauma for long. He also said that the schools do not have adequate mechanisms to spread the awareness about this act, therefore, all the teachers and students must be made aware of its provisions. The DMK lawmaker also said that only 35 per cent schools and 32 per cent students are aware of the provisions of the act, therefore, it should be made compulsory in all schools so that the sexual offence against children is effectively prevented. IUML MP Abdul Wahab raised the issue of non availability of ships for Lakshadweep from Kochi. During the pandemic period, the number of ships was reduced but as of now, the ships have not been increased. Now people have to wait for weeks to go to the Lakshadweep. He requested the government to restore at least five ships as of now as this also affects the tourism in the UT. New Delhi, March 29 : US-based AI company Moveworks on Tuesday announced the opening of its first office outside the US. The new office, located in Bengaluru, will serve as its second headquarters, where team members will perform groundbreaking research and development, establish strategic partnerships and rise into senior leadership roles. Founded in 2016, Moveworks have raised $315 million in funding to date. The platform is powered by the latest techniques in natural language understanding (NLU), conversational AI, semantic search, and Collective Learning, which combine to automatically resolve issues in the workplace. "Moveworks is a rare opportunity for engineers: we are applying the bleeding edge of machine learning to help millions of people stay productive," Mihir Gore, Moveworks' Director of Engineering and India Site Leader, said in a statement. "Our India team is making our platform even more powerful by building deep integrations with other systems, and by providing customers with total visibility over their employee experience. Ultimately, we'll give every employee the support they need -- the moment they need it," Gore added. Whether employees need IT support, HR service, or a map of the new office, they can describe any issue to Moveworks to get the most relevant solution in seconds -- without any manual intervention. The company's expansion into India continues a year of rapid growth for the business. In 2021, both its revenue and its team size more than doubled; it now has more than 500 employees around the world. The company plans to double the size of its team in the next six months, with a focus on roles in research and development (R&D) as well as general and administration (G&A). New Delhi, March 29 : Indian companies are witnessing a higher attrition rate that is also set to fuel increment for jobseekers in the coming months, according to a report. Recruiters across the country are indicating a strong hiring sentiment for the first half of 2022. The Naukri Hiring Outlook Survey 2022 revealed that 57 per cent of recruiters indicated both new and replacement hiring in their organisations in the coming months till June 2022 vis-a-vis 51 per cent in last year's survey. Interestingly, 62 per cent of the recruiters expect the hiring to go back to pre-Covid levels in their organisations by June 2022. Active hiring is expected most in IT (59 per cent), business development (43 per cent), and marketing (36 per cent). Recruiters also expect attrition to rise further in the coming months. The majority of this attrition is expected from employees in the experience bracket of three to five years (51 per cent), followed by 1-3 years (45 per cent). The IT sector is expected to witness a high employee fallout rate of 49 per cent. It is interesting to note that the number of recruiters anticipating an attrition rate greater than 20 per cent grew by 33 per cent when compared with the previous survey conducted last year. As per the survey findings, the number of recruiters planning to roll out increments greater than 30 per cent in their respective organisations grew substantially by 60 per cent versus the previous outlook survey conducted in July 2021. At the same time, the number of recruiters foreseeing an increment below 10 per cent reduced from 37 per cent to 33 per cent. "The anticipation of returning to normalcy by companies is fueling a strong hiring sentiment as there has been pent up demand across sectors," said Pawan Goyal, Chief Business Officer, Naukri.com, in a statement. In the survey "57 per cent recruiters indicated a surge in both new and replacement hiring in their organisations, only 2 per cent recruiters foresee a hold on hiring, while just 1 per cent indicate layoffs for the coming months which indicates re-stabilisation after a turbulent period", he added. The campus hiring is also showing signs of improvement since last year, and several companies have also agreed on hybrid models. About 41 per cent Indian companies are gearing to kickstart work from office, while 42 per cent recruiters believe that work from home is equally productive as working in office while around 14 per cent recruiters said they would be back to office with a restricted team size. The bi-annual survey was represented by 1,879 recruiters and consultants in over 10 major sectors. Nairobi The 2021 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) exams top candidate Magata Bruce Mackenzie says he wants to join Alliance Boys. Mackenzie who emerged top after scoring 428 marks attributed his success to hard work and putting in extra hours. "I expected to pass but not being Kenya's top. Studying extra hours and in my free time is what has led to this success," he said as he acknowledged and thanked God for his success. He said he wants to become a Robotics Engineer after completing his University education. "I now have a good head start and I hope to fulfill my dream," he said. His mother expressed joy following his son's success even though she noted that she did not expect him to be ranked among the top performers in the country. "I knew he would do well but not this much. I give all the glory to God. Magata has been s a self-driven child and he has always given me easy time." In results released Monday by Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha, Momanyi Ashley Kerubo of Makini School in Kibos, Kisumu, was ranked the second best performer after garnering 427 marks. Magoha said that the third position was carried by six candidates who scored 426 points. "These are remarkable results and I congratulate the stars of the 2021 KCPE examinations," said Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha when he released the results. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Kenya Education By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. "There is no point of denying the candidates their examination results because of fees balances because in any cause it is known that primary school education is free in the country," he said. He assured that examination result slips will be released to all candidates who sat for the exams, even if they have fee balances. The Education CS maintained that no cases of exam leakage was reported in the country during the examination period. He, however, pointed out that 320 candidates in seven examination centers were involved in irregularities. He added out of 1.2 million candidates who sat for the KCPE exams 50.28 of the candidates were boys while 49.72 per cent were girls noting the country had achieved gender parity. He pointed out during the 2021 exams 12 counties registered more females than male candidates including, Mombasa, Meru, Kisumu, Kakamega, and Siaya, a drop from 20 counties in 2020. "We thank God the male child is starting to come up," he said. Magoha said that the number of candidates who were absent during the exams decreased from 12,424 in 2020 to 11,500. He lauded the teachers and parents for their good performance noting the challenges that the country faced during the period. He also said that the education calendrer in both primary and secondary schools will revert to running from January to December next year. New Delhi, March 29 : In two separate operations in Patna and Chennai, a man was arrested and 10 kg narcotic substances seized, the Narcotics Control Bureau said on Tuesday. In the first case, a man was held in Patna with 14 kg opium worth Rs one lakh. He was supplying opium through an SUV in Bihar. The NCB got a tip off about the accused and laid a trap following which the culprit was held and opium packed in polythene was recovered from him. The NCB is likely to seek his custody to know about his gang and aides. In the second case, the NCB team in Chennai intercepted a suspicious air parcel and recovered 10 kg pseudoephedrine, which was to be delivered in Australia. The NCB team had earlier also detected a few such parcels, and during the further investigation got more input about the pseudoephedrine parcel. "10 kg pseudoephedrine tablets worth Rs 25,000 were packed in 2 boxes with a fan each," tweeted NCB India. The parcels had been deftly packed in two table fans and after opening them, the narcotic substances were recovered, said an NCB official. Gandhinagar, March 29 : Gujarat Congress MLA Virji Thummar on Tuesday alleged that more than 30 lakh litres of adulterated milk is being consumed everyday in the state. Thummar was speaking in the state assembly. "I have got solid evidence in the form of reports based on milk samples taken by the authorities. I even discussed it with the former Animal Husbandry Minister, Bhupendrasinh Chudasama and he also acknowledged the fact. I believe that it is due to such adulteration that the public of Gujarat is suffering from diseases like cancer," said Thummar. Speaker Neemaben Acharya asked the Lathi legislator to provide evidence to the Minister so that action can be taken. "According to the information I received from sources, over 30 lakh litres of adulterated milk is being manufactured here in Gujarat and is consumed by the public everyday, which is very harmful. Although, the report says that even though the milk is found to be adulterated, it is not harmful. Despite this milk being duplicate and synthetic in nature, why is the report terming it as not harmful that needs to be investigated," said Thummar talking to reporters. New Delhi, March 29 : A BJP delegation will meet the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday evening demanding action against a Trinamool Congress MLA for reportedly threatening the party voters. Another BJP delegation will meet the chief electoral officer (CEO) of West Bengal in Kolkata. The BJP has alleged that Trinamool MLA from Pandaveswar, Naren Chakraborty is seen issuing open threats to BJP voters and supporters ahead of Asansol Lok Sabha bypolls. Sources said that a BJP delegation will meet the Chief Election Commissioner in Delhi at 5 p.m. and another delegation to meet CEO in Kolkata at 4 p.m. "BJP parliamentarians from West Bengal will be part of a delegation which will meet the Chief Election Commissioner to urge him to take action against Chakraborty for issuing threats to BJP voters," a party insider said. Earlier in the day sharing the video, West Bengal BJP co-incharge Amit Malviya tweeted, "TMC's Pandaveswar (Asansol) MLA Naren Chakraborty, is seen issuing open threats to BJP voters and supporters, asking them not to come out and vote, or else face consequences. Such criminals should be behind bars but in Bengal Mamata Banerjee patronises them. ECI must take note." Rajya Sabha member and BJP national media in-charge Anil Baluni tweeted, "Naren Chakraborty, MLA of Mamata Banerjee's TMC from Pandaveswar, is openly issuing threats to the voters of Asansol in a press conference saying that it will make difficult to stay in Bengal if they vote for BJP." Islamabad, March 29 : Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Tuesday left for China on a three-day visit, at the invitation of his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, to attend a conclave on Afghanistan, Dawn reported. According to a statement issued by the Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the third meeting of the Foreign Ministers of Afghanistan's neighbouring countries will begin on Tuesday and run through Thursday. Qureshi will also interact with his counterparts from participating countries, the statement added. The Ministry highlighted that Pakistan had initiated the Neighbouring Countries format in September 2021, "with a view to evolving a regional approach on the situation in Afghanistan". Pakistan had hosted the first such meeting on September 8, 2021. "Pakistan fully supports a regional approach on Afghanistan for promoting durable peace and stability in the region," the Ministry said in its statement. It further maintained that Pakistan will continue to support the international community's efforts to advance the shared objectives of a "peaceful, stable, sovereign, prosperous and connected Afghanistan". Prior to departing for his China visit, Qureshi said that Afghanistan must not be seen through a regional prism, but as a "shared and collective responsibility". March 29 : Not only Alia Bhatt, Ranbir Kapoor and their director Ayan Mukerji are celebrating Brahmastras wrap, the actors mothers, Soni Razdan and Neetu Kapoor along with the fans are also rejoicing the final wrapping up of the film after five long years. As soon as Alia and Ayan announced the wrapping up of the film on social media, Ranbir and Alias fans were overjoyed on Tuesday and shared their happiness on the comments sections. Ranbirs mom Neetu Kapoor and Alia's mother Soni Razdan also shared the news on their respective Instagram stories. Soni Razdan commented with a string of clapping emojis, while Neetu Kapoor wrote, "And finally it's a wrap." Mouni Roy, who also stars in Brahmastra, reposted the director's post and shared the news with her fans. Many others celebs including Shweta Bachchan, Anaita Shroff Adjania, Saqib Saleem and Abhimanyu Dassani also commented on Ayan's post as they wished him best for wrapping up his passion project. Brahmastra has been in the making for almost five years, since 2018. Besides other reasons for delay, the film was delayed multiple times due to the pandemic as well. Ayan Mukerji wrote on social media, 5 years since we took our first shot on the fantasy drama Brahmastra, and we have finally filmed our last one! Absolutely incredible, challenging, once in a lifetime journey!!! Some hand of destiny that we finished the shoot of Part One: Shiva in Varanasi, the city infused with the spirit of Shiv Bhagwan, and that too at the most sacred Kashi Vishwanath Mandir, allowing us to finish in the atmosphere of purity, joy and the blessings. Alia also wrote on social media that she had been wanting to say it for such a long time, that its a wrap. Today, finally she could write, We started shooting in 2018. And now finally .. The filming of Brahmastra (Part One) comes to an end!! Ive been wanting to say this for such a long time..ITS A WRAP!!!!!!!! See you at the cinemas. 09.09.2022." The film is set in two time-frames. The main story is set in present times where Shiva (Ranbir), who has some superpowers, travels 3000 years back in time to pre-Mahabharatha era to learn about weapons like Brahmastra in order to fulfil a mission in the present time. Ranbir Kapoor, Alia Bhatt and Amitabh Bachchan starrer Brahmastra will hit the big screens on September 9, 2022. The film also stars Nagarjuna Akkineni, Dimple Kapadia and Mouni Roy. The superhero film is written and directed by Ayan Mukerji, and produced by Karan Johar. It is a three-part epic fantasy film series. The film went on floors in Bulgaria in February 2018, and will be released in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Shanghai, March 29 : Amid an ongoing nine-day lockdown in Shanghai, more than 8.26 million people were screened in a new round of nucleic acid testing, a health official announced on Tuesday. Testing took place in areas including those lying to the east of the Huangpu River, which are under temporary closed-off management, Xinhua news agency quoted Wu Qianyu, an official with the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, as saying. Around 17,000 testing personnel from Shanghai and the surrounding provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang had set up 6,300 test sites in these areas, Wu said. In the last 24 hours, Shanghai reported 96 confirmed locally transmitted Covid-19 cases and 4,381 asymptomatic carriers. Due to a fresh Covid-19 resurgence since nearly a month now, the lockdown, which is the largest in China since the onset of the pandemic two years ago, came into force on Monday and it will be imposed in two phases. From 5 a.m. March 28 to 5 a.m. April 1, temporary closed-off management will be enforced in regions lying to the east and south of the Huangpu River, including Pudong and its adjacent areas, to carry out nucleic acid testing. Then from 3 a.m. on April 1 to 3 a.m. on April 5, similar temporary closed-off management and testing will be launched mainly in urban districts west of the Huangpu River. In affected areas, closed-off management will take place in residential communities and residents will be required to stay indoors, while non-contact delivery of necessities will be allowed. Besides, all enterprises, except those necessary for ensuring the people's daily needs and the city's operation, will run under closed-off management or have their employees work from home. Meanwhile, services including bus, subway, ferry, taxi and online ride-hailing will be suspended in the areas under closed management. Last week, the Shanghai Disney Resort said it would close until further notice, citing the "current pandemic situation". The latest measure in Shanghai comes after the entire Jilin province and the technology hub of Shenzhen were placed under lockdowns earlier this month due to a spike in local Covid cases. Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19) Mumbai, March 29 : Bollywood actor Saqib Saleem has finished shooting for the second season of Apoorva Lakhia's espionage thriller series 'Crackdown'. The shoot recently concluded in Jammu & Kashmir. The show with a suspenseful storyline at its core and power-packed performances, is expected to hit the digital screens in 2022. Commenting on the development, Saqib says, "I am extremely grateful that I got to bring Riyaaz Pathan to the digital screens. The team of the series synergised wonderfully and we were able to successfully finish the shoot in time." For him, living this character and playing him for the camera was a very fulfilling experience, something that he thoroughly enjoyed, "The journey of being Riyaaz through training and prep and embodying him before the camera was super fulfilling. I'm looking forward to its release. I hope to entertain the audience in a way that gets them to watch the series again." The series also stars Shriya Pilgaonkar, Mohammed Iqbal Khan, Ankur Bhatia, Rajesh Tailang, Waluscha De Sousa and Ekavali Khanna in pivotal roles. Apart from the series, Saqib Saleem will be also seen in the horror comedy 'Kakuda' along with to Sonakshi Sinha and Riteish Deshmukh and is awaiting the release of first his production 'Double XL', which stars Sonakshi Sinha and his sibling Huma Qureshi. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text Beijing, March 29 : Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will host the third Meeting of Foreign Ministers of Afghanistan's Neighbouring Countries this week. Analysts said the meeting on Wednesday and Thursday will focus on humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people and call on the US to return the Afghan people's assets, the Global Times reported. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin announced that Foreign Ministers or representatives from Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are scheduled to attend the meeting in Tunxi. Wang Yi will host the meeting, and acting Foreign Minister of the Taliban-led Afghan government Amir Khan Muttaqi will attend. The Foreign ministers of Indonesia and Qatar will also be invited to join as special guests, according to Wang Wenbin. The meetings comes at a time when international attention has largely moved to the Ukraine crisis from the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. The meetings in China will call on the world to continue to assist Afghanistan and pool resources for the war-torn country, Zhu Yongbiao, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies in Lanzhou University, told the Global Times on Monday. "The neighbouring countries may also call on the US to fulfil its responsibility to Afghanistan, unfreeze the assets of the Afghan people and help with its rebuilding," Zhu said. Panaji, March 29 : India is the 'preferred security partner' in the Indian Ocean region, which reflects India's ability to play an effective strategic role in the region and need to expand its operational reach, Chief of Naval Staff Admiral R. Hari Kumar said on Tuesday. Speaking in Goa at the commissioning of the Indian Navy's second P-81 aircraft squadron, 'INAS 316', Kumar also said that the commissioning of the new squadron marked another milestone towards enhancing maritime security and surveillance in the Indian Ocean Region. "With the commissioning of INAS 316, we will be inducting four new P-8Is, delivered under the Option Clause with Boeing. These aircraft, with advanced maritime patrol radars, state-of-the-art acoustic suites, EO/ IR equipment, air-to-ship missiles and torpedoes, are substantial capability enhancers," Kumar said. "While the potent assets of the Indian Navy, would continue to innovate and enhance their combat role to meet security challenges of the future - the commissioning of INAS 316, will certainly enhance our operational capabilities across the three domains of maritime operations - sea, air and sub-surface," he added. Christened as 'Condors', the INAS 316 are considered one of the largest flying land birds with a massive wingspan. The insignia of the squadron depicts a 'Condor', a bird known for excellent sensory capabilities, powerful and sharp talons and large massive wings symbolises the capabilities of the aircraft and envisaged roles of the squadron. A statement issued by the Indian Navy also said that the INAS 316 will operate the Boeing P-8I aircraft, a multi-role Long Range Maritime Reconnaissance Anti-Submarine Warfare (LRMR ASW) aircraft, that can be equipped with a range of Air-to-Ship Missiles and Torpedoes. "The 'Game Changer' aircraft is a potent platform for Maritime Surveillance and strike, Electronic warfare missions, Search and Rescue, providing targeting data to Weapon platforms, providing time-critical surveillance information for IA and IAF and is also the platform of choice for detecting and neutralising enemy ships and submarines in Indian Ocean Region," the statement said. "The squadron has been specifically commissioned to be the home for the four new P-8I aircraft procured under the Option Clause contract and to Deter, Detect and Destroy any threat in the IOR," it added. The aircraft have been operating from the Goa-based naval base INS Hansa since December 30, 2021 and the squadron is integrated with full spectrum surface and subsurface Naval Operations. New Delhi, March 29 : The Uttar Pradesh government has told the Supreme Court that a decision on filing an appeal challenging bail granted to Ashish Mishra in the Lakhimpur Kheri violence case "is pending consideration before the relevant authorities". Refuting the allegations that it did not oppose bail granted to Mishra by the Allahabad High Court in February this year, the Uttar Pradesh government in a counter affidavit said that Mishra's bail application was vehemently opposed by it and any averments to the contrary in the special leave petition (SLP), filed by the family members of victims, are completely false and merit to be rejected. "Furthermore, the Impugned Order being of 10.02.2022, the limitation period against the same is still running, and the decision to file SLP against the same, is pending consideration before the relevant authorities," said the affidavit. The family members of the farmers, mowed down by a car belonging to Mishra, in Lakhimpur Kheri had moved the top court challenging bail granted to him. He is the son of Union Minister and BJP MP Ajay Kumar Mishra. The victims' families have claimed that the state has not filed an appeal opposing bail granted to Ashish Mishra. The top court is scheduled to hear the matter on Wednesday. Advocate Prashant Bhushan, representing the family members of the victims, had told the Apex Court that one of the witnesses in the matter was attacked and the attackers threatened him saying that Mishra is out on bail and the ruling party has also won the elections and that they will see to it. Responding to this allegation, the Uttar Pradesh government said that during the course of investigation a gunner, assigned to protect the witness as per apex court order, and three independent eyewitnesses to the incident were examined. All the four persons stated that the incident occurred suddenly due to an altercation between the witness and the attacker party over throwing of 'gulal' on him, added the affidavit. On March 16, the top court had asked the Uttar Pradesh government to file a detailed affidavit in connection with an attack on one of the witnesses in the matter. Detailing on the incident, the state government said on March 10 at around 8.15 p.m., the witness came towards the primary school near Danga, on a tractor trolley laden with sugarcane and his police gunner was with him at that time. The government said the witness objected when some people threw 'gulal' at him, which led to an altercation between him and the others, in which one of the miscreants hit him with a belt and others kicked and punched him. The affidavit added that all the witnesses claimed that none of the miscreants mentioned Mishra or the ruling party winning the elections, and that the incident was a result of a sudden altercation due to the dispute over Holi gulal, and had no relation to the incident of October 3, 2021. The state government contended that the attempt by the petitioners in the SLP and application for additional documents to conflate and connect the two incidents is completely unwarranted. The government added that the accused in the attack on the witness were arrested on March 11, and they were granted bail on March 14. The affidavit said as per the top court orders, the families of all the victims and all the witnesses whose Section 164 statements were recorded, have been receiving continuous security under the Witness Protection Scheme 2018. In November last year, the Supreme Court appointed Justice Rakesh Kumar Jain, a former judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, to monitor the Lakhimpur Kheri violence probe. The top court also reconstituted the SIT investigating the incident and appointed IPS officer S.B. Shiradkar, as its head. Mishra was arrested on October 9 last year in the case. On October 3, 2021, eight people, including four farmers, were killed in Lakhimpur Kheri in clashes during a farmers' protest. The East African Community Heads of State are set to convene for the 19th Extra-Ordinary Summit of the EAC Heads of State, set to take place virtually, on Tuesday, March 29, the bloc's Secretariat announced Monday. As noted, the Summit is expected to consider the report of the Council of Ministers on the negotiations between the EAC and the DR Congo on admission of the latter into the EAC. The Extra-Ordinary Summit will be streamed live on the EAC website - www.eac.int alongside other EAC social media platforms. The Summit is preceded by the 48th extra-ordinary meeting of the EAC Council of Ministers, which took place earlier on March 25 to consider the provisional agenda and programme of the EAC Summit on admission of the DR Congo into the bloc. Nearly three years after making a formal application, in June 2019, the DR Congo could be officially admitted into the Community when an extraordinary Heads of State Summit convenes. Soon after the Summit on Tuesday, EAC Secretary General, Peter Mathuki, is expected to hold a virtual press conference to brief the media on issues. The process of DR Congo's entry started when Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi on June 8, 2019, wrote to then EAC Chairperson, President Paul Kagame, expressing his country's wish to be a member of the bloc. Regional leaders on February 27, 2021 considered the application by DR Congo to join the Community and directed Ministers to expeditiously undertake a verification mission in accordance with the EAC procedure for admission of new members. When, on January 17, 2022, negotiations paving way for the vast country's admission were launched in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, Kinshasa reaffirmed its willingness to be part of the bloc. During the January launch in Nairobi, DR Congo's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Christophe Lutundula Apala Pen'Apala, said his country was looking forward to increased trade and investment, and strengthened relations with the EAC. A few weeks later, the report of the negotiations was presented to the Council of Ministers. The leaders are likely to usher in in country's accession phase which literally concludes the admission process. The private sector has urged Heads of State to direct relevant government bodies to fast track the admission of the DR Congo. By become the seventh member, the DR Congo is expected to bolster the bloc's economic potentialthrough various ways including opening the corridor from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, hence expanding the economic potential of the region. Four stages for DR Congo admission The procedure for admission of the DR Congo, or any other new member, entailed four stages. First was a verification exercise; then there were negotiations with the country on its admission to the EAC directed by Summit. Mid last year, a verification team was deployed in the country. It submitted its report to the Council of Ministers in December 2021. What follows now will be eventual official admission; and the ultimate deposition of the instrument of acceptance of the terms of admission by the country within six months of its admission. Earlier, Mathuki noted that DR Congo's intention to join the Community was not by default since it shares borders with five partner states - Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan. The role of the negotiations with the DR Congo was to establish its readiness to comply with the set six criteria as stipulated under the EAC Treaty and the bloc's procedure for admission. The six criteria include: acceptance of the Community as set out in the Treaty; adherence to universally acceptable principles of good governance, democracy, the rule of law, observance of human rights and social justice; potential contribution to the strengthening of integration within the region; geographical proximity to and inter-dependence between the foreign country and partner states; establishment and maintenance of a market driven economy; and social and economic policies being compatible with those of the bloc. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines East Africa Business Governance By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. The negotiations also took into account the country's profile and established, among others, its level of compatibility with the EAC's stages of development in trade liberalization and development; co-operation in investment and industrial development; coordination in monetary and financial matters; development of infrastructure and services; development of human resources; and the development of agriculture and natural resources. Lucknow, March 29 : Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and the Leader of Opposition in the state Assembly Akhilesh Yadav, on Tuesday, welcomed the unanimous election of Satish Mahana as Speaker and promised to positively contribute to the functioning of the house. Speaking on the occasion, Yogi Adityanath said it is a welcome sign for the state that two 'wheels of democracy' (ruling and opposition) had moved in one direction. He appealed to both the ruling and the Opposition members to work together for the development of the state. Leader of Opposition Akhilesh Yadav termed the unanimous election of Speaker a "beginning of a healthy tradition". "You have come from the right (BJP) but I hope you will look more towards the left (opposition)," he said. He further said: "It will be your duty to safeguard the rights of the Opposition and prevent the government from becoming dictatorial." The eight-term MLA, Satish Mahana, was on Tuesday declared elected as Speaker of the 18th UP Assembly without a contest. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text San Francisco, March 29 : Tech giant Google is reportedly working on a Face Unlock feature for Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro smartphones. According to a noted XDA Forum contributor, the new Android 12 Quarterly Platform Release Beta 1.1 build contains a new change that references the face unlock system. XDA Recognized Developer Freak07 has unearthed new evidence that Google is still working on adding Face Unlock on the Pixel 6 series. While digging the new Android 12 QRP3 Beta 1.1 build, they found a new change related to the feature in the PowerHAL config file, reports XDA Developers. Freak07 noted that Google does not generally push device tree changes of developer previews or beta releases to their Git. This suggests the possibility that Google might still be working on Face Unlock, and it could make its way to the Pixel 6 Pro via a future software update. However, whether that turns out to be the case remains to be seen, the report said. Earlier reports revealed that the Face Unlock feature was internally called "Tuscany" and that Google was working on reducing its impact on the battery. The flagship phones were expected to debut with face unlock, but the security feature was reportedly dropped at the last minute. However, the devices only launched with an in-display fingerprint sensor. New Delhi, March 29 : The Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), youth wing of BJP, on Tuesday held a meeting to brainstorm strategies to bring the party to power in non-NDA ruled states. In the meeting held at party national headquarters here, BJYM national president and Lok Sabha member Tejasvi Surya, presidents, in-charges, co-incharges from non-NDA ruled states were present. During the meeting, those present discussed strategies to bring the BJP to power in non-NDA ruled states. The state presidents submitted a detailed report on issues taken up politically for agitation in the last one year and the impact of these events in those states. "The BJYM also discussed its political strategy to tackle the non-democratic and unconstitutional acts of these state governments," it said in a statement. Surya said that it is pertinent that the BJYM assists in uprooting the undemocratic and corrupt governments in non-NDA-ruled states in the next Legislative Assembly elections and pave the way to establish clean and transparent BJP governments in these states. "This will enable better coordination with Narendra Modi's government at the Centre and help the states join the path of achieving remarkable economic progress," Surya said. Surya suggested the state leaders exercise their duties by helping the general public in full capacity and by pointing out to the state government instances of misconduct and unfair discharge of powers. He asked the BJYM office-bearers to make the presence of the Youth Wing felt in each of the non-NDA-ruled states. "The BJYM needs to work like a bridge to make the general public aware about the public welfare policies of the central government led by respected Prime Minister Modi and the repressive decisions of the non-NDA government of the states. The non-NDA government of the state takes the credit for the good work of the Centre and blames its failures on the Centre," Surya said. He further stated that the people of the country have realised that it is only the BJP government, led by Prime Minister Modi, that is working for the benefit of the citizens and safeguarding its interests. "In the next Legislative Assembly elections, the people in non-NDA-ruled states will surely elect the BJP to power," Surya added. Gandhinagar, March 29 : Gujarat Irrigation Minister Hrishikesh Patel on Tuesday said that the Centre decided to stop the Par-Tapi-Narmada (PTN) river-linking project to avoid the displacement of tribals in the affected region. He was speaking in the Assembly during a discussion on the irrigation department's demands proposed by the BJP government in Gujarat. "The tribals, especially those in the Ambaji to Umargaon belt, felt that a large portion of their community in the affected region will be displaced. Respecting their concerns, Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel and the party decided against the project," he said. "Nareshbhai Patel, Ganpatbhai Vasava and many other MLAs from South Gujarat went and met Union Jal Shakti Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and requested that this feeling be conveyed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On behalf of the Gujarat government, I thank the PM and Amit Shah for dropping the project respecting the tribal communities feelings," added Patel. In her Budget speech last month, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced that river-linking projects, including the PTN project, will be carried out by central government. The PTN project was opposed by a majority of the tribals in south Gujarat and the opposition Congress party has been supporting the community. Panaji, March 29 : Former Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram should share his formula of wealth growth with India's industrialists, Goa Minister Mauvin Godinho said on Tuesday, shortly after the senior Congress leader took a sarcastic dig at the composition of the newly sworn-in Goa cabinet. "Does he realise that people in India have not slept from the day they have learnt, P. Chidambaram used his intellect... for furthering his son's ends, his own ends. He has done business in multiple countries. He has done business in this country where his wealth has multiplied manifold," Godinho told reporters while reacting to Chidambaram's tweet. "So many quantum jumps, thousands of crores. I wish he gives the formula to industrialists in this country so that the wealth multiples as many times as his and his son's wealth multiplies. And he has the gumption to comment on our ministry on members of the cabinet?" Godniho also said. On Tuesday, the former Union Finance Minister had tweeted: "The people of Goa may not have slept in peace last night knowing the kind of government and ministers they have got. Are Messrs Pramod Sawant, Vishwajit Rane, Mauvin Godinho, Ravi Naik and Babush Monserrate the leaders who will bring about change or development?" Sawant and eight cabinet ministers were administered oath to office and secrecy on Monday. Godinho also claimed that Chidambaram had also represented him in a corruption case filed against him in the past, while questioning his inclusion in the Congress leader's tweet. "Does he know, he is a lawyer. P. Chidambaram forgot that he once appeared for me in this same very case and he said what nonsense they have done. Ask him. My lawyers had gone to him and he appeared for me. I can prove with records that he appeared for me. So how can he comment against me," Godinho said. "Had he used his intellect, had he used his intelligence capacity, to further the finance in this country, I would have been very happy. Instead he used it for himself, his son and you know how much the wealth multiplied, that is why he is facing multiple cases. And he comments on us?... He should learn political decency," Godinho also said. Amaravati, March 29 : The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) celebrated its 40th formation on Tuesday with the party's national President and former Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu called for a renewed struggle for the reconstruction of Andhra Pradesh. Naidu recalled that it was in this day in 1982, N.T. Rama Rao floated the TDP and demonstrated the power of Telugu self-respect to the whole world. Stating that the "motherland" is now facing an existential threat under the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) rule, he said it that everyone has a duty to fight with self-confidence to regain Telugu pride. In a video message to the Telugu NRIs, the TDP chief lauded the Telugu diaspora for taking an active part in Janmabhoomi rural development works for the construction of motherland. Naidu said that the state has fallen back into the hands of forces of destruction. "Time has come to rededicate ourselves to restore Telugu pride," he said. The former Chief Minister claimed that in its long journey, the TDP had weathered and overcame many obstacles. "NTR laid strong foundation for the party's pro-poor welfare agenda. He ushered in bold reforms by scrapping the Patel-Patwari system to end suppression," he said. He recalled that the Rs 2-a-kKg rice scheme introduced by NTR became a model for the entire country and it was the beginning of food security currently being implemented. Naidu asserted that in the united Andhra Pradesh, the TDP laid the foundation for a vibrant knowledge economy by developing infrastructure projects in IT and other sectors. Huge wealth creation had enabled greater scope for poverty alleviation. Children of farmers and poor families went to all corners of the world, took up jobs and sent back money for their parents, he added. He said after the 2014 bifurcation, the TDP regime came out with a grand plan to create new opportunities for the Andhra Pradesh people by developing Amaravati on the lines of Hyderabad. However, the present government stalled Amaravati and also chased away industries. There has been no development in the past three years, he said. The TDP chief termed it as a matter of pride as the party NRI units were celebrating 40th foundation day in over 200 cities spread over 40 countries. The NRIs in Europe extended timely help to bring back the stranded Telugus in the war-torn Ukraine. The NRI TDP units were responding immediately with a sacred duty to help those in need of help in times of emergency. Naidu said since its inception, the TDP has been giving top priority to poverty eradication and finding solutions to the problems of people. The party has now completed four decades of committed services to the people. Earlier, in a tweet, Naidu asserted that the TDP would always stand for development, welfare and equal distribution of power among all sections. The TDP would go down in history as the only political party that had passed on the benefits of reforms to the village level. On March 29, 1982, N.T. Rama Rao, a popular Telugu actor, formed the TDP on the slogan of Telugu self-respect. NTR, as he was popularly called, created a record of sorts by coming to power within nine months of forming the party. NTR died in January 1996, a few months after his son-in-law Naidu led a revolt against him to become Chief Minister of then undivided Andhra Pradesh. Naidu led the TDP to power in 1999 and remained Chief minister till 2004, when Congress wrested power. After bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, the TDP formed the first government in the residuary state. In 2019, the party lost power to the YSRCP led by Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy. Mumbai, March 29 : The Maharashtra government on Tuesday informed the Bombay High Court that it has withdrawn an order to demolish illegal constructions in the bungalow owned by Union MSME Minister Narayan Rane. Advocate General Ashutosh Kumbhakoni made the submission before a division bench of Justices A.A. Sayed and M.S. Karnik. The statement followed a plea against the March 21 order of the Collector ordering Rane to remove the alleged unauthorised constructions carried out in the bungalow failing which the authorities concerned would raze it. Kumbhakoni also said that the government will consider any application by Rane seeking regularisation of the purported illegalities before taking action in the matter, and the court allowed the state liberty to initiate any fresh necessary action in accordance with the law. Even as a huge row erupted between the Maha Vikas Aghadi government and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, Rane had challenged the Collector's order citing various grounds. These included that there was no show cause notice preceding the order nor a reply sought, no hearings were conducted prior to passing the order, it was without jurisdiction or powers and arbitrary, violated the fundamental rights of the petitioner, etc. Following the state government's submissions, the high court disposed of Rane's plea. New Delhi, March 29 : Himachal Pradesh Urban Development Minister Suresh Bhardwaj on Tuesday called on Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri and sought extension of timeline of the Smart City Mission till September 30 to enable the state to award all works. He said the state would complete awarding a majority of works by March and some projects needed clearances under the Forest Conservation Act that caused the delay. Bhardwaj further requested to consider funding the state on 90:10 pattern under the Smart City Project as it faces several challenges being a hill state. He said the state is not in a position to contribute Rs 1,000 crore for both Shimla and Dharamsala under the Smart City Mission. "Himachal Pradesh is getting funds on 90:10 pattern under various government schemes like AMRUT and Swachh Bharat Mission." He demanded enhancement of allocation under AMRUT 2.0 scheme and thanked the government of India for covering all 68 urban local bodies and cantonment boards along with Shimla and Kullu towns. The Union Minister heard the demands and assured of all possible assistance, an official statement said. New Delhi/Jaipur, March 29 : A fire broke out in Rajasthan's Sariska Tiger Reserve following which the Indian Air Force (IAF) sent two helicopters to bring the blaze under control, officials said on Tuesday. The IAF said that on a request from the Alwar district administration for assistance in controlling the fire that has spread over large areas in Sariska Tiger Reserve, it has deployed two Mi 17 V5 helicopters for the Bambi Bucket operation. "The operation is underway," the IAF said. The fire began on Monday evening. The cause of the fire is yet to be ascertained. Villagers residing in the periphery of the fire-affected areas have been moved to safety. New Delhi, March 29 : Short-term interventions addressing the current energy crisis must be accompanied by a steadfast focus on mid- and long-term goals of the energy transition. High fossil fuel prices, energy security concerns and the urgency of climate change underscore the pressing need to move faster to a clean energy system, says World Energy Transitions Outlook 2022. Launched by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) at the Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue on Tuesday, the agency's Outlook sets out priority areas and actions based on available technologies that must be realised by 2030 to achieve net zero emissions by mid-century. It also takes stock of progress across all energy uses to date, clearly showing that the current pace and scale of the renewables-based transition is inadequate. "The energy transition is far from being on track and anything short of radical action in the coming years will diminish, even eliminate chances to meet our climate goals," said Francesco La Camera, Director-General of IRENA. "Today governments are facing multiple challenges of energy security, economic recovery and the affordability of energy bills for households and businesses. Many answers lie in the accelerated transition. But it's a political choice to put policies in place that comply with Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Agenda. "Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure will only lock-in uneconomic practices, perpetuate existing risks and increase the threats of climate change." "It is high time to act," La Camera added. "Recent developments have clearly demonstrated that high fossil fuel prices can result in energy poverty and loss of industrial competitiveness. Eighty per cent of the global population lives in countries that are net-importers of fossil fuels. "By contrast, renewables are available in all countries, offering a way out of import dependency and allowing countries to decouple economies from the costs of fossil fuels while driving economic growth and new jobs." The Outlook sees investment needs of $5.7 trillion per year until 2030, including the imperative to redirect $0.7 trillion annually away from fossil fuels to avoid stranded assets. But investing in the transition would bring concrete socioeconomic and welfare benefits, adding 85 million jobs worldwide in renewables and other transition-related technologies between today and 2030. These job gains would largely surpass losses of 12 million jobs in fossil fuel industries. Overall, more countries would experience greater benefits on the energy transition path than under business as usual, according to the Outlook. Renewables would have to scale-up massively across all sectors from 14 per cent of total energy today to around 40 per cent in 2030. Global annual additions of renewable power would triple by 2030 as recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). At the same time, coal power would have to resolutely be replaced, fossil fuel assets phased out and infrastructure upgraded. The incident happened between Katari and Rijana train stations, en route Kaduna from Abuja. Fidet Okhiria, the managing director, Nigeria Railway Corporation (NRC), has confirmed the attack on the Abuja-Kaduna train by suspected bandits on Monday night. Mr Okhiria, however, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that "information concerning the attack was still sketchy, and no concrete information could be given at the moment. "We have confirmed the attack, but we cannot give you much information right now. "From the reports we have gotten, most of the passengers have gone into hiding and the officials on board are yet to give us report of the situation. "There are reports of gunshots and the train derailed due to the attack," Mr Okhiria said. NAN gathered that the incident happened between Katari and Rijana train stations, en route Kaduna from Abuja. Bhubaneswar, March 29 : The economic offence wing (EOW) of Odisha police has arrested two fraudsters from Mumbai for cheating over Rs 2 crore from a businessman of Odisha. The accused persons are identified as Rakesh Kumar Girija Shankar Pandey and Sarman Singh Tomar. Both the accused were arrested on March 26 and have been brought to Odisha on transit remand, police said on Tuesday. The arrest was made against a case registered on the basis of a complaint filed by one Ashok Kumar Singh. As per the allegation, Rakesh, Sarman and seven others have cheated more than Rs 2.02 crore on the pretext of financing Rs 100 crore to Ashok Kumar Singh for his business. During investigation, the EOW found that Sarman Singh Tomar runs an illegal Hawala business in Mumbai and Rakesh Pandey, a native of Uttar Pradesh, is a veteran fraudster/criminal/extortionist having numerous criminal cases against him in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. The police seized debit cards, credit cards and cheques of different banks, mobile phones, one pistol with eight rounds of live ammunition and cash of Rs 50,000 from the possession of Rakesh Pandey. The EOW further informed that Rakesh Pandey is involved in at least 15 crimes like fraud, dacoity, robbery, swindling, forgery and attempt to murder registered at different police stations of Mumbai, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. His involvement in other such cases is under verification, the officials said. The investigation of the case is continuing. Efforts are on to identify and arrest the remaining accused persons of the gang and to unveil their involvement in hawala transactions, they added. Istanbul, March 29 : During the talks between the Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Istanbul, the parties discussed an agreement on international security guarantees for Ukraine, a ceasefire and the resolution of humanitarian issues in Ukraine. Adviser to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Mykhailo Podoliak at an interim briefing in Turkey said: "Intensive consultations are underway on several important issues. The key one is the agreement on international security guarantees for Ukraine. Only with this agreement can we end the war as Ukraine needs it. An equally important issue is the ceasefire so that we can address the humanitarian problems that have accumulated", Ukrayinska Pravda reported. Podoliak added that "today we have another problem, it is getting bigger and bigger -- the problem of escalating war, escalating hatred, escalating violations of rules of warfare not only on the battlefield". According to him, calls are sometimes being made on air to destroy certain nations; the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war is also being violated. The Armed Forces of Ukraine will ensure that the rights of Russian prisoners of war are not violated and expect the same from the Russian side. Podoliak stressed that both sides must abide by the conventions and stop violating them. The Foreign Minister of Ukraine, Dmytro Kuleba stated that the Ukrainian delegation at the talks with Russia in Turkey does not plan to discuss the referendum. Sources in The Financial Times reported that Russia had allegedly withdrawn its demands on Ukraine regarding "de-Nazification", "demilitarization" and the status of the Russian language in Ukraine. Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text New Delhi, March 29 : A whopping 93 per cent Indians are planning to spend more or the same on travel in 2022 compared to a typical pre-pandemic year, according to a report. The American Express Travel: Global Travel Trends Report showed that Indian travellers are looking to adopt the new normal. Overall, Indians think travel will be less stressful this year than last year and many are looking forward to regaining control over their trips in 2022 after feeling overwhelmed last year. The survey report is based on 3,000 travellers from seven countries including the US, Australia, India, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and the UK. It reveals that the motivation to travel for 48 per cent Indians is for discovering new experiences, 46 per cent for relaxing and 45 per cent for exploring new destinations. About 96 per cent agreed they like to eat and shop at local businesses to support the local economy. "After two tough years, the travel sentiment amongst Indian travellers is upbeat where spending time with loved ones is a top priority," said Manoj Adlakha, SVP and CEO, American Express Banking, India, in a statement. "With the resumption of all regular international flights and the upcoming summer holiday season, we are seeing a surge in travel bookings amongst our card members for both international and domestic travel," he added. Majority of Indians agree they want to have a positive impact on the community they are visiting and want to travel to destinations where they can immerse themselves in the local culture. Travelling responsibly is of high importance for the respondents as 94 per cent stated they would take a 'greencation' and 93 per cent are more likely to book travel with a brand that is committed to improving its environmental impact, ranking highest than their global counterparts. About 69 per cent of respondents agree they want to travel to their dream destination this year. Five in ten respondents shared they are willing to travel solo now to visit their dream destination. Nearly 92 per cent agree that they are willing to book a trip for 2022 even if they might have to cancel or modify it later. Bengaluru, March 29 : The victim in a landmark judgment case which ruled that sexual assault even by the husband is rape, has appealed to other sufferers to speak up if they are going through a similar traumatic experience. On March 24, Karnataka High Court Justice M. Nagaprasanna dismissed the petition of the accused husband in the case seeking to quash the legal proceedings against him. The judge had pronounced that sexual assault even by the husband is rape. In the order the bench has noted that Section 375 (rape) of the IPC is not progressive but regressive. Speaking to IANS, the young victim who got relief by the verdict shared her experience of brutal sexual assault by her husband. "I was quiet regarding the matter for 11 years," she said. "I had become a sex slave to my husband right from the day of my marriage. I was compelled and forced to have unnatural sex by imitating sex films. My husband forced me to have sex even after my pregnancy and continued to have sex even after my baby got terminated," she said. "I didn't tell my mother. I didn't even go to my parents home. I was able to share what happened to me only after learning of the plight of another victim of sexual assault. I came out of depression and dared to speak about my experience." Speaking about the court's judgment, the victim stated that she awaited the order for five years. The ruling should have come much earlier. "Itna tadpaya humko, aisa lag raha tha ki useeke saath hi hoon," she said. "My husband is totally inhuman and he forced me to have sex in front of my daughter and on many occasions he had beaten her and had forcible sex with me. There was continuing sexual harassment which no female in the world would like to express. I am in pain from knowing that my husband had sexually harassed my daughter by bringing her early from school. I do not want any daughter or mother to undergo the suffering which both me and my daughter have undergone," she stated. The bench has directed the jurisdictional POCSO court to also register a case under section 377 (unnatural offences) of the IPC, which is a more heinous crime than section 376 (rape) of the IPC. The stay issued on the trial of the case was also vacated after 4 years, said senior advocate Ramananda who represented the victim. Ramananda explained that "the investigation has not proceeded properly as per the POCSO Act. The prosecution had not supported the case. As per the Supreme Court guidelines, the trial should have ended within 6 months. Because of the delay, the accused secured bail and shockingly the lower court said the victim is dragging the case." The bench headed by Justice Nagaprasanna considered all these factors while giving the verdict and described the ordeal of the victim as 'ghastly'. The bench in its judgment said that the entire issue springs from the complaint registered by the wife alleging brutal sexual acts by the husband against her, as also sexual abuse of the child. It therefore becomes necessary to notice the complaint and its ghastly narration. The bench talking about the chargesheet submitted by the police opined that it also has graphic details of the demonic lust of the accused who according to the investigation had unnatural sex, torturing or abusing his wife, or threatening to beat the daughter or beating the daughter, all for the satisfaction of his gory carnal lust. The bench in its order noted that the communications made or the letters written by both the wife and the daughter are so chilling and abhorrent that they cannot be reproduced in the order. After consideration of all aspects the bench refused to quash the proceedings against the husband. "A man is a man; an act is an act; rape is a rape, be it performed by a man, 'the husband', on the woman, 'wife'. The judgment said the Constitution, a fountainhead of all statutes depicts equality. But, when it comes to Section 375 of the IPC the exception springs. "In my considered view, the expression is not progressive but regressive, wherein a woman is treated as a subordinate to the husband, which concept abhors equality." It is for this reason that several countries have made such acts of the husband penal by terming it marital rape or spousal rape. Marital rape is illegal in 50 American states, 3 Australian states, New Zealand, Canada, Israel, France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia and several others, the verdict said. Ramananda explained that he was working for a social cause in this case. Senior Supreme Court advocate Indira Jaisingh had contacted him and heard the matter and assured that she will appear for the victims in the Apex court, if needed, he claimed. The victim said that Ramananda had given her food, shelter and also got her daughter admitted to a school. "I lost my father at a very young age. He is taking care like a father. Without him, coming from a north Indian state, I would not have survived here. My daughter is a rank student. It is my dream to make her an IAS officer. Afterwards, I will get back to meditation and support other victims like myself," she added. The daughter, who is also a victim of sexual abuse, told IANS that she will fulfil her mother's wish and help other girls who have suffered like her. "I avoid friends in school but have a good rapport with teachers. Sometimes I feel sad and depressed. I feel like hanging my father." San Francisco, March 29 : Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced that the electric vehicle company's head of AI, Andrej Karpathy, is on a four-month sabbatical, and people are worried since other Tesla executives have left after going on sabbatical. The news comes as Tesla expands its Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta to Canada, reports the auto-tech website Electrek. While Tesla has built a strong AI team, Karpathy is still seen as a critical part of the automaker's effort to achieve full self-driving. That is why many were worried to have not heard from him, and now the CEO revealed on Twitter that the AI expert is on a four-month sabbatical. "Taking some time off to rest and travel after almost 5 years at Tesla. Especially excited to get focused time to re-sharpen my technical edge and train some neural nets! Though I already miss all the robots and GPU/Dojo clusters and looking forward to having them at my fingertips again," Karpathy wrote on Twitter after Musk made the announcement. This is nonetheless getting some Tesla fans and investors worried because that's how it started for other Tesla executives in the past, the report said. For example, Doug Field, Tesla's former senior VP of engineering, took a leave of absence to "recharge and spend time with his family" back in 2018. At the time, Tesla reassured everyone that Field had not left the company. A few months later, it was revealed the Field would not be returning from his leave of absence. It was revealed that after almost five years at Tesla, Field return to Apple. More recently, he joined Ford. New Delhi, March 29 : The Embassy of Israel and Mashav India, in collaboration with Jain Irrigation Pvt Ltd, have donated a family drip irrigation kit to Shaurya Foundation Trust in Haryana for empowerment of persons with special needs. This initiative was organised on the occasion of Good Deeds Day and to celebrate 30 years of Diplomatic Relations between Israel and India. The drip irrigation kit will be used towards education and skill development of persons with special needs. This Israeli-invented technology will make them aware about smart agricultural technologies and water conservation. These skills will also help them in becoming self-sufficient for their future endeavours. Plants were also donated on this occasion. The Embassy and Mashav India will provide technical know-how to the trainers of the trust, who will then implement it on the ground. This will lead to optimal water usage and conservation in the area. Orly Goldschmidt, Head of Public Diplomacy, Embassy of Israel in India, said: "We couldn't have found a better match than Shaurya Foundation Trust to partner on this International Good Deeds Day. "I am really happy that we could play a small part in this important project, by offering them a drip irrigation system and allowing them to use it in order to give more skills to their people with special needs. Looking forward to seeing the fruits of this partnership." Thiruvananthapuram, March 29 : It was a proud moment for 87-year-old former director general of police V. Subramaniam when his elder son Raj Subramaniam took over as the President and CEO of FedEx, the US-based multinational transportation and courier delivery giant on Monday. Advising his son to be totally devoted and committed, the former top police officer who lives in a flat near here, said: "I specifically told him that he should be loyal to the company with impeccable integrity." He called his family an out-and-out FedEx family as Raj's wife Uma quit a top post in FedEx following conflict of interest. "Their 25-year-old son, who has been working with FedEx for the past four years, will quit in May to pursue his management programme. My second son Rajiv Subramaniam has also been working with FedEx in the IT division for more than two decades," he said. Raj studied at the Loyola School here till Class 10. "After his Class 10, I wanted him to explore India and sent him to Mumbai and after two years he joined IIT Mumbai where he did his chemical engineering. Then he got full scholarship to do his MS in the US. Soon after, he joined a management programme and won a gold medal," said Subramaniam. He returned to India and got married after completing his management studies. Later, when he went back to the US, he learnt that FedEx had come to their campus for campus selection. A person from Chennai was selected. That person was from the biggest industrial group in Chennai and he did not join. "Soon my son called up FedEx and expressed his keenness in working with them. He was called for an interview and he joined the company in September 1991," he said. He said his son last came here before the Covid pandemic struck as he hardly gets time because of his tight schedule. Owing to his advanced age, he is not able to travel much now and the last he went to the US was seven years back, Subramaniam said. Since his doctor (retired) wife is also not keeping in good health, the couple will be tracking their son's growth trajectory from their flat. Subramaniam replaces Frederick W. Smith, chairman and CEO, and will become the Executive Chairman of the company. New Delhi, March 29 : Odisha Chief Minister and BJD chief Naveen Patnaik's visit to Parliament on Tuesday created a buzz about the upcoming Presidential polls likely to be conducted in June-July. During his visit, Patnaik, who is the senior-most Chief Minister in India at present, being in power since 2000, met the MPs of his party, as well as his Assam counterpart and BJP stalwart Himanta Biswa Sarma and DMK leader T.R. Baalu. However, as per sources, Patnaik, asked about his BJD's preferences in the presidential polls, did not give an unequivocal answer. "There is still time for the Presidential elections so no thoughts on that for the moment," he said. The BJP has a majority in the Parliament, but in terms of big states - which are key in the election, has seen its strength reduce in UP while several other big states are ruled by opposition parties, whose unity can make the situation tense for the party. BSP supremo Mayawati has termed reports of her being a candidate as "rumours" while West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee had warned the BJP that the Presidential election will not be an easy task for it because they don't have even half of the legislators of the country. "Regional forces, such as the Samajwadi Party, may have been defeated but they are stronger now," she had said, adding that opposition parties have more MLAs across the nation. The electoral college, comprising 776 MPs of both the Houses and 4,120 MLAs of all the states and Union Territories, has 1,098,903 votes, and a majority is 549,452 votes. As far as the value of votes is concerned, Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of votes, approximately 83,824, followed by Maharashtra and West Bengal. Chandigarh, March 29 : Punjab NRI Affairs Minister Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal on Tuesday said the government has decided to appoint nodal officers in all 23 districts for the ease of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), besides setting up of special courts in Amritsar, Patiala, Ludhiana and Bathinda districts. Chairing a high-level review meeting with officials of the NRI Affairs Department and members of the NRI Commission, he issued directions that the appointment of the nodal officers should be made in a transparent manner and working of these officers should be reviewed by the Deputy Commissioners on a regular basis. Dhaliwal said the government has continuously been working with full zeal and commitment to resolve the issues of Punjabis residing in foreign countries and requisite directions have also been issued to Special Chief Secretary of the department. Special courts will be set up in districts of Amritsar, Patiala, Ludhiana and Bathinda to resolve cases related to NRIs in time-bound manner and directions have been issued to the department to initiate the process, he added. Dhaliwal said the state would also coordinate with the Union government and embassies to resolve the problems of NRIs. The government would honour the NRIs who have done commendable work in various walks of life, he said. Mumbai, March 29 : Kunal Kemmu, who is playing the title role in the web series 'Abhay 3', says as an actor he is getting more creative satisfaction now than ever thanks to the growth of OTT. In the latest season of 'Abhay 3', the story takes different turns and twists with how the investigating officer is decoding the murder mystery done by a bunch of people who practice witchcraft. Asked about his interpretation of supernatural power, Kunal told IANS: "As an audience, I enjoy watching horror and supernatural genre of films and show because it really gives me that thrill and edge of the seat experience. But at a personal level, I am not really interested in knowing the existence of dark power, something that we are exploring in the new season of the show." Considering the fact that Kunal has been living with the character of 'Abhay' for last three seasons and the world of the story deals with crime stories, the actor mentioned how those stories used to shock him. He answered, "Initially the first two seasons were more shocking for me because some of them were based on the real account. Those were horrifying and shocking, to say the least. Yes, some of those criminals existed in real life and they were medically sick and needed help. There is a reason why they call psychopaths. When as an actor I am living a character like SP Abhay Pratap Singh, I tried to keep it between action and cut and not carry them home." "As an individual, I am completely opposite of who Abhay is, so I live him only on-screen. I worked and build the character only to live on-screen and not to carry any hangover of it in my real life," he added. Being an actor who has always appeared in experimental films be it - 'Kalyug', 'Go Goa Gone', 'Traffic Signal', 'Dhoondte Reh Jaaoge', and also in 'Golmaal 3', Kunal said how it is only now with OTT, he is getting the work that he always believed in. "From the beginning of my career, I always believed in a certain kind of cinema and that was not a regular affair in mainstream Bollywood. So, all my passion-driven choices were limited. I do not complain because I understand that the commercial aspect in mainstream Bollywood was prioritised. "But now that the section of audience, who had the appetite of watching offbeat stories, that they used to only get from the international show, is celebrating our 'desi kahaani' on OTT, actors like us are getting creative satisfaction with good content. I am happy with the work I am doing these days," Kunal signed off. Directed by Ken Ghosh, 'Abhay 3' also features Asha Negi, Vidya Malvade, Vijay Raaz - and is releasing on ZEE5 on April 8. Rwanda's Minister of Trade and Industry, Beata Habyarimana, has said business growth between Rwanda and Zimbabwe must be facilitated for the benefit of the region. She said this at the ongoing Zimbabwe Rwanda Trade and Investment Conference in Harare on Monday. The conference follows the first one, which took place in Rwanda last year, and gives impetus to the two countries' efforts to strengthen commercial ties and accelerate the implementation of mutual programmes and projects. Speaking at the event Habyarimana commended the efforts by Rwanda Development Board and Zimtrade in forging business relationships between the two countries. She said there was need to build on progress made from the last conference and facilitate business growth between the two countries. "This conference comes at an opportune time in forging bilateral relations between the two countries and I commend Zimtrade and RDB in their efforts to promote bilateral trade and investment opportunities between the two countries Our cooperation has indeed grown exponentially in the last five years with agreements signed in various sectors of common interest such as education. From this conference we need to facilitate business growth between Rwanda and Zimbabwe so that we enhance trade between African countries," Habyarimana said. The President of Zimbabwe Emmerson Mnangagwa who was the guest of honour said trade volumes between the two countries must reach full potential. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Rwanda Business Zimbabwe By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. "The cordial excellent relationship between Rwanda and Zimbabwe should continue to spur the growth of businesses across various sectors of the economy. We have the collective responsibility to shift the trend which was characterised by low trade volumes between our two friendly countries despite the huge potential," the Zimbabwean president said. Zephanie Niyonkuru, the Deputy CEO of RDB, said that the partnership between the two countries was also important for other countries in the region. "Since the conference we held last year, we saw more businesses getting registered. We want to make sure that we increase the contribution of our members of the private sector to the development of our two nations. This will not benefit only us but also countries within the region," Niyonkuru said. The conference's theme is 'Explore, Invest, Export,' which reflects the generally held belief that trade, investment, and exports are vital drivers of long-term socio-economic development and growth. The conference, which runs till March 31, is being attended by 60 Rwandan businesses and close to 200 Zimbabwe business people and senior government officials. Two Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) in the areas of trade, investment and climate change and an implementation agreement with Zesa Holdings were signed presided over by the President of Zimbabwe. Hyderabad, March 29 : A war of words broke out between Telangana's ruling TRS and opposition Congress on Tuesday after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's tweets over procurement of paddy from Telangana farmers. With Gandhi slamming both the BJP government at the Centre and the TRS government in the state for failing to procure paddy, TRS leader K. Kavitha joined issue with him. Kavitha, a state legislator and daughter of Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, advised Gandhi not to just resort to tweets for political mileage but extend support to the TRS demand for uniform procurement policy for the entire country. Kavitha took to Twitter to respond to Gandhi's earlier tweets in Telugu. She wrote that every day, TRS MPs are going to the well of ths house in the Parliament demanding that there should not be one procurement policy for Punjab and Haryana and another policy for other states. "If you are sincere, come to the well and protest in support of TRS MPs. Demand one nation one procurement policy," Kavitha told him Congress MP incharge of Telangana Manickam Tagore hit back at Kavitha, asking her not to play with Telangana farmers by 'one nation one procurement' demand. "Nothing personal against you. Kindly don't take the Nizamabad defeat to your heart. It's the same Turmeric farmers who defeated TRS because TRS couldn't keep the promise to farmers," tweeted Tagore referring to the defeat of Kavitha in Nizamabad Lok Sabha constituency in 2019 when several turmeric farmers had filed their nominations. Stating that farmers want their paddy to be procured for a decent price, Tagore warned Kavitha that if they play with farmers, then what turmeric farmers did to her in Nizamabad will happen to the TRS in 2023. He urged her to tell KCR not to play with farmers of Telangana. Kavitha then hit back, this time targetting Gandhi. "This arrogance reduced your party into double digits in the same parliament. Win or lose, I did not run away from my constituency like your ex-CP Rahul Gandhi did. Also, I did not contest two seats like your ex-CP," she tweeted, tagging Gandhi. Stating that the TRS is demanding 'one nation one procurement policy', she wanted to know the stand of Rahul Gandhi on this. "TRS will always be with the farmers & won't rest until every gram of Telangana paddy is procured," she added. The exchange of words did not end with this as Manickam Tagore tweeted again to tell Kavitha that TRS MPs are not in the well of the Lok Sabha but "are in the Central Hall tasting Dhokla and Biryani". "Let's not forget who signed an agreement in August 2021," he wrote referring to the agreement signed between the Telangana government and Food Corporation of India (FCI) over procurement. State Congress chief A. Revanth Reddy also tweeted that Telangana government had signed an agreement in August 2021 that it will not give boiled rice to FCI, and "the signature on the agreement has now become the noose around Telangana farmers' neck". New Delhi, March 29 : The Supreme Court on Tuesday told the project proponent to not continue with construction activities in connection with Rs 2,000 crore extension of the commercial Karwar port in Karnataka. After hearing arguments in the matter on the plea filed by a fishermen association, a bench headed by Chief Justice N.V. Ramana issued notice to the Karnataka government and others.e Senior advocate Devadatt Kamat and advocate Amit Pai, representing the petitioner, questioned the validity of the high court judgment passed on July 29, 2021, declining to entertain the association's plea against the project. Senior advocate Maninder Singh, representing DVP Infra Projects Private Ltd, contended before the top court that halting the construction activity would escalate the costs. However, the bench replied that beaches and environment can't be destroyed, and also made an oral observation against carrying out further construction activities. The plea contended that Karwar is an ecologically sensitive area, therefore, the environmental clearance given to the 2nd stage expansion of the commercial Karwar port by the state level authority is bad in law. "For the said expansion, only the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change could have given prior environmental clearance upon the recommendation of the Expert Advisor Committee (EAC)," added the plea. It further contended that it is also a Critically Vulnerable Coastal Area (CVCA). Counsel representing the petitioner insisted that there should be status quo on the project and pointed out that construction commenced based on environmental clearance (EC) granted from state-level authorities on January 23, 2019. The plea contended that this EC was in contravention of the Environment Impact Assessment notification of September 14, 2006. The plea claimed the high court did not pay heed to the livelihood of the fisherfolk, which would be adversely impacted by the project and added that Karwar is notified as a "ecologically sensitive areas" as per 2011 and 2019 notifications. The plea contended that the project of the 2nd Stage Expansion of the Karwar Commercial Port has the impact of directly and adversely impacting the right of the people to enjoy the beach. --IANS ss/vd A Patna, March 29 : The Patna police have registered an FIR against 11 unidentified persons for allegedly gang raping a 17-year-old girl in Faridabad, an official said. The victim is a native of Patna's Rajiv Nagar locality. She alleged that the woman landlord of her friend was involved in the flesh trade in Patna and was having interstate links. The victim along with her minor sister came in contact with the woman named Priyanka Devi in February this year. The accused told them that she knew a saint in Faridabad in Haryana who could perform rituals to make them wealthy. "The victims came under the influence of Priyanka Devi and reached Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay railway station (Mughalsarai) where a youth met them. They were taken to Varanasi and then boarded another train bound for Delhi. The victims were then taken to a house in Faridabad city," as per the FIR. "There were 10 more persons present in the house of the alleged saint. The victim was asked to sit for a Puja. As the victim's sister was menstruating, they had not included her in the Puja. and asked her to stay outside. The sister became suspicious and fled from the house. The victim was still inside the room and was given prasad to eat. As soon as she ate the prasad, she went into a semi-conscious state. Following that the so-called seer and 10 men gang raped her. After committing the crime, they removed the clothes of the victim, put bundles of currency notes alongside her and made a video clip," the FIR stated. "The victim was held captive for the next couple of days and taken to Varanasi on March 3. The victim managed to escape from the clutches of the accused and returned to Patna," the FIR said. "The victim revealed her ordeal with Priyanka Devi. When the victim threatened to go to the police, Priyanka offered her money and also warned her not to reveal the incident to anyone. Priyanka was also applying pressure on the victim to go to Faridabad again," the FIR stated. The victim finally decided to go to the police station and lodged a complaint against Priyanka and 11 other persons. "We have registered an FIR against one woman and 11 unknown persons for gang raping a minor girl under POCSO Act. The investigation is currently underway," said Saroj Kumar, SHO of Rajiv Nagar police station. Istanbul, March 29 : Russia has "drastically" reduced its military activity near Kiev and Chernigov as talks with Ukraine enter the "practical" stage, the deputy minister of defense Alexander Fomin announced on Tuesday. Speaking to the press following the talks with the Ukrainian delegation, Fomin said that "a decision was made to drastically, in several times, reduce the military activity on the approaches to Kiev and Chernigov." "We expect that relevant key decisions will be taken in Kiev and the conditions for further normal work will be created," he said, RT reported. Fomin called on Ukraine "to fully abide by the Geneva Conventions, including with regard to the humane treatment of prisoners of war." He explained that this decision was taken due to the fact that "negotiations on the preparation of an agreement on the neutrality and non-nuclear status of Ukraine, as well as on the provision of security guarantees to Ukraine" are entering "the practical phase." Reduction of Russian forces' activity is poised "to increase mutual trust and to create the necessary conditions for the further development of negotiations and the achievement of the ultimate goal of agreeing and signing the agreement," Fomin said, RT reported. Further details will be announced by the Russian General Staff upon the return of the Russian delegation from Istanbul, where the negotiations were taking place, to Moscow. Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War New Delhi, March 29 : In the late 19th century, Justice Syed Mahmood, son of the great social reformer Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, and the first Indian judge of the Allahabad High Court, became an icon of judicial resistance to British colonialism at the apex of British power across the world. Appointed to the High Court at the remarkably young age of 32, he displayed during a tenure of just six years that law without a conscience was merely a facade for the perpetration of injustice. A number of his dissenting judgments became a template for reference by future generations, Mohammad Nasir and Samreen Ahmed write in "Syed Mahmood: Colonial India's Dissenting Judge" (Bloomsbury). Outside of law, his largely invisible but wide-ranging intellectual corpus engages with questions related to colonial transformation of education and its reconciliation with Muslim identity, national integration and religious tolerance. His role in the making of Aligarh Muslim University, presently celebrating its centenary, was notable, but survives only as a footnote in history. This book chronicles the triumphs and tragedies of Syed Mahmood's life, and his contribution to shaping the consciousness of modern India. It succeeds in exhuming a seminal figure from the dust of history and demonstrates how the past continues to speak in the present. Mohammad Nasir is Assistant Professor in the Department of Law, Aligarh Muslim University. He has written on legal and socio-political issues for the Hindustan Times, Indian Express, Wire and OPEN. He co-edited the Special Centenary Issue of the Aligarh Institute Gazette, a periodical started by AMU founder Sir Syed in 1866. Samreen Ahmed is a legal researcher and writer based at the Aligarh Muslim University. Her academic writings have been published in the Economic & Political Weekly. New Delhi, March 29 : Assam and Meghalaya on Tuesday signed an accord to resolve the 50-year-old boundary dispute when Chief Ministers Himanta Biswa Sarma and Conrad Sangma signed an agreement in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, the chief secretaries of the two states and other officials of the Home Ministry. Describing as the historic day for the northeast, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said that this will usher in a new era of peace, harmony and progress in both the states. This accord paved the way for resolving the interstate boundary disputes at six places out of 12 which comprise 70 per cent of the boundary, he added. "In 2019, there was an agreement between the armed groups in Tripura. The Bru Reang Agreement, signed on January 16, 2020, which benefited over 34,000 people. The historic Bodo Accord was signed on January 27, 2020, ending the 50-year-old problem without disturbing Assam's geographical entity format and without disturbing its original character. Then, the Karbi Anglong agreement was reached in September, 2021 and today this agreement and about 70 per cent of the border between the two States has become dispute-free," Shah further said. He said the development of the northeast is not possible unless disputes between states are resolved and armed groups do not surrender. He thanked the Chief Ministers and officials of both the states on behalf of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Central Government. Speaking about the pact, Meghalaya CM Conrad Sangma said: "Of the 12 areas of difference, we have come to an agreement with Assam on six areas. Further, a survey will be done by the Survey of India with both states' involvement, and when that's done, the actual demarcation will take place." The Assam and Meghalaya governments had come up with a draft resolution to resolve the border disputes in six of 12 regions along their state boundaries. Assam and Meghalaya share 885 km long border. The agreement aims to resolve differences in six "areas of differences", that comprise nearly 70 per cent of the total boundary. New Delhi, March 29 : The 2022 National Poker Series India, which began on March 6, concluded in style as winners from Rajasthan and Goa ruled the final three tables of the event, the organisers said on Tuesday. The final three tables of the NPS 2022 were played at Majestic Pride, Goa from March 23-25, 2022 between the top poker players of India. Shagun Jain from Jaipur, Rajasthan claimed the top spot on the NPS podium (medal leaderboard) with four gold medals and two silver (50 points) and won a package of Rs 10 lakh while Rohit Begwani from Churu, Rajasthan ended in the second position with four gold medals (40 points) and a package worth Rs 7.5 lakh. The third spot on the podium was taken by Dhaval Doshi from Mumbai with one gold and three silver (25 points) and has received a package worth Rs 2.5 lakh. "All the three podium finishers will be heading to Las Vegas to represent India on the largest stage of Poker in the world," the organisers said in a release. The final tables saw top Indian players battling it out for glory. The first final table was "NPS Super High Roller". The table was won by Kartik Ved from Goa who clinched gold, Vipin Pantola from Haldwani, Uttarakhand bagged silver while the third place and bronze medal went to Gokul Raj from Goa. They took home Rs 22.09 lakh, Rs 15.50 lakh and Rs 9.97 lakh, respectively as prize money. The second final table was the "NPS Main Event" which again saw Goa claiming the top spot with Chirag Sodha (Rs 44.84 lakh) clinching gold, the surprise came in the second spot with Riteish Kumar (Rs 39.34 lakh) from the small town of Gumla in Jharkhand clinching silver while the third spot and the bronze medal went to Ashutosh Balodhi (Rs 20.90 lakh) from Delhi. On the final day of the event, "NPS Golden Rush" took place. The event which had a Rs 550 buy-in and saw nearly 15,000 entries was won by Sankesh Kumar A Jain from Chennai (Rs 9 lakh) taking home the gold medal. The silver medal was won by Arbaaz Ahmed (Rs 7.01 lakh) from Bengaluru, Karnataka followed by the bronze medal by Dilip Kumar (Rs 4.38 lakh) from Jalore, Rajasthan. The top five states which registered the greatest number of medals include Maharashtra (46 medals), New Delhi (36 medals), Rajasthan (35 medals), Uttar Pradesh (27 medals), and Haryana (21 medals). Over the course of NPS, 252 medals were awarded across 84 tournaments. Mumbai, March 29 : As Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi epic 'Dune' swept six awards at the 94th Academy Awards, it also brought home an accolade for India with its Best Visual Effects win, comfortably edging out 'No Time to Die', 'Spider-Man: No Way Home', 'Shang-Chi' and 'Free Guy'. The VFX for 'Dune' has been done by DNEG, a studio headed by Namit Malhotra, third-generation film industry entrepreneur. This year, incidentally, two of DNEG's projects found their way into the recent edition of the Oscars -- 'Dune' and 'No Time to Die' -- but it was Villeneuve's epic that eventually clinched the prized gold statuette. Eldest son of Bollywood director Naresh Malhotra ('Yeh Dillagi', 'Achanak', 'Kranti' and 'Dil Ka Rishta') and grandson of M.N. Malhotra, the cinematographer, Namit is the founder of Prime Focus Limited, which is billed as the world's largest independent integrated media services company. DNEG was born out of the merger of Prime Focus and Double Negative, a London-based VFX studio. 'Dune' marks the seventh Oscar win for the studio after Christopher Nolan's 'Tenet', 'Interstellar' and 'Inception', Alex Garland's 'Ex Machina', Villeneuve's 'Blade Runner 2049' and Damien Chazelle's 'First Man'. In a conversation with IANS, Namit spoke about what the Oscar win means for DNEG. He said: "'Dune' is a very special film for us. I have been talking about how there is a pre-'Dune' and a post-'Dune' world in the VFX space simply because of what we were able to achieve. I am very proud of the work that my team has been able to put together with 'Dune'." He added: "For a film such as 'Dune', it wasn't just an effort to create big VFX moments, but to be able to do justice to the story and tell it through our visual work. This is just the beginning of what is to come and there's no stopping now." Namit's journey has been a long one marked by constant learning and a keen eye for business combined with excellence. After enrolling in a computer graphics school in 1995, Namit launched his own editing studio called Video Workshop, operating from his father's garage. He partnered with three of his teachers from the graphics school and brought them on board as co-founders. The mid-90s was the beginning of the era of economic liberalisation, which, among other things, opened up a wide market for outsourced audio-visual work in India, an opportunity that Video Workshop capitalised on and delivered work for several television shows and serials. Soon, Namit merged Video Workshop with his father's company, Video Works, a film production equipment rental business, to create Prime Focus, which eventually merged with Double Negative in 2014. Listing the challenges faced by DNEG while working on 'Dune' and 'No Time to Die', Namit said: "The biggest was that one is a modern-day action spy thriller and the other transcends into what humanity's possible future could look like as imagined in 1975." A big moment for him, Namit said, was to be able to bring, for the first time in the 60-year history of the franchise, a James Bond movie into the visual effects category at the Oscars. He continued: "That is a big step forward, knowing that we had a different approach to visual effects when compared to 'Dune'. James Bond is all about making sure that he's capable of doing anything. That is the character. That is what he does. It is very close to reality." As for 'Dune', Namit said the "visual effects crew ensured that all post-production work remained as realistic as possible". He added: "Each VFX element was designed to heighten the photorealism of Villeneuve's immersive vision, which has introduced a whole new generation of fans who have never read the book. Whenever someone watches 'Dune' they will discover new things, new details about the world." Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting Anurag Thakur recently took to Twitter and congratulated DNEG for their Oscar win. He tweeted: "Congratulations to DNEG, VFX & Animation Studio led by CEO Namit Malhotra, on winning the #Oscar in the 'Best Visual Effects' category for their team's work on 'Dune'! India is leading the way in the AVGC sector, we're geared up to meet the global demand w/ our innovations & talent." AVGC is the abbreviation for Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics. In her Budget Speech last month, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said a task force would be set up "to build domestic capacity to serve our markets and global demand". Asked by IANS about how this win would push the envelope for India and enable the country to project itself as a VFX soft power, Namit responded: "The work we produce is not just out of India, or London. What we do is so seamless that it is impossible for people to differentiate where it was done. Today, if we are going to make Indian movies and stand against Western movies, or any other films in the world, we have got to be able to take on that challenge." He added: "I believe we can take it on very comfortably. I feel with the way our business is growing and evolving, we have a tremendous opportunity to do that. Because India has its own treasure of characters and stories and history, there is no limit to what we can create and how much we can create for the audience. We haven't even scratched the surface yet. But now, I can confidently say that there is no barrier that we Indians cannot breach." As for all the VFX aspirants, who follow him closely and wish to work with him some day, Namit has an important life lesson to share: "Nothing comes easy. Artistes have to adapt to the process of unlearning and learning continuously with the evolving demands in the industry where every day there's something new that comes to the table." He concluded by saying: "If you've truly got what it takes to transform the future of visual storytelling, we've got a platform that will enable you to do so. But It all boils down to passionate professionalism where there are no boundaries to do great work." Latest updates on Oscars 2022 New Delhi, March 29 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday held a meeting with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MPs from Gujarat to discuss the party's strategy for the year-end assembly polls. All Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha MPs from Gujarat attended the meeting held at the Prime Minister's official residence in the national capital. BJP chief JP Nadda, Home Minister and Lok Sabha member from Gujarat Amit Shah, BJP national general secretary (organisation) BL Santhosh and Union Minister Pralhad Joshi were also present in the meeting. Sources said the Prime Minister asked the MPs to reach out to the people with the government development and welfare measures. "PM Modi told all the MPs present in the meeting to tell people about the public welfare schemes of the Central government to each and every village of Gujarat. The party has decided to contest the election on a development agenda," sources said. It was learnt that MPs were told to use social media to explain to the people about the government's work. "We are asked to make a short video and share it with each voter through WhatsApp group. The video will tell about the work of the Union and the state government. The MPs will also be asked to highlight their own work for their parliamentary constituency," a BJP MP said. This was the second meeting of the BJP MPs from Gujarat with Prime Minister Modi in a week. On March 24, Modi had met BJP MPs from Gujarat. In the last meeting, the Prime Minister asked the BJP MPs about their work in the parliamentary constituency and discussed issues related to the state. "PM Modi asked about the work we are doing in our area and advised us to work for the people," an MP from Gujarat had said after the meeting held last week. Bengaluru, March 29 : Karnataka Education Minister B.C. Nagesh has clarified that there is no proposal before the government to take over Madrasas, where minority Muslim students study. "We have not discussed anything with Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai in this regard," he said. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Nagesh, however, said that the required education and skill set is not being imparted to students in madrasas. The education imparted is not suitable for the competitive world. If they (madrasas) come forward, it can be considered, he said. The students studying in madrasas should get the education that is being provided to other children. The curriculum which is taught in the education department is not there in madrasas, Nagesh said. The minority department is running madrasas. The children studying there should become doctors, artists and engineers like any other students, he underlined. Commenting on rumours of the lesson on erstwhile king of Mysuru, Tipu Sultan being dropped from the school syllabus, the Minister said, there is no such plan. However, he said there are certain things which are written on the basis of imagination. The facts which are baseless and are written without proof would be removed, he said. The content which has documentary and historical proof will have to be prescribed for children, he said and assured that he will answer all the questions in this regard next week. The discussion on this matter is a figment of somebody's imagination. The lesson on Tipu Sultan will not be dropped from the syllabus, he reiterated. "Our intention is to educate children on real history. If any proof is available for the title of 'Lion of Mysuru' given to Tipu Sultan, it will be retained. The glorification part would be taken off," minister Nagesh maintained. Talking about the absence of 20,994 students from SSLC (class 10) examination, he said, there is no connection between hijab and absence of students. More number of students got enrolled thinking that they will be passed without examination like last year, he maintained. President Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders attending a high-level meeting of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on Monday observed a moment of silence to mourn the victims of China Eastern Airlines plane crash. The moment of silence, proposed by Xi, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, was observed at the start of a meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee. The China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 aircraft crashed into a mountainous area in Tengxian County, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, on March 21. All 132 people on board were dead, according to the national emergency response headquarters for the accident. Investigation is still underway to find the cause of the crash. ECOWAS Court rules that the section of Nigeria's cybercrime law is not in conformity with Articles 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The ECOWAS Court of Justice has ordered the Nigerian government to amend the controversial section 24 of its cybercrime law which is widely viewed as authorities' weapon for muzzling citizens' rights to freedom of expression. The court gave the decision on March 25, 2022 in Accra, Ghana, a statement by the court's information unit stated on Monday. In the decision, the court ruled that the contested section 24 of Nigeria's Cybercrime (Prohibition, Prevention, etc) Act, 2015 "is not in conformity with Articles 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)." Keikura Bangura, the presiding judge, who read the court's decision, asked Nigerian government to amend the legal provision "in order to ensure conformity with the country's obligations" under the ACHPR and ICCPR. Suit The decision was delivered in a suit filed by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), one of the frontline civil society organisations in Nigeria. SERAP had, in its suit, challenged the legality and compatibility of Section 24 of the Cybercrime Act 2005 in relation to the guarantees of freedom of expression and information enshrined in Article 9 of the ACHPR and Article 19 of the ICCPR, respectively. The said section 24 of the cybercrime law criminalises sending a message via a computer system which was "grossly offensive, pornographic or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character" or to send a message or cause any such message or matter to be so sent; or to send a message, knowing it to be false for the purpose of "causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, ill will or needless anxiety to another" or to cause such a message to be sent. It particularly alleged that Section 24 violated the rights to freedom of expression, information and other rights of human rights defenders, activists, bloggers, journalists, broadcasters and social media users through the repressive use, interpretation and by agents of the respondent, the same being vaguely worded and ambiguous. The applicant contended that since the passage of the Act, the Nigerian government and its agents had used its provisions to harass, intimidate, arbitrarily arrest and detain and unfairly prosecute users of the social media, human rights defenders, activists, journalists, broadcasters and bloggers who express their views perceived to be critical of the Government both at the Federal and State levels. The applicant listed 12 high profile cases of the alleged victims of harassment, intimidation, arrest unlawful detention, prosecution and imprisonment of journalists, bloggers, broadcasters, social media users, human rights defenders and activists, by the respondent, its agents and several states of Nigeria between August 2015 and November 2018, for alleged cyberstalking and urged the Court to make several declarations and orders that will underscore the incompatibility of the Act with the provisions of the two international instruments. Defence In its defence, the respondent (the Nigerian government) urged the court to dismiss the suit on the grounds that it was misconceived, adding that the prayers sought were not grantable in law. In particular, the respondent contended that the application was not only pending before the national court for the same reliefs but that the interpretation of Section 24 of the Act must be submitted to domestic courts and not the ECOWAS Court as this is not within its competence as it concerns the interpretation of extant laws. Moreover, the respondent contended that the Act was not only in line with Section 45 of the Nigerian Constitution, but was subjected to the requisite constitutional and legal processes before its passage. It said the applicant was aware of the processes leading up to the passage of the Act into law but did not protest it at the time. The respondent argued that the Act was not enacted to muzzle the freedom of expression in Nigeria, but to curtail the activities of criminals carried out on the internet. Partial victory The court's judgement turned out to be a partial victory for the two sides. Apart from securing the decision of the court dismissing the Nigerian government's objection to the suit, the other favourable part of the ruling in the applicant's favour was the order directing the government to amend the contested provision of the law. The applicant's other prayers were turned down. For instance, the court dismissed its claim for compensation and ordered both parties to bear their costs pursuant to Article 66 of the Rules of the Court. The court decided that proving a claim is imperative and that adducing a list without establishing by way of evidence, the violations suffered by those listed that resulted in breach of the respondent's obligations, cannot procure a favorable judgment. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Nigeria West Africa Legal Affairs By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. Furthermore, the court stated that in the pursuit of proof, a claimant must support its claim with uncontroverted evidence which is of persuasive value to enable it discharge its burden of proof. Similarly, the court held that the assertion by the applicant that several persons were prosecuted and convicted was not supported with evidence and therefore found the claims bereft of evidence of summons or a judgment containing details of parties that will persuade it on the claim for prosecution. The court held that the applicant failed to discharge the burden of proof required by law. But the court affirmed its jurisdiction to hear the case, noting that a mere allegation of human rights violation is sufficient to invoke its human rights mandate pursuant to Article 9 (4) of the Supplementary Protocol as long as the two requirements of accessing the Court has been met -- it was not anonymous and that the case was not before another international court. The other members of the court's panel were Gberi-Be Ouattara and Dupe Atoki. New Delhi, March 29 : The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Tuesday filed a charge sheet against six accused persons, including a woman, before the NIA Special Court in Chennai in connection with LTTE terror funding case. The charge sheet was filed against Letchumanan Mary Franciska, T. Kenniston Fernando, K. Baskaran, Johnson Samuvel, G. Dharmendran, and E. Mohan under various sections of the Indian Penal Code, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Passport Act and the Foreigners Act. The case pertains to a criminal conspiracy to revive the LTTE by committing forgery for cheating besides using forged documents as genuine to divert funds lodged in dormant accounts to commit unlawful and terror activities. The case was initially lodged by the CID Chennai in 2021, and the NIA took over the probe this year. During investigation it was learnt that Franciska, Fernando and Baskaran entered into a conspiracy with foreign entities to siphon off deposits in dormant bank accounts by using Indian identity documents obtained fraudulently and forging identity documents to revive, revamp and regroup LTTE in India and Sri Lanka. They were abetted by Samuvel, Dharmendran and Mohan in forging Indian identity documents. New Delhi, March 29 : The Congress is wooing Naresh Patel, an influential Patidar leader and political strategist Prashant Kishor simultaneously for Gujarat assembly polls which are slated at the end of the year, sources told IANS. Congress leaders in Gujarat feel that Naresh can ensure party's win in crucial Saurashtra region and Prashant Kishor can build narrative and strategy for the party. The state is crucial for both BJP and the Congress as the outcome will be booster for the winner for the general elections of 2024. Naresh Patel, chairman of Shree Khodaldham Trust (SKT), said in Rajkot that he was keen on joining politics. He has commissioned a survey to be carried by youth of the community and they are going house to house to get the feedback. Patel said the survey committee of SKT is working through its network from district to the village level and is approaching people to seek their opinion. On the Prashant Kishor front, the sources said that he met Gandhis last week and talked about working with the party, but both sides are tight-lipped on the issue. The issue of availing services of poll strategist Prashant Kishor in the Gujarat Assembly polls was discussed in a meeting of state party leaders with senior leader Rahul Gandhi, on March 24. Since then the back-channel talks have been going on after the initial negotiations failed, but the Congress has denied it. However, the party has taken on board a close aide of Kishor, to work for the party without any condition, as the joining of the political consultant was stalled by Congress leaders because he wanted a major say in ticket distribution. Meanwhile, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) has already hired Kishor to evolve a strategy for next elections. PK, as Kishor is popularly called, had recently met Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao and they were understood to have discussed plans for 2023 Assembly polls and also Rao's proposed front against the BJP. Mumbai, March 29 : The Maharashtra Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Tuesday demanded the resignation and arrest of Bhartiya Janata Party's Leader of Opposition (Council) Pravin Darekar in connection with an alleged bank fraud case he is embroiled in. Addressing the media, AAP state General Secretary Dhananjay Shinde and others said that Darekar had cheated Mumbai citizens by falsely claiming to be a manual labourer to contest and win the Mumbai District Central Cooperative Bank (MDDCB) elections. During his tenure as the MDCCB Chairman, Darekar also "oversaw the misappropriation of bank funds to the tune of Rs 2,000 crore", Shinde alleged. However, Darekar - who was the MDCCB Director for two terms and followed as Chairman for two terms (2011-2021) -- has consistently denied all the charges against him by the AAP and earlier by the ruling Shiv Sena. The AAP leaders said that during his tenure at the helm of the bank, the State Cooperative Department and NABARD audit reports pointed at irregularities related to misappropriation of funds to the tune of Rs 2000 crore between 2015 and 2021, and utter disregard of regulatory compliances and procedures. "We demand the immediate resignation of Darekar as Leader of Opposition (Council) and call upon the MVA government to set up a Special Investigation Team for a time-bound probe into the embezzled funds at the MDCCB," said AAP Mumbai In-Charge Preeti Sharma-Menon. Shinde, who lodged a police complaint against Darekar in January after exposing his dubious credentials in the name of a labour organisation, Pratigya Cooperative Labour Organisation, said he was disqualified by the Cooperative Department on January 8, 2022. After Shinde's complaint, the MRA Marg Police Station lodged a first information report against Darekar on March 15 after which the latter has been moving various courts seeking pre-arrest reliefs. "The post of Leader of Opposition is prestigious and a dishonest and corrupt person like Darekar cannot be allowed to occupy it. The Leader of Opposition (Assembly) Devendra Fadnavis, former ministers like Chandrakant Patil and Subhas Deshmukh have shielded Darekar and are equally liable for the crimes perpetrated by him," Shinde said. Targeting the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), he accused it of failing to take action against Darekar because some of the ruling coalition leaders were also directors at the MDCCB. Sharma-Menon further demanded that the RBI should intervene to appoint an administrator and monitor the MDCCB's functions till the issue reaches its logical conclusion. New Delhi, March 29 : The Supreme Court on Tuesday said the mental and physical loss of a victim in a road accident cannot be computed in terms of money but there is no other way to compensate. A bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and V. Ramasubramanian enhanced the compensation awarded to the boy, who was 5 years old at the time of the accident, to Rs 49.93 lakh, along with interest. The boy suffered serious injuries and he is a paraplegic now. "The determination of damages in personal injury cases is not easy. The mental and physical loss cannot be computed in terms of money but there is no other way to compensate the victim except by payment of just compensation," it said, noting that the appellant herein is not able to move his both legs and had complete sensory loss in the legs, urinary incontinence and bowel constipation, and bed sores. "Therefore, we find that in view of the physical condition, the appellant is entitled to one attendant for the rest of his life though he may be able to walk with the help of assistant devicea.. The appellant has not only lost his childhood but also adult life. Therefore, loss of marriage prospects would also be required to be awarded," it held. The top court verdict came on appeal filed by the boy against the Karnataka High Court order, awarding a compensation of Rs 13.46 lakh as against Rs 18.24 lakh, which was awarded by the Motor Accident Claims Tribunal. The bench noted that the tribunal has rejected the claim of taxi expenses for the reason that the taxi driver has not been produced. "It is impossible to produce the numerous taxi drivers. Still further, the Tribunal should have realized the condition of the child who had complete sensory loss in the legs. Therefore, if the parents of the child had taken him in a taxi, probably that was the only option available to them. Accordingly, we award a sum of Rs 2 lakh as conveyance charges," it said. "The compensation comes out to be Rs 49,93,000, along with interest already awarded by the Tribunal and affirmed by the High Court i.e. 7.5 per cent p.a. from the date of filing of the claim application till realisation." New Delhi, March 29 : The Border Security Force (BSF) on Tuesday said that it handed over a Bangladeshi national, who inadvertently crossed the International Border, to Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) on humanitarian grounds. According to the BSF's South Bengal Frontier, around 10.15 am on Monday, the alert troopers of the Border Out Post Tilasan, apprehended a person who had crossed the international boundary into Indian territory. The apprehended Bangladeshi national was identified as Mohammad Mukdesh, 65, of Shyampur village under Bangabari Police Station of Gumstapur district of Bangladesh, the officials said. "During interrogation of the apprehended Bangladeshi national, it was found that the Bangladeshi national had inadvertently entered India... Therefore, that person has been handed over to the BGB on humanitarian grounds due to the mutual cooperation and goodwill of the border guarding forces of both the countries," the South Bengal Frontier said. Commanding Officer of the BSF's 44 Battalion H.S. Bedi said that their personnel are keeping a close watch on illegal infiltration along the International Border as well as people crossing the border. The apprehended Bangladeshi national had no prior criminal history or any record of crossing the border illegally and hence was handed back to BGB on humanitarian grounds, he added. Bengaluru, March 29 : The Politburo of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) on Tuesday congratulated the working class for the successful 48-hour general strike held on March 28 and 29 in the country. Millions of workers responded to the call given by 10 Central Trade Unions and various sectoral federations, the official statement on Tuesday said. According to reports, there was a total shutdown in Kerala and the strike had a huge impact in major industrial centres in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Telangana, Karnataka, Assam and Tripura. Insurance and banking services saw total participation in the strike. Large number of workers in key sectors like transport, electricity, state government and central government employees, scheme workers also participated in the strike. The success of the strike reflects the growing anger against the BJP government's policies of monetisation of national assets, privatisation of public sector units, four labour codes and price rise, the statement said. The strike call was actively supported by various Kisan organisations, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) and agricultural workers' organisations. The CPI-M condemns the high-handedness of police in certain states. The government should heed to the workers' demands instead of resorting to repression. This general strike should be a warning to the government not to pursue anti-working class policies, the Party said. New Delhi, March 29 : Communal harmony is the hallmark of democratic India. The rule of law pervades over the entire field of administration and every organ of the state is regulated and governed by democratic principles. The Indian Constitution supports and encourages religious harmony. Article 51 A (e) of the Constitution of India clearly states as the fundamental duties "It shall be the duty of every citizen of India to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people of India transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities." Every citizen has a right to choose and practice any religion. There are examples of Muslims and Sikhs building temples. People of different religious traditions live harmoniously and seers of all religions in India have called for religious harmony. The late 19th century and early 20th century Indian guru and yogi Sai Baba of Shirdi preached religious harmony through his teaching. To practise and promote it, he combined the celebration of the Hindu festival of Rama Navami with a Muslim Urs. Dargahs in India such as the Ajmer Sharif Dargah, have been a place for Muslims, Hindus, and people of other faiths since medieval times. According to the Dalai Lama, India is a model for religious harmony, "In the last 2000-3000 years, different religious traditions, such as Jainism, Islam, Sikhism, and others, have flourished here." Even though India is predominantly Hindu, its leaders have often included Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Zoroastrians, etc. Dr. Zakir Hussain, Mohammad Hidayatullah, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam were Muslim and Giani Zail Singh was a Sikh. Indian Army has had chiefs like Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw who was a Zoroastrian, Sunith Francis Rodrigues was a Christian, Joginder Jaswant Singh and Bikram Singh were Sikhs. The list of India's 100 richest people includes Dilip Shanghvi, a Jain, Azim Premji, a Muslim, and Pallonji Mistri, a Zoroastrian. Popular film stars in India like Salman Khan and Shahrukh Khan celebrate festivals of Hindus. Demonstrating how religion can never be a barrier when it comes to true friendship, Razzak Khan Tikari, a Muslim, performed the last rites following all Hindu rituals of his best friend Santosh Singh who lost his life to a terminal disease. There are countless instances in India where Muslim and Hindu communities have prayed, rejoiced and felt grief together. Take the instance of the mosque in the Malappuram city of Kerala which continues with the tradition of celebrating an 18th century Hindu martyr even today. His name was Kunhelu and he is a respected legendary figure. It is believed that Kunhelu lost his life along with 43 Muslim warriors in a battle, when the then ruler of Kozhikode attacked Malabar, about 290 years ago. Kunhelu belonged to the goldsmith community and he joined his Muslim friends in the war which started over an issue of tax collection. Every year, a group of Muslims gather at the Valiyangadi Jumma masjid to pay homage to the martyr who is buried at the mosque. The descendants of Kunhelu are also invited during prayer meetings. In 2015, during the celebration of Bakra-Eid, many Muslim devotees in Mumbai were seen performing their prayers inside a Ganpati pandal. When members of the Seva Sangh Ganeshotsav Mandal in Colaba saw that the Madrassa Rahamatiya Talimul Quran mosque could not accommodate all the devotees who had turned up to offer their prayers, they invited them to the pandal meant for Ganesha Chaturthi celebration so they could pray in peace. Similarly, in Nathowal village near Ludhiana, people from the Sikh and Hindu communities helped repair an old mosque . They also took care of more than 65 per cent of the repair expenses. The project cost was around Rs 25 lakh, of which Rs 15 lakh was contributed by Sikhs and Hindus. The three communities live in peace in this village. The entire country knows the tale of pregnant Noor Jahan who went into labour in a cab, while going to the hospital in Mumbai. Spotting a Ganesha temple at a distance, she and her husband walked towards it and were helped by a group of women who created a makeshift delivery room in the temple. To commemorate this gesture and the fateful day, Noor Jahan named her son Ganesh. Abid Alvi, a Muslim youth, has translated the Hindu prayer, Hanuman Chalisa, into Urdu with the view that it will unite the two communities as they will understand each other's culture and beliefs better. A resident of Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh, Abid took three months to complete the translation. He wishes that Urdu books should be converted to Hindi and vice versa. Just like Abid, Rajeev Sharma read about Prophet Muhammad and was impressed by his teachings. So he wrote a book about him in Marwari, a regional language of Rajasthan. The 112-page-long book called "Paigambar ro Paigaam" talks about the life of Prophet Muhammad, and has made the book is available for free on his e-library. There is the famous case of 73-year-old Muslim from Beed city in Maharashtra, Shaikh Riyazoddin Abdul Gani, better known as 'Rajubaba Kirtankar', who is popular for singing Meera Bhajans while balancing a water-filled pot on his head. Fascinated by Hinduism when he was a child and used to sit outside temples to learn kirtans. He was invited by Hindus to the temple, and started singing there. Is there communal disharmony in our country today? If yes, the instances are rare and magnified by the insidious media. Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Christians are capable of living in peace together like they have done for centuries in India. Mischievous and malignant elements in society, much like the British divided and ruled India for years are continuously trying to drive a wedge between the communities. Eventually it is the responsibility of the political and religious leadership, civil society, intelligentsia and the media to uphold the Constitution and the integrity of institutions. The communal harmony campaign week (November 25-29) is celebrated every year to promote national integrity and the government has erected Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel - Statue of Unity in Gujarat for the same. Thiruvananthapuram, March 29 : The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) will be inviting Bharatnatyam dancer Mansiya V.P. to Pavakkulam temple in Kochi, controlled by it. The temple is one of the oldest in Kochi, Kerala. The VHP office-bearers told media persons at Kochi that the organization would extend full protection to Mansiya when they invite her to perform at the temple. The date and the time would be announced later. Bharatnatyam exponent and Ph.D. scholar Mansiya was denied permission to dance at the famous Koodalmanikyam temple in Iringalakkuda on April 21 as she is not a practicing Hindu. The Koodalmanikyam temple is controlled by the Left government in Kerala. There has been outrage in several quarters over the treatment meted out to Mansiya by the management of the Left government-controlled temple. Congress leader and Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram, Shashi Tharoor told media persons in Delhi that the temple not allowing an atheist dancer to perform there was not acceptable. He said that the temple Chairman Pradeep Menon has said that the decision was in keeping with the existing traditions at the temple'. Tharoor said that traditions change with times and it was the tradition at every temple to deny Dalits entry a century ago, but that is not the case now. The BJP local leadership also expressed support to Mansiya. The party's Iringalakkuda mandalam president, T.K. Shaiju told IANS that "The decision of the temple not to allow Mansiya to perform within the premises is unfortunate and this has challenged the secular principles of the Constitution." Koodalmanikyam temple as part of its annual festival will be conducting the ten-day National Dance and Music Festival from April 16 to 25 and Mansiya's dance was slated for April 21. Speaking to IANS, Mansiya said, "On Sunday an official from the temple called me and informed me that I will not be able to perform as I was not a Hindu." Mansiya was born a Muslim and she had faced stiff resistance from the Muslim clergy while she was learning dance along with her sister. Her mother Amina and father Alavikutty, however, stood strongly with their daughters. When Amina passed away due to cancer, the clerics denied her burial in the mosque graveyard and this led to Mansiya leaving the religion. She later married a vocalist, Shyam Kalyan who is a practicing Hindu. Mansiya told IANS that the Koodalmanikyam temple authorities asked her why she had not converted to Hinduism after marrying a Hindu to which she answered that she does not believe in any religion and her husband's family also did not put any pressure on her. The Left government of Kerala which has been vocal on the secular credentials of the society now faces major embarrassment after a government controlled temple prevented an artist from performing within the temple as she was not a practicing Hindu. Mumbai, March 29 : Debt-ridden IL&FS Group on Tuesday said that it has addressed debt of Rs 55,000 crore till date and the resolution of remaining Rs 6,000 crore debt will move into FY23. According to IL&FS, the current addressed debt is higher than Rs 52,200 crore as of November 2021. "The group retained its overall resolution estimate at Rs 61,000 crore, representing 62 per cent of overall - fund based and non-fund based - debt of over Rs 99,000 crore as of October 2018. "The debt addressed till date (Rs 55,000 crore) represents over 90 per cent of the overall estimated resolution value." The group said that resolution of remaining Rs 6,000 crore debt will move into FY23. Consequently, out of the 347 entities under IL&FS Group as of October 2018, a total of 246 entities stand resolved leaving only 101 entities to be resolved in the next financial year. "An application has been filed with Hon'ble NCLAT for undertaking interim distribution of Rs 16,000 crore of cash and InvIT units available across the Group. "Over 75 per cent of this would be distributed to creditors of three large holding companies - IL&FS, IFIN and ITNL - which have a large base of public fund creditors." Furthermore, the incremental resolution of over Rs 2,700 crore since November 2021 comprises of Rs 1,080 crore from sale of IL&FS Headquarters (TIFC) in BKC Mumbai, Rs 900 crore under Khed Sinnar claim settlement with the NHAI, Rs 230 crore from settlement of IFIN's non-performing loan accounts, and Rs 520 crore from other recoveries. Additionally, the Group said it continues to service debt of Rs 1,000 crore across companies. "ITNL completed transfer of two road assets to Roadstar Infra Investment Trust at a cumulative enterprise valuation of Rs 4,200 crore. Transfer of remaining SPVs to the InvIT is being undertaken in multiple phases." The group also announced that C.S. Rajan, Managing Director, IL&FS has been appointed as Chairman and Managing Director of IL&FS for a period of six months with effect from April 3 by the Union Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Rajan succeeds Uday Kotak, whose term as the Chairman ends on April 2. Gurugram, March 29 : Tension prevailed after hundreds of protesting workers broke the windshield and window panes of two buses of their company (JNS Instruments Limited) and set a bus on fire on Tuesday evening at IMT Manesar, Gurugram. No one was, however, hurt in the incident, the police said. Deputy Commissioner of Police (Manesar), Manbir Singh told IANS: "The company had transferred several employees to another unit located in Bhiwadi (Rajasthan) in November but the protesting employees do not want to go there. Since then, they are protesting outside the company and on Tuesday, they damaged two buses of their company and set a bus on fire." He said the workers were transferred as per the rules but they had tried to disrupt the company operations on Tuesday. "We have arrested some employees and tried to identify others for further legal proceedings," Singh said. Inspector Subhash, Station House Officer (SHO), IMT Manesar, told IANS: "We are in the process of registering a case against employees. Also, we are questioning the arrested employees about the incident. The situation in the area is in control, and no one will be allowed to disrupt law and order in the area." Pawan Yadav, President of IMT Industrial Association, said: "Section 144 of the CrPc was imposed on the company on Tuesday and despite that, the employees were protesting. "Duty Magistrate, Ajay Kumar who is also a Naib Tehsildar, Manesar, along with the police reached the spot and warned the striking employees not to disrupt company operation but the workers completely obstructed the work of the company and also prevented the other employees from going to duty," he added. "We strongly condemn this act of the workers against the company. This type of rebellion or loss of life and property cannot be tolerated," he said. The company management was not available for comments despite phone calls. IPOB is suspected to be responsible for the attack. One person was feared killed, while two sustained injuries on Monday when gunmen attacked commuters at Odegba, Coal Camp, in Enugu North Local Government Area, Enugu State. The gunmen, suspected to be members of outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) enforcing the suspended sit-at-home order, reportedly opened fire on commuters. An official of the Federal Road Safety Commission, who did not want his name mentioned in the report because he did not have the authority to speak on the incident, was the first to tell PREMIUM TIMES that the attack happened around 5 a.m. when the commuters, said to be traders, were hurrying to their business premises. He expressed sadness that the sit-at-home was yet to be over despite condemnations against it and the hardship it has inflicted on residents. "Some people were attacked early this morning. I think one person was killed, but we will confirm the figure tomorrow," said the official, whose office is close to the scene of the attack. The police spokesperson in the state, Daniel Ndukwe confirmed the incident but insisted that no life was lost. "There was a shooting incident there (at Odegba, along Iva Valley road) in the early hours of this morning by armed men. The shooting led to the injury of two persons," he said "The victims are responding to treatment at the hospital where they were promptly taken to by police operatives, who swiftly responded to a distress call," Mr Ndukwe added. He said the police have launched an investigation into the incident to "fish out the fleeing miscreants". IPOB, a group seeking the creation of an independent state of Biafra which they want carved out from the South-east and some parts of South-south, has been accused of being responsible for the deadly attacks across the two regions. Bengaluru, March 29 : The Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) activists in Karnataka have taken out a protest march from Belthangadi town to Mangaluru demanding justice for the family of Dinesh Kanyadi, a Dalit youth allegedly killed by a Sangh Parivar activist. The protesters marched 60 km, condemning the "negligent attitude" of the ruling BJP government. They demanded Rs 50 lakh as compensation for Dinesh's family, and a government job for one of his family members. Afsar Kodlipet, state Secretary of SDPI, said on Tuesday 2 acres of land must be given to his family, and conspirators behind the death be investigated and booked. Aboobakar Kulayi, the district president of SDPI, said: "The ruling BJP government will shower condolences and compensation after the murder of a Sangh Parivar activist... The accused persons are booked under UAPA Act," he said, indirectly referring to Bajrang Dal activist Harsha murder case in Shivamogga. "But, if a Dalit is killed by a Sangh Parivar activist, no one from the government is bothered to visit his family, no compensation announced and not a word of solace is being offered to the family." "The Karnataka government should come forward to offer succour to the family of Dinesh Kanyadi. However, since the accused is a Sangh Parivar activist, the case is not taken seriously and the government is turning a blind eye to it," he said. Dinesh Kanyadi, a Dalit youth was attacked for a trivial reason on February 23. He breathed his last on the same day in the hospital in Dharmasthala. D. Krishna, a Sangh Parivar activist and BJP leader was arrested in connection with the case and released on bail later. Islamabad, March 29 : Three female teachers of a seminary in Dera Ismail Khan in Pakistan were arrested on Tuesday for allegedly killing a former colleague after accusing her of blasphemy, Dawn reported. The murder occurred early in the morning outside the Jamia Islamia Falahul Binaat. According to the first information report (FIR), when police reached the site of the crime, they found the victim lying in a pool of blood with her throat slashed. Sharp objects were used in the attack on the victim, the FIR added. The suspects -- aged 17, 21 and 24, respectively -- killed the 21-year-old victim over "difference of opinion on religious issues" and allegations of blasphemy. He said the victim was a follower of well-known religious scholar Maulana Tariq Jameel, which was not liked by the suspects, Dawn reported. A police officer quoted the suspects as saying that a 13-year-old female relative of theirs "saw a dream last night" in which she found out about the alleged blasphemy committed by the victim and was subsequently "ordered to slaughter her". A register containing details of the dream has been recovered during the initial investigation, the DPO said, adding that the trio of suspects, along with their relative, have been arrested. The women belong to the Mehsud tribe and hail from South Waziristan tribal district, he said, adding that their current residence was in DI Khan's Anjumabad area. Following the incident, Wafaqul Madaris al Arabia Pakistan, which is a board of seminaries, condemned the murder, terming it "unfortunate". In a statement, the board demanded an independent and fair investigation into the incident and called for arresting and punishing the culprits, Dawn reported. Bhubaneswar, March 29 : The Opposition BJP and Congress in Odisha Assembly on Tuesday demanded constitution of a House Committee to examine the construction work undertaken by the Odisha government near Jagannath temple in Puri. Raising the issue during Zero Hour, Puri MLA of BJP, Jayant Sarangi said the National Monument Authority and Archaeological Survey of India have said that they have not given any approval to undertake construction of a permanent structure near the temple. Deep pits are being dug close to the temple, which may damage the structure of the temple, he said. "If major damage happens to the temple in the coming days, the state government will be responsible," Sarangi said. Requesting Speaker S.N. Patro to take the issue seriously, the MLA has demanded formation of a House Committee consisting of members from all political parties, temple administration, servitors and architectural experts, to examine the construction activities. Joining him, BJP chief whip Mohan Majhi too demanded the Speaker to give ruling for formation of a House panel for this purpose. Similarly, Congress legislature party leader Narasingha Mishra too demanded the formation of a House Committee immediately so that the members can inspect the construction site and submit its report by the next session of the assembly. Otherwise, the Law Minister should make a statement in the House on this, he said. However, Speaker Patro remained silent over the demand. Later, Parliamentary Affairs Minister B.K. Arukha said the Heritage Corridor project work is underway and there is no threat to the temple. An unanimous resolution was also passed in the House on February 27, 2021 for development of the project, he said. On the Opposition's demand for a House panel, Arukha said that the government is prepared to constitute a committee on March 31 when various panels of the assembly will be formed. New Delhi, March 29 : Minister for Health and Family Welfare Mansukh Mandaviya on Tuesday said other countries of the world look at India as a leader in the health sector after "we handled the Covid-19 pandemic so efficiently under the leadership of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi". In response to a question on the development of healthcare facilities in the country, the Health Minister said the Central and the state governments need to work together in the health sector. Replying to another query on states receiving more authority to deal with disease outbreaks, the Health Minister said the House that even though Health was a state subject, there was no gap in between the Centre and the states while tackling issues in the health sector. Answering a question of Trinamool Congress MP Derek O' Brien who asked questions about the medical bills of ex-servicemen, Mandaviya said that the government is committed towards the welfare of the ex-servicemen and always ready to provide services to those with Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) cards. He also said that earlier the CGHS facility was provided to 75 cities in the country which has increased to 81 cities now. Responding to the question of Samajwadi Party Member Rewati Raman Singh, the Minister of State, Health, Bharati Pawar said that altogether, 22 All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) are being set up in the country. Out of 10 proposed in the first phase, six have started functioning with all departments. "Over 15,000 patients are being examined at these six AIIMS, over seven thousand major and minor surgeries have been doing in these AIIMS while the OPD facility in another 10 AIIMS will start soon", Pawar said. Replying to the question of DMK MP T Siva about the new AIIMS proposed in Tamil Nadu, she told the House that the site has been earmarked in Madurai. "This AIIMS is being built with the funding from Japan International Cooperation Agency and the appointment of the Project Management Consultant has also been appointed." She said that the land for AIIMS in Darbhanga has been finalised by the state government and the work on the building will start soon. New Delhi, March 29 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said "if anyone is being harassed anywhere, then definitely raise your voice". The Prime Minister said this during his virtual address at the Matua Dharma Maha Mela 2022 at Shreedham Thakurnagar, Thakurbari in West Bengal on the occasion of 211th birth anniversary of Shree ShreeHarichand Thakur ji. Modi called upon the Matua community to raise awareness to remove corruption at every level in the society. "If anyone is being harassed anywhere, then definitely raise your voice there. It is our duty towards the society and also towards the nation," the Prime Minister said. He said "it is our democratic right to participate in political activities". "But because of political opposition, if someone intimidates someone with violence, then it is a violation of the rights of others. Therefore, it is our duty that if the mentality of violence, anarchy exists anywhere in the society, then it should be opposed," he said. The Prime Minister recalled his happiness on being able to pay his obeisance at Orakandi Thakurbari in Bangladesh in March 2021, and also in February 2019 when he had the opportunity to visit Thakurnagar. The Prime Minister further emphasised that Matua Dharma Maha Mela is an occasion to bow to the Matua tradition, foundation of which was laid by Shree Shree Harichand Thakur ji and further nurtured by Guruchand Thakur ji and Boro Ma. The Prime Minister also credited his Council of Minister colleague Shantanu Thakur for taking forward the "great tradition". Modi termed the Maha Mela a reflection of 'Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat'. "Our culture and civilisation is great due to its continuous flow and continuity and has a natural tendency to self-regenerate," he said. The Prime Minister has talked about "New India's effort to provide cleanliness, health, and self-confidence to the daughters of the country". "When we see our sisters and daughters in every sphere of society contributing to nation building along with sons, then it feels like a true tribute to great personalities like Shree Shree Harichand Thakur ji," he said. The Prime Minister said: "When the government takes the government schemes to the people on the basis of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas, and when, Sabka Prayas drives the development of the nation, then we move towards building an inclusive society." Amaravati, March 29 : There have been many ups and downs for the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in its four-decade-old journey. Floated by N. T. Rama Rao, a.k.a NTR on March 29, 1982 on the slogan of Telugu self-respect, the party changed the course of the politics in the then undivided Andhra Pradesh. It remained a dominant political force in all the regions of Andhra Pradesh till bifurcation of the state in 2014 and since then, has largely remained confined to the residuary state of Andhra Pradesh. The party's efforts to have a presence in Telangana did not yield results with its entire leadership migrating to Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) over the last eight years. Seen as the 'Andhra party', the TDP currently has no presence in Telangana Assembly. Despite losing power to YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) in Andhra Pradesh in 2019, the Chandrababu Naidu-led party remained the formidable political force who can challenge the ruling party. Led by a seasoned leader and the longest-serving Chief Minister in undivided Andhra Pradesh, the TDP celebrated 40th formation day at a time when it is gearing up to take on the YSRCP over various issues and keep up the pressure in the run-up to 2024 elections. Till the emergence of the TDP, the political scene in Andhra Pradesh was dominated by the Congress. NTR, who enjoyed the status of a demigod among Telugu masses, was not happy with the Congress as it was seen ruling the state from Delhi. He gave the slogan of Telugu self-respect and launched the TDP. He had a phoenix-like rise in politics as the TDP created a record by coming to power within nine months after floating the party. The pro-poor image NTR built with his schemes like Rs 2 a kg rice and scrapping Patel-Patwari system to usher in governance reforms made him one of the most popular regional leaders in 1980s. He successfully dealt with resistance to some of his revolutionary measures like slashing the retirement age for government employees. When the Congress engineered a revolt against him and installed N. Bhaskar Rao as the Chief Minister when NTR had gone to the US for treatment, the actor led a state-wide agitation for restoration of democracy and returned to power with a new vigour and more popular support. Though the TDP lost power to the Congress in 1989, NTR remained a key political figure not just in the state but also at the national level. As Chairman of National Front, he played a vital role in bringing together regional parties and in the formation of the V.P. Singh-led government at the Centre. Riding on his popularity and various poll promises including total prohibition, NTR stormed back to power with a record majority. However, this time he was accompanied by Lakshmi Parvathi, his biographer-turned second wife whom he married secretly in 1992 but publicly announced in 1993. NTR was then 70 and Parvathi was as almost half his age and had separated from her first husband. In August 1995, NTR's children from his first wife led by his son-in-law Chandrababu Naidu staged a revolt and captured power, citing growing interference in party and administration by Lakshmi Parvathi. NTR was heart-broken over the revolt and claimed his party to be the real TDP. Five months later, he died of cardiac arrest. Though Lakshmi Parvathi tried to run the party NTR TDP after her husband's death, it could not survive politically. With a firm grip over the party and administration, Chandrababu Naidu rose to the status of a big leader. The reforms he introduced and the big push he gave to the information technology sector and creation of world-class infrastructure transformed Hyderabad into a technology and knowledge hub. Naidu also emerged as a key figure in national politics. In 1996 as the convenor of the United Front, he brought together regional parties to prop up the government of the third alternative. However, in 1999, he joined hands with the BJP and became a key figure in BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Many saw in him a shrewd politician and few branded him a rank opportunist as he aligned with the BJP, apparently to ride on the Atal Bihari Vajpayee wave. He succeeded in retaining power. Then known as the poster boy of new economic reforms, a reformist and a tech-savvy leader, Naidu mastered the skills of doing business with any formation at the Centre, irrespective of its ideology. After losing power to his bete noire Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR) in 2004 following a record 9-year stint as Chief Minister, Naidu admitted his priorities were lop-sided which led to the neglect of agriculture in the state. He promised a slew of freebies in the 2009 elections, which he contested in alliance with the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and other parties but the people remained unconvinced and gave YSR a fresh mandate. The death of YSR in a helicopter crash a few months later and subsequent developments threw the state into political chaos. The Centre agreeing to the demand for Telangana state and the strong reaction in coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema regions posed a new challenge to the TDP. The emergence of Narendra Modi as the prime ministerial candidate in 2014 offered Naidu a chance to revive his political fortunes. He not only joined the NDA once again but by campaigning with Modi, he succeeded in storming to power in the truncated state of Andhra Pradesh, as people preferred him, apparently for his experience in developing Hyderabad as a tech hub. However, with Modi getting absolute majority, Naidu could not play kingmaker, a role which he always enjoyed playing at the Centre. Not finding enough support from the Centre for his ambitious plans including development of Amaravati as a world-class city, Naidu walked out of NDA in 2018, accusing Modi of 'betrayal'. From a great admirer of Modi, Naidu soon turned into his worst critic and even joined hands with the Congress, his party's sworn enemy of 35 years. A second term for Modi with a massive majority dashed Naidu's hopes of salvaging some pride with a role at the Centre. Though the TDP chief has been trying to mend fences with the BJP, the latter appears not keen in reviving the ties. As the TDP completes its four-decade journey, Naidu has his eyes set on 2024 elections and political observers say he may come up with another surprise to bounce back. New Delhi, March 29 : As many as four persons are feared dead after they fell into a sewer in the national capital's Sanjay Gandhi Transport Nagar area on Tuesday evening, an official said. Three persons working for a private contractor had fallen into the sewer. An auto driver who tried to rescue them also got trapped there. The workers were identified as Bacchu Singh, Pintu and Suraj Kumar Sahni, while the auto driver's name is Satish. "We received a PCR call at 6.34 p.m regarding three workers who were engaged in an MTNL wire-laying work who had fallen into a sewer in Sanjay Gandhi Transport Nagar," DCP (outer north) Brijendra Kumar Yadav said. As the police rushed to the spot, after enquiry they learnt that an auto driver, who went inside the sewer to rescue the three workers also got trapped. According to the police officer, all the four are possibly dead as they have shown no signs of movement since the last three hours. "The sewer has an iron net on which MTNL lines have been placed," Yadav said. Apart from the police, the Fire Department also received a call about the incident. "A call was received around 6.25 p.m. regarding the incident after which four fire tenders were pressed into service," Delhi Fire Services chief Atul Garg told IANS. The rescue operation is underway. New Delhi, March 29 : Journalist Rana Ayyub was on Tuesday stopped at Mumbai Airport when she was about to board a flight to the UK to deliver a speech at the International Centre for Journalists (ICJ), and accused the Enforcement Directorate for summoning her despite making her programme public in advance. Ayyub alleged that the ED's summon arrived in her inbox after she was stopped. The ICJ came out in her support, tweeting that Ayyub was being legally harassed by Indian authorities. "ICFJ stands with @RanaAyyub and we reiterate our demand for the Indian authorities to end their legal and digital harassment campaign against the multi-award-winning @washingtonpost journalist. #LetRanaFly #WeStandWithRana," it tweeted. Ayyub is facing a Prevention of Money Laundering case for allegedly misusing funds collected for charity through website ketto.com, and the ED, in February, attached Rs 1.77 crore of hers, claiming that the money was proceeds of crime. "Funds totalling to Rs 2,69,44,680 were raised on Ketto by Rana Ayyub. These funds were withdrawn in the bank accounts of her sister/father. Out of this amount, Rs.72,01,786 was withdrawn in her own bank account, Rs 37,15,072 was withdrawn in her sister Iffat Shaikh's account and Rs 1,60,27,822 was withdrawn in her father Mohd Ayyub Waquif's bank account. All these funds from her sister's and father's account were subsequently transferred in her own account," read the order accessed by IANS. It further said that Ayyub submitted information/documents of expense to the tune of Rs 31,16,770, but after verification of the claimed expenses, it surfaced that the actual expenses was only of Rs 17,66,970. "Fake bills were found to have been prepared by Ayyub in the name of some entities to claim expenses on relief work. Expenses made for personal travel by air were claimed as expense for relief work," it said The ED claimed that its investigations found that the funds were raised in the name of charity in a completely pre-planned and systematic manner but were not utilised completely for the purpose for which they were raised. It said Ayyub parked some of the funds by opening a separate current bank account, and also created a fixed deposit of Rs 50 lakh from the funds raised on Ketto and subsequently did not utilise these for relief works. She deposited a total of Rs 74.50 lakh in PM Cares fund and CM Relief Fund. "Accordingly, at the stage of investigation, the proceeds of crime are quantified as Rs 1,77,27,704 and the interest generated upon the said FD of Rs 50 lakh," the order read. On August 28, 2021, Vikas Sankrityayan had lodged a complaint with the Ghaziabad police against Ayyub, alleging that she cheated general public in the name of charity. Acting on his complaint, an FIR was lodged against her on September 7, 2021 under various sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Information Technology Act. On basis of this, the ED initiated a money laundering probe against Ayyub. New Delhi, March 30 : Two Indians, who were trying to travel to Europe on forged travel documents from the IGI airport here, have been arrested, CISF officials saidon Tuesday. According to the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) officials, these two passengers were apprehended on the basis of suspicious behaviour, detected by CISF and intelligence staff, at the departure forecourt area. "They were kept under close watch through physical and electronic surveillance and later identified as Vinod Kumar and Ajay Kumar Kamboj bound for Paris by Vistara Airlines flight No UK-21. On suspicion, they were intercepted and their travelling documents were thoroughly checked with the help of Vistara airlines staff at the check-in counters," an official said. On checking their travelling documents, the visas affixed on their passports appeared to be forged and then the matter was informed to the liaison officer of the embassy concerned, who later confirmed that the visas were not genuine. Subsequently, both the passengers were offloaded and handed over to the IGI Airport police station for further legal action. Delhi Police has registered a case against the two. Chennai, March 30 : Tamil Nadu's ST Irula community, which shot into the spotlight after "Jai Bhim" which projected the torture and torment faced by them, can now heave a sigh of relief after the Tamil Nadu Forest Department granted them permission to catch snakes. The community, who are expert snake charmers and catchers, have the Irula Snake Catcher's Industrial Cooperative Society and it has also been issued permission to sell Rs 54 lakh worth of snake venom. Chief Wildlife Warden, Syed Muzzamil Abbas issued sale permits of the venom of 224 grams in the possession of the cooperative society. This society was the leading supplier of snake venom in the country with an annual turnover of Rs 4 crore but with the Forest Department not granting permission to catch snakes, the sales and profits from the venom had dwindled. In financial year 2021-22, the Irula cooperative society could manage sales of venom to the tune of only Rs 30 lakh, and the functioning of the society constituted in 1978 was almost crippled. However, the state government order issued on Monday that the society can catch snakes and sell venom has brought a major relief to the community. The Irulas were permitted to catch around 13,000 snakes annually but of late, the state Forest Department prevented the community from catching snakes and reduced the numbers to 5,000 which affected the business drastically. Officials with the Irula Snake Catchers Industrial Society said that the Madras High Court had granted the society permission to catch 13,000 snakes a year to extract venom but the Forest Department had been preventing this for the past few years. The society officials said that in 2021 also, they were allowed to catch only 5,000 snakes and this led to the business of selling snake venom coming down drastically. The society, according to the officials, at present, have the venom of spectacled cobras and Rusell's vipers but the anti-venom-making companies require the venom of common krait and saw-scaled vipers also. The Irula society is the only authorized supplier of venom for the production of anti-venom medicines and if the society's functioning is crippled, it would lead to companies depending on unauthorised venom suppliers. The pursuit by the Irula society officials with the Tamil Nadu Forest Department has led to the granting of permission for the society to catch snakes as well as to supply venom to anti-venom-making companies. Studies have revealed that around 58,000 people die in the country due to snake bites a year and without an adequate supply of snake venom, anti-venom medicines cannot be made and this has led to the Tamil Nadu Forest Department sanctioning permission for the society to catch snakes and extract venom as also to sell the stock of venom it has. The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited, Mallam Mele Kyari, yesterday said the Nigerian economy had weaned itself of total dependence on oil revenues, unlike what was obtained in the past. Speaking on Day 1 of the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum in Abu Dhabi, Kyari, stated that presently, the contribution of the sector to the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was just nine per cent. Kyari who elucidated on the need to give Africa special consideration in the movement away from fossil fuels, maintained that Nigeria was not ready for Electronic Vehicles (EVs) as it is currently dealing with basic issues of power supply. The NNPC GMD argued that while Nigeria believes in the net zero drive and has already committed to it, it would continue to build on its gas infrastructure as a buffer before the achievement of the net zero target in 2060. "First of all, let me put it in a general context, our country's GDP contribution from the oil and gas is just nine per cent. So, we are not really an oil-dependent economy. Secondly, the US Bureau of Statistics has estimated that by year 2047, Nigeria's population will be around 379 million people and will be the third most populous country in the world. "The combination of this is that you have a very rapidly growing population with a huge gap in terms of energy accessibility and you have a huge economic disparity between the poor and the rich and this is growing. "There is no way you can take the context of energy transition out of this, but our country is clearly committed to net zero by 2060 to reduce our carbon footprint in a manner that will contribute to net zero by 2060," he said. Kyari stressed that while Nigeria was trying to move its dependence on thermal sources of power to other sources of energy, more than 70 per cent of energy need was currently coming from the source. "And most of them are not even coming from gas, so most of them are coming from fuel oil and other dirtier fuels," he said. He added: "What we are going to do is some kind of replacement so that we will move from the dirtier fuels to cleaner fuels which is gas, and therefore our focus is to see gas as a transition fuel." According to him, what Nigeria had tried to do in recent years was to build enormous gas infrastructure to ensure it is able to supply gas to the domestic market and export to the international market. He explained that the energy poverty that Nigeria was confronted with, was also true of other African countries. "Therefore, we are trying to see how we can build a network of pipelines and infrastructure that will deliver gas throughout the West African region and potentially into Europe through Morocco and Algeria. "We are a 306tcf gas nation and this is enough to cover a lot of our needs in Africa, but our people still use charcoal as cooking fuel and that's the lowest fuel that you can put forward," he stressed. Lamenting that public transportation was weak in Nigeria, Kyari stated that the only way to reduce the number of internal combustion engines was to increase the gas infrastructure and close the gap. He noted that differentiation remains very critical as the world moves towards 2060, because different countries have peculiar circumstances. Kyari added: "Total lack of investment in this sector will mean some kind of exclusion for a very large population in Africa and very many other nations. Therefore, this bandwagon approach to stop funding for fossil fuels won't work. "This is because, today, we have much more basic problems in Sub-Saharan Africa than worrying about EVs. We are not in the EVs age and definitely the electricity supply is still the weakest. "Less than 30 per cent has access to clean electricity and you need to fill this gap. And there's no way the scale of investment in renewables will do this. So, the world must sit back and take a second look at this. "Can we differentiate this? Can the cleaner energy come later for some countries? Can we fund fossil fuels so that resources can be available to some countries to fund the transition journey itself? "Also, can we segregate and say we want to fund gas in certain countries and certainly locations so they can provide cleaner, quicker and more practical fuels? Clearly, there has to be differentiation." Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Nigeria Business Petroleum By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. In his remarks, the Secretary General of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Dr. Sanusi Barkindo, argued that the role of oil and gas is guaranteed in the foreseeable future. "The world will continue to acquire all sources of energy. What is required at the moment is to revisit how we explore and consume hydrocarbons and to bring them in line with current realities, especially in terms of sustainability. "The energy trilemma: energy access, affordability and sustainability should be taken in the holistic manner. Oil and gas, according to our oil outlook, will continue to account for more than 45 per cent to 50 per cent of the global energy mix. "This number has not changed in the last 30 to 40 years because population has been growing rapidly over 3 per cent. we project that potential to grow till 2045 and the vast majority of that growth will come from developing countries where energy poverty is already epidemic," he stated. Guwahati, March 30 : The Assam government on Tuesday signed a Petroleum Mining Lease (PML) blocks with oil sector PSU major Oil India Ltd (OIL) for exploration of petroleum products in eight blocks, expecting an annual royalty of over Rs 2,000 crore, officials said. Assam government's Geology and Mining Department Director Ananda Kumar Das, and OIL's Executive Director (Frontier Basin) Agadh Medhi signed the deal in presence of state's Mines and Minerals Department Minister Jogen Mohan, and other senior officials. The 8 PML blocks are Dibrugarh, Dibrugarh Extn, Hugrijan Extn, Borhapjan, Borhat, Moran, Dumduma Extn and Mechaki Extn. The Minister said that the Assam Government is expected to receive more than Rs 2,000 crore royalty from OIL annually for the pact. He told the OIL officials that the Assam government would provide all possible support to the company in its quest for hydrocarbons. Jogen Mohan requested OIL to enhance the employment generation to the local people. OIL's Resident Chief Engineer Prasanta Borkakoty said that the company has planned to ramp up crude oil and gas productions by enhancing its exploration and development programme. Jaipur, March 30 : Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on Tuesday convened a meeting in New Delhi in relation to the proposed Kumbhalgarh Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan. The proposal for the reserve was made by Rajsamand MP Diya Kumari. The meeting was attended by the members and officials of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the officers of the Rajasthan Forest Department. Union Environment Minister Bhupendra Yadav and Rajya Sabha MP Om Prakash Mathur were also present in the meeting. Sources said that the Rajasthan government is not clearing the proposal for the Tiger Reserve and forwarding it to the NTCA. It is not even replying to letters and queries of the NTCA, sources added. During the meeting, it was emphasised by both the Speaker and the Union Minister that there has to be a synergy between the different departments as well as the Union and the State Governments. They said that the impediments coming on the way of the Reserve must be removed. A tiger reserve in Kumbhalgarh would give boost to the tourism and the economy of the region. New Delhi, March 30 : Her search for a new country to travel took her to Ukraine around the New Year 2022; she came back, in love with the architecture, the people, the landscape. So, when the war broke out in Ukraine, it was almost instinctive for ace photographer Avantika Meattle to put up a photo exhibition to show the eastern European country through her lens. Notwithstanding that in her earlier avatar, she had begun with cinematographic masterpieces such as Asoka, Umrao Jaan, Dostana and Saawariya in Mumbai before returning to Delhi, Meattle said, it is the travel photography that is close to her heart. 'UNTOLD [GLIMPSES] - Memories of a Travelling Photographer' showcases the vibrant streetscapes of Kyiv and Lviv as captured by Meattle during her 9-day visit. Inaugurating the exhibition, Congress leader and MP Shashi Tharoor said, "She (Meattle) has humanised Ukraine for many of us who have not been there. She also has a very very interesting eye and as a result, she has really brought life to various images of Ukraine buildings, landscapes. That is absolutely fascinating to see Ukraine with a certain level of poignancy because we don't know whether any of those buildings in these pictures are still standing." "And by visiting this exhibition, we all are expressing solidarity with the suffering victims of war in Ukraine," Tharoor, who was accompanied by SpiceJet CMD, Ajay Singh for the inauguration, said. Meattle, who has earlier dabbled into multiple genres and subjects, said, "Who knew, a few weeks down the line, this beautiful land would plunge into a turmoil? Television has shown us the devastation in Ukraine, so I wanted to show what the place was before the war. Not many have known and been to Ukraine." And that is what the exhibits tell, the tale, exactly as she has envisaged. The view from the ground of the Kyevo-Pecherska Lavra, the Eastern Orthodox Christian Monastery, situated on a 28-hectare grassy hill overlooking the Dnipro river, greets you right at the entrance followed immediately by hanging glass panels displaying the cluster of golden domed buildings. The exhibits also include matt-finished images of century-old buildings in stone, some in colour, some in B&W, bringing alive the damp streets around the New Year soon after snowfall. In a small enclosure, are few lenticular photographs, actually making one feel as if one is walking along that street in Ukraine, below the arch, or in front of the leafless tree. Few photographs are in a box with eyeholes giving a feel as if one is looking out of the window. The best part is the use of multiple surfaces. Curator Aakshat Sinha said: "There is deliberate use of multiple surfaces for printing the photographs on, including archival paper, metal, lens sheets for lenticular prints, fabric and sun board; each surface lending something to their nature adding to the experience of engaging with the exhibition." All proceeds of the exhibition will go to the UNHRC for relief efforts in Ukraine, it was told. The exhibition will continue at the India Habitat Centre here till March 31. Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text Bengaluru, March 30 : Karnataka police have arrested four persons on Tuesday in connection with gang rape of a young woman from West Bengal in Bengaluru. The arrested persons are identified as Rajath, Shivaran, Dev Saraoi and Yogesh Kumar. All the accused are from New Delhi. The incident had come to ligh lately. The victim, a private company employee had lodged a complaint with Sanjaynagar police in Bengaluru in this regard. DCP (North) Vinayak Patil stated that the complaint was lodged last week regarding the incident. The woman got introduced to Rajath, one of the accused on a dating app and developed friendship. She had gone to his house for dinner when the incident had taken place. She had filed a complaint that Rajath and his three friends have gang raped her. Following which the police have immediately arrested the accused persons, he explained. All the four accused have been sent to judicial custody. They had come to Bengaluru for swimming training. Police sources explain that all the four accused are national level swimmers. After got introduced to Rajath on a dating app, they had exchanged numbers and developed friendship. Later the accused and his friends called the victim for a party and gang raped her after she stayed back in accused's house. Further investigation is on. Moscow, March 30 : Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are likely to meet only after an agreement is ready for signing, Vladimir Medinsky, the head of Russia's negotiation team, said on Tuesday. Before the discussion of a possible meeting of the presidents, a treaty must be prepared and approved by the negotiators, and then endorsed by the foreign ministers, explained Medinsky, also an aide to the Russian President. This will be not simple especially because the meeting could be a multilateral one with the participation of state guarantors of peace and security to Ukraine, he was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency. Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War Jerusalem, March 30 : Jordanian King Abdullah II and Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz discussed "regional security challenges" during their meeting in Amman on Tuesday, Israel's Defence Ministry said in a statement. The meeting at the king's palace focused on measures to safeguard freedom of worship, security coordination and improving the livelihood of the Palestinians, Xinhua news agency reported, citing the statement. Gantz stressed the need of maintaining regional stability during the upcoming Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and the fight against terrorism. The meeting was also attended by Ayman Safadi, Jordan's deputy prime minister and foreign minister. Last week, Safadi met Israel's Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev in Amman to discuss the escalating tensions in the region. The Tuesday meeting came in the wake of a two-day conference in southern Israel, during which foreign ministers from four Arab countries, Israel and the US met on regional security and cooperation. The Jordanian king on Monday travelled to Ramallah city in the occupied West Bank to show his solidarity with the Palestinians, who did not attend the conference in Israel. Israel witnessed two attacks over the past week, the latest being a shooting in northern Israel on Sunday that killed two Israeli police officers. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Sunday attack. "Based on studies such as this, it is my opinion that use of products that inhibit myostatin levels to reduce sarcopenia, such as Fortetropin, should be considered a valuable component of multimodal management for the treatment of canine osteoarthritis, said Dr. Jaffe. MYOS CORP, a research-based, advanced nutrition company, announces that a new peer reviewed study conducted at Kansas State University to examine the impact of Fortetropin on the quality of life and mobility in geriatric dogs has been accepted for publication in the Canadian Veterinary Journal. The study also examined the role that muscle atrophy plays in the progression of canine osteoarthritis. Ninety percent of dogs five years of age or older suffer from osteoarthritis, a painful condition that can severely impact their mobility and quality of life. Fortetropin, the active ingredient in the MYOS Canine Muscle Formula product line, has been shown to accelerate gains in muscle tissue in multiple clinical studies involving humans and dogs. The study conducted at Kansas State University involved supplementing geriatric dogs with a nutrition product. Half of the dogs enrolled received Fortetropin and the other half received a macronutrient-matched placebo. Dog owners completed the LOAD (Liverpool Osteoarthritis in Dogs) questionnaire, a standardized questionnaire that measures general mobility and the capability to perform exercise. The study revealed that the Fortetropin group showed a statistically significant decrease in LOAD scores at week 6 (p=0.0261) and week 12 (p=0.0040) relative to baseline, indicating reduced severity of osteoarthritis. The placebo group showed no significant decrease in LOAD scores during the same time period. Osteoarthritis in dogs is one of the most common orthopedic conditions seen in veterinary practice. Multimodal management, with few surgical options, is the mainstay of its treatment. To combat the ongoing problem of generalized muscle atrophy due to aging and reduced pet mobility, the Kansas State University researchers focused on an aspect of treatment that has largely been minimally addressed. To minimize sarcopenia, and thus improve patient mobility, treatment by reduction of serum myostatin levels with Fortetropin showed promise compared to a nutritionally similar control, stated Michael H. Jaffe, DVM, MS, CCRP, DACVS, Associate Professor, Mississippi State University College of Veterinary Medicine, an expert in canine osteoarthritis who was not involved in the study. The Kansas State University researchers demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in owner assessed (LOAD) mobility scores after 6 and 12 weeks of treatment compared to a placebo supplement. Based on studies such as this, it is my opinion that use of products that inhibit myostatin levels to reduce sarcopenia, such as Fortetropin, should be considered a valuable component of multimodal management for the treatment of canine osteoarthritis, added Professor Jaffe. "There was a statistically significant improvement in dogs that received Fortetropin supplementation at the 6- and 12-week timepoints relative to baseline as measured by LOAD scores. We did not observe such an improvement in dogs that received the macronutrient-matched placebo," commented the Principal Investigator, Kenneth R. Harkin, DVM, DACVIM (SAIM), Professor and Section Head, Kansas State University. "Osteoarthritis is a painful condition that is very common in geriatric dogs. Typically, dogs with osteoarthritis are managed with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), but these do not address the muscle loss of geriatric dogs that compounds the loss of mobility with osteoarthritis. These encouraging results with Fortetropin suggest that geriatric dogs with limited mobility may have another option," added Professor Harkin. From a nutritional standpoint, veterinarians address canine osteoarthritis primarily by prescribing the glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), glucosamine hydrochloride and chondroitin sulfate to repair and regenerate cartilage that has been damaged. We believe that strengthening the quadricep muscles in dogs with osteoarthritis can be a powerful approach to managing canine osteoarthritis. For this reason, Fortetropin supplementation can play a complementary role with glucosamine hydrochloride and chondroitin sulfate supplementation in terms of managing canine osteoarthritis, stated Joseph Mannello, CEO, MYOS Corp. Typically, dogs with osteoarthritis are also managed in part with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Long-term NSAID use is associated with damage to the kidneys and liver. Fortetropin supplementation may enable veterinarians to reduce the dose of NSAIDs needed to manage osteoarthritic dogs," he added. Fortetropin is now backed by seven peer-reviewed publications in well reputed scientific journals. The completion of this most recent study at Kansas State University represents the completion of MYOS' fourth randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled clinical study on Fortetropin which includes two human clinical studies and two veterinary clinical studies. MYOS remains committed to continuing to pursue rigorous scientific research as we build our Human Nutrition and Animal Health businesses," added Mr. Mannello. About MYOS CORP. MYOS CORP, "The Muscle Company", is a Cedar Knolls, NJ-based advanced nutrition company that develops and markets products that improve muscle health and performance. MYOS is the owner of Fortetropin, a fertilized egg yolk-based product manufactured via a proprietary process to retain and optimize its biological activity. Fortetropin has been clinically shown to increase muscle size, lean body mass and reduce muscle atrophy. MYOS believes Fortetropin has the potential to redefine existing standards of physical health and wellness and produces muscle health support products featuring Fortetropin under the names of Yolked, MYOS Canine Muscle Formula, (Regular & Vet Strength) and MYOS Feline Formula. For more information, please visit http://www.myoscorp.com. Queens University of Charlotte Launches Talent Initiative Collaborative college and career readiness efforts like the Charlotte Talent Initiative are putting low-income students on the path toward achieving economic mobility. Queens University of Charlotte President Daniel G. Lugo will welcome senior executives from Lowe's Companies Inc. to officially announce details of the Charlotte Talent Initiative (CTI), a newly established partnership between organizations in Mecklenburg County and Queens to expand Charlotte's talent pipeline while also impacting the lives of low-income graduates of local high schools. Lowe's representatives, including Marvin Ellison, chairman and chief executive officer; Janice Dupre, executive vice president of human resources; Margi Vagell, senior vice president and general merchandising manager; and Joel Cogdell, division president, South Division; as well as Sherri Chisholm, executive director, Leading on Opportunity; will join President Lugo for a press conference and check presentation to formalize Lowe's $2.5 million investment at the Belk Chapel, 2234 Radcliffe Avenue, on the campus of Queens University on Tues. March 29, 2022, at 4 p.m. "The Charlotte Talent Initiative is an immersive cohort program designed to accelerate the economic trajectories of students who have historically been excluded," President Lugo said. "We are beyond honored to have Lowe's as our first corporate partner in this bold effort that begins to level the playing field for talented young people, regardless of their socioeconomic background, while also fueling Charlotte's engine of economic mobility." CTI will create pipelines of socioeconomically diverse and talented university graduates to contribute to the most pressing organizational needs of partner organizations. The annual Lowe's investment over four years will provide full-tuition scholarships for students in the Lowe's cohort. Through the partnership, Queens will create a cohesive set of business management opportunities to educate students in modern leadership within the context of a liberal arts curriculum. "We're committed to opening more doors for talented and hard-working students because we know that creating pathways to economic and social mobility is critical for building the workforce of the future," Ellison said. "By welcoming students of all backgrounds to explore retail management careers, this partnership is right in keeping with Lowe's history of investing in communities and our focus on initiatives that break down barriers to opportunity. And it aligns perfectly with our commitment to make a meaningful impact on our hometown Charlotte community." The Lowe's partnership will enable Queens to infuse curricular and co-curricular management experiences throughout the student experience. The program will provide students with an authentic application of learning while providing Lowe's a pipeline of valuable interns and graduates. "Collaborative college and career readiness efforts like the Charlotte Talent Initiative are putting low-income students on the path toward achieving economic mobility, said Sherri Chisholm, executive director for Leading on Opportunity. Queens' and Lowe's commitment to these students' success through education combined with mentorship and internship opportunities will help them be successful in the classroom and life. These types of partnerships will help us close the economic mobility gap one family at a time." The first Lowe's student cohort will begin in the 2022 Fall semester. Students will take a suite of management, business and leadership courses designed and developed in partnership with Lowe's while pursuing a major in their chosen field of interest. "The success of the Lowe's and Queens partnership will expand our applicant pool, increase retention and graduation rates, and enable the university to change the trajectory of the lives of traditionally under-resourced students who are poised to make meaningful contributions to our community," President Lugo said. "This is the beginning of an extraordinary journey for Queens and Lowes as we partner to recruit, educate, support, and propel students to incredible business careers and lives of purpose, meaning and impact." ### About Queens Queens University is a private, coeducational university located in Charlotte, N.C. The university serves nearly 2,500 students with 43 major and 63 minor undergraduate degree options and 12 graduate degrees. Students represent 44 states and 70 foreign countries. As part of the university's vision to promote educational experiences that nurture intellectual curiosity and promote global understanding, nearly two-thirds of traditional undergraduates participate in study abroad experiences and 100 percent take part in internships. The U.S. News & World Report ranked Queens 15th among regional universities in the south in its 2022 edition of Best Colleges. About Lowe's Lowe's Companies, Inc. (NYSE: LOW) is a FORTUNE 50 home improvement company serving approximately 19 million customer transactions a week in the United States and Canada. With fiscal year 2021 sales of over $96 billion, Lowe's and its related businesses operate or service nearly 2,200 home improvement and hardware stores and employ over 300,000 associates. Based in Mooresville, N.C., Lowe's supports the communities it serves through programs focused on creating safe, affordable housing and helping to develop the next generation of skilled trade experts. For more information, visit Lowes.com. We needed a reporting tool that our non-technical users could adapt to their needs... InetSoft Technology, a pioneer in data intelligence, analytics, and reporting, announced that Spanish savings bank Caixa Ontinyent has selected InetSofts Style Intelligence, for dashboards, reporting, and data exploration. Founded in 1884, Caixa Ontinyent is a Spanish savings bank and credit institution located mainly in the central Valencian counties, with headquarters in Ontinyent. Their activity is focused on raising reimbursable funds and providing banking and investment services for retail customers and small and medium-sized companies, with special emphasis on activities that promote economic and social development. As a savings bank, they pass on their benefits to society in the form of social projects in education, health, culture, the environment, social assistance, social housing, financial inclusion and financial education. Maintaining their three foundational objectives as basic pillars (ensuring the availability of savings, financing the economy and returning the benefits to society), Caixa Ontinyent gradually adapts its strategies to the demands of the moment, constantly updating its technology and services, prioritizing the economic recovery of their regions, seeking new opportunities for young people, and getting involved in sustainability and the fight against climate change, as well as opposing financial and social exclusion. Caixa Ontinyent needed a tool to help their users prepare dashboards and reports to monitor business performance and discover trends. Self-service was a major requirement, as Caixa wanted users to be able to adapt reports to their own needs, reducing dependence on IT. After evaluating a variety of solutions from a variety of mainstream, alternative, and open source providers, Caixa Ontinyent found that InetSofts Style Intelligence met their requirements in dashboards, reporting, and self-service. We needed a reporting tool that our non-technical users could adapt to their needs, says Francis Perez Mateu, Head of IT at Caixa Ontinyent. Style Intelligence was both easy to use for those business users, but also powerful enough for our IT staff. InetSofts Style Intelligence is the perfect solution for making analytics pervasive across your organization, expresses Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft. When you empower business users to fulfill their own ad hoc needs, you multiply the amount of data driven decision making. InetSoft's Style Intelligence is a data intelligence platform. At its foundation is a powerful data mashup engine that enables fast and flexible transformation of data from disparate sources, which can either supplement or obviate a data warehouse solution. At the development level, a unified interface allows for easy and advanced data manipulation and design of interactive dashboards, and visual analyses. At the consumption level, self-service is maximized for a range of users, from casual business or consumer-type browsers, to power users and data scientists. As a cloud-ready, fully scalable enterprise-grade platform with granular security, multi-tenancy support, and multiple integration points, it serves both enterprises and solution providers. In either environment, ease of deployment and ease of use are chief development principles that help lower the time investment and total cost of ownership - and make the solution attractive to organizations of any size, with or without BI expertise. To learn more about InetSoft's Style Intelligence, view a demo, or read customer reviews, and download a free evaluation copy, please visit https://www.inetsoft.com/evaluate. About Caixa Ontinyent Founded in 1884, Caixa Ontinyent is a Spanish savings bank and credit institution located mainly in the central Valencian counties, with headquarters in Ontinyent. Their activity is focused on raising reimbursable funds and providing banking and investment services for retail customers and small and medium-sized companies, with special emphasis on activities that promote economic and social development. As a savings bank, they pass on their benefits to society in the form of social projects in education, health, culture, the environment, social assistance, social housing, financial inclusion and financial education. Maintaining their three foundational objectives as basic pillars (ensuring the availability of savings, financing the economy and returning the benefits to society), Caixa Ontinyent gradually adapts its strategies to the demands of the moment, constantly updating its technology and services, prioritizing the economic recovery of their regions, seeking new opportunities for young people, and getting involved in sustainability and the fight against climate change, as well as opposing financial and social exclusion. About InetSoft Since 1996, InetSoft has been delivering easy, agile, and robust business intelligence software that makes it possible for organizations and solution providers of all sizes to deploy or embed full-featured business intelligence solutions. At the core of the platform is a data mashup and transformation engine that can preclude the need for data warehouse and data preparation expenses. Application highlights include visually-compelling interactive dashboards, pixel-perfect production reporting, and machine learning functionality accessible to non-data scientists. All of these capabilities combine to allow a maximum degree of self-service that benefits the average business user, the IT administrator, and the developer. InetSofts solutions have been deployed at over 5,000 organizations worldwide, including 25% of Fortune 500 companies, spanning all types of industries. With Babyscripts, LCMC Health is able to streamline the maternal health experience across their system, opening opportunities to access and providing consistent, high-quality pregnancy care to all patients, regardless of race, income, geography, or risk. Babyscripts, the leading virtual care platform for managing obstetrics, announces its one-year partnership with LCMC Health, a New Orleans-based, non-profit health system. The partnership has provided more than 1,200 mothers with equitable access to care through the Babyscripts virtual maternity care platform and has been shown to increase patient compliance to important maternal care guidelines. Pregnant and postpartum mothers receiving care through LCMC Health have access to Babyscripts myJourney, a mobile app that offers provider-approved educational content, gestational age-appropriate information, reminders, and notifications to improve engagement and adherence to quality measures, weight tracking, and practice-specific resources. Additionally, patients at risk for high blood pressure are enrolled into Babyscripts myBloodPressure, which enables at-home antenatal and postpartum blood pressure monitoring to facilitate diagnosis and management for complications such as preeclampsia and postpartum hypertension. Maternal healthcare is consistently changing, and it is important to LCMC Health that our services reflect the unique needs of our community, said Dr. John Heaton, President and Chief Medical Officer, LCMC Health. LCMC Health continues to seek pertinent ways to address community needs and enhance the patient experience for families in Louisiana and throughout the Gulf South. Our community has a need for added access and this special partnership will allow us to ensure the most positive outcomes for our patients and families. All parishes in South Louisiana, with one exception, fall in the highest category on the March of Dimes Social Vulnerability Index, a scale that determines areas where pregnant women are more likely to experience poor maternal or infant health outcomes. Sustained blood pressure management and timely postpartum care are critical factors for improving these outcomes. Since the inception of the partnership, mothers enrolled on Babyscripts receiving care through LCMC Health have demonstrated the following improvement: Patients enrolled in myBloodPressure have demonstrated sustained compliance with blood pressure monitoring, allowing providers to capture more than four times the amount of data collected in a traditional office setting Patient compliance with remote monitoring has exceeded LCMC Healths target goals, with levels of patient engagement and satisfaction consistently exceeding targets by as much as thirty percent Babyscripts users were more than two times as likely to complete a 30-day postpartum visit than the control group At 60 days postpartum, 64% of Babyscripts users had completed a postpartum visit, compared to 44% of the control group. The ability to access adequate prenatal and postpartum care is one of the largest predictors of maternal and infant health outcomes, said Juan Pablo Segura, President and co-founder of Babyscripts. With Babyscripts, LCMC Health is able to streamline the maternal health experience across their system, opening opportunities to access and providing consistent, high-quality pregnancy care to all patients, regardless of race, income, geography, or risk. Together, LCMC Health and Babyscripts are offering mothers that receive care at East Jefferson General Hospital, Touro, and West Jefferson Medical Center the support and solutions needed to align with their needs. As Louisiana strives to improve in national rankings for maternal and infant health outcomes, LCMC Health continues to look for opportunities to adopt more advanced measures for maternal and postpartum care. Babyscripts has spent the last eight years building a clinically validated, virtual care platform to allow OBGYNs to deliver a new model of prenatal care. Using internet-connected devices for remote monitoring, Babyscripts offers risk-specific experiences to allow providers to manage up to 90 percent of pregnancies virtually, allowing doctors to detect risk sooner and automate elements of care. Partnering with organizations like LCMC Health provides opportunities to make a greater impact and sustainable change in the communities that need it most. About Babyscripts Babyscripts is delivering a new model for prenatal and postpartum care that is transforming the way expectant mothers use technology to work with their healthcare providers. Since 2014, weve delivered the most-implemented mobile clinical solution for remote monitoring in pregnancy, with the mission to eliminate maternal mortality and improve access to care for all mothers. For more information on our virtual care solution and to request a demo, visit babyscripts.com. About LCMC Health Established in 2009, LCMC Health is a Louisiana-based, not-for-profit hospital system serving the healthcare needs of the Gulf Coast region. LCMC Health currently manages Childrens Hospital New Orleans, East Jefferson General Hospital, New Orleans East Hospital, Touro, University Medical Center New Orleans, and West Jefferson Medical Center. An unspecified number of villagers have been killed in several communities in the Munya Local Government Area of Niger State when terrorists invaded their villagers between Sunday afternoon and early Monday morning. In addition, the terrorists also kidnapped a catholic priest Reverend Leo Raphael Ozigi and some clergymen who ran into the gunmen as they were returning to Minna after the Sunday mass held in one of the communities. This is even as the terrorists have now reportedly set up a camp at Kuchi town. THISDAY was told that the bandits raided Chibani, Injita, Tsohon, Kabula, Jesso as well as Gini and Gunu. The gunmen according to THISDAY findings rode on more than 50 motorcycles with between two and three of them on each of the motorcycles and were all carrying sophisticated gun. At a point it was learnt that they blocked the bridge linking the local government area with Shiroro local government from where they carried out their operations. It was when the gunmen were on the bridge that the Catholic Priest and other clergymen ran into them leading to their abduction. From the bridge area it was gathered that the terrorists moved to Chibane where they have now set up their camp from where they launched attacks on the communities. THISDAY learnt that they forced several houses open, burgled food bans and stores and made away with several items. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Religion Nigeria By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. An eyewitness said though there was a military and other security posts at Sarkinpawa the headquarters of the local government there was no counter offensive for the terrorists. Secretary of Munya Local Government Council Mr. James Jagaba in a telephone interview yesterday, confirmed the incident saying the terrorists have been operating unhindered for several hours, " even now they are still there and nobody can tell you the number of people already killed or kidnapped, all I know is that there are casualties." The Commissioner for Local Government and Internal Security, Mr. Emmanuel Umar, when contacted also confirmed the incident saying a statement would be issued on the matter soon. Also, the State Chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Niger State Chapter, Reverend Mathias Echioda, confirmed the kidnap of the catholic priest and others. "We are trying to get the identities of other clergymen with the kidnapped priest," Echioda said. Online marketing channels are now used more than ever, and we see the effects of this phenomenon across all industries. SEOblog.com, a fast-growing website providing the latest SEO news, tips and resources and helping business owners connect with leading SEO agencies, has released its exclusive 2022 ratings naming the best web design companies in the United States. SEOblog analysts determined the 15 best web design SEO companies in the U.S. based on dozens of key quantitative and qualitative factors. SEOblog industry experts examined each digital marketing agencys website, industry experience, market presence, client list, portfolio, expert certifications and authorship, among other factors in its ranking system. SEOblog has provided an in-depth view of companies in a particular city or focus area on various directory pages to help business owners find the expert help they need to grow. This was a new, free offer added by SEOblog in 2019. The United States boasts several top web design companies that provide a very competitive digital marketing landscape. We work with people from every walk of life and no day is the same, said Nicholas Noe, Chief of Marketing and Design of NB Media Solutions. I have been doing this for a decade and everything we do related to digital marketing evolves around SEO. SEO keeps you on your toes! Elle Poulus, the CEO and co-founder of Little Big Marketing San Diego said: The COVID-19 pandemic caused a shift in how customers interact with businesses. Online marketing channels are now used more than ever, and we see the effects of this phenomenon across all industries. SEOblog.com rankings are updated regularly as the market shifts and new players emerge. SEOblog.com has published more than 2,300 agency listings, with more added every day. There is no fee to participate, and the website welcomes all qualified agencies to apply. SEOblog.coms 15 Best Web Design Companies in the United States in 2022: NB Media Solutions, Lockedown SEO, OnSet Media, Odyssey Design Co, Mr. Technique, On First Page, Moore Tech Solutions, All Cyber Solutions, MOJO Creative Digital, Big Gorilla Design, Ciphers Digital, HMG Creative, Digital Authority Partners, Little Big Marketing San Diego and LinkNow Media. Link: https://www.seoblog.com/best-web-design/ About SEOblog.com SEOblog.com is a leading thought leadership site with a rich history of publishing educational and informative articles about SEO and digital marketing topics. In early 2019, SEOblog.com answered the call from buyers of digital marketing services that lacked unbiased, informative online resources and launched a comprehensive directory to highlight the best SEO companies in the United States https://www.seoblog.com/best-seo-companies/. SEOblogs mission is to connect businesses with qualified digital marketing agencies while also offering further SEO education, best practices and industry trends. SEOblog.com is a one-stop shop for educational SEO and digital marketing content, research, ratings and reviews for the best agencies in each local market across the United States and Canada. The website will be increasing its coverage of U.S. and Canada SEO agencies and accepting more guest blog posts in the coming months. Contact SEOblog if youre interested in getting involved. AfterShip logo AfterShips Postmen product now gives small and medium online retailers using FedEx as their carrier a powerful tool to automate shipping, manage costs, and shorten fulfillment for domestic and international shipments. AfterShip, a leading post-purchase and tracking platform for e-commerce businesses, today announced that its Postmen carrier shipping software is available as part of the FedEx Compatible Program at FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX), the worlds largest express transportation company. AfterShips Postmen product now gives small and medium online retailers using FedEx as their carrier a powerful tool to automate shipping, manage costs, and shorten fulfillment for domestic and international shipments. With the supply chain in constant flux, e-commerce businesses have had to anticipate changing costs and delays with their shipping strategies. By collaborating with FedEx to join its Compatible program, AfterShip gives e-commerce businesses that use its Postmen product a scalable solution to address these shipping challenges. Postmen customers that enroll in FedEx Compatible can now ship more confidently, thanks to the simple, streamlined process flow that enables Postmen with FedEx shipping functionality. Working with FedEx to certify Postmen for its Compatible program was extremely important to the AfterShip team, especially as our customers deal with issues surrounding the supply chain and the pandemic, said Andrew Chan, Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder of AfterShip. This certification means that e-commerce businesses can depend on us to handle their national and international shipping needs with enhanced convenience and efficiency. Small- and medium-sized e-commerce businesses find themselves at a disadvantage when competing with huge enterprise retailers, who can leverage their business size to negotiate more favorable shipping rates. Having Postmen certified for the FedEx Compatible Program provides a tool that can be tailored for any size business that grows to meet new challenges as the company scales. With FedExs unparalleled express shipping capabilities and access to international markets, Postmen users now have an efficient option for managing shipments as well as maintaining on-time deliveries. AfterShips Postmen software & API is an enterprise-grade shipping platform with ISO 27001 and GDPR compliance certifications. Postmen also features 24/7 email support, integrates easily with top e-commerce apps, allows multiple users, and can connect with multiple organizations. Postmen also provides order management, real-time shipping rates, shipment label printing, and more. For more information about AfterShip and its e-commerce business solutions, please visit https://www.aftership.com/. About AfterShip Founded in 2012, AfterShip is a post-purchase platform that helps companies improve the consumer experience, increase revenue, and build brand loyalty. With more than 10,000 customers, AfterShip is used by leading marketplaces such as eBay, Wish, and Etsy, as well as iconic brands such as Gymshark, Kylie Cosmetics, Murad, and Kate Sommervile. AfterShip offers branded shipment tracking, notifications, returns, and exchanges, leading to increased sales and fewer WISMO tickets. Integrating with more than 930 carriers worldwide, AfterShip is the solution of choice for multinational organizations or those looking to grow internationally. About FedEx Corp. FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX) provides customers and businesses worldwide with a portfolio of transportation, e-commerce and business services. With annual revenue of $90 billion, the company offers integrated business solutions through operating companies competing collectively, operating collaboratively and innovating digitally under the respected FedEx brand. Consistently ranked among the worlds most admired and trusted employers, FedEx inspires its 600,000 team members to remain focused on safety, the highest ethical and professional standards and the needs of their customers and communities. FedEx is committed to connecting people and possibilities around the world responsibly and resourcefully, with a goal to achieve carbon-neutral operations by 2040. To learn more, please visit about.fedex.com. ### Dr. Ann Bluntzer, executive director of the TCU Ralph Lowe Energy Institute. As an award-winning professor, she brings an infectious enthusiasm to our goal of preparing students to lead in this all-important industry," said Daniel Pullin, John V. Roach Dean of the TCU Neeley School of Business. The TCU Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University today announced that Ann Bluntzer, Ph.D., associate professor of professional practice, management and leadership, has been appointed executive director of the TCU Ralph Lowe Energy Institute. As executive director, Bluntzer works in concert with TCUs Ralph Lowe Energy Institute Board of Advisors, which she has served on since 2013, to provide strategic direction and leadership for the program, including its award-winning Energy MBA and Energy Certificate. Housed in the nationally-ranked TCU Neeley School of Business, home of the No. 1 ranked Energy MBA program in Texas and No. 2 in the United States by Oil and Gas Investor magazine, as well as No. 1 ranked MBA Faculty in the world by The Economist, the institute is dedicated to developing tomorrows energy leaders for a sustainable future. This is achieved through its focus on academics and innovation in the classroom, research and outreach through building relationships with the energy and business industries. Dr. Bluntzers deep experience with and passion for energy, combined with her extensive network among domestic and global industry leaders, positions the Ralph Lowe Energy Institute to further advance TCUs distinctive contributions to the energy space, said Daniel Pullin, John V. Roach Dean of the TCU Neeley School of Business. Likewise, as an award-winning professor, she brings an infectious enthusiasm to our goal of preparing students to lead in this all-important industry. While we are proud of TCUs rich history of energy research and education, Dr. Bluntzers leadership is poised to extend the breadth and depth of our impact in the time ahead. Bluntzers passion for the energy industry, along with 23 years of experience working and teaching in the organizational management space, enhances TCUs ability to prepare students to lead in energy as they work arm-in-arm with industry partners. In her time at TCU, she has helped create and fund 10 annual $10,000 energy scholarships, which enabled the Neeley School to recruit top students and greatly expand student financial aid. I am honored to serve as the director of the Ralph Lowe Energy Institute, Bluntzer said. TCU students, alumni, faculty and industry partners have an impressive and storied history with the energy sector. My intention is to honor that legacy while seeking new opportunities to grow TCUs relevance as a global energy thought leader. Key to TCUs distinctive edge in energy education is a forward focus on providing students a global view of this critical industry. In early January, Bluntzer and Pullin led a group of TCU Energy MBA students on a week-long study abroad trip to France, where they took an in-depth, first-hand look into the energy industry through an international lens. This unique opportunity provided TCU Energy MBA students with the valuable insights and confidence necessary to lead and compete on the global energy stage. Bluntzer is credited with developing Faculty Fellows, a fellowship program to enrich the institute and support its mission to prepare and develop tomorrows leaders for an economical, sustainable and reliable energy future. She developed TCUs graduate energy curriculum, which operates alongside the recently launched Sustainable Energy and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Certificate. Recently elected to serve on the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations, a prestigious group of leaders from industry, academia and government, Bluntzer began her career as a Foreign Service Officer and has been teaching the Geopolitics of Energy course in the MBA program for eight years. Ralph Lowe Energy Institute to host TCU Global Energy Symposium Further advancing TCUs status as a global energy thought leader, the institute will host the TCU Global Energy Symposium Wednesday, March 30, featuring industry and academic experts discussing quickly developing topics such as the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on energy markets and resulting business models, short- and long-term expectations for the global supply of oil and natural gas and how energy leaders are managing considerations around sustainable energy solutions. About the Ralph Lowe Energy Institute The Ralph Lowe Energy Institute develops tomorrows energy leaders for a sustainable future by focusing on academics and innovation in the classroom, research and outreach through building relations with the energy and business industries. Mary Ralph Lowe, a member of the TCU Board of Trustees, made a significant philanthropic investment to help endow and name the Ralph Lowe Energy Institute as a tribute to her late father. Her gift also supports Lead On: A Campaign for TCU, the universitys most ambitious philanthropic campaign in its nearly 150-year history. For decades, businesswoman and philanthropist Mary Ralph Lowe has played a vital role in the life of TCU. Lowe, who now manages her familys energy interests as CEO of Maralo, LLC, as well as working cattle ranches in the Hill Country, attended both TCU and Briarcliff College. She is a member of TCUs Board of Trustees, a Founder of the Addison & Randolph Clark Society and a KinderFrogs Ambassador. She also served on the Chancellors Advisory Council, the Leadership Gifts Committee and the Trustee Campaign Planning Committee. In the early 1930s, Missouri-born Ralph Lowe came to Midland, Texas, where he opened and successfully operated a Texaco Station before turning his talents to oil exploration. Using a contract cable tool rig, he completed his first oil well in June 1940. From then until his death in 1965, Mr. Lowe participated in more than 500 wells in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and New Mexico. As a child, Mary Ralph analyzed oil maps, studied geology and learned about the business from her father. He died while she was a TCU student, and a few years later, she took over running the familys oil and gas business. Ralph Lowe was elected to The Petroleum Museum Hall of Fame in 1973. About the TCU Neeley School of Business The nationally ranked TCU Neeley School of Business is committed to fostering an inclusive, scholarly community composed of individuals who, through their diverse and sometimes competing perspectives, contribute to a free and intellectually challenging culture where students, faculty, staff and alumni have equitable opportunities and can forge paths toward personal and professional growth. We build upon the momentum generated by living the Neeley Promise: The Neeley School of Business unleashes human potential with leadership at the core and innovation in our spirit. For more information, visit TCU Neeley. About Texas Christian University Founded in 1873, TCU is a world-class, values-centered private university based in Fort Worth, Texas. The university comprises 10 schools and colleges offering 114 areas of undergraduate study, 60 masters level programs, and 38 areas of doctoral study. Total enrollment stands at 11,938, including 10,222 undergraduates and 1,716 graduate students. The student/faculty ratio is 13.6:1, and 88 percent of TCUs 699 full-time faculty members hold the highest degree in their discipline. TCU consistently ranks among the top universities and colleges in the nation, and the Horned Frog family consists of more than 97,195 living alumni. For more information, please visit TCUs website. Lead On: A Campaign for TCU In October 2019, TCU launched the community phase of Lead On: A Campaign for TCU. The $1 billion goal of this campaign will strengthen TCUs people, programs and endowment for the future. To date, more than 50,000 donors have contributed more than $777.7 million. For more information, visit Lead On: A Campaign for TCU. We hope our blog series educates drivers and makes them savvier when filing their auto accident claim. Many people dont realize the value of an Accredited Claims Adjuster and how they can be a liaison during the claim process. Educational Services & Consulting (ESC) announces the completion of their blog series on filing an automobile accident insurance claim. This Clermont, Florida based company is best known for their 6-20 Accredited Claims Adjuster (ACA) designation course and their 4-40 Registered Customer Service Representative (RCSR) designation course. ESC recently completed the final blog in their series geared at educating drivers on a variety of topics including what to do if you are in a car accident, how to file a car accident insurance claim, how can an accredited claims adjuster help you solve your claim and roles and responsibilities of an accredited claims adjuster. Co-Owner and Chief Strategy Officer, Natalie Zimmerman, stated, We hope our blog series educates drivers and makes them savvier when filing their auto accident claim. Many people dont realize the value of an Accredited Claims Adjuster and how they can be a liaison during the claim process. Once individuals take our 6-20 ACA designation course and pass our exam, they can apply to the state for their license. Once licensed they will be an All-Lines Adjuster which means they can assist with auto accident claims, home insurance claims, property insurance claims and much more. Within our blog series readers will learn more about basic protocols to filing an auto accident claim, what information and documents are needed to file an auto insurance claim, as well as the roles and responsibilities of the claimant and ACA. The world of insurance can be confusing so our blog series is intended to guide people if/when they have an auto accident so their claim can move along in the process. In their first blog in the series entitled Car Accident and Filing an Insurance Claim, readers will learn more about what to do at the accident scene if the driver and passengers can safely exit their vehicle. Readers will see a checklist of information that should be collected at the scene of the accident. This blog also discusses when an ACA will get involved and how long it can take before this person reviews the accident claim. Payment is another question most policy holders ask. In this blog, ESC addresses how payment will be made if the claim is approved. In their second blog, ESC discusses how an Accredited Claims Adjuster can help policy holders with their accident claim. They address how often the claimant can speak with their assigned ACA, what to do in the event the claimants vehicle value is not agreed upon, and the timeline for processing an auto accident claim. Zimmerman adds Its pretty common for people to be confused during the insurance claim process. There are usually several people involved in addition to the claimant. The insurance companies usually have several people touching the claim from beginning to end. Our goal with this blog series is to educate policy holders so the claim process goes much smoother. In our third blog of the series, we discuss how to file a car accident claim. Readers will understand what the first step in filing should be and what are the follow up steps a claimant should take once the claim is officially filed. Sometimes people may feel the insurance adjuster doesnt necessarily have the policy holders best interest in mind. This is not true. We discuss this in greater detail in our blog. The ACA is the claimants advocate during the entire claim process, and we stress that claimants should stay in close communication with their ACA during the entire claim process. The final blog of the series is entitled What are the Roles and Responsibilities for Accredited Claims Adjusters and Claimants When a Claim is Filed? In this blog readers will learn exactly what the ACA is responsible for as well as the claimant. ESC also addresses the situation if the claimant disagrees with the ACAs vehicle value, how the assessment can be countered and re-reviewed and who is responsible for ensuring how payment is received. Educational Services & Consulting offers both their ACA and RCSR courses online. Students can work at their own pace throughout the duration of their 40-hour online designation courses. Many colleges and universities have partnered with ESC to offer their 6-20 ACA and 4-40 RCSR designation courses. Registered college students can enroll through their local college to take either designation course. When students register through their college or university, those schools can benefit from ESCs revenue share agreement. For each student that registers through their school for either of ESCs designation courses, the school will receive monetary compensation. Zimmerman stated The ACA and RCSR courses are designed for people desiring to make more money, maybe supplement their current income, those looking to start a new career or those retiring from the military. These courses are online and self-paced. Once individuals pass our exam they can apply to the state for their license. Passing our exam waives the requirement for individuals to sit for the state exam. For more information on the 6-20 Accredited Claims Adjuster designation course or the 4-40 Registered Customer Service Representative course, visit https://escconnected.com/ or call 1-800-309-2549. Enrollment is on-going so students can start their designation course at any time throughout the year. It has been a pleasure working with Key Auto Group for the second time. I appreciate their entire team who worked diligently, along with the seller and his comptroller, LaShawnda Crews, to get this transaction to a successful closing.-Courtney Bernhard Performance Brokerage Services, North Americas highest volume dealership brokerage firm, is pleased to announce the sale of Bob Pforte Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram of Marianna, Florida from Bob Pforte to Key Auto Group. Bob Pforte had a vision of becoming an automotive dealer from the time he was a young boy. In 1965, that vision became a reality. Known as the oldest family-owned dealership in the tri-state area, Bob Pforte Motors worked hard to build a strong foundation in the community. Dedicated to his staff and providing exceptional customer service, its easy to see why the customers that visited the dealership felt like family. Never one to sit still, Bob was always looking for ways to grow and build upon his thriving dealership. While retirement looks promising, he mentioned he will always be busy doing something. Following the sale, Pforte commented, After 57 years as a dealer, it was not an easy decision to sell. I met with George Chaconas and Courtney Bernhard of Performance Brokerage Services after an unsuccessful attempt to sell with a prior broker, and felt they had the reach and commitment to see this through to the finish line. It was a pleasure working with George and Courtney, and I appreciate the efforts they put forth. I wish success to the new owners and look forward to spending more time in our Real Estate development business. Over the last 5 years, Performance Brokerage Services has advised on the sale of over 250 dealerships, making it the highest volume dealership brokerage firm in North America. In 2021, the company consummated over 72 transactions, marking a record-breaking year. George C. Chaconas, the exclusive advisor for this transaction and the Southeast Partner for Performance Brokerage Services commented, Bob Pforte reached out to me about helping him sell his dealership so he could retire after 57 years as a Stellantis dealer in Marianna, Florida. Unfortunately, Bob had a bad experience with another broker, so my Associate, Courtney Bernhard, and I immediately went to visit him, and we hit it off! While we had multiple buyers interested, we were able to identify Key Auto Group, who we recently sold another Chevrolet dealership to in Perry, Florida, as the most qualified and strategic buyer. Bob is a great dealer and a true gentleman. He has been around a long time, and I really respect what he has built over the years. It's always a pleasure to help this type of dealer gracefully exit into the sunset of retirement. I want to thank Bob again for the opportunity and wish him well in his retirement. However, as he said, he's got plenty to do to keep him busy. Additionally, it is important that we helped the buyer continue to grow in the Florida market, and we look forward to working with Key Auto Group and their team again in the future. Anthony DiLorenzo, owner of Key Auto Group, began his career in the automotive industry in 1986, as a sales associate at Edwards Toyota. Key Auto Group was established in 1994 with the acquisition of Somerset Auto Center, and then added Portsmouth Chevrolet in 1997. Over the past 11 years, the company continued to grow, adding automotive dealerships, collision centers, a brewery, a rental car company, and fitness centers. DiLorenzo has set the vision and mission for the entire group of businesses, which has grown to over 400 employees. The company states that their goal is to be one of the most recognized and well-respected auto groups in the Eastern U.S. and to uphold the following values to help them achieve this vision: Respect, Integrity, Initiative, Value, Responsibility, Transparency, and Peer Development. Upon the transaction closing, Todd Jackson, Regional VP of Key Auto Group, stated, We knew we wanted to expand in Florida. After the successful purchase of our General Motors dealership in Perry with Courtney Bernhard and George Chaconas, we quickly entered into our second purchase agreement for Bob Pforte Motors. We look forward to working with George and Courtney on more dealership acquisitions in the near future. Following the sale, Courtney Bernhard of Performance Brokerage Services commented, It has been a pleasure working with Key Auto Group for the second time. I appreciate their entire team who worked diligently, along with the seller and his comptroller, LaShawnda Crews, to get this transaction to a successful closing. The dealership will remain at its current location at 2471 Commercial Park Drive in Marianna, Florida and has been renamed Key Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram of Marianna. Bob Pforte was represented by Logan Parker of Bass Sox Mercer in Tallahassee, Florida. Key Auto Group was represented by Stephen Roberts, Partner at Hoefle, Phoenix, Gormley & Roberts, PLLC in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. About Performance Brokerage Services Performance Brokerage Services, Inc. is North Americas highest volume dealership brokerage firm, specializing in buy-sell activity for automotive, RV, commercial truck, powersports, and equipment dealerships. With over 25 years of experience, 700 dealerships sold, and a 90% closing rate, the companys reputation is unmatched and governed by the utmost ethical conduct and integrity. The company offers a unique approach by providing complimentary estimates of value with no upfront fees or retainer, no reimbursement of costs, and paid a success fee only after the transaction closes. Headquartered in Irvine, California, and supported by 7 regional offices in Utah, Texas, Florida, Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, and Canada, clients benefit from national exposure with local representation. As trusted and respected experts in the field, the company utilizes an extensive network of industry related attorneys, accountants, hundreds of registered buyers, and longstanding relationships with various vehicle manufacturers. For more information about the services offered by Performance Brokerage Services, visit https://performancebrokerageservices.com. AINS, a provider of FedRAMP-certified case management software and IT services for government, today announced the appointment of Martha Mathers as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and member of its executive team. Mathers brings nearly 20 years of experience as both a marketing leader and advisor and will lead the companys go-to-market efforts with a focus on building a comprehensive go-to-market strategy, driving brand awareness, and enhancing the end-to-end customer experience for AINS prospects and customers. Martha has an impressive track record of driving growth and building robust go-to-market capabilities for technology businesses, said Howard Langsam, Chief Executive Officer at AINS. We are thrilled for her to join our executive team, where she will transform our marketing capabilities and strengthen our demand generation engine. The AINS team has built differentiated solutions that transform the government worker experience, improving speed and efficiency with low-code, adaptive case management software, said Mathers. We are at an exciting inflection in our growth trajectory, and I am thrilled to partner with this incredible leadership team to accelerate our expansion through enhanced go-to-market capabilities. Prior to her appointment at AINS, Mathers served as VP, Marketing at Granicus (Vista Equity Partners portfolio company), where she led marketing strategy, demand generation, and product marketing. Matherss experience also includes more than 10 years at Gartner (and previously CEB), where she served as Managing Vice President in the marketing practice, and SBI (Sales Benchmark Index, LLC), where she supported the launch of a new advisory business. This addition to the AINS executive team follows the recent appointment of new CEO, Howard Langsam, in early 2022. About AINS AINS is a global provider of adaptive case management platforms and solutions and IT services for government customers. AINSs software enables organizations to streamline workflows across diverse lines of business. The Companys software solutions span FOIA, Audits, Investigations, and other applications, all of which are purpose-built for specific use cases. Founded in 1988, AINS is headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland and has 161 employees in the DC Metro area. For more information on AINS and its growing team, visit http://www.ains.com or follow our story on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/company/ains_inc. Intelligent Process Automation with a focus on Intelligent Document Classification and Advanced Data Capture Everything ancora does ultimately focuses on reducing human involvement in processes that can be automated, said ancora Software CEO Noel Flynn. With the advances of digitization and the cloud, its essential to develop faster automated processes." ancora Software, Inc., a global leader in intelligent process automation solutions including Intelligent Document Classification and Advanced Data Capture, announced today the filing of a U.S. patent application for a customer-driven super-portal to enable automated accounts payable and sales order document processing. The method and system benefits customers by reducing labor for recipients and expediting invoice payments. This would be the third US Patent issued to ancora Software for its industry leading technology. With millions of documents exchanged daily, businesses must find more efficient ways of addressing processes such as accounting workflows. With many different types of documents and formats, though, it is difficult to access and extract data of interest to enable seamless data flow between issuers and recipients. This complexity results in a cumbersome and time-consuming translation process that has traditionally been performed by the recipient of documentsthe company receiving an invoice. This delay creates a data lag between organizations ERPs, contributes to human error, increases the cost of the AP process, and delays payment. ancoras customer-driven super-portal uses patented automation technology, ancoraDocs, to give the organization issuing the invoice control of the process, ultimately speeding payment. The vendor logs in, gets authenticated as an authorized user, and uploads all documents such as invoices and supporting documents to the recipient system. Data is then automatically extracted, verified against the recipients ERP system, and exported to this system. Required documents are then submitted for the recipients approval, streamlining the traditional approach to invoicing. The portal, using ancoraDocs, includes a menu of all supported input formats as well as export formats acceptable to the recipients ERP system. Everything ancora does ultimately focuses on reducing human involvement in processes that can be automated, said ancora Software CEO Noel Flynn. With the advances of digitization and the cloud, its essential to develop faster automated processes. Our customer portal is a win-win solution, benefiting both the vendor submitting the invoice by speeding up payment terms, and the company receiving it by eliminating manual labor. ancora Softwares advanced capabilities in intelligent process automation leverage unassisted and assisted machine learning to help software extract data of interest from a variety of documents. This will cut implementation time dramatically, from weeks or months to as little as hours or days with our portal. About ancora Software ancora Software, Inc. is an innovative provider of Intelligent Process Automation solutions including Intelligent Document Classification and Data Capture. Its flagship product, ancoraDocs, simplifies document capture. ancora Softwares patented artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies help organizations eliminate costly manual steps in their business processes such as document classification, document analysis, manual data entry, and manual filing. Organizations using ancora Software achieve faster and less expensive business process automation and better controls over their mission-critical information. Headquartered in San Diego, CA, ancora Software maintains sales and support operations throughout North America and in the United Kingdom. For more information about ancora Software, Inc. visit http://www.ancorasoftware.com Ultimately, our primary goal with upgrading our EHR was to improve both our patient and employee experiences. The selection of Arize was part of a strategic shift to cloud-based, mobile-first solutions, enabling our clinical teams to meet the needs of our clients anywhere at any time. Cantata Health Solutions, a leading provider of healthcare technology solutions for the Behavioral Health industry, today announced that The Village Network will deploy Arize Electronic Health Record (EHR) to leverage its superior configuration, outcomes-based reporting, and mobile access capabilities. Ultimately, our primary goal with upgrading our EHR was to improve both our patient and employee experiences, says Richard Graziano, President & CEO of The Village Network. The selection of Arize was part of a strategic shift to cloud-based, mobile-first solutions, enabling our clinical teams to meet the needs of our clients anywhere at any time. As weve begun the implementation process, were already seeing how the reduced documentation requirements will allow clinical staff to focus more on patient care and less on paperwork. Its a win-win situation, said Grazino. Arize is the first completely new, purpose-built solution for the Health and Human Services market, dramatically reducing the complexity of solutions that have evolved over decades. Arize represents a new way of thinking about an EHR, eliminating the technical restrictions and layers of outdated features that are characteristic of traditional systems, says Alan Tillinghast, CEO, Cantata Health. Over the course of the last several years, we have been monitoring the evolution of electronic health record software options available on the market. With the release of the Arize product, we saw an opportunity to partner with a solution provider with whom weve already had a proven track record of success, said Mary Schantz, Vice President of Information Systems. Arize delivers on flexibility and user-friendly design, all the while reducing clinical documentation, clearing the path for us to efficiently grow our services and focus on patient care, said Schantz. Arize is a comprehensive, person-centered, collaborative care platform created by and for providers, caregivers and people served in the Health and Human Services community. Arize focuses on the individual, allowing people in care to participate in data workflows and processes. It is based on cutting-edge technology that takes advantage of an open and customizable design that enables connections with outside data sources and applications quickly and seamlessly. About The Village Network Since 1946, The Village Network has been a leader in caring for at-risk youth and their families in Ohio and West Virginia. Our premiere treatment plans paired with compassionate care create opportunities for our clients to experience healing from their individual traumas and improve their behavioral, physical, and emotional health. Our services are designed to transition individuals to permanent, stable environments and include Community Services, Residential Treatment, and Treatment Foster Care. All our services contribute to our mission to empower all individuals to build brighter futures. The Village Network is nationally recognized as a quality care provider, licensed by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, certified by the Ohio Department of Mental Health & Addiction Services, accredited by the Council of Accreditation, and is a flagship partner of the Neurosequential Network. About Cantata Health Solutions Cantata Health Solutions delivers award-winning software for acute, post-acute, and behavioral health facilities purpose-built to improve the health of the facilities and their patients. Cantata Healths Revenue Cycle Management (RCM), financial management, and Electronic Health Records (EHR) software are configurable to meet the unique needs of each facility or system; provide staff and administrators with greater visibility to patient care across the continuum of care; ensure predictable financial outcomes; improve back-office operations; clinical efficiency; and revenue recovery. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, their team of experts provides uncommonly attentive service and support. For more information about Cantata Health Solutions, and Arize EHR visit: https://cantatahealth.com "This is the type of track record and experience we need to turn around our state and our country. I am asking the voters to support my candidacy and hire me to work for them. We can all realize the American dream. We all deserve a chance at it." Heading into his run for U.S. Congress for Georgias 6th Congressional District, nominee Blake Harbin is hosting a special event tonight, where he will speak about his forthcoming run. The event will feature Brad Parscale, former campaign manager for President Donald J. Trump, as well as a host committee consisting of Dr. Britt and Copeland Boyd, Tom Pope III, and several others. The event will take place today from 5:00 PM to 8:30 PM at the Crooked Creek Community Clubhouse in Milton, GA. Harbin announced his qualification for the ballot to represent the voters of Georgias 6th Congressional District earlier this month, after submitting his registration forms outside the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. Hes overcome a great deal to get to this point, but believes that with his approach towards the American dream, it can become a reality. "I've built my life and my home in the 6th district. Raised by a single mother with hardly any resources, I know the importance of community and opportunity and what they can do to help us change our lives. It would be a tremendous honor to help Georgians in the 6th district, Harbin noted about his run. "Our great country is under attack. It is headed in the wrong direction and we need to turn it around. Putting America First is not just a policy agenda, it is a mantra for us to do the right thing for our fellow Americans, Harbin continued. "Only in this country can a boy who grew up with literally nothing work hard to find success. You have to earn it but it is there if you want it. The values this country and this great state were built upon are today under assault, and we need a fighter and a doer in Congress to protect them." "I know what adversity is and how it can shape our lives. In 2007, I lost the ability to walk after a tragic fall and had to start life all over. I've been knocked down before and know what it takes to get back up again and again. Determination and experience set me apart and I want to use the lessons I have learned to help our residents in the 6th district. I am an outsider. I am not connected to establishment politicians and I don't commute to our district. I live in it." For more than 20 years Blake Harbin has built small businesses in financial management and home mortgages. He has created hundreds of jobs and helped others achieve their dreams saying, "This is the type of track record and experience we need to turn around our state and our country. I am asking the voters to support my candidacy and hire me to work for them. We can all realize the American dream. We all deserve a chance at it." For more information please visit: https://blakeharbin.com/ Those interested in reserving a spot at tonights event can do so by reaching out to Ryan Caudelle at ryan@blakeharbin.com. CONTACT: Celinda Hawkins at: jerry.specialguests@gmail.com Hundreds of additional guests at: https://SpecialGuests.com/guests-topics/ Aimed at white Christians, Katherine B. Martins book The Colorful Image of God: A White Christians Guide to Doing Better (published by Archway Publishing) teaches about race and how to do better in the fight for racial justice. The book explores race, racism and related topics like white privilege and implicit bias from the authors perspective as a white, Christian woman. Martin tells personal stories from her own racial identity journey to help ease others into what can sometimes be uncomfortable topics and provide concrete suggestions of what others can do to help uproot racial injustices in the United States. I want readers to feel more comfortable talking about race. I want them to have a deeper sense of their Whiteness and what that means in terms of how they show up and engage in the world. I want readers to understand that racism is real and that they play a role in it daily, Martin says. I want readers to feel inspired to learn more, to begin reading and listening to people of color more, and to recognize that it will take all of us to end racism in our country, given how deeply it exists in ourselves and in our systems. The Colorful Image of God is available for purchase online at the Archway link above, from Barnes & Noble and on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/Colorful-Image-God-Christians-Better/dp/1665714034. The Colorful Image of God By Katherine B. Martin Hardcover | 5.5 x 8.5 in | 214 pages | ISBN 9781665714051 Softcover | 5.5 x 8.5 in | 214 pages | ISBN 9781665714037 E-Book | 214 pages | ISBN 9781665714044 Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble About the Author Katherine B. Martin was born in Tennessee, spent her middle school years in New York and attended high school in Georgia. Since then, she has lived in more than a dozen cities and towns and currently calls Charlotte, North Carolina home. She has more than 20 years of work experience in the corporate and nonprofit sectors and has spent most of her career fighting for educational equity for children. Martin is married to her husband, Lee, and they have three young children. The Colorful Image of God is the authors first book. She recently started blogging at katherinelearns.com. Simon & Schuster, a company with nearly ninety years of publishing experience, has teamed up with Author Solutions, LLC, the worldwide leader in self-publishing, to create Archway Publishing. With unique resources to support books of all kind, Archway Publishing offers a specialized approach to help every author reach his or her desired audience. For more information, visit archwaypublishing.com or call 844-669-3957. Luanda Around 30 young Angolans, residents of the cities of Goias and Anapolis, went Sunday to the consular sector of the Angolan Embassy in Brazil, in Brasilia, where they provided data for renewal of their Identity Card and Electoral Registration. According to a note from the Communication and Press sector of the Angolan diplomatic representation in Brazil, after completing the formalities of the process, the group, most of them students, expressed their happiness and satisfaction for the duty of citizenship fulfilled. For Flavio Domingos, student of physiotherapy at the Unievangelica in Anapolis, it was a historic moment because he managed to register and, for the first time, will vote even living abroad. Margarida Bras, a Master's student in the speciality of Nursing at Work, did not hide her enormous satisfaction at the fact that she is now able to vote because, as she stressed, the welfare and development of the Angolan nation involves the holding of elections, the main barometer of democracy. The process of voter registration, which began on 17 January and is due to close on 31 March, is being carried out in the Angolan capital. 31 March, is taking place in the Brazilian Diaspora, in the Consular Sector of the Angolan Embassy in Brasilia and in the Consulates General in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. At 7.8 cubic feet, Forza's 48" range has over 40-inches of clearanceenough to fit two turkeys during the holidays, or one full plus one-half commercial tray for a whole lot of cookies. It is a great honor to receive this international award for best consumer design. Our slogan is Different by Design and thats how we came to create this professional range. Its bold form and style truly embody the soul of radical Italian design with the heart of an American muscle car. Forza, the ultra-premium Italian cooking appliances brand, has earned the prestigious 2021 Good Design Award from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies. The winning 48-inch Professional Gas Range is the worlds first 48-inch gas range with a single oven cavity. "It is a great honor to receive this international award for best consumer design, said Marco Guerzoni, Forza Director of Marketing and Product Development. Our slogan is Different by Design and thats how we came to create this professional range. Its bold form and style truly embody the soul of radical Italian design with the heart of an American muscle car. TWEET THIS: Ultra-premium Italian cooking appliances brand @forzacucina earns the prestigious @Chi_Athenaeum #GoodDesign Award 2021 for the worlds first 48-inch gas range with a single oven cavity. https://youtu.be/KtGwMjusceY Founded in Chicago in 1950 by legendary designers Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames, Good Design remains the oldest and the worlds most recognized program for design excellence worldwide. This year, the Museum received a record number of submissions from over 55 countries. This is the second straight year Forza has won a Good Design Award. In 2020, the companys 30- and 36-inch ranges were honored. KEY/EXCLUSIVE FEATURES OF THE 48-INCH MODEL: Featuring an impressive 7.8 cubic feet, the range cavity has over 40 inches of clearance. To bring the outdoor barbecue trend indoors, the MaxRotisserie accessory is a 33-inch motor-driven rod that can rotate a whole goat, lamb or small pig for multicultural cuisines. The oven goes 0 to 400F in 8 mins and tops out at 536F in 20 minutes with a 19,000 Btu bake burner. The range features Forzas proprietary MassimoBlu Hyper Double Broilerthe industrys only blue-flame double broiler. With 18,000 Btu, it heats the oven cavity evenly from edge to edge, eliminating cold spots and maximizing the heating area. An additional ultra-premium function is the exclusive Infinito Grate Systemthe industrys only continuous grate system with an integrated bullnose, utilizing edge-to-edge cast iron grates. The bold form and style of range embodies the soul of radical Italian design with the heart of an American muscle car, featuring unique angular racecar-inspired lines and offered in seven vivid colors: Audace Black, Dinamico Blue, Radicale Red, Ardente Orange, Ribelle Yellow, Valoroso White and Stainless Steel. For more information about Forzas lineup of professional appliances, visit forzacucina.com. About Forza Forza delivers dynamic Italian design with ultra-premium, professional cooking appliances. Designed and built in the heart of the famed Emilia-Romagna region in Modena, Italy, Forza appliances include professional gas ranges, dual convection electric wall ovens, professional range tops, high-performance ventilation hoods and a powerful, energy-efficient dishwasher. Forza is the American brand of parent company, Glem Gas, which has been producing high-performing appliances that embody the spirit of Italian craftsmanship for more than 60 years. For more information about Forza, visit forzacucina.com. Left: Kara Kelley, Ifey & Blue's - 2021 Idea Stage winner. Right: Allison Jachowski, ODIN CrossFit - 2021 Growth Stage and People's Choice winner. Photo credit: Acacia Bowens, AK's GraFix and Photo "The SHE Pitch program is an incredibly successful story-telling vehicle, made all the more special by hearing from these amazing business owners themselves. - Rick Weldon, President and CEO, Frederick County Chamber of Commerce S.H.E. Pitch is a component of S.H.E. Week, a week of events celebrating the Strength, Heart and Equality of women in Frederick County. The competition is designed for female entrepreneurs to give businesses both in the idea stage and growth stage significant cash prizes, publicity and networking opportunities. Enrollment is now open and runs through May 2, 2022. "Frederick leads the state and the mid-Atlantic region in recognizing and celebrating women entrepreneurs for their enormous positive impact on our economy and opportunity creation. The SHE Pitch program is an incredibly successful story-telling vehicle, made all the more special by hearing from these amazing business owners themselves, said Rick Weldon, Chamber president and CEO. We don't just feature and celebrate, we directly invest in their success and their businesses through a facilitated pitch development process. I hope you get a chance to see/hear these women describe their passion and purpose. I'm sure you'll be as inspired as I've been if you do! Eligibility for S.H.E. Pitch is based upon a set of criteria established for two categories of competitors - those in the idea stage of their business and those in the growth stage. Registration for the competition is free but requires a discounted investment of $26 to develop the necessary materials needed for judging and progression through the competition. Interested entrepreneurs are encouraged to enroll in the month of April as the process involves online coursework and submission deadlines for judging. Finalists in both categories will pitch their businesses to a live and virtual audience on August 24th as part of S.H.E. Week 2022 programming. Winners will be announced during the live event with audience members also getting the opportunity to vote and award their favorite pitch a Peoples Choice prize. This opportunity wouldnt exist without our partners at Frederick County Office of Economic Development, City of Frederick Department of Economic Development, Maryland Womens Business Center and Octavo Designs, said Jennifer Gerlock, vice president of the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce. Their vision, financial prize investments and work on behalf of established, emerging and underrepresented female entrepreneurs is nothing short of inspiring. More details on the process, eligibility and registration can be found online at frederickchamber.org/shepitch. Businesses who wish to get involved or sponsor either S.H.E. Pitch or S.H.E. Week are encouraged to reach out to Jennifer Gerlock at jgerlock@frederickchamber.org for more information. S.H.E. Pitch is made possible through a partnership with the Maryland Womens Business Center, Frederick County Office of Economic Development, City of Frederick Department of Economic Development, the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce and Octavo Designs. S.H.E. Week, which runs August 22-26 in 2022, is a program developed by The Frederick County Chamber of Commerce's Women in Business Committee. The Frederick County Chamber of Commerce's Women in Business Committees mission is to empower and develop women through education, networking, mentoring and partnerships and to promote opportunities for all women throughout Frederick County. Women in Business Committee members develop programs that provide opportunities for women to learn and network as well as share their expertise with each other and to address the unique issues of women in business. GPR Ventures has purchased the Alta View Apartments in Salt Lake Citys East Bench neighborhood near the University of Utah. Salt Lake City consistently ranks as one of the top markets in the nation for growth opportunity, and our activities in the industrial and multi-family sectors reflect that. GPR Ventures has made its second-ever multi-family acquisition by completing the purchase of a six building, 64-unit residential project in Salt Lake City. The buildings, renamed from City View Apartments to the Alta View Apartments, are located at 1012 East Barbara Place and have significant vacancies. The purchase, which closed escrow on Dec. 10, 2021, marks the 34th overall acquisition for GPR Ventures and the third in the state of Utah. Salt Lake City consistently ranks as one of the top markets in the nation for growth opportunity, and our activities in the industrial and multi-family sectors reflect that, said Glen Yonekura, GPR Ventures co-founder and Managing Principal. We continue to expand GPR Ventures value-add presence in the Western United States with this acquisition. Additionally, we remain committed to the Salt Lake City market and our multi-family platform expansion. Real estate firm #GPRVentures has purchased a six-building, 64-unit multifamily property in #SaltLakeCity #Utah. The portfolio is set in the East Bench neighborhood and overlooks the Salt Lake Valley near the University of Utah. https://GPRVentures.com/ Property Features + Benefits The Alta View Apartments portfolio is set in the East Bench neighborhood and overlooks the Salt Lake Valley near the University of Utah. The vintage-style apartments are outfitted with hardwood floors and are available in a variety of layouts, from studio to three-bedroom units. For more information on GPR Ventures and its complete portfolio, visit https://www.gprventures.com/. GPR Ventures has purchased a four-building industrial portfolio in Idaho Falls, marking the companys first venture into the market. The state of Idaho continues to experience positive growth, and Idaho Falls, in particular, is an ideal market for GPR Ventures to continue expanding our presence in the Western United States. GPR Ventures further expands its West Coast presence with the purchase of a four-building industrial portfolio in Idaho Falls, the first of two acquisitions in the state of Idaho. The buildings total 584,800 square feet and are 100 percent leased. The new purchase is the 37th overall acquisition for GPR Ventures after closing on a multifamily property in Salt Lake City to end the year. The state of Idaho continues to experience positive growth, and Idaho Falls, in particular, is an ideal market for GPR Ventures to continue expanding our presence in the Western United States, said GPR Ventures cofounder and Managing Principal Glen Yonekura. Population increases, job growth and a key distribution location geographically are critical factors that drew us to the area. We are excited to expand our presence in this market. We like the people, the growth, the distribution opportunities and the resources that this market offers, and we remain committed to this region. Commercial real estate firm #GPRVentures enters the Idaho Falls market with the purchase of a four-building industrial portfolio. The buildings total nearly 600,000 sq ft and are fully leased. https://gprventures.com/ The buildings are located along the Snake River at 2020-2332 Heyrend Way and 2167-2187 West 49th South in Idaho Falls. The buildings provide easy access to Interstate 15 and are less than five miles from downtown Idaho Falls. The four buildings are primarily used for industrial storage and manufacturing and include interior office spaces, conference rooms and storage and data rooms. Numerous recessed truck loading docks are integrated within each building for shipping and receiving. For more information on GPR Ventures and its complete portfolio, visit https://www.gprventures.com/. About GPR Ventures Founded in 2011, GPR Ventures is a privately held real estate investment firm with offices in Silicon Valley and Sacramento that specializes in providing real estate opportunities for a select group of sophisticated investors. GPR Ventures uses a dynamic, fully developed process and the acquisition-to-disposition expertise of founders Glen Yonekura and Phillip Rolla to yield consistent results. GPRs portfolio includes 101 industrial and office buildings totaling over 3 million square feet and an additional 36 acres of land. For additional information, please visit GPRVentures.com or call (408) 559-3300. Green Development, Rhode Islands leading renewable energy developer, released an update today on the companys 2021 accomplishments, including the number of projects developed and the off-takers who are taking advantage of the states virtual net metering program. Today, the company has 135 MW of installed, interconnected and operational projects in Rhode Island (including solar and wind). Green Development now has the capacity to produce an estimated 208,803,000 kWh of energy per year, which is enough to provide electricity to 29,250 homes per year. 2021 was a record year for the company, nearly 60 MW (59.725 MW) of projects were installed last year across 9 projects. Of the 60MW total, the Iron Mine solar project in North Smithfield represents nearly 83% of the total at 49.3 MW. The Iron Mine project is the largest solar array in Rhode Island. It is humbling to think about where we started in 2009 and what we have built today. The backbone of this company is our employees and we are proud of what we have accomplished together. I also want to thank our municipal partners and so many organizations that have embraced renewable energy through the states virtual net metering program. Each and every project, no matter its size, helps Rhode Island achieve its clean energy goals, said Mark DePasquale, Green Developments founder and CEO. In 2021, the company helped more than a dozen Rhode Island organizations realize significant savings on their electric bills through Rhode Islands virtual net metering program. Some examples include the Pawtucket Housing Authority, Central Falls School Department, Crossroads RI, YMCA of Greater Providence, Town of Scituate, Narragansett Bay Commission, and Johnson & Wales University. The RI Virtual Net Metering Program is open to schools and universities, municipalities, hospitals, quasi-public corporations, organizations that provide low-income housing, and other nonprofits. We began by enrolling our schools and other municipal buildings in the virtual net metering program, and we have since added our housing authority. Green Development has helped us understand how to take advantage of this program that has produced real savings for the taxpayers of Central Falls, stated Maria Rivera, mayor of Central Falls. I would encourage municipal leaders throughout the state to take a look at the virtual net metering program if they havent adopted it already. Taking advantage of Rhode Islands virtual net metering program was one of the best decisions weve made for the organization and we have relied on the expertise of the Green Development team along the way, said Steven G. O'Donnell, CEO at the YMCA of Greater Providence. We continue to accrue savings on our energy bills, had zero upfront costs and it aligns with our core values and mission to create healthier lifestyles while lessening our dependence on fossil fuels. List of organizations that saved money via Green Development & net metering in 2021: West Warwick Housing Authority ONE Neighborhood Builders Pawtucket Housing Authority Church Community Housing, Phoenix, Sandywoods Omni Development Co. Johnson & Wales University Narragansett Bay Commission Central Falls Schools City of Central Falls YMCA Portsmouth School Department Town of Portsmouth City of East Providence Crossroads RI Town of Scituate RICCA Additionally, the company released a list of newly signed off-takers for 2022 which includes: This award belongs to everyone in our company who makes our mission possible. Their dedication to customer care, teamwork and inclusion make Infosec a top place to work. Infosec Institute, a leading cybersecurity education provider, today announced it received a Top Workplaces 2022 honor by Wisconsin State Journal Top Workplaces. Based on employee feedback, Infosec was recognized as one of the top 60 employers in the Madison area. Infosec also received a special award for company communication, crediting the organizations' frequent employee updates and transparent communications. At Infosec, our people make all the difference. From creating the award-winning content learners love to the dedicated team who help our clients reach their security goals, they make Infosec great, said Jack Koziol, SVP, GM and founder of Infosec. This award belongs to everyone in our company who makes our mission possible. Their dedication to customer care, teamwork and inclusion make Infosec a top place to work. Each year the Wisconsin State Journal and its partner Energage recognize and honor the top employers in the Greater Madison area. This years Top Workplaces awards received nominations from more than 95 Madison community organizations. The annual list is based solely on employee feedback gathered through a survey administered by third-party employee engagement technology partner Energage LLC. The anonymous survey uniquely measures 15 culture drivers that are critical to any organization's success: alignment, execution, and connection, just to name a few. As a University of Wisconsin alumnus, Koziol started Infosec in 2004 and has grown the company to a team of more than 130. In 2021 alone, Infosecs software platforms Infosec IQ and Infosec Skills helped millions of learners make the digital world safer by delivering 26 million minutes of cybersecurity training. Its recognition as a Madison Top Workplace follows other recent accolades, including: Learn what makes Infosec a 2022 Top Workplace. About Infosec Infosec is a leading cybersecurity education company helping IT and security professionals advance their careers and empowering employees to be cyber safe at work and home. Its mission is to equip individuals and organizations with the knowledge and skills to confidently outsmart cybercrime. More than 70% of the Fortune 500 have relied on Infosec Skills to develop their security talent and teams, and more than 5 million learners worldwide are more cyber-resilient from Infosec IQs security awareness and phishing training. Follow Infosec on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Infosecs Resources Blog for the latest news, or visit infosecinstitute.com for more information. About Energage Energage is a purpose-driven company that helps organizations turn employee feedback into useful business intelligence and credible employer recognition through Top Workplaces. Built on 15 years of culture research and the results from 23 million employees surveyed across more than 70,000 organizations, Energage delivers the most accurate competitive benchmark available. With access to a unique combination of patented analytic tools and expert guidance, Energage customers lead the competition with an engaged workforce and an opportunity to gain recognition for their people-first approach to culture. For more information or to nominate your organization, visit energage.com or topworkplaces.com. 2022 Nissan Sentra Front Left-quarter view Customers looking for alternative ways to own a vehicle can benefit from leasing deals offered by dealerships. Glendale Nissan is offering a limited-period lease offer for the 2022 Nissan Sentra. The 2022 Sentra can be leased at $269 per month for 36 months (about 3 years). An initial payment of $2,539 must be made at the time of signing the agreement. The car in question is the 2022 Sentra SV with Splash Guards and Floor Mats. The lease offer is available only for well-qualified lessees. Apart from this, the 2022 Sentra can also be financed at a special annual percentage rate of 0.9% for 36 months. For customers looking to purchase the vehicle by paying the entire amount at once, the 2022 Sentra is available at a special price of $19,610 MSRP. For more details on the offers mentioned above along with the others that the dealership is offering, customers can visit the Glendale Nissan dealership located at 484 E North Avenue, Glendale Heights, Illinois 60139. The dealership can also be reached by phone at 630-469-6100 or through their website - https://www.glendalenissan.com/specials?utm_source=prnewswire&utm_medium=press+release&utm_campaign=2022mar29 Rubenstein starts with comparisons between the 1918 flu and the COVID-19 pandemic before discussing the many contributing factors that tie into the worlds Total Fertility Rate, the history of life expectancy, and possible outcomes in the future. Homicide, opioid overdose, and suicide contribute to the widening life expectancy gap between the U.S. and other wealthy countries. Negative Population Growth, Incs newly published Forum paper, titled: Life Expectancy Drives U.S. and World Population Growth, by Edwin S. Rubenstein, explains the nuances of population growth in tandem with life expectancy. With such a large scope at hand, Rubenstein starts with comparisons between the 1918 flu and the COVID-19 pandemic before discussing the many contributing factors that tie into the worlds Total Fertility Rate, the history of life expectancy, and possible outcomes in the future. Beginning his narrative with data covering the 1918 influenza pandemic, Rubenstein compels readers to look critically at the differences between the 1918 flu and the COVID-19 pandemic, starting with how many deaths occurred during each worldwide scenario. The best estimates, he shares, suggest as many as 100 million people died from the Spanish Flu that eventually circled the world. To put that in context, as of January 14th, 2022, 5.5 million people have died from all COVID variants, on a planet with four times as many people. During the 1918 flu life-expectancy plunged by 12 years, from 51 in 1917 to 39 in 1918, before returning to pre-pandemic life-expectancy estimates in 1919. Rubenstein then zeros in on the different factors that play into life expectancy in the U.S., sharing that opioid overdoses, suicide, homicide, and infant mortality are causes of death that affect young people (which, in turn, dramatically affect life expectancy trends). Expanding to include the world in his analysis, Rubenstein highlights another part of the life expectancy equation: the impact of the Total Fertility Rate (TFR). He illustrates the significance of its impact with an example, sharing: Even slight changes per woman translates to around 500 million more individuals on the planet in 2100. Rubenstein tells readers the population will peak, decline, and stabilize in the future, noting: World population will likely peak at 9.7 billion in 2064, and then decline to about 8.8 billion by 2100 about 2 billion lower than the latest UN projection. Touching on life expectancy history, Rubenstein notes that data was not collected on the subject until the 1600s, fueled by the curious elite. Then, the smallpox vaccine allows everyone to live longer lives until industrialization develops and negatively affects human health. Along with industrialization came the prevalence of another lethal blow to young lives: milk. It would take decades for widespread acceptance of pasteurized milk to take hold in the early 1920s. Soon after the advancement of milk processing, science confirms that chlorine (in microscopic doses) in water eliminates water-borne diseases. By the 1950s, there was safe milk, clean water, and vaccines for the most lethal diseases all positive gains for human health and longevity. At this point, another critical medicine was added to our collective human arsenal: penicillin. This antibiotic, Rubenstein states, triggered a revolution in human healthThe mass production of antibiotics, the Green Revolution, the rise of international health organizations lifted global life expectancy especially in the worlds poorest countries. Given this wide birth of positive outcomes (longer life expectancy) over the last 100 years, Rubenstein points to what can only be called the elephant in the room, saying: the last century was marked by nearly unbroken increases in life expectancy. This century may not be as kind. The problem is human population growth. Rubenstein ends with a concise quote from journalist Steven Johnson: All those brilliant solutions we engineered to reduce or eliminate threats like smallpox created a new, higher-level threat: ourselves. Many of the key problems we now face as a species are second-order effects of reduced mortalityRunaway population growth and the environmental crisis it has helped produce should remind us that continued advances in life expectancy are not inevitable. Founded in 1972, NPG is a national nonprofit membership organization dedicated to educating the American public and political leaders regarding the damaging effects of population growth. We believe that our nation is already vastly overpopulated in terms of the long-range carrying capacity of its resources and environment. NPG advocates the adoption of its Proposed National Population Policy, with the goal of eventually stabilizing U.S. population at a sustainable level far lower than todays. We do not simply identify the problems we propose solutions. For more information, visit our website at NPG.org, follow us on Facebook @NegativePopulationGrowth or follow us on Twitter @npg_org. Tax Season 2022 The days of making accidental mistakes and errors that elongate the tax filing process are now over Today, PaystubsNow, a website offering various digital documentation solutions, announced that it will be updating its features to offer highly-accurate forms. These improvements will be applied to its Paystub Generator, W-2 Generator, Invoice Generator, and 1099 Generator. Users can fill out their desired form within a few minutes through the website and receive an immediate digital copy, which is sent via email. Of the companys announcement, a spokesperson for PaystubsNow commented, Tax season is an increasingly confusing period for millions of taxpayers across the country. Whether theyre the owner of a small business attempting to get their records organized or the boss of a major corporation, having access to accurate forms is of the utmost importance. Thats why PSN has focused more heavily than ever on providing a convenient, effective resource that minimizes errors as much as possible. The process users follow to receive their documents is crafted for maximum precision. These steps include: 1) Choosing their desired documentation generator from PaystubsNows website. 2) Picking from one of PSNs many convenient templates. 3) Entering their relevant information, which depends on the form chosen. For instance, the Paystubs Generator allows users to enter their company information, employee information, earnings statement, and more. 4) Reviewing the preview of their final form to ensure everything is correct before continuing. 5) Accepting the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy to reach the Checkout page, where the document can be paid for and downloaded immediately. Furthermore, users can reach out to support@paystubsnow.com to receive help from a qualified expert should they experience any troubles or encounter an issue. There is also a convenient chat feature on the website itself, which can be used at any point during the creation process. It is increasingly common for people to make mistakes on their important forms especially if theyre done on paper, the spokesperson continued. In 2017, the IRS found almost two-and-a-half million errors on tax returns submitted, most of which were due to simple inaccuracies. The solutions provided by PaystubsNow were made in an effort to reduce this number as much as possible. PaystubsNows announcement comes at just the right time for taxpayers, as Tax Day arrives on April 15. With over one hundred million individual income tax returns being processed yearly, it is increasingly important for citizens to provide the government with documentation that is accurate and on-time, or else they could risk receiving IRS penalties that delay their processing period or worse places them into debt with the organization. PaystubsNow recognizes how complex modern documentation methods can be, the spokesperson said. Thats why every generator found on the website has been designed and updated to be as accurate as possible. The days of making accidental mistakes and errors that elongate the tax filing process are now over. Additionally, PaystubsNow has previously announced efforts to make their solutions as accessible as possible through affordable pricing. For instance, its Invoice Generator is entirely free for all users, while its Paystubs, W-2, and 1099 Generators do not exceed $15.49 for a digital copy of the completed document. About PaystubsNow: A website that offers multiple solutions for digital documentation, PaystubsNows online Paystub, Invoice, and W-2 generators have been used by thousands of returning customers. Since its establishment, the company has helped over 300,000 satisfied clients and earned more than 1,000 five-star reviews. Visit PaystubsNow today to learn more and create your documents today. Shaylene King wanted to blend her work with girls and her love of reading modern retellings of fairytales with her love of reading Bible stories. It is for this reason she has written Liberty Lane and the One-Girl Rebelution (published by WestBow Press), a modern retelling of the biblical story of Esther, creatively re-imagined for a younger generation. The confident but often stubborn spitfire, Liberty Lane OShea strongly stands for what she believes in; from standing on tables at school to boycott the high calorie foods they are serving, to standing in the pouring rain outside Target to protest their lack of chic rain attire. When the reigning queen of the Royal Crown competition is fired, the King of Sir Frederick Preparatory School and his talent scout search for the next big star. Liberty Lane is discovered and asked to compete. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, she agrees to vie for the crown. However, everything Liberty Lane stands for will be tested when she encounters a malicious contestant intent to secure himself the crown by destroying his competition, which just happens to include Liberty Lane herself. This story is whimsical, full of wisecracks, capers and clowning, perfect for middle grade readers who wants a strong, real life protagonist, not a cardboard Christian who wins against the odds because here, the protagonist offers hope that they too can overcome obstacles in their life, King says. When asked what she wants readers to take away from the book, King answers, To teach biblical truths while meeting tweens where they are at in their me obsessed world. It tackles important issues at the core of the story like bullying, gossiping, and peer pressure. Within this framework are the many life lessons learned along the way. The central messages the Bible teaches in each story are taught through Liberty Lanes adventures. For more details about the book, please visit https://www.westbowpress.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/731923-liberty-lane-and-the-one-girl-rebelution Liberty Lane and the One-Girl Rebelution By Shaylene King Hardcover | 5.5 x 8.5in | 170 pages | ISBN 9781664211971 Softcover | 5.5 x 8.5in | 170 pages | ISBN 9781664211964 E-Book | 170 pages | ISBN 9781664211957 Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble About the Author Shaylene King is the founder of The Mean Girl Extinction Project, a 501(c)3 non-profit created to address the rise in relational aggression among girls. She teaches girls how to, not only survive girl world but to make a difference and thrive in girl world. King also teaches and trains the nations leading student-led bully prevention program, Safe School Ambassadors. She works to equip students with the tools they need to develop self-confidence while practicing and promoting positive communication with their peers. She lives with her husband in Middle Tennessee, sailing the unchartered waters of empty nesting. She enjoys any time she gets to spend with her two grown children who are off exploring the world and living the life God created for them. WestBow Press is a strategic supported self-publishing alliance between HarperCollins Christian Publishing and Author Solutions, LLC the world leader in supported self-publishing. Titles published through WestBow Press are evaluated for sales potential and considered for publication through Thomas Nelson and Zondervan. For more information, visit westbowpress.com or call 844-714-3454. Luanda Angolan head of State Joao Lourenco is expected Tuesday (29) in the central Huambo province to preside over the opening ceremony of the 2022 Judicial Year, according to the spokesperson for the Presidency of the Republic. Luis Fernando said the Statesman will deliver speech in the presence of the Presidents of Higher Courts, the Attorney General, Chairman of the Angolan Bar Association, among other entities of the body that run Justice in the country. The opening of the Judicial Year is a ceremony surrounded by great symbolism. In his formal speech, the president will focus on universe of justice and the way it is applied in Angola, the note adds. Likewise, the ceremony aims to highlight gains and, eventually, express concerns about issues that need to be improved in the Justice sector. The speech raises great expectation as democracy is the way in which justice is administered. According to the note, the President of the Republic, Joao Lourenco, will return to Luanda on the same day (29). Both Dr. Siegel and Dr. Patton are essential team members who support RadSites accreditation mission and learning-based culture, notes Garry Carneal, RadSites President and CEO. RadSite, a leading accrediting organization promoting performance and quality-based imaging practices, is proud to be celebrating the 10th anniversary of two of its key leaders: Eliot Siegel, MD, and Phil Patton PhD, CHP, DABR, DABSNM. In 2012, Dr. Siegel and Dr. Patton were both hired to help lead RadSite and finalize the development of several accreditation programs for advanced diagnostic imaging (ADI) pursuant to the Medicare Improvement for Patients and Provider Act of 2008 (MIPPA). Dr. Siegel serves as RadSites Chief Strategy Officer and Chair of RadSites Standards Committee. Dr. Patton serves as RadSites Chief Physics Officer and oversees RadSites physics standards and the technical assessment during the accreditation review process. Both are nationally recognized thought leaders in advanced diagnostic imaging. It has been and continues to be an honor to support RadSites quality-based mission over the past decade, notes Dr. Siegel. We have created a dynamic accreditation experience with feedback loops to improve imaging suppliers workflows. RadSite continues to work closely with the standards committee with input from public and private payers to update and refine our standards, as clinical practice and information technology changes at a rapid pace as well as adopting to the major challenges associated with the pandemic. Dr. Siegel is an internationally recognized radiologist who serves as Professor and Vice Chair of research information systems at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, as well as chief of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine for the VA Maryland Healthcare System. The RadSite accreditation review process provides an important opportunity to optimize the physics testing, assessment, and reporting process with over 1,000 ADI locations accredited by RadSite, adds Dr. Patton. State requirements often vary from one jurisdiction to the next, and RadSite has established clear national standards to help ensure that imaging systems remain properly calibrated in a wide range of clinical settings. Dr. Patton also serves as President and CEO of LBT Radiation Physics Consulting, Ltd. He is a licensed medical physicist, a Diplomat of the American Board of Radiology, and a Diplomat of the American Board of Science in Nuclear Medicine among other accomplishments. Both Dr. Siegel and Dr. Patton are essential team members who support RadSites accreditation mission and learning-based culture, notes Garry Carneal, RadSites President and CEO. They both provide strategic guidance and also can connect with applicants during the accreditation review process. They help explain RadSites standards and related requirements with the ultimate goal of improving patient care. RadSites accreditation programs cover all ADI modalities including CT, MRI, and nuclear medicine (such as PET and SPECT) imaging exams. RadSite now offers five accreditation programs: -Computed Tomography (CT) ADI, version 3.3 -Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) ADI, version 3.3 -Nuclear Medicine (NucMed) ADI, version 3.3 (including SPECT and PET) -Dental Cone Beam CT ADI, version 1.1 -Medical Cone Beam CT ADI, version 1.1 To learn more about RadSite, visit http://www.radsitequality.com or call us at 410 440-6007. Click here to learn more about RadSites upcoming and previous webinars. ### About RadSite (http://www.RadSiteQuality.com) Founded in 2005, RadSites mission is to promote performance and quality-based practices for imaging systems across the U.S. and its territories. RadSite is recognized by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as an official accreditation organization under the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act (MIPPA) of 2008. RadSite also is recognized by over 300 payers and has accredited over 1,000 imaging suppliers. RadSites programs help assess, track, and report imaging trends to enhance imaging procedures and outcomes. RadSite also offers educational programs, publishes issue briefs, and underwrites research on a complimentary basis to raise awareness of patient safety issues and to promote best practices. The organization is governed by an independent advisory board and committee system, which is open to a wide range of volunteers to ensure transparency and accountability. To learn more about RadSite, please contact us at (443) 440-6007 or info@radsitequality.com. (Graphic: Revieve) Revieve, a leading health, beauty and wellness personalized experience company, today announced the appointment of Joseph Harwood to its Advisory Board, expanding its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) platform capabilities, in cooperation with its retail, brand, social media and ecommerce partners. As a global DEI leader, digital media pioneer, award-winning beauty expert, and a member of the British Beauty Council, Harwood helps navigate the challenges consumers, beauty brands and retailers face, ensuring everyone can feel seen, heard, valued and championed. As a member of the Revieve Advisory Board, Harwood will play an instrumental role in expanding Revieves DEI programs, central to Revieves structure and platform solutions. Together, Harwood and Revieve will work to remove barriers within the health, beauty and wellness industries, in addition to identifying and implementing equitable and inclusive solutions. "As we continue to champion, change and promote values of inclusionin cooperation with our retail, brand, social media and ecommerce partnerswe must be challenged by both our colleagues and external voices. That is one of the core values of our board, said Dean DeBiase, Executive Chairman at Revieve. Joseph represents impactful voices of the LGBTQ+ community, and will help us continue to identify DEI gaps and expand our leadership position in in the industries and constituents we serve. I have always been passionate about changing the beauty industry into a more diverse, happier, and inclusive community. Ever since the beginning of my professional career, I was certain that there were some biases and barriers within the beauty space that could be easily removed. Im excited to be a member of Revieves Advisory Board and take the beauty tech industry to the next level, bringing more impactful equity, diversity and inclusion. I believe a key goal, for the health, beauty and wellness industry, is to make every voice heard, said Joseph Harwood, diversity and inclusivity consultant, digital media pioneer, award-winning beauty expert. About Revieve Advisory Board The Revieve Advisory Board was established to further Revieve's mission of transforming how its retail, brand, social media and ecommerce partners engage, connect, and interact with consumers across all touchpoints. Made up of global industry leaders across retail, beauty, eCommerce, innovation, media, marketing, and technology, the board serves as a catalyst for innovation alongside Revieve's AI-driven platforms. About Revieve Revieve is the preferred provider to brands and retailers across five continents for delivering a digitally-driven, personalized brand-experience leveraging state-of-the-art AI/AR technology. Working with our partners, Revieve has transformed the customer-experience for skin care and color cosmetics through its proprietary technology, the Revieve Health-Beauty-Wellness Platform. With easy-to-use self-diagnostic modules that personalize search, product discovery and shopping experiences, Revieves digital beauty platform delivers consumers targeted products, services and treatments. Encompassing all facets of the health, beauty and wellness industry, Revieves trusted powered-by modules include the AI Skincare Advisor, AI Makeup Advisor, AI Haircare Advisor, AI Suncare Advisor and AI Nutrition Advisor. The Revieve platform seamlessly integrates personalized shopping solutions, in-person and live-video consultations with health and beauty advisors, driving tangible business value by increasing consumer engagement, conversion and basket size across all digital in-store and online brand touchpoints. For more information EMEA and APAC: Kim Oguilve, kim@revieve.com and Vitalia Vasilkova, vitalia@revieve.com US: Cynthia Patoni, cynthia@apccollective.com France: Camille Dor, camille@apccollective.com LATAM: Margarita Robles-Martinez, margarita@nasci.com.mx Japan: Yusuke Mori, yusuke@revieve.com http://www.revieve.com Revieve Press Kit The Women Who Shaped My Faith: a thoughtful discussion of those who have guided and nurtured a sense of faith. The Women Who Shaped My Faith is the creation of published author Roslyn Joseph, a native of Trinidad who now resides in the United States with her loving husband and son. Joseph shares, There is a saying that goes, It takes a village to raise a child. In this case, it takes many women to develop a little girls faith journey. The setting started in Saint Lucia with Philomen playing a major role in her siblings lives. She had some hardship when her firstborn child died. Nevertheless, Philomen met the love of her life, Remy. Philomen went to Trinidad to be with Remy after he made plans for them to join him. She eventually called Trinidad home where she had other children and made new friends. Philomens love for her family, relatives, and friends drew people to her. Her faith in GOD grew throughout the years despite her losses and life choices. Roslyn looked on and learned from the women who shaped her life. She too experienced some hardship but trusted in the LORD and was rewarded. Prayer is one of the most powerful tools given to us by GOD. In times of distress, close your eyes, and ask GOD for strength. Then sit back and watch your life will change. Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you (Matthew 7:7, NKJB) Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Roslyn Josephs new book will encourage and surprise readers as they witness a unique journey on Gods path. Consumers can purchase The Women Who Shaped My Faith at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble. For additional information or inquiries about The Women Who Shaped My Faith, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919. We found that AI performed with a high degree of accuracy, comparable to clinician performance. Importantly, we found this to be the case when AI was validated using independent external datasets, suggesting that the results may be generalizable to the wider population. Artificial intelligence (AI) is an effective tool for fracture detection that has potential to aid clinicians in busy emergency departments, according to a study in Radiology. Missed or delayed diagnosis of fractures on X-ray is a common error with potentially serious implications for the patient. Lack of timely access to expert opinion as the growth in imaging volumes continues to outpace radiologist recruitment only makes the problem worse. AI may help address this problem by acting as an aid to radiologists, helping to speed and improve fracture diagnosis. To learn more about the technologys potential in the fracture setting, a team of researchers in England reviewed 42 existing studies comparing the diagnostic performance in fracture detection between AI and clinicians. Of the 42 studies, 37 used X-ray to identify fractures, and five used CT. The researchers found no statistically significant differences between clinician and AI performance. AIs sensitivity for detecting fractures was 91-92%. We found that AI performed with a high degree of accuracy, comparable to clinician performance, said study lead author Rachel Kuo, M.B. B.Chir., from the Botnar Research Centre, Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences in Oxford, England. Importantly, we found this to be the case when AI was validated using independent external datasets, suggesting that the results may be generalizable to the wider population. The study results point to several promising educational and clinical applications for AI in fracture detection, Dr. Kuo said. It could reduce the rate of early misdiagnosis in challenging circumstances in the emergency setting, including cases where patients may sustain multiple fractures. It has potential as an educational tool for junior clinicians. It could also be helpful as a second reader, providing clinicians with either reassurance that they have made the correct diagnosis or prompting them to take another look at the imaging before treating patients, Dr. Kuo said. Dr. Kuo cautioned that research into fracture detection by AI remains in a very early, pre-clinical stage. Only a minority of the studies that she and her colleagues looked at evaluated the performance of clinicians with AI assistance, and there was only one example where an AI was evaluated in a prospective study in a clinical environment. It remains important for clinicians to continue to exercise their own judgment, Dr. Kuo said. AI is not infallible and is subject to bias and error. Artificial Intelligence in Fracture Detection: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Collaborating with Dr. Kuo were Conrad Harrison, B.Sc., M.B.B.S., M.R.C.S., Terry-Ann Curran, M.B. B.Ch. B.A.O., M.D., Benjamin Jones, B.M.B.Ch., B.A., Alexander Freethy, B.Sc., M.B.B.S., M.Sc., M.R.C.S., David Cussons, B.Sc., M.B.B.S., Max Stewart, M.B. B.Chir., B.A., Gary S. Collins, B.Sc., Ph.D., and Dominic Furniss, D.M., M.A., M.B.B.Ch., FRCS (Plast). Radiology is edited by David A. Bluemke, M.D., Ph.D., University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, Wisconsin, and owned and published by the Radiological Society of North America, Inc. (https://pubs.rsna.org/journal/radiology) RSNA is an association of radiologists, radiation oncologists, medical physicists and related scientists promoting excellence in patient care and health care delivery through education, research and technologic innovation. The Society is based in Oak Brook, Illinois. (RSNA.org) For patient-friendly information on musculoskeletal imaging, visit RadiologyInfo.org. Texas Liberty Forever: The Battle of the Alamo interactive diorama There is nothing subtle about this inspired and active diorama, Chiao said. It is a must-see for people of all ages. Karl Chiao, executive director of the Dallas Historical Society (DHS), along with lead sponsors Stanley V. Graff and Reed Graff, are thrilled to announce the unveiling of the newest addition to DHSs exhibits, the interactive battle of the Alamo diorama, Texas Liberty Forever: The Battle of the Alamo, created by artist Tom Feely. Open to the public beginning Tuesday, March 29th, the exhibit kicks off the 100th Anniversary celebration of the Dallas Historical Society. Texas Liberty Forever: The Battle of the Alamo diorama is a vibrant expansive work featuring replicas of scenes from the famous battle, as well as the forward-thinking incorporation of an interactive mobile app that draws guests in to feel more connected to the battle of the Alamo and maybe even discover scenarios they never knew existed. There is nothing subtle about this inspired and active diorama, Chiao said. It is a must-see for people of all ages. Measuring 24-by-14 feet, this historical composition features over 2,000 hand-painted pewter figures in 1/54-scale. Feely often rebuilt parts of the work as new research surfaced. This remarkable exhibit will be on permanent display in the South Texas Room at the Hall of State in Fair Park. Feely spent almost two decades carefully constructing the scene of the morning of March 6, 1836, at the height of the battle for Texas independence. He has brought to life the findings of many Alamo researchers to get every detail correct, from architecture and uniforms to weapons, blacksmiths tools and even knots used to tie down horses. A stirring sight, this diorama captures incredible detail and will delight visitors with its overpowering presence. Additional sponsors include the Scovell Family Foundation at The Dallas Foundation, Patrick and Kristy Sands and the Sands Foundation, Hillcrest Foundation, The Summerfield G. Roberts Foundation, The Summerlee Foundation and Phoenix I Restoration and Construction, LLC. Whether someone is new to Dallas or a native Texan, the Dallas Historical Society offers programs and exhibits that educates and informs visitors about their home city and reveals insights and little-known facts that one might be unable to grasp from history books alone, especially with the museums newest permanent exhibit. Ongoing events include brown bag lectures, Evening With programs, and the Deep Vellum series along with the unveiling of this very special exhibit honoring Texas independence, the interactive Texas Liberty Forever: The Battle of the Alamo diorama. Join in discovering more about Dallas and take part in one or more of these wonderful programs. Visit the website for more information at http://www.dallashistory.org. About The Dallas Historical Society: Celebrating Its Centennial Year In 2022 The stories of Dallas are shared each day at the Dallas Historical Society through the three million items that comprise our archives and artifact collections. Established in 1922, the Dallas Historical Society collects, preserves, and exhibits the unique heritage of Dallas and Texas to educate and inspire future generations. Housed at the Hall of State in Fair Park since 1938, DHS presents these collections through education programs, exhibitions, tours, access to research materials and workshops. Among the three million historical artifacts at DHS are such treasures as Sam Houstons handwritten account of the Battle of San Jacinto, the only known original Juneteenth document, James Fannins watch, and Santa Annas spurs. The DHS collection houses over 10,000 bound volumes and receives more than 1,500 research requests annually. Each year, the Dallas Historical Society is visited by over 160,000 people and serves more than 20,000 students through guided tours and educational programming at the Hall of State, as well as outreach programs at schools. Visit the website for more information at http://www.dallashistory.org. Photos of the exhibit by Danny Campbell. Photos of artist Tom Feely, courtesy. Unicon, Inc., a leading technology consulting firm focused solely on the education ecosystem, announced today they will be attending the 2022 ASU+GSV Summit, happening April 4-8 in San Diego, California. Unicon will take part in three different panel sessions addressing a variety of current topics in the education industry such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, competency-based education (CBE), technical due diligence, and the role EdTech plays in all of these areas. Unicon will be participating in two panels with the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), sharing our knowledge of improving equity and outcomes for postsecondary education. The ASU+GSV Summit is a convening of the world's most important global education and workforce companies along with key technology players. Unicon looks forward to taking part in this premier event. Unicons session panelists include Chief Operating Officer Kate Valenti, Principal Software Architect Linda Feng, and Senior Director of Learning Experience Design, Dr. Linda Crismon. Panelists will provide insights and thought-provoking perspectives to inspire the audiences curiosity by sharing experiences impacting all stages of the learner journey including identity, learning, assessment, mastery, connection, and support. Unicon will be participating in the following sessions: Personalizing the Learning Journey: Monday, April 4 | 4:40 p.m. PT Most people are yet to be exposed to Competency-Based Education (CBE), and this interactive session will allow participants to experience a personalized learning journey. Moderated by C-BEN. AI and Machine Learning: The Future of EdTech: Tuesday, April 5 | 1:00 p.m. PT AI can sift through the data and create a curriculum focused on a students strengths and needs, thus making the educational program more useful leading to employment-ready graduates. EdTech + CBE: Accelerating the Movement: Tuesday, April 5 | 2:10 p.m. PT EdTech is necessary to enable highly flexible CBE programs. This panel will explore enterprise-wide technology solutions and give insights into what is still needed to scale CBE. Moderated by C-BEN. The ASU+GSV Summit will be held at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, California April 4-8. For those looking to learn about CBE, AI/ML, technology due diligence, and to discover how Unicon solves business and technology challenges for higher education, interested parties can contact Unicon for more information about these topics. About Unicon Unicon is a leading technology consulting firm focused solely on the education ecosystem. We partner with institutions and companies to create learner-centric digital experiences to transform online teaching and learning. We believe in the power of technology to expand access to education, and in the power of education to create a better future for all. Unicon is a Joint Venture Partner of Argos Education, a Contributing Member of IMS Global Learning Consortium, a Commercial Affiliate of the Apereo Foundation, a Trust and Identity Solution Provider in the Internet2 Industry Program, an Industry Member of Internet2, an InCommon Participant, an InCommon Catalyst, an Instructure Certified Partner, and a community member of the Ed-Fi Alliance. Unicon is also an AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Consulting Partner, has achieved the AWS Education Competency, and is a member of the AWS Public Sector Partner Program. Unicon is also a Google Cloud Partner and a member of the Microsoft Partner Network. Follow Unicon on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. # # # Unicon is a Registered Trademark of Unicon, Inc. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. A recent Urban Institute report analyzing the role of Parent Teacher Organizations and similar groups in Illinois echoes and amplifies the existing critique of private fundraising: that it exacerbates inequitable school funding. However, some weaknesses prevent it from making a convincing case. Maia Cucchiara, a professor at Temple University, reviewed Documenting Inequitable Patterns in Spending by Parent Teacher Associations, Parent Teacher Organizations, and Friends of Fundraising Groups at Illinois Public Schools, and found that problems with its analysis and presentation of the data undercut its conclusions about the impact of this fundraising. The report uses a thoughtful and creative analysis of tax return data for 600 school-specific organizations in Illinois, matched with school-level demographic data. It finds that fundraising organizations are more likely to exist in advantaged schools. It also finds that groups at wealthier and whiter schools spend more per student than groups at other schools. Based on these findings, the report recommends that state and district policymakers track private fundraising and consider strategies for resource sharing and equalization. However, Professor Cucchiara explains that while the reports claims are consistent with other research, and while its recommendations are sound, its problems with data presentation and analysis prevent the report from illustrating how much these patterns actually exist in Illinois schools. As such, she explains, the report fails to conclusively demonstrate two key claims: that schools serving wealthy student bodies are more likely to have private fundraising groups, and that larger shares of white students are associated with increased private spending. Nonetheless, the reports approach of calculating per-pupil spending to estimate the magnitude of spending by private fundraising organizations could be useful to scholars and policymakers interested in understanding the potential impact of school-specific fundraising organizations. These groups could also find reports recommendations helpful, especially those concerning tracking and equalizing funds raised. Find the review, by Maia Cucchiara, at: https://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/fundraising Find Documenting Inequitable Patterns in Spending by Parent Teacher Associations, Parent Teacher Organizations, and Friends of Fundraising Groups at Illinois Public Schools, written by Claire Mackevicius and published by the Urban Institute, at: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/105420/documenting-inequitable-patterns-in-spending-by-parent-teacher-associations-parent-teacher-organizations-and-friends-of-fundraising-groups-at-illinois-public-scho.pdf NEPC Reviews (http://thinktankreview.org) provide the public, policymakers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. NEPC Reviews are made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: http://www.greatlakescenter.org The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), a university research center housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: https://nepc.colorado.edu USOSM President and CEO Richard Hall Welcomes New Partner. Dr. Scroggins and his team are well known for high-quality patient care and clinical excellence, qualities we value and look for in all of our surgeon partners. U.S. Oral Surgery Management (USOSM) a specialty management services company that exclusively serves premier oral and maxillofacial surgeons is pleased to announce a new partnership with Southwest Virginia Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, this is USOSMs second partnership in the state of Virginia. Were excited to announce a new partnership with Southwest Virginia Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, our second partnership in this state. Dr. Scroggins and his team are well known for high-quality patient care and clinical excellence, qualities we value and look for in all of our surgeon partners, said Richard Hall, USOSM president and CEO. Located in Roanoke, Virginia, Southwest Virginia Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery is led by Samuel E. Scroggins, DMD. Dr. Scroggins is a board-certified oral and maxillofacial surgeon and a graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of Alabama Dental School in Birmingham, Alabama. Dr. Scroggins practiced general dentistry in the Birmingham area for three years before completing his internship at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, Georgia, and his oral and maxillofacial surgery (OMS) residency at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. He has been in private practice in Virginia since 2014. Southwest Virginia Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery is known throughout the region as an expert provider of oral surgery and facial trauma services, including emergency care. The practice offers a wide variety of OMS procedures and treatments, from dental implants to tooth extractions, facial trauma treatment, bone grafting, wisdom teeth removal and more. Like all USOSM partner practices, Southwest Virginia Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery will retain complete clinical autonomy. The practice will focus on patient care and USOSM will provide business support. The partnership with USOSM will enable us to continue providing our patients with exceptional care and to do so on an even deeper level, and thats something were all looking forward to, said Dr. Scroggins. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, USOSM has partner practices spanning 19 states. They include Texas, Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee, Minnesota, Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Arizona, California, Oregon, Virginia, Washington and Massachusetts. A shared services organization, USOSM collaborates with premier oral and maxillofacial surgeons to offer a partnership solution for continued and accelerated practice success. USOSM provides operational, marketing and administrative support services, reinvests resources, and applies best practices to improve clinical and financial performance and produce steadier, more profitable growth for all. For more information, visit https://www.usosm.com/. Inc. magazine today revealed that Voltage Coffee Supply is No. 25 on its third annual Inc. 5000 Regionals Rocky Mountain list, the most prestigious ranking of the fastest-growing private companies based in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. Born of the annual Inc. 5000 franchise, this regional list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the Rocky Mountain region economys most dynamic segmentits independent small businesses. Voltage Coffee Supply is so much more than an online retailer; this company was founded in 2015 with a strong focus on end-to-end relationship building. We pride ourselves on sharing strong ties with our manufacturers, as well as our coffee shop owners, restaurant owners, and other customers. With that, our business has become uniquely positioned as a service liaison to both, said Taylor Ohlsen, CEO of Voltage Coffee Supply. We owe our companys success to the trust upon which those relationships are built and the hard work and dedication of every member of our team. We are very excited about this recognition we are receiving from Inc. Magazine. We will continue to solve the most important problems in the coffee industry by equipping our customers with the right products and services for their needs. The companies on this list show a remarkable rate of growth across all industries in the Rocky Mountain region. Between 2018 and 2020, these 60 private companies had an average growth rate of 252% percent and, in 2020 alone, they added 4,176 jobs and nearly $1 billion to the Rocky Mountain regions economy. Companies based in the Las Vegas, Nevada, Boise, Idaho, and Vail, Colorado, areas had the highest growth rate overall. Complete results of the Inc. 5000 Regionals Rocky Mountain, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, metro area, and other criteria, can be found at inc.com/rocky-mountain starting March 15, 2022. This years Inc. 5000 Regional winners represent one of the most exceptional and exciting lists of Americas off-the-charts growth companies. Theyre disrupters and job creators, and all delivered an outsize impact on the economy. Remember their names and follow their lead. These are the companies youll be hearing about for years to come, says Scott Omelianuk, editor-in-chief of Inc. Contact: marketing@voltagecoffeesupply.com More about Inc. and the Inc. 5000 Regionals Methodology The 2022 Inc. 5000 Regionals are ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2018 and 2020. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2018. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, and independentnot subsidiaries or divisions of other companiesas of December 31, 2019. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2018 is $100,000; the minimum for 2020 is $1 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. About Inc. Media The worlds most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit http://www.inc.com. The winners of the 2022 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions represent some of the brightest and most innovative young psychological scientists in the world. In a series of mini-episodes, Under the Cortex talks with each winner about their research and goals. Today, Jason Okonofua (University of California, Berkeley) tells us about his research on empathy and social-psychological processes that contribute to inequality. Transcript Charles Blue (00:12) This is Charles Blue with the Association for Psychological Science with another of our many podcasts featuring the winners of the APS 2022 Janet Taylor expense award for transformative early contributions to psychological science. Today Im speaking with Jason Okonofua with the University of California, Berkeley. Welcome to the show. Jason Okonofua (00:34) Alright, thank you. Charles Blue (00:36) Lets dive right in and just have you summarize for our listeners your current field of research. Charles Blue (00:42) What are you most interested in? Whats the exciting thing that gets you out of bed in the morning? Jason Okonofua (00:48) I am most interested in thinking about and investigating the power of empathy and how it can apply to so many situations and how it can provide real world benefits and outcomes for things that have been difficult to bring change in, like equity. Charles Blue (01:11) Well, it seems with the stories going around internationally now in the news that theres a definite lack of empathy. So with that in mind, what inroads do you feel youve made in your understanding of empathy? What is it that we now know that we didnt know before? Jason Okonofua (01:31) Well, I think with my work, it very much has to do with the application of it and how to channel its benefits in a way that can strategically solve problems. And so so far in my career, Ive looked at this as it pertains to the consequences, negative consequences of bias and domains like education and criminal justice. And so in education, the empathy can protect teachers from the influence of stereotyping and prejudice and how they engage or interact with their students. For example, black students are around four times more likely to get kicked out of school. And taking this approach in a scalable way, its possible to reduce that real world disparity in suspensions and the type of discipline that removes children from the learning environment across entire school districts and in criminal justice. Weve worked with probation and parole officers, and theres a huge experiment. Pretty much every probation and parole officer for a major US city. And those officers served about 200 adults on probation or parole. And that similarly in a very scalable online exercise, reminding them of their own empathy and doing it in a way that its more likely to be applied in times of conflict or times of stress, when otherwise we might have more knee jerk reactions that could lead one to think of people who have been incarcerated as once a criminal, always a criminal. Jason Okonofua (03:09) So instead of that type of bias, more empathy that can lead everyone to win those officers to get more out of their job, the teachers to get more out of their job, the students and the people on probation and parole to have a relationship upon which they can explore and build and become better versions of themselves and teachers, probation and pro officers. These people joined that profession for some very prosocial, empathetic reasons. They wanted to help people thats where this work has been so far, and I very much look forward to all the opportunities for where it can go, whether that be in healthcare or military, anything that has potential for bias to shape decision making and ongoing real world relationships. Charles Blue (03:55) Taking a look at your fields, taking a look at the current body of knowledge, is there anything thats missing? Are there pieces to the research puzzle that would advance what youre trying to do? Whats the hurdle thats keeping us from the next step in understanding? Jason Okonofua (04:12) Well, its funny, because actually that would also be the answer to the first question I love thinking about when I wake up in the morning is exactly that. A few main things. One, this idea of heterogeneity or just essentially, when will this type of approach work? We dont know if it would just work in all contexts, and I dont believe that it necessarily would. However, itll be interesting to see are there certain schools or departments or regions that makes it more likely that this type of approach will indeed be effective? I think thats going to be very important to learn, and Im excited to find out more about it, to be continued and coming soon, and also would like to find out more about how exactly this works for these teachers. We have reason to believe that it leads teachers to be more satisfied with their jobs, feel more efficacy in their jobs. And our research is suggesting that maybe its indeed doing something with the students or the people that those probation parole officers are engaging with that leads them to feel more respect, more respected, and more motivated to indeed go the path and follow their pro social goals. Charles Blue (05:28) And so its beneficial to all involved. But it would be great to find out more about the specific processes by which that happens and how those can build on each other over time. And so very much looking forward to looking at it in a more granular lens and more strategically pinpointing exactly how this is working. But then last, something I think a lot about is the connection to stereotyping or implicit or explicit bias and how it seems like this type of an approach kind of puts bias in the back seat. And it doesnt necessarily get rid of peoples bias, though in ways I imagine it does. But it foregrounds the empathy, and it makes it more about what are your goals and the context. Well, an empathic mindset is more conducive to getting those things done. For example, teacher joined a profession to help children learn and grow and become their best possible selves. And due to policies in place or just the nature of the job, it can become difficult to remember that in the heat of the moment when youre teaching 20 young children with their hormones all over the place and may resort to something more punitive in nature. Jason Okonofua (06:40) But instead, if ones remembering those reasons for joining the profession in the first place well, bias then is rendered not functional or dysfunctional because that would get in the way of helping children learn and grow and become their possible selves. And for them, they especially want to do that for the children who may have been the least likely to receive that support or care elsewhere. And so again well, bias would totally get in the way of doing that. And so thinking about bias in that way, I really look forward to all of the amazing research we have on implicit and explicit bias and introducing it to the growing research we have on applied psychology and how we can do wise psychological interventions that bring about large and lasting effects in the real world. Bringing these together, I really look forward to seeing how this can be done in a variety of other ways that while we continue to rightfully investigate ways to provide more education about how bias functions that we can also have other options at our disposal to sideline bias. Those are some exciting avenues that were thinking about Well. Charles Blue (07:51) Im excited to see how this plays out as well. Theyre fascinating bits of work and definitely amazing contributions. This has been Charles Blue Ive been speaking with Jason Akona Fuel with the University of California, Berkeley, who is also the winner of the APS 2022 Janet Taylor Spence Award. Thank you for joining me. Jason Okonofua (08:09) Thank you. Feedback on this article? Email apsobserver@psychologicalscience.org or comment below. Saurimo At least 426 non-detonated explosive devices were today, Monday, removed and destroyed in Mona Quimbundo commune, Saurimo municipality, Lunda Sul province, by the National Demining Institute (INAD). The devices were two anti-tank mines, 46 anti-personnel mines, four 82mm mortar shells, 57 81mm mortars, 23 small calibre rounds, one B/21 abuse, 11 tank perforators, 50 RPG-7 rockets, 119 anti-area rounds, 30 impact waistcoats and eight singlaides. Speaking to the press, the INAD coordinator in Lunda Sul, Jose Dumba, said that the removal of these unexploded ordnance was thanks to the cooperation of a citizen, who reported the fact to the National Police (PN). He explained that according to information from the National Police, the citizen was trying to build a bathroom in the backyard and found the devices underground, and immediately informed the police authorities. Jose Dumba said that that area is prone to mines, hence, in partnership with other technicians and related brigades, working in the circumscription to carry out a thorough cleaning, in order to ensure greater safety for citizens. Publishers Weekly and the Millions are offering the literary community ongoing coverage of the war in the Ukraine. Publishers Weekly is looking at the impact on the publishing and literary community, while the Millions is offering first-hand, on-the-ground reportage from its correspondent in Ukraine. We will continue to update this page regularly. Please feel free to email international editor Ed Nawotka at ENawotka@publishersweekly.com if you have information or a charity to share. Fundraising and Charity In the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, the international publishing community has come together with a number of initiatives aimed at offering support to authors, publishers, and aid organizations. For those interested in helping, there are a number of ways to get involved. The Federation of European Publishers, for instance, is raising money for the Ukrainian Publishers Association to help print books for the millions of refugee Ukrainian children and families now spread throughout Europe. You can donate online here. Irbis Comics, one of Ukraine's top comics and graphic novel publisher for young readers, is raising money online to stay in business. The Impact on Publishing A majority of book-related activities in Ukraine have shut down, and many companies are looking to restart work from abroad, including in Poland and elsewhere. Many authors and publishing professionals have also joined the fight against Russia. In solidarity, most international book fairs and events have suspended relations with Russian publishing companies and institutions affiliated with the state. Dispatches from Ukraine Millions staff writer Ilja Rakos and his family lived, until recently in Kyiv, Ukraine. What follows are his writings on, and written during, the ongoing Russian invasionmany of them Facebook posts written from a bomb shelter, reposted with his permission and the assistance of his friend Mark Slouka. This piece was last updated on March 30, 2022. WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. Home to national hubs for hypersonics and cybersecurity research, a sprawling innovation district and graduates who are among the most in demand in professional areas such as health care, finance and consulting, aviation and aerospace, and manufacturing, Purdue University has seen graduate student enrollment reach an all-time high up 16% from last year and 43% over the last decade. Why such success? A look at the newest U.S. News & World Report Graduate School rankings provides a strong clue. For the second consecutive year, Purdues College of Engineering graduate program is No. 4 nationally in the rankings, released Tuesday (March 29). Seven of the College of Engineerings graduate programs are in the top 10 of their areas, and 11 departmental programs made the top-15 rankings in the country. The College of Science also lights up specialty lists, with 11 of its programs ranked. Purdues Agricultural and Biological Engineering graduate program is in its familiar spot at the top. Thats nothing new: It has been ranked No. 1 the last two years (and either No. 1 or No. 2 in 11 of the last 12 years) with the ABE undergraduate program dominating the top spot the last 11 years. Analytical chemistry is in the No. 1 spot in its specialty area as well. In addition to these accolades, the Graduate School has also seen the impact of a focused effort on enhancing diversity. During the five-year period that ended spring 2020, Purdue conferred the most doctorate degrees to Black students among peer R1 research institutions (those that reach certain benchmarks in research activity and funding as set by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education) nationally and in the Big Ten in the disciplines of chemistry, the physical sciences, veterinary medicine, computer science and statistics. This strong diversity picture is based on a Purdue analysis compiled from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Additionally, Purdue ranked second among its R1 and Big Ten peer universities for the number of Ph.D.s granted to Black students in agricultural engineering and engineering-related technology during this period, the Purdue-IPEDS analysis shows. When I became dean of the Graduate School, I made a commitment to diversify graduate education at Purdue, and we are working to accomplish that through innovative programs, like our Graduate Diversity Visitation Program and Summer Research Opportunities Program, said Linda Mason, dean of the Graduate School. We understand that diversity fosters innovation, and innovation is the backbone of Purdues research enterprise. We are proud of the strides weve made as a university and understand that we still have more work to do. Tuesdays Graduate School rankings come on the heels of the U.S. News & World Reports Online rankings in January, in which Purdue Engineering also shows as elite. Purdue is third overall in online masters programs from the College of Engineering, with masters programs in electrical engineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering and engineering management all No. 1. That persistent pursuit of excellence carried into the Graduate rankings across the board. Other than petroleum engineering, Purdue competes in all the engineering rankings, and it bettered last years ranking in eight of them. Engineerings highlights show Purdue at: No. 1 in agricultural and biological. No. 5 in aerospace, up from No. 6 in the 2021 rankings. No. 7 in both civil and industrial (up from No. 10). No. 8 in mechanical. No. 9 in both computer (up from 11) and electrical (up from 11). No. 11 in both environmental (up from 14) and nuclear. No. 13 in material, up from 17. No. 14 in chemical, up from 16. No. 29 in biomedical, up from 33 (No. 7 among those without a medical school). While any particular ranking is always partially noisy, the Pinnacle of Excellence at Scale in the caliber of engineering faculty, students and staff is reflected, said Mung Chiang, executive vice president for strategic initiatives and the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering. This year marks the first time on record for Purdue Engineering to be ranked among the nations top four in consecutive years. And this is the first time that we have, other than biomedical that competes against many with medical schools, all of the other 11 departmental rankings in the top 15, including seven in the top 10: upward momentum and stellar strength across the board. Doctoral programs in the College of Science saw substantial increases in rankings, with 11 programs now listed among the best in their fields and analytical chemistry carrying the torch at No. 1. Highlights include the continued strengthening of the experimental sciences at Purdue, with biology and physics each rising several places. Reflecting strong cross-campus investments in data science, Purdue is now ranked in the top 25 in statistics and computer science, including systems and theory, with programming languages and topology in the top 15. The progress reflected in these rankings is a direct result of our substantial efforts and investments to strengthen the sciences across Purdue, showing not only how much we are capable of achieving, but also how much more and greater potential remains, said Patrick J. Wolfe, the Frederick L. Hovde Dean of the College of Science. The sky is the limit, and we are working every day to define Purdue as a top destination for students looking for the best education in the science fields. Agricultural and biological engineering, operated by both the College of Agriculture and the College of Engineering, remains the gold standard in its field. Our college is extremely proud that we have the number 1 graduate and undergraduate Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department in the country, said Karen Plaut, the Glenn W. Sample Dean of the College of Agriculture. What makes these the top programs in the country is a faculty world-renowned for their research and respected for their commitment to teaching future generations of scholars and innovators. In Krannert School of Managements graduate program, the production operations program is No. 3, project management No. 7, supply chain management No. 9, business analytics No. 15 and information systems No. 19. In the College of Health and Human Sciences, the industrial psychology program is No. 7. In other rankings, Purdue is No. 47 overall in education; in the top 50 in economics and psychology, No. 26 in nursing master's programs and 45 in doctor of nursing practice; and in the top 75 in public health graduate programs. We are delighted to see the graduate programs in our newest department, Public Health formed in July of 2019 already ascending in the rankings, said Marion Underwood, dean of the College of Health and Human Sciences. Purdue is uniquely positioned to help meet the need for additional public health care workers and to enhance public health and health equity in Indiana, the nation, and the world. In addition to our strong and growing public health faculty, Purdue has particular strengths in pharmacy, nursing, health sciences, agriculture, food and nutrition science, veterinary medicine, engineering and extension. All can contribute to distinctly Purdue initiatives in public health and health equity. About Purdue University Purdue University is a top public research institution developing practical solutions to todays toughest challenges. Ranked in each of the last four years as one of the 10 Most Innovative universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, Purdue delivers world-changing research and out-of-this-world discovery. Committed to hands-on and online, real-world learning, Purdue offers a transformative education to all. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue has frozen tuition and most fees at 2012-13 levels, enabling more students than ever to graduate debt-free. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap at https://stories.purdue.edu. Writer/Media contact: Jim Bush, jsbush@purdue.edu The deal will see the direct-to-consumer service bring its premium content exclusively to subscribers of the Flow and BTC video services in more than 15 new markets including Anguilla, The Bahamas, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Curacao, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts & Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks, and Caicos Islands. More territories could be added in the future.As part of their subscription (except for subscribers to Essentials TV), Flow and BTC customers can access Paramount+'s catalogue through Flow's video-on-demand service. This includes a library of original series, hit shows, and popular films from across every genre from world-renowned brands and production studios, including SHOWTIME, BET, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures and the Smithsonian Channel. Paramount+ will soon feature the long-awaited Halo series, based on the Xbox franchise and produced by SHOWTIME in association with 343 Industries and Amblin Television. In addition, it's home to the Star Trek universe, which includes live-action and animated series and movies, Dexter: New Blood and the acclaimed series Yellowjackets.Commenting on the deal, Britta Reinhardt chief commercial officer, consumer markets, C&W Communications , operator of the Flow and BTC brands in the Caribbean, said: We are thrilled to be the first to bring the amazing content of the globally acclaimed Paramount+ service to the region. Our partners at Paramount have curated the most powerful content proposition for our countries. Our subscribers across most of our Caribbean markets will have access, as part of their existing TV subscription, to thousands of exclusive premium series, movies, children's programming, including originals from BET+ and Showtime, that have become viewer favourites in the US, and all over the world." CITY SETS CLEANUP WEEK APRIL 18-22 Fees relaxed for Landfill disposal of many items April 18-22; Annual community clean-up day set for April 23 RAPID CITY, SDHomeowners have three weeks to clean out their garages, attics and closets as the annual City-Wide Cleanup Week is just around the corner. This years Cleanup Week is scheduled for April 18-22. Highlights of the week include fees waived for disposal of many items at the Rapid City Landfill Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. and the annual community cleanup set for Saturday (April 23). Community Cleanup Day will include hundreds of volunteers armed with plastic bags combing through parks, along ditches, drainage areas, fence lines and neighborhoods in the community picking up trash. The City is continuing to signup volunteer groups and individuals to help clean up public spaces. The City will provide trash bags and interested groups are encouraged to email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to determine available spaces. The Landfill will be available Monday through Friday of Cleanup Week with fees waived for disposal of many items, said Ria Harper, City Solid Waste Outreach coordinator. Its a great way to get rid of a lot of items around the home and yard and in the garage. The relaxing of fees will be available for private pickups, cars and small trailers Monday to Friday of Cleanup Week but not commercial vehicles. All loads must be secured. The Landfill will not accept Freon-based appliances and there will be a fee for disposal of tires. Community Cleanup Day teams will collect trash and items and leave them curbside at their respective cleanup areas for collection. There will be no admittance to the Landfill for cleanup items on Saturday, Regular paid access on Saturday, April 23 from 7 a.m. to noon. This is a great way to help clean up our community, said Harper. Its a great community service project for groups, especially youth groups and teams, as well as getting groups and teams from businesses together to spend a few hours during the week or on a Saturday morning cleaning up an area of town. This is the 51st year for the Community Cleanup Week. For more information about Cleanup Week, contact the Rapid City Solid Waste Division at 355-3496. "They (gunmen) were overwhelmed by troops' superior firepower forcing them to abandon their hideout." Troops of Nigerian Army have raided a suspected hideout of the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its militant wing, ESN in Orsumoghu, Ihiala Local Government Area of Anambra State. Army spokesperson Onyema Nwachukwu, who disclosed this in a statement on Monday, said gunmen have been terrorising residents of the area and security agencies from the hideout for a while. He said troops were met with "stiff resistance" from gunmen during a clearance operations in the border communities of Anambra and Imo States. "They (gunmen) were overwhelmed by troops' superior firepower forcing them to abandon their hideout," he said. He said investigations revealed that the hideout served as the operational base for the head of a vigilante group in the area, Innocent Obieke, also known as 'Double Lion' said to be "surreptitiously coordinating the criminal activities of IPOB and ESN" in the communities. "The suspect is currently on the run while troops have intensified operations to close in on him and his cohorts," Mr Nwachukwu, a brigadier-general, said. Twenty-two pump action rifles, 19 dane guns, six machetes, assorted mobile phones, a laptop and one operational Toyota hilux pick-up truck were some of the items recovered during the operation. The army spokesperson appealed to the public to continue to support the troops and other security agencies with credible and timely information that will lead to the arrest of criminals in their area. IPOB, a group seeking the creation of an independent state of Biafra which they want carved out from the South-east and some parts of South-south, has been linked to the deadly attacks across the two regions. By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 03/28/2022 ADVERTISEMENT RELATED LINK: '90 DAY FIANCE: BEFORE THE 90 DAYS' COUPLES NOW: WHO IS STILL TOGETHER? WHO HAS SPLIT? WHERE ARE THEY NOW? (PHOTOS) ADVERTISEMENT Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade. couple Elizabeth Potthast and Andrei Castravet have announced they're expecting another baby together.Elizabeth and her husband took to Instagram on Friday to reveal their second child is on the way and the little one will be joining their three-year-old daughter Eleanor Louise."We are so extremely excited to announce that we are expecting baby Castravet #2!" Elizabeth, 30, captioned a family photo, which proudly showed off her baby bump."Ellie is SO ecstatic to be a big sister and help momma! We appreciate all of your love and support and cannot wait to have you on this journey with us!"Elizabeth added the following hashtags to her upload: "#letsdothisagain #castravetbaby #terrorizing #babynumbertwo #familyoffour #90dayfiancehappilyeverafter."In the Instagram photo, Elizabeth was wearing a white dress, and she, Andrei and Ellie posed together on a beach and were all smiles. Ellie and Andrei also matched the expectant mother in white.Andrei, 36, posted the same photo on his own Instagram account and wrote to his followers, "We are pleased to announce that due to hard work and a good attitude we will be promoting our daughter to big sister."Congratulatory messages poured in from other alums -- including Jovi Dufren Molly Hopkins , and Loren Brovarnik.Elizabeth was a 27-year-old from Tampa, FL, and Andrei was a 31-year-old from Chisinau, Moldova when he came to America on a K-1 visa.After originally appearing on Season 5 of , Elizabeth and Andrei also returned for Seasons 4, 5 and 6 of : Happily Ever After?.The couple had met on a dating app in 2016 when Elizabeth, the youngest of ten children, was planning a visit to Dublin and decided to "see what was out there" before she visited the city.Andrei, originally from Moldova, was living in Dublin and working as a bouncer at the time of Elizabeth's visit.It took time for Elizabeth's family to warm up to Andrei, as they said they found him controlling. They also disapproved of Elizabeth's hasty decision to wed after knowing Andrei for such a short amount of time.However, Elizabeth and Andrei tied the knot in late 2017 and are currently living together in Florida.In October 2018, Elizabeth's brother-in-law Orlando Davis accidentally revealed the couple was expecting their first child together.Elizabeth and Andrei later confirmed the news, and the couple welcomed a baby girl, whom they named Eleanor Louise, in January 2019.Season 5 of : Happily Ever After? featured Elizabeth and Andrei having a second lavish wedding in Moldova so Andrei's whole family could attend.Elizabeth didn't like seeing a "chauvinistic" side of Andrei while planning the big event, and he often snapped at her for being "OCD" and annoying.Following the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, TLC announced in March 2021 that Elizabeth and Andrei would be part of : Happily Ever After's Season 6 cast.Andrei was shown joining Elizabeth's family's real estate business under the guidance of her father Chuck Potthast, which resulted in explosive family arguments amongst Elizabeth's siblings.Elizabeth and Andrei were working towards financial stability after COVID-19 impacted Elizabeth's real estate career and put a lot of stress on their relationship.Elizabeth and Andrei have also made appearances on : Pillow Talk, TLC's spinoff which features former cast members offering commentary on episodes on the reality franchise's newest seasons.The couple also won : Love Games, which began streaming on Discovery's discovery+ streaming service in February 2021.Want more spoilers or couples updates? Click here to visit our homepage! Morgan Simianer, the star of Netflix's hit series "Cheer," has announced she is engaged to her boyfriend, Stone Burleson. ADVERTISEMENT "He stole my heart, so I'm stealing his last name," she wrote on Instagram alongside photos from their engagement on Monday. "I can't wait to marry my best friend. I love you unconditionally, Stone." Burleson shared similar pictures on his Instagram, writing: "On Saturday, the woman of my dreams blessed my entire world by saying, 'Yes.' Morgan Lyn Simianer, I can't wait for my life with you by my side." The couple told People that they got engaged over the weekend at the Hall Arts Hotel in Dallas. Simianer was brought to the hotel under the pretense that she was there for an interview, only to discover Burleson was there waiting for her. Burleson, who has dated Simianer since early 2021, proposed with a Kay Jewelers custom Neil Lane marquise diamond ring. The 2 and 3/4-carat diamond was set among a halo of diamonds on an 18K yellow gold band. FOLLOW REALITY TV WORLD ON THE ALL-NEW GOOGLE NEWS! Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! "After our first date, I knew I wanted to be with Morgan for the rest of my life, and this weekend, I asked her to be my forever," Burleson told the outlet. "She blessed me by saying yes." Simianer appeared on the first and second seasons of "Cheer" and quickly became a fan favorite. She has since graduated from Navarro College in Texas. The Foo Fighters announced Tuesday they are canceling all tour dates after the sudden death of drummer Taylor Hawkins. The band tweeted the announcement on their official account. ADVERTISEMENT The band cited "the staggering loss of our brother Taylor Hawkins." Hawkins died on March 25. He was found in a hotel room in Bogota, Colombia. No official cause of death has been announced. Colombian authorities suggested a drug overdose was possible. "We're sorry for and share in the disappointment that we won't be seeing one another as planned," the band tweeted. "Instead, let's take this time to grieve, to heal, to pull our loved ones close, and to appreciate all the music and memories we've made together." Hawkins' last performance with The Foo Fighters was at Lollapalooza Argentina on March 20. The Foo Fighters were in South Africa performing without Hawkins and set to reunite in Bogota on March 25. That show was canceled. "I asked my only daughter to stay at home, if the governor sacks her for not coming to work on Monday, let her come home and manage with me." Civil servants in Anambra State, on Monday, refused to heed the state government's directive to come to work every Monday against the Indigenous People of Biafra's (IPOB) sit-at-home order. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) correspondent, who monitored the situation in Awka, reported that most government offices visited were locked. The Anambra State Government had, on March 25, sent out a circular directing workers to report to their duty posts on Mondays. The statement was signed by the Head of Service, Theodora Igwegbe. It read in part: "Following the need to reposition the service for better performance and productivity, Prof. Charles Soludo has directed that all public servants should henceforth report to their places of work on Mondays as they do on other workdays. "Consequently, absence from duty on Mondays or any other official workday without approval will be viewed as serious misconduct which will attract appropriate sanctions." NAN reported that only a few junior workers were seen loitering around the state secretariat complex. Even the Office of the Head of Service, together with the ministries in the block, was also locked. Most staff buses, which convey workers to and from their offices were also seen parked in the secretariat. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Labour Nigeria By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. Some of the buses included Route 1 for Awka- Ogidi-Onitsha, Route 2 for Awkuzu-Otuocha and Route 4 for Awka-Agulu-Ekwulobia. Some workers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that people might want to comply with the directive but had no means to get to their offices. "We are here because we live in Awka and we can easily find the means to be in the office than those living outside Awka. "It is not everyone living in Awka that can make it because in most areas there is no vehicular or human movement at all. It was, however, observed that the Office of the Accountant-General of the state was open and the Accountant-General, Chudi Okoli, and staff members were on duty at the time of the visit. NAN also reported that some of the schools visited in Awka and its environs were not open. Markets and motor parks near the capital city were also closed. Some stores and food vendors were seen trekking to Aroma, a popular junction in Awka. A petty trader, Grace Anaelu, advised the government to revisit the issue to avoid unnecessary loss of lives. "We do not have security following us around, so the issue does not require a hasty decision. "People's safety needs to be considered before the marching order. "I asked my only daughter to stay at home, if the governor sacks her for not coming to work on Monday, let her come home and manage with me. "Her life is more important to me than the salary," she said. (NAN) Athens, GA (30605) Today Strong thunderstorms likely. Damaging winds, large hail and possibly a tornado with some storms. High 76F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 90%.. Tonight A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible early. Partly cloudy. Low 57F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. People gathered in Harmony Parking lot in Brattleboro on Friday, April 22nd for a street festival and parade in celebration of Earth Day. According to Nancy Braus of 350 Brattleboro, the goal was to celebrate the ways in which the community is working towards climate justice and to empower "His spending propensity was ravenous. His ambition was inordinate and he was prepared to go to any extent and employ any weapon no matter how dastardly or devilish to achieve his objectives," Bisi Akande said of Mr Omisore. Iyiola Omisore, the man who has just been elected National Secretary of Nigeria's ruling party, APC, has a chequered history. For over a decade, he was an outcast of the 'progressives,' as members of Nigeria's ruling party, APC, describe themselves. Although he has now become a darling of the progressives, for about 15 years, he was a subject of scorn and derision from the leaders of the ruling party, particularly those from the South-west where he is from. He was accused of murder and said to have a totally different ideology, guided by 'self-interest', different from that of the 'progressives.' But Mr Omisore did not start Nigeria's recent political journey in the bad books of the 'progressives'. In fact, just as he is their lovely bride now, so was he 22 years ago, before the relationship went south. To understand Mr Omisore's roller coaster ride with the 'progressives' one has to go back to how it started. How It started The year was 1999. The 'progressives' who had vehemently fought against military rule had finally agreed to take part in the general elections being superintended by Nigeria's new military ruler, Abdusalam Abubakar. After a lot of politicking, they formed their own party, Alliance for Democracy (AD). The AD was one of the three major parties at the time and it was taking part not only in the presidential election but also in the local elections. In Osun, the AD had presented Bisi Akande as its governorship candidate. Mr Akande, a grassroots politician, considered prudent by many, had the backing of influential AD leaders like Bola Ige. But there was a problem. He had no political structure. Mr Akande and the AD leaders turned to Mr Omisore, a businessman, who, unlike the 'progressives,' did not fight against military rule and had built a political structure by taking part in the previous controversial elections organised by late dictator Sani Abacha. "I wanted to win election. He (Mr Omisore) had structure, I did not have structure. I was with Bola Ige; we were sit-down-look during the military, we did not believe in military governance at all and we didn't participate in politics then. We form a party, maybe in August or September 1999 and the election was to hold in December and we had no structure, particularly in Osun state. He had structure, he had boys and in addition to the credibility that we brought into governance, I wanted his structure to be part of me," Mr Akande told CityMirrorNews in 2016. The AD's popularity in the South-west, coupled with Mr Akande's reputation and Mr Omisore's 'structure' all combined to secure victory for the party in the Osun governorship election. Things, however, went south after they assumed office. Akande, Omisore's relationship deteriorates Not long after they assumed office, Mr Akande started having problems with his deputy. The former governor believes their differences were largely 'ideological,' especially due to Mr Omisore's love for public funds. "... our sense of responsibility towards financing was not in the same direction: he was a spend-free person, I was being careful with the public money and I could not have approved all vouchers. I could not approve all requests and that was not going well with him," he said in the interview. While the relationship between Mr Akande and his deputy nosedived, a tragedy happened. Mr Akande's mentor and benefactor, Bola Ige, was killed and many Nigerians including among the 'progressives' felt Mr Omisore was involved. Omisore and Bola Ige's murder Apart from being Mr Akande's mentor, Mr Ige was also a presidential aspirant in the AD in 1999. He narrowly lost the ticket of the party to Olu Falae who went on to lose the election to Olusegun Obasanjo. After he assumed office, Mr Obasanjo appointed some members of the opposition, including Mr Ige, to his cabinet. Mr Ige was initially appointed power minister before he was made justice minister. While serving as justice minister, the Esa-Oke born politician was assassinated in his Ibadan residence on December 23, 2001. About a week before Mr Ige was killed, he was attacked by a mob led by a political thug popularly known as 'Fryo'. This was during the conferment of chieftaincy title on some people at the palace of the former Ooni of Ife, Sijuade Okunade. Ife is the political base of Mr Omisore. Details of why Fryo, an ardent supporter of Mr Omisore, and others attacked Mr Ige remain sketchy. After the attack, Mr Omisore granted an interview to 'Tempo magazine' where he verbally attacked Mr Ige for allegedly insulting him (Mr Omisore) and his family. Mr Omisore, at the time the deputy governor, gloated over the attack on Mr Ige in Ile-Ife. "He (Mr Ige) was beaten yesterday; the people of Ife beat him up and he was crying like a baby as they removed his cap and his glasses," he said. Barely a week after the attack and Mr Omisore's gloating in the media, Bola Ige was shot dead in his Ibadan home. Omisore's impeachment, trial Although Mr Akande does not believe Mr Omisore had a hand in the murder of Mr Ige, his relationship with his deputy continued to deteriorate. Amid the allegations of financial impropriety and murder, Mr Omisore was impeached by the Osun State House of Assembly in December 2002. He was also arrested by the police and tried for his alleged role in Mr Ige's murder. While still in detention, Mr Omisore, who had defected to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) won the Osun East senatorial election. The Oyo State High Court eventually set him free on the grounds of a lack of evidence to link him to the murder. Mr Omisore not only completed his term as senator in 2007 but he was also re-elected in 2007 on the PDP platform. During this period, he was treated like an outcast by the 'progressives'. Their party, AD, had over the years metamorphosed into different names: AC, ACN, and eventually APC. Through all its metamorphosis, some things remained constant: key members like Bola Tinubu, Bisi Akande and Rauf Aregbesola remained in the party while its dislike, at least publicly, for Mr Omisore remained. All that changed in 2018 Mr Omisore officially joined the APC from the fringe Social Democratic Party (SDP) in February 2021, PREMIUM TIMES reported. But his new relationship with the ruling party started in 2018. He was the PDP candidate in the 2014 governorship election in Osun. He lost to the incumbent, Rauf Aregbesola of the APC. In the build-up to the 2018 governorship election, it was clear to Mr Omisore that he would not secure the PDP ticket, so he defected to the SDP and became its candidate. He came a distant third in the 2018 election. But the APC was in a dilemma. Its candidate, Gboyeka Oyetola, was narrowly losing to PDP's Ademola Adeleke before a rerun election was declared in seven polling units in four local government areas: Osogbo, Orolu, Ife North and Ife South. Although Mr Omisore had come a distant third, two of the local government areas for the rerun, Ife North and Ife South, were considered his strongholds and had some of the largest votes. The controversial politician had become a beautiful bride, to be seduced by the two leading parties. High-powered delegations from both APC and PDP took turns at Mr Omisore's house to beg him to back them. The PDP delegation was led by the then Senate President, Bukola Saraki, while that of the APC included Governors Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti and Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun State. Eventually, Mr Omisore backed the APC for the September 28 rerun, helping Mr Oyetola to breast the tape. He has since then been hobnobbing with the APC until he formally decamped last year. The Aggrieved Not all members of the 'progressives' are happy with Mr Omisore. In fact, his re-entry into the Osun APC is believed to be one of the major reasons for the fallout between Mr Aregbesola and his successor, Mr Oyetola, as well as party leader Bola Tinubu. Mr Akande also does not hide his disdain for Mr Omisore. In his autobiography released to the public last year, Mr Akande described the Ife-born politician as a 'malignant cancer.' "Iyiola Omisore crept into my life like a silent malignant cancer. He came in full force. In a few months, I thought I knew him. I regret I did not know him in his true colours," Mr Akande wrote. "I was quick to conclude, shortly after we came into office, that Iyiola Omisore would be a big problem for my government. His spending propensity was ravenous. His ambition was inordinate and he was prepared to go to any extent and employ any weapon no matter how dastardly or devilish to achieve his objectives. He showed his hands early enough during the transition period. For me, this was both a political and personal tragedy." Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Legal Affairs Nigeria By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. Mr Akande was the first national chairman of the APC and remains one of its leaders. However, his views on Mr Omisore did not deter the party from handing the latter the position of national secretary. Sources in the party told PREMIUM TIMES that Mr Omisore was supported by the APC leadership in the South-west for the position based on the request of Mr Tinubu, who seeks to be Nigeria's next president. The APC had zoned the position of national secretary to the South-west. Before Saturday's convention, Mr Omisore, who declared for the position about 10 days to the convention, had been seen around Mr Tinubu at different fora. At Saturday's APC convention in Abuja, other candidates for the position of national secretary were made to step down for Mr Omisore. Omisore's promise to APC The position of national secretary is considered the second most important in a Nigerian political party after the position of national chairman. In his declaration letter posted on his social media handles, Mr Omisore promised an "efficient and effective management of the National Secretariat for next level prosperity, Democracy deliverables for Nigeria and Nigerians in the atmosphere of peace, happiness, safety and plenty." In his agenda which was tagged 'New Era', the new APC scribe further promised to "Institutionalise civility by leveraging technology for efficient party administration." "I will create a people-driven political party that will deepen democratic norms across the board in administration and in capacity building not only to win the election but to be bonded as an institution whereby everyone will be recognised and respected for their many roles in aiding growth and development of the party from the grassroots," he said. Now that he is the darling of the 'progressives' and, in fact, their national secretary, a new chapter appears to have been opened for the Ife politician to play another prominent role in Nigerian politics. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate STAMFORD Webster Bank, which completed its merger with Sterling National Bank last month, announced Friday that it has doubled the footprint of its headquarters in downtown Stamford. The bank has added 23,031 square feet and now occupies a total of 45,979 square feet at 200 Elm St., while it has also extended its lease. Webster originally leased space in the building in 2018 and then confirmed last month that those offices would serve as its new headquarters. Webster is pleased to have 200 Elm as our new corporate headquarters and taking additional space. This will allow us to continue to grow in one of Stamfords premium downtown buildings, Michael OConnor, Websters regional president and director of corporate services, said in a statement. Webster was represented in the transaction by Drew Saunders and Ed Tonnessen, who work in the Stamford office of commercial real estate firm JLL. Another commercial real estate firm, CBRE, is the new exclusive leasing agent for 200 Elm and an adjacent building at 695 E. Main. The two buildings comprise an approximately 560,000-square-foot complex, which was acquired by A.M. Property Holdings late last year for $235 million in one of the largest property sales of the past decade in Connecticut. While the new headquarters is in Stamford, Webster officials have said offices in Waterbury and Pearl River, N.Y. which, respectively, served as the former headquarters location for Webster and Sterling will be part of a multi-campus presence. The bank employs a total of about 4,300 people. Webster officials said in a statement last month they could not specify how many employees are based in Stamford, Waterbury and Pearl River because there are no specific headcounts for any locations as we have a hybrid and remote working model. Our colleagues work in company locations based on the needs of our customers and the most productive way to work in a safe and collaborative manner. At 200 Elm, Websters headquarters are part of a property that underwent a $75 million, multi-stage redevelopment in the past decade under its former owner, Stamford-based developer Building and Land Technology. When BLT acquired the site in 2012, it stood totally vacant as a result of the relocation a couple of years earlier of reinsurance firm GenRes headquarters to a campus about two miles north, on Long Ridge Road. The property is being renamed The Link, with the new owners announcing Friday that they plan to further develop the asset by engaging the interior courtyard along with service enhancements, as well as rigorously pursuing sustainability and environmental initiatives. Ownership is committed to creating a truly amazing work environment that is like no other in Stamford that offers tenants a plethora of amenities that are geared towards health, wellness, sustainability and safety as employees return to work, Nathan Wasserman, president of AM Property Holding Group, said in a statement. The Link has 83,902 square feet of available office space, with units ranging from 3,700 square feet to 52,000 square feet, according to CBRE. Its amenities include a fitness center and spa, a conference facility and a cafeteria with indoor and outdoor dining. Other tenants at 200 Elm-695 E. Main include professional services firms Deloitte and RSM, personal care and home care goods producer Henkel, alcoholic beverages specialist Diageo, insurer Ascot Group and hedge fund Tudor Investment Corp. We are excited to be marketing this truly iconic asset in the heart of the Stamford Central Business District, Brian Carcaterra, a member of CBREs leasing team for the property, said in a statement. Never in history has Stamford been a better place to live, work and play, and The Link is surrounded by all of the excitement of Harbor Point and the influx of new residents during these last two years. With the recently concluded expansion and extension for Webster Bank, we are accelerating through our strategy and are hyper-focused on leasing the remaining balance of space. pschott@stamfordadvocate.com; twitter: @paulschott In the basement of Madry Temple Church in New London, Margaret Lancaster, a health program coordinator at Ledge Light Health District, shows the pastor how to administer Narcan, the opioid overdose reversal treatment. In New Haven, at the Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ, the Rev. Jerry Streets and local clinical staff are offering substance use disorder treatment. These alliances of frontline health care workers with trusted community leaders are addressing the alarming rise of substance use disorders by leveraging the cultural power of churches to reach people in need of help. Overdose mortality rates have risen among all races in Connecticut over the past three years. But the rise has been particularly marked among the Black population. A rate in 2019 of 34 deaths per 100,000 people more than doubled to 70 deaths per 100,000 by 2021. Figures from the Department of Public Health in Connecticut show that since 2019, more than 80% of overdose deaths have involved fentanyl. The influx of that drug has significantly affected communities of color, the data up to January 2022 show. Alcohol use rose at the start of the pandemic across all populations. But among Black people, there was a sharper increase in binge drinking than among whites, according to a report by the Research Triangle Institute. Seeking help for substance use disorder is rarely straightforward for anyone. Lancaster says the barriers are even higher for people of color, who are already marginalized and distrustful of official institutions. Rev. Jack E. Madry said, Drinking has gone up, self-medicating. People are doing whatever they can to try not to allow depression to overtake them. Because the lens is already on you, we try not to make the lens bigger, Lancaster said. Sometimes that means staying with the circle of people that you trust. We're setting the table for someone to come to the table, come sit with us, Lancaster said of the harm reduction training shes coordinating. Change The Dynamics Lancaster has been in recovery for 17 years. She says that lived experience informs her work every day. When you receive individuals who have substance use disorder, you just have to accept people where they are and love them where they are, Lancaster said. Shes facilitating four weeks of training for 10 congregations around New London County. The program is open to communities of all faiths. Trainers from the National Harm Reduction Coalition will conduct the sessions. Harm reduction means just that: It does offer the opportunity for someone with substance use disorder to get into treatment if they choose, but the first principle is that they stay safe and alive, even if they keep using. The program includes training in how to use naloxone and the distribution of fentanyl test strips so users can make sure the drugs they are taking are safe. Trisha Rios is a recovery navigator with Alliance for Living, who is working with Ledge Light, engaging with people in the community on harm reduction and connecting them to treatment. This is absolutely huge, she said of the faith-based initiative. It's going to be a game-changer. I've had experiences speaking at certain churches where I could go and tell my story, but I couldn't bring my Narcan, you know? She said it will put the knowledge of harm reduction techniques in the hands of community leaders who can make a difference. It'll change the dynamics, Rios said. Our churches do great with helping people. But if they have the knowledge of what comes with substance use or mental health, it's going to be more than just coming to get a pair of socks. A Welcoming Space Streets of New Haven uses the word hospitality to describe what theyre trying to achieve with the Dixwell church setting. You want it to be in an environment where people are comfortable and familiar, he said. Substance abuse has hit the communities of people of color in a much more devastating way than some other communities, said Annette Streets, Jerrys wife. We feel an urgency to do whatever we can to help address it. The program theyre hosting was designed by Dr. Ayana Jordan, now an associate professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Health and the former director of Yales Social Justice and Health Equity Curriculum. One of the underlying factors of health care disparities is not that people dont care about themselves, not that they dont want to access health, but they are not treated in a way that makes them feel safe, she said. So much of what weve done in medicine for centuries has been dominatedat least in psychiatryby white men, truly, she said. And now were seeing the ramifications of that. Not because they inherently are bad, but its just a particular point of view. You dont have access to varying points of view. She has already run a pilot program at the Dixwell Avenue church to demonstrate her idea. The study recruited people of color with primarily alcohol use problems to attend an eight-week program. Recruits now in the study, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health, are divided into a control group attending conventional treatment at a New Haven clinic run by the Midwestern Connecticut Council of Alcoholism (MCCA), with the remainder going into a treatment group at the church. At the Dixwell church, participants complete a computer-based cognitive behavioral therapy program and take part in spiritually based sessions with church volunteers that include meditation, music and prayer. Jordan said theres a central question shes trying to answer: how to address high drop-out rates of people of color from conventional treatment settings. Is there a culturally informed way to get them initiated into substance use treatment, but also keep them in treatment? Jordan asks. Shes found a staunch ally in Rev. Streets. As well as being a minister and professor at Yale Divinity School, hes also a licensed clinical social worker and has taught at Columbia School of Social Work and the Wurzweiler School of Social Work at Yeshiva University. Rev. Streets said, So, I had an appreciation and an understanding for what she was aiming to do. Annette Streets, who helps to deliver the pastoral aspect of the program, said some of the participants remember coming to the church as children. So, a person said, I learned how to play drums right over there, you know, or I took dance lessons right on that stage, Streets said. It's a welcoming space to people in the community, and they feel comfortable coming here. The small-group aspect spoke to Terry Ritter, 50, who said shes been using alcohol and drugs since she was 13. I done been through so many drug programs, Ritter said. Im on like my 10th, 12th drug program. There, I'm in group, and I can't wait to leave to go get high. I didn't think about that when I was in group here. My mind was clear. We formed a bond. Thats what it was. We formed a bond here. She said that only once before has she been successful in quitting completely. However, she now says shes been clean for six months since she completed the program in September. At MCCAs New Haven location, participants in the control group receive more conventional treatment, overseen by Steve Palma. I still think for the most part at agencies across the stateeven within our ownpeople fail to understand urban trauma and how much it factors into their continued addiction and their continued resistance, he said. God knows, New Haven has a problemtalking about the public intoxication problem alone happening in these hot zones outside of package stores, Palma said. Sometimes, its right across the street from some of the churches. He said the majority of the population that his clinic serves is sent to treatment through the court system. That means that even if people attend sessions at MCCA, sometimes they dont engage. It's very hard for them not to see us as an extension of the legal system, even though we're not, Palma said. They see treatment as punishment, not as recovery. So that's what I love about the Black church project. They trust the church. They're involved in the church. Hes excited about the possibility for learning that may come from the Dixwell study. It could change the way we service these clients completely, he said. Anything thats evidence-based we would always use to inform our practices. For Jordan, changing the paradigm of treatment is a deeply personal goal. Being a woman, someone whose family has gone through many different iterations of addiction and mental illness, someone whos Black in this countryall of those identities inform how I can not only engage with the patient, but my point of view, she said. The ultimate aim is to design a program that could be replicated and rolled out among churches across the country. It really is about life or death, she said. Were seeing people die disproportionately because they dont have access to people who understand their cultural values to take care of them. Its unacceptable. If you identify as Black, are 18 or older, and would like to reduce your alcohol use, the Black Church Project is open to new study participants. Contact Lawanda Frederick at 203 641 1218. If you represent a church or community organization that would like more information, contact Traci Norman, traci.norman@yale.edu . This story was reported under a partnership with the Connecticut Health I-Team ( c-hit.org ), a nonprofit news organization dedicated to health reporting. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate WATERBURY Two fugitives were arrested and two children rescued from unimaginable conditions of squalor and abuse at a local residence on Monday, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. In December, officers began seeking Jesueily Sanchez and Tyshaun Peete, both of Rhode Island, officials said. Sanchez was to be charged with cruelty to/neglect of a child, while Peete will be charged with carrying a pistol without a license and resisting arrest. Federal officials said they they were taken into custody Monday in Waterbury following a three-month investigation. Officials said Sanchez and Peete were wanted in Rhode Island before they fled to Connecticut. Officials said they were found Monday in a Waterbury apartment with two children, one of whom had been classified as missing from Rhode Island and endangered. The Connecticut Department of Children and Families took custody of the children, officials said. Robert Charette, chief deputy U.S. marshal for the District of Rhode Island, said in the email that the case is the reason why the U.S. marshals created a missing child unit following the passage of the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015. The toddlers recovered today did not have a voice to advocate for themselves. They were living in unimaginable conditions of squalor and abuse. I commend the work of my deputy U.S. marshals here in Rhode Island, the Rhode Island State Police, deputy U.S. marshals in Connecticut, and the Waterbury Police Department in recovering these toddlers this morning, Charette said. The relentlessness displayed by these investigators is why these toddlers are now safe. Through its nationwide reach and established partnerships with state and local police departments, the U.S. Marshals Service is particularly well-positioned to aid in the recovery of missing and endangered children, acting U.S. Marshal for the District of Connecticut Lawrence J. Bobnick said in the email. Todays recovery of two young children from such tragic conditions was the culmination of countless hours of investigation and is a testament to the dedication of all the talented law enforcement officers involved. Additionally, the U.S. Marshals Service would like to thank the Connecticut Department of Children and Families and the health care workers at Waterbury Hospital for standing ready to assist in the recuperation of these young children. Sanchez and Peete are also expected to be charged with risk of injury to a child and cruelty to a person, officials said. william.lambert@hearstmediact.com China has made progress on preparing a law dedicated to tackling climate change, a senior official with the Ministry of Ecology and Environment said. Li Gao, director of the ministry's Climate Change Department, added that the ministry will accelerate efforts to promote the legislative process, and incorporate mechanisms for dealing with the global climate crisis into other laws. Following a decision by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the law was proposed in 2009 and included in the top legislature's legislative agenda, Li said in an exclusive interview with China Daily. A group consisting of members from a number of bodies, including the NPC's Environmental Protection and Resources Conservation Committee and the now defunct Ministry of Environmental Protection, was established in 2011 to draft the legislation, he added. In 2018, the State Council, China's Cabinet, assigned the task of tackling climate change to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment. As a result of the importance the new ministry attaches to climate legislation, a legal framework was hammered out and a draft law has been drawn up, Li said. "Currently, the framework for the draft law has reached maturity," Li said, adding that it is based in part on suggestions solicited from other departments and experts. At least three provinces, including Qinghai and Shanxi, and three major cities, including Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi province, have already enacted legislation or regulations on climate change and low-carbon development, he said. These regional efforts have provided instructive experiences for developing national legislation. Stressing the need for a special law to deal with global warming, Li vowed that the ministry will work consistently to promote climate legislation. "We will make the legislation a key part of our efforts to speed up the creation of an ecological civilization and enhance national environmental protection work," he noted. Ecological civilization is a concept promoted by President Xi Jinping and refers to balanced, sustainable development based on the harmonious coexistence of humans and nature. In accordance with the guidelines of the legislation, the ministry will encourage the incorporation of climate change regulations into other laws, including those related to environmental protection, energy management and urban-rural development. Li said the drafting of regulations for the national carbon trading market, which was launched last year and is the world's largest, is also a major priority. The ministry has so far issued four trial regulations and two trial technical specifications for the market. With stipulations on procedures for carbon trading and the rights and liabilities of parties, these documents offer guidelines on how to build, operate and supervise the market. In cooperation with the Ministry of Justice, Li said his ministry is drafting a provisional regulation on trading carbon emission allowances. "It was included in the legislative work plan of the State Council in 2021," he said. "Having already passed legislative review, the regulation has been submitted to the State Council for examination and approval as required by procedure." The EFCC has not been able to arraign Mr Okorocha and his co-defendants due to non-service of the money laundering charges on him. The Federal High Court in Abuja, on Monday, threatened to throw out a N2 billion money laundering case instituted against Rochas Okorocha, a former governor of Imo State. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) had in April 2021, arrested the former governor, and interrogated him over issues bothering on alleged corruption before he was admitted to administrative bail. It subsequently filed charges against Mr Okorocha, an incumbent senator, and others, but the arraignment had been stalled due to non-service of the charges on the former governor. At the proceedings on Monday which was meant for the arraignment of Mr Okorocha and his co-defendants before Inyang Ekwo, the EFCC's lawyer, Cosmos Ugwu, told the court that every effort to find Mr Okorocha and serve him with the charges had been futile. It was the second time the prosecuting lawyer had complained of his inability to personally serve Mr Okorocha with the charges as required by the law. He informed the court that he would continue to make efforts until he succeeds in serving the former Imo State governor with the court papers. Subsequently, Mr Ugwu applied for another adjournment to enable him serve the charges on Mr Okorocha, who represents Imo West senatorial district at the National Assembly. But, Mr Ugwu's excuse for not serving charges on Mr Okorocha did not go down well with Mr Ekwo who reminded the lawyer that the same excuse had been given by the prosecution on February 22 when the defendants ought to have taken their pleas. In a bench ruling, the judge granted the request for the second adjournment and warned the anti-graft agency's lawyer to show seriousness or else, the case would be struck out. The judge said, "Let me place on record, that this is the second time this flimsy excuse is being made to justify the absence of the 1st defendant (Okorocha) in court to take his plea. "As the prosecutor, you must demonstrate seriousness in the discharge of your duties. This is the last adjournment I shall grant in this matter. "If on the adjourned date, you come up with the same flimsy excuses, I shall have no option but to strike out the charges," Mr Ekwo warned, before adjourning the suit until May 30." Backstory The EFCC on January 24, 2022, filed 17-count charges involving criminal diversion of public funds and properties against Mr Okorocha and Anyim Nyerere Chinenye, Naphtali International Limited, Perfect Finish Multi Projects Limited, Consolid Projects Consulting Limited, Pramif International Limited, and Legend World Concepts Limited. Mr Okorocha, who has declared his interest to run for president in the 2023 general elections, is being put on trial by the Federal Government on 17-count charges involving criminal diversion of public funds and properties. At the last adjourned date, other defendants billed to be arraigned along with Mr Okorocha were present in court. The anti-graft agency in February obtained an interim forfeiture order for the purposes of confiscating the former governor's assets in Abuja. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Legal Affairs Nigeria By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. Wilson Uwujaren, EFCC's spokesperson, had said the property located in the Garki area of Abuja is "reasonably suspected to be proceeds of unlawful activities" of Mr Okorocha. He gave the full address of the property as Plot 1032 & 1033 Cadastral Zone AO3, Takum Close, Off Michika Street, Ahmadu Bello Way, Garki, Abuja. The interim forfeiture order came just some days after the EFCC lamented its inability to serve the ex-governor with the corruption charges it recently filed against him. The anti-graft agency had in January filed a 17-count charge against Mr Okorocha over allegations that he conspired with others, including an APC politician and five companies, to steal N2.9 billion from public coffers. TORRINGTON Members of the Torrington-Winsted Rotary Clube are are holding the Rotary Rally for Relief: 2022-Stock the Shelves, joining club members from Connecticut and Massachusetts for a day of service on April 9. Members participating in the Rotary Day of Service are collecting clothes for the homeless, refurbishing parks, building shelters, and other community-related activities. Club members, high school Interact club members and teen advisory members from the Torrington Library have already signed up to collect donations of food and personal supplies at Super Foodtown in New Hartford, and Walmart and Market 32 on East Main Street, Torrington. Food and supplies will be distributed to six local food banks: the Food Pantry, Friendly Hands Food Bank, and Salvation Army Food Bank in Torrington; and also to Salvation Army Food Bank in Winsted, Hands of Grace in New Hartford, and the Community Food Bank in Barkhamsted. Collectively, these food banks have seen their donations drop by 100,000 items per year over the last two years, according to a statement. With the involvement of clubs from the entire state of Connecticut, as well as Western Massachusetts, the Day of Service is an unprecedented Rotary effort to improve the lives of individuals and families in communities they serve, members said. Rotarians are known for their tireless efforts to help those in need, but the Day of Service will be the single largest volunteer effort weve ever held in our region, said Joanne Alfieri, Governor of District 7890, which oversees 57 clubs in northern Connecticut and western Massachusetts. Literally every community in our state will be impacted by what happens on April 9, added Jeff Krause, District Governor of Rotary District 7980, which oversees 63 clubs in southern Connecticut. From building houses for Habitat for Humanity in Norwich to painting an elementary school in Meriden, our projects will make a difference where help is needed most. Community members interested in volunteering for the Torrington Food Collection can email events@brookermemorial.org or call Kaitlyn at 860-489-1328, ext. 128. For more event information, go to TWRotary.events, or contact Kaitlyn at 860-489-1328, EXT 128, or email events@brookermemorial.org. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Montville Police Department / Contributed Photo / Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Montville police Show More Show Less 3 of 3 MONTVILLE A Florida man was charged and returned to Connecticut last week in connection with an alleged sexual assault, according to the Montville Police Department. Jason Howard, a resident of Inverness, Fla., was charged with first-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a minor, police said on Facebook. NORWALK A local attorney plans to resign and will not seek readmission to the state bar amid an investigation into complaints that he failed to pay clients funds from real estate closings, according to court documents. Norwalk attorney Carl Ferraros license to practice law in Connecticut was suspended March 15, after a judge found he poses a threat of irreparable harm to current and prospective clients, according to an order filed in Stamford Superior Court. The order also appointed a trustee to take control of his clients accounts and notify them of Ferraros suspension. The action stems from complaints against Ferraro from at least four clients who alleged they are owed funds from real estate closings, the application for his suspension states. The Norwalk Police Department is investigating several complaints, the filing also states. A spokesperson for the Norwalk Police Department said the agency is investigating multiple complaints against Mr. Ferraro of that nature, but said further information could not be released because of the ongoing investigations. Suzanne Sutton, Ferraros attorney, did not immediately respond to an email Monday seeking comment on the allegations, but wrote in a court filing that her client intends to resign and waive the right to readmission to the Connecticut State Bar. To that end, he has previously tendered a resignation to the Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, she continued. To the best of the undersigneds knowledge, [Ferraro] is presently in a rehabilitation facility and is unable to have any contact with anyone for the next two weeks. The type of rehab facility was not referenced in the court documents. Ferraro was admitted to the state bar on December 7, 1990 and has no history of discipline, according to the application for his suspension. A grievance complaint was filed against Ferraro on March 3 after a check he wrote for more than $400,000 bounced for insufficient funds, according to the court document. Although the respondent ultimately wired sufficient funds to the complainant, an investigation of the complaint is currently pending, the application states. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate TORRINGTON Tuesdays cold temperatures and chilly breezes didnt deter the Torrington Veterans Memorial Committee from holding one if its annual ceremonies Tuesday. A small group that included the volunteer committee and its honor guard, Mayor Elinor Carbone, state Reps. Michelle Cook, D-Torrington, and Jay Case, R-Winsted, gathered inside the civic center at Coe Memorial Park for the brief ceremony marking National Vietnam War Veterans Day. Several veterans also sat in the audience at the ceremony, including Cal Silano, U.S. Navy, 1972-76. Gregg E. Timms, a U.S. Marine veteran, with chairman Michael Kaneb and Michael Thomas, belong to the committee. Membership is low, and Timms and Kaneb encouraged anyone interested in joining to contact them. The group meets on the second Monday of the month at City Hall in Room 224; interested members can call 860-489-2531 or email TorringtonVSO@outlook.com for information. Members work together to hold the monthly ceremonies and plan the citys annual Memorial Day parade. We definitely could use more people, who want to get involved, Timms said. If someones interested, they can contact me, Kaneb said. Were continuing to hold the ceremonies for the various days that honor veterans. Case, Cook and Carbone all thanked the small group for their service. This helps us remember the past; today is more a thank you for your continued service, and not to forget all the consequences of war, Carbone said. The Honor Guard, led by Thomas, director of Torringtons Veterans Service Office, includes Steve Kovaleski, Don MacLeod, Bob Koplar, Denis Bailey, Pete Jacquette, chaplain Roger Geiger and Mike Magnifico, who performed Taps in his bugle. The guard also fired their rifles outside the civic center. Magnifico isnt a veteran, but hes a faithful member of the honor guard and attends the ceremonies to participate and honor his friends and others who have served. Im a member of Post 44 in Bantam, he said. The guard and committee also hold ceremonies on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, Pearl Habor Day, Dec. 7; Gulf War Veterans Day, Feb. 28; Memorial Day and Korean War Veterans Day. According to Stars and Stripes website, the Vietnam War Veterans Recognition Act of 2017 established March 29 as the day to pause and commemorate, remember, recognize and honor Vietnam Veterans, former Prisoners of War, those listed as Missing in Action and their families. March 29 was chosen for several reasons. It was on this date 49 years ago that the last combat troops departed Vietnam. It was also on this day, nearly half a century ago, that Hanoi freed the remaining prisoners of war the Republic of Vietnam was willing to acknowledge. Stars and Stripes reported that U.S. involvement in Vietnam started slowly with an initial deployment of advisers in the early 1950s, grew incrementally through the early 1960s and expanded with the deployment of full combat units in July 1965. The last U.S. personnel were evacuated from Vietnam in April 1975. Approximately 9 million Americans served during the Vietnam era (Nov. 1, 1955, to May 15, 1975). More than 6 million are still alive. Officials of the Nigeria Immigration Service and the interior ministry, have described the Nigeria High Commission's claim as untrue. The suspension of the biometric capturing of the new enhanced electronic-passport by the Nigeria High Commission in London, the United Kingdom, is already generating controversy. Findings by this newspaper have confirmed that the concerned government agencies are already working behind the scene towards addressing the looming conflict. A source at the interior ministry, who craved anonymity for not having the authority to comment on the matter, alleged the high commission's office of kicking against the new passport regime "because it abrogates the hitherto existing underhand dealings where applicants pay as high as 120 pounds as service charge." A spokesperson for the foreign affairs ministry did not respond to enquiries on Monday. Suspension At the weekend, the high commission's office issued a directive for the suspension of the enhanced e-passport processes, citing confusion created allegedly by the linking of the National Identity Number (NIN) issued by the National identity Management Commission (NIMC) with the NIS system. In a statement issued on its website and dated Friday, March 25, 2022, the Commission said the suspension would take effect beginning from Monday, March 28, until the challenges are resolved. The Commission said the deplorable situation in passport issuance and renewals shortly after the coronavirus-induced lockdown was eased had degenerated into tension which, it said had been "responsible for multiple ugly incidents recorded in the Mission, thus exposing the entire staff to danger," including breaking of vehicle screens, knife attacks on vehicles' tyres, assaults on staff, and general insecurity in the Mission's premises and its surroundings. It, however, noted that in May, 2021, measures were put in place to restore order, and that the measures had received cooperation from Nigerians in the UK. "The smooth operations widely acclaimed by Nigerians existed till 22nd November 2021." The statement reads in part; "At the launch of Enhanced E-passport operations in London on 23rd November 2021, Nigerians in the United Kingdom were quite optimistic of improvements in service by the Immigration Section, on the issuance of passports. "However, the issuance, renewal, and operations since the introduction of the new Enhanced E-passport have been fraught with many challenges, particularly on the issuance of National Identification Number (NIN) and the appointments for biometrics capture. "The Mission feels and shares in the pains of teeming Nigerians since the launching of the new Enhanced E-passport scheme in the United Kingdom by the Minister of Interior, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola. The staff of the High Commission are currently being assaulted on a regular basis on account of attendant frustrations, particularly by Nigerians who travel long distances from Scotland, Northern Ireland, Manchester, Cardiff, Birmingham, etc to the Mission in London without positive resolution of their respective consular issues." The Commission said the decision to suspend the process was taken after a meeting with "relevant stakeholders" including "members of the Nigerian Council of Elders in the UK, comprising Pa Adebayo Oladimeji, Arc Otunba Mobolaji Falase, Dr. Boma Douglas, Chief Fred Ajiduah, in concert with the Chairman of Central Association of Nigerians in the United Kingdom (CANUK) - Mr. Ayo Akinfe, leading the Executive members of the Association. Nigeria High Commission was led to the meeting by the High Commissioner... " "Consequently, the biometrics capture on the new Enhanced EPassport at the Nigeria High Commission in London is hereby suspended with effect from Monday, 28th March 2022, until these challenges are resolved, in the interest of the Nigerian Community in the United Kingdom. Whilst we regret the inconveniences the suspension may cause, the Emergency Travel Certificate window and visas for British- Nigerians are available as a stop-gap measure," the statement concluded. Untrue? But officials at both the Nigeria Immigration Service and the interior ministry, who do not want to be quoted, have described the Nigeria High Commission's claims as untrue. The media aide to Rauf Aregbesola, interior minister, Sola Fasure, denied the claim of inefficiency of the new enhanced e-passport issuance and renewal system. He, however, declined further comments on the matter, saying the two concerned ministries will iron out the differences in the interest of Nigerians. "I don't want us to drag this matter. You can go and conduct your investigations and see if the new system is working or not. But I can assure you that whatever the issues are, the government will resolve them in the interest of Nigerians." Also speaking, a high-ranking official of the NIS, who said this newspaper should await official statement from the agency, and declined to speak on the record, however, offered some insight when he alleged that the new enhanced e-passport has stopped the high commission from generating "illegal funds under the guise of imposing service charge." "The truth is that before now, the Commission was charging 120 pounds as service charge for a passport worth 80 pounds but since the introduction of the enhanced e-passport, that was no longer possible. We knew there would be resistance because embassies rely on these illegal revenues to survive since they claim they are not properly funded," the official said. The source added that only the comptroller-general of immigration is empowered, apart from the President to take such a critical decision on travel documents. The official added; "Even the stop-gap documents they want to be issuing do not belong to the Commission. It is the responsibility of the NIS and so how can you charge fees for what you don't own?" Statistics of applications Another official of the Nigeria Immigration Service, who also does not want to be mentioned, saying the development may degenerate into inter-agency conflict, said between November 2021 when the e-passport was launched in London and March 25, 2022, a total of 5,400 applications were received and that 5,200 had been processed and delivered. The source said the new e-passport enables the applicants to engage in the process personally and that it is by appointment, which the official noted is the standard practice globally. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Governance Nigeria By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. The source said; "Passport issuance globally is like visa issuance, it is on an appointment basis. But there are clearly provisions for emergency situations. The delay in the 200 cases that were not delivered are mainly due to the synchronisation of NIN with our database because that is what the government wants. "It is to the advantage of the country that we have a single identity number. We agree that there could be teething problems but these issues are not insurmountable, 200 cases out of 5,400 are very minimal and we are resolving them as well." The source cited the situation with the registration for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), saying JAMB had in the past jettisoned the use of NIN over complaints but that it later adopted it since it is the government policy. "Today, I am aware that even with the adoption of NIN, JAMB was able to register 1.8 million candidates within record time without issues. Such is the system and I hope the Commission will see reason and stop extorting Nigerians," the official added. Foreign affairs ministry yet to respond Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the foreign affairs ministry, Francisca Omoyuli, said she will find out the details of what transpired and react appropriately on the allegations and other issues raised. She said since a short message detailing the information requested had been sent by the reporter, she would inquire and revert. However, many hours after her promise, there is yet to be any response from the official as of the time of filing this report. Pottsville, PA (17901) Today Periods of rain. High 59F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall possibly over one inch.. Tonight Cloudy with periods of rain. Low 48F. Winds ENE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall possibly over one inch. A Cambodian National Election Committee officer shows the logo of the ruling Cambodian People's Party during a draw ceremony in Phnom Penh on May 29, 2018, to determine the order in which political parties are listed on the ballots for the national election in July. Cambodias opposition Candlelight Party, whose popularity has been steadily increasing, is threatening to boycott local elections on June 5 if its activists and members continue to be harassed by officials from Prime Minister Hun Sens ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP). Some political observers believe the Candlelight Party poses the greatest challenge to the CPP in the June commune votes. But Candlelight Vice President Thach Setha said local officials continue to hound candidates from his party without any effort from the Cambodian government to stop the abuse. Thach Setha told RFA on Tuesday that he is considering petitioning the European Union and foreign embassies in Cambodia to intervene to try to stop the governments intimidation of his party. If the problem has not been resolved, the party will boycott the election, he said. The Candlelight Party, formerly known as the Sam Rainsy Party and the Khmer Nation Party, was founded in 1995 and merged with other opposition forces to form the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) in 2012. In November 2017, Cambodias Supreme Court dissolved the CNRP in a move that allowed the CPP to win all 125 seats in Parliament in a July 2018 election. Candlelight officials allege they have been falsely accused of using fake names for candidates and putting forward some candidates for election without their permission. At least two Candlelight Party activists have been jailed on allegations of submitting false documents to run in the communal elections. Activists say the harassment often comes at the hand of local police. Candlelight Party activist Sim SoKhoeun told RFA that he was summoned to his local police station in Pursat province on Monday. Once there, police could not produce any complaint against him. After asking me to wait for an hour, they set me free, he said, adding that he suspected the move was meant to intimidate him. The Candlelight Partys boycott threat came as a U.N. human rights official warned that the rights of Cambodians to speak freely and challenge authorities are being eroded by single-party rule. Vitit Muntarbhorn, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Cambodia, called on all CPP officials to respect basic freedoms of expression and assembly. He spoke via video at a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday. Civic and political space in Cambodia have receded and regressed due to what is effectively all-intrusive single-party rule, he said. The outlook for human rights and democracy in Cambodia is troubling on many fronts as local, commune elections approach in June, Vitit Muntarbhorn said. Although Cambodia has made progress by drafting laws to protect vulnerable people and has reduced a backlog of court cases that had kept people in jail before their trial, Vitit Muntarbhorn said that he had immediate concerns about closing civic and political space; mass trials and imprisonment of political opposition members; and the upcoming elections. I call on all authorities in Cambodia to respect fundamental human rights and international human rights laws to which the country is a party, including the basic freedoms of expression and assembly, he said. Too much impunity Kata Orn, spokesman for the governments Cambodia Human Rights Committee, said the government does not abuse human rights and that only politicians abuse the law. The special rapporteur for Cambodia confused the meaning of human rights abuse and abuse of the law, he said. Seventeen political parties have registered to put forward candidates in the communal elections, he said. Kang Savang, a monitor with the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (Comfrel), said although local authorities are supposed to remain neutral, some of them, including police officers, have abused their power and threatened the opposition party. He warned that the integrity of the communal elections would be affected without new measures to prevent political threats against Candlelight Party. Kang Savang urged the Ministry of Interior to investigate the conduct of local authorities. Impunity will allow perpetrators to not be concerned about their conduct, he said. Sam Kuntheamy, executive director of the Neutral and Impartial Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (NICFEC), said local officials do not have the authority to resolve election-related disputes. Those instead must be handled by Cambodias National Election Committee (NEC). It is the NECs job. If there are disputes, they should file a complaint with the NEC, he said. RFA couldnt reach Ministry of Interior spokesman Khieu Sopheak for comment on Tuesday, but Interior Minister Sar Kheng said at a meeting a day earlier that the Candlelight Party was using fake candidate names and then names of others without their consent a punishable crime. He mentioned a few districts where this had occurred. Thach Setha denied the accusation, saying local authorities had not produced any evidence to support their claims. Reported by RFAs Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. A Swissair flight from Zurich to Shanghai was canceled 20 minutes before departure on , leaving more than 200 Chinese passengers stranded, as Shanghai's COVID-19 lockdown begins to bite. Swissair flight LX188 was due to take off for Shanghai's Pudong International Airport at 7.10 p.m. local time on evening, but was canceled as passengers were waiting to board the plane at the gate, despite all having provided negative COVID-19 tests at check-in, disgruntled passengers told RFA. Some passengers shared photos of people holding up placards saying "I want to go home," in the airport, demanding the authorities take measures to help them. In one video clip uploaded to social media, the passengers stood in a row chanting "We're going home! We're going back to China!" They included around 100 passengers who had transited through Zurich following a 10-hour flight from Brazil, as well as children, elderly and a pregnant woman, passengers told RFA. Zhejiang-based scholar Cai Yong said the group appeared to be angry with Swissair for canceling the flight, although it was the authorities at Pudong who had revoked its landing permission. "The stranded passengers have no problem with the Chinese government, just the airline," Cai said. "They are addressing their demands to the wrong place." "It would make more sense for them to get in touch with their local Chinese consulate, and convey their demands to the Chinese government [that way]," he said. Passengers posted to social media that some of their visas had expired, leaving them in Switzerland illegally. Most said they were forced to buy tickets on other flights at sky-high last-minute prices. Calls to the Chinese consulate in Zurich resulted in a statement saying officials there respected "all Swiss decisions." The logos of Swissair (L) and China Airlines (R) are seen on the fins of long-haul airplanes on the opening day of the International Paris Airshow, June 15, 2015. Consulate trying to 'pass the buck' However, some help did arrive from the consulate on morning, as consular officials delivered food, water and other necessities to Chinese nationals still stranded at the airport, and promised to negotiate with Swissair on their behalf. "This flight cancellation wasn't done by the airline, which was forced into that decision," Cai said. "The consulate is also trying to pass the buck." "Don't any of those people have critical thinking skills?" he said. Germany's Lufthansa was also forced on to cancel a flight to Shanghai from Frankfurt, while Air China also canceled CA842 from Vienna to Beijing, leaving more than 100 Chinese nationals stranded in the Austrian capital. Chinese scholar Wang Zheng said many people have taken by surprise at the strictness of Shanghai's COVID-19 restrictions. "Many people have expressed surprise and incomprehension faced with Shanghai's COVID-19 measures," Wang told RFA, adding that the lockdown is largely ideological, and in keeping with ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping's insistence on a zero-COVID policy. "One size fits all lockdowns are the latest trend in the new era," Wang said in a reference to Xi's personal brand of political ideology, "socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era." "Shanghai's lockdown tells us that they are tightening restrictions to curb COVID-19, not loosening them," he said. Meanwhile, the current lockdown in the Pudong financial district and an imminent lockdown across the river in the downtown area of Puxi have been extended until , local residents told RFA. " the residential community committee informed us that we're no longer allowed to take a walk [in the compound] downstairs," a resident of the Pudong No. 1 residential community surnamed Liu said. "The restrictions on the community have been extended now to ," he said. Previously, the authorities said the lockdown would be lifted on . Shoppers rummage through empty shelves in a supermarket before a lockdown as a measure against the Covid-19 coronavirus in Shanghai, March 29, 2022. Credit: AFP Heavy losses from zero-COVID The news came as a study found that while China's zero-COVID measures have been largely effective at curbing the spread of the virus, the country's economy has paid a heavy price in the form of an estimated U.S.$46 billion in losses a month, just over three percent of GDP. Economists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong used logistical tracking data linked to two million trucks to extrapolate the impact on economic activity. Co-author and CUHK economics professor Song Zheng said a strict lockdown in Shanghai alone could knock four percentage points off China's GDP. Tsai Ming-fang, economist at Taiwan's Tamkang University, said the lockdown had effectively wiped out the city's electronics industry. "The Shanghai lockdown has led to the disappearance of the entire electronic logistics industry," Tsai told RFA. "The port is also directly affected, and it is impossible for goods to be shipped." "It's also impossible for workers to commute to work normally. These are the points at which the economic impact is felt." Reuters cited sources on as saying that Tesla supplier Lingang had halted production for four days. "There will be some satellite factories under Tesla, and smaller partners under the satellite factories, which have a low tolerance for risk," Tsai said. "Once production is halted, they won't be able to keep going because they will have operational difficulties caused by cash-flow problems, or even go bankrupt," he said. Current affairs commentator Si Ling said the lockdown in Shanghai casts doubt over whether the CCP under Xi is that committed to running a globalized economy that is connected to the rest of the world. "It does make you wonder how determined China is to pursue economic reform and an open economy," Si told RFA, in a reference to economic policies initiated by late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979. "Shanghai was once a window on the world for that policy." He said the status of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen as attractive entry points for foreign direct investment could now be in jeopardy. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is moving to delete rumor, speculation and opinion about the China Eastern crash from the country's tightly controlled internet, while even state-approved journalists have reported problems gaining access to the crash site. Since officials announced on March 22 that all 132 people aboard flight MU5735, a Boeing 737 China Eastern en route between Kunming and Guangzhou that crashed in a mountainous part of Guangxi outside Wuzhou, had died, any information about the investigation into the cause of the crash has been tightly restricted by the authorities. Chinese journalist Du Qiang recently complained on the social media platform WeChat that he and a colleague, Chen Weixi, were denied access to the crash site by police after flying there on the same day, only managing to take a few photos from a distance before being ordered to leave. Du wrote that the roads leading to the crash site were blocked by three police checkpoints, and that fellow journalists working for Japanese broadcaster NHK met with similar treatment. He wrote that official journalists working for state broadcaster CCTV and Xinhua news agency had once been in the habit of visiting disaster sites in the hope of netting some prized photos or footage of the area, but that this now seems impossible. His WeChat post, which also called for better press arrangements, including wider access to official news conferences, garnered huge numbers of views and comments, but has since been deleted. "Could the leaders of China Eastern Airlines and relevant departments come better prepared so that more questions can be raised?" Du's post said, also calling for more interviews with rescue teams or grieving relatives. "Is it possible to seek the opinions of family members and let those who are willing to meet with the media?" A photographer who gave only the nickname Xiao Gao told RFA he had also tried to get to the site around the same time. "I have never come across such tight controls at a disaster site as I did this time around," Xiao Gao said. "We tried to interview people in nearby villages ... but there were obstacles at every turn." Hebei-based journalist Huang Tao said the authorities are keen to ensure that they control every aspect of media and social media reporting of the crash. "This must be to prevent information from leaking out," Huang said. "There is probably a lot of evidence at the scene indicating something that they don't want reporters to find out about." Deleting 'rumors' China's powerful Cyberspace Administration said on March 26 that it has deleted more than 279,000 posts containing "illegal content" relating to the crash, including 167,000 rumors and 1,295 hashtags. It said it had also shut down 2,713 social media accounts. Among the "rumors" deleted from social media included claims that China Eastern had already sustained losses of tens of billions of dollars, and had slashed maintenance costs in a bid to improve its financial situation. But Huang said he believes much of what the authorities say is "rumor" is authentic information. "You can tell which reports are true by looking at what they are deleting," Huang said. "[So] the reports that the airline didn't maintain [the aircraft] properly to save money ... may be true; it's looking more and more likely that it has to do with maintenance." An aircraft maintenance engineer surnamed Chen said the fact that parts of the aircraft's tail were found some 10 kilometers from the crash site suggests that there may have been problems with this part. "[If] the torque was too large, it could have gotten sheared off, which wouldn't be surprising," Chen said. "The crash is going to be either due to human error or a mechanical failure." Both black boxes, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, have been recovered and taken to Beijing for decoding, Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) official Zhu Tao told journalists on March 27. The investigation is seeking answers to questions about why the Boeing 737 descended 6,000 meters in the space of just one minute, before burying itself 20 meters deep in a mountainside as it began its descent to Guangzhou. Deliberate media controls U.S.-based economist He Qinglian said the media controls are likely top-down and deliberate. "They won't let them report from the crash site -- that's the CCP's dead hand controlling the media," He said. "It's to make sure that nobody starts making interpretations that aren't in line with the official narrative." Meanwhile, the authorities have yet to publish a list of the passengers and crew who were aboard the doomed flight, with Hong Kong media reports saying the families of victims are being closely watched around the clock by Chinese officials. An online appeal from the families of victims complained that they, too, are being kept in the dark by officials. "Due to the pandemic, there is almost no way for family members [of victims] to communicate with other family members," the appeal, which was no longer visible on Toutiao by Tuesday, said. However, authorities did respond to some of the relatives' requests by taking them up to the crash site in separate groups, to view the scene and to make offerings for their loved ones at a temporary shrine in the area. One family member wrote: "Even if they don't find anyone, I am hoping to go home with some soil from the crash site [in lieu of remains]." Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. Some groups are seeking to deny Opeyemi Bamidele, the current senator from Ekiti Central, the ticket to return to the Senate. Controversy over the zoning of the ticket for Ekiti Central Senatorial District is now creating ripples in the state's chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) ahead of the 2023 general election. PREMIUM TIMES learnt that there is pressure on the leadership of the party to zone the ticket to Ado Ekiti if it must emerge victorious in the coming election. The pressure groups are seeking to deny Opeyemi Bamidele, the current senator from the district, the ticket to return to the Senate. Mr Bamidele is from Irelodun/Ifelodun, one of the area councils in Ekiti Central, which also has Ado Ekiti, Ijero, Efon and Ekiti West local government areas. A faction of the party with the name, Ado Ekiti Frontiers (AEF), has warned the party against feilding Mr Bamidele for the next senatorial election. Instead, it urged the party to field a candidate from Ado Ekiti if it intends to be victorious in the coming National Assembly election. The AEF Coordinator, Taiwo Salami, argued that allowing Ado Ekiti to produce the party's senatorial candidate would boost its chances in the June 18, 2022 governorship election and general elections scheduled for 2023. Mr Salami urged Governor Kayode Fayemi and other key party members to consider allowing the senatorial candidate to come from Ado Ekiti Local Government Area. "Ado Ekiti had produced likes of Prof 'Banji Akintoye as senator and Hon Gabriel Falayi as a member of House of Representatives in 1979, hence we are not asking for too much, if we're pleading for a senatorial seat in 2022," he said. "We shall continue to be peaceful and patient to demand for our rightful positions as a community that hosted entire Ekiti. The voting strength of Ado Ekiti secured victory for our party in 2018 because we were able to bridge the gap of the 2014 governorship election to the minimum level. "For instance, in 2014 governorship election, APC polled 13,927, while PDP scored 41, 169 with a wide margin of 27,242, but in 2018 gubernatorial election, we reduced the wide margin to 4,699, which actually gave victory to our party." Opposition kicks However, an opposing faction has come out strong to defend the senator, saying he remains the best option for victory. The group, Ekiti Central Progressive Alliance (ECPA), maintained that the current occupant of the seat should be given the right of first refusal for the party to win the election. The ECPA Chairman, Mayowa Olowoyeye, said the party needs Mr Bamidele's popularity to win the June 18 governorship poll, saying the candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Segun Oni, is a serious threat to the APC candidate, Biodun Oyebanji. "We are not in any way against Ado Ekiti producing the Senator in our zone, but as we are today, Senator Bamidele should be a natural choice for APC on account of his experience as a ranking Senator and popularity in the district," he said. "Except APC is deceiving itself, the SDP is gaining grounds on daily basis in Ekiti and threatening our chances of winning the election. So, we need to give our ticket to a popular person to be able to galvanise support for our party. "Again, a ranking Senator always command respect in the Senate, so we need people with experience to be able to give Ekiti a strong voice and that person is Senator Bamidele. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Governance Nigeria By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. "In the last election, I mean 2019 elections, Senator Bamidele scored over 94,000 votes in Ekiti Central Senatorial Election. This confirmed how popular he is. He is also the Chairman Senate Committee on Judiciary as a first termer and if given the ticket and wins, he will go higher and give Ekiti a better representation." The spokesperson for the party in the state, Segun Dipe, said on Monday in Ado Ekiti, that the agitations and aspirations of the groups are legitimate. "What we would, however, not do is to enforce any person on the people," he said. According to him, the different interest groups could present their arguments to the appropriate quarters, but the choice will be made by the proper elective structures of the party as laid down in its constitution. Observers say a base could extend the range of Chinas navy and allow intelligence gathering. New Zealands leader voiced grave concern Monday over a draft security agreement between China and the Solomon Islands that, if approved, could see Beijing establish a military base in the South Pacific. Australias prime minister also reiterated his nations concern about the planned agreement that was leaked online last week. The security pact would allow Beijing to set up military bases and deploy troops in the Pacific island nation, marking the start of a much sharper military competition than anything weve seen in the region for decades, said David Capie, director of the Centre for Strategic Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Adern said on Monday that her country sees the pact as gravely concerning." "We see such acts as a potential militarization of the region and also see very little reason in terms of the Pacific security for such a need and such a presence," Adern told Radio NZ when asked about a possible stationing of Chinese military ships in the Solomon Islands. Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was quoted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as saying that the agreement was a "reminder of constant pressures and threats that present in our region to our own national security." Morrison was due to speak to leaders of Papua New Guinea and Fiji on Monday to discuss the matter which he called an issue of concern for the region, but it has not come as a surprise. Capie said that if approved by the Solomon Islands cabinet, the agreement would allow the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) to deploy police and military personnel to Solomon Islands with the consent of the host government, and potentially provide for refueling and support of Chinese ships. New Zealand military and police depart on a C-130 Hercules from Ohakea, New Zealand, to help contain rioting on the Solomon Islands, Dec. 2, 2021. Credit: NZDF via AP Clear evidence of Beijing intention According to Capie, there have been a lot of reports in recent years about China looking to improve its access to South Pacific states and possibly seeking some sort of military or dual-use facility. Some of the stories seemed pretty fanciful, but this draft agreement is clear evidence of Beijings ambitions, he said. China has denied any ulterior motives beyond promoting regional peace and stability. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said: As two sovereign and independent states, China and Solomon Islands conduct normal law enforcement and security cooperation on the basis of equality and mutual benefit. We hope relevant sides will look at this in an objective and rational light and refrain from reading too much into it, Wang said. China has growing interests in the region including trade, investments, a sizeable diaspora and a large deep water fishing fleet. But Capie noted that China also wants to be able to operate its rapidly growing navy out in the wider Pacific, complicating U.S. plans in the event of a future conflict. A base in the Pacific would let Peoples Liberation Army Navy vessels operate far away from their home ports for longer and in the future might also be used for intelligence gathering and surveillance, he said. The draft agreement would still need to go through the Solomon Islands cabinet and there will be plenty of twists and turns before this is a done deal, if it ever is, the New Zealand analyst said. The U.S. has vowed that the Ukraine crisis would not distract it from implementing its Indo-Pacific strategy. U.S. President Joe Biden listens during a joint news conference with Singapores Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in the East Room at the White House in Washington, DC, March 29, 2022. Four Southeast Asian foreign ministers are traveling to China this week while a U.S.-ASEAN summit that was due to take place in Washington appears to have been postponed indefinitely, prompting Chinese state media to carp that the region prefers to speak to China instead of the U.S. Chinas Foreign Ministry announced on Monday that the top diplomats of Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Myanmar will visit China respectively from March 31 to April 3 at the invitation of Foreign Minister Wang Yi. At least some of the ministers would have accompanied their heads of state for the long-anticipated summit between leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and President Joe Biden that had been planned for March 28-29. But that meeting ran into scheduling problems. A senior Biden administration official conceded Monday that much to our disappointment, we werent able to get this locked down but they were very committed to rescheduling it. We believe the clock is ticking, and we want to try and get this done. And were working very closely with ASEAN to try and come up with an appropriate time to do this, said the official who was briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, under ground rules set by the administration. Still, on Tuesday Biden had an Oval Office meeting with Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who urged closer U.S.-ASEAN ties and expressed appreciation for Bidens commitment to the region. He said "it helps the U.S. to be present in the Asia-Pacific and to deepen its relations with many friends and to strengthen its strategic interests in the region." Biden vowed that the Ukraine crisis would not distract from the U.S. from implementing its Indo-Pacific strategy. He said he wanted to ensure that the region remains "free and open." A file photo showing ASEAN foreign ministers posing with China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a meeting in Vientiane, Laos, about the COVID-19 pandemic, Feb. 20, 2020. Credit: Reuters Apples and oranges In Beijing, China was making its own play to demonstrate its engagement with Southeast Asia. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters Monday that the four countries whose ministers will visit are important ASEAN members and Chinas friendly neighbors and important partners for high-quality Belt and Road cooperation referring to Chinas global infrastructure program. He said the visit again demonstrates the close and friendly relations between China and its ASEAN neighbors and the high importance all sides attach to advancing China-ASEAN cooperation. It is unclear whether foreign ministers from the remaining six ASEAN countries were invited. The state-run newspaper Global Times said to visit China while delaying the meeting with the U.S. shows ASEAN's willingness to talk with China rather than the U.S. The paper, known for its nationalistic, anti-U.S. stance, quoted an expert, Qian Feng, as saying that while China truly and sincerely helps them [ASEAN countries] boost economic development and solve practical problems through win-win cooperation, the latter [the U.S.] doesn't really care about their current situations but just wants to use them to contain China without bringing them tangible benefit. Obviously, ASEAN members know that, said Qian, director of the research department at the National Strategy Institute at Tsinghua University. Collin Koh, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said the Chinese newspaper is comparing apples and oranges, and making a mountain out of a molehill. The trips to Beijing is of a different level to the summit which would involve heads of state, Koh said. This cant be compared to the foreign ministers going to China, he said. Pushed to take sides? The scheduling of the ASEAN-U.S. summit ran into trouble when the facilitating country, Indonesia, couldnt get all ASEAN members to agree on a date. Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia, the current chair of ASEAN, explained on March 17 that among the blocs 10 members, four countries said they could not attend the meeting [on March 28-29] while some others were requesting that the summit be held on March 26-27 - dates the U.S. said it could not make. Thai foreign policy expert Kavi Chongkittavorn said that ASEAN leaders became exasperated about the proposed meeting. Half the ASEAN leaders were not happy with the U.S. because they had proposed several dates for the Biden team to consider but the U.S. side kept changing the schedule, he said. And with the crisis in Ukraine, in some ASEAN capitals there is a prevailing fear that the Russia-Ukraine quagmire could hijack the summit, Kavi said. According to a Vietnamese analyst, there has also been a certain unease among some ASEAN countries that they would be pressured to take sides in the Ukraine war. The analyst requested anonymity to discuss a matter of diplomatic sensitivity. Vietnam, together with fellow ASEAN members Brunei and Laos, abstained on March 24 from a U.N. resolution on humanitarian consequences of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Hanoi also abstained on an earlier resolution on March 2 that condemned Russias aggression and demanded that Moscow immediately end its military operations in Ukraine. Balikatan 2022 will send a message that their alliance endures, officials from both countries say. Gen. Andres Centino, the chief of the Philippine armed forces, speaks to reporters during opening ceremonies for the Balikatan or shoulder-to-shoulder joint military exercises with the United States, at Camp Aguinaldo in Quezon City, Philippines, March 28, 2022. The Philippines and the United States kicked off one of their largest-ever joint exercises Monday with officials saying they hoped it would convey a message of strong bilateral military ties in the face of maritime challenges from China. Philippine Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said the exercises called Balikatan, which means shoulder-to-shoulder in Tagalog, marks another milestone in the enduring alliance between the two countries. The drills will end on April 8. This years Balikatan exercise is no ordinary iteration because it is the largest edition ever held, with almost 9,000 participants from the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the United States Indo-Pacific Command, Lorenzana said in his opening remarks read out by his assistant at Camp Aguinaldo in Quezon City. We are, thus, sending a message to the world that the alliance between our countries is stronger than ever and that we remain committed to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in response to the evolving security challenges that face both our nations and the region, Lorenzana said. The 37th edition of the annual exercise under the countries Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) is designed to enhance force capability and strengthen cooperation in maritime security, amphibious operations, live-fire training, urban operations, aviation operations, counterterrorism, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, according to organizers. About 3,800 Filipino soldiers will join 5,100 American counterparts in the combined joint exercise the largest since 2015 when 11,500 participated. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the 2020 exercise to be canceled and limited the number of participants to less than 1,000 in 2021. The 2022 joint exercise began a day after the Philippine Coast Guard reported a March 2 close distance maneuvering incident involving one of its ships and the Chinese coast guard near Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. Philippine officials said the Chinese ship sailed within 21 meters (69 feet) of the Philippine ship, and accused the Chinese Coast Guard of violating 1972 international regulations on preventing collisions at sea. In Manila, the Chinese Embassy did not immediately return requests for comment, and the Philippine Coast Guard did not explain why it took more than three weeks for it to report the incident. Speaking at Mondays kickoff ceremony for Balikatan, Maj. Gen. Jay Bargeron, commanding general of the U.S. 3rd Marine Division, said the drills were part of efforts to maintain readiness and uphold commitments to the defense treaty. Signed in 1951, the MDT calls on both countries to aid each other in times of aggression by an external power. The Pentagon previously said it was prepared to assist Manila if it invoked the treaty amid threats from other nations. Bargeron stressed that the drills were not at all a show of force in light of concerns about Chinese actions around the disputed islands in the region, especially near Taiwan. Balikatan 2022 is a tremendous training opportunity and is aimed at improving our security, defensive capabilities and our readiness to respond to any crisis anywhere, Bargeron said. It is designed to enhance our interoperability, strengthen cooperation across the board and contribute to peace and stability in the region. China has laid claim to almost the entire South China Sea. Tension surrounding those actions has fueled diplomatic protests from Manila, which in 2016 won an international court ruling against Beijings territorial claims in the contested waterway. Lorenzana, the Filipino defense chief, said this years drills were designed to boost the capability of both militaries to work seamlessly together so that we can readily and jointly respond to our mutual security concerns, including peace in the resource-rich sea region. The Balikatan exercises also affirm that the U.S. and the Philippines are not alone in espousing peace, security, and cooperation in the region, he said. We have been expanding the scope of the exercises through wider engagement and networking with our partners in the region. About 40 participants from the Australian Defense Force are observing the drills. Amphibious Assault Vehicles maneuver during the Balikatan exercise in Zambales province, Philippines, April 11, 2019. Credit: AP Meanwhile, during the opening of a security conference in neighboring Kuala Lumpur on Monday, a senior U.S. military official said multilateral cooperation was the best way to handle Chinas territorial expansion in the South China Sea. [To solve] complex problems like this, its very helpful to have a multilateral approach and collective security that allows for free and open Indo-Pacific (waters), Gen. Charles Flynn, the U.S. Army commander in the Pacific, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur. I think training exercises and the ability to get regional leaders together to understand the challenges that we each face on a personal level I think that is the great counterweight to any adversarial action that happens, he said. Flynn stressed that regional military exercises and cooperation should continue. Apart from the Philippines and China, other parties with South China Sea claims are Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan. Indonesia has a separate spat with China over its exclusive economic zone. Earlier this month, Adm. John C. Aquilino, the overall American military commander for the Indo-Pacific region, said China was learning from watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine specifically about the investment in blood that would be required to launch such an attack, the international condemnation that followed, and the reactions of people to being attacked. Asked if China wanted war with the U.S., Aquilino said Beijing had not ruled out the use of force. My task has been to be ready, he said during a U.S. congressional hearing on national security challenges and military activities in the Indo-Pacific region. This is a real wakeup, Aquilino replied when asked to compare the Russian invasion with what China could do against Taiwan. We have to look at this and say, hey, this could happen The U.S. participates in 120 exercises a year across the globe and is looking to expand, Aquilino said. Nisha David and Ray Sherman in Kuala Lumpur contributed to this report by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service. The military may have to sit down with the shadow government as fighting continues across the country. This handout photo taken and released on March 27, 2022 shows Senior General Min Aung Hlaing attending a ceremony to mark the country's 77th Armed Forces Day in Naypyidaw. Junta chief Snr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing vowed to crush the countrys opposition in an address marking Armed Forces Day over the weekend, but the shadow government vowed to resist and observers said negotiation was the only answer to the current turmoil. Speaking in Naypyidaw on Sunday, Min Aung Hlaing condemned the shadow National Unity Government (NUG) for trying to unseat him and said the junta will not take part in a dialogue with the group. We, the military, are fighting internal insurgency and terrorism to bring peace and stability to the whole country, he said. We will not negotiate with these groups or their minions who are killing innocent people and government servants and threatening the nations peace and stability, he added, referring to Peoples Defense Force (PDF) paramilitary units that have aligned with the NUG and are fighting government troops throughout the country. Min Aung Hlaings delivered his ultimatum a year to the day that security forces killed as many as 163 anti-coup protesters in what is thought to be the bloodiest day of violence in Myanmar since the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup. His comments also came four days after a March 21-23 visit by Prak Sokhonn, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) special envoy on the situation in Myanmar. Although he traveled to the country with the goal of meeting all the countrys stakeholders, Prak Sokhonn did not meet with anyone from the NUG during his trip. He said that a request to speak with Aung San Suu Kyi, the detained head of the deposed National League for Democracy (NLD), was blocked by the junta. Since the coup, authorities have killed more than 1,700 civilians and detained nearly 9,950 others mostly during peaceful anti-junta protests, according to the Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. However, the junta has faced tough resistance since launching offensives against ethnic insurgents and branches of the PDF loyal to the NUG in the countrys remote border regions. A report released last week by the Myanmar Institute for Strategic and Policy Studies documented at least 3,302 clashes across the country in the 13 months after the military coup, a three-fold increase from prior to the takeover. Kyaw Zaw Han, a military and national security analyst at the Australian National Security College, told RFA that the junta cannot end unrest in Myanmar through fighting alone and will eventually have to invite the NUG to the negotiating table. The military says it will not discuss peace [with NUG] because it is a terrorist organization, but this is wrong. Most governments, when they have the upper hand or want others to believe they have the upper hand, make comments like these, he said. There are many examples of governments holding talks with organizations they declared terrorists, he added. Negotiations will eventually take place when there is a balance of power. Naing Htoo Aung, permanent secretary of the NUGs defense ministry, said that by pledging to crush the shadow government and the PDFs, Min Aung Hlaing is signaling that he intends to ratchet up repression of Myanmars public as well. He said he would crush the CRPH [Pyidaungsu Hluttaw Committee of Representatives], formed by people's elected representatives, the NUG, which is recognized by the people as their government, and the PDFs, which were created by the people and enjoy their full support, he said. This indicates he will continue oppressing the population. Therefore, we will continue our fight to reach our goal of establishing a democratic state. Min Zaw Oo, a security and military observer, told RFAs Myanmar Service that the fighting is likely to worsen because of Min Aung Hlaings decision to rule out talks. The number of battles has increased [since the coup] and expanded to areas where there were no battles before, he said. Large-scale battles are unlikely, especially this year, as the PDF forces do not have enough weapons or ammunition. However, there could be serious fighting in areas close to territories controlled by [insurgent groups]. Prak Sokhonns visit last week was highly anticipated by observers who say that leaders of the NLD, which won Myanmars November 2020 election by a landslide, and other stakeholders must be given a seat at the table for any negotiations on the countrys political future. Allowing the ASEAN envoy to meet with all parties is a key stipulation of the Five-Point Consensus agreed to by Min Aung Hlaing during an emergency gathering of the bloc in April last year. However, ASEAN operates under a policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of its member nations and such agreements are non-binding. At the end of his trip, Prak Sokhonn acknowledged that the junta had failed to make any real progress on implementing the other points it agreed to in the 5PC, including ending the use of violence against civilians. He said ASEAN would refrain from inviting its representatives to bloc gatherings until it had done so, a policy that has been in place for months. A member of the People's Defense Force in Kayah state's Loikaw township. Credit: Loikaw PDF International arms trade While ASEAN has attempted to work with the junta to end violence in Myanmar, other members of the global community have sought to force it to do so through sanctions and condemnation. Nonetheless, the junta continues to enjoy support from some of its closer allies, including Russia and China, which have sold arms and attack aircraft to the regime. On Sunday, the rights group Justice For Myanmar said in a statement that as a major supplier of arms and dual use goods to Myanmars military, Russia is aiding and abetting the militarys genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and called for international action to stop the trade. It called for sanctions against 19 companies that it said have supplied Myanmar since 2018, including multiple subsidiaries of the Russian state-owned arms giant, Rostec, as well as manufacturers of missile systems, radar and police equipment. The group said many of the companies it identified have exported to Myanmar since the coup. In its statement, Justice For Myanmar also urged the government of Singapore to take action against brokers who facilitate payments for the arms purchases from within its borders. Russias arms industry earns big profits from the Myanmar militarys atrocities, said Justice For Myanmar spokesperson Yadanar Maung. We call on the international community to impose a global arms embargo on the Myanmar military junta and targeted sanctions on all Russian companies supplying the Myanmar military. Its time to hold arms traders accountable for aiding and abetting international crimes. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes. The warning reflects Beijing's concern that Nepal may be moving closer to the US, experts say. China warned Nepal this month against what it called interference from outside forces following Nepal's ratification of a U.S. development grant, while China-tied projects in the country continue to stall, media sources say. The warning came during Chinese foreign minister Wang Yis March 25-27 visit to Nepal, and only a month after Nepals parliament ratified a $500 million no-strings-attached U.S. grant to build electric power lines and improve roads in the impoverished Himalayan country. Signed by Washington and Kathmandu in 2017, the agreement called the Millenium Challenge Corporation Nepal Compact (MCC-Nepal) was finally ratified by Nepal on Feb. 27 after numerous delays in the countrys parliament. In talks in Kathmandu last week, Wang Yi said that external interference in Nepals affairs might now threaten the core interests of both China and Nepal, according to a March 28 report by the India-based ANI online news service. China supports Nepal in pursuing independent domestic and foreign policies, ANI said, quoting Wang. Regional experts speaking to RFA in interviews this week said Wang Yis statements in Nepal reflect Beijings growing concern that Kathmandu may no longer rely exclusively on China for supporting its development. Beijing wants to convince Nepalese politicians that China is still a friend to Nepal, said Aadil Brar, a China specialist at the Delhi, India-based online newspaper The Print. And there is now a certain concern within China that Nepal might be moving closer to the U.S., and so I think that was the primary goal in terms of [Wang Yis] three-day visit, he said. If we look at the kind of support China offers, its mostly in terms of infrastructure projects that are being built in Nepal. But Nepalese politicians usually like to have grants instead of loans, because that helps them make sure they are not going to be dependent on China. No progress on BRI projects Nepal is seen by China as a partner in its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to boost global trade through infrastructure development, but no agreements on BRI projects or the terms of their loans were signed during Wang Yis visit, sources in the country say. We have seen many politicians and experts here in Nepal who do not approve of Chinas Belt and Road Initiative project and consider it threatening to Nepal, said Sangpo Lama, vice president of HURON, the Human Rights Organization of Nepal. Chinas principle is to give money for BRI projects in Nepal in the form of loans, and not as grants, Sangpo Lama said. Beijing has been apprehensive ever since Nepal ratified the MCC-Nepal agreement with the United States, said Santosh Sharma, a faculty member at Nepals Tribhuvan University and co-founder of the Nepal Institute for Policy Research. Nepal needs international grants and support to build infrastructure in the country, and Chinas Belt and Road Initiative and the MCC grant from the U.S. both serve that purpose. However, by signing the MCC agreement, Nepal has shown just how significant the American grant is, Sharma said. Wang Yis claims of concern for Nepals sovereignty and independence from external forces only mask Beijings greater worry over U.S. influence in Nepal, added Parshuram Kaphle, a special correspondent on foreign and strategic affairs at Nepals Naya Patrika newspaper. However, neither China nor the U.S. will be able to create a bond with Nepal like India has, Kaphle said. There is a natural bond between Nepal and India. And geopolitically India will also play a huge role in Nepals future. Though BRI projects in Nepal have so far failed to launch, Nepals government has cited promises of millions of dollars of Chinese investment in restricting the activities of an estimated 20,000 Tibetan refugees living in the country, leaving many uncertain of their status and vulnerable to abuses of their rights, rights groups say. Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFAs Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney. Authorities ordered Zeynebhan Memtimin to terminate her pregnancy, but she fled instead. A Uyghur woman holds a baby at a market in Hotan in northwestern China's Xinjiang region in a file photo. A Uyghur woman who escaped from a hospital in northwestern Chinas Xinjiang region to avoid a forced abortion in 2014 has died in prison, a Uyghur who lives in exile and a village police officer said. Authorities ordered Zeynebhan Memtimin to terminate her pregnancy, but she fled the hospital in Keriye (in Chinese Yutian) county in Hotan (Hetian) prefecture where the procedure was to take place. In 2014, a Uyghur from the county who was then living in exile told RFA that authorities took Zeynebhan from Arish village to a hospital for a forced abortion. RFA later determined through interviews with sources in Xinjiang that Zeynebhan had escaped from the hospital to save her unborn child. When the child turned three in 2017, authorities detained Zeynebhan in an internment camp along with her husband, Metqurban Abdulla, who had helped her escape from the hospital, on charges of disturbing the social order and religious extremism for avoiding the abortion, the Uyghur in exile told RFA last week. Both were sentenced to 10 years in prison, the source said. The Uyghur source said that contacts in the region and a former neighbor confirmed last week that Zeynebhan died in 2020. The womans funeral was conducted under heavy supervision by Chinese officials, who did not disclose the reason for her death to her family and didnt provide any information on her detained husband, the Uyghur source said. Chinese authorities in Keriye county contacted by RFA declined to comment on the matter. A police officer in Arish village confirmed to RFA that Zeynebhan and Metqurban had been sentenced to 10 years, but he didnt provide any information on what happened to their four children after they had been incarcerated. They were sentenced to 10 years in prison and were serving their terms in Keriye Prison, he told RFA. He also said that Zeynebhan was 40 years old when she died in prison from an illness caused by having multiple births, and that she had been jailed for violating family planning policies. Since she had multiple births, its natural that she died from illness, he said. RFAs Uyghur Service reported in 2014 that Metqurban agreed to pay a fine for Zeynebhan to have a fourth child in violation of Chinas family planning policy for ethnic minorities, which limited families to two children. But instead, authorities tried to force her to terminate the pregnancy. At that time, the Uyghur Service aired a series of eight reports on authorities forcing women in Keriye countys Lenger, Arish and Siyek villages to have abortions. Of the 70% of Uyghurs in Arish village who were arrested and detained in 2017 for allegedly engaging in illegal religious activities about 10% were being held because they violated family planning policies, according to the Uyghur source in exile. Uyghur activists say Chinese authorities in Xinjiang often arrest Uyghurs accused of violating family planning policies as a pretext for meeting their arrest quotas. The Chinese government implemented population control measures for Uyghurs, including forced sterilizations and abortions as part of the crackdown that began in 2017. Muslim Uyghur and other Turkic minority women who have been detained in Xinjiangs vast network of internment camps but later released have reported being raped, tortured and forced to undergo sterilization surgery. Such population control measures, among other repressive policies in Xinjiang, were cited by some Western parliaments and the United States as evidence that China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs. Translated by RFAs Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Russian forces and the remaining Ukrainian soldiers holed up in the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol continue to fight pitched battles as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed hope a cease-fire would take place to evacuate more civilians from the devastated complex. After ten weeks of brutal bombardment that have turned the city largely to rubble, Russian fighters have entered the massive steel plant, where about 2,000 Ukrainian fighters and a few hundred civilians have taken shelter in the tunnels and bunkers deep beneath the surface. Russian forces have stepped up attacks against the plant in recent days, Ukrainian forces said, and may be seeking to sack it by May 9, when Russia celebrates Victory Day, the country's most patriotic holiday, commemorating the Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. "Russian occupiers are focusing on blocking and trying to destroy Ukrainian units in the Azovstal area," the Ukrainian Army said in a statement on May 5. "With the support of aircraft, Russia resumed the offensive in order to take control of the plant." Mariupol's fall would be a major success for President Vladimir Putin, depriving Ukraine of a vital port, allowing Russia to establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and freeing up troops to fight elsewhere in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region that the Kremlin says is now its chief objective. The plight of the civilians holed up in the plant with little food or water has garnered international attention and led to calls from leaders around the world for Russia to allow them to be evacuated. Guterres told the UN Security Council on May 5 that a third operation was under way to evacuate civilians from Azovstal. In joint efforts with the Red Cross, the UN has helped nearly 500 civilians flee the area over the past week. "I hope that the continued coordination with Moscow and Kyiv will lead to more humanitarian pauses to allow civilians safe passage from the fighting, and aid to reach those in critical need," Guterres said. "We must continue to do all we can to get people out of these hellscapes," he said. Guterres declined to give details on the new operation "to avoid undermining possible success." Ukraine's deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said on her social-media page that people would be evacuated from Mariupol on May 6 at noon, but gave no further details. Russia had earlier said it would open a humanitarian corridor from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Moscow time on May 5, 6, and 7 from the Azovstal plant to evacuate civilians. Though the Kremlin claimed on May 5 that the corridor was "functioning," Ukraine had not confirmed that anyone had been freed from the plant that day. Skepticism still remains about the likelihood of an evacuation as previous Russian announcements of cease-fires have failed. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett raised the humanitarian crisis at Azovstal with Putin during a call on May 5. Bennetts office said in a statement following talks between the two leaders that Putin had promised to allow the evacuation of citizens through a UN and Red Cross humanitarian corridor. In a statement released by the Kremlin, Putin told Bennett that Kyiv must order the remaining Ukrainian fighters inside the steel plant to lay down their arms. Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the major developments on Russia's invasion, how Kyiv is fighting back, the plight of civilians, and Western reaction. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war, click here. With Russian forces bogged down by stubborn Ukrainian resistance along all the eastern front line, a frustrated Kremlin accused the West of preventing a "quick" end to its military invasion by supplying weapons and intelligence to the country. "The United States, Britain, NATO as a whole hand over intelligence...to Ukraine's armed forces on a permanent basis," Peskov told reporters. "Coupled with the flow of weapons that these countries are sending to Ukraine, these are all actions that do not contribute to the quick completion of the operation," he said, adding that this was "incapable of hindering the achievement" of the goals of Russia's military operation. Russia appears to have already given up on its initial goal -- to take the capital and install a Kremlin-friendly regime. After suffering heavy losses during the first month of the war as it spread its forces out too thin, Russia has since regrouped to focus its efforts on taking eastern Ukraine. However, Russian forces continue to face tough resistance and suffer losses, raising doubts among many military experts that they will be able to achieve their more modest goals. Zelensky, meanwhile, launched a global crowdfunding platform -- United24 -- on May 5 to help Kyiv win the war and rebuild the country's infrastructure. "Every donation matters for victory," he said in English in a video on his Twitter page. "In one click, you can donate funds to protect our defenders, to save our civilians, and to rebuild Ukraine," Zelensky said in the video. WATCH: In the first stage of the operation to evacuate civilians from the Azovstal steelworks, which is under attack by Russian forces in Mariupol, over 150 people were brought out by bus. Those who got out told harrowing stories on May 3 of bodies strewn around the plant. Later that day Zelenskiy addressed by video a conference in Warsaw dedicated to supporting Ukraines war effort and rebuilding. Referencing the U.S.-led initiative to rebuild Europe following World War II, the Ukrainian leader called on the West to launch an analogous Marshall Plan to help his country recover from the extensive destruction caused by Russias military campaign. Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the conference raised $6.5 billion for Ukraine. In discussing ways to financially support Kyiv, EU President Charles Michel said on May 5 that the bloc should confiscate and sell Russian assets it has seized and use the proceeds to rebuild Ukraine, echoing an idea already floated by the United States. The EU said early last month it had frozen 30 billion euros ($32 billion) in assets linked to blacklisted Russian and Belarusian individuals. Meanwhile, the United States announced on May 5 that it had seized a $300 million yacht in Fiji belonging to Russian billionaire Suliman Kerimov. In addition to seizures, the West is continuing to impose sanctions to weaken Russias ability to carry out its current military campaign and future aggression. A day after the European Union announced plans to curb Russian oil imports across the board, the U.K. said on May 5 that it had sanctioned Evraz, a Russian steel producer whose products are critical for the nations rail industry. Russia is using its rail network to ship weapons and troops to its border with Ukraine. Marking "another small victory," Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk announced on May 4 that 344 women, children, and elderly people were evacuated safely from Mariupol. But her announcement was clouded by a report by the Associated Press that put the death toll of an earlier Russian air strike on a Mariupol theater converted into a shelter at approximately 600 people, doubling previous estimates by Ukrainian officials. In neighboring Belarus, the armed forces began "surprise" large-scale drills on May 4 to test their combat readiness, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said. The British Ministry of Defense said in its daily intelligence bulletin on May 5 that Russia will likely attempt to "inflate the threat" posed by the Belarusian military's exercises with the aim of fixing Ukrainian forces in the Belarusian border area to prevent them from being deployed to the front line in eastern Ukraine. Minsk has aided Russia's invasion by allowing Belarusian territory to be used to stage the attack. Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka claimed in an interview with AP on May 5 that he had information showing Ukraine had planned to attack Belarus, without producing any evidence. Lukashenka has been shunned by the international community since he claimed victory in a presidential election in August 2020 that the opposition says was rigged, and unleashed a wave of violence to stifle mass protests afterward. In Moldova's Moscow-backed separatist region of Transdniester, a television channel reported that shots have been fired near one if its border crossings with Ukraine. The report on May 5, which comes after several similar alleged incidents in the Moscow-backed Transdniester region since the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, could not be independently verified. Kyiv has warned that Russia wants to destabilize the region to create a pretext for a military intervention in Moldova, which also borders NATO member Romania. With reporting by Reuters, AP, BBC, and AFP ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- The widow of a man killed during anti-government unrest in Kazakhstan in January says authorities have pressured her in an apparent bid to gain testimony that fits the governments narrative of the deadly uprising. Yermek Kebekbaev, a 42-year-old businessman, was fatally shot by security forces on January 6 near Almaty's central square where security forces clamped down on protesters. His widow, Aqtoty Kebekbaeva, says he was driving home from a gas station when the incident happened. According to the passenger in Kebekbaevs car, the men were hit by bullets fired from armored personnel carriers. Kebekbaev was killed instantly and the passenger wounded. Kebekbaevs body was found by his family at an Almaty morgue the following day. His car, sporting several bullet holes, was found near the square. Kazakh authorities maintain that government forces did not fire at unarmed protesters or passersby. They say security forces targeted armed criminals and foreign-trained terrorists, although no evidence has been provided to back claims that such people were present at the protests. Kebekbaeva says she has faced threats and pressure from law enforcement officers investigating the killing of her husband. The mother of three told RFE/RL that the investigators have summoned her for questioning multiple times and paid several unannounced visits to her home to interrogate her. Kebekbaeva claims authorities are trying to portray her dead husband as a terrorist. She insists he was just an innocent bystander. They treat me as if Im the wife of a terrorist. They ask, why did he go there, why did you bury his body so quickly? the 29-year-old widow said. According to an Islamic tradition that dictates the body should be buried as soon as possible, Kebekbaevs burial took place on the same day it was discovered at the morgue. They threaten me that I would be sent to prison if I give false testimony. They put pressure on me, she added. Many witnesses of the January unrest have repeatedly accused the army and police of shooting at unarmed people, both protesters and those caught in the crossfire. There were many elderly people and children among the more than 238 victims Kazakh authorities say died in the nationwide unrest that began with a protest over a fuel-price increase in western Kazakhstan. Many people believe the death toll could be considerably higher than the official account. But authorities have rejected calls for an independent probe into the killings. Suffering In Silence There were so many dead bodies in the morgue. There were also bodies outside the morgue on the streets because there was no space left inside, Kebekbaeva said. She wants to know who killed her husband and why he and so many other people had to die during several days of mostly peaceful protesting. The young family is still trying to come to terms with the tragedy that has struck them. The mother worries that her older children -- a nine-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son -- are deeply traumatized by the loss of their father. My son cries while hiding under a blanket, so I dont see his tears. My eldest daughter also tries hard not to show she is upset, she said. Her youngest child, who is five, still doesnt know his father is dead. Kebekbaeva says the visits by investigators have left her children fearful of any loud noise and knocks on the door. The officers come without letting us know in advance, sometimes they come when Ive popped into the grocery store and the children are alone at home, she said, adding that she has asked the officials not to come unannounced. But such visits havent stopped. The death of the only breadwinner has also left the family facing financial hardship and an uncertain future. Kebekbaeva relies on the $140 monthly assistance she gets from the state. But that money is not enough for food and other essentials, such as rent for their modest Almaty apartment. And there is no one to turn to for help since Kebekbaevas parents have died and her in-laws are old and frail. Kebekbaeva is looking for work, but she doesnt know who would look after her children while shes at work. We had a normal life -- my husband drove the children to school, he worked to earn money for the family, he brought home food and clothes, she said. We miss him terribly. Written by Farangis Najibullah based on reporting by RFE/RLs Kazakh Service correspondents Ayan Kalmurat and Tokmolda Kusainov The March 26 edition of the talk show Your Own Truth with Roman Babayan on Russia's NTV television opened with a montage of short, tightly cropped clips from people presented as citizens of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which has been devastated by Russian bombs, rockets, and shells since Moscow invaded Ukraine on February 24. One woman claimed that Ukrainian forces would shoot at children in playgrounds "as a game." An angry man shook his fist and cursed "those fascists, those bastardsthose drug addicts." Live Briefing: Russia Invades Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the major developments on Russia's invasion, how Kyiv is fighting back, the plight of civilians, and Western reaction. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war, click here. A moment later the show's first guest, state broadcaster RTs editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, seemed to fight back tears as she piled on claims ranging from outlandish to outrageous: that Ukrainian forces target children with banned cluster bombs; that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has banned all private media; that Ukrainians don't consider Russians to be human; that Ukrainian doctors have called for Russian prisoners of war to be castrated; and that Ukrainian Nazis are "prepared to pluck childrens eyes out based on their ethnicity." All in the first five minutes of the broadcast. The Russian government falsely insists that its war on Ukraine is not a war but a special military operation," and has said its main goals are to "de-Nazify and demilitarize" the neighboring country. President Vladimir Putin has characterized Ukraine as an illegitimate country that was essentially created by the Soviet authorities and that is now run by "neo-Nazis and drug addicts" who take orders from Washington. All these themes are hammered home continuously on state television news broadcasts and on the multitude of political talk shows on the pro-Kremlin channels -- programs that increasingly feature venomous rhetoric amid a kaleidoscope of swirling graphics and oversized videos playing on a continuous loop. 'They Are Always Lying' "All of television is now full of military brainwashing," Yelena Rykovtseva, an RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent who focuses on the media, wrote recently in a column headlined Carpet Bombing Of The Brain. She added that, in a single article, it is hard to do justice to the content on Russian state TV at the peak of anti-Ukrainian hysteria. "One click of the remote and its: 'in Mariupol, as the ring [of Russian forces] around the neo-Nazis tightens, they increasingly use local residents as human shields.' 'battalions of neo-Nazis rob and slaughter local residents.' 'the Nazis destroy columns of refugees, while the rest are trapped in the city.' 'Russian servicemen rescue children and operate on the wounded.'" These claims, provided without grounds or evidence, are contradicted by officials, by Western media outlets that have had reporters in Mariupol, and by residents who have escaped from the city -- some of them coming under Russian fire despite agreements for humanitarian corridors. On March 29, the news program Time Will Tell on state-run Channel One showed an Orthodox Christian cathedral standing largely undamaged among the ruins of Mariupol as the correspondent comments that the sight "gives us great hope that God is with us." Two key parts of the Kremlin narrative are the unsubstantiated claims that Kyiv was about to launch a major offensive against Russia-backed separatist forces in Ukraines Donbas region and that the United States is bent on eliminating Russia. These themes were hit hard on March 27 by state channel Rossia-1 and NTV, which is owned by a media arm of state-controlled natural-gas giant Gazprom. On NTV, the Week In Review With Irada Zeinalova had a segment on "captured documents" that it erroneously said proved Russias invasion had thwarted a planned attack by Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. The same day, pugnacious pro-Kremlin pundit Vladimir Solovyov used his three-hour program on Rossia-1 to discuss what he falsely claimed was the U.S. intention to "destroy Russia, to split it into tiny parts, deprive Russia of its nuclear weapons, and to once and for all end the topic of the existence of the Russian people." Ukrainian journalist Roman Tsymbalyuk, who worked in Moscow for many years as a correspondent for the UNIAN news agency and was a frequent guest on Russian state TV talk shows, told RFE/RL he has learned exactly how Russian propaganda works. Russian mass media are not mass media but information troops, and they are always lying," he said. From Television To RuTube In the past, the Kremlin has seemed satisfied with its control of national broadcasting, allowing independent and liberal media to exist on the margins. The model appeared to be effective even in 2014, when Russia seized Ukraines Crimea region and fomented war in the Donbas, helping separatists take control of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. This time, Moscow pollster Maksim Kats said, public support for the Kremlin's policies is much more tenuous. As a result, he suggested, the state has both turned up the volume on the propaganda and supplemented it with increased pressure on independent media and the freedom of speech. "It appears as if they think that people do not support the war, and so they are implementing measures like military censorship," Kats told RFE/RL. "They are closing down social networks that have been working for years. They shut down Ekho Moskvy [radio]. They understand that if information is disseminated freely, then no one will support the war." Sociologist Lyubov Borusyak agreed that in Russian society the war against Ukraine has brought nothing like the kind of emotional lift that we saw during the Crimea events." In addition, she said, about 75 percent of Russians use the Internet, and some opposition reports garner tens of millions of views, potentially undermining the states control over information about the war. "When there is interest, the audiences can be much greater than what television attracts," Borusyak said. "And the percentage of regular television viewers has constantly fallen in recent years, particularly among young people." As result, the Kremlin's interest in dominating Internet television as well as broadcast television has been growing. By far the most popular social-media platform in Russia is YouTube, which is used by about three-quarters of all Russian Internet users. And calls for it to be blocked in the country have been growing louder, particularly after YouTube blocked Kremlin-controlled media on March 11. In February 2021, Putin laid out the Kremlin's policy regarding foreign social media: "We aren't going to shut anything down until we have our own," he said. "When our esteemed colleagues see that there is an alternative, that they do not hold monopoly positions in this market, they will behave differently." Kremlin opinion-shapers have been trying with little success to promote RuTube, a slow-moving YouTube clone that was founded in 2006, is owned by Gazprom, and features all the news Moscow wants Russians to see. According to the independent outlet iStories, RuTube's popularity peaked at 14.5 million users in 2011 and fell to just 3 million in 2021. By comparison, in 2021, 78.5 million Russians were using YouTube. Channel Z The RuTube "news and media" page features live feeds from all the nationwide television channels, plus short videos from Kremlin-friendly news agencies and newspapers. It also features the channels of various agencies of the Russian government, including the Defense Ministry's Zvezda channel and those of the Foreign Ministry, the upper parliament house, and the space agency, Roskosmos. On March 22, a new channel called ZTV -- an apparent reference to the Z symbol that Moscow has been promoting to drum up support for its narratives of the war in Ukraine -- proclaimed itself "a round-the-clock channel about the special military operation of the armed forces of the Russian Federation in Ukraine." Some of its earliest programs featured short interviews with Russian soldiers proclaiming "the 100-percent effectiveness" of the operation and videos of Russian military technology in action. Such assertions run counter to the assessments of numerous military experts who say the Russian offensive has fallen far short of its initial goals, and by evidence of high casualty tolls and equipment loss in the war. On March 28, the RT In Russian channel posted a short clip purportedly showing Russian soldiers reading aloud letters sent to them by schoolchildren. "Dear soldier," one serviceman reads. "I am writing to you in gratitude and want to say with my entire soul thank you for the fact that I sleep peacefully, go to school, and live with a peaceful sky over my head. I hope that you will keep your spirits up and be able to continue standing up for your motherland. I believe in you and pray for you. You can't imagine how I and the other people living on the territory of Russia love and support you." A related channel called RT Rossia on March 21 posted an hour-long documentary film by Anton Krasovsky, detailing Moscow's baseless claims that the U.S. Defense Department was backing biological-weapons laboratories in Ukraine. The Russian narrative, which has been widely disseminated by state TV, has been denied by Washington and widely dismissed by experts. With the war in Ukraine in its second month, the Russian public "so far has no reason not to believe what they are being told" by state media, said Aleksei Levinson, an analyst with the independent Levada Center polling agency. However, he added, many feel a "subconscious sensation" that the war is wrong. "So, there must a means to overcome that voice of conscience," he concluded. "And this is being done through television -- so far, rather successfully." On the wall near the front door of Johnathon Stones home in Pacific Beach, theres a hand-painted sign that reads: Team Stone, Estab. 2006. Its the nickname that Stone and his wife, Sarah, used to describe the unity they shared first with each other and, later, their four young children. Team Stone remains a rock-solid force, even though it recently lost an important player. In November, 29-year-old Sarah Stone died after a yearlong cancer battle. Now, Johnathon a Navy chief petty officer stationed at Coronado is leading the team as a widowed single dad. On Sunday, the five remaining members of Team Stone are planning a backyard barbecue to celebrate Fathers Day. Twins Allison and Alyssa, who turn 10 later this month, and 7-year-old Madelynn say theyve made homemade cards to surprise their dad, who also cares for their disabled 4-year-old brother, Jackson. The Stone girls say they love their dad because hes brave, kind, not too strict, really good at grilling steaks and sometimes super silly. When no other adults are around, hell break into singing Let It Go from Disneys Frozen. And when theyre missing their mom, he listens. 1 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone, now a single dad, with his children, from left, Allison, 9, twin sister Alyssa, adopted son Jackson, 4, and Madelynn, 7, while on the backyard hammock, which was his wifes happy place, at their Pacific Beach home. Stones wife and mother of the children Sarah Stone died of cancer last November. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 2 / 20 A family portrait of Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone with his wife Sarah, who died of cancer on November 1, 2016, and daughters Alyssa, Alison, and Madelynn. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 3 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone, a single father of four, pauses while talking about dealing with the death of his wife Sarah while at his home in Pacific Beach. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 4 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone looks at his twin daughters Allison, 9, left, and Alyssa. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 5 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone talks to his daughter Madelynn, 7. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 6 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone talks to his daughter Madelynn, 7. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 7 / 20 Allison Stone, 9, twin sister Alyssa, center, friend Faylen Hines, 9, lower right, and Madelynn Stone, 7, jump on a trampoline in their backyard. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 8 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone holds his adopted special needs son Jackson, 4, while the backyard of his Pacific Beach home. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 9 / 20 Allison Stone, 9, right, shows her friend Faylen Hines, 9, family portraits of her, and her family, which includes her mother Sarah Stone, who died of cancer on November 1, 2016. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 10 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone with his wife Sarah Stone, who died of cancer on November 1, 2016. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 11 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone holds his adopted son Jackson, 4, as his daughter Alyssa, 9, opens a can of tomato sauce while they prepare a spaghetti dinner. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 12 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone holds his adopted son Jackson, 4, while opening a can of tomato sauce as he prepares a spaghetti dinner for his family with his daughter Alyssa, 9. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 13 / 20 Alyssa Stone, 9, looks in the refrigerator as Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone cooks spaghetti for his family. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 14 / 20 With a picture of him and his wife Sarah Stone, who died of cancer on November 1, 2016, on the wall next to him, Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone puts his special needs son Jackson, 4, that he and his wife adopted, into a chair as he and his children get ready to eat dinner. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 15 / 20 Alyssa Stone, 9, lets the family cat in, as Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone Jackson, 4, right, daughter Madelynn, 7, center left, Allison, 9, head of table, and friend Faylen Hines, 9, eat dinner. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 16 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone, his adopted son Jackson, 4, right, daughter Madelynn, 7, left, Allison, 9, head of table, twin sister Alyssa, next to her father, and friend Faylen Hines, 9, eat dinner. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 17 / 20 Allison Stone, 9, daughter of Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone, eats spaghetti as she, her siblings, and father eat dinner. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 18 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone looks toward his adopted son Jackson, 4, as he, his daughter Madelynn, 7, left, Allison, 9, second from left, and friend Faylen Hines, 9, eat dinner. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 19 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone looks toward his adopted son Jackson, 4, as he , daughter Alyssa, 9, and the rest of his family eat dinner. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 20 / 20 Navy Chief Petty Officer Johnathon Stone talks to his daughter Alyssa, 9, center, and her friend Faylen Hines, 9, as they and the rest of Stones family eat dinner. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) Advertisement I used to snuggle with my mom and I miss that, Allison said. When Im really sad, we go and jump on the trampoline and he picks me up and spins me around. Stone said he and his children are doing well, under the circumstances. Hes getting better every day at cooking, thanks to Youtube videos, and the twins are a big help getting everyone dressed and their hair combed each morning. There are hard times, he said, but they try to find the good in every day. We have our daily struggles, but we plow through them together, said Stone, 31. Everythings a learning experience, but I love being here for them and being their No. 1. I appreciate the time we have together because I know how important it is to live. Having a large, stable family was a priority for Johnny and Sarah Stone, who met in elementary school in the rural Central Illinois town of Clinton. Both of their parents have been happily married for more than 30 years. So when they fell in love in high school she was a freshman, he was a junior they vowed it would be for life. Two years later, when he finished Naval training in Pensacola, Fla., he proposed. They married in June 2006 and five months later loaded up their car and headed west to San Diego, where he had received his first orders. It was beautiful here, but there was also some culture shock. Locals didnt wave hello like people in the Midwest, and the roads were confusing. Until Navy housing was available, the couple could only afford a small apartment in Imperial Beach where they slept on an air mattress. But it didnt matter. We had each other and were so happy and rich with love, Stone recalled. A couple months after they arrived, the Stones learned they were expecting twins, who arrived in June 2007, three months ahead of schedule. After 10 weeks in incubators the girls came home, to a three-bedroom in a Navy housing complex. Two years later, Madelynn was born. The Stones wanted a fourth child, but Sarah had a blood-clotting issue that would make carrying another child difficult. She grew up with three younger siblings who her parents adopted from foster care. So in 2012, the Stones started taking classes with the Angels Foster Family Network in San Diego. Thats where they met Jeff Wiemann, a fellow foster parent who went on to become Angels executive director. He said Team Stone, as they were known to the other parents in the organization, were admired by everyone. They were an example to follow and inspired us through their story of service to our community and the country, Wiemann said. On the day they earned their fostering certification in April 2013, the Stones got a call that an infant boy needed a foster home. Hed been surrendered by a homeless couple who were addicted to methamphetamine. Because of the mothers drug use during pregnancy, Jackson was born with a condition known as severe global development delay. Hes on the autism spectrum and he cannot speak. The boys mother was never able to kick her addiction and reclaim her son. Instead, she died of an overdose on the streets. In 2015, the county asked the Stones if they would like to adopt the boy. Just before Jacksons second birthday, he officially joined Team Stone. Stone said he always considered himself a hands-on dad, but then he was assigned sea duty aboard the USS Essex. Stone wasnt sure he could leave his large family, especially Jackson who needed three to four hours of therapy appointments every weekday. But because his income and insurance supported the family, he went to sea in August 2015. When he returned five months later, he barely recognized his wife, who had kept her increasingly poor health a secret to avoid worrying him. At first, they thought Sarah had gall bladder problems. But scans and, later, surgery on Christmas Eve 2015 revealed a rare and advanced case of appendix cancer that quickly spread to her bones and other organs. By June 2016, her health had deteriorated rapidly and she was in constant pain. That was when she secretly wrote her husband a passdown a list a instructions to be read after she was gone. She hid the letter in a nightstand and only told him about it months later, on her deathbed at a local hospital. Her passdown letter, complete with her detailed funeral wishes, encouraged her husband to keep moving forward in life; to find love and marry again; to continue doing community service; and to be patient with their children. She shared many of those same thoughts with him when she was hospitalized for the last time on Oct. 30. Two days later, she died in her husbands arms. Stone said losing his wife was devastating, but as a man of faith, he knew she had gone to Heaven and was grateful she was no longer suffering. It was only when he was driving home to tell the children she was gone that he realized he was suddenly a single parent. I was scared out of my mind, he said. I remember thinking no way! Im going to fail. But he didnt. With the support of family, friends, co-workers and the The Village his name for the neighbors in his P.B. cul-de-sac Team Stone has survived and thrived. Wiemann said Sarahs death was heartbreaking, but Team Stone seems to be weathering the loss well. Just as before, the whole family takes part in community service programs, like fundraisers for Angels Foster Family Network and delivering Girl Scout cookies to cancer patients at Moores Cancer Center, where Sarah was treated. While the loss of Sarah was tragic, it has made Team Stone even stronger and more resilient as they work to honor her memory by embracing the joy in life and volunteering in our community, Wiemann said. The Navy has assigned Stone shore duty for four years, so hes able to be home with the children every night. He rises every morning at 4 a.m. to get to work early at Naval Air Station North Island, where he leads an 80-member aviation squadron support team. A nanny gets the children up and off to school each day the three girls attend Kate Sessions Elementary and Jackson attends a special-education preschool. Stone gets home from work every day in time to meet the girls at their bus stop after school. In good Navy fashion, the familys lives are on a schedule. School, then homework, then dinner, baths and an early bedtime for all. Theres always time for play, like a family hop on the backyard trampoline or a swing in the family-size hammock, which Stone said was his wifes happy place. From the time Sarah got sick, the Stones kept family and friends informed with videos they posted on Facebook. He still carries on that tradition and his video diaries are a mix of positive affirmations and confessions about his parenting challenges. Recently he began writing a book about Team Stone, which he said will chronicle what he calls his wicked hard journey but it will have a life-affirming message. If you focus on all the bad stuff happening, you miss all the good, he said. Im glad this happened to us. We were strong enough to handle it. pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com At Adobe MAX held inside the San Diego Convention Center on Thursday, an unlikely, self-proclaimed tech-nerd took the stage to illustrate how the worlds of fashion and technology intersect. Designer Zac Posen spoke to more than 11,000 people at the annual conference, alongside director Quentin Tarantino, photographer Lynsey Addario and sculptor Janet Echelman. Posen, known also for his role as a judge on Project Runway, most recently made headlines for creating new uniforms for 60,000 Delta Airlines employees, including the in-flight crew and the ticket agents. I was in my suit, and I needed to understand how much I could move, Posen said of his job shadowing experience with Delta. I had to see how sharp I could make at least the gentlemen look and test it. IMAGE DISTRIBUTED FOR ADOBE - Fashion designer Zac Posen talks with the press while showing off his light-up, fiber optic dress at Adobe MAX, The Creativity Conference, on Thursday, Nov. 3 , 2016 in San Diego. (Denis Poroy/AP Images for Adobe) AP Images for Adobe Designing for the skies isnt the only way Posen seems to be pushing the boundaries of fashion. At this years Met Gala, he debuted a glowing dress on Claire Danes made entirely of fiber optic woven organza. Posen brought the dress with him to San Diego, as well. As the world is evolving into technology, you cant fight it, you have to embrace it. They have to be symbiotic, he said. I think that understanding of creativity, of technology, all goes together. They dont fight each other. They have to have that dialogue. The gown is made with 30 mini battery packs sewn into a thin organza lining, creating a glow-in-the-dark effect and providing the audience a moment of fashiontainment, as he calls it. While the runway and the red carpet are embracing this experimental use of technology, Posen believes its already part of the average persons life (and closet), as well. I think body scanning is starting to enter into the commercial market, and I think that will have the ability for customization. I think in the future youll be able to design your own clothing, he said. I think that theres technology brought to other price points that you might not know exist. You have solar fabric that can create energy and anti-perspirant socks. Posens intelligence for the right risk moments shows in the details, and his architectural approach to design is evident in both the light-up gown and the incoming Delta uniforms. I think its very important as a creator to take some punches. When something is authentic, it should have real staying power. You have to trust, culturally and on a business side, invest in longevity. Q&A with student body President Reedy Newton New executive officers were chosen in Student Government elections and took office this month. We asked new student body president Reedy Newton, a marketing major/mass communications minor, about why she got involved in student government and her priorities for the coming year. What made you want to get involved in Student Government in the first place? I wanted to get involved in an organization that was able to build me as a leader and made an impact on the student body. UofSC Student Government does just that. In high school, I served on our small-scale Student Council. Having that past experience, I knew that I wanted to get involved in a leadership organization, but Student Government initially seemed too scary or too intense for me to join coming from a small high school. I was encouraged to join Student Government during my freshman year when current leaders in Student Government reached out to me and continued to help me navigate all of the different organizations, resources and opportunities our campus provided. They inspired me to push through my nerves. What positions have you previously held or been a part of in Student Government? What were your responsibilities in these roles? As a freshman, I served as a member of the Legislative Action Network a nonpartisan advocacy entity, communicating with the General Assembly. This communication is on behalf of the student body to share concerns with state officials. Having the platform and ability to interact with legislators for student advocacy is an incredibly empowering and eye-opening experience. I served on the student body presidents cabinet as the secretary of government relations this past year. The Government Relations Department is made up of the local, state and federal advocacy agencies. I was tasked with managing these three departments, formulating and publishing the student insights survey, assisting in the research of the agencies' annual reports, planning presentation of those reports and executing Carolina Day in conjunction with the Alumni Association. What has been your most meaningful experience so far during your time at UofSC? My most meaningful and rewarding experience in my time at UofSC has been engaging, mentoring and pouring into the freshman and first-year students. During this time of great transition and change for these students, it has been so rewarding to be able to serve as a resource for them. I was able to do this in two ways this year. First, I served as a Pi Chi for Panhellenic Recruitment, assisting 30 girls in navigating the sorority recruitment process. In this role, I was able to guide and mentor them for the first two weeks of their college transition and helped them find their home within the Greek community with girls who shared similar values. In addition, I served as a peer leader for a University 101 course, where I student-taught 19 pre-business Capstone Scholars. In this role, I was able to academically mentor and guide these students through their entire first semester of college, providing resources and opportunities to get involved, challenging them to set goals, and leading them through difficult conflicts. Having been in these students shoes only two years prior, I was able to help them transition to life as a Gamecock. Whether it was through my role as a Pi Chi or peer leader, it was so rewarding to form these new relationships, see them overcome their challenges and start to come into their own. What are your main goals as president? There are so many things that I would want to accomplish in the office, but with limited time, I want to make sure that I am setting groundwork and making tangible changes to things that will leave a lasting impact. First, I want to increase the visibility of the organization. Students may not understand what we do in Student Government, and it is our responsibility to communicate with them what we are doing on their behalf. I want students to feel comfortable voicing their concerns or wanting to get involved. I want to collaborate between the differing executive offices of Student Government, so that our organizations committees and teams are able to work together on their similar goals or issues. In general, I want to work towards a restructured academic advising system to ensure that students feel supported by their academic advising and mentoring. I want to advocate for additional funding for our mental health resources and health center on campus, and for our library so that we are able to work towards bringing back 24-hour operating hours in the library. I also want to work closely with incoming President Michael Amiridis in his transition so that we are able to create opportunities for him to engage directly with students on campus and open that line of dialogue. Why should students get involved in Student Government? If students are passionate about making an impact on this campus, they should consider getting involved in Student Government. We have something for every student to be involved in from event planning, to communications, to writing legislation, to advocacy work, to providing funds for other organizations, and more. Students should get involved to make a difference on our campus and to amplify the voices of all students across our campus. How will your experience in Student Government help you with what you want to do in the future? My experience in Student Government thus far shaped me and developed me into the leader that I am today. The organization has given me real-world experience with student governance and has enhanced my professional development and interpersonal communication skills. The experiences that I have had and will continue to have will develop me as a person and fine-tune my leadership skills and qualities. After graduation, I hope to pursue my masters in mass communications and potentially my MBA as well. These skills and experiences will play a pivotal role in my next steps of my professional development and career pursuits. Learn more As Student Government president, Reedy Newton will be the student representative at the universitys Board of Trustees meetings. Her mother, Rose Buyck Newton, is also a board member, making the two the first mother-daughter pair to serve on the board at the same time. Learn more about Newton's family ties to the university. Share this Story! Let friends in your social network know what you are reading about As the national average price for gas continued to plateau on Monday, the same could not be said for several cities in California, including the Bay Area, according to AAA. San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Rosa, Napa, Vallejo, Fairfield and San Jose recorded their highest average price of gas regular and/or diesel in the past two days, according to AAA figures. The cost of crude oil which makes up more than two-thirds of what drivers pay at the pump spiked to $100 a barrel when Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Two weeks ago, when crude oil prices gradually fell below $110, the national average price for gas followed suit, AAA said. Now petroleum analysts say gas prices have stabilized as demand for gas has declined for the second week during a time when its typically high, AAA said. That could be due to high gas prices and in turn is helping bring down the cost at the pump nationwide, Aldo Vazquez, a spokesperson for AAA in Northern California, said in a statement. But if the cost of crude oil remains high or goes up, that will slow down the progress and drive up gas prices, Vazquez added. On Monday, the national average price for regular gas was $4.24, down by 1 cent from a week ago. For the near future, well see a mix of slight decreases and some potential increases mixed in, Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at Gas Buddy, said in a statement. He added: California markets should finally cool off and areas could even move lower in Southern California, while the Great Lakes could see gas prices jump up after having fallen for the last week or so. In an email to The Chronicle, De Haan said drivers in the Bay Area and Northern California could also possibly see some relief at the pump as well. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. While the national average should start to stabilize for the time being, theres no telling whats around the corner, at least for now, as the volatility in oil prices persists, De Haan said in a statement. Until then, California continues to see the highest gas prices in the country. On Monday, the Golden State recorded its highest average prices for both regular unleaded and diesel gas, $5.91 and $6.42, respectively up about 6 cents and 16 cents, respectively, from last week, AAA said. In the Bay Area, San Francisco topped its highest recorded average price for regular gas on Monday at $5.93, up one penny from a week ago. On Sunday, the city recorded $6.62 per gallon of diesel gas, up 15 cents from one week ago, AAA said. Jessica Flores (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jesssmflores Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson maintained her composure while deflecting Republican attempts to distort her record as a federal public defender who represented Guantanamo Bay detainees and a federal judge who sentenced people convicted of possessing child sexual abuse imagery during four days of Senate Judiciary confirmation hearings last week. But when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, started asking the 51-year-old federal appeals court judge about critical race theory a topic unrelated to her judicial experience Sharayah Alexander almost turned off her television. Almost. I kept it on, said Alexander, 33, of Vallejo. This nomination is historic and important not just for me, but for my 3-year-old daughter, too. Senate Republicans line of questioning has repelled many who were inspired by Jacksons historic nomination to the nations highest court. For some Black women in the Bay Area, partisan attempts to misrepresent Jacksons record reminded them of their own experiences being undermined in the workplace. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Alexander said its happened to her at different jobs. In 2016, after she was promoted to lead teacher at a child care center, Alexander said, her director began interrupting and dismissing her so often that she ultimately requested a transfer to another center. It messes with your head, recalled Alexander, now a coordinator at Eden Community Land Trust, part of the Oakland Community Land Trust nonprofit that advocates for housing affordability. No matter how qualified you are, to get treated like that in front of your colleagues is demeaning. It impacts your self-esteem and gets emotionally tiring. The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on Jacksons nomination on April 4. Even if the committees vote splits along party lines, Jacksons nomination will likely proceed to the Senate floor, where Democrats hold a tie-breaking vote in the form of Vice President Kamala Harris. If appointed, Jackson will make history as the Supreme Courts first Black female justice as well as its first former public defender. The road wont necessarily become easier if and when that happens, said Teresa Cox, who is no stranger to breaking glass ceilings. We have to give 300% at work, said Cox, the first Black woman elected to the Fremont City Council in 2020. We learn to decide if picking a battle is worth it quite early on. According to her council biography, Cox also holds the distinction of being the first Black woman to obtain a nuclear engineering degree, which she received from Northwestern University in 1985, and the first to get elected to the Ohlone Community College Board of Trustees in 2008. But Cox said Black women regularly navigate a disproportionate amount of scrutiny and doubt that draws on both gender and racial stereotypes, no matter what their qualifications or accomplishments. Jacksons confirmation hearings just brought the issue to a bigger public audience. We get treated this way because racism is still the underlying force in our communities, said Cox, who represents Fremonts Irvington district. Even though she (Jackson) could have a Harvard degree and has been confirmed three times by the Senate for federal appointment before, it is still not good enough. Tatishe Nteta, an associate professor of political science at University of Massachusetts Amherst, said Republicans are pulling straight from their playbook by asking Jacksons definition of the word woman and demanding her views on the treatment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his own confirmation hearings. Along with Cruz pulling out a childrens book called Antiracist Baby and asking Jackson if she thought babies could be racist, the GOP tactics represent attempts to dislodge President Bidens pick to succeed Justice Stephen Breyer while appealing to the far-right base. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. And so you saw those types of lines of questioning, which reflect the Republican Partys connection to a very conservative position on issues of race, and a particular viewpoint regarding African Americans place within society, said Nteta, who studies the intersection of politics and race. For Courtney Welch, a City Council member in Emeryville, the way Jacksons expertise was challenged was relatable. So was her poise in the face of hostility. Black women have to prove more than anyone else that we belong and deserve a seat at the table, Welch said. And do so with a smile on our faces. A study published last year in the Journal of Applied Psychology examined the angry Black woman trope in the workplace and found that Black women face worse performance reviews and harder promotional paths when expressing anger at work, compared with white women and men and with Black men. Despite cringing through the vicarious trauma of the confirmation hearings, the women interviewed by The Chronicle said they didnt want GOP antics to detract from the historic moment. For Black women and girls, its important for us to see a vision of ourselves in powerful and impactful roles, said Frances Cohen, president of the Oakland chapter of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, a nonprofit focused on economic empowerment. Representation is important, its encouraging. They (young Black girls) have to see the greatness of other Black women. Shwanika Narayan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: shwanika.narayan@sfchronicle.com Twitter/Instagram: @shwanika People age 50 and older can get a second COVID-19 booster following authorization by federal regulators Tuesday to improve protection against any resurgence of the unpredictable coronavirus. But the action poses a tricky question for millions of Americans: Should they get that fourth shot and when? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized a second Pfizer or Moderna booster for adults 50 and over and certain people with compromised immune systems at least four months after their first booster shot. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention then updated its guidance to say the second Pfizer or Moderna booster is allowed for those older adults and for immunocompromised individuals, but issued no blanket recommendation that they get it. Instead, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the added protection was especially important for everyone over 65, and for those at least 50 with medical conditions that increase their risk for severe COVID. The CDC also said that recipients age 18 and older of the single shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine who then received a J&J booster can get a second booster by Pfizer or Moderna after four months. J&J recipients who already received a Pfizer or Moderna booster have to be 50 or older for the second, a CDC spokesperson said. Until now, the vaccine recommendation has been straightforward: Get all three shots two vaccinations and a booster for most people as soon as you can. But for many people, the calculation has changed, and is likely underscored by CDCs stopping short of a formal recommendation to get the second booster. Bronte Wittpenn/The Chronicle 2021 With coronavirus infections down in the Bay Area and elsewhere, the urgency is not there, said Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley. Its very likely that a fourth dose will be needed, he said. But with no certainty about when another virus surge might hit, timing that fourth shot could become a question of strategy, like trying to time the stock market, as Dr. Bob Wachter, UCSFs chief of medicine, put it. He also pointed out that this approach rarely works. Fortunately, the third jabs immunity is waning when the number of cases is going down, Swartzberg said. As for when to get the fourth shot, he added, Im not sure. Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDAs Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, addressed the question at a news conference Tuesday, noting the FDA authorized the additional booster because new data from Israel shows it can save lives and prevent severe COVID as initial vaccine protection wanes. If it were my relatives, I would be sending them out to do this because of the higher level of protection, he said. COVID-19 has had a really disproportionate impact on people 65 and older 1 in 100 are not with us today who were with us before the pandemic because of COVID-19. Marks said people whose immune systems are compromised should undoubtedly get another booster. The FDA had previously authorized a fourth shot for people in that situation such as those with cancer or organ transplants. The agencys action Tuesday approved a fifth shot for immunocompromised people who had received a three-shot primary vaccination series. Marks recommended that they take every available shot because for them, theres not a lot of margin for error. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle 2021 The FDA typically authorizes vaccines after hearing expert testimony before an advisory panel, but skipped that step in green-lighting the fourth dose for older adults. Marks said that was done because the action was a relatively straightforward decision. Public health experts in the Bay Area said they were neither surprised nor alarmed by the idea that FDA would bypass the advisory panel in its decision. Consider the annual flu shot, which is reconfigured each year and doesnt go through a full approval process, said Arnab Mukherjea, chair of Cal State East Bays Department of Public Health. If we use that framework, and weve gone through two rounds of the (COVID) vaccine, plus the booster, its not likely the safety profile of the fourth shot would change, he said. Mukherjea said trying to properly time a fourth shot is not worth stressing over. Just get it when you can, he said, because a new, dangerous variant can emerge at a moments notice. He pointed to the fast-spreading omicron variant, which showed up in the U.S. less than two weeks after it surged in South Africa. Other experts advised playing it more strategically. On Monday, UCSFs Wachter posted a question on Twitter that he said was typical of those hes been asked lately: Im over 50, had my 3 shots, AND had Covid in past 3 months. Should I get 2nd booster? In this case, with little data to go on, Wachter said he would hold off and rely on any immunity the persons past infection might provide, then get the second booster in a month or two if cases climb. Yet Wachter who turns 65 this year and has not had COVID also tweeted Monday that hell get the second booster when he can, citing the new Israeli study of more than half a million people that the FDA cited to support its decision. The study, not yet peer reviewed, showed the COVID death rate falling 78% in people 60 to 100 years old who got a fourth Pfizer shot. The FDA said the Israeli study revealed no new safety concerns with the fourth dose. Of course, in people who already had a single booster, the 78% represented a decline from one very low death rate to an even lower one, less than 0.1%, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at UCSF. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. Chin-Hong said approving the second booster was the right thing to do, especially because another surge can show up suddenly. COVID vaccines have shown that their greatest strength is in protecting people from severe illness and death. Having all the ducks in a row by allowing a fourth shot now in those over 50 years old is reasonable, he said. Not everyone agrees. Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and editor at Kaiser Health News, said the Israeli study offers no evidence for how long the extra protection lasts. From a scientific perspective, we still dont have definitive evidence that giving a second booster dose is the right way to go in older people, she told NPR this week. Nevertheless, the FDAs Marks said that when the agencys vaccine advisory panel meets for a broader discussion on April 6, it is likely to consider whether to pair annual COVID vaccines with annual flu shots for operational efficiency. Dr. Monica Gandhi, a UCSF infectious disease expert, suspects that annual boosters will not be needed year after year. Thats because COVID vaccines generate something called cellular immunity, which is much longer lasting and protect many in an enduring fashion against severe disease, she wrote in an opinion piece last week for The Chronicle. Even so, most people arent racing to the vaccination clinic for the initial booster. Just 39% of eligible Californians have gotten their third shot, according to a new analysis from Dr. George Lemp, a retired University of California epidemiologist who regularly analyzes state coronavirus data. Jeffrey Anderson, a retired maintenance manager for the San Francisco Water Department, is one of those who not only got a third shot, but also a fourth. I think its prudent of me to get as many vaccines as I can, said Anderson, a UCSF patient who said hes mystified by peoples reluctance to protect themselves. He got his fourth shot on Thursday, qualifying because hes got a cancer called multiple myeloma that attacks the immune system. Im kind of obsessed with not getting COVID, he said. As people continue to debate whether and when to continue with booster shots against COVID, the vaccine itself may change. By the winter, we may have an alternative, universal COVID vaccine available that may be more potent against future variants, Chin-Hong said. Many are working on this at this time. Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov On the evening of June 11, 20c21, Mexican immigration authorities entered Christopher Doyons home in Mexico City and put him in handcuffs. His two dogs were left running in the street, he said, and by noon the next day, he found himself alone in a cell at Alameda Countys Santa Rita Jail. After 10 years of running from the law, Doyons time was up. A hacktivist with ties to the hacking collective Anonymous, Doyon, 57, has a dedicated following among some internet freedom and human rights advocates who know him as Commander X. As Doyon hunkered down in Canada and Mexico for the better part of the past decade, and as he has spent much of the past year in jail, his supporters have clamored for his freedom, echoing his own belief that his incarceration is unjust and an affront on freedoms of expression. The former Mountain View resident, voluntarily homeless for much of his life, pleaded guilty Tuesday to cyberattack charges out of California and Florida hackings in Santa Cruz in 2010 and Orlando in 2011 that temporarily shut down several local government websites. Doyon describes the cyberattacks as nothing more than peaceful protests against local ordinances that he says targeted homeless people. In a recent interview with The Chronicle from Santa Rita Jail, he said he shudders at the implications his prosecution will have on the right of people to demonstrate peacefully. He believes his conviction could set dangerous precedents for how the internet is used and regulated. Is the internet the public commons, or is the internet the private estate of corporations and governments whereby they can simply brutally crush even the slightest dissent that takes place on it? he said through a jail phone. Thats where were at, thats what theyre doing and thats the question. Provided by Doyon family Doyon believes the law at the heart of his case the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 is outdated and no longer applicable because it was written before the advent of the modern internet. Whether his cyberattacks merit the kinds of penalties hes up against possibly months in prison and thousands of dollars in restitution should be up for debate, he said. His sentencing is scheduled for late June. Just because what I did is being claimed by the government to be illegal does not mean it shouldnt be free speech, Doyon said. This is a hill were dying on. But cybersecurity and computer law experts say that despite the intentions behind the cyberattacks, Doyon appears to have broken the law; the CFAA prohibits accessing a computer without authorization when such access causes losses, which Orlando and Santa Cruz reported, according to prosecutors. It doesnt matter that the cyberattacks were peaceful or in support of the needy, experts said, they were still illegal, and the charges appear warranted. Doyon was indicted on seven counts of intentional damage to a protected computer stemming from the 2011 cyberattacks in Orlando, as well as two similar charges following his participation in the 2010 cyberattack in Santa Cruz County. In both cases, prosecutors said, Doyon and others temporarily shut down local websites in retribution for local officials enforcing existing ordinances that affected homeless people. In December 2010, Doyon joined Operation Peace Camp 2010, a local movement formed in response to a Santa Cruz ordinance that prohibited camping within the city. Operation Peace Camp 2010 occupied the Santa Cruz County Courthouse for months, and several protesters were charged with misdemeanors. In response, as part of the movement, the Peoples Liberation Front which Doyon helped found and which was associated with hacking groups such as Anonymous executed a distributed denial of service attack on the countys computer servers, shutting down the county website. The website crashed for about an hour, said Jason Hoppin, a county spokesperson. Distributed denial of service attacks are designed to shut down a website or network by essentially overwhelming it with traffic, causing it to crash. Six months later, Doyon and others carried out a series of cyberattacks in Orlando. Law enforcement in the city had arrested members of an activist group called Food Not Bombs for feeding a large group of homeless people, violating a city ordinance that prohibited the distribution of food to large groups in city parks without a permit, case records show. Provided by Doyon family In an act of retribution, prosecutors said, Doyon and others targeted computer networks associated with government agencies in Orange County, Fla. They targeted websites such as cityoforlando.net and downtownorlando.com, according to case records. The Orlando websites were down for a few periods of 15 minutes or less each, and were not damaged. The city of Orlando did not incur financial losses as a direct result of the attacks, but officials did report hundreds of hours of staff time and a cost of roughly $100,000 for additional technology solutions to shore up our defenses, said Cassandra Bell, a spokesperson for the Orlando mayors office. Those protests were held to defend and give voice to the most disenfranchised people in our entire society, the homeless, Doyon said. I have no regrets at all, whatsoever. Doyon was released following his arraignment, pending his trial, but he skipped out on court dates in 2012 and quietly moved to Canada. He spent much of his time in Montreal and Toronto, in self-imposed exile, unable to gain asylum status, he said. He wrote two books during that time about his involvement in Anonymous. After seven years in Canada, Doyon decided to resettle in Mexico, believing he would have a better chance of getting asylum status there. He took all the royalties from his books, bought supplies, walked across the U.S.-Canada border and biked from North Dakota to New Mexico before crossing the southern border on foot, he said. He turned himself in to Mexican officials, was granted political asylum, and a few months later was given refugee status and a green card, he said. He spent time in Mexico City, Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende and other cities over the course of three years, until his arrest last June. The case from Florida was recently transferred to the Northern District of California and combined for prosecution by the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of California. Legal proceedings have been delayed by the pandemic, Doyon said. He previously pleaded not guilty, but this month reluctantly accepted a plea agreement with prosecutors wherein he pleaded guilty to seven counts of intentional damage to a protected computer; one count of intentional damage to a protected computer, aiding and abetting; one count of conspiracy to commit intentional damage to a protected computer and one count of failure to appear after pre-trial release. The charges out of Santa Cruz, originally felonies, were reduced to misdemeanors after the losses to the county were determined to be just under $5,000. Doyon and his supporters have raised questions about peoples right to use the internet as a medium for peaceful protest, and Doyon has equated the hackings to sit-ins or unpermitted street marches they can be annoying and disruptive, he said, but they dont typically result in federal charges. But experts say there are legal limits to what can and cannot be done on the internet, and that Doyons cyberattacks rightfully crossed legal lines. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. Allison Berke, director of advanced technology at California 100, a think tank based at the University of California and Stanford University, said Doyons case appears to be well in the strike zone of how the CFAA was designed, since he deliberately rendered a government agencys computer or computer system inoperable, essentially sabotaging it. Launching a DDoS attack against the whole of a municipality's web presence cant reasonably be expected to be interpreted as a protest against one particular statute, Berke told The Chronicle. Other experts said that while Doyon did have a right to peacefully protest, the way he went about it was against the law. You can protest government policy by expressing your opinion against it, but that expression doesnt give you a right to damage someone elses property, said Orin Kerr, a law professor at UC Berkeley who helped develop the field of computer crime law. All of us have many complaints about government policy, but we resolve those disagreements by voting rather than through vandalism. You don't have a right to damage government property, and to stick the taxpayers with the bill, to express your dissatisfaction. ACLU guidelines on protest and demonstration law indicate that protests that symbolically express a viewpoint are protected by the Constitution, until they involve illegal conduct. While sitting in a road may be expressing a political opinion, the act of blocking traffic may lead to criminal punishment, the ACLU guidelines state. Doyons future, to be decided at an upcoming sentencing hearing, is at Judge Beth Labson Freemans discretion. He could be released from jail or serve months in prison and be ordered to pay restitution. Hes a man of conviction with a good heart who stood up for the hungry and the homeless and for those being persecuted and jailed for helping them, his sister, Amy-Beth Doyon, said in a statement to The Chronicle. Its been a decade of hell. I pray this judge will show mercy and leniency and save my brothers life. Doyon insists that the cyberattacks were harmless and that they did not cause any damage to the website or servers. He hopes Freeman, the judge, will take that into consideration and that she will be lenient in deciding his sentence. Please have mercy on me, Your Honor, he wrote in a letter to Freeman in January. I am just a little old man who desperately wants to be with my little doggies again. He said he is cautiously looking forward to a future in which he is neither behind bars nor hiding from law enforcement. He is now too old for that, he said, and wants nothing more than to retire from my activism and move to Idaho to live with and help his sister, who has a disability, according to the letter. Once out of jail, Doyon said, he will try to recover his dogs from a friend in Mexico who has been caring for them. He will try to finish writing his third book, visit Buddhist monasteries and temples he is a practicing Buddhist and sell the rights to his life story to a streaming platform, for which negotiations are already underway, he said. After 10 years of running from the law, Doyon hopes he is close to getting a fresh start. There is upside to being the greatest fugitive activist in history, he said. I think my future is bright if I can just get out of here. Andy Picon (he/him) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: andy.picon@hearst.com Twitter: @andpicon World-famous Chinese tourism city Huangshan in East China's Anhui Province is announcing to offer tea-picking jobs for the city's tour guides who have no jobs currently, as the pandemic-hit industry still sees no signs of recovery amid the latest virus resurgence across the country. At present, it is difficult for the tourism industry to operate normally, and tour guides cannot work their jobs as before. Some tour guides are facing difficulties in life and need to find a temporary job to tide over the current difficulties, according to a job hunt notice from Huangshan Tour Guide Association on Thursday. With the help of local authorities, the association said it will now provide tea-picking jobs for tour guides, with a salary of 170 yuan ($26.73) per day, food and accommodation; reimbursement of round-trip transportation fees will also be covered. Huangshan is a large tea-planting area; as Spring comes, it's now time for tea-picking. The working period will be from April 10 to April 30, according to the notice. Famous for its Huangshan Mountain, also known as the Yellow Mountain, the city received 63.17 million visits and recorded an annual tourism income of 53.8 billion yuan in 2021, about 81 percent of that in 2019, according to local governments. Prior to the pandemic outbreak, in 2019, about 74 million visitors visited Huangshan - about seven times the number of visitors to Hawaii in the US the same year - while visitors from outside the Chinese mainland numbered 2.87 million. An immigration judge has blocked the deportation of a Sacramento man to his native Iraq where he would face trial, and likely execution, for a terrorist murder a murder that, according to a U.S. magistrate, took place while the man was in another country. Omar Ameen was granted U.S. refugee status in 2014 by immigration officials who said he would face persecution in Iraq. But the U.S. government jailed him in August 2018 while Iraq sought to extradite him on a murder charge. Last April, U.S. Magistrate Judge Edmund Brennan found that the crime Iraq accused Ameen of committing, the fatal shooting of a police officer in 2014 before his departure for the U.S., had taken place while Ameen was 600 miles away in Turkey, where he had fled from Iraq more than two years earlier. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement then sought to deport Ameen to Iraq, saying he had lied about his alleged terrorist connections and other subjects, and kept him in custody. But Immigration Judge Tara Naselow-Nahas of Van Nuys (Los Angeles County) ruled last week that Ameen could not be deported to Iraq because he was likely to be jailed and tortured there. She did not dismiss ICEs claim that Ameen had made false statements, but said she found no evidence of terrorist connections. Ameens lawyers said the ruling should allow him to remain in the United States. ICE can seek review before the Board of Immigration Appeals. Meanwhile, his lawyers said they would ask a federal judge on April 13 to order Ameens release from custody and let him rejoin his wife and four children in Sacramento. The federal governments baseless targeting of Mr. Ameen to pursue a political agenda in its War on Terror has always been unacceptable, attorney Siobhan Waldron of the nonprofit Immigrant Legal Defense said Monday. Ameen is now 48. More than two years after he left Iraq for Turkey with his wife and children in 2012, fighters from the Islamic State terrorist group, also known as ISIS, took over his former Iraqi home town of Rawab. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. The next day, police officer Abdulhafiz Jasim, who had taken part in previous anti-terrorism campaigns, was targeted in his home by ISIS gunmen and went outside and was shot to death. A witness who was in Jasims home told the FBI, and an Iraqi court, that Ameen was the assassin. Iraqs government said a second witness also identified Ameen. But Brennan, the federal magistrate, said eyewitnesses reported seeing Ameen in Turkey on the day of the killing, and cell phone towers in Turkey recorded calls that day from a phone he used regularly. Ameen also passed polygraph tests on his whereabouts, Brennan said. Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko The Biden administration has continued a secretive surveillance program begun under President Donald Trump to keep track of immigrants postings on social media for possible use in deportation proceedings, a watchdog group says in a San Francisco lawsuit. The Visa Lifecycle Vetting Initiative was adopted by Trumps immigration agencies in 2017 to help enforce his executive order barring anyone from a group of mostly Muslim nations from entering the United States. When the Supreme Court upheld a revised version of the travel ban in 2018, it applied to most entrants from five nations with largely Muslim populations, plus North Korea. President Biden withdrew the travel ban after taking office in 2021. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation says Bidens Department of Homeland Security paid $4.8 million last May to the company running the surveillance program, SRA International, part of a five-year, $42.1 million contract approved by the Trump administration in August 2018. The foundation, based in San Francisco, said it asked the department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in November whether they were monitoring immigrants online activities, whether any such monitoring was used to deny visas or order deportation, and for any other information about the surveillance program, including all contracts with SRA International. The foundation said the agencies did not respond, so it filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday seeking disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. There has been no transparency about this program, and the public has a right to know how tax dollars are being spent to support surveillance of peoples speech, said Mukund Rathi, the foundations lawyer. The suit contends the program is likely to chill expression the First Amendment protects and allow the government to punish people for speech it doesnt like. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. The government has no evidence that scouring potential immigrants online statements will help keep the country safe, Rathi said in the court filing. Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to requests for comment. Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko Two weeks after California lifted its school mask mandate, COVID-19 case rates largely continued declining across California and in classrooms, leading education and health officials to pull out their cautiously optimistic cliches. So far, so good. No red flags. Fingers crossed. The early numbers bolster the arguments of parents and health experts who supported an end to mask requirements in schools. The vast majority of Bay Area districts and private schools followed the states lead, letting students and staff remove the face coverings starting March 12, if they wanted. The data also offered some positive signs for school districts taking a wait-and-see approach, including Oakland, where officials have kept the mask mandate in place, with plans to reevaluate it in the coming weeks. State officials said they were actively monitoring case rates in schools, noting that they continue to decline and current conditions indicate that schools remain safe for students and staff, said Alex Stack, spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a statement to The Chronicle. The mask debate has been among the more divisive battles of the pandemic, pitting parents and even health experts against one another. The debates focused on whether masks were effective in schools or cause developmental or emotional harm. Both topics are still being studied by researchers. So far, many districts and communities have not seen a spike in cases since the masks came off. In San Francisco, the school districts positivity rate was 0.3% last week, with six cases, down from 0.5% and 12 cases a week earlier. In Oakland, where the indoor mandate remains in place, the positivity rate during the same period was 0.4%, with 27 cases. Farther east in Pleasanton Unified schools, cases dropped from 38 during the first week after the mask mandate lifted, to 25 last week. For parent Laura Powell, whose two children attend Mount Diablo Unified schools, the lifting of the mandate has made a big difference for her and her kids. In the Contra Costa County district, the vast majority of students no longer wear masks, she said. My kids are happier, she said, adding that her son in kindergarten, who has a speech delay, especially struggled to be understood with a mask on. When required to wear a mask, he hid during recess because he was afraid he was going to get in trouble for something because he couldnt explain, Powell said. In San Francisco, parent Courtney Helland said most of her childs middle school peers have continued wearing masks at school. Middle school is all about fitting in, she said. No one wants to be the only kid in class without a mask. Also, the kids use them to literally hide. A friends daughter, for example, told her mom that she doesnt like her face and thats why she wears a mask, Helland said. Helland was looking forward to the mandate lifting for her two elementary school children on April 4, after spring break this week. They care a lot less about fitting in, she said. Im thrilled for them to go mask-free and see their friends and teachers faces. Jessica Christian/The Chronicle Its unclear how many San Francisco middle and high school students have tossed aside their masks in the past two weeks, given its an individual choice. In Berkeley Unified, where district officials said case rates remain at pre-omicron levels, parent Jamila Dunns two children were among the first to remove their masks. As soon as masks were allowed to be off, they were like, Yay! she said. My feeling is that childhood is more important than COVID. Im not that worried about my kids getting sick. I know its definitely a possibility and its real. I just think its more important to experience the world and see faces. So far, Berkeley school district officials have seen some clusters of cases since the mandate lifted, although they saw similar situations with mandatory masking. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. Experts say with case rates so low and voluntary masking in effect for just two weeks, theres not enough information yet to draw big conclusions about the impact of lifting the mandate. I would think with the very low levels of transmissions right now, were in a lull period. Its going to be hard to detect any real differences with the mask mandate lifted or not, said Dr. George Lemp, an infectious disease expert who is retired from the University of California. Were at a really low point. The risk of catching COVID right now is generally so low its unlikely were going to see removal of masks make a great change, said Dr. John Swartzberg, a UC Berkeley infectious disease expert. Both of the Bay Area experts, however, said their concerns relate less to masks than vaccination rates as the region faces a possible bump in cases from the omicron BA.2 subvariant or another coronavirus mutation. Just 33.5% of children ages 5 to 11 across California are fully vaccinated, Lemp said, adding, You would have hoped it would have been higher by now. The Pfizer vaccine is recommended for children 5 and older in the U.S., with vaccination not yet authorized for children under age 5. Lemp said masks are not the panacea in schools that many think they are, given that he sees most little kids running around wearing cloth masks or ill-fitting surgical masks, which do little to protect them. Vaccinations offer much better protection, Lemp said. Masks or no masks, Were not prepared for the next wave, particularly in this younger group, he said. Swartzberg also sees a distinct possibility thatcase rates will go back up in the coming weeks, with spring break travels possibly fueling spread of the BA.2 variant. I cant make a continuing argument for continuing masks now, Swartzberg said. I can make a strong argument for being prepared to pivot quickly. Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker In early March, Contra Costa County Sheriff David Livingston wrote a letter to staff. One of his deputies had just been sentenced to six years in state prison for killing a motorist who was in the throes of a mental health crisis in 2018. Livingston, whod cleared the same deputy of wrongdoing through an internal investigation, wanted deputies to know he was still behind the convicted officer. The sheriff said it was abhorrent for Contra Costa District Attorney Diana Becton to prosecute the deputy or any other peace officer for a split-second tactical decision. I respect your sacrifice and commitment to the community we serve, and most importantly, I have your back, Livingston wrote in the March 4 missive, telling deputies to continue following the law and their training. I may not be able to impact the decisions of other elected officials, or the courts, but I definitely can impact what happens in our organization. On Tuesday, protesters gathered outside the Sheriffs Office in Martinez to call for the sheriffs resignation, saying his remarks were tantamount to preapproval for excessive uses of force. Among those calling for his ouster is Jennifer Leong, whose brother was killed by Andrew Hall, the deputy the sheriff praised. Samantha Laurey/The Chronicle The letter hurt her family deeply, she said. For him to say at the end, I have your back, Leong said, its just disgusting, very disheartening and just so wrong. The letter prompted criticism from the Prosecutors Alliance of California whose leaders accused Livingston of seeing his deputies as above the law. The sheriff hit back. Contra Costa is not San Francisco or Los Angeles where two of their far-left wing founding members serve, Livingston said in a statement emailed to The Chronicle. Instead of playing politics here, they should do their job and prosecute offenders and start caring about crime victims for once. Concerns over the letter only grew after March 22, when Contra Costa deputies shot and killed a man in Discovery Bay, who they said was menacing them with an archery rifle. While details of the shooting are still emerging, critics say they are concerned because Livingston, who also serves as coroner, will have outsize influence in the investigation. California law gives counties the option to pair the offices of sheriff and coroner. Forty-eight of the states 58 counties have a dual sheriff-coroner, including six of nine counties in the Bay Area. Researchers with the University of Washington found in a 2021 study that killings by police are vastly undercounted in the nation, largely because deaths involving police are often not classified that way. For instance, Rakeem Rucks, 34, became unresponsive while Antioch police officers pinned him to the ground in June 2015. His official cause of death, in a coroners inquest called by the Contra Costa Sheriffs Office, was listed as a heart attack probably brought on by methamphetamine use. Eve Wool, the studys lead author, has said part of the reason for the underreporting is that coroners are often embedded within police departments, leading to conflicts of interest as theyre expected to report on the violence of the departments they may be embedded within. Leong said there must be more objectivity in investigations into shootings like the one where Hall shot her brother Laudemer Arboleda as he attempted to flee in a car traveling 6 mph. As the District Attorneys Office was still investigating the Arboleda shooting, Hall shot and killed Tyrell Wilson, 33, who like Arboleda was struggling with mental illness. The D.A.s office and the Sheriffs Office havent completed their investigations into the March 2021 Wilson shooting. But the sheriff, whos been in office since 2011 and is a past president of the California State Sheriffs Association, has already said publicly that Hall made a split-second decision to protect public safety. Since Livingston has been in office, at least 12 people have died in incidents with his deputies, according to Fatal Encounters, an online data project. Other than Hall, none has ever been charged, and the Sheriffs Office didnt immediately respond when asked if anyone had been found in violation of policy. Veronica Benjamin, co-founder of the social justice group Conscious Contra Costa, said she wants the sheriff and coroner positions separated in the county and Livingston out of office. Her organization demanded he resign, and if he wont, for the Board of Supervisors to censure him. She also wanted to know a lot more about the recent shooting in Discovery Bay. They need to release that bodycam footage as soon as possible to corroborate what they say, she said. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. The Sheriffs Office said deputies were responding to a call about a domestic disturbance on the evening of March 22 when they encountered Robert Jones, 51. Jones allegedly pulled out an archery rifle. The weapon, a Umarex AirJavelin model, can fire arrows at speeds of up to 300 feet per second, according to the manufacturer. They attempted to de-escalate the situation by giving him numerous commands to put his weapon down, a Sheriffs Office spokesperson wrote in a statement on Facebook. He refused to comply and advanced on the deputies and officers who discharged their firearms striking the man. Attempts to reach Jones family were unsuccessful. Supervisor Candace Andersen, who represents the area where the Arboleda and Wilson shootings took place, said she had no comment on Livingstons letter. I have always found the Sheriff to be transparent and responsive to questions asked him by the Board of Supervisors or the public, Andersen said in an email late Monday, and he has fully cooperated with investigations by the District Attorney, Attorney Generals office, or any other agency investigating officer involved shootings or alleged misconduct by an officer. All the same, Andersen thinks it would be helpful for the Board of Supervisors to facilitate communication between residents and Livingston in a public forum. She said shes been in talks with Livingston and the county administrator about what it would look like. Andersen also noted that the D.A.s office conducts a separate investigation into the shootings. The state investigates if the killing involved an unarmed victim. Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris, who represented the families of Arboleda and Wilson and has sued Contra Costa County over deputies conduct in the past, said the Sheriffs Office should not investigate its own officers, especially with Livingston at the helm. My experience with him is that he is completely protective of officers, Burris said. Joshua Sharpe is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: joshua.sharpe@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joshuawsharpe A column is a story, and a story is a circle. The beginning is the end is the beginning, whether that story goes from the Excelsior to the Sunset or from Russia to Ukraine. Many readers have asked how my son Aidan is doing in his new school, Compass High. The answer is that we have returned to bake sales. One of the first pre-schools that my boys attended was out in the Avenues. Tanya, a Russian woman, ran it. My husband Brian found it, but we checked it out together, to see whether this woman was robust enough to handle both Fisher-Paulson boys. Tanya sized up Zane, then Aidan. Then me. She handed me a bowl of steaming kasha, a sweet, nutty porridge, announcing, We are fine. And, for many months, we were. The boys even learned a few Cyrillic letters. In August came Zanes birthday, and the week before, Tanya handed me a list of items I would need to bring in to insure my good-parent status: streamers, balloons, a disposable camera, and cupcakes -- not cake. And the cupcakes, she added. You do not shop Safeway. You make from scratch. I must have looked flabbergasted because Tanya pressed on: Look. There are two kinds of parents: bakery and baking. The bakery parents, they go to Noe Valley or Diandas and the cakes are bijou what is the word? Precious? But the next day, their children do not remember. But you. I can tell. Your mother would have baked for you. You will do same. Your boys will remember that their kitchen smelled like vanilla and warm chocolate. She was right. Nurse Vivian was a baking mother, not a bakery mother. And a cooking mother. Courtesy Kevin Fisher-Paulson Mrs. Roth, my sixth-grade teacher, hosted a French Fair. We memorized conjugations. We needlepointed a Parisian scene. We danced a pavanne. Mrs. Roth invited all the mothers to chef some haute cuisine, but Nurse Vivian was working swing watch at that PTA meeting, so she missed the easy signups of quiche and croque monsieur. So, she went down to the library and got a recipe for Crevettes en Gelee, which involved a gelatin mold of shrimp, tomatoes and chevre. True story: Until that day, Nurse Vivian did not know that you could get cheese from a goat. I had to convince her not to substitute Velveeta. But she took the day off from work and cooked it, proudly presenting it to my beloved teacher, only to find out that Mrs. Roth kept kosher. I did become a baking dad. Not all the cupcakes were perfect. But its hard to notice any imperfections when you cover them in frosting and sprinkles. And the kitchen frequently smelled of cinnamon rolls and pumpkin pie. Cakes featuring Winnie the Pooh, Batman, Ben 10. Neither Zane nor Aidan will remember, but the year that Zane started kindergarten at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, the night before our (legal) wedding, I did not attend a bachelor party. Instead, I baked gingerbread persons to raise money for a field trip to the pumpkin patch. And for eight years, every time the school at St. Johns raised money for trips with NatureBridge or to Coloma, I baked brownies. Then Brian would buy out the stock of field-trip pastries and hand them out to the unhoused in the neighborhood. Riordan High never asked us for tarts or cookies, and maybe we should have taken that as a sign. There is something about a community that requires breaking (and baking) bread together. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. So Brian and I were relieved and happy when Compass, this tiny school of fewer than 50 students, announced a bake sale to support World Central Kitchens (www.wck.org) relief effort in Ukraine. There are some who would describe my husband as high-maintenance. Others would say diligent. But Brian spent several hours in research. He insisted that if the bake sale was to benefit the Ukraine, then the food must be Ukrainian. He settled on a medivnyk. Think Bundt cake. Then think complicated -- with parchment paper, dates, sour cream, orange zest and Zante currants. Brian drove to five stores looking for ingredients, and not even Canyon Market, the emporium of the obscure, sold buckwheat honey. So, to come full circle, the answer to How is Aidan doing? is this: He goes to Current Events class. I pick him up a little after 3, and he gets in the car and talks about the siege of Kyiv. He asks me what we can do about it. I tell him one family cannot change the world. We can only hope to change our corner of the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior. We can do this by baking medivnyk. Whether the circle is a Jell-O mold of shrimp or a honey funnel cake, the circle brings us home. Tanya was right: We are not a bakery family. We are a baking family. And if something does not turn out well, we can always sprinkle it with powdered sugar. Kevin Fisher-Paulsons column appears Wednesdays in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com After a nearly two-year closure, Daly City Filipino institution Ling Nam is back. The beloved restaurant has reopened in a new home, at 980 King Drive Plaza in Daly City, about a mile away from the original location on Gellert Boulevard. Longtime customers poured into a soft opening on Saturday, many requesting favorite dishes they had been missing, said Alexson Lim, whose father, Tony Lim, started the business in 1990. They didnt change the menu, though theyre starting with a smaller number of dishes as they get settled, Lim said. The Ling Nam kitchen is again serving the popular mami, noodle soups with shredded chicken, asado or beef, as well as siopao, enormous, fluffy steamed buns filled with pork. Customers asking for bola bola, a sausage and egg version of siopao, and siomai dumplings, will have to wait until they expand the menu. Breakfast staples like silog, sisig and lechon kawali, the deep fried pork belly dish thats served with rice here, are available all day. For dessert, look for halo halo and taho with sago, silken tofu layered with tapioca pearls and brown sugar syrup. Ling Nam is open daily for indoor dining and takeout from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. It will eventually open at 7 a.m. The Lim family, which is Chinese and lived in the Philippines, decorated the dining room with photographs of the entrance to Chinatown in Manila, where the original Ling Nam restaurant is located. On a back wall hangs a large, framed collage of faded photos of Tony Lim with Filipino celebrities eating at the former Daly City restaurant. Provided by Tony Lim The excitement about Ling Nams return is palpable. Dozens of people shared a post in a Facebook group for the NorCal Kababayan Community Group Corporation, a local Filipino nonprofit organization. Their food is still delicious, the poster wrote. The homey restaurant long served as a hub for the Bay Area Filipino community and was part of the vibrant Filipino food scene in Daly City. After the lease on the Gellert Boulevard space ended, the Lim family searched for a new location. They reopened an outpost of the popular Starbread Bakery at the Daly City strip mall last year where diners can stop in next door for boxes of warm senorita bread but the restaurant took longer. Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. At Saturdays soft opening, Alexson Lim recognized some customers he hadnt seen for 20 years. Its a new location, but time has not passed, he said. My dad made a comment, saying, This was my purpose. Elena Kadvany is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: elena.kadvany@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ekadvany Courtesy Emma K. Morris Little Saint, the massive Healdsburg complex combining music and art with food from the owners of three-Michelin-starred SingleThread, is officially opening on April 22. The main attraction of the 10,000-square-foot building, at 25 North St., will be the entirely meat-free restaurant run by SingleThreads Kyle and Katina Connaughton. Itll highlight produce from the SinlgleThread Farm as well as the new Little Saint Farm, with dishes such as potato-green garlic soup drizzled with caraway oil and cauliflower biryani topped with fried onions and dried rose petals. WASHINGTON President Biden on Monday unveiled his proposed federal budget for the coming year, an aspirational document that serves as an important messaging exercise of what matters to the president and his party. In addition to calling for major investments in the military, crime-reduction efforts and lowering costs for families on items like child care and health care, Biden is proposing to raise money to offset those investments by significantly changing the way taxes are collected on the wealthiest Americans. As the state with the most billionaires by far, that will impact California in particular. Forbes calculates that California is home to 189 billionaires with a combined net worth over more than $1 trillion. Thats more than 60 billionaires (and more than $300 billion) more than the next closest state, New York. Biden is proposing requiring a minimum tax bill of 20% for all of them. In fact, Bidens plan would tax everyone with a net worth over $100 million at the minimum rate of 20%. The key change is taxing not only realized income, as is currently the case, but also wealth that is sitting in reserve. Under the current system, many of the nations wealthiest people pay very low taxes because most of their wealth is not income. The change is projected to generate $361 billion over 10 years. Still, it faces steep odds in Congress. While there can be bipartisan support for the idea of taxing only the wealthiest Americans, specific proposals to do so have met resistance from even a handful of Democrats in the past year, stymieing much of Bidens agenda. And presidential budgets are rarely if ever passed as proposed. Congress has the responsibility of passing federal spending, and does so through hard-fought compromise between the parties. But if enacted, the proposal could mean a big change for the wealthiest Californians. The list of who is worth the most can change day to day. Since September 2021, when Forbes last updated its list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, some have had their wealth change considerably, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg losing more than $50 billion in net worth. Its not just billionaires who will be subject to Bidens proposal. Its hard to estimate exactly how many Californians are worth more than $100 million. As California does not tax wealth, it doesnt keep data on it. The California Department of Finance told The Chronicle that out of 17.8 million tax returns filed in California in 2020, 665 individuals or households reported income of at least $100 million per year. But that only includes those who had direct earnings, as opposed to accrued assets, as Biden seeks to tax. In fact, some of Californias members of Congress could be in that category. While lawmakers do not report their exact net worth, financial disclosure reports give some clues. According to media outlet Insider, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista (San Diego County), is worth nearly $116 million. On Insiders list, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-San Francisco, is just below the $100 million threshold, worth $96.5 million due largely to the wealth of her late husband, investor Richard Blum. While Insider estimates House Speaker Nancy Pelosis wealth at $46 million, a 2018 analysis by the nonpartisan group Open Secrets said the San Francisco Democrat could be worth as much as $242 million, with its estimate being more than $114.5 million. As of Monday, here are the top 10 wealthiest people in California and where they get their wealth from, according to Forbes billionaire tracker. 1. Larry Page, Google. Net worth: $118.8 billion Global wealth rank: 6th 2. Sergey Brin, Google Net worth: $114.1 billion Global wealth rank: 8th 3. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Net worth: $79 billion Global wealth rank: 14th 4. Jensen Huang, Nvidia and semiconductors Net worth: $25.6 billion Global wealth rank: 57th 5. Eric Schmidt, Google Net worth: $23.4 billion Global wealth rank: 67th 6. Laurene Powell Jobs, Apple and Disney Net worth: $17.8 billion Global wealth rank: 98th 7. Robert Pera, wireless networking technology Net worth: $16.3 billion Global wealth rank: 113th 8. Donald Bren, real estate development Net worth: $16.2 billion Global wealth rank: 115th 9. John Doerr, venture capitalist Net worth: $13.8 billion Global wealth rank: 136th 10. Charles Schwab, investor Net worth: $13.5 billion Global wealth rank: 142nd Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan The father of an Oakland teenager is asking for answers as to why his daughter was found dead earlier this month in a Sacramento apartment. "Detectives haven't even contacted me," Raul Garcia told KTVU. "The coroner came to say, Im sorry to tell you your daughter is dead. She was shot in the head.' But that's it. I don't know anything that happened. Police haven't contacted me at all." Police found Marcella Bernal-Garcia, 16, in a residence in the 2100 Block of L Street on March 17 at 11:24 a.m., the Sacramento Police Department said in a statement. Officers were responding to a report from a resident in the block saying an individual was shot, police said. Officers attempted life-saving measures, and despite these efforts, Bernal-Garcia was pronounced deceased at the scene, police said. She had been shot at least once. In a preliminary investigation, police located a firearm at the scene. The Sacramento Police Department's Homicide Unit is continuing to investigate the incident, police said. Bernal-Garcia was a student at Castlemont High School in Oakland, the Oakland Unified School District confirmed. A statement from the district said, "She was a bright light at Castlemont, whose natural talents were obvious to those around her. She had a wonderful singing voice which we were looking forward to hearing on stage during the school's upcoming Cinco de Mayo celebration. Of course, the fact that she passed the way she did is another tragic example of our country's scourge of gun violence, which must come to an end. The Castlemont family will miss Marcella, and our hearts go out to her friends and family." Bernal-Garcia was reported missing to the Oakland Police Department on March 15, the Associated Press said. KRON reported that Bernal-Garcia was living in a group home in Oakland and was also in foster care, as both of her parents served prison sentences. Her father was recently released. SAN FRANCISCO Ubers plan to lure more taxis onto its platform in the next several years could soon take another big step. The company is close to a completing an agreement with a San Francisco partner, Flywheel Technologies, to allow Uber passengers in the city to call a taxi through the Uber app, according to four people familiar with the matter and a video presentation by the citys transportation agency that was viewed by The New York Times. The next step is for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agencys board of directors to approve tweaks to a pilot program at its April 5 meeting. The citys director of transportation would then need to authorize it, paving the way for Uber and Flywheel, which operates an app used by hundreds of taxi drivers in San Francisco across several taxi companies, to accept rides. The agreement, after a similar partnership between Uber and taxi companies in New York City was announced last week, would mark an abrupt departure from the years of fierce fighting between the two groups. If approved by regulators, the partnership in San Francisco could begin as soon as May. Uber has called the taxi industry corrupt and greedy, and a San Francisco taxi company once sued Uber in federal court, accusing it of predatory pricing practices. Some taxi drivers are pushing back against the idea of a partnership, worried that it would lead to lower earnings and make it more difficult for longtime taxi customers to get affordable rides. The agreement is particularly surprising because San Francisco, Ubers hometown, has been among a group of cities that have at times aggressively resisted Ubers business. Uber, along with other companies that use gig workers, like Lyft and DoorDash, backed Californias Proposition 22, a measure that gave gig workers some limited benefits but prohibited them from being considered full employees. Though the measure passed statewide in 2020 before a judge threw it out last year, San Francisco was one of the few counties where a majority of voters opposed it. In recent years, Uber has struck partnerships with taxi firms, mostly outside the United States. The company said in February that it had added 122,000 taxis to its platform last year. The taxi industry had lost customers to ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft even before the pandemic drastically reduced travel demand. The number of taxis in operation fell to 400 during the pandemic from 1,300 before recovering to 600, the Municipal Transportation Agency said. Teaming up with Uber could give taxi drivers access to a much larger pool of riders, while Uber would gain supply in the form of hundreds of taxi drivers. Last year, San Francisco approved a test program that would allow passengers who ordered a taxi using an app to receive a guaranteed upfront cost, similar to how Uber and Lyft function. The goal was to help taxi drivers earn more money, in part by countering a phenomenon called meter anxiety the idea that the unease of watching a rides cost increase in real time on a taxi meter prompts riders to cancel a trip or avoid calling a taxi in the first place. The upfront cost was required to be the same as the trips cost if calculated using a meter. Now Uber wants to join this experiment, with a twist: If San Francisco approves so-called third-party dispatch services like Uber to participate, the upfront cost that Uber charges customers to get a taxi through its app will not be required to be the same as a metered taxi ride. That means they could charge the same price as a typical UberX car ride, which is often cheaper than a taxi ride. That has some San Francisco taxi drivers concerned that they will be offered cheap rides that earn them only a few dollars. Others worry that surge pricing when Uber elevates rates at times of high demand could price current low-income taxi customers out of getting rides. Its just not right, said Evelyn Engel, an executive board member at the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance, which backs taxi drivers. She said she and other taxi drivers had heard from the citys transportation agency about Ubers involvement in the pilot program. Uber is going to get hundreds of full-time drivers on their platform, Engel said, but taxi drivers are not going to even get paid a per-ride fare that allows for a dignified living. Muwaffaq Mustafa, 53, who has been a taxi driver for decades and now also runs operations for Flywheel Taxi the company that once sued Uber said he thought the Uber partnership would enrich taxi drivers and could help save a floundering industry. The slightly cheaper rides, he said, would be offset by greater demand. Im optimistic if this deal goes through we will make up for all these years that were down, Mustafa said. More calls, more value, and its more money. George Lama, 60, a taxi driver in San Francisco for 20 years, said the partnership was needed because passengers now completely ignored taxis. He waits outside hotels in a line of cabdrivers to pick people up, he said, but they order Ubers instead. No one is looking at us because theyre conditioned that Uber is quicker, a larger fleet, cheaper, Lama said. In December, Hansu Kim, the president and a co-owner of the Flywheel taxi-hailing app, told a panel at a transportation regulators conference that the taxi industrys approach to technology was like dinosaurs that are still in the tar pits, and that he was talking with Uber to help taxi drivers get access to ride-hailing customers. If we do not co-opt this technology as a standard, we are going to continue to be marginalized, Kim said in video of the meeting, which was viewed by the Times. Uber could benefit from the partnership by gaining access to potentially hundreds more drivers; although it said it had seen driver numbers rebound in recent months after many left during the height of the pandemic, many drivers still complain of low earnings and some said they had quit the platform or started driving less as gas prices have risen. The Municipal Transportation Agency says taxi drivers will benefit, too. The taxi industry is leveraging Ubers large riding population and pushing that toward the taxi industry, Forest Barnes, a transportation planner for the agency, told taxi drivers in a recent Zoom meeting viewed by the Times. If taxi drivers do see more money through the partnership, that could encourage some ride-hailing drivers to consider operating taxis instead. But some taxi drivers are balking at the merger. Marcelo Fonseca, 62, said he would rather drive empty than participate in driving passengers for Uber or Lyft. My morals, ethics and principles would never allow me to be part of that, he said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. A 50-year-old experienced climber and hiker died after falling 80 feet from a climb at Joshua Tree National Park Saturday, officials said. The climber, identified by the Palm Springs Desert Sun as Tina Fiori, was found at around 4 p.m. Saturday near the Sheep Pass group campground at the National Park. Fiori, the Desert Sun reported, was celebrating a friends birthday and 2,000th climb at the park that day. The group had climbed up a wall, and Fiori was the last to climb. They were "top roping," which entails attaching their rope through an anchor at the top of the climb. The rope can also be attached to climbing webbing left behind by past hikers, which can deteriorate with age, use and the elements. Fiori ran her safety rope through compromised nylon webbing, the Desert Sun reported, while she was attempting to clean the anchor and fell after leaning back to rappel down the wall. In various Facebook remembrances mourning her death, Fioris friends remembered her as an intrepid, supportive person who loved mountaineering and jelly beans. We had so many amazing adventures and supported each other through all of the twists, turns, challenges, and joys of life, said one friend on Facebook in a post Monday. Fioris death marks the second death from a rock climbing accident at Joshua Tree so far this year. Earlier this year, a 35-year-old San Diego teacher was found dead at the base of a climb near the Hidden Valley Nature Trail. A spokesperson for the Riverside County Sheriff's Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from SFGATE. In the early 1960s, Santa Barbaras first wave of planners probably never envisioned it would take more than a half century, plus a global pandemic, to bring their pedestrian-friendly, no-traffic corridor in the heart of the city to fruition but thats exactly what had to happen. The arterial road, home to the city of 91,000s main row of retail, restaurant, and hospitality businesses, was originally envisioned in the general plan, adopted in 1964, as a pedestrianized downtown that encourages walking and biking and other aspects of mobility, Tess Harris, Santa Barbaras State Street master planner, said. But in the decades to follow, cars won the day, and the different ways to access downtown shrunk to Californias favored mode of transportation. John Palminteri/AP It took an emergency order during the height of the first wave of COVID to reverse almost six decades of two-way traffic and congestion, echoing the creation of Slow Streets in San Francisco. In May 2020, eight blocks of State Street from Sola Street to Gutierrez Street in the area known as Lower State were closed off to car traffic to enable restaurants and merchants to spill out into the street and meet the ever-changing state and national guidelines for reopening. An emergency measure becomes permanent solution We closed the street on May 22, 2020, for Memorial Day weekend thinking if we could [extend it to] Labor Day, wed be good, Harris said. The thinking was that COVID was not something that was going to exist long-term. But [the closure] became much more popular than anyone realized, and that was great. Photo By Andrew Pridgen The area is still emerging from a two-way boulevard into a living, working pedestrian zone. For the boozy day drinker, serious cyclist and scrambling dog walker, there are various obstacles to navigate, including the propane heat-throwers that look like robot hat racks and lattice with fake ivy crawling up it for diners privacy. Dancing around it all is a rotating cast of stackable restaurant-style square stools with the hole in the seat that come standard with every eatery that has around a six-month life span. The Santa Barbara City Council has extended the emergency ordinance multiple times, the latest of which is in place until December 31, 2023 by then, a permanent restructuring and use plan for the now-pedestrian-friendly destination should be in place, Harris said. The planner noted the city is working to develop a plan that takes on many issues the city has needed to address for a while. Photo By Andrew Pridgen We now have to ask what [a permanent change] is going to look like, Harris explained. How does the pedestrianized space interact with the downtown and how [does] it connect community members from all over the city. How is it sustainable and equitable? Beyond managing businesses and parking, there's the housing component were looking at homeless, were looking at changes in behaviors over the decades [to come], were looking at it holistically. Businesses outside the new State Street promenade feel pinch While the city workshops a new permanent pedestrian plan for the 10-block corridor, where business is booming, merchants and restaurants outside the choked-off area have, at times, felt the pinch. Some say theyve taken on the burden of traffic and human activity outside what is now known as the State Street promenade. Jumping Rocks/Universal Images Group via Getty The 400 block of State Street is perhaps the most impacted area as it abuts the western edge of the promenade. Santa Barbara City Councilmember Oscar Gutierrez said hes been pushing the closure of that block to vehicles to help businesses near the gateway to the State Street promenade. Photo By Andrew Pridgen Since Ive been in office, the business and property owners of the 400 block of State Street have been voicing their frustrations and concerns about how the city treats them even before the pandemic, Gutierrez told Noozhawk. The pandemic and the shutting down of certain blocks to traffic only made them feel even more alienated and ignored. Theres also the question of how to provide emergency services to the entire area with a major piece of the thoroughfare cut out to through traffic. Santa Barbara fire Chief Chris Males said the department receives a high call volume near the promenade and increased congestion in adjacent blocks is a concern. 'We're fitting in more' Business owners and operators on the 400 block say theyve come around to the notion of making the promenade permanent. Were fitting in more as a pedestrian-friendly [business], said Kim Kjar, owner of Paradise record shop at 432 State St. His storefront is rock-throwing distance from the temporary 3-foot-high industrial plastic street barriers that distinguish the promenade and cut his place off from the walkers, cyclists, skateboarders, accidental tourists, professional browsers, dog-walkers, first dates, bad tippers and SUV-sized jogging-stroller pushers who partake in the car-free zone. Even though hes on the outside looking in, Kjar said use patterns are beginning to change on his block and its for the better. We still get a little drive-by traffic, but its a lot of people [who] either walk up from the beach or parking up higher and walk back, he said. Its happened slowly, but its a good change. More than the permanent closure of the State, Kjar says he just wants to see a permanent plan in place. I dont see things happening fast enough, he said. As a business, Im just like make up your mind. Dont change every three months. I know they need to eliminate emergency response concerns, but that part seems simple. Photo By Andrew Pridgen Torey Schreiner, the manager at Oat Bakery on Haley Street, which runs perpendicular to the 400 block of State Street and is a main thoroughfare for car traffic on the western edge of the promenade, agrees that foot traffic has picked up on her block since the pedestrian-friendly zone came to be. Still, other residual effects, including recent road work on Haley Street, can present issues. Honestly, we have a good local base, she said, and thats helped. People [who] supported us through the pandemic are still coming. They find a way. As the summer comes, we get more walking-by, and it turns 50/50 locals to tourists. Overall she says her business is in favor of keeping the new State Street promenade closed to traffic. But, like her neighbors, she also hopes a permanent plan circulates sooner than later. [The promenade] gets people out on the street and walking around. Its good for us and were enjoying it. I really like it City officials say it wont take until the latest temporary closure lapses at the end of next year for business owners and residents to see a permanent solution taking shape. Photo By Andrew Pridgen I think were going to have a pretty good idea by summer of 23 of what its going to look like, planner Harris said, also noting the path between now and then will be filled with multi-faceted input. From a mobility standpoint, we need to look at transportation and circulation in the downtown core, she said in reference to other recent traffic issues on State Street. When we take away one thoroughfare, what does it do to the adjacent streets and how people are traveling? Its more than just one decision; its about the entire circulation of a town. For now, on a recent spring afternoon, it seems those who are most charmed by the change are also the ones who werent aware of State Street as anything but a pedestrian-friendly corridor. Its my second day here, said Anand Verma, a visitor from Santa Cruz who was enjoying a beverage and a game of corn hole with a friend in the middle of the road in front of M. Special Brewing Company, in the heart of the promenade on the 600 block of State. I feel like Ive been to a lot of outdoor spaces like it, so this seems natural. On cue, he took a sip, threw a looping underhand toss and with a signature hollow thud stuck a bean bag on the box in front of his opponent. I really like it. Do you remember the first time you had a Ghirardelli sundae? Maybe you were all of 9 years old, eyes as big as saucers while you waited impatiently in line for a hot fudge-drenched monstrosity. Maybe you were 17 on your first ever trip to San Francisco, considering whether you wanted to move here for college between chocolatey bites (thatd be me the sundae certainly sealed the deal). But once youve lived here for a while, theres a tendency to leave Ghirardelli to the tourists. Its a $15 sundae from a massive corporation, after all, and its not like San Francisco has a dearth of excellent local ice cream shops. Theres a reason, though, that tourists flock to Ghirardelli Square for ice cream even on the foggiest San Francisco days. So on a recent Thursday afternoon, I joined them. It was a cloudy, windy weekday, but the line still snaked out the door of the soda fountain entrance at the square. I gritted my teeth and paid the $15.76 (after tax) for my world famous hot fudge sundae, grabbed a cushy corner booth by the window and began people-watching. Charles Russo/SFGATE Charles Russo/SFGATE Charles Russo/SFGATE Tourists, locals and ice cream lovers alike cue up at the "Soda Fountain Entrance" at Ghirardelli for ice cream and chocolates, on Thursday, March 24. (Photo by Charles Russo/SFGATE) Tourists, locals and ice cream lovers alike cue up at the "Soda Fountain Entrance" at Ghirardelli for ice cream and chocolates, on Thursday, March 24. (Photo by Charles Russo/SFGATE) A woman next to me shook her head furiously when a server in a paper cap attempted to hand her a plastic spoon. The long spoon is better, she declared. Charles Russo/SFGATE When I dipped into my sundae, which arrived seconds later, I realized I couldnt agree more the long stainless steel dessert spoon is way better. If you do go to Ghirardelli, you simply must order the sundae for here, because then it comes in a glass goblet, which makes it look more like something that should cost $15 (to be fair, its large enough to feed two people). Its presentation is simple, but glorious two layers each of hot fudge and vanilla ice cream, topped with a peak of fluffy whipped cream, chopped almonds and a cheeky maraschino cherry. Charles Russo/SFGATE Instantly, eating the sundae transported me back to childhood to little kid birthday sundaes at the popular chain restaurant in my suburban hometown and to teenage banana splits at the retro drive-in diner. As a child, there was nothing more exhilarating than getting your parents to splurge on a sundae. A sundae is not your everyday ice cream cone. A sundae is an extravagance. A sundae is a cherry-topped birthday party in a glass. As I ate, my most juvenile instincts took over: I licked the whipped cream off my spoon; I saved the maraschino cherry for last. There was no way I could finish the whole thing, but like a determined child, I kept going until I felt sick. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The Ghirardelli sundae is not an innovative culinary experience. It offers none of the sophistication of San Franciscos trendiest ice creameries, which draw patrons in with Tasteful Adult Flavors like honey lavender and strawberry balsamic. Sometimes, I like to pretend I have an extremely refined palate when picking an ice cream flavor, but sometimes, my taste buds just want to be pacified. After all, Ive never seen my middle-aged parents more confused than when I took them to Humphry Slocombe. What on earth is a secret breakfast? my mom asked the helpless person behind the counter. A Ghirardelli sundae, on the other hand, tastes exactly how youd expect. No tongue-in-cheek names or quirky ingredient combinations. Its vanilla ice cream and hot fudge, plain and simple. And you know what? Its fking delicious. $15 is still a sticker shock, but maybe the tourists are on to something. Warner Bros. Actor Ezra Miller, 29, was arrested and charged on suspicion of disorderly conduct and harassment on Sunday in a Hawaii karaoke bar, officials said. Miller, best known for playing the Flash in the Justice League films, became agitated when patrons at the bar in Hilo began singing karaoke, Hawaii County police said in a statement. In a bout of belligerence, Miller yelled obscenities and grabbed the microphone from a 23-year-old woman singing karaoke and later lunged at a 32-year-old man playing darts, police said. Ignatz Steinhart could sense his dream coming closer to reality. At a ceremony in Golden Gate Park to lay the cornerstone for what would be the de Young Museum, Steinhart thought of the aquarium that he and his late brother had been fighting to build there for around a decade. I hope we can have something like this soon, he told Barton Warren Evermann, California Academy of Sciences director, at the ceremony on April 15, 1917. Exactly one month later, Steinhart died. He had succeeded in laying his own foundation just in time. This fall will mark the 99th anniversary of the Steinhart Aquariums opening. Though it became an immediate sensation in Golden Gate Park and a source of memories for countless Bay Area children since, getting the aquarium built there was no sure thing. The future aquariums location was the source of a fierce public relations battle that pitted San Franciscos newspapers against each other. Golden Gate Park wouldnt win until after multiple voter initiatives, a historically large private donation and a passion for fish from two wealthy brothers who emigrated from a landlocked part of Germany. Even then, no one knew whether Sigmund and Ignatz Steinhart had dedicated enough money until after they were dead. While the aquarium still bears the Steinhart brothers name and celebrates them, little was ever reported about their personal lives, and it remains a mystery why they were so determined to get it built. They were in the Bohemian Club, were local businessmen and supported charities, Steinhart Aquarium senior director Bart Shepherd told SFGATE. Why an aquarium? I wish I knew the answer for that. What was it that resonated, and why not an art museum or a school? Courtesy of California Academy of Sciences Heres what we know: Sigmund and Ignatz Steinhart immigrated to Northern California from Sulzbach, Bavaria, around the Gold Rush period and later settled down in San Francisco. Sigmund made his fortune in dry goods and mining, and Ignatz became chairman of the board at the Anglo and London Paris National Bank. Sigmund never married or had kids, was involved in several social clubs in San Francisco and New York, and according to the Chronicle soon after his death, he "was very generous to the poor, especially to old Californians, but avoided publicity in his benefaction." Sigmund also enjoyed Golden Gate Park and expressed an interest in building an aquarium in San Francisco. As for Ignatz Steinhart, he loved travel and he demonstrated his fondness for his wife, May F. Steinhart, with gifts of fine and expensive animals, according to John E. McCoskers book, The History of Steinhart Aquarium: A Very Fishy Tale. Ignatz lost May after 23 years of marriage, however, when she died in her sleep in 1901 at the age of 42. The Chronicles obituary said May had been an invalid for the last few years, but her death still came as a shock. The story said that on the day of her death, "feeling comfortable yesterday morning, she took a ride to Golden Gate Park and on her return said she would lie down for a short rest. Its unclear what effect losing his wife had on him, but Ignatz never remarried or had children. His brother, Sigmund, died at the age of 77 in 1910. Not 10 days later, Ignatz made his first offer to fund an aquarium in San Francisco: $20,000 from his brothers estate, and $20,000 from him. His terms, which changed little over the years, included that it had to be built in Golden Gate Park, be maintained by public funds and should be named Steinhart Aquarium. Almost immediately after Sigmunds death, Steinhart traveled to Europe for eight months and studied its aquariums. Upon returning, he may have dropped a hint on why he insisted on Golden Gate Park as the aquariums site. Courtesy of California Academy of Sciences A Chronicle columnist talked to Steinhart and wrote in February 1911 that Steinhart valued natural sights: Those who really need them must be lured to visit them. Recreation, amusement and instruction must be provided, or the balmy atmosphere and the green trees will be neglected and the stuffy downtown resorts will be favored. That is why he has made munificent provision for an aquarium of which we shall be proud." Steinhart struggled to realize his vision, almost to the point where he abandoned it. He raised his donation offer to $50,000 to have the aquarium built in the park for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition. A January 1912 Chronicle report suggested he might have had the support of federal Fisheries Commissioner George Bowers. However, according to Evermanns notes in later years, Steinhart told him the expositions board turned me down hard, so hard that I have about lost all interest in the matter and have about decided to give my money to a [tuberculosis] hospital. One meeting reshapes history The turning point for Steinhart appears to have come when he met Evermann in March 1916. By that time, Steinhart was so discouraged from a half-decade of failure that Evermann later told the Standard Oil Bulletin, I left him feeling there was no probability that he would ever establish an aquarium. One week later, however, Steinhart was back to offering $75,000 for an aquarium in the park. By the fall of 1916, the aquariums future home had emerged as a major story, with the news outlets themselves taking sides. The early favorite for the aquariums home wasnt Golden Gate Park. When the citys big fish (my apologies) met at San Franciscos Palace Hotel for a luncheon Sept. 21 to discuss the aquarium, the committee charged with investigating locations said it favored the Marina District. Courtesy of California Academy of Sciences On a table at the luncheon was a topographical design of the Marina project pushed by the Exposition Preservation League, including the proposed aquarium housed at the direct ferry site of the 1915 expo. Nearby were the new Palace of Fine Arts and a future tree-lined Marina Boulevard. The Preservation League estimated it could raise between $150,000 and $175,000 for construction a good deal more than Steinhart, but unlike his offer, they gave no firm money source or timeline. Steinhart went on the offensive at the luncheon, saying he disagreed with the committees findings. The playground of the city was a far more desirable location than the Marina, he argued, and the Academy of Sciences a superior steward for an aquarium. "The Marina has some good points, but Golden Gate Park is the best site," he said. If everything is all right, I will assist the aquarium project to the extent of my means if Golden Gate Park is chosen as the site. 'HANDS OFF GOLDEN GATE PARK' Days later, the dueling newspaper op-eds began. The Examiner had already staked its claim for the Marina as the aquarium site through several editorials that year, but on Sept. 26 it argued against Golden Gate Park as the location in the name of protecting it. Its editorial doesnt mention an aquarium at all, but theres no secret what the Examiner was getting at when it wrote, That park is the city's chief glory and most delightful asset. It should be kept as a park and not transformed into a sort of Coney Island. M.H. de Young responded in a Chronicle op-ed the day after with all the ferocity of a diss track. Alternating his sentences in all-caps, he decried the park aquarium opposition as a Real Estate Scheme. Courtesy of California Academy of Sciences After writing that the park covered 1,070 acres and an aquarium might cover 1 acre, he bellowed, ALL THE BUILDINGS IN THE PARK TODAY DO NOT COVER 18 ACRES. HOW COULD THE INSTALLATION OF AN AQUARIUM IN SUCH A VAST TRACT BE AN INJURY TO THE PLAYGROUND OF THE PEOPLE? De Young also directly slammed the Examiner for its Coney Island reference, writing, Such a suggestion reveals the absurdity of this attack. In true mic-drop flair, the editorial ends with, HANDS OFF GOLDEN GATE PARK. HANDS OFF THE ATTRACTIONS THAT BELONG TO ALL THE PEOPLE IN GOLDEN GATE PARK. It wasn't long before Steinhart and Golden Gate Park won the public relations battle. The Chronicle advocated for the park by devoting weeks of coverage to the various city groups and leaders favoring it as the site, while its reporters openly editorialized of a scheme to divert the aquarium to the Marina or Fishermans Wharf in the name of real estate interests. Saltwater public relations Steinhart, Evermann and de Young hosted luncheons at the Palace Hotel to advocate for the park site, with Evermann effectively countering a key argument against the park: that natural saltwater sources would be too far away to replenish the tanks. The aquarium would use a closed circulation system, he said. And anyway, saltwater baths throughout San Francisco were all the rage at that time. The water in the New York Aquarium was last changed in 1907, while that of Detroit was changed 12 years ago, Evermann said at one luncheon. Just as important, Team Steinhart had the backing of a key luminary. Golden Gate Park Superintendent John McLaren, who was often opposed to development in the park and was against the highly problematic 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition, supported building the aquarium there. Courtesy of California Academy of Sciences In November 1916, San Franciscos voters brought the aquarium another step forward by approving a charter amendment that committed $20,000 every year to its maintenance one of Steinharts requirements. That same month, Steinhart laid out his final monetary offer and stipulations in his will. Nobody, including Evermann, who later wrote he had come to love him as a father, knew what was in it. Ignatz Steinhart died six months later at 77 years old the same as Sigmund on May 15, 1917, reportedly of heart failure. In his diary that day, Evermann wrote with Steinharts legacy in mind, The good man is dead. Has he provided for it in his will? Like the unwrapping of a giant fish tank, the answer was revealed three days later at the will reading. The Steinharts had left behind a combined $250,000 about $5.5 million in todays money and more than 8% of Ignatzs total fortune for an aquarium in Golden Gate Park, under certain conditions. Anadolu Agency/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Those conditions stayed essentially the same: That the money would go to the Academy of Sciences for the aquariums creation, that the aquarium would be built next to it in the park, and that it be maintained by public funds. Finally, the will stated that a bust of Sigmund Steinhart be displayed somewhere at the aquarium. Even if his terms werent met and an aquarium was built elsewhere in San Francisco, Steinharts will bequeathed $150,000 with no strings attached to go to its enlargement and extension. Voters passed another charter amendment in November 1918 accepting Steinharts conditions, and from there it was a matter of time. On Sept. 29, 1923, the Steinhart Aquarium opened for an estimated 2,500 people excited to see 2,000 sea specimens. Shepherd, the present-day aquarium director, said the swamp opened with the first alligators to pre-date its modern-day resident, Claude. There was a since-removed sea lion pool outside, and more cubic feet of water inside than in any of the six other major American aquariums. Although the executor of Ignatzs Steinhart estate was there to speak at the opening and others spoke of his dream, there are no reports of anyone in his family attending. His original terms were granted, however: There remain medallion-shaped plaques of Ignatz and Sigmund on the swamp mezzanine level, near the underwater window facing Claude. And although Ignatz didnt request this, Shepherd holds an annual staff appreciation day at the aquarium where he tells the story of the brothers. He calls it Steinhart Day. Goats, horses and chickens roamed the pastureland at the end of my childhood street in Monte Sereno, Calif. After dinner, my parents and I often went on a neighborhood walk and stopped at the farm so I could pet the animals. That pastoral scene disappeared long ago torn out to make way for homes that were sold for tens of thousands of dollars in the 1970s and are worth millions 40 years later. My earliest memories of Monte Sereno are of a rural community dotted with ranch houses, orchards, dairies and a few large estates. By the time I graduated from high school and left for college in the late 1990s, it was a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Now, the Netflix headquarters is within walking distance from my childhood home, built on a former plant nursery. I got to thinking about my hometown when I stumbled upon a Reddit thread posing the question: What Bay Area city has changed the most since your childhood? Over less than a week, the post has erupted with lively discussion about long-lost hobby shops and toy stores, orchards pulled out to make way for tract housing and former cow pastures that are now home to massive shopping malls. Ed. H / Yelp "Where I grew up in San Jose... There used to be just open fields and random clusters of homes. Now there's a Target and $4000+ apartments on every corner," wrote one user. "Have you seen Dublin? Townhomes/condos as far as the eye can see, with shopping centers interspersed. With a large chain store, as an anchor." "San Ramon through to Blackhawk is literally a different world than the 80s/90s," wrote another. Los Gatos also pops up in the comments as a place that was transformed by development in recent decades. My childhood home was about two miles from downtown Los Gatos that's where we went to school, shopped, marched in the annual holiday parade. In the 1970s and '80s, downtown was a stage set by Norman Rockwell with a diner (Gilley's), a five and dime (Jolly's), a movie theater (it's actually still there), a fabric store and several toy stores. One of them, Bears in the Woods, sold only teddy bears. The mall-ification of downtown started in the 1990s and continued into the 2000s with the opening of several chains from the Gap to an Apple store. This happened in cities across the Bay Area, from downtown Burlingame to University Avenue in Palo Alto. Which Bay Area city has changed the most in your eyes? SFGATE wants to hear from you. Please send us no more than 300 words on how your Bay Area city has changed and we may publish it in an upcoming article. Send your submissions to agraff@sfgate.com. More than ever, California is positioning itself as a state that fights back. Texas, Idaho, Arizona and a number of other conservative states this year have been moving forward with a suite of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ legislation. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Monday signed a law opponents have called Dont Say Gay, which prohibits classroom discussions in some elementary grades about sexual orientation and gender identity. Here in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has been vocal about his distaste for these laws. On Twitter, he invited Disney to brings its Florida workforce to California, the state that actually represents the values of your workers. And in open defiance of a Texas abortion law that allows private individuals to sue abortion providers, he recently unveiled a proposal that would let residents sue gunmakers. But theres even more brewing in the state Legislature as California tries to position itself as a sanctuary for transgender youth and for people seeking abortions. Ill walk you through the latest: Transgender youth legislation Were in the midst of a nationwide wave of legislation seeking to restrict the rights of transgender youth. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas recently ordered the state to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children. In Arizona, a bill is moving forward that would force teachers to disclose to parents if their children came out as LGBTQ. In California, Democratic lawmakers are proposing to make California a haven for transgender youth and their parents who are fleeing other states. They have a safe place to go if theyre threatened with prosecution, state Sen. Scott Wiener told The Associated Press. California will not be a party to this new wave of deadly LGBTQ criminalization. The bill would prevent California courts from enforcing any out-of-state court rulings that deny parents custody for allowing their trans children to get gender-affirming care. It would also prohibit California officials from complying with out-of-state subpoenas seeking medical information about people who travel to California for such care. Abortion laws With the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned this year, conservative states are advancing new restrictions that aim to make abortion illegal in as many circumstances as possible. California leaders are trying to make the state a sanctuary for those seeking reproductive care. (Washington and Oregon are also taking steps to make those states more friendly to those seeking abortions.) Newsom signed a bill last week that would make abortions cheaper for people on private insurance plans. California legislators are anticipating that restricted access to abortion in other states will lead to more women coming to the Golden State for procedures. A number of related proposals are also under consideration in California: banning the disclosure of abortion medical records to the police or other out-of-state entities; allowing nurse practitioners to perform abortions; and setting up a fund to help pay for people to get abortions, including assistance with travel and lodging. This legislative package is robust, its bold, its responsive and its innovative, and thats exactly what we need right now, Amy Moy, chief external affairs officer for Essential Access Health and a member of the steering committee for the Future of Abortion Council, told The Associated Press. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Older adults can get second booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines, federal agencies announced Tuesday as they expanded access to additional shots to help shore up protection against severe illness. The Food and Drug Administration authorized a second booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines for people 50 and older at least four months after their first booster. The FDA also updated its authorization for people 12 and older who are immunocompromised, saying they are eligible for an additional booster - a fifth shot for people at heightened peril from the virus. The shots are not a permanent solution to the pandemic. But with a still-more-transmissible version of the omicron coronavirus variant becoming dominant in the United States, even a short-term immunity boost among those at risk of severe illness could provide a valuable layer of protection. The FDA action was followed within hours by a statement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updating its booster guidance. The second booster for adults 50 and older and for people 12 and older who are immunocompromised is expected to become available as early as Wednesday, now that the CDC has updated its guidance allowing those individuals to get it. "This is especially important for those 65 and older and those 50 and older with underlying medical conditions that increase their risk for severe disease from COVID-19, as they are the most likely to benefit from receiving an additional booster dose at this time," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in a statement. Outside experts have debated the age at which second boosters should be made available. Many scientists who support a fourth dose for some older adults see little evidence that people under 60 or even 65 would clearly benefit. There are about 118 million people age 50 and older in the United States. But because not all of the people in that age range have received the initial series of shots or boosters, only a fraction are immediately eligible for a fourth shot. Booster uptake in the United States has been slower than desired, particularly among older Americans who are at higher risk of severe illness. About 15 million people age 65 and older - a third of people in the age group - are fully vaccinated but have yet to receive a first booster. Only about 40 percent of people between 50 and 64 have received a first booster. "I would urge people to get their first booster because one thing that did become apparent . . . is the third dose provides a differentiating level of immunity that does seem to provide people some additional benefit, in terms of preventing the severe outcomes of hospitalization and death - and that seems to last and be more durable," Peter Marks, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said at a news briefing. The messenger RNA boosters will be available to people regardless of which brand of coronavirus vaccine they initially received, including Johnson & Johnson recipients. The Pfizer-BioNTech booster is authorized for immunocompromised people age 12 and older. The Moderna vaccine has not yet been authorized in teenagers, and its booster is authorized for immunocompromised people 18 and older. Experts have been inundated with questions from family members and emails from the public seeking advice on boosters. "I've been getting multiple inquiries from lay friends over the past few days: 'What does this mean, and what should I do?' " said John P. Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. "I find it increasingly difficult to tell friends what they should do. It's becoming really problematic." The primary benefit of a fourth shot is thought to be protection against severe illness, and that risk can vary dramatically among people 50 and older. Not all experts are convinced the benefits are clear, and some have debated about whether the age cutoff should be 60 or older. A matrix of factors - including underlying health conditions, age, and time since last booster dose or infection - could play a role in what a person should consider in risk vs. benefit. A 70-year-old with diabetes and high blood pressure, for example, who received a booster dose in October probably would be at dramatically different risk from covid-19 than a 50-year-old with no underlying health conditions. Tens of millions of people were infected with the omicron variant during the winter surge, and those people's immune systems have been effectively boosted - so they may not need another shot now. Some experts have raised concerns about the decision-making process. The second booster issue is not scheduled to be presented to outside committees advising the FDA and CDC. "I think it's wonderful that the FDA is making [a second booster] available," said William Schaffner, an infectious-diseases expert at Vanderbilt University and a liaison member of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. But Schaffner said such decisions are typically reviewed by the CDC's advisers, "and I think that mechanism should have been used for this also." Even if outside experts reached a similar conclusion, having a discussion and seeing data presented at a public meeting offers transparency and a "different tone," Schaffner said. But the FDA news is certain to be welcome to a segment of the population "who will be at their doctor's office or pharmacies tomorrow, if not this afternoon, getting their fourth dose," Schaffner said. "But they will be the minority of the population because after all, before you get your fourth, you have to get your third." Evidence in support of a fourth dose is limited and mixed, based largely on data from Israel - where people 60 and older have been able to receive a second booster shot. Israeli studies have supported the idea that an additional shot could be lifesaving for people older than 60 but have also suggested the shots will have marginal benefits for young, healthy people and offer only short-term and modest protection against getting infected. In one preprint study from Israel, out of 328,597 people who received a second booster dose, 92 died from covid. That outcome was significantly better than in the group of 234,868 who received only one booster; in that cohort, 232 died from covid. Another preprint found a lower rate of severe illness among people older than 60 who received four shots, but was limited, covering only a two-week period in late January. Data included in a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine provided a more mixed picture. Among health-care workers in Israel, a fourth shot increased virus-blocking antibodies. But that boost provided little protection against infection, and people who became infected experienced few symptoms regardless of whether they had received three or four shots. Vaccinated people had relatively high amounts of virus in their nose, suggesting they could pass the infection to others. The Israeli data underscored that boosters' effects are transient and that a fourth-dose strategy is a short-term approach. An Israeli preprint study published last week before peer review found that a fourth dose was 73 percent protective against severe illness compared with three doses over the course of 10 weeks of follow-up. But the protection against infection was modest and short-lived, peaking at 64 percent three weeks after the vaccination and falling to about 29 percent. Marks acknowledged the data supporting a fifth dose for immunocompromised people was more limited but said that it was seen as a way to protect vulnerable people. Vaccines tend to generate weaker protection against covid-19 in this group of people, and that protection tends to erode more quickly. Timing the shots' peak protection to the time of greatest risk from the virus is tricky. No one knows when future variants will emerge, and scientists are uncertain even about known threats. Infections from the BA.2 version of the omicron variant are ticking upward in the United States, but some health officials have said they don't expect BA.2 to cause a surge. Some experts predict a surge next winter. In terms of giving a second booster, Moore said, "Should you do it now - and in the fall? Or in the fall - and not now? This is where it gets head-spinning. What is the long-term intent, and what is the long-term policy?" Separate from Tuesday's action, the FDA plans next week to convene external advisers who will debate the long-term booster dose strategy for the general population. One possible scenario, Marks said, is a fall booster campaign that coincides with annual influenza shots. White House spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield said there is sufficient supply to offer a fourth dose to limited populations. "What I would say is that if it at some point it becomes recommended that the full population get . . . a fourth shot, we're going to need additional funding," Bedingfield said. Vaccine makers are working on shots they believe will provide more durable protection. In recent days, leaders from Pfizer, and German partner BioNTech, and Moderna have indicated they believe new versions of their vaccines, including formulations that incorporate two versions of the coronavirus, will create longer-lasting immunity. "I think about my family - my loved ones, and what I would say. . . . I would probably tell them to just kind of hang back until there's clear evidence of a rise in their area," said Natalie Dean, a biostatistics expert at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. "There's something to the timing of it - and where numbers remain low and they've been boosted not that long ago, a few months ago, I wouldn't go out and tell them they need that right now." - - - Dan Keating contributed to this report. Federal prosecutors and congressional investigators have gathered growing evidence of how a tweet by President Donald Trump less than three weeks before Jan. 6, 2021, served as a crucial call to action for extremist groups that played a central role in storming the Capitol. Trumps Twitter post in the early hours of Dec. 19, 2020, was the first time he publicly urged supporters to come to Washington on the day Congress was scheduled to certify the Electoral College results showing Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential vote. His message which concluded with, Be there, will be wild! has long been seen as instrumental in drawing the crowds that attended a pro-Trump rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 and then marched to the Capitol. But the Justice Departments criminal investigation of the riot and the parallel inquiry by the House select committee have increasingly shown how Trumps post was a powerful catalyst, particularly for far-right militants who believed he was facing his final chance to reverse defeat and whose role in fomenting the violence has come under intense scrutiny. Extremist groups almost immediately celebrated Trumps Twitter message, which they widely interpreted as an invitation to descend on the city in force. Responding to the presidents words, the groups sprang into action, court filings and interviews by the House committee show: Extremists began to set up encrypted communications channels, acquire protective gear and, in one case, prepare heavily armed quick reaction forces to be staged outside Washington. They also began to whip up their members with a drumbeat of bellicose language, with their private messaging channels increasingly characterized by what one called an apocalyptic tone. Directly after Trumps tweet was posted, the Capitol Police began to see a spike in right-wing threats against members of Congress. Prosecutors have included examples in at least five criminal cases of extremists reacting within days often hours to Trumps post. One of those who responded to the post was Guy Wesley Reffitt, an oil-field worker from Texas who this month became the first Jan. 6 defendant to be convicted at trial. Within a day of Trumps Twitter post, Reffitt was talking about it on a private group chat with other members of the far-right militia organization the Texas Three Percenters. Our President will need us. ALL OF US!!! On January 6th, Reffitt wrote. We the People owe him that debt. He Sacrificed for us and we must pay that debt. The next day, prosecutors say, Reffitt began to make arrangements to travel to Washington and arrive in time for Armageddon all day on Jan. 6, he wrote in the Three Percenters group chat. He told his compatriots that he planned to drive because flying was impossible with all the battle rattle he planned to bring a reference to his weapons and body armor, prosecutors say. Some in the group appeared to share his anger. On Dec. 22, one member wrote in the chat, The only way you will be able to do anything in DC is if you get the crowd to drag the traitors out. Reffitt responded, I dont think anyone going to DC has any other agenda. The House committee has also sharpened its focus on how the tweet set off a chain reaction that galvanized Trumps supporters to begin military-style planning for Jan. 6. As part of the congressional inquiry, investigators are trying to establish whether there was any coordination beyond the post that ties Trumps inner circle to the militants and whether the groups plotted together. That tweet could be viewed as a call to action, said Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., a member of the committee. Its definitely something were asking questions about through our discussions with witnesses. We want to know whether the presidents tweets inflamed and mobilized individuals to take action. On the day of the post, participants in TheDonald.win, a pro-Trump chat board, began sharing tactics and techniques for attacking the Capitol, the committee noted in a report released Sunday recommending contempt of Congress charges for Dan Scavino, Trumps former deputy chief of staff. In one thread on the chat board related to the tweet, the report pointed out, an anonymous poster wrote that Trump cant exactly openly tell you to revolt. This is the closest hell ever get. Attorneys for the militants have repeatedly said the groups were simply acting defensively in preparing for Jan. 6. They had genuine concerns, the attorneys said, that leftist counterprotesters might confront them, as they had at earlier pro-Trump rallies. Trumps post came as his efforts to hang onto power were shifting from the courts, where he had little success, to the streets and to challenging the certification process that would play out Jan. 6. A week before his message, thousands of his supporters had arrived in Washington for the second time in two months for a large-scale rally protesting the election results. The event on Dec. 12, 2020, which Trump flew over in Marine One, showed his ability to draw huge crowds of ordinary people in support of his baseless assertions that the election had been stolen. But it also brought together at the same time and place extremist and paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the 1st Amendment Praetorian, who would be present Jan. 6. On Dec. 14, the Electoral College met and officially declared Biden the winner of the election. But behind closed doors, outside advisers to Trump were scrambling to pitch him on plans to seize control of voting machines across the country. The debate over doing so came to a head in a contentious Oval Office meeting that lasted well into the evening on Dec. 18, 2020, and ended with the idea being put aside. Hours later, the president pushed send on his tweet. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th, he wrote at 1:42 a.m. on Dec. 19. Be there, will be wild! Almost at once, shock waves rippled through the right. At 2:26 a.m., the prominent white nationalist Nicholas J. Fuentes wrote on Twitter that he planned to join Trump in Washington on Jan. 6. By that afternoon, the post had been mentioned or amplified by other right-wing figures like Ali Alexander, a high-profile Stop the Steal organizer. But Trumps message arguably landed with the greatest impact among members of the same extremist groups that had been in Washington on Dec. 12. On Dec. 15, Stewart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the Oath Keepers, posted an open letter to Trump urging him to invoke the Insurrection Act. The next day, the national council of the Three Percenters Original group issued a statement, saying their members were standing by to answer the call from our president. Once the call came, early on Dec. 19, the extremists were ecstatic. Trump said Its gonna be wild!!!!!!! Its gonna be wild!!!!!!!, Kelly Meggs, a Florida leader of the Oath Keepers, wrote on Facebook on Dec. 22. He wants us to make it WILD thats what hes saying. He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!! Sir Yes Sir!!! Gentlemen we are heading to DC. That same day, Rhodes did an interview with one of his lieutenants and declared that there would be a massively bloody revolution if Biden took office. On Dec. 23, Rhodes posted another letter saying that tens of thousands of patriot Americans would be in Washington on Jan. 6, and that many would have their mission-critical gear stowed outside the city. The letter said members of the group largely composed of former military and law enforcement personnel might have to take arms in defense of our God-given liberty. By the end of December, court filings say, the Oath Keepers had reserved three hotel rooms in Arlington, Virginia. The rooms were meant as a staging ground for three teams of armed militiamen poised to rush across the river into Washington on Jan. 6 if needed. On New Years Eve, court papers say, one team member from Arizona told Rhodes that his men were ready. Everyone coming has their own technical equipment and knows how to use it, the militiaman wrote in an encrypted message to his leader. By then, prosecutors say, Rhodes seemed set on action. There is no standard political or legal way out of this, he wrote to his group. The Proud Boys who had long been some of Trumps most ardent supporters also viewed his message as a clarion call, prosecutors say. On the same day it was posted, Joseph Biggs, a Proud Boy leader from Florida, sent a private message to the groups chairman, Enrique Tarrio, suggesting that they had to start recruiting better members not losers who wanna drink, as he put it. Lets get radical and get real men, Biggs wrote. The next day, Tarrio established a crew of hand-selected members for rallies that was known internally as the Ministry of Self-Defense, or MOSD, according to an indictment released this month. As MOSD turned its attention to Jan. 6, court papers say, Tarrio set up an encrypted Telegram chat for the group. Two days after Christmas, Charles Donohoe, a Proud Boys leader from North Carolina, posted a message complaining that local officials in Washington appeared to be planning to restrict access to the city on Jan. 6. They want to limit the presence so they can deny Trump has the Peoples support, Donohoe wrote. We cant let them succeed. The next week, another MOSD member posted a message reading, Time to stack those bodies in front of Capitol Hill. A third member raised the prospect of a mob of normies or normal people pushing through police lines and breaking into the Capitol. A few million vs A few hundred coptifa should be enough, he wrote. At the same time, prosecutors say, other Proud Boys were setting up crowdfunding campaigns for travel expenses and protective gear and communications. As the year came to an end, Tarrio posted a message on social media saying that the Proud Boys intended to turn out in record numbers on Jan. 6th but this time with a twist. We will not be wearing our traditional Black and Yellow, he wrote, a reference to the Fred Perry polo shirts favored by the group. We will be incognito and we will be spread across downtown DC in smaller teams. On Dec. 21, the intelligence arm of the Capitol Police issued a 7-page report tracking an increase in activity on TheDonald.win, which made threatening references to potentially trapping lawmakers in the tunnels of the Capitol. The report listed militia groups expected to descend on Capitol Hill for Jan. 6, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. The report also stated that Trump supporters were promoting confronting members of Congress and carrying firearms during the protest. It included more than two dozen comments from posters, including: Forget the tunnels. Get into Capitol Building. Surround every building with a tunnel entrance/exit. They better dig a tunnel all the way to China if they want to escape. And: Bring guns. Its now or never This article originally appeared in The New York Times. The crime first came to light last week, when Ukraines prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said in a Facebook post that a Russian soldier had killed an unarmed civilian and then repeatedly raped his wife. Days later, the White House said it was concerned about emerging reports of sexual violence in Ukraine. Then on Monday night, The Times of London published the womans chilling account. Using the pseudonym Natalya, she told a reporter she had been in her home in a village near the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, when she heard footsteps, and a shot rang out. Moments later, her husband lay dead outside her front door, and two Russian soldiers were at her side, one holding a gun to her head. I shot your husband because he was a Nazi, the gunman told her before he and the other soldier raped her as her 4-year-old son sobbed in a boiler room next door, according to the Times. She said she was later raped a second time by the soldiers and eventually managed to flee to western Ukraine with her son. I could have been silent, but when we got to the police, my husbands sister made me speak up, and there was no going back, she was quoted saying in the Times. I understand that many people who have been hurt would stay silent because they are afraid. Lots of people dont believe terrible things like this happen. A Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov, rejected Venediktovas allegation, telling reporters in Moscow last week that we dont believe it at all. It is a lie, Peskov said, according to the Interfax news agency. Venediktova said a Russian soldier is wanted for arrest on suspicion of violation of the laws and customs of war. Ukrainian officials contend that numerous cases of rape and sexual violence have occurred in the country since Russias invasion began Feb. 24. Maria Mezentseva, a Ukrainian member of parliament, detailed the womans account to Sky News on Sunday and said there were many more victims. She did not provide further details or say how she learned of other assaults but said that she expected them to come to light once the victims were ready to talk. We will definitely not be silent, she said. Rape and other forms of sexual violence, which have accompanied armed conflicts throughout history, can constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. Russian forces and Moscow-backed armed groups have been accused of perpetrating sexual violence in other conflicts most recently involving detainees in eastern Ukraine. This month, Ukraines foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said that he had little confidence that international organizations, like the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, would hold Russian soldiers to account. When Russian soldiers rape women in Ukrainian cities, its difficult, of course, to speak about the efficiency of international law, he said via videolink during an event at Chatham House, a think tank in London. Accounts of rape and sexual violence began to emerge almost immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine, according to Kateryna Busol, an associate with Chatham House and a Ukrainian lawyer who documented allegations of sexual violence following Russias seizure and annexation of Crimea in 2014. These accounts are growing, and we are hearing that they are much more widespread than the one account raised by the inspector general, Busol said in a phone interview from Regensburg, Germany, where she fled from Kyiv in the days following the invasion. What we are hearing by word-of-mouth, from acquaintances of survivors in the country, is horrific, she added. I have had described to me incidents of gang rape, rape in front of children and sexual violence following the killing of family members. Most of the accounts, she said, involved female victims and were coming from cities in Ukraines east and the south occupied by Russian forces. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. A former Fairfax County, Virginia, woman was sentenced to life in prison Monday for killing her mother and sister and staging the scene to look like a murder-suicide as part of a scheme to steal more than $400,000 to pay for a new home. A Fairfax County jury found Megan Hargan, 39, of West Virginia, guilty of two counts of first degree murder nearly five years after police discovered Pamela Hargan, 63, and Helen Hargan, 23, dead from gunshot wounds to the head in the large, yellow home they then shared with Megan. Fairfax County police initially declared that Helen had killed Pamela before turning the gun on herself, shortly after the July 2017 slayings. But during a sprawling 16-month investigation that followed, detectives pieced together clues that pointed to a stunning twist: Megan Hargan had actually killed both. Fairfax County prosecutors unspooled the plot during the 13-day trial, building a case that relied on a range of circumstantial evidence. They contended she impersonated her mother to steal nearly $420,000 to cover the costs of closing on her home, which was slated to occur at the time of the slayings. Megan then shot Pamela and Helen with a .22 caliber rifle to keep them from interfering with her plan. Prosecutors said she staged the scene inside the home, sent fake text messages and made up a false story that painted Helen as the culprit. "It was the defendant who had embarked on a multi-day theft and was caught on the very day she needed the money," said Fairfax County Senior Commonwealth's Attorney Tyler Bezilla during his closing argument. Prosecutors contended the tragedy was set in motion a month before the July 14, 2017 slayings. They told jurors Megan falsely used her mother's bank account to prove she had the money to put a bid on a house. At the time, Megan had just $30 to her name. Megan Hargan was between jobs, but her mother had been a successful vice president of human resources for the government contractor SAIC and had hundreds of thousands of dollars in various bank accounts. Helen was a recent graduate of Southern Methodist University. Prosecutors said in court that Megan Hargan began to feel pressure to come up with the money, so the day before the killings she fraudulently tried to transfer nearly $420,000 from her mother's bank account to her title company. But her plan was foiled when Pamela's bank alerted her and she put a freeze on the funds. The next day the slayings unfolded in part on a series of harrowing phone calls Helen placed from the family home to her boyfriend, Carlos Gutierrez, in Texas. Gutierrez fought to keep his composure as he testified to his final conversations with the woman he planned to marry. The first call came around 11:30 a.m. on July 14, 2017. "She told me her sister had killed her mother," Gutierrez said of Helen. "She sounded frightened and scared. I could hear her mouth trembling and she was sobbing." Gutierrez told jurors Helen said Megan was downstairs "transferring money on the computer." At the same time, prosecutors said investigators later discovered Pamela's computer was accessing her bank account to transfer more than $400,000 to Megan's title company. In a call to Gutierrez that followed, Helen told him he could hear her mother dying, Gutierrez testified. Gutierrez urged Helen to get out of the home, but Helen said she was concerned for Megan's daughter, who was also inside. Other calls followed but eventually Gutierrez couldn't reach Helen. Sometime around 1 p.m., prosecutors said Megan shot Helen. And around 1:15 p.m., Gutierrez said he began to get a series of puzzling texts from Helen's phone that he ultimately concluded Megan had sent, imitating his girlfriend. "Everything is fine," one read. "I'm not mad at Megan." Megan left the home a short time later and Gutierrez called 911 and summoned police. Officers found Pamela Hargan wrapped in a bloody blanket in a mud room, while Helen was dead in an upstairs bathroom with a gun between her legs. Megan told detectives in an interview after the killings that trouble began the day of the killings. She said that Helen was upset because her mother had announced she was canceling plans to build Helen a home because her daughter was planning on having her boyfriend move in with her. Megan said Pamela did not like Gutierrez. The interview was played in court. "I love Helen, but something has really changed in her over the last couple months," Megan Hargan said in the interview. Police announced the slayings were a murder-suicide in the days after the killings, but slowly investigators pulled together evidence suggesting a more sinister story. They found gunshot residue on Megan's hands, the angles the bullets entered Helen's skull were not consistent with a self-inflicted gunshot wound and Megan's DNA was found on the bag for the rifle among other pieces of evidence. Megan Hargan pleaded not guilty to the murder charges and maintains her innocence, even after the verdict."This case is not over," the public defenders representing her wrote in a statement. She will be formally sentenced by a judge on Oct. 28. A judge can decrease the jury's sentence, but not increase it. They argued during the trial police had made the right call at the beginning of the case - Helen had shot her mother and killed herself because she was disgruntled over the loss of the home her mother promised to build for her. They said much of the prosecution's circumstantial evidence was ambiguous and argued it could point to Helen as the killer. They noted Helen had not summoned police to the home after her mother was shot and there was testimony at trial that Helen was emotionally troubled. They mounted only a short defense for Megan. "The idea that Megan would kill Pam and she would kill Helen too is pure fantasy," said public defender Bryan Kennedy in his closing statement. As the verdict was read, two Hargan relatives clutched each other as they sat at the front of the courtroom. Megan could be seen shuddering next to her attorneys. Ashley Hargan, another sister of Helen and Megan, testified during the sentencing portion of the hearing that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the slayings. She said she would only have memories of her sister and mother. "I can't explain how terrifying it is to know that a murderer is in your family," Ashley Hargan told jurors. "I was supposed to be there that weekend." Ukrainian forces have reclaimed control of a few small fronts in the country's north, officials said Monday, as Russia appears to be directing its fiercest attacks on besieged areas in the country's east and south, including Mariupol. As the war grinds into its second month, Ukrainian and Russian delegations are set to meet in Turkey on Tuesday for in-person negotiations. Kremlin officials have delivered icy remarks ahead of the talks, however, dampening prospects of a meaningful outcome. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday said his government should "stop indulging the Ukrainians" in negotiations. In Washington, President Joe Biden defended unscripted comments he made in Poland over the weekend when he said that Russian President Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power." He clarified that he was "expressing moral outrage" and echoed aides who has said his comments didn't represent a change in U.S. policy or a campaign to remove the Russian leader. Western intelligence officials and others say Moscow seems to be changing tactics to focus most intensely on the eastern Donbas region where the invasion began, after attempts to topple capital Kyiv and other key cities have stalled. Ukrainian forces have taken back Trostyanets, a town south of Sumy that is about 20 miles from Ukraine's northeastern border with Russia, a senior U.S. defense official said. Ukrainian officials said the government had regained control of Irpin, a suburb of capital Kyiv. Irpin Mayor Alexandar Markushin said in a video posted Monday that the area had been reclaimed and that "mopping up" was underway. Speaking from inside a vehicle and dressed in a green military-style vest, he told residents of the suburb not to return yet, as the fighting was ongoing. In early March, Markushin described witnessing fatal attacks on citizens, including children, who were attempting to leave Irpin as Russian forces made their initial advance. Ukrainian military officials separately said in a Facebook post that several Russian units had retreated toward Chernobyl in Ukraine's north and over the border into Belarus to refresh their combat ability "as they have suffered significant losses." Despite the modest gains, Ukraine's defense ministry said there was no indication that Russia has fully reversed plans to take over or attack Kyiv. "According to our information, the Russian Federation has not 100% dropped their attempts if not to take at least to besiege the capital of Ukraine," Ukrainian defense minister Sergey Rudskoy told reporters. Rudskoy also gave updates on Russian losses, which could not be independently verified by The Washington Post. He said the Russian army had lost 17,000 people, 1,694 armored vehicles, 586 tanks, 302 artillery systems, 95 rocket systems, 123 aircraft and 66 drones. NATO last week estimated that between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed. The British Defense Ministry said in a daily intelligence briefing that Russian forces have continued to advance in Ukraine's south, with the most substantial gains in the besieged city of Mariupol, but also that some units are still struggling with logistics issues and low morale. The mayor of Mariupol again called for the urgent evacuation of the city's remaining 160,000 civilians, who have gone without basic necessities including food and electricity for weeks under a Russian blockade and fierce shelling. But Ukrainian officials said there would be no immediate efforts to evacuate citizens from besieged cities through humanitarian corridors, citing "possible provocations" by Russian forces. Despite that, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a Telegram post on Monday morning that 586 residents had escaped Mariupol in their own vehicles on Sunday. Ukrainian President President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday said he would like to meet Putin in a neutral country for eventual negotiations, striking a more conciliatory tone ahead of the talks in Turkey on Tuesday. He also said Ukraine is open to dialing back its ambitions to join NATO, an apparent concession to Moscow, on the condition that Russian troops exit the country. The remarks, made in a rare interview with Russian journalists, were swiftly censored in Russia, which has tightened media controls to protect the Kremlin's narrative about the war. Russian officials have played down expectations for the talks. "So far, we cannot and will not talk about progress," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a daily call with journalists on Monday. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Monday joined calls for an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine to pave the way for "serious political negotiations," adding that he was in close contact with countries including Turkey, Qatar, Israel, India, China, France and Germany to discuss mediation plans. Turkey has also called for a reduction in the conflict. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan told Putin in a telephone call on Sunday that a cease-fire and efforts to improve the humanitarian conditions were necessary. The country's proximity to the conflict has not only interrupted trade relations but raised safety alarms. The Turkish and Romanian defense ministries have in recent days worked to neutralize potentially explosive mines amid concerns that live weaponry could drift from Ukraine's southern shores toward its Black Sea neighbors, according to statements by the respective ministries. The Pentagon announced that it is deploying about 240 troops and six Navy electronic warfare aircraft to Germany in an effort to reinforce NATO powers in Eastern Europe. "They are not being deployed to be used against Russian forces in Ukraine," said Pentagon press secretary John Kirby. "They are being deployed completely in keeping with our efforts to bolster NATO's deterrence and defense capabilities." The move nevertheless will probably anger Russia, which has cited NATO's expansion in Europe as a pressure point in its decision to invade Ukraine. Kirby said the planes would not be used to jam Russian communications but would help bolster security in Eastern Europe. Analysts say Biden's comment over the weekend calling for Putin to be ousted also will probably worsen tensions and reaffirm anti-U.S. narratives in Moscow. Biden insisted on Monday that he was not "walking anything back" and would make no apologies. But he also reiterated that he is not calling for regime change in Moscow. Since the invasion began, more than 3.8 million Ukrainians have fled the country into the European Union - over half of them children, according to E.U. officials. Most of the refugees have flowed into neighboring countries, primarily Poland, with about 1 million traveling to other countries across the bloc, Ylva Johansson, the E.U. commissioner for home affairs, said at a news conference in Brussels on Monday. The exits from Ukraine have slowed, however, with daily arrivals shrinking from a peak of 100,000 a day to about 40,000, Johansson said. Inside Russia, a battle over the use of foreign social media outlets continued Monday, amid Moscow's crackdown on sites that report information outside the Kremlin's official narrative. A Russian court ruled that Facebook and Instagram users who don't violate national laws can continue to use the sites, according to state-owned RIA news, despite the Kremlin earlier designating U.S. parent company Meta Platforms as an "extremist" organization. Also Monday, the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta said it was suspending operations for the duration of the conflict. The outlet - edited by Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov - was the last independent news organization operating inside Russia, which has outlawed most references to the war in Ukraine. - - - The Washington Post's Robyn Dixon and Mary Ilyushina in Riga, Latvia; Emily Rauhala in Brussels; Annabelle Timsit, Kareem Fahim and Zeynep Karatas in Istanbul; and Julian Mark, Brittany Shammas and Maite Fernandez in Washington contributed to this report. ROHNERT PARK (BCN) A teenager who has been missing for over two weeks from Rohnert Park has been added to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's database. Eloise Urbanski, 17, was last seen at Technology High School at 550 Bonnie Ave. in Rohnert Park on March 9 at 10:15 a.m., according to the Polly Klaas Foundation. Urbanski is Caucasian, 5 foot 6 inches tall, weighs 180 pounds, and has blue eyes and piercings on her lip and nose. A spokesperson for the Cotati Police Department said Urbanski was last seen wearing a green and black hooded sweatshirt and black sweatpants. Police think she could have been heading for San Francisco. Anyone with any information is encouraged to contact the Cotati Police Department at (707) 792-4611, the Rohnert Park Public Safety Department at (707) 584-2600 or any local law enforcement. Copyright 2022 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area. BART will be able to maintain its current service level through at least mid-2025 due to federal emergency funds, even if its ridership remains flat, according to the transit agency's budget officials. While the transit agency's long-term financial outlook remains bleak, BART budget officials said Thursday that a recent allocation of $271 million in federal relief funding will push the agency's projected fiscal cliff from mid-2024 to September 2025. BART has received some $1.5 billion in federal relief funds since the COVID-19 pandemic began. BART budget officials said last month that the agency was using roughly $25 million per month from that relief funding pool to maintain its current operating schedule and staff size. A teenager who has been missing for over two weeks from Rohnert Park has been added to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's database. Eloise Urbanski, 17, was last seen March 9 at 10:15 a.m. at Technology High School at 550 Bonnie Ave. in Rohnert Park, according to the Polly Klaas Foundation. Urbanski is Caucasian, 5 feet, 6 inches tall, weighs 180 pounds, and has blue eyes and piercings on her lip and nose. A spokesperson for the Cotati Police Department said Urbanski was last seen wearing a green and black hooded sweatshirt and black sweatpants. Police think she could have been heading for San Francisco. President Joe Biden has earmarked an additional $200 million for the Silicon Valley BART Extension Phase II in his upcoming proposed budget, a spokesperson for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority announced on Monday. The project will extend BART alignment from the North San Jose Berryessa station through downtown San Jose to Santa Clara, adding four more stations and six more miles of track, the agency said. This will be the third allocation of funds for the project after the Federal Transit Authority authorized $125 million in 2019 and another $100 million in 2021. March used to be considered a relatively safe month for snake-averse hikers. Not anymore. By mid-month, photos of wild snakes -- especially rattlesnakes -- were showing up on social media pages of both hikers and non-hikers in the Bay Area. Not all of the photos were taken in far-flung wilderness areas; some were in suburban neighborhoods and at least one was near downtown Walnut Creek. It's California. We live with and around wild animals. But snakes usually wait until April or May to start showing up regularly. Climate change and California's historic drought - which some experts say will be more of a regular thing for the state - are changing how plants and animals do their business. The FBI and the Central County SWAT team have arrested a man on suspicion of an attempted murder that occurred in 2020, the Walnut Creek Police Department announced Monday. Anthony Hamid, 22, was taken into custody on March 22 after a warrant was issued for his arrest in unincorporated Walnut Creek, police said. The victim was in his vehicle at Homestead Avenue and Ygnacio Vallejo Road on July 6, 2020, at about 4:56 p.m. when another person walked up to the vehicle and opened fire with a handgun, police reported. The victim was taken to a hospital and survived his injuries. The Contra Costa District Attorney's Office has charged Hamid with attempted murder, shooting at an occupied vehicle, and two enhancements. He remains in custody awaiting trial on $3.25 million bail, police said. The San Francisco office of the FBI an investigation involving the compromise of computer networks, the agency announced on Monday. On March 21, individuals from a group identifying themselves as "Lapsus$" posted on social media and alleged to have stolen source codes from a number of US-based tech companies. Lapsus$ took credit for both the theft and dissemination of proprietary data that they claim to have illegally obtained, FBI officials said. The FBI is attempting to identify the individuals involved in Lapsus$. Anyone with information about this group is encouraged to contact the San Francisco FBI Office at (415) 553-7400 or try an FBI field office in their area. A Monterey County jury convicted a former correctional officer for multiple charges in connection with an assault of a police officer in a 2019 incident at the Concours d'Elegance car show in Pebble Beach. Robert Willis Davis, 61, was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon on a peace officer, escape after arrest and resisting arrest, according to a news release Monday from Monterey County District Attorney Jeannine M. Pacioni. Davis was working as a chauffeur at the event and was driving the wrong way on a one-way street when police advised him to stop his vehicle. Despite being told repeatedly to stop, Davis kept driving and proceeded to accelerate toward oncoming vehicles, forcing off the roadway a golf cart driven by a young person participating in a police explorer program, according to the news release. Davis kept accelerating directly at Merced Police Officer Nathaniel McKinnon, who had drawn his weapon in response to the driver's refusal to stop. Davis's vehicle clipped McKinnon as it passed him. Two Monterey County Sheriff's commanders pursued Davis and took him into custody, but Davis managed to escape from a police vehicle and, while handcuffed, rolled across a fairway before he was placed back into custody, according to the news release. A Fremont man has been indicted on federal charges for insider trading, the Northern District of California Department of Justice announced on Monday. Dileep Kumar Reddy Kamujula, 35, is charged with securities fraud in connection with alleged illegal securities trading based on inside information obtained from an employee of the San Francisco-based cloud communications company Twilio, US attorney Stephanie M. Hinds and FBI special agent Timothy M. Stone said. Hinds alleges that Kamujula "schemed" to "profit on the confidential information of a ... public company to gain an illegal edge in the stock market" in the spring of 2020. According to the announcement, Kamujula is charged with two counts of violating the Securities and Exchange Act and a forfeiture allegation. He is facing a maximum term in prison of 45 years and more than $5 million in possible fines. The National Weather Service forecast Tuesday for the San Francisco Bay Area calls for possible lingering sprinkles and morning fog. Highs will be in the 60s and overnight lows in the 40s. The outlook for the next seven days is dry weather and generally seasonable temperatures with a slight warmup possible by the middle of next week. Copyright 2022 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area. Copyright 2022 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reportedly plans to talk to North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn about the freshman congressman's recent comments regarding some of his colleagues. During a recent podcast appearance, Cawthorn compared Washington D.C. to the Netflix hit "House of Cards" and accused lawmakers of... things. "All these people, a lot of them that I've looked up to through my life, I've always paid attention to politics," Cawthorn said. "Then all of a sudden you get invited: 'We're going to have a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come.' What did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize they're asking you to come to an orgy... Some of the people leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you. And it's like, this is wild." Politico congressional reporter Olivia Beavers reported that during a closed-door meeting among House Republicans Tuesday, several members were "upset" about Cawthorn's remarks which they characterized as false and pressed McCarthy to take action to address the incident. "Hear Rep. Steve Womack stood up, said he hardly ever stands to talk, he has to say something about this bc now he is getting Qs about which members partaking in orgies after Cawthorn suggested they are happening in DC along w/ the use of cocaine," Beavers tweeted. "Told Cawthorn not there this am." J. Scott Applewhite/AP CNN reporter Melanie Zanona subsequently reported that "members said that if [Cawthorn's remarks are] true, he needs to name names because otherwise it unfairly maligns the entire institution." McCarthy, who hails from Bakersfield, reportedly promised to address the matter with Cawthorn. It's not the first time McCarthy has allegedly had a testy meeting with his caucus. In November, McCarthy reportedly got into a "heated exchange" with Texas Rep. Chip Roy over 13 Republicans voting for a bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law by President Joe Biden. At that same meeting, McCarthy had to address Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar tweeting an anime video that depicted him killing New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Cawthorn's comments have received widespread media attention. Some Democrats have also seized on the remarks, with California Rep. Ted Lieu tweeting, "Based on this interview of GOP Rep Madison Cawthorn, I just have to say, wow, the @HouseGOP Caucus is much wilder than I thought." An overview of the dialogue (Photo: VNA) Both sides discussed cooperation and specific measures to develop the Vietnam-UK strategic partnership in a substantive and effective manner, especially in politics-diplomacy, trade-investment, climate change response and sustainable development, education-training, science-technology, security-defence, and people-to-people exchange. They affirmed that the Vietnam-UK strategic partnership is growing in line with the spirit of the two countries' Joint Declaration on strategic partnership released in September 2020. As Covid-19 has been being put under control in both countries, the two sides agreed to increase the exchange of delegations at levels and resume cooperation mechanisms such as policy dialogue at deputy defence ministerial level and the Vietnam-UK Joint Economic and Trade Committee (JETCO) in an early date. They will work closely together to organise activities to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam-UK diplomatic relations in 2023, including trade, investment and tourism promotion activities, and cultural and people-to-people exchange events. Hieu underlined Vietnams determination to realise its commitments given at the COP26, saying that the country is preparing to carry out many solutions to curb greenhouse gas emissions using national resources and the support from the international community. He asked for the UKs assistance in accessing financial resources to help Vietnam realise the commitments. Milling affirmed that the UK stands ready to accompany Vietnam in implementing the commitments with support for the country in emission mitigation and energy transformation. Both sides shared their delight at economic achievements brought about from the UK-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (UKVFTA) that has taken effect for over one year, with two-way trade reaching US$6.6 billion. With 452 FDI projects worth over $4 billion, the UK is the 15th largest out of 140 countries and territories investing in Vietnam. Both countries pledged to continue to work closely to make full use of opportunities generated from the UKVFTA, thus making a breakthrough in trade and investment partnership and expanding cooperation in digital economy, energy transformation, green finance, infrastructure development, and finance-banking. The Vietnamese deputy FM thanked the UK Government for providing Covid-19 vaccines and medical supplies for Vietnam. Hieu suggested that the UK continue helping Vietnam in developing pharmaceutical industry and transferring Covid-19 vaccine production technology, while increasing training cooperation programmes, creating favourable conditions for Vietnamese students in the UK and implementing science research projects within the Newton Vietnam Programme funded by the British Government. Regarding defence cooperation, the two sides welcomed positive developments in bilateral collaboration in recent times, which were marked by the Vietnam visit by British Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace in July 2021 and the effectively implementation of the Vietnam-UK defence policy dialogue mechanism. They agreed to continue to increase defence delegation exchanges and enhance capacity for Vietnamese officers joining UN peacekeeping operations. In the field of security, the two countries concurred to continue to coordinate closely in the areas of migration, entry-exit, mutual judicial assistance, extradition, organised and high-tech crime prevention, human trafficking combat as well as cooperation in personnel training and capacity improvement. Affirming that the UK considers Vietnam an important partner in the region in the context where the European country is adjusting its policy towards stronger partnership with the IndoPacific region, Milling thanked Vietnam for supporting the UK to become a full dialogue partner of ASEAN as well as during negotiations for the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). The two countries agreed to continue collaborating closely at multilateral forums and regional cooperation mechanisms. Both sides also discussed a number of international and regional issues of shared concern, underlining the significance of ensuring aviation and maritime freedom, security and peace in the East Sea. VNA The project aims at systematically monitoring the income and property of all citizens, businesses, organizations for the sake of modernization and digitalization of this task; the establishment of IT infrastructure, regulations and procedures to systemize, update, store, protect, and timely, accurately provide conclusions or declarations on properties, incomes, related data in accordance with legal regulations on corruption prevention and control. From 2022-2023, the mechanism to operate, manage, and exploit this national database will be completed. In the next two years, data on incomes and properties will be digitized and integrated to the national database controlled and managed by the Government inspection office. In 2025, these data will then be used to replace 50 percent of the hard copy to support in individuals, businesses, and organizations in declaration and monitoring tasks. After 2025, 100 percent of the data will be digitized. This valuable database consists of information on property, income declaration, verification conclusion, other data related to legal property and income control. By Phan Thao Translated by Yen Nhi India aspires to become the largest startup ecosystem in the world, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said. Addressing a session on "Gateway to Growth - Roundtable on Indian Startup Ecosystem" in Abu Dhabi, he said: "Today we are the third largest startup ecosystem, but our aspiration is to be the world's number one startup destination," as per an official statement. "The startup bug has caught India's imagination. The entire innovation ecosystem that the startup industry represents is giving a new direction, new momentum to India," he said, as per the Commerce and Industry Ministry statement. According to Goyal, India offers one of the best ecosystems for startups with a special 'jugalbandi', or blend between investors and entrepreneurs to get a balanced outcome and achieve a win-win solution for all. "I have seen tremendous response from the Dubai Expo where our startups have got the opportunity to raise finances, sign MoUs and get angel investments. All these aspects will help strengthen India's strong bond of friendship with the UAE." The Minister also said that startup need to experiment, fail and learn from their experiences. "I would urge all of you from the startup world to go extra mile and take the startup story to all the remote places, villages, small towns, northeastern India and other regions," he added. On the government's role in promoting startups, he said that India aims to provide a level playing field and the best business ecosystem. "We have recently finalised the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with the UAE, which is expected to further enhance bilateral trade, B2B engagement and explore attractive investment opportunities. "I can assure you that we will take this partnership to newer heights in the areas of sustainability, aerospace, space technology, connectivity, AI, data analytics, 5G, Metaverse, etc. We look forward to leveraging each other's offerings and expertise," he said. In addition, Goyal said that the UAE-India partnership is destined to play an important role in the global economy and in ensuring a better future for billions of people around the world. "This will be a defining partnership for the 21st century." An Indian couple became the countrys first husband and wife to build their respective startups into enterprises with at least $1 billion valuation, also known as unicorns. Oxyzo Financial Services, a digital lending startup co-founded by Ruchi Kalra, said on Wednesday it hit the milestone with its maiden fundraising round of $200 million led by Alpha Wave Global, Tiger Global Management, Norwest Venture Partners and others. Less than a year earlier, her husband Asish Mohapatras OfBusiness reached the same valuation after backing from SoftBank Group Corp. and others. Kalra, 38, and Mohapatra, 41, are alums of Indian Institute of Technology and met while working at McKinsey & Co. Both startups are profitable, an unusual feat for young growth companies. Kalra is the CEO of Oxyzo while Mohapatra is the CEO at OfBusiness. Matrix Partners and Creation Investments also invested in Oxyzo in what is one of the largest Series A rounds in Indias startup industry. Oxyzo, a blend of the words oxygen and ozone, was founded by Kalra, Mohapatra and three others in 2017 as an offshoot of the couples first startup, OfBusiness, which they started along with three others in early 2016. Oxyzo uses technology to crunch data and provide purchase financing to businesses, giving out cash-flow based loans in a credit-starved country where small and medium businesses struggle to get working capital. OfBusiness, formally known as OFB Tech Pvt., supplies bulk raw materials such as steel, diesel, food grains and industrial chemicals to small and medium-sized businesses. Its valuation surpassed $1 billion when SoftBank and others invested in April last year, according to Mohapatra. In December, the startups valuation reached nearly $5 billion as SoftBank and others put more money into it, he said via phone. Kalra, who was a partner at McKinsey, left the firm to join entrepreneurial forces with her husband, who exited venture-capital company Matrix. We both had an itch to go out and build something, she said. The two startups run separately with different offices and teams, Kalra said. However, they target the same industries such as manufacturing and infrastructure sub-contracting. Both are based in Gurgaon, in the suburbs of New Delhi. Oxyzo has more than 500 employees and a data warehouse specializing in supply chain analytics. It has disbursed over $2 billion in loans and has been profitable since its inception. In the statement, investor Norwest described Kalra as the countrys first female founder in India of a profitable, fintech unicorn. To continue, please log in, or sign up for a new account. We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription. A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much! Drinks retailing giant Dan Murphys is hoping a new experimental zero alcohol bar in Melbourne will convince a new cohort of athleisure-wearing wine mums to pick booze-free alternatives as the no-alcohol grog market continues to boom. On Tuesday, the ASX-listed retailer opened the doors of its new ZERO% bar in the well-heeled suburb of Hampton in Melbournes south, where customers will be able to drink a selection of zero-to-low alcohol beer, wine and spirits in a traditional bar setting. Dan Murphys Managing Director Alex Freudmann at the companys new zero alcohol bar in Hampton. Credit:Eddie Jim Dan Murphys managing director, Alex Freudmann, told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald he was hopeful the bar would give customers who were curious about low-alcohol options a chance to try a glass. People who havent yet tried a non-alcoholic version of their favourite drink are a bit nervous about buying a whole bottle, so if they can buy a glass and consume it in a social environment, it makes it more accessible, he said. Hotel owner and developer Pro-invest Group has teamed up with Next Story Group to create a new hotel management company with a foundation hotel portfolio of seven brands. It comes at the time when the hard-hit hospitality sector is seeing growth in tourism for the first time in two years, after the global pandemic forced national and international borders to close. Under the scheme, the newly created Vista Hospitality Group will introduce a one-stop-shop approach for the sector, offering services from development planning and asset management, franchising and revenue generation modelling right through to day-to-day hotel operations tailored for hotel owners and partners. The new company will combine hotel brands from each party to immediately offer a portfolio including Next, Ink, Sage and Country Comfort hotels, plus Sebel, voco and Hotel Indigo brands. So was it the controversies during Oscar season or the times? Had The Power of the Dog been over-praised? Certainly actor Sam Elliotts wild view that Campion should not have made a piece of shit and and asking What the f--- does this woman from down there know about the American West? did not help. But Campion seemed to deftly defuse the issue when she said Elliott was being a B-I-T-C-H adding: Plus hes not a cowboy, hes an actor. Likely more damaging was Campions awkward reference to the Williams sisters not playing against the guys while I have to while accepting the Critics Choice Award for best director. While she quickly apologised, she was accused of white feminism and the sisters are so revered that it could have turned off some voters. Another factor is that The Power of the Dog played brilliantly to audiences in cinemas but seemed less impressive on a smaller screen at home, where the vast majority of Oscar voters would have watched it. It was not just losing the epic landscapes but the slow-burn pacing and subtle visual plot twists were often missed. A brilliant performance: Kodi Smit-McPhee arrives at the awards. Credit:Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP CODA, the surprise best picture winner, was much more suited to both the small screen and the Oscars preferential voting system than a challenging Western. It is exactly the kind of heartwarming film that everyone has been craving after two years of the pandemic and war raging in Ukraine. It also had an issue worth supporting respect for the deaf community and charming performances all around. And while Smit-McPhee was exceptional as a fey young medical student in The Power of the Dog, Troy Kotsur, who played a charismatic deaf fisherman in CODA, was warm and funny accepting other awards. Oscar voters wanted another charming signed speech. The narrative that this was Will Smiths year to finally be rewarded with best actor for King Richard sidelining Cumberbatch did not go as well as expected. Jesse Plemons, left, and Kirsten Dunst in a scene from The Power of the Dog. Credit:AP There is also a strong sense that when Oscar voters got around to watching The Power of the Dog, they expected a masterpiece so were disappointed. That became apparent in an always-entertaining series that runs in The Hollywood Reporter just before the Oscars every year, where anonymous voters give their brutally honest opinion of the films in contention. While it often reveals them as self-interested philistines, there were some revealing takes this year. A producer thought The Power of the Dog was beautifully acted, photographed and, in a lot of ways, directed, but its just too long, with some really dull moments. A voter from the short films and feature animation branch thought The Power of the Dog was too slow and boring and was mystified why people thought it was so amazing. Its also not a storyline that we havent seen a million times before the repressed angry gay cowboy who is hurtful to everyone else because he cant deal with his own feelings and the ending was a little confusing, the voter said. Benedict Cumberbatch, who was up for best actor, and Sophie Hunter arrive at the Oscars. Credit:AP A director understood The Power of the Dogs artistic merits but also thought it was slow and did not think the topic of repressed homosexuality was original or daring. Im not quite in the Sam Elliott camp ... but I do agree with him that it didnt have the aura of an authentic western, the director said. What Benedict Cumberbatch is to an authentic cowboy, New Zealand is to Montana it just doesnt add up. The topography is off, the extras are off and Im just kind of surprised that it has been the frontrunner up until now. And an actor hatedthe Dog movie, except for the cinematography. Loading It was so predictable and not subtle you knew right away that Benedict Cumberbatch was a latent homosexual, the brother was a wimp and the son was a little demented unlike Brokeback Mountain, where the characters were so finely developed and interesting, the actor said. In a way, I understood what Sam Elliott meant. Four takes, all negative based on the idea that The Power of the Dog felt slow watching at home. And two voters were reacting to Elliotts savage comments. At first, when Scottish comedian Fern Brady saw Chris Rock slapped on the Oscars stage over a joke, she admits feeling a little sympathy for the slapper Will Smith: Because maybe his wifes been crying about being bald. But the feeling didnt last long. They are really rich. She could afford to buy a wig made of gold. Scottish comedian Fern Brady at the launch of the 2022 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Credit:Chris Hopkins And jokes aside, the incident worries her, and others who make their living doing comedy on stages. Tuesdays launch of this years Melbourne International Comedy Festival was a joyous celebration of a return to stage after long, hard pandemic years without much work. They really want to get back on the job. But they also really want it to be safe. I was talking about this with other comedians this morning, says Brady. What a lot of comedians are saying is [they worry the attack has] basically legitimised being able to get up and punch us. Thorn was 16 when she began playing harmonica alongside her sister Donna on guitar, forming the bluesy duo Colours while still in high school. In 1992 Josh Cunningham joined to make the Waifs, beginning a slow, steady rise to success (their biggest hit, London Still, and most successful album, Up All Night, came a decade later). Im heading into my 50s in the next couple of years and Ive been in a band thats been going for 30 years, and I felt like stepping outside of that a little bit. Donna and Josh feel the same, it just feels like the right time to try some other things we enjoy, she explains as she sits looking out over Cosy Corner Beach on the coast of Western Australia. Thorn, 48, has transformed into ThornBird, infusing heartache, ecstasy and adventure into 12 country-folk songs. It was now or never, she says. In December 2018, Thorn, her husband and their three boys (aged 17, 16 and 10) left their home of 12 years in the wild canyons of Utah to return to a one-room beach shack in Cosy Corner, 29 kilometres west of her birthplace of Albany. Her family used to spend three months a year on the beach there, fishing and swimming. We packed our bags as a family and came to Australia because my struggle was that [Utah] wasnt LA or Nashville. There were very limited musical connections and I was commuting to Australia regularly, which is such a long way to commute we had a loose plan to stay 12 to 18 months and see if we were ready to move back. They were ready to board the plane back to Utah, having packed their belongings and motorbikes ready to ship, when COVID-19 forced an about-turn. Three years later, they have renovated that beach shack into a home and Thorn is about to set off on tour with the album shed begun working on in Utah as far back as 2008. I have the very line in a song Ive written she ended up in Utah, not even New York or LA. Thats where my husband is from, thats where we met. When he suggested we move there, we just threw it out into the universe, you know? When they came across a farm in the middle of nowhere, Thorn recalls, I drew a very deep breath in and went OK, Im up for an adventure, lets do this. That was the best 12 years of my life, I reckon. They may be able to mimic the sounds of barking dogs, car alarms, kookaburras and parrots, while their courtship dances have garnered worldwide attention, but the superb lyrebird has been hiding a talent: a post-mating dance. Researchers from the University of Wollongongs School of Earth, Atmospheric and Life Sciences spotted the new post-courtship moves using hidden cameras to spy on the birds in the Blue Mountains and in Victorias national parks. The team found that after mating the male birds tossed their tail over their head and made regular clicking noises as they danced away from the females. Superb lyrebirds live in the wet forests of south-east Australia and are known for their ability to mimic almost any sound. During the breeding season, each male builds and defends a clustered set of mounds: circular patches on the forest floor that function like a stage for the males sophisticated song and dance displays. Lead author Dr Anastasia Dalziell said the new research was fairly surprising given how well-studied the lyrebirds were. She said while more research was needed, there could be a number of evolutionary explanations for the behaviour. Mullumbimby resident Nitya Ellemor used to love the sound of rain. But as rain fell on Monday night, she felt like crying and her whole body tensed up. All she could think of was floodwaters inundating her street in the middle of the night without warning four weeks ago. On that occasion, she made it out with the essentials: a phone, charger and spare clothes. She spent days sheltering with three strangers and two dogs in a house, where they stood guard for two-hour shifts at night and watched as the water continued to climb. Mullumbimby resident Nitya Ellemor used to love the sound of rainfall, but now the floods are all she can think about. Credit:Natalie Grono When they tried to evacuate, they were told there was no help. Their best bet was to wave down anyone who passed by in a boat. KAMPONG SPEU, Cambodia, March 28 (Xinhua) -- The construction work of a China-funded auditorium building began at the Army Institute here in Phnom Sruoch district on Monday. Vong Pisen, commander-in-chief of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, and Colonel Zhu Shuaifei, deputy military attache of the Chinese Embassy to Cambodia, presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for the five-story building, which was attended by hundreds of military students and teachers. Speaking at the event, Pisen thanked China for its assistance to Cambodia's socio-economic development, saying the building caters to Cambodia's need for a better training facility. "When completed, this auditorium building will be an important venue for training human resources in the national defense," he added. Zhu said the building will not only provide a better training facility for military students, but also contribute to further deepening the fraternal friendship between the two armies. Eight evacuation orders and flood warnings affecting 14,455 residents are currently in place, and weather warning issued for the Northern Rivers, parts of the Northern Tablelands and the Mid North Coast. Residents in Lismores CBD were told to leave the area by 4pm on Tuesday, while those at Corakis Riverside Caravan Park have been told to evacuate by 7pm. Minister for Emergency Services and Resilience and Minister for Flood Recovery Steph Cooke said it was a rapidly evolving weather and flooding situation and urged people in the Northern Rivers and the Mid North Coast to heed the warnings of emergency services. Multiple evacuation orders have been issued for the flood-affected Northern Rivers region, including in Lismores CBD and Coraki, with residents urged to leave in the coming hours. Mullumbimby resident Nitya Ellemor used to love the sound of rain. But last night, as the rain fell, she felt like crying and her whole body tensed up. All she could think about is what happened four weeks ago, when in the middle of the night four weeks ago and with no warning, Ms Ellemors entire street went under. She made it out with just the essentials: a phone, charger and some spare clothes. She spent days sheltering with three other strangers and two dogs in a house, where they rotated two-hour shifts at night and watched as the water continued to climb. When they tried to evacuate they were told there was no help. Their best bet was to wave down whatever help floated past. On Monday night, as soon as word came through that heavy rain and flooding could impact the region, Ms Ellemor and her son made the decision to leave. While theyve returned home in daylight, theyre not sure if they will stay the night. I am on edge, I dont know what tonight is going to bring, she said. We just went through this in 2017, 2022 and a month later we are preparing for it again. What does that say about the way we live on this earth?. Ernie Carroll, the creator of beloved Hey Hey Its Saturday character, Ossie Ostrich has died, aged 92. Daryl Somers announced Mr Carrolls death on the shows Facebook page on Wednesday evening, and expressed his gratitude for Mr Carrolls guidance during the early stages of his career. It is with overwhelming sadness I announce the passing of my beloved friend and mentor Ernie Carroll, the post said. Ernie Carroll creator Ossie Ostrich has died. Credit:Fairfax Media Ernie was a pioneer of television starting back in the 50s, coming from a radio background to GTV9 when television was in its infancy. He was a man of few words with a quiet countenance but when he did speak he imparted great wisdom... I loved him very much. Rest in peace Ern. Forever in my heart. Mr Somers said Carroll has died of natural causes in a Melbourne retirement village. Three newspapers being sued for defamation by war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith say the evidence of a former soldier dubbed Person 66 may be a key to winning the case, as a Federal Court judge considers whether to compel the man to testify about an alleged murder. Person 66, a former Special Air Service soldier whose identity cannot be revealed for national security reasons, appeared in the Federal Court witness box on Monday and objected to giving evidence about his potential involvement in missions in Afghanistan in 2012 with Mr Roberts-Smith. Ben Roberts-Smith outside the Federal Court earlier this month. Credit:Edwina Pickles His barrister, Jack Tracey, told the court on Tuesday that his clients evidence may involve self-incrimination of the gravest kind in relation to an alleged murder in 2012 in an area of Afghanistan called Siah Chow. The former SAS soldier was subpoenaed by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times to give evidence in Mr Roberts-Smiths defamation case against the mastheads. The Coalition has now hit the punchline in the old Irish joke where a local is asked by a stranger how to get to Dublin. Well, I wouldnt start from here, comes the answer. Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen With the budget delivered the federal election must be called within a fortnight and, at the latest, it will be run and done within 52 days. Time is rapidly running out for a government trailing badly in the polls and the task Scott Morrison faces is neatly summed in a mnemonic sequence recited by a shadow minister: one, five, seven. Lose one seat to Labor and the Coalition falls into minority, lose five and Labor wins the parliamentary bargain for power, lose seven and Labor governs in majority. Sydneysiders living in beachside homes have been urged to prepare for heavy rainfall and gusty winds in the coming days as the weather system wreaking havoc across northern NSW moves south. Sydney recorded 63 millimetres of rain since 9pm on Monday and the majority of the citys dams are full and overflowing. Sydneys main water supply, Warragamba Dam, is spilling at 19 gigalitres a day, compared with 350-400 gigalitres a day during the floods earlier in March. Parts of the Northern Rivers were forced to evacuate on Tuesday morning after six-hour of rainfall totalling up to 300mm were forecast in the area. Lismore mayor Steve Krieg described the community as exhausted on Tuesday, following flooding earlier this month in south-east Queensland and northern NSW which killed 22 people. Police have charged one man and are looking for six others after a man was left with stab wounds when a fight broke out in the early hours of Monday morning at a crowded Darling Harbour venue. Officers were called to the venue at Cockle Bay Wharf about 1.30am to disperse a large crowd outside a cafe that had reached capacity, NSW Police said in a statement on Tuesday. NSW Police are seeking to speak with six men captured on CCTV after a brawl at a Darling Harbour premises, in which a man was stabbed. While officers were dealing with the crowd, they were told a fight had broken out between a large group of men inside the venue about 2am. The officers were able to break up the brawl using pepper spray, but found a 21-year-old man had suffered stab wounds during the melee. To survive the isolation of lockdowns in my nursing home, I revisited the old Australian writers, says Barry Ryan of Georges Hall. I came across a shingle-splitters hut in the first few pages and similar Australianisms kept bobbing up, taking me back to my early years (I am 95). What a topic for the Column 8 intelligentsia. Has the governess gone the way of the sundowner and the cocky? How long is the long paddock these days? Do they still make blucher boots and can anyone still make a cabbage-tree hat? The picker-upper still has a job, you can buy a swingletree and the lazy coots are still leaving the slip rails down, but does anyone still hump the bluey? Terry Gibbs (C8) was right. Not wishing to start a war or anything, but true connoisseurs of Worcestershire sauce (C8) use Lea and Perrins, not Holbrooks; the latter is fit only for boarding school food, insists Dave Horsfall of North Gosford. Speaking of Tooleybuc (C8). In 1967, as a young high school teacher, I was posted to Tooleybuc Central School, writes Valerie Little of Tathra. My home was in Sydney and my mother was aghast when I told her. Tooleybuc! she gasped, Thats out in the desert, halfway across the country, isolated, in the middle of nowhere. Well never see you. Which was almost a correct prediction as the local school and town community (100 people) welcomed me so well, I fell in love with the school, the town and married a local Goodnight lad. Since then, we have moved around a bit, but I can assure Grannys readers, Tooleybuc is still a very welcoming town and worth a visit. Back on the fish puns (C8) already? Wahoo! declares Chris Roylance of Paddington. Granny has great concerns regarding an outbreak of foot and mouth in the household of Christine Tracey of Worrowing Heights: I bought some new shoes on Monday. On the inside of the shoebox lid was a sticker stating SUPER CLEAN Do not eat. My dilemma is this: Do I not eat the box or do I not eat the contents? I have always fancied a shoe sandwich. At least 80,000 more students than usual were absent from public schools last week as COVID-19 cases soared, while sick and isolating staff left many principals struggling to find enough teachers to cover classes. On Friday three public schools introduced so-called circuit-breaker restrictions, such as reinstating mandatory masks, to curb the spread of the virus; by Monday that number had grown to 23, while another 17 had sent a cohort home for remote learning. Ilina Lovelys children Natasha, 11, and Spencer, nine, are both at home after Natasha caught COVID-19 for a second time. Spencer, pictured behind his mother, said he found his first day of isolation on Tuesday very boring. Credit:Flavio Brancaleone Two weeks ago, the attendance rate at public schools was 86 per cent, compared with almost 92 per cent in the same period last year, which is around the usual rate. That fell to 80 per cent last week. A spokesman for the NSW Department of Education said the student attendance rate was 90 per cent for the same week in 2021. There are 823,000 students at NSW public schools. The department has deployed more than 350 staff from head office into schools, and more than 2000 final-year university students have been granted interim teaching approval for casual work, the spokesman said. Gee, hasnt the past 1000 years passed quickly? Bill White, South Grafton A bitter pill, perhaps, but lack of name pain a relief Mis-pronounced names? (Letters, March 29). Im often referred to as Miss/Ms/Mrs Panadol. Im pleased to say that it doesnt cause me pain. Rose Panidis, Graceville (Qld) My full given first name is Radmila, but I have been called Mila since childhood. When I tell people my name, a common response is, And what is your first name? thinking I had said the surname Miller. Maybe I started the trend of naming baby girls Mila, which is of Slavic origin and means gracious or dear, as I arrived in Australia over 70 years ago. The name is now in the top 100 baby girls names in Australia. Mila Yates, Valentine My unofficial last name seems to be as in paints, since thats what everyone says after Ive spelt it out yet again. And the first syllable is said torb, not taob. Andrew Taubman, Queens Park Ive long lost count of the times Ive seen my surname written minus the c. Same for and here he is in the flesh remarks. At the school I went to, we occasionally sang a hymn with the line the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, prompting grinning turned heads from in front and pokes in the back. Now in my 70s, Im used to it all. Daniel Flesch, Bellingen In the early 70s, I got a job with the Sydney Water Board, where Wheelbarrow was the name you copped if yours wasnt Anglo-Saxon or was more than two syllables. Anthony Malivanek, Bray Park If the double-barrelled name is not enough, when I mention hyphen, some people hesitate, not sure what to use. Some use commas, explanation marks, or a back or forward slash. Ive even been asked to spell hyphen. Peter Cowan-Lunn, Wentworth Falls One would think it would be my surname that causes difficulty, but I get Lyn, Lynne, Linda, Lynette, and sometimes Lynn. Once, when spelling my name out to someone, I was even asked, Are you sure? Lynn Rattray, West Pennant Hills Spare a thought for Irish and Islander people while you are at it. For a time, I did not exist, according to one government department, because its system did not take account of the apostrophe, not to mention not being allowed to have two capitals in a surname. Chris ORourke, Bathurst Having spent almost 75 years spelling out my surname, I am amazed at some of the alternate spellings. As a child, I was sent to pay our bill at the newsagent run by an Italian family. After looking through his ledger, he suddenly declared, Its Poccocolo, your name is too hard to pronounce. Peter Pocock, Hornsby Tax cuts let wealthy off lightly Tax cuts seem to be the go-to and an easy sell for a government trying to protect those who run aged care facilities and other enterprises farmed out to the private sector (Long-term debt recovery needed, not fuel excise cuts, March 29). Wage rises would cost these business owners directly and the government would have to increase funding, so tax cuts are an easy cop-out. But as the costs of doing business naturally increase, there is less tax to fund the running of these facilities and it becomes a downward spiral. Perhaps the Prime Minister can increase his backpackers tax to his originally suggested level. What can they say? Theyre not voters. Chris Gresham, Upper Lansdowne Jobs and wages are crucial election issues (Budget sets up election fight over jobs, wages, March 29). Scott Morrison definitely wont be fighting the election on properly addressing climate change, integrity and the urgent need for a federal corruption commission or the allocating of funding to electorates based on merit and not the sitting members political stripe. John Cotterill, Kingsford The Coalition has spent nine years suppressing wages and conditions and now expect to make it the issue that will win them an election. Why didnt they just provide good government services over the past nine years? Philip Cadwallen, Werrington Build Unnecessary Debt Get Electoral Tick. Stuart Pratt, Ocean Shores Jessica for treasurer Can Jessica Irvine be the new treasurer, please (Free childcare just the beginning, March 29)? Missing from her list of benefits of quality early childhood education are the long-term effects on all children, but especially disadvantaged children. Research shows this links to social skills including empathy, educational success and employment. Give the next generation the start they deserve. Jenny Forster, Manly Free childcare would change more than half the populations lives in one easy stroke, thank you, Jessica Irvine not just those of women, but for families quality of life now and in the future. Beats cheaper beer for the blokes. Terry Lavis, Coogee Get the kids jabbed More people will be infected and more of the elderly will die until something is done about the large reservoir of susceptible children in schools (Only had it seven weeks ago: More people report COVID-19 reinfection, smh.com.au, March 29). Until the childrens vaccination rate rises above 40per cent, infections will run rampant. Unvaccinated people, including children, should not be allowed indoors with others when COVID-19 is in the community. This means no school for the unvaccinated. Not only would this significantly slow infections, but it would also give some people the incentive to do the right thing. I am currently home, unable to work, due to COVID-19 brought home from school. Bart Fielden, Lindfield Rural roads need funds With loss-making public transport devouring an ever-increasing proportion of the state budget and stealing funds needed for rural roads, your correspondents plea for free public transport is nonsensical (Letters, March 29). Unless Sydneys users pay for their shiny new public transport, non-users in the rest of our large state will have to pay and watch the disintegration of their roads continue. Michael Britt, Macmasters Beach No blame for bully Rock? It is clear from the academys stance that the movie industry has learnt nothing through the #MeToo period (Slap in the face for Oscar winners, March 29). Chris Rock made a public humiliating statement clearly directed at Will Smiths wife for nothing more than a pathetic attempt at humour. His choice was scandalous. But the academy chooses to attack her chivalrous husband who does what any proud husband would do? While physical violence is never an answer, Smith slapped Rocks face, a centuries-old symbol that displays your feeling at being slighted. In fact, in days of the knights who wore armour, this was how you challenged for a duel. Rock took to a public forum to be inappropriate in the belief no one would react in public. He was wrong and deserved the slap. The academy should condemn Rock, and then Smith for reacting, and take no further action. Instead, it has attacked the victim and allowed the bully a free ride. Gary Bigelow, Teralba Regarding Will Smith hitting Chris Rock, where is the feminist commentary in this? Since when is it OK to walk up and strike another man when you dont like what he said about your wife? We teach our children to work things out in a calm manner, using their words. Did we all just make what Will Smith did acceptable because he was defending his wife? Like she is his property? Yes, Will, call it out when it is wrong, but society does not condone physical violence. Showing how powerfully violent men can be to control a situation does not warm the hearts of millions of women who have been subjected to this kind of manly control. It may take a long time for society to move away from the romantic idea of men who defend a ladys honour but we need to see it for what it is: unnecessary violence in the post #MeToo movement. Carla Gillis, Hallidays Point Thank goodness for the Oscars. Now I know what Will Smith, Chris Rock and poor form look like. Shane Joseph, Marsfield Cup winners Its not just the caffeine we crave in a cafe (Letters, March 29) but the Hi, the welcome, the smile and to be remembered. Baristas have a complex job, indeed. Mary Julian, Glebe A correspondent speaks of a home coffee machine, costing under two grand. Even more frugal method here china jug topped with plastic filter, with filter papers and coffee (bought on special, when possible). $2a cup. Any better offers? Elizabeth Jones, Kirribilli Spelling trouble All this kerfuffle lately over the spelling of names reminds me of a students absentee note given to a colleague of mine. It was addressed Dear Madman and to this day we have not determined whether it was intentional, or merely a misspelling of Madam. Terry Charleston, Cootamundra Train envy Your correspondent (Letters, March 29) should visit Ballarat railway station, where there is a huge map showing 1890s Victoria riddled with railway lines. They go everywhere. And to towns that once existed. Clearly, the British took decentralisation and public transport seriously with their visions of A4 Class steam locomotives thundering off daily at their steady 160 km/h. Ronald Elliott, Sandringham (Vic) The digital view Online comment from one of the stories that attracted the most reader feedback yesterday on smh.com.au Australia warned to pay attention to PNG following Chinas Solomon Islands deal From rosebud: This is the result of successive, excessive and relentless bullhorn politics, especially since Abbott. He cut foreign aid, was dismissive of climate change, slow with a handout and never a hand up. China is dangerous for all, especially the Solomons as hosts, but this is the result of our ignorance over many years. Applications for money from an online flood support fundraiser by federal Defence Minister Peter Dutton are being directed through a password protected section of his Liberal National Party-branded website, alongside links to other official government programs. Mr Dutton, who holds the seat of Dickson in Brisbanes north, has also named a small community group with close links to him as the beneficiary of the $28,962 raised for his electorate, despite it not being listed with the national charities register. Minister for Defence Peter Dutton during his address to the Air and Space Power Conference at the National Convention Centre in Canberra last Tuesday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The move has been described as risky by Queensland University of Technology emeritus professor Myles McGregor-Lowndes, a former director of the universitys Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies. Griffith University professor and Transparency International Australia board member AJ Brown suggested the decisions by Mr Dutton and his Coalition colleague, Petrie MP Luke Howarth, to establish the fundraisers risked opening them up to perceptions of favouritism or politically motivated funding allocations. A United Nations body is calling for the immediate and unconditional release of Australian man Robert Pether from an Iraqi jail cell, finding his detention contravenes international law. A report from the UNs Working Group on Arbitrary Detention this month found the imprisonment of Mr Pether and his colleague Khalid Radwan to be arbitrary and in contravention of international law. Robert Pether, who has been detained in Iraq since April, pictured with his three children. The report found the men were lured into returning to Iraq on the pretext of assisting in an investigation and arbitrarily detained, without any legal basis ever since. Mr Pether, an Australian engineer and father of three, was arrested in Iraq alongside an Egyptian colleague in April. They were both later jailed following a dispute between their employer and the Central Bank of Iraq. Hunters will target feral deer on Melbournes outskirts in an effort to prevent them from destroying the environment, amid fears the animals may roam further into city suburbs and endanger people. Deer have been seen as close to the city as Fitzroy, Ivanhoe and Kew. In June last year, startled residents watched as a wild deer ran down Johnston Street, Collingwood. A deer on the run in Fitzroy last year. Credit:Rosie Bourke (supplied) The state governments control plan says deer are a growing concern in densely populated places, appearing in backyards, schools and other public places. Deer may charge or kick people if they feel threatened, the plan said. Given their size, they can cause significant and even fatal injuries, particularly associated with vehicle collisions. Sonny Bill Williams short-lived fight against Barry Hall contained less violence than the Oscars, but it could have serious repercussions for Rupert Murdochs pay television service, Foxtel. A few days after the former All Black knocked out the former Swan in about 120 seconds, Williams manager, Khoder Nasser, landed a blow of his own in an interview with Sydney Morning Herald columnist Danny Weidler. Sonny Bill Williams (right) takes the fight to Barry Hall. Credit:Flavio Brancaleone Nasser claimed he had a conversation with a senior Fox Sports employee about a deal for the Williams-Hall bout (which was ultimately broadcast on rival Stan), during which the unnamed Foxtel exec asks me word for word, What can we do with that beard? I did everything I could not to go off my rocker, said Nasser, who added he tried to take his complaint to News Corp co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch. Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size As Melbourne flickers back to life, the pandemic-induced shutdown of the past two years has offered a chance to reboot the city and reshape its future. The Age has asked five innovative Melbourne under-35s for their best ideas to rejuvenate the city. In the latest instalment of our series, Nathaniel Diong tells how education and entrepreneurship can be used to equip students to take on a shifting employment landscape and prepare for jobs that dont yet exist. COVID-19 rammed home the instability of the workforce in Australia and, particularly, in Victoria. This was especially so for young people. As tens of thousands of people were losing their jobs, tens of thousands of new graduates couldnt find one. Even before the pandemic we were hearing statistics that in 15 years many of the jobs that current school and university students will work in dont exist yet. How are you supposed to deal with that? Its a scary thing to ponder. Theres a growing awareness, too, that the education system isnt teaching us skills such as financial literacy and how to manage our taxes and superannuation, or how to start a business. My big idea is to make our learning in schools and universities more hands-on and improve the way they prepare young people for whatever the future throws at them. Entrepreneurship courses should be compulsory in every school. That means learning to identify a problem and working to solve it. Communication skills being able to network and get your way into a job, which can be so daunting are critical. Creativity. All these things you see in job ads but arent directly taught at schools. As part of the curriculum, every year students in Victoria would build a project that solved a problem in their local community. For example, how do we reduce food waste? Students would have to go out to their local grocers and understand the problems with food waste that theyre facing. The student would need to come up with a campaign, event or business idea to manage that. They would build it from start to finish, practising skills such as design, marketing and organisational planning. They would then pitch their ideas to the local council or MP, giving them the real-world experience of trying to secure support. The best ideas could actually come to fruition. Young people are full of optimism and creativity, so lets use that. Advertisement Introducing more entrepreneurship would take leadership from the government. Weve spoken to state and federal governments, and theyre interested, but they always are. Its about prioritising the skills that young people need and want. A lot are pushing for things around climate education, how to be a global citizen and do good things in their community. Its not something were fighting on: A lot of councils and governments want young people to be more involved. So, why are we not seeing those skills in education, where young people spend the most time of their lives? Loading The feedback we get from teachers in Victoria is that, even before the pandemic, they were overworked, underpaid and have so much to cram into the curriculum. In a practical sense, there need to be more incentives for teachers to join the workforce. More teachers with more talent allows them to teach life skills, not just maths skills, for example. Melbourne, as much as anywhere, should be focusing on entrepreneurial skills post-pandemic. We have the infrastructure of a thriving start-up industry. Tech is one of the few sectors in which jobs have boomed through the pandemic, with something like 15,000 new ones created every year. When I look on my social media, I already see young people in Melbourne with business ideas: clothing brands, make-up and skincare, arts and photography. The desire and creativity are there, they just need the confidence and skills to hone those characteristics that are transferable to any industry they end up working in. The beauty of teaching practical skills is that anyone can learn them. Just like you dont have to go to the nicest school or university to start a business these days, you dont need to come from wealth to learn entrepreneurship. Its a way of addressing education inequality, something that crystallised while Victorian students were learning from home in the past two years. Going digital and being creative can, and should, mean more than just staring at the same screen in class. Its about trying things out, failing and learning, helping young people practice real-world skills, and not just preparing for a test, then an assignment, then another test. Im the son of Malaysian migrants who were well qualified back home but struggled to find work in Melbourne. Id love to build on a community we started calling Bamboo. It connects Asian Australians as a cultural bridging and events company. The first aspect would be about community building picnics and spaces where people in different careers can connect. The second element would be mentorship setting up a direct line with someone more senior in your field who can give you advice and link you to job opportunities. Advertisement Former cabinet minister Christian Porter has blamed the end of his political career on the actions of a mob, telling Parliament in his farewell speech that although he did not regret his time in politics he would not wish the experiences he faced on anybody. The former attorney-general thanked political journalist Peter van Onselen and Defence Minister Peter Dutton as two key friends who stood up for him in the face of intense scrutiny over historic rape allegations as well as a guardian pixie whom he could never repay. Former attorney-general Christian Porter hugs Defence Minister Peter Dutton following his valedictory speech. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Some people, they will join a mob and they will slink away, some think they can harness it for their own interests, Mr Porter told the House of Representatives on Tuesday afternoon during his valedictory speech. Very few people try and stand in the way of a mob. I watch people, friends, put themselves between me and the mob. I cant mention them all, but Peter van Onselen, and Peter Dutton, knowing the risks better than any two people could possibly know the risks, they stated plain public support for me while the mob was in its full fury. A single number tells Australians just how desperate Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg have become in their quest to beat Anthony Albanese to the prize of power. Their decisions will cost $30.4 billion over five years by cutting tax revenue and boosting spending across all policies. That is one measure of the starting price for the federal election. Anthony Albanese and Scott Morrison. Credit: For all the attention on the household measures in this budget, such as the cut to fuel excise, these retail moves are just one part of a much broader spend-a-thon that offers targeted programs for key election battlegrounds. The regional programs, for instance, promise $1.3 billion for broadband and mobile coverage projects in locations yet to be announced, which means voters may find out more during the campaign. The regional accelerator program offers $2 billion for employers in places unknown, setting up more announcements before election day. Fuel excise slashed in half, tax rebates for low and middle income earners and a $250 direct payment to pensioners, welfare recipients and veterans. The Morrison government is spending $8.25 billion to help people deal with the rising cost of living in a budget delivered days before an election is called. Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in the budget lock-up on Tuesday. Credit:James Brickwood Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told Parliament tonight that events abroad were raising prices at home and said his suite of measures to help households was temporary, targeted and responsible. He argues Australia has recovered from the pandemic better than any other nation, pointing to 4 per cent unemployment, the lowest in 48 years, and a predicted $100 billion improvement in the budget position compared to last year. But other figures in his fourth budget are less rosy. The deficit for 2022-2023 will be $78 billion, the fourth biggest on record. Gross debt will rise to $1.2 trillion by 2024-25, while net debt will reach 33.1 per cent as a share of the economy by June 2026. Small business owners will receive a $120 tax deduction for every $100 they spend on training their staff. The same deduction will also apply to investments in cloud computing, eInvoicing, cybersecurity and web design up to a maximum of $100,000 per year. Loading Infrastructure The headline figure is $17.9 billion for new roads and faster rail. That includes $3.7 billion for faster trains between Sydney and Newcastle and in south-east Queensland. Theres also $3.1 billion for two intermodal terminals on the outskirts of Melbourne, designed to get trucks off roads and freight onto rails - and eventually, onto the inland rail track between Melbourne and Brisbane. Motorists The fuel tax excise will be cut in half to 22.1 cents per litre for six months. The net cost of the measure is about $2.7 billion. In practice, thats a saving of about $11 on a 50 litre tank of petrol and over six months, filling up once a week, that saving will reach $264. The change comes into effect from midnight on Tuesday night and the competition watchdog will police it. Loading Support services for women Another $1.3 billion will be spent tackling violence against women and children in this budget, building on the $1.1 billion spent in last years budget to improve womens health, safety and economic security a package that was unveiled after fierce criticism the 2020 budget had largely ignored women. The new spending is on front-line services, emergency accommodation, access to legal advice and more. The regions Theres $7.4 billion on the table to invest in more dams and water projects, such as the already-announced Hells Gate dam in Queensland. Mobile phone coverage will be expanded across approximately 8000 kilometres of regional roads, at a cost of $1.3 billion while $2 billion will be spent on a so-called regional accelerator program to invest in skills, education infrastructure and more. First-home buyers The number of people able to access the Home Guarantee Scheme will double to 50,000 places per year. That scheme, designed to help more people buy their first home, lets people put down a deposit of just five per cent, or two per cent for single parents. Defence The headline figures for defence investment are startling. Already announced is a $38 billion plan to grow the defence force to 80,000 people though it wont be fully implemented until 2040. Theres also $9.9 billion over ten years in Australias offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. LOSERS Aid agencies wont be thrilled by the inconsistent foreign aid budget. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Future generations The budget bottom line will see future generations paying back Australias debt for decades to come and the one-off payments and cut to fuel excise contained in this budget dont help. Net debt will reach 31.1 per cent of GDP by June 2023, or $714.9 billion and is still growing. Its expected to peak at 33.1 per cent by 2025, before beginning to decline. The good news net debt is down from the 38.4 per cent or $835 billion forecast a year ago, thanks to falling unemployment and higher than forecast prices for resources such as coal and iron ore. Developing countries Funding for foreign aid from the Department of Foreign Affairs will bounce around over the next four years. While the amount of money will rise by a bit over $600 million to $4.4 billion in 2022-23, it will then fall to $3.7 billion in 2023-24, rise again in 2024-25 and fall in 2025-26. Aid agencies are unlikely to be thrilled with this budget. Loading Climate change mitigation After committing to net zero emissions by 2050, the government has made no major promises in this budget about how to get Australia to that target. Theres $247 million over five years to back in private sector investment in hydrogen, $148 million for so-called microgrid projects in regional areas and $50 million for gas infrastructure. People with a disability Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy has called on the Andrews government to overhaul COVID-19 isolation rules for household contacts, saying people who test negative should be able to get on with life. Mr Guy announced on Tuesday morning he was forced into home isolation for seven days after the youngest of his three sons, Alex, 9, tested positive for the virus. The Opposition Leader said, while he and his family would make isolation work and always follow the rules, it is very weird when it happens to yourself because then you realise you havent planned out your whole week to be at home. I mean, Ive got things to do, Mr Guy said on a press conference via Zoom. Im meant to be on the Peninsula today and then going over to Geelong. Ive got a very, very busy week coming up, but you have to make things work. Since late February, Western observers analysing the war in Ukraine have largely focussed on Russian strategy, as well as the performance of its military forces on the ground and in the air. That includes me. But like all wars, this is a two-sided and interactive human activity. A Ukrainian soldier stands on the ruins after Russian shelling destroyed a shopping center in Kyiv. Credit:EFREM LUKATSKY Russia has made many errors. But Ukraine has played an inferior hand well. It is a country that is smaller in size, population, economy, and military forces than its invader. Why has it, so far, been successful at defending itself against the military forces of a nuclear-armed superpower? In short, Ukrainian strategic thinking has out-thought the Russian President and his advisors. What are the key elements of the Ukrainian strategy that have allowed this to happen? To understand the approach, we must first understand what political outcomes the Zelensky administration seeks from a war that was forced upon them. Zelensky has described Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity as beyond doubt and his goal is peace and restoration of normal life. In a recent interview with The Economist, Zelensky also noted that as for compromises that may risk the disintegration of the country, the ones which Putin proposes, or rather demands in the form of an ultimatum, we will never make them. Never. Sde Boker, Israel: At a groundbreaking meeting, the top diplomats of Israel, the United States and four Arab countries discussed how to coordinate against Iran; the importance of Washington remaining engaged in the region; and the need to maintain calm over the next weeks when a convergence of religious holidays could raise tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. Several of the Arab participants also publicly pressed Israel on the need to create a sovereign Palestinian state, signalling that while they had normalised ties with Israel, they had not abandoned the Palestinian cause. After meeting for the Negev Summit, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, centre, chats with United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Sde Boker, Israel. Credit:AP But if that created mild tension between Israel and its guests, they appeared united in their shared fears of Iran and its proxies at a news briefing at the events conclusion. What we are doing here is making history building a new regional architecture based on progress, technology, religious tolerance, security and intelligence cooperation, said Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who organised the conference. Barcelona attacker Memphis Depay will leave Camp Nou this summer, according to a report. Barcelona attacker Memphis Depay will reportedly leave Camp Nou during this summer's transfer window. The Netherlands international joined the Catalan giants on a free transfer last July following the expiration of his contract at Lyon, penning a two-year deal with the club. Memphis has been a regular during the 2021-22 campaign, making 29 appearances in all competitions, contributing 10 goals and two assists in the process. The 28-year-old has struggled to secure regular action since Barcelona signed attacking reinforcements in January, though, with the Dutchman dropping down the pecking order at the club. There has been a host of speculation surrounding Memphis's future in recent weeks, with a number of clubs believed to be keeping a close eye on developments. According to Sport, Barcelona are planning to offload the former Manchester United winger when this summer's transfer window opens for business. Tottenham Hotspur, Napoli and Juventus are among the clubs to be credited with an interest in Memphis, who has been used off the bench in his side's last four La Liga matches. Brussels, 28 March 2022 (SPS) - A group of 19 MEPs (members of the Intergroup on Western Sahara) has expressed "its deep rejection" of the new position of the Spanish government on Western Sahara, calling on the EU High Representative to defend international law in this non-autonomous territory. In a letter addressed to the High Representative of the European Union (EU) for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borell, the parliamentary group expressed its "deep rejection of the decision adopted by the head of the Spanish government regarding the Western Sahara. In this context, MEPs called on Josep Borrell to defend, on behalf of the EU, respect for international law in Western Sahara, while ensuring that "denying the right of the Sahrawi people to the decolonization of its territory is to choose the side of the brutal occupation of Morocco and its systemic violation of human rights". The MEPs, from the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), Greens/EFA, Renew Europe and the Left (GUE/NGL) political groups, recalled that Western Sahara is the last territory to be decolonized in Africa, stressing that "as a non-self-governing territory, it is up to Spain, as the last colonial power, to administer its right to self-determination according to international law. "The military and colonial occupation of Morocco is an obstacle to compliance with the repeated resolutions of the UN Security Council calling for the holding of a referendum on self-determination," they said, adding that "the exploitation of natural resources by the Moroccan occupying force has been repeatedly rejected by the EU Court of Justice, which has affirmed that these resources belong to the Saharawi people. The signatories of the letter said, moreover, that the only possible solution to the conflict in Western Sahara is through international law and the decolonization of this territory through a referendum of self-determination, as dictated by the various UN resolutions. "Like the UN, we consider the Polisario Front as the only legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people and we defend its right to self-determination, (and demand) the monitoring of human rights by the UN mission in Western Sahara (MINURSO), and the release of Sahrawi political prisoners," they said. 062/T This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate STAMFORD With funding from the Womens Business Development Council, the downtown Lorca Coffee Bar purchased a convection oven that powered a jump in sales last year. Officials at the Stamford-headquartered WBDC are aiming to help many other small businesses overcome the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a new infusion from one of the countrys largest companies will bolster that mission. Bank of America announced Monday a $100,000 contribution for counseling, technical assistance and other services to support future rounds of the WBDCs Equity Match Grant Program. Launched in 2020, the initiative has provided $924,000, across 98 grants, to women-owned businesses in Connecticut. Weve all come together, Roberta Rich, Bank of Americas consumer bank market leader in lower Fairfield County, said at a press conference at Lorca, at 125 Bedford St. Whether its a small-business owner or a not-for-profit organization, were working together to better the communities that we serve. Bank of Americas contribution highlights the corporate support for Equity Match. Among other major companies that have provided funding, JPMorgan Chase announced a $300,000 commitment in January. Any women-owned small businesses in the state can apply for the Equity Match grants, which each total up to $10,000. The funds are allocated to clearly defined projects that will have a measurable impact on the business, its growth and profitability, according to WBDCs website. The grants cannot be used toward operating expenses, payroll or real estate improvements. Applicants are required to provide a minimum 25 percent match. Within the next couple of weeks, WBDC officials plan to announce the recipients of the fourth round of Equity Match grants. Applications for the next round of grants are expected to open by the end of May. This (Bank of America) grant is going to help us with the next few rounds of operational support that we need to help people with that application process, WBDC founder and Chief Executive Officer Fran Pastore said. Its absolutely critical that we do that piece of this to make sure that these grants are equitable. Some people need more help than others. Many state officials are enthusiastic supporters of the WBDC, as highlighted by the attendance Monday of Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, Stamford Mayor Caroline Simmons and state Sen. Patricia Billie Miller, D-Stamford. WBDC programs such as Equity Match have helped to offset a bias in other business-assistance programs toward male-owned and white-owned businesses, Bysiewicz said. About 30 percent of the Equity Match grants have gone to minority-owned businesses. Our governor loves public-private partnerships and when we get to work with nonprofits, Bysiewicz said. This program is all of that. Miller and Simmons gave a similar assessment. The government cant do it all, so we need partners like you (Bank of America), Miller said. Simmons said, I couldnt be prouder to have businesses like Lorca in our community. These businesses are the lifeblood of our economy. With a $10,000 Equity Match grant that Lorca received about a year and a half ago, the business was able to buy a $13,000 convection oven. The new apparatus has significantly sped up the preparation of popular items such as sandwiches, empanadas and quiches, said Lorca owner Leyla Dam. The oven played a large part in Lorcas sales increase in 2021, a total that was 32 percent higher than in 2018, according to Dam. For me, the WBDC has been integral. I dont know what I would have done without them especially in the very beginning of the pandemic, said Dam, who started Lorca in 2012. Im so honored to be able to keep this place in business thanks to you all and to keep the community going. Its been amazing to watch people come back to this place. pschott@stamfordadvocate.com; twitter: @paulschott The Food and Drug Administration Tuesday authorized an additional booster shot of both Pfizer and Modernas COVID vaccine for adults 50 and over. The FDA is authorizing fourth COVID shots for adults over 50 years old if they are more than four months past their third vaccine dose. The authorization extends to immunocompromised patients 12 years old and older, including those who have undergone solid organ transplantation. Current evidence suggests some waning of protection over time against serious outcomes from COVID-19 in older and immunocompromised individuals, Peter Marks, director of the FDAs Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a release. Rick Martinello, director of infection prevention at Yale New Haven Health, said he will plan to get a second booster shot but specifically because he is planning a vacation. Some of it is because I have a trip to Europe planned later this month, he said. Maritnello got his third shot in December, which was about four months ago. He said the COVID rates in Connecticut are relatively low and relatively stable so, if a trip to Europe was off the table, Martinello said his decision would be a different one. I probably would wait at this point and, the reason being, I would probably wait to see and get vaccinated more toward early fall, he said. Everything seems pretty stable right now. The state reported Tuesday that 365 additional COVID cases had been identified out of 10,010 reported tests for a positivity rate of 3.65 percent since Monday. The number of patients in Connecticut hospitals fighting a COVID-19 infection increased by seven on Tuesday for a total of 101. Ulysses Wu, chief epidemiologist at Hartford HealthCare, said Monday that the FDAs decision was the result of fears over BA.2, the omicron subvariant being blamed for COVID spikes in Europe and Asia. I think theyre worried about BA.2, Wu said. Thats basically what theyre basing their decision on. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, BA.2 is now the dominant coronavirus strain in the United States, making up 54.9 percent of all tested samples as of March 26. BA.2 is far more prevalent in New England, where the CDC said the subvariant comprises 72.6 percent of samples. Martinello said research has shown that BA.2 is as much as 40 percent more transmissible than its progenitor, omicron. Days after a bill allowing out-of-town commuters and caretakers of the disabled or chronically ill to vote by absentee ballot received final approval in the General Assembly, a key legislative committee advanced a measure that would ease ballot access for all residents in Connecticut. No-excuse absentee voting would require a constitutional amendment thats approved by voters. If the proposal gets 75 percent support in the state House and Senate a high bar then it would appear on the ballot in November. If only a simple majority approves the measure, then the General Assembly would have to approve it again next year for it to appear on the 2024 ballot. The states constitution allows for absentee voting by anyone who is unable to appear at the polling place on the day of election because of absence from the city or town of which they are inhabitants or because of sickness, or physical disability or because the tenets of their religion forbid secular activity. The Government Administration and Elections Committee voted Monday to pass the no-excuse absentee voting bill out of committee with no GOP support. One of the strongest opponents, Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, said theres an appetite for an expansion of absentee voting among Democrats and Republicans, provided the right protections to prevent voter fraud are in place. The Republican objections have been consistent and that is that we want to see the same type of protections that other states that engage in a significant amount of mail-in voting have implemented simultaneous with an expansion of absentee balloting, Sampson said. Sampson said he could be persuaded to vote in favor of no-excuse absentee voting, provided a process exists for verifying mail-in ballots. The most common method used by states is signature verification, which involves voters signing an affidavit on the ballot envelope when returning their ballot. Election officials then compare that signature to other records they have on file that contain a voters signature, usually someones voter registration. Research shows low rates of fraud in states that allow residents to vote by mail. Many states, including Connecticut, allowed for absentee voting during the COVID pandemic as people feared contracting the virus if they showed up to the polls in person. Democrats in the General Assembly pushing for the expansion of mail-in voting are on a limited timeline to get it done with the legislative session set to adjourn May 4. I dont give up hope that over the next five weeks we might be able to find that path to language that we could cross the threshold of getting stronger bipartisan support so the voters in Connecticut could decide this fall. ... whether or not we could have no-excuse absentee ballot voting, said Sen. Mae Flexer, D-Windham, co-chairwoman of the GAE Committee. julia.bergman@hearstmediact.com This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate STAMFORD A week after Mayor Caroline Simmons first announced that city-hired engineers would expand their investigation into Harbor Point developer Building and Land Technology, her administration laid out a sharper focus for its inquiry. Engineers hired by the city will examine eight additional Harbor Point properties built by the South Ends biggest developer as part of the citys growing efforts to understand a partial terrace collapse at a BLT high-rise in February, she said. A 15 by 20 portion of an outdoor terrace at Allure, one of developer Building and Land Technologys South End high rises, collapsed on Feb. 1. City officials immediately promised an investigation and hired independent engineers from Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates to examine the structural failure. BLT did the same. Simmons on March 18 announced in a letter to BLT Co-President Ted Ferrarone the city and its engineers would expand their investigation into properties built by the developer. Though engineers had spent weeks eyeing structural deficiencies at Allure, the mayor pointed out an additional specific complaint shared by a resident regarding retrofits made at the Escape property. The letter did not provide specific examples about any concerns from city officials associated with Escape, which is adjacent to Allure. However, concerns leveled by some residents at the building were brought up in past public hearings before the city Board of Representatives. Residents especially aired anxieties over an uncovered pool at Escape filled with frozen water at a Public Safety subcommittee meeting. In the March 18 letter, Stamford officials said they planned to expand their investigation to other properties built by BLT. Simmons specifically called out constructed or in-progress buildings designed or built with post-tension slabs designed by Henderson and Rogers BLTs structural engineer built in whole or in part by Baker Concrete a high-profile concrete construction company that has built projects across the country or using the same post tension sub-contractors ... used at the Allure and Escape properties. Though Simmons did not further list the properties under scrutiny in that letter, in a March 25 letter to Ferrarone, Simmons asked for access to eight addresses where engineers could examine any potential public safety concerns: 301 Commons Park South, 201 Commons Park South, 101 Washington Blvd., 100 Commons Park North, 800 Pacific St., 900 Pacific St., 850 Pacific St. and 2 Harbor Point South. When asked why the city planned to inspect those properties, Simmons said Monday in a statement that the citys engineering department, in conjunction with WJE ... identified the eight locations. Public Safety Director Ted Jankowski previously noted at a Board of Representatives meeting that 880 and 900 Pacific St. are constructed similarly to Allure. Stamford Operations Director Matt Quinones clarified on Monday engineers from WJE would instead inspect 880 Pacific St. BLTs Escape building instead of 800 Pacific St. Simmons also stipulated that BLT must provide the citys notice of an expanded investigation to residents within 24 hours of its receipt. The buildings under review span much of BLTs long history in the South End. The 101 Park Place building at 101 Washington Blvd. and now owned by AJH Management, was built just one year after the developer took over the Harbor Point project in 2008. Apartment buildings Infinity and Postmark which are no longer owned by BLT went up in 2011 and 2012 respectively. Allure, Opus and Escape represent some of the companys newest offerings in the neighborhood and were built within the past five years. Representatives from BLT did not immediately respond to The Stamford Advocates request for comment. The Board of Representatives will discuss the ongoing investigation of BLTs Stamford properties at its upcoming March 31 meeting. Residents can attend the meeting via Zoom or by telephone. Further information is available on the boards website. veronica.delvalle@hearstmediact.com Blog Archive Apr 2010 (22) May 2010 (25) Jun 2010 (8) Jul 2010 (12) Aug 2010 (18) Sep 2010 (19) Oct 2010 (29) Nov 2010 (30) Dec 2010 (18) Jan 2011 (13) Feb 2011 (21) Mar 2011 (23) Apr 2011 (19) May 2011 (31) Jun 2011 (36) Jul 2011 (46) Aug 2011 (26) Sep 2011 (12) Oct 2011 (15) Nov 2011 (17) Dec 2011 (7) Jan 2012 (18) Feb 2012 (4) Mar 2012 (12) Apr 2012 (18) May 2012 (10) Jun 2012 (21) Jul 2012 (8) Aug 2012 (15) Sep 2012 (7) Oct 2012 (17) Nov 2012 (20) Dec 2012 (10) Jan 2013 (58) Feb 2013 (59) Mar 2013 (60) Apr 2013 (98) May 2013 (135) Jun 2013 (204) Jul 2013 (293) Aug 2013 (351) Sep 2013 (363) Oct 2013 (348) Nov 2013 (374) Dec 2013 (442) Jan 2014 (547) Feb 2014 (476) Mar 2014 (526) Apr 2014 (527) May 2014 (471) Jun 2014 (408) Jul 2014 (472) Aug 2014 (522) Sep 2014 (443) Oct 2014 (472) Nov 2014 (497) Dec 2014 (536) Jan 2015 (539) Feb 2015 (520) Mar 2015 (582) Apr 2015 (658) May 2015 (679) Jun 2015 (673) Jul 2015 (728) Aug 2015 (803) Sep 2015 (923) Oct 2015 (924) Nov 2015 (802) Dec 2015 (791) Jan 2016 (782) Feb 2016 (835) Mar 2016 (929) Apr 2016 (866) May 2016 (947) Jun 2016 (1044) Jul 2016 (882) Aug 2016 (1035) Sep 2016 (967) Oct 2016 (918) Nov 2016 (854) Dec 2016 (885) Jan 2017 (879) Feb 2017 (777) Mar 2017 (896) Apr 2017 (872) May 2017 (850) Jun 2017 (851) Jul 2017 (971) Aug 2017 (1040) Sep 2017 (998) Oct 2017 (1144) Nov 2017 (1046) Dec 2017 (838) Jan 2018 (873) Feb 2018 (769) Mar 2018 (885) Apr 2018 (808) May 2018 (827) Jun 2018 (820) Jul 2018 (840) Aug 2018 (854) Sep 2018 (844) Oct 2018 (851) Nov 2018 (870) Dec 2018 (912) Jan 2019 (919) Feb 2019 (827) Mar 2019 (957) Apr 2019 (913) May 2019 (1007) Jun 2019 (935) Jul 2019 (950) Aug 2019 (936) Sep 2019 (910) Oct 2019 (920) Nov 2019 (874) Dec 2019 (908) Jan 2020 (941) Feb 2020 (849) Mar 2020 (898) Apr 2020 (848) May 2020 (822) Jun 2020 (789) Jul 2020 (819) Aug 2020 (858) Sep 2020 (841) Oct 2020 (873) Nov 2020 (812) Dec 2020 (780) Jan 2021 (765) Feb 2021 (716) Mar 2021 (819) Apr 2021 (805) May 2021 (815) Jun 2021 (824) Jul 2021 (830) Aug 2021 (832) Sep 2021 (791) Oct 2021 (754) Nov 2021 (683) Dec 2021 (693) Jan 2022 (694) Feb 2022 (654) Mar 2022 (740) Apr 2022 (745) May 2022 (124) A delegation led by the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Adrian Chesnoiu, will pay an official visit to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan between March 29 and April 2, 2022, in order to consolidate and increase trade of agricultural products between Romania and Jordan. According to a release from the relevant ministry sent to AGERPRES on Tuesday, the program of the visit includes a bilateral meeting with the Minister of Agriculture of Jordan, Khaled Hneifat, as well as a meeting with the Minister of Industry, Trade and Supply, Yousef Mahmoud Al Shamali.The two agriculture ministers will also attend the plenary session of the Agriculture Committee meeting, which will be followed by the expert-level meeting.The program will also include a visit to the National Center for Agricultural Research to identify opportunities for cooperation in agricultural scientific research between Romanian institutes and the Jordanian center, a visit to a fertilizer factory, and a meeting with major animal importers."Romania is the main supplier of wheat and sheep to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. At the same time, between 2019 and 2020, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan represented the 3rd international market for Romanian agri-food products," the release informs.Bilateral cooperation between Romania and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is based on the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in the Field of Agriculture between the Ministry of Agriculture of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.Specifically, the two ministries, through technical experts, exchange information and good practices on the legislation and procedures used, in order to facilitate the collaboration of the private environment in the two countries. Romania's Defence Minister Vasile Dincu on Monday met his Italian counterpart Lorenzo Guerini as part of Guerini's visit to the 57th Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base to discuss the current developments in the Black Sea region security amid the ongoing war in Ukraine. According to a press statement released by the Romanian Defence Ministry (MApN), the agenda of talks between the two officials included security developments in the Black Sea region amid the ongoing war in Ukraine, decisions and measures agreed upon at the NATO summit to strengthen NATO's deterrence and defence posture, as well as EU and bilateral co-operation.Dincu thanked Italy for its substantial commitment through the constant participation of the Italian Air Force in the enhanced air policing missions in Romania reflected also by the provision of four additional Eurofighter aircraft as contribution to the mission.The Romanian official reconfirmed Romania's solidarity with Ukraine and its full and unconditional support for the latter's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity."The Romanian minister of national defence underlined the unique relevance of the extraordinary NATO Summit of March 24, during which the NATO leaders took historic decisions to strengthen NATO's deterrence and defence posture on the entire eastern flank, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea."Regarding co-operation inside the European Union, Dincu appreciated that the recently approved Strategic Compass represents an essential document in the repositioning of the EU as a global actor through a strategic orientation based on a common assessment of the security situation and by reconfirming the importance of EU-NATO co-operation for the security of the European continent."Minister Dincu emphasised NATO's key role in the security of the Euro-Atlantic area. At the same time, the minister of national defence reiterated the importance of strengthening security in the immediate eastern neighbourhood by using the full potential of EU instruments and policies to strengthen the resilience of Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova and Georgia."In the end, Dincu reiterated the importance of continuing the steps related to humanitarian support to Ukraine, welcoming the contribution of Italy materialised in substantial donations, including eight fully equipped ambulances, which arrived in Ukraine through the humanitarian logistics hub in Suceava, Romania. Italy is one of the first countries to use the facility.In his turn, the Italian defence minister highlighted "Romania's key role to security in the Black Sea region," reiterating Italy's decision to help reinforce NATO's eastern flank.Guerini announced the intention of Italy to send two sea dredgers to operate in the Black Sea, together with the Romanian Navy, for the detection and neutralisation of sea mines. Starting next week, there will be a downward trend in SARS-CoV-2 infections that will lead to the disappearance of the public health problem and the resumption of activities as usual, Health Minister Alexandru Rafila told a press conference on Tuesday. "As many as 4,276 cases have been registered. We note a decrease on Tuesday and if it continues in the coming days, there will probably be a downward trend. Developments in the number of new cases after the date of confirmation, the evolution of the positivity rate which has increased slightly, from 9% to 12%, the occupancy of ICU beds having experienced a slower decline than the decrease in the number of hospitalized persons, and this is the way it is supposed to be. (...) In view of the regional trend, we think that, starting next week, we will also enter a downward trend that will lead to the gradual disappearance of this public health problem in the next period and to the resumption of activities as usual," said Alexandru Rafila.He added that the authorities remain vigilant, with all systems in place - starting with testing, monitoring, evaluation of patients in outpatient centers, medication and hospital beds.Minister Rafila also said that the sequencing demonstrates the same dominance of the Omicron strain, which "occupies the entire spectrum of sequencing in Romania". In a message conveyed on Tuesday on the 18th anniversary of the submission of the documents for Romania's joining the North Atlantic Alliance, President Klaus Iohannis points out that the status of NATO member is all the more so important in the current special security context created by the Russian Federation's "illegal" military aggression against Ukraine. "18 years ago, on March 29, 2004, Romania submitted the instruments for the ratification of the North Atlantic Treaty to the U.S. Department of State. Our country thus took the decisive step in order to become a member of the most successful and powerful political and military alliance of all times. The crucial and historical importance of NATO membership is all the more so evident in the current special security context of the Russian Federation's illegal military aggression against Ukraine. This aggression has once again revealed the capacity of the Alliance to adapt quickly and to act promptly and efficiently, based on the member states' cohesion and decision-making unity," the President said, as cited by the Presidential Administration. According to Iohannis, Romania has been and is deeply involved in NATO's adaptation process, both through its "substantial" national contributions to the allied reflection process and through its ongoing efforts at national level, Agerpres.ro informs. The President reaffirms Romania's commitment to strengthening its defense capacity, including by increasing defense budget expenditures from 2 to 2.5 percent of GDP, by modernizing its force structure, by adapting the security and defense legislative framework and other appropriate measures. "Romania will continue to promote the NATO - EU partnership, a very important institutional framework for optimizing the European and Euro-Atlantic security and defense efforts, which must increase in relevance. Romania will remain a strong ally, a security provider at the Black Sea and beyond that, a determined supporter of a strengthened transatlantic relationship, dedicated to NATO's fundamental values. Many happy returns, Romania, within NATO!," the head of the state wrote in the end of his message. Increasing Romania's defence budget up to 2.5pct of GDP, the need for tougher, immediate sanctions against Russia and the state of our country's energy security projects were the topics addressed by Senate President Florin Citu during a meeting with the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. "I had a good discussion with Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, about increasing Romania's defence budget up to 2.5pct of GDP, the immediate need for much tougher sanctions against Russia, and the status of projects that, in partnership with the United States, will ensure Romania's energy security," Citu wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.The President of the Senate, together with a delegation of MPs, pays a working visit to the United States of America, in Washington, until March 30, having meetings scheduled with representatives of the US Legislature, of the business environment, as well as of the Romanian community in the area. Over 4 million Euro, money and products, were donated by the business environment for helping the Ukrainian people during the "Humanity has no borders" campaign. According to a press release sent by public TV broadcaster TVR, sent to AGERPRES, the Romanian Television hosted a humanitarian event, organized in partnership with the Romanian Red Cross, as part of the "Humanity has no borders" campaign. During a special edition of the "Referendum" show, as well as during its run-up to, the business environment donated to the Romanian Red Cross no less than 4,134,000 Euro, in money and products, for helping the Ukrainian people, the quoted source specifies, Agerpres.ro informs. Over 40 companies and institutions have donated basic necessity materials (food, medicines, medical equipment, water, bedding materials), as well as money for directly helping people who were affected by the conflict in Ukraine. Moreso, three companies in Romania (Uipath Foundation, Profi Romania and Cefin) have acquired for the Romanian Red Cross one truck and a truck-trailer, which will allow the organization to carry out humanitarian transport in Ukraine more easily, the press release reads. Until now, the Romanian Red Cross has sent to Ukraine 45 trucks with approximately 1,000 tons of materials. Also during TVR's event, a call-center was officially launched, established at the headquarters of the Romanian Red Cross, with the support of Orange Romania, for managing situations for citizens in Ukraine more easily. The allocated number is 0374-415-000 and allows Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian and English speaking operators, Red Cross volunteers to take on four simultaneous calls. NATO represents for Romania the strongest security guarantee that we can count on, "in the dangerous context created by the Russian aggression in Ukraine" said Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, on Tuesday, in a message on the occasion of the 18th anniversary of Romania submitting accession papers to the North Atlantic Alliance. "Romania is celebrating 18 years of membership in the North Atlantic Alliance, period in which our country constantly had substantial contributions to NATO missions and operations, thus consolidating its position of committed, responsible and professional ally. It is an opportune moment to review the steps Romania has taken in all these years, and the appreciation received along the years from the other allied states confirms the trust that our country enjoys within the Alliance and the high level of training, seriousness and courage of our professional soldiers. NATO can count on Romania in the joint efforts to develop strategic defence," said Nicolae Ciuca in his message, Agerpres.ro informs. At the same time, emphasizes the Prime Minister, NATO represents for Romania the strongest security guarantee that we can count on in times as those that we are living now, "in the dangerous context created by the Russian aggression in Ukraine." "Ensuring a security framework and stability in the area of the Eastern Flank has become these days an extremely important stake so that the steamroller against democracy started by Russia does not destabilize the entire world. The concrete measures established at the NATO level in support of Romania and the countries that may be affected strengthen the conviction that our citizens, the allied states' economies and democratic values will be safe. At 18 years since the submission of Romania's accession documents to NATO, Romania offers and receives, in equal measure, safety and security," said Ciuca. "Many happy returns, NATO! Many happy returns to Romania in NATO!," Ciuca also said. On Tuesday, President Klaus Iohannis discussed with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky about the critical situation in Ukraine. "I have discussed with President Zelensky about the critical situation in Ukraine. Romania will continue to take care of every citizen of Ukraine who arrives in Romania," the head of state wrote on Twitter.He added that more than 125 trucks with aids, ambulance and fire trucks from Romania and other European Union member states reached Ukraine through the humanitarian hub in Suceava. Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca and Gallina A. Vincelette, the World Bank's Country Director for the European Union, have agreed to further talks between the government and the World Bank on issues of major interest to our country, such as education and health, energy, measures for the integration of refugees, relocation of companies from the areas affected by the conflict. According to a Government press release, during the meeting with the WB Director for the EU at Victoria Palace of Government, the Prime Minister underlined the need to address in an integrated way the financial instruments available to Romania during this period, as well as the need to coordinate efforts with European and international institutions, Agerpres.ro informs. "We are committed to implementing the necessary reforms for our citizens and our economy, using the available financial resources. Our government program grants special attention to recovering development gaps between regions. In this regard, we use public resources, but we also encourage private investors to invest in areas that have a strong development potential," Ciuca stated. At the same time, the head of the Executive presented the Government's plan for achieving energy independence, through the development of renewable energy production capacities or through nuclear reactors, as well as the diversification of gas exploitation or transportation capacities. With regard to food security, the Prime Minister pointed out that Romania is among the European countries with an agricultural production with the potential to cover other markets as well. "In this regard, the Government will launch a program to develop the capacity to process and store agricultural products, in order to generate added value and be able to offer solutions to other countries as well," reads the release. In its turn, the World Bank delegation expressed its readiness to come to the aid of Romania with expertise, specialists and financing programs. As many as 4,276 new cases of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 were recorded in the last 24 hours in Romania, up 2,325 from the previous day, with more than 41,000 RT-PCR and rapid antigenic tests performed, the Health Ministry informed on Tuesday. Of the new cases, 533 were in re-infected patients, who tested positive more than 90 days after the first time they recovered from the disease.Most of the newly confirmed COVID-19 cases in Romania since the previous reporting were recorded in Bucharest City - 1,090, and in the counties of Cluj - 471, Timis - 339, Brasov - 179, Ilfov - 161, Iasi - 144, Arad - 120, Mures - 117, and Sibiu - 103.As of Tuesday, 2,847,015 cases of people infected with the novel coronavirus were confirmed in Romania.- Hospitalisations -As many as 2,702 people with COVID-19, down 145 from the previous reporting, including 183 children, are hospitalised in Romania at specialist care facilities.Out of the total number of hospitalised patients, 398 patients, down two, no children, are in intensive care.Of the 398 patients admitted to ICU, 346 are unvaccinated against COVID-19.- Deaths -According to the ministry, another 45 Romanians infected with SARS-CoV-2 - 29 men and 16 women - are reported dead in the last 24 hours.Out of the total 45 patients who died, 31 were unvaccinated and 14 vaccinated. One of the vaccinated patients who died was 50-59 years old, six were 60-69 years old, one was 70-79 years old, and six were over 80 years old. All the vaccinated patients who died had comorbidities.Since the beginning of the pandemic, 64,958 people diagnosed with the SARS-CoV-2 infection have died in Romania. The President of the Senate, Florin Citu, who is visiting the United States of America, has met with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, with whom he discussed the importance of Romania in NATO, the consolidation of defence capabilities and the Visa Waiver program. 'Today we celebrate 18 years of membership in NATO. This year we celebrate, also, 25 years of Strategic Partnership with the USA. An honest discussion with Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, about the importance of Romania within the Alliance, about the Visa Waiver program for Romania and about consolidating our defence capabilities," wrote Citu, on Tuesday, on Facebook, Agerpres.ro informs. He mentioned that, together with the US official, he sought "new opportunities for economic development for the prosperity of our countries, which would take into account the current regional dynamic." The President of the Senate is conducting, together with a delegation of MPs, a working visit to the United States of America, in Washington, until March 30, having meetings with representatives of the US legislative, of the business environment, as well as with the Romanian communities in the area. The Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Marcel Ciolacu, stated, on Tuesday, in Constanta, that the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, will address Parliament, a series of "communications" being started in this sense. "I believe that the most important is the reaction of the Romanian state in what regards refugees and the help and involvement of the Romanian state regarding the Republic of Moldova. In regards to the speech of the President of Ukraine in Parliament we started to have communications and this speech will take place. But, again, I believe that most important is how much we've been involved and in what regards the refugees, a complex and long-term situation, I believe that it was an impeccable involvement," said Marcel Ciolacu, in a press conference, Agerpres.ro informs. Deputy Chairman of the Romanian Society of Epidemiology Emilian Popovici told a specialist videoconference on Tuesday that related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, universal indoor masking should continue when indoors, in crowded spaces, on public transport, in medical offices. "It is important that the mask is still worn indoors, in crowded spaces by those who do not want to get sick. (...) It should be worn on public transport, and in medical offices," Popovici told the videoconference "Health and Pharma" organised by the Bursa Press Group.He also recommended distancing oneself from people with "obvious" symptoms, noting that the Omicron strain has the potential to re-infect people that have already been sick with COVID-19.According to him, the average form of infection with the novel coronavirus may cause brain damage, citing specialist studies indicating that the loss of taste and smell is not transient, as the affected senses may return after a longer or shorter time, and some people have noticed some form of "brain fog." As many as 12 Ukrainian men were detected by border guards on Romanian soil after crossing the Tisza River to seek asylum in Romania. "Maramures border police found 10 Ukrainian citizens who crossed from Ukraine into Romania swimming the Tisza River. They were found following a Lunca la Tisa, Tisa, Craciunesti route. Two more Ukrainian nationals were found after crossing from Ukraine into Romania in the jurisdiction areas of the Sarasau Border Police and the Valea Viseului Border Police. The Ukrainian men, aged between 18 and 59 years, requested a form of protection from the Romanian state, and specific procedures for such cases were started," says Dan Buca, spokesman for the Maramures County Emergency Management Committee.At the same time, Maramures firefighters carried four people in their utility vehicle accompanied by gendarmes, to the Maramures Regional Centre for Asylum Seekers Accommodation and Procedures at Somcuta Mare.Another 15 people were carried, accompanied by gendarmes, from the Sighetu Marmatiei Border Crossing Point to the Sighetu Marmatiei railway station, where they took a train for Bucharest City. Three people were picked up from a supermarket in Sighetu Marmatiei and taken to the Sighetu Marmatiei railway station, where they took a train for Bucharest."Currently there are no people accommodated in the camp operated by Maramures fire brigade in Sighetu Marmatiei. The camp can host 160 people, and additional accommodations may become available depending on further developments," said Buca. Romanian citizens are urged to sign a petition for the renaming of a part of Road Pavel D. Kiseleff, where the Russian Embassy in Bucharest is located, to Ukraine Road. "This would be a symbolical action of support for the Ukrainian people, who are defending their independence in the war started by Russia," shows the diplomatic mission to Bucharest. According to the quoted source, the Embassy of Ukraine and the Union of Ukrainians in Romania have appealed to Bucharest General Mayor Nicusor Dan and the City Hall with the request to join other capitals of Europe and America to examine the possibility of renaming part of Pavel D. Kiseleff Road, where the Embassy of the Russian Federation to Romania is located, to Ukraine Road. The campaign "Ukraine Street" campaign is addressed to the entire world to make Ukraine part of their capitals. The organizers see the initiative as a very powerful way to respond to the attempts of Russia and Vladimir Putin to destroy Ukraine and the culture of this country, Agerpres.ro informs. Several European and American capitals have joined the campaign, renaming the streets hosting the embassies of the Russian Federation to Free Ukraine Street, Ukrainian Heroes Street, Independent Ukraine Street or other names evocative of Ukraine. The website of the campaign https://www.uastreet.world/ contains links to petitions to rename the streets hosting the embassies and consulates of the Russian Federation in 53 cities in 34 countries of the world. The list will be expanded as the campaign develops. ST. LOUIS Free rides will be available again downtown from a small fleet of electric vehicles, first test-driven here a few years ago. City officials announced on Monday they are relaunching the free micro-transit service now called STL Downtown Link with $240,000 in federal stimulus funds. It means service for all, said Alderman James Page, whose 5th Ward overlaps with northern parts of the service territory. Think of The Link as a zero-emissions, horizontal elevator. A team of two fully electric Polaris GEM e6 vehicles will roam downtown streets, ferrying the public. The electric vehicles seat a driver and up to five passengers. The vehicles are legal on roads where the speed limit reaches up to 35 miles per hour making highways off limits. The downtown fleet is intended to stretch from the Mississippi River to 20th Street, and from Clark Street in the south to Cass Avenue in the north. The shuttles will be available 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 3-8 p.m. on weekdays only. They can be hailed on the street, picked up at designated stops, or called by either a dispatch number or the smartphone app TripShot. The city tried out a similar service in 2018. Page, who helped fight for its resurrection, said a top priority of his was having it available beyond the northern edge of downtown, into less wealthy neighborhoods like Columbus Square and Carr Square. I wanted to make sure to extend the service to that population, said Page. Others touted enhanced transportation access as a main attribute of the service, which can connect with broader transit systems, like MetroLink, in addition to downtown destinations, workplaces and more. We think about mobility as a utility, said Mark Minden, the executive vice president of business development for Labyrinth Smart Mobility, a Hazelwood-based company that will manage the service and that partnered with the citys Downtown Engagement and Public Safety Initiative to bring back the ride program. Though formally launched Monday, officials said the service warmed up over the past week or two. David Shelton, one of the drivers, says hes already given out quite a few rides, some of which were for out-of-state visitors and hotel guests, while some went to or from Union Station, the convention center, and the GreenLeaf Market grocery store, near the northern fringe of downtown. Its starting to pick up, said Shelton. The new chapter of the service is currently set to run for one year, supported by economic stimulus funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, passed in early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Its future is unclear, for now. Minden said that Labyrinth Smart Mobility could right-size, and expand, the program, based on what demand dictates. And in the long run, he hopes expanded transportation options and services like the STL Downtown Link could make it easier for downtown residents to forgo car ownership contributing to a live, work, play area where private vehicles arent needed. The business news you need Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. LADUE A wave of unionization efforts sweeping Starbucks cafes across the country has reached St. Louis. Workers at the South Lindbergh Boulevard store in Ladue said Tuesday they were filing paperwork with federal labor officials calling for a union election. The workers would be represented by Starbucks Workers United, which backed successful campaigns at several stores in Buffalo, New York, last year. In a letter Tuesday to Howard Schultz, the Seattle-based coffee chains CEO, the Ladue store workers complained of managers ignoring safety concerns amid the pandemic and cuts to hours forcing employees to seek second jobs or quit. We are announcing our union because we know we can stop this, the letter read. Workers at more than 100 of Starbucks 9,000 company-owned stores, including three in Kansas City, have sought union representation in recent months as a way to secure better pay and working conditions. The push has coincided with a tight labor market thats given workers bargaining power and a broader effort to grow union ranks amid a pandemic spotlighting the standing of lower-wage workers. Starbucks opposes the unionization efforts here and elsewhere. Our belief is that we are better together as partners, without a union between us, and that conviction has not changed, a spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday. Executives told investors earlier this month they are looking to do more to improve baristas work environment and listen to employees. It is currently boosting average pay for U.S. workers to $17 per hour, from $14 per hour. Bradley Rohlf, a barista at the Ladue location, said workers started talking about unionizing last year after hearing about the organizing efforts in Buffalo. Everyone saw that and started talking about it, he said. Around the same time, the store was getting new management that announced major cuts to employees schedules, Rohlf said. Employees here spoke with workers organizing other stores and heard that the same thing was happening elsewhere. Workers worried about qualifying for benefits, and a dozen left, the workers said in their letter. That led to an overwhelming majority of those left signing cards in favor of joining a union. It was not immediately clear Tuesday when an election would be held. But Rohlf said hes looking forward to getting to the bargaining table. Hes been unimpressed by the pay bumps the company has offered so far: The companys new floor may be the long-sought $15 per hour, but that doesnt mean as much as it once did. I think the minimum wage should be closer to $24, he said. The business news you need Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Tony Messenger Tony Messenger is the metro columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Follow Tony Messenger Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today DeRay Mckesson has been a lightning rod for as long as Ive known him. We met in 2014, after Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, and Mckesson came to St. Louis to protest. You might know him by the blue Patagonia vest that became his calling card. He built up a massive Twitter following, even becoming friends with the social media companys founder, Jack Dorsey. He used that following to help people know about protests, and to see what was happening in our region as young, Black people faced down a militarized police force. Mckesson had, and has, many detractors, from the local Black activists who clashed with some out-of-state protesters, to some of the national Black activists, who later said he co-opted elements of the Black Lives Matter movement, to, of course, some police officers and others who just wanted the protests to end. Ive always appreciated Mckessons insights. Hes been gracious to me. But some of those who tend to criticize him might cheer a recent development in a long-running lawsuit between a Louisiana police officer and Mckesson. Those folks should be careful what they wish for. The lawsuit, filed in 2016, seeks to hold Mckesson accountable for injuries the police officer sustained in the protest that followed the death of Alton Sterling, even though Mckesson, who was at the protest, had no connection to any violence. It doesnt matter that McKesson wasnt violent, say the officer and his attorneys. Because he helped organize the protest, and let people know about it on social media platforms, he should be held accountable. Last week, the Louisiana Supreme Court agreed with the officer. In responding to a question from the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, a majority of Louisianas high court determined that under state law, Mckesson could be held liable for the officers damages. Because it is alleged that Mckesson, with knowledge that such protests could turn violent, staged a protest in direct contravention of law, thereby provoking the police to respond, a person can easily associate the injury to the police officer with the alleged conduct, wrote one of the judges in the majority. No matter what one thinks of Mckessons activism, this is a devastating development, if it stands, for the cause of free speech in America. It is cancel culture on steroids. Consider the ongoing investigation by the congressional Jan. 6 commission into the events that led to the insurrection against the seat of American government. We now know that Virginia Ginni Thomas, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was at the Stop the Steal protest that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and that she texted then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to encourage him to use whatever power he might have to overturn the election of President Joe Biden. We know through federal prosecutions of the people who stormed the Capitol, leading to countless injuries of police officers and other public employees, that many of the people there were following instructions posted on social media by leaders from organizations like the racist Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and, yes, even by former President Donald Trump and members of his family, and other high-ranking Republicans. If a police officer in Louisiana can sue DeRay McKesson for tweeting about a protest, then where does it stop? Its one thing for those directly involved in violence to be held accountable as they were in Ferguson, in Louisiana, and in the nations capital. But if the courts decide that anybody who exercises his or her right to peaceably assemble, or encourages others to do so, can face civil liability, then we might as well rescind the First Amendment and consider it null and void. The lone dissenter in the Louisiana case, Justice Piper Griffin, explains what will happen to free speech in this country if the decision by her colleagues is allowed to stand: It will have a chilling effect on political protests in general as nothing prevents a bad actor from attending an otherwise peaceful protest and committing acts of violence, wrote Griffin, a Black woman who is the only person on her court who is not a white male. Courts would see increased litigation from all sides of the political spectrum and the flow of political speech could hinge on which viewpoints had patrons with deeper pockets. One doesnt have to agree with Mckesson to root for him to win this case. Civil rights are not the province of those we like or agree with. They belong to all Americans equally, or, theyre supposed to, anyway. If Mckesson loses, we all do. From City Hall to the Capitol, metro columnist Tony Messenger shines light on what public officials are doing, tells stories of the disaffected, and brings voice to the issues that matter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. EAST ST. LOUIS A former airman at Scott Air Force Base admitted on Tuesday getting caught in an underage sex sting in 2020. Urich N. Gaines admitted meeting someone he believed to be 16 years old through the Grindr dating app, and agreeing to come to the teen's house in Collinsville for sex on June 27, 2020. The teen was actually an FBI employee. Gaines brought condoms, and was arrested when he arrived at the house. He told FBI agents he planned to have sex with the teen, Gaines' plea agreement says. Gaines pleaded guilty Tuesday to a felony charge of attempted enticement of a minor. At his June 30 sentencing, Gaines will face a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison. A spokesman for Scott Air Force Base, near Belleville, said Gaines was "administratively separated" from the Air Force last year on an "other than honorable" basis. Shake off your afternoon slump with the oft-shared and offbeat news of the day, hand-brewed by our online news editors. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. JEFFERSON CITY The mother of a Kansas City girl who died from a stray bullet more than a decade ago urged members of the Missouri Senate to rewrite legislation that would further loosen state gun laws. Michele Shanahan-DeMoss, the mother of an 11-year-old who was killed on July 4, 2011, said a bill that allows guns on buses and churches should not include a provision imposing tougher penalties for people firing celebratory gunshots. We just need to somehow separate it, Shanahan-DeMoss told members of the Senate General Laws Committee. Shanahan-DeMoss said the Legislature needs to address celebratory gunfire without bogging it down with other provisions of state gun laws. In tearful testimony, she described the incident that killed her daughter, Blair. As we were loading Blair in the ambulance, there was gunfire still happening, Shanahan-DeMoss said. Her call for separating the provision found bipartisan support. It gets stalled every year. I apologize to you that it keeps happening, said Sen. Greg Razer, D-Kansas City. Sen. Holly Thompson Rehder, R-Sikeston, said she is helping to get a stand-alone version through the House and into the Senate for further debate. This year, St. Louis police received 736 reports of gunshots across the city as people celebrated the New Year. At least four people were wounded by stray bullets. The proposal is one piece of a bill that is part of an ongoing push by Republicans to ease gun laws in a state where gun violence has become a significant concern. State law allows people to carry concealed weapons without a permit. There is no requirement for background checks on the sale of certain weapons. The legislation containing Blairs Law and the public transit and church provisions earlier moved out of the House on a 101-40 vote. Supporters say transit riders will feel safer if they are packing a gun while riding to their destination. Under current law, it is a crime to board a bus with a dangerous or deadly weapon. The measure wouldnt apply to Amtrak. The prohibition stifles their ability to protect themselves, said Sen. Rick Brattin, R-Harrisonville. To me, this is protecting that little grandma who has to use public transportation to go to the grocery store. Rep. Adam Schnelting, R-St. Charles, is sponsoring the package. As a former pastor, he said he carried a concealed weapon in his parish and encouraged others to if they desired. But he said leaders of places of worship could put up signs asking people not to bring weapons in. I do know there is an underlying level of support for that, Schnelting said. Under current law, people with concealed carry licenses must get the explicit permission from the place of worships leaders to bring their weapon inside. Opponents said Missouri doesnt need looser gun laws. I know my city doesnt want this, Razer said. This is not an issue in Kansas City. Im not afraid to go to the grocery store. Whats wrong with society that weve gotten to this point? Mike Winter, representing the Missouri Public Transit Association, said the group continues to oppose the proposal. Our position has not changed. We are obviously very concerned about the safety of our riders, Winter said. Bi-State Development, which operates transit in the St. Louis region, has previously said concealed weapons could only be allowed if Illinois approves the same law, which is unlikely to happen. The legislation is House Bill 1462. Originally posted at 12:50 p.m. Tuesday, March 29. Shake off your afternoon slump with the oft-shared and offbeat news of the day, hand-brewed by our online news editors. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. CREVE COEUR A man fatally shot himself Monday evening inside a vehicle parked at Mercy Hospital St. Louis in Creve Coeur, police said. Creve Coeur police received a call about 5:30 p.m. that a man in "emotional distress" was by himself with a gun in a vehicle in the parking lot at the Mercy Hospital emergency room. Officers set up a perimeter around the man's vehicle and attempted to talk with him, but the man shot himself, police said in a statement. Authorities took him inside the hospital, where he died. Police remained on the scene for several hours and were continuing to investigate. No other details, including the man's identity, were released. Shake off your afternoon slump with the oft-shared and offbeat news of the day, hand-brewed by our online news editors. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. ST. LOUIS COUNTY St. Louis County residents can now call a hotline to report suspected abuse against elderly and disabled people. The hotline is staffed by prosecutors and staff members with backgrounds in social work, according to a release from St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bells office. The staff members will return each hotline call to follow up on the report by collecting evidence and evaluate for referrals to police or prosecution. "It takes a village to protect our most vulnerable members," Bell said. "No matter where you see abuse in the home, in a facility, in the community, at work please report it immediately." Bells statement referenced the National Institute on Aging, which notes there are many types of abuse, including physical, emotional, sexual, abandonment, financial and neglect. Signs of abuse can include: The person seems depressed, confused or withdrawn, or becomes isolated from friends and family. The person has unexplained bruises, burns or scars, or bed sores or other preventable conditions. The person appears dirty, underfed, dehydrated, over-or undermedicated, or is not receiving needed medical care. There are changes in banking or spending patterns. To make a report through the hotline, call 314-960-6100. ST. LOUIS The lesson Monday was in solidarity, as 100 students from three Catholic high schools rallied to support their teachers, who are locked in a union contract dispute with the Archdiocese of St. Louis. Classes were canceled Monday at Bishop DuBourg, Rosati-Kain and St. Marys after teachers staged a sickout, prompting students to gather on the steps of the Cathedral Basilica in St. Louis before the midday Mass. Theyre more than our teachers, theyre caregivers, said Lisha Luster, 17, a junior at Rosati-Kain. They never let us down. The St. Louis Archdiocesan Teachers Association also represents members at Cardinal Ritter College Prep in St. Louis and St. Pius X in Festus, which held classes Monday. The unions three-year contract with the archdiocese expired earlier this month. Nearly all of the 120 teachers from the five schools rejected the archdioceses final contract offer, which allowed for some pay raises but struck grievance and seniority protections. No additional negotiation sessions have been scheduled and teachers were given individual at-will contracts to sign by Friday. Union leaders have indicated a willingness to strike if a collective agreement is not reached. Public school teachers in Missouri are restricted from striking, but teachers at private schools are not covered by that law. The teachers want to be with our students; we want to teach in our schools. But one of the primary lessons we teach students is treating everyone with dignity and respect, reads a message sent Monday from the union to parents and students. Due to the actions by their employer, the Archdiocese and ultimately Archbishop (Mitchell) Rozanski, your teachers have not been afforded this dignity and respect. We are extremely concerned about the position of the Archdiocese which is so contrary to Church teaching on social justice and workers rights. The archdiocese did not respond Monday to a request for comment. In a letter to teachers March 9, Todd Sweda, superintendent for secondary education, expressed disappointment after they rejected the final contract offer. Under that offer, starting teacher salaries in the union would move to $33,000 a year from $30,387. Teachers with a masters degree and the equivalent of 10 years of experience would get $41,599 a year, up from $36,646. However, more experienced teachers at the top of the scale with a masters degree would see a pay cut to $56,750 from $64,070. The proposed pay scale is the most forward-thinking and aggressive approach to compensation in the past two decades, reads the letter from the superintendent. At the rally Monday, drivers including a few teachers honked their horns and shouted support to the students as they chanted Break communion, not the union and Practice what you preach. Jordyn Valentine, 16, of Rosati-Kain cried as her Spanish teacher Rebecca Nagel drove by to cheer for the students. Jordyn said she is worried about the future of the school if teachers decide to leave. I want to walk up these steps in our white gowns at graduation with our teachers, she said. A lot of my teachers are like my best friends. St. Louis Catholic high school teachers poised to strike over contract Catholic high school teachers began negotiating with Archdiocese of St. Louis in October, and they're now poised to strike after their contract expired on March 4. Stay up to date on life and culture in St. Louis. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. WENTZVILLE Danielle Tormala has been named superintendent of the Wentzville School District starting July 1. Tormala replaces 2022 national superintendent of the year Curtis Cain, who has led the district since 2013 and has taken the top job in the Rockwood School District. The announcement from the Wentzville School Board comes one week before local elections when voters will select two members for open seats on the seven-member board. Tormala is the first woman and 19th superintendent to lead Wentzville schools, one of the fastest growing districts in the state. She is associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction at the City of St. Charles School District, where she has worked since 2006. I am thrilled to join the Wentzville School District by continuing to serve students throughout St. Charles County, Tormala said in a statement. As the Wentzville superintendent, I look forward to working alongside the staff and community by building upon WSDs strong foundation to ensure that Wentzville becomes a recognized leader of excellence in education for strong educational programming and the ability to meet the unique needs of our students and community. Tormala started her career as an elementary school teacher in the Hazelwood School District. She has held various administrative positions in the St. Charles and Francis Howell school districts and been an adjunct professor at Maryville and Lindenwood universities. She has a bachelor's degree from St. Louis University, and master's and doctorate degrees from Maryville in educational leadership. Dr. Tormala brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to our District, said Betsy Bates, Wentzville School Board president, in a statement. She has a proven history of driving student achievement in her current role, and we look forward to seeing her grow that vision on a larger scale. Please join us in welcoming Dr. Tormala to the WSD family. The Wentzville board enlisted the the Missouri School Boards Association to conduct the superintendent search following Cain's announced departure. Cain led Wentzville for nearly a decade, overseeing a massive expansion amid steady population growth. During the pandemic, the Wentzville School Board repeatedly rejected Cains recommendations on mitigation measures including masks. In January, the board voted to ban The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison from high school libraries, drawing national criticism and a lawsuit from the ACLU. The board reversed its decision a month later, returning the book to library shelves. Stay up to date on life and culture in St. Louis. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. JEFFERSON CITY A Chesterfield Republican will not seek a final term in the Missouri House, deciding instead to focus on his real estate brokerage with his wife, he said on Tuesday. Rep. Derek Grier, R-Chesterfield, has represented the 100th House District since 2017. He filed to run in the redrawn 101st District, but withdrew from the race on Tuesday, the last day of candidate filing. Im extremely proud that I have been able to accomplish everything I set out to do when I first ran for office, Grier said in a statement. The time is right to shift gears to spend more time with my family and put all of my energy into growing our brokerage. Grier called his tenure a success and said he focused on reducing red tape for businesses. He is the current chairman of the House Economic Development Committee. In his place, John Brunner filed as a Republican shortly before candidate filing closed on Tuesday. He listed a Ladue mailing address, which is outside of the 101st District. House candidates dont have to run in the districts where they reside during a redistricting year. Grier said Brunner is the son of the elder John Brunner, who ran for Missouri governor in 2016. The younger Brunner had not yet formed a committee with the Missouri Ethics Commission, according to state records. In a statement, Brunner said, As a husband and father of five, with so much at stake for our state and country, we need more conservatives to answer the call to public service. He described himself as pro-business, pro-parental rights, anti-COVID tyranny, pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life. Rich Chrismer, spokesman for Brunners campaign, said the candidate is moving to the district. Also filing Tuesday was Helena Webb, a Democrat who ran against Grier in 2020. Libertarian Jeff Coleman, of Chesterfield, is also running. Originally posted at 5:13 p.m. Tuesday, March 29. Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. CLAYTON Jane Dueker, a local police union attorney, will challenge County Executive Sam Page in the Aug. 2 Democratic primary. A surprise entry in the race, Dueker pledged to serve full time if elected, a reference to Pages decision to continue to work part-time as an anesthesiologist while in office. She also called on Page to debate her, anywhere, anytime. Page, of Creve Coeur, is running for reelection for a full, four-year term. He won election in 2020 to complete a term vacated by Steve Stenger, defeating three Democratic challengers in the primary and easily sailing past his GOP challenger, Paul Berry III. Richard Callow, a Page campaign spokesman, called Duekers candidacy a surprise. I didnt have Steve Stengers campaign manager runs for county executive on my bingo card this year, Callow said. Dueker didnt serve as Stengers campaign manager, but was a top political adviser. The former county executive pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges in 2019. A regular presence in Stengers office, Dueker helped the former county executive craft responses to questions about the Northwest Plaza lease that moved county offices to property owned by some of his largest campaign donors. Dueker was chief of staff in former Missouri Gov. Bob Holdens administration from 2003 to 2004. More recently, she has been the vocal lobbyist for the police unions representing officers in St. Louis and St. Louis County. She was also a lobbyist hired as part of the effort to privatize St. Louis Lambert International Airport. A lawyer, she also represented former Missouri State Rep. Penny Hubbard in a vote-harvesting scandal that led to Hubbards loss of the seat in a do-over election. She also worked for coal company Peabody Energy in its efforts to block a vote that activists hoped to place on the ballot to bar tax breaks for major contributors to climate change such as the St. Louis-based Peabody. Asked about Duekers challenge to a debate, Callow said he would wait for a phone call from Dueker requesting one. Rep. Shamed Dogan, a Ballwin Republican, previously announced his candidacy for county executive. Dogan, the only Black Republican in the Missouri Legislature, has said he wants to build a coalition of Republicans and voters in the heavily Democratic, majority-Black north St. Louis County. Katherine Pinner, a Republican from South County, has filed to take on Dogan for the GOP nomination. Randall Holmes, of South County, has filed to run for county executive in the Green Party primary. Fitch wont seek second term Also on Tuesday, one of Pages harshest critics on the County Council announced he will not to seek a second term. Councilman Tim Fitch, R-3rd District, said he decided he would not be able to commit to another four-year term. His decision did not hinge on him being drawn out of the 3rd district in the new council district map, he said. Fitch, who joined the council in 2019, said he is exploring other options to remain involved in politics in coming years, but declined to provide more details in an interview. You cant spend 35 years in county government and then just walk away from it, he said. His withdrawal from the ticket appears to leave former Fenton mayor Dennis Hancock as the only candidate in the Republican primary in the 3rd District. Former state Rep. Vicki Lorenz Englund, a Democrat from Sunset Hills, and Jeanne Chickanosky, a Libertarian from Kirkwood, have also filed for the 3rd District council seat. Fitch, a former county police chief, had been one of the most outspoken members of the County Council and one of the fiercest critics of Page, a Democrat. While Democrats have long held a majority on the seven-member council, Fitch had considerable power on the legislative body over the last year as part of a bipartisan majority critical of Page. The majority included Rita Heard Days, D-1st District, Shalonda Webb, D-4th District, and Mark Harder, R-7th District. Fitch, who lives in a Creve Coeur apartment complex at 13115 Mill Crossing Court, would have had to move at least a mile south in order to run for reelection. Under new council district lines drawn by a federal court judge last week, the districts border on Olive Boulevard shifted south by several blocks, leaving Fitch in the 2nd District, a majority-Democratic area represented by Kelli Dunaway. Fitch had moved from Fenton, in the southern half of the 3rd district, to his new residence in Creve Coeur, about a year ago. He announced his decision not to seek a second term in a tweet Tuesday afternoon. Serving the people of St. Louis County for 35 years has been the honor of my life. Ive been humbled by the support of my family & the people of District 3. Due to future family & professional commitments, Im announcing that I will not be a candidate for this office in 2022. Republicans to challenge Clancy In other new candidate filings, two Republicans will compete in August for nomination to challenge incumbent Councilwoman Lisa Clancy, D-Maplewood, in the 5th District. Steven G. Bailey, a retired personal injury attorney from Clayton, has previously run for Congress in Missouris 1st Congressional District. He will face Jennifer Bird, of Crestwood. Bird ran unsuccessfully for the 5th District in 2014 against then-incumbent Pat Dolan; Dolan was unseated by Clancy in the 2018 August Democratic primary. Last year, Bird represented the 5th District Republican seat on the St. Louis County Bipartisan Reapportionment Commission, a 14-member panel tasked every 10 years with redrawing council district lines based on shifts in population. Michael G. Lewis, of Brentwood, also filed to run for the 5th District seat in the Libertarian primary. In other County Council races, Council Chair Days and her previously announced Democratic primary opponent, Jennings City Councilman Terry Wilson, have both filed in the 1st District. No other candidates have filed for the seat. And Harder, the GOP 7th District incumbent from Ballwin, has Democratic opposition in Kristine Callis of Chesterfield, the director of education, research and outreach for the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. Zimmerman and Bell in uncontested primariesCounty Assessor Jake Zimmerman and Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell, Democratic incumbents in the two other countywide elected offices, will go unchallenged in the August primary in the majority-Democratic county. Zimmerman, a Democrat and former state representative from Olivette, is seeking a fourth four-year term. He will face a Republican challenge in November from Peter Pfeifer, a real estate agent from Manchester. Nick Kasoff, of Ferguson, has filed to run for office in the Libertarian primary. And Don Fitz, of University City, has filed to run for the office in the Green Party primary. Bell, a Clayton Democrat, is running for a second, four-year term after unseating longtime prosecuting attorney Bob McCulloch in the 2018 Democratic primary. Theo Brown Sr., a Libertarian from Black Jack, has also filed for the office. St. Louis None of the three city officials up for election this year, Collector of Revenue Gregory F.X. Daly, License Collector Mavis Thompson and Recorder of Deeds Michael Butler, drew Democratic primary opposition in the heavily Democratic city. But three Republicans filed Robert Vroman for revenue collector, Michael Hebron for license collector and Timothy Gartin for recorder. Also running for recorder are two Green Party candidates, Jerome Bauer and Don Devivo. St. Charles County In the countys highest-profile race, County Executive Steve Ehlmann of St. Charles is fighting a GOP primary challenge from state Sen. Bob Onder of Lake Saint Louis. Also in the race is perennial candidate Arnie Dienoff of OFallon. A fourth candidate, Wentzville Municipal Judge Michael Carter, withdrew last week. Meanwhile, the countys longtime assessor, Republican Scott Shipman, has withdrawn his candidacy for reelection. Running in the GOP primary to succeed him are the assistant assessor, Travis Welge of OFallon and Harry Daw of Lake Saint Louis. Meanwhile, four incumbent County Council members up for election this year have gotten GOP primary opposition. Jefferson County Fran Newkirk of Barnhart filed Tuesday as the lone Democratic candidate for county executive. The Republican incumbent, Dennis Gannon of De Soto, will face state Sen. Paul Wieland of Imperial in the GOP primary. Mark Schlinkmann and Jacob Barker of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report. Updated at 6:45 p.m. Tuesday, March 29. Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. JEFFERSON CITY The Missouri House on Tuesday rejected fast action on a Senate-approved blueprint of the states congressional map, instead voting for a cross-chamber conference committee in an attempt to work out differences. The move delays passage of the congressional map indefinitely. Rep. Nick Schroer, R-St. Charles County, cast doubt on a conference committee, saying senators had vowed to filibuster any attempt at meeting with their House colleagues on the map. Ive already been told ... that if this goes back, they will filibuster the motion to take it to conference, he said during debate on Tuesday, urging House lawmakers to send the Senate-approved map to Gov. Mike Parson for his signature. Schroer ultimately was one of only 19 House members to vote against the conference committee. A bipartisan group of 115 lawmakers voted for the conference, and 12 Democrats abstained. Our best approach for the House today is to continue this discussion and go and try to come up with the best possible map, said Rep. Dan Shaul, R-Imperial, chairman of the House Redistricting Committee. The debate became heated when Schroer inquired of House Speaker Pro Tem John Wiemann, R-OFallon, who is running against Schroer in the GOP primary for the 2nd Senate District on Aug. 2. Schroer asked why Wiemann called a map Schroer proposed earlier this year illegal. That prompted Wiemann to question why Schroer was asking about this on Tuesday. Why are we having this argument right now? Wiemann asked. You want to try to prove that youre a big shot? The map that the Senate sent us is not compact, Wiemann said. Tuesdays vote for a conference committee followed Senate passage last week of a so-called 6-2 map dramatically different than the outline the House narrowly approved in January. The Senate product resulted from overnight negotiations into Thursday morning that sought to appease hard-line members of the GOP caucus. Those members had pushed for changes to district boundaries in St. Charles County. At least one of the hard-line senators vowed to fight against the House move. I would not be in favor of sending that bill to conference. We painstakingly worked on changing the House map for two months, said Sen. Denny Hoskins, R-Warrensburg. One of the largest alterations from the House plan has to do with the shape of the 2nd Congressional District, held by U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Ballwin. Under the House plan, the 2nd would include both St. Charles and St. Louis counties. But the Senate plan stretches the 2nd all the way from St. Louis County as far south as Iron County, in southeast Missouri. St. Francois and Washington counties, as well as portions of Franklin and St. Charles counties, would also be placed in the 2nd. To me District 2 looks like gerrymandering on steroids, said Rep. Mike McGirl, R-Potosi, in Washington County. The Senate-approved map places about four-fifths of St. Charles Countys population in the 3rd Congressional District, held by U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-St. Elizabeth. St. Charles County lawmakers want as much of St. Charles County as possible within one congressional district. Rep. Phil Christofanelli, R-St. Peters, said Monday the new 3rd was the best deal that St. Charles could get adding that I would be prepared to vote for that map. But Christofanellis view wasnt shared universally among House lawmakers. I think that there were a number of people that had other interests that werent as excited about it (the map), he said. The Senate map, like the House version, gives Republicans six likely seats, allotting Democrats two seats in Kansas City and St. Louis, respectively. Rep. Michael Burton, D-Lakeshire, said a fair map would include three Democratic seats and five Republican districts, based on recent statewide election results. How could you come to any other conclusion than a 5-3 map if you really want fair elections? Burton asked. Kurt Erickson of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report. Updated at 4:50 p.m. Tuesday, March 29. Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. JEFFERSON CITY St. Louis beer heiress Trudy Busch Valentine joined the heated race for Missouris U.S. Senate seat Monday. The move triggered former state Sen. Scott Sifton, who had represented south St. Louis County in the Legislatures upper chamber until 2020, to exit the Democratic primary race and throw his support to the wealthy Clayton resident. In a campaign video, Valentine recounted her childhood growing up at the iconic family estate, Grant's Farm, and highlighted her financial contributions to the nursing program at St. Louis University. Across Missouri our communities are strong but our politics are broken. We just need to talk to each other again, she said. We need something different. We need a new politics." Valentine is the daughter of the late Anheuser-Busch beer baron August Gussie Busch Jr., who died in 1989. Her mother, Gertrude Trudy Busch, was Buschs third wife. She has been a major fundraiser for Democratic candidates. In 2016, she held a fundraiser at Grants Farm, the historic homestead of the Busch family, for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The 2016 event was organized by Joyce Aboussie, a longtime Democratic operative. In addition to Sifton, guests included former U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, former Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster, and former St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay. In addition to contributing more than $37,000 to campaign accounts supporting Clinton, federal campaign records show Valentine has written checks to U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat. In the video, Valentine also talked of tragedy. Her husband, John, died of cancer at age 49. In 2020, her son, Matt, died of an opioid overdose. "Matts death brought so much sadness but it also reignited the passion in me to make a positive difference for others, this time on a larger scale, Valentine said. With filing to close Tuesday, there are at least 10 Democrats running for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Roy Blunt, including Jefferson City native Lucas Kunce. In statement Monday evening, Sifton said he was throwing his support to Valentine. Im proud of the race we ran. We traveled to each of Missouris 114 counties and saw more Missourians contribute to our cause than did any other candidate running on either side of the aisle by a wide margin, Sifton said. A poll just two weeks ago showed me dead even with Republican front-runner Eric Greitens. Sifton said the party needs to be united behind beating Greitens, who left office amid a scandal and was accused last week of mental and physical abuse by his ex-wife, Sheena Greitens. Sifton praised Valentine. I have seen her in action working on issues in the community and know she will do right by Missourians. I am excited to see what she can do for our state in the Senate, and call on all other Democrats in the field to lend her their support, Sifton said. Along with Greitens, others seeking the GOP nomination include Attorney General Eric Schmitt, St. Louis attorney Mark McCloskey, U.S. Reps. Vicky Hartzler and Billy Long and state Senate President Dave Schatz. In 2019, Valentine contributed $4 million to St. Louis University to support its nursing school, which is now named after her. Valentine graduated from the nursing school in 1980. Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. JEFFERSON CITY A state senator from St. Louis filed Monday to run in the Democratic primary for Congress, pitting himself against incumbent U.S. Rep. Cori Bush. Sen. Steve Roberts of St. Louis said hes running in the newly redrawn 1st Congressional District after being encouraged by supporters to challenge the progressive Bush. We all had the highest hopes for Congresswoman Bush but shes shown over the past year and a half that shes not interested in the job of United States Representative. We dont have time for slogans; Im ready to get to work, bring people together, and deliver results for the families of the 1st district, Roberts said in a statement. Roberts name had been linked to a challenge of Bush for months. He has been largely silent in public, but has been readying a campaign behind the scenes, pending the outcome of a favorable district map. Bush, a progressive activist and veteran of the racial justice protest movement, defeated 20-year incumbent U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay in the 2020 primary and went on to win the general election. The seat, based in St. Louis, had been held by Clay and his father, former Rep. William Clay Sr., one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus, since 1969. "The people of St. Louis will have a choice: between their Congresswoman who loves them and delivered hundreds of millions of dollars to St. Louis, and a host of ego-driven men who seem to think all that Black women leaders do is never good enough," said Karthik Ganapathy, spokesperson for Bush's campaign. Roberts addition to the race comes as others have said they plan to run as more moderate candidates than Bush. Michael Daniels, a Jefferson City lobbyist for then-Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr. in the mid-1990s, said in a statement Friday that the area doesnt need an activist who is not committed to representing and protecting all of St. Louis, referring to Bush. Democrats Earl Childress of Florissant and Ron Harshaw of St. Louis also have criticized Bushs positions. Republicans who have filed include Andrew Jones, a St. Louis mayoral candidate last year; Steven Jordan, also of St. Louis; and Laura Mitchell-Riley of north St. Louis County. George Zsidisin of Creve Coeur has filed as a Libertarian candidate. Bush has said she regards defunding police as shifting money from police to other government programs such as mental health and social services. Bush, 45, also has been criticized for voting last year against President Joe Bidens infrastructure spending bill. Roberts, 34, whose father and uncle are former city aldermen and mayoral candidates, is a captain in the Missouri Air National Guard. He also served previously in the Missouri House, where he was chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus. During his House tenure, he was involved in legal action with Cora Faith Walker, who died earlier this month at age 37. Before she joined the House, in September 2016, Walker wrote a public letter to House leaders accusing Roberts of raping her in his apartment after a night out together. Roberts denied the claims and contended that he and Walker had consensual sex. No criminal charges were filed after a special prosecutor determined there was not enough evidence to indicate the sexual relations were not consensual. Roberts later filed a defamation suit against Walker in October 2016. Walker then countersued Roberts in 2017. Both dismissed their lawsuits later in May 2019. "Among that crowded field is at least one candidate who has been credibly accused of rape, and such men do not belong in public service, much less representing the incredible people of St. Louis in Congress," Ganapathy said. "The choice is clear, and the people of St. Louis know that." Originally posted on Monday, March 28. Updated at 7:33 a.m. Tuesday with reaction from Bush's campaign. Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. A steady drip of evidence continues to indicate that former President Donald Trump may have personally committed crimes in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. A federal judge said as much on Monday, finding that facts show it is more likely than not Trump on that day committed the federal crimes of obstructing Congress and conspiring to defraud the U.S. On Tuesday, The Washington Post and CBS News reported there is a seven-hour, 37-minute gap in official phone logs turned over to Congress regarding Trumps calls as the attack unfolded this despite reporting from the time showing Trump was on calls throughout the event. Did Trump use an undocumented burner phone, favored communication mode of mobsters and other criminals, to hide his activity that day? If so, why? Politically fraught as it may be, its becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that a full-bore criminal investigation by the Justice Department is warranted. Trumps documented activities alone between the November 2020 election and Jan. 6 are a parade of impropriety at least bordering on criminality. In court and in public, he spread pernicious lies about voter fraud, with zero evidence. He personally hounded state election officials, including Georgias secretary of state, of whom Trump demanded, find 11,780 votes the exact margin he needed to win the state. On the day of the Capitol riot, Trump incited his followers to fight like hell shortly before they stormed the building and halted the election certification. Then he refused for hours to intercede, ignoring pleas from his own advisers to call off the horde. He harangued and pressured his own vice president, Mike Pence, to illegally throw the election, then publicly condemned Pence for refusing. Prior reporting has established that Pence was among those with whom Trump talked by phone on Jan. 6 during the 457 minutes when, the logs turned over to Congress indicate, he wasnt talking to anyone. Its a matter of record that Trump had multiple other phone conversations during that mysterious gap, including one in which he brushed off House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthys frantic demand that he call off the rioters. The Jan. 6 commission ultimately must determine whether to recommend that the Justice Department criminally investigate a former president for actions he took while in office. Thats something no former president has ever faced not because they were all choirboys but because, no matter how justified, one administration going after its predecessor would inevitably create a precedent that partisans of the future may feel empowered to abuse. Thats a legitimate concern. But its not more legitimate than the principle that no one, not even a president, is above the law. At some point, evidence of clear criminality cries out for a response. If that point hasnt yet been reached in the current case, its certainly getting close. Regarding Aisha Sultan's column "Festus teacher says she was fired for support of LGBTQ students" (March 19): The Constitution guarantees us certain inalienable rights. But who is us? Does the woman who cannot carry a pregnancy to term have rights? Does the Black teenager growing up in poverty? Or the gay man or lesbian woman? Are the rights guaranteed by the Constitution only for the right people? And, of course, what about our responsibility to respect those rights? Apparently, that doesn't apply to Big Religion. I believe Festus R-VI Middle School principal Jacob Munoz is using his religion not only to shame and discriminate against lesbian and gay students but to fire a teacher, Patricia Johnson. He took actions against her because she hung up a students work that included a small gay pride flag. Munoz, a conservative Christian, said that his personal religious views would not allow him to support LGBT students in his school. Munoz has greatly overstepped his authority by allowing his personal religious views to interfere with his official duties. Johnson had done nothing wrong. The gay students had done nothing wrong. P. Andersen St. Louis County After weeks of hints, Southwest announced its new fare last week. Any time a big airline makes such a portentous announcement, you need to take a look and answer seven questions. 1. What's New? The new Wanna Get Away Plus fare sits above the line's lowest offering, Wanna Get Away, and below Anytime, its entry-level unrestricted fare. As the name indicates, it's much closer to the low fare than the higher one. It remains capacity controlled which means it's almost never available within a week or two of departure it's nonrefundable and not changeable. As with all Southwest fares, however, it includes two free checked bags and retention for a year of the full dollar value of a ticket you change or cancel. The Plus part adds two potentially important and one trivial benefit to the base fare: You can switch to an available seat on a different flight on the same day as your original flight confirmed or standby, depending on the status but you may have to pay a higher fare. You can transfer the credit for a canceled flight to another person to use if you can't use it yourself. You earn eight frequent flyer points per airfare dollar spent rather than six. The new fare will hit the marketplace in the second quarter of this year. Current announcements do not specify how big the fare differences will be. 2. Does it Affect the Hard Product? No, it does not. In fact, Southwest is unique among the large US lines in that it offers the same, tight hard product to everyone at every fare. Southwest's hard product, at 31- 32-inch pitch, gives a tad more legroom than many competitors do, but all six-across 737 seating it too narrow to accommodate today's travelers comfortably. 3. Who's the Target? The additional benefits of Plus potentially appeal to both business travelers and leisure travelers. Business travelers who finish their day's schedule early enough to catch a flight prior to the one on which they're ticketed avoid sitting around the airport for hours until their original flight leaves or paying the high same-day fare to get on that earlier flight. And companies that recover frequent flyer benefits for company travel will be happy to use one traveler's points for another's trip. Some leisure travelers will also welcome value transfer. Often, I hear of parties forced to cancel a trip that include some members who would be unlikely or unable to use retained credit at a later time. 4. Are there Any Losers? Often, an airline's big fare move is a zero-sum game: Some travelers gain a better deal, but others lose some feature that was previously included. As far as I can tell here, however, nobody loses. Folks at the base fare lose nothing they got before the change. 5. Will Southwest Keep It? Probably it will, Southwest has always studied its moves carefully before committing to a change, and I'm pretty sure that the numbers look good, The new fare doesn't affect Southwest's costs at all, and the only risk to Southwest that I see is that some business travelers who normally buy Anytime tickets will drop down to the lower Plus level. Southwest can easily tweak the Plus fare level to minimize that risk. 6. Will Other Lines Copy? Probably not, at least not directly. The giants and niche lines already offer both base and standard economy fare levels. At most, one of them might add a little flexibility to travel or refund rules on standard economy fares. Alternatively, they might decide to enhance the attraction of their extra-legroom options by adding value transfer. 7. What's The Take-Away? The outcome depends entirely on where Southwest sets the price premium over Wanna Get Away. If the difference is minimal, it's a big deal: A lot of Southwest travelers will bite. But if the difference is big, the result is "meh" and you'll see little change. For sure, however, if the giant lines see any shift in market share, they will respond. (Send e-mail to Ed Perkins at eperkins@mind.net. Also, check out Eds new rail travel website at www.rail-guru.com.) Israel received its first Sky Dew aerostat (aerodynamic unpowered blimp) system recently and sill use to provide more protection from Iranian air attacks. Sky Dew carries radars and other sensors to monitor large land areas for low, slow intruders like fire balloons or UAV cruise missiles. The first Sky Dew is being installed along the northern border where Iranian armed UAVs are a growing problem. Another Sky Dew may be installed in the south, along the Gaza border, where fire balloons are less of a problem.. Hamas, which runs Gaza, has been relatively quiet so far this year as it tries to negotiate a cease fire that would improve the Gaza economy. Economics is something Hamas has ignored since it took control of Gaza in 2007. Polls show both Hamas and Fatah (which runs the West Bank) are seen as unfit to rule by over 70 percent of Palestinians. Iranian Nukes Israel, along with Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Gulf Oil states are very angry with the Americans because the U.S. is not only offering Iran a revival of the 2015 sanctions treaty, but also a modification of the terms to make it easier for Iran to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Billions of dollars in frozen accounts would be returned to Iran and if the Americans went ahead with taking the Iranian IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) and its Quds Force off the list of known terrorists there would be a lot more violence in the Middle East. Iran saw the 2015 treaty suspended by the Americans in 2018 because of Iranian cheating. Then came the 2020 American presidential elections, which put into power what is now recognized (by numerous polls) as the most unpopular and inept American president ever. One reason for this unpopularity is current American policies towards Iran and reduced support for Arab resistance to Iranian violence. This has driven many Gulf oil states into an economic alliance with Russia to drive up the price of oil. This policy makes it easier for Iran to smuggle more of its heavily discounted oil to customers. That plan survived the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine and even more economic sanctions. Because of this new American attitude, Israel has carried out several major attacks on the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Some earlier attacks were in cooperation with the United States but the most recent ones were done with the help of Iranians who also oppose the nuclear weapons and the current Iranian religious dictatorship. Israel makes it clear it will launch a major air and missile strike against the Iranian nuclear program if Iran gets close to creating a working nuclear weapon. Israels new allies among the Arab Persian Gulf oil states will cooperate with such an attack, as they are already being hit by Iranian missiles, cruise missiles and guided rockets. Israel has had locally developed nuclear weapons since 1970 and used these weapons as the ultimate deterrent to any serious effort to destroy Israel. Israel can deliver their nukes several ways. This first method was aircraft-delivered gravity bombs and later air-to ground missiles. Then came ballistic missiles plus cruise missiles that can be launched via torpedo tubes from a submerged Israeli sub. Israel never acknowledged it has nukes and continues to maintain them and several delivery systems. This has deterred everyone except Iran, which since the 1980s has been ruled by a religious dictatorship that was obsessed with destroying Israel. The Russian Relationship Israel has always had good relations with Russia, which was one of the first nations to recognize the new state of Israel in 1948. This played a role in Russian Jews being allowed to migrate to Israel starting in the 1970s. Currently about 15 percent of the Israeli population are either those who migrated from Russia or their descendants. Many of these Russian Jews came from Ukraine, where the current leader is a Jew elected president in 2019 because he backed more economic and security connections with NATO and the West. Despite that Russia worked hard to maintain its good relations with Israel and in 2016 Russian leader Vladimir Putin described Russia and Israel as unconditional allies. Thousands of Russian Israelis have demonstrated in support of Ukraine after the recent invasion. The Israeli government refused to openly criticize the Russian invasion of Ukraine and used its good relationship with Russia to help negotiate an end to the fighting and the war. Israel has reacted to the more limited 2014 Russian attacks on Ukraine by halting cooperation with Russian efforts to develop modern UAVs. Because of its even closer relationship with the United States, Israel has never provided Russia with lethal weapons or weapons technology. At the same time Israel has sold over a billion dollars worth of weapons to Moslem majority Azerbaijan, another former part of the Soviet Union that borders Iran and Russian backed Armenia. In late 2020 there was a brief war between Azerbaijan and Armenia that the Azeris won, in part because of the Israeli weapons. Selling weapons to Ukraine was another matter and Russia apparently told Israel that such sales could reduce Russian cooperation in Syria against Iran. Most Israelis support Ukraine, but the Iranian threat is very real and next door, so Israeli politicians cannot ignore it unless they want to lose their next election. Russia has already suffered major economic losses from the additional economic sanctions imposed after the February 2022 invasion and may end up a much-reduced military power. This could include the withdrawal of their forces in Syria. Even with that, Russia remains a major nuclear power with a large enough arsenal to trigger the nuclear apocalypse that became a reality in the 1960s and has kept the peace between the nuclear powers ever since. Vladimir Putin openly threatens to use nukes to keep NATO nations from supporting Ukraine militarily. NATO is sending in lots of weapons anyway, but not NATO forces. Israel wants to stay off the Russian nuclear targets list. March 28, 2022: Foreign ministers from Egypt, the UAE (United Arab Emirates), Bahrain, Morocco, Israel and the United States met in southern Israel (Negev) to discuss expanding diplomatic and trade relationships. Iran was not a topic for discussion because those matters are handled in less public meetings. The Negev meeting was about long-term commercial matters and the prospects of other Arab countries recognizing Israel. The American Secretary of State (foreign minister) was reminded that everyone else at the meeting was not pleased with the generous terms the U.S. was offering Iran to get sanctions lifted and Iran to again promise it was not developing nuclear weapons. There is growing opposition within the United States against this treaty, which the Arab foreign ministers pointed out is turning Arab nations against the United States, or at least the current government. The Palestinians were not invited to this meeting because the Palestinian obsession with destroying Israel, and relying on Iranian aid to do it has made the Palestinians more an enemy than anything else. March 27, 2022: While Israel is not providing weapons to Ukraine, this has not prevented foreign subsidiaries of Israeli firms from doing so. In Germany Dynamit Nobel Defence . a subsidiary of Israeli arms manufacturer Rafael began shipping 2,600 RGW90 portable anti-tank rocket launchers. RGW90 is an 8 kg (18 pound) recoilless rifle weapon that fires a 90mm warhead that can penetrate all vehicles except the frontal armor of modern tanks. RGW90 can hit a vehicle size target at 500 meters over 90 percent of the time. When ambushing Russian armored vehicles the Javelin ATGM (anti-tank guided missile) can hit the tanks from up to 2,500 meters while the RGW90 or similar weapons take care of everything else. Israeli forces have been using RGW90 for over two decades. Germany and other NATO nations have been donating and delivering thousands of portable anti-tank weapons to Ukraine in the last few weeks. Ukraine has been able to purchase additional weapons and these orders are quickly approved, usually in a week or so. This is very fast because Ukrainian forces need these weapons now. Israel can sympathize with that and Russia is apparently not objecting to weapons from foreign subsidiaries of Israeli firms being sold to Ukraine. March 24, 2022: Three more F-35s were delivered to Israel, flown in by Israeli pilots from the United States. This gives Israel 33 of the 75 F-35s it has ordered. These will provide three fighter squadrons, all based at an airbase in southern Israel with numerous dispersal (wartime) locations. Putting all three squadrons in one base makes it easier to maintain the F-35 and apply upgrades. The first F-25 arrived in 2016 and the last of the 75 is supposed to arrive by the end of the decade, if not sooner. March 23, 2022: In western Ukraine, 15 kilometers from the Polish border and near the city of Lviv, a $6.5 million Israeli field hospital opened, staffed by a hundred Israeli volunteers, most of them doctors and nurses. The hospital has 150 beds, operating rooms and uses ten large tents and classrooms in an adjacent school for treating patients. The Israeli staff sleep in nearby dormitories. The hospital is there mainly to treat refugees from other parts of Ukraine where Russian artillery and missiles have destroyed many homes and businesses. The field hospital also has some Ukrainian doctors and nurses and is establishing relationships with other Ukrainian hospitals. Some of the Israeli staff are Ukrainian or the children of Ukrainians who moved to Israel years ago. The field hospital and other non-lethal aid is appreciated but Ukrainians want Israeli weapons. Ukraine tried to purchase Iron Dome rocket defense systems from Israel in 2019 and Israel refused. Israel would not sell weapons to Ukraine before the Russian 2022 invasion because of Russian cooperation in Syria where Israel regularly attacks Iranian forces trying to get close enough to the Israeli border to launch attacks. Israel carries out these air strikes without interference from Russian air defense systems or jet fighters in Syria to support the Assad government against rebels, including a large number of ISIL Islamic terrorists. Israel still will not sell any weapons to Ukraine. You wont see Russian troops using any Israeli weapons either and that is part of the price Israel has to pay to keep its population safe from Iranian attacks and decades of pledges to destroy Israel completely. Iran will use nuclear weapons for this, once it completes development of a workable nuke that is rugged enough to work in a ballistic missile warhead. Israel did send a field hospital to Ukraine and other non-lethal assistance without visibly angering Russia. March 22, 2022: In the south, four Israeli Jews were killed by a local Bedouin who was an ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) supporter. The killer was also an Israeli citizen and used a knife to attack people before armed civilians shot him dead. Most of these knife attacks take place in the West Bank and began in 2015 when Palestinian leaders called for suicidal knife terrorism attacks. These attacks soon lost their popularity despite Fatah still pushing them energetically in all the Palestinian media. This can be seen in the number of Palestinian terror attacks disrupted each year. It was 217 in 2014, 187 in 2013 112 in 2012 and 88 in 2011. In the last decade knife attacks are less common and almost always occur in the West Bank or Jerusalem. Since 1948 some 2,600 Israelis have died from terror attacks inside Israel. Nearly five percent of those dead were foreigners. Palestinian terrorism efforts have never recovered from the defeat they suffered, when Israel adopted new tactics that largely shut down the terror campaign the Palestinians began in 2000. Fatah and Hamas have been trying to revive that effort ever since and have largely failed. March 21, 2022: Recent commercial satellite photos showed the extent of a February 16 Israeli airstrike, using six large UAVs, on an Iranian UAV storage warehouse in rural west Iran. Israel has still not officially taken credit for the attack, which the Iranians describe as a fire that got out of control. Iran admitted it was an Israeli attack on March 20th. The satellite photos show precise and total destruction of the facility. The warehouse stored hundreds of the large UAVs, which are disassembled and smuggled into northern Yemen where Iran-backed Shia rebels use them to attack Saudi Arabia and the UAE. March 18, 2022: The commander of U.S. CENTCOM (Central Command), who manages all American forces in the Middle East, confirmed that the United States considers Iran the major threat in the region. The U.S. backs Israeli efforts to attack Iranian forces in Syria and Iraq. Iran often attacks American forces in retaliation. The improved diplomatic, economic and military relations between Israel and the Gulf Arab states since 2020 is mainly about the Iranian threat that both Americans, Israelis and Gulf Arabs face. Because of the increased cooperation between Arabs and Israel since 2020 Israel became part of CENTCOM instead of EURCOM (Europe). The main reason Israel was long part of EURCOM was that Israel had better relationships with European nations than its Middle East neighbors. Even Iraq, long one of the most virulent critics of Israel, has mellowed and come to admit that Iran was a larger threat and Israel was useful in diminishing that threat. For that reason, Iraq wants the few (about 2,500 trainers and advisors) American troops in Iraq to remain as long as Iran is a threat. The Shia Arab majority in Iraq also knows that the Kurdish minority (about 20 percent) has long sought and accepted Israeli military assistance and benefited from it. March 15, 2022: In the West Bank Israeli police arrested a known Palestinian terrorist but were attacked by other Palestinians armed with firearms or just rocks. There Palestinians were killed. There was less violence as two other wanted Islamic terrorists were arrested. March 13, 2022: In northern Iraq, Iran launched a dozen cruise missiles at targets in or near Erbil, the capital of autonomous Kurdish northern Iraq. Some of the missiles landed near the American consulate but caused no damage or casualties. Other missiles did hit buildings and the damage was substantial for the palatial home of a wealthy Iraqi Kurd. Iran later took credit for the attack, explaining that it was directed at a mythical Israeli Mossad Base near Erbil. The mansion, used by the wealthy and influential Iraqi Kurd and his family, was demolished when no one was home. The bombed-out ruins were open for the media, who took lots of pictures. Iran had no explanation why their guided projectiles seemed to land randomly, except on the mansion. Iran said the attack was revenge for an Israeli airstrike in Syria last week that killed two senior Quds Force commanders. Kurdish officials speculated that the attack was made at a time when no one was in the mansion and avoiding any casualties was an objective, so the attack would serve as a warning rather than something demanding a retaliatory attack. The Kurds believe the attack was more about Iran reminding everyone that Iraq is subordinate to Iran and foreigners as well as Iraqis must remember this. March 12, 2022: Russian troops are now patrolling the Syria-Israel border along the Golan Heights. Russia says it has expelled all Iran forces from the border region and will keep them out. This is part of an effort to reduce the need for Israeli attacks on Iranian forces operating in Syria. This is part of an effort to enable the Syrian government, still a dictatorship run by a Syrian Shia Arab Assad group, to abandon decades of dependence on Iranian military and diplomatic support. The Assads are seeking to joint an Arab alliance that is cooperating with Israel against Iran. Israel does not want to ruin its relationship with Russia, which is an unofficial ally of Israel against Iran. March 7, 2022: In southern Syria (Damascus) another Israeli air strike against Iranian targets left two Iranian Quds Force colonels dead and six Iran-backed militia wounded. Iran responded with threats of retaliatory attacks to avenge the loss of two Quds Force officers. This was the seventh Israeli airstrike in Syria for 2022. March 2, 2022: At the UN Egypt, along with the 140 other members, voted to condemn the Russian attack on Ukraine. There are 193 member nations and 35 abstained while five, including Russia, voted against the resolution. Egypt voted against Russia even though the state-owned Russian atomic energy corporation Rostom is supposed to begin construction of a nuclear power plant in Egypt that will contain four reactors and solve Egypts energy shortage problems once all four reactors are operational in 2031. The first one will be producing 1,200 megawatts of electricity by 2028, if construction starts on time. The massive economic sanctions on Russia appear to stall the Egyptian power plant projects. As of late March Russia was still reassuring Egypt that the Ukrainian matter would be resolved and the nuclear plant work would not be disrupted. Russia did not reveal how it was going to take care of this. That is an issue because two weeks after the UN resolution it was clear that the Russian invasion had failed and a week after that the Ukrainians were counterattacks and regaining ground while Russia scrambled to replace losses and avoid an embarrassing defeat. Ukraine was demanding the Russia withdraw from Ukraine, including Crimea and portions of eastern Ukraine Russia has occupied since 2014. To preserve the $29 billion Egyptian Rostom deal Russia has to get out from under the Western sanctions. This calls for Russia to get out of Ukraine and possibly agree to pay billions in reparations for the deaths and damage their invasion caused. February 24, 2022: In southern Syria (Damascus) another Israeli air strike against Iranian targets. Three Syrian soldiers died. This was the seventh Israeli airstrike in Syria for 2022. Russia launched a limited invasion of Ukraine, advancing from about six directions, plus an airborne assault on an airport near Kyiv. Several ballistic missiles hit Kyiv at 4 AM local time. Within 24 hours Ukraine reported that about fifty people had been killed by the missile strikes, and about 150 wounded. Military casualties were about twice that during the first 24 hours of combat, where Russian airstrikes, mainly via ballistic missiles, were against military targets. Russia hoped to wipe out most of the Ukrainian air force but discovered that most of the aircraft had been dispersed to remote locations where they could land and take off on highways and operate safely at low altitudes. Commercial satellite photos were soon available to provide a more accurate picture of what was happening. Russia invaded Ukraine and this put Israel in a difficult position because of how Israel was dealing with Iran and getting help from Russia. Iran needs cash to keep its wars in Syria, Yemen and Iraq going. Israel is preparing to carry out airstrikes on the Iranian nuclear program if they get too close to producing a bomb. Arab oil states will allow Israeli warplanes to unhindered passage to and from such a mission. Iranian threats against its Arab neighbors have caused more resolve to resist and the Arab peace deals with Israel are a nightmare scenario Iranians never expected to experience. February 26, 2022: In Iran (the capital Tehran) several dozen Iranians protested the Russian invasion of Ukraine and did so outside the Russian embassy. This protest was technically illegal but more accurately represented the attitudes of most Iranians. Enthusiastic Iranian media support for the Russian invasion was criticized by many senior Iranian officials because the media sounded like it was just repeating the Russian justification for the invasion as self-defense against NATO expansion. Some Iranian government officials point out that Russia has claims on portions of Iran and Iran could be next on the Russian list of self-defense invasions. The Shia in neighboring Iraq also protested the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There were mixed signals elsewhere in the region. Western nations criticized Israel for not condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Actually, Israel did announce that it supported Ukrainian territorial integrity. Israel has an important relationship with Russia in Syria and Israel does not want to endanger that because it makes it easier to carry out airstrikes against Iranian forces in Syria. Russia needs its relationship with Israel more that it needs an alliance with Iran. For that reason, Israel and Russia are often described as frenemies and have consistently behaved as such. GOTEBORG, Sweden, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Victoria van Camp, CTO and Senior Vice President, SKF Technology Development will leave SKF to continue her career outside SKF. She will leave Group Management today but will remain in an advisory role during a brief transition period. Rickard Gustafson, President and CEO, says: "On behalf of SKF I would like to thank Victoria for her valuable contribution during many years of employment and I wish her all the best in future". The role as CTO and Senior Vice President, SKF Technology Development has been assumed on an interim basis by Andrew Bell, Director, Product Development & Engineering. A recruitment process to identify a new CTO and Senior Vice President has been initiated. Aktiebolaget SKF (publ) CONTACT: For further information, please contact:PRESS: Carl Bjernstam, Group Communicationtel: 46 31-337 2517; mobile: 46 722-201 893; e-mail: [email protected] INVESTOR RELATIONS: Patrik Stenberg, Head of Investor Relationstel: 46 31-337 2104; mobile: 46 705-472 104; [email protected] This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com https://news.cision.com/skf/r/skf-announces-changes-to-group-management,c3534357 The following files are available for download: https://mb.cision.com/Main/637/3534357/1555411.pdf 20220329 SKF announces changes to Group Management View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/skf-announces-changes-to-group-management-301512490.html SOURCE SKF (Tribune News Service) In most of the 16 sites where Wright-Patterson Air Force Base environmental engineers are investigating the presence of PFAS and PFOA chemicals, those substances were found in amounts above EPA-recommended lifetime health advisory levels, base staff members said in a virtual public meeting Monday. But those levels have been found in either groundwater or surface water, not drinking water, said Raymond Baker, environmental branch chief at Wright-Patterson. Thirteen of the 16 sites are on the base's Area A, with two on Area B and one off-base to the northeast of the installation. "Right now there are no unsafe levels of PFAS in treated drinking water here at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base or the city of Dayton," Baker said. "This is in ground water," he said. "It's not in the drinking water at levels above the LHA (lifetime health advisory)." Wright-Patterson's environmental restoration team identified priorities and tasks ahead in a virtual public session Monday evening, updating viewers on efforts to detect and treat chemicals in base soil and water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has established advisory levels at 70 parts per trillion when it comes to PFOA (Perfluorooctanoic acid) and PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl) chemicals in drinking water. These chemicals, sometimes called "forever chemicals," are human-produced substances found in some fire-suppression foams, nonstick cookware and industrial products. Firefighters sprayed the suppressant, known as Aqueous Film Forming Foam, to fight aircraft fires and used it in training for decades on the military installation. Wright-Patterson shut down two drinking production wells in Area A in May 2016. In June 2016, Dayton shut down seven water production wells closer to the base at Huffman Dam as a "precautionary measure." Base officials said they haven't used the problematic fire suppression foam since 2016. But the substances have been linked to cancer and other health issues, and have become a local and national concern. As of Sept. 30, 2021, base officials said they had pumped 7.8 billion gallons 7,836,784,305 gallons was the number given from one extraction well, collecting influent and effluent samples. Two former munitions sites on the base, including a former skeet range, are also being investigated. In all, more than 100 monitoring wells are to be installed, with more than 372 soil samples collected in addition to other work, listeners were told at the Microsoft Teams meeting. John Crocker, a remedial project manager at the base, said sampling in the proximity of fire training areas and elsewhere will document the effectiveness of different water treatment systems. "We'll be collecting samples at 21 locations, upstream and downstream," prior to and after treatment, he said. With Army engineers, the base last year launched a $26.5 million effort to deal with PFAS chemicals. Two areas on base sites the base said were found to have the "greatest potential to impact public drinking water sources" were an area of initial focus. Last summer's remedial work started about two months after Dayton city government sued Wright-Patterson and the U.S. Department of Defense in federal court, alleging the base failed to stop PFAS chemicals from entering city water. A base representative told the Dayton Daily News last year the remedial work was not a response to the suit. In mid-August, the suit was transferred to a federal court in South Carolina. Wright-Patterson and DoD officials have denied the city's allegations in the lawsuit, saying they have followed federal guidelines to ensure contaminants migrating from the base remain below federal recommended levels. By the city's own admission, base representatives have maintained, Dayton's water is safe to drink. "We've been reengaging recently with the city of Dayton and the regulators to get more communication going back and forth with everybody," Crocker said Monday. A message seeking comment was sent to a city representative. (c)2022 the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) Visit the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) at www.daytondailynews.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. The USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group arrived in Manila, the Philippines, on Friday, marking the first such visit to the nations capital city in nearly three years, the Navy said. The Lincoln Strike Group is the first to visit Manila since the USS Ronald Reagan made a port call in August 2019, but the Lincolns arrival also bears historical significance, 7th Fleet spokesman Lt. Mark Langford told Stars and Stripes by email Tuesday. USS Abraham Lincolns maiden deployment to the Western Pacific in 1991 included time in this region providing humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief to assist with evacuating nearly 18,000 people across 10 days following an eruption of volcano Mount Pinatubo, coupled with a typhoon, he said. The port call gives many of its Philippine crew members a chance to visit with their family and friends. About 10% of the Lincolns crew are Filipinos, according to a Saturday report from the official Philippine News Agency. The Abraham Lincoln left San Diego, its homeport, on Jan. 3 and spent the interim sailing across the Pacific Ocean and participating in several exercises. The stop in Manila is an opportunity for the strike group and its crews to resupply, refuel and rest, Langford said. He declined to comment on the Lincolns next move, citing security concerns, but said the ship and its strike group will continue to execute its routine deployment while working alongside allies and partners in the region. The ships arrival in Manila came just three days ahead of the launch of Balikatan 2022, a military drill by the U.S. and the Philippines that will run until April 8. However, neither the Abraham Lincoln nor any of its strike group will be participating in Balikatan, Marine 1st Lt. Stephanie Murphy, spokeswoman for Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group-Philippines, told Stars and Stripes by email Tuesday. Canceled in 2020 and trimmed to a leaner version in 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, Balikatan this year will be the largest ever in terms of personnel and distances involved, according to the 3rd Marine Division. This years exercise involves 5,100 U.S. and 3,800 Philippine troops throughout the Philippines. Stars and Stripes is making stories on the coronavirus pandemic available free of charge. See more stories here. Sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletter here. Please support our journalism with a subscription. Christina Paz was typing up notes about a patient she'd just seen at Centro San Vicente, El Paso's largest community health center, when an email from Washington showed up. "Lord," she thought as she read it at the clinic's nursing station. "Oh, my God." The brief email told Paz, a nurse practitioner who is the clinic's chief executive officer, that at 11:59 p.m. on March 22 the federal COVID-19 Uninsured Program would stop accepting claims for testing and treating for the deadly virus on patients who had no way to pay their medical bills. On the Wednesday afternoon when Paz opened the federal notice, that deadline loomed just six days away. For a clinic where nearly two-thirds of patients are classified as "unfunded," the $252,000 the federal program has sent Centro San Vicente has been a lifeline as its staff treated more than 2,000 patients for COVID and tested thousands more. Now, the health center blocks from the Rio Grande is one of more than 50,000 providers of health services nationwide that have run out of time to claim reimbursement from the Department of Health and Human Services for coronavirus testing and care of those without health coverage. And another deadline nears April 5 to submit charges for vaccinating the uninsured. The wind-down of the uninsured program is among the first concrete casualties of a decision by Congress this month to exclude about $15 billion in pandemic relief from a large spending plan adopted for other parts of the government and the Ukraine war. The Biden administration has been trying to draw attention to the consequences if lawmakers continue bickering over whether to provide more coronavirus aid. The White House and health officials say the government will not have enough vaccines to give every American a fourth shot to protect against the virus, if federal regulators approve the additional booster, and soon will lack money to buy additional monoclonal antibodies to treat coronavirus infections. Those pandemic-fighting hindrances could lie in the near future. The uninsured program already is ending. Since it was created in spring 2020 as one of several pools of pandemic aid for health care providers, the uninsured program has provided more than $20 billion in reimbursements to medical labs, hospitals, doctor's offices, pharmacies and clinics. But as it winds down, its absence unless Congress acts will be felt most keenly in the health care system's safety net, focused on patients who have no health coverage. Often, those patients are low-income Black Americans or Latinos whose communities have been scarred by the greatest illness and death from the pandemic. They are places like Harris Health System in Houston, which runs Ben Taub and Lyndon B. Johnson hospitals and a network of clinics. Of more than 16,000 patients with COVID-19 admitted to one of those hospitals or treated by a Harris facility as outpatients, 47% have been uninsured. Without the federal program, "there is no way we would have been able to care for the number of patients we've cared for," said Esmaeil Porsa, Harris's chief executive officer. At one point, COVID-19 patients filled 22 of the 23 intensive care beds at LBJ, the smaller hospital. "I was basically running a COVID hospital," Porsa said. When the initial pandemic relief laws provided money to health care providers, safety-net facilities were not helped much at first. Trying to get money out quickly, HHS began by allotting aid in ways that benefited some well-heeled hospitals that had a lot of revenue or many Medicare patients. But since federal health officials began setting aside a pool for coronavirus care of the uninsured later that first pandemic spring, Harris has been reimbursed for almost $200 million in services. As a result, doctors, nurses and administrators, stressed by the pandemic's enormity, have been spared the added pressure of considering how to close some other medical services for lack of money. "That's been a huge blessing," Porsa said. As the program winds down, the financial pressure isn't that intense at the moment, because coronavirus case rates have ebbed, Porsa said. But he said he fears what will happen if a new omicron subvariant, like the BA.2, produces another spike in infections and illness. "That's the worrying part. We don't have a clue what's in store for us," Porsa said. At OIC Family Medical Center in Rocky Mount, N.C., fears of another surge weigh heavily as the money is going away. "I do anticipate it will be a hill to climb to respond adequately," said Reuben Blackwell, president and chief executive of a nonprofit that includes the clinic. In a small city with residents who are largely Black and relatively poor, nearly one-third of OIC patients are uninsured. Payments through the program and other public pandemic aid allowed the clinic to hire 20 "COVID interns" to fan out into the community to encourage people to get coronavirus tests and shots. Twice a month, they go into day care centers and homeless shelters to give tests. They reach into parts of the community where internet access is scarce, making it hard for people to sign up online for tests or vaccines. OIC has served about 3,800 uninsured patients and been reimbursed nearly $130,000. In the last few weeks, having heard ahead of time that the uninsured program would end, Blackwell said, 11 of those COVID interns were let go, and three of the remaining workers have been switched to part-time. With the funding winding down, "it's now all on us to make it work or not. That's scary. We don't have a lot to work with," said Blackwell, who also is a Rocky Mount City Council member. "I just hope that, somewhere in Washington, they have a door locked with some money inside." According to HHS's Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the agency that has overseen the program, it has been spending about $2 billion a month lately on claims - more than $20 billion since the start. For the past few months, as it became clear the money would soon run out, the agency brought that "burn rate" to the attention of others in the administration who "have been making that very clear to Congress," said an HRSA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. This month, the White House Office of Management and Budget sent House and Senate leaders a two-page letter laying out "immediate needs to avoid disruption to ongoing COVID-19 response efforts over the next few months." One item was $1.5 billion for the uninsured program - less than the program has been spending in a month. Advocates for hospitals and community health centers have been pressing lawmakers to pour more money into the program. Talks are continuing on Capitol Hill, with Republican lawmakers stipulating that they will consider more pandemic aid only if they become convinced there is a clear way to pay for it. Amid that uncertainty, the HRSA official said agency leaders felt "not great" sending the March 16 email, addressed to "Valued Provider," one of whom was Paz in El Paso. "HRSA's mission is to address these kind of health disparities, to serve these kind of populations," the official said. "And so obviously, we don't want to be winding down a program if there's a need." In the meantime, health care facilities that have relied heavily on the money are confronting wrinkles. One involves a routine lag between when a doctor, clinic, hospital or medical lab provides a service and when the paperwork is submitted to claim reimbursement from the federal government. It is uncertain how much care has been provided for which it is too late to send in a claim. A second problem is hinted at in the email and involves claims filed before the deadline that have not yet been reimbursed. It says that claims that arrive in time "will be paid subject to . . . availability of funds." HRSA officials declined to say how much money the uninsured program has in hand to cover reimbursements, even when the claims reached HRSA before the deadline for treatment and testing - or will arrive in early April before the deadline for vaccinations. The official said only that the agency had "received a significant increase in claims leading up to the deadline that are working their way through the system. We are in the process of adjudicating millions of claims subject to the funds that remain available." At Harris in Houston, the health system is still waiting to be paid for more than $7 million in claims that were pending a few days before the March 22 deadline. Harris is not expecting that all those claims will be paid, said a Harris spokesman, Bryan McLeod. If the money runs out without Congress providing more, "there are going to be some tough calls" for the nation's health care safety net, the HRSA official said. Under rules set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus vaccines must be given at no charge. The question of possibly charging for coronavirus tests is more ambiguous, and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra has hinted at that in public. At a recent White House briefing, he was asked whether uninsured people could face bills for coronavirus services if Congress does not act soon. "We'll exhaust every dollar we have," Becerra said. He said "we're going to do what we can" to keep coronavirus services available "[w]hether it is moving toward allowing Americans to purchase these through other means or secure them through other means, or whether it means getting the support from Congress that allows us to continue to offer those for free." One company that operates coronavirus testing sites and medical labs, Quest Diagnostics, notified clients last week that, without the ability to bill HRSA, it no longer can provide tests for free to the uninsured, according to a spokeswoman, Kimberly Gorode. Quest will now charge people without health coverage $125 for a PCR test, Gorode said. Without the federal uninsured program, leaders of health care institutions that serve the poor worry the burden on them could grow. "If anything, COVID has taught us to be nimble," said David Zaas, chief executive of the Medical University of South Carolina's University Medical Center in Charleston. The medical center is the hub of a health system that has tested 66,000 people who turned up positive for the virus. The hospital has admitted nearly 6,000 people with COVID-19. If another surge arrives, MUSC, as it is known, will carry out its mission to serve the underserved, said Zaas, a pulmonologist and critical care specialist. Still, he said he fears that other hospitals without that mission could balk at caring for uninsured COVID-19 patients, further straining safety-net hospitals such as his. At Centro San Vicente, where 80% of patients are Hispanic and most live under the poverty line, Paz said she is still shellshocked by the uninsured program drying up. It was the "huge cushion," she said, that allowed the clinic's four sites across El Paso to avoid furloughs and layoffs as the costs of coping with the pandemic soared. "We all knew at some point the funding was going to stop. We didn't anticipate it from one night to another. I don't have a strategy how we are going to compensate." In the world of community health centers, she said, "we all wear a million hats. We have yet to have time to sit down and talk." The one thing she knows, Paz said, is that "COVID is not going away." Southern Iraq, February 1991: Multiple-Launch Rocket System (MLRS) rockets are fired toward Iraqi military units at dusk during Operation Desert Storm. In the foreground is a soldier from Iron Troop, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Like all effective satire, the Onion's headline had a ring of truth: Putin Pleased as Plot to Ruin Russian Economy, Destroy International Standing Goes Exactly to Plan. A month after Russia invaded Ukraine, the comedy website has been willing to Go There, to look for humor in the most searing of stories even as it unfolds. The satirical site has identified Russian President Vladimir Putin's college major as aggression, showed a coastal resort in Ukraine with extremely affordable rates right now and said the United Nations is escalating its response to the invasion from warnings to stern warnings. Too soon? Too bad. Finding comedy in the Ukraine situation serves several functions, says Chad Nackers, editor in chief of The Onion. "It is a powerful tool for exposing the folly and absurdity and human cruelty as well as providing some release from a stressful state of affairs and an endless cycle of misery. Laughter," he says, can fill the hole created by a sense of hopelessness. The war hasnt been ignored elsewhere in comedy. Late-night television has used Ukraine for familiar or tangential punch lines Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump or the quality of Papa Johns pizza. Stephen Colbert suggested the United States add a T-shirt cannon to the weapons it sends to the Ukraine. After President Joe Biden called Putin a war criminal, Jimmy Kimmel suggested stupid-head was next. True to the Onion's nature as a brand sprung from the Midwest (Madison, Wisc.) in 1988, there's a whiff of gentility to its Ukraine humor. None of its sarcasm touches upon the human victims of the war. Its list of the war's potential outcomes ranged from a lot of really bad speculative historical fiction to the Mets win the World Series. A map of Ukraine identifies the only decent taco place in the whole damn country. A mock slide show on Putin's rise to power shows a pregnant woman with the caption, Putin's parents decide to try for an evil megalomaniac. Under another picture of a gravestone, the caption reads: Opponent for student council treasurer suffers mysterious organ failure. The Onion's decision not to ignore a thorny topic recalls one of its most impactful moments, when its print issue two weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks helped break a comedy barrier, says Sophia McClennen, a Penn State University professor and author of the upcoming book, Trump Was a Joke: How Satire Made Sense of a President Who Didn't. That issue's cover pictured President George W. Bush under the headline, U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever it is We're at War With. Those were more influential days at the Onion, which stopped printing editions in 2013 and now exists as a website with traffic directed through social media posts. It has a great deal more competition online now and in late-night television comedy, which grew more satirical in the wake of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. There's a rich history of satirical publications like Mad magazine and National Lampoon places where the news of the day collides with the potential for laughter that can reduce its heaviness. Spy magazine burned brightly and briefly in the 1980s. Private Eye and Punch were popular English magazines. Notoriously, the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was the target of a terrorist attack in 2015. The Onion sometimes looks to be merely entertaining instead of satirical, says James Caron, author of Satire as the Comic Public Sphere. It's just kind of silly at times, Caron says. Yet it still has the capacity to hit a target squarely. In the wake of several mass shootings in the United States over the past decade, the Onion repeated essentially the same article, changing only a few details, under the headline, 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. It's just this endless loop of horror, Nackers says. The way the Onion matched the repetitiveness with its stories "really struck a nerve with people. It hit it in a way that is respectful. It feels like there's a really strong point being made, but ... it doesn't feel like you're exploiting people. The Onion, now based in Chicago, has a staff of 20 people. It has gone through a handful of corporate overseers. The current owner, Great Hill Partners, purchased the Onion from the communications company Univision in 2019. Nackers started in 1997 as a photographer, earning $10 a photo. He began contributing jokes, became a writer and now runs the place. He watched the satire grow more serious after 9/11, as the world's insanity kind of caught up with what used to be insane satirical premises. The focus tends to toggle between dark humor and the more frivolous as dictated by the times. One thing that we can kind of do, because we have a lot of editorial freedom, is that we are basically a truth-teller," Nackers says. We kind of get to the core of things and expose the real truth by using satire, making a joke, but showing things how they really are. During the past month, the Onion ran a mock fact check" on Ukraine. To the statement that Russia claimed Ukraine is harboring biological weapons, the Onion said fabricating allegations about enemies holding biological weapons is America's job. CLAIM: Rudy Giuliani is a valued Russian asset acting against Ukraine in service of the Kremlin, the Onion wrote. REALITY: Rudy Giuliani has not been of value to anyone for years." Occasionally, someone will think some of the Onion's fake news is actually true, like when a Chinese newspaper reprinted its declaration of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as the sexiest man of the year adding its own slide show. When those things happen, it's a fun day at the office, says Jordan LaFlure, senior managing editor. The story of the Onion is how little we've changed, LaFlure said. We have a voice that endures across changing political climates. It's just a matter of deciding what is the best arrow in our quiver to fire at a particular target. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in surrounding himself with yes-men too scared to tell him the truth on the ground, created an unwinnable situation in Ukraine for his regime. Putin expected to waltz into Kyiv to fanfare and open arms. One month into a stalled invasion, the once mighty Russian army is looking more like a washed-out former boxer drunkenly waving a gun around his local bar. But like a cornered animal, even a once-great shell of a former superpower can be dangerous if pushed. President Joe Bidens recent comments are food for thought once the war ends and Putin doesnt get exactly what he wants, whats next for him? Whats next for NATO? Could this finally be the beginning of the end of Putins tyranny? The key takeaway from this conflict is that manpower alone is not enough to win a war: Armies of starving conscripts dont do well against battle-hardened and principled defenders, no matter how hard their commanders push them. Russian generals received practical experience on why the battle-tested World War II tactic of throwing more bodies at a problem is not effective in modern near-peer conflicts. Stories of surrender, desertion, and even fragging the killing of officers by their enlisted men paint a harrowing picture of the state of Russian combat readiness. Russias seeming failure to achieve a swift victory comes with an important lesson in not drinking your own Kool-Aid. Russian propagandists spent decades glorifying the Soviet Unions rallying cry from World War II: victory at all costs. This mentality has directly contributed to Russias colossal costs of victory Russian military losses have always been higher than their Western counterparts in similar engagements, and the flagrant disregard for human life is evident in the extent of Russian losses as well as the brutality of the invasion. War-ravaged Ukraine has thus far been able to stymie the Russian offensive NATO estimates 7,000-15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in action. Even Russias far more conservative official losses of 1,300 troops over the past month paint a harrowing picture. For context, over a decade in Afghanistan, Soviet losses numbered 14,500 killed. The discrepancy in lethality of the conflict comes from the three major challenges faced by the Russian invaders in this operation: logistics, fighting spirit and technology. Technology has played a crucial role as a force equalizer. The Russian forces are ill-equipped and underprepared for this conflict, with the quantity of troops deployed largely making up for a clear lack of quality. Russian infantry lacks encrypted communication and night fighting capabilities things Western warfighters have long taken for granted. Russian armor, operating without sufficient infantry support or the latest defensive countermeasures, are decimated by anti-tank guided missile and Bayraktar fire when they are not abandoned without fuel in muddy fields. Unable to make new ground, the stalled invading force turned to shelling civilians. As Putin expected a quick victory, a decision to deploy older equipment without the necessary countermeasures for modern combat has come back to bite the invaders. Bayraktars in particular have proved very effective, both in reconnaissance and ground attack roles. The Turkish-made drones have been stunningly effective in destroying enemy infantry, armor, and surface to air attack capabilities, making it difficult for the Russian air force to establish air superiority. Indeed, one month into the invasion and despite no support in this regard from Western allies, the Ukrainians somehow managed to prevent Russias vastly larger air force from closing the skies. The cheap drones, just a fraction of a $40 million predator system, have been so effective that Ukraine has ordered an additional 40 units, equipped with Ukrainian-made engines. As experts have pointed out since the start of the conflict, Russia is woefully underequipped for fighting outside its territory. Russian armed forces rely heavily on rail for transporting troops and equipment a relic of WWII, and doctrine of the type of war the Soviets have spent decades preparing to fight in. As a result, a glaring lack of logistics infrastructure has led to a shortage of fuel, food and munitions. Reports show many Russian soldiers suffer from frostbite. Some are even trading equipment for asylum. Rampant desertion has led to generals appearing on front lines to personally motivate troops generals who are exposed to defensive fire. Russia has lost seven generals in the conflict to date, an average of one every four days. Some reports claim that so-called barrier troops soldiers tasked with shooting their deserting comrades have been deployed in Ukraine. Ukraine has managed to turn a 72-hour invasion into a month of hell. This defensive miracle occurred with the merger of an unwavering fighting spirit and incredible technology. To prevent a larger global conflict, the West must ensure the Ukrainians can continue their fight. Ukrainian hopes and dreams alone will not repel the enemy from their land, and a victorious Putin is an emboldened Putin. Today, Ukraine is fighting not just for its own sovereignty, but for the safety of all of Europe. Give President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the tanks, MiGs and anti-ship munitions he needs to protect the peaceful lives we have all come to expect in Europe. The Ukrainian people have proven their resolve and their results. They can win this war on their own, without Western involvement, by putting the tools to work. All they need is a steady supply. David Zaikin is a co-founder of Key Elements Group. Born in Ukraine and based in London, he is a strategic adviser to a several multinational brands, current and former leaders, and nongovernmental organizations. Great power competition in the Western Pacific is likely to intensify following the appearance of Chinese plans for a military presence in the Solomon Islands, according to security experts. Leaders in Australia and New Zealand reacted with alarm this week after opponents of a security agreement between China and the Solomons leaked a draft of the agreement online, according to the New York Times on Thursday. Officials worry that it could allow China to base warships 1,200 miles off Australias east coast. For years, rumors circulated about Chinese efforts to establish a military presence throughout the South Pacific, according to David Capie, director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Wellington, New Zealand. Vanuatu, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Samoa have been rumored as potential sites for future Chinese military facilities, he told Stars and Stripes by phone Tuesday. This is the first time we have something on paper, he said. Its concerning that this is an explicit example of China wanting a bigger presence in the Southwest Pacific. Guadalcanal, the Solomons main island, was the site of the first major U.S. ground offensive against the Japanese empire in World War II. Between Aug 7, 1942, and Feb 9, 1943, air, land and sea battles there claimed the lives of about 30,000 Japanese and 7,000 U.S. and Allied troops along with two U.S. aircraft carriers, numerous other ships and hundreds of aircraft before Japanese forces evacuated. The leaked Solomons security agreement would facilitate the first non-western military presence in the region since Japanese occupation during World War II, Paul Buchanan, an American security expert based in Auckland, New Zealand, told Stars and Stripes by phone Tuesday. This is a golden opportunity for [China] to project power into Melanesia and beyond, he said. What we are looking at is great power rivalry coming home to roost in Melanesia. Chinese police are already in the Solomons, training locals on riot control and personal protection, Buchanan said. The fact that the Chinese are able to secure a deal, at least in principle, shows you that years of neglect on the part of traditional allies have given China room to maneuver, he said. A base in the Solomons would allow China to monitor relatively shallow shipping lanes between Australia and Southeast Asia, he said. The waters would be transited by nuclear submarines that Australia is acquiring under last years AUKUS defense pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S., he said. Seas around the Solomons are also transited by U.S. Navy ships headed Down Under, with Australia likely to host a reactivated U.S. 1st Fleet, Buchanan said. China isnt likely to stop at a base in the Solomons, he said, noting that a Chinese navy hospital ship is a regular visitor to Fiji. Defense officials in the U.S. have planned for Chinese efforts to build a blue water navy equipped with aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, he said. To that end America has stationed Marines in Australias Northern Territory and is providing Australia with top-shelf weapons such as F-35 stealth fighters and nuclear submarines, Buchanan said. CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea Two U.S. service members are under investigation by South Korean police in unrelated cases of vandalism and drunken driving in Pyeongtaek city last week, according to authorities. Police arrested a roughly 30-year-old Army warrant officer for drunken driving after he made an illegal U-turn, collided with a taxi and drove away around 1:30 a.m. Thursday, a Pyeongtaek traffic officer told Star and Stripes by phone Monday. The officer declined to identify the warrant officer, who was eventually turned over to U.S. military police. His blood-alcohol content measured higher than the 0.03% legal limit in South Korea, the traffic officer said. He did not specify the warrant officers blood-alcohol at the time of his arrest, although local news agencies reported he measured 0.183%. Some government officials in South Korea customarily speak to the media on condition of anonymity. The taxi driver chased the warrant officers vehicle and managed to pull it over, the Pyeongtaek officer said. An argument ensued between the taxi driver, his two passengers, the drunken driving suspect and another U.S. service member who appeared on the scene, according to the traffic officer. He said Pyeongtaek police took the warrant officer into custody. In a separate case, Pyeongtaek police used a Taser to stop a U.S. service member suspected of scratching 14 vehicles and cutting a convenience store canopy on Sunday morning, a police supervisor told Stars and Stripes by phone Monday. Police officers dispatched to a disturbance call on the citys north side found a completely intoxicated service member wielding a knife, the supervisor said. The supervisor identified the service member as a male about age 20 but declined to provide his name because the case is under investigation. Confronted by police, the service member ran about 200 yards before police used a Taser to stop him, the supervisor said. He was also turned over to U.S. military police, the supervisor added. U.S. Forces Korea declined to comment or to provide additional information about either case, a spokesman for the command told Stars and Stripes on Tuesday. This type of behavior does not represent USFKs values or the respect we hold for Korean people or their culture, Army Col. Lee Peters said in an email. As these are ongoing investigations, we will not provide any additional comments or statements until the investigations are complete. Roughly 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, the majority of them in Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek. Stars and Stripes reporter YooKyong Chang contributed to this report. YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan Capt. Madeline Atkinson never felt that being a woman interfered with her lifelong dream of becoming an Air Force pilot, she told Stars and Stripes recently. Her mother, Pamela Atkinson, a Girl Scout leader, always encouraged her to push for her dreams, Atkinson said by phone Thursday. My mom was a really strong and a really big influence in my life and instilled in me that, Hey, youre not different or anything, because youre a woman; youre the same, Atkinson said. And these opportunities are all in front of you. Atkinson, 29, a C-130J Super Hercules instructor pilot and chief of training for the 36th Airlift Squadron, took her experience to Bangladesh in February as the squadron mission commander for the weeklong Cope South 2022 exercise. She and squadron operations director Lt. Col. Kira Coffey, the detachment commander, worked with two of the first women in the Bangladesh Air Force and two of the first to fly the Super Hercules. Women were not permitted to become military pilots in that country until 2014. The best thing about meeting them was that Col. Coffey and I were saying to them, You guys are awesome; youre leaders in your community, Atkinson said. And they were telling us how much they look up to us. Im not one to usually get emotional about that stuff, but I thought that was pretty awesome, that they were looking up to us, while we were looking to them. Coffey enjoyed working with the trailblazing Bangladeshi women, she said. Their pilots were inspired by seeing U.S. women aviators in leadership positions, she said Tuesday in an email from the 374th Airlift Wing. In return, it was heartwarming and inspiring for me to be able to meet women who were just beginning on a trailblazing journey, knowing that it wont be easy, but that it will be rewarding, Coffey said. That was probably the coolest part of a very cool experience for me overall. Atkinson began her journey to the pilots seat at age 8, when the idea of flight first intrigued her, she said. Women in the United States were first allowed to enter military pilot training 17 years before she was born. I liked the idea of kind of getting to see a different perspective of the world, from above, that has always been really fascinating to me, she said. By weight of numbers alone, Atkinson faced an uphill slog. Of the 329,597 active duty service members in the Air Force in February, 960 of them are women pilots, or about 1/3rd of 1% of Air Force personnel, according to the Air Forces Personnel Center. A native of San Anselmo, Calif., Atkinson graduated from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., in 2014. Women were outnumbered there by about 4 to 1, she said. When it came time to apply for the academy, I recognized that I would be definitely outnumbered, Atkinson said. For each class, theres approximately 1,000 students in each class, and theres only about 200 girls. That ratio apparently improved over the past eight years. The class of 2025, which entered the academy last year, included 325 women and 768 men, a ratio of about 2.4 to 1, according to the academys class profile. Atkinson said she never felt handicapped or discriminated against at the academy because of her gender. I didnt feel like when I was there it was the factor on how I was treated or my performance, Atkinson said. Yes, I recognize that most people in my squadron or in my classes were guys and usually I was one of the only girls in the class, but I never felt ostracized, that I was different or that it was a big deal that I was a girl. The lopsided ratio of men to women in the military is steadily changing due to growing changes in societal norms, she said. I think its a cultural thing, she said. I think that in the history of humanity, its usually been men that are in the military. So, as our society develops, and it becomes a more normal for women and men doing the same jobs, youre going to see more and more women being involved in the military. Citizen intelligence analysts are spotlighting the Russian navys role in its war on Ukraine, using publicly available information to report on missile launches, blockades and other actions in the Black and Mediterranean seas. The information gathered using open-source intelligence, or OSINT, offers a glimpse into Russias maritime war activities and sometimes challenges information released by government sources. Dozens of private citizens are parlaying their prior military experience, specialized knowledge of the Russian navy and online information-mining skills into robust, almost-real-time coverage of Russias full-scale invasion, which began Feb. 24. OSINT relies on public information such as satellite images, video and photographs, documents, databases, news stories and social media posts about a particular event or topic. Its painstaking work usually unpaid involving hourslong searches for information, verification of its authenticity and accuracy and then contextualization of events before analysis is posted on social media or a blog. The work finds its roots in early government efforts by the U.S. and other countries to monitor news and other reports as part of intelligence gathering. Not everyone has the skill set to parse the meaning of all this information, but those who do now have relatively easy access to satellite images and quality imagery recorded by increasingly sophisticated phones, experts say. What I bring here is (professional) knowledge that I try to bring to open source using primary and secondary sources to actually give you an idea of whats going on, said James Phillips, a naval historian whose Twitter account, @TheShipYard2, presents detailed maps showing the location of Russian ships and other information. On Monday, Phillips posted on Twitter a map showing an amphibious assault group in the Sea of Azov near the Ukrainian port city of Berdyansk. In the early days of the invasion, images and public data gathered by private OSINT analysts painted a different picture of what an unnamed senior Pentagon official said was happening near the port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. The unidentified official indicated that a nighttime amphibious assault potentially involving thousands of Russian troops was underway there. The assertion was tweeted out by several U.S. national security reporters and almost immediately challenged online. I keep stressing: the Russian Navy never trained for night time amphibious assaults, said Frederik Van Lokeren, a Belgian former navy officer, in a Feb. 26 tweet. They can not do this as they lack expertise and equipment needed. Why U.S. officials keep claiming otherwise for the second night in a row is beyond understanding. Van Lokeren's OSINT analysis found that a Russian amphibious assault group was in the Sea of Azov but he strongly disputed the number of sailors involved, which he estimated at 300 to 400 based on the number and size of the landing ships involved and their capacity. He also expressed doubt that any naval landing had happened, citing a lack of evidence. There were ample images in the days that followed of war damage and fighting in Ukraine, but none of a large-scale amphibious assault. In other cases, OSINT analysts were among the first to break news later addressed through official channels. On Thursday, several analysts were quick to provide details on how a Russian Alligator-class landing ship in port in Berdyansk had caught fire, potentially as the result of a strike by a Ukrainian missile. And on March 22, several analysts, including H. I. Sutton, who tweets as @CovertShores, posted video on Twitter showing a Russian ship near Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula firing eight Kalibr cruise missiles into Ukraine. Others have kept running tallies on the last known locations of Russian navy ships, submarines and other vessels, detailing their actions in the Black and Azov seas and providing supporting information about capabilities and potential strategies. Russian navy vessels thought to be observing U.S. and NATO maritime activities in the eastern Mediterranean and protecting a Russian port in Tartus, Syria, also are analyzed. I havent seen a conflict this well-covered (through the OSINT community) in my career, said Lukas Andriukaitis, associate director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council think tank, in a phone interview. You can watch the conflict almost evolve live. There are signs that Moscow increasingly is aware of the OSINT communitys ability to quickly challenge narratives and document war crimes and other activities. For example, before the war started, Russia took away troops cellphones, Andriukaitis said. The Russian navy also recently started painting over ship numbers and obscuring other identifying information, Phillips and other analysts have noted. The greatest contribution OSINT analysts have made came in the months leading up to the war, said Ryan Fedasiuk, an adjunct fellow for the Center for a New American Securitys technology and national security program. A private company publicized satellite images that correctly identified a buildup of nearly 200,000 Russian troops and advanced weaponry along the northern, eastern and southern borders of Ukraine. Citizen journalists on Twitter also sounded the alarm bell in January that six Russian navy amphibious assault ships left the Baltic and North seas, passing through Gibraltar and into the eastern Mediterranean before entering the Black Sea. The value of open-source intelligence is in sifting through the noise to identify signals that something is going to happen, he said. In the future, governments ought to take that sort of signal much more seriously, even if it isnt a smoking gun, secretive indication of intent, Fedasiuk said. The groundwork is being laid to turn a sleepy German garrison town into a hub for U.S. special operators in Europe as the Pentagon looks to spend millions on base improvements, budget documents show. Tucked into the White Houses 2023 budget request is a series of projects totaling more than $200 million that will provide U.S. Special Operations Command with a foothold, while also adding housing and family resources for the military community in Baumholder. During the Cold War, the town near the rural western edge of the state of Rheinland-Pfalz had the largest concentration of American combat forces in Europe. But now it serves mostly as a home for logistics units. The Defense Departments budget plan sets aside $78 million to build a special operations battalion annex and three other annexes for communications, operations and support missions at Baumholders Smith Barracks. Beyond that, details are scant. Special Operations Command Europe didnt immediately respond to a request for comment on the project. However, plans have been in the works for years to shift hundreds of special operations troops based in Stuttgart to Baumholder. Former SOCOM chief Gen. Tony Thomas confirmed the plan in 2018, when he heralded the idea of sending Green Berets and Navy SEALs to Baumholder, where they could take advantage of the wide-open spaces and training grounds. At the Armys garrison in Stuttgart, a congested metropolis, the presence of U.S. special operators has long been an irritant to residents upset about the regular crackle of gunfire from an Army range near a housing area. In last years defense budget, the Army received $17.5 million for an indoor small-arms range and an additional $16 million for a shoothouse for live-fire exercises in Baumholder. The Armys 2023 budget request also calls for other spending in Baumholder, including a major family housing project. The plan is to build 64 new units at a cost of $57 million. The proposal also allocates $74 million for a new elementary school. For Baumholder, the upgrades are part of an ongoing effort to renovate an installation that was once on the Armys chopping block in connection with a long post-Cold War drawdown. For years, the garrison received little funding to make improvements. But in 2015, the Army declared Baumholder one of its enduring installations, and money began to flow back in. Other major military construction projects for European bases in the 2023 budget plan include initiatives that have been under development for years. Chief among them is a new military hospital at Rhine Ordnance Barracks, which is slated to get $299 million in funding in 2023. The Army budget also calls for $168 million in upgrades at its training base in Grafenwoehr, the largest such facility in Europe, and $95 million for new housing at the garrison in Vicenza, Italy. WARSAW, Poland (Tribune News Service) The first thing he noticed upon arriving in Ukraine's shattered capital of Kyiv was the stationary train. "One entire train of the metro isn't even moving," said Jared Malone. "And it's because people are living on it. You know, all their kitchen supplies are in there, blankets, towels, people sleeping on the floor." Malone is a Marine veteran who now lives in Post Falls, Idaho, and works as a counselor. He arrived in Ukraine on March 22 and is working with a church in Lviv, a western city mostly spared from fighting. But on Friday he took an overnight train to Kyiv, with plans of bringing a family back west. He knew Kyiv would be intense. He served two combat tours in Iraq so he's familiar with war. But what he's seen over the course of three days shocked him. The streets of the country's capital city are covered in glass, the consequence of shock waves from bombs. Residents leave their windows open so concussions don't break them. The roads are nearly empty other than military checkpoints, one every 200 meters, he estimated. "It's like something out of an apocalyptic movie," he said. At each checkpoint he was interrogated, his passport examined, his motives questioned. Soldiers searched through his phone checking to see if he'd taken photos of buildings or fighters, suspicious he was a Russian spy. All this happening to the drumbeat of artillery and bombs exploding on the city's outskirts, the noise making it seem as if everyone was whispering. "It's a very, very tense situation," he said. "They're ready for a battle. Defensive positions everywhere, everywhere." Malone had been in Kyiv for three days as of Monday, and he's accompanied by two Ukrainian men affiliated with the Victory Christian Church. While in Lviv, the western city, he's staying and working with that church although the churches' main congregation is in Kyiv. On Friday, Malone met with the main pastor in Kyiv to coordinate support and supplies from America. Malone has raised about $18,000 so far. After meeting with the pastor he contacted some families with disabled children trying to coordinate pickups and evacuation from Kyiv to Lviv. He spent that night at the home of one of his Ukrainian friend's parents. The man's parents fled Kviv about a month ago. Getting to that house was harder than he'd anticipated. "When we pulled into the neighborhood we were immediately interrogated, and they were upset," he said of the soldiers at the checkpoint. The soldiers yelled at him and his two Ukrainian friends. Asked why they were there, particularly after seeing Malone's body armor, they grew even more suspicious. This lasted for 10 minutes and Malone was getting "pretty scared." But then his friend spotted a soldier with whom he'd grown up. The solider vouched for them and they made it into the neighborhood. Snow fell that night and the house was freezing. They cooked eggs over a propane stove. "Constant bombs here," he texted. "Going to sleep in a freezing house with no electricity to the sound of explosions." He spent Saturday touring the city with his friends, documenting the damage to civilian areas, upon their request. That included a visit to the shopping center that was bombed on March 21, killing eight people. Shrapnel from that explosion sprayed upward, pockmarking the sides of nearby apartment buildings. He hopes his photos and videos will inspire more people he knows, through his church, friends and family, to donate. "They want people to understand that civilian structures are being targeted," he said. He also visited a children's hospital that evening and spoke to overwhelmed doctors. On Sunday he went to a local grocery store and bought food for some elderly residents who couldn't leave their home. Most grocery stores are closed, from what he's seen, although one that's located in a basement continues to operate and "seemed like it had plenty of food." Malone also continued to try and make arrangements with a stranded family, although phone calls started to fail Monday afternoon. As of Monday evening he was still deciding whether to return to Lviv or wait to connect with a family ready to leave. "It's heartbreaking thinking we may have to leave without reaching people. I've been angry and frustrated most of the day. One family requested evacuation but they are in occupied territory and can't get out. They have a sick daughter. We can't do anything for them," he texted. "I feel like Kyiv is getting more tense by the minute." (c)2022 The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Wash.) Visit The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Wash.) at www.spokesman.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. The war in Ukraine has led to a resurgence of fears about the use of nukes. Russia is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, which some analysts fear it would consider using to escalate the conflict if it felt it was losing, and Ukraines Western backers are also armed with nukes, which means that the conflict - if it were to spiral beyond Ukraine - would pit nuclear powers against each other. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said last week that Russia should stop its dangerous irresponsible nuclear rhetoric, and warned that it could never win a nuclear war. Only recently has Russia gone out of its way to tamp down the worries: Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told PBS Monday that no one is thinking about using nuclear weapons. But even as peace talks stir optimism, trust in Russian rhetoric remains low, after Moscows repeated claims that it would not invade Ukraine. Despite echoes of the Cold War past, the strategic landscape has shifted. Wartime equations about the risk of using nuclear actions - which are never simple - have been complicated by tactical warheads that Russia has stockpiled. These smaller nuclear weapons, far less powerful than the ones the United States dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, are designed to be used on the battlefield. Their smaller size, some experts fear, could break down the nuclear taboo. Russia is believed to have more than 1,500 of them. Sarah Bidgood, director of the Eurasia program at James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, said it was hard to estimate the level of risk that Russia would use a tactical nuke in Ukraine, but that it was clear Russia relied on its nuclear weapons, including tactical weapons, to give it flexibility in managing the risk of escalation. That means Russia could introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict when it felt it had run out of conventional options and was facing an existential threat, Bidgood said. Its hard to say, because we dont have a good sense for what all of Putins red lines are here, or what he regards as an existential threat. - What is a tactical nuclear weapon? Strategic warheads have enormous yields and would be able to level a city. Then, theres the nonstrategic, or tactical, warhead. These are smaller, though still able to inflict considerable death and destruction. Aside from their size and yield, the key difference is how they are intended to be used. A strategic weapon is designed to strike with devastating might as part of a grand strategy during wartime. This has been the traditional nuclear fear in Washington and Moscow - a Dr. Strangelove-esque nuclear doomsday scenario. But tactical nuclear weapons are designed to be used on a battlefield. Some types have a variable yield, which would allow their explosive power to be calibrated to a specific attack; others, dubbed neutron bombs, were designed to spread radiation with only a minimal blast. - What do we know about Russias tactical nuclear arsenal? Many countries, including the United States and Soviet Union, invested heavily in tactical weapons during the Cold War. Both Washington and Moscow unilaterally downsized their nuclear programs after the fall of the Soviet Union. An arms control treaty, called New START, negotiated by President Barack Obama and Russias then-president Dmitry Medvedev in 2010 limited both countries to the deployment of 1,550 nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles and bombers. However, the smaller tactical weapons are not governed by this deal, nor any other international agreement. A report released last month by the Federation of American Scientists found that Russia had a stockpile of approximately 4,477 nuclear warheads in total. Of this number, roughly 1,588 were strategic warheads that had been deployed, while 977 were in storage but ready to use. Russia had roughly 1,912 nonstrategic warheads which it says are also in central storage, though FAS notes that these storage sites may be close to bases with operational forces (a further 1,500 warheads were considered retired but still largely intact). The United States, meanwhile, has 1,644 strategic nuclear weapons deployed, as well as 100 tactical weapons that are deployed in Europe. It has a further 1,984 warheads in storage - of which 130 are tactical. - Are tactical nuclear weapons of particular importance to Russia? In the late 1990s, facing economic problems that left their traditional army in tatters and the humiliating military stalemate with separatist leaders in Chechnya, Russian leaders appear to have refocused on nuclear technology. In 1999, Putin, who was then chairman of the Kremlin Security Council, said that after a meeting with then-president Boris Yeltsin, the Russian leader had endorsed a blueprint for the development and use of nonstrategic nuclear weapons, according to reports from the time. Western analysts argue that in recent years, Putin has created what became known as an escalate to de-escalate doctrine, though Russian documents did not use this phrase. In a report released in early March, the congressional Research Service described that alleged doctrine. Russian statements, when combined with military exercises that seemed to simulate the use of nuclear weapons against NATO members, led many to believe that Russia might threaten to use its nonstrategic nuclear weapons to coerce or intimidate its neighbors, the CRS report stated. Adam Mount, director of the Defense Posture Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said that the weakness of Russias conventional weapons systems might explain potential reliance on nuclear threats. In general, if a country can achieve its objectives without nuclear weapons, it will, Mount said. Nuclear weapons are tools of the weak. - Why are some experts worried about nukes in Ukraine? No country has used nuclear weapons in a war since the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945. However, Russian officials have made repeated comments about nuclear weapons. Putin announced on Feb. 27, just days after he invaded, that he had moved Russias nuclear deterrent forces into alert. Russia has also shown off new missile technology during its invasion of Ukraine, including an air-launched ballistic missile called Kinzhal that can travel at hypersonic speeds, as well as a long-range cruise missile called Kalibr. Both missiles are considered dual-capable, Mount said, meaning they could carry a conventional weapon or a nuclear warhead - a significant problem for Western militaries, as they might not know it is a nuclear strike until one explodes. But so far there is no sign that Russia has moved its tactical warheads out of storage, Mount added. Bidgood said that she rated the risk of nonstrategic weapons in Ukraine as low, but increasing. Putin seems to feel confident that he can use veiled threats and signals to escalate and de-escalate to suit his needs, Bidgood said. But thats a very dangerous game and one that can easily lead to miscommunications and misinterpretations. Mount said that the public anxiety over the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine has far outstripped the actual risk, so far at least. The risk increases as Putin becomes more desperate, but the fact remains that nuclear use would not help him win the war or cause Washington to abandon Kyiv, Mount said. It is not clear how the United States would respond if Russia detonated a tactical nuclear weapon. Ukraine is not a NATO ally and it is not bound by treaty to protect it. But U.S. officials have spoken of how seriously they would take such an instance. In 2017, then-Air Force Gen. John E. Hyten took exception to the idea that tactical nuclear weapons were really anything different than a strategic nuclear weapon. Hyten, who was at that point overseeing U.S. nuclear weapons as the chief of U.S. Strategic Command, described how the United States could respond if another country used them. Its not a tactical effect, and if somebody employs what is a nonstrategic or tactical nuclear weapon, the United States will respond strategically, not tactically, because they have now crossed a line, a line that has not been crossed since 1945, Hyten said. ISTANBUL - Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul said Tuesday they had offered a detailed peace proposal to their Russian counterparts, exchanging military neutrality for security guarantees, as Moscow said it would drastically reduce military activity near the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations. The declarations from the two sides, after hours of negotiations in an ornate palace on the Bosporus strait hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogans government, signaled a moment of rare optimism - if not a breakthrough - after weeks of halting negotiations that have done nothing to slow the bloody and intensifying conflict in Ukraine. The centerpiece of the Ukrainian proposal was a pledge that it would maintain the kind of military neutrality sought by Moscow, in exchange for a security system for Ukraine guaranteed by international partners including the United States, Turkey and others. Ukrainian negotiators likened the offer to Article 5 of NATOs charter, which ensures the alliances collective defense. The guarantor parties - including European countries, Canada and Israel - would provide Ukraine with military assistance and weapons if it were attacked, the negotiators said. Ukraine, in turn, would ensure it remained nonaligned and nonnuclear, although it would retain the right to join the European Union. The Ukrainian proposal also offered a 15-year timeline for negotiations with Russia over the status of Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014. Vladimir Medinsky, Russias lead negotiator, characterized the talks to reporters afterward as a substantive conversation. Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkeys foreign minister, said the most meaningful progress since the start of negotiations was made today. Reactions by the United States to the days events were mixed. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed skepticism about the talks in Turkey, saying Moscows continued military offensive leaves little room for optimism. There is what Russia says and what Russia does: Were focused on the latter, and what Russia has been doing is the brutalization of Ukraine and its people, Blinken said during a joint news conference with his Moroccan counterpart in Rabat, the Moroccan capital. But the Pentagons top general overseeing U.S. troops in Europe said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday that there was evidence of shifting dynamics on the ground near the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, appearing to confirm that some Russian forces in the region are pulling back. The change in Russian posture comes after Ukrainian forces have gone on the offensive in several parts of the country. Ukrainian officials said Monday that they have recaptured Irpin, a Kyiv suburb. In Istanbul, the delegations from Ukraine and Russia arrived in convoys at the Dolmabahce Palace about 9 a.m. local time. Erdogan, addressing the delegates, expressed hope that the negotiations would lead to a cease-fire and said the whole world is waiting for benevolent and good news from you. Turkey, which for a multitude of reasons including economic, depends on close relations with both Moscow and Kyiv, has thrust itself into the middle of negotiations to halt the war. Before Tuesdays talks, Russia and Ukraine had sought to temper hopes of a breakthrough, after high-level negotiations in southwestern Turkey this month and weeks of talks via video link failed to produce an agreement. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told local media outlets Monday that Kyivs goal is - at best - a sustainable cease-fire. Meanwhile, his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, said Moscow should stop indulging Kyiv. Outside the palace, the international press corps, barred from the meeting hall, crowded on a narrow sidewalk, perching laptops on shrubbery and watching convoys of delegations roll in while waiting for dribbles of news. Inside the hall, a sighting of Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch who faces sanctions in Europe, added to the intrigue surrounding the proceedings: A day earlier, an associate of Abramovich said the oligarch suspected he was poisoned at a previous round of talks, along with members of the Ukrainian delegation. The Kremlin denied any connection to the alleged incident. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed it Tuesday in a conference call with reporters as part of the information sabotage of the West. But in comments to a Ukrainian news channel, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba advised anyone at the negotiations not to eat or drink anything, and preferably avoid touching any surface. In comments to reporters early Tuesday afternoon, Ukrainian delegates said any agreement struck with Moscow would be subject to a popular referendum. Some of the thorniest issues, including the status of Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia, would have to be worked out by the presidents of Russia and Ukraine, they said. But Ukrainian negotiators suggested Tuesday that the days events had provided a possible path forward. Oleksandr Chaly, a member of Ukraines delegation, said talks with Russia would continue in the next two weeks. Consultations have already begun with the guarantor countries, which could be invited to send representatives to the upcoming negotiations, he said. After the Ukrainian and Russian leaders reach a final agreement, they would hold a multilateral conference, where a deal would be signed, Chaly said. He said high officials from the guarantor countries would participate in the conference. Stern reported from Mukachevo, Ukraine, and Lamothe from Washington. The Washington Posts John Hudson in Rabat, Morocco, and Annabelle Timsit and Zeynep Karatas in Istanbul contributed to this report. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates said the U.S. must trust OPEC+s strategy, as Washington and other major importers call on the group to hike oil production following Russias invasion of Ukraine. Crude prices surged to almost $140 a barrel soon after Moscows attack last month, though theyve eased to around $110 this week amid a rise in coronavirus cases and tighter lockdowns in China. Theyre still up by 40% this year. OPEC+, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, meets on Thursday to decide on output levels for May. Members have far signaled they see no need to divert from their policy of small increases each month. Were experts in our field and weve been doing it for a very long time, UAE Energy Minister Suhail al Mazrouei said at a conference in Dubai on Tuesday, sitting alongside his Saudi counterpart. Were trying to balance the market and its not an easy job. Were not the only producers in the world and when we say this is the right way to do it, we know it from experience. So, trust us. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners say prices have spiked because of geopolitical tension and that theres little evidence yet of the market being significantly under-supplied. Russian oil flows have probably fallen by 1.5 million barrels a day since the invasion, according to the International Energy Forum, a multilateral organization based in Riyadh. Still, it will take around two weeks until theres firm evidence and OPEC+ will want to assess that data, IEF Secretary-General Joe McMonigle told Bloomberg Television. OPEC+ slashed supply by 10 million barrels a day at the start of the pandemic, which crushed oil demand, and is still unwinding those cuts. The U.S., Japan and Europe have tried to persuade the 23-nation group to accelerate its increases of around 400,000 barrels a day each month. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to meet the UAEs de facto leader, Mohammed bin Zayed, in Morocco on Tuesday. Washington says theyll talk about regional security. Its unclear if oil will be on the agenda. Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi energy minister, reiterated that OPEC+ must ignore politics and focus on the balance between supply and demand. The Saudis and UAE have said Russias presence in OPEC+ is key to the groups success and that the alliance shouldnt be broken up. Todays volatility would have been even worse if OPEC+ were not together and did not exist, Prince Abdulaziz said at the Dubai conference. He also said the international community must take attacks on oil infrastructure in the Arabian Gulf more seriously. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been targeted by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels based in Yemen several times this year. On Friday, the Houthis launched missiles and drones at several sites in Saudi Arabia and caused a large fire at a fuel depot in Jeddah. The Saudis and Emiratis have criticized Washington for responding too slowly to Houthi aggression and pursuing the nuclear negotiations with Iran, which they fear will hand Tehran an oil windfall. Last week, Saudi said it cant be held responsible for any drop in oil exports if the Houthis damage its infrastructure. WASHINGTON Senators considered for the first time Tuesday a sweeping measure that aims to expand eligibility for health care and benefits to millions of veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins. The Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs discussed the Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act, known as the PACT Act, which passed through the House in early March and is at odds with a Senate strategy to address the same issue. Though advocates are pushing Congress to take swift action on the bill, some committee members conveyed interest Tuesday in taking their time to consider the measure, make changes and come to an agreement before sending it to the Senate floor. The PACT Act seeks to provide an easy path to health care and benefits for veterans who served near open-air burn pits, which were used throughout the 1990s and the post-9/11 wars to burn garbage, jet fuel and other materials. Veterans diagnosed with cancer, respiratory issues and lung disease at young ages have blamed exposure to the toxic fumes, but the Department of Veterans Affairs contended for years that there wasnt sufficient evidence to support their claims. VA Secretary Denis McDonough testified at the hearing and expressed his support for the measure. We support the bill for many reasons, the first of which is that it helps the VA accomplish a priority goal: getting veterans into VA care, he said. Addressing toxic exposure is also a top priority for this [presidential] administration. President Joe Biden said during his State of the Union address earlier this month that he would sign any legislation to expand health care and disability compensation to veterans suffering the effects of toxic burn pits. While the House has proposed a major reform bill, the Senate has opted for a more incremental approach to the issue. In February, the Senate passed the Health Care for Burn Pit Veterans Act, which would expand health care to veterans but doesnt address benefits. The sponsors of the bill insisted the measure is just a first step in a three-phase approach that would add benefits incrementally. The Houses PACT Act would increase spending by about $318 billion during the next decade, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. The Senates initial bill would come with a price tag of about $1 billion. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, the ranking Republican on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, urged the House on Tuesday to approve the Senates bill. He argued the VA didnt have the ability or staffing to implement the House bill. We asked the House to pass the [Health Care for Burn Pit Veterans Act], but they have chosen not to take up that piece of legislation yet and decided to send us the bill were reviewing today, Moran said. It includes provisions that perhaps will stretch the VA beyond its operational capacity, providing no guarantee that veterans will be able to access the benefits promised. McDonough responded to the concerns, saying the department was working to hire about 2,100 new employees to process veterans claims for benefits. The extra staff could help with the estimated 1.5 million new benefits claims that the PACT Act would likely generate, he said. We think there are things we should do and we are doing, and one is were hiring about 2,100 extra people, McDonough said. Well probably have to hire more if this is enacted and use the teams we have more aggressively, with mandatory overtime. McDonough pointed out two changes that his department wants to make to the bill before its passed, one is to amend a section that he believes would inadvertently delay the process to approve presumptive conditions. When a condition is on the presumptive list, it means the government acknowledges a veterans military service caused their medical condition, and it lowers the amount of evidence that a veteran must provide to receive benefits. The PACT Act could create a commission to oversee the VAs efforts to add presumptive conditions. While the idea is intended to speed up the process, McDonough said he believed it could do the opposite. I get what theyre trying to do, which is to get us to move quicker, but I think the tools they use to get us to do that would actually slow us down, he said. McDonough also wants Congress to add a provision to the bill that would authorize 31 pending leases for VA medical facilities nationwide. Under the law, the VA must receive legislative approval to lease major medical facilities, but Congress has not authorized them on a regular basis. Facility space is critical to caring for veterans, and the PACT Act will bring millions more into our care, McDonough said. Yet, of 31 large medical facility leases, 21 have been pending for years. We urge you to approve those so we can be genuinely responsive to veterans needs. While the Senate works through changes on the bill, some advocates are losing patience. Comedian Jon Stewart, who recently became an advocate for veterans suffering from burn-pit exposure, led a rally outside the Capitol before the hearing on Tuesday afternoon. He told the crowd, We cant wait any longer. We have a hearing today, and youre going to hear a lot of nonsense about whether this is responsible, Stewart said. You know what wouldve been nice, if they wouldve been responsible 20 years ago and understood that 20 years of war was going to create an overflow and influx of sick veterans. Various veterans organizations and friends and family members of veterans suffering the effects of toxic exposure attended the rally. Marine Corps veteran Kate Hendricks Thomas, an outspoken advocate of the legislation and a public health official, couldnt be there. Though she had testified on Capitol Hill just four weeks ago, shes now in hospice care, said her friend and fellow Marine Mindy Beyer. Thomas was diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer in 2018 at the age of 38. As a military police officer, Thomas served for six months in Fallujah, Iraq, near an open-air burn pit, Beyer said. Thomas fought for years to prove her cancer was the result of her exposure to toxic burn pits before the VA recognized the link. At the same time, she advocated for the process to change, so other veterans didnt face the same challenges. Beyer urged lawmakers at the rally to fight for the legislation on behalf of her friend. Kate was just here four weeks ago, testifying, she said. But her liver is failing now, and she went into hospice two weeks ago. So now, its your turn. As Marines, its an honor to pick up the flag for someone who knew from the get-go that she would die holding the line. Kate has done that for us, and now we need to carry on the mission for her. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the Senate majority leader, vowed during the rally to take the bill for a vote on the Senate floor by the end of the year. Stewart attempted to place pressure on Republicans. You see the entire veterans community standing together to get this done, and its going to come down to what it always comes down to here: We need 10 Republicans, Stewart said, referring to the 60-vote majority that the Senate requires in many cases to pass legislation. After 20 years of fighting, thats what it comes down to: 10 Republicans. The House approved the PACT Act earlier this month with a vote of 256-174, and all those voting against the measure were Republicans. Some House Republicans cited cost concerns and urged Democrats to approve something more fiscally palatable to both parties. Concerns from Senate Republicans have so far centered on the implementation of the bill. WASHINGTON The United States will likely send more troops to Europe as Russia continues to wage a brutal war against Ukraine that threatens the stability and peace of the Continent, the commander of U.S forces in Europe told senators on Tuesday. American military presence in Europe ballooned from 60,000 personnel to 102,000 since Russia launched a full-scale attack last month against its neighboring country, upending decades of general security in the region, Air Force Gen. Tod Wolters said. My suspicion is were going to still need more, the commander of U.S. European Command told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The decision to deploy additional rotational or permanent forces will depend on the actions of European countries and the needs of NATO, said Wolters, who also serves as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe. The military alliance announced last week that it will deploy four new battle groups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, doubling NATOs forces on its eastern flank. As Russia massed thousands of troops along Ukraines border in January, EUCOM confirmed it is also building a headquarters for U.S. special forces in Albania. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., asked Wolters on Tuesday how the new military base will benefit the region. He said the outpost will lead efforts to provide intelligence to the Balkans. It will make that region much stronger and much more ready when it comes to identifying nefarious activities that start to creep in, he said. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., questioned the ability of U.S. forces to collect accurate information, noting the U.S. had overestimated Russias military might and underestimated Ukraines defensive strength. What we were hearing is the Russians would defeat the Ukrainians and obtain their invasion objectives within five days or so, he said. Is there an intelligence gap in our capability? Wolters conceded there could be and he said EUCOM would conduct a comprehensive review of its weaknesses after the crisis in Ukraine ends. The U.S. is regularly sharing intelligence with the besieged country, he added. Now entering its second month, the Russian offensive against Ukraine has stalled throughout the country, Wolters said. The Ukrainian army has had a very positive learning curve in mastering Western weapons and military tactics and the U.S. military continues to advise Ukrainian liaisons on Polish soil, he said. Im optimistic about [Ukraine] being able to force some additional stalling on behalf of the Russians, Wolters said. U.S. troops in Europe, particularly the 18th Airborne Corps and the 82nd Airborne Division, have also proved integral to managing the flood of Ukrainian refugees, ensuring that the millions of women, children and elderly fleeing Russian bombardment have a soft landing in Europe, he said. The U.S. is able to quickly build up its posture on the Continent, including the recent deployment of an entire armored brigade combat team from the U.S. to Germany in just one week, due to ongoing investment in the Pentagons European Deterrence Initiative, Wolters said. That level of speed and agility is unmatched, he said. The deterrence program, created to counter Russian aggression after the 2014 annexation of Crimea in Ukraine, has funneled billions into training and equipment and enabled the first increase in U.S. military forces in Europe since the end of the Cold War, according to the Congressional Research Service. Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, described funding for the program as lackluster on Tuesday. But Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., criticized the lack of transparency on how the program allocates its funds, noting the Defense Department has failed to submit three plans for long-term spending to Congress as required by law. Our strong multilateral response in Ukraine shows how important it is for us to invest in diplomacy in helping refugees and using all of our foreign policy tools, she said. But that does not mean giving the Pentagon a blind check or shrugging when we don't get the budget information we need to conduct spending oversight. The White House on Monday proposed $773 billion in Defense Department spending for the 2023 fiscal year, including $6.9 billion for the European Deterrence Initiative. Tracking these dollars is part of how we keep America safe and how we work with our allies, Warren said. The Kremlin breached its international obligations by raising nuclear tensions amid the war in Ukraine, according to a top U.S. arms control official, pushing some countries to reassess their dependency on Russia for atomic fuel and technology. Bonnie Jenkins, under-secretary for arms control and international security at the State Department, said the U.S. is ready to help allies in Eastern Europe escape their reliance on Moscow. We have obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and threatening non-nuclear weapons states isnt something that a nuclear weapons state should be doing, Jenkins said in an interview at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. This saber rattling is certainly not good. There were no threats made against Russia. Just two days after Vladimir Putins troops invaded Ukraine, he put Russian nuclear forces on a special regime of combat duty, following a warning that any nation that interfered with the invasion would suffer consequences that you have never experienced in your history. The unprecedented public warning forced security analysts to reassess some long-held assumptions about the stability of the global security landscape. American officials signaled growing alarm that as his war in Ukraine fell behind its objectives, Putin might escalate rather than back down, raising the specter of blanket bombing of Ukrainian cities and the use of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological arms. The U.S. said last week its working with North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners to mitigate the risk of a potential nuclear incident linked to the Kremlins invasion. The presence of Russian troops at Ukrainian nuclear facilities, along with the bombing of a U.S.-backed atomic laboratory and waste depots has increased that probability, according to American officials. People are concerned right now about what Russian troops are doing at Ukraine facilities, said Jenkins, who was in the Austrian capital for an IAEA nuclear-security meeting. She urged the Kremlin to deescalate the language its using to make atomic threats. IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi traveled to Ukraine on Tuesday for consultations over the safety and security of the countrys 15 nuclear power reactors. The month-long war has put facilities with radioactive material in unprecedented danger, the Argentine diplomat said in a statement. Jenkins said the change in Russias nuclear posture violated its responsibilities as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The Kremlins aggression against civilian nuclear facilities in Ukraine has also exposed weaknesses in the catalog of international nuclear safety and security rules, she said. Consequences of the war are already rippling beyond Ukraines borders and into neighboring countries that find themselves hooked on Russian nuclear technology and fuel, Jenkins said. State-controlled Rosatom Corp. -- the worlds biggest supplier of nuclear fuel and reactors -- is the object of potential U.S. sanctions. It powers more than a dozen reactors in central and eastern Europe and is building new ones across Asia and in the Middle East. This is something theyre starting to think about, said Jenkins, who cautioned that switching from Rosatom isnt something that can happen overnight. This is going to require planning and a strategy on their part to make it happen. In the years leading to the Ukraine war, the U.S. enabled Ukraine to weaken Rosatoms grip on its nuclear fuel market. The Department of Energy worked with Westinghouse Electric Co. to replicate fuel assemblies and optimize Ukrainian reactors. The partnership ended decades when Ukrainian utilities were hostage to a single supplier. Its set to gain even greater traction as countries from Bulgaria, to Slovakia to the Czech Republic weigh looking for new sources of fuel. If they approach us, I think we would have a conversation about that, Jenkins said. We recognize that this is an issue. Its an opportunity to work with other countries. SALISBURY, N.C. (Tribune News Service) At least two physicians at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salisbury had their medical licenses suspended or put on probation before the center hired them, a new report from the Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General shows. And the Salisbury facility may have inappropriately hired the physicians without proper review and investigation, according to the report. The Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General released a Comprehensive Healthcare Inspection report Tuesday, a report evaluating the regional heath care network including North Carolina and Virginia. According to the Veterans Health Administration, physicians who have ever had a license suspended or placed on probation must go through a thorough, documented review, before their appointment to the VA. That review should include approval from the chief medical officer of the North Carolina and Virginia veterans health care network. But at least three physicians in the North Carolina and Virginia network were hired without evidence of approval from the network CMO, according to the report. At least two of those physicians were overseen by the Salisbury facility: One physician, hired in August 2019, had an North Carolina license suspended in 2012 and an Illinois license suspended in 2013. Information regarding the adverse actions was not provided to the facility until after the physician had been on duty for about six weeks, according to the report. A second physician, also hired in August 2019, had a license placed on probation in June 2014. In both cases, Salisbury staff did not report the cases to the network chief medical officer, according to the report. The report did not identify the doctors or say what had led to the licensure actions. A third physician was hired in November 2020 and had a license revoked in 1985. The report does not detail where that physician is based. The report recommended the chief medical officer evaluate credentials files for any physicians with previous licensure issues. The Salisbury VA facility did not immediately comment on the report Tuesday. In 2020, the Salisbury medical center served more than 90,000 veterans, according to the facility. The North Carolina and Virginia Veterans Affairs health care network cared for more than 415,000 people in fiscal year 2020, according to the report. Other problems at the Salisbury VA The Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General has previously released reports highlighting dozens of problems at the Salisbury facility. In 2017, the office released a report detailing more than two dozen issues found in an inspection of the medical center. And in 2016, the inspector general released a report that found supervisors at the Salisbury VA Medical Center manipulated wait time data in order to increase their performance evaluations and, in turn, receive higher bonus payouts For more details, read the full report from the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General. 2022 The Charlotte Observer. Visit charlotteobserver.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Former tourism workers are taking the plunge back into the hard-hit industry, saying they cannot wait to welcome back visitors. Thousands of tourism workers lost their jobs when the borders slammed shut and revenue dried up for businesses around the country. Now staffing shortages were one of the industry's most pressing concerns with overseas visitors set to start arriving within a matter of weeks. It has been a rollercoaster of a few years for Leo Medina, who has more than 15 years of tourism experience both in New Zealand and abroad. When Covid-19 cut his travels short, he managed to get a tourism job during the very first lockdown. "But I only lasted for a good four months in that company and the company went under. So they had to go into hibernation and I was essentially made redundant, and then I found a job managing a warehouse." But he says tourism is where he wants to be. And last year, he returned to the industry as the Auckland sales manager for AJ Hackett Bungy. He started during the first week of the city's lockdown with all of the company's sites closed for roughly three months. "That was a very challenging beginning and then we went straight into Christmas functions and festive season. "Now, we kind of can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it is very pleasing to be back where I come from and where I'm supposed to be." It's the excitement and meeting different people that first attracted him to the industry, he says. "We need doctors, we need journalists, we need so many different professions ... but tourism is where people come to see you when they're happy, when they are on holiday, when they're wanting to do something that actually excited about doing." Cantabrian Rosie Marchant's spark for tourism first emerged as a 19-year-old on her first solo trip - a Contiki tour of the South Island. Without an easily identifiable Kiwi accent, she said she could see New Zealand through the eyes of a tourist - and loved what she saw. Once hooked, she went to an open day at Lincoln University to see what her options were. It inspired her to quit her day job and start working at a hotel ahead of studying for a Bachelor of Commerce in tourism, hotel management and marketing. "It's all sort of stemmed from that experience back in 2017. It's just made me realise that I'm very proud to be a New Zealander. I want to show the world what New Zealand has to offer. "I'm very passionate about New Zealand as an incredible place to live and also to come and visit." She had a month of university before the first lockdown and her resolve started to waver. But she says a lecturer reassured her to keep going, telling her there will be light, jobs and tourists at the end of the tunnel. "When tourists come back, there's jobs that have been vacated, there's people who've left, there's people who have moved into other job types, and those jobs need filling. "So that's kept me going. The reassurance that when tourists come back that there are jobs that really do need filling." She's hoping to find a job marketing her home region, Canterbury, as a destination once she finished her degree at the end of the year. When Ruby Trafford started her hospitality management diploma in Queenstown in 2018, business was booming. She left the resort town after graduating in 2020 and Covid hit, returning last year. "I decided to go into retail because I thought it would be a little bit more stable and the hours, they were confirmed, so I did that for a year. "And now I've just started at The Rees [Hotel Queenstown]. I've been there for about a week now and hopefully it's just waiting for it to pick back up once the borders open." She can't wait for the energy - and tourists - to return to Queenstown. "Seeing it drastically change makes me want to stay in it to see it get better. "It was so much fun when I first started and hopefully it will pick back up." She's reassured by seeing more reservations come through. With the border reopening only weeks away, the tourism industry is hopeful more new and former workers will get back onboard. -RNZ/Tess Brunton. At a national level, the veterinary sector is approaching a crisis due to severe staff shortages. Many veterinarians in New Zealand are working long hours, with some concerns being raised about the well-being of those in the field. Contrary to the pattern across the country, Tauranga Vets managing director David McDonnell says they are coping well with this increased demand, which has come as a result of multiple factors. Over the last two years, weve seen about a 20 per cent increase in activity, which as resulted in an unprecedented level of demand. This is due to the growth of the Tauranga area and the increasing numbers of people owning pets over the lockdown periods where people were isolating. People are also focusing on more basic pleasures in life rather than travelling during this Covid-19 period, such as gardening, pets and do it yourself projects, from what weve seen all of those industries have done really well. David says the high level of demand is something that can be seen at a national and international level, through social media groups and the New Zealand Veterinary Association. However, David says that the Bay of Plenty being an attractive place to work has enabled Tauranga Vets to keep up with the extremely high levels of demand. We were lucky enough to hire a few more people over the last two years. We are fortunate that the Tauranga area is a desirable option to people who are looking for work. Because of this, we have managed to be okay despite this extreme shortage with high demands across the country, while other areas have not been so fortunate. David says the closed borders combined with New Zealand not producing enough vets is another reason for the extreme demands on the veterinary sector. Theres only one vet school at Massey University, and theres lots of opportunities for veterinarians to work in other areas, not necessarily in the clinical area. They can apply their skills in other areas such as food hygiene advisory, welfare, or industry research. This doesnt necessarily fit into where the demands are, so there is a shortfall of supply. Places that are more remote are struggling most, as those areas are often isolated and find it hard to attract and retain employees. David also mentions that the agriculture and produce sector has also grown as a result of Covid-19, and the veterinary service on this level is still an unmet need. Its not just pet ownership demands in the urban areas, its the agricultural commodities sector that have also increased their demands on veterinarians. Weve staffed up in the paraprofessional area to take some of the load, and were trying to leverage our veterinarians time a bit more and take care of them." "Were locally owned, so weve been able to manage things on the ground, and it helps that people want to work where there is a good rota that is not too demanding." The overseas corporates and those who are not locally owned are probably struggling a lot more with filling the vacancies. Click the image above to view slideshow The Element IMF Otumoetai Cadets have ended their season on a high, claiming their 12th Williams Cup title. A ground delay meant the game started later than expected with reduced overs with the home team winning the toss and putting Cadets in to bat, says a spokesperson for the club. The day started well for Central as they broke up Cadets opening partnership early before too much damage was done but a 2nd wicket, 68 run partnership between Fergus Lellman and Joe Carter got their team back on track. Parv Mehta made the breakthrough, dismissing both danger men in one over which meant two new batsmen at the crease, Jono Boult and Tim Pringle. The duo put on an additional 31 runs before Boult was dismissed by Mehta too. Pringle carried on and some big run scoring overs at the end of their innings saw Cadets post a formidable total of 195 off 43 overs. Central began their run chase in a slow and steady fashion and found themselves on 33 in the 12th over without a wicket down. Issac White made the first breakthrough, dismissing Daniel Ford which opened the floodgates. Spencer Wills then came in and ripped through Central's batting line up, finishing up on 4/8 off 3 overs as the Cadets cruised to an 84 run win. Element IMF Otumoetai Cadets 195/9, 43 overs (Tim Pringle 64, Fergus Lellman 56; Parv Mehta 3/41) Bayleys Central Indians 111/10, 33.1 overs (Lovely Sandhu 44, Stephen Nicholls 12; Spencer Wills 4/8) Element IMF Otumoetai Cadets won by 84 runs. Supplied photo. Bay of Plenty Our client has plenty of work in the pipeline and as such they are in need of qualified or experienced carpenters for an... View or Apply on GoodWork.co.nz Current Print Subscribers will be prompted to either login to their current site user account or to create a new one. A confirmation email will be sent when a new user account is created, which must be confirmed within three days in order to provide uninterrupted online access through your Print Subscription. Once the email address is confirmed please provide your Account Number to activate your Print Subscription Service. Offer a personal message of sympathy... By sharing a fond memory or writing a kind tribute, you will be providing a comforting keepsake to those in mourning. If you have an existing account with this site, you may log in with that below. Otherwise, you can create an account by clicking on the Log in button below, and then register to create your account. Poitive Senior - BHPian Join Date: Apr 2011 Location: 3rdRockFmTheSun Posts: 1,087 Thanked: 1,944 Times Re: Impact of the Russia-Ukraine war Sharing some excerpts below. Emphasis/formatting added. Quote: Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. Is this period, you were the national securty advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct? Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention [emphasis added throughout]. Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into the war and looked for a way to provoke it? B: It wasnt quite like that. We didnt push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would. Q : When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan , nobody believed them . However, there was an element of truth in this. You dont regret any of this today? B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war." Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime , a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire. Link to full text, a 14 page pdf: The above seems rather similar to the Ukraine Russia situation. Prior posts too have talked about the possible/likely/certain US involvement in Ukraine. It is obviously way more than an issue of 'sovereign country making it's choice to join NATO'. Some thoughts: Is the US outsmarting Russia by drawing them into a resource-draining conflict, is a question worth pondering over. At least in direct war costs (money and human), the US spend is small; Russia's is huge; Ukraine of course; Europe too. Could this be the build-up to a Post-Putin Russia in the making? To have a US favouring 'leader' in the most potent military adversary of the US, as and when Putin is out of the game. Building discontent, and giving hopes of an improved future is the start of 'revolutions' - the recent ones, 'incidentally' tend to favour the US; also have suggestions of them not being organic (belief of which might depend on one's political persuasion, and especially exposure to how politics works). Quoting myself from an earlier post: Quote: Poitive Originally Posted by ...Also, let us not prejudge the effectiveness of the power structure of the US. This structure took centre-stage during WW2 and quite displaced the empire where the sun never set as the leading power in the world, and has maintained and enhanced it's position ever since. Won the Cold War without it getting hot with the Soviet Union, and so on. Despite what seems like a relatively weak president, I would not dismiss them with ease; at all... . Folks, came across an interesting interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski who was the National Security Advisor of President Jimmy Carter when the Soviet attacked Afghanistan in 1979-80. It gives an insight into the possible means and intents of the US system.Sharing some excerpts below. Emphasis/formatting added.Source: https://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/brzezinski_interview Link to full text, a 14 page pdf: https://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/s.../afghan-ip.pdf Prior posts too have talked about the possible/likely/certain US involvement in Ukraine. It is obviously way more than an issue of 'sovereign country making it's choice to join NATO'.Some thoughts:Is the US outsmarting Russia by drawing them into a resource-draining conflict, is a question worth pondering over. At least in direct war costs (money and human), the US spend is small; Russia's is huge; Ukraine of course; Europe too. Could this be the build-up to a Post-Putin Russia in the making? To have a US favouring 'leader' in the most potent military adversary of the US, as and when Putin is out of the game.Building discontent, and giving hopes of an improved future is the start of 'revolutions' - the recent ones, 'incidentally' tend to favour the US; also have suggestions of them not being organic (belief of which might depend on one's political persuasion, and especially exposure to how politics works).Quoting myself from an earlier post:I'm not rushing to any conclusive answers yet, as there usually is way more happening behind the scenes than most of us can imagine. Last edited by Poitive : 27th March 2022 at 20:43 . Reason: Formatting W16rocks BHPian Join Date: Nov 2021 Location: Pune Posts: 40 Thanked: 94 Times 3 Day weekend trip across Mahabaleshwar-Satara-Panchgani A small Introduction Me being a fairly new member to team bhp, I am getting accustomed to writing a travelogue, I will request you all to overlook my small mistakes in this travelogue. Sometimes I feel my father should have been a member here long ago, both for his love of road trips and Cars, and also his vast experience of driving multiple vehicles from his days in the army to the corporate world. So the circumstances that led to this small but enjoyable road trip was that my yearly exams had just got over and I was bored as hell, so my father suggested we take a road trip. My new session was starting in four days, which gave us only three days to make a trip and be back, as we just moved to Pune, we figured what better than than the Punekarss go to hill station, Mahabaleshwar. It was just 119 kms away from Pune and due to the approaching festivities(Holi) what better time to go on a trip. So we decided to leave the next day after lunch, we planned it to be a two nights, three days trip. As luck would have it due to our sudden planning and festival season we couldnt find a single good hotel/resort, but we decided to proceed to Satara where we could meet some of my fathers colleagues with better knowledge about the places and the resorts. As a last resort if no hotel was available we decided to book my fathers company guesthouse for just in case. We decided to take our trustworthy mile gobbler City, for the trip. Day 1 - Pune - Satara - Koyna lake We started from home at 1:30pm for Satara which was 133 kms only but the route was very scenic so we took many stops in between to take photos, some of which I will attach so you all can enjoy it yourself. We took the Pune Satara Highway and joined it as soon as possible. The highway was pretty nice and smooth, after a while it separated for the ongoing and incoming traffic. The route was pretty busy that day due to many Pune and Mumbai people heading to the hill stations for the Holi weekend. There was a diversion along the way to go to Mahabaleshwar but since we first wanted to go to Satara and then to Mahabaleshwar we headed straight. We reached Satara at around 4:30 pm and went directly to meet my fathers colleagues, we asked them about hotels and resorts with nice views and location, due to Holi most of the hotels were booked out, but they suggested a resort which was situated right next to the Koyna lake in the Koyna reserve. We talked to the manager and reserved a room. The resort was around 50 kms from Satara, after some light snacks, we left at around 6pm, but while leaving we were able to take in the beautiful sunset sights at Satara. The route was through heavy jungles and it was a single road. The road was newly built but very narrow, we kept honking at turns to notify incoming drivers as the road was very curvaceous and also it was getting dark. We also lost gps at this time, so we proceeded by asking people. While going we saw the UNESCO heritage site Kass plateau - Valley of Flowers, it is a place where flowers grow naturally, but due to the season, there were no flowers at the time. Due to our almost zero knowledge of the route and the narrowness and darkness of the roads we drove extra carefully. Thats why it took us extra long to reach our destination. We reached by 8 pm by the time it was dark and so we could not see the magnificent lake. We were initially pretty dissatisfied by the resort as it was devoid of basic amenities like cutlery and the rooms were also pretty basic. But as we had drove a long way here we decided to stay the night here and had a light dinner and call it a day. Me being a fairly new member to team bhp, I am getting accustomed to writing a travelogue, I will request you all to overlook my small mistakes in this travelogue. Sometimes I feel my father should have been a member here long ago, both for his love of road trips and Cars, and also his vast experience of driving multiple vehicles from his days in the army to the corporate world.So the circumstances that led to this small but enjoyable road trip was that my yearly exams had just got over and I was bored as hell, so my father suggested we take a road trip. My new session was starting in four days, which gave us only three days to make a trip and be back, as we just moved to Pune, we figured what better than than the Punekarss go to hill station, Mahabaleshwar. It was just 119 kms away from Pune and due to the approaching festivities(Holi) what better time to go on a trip.So we decided to leave the next day after lunch, we planned it to be a two nights, three days trip. As luck would have it due to our sudden planning and festival season we couldnt find a single good hotel/resort, but we decided to proceed to Satara where we could meet some of my fathers colleagues with better knowledge about the places and the resorts. As a last resort if no hotel was available we decided to book my fathers company guesthouse for just in case. We decided to take our trustworthy mile gobbler City, for the trip.We started from home at 1:30pm for Satara which was 133 kms only but the route was very scenic so we took many stops in between to take photos, some of which I will attach so you all can enjoy it yourself.We took the Pune Satara Highway and joined it as soon as possible. The highway was pretty nice and smooth, after a while it separated for the ongoing and incoming traffic.The route was pretty busy that day due to many Pune and Mumbai people heading to the hill stations for the Holi weekend. There was a diversion along the way to go to Mahabaleshwar but since we first wanted to go to Satara and then to Mahabaleshwar we headed straight.We reached Satara at around 4:30 pm and went directly to meet my fathers colleagues, we asked them about hotels and resorts with nice views and location, due to Holi most of the hotels were booked out, but they suggested a resort which was situated right next to the Koyna lake in the Koyna reserve. We talked to the manager and reserved a room.The resort was around 50 kms from Satara, after some light snacks, we left at around 6pm, but while leaving we were able to take in the beautiful sunset sights at Satara. The route was through heavy jungles and it was a single road. The road was newly built but very narrow, we kept honking at turns to notify incoming drivers as the road was very curvaceous and also it was getting dark. We also lost gps at this time, so we proceeded by asking people.While going we saw the UNESCO heritage site Kass plateau - Valley of Flowers, it is a place where flowers grow naturally, but due to the season, there were no flowers at the time.Due to our almost zero knowledge of the route and the narrowness and darkness of the roads we drove extra carefully. Thats why it took us extra long to reach our destination. We reached by 8 pm by the time it was dark and so we could not see the magnificent lake.We were initially pretty dissatisfied by the resort as it was devoid of basic amenities like cutlery and the rooms were also pretty basic. But as we had drove a long way here we decided to stay the night here and had a light dinner and call it a day. Last edited by W16rocks : 25th March 2022 at 19:00 . prashant316 BHPian Join Date: May 2012 Location: New Delhi Posts: 212 Thanked: 280 Times Review - Bridgestone Ecopia EP150 on a journey through Devbhoomi At the time I decided to not fit new tyres as there was a life of about 5000 kms left in them. But as luck would have it, 2 weeks later, on the infamous Gurgaon roads (read potholes), the left front gave up. And gave up quite badly as there was a 2 inch laceration on the sidewall and it simply could not be repaired. Hence began my search for the next set of tyres. These tyres lasted just under 40000 kms. I was pretty sure I did not want to fir the MRF again. So I went to a shop and started looking at the options. And I boiled down to 3: Apollo ALNAC @Rs. 6400 per tyre primarily because of the price Bridgestone Ecopia @Rs. 7500 per tyre highly suggested by the shop owner Michelin Primacy @Rs. 9000 per tyre because Michelin The prices mentioned are for the 195/60 R16 profile. The price made me decide against the Michelin. I had just lost my job and I didnt want to make extra desirable expenses. Though if I had the provision, I would have picked the Michelin. Between the other two choices, I had first picked the Apollo as it seemed like a safe option with respect to its price and that it is widely used on this car from factory. But keeping the two tyres side by side, even when they were the same size, the Ecopia just looked so much wider. I could simply feel more grip coming from those tyres and they were not even on the car. It was at this time that I truly missed being able to test ride the two tyres to feel them. Since that was not an option, I put my hand to my heart and eventually chose the Ecopia. Even at a slightly higher price, I just felt it would be a better long term investment. Just look at that tasty looking new rubber! Now I did go through the T-BHP forum of the Ecopia and I know it doesnt have a lot of positive things to say for the claims Bridgestone made around it. But I was willing to experiment and try it out on my own. And soon after the first major test for the tyre came when the week after that, I was to go for a long journey which was going to take me from Delhi to Manali to Sissu to Jibhi to Narkhanda and back to Delhi. I had a ~1500 km test of this tyre through city roads, highways, expressways, mountain roads and even no roads at all. And here is my summary. Ride quality 6/10 Now simply because these were brand new tyres, I could feel major difference in the way the ride was. So I had to get used to it before I started making proper observations. Over a period of time, I realised its not too bad, but not that great either. In my mind, the expectation was higher. Probably because of its price. At almost Rs. 1800 lesser I could have fitted the same MRF I got as stock and the difference between the two wasnt huge enough to justify the price. The comfort factor felt similar though the overall steering feel was a little better. The ecopia advertising claims to have better braking capability with this tyre. IMHO, maybe. But the difference didnt feel enough to have its mention here. Grip 7/10 Here the price difference started making some more sense to me. A mixture of the compound, tread design and the contact patch design helped me notice the difference in grip. Especially on corners. Most notably on the mountain roads. The car felt more precise, more in control and subsequently gave me more confidence to carry more speed. Having said that, since I have experienced this, the Michelin Primacy does offer even more grip and confidence. Road noise 6/10 This is where this tyre is a mixed bag. It has varying degrees of road noise coming in basis the kind of tarmac it is being driven on. And this difference is more than it was on the MRF. I felt on city roads it is a loud tyre. Anything about 60 kmph and you could notice the sound enough that I needed to turn up the volume of the car. And infact with this impression, I was expecting a hard time listening to podcasts on the highway at higher speeds. But on the highway tarmac, the tyre seemed to quiet down a lot more. There were some patches of highway tarmac that it became really loud, but on a whole it was very much within my acceptable range. But since the cars are largely driven in city, I will now have to deal with the road noise, which will keep irking me in times to come. Fuel efficiency 9/10 Now this is where this tyre shines. It is advertised to give 7-10% more mileage than regular tyres. This is due to its low rolling resistance nature. I can safely say, compared to my last trip to Himachal, the car returned 9% more mileage this time. Not just that, this is the first time that any tyre change in my life actively made me change my driving style on the highways. I could feel the car go on longer once you leave the accelerator, albeit slightly, yet enough to make me change my style. Initially I had to brake more as with my current habit, I was expecting the car slow down in a certain distance. Instead it slowed down much slower and I had to increase my use of brakes. To adjust that I now kept lifting from the throttle much earlier than before. I feel that is what saved more fuel. Overall 7/10 If you are an enthusiastic driver, I think there are better tyres on sale Yokohoma, Michelin and similar. If you do not want to spend Rs. 30000 on a set of 4 tyres, there are cheaper options available too Ceat, MRF, Kenda and so on. I think these tyres lie somewhere on the cusp of where average ends and premium begins. If I could have, I still would have chosen to buy Michelins. But I think for the most common usage these tyres are buyable, if you are willing to spend on its initial investment. If the mileage continues to be 8-9% higher than what it used to be, then the difference of price would pay out on its own before its lifetime. Coming away from the tyres, I wanted to conclude with a line on this car. It has once again taken everything thrown at it. Affirming my belief even further that one does not need a 4x4 until you are going for extreme terrains. Leaving you all with a few pictures from the journey. In January, I had sent my car Polo GT for its annual service and among the few things that needed to be replaced, the service advisor had recommended me to change the tyres as well as very little life was left in them. The only tyres the service centre had to fit were the Apollo ALNAC. My Polo GT was stock fitted with the MRF ZVTV, 195/60/ R16.At the time I decided to not fit new tyres as there was a life of about 5000 kms left in them. But as luck would have it, 2 weeks later, on the infamous Gurgaon roads (read potholes), the left front gave up. And gave up quite badly as there was a 2 inch laceration on the sidewall and it simply could not be repaired. Hence began my search for the next set of tyres. These tyres lasted just under 40000 kms.I was pretty sure I did not want to fir the MRF again. So I went to a shop and started looking at the options. And I boiled down to 3:The prices mentioned are for the 195/60 R16 profile.The price made me decide against the Michelin. I had just lost my job and I didnt want to make extra desirable expenses. Though if I had the provision, I would have picked the Michelin.Between the other two choices, I had first picked the Apollo as it seemed like a safe option with respect to its price and that it is widely used on this car from factory. But keeping the two tyres side by side, even when they were the same size, the Ecopia just looked so much wider. I could simply feel more grip coming from those tyres and they were not even on the car.It was at this time that I truly missed being able to test ride the two tyres to feel them. Since that was not an option, I put my hand to my heart and eventually chose the Ecopia. Even at a slightly higher price, I just felt it would be a better long term investment.Just look at that tasty looking new rubber!Now I did go through the T-BHP forum of the Ecopia and I know it doesnt have a lot of positive things to say for the claims Bridgestone made around it. But I was willing to experiment and try it out on my own.And soon after the first major test for the tyre came when the week after that, I was to go for a long journey which was going to take me from Delhi to Manali to Sissu to Jibhi to Narkhanda and back to Delhi. I had a ~1500 km test of this tyre through city roads, highways, expressways, mountain roads and even no roads at all. And here is my summary.Now simply because these were brand new tyres, I could feel major difference in the way the ride was. So I had to get used to it before I started making proper observations. Over a period of time, I realised its not too bad, but not that great either. In my mind, the expectation was higher. Probably because of its price. At almost Rs. 1800 lesser I could have fitted the same MRF I got as stock and the difference between the two wasnt huge enough to justify the price. The comfort factor felt similar though the overall steering feel was a little better. The ecopia advertising claims to have better braking capability with this tyre. IMHO, maybe. But the difference didnt feel enough to have its mention here.Here the price difference started making some more sense to me. A mixture of the compound, tread design and the contact patch design helped me notice the difference in grip. Especially on corners. Most notably on the mountain roads. The car felt more precise, more in control and subsequently gave me more confidence to carry more speed. Having said that, since I have experienced this, the Michelin Primacy does offer even more grip and confidence.This is where this tyre is a mixed bag. It has varying degrees of road noise coming in basis the kind of tarmac it is being driven on. And this difference is more than it was on the MRF. I felt on city roads it is a loud tyre. Anything about 60 kmph and you could notice the sound enough that I needed to turn up the volume of the car. And infact with this impression, I was expecting a hard time listening to podcasts on the highway at higher speeds. But on the highway tarmac, the tyre seemed to quiet down a lot more. There were some patches of highway tarmac that it became really loud, but on a whole it was very much within my acceptable range. But since the cars are largely driven in city, I will now have to deal with the road noise, which will keep irking me in times to come.Now this is where this tyre shines. It is advertised to give 7-10% more mileage than regular tyres. This is due to its low rolling resistance nature. I can safely say, compared to my last trip to Himachal, the car returned 9% more mileage this time.Not just that, this is the first time that any tyre change in my life actively made me change my driving style on the highways. I could feel the car go on longer once you leave the accelerator, albeit slightly, yet enough to make me change my style. Initially I had to brake more as with my current habit, I was expecting the car slow down in a certain distance. Instead it slowed down much slower and I had to increase my use of brakes. To adjust that I now kept lifting from the throttle much earlier than before. I feel that is what saved more fuel.If you are an enthusiastic driver, I think there are better tyres on sale Yokohoma, Michelin and similar.If you do not want to spend Rs. 30000 on a set of 4 tyres, there are cheaper options available too Ceat, MRF, Kenda and so on.I think these tyres lie somewhere on the cusp of where average ends and premium begins. If I could have, I still would have chosen to buy Michelins.But I think for the most common usage these tyres are buyable, if you are willing to spend on its initial investment. If the mileage continues to be 8-9% higher than what it used to be, then the difference of price would pay out on its own before its lifetime.Coming away from the tyres, I wanted to conclude with a line on this car. It has once again taken everything thrown at it. Affirming my belief even further that one does not need a 4x4 until you are going for extreme terrains. Leaving you all with a few pictures from the journey. Why it matters: Microsoft has talked plenty about the changes that its DirectStorage Xbox technology will bring to Windows PC users, but it's not just speedy loading times we'll get to enjoy: it will also take the pressure off your CPU, reducing a processor's overhead in games by up to 40% in some cases. Microsoft senior software engineer Cooper Partin, a developer on the DirectStorage for Windows team, explained in a video how the technology was designed to utilize PC hardware fully, and that's especially true when using Windows 11 alongside an NVMe drive; a setup that could offer a 20% to 40% CPU saving. "This is attributed to the advancements made in the file IO stack on Windows 11 and the improvements on that platform in general," said Partin. While DirectStorage also supports Windows 10 (19H1+), it won't offer the same sort of performance those running Microsoft's latest OS will see. Freeing up processor resources will have a number of benefits for gamers. Those extra CPU cycles could be used for background processing, AI workloads, or other game features, such as gigantic open-worlds, which can often cause older processors to groan under the weight of the workload. Additionally, extra CPU resources should be welcomed by anyone who finds their PC performance is severely impacted when trying to game and stream/capture footage at the same time. Will DirectStorage be enough to encourage those who shun Windows 11 to upgrade? Probably not, at least initially, given that the only game announced so far to support the tech is Forspoken, which doesn't arrive until October 11. Moreover, we'll need to put Microsoft's claims of much better Windows 11 performance to the test. Developer Luminous Productions says that DirectStorage will reduce Forspoken's loading times from an average of 10 seconds when using a SATA SSD to just one second with DirectStorage on an NVMe SSD, though that's being disputed. The API was made generally available to devs last week, so it could be a while before more games start supporting it. In brief: One company's loss is another's gain. It seems that's especially true in the US mobile industry, where Motorola has taken advantage of LG's demise to become the third-largest smartphone maker in the country, taking a 10% market share. According to Counterpoint Research's Market Pulse Service, Lenovo-owned Motorola was the number three smartphone firm in the US last year. In 2008, back when feature phones were the dominant variant, Motorola was the largest handset (smartphones and feature phones combined) OEM in the US, but 2021 marked the first time it has entered the top-three US smartphone market. One of the main reasons behind Motorola's sales growing 131% last year was the long-predicted exit of LG from the phone business. The last handset rolled off the Korean firm's production line in June, and we started seeing OnePlus, Nokia, and Motorola filling the void LG left behind. Research Director Jeff Fieldhack said Motorola has all the key characteristics major carriers desire, including "a full portfolio, ability to ramp volumes, and low return rates." Illustrating just how popular its mid- to low-range phones are, Motorola was the number two smartphone company in the $400 and lower segment in the United States. "Motorola's sub-$300 portfolio Moto G Stylus, Moto G Power and Moto G Pure has driven its success in the US," Fieldhack added. "Thanks to its reliability, Motorola has been a key free 'switch' device, a device carriers use to move subscribers from networks that are being shut off or as a device MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) use when changing network partners." Motorola continued its US success in the first quarter of this year; Samsung, which has a 22% market share, could soon start feeling its competitor breathing down its neck. Apple remains the dominant force in the US market by holding a massive 58% share at the end last year. But that number might not be as high in 2022 if reports of Cupertino slashing iPhone SE production in the face of low demand are accurate. Masthead image credit: Jonas Leupe In a nutshell: The European Space Agency has outlined its plans and goals for an upcoming mission to Jupiter. With any luck, Juice - short for the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer - will bring us a step closer to better understanding the mysteries of these moons. Juice will leave Earth on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou in April 2023. The spacecraft will leverage four gravity assist maneuvers over the next several years to help propel it towards our solar system's largest planet while conserving as much propellant as possible. Once on its way, the craft will take a little more than two years to reach its target. Should everything go according to plan, Juice will conduct its first flyby of Jovian moon Ganymede in July 2031. Flybys of Europa and Callisto are also in the cards. Astronomers believe some of Jupiter's moons may contain liquid water under their icy surfaces. Ganymede, which is the largest moon in the solar system, is also the only one to have a magnetosphere. The craft will ultimately settle into an orbit around Ganymede and remain there until its orbit naturally decays. In late 2035 once all of the craft's propellant is used up, Juice will impact the surface of the moon. Of course by that time, we should know a lot more about the universe as a whole thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. The mission will notably be the last for the Ariane 5 launch vehicle, which will be replaced by the Ariane 6. Image credit NASA Elon Musk has mentioned that he's seriously thinking of building his own social media platform. The multi-billionaire tech mogul made this claim after he was asked about it by a follower. Free speech will reportedly be the focus of the platform, which will also be one "where propaganda is very minimal," according to Twitter user Pranay Pathole who asked Musk about it. According to Bitcoin.com, this discussion popped up right after the SpaceX founder asked his over 79 million followers about Twitter. The poll asked users whether they believe Twitter (Musk's social media platform of choice) "rigorously adheres" to the principle of free speech in a functioning democracy. The results of the poll were telling: 70.4% of the polled Twitter users believed Twitter doesn't adhere to the principle, with the rest believing that they do. This result came from a total of 2,035,924 votes, so you can't really say that the sample size was small and insignificant. Musk himself said that the consequences of the poll "will be important" in a March 25th tweet, alongside the release of the poll. Furthermore, the billionaire also mentioned how Twitter is the world's "de facto public town square," saying that it should not fail to adhere to the principles of free speech if it doesn't want to undermine democracy (via CNN). He then aided his statement with a question to anyone, asking "What should be done?" These claims come shortly after Musk complained about Twitter's algorithm, saying that there's a so-called "de facto bias" going around on the platform. He also followed this with another poll (which preceded the above mentioned other one) wherein he said that Twitter's algorithm should be open source. As usual, many folks agreed with the tech mogul, with the poll recording 82.7% in favor out of 1,117,574 votes in total: Twitter algorithm should be open source Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2022 Read Also: Elon Musk says TikTok Feels like an 'AI Attack,' Picks on the Social Media Service with Other Executives Elon Musk Making His Own Social Media Network Is Not Too Weird Considering he's one of the biggest and most powerful tech CEOs in the world, it is not too out of place for Elon Musk to claim that he wants to make his own social media platform. He does have the skills and experience to do so. Or even if he doesn't make his own, there is still a possibility for him to just buy a social media company outright. In a Tech Times report from earlier this year, Indian-American political commentator Dinesh Souza said that Twitter will soon not be enough for Musk to "push his ideas and promote his beliefs." Tweets are fine @elonmusk but you can dramatically change the political and cultural landscape this way: 1. Buy and take over a major social media platform 2. Acquire or create a TV network like ABC, NBC or CBS 3. Create a world-class online university and offer degrees for free. Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) January 28, 2022 This suggestion was made alongside two others: creating his own media outlet/TV station, or putting up a school. According to Souza, these three "pillars" will serve the popular multi-billionaire well in his quest to "effect the change he wants on society." But despite these suggestions, Elon Musk only commented that the ideas are "interesting" and didn't make any mention of actively pushing for them. So don't expect him to go all Donald Trump and release his own social media platform anytime soon, no matter how much sense it makes for him to do so. Related Article: Elon Musk Increases Support for Ukraine by Sending Solar Battery System 'Tesla Powerwalls' This article is owned by Tech Times Written by RJ Pierce 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Electric cars are almost everywhere in this age of "cultural revolution." In this era, people want to go for the most advanced, faster, and more nature-inclined auto products which, in this case, are EVs. Of course, the auto industry is heavily dominated by popular brands such as Tesla, Lucid, and other firms to date. However, there's another notable company that continues to create long-lasting electric cars: Polestar. For today, we will know more about its CEO Thomas Ingenlath, the iconic man behind this electric vehicle brand. Who is Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath Before becoming the current CEO of Polestar, Ingenlath served as the Senior VP of Design at Volvo Car Group. According to Volvo Car France, his work under this position was one of the "best kept" secrets of the car industry at that time. During his transition in 2012, Ingenlath saw that the auto firm was progressing at a rapid rate. There were times when his team was focusing on making a new interpretation for the design language. This was an important tool for keeping the brand on track. The site described Volvo as a "human-centric" brand known for its strong heritage. Ingenlath said that the core values of the company were centered on improving a premium EV brand. Regarding the Scandinavian design, Thomas assured us that what they are creating was an original Scandinavian design since Volvo Cars were the only car brand that still remains in Sweden. With that, he knew that the company should quickly adapt to the stylish and modern design of the cars. Thomas said that through executing a meticulous design and quality for this brand, producing a premium EV will be one step ahead already. Related Article: Polestar Unveiles Convertible EV with Integrated Drone, Polestar OS Dreaming Big With Polestar As the company weaves more improvement throughout the years, Polestar remains focused on producing top-notch cars which feature good visuals and decent internal components. Per The CEO Magazine, Ingenlath first dreamed of having a well-designed car. The German CEO cited that the plan had to be dreamy but not to the point that it would be unachievable. Since the arrival of Polestar 1, the company has learned the right approach to create a car that people will love. A year later after its release, Polestar 2 was introduced. This sparked the appearance of other luxury electric vehicles in the market. This year, Thomas aims to launch Polestar 3 which would be the first coming to the SUV market. Speaking of their business strategy, Ingenlath noted that they rely on the direct-to-consumer model which tackles establishing the customer experience and incorporating it with their current products that spark the modern touch. Like other companies, Polestar is used to some challenges presented along its way. However, the company quickly adapts to them to meet their goals on the other line. Thomas highlighted that their mission is now aligned with sustainable mobility and technology which are beneficial in attaining climate neutrality. Read Also: #TechCEO: Introducing Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and His Contribution to Crypto Space This article is owned by Tech Times Written by Joseph Henry 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. ASUS revealed that the tariff for Chinese goods and imports was temporarily lifted until December, now stating that it will have a 25 percent discount on its internal components. The company is taking this opportunity to give back to its customers and gamers, focusing on discounted items with no import tax on its prices. ASUS Graphics Card to Have Up to 25 Percent Discount ASUS announced via its press release that the company is holding as much as 25 percent discounts for its existing graphics card lineup due to new development in the country. It is with the import tariff temporarily lifting itself until December, giving the public up to nine months of cheaper GPUs in the brand's lineup. The sale includes the entry-level RTX 3050 and RTX 3060, the mid-range RTX 3070, and the high-end graphics card it features, including the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3090. The sale will start on April 1 this year, and it will be by Friday. The sale did not say when it would last or if it would only be available until stocks were not yet sold out from its inventory. Moreover, Asus said that it would only be up to 25 percent, with some items having less discount from their previous selling price. Read Also: ASUS Z690 Hero Boards Are Burning Up Because Of A Reversed Capacitor ASUS Breaks Free of Import Tariff on Products The news from ASUS may be good, but it is not entirely something that can be considered one, as the United States Trade Representative said that it is reinstating these exclusions by December 31. It is public knowledge that the Trump administration brought the Chinese import tariff on the products like ASUS's GPUs, and it is not going away permanently. GPUs in the Market Now There were reports that the GPU items in the market are finally normalizing their prices after a massive surge in the past that many factors have influenced the industry. Many people are astounded by its price surge in the past years, and it was felt during the pandemic when the chip production and components were at scarce availability. Nvidia is one of the companies with massive prices for its graphics cards, particularly with the RTX series' latest lineup that went as far as $1,500 for other retail stores. The expensive items were condoned by gamers and became a topic for debate for their affordability, focusing primarily on demand for the GPUs among its users. AMD, Asus, Nvidia, and more are now in the era where the price of these items is lowering and going back to normal, particularly with the tariff over Chinese imports piping down. However, it may not be long until another 25 percent surge, particularly if this directive comes back to affect the prices of Asus' GPUs, the foreign company's available products in the US. Related Article: ASUS Reveals AMD Ryzen 6000 Laptops: 20 ROG Line Gaming Laptops This article is owned by Tech Times Written by Isaiah Richard 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. OnePlus 10 Pro release in the United States and North America comes with a notable downgrade that slows down what should have been impressive fast charging support. OnePlus 10 Pro US Release Downgrade As per a news story by XDA Developers, the latest flagship smartphone of OnePlus, the 10 Pro, has been available in China for quite some time now. On the other hand, other parts of the world are still waiting for the release of the OnePlus 10 series. In fact, the upcoming smartphone is scheduled for its international launch event on March 31, wherein all the OnePlus 10 models will be showcased in the global spotlight. As the smartphone has been available in the Chinese nation, we now know what are some of the specs that we could expect from the next-generation OnePlus flagship. However, it is worth noting that some of the features of smartphones that were initially released in China are left out once it is shipped to the global market. Thus, it has been a norm for spectators to expect a slightly different version of a mobile device once it is released on the international scene. But this time around, it turns out that one of the most sought-after features of the OnePlus 10 Pro during its release in China apparently would not make it globally. XDA Developers said in the same report that one of the most notable features of the latest top-of-the-line OnePlus flagship is its wired fast charging support of up to 80W. OnePlus 10 Pro US: No 80W Fast Charging? Unfortunately, the 80W charging support of the OnePlus 10 Pro is not reaching the shores of North America. A member of the OnePlus Community Team said in an online thread that the next-gen flagship of the Chinese phone is releasing in North America without one of its selling points. Read Also: OnePlus 10 Pro Receives TENAAA Certification! Better Than Google Pixel 6 Pro? Here are Leaked Specs OnePlus 10 Pro Slower Charging Support: Here's Why The online post confirmed that "in North America, the OnePlus 10 Pro supports 65W SUPERVOOC. As such, instead of getting the impressively fast 80W charging feature of the OnePlus 10 Pro, folks based in North America are only getting 65W charging support. According to a recent report by Android Central, the charging support in North America will maintain the charging speeds of the predecessor of the OnePlus 10 Pro. It comes as the all-new 80W SUPERVOOC has yet to work on 110 or 120-volt AC power, which is widely used in North America. For now, it is exclusively available in 220 volts. Related Article: OnePlus 10 Pro Global Release Date Unveiled | OxygenOS 13 in the Works? This article is owned by Tech Times Written by Teejay Boris 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Ukraine's main internet provider is the latest victim of a cyberattack, over a month into the conflict with Russia. According to a report by Yahoo, the company Ukrtelecom reported a cyberattack targeting its core infrastructure. This is enough to potentially disrupt the company's service nationwide, which is why it is being considered the "most severe" breach ever recorded since the war began. The cyberattack was further confirmed by Ukrtelecom chief executive Yuriy Kurmaz. He says that they've been "forced" to restrict internet access to a lot of their enterprise and private consumers due to the attack. This decision was made so their services, which are being used by Ukraine's armed forces, won't be disrupted in any way. Despite that, though, Kurmaz says that they have already fought back the attack. As a result, a gradual resumption of internet service across the war-torn country is expected within the foreseeable future. Cybersecurity specialists from the Ukrainian government had a helping hand in fighting back against the attack. A Sudden, Massive Drop In Online Users Cybersecurity watchdog NetBlocks was among the first to notice an irregularity in the Ukraine telco's operations. According to the BBC, NetBlocks observed an increase in the number of users going offline. This was happening at a rate far beyond what could happen if it was an issue with cabling or other components of the service. Confirmed: A major internet disruption has been registered across #Ukraine on national provider #Ukrtelecom; real-time network data show connectivity collapsing to 13% of pre-war levels; the provider reports issues assigning new sessions Background: https://t.co/S0qJQ7CbNv pic.twitter.com/BY2OOBK0m6 NetBlocks (@netblocks) March 28, 2022 This is the latest in the series of multiple cyberattacks to hit Ukraine in the midst of the war with Russia, which the former has been fighting gallantly since the invasion began. Read Also: CaddyWiper: New Wiper Malware Hits Ukraine-based Organizations | What's New About This? Looking Ahead Both the Ukrainian authorities and NetBlocks didn't provide any suspects who may have instigated the cybersecurity breach. For now, it remains unclear whether the attack has been made to specifically target the Ukrainian military, who relies a lot on Ukrtelecom's services. Whoever it was that tried to take the ISP down, however, will have to see that their efforts are futile. That's because multiple tech companies have already stood by Ukraine to provide much-needed internet access to help with the war efforts. And perhaps there's no bigger company out there to voice out its support than Elon Musk's Starlink. Earlier this month, the multibillionaire made it clear that he wants to help restore the war-torn country's connection. As such, he has sent shipments of his company's satellites to Ukraine earlier this month, providing much-needed internet in parts where there's not a lot of signals. And as of late, the Starlink satellites have proved to be a boon. SoftServe, a software company based in Austin, TX but founded in Ukraine, has expressed gratitude to Musk and his efforts. This was conveyed by company CTO Alex Chubay, who said that the Starlink satellites are bringing "tremendous value" to Ukrainians who have been left without a stable connection since the war began, reports KVUE. Related Article: Elon Musk Shares How Ukrainians Can Protect Starlink Terminals as SpaceX's Comms Systems Likely Targeted This article is owned by Tech Times Written by RJ Pierce 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. A Russian multi-billion dollar company, Yandex, laid off about two dozen US-based workers. The company reportedly had a small autonomous vehicle fleet in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It said that the state suspended their vehicle licenses, but Michigan denied this. Yandex Stops Its AV Testing in Ann Arbor The Verge reported that as a result of the invasion of Ukraine, Yandex is now stopping its AV testing in Ann Arbor. This includes the halt of its tests and even its six-wheeled delivery robots at numerous campuses in Arizona and Ohio. Yandex stated that they got word of the suspension for their vehicle licenses by the official Michigan Department of Transportation on Mar. 9. The company also confirmed that six of their Ann Arbor-based safety drivers were also let go. 21 Yandex Workers Were Laid Off in Ohio and Arizona On top of the six employees laid off in Ann Arbor, the company also let go of 21 workers in Ohio and Arizona who were working as on-the-ground support staff for Yandex's delivery robots. Although initially supposed to be temporary, Yandex currently hopes that they will be able to resume later on. On the other hand, Michigan denies that the licenses of Yandex were suspended. As per a spokesperson for the Michigan Secretary of State, Tracy Wimmer, Yandex currently has 14 valid manufacturer plates left that remain registered within the state. Yandex Contract Terminated Due to the Pandemic in 2021 Wimmer noted that their office did not receive any requests to have the licenses canceled. As reported by Fox2Detroit, when it comes to MDOT, they remained to have a contract with Yandex regarding operations of the company's autonomous ride-hail service last year during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. The contract, however, was reportedly terminated due to the pandemic on July 1, 2021. Jeff Cranson, the director of Communications for MDOT, said they did not have any "further business with Yandex." Yandex Said MDOT Asked Them to Pause On-Road Operations This statement, however, doesn't match that of Yandex, which told both its employees and The Verge. As per Yandex, they received pressure from the state to close its operations in Ann Arbor. As per a Yandex spokesperson in an email, Yulia Shveyko, during the start of March 2022, Yandex's legal counsel spoke with MDOT and were reportedly asked to pause the company's on-road operations. Read Also: 'Educational' Mini Robot Arm Launched for $600: Arduino's RP2040 Powered Braccio ++ MDOT Reportedly Suspended Yandex Testing Licenses The spokesperson said that the MDOT informed them that their licenses for testing were suspended on Mar. 9. The company said that due to on-road testing no longer being possible without the licenses, they had to let go of six safety drivers in Ann Arbor. Shevyko was then asked for a response regarding the information. His only reply was, "all the details were shared." Related Article: Robot Window Washer Startup Raises $6.5 Million: Skyline's Ozmo? This article is owned by Tech Times Written by Urian B. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Apple, Google, and other tech firms may be in a bad situation as the U.S. Department of Justice endorsed a new antitrust bill that will prevent them from favoring their products over their competitors. Anti-competitive activities are still among the main problems that DOJ is trying to solve. The government agency has prevented this problem since it prevents small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) from generating revenues. Now, the Department of Justice decided to endorse a new antitrust bill that can prevent the anti-competitive behaviors of Apple and other tech giants. Apple, Other Tech Firms To Face New Antitrust Bill According to 9To5Mac's latest report, the antitrust bill that received the U.S. DOJ's endorsement was already introduced. Also Read: Why Apple Bans iPhone-Throwing App? Here's Where You Can Download 'Send Me To Heaven' Application The American Innovation and Choice Online act provides some restrictions against the tech giant firms to solve the current anti-competitive situation in the market. One of its main goals is to prevent Apple from pre-installing its apps, such as Spotify, so that consumers can have a choice regarding the applications they want to use. However, it can only do this if the antitrust bill moves forward and becomes law. Since the Department of Justice finally endorsed it, there's a high chance this could happen. DOJ Says New Antitrust Bill Can Be Helpful The Wall Street Journal reported that the latest endorsement of the U.S. Department of Justice marks the first full support of the Biden Administration for such a law. "The Department views the rise of dominant platforms as presenting a threat to open markets and competition, with risks for consumers, businesses, innovation, resiliency, global competitiveness, and our democracy," said DOJ's Acting Assistant Attorney General Peter Hyun. However, some officials oppose the new antitrust bill, saying that it can affect the sales of popular apps and other products. If you want to see more details about the new antitrust bill, you can visit this link. In other news, Apple's iPhone SE will face a production decrease since the demand for this smartphone is further lessening. Meanwhile, the iPhone maker ended Apple Pay's Mir support because of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. For more news updates about antitrust bills that can affect Apple and other tech firms, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes. Related Article: India Says NO To Apple's Refurbished iPhones! Competitors Allegedly Encouraged the Decision? This article is owned by TechTimes Written by: Griffin Davis 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Sony has officially given word of its plans to bridge both its cloud gaming service, PlayStation Now, with its online multiplayer subscription, PlayStation Plus, into three cohesive offerings. The Xbox Game Pass lookalike will feature over 700 games, some of which will be retro and trial versions, that will span the lifetime of PlayStation's long history in gaming. The company announced the new service via its official blog, giving immense details on the three varied plans. Rollout won't begin until June, and those already subscribed to PlayStation Now will be siphoned into the Premium category, which, as the name implies, is essentially the highest offering to choose from. All-new PlayStation Plus launches in June with three flexible membership options. First details: https://t.co/2KXcEp7XWs pic.twitter.com/jAU9Do3CfE PlayStation (@PlayStation) March 29, 2022 The evolved form of PlayStation Plus will now have three versions (four, counting the Deluxe plan offered only in select markets). PlayStation Plus Essential encompasses much of the same concepts already applied to the Plus service as it stands now, costing a monthly $9.99 to an annual $59.99. PlayStation Plus Extra will utilize all the same benefits from Essential while adding in 400 PS4 and PS5 games at $14.99 a month and a $99.99 yearly price tag. Related Article: PlayStation Won't be Pushing Backwards Compatibility | Ad Was NOT a Teaser PlayStation Plus Premium, which current Now subscribers will be bundled into, will add an additional 340 games on top of the Extra tier's 400, with classics from the PSP, PS2, and original PlayStation. Premium will also have cloud streamed PS3 games, which was one of the main features of Now, and cloud streamed classics and PS4 games, which all can be accessed on PS4, PS5, and even PC. It will also have time-limited trials for certain games, which will be based on a $17.99 monthly fee or an annual $119.99. Deluxe will only be available to markets that don't have cloud streaming capabilities, a huge issue plaguing the inevitable rise in cloud gaming. Thus, PlayStation Plus Deluxe won't have any cloud streaming offerings but will still carry over classics from the PS2, PS, and PSP for downloadable play at a lower price. It will also have the same benefits as both Essential and Extra. PlayStation relayed that such games as "Death Stranding, God of War, Marvel's Spider-Man, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Mortal Kombat 11, and Returnal" will all be launch-based content. The company also explained that, akin to Game Pass, the new Plus subscription tiers would have "regularly refreshed" libraries that will "include some of the best gaming experiences available" via both PlayStation Studios and third-party partners. The regional rollout will begin in Asia, then into North America and Europe, with the remainder of the world already having PlayStation Plus seeing the additional tiers arriving after June. Countries with PlayStation Network will see the new subscription service by "the end of the first half of 2022." There is no mention of day-one releases, but several reports prove PlayStation isn't considering it for its updated PS Plus subscriptions. The service seems quite adequate for an average gamer who doesn't want to spend $50-$70 on a year-old game. But, for more seasoned gamers who are often buying new releases and are playing more often than most, PS Plus doesn't exactly seem like a Game Pass killer, but it does offer some interesting insight into how Sony sees the future of its subscription service. Read Also: PlayStation's 'God of War: Ragnarok' is Coming This Year; Santa Monica Developer Leaks Online 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The Historical Pact's binomial is the favorite to win in the presidential election to take place on May 29. On Sunday, Historical Pact's vice president candidate Francia Marquez denounced having received death threats and demanded Colombian President Ivan Duque to guarantee her safety. Slander and racist demonstrations were not enough. In less than a month, they have threatened me with death twice, Marquez tweeted and posted photographs of pamphlets from the paramilitary organization Black Eagles, which makes threats against her and other progressive political and social leaders. "President Duque, I ask you to guarantee my physical integrity and that of the leaders mentioned there," the leftist politician added. Marquez also asked the Colombian Attorney General's Office to thoroughly investigate the reported events. "Hopefully this time impunity does not win," she said and warned that the operation of her protection scheme has presented some drawbacks. Indigenous rebel villages burn in Sierra Nevada, Colombia. Torched by paramilitaries run by the mining co. Cos ppl stood up against their pollution & destruction. In this US-backed capitalist state, theres no protection for those who defend the planet. pic.twitter.com/FG1MMC6UIY GhostofDurruti (@RobTheRich0001) February 1, 2022 The Historical Pact's presidential binomial, which includes Gustavo Petro and Marquez, is the favorite to win in the elections that will take place on May 29. Death threats and attacks against progressive social and political leaders continue unabated in Colombia. So far, the Duque administration has done very little to enforce the peace agreements signed in 2016. The far-right paramilitary organizations are actin with impunity. On March 25, for example, Alcibiades Moreno, defender of the Indigenous emerald miners in the Muzo region, was assassinated in Bogota. With his death, the count of social leaders assassinated so far this year rises to 45. Former President Jose Maria Figueres and former World Bank official Rodrigo Chaves compete in the second round sharing orthodox views on economic policy. On April 3, over 3.5 million Costa Ricans will go to the polls to elect their president between the National Liberation Party (PLN) candidate Jose Maria Figueres and the Social Democratic Party (PSD) candidate Rodrigo Chaves. In the first electoral round held on February 6, none of them achieved more than 40 percent of the votes needed to become President of Costa Rica until May 2026. Figueres wants to be president again. The 67-year-old politician Jose Maria Figueres returns to compete for the presidency after a long stay abroad. He held the presidency between 1994 and 1998. He was born into a family linked to a long political legacy, as his father founded the PLN and served as president in the 1940s, 1950s and 1970s. During the Oscar Arias's administration (1986-1990), Figueres was appointed Trade Minister and Agriculture Minister. After the death of his father, he fully entered electoral politics and became President in 1994 at the age of 39. His current government plan proposes policies related to education, export promotion, investment attraction, business competitiveness, and promotion of technology and innovation. Figueres seeks to take advantage of existing business opportunities by strengthening relations with Asian countries. He swears he will fight unemployment and poverty, protect the environment, and abolish oil extraction. Chaves is a former World Bank official. Rodrigo Chaves was part of the government of Carlos Alvarado (2018-2022), with whom he had several frictions. Born in 1961, he studied in the United States and has a PhD in economics. For more than 30 years he worked at the World Bank (WB), which led him to conduct research in Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Asia. Upon finishing his work with that multilateral institution, Chaves returned to Costa Rica, where he assumed the Ministry of Finance for almost six months in 2019. He contemplates promoting foreign trade through Costa Rica's accession to the Pacific Alliance and eliminating all tariffs on machinery and industrial raw materials such as steel, iron, aluminum, paper, wood, and electronic components. Chaves proposes to reorganize the public budget, increase investments in green energy, and establish a universal minimum pension. Robbery of a Chanel store: the amount of damage is estimated at at least one million euros US President Joe Biden and several European leaders agreed in a phone call on Tuesday to continue to sanction Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, warning against any "slackening of Western resolve". Europe 1 with AFP 9:06 p.m., March 29, 2022 US President Joe Biden and several European leaders agreed in a phone call on Tuesday to continue to sanction Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, warning against any "slackening of Western resolve". US President Joe Biden and several European leaders agreed in a phone call on Tuesday to continue to sanction Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, warning against any "slackening of Western resolve". >> READ - Ukraine: several European countries expel Russian diplomats accused of espionage "No relaxation of Western determination" During the approximately hour-long telephone conversation, the American, British, French, German and Italian leaders affirmed "their determination to continue to increase the cost paid by Russia for its brutal attack on Ukraine, as well as to continue to provide security assistance to Ukraine to defend itself," according to a White House statement. Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and Mario Draghi also agreed that 'there can be no relaxation of Western resolve until the horror inflicted on Ukraine is over' , according to a statement issued by Downing Street. The American president also said that the West was waiting to see if Russia "kept its word" on the reduction of its military activity in the direction of kyiv and Cherniguiv, in Ukraine. "There seems to be a consensus that we have to see what they have to offer," Joe Biden told reporters. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also stressed that Putin's regime should be judged "by its actions and not its words", according to a press release. >> READ ALSO - Kiev will accept neutrality if it obtains an "international agreement" guaranteeing its security Talks between Moscow and kyiv Russian and Ukrainian delegations met Tuesday in Istanbul for talks described as "substantial" by the representative of the Kremlin, Vladimir Medinsky, at the end of the discussions. Russia has notably promised to "radically" reduce its military activity in the direction of kyiv and Cherniguiv, in Ukraine. For his part, the Ukrainian chief negotiator indicated that his country would agree to be neutral if it obtains an international agreement to guarantee its security. He said that after Tuesday's talks in Istanbul, the conditions were "sufficient" for a summit meeting between Russian Presidents Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Saturday, at the end of a European tour, Joe Biden had caused trouble by saying that his Russian counterpart could "not stay in power", a little phrase improvised by the president and immediately minimized by the White House. Several experts and leaders of countries allied with the United States considered that this declaration went against the efforts of the West not to justify a Russian escalation in the war led by Moscow in Ukraine. Joe Biden, however, said on Monday that he was not withdrawing his remarks, which he said expressed his personal "outrage" and not a "policy" in favor of regime change. Keywords: 'The specialness of a meal is the communion, not just the eating' Large Australian fuel companies Ampol and Viva Energy have vowed to work with the federal government to ensure consumers can quickly benefit from the proposed cut to the 44 fuel excise in Tuesday nights budget. Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg have agreed to temporarily reduce fuel excise a flat sales tax on petrol and diesel for constructing and maintaining road infrastructure in a bid to help combat cost-of-living pressures that have intensified since Russias invasion of Ukraine. Petrol prices have been rising across the globe as Russia faces increased oil sanctions for the invasion of Ukraine. Credit:Eddie Jim The governments excise change, expected to be unveiled on Tuesday evening, comes as Australian motorists have been facing record-high unleaded petrol prices above $2.20 a litre after crude oil shot past the $US100-a-barrel mark for the first time since 2014. Ampol, the $7 billion listed petrol-station operator and owner of Brisbanes Lytton oil refinery, said rising fuel prices in Australia were directly linked with the higher cost of oil. The Russian stockmarket has reopened for equities trading but its not trading that resembles anything an investor in London, New York, Sydney or Melbourne would recognise. The market, closed since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, actually re-started trading last week but the trading sessions on Thursday and Friday were limited to a few hours and only 33 stocks. On Monday trading in all the companies listed on the Moscow Stock Exchange was allowed. The Moscow Exchange has reopened for equities trading Credit:Bloomberg At face value the market, which was shut down more than a month ago after losing about a third of its value when Russia launched the invasion, has been relatively calm and the trading quite orderly. The exchanges benchmark MOEX index was up 4.4 per cent on Thursday, down 3.7 per cent on Friday and then slipped another 2.15 per cent on Monday in thin trading. The volumes of shares traded since the exchanges reopening have been a fraction of those before the invasion. The Department was keen to appoint a virologist and Alan Murphy was recruited from New Zealand. His responsibilities were to set up a viral diagnostic laboratory and to investigate any outbreaks and epidemics that occurred. One of the departments was the virus laboratory. There had been a small virus laboratory at Prince Henry Hospital employing four scientists, but this had closed. The Health Department was worried that, should a poliomyelitis epidemic occur, they would not have the ability to determine its cause. Victoria had three virus laboratories but the thought of sending specimens to Melbourne was a political anathema. In 1959 the NSW Health Department established the Institute of Clinical Pathology and Medical Research as a separate entity from the hospital laboratories. It was to train pathologists and medical technologists; perform tests for country hospitals; and carry out special tests which were increasing in number, complexity and cost. Alan Maxwell Murphy was born in July 1923 in Auckland. His father was Frederick George Murphy, a baker, and his mother was Ann McDowell, who worked in retail. Alan graduated in chemistry from Auckland University in 1945 and was employed as assistant biochemist in the pathology department of the Auckland Public Hospital. However, he later became more interested in microbiology. In 1951 the Auckland Hospital Board decided to establish a virus diagnostic and research laboratory (partly financed by a private bequest) and Murphy was asked to take charge. He toured Australia for most of 1952, working in the Hall Institute in Melbourne (then under the direction of Sir Macfarlane Burnet), at the Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney, and finally at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. He then returned to Auckland and organised the planned virus laboratory. The year 1952 was a seminal year in the history of medical virology. American scientists demonstrated that all three types of poliovirus would multiply and destroy cells grown in the laboratory, and this could be observed under the normal microscope. Ultimately this resulted in the production of Salk vaccine and later to Sabin vaccine. It also led to the discovery of a multitude of previously unknown viruses resulting in the celebrated publication, Viruses in Search of Disease. Murphy worked with the scourge of the time poliomyelitis and he was the first person in New Zealand to grow the virus in the laboratory from a fatal case. Moving to Sydney in 1959, Murphy investigated the poliomyelitis epidemic of the summer of 1960-61 (the last to occur in NSW). He realised that the epidemic was caused by type 1 poliomyelitis virus, with a smaller number of people with type 3 virus. He also found that patients who had already been vaccinated with the Salk type vaccine were not immune to the polio type 3 variant of the virus. As a result, the type 3 component of the locally-produced vaccine was increased in subsequent batches to give better protection. Starting with one assistant, Murphy built up an efficient diagnostic and epidemiological laboratory employing 26 staff by the time he retired from the NSW Public Service in 1984 to establish his own diagnostic laboratory. How good is the budget? There was no wiping the smile off Josh Frydenbergs face as the ebullient Treasurer handed down his fourth budget in a refreshingly non-socially distanced and post-COVID Canberra. Done with the pandemic, the Treasurer is now grappling with a war in Ukraine, demands for more defence spending, and a rising chorus demanding relief to deal with the rising cost of living. All in an election year, no less! Not that any of that appeared to be weighing on The Fry on Tuesday evening as he strode up to the dispatch box on the night of the year when Parliaments doors opened to the pinstripe set for the fresh-pressing bonanza. James Symond, left, and Justin Hemmes arrive at Parliament ahead of the budget speech on Tuesday night. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen There to support The Frys fourth budget was the usual Rat Pack of Merivale boss Justin Hemmes and his best mate Jimmy home loans tzar-turned-pub owner James Symond. The pair strode into Parliaments Marble Foyer just before 6pm before being swiftly escorted to a private do in the Treasury wing, with a fast-walking Hemmes telling CBD: Were here with Josh. Were always here to support him. But there were some new additions to the Member for Medias pack. Radio host and Sky News presenter Erin Molan was part of the Treasurers posse in the same week her senator dad Jim Molan nabbed the last winnable slot on the NSW Senate ticket as was her on-air colleague Dave Hughes who said he was looking forward to meeting anyone in power on the evening. The funny man memorably quipped in 2018: Josh Frydenberg came to a stand-up comedy gig I did in Lorne earlier this year, and now hes Deputy Prime Minister. Well Hughesy, now youre at the budget. We cant wait to see what happens in two months time. Anyone spending time on the main floor of casinos in Australia (or most other places) will appreciate that casinos make their bread and butter from the grind: ordinary people spending rather more than they might have planned. In many cases, this money comes from people with a gambling addiction. Research demonstrates that a significant proportion of the money lost by gamblers using poker machines (the staple of Australian casinos) and casino table games, comes from those experiencing serious harm. The Productivity Commission estimated this in the range of 40 per cent or more. More recent research globally supports this estimate. Applying this to Stars 2019 financial report (reporting revenue from domestic gaming at $1,342.4 million), addicted gamblers were contributing about $540 million. The problem with revelations of money laundering and exploitation for the casino business is, of course, the likelihood that these practices might be stopped, or at least reduced. AUSTRAC, Australias money laundering watchdog, has accused Crown of serious and systemic noncompliance with relevant laws, citing 547 instances. Crown also allegedly knew of 60 customers involving $70 billion in turnover, who made payments to unkown offshore third parties, or who made payments using cash in plastic bags, shoeboxes or cardboard boxes. The Star inquiry is discovering similar behaviour, with cash bundled into suitcases and cooler bags used to purchase chips, the disguising of $900 million in credit card transactions as hotel expenses, subsequently converting these into gambling accounts, and enjoying the benefits of junket operators despite knowing of highly suspicious activity. On the basis of these revelations and research into who is losing money at Australian casinos, its reasonable to conclude that the casino business model in Australia benefits heavily from exploiting people with gambling addictions, and harvesting a share of the proceeds of crime (via money laundering for criminal syndicates engaged in drug and human trafficking). Crown is still awaiting final approval to open the Barangaroo casino. It was touted as a high roller venue, to distinguish it from the more down-market Star. No pokies, in other words, and thus largely reliant on the international tourist and VIP trade. Whether that business model will be viable in current conditions remains questionable. Effective controls to prevent criminal infiltration and money laundering at scale will reduce revenue that in yesteryear might have existed, probably significantly. This includes prohibition on junket operators, third parties who organise visits to casinos for high wealth individuals. Some of these, it seems, have criminal connections. The more downscale end of the casino market will also suffer if the recommendations of the Victorian and WA Royal Commissions are put in place. These would require Crown to use a universal pre-commitment system, requiring gamblers to identify a realistic pre-set limit for their gambling, and to restrict the amount of time they may gamble. These systems allow limits to be enforced, and to permit effective self-banning from the venue. The WA Royal Commission also recommended that those wishing to join the VIP room be required to establish their financial capacity. It will be difficult for the NSW regulator and government to ignore issues around predatory practices. In the words of Commissioner Finkelstein, Crown Melbourne had for years held itself out as having a worlds best approach to problem gambling. Nothing can be further from the truth. Effective action on money laundering, and limiting exploitation of vulnerable people, will reduce revenue for casinos and other gambling venues that have relied on these rivers of gold. They may seek to adapt. Barangaroo, for example, is likely to ask for a licence to operate poker machines soon. The high roller trade is largely suspended. If that remains curtailed, so will revenue. The international VIP business was worth $256 million to Star in 2019. That will dry up. Pre-commitment and loyalty systems collect data from people who gamble. Apart from shining a light into money laundering, they can also identify how much money comes from gamblers with problems. Data can be analysed to automatically provide these people information and support. If that is implemented effectively, the revenue from those gamblers will also decline, perhaps not by the $540 million they contribute yearly to Star, but by some significant fraction of that. Loading Money laundering and exploitation of the vulnerable doesnt have to be large-scale to be corrosive. The current NSW Crime Commission inquiry into money laundering in NSW pubs and clubs is a case in point. Lower level money laundering and tax evasion is straightforward in NSWs many casino sized clubs, and in hotels. It is also clear that clubs and pubs rely heavily on revenue from people with gambling addictions. As reporting in this masthead has shown, clubs and pubs have their own challenges ahead. It is significant that exposure of these problems has been the work of investigative journalism, principally by this masthead, supported by whistleblowers and others concerned with the many harms of gambling. That makes clear the case for establishing well resourced independent regulators, with coercive powers, including the ability to require production of documents, data, and evidence. Queenslands COVID-19 hospitalisation rate is the highest it has been in almost a month, as the state government called for more health funding before the federal budget was handed down. Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk on Tuesday morning called on the Morrison government for further funding into the states health system amid Queenslands second wave of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. The state recorded 10,326 new cases on Tuesday from more than 8000 rapid tests and 2300 PCR tests, while nine people with COVID died in the previous 24 hours. There were 325 COVID-infected people in hospital across Queensland, with 14 people in ICU. A former police officer who snapped a photograph of Dani Laidley inside a police station admitted afterwards he made a poor decision that damaged the forces reputation and denied the former AFL coach her rights. Shane Reid was a senior constable delivering correspondence to a colleague at St Kilda station when on May 2, 2020, he used his mobile phone to take a photograph of Ms Laidley being interviewed by two officers following her arrest for stalking. Ms Laidley was wearing a wig and makeup at the time. Dani Laidley (right) with former teammate Brent Harvey at a North Melbourne Football Club function last year. Credit:Wayne Taylor On his return to South Melbourne station, Mr Reid who is no longer a police officer allowed another officer to photograph the image on his mobile phone. The next day Mr Reid posted the photo in a WhatsApp group with eight other officers. The group members shared messages socially. Mr Reids photo and a mugshot of the former North Melbourne coach and player entered the public domain, and three officers were charged while others were disciplined by the force. Mr Reid did not take the mugshot photo. After landslides, fires, floods and waves of COVID-19 cut visitors off from the tiny tourist town of Mount Victoria in the Blue Mountains, small business owner Kara Cooper is embracing short-term support offered in the federal budget. Its not effective long-term, but all of us are scrambling and treading water, so its welcome, Mrs Cooper, who owns and runs a gift design studio, said as the government announced a $420 increase to the low and middle-income tax offset. She and her husband, Geoff Cooper, and their children Xanthe, 10, and Theodora, 13, live in the most marginal federal electorate in the country, the Blue Mountains-based seat of Macquarie. Labors Susan Templeman holds it by a 0.19 per cent margin. Kara Cooper with daughter Theodora, 13, and dogs Badger and Andy. Credit:Flavio Brancaleone The Coopers have been relying more on their chooks, veggie patch and water tanks to help dodge increased costs of goods and services. Almost $10 billion over the next decade will be pumped into helping Australia compete in cyber warfare with adversaries such as Russia and China in a major funding boost that will nearly double the size of the nations leading cyber security agency. In its centrepiece defence budget announcement, the government will make the largest single investment in the 75-year history of the Australian Signals Directorate, the countrys powerful and highly secretive electronic intelligence agency. Defence Minister Peter Dutton said the spending recognises the deteriorating strategic circumstances in Australias region. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The government said the funding increase dramatically named Project REDSPICE (Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber, and Enablers) will significantly expand the ASDs offensive cyber capabilities, as well as the agencys ability to prevent hacking and other digital attacks. The government intends to put national security at the centre of the upcoming election campaign, contrasting its latest announcements with reductions to defence spending during the Rudd-Gillard era. The price of a 50-litre tank of petrol will fall by $11 under a six-month cut to the fuel excise tax as the federal government unveils a plan to ease the rising cost of living in the federal budget. Fuel excise currently adds 44 to a litre of petrol, but will be halved from midnight on Tuesday, delivering a saving to motorists at a net cost to the federal budget of $2.7 billion in lost revenue from oil companies. Petrol prices are expected to fall by $11 a litre as the federal government announces fuel excise tax be halved for six months. Credit: The cut could take several weeks to flow through at the bowser as supply of fuel bought at the current, higher price is exhausted. Petrol stations have promised to pass on the excise cut in full and Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission would monitor prices to ensure savings are passed onto motorists. It cost more than $126 million to deploy defence personnel in flood-stricken parts of NSW and Queensland and more than one million disaster payments have gone out to communities affected by the disaster. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said total support for those communities is expected to exceed $6 billion, including further support for farmers, small businesses and families. An army vehicle drives past debris in Lismore. Credit:Getty We will stand with these communities and help them rebuild, he said. Treasury estimates $1.75 billion in assistance will be distributed through the disaster recovery payment and the disaster recovery allowance. As he did his pre-budget day media rounds, insensitive journalists pointed out that this might be Treasurer Josh Frydenbergs last ever budget. With the polls as they are, how could his governments political mortality not be top of mind? Treasurer Josh Frydenberg being asked questions by journalists at Parliament House on Tuesday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The result is a budget with a strong carpe diem vibe, a stick-with-me-baby budget powered by Big Bowser Energy, with future deficit numbers so dazzlingly big they cant possibly be real. This budget throws sugar on us all, halving petrol excise here, chucking out a $250 payment there. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will address a rare joint sitting of federal Parliament on Thursday in a move to thank Australia for its support after the Russian invasion of his country. President Zelensky is expected to speak to both chambers of Parliament at 5.30pm on Thursday after a series of major addresses to the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom in which he has urged more international support against the invasion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will address the Australian Parliament on Thursday night. But the timing of the speech is subject to the uncertainties of the conflict at a time when Russian forces are bombarding Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, which means the address may not happen if hostilities escalate. And the late notice about the address has raised concerns among some Labor MPs that the timing will complicate the budget reply speech from Labor leader Anthony Albanese, due to occur at 7.30pm on Thursday. With an election due in weeks, and Labor ahead in the polls, this budget was the last roll of the dice for the Coalition to woo voters. The government did not pretend otherwise, showing a blatant focus on immediate politics in a budget that did nothing to tackle Australias longer-term challenges let alone present a plan to address an alarming deficit and mounting debt. Gone are the days of the Morrison government trumpeting its debt and deficit rhetoric to burnish its economic credibility. Its not that the governments coffers are short on revenue. The budget bottom line is flush with tens of billions of extra revenue from an array of sources, including soaring commodity prices, historic low unemployment and rising inflation. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer But the governments good fortune when it comes to revenue is a double-edged sword. The jump in prices on everything from fuel and food to building supplies may bring in extra revenue, but it is putting pressure on household budgets. And while the rise in inflation was once considered a pandemic-induced blip, the Ukraine war has ingrained the view that price rises are here to stay for some time. The government had a choice. It could have held its nerve, explained that the billions in spending required during the height of the pandemic are no longer needed as the economy rebounds. There was no need for austerity measures, but it could have announced a plan to reduce the deficit quickly, ensuring that when the next crisis hits it would have the ability to, once again, prime the economy. That is not the path it took. But a divisive election campaign convinced enough Koreans on March 9 that one of the solutions to their woes was to elect Yoon, a 61-year-old political novice who promised to abolish the Gender Equality Ministry. Yoons election victory was not built on a sudden surge in anti-feminist sentiment, it grew out of a slow, bubbling malaise particularly among young men who would have historically voted for his more progressive Democratic Party opponent. In the past two decades, these men had their advantage in the job market hiring credit for compulsory military service taken away from them, and watched apartment prices soar (including doubling in the last five years). Many of them have been stuck at home with their parents as #MeToo emboldened a generation of women already increasingly carving out their economic independence by choosing not to have children. Kim Nae-hoon, 29, author of Radical 20s: K-Populism and the Political, poses for a portrait at a local cafe in Goyang, South Korea Credit:Sean Na Kim Nae-hoon, the 29-year-old author of Radical 20s: K-Populism and the Political said older generations who had lived through the Korean War lived each day hoping for a better tomorrow. But such a luxury isnt allowed for the current generation, he said in an interview in Seoul. Though young adults cry foul for unfair society, many of them are just repeatedly grieving like a parrot, unsure of how the society has treated them unfairly and how they want the society to change. Loading Michael Sandels book The Tyranny of Merit won critical acclaim across Europe and the United States when it was released in 2020. But it found an even bigger fan base the following year in South Korea, where it became the second-best non-fiction seller at Kyobo, the nations largest book chain. Sandel argues that meritocracy is a facade undone by entrenched structural hurdles such as money and education. But because it persists as an ideal, it leaves those who dont achieve their aspirations frustrated and blaming themselves. When those workers look for answers, they find it in populist politicians like Donald Trump and Yoon, who tell them that immigrants or gender equality are the problem, and that they have the solution. Park Ji-hae, 20 an account manager in Seoul said lots of Korean voters wanted presidential candidates to bring straightforward, gratifying campaign promises on lingering social issues that have been bothering us. Down on their luck: Jung-jae Lee stars as Gi-hun in Squid Game alongside Hae-soo Park as Sang-woo. Credit:Netflix Last years smash Netflix hit, Squid Game was born in the backstreets of Seoul. Its cast of strugglers reflected this clash of aspiration and harsh economic reality. Its not a coincidence that Sandels book became a best-seller in this country, said Koo. There is a big, powerful and persuasive argument that the reason why young men got upset and engaged in collective action was because of the economic insecurity they felt. But I think thats unfair and actually might be insulting. I think the reason why young men are upset is they have legitimate grievances about the very powerful framework that has existed in this country. Koo argues that gender equality has defined education curriculums and hiring practices over the past decade.It is actually biased towards women, he said. Koo said men, who are still expected to be able to buy a home for their wife before they get married, are disadvantaged after doing 18 months of military service, and then struggle to get into a tight job market that requires two or three degrees before full-time employment can be secured. They have masculine duties, said Koo. They should at least have the capacity to provide shelter. South Korea is ranked 102 out of 156 countries in the World Economic Forums Gender Gap Index. Decades of preferential treatment for men at the top of its big chaebol firms like Samsung and LG, in the National Assembly, and across its workforce have seen gender expectations entrenched among older generations. For the older generation, the situation is different because thats where the promotion takes place, thats where discrimination is actually made. But if you look at the young people, its not the case, said Koo. Looking around, I dont see any evidence whatsoever that young men are more privileged than women. And then you tell them, well, its very likely you will be discriminating against women when you become 45. That doesnt make sense. Hwang Jung-min, a 29-year-old researcher with her partner Shin Seon-hyeop at a Lee rally in March. Credit:Sean Na But Kim, the author of Radical 20s, said the debate in Korea was still dominated by powerful men who felt their position was threatened. Men are overwhelmingly more powerful than women in terms of how mens voices are pictured in the media. Thus I wouldnt call it a gender divide but would rather call it a one-sided match, where men unilaterally beat down women, said Kim. That has been fuelled by sharp social media campaigns that have drawn otherwise disinterested Koreans into politics. Almost eight in 10 Koreans voted in the presidential election in March, a remarkable turnout for a voluntary voting system. The United States hit a high of 62 per cent during the 2020 election. Ill-informed young adults who had known little to nothing about the feminism movement became anti-feminists or misogynists after having been exposed to sensational anti-feminism posts on social network sites, like Instagram, said Kim. Yanglee Hyun-kyung, a member of the Korean United Womens Associations said anti-feminist movements had weaponised economic divisions. Korean society will continue to be very unequal and polarised, and I am very concerned about how this discrimination will be resolved, she said. Lee Jae-myung, the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. Credit:Sean Na Hwang Jung-min, a 29-year-old researcher said Yoons opponent, the Democratic Partys Lee Jae-myung who lost the presidency by less than 1 per cent was the only candidate who wanted to protect womens rights. He genuinely leaned toward listening to womens voices. I dont think Lee [could] resolve all gender issues; however, at the very least, among other candidates, Lee seems to be the only one whos been wholeheartedly listening to womens voices, she said. In a Seoul coffee shop last week, Hwang In-beom said he knew little about South Korea Gender Equality Ministry until dismissive posts started appearing on social media in 2018. The Ministry was formed in 1998 but did not play a significant role until 2014 when it started setting gender quotas for government committees and targets for female managers and school principals. Its top goal is to promote awareness of gender equality, but females still make up less than 50 per cent of representatives across key areas and industries. Hwang In-beom, a 27-year-old marketing specialist in Seoul. Credit:Sean Na Reading through negative comments about the ministry on an online news article makes me feel as if no one would get hurt even if the ministry gets abolished, said Hwang. Yanglee said the ministry was more than just another bureaucratic department. It was symbolic. Yoons call to abolish the Gender Equality Ministry was an election strategy based on distorted misinformation, she said. I hope he will realise the importance of it when he becomes president. Now that he is in power, Yoon faces a challenge getting one of his signature policies through the National Assembly where the Democratic Party still controls 60 per cent of the legislature. Koo said that could work as another campaign device for Yoon while he is in office. Ann Richards, a former governor of Texas, was a force of nature, a liberal woman in the most macho and conservative of states. A housewife and mother who took a leap of faith and jumped into the political arena, she dazzled as the keynote speaker of the 1988 Democratic Convention and built a career that led to the state Capitol. Writer and actor Holland Taylor pays tribute to the dynamic Richards in Ann, her affectionate solo comedy in which she showcases her own immense talent. This production marks the show's West Coast premiere (and Taylor's possible retirement from the role), but Taylor has delighted audiences around the country with this portrayal for years, including a Tony-nominated run in 2013. The Pasadena Playhouse, where Taylor currently performing, is fortunate to land this master class in acting. Taking on the task of personalizing this iconic woman, Taylor presents audiences with a hectic, but normal day in the life of the governor, where Richards juggles gala dinner speeches, a death-row stay of execution, and motherly duties all within the confines of a few hours. Utilizing the framework of a university commencement speech, Taylor takes the audience in her confidence, spinning them into active supporting players. Holland Taylor plays Governor Ann Richards in Ann at Pasadena Playhouse. ( Ave Bonar) When set in the governor's office, the play balances Richards's daily life with little details: worrying about the feelings of the staff whom she just scolded; keeping her kids from battling over a contentious game of charades; taking out a pin cushion and fixing a frayed flag on display in her office. Though the play could trimmed the final sequence portraying Richards later in life as a New York power broker adds little and could have been summed up in a few words it is a loving tribute to a time when Texas was run with intelligence, compassion, and gumption. Taylor has performed the role so many times that she could probably do it in her sleep. To say she inhabits the role minimizes how seamless her performance is. Even when fumbling a line or two, the audience never doubt this is the usual cadence of a constant thinker. The production doubles down on Taylor's portrayal by showing the real Richards in a television clip of her famous keynote speech. From that, we see how Taylor has captured Richards's Texan drawl, stance, and loquaciousness to a T. With wig designer Paul Huntley and costume designer Julie Weiss, she finesses the look as well. Holland Taylor wrote and stars in Ann, directed by Benjamin Endsley Klein, at Pasadena Playhouse. ( Ave Bonar) Director Benjamin Endsley Klein uses a light touch and allows Taylor to command the stage the entire evening. The set by Michael Fagin, an immaculately decorated governor's office, slides out in the middle of Act 1 and illustrates the chaos a governor faces every day. Though you can watch the Broadway production of Ann online, there's nothing like the exhilaration of watching Taylor in person and sharing the chemistry and artistry with the performer. Both Richards and Taylor are legends, as this production at the Pasadena Playhouse makes crystal clear. When we think of America's civil rights movement, we often think of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and other adults who took stands against unfair treatment of people of color. But we sometimes forget to acknowledge the role that young people played. That's an issue that Jabari Dreams of Freedom, now running in a First Woman production at the New Victory Theater, addresses in a 50-minute play with music, dance, and some important lessons. The show is geared toward kids 7 and up, but adults will find much to value in it too. For Jabari (Verdale Stinson Jr.), a Black fifth-grader from Chicago's South Side, the world can be a scary place, especially after his friend Emmett (Joshua Perry) is hurt when a police officer wrongfully detains him. His parents (Colette Ambo and Marcus A. Siler) understand, but that doesn't mean he can avoid going to school. One night Jabari has a dream that takes him through the 1950s and '60s where he meets other young people who were afraid when they felt themselves being treated unfairly, but they took a stand for what they knew was right. Jabari also travels to Indonesia and meets the young version of his hero, Barack Obama (Siler), and teaches the future president what he has learned. When Jabari awakes, he knows he has to send a message to the world even if he's a little afraid while doing it. That's a powerful message for children (and adults) to hear. Playwright Nambi E. Kelley and director Daniel Carlton don't try to frighten kids in the audience with violent imagery of protests, but they don't dumb down the material, either. Jabari learns about 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up her bus seat to a white woman (months before Rosa Parks refused to give up hers); the 1963 Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, in which 1,000 children marched against segregation and in some cases were arrested; and Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to desegregate an all-white school in New Orleans. Using music (Stinson's singing raises the roof), dance (lively choreography by Cedric Greene), eye-catching projections designed by Yu Leo Lei, a few protest signs in the hands of some kids in the audience, and lots of laughs, the show does a terrific job of getting young voices to join in (Rantea Thompson and Kevin Allen complete the ensemble). Call-and-response numbers, together with Jessica Wardell's colorful set, David Lander's lively lighting, and Yu'seph Cornish's modern-day and 1960s-style costumes, get the audience feeling like a community with a common goal of fairness and justice. The message is one of inclusivity, since the struggle for freedom is something all Americans, regardless of age or skin color, are called to participate in. We could all use a little reminder of that now. FLASHBACK! - Methanol And Ethanol Powered 1997 Ford Taurus Costs Less To Buy And To Run Than Taurus Gasoline Models Co-publishers Note - So Wha Happened? WASHINGTON, Aug. 27, 1996; The Ford Motor Company is offering an "Unlimited" number of Taurus FFV (flexible fuel vehicle) sedans for the 1997 model year at a discounted sticker price of $345 less than the conventional gasoline-powered Taurus. Ford is offering the Taurus FFVs, capable of running on methanol (or ethanol) and unleaded gasoline, for sale to fleet purchasers. "When it comes to alternative fuel vehicles, Ford is in the driver's seat," said American Methanol Institute President Raymond A. Lewis. "Ford is the only automaker offering a full line of alternative fuels vehicles -- including methanol -- and the only automaker to ever sell an alternative fuel vehicle for less than the gasoline model. The company's decision to offer an unlimited number of Taurus FFVs was made, quite simply, because the cars sell. Ford sold out its production run of 5,300 Taurus FFVs last year, and orders have exceeded production quotas for the last three years." The methanol Taurus FFV operates on M-85, a blend of 85% methanol and 15% unleaded gasoline or any mixture of the two fuels in the same fuel tank. The Taurus FFV is an ideal alternative fuel vehicle for fleet operators that require the ability to fuel with conventional fuels when vehicles operate outside their normal service territory. The majority of methanol Taurus FFVs sold are placed into service in California. Since the early 1980s, the State of California has pioneered the development and introduction of flexible fuel vehicles. Today, in California over 13,000 methanol FFVs serve in federal, state and municipal governments fleets, corporate fleets, rental car fleets, and are driven by hundreds of individual consumers. To serve these vehicles, an extensive network of 60 public methanol refueling stations stretches from Los Angeles to Sacramento, including a station in Yosemite National Park. This methanol fueling infrastructure was established by the California Energy Commission in cooperation with the State's major gasoline retailers. In addition, more than 50 private fueling stations are operated in California by individual fleet operators. Outside of California, there are an additional 40 methanol fueling stations located in 14 states and Canada. This includes 9 methanol stations operated by the New York State Thruway Authority at maintenance areas located along the length of the highway from the Tappan Zee Bridge to Buffalo. Methanol fueling stations are relatively inexpensive to build and operate. A below-ground methanol tank and fueling system can be installed for about $50,000, while a 2,000-gallon above-ground fueling system costs around $20,000 to install. Methanol is a liquid alcohol fuel made from clean, domestic natural gas. In 1995, methanol production capacity from 17 U.S. plants in 8 states totaled 2.2 billion gallons. These plants meet three-quarters of U.S. methanol demand. The remaining supply comes from imports of which Canada supplies well over one-half. In 1995, 90% of methanol supplied to the U.S. was produced in North America, 8% from Trinidad, Venezuela and Chile, with the remaining 2% produced in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The largest market for methanol in the U.S. is for the production of methyl tertiary butyl ether or "MTBE." Produced in nearly 50 U.S. plants in 14 states, it is estimated that 3.3 billion gallons of MTBE will be used in 1996 for blending in clean, reformulated gasoline. The American Methanol Institute (AMI) serves as the voice of the methanol industry in Washington and across the country. AMI works to support the use of clean reformulated and oxygenated gasoline, promote the use of methanol as an alternative fuel, and encourage the development of emerging methanol- powered fuel cells. The 5 Best Road Trip Destinations from Houston, TX Houston is the perfect starting point for an amazing road trip. You can set off in any direction and find awesome places to visit. Where you go will depend on whether you want to escape the hustle and bustle for some relaxation, or maybe you are looking for a fun day out for the family. Read on for the best destinations. Considerations Before you set off for a road trip, you need to have a vehicle. If you have been thinking about trading up, then you should consider EchoPark Automotive, which is a used car dealership in Houston. They have a huge range of vehicles, some of which are perfect for a road trip, so be sure to check them out if you are in the market for a new vehicle. On to the destinations! The Nasa Center The Houston space center is only a thirty-minute drive from Houston, and it is open year-round. You can explore the facility and take a look behind the scenes, as the Nasa center is still a hub for much of Americas space exploration programmes. There are lots of exhibits to see, and by all accounts, it is a great day out all round. College Station, TX College Station is a university town in northwest Houston, and it is roughly a ninety-minute drive from Houston itself. There are many sights to see, including the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, which is worth the journey in itself. College Station also has many beautiful parks and a great local winery and breweries to visit. Galveston, TX Galveston is roughly an hour away, and it is a popular destination for locals. Galveston Island is designed to be a place of rest and relaxation. The pier has all the classic rides and food stalls you need to make the most out of your beach day. There is also several amusement parks and waterparks to visit too. Texas City, TX Texas City is less than an hour away from Houston, it sits along the western edge of Galveston Bay, and it is a great place to visit if you want something a little off the beaten track. It has far less tourism than Galveston, so it is much quieter. It is perfect for a stroll, a picnic, or a spot of fishing. Brenham, TX Brenham is just under ninety minutes away; it is located about halfway between Houston and Austin. There are two things that Brenham is associated with, and that is bluebonnets and ice cream. The Blue Bell Creamery has become an American institution, and you can tour the famous creamery and even sample their product! In addition, the town itself is full of quaint shops and historical buildings, making it great for exploring. In Conclusion Road trips are a great American tradition, and Houston acts as a great starting point for a lot of amazing trips. If you are looking for destinations, this list is a great starting point and full of must-visit locations. If you needed any more convincing that 'the slap' we all witnessed Chris Rock taking from Will Smith during the Oscars yesterday was totally real - look no further. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has publicly called the King Richard star out in more detail, having made an initial statement shortly after the wild incident unfolded on live TV. A Princess Cruises ship is seen near Yokohama, south of Tokyo on Feb. 5, 2020, in a file photo. (Hiroko Harima/Kyodo News via AP) 100 Percent Vaccinated Cruise Ship Hit With COVID-19 Outbreak Princess Cruises confirmed that one of its cruise liners, the Ruby Princess, reported a COVID-19 outbreak before docking in San Francisco. The cruise operator requires passengers and crew members to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19, which is caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Princess Cruises also mandates passengers to show a negative COVID-19 test and proof of vaccination to board, according to its website. Those who tested positive were isolated and quarantined while monitored and cared for by our shipboard medical team, Princess Cruises said in a statement to news outlets Monday. It did not say how many people tested positive or when they tested positive during the cruise. They were all asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic, the firm said. Some of the passengers who contracted the CCP virus did not finish their quarantine and were either sent home or were provided with accommodations ashore to hotels coordinated in advance for isolation and quarantine, the statement added. As with all Princess itineraries, this cruise is operated as a vaccinated cruise, as defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the company told the San Francisco Chronicle. Guests and crew vaccination rates were at 100 percent. The Ruby Princess docked in San Francisco on Sunday, the company said, after the ship was on a 15-day cruise to the Panama Canal. The ship departed later that day on a 15-day cruise to Hawaii, said Negin Kamali, spokesperson for Princess Cruises, in a statement to USA Today. Under the Center for Disease Control and Preventions (CDC) cruise ship monitoring website, the Ruby Princess is described as under observation by the federal health agency. The development comes about two weeks after the CDC lowered its COVID-19 warning for cruise travel to Level 2, a moderate risk. Previously, the agency gave cruise travel a Level 4 warning, which is the highest level, as the Omicron variant spread across the United States several months ago. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the cruise industry has been battered by lockdowns and federal restrictions on cruisesamid early speculation that cruise ships were super spreaders of the virus. Industry data suggests that cruise companies collectively lost $63 billion in 2020 and 2021. On March 18, the CDC released new COVID-19 guidelines for the cruise industry, with a spokesman telling USA Today that it entails the agencys suggestions on social distancing, quarantine requirements, and port agreements. The Epoch Times has contacted Princess Cruises for comment. A "sold" real estate sign is seen outside a high-rise apartment block in the suburb Kirribilli in Sydney, Australia, on May 8, 2021. (Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images) 50,000 Australian Home Buyers to Receive Deposit Assistance Every Year The Australian government has announced that it will extend the quota of the current home guarantee scheme to 50,000 places a year in the 202223 budget to help more people own their homes sooner. The Australian housing industry has welcomed the federal governments decision, saying this would help change the lives of thousands of people. The scheme enables first home buyers to enter the housing market with a deposit as low as five percent and has supported 60,000 Australians so far. According to Finance Minister Simon Birmingham, the federal governments retirement income review indicated that homeownership was the most significant thing for peoples safety and security when they retired. So helping people to get into homeownership as soon as possible is one of the best things any government can do to provide economic security right throughout their life into retirement years, he told reporters in Canberra. The 50,000 places announced by the government will be allocated as follows: From July 1, the number of places available each year under the First Home Guarantee will increase from 10,000 to 35,000. Eligible first home buyers can apply for the scheme to buy a new or existing home with a minimum deposit of five percent. From Oct. 1, 2022, to June 30, 2025, a new Regional Home Guarantee scheme will support 10,000 eligible homebuyers, including non-first home buyers and permanent residents, buying or building a new home in regional areas each year. The final 5,000 places will go to the Family Home Guarantee between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2025. This scheme is only available to single-parent families so that they can enter or re-enter the housing market with just a two percent deposit. A prospective buyer attends an auction of a residential property in the suburb of Strathfield in Sydney, Australia, on May 8, 2021. (Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images) Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese said he was content that the federal government had implemented the regional housing policy that the Labor party had announced in the previous week. Thats an idea that the government, I hope, steals again on Tuesday night, Albanese told reporters. On March 25, Labor announced the Regional First Home Buyer Support Scheme, in which the party promised to help 10,000 first home buyers purchase a home in regional areas every year by providing them with a government guarantee of up to 15 percent. The scheme was scheduled to start in January 2023 and finish by the end of the 2024/2025 financial year with a price tag of $12.1 million ($US9.07 million) if Labor won the upcoming election. Albanese said that Labors announcement should be seen in the context of the partys Housing Australia Future Fund, which was expected to increase the housing supply by building more social housing and providing affordable housing for essential workers. Meanwhile, Graham Wolfe, managing director of the Housing Industry Association (HIA), said that saving for a deposit remained the largest hurdle for prospective home buyers. HIA is extremely pleased to see the government expand the scheme to address the missing middle of home seekers those people that have previously owned a home but have been out of the market, most likely renting, for more than five years in regional Australia, he said. Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA), a representative industry association, also welcomed the federal governments announcement. However, the organisation said that the government needed to link the initiative to measures that improved the housing supply to ensure its successful implementation. Unless we boost supply immediately, the looming affordability crisis will be overwhelming particularly for first homeowners, but also affordable rentals and vulnerable Australians relying on subsidised housing, UDIA national president Max Shifman said. 7 Decades of Australia-US Alliance Marked as New Cyber Intelligence Centre Announced Australia will establish a new cyber intelligence centre to be led by the Office of National Intelligence to bolster the countrys security, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced at a dinner to mark the 70th anniversary of the ANZUS alliance with the United States. Noting that shared intelligence was a major pillar of the ANZUS alliance, Morrison said the multi-agency cyber intelligence centre will ensure Australia works well, and keeps pace, with its allies and emerging technologies at a time when changing geopolitical realities meant cyber intelligence was more important than ever. Working with non-government [research and development] partners as well, we will be able to better fund, shape, and deploy cutting-edge science, research, and technology to deliver better capabilities into the future, Morrison said at the dinner hosted by the American Australian Association, the United States Studies Centre, and the Perth USAsia Centre at Parliament House on March 28. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison at a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Aug. 23, 2021. (Rohan Thomson/Getty Images) Beyond defence and intelligence, today Australia and the United States work together on a wide and expanding canvasscyber security, space, supply chain resilience, critical minerals, quantum computing, low emissions technologies, and so much more. In his remarks, Morrison outlined steps his government had taken to bolster Australias security, including increasing defence spending from 1.56 percent of the countrys economy to 2.1 percent this year and committing half a trillion dollars over the next decade in defence and defence capability spending. The announcement of the new Cyber and Critical Technology Intelligence Centre comes at a time when the stakes could not be higher with Morrison warning: Our quest for a world order that favours freedom has never been more urgent and it has never been more pressing. HMAS Ballarat is participating in Exercise Malabar 2020 alongside warships from India, Japan and the United States. (LSIS Shane Cameron via ADF) Amid geopolitical power struggles between China and the United States in the Indo-Pacific, Australia, despite its comprehensive strategic partnership and significant economic ties with China, has reaffirmed its deep and everlasting alliance with the United States, which Morrison noted is based on shared values. Meanwhile, Australias relationship with China has, over the last two years of Beijings economic coercion, often been referred to as mutually beneficial. This is a partnership of values, not of contract and certainly not of contradiction. It is not a relationship of transaction. It is a bond that goes deep and is everlasting, Morrison said, reflecting on the nature of the ANZUS alliance. In this age where peace, stability, and prosperity can certainly not be assured, I affirm our Australian pledge: that we look to the United States but we will never leave it to the United States. We come to this partnership as equals. We come to this partnership bringing everything we have and to share it and to ensure that we can meet the challenges together. We stand in an Alliance of trust, commitment and sacrifice. An Alliance that continues to be renewed for our times, he said. News Corps The Australian reported that U.S. President Joe Biden said ANZUS was essential to our shared safety and prosperity. Alberta Premier Kenney Interviewed by RCMP in Probe Into UCP Leadership Race Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said he has been interviewed by the RCMP as part of an investigation into potential criminal identity theft during the 2017 United Conservative Party leadership election. Yes, I did an interview at [their] request, he said in a press conference on March 28. Well always be there to cooperate in any investigation. At the end of the day, my campaign did everything it could to carefully follow all of the rules, and Im confident we did so. The RCMP has interviewed several of Kenneys cabinet ministers as they look into possible voter identity fraud. No charges have been laid so far. The investigation is one of the two related to the 2017 UCP leadership contest. The RCMP has also taken over investigation from Albertas Office of the Election Commissioner into allegations of irregular financial contribution to the campaign of another UCP leadership candidate Jeff Callaway, who dropped out of the race halfway and turned to support Kenney. Following CBCs March 23 report of two insiders court affidavit allegations that Kenney was in the room when Callaways illegal contributions were discussed, the premier was asked on March 28 if he was aware of the unlawful disbursements. No, absolutely not, Kenney said. To the contrary, while I sought Mr. Callaways endorsement I never offered and he never received from me or anybody in my campaign, any fundraising assistance. Period. Full stop. Kenney also questioned the legitimacy of two sources cited by CBC in court affidavits, alleging that Kenney was in the room when Callaways campaign contributions were discussed. Kenney said the sources themselves have been fined for Callaway fundraising irregularities following an investigation by the Chief Electoral Officer. The question of irregular contributions has resurfaced given changes announced last week to the vote to determine Kenneys fate as party leader. The leadership review was planned to be an in-person ballot on April 9 in Red Deer, but the partys executive changed that, claiming a dramatic increase of 15,000 registered party members made an in-person vote impossible, and it was switched to a mail-in ballot that opened the vote up to all party members. Critics, including Jean, say theyre concerned Kenneys camp orchestrated the change for his benefit. Jean and the citizen advocacy group Take Back Alberta have spent weeks soliciting people to sign up for membership to vote against Kenney. They say they plan to ask the elections commissioner to investigate. Kenneys organizers dismiss the allegations. The UCP executive also rejects allegations from Jean and Take Back Alberta that the party set up an illegal web portal for Kenneys team to register voters. [Jeans campaign manager] knows that membership portals are routinely created for candidates selling memberships. We created one for him to use for Brian Jeans nomination, UCP spokesman Dave Prisco said in a statement. Jean won a recent byelection under the UCP banner despite his platform to challenge Kenney for its leadership. He wont be sworn in until April 5 and his team isnt sure hell be allowed to sit in Kenneys caucus. The Canadian Press contributed to this report. Do lockdowns actually work? The answer appears to be a rather resounding no. The argument in favor of lockdownsboth from a scientific and medical standpointcarries very little weight. Not only are lockdowns ineffective, they are unnecessarily cruel. This cruelty comes in many forms: economically, psychologically, spiritually, and existentially. Human beings are social creatures. We are not designed to cut ourselves off from society. Extended hibernation is necessary for many animals, but its detrimental to human beings. The cure, as they say, should never be worse than the disease. Lockdowns, especially mass lockdowns, pose a far graver threat to society than Omicron, a variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But try telling this to the tyrants in Beijing. In Xian, a large city and capital of Shaanxi Province in central China, millions of people now find themselves placed in restrictive lockdowns. The city, once called Changan or Eternal Peace, has become an Eternal Prison. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to reports, has reportedly set up brutal, eerie-looking quarantine camps throughout the city, just weeks before the country hosts the Winter Olympics. Why has the CCP locked down the city? All in the hope of achieving zero COVID. China is now the last major country to pursue this rather ridiculous goal. I say ridiculous because the idea of zero COVID is just not realistic. We must learn to live with the disease. To quote Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease physician, the key question facing society is this: How do we move on, rationally and emotionally, from a state of acute [emergency] to a state of transition to endemicity? Although the transition period is going to be very bumpy, its necessary. Human beings cannot live in a perpetual state of fear. Just like the common cold, COVID-19, it seems, is here to stay. Governments must learn to adapt. People need to move on with their lives. Again, though, try telling this to the tyrants in Beijing, who appear to be doubling down on the most misguided of zero COVID strategies. Whats the endgame here? A sort of slow-motion self-destruction? Perhaps. Not surprisingly, Chinas economy appears to be taking a hit. Analysts at Goldman Sachs recently cut Chinas 2022 growth forecast to 4.3 percent, from 4.8 percent previously. But, I argue, the ideological myopia of the CCP is far more concerning than the actual slow-motion economic suicide thats now occurring. Of course, many Westerners, especially in the United States, will read this and say, So what if China, our biggest rival, self-destructs. However, as China becomes more isolated, it becomes more dangerous. The idea of a globalized China, Im sure, fails to fill many readers with a sense of joy. But an isolated China would be much more dangerous. A more isolated China wouldnt necessarily mean a China that disappears from the radar; a country that size and that powerful doesnt just disappear, nor does it just fade away into obscurity. It goes out with a bangand that bang would have a global impact. A more isolated China would become an increasingly desperate onemore willing to engage in serious acts of subterfuge and deceit. We already have one Hermit Kingdom; we dont need a second. Also, a more isolated China would result in even more brutal acts being carried out on innocent people throughout the country. Its of utmost importance that we separate the Chinese people from the CCP. The cruelty being inflicted on tens of millions of innocent Chinese people is as inhumane as it is unnecessary. These people, powerless in the extreme, are not representative of the oppressors in Beijingwe should never forget this. In the aforementioned Xian, as the journalist Nicole Hao recently noted, Chinese authorities sealed residents homes, but didnt arrange for a reliable food supply. These people, locked down for roughly three weeks, are lacking in food and are on the edge of mental breakdown. Theres a perverse, social experiment being carried out in Xian, and innocent people are losing their minds. Some, sadly, will lose their lives. Some wonder if Hell is a real placeit is. Millions of people already live in it, and many of these people are situated in China. Theres a lesson to be learned here. Lockdowns are not the answer. They never were. Human beings are not farm animals. We should not be sealed off from society. Our every move should not be monitored. We deserve the right to make our own informed decisions. We deserve to be free. Whats occurring in China is brutal, but its not necessarily surprising. In many ways, the Chinese people have always been prisoners, regularly subjected to cruel and unusual punishments. Now, though, the people of Xian are literal prisoners, quite literally sealed off from society. When will they be freed? A week from now, a month, a year? Sadly, we dont know. Republished from Brownstone Institute Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Australia Considers Teen COVID-19 Boosters Australias leading vaccine advisory group is considering whether to approve COVID-19 boosters for 12 to 15-year-olds. As the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) last week moved to approve the fourth dose for elderly and at-risk people, the group is also weighing up whether to expand the vaccine rollout for young people. A statement from the federal health department said ATAGI was reviewing data on the use of Pfizer vaccine for 12 to 15-year-olds as a booster. Currently, boosters are only approved for those 16 and over. The review of Pfizer data will include information on serious illness, epidemiology and international rollout among the age group. ATAGI is continuing to look at emerging evidence on the use of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments as part of its ongoing review of current recommendations, the health department said in a statement. It comes after ATAGI last week approved a winter dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to those over 65, Indigenous Australians over 50, those in aged or disability care, along with those who are immunocompromised. The fourth dose, or second booster, will be rolled out among the cohort from April 4, with people eligible for the dose four months after their first booster shot. However, a second booster was not recommended for the broader population. The new ATAGI advice was put in place ahead of a predicted surge of COVID-19 cases in winter, coinciding with a likely spike in flu cases. Case numbers of COVID-19 have been increasing across the country in recent days due to infections linked to an Omicron sub-variant. There were 46,888 new cases of COVID-19 reported nationally on Monday, with 16,199 in NSW, 8739 in Victoria, 7816 in Queensland, 7288 in WA, 4140 in SA, 1726 in Tasmania, 701 in the ACT and 279 in the Northern Territory. Among those new cases was Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, who said he had tested positive and will isolate for seven days. NSW Treasurer Matt Kean has also tested positive, saying the virus has finally caught up with him. Six deaths linked to the virus were also reported on Monday, with three of those in NSW and three in SA. LATEST 24-HOUR COVID-19 DATA FROM ACROSS AUSTRALIA: NSW: 21,494 cases, nine deaths, 1283 in hospital, 53 in ICU VIctoria: 10,916 cases, five deaths, 284 in hospital, 33 in ICU. Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg speaks during a press conference in Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on June 3, 2021. (Sam Mooy/Getty Images) Australia Investing $17.9 Billion Into Infrastructure in Next Federal Budget The Australian federal government announced a record $17.9 billion (US$13.4 billion) in infrastructure funding for new and existing projects across every jurisdiction in the 2022-23 federal budget. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said infrastructure is a key pillar of the economic growth plan and get more Australians into work. With the unemployment rate already at an equal 48-year low, the measures in this budget will create an additional 40,000 jobs across Australia, building on our world-leading economic recovery, he said. Major new commitments that are receiving funding include $1.6 billion (US$1.2 billion) for the Brisbane to Sunshine Coast rail extension, $1.2 billion for Beveridge Interstate Freight Terminal in Victoria, $1.1 billion for the Brisbane to Gold Coast rail upgrade, and $1 billion (US$750 million) for the Sydney to Newcastle rail upgrade. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the investment would help keep Australians moving and also support tens of thousands of local jobs, both directly and indirectly, across the economy. A strong economy means a stronger future, Morrison said. Continuing to provide record future funding for road and rail projects is a key part of our economic plan for the long term to keep our economy strong. Frydenberg said the budget, to be delivered on Tuesday evening, would demonstrate that growth was higher, unemployment was lower, and wages were strengthening. Tonights budget delivers for Australian families, for seniors, for small businesses, with costofliving relief now in a temporary, targeted, and responsible way, he told reporters. Fuel prices are listed on a fuel price board at a petrol station in Melbourne, Australia, on March 14, 2022. (AAP Image/Diego Fedele) The treasurer said the budget would bank on the dividend of a stronger economy to afford the funding, despite the country being almost a trillion dollars in debt. Deficits will be lower, and debt as a share of the economy will peak earlier and lower than was previously forecast, he said. The budget will show that this year, Australians can expect the unemployment rate to drop below four percent, where it is currently sitting. This is a remarkable achievement that belongs to 26 million Australians, Frydenberg said. We now have an unemployment rate which is very, very low, and we are banking that dividend. Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers said despite the record low unemployment forecasts; it would not change the reality that the real wages for working families were going backwards. We dont have anywhere near enough to show for this trillion dollars in debt, he told ABC radio. This government is temperamentally incapable of seeing beyond the election, so there wont be a plan for a better future. Chalmers said if Labor won the next election, the debt would be addressed in time, but that it was currently not the time to flick the switch to austerity. The Liberal Coalition abandoned its general policy of fiscal conservatism in favour of heavy government intervention from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fiscal and monetary stimulus has its limits and is not a substitute for self-sustaining growth, economist Robert Carling said. Right now, there is little fiscal discipline insight. Social media apps on a smartphone in this file photo. (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images) Australian Government to Introduce New Misinformation Laws The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) may soon be granted greater regulatory powers against disinformation and misinformation online. Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher announced the new powers following the release of an ACMA report on digital platforms current disinformation and news quality measures. The report found that four-in-five Australians have seen misinformation about COVID-19 and that people who believe COVID misinformation had lower levels of trust for health officials and authoritative sources. Digital platforms must take responsibility for what is on their sites and take action when harmful or misleading content appears, Fletcher said. This is our governments clear expectationand just as we have backed that expectation with action in recently passing the new Online Safety Act, we are taking action when it comes to disinformation and misinformation. The government has welcomed all five recommendations made by the report, including giving the ACMA formal information-gathering powers and improved access to Australians data. The media authority will also be given reserve powers to register and enforce industry standards or create industry standards. This will encourage platforms to be ambitious in addressing the harms of disinformation and misinformation while providing ACMA with the ability to hold platforms to account should their voluntary efforts prove inadequate or untimely, Fletcher said. A Misinformation and Disinformation Action Group will also be established, composed of stakeholders across government and private sectors to collaborate and share information on emerging issues and best responses. The digital industry group, DIGI, of which Apple, Google, and Meta are founding members, said it supported the ACMA recommendations in principle and looked forward to working with the government on the details. A woman holds a smartphone with the Meta logo in front of a displayed Facebooks new rebrand logo Meta in this illustration picture taken on Oct. 28, 2021. (Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters) Well be closely reviewing the reports findings, as part of DIGIs planned review of the code, where we intend to proactively invite views from the public, civil society, and government about how it can be improved, DIGI Managing Director Sunita Bose said in a statement. However, it is not clear how far reaching the new regulatory powers will extend over the media, and whether it could violate the rights of Australians. It is also unclear how authorities would define as misinformation and disinformation, considering the ACMA report specifically touched on news surrounding COVID-19 that did not follow the prevailing mainstream narrativemuch of which is currently being challenged through political and non-political processes. The government previously restricted doctors from voicing their criticism of COVID-19 vaccines or the vaccination program. In March 2021, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) said there was no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice and that any such claims by health practitioners could be subject to regulatory action. There is a real strong move to suppress criticism, legitimate criticism of the public health vaccination program, emergency doctor David Berger told ABC radio in March 2021. Senator Pauline Hanson in the Senate at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia on July 4, 2019.(Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images) Australian Senator Calls for COVID-19 Royal Commission One Nation party leader Senator Pauline Hanson will submit a petition signed by more than 41,000 Australians to the Senate calling on the federal government to establish a Royal Commission, or major public hearing, into the countrys handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today I will be submitting this petition, signed by 41,079 Aussies, calling on the federal government to establish a broad Royal Commission into the true facts and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic by Australias state and federal governments, to the Senate, Hanson wrote on Facebook on March 29. Thank you to the tens of thousands of Australians who took the time to add their voices to mine. One Nation will continue to fight for transparency and honesty and we will do everything in our power to ensure those responsible for denying Australians their rights are freedoms are held responsible, she said. One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson shared a photo on social media of her petition signed by more than 41,000 people, obtained by The Epoch Times on March 29, 2022. (Senator Pauline Hanson) In the text of the petition, Hanson writes that as a result of the federal and state governments responses to the pandemic, people have died; the economy, schools, and entire cities were shut down; and borders were closed. Further, the petition states that vast quantities of taxpayers money were expended, thousands lost their jobs, businesses were closed (some permanently), individual rights and freedoms were curtailed, military personnel were deployed, and unelected bureaucrats have wielded extraordinary power. Only a Royal Commission is likely to have the power necessary to compel the expert health advice Australian governments relied on to justify and implement pandemic measuresmuch of this advice has been hidden from the Australian people, the petition reads. We need a Royal Commission because this inquiry must be completely transparent to the Australian public. We need a Royal Commission because those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them. COVID-19 Under Question The call for the Royal Commission comes as Australia seeks to recover from the impacts of almost two years of rolling lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions, with Queensland One Nation federal Senator Malcolm Roberts leading the charge to hold the federal and state governments accountable for their pandemic measures. On March 23, Roberts hosted a non-political cross-party inquiry with fellow parliamentarians in a bid to gather empirical data into the federal and state governments responses to the pandemic which he said the federal government failed to provide. In his opening remarks at the COVID Under Question inquiry, Roberts said that in the early stages of the pandemic he stood up in Parliament and called on the federal government to provide data and a comprehensive plan for how it would handle the pandemic. We did not get the data. We have still not seen a comprehensive plan, he said. We have seen people die needlessly. Liberal MP George Christensen (L) with One Nation Sen. Malcolm Roberts, chair of the Cross Party Inquiry into the Australian Governments Response to COVID-19, on March 23, 2022. (George Christensen/Supplied) So when the government wont provide the empirical data that we as MPs need to fulfil our roles serving the people, well [expletive]-well go out and get the data, and we will get it from the best independent, international and Australian experts that are free from conflicts of interest, Roberts said. He also compared Australias response to COVID-19 with Taiwans, which despite being on Chinas doorstep, and closer to the epicentre of the pandemic, never locked down. [Taiwan] has done a spectacular job with managing the virus, whereas Australia has done a lousy job. Taiwan never locked down and they kept going normally at work. But they protected the vulnerable and the sick, Roberts said. Pedestrians wear protective masks after a new wave of COVID-19 pandemic occurred in New Taipei city on May 15, 2021. (Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images) The inquiry, which was not a formal parliamentary hearing, was attended by One Nation Queensland state MP Stephen Andrew, Nationals federal MP George Christensen, Liberal federal MP Gerard Rennick, Liberal federal Senator Alex Antic, and United Australia Party leader MP Craig Kelly. The parliamentarians heard from a range of doctors, experts, economists and everyday people about how the governments response to COVID-19 has affected them. The guests spoke across a range of issues, organised under the topics such as the costs of ignoring science in favour of prevailing narratives against treating COVID-19 with certain drugs, the costs of the governments measures on businesses and professionals, vaccine injuries, the legal questions surrounding vaccine mandates, and on the alleged failings of Australias regulatory bodies. A nurse takes a man's information before administering the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a drive through vaccination centre in Melbourne, Australia, on Aug. 9, 2021. (Darrian Traynor/Getty Images) Australian Young Job Seekers Look Forward to a Career in Health Care: Survey More young Australians now want to work in the healthcare industry than any other sector due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a job survey has found. Skillsroad, a website that is backed by Business Australia and several chambers of commerce and provides career advice and employment information, surveyed 5,012 young Australians, with more than 75 percent aged 20 or younger between November and December 2021. The survey showed that health care had become a top choice for young Australian job seekers, with one out of five desiring to start a career in the industry. The next most popular sector after health care was education and training, with 12 percent of respondents expressing interest, followed by professional services at 11 percent. According to industry experts, the pandemic has made health officials attract more public attention and put the healthcare industry in the spotlight. During the pandemic, weve seen some of these health sectors up in lights, which you could call the rock-star effect, said Daniel Hunter, chief executive of Business NSW, a peak pro-business organisation in the state of New South Wales. National chief health officer Paul Kelly and his state counterparts have regularly appeared in the media due to their roles in the pandemic. Seeing high-profile people attracts people into the industry, Hunter said. In addition, he said that the surge in interest from young people was good news for the healthcare industry, which was struggling with staffing pressures and pandemic burnout. The pandemic showed the public how important the role of healthcare workers was, and the shortage of staff in the industry scored points with job seekers who were looking for stable employment opportunities. Theres a high labour shortage in health care, and young people are attracted to industries that are stable with better long-term career prospects and promotion opportunities, Hunter said. Its an attractive industry because it also has meaning as you are helping people in their time of need, and young people are looking for that sense of purpose in their careers. A nurse explains to a woman the vaccination process at the Royal Exhibition Building COVID-19 Vaccination Centre in Melbourne, Australia, on May 28, 2021. (Darrian Traynor/Getty Images) Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicated that there were 2.074 million Australians employed in the health care and social assistance industry in the December quarter of 2021, accounting for 13.9 percent of the countrys total workforce. The industry also had the highest increase in the percentage of businesses reporting vacancies, from 8.2 percent in February 2020 to 26.7 percent in November 2021, with resignations and increased workload being the top two reasons for the shortage of employees. At the same time, the survey pointed out that school leavers remained overwhelmed by the realities of online learning since nearly eight in ten respondents reported they were underprepared. Additionally, around 70 percent of the young people surveyed were worried about their employment prospects, and nearly 50 percent were not confident about getting employed in their preferred industry. Meanwhile, the Australian government has announced a $365.3 million ($US 274.4 million) investment to support an extra 35,000 apprentices and trainees getting into a job by extending the Boosting Apprenticeship Commencements and Completing Apprenticeship Commencements wage subsidies by three months to June 30. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that the extension would add to the record number of Australians currently in trades training. Right now, there are more than 350,000 apprentices and trainees in training, and a record 220,000 of these are trade apprentices, and these investments are about making those numbers go even higher, the prime minister said in a joint statement on March 27. By backing 385,000 apprentices in their training, were boosting the pipeline of workers Australia is going to need for a stronger economy and a stronger future. Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang inspect honor guards during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Oct. 9, 2019. (Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images) Beijing-Solomons Deal: A Threat to Australian Sovereignty Commentary On March 24, a leaked draft agreement between the Solomon Islands and the Peoples Republic of China on security cooperation sent shockwaves through the Australian political and security establishments. Article 1 of the Agreement stipulates that China may, according to its own needs and with the consent of the Solomon Islands, make ship visits to, carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in the Solomon Islands, and the relevant forces of China can be used to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in the Solomon Islands. The disclosure of the existence of a secret security agreement between the two nations has spawned a variety of comments, which are either provocative or conciliatory. For example, David Llewellyn-Smith, former owner of The Diplomat, a prominent Asia Pacific foreign affairs journal, has argued that the proposed security agreement presents Australia with its own Cuban missile crisis. Specifically, he contends that the establishment of a Chinese base in the Solomon Islands would be the effective end of our sovereignty and democracy and that Australia has no choice but to invade and capture Guadalcanal such that we engineer regime change in Honiara. In contrast, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Marise Payne, in a statement released on March 25, strikes a more conciliatory note when she commented that the Australian government has regularly and respectfully raised our concerns with the Solomon Islands Government and will continue to do so and that Australia would be particularly concerned by any actions that undermine the stability and security of our region, including the establishment of a permanent presence such as a military base. Although both viewpoints confirm the strategic importance of the Solomon Islands to Australia, it is difficult to reconcile them. Hence, it is appropriate to consider whether the agreement between the Solomon Islands and China threatens Australias sovereignty; by considering the background of this matter and its context, it might be possible to secure a better understanding of this issue. Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare speaks during a panel discussion at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, on Aug. 14, 2017. (Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images) When the present Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands, Manasseh Sogavare, came to power on April 24, 2019, he severed the Islands diplomatic ties with Taiwan in September 2019 (followed by Kiribati four days later). The Solomon Islands then recognised China as its legitimate diplomatic partner. In 2020, China sent 14 grievances to Australia that, according to Beijing, poison the bilateral relationship between the two countries. The list of grievances includes Australias banning of Huawei from its 5G network and its insistence to convene an international commission to consider the origins of the COVID-19 virus. Beijing also complained about the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act 2018 (FITS), which was meant to expose dangerous foreign influences well-known to our security agencies. In 2018, the then federal Attorney-General Christian Porter stated that this new Act would safeguard the nations democracy. FITS will provide visibility of the forms and sources of foreign influence in Australias governmental and political processes, he said. This law was therefore supposed to protect Australia from foreign undemocratic regimes, such as China, attempting to influence Australian citizens. In getting a foothold in the Pacific, China would make it easier to isolate Taiwan. Thus, the draft agreement, if it were to result in the establishment of a military base, could significantly serve the geopolitical interests of Beijing. The agreement would also effectively weaponise the list of 14 grievances because, in a military conflict, China would be able to strike Australia, especially if a military base on the Solomon Islands were to have cruise missile boats and hypersonic missiles that could reach Brisbane in less than 15 minutes. Of course, the Solomon Islands is an independent nation, and, as such, it enjoys the benefits of sovereignty and the concomitant right to make its own decisions. In fact, the Solomon Islands also has a current operational security agreement with Australia, signed in August 2017. The agreement enables Australia to deploy rapidly and effectively in an operational capacity in the event of a major security challenge or event, including humanitarian response situations. Anti-government messages adorn a burnt-out building in Honiara, Solomon Islands, on Nov. 27, 2021, (Charley Piringi/AFP via Getty Images) The comment in the agreement that the Pacific Region is of great importance to Australia and that the stability of Solomon Islands has a major impact on the security of Australia and the broader region underscores the importance of the Islands security to Australia. Australia has always assumed the role of the police officer in the Solomons Islands, most recently in November 2020, when protestors tried to storm the parliament and set fire to Honiaras Chinatown in a three-day rampage. The riots were, at least partially, a response to the decision of the Sogavare government to sever diplomatic relations with Taiwan and to switch its allegiance to Beijing. Australia deployed 200 peacekeepers to restore order, which helped the prime minister of the Islands to retain power. At present, there is still 50 Australian personnel serving in the Islands until the end of 2023. Following international criticism of the agreement with China, the Solomon Islands described its foreign policy strategy as friends to all, enemies to none. Additionally, the Solomon Islands, on March 25, sought to justify the proposed agreement with China as necessary to improve the quality of the 800,000 people who live on the islands and address soft and hard security threats facing the country. Even if this justification is plausible, the agreement dealing with police cooperation with Beijing can be characterised as an example of opportunism, or dollar diplomacy, which fails to consider the interests of the whole Pacific region, especially Australia. The suggestion of Llewellyn-Smith to secure Guadalcanal and to seek regime change in Honiara is reminiscent of the invasion by the United States, under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, of the island of Grenada on Oct. 25, 1983, to restore order caused by internal divisions in the ruling communist party. The Grenada invasion, coined Operation Urgent Fury, was a successful intervention that could be used as a boilerplate in case Australia decides to act upon Llewellyn-Smiths recommendation. The language of Article 1 of the proposed Solomon Islands-China security agreement is suitably vague. However, if it were interpreted as allowing China to establish a military base in the Solomon Islands, which is only 1,700 kilometres (1050 miles) from the coast of Queensland, Australia might well decide to act to protect its Asia-Pacific interests. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. (L-R) Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, Solomon Islands Foreign Minister Jeremiah Manele, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Chinese State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi attend a signing ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China on Oct. 9, 2019. (Thomas Peter-Pool/Getty Images) Beijing-Solomons Military Deal Is Ready for Signing: Prime Minister Sogavare Blames lunatics and agents of foreign regimes for leaking of the deal The Chinese military deal with the Solomon Islands, which will allow the stationing of Chinese police, troops, and weapons in the region, is ready for signing, according to Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. His comments come in a fiery address to the Pacific nations Parliament on March 29, where the embattled prime minister attempted to justify the impending deal, which has sparked concerns from the opposition, as well as Australian and New Zealand leaders. Sogavare lashed criticism of the Framework Agreement Between the Government of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and the Government of the Solomon Islands on Security Cooperation, which will open the door for Beijing to supply police, weapons, and even base naval ships in the nation if requested by the Solomons government. We find it very insulting, Mr. Speaker, to be branded as unfit to manage our sovereign affairs, Sogavare said on March 29, saying his government did not experience any pressure from their new friends and there was no intention for a military base to be in the Solomon Islands. We are now having this discussion, Mr. Speaker because some lunatics and agents of foreign regimes in the government system have no regard for secrecy. There are people who exist only to undermine the work of legitimate authorities. Anti-government messages adorn a burnt-out building in Honiara, Solomon Islands, on Nov. 27, 2021, (Charley Piringi/AFP via Getty Images) When questioned by the opposition leader, Matthew Wale, on the progress of the agreement, Sogavare said it was ready for signing. Pages from the deal were leaked online on March 24, sparking concerns from Pacific neighbours, with New Zealand (NZ) Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta travelling to Fiji to discuss the deal with Pacific leaders. Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has spoken with the leaders of Fiji and Papua New Guinea. The Solomons was the site of the Battle of Guadalcanal during World War II and fought over tooth and nail because of its influence over the sea lanes in the region. Michael Shoebridge, defence director at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the deal could lead to a fundamental change for the region. A good way of thinking about that would be everything we see happening in the South China Sea, East China Sea, and the Taiwan Straitsthat will be enabled right here in the South Pacific by a growing Peoples Liberation Army presence, he told The Epoch Times. Cleo Paskal, an associate fellow of the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House, has warned that the defiant Sogavare could attempt to solidify his hold on power if he locks in the current partnership with Beijing. (Sogavare could say,) We need outside help to come and create stability in the country, and our friends China will come and do it, Paskal told The Epoch Times. And thats when they arrest the leaders, the Malaitan leaders, and God forbid what happens to them in detention. Malaita is the most populous province of the Solomon Islands and is led by Premier Daniel Suidani, who has staunchly maintained relations with Taiwan despite the national government switching ties to Beijing in 2019. She said Australia and New Zealand should try to reinvigorate the democratic process in the countryvia the 2000 Townsville Peace Agreementto put more pressure on Sogavare. Put out the steps that the various provinces, including Malaita, agreed to. Theres a whole series of things that have already been negotiatedeverybody signed on, including the government under Sogavare, she said. Shoebridge agreed, saying the first order of business for a new government, if elected, should be to unravel the agreement. The actual physical experience of having China act inside the Solomons in the way this agreement sets out will be so obviously at odds with the Solomon Islands own sovereignty and security, he said. A democratic Solomon Islands will end this, but for now the current government seems determined to create this problem for itself and the region. Canal Winchester farmer and restaurant owner Joe Blystone is running against Gov. Mike DeWine, Jim Renacci, and Ron Hood in the GOP gubernatorial primary. (Photo courtesy of Joe Blystone) Blystone Alleges Campaign Finance Violation Claims Are Misleading Claims that Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Joe Blystone was ordered by the Ohio Secretary of States office to return more than $100,000 in campaign donations are not completely true, according to Blystone and his campaign representatives. According to a letter dated March 4 from Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRoses Director of Campaign Finance Brian Katz and sent to Friends of Joe Blystone, more than $101,000 in donations that exceed the states limit of $100 for each contribution made in cash were flagged. The 20-page examination of Blystones campaign finance reports from 2021 by LaRoses office also found that Blystones campaign reported $1,100 contributions from corporations, which are not allowed to contribute to individuals running for office. The letter also disclosed that the Blystone campaign might need to return another $132,000 if the donors were corporations. Blystone is running in the GOP gubernatorial primary against Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, former U.S. Representative Jim Renacci, and former Ohio State Representative Ron Hood. The findings from LaRoses office are not Blystones first brush with allegations of campaign finance violations. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine in Bexley, Ohio, on Aug. 6, 2020. (Jay LaPrete/AP Photo) A group of campaign volunteers and staff members filed an Ohio Elections Commission complaint that accuses Blystones campaign of disregarding multiple campaign finance lawsamong them being a failure to document thousands of dollars in contributions. The elections commission voted to conduct a hearing about the allegations before Blystone filed a lawsuit claiming that the commission abused its powers. The commission asked a judge to dismiss that legal action and the issue is currently on hold. Candidates for statewide office must file semiannual and annual reports with the Ohio Secretary of State describing their campaign contributions and expenses. If the Blystone campaign does not make its reports compliant, it could face an Ohio Elections Commission probe. The commissionwhich includes three Democrats, three Republicans, and one unaffiliatedrules on complaints resulting from alleged violations of Ohios campaign finance laws. According to the Blystone campaigns statement, on March 23, lawyers for the campaign engaged in extensive discussions with the office of the Ohio Secretary of State. The conversation went extremely well. At the end of the discussion, they both agreed on a clear framework, creating a specific manner and timeframe for ensuring full compliance in the campaign finance report. Likely, the campaign will voluntarily return a small number of donations that total nowhere near $100,000 according to the statement. A Blystone campaign spokesperson said that, on April 15, the campaign will issue a comprehensive report that will be available to the public and identify whether any of the secretarys concerns are not valid or misconstrued; identify and correct any mistakes, and provide full detail of any corrective measures that may be necessary. The campaign and the secretary of states office mutually agreed to this arrangement and the campaign looks forward to engaging in a respectful, orderly processfree of the stain of internet gossip, political posturing, and shoddy reporting, the statement added. Friends of Joe Blystone last reported $214,000 cash in hand. The first-time political candidate is running a grassroots campaign where he travels across the state and speaks at events where he collects donations from supporters. The review noted that Blystone takes in donations of $25 or less in an uncharacteristic frequency and amount. The letter included unclear or vague costs like food and lssep, possibly referring to sleep, and approximately 126 expenses did not list a purpose. Blystone said that his campaign did not intentionally violate the rules. Am I saying that everything was done efficiently and effectively per the Ohio Revised Code? I hope that everything is perfect, but the campaign finance regulations are very convoluted, Blystone said. If we made a mistake, well fix it. Its just as simple as that, but we didnt go out there trying to defraud the campaign finance. Blystones campaign treasurer is his wife, Jane. Bryan Robson, Blystones campaign manager, said that what was cited in the report are clerical errors or omissions of required information and that we are in the process of rectifying these errors and omissions. Blystone owns and operates Blystone Farm outside of Canal Winchester. The working cattle farm also includes a restaurant, butcher shop, bakery, and special events venue. Identified by his long beard and cowboy hat, the East Liverpool, Ohio, native first gained attention for his refusal to abide by DeWines COVID-19 mask mandate. GOP gubernatorial candidate Jim Renacci introduces his running mate, filmmaker Joe Knopp, at an event in West Chester, Ohio in 2021. (Photo by Jeff Louderback) A poll by The Hill/NBC4i/Emerson College that was conducted Feb. 2526 showed DeWine at 34 percent support followed by Blystone (20 percent), and Renacci (9 percent). Thirty-six percent are undecided. A Fox News poll conducted by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company Research from March 26 placed DeWine in first place on 50 percent, followed by Blystone (21 percent) and Renacci (18 percent). Joe Blystone has spent the past year doing DeWines dirty work for him and paving the way for his re-election, Renacci campaign spokesman Tom Weyand said in a statement. Its going to take a lot of work to defeat DeWine in these final weeks, and it wont be done by spreading baseless lies or going broke from returning hundreds of thousands of dollars in mismanaged donations. Its now clearer than ever that Jim Renacci is the committed pro-Trump, America First conservative Ohio Republican primary voters can rely on to have the discipline and the organization necessary to put an end to Mike DeWines 40-year political career, Weyand added. Ohios gubernatorial primary is scheduled for May 3. Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro speaks, during a joint press conference with Paraguay's president at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, on Nov. 24, 2021. (Raul Spinasse/AP Photo) Brazils Bolsonaro Hospitalized After Feeling Abdominal Discomfort Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was hospitalized in Brasilia late Monday after suffering abdominal discomfort, Communications Minister Fabio Faria said. Bolsonaro, 67, was taken to the Army Hospital in Brasilia for testing, Faria said, noting that he is alright. Faria said the president felt unwell and went to the hospital to be tested as he has a history of intestinal obstructions. Bolsonaro will stay in hospital overnight under observation, Faria said. The president has undergone multiple emergency surgeries after he was stabbed on a campaign trail in September 2018. He has also undergone surgeries to correct a hernia in the wounded area. He was most recently hospitalized in January to clear an intestinal obstruction and was discharged two days later without needing surgery. Being discharged now. Thank you all, Bolsonaro said on Twitter in January, sharing a photograph of himself beside his doctors giving a thumbs up. In July last year, after 11 days of hiccuping, he was hospitalized with strong stomach pains that were treated without needing surgery. Bolsonaro, who has begun campaigning for re-election in October, was due to attend a political meeting of the Republican Party but did not appear, local media reported. The partys president Marcos Pereira said at the event that the president had instead gone to hospital feeling unwell, an aide to Pereira said. The conservative president kicked off his re-election campaign on Sunday. First Lady, receive my regards, our prayers, Pereira told attendees. Im sure the president is fineits just some tests hes doing, so hes not here. In August last year, Bolsonaro said he sees three alternatives for his future: winning the 2022 presidential elections, death or prison. I have three alternatives for my future: being arrested, killed or victory, he said, in remarks to a meeting of evangelical leaders. Bolsonaro later added that the first option is out of the question. No man on Earth will threaten me. He questioned Brazils electronic voting system last year and called for the adoption of printed receipts, saying that electronic ballots are vulnerable to fraud. Bolsonaro was left in serious condition after the stabbing incident in the town of Juiz de Fora in 2018. A man rushed up to him as he was being carried on the shoulders of a supporter through a crowd, and stabbed him in the abdomen. His son said on Twitter at the time that Bolsonaro was almost dead when he arrived at the Santa Casa de Misericordia hospital. Reuters contributed to this report. A policeman holding a long firearm stands in front of anti-coup protesters gathering outside the Hledan Centre in Yangon, Myanmar on Fri. Feb. 19, 2021. (AP Photo) Burmese Military Special Command Authorized Killing Civilians Using Snipers: Report The Burmese military junta issued a special command authorizing the deployment of troops in civilian-populated cities, and the use of snipers to intimidate and kill civilians, according to a report released on March 24. The report, published by human rights group Fortify Rights and Yale Law Schools Schell Center, stated that senior general Min Aung Hlaing had created the special command the day after the military coup that ousted elected Aung San Suu Kyi in February last year. It stated that the military junta deployed snipers to kill protesters as a matter of state policy to deliberately instill fear among them, and established a fieldcraft manual that makes no mention of the laws of war or human rights. In one section [of the fieldcraft manual], it advises soldiers to make sure a bullet equates to an enemy killed, the report stated. The 193-page report was based on leaked documents and 128 testimonies from various sources, including survivors, protesters, medical professionals, members of armed resistance, and former police. Medical professionals who treated victims of the military juntas attack claimed that numerous victims were fatally shot in the head or chest with a single bullet, indicating the militarys deadly precision and intent to kill. The report identified 61 military and police officers who the researchers believe should be investigated for crimes against humanity in Burma, also known as Myanmar. Six of them were active-duty army personnel, including a colonel and two majors. It also documented the physical locations of 1,040 military units across Burma, which the researchers believe could help prosecutors and policymakers in geolocating alleged perpetrators. All individuals responsible for these crimes should be sanctioned and prosecuted, Matthew Smith, chief executive officer at Fortify Rights and co-author of the report, said in a statement. The military junta systematically imprisoned and forcibly disappeared several thousand people in Burma, including children, civilian opinion leaders, elected officials, peaceful protesters, journalists, and human rights defenders. The whereabouts and well-being of many detainees are unknown, effectively amounting to a situation of mass enforced disappearances, it stated. At least 1,600 people have been killed and more than 12,500 people detained, while 440,000 more people have been displaced since the military seized power in Burma, according to the United Nations. On March 15, the U.N. urged the international community to take immediate measures to the military juntas systematic human rights violations, which it said amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said that the military junta has shown a flagrant disregard for human life by launching airstrikes on populated areas and deliberately targeting civilians. Throughout the tumult and violence of the past year, the will of the people has clearly not been broken. They remain committed to seeing a return to democracy and to institutions that reflect their will and aspirations, Bachelet said. Canadian Novelist Explores Our Western Identity Crisis Commentary Novels can move hearts and change minds in ways that cannot always be achieved by exposure to academic analysis. Late last century, the distinguished American jurist Robert H. Bork published a book titled, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. For conservatives in the Reagan and Harper eras, Borks book was a blockbuster, a blistering indictment of the consequences produced by radical progressivism and the cultural self-indulgence of the New Left. But by the end of the 20th century even graduate students in the humanities were ill-equipped to understand sober academic analyses. Culturally illiterate progressive schooling had long since closed the minds of young people to classical references like Gomorrah or scholarly analyses of post-modern ideology. The Power of a Personal Story Popular novelists, on the other hand, can encourage a wider spectrum of readers to re-examine biases and question conventional wisdom. In the early years of the present century, parents of various partisan stripes shared anxieties about sending a daughter away to university. Readers may recall that American novelist Tom Wolfes bestseller I Am Charlotte Simmons exposed shocking new sexual and status relationships that were developing in Ivy League universities. Like Bork, Wolfe explored cultural phenomena with remarkable insight. He too raised serious questions about moral decline and the uncertain future of Western civilization. But Wolfes approach of reality-based personal stories was easy to grasp and enormously engaging. He raised our consciousness with captivating tales and life-like characters. A Canadian Novelists Fierce Indictment Early this year, a promising Canadian novelist also produced a book of compelling significance. Hailing from Toronto, at first glance T.K. Kanwars pedigree appears liberal. He earned a degree in sociology from the University of Toronto and a masters in public administration from Ottawas Carleton University. He spent several years as a media analyst and has worked for the federal government. But, out of the gate, Kanwar has produced a thoroughgoing impeachment of our progressive social order. His first novel, Identity Crisis, is a fierce indictment of the divisive, far-left, race-baiting wokerati who are tearing apart the social fabric of Western nations. Years ago, political analysts like Mark Steyn warned about the inevitable consequences of combining nanny state redistribution policies with indiscriminate mass immigration from areas of the world that do not share Western democratic values. Kanwar anchors Identity Crisis in 2025. In the authors vision, decades of excessive multicultural policies and progressive diversity commitments have all but destroyed national solidarity within nations like Canada and the United States. The personal stories of Kanwars characters play out in Toronto and New York City. Both principal protagonists are authentic individuals who readers will care about. Sam Dhillon is a second-generation East-Indian Canadian who no longer recognizes and, in fact, misses the country he grew up in. In Dhillons Canada, new laws aim to eliminate the ideals of personal freedom and liberal meritocracy. A disruptive left-wing coalition is ushering in a new order based on state enforced principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Over time, Sam discovers there are others who share his anxiety. In New York City, Jennifer Moore, a Midwestern girl who was entirely transformed into a social justice warrior by her years at New York University, works for an organization that claims to fight for social justice. She proudly serves the vision of a racially transfigured America and the end of white privilege. When tragedy strikes her own family during a violent Black Lives Matter riot, even Jennifer begins to question who she has become as a result of her years in the radical progressive movement. Throughout the novel, sinister establishment forces are working behind the scenes to silence dissent and ensure the success of their proposed cultural reset. A Prologue: 4 Steps to Subversion Kanwar opens his book with a historic bit of correspondence. Initially, his prologue appears somewhat disconnected from the novel itself. It takes the form of a 1983 letter to the North American public from the late Yuri Bezmenov, a Cold War era KGB informant and Soviet journalist for RIA Novosti who defected to Canada in 1970. Bezmenovs message is chillingly clear and exceptionally relevant for our present generation. He explains how free countries can, over time, be overcome by totalitarianism from within without a shot being fired. The former KGB operative explained that there are four steps involved in the ideological subversion of a nation: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. Demoralization takes at least 15-20 years to perform properly he wrote. This is the length of time it takes to indoctrinate a generation of students with subversive ideologies. During the demoralization stage, the moral fibre and integrity of a country in every facet will be put into question and systematically degraded. To do so, manipulation of the press and academia will be required to influence young people. Bezmenov goes on to assert that: At every turn, the media and academia are to mock the prevailing religion and bring it into disrepute by any means necessary, including by advocating for the arrival of a large number of people into the society who have different, preferably conflicting, religious and cultural beliefs. As for social life, he wrote, the goal is to undermine the sense of community and solidarity amongst a nations people by eroding opportunities for natural, human connections between individuals. Step two toward surrender, destabilization, takes between two and five years. This phase, Bezmenov said, is characterized by a dramatic change in the overall function of the society, particularly in terms of the countrys economy, foreign relations, and defence systems. The intent is to create a massive and powerful government that controls everything and becomes intrusive in the lives of its citizens. Crisis, he wrote, is a comparatively short third stage. It can unfold in a matter of six weeks once a nation has been sufficiently destabilized. It will be characterized by a major incident that creates panic in the citizenry; one for which the people will look to the government for control and stability. The goal is to create a transfer of power from the people to the state, suspend entrenched civil liberties, and take steps to silence dissenters. In the final normalization stage, citizens finally acquiesce and begin to accept the new order. Once this is underway, Bezmenov predicted that any semblances of the old society will be long goneas will any chance to restore it. Summoning the Courage to Resist These days, authors with the courage of their convictions are rare. Issues like excessive immigration and national preservation are increasingly forbidden to enter the realm of civil discourse. Epoch Times readers will grasp that for some 30 years since the end of the Thatcher-Reagan revival of liberty, democratic nations have limped through all four stages of subversion. Kanwars Identity Crisis strikes an uncomfortable chord of our anxiety and frustration. From the lefts long march through our schools, to the co-opting of our media and cultural institutions, to the expansion of the welfare state, the development of woke identity politics, unprecedented levels of immigration, creeping economic and military impairment, and draconian pandemic measures, we have been watching the plot of Kanwars novel play out over the best years of our lives. The most disturbing thing about Kanwars book is that it is not mere fantasy. The dystopian nightmare he portrays is literally happening all around us, and unless we can summon up the kind of resistant courage that is displayed by characters like Sam Dhillon in Toronto or Jennifer Moore in New York, we have little hope of waking from it. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies at a Senate Health, Education, and Labor and Pensions Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on Sept. 23, 2020. (Graeme Jennings/Pool/Getty Images) Capitol Report (March 28): Americans Losing Trust in CDC President Joe Biden announced his budget goals for next year. He aims to tax the rich, fund the police, and counter china. Well take a look at how the administration wants to spend your tax dollars. The data is in and according to a new poll, the vast majority of independent voters say that the Biden familys ties to Ukraine and China present a serious conflict of interest. How will Biden handle China as the situation in Ukraine unfolds? Bidens surprising remark that Putin cannot remain in powerwas it a gaffe or a signal of escalation? As gas prices continue to soar, lawmakers look for unusual solutions to help lower the costs for consumers. Have the Democrats energy policies stifled American energy from being unleashed to help lower the cost of energy? And have the American people lost trust in the once-highly regarded CDC after mixed messaging related to the pandemic? Physician and heart surgeon Congressman Larry Bucshon joins us to discuss. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting Israel. He hopes to reassure allies of his commitment to keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Follow CapitolReport on social media: Twitter https://twitter.com/capitolreport Facebook https://www.facebook.com/CapitolReport/ Gettr https://gettr.com/user/capitolreport Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrives to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for Britain's Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey in central London on March 29, 2022. (Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images) Ceasefire Not Enough for UK to Lift Russia Sanctions: Johnson Agreeing on a ceasefire in Ukraine would not be enough for the UK to lift its sanctions on Russia, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said. Johnson told his Cabinet that a ceasefire alone would not be cause for UK sanctions to be removed in Russia, the prime ministers official spokesman said on Tuesday. He said the pressure on Putin must be increased both through further economic measures and providing military aid to ensure Russia changes course completely, the spokesman said. A full withdrawal would be a good start but a ceasefire was only the first step towards that, the spokesman suggested. But it cannot be a ceasefire alone, he said. That would not be the significant step wed need to remove the pressure. He said: I think as ever, we will judge Putin by his actions. Ukrainian servicemen walk past the wreck of a Russian tank in the village of Lukyanivka outside Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 27, 2022. (Marko Djurica/Reuters) Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said on March 27 that the sanctions can only be lifted with a full ceasefire and withdrawal and commitments that there will be no further aggression. Snapback sanctions will be quickly reimposed if Russia commits further aggression in future, she said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph. Her remarks fit with those of her U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has said the travel bans and asset freezes are not designed to be permanent, and the sanctions could go away in the event of an in effect, irreversible withdrawal of Russian troops. There are signs of progress on Tuesday in talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiating teams in Istanbul. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said the talks marked the most significant progress in discussions to date. Ukrainian negotiators said they had proposed that Ukraine adopt neutral status in exchange for security guarantees, meaning Kyiv would not join military alliances or host military bases. Russia has decided to drastically cut its military activity around Kyiv and Chernihiv in Ukraine in order to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for the talks, Russian deputy defence minister Alexander Fomin said on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Downing Street said the UK will be providing further military aid to help Ukraine regain its territory that has been taken by Russian forces. The Chief of the Defence Staff, Adm. Sir Tony Radakin, told Cabinet ministers the UK is moving to a new phase in its support of Ukraine as the Ukrainian army sought to defend and regain its territory, the prime ministers official spokesman said. Asked if this means sending more offensive rather than defensive weaponry, the spokesman said the UK does not want to do anything which had any escalatory effects. But he added, We are considering all possible options when it comes to making sure the Ukrainian government have what they need to defend themselves. PA Media and Reuters contributed to this report. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) speaks during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on April 21, 2021. (Graeme Jennings/AFP via Getty Images) China Is Greatest Threat Facing America Today: Sen. Rubio The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the greatest threat to the American people and nation, according to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who delivered a talk on the dangers posed by Russia and China at the Washington-based think tank Heritage Foundation on March 29. For decades, the members of the Chinese Communist Party hid their true ambitions, Rubio said. Their true ambition to remake the global order, to become the worlds most powerful nation. They dont hide it anymore. Rubio said that the CCP, under the rule of Party leader Xi Jinping, was engaged in a campaign to undermine the international order and to create a system more favorable to itself by weakening large states and forcing smaller states to become dependent on China. They believe in raw power, Rubio said. They believe that because they are a big country, their smaller neighbors have to be their tributaries. Rubio said that the post-Cold War belief that unfettered free trade and globalism would bring about world peace was U.S. leaderships biggest geopolitical blunder. He added that outdated economic interests were hampering U.S. efforts to counter CCP espionage, and blamed lobbying attempts by major American corporations for the watering down of legislation that would have banned the import of goods made with slave labor in China. Well never be able to confront the threat before us if our public policy is built solely on the pursuit of corporate profit, Rubio said. We will need a whole-of-society, not just government, whole-of-society effort to match them. Rubio said that such an effort was not only being hampered by big business but blamed the Biden administration also for terminating the Trump-era China Initiative, a Justice Department (DOJ) counter-espionage program that had been criticized by some as racist. A DOJ internal review found no evidence of such racial bias in the program but terminated it to avoid the harmful perception of bias. Rubio urged President Joe Biden to reinstate the program and said that working to modify it was preferable to terminating it outright. If it needs improvement, lets improve it, Rubio said. Further, Rubio said that continued U.S. reliance on the CCP for manufacturing would ultimately prove a catastrophic national security matter should the United States and China ever be drawn into conflict. He noted the duress caused by the United States attempt to pull away from Russian oil, and said that any attempt to pull away from Chinese business ties during wartime would be much greater. To prevent that, he said that the United States would need to revitalize its own industrial capacity, particularly in critical industries like semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. Relying on a hostile adversary for these things and more will leave us vulnerable, will leave us weak, Rubio said. Our dependence on Beijing is a vulnerability we can no longer accept. In all, Rubio said that greater domestic unity was required in the United States, and that a renewed focus on the national interest in all spheres of policy was necessary to prevent the erosion of the international liberal order and its replacement with something far more authoritarian. Since 2012, Xi Jinpings words and actions make it clear that Beijing believes it now has enough power to begin to remake the international order in its image, Rubio said. The greatest threat facing America today the threat that will define this century, is China. Hunter Biden attends his father Joe Biden's inauguration as the 46th President of the United States on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 2021. (Jonathan Ernst/Pool/Reuters) CIA Officer Who Signed Hunter Biden Laptop Letter Claims Credit for Trump Loss One of the former CIA officers who signed a letter claiming stories about a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden were disinformation says he helped swing the 2020 election away from President Donald Trump. I take special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump, John Sipher, who served for decades as a senior operations officer at the CIA, wrote in a recent post on Twitter. I lost the election for Trump? Well then I fell [sic] pretty good about my influence. Sipher and 50 other former U.S. intelligence officials signed the letter on Oct. 19, 2020, alleging that the effort to distribute the laptops contents has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation, despite not knowing whether the laptop was legitimate. The letter was at the core of a story from Politico that claimed the New York Post story about the laptop was Russian disinformation. The Post was the first to report about emails on the laptop, which was dropped off at a computer repair store and never picked up by then-candidate Joe Bidens son, according to the stores owner. While the FBI picked up the computer and a hard drive from the stores owner, the bureaus apparent inaction in probing the matter prompted the store owner to pass on a copy of the hard drive to an attorney representing former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who, in turn, passed it to the Post. The Oct. 14, 2020, story about the emails came as some voters were still deciding whether to vote for Biden or Trump. The story was widely questioned by legacy media outlets, suppressed by social media platforms, and claimed to be part of a Russian effort, despite top officials such as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe saying there was no evidence that this was the case. Sipher is one of the few former officials who signed the letter to respond to fresh questions about the laptops contents, after more legacy media outlets, including Politico, said theyve confirmed that its legitimate. Sipher got into arguments with former acting DNI Richard Grenell and others on Twitter, where he later said his claims of helping Trump lose were sarcasm. He also wrote that the letter didnt say the laptop was disinformation, but, in May 2021, he posted a link to the Politico story that did say that. Nick Shapiro, once a top aide to former CIA Director John Brennanboth Shapiro and Brennan signed the missiveand who provided it to Politico, didnt respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times by press time. Most of the other signers didnt respond to requests for comment or declined the requests, the Post reported. Former DNI James Clapper told the paper that he stands by the statement made AT THE TIME. I think sounding such a cautionary note AT THE TIME was appropriate, Clapper said. The letter explicitly stated that we didnt know if the emails were genuine, but that we were concerned about Russian disinformation efforts, said Russ Travers, former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center. I spent 25 years as a Soviet/Russian analyst. Given the context of what the Russians were doing at the time (and continue to doUkraine being just the latest example), I considered the cautionary warning to be prudent. European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager speaks during an interview with Reuters in Brussels, on March 28, 2022. (Johanna Geron/Reuters) Deal on Rules Forcing Tech Giants to Police Content Possible in April, EUs Vestager Says BRUSSELSA deal between EU countries and EU lawmakers that would require tech giants to do more to police content on their platforms could be agreed next month, EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said on Monday. Vestager proposed the Digital Services Act, (DSA) which forces tech giants to do more to tackle illegal content or risk fines up to 6 percent of their global turnover, just over a year ago. EU countries and EU lawmakers are now thrashing out the details, with debate over the definition of an online marketplace subject to the rules and the criteria for banning targeted advertisements. There is a very strong momentum to get things done. And the leadership of the French presidency may allow us to finalize the Digital Services Act before the end of April. But if we work hard, and were lucky, it may be possible, Vestager told Reuters in an interview. Vestager last week secured the green light from EU countries and EU lawmakers for her other landmark proposal, called the Digital Markets Act (DMA), targeting Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. The DMA sets out a list of dos and donts and gives companies designated as online gatekeepers, which control access and data on their platforms, six months to comply with the rules. Businesses, however, say that is too short for such complex legislation. Vestager said there would be no extension as companies are aware of what constitutes anti-competitive practices. Well, actually both I think we in our work and the companies should be very happy that we have six months because it was one of the things that were intensively discussed during the negotiations, she said. And since both the prohibitions and the obligations are things that come from established case law, I dont think any of them are sort of big surprises. Asked whether the DMA would cover non-U.S. tech giants, Vestager said: Its likely but I dont know. Observers said booking.com and Alibaba may fall under the new rules. By Foo Yun Chee Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) speaks about his opposition to S. 1, the "For The People Act" in Washington, on June 17, 2021. (Joshua Roberts/Getty Images) Disgusting and Inhumane: Sen. Scott Condemns CCP Over Death of Falun Gong Practitioner While in Custody U.S. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) has condemned the Chinese communist regime for its persecution of a 65-year-old Falun Gong practitioner and mother, who died in custody after being arrested simply for practicing her spiritual beliefs. Ji Yunzhi died on March 21 after being tortured while in custody, 48 days after she was put in a detention center in Bairin Left Banner, in northern Chinas Inner Mongolia region, according to Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that documents the Chinese Communist Partys persecution of Falun Gong. She is survived by her husband and two sons, one of whom is U.S. resident Simon Zhang. My heart breaks for Simon and his father dealing with this tragic and senseless loss, Scott said in a March 29 statement. Beijings gross campaign against Falun Gong practitioners has gone on for far too long, and its latest victim is an innocent woman who was simply living out her beliefs in the face of Communist Chinas oppressive authoritarian regime. Ji Yunzhi with her son Simon Zhang in an undated photo. (Sen. Scotts office) Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that features moral teachings based on three core tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, along with a set of slow-moving exercises. The discipline surged in popularity in China during the 1990s, with 70 million to 100 million practitioners by the end of the decade, according to estimates. In 1999, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deemed that popularity a threat to its control, and began a nationwide persecution campaign to eradicate the practice. Since then, millions of adherents have been thrown into jails, labor camps, detention centers, and other facilities, where they are subjected to torture, brainwashing, and organ harvesting. It is no secret that brutal human rights abuses like this regularly occur in Communist China, and that Xi Jinpings regime regularly imprisons and tortures innocent people, Scott said. Death in Custody According to Minghui, following Jis death, her family hurried to the hospital where her body lay. However, local police officers denied their request to let them view her body. Though kept outside the door, the family members could see her esophagus was cut open and her face and shoulder were stained with blood. Meanwhile, local authorities mobilized a large number of police officers to guard Jis body, Minghui said. Family members said the officers were there to conceal evidence of abuse and to prevent them from examining or photographing her body. Prior to her death, Ji suffered severe beatings by guards and other inmates at the detention center, which almost killed her, according to Minghui. If I end up with death, Ji once told her cellmates, I must have died from persecution, Minghui reported. Scott said that Chinese Communist Party thugs had previously lied to Simons family and claimed they werent torturing his mom. Chinese authorities also refused to allow Ji to go home to be with her husband in her final days, the senator said. Its disgusting and inhumane, he said. Reenactment of one of the torture methods employed by Chinese officials to coerce Falun Gong practitioners to renounce their faith. (Minghui.org) Prior to her recent detention, Ji had previously been sent to labor camps in Inner Mongolia in 2001 and 2008, where she suffered various forms of mistreatment and torture, including prolonged electrocution, according to Minghui. Scott hopes that Jis case and others like hers can serve as a wakeup call to all U.S. companies doing business in communist China, such as Intel, Nike, Coca-Cola, Delta, and Wall Street hedge funds. Any company that continues to work in Communist China is funneling money to the regime and funding these atrocities, he said. The Chinese regimes more than two-decades-long suppression of Falun Gong adherents has been described by experts as a genocide. There are no signs that the persecution is abating. Data compiled by Minghui show that 782 adherents were detained or harassed simply for their spiritual beliefs during the first two months this year, including 33 aged 80 and older. A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the number of Jis offspring. She has two sons. The Epoch Times regrets the error. In this handout provided by the Australian Department of Defence, Armadale Class Patrol Boat, HMAS Armidale, sails into the Port of Honiara, Guadalcanal Island, Solomon Islands, on Dec. 1, 2021. (CPL Brodie Cross/Australian Department of Defence via Getty Images) Echoes of South China Sea: Expert Calls on Pacific Nations to Stop Chinese Military Deal Pacific nations should pressure the Solomon Islands government to step away from an impending deal with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), warning it could result in the regions militarisation and a ratcheting of tensions, according to a defence expert. The deal, which surprised officials last week, was revealed after it began circulating online on March 24 and could open the door for Chinese security personnel, including police, soldiers, weaponry, and naval ships, to be stationed in the Pacific nationbased just 1,700 kilometres from the northern Australian city of Cairns. The Solomons was the site of the Battle of Guadalcanal during World War II and fought over tooth and nail because of its influence over the sea lanes in the region. Michael Shoebridge, defence director at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the issue did not just concern the Solomon Islands government but was a problem shared by every country in the South Pacific. This is a fundamental change for the region that will bring direct military tension and conflict right into the South Pacific, he told The Epoch Times. A good way of thinking about that would be everything we see happening in the South China Sea, East China Sea, and the Taiwan Straitsthat will be enabled right here in the South Pacific by a growing Peoples Liberation Army presence. Ships are docked offshore in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, on Nov. 24, 2018. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo) He warned that if the people in the South Pacific region wanted to see the region become an echo of the South China Seawhere tensions have escalated after Beijing built and militarised three man-made islandsthan we should all welcome the Sogavare governments negotiations. Otherwise, governments should collectively try to stop Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare from entering the agreement. Australian and New Zealand leaders have scrambled after revelations of the Framework Agreement Between the Government of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and the Government of the Solomon Islands on Security Cooperation emerged. New Zealand (NZ) Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta has travelled to Fiji to discuss the deal with Pacific leaders. Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has spoken with the leaders of Fiji and Papua New Guinea after noting that the agreement did not come as a surprise. This is an issue of concern for the region, but it is; it has not come as a surprise. We have been long aware of these pressures. Thats why we had the Pacific step up. Thats why we doubled our effort, he told reporters on March 28. Solomon Islands Prime Minister Sogavare responded to criticism of the deal the next day, telling Parliament that it was very insulting to see the backlash. FILE PHOTO: Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare addresses the 72nd United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, the U.S., September 22, 2017. (Reuters/Eduardo Munoz) We are not pressured in any way by our new friends, and there is no intention whatsoever to ask China to build a military base in the Solomon Islands, he said in comments obtained by Reuters. He said the Solomons had asked Australia to help build a naval base in the country but was refused because of an existing defence program with neighbouring Papua New Guinea. Cleo Paskal, an associate fellow of the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House, has warned that the defiant Sogavare could attempt to solidify his hold on power if he locks in the current partnership with Beijing. (Sogavare could say,) We need outside help to come and create stability in the country, and our friends China will come and do it, Paskal told The Epoch Times. And thats when they arrest the leaders, the Malaitan leaders, and God forbid what happens to them in detention. She said Australia and New Zealand should try to reinvigorate the democratic process in the countryvia the 2000 Townsville Peace Agreementto put more pressure on Sogavare. Put out the steps that the various provinces, including Malaita, agreed to. Theres a whole series of things that have already been negotiatedeverybody signed on, including the government under Sogavare, she said. Shoebridge agreed, saying the first order of business for a new government, if elected, should be to unravel the agreement. The actual physical experience of having China act inside the Solomons in the way this agreement sets out will be so obviously at odds with the Solomon Islands own sovereignty and security, he said. A democratic Solomon Islands will end this, but for now the current government seems determined to create this problem for itself and the region. Russia's President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with China's leader Xi Jinping during their meeting at Friendship Palace in Beijing on April 26, 2019. (Alexey Nikolsky/AFP via Getty Images) ESG Investments in Russia and China Are Questioned After Ukraine War For the first time in its history, the war in Ukraine is triggering fundamental questions about funds associated with the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) industry and its presence in Russia and China. Following Moscows invasion of Ukraineand China eyeing TaiwanESG fund managers are feeling a sense of consternation in this environment, industry observers say. Its estimated that ESG funds had more than $8 billion in Russia prior to the countrys military incursion. In addition, European ESG funds have about $130 billion invested in China, the worlds second-largest economy. However, the global investment sector might be assessing its assets a little bit differently moving forward. Although the financial blows of ESG investing in the Eastern European nation have been cushioned, the pecuniary plight in China is more challenging. China is a massive market, but its lackluster response to the worst military conflict in Europe since World War II is leaving some asset managers befuddled and cautious. For now, ESG fund managers and investors are keeping a close eye on the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. Despite calls for peace in the region, Beijing has made moves and released comments that suggest its on the side of Russia, noting that it doesnt want to threaten its strategic relationship with the worlds largest energy exporter. When the International Court of Justice voted to require Russia to halt its military operations in Ukraine immediately, China joined Moscow in dissenting. Workers install solar panels at a photovoltaic power station in Hami, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, on Aug. 22, 2011. (Chinatopix via AP) Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin noted last week that Russia should be allowed to attend the next G-20 summit. No member has the right to remove another country as a member. The G-20 should implement real multilateralism, strengthen unity and cooperation, Wang said. At the same time, Chinas state-run Sinopec Group reportedly suspended discussions for a significant petrochemical investment and a gas marketing venture in Russia. Moreover, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, headquartered in Beijing, emulated the World Banks decision to stop its $1.1 billion approved or proposed activities pertaining to Russia and Belarus. China has also refrained from sending aircraft parts to Russia, forcing Moscow to search for alternative sources. Despite these developments, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has reaffirmed the governments relationship with China, calling it more robust than ever. And RussiaChina relations are what could prompt questions surrounding ESG funds and their principles, experts say. Industry experts say ESG is incompatible with authoritarian regimes. However, Paul Clements-Hunt, founder of advisory firm The Blended Capital Group, told Bloomberg that ESG fund managers and investors have failed. ESG is being used ineffectively, Clements-Hunt said. The obsession with easy money-making is overriding everything. In recent years, BlackRock has significantly increased its focus on ESG investments. However, the U.S. fund manager has been criticized for investing in Chinese enterprises that aid the Chinese regimes military and security forces, as well as its human rights violations. Considering Chinas economic connections to the rest of the world, fund managers believe it could be more challenging to divest from the $16 trillion economy. In the end, both ESG and non-ESG funds might reassess their investment decisions overseas, according to Samuel Adams, CEO at Vert Asset Management. I think all managers, not just ESG managers, will be revisiting whether investing in Russia and China are worth the risks, Adams told The Epoch Times. But theres a sort of loophole for the ESG realm, according to Hortense Bioy, Morningstars global head of sustainability research. There are still people who inappropriately conflate sustainability and ethics, Bioy told Bloomberg. Sustainable and ESG funds arent the same as ethical funds. A general view shows a local oil refinery during sunset in Omsk, Russia, on March 16, 2022. (Alexey Malgavko/Reuters) This is why ESG funds can maintain diversified portfolios that park capital in weapons manufacturers and crude oil producers. A recent report from CIBC Capital Markets suggests that ESG funds arent placing enough emphasis on social and governance. This led analysts to scoop up shares in Russian energy firms late last year. In evaluating ESG risk, however, carbon should not be the only variable to consider. Unfortunately, this doesnt appear to be the case. Tesla is one of the most owned equities within the ESG universe given its environmental performance, yet the company certainly leaves room for improvement on both governance and social issues (Elon Musk is quite anti-union), CIBC analysts wrote in a note to clients. In the most shocking example we have come across to date, the ESG fund universe owned twice as much Russian oil and gas as Canadian oil and gas at the end of last year. Clearly, the concept of aligning investments with the values and ethics of responsible corporate citizens was significantly outweighed by simple, backward-looking carbon metrics. In recent months, ESG funds have also come under intense scrutiny, with accusations that the sustainable investment community is greenwashing companies practices and not spotlighting authentic ESG investing. Financial regulators say that the industry must adopt standardized criteria that organizations need to heed before installing ESG tags on their investment products. Last year, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) stated that misleading terms without any legal definition, such as green hedge, are too pervasive. Similar to ESG derivatives, new expressions such as green hedge are primarily intended for marketing purposes without any legal meaning, ESMA wrote in a report. This contributes to investor confusion and greenwashing risks. In December, UBS suggested that companies, particularly in China, need to disclose their ESG standards better. Sustainability considerations are growing in importance for both companies and investors in China with performance being derived from a companys environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics, the Swiss investment bank stated. A core aspect of sustainability also involves assessing the quality of a companys management and its ability to orient the business away from material risks, toward opportunities. JPMorgan Chase shared this sentiment in a report about challenges surrounding the dissemination of ESG data. There is a rising awareness of ESG issues, and although such issues are generally not currently driving investment decisions, we expect them to play more of a role in the future, the Wall Street titan stated. Global ESG assets are forecast to surpass $53 trillion by 2025. Rescue teams with a piece of the fuselage as they continue to search at the site of a China Eastern passenger jet crash near Wuzhou, Guangxi region, China. (CCTV via Getty Images/Screenshot via The Epoch Times) Too Early to Determine Cause of China Eastern Crash: Former NTSB Official A former official at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) discourages speculation about the causes of the China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 accident, urging the public to stay patient until black box data is read. Barry Strauch, former deputy chief of the NTSBs major investigations division, served as an air crash investigator for 33 years. He also holds licenses as a pilot and an instructor, and authored the book Investigating Human Error: Incidents, Accidents, and Complex Systems. Currently, he is the principal of Strauch Associates, which provides consulting and training services in human factors and transportation accidents. The March 21 China Eastern accident claimed all 132 who were on board, including nine crew, and triggered global attention. Various guesses about causative factors have sprung up from technical problems to corporate operational issues, from pilot suicide to airplane kidnapping. A screen displays cancelled China Eastern Airline flights at Kunming Changshui International Airport in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China on March 22, 2022. (Dake Kang/AP) I am continually amazed at the speculation about causation that an aircraft accident engenders, Strauch told The Epoch Times on March 27. But having worked on many investigations I am also amazed how often those who speculate early about an accidents cause are then shown to be wrong in their speculation. The expert declined to identify contributing factors to the tragic event prior to the readout of black box data. It is very difficult to say at this point whether it is a mechanical- or human-caused event or both, he said. It is also possible that a mechanical issue with the airplane precipitated an inappropriate crew response that made a benign event to a catastrophic one. However, the expert deemed the chances of mechanical trouble as extremely low, based on the safety records of the Boeing 737-800 and Chinas aviation industry over the last decade. George Chiu, a Canada-based insider with more than 10 years of industry experience in China, echoed Strauchs analysis in a March 27 interview. Unlike the 737-Max, the 737-800 is a mature plane model in China that has been in service for more than a decade, said Chiu. A mechanical trouble is highly unlikely, not to mention the cruising height at the time of the accident. Full Investigation Might Take up to 2 Years: Expert Chinese authorities said they have recovered the two black boxes from the flight, a badly damaged cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and a flight data recorder (FDR). Though often referred to as black boxes, they are actually painted bright orange to to aid in their recovery after accidents. A worker holds the second black box recovered at the China Eastern flight crash site near Wuzhou, China on March 23, 2022. (CCTV via Reuters/Screenshot via The Epoch Times) Strauch maintained that a full investigation would take roughly 18 to 24 months to complete either in the United States or in China, depending on the complexity of the investigation and analyses, investigators workload, manpower availability, and other factors. It takes a long time to collect all of the data, write it up, analyze it, and put it all together into one investigation report, the former NTSB veteran said. Because the cost of getting it wrong is so high, investigators review the report multiple times to assure that it is accurate and effectively presents the viewpoint of investigators. By the same token, investigators should be fully aware that the longer it takes to complete the investigation, the less impact the findings will have on the aviation community and the general public, as interest in an accident wanes over time, said the expert. According to Strauch, the two flight recorders should provide investigators with most of the information they need to figure out the causes. The CVR that records cockpit sounds normally provides what the crew said during the event and what sounds they heard. The FDR should inform investigators of what the airplane was doing before and following pilot statements because it records hundreds of parameters about the airplane, its control surfaces, systems, engines, and pilot actions. Their data can even suggest whether an abduction or a pilot suicidal act occurred in the cockpit, said Strauch. Hijacking cannot be called the worst scenario [for flight safety], Chiu told The Epoch Times. The pilot can immediately press the button transponder code to report the abnormality to the area controller. One second will be okay. The Chinese rescue team formally announced on March 26 there were no survivors in the flight crash after six days of scouring the mountain in the southern Chinese region of Guangxi, according to state media. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses Russian and Ukrainian negotiators before their face-to-face talks in Istanbul, on March 29, 2022. (Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Press Office/Handout via Reuters) Face-to-Face Talks Resume With Fresh Hope for Peace in Ukraine Face-to-face peace talks have resumed as negotiators from Russia and Ukraine met in the Turkish capital of Istanbul in a search for common ground that would put an end to the war that has killed thousands of people and driven millions more from their homes. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed the delegates, saying that stopping this tragedy is up to them. We hope that your meetings and your consultations will be auspicious for your countries, for our region, and for all of humanity, Erdogan told the delegates at the start of the talks. NATO member Turkey shares a maritime border with Ukraine and Russia in the Black Sea, has good ties with both countries, and has sought to mediate the conflict. Turkey-mediated talks in Antalya several weeks ago between the foreign ministers of both sides led to no progress on a ceasefire. The Turkish president said he had spoken by phone in recent days with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with Erdogan saying that their conversations had revived expectations for a negotiated settlement. In line with the instructions from your leaders, the negotiations that you are running have given fresh hope for peace, Erdogan told the negotiators ahead of the March 29 discussions. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan greets Russian and Ukrainian negotiators ahead of their face-to-face talks in Istanbul, Turkey, on March 29, 2022. (Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Press Office/Handout via Reuters) In a video address ahead of the talks, Zelenskyy said his country is prepared to declare its neutrality, a key demand on Moscows part, and is open to compromise on the fate of the Donbas, the contested region in eastern Ukraine. A new round of negotiations is ahead, because we are looking for peace. Really. Without delay, Zelenskyy said. Ukraines priorities for the talks are well known, he said, with the countrys sovereignty and territorial integrity being beyond doubt and meaningful security guarantees being mandatory. Our goal is obviouspeace and the restoration of normal life, Zelenskyy said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is seen in a photo provided by the Presidents Office on March 25, 2022. (Office of the President of Ukraine) In an interview with a number of Russian media outlets, Zelenskyy said security guarantees, Ukrainian neutrality, and the countrys nuclear-free status are the most important issues in talks to put an end to the war. Russia has called the invasion a special military operation to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine, generally understood as some form of degradation of Ukraines military forces and an ouster of its political leadership. Zelenskyy insisted these two matters wouldnt be the subject of the talks. We do not discuss de-Nazification and demilitarization at all. I said that we will not sit at the negotiating table at all if we talk about some kind of demilitarization, some kind of de-Nazification. For me, these are completely incomprehensible things, Zelenskyy said. The Ukrainian president reiterated his earlier view that any terms of a peace deal would have to be put to a referendum in Ukraine, while insisting that before a compromise is put to a popular vote, there needs to be a full withdrawal of Russian forces from his country. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow that the decision to proceed with face-to-face talks in Istanbul is important and provides an opportunity for negotiations to move forward in a focused, tighter, and meaningful way, according to state-backed press agency TASS. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov attends a joint news conference of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Moscow on Feb. 18, 2022. (Sputnik/Sergey Guneev/Kremlin via Reuters) Regrettably, we cannot say there have been any significant achievements or breakthroughs so far, Peskov said regarding the talks. The spokesperson also declined to go into any details of what Russias expectations or demands were for the discussions in Istanbul, saying that such disclosure would be harmful to the negotiations. More than a month into the conflict, more than 3.8 million people have fled abroad, thousands have been killed and injured, and Russias economy has been hammered by sanctions. Voters cast their ballots at Keevan Elementary School in North St. Louis, Mo., on Aug. 4, 2020. (Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images) FBI: Election Officials in Nine States Targeted by Cyberattacks The FBI warned Tuesday that election officials in nine states have been targeted in recent cyberattacks, including phishing emails containing malicious links. If successful, this activity may provide cyber actors with sustained, undetected access to a victims systems, the FBI said in a report (pdf). These emails shared similar attachment files, used compromised email addresses, and were sent close in time, suggesting a concerted effort to target U.S. election officials. Such cyberattacks have occurred since October 2021, the bureau said, adding that such incidents will likely increase or continue in the lead-up to the 2022 U.S. midterm elections in November. On Oct. 5, 2021, unidentified hackers targeted certain election officials in nine states while also targeting representatives of the National Association of Secretaries of State, the FBI said. These emails originated from at least two email addresses with the same attachment titled, INVOICE INQUIRY.PDF,' the report said, adding that the email redirected users to a website that harvests logins and passwords. One of the email addresses sending the phishing emails was a compromised U.S. government officials email account, the agency continued, adding that both emails contained Microsoft Word document attachments regarding invoices, which redirected users to unidentified online credential harvesting websites. The FBI did not say whether the alleged cybercriminals had ties to another country or group. Previously, U.S. intelligence officials have blamed Chinese, Russian, and Iranian state actors for coordinated cyberattacks against U.S. officials. Proactive monitoring of election infrastructure [including official email accounts] and communication between FBI and its state, local, territorial, and tribal partners about this type of activity will provide opportunities to mitigate instances of credential harvesting and compromise, identify potential targets and information sought by threat actors, and identify threat actors, the FBI also wrote. As a result, the FBI recommended that elections officials and other government workers should take precautions to stop phishing attacks. Earlier this month, President Joe Biden called on American companies to make certain all necessary steps are taken to deal with a potential cyberattack amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Russian officials blamed the United States for leading a massive cyberattack on the countrys critical infrastructure and network systems. In a statement posted on its website, the Russian Foreign Ministry claimed the U.S. has allegedly targeted state institutions, the media, critical infrastructure facilities, and life support systems. An army of cyber mercenaries is waging war against us, facing specific combat missions, often bordering on open terrorism, the ministry also said. No one should have any doubts: the cyber aggression unleashed against Russia will lead to grave consequences for its instigators and perpetrators. A spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Agency, Emily Horne, told The Hill that Russias claims were unfounded. The United States Government has not engaged in the activity described by Russia. Moscows statements to the contrary amount to disinformation, said Horne. Naomi Irion, 18, of Fernley, Nev., makes a purchase shortly before authorities say she disappeared before dawn, on March 12, 2022. (Lyon County Sheriff's Office via AP) FBI Offering up to $10,000 Reward for Information in Search for Missing Nevada Teen The FBI is offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to the location of an 18-year-old Nevada woman who was abducted from a Walmart parking lot earlier this month and has been missing since. Naomi Christine Irion was last seen (pdf) in the Walmart parking lot in the city of Fernley in Lyon County, Nevada, on March 12 at approximately 5 a.m. Fernley is approximately 30 miles east of Reno. Irion was catching an employee bus to work at a Reno-area Panasonic facility close to her home in Casey Valley where she lives with her older brother, officials said. She was wearing a blue Panasonic company shirt, a gray cardigan sweater, gray pants, and brown boots and was carrying a black purse at the time she went missing. Sheriffs officials and the FBI havent detected any signal from her iPhone and have been unable to locate it since her disappearance. However, officials did locate her vehicle three days later near the Sherwin-Williams Western Emulsion Plant and said forensics teams and officers found evidence was discovered leading investigators to believe Naomis disappearance was suspicious in nature according to a Lyon County Sheriffs Office press release. Surveillance video showed a man wearing a mask and hooded sweatshirt getting into Irions car outside the Walmart store having previously paced up and down around the parking lot. The vehicle then exited the parking lot. Lyon County sheriffs Detective Erik Kusmerz told reporters in Fernley on March 22 that Irion was active on social media and her cellphone until 5:23 a.m., a minute before the man entered her car. On Friday, the Lyon County Sheriffs Office said they have arrested Troy Driver, 41, from Fallon, Nevada, in connection with Irions disappearance. Hes currently being held at the Yerington Jail on kidnapping charges and is due in court on March 30. Authorities said they have impounded and taken in for evidence a pickup truck that they believe may have been involved in Irions disappearance. However, the investigation is still ongoing. Irions older brother, Casey Valley, reported her missing when she didnt return home on March 13. Irion had been living with her brother after moving to Nevada from the South African capital of Pretoria in August 2021. Naomis father, Herve Irion works for the U.S. State Department in the foreign service and is currently stationed in South Africa alongside his wife, Diana. Irions parents have both flown to Nevada to help search for their daughter. Meanwhile, an online fundraiser has been launched to help assist Irions parents with the travel costs and other expenses related to the search for Naomi and has so far raised over $37,000. No piece of information is too small to report at this point, Diana Irion, said at a press conference last week. We need everyones help across the nation She could be anywhere. Irion is 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighs between 230 and 250 pounds, according to the FBI. Her hair is naturally brown but has been dyed black and she has green eyes, although officials noted that one eye has a brown tint to it. She also has a septum piercing and a tattoo of a smiley face on her right ankle. The Associated Press contributed to this report. President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden walk to board Marine One for travel to the G-7 Summit in the UK from the Ellipse at the White House in Washington on June 9, 2021. (Leah Millis/Reuter) First Lady Jill Bidens Community College Closed Over Bomb Threat First Lady Jill Biden was forced to cancel a community college class after a bomb threat was sent to the Northern Virginia Community College on Tuesday, the school and a spokesperson said. Biden was told about the threat at Northern Virginia Community College before she left the White House on Tuesday morning, her spokesman Michael LaRosa told news outlets. At no point was she in any danger, LaRosa said. The Epoch Times has contacted the first ladys office for comment. Earlier, an alert was sent out by the school on Twitter. The nature of the bomb threat was not disclosed. CODE RED Alexandria Campus is closed today due to a bomb threat and the college has evacuated the area. Follow instructions of authorities and avoid area, NOVA Community Colleges wrote on Twitter. North Virginia Community Colleges website as of noon Tuesday displayed a message that read: All campuses closed at 11:30AM. In-person classes are cancelled; remote classes continue as scheduled. Biden, 70, is listed on the NOVA website as a nine-month professor who teaches at the Alexandria campus. Its not clear exactly what class she teaches, but the White House has said previously that she instructs writing and English at the school. It comes weeks after Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, was evacuated from an event at a Washington, D.C. high school due to a bomb threat that was issued on Feb. 8. We have to go, a Secret Service agent was heard telling Emhoff during an event at Dunbar High School, according to an Associated Press reporter. Photos captured by the news agency also showed him being grabbed by the arm and being moved by the agent. Kristen Metzger, a D.C. Police spokeswoman, told The Washington Post at the time police were informed of the bomb threat but no item or device was found. Days later, two 16-year-olds were arrested and charged for allegedly making similar threats in the area, officials said. The two 16-year-old boys, whose identities have not been released, were charged with terroristic threats, officials said. A 16-year-old juvenile male, of Southeast, DC, has been arrested and charged with Terroristic Threats in connection to multiple bomb threats yesterday, the D.C. Police Department said on Twitter on Feb. 10, adding the agency continues to investigate these incidents with our federal partners. And another 16-year old juvenile male, of Northwest, DC, has been arrested and charged with Terroristic Threats in connection to a bomb threat at Kipp DC College Preparatory school, it added. As some parents decide whether to homeschool their children, a specific facet of the homeschooling population may offer some unique insight. Among homeschoolers you might be surprised to find a great many former public school teachers who said no thank you to the prescribed route and chose the path of homeschool for their own children. One such parent is Sarah Miller from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Sarah taught professionally for 10 years before choosing to homeschool her own children. She now blogs about her experience and helps other parents who are just getting started. I recently asked Sarah about her homeschooling journey. Heres what she said. The Epoch Times: How old are your children, and how long have you been homeschooling? Sarah Miller: My son is 6 and in first grade. My daughter is 3 and starting preschool this year. We are starting our fourth year homeschooling, since we started when my son was in preschool. The Epoch Times: As a former teacher, what factors led to your decision to homeschool your children? Ms. Miller: Our decision to homeschool started when trying to choose a preschool for my son. He has a late birthday and would have started preschool just weeks after turning 3. We didnt qualify to delay a year in our local public school, but my son was very young and very active. I wanted him to have another year at home to play, explore, and grow up before spending time in a classroom environment. We decided to homeschool for one year. By the end of the year, we knew that homeschooling was an incredible blessing for our family. I had watched my son thrive with the focused attention and customized lessons I could give him, and we both loved the quality time we got to spend together. I am so grateful that we found homeschooling. Its a great solution for our family. The Epoch Times: Would you say your teacher training and experience helped you as a homeschooling parent? Ms. Miller: In some ways, my teacher training does help in our homeschool. I know how to plan a lesson and how to evaluate and choose a curriculum that will work well for us. I am familiar with a lot of research about how kids learn best that I am able to apply to our homeschool. But in some ways, being a trained teacher is a disadvantage too. I often have to challenge myself to think outside the box about what our school looks like. For many families who are successful at homeschooling, school looks very different than what the public schools offer. I am learning to challenge what I learned in school about how to teach and to adapt it to fit how my kids learn in a more natural way. The Epoch Times: Do you feel that homeschooling parents without teacher training are at a disadvantage? Ms. Miller: I dont think that parents without teacher training are at a disadvantage. There is so much information available about how to homeschool, especially now that it is becoming more popular. All homeschool parents, whether or not they are trained teachers, will learn how to teach each of their individual children as they spend time teaching them. Parents have a unique advantage that more than makes up for any lack of teacher training they have. As parents, they are an expert on their own children. They know how their children think, what they are interested in, and what motivates them better than anyone else. They care about their childrens success more than any other person on Earth. The Epoch Times: What have you found to be the greatest challenges of homeschooling? Ms. Miller: Homeschooling is a big time commitment, so balancing the time it takes to homeschool well with my other life responsibilities is a challenge. It can also be hard not to take things personally when we have a hard day in our homeschool. I care so much about my kids learning and I want nothing more than for them to be successful. Its hard when they are struggling with what they are learning or not feeling motivated to learn. I am learning to be patient and to prioritize my relationship with my kids first, my kids love of learning second, and then whatever I am trying to teach them that day third. The Epoch Times: What have you found to be the greatest benefits of homeschooling? Ms. Miller: Homeschooling allows us to spend a lot of quality time together as a family. Every day I have the opportunity to invest time intentionally into my relationships with my children. It is such a blessing to be the one who gets to see the light in their eyes when they understand something for the first time, or their excitement about new skills they are learning. My kids also have a close relationship with each other because they are homeschooled together. They are forming a strong sibling relationship now which I hope will be a lifelong blessing for them. The Epoch Times: Whats one thing you wish you knew about homeschooling when you were just getting started? Ms. Miller: Everyones homeschool is unique, because everyones kids are unique. As a homeschool parent, it is important not to compare what you are doing with what you see others doing. Instead, spend time observing your kids and how they learn. Try to create an experience for them that will help them love learning, and give them lots of opportunities to learn in the way that they learn best. Because every child is different, this will look different for every family. But that is a good thing! The Epoch Times: What advice would you give a parent today who is considering homeschooling their children? Ms. Miller: I would recommend taking some time to adjust. This is a big change in your familys priorities. Start slow and take some time to get used to your new normal. Its OK to lower your expectations and relax, and its OK not to get everything done at first. Learning how to homeschool takes time, both for you and for your child. German Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck speaks during an extraordinary session, after Russia launched a massive military operation against Ukraine, at the lower house of parliament Bundestag in Berlin, Germany, on Feb. 27, 2022. (Michele Tantussi/Reuters) G-7 Reject Paying for Russian Natural Gas in Rubles The German energy minister has announced that the Group of Seven major economies (G-7) had agreed to reject categorically Russian President Vladimir Putins demand that payments for Russian natural gas be made in rubles. On Monday, when asked about Putins ultimatum demanding that unfriendly countries must make payments for natural gas in Russian fiat currency, German politician Robert Habeck told reporters all G-7 ministers agreed completely that this (would be) a one-sided and clear breach of the existing contracts. Habeck continued, payment in ruble is not acceptable and we will urge the companies affected not to follow Putins demand. The remarks follow after a demand issued by President Putin on Wednesday, requiring that all payments for exports of Russian natural gas must be made in the countrys fiat currency, the ruble, which has lost more than 50 percent of its value relative to the U.S. dollar since the beginning of the yearparticularly after Russias invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions from the United States and its allies. Many see this as an illegal violation of the countrys existing trade agreements, which make no such stipulation about payments for natural gas exports. However, the Russian head of state has remained steadfast in his commitment to the new policy, which is effective March 31st. According to President Putin, the new policy is an attempt to protect Russian economic sovereignty from the freezing of assets by Western nations. [A] number of Western countries made illegitimate decisions on the so-called freezing of the Russian assets, effectively drawing a line over reliability of their currencies, undermining the trust for those currencies, Putin said during a meeting last week, as he announced the new trade policy. Since Putin issued this ultimatum, E.U. politicians have attempted to downplay its strategic significance, arguing that the move arises out of desperation. Putins demand to convert the contracts to ruble (means) he is standing with his back to the wall in that regard, otherwise he wouldnt have made that demand, Habeck stated. However, other analysts consider Putins strategy a masterstroke of diplomacy, which could potentially salvage the value of the ruble by using Russias most powerful leverage in its negotiations with the western bloc: the flow of Russian fossil fuel exports to Western Europe. Russia supplies about 40 percent of the E.U.s natural gas supply, which has become especially relevant in Germany (the de facto locus of power in the E.U.) since the countrys decision to dismantle its nuclear program in the past decade. Given the sensitive nature of natural gas imports and the waning European winter, existing trade sanctions have exempted natural gas. With the demand that energy payments be made in the currency of the Russian Federation, Putin is attempting to force the hand of the Western bloc by threatening the European energy supply. Since the onset of the invasion, the ruble has collapsed relative to the U.S. dollar and all major fiat currencies, jeopardizing the entire Russian economy. Notwithstanding perhaps its large and powerful military and nuclear arsenal, Russias greatest leverage may lie in its fossil fuel exports to Europe. However, compliance with Russias demand would likely weaken the position of the Western bloc, which accounts for the G-7s refusal to comply. With the European winter receding as April approaches, the timing of Putins demand is perhaps less threatening than it may have been three or four months ago. However, in the medium and long term, European policymakers will find themselves in a difficult position as they attempt to shore up E.U. energy independence in time for the next and subsequent winters. The Frankfurt skyline is pictured, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Frankfurt, Germany, on Jan. 5, 2022. (Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters) German First-Quarter Dealmaking Slides to 6-Year Low Due to Ukraine War Jitters Mergers and acquisitions in Germany in the first three months of 2022 have dropped 10 percent from the same period in 2021 in what has been the slowest start to a year since 2016 due to market uncertainty caused by Russias invasion of Ukraine. Equity capital markets in the euro zones biggest economy have been hit harder as market jitters have led to a total dearth of deals with no initial public offerings (IPOs) or convertible offerings recorded so far this year, according to Refinitiv data. It is unlikely that companies will choose to list before Easter, even unlikely before the summer given current market conditions, said Armin von Falkenhayn, head of corporate and investment banking in Germany, Austria,and Switzerland at Bank of America. German equity capital markets raised only $1 billion so far this year, down 88 percent compared with the first quarter of 2021. But appetite for M&A deals remains strong even if boardrooms have become more risk-averse. Unlike at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, the M&A market has definitely not come to a standstill and projects are continuing. But parties are examining very carefully how the conflict may affect each company, said Tibor Kossa, co-head of German and Austrian M&A at Goldman Sachs. While the Ukraine crisis has affected only around 1-2 percent of German companies sales, the war and its longer-term consequences absorb a lot of management capacity, said Berthold Mueller, chairman of DACH investment banking at Jefferies. Yet amid prevailing caution to begin new processes, some auctions that were launched before the war managed to get to the finish line. One such example was Siemens $1.3 billion carve-out of its mail and parcel logistics business, which was sold to Hamburg-based Koerber in February and led to consumer products and services accounting for one-third of German target M&A in the first quarter. Other deals in the technology sector contributed to 31 percent of German target M&A including the purchase by Italian infrastructure and transport services firm Atlantia of Siemens traffic software solutions business, Yunex. Strong growth in the technology sector contributed to an increase in mid-market deal activity to its highest year-to-date total since 2015, according to Refinitiv data. Private equity remains open to acquisitions and transactions can continue to be funded, said Christopher Droege, co-head of German and Austrian M&A at Goldman Sachs. Eyes on Transatlantic Tie-Ups One sector that seems resilient to the backdrop of war is telecommunicationsarguably a necessity for information flow in times of crisis. Earlier this month, Deutsche Telekom launched the sale of its towers business and is collecting indicative offers together with adviser Goldman Sachs, in a deal that could value the business at close to 18 billion euros ($19.86 billion). Dealmakers say there are intense dialogues with corporate clients as well as private equity and the deal pipeline for the rest of the year looks intact. Transatlantic tie-ups could increase as the European landscape becomes more challenging. In the future we expect that German companies looking for takeovers will orient themselves increasingly towards North America since the growth gap between Europe and the United States is likely to widen further in the current environment, Goldmans Kossa said. Nevertheless, dealmaking during wartime remains hard to stomach for some parties that prefer to wait for peacetime. A buyer cannot go before their board of directors and pretend this war does not exist. The question is how long this situation will last. That is why many companies tend to wait until the situation clears up, said Jefferies Mueller. By Emma-Victoria Farr and Alexander Hubner The United Food & Commercial Workers International Union (U.F.C.W) logo is seen at their headquarters in Wash., on Aug. 30, 2020. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters) Grocery Workers Vote to Strike If Needed in Southern California for Higher Wages Around 48,000 grocery workers voted to strike if needed when seeking higher wages from stores owned by Kroger Co and Albertsons Companies Inc. in Southern California, the UFCW 770 union said on Saturday. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) has been seeking significantly higher and equal pay, sufficient staffing, and enough working hours in their negotiations with the grocers, which began on Jan. 28. As U.S. food prices rise, workers are pushing big corporations that have been posting record profits to offer more. Politicians including President Joe Biden and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have voiced support for such demands. The union said in a statement it would notify workers if a decision were made to strike. It said there was a big disconnect between its proposal and the offer of an hourly raise of 60 cents, or less than a 1 percent increase, made by the grocers, including Ralphs, Albertsons, Pavilions and Vons. Kroger-owned Ralphs called the unions proposal unrealistic as it is expensive to do business in California, while proposing to maintain its nearly $133 million annual investment in health care benefits. The grocer, which has around 190 stores in California, said it might start making contingency plans, including advertising for temporary workers, to keep its business running. As the previous workers contract expired on March 6, the labor union has slapped unfair labor practice charges against the grocers. The union said bargaining would resume on Wednesday and if talks failed, it would decide on the next steps. It warned the workers not to walk out until it notified them and said it would have strike benefit funds available to support members if the companies forced the union to take action. Ralphs said on Monday it hoped the union would return to the bargaining table with renewed interest in reaching a balanced deal. Albertsons did not respond to a request for comment. Army Major Alexei Fainblout and his wife, Jodi, at the Shen Yun performance in Honolulu on March 27, 2022. (Nancy Ma/ The Epoch Times) HONOLULU, HawaiiShen Yun, a performing arts company based in New York, travels the globe spreading the divine culture of ancient China nearly lost to 70 years of communist rule. U.S. Army Major Alexei Fainblout and his wife Jodi Fainblout attended the performance on the afternoon of March 27. On what makes Shen Yun a beautiful experience, Major Fainblout said: besides the fact that its a flawlessly executed performance, its also that the messaging is great. Its one of respecting tradition, and faith, compassion, and how that translates to modern times. The fact that Shen Yun tours the globe demonstrating the ancient values of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance brought him great hope. I think it is a huge impact on taking this message around the world, he said. I think it brings people on the same page that there are some universal values that are important to all people. And if we adhere to those values, I think it will be less pain and suffering in the world. Shen Yun was the first theater performance the couple saw since the pandemic. Now that people are coming out of their caves [after] COVID, he said, this is a great step to start bringing people out and bringing back that spirit of unity. To anyone who hasnt seen Shen Yun yet, he described it as a greatly technically executed show with a good enlightened message. Janelle Castillero, U.S. Army operations assistant C.O., and her daughters at the Shen Yun performance in Honolulu on March 27, 2022. (NTD) Janelle Castillero, operations assistant commanding officer at U.S. Army Pacific at Fort Shafter, brought her daughters out to see Shen Yun on the same evening. She said the girls were glued to the action onstage. The colors were eye-catching. The storylines were beautiful, Castillero said. The music, the dancing was spectacular to me. I could never catch a dull moment. At the shows end, she wished she could watch it again. I really wish it would be coming back because there is so much detail and traditions behind it, she said. The details, the storylines, how it was to how it is now. It made you realize how fast the culture and tradition kind of fade away, but kind of brought back at the same time. This is the core of Shen Yuns mission: to preserve and revive the 5,000 years of heritage that is at risk of being lost forever. To Chinese people, faith-based traditions are the core of their identity and the essence of a meaningful life. I think its extremely important because tradition is fading away with how the generations are not seen. And normally these days, the traditional buildings are getting replaced by modernized technology and architecture and not realizing how and where they come from, Castillero said. So I think its very important for shows like this to keep producing every year. I think its very important for especially kids to see outside of the internet, on global Googling all that stuff, on books, for them to actually see it in real life. For me, its very important. Reporting by NTD and Nancy Ma. The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. We have covered audience reactions since Shen Yuns inception in 2006. Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro gestures during a press conference at the Vila Nova Star Hospital after he was discharged, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Jan. 5, 2022 (Nelson Almeida/AFP via Getty Images) Brazilian President Bolsonaro Super Well After Overnight Stay in Hospital BRASILIABrazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was discharged from hospital on Tuesday morning after spending the night there for tests, the presidents office said. Bolsonaro was hospitalized in Brasilia late on Monday after feeling abdominal discomfort, according to Communications Minister Fabio Faria. Faria said on Twitter early on Tuesday the president was super well after leaving the hospital. Bolsonaro has kept his Tuesdays agenda unchanged and traveled to the city of Ponta Pora on the border between Brazil and Paraguay, where he is expected to attend an event later this morning, his aides said. This was the second time Bolsonaro has been hospitalized this year. In January, the president was on vacation in the southern state of Santa Catarina when he was urgently taken to hospital in Sao Paulo with an intestinal obstruction. The blockage, the latest complication he has experienced since a 2018 stabbing during a campaign rally, was cleared after a few days and no surgery was needed. Peter Navarro, Director of the National Trade Council speaks during a press briefing in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, on March 22, 2020. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images) House Jan. 6 Panel Advances Charges Against Peter Navarro, Dan Scavino The House Jan. 6 committee voted on Monday evening to advance criminal charges against two former aides to President Donald Trump in the commissions latest bid to bolster its authority amid a raging legal battle over executive privilege. The Jan. 6 committee was formed in June in a mostly party-line vote, and all but two RepublicansReps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.)voted against forming the commission. The committee is led almost exclusively by Democrats, with Kinzinger and Cheney the only Republicans sitting on the panel. The committee recommended contempt of Congress charges against Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino, who each refused to testify before the committee, citing their claims of executive privilege as former White House advisers. At the time of the vote, Jan. 6 Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) rejected the claims of executive privilege. Executive privilege doesnt belong to just any White House official. It belongs to the president, Thompson said. Here, President Biden has been clear that executive privilege does not prevent cooperation with the Select Committee by either Mr. Scavino or Mr. Navarro. Even if a president has formally invoked executive privilege regarding testimony of a witnesswhich is not the case herethat witness has the obligation to sit down under oath and assert the privilege question by question. But these witnesses didnt even bother to show up. Neither of the former aides have given public responses to the charges, but Scavino seemed to refute the charges in a post he shared on Facebook of a Breitbart article that calls the committees false. Claiming that the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally amounted to a full-fledged insurrection against the United States government, the Jan. 6 commission has been zealous in their pursuit of former Trump allies, including those who were not working with the White House at the time of the rally. In October, the commission set its sights on former White House adviser Steve Bannon, who left the White House years before the Jan. 6 rally. Bannon, citing executive privilege, refused the summons. The Democrat-led House quickly advanced a contempt of Congress charge against Bannon, and President Joe Bidens Department of Justice has since indicted Bannon on the charge. Trumps attorneys have argued that Bannon and other former officials shouldnt comply because the requested information is protected by Trumps executive privilege. Much the same story has played out with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who also refused the Jan. 6 commission summons in November, citing executive privilege. Since then, the Jan. 6 commission has further expanded its search, targeting sitting members of Congress like Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), and even House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). McCarthy called the efforts to subpoena sitting members of Congress an abuse of power, and all three House Republicans refused to testify before the committee. The panel also set its sights recently on Ginni Thomas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wife, over claims that she texted Meadows during the Jan. 6 rally. In view of the partisan nature of the summons and charges advanced by the commission some Republicans, including Trump himself, have accused it of a witch hunt exclusively targeting Democrats GOP enemies. Others, like McCarthy, have been more ambiguous in their critiques of the committee. When the commission sent out its subpoena to Bannon, McCarthy argued that the ongoing legal disputes made the subpoenas legitimacy unknown. Theyre issuing an invalid subpoena, McCarthy said. Issuing an invalid subpoena weakens our power. He has the right to go to the court to see if he has executive privilege or not. I dont know if he does or not, but neither does the committee. So theyre weakening the power of Congress itself by issuing an invalid subpoena. With the committees recommendation that Navarro and Scavino face criminal charges, it will now be left to the House of Representatives to advance the charge to Attorney General Merrick Garlands desk for a final decision to open an investigation. Zachary Stieber contributed to this report. Houthi Attacks Endanger Global Energy Security: Saudi Oil Chief Attacks on Saudi Arabias oil and gas sector are threatening the kingdoms ability to ensure energy security, the countrys energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said at the World Government Summit in Dubai while adding that the markets are going through a jittery period. His comments came after Saudi Arabia faced another attack from Iran-backed Houthis on March 25. Cross-border attacks have compromised our ability to supply the world with the necessary energy requirements, the minister said, according to AP. It goes without saying that if this security supply is impacted, it will impact us but more fundamentally, I think it also will affect the world economy. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates could once rely on a collective effort to protect energy security. But these pillars are no longer there, the prince added. After the Houthis took over Yemens capital city of Sanaa in 2014, the country has been mired in violence. Though Saudi Arabia and the UAE intervened to suppress the rebels in 2015, the war has carried on. Houthis had sent 851 armed drones and fired 430 ballistic missiles into Saudi Arabia from 2015 till late December. The most recent attack occurred on March 25 when they attacked oil giant Aramcos facilities in Jeddah. Besides missiles, the attackers sent drones at the Rabigh and Ras Tanura refineries as well as critical facilities in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Saudi state media reported that the Houthi drone and rocket attacks had been foiled and a ballistic missile was destroyed. However, the incident caused a fire at an electricity distribution plant. The United States has denounced the Houthi terror attacks. At a time when the parties should be focused on de-escalation and bringing needed life-saving relief to the Yemeni people ahead of the holy month of Ramadan, the Houthis continue their destructive behavior and reckless terrorist attacks striking civilian infrastructure, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a March 25 press statement. Following the Friday attack, Saudi Arabia retaliated by pounding Houthi-controlled Yemeni ports on March 26, after which the Houthis offered a three-day peace deal. The United Nations is also working toward a temporary truce between the two parties for Ramadan which begins in April. Saudi Arabia released an official statement on March 21, highlighting the dangers posed by Houthis to global energy security. The Arab country declared that it will not incur any responsibility for any shortage in oil supplies to global markets in light of the attacks on its oil facilities from the Iranian-backed terrorist Houthi militias. Meanwhile, Brent crude oil futures, which exceeded $138 per barrel on March 7 primarily due to the RussiaUkraine war, have since come down, but are still trading around the $100 per barrel level. Oil prices declined after Thursdays peak and were trading at $106.78 per barrel as of 16:53 UTC on March 29. In May 2020, Attorney General William Barr declared that special counsel John Durhams investigation was not focused on former Vice President Joe Biden. In his new book, Barr has now revealed that he made that statement in response to a series of Trump tweets that Biden had led the charge on the FBIs Russiagate investigation. Barr said it was unacceptable for Trump to drag his upcoming presidential election opponent into the Russiagate scandal. But Barrs statement stands in stark contrast to his decision to remain silent after Biden falsely blamed his son Hunters laptop story on a Russian plot during the second presidential debate. Barr now claims he was shocked that Biden lied to the American public, calling Bidens actions election interference. By speaking out against Trump and remaining silent on Biden, Barr put his thumb on the election scale, leading to material ramifications for our country. Welcome to Truth over News with Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke. Follow EpochTV on Facebook and Twitter Residents queue for COVID-19 PCT testing in Jilin city in China's northeastern Jilin Province on March 15, 2022. (STR/AFP via Getty Images) Migrant Workers Constructing Makeshift Hospitals in China Are Diagnosed With COVID-19 Dozens of migrant workers constructing makeshift hospitals in Chinas Jilin Province were infected with COVID-19 due to the harsh living environment and lack of protection. These workers have been quarantined in those makeshift hospitals, all the while having not received payment for their labor, but forced to pay for quarantine. We are diagnosed with COVID-19, but cant find any official to take care of us, migrant worker Wang Hao (pseudonym) told the Chinese-language Epoch Times on March 26. Many of us [came here for this job] because we didnt have enough money to pay for the mortgage and didnt have savings. [If we werent poor], we wouldnt take risks for only several hundred yuan. One Chinese yuan is $0.16. The Chinese regime has followed strict zero-tolerance and dynamic zero-COVID-19 policies in an attempt to curb the COVID-19 outbreak in China, in which the regime mass tests all residents, locks down communities, and quarantines infected and potentially infected citizens in the vicinity of newly reported cases. Makeshift hospitals are used to quarantine patients with mild symptoms and asymptomatic infections. Migrant Workers Changchun and Jilin cities in northeastern Chinas Jilin Province have experienced bad COVID-19 outbreaks in March. On March 12, a construction company in Harbin, the capital of neighboring Heilongjiang Province, sent nearly 1,000 workers to Jilin to build the makeshift hospitals. 293 migrant workers have come back to Harbin in recent days, and some of them were diagnosed with COVID-19. All these 293 workers are under centralized medical observation, manager of the construction company Tang Jiaru told state-run Harbin Daily on March 26. [The other about 700 workers] are staying in the city where they constructed the makeshift hospitals. Wang was one of the stranded workers. He worked together with over 300 migrant workers at Xinbei community in Chuanying district of Jilin city and for what would be a hard and underresourced word. Wang and his peers arrived at the makeshift hospitals construction field on March 14 to find out that they werent provided rooms to sleep but a drafty tent. Its a temporary tent without water, electricity, or heat. It was very cold to live inside, Wang said. Jilin city is still cold in March and average temperatures of around 20F at night and 33F at noon. People visiting Beishan Park during snowfall in Jilin city in Chinas northeastern Jilin Province on March 13, 2019. (STR/AFP via Getty Images) On the second day, the workers decided to sleep in a shopping mall under renovation in Changyi district of the city. The over 300 workers lived there together. Without heating, the shopping mall was still cold but better than the tent. Wang complained that the local authorities regime didnt supply them with enough food, and ordered them to work for 36 hours continually before being allowed a 12 hour break. Another 36 hour shift then awaited them. We didnt rest and were tired, which might have caused our immune system to become weak. On March 20, some of the workers started to feel sick, Wang said. Two of us tested positive for COVID-19 that day. However, neither the construction company nor the city regime took any action. The over 300 workers had to sleep together in the shopping mall for another night. On March 21, some of the workers refused to work again and protested on a street close to the shopping mall. By this time, the workers had finished the construction of the makeshift hospital at Xinbei community, and the construction company planned to move them to Changchun to build another makeshift hospital. Many of us were afraid of being infected with the virus. We didnt want to work any more and we wanted to go home, Wang said. But authorities didnt allow them to return home because of the infections. Becoming Infected More and more workers then started to cough and experience fever. The regime then moved all the workers out of the shopping mall into a nearby hotel. Three workers shared one empty room. They didnt give us a bed nor cover, Wang said. We werent allowed to leave the hotel for two days and one night. Many of us tested positive [for COVID-19] in there. Eventually, Wang and another 160 workers who tested negative for the virus were moved to a hotel in Shulan county where they could finally sleep on a bed. But on March 25, they were moved to a makeshift hospital in Longtan district because the majority of them tested positive. I havent received todays test result. I guess all of us have been infected with COVID-19, Wang said on March 26. On that day, he started to have symptoms. The medical staff of the makeshift hospital gave me some drugs this morning. Thats all. I feel weak now and the lunch was too small to fill my stomach, Wang said. We kept on asking for the salaries. The construction company didnt respond. We are worried about the cost of the quarantine and treatment. Liu is another migrant worker from Harbin who works for the same construction company as Wang, but at a different construction site. On March 26, Liu was treated at a makeshift hospital in the Chuanying district of Jilin city after being diagnosed with COVID-19 few days earlier. He traveled to the city for employment with another 18 colleagues. All of us, 19 workers, were diagnosed. In this makeshift hospital, 200 to 300 patients are living in the same room. The hospital is full, Liu told the Chinese-language Epoch Times. He said that he didnt know the identities of the other patients in the hospital. Liu said that the hospital was inside a hall, with patients sleeping on bunk beds. He said that Jilin city officials didnt allow them to post anything online about their experience or talk to the media. The officials told us that we will face criminal charges if we dare expose our situation on social media platforms, Liu said. Gu Xiaohua contributed to this report. IgA Antibodies Appear to Protect Unvaccinated Against COVID-19: Study Findings from a study in Sweden provide one possible explanation for why some health care workers who were in contact with COVID-19 patients every day remain uninfected, even though they were not vaccinated against the disease. The reason why some of the staff did not contract the disease seems to have been that IgA (immunoglobulin A) was present in their respiratory tract, announced the University of Gothenburg in a release. These antibodies, found naturally in the secretions of mucous membranes in the airways and gastrointestinal tract, can protect the body by binding to viruses and other invading organisms. Researchers at the universitys Sahlgrenska Academy examined 156 unvaccinated employees at five primary care health centers belonging to the Notkarnan group in the Gothenburg area. The results were published in the European Journal of Immunology. We all have IgA. Its found on the mucous membranes, and COVID-19 is an infection that spreads via those membranes, Christine Wenneras, an author of the study, said in a statement. We thought it was important to investigate what happened when completely healthy people encountered the coronavirus, before vaccines became available. Authors said their study tried to learn more about how immunity to COVID-19 develops in a relatively healthy group of people, noting that the vast majority of published studies on COVID-19 have been cross-sectional and/or focused on hospitalized patients with severe disease. Meanwhile, no one who contracted COVID-19 in their study was hospitalized. Study Methods The health workers were recruited into the study during April and May 2020, and were monitored every month for six months. Of the 156 participants, 150 completed the entire study. In the study, researchers checked whether the participants ever contracted COVID-19. They also monitored all participants for serum IgA and IgG antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Other health factors that appeared to afford protection against COVID-19 were also monitored, by having the participants take blood tests, questionnaire surveys, and more. Authors found that a third, or 53 of the 150 health care workers had developed antibodies to COVID-19. The remaining two-thirds, or 97 of the 150 health care workers, comprise those who had a negative antibody response (no antibodies against the virus), or only borderline levels of IgA responses. A total of 16 study participants had contracted COVID-19, verified by PCR, during the study period. Six study participants had been living with another PCR-positive person, the authors also noted. Key Findings Researchers said there were two main patterns of immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 among the 53 participants who developed antibodiesan IgG-dominated and an IgA-dominated pattern. These people had detectable IgA and/or IgG antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, with 38 having antibody responses dominated by IgG (immunoglobulin G), while 15 showed antibody responses dominated by IgA. Only individuals with IgG responses developed T-cell responses to SARS-CoV-2. IgG responsiveness was associated with SARS-CoV-2 PCR positivity and self-reported typical COVID-19 symptoms, researchers wrote. In contrast, IgA responsiveness was associated with limited T-cell responses to SARS-CoV-2, autoimmunity, airborne allergy, and not contracting COVID-19. T cells, like antibodies, play an important role in the adaptive immune system to help prevent infection. Authors said the first key finding was that the 15 people who had IgA-dominated responsesthat is, one in ten study participantsnever showed any symptoms of COVID-19 nor tested positive for the disease. SARS-CoV-2 IgA-only responders constituted 10 [percent] of our cohort which is in line with other studies, and 87 [percent] of them were already IgA-positive at the start of the study Interestingly, none of the IgA-only responders reported any COVID-19-associated symptoms nor had PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection, which implies that SARS-CoV-2-specific IgA-responses may protect against contracting COVID-19, the authors wrote. It is possible that this IgA response constituted cross-reactive IgA antibodies generated in response to other coronaviruses, the authors noted. A limitation of the study was that it only looked at serum IgA levels and did not look at nasal IgA levels, authors said. The serum IgA we have monitored in this study may be said to be a surrogate marker of nasal IgA, the latter of which confers protection from Covid-19 by preventing virus entry into the body. A limitation of our study is that we did not investigate corresponding nasal IgA antibody levels to SARS-CoV-2 and their neutralizing capacity. The second key finding was that IgG-dominated antibody responses were strongly associated with T-cell responses and had PCR-confirmed COVID-19, authors reported. Being an IgG-responder was also associated with PCR-positive COVID-19 and cohabitation with a PCR-positive person. Wenneras said that most other COVID-19 related research has been about IgG antibodies and T cells. The interesting thing is that when we now examine other peoples articles and tables, we find evidence for the conclusion weve arrived at about IgA ourselves, she noted. But its not something those studies have highlighted. (LR) After meeting for the Negev Summit, Bahrains Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid al-Zayani, Egypts Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, Israels Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Moroccos Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita, and United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, pose for a photograph in Sde Boker, Israel, on March 28, 2022. (Jacquelyn Martin/Pool via AP) Israel Hosts Arab, US Top Diplomats SDE BOKER, IsraelIsrael on Monday hosted the foreign ministers of four Arab nations and the United States. The gathering brought together the top diplomats from Egypt and three Arab nationsthe United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Moroccothat signed the Abraham Accords to normalize relations with Israel under the Trump administration. Meeting at a resort in Israels southern Negev Desert, the ministers and Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledged to expand cooperation to include energy, environmental, and security matters and try to bring others into the agreements. Just a few years ago this gathering would have been impossible to imagine, Blinken said. The United States has and will continue to strongly support a process that is transforming the region and beyond. As the ministers gathered late Sunday, a deadly shooting rampage claimed by the ISIS terrorist group killed two young police officers in central Israel. Participants also repeatedly expressed misgivings over Iranian military behavior across the region and the possible renewal of the international nuclear accord. Jordan, a close U.S. ally that strongly supports Palestinian statehood, declined to attend the meeting. Instead, King Abdullah II visited the Israeli-occupied West Bank in solidarity with the Palestinians. The high-profile visithis first in nearly five yearsand Jordans absence from the ministers meeting, were reminders that the Palestinian issue has not disappeared from the regional agenda. The region cannot enjoy security and stability without a just and comprehensive solution to the Palestinian issue, the king said as he met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who welcomed the visit. Neither leader mentioned the meeting hosted by Israel. Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh wrote on Twitter that Arab normalization meetings that dont end Israels military occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a state are just an illusion, a mirage, and a free reward for Israel. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said the group was making history as he announced the gathering would become an annual event. He said the countries were forming a partnership based on technology, religious tolerance, security, and intelligence cooperation. This new architecture, the shared capabilities we are building, intimidates and deters our common enemies, first and foremost Iran and its proxies, he said. They certainly have something to fear. What will stop them is not hesitation or being conciliatory but rather determination and strength. The Arab ministers condemned Sunday nights deadly shooting in the city of Haderabut they also repeatedly said it was critical to address the century-old Mideast conflict. We did highlight the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, importance of maintaining the credibility and viability of the two-state solution, said Egypts foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry. This an important issue. The Biden administration has urged Israel and the Palestinians to take steps to reduce tensions and create conditions for eventually renewing peace talks. But it has made clear that it has no immediate plans to press the sides to renew negotiations. The last serious and substantive talks broke down more than a decade ago. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has said he opposes a Palestinian state and has no intention of restarting peace talks. Instead, he has called for steps to improve economic conditions for the Palestinians to help reduce tensions. The Biden administration has meanwhile been working to renew the 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran. The agreement placed curbs on Irans nuclear program in exchange for billions of dollars in sanctions relief. With support from Israel, the Trump administration withdrew from the deal in 2018, causing it to unravel. Iran has raced ahead with its nuclear program, and Israel and Gulf Arab countries are deeply concerned about restoring the original deal. Israel fears it does not include enough safeguards to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Both Israel and its Gulf allies also believe that relief from economic sanctions will allow Iran to step up its support for militant groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the Palestinian territories. Bahrains foreign minister, Abdullatif al-Zayani, said the need to cooperate was made more urgent by attacks by Iranian-backed militant groups and the unresolved nuclear issue. We need to put into practice the principles behind the accords, mainly those of dialogue, cooperation, and mutual respect, he said. By doing so, we will demonstrate to the whole region what can be achieved by working together. Blinken sought to address the concerns about Iran on Sunday, saying that the United States sees eye to eye with Israel on the goal of making sure Iran never builds a nuclear weapon. Underscoring regional anxieties, Israels government hastily arranged the meeting of top diplomats from Arab countries that have normalized relations with Israel. Sudan, the fourth Arab country to normalize ties with Israel during the Trump administration, is mired in turmoil following a military coup in October and did not attend the meeting in Israel. The two-day gathering, with Blinken, took place at the kibbutz in the Negev Desert where Israels founding father, David Ben-Gurion, retired and is buried. Lapid on Monday visited Ben-Gurions grave with Blinken. But the Arab ministers did not join them, citing scheduling issues. Such a visit would have been a remarkable step given the sensitivities with the Palestinians over Israels establishment. Palestinians blame Ben-Gurion for their naqba, or catastrophe, the term they use for the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the war surrounding Israels establishment in 1948. Blinken on Sunday also traveled to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank to meet with Abbas and stress to him the U.S. commitment to help the Palestinian people and encourage a resumption in long-stalled peace talks with Israel. Will Smith (R) hits at Chris Rock as Rock spoke on stage during the 94th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Los Angeles, Calif., on March 27, 2022. (Brian Snyder/Reuters) Jada Pinkett Smith Breaks Silence After Will Smith Slapping Incident Jada Pinkett Smith broke her silence on Tuesday after her husband Will Smith appeared to slap Chris Rock during Sundays Academy Awards broadcast. This is a season for healing and Im here for it, Pinkett Smith wrote on Instagram, without elaborating. Her husband on Monday issued an apology to Rock after he slapped the comedian for making a joke about Pinkett Smiths shaved head during the awards show. Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive. My behavior at last nights Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable, Smith wrote in his apology, coming hours after the Academys organizers said they would investigate the incident and possibly reprimand him. According to Pinkett Smith in several previous interviews, she allegedly suffers from alopecia, which can cause sudden hair loss. Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jadas medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally, Smith said in his apology. I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air actor wrote, adding: I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness. Jada Pinkett Smith arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar party during the 94th Academy Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., on March 27, 2022. (Danny Moloshok/Reuters) Rock, for his part, has not issued a public comment on the matter. The Los Angeles Police Department on Monday confirmed he would not press charges over the incident. On Monday afternoon, the Academy wrote in a statement: The Academy condemns the actions of Mr. Smith at last nights show. We have officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct, and California law. The Screen Actors Guild also issued a critical comment on Monday night and said it would take action. As the union representing presenters and other performers working on the Oscars, SAG-AFTRA is focused on ensuring our members always work in a safe environment, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists said in a statement posted on its website. Violence or physical abuse in the workplace is never appropriate and the union condemns any such conduct. The incident involving Will Smith and Chris Rock at last nights Academy Awards was unacceptable. Despite the incident, which drew considerable media attention, the 2022 Oscars drew its second-lowest ratings on Sunday evening. A Bastion missile launcher moves ashore from an amphibious landing vehicle on Matua Island, part of the Kurils Islands chain on Dec. 2, 2021. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP) Japan Protests Russias Unacceptable Military Expansion on Disputed Islands Japan has lodged a protest over Russian military drills involving more than 3,000 troops on the disputed Kuril Islands, chief cabinet secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said Monday. Matsuno objected through diplomatic channels to Moscow over the drills on the islands, which Japan refers to as the Northern Territories which Soviet troops seized at the end of World War II. Russias military expansion in the Northern Territories is unacceptable as it goes against our countrys position regarding those islands, Matsuno said reported Jiji Press. Russias Interfax news agency reported the drills involved repelling a mock amphibious attack, including destroying defense aircraft carrying troops and testing skills to operate fire control systems of anti-tank guided missiles. The agency further reported that Russias air defense forces conducted measures to detect, identify and destroy aircraft of a mock enemy that would carry out an airborne assault. Russian military drills came as Moscow suspended peace treaty talks with Japan over Tokyos response to Russias invasion of Ukraine. The two countries have not signed a peace treaty due to the Kuril Islands dispute. The Russian Federation does not intend to continue peace treaty talks with Japan because it is impossible to discuss this fundamental document on bilateral relations with a state that holds an explicitly unfriendly position and seeks to harm the interests of our country, Russias Foreign Ministry said on March 21. Bastion missile launchers move to their positions on the Matua Island, part of the Kurils Islands chain, in Russia on Dec. 2, 2021 (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP) Japan has strongly protested Russias stance, saying it appeared to be an attempt to deflect responsibility for Japan-Russia relations. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said that Japan will resolutely continue to sanction Russia despite his government still wanting to pursue a peace treaty with Moscow. Russia has intensified its military exercises near Japan, with four Russian amphibious warfare ships spotted sailing through northeastern Japan on March 17. Japans defense ministry said the Russian ships could be heading to Ukraine, reported Japan Times. On March 11, Japans military said it detected 10 Russian navy ships passing through the Tsugaru Strait, between Japans main island of Honshu and Hokkaido prefecture. Meanwhile, Japan has increased sanctions on Russian individuals and organizations over the war in Ukraine. The country has also restricted exports of certain goods to Russia and banned Russian banks from the SWIFT global interbank network. Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa said at a Group of Seven (G7) meeting on March 23 that Japan has been reviewing possible measures to implement the revocation of Russias most favored nation, which will result in higher taxes on Russian goods. Reuters contributed to this report. A liquefied natural gas tanker behind a port in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, on Sept. 4, 2015. (Yuya Shino/Reuters) Japans Energy Firms Seek Alternatives Amid Russian Supply Fears Japanese gas and energy firms are seeking alternate natural gas suppliers amid concerns over potential disruption from Russia, which has been subjected to a barrage of Western sanctions since its invasion of Ukraine, according to reports on Monday. Russia is Japans fifth-largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplier, accounting for about 8 percent of the countrys consumption. Russias Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project was also one of Japans main LNG supply sources, with an annual capacity of 9.6 million tons. Tohoku Electric Power and Kyushu Electric Power both obtain coal and LNG from Russia, though Tohoku Electric Power reportedly eliminated Russian LNG from its tender, The Japan Times reported on March 25. Hiroshima Gas, which procures about 200,000 tons of LNG from the Sakhalin-2 project, said it plans to purchase LNG from Malaysia and other countries or tap supply reserves from other Japanese utilities if the Russian supply chain is disrupted, Japanese outlet Kyodo News reported. We are keeping close attention on new developments including the impact of economic sanctions on Russia, the company stated. Osaka Gas also said that it intends to advance gas procurement from the United States or Australia in anticipation of a potential supply disruption from Russia. Japanese companies Mitsui and Mitsubishi are major shareholders of the Sakhalin-2 project, with each holding 12.5 and 10 percent stakes. The companies have yet to decide whether to pull out from the project, as they aim to continue talks with the government and other stakeholders on the matter. The British-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell and U.S.-based Exxon Mobil have announced plans to exit the Sakhalin-1 and 2 oil and gas projects in Russias Far East in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There were concerns that Russia may cut or suspend its natural gas supply in retaliation for Western sanctions. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on March 27 that his country will seek gas payments in rubles from unfriendly countries, such as Japan and the United States. German economy minister Robert Habeck said Monday that the Group of Seven (G-7) major economies rejected Putins demand to pay Russian gas in rubles, given that it would be a clear breach of the existing agreements. On March 10, Japans industry minister Koichi Hagiuda said the G-7 economies agreed on the need to quickly diversify energy sources, including using nuclear power. Several countries expressed the need to quickly reduce reliance on Russian energy, Hagiuda told reporters, adding that the G-7 nations would restate the effectiveness of nuclear energy. Most of Japans nuclear reactors have been closed since the Fukushima nuclear disaster 11 years ago, with only six operating compared with 54 before the plant was crippled by an earthquake and tsunami. Reuters contributed to this report. A Navy member gets a COVID-19 vaccine on Naval Station Norfolk in Norfolk, Va., in a file image. (U.S. Navy/Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Jackson Adkins via The Epoch Times) Judge Blocks Vaccine Mandate for Navy Members Seeking Religious Exemptions The U.S. militarys COVID-19 vaccine mandate has been blocked for all Navy members seeking religious exemptions. A preliminary injunction that previously covered 35 Navy SEALs now covers some 4,000 others. U.S. District Judge Reed OConnor, a George W. Bush appointee who entered the original ruling in January, agreed to expand it in part because all members who have applied for religious exemptions have all been harmed in essentially the same way. Each is subject to the Navys COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Each has submitted her religious accommodation request, and none has received accommodation. Without relief, each servicemember faces the threat of discharge and the consequences that accompany it. Even though their personal circumstances may factually differ in small ways, the threat is the sameget the jab or lose your job, he said in a 27-page order. The Supreme Court recently sided with the Pentagon in the case, ruling that Navy commanders can consider a members vaccination status when deciding on deployment. The new ruling means anyone in the U.S. Navy whose religious accommodation from the vaccine mandate was denied is now protected from any sort of punishment or involuntary separation, things like that, said Mike Berry, a lawyer with First Liberty Institute, which represents the plaintiffs in the case. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in August 2021 ordered all U.S. troops to get a COVID-19 vaccine, asserting vaccination would help the force stay ready and prevent contraction of the virus that causes COVID-19. The mandate has remained in place even as the three vaccines available in the United States have proven increasingly ineffective against infection from the virus, SARS-CoV-2, and have also waned against severe disease. As of March 23, 3,320 active-duty Navy members have requested a religious exemption from the mandate, along with 864 reserve members. Zero religious accommodation requests have been approved. The Navy has declined to comment on court orders, referring comment to the Department of Justice. A government lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. Berry told The Epoch Times his organization wanted to expand the case to cover all service members seeking religious accommodation but under federal rules, they were not able. The case is currently proceeding on multiple fronts. While OConnor ruled on the motions for an expanded injunction and to certify a class, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is considering an appeal from the Navy from the original injunction. The Navy has kicked out 630 members so far for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson arrives for the third day of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Judge Jacksons Dont Know Much Biology Moment and Our Endangered Civilization Commentary That President Joe Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, fulfilling his promise to put a black woman up for a seat on the bench, yet Judge Jackson pled the Fifth and then ignorance when asked in confirmation hearings to define one of Bidens two prerequisiteswhat a woman iswill forever live in infamy in the annals of Court history. Perhaps the most consequential element of the stunning exchange between Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Judge Jackson, in which Sen. Blackburn asked the judge to provide a definition of the word woman, eliciting a reply from Judge Jackson of No, I cant, is to be found in its transparentand purposefuldishonesty. It isnt that Judge Jackson cant define womansomething that, to put it lightly, strains all credulity, and would disqualify her in a sane worldbut that she wouldnt define what a woman is. Why wouldnt she? Because to assume one of the nine most powerful positions in the nation, after president of the United States, in which she would be tasked with deciding the most crucial questions of public policy, on behalf of a party representing roughly half of voters, requires Judge Jacksons silence on the most basic facts of human nature. Because the coterie of progressive groups backing Judge Jackson, and the progressive Democrat Party that has elevated her to such rarefied heights, would have been apoplectic had she recognized the actual science. Because to proffer the kind of answer Judge Jacksons proponents would have craved would be to expose to the entire country the utterly insane, perverse, and detrimental views on sex they have sought to mainstream, provoking a backlash that would echo far beyond the midterms. The evasiveness is the point. Better only to inflame the Senate minoritys constituentsa Senate minority that by all appearances will not fight her nomination with the same tenacity as her backers, they of Borking, high-tech lynching, and the Kavanaugh caper. That Im not a biologist was the best Judge Jackson could muster when pressed by Sen. Blackburn speaks volumes not only about a woman poised to sit on the highest court in the land for decades, and the administration that tabbed her, but the hallowed institutions from which she comes, and the ruling elite who control them. In a time of deathly serious challenges, we have a Ruling Class uniquely unserious about preserving the civilization from which it has so richly benefitted, and therefore ill-equipped to grapple with whats facing it. In fact its worse than that. We have a Ruling Class that is actively undermining the very pillars of that civilization, while pursuing those who call out its daily depredations as domestic terrorists. Their destruction begins with rejecting things we know to be true, or at minimum coercing people into telling lies, and if all else fails, silencing them. It ends with societal collapse. And among the most basic and fundamental truths is that we are born men and women, each with unique and distinctive characteristics. Human life begins there. Judge Jacksons non-response should be seen as an inadvertent endorsement of the progressives radical sexual ideology which denies this; celebrating the likes of a Lia Thomas or a Rachel Levine, while deplatforming the people and publications who dare to refer to them by their sex. This denial is a precursor to the progressives rejection of the nuclear family. Kill the nuclear familyand indeed we have seen the decline of the family, and relatedly that of faith in G-d, and love of countryand you kill the country. Supplant the nuclear family with a series of socializing institutions that propagate the regimes ideologyan ideology to which, based on her scholarship and rhetoric, Judge Jackson obviously subscribesand you hasten its death. One need not go any further into Judge Jacksons dubious record, particularly the apparent soft-on-crime approach shes taken to the most heinous of crimes and criminals, including sexual ones, and the nexus to the leftist ideologues whose work she has toutedissues on which shes been similarly evasiveto see her for the disastrous justice she will be. Judges like Ketanji Brown Jackson are a feature, not a bug, of our brave new post-modern, arguably pre-civilizational world, brought to you by our Ruling Class. We will all suffer the consequences. That is an inescapable truth you wont need a biologist to confirm. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Russia's President Vladimir Putin (front) and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov attend a session of the Council of Heads of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in Sochi on Oct. 11, 2017. (Maxim Shemetov/AFP/Getty Images) Kremlin Rules Out Using Nuclear Weapons Over Ukraine War A top Kremlin official this week ruled out using nuclear force over the conflict in Ukraine. No one is thinking about usingabout even the idea of using a nuclear weapon, Russian President Vladimir Putins spokesman Dmitry Peskov told PBS on Monday evening. Last week, Peskov suggested in an interview with CNN that Russia would consider using nuclear weapons if faced an existential threat. And former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said earlier this week that Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons if it faces an existential threat, even if the other side has not employed nuclear weapons. Any outcome of the operation, of course, is not a reason for usage of a nuclear weapon, Peskov also told PBS on Monday. We have a security concept that very clearly states that only when there is a threat for existence of the state in our country, we can use and we will actually use nuclear weapons to eliminate the threat. Lets keep these two things separate, he continued, and said that the existence of the state and special military operation in Ukrainethey have nothing to do with each other. Ukrainian servicemen walk past the wreck of a Russian tank in the village of Lukyanivka outside Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 27, 2022. (Marko Djurica /Reuters) Since the start of the conflict on Feb. 24, there have been fears that a nuclear weapon might be deployed as Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Days after the conflict started, Putin announced that he ordered the countrys nuclear deterrence forces to operate on high alert while the Russian leader on Feb. 24 warned of consequences you have never seen in history should another country intervene. Meanwhile, there have been reports of fighting around two of Ukraines nuclear sites. Early on in the war, Russian troops took control of the Chernobyl area, which was the site of the 1986 Soviet nuclear disaster, and shelling was reported at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant several weeks ago. The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, wrote that he traveled to Ukraine on Tuesday. We must act now to help prevent the danger of a nuclear accident, he wrote. On Tuesday, Russian officials announced they will fundamentally scale back military operations near Ukraines capital and a northern city, as talks to end the grinding war brought the outlines of a possible deal into view. Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said the change on the battlefield was meant to increase trust at the talks after several rounds of negotiations failed to halt what has devolved into a bloody campaign of attrition. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Liberation of Education: Providing Innovative Alternatives to Public Schools 'Education is about experiencing as much as possible.' As impatience with left-wing ideology increases and more parents are removing their children from the public school system, a new movement focused on education, entrepreneurship, and free-market solutions is providing parents with innovative alternatives. According to its website, Liberation of Education is a movement to provide parents with a wide array of actionable educational choices which lead children to healthy and positive lives. On April 2528, 2022, a unique partnership of educators, business professionals, authors, and parents will gather for the annual Liberation of Education virtual conference to share what they have learnedand created. Michael Strong, who has spent the past 35 years creating alternatives to traditional public schools, is a driving force in this new movement. His projects include Moreno Valley High School, a charter school in California ranked the 36th best public school in the United States by Newsweek, and Winston Academy, a school for highly-gifted students in Florida. He is also the author of The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice and Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the Worlds Problems. Michael Strong, founder of The Socratic Experience. (Courtesy of Michael Strong) According to Strong, public schools do not meet the individualized needs of most children. His latest alternative, The Socratic Experience, is a virtual program for grades 312 that has three tracks: entrepreneurial, creative, and intellectual. He created entrepreneurial and creative programs because he believes some of the most capable students may not be academically focused. For example, Strong noted how Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are college dropouts, and Richard Branson dropped out of high school. A lot of entrepreneurs and creators did not likeand did not necessarily do well inschool because theyre impatient, Strong told The Epoch Times, explaining that creative minds prefer to find unique ways to get things done rather than follow traditional academic roads. Theyre thinking of business ideas all the time. Maybe theyre an animator, a video producer, or a graphic artist. They want to be creating, Strong said. These are the skills valued in the 21st century economy. Twenty years ago, there were no jobs as [user experience] designers or digital-media marketers. These are the places where many, often lucrative, jobs are. I know kids who are digital-media marketers specializing in Instagram, Instagram Reels, TikTok, or Facebook. They make good money while having no traditional education. Schools are not teaching them how to make a living like this. School is still teaching them outdated curriculum that is irrelevant to many 21st century jobs. This is Strongs motivation, to create diverse educational pathways that look a lot different than traditional education, relying more on initiative, responsibility, creativity, entrepreneurship, and a focus on 21st-century skills, which are not taught in most high schools or colleges. Thats where the money, opportunity, and cool, fun jobs are, Strong asserted. Kerry McDonald is an author, podcast host, and senior fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education. (Courtesy of Kerry McDonald) Kerry McDonaldsenior education fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education, host of the weekly LiberatED podcast, and author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroomwill be one of the speakers at the conference. McDonald, also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and a regular Forbes contributor, has a masters degree in education policy from Harvard University and a bachelors degree in economics from Bowdoin College. Im very excited to be a presenter at the Liberation of Education conference, McDonald told The Epoch Times. McDonald will be sharing her insights on how the lockdowns and virtual learning during the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus outbreak, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, became transformative in terms of educational entrepreneurship and innovation. Many parents realized it was not what they wanted to see, so they began trying to regain control of their childrens education, McDonald said. That prompted parents to look at alternatives like pandemic pods, where parents form home-based micro-schools where a small number of families take turns teaching, or they pool resources to hire a teacher or college student to conduct the lessons. Matt Beaudreau, founder of several Acton Academy campuses in California. (Courtesy of Matt Beaudreau.) Matt Beaudreau, a 42-year-old husband and father of three, has been in what he calls the education game for two decades. It was during his time as a teacher and administrator at Stanford University that he first saw the gaming of schooling. After leaving Stanford, Beaudreau became a teacher and administrator in the public education system. From there, he went on to do the same at a private school, along the way becoming more convinced that the system of education didnt have anything to do with education. Unsure of what direction to take from there, Beaudreau said he organically began a public speaking career, which took him around the world speaking to Fortune 500 companies. The leaders of these companies were quick to tell him the college graduates coming to them for employment were awful. They play school, Beaudreau told The Epoch Times, reciting the complaints he heard the most. They dont have any real-world skills. They dont have any backbone. They dont have any character, theres no work ethic, and the business leaders wanted to know, How do you find good young people? Knowing that good young people arent found, but rather created, Beaudreau decided to start his own school: an Acton Academy campus. According to its website, Acton Academy is dedicated to inspiring each child to see life as a Heros Journey, where someone with curiosity and character can find a calling, using his or her most precious gifts, in a way that brings great joy, to solve a deep burning need in the world. Beaudreau explained how he got started running charter schools. My first Acton campus was in Roseville, California, five years ago, which quickly grew to become the largest campus in the global Acton network of about 300 campuses, he said. My entire career has been dedicated to helping young people avoid schooling and actually getting an education. Rather than sending children off to what Beaudreau describes as a government-led babysitter, where everyone does the same thing at the same time, Acton Academy focuses on the individual child. What are they excited about? What kind of things do they want to experience? What are they naturally good at? What do they naturally gravitate toward? Those are the things any form of education should answer, he insisted. What is the unique thing they bring to the world? Education is about experiencing as much as possiblebeing allowed to succeed and to failso they can learn from both and go forward in self-awareness and self-confidence. Thats what a real education looks like. Lindsey Hoyt with her two daughters. Cornerstone Classical Academy second graders had just finished reading Charlottes Web, so they brought a pig to campus to celebrate their accomplishment. (Courtesy of Lindsey Hoyt) Lindsey Hoyt, founder and board chair for Cornerstone Classical Academy (CCA) charter school in Duval County, Florida, will be another speaker. As described on the CCA website, a charter school is a tuition-free public school that is privately managed with its own board of directors. It operates under a contract (or charter) with an authorizer, and that contract frees the charter school from some of the restrictions of a standard public school. It is open to all children eligible who attend public school in the county in which it is located. Hoyt, who graduated from the College of Journalism and Communication at University of Florida with a degree in public relations, became involved in education eight years ago when her first daughter was born. The one-size-fits-all form of education doesnt work for most families, Hoyt told The Epoch Times. Theres a lot of discontent out there because of that. Like McDonald, Hoyt also recalled the great awakening that came when virtual learning exposed what had been really going on in the public education system. Thats when parents started ripping their kids out of public schools. As Hoyt describes, CCA is not a cookie-cutter school. Rather than applying the same curriculum to a class full of students, CCAs objective is to develop an education approach that is specific and unique to each child and what their gifts are. We dont teach them what to think, but how to think for themselves, Hoyt said. If theyre being programmed, how is that even going to be possible? Its really terrifying. Hoyt was recruited to speak for Liberation of Education by Chris Engl. While he is one of the event organizers, he is also a board member of CCA. Chris Engl, treasurer for Cornerstone Classical Academy and organizer of the Liberation of Education virtual convention. (Courtesy of Chris Engl) Engl is married with three children, and after a long career on Wall Street and in the world of corporate finance, Engls observations of the declining public education system inspired a change. Rather than managing assets and hedge funds for large institutional clients, Engl joined the CCA team. We were an A-rated school our first year, Engl boasted. Im very proud of that. Its classical education, which focuses both on virtue (and) logic as well as knowledge accumulation and an ability to communicate. For the 2022-2023 school year, Engl said CCA already has over 770 students lined up with another 440 on a waiting list. They have fundraising plans to expand. One of the greatest sources of Engls pride is that parents choose to enroll their children at CCA. We dont get paid unless kids come here and stay, he said. It increases competition and gives us an opportunity to make a better life for these kids. Quisha Kingthe Florida mom who was thrust into the public spotlight after a video of her comments before the Duval County School Board in June 2021 slamming critical race theory (CRT) went viral on social mediawill be a guest speaker. It was King who launched the Mass Exodus Movement, just after the National School Boards Association sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking that concerned parents who spoke out against CRT at school board meetings be treated as domestic terrorists. Kings public announcement of the movement came during a panel discussion on Fighting Indoctrination on a National Scale at the Family Research Councils annual Pray Vote Stand Summit in October 2021. Quisha King joined Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to address the Biden administrations weaponizing of the Department of Justice against parents First Amendment rights in Brevard County on Oct. 20, 2021. (Courtesy of Quisha King) I really think at this point the only thing to do is have a mass exodus from the public school systemthats it, King said at the summit. She received a standing ovation. Liberation of Education is a conference to show parents a new way to educate children and to arm them with all the tools available, King told The Epoch Times. Public school is not for everyone. All of our children are unique and need different things and we want to show parents there are other ways to school. Like so many others, King also recalled how parents who observed the virtual classes began to realize that something was wrong. CRT, The 1619 Project, and social and emotional learning had replaced reading, writing, and arithmetic. So parents were forced to reclaim the education of their childrenand theyre succeeding. Homeschooling doesnt look like what it used to look like, King noted. There are home school co-ops, pods, and micro-schools. There are charter schools and private schools. We cant let our children sit on the front lines while we wait for the public school to get its act together. Joseph Lord contributed to this report. German farmers Tim Nandelstadt (C) and Torben Reelfs (R) inspect the field of their farm in Derzhiv, Stryi Raion, Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine on March 23, 2022. (Tim Nandelstaedt/AFP via Getty Images) RussiaUkraine War (March 30): Zelenskyy Says Russia Talks Could Be Called Positive, Wont Slacken Defenses The latest on the RussiaUkraine crisis, March 29. Click here for updates from March 28. With Ukraine Farmers on Frontlines, UN Food Chief Warns of Devastation The U.N. food chief warned on Tuesday that the war in Ukraine was threatening to devastate the World Food Programmes efforts to feed some 125 million people globally because Ukraine had gone from the breadbasket of the world to breadlines. Its not just decimating dynamically Ukraine and the region, but it will have global context impact beyond anything weve seen since World War Two, WFP Executive Director David Beasley told the 15-member United Nations Security Council. Beasley said 50 percent of the grain bought by the WFP, the food-assistance branch of the United Nations, comes from Ukraine, so you can only assume the devastation that this is going to have on our operations alone. The farmers are on the frontlines, he said. Beasley added that the crisis was compounded by a lack of fertilizer products coming from Belarus and Russia. If you dont put fertilizer on the crops, your yield will be at least 50 percent diminished. So were looking at what could be a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe in the months ahead, he told the council. ___ Zelenskyy Says Russia Talks Could Be Called Positive, Wont Slacken Defenses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday said the signals from peace talks with Russia could be called positive but added that they did not drown out the explosions from Russian shells. In a late-night address, Zelenskyy also expressed caution about Russias promise to sharply curtail military action in some areas and said Ukraine would not be easing off its defensive efforts. We can say the signals we are receiving from the talks are positive but they do not drown out the explosions of Russian shells, he said, adding that Ukraine could only trust a concrete result from the talks. Earlier in the day, Russia promised to scale down military operations around Ukraines capital and north. Zelenskyy said that despite this vow, the situation has not become easier the Russian army still has significant potential to continue attacks against our state. He added: Therefore we are not reducing our defensive efforts. Zelenskyy reiterated that for any peace deal to work, Russian troops would have to leave and there could be no compromise on Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity. ___ Pentagon Detects Small Numbers of Russian Forces Move Away From Kyiv The Pentagon says it has detected small numbers of Russian ground forces moving away from the Kyiv area. Spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday that the movement appears to be a repositioning of forces, not a real withdrawal. He said it was too soon to say how extensive the Russian movements may be or where the troops will be repositioned. It does not mean the threat to Kyiv is over, he said. They can still inflict massive brutality on the country, including on Kyiv. He said Russian airstrikes against Kyiv are continuing. Asked whether the Pentagon assesses that the Russian military campaign in Ukraine has failed, Kirby said the Russian forces have failed in their initial objective of conquering Kyiv but remain a threat to the country, including the eastern Donbas region where Russian forces now appear to be focusing more fully. ___ Biden Says Well See if Russia Deescalates in Ukraine U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday said it remains to be seen whether Russia follows through with any actions to scale down its military operations in Ukraine, saying Washington and its allies will continue with strong sanctions and aid for Ukraine. Well see if they follow through with what theyre suggesting as MoscowKyiv negotiations continue, he told reporters at the White House following his meeting with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore. Were going to continue to keep a close eye on whats going on. ___ Ukraine Demands Security Guarantees Similar to NATOs Article 5 Ukrainian negotiators on Tuesday proposed a mechanism similar to Article 5 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, the founding document of NATO, to guarantee the security of Ukraine. The proposal would require the guarantors to hold consultations within three days of the start of any war, aggression, military operation, and any disguised, hybrid war against Ukraine. After which [the guarantors] are legally obliged to provide military assistance to our country, in particular in the form of armaments and the closure of the skies, the Ukrainian government said in a statement. The suggested guarantors include the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the United States, Great Britain, France, China, and the Russian Federation. Ukraine also wants Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland, and Israel to be listed as guarantors. However, some territories under dispute will not be covered by the security guarantee. As for the temporarily occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, since their status is not regulated, international security guarantees will not work temporarily in these territories, reads the statement. Read the full article here ___ White House Looking Into Allegations of Harm Against Abramovich The Biden administration is looking into allegations Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich was poisoned earlier this month during peace negotiations aimed at ending the Ukrainian conflict, White House spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield said on Tuesday. A U.S. official said on Monday that intelligence suggests the sickening of Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators was due to an environmental factor, not poisoning. ___ EU Rejects Moscows Ruble-for-Gas Payment EU member states wont pay for Russian gas in rubles, the European Commission said on Tuesday, rejecting Moscows March 31 deadline for switching payment mechanisms. The announcement comes a day after a similar response from the G7 nations. ____ Russia to Study Video of Alleged Mistreatment of Prisoners, Kyiv Questions Veracity The Kremlin said on Monday that Russian investigators would look into a video circulated on social media that purported to show Ukrainian forces mistreating captured Russian soldiers. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the video contained monstrous images and needed to be legally assessed, and that those who took part in what he described as torture needed to be held responsible. Reuters was not able to independently verify the authenticity of the video cited by the Kremlin. Asked about the video during an interview on Sky News, Ukraines Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said it could not be taken at face value. We need proof, she said on Monday. If militaries from (the) Ukrainian side are guilty, we will investigate them and take them to court. Earlier, senior Ukrainian officials had portrayed the video as a fake. Currently, no one can confirm or deny the veracity of this video. Its not known where its happening, or who the participants are, military spokesperson Oleksander Motuzyanyk said. He referred Reuters to comments made by Valery Zaluzhny, the chief commander of Ukraines armed forces, before Peskov announced the Russian investigation into the video. The enemy produces and shares videos, with the inhuman treatment of alleged Russian prisoners by Ukrainian soldiers in order to discredit the Ukrainian Defence Forces, Zaluzhny said. Ukraines armed forces respect international norms, Zaluzhny said, accusing Russia of producing such videos to discredit Ukrainian soldiers. He did not provide any evidence to support his accusation. Sergii Nykyforov, press spokesperson for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the video must be assessed in the context of both real and information wars. He did not elaborate. ____ US General Says More Forces May Be Needed The United States will likely need to add more permanent or rotational forces in Europe in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. European Command leader told Congress Tuesday, without detailing when or how many. Gen. Tod Wolters, who also serves as NATOs supreme allied commander, said decisions will be based on what European nations do, particularly in response to the need to build four additional NATO battlegroups, which are being set up in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. The groups are an effort to protect and reassure nations on Europes eastern flank. My suspicion is were going to still need more, Wolters told the Senate Armed Services Committee. ____ Kremlin Backs Off Threat of Using Nuclear Force Amid Ukraine War Chief spokesman to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Peskov, said on Monday no one is thinking about usingabout even the idea of using a nuclear weapon. He added however, We have a security concept that very clearly states that only when there is a threat for existence of the state in our country, we can use and we will actually use nuclear weapons to eliminate the threat. _____ Russian Delegate Says Talks Show Progress The head of the Russian delegation in talks with Ukraine says that Moscow sees the latest meeting as a step toward compromise. Vladimir Medinskiy said on Russian RT television that Russia sees Ukrainian proposals made Tuesday during the talks in Istanbul as a step to meet us halfway, a clearly positive fact. He added that the two parties have a long way to go to reach an agreement. Medinsky said that Russia made two big steps toward peace during the talks, first by agreeing to reduce military activities around the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv. He said Russia agreed to a prospective meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy once a prospective peace treaty is ready for signing. The Ukrainian delegation earlier Tuesday said it had laid out a possible framework for a future peace deal based on legally binding security guarantees that would provide for other countries to intervene if Ukraine is attacked. ____ Turkey Sees Meaningful Progress in Talks Turkeys foreign minister says Russian and Ukrainian negotiators have reached a consensus and common understanding on some issues. Mevlut Cavusoglu said the two sides made the most meaningful progress since the start of the negotiations at a meeting in Istanbul on Tuesday. He said the meeting would be followed by a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers. Cavusoglu said a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders was also on the agenda, he said. He didnt give a timeframe. He said that difficult issues will be taken up at a higher level. Cavusoglu added that Turkey encouraged the two sides to secure a cease-fire and an agreement on the issue of the opening of humanitarian corridors. ___ Chechnya Leader Calls for Storming Ukrainian Capital The Kremlin-backed leader of the Russian province of Chechnya has called for storming the Ukrainian capital. Ramzan Kadyrovs statement came Tuesday as the Russian military announced after a round of talks with Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul, Turkey that it would scale back its combat operations near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv. Speaking to about 10,000 troops in Chechnyas regional capital of Grozny, Kadyrov said that we need to complete what we have started and shouldnt stop. He said if Moscow had allowed his fighters to press the offensive, Im more than confident that we would have entered Kyiv and established order there. Kadyrov has posted numerous videos on a messaging app allegedly featuring himself and Chechen fighters on the outskirts of Kyiv and in the besieged Sea of Azov port of Mariupol. Those videos couldnt be independently verified. ____ Belgium Orders 21 Russian Diplomats to Leave Belgium has decided to expel 21 Russian diplomats for activities related to espionage or unlawful influence peddling. The diplomats were given two weeks to leave the country, foreign affairs spokeswoman Elke Pattyn told The Associated Press on Tuesday. ____ Ukrainian City of Mariupol In the Hands of Russian Forces: Mayor Russian forces are in control of large areas of the besieged Black Sea city of Mariupol, said Ukrainian officials. Not everything is in our power, Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko told CNN on Monday. Unfortunately, we are in the hands of the occupiers today. Fewer than half the citys residents have remained, he also said. According to our estimates, about 160,000 people are in the besieged city of Mariupol today, where it is impossible to live because there is no water, no electricity, no heat, no connection, he continued. And its really scary. The apparent loss of the city comes after about a month of heavy bombardment as well as days of fighting in the streets. Mariupol is likely considered a strategic city for Russia because capturing it would allow Moscow to connect its forces in the Crimean Peninsula with the separatist Donbass region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday said in an address to Denmarks Parliament that the siege of Mariupol is a crime against humanity. Russian forces, he alleged, are destroying shelters with civilians inside. Read the full article here ____ Netherlands Orders 17 Russian Diplomats to Leave The Dutch government says it is expelling 17 Russian intelligence officers, calling their presence a threat to national security. The foreign ministry said that the Russian ambassador was summoned Tuesday and told the officers, who were accredited as diplomats, are to be removed from the country. The ministry says it took the decision on national security grounds. The government said it took the decision in consultation with a number of like-minded countries, citing similar expulsions by the United States, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Montenegro. ____ Zelenskyy Warns of Russian Regroup, Renewed Assault on Kyiv Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday said that Russian forces are allegedly trying to regroup before an assault on Kyiv. Today we have good news, Zelenskyy said. Our defenders are advancing in the Kyiv region, regaining control over Ukrainian territory. Zelenskyy then said that the Kyiv suburb of Irpin was re-captured by Ukrainian forces on Monday. Earlier, Ukrainian officials said that their forces rebuffed Russian troops, who have been attempting to move on Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, since the start of the conflict. I am grateful to everyone who worked for this result. The occupiers are pushed away from Irpin. Pushed away from Kyiv, Zelenskyy added. However, it is too early to talk about security in this part of our region. The fighting continues, the Ukrainian president said. Read the full article here ____ Google CEO Meets With Polish PM to Offer Support for Ukrainians Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has met with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to offer support and humanitarian aid for the people of Ukraine. Pichai and Morawiecki also held a remote meeting with the Slovenia Prime Minister Janez Jansa and a representative of Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala. In addition, Pichai also met with Polish humanitarian organizations and Ukrainian startups. Poland has been the largest single destination for refugees fleeing Ukraine. ____ Russia to Drastically Cut Military Activity Near Kyiv Russia is cutting down on its military activity near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, an official said after the latest round of negotiations between the warring countries. The Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation, for purposes of trust-building and creating conditions for holding talks further, and achieving the final goal of agreeing and signing a peace treaty, made a decision to radically decrease the military activities in the directions of Kyiv and Chernihiv, Alexander Fomin, Russias deputy minister of defense, told reporters in Turkey after the two sides met. Chernigov, in northern Ukraine, sits about 150 kilometers (93 miles) from Kyiv. Russian officials will provide more details about the reduction after the delegation returns to Moscow, Fomin said. Read the full article here ____ Ukraine-Russia Talks Start in Turkey; Abramovich Attends Talks Russian and Ukrainian negotiators began the first direct peace talks in more than two weeks on Tuesday in Istanbul, with the surprise attendance of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich who is sanctioned by the West over Moscows invasion of Ukraine. The two teams sat facing each other at a long table in the presidential office, with the Russian oligarch sitting in the front row of observers wearing a blue suit, a Turkish presidential video feed showed. In a speech ahead of the talks on the Bosphorus strait, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan told the delegations the time had come for concrete results and that progress would pave the way for a meeting of the countries two leaders. It is up to the sides to stop this tragedy. Achieving a ceasefire and peace as soon as possible is to the benefit of everyone. We think we have now entered a period where concrete results are needed from talks, he said. The negotiating process, which you have been carrying out under the orders of your leaders, has raised hopes for peace. Ukrainian television said the meeting began with a cold welcome and no handshake between the delegations. Ukraine said on Monday its most ambitious goal at the meeting was to agree to a ceasefire. _____ Zelenskyy: 7 Dead in Southern Ukraine Strike Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says seven people were killed in a missile strike on the regional government headquarters in the southern city of Mykolayiv. Zelenskyy, who spoke to the Danish parliament through a translator, claimed Tuesdays strike also left 22 people injured. The Telegram channel of regional governor Vitaliy Kim showed a gaping hole in the center of the nine-story building. Zelenskyy has made online speeches to lawmakers in several countries, including the United States, Britain, Sweden, Germany, Canada, Israel, Japan, and the European Union. He is set to address Norways parliament on Wednesday. _____ Russia Expel a Total of 10 Diplomats From Three Baltic States Russia has expelled a total of 10 diplomats from the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in retaliation for those countries expelling Russian diplomats earlier this month. The Russian Foreign Ministry said it was canceling the accreditation of four Lithuanian diplomats, three Latvians, and three Estonians and they would be required to leave the country. That corresponds to the number of Russian diplomats each country previously expelled. On March 18, the three Baltic countries ordered the expulsion of 10 Russian embassy staff members in a coordinated action taken in solidarity with Ukraine. Russia said Tuesday that the move was provocative and entirely baseless and that it had summoned the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian ambassadors in Moscow for an official protest. ___ Kremlin Denies Abramovich Poisoned, Confirms Role in Talks Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has rejected reports that Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich may have been poisoned as part of an information war. The investigative news outlet Bellingcat claimed Monday that Abramovich and two Ukrainian delegates suffered symptoms of poisoning after attending talks between Russia and Ukraine on March 3. Peskov said Tuesday that Abramovich has been ensuring certain contacts between the Russian and Ukrainian sides but is not an official member of the Russian delegation. He said that Abramovichs role has been approved by both sides. He said of the reports that Abramovich may have been poisoned: Its part of the information war. These reports obviously do not correspond to reality. _____ Russian Minister Underlines Focus on Donbass Russias defense minister says that liberating the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine is the main goal of Moscows military operation. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whose few public appearances this month raised questions about his health and whereabouts, held a meeting with top military officials on Tuesday and said that overall, the main tasks of the first stage of the operation have been completed. He said that the combat potential of the Ukrainian armed forces has been significantly reduced, which makes it possible to focus the main attention and main efforts on achieving the main goalthe liberation of Donbass. The minister stressed that the Russian military will continue the operation until the set goals are achieved. Shoigu also offered an assurance that Russia will not send conscripts recruited in the upcoming April draft to Ukraine. Earlier this month, the Russian military admitted that a number of conscripts ended up in Ukraine and were even captured there. _____ Ukraine: Talks Focusing on Security Guarantees An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the talks under way with Russia in Istanbul are focusing on security guarantees for Ukraine and hopes of a cease-fire. Mykhailo Podolyak told Ukrainian media on Tuesday that there are intensive consultations going on regarding several important issues, the key among those is an agreement on international security guarantees for Ukraine. He said that only with this agreement can we end the war in a way that Ukraine needs. He adds that the second block of issues is a cease-fire so that we could resolve all the humanitarian problems which have piled up and which require urgent resolutions. Podolyak added the two sides were also discussing breaches of the rules of war. ____ Russian Foreign Ministry: US and Its Allies Hack Russian Data and Infrastructure The Russian Foreign Ministry says the United States and its allies are involved in hacking Russian data and infrastructure. The Foreign Ministry said in a statement Tuesday that the U.S. and its satellites are undertaking a massive cyber-operation against our country. It also said the U.S. and other NATO members had trained Ukrainian hackers and blamed what it said was an effort by Ukraine to recruit international hackers. The ministry said that the attacks include stealing Russians personal data, putting pressure on the economy, and spreading fake information about the Russian military. Russia says it is strengthening its own cyber-security and will seek to bring hackers to justice. ___ IMF Says It Has No Problems With Russia The International Monetary Funds chief says the global lender has no problems with Russia and that its board can only suspend the country if the funds membership says it no longer recognizes the government. That is a very tall order, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said Tuesday in response to a question about consequences against Russia over its war in Ukraine. She added that we all know for this war to end there has to be dialogue. Georgieva spoke at the World Government Summit in Dubai. The fund approved emergency financing of $1.4 billion for Ukraine on March 10. Thats in addition to a disbursement of $700 million to the country before the war, which was launched by Russia on Feb. 24. The IMF has said it expects a bad recession in Russia and spillover impact on neighboring countries. The IMF says its Moscow office is not actively operating. ____ Lithuania May Ban Use of Russian Troops Z Symbol Lawmakers in Lithuania are debating a ban on using the Z symbol to show support for Russias attack on Ukraine. Russian troops in Ukraine have painted the letter Z on the side of vehicles and it has been adopted by some in Russia as a symbol of support for what the Kremlin describes as a special military operation. Lithuania, which already has outlawed Soviet and Nazi symbols, also wants to ban the black-and-orange ribbon that was originally a military decoration that is now used as a remembrance of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. A vote in Lithuanias parliament is expected this week. If it passes, people who violate a ban could face a fine of up to 500 euros ($550). _____ Finland Claims Russia Is Likely to Carry Out Cyber Attack Against Country Finlands main intelligence agency claims that Russia is likely to carry out cyber and information operations against the Nordic country in the coming months as the government and lawmakers debate possible NATO membership. The Finnish Security and Intelligence Service said in its annual report published Tuesday that it considers unlawful intelligence operations of Russia to be among the main current threats to Finlands national security. Director Antti Pelttari said that Finnish society as a whole should be prepared for various measures from Russia seeking to influence policymaking in Finland on the NATO issue. _____ Turkey on Alert Against Naval Mines Floating in Black Sea Turkeys defense minister says the country is on alert against naval mines after authorities detected and deactivated two explosive devices floating in the Black Sea. Hulusi Akar told journalists late Monday that authorities were still trying to determine whether the mines had drifted from Ukrainian waters. He had no information on the number of anti-ship devices that may be floating in the sea. Akar said in comments released by his ministry Tuesday: Whether the mines that were laid in Ukraine have arrived, or whether other mines were activatedit would not be right to say anything without being certain about it. Our mine-sweeping vessels and maritime patrol planes are on alert, he said. Detected mines are immediately destroyed in a safe manner. Akar added that Turkey was cooperating with Romania and Bulgaria to detect mines. Turkish military teams disabled two naval mines in the past four days, including one on Saturday that forced the temporary closure of the Bosporus Strait. The sighting followed warnings that mines laid at the entrances to Ukrainian ports could break free in heavy weather and cross the Black Sea. _____ UN Nuclear Watchdog Chief in Ukraine to Talk Safety Support The U.N. nuclear watchdog says its director-general has arrived in Ukraine for talks with senior government officials on delivering urgent technical assistance to ensure the safety of the countrys nuclear facilities. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Tuesday that Rafael Mariano Grossis aim is to to initiate prompt safety and security support for Ukraines nuclear sites. That will include sending IAEA experts to prioritized facilities and sending vital safety and security supplies including monitoring and emergency equipment. It said that Grossi will travel to one of Ukraines nuclear power plants this week, but didnt say which one. Ukraine has 15 nuclear reactors at four active power plants, and also is home to the decommissioned Chernobyl plant, the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. Russian forces have taken control of Chernobyl and of the largest active power plant, at Zaporizhzhia. Grossi said in a statement that the military conflict is putting Ukraines nuclear power plants and other facilities with radioactive material in unprecedented danger. He added that there have already been several close calls. We cant afford to lose any more time. _____ Ukraine: Countries Should Ban Use of Russian Troops Symbol Z Ukraines foreign minister called on countries to ban the use of the letter Z as a symbol of the Russian war on Ukraine. Russian troops in Ukraine have painted the letter Z on the side of vehicles and it has been adopted by some in Russia as a symbol of support for what the Kremlin describes as a special military operation in the neighboring country. ____ Germany Works Toward a De Facto Embargo of Russian Oil Germanys foreign minister says her country is working toward a de facto embargo of Russian oil because of the war in Ukraine. Germany has long relied on fossil fuels from Russia and Chancellor Olaf Scholz has warned that suddenly halting imports could have severe economic consequences for his country. But Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Tuesday that Germany is nevertheless aiming for a complete national exit from Russian fossil fuel dependence. She cited recent efforts to diversify Germanys imports that aim to end the use of Russian oil and coal this year, and natural gas by mid-2024. You can () call it a national, step-by-step, de facto embargo, particularly of oil, Baerbock said at the Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue conference. ____ Ukraine Says Its Running 3 Evacuation Routes The Ukrainian government says it is operating three humanitarian corridors Tuesday to move civilians out of the besieged port of Mariupol and two Russian-occupied cities in the south. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk says that besides Mariupol, evacuations will run from Enerhodar and Melitopol. The routes all converge in the Ukraine-controlled southern city of Zaporizhzhia. _____ Explosion Struck Administration Building in Port City of Mykolaiv: Ukrainian Official A Ukrainian official says an explosion struck a nine-story administration building in the strategic port city of Mykolaiv on Tuesday morning as talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Istanbul began. The Telegram channel of the regional governor, Vitaliy Kim, showed a gaping hole in the center of the building. Kim said most people escaped the building and rescuers were searching for a handful of missing people. ____ Bloomberg News Says It Suspends Its Operations in Russia and Belarus Bloomberg News says it has suspended its operations in Russia and Belarus, citing international condemnation and sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. The financial news company said customers in both Russia and Belarus will be unable to access any of Bloombergs financial products including terminals, data licenses, data feeds, and electronic trading platforms. Trading functions for Russian securities were disabled in line with international sanctions, it said. Earlier, Bloomberg suspended the work of its journalists in Russia and removed Russian stocks from its global equity indexes. Russian bonds will be removed with the month-end rebalancing, the company said in a statement. It said Bloomberg Philanthropies had pledged $40 million to the International Rescue Committee and the World Central Kitchen to help Ukrainians and refugees in the region and elsewhere. ____ British Intelligence Says Russias Wagner Group Deployed to Eastern Ukraine British military intelligence said on Monday the Russian private military company, the Wagner Group, has been deployed to eastern Ukraine. They are expected to deploy more than 1,000 mercenaries, including senior leaders of the organisation, to undertake combat operations, Britains Ministry of Defence said. _____ New Round of Talks Aims to Stop the Fighting in Ukraine Another round of talks aimed at stopping the war in Ukraine is scheduled for Tuesday as the fighting looks increasingly like a stalemate on the ground, with the two sides trading control of a town in the east and a suburb of the capital. Ukrainian forces retook Irpin, northwest of Kyiv, from Russian troops, who were regrouping to take the area back, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Monday as he sought to rally the country. We still have to fight, we have to endure, Zelenskyy said in his nighttime video address to the nation. We cant express our emotions now. We cant raise expectations, simply so that we dont burn out. Ahead of the talks, to be held in Istanbul, the Ukrainian president said his country is prepared to declare its neutrality, as Moscow has demanded, and is open to compromise on the fate of the Donbass, the contested region in the countrys east. ___ Zelenskyy: Russian Forces Still Attacking Kyiv Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Monday that Russian forces are still attacking Kyiv, despite being driven out of Irpin, a suburb northwest of the capital that has seen heavy fighting. He said the Russians remain in control of northern suburbs and are trying to regroup after losing Irpin on Monday. He urged Ukrainians not to let up in the war. He said the situation remains tense in the northeast, around Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkhiv, and also in the eastern Donbass region and in the south around Mariupol, which remains blockaded by Russian troops. The president said no humanitarian corridors could be opened Monday out of the besieged city. Zelenskyy said he spoke Monday with the leaders of Azerbaijan, Britain, Canada, and Germany, urging them to strengthen the sanctions against Russia. ___ Missile Hits West Ukraine Oil Depot: Ukrainian Official A missile attack hit an oil depot in western Ukraine late Monday, Rivnes regional governor said, marking the second attack on oil facilities in the region and the latest in a series of such attacks in recent days. Western Ukraine has not seen ground combat, but missiles have struck oil depots and a military plant in Lviv, a major city close to Poland where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have gone to escape fighting elsewhere. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested in an interview with Russian journalists released on Sunday that the attacks on oil depots are intended to disrupt the planting season in Ukraine, which is a major grain producer. ___ Biden Says Hes Not Walking Back Comments About Putin President Joe Biden told reporters Monday he is not walking back his Saturday comments when he said that Russian President Vladimir Putin should not remain in power. Biden made the initial comment about the Russian leader at the end of a speech in Warsaw, Poland, when he said, for Gods sake this man cannot remain in power. Earlier in the day, Biden referred to Putin as a butcher. Taking questions from reporters Monday, Biden said he is not walking anything back, adding that he was speaking of his outrage at Putins actions in Ukraine and not articulating a change in U.S. policy. The last thing I want to do is engage in a land war or a nuclear war with Russia. Thats not part of it. I was expressing my outrage, the behavior of this man, Biden said. Its outrageous. Its outrageous, and its more an aspiration than anything that he shouldnt be in power. Theres no, I mean, people like this shouldnt be ruling countries, but they do. The fact [is] they do but [it] doesnt mean I cant express my outrage about it. When asked later if he was concerned his comments would escalate tensions with Russia, Biden said Putin is going to do what hes going to do. Read the full article here Allen Zhong, Zachary Stieber, Nick Ciolino, Jack Phillips, The Associated Press, and Reuters contributed to this report. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin enter a hall for talks in the Kremlin in Moscow in this 2019 file photo. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Photo) Majority of Americans Support Sanctions on China If It Aids Russia: Poll Nearly 75 percent of likely U.S. voters polled believe that President Joe Biden should issue sanctions on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) similar to those he has announced against Russia if the CCP chooses to provide aid to Russia. The poll follows allegations by the U.S. State Department that CCP leadership is considering a request for economic and military aid from Russia following the latters mismanagement of its invasion of Ukraine. Both China and Russia have denied the report. Biden recently met virtually with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and told him that China would face consequences if it delivered aid to Russia, although he declined at the time to elaborate on what those consequences would be. Last week, leadership from across the 30 member nations of the NATO alliance also condemned Russia and formally urged the CCP not to provide such aid. The Chinese communist regime has repeatedly refused to denounce Russias invasion or join multilateral sanctions placed on Moscow by the rest of the international community. Former Assistant Secretary of State David Stillwell has described the U.S. relationship with China as being in a state of cold war, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said the SinoRussian partnership would only deepen in the next decade. As such, broad support of coercive economic measures against the CCP if it supports the war in Ukraine more directly could prove to be a litmus test for how Americans view the international order going into the 2022 midterm elections. Chinas close partnership with Russia, which emerged shortly before Russias Ukraine invasion, is now putting China in a precarious position, said Mark Meckler, president of Convention of States Action (CoSA), a nonprofit that aims curb the scope of the federal government, which conducted the poll. Americans believe, quite simply, that if the international community is able to obtain proof that the CCP is supporting Russias war in Ukraine, China should face the same economic consequences being imposed on Russia. Such sanctions found support from a broad majority of Americans regardless of party affiliation, but that support was slightly stronger among Republicans. The poll, exclusively obtained by Epoch Times sister media outlet NTD, was conducted by CoSA in partnership with pollster Trafalgar Group. It elicited responses from more than 1,000 likely voters in the 2022 midterms from across the political spectrum. In all, 77.8 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of Democrats polled were in favor of sanctioning the CCP if it provides aid to Russia. A total of 76.4 percent of independents also agreed. What type of aid the CCP would need to deliver to Russia to warrant the sanctions wasnt explicit in the language of the poll. A Chinese bride poses for a wedding photographer as her groom looks on, on a section of the Great Wall of China near Beijing on October 28, 2014. China's marriage rate has continually decreased for many years. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images) Marriage Registrations Hit a Record Low in China In 2021, approximately 7.6 million couples registered marriages in China, the lowest number over the past 36 years according to the latest data released by the Chinas Civil Affairs Bureau. China, the worlds most populous country, has seen the number of marriage registrations decline every year since 2013, foreshadowing potential demographic problems. The number of marriages registered in China peaked at about 13.5 million couples in 2013, and decreased every year since then, falling below 10 million in 2019 to 7.6 million this year, the lowest since the Ministry of Civil Affairs official website started publishing data in 1986. A summary of marriage registrations in China over the years. The data comes from the website of the Civil Affairs Bureau of the Communist Party of China. (The Epoch Times Cartography) Regarding why more Chinese people are opting to not get married or marry without having children, Li Yuanhua, former Beijing Normal University professor, told The Epoch Times that the major causes are rising costs of child birthing, growing and educating a child, as well as a variety of life pressures in China. The problem emerges not just for today, not temporarily, but was shaped by a long-term accumulation of social pressures as a whole, which overwhelmed Chinese people almost breathless, Li said. The rising cost of living and the demographic imbalances stem from the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) economic system and demographic policy, respectively. The two factors interact with each other. For example, cadres in the Communist government system oversee most of the social resources, which probably led to the distribution of social resources morphing into a serious imbalance, and exacerbated the gap between the rich and the poor. Therefore, most Chinese people will find their cost of living has risen making it hard to make ends meet, and so they cannot afford to have children. Chinas current population decline is one result of the CCPs one-child policy, Yang Zhi (a pseudonym), a professor at Henan University said in an interview with The Epoch Times. According to Li, the CCP imposed the compulsory one-child policy and forced abortion measures in a bid to control population growth, which over time, resulted in a smaller labor force. Labor force is widely seen as a vital factor of social development. In this case, an insufficient workforce will affect the countrys economic development. China implemented a nationwide one-child policy in 1980 and only ended the controversial plan in 2016. After more than three decades, side effects of the one-child policy began to emerge, with Chinas population growth decreasing dramatically and serious demographic imbalances appearing. Obviously, the policy-makers decisions are lacking the foresight of the upcoming two or three decades, Yang Said. Ms. Cao, of Hefei, Anhui Province in south-central China, told The Epoch Times that Chinese women find it is more difficult to get married earlier because there are more men than women in China, so women have more options for a future spouse. They will seek better mate criteria, with the mans salary, job, and even his parents wealth, incorporated into a womans selection of the best spouse. Elevated criteria for choosing a spouse renders Chinese women less eager to get married before finding a suitable husband, as Ms. Cao said, which repeatedly delays the age of marriage, and as they get older, more and more women are getting used to being celibate. According to multiple Chinese media, the drop in the number of marriages has various causes such as, a downturn in population, the imbalanced numbers between males and females, a smaller marriageable population, prolonged age of first-marriage, poor economic factors, fierce societal competition, and shifts in the modern perceptions of Chinese young people. Epoch Times Reporter Weber Lee contributed to this article. Minister of Foreign Affairs Wopke Hoekstra talks to the press in The Hague, the Netherlands, following the decision to expel 17 Russian diplomats on March 29, 2022. (Bart Maat/ANP/AFP via Getty Images) Netherlands, Belgium Extradites Dozens of Russian Diplomats Accused of Espionage Dutch and Belgian authorities are expelling 38 Russian diplomats after accusing them of engaging in espionage activities, the foreign affairs ministry in the Netherlands and Belgium announced on Tuesday. Wopke Hoekstra, the Netherlands minister of foreign affairs, said a total of 17 individuals, who were accredited as diplomats at the Russian representations in the Netherlands, were secretly working undercover in the country as intelligence officers. The reason for the extradition is based on information collected by two Dutch intelligence services, AIVD and MIVD, which have put out warnings against Russian spies in the past, Hoekstra said in a statement. The Russian ambassador was summoned on Tuesday and informed of the decision. The 17 diplomats have two weeks to leave the Netherlands and the decision cannot be appealed. These people have diplomat on their business card when they are actually doing something completely different, Hoekstra said, Dutch news agency NOS reported. He didnt further clarify in which kind of sector the espionage took place. We have made this decision for the sake of Dutch security, he added. In the greatly changed context, with the war in Ukraine and the increasing Russian assertiveness. Hoekstra noted that he assumes deporting these intelligence officers may have consequences, but the Dutch government is prepared for any retaliation by Moscow. Experience shows that Russia does not leave such measures unanswered, he said. We cannot speculate on that, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is prepared for various scenarios that may occur in the near future. Meanwhile, Belgium also decided to expel 21 Russian diplomats suspected of espionage. Sophie Wilmes, Belgiums minister of foreign affairs, announced on Tuesday that 21 Russian diplomats have two weeks to leave the country, noting the move is not a sanction to Russia and is only related to [Belgiums] national security. Foreign Affairs Minister Sophie Wilmes is pictured during an extraordinary summit of the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) military alliance in Brussels, Belgium, on March 2022. (Benoit Doppagne/Belga Mag/AFP via Getty Images) Diplomatic channels remain open with Russia, the Russian Embassy can continue to operate and we continue to advocate dialogue, she said. Belgiums decision to expel the 21 Russians, who were also all accredited as diplomats but were accused of working on spying and influencing operations, was in consultation with the Netherlands, two neighboring countries. Ireland also asked four senior officials at the Russian Embassy to leave the country and the Czech Republic also expelled one member of the diplomatic staff at Russias embassy in Prague. Reuters contributed to this report. From NTD News A man walks past a train of the newly completed Abuja-Kaduna night railway line in Abuja, on July 21, 2016. (Stringer/AFP via Getty Images) Nigerian Rail Service Suspended After Terrorists Attack on Train Carrying Nearly 1,000 Passengers A group of suspected terrorist bandits attacked a passenger train headed to the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna from the capital Abuja late on Monday by detonating explosives on the rail track in order to trap the train, officials said. One of the passengers also confirmed the bombing on social media, saying attackers destroyed the engines of the train after planting explosives and had surrounded the train, shooting sporadically. Please this is an emergency, Anas Iro Danmusa wrote on Facebook. We are helpless gunshots [are] still being fired around us. We are under the seats praying to God while waiting for help. A Kaduna State government spokesman confirmed that fatalities were recorded and multiple people have been injured. The official did not state the exact number of casualties or wounded. Samuel Aruwan, Kadunas commissioner for internal security and home affairs, said in a statement that passengers who were injured or who died have been transferred to hospitals, Africa News reported. Aruwan noted that the evacuation of passengers trapped on the train was completed early on Tuesday and the military has secured the area. The military has secured the Kaduna-bound train from Abuja trapped by terrorists, he said. [Passengers] that sustained injuries have been rushed to hospitals for urgent medical attention. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. According to official sources familiar with the train service, there are at least 970 passengers on board the train, Daily Nigerian reported. The train was stopped about 15 miles to Kaduna when the attack happened, an official of the Nigerian Railways Corp (NRC) said, adding that a family relative was also trapped on the Kaduna-bound service. The NRC announced in a statement on Tuesday that due to unforeseen circumstances all train operations along the Abuja-Kaduna routea very popular Nigerian routehave been temporarily suspended until further notice. It is the second train attack since October in Nigeria, which faces an insurgency by Islamic terrorist groups and armed bandits that have kidnapped hundreds of students, travelers, and villagers for ransom. Some people have opted to travel by rail after several kidnappings by armed bandits on Nigerian highways, especially in the northwest of the country. The incident came two days after gangsknown locally as banditsinvaded Kaduna International Airport, killing aviation workers and leaving many others wounded. Reuters contributed to this report. From NTD News Storage tanks are seen at Marathon Petroleum's Los Angeles Refinery, which processes domestic & imported crude oil into California Air Resources Board (CARB), gasoline, diesel fuel, and other petroleum products, in Carson, Calif., on March 11, 2022. Picture taken with a drone. (Bing Guan/Reuters) Oil Drops on Positive Signals From Russia-Ukraine Peace Talks LONDONOil prices dropped on Tuesday, extending losses from the previous day after Russia called peace talks with Ukraine constructive and Chinas new lockdowns to curb the spread of the coronavirus hit fuel demand. Brent crude fell $4.55, or 4 percent, to $107.93 a barrel by 1210 GMT, and U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude was down $4.64, or 4.4 percent, at $101.32. Both benchmarks lost about 7 percent on Monday. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Turkey for the first face-to-face talks in nearly three weeks. The top Russian negotiator said the talks were constructive. Ukraine proposed adopting neutral status in exchange for security guarantees at the talks, meaning it would not join military alliances or host military bases, Ukrainian negotiators said. Oil prices are under pressure again on expectations about peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, which could lead to an easing of sanctions said Hiroyuki Kikukawa, general manager of research at Nissan Securities. Sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine have disrupted oil supplies, driving prices higher. Prices also came under pressure after new lockdowns in Shanghai to curb rising coronavirus cases hit fuel demand in China, the worlds biggest importer. Shanghai accounts for about 4 percent of Chinas oil consumption, ANZ Research analysts said. Oil prices rose almost $2 earlier in the day as Kazakhstans supplies continued to be disrupted and major producers showed no sign of being in a hurry to boost output significantly. Kazakhstan is set to lose at least a fifth of its oil production for a month after storm damage to mooring points used to export crude from the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), the energy ministry said. The producer group OPEC+ was also expected to stick to its plan for a modest rise in May at this weeks meeting, despite a surge in prices due to the Ukraine crisis and calls from the United States and other consumers for more supply. The energy ministers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, key members of OPEC+, said the producers group should not engage in politics as pressure mounted on them to take action against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. By Bozorgmehr Sharafedin Ontario MPP Hillier Released on Bail After Being Charged in Relation to Freedom Convoy Independent Ontario MPP Randy Hillier has been released on bail with several conditions after turning himself in to Ottawa police on March 28 over nine charges related to the Freedom Convoy protests that took place in the national capital last month. The Crown consented to Hilliers release after he made an appearance in court by telephone the same day. Justice of the Peace Louise Logue released him with several conditions, including a prohibition from posting on social media about the Freedom Convoy protests, COVID-19 mask or vaccine mandates, or the anti-vaccine cause. The MPP, who represents the riding of Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston in Ontario, is also forbidden from attending or providing any form of support, including financial support, to the Freedom Convoy or any organizations or causes that oppose COVID-19 masks or vaccines. In addition, the 64-year-old is not allowed to set foot in downtown Ottawa other than meeting with his lawyer nor establish any contact, in any form, with people associated with the Freedom Convoy, including organizers Chris Barber and Tamara Lich. Hillier was released on a combined $35,000 bond between him and his surety. If Hillier breached the order, the courts may pursue the full bond amount, along with the possibility of being taken back into custody for a period of up to two years, Logue said. Hilliers Lawyer Responds David Anber, a criminal lawyer who represents Hillier, argued that the conditions set out in the release order were too restrictive and that the conditions should be centred on posting, attending, or providing support for the Freedom Convoy and not restrict other pandemic-related communications. That is the condition that would be the least restrictive version, Anber said. Now the Crown wants to go beyond that by also prohibiting Mr. Hillier, whos a member of the provincial legislature elected to comment on public policy in this province, to prohibit him from commenting on policies related to vaccine mandates or mask mandates. And that in my respectful submission would be going beyond what is set out in Zora. In June 2020, the Supreme Court of Canada criticized the excessive use of bail conditions and set out a framework to assess whether such requirements are reasonably necessary, in the ruling of R v. Zora. Quoting from the ruling of Zora, Anber argued that the court and the Crown must be guided by the principles of restraint, and review when imposing or enforcing bail conditions. The principle of restraint requires any conditions of bail to be clearly articulated, minimal in number, necessary, reasonable, least onerous in the circumstances, and sufficiently linked to the accuseds risks regarding the statutory grounds for detention in s. 515(10), said Anber, referring to paragraph six of the ruling. Logue sided with the Crown, citing the undeniable concerns with respect to the safety of the public in relation to these protests. She added that the conditions will not limit Hilliers role as an MPP to work on policies related to COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates provided he does not post about it on social media. Ontario Independant MPP Randy Hillier speaks to anti-lockdown protesters at the Ontario Legislature in Toronto on Nov. 26, 2020. (The Canadian Press/Frank Gunn) Charges Laid On March 27, the Ottawa police called on Hillier to turn himself in over charges related to the truckers protests in downtown Ottawa. He is facing nine charges, with two counts each of obstructing a public officer, counselling mischief and mischief/obstructing property over $5,000. He is also charged with obstructing a person aiding a peace officer, assaulting a peace or public officer, and counselling an uncommitted indictable offence. Crown counsel Tim Wightman told the court the assault charge dates back to Jan. 29, the first weekend of the protest, when Hillier, Peoples Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier, and a group of supporters tried to access Parliament Hill with a megaphone. The Crown alleged they were blocked by a metal gate, and a Parliamentary Protective Service officer attempted to stop them. Wightman said Hillier threw the gate out of the way and shouted lets go, in an attempt to overwhelm the checkpoint. When that didnt work, Hillier used his shoulder and hip to push the officer out of the way so the group could force their way past, he alleged. Wightmans allegation stood in contrast to Hillier who denied assaulting a police officer, saying he has no idea how the charge came about. I had thousands of interactions. I only ever greeted people inwith love and affection and embraces and handshakes, said Hillier before turning himself in to the police on March 28. Unless handshakes or warm embraces are now considered assault, I have no idea. The charges on Hillier also relate to his attendance at the Freedom Convoy protest. Wightman alleged Hillers active encouragement of people bringing their vehicles and attending the protest in downtown Ottawa, which the federal and provincial governments objected to. This includes shaking hands publicly at trucks and honking horns during the course of the occupation, as well as directing vehicles arriving in Ottawa to park on streets obstructing traffic, greeting new arrivals on behalf of the Freedom Convoy, organizing and speaking at numerous news conferences, the Crown said. Hillier also encouraged supporters to flood 911 phone lines, limiting the polices ability to respond to emergencies, the court heard. This allegation was related to a Twitter post by Ottawa police during the convoy protests, who called on supporters to stop calling critical emergency and operational phone lines to express displeasure about the police action against protestors. Independent Ontario MPP Randy Hillier greets protesters against federal COVID-19 mandates and restrictions at the War Memorial in Ottawa on Feb. 13, 2022. (The Canadian Press/Frank Gunn) Hillier retweeted that post with the comment: Keep calling in a democracy expressing yourself is a fundamental freedom #FreedomConvoy2022. Ive Not Seen the Full Evidence: Anber In an interview with David Freiheit, a lawyer and YouTuber on March 28 evening, Anber said he has yet to see the full disclosure from the Crown on the allegations against Hillier. Ive not seen the full evidence. So certainly, were at a stage, at the bail stage, where we get a very limited understanding of the facts right now. The video Ive seen does not disclose Mr. Hillier committing an assault of any kind, said Anber on Freiheits program Viva Frei. Anber added that he should be able to get hold of the disclosure in the next few weeks. Were going to need to get the videos and the tweets that they say theyre relying upon. Were going to need to get the statements of the various officers, what they wrote at the time Then were going to get these alleged phone calls [to emergency lines], he said. The criminal lawyer stressed it is critical to listen to the content of the phone calls. They claim that people started making malicious calls. If theyre going to advance that at Randy Hilliers trial, we need to know what those malicious calls actually were. Anber said he will push back should the prosecutor want Hillier to plead guilty. A judge will look at the evidence and give his or her opinion on the case, and then either well reach some kind of agreement, or well schedule it for trial, where the Crown will have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, he said. Hilliers next court date is scheduled for May 4. The Canadian Press contributed to this report. Little known fact: the mountain people who live in the Ramapo mountains of New Jersey are the same mountain-folk (formerly known as hillbillies) who live in the fabled Smoky, Appalachian, and Blue Ridge mountains of the American Southits the same mountain range all the way up the East coast. It goes, roughly, Great Smoky, Appalachian, Blue Ridge, Alleghenies, Poconos, Ramapos, Berkshires, Catskills, Adirondacks. In the same way that not all ghetto-dwellers are lawless, but some are, mountain culture lawlessness (born of the moonshine whiskey distillery era of the Great Depression) tends to pervade pockets all up and down the Eastern mountain range. In certain areas, meth and marijuana have replaced moonshine, but the guns and money are the same as they ever were. Out of the Furnace Produced by Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio, Out of the Furnace is a well-told, if hyper-violent tale of U.S. rust-belt economic dire straits meeting mountain-culture decadence. Similar to Sean Penns The Indian Runner, its a story of two brothers; one upstanding, the other damaged by war (and descending into madness) and the brotherly love and hard luck they share. Steelworker Russell Baze (Christian Baze, L) and his ex-military younger brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) in Out of the Furnace. (Relativity Media) Brothers Russell and Rodney Baze (Christian Bale and Casey Affleck) live in Braddock, Pennsylvania, where the elder Russell works at the Carrie Furnace, a steel mill (hence the title). Millwork put their father on his deathbed, but Russells content to work there and make plans with his beautiful girlfriend Lena Taylor (Zoe Saldana of Avatar). Russell Baze (Christian Bale) works in an Appalachian steel mill, in Out of the Furnace. (Kerry Hayes/Relativity Media) Younger brother Rodneys a soldier, back from a third tour in Iraq. His PTSD manifests in compulsive gambling and a berserker refusal to keep promises on the pre-planned dives (losing on purpose) of the illegal, corrupt, backwoods bare-knuckle fighting to which hes turned to pay his debts. His bar tabs and betting tabs are rapidly rising. Hes in debt, big time, to his fight-manager and bar-owner John Petty (a pony-tailed Willem Dafoe). Whats Rodneys next move? John Petty (Willem Dafoe, L) and Rodney Baze (Casey Affleck), play manager and fighter, respectively, in Out of the Furnace. (Relativity Media) Go North, Young Man Rodneys answer is to take a big fight up north in the Ramapo Mountains, whose turf is overseen by drug manufacturing, backwoods fight-club overlord Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson, about as mean, dangerous, and far from Cheers as you never thought possible). Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson), in Out of the Furnace. (Relativity Media) Rodney owes Petty, and Petty owes DeGroat, except Petty, luckily for Rodney, has an avuncular soul. Within DeGroats soul, however, squats a demon of mercilessnesschances are, DeGroat wont even make it into hell; his name shall most likely be biblically blotted out of the Book of Life. Similar to Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River, A Place Beyond the Pines, and even Blue Velvet, the film Out of the Furnace explores the festering underside of American moral depravity, while rounded by the beauty of American woodlands, and, in a certain sense, cozy communities. Its a dark tale of revenge containing staggering scenes of great sadness. One such scene is Russell coming home from four years of prison (due to killing a child while drunk driving) and visiting Lena at the kindergarten where she works. She tells him of another man she now fully, inescapably, and devastatingly, belongs to. But her heart still utterly belongs to Russell, who was ripped away. Both actors thoroughly manifest this complex combination of love, crippling loss, and profound sadness. Lena Taylor (Zoe Saldana) and Russell Baze (Christian Baze) lament their lost love in Out of the Furnace. (Relativity Media) Americas Sadness Likewise profoundly sad is Rodneys shattering, out-of-the-blue descriptions of war atrocities hes experienced. We glimpse inside the door of his daily personal hell. There should have been an Oscar nomination for Casey Affleck. Rodney Baze (Casey Affleck, center) in an illegal bare-knuckle fight in Out of the Furnace. (Relativity Media) In one particularly vivid sequence, DeGroats unjustified beating of Rodney is cross-cut with shots of Russell and his dad (Sam Shepard) skinning a moose. Scenes of meth addicts in abandoned homes remind us that, while exotic compared to Russells lonely blue-collar gloom, we have a wide range of low-income sadness in America. Gerald Red Baze (Sam Shepard, L) and his son Russell Baze (Christian Baze) discuss the whereaboust of son/brother Rodney Baze in Out of the Furnace. (Relativity Media) Forest Whitaker, in a small cop role, shows why hes a character actors character actor. Compare this role to the one he played in The Butler, and youll appreciate the craft. Forest Whitaker (foreground) plays a cop in Out of the Furnace. (Relativity Media) Most Eerily Impressive Scene In search of Rodney whos gone missing, Russell tries to sneak up on the mountain drug-community. Its nighttime. ATVs and muscle cars abound, which are parked beside a neon-lit convenient store. Neck tattoos are in abundance. Russell sidles up to a local, highly suspicious teenagers cherry-red Chevelle, and, in the time-honored American male ritual of standing around and paying homage to horsepower enhancement-work, takes note of, and compliments said teens engine upgrades. Danger hangs, invisibly, like the voltage in a maximum-security electric fence. Its ironic to note that in these traditionally deeply racist mountain enclaves, the sideways-worn ball-caps and pants-on-the-ground fashions of hip-hop and gangland culturenot to mention the gangsta rap pounding their car stereoshave snuck in the back door, and the inhabitants are unaware of the infiltration. Its not surprising though, as both of these predominantly white and predominantly black communities, respectively, share the sad, limited life options of selling drugs, the military (as in a job of chipping paint all day, all week, on Navy destroyers rather than, say, exciting Naval special warfare) and of prison. Theyre unified in thug life, after all. While Out of the Furnace is riveting due to being chock full of actors actors, director Cooper paints a particularly grim picture. But if it did nothing else than rub Americas nose in the abominable treatment of soldiers coming home from war, it would more than justify itself. Movie poster for Out of the Furnace. (Relativity Media) Out of the Furnace Director: Scott Cooper Starring: Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck, Willem Dafoe, Zoe Saldana, Forest Whitaker, Sam Shepard Running Time: 1 hour, 56 minutes MPAA Rating: R Release Date: Dec. 6, 2013 3.5 stars out of 5 Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine acknowledges members of the media while entering his residence after testing positive for COVID-19 earlier in the day in Bexley, Ohio, on Aug. 6, 2020. (Jay LaPrete/AP photo) Ohio Restaurant Groups Endorsement of Gov. DeWine Sparks Outrage 'How could any restaurant owner not be angry and hurt about this?' Many restaurant and bar owners across the state are expressing outrage after the Ohio Restaurant Association (ORA) announced that its endorsing Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted for reelection. Thousands of restaurants and bars have closed amid DeWines COVID-19 shutdowns and restrictions. They have betrayed the very businesses they claim to represent, said Aaron Crater, a professional bartender who founded an advocacy group for the hospitality industry known as Ohio Barhop in the summer of 2020. Gov. DeWine destroyed our industry, shutting it down without any regard to actual data and science. As of March 2022, more than 3,000 Ohio restaurantsor about 10 percenthave closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the ORA. Clinging to Life Crater believes that number is conservative and says that about 4,000 restaurants and bars shuttered for good in 2020 alone. Thousands more are clinging to life because of the heavy restrictions that followed closures, he said. He believes that DeWine is responsible for the struggles because of his unnecessary overreach. The ORA has a different opinion. Mike DeWine is an advocate for Ohios business community and has demonstrated an appreciation for the unique challenges that face the restaurant community, ORA President and CEO John Barker said. This has never been truer than over the past two years during the pandemic where he consistently reached out to listen and understand our industrys complex issues. Governor DeWine and Lieutenant Governor Husted spent countless hours with the ORA and our restaurant, foodservice, and hospitality industry leaders, and we are thankful for their thoughtful approach. The governors restaurant advisory group developed the roadmap to safely reopen restaurants in Ohio in May of 2020. We partnered on the Ohio Restaurant Promise for guests and employees, and the state provided a grant program with more than $200 million in COVID relief for impacted operators. These steps and more enabled Ohio to fare significantly better than other states that suffered from overreach on mandates and restrictions, which devastated their hospitality communities. It is critical to our members that Ohios leaders are balanced and pro-business, pro-economic growth, and pro-job creator, especially now as our economy continues to rebound and we position restaurants to thrive again. Because of this, DeWine and Husted have earned our endorsement in the 2022 election. Honored to have the endorsement of the @OhioRestaurant Association. The restaurant, hospitality & foodservice industries bring vibrancy to Ohio communities. We look forward to continuing to partner with the ORA for the next 4 years to keep fighting and WINNING for Ohio! pic.twitter.com/IA78oM9gM9 Mike DeWine (@MikeDeWine) March 22, 2022 Shutdown Was Devastating On March 15, 2020, DeWine announced that the Ohio Department of Health had issued a Directors Order to close all Ohio bars and restaurants to in-house patrons, effective that evening at 9 p.m. The measure limited restaurants to take-out and delivery services only. Tina Ramsey has owned OConners Irish Pub in Springfield, Ohio, for 14 years. The shutdown was devastating to Ramsey, as it happened less than 48 hours before her pubs busiest time of the year, St. Patricks Day. I had spent $17,000 on tents, food, liquor, beer, and staffing. We ended up giving away most of the food, Ramsey said. I thought I was going to lose everything I worked so hard for. Even today, nothing is the same. There is an uncertainty from day to day. I dont feel secure about the stability of operating the business, from staffing to food pricing. Ramsey said she was so stunned that the ORA endorsed DeWine that she cried. I am in shock. I used to be a member, but they dont show any concern for small restaurants, she said. Because of Gov. DeWines response to COVID, thousands upon thousands of peoples lives were ruined, and the ORA thinks he is the person who should lead our state. How could any restaurant owner not be angry and hurt about this? The ORAs political action committee contributed more than $13,000 to DeWines 2018 gubernatorial campaign, state filings show. Lobby groups frequently make campaign contributions to political candidates. Its puzzling for many Ohioans that an organization that represents the industry that arguably is the most affected by COVID-19 mandates would support the governor who authorized those measures. Jonah Schulz, who is running in the Republican primary in Ohios 7th District Congressional race, says the ORAs decision to support DeWine raises questions about the legitimacy of endorsements. (Courtesy of Jonah Schulz) Jonah Schulz, whos running in the Republican primary in Ohios 7th District congressional race, said the ORAs decision to support DeWine raises questions about the legitimacy of endorsements. Many of these endorsements are nothing more than special interest groups masquerading as advocacy groups, Schulz said. When I decided to run for Congress, the ORA was one of the first groups I contacted. I figured they would be outraged about what DeWine has done to their industry, and I am a liberty-minded candidate. They were not interested in what I had to say and told me they are taking a lets see what happens approach. Well, I guess we are seeing what happened. They showed they dont support the best interests of an industry they claim to representan industry that has been decimated by the candidate they want to stay in power for four more years. Crater called the ORAs reasoning for endorsing DeWine hypocritical. He pointed out that DeWine was one of the first governors in the United States to close restaurants and bars, doing so on March 15, 2020. When he allowed them to re-open that May, the restrictions put on them were so onerous and burdensome that many collapsed very quickly, and it made it nearly impossible for them to turn any profit, if they were lucky enough to stay out of the red at all, Crater said in a written statement. Business owners were facing severe weekly and monthly losses. Many took out second mortgages and/or drained their retirement accounts to stay afloat and keep their staff employed. Some lost everything that they had worked for their entire lives. Immediately after allowing these struggling businesses to reopen, he threatened them with severe fines and punishments if the businesses did not act as policing agents for the state to enforce his orders, sending out the Ohio Investigative Unit to cite non-compliant businesses, for which they had to appear before the Ohio Liquor Control Commission for adjudication of those casescommitting a complete end-run around our legislature and judiciary by having the executive branch create mandates, enforce them, and adjudicate them. Treated Like an Outlaw J.J. Sauber owns Saubers Stumble Inn, which is located in the village of Bascom in northwest Ohio. DeWine allowed restaurants and bars to reopen in May 2020, a move that encouraged Sauber, who said his restaurant and bar could only generate sales from carry-out orders during the in-house dining closure mandate. The first night we reopened, I was at home and got a call from one of our employees who said, Some lady from the state is shutting us down, he said. When I walked in, I saw three women, and they said they were with the Ohio Investigative Unit. They were driving by, saw our door open, and decided to stop in. Sauber expected to see uniformed officers with clearly displayed IDs. Instead, the women were in plain clothes and their badges werent clearly displayed. I introduced myself and said I am the owner. One of them said she needs to see my ID, he said. I told her, I dont know who you are and asked her to show her ID. The officers said they felt threatened and called the sheriffs office, which dispatched a deputy, according to Sauber. He said he rushed over because he thought there was a brawl. I said, No, I just refused to give them my ID because I didnt know if they are who they say they are, he said. The officers finally showed their badges, and Sauber provided his ID. The establishment was cited by the OIU, and Sauber was eventually convicted of a misdemeanor for interfering with an investigation. Initially, I was offered 90 days in jail, a $2,000 fine, and two years of probation, Sauber said. When the case was settled, I spent $6,300 out of my own pocket on attorneys fees and ended up with two years of probation. There were four pre-trial meetings. They were bound and determined to put me in jail for not showing my ID. Its one of many examples of how DeWines mandates led to financial problems and unnecessary stress from harassment. The bar business, in general, is tough. We are in a small town, which makes it even more difficult. They treated me like I was an outlaw. Ohio Barhop founder Aaron Crater believes that the Ohio Restaurant Associations endorsement of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is a betrayal to restaurant and bar owners. (Image from The Ohio Channel) The statewide mask mandate that DeWine implemented on July 23, 2020, created a further strain on restaurants and bars, according to Crater. In Ohio, COVID-19 cases escalated after the mask mandate started and mask-wearing compliance was at its highest. DeWine announced a 10 p.m. curfew on alcohol sales on July 31, 2020. The mask mandate required all businesses to force patrons and employees to wear a mask indoors, unless they were seated at a bar or table, because we were all safe from COVID as long as we were seated, Crater said. He continued to hammer the industry by placing the curfew for alcohol sales on all businesses that had a liquor permit, as if Ohioans were magically in grave danger of contracting COVID-19 if they were in a bar or restaurant past 10 p.m. This killed the most profitable hours for many of these businesses that were drowning in debt already. On Nov. 19, 2020, DeWine instituted a 10 p.m. curfew for most businesses. Two days before he made that announcement, DeWines medical advisory team told Ohioans in a press conference that the highest spread of COVID-19 occurred at private gatherings, not at restaurants and bars. The ORA published a study on Dec. 28, 2020, showing that restaurants and bars only accounted for 1.4 percent of COVID-19 cases, while household gatherings made up nearly 74 percent of the cases. Yet they [the ORA] remained silent on DeWines overreach, Crater said. DeWine extended the statewide curfew on Jan. 21, 2021, although evidence continued to show that few COVID-19 cases originated from restaurants and bars. On Feb. 11, 2021, DeWine announced that the curfew would end, and in June 2021, he lifted statewide COVID-19 mandates. The decision was made after the state legislature approved Senate Bill 22, which prevents the Ohio Department of Health from issuing any kind of stay-at-home order such as the one that DeWine initiated in the early weeks of the COVID-19 crisis. The law also allows state legislators to vote down health orders or emergency declarations without requiring the governors authorization. Masks Not Required Shonna Bland, who owns Top Notch Diner in Cortland, Ohio, has steadfastly refused to make customers wear masks. More than 40 complaints were sent to the Trumbull County Health Department from people who were unhappy that some diner customers werent wearing facial coverings. Bland accurately said at the time that scientific data doesnt back what they want us to do, and she posted a sign on the diners door announcing that she will not force any masks/facial coverings. Bland found her business in the news when DeWine learned that his mask mandate was being ignored. I dont know why anybody DeWine said before pausing when he was asked about Top Notch Diner during an appearance at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport in October 2020. I just shake my head, thats all. Thats all I can say. I just shake my head. Let me just shake my head, and I dont have to say anything. When she heard that the ORA voted to endorse DeWine for reelection, Bland said it was like getting slapped in the face. We had to lay off most of our staff. I worked 80 hours a week along with my sister just to pay the bills, Bland said. I am no longer giving money to the ORA or the Ohio Republican Party. They dont care about small independent business owners. Some restaurant owners dont place the blame for their struggles on DeWine. Sokolowskis University Inn was Clevelands oldest family-owned restaurant until it closed its doors after 97 years in late 2020. Established in 1923, it was operated by third-generation owners and siblings, Mike, Mary, and Bernie Sokolowski. Speaking to The Epoch Times on March 24, Mike Sokolowski said the restaurant is up for sale and wont reopen under the family. Sokolowskis University Inn is a longtime family-owned restaurant that has shut its doors since the COVID-19 crisis started. (Photo by Mike Sakal) We just could not survive with all the regulations put in place during COVID, he said. It was a very strange chain of events that happened when COVID started. There were shutdowns, people died, and places closed. We had been wanting to move toward selling so we could retire. This COVID thing sped up what we wanted to do by about five years. Speaking about the ORAs endorsement of DeWine for reelection, Mike Sokolowski said about his mandatory two-week shutdown of restaurants at the beginning of the pandemic: Im never going to blame any one politician for being a part of the hurting of any businesses. Theyre all crazy. The shutdown probably did help get things under control and help keep people safe. These are weird times were living in. Two Sides To Every Story Balaton, a Hungarian restaurant in Cleveland, also closed amid the COVID-19 crisis. Owner Krisztina Ponti told The Epoch Times on March 24 that she and her husband, George, have picked out a few locations to reopen the restaurant on the east side of Cleveland, hopefully by the summer. Although they havent decided on a final location, yet, the places that theyre considering are the east Cleveland suburbs of Beachwood, Mayfield, or Solon. Were getting excited about reopening in a new spot, Krisztina Ponti said. We look forward to continuing the business. As for the ORA endorsing DeWine, she declined to either support or condemn it. There are two sides or two angles to every story, Krisztina Ponti said. We have our own thoughts about what is going on. Given that Balatons customer base mostly includes older couples, the restaurant struggled during the first wave of COVID-19 as they provided take-out only. Never fully recovering, the restaurant announced in late 2021 that December would be its last month of dine-in. Krisztina Ponti is currently in Budapest learning some new recipes for the restaurant. In about two weeks, shes going to the HungaryUkraine border to donate hygiene items, food, and clothing to the refugees coming into Hungary, she said. Thus far, there have been about 500,000 Ukrainian refugees that have come into Hungary, Krisztina Ponti said. Many restaurants and bars that are still open continue to struggle with staffing issues, even though unemployment compensation has long ended. Every time the government gets involved, there are unintended consequences. One of those is that many people who once worked in the restaurant and bar industry have left to take jobs in other fields, whether it be Amazon or something else, and they are not returning to the service industry, Crater said. Even though the mandates are lifted, those actions have a lingering impact that continues to cripple the industry. He said hes exploring the creation of a nonprofit that would represent independent restaurants and bars in Ohio. We would represent small businesses in our industry that have been completely ignored, Crater said. The ORA is about big business and big government, and that is not conducive to the health and vitality of small restaurants and bars. Michael Sakal contributed to this report. Previously, in part one of my interview with classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson, we discussed Vladimir Putins goals, Beijings position on the war, and why the left and corporate media seem to all be advancing identical narratives. In part two, we dig deeper into whats really going on with the Russia-Ukraine Warfrom talk of biolabs to ultra-right-wing battalions to President Joe Biden describing a new world order. And while everyone is talking about a no-fly zone, many havent noticed that Turkey, a NATO member, has imposed whats essentially a no float zone, blocking Russian warship access to the Black Sea. Is this a World War III moment? If you missed part one, you can watch it here. Jan Jekielek: So there isnt a no-fly zone, but Turkey has a no-float zone, blocking the Turkish straits from Russian warships, for example. Now, what do you make of that? Couldnt that be considered an act of war by the Russians? Victor Davis Hanson, PhD: Turkey is a very strange country in that regard. There are 30 members in NATO. Turkey is the largest by population, 85 million, and its the largest in terms of manpower. Mr. Hanson: It is also more anti-American than Germany. Thats saying a lot. So if you poll the Turkish citizenry, Do you have a favorable view of America? About 65 percent say no. Erdogan has been very anti-Israeli and anti-American, and he said some crazy things about old American nukes and bases outside of Izmir, that maybe these are quasi-Turkeys. Theyve been there so long, theyre our nukes. And were even afraid to take them out in broad daylight. I think there had been a program, one or two a month, to get them out of there. So we have a very checkered history. But when you go to Istanbul and you see the Bosporus, its right there. What hes saying to us is, First of all, we act independently. So weve decided to give very effective drones to Ukraine, more than you guys did. We were there before you, and theyre very effective, and we can govern who can go into the Black Sea. Maybe, for a while, Russia cant go. So in terms of what were actually doing for NATO, were doing more than you are, but dont tell us that we have to cut off the Russians or that we cant. Then theyre going in, telling the Russians, Lets negotiate access into the Black Sea. Lets negotiate how many drones we give per month. Maybe we should give a few less to help you guys out. So thats what theyre doing. Its like what Germany was doing before the war started, Germany was saying to us, We love NATO. Thank you so much. But our polls show that about 55 per cent of Germans would rather have closer relations with Putin, than with Biden or Trump or Obama. We also would like to have half of our energy needs met with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Thats why we told Joe Biden you better not sanction that. And Joe said, Okay, Im sorry. We wont. They like Putin. They like the commerce and they like not paying the 2 percent. What we forget about not paying the 2 percent military obligation in NATO is that Germany just didnt fail to do that, they went around to other countries and said, Were not going to pay, we dont want you either to do it. So it undermined NATO. It really did. So again, be careful what you wish for, Today, Biden is at NATO, and they are yucking it up about how wonderful it is. But you remember those conversations with Trudeau and Boris Johnson. They made fun of Trump at the NATO summit, and they kept him out of the limelight. They had, I think, the miner in Montenegro, or somebody was there in the limelight and he had to push everybody out. Im the United States. I pay a third of the budget. I should be out in the picture. So they wouldnt even let him be in the forefront of the group picture. Yet, he was the one that forced them to spend a $100 million on their budget. He upped our military budget and he did more for NATO than Obama and Biden combined, yet they hated him. They loved Biden and they loved Obama. Both of them had been very deleterious to NATO. They said, Well, were bringing back NATO solidarity and unity. Im thinking, Okay. Thats why he (Putin) went into Georgia. Thats why he went into Crimea. Thats why he went into Eastern Ukraine. Thats why he has gone into Central Ukraine. Its a long explanation about what Turkeys freelancing, Germanys freelancing. These are incredible times right now. All of our listeners are so confused and baffled. They wake up and they see Ukraine and they cant make any sense of it. They think, Okay, we need oil, so were sanctioning Russia, but were asking the Russians to negotiate the Iran deal for us. Okay. But were not letting the North Dakotans or the Texans or the Alaskans pump another two or three million barrels. They are our brethren, United States citizens, that are in a depression almost, or high-end stagflation, and they could really help us out, but were going to beg Vladimir Putin? Were going to beg the Saudis? Were going to beg the Iranians? Were going to beg the Venezuelans to pump more? They cant figure it out. Its insane. And the same thing about NATO. Okay. Were all on the same page with NATO. We dont want to make fun of NATO. But theyre not going to pay the 2 percent that we do, and were going to keep doing this? So it doesnt make any sense. The only common denominator I can think of is weakness, or maybe green ideology, zealotry. How could you explain that Joe Bidens administration came in and the first thing they did was say to the Germans, We agree, you need Russian oil and gas. Go ahead with Nord Stream 2. Were going to drop the Trump sanctions. And by the way, Cypress, Greece, and Israel that are allies of the United States, who are just formulating this brilliant idea to tap Mediterranean and Aegean natural gas and oil and pipe it right into Northern Italy, right into the belly of Europedont do that. Its not tolerable according to climate change protocol. So we vetoed a way of supplying Europe with fossil fuels from allies. We opened up or encouraged another pipeline from enemies. That was the Biden administration that did that. All of these things are so bizarre that the American people are confused. Mr. Jekielek: Putins propaganda has been, We are denazifying Ukraine. Mr. Hanson: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: There are these Azov battalions that are somehow actually far-right? Tell me how you understand that. Mr. Hanson: If you talk to guys in their 80s or 90sI wrote a book on World War II, and I would try to do that when I could. And you would hear a lot about D-Day. One of the weirdest things about D-Day was, when they captured D-Day defenders and they spoke Ukrainian, they were not bilingual. This is what Hitler had done with the half a million Ukrainians who felt they were liberated by the Nazis, and didnt really worry about the fate of the Jews too much. You can see why they did because of the great famines and what Stalin had done to them, the collectivization and the war on the kulaks. They didnt want them fighting on the Eastern front because of loyalties, so they sent them as peacekeepers. I shouldnt say peacekeepersas garrisons along the Atlantic coast. Thats where Americans ended up being shot by them. So theres a torturous history in Ukraine. Thats very hard to simply just reduce to, They were the best people in the world in World War II, and our allies, and they helped everybody. No, thats not true at all. And yet on their point of view, they had certain reasons, like the Finns did, to fight against Stalin, given what Stalin had done to them. Ill give you one other example of the bizarre things that happened. Zelenskyy, being the rockstar and the representation of Western consumer capitalist democracy, suspended all the opposition right in the middle of the war. He just said, You, you, you, and you have no access to my media. Now Im the only media, and your political party is going to be in suspended animation. And Im thinking, Okay, but youre not in a World War. FDR held a 1944 election. Winston Churchill, once the European theater was over, held elections and he was defeated by Clement Attlee, right when he was attacking and being attacked in Singapore with the whole Pacific front still furious. The last four, five months of the Pacific were the most deadly in the history of that theater. Yet, he didnt suspend elections. He not only held them, he was voted out of office. If hes really this constitutional boar, why did he do that? What I just said would be considered pro-Putin. It is not. Its just that I wish that people would get a little bit more sophisticated and complex. War is never 100 percent good, 100 percent bad. Its murky. People have 54 percent right. The other people have 46 percent. And if youre over 51 percent, thats usually good enough to support one side. Ukraine more or less has the moral edge, both historically and in the present. Im not stupid enough to think Im going to get on the Ukrainian gaga wagon and just say, Oh my gosh, look at himand people have said thishes a Christ-like figure. Hes not. Hes a realist politician that wants his nation to survive, and hes willing to do anything he can to do it. Sometimes that means lie about history, and get rid of the opposition. Dont tell me that Ukraine is a transparent democratic society. But that doesnt mean that we dont support it. Thats whats so funny about the Left. We cant support the Contras. We cant support the Taiwanese. They cant support all of these other people because theyre not quite liberal enough, or theyre not quite woke enough or constitutional. But they can support people on the Left that are perceived to be on the Left. They dont need to meet the same standards. Mr. Jekielek: I want to touch on these Azov battalions in Ukraine. Ive had a guest on the show who is very concerned about the West effectively supporting potentially extremist entities. Hes a counter-extremist activist. At the same time, theres one of these, to use your word, mystical topicsthe biolabs. Of course, there are biolabs. The U.S. has commented on the biolabs, and they have been involved. Theyre being used, of course, as propaganda, as well. So on both of these topics, what is your understanding? Mr. Hanson: Im worried about these issues too. One way to look at it is when youre actually in war, the spectrum of tolerance widens. So if youre Zelenskyy and you say, We have some ultra-nationalist, right-wing, hyper-patriotic or irredentist Ukrainians, and they dont have a good record in the past or the present, but theyre willing to fight Russians, well let them. In the same way during World War II, Churchill said, Id go to hell and get the devil to help me, if it would stop the Germans. Thats how we explained asking the Soviets. Recently, research has shown that the Soviets were much worse than we thought, as far as their double-dealing, the manipulation of the fronts, and the ingratitude they showed to us. Nevertheless, they killed two out of every three Wehrmacht soldiers. What is the price that Zelenskyy paid these ultra-right-wing battalions to fight, if any? We wont really know until its over with. During the actual heat of battle, youre getting all sorts of people, flocking into Ukraine. A lot of them are mercenaries. It doesnt mean that Putin is right when he said theyre hired thugs and all of that, because theyre doing the same thing. They are bringing in Syrians, supposedly, and Chechens. Thats what happens. Its like the Spanish Civil War where we all felt that these people were idealists. No, a lot of these people were hardcore Trotskyites. The communist party was running the show on the loyalist faction, and Mussolini and Hitler were Francos puppeteers. Thats what happens when the world looks at a dividing line as a referendum on respective values and hopes. So theres some pretty odious figures coming into this war. Zelenskyy is posing as this Churchillian leader. But he doesnt seem to be a champion of civil liberties. If he wants to play Churchill and galvanize the world with idealism, then you cant outlaw political parties. And you may have to clamp down on some of these ultra-right groups that helped you after the war is over. As far as the biolabs, I have a very quirky explanation. I didnt know that before the breakup of the USSR, Soviet military-affiliated biological labs that were the center of the program were located in Ukraine. I didnt knowand I may speak for the American peopleI didnt know that the United States had a plan to decommission these. When it was brought up in the news that the decommissioning seemed to be taking a long time, I became a little worried. Why didnt you just decommission them? After World War II, when we looked at German rocketry and we looked at German Zyklon B, we didnt just stop it. We took it over to the United States and we incorporated Wernher von Brauns team. This is a guy who had blood on his hands with the V2 rockets, killing innocent British civilians. Zyklon B was an organophosphate, and it was the precursor of the American pesticide industry. So I had that in mind. When Victoria Nuland was testifyingshe was our Ukrainian point woman, very articulate, very bright, married to Robert KaganI thought, Shell just explain it and thatll be it. She will just say, We had a program, just like we disassembled the nuclear weapons of Ukraine and sent the material back to Russia. We had a partnership, a quartet, and it worked well. We did the same thing. It took a little bit longer and weve got a little bit of residual. But she didnt. She looked like a deer in the headlights. She wasnt an effective witness. That performance, or lack of one, was analogous to Robert Mueller defending the Mueller investigation, if you remember that. Shes really not in his league, but for a moment she was. That created all of this controversy. So I dont know what to make of it. My only concern, and I think of most people, is if there are virae there that are gain-of-function, or enhanced for vaccination purposes, or for whatever purposeare they secure if a Russian missile hits them? Thats the real worry, that Putin knows where they are, because the Russians built them. If he takes a missile and tries to hit one of them and blow them up, then all he has to say is, Why were they active? According to the agreement, they should have finished their work a long time ago. I didnt know it. I just hit something by accident. Then we dont know what that would release. We dont have the information, whether theyre viable specimens or what they were doing. We need some explanations about it. Thats what Im worried about. We havent got transparency. But I havent bought into the, We were in league with the Ukrainians creating biological weapons and maybe as a deterrent against Russian nukes, or whatever the conspiracy is. If it was as simple as Nuland said, then she wouldve been much more confident in her answers. Mr. Jekielek: There is something that strikes me as were talking here today. President Biden said this himself, The world order is being challenged. Mr. Hanson: New World Order. George H.W. Bush. Mr. Jekielek: Okay. Tell me what youre thinking right now. And then Ill continue. Mr. Hanson: Whoever gave him that phrase should have his head examined, because New World Order brings back the Bushes going into the first Gulf War. It brings back globalism. Its the Davos reset. Specifically, it is a very transparent attempt to leverage an existential crisis into a political agenda, just in the way COVID did. Remember that Klaus Schwab at Davos said, This is a chance to have a Great Reset. He wrote a book called, COVID-19: The Great Reset, meaning we can force corporations worldwide to have a uniform corporate structure. We can choose the diverse members of the board on an international scale that supersedes sovereignty. Then that was echoed by Gavin Newsom who said, COVID allows us to be more progressively capitalistic, have capitalism in a new progressive way. Hillary said, I dont know, maybe COVID will help us get universal healthcare. In the same way, after the 2008 meltdown, Rahm Emanuel said, Never let a great crisis go to waste. So when he said New World Order, right in the middle of a Ukrainian crisis, you thought, Well, what is your New World Order? Its what? An international consortium going to do what? Stop the Ukrainian war? Stopped the Iranian nuclear proliferation? And who are they that are going to do this? Well, theres only four or five people in the world that have the power to force less powerful people to go along. Thats us, and China, maybe Russia, German and Japan, the economic powers. But who is it? Because people are not just going to raise their hands. Then the next thing I thought was, Before, you solved all the worlds problems with an international consortium. We did that before, right after World War II, and we created the New World Order. That meant, we said to the world, The shipping lanes will be open. Communications will be open, and we will deter the Soviet Union from taking over Europe and Asia. That was a different United States, wasnt it? It had men like FDR and Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower and JFK at its helm. It had, by far, the worlds largest economy. It was energy self-sufficient. It was confident, robust, and coming off the victory of World War II. But when I look at this generation, I see Barack Obama. I see Joe Biden. I see giving up energy independence. I see woke narratives. I see 128 days of rioting. I see hysteria over a laptop. Its not the same United States. And Joe Biden is no Harry Truman. Im very pessimistic. He said that, of course, to assert U.S. leadership, rather than actualize or reify. He always does that, doesnt he? He threatens people with corn pop, like braggadocio, but he never follows through. During the campaign, he said, Vladimir Putins going to fear me. He knows who I am. No, hes not, he knows who you are. He doesnt fear you. But its always, Im the tough guy. Im going to take Donald Trump behind the gym and beat him up. When you hear people talk like that, it comes from asking him a question, Should we send more Javelins right away? Or maybe harpoon missiles that could protect the Ukrainian coast Mariupol or Odessa from amphibious attack? No, Im a little worried about that. Thats Joe Biden. Talk tough, because hes not willing to take the heat to make tough decisions. Its not a win-win, its a lose-lose decision. Mr. Jekielek: Heres the question. This actually points towards some of what I was going to talk about, which is the U.S.-led world order, post-World War II. It appears to be coming apart. Mr. Hanson: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Its in jeopardy, but theres considerable benefits to it, actually, you could argue. But there seems to be all sorts of peoplethis is something that unites people on the Left and the Righttheres all sorts of people cheering for it to actually fall apart. Mr. Hanson: Yes. It is falling apart. But why is it falling apart? Its falling apart because of this global veneer of popular culture, the Internet, TikTok, Facebook, common music, and everybody all over the world watching a Super Bowl halftime. It has created this veneer that were all on the same page, and we just dont need it. Theres no need for it. Were all in the global world community. But thats not true. Its really just a veneer. Nationalism is still there. Ethnic, racial, religious divides are still there. You need some type of coercive power, not to get into their internal affairs, but to tell the Somali pirates, If you send in a rocket and take out a tanker, were going to blow up your base. And thats what the United States Navy did. But we dont think that you need that anymore. On the one hand, thats being naive. On the other hand, Trump, Obama, and Biden for various reasons said, Were not going to do that anymore. All of them together have a larger aggregate GDP than we do. They dont contribute. We cant get Australia and Japan and Taiwan and South Korea on the same page to check Chinese aggression. China, in that void, is the new power. China is going to control all the major choke points of the world. One day it is going to run Egypts Suez Canal. Its going to run the Panama Canal like it does, only in their interest. Its going to run a lot of the South China Sea from the Spratly Islands. It has been so advanced and confident in that agenda, that to stop it now would require a major war. So the United States looks around and says, Not us. And thats what the problem is. The irony is that actually, in all of the historical barometers of strength, the United States is superior. We only have 330 million people. China has 1.4 billion. So they have almost five times our population and their GDP is smaller. In crude terms, that means one Chinese citizen is not producing as much goods. One American citizen is producing five times the goods and services of a Chinese citizen, in that way of thinking. In the Japanese or British education surveys of the top 100, top 50, top 20 major universities that are not based on the English department or the gender studies or computer engineering, mathematics, physics, its still all American at the top. Its about 17 out of 20. Caltech is usually number one, or MIT, Harvard, Stanford. California has more top-ranked universities in the top 25 than any other nation in the world, except the U.S. You look at fuel, natural gas. Thats what a society is. Its education, its the fuel that keeps people moving. We were the largest producer of gas and oil in the world until two years ago. Food, were the most efficient. China may produce a little bit more, but were the most efficient food producer in the world. So its education, food, fuel, and defense. For all of the wokeness, the inefficiency, the corporate revolving door of retired generals, the corruption in the Pentagon, we still have the largest military in the world. Were the oldest democracy, or constitutional republic, whatever you choose to call it, in existence right now. By every imagined barometer of national strength, we should be stronger than weve ever been, but were not. Thats because of this woke postmodern anti-American fringe, that was always necessary to remind us not to be too cocky. It was always in a minority role, not by race or gender, but by ideology, saying, Dont get too cocky here. There was some value in that. Now it is the dominant narrative. Its defeatism, cannibalism, suicidal impulse, nihilism, and that can destroy an empire, and can destroy a great nation. We were never an empire, but its destroying us. We have to have leaders who say, We dont have to be perfect to be good. We just need to be better than all the alternatives. Were not going to fall down and ask for forgiveness because were not utopia, heaven on earth. Thats what the Left has done to us. It has a history of doing that to countries, whether Cuba or China or Russia or Venezuela. It can be insidious. Mr. Jekielek: Lets just jump back to the bigger picture. As we finish up here, please put on your historian hat again. Today has been compared to what prompted World War I, and what prompted World War II. Weve talked about that in this interview already, but what analogies do you see to past history? Mr. Hanson: People cite World War I and World War II for a couple of reasons. In World War I, it was Serbia, an area that is located in between realms of influence. There was the Russian Empire and it was Orthodox. Then there was the Austro-Hungarian empire that was Central European and Catholic-Protestant. Serbia was right in between and wanted to be free from Austria-Hungary. It was a flashpoint to reflect elemental differences between the two cultures. World War II started in Poland. You could argue that the countries between Europe and Russia, that is Hungry and Poland and Romania and Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia and Finland, right down that spine, were at various times contested either in a cold fashion, right before 1939, or right after. Think of the Munich Agreement and the German Sudetenland. So it is a disturbing parallel that the geography is once again, between Europe and Russia. The second thing is their irredentist problems. In these areas of contention, there were outside parties that said, This country belongs to us. Take the World War II example, Germany said, The Versailles Treaty stripped us of our natural right to protect German speakers in east Prussia, which had created Poland. And they didnt believe in anything called Gdansk. It was Danzig. They didnt believe that the Sudeten Germans were part of the Czech Republic. They didnt believe Austria was really a separate country. They didnt believe in the AlsaceLorraine, where there were German speakers. There was an effort to bring them back. Thats very scary because thats what Russia is doing again. These are very primitive, neanderthal things that we all have in us. The third thing is, and this is what a lot of historians have been worried about. They all have another commonality. Nobody thought that when Archduke Ferdinand was murdered, it would lead to 17 million dead. If you told somebody in August, 1914, that youre going to start this ball rolling, nobody would believe you. When Germany decided to have the plebiscite in the Saarland or the Anschluss, or go into Sudetenland, nobody felt it was going to start a World War II. In fact, the word, World War II, did not really exist in the popular vocabulary. Some scholars had thought about it. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941. Then all of a sudden, 1941 saw Russia go to war, Then there was Pearl Harbor. Mussolini and Hitler declared war on the United States. Then it was a World War. Before that it was the Polish War. It was over with. There was a big movement in Germany to decommission troops. Then it was the Danish War, and it was a Belgian War. Then it was a French War. Then it was the Blitz. And then it was the Yugoslavian War. Then the Norway Warthese 11 theaters. We never considered it a World War. We know that, because people use the term Great War, then suddenly in 1941, they start talking about World War I. So that is similar to what we say today, nuclear war, or this cant expand, or we could never Its the same blinkered idea. The geography is similar, the aims of Putin are similar to other irredentist megalomaniacs, and the denial that this powder keg can explode into a larger war are the same. The only thing that I can see is different is, in World War I and World War II, the United States was not an active player. What if the United States had to said to the Kaiser in 1914, We have a natural affinity with Britain and the land of France is sacrosanct. Because when we did go to war, we finally were getting 10,000 men a week and we sent 2 million people over there in one year and crushed the German army. We dont get credit for it in World War I, but that was really the story. In World War II, had we been armed as we were by 1943, if we had been armed as we were in 1943 in 1938, Hitler would have never done that. Goring said to us, You make good planes, but you dont make enough of them, sorry. By 1944, we had a fleet that was larger than all the fleets in the world put together. If we had had that, he wouldve never done it, But today we do, we are engaged, we have enormous power, and we can effect change before it gets started. There is such a thing as a bipartisan consensus. We need to be very careful how we use it, but to use it nevertheless, so this war does not expand. The difference as I see it is people on the Right who are very pro-Ukrainian are divided. Some of them say, lets help Ukraine with weapons. But given the complex history of that country and our own checkered relation with Putin, lets not just go gung-ho and give them unqualified support and get into a nuclear war. Then theres the other people who are Jacksonians. They say, No, you let him come in there, and you establish a precedent that hell be doing it everywhere. Whereas the Left is more united, and united in a very bizarre way. Anybody who says that you dont give unqualified support is an asset, is a Russian puppet. Were going to do everything that we can, and its unlimited. Im quoting the squad or Eric Swalwell, Why dont we have a no-fly zone? We could do it. Its very funny. Mr. Jekielek: Two quick things. On the Right, people are thinking, Let the Ukrainians deal with their own situation. Mr. Hanson: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: To be fair, theres actually a significant portion. Mr. Hanson: Theres some on the Right that will say, We didnt ask the Ukraine to get in our business. Theyve gotten in our business before, but we didnt ask them to, and we dont want to get in their business. Its time we just stay clear. Its a tragedy, but its their tragedy, not ours. Some of them are saying that. Mr. Hanson: Theres other people who are saying, Okay, you went into Afghanistan to do what? Maybe it was to get rid of Bin Laden, but very soon you decided to turn that into nation-building for the Afghan people. You went in to get rid of Saddam Hussein because you said he had violated UN accords. But very soon it was for the Iraqi people. Well, Ukrainian people have a quasi-democracy and they will fight for us against our enemies. That wasnt true of the Afghans or the Iraqis. Then the other side says, We did the wrong thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lets not risk it a third time. So, Ive never seen a more complex, messy political spectrum. Maybe its good that you cant just say Im a Democrat or Im a Republican. Although the Left now sees this for other reasons that you and I discussed. It is a hysterical crisis, a hysterical crisis in which they can ramp up their outrage and virtue-signal their moral superiority over everybody. Mr. Jekielek: I agree. Its an incredibly complex situation right now in terms of what people are thinking. But it does hark back to what you were saying just moments ago, which is, the U.S. somehow stopped believing in itself to some extent. Thats my observation looking at it from the outside, as a fierce American exceptionalist. Maybe rediscovering that belief or some courage would be what the doctor ordered. Is that even possible at this stage? Mr. Hanson: Yes, it is possible. Theres an alternative point of view that says for all the complexity and self-interest in disunity, theres a glimmer of hope that there is still such a thing as the West. So when this thing happened, Germany, France, Britain were on the same page as us. Then certain things happen that we in our right minds never thought would happen. President Macron says, I would like to remind President Putin that NATO was a nuclear power. I couldnt believe that he said that when Putin was threatening everybody. Then the German Chancellor Scholz, said, We will meet and exceed our 2 per cent. We will re-arm. I thought, Wow, thats very strange. Suddenly people said, This is a wake-up call on Taiwan. So how would that be orthodox? How could that become orthodox, that unorthodox burst of unity or backbone? You could envision, in the next two or three weeks, the Ukrainians flooded as they are with weapons, and hurt as Russia is, that Russia loses the propaganda war. Because people all over the world will begin to resent the absolute slaughter a little bit more than they are. Then they start waging counter-offensives, and we control Putin so he doesnt go nuclear or deter him. And by military force, they casually start to decrease. Then they rout the Russians. I dont think thats going to happen, but I wish it would happen, whatever cuts down the number of dead the most quickly. It could be a negotiated settlement or a rout of Putin, and then he can claim whatever he wants. What would happen if all of NATO would say at the next summit, Were going to make our 2 per cent. Germany would say, Were going to contribute, we have the biggest, a massive army. The United States says, Were going to pump oil, were going to pump natural gas. We believe in this green agenda, but you know what, if you give up your advantages and fossil fuels, you get people killed. So just like the German Green Party can be overruled in Germany, then the squad and the radical environmentalists can too. Out of that, all of us have learned that we need to be energy-independent. We need to be united. Our armed forces need to be physically and materially and militarily strong, because we have a China on the horizon. We should tell China right now, they cant split us. Were going to have a uniform policy of sanctions against them if they try it in Taiwan. Were going to be tough on their trade. Our military is going to be 10 times stronger than theirs. We actually have a larger population, Europe, the United States, North America, and all of Europe together, than China does, or at least equivalent. So the West has that potential. That would be something that would be good. Otherwise, were going to be relegated to Athens during the Roman Empirea nice place to hang out, and talk about the glory of the past. Plutarch writes Lives of the Noble Greeks, and compares them to Romans. Athens is a tourist center. Sparta, you go down and see these guys dressed up in hoplite gear and say, Wow, there used to be an army here. You look at the ruins of Thebes and say, Wow, this is where Antigone was started. But it was not, it was just a backwater of the Roman Empire. And thatll be what well become if Chinas visions are reified. Mr. Jekielek: Victor Davis Hanson, its such a pleasure to have you on again. Mr. Hanson: Thank you for having me. Subscribe to the American Thought Leaders newsletter so you never miss an episode. Follow EpochTV on social media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EpochTVus Twitter: https://twitter.com/EpochTVus Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/EpochTV Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/epochtv Gab: https://gab.com/EpochTV Telegram: https://t.me/EpochTV A worker, wearing protective gear, guards the entrance to a neighbourhood in lockdown in Jing'an district, Shanghai on March 29, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images) I Cannot Watch My Father Waiting to Die at Home: Residents in Locked-Down Shanghai Being Denied Medical Care Tragic scenes emerged in locked-down Shanghai as residents in poor health struggled to obtain medical services amid the citys harsh COVID restrictions. Battling a new wave of COVID-19 infections, Shanghai has moved to enact the countrys biggest city-wide lockdown, since Wuhan, as authorities rush to shut off every chain of infection. The eastern Chinese port and financial hub has set off sealing 26 million residents in two stages for mandatory mass-testing over nine days starting March 28. As of March 26, 36 hospitals in Shanghai had been designated as special treatment sites for pandemic patients. Insiders confirmed to the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times that elderly residents confined to their homes were in danger after being denied treatment by staff of the overwhelmed hospitals, and suicide attempts have occurred in local communities. A resident in Pudong New District surnamed Dong, whose father is a renal patient who requires dialysisa procedure to clean the bloodthree times a week, sought help on Chinese social media. My father hasnt had hemodialysis for four days and now his feet have developed edema. High potassium in the blood would also damage the heart, and (my fathers) life could be in danger, he told the Epoch Times on March 28. All my requests received no response, but I cannot watch my father waiting to die at home, said Dong. His Monday post has drawn intense responses. A netizen from Pudong said his relative had not received dialysis for a week, after being rejected by Shanghai East Hospital and Pudong Hospital. A transit officer, wearing protective gear, controls access to a tunnel in the direction of Shanghais Pudong district in lockdown on March 28, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images) Although dialysis is the most common treatment for uremia, only one hospital in the Pudong district currently takes patients in quarantine, according to Dong. Two other patients in his community are also desperate to receive the dialysis treatment. There could be hundreds or thousands more patients on dialysis across Pudong, he said, worrying a second crisis in the grip of COVID-19 will kill more than those who die of the outbreak. By press time, Dong had posted another update saying his father is temporarily scheduled to receive dialysis on March 29. Residents Committing Suicide Meanwhile, severe restrictions on travel and movement saw an elderly resident jump off his apartment building in Shanghais Minhang district, a video circulated online shows. Lin (pseudonym), a Shanghai resident from the same neighborhood, confirmed on March 28 with the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times that the man, who passed away after his fall, was about 70. I heard that it was driven by his poor health, probably suffering from cancer and the pain, she said, as the outside alleged local committee rejected his access to medication. Chinas state media denied the allegation, calling it a rumor. The Epoch Times repeatedly call local authorities but the calls were unanswered. Pudong citizen Wang told The Epoch Times on March 27 that a 14-year-old girl jumped from her home in Kangqiaozhen of Pudong district, after testing positive for Covid. The Epoch Times cannot independently verify the facts. Her mother cried almost to death, Wang said during the interview. People have done so many rounds of sweeping nucleic acid tests over and over again, he said. [Authorities] should think about whats going on and find out the cause. But when I said it online, they suspended my account. The latest tragedy came on the heels of a Shanghai nurse dying of an asthma attack last week after being turned away from the hospital where she is employed. She was told the emergency room was closed for disinfection following COVID-19 restrictions. Shanghai continued to set a new record of 4,477 new COVID-19 cases on March 28, official data show, accounting for about two-thirds of the reported nationwide total. Yi Ru and Lin Cenxin contributed to this report. Pentagon Plans to Retire Dozens of F-22 Fighter Jets: Report The Pentagon could retire 33 of the services oldest F-22 fighter jets in fiscal 2023 as part of a move to fund research for more advanced combat jet designs, according to reports. The services $773 billion budget for the upcoming fiscal year details that the Air Force would scrap more than 150 aircraft including 33 F-22s and 21 A-10s, according to Task and Purpose. The Navy could also ditch 24 vessels in fiscal 2023. Defense Department officials say they want to use funds they would save to instead research new fighter jet designs under the Next-Generation Air Dominance program, Defense News reported. The move would reduce the total F-22 fleet in the United States from 186 to 153 jets, and it would end tentative plans to move the fighter jets to Virginia. The Air Forces Next-Generation Air Dominance program could potentially include a sixth-generation fighter jet and drones, National Defense reported. The outlet reported in September that Lt. Gen. Duke Richardson, military deputy in the office of the assistant secretary of the Air Force for AT&L, a top acquisition official, said the secretive program was progressing per plan. NGAD is not one [of the Air Forces programs] where Im able to share a lot of details, he said during a meeting with reporters at last years Air-Space-Cyber confab in National Harbor, Maryland. I will just tell you that it is progressing per plan. Theres just so much of it thats not able to be discussed in an open forum. According to Defense News, Maj. Gen. James Peccia, the Air Forces deputy assistant budget secretary, highlighted the high cost of upgrading the jets to be combat ready$1.8 billion over eight years. Peccia on March 25 said upgrading newer F-22s with more advanced sensors and improving the F-35A Lightning II would be a better use of money by the Air Force. We will take operational jets and use them for training, but yet we can also take them and use them in the fight, Peccia told reporters, according to Defense News. Its really using every dollar as smart as we can in our fighter portfolio when were trying to modernize that portfolio. Bloomberg reported separately on March 16 that the Pentagon would request 33 fewer F-35 stealth warplanes from Lockheed Martin in its next budget, citing people familiar with the matter. Lockheed said in a statement at the time that it was premature to speculate about the proposed budget. A Pentagon spokesman also said that the department cannot confirm specific budget details until after the FY23 Presidents Budget is released. The F-35 is one of the worlds most advanced fighter aircraft and considered a highly sensitive export, sold only to the closest allies of the United States. Lockheed Martin delivered a total of 142 F-35 fighter jets to the United States and its allies last year, three more than originally planned. The Epoch Times has contacted the Pentagon for additional comment. Reuters contributed to this report. A semi-truck arrives to the Port of Long Beach on Oct. 14, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times) Peoples Convoy Shifts Gears to Protest Proposed California Vaccine Laws Truckers protesting the Biden administrations reluctance to halt its COVID-19 pandemic-induced emergency powers are now headed to California to fight against proposed vaccine-related legislation. Mike Landis, a lead trucker and spokesman for The Peoples Convoy, told a crowd of truckers and supporters on March 27 that the proposed set of 10 legislative bills is tyrannical. A video posted on social media site GETTR, shows Landis outlining the bills to jeers from supporters gathered at Hagerstown, Maryland. The Peoples Convoy left Adelanto, Calif., in late February and has been in the Washington, D.C., area for the last few weeks demanding that President Joe Biden give up his emergency powers. The mission was to come here and get this emergency declaration repealed so we can go by our Constitution, and hold these people accountable for ruining everybodys lives for the last couple years, and get back to the way this country is supposed to be, and end the tyranny thats going on in our government, Landis told supporters. (L to R) The Peoples Convoy co-organizer Mike Landis, co-organizer Brian Brase, the Unity Projects Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Paul Alexander, and emcee Marcus Summers at a rally at Hagerstown Speedway in Hagerstown, Md., on Mar. 26, 2022. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times) Landis suggested that because the emergency powers are already in place, the truckers should focus on the tyranny in California and then head back to the DC area. Were not done here. But well go to California and raise awareness on this along the way, and hopefully gain more people like we did on our way here. Theres been some tyranny brought to my attention today, he said before he read aloud summaries of the 10 California bills: The 10 Bills Assembly Bills AB 1993 Employment: Vaccination requirements would require proof of COVID-19 vaccinations for all employees and independent contractors to work in California. The bill has been put on hold, announced state Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) on March 29. AB 2098 Physicians and Surgeons: Unprofessional conduct would classify anti-COVID medical opinion as unprofessional conduct subject to discipline by the medical board. AB 1797 Immunization: Registry would create an immunization tracking system giving all government agencies access to vaccination records of all people. Senate Bills SB 871 Public health: Immunizations would add COVID-19 injections to the list of immunizations for public and private schools regardless of FDA approval. SB 866 Minors: Vaccine consent would lower the age of vaccination consent to 12 years old without parental consent or knowledge. SB 920 Medical Board of California: Record requests would authorize the medical board to inspect a doctors office and medical records without patient consent. SB 1464 Law Enforcement: Public health orders would require law enforcement agencies to enforce public health guidelines or lose their funding. SB 1479 COVID-19 Testing in Schools: COVID-19 testing plans would require schools to create long-term testing plans and report test results to the California Department of Public Health. SB 1390 Social Media Platforms: Amplification of harmful content would prohibit any person or entity from making statements the government deems untrue or misleading by any means, including on the Internet and in advertising. SB 1184 Confidentiality of Medical Information Act: School-linked services coordinator would authorize school health personnel to disclose a childs medical information without parental consent to a third party. What do yall think about heading to California? Landis asked supporters. Met with cheers from the crowd, he urged truckers to prepare for the drive west. Mike Landis, a co-organizer of The Peoples Convoy, speaks on stage at Hagerstown Speedway, in Hagerstown, Md. on March 5, 2022. (Enrico Trigoso/The Epoch Times) Landis said the hopes the convoy will draw more attention to the California bills. These 10 bills I just read are up for vote next week in California. To me, they are the reason that we are here. I think stopping those is more important than getting the emergency declaration repealed because thats already in place, and we need to stop stuff like these bills from getting in place. Otherwise, the rest of us that dont live in California are going to end up subject to the same situation, Landis said. Landis said the California legislation needs to be stopped for the sake of our kids and grandkids. This is a type of nonsense that creates a tyrannical government. This is a type of nonsense thats going to keep us from being free people, he said. Landis said tracking peoples health history is unconstitutional. Its absurd. Its ridiculous, he said. And the thought of a 12-year-old making their own medical decisions isI dont even know what word to use for thatits scary. Someone in the crowd called it horrific and child abuse. Landis also said truckers are frustrated with Californias environmental laws. Weve seen diesel fuel get changed from regular old diesel fuel to low sulfur to ultra-low sulfur. Weve seen diesel engines in our newer trucks be completely unreliable because of emission systems, [and] we have trucks that legally cant even enter California just because theyre too old, thanks to CARB, he said, referring to the California Air Resources Board. The problem is, it doesnt stick in California. It goes nationwide, and some of it even worldwide. Brian Brase, another lead trucker, confirmed via text message on March 28 that The Peoples Convoy is planning to head to California. P&O Ferries the Pride of Canterbury (L) and the Pride of Kent (R) moored at the Port of Dover in Kent, England, on March 29, 2022. (Gareth Fuller/PA Media) P&O Rejects Government Ultimatum as 2nd Ferry Detained After Safety Inspection A Dubai-Owned Ferry Firm has rejected the UK governments ultimatum demanding it rehires nearly 800 seafarers it had sacked without notice. It comes as British maritime authorities said a second ferry operated by P&O was being detained after a safety inspection. P&O Ferries, which was bought by Dubai-based logistics giant DP World in 2019, sparked outrage when it fired almost 800 UK-based seafarers without any prior notice on March 17 and later replaced them with cheaper agency workers. P&Os Chief Executive Peter Hebblethwaite previously acknowledged that the company knowingly broke the law by deciding not to consult the unions. He also said the new crews were being paid an average hourly wage of 5.50 ($7.25), lower than the UKs minimum wage of 8.91 ($11.74) apart from on domestic routes, but said it is allowed under international maritime rules. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps accused the company of using loopholes like flagging their ships in Cyprus to avoid and evade British law and not give notice to authorities as required. Shapps on Monday wrote to Hebblethwaite, saying the CEOs position had become untenable, and giving P&O one further opportunity to drop the March 31 deadline by which the seafarers would have to respond to their redundancy offers and reinstate the fired workers with their previous terms, conditions, and wages, or be forced to do so under new legislations. Peter Hebblethwaite, chief executive of P&O Ferries, answers questions in front of the Transport Committee and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee in the House of Commons, on March 24, 2022. (PA Media) Responding to Shappss letter on Tuesday, Hebblethwaite rejected the ministers demand of rehiring the workers, saying it ignores the situations fundamental and factual realties. Hebblethwaite said the companys management had no choice but to make 786 of our colleagues redundant without following due process because it would otherwise risk collapsing the entire company with the loss of 3,000 jobs, adding the circumstances still apply. He also declined to drop the March 31 deadline, saying more than 765 workers had already taken steps to accept the settlement offer, which more than 500 of them had accepted and signed settlement agreements, including 67 officers who have either accepted the offer to work with the new crew provider or are in process. These are legally binding agreements, and crew members who have entered them will rightly expect us to comply with their terms. Accordingly, we cannot offer a change to the 13 March deadline for our redundancy offer to seafarers, he said. Hebblethwaite argued that even if the national minimum wage were to be applicable, the previous crewing model, which he said was giving crews full pay for working 24 weeks a year, is unsustainable, and needed to be replaced with a new model under which crews are paid for the actual time they work (plus holidays). The CEO also rejected the call for him to resign, saying he would continue to do my utmost to ensure that this company has a sustainable business for the future. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), which was tasked with inspection of all P&O vessels after the mass-firing of seafarers, on Monday night said its surveyors were in the process of detaining The Pride of Kentthe second P&O vessel it was detaining. We are awaiting confirmation of all the detainable items, the agency added. Shapps confirmed the news on Twitter, adding that the ship was being held following an inspection and that safety will not be compromised. The MCA also said another of the firms vessels, European Causeway, remains under detention in Larne, Northern Ireland. The European Causeway was impounded on Friday due to failures on crew familiarisation, vessel documentation, and crew training. PA media contributed to this report. Quebec Transport Minister Francois Bonnardel responds to the Opposition during question period May 27, 2021 at the legislature in Quebec City. (The Canadian Press/Jacques Boissinot) Quebec Drivers Who Turn 75 No Longer Need to Take Physical, Eye Exam to Keep Licence Quebecers who turn 75 will no longer be required to pass a visual or medical exam to keep their drivers licence. The provinces vehicle licensing corporation, Societe de lassurance automobile du Quebec, said today in a news release the requirement will only be necessary for residents who turn 80. The corporation says 75-year-olds will only have to self-declare that they are able to drive, adding that the change allows it to simplify and improve its services and reduce bureaucracy. Transport Minister Francois Bonnardel said in the news release that the change also reduces the administrative burden on the provinces health-care system. Previously, drivers who turned 75 had to be cleared by a doctor to drive and had to take an eye exam. The corporation says a small percentage of 75-year-olds in the province have had their drivers licences revoked in recent years. Quebecers 80 and older still need to be medically evaluated every two years in order to keep their drivers licence. A U.S. F-35 fighter jet flies over the Eifel Mountains near Spangdahlem, Germany, Feb. 23, 2022. (DPA via AP/Harald Tittel) Questions Swirl as Canada Launches Negotiations for F-35 Stealth Fighter OTTAWACanadas decade-long search for a new fighter jet to replace its aging CF-18s came full circle on Monday as the Liberal government announced negotiations with U.S. defence giant Lockheed Martin to purchase the F-35. Yet even as the end to that circuitous search appeared to finally be in sight, many unanswered questions remained: how much the aircraft will cost? When they will start to arrive in Canada? And were the past 12 years of debate and delays worth it? Procurement Minister Filomena Tassi and Defence Minister Anita Anand confirmed during a news conference that Lockheed Martins stealth fighter beat out Swedens Saab Gripen in a competition many had long considered the F-35s to lose. The government will now launch formal negotiations with the company this week for the purchase of 88 F-35s to replace Canadas CF-18s, with officials anticipating the talks will take about seven months and result in a final contract by the end of the year. Tassi and Anand emphasized the negotiations do not mean a deal for the F-35 is done, and that the government retains the option to talk with Saab about its Gripen fighter should discussions with Lockheed Martin stall. Despite what Anand described as a rigorous competition designed to ensure Canada gets the best fighter jet at the lowest cost with the most economic benefits, a senior procurement official indicated the scope of the negotiations will be broad. We need to discuss capability requirements, we need to discuss costs, we need to discuss timelines, when are we going to get these aircraft, said Public Service and Procurement Canada assistant deputy minister Simon Page. So there are still quite a few parameters and variables to bring home with the company. As for the anticipated $19-billion cost, Anand said that will be further refined. Officials did express optimism that a deal will be finalized in the next seven months, and that the first F-35 will arrive by 2025 and the last around 2032. Lockheed Martin Canada chief executive Lorraine Ben in a statement welcomed the launched of negotiations, while Saab Canada spokeswoman Sierra Fullerton said the firm respected the governments decision while leaving the door open to future talks. The move into final negotiations for the F-35 has also prompted questions about whether Ottawa should have pressed ahead with its original deal more than a decade ago. Stephen Harpers Conservative government committed to buying 65 F-35s without a competition in 2010, before concerns about the stealth fighters cost and capabilities forced it back to the drawing board. The Liberals promised in 2015 not to buy the F-35, but to instead launch an open competition to replace the CF-18s. They later planned to buy 18 Super Hornets without a competition as an interim measure until a full competition could be launched. Some at the time questioned that plan, suggesting the Liberals were trying to find a way to lock Canada into the Super Hornet without opening itself up to a legal challenge from Lockheed Martin or any other jet makers. But the government cancelled the plan after Boeing launched a trade dispute with Montreal aerospace firm Bombardier. Ottawa initiated the current bidding process in July 2019, at which point the Super Hornet and F-35 were allowed to compete. In the meantime, the government has been forced to invest hundreds of millions of additional dollars into the CF-18 fleet to keep it flying until a replacement can be delivered. By 2032, the CF-18s will have been around for 50 years. Tassi sidestepped questions about the Liberals original promise not to buy the F-35, but did defend the decision to move ahead with the stealth fighter more than a decade after the Conservatives announced their planned sole-source purchase. Theres a difference from speculating and saying in a sole-source contract: We think that this bidder is going to give us the best deal that we can possibly get, and actually going through the process, she said. We are basing this decision on fact and on evidence based on all the evaluations that have been done. And I can tell you that its rigorous. The second point is that the competition itself drives bidders to come forward with their best bid. She also described the decision as free from political interference, saying the bids submitted by the two companies were evaluated by non-partisan public servants from three departments who unanimously recommended the F-35. Because we designed a process that is free from political interference. neither myself nor my colleagues were told which bidder was top ranked, only the results of the analysis led to this conclusion and recommendation, she said. I agreed with the recommendation. This morning, officials informed me that the top-ranked bidder is Lockheed Martin, and officials will now enter into the finalization phase of the process with Lockheed Martin. Many had long considered the F-35 the front-runner to win the competition. Not only has Canada contributed US$613 million into the F-35s development since 1997, with another multimillion-dollar payment due in the coming weeks, but the stealth fighter is being used by the U.S. and a growing number of allies. Many observers had seen the Boeing Super Hornet and F-35 as the only real competition because of Canadas close relationship with the United States, which includes using fighter jets together to defend North American airspace on a daily basis. Those perceptions were only amplified after two other European companies dropped out of the competition before it even started, complaining the governments requirements had stacked the deck in favour of their U.S. rivals. In particular, both Airbus and Dassault had complained about what they saw as onerous requirements associated with adapting their aircraft the Eurofighter and Rafale respectively to meet Canadas intelligence-sharing requirements. Sweden is not a member of NATO or Norad, the joint Canadian-American defence command responsible for protecting the continent from foreign threats. That had prompted questions about the Gripens compatibility with U.S. aircraft. Many were therefore surprised when Boeing was kicked out of the competition in December, setting the stage for a final dogfight between the F-35 and Gripen. Airbus, which dropped out of the running in August 2019, also expressed frustration over the governments decision to change a long-standing policy that requires bidders on military contracts to legally commit to invest in Canada. That change followed U.S. complaints the previous policy violated an agreement Canada signed in 2006 to become one of nine partner countries in developing the F-35. The agreement says companies in partner countries will compete for work. By Lee Berthiaume Former U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci is running in the Ohio GOP gubernatorial primary against Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, farmer and restaurant owner Joe Blystone and former Ohio State Representative Ron Hood. (Photo by Doug Coulter Renacci Gains Endorsement Over Gov. DeWine in Cuyahoga County Ohio Gov. Mike DeWines decision to not participate in a GOP gubernatorial debate has already led to an unexpected surprise in his re-election bid. A forum coordinated by the Ohio Debate Commission was scheduled for March 29 at Central State University, located four miles from DeWines Cedarville home. The governor declined the invitation, claiming that Ohioans already know where he stands with his policies. That strategy could generate ongoing negative results if what happened at the Cuyahoga County Republican Party endorsement meeting on March 26 continues. DeWine, who was endorsed by the Ohio Republican Party State Central Committee (ORP SCC) at a heated meeting on Feb. 18, anticipated the same support at the Independence Civic Center in suburban Cleveland. Instead, former U.S. Representative Jim Renacci decisively received the nod, 12373. Canal Winchester farmer and restaurant owner Joe Blystone and former Ohio State Representative Ron Hood did not receive a vote. Blystone attended the meeting and spoke. Hood was not there. Our campaign to deliver accountable conservative leadership to Ohio continues to surge and we are thrilled to have the support of the Cuyahoga County Republican Party, Renacci said. I have a different vision than the current governor, and Im going to work real hard to get elected and bring Republican values back to this state and Cuyahoga County. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine gives his victory speech after winning the Ohio gubernatorial race at the Ohio Republican Partys election night party at the Sheraton Capitol Square in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 6, 2018. (Justin Merriman/Getty Images) DeWine entered the Independence Civic Center to cheers from members of his welcoming committeepeople who are part of the DeWine reelection campaign who attended to whip up support. The mood quickly changed, however, when the governor entered the event space where members of the county central committee and executive committee were assembled. He was clearly booed by the crowd when he was introduced to the members, Shannon Burns, a Cuyahoga County executive committee member who also serves on ORP SCC, told The Ohio Press Network. Thats why they didnt have DeWine come out of his basement to attend the Ohio Republican Party State Central Committee meeting in February because he would have been booed there, too. At the ORP SCC meeting on Feb. 18, DeWine captured the endorsement with a vote of 3626. DeWine did not attend that gathering. Renacci was not allowed to address the group before votes were tallied. The ORP SCC includes 17 people who are employed by DeWine or were appointed by him. The agenda for Cuyahoga County Republican Party meeting on March 26 featured a resolution that would have recommended a vote to endorse DeWine. After the meeting started, and the time arrived for a vote, there was a motion to endorse Renacci. DeWine left the meeting before the official endorsement of Renacci was made. Votes were collected via secret ballot. The secret ballot was important because it allowed people to do what they truly wanted to without fear of repercussion, Burns said. Burns said that the 12373 vote for support of Renacci is consistent with the polling his group is completing. A poll by The Hill/NBC4i/Emerson College that was conducted from Feb. 2526 showed DeWine at 34 percent support followed by Blystone (20 percent), and Renacci (9 percent). Thirty-six percent are undecided. The poll also showed that 45 percent of voters approve of DeWines job as governor while 37 percent disapprove, and 18 percent are neutral or have no opinion. DeWine has 47 percent approval among Democrats, 46 percent approval with Republicans, and 42 percent from independents, according to the survey. A Fox News poll conducted by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company Research between March 26 placed DeWine in first place on 50 percent, followed by Blystone (21 percent) and Renacci (18 percent). DeWine refused the ODCs offer to take the stage with Renacci, Canal Winchester farmer and restaurant owner Joe Blystone, and former state Rep. Ron Hood on March 29. One hour with four people, Im not sure really adds a whole lot to what the public knows about Mike DeWine or public policy debate, DeWine said. It might be an entertaining hour, not sure how productive an hour. Former U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci is running in the Ohio GOP gubernatorial primary against Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, farmer and restaurant owner Joe Blystone, and former Ohio State Representative Ron Hood. (Courtesy of Doug Coulter) The 63-year-old Renacci is a businessman who served as mayor of Wadsworth in suburban Cleveland before representing Ohios 16th Congressional District from 2011 to 2019. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2018, defeating Mike Gibbons in the GOP primary and losing to Sherrod Brown in the general election. Gibbons, a Cleveland investment banker who is vying to replace retiring Sen. Rob Portman in the crowded GOP U.S. Senate primary, also gained the endorsement of the Cuyahoga County Republican Party on March 26. Upon learning that DeWine would not appear at Central State on March 29, Renacci also declined to participate, citing that it is not a gubernatorial debate without the governor. He criticized DeWine for refusing to attend. Mike DeWine has spent his term governing like a blue state liberalshuttering our economy, irreparably harming our kids access to education, trashing Donald Trump, and turning Ohio into ground zero for public corruption, Renacci said. And now hes refusing to answer for any of it. As a pro-Trump, committed conservative who has a clear plan to lead Ohio out of the mess DeWine has created, Im not surprised hes terrified to debate me, Renacci added. But what does shock me is that Gov. DeWine thinks so little of the countless Ohio families whose lives hes harmed, futures hes ruined, and businesses hes destroyed, that he wont even take the debate stage to attempt to justify itlet alone apologize for it. In a statement posted on his website on March 18, Renacci challenged DeWine to agree to a different option for debating. If DeWine is worried about getting booed by protesters, then I challenge him to a debate without a live audience and without interruptions, Renacci said in the statement. DeWine hiding from tough questions by the Ohioans whose livelihoods he destroyed and voters hes let down is simply inexcusable. Romania's Midia port on the Black Sea before it embarks its passengers: thousands of sheep to be shipped to Libya for the Eid al-Adha holiday on July 30, 2019. (Daniel Mihailescu/AFP via Getty Images) Romanian Military Neutralizes Stray Naval Mine Discovered in Black Sea: Defense Ministry The Romanian military on March 28 neutralized a stray naval mine discovered roughly 43 miles offshore in the Black Sea, the defense ministry said. Romania shares a border along the Black Sea with Bulgaria, Turkey, and Ukraine, which was invaded by Russian forces on Feb. 24. The device was first spotted by a fisherman who reported it to the Romanian naval forces, Reuters reported. Defense ministry officials announced on Twitter that Romanian military soldiers destroyed the explosive device using a high-velocity shaped charge and remote detonation. Photos shared alongside the statement showed the mine adrift in the water as officials sought to remove it from the sea using a net. A separate photo appears to show it being detonated, sending thick plumes of smoke and water up into the air. The images appear to show a classic horned death naval mine, a Soviet-made munition dating back to the World War II era, Russian state-owned news agency RT News reported. H.I. Sutton, a defense analyst and writer who specializes in submarines and subsurface systems, said on Twitter that the mine was likely similar to that which was discovered in Turkey on March 26a Soviet-era design, YaM, or MYaM. Old but simple and deadly, he wrote. Sutton described it as a moored contact mine that was designed for use in rivers and inshore. The Epoch Times has been unable to verify the exact description of the naval mine. This is the third time in recent days that a stray naval mine has been discovered in foreign waters. On March 28, a military diving team deactivated a stray self-contained explosive device off Turkeys northwest coast, Turkeys defense ministry announced. The mine detected off the coast of Igneada was deactivated by SAS teams, the Turkish defense ministry statement said. Igneada is a small town within the district of Demirkoy in Turkeys Krklareli Province, which borders Bulgaria. Prior to that, a separate stray mine was deactivated in Istanbuls Bosporus on March 26, forcing authorities to briefly suspend marine traffic in the waterway. The mine was later defused, Turkeys Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said in a televised statement. Akar said the mine was first discovered by fishermen in the northern Bosporus and described it as an old type of mine. The countrys defense minister said he was in communication with both Russian and Ukrainian authorities regarding the discovery. Authorities have also informed Turkish ships that regularly operate on the busy waterway of the potential threats posed by the drifting marine mines in the Black Sea. The mine, determined to be an old type, was neutralized by our team and naval forces continue their vigilant work, Akar said. The discovery of the latest mine comes after Russias Federal Security Service (FSB) warned that a number of naval mines were allegedly placed in the Black Sea by Ukrainians in an effort to counter Moscows invasion, and that the mines have been detached from their anchors, meaning they could drift toward the Bosporus and the Mediterranean Sea. FSB said that Ukrainian naval forces had placed lines of minesmade in the first half of the 20th century by the Soviet Unionnear the ports of Odessa, Ochakov, Chernomorsk, and Yuzhny, reported state-run news agency TASS. But Andrii Klymenko, co-founder and chief editor of BlackSeaNews.net and head of the Monitoring Group of the Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies, called the Russian claims dangerous disinformation from the enemy side. In a social media post translated from the original Ukrainian, Klymenko accused Russia of placing the mines along the recommended routes from the Bosporus to Odessa and then blaming Ukraine. Klymenko said he believes Russias warning is to prevent commercial shipping in the Black Sea. Mimi Nguyen contributed to this report. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Sept. 21, 2020. (Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images) Romney to Take Much Deeper Dive Into Judge Jacksons Record Ahead of Senate Vote The Utah swing-voter opposed her nomination to the DC Circuit Court last year Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said in an interview with CNN that he was planning a much deeper dive into Judge Ketanji Brown Jacksons record ahead of the Senate vote to confirm her to the Supreme Court. Romney has long been known for voting much closer to the center than his GOP colleagues, and some Democrats view him as a potential swing-voter in favor of Jackson. Romney said that he has not made the decision whether he will vote for her or not, but he was opposed to her nomination to the D.C. District Circuit Court last year. This time around, he promised to look much further into her track record before making a decision. I have begun a deeper dive, a much deeper dive than I had during the prior evaluation, Romney told CNN. In this case, as well, shes gone into much more depth talking about her judicial philosophy than she had before. And were, of course, looking at her judicial record, as a district judge, and as an appellate judge, in far more depth than we had before, he continued, referencing a common GOP concern over Jacksons confirmation. However, Romney also said that some of the lines of questioning explored by his GOP colleagues during the hearingsparticularly over her track record on sentencing child pornography offenders, which led to an especially heated exchange between Jackson and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)was a little hot. I think any setting like this that doesnt show respect for the witness, or in this case the judge, is not the right way for us to go. We should show, in my opinion, more respect for one another. And so sometimes the rhetoric was a little hot, Romney said. I think in the final analysis, well each be able to make our decision based upon our personal interviews with Judge Jackson and with the results that come from these hearings, Romney concluded. In a June 2021 vote to confirm Jackson to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Romney joined most of his colleagues in opposing Jacksons nomination. Only three RepublicansSens. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)voted for her at the time. Beyond Romney, these three Republicans are seen as possible swing votes to allow Jacksons confirmation to go through on thinly bipartisan lines, but none have committed to voting for the nominee. Graham, despite his support for Jackson to serve as district judge, sparred often with the nominee last week, and made clear his preference that Biden instead nominate South Carolina District Court Judge J. Michelle Childs. During the hearings, Graham intimated at a behind-the-scenes plot to prevent Childs ascent to the Supreme Court, citing the efforts of left-wing activist groups like Demand Justice to secure Jacksons nomination. Graham also voted in favor of all three of the nominees sent to the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump. Given the wide gaps between Jacksons judicial ideology and his own, in addition to his concerns over how Jackson received the nomination, Graham has indicated that he will not support her confirmation in the House Judiciary Committee or on the Senate floor. Murkowski has also remained uncommitted, but has suggested that Jacksons track record on child pornography cases is worth looking into. If it really is a pattern, thats something I think we should be paying attention to, Murkowski said noncommittally. If its an issue of one-offs that have been hyped into more than that, I think thats something we need to try to discern. Murkowski supported the confirmation vote for Justice Neil Gorsuch, voted present during Justice Brett Kavanaughs confirmation, and attempted to filibuster Justice Amy Coney Barretts confirmation before eventually voting in favor of it. Collins is considered by some observers to be the Republican most likely to support Jacksons confirmation. Like other potential swing-voters, Collins has stayed mum on how she will vote, but she called the meeting between she and Jackson prior to the hearings lengthy and productive. Collins also joined her colleagues in supporting Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, but voted against Barretts confirmation due to its proximity to the 2020 presidential election. On the Democrats side, the most likely defector was Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), who has become infamous among Democrats in the 117th Congress for his willingness to oppose the policy goals of the party and the White House. However, Manchin said on March 25 that he will vote to confirm Jackson, leaving little room for doubt about her confirmation short of unexpected Democrat defections. Jacksons confirmation will face a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 4 before moving to a final floor vote. A man fills a car at a gasoline station in Gauhati, India, on Sept. 22, 2019. The state-run Indian Oil Corp. bought 3 million barrels of crude oil from Russia earlier this month to secure its energy needs, resisting Western pressure to avoid such purchases, an Indian government official said March 18, 2022. (AP Photo/Anupam Nath) Rupee-Ruble Trade Under Consideration, Says Head of Indian Export Group India may announce a payment arrangement that would allow it to trade with Russia using local currenciesthe rupee and the rubleaccording to A. Sakthivel, the president of the Federation of Indian Export Organizations (FIEO). Such a proposed rupee-ruble method would allow India to continue trade with Russia even as Western sanctions have disrupted international payment mechanisms. Around four or five Indian nationalized banks are being considered to engage in such a trade, Sakthivel said in an interview with CNBC. International sanctions slapped on Russia also offer India an opportunity to expand into the Russian market, he added. Export to Russia is not much, only in agriculture and pharmacy products. Now that the whole of the West is banning Russia, there will be a lot of opportunities for Indian firms to enter Russia, Sakthivel said. FIEO is a government-backed association that represents more than 200,000 exporters. India exported $3.3 billion worth of goods to Russia last year and imported $6.9 billion in return. Indias attempt to try and set up a rupee-ruble trade mechanism would upset the West as it will dilute the effect of sanctions. However, Sakthivel expects the Indian government to handle the issue very carefully after taking into account all the factors. Russias President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, India, on Dec. 6, 2021. (Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via Reuters) India, the worlds largest democracy, has taken a neutral stand on Russias war against Ukraine. Both the United States and the United Kingdom have criticized India for continuing to import Russian crude oil. New Delhi has defended its actions. India buys very little oil from Russia, which accounts for less than one percent of the countrys imports, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the bicameral Parliament of India, on March 24. He pointed out that many other nations import 10, 15, and 20 times more than India, reported Deccan Herald. Meanwhile, India has also officially dismissed the idea of a possible rupee trade on Russian oil. At present, oil public sector undertakings neither have any contract nor is any such proposal under consideration from Russia or any other country for purchase of crude oil in Indian rupees, Rameswar Teli, Minister of State in the ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, told parliament on March 28 reported Economic Times. An oil treatment plant in the Yarakta Oil Field, owned by Irkutsk Oil Company in the Irkutsk region of Russia on March 10, 2019. (Reuters/Vasily Fedosenko) When questioned about India continuing to buy oil from Russia during a press briefing on March 18, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that though the United States has decided to ban Russian oil imports, we recognize that other countries have not taken such a decision. And they have different economic reasoning as to why different countries do, including some in Europe, she said. The bulk of Indias oil imports come from the Middle East, with Iraq supplying 23 percent, Saudi Arabia 18 percent, and the United Arab Emirates 11 percent. Though Russia is a marginal supplier, imports have spiked this month with Russia sending 360,000 barrels of oil per day to India, which is four times the average of last year. Service members of pro-Russian troops drive a multiple rocket launcher with the symbols "Z" painted on its sides in the course of Ukraine-Russia conflict in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, March 24, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/File Photo/Reuters) Russia Aiming at Korean Model for Splitting Ukraine, Intel Chief Warns of Guerilla Resistance Moscow is attempting to divide Ukraine through war efforts in the country, Kyivs military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said while adding that his nations army will proceed to engage in guerilla warfare to avoid such a situation. After the failures near Kyiv and the impossibility of overthrowing the central government of Ukraine, Putin is already changing the main operational directionsthe south and the east. There is reason to believe that he is considering a Korean scenario for Ukraine, Budanov said of the Russian president in a statement. That is, he will try to impose a dividing line between the unoccupied and occupied regions of our country. In fact, it is an attempt to create North and South Korea in Ukraine. After all, he is definitely not able to swallow the whole state. Russia will try to unify the occupied territories into a single quasi-state entity. However, the counteroffensive by Ukraine complicates such plans, Budanov said. Prior to invading Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Feb. 21 that Moscow will recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, regions located in the Donbass area of south-eastern Ukraine. The leaders of these two regions had asked Putin to recognize their independent status. Read More Ukraine War Necessary If Russia Recognizes Breakaway Regions: Former Donetsk Separatist Leader Turned Russian Lawmaker With Russia unable to overcome Ukrainian forces after more than a month of war, the Kremlin has indicated that it is scaling back ambitions to focus on securing the Donbass region. A leader from Lunhask said on Sunday that the region might soon hold a referendum about joining with Russia. However, the Ukrainian government hit back at these suggestions. All such fake referendums in the temporarily occupied territories will have no legal validity and are null and void, Ukraines foreign ministry spokesperson Oleg Nikolenko said to Reuters. Instead, Russia will face an even stronger response from the international community, further deepening its global isolation. Ukrainian ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova rejected the possibility of Ukraine surrendering to Russia during an NBC program, while also stating that recognizing the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass as an independent state was out of the question. I think we shouldnt ask Ukraine what we are ready to give up in order for Russia to stop this aggression. All of us should be asking each what are we prepared to do to stop it, she added. Because if we lose this, its very importantIf Ukraine loses it, its not only your friends lost, it means that brutality, oligarchy, and war criminals prevail on our planet. Kyiv and Moscow will be holding face-to-face talks in Turkey on Monday. Earlier talks between the two sides had concluded without any positive outcome. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has softened his stance on a compromise, saying in an interview with Russian outlet Meduza that Kyiv could guarantee neutrality and a non-nuclear status as part of a potential peace deal with Moscow, if supported by a vote from the Ukrainian people. Declaring neutrality would effectively end the possibility of Ukraine becoming a member of NATO. The Kremlin has banned the interview in Russia. Talks between Russia and Ukraine restarted in Turkey, where a Russian billionaire made a surprise visit. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo says China needs to be labeled an adversary instead of a competitor. And he says the U.S. should recognize Taiwans sovereignty. Republicans placed a weeklong hold on the vote to advance Judge Ketanji Brown Jacksons Supreme Court nomination. They cite gaps in Jacksons record, and incomplete documentation from the White House. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan greets Russian and Ukrainian negotiators before addressing them, ahead of their face-to-face talks in Istanbul, Turkey on March 29, 2022. (Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Press Office via Reuters) Russia to Cut Down on Military Activity Near Ukraines Capital: Officials Russia is cutting down on its military activity near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, an official said after the latest round of negotiations between the warring countries. The Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation, for purposes of trust-building and creating conditions for holding talks further, and achieving the final goal of agreeing and signing a peace treaty, made a decision to radically decrease the military activities in the directions of Kyiv and Chernihiv, Alexander Fomin, Russias deputy minister of defense, told reporters in Turkey after the two sides met. Chernigov, in northern Ukraine, sits about 150 kilometers (93 miles) from Kyiv. Russian officials will provide more details about the reduction after the delegation returns to Moscow, Fomin said. Around the same time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces may be trying to regroup before launching a fresh assault on Kyiv. Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 but has failed to capture Kyiv, though it has gained control of a number of other cities. Russia and Ukraine have held multiple rounds of talks but have thus far not come to an agreement to stop the fighting, which has displaced millions and left thousands dead. Vladimir Medinsky, Russias top negotiator, meanwhile, said that the latest discussions were constructive and that Russian President Vladimir Putin may meet with Zelenskyy, but only if the meeting were to coincide with the signing of a deal by the respective ministers of foreign affairs. Ukraines written proposal for a treaty, which says the country will be a neutral nation that will not try to get nuclear weapons, will be conveyed to Putin, said Medinsky, who added that his group protested against the alleged treatment of Russian prisoners of war, with videos appearing to show Ukraines military abusing them. David Arakhamia, the top Ukrainian negotiator, said Russia must completely withdraw from Ukraine. Ukrainian officials also said Ukraine is seeking security guarantees from outside nations like the United States and Israel but that the guarantees would not apply to certain portions of Ukraine, including parts of the east where local officials have declared independence. The implementation of this agreement about security guarantees will follow a certain procedure. Firstly, a referendum for all Ukrainian citizens to give their position on this agreement and how it should be implemented. After that, there will be a ratification by the parliaments of the guarantor countries and the Ukrainian parliament. This is crucial. Therefore, we must have the support of the society before we can consolidate this agreement, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, told reporters after the talks. Podolyak wrote on Twitter that the guarantees would be similar to Article 5 of NATO, which essentially triggers a military response if any NATO member is attacked. Ukraine wants outside countries to commit to protecting it from any aggression, he said. Fire fighters extinguish fire in an oil depot that Ukraine's State Emergency Services say was caused by Russian strikes in Zhytomyr region, Ukraine March 7, 2022 in this still image obtained from a handout video. State Emergency Services of Ukraine/Handout via REUTERS Russian Missile Strikes Oil Depot in Western Ukraine A Russian missile struck an oil depot in western Ukraine late on Monday, the governor of the Rivne region said. Governor Vitaliy Koval said in a brief video address on social media that emergency services were at the scene, without elaborating. The attack marks the second on oil facilities in the region and is the latest in a series of such attacks in recent days. Western Ukraine has not seen ground combat, but missiles have struck oil depots and a military plant in Lviv, a major city close to Poland where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have gone to shelter from fighting elsewhere. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested in an interview with prominent independent Russian journalists released on Sunday that the attacks on oil depots are intended to disrupt the planting season in Ukraine, which is a major grain producer. Russia and Ukraine are key exporters of grain, supplying nearly 30 percent of wheat and nearly 20 percent of corn in the global market. On March 21, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the White House anticipates a global food shortage due to the full-scale invasion launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 24. Psaki said that although the United States is not likely to be impacted by a food shortage, the White House does expect that higher energy, fertilizer, wheat, and corn prices sparked by the Ukraine invasion could impact the price of growing and purchasing critical food supplies for countries around the world. Among the most reliant on Russia and Ukraine for their wheat supply are developing nations in northern Africa and Asia. Early estimates from the World Bank suggest disproportionate impacts on low- and middle-income countries including in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, Psaki said. The attack comes ahead of expected negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul this week. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that talks could begin as soon as Tuesday. The spokesman declined to elaborate on the details of the negotiations. While we cannot and will not speak about progress at the talks, the fact that they continuing to take place in person is important, of course, Peskov said. We are adhering to a policy of not disclosing any information about the talks, which we think could only hurt the negotiation process. He acknowledged that no substantial achievements or breakthroughs have been achieved in previous rounds of negotiations between the two nations. Zelenskyy said in his interview on Sunday that Ukraine is ready to discuss security guarantees and neutrality, the non-nuclear status of our state. Putin has sought reassurance that Ukraine will not seek NATO membership. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Economist Adewale "Wally" Adeyemo answers questions during his Senate Finance Committee nomination hearing to be Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, in Washington, on Feb. 23, 2021. (Greg Nash/Pool via Reuters) Russian Supply Chains Next in Line for Sanctions: Deputy US Treasury Secretary LONDONThe United States and its allies plan new sanctions on more sectors of Russias economy that are critical to sustaining its invasion of Ukraine, including supply chains, Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said on Tuesday. Adeyemo, speaking in London on a European trip to consult with allies on strengthening and enforcing sanctions to punish Russia, said the broadening of those efforts was aimed at undermining the Kremlins ability to operate its war machine. In addition to sanctioning companies in sectors that enable the Kremlins malign activities, we also plan to take actions to disrupt their critical supply chains, Adeyemo told an event at the think tank Chatham House. Our goal is to use an integrated approach that includes export controls which will bite over time and sanctions that will bite immediately, he said, adding they would also target alternative military suppliers used by Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on what he calls a special military operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. Since the invasion began on Feb. 24, western allies have frozen Russias central banks foreign currency assets, banned key Russian banks and wealthy elites from hard currency transactions, and put restrictions on exports of advanced semiconductors and other technology. The sanctions have stripped the Kremlin of resources and helped to cripple Russias economy. Adeyemo said they would stay in place for as long as the invasion continued. He attributed the success of the sanctions to a strong multilateral effort and the strength of an international economic and financial system built by democratic countries at the end of World War Two, which created institutions including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the precursor to the World Trade Organization. A small toy figure and gold imitation in front of the Polymetal logo in a photo illustration taken on Nov. 19, 2021. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters) Russias Polymetal Is Studying Possibility of Kazakh Mines Demerger Russian gold and silver producer Polymetal is analyzing the possibility of breaking off its Kazakh mines at the request of a group of investors, it said on Monday, adding that it was premature to speak of a decision. London-listed Polymetal, which has a free float of 75.2 percent, is not subject to any Western sanctions imposed on Russia for what Moscow calls a special military operation in Ukraine. However, its shares are down 78 percent amid a global sell-off of Russia-related stocks since the operation began on Feb. 24. Polymetal did not provide any further detail in its comment. Polymetal produced 1.7 million troy ounces of gold equivalenta mix of gold and other metalsin 2021, of which 558,000 ounces were produced by its two mines in Kazakhstan. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) holds a press conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 5, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) Senate Passes Legislation to Boost US Competitiveness Eyeing China Threat The Senate has approved a multibillion-dollar bill designed to support the U.S. high-tech industry, particularly the domestic semiconductor chip sector, in boosting U.S. competitiveness in face of threats posed by the Chinese regime. In a 68 to 28 vote, the Senate passed the Houses Democrat-led America COMPETES Act, a controversial bill that was nominally designed to counter Chinas influence but also provided funding for climate change projects and labor unions. The House legislation was approved in February by mostly a party-line vote, with Republicans saying that provisions in the bill werent tough enough on China. On Monday, 27 of the 28 senators who voted against it were Republicans, while four other Republicans chose not to vote. This bill, for all its provisions, is really about two big things: creating more American jobs and lowering costs for American families, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said before the vote. It will help lower costs by making it easier to produce critical technologies here at home, like semiconductors. This legislation will fuel another generation of American innovation, he added. America cannot afford to come in second place when it comes to technologies like 5G, AI [artifical intelligence], quantum computing, semiconductors, bio-engineering, and so much more. Schumer and Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) introduced a Senate version of the bill, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), which was passed in June last year. Now, the two chambers of Congress will convene in a conference committee to reconcile differences between the bills before a final version can be sent to the presidents desk. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who voted in favor of the Houses bill, said the legislation sent an unmistakable message to authoritarian regimes around the world, according to a press release from her office. Were now one step closer to passing historic legislation that counters Chinese aggression by pushing new frontiers of U.S. innovation and bolstering our national security, Shaheen wrote. Heritage Action, a grassroots conservative advocacy group and sister organization of the Washington-based think tank The Heritage Foundation, took to Twitter to express its concerns about what the final bill that could cost over $300 billion might look like. The House conferees will try to add provisions from their bill back into the final deal. Those House provisions will make a bad bill worse, the group wrote of the bill it said does little to meaningfully counter the CCP. It added, Senators must draw a red line and refuse to add the harmful Left-wing provisions of the COMPETES Act. A transit officer, wearing a protective gear, controls access to a tunnel in the direction of Pudong district in lockdown as a measure against the Covid-19 coronavirus, in Shanghai on March 28, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images) Shanghai COVID Lockdown to Cost Chinas Economy $29 Billion in 2 Weeks, Analysts Say Trucks are delayed, deliveries are slowed, and costs will rise, according to logistics providers A full-scale lockdown on Chinas financial hub of Shanghai is likely to cost the economy 190 billion yuan ($29.8 billion) in two weeks, or 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), according to a minimum estimate by a Hong Kong economist. Almost 7 percent of the loss would be from the spillover effects to other cities, said Zheng Michael Song, an economics professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The cost could reach 295 billion yuan ($63 billion), or 3.1 percent of GDP, if one-tenth of Chinese cities entered into lockdown for two weeks, Song said in a recent article. Song, along with four other economic researchers from the United States, Hong Kong, and mainland China, used city-to-city truck flow data from the real-time location of 1.8 million trucks to measure the economic impact of Chinas lockdowns. The research came amid concerns that the lockdown in Shanghai, Chinas financial hub and a home to the worlds largest container-shipping port, could further disrupt economic activities in the coastal city and beyond. Half of Shanghai began a four-day locking down on March 28, and the restrictions will move to the other half for four days starting Friday. The sweeping, two-staged measures were to allow health workers to complete at least two rounds of mass screening of the citys 26 million residents in a bid to contain surging infections under the regimes zero-tolerance COVID-19 strategy. The restrictions barred unapproved vehicles from streets, closed public transportation, and required millions of residents to stay at home. Companies, meanwhile, are allowed to continue operations, with limited workers staying within a closed loop system, separating them from the general public for the duration of the lockdown. Many bankers, traders, and other key company staff are now bedding down in their offices. Chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation said their factories in Shanghai remained open to produce as usual, state media outlets reported on March 28. Tesla, meanwhile, reportedly suspended productions for four days on Monday, according to Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter. Stranded lorry drivers line up for nucleic acid testing at a parking lot, following a lockdown in Tangshan city, Hebei province, China on March 26, 2022. (China Daily via Reuters) Minimum Estimate The staggered lockdown in Shanghai marked a U-turn for the citys authorities. The city had previously been held up as a model for tamping down outbreaks through a more targeted approach, without resorting to a full-blown lockdown. The city had sealed off many residential communities in the past week and screened citizens neighborhood by neighborhood. Officials had also said the city couldnt enter a full lockdown, citing the impact on the national and global economy. But the current outbreak driven by the highly infectious Omicron variant of the virus appears to have put pressure on local officials to follow the measures implemented in southern Chinas Shenzhen, a manufacturing hub that had recently undergone lockdown, and double down on its zero-COVID policy. Related Coverage China Locks Down 51 Million as COVID Surges Across the Country If three other megacities in the countryBeijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhenwere to together impose a strict lockdown, national real income would fall by 12 percent, Song said in a preliminary paper co-authored with four economic researchers released on March 15. These estimates only capture the effects of lockdown in the short run, the experts said in the report. Shenzhen relaxed the citywide restrictions on March 21, allowing businesses to resume operations after a week lockdown. A survey conducted by a state-run newspaper found Shenzhens war on COVID-19 has hurt up to 93 percent of local small and medium-sized companies, with many experiencing disruptions to production, interruptions to supply chains, and delays in orders as a result of the shutdown. US cargo ship at the Yangshan Deep-Water Port in Shanghai on April 9, 2018. (JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images) Disruption to Global Supply Chains As millions of residents in Shanghai are confined to their homes, consumers in the rest of the world are also likely to feel the pressure as global supply chains are expected to be further disrupted due to the lockdown. City officials assured major ports and airports that normal operations could be maintained during the lockdown. However, researchers and logistics providers warned that delays are expected in cargo transportation and trucking services. State-backed media Global Times, quoted a researcher from the Shanghai International Shipping Institute who said that while the port in the city remained open, efficiency has declined due to labor constraints and quarantine requirements. Shipments scheduled to leave for Japan and Thailand on March 29 were delayed to next week, the report said, citing an unamed employee from a logistics company. There is a significant disruption to truck movements already, Woodlands Group, a UK supply chain consulting company, said in a Monday statement. The disruptions particularly come from neighboring provinces with trucks being forced to turn back on their way to Shanghai port, leaving a large part of the cargo ready for loading today unable to be transported to the port, it stated. Danish shipping giant Maersk also warned of affected trucking service in Shanghai and potential higher transportation costs due to the citys lockdown. Trucking service in and out [of] Shanghai will be severely impacted by 30 percent, Maersk, the worlds second-largest container shipping company, said in an advisory to clients on March 28. Maersks warehouses in Shanghai would be closed until April 1. Consequently, there will be longer delivery time and a possible rise in transport costs such as detour fee and highway fee. SEKO Logistics, a U.S.-based freight transport and warehousing company, said factories in the neighboring province of Zhejiang were opting to move cargo out of the port in Ningbo, to Shanghais south, rather than Shanghai. We are anticipating: a sharp increase in air freight rates from today, the company said on its website. Reuters contributed to the report. Citywide lockdowns hit Chinas top financial hub; 26 million people in Shanghai are now subject to mass testing for COVID-19, while concerns over the shutdown rise following a number of apparent hospital failings. The second of two black boxes has been found after last weeks devastating plane crash in China. But a curiously short report has some questioning if theres a coverup effort in play. China rebukes a warning from Washington about helping Russia evade sanctions. But do Beijings actions match its words? A new report says capital outflow in China has reached unprecedented levels. Was the rise spurred on by Russias invasion? Americas major defense partner in Asia finds itself in a sticky situation. Putins war on Ukraine has complicated the countrys relations with China, Russia, and the United Statesall at once. Have other topics you want us to cover? Drop us a line: chinainfocus@ntdtv.org And if youd like to buy us a coffee: https://donorbox.org/china-in-focus Subscribe to our newsletter for more first-hand news from China. For more news and videos, please visit us on Gettr and Twitter. Stop the Talk About Removing Putin Commentary A few weeks ago, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) indelicately stated his opinion about Russian boss Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine: The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. The past weekend, President Joe Biden got in on the act, calling Putin a butcher and declaring, For Gods sake, this man cannot remain in power. While not an explicit call for Putins assassination like Grahams, its difficult to interpret Bidens rhetoric as anything other than a call to Russians to stage some sort of coup. Both of these politicians were indulging the long-established political expediency of cheap grandstanding. Gentlemen, please: Keep those thoughts to yourselves. Before I explain why such statements should cease, let me emphasize that I have never been nor am now in any way a fan or admirer of Vladimir Putin. But I can think of at least three reasons why Americans should be quiet about wanting Putin to disappear. First, such talk lends credence to Putins stated concerns that the United States has aggressive designs against Russia and wants to dominate her. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States is already too overextended financially and logistically to even consider trying to manage the government of Russia. Even if it were not so, who would want the thankless task of weeding out the extensive endemic corruption and trying to govern one of the most anarchical populations on Earth? Russia is broken, and only Russians can fix Russia. Theres zero evidence to support the notion that the United States has designs on Russia. NATO is a completely defensive alliance. It expands eastward only because Russias treatment of neighboring countries has been and is so abominable that it drives nations into the much kinder arms of the West. All that the United States and NATO have ever wanted has been to keep Russia out. The West isnt trying to move into Russia; we just dont want Russia moving into Europe. Second, the scuttlebutt has long been that President John F. Kennedy made some not entirely clandestine plans to take out Fidel Castro. We all know who it was who got taken out. Lets not have our leaders talk about removing Putin with either explicit or implied suggestions to assassinate him. Our enemies can concoct such plans, too. Lets not put an American president in the cross-hairs of a notoriously murderous regime. I say that as one who can still feel the pain from when I heard of JFKs assassination. Also, think of the ramifications of Joe Biden being taken out (God forbid!): We would have Kamala Harris as president. Putin would eat her for lunch. Third, this would be a good time to heed the wisdom embodied in the saying, Be careful what you wish foryou might get it. Lets say some as-yet little known or unknown Russians engineer a coup to remove Putin, either violently or nonviolently. Putin is gone, end of problem, right? Not necessarily. We dont know if Putins successor would be just as bad, or possibly even worse. What if one Russian faction takes control at the outset and a competing faction believes that their new leaders are American puppets? Then the second faction wrests the reins of power away from the perceived American faction. Talk about stirring the pot and escalating tensions between the United States and Russia! No, we need to resist the temptation to vent our frustrations through careless verbiage. All politicians should avoid openly expressing the desire to see Putin removed from the world stage. Instead, our policy should be to continue to supply Ukraine with sufficient firepower to wipe out large sections of the invading Russian armyto inflict such great losses on Russia that nobody in the Kremlin can come to any other conclusion than that Putin led his country into a humiliating defeat, utter disgrace, and a historic disaster. In desperation, Putin might figure he has nothing to lose by letting the nukes fly, taking millions of innocent lives to the grave along with him. I cant help but believe, though, that those around Putin dont share such a death wish. Not wanting to die, they would strive to avert nuclear war with the United States. The outcome of such a war would wreak massive destruction on both countries, leaving China, by default, as the dominant superpower in the world. No sane Russian patriot could want such a dismal outcome as a nuclear-devastated homeland next door to a ruthless, dominant China. Such a prospect would trigger a reset in Russia that would end Putins reign. Lets have no more reckless chatter about removing Putin from power. Instead, lets adhere to the Teddy Roosevelt formula: Speak softly and carry a big stick. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Model Y cars are pictured during the opening ceremony of the new Tesla Gigafactory for electric cars in Gruenheide, Germany, on March 22, 2022. (Patrick Pleul/Pool via Reuters) Tesla to Seek Shareholder Approval for Stock Split; Shares Surge Tesla Inc. will seek investor approval to increase its number of shares to enable a stock split in the form of a dividend, the electric-car maker said on Monday, sending its shares up about 5 percent. The plan came as the company suspended its Shanghai factory amid COVID-19-related lockdown measures and its artificial intelligence head took a sabbatical as the company aims to achieve full self-driving capability this year. The proposal, first announced on Twitter, has been approved by its board and shareholders will vote on it at an annual meeting. The stock split, if approved, would be the latest after a five-for-one split in August 2020 that made Tesla shares cheaper for its employees and investors. Following a pandemic-induced rally in the technology shares, Alphabet Inc, Amazon.com Inc., and Apple Inc, too, have in the recent past split their shares to make them more affordable. Tesla debuted at $17 per share in 2010. Following its 2020 5-for-1 stock split it is trading above $1,000, equivalent to over $5,000 on a pre-stock split basis. Since the stock split in 2020, they have surged 128 percent, boosting the companys market capitalization above $1 trillion and making it the biggest U.S. automaker by that measure. This (stock split) could further fuel the bubble in Teslas stock that has been brewing over the past two years, said David Trainer, chief executive of investment research firm New Constructs. Tesla has delivered nearly a million electric cars annually, while ramping up production by setting up new factories in Austin and Berlin amid COVID-19-related disruptions and increasing competition. Tesla on Monday notified its suppliers and workers that its Shanghai factory in China will be closed for four days as the financial hub said it would lock down in two stages to carry out mass COVID-19 testing. Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said on Monday that he had supposedly tested positive for COVID-19, a few days after he attended a car delivery event at the companys new Berlin factory. We think Berlin ramping, and both the MiniCar and India are on the horizon, we would agree with the timing, Roth Capital analyst Craig Irwin said, hinting that companies usually execute stock splits when good news is ahead. AI Chief Musk also said on Sunday Teslas artificial intelligence chief Andrej Karpathy was on a fourth-month sabbatical, at a critical time that Musk wants to achieve full self-driving capability and roll out a humanoid robot prototype this year. Especially excited to get focused time to re-sharpen my technical edge and train some neural nets! Karparthy tweeted. Though I already miss all the robots and GPU/Dojo clusters and looking forward to having them at my fingertips again, he said, referring to Teslas AI chip Dojo. Musk said in a podcast interview in January that Karpathy played an important role, adding: People will give me too much credit and theyll give Andrej too much credit. By Nivedita Balu and Akash Sriram Texas Oil and Gas Association president Todd Staples said, "Texas Oil Can Lead the Way," at the TXOGA Energy Summit in Tyler, Texas, March 23. (Patrick Butler/The Epoch Times) Texas Oil Can Lead the WayBut Will It Be Allowed To? Industry bosses say the Lone Star State is ready to meet energy needs Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Railroad Commission chairman Wayne Christian asked President Joe Biden to get out of the way and give the green light respectively, so Texas oil can lead the way. Texas can drill enough oil and natural gas to keep prices low here in America and in Europe if Biden would get out of the way, Abbott tweeted on Feb. 24 as the war in Ukraine ramped up, and Russian oil slowly became a target for sanctions by the United States and its Western allies. Christian concurred three weeks later in a post on the commissions website on March 18, 10 days after Biden banned the import of Russian oil, liquefied natural gas, and coal to the United States, and suspected war crimes in Ukraine were coming into focus. The Lone Star State is ready to meet U.S. energy needs, he wrote, and help our European allies meet theirs. Mr. President, please just give Texas the green light. Get out of the way, tweeted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott about President Joe Bidens stand on energy, on Feb. 14. Abbott is seen here speaking at a press conference at the Capitol in Austin, Texas, on June 8, 2021. (Montinique Monroe/Getty Images) Texas is the third-largest producer of oil in the world. Of the top five largest oil fields on the globe, Texas is home to two of them; the Permian Basin and the Eagle Ford Shale. The commission that Christian leads is the Texas agency that primarily regulates gas and oil production in the state. Todd Staples, head of the Texas Oil and Gas Association (TXOGA), questioned Americas future in a timely keynote message at the Northeast Texas Energy Summit in Tyler, on March 23, saying that Texas can lead the way. A year ago, many people were questioning the future of oil and natural gas, Staples said. Today, people are questioning if they have a future without them. A decade ago, countries in Europe traded energy security for energy ideology. Now they are in a weakened condition with grave consequences. We cannot let that happen in the United States of America. Texas can lead the way. One of the perceived obstacles to that green light is the Biden administrations focus on the transition from fossil fuels to so-called clean renewable energy sources, a pledge in his presidential campaign. Bidens canceling the Keystone XL Pipelinethat would have seen crude oil by the millions of barrels sent from Canada to Texas refineries to make fuelon his first day in office put a crimp on Texas abilities to provide for the nation and world when the war hit fuel prices. Investors in publicly held oil companies in Texas had interpreted Bidens quick termination of the Trump-era project as a hostile act toward the production of oil as a favored resource. Companies responding to investor concerns had already declined to spend the necessary money to expand drilling infrastructure when war broke out in Ukraine. As a result, investors in Texas oil are even now hesitant to expand production regardless of the rising prices Texas crude has been selling for, according to a survey by the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, released on March 23rd. The message from the White House, Capitol Hill, and Wall Street has been that oil and gas is a dying industry and one that needs to be abandoned, said a survey respondent. Garret Golding of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve analyzes trends in energy markets, geopolitics, and the U.S. Shale Oil and Gas sector. Golding was the keynote speaker at the Southeast Texas TXOGA conference in Corpus Christi, on March 24, where he hoped to prod a re-think of where future energy answers come from. While the mix of sources we derive our energy from is shifting, global growth demands more energy in every form, Golding said. Meanwhile, Staples addressed environmental concerns, and told conference attendees, No one produces the oil and natural gas the world needs in a more environmentally friendly way than American producers. He noted that carbon emissions in the United States were reduced by 8 percent, while in China and Russia, emissions rose 25 and 21 percent respectively, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Its time to unleash American energy leadership, Staples said, and start treating oil and natural gas in our country as an asset, not a liability. The Great Translation Movement account translates Chinese pro-Russia messages into English. (The Great Translation Movement Twitter/Screenshot via The Epoch Times) Movement to Unveil CCP Domestic Propaganda to Western World Faces Crackdown From Beijing The online translation campaign reveals the CCP inciting pro-war, pro-Russia, and anti-American sentiment within China The Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) Great Firewall has long controlled public access to uncensored information on the internet and thus opinion within China, imbuing its citizens with values that differ from the universally accepted ones. However, a new grassroots movement is pushing to unveil the CCPs domestic propaganda to the Western world. The Great Translation Movement started in China after Russia invaded Ukraine, translating what the CCP tells its citizens into foreign languages and making it available on various online forums abroad. The movement was initially started by ChongLangTV, the largest Chinese community on the American social news and discussion platform Reddit. Reddit later took down the channel. However, loosely organized accounts on social platforms like Twitter and Facebook have taken it upon themselves to continue the translation effort, with the core idea of exposing what the CCP is truly telling its people about the Russian invasion of Ukraine versus what its officials say to the world. Due to the internet blockade and limited information being available to foreign reporters or diplomats, Western media dont often get the CCPs actual position on a matter or the complete picture of what the CCP shows or tells its people within its borders. As the world condemns Russia for its actions, there exists a pro-war, pro-Russia, and anti-American sentiment on the Chinese internet space. Rather than publicly condemning the aggressor, the Chinese media space is filled with videos and posts supporting Russia and disparaging Ukraine. Participants of the Great Translation Movement collect the pro-Russia content from major Chinese platforms such as Weibo, Bilibili, and Zhihu, translating it into foreign languages and then posting it on foreign forums or media platforms. The movement appears to be taking off and has gained many supporters worldwide. Crackdown on Movement Supporters Pincong is a Chinese internet forum with a U.S.-based main server. It focuses on discussing sensitive political topics or current affairs, and is blocked in China by the Great Firewall. Mr. Chen, the administrator of Pincong, told The Epoch Times that the CCP is maliciously targeting the website for supporting the Great Translation Movement. Pincong is not the initiator of [the movement] but a supporter. It is now being attacked [by the CCP] like never before, Chen said. However, even if we didnt support the movement, wed still be subjected to cyberattacks because we have long been a thorn to the CCP. Chen said that the Pincong forum has been threatened and harassed by the CCP for allowing discussions of sensitive political topics on the site. The site was allegedly subjected to thousands of malicious Chinese IP attacks daily, which increased since it started supporting the Great Translation Movement. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Pincong.com set up a special forum for the Great Translation Movement on its homepage and published rules encouraging users to distribute screenshots of content from Chinese sites to foreign audiences while maintaining the safety of their personal information. Chinas largest question-and-answer website Zhihu was once taken down by the Cyberspace Administration of China for discussing sensitive political topics and current affairs. As a result, many internet refugees flocked to Pincong as its main server is based in the United States and not subject to the CCPs internet censorship. Pincongs server does not record users IP addresses to ensure their privacy. Email and phone numbers are also not required when registering. For a non-profit website, the more practical approach is to avoid phishing behaviors that ask for users personal information, and implement countermeasures [against the CCPs cyberattacks]. However, Chen said that one of the websites server maintainers based in China has been missing for more than four months, speculating that the Chinese authorities may have arrested the person. Pincong used gift cards donated by the users to pay its server providers in China. There may have been spies working for the CCP among the donors, who may be able to obtain the server providers IP address, Chen added, breaking down a possible reason for losing one of his server maintainers in China. CCP Fears The CCP mainly controls its official image through the selected information it makes available to the free world. However, the Great Translation Movement has threatened its ability to contain the external narrative. U.S.-based China affairs commentator Tang Jingyuan told The Epoch Times that the CCP has always had two sets of propaganda for internal and external use. Domestically, the CCP incites and manipulates public opinion to support Putins aggression with a great and righteous rhetoric. Yet, it displays a neutral position when addressing the Western world, saying that it respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries. Tang believes that the CCPs two-faced responses serve to disguise its true nature, which it shows within the country. It would hurt the national interest if its true intentions were revealed. Thus, the CCP is highly concerned and disturbed by the Great Translation Movement, attempting a crackdown by any means necessary. As the new wave of translations uncover the CCPs hidden lies, Chinese state-run media promptly issued editorials denouncing the movement. On March 24, the Chinese state-run Global Times published an editorial calling the Great Translation Movement a malicious smear campaign against China on Russia-Ukraine issues that has surfaced on overseas social media. The article went on to say that a few Chinese-speaking bad-faith actors fed by antagonistic Western media are behind the online translation campaign. Ellen Wan and Xinan Li contributed to this report. An attempt to explain reports of healing after watching Shen Yun Performing Arts Shen Yun Performing Arts is the worlds premier classical Chinese dance and music company. According to its website, it was established in New York by elite artists inspired by a shared missionto bring back the lost world of traditional Chinese culture. The performance is meant to entertain and uplift audiences, yet many have reported an unexpected reduction in pain or an increase in mobility. The effect has been so dramatic in some cases as to defy explanation, though researchers, doctors, and other experts point to several effects Shen Yun might be having on the mind and body. Im an expert in infectious disease and antiviral drug development and have been the chief scientific officer at a Swiss biotech company. More and more, scientists are starting to recognize the incredible interconnection between mind and body. Understanding this connection might help explain why so many Shen Yun audience members report improved physical and mental health after watching the performance. Shen Yun pairs classical Chinese dance with an orchestra that combines authentic ancient Chinese instruments with orchestral instruments from the West. Shen Yuns performance is filled with bright color, breathtaking music and dance, universal values, and a message of compassion. Its the kind of performance that audience members often say leaves them in tears of joy and filled with hope. Beauty, as well as the awe it stirs in the human spirit, has a profound impact on how we think and feel. Shen Yuns beauty comes from many aspects of its performance, but it may offer an even deeper resonance for many because of the culture it comes from. Chinese civilization has persisted for 5,000 years, orders of magnitude longer than any other civilization, though it did suffer a catastrophic communist revolution in 1949. Despite that, the culture persists, and within it are profound insights into how to live a dignified and meaningful human life. The dramatic decrease in pain and disease symptoms some audience members report after seeing the performance is worth looking into. Chronic Pain Disappeared You know, when we were coming to the show, I was sitting at the beginning [of the performance], and I was saying, Oh, my back hurts, Antonio Divine, a nurse who works in a Baptist hospital, said. But after watching the Shen Yun performance at Fort Lauderdales Au-Rene Theater on Dec. 29, 2021, Divine realized that his back pain had disappeared. Divine isnt the only person who has experienced such pain-relieving effects after watching Shen Yun. Queene Owl said she had pain in her legs as she was making her way to watch Shen Yun at the Belk Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Jan. 8, 2022. But once she watched the performance, her pain disappeared. When I came, I was in pain. I had cramps in my feet, upper thighs, and calves. I had a hard time walking; it was painful to even try. I usually do, and Im used to it. I need a wheelchair in case I need support. But now I feel better, she said. I cant explain the feeling, its just this ooh wow feeling, and I think the energy had a lot to do with it. I looked at that amazing art and beauty, and I forgot about [the pain]. Diane Richter, a retired caregiver who still works at St. Pauls School in Cudahy, Wisconsin, suffered a lot of pain and stiffness in her body and neck due to an accident when she was a teenager. On Jan. 2, she watched Shen Yun at the Marcus Performing Arts Center in Milwaukee, where she experienced the disappearance of pain and stiffness in her body for the first time in 49 years. I came in with stiffness in my body and my neck, and I dont know how to explain this, but its gone, she said. Its like through the time of watching [Shen Yun], it [was] actually released, and its not painful right now. On Feb. 12, 2022, Walter Dixon, a retired business owner who suffers from Parkinsons disease, came with his cane to see Shen Yun perform at the Oncenter Crouse Hinds Theater in Syracuse, New York, and walked out after the performance without it. I usually use walking sticks. Im not using them right this minute. Im standing without them. I have Parkinsons disease. I had trouble getting in here, and after the show, I walked right out of thereI dont know what happened. Doctor Calls Shen Yun a Prescription One thing we have learned in recent years, which was widely held in older forms of medicine, is that a poor mental and emotional state is a foundation for illness. There have been numerous immunological studies showing that if a person is in a state of chronic stress and depression, the release of the stress hormone cortisol increases, which not only suppresses the function of immune cells (including phagocytes, natural killer cells, T cells), but also inhibits their ability to fight viruses. Depression also increases the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, leading to a state of chronic inflammation, which in turn can easily trigger or aggravate chronic diseases (such as cardiovascular and neuromuscular disorders) and lead to further deterioration of chronic symptoms, including pain. These reported cases of pain completely disappearingeven long-term severe painmay be related to the decrease of stress hormones and increased levels of endorphins and oxytocin while watching Shen Yun. In August 2021, professor George Slavich from the Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the University of CaliforniaLos Angeles and psychology professor Jamil Zaki from Stanford University published an article in the journal Anxiety, Stress and Coping, proposing three evidence-based strategies that could help foster individual and collective recovery, growth, and resilience. Those strategies are cultivating social belonging, practicing compassion, and engaging in kindness. For many people, a sense of social belonging all but disappeared during the pandemic. People now are feeling depressed because they feel more isolated and alone, psychologist Howard Berlin said. Berlin was glad to see people come together for Shen Yun performances in part because of the shared social experience. When you come to something like this, you see people coming together and the beauty of community, he said. Many experiences can provide this sense of community, but not all of them generate compassion and kindness. For many people, these virtues, which are woven throughout Shen Yuns story-based dances, stand out as a powerful medicine. Dr. Lisa Miller, a doctor of internal medicine, describes Shen Yun as a perfect prescription for joy. She describes Shen Yun artists as physicians of beauty and grace and chemistry and electricity. Being a physician, I use my hands to get things done and take care of my patients, while these performers use their bodies, their gestures, their fingersthey use every part of their body to healas what they did tonight was a form of medicine. It was a perfect prescription for joy and pageantry and beauty and honor, and everything. It is just good and magical, Miller said. And we need it. Its the perfect prescription for happiness. More Than Just Art and Beauty In the 1970s, Dr. Norman Cousins, a UCLA professor of psychiatric and biobehavioral sciences, tailored for himself a holistic approach that included spirituality and laughing, prescribing himself comedy movies. He eventually recovered from a life-threatening autoimmune disease. Joy is medicine, but Shen Yuns healing power isnt just based on joyit also delivers a potent dosage of awe. Shen Yun aims to bring back universal values and deliver a message of compassion. One Harvard study quantified the power of compassion with biomedical methods. Students were shown a 50-minute film of Mother Teresa performing acts of kindness, helping the sick and dying poor of Calcutta. The audiences immune function was enhanced and remained high for an hour afterward. This effect happened even to those who didnt like Mother Teresa; their brains subconsciously resonated with her good deeds and the power of compassion. This is far from the only study demonstrating a link between kindness and health benefits. Studies have shown that when people do good deeds, their levels of oxytocin increase. Oxytocin has been shown to promote immunity and help people fight viruses and bacteria. Science has shown that kindness has a biochemical effect; accordingly, kindness can be used as a treatment for pain, depression, and infectious disease. More interestingly, the oxytocin in the body of those who witness the good deeds will also increase. If a performance includes a story of acts of kindness toward others, it has the potential to help increase the audiences oxytocin levels, which in turn can boost immunity and reduce chronic inflammation. All this is to say we cant discount the importance of the role our thoughts and behaviors play in our health. Any spiritual phenomenon has a material implication, and we cant neglect this. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that people with different perspectives on well-being (hedonistic versus eudaimonic/altruistic) had two different types of gene-expression profiles for peripheral immune cells. People who had a noble purpose in life had a clear pattern of a much stronger potential for antiviral immunity than those who were more focused on self-gratification. The effect of our thoughts could be as far-reaching and deep as the genetic layer of the human body. Dr. Yang Jingduan, an expert in neurology and psychiatry who did a research fellowship in clinical psychopharmacology at Oxford University, is also an expert in integrative Chinese and Western medicine. Yang has found that ones behavior has the most direct impact on ones physical health. And the most powerful influence on our behavior is our emotions. The strongest effect on our emotions are our thoughts. And what determines our thoughts is our belief system, he said. Ancient Chinese medicine holds that in each internal organ system exists a soul or spirit, and they are the immortal part of our life, called our true self. What nurtures our spiritual part are the five virtues: compassion, respect, justice, wisdom, and faith. The morals of Shen Yuns performances present the best practice of these values. In summary, Shen Yun nourishes our body, mind, and soul. Shen Yun also describes an ancient yet renewed life-cultivation system, Falun Dafa, which teaches three universal principles: truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Anyone who practices these values will find themselves much more positive, happier, and relaxed. These minimize their reactions to daily stressors, consequently eliminating one of the most fundamental causes of illnessstress, Yang said. Audience members who experience unexpected relief from symptoms that are normally difficult to treat have been sharing these stories with friends and family, generating more interest in Shen Yun. Parkinsons disease is not curable, yet Dixon experienced such a miraculous improvement after watching the performance. This kind of result is particularly interesting for medical professionals. Yuhong Dong is the chief scientific officer for a Swiss biotech company and was previously a senior medical scientific expert for antiviral drug development with Novartis Switzerland and held similar roles at Novartis China. She is a postdoctoral fellow in the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and a doctor of infectious diseases. UK Police to Issue 1st 20 Fines Over Lockdown Parties in Government Buildings British police said the first 20 fines over alleged lockdown-breaching parties in Downing Street and Whitehall were set to be issued on Tuesday. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been plagued by a series of damaging allegations of parties and other gatherings held in his official residence at Number 10 Downing Street and other government departments in Whitehall at the height of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, in violation of lockdown rules written by the government. The Metropolitan Police said on Tuesday that 20 fixed penalty notices will be referred to the ACRO Criminal Records Office, which will then be responsible for issuing the fines. In a statement, Scotland Yard said, The investigation into allegations of breaches of COVID-19 regulations in Whitehall and Downing Street has now progressed to the point where the first referrals for fixed penalty notices (FPN) will be made to ACRO Criminal Records Office. It said further referrals could be made in the future if the evidential threshold is made. The issuing of the fixed penalty notices means the police have ruled the law was broken. But Downing Street has denied the prime minister misled the House of Commons when he told MPs that the COVID-19 regulations had not been broken in Number 10. At all times he has set out his understanding of events, the prime ministers official spokesman said. The spokesman said Downing Street had not been informed by the Met that Johnson was among those being referred to the ACRO Criminal Records Office. He refused to be drawn on whether Johnson would resign if he did get a fine, and also declined to say whether fined individuals can carry on working in Number 10. In response to the Mets announcement, Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the main opposition Labour Party, said the so-called partygate saga had been a slap in the face for the public. She said, After over two months of police time, 12 parties investigated and over a hundred people questioned under caution, Boris Johnsons Downing Street has been found guilty of breaking the law. Rayner repeated her call for Johnson to resign. The culture is set from the very top. The buck stops with the prime minister, who spent months lying to the British public, which is why he has got to go, she said. Calls for Johnson to quit over the scandal also came from his own backbench Conservative MPs, but in recent weeks the war in Ukraine has seen Tory MPs rally round their leader. PA Media contributed to this report. The NatWest logo hangs from the facade of a NatWest bank branch in central London, on July 17, 2015. (Niklas Hallen/AFP via Getty Images) UK Relinquishes Control of Former Royal Bank of Scotland LONDONThe British government has relinquished control of the former Royal Bank of Scotland for the first time since it bailed out the lender during the global financial crisis almost 15 years ago. The Treasury said Monday that it had sold 1.2 billion pounds ($1.6 billion) of shares back to the bank, now known as NatWest Group, cutting the governments stake to 48.1 percent, from 50.6 percent. Royal Bank of Scotland came to the brink of collapse in 2008 after a global acquisition spree that briefly made it the worlds biggest bank but also left it heavily exposed to risky loans in the United States. The government owned as much as 84.4 percent of the bank after investing 45.5 billion pounds in 2008 and 2009. The stake has been gradually reduced through a series of share sales that began in 2015. This sale means that the government is no longer the majority owner of NatWest Group and is, therefore, an important landmark in our plan to return the bank to the private sector, John Glen, economic secretary to the Treasury, said in a statement. NatWest bought 550 million shares, a 2.5 percent stake, for 220.5 pence a share, the Treasury said. The price is equal to Fridays closing price for NatWest shares on the London Stock Exchange. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan addresses Russian and Ukrainian negotiators before their face-to-face talks in Istanbul, Turkey, on March 29, 2022. (Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Press Office/Handout via Reuters) Ukraine Demands Security Guarantees Similar to NATOs Article 5, Excludes Donbas and Crimea Ukrainian negotiators on Tuesday proposed a mechanism similar to Article 5 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, the founding document of NATO, to guarantee the security of Ukraine. The proposal would require the guarantors to hold consultations within three days of the start of any war, aggression, military operation, and any disguised, hybrid war against Ukraine. After which [the guarantors] are legally obliged to provide military assistance to our country, in particular in the form of armaments and the closure of the skies, the Ukrainian government said in a statement. The suggested guarantors include the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the United States, Great Britain, France, China, and the Russian Federation. Ukraine also wants Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland, and Israel to be listed as guarantors. However, some territories under dispute will not be covered by the security guarantee. As for the temporarily occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, since their status is not regulated, international security guarantees will not work temporarily in these territories, reads the statement. If a deal is reached on Ukraines security, the former Soviet Union country would commit to a non-aligned and non-nuclear state of permanent neutrality, David Arakhamia, head of the Ukrainian delegation, said. Also, Ukraine would agree to not deploy foreign military bases, host foreign military contingents on its territory, join military-political alliances, or participate military exercises on the territory of Ukraine. The negotiators did not sign any documents, Arakhamia emphasized. Arakhamia is also the head of the Servant of the People political party in Ukraine. Separate arrangements were proposed for Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk, and Luhansk, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyys adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said. Vladimir Medinsky, an aide of Russian President Vladimir Putin, confirmed that the Russian negotiators have received Ukraines proposal, Russian state media TASS reported. The proposal will be studied in the near future and reported to the president, and then Moscow will come back with a response, he said. Medinsky said the talks were constructive. (L) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 20, 2022. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP); (R) Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 18, 2022. (Sergei Guneyev/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images) The Kremlin took two de-escalating steps after the negotiations, agreeing to move the potential meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy earlier. Meanwhile, Russia announced after the negotiations that it is cutting down on its military activity near Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and Chernigov. The Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation, for purposes of trust-building and creating conditions for holding talks further, and achieving the final goal of agreeing and signing a peace treaty, made a decision to radically decrease the military activities in the directions of Kyiv and Chernihiv [Chernigov], Alexander Fomin, Russias deputy minister of defense, told reporters in Turkey after the two sides met. Chernigov, in northern Ukraine, sits about 93 miles from Kyiv. A picture taken on March 21, 2022, shows a view of the damage at the Retroville shopping mall, a day after it was shelled by Russian forces in a residential district in the northwest of the Ukranian capital Kyiv. (Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images) Moscow and Kyiv announced the updates after the two sides concluded the talks in Istanbul on Tuesday. The talks were planned to last two days over March 29 and March 30 but were brought to close earlier on Tuesday. The new progress indicates the two sides may be able to reach common ground for a ceasefire after more than a month of war. The United Nations said that as of March 28, 1,151 civilians have been killed and 1,824 injured in Ukraine since Russias invasion and nearly 3.9 million people have fled Ukraine. Zachary Stieber contributed to the report. Service members of pro-Russian troops drive a multiple rocket launcher with the symbols "Z" painted on its sides in the course of Ukraine-Russia conflict in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, on March 24, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/File Photo/Reuters) Ukrainian City of Mariupol In the Hands of Russian Forces: Mayor Russian forces are in control of large areas of the besieged Black Sea city of Mariupol, said Ukrainian officials. Not everything is in our power, Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko told CNN on Monday. Unfortunately, we are in the hands of the occupiers today. Fewer than half the citys residents have remained, he also said. According to our estimates, about 160,000 people are in the besieged city of Mariupol today, where it is impossible to live because there is no water, no electricity, no heat, no connection, he continued. And its really scary. The apparent loss of the city comes after about a month of heavy bombardment as well as days of fighting in the streets. Mariupol is likely considered a strategic city for Russia because capturing it would allow Moscow to connect its forces in the Crimean Peninsula with the separatist Donbass region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday said in an address to Denmarks Parliament that the siege of Mariupol is a crime against humanity. Russian forces, he alleged, are destroying shelters with civilians inside. The International Committee of the Red Cross said that time is running out for civilians who are still in the city, dismissing misinformation about what role its playing in Ukraine. Time is running out for civilians in Mariupol and in other frontline areas who have now gone for weeks with no humanitarian assistance, the charity said. A man walks past a building that was damaged by shelling in Mira Avenue (Avenue of Peace) in Mariupol, Ukraine, on March 20, 2022. (Evgeniy Maloletka/AP) Service members of pro-Russian troops are seen atop tanks during the Ukraine-Russia conflict on the outskirts of the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, on March 20, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters) We have made detailed proposals regarding safe passage and evacuations for civilians to ease the massive suffering taking place in Mariupol, the Red Cross said in a statement on Tuesday. But we still lack the concrete agreements needed to move forward. The development comes as a top Russian Defense Ministry official said Moscow is planning to drastically pare back its military activities in certain regions, including Kyiv and Chernihiv. Negotiations over the preparation of an agreement on Ukraines neutrality and non-nuclear status, as well as on the provision of security guarantees for Ukraine, are entering a practical stage were taken into account before that decision was made, said a deputy Defense Ministry official, Alexander Fomin, via state-run media. Several days ago, Russia said that a new phase of the conflict, which started on Feb. 24, would begin amid Western officials claims that Moscow is currently bogged down after more than a month of fighting. Russia, under the new directive, will focus on expanding the Donetsk and Lugansk regions in the Donbass. United Arab Emirates Maintains Alliance With Russia in OPEC+ Despite Western Pressure The United Arab Emirates will maintain its alliance with Russia in OPEC+ despite economic sanctions and pressure from Japan and Western nations, said UAE Energy and Infrastructure Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei. Russia is the leader of OPEC+, a group of 10 oil-exporting nations that are not part of the official OPEC but that work with the formal organization to manage global oil markets. OPEC+, when they speak to us, they need to speak to us including Russia, said al-Mazrouei in a March 28 interview with CNBC, referring to the oil cartels negotiations with energy importers. Always, Russia is going to be part of that group and we need to respect them, he said. Al-Mazrouei spoke with CNBC at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum in Dubai, UAE. Who can replace Russia today? I cannot think of a country that can in a year, two, three, four or even 10 years replace 10 million barrels, he said. Its not realistic. The energy minister was responding to concerns from the United States and its allies that Russian energy imports were propping up President Vladimir Putins military operations with oil and gas revenue. In a speech during the Global Energy Forum, al-Mazrouei said that Russian oil is needed by energy markets and no producer can substitute its production. And leaving the politics aside, that volume is needed today, said the UAE minister. Staying together, staying focused, and not allowing politics to kick in to this organization we always believe that whatever we do as countries when it comes to production and to this work, it needs always to stay out of politics, said al-Mazrouei. He reminded his audience that the OPEC+ alliance will stick together and shot down any suggestions that the UAE will increase production unilaterally on its own. The OPEC+ energy alliance, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, accounts for about 40 percent of the worlds oil supply. The group had made a joint decision in August 2021 to raise output by 400,000 barrels per day each month. The fuel situation has worsened since the conflict in Ukraine began in February, with crude oil prices soaring past $100 a barrel. The United States, the European Union, and Japan have called on OPEC to release more oil and bring down record-high prices amid ongoing supply shortages, but the energy alliance has resisted any sustained pressure from its top consumers to aid their hard-hit economies. During an emergency summit in Brussels on March 24, representatives from G7 (the leading group of seven industrial nations) released a statement outlining the groups discussion surrounding the Ukraine crisis, including the resulting disturbance in the global oil and gas markets. We call on oil and gas producing countries to act in a responsible manner and to increase deliveries to international markets, noting that OPEC has a key role to play, the statement said. The oil cartel maintained that it will stick with its original plan for gradual oil production increases, a plan formed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 when energy producers agreed to make deep cuts in output after plummeting demand for fuel. Al-Mazrouei also said that the UAE would press for greater investment in oil and gas, despite its pledge to move toward cutting carbon emissions within its borders and to eventually reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. However, the oil-producing nations along the Persian Gulf still rely heavily on energy exports to fuel their economies, even after attempted efforts at diversification. Saudi Arabia, OPECs largest oil producer, is facing continued cross-border attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen who are using drones and missiles to damage Saudi Arabias oil facilities, leading to higher prices. SaudiAmerican relations have been cold since President Joe Biden took office, as he is seen as pro-Iranian by many in the Arab world and especially after the United States pulled its anti-missile defenses out of the kingdom in 2021. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has refused Bidens phone calls and there has been little direct contact between the two. The U.S. State Departments senior advisor for global energy security, Amos Hochstein, stressed that the Biden administrations commitment to its allies in the Gulf states remains rock solid, explaining that this doesnt mean that we always agree. We are committed. At no attack will we ever say this is your problem and not ours,' Hochstein said. Meanwhile, the UAE has been strengthening its ties with Russia since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, with its countrys foreign minister traveling to Moscow earlier in March 2022. The UAE energy minister called for the crisis in Ukraine to be resolved diplomatically, and in a snub apparently aimed at NATO, he said that the conflict should be handled not by pouring more weapons into the situation because basically the people are going to be the victim. OPEC and non-OPEC representatives are set to meet March 31 via videoconference to determine the next phase of production policy. The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report. Philippines Exercise Director Major Gen. Charlton Sean Gaerlan of the Philippine Navy (L) and U.S. Exercise Director Major Gen. Jay Bargeron (C), of the US Marine Corps unfurl the "Balikatan" or "Shoulder to Shoulder" flag during opening ceremonies at the military exercises Camp Aguinaldo, Quezon City, Philippines on March 28, 2022. (Aaron Favila/AP Photo) US, Filipino Forces Start War Drills in Region Facing Taiwan MANILA, PhilippinesThousands of American and Filipino forces began on Monday one of their largest combat exercises in years that will include live-fire maneuvers, aircraft assaults, urban warfare, and beach landings in a showcase of U.S. firepower in the northern Philippines near its sea border with Taiwan. The annual exercises, called BalikatanTagalog for shoulder-to-shoulderwill run up to April 8 with nearly 9,000 Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Army troops, including 5,100 American military personnel, to strengthen the longtime treaty allies capabilities and readiness for real-world challenges, U.S. and Philippine military officials said. The Chinese regime will likely frown on the war drills given their relative proximity to Taiwan, which it claims as Chinese territory, but organizers said the exercises dont regard any particular country as a target. Taiwan is a de facto independent country, with its own military, democratically-elected government, and constitution. The U.S. military and Armed Forces of the Philippines will train together to expand and advance shared tactics, techniques, and procedures that strengthen our response capabilities and readiness for real-world challenges, said Maj. Gen. Jay Bargeron, the U.S. 3rd Marine divisions commanding general. Our alliance remains a key source of strength and stability in the Indo-Pacific region. First staged in 1991, the Balikatan exercises are anchored on the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty, which commits the United States and the Philippines to come to the aid of the other in case of an attack. The allies aim to be strong and seamlessly braced for any security contingency as a deterrence against war. Its for mutual defense, never for offense, Philippine military spokesman Col. Ramon Zagala said. The treaty alliance declares formally our sense of unity and determination to mutually defend against external armed attack, so that no potential aggressor could be under the impression that either of them stands alone, Zagala told The Associated Press. But the governor of northern Cagayan province, where amphibious landings with limited live-fire maneuvers were scheduled to be held in the coastal town of Claveria this week, has opposed any joint exercise utilizing gunfire, fearing it could antagonize the Chinese regime. The military consulted and asked me, but I said I cannot allow any live-fire exercise. Any exercise is OK, but live-fire, Cagayan Governor Manuel Mamba told The AP by telephone. We have to engage China, but not in a war, because I know Taiwan is a powder keg. China, along with the United States and Taiwan, has expressed interest in investing in Cagayan, which has an underdeveloped agriculture and related industries, Mamba said, adding Im not pro-China, Im pro-Cagayan. A Philippine military official said the beach landing exercises would proceed in Claveria without any live-fire training, which will be held instead at Crow Valley, an aircraft gunnery range in Tarlac province further south of Cagayan. The combat exercises in the northern Philippines are being held amid heightened tensions between Taiwan and China. But Zagala said most of the military maneuvers have been planned a year ago and did not consider the recurring tensions in the Taiwan Strait. The Chinese regime has been staging threatening exercises and flying military planes near Taiwans airspace, including on Feb. 24, when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. The United States has consistently expressed its support for ensuring that Taiwan can defend itself, and Chinese military action against the island in the short- to medium-term is generally considered a remote possibility. Maj. Kurt Stahl of the third U.S. Marine division said that while most combat exercises and humanitarian projects would take place in the countrys north, some maneuvers will be staged on the western island province of Palawan, along with an air defense exercise featuring U.S. and Philippine fighter aircraft around the western side of Luzon. That region faces the disputed South China Sea, where the Chinese regimes increasingly aggressive actions, including the building of missile-protected island bases to reinforce its vast territorial claims, have sparked protests from rival claimants like the Philippines and Vietnam, along with condemnation from the United States and its Western and Asian allies. The large-scale exercises reflect how outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte has walked back on his earlier threat to restrict U.S. military activities in the Philippines. He has nurtured closer ties with the Chinese regime and Russia while often criticizing U.S. security policies. In July last year, Duterte reversed his termination of a key defense pact with Washington that allows large-scale combat exercises between U.S. and Philippine forces like the Balikatan after the United States provided millions of doses of coronavirus vaccine that he had publicly demanded. President Joe Biden has said Americas vaccines were being donated to poorer countries at the time to save lives and dont include pressure for favors or potential concessions. Residents place mail-in ballots in a ballot box outside of the Tippecanoe branch library in Milwaukee, on Oct. 20, 2020. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) Election Watchdog Finds 137,500 Ballots Unlawfully Trafficked in Wisconsin 10 trillion unique cell phone 'pings' were used to reconstruct the movements of ballot box intermediaries in 2020 election At least 137,500 absentee ballots were cast through unlawful vote trafficking throughout several of Wisconsins largest cities in the 2020 election, according to research presented last week to the state Assemblys Committee on Campaigns and Elections by the public interest organization True the Vote (TTV). Ballot trafficking is an activity in which absentee ballots and votes are solicited, sometimes in exchange for money or other valuables. They are then collected through a process called harvesting and delivered to drop boxes by intermediaries (someone other than the voter), who are often paid a per-ballot fee by partisan actors. An organized crime against Americans is how TTV cyber expert Gregg Phillips described to the committee what happened in Wisconsin and elsewhere during the 2020 election. Supporters of President Donald Trump protest outside State Farm Arena as ballots continue to be counted inside in Atlanta, on Nov. 5, 2020. (Megan Varner/Getty Images) Based on his 15-month study of election practices in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Michigan, Phillips estimates that at least 4.8 million votes were trafficked nationally. According to the True the Vote report, 242 intermediaries in metro Atlanta made 5,668 stops at drop boxes during elections in late 2020. In its report, TTV said it obtained 4 million minutes of drop box video surveillance tape that helped to document its Georgia findings. Many of the traffickers we spoke with do not recognize what they are doing as being a problem, TTV spokesperson Catherine Engelbrecht said. The study found that in Arizona, 202 intermediaries made 4,282 separate visits to ballot boxes in Maricopa County. Several Arizonans have since been indicted for election law violations, with at least one conviction, according to Phillips. Poll workers count ballots inside the Maricopa County Election Department in Phoenix, on Nov. 5, 2020. (Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images) Phillips told the committee that, in the states studied, TTV purchased from commercial brokers 10 trillion unique cell phone identity signals called pings. Human rights organization First Freedoms funded the time-consuming and costly project. Using a technique called geospatial mobile device signal analysis, Phillips said researchers are able to reconstruct a four-dimensional pattern of life of cell phone holders. From these pings, it can be determined where you work, where you sleep, and even what floor you are on within inches, he said. The Wisconsin study focused primarily on the Milwaukee County area, with some partial initial data coming from Racine and Green Bay, where the study will soon be further expanded, Phillips said. In those three areas, TTVs cell phone ping research found that in the two weeks from Oct. 20 through Nov. 3, 2020, 138 individuals each visited the location of a nongovernmental organization at least five times and made a combined total of 3,588 trips to absentee ballot drop boxes. Thats an average of 26 trips per person to drop boxes in the Milwaukee area, Phillips said. Is this evidence of fraud? committee member Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, asked. Vote trafficking is being done through the process. It is illegal, replied Engelbrecht, who stated that every vote cast illegally cancels the vote of a legitimate voter. Wisconsin Statute 6.87 (4)(b)1 provides that an absentee ballot envelope, in which the cast absentee ballot is placed, must be mailed by the elector, or delivered in person, to the municipal clerk issuing the ballot or ballots. The Circuit Court in Waukesha County in Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, has agreed, holding that use of drop boxes for absentee voting violates Wisconsin law. Drop boxes, if unattended by a municipal clerk or in an unauthorized location, are illegal under Wisconsin law. The law is currently being challenged in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In her testimony, Engelbrecht stressed that the TTV report was focused on the process and wasnt attempting to prove the 137,551 votes were illegal votes. State Rep. Dave Murphy, a Republican member of the committee, stated: If you vote in an illegal way, it is an illegal vote. If the process is illegal, the vote is illegal. Earlier in March, the report of special counsel Michael Gabelman on voter fraud revealed that some personnel of nongovernmental organizations are suspected of coordinating the 2020 ballot harvesting operations in Wisconsins five largest heavily Democrat-run citiesMilwaukee, Kenosha, Green Bay, Madison, and Racine. When asked by Rep. Donna Rozar, a Republican, to name the NGOs in the study that were repeatedly visited by intermediaries, Phillips declined. A spokesperson for Micah Inc., a leading Milwaukee nonprofit philanthropic organization, told The Epoch Times that Micah does conduct voter engagement efforts, but declined to say more. Phillips and Engelbrecht testified that enormous nonprofits, such as National Vote at Home, are promoting voting from home and favor doing away with in-person voting on Election Day entirely. Most countries around the world vote in person on election day, including Ukraine, Phillips said. Engelbrecht argued that some countries have perfected secure blockchain electronic voting and said she thinks U.S. technology is advanced enough to at least ensure accurate election data. She said that some U.S. election jurisdictions view inaccurate voting rolls as a feature rather than a bug. Our rolls are abysmal. Bad records are the gateway to fraud, Engelbrecht said. If you cant verify identity, you cant do anything else, Phillips said. Rep. Ron Tusler, a Republican, asked if TTV could identify the 138 alleged ballot harvesters (also known as mules). We know the names but are not disclosing them, Phillips said. Anyone can buy them commercially. However, law enforcement would need a warrant. In the other states studied, government-made video surveillance tapes of ballot drop boxes obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests were used as part of the process of estimating how many ballots were trafficked, along with personal interviews with intermediaries and other tipsters and cell phone ping data. Engelbrecht told the committee that in Wisconsin, in September of 2020, her organization set up a hotline to receive tips from informants. Unlike other states where video surveillance footage of the drop boxes was made available to TTV investigators, Engelbrecht said that only one of the 17 Wisconsin localities studied provided TTV with video. Engelbrecht stated that in the summer of 2020, the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) announced it approved of video surveillance of the states drop boxes, as recommended by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). WEC did not follow through, she said. Neither did WEC provide to localities written guidelines based on CISAs recommendations for the locations where the drop boxes were to be placed, according to Engelbrecht. She testified that across the country, the majority of the ballot drops surveilled typically happened between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m. Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, in January 2020. (Masooma Haq/The Epoch Times) She told the committee that the removal of 234,000 problem names from Wisconsins registered voter rolls, as recommended by the Electronic Registration Information Center, was stopped by a lawsuit. Forty-nine-year veteran elections attorney James Bopp Jr. came before the committee to provide a legal perspective to the facts presented in the TTV report. Bopp has litigated 200 election lawsuits and is currently legal counsel to TTV. He is also representing special counsel Gabelman in several lawsuits against him stemming from his investigation. Bopp testified that filing an avalanche of lawsuits was part of a years-long effort by Democrats to make the whole system more susceptible to fraud and abuse. He said 425 lawsuits were filed across America by Democratic Party operatives or front organizations in the runup to the 2020 election. Bopp asserted the suits were designed to ensure ineligible people were maintained on voting rolls; to expand voting to every voter on the rolls, whether active or inactive; and to tear down every other anti-fraud protection, such as prohibiting signature verification and striking down witness requirements for absentee voting. Turning to Wisconsin, Bopp pointed the committee to what he called the corrupt and illegal activity and administration of election laws for partisan ends engaged in by your Wisconsin state government and municipalities designed to maximize the number of Democrat votes. Addressing the alleged embedding of partisan get-out-the-vote efforts within local governments in Wisconsins largest cities, Bopp said the practice evades federal and state campaign contribution limits of just a few thousand dollars, and gives real-time, hour-by-hour, cost-free access to voter rolls to partisan actors. Bopp said the practice disguises its partisan nature, disguises the identity of out-of-state billionaire donors contributing millions, thereby violating the principle of transparency and exceeding contribution limits. Despite clear and unequivocal state law, drop boxes created the infrastructure to accomplish all of this, he said. Drop boxes left unstaffed and located anywhere clearly violated state statutes. He criticized what he said was the grossly partisan, corruptly political, and blatantly illegal actions of the people administering Wisconsin election laws. Bopp asserted that the actions in Wisconsin gave significant partisan political advantage to Democrats, exactly the people the plan was designed to help. Ruthlessly exploited by large-scale organized and illegal ballot harvesting operations, involving not-for-profits and the people working with them, (the scheme) could very well have influenced the outcome of the 2020 election, he said. What has been disclosedand, in my view, provenis that there were sufficient irregularities in the 2020 election that a court, at the time, could have reached the conclusion that the true result cannot be determined. But that time has passed. Its not about overturning the 2020 election. Its about the future. The situation is crying for reform. Rozar reminded the audience that numerous election reforms passed by the legislature have been vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. Neither Evers nor state Attorney General Josh Kaul, also a Democrat, responded by press time to requests for comment. The U.S. Capitol is shown in Washington on June 5, 2003. Both houses of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives meet in the Capitol. (Stefan Zaklin/Getty Images) Washington Considers Ways to Deny China Economic Advantages Commentary Long before the recent rise in tensions, Washington had already edged toward more open economic warfare with China. Several bills have been circulating in Congressmost with bilateral supportlimiting American sourcing in China, constraining American investments in Chinese firms, or circumscribing both activities. In addition, the White House has indicated that it is considering executive orders along these lines. If things reach such a point, all might offer ways to punish China for leaning too far in Russias direction, though such efforts would not hurt China as much as some proponents think. These efforts would constitute an unprecedented expansion of government oversight in American economic activity. They would affect both importing and investing. It would take too much space to itemize all the bills now circulating in Congress and orders contemplated by the White House. Still, they are grouped into two sorts: those that focus on reducing supply chain vulnerabilities to China and those that would limit American support, primarily through finance, of Chinese technological innovation and military advantage. Some time ago, legislation passed limits on how much American investment can get involved in activities that would enhance the abilities of the Chinese military, though to accomplish this properly would require much broader strictures than now exist. Militaries across the globe have long shown an ability to weaponize any technological advance, however seemingly harmless on its face. The most prominent proposal currently circulating in Congress is a piece of legislation supported by Sens. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas). This bill would focus mostly on American supply chains in China, screening business ventures to limit Chinese influence on American needs. The bill has recently received support from a group of Democrats in the House of Representatives. Elsewhere in Congress, Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) have pushed legislation limiting investment monies to China. At the same time, some in the Senate would expand the Casey-Cornyn legislation to authorize a federal commission to screen U.S.-based investments in China, especially in critical industries such as health care, energy, and defense. The Biden White House has, in this matter, embraced much of what former President Donald Trump had initiated. Administration spokespeople have talked about executive orders that would screen American funding for Chinese startups and technology firms. Other orders would greatly expand the already existing strictures put in place by Trump in 2020 to stop investments going into some 30 Chinese firms aligned with the Peoples Liberation Army. President Donald Trump signs trade sanctions against China in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House in Washington on March 22, 2018. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images) The Biden White House has also talked about issuing orders to extend government oversight, much like the legislative proposals circulating in Congress, of American supply chains in China and American lending to Chinese firms. So far, the president has refrained from endorsing any of the proposed bills going around Congress, though both the Commerce Department and the Treasury have made clear that they are talking to the proposers. It hardly needs saying that corporate America will oppose any of these measures. In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has lobbied actively against the Casey-Cornyn supply chain bill for over a year. Such lobbying killed a similar bill in 2018. Several other corporate interests have indicated that the bill would affect some 43 percent of all American investments in China and have gotten sympathetic lawmakers to describe the bill as entirely too broad. These interests have argued further that the proposal to use the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative for the screening would overtax its available resources. Still, the anti-China sentiment in Washington is strong that the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission has declared this sort of legislation a fait accompli, with the only question concerning how extensive it will be. Of the two focuses involved, those close to the politics suggest that the investment screening is more likely to make headway than the supply chain screening. There are, after all, already precedents on the investment side but not on the supply chain side. There is some irony in this mix of likelihoods. The supply chain is where the United States is most vulnerable to disruption and where legislation could have the most significant impact on the Chinese economy. Investment limitations are more likely to keep Americans out than to slow Chinese technological advances, which, history shows, have a way of finding fertile economies no matter how much other powers try to limit access to them. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei Province on April 17, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images) NIH Deleted Info From Wuhan Lab on CCP Virus Genetic Sequencing, Watchdogs FOIA Finds National Institutes of Health (NIH) documents obtained by a nonprofit watchdog in a federal court suit reveal that the agency deleted CCP virus genetic sequencing information from the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the Chinese labs request. The Arlington, Virginia-based Empower Oversight Whistleblowers and Researchers (EO) obtained, as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and lawsuit, more than 230 pages of documents dating from 2020 that include emails, memoranda, and other correspondence among and between the lab and multiple NIH officials. The CCP virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, was first detected in China in late 2019, before it spread worldwide. Since the first death from the virus in the United States was reported in January 2020, an estimated 1 million Americans and 6 million globally have reportedly succumbed to the virus. Controversy has raged in the United States over whether the virus originated in an animal-to-human transfer in a Wuhan-area wet market, as Chinese officials have insisted, or if it escaped from the Wuhan lab where research was being done on such viruses, some of which was being supported with NIH funds through the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. Among the NIH officials prominently mentioned in the documents are then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who actively participated in the discussions and decision-making described in the materials obtained by EO. On June 5, 2020, a Wuhan University researcher requested that NIH retract the researchers submission of BioProject ID PRJNA637497 because of error. The Wuhan researcher explained Im sorry for my wrong submitting,' EO said in a statement on March 29. BioProject ID PRJNA637497 is also referred to as Submission ID SUB7554642. Three days later, on June 8th, the NIH declined the researchers request, advising that it prefers to edit or replace, as opposed to delete, sequences submitted to the SRA, EO reported. But then, on June 16, 2020, NIH officials reversed themselves and deleted the genetic sequencing data, as requested by the Wuhan researcher. That researcher was quoted by EO as explaining to NIH: Recently, I found that its hard to visit my submitted SRA data, and it would also be very difficult for me to update the data. I have submitted an updated version of this SRA data to another website, so I want to withdraw the old one at NCBI in order to avoid the data version issue. After some discussion about what would be deleted, the NIH concluded the discussion by reassuring the Wuhan researcher that it had withdrawn everything. The documents also indicate, according to EO, that after researcher Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, alerted NIH about the deleted sequences, [Collins] and [Fauci] hosted a Sunday afternoon Zoom meeting. The invitation Collins sent out for the meeting asks invitees to read Blooms [June 22, 2021] preprint paper closely and provide their advice on the interpretation and significance of it. According to EO, the documents show that Professor Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center later sent the group an email stating that the deleted data seemed to support the idea that the pandemic began outside the Huanan market in Wuhan and that the matter must be analyzed properly. If the viruss spread began outside of the market, it would undermine the official Chinese government claim, and thus reinforce claims of experts in the United States and elsewhere that the pandemic likely escaped from the Wuhan lab. The EO report also claims that NIH communications staff members were using off-the-record emails to advise reporters toward more favorable coverage concerning termination of public access to the sequences by The Washington Post, and away from coverage by The New York Times, whose tone had been criticized in communications among NIH officials. In addition, EO said NIH claims to have retained copies of the deleted data for preservation purposes, although the federal agency has refused to conduct a transparent examination of it. An NIH spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that the sequences in question were submitted in March 2020 by a researcher at a China-based institution for posting in SRA, which it said it managed by NIHs National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI). In June 2020, in response to a request by the same researcher, NCBI gave the sequence data the status of withdrawn, which removes sequencing data from all public means of access but does not delete them. NCBI subsequently reassigned the status of the sequence data to suppressed, which means that sequence data are removed from the search process but can be directly found by accession number. This action to reassign the data was identified as part of NLMs ongoing review into the matter. We are working to make more information available, the spokesperson said. Collins, Fauci, and the NIAID did not respond to requests for comment. The EO document release is likely to strengthen congressional efforts to get all the facts concerning the NIHs role in funding the Wuhan lab research that may be at the center of the CCP viruss creation and spread around the world. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), a physician who is a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions (HELP), told The Epoch Times that the NIH deleting key data at the onset of the pandemic has only caused more questions regarding its involvement on the emergence of the virus. The American people deserve to know the truth behind the origins of COVID-19, as well as how we can best prepare for, prevent, and recover from future global pandemics, Marshall said. As a physician, I think we always need to know the what, where, how, and why when giving a diagnosis. For this reason, it couldnt be more important that we get to the bottom of this deleted data and ensure that NIH operates at the interest of our national security. The HELP panel on March 15 approved legislationthe PREVENT Pandemics Actthat requires the establishment of a government task force to investigate the origins of the CCP virus. That legislation includes eight provisions authored by Marshall. This legislation is in response to the congressional inquiries and various media investigationsincluding The Epoch Timesrevealing national security issues with federal agencies authorizing dangerous research with certain foreign entities that may have contributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, Marshalls office told The Epoch Times. Dr. Marshall secured his bipartisan 9/11-style COVID Task Force to investigate the origins of COVID-19, as well as find out how we can prepare for, prevent, and recover from future global pandemics, his office said, adding that he seeks to ensure that American organizations would never be allowed to conduct dangerous research capable of pandemic proportions with organizations in countries that threaten our national security. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told The Epoch Times via email that the radical left has systematically worked to cover the Chinese Communist Partys tracks and hide the truth of COVID origins. Dr. Fauci, the NIH, and liberal media giants weaponized the COVID-19 pandemic to shut down schools, businesses, and life for hardworking Americans. The report from Empower Oversight exposes what weve always known about COVID-19its all about big government control, she added. Another Republican senator, Joni Ernst of Iowa, proposed last November to ban all federal funding of EcoHealth Alliance and the gain-of-function virus research it supported with federal funds at the Wuhan lab. Other congressional Republicans have also called for a federal investigation of the nonprofit. Zachary Stieber contributed to this report. WHO Investigating Hearing Issues Among People Vaccinated Against COVID-19 The World Health Organization (WHO) is looking into reports of hearing loss and tinnitusconstant ringing or other noises in one or both earsamong people who have taken COVID-19 vaccines. The organization said in a recent newsletter that it found 164 unique cases of hearing loss globally. Women accounted for 104 of these cases while men accounted for 59. Ages of those affected fell within the range of 19 and 93, with 49 being the median age. The United States saw the highest number of incidents at 66, followed by the UK with 36 cases, and Italy with 15. Pfizer/BioNTechs vaccine with 142 cases registered the highest number of cases followed by Moderna with 15 cases, and AstraZeneca with seven. Of the 164 cases, 51 recovered or were recovering while 50 had yet to recover. The situation of the remaining 63 individuals was not known. While most of the cases were recorded as non-serious (93 cases, 57 percent), 71 cases (43 percent) were recorded as serious. Seriousness criteria were most often Other medically important condition (37 case reports), and Disabling/incapacitating (29), followed by Caused/prolonged hospitalization (5), and Life threatening (2), the newsletter said. Tinnitus was observed in 367 cases, which included 56 incidents that were grouped into hearing losses. Of the 367 cases, women accounted for 73 percent and men the rest. The UK and the United States saw the highest number of cases at 115 and 113 respectively. Italy reported 42 cases. As to the vaccines, 80 percent of cases were among people who had received a Pfizer shot, with Moderna accounting for 11 percent of incidents. Of the total number of cases, 164 are reported to have recovered from tinnitus while 90 are reported as not recovered. The situation of 112 cases is unknown. A link between hearing loss and COVID-19 vaccination was also discovered in a study published by JAMA on Feb. 24. Although it states that the effect size of potential hearing loss is very small, the researchers admit that this study suggests that the BNT162b2 mRNA [Pfizer] COVID-19 vaccine might be associated with increased risk of SSNHL [sudden sensorineural hearing loss]. In addition to hearing loss, COVID-19 vaccinations have been found to trigger other medical issues. One study found heart abnormalities in certain adolescents several months after their vaccination. Dr. Anish Koka, a cardiologist who wasnt involved with the study, noted that the results suggest around 60 to 70 percent of teenagers who are affected by myocarditis after vaccination might get a scar on their hearts. Myocarditis is a condition in which the heart muscle myocardium becomes inflated. Certainly, children who had chest pain severe enough to merit seeking medical attention need to at least make sure they get a follow up MRI, he told The Epoch Times. The findings of the study should have clear implications for the discussion around the risk of vaccines and vaccine mandates, he added. Will Smith slaps Chris Rock onstage during the 94th Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California on March 27, 2022. (ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images) Will Smith Apologizes to Chris Rock After Slapping Him at Oscars 'I was out of line and I was wrong' Actor Will Smith has issued an apology to comedian Chris Rock after slapping him at the 94th Academy Awards ceremony, also referred to as the Oscars. In a statement posted on Instagram on March 28, Smith wrote: Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive. My behavior at last nights Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable. Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jadas medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally, he wrote of his reaction to Rocks joke delivered on stage on March 27. Rock was speaking prior to presenting Best Documentary, and made a joke about Smiths wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Jada I love you, G.I. Jane 2, cant wait to see it, Rock said to Pinkett Smith, referring to her shaved head. Shortly following the comment, Smith walked onto the stage and appeared to slap the comedian before he returned to his seat and yelled, Keep my wifes name out your [expletive] mouth. Pinkett Smith in 2018 said that she was diagnosed with alopecia, an autoimmune skin condition that can result in hair loss. Smith then won the Academy Award for Best Actor for King Richard just minutes after the incident. I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong, Smith said on March 28 on Instagram. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness. Smith also apologized to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is the group that oversees the Academy Awards ceremony. He directed his apology to the producers of the show, all the attendees, and audience around the world. I deeply regret that my behavior has stained what has been an otherwise gorgeous journey for all of us, he added. I am a work in progress. The Academy earlier on March 28 issued a statement to condemn Smiths actions and announced a review, which could potentially result in Smith being suspended from the group. We have officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct, and California law, the statement reads. Earlier, the Academy said on Twitter that it does not condone violence in any form. The Los Angeles Police Department told outlets that Rock wont be pressing any charges against Smith. Will Smith (R) hits at Chris Rock as Rock spoke on stage during the 94th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Los Angeles, Calif., on March 27, 2022. (Brian Snyder/Reuters) Academy Condemns Will Smiths Oscars Slap The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences condemned actor Will Smith the day after the actor slapped presenter Chris Rock onstage. The organization held an emergency meeting on March 28, saying they would start a formal review of the incident. The Academy condemns the actions of Mr. Smith at last nights show. We have officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct and California law, the Academy said in a statement to media. During the 94th Oscars show, Smith appeared to respond to Rocks joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smiths, hair. Smith walked on stage and slapped Rock, shocking the audience and viewers at home. After the slap, Smith returned to his seat and yelled to Rock. Later in the show, Smith gave a tearful acceptance speech after winning an Oscar for Best Male Actor, apologizing to the Academy but not to Rock. The incident trended on social media as the public and industry insiders called for action, including the suspension of Smiths academy membership. Many also speculated whether the slap was staged to boost ratings. Film producer Marshall Herskovitz called on the Academy to take action on Twitter on March 27. I call upon the Academy, of which I am a member, to take disciplinary action against Will Smith. He disgraced our entire community tonight. Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund, wrote on Twitter that the event will have consequences. I know were all still processing, but the way casual violence was normalized tonight by a collective national audience will have consequences that we cant even fathom in the moment, Nelson wrote on Twitter. The events producer Will Packer said the moment was painful for him. Black people have a defiant spirit of laughter when it comes to dealing with pain because there has been so much of it, Packer wrote on Twitter. this was a very painful moment for me. On many levels. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said Rock had declined to file a report about the incident. LAPD investigative entities are aware of an incident between two individuals during the Academy Awards program, according to an LAPD statement. The incident involved one individual slapping another. The individual involved has declined to file a police report. If the involved party desires a police report at a later date, LAPD will be available to complete an investigative report. Initial ratings estimates released the morning after showed the live awards ceremony drew more viewers than last year. ABCs broadcast drew 15.4 million viewers, an increase of about 48 percent from last year but the second-lowest ratings in its history, according to fast national ratings from Nielsen, media reported. Last year, the program had a record low viewership when 10.4 million tuned in. In this image from video provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office and posted on Facebook, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks from Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 16, 2022. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP) Zelenskyy Warns of Russian Regroup, Renewed Assault on Kyiv Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday said that Russian forces are allegedly trying to regroup before an assault on Kyiv. Today we have good news, Zelenskyy said. Our defenders are advancing in the Kyiv region, regaining control over Ukrainian territory. Zelenskyy then said that the Kyiv suburb of Irpin was re-captured by Ukrainian forces on Monday. Earlier, Ukrainian officials said that their forces rebuffed Russian troops, who have been attempting to move on Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, since the start of the conflict. I am grateful to everyone who worked for this result. The occupiers are pushed away from Irpin. Pushed away from Kyiv, Zelenskyy added. However, it is too early to talk about security in this part of our region. The fighting continues, the Ukrainian president said. Russian officials have not made any public comments on Zelenskyys claim. Hours later, a top Russian Defense Ministry official said Moscow will pare back its forces near Kyiv and Chernihiv amid negotiations between the Ukrainians and Russians in Istanbul. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the two sides have a historic responsibility to stop the fighting, reported The Associated Press. We believe that there will be no losers in a just peace. Prolonging the conflict is not in anyones interest, Erdogan said, greeting members of both negotiation teams. Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin made the announcement as delegations from the two countries negotiate. In order to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and achieving the ultimate goal of agreeing and signing (an) agreement, a decision was made to radically, by a large margin, reduce military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions, Fomin told reporters, according to state television. Ukraine military officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday that it had noted withdrawals around Kyiv and Chernihiv. Late last week, Russia announced that it would enter another phase of the invasion, which started on Feb. 24, and instead focus on regions in eastern Ukraine. During remarks in Morocco on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that the United States is evaluating whether Russia is moving its forces away from those two cities or whether [Moscow] is simply trying to regroup. Ukrainian negotiators said they had proposed at the latest round of talks with Russia that Ukraine adopt neutral status in exchange for security guarantees, meaning Kyiv would not join military alliances or host military bases. Fomin said Russia had also called on Ukraine to eliminate what he called torture of captured Russian prisoners. Reuters contributed to this report. EDITORS NOTE: The Intelligencer requests briefs be submitted at least 10 days prior to the desired publication date. Due to the volume of community-submitted briefs, the content may be published within 10 days of submission. Holidays and weather forecasts may impact some events. The Intelligencer cannot guarantee that submission will be published. Free COVID-19 Testing 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. at the Tyrone Echols Senior Center, 1302 Klein Avenue, Venice, in Madison County. Members of the community can go to Portal.shieldillinois.com to register and make an appointment. Cribbage Club 6 p.m. at Camelot Bowling Alley, 801 Beltline Road, Collinsville. Beginners welcome, free to attend. Contact Phil (618) 288-7910 or Susan at (618) 978-1664 for more information. Pasta Dinner Every Tuesday 3-8 p.m. Dine-in or Carryout at the Edwardsville American Legion Post 199, 58 South State Rt. Edwardsville. Pasta of the week served with salad. 618-656-9774 Toddler Time 10 a.m. at the Edwardsville Public Library. Ages 0-2. Theyve got the books, bops and bubbles. Bring your babies and toddlers to share stories and songs with Miss Kristen and all the Story Time friends. Registration Required. Teen Game Night 6-7 p.m. at the Edwardsville Public Library. Grades 6-12. Game Night is back every week. Go on a quest with fellow players in Dungeons & Dragons or choose from a variety of board games to play with friends. Southern Illinois PAL 7-8:30 p.m. via Zoom. The Southern Illinois Parents of Addicted Loved Ones group meets each week to provide hope through education and support. For parents and loved ones over the age of 18 who have someone in their life who is struggling with or recovering from substance use. PAL respects anonymity and is free of charge. Contact Craig at 618-567-6095 to receive the link for the Zoom meeting or for questions. More information can be found at www.palgroup.org. Wednesday, March 30 Free COVID-19 Testing 9 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. at the Tyrone Echols Senior Center, 1302 Klein Avenue, Venice, in Madison County. The NAACP Madison Branch in Venice is offering free saliva-based COVID-19 testing to the general public through a partnership with the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) and SHIELD Illinois. Members of the community can go to Portal.shieldillinois.com to register and make an appointment. Virtual Evening Flow Yoga with Anne 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. at Glen Carbon Library via Zoom. A Slow Flow mixed levels practice that will lead participants through a series of yoga poses that focus on strengthening, lengthening and stretching. Requires Registration. To register call 288-1212, register at the Help Desk or go online to www.glencarbonlibrary.org. An Evening with Jenny Lawson 7 p.m. at Glen Carbon Library via Zoom. Join for an evening with the #1 New York Times bestselling author and award winning humorist Jenny Lawson as she discusses her most recent memoir, Broken (in the best possible way). Lunch and Brunch on Us 11 a.m. at New Shining Light HDNC at 740 Broadway, Venice. Free. Everyone welcome. Thursday, March 31 Forest Park Owls: Hiding in Plain Sight 6 p.m. at the Edwardsville Public Library. Mark Glenshaw, award-winning naturalist, will discuss his fascination with the Great Horned owls at St. Louis Forest Park. Hes been covering them since 2005, and his enthusiasm, expertise and great photos make this program a patron favorite. Free COVID-19 Testing 9 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. at the Tyrone Echols Senior Center, 1302 Klein Avenue, Venice, in Madison County. Members of the community can go to Portal.shieldillinois.com to register and make an appointment. Adult Zumba with Aimee 6-7 p.m. at Glen Carbon Library via Zoom. Join in for an evening workout with a Zumba Fitness instructor. Come in comfortable exercise clothing and bring a water bottle. Space is limited. Requires Registration. To register call 288-1212, register at the Help Desk or go online to www.glencarbonlibrary.org. NAMI Meeting 7-8:30 p.m via Zoom. The National Alliance on Mental Illness Southwestern Illinois (NAMI SWI) family support meetings may also be in person. To receive the link for a Zoom meeting or address for an in-person meeting contact Pat Rudloff, silverlining6@charter.net. Preschooler Story Time 10 a.m. at the Edwardsville Public Library, 112 S Kansas St. If youre ready for a story, clap your hands. Ms. Megan will be sharing fun tales & tunes, and dont forget, bubbles. Ages three - five. Registration required. Chicken Dinner Every Thursday 4-8 p.m. Dine-in or Carryout at the Edwardsville American Legion Post 199, 58 South State Rt. 157, Edwardsville. Two or four pieces of chicken and vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy and a biscuit. 618-656-9774 Friday, April 1 Fish Fry Every Friday 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Dine-in or Carryout at the Edwardsville American Legion Post 199, 58 South State Rt. 157, Edwardsville. Two pieces of cod or one catfish filet and sides. 618-656-9774 Fish Fry 4:30-8 p.m. at the Edwardsville Moose, 7371 Marine Road, Edwardsville. Dine-in and carryout options. 618-656-5051 Knights of Columbus Fish 4:30-7 p.m. at The Knights of Columbus at Rt. 143, 7132 Marine Road, Edwardsville. For call in orders the phone number is 656-4985. Carryout or inside seating is available. Menu consists of cod, catfish, shrimp and a variety of sides. There is also a children's menu. Free COVID-19 Testing 9 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. at the Tyrone Echols Senior Center, 1302 Klein Avenue, Venice, in Madison County. Members of the community can go to Portal.shieldillinois.com to register and make an appointment. Book Sale 9 a.m. - noon at Tri Township Library, 209 South Main, Troy. Book donations are accepted during the book sale and on Tuesdays from 9:00 am to 8:00 pm. The book sale is sponsored by the Friends of the Library. Masks are required at the Book Sale. Saturday, April 2 Rummage Sale 7 a.m. - 1 p.m. at Edwardsville Moose Lodge at 7371 Marine Road, Rt. 143. The Illinois Nut Tree Association Meeting 10 a.m. at 6801 Strieker Road, Aviston. Registration from 9-10 a.m. Open to members and interested public. Speaker Elizabeth Wahle, Illinois State Horticulturist. Donuts and coffee will be available during registration. Sandwich, chips and a cookie served at noon by the organization. Freebie and attendance prize items included. For more information call 618-594-4122 or email vosspecans@hotmail.com. Smash Bros. Showdown 1-4 p.m. at the Edwardsville Public Library. Enter the tournament to test your Super Smash Bros. skills against opponents on the Nintendo Switch. Registration Required. Sunday, April 3 Chicken Dinner 11 a.m. - 3 p.m. at Edwardsville Moose Lodge at 7371 Marine Road, Rt. 143. Dinners are $10 for adults and $5 for children 10 and under. Dine-in dinner includes all you can eat chicken as well as mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, green beans, salad, tea and coffee. Carry-out also available for chicken and sides. 656-5056. Monday, April 4 Bingo Every Monday 7 p.m. at the Edwardsville American Legion Post 199, 58 South State Rt. 157, Edwardsville. Features 21 games including Racehorse, Bonanza, Eds Lucky Number, Lightning Round and $500 Cover All. Food and drinks are available. Free COVID-19 Testing 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. at the Tyrone Echols Senior Center, 1302 Klein Avenue, Venice, in Madison County. The NAACP Madison Branch in Venice is offering free saliva-based COVID-19 testing to the general public through a partnership with the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) and SHIELD Illinois. Members of the community can go to Portal.shieldillinois.com to register and make an appointment. Tuesday, April 5 Cribbage Club 6 p.m. at Camelot Bowling Alley, 801 Beltline Road, Collinsville. Beginners welcome, free to attend. Contact Phil (618) 288-7910 or Susan at (618) 978-1664 for more information. Pasta Dinner Every Tuesday 3-8 p.m. Dine-in or Carryout at the Edwardsville American Legion Post 199, 58 South State Rt. Edwardsville. Pasta of the week served with salad. 618-656-9774 Toddler Time 10 a.m. at the Edwardsville Public Library. Ages 0-2. Theyve got the books, bops and bubbles. Bring your babies and toddlers to share stories and songs with Miss Kristen and all the Story Time friends. Registration Required. Teen Game Night 6-7 p.m. at the Edwardsville Public Library. Grades 6-12. Game Night is back every week. Go on a quest with fellow players in Dungeons & Dragons or choose from a variety of board games to play with friends. Southern Illinois PAL 7-8:30 p.m. via Zoom. The Southern Illinois Parents of Addicted Loved Ones group meets each week to provide hope through education and support. For parents and loved ones over the age of 18 who have someone in their life who is struggling with or recovering from substance use. PAL respects anonymity and is free of charge. Contact Craig at 618-567-6095 to receive the link for the Zoom meeting or for questions. More information can be found at www.palgroup.org. Free COVID-19 Testing 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. at the Tyrone Echols Senior Center, 1302 Klein Avenue, Venice, in Madison County. Members of the community can go to Portal.shieldillinois.com to register and make an appointment. Wednesday, April 6 Food on the Move 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. at New Shining Light HDNC at 740 Broadway Ave., Venice. Free food distribution. Snap support and referrals provided. Red Cross Blood Drive 1-6 p.m. at St. Johns United Methodist Church at 7372 Marine Road, Edwardsvillle. To sign up go to redcrossblood.org and look for the drive date and location or contact Michelle Babb at michellebabb@thenewstjohns.com or 618-656-1853. Free COVID-19 Testing 9 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. at the Tyrone Echols Senior Center, 1302 Klein Avenue, Venice, in Madison County. The NAACP Madison Branch in Venice is offering free saliva-based COVID-19 testing to the general public through a partnership with the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) and SHIELD Illinois. Members of the community can go to Portal.shieldillinois.com to register and make an appointment. Thursday, April 7 NAMI Meeting 7-8:30 p.m via Zoom. The National Alliance on Mental Illness Southwestern Illinois (NAMI SWI) family support meetings may also be in person. To receive the link for a Zoom meeting or address for an in-person meeting contact Pat Rudloff, silverlining6@charter.net. Preschooler Story Time 10 a.m. at the Edwardsville Public Library, 112 S Kansas St. If youre ready for a story, clap your hands. Ms. Megan will be sharing fun tales & tunes, and dont forget, bubbles. Ages three - five. Registration required. Chicken Dinner Every Thursday 4-8 p.m. Dine-in or Carryout at the Edwardsville American Legion Post 199, 58 South State Rt. 157, Edwardsville. Two or four pieces of chicken and vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy and a biscuit. 618-656-9774 Free COVID-19 Testing 9 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. at the Tyrone Echols Senior Center, 1302 Klein Avenue, Venice, in Madison County. Members of the community can go to Portal.shieldillinois.com to register and make an appointment. PFLAG Edwardsville Meeting 7-8:30 p.m. at Rainbow House on Main, 808 North Main Street, Edwardsville. PLFAG offers support, education and advocacy for LGBTQ people and their allies. Contact Amy for more information at (618)977-5078 or pflagedwardsville@outlook.com. Friday, April 8 Fish Fry Every Friday 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Dine-in or Carryout at the Edwardsville American Legion Post 199, 58 South State Rt. 157, Edwardsville. Two pieces of cod or one catfish filet and sides. 618-656-9774 Fish Fry 4:30-8 p.m. at the Edwardsville Moose, 7371 Marine Road, Edwardsville. Dine-in and carryout options. 618-656-5051 Knights of Columbus Fish 4:30-7 p.m. at The Knights of Columbus at Rt. 143, 7132 Marine Road, Edwardsville. For call in orders the phone number is 656-4985. Carryout or inside seating is available. Menu consists of cod, catfish, shrimp and a variety of sides. There is also a children's menu. Free COVID-19 Testing 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. at the Tyrone Echols Senior Center, 1302 Klein Avenue, Venice, in Madison County. Members of the community can go to Portal.shieldillinois.com to register and make an appointment. Saturday, April 9 Saturday Story Time 10 a.m. at the Edwardsville Public Library. Can't make it to story time during the week? Join the library on a Saturday morning for fun stories, songs and bubbles. This program will be geared toward preschool age, but everyone is welcome. Monday, April 11 Free COVID-19 Testing 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. at the Tyrone Echols Senior Center, 1302 Klein Avenue, Venice, in Madison County. The NAACP Madison Branch in Venice is offering free saliva-based COVID-19 testing to the general public through a partnership with the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) and SHIELD Illinois. Members of the community can go to Portal.shieldillinois.com to register and make an appointment. Tuesday, April 12 Cribbage Club 6 p.m. at Camelot Bowling Alley, 801 Beltline Road, Collinsville. Beginners welcome, free to attend. Contact Phil (618) 288-7910 or Susan at (618) 978-1664 for more information. Pasta Dinner Every Tuesday 3-8 p.m. Dine-in or Carryout at the Edwardsville American Legion Post 199, 58 South State Rt. Edwardsville. Pasta of the week served with salad. 618-656-9774 Toddler Time 10 a.m. at the Edwardsville Public Library. Ages 0-2. Theyve got the books, bops and bubbles. Bring your babies and toddlers to share stories and songs with Miss Kristen and all the Story Time friends. Registration Required. Teen Game Night 6-7 p.m. at the Edwardsville Public Library. Grades 6-12. Game Night is back every week. Go on a quest with fellow players in Dungeons & Dragons or choose from a variety of board games to play with friends. Southern Illinois PAL 7-8:30 p.m. via Zoom. The Southern Illinois Parents of Addicted Loved Ones group meets each week to provide hope through education and support. For parents and loved ones over the age of 18 who have someone in their life who is struggling with or recovering from substance use. PAL respects anonymity and is free of charge. Contact Craig at 618-567-6095 to receive the link for the Zoom meeting or for questions. More information can be found at www.palgroup.org. Free COVID-19 Testing 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. at the Tyrone Echols Senior Center, 1302 Klein Avenue, Venice, in Madison County. Members of the community can go to Portal.shieldillinois.com to register and make an appointment. Ongoing Events Al-Anon For information call 618-463-2429. For more information, visit SIAFG.org and District-18.org. Youth Take Home Crafts Pick up a take-home craft bag at the Edwardsville Public Library with all the materials to make the project. A new craft will be available each month at the Youth Desk. For seven years I have been a film critic in print and on the radio. In all that time I have wanted to go to the Academy Awards press room. I have applied every year, and every year I was turned down until this year! More than 10,000 journalists from around the world applied for press room credentials; only a thousand were issued credentials. All week I reviewed the movies, actors, actresses, screenplays and technical awards to be given. I spent Sunday making sure I had access to the press room and thought up questions to ask. I wondered if they had time for the hundreds of questions I wanted to ask (They didnt!) I was a nervous wreck. This was a dream come true. When you have credentials to the Academy Awards you watch it through their website. It started at 3 p.m. local time with the stars arriving on the red carpet. For the last few years, the dresses have left a lot to be desired, but this year created a pleasant change. With few exceptions, most the women did not have their breasts hanging out. Their gowns were more modest and more reminiscent of years past. As I went through the pictures of the dresses I liked, I stopped writing them down when I got to 11, and there were many more than that. I will mention a couple: Kirsten Dunst was stunning in red. I loved Lily Jamess pink dress. But my very favorite was the white beaded dress worn by Danielle Haim. It reminded me of the glamorous movie stars of the past who knew how to dress for the occasion. I would like to remind Kristen Stewart that she was going to the fanciest party of the year, not to a picnic. Her outfit was awful. She wore shorts! I hope she immediately fires her dresser. And Timothy Chalamet forgot his shirt. Someone should have told him that it is not appropriate to come to the Academy Awards bare-chested. The men need to stop trying to compete with the women for the gaudiest suits. I am old fashion; I think a black tuxedo on a man is sexy as all get out. A white dinner jacket is also nice. But pink, purple and flowered just look goofy. Hairdos seemed neater this year. In the past, most of the women looked like a dog chewed on their hair. I sometimes wonder if these people own a mirror and if they look at it before they go out. I have to believe most of them have been partying all afternoon and their vision is a little bleary from gin, rum and tequila. Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer and Regina Hall hosted the event. I thought Sykes and Schumer were funny but the scene with Hall playing with Jason Momoa's and Josh Brolins rear ends looked like sexual harassment to me. The Academy made the memorial seem more like a production number than a tribute to people who have died this year. The pictures were too small and went by too fast. The focus should have been on the people who had passed and not on the performers. There shouldnt have been performers during this segment to my way of thinking. As the evening progressed everything was going swimmingly until Chris Rock came out on stage. Then the Award show took a turn for the worse. At first, I was appalled at what Rock said knowing that Jada Pinkett Smith had alopecia. It was like making fun of a cancer victim. Then Will Smith went up on stage and slapped Chris Rock. At first, I thought it was staged. Then when Smith told Rock Keep my wifes name out your (deleted) mouth, I knew it wasnt. Violence is never appropriate. Will Smith needs to be censured by the Academy. Although it was bleeped to the American television audience, the press heard the whole thing. The audience and the press room were in shock. At first, you couldnt hear a pin drop and then there was pandemonium. We started writing down the questions we planned to ask Will Smith if he won an Oscar, which he did. He was the only Academy Award winner not to show up in the press room. Although I was disappointed, I wasnt surprised. After each recipient received their Oscar and made their speech, they were escorted to the press room where we had a chance to ask questions. I was disappointed because each winner we really wanted to question only answered four or five of our inquiries. Of course, they were anxious to go back to the audience and watch the proceedings and not be interrogated. Jessica Chastain who won Best Actress for The Eyes of Tammy Faye was asked where she was going to put her Oscar. She had a shocked look on her face and said she really didnt know. Now, I didnt believe that for a second. I write screenplays and if I won an Oscar, I know exactly where I would place it and it would be in a very conspicuous place where everyone who walked in my house would see it! I loved the answer by Jenny Beavan who won Best Costume Design for Cruella. She said all her designs begin with the script. As a screenwriter, I thought that was most appropriate; without a script, there is no movie. Kenneth Branagh won best original script with Belfast which was my favorite movie. I was so hoping that would win Best Picture. While Will Smith won Best Actor won for King Richard I was hoping it was Andrew Garfields year. He had two good movies, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Tick, TickBoom. CODA won Troy Kotur a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and Ariana DeBose won Best Supporting Actress for West Side Story. Hopefully, this means that musicals are coming back. I hope that sometime in the near future someone will remake Brigadoon. CODA won Best Picture, which was a surprise. I loved Belfast and was hoping it would win, but expected Power of the Dog. Jane Campion won Best Director for Power of the Dog which was one of the most depressing, depraved movies I have seen in a long time. If I want to be depressed, I sit down and watch one of Campions movies. It was after midnight when we got out of the press room. What a glorious night it was! Rotary Club of Houston Heights members, from left, Tom Mack, Rosemary Vega, Howard Moon and Ruby Dee, gather during a recent club meeting at Saltgrass Steak House, 1803 Shepherd Drive. (Contributed photo) That release could not be found. As warned by telecommunications operators, nine states of the federation may experience blackout today, over the clamped down of operation of a number of critical telecommunications sites in Kogi State. The Kogi State government, in a bid to force telecom operators to pay more taxes and levies, has shut down a number of telcos sites in the state. The operators, however, asked President Muhammadu Buhari to urgently prevail on Kogi State government, otherwise there would be blackout today. According to the Chairman the operators, under the aegis of telcos, Association of Licensed Telecom Operators of Nigeria, ALTON, Engr Gbenga Adebayo, said his members have paid all required taxes and levies in the state, describing the ones in dispute as unusual. He added that over 70 sites within the state and environs have shut down due to the inability of its members to have access and maintain them. According to a statement issued by the body and signed by Adebayo, it noted: The Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria, ALTON wishes to express concern about the shutting down of telecommunications facilities in Kogi State as a result of disputes arising from unusual taxes and levies demanded by the Kogi State Government through its Internal Revenue Service (KIRS). This issue is likely to lead to a total communications blackout in the entire Kogi State, parts of Abuja the Federal Capital Territory. It will also impact on service availability in some parts of the following states: Nassarawa, Benue, Enugu, Anambra, Edo, Ondo, Ekiti, Kwara, Niger States. These are States sharing borders with Kogi State. This situation arises as a number of critical telecommunications sites belonging to our members have been closed and sealed up by Kogi State Government in an attempt to increase Internally Generated Revenue IGR collection. This action followed an ex-parte court order obtained by the KIRS over unsubstantiated allegations that our members are in default of tax payments to the state government (which is not the truth) and access to these critical telecom sites has been denied. As result of these actions by the state government, our members are unable to refuel power generators in these sites, a situation which has led to outage of over 70 sites including hub sites across parts of Kogi State. Now, with likely impact on nine states surrounding Kogi (namely:- Nasarawa, Benue, Enugu, Anambra, Edo, Ondo, Ekiti, Kwara, Niger States. These are states sharing borders with Kogi State; and Abuja the FCT inclusive. We are very concerned that this indiscriminate action has the potential of further leading to a total telecommunications outage in Kogi State with neighbouring states and parts of the Federal Capital Territory adversely impacted. To the best of our knowledge, our members have settled all statutory levies and taxes due the Kogi State Government and have taken necessary steps to comply with local laws that govern business activities within Kogi State. The African Democratic Congress(ADC) has expressed displeasure to the Federal Government over the continuous industrial action embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union Universities which, according to the party, has undoubtedly disrupted academic calendar. ADC's disclosure was contained in a statement issued by the Forum Chairman and Chairman, Delta State Chapter of the Party, Prince Joe Chukwu, in Asaba today. Joe Chukwu noted that ADC's forum Chairmen across the 36 states of the federation and the FCT, had recently in recent meeting asked the FG to urgently address the contemporary issues of insecurity, and the ASUU strike, as it is negatively affecting the citizens. According to the statement: ADC Chairmens Forum frowned at the current ASUU strike in Nigeria. We are calling on the Federal Government to negotiate with them for the good of Nigerian students, growth and development of education sector in the country. We gravely discountenance the lingering contractual quagmire between ASUU and the Federal Government that has kept our University system under the torment of incessant ASUU strike. This culture of disruptions of Academic programme by ASUU strike keeps frustrating the ambitions and aspiration of Nigeria students in the process of acquiring knowledge. This latest episode calls for concern and a rethink. This is the 16th strike since Nigerias return to democracy in 1999. Despite the numbers, there is little to show. The forum also tasked the Federal Government to genuinely see to the demand of ASUU and resolve the issue, adding that tertiary institution is the research centre of our national growth and development. The Oyo State government has reiterated its commitment to leave no stone unturned in harnessing the natural resources at its disposal. It also vowed to put the resources into effective use in order to expand industrialization potentials for progress and development in the State. Commissioner for Trade, Industry, Investment and Cooperatives, Barr. Olasunkanmi Olaleye made this known while delivering his keynote address at the quarterly meeting with Oyo State Council of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (OYCCIMA) and other Organised Private Sectors in Oyo State held at the Western Hall, Secretariat, Ibadan . According to Hon. Olaleye, the purpose of the quarterly meeting is to encourage interaction among relevant stakeholders, interest groups and government with a view to ensuring a virile business environment conducive for productive investments in the State. The commissioner stated that the Ministry has put in place laudable programmes and projects targeted at revitalization of the State economy which includes development of entrepreneurial skill among the youths and women and the proposed construction of Industrial Cluster within Akinyele Local Government, Ibadan in collaboration with Technology Incubation Centre (TIC) to expand the existing enabling environment in the State. Olaleye further explained that the Ministry is fully geared up to celebrate with other African countries the "Africa Industrialization Day" come 20th November which is the day set aside by the United Nations to raise awareness regarding the Industrialization challenges faced by the continent. He therefore admonished stakeholders and Federal agencies present to reach out to rural areas too by taking their programmes and activities to these communities that don't put priority on social media but make use of the old analog way of communicating. In their different briefings the manager, SMEDAN, Mrs. Ojogbede Iyabo, State Coordinator RMRDC, Mrs. Bakare Adebola and Coordinating Director OYSIPPPA, Mr. Akin Makinde(JP), stated that the economic growth of a Nation is greatly dependent on industrialization and stakeholders should approach relevant agencies for government financial assistance for manufacturers, agribusiness etc both at the State and Federal agencies saddled with this responsibility with relevant documents in order to expand the economy of the State through the industrial sector. Among stakeholders present at the meeting includes representatives from Small Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), Raw Material Research Development Council (RMRDC), Technology Incubation Centre (TIC) and Oyo State Investment Public Private Partnership Agency (OYSIPPPA). While representatives of Oyo State Council of Chambers of Commerce(OYCCIMA), Manufacturer Association of Nigeria (MAN), National Council of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA) Youth Entrepreneur and National Association of Small and Medium scale Entrepreneur (NASME) were also present. E-signed: Hon. Wasiu Olatunbosun, Ph.D., Commissioner for Information, Culture and Tourism. There is no denying the fact that the office of wife of governor as presently called as against Office Of The First Lady should exude graciousness, exemplify charity, radiate humbleness and promotes virtue. And like some spurious agencies for charity, the first office of wife of governor should not be seen as an agent of spawning hullabaloo by its very existence or by its interventions. So, if media speculation is anything to go by, why would Governor Charles Soludo somewhat see the office of wifeof the Governor as an inconsequential office that need to be scrapped or has its influence whittled down? In as much as the First Ladys office in most jurisdictions is seen as an adjunct to that of her husband, there is no denying the fact that most first ladies invaluably and indispensably perform social functions of state even when their office is not constitutionally provided for. First ladies in Nigeria have always functioned informally but with quasi-official roles receiving and entertaining foreign dignitaries and their families on behalf of the state. Not few observers of the office have posited that contrary to the opinion of some that the office is an unnecessary supplementary cost to government, and that the first lady can actually perform crucial state functions without any additional cost to governance. Why has the retention or otherwise of that office, which in any case should be minutiae, and unarguably become a controversial issue on which people openly disagree onthe campaigns, which have inarguably been about inanities and profanities so the opportunity offered by this controversy must be milked. There is no denying the fact that in many developed democracies with functional public institutionalinfrastructure and social welfare schemes for delivery of services to the ordinary people that first ladies have continued to play invaluable charitable and social roles. Some even help in giving expression to particular government policies of special interest. Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosalyn Carter played active roles in the government of the United States. A reasonable presumption would be that the office of the first lady is pertinent and helpful in Nigeria. Even without statutory grounding, any intervention aimed at delivering succor to the poor especially in a weak society will be welcomed. The grim circumstances that have led to a proliferation or rather mushrooming of NGOs justifies that office. At this juncture, permit me to say that I was inspired to express my view on this issue as it has been observed that the structure of the office of the First Lady, located at the left-hand side of the entrance gate of the Government House in Awka was sighted to be undergoing renovation, as painters were seen cleaning off the bold inscription Office of Wife of the Governor. It is informatory that the new government started with signing an Executive Order banning touting in Anambra State, making key political appointments, and embarking on some crucial tours and visitations, among others, all aimed at paving the way to run an effective administration as the governor had stated in some of his outings after his swearing-in. The building currently stands without any inscription, which according to observers, implies abolishment of the Office of the Wife of the Governor, by the current administration. Analysts believe the measure is to cut down on cost of governance and prudently manage the states resources. There are speculations that the Soludo administration might not allow the existence of the First Lady Office, as he made no mention of First Lady or Governors Wife in his inaugural address. It is, however, still sketchy, what the building would be used for by this current administration, if truly it decides to scrap the First Ladys Office. Be that as it may, the last administration of Chief Willie Obiano created the Office with his wife, Dr. Mrs. Ebelechukwu Obiano, occupying it throughout the eightyears of two terms as First Lady of the state. The building was, however, not designated as the Office of the Wife of the Governor during the administrations of former Governors, Chris Ngige and Peter Obi, until the arrival of Chief Willie Obiano who designated it as such. In Nigeria, however, many incorrigibly selfish and greedy people set up NGOs to seek funds and fame, to cater more for themselves than anyone else. International donors have been scammed severally by these phony set ups, and this malady has adversely affected international support flowing to those in need. Ordinarily, this anomaly necessitates establishment of efficient charities that can gather and channel funds and energies altruistically. To this end, permit me to say that the office of the first lady should be such an agency. Its widely assumed that the spouse of a governor anywhere wields power and influence. She will wield even more power in jurisdictions where democratic checks and balances are weak and where democratic institutions are almost nonexistent. The office should then be able to circumvent bureaucracy and meet disadvantaged groups or push policy. So why does Soludo want the office relegated to the background or have its influence whittled down? Could it be that Soludo views the office of the First Lady as an extra constitutional profligate agency? Or does he thinks that the office has come to be a symbol of vanity, ostentatious living and perhaps political meddlesomeness? To this end, it would not be a misnomer in this context to say that for as long as the United States of America(USA), which is unarguably the beacon of democracy, continue to adopt democracy as its system of governmentthat it would be inopportune for Soludo to undermine the influence of First Ladyship. For the sake of clarity, the First Lady position is a ceremonial title bestowed on the hostess of government house, who is most commonly the wife of the sitting president or governor, and who has her tenure as the first lady whose tenure is tied to that of the president or the governor. To my view, Soludo should retain the position as a mark of respect to Anambra women, and his doing that no doubt will give him a commendable reckoning as one of Nigerias governors that accorded respect to women, particularly in this era of the struggle and fight for gender equality. To my view, undermining the office of the wife of the governor in Anambra State would tantamount to throwing away the baby and the bath water. Anutin urges to forget Songkran water festivities BANGKOK: Deputy Prime Minister and Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul has urged business operators on Khao San Road to forget plans to hold water-splashing activities during this years Songkran holiday period, saying their patience and cooperation are needed to avoid the risk of another disruptive coronavirus outbreak. CoronavirusCOVID-19culturehealthSafetytourism By Bangkok Post Tuesday 29 March 2022, 09:00AM Khao San Road is quiet during Songkran last year. Photo: Nutthawat Wicheanbut The ministers remarks came as Bangkoks communicable disease control committee is set to meet later today (Mar 29) to consider whether or not to allow water-splashing celebrations at the capitals tourist hotspot over the Thai New Year festival, as was requested by business operators in the area. The Centre for COVID-19 Situation Administration (CCSA) had earlier banned water-splashing and other celebrations associated with the holiday - including powder-smearing - as such activities are deemed to increase the risk of contracting COVID-19, reports the Bangkok Post. The move prompted businesses along Khao San Road, and other cities such as Chiang Mai, Phuket and Pattaya to jointly petition the government to reconsider. Sa-nga Ruangwatthanakul, president of the Association of Business Operators on Khao San Road, said revellers are expected to spend between B50-80 million over the four-day holiday if authorities lifts the ban on water-splashing. Bangkoks communicable disease control committee was supposed to consider the petition yesterday but postponed its meeting until today. Anutin said the ban on water-splashing is necessary to reduce the risk of contagion. This year, other social activities arent prohibited, so please be patient for another year, he said. We are preparing to classify COVID-19 as an endemic disease, so we need to have the cooperation of all stakeholders. Public health officials had previously warned that new infections could reach 100,000 per day unless precautions are taken during the festival. The public health minister also called on those who plan to visit their families during the Songkran holiday to exercise extreme caution and avoid risky activities at least one week before travel to help keep their families, especially the elderly, safe from the virus. Suthat Chottanapund, director of the Institute of Urban Disease Control and Prevention and a member of Bangkoks communicable disease control committee, said it is highly likely that water splashing will not be allowed as it is considered a risky activity. However, the committee is likely to announce the easing of more restrictions, including alcohol consumption in SHA Plus venues, he said, noting group outings still arent recommended. Dr Suthat said from Jan 1 to March 27, Bangkok saw 445 deaths from COVID-19, most of whom were elderly people with chronic health conditions. Some 75% of those who died, he noted, werent vaccinated or didnt complete their COVID vaccination regime. He urged individuals in at-risk groups to get their booster shot as soon as they can. Yesterday, the Ministry of Public Health reported 81 more COVID-19 fatalities and 24,635 confirmed cases over the previous 24 hours. The latest figures did not include 14,200 positive results from antigen tests. The victims ages ranged from nine months to 94 years, according to the ministry. Bangkok had the most new cases with 3,248, followed by 1,390 in Chon Buri, 1,328 in Nakhon Si Thammarat, 973 in Songkhla, 872 in Samut Sakhon, and 865 in Samut Prakan. Army TV channel director replaced over Russia-Ukraine war coverage BANGKOK: The head of army-owned TV Channel 5 is being replaced amid reports of controversial meetings and orders regarding news coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. RussianUkrainemilitary By Bangkok Post Tuesday 29 March 2022, 03:51PM Gen Rangsee Kitiyanasap, president of the Royal Thai Army Radio and Television Station, aka TV Channel 5. Photo: TV Channel 5 A source said today (Mar 29) that army commander-in-chief Gen Narongphan Jitkaewtae had ordered the replacement of Channel 5 president Gen Rangsee Kitiyanasap with Lt Gen Wisanti Sasrida, former director of the Army Training Command, effective on Apr 7. All three generals were members of Class 22 at the Armed Forces Academy Preparatory School, and Gen Narongphan and Gen Rangsi have been close friends for over 40 years since then, reports the Bangkok Post. Lt Gen Wisanti was expected to run the military TV channel for six months, until his retirement in October. Gen Rangsee said today that he had not been sacked, because he sent his resignation letter to the army chief yesterday. He said he had personal reasons for tendering his resignation. Asked if it stemmed from an order that the channel not report news about the Russia-Ukraine war, Gen Rangsi said that depended on the judgement of the media. Gen Rangsi had earlier assigned the pro-government Top News TV team to supply news content to Channel 5. Recently he met the Russian ambassador to Thailand and signed an agreement about the channels news coverage of the war. He said he intended to ensure more balanced news, in comparison with reports by Western media. Under the agreement, Channel 5 staff would verify reports with the Russian embassy and also present news from Russia. This led to criticism of the neutrality of the channel. Gen Rangsi later promised the Ukrainian ambassador to Thailand that news coverage would be neutral. However, sources said that Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha was concerned about the issue and ordered Channel 5 to refrain from covering news about the war. Yesterday, the team supplying news to Channel 5 was presenting a report about the war and its signal was abruptly disconnected. That led to speculation that the Top News team would withdraw from the channel at the end of this month. Plans to tackle wild fires and dust pollution PHUKET: Authorities met yesterday (Mar 28) to discuss procedures for combating forest fires, haze and dust pollution across the island. pollutiondisastersenvironmenthealthland By The Phuket News Tuesday 29 March 2022, 02:59PM The meeting, held at the Phuket Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Office at Phuket Provincial Hall, was presided over by Phuket Deputy Governor Anupap Rodkwan Yodrabam. He was joined by Udomporn Kan, Head of the Phuket Provincial Disaster Prevention and Mitigation office, and other relevant government agencies. Mr Anupap stressed how forest fires that are common during the dry season at this time of year produce fine particulate matter known as PM2.5, tiny particles found in the air including dust, soot, dirt, smoke, and liquid droplets that reduce visibility and cause the air to appear hazy when levels are elevated. Although this air pollutant can be created naturally, it is generally caused by human activity such as open-air burning, crop burning, forest fires, irresponsibly discarded cigarette butts, poorly maintained vehicles and industrial work such as construction or transportation, which causes smog. The topography in certain parts of the island are also contributory factors, Mr Anupap said. PM2.5 is a concern as it can greatly diminish peoples health when levels in the air are high, as they often tend to be in Phuket at this time of year, he added. Bad ventilation and periods of calm or low winds leading to poor circulation cause the dust to accumulate which can pose a health threat to people which in turn can have a detrimental impact on society and the economy, Mr Anupap commented. In order to reduce the risks that create this situation and to prevent problems associated with wild fires, Mr Anupap confirmed that a committee was appointed at the meeting yesterday in line with the National Agenda Action Plan to tackle the issue of PM2.5 dust pollution. He added that the committee had drafted a response plan detailing preparationary efforts and action measures which will be assigned to the responsible local government agencies who would work together and cooperate in sharing equipment and resources such as fire prevention equipment. By working together proactively it is hoped that when these solutions are implemented that the dangers can be minimised, Mr Anupap concluded. PSG star Navas takes in Ukrainian refugees FOOTBALL: Paris Saint-Germain goalkeeper Keylor Navas is hosting around 30 Ukrainian refugees who fled their country following the Russian invasion, the Ligue 1 leaders confirmed yesterday (Mar 28). Football By AFP Tuesday 29 March 2022, 09:44AM Keylor Navas. Photo: AFP Spanish publication Sport revealed the 35-year-old Costa Rican international had adapted his home so they could stay with him. His wife Andrea Salas had posted in several different languages on social media outlets messages from charities willing to help lots of children with their mothers, or youngsters on their own, who arrived with just the clothes that they were wearing. The refugees taken in by the Navas family arrived via a Christian Evangelist association whose headquarters are in Barcelona. PSG did not specify the number of refugees given safe haven by Navas save to confirm the news, because Keylor did not wish to publicise his gesture. Teen racing on Phuket pier leaves boy, 13, dead PHUKET: A 13-year-old boy died after his head struck a pylon while he and his friends were racing on Laem Sai Pier in Thepkrasattri, Thalang, yesterday morning (Mar 28). accidentsdeathtransportpolice By Eakkapop Thongtub Tuesday 29 March 2022, 10:03AM Chanachon Chaiwichian, 13, died after his head struck a pylon after he from the motorbike while racing on the pier. Screenshot: Eakkapop Thongtub Chanachon Chaiwichian, 13, died after his head struck a pylon after he from the motorbike while racing on the pier. Screenshot: Eakkapop Thongtub Chanachon Chaiwichian, 13, died after his head struck a pylon after he from the motorbike while racing on the pier. Screenshot: Supplied Police and rescue workers were called to the pier, in Moo 6 Thepkrasattri, soon after 11:30am. The first-responders arrived to find the boy, Chanachon Chaiwichian, a 13-year-old local resident of Moo 6 Thepkrasattri, dead from fatal head trauma. Police explained that Chanachon was racing along the pier on motorbikes with friends when the accident happened. The youngsters were on three motorbikes. They were fast approaching the covered seating area at the end of the pier when two of the motorbikes collided, spilling their drivers and passengers onto the pier. Chanachon was riding as a passenger on one of the motorbikes. He fell and his head struck a pylon supporting the roof of the seating area. He was not wearing a helmet. The driver of the motorbike Chanachon was riding on was a 14-year-old friend from primary school. The boy, a Myanmar national living in Pa Khlok, was rushed to Thalang Hospital for treatment of serious injuries. The other youngsters involved in the racing were a boy aged 11, a girl aged 12 and another girl, 13 years old. All three live nearby, in Moo 6 Thepkrasattri. Jetty supervisor Sudjai Leenoi, 42, said that she was in her office with staff when they saw the children arrive on the motorbikes. Before staff could react, the children took off down the pier at speed, then the accident happened. Police have yet to reveal what action they will take over the deadly accident. Southern Pines, NC (28387) Today Cloudy early, then thunderstorms developing this afternoon. A few storms may be severe. High 88F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 60%.. Tonight Thunderstorms early, then partly cloudy after midnight. A few storms may be severe. Low 61F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Paying tribute to Taylor, who was found dead in his hotel room in Colombia last week, Bryce from The Morning Rumble addressed what many Foo Fighters fans were wondering. "I don't know what it means for the Foos now, no one does, it's all speculation. But it makes you appreciate that it can all be over in a second and not to take it for granted," he said. Taylor Hawkins, thank you for giving us the best of you, the sky sure is a neighbourhood now, and may your spirit rock Everlong. The Foo Fighters post announcing the cancellation was immediately flooded with messages of support from fans who assured the band they understood. "Take your time, we are here whether you continue on or not," one comment read. "Don't be sorry for a thing, well be here healing with you," said another. Today Rain showers early with bright sunshine by the afternoon. High 73F. Winds WNW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%. Tonight Clear to partly cloudy. Low 49F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph. Tomorrow Partly cloudy skies with gusty winds. High 69F. Winds W at 20 to 30 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph. Montreal, CA (H4T1V6) Today Some clouds this morning will give way to generally sunny skies for the afternoon. High 14C. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Mostly clear. Low 3C. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Joseph Felter, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of Defense and Army Special Forces officer, served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a Hoover Institution research fellow at Stanford University. JERSEYVILLE A Godfrey resident was charged last week with sex assault and other violence-related felonies. John E. Piper, 27, of Godfrey, was charged March 25 with aggravated criminal sex assault/dangerous weapon/bodily harm, a Class X felony; aggravated domestic battery, a Class 2 felony; aggravated unlawful restraint, a Class 3; and unlawful violation of an order of protection, a Class A misdemeanor. According to court documents, on March 22 Piper allegedly sexually assaulted a victim while threatening her with a knife. He's also accused of stabbing her multiple times on the legs and hand, pinning her down, strangling her until she blacked out; and preventing her from leaving. Court records also show Piper violated an order of protection filed against him by the victim. His bail was set at $1 million. Two other felony charges were recently filed by the Jersey County States Attorneys Office. Paul E. Calvert, 36, of Carrollton, was charged March 21 with unlawful possession of weapons by a felon, a Super Class 3 felony. According to court documents, on March 19 Calvert allegedly had brass knuckles. Because of a previous felony conviction, he is ineligible to possess weapons. Bail was set at $30,000. Samantha K. Godar, 27, of Jerseyville, was charged March 21 with unlawful possession of a controlled substance, a class 4 felony, and unlawful possession of hypodermic syringe or needle, a Class A misdemeanor. According to court documents, on March 16 Godar allegedly had less than 15 grams of heroin and a hypodermic syringe. Bail was set at $25,000. ALTON Ebony R. Huddleston of Alton has launched her campaign to become a Madison County circuit judge. This is a dream that I have prepared for my entire professional career," she said. "My journey consists of helping others to succeed in achieving their best outcomes. "If elected to serve as Madison County Circuit Judge, I pledge to conduct my courtroom with compassion, understanding, integrity, and to treat every individual who appears before me with dignity and respect, regardless of their circumstances, said Huddleston. The Alton High School graduate was valedictorian of her class. She received her bachelor degrees in English, Accounting and Spanish from Xavier University of Louisiana where she graduated magna cum laude. She earned her juris doctor degree from Ohio Northern University with a specialization in Bankruptcy Law. While attending law school she clerked for a federal bankruptcy judge and was a law clerk with Farrell, Hamilton & Julian, P.C. in Godfrey. She also worked with Arthur Andersen, LLP in St. Louis for four years in the tax, audit and business consulting practice areas while in college. Upon graduating, she was hired as a full-time attorney and later became Assistant Vice President of Farrell, Hamilton & Julian, P.C. Her practice areas include civil litigation, bankruptcy, tax litigation, estate planning and business organizations. She has successfully argued cases in front of the Illinois 5th District Appellate Court, the Illinois Department of Revenue Board of Appeals, the Internal Revenue Service Appeals Office and the U.S. Tax Court. While at Farrell, Hamilton & Julian, P.C., she worked directly with the late J. Thomas Long and John A. Farrell. In 2018, Huddleston started The Law Office of Ebony R. Huddleston, P.C. in Alton. She is licensed to practice in Illinois, Southern District of Illinois, Central District of Illinois and the U.S. Tax Court. She also has also taught in the paralegal program at Lewis & Clark Community College in Godfrey. She is a member of the American Bar Association, Illinois State Bar Association and presently sits on the General Practice, Solo and Small Firm Section Council, Standing Committee on Racial & Ethnic Minorities in the Law, Standing Committee on the Rural Practice Initiative, and Steering Committee for Racial Inequality of the Illinois State Bar Association. She has participated in ISBA Conclaves on Professionalism. She has served on the board of directors for the Alton YWCA and Boys & Girls Club, United Way Allocations Committee, Alton-Godfrey Rotary Club, Madison County Bar Association and Alton-Wood River Bar Association. She currently sits on the board of directors of the Clayton and Virginia Williams Foundation Justice Advocacy Group, Land of Lincoln Legal Aid, Alton Memorial Hospital and is Vice President of IMPACT CIL (Center for Independent Living) in Alton. She lives in Alton with her daughter, Arianna. ALTON The Riverbend will soon have what is believed to be the area's first food pantry dedicated just to the family pets of the elderly and homeless. The 4 Paws Pet Food Pantry, operated out of the Market Street entrance to St. Paul's Episcopal Church at 10 E. 3rd St. in Alton, is scheduled to open Sunday, May 1, 12:30-1:30 p.m. The pantry will be similar to one the Rev. Cynthia Sever and her husband, Byron, opened at her last church in western New York state. Sever said the goal of the pantry is to provide food to the pets of the poor or elderly who often end up feeding their own food to their animals. That practice can eventually lead to the pet, who may be "a link to life, comfort and joy" for the owner, being sent to an animal shelter, she said. The free food can help avoid that difficult choice for those who suffer from food insecurity. The pet food pantry will be open the first Sunday of each month 12:30-1:30 p.m. Food will not be distributed at any other time. Businesses are encouraged to set out collection jars provided by the church for the pet pantry. Currently there are jars at the Round Table Restaurant in Godfrey and Mississippi Mud Pottery and Luck Dog Groomers in Alton. Sever said her New York pantry also had the volunteer services of a veterinarian and she is hoping to have an area vet provide assistance. She said the New York pantry served up 900 pounds of pet food in the one hour window it was open each month; she expects the demand in the Riverbend could be similar. Businesses who wish to set out a collection jar for the pantry and anyone wishing to donate pet food, money or veterinarian services can contact Sever at 618-465-9149. SPRINGFIELD One Prisoner Review Board member resigned on Monday, while another was rejected by the Senate in an evening vote. Oreal James resigned Monday by way of a letter to Gov. J.B. Pritzker before going to the Senate for a vote. Hours later, Eleanor Kaye Wilson failed to get the 30 votes needed to confirm her appointment. Wilson received 15 votes to confirm her appointment and 31 votes against while 13 members did not vote. Mondays developments represented the latest shakeup on the governor-appointed board that has seen heavy Republican scrutiny in the past year as the Senate repeatedly delayed hearing several of Pritzkers appointees to the board that determines whether offenders should be released from Illinois Department of Corrections custody and what the terms of their release should be. The board also makes recommendations on clemency, arbitrates the calculation of good time credit, and reviews cases of those who violate the terms of their parole to decide whether they should be returned to prison. The job pays roughly $90,000 per year. With James resignation and Wilsons failed confirmation, there are just six members seated to the 15-member board. Of those, three LeAnn Miller, Jared Bohland and Ken Tupy still need Senate approval. Tupy and Bohland were recommended by the Senate Executive Appointments Committee unanimously. Miller was also recommended. Wilson is the second member of the PRB not to win confirmation. Last week, Jeff Mears, a downstate Democrat, was recommended by the Executive Appointments Committee but failed to get confirmed by the full Senate. Two weeks ago, Pritzker pulled the appointment of Max Cerda, a PRB board member who was convicted of a double murder when he was 16 years old and paroled in 1998. It appeared Cerda would not have enough Senate support for approval. During the debate into Wilsons appointment, the opposition stemmed from her voting record while she was on the PRB. Miss Wilson voted multiple times to release cop killers, release those who are putting their jobs on the line for us, said Sen. Terri Bryant, R-Murphysboro. Bryant said she counted seven times Wilson voted to release an individual who was incarcerated for killing an officer. She brought up the case of Aaron Hyche, charged with killing State Trooper Layton Davis in 1976. He was given 150 to 300 years. In February 2021, Hyche, who is 71 and has cancer, Parkinsons disease and dementia, was released on medical parole. Sen. Mike Simmons, D-Chicago, countered that Wilson was qualified for the position. There are many of us in this chamber and the people that we represent that believe in restorative justice, and we believe in redemption, Simmons said. And I don't expect anybody here to unanimously say that they are always going to support restorative justice. But with the Prisoner Review Board, when I look at what this body is charged with doing, I think that the members have done their jobs. Wilson was director of DePaul Universitys School for New Learning, as well as director of urban programs at Chicago City-Wide College. She is the godmother to the former President Barack Obamas daughters, Sasha and Malia. Neither Wilson nor James could be reached for comment Monday. James and Wilson were originally appointed to the Prisoner Review Board by Pritzker in April 2019, but those appointments were withdrawn in March 2021 and submitted just days later. Last week, their appointments moved out of the Senate Executive Appointments Committee without a recommendation. James, a certified mediator focused on restorative justice in public education, was appointed by Pritzker in April 2019. James received his undergraduate and law degree from DePaul College of Law. Thank you for the opportunity to serve the State of Illinois while on the Prisoner Review Board, James stated in his resignation letter to Pritzker. I took seriously the responsibility to apply the law as it is written in our constitution. These laws direct the board to be fair to all without bias or prejudice. This too, is all you have ever asked of me. It is my hope I have fulfilled this request completely. Pritzker spokesperson Jordan Abudayyeh issued a statement after the Senate vote Monday. The governor is disappointed that a highly qualified nominee will no longer be able to serve on the Prisoner Review Board and he thanks Eleanor Wilson for her service and dedication to justice, she said. The Pritzker administration remains committed to ensuring that highly qualified nominees fill these critical roles on the Prisoner Review Board, especially because we must fulfill our constitutional and statutory obligations for clemency and parole as well as key public safety functions of the board. SPRINGFIELD There are growing issues of trust with how Illinois is managing its legal cannabis industry. Illinois legalized adult-use cannabis beginning in January 2020. Since then, the states limited number of dispensaries have sold nearly $2.3 billion worth of marijuana products. Taxes collected by the state, which can be in excess of 40% depending on the potency, total nearly $680 million. Local governments can tack on even more taxes. Cannabis Business Association of Illinois Executive Director Pam Althoff said theres an oversupply of the product because of ongoing litigation challenging the application scoring process for new dispensaries. The next tranche of dispensary licenses that were supposed to be awarded a year ago still are in the legal system and they have a temporary restraining order placed up on them so there are no new dispensaries, Althoff told a Springfield radio station. There are 110 original dispensaries throughout Illinois, including one in Collinsville, with 185 potential licensees waiting. The situation is frustrating to consumers and business owners alike, Althoff said. Its extraordinarily frustrating and it creates a great deal of anger and I think just distrust with the entire process, Althoff said. During a Senate committee hearing last week, state Sen. Jason Plummer, R-Edwardsville, raised another issue of trust surrounding the states regulation of the industry. Plummer questioned Cannabis Regulation Oversight Officer Danielle Perry about recent stories of mold being found in some pre-rolled joints. He said no one warned the public of the problem, though there was an internal email within the state to quarantine the product. Perry said the product was quarantined as a precaution, though state testing didnt find any issues. From a consumer protection perspective, the responsibility I believe of the agency is to inform the company and for the company is to inform the consumer, Perry said. Plummer said the state needs to take a larger role in such announcements. If a state lab finds an issue with a product, I think a state lab, once a confirmation is made, should probably be disseminating that information to the public if theres a health or safety issue there, Plummer said. For seven years I have been a film critic in print and on the radio. In all that time I have wanted to go to the Academy Awards press room. I have applied every year, and every year I was turned down until this year! More than 10,000 journalists from around the world applied for press room credentials; only a thousand were issued credentials. All week I reviewed the movies, actors, actresses, screenplays and technical awards to be given. I spent Sunday making sure I had access to the press room and thought up questions to ask. I wondered if they had time for the hundreds of questions I wanted to ask (They didnt!) I was a nervous wreck. This was a dream come true. When you have credentials to the Academy Awards you watch it through their website. It started at 3 p.m. local time with the stars arriving on the red carpet. For the last few years, the dresses have left a lot to be desired, but this year created a pleasant change. With few exceptions, most the women did not have their breasts hanging out. Their gowns were more modest and more reminiscent of years past. As I went through the pictures of the dresses I liked, I stopped writing them down when I got to 11, and there were many more than that. I will mention a couple: Kirsten Dunst was stunning in red. I loved Lily Jamess pink dress. But my very favorite was the white beaded dress worn by Danielle Haim. It reminded me of the glamorous movie stars of the past who knew how to dress for the occasion. I would like to remind Kristen Stewart that she was going to the fanciest party of the year, not to a picnic. Her outfit was awful. She wore shorts! I hope she immediately fires her dresser. And Timothy Chalamet forgot his shirt. Someone should have told him that it is not appropriate to come to the Academy Awards bare chested. The men need to stop trying to compete with the women for gaudiest suits. I am old fashion; I think a black tuxedo on a man is sexy as all get out. A white dinner jacket is also nice. But pink, purple and flowered just looks goofy. Hair dos seemed neater this year. In the past, most of the women looked like a dog chewed on their hair. I sometimes wonder if these people own a mirror and if the look at it before they go out. I have to believe most of them have been partying all afternoon and their vision is a little bleary from gin, rum and tequila. Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer and Regina Hall hosted the event. I thought Sykes and Schumer were funny but the scene with Hall playing with Jason Momoa's and Josh Brolins rear ends looked like sexual harassment to me. The Academy made the memorial seem more like a production number than a tribute to people who have died this year. The pictures were too small and went by too fast. The focus should have been on the people who had passed and not on the performers. There shouldnt have been performers during this segment to my way of thinking. As the evening progressed everything was going swimmingly until Chris Rock came out on stage. Then the Award show took a turn for the worse. At first, I was appalled at what Rock said knowing that Jada Pinkett Smith had alopecia. It was like making fun of a cancer victim. Then Will Smith went up on stage and slapped Chris Rock. At first, I thought it was staged. Then when Smith told Rock Keep my wifes name out your (deleted) mouth, I knew it wasnt. Violence is never appropriate. Will Smith needs to be censured by the Academy. Although it was bleeped to the American television audience, the press heard the whole thing. The audience and the press room were in shock. At first, you couldnt hear a pin drop and then there was pandemonium. We started writing down the questions we planned to ask Will Smith if he won an Oscar, which he did. He was the only Academy Award winner not to show up in the press room. Although I was disappointed, I wasnt surprised. After each recipient received their Oscar and made their speech, they were escorted to the press room where we had a chance to ask questions. I was disappointed because each winner we really wanted to question only answered four or five of our inquiries. Of course, they were anxious to go back to the audience and watch the proceedings and not be interrogated. Jessica Chastain who won Best Actress for The Eyes of Tammy Faye was asked where she was going to put her Oscar. She had a shocked look on her face and said she really didnt know. Now, I didnt believe that for a second. I write screenplays and if I won an Oscar, I know exactly where I would place it and it would be in a very conspicuous place where everyone who walked in my house would see it! I loved the answer by Jenny Beavan who won for Best Costume Design for Cruella. She said all her designs begin with the script. As a screenwriter, I thought that was most appropriate; without a script there is no movie. Kenneth Branagh won best original script with Belfast which was my favorite movie. I was so hoping that would win best picture. While Will Smith won Best Actor won for King Richard I was hoping it was Andrew Garfields year. He had two good movies, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Tick, TickBoom. Coda won Troy Kotur a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and Ariana DeBose won Best Supporting actress for West Side Story. Hopefully, this means that musicals are coming back. I hope that sometime in the near future someone will remake Brigadoon. Coda won best picture, which was a surprise. I loved Belfast and was hoping it would win, but expected Power of the Dog. Jane Campion won best Director for Power of the Dog which was one of the most depressing, depraved movies I have seen in a long time. If I want to be depressed, I sit down and watch one of Campions movies. It was after midnight when we got out of the press room. What a glorious night it was! The value of your investment and any income from it can go down as well as up and capital is at risk. Every investment we make needs to have a decent chance of at least doubling over five years, says Baillie Gifford European Growth Trusts Stephen Paice. And while I say the minimum required return is doubling over five years, ideally we want more than that. We want to find companies that go up five-fold or ten-fold over five years. We are looking for multi-baggers, outliers, these are the ones that will drive the performance of the portfolio. Paices job, along with co-managers Moritz Sitte and Chris Davies, is to find the European companies that offer the best growth prospects for the trusts shareholders to profit from over the long-term. And while star US big tech names often dominate the headlines on disruptive growth, Paice believes investors should not overlook the promise of the exceptional companies Europe has to offer and how rapidly it is changing. European innovator: Music streaming leader Spotify is among Baillie Gifford European Growth's holdings The trusts holdings vary from household names, including Spotify, Adidas and Ryanair, to lesser-known stocks, such as payments platform Adyen, and the unlisted Swedish environmentally friendly battery maker Northvolt. What ties the 50 or so companies in its portfolio together is that the fund managers believe they have very bright futures and over the next decade their investors will be richly rewarded. So why should investors back Europes innovative growth businesses and where are they to be found? We spoke to the Baillie Gifford manager to find out more. This interview took place before Russia invaded Ukraine. What does Baillie Gifford European Growth Trust seek to do for investors? We invest in what we consider the best European growth companies. These are companies that we consider outliers within Europe, its to do with their business model, their growth rate, their competitive position, the people that are managing and owning those businesses and the potential to generate significant value. Its growth in value that we are interested in and thats what our investors are interested in as well We have a guideline to invest in between 30 and 60 companies. We focus on the fundamentals of a company which really drive value. We think those include sales growth, the ability to grow earnings and cashflow and whether those companies are managed and owned by some very special, trustworthy people. Its growth in value that we are interested in and thats what our investors are interested in as well: are we going to be able to compound and grow their investments in these companies? What do you look for in a growth company? Stephen Paice: 'We invest in what we consider the best European growth companies' The most important factor for value creation over longer periods is revenue growth, whether thats through disruption, taking market share, or pricing power. If companies can grow at that high rate and then, through competitive strength and barriers to entry, increase returns on capital, they are going to hopefully create a lot of value over long periods. When you have a timeframe which is five, or 10 years, or longer, the most important driver of value is the fundamental factors: sales, cashflow growth and corporate culture something which is slightly intangible. Thats what matters most. Its not the valuation multiple that you are putting these companies on, its much more important that you are getting the growth right. What we need to make sure is that they have the balance sheet and the financing to continue to grow. The market is more short term, it looks at what the next years profit margin is going to be. For some companies that will be depressed by investment in growth. What we spend more time on is whether these companies can generate significant profits in five or 10 years, because they are growing very quickly. The majority of the companies we invest in are profitable, they are market leading, they have very attractive returns on capital... We look at the business model; is it capable of defending its franchises and generating attractive rates of return in the future? Probably 90 per cent of the companies we own have some form of meaningful inside ownership, whether its a founder or a family. Having that alignment with the people you are investing in is really important. These are some of the most entrepreneurial people in Europe. Family and founder-type businesses tend not to like taking on too much debt, so theyre a bit more conservative when it comes to their balance sheets, but they are also more forward thinking in terms of investing over long periods. Those we are giving money to, we genuinely trust to manage the businesses in a long-term and sustainable manner. The majority of the companies we invest in are profitable, they are market leading, they have very attractive returns on capital, theres no problem with net debt or balance sheet risk. The portfolio is also growing much faster than the market. We believe that the market is mis-pricing their ability to grow and to grow profitably over the next five to ten years. Ryanair is among the Baillie Gifford European Growth Trust's portfolio of dynamic businesses Do investors overlook Europes growth companies and are they missing out? Europe has always suffered from a perception problem, but that has been warranted. If we look at the largest companies in Europe, most of them are slow growing and we dont have any big tech companies. We dont have many dynamic fast-growing big businesses in Europe, and I think that affects the perception of Europe that people have when they look at the index; they see these quite stodgy companies. But when you go further down the market cap, you start coming across some of the more interesting names. Until five years ago, Europe was quite backwards in terms of offering the right kinds of growth companies, but its going through a big transition which is coming from the private company space and the small and mid-cap space. These companies are now coming to the market and offering a completely different growth profile to anything that weve ever seen before. Companies are now coming to the market and offering a completely different growth profile to anything that weve ever seen before For example, Spotify listed in 2018, Adyen, which is a Dutch payment processing business - listed in 2018. Weve also got Prosus, which is a Dutch technology holding company spun out of Naspers (a global internet group and one of the worlds largest technology investors) listed in 2019. Weve got all these companies that have just come to the market in the last five years and its completely changed the opportunity set for growth investing. Thats why we are so enthusiastic about it. The other structural reason the US has been a better place for growth investors is that the funding environment has been better. Europe is still miles behind but its catching up quickly. Weve seen this explosion in rapidly growing, next-generation growth companies in Europe and thats been driven by the funding environment and also by a change in the culture and ambition of the people involved. Why should investors think long-term? Its not about timing the market, its about time in the market. If you can have the fortitude, and if you believe in the investment managers youve chosen, or you believe in the companies youve invested in, you stick with them. Dont forget about the compounding effects of investing and keep at it. If you buy the right companies, youll never have to sell them. Baillie Gifford European Growth Trust annual past performance (%) to 31 December each year 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 Share price 24.5 -15.2 16.9 64.8 4.2 NAV 15.7 -14.8 15.0 45.4 13.4 Performance source: Morningstar, FTSE, total return in sterling. Investments with exposure to overseas securities can be affected by changing stock market conditions and currency exchange rates. The views expressed should not be considered advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a particular investment. The article contains information and opinion on investments that does not constitute independent investment research and is therefore not subject to the protections afforded to independent research. Baillie Gifford & Co Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The investment trusts managed by Baillie Gifford & Co Limited are listed on the London Stock Exchange and are not authorised or regulated by the FCA. A Key Information Document is available by visiting bailliegifford.com Taxpayers no longer own the majority of NatWest for the first time since the bank was rescued with a near-50billion bailout in the depths of the financial crisis. In a highly symbolic move, the Treasurys stake fell below 50 per cent after it sold 1.2billion of shares back to the lender. The transaction came 14 years after ministers stepped in to rescue NatWest then known as Royal Bank of Scotland. In all, 45.5billion was pumped into the bank as the Government took an 84 per cent holding. End of an era: In a highly symbolic move, the Treasury's stake in Natwest fell below 50% after it sold 1.2bn of shares back to the lender Boss Alison Rose said the latest share sale was an important milestone for the company. But taxpayers have been left sitting on a loss of around 18billion. The Governments 48 per cent stake is worth 12billion and it has recouped 15.5billion in dividends and share sales adding up to just 27.5billion of the initial 45.5billion package. The Treasury and NatWest have said it is inevitable not all of the money the Government spent would be recouped because it is a smaller bank than before the crisis and it was a rescue deal rather than an investment. Ministers plan to sell the remaining stake in tranches between now and 2025-26. RBS was effectively bust when it was rescued during the financial crisis following the disastrous takeover of toxic Dutch rival ABN Amro, which briefly made it the worlds largest bank. The company had rapidly expanded under the reign of then-boss Fred the Shred Goodwin, who was dubbed the worlds worst banker and was stripped of his knighthood for his role in the crisis. If RBS had collapsed, it would likely have taken the British economy down with it. John Glen, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, said: This sale means that the Government is no longer the majority owner of NatWest Group and is therefore an important landmark in our plan to return the bank to the private sector. We will continue to prioritise delivering value for money for the taxpayer as we take forward this plan. Rose said: Reducing government ownership below 50 per cent is an important milestone for NatWest Group and a further demonstration of the progress we are making as we continue to deliver for our customers and shareholders. She added that buying the shares would be a good use of money. Analysts said the latest cash could not come at a better time for the Treasury. Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: Its been a long road back from emergency purchase of the beleaguered Royal Bank of Scotland. This is the fifth sale, returning 1.2billion to Treasury coffers, at a time when the Government sorely needs the cash with the costs of borrowing mounting. Rose, 53, took over in 2019 and soon launched a restructuring and rebrand that changed the name from RBS to NatWest. The company owns both banks as well as Coutts, a private banking and wealth management division that traces its history back to 1692. Rose told the Mail last month that she is determined to repay the taxpayer in full for the support given during the financial crisis. She said: Thats my plan. My job is to build a bank that is valuable to the economy, my customers and my colleagues. Last month NatWest said it would start paying cash bonuses to its top bosses for the first time since the Goodwin era as it prepares to return to private control. It made the announcement alongside results that showed it made profits of 4billion last year. NatWest fell 0.3 per cent to 219.8p. Sales at Inmarsat rose at the fastest pace in a decade as shipping and air travel bounced back from the coronavirus pandemic. Rajeev Suri, the British satellite and maritime communications firm's boss, hailed an 'excellent' 2021 as revenues rose 6 per cent to 1billion. The group also swung back into the black making a 13million profit after racking up a bruising 139million loss the year before. Deal ahoy: British satellite and maritime communications firm Inmarsat provides the connectivity in the Volvo Ocean Race (pictured) The bumper figures underline the strength of the cutting-edge company, which is on the brink of being taken over by American rival Viasat in a 5.4billion deal. The stellar results come a week after Viasat said it had thrashed out a series of legally binding commitments with ministers in order to get the tie-up over the line. The Californian satellite giant promised to increase research spending and create more highly skilled jobs after meetings with officials including Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng. Rick Baldridge, chief executive of Viasat, flew to London in late January in an attempt to win political support for the deal. Viasat's swoop on Inmarsat, which is a former United Nations agency, is one of a string of foreign bids for defence and other strategically important industries since the pandemic began. Kwarteng has also been analysing Advent International's proposed 2.6billion takeover of Ultra Electronics and Parker-Hannifin's 6.3billion offer for Meggitt. He has faced repeated calls to block all three US deals amid concern that Britain's aerospace and defence industry is rapidly being hollowed out. There are fears Inmarsat could suffer the same fate as aerospace group Cobham which was carved up 18 months after it was bought by US private equity firm Advent. Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, has warned that the Inmarsat takeover risks 'reducing the UK's sovereign capabilities and making it reliant on other countries for the provision of critical infrastructure'. National security investigations have been launched into all three deals and all appear to be edging closer to completion. Tech jobs: Californian satellite giant Viasat has promised to increase research spending and create more highly skilled jobs The Daily Mail revealed earlier this month that Advent has provisionally agreed to a beefed up set of commitments that include setting up a supervisory board with Government representation to oversee sensitive UK contracts. And Parker-Hannifin has offered a series of remedies to EU regulators for its Meggitt takeover, though it is not clear what these are or if it is already in talks with UK officials. Suri, 54, said the Viasat deal was going as planned and was expected to complete in the second half of this year. He added: 'Overall it was an excellent year.' But Suri also warned that the world remains an 'uncertain place' and that it is still at risk of facing component shortages that have hit a number of manufacturing industries. Inmarsat is the largest provider of in-flight wi-fi for airlines and the top provider of internet connections for ships. It was founded in 1979 by UN agency the International Maritime Organisation to help distressed sailors send SOS signals. The company now has around 1,800 employees across the world and around 860 in London, where it is headquartered. It has 14 satellites in orbit and is planning to launch another seven. The company's technology is used in everything from the Volvo Ocean Race to climate change tracking and keeping rural cattle farmers connected to the internet. It was taken private in 2019 for 4.7billion by foreign private equity groups including Warburg Pincus, but was put up for sale last year. Viasat boss Rick Baldridge previously told the Mail his company sees Inmarsat as a long-term investment. He added that Viasat could sell some of Inmarsat's US operations if they do not fit with the company far into the future, but added that the company has been around for 35 years and has not sold anything to date. Viasat invested 300million in a cyber centre based in Aldershot, Hampshire, last year, and does other work in the UK. Baldridge has said: 'We've already been making hundreds of millions of dollars in commitment here. 'So, you don't have to believe me and say, 'What are you going to do with this? Is this going to be the latest promise?' Look at what we've done.' The Government has been so worried about the string of sell-offs of aerospace and defence companies it has brought in new laws to protect firms in sensitive industries including space which mean deals are screened automatically. The Inmarsat takeover is being dealt with under the new regime. Russian precious metals producer Polymetal is considering options to boost shareholder value, including potential changes to its asset-holding structure. The London-listed miner said on Tuesday it was considering options including changes to 'ensure distinct ownership' in various jurisdictions where it operates. Polymetal has already previously revealed it is looking at the possibility of breaking off its Kazakh mines at the request of a group of investors. Update: Polymetal has revealed it is considering various options to boost shareholder value It follows a Financial Times report on Monday, which said Polymetal was considering splitting its Russian business from the rest of the company in efforts to guard its international business against the effects of western sanctions. In response to the speculation, the group said: 'Polymetal is evaluating various options that could maximise shareholder value. 'Such options, among others, include potential modification of asset holding structure which would ensure distinct ownership in various jurisdictions in which the Company operates. 'Early stage deliberations are ongoing and accordingly, there can be no certainty as to the outcome. A further announcement will be made as and when appropriate.' The group has seen an exodus of shareholders, including Norway's sovereign wealth fund, even though it has not been placed directly under UK, US or EU sanctions. On Friday, the gold and silver producer said it had appointed four new board members following the abrupt departure of its British chairman and most of its board of directors this month in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Polymetal said Janat Berdalina, Steven Dashevsky, Evgueni Konovalenko and Paul Ostling were named independent non-executive directors, with effect from 17 March. Berdalina, a consulting professional, has held director positions at several Kazakh entities, while Dashevsky is the chief executive officer at UK-based investment management firm D&P Advisors LLP. Konovalenko is a senior executive at Russian-founded Renaissance Capital. Ostling has served as director at several Russian companies including potash producer Uralkali, besides having helped build E&Y's businesses in Russia and Eastern Europe. Polymetal shares have fallen sharply over the past year, but are up sharply today. The shares were up 39.51 per cent or 96.00p to 339.00p this afternoon. Barclays shares declined the most amongst FTSE 100 firms on Tuesday morning after one of its most prominent investors sold a 900million stake in the banking group. Shares in the financial services giant were down as much as 6 per cent in early trading before recovering to end 2.5 per cent lower at 156.4p, though this still made it the third-biggest faller on the blue-chip index. It marks another blow to the bank this week, which also had its rating from J.P. Morgan downgraded from 'overweight' to 'neutral.' Fall: One of Barclays' most prominent investors sold a 900million stake in the banking group, causing its share price to decline by as much as 6 per cent in early trading The company's tumble on the London markets comes a day after it admitted exceeding the permitted sale of complex security products in the United States by an astounding 11.6billion. This was almost twice the amount it was allowed to sell and has led to the group declaring a recission issue, whereby it must repurchase the oversold notes at the value they were sold, something it warned could cost them around 450million. Barclays revealed investigators are looking into the issue, which concerns two exchange-traded notes linked to oil prices and market volatility. Because of the matter, the business has decided to suspend the 1billion share buyback scheme that it announced in late February until the second quarter. Following this announcement, an unnamed investor offloaded almost 600 million shares in the bank yesterday evening, equivalent to a 3.6 per cent stake, according to financial market data firm Refinitiv. Capital Group offloaded 399 million shares on Monday, according to Eikon data, but it was unclear whether the sale was connected to the transaction managed by Goldman Sachs. Capital Group is one of the world's largest investment firms and parent to the American Funds brand that is popular among millions of U.S. investors and retirement savers. Capital Group declined to comment. Other top Barclays shareholders with around a 3 per cent stake in the lender include the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and Blackrock, according to Eikon data. Blackrock declined to comment when approached by Reuters on Monday, while QIA was not immediately available for comment. QIA last week offloaded 1.2 per cent of miner and commodity trader Glencore for about $1.04billion. Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at trading platform Hargreaves Lansdown, said Barclays had suffered from 'a highly embarrassing turn of events' that was reflected in the company's falling share price. She added: 'The bank now needs a reputation reboot for its investment arm, which had been the shining light during the dark days of the pandemic, when the sharp increase in trading helped offset the provisions for bad loans.' Kingsport, TN (37660) Today Strong thunderstorms likely. Damaging winds, large hail and possibly a tornado with some storms. High 73F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%.. Tonight Overcast with rain showers at times. Thunder possible. Low 56F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%. nftacos.xyz Alcoholic beverage companies are starting to look to the metaverse and NFT's to get closer to their target audience. It's not just about virtual distilleries and exclusive benefits for concerts . No, there are also virtual tacos to celebrate Taco Day on March 31. Cerveza Victoria , a Grupo Modelo brand, has announced that it will be raffling off a series of digital tokens (called Victoria NFTacos !) that can be exchanged for real tacos for an entire year. To participate, users must be of legal age and register on this site. In 2017, at the age of 17, Nick Furnia had taken over the baking island of his parents kitchen as an espresso and cold brew extraction station to make ready-to-drink coffee drinks to sell in glass bottles around Ballston Spa High. If his roasting start was at Wired Coffee in Malta, by age 18 he had graduated, apprenticed with Delmar coffee roaster Brewtus Coffee, trained with The Loft at Irving Farm Coffee Roasters in New York City, with which he partnered on direct trade, and joined the Specialty Coffee Association, a scientific, community-based organization focused on promoting coffee excellence. With help from his father, Brian, Furnia outfitted Nomad Coffee & Crepes on Ballston Spas Milton Avenue, designed the logo of a running coffee cup using graphics skills learned in school, built a client base beyond the confines of the schoolyard and determined coffee production, not college, would be his career path in life. Upstate is as saturated with coffee roasters and coffee shops as the craft breweries that tightly evolved the landscape with regional, then local and hyper-local beers. But not all who roast also craft crepes and upscale cocktails. Over the years, friends mentioned Nomad to me, but my interest was piqued post-pandemic by the Instagram posts featuring Nomad (After Dark). One such pop-up, focused on Japanese cocktail culture, went where I didnt expect a Ballston Spa coffee shop to go with a cocktail night and a menu showcasing the Mizuwari Japanese Whiskey Highball, a gin-and-umeshu umetini and the frothy pineapple-gin Million-Dollar cocktail popularized by Japanese barkeep Shogo Hamada. Who, I had to know, was this guy? Furnia is now the mature 22-year-old owner of Knockabout Coffee Roasters, with a monthly subscription service for which he buys single-source first and second harvests from equally young independent coffee producers in South America, conducting Zoom business in dusty high school Spanish and roasting the imported green beans in a commercial roasters from the manufacturers Mill City and Ozturk on the Furnia family farm. Hes also on the cusp of his next move: expanding Nomad into larger digs just down the road where specialty coffee, cocktails and a chef-led kitchen can be combined under one roof in space larger than the 200 square feet theyve called home for four years. The diminutive Nomad Coffee & Crepes is as snug and cozy as some tiny West Coast wine bar. In a true labor of love, Nick and Brian spent a year salvaging materials for the interior, finding wood from a Ballston Spa barn, corrugated metal sheets for the bar and a vintage typewriter, cowbells and the mechanism of an old-fashioned doorbell for charm. They rigged a 1971 jukebox to play songs for free, anchored the counter with a twin pour-over system made of wood and plumbers pipe, and filled a lending library with tomes from Leon Tolstoy to Herman Hesse. They look right at home, given that the crepes are all named for literary protagonists. Theres Mustapha Mond of Huxleys "Brave New World" and Gregor Samsa, whom Franz Kafka transforms into an insect in "The Metamorphosis." Still, crepe names arent matched to contents, and you can mix-and-match as you please. We borrowed the matcha green tea crepe from a Raoul Duke (Hunter S. Thompsons "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas") and filled it with strawberries, bananas and Nutella from Marion (Molly) Bloom in Joyces "Ulysses." The crepes themselves are thick, arriving in fat laundry folds over oozing cargo. Savory whole wheat lends itself to the task, and the Mustapha Mond, packed with chicken, guacamole, tomato, jack cheese and chile-ranch dressing, stands a good 2 inches tall. While some will go gaga for a chocolate-peppermint crepe or the deeply alluring orange marmalade crepe with flaming Cointreau topping, for me its the brooding stranger Le Meursault, from Albert Camus "LEtranger" that quietly steals the show. A filling of roast beef and horseradish, Asiago, Parmesan and cheddar, crisp lettuce, tomato and onion, feels like a deli sandwich gone rogue. But lets talk drinks. Were in a coffee shop despite a dozen mixed drinks on the menu and OYO Bourbon, Comerlet Coffee Cognac, Vermouth, booze-free Seedlip and Monday Gin on shelves behind the bar. A chalkboard lists the current coffee imports, a choice of two: a dry (natural) roasted Monte Verde from El Salvador with tasting notes of strawberry sweetness and cocoa, grown at an elevation of 1,600 to 1,850 meters above sea level; and a Honduran Manos de Mujer, honey roasted (pulped natural), grown at 1,524 MASL, with notes of tangerine and honey. Espresso drinks, single-origin sipping chocolate and matcha tea are all available, but our server Furnias twin brother recommends a pour-over to really see what theyre about. In 1615, Venetian clergy condemned the coffee entering Europe via silk trade routes as the bitter invention of Satan. It took off, caffeinating minds and placing a coffee shop in every city. Coffee has since circumnavigated the globe, freeze-dried, podified and codified by Starbucks with the high pressure art of espresso giving way to the manual slow craft of pour-overs with extraction and water temp on every baristas mind. Confession: I usually splash milk in my morning coffee or enjoy a flat white, but a pour-over is about grind size, brew time and temperature. A careful pouring of 190- to 205-degree water from a Fellow Stagg gooseneck kettle extracts the maximum taste, aroma and flavor. Our server brings the cup and the rest of the glass vase, the coffee as nuanced and honey brown as steeped tea. In unadulterated form, its easy to detect fruit notes and caramel sweetness. Coffee beans are, after all, the seed of a fruit with as many variations as wine grapes, and flavor is a reflection of terroir and fermentation, like wine. I add nothing to my cup; it needs nothing more. For a mission-driven coffee roaster like Furnia, who talks of similarities in the coffee and chocolate industries and the ugliness of slavery in mass production, it comes down to the exploration and pursuit of flavor and commitment to the producer: In the end, its the farmers name on the bag. Theres beauty in honesty. I ask myself: Did I change this in any way? I dont want to overroast so the beans become black and oily and change the flavor. To talk with Furnia is a seamless flow of production and goals peppered with friendly references to roasters at other coffee companies with whom he confers on processes or beans, suggesting community in ways I hadnt considered. Since you cant see inside equipment while roasting, Furnia found the thinnest thermocouple probes, drilled holes in his roasting machines and connected them via USB hub to his computer to collect data on every batch and every second of roasting time. This is coffee-roasting science, and his roasts are consistent by design. Perhaps more surprising is Furnias interest in farm-to-table cuisine. His inspiration started in his grandmothers Pawling, Ulster County, kitchen, making themed international dinners, and includes at Nighthawks in Troy as the epitome of an exciting, farm-focused menu thats limited, fairly priced, honest and constantly changing based on what they have. If you go Nomad Coffee & Crepes Where: 80 Milton Ave., Ballston Spa Hours: 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday to Monday, closed Tuesday. Biweekly cocktail nights promoted on Instagram. Prices: Crepes, $8 to $11.50; cafe drinks, $2 to $5; alcoholic drinks, $8 to $14 Info: 518-309-4168 and knockaboutcoffee.com See More Collapse It brings us back to Nomad After Dark, for which Furnia planned a cocktail night themed for St. Patricks Day with an Irish Negroni, a cocktail invented at Ramona in New York City, and a dark-berry tequila-black currant cocktail named after Dignam in "Ulysses." Its a thoughtful menu with more detail than most. Since Nick and Brian Furnia also sell used commercial kitchen equipment, a side hustle that can involve pulling ranges out of shuttered New York City kitchens, the new family-owned Nomad crepes and coffee dropped from the name is well underway for a projected opening this fall. TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images Anna Sorokin, the scammer and subject of the popular Netflix series, Inventing Anna, faced imminent deportation from a Hudson Valley immigration detention center back to her home country of Germany. Now, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) confirmed that the woman who swindled hundreds of thousands of dollars from acquaintances and businesses and is currently experiencing newfound notoriety as an artist will temporarily remain in the country, at the Orange County Correctional Facility in Goshen. This is not the first time Sorokin has bought herself more time in the country. The Russian-born woman originally arrived in New York City in 2013, and for four years pretended to be a German heiress by the name of Anna Delvey, conning banks, hotels, monied friends and acquaintances to fund a lavish lifestyle with no intention of repaying. ALBANY Four months after New York banned the slaughter of thoroughbred and standardbred race horses for human or animal consumption, lawmakers central to the change are considering protecting other breeds. "Somewhere down the line, hopefully soon, we can expand it," said state Sen. Joseph P. Addabbo, head of the Senate Committee on Racing, Gaming and Wagering. Sen. Daphne Jordan, the ranking Republican on the committee, said she is open to a "possible expansion of the slaughter law," as is Assemblywoman Carrie Woerner, whose district includes the Saratoga Race Course. The law, which applies only to thoroughbred and standardbred race horses and breeding stock, was met with broad support among horse racing industry members and animal rights activists. But while a more expansive bill could prove simpler to enforce if it removes the need for authorities to identify each horse eligible for protection, that proposal is likely to face resistance from other stakeholders. A separate bill drafted with the intent to ban all horse slaughter has been languishing in the state's agricultural committees for over a decade. "If I had a magic wand and could wave it, I would say no horse should be slaughtered," said Assemblyman J. Gary Pretlow, head of his houses racing and wagering committee. Expanding the anti-slaughter law to additional breeds is "absolutely the intention," but he thinks resistance from the New York Farm Bureau would preclude outlawing horse slaughter altogether. The group is known for pushing back against the decade-old bill. Farm Bureau spokesman Steve Ammerman said that "rather than an outright ban we encourage legislation that would address solutions for dealing with unwanted animals," including euthanasia and aftercare programs. He said it is hard for the group to comment on a bill that has not yet been proposed. Before looking to ban horse slaughter more broadly, though, many racing committee members want to ensure the current law is enforced effectively. The Times Unions ongoing investigative series on New Yorks racing industry found that former New York race horses are still ending up in neighboring states where they can be shipped to Canada and Mexico for their meat; there have been no slaughterhouses permitted to kill horses for human consumption in the U.S. since the mid-2000s. Reporting also showed that the new law banning slaughter sales could face implementation challenges. To find violators, authorities need to identify slaughter-bound horses by breed, though race horses are often trucked across the state mixed with other equines. They must also consider a horses official sale history, and equines often pass between multiple dealers, across state borders and through livestock auctions before they are shipped. "I need to find out from the administration, do they need any particular resources? Is there something budgetarily that we need to put money in, (such as microchip) scanners?" Addabbo said, referring to handheld devices that read the digital identifiers now embedded in the necks of registered thoroughbred and standardbred race horses. "I think we have to figure out a way." Woerner recalled that in a previous legislative hearing, she asked whether police would be trained on how to check microchips on horses transported through the state and who to call if they find New York race horses in the trailers. "I dont really believe that we are doing that well now," she said, though she has not had conversations with police since the law took effect in January. "The State Police is aware of the new law and will investigate cases and take enforcement action when appropriate," said Beau Duffy, a spokesman for the agency. He said they have not charged anyone under the new law. Gov. Kathy Hochul's office said the Gaming Commission has also been working on the horse slaughter issue. Avi Small, a spokesman for the governor, said they will "ensure this administration addresses any existing systemic issues." The New York Racing Association (NYRA), which runs the states largest thoroughbred tracks, initiated its own ban on race horse slaughter in 2009, threatening to revoke the stalls of any owner or trainer who sold a horse for meat. But its thoroughbreds have continued to land in the slaughter pipeline. The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote. "There have been no instances where a trainer occupying stall space at NYRA has been proven to have sent a horse under his or her care to slaughter" since 2009, said Patrick McKenna, a NYRA spokesman. The NYRA rule does not apply to people who buy race horses from NYRA-registered owners or trainers and sell them for slaughter later on. Pretlow said the new law is different, holding the last registered owner of each slaughter-bound race horse accountable, regardless of who they are. "Theyre responsible for that horse. If that horse cannot be produced (when authorities ask), then it will be assumed that they did something wrong," Pretlow said. But he noted it would be difficult to catch trucks with slaughter-bound horses driving in from out-of-state, like those entering from Pennsylvania on their way to Canada as described in the Times Union's investigation. "The police generally wont have probable cause to stop those to inspect the cargo. ... I cant be responsible for race horses that start in Pennsylvania," Pretlow said, adding he does hope the "State Police would find reasons to stop" trucks and scan horses for microchips. Jordan said she believes it's the responsibility of the Senate racing committee to ensure the current law is implemented effectively; Woerner said she thinks the race horses, who have an average life span of nearly 30 years, "deserve a kind retirement." Susan Wagner runs a local industry-accredited horse sanctuary, one of the places a retired New York thoroughbred race horse might end up. Programs like hers were singled out in the current law to benefit from the funds accrued from misdemeanor penalties. Wagner thinks the New York bill should be more expansive, saying its restriction to thoroughbreds and standardbreds "is terrible because it's like saying it's OK to slaughter some (horses) but not others." But she also feels the goal of state slaughter bans is mostly to build change at a federal level, since porous state borders will make it difficult to catch violators. She noted that if a New York owner sells their horse at auction or to any out-of-state buyer, as they often do, that New Yorker cannot be held responsible if the new owner decides to ship the horse to slaughter. Pretlow said that in light of the challenges, his staff is looking into contacting Pennsylvanias racing entities to get them on board with a similar anti-slaughter framework. OGDENSBURG Regent Beverly L. Ouderkirk, who represented much of the North Country on the state Board of Regents, has died at age 82. The longtime North Country educator known as "Bev" to colleagues, family and friends passed away on March 23. Ouderkirk had over 50 years of experience in public education when she was appointed to the 17-member Board of Regents in 2015. Regents Chancellor Lester W. Young Jr. and state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa mourned her passing in a joint statement Tuesday. "The North Country educational community, and all of New York, benefited from Regent Ouderkirks tenacity, drive, and passion for helping students and educators succeed," Young and Rosa said. They noted that Ouderkirk, who represented 11 counties on the board, "made it her mission to visit as many schools as possible," putting countless miles on her own car. She was known to greet students, teachers and staff with hugs. "Regent Ouderkirk was more than a colleague," Young and Rosa said. "She was a thoughtful and trusted contributor to the work of educating New Yorks children and a dear friend to her fellow Board members." Colleagues and friends shared memories of Ouderkirk, describing her as caring, warm and generous with her time. "Her dedication to all the school districts she represented was inspiring ... She always had time for us, WSWHE BOCES District Superintendent of Schools James Dexter said in a statement. In October, Ouderkirk joined Rosa on a visit to Queensbury Union Free School District. During the visit, her focus was on the students; she sought their opinions on policies that affected them, according to Queensbury Superintendent Kyle L. Gannon. "She truly cared about all school districts ... She was an inspiration to all educators," Gannon said in a statement on the district website. Ouderkirk began her career as a kindergarten teacher and spent two decades teaching in various elementary and special education classrooms in the Jordan-Elbridge and Weedsport Central school districts, in Onondaga and Cayuga counties, respectively. The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote. Later, she served in numerous administrative and leadership roles, including as superintendent of Morristown (St. Lawrence County), Tioga (Tioga County) and Valley (Orange County) school districts before becoming a BOCES district superintendent in Western New York, according to her biography on the state Education Department website. Charlotte Gregory, a former colleague and longtime friend of Ouderkirk, wrote on a memorial page that they became superintendents together at a time when there were few women in the role. "Commissioner Gordon Ambach called our group to a meeting in Albany and announced we were his first class under his leadership," she wrote. "Bev and I traveled together, roomed together at conferences and consulted each other many times. She often told me about her family and the times together she enjoyed with them." Following her first retirement, Ouderkirk frequently stepped into the role of interim superintendent, mentored new superintendents and served as a consultant to various boards of education. She served on numerous boards and committees advocating for students with disabilities. She raised three now-adult sons, fostered a child with disabilities and hosted foreign exchange students in her home. She's also survived by six grandchildren. She was an active member of her community in Ogdensburg, St. Lawrence County, and at one point co-owned a tour boat that traveled up and down the St. Lawrence River. SCHENECTADY A driver in a 2019 Halloween night crash that killed a single mother was in court Monday for the opening arguments in his non-jury murder trial. In his opening statements, District Attorney Robert Carney argued Oscar Lopez is guilty of "murder by depraved indifference" for the crash that claimed the life of Amanda Slaven of Rotterdam. Carney said Oscar Lopez was heavily intoxicated and high on cocaine and marijuana, hurtling the wrong way down a two-lane road at nearly triple the posted speed limit of 35 mph in Rotterdam, when his pickup slammed into Slaven's much smaller car and causing her death. The district attorney on Monday told Schenectady County Court Judge Matthew Sypniewski, who will decide the defendants fate, that shortly after midnight on Nov. 1, 2019, Lopezs older model Chevy Silverado became an almost 3-ton missile that literally crushed the life out of Amanda Slaven after numerous people at two different Halloween parties, including his pregnant girlfriend, had tried to stop him from getting behind the wheel. At the time, Lopez's driver's license was revoked and he was sporting a Spider-Man costume to match the one worn by his then 2-year-old son. The fatal collision near the intersection of Chism and Hamburg streets in Rotterdam, which Carney said was captured on surveillance cameras, was "murder by depraved indifference" by the defendant who "purposefully drove as recklessly as he could." But Lopezs defense attorney, Adam Eggleston, while acknowledging his client was drunk and high that night, countered that the evidence will show Slaven had an "astronomical amount " of prescription medication in her system at the time of the crash and was also driving impaired. He argued that after attending a children's Halloween party in Albany early that day, Lopez, then 31, didn't drive but instead got a ride to a second gathering at the home of his girlfriend's uncle and is not guilty of the most serious count of second-degree murder. The defendant, a father of three, is also charged with three counts of aggravated vehicular homicide, aggravated driving while intoxicated, driving while ability impaired by the combined influence of alcohol and drugs, and two counts of aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle. Eggleston also challenged a linchpin of the prosecution's argument, that an already intoxicated Lopez grew increasingly angry and out of control after hitting his girlfriend late Halloween night when she got out their stopped vehicle with their young son on the side of the road because of Lopezs dangerous driving and repeated refusal to let her take the wheel. A good Samaritan stopped and helped the woman. The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote. Lopez eventually made it back to his hometown of Rotterdam without incident where he spoke with his girlfriends brother and later two neighbors before what Eggleston described in court as a "tragic accident" after his client made a "poor choice" to get back behind the wheel of his truck. Your honor, I think the evidence will show that Oscar did not possess a mental state of depraved indifference to human life, said Eggleston, who argued that the prosecution was attempting to make the facts fit a theory and that "driving at a high rate of speed is not inherently reckless." Carney told the judge that Lopez was airlifted to Albany Medical Center Hospital where he consented to a blood alcohol content test that came back at 0.19 and then a second test of 0.20. He also said that the results from the accident reconstruction by Colonie police will show Slaven's Honda was traveling at 14 miles per hour while making a turn, a speed that increased to 44 miles per hour after she was struck, while Lopez's Silverado went from 93 to 94 miles per hour when he hit her and that the pickup truck ended up entirely in the southbound lane even though he had been traveling in the opposite direction. Slaven, a 33-year-old single mother of a then 9-year-old son who worked for the state, died at the scene of massive trauma. The trial is slated to resume Tuesday morning. ALBANY A deal to replace New Yorks much-criticized ethics commission is taking shape in the final days of state budget talks. The plan under discussion among the Democrats who control state government would make several major changes to the enforcement of ethics and lobbying laws, but state lawmakers would continue to appoint the panels members raising questions about the independence of the regulatory body. Senate Democrats and Gov. Kathy Hochuls office are said to have tentatively agreed on most aspects of a new 11-member "Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government." Assembly Democrats are open to an agreement but it's unclear if they would seek any significant changes, including the appointment process that has been a point of debate. The proposal under consideration may receive a negative review from good-government groups if it is too similar to the dysfunctional Joint Commission on Public Ethics that would be dismantled. "They don't really do anything to add to independence in the process," said John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, when told about the plan. "If this was the final adopted proposal, it would be harshly criticized because it doesnt rein in the worst aspect of JCOPE, which is that you have commissioners determining penalties and investigations for the people that directly appointed them." The process would entail legislative leaders and the three statewide elected officials nominating a "pool" of applicants for the commission. Those applicants would be vetted by New York law school deans to determine qualifications, using criteria ranging from their professional backgrounds to their geographic diversity. Some would be barred from serving, including lobbyists and political party chairs. The final 11 selections from the pool of qualified applicants would be made directly by top New York elected officials. Three ethics commission members would be appointed by the governor, two by the Senate majority leader, two by the Assembly speaker, one by the Assembly minority leader, one by the Senate minority leader, one by the attorney general and one by the comptroller. That contrasts with JCOPE, which has 14 members: Eight appointed by both houses of the Legislature and six by the governor. Created in 2011 when Senate Republicans held a majority JCOPE is structured to give significant voice to the GOP. But Democrats now hold both houses of the Legislature and the governorship, as well as the attorney general and comptroller offices; Republicans would have diminished influence under the plan being discussed. The diminished role of New Yorks 15 accredited law school deans in the appointment process is apparently a residual idea from Hochul's proposal in January to have those school leaders pick five commissioners, a nonstarter with a state Legislature that still wants sway over the appointment process. The new entity would be subject to the Freedom of Information Law, a contrast with JCOPE, which has been criticized for its secrecy. And JCOPEs "special voting" rules would be eliminated: instead of a small number of commissioners being allowed to veto an investigation of a state official, investigations would be decided by a simple majority vote of the 11 members. In her plan released in January, Hochul had proposed both those key changes to the status quo. Another criticism of JCOPE was that former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo held too much influence. Under the new plan, the governor would no longer appoint the chair of the commission, who would instead be appointed by a vote of the other commissioners. And the executive director of the panel would be responsible for hiring the staff. According to a person with direct knowledge of the discussions, the "pool" idea has been the subject of debate in the Assembly Democratic conference. The Assembly could go along with the Senates plan, or perhaps, push for the Legislature and three statewide elected officials to make 11 appointments at the outset, with law school deans then approving their qualifications at the end of the process. On Tuesday morning, good-government groups held a news conference outlining their own plan to replace JCOPE, which they said would be a standard by which Hochul and the Legislatures plan would be judged. The good-government groups' proposal envisions a seven-person "selection committee" appointed by New York's three statewide elected officials and the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Legislature's two houses. In turn, the seven-person committee would select a new, five-person ethics commission. More for you Hochul's ethics overhaul plan wilts but new plan is pushed Under the groups' plan, members of the public could apply to be on the ethics commission. The seven-person selection committee would create a final list of candidates, using ranked-choice voting, with the list released 15 days before a public meeting to vote on the five commission members. Kaehny said that if the Legislature and governor used ranked-choice voting to pick the final 11 commissioners, it would lessen the problem of elected officials directly appointing the members. The plan under discussion by Hochul and the Legislature, Kaehny said, "adds more moving pieces, but is very very similar to what we have now." Reducing the commissioners from 14 to 11, adding the attorney general and comptroller as appointing authorities, and changing the special voting rules are positive points, Kaehny said. The offices of Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday. "Gov. Hochul has been clear that the current structure of JCOPE is irrevocably broken, and that she is committed to bold reforms," said Hochul's press secretary, Hazel Crampton-Hays. "The governor has been working with stakeholders to develop strong ethics reforms, and in the governors State of the State, she proposed establishing a new truly independent ethics oversight entity." Everton Fixtures April 2022 Preview by | 29/03/2022 Alex Iwobi's last-gasp winner fired Everton to an all-important 1-0 home triumph over Newcastle United, ending their frustrating run of four straight Premier League defeats. But Frank Lampard's side can ill-afford to rest on their laurels, as their hopes of avoiding the drop are still up in the air. Going into the business end of the 2021/22 season, the Toffees sit just three points clear of 18th-placed Watford in the Premier League table. The bookmakers at newbettingsites.com.au and other betting sites give Everton a good chance to avoid the drop, but when have we ever played by the odds? With two games in hand on the Hornets, Everton hold their survival bid firmly in their hands ahead of their hectic April schedule. Article continues below video content West Ham United Everton's first post-international break Premier League fixture pits them against European-battling West Ham United at the London Stadium. After falling to a 1-0 defeat at Goodison back in October, the Toffees stare at the prospect of suffering their first league double to the Hammers since 1972/73. Yet, David Moyes' men have struggled with inconsistent performances, alternating between victories and defeats across their last four Premier League outings (W2, L2). Therefore, Everton cannot afford to throw in the towel despite their status as pre-match underdogs. Burnley Just three days after their visit to the nation's capital, Lampard's side will take a trip to Turf Moor to take on Burnley in a relegation six-pointer. Only four points currently separate Everton from 19th-placed Clarets, who headed into March's international break on a run of three consecutive league defeats. A potential victory in the Lancashire, where the Toffees are winless in their last two top-flight visits (D1, L1), would be a massive coup for the Merseysiders. Manchester United Everton's bid to secure Premier League survival will face a stern test in the shape of Manchester United on April 9. The Toffees held Ralf Rangnick's side to a 1-1 draw in the reverse fixture at Old Trafford, but another stalemate may not suffice this time around given the circumstances. Unfortunately, the Merseysiders have lost both previous competitive meetings with Man United on home turf by a two-goal margin. Meanwhile, Man United loanee Donny van de Beek has gone from strength to strength since moving to Goodison in January. But his stay in Merseyside is hanging in the balance as Ajax boss Erik ten Hag leads the race to take over the Red Devils in the summer, as per the Daily Mirror. Leicester City Everton will have 11 days to rest and prepare themselves for another formidable challenge in the form of mid-table Leicester City. Brendan Rodgers' men regained their confidence ahead of the international break, racking up three wins from their last four league outings (L1), including a 2-1 home victory over Brentford last time out. However, the Toffees have enjoyed facing Leicester of late, having won twice across their last three top-flight H2Hs, barring a 1-1 draw in the reverse fixture at the King Power Stadium. Liverpool The 60th edition of the famous Merseyside derby in the Premier League will serve to round off Everton's action in April. Lampard's side will carry revenge on their minds when the two sides lock horns at Anfield following an embarrassing 4-1 defeat at Goodison earlier this season. But the Reds, who have returned in contention for the Premier League title after nine successive league victories, boast a clear advantage in the overall H2H record. Liverpool have won 25 of their 59 Premier League encounters against Everton, who have just ten triumphs to their name, with 24 draws. Return to Talking Points index : Add your Comments Note: the following content is not moderated or vetted by the site owners at the time of submission. Comments are the responsibility of the poster. Disclaimer About these ads ToffeeWeb We've talked about Missouri legislation targeting our recently "fully accredited" schools earlier in the year, now here are more deets about pending legislation that could change the course of public education in Kansas City. The political intrigue is somewhat interesting whereas most residents across all demographic lines have walked away from the KCPS en masse. Still, the policy deserves a peek . . . One bill, HB 1552, would update the funding model that dictates how much school districts must give to charter schools within their jurisdiction. Another bill, HB 1814, would allow students whose families pay a certain amount in taxes to attend any school district of their choosing. Both bills loom large for the Kansas City region, where charter schools are plentiful and school districts tend to be compact and their boundaries easily crossed. Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . . Probably not. But do their credit . . . Progressives don't seem too excited about this Hillary Clinton Democrat getting into the fray. We sense more than a bit of skepticism from this quick write-up . . . Beer heiress Trudy Busch Valentine, a registered nurse, is a member of the family that owned a majority stake in Anheuser-Busch until it was sold to InBev in 2008 for $52 billion. Forbes magazine in 2020 listed the familys wealth at $17.6 billion, the 16th largest family fortune in the nation. How much of that is her personal wealth is uncertain. The campaign will be Valentines first run for public office, although she is well-known in Democratic political circles. According to data from the Federal Election Commission, Valentine contributed $116,000 to Democratic party and candidate committees from 2015 through 2020. And in 2016, Valentine hosted a fundraiser at Grants Farm, the Busch family estate, for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . . Beer heiress joins Missouri Democratic primary for U.S. Senate * Missouri Independent Beer heiress Trudy Busch Valentine entered the Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate on Monday, giving the party a candidate who could potentially match Republican spending this year out of her own pocket. In a three-minute video announcing her campaign, Valentine says she is entering the race to bridge divisive politics but provides no specifics on issues facing the nation. Busch beer heiress Valentine enters Missouri US Senate race JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - Anheuser-Busch beer heiress Trudy Busch Valentine is running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat. The daughter of the late chairman of the Anheuser-Busch Companies officially filed her candidacy for retiring Republican U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt's seat Monday. You decide . . . This bit of bright side Monday news deserves a look if only because of so much fear on the horizon and naive hope that TKC will be able to return to local coffee shops and maybe get slapped in public just like Chris Rock. Here's a peek good news . . . "The hospital also shared a photo of the medical and surgical trauma intensive care unit team. This was the very first team to treat COVID-19 patients at Saint Luke's Hospital of Kansas City at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 two years ago." Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com links . . . 'Special occasion for hope': Saint Luke's Hospital of Kansas City celebrates no COVID-19 patients in ICU Officials at Saint Luke's Hospital of Kansas City are celebrating what they call a rare moment. Currently, there are no COVID-19 patients in the hospital's intensive care units. "While the pandemic is not yet over, this moment is a special occasion for hope and celebration," officials said in a post on Facebook. Theft from the Covid relief plan known as PPP was even worse than we thought They bought Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bentleys. And Teslas, of course. Lots of Teslas. Many who participated in what prosecutors are calling the largest fraud in American history-the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money intended to help those harmed by the pandemic - couldn't resist purchasing luxury automobiles. U.S. expands COVID-19 vaccinations of migrants in border custody The Biden administration is expanding efforts to vaccinate migrants in U.S. custody against the coronavirus as border authorities prepare for potential policy changes that could increase the number of people they need to process, according to a notification shared with Congress and obtained by CBS News. U.S. You decide . . . Life as a local Catholic involves a great deal of guilt, shame and self-hate . . . Today the newspaper decided to pile on. Here's yet another bit of racial divisiveness directed against some of the last remaining people in this cowtown who actually care about being faithful . . . "St. Monica, a largely Black Catholic Church on Kansas Citys East Side, and Visitation, a mostly white Catholic church near the Country Club Plaza, partnered to host a discussion on racial justice. The churches invited congregants from other parishes around town and the general public to join. About 150 people filled St. Monicas fellowship hall and found places at 19 tables, each seating a diverse group. Folks then were presented with three questions designed to generate talk about race. And it worked. Of course those who came had some idea in advance what they had signed up for and were willing to listen and engage." Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . . A terrifying tradition resurfaces this Springtime in Kansas City. The old school street art is nearly as scary as the future of retail and/or so many progressive activists burning down this place in the name of social justice . . . "We're so excited, you know, signs of spring. Signs of warm weather," Kendra Goodman, Country Club Plaza, said. We have our tulips popping up and all the flowers coming back. Just kinda signs of Kansas City coming back to life and warmer weather." The eight life-size bunny statues are about 100 years old. There are also other animal statues that people can look for when they visit the Plaza. Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . . Starbucks continues to implode in and around the metro as their employees make it harder to serve some of the most overpriced java on the planet. Take a peek . . . In their letter to Howard Shultz, two-time and current interim CEO of Starbucks, the Lawrence workers discussed the need for unionization to truly make the employees partners (as Starbucks refers to them). We realize now that this partnership can only truly be possible through collective bargaining guaranteeing us a living wage, safer working conditions, stability of employment, and a say in our place of work, the employees wrote in the letter. Youve left us with no choice but to come togetherto rebalance the scales of this relationship. Unionizing will make this title a reality: we are Partners truly becoming Partners. Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . . It's Slap's BBQ of course!!! Something to consider . . . No, this isn't promo for the local biz and probably not condoned by their branding experts BUT we like their story nevertheless . . . Slaps BBQ (Squeal Like a Pig) opened in June of 2014 and started with just a few hundred pounds of meat. The KCK Central Ave location is a hidden treasure for fans of our local cuisine. And so far this local spin on the Will Smith "controversy" has been my favorite chuckle. Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com links . . . Could Will Smith lose his Oscar? Explaining the Academy's code of conduct Will Smith may be asked to hand back his Best Actor statuette following his live onstage assault of Chris Rock, industry insiders told The Post. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which handed out awards Sunday at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, has strict guidelines in its code of conduct. Jada Pinkett Smith Breaks Silence After Will Smith Hit Chris Rock at Oscars: 'Season for Healing' The actress posted a message on her Instagram that read, "This is a season for healing and I'm here for it." Jada's statement comes after Will, 53, issued an apology of his own on Monday, writing, "Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive. Will Smith's Oscars Slap of Chris Rock Prompts One-Liners and Worry From Comedians When Will Smith retaliated for a joke at the Oscars by slapping Chris Rock, fellow comedians saw the incident from two angles: as a rich source of material for themselves, and as an assault on one of their own. "As Rock got hit, I got hit. Will Smith Made the Oscars Memorable A hit! A palpable hit! For years, people have wondered what to do with the Academy Awards. How do you freshen them up-make them topical, urgent, and crisp? How do you bring back the television audience, which has sunk to such drastic levels that the only guaranteed viewers are the immediate family members of the nominees, plus their more intelligent pets? 'King Richard' weighs in on Will Smith's slap of Chris Rock at Oscars The father of Venus and Serena Williams said Monday he condemns violence a day after Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock at the Oscars ceremony - and then won an Academy Award for playing him in the movie "King Richard." "We don't know all the details of what happened," Richard Williams, via his son Chavoita LeSane, told NBC News. Will Smith's mother: 'That's the first time I've ever seen him go off' Carolyn Smith, Will Smith's mother, was gathered with family at her home in the Philadelphia suburbs Sunday night, excited to watch her son at the Academy Awards. There's only one way Will Smith can make amends: give the award back Opinion Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Today, Will Smith apologised to Chris Rock for slapping him in the face during the Oscars on Sunday night. This apology is, of course, a good thing. Smith was way out of line. There is value in his publicly acknowledging this. Developing . . . Ontarios wastewater signal is down markedly from its recent spring peak last month, meaning infections are also declining. Toronto police investigate a shooting at a bus stop in the Guildwood Parkway and Livingston Road area, just before 12:30 p.m. Monday. Sir Wilfrid Laurier C.I., across the street from the shooting, was in lockdown while police investigated. - Dan Pearce/Metroland Police searching for suspect believed to be armed and dangerous in connection with stabbing in downtown Toronto THE REOPENING OF CITADINES SUKHUMVIT 8 BANGKOK (TRAVPR.COM) THAILAND - March 29th, 2022 - Bangkok, Thailand, 25 March 2022 CapitaLand's wholly-owned serviced residence business subsidiary, The Ascott, announces the Citadines Sukhumvit 8 Bangkok has completed its renovation and reopened for business with SHA Plus+ accreditation. With its new rooms, public spaces, and lobby, this renovated apart-hotel is ready to welcome all visitors back and make all stay even more enjoyable for a restful recharge. Situated in a tranquil residential area of the city centre, this apart-hotel is an ideal base to explore Bangkok's attractions. It's close to parks, office buildings, shopping malls, and restaurants, and it offers a free tuk-tuk shuttle service between the residence and other popular destinations. The location is ideal for both business and pleasure travellers who want to see Bangkok's many different attractions. "We are excited to welcome back the newly renovated Citadines Sukhumvit 8 Bangkok and show our guests what it's like to benefit from a living experience that prioritises comfort and offers the flexibility of personalised services to suit each resident's lifestyle. We can't wait to see what our guests think." said Mr. Brian Tan, Country General Manager for Ascott in Thailand and Laos. Citadines Sukhumvit 8 Bangkok offers 130 stylish units of studios, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments with a fully-equipped kitchenette and separate living areas. There is a fitness area, an outdoor pool, and business facilities, among many other things that make this apart-hotel unique. For reservations or more information, contact +66 2 204 4400, 1800 888 272 (Thailand toll-free), e-mail: enquiry.thailand@the-ascott.com or visit www.discoverasr.com About The Ascott Limited The Ascott Limited is a member of CapitaLand Investment. It is one of the leading international lodging owner-operators with properties across Asia Pacific, Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the USA. Its portfolio of serviced apartment, coliving and hotel brands includes Ascott The Residence, The Crest Collection, Somerset, Quest, Citadines, lyf, Preference, Vertu, Harris, Citadines Connect, Fox, Yello, Fox Lite and POP!. About CapitaLand Investment Limited Headquartered and listed in Singapore, CapitaLand Investment Limited (CLI) is a leading global real estate investment manager (REIM) with a strong Asia foothold. As at 30 September 2021, CLI had about S$120.8 billion of real estate assets under management, and about S$84.3 billion of real estate funds under management (FUM) held via six listed real estate investment trusts and business trusts, and 30 private funds across the Asia-Pacific, Europe and USA. Its diversified real estate asset classes cover integrated developments, retail, office, lodging and new economy sectors such as business parks, industrial, logistics and data centres. CLI aims to scale its FUM and fee-related earnings through its full stack of investment management and operating capabilities. As the listed investment management business arm of the CapitaLand Group, CLI has access to the development capabilities of and pipeline investment opportunities from CapitaLands development arm. Being a part of the well-established CapitaLand ecosystem differentiates CLI from other REIMs. As part of the CapitaLand Group, CLI places sustainability at the core of what it does. As a responsible real estate company, CLI contributes to the environmental and social well-being of the communities where it operates, as it delivers long-term economic value to its stakeholders. Visit http://www.capitalandinvest.com/ for more information. Issued by: Ascott International Management (Thailand) Limited Website: www.the-ascott.com Address: No.219/43, 12th floor, Asoke Towers, Soi Asoke, Sukhumvit 21 Rd., North Klongtoey, Wattana Bangkok 10110 Thailand For more information, please contact: Myra Regner, Director of Sales & Marketing Tel: (66-2) 204 4340, Email: myra.regner@the-ascott.com Chotiphat Tangkiatsilp, Director of Marketing Communications Tel: (66-2) 204 4337, Email: chotiphat.t@the-ascott.com Sarina Osman, Marketing Manager Tel: (66-2) 204 4381, Email: sarina.o@the-ascott.com ### Two of the four green-band-maxi-taxi routes yet to implement a fare increase will be doing so, come Monday. Meantime discussions are underway with respect to raising fares on a third route, but the Route 3 Maxi-Taxi Association is giving its clients the opportunity to suggest a reasonable increase. Rynessa Cutting has more. Elisabeth Martinez and Alba Ortega. 28/03/2022 Institucional Alba Ortega, doctoral Student of the program on Biomedicine, will represent the University of Barcelona in the Coimbra Group contest 3-Minute Thesis. The student was chosen out of several researchers in an event on Monday, March 28, where Elisabeth Martinez, from the program on Engineering and Applied Sciences, was among the finalists. Alba Ortega, member of the Institute of Neurosciences of the UB (UBNeuro) summarizes her research: I study the role of a protein called neural cell adhesion molecule 2 (NCAM2) in the molecular mechanisms of neuronal plasticity. These are the mechanisms that make memory and learning possible during life, and they include the synaptic plasticity, which would be the changes in connections between neurons, and adult neurogenesis, which is the formation of neurons over the course of life. A better understanding of the adult neurogenesis mechanisms will contribute to promote the advances in the field of cognitive learning, memory and the fight against neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers. The 3-Minute Thesis contest challenges doctoral students to explain their research in English, and in three minutes, to a general audience. It supports the doctoral students findings and it encourages them to talk about the research they carry out and explain its importance to the community. The Doctoral School will soon open two calls to represent the UB in tow more contests: the 4-Minute Thesis by the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation, and Your Doctoral Thesis in a Twitter Thread: #HiloTesis by CRUE Spanish Universities. The University of Barcelona is the only institution in Spain to take part in the three contests. All the information about the contests is available on the La UB Divulga site. Russia has currently accumulated more military equipment in the Kursk region than it was on February 24, the day Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to Ukrinform, the Operational Armed Forces of Ukraine reported this on Telegram, referring to the information provided by a spokesman for the international intelligence community InformNapalm, Mykhailo Makaruk. "Russia continues regrouping troops and accumulating obsolete equipment. Currently, there is more military equipment in the Kursk region, which is located near the Ukrainian border, than it was on February 24, the report says. As Ukrinform reported, as of February 16, Russia deployed 125,000 ground troops on the border with Ukraine, whereas the total number of Russian troops with a naval and air component amounted to about 140,000. In the temporarily occupied territories in eastern Ukraine, the Russian Federation maintained 35,000 mercenaries. Photo credit: t.me/operativnoZSU At night, two missiles were launched on the city of Lviv from the territory of Belarus, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine destroyed them about 30 kilometers away from the city. The relevant statement was made by the Air Force Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Telegram, an Ukrinform correspondent reports. In the evening of March 28, 2022, from the territory of Belarus, the occupiers fighter launched two X-type missiles towards the city of Lviv. The targets were timely detected by the radio-technical forces and destroyed by the anti-aircraft missile units about 30 kilometers away from the city, the report states. In addition, the anti-aircraft missile units shot down two enemy operational and technical unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Photo: Air Force Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine mk Russian troops fire an average of 40 missiles a day on Ukrainian populated localities. 40 missiles. Every day, Russian troops use so many different but equally deadly missiles against our state, against Ukraine. This is the average number per day, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said in his video address to the Parliament of Denmark, the Folketing. More than 1,370 missiles have been launched in just over a month of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the President noted. Moreover, the total number of means of destruction that Russian troops have already used against our people on our land is simply impossible to count, Zelensky said. On February 24, Russian president Putin declared war on Ukraine and launched a large-scale invasion. Russian troops shell and destroy infrastructure, massively fire on the residential areas of Ukrainian cities, towns, and villages using artillery, MLRS, missiles, and aviation bombs. ol Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba says Ukraine's position in negotiations with the Russian Federation is supported by international law, the Armed Forces, and sanctions. Kuleba addressed the issue on the air of the national telethon, Ukrinform reports with reference to the Foreign Ministry. The President of Ukraine gave very clear instructions to our delegation. We do not trade in people, land, and sovereignty. Our position is made of reinforced concrete. It is supported by international law, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, international sanctions that have been applied against Russia, and weapons that have been transferred and are being transferred to Ukraine to defend itself against the aggressor," the Minister stressed. According to the top diplomat, the minimum result Ukraine will try to achieve in the negotiations in Turkey is resolving humanitarian issues. The maximum agenda is about a ceasefire and reaching stable agreements. "We are looking forward to the talks of the two delegations to see if the Russians come to these talks ready to really agree on something or just repeat their demands, which we have been hearing from the beginning. If we see that the mood has changed and they are ready for a serious, substantive conversation and balanced arrangements, then things will move forward. If it is a repetition of their propaganda templates behind closed doors, they will just leave the same way they came," Kuleba said. He stated that so far no agreements have been reached as such. Instead, there has been an exchange of thoughts, suggestions, and ideas. Contacts of Ukraine's partners with the Russian side continue at different levels and in different formats, aimed at encouraging Russia to take a more constructive position. The Foreign Minister especially thanked Turkey for its leadership in mediation efforts and for stimulating the negotiation process. The Minister pointed out that throughout this month, Russias public position gradually changed from voicing plans to capture key cities of Ukraine just a few days before explaining that hostilities are limited to the seizure of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. According to the Kuleba, the issue of holding a referendum will not be discussed at the talks in Turkey on March 29, as it is Ukraines internal affair. The President of Ukraine always focuses on the position of the people, the position of Ukrainians. We have come a long way in this month of national unity. I rule out a situation when the government would do something against the will of the people," said the head of Ukrainian diplomacy. As Ukrinform reported earlier, the Istanbul talks between the delegations of Ukraine and the Russian Federation may begin on March 29 at 10:00 local time. In a conversation with Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed gratitude for assistance in combating the Russian aggression and the exceptional attitude to Ukrainian refugees in the Czech Republic. The relevant statement was made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Twitter, an Ukrinform correspondent reports. I have thanked Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala for assisting the Ukrainian people in the fight against the Russian aggression. Noted a significant humanitarian, security assistance, the exceptional attitude to the Ukrainian refugees, who received a temporary protection status in the Czech Republic. We really appreciate this! Zelensky wrote. A reminder that the Czech Republic has frozen the assets of Russian citizens and companies affected by the EU sanctions, which were introduced after Russia initiated a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The value of such assets is several hundred millions of Czech korunas. Photo: Office of the President of Ukraine mk Over 125 trucks with aid, ambulances, and fire engines from Romania and other European Union Member States have arrived in Ukraine through the humanitarian hub in Suceava. I discussed with President Zelensky the critical situation in Ukraine. Romania will continue to take good care of every Ukrainian citizen arriving in Romania. Over 125 trucks with aid, ambulances, and fire engines from Romania and other EU Member States have arrived in Ukraine through the humanitarian hub in Suceava, President of Romania Klaus Iohannis posted on Twitter following talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukrinform reports. On March 28, volunteers from Romania donated humanitarian aid to the children of internally displaced persons in Chernivtsi region. ol | By Laura Hager In the newly released 2023 edition of U.S. News and World Reports Americas Best Graduate Schools, the University of Maryland School of Nursing (UMSON) is among the top 10 best public schools in the nation for its overall Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) and Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) programs, out of 601 accredited nursing schools surveyed. UMSONs DNP program is ranked at No. 4 among public schools of nursing (No. 13 among all ranked schools), and the MSN program is ranked at No. 9 among public schools (No. 21 among all ranked schools). UMSONs top-ranked DNP specialties among all ranked schools include: Among public schools of nursing, UMSON ranked No. 1 in the nation for the Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) and Adult-Gerontology Primary Care Nurse Practitioner (AGPCNP) DNP specialties. The schools FNP specialty is offered both in Baltimore and at the Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville, Maryland, an effort to expand FNP education to better meet the needs of nurses and to prepare them to practice in underserved areas in the western, more rural portion of the state. UMSONs AGPCNP specialty is focused on providing care to adolescent and adult patients, ages 13 and up, in addition to an expanding senior population. UMSONs FNP and AGPCNP programs boast a 100 percent pass rate on the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners Certification Board exam for its 2021 graduates. UMSON also ranked in the top 3 among public schools of nursing for Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (No. 2), Pediatric Primary Care Nurse Practitioner (No. 2), and Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner/Adult-Gerontology Clinical Nurse Specialist (No. 3). It is gratifying to continue to be recognized nationally for our Master of Science in Nursing and Doctor of Nursing Practice programs, said Jane M. Kirschling, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Bill and Joanne Conway Dean of the University of Maryland School of Nursing. We continue to play a vital role in efforts within Maryland and nationally to increase the number of nurses with advanced education at the masters and doctoral level. We believe this is essential to ensuring that our graduates are well-prepared to meet the needs of patients and their families at a time when the health care system is increasingly complex with a growing percentage of older adults and a far more diverse population overall. The U.S. News & World Report rankings are based on a variety of indicators, including student selectivity and program size, faculty resources, and research activity, and on survey data from deans of schools of nursing that are accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education or the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing. Dear Members of the UMass community, I am pleased to present my 2022 State of the University address today as we approach the culmination of our academic year. As an alumnus of the university and a lifelong resident of Massachusetts, I am inspired by our five nationally recognized universities that annually educate 75,000 students, generate nearly $700 million of research, and drive $7.5 billion of economic activity across the Commonwealth from our capital city of Boston to the Pioneer Valley, from the SouthCoast to the Merrimack Valley, and through the burgeoning city of Worcester. Our leadership teams, faculty, staff and students have answered the call to keep our communities healthy and safe, our students progressing toward their degrees, and our university on solid financial ground throughout a two-year global pandemic. As we emerge from this extraordinary challenge, I want to advance a conversation about the future for the University of Massachusetts in particular and higher education in general and our collective obligation as centers of learning, discovery and reason to confront challenges that our country and the world face. Thank you for all that you do to support the University of Massachusetts. Sincerely, Marty Meehan President, University of Massachusetts Rohingya refugee children play after heavy rainfall in a camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. UNHCR/Amos Halder As the Rohingya refugee response in Bangladesh is well advanced in its fifth year, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and partners are calling once more for robust and sustained international support for refugees and the Bangladeshi communities generously hosting them. The 2022 Joint Response Plan (JRP) for the Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis is being launched today (Tuesday, 29 March). Humanitarian agencies are seeking more than US$881 million to support approximately 1.4 million people, including over 918,000 Rohingya refugees in Coxs Bazar and Bhasan Char, and around 540,000 Bangladeshis in neighbouring communities. Under the leadership of the Bangladeshi authorities, the JRP brings together the activities of 136 partners, of which 74 are Bangladeshi organizations. It also recognizes the significant contributions of refugees themselves to the response. The Government of Bangladesh, supported by the international community, has generously hosted Rohingya refugees for decades. As global displacement continues to rise, UNHCR and partners are emphasizing the need to ensure that the Rohingya situation does not become a forgotten crisis. It is therefore vital to ensure continued funding and support to meet the needs of refugees and surrounding host communities. Given their geography, the refugee camps in Coxs Bazar are especially vulnerable to natural disasters. This years JRP accordingly highlights the need for enhanced efforts towards disaster risk management and climate change mitigation, including through reforestation and energy interventions. Yet the solutions ultimately lie within Myanmar. Many Rohingya refugees continue to express their desire to return home when conditions allow. UNHCR and partners maintain a presence in Rakhine State to support Myanmar to create the conditions that would be conducive for such returns. The steadfast support from the international community has been, and will be, crucial in delivering lifesaving protection and assistance services for Rohingya refugees, until they are able to return voluntarily, safely and with dignity. While they are in Bangladesh, it is important that Rohingya refugees are able to live in safety and with dignity, and that they can develop the skills and capacities that could support their sustainable return. For the first time, the JRP also includes humanitarian activities on Bhasan Char, to which over 24,000 Rohingya refugees have been relocated by the Government of Bangladesh. It is critical to continue to scale up essential humanitarian services on the island, including in the areas of health, protection, nutrition, education, and livelihoods and skills building. The virtual JRP launch event is being co-hosted by the Government of Bangladesh, the International Organization for Migration and UNHCR. For more information on this topic, please contact: The sores on Marianas* legs from the rubber boots she wore on the gruelling trek through the jungles of the Darien Gap will soon heal. But the less visible wounds from the harrowing experience she endured in that patch of rainforest-covered mountains that separates South and Central America will likely take much longer. Over five exhausting days, Mariana climbed impossibly steep, muddy hills, crossed rushing rivers, and was accosted by armed bandits. She is part of a growing flow of refugees and migrants from different countries throughout Latin America and beyond, willing to brave the inhospitable wilderness in their search for safety, protection, and a place to call home. Mariana initially fled her home country of Venezuela to Colombia, where she tried to establish herself first in the border city of Cucuta, and then in the capital, Bogota. But she struggled to support herself and her parents and six siblings back in Venezuela on the odd jobs that were all she could find. For us, it isnt easy to find stable work and what there is just doesnt pay enough, she said, adding that many of her compatriots dont seem to fare much better elsewhere in the region. More than 6 million Venezuelans are living abroad amid widespread food and medicine scarcities and spiraling insecurity back home. Although some 2.6 million Venezuelans have benefited from residency permits or other visas in different Latin American countries, an almost equal number living abroad lack such papers. Even for those with documentation, opportunities to restart their lives with dignity are scarce. This, coupled with the heavy economic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, has forced many to embark on perilous journeys, joining the northward flow of refugees and migrants from Haiti, Cuba and elsewhere, who have also struggled to find stability in South American countries. See also: Number of Venezuelans crossing the Darien Gap soars Despite the rough terrain and dangerous conditions, in 2021 alone, a record 133,000 people crossed from Colombia to Panama through the Darien Gap, according to Panamanian authorities, braving a gruelling trek few are prepared for. I had heard that it was dangerous, but I didnt think it would be that dangerous, said Mariana, now in the safety of the government-run Lajas Blancas Reception Centre in southern Panama. On the third day of her journey, the group of Haitians, Senegalese, and Venezuelans she was travelling with encountered a band of three gunmen who stole the few possessions and little money they had. One of them told the group to continue but pulled Mariana aside. He then raped her behind some trees. He told me, If you behave and you dont hide any money from me, you can catch up to your group. Otherwise, youll end up like the others. Mariana had seen the corpses of four women who had been shot on the trail, so it was frighteningly clear what he was referring to. More than 50 bodies were recovered from the jungle paths in 2021, according to news reports, although it is estimated to be only a fraction of all deaths on the trail. A group of refugees and migrants walks towards the village of Canaan in the far south of Panama after crossing the Darien Gap. UNHCR/Nicolo Filippo Rosso Women show their mosquito-bitten legs after trekking through the jungles of the Darien Gap. UNHCR/Nicolo Filippo Rosso The indigenous Embera-Wounaan community in the village of Canaan on the Membrillo River provides food and temporary shelter to refugees and migrants who cross the Darien Gap. UNHCR/Nicolo Filippo Rosso Refugees and migrants sit in a canoe on the Membrillo River while an officer with Panama's National Border Service registers them. UNHCR/Nicolo Filippo Rosso Venezuelans rest at the Lajas Blancas Reception Centre in southern Panama after crossing the Darien Gap, one of the most dangerous routes for refugees and migrants in the world. UNHCR/Nicolo Filippo Rosso At the reception centre, Mariana was given treatment to prevent an unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. She also filed a report with Panamanian prosecutors, who have deployed officials to the region to bring the perpetrators of such acts to justice. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is supporting refugees and migrants by providing temporary housing units, blankets, cots and hygiene kits at the governments two reception centres. It is also providing support to remote indigenous communities to try to mitigate the impact of the hundreds of people passing through their villages. Last year, the majority of those who crossed the Darien were of Haitian origin. Most had spent years in Chile or Brazil, after fleeing their homes in the wake of the deadly 2010 earthquake that flattened much of the island nation. But a mix of bureaucratic hurdles to renew residency permits, economic hardship and discrimination in their initial destinations drove many northwards, often with small children born in the countries where they first settled. Dieufaite Sylvain, a Haitian national, crossed the Darien Gap with his wife Cherlie and three small children, aged 6, 5 and 2, all born in Santa Catarina, Brazil. Dieufaite had worked construction jobs there since leaving Haiti in 2013, but the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic made it harder and harder to find work. At the same time, the needs of their family still in Haiti, who relied on his financial support, grew amid the instability that flared following the assassination of President Juvenal Moise, and another earthquake in 2021. The Darien Gap is a region of dense forest and mountains between Colombia and Panama. UNHCR It took the family 11 days to cross the jungle. They were accosted by bandits along the way who robbed them of all their money and their cellphones. After their food ran out mid-journey, they went hungry for five days. Twice, their youngest child, Esteline, was nearly swept away by the raging rivers they had to cross along the way. I was carrying her, and I fell, and she fell with me. God helped me, said Dieufaite. The family were now stuck at the Lajas Blancas Reception Centre until they could convince a bus driver to give them a break on the fare to the border with Costa Rica. They were thinking of settling there or going further north to Mexico. In 2021, Haitian nationals lodged the highest number of new asylum claims of any nationality in Mexico, at more than 51,000. In the first two months of 2022, Venezuelans became the top nationality crossing the Darien at more than 2,400, nearly as many as crossed in all of 2021. In January and February, nearly 2,000 Venezuelans lodged asylum claims in Mexico, which represents almost a third of all claims by Venezuelans in 2021. Antonio*, a Venezuelan who crossed the Darien with Mariana, said that although he spent six years in Colombia after fleeing Venezuela, the deteriorating security situation there drove him to move north. He said he has friends in Mexico and would try to settle there. After so much time on the move, I just want to live in peace, he said. *Names have been changed for protection purposes UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency is warning that thousands of Ukrainians who were already in the United Kingdom (UK) at the time of the Russian invasion risk being left in a precarious state unless the government moves to quickly grant leave to remain for these individuals. Whilst UNHCR welcomes the concessions made by the Government to allow Ukrainians to apply while in-country onto the existing work and family routes, there are many Ukrainians in the UK who will not qualify under these visa categories. Workers on short-term work visas are among those affected, including in particular agricultural workers who are no longer needed by their employers or who cannot continue in that line of work. UNHCR is calling on the government to ensure that Ukrainians already in the UK be granted leave to remain on the same terms as the leave granted to people admitted under the Ukraine Family Scheme and Homes for Ukraine scheme, namely, leave to remain for three years, with the right to work and access to public funds and services. While its encouraging to see the UK take steps to welcome thousands of Ukrainian refugees to the UK, we mustnt forget the thousands that were already here when the war started in February. They too cant now return and need legal security in order to become self-sufficient, said Larry Bottinick, Acting UNHCR Representative to the UK. UNHCR also calls on the UK to extend family reunion rights to all Ukrainians in the UK. Whilst UNHCR has welcomed the fact that the Family Reunion visa route enables Ukrainians to join close and extended family in the UK, not all Ukrainians currently in the UK, for example those on short term visas, are able to bring their family out through this scheme. At present, many Ukrainian students, workers, or visitors living across the UK would be willing to offer shelter to their family members but are unable to do so under current Home Office policies. Recognising the essential importance of family unity and in a spirit of international cooperation and responsibility sharing, UNHCR is calling for family reunion rights to be extended to all Ukrainians. UNHCR is aware of seasonal agricultural workers who left their partners and children behind this past winter, thinking they would only be separated for a few months. They are now unable to go home, but also unable to be bring their loved ones to safety in the UK. At such a distressing time for Ukrainians, it is important that the Government takes all necessary steps to ensure that those seeking to be reunited with their families can do so, Bottinick added. Please find a link here to UNHCRs proposals and observations in full. Braslia, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Mar, 2022 ) :Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was admitted to a military hospital in Brasilia Monday to undergo tests after feeling unwell, local press reported. Bolsonaro, 67, who was stabbed in the abdomen during the 2018 presidential campaign leaving him with lasting health problems, was absent from an evening event organized by the Republican Party which he had been slated to attend. "I'm sure the president is fine, it's just some extra exams he's doing, that's why he's not here," party chairman Marcos Pereira said. According to the G1 news site, First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro, who attended the event, said that her husband "is fine," and Minister of Communication Fabio Faria reported that the president simply felt "discomfort. " AFP contacted the presidential press service but did not immediately receive a response. In January, Bolsonaro was hospitalized for two days in Sao Paulo with a partially blocked intestine. The president, in power since 2019, was also admitted to the hospital in mid-July with the same problem, staying for four days although he did not undergo surgery. Due to the stab wound, the far-right leader has undergone at least four surgeries, including the placement and subsequent removal of a colostomy bag, which made him more prone to intestinal disorders. Singapore, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Mar, 2022 ) :Singapore's top court Tuesday dismissed a mentally disabled Malaysian man's last-ditch appeal against the death sentence despite a storm of international criticism. A challenge to previous decisions in the case of Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam and a bid to get proceedings delayed for a psychiatric assessment were both rejected, said Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon at the Court of Appeal. The attempt to get a further assessment amounted to a "blatant and egregious abuse of the court process" aimed at delaying the execution, he said. Nagaenthran was arrested in 2009 for trafficking a small amount of heroin into the city-state, which has some of the world's toughest drugs laws, and handed a then-mandatory death sentence the following year. He was originally scheduled to be hanged in November but the plan sparked criticism due to claims he is intellectually disabled and he lodged the 11th-hour challenge at the Court of Appeal. (@FahadShabbir) Kyiv, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Mar, 2022 ) :Ukrainian forces recaptured a key Kyiv suburb and desperately clung onto control of the besieged city of Mariupol, as negotiators prepared to meet Russian counterparts for face-to-face talks in Istanbul Tuesday. Troops "liberated" the suburban town of Irpin, Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky said, wresting a key gateway to the capital's northwest from Russian control. AFP journalists witnessed continued heavy shelling in the area and encountered fleeing residents, who described hellish scenes of bombs raining from the sky and people killed in cold blood while trying to escape. "We saw those cars which tried to get out on their own, they were crushed by tanks, with people inside," said 55-year-old Roman Molchanov, his voice cracking with emotion. His sister added that the "Russian orcs" had "shot dead people sitting in their cars." Western experts described the loss of Irpin as a significant setback for Russian forces, who are still trying to regroup and after a failed first attempt to encircle the capital. It is now more than a month since Russian President Vladimir Putin's tanks rolled into Ukraine, hoping to cripple or oust the democratic government in Kyiv. The fighting has already killed an estimated 20,000 people and forced more than 10 million from their homes. The prospects of a peaceful end to the war -- or an imminent victory for either side -- appear faint. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators will resume peace talks on Tuesday, under the shadow of shock allegations that delegates were poisoned at a previous round of negotiations. Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian negotiators were said to have been targeted earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Abramovich -- a billionaire businessman under Western sanctions -- and the negotiators reportedly developed symptoms including red eyes and peeling skin, though they later recovered. Ukraine played down the allegations and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the Istanbul talks would focus on easing the humanitarian situation, and sounded a note of scepticism about the hopes for success. "If we see that the mood has changed and they are ready for a serious, substantive conversation and balanced arrangements, then things will move forward," he said. "If it is a repetition of their propaganda," then, he said, talks will again fail. Putin has demanded the "demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine", as well as the imposition of neutral status and recognition of the Donbas and Crimea as no longer part of Ukraine. Kuleba indicated there was little room for agreement there: "We do not trade people, land and sovereignty. Our position is concrete." - Fighting rages - On the battlefield, both sides appear determined to press where they can. Ukrainian officials still believe that Russia wants to take the capital Kyiv, dismissing suggestions the Kremlin is focused on the eastern Donbas region. Capturing "Kyiv is essentially a captured Ukraine, and this is their goal," said deputy defence minister Ganna Malyar, insisting Russia was still "trying to break through the corridor around Kyiv and block transport routes." On Monday Russian attacks near Kyiv cut power to more than 80,000 homes, officials said, underscoring the continued peril facing the capital. While Ukraine's forces are counterattacking in the north, they are struggling to retain control of the southern port city of Mariupol. Russian forces have encircled the city and have embarked on a steady and indiscriminate bombardment, trapping an estimated 160,000 people with little food, water or medicine. At least 5,000 people have already died, according to one senior Ukrainian official who estimated the real toll may be closer to 10,000 when all the bodies are collected. "The burials stopped 10 days ago because of continued shelling," Tetyana Lomakina, a presidential adviser now in charge of humanitarian corridors, told AFP by phone Monday. Local lawmaker Kateryna Sukhomlynova told AFP that unburied bodies line streets and residents cowering in basement shelters have been forced to eat snow to stay hydrated. Ukraine's foreign ministry called the situation "catastrophic," saying Russia's assault from land, sea and air had turned a city once home to 450,000 people "into dust". France, Greece and Turkey are hoping to launch a mass evacuation of civilians from Mariupol within days, according to French President Emmanuel Macron, who is seeking agreement from Putin. But as the ground war has stalled and Russian casualties have mounted. Moscow appears to have turned to ever-more brutal tactics. Western powers say they have seen evidence of war crimes, which are already being investigated by the International Criminal Court. On Monday, Ukraine's prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said there was proof that Russian forces have used banned cluster bombs in the southern Odessa and Kherson areas. And Britain's defence ministry said that private Russian military firm Wagner Group has headed to eastern Ukraine, where "they are expected to deploy more than 1,000 mercenaries, including senior leaders of the organisation, to undertake combat operations." Reputed to be close to Putin, the Wagner Group and its mercenaries are suspected of widespread abuses in Mali, Libya and Syria. US President Joe Biden's has expressed his "moral outrage" at the conduct of the war, and ruffled feathers by suggesting Putin "cannot remain in power". He has since denied seeking regime change and swatted away concern that his remarks would ratchet up tensions with Putin. "I don't care what he thinks," Biden said as he proposed $6.9 billion in funding to Ukraine and NATO, and another $1 billion to help counter Moscow's influence. (@ChaudhryMAli88) BUENOS AIRES (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th March, 2022) Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been hospitalized and will undergo tests, the G1 news portal reported, citing Communications Minister Fabio Faria. The report said President Bolsonaro was transferred to the Armed Forces hospital in Brasilia on Monday evening for tests due to some kind of "discomfort." The president was expected to spend the night in the hospital. According to First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro, the politician feels well. In early January, the president was already hospitalized due to intestinal problems. The President of Brazil is experiencing health problems after an assassination attempt on him in 2018. Then Bolsonaro was stabbed during an election rally in the city of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais state, almost a month before the elections. The knife damaged the mesenteric artery, which provides blood supply to the intestines. After that, the President of Brazil underwent several operations. Negotiations between delegations of Russia and Ukraine started in Istanbul on Tuesday, a diplomatic source told Sputnik ISTANBUL (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th March, 2022) Negotiations between delegations of Russia and Ukraine started in Istanbul on Tuesday, a diplomatic source told Sputnik. Talks are being held in the Dolmabahce palace. (@ChaudhryMAli88) TORONTO (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th March, 2022) Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy discussed by telephone Canada's support for Kiev amid the Russian special military operation and additional sanctions against Moscow , the Prime Minister's Office said in a readout of the conversation on Monday. "The Prime Minister and President discussed the continuing Russian military aggression and the devastating impacts to Ukraine's people, infrastructure, and economy. Both leaders discussed next steps in terms of required support to Ukraine, to include humanitarian, financial, and military support as well as further sanctions against Russia." the readout said. Trudeau reaffirmed Canada's steadfast support for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, and Zelenskyy thanked him for the ongoing assistance, the readout added. Trudeau and Zelenskyy agreed during the call to keep in close touch, according too the readout. Former US President Donald Trump on Tuesday called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to release information related dealings between current US President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, and the wife of the former mayor of Moscow WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th March, 2022) Former US President Donald Trump on Tuesday called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to release information related dealings between current US President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, and the wife of the former mayor of Moscow. In 2020, a group of US Senate Republicans revealed that an investment firm co-founded by Hunter Biden received $3.5 million from the wife of former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, billionaire Elena Baturina, as part of a "consultancy agreement." "Why did the Moscow Mayor's wife give (Joe and Hunter Biden) $3.5 million... I would think Putin would know the answer to that, I think he should release it. I think we should know that answer," Trump said. When previously asked about the issue, Putin refused to comment and denied any knowledge of ties between Baturina and the Biden family. The White House has downplayed the allegations made by Senators and the report that digs into the Biden family's business endeavors in Ukraine and are now part of several investigations in the US. White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said last week that she is unfamiliar with the report and questioned the evidence behind it. Biden, meanwhile, has repeatedly brushed off the accusations, claiming them to be a "Russian disinformation." (@FahadShabbir) British police announced on Tuesday they would be issuing 20 initial fines, after probing suspected breaches of Covid-19 lockdown laws by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his staff in Downing Street London, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Mar, 2022 ) :British police announced on Tuesday they would be issuing 20 initial fines, after probing suspected breaches of Covid-19 lockdown laws by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his staff in Downing Street. London's Metropolitan Police said it would not be disclosing the number or identities of those being fined, but Johnson's spokesman confirmed that the UK leader was not among those hit in the first wave of sanctions. The news nevertheless revives the so-called "Partygate" scandal, which left Johnson him fighting for political survival after a number of lawmakers from his ruling Conservatives withdrew their support for his leadership. Opposition politicians promptly reiterated their calls for his resignation following the Met's announcement on Tuesday. "We will today initially begin to refer 20 fixed penalty notices to be issued for breaches of Covid-19 regulations," the Met said in a statement, adding that its investigation was continuing. "We are making every effort to progress this investigation at speed and have completed a number of assessments," it added. Because there was still a "significant amount" of evidence to be assessed, they did not rule out further action. - Questions for Johnson - The London force is investigating claims that Johnson and his Downing Street officials organised and attended at least a dozen alcohol-fuelled events in 2020 and 2021 that violated Britain's then-strict virus curbs. Johnson has already apologised for the parties, which included Christmas celebrations and a drink-fuelled gathering the evening before Prince Philip's funeral. The prime minister, who initially denied any rule-breaking events had occurred in the complex where he lives and works, has consistently rejected personal wrongdoing. But the 57-year-old faces a fine unless he can adequately explain why he appeared to attend some social gatherings when his government was telling the public that they were illegal. His office confirmed last month that Johnson had submitted his response to a police questionnaire on the matter, but sources have said he has not been interviewed in person by investigating officers. His spokesman restated on Tuesday that he will disclose any significant developments in the probe relating to the prime minister. - 'Got to go' - The "Partygate" revelations and a steady stream of other scandals dating back to late 2021 had left Johnson's position as prime minister hanging by a thread at the start of this year. The mood among some of his own MPs grew increasingly mutinous and his position was weaker than at any time since he became prime minister in 2019 on a wave of support for his populist Brexit agenda. His opponents accused him of misleading parliament by insisting the Downing Street events were work-related and within the rules. Normally, ministers found to have misled other lawmakers are expected to resign. A handful of Johnson's own Tory MPs publicly said they had no confidence in his leadership, and speculation grew that the 54 votes required to force a no-confidence vote to remove him as party leader and prime minister could be reached. However, the launch of the police investigation in late January bought the embattled Johnson some time. In recent weeks, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has further eased the political pressure on him, with the international crisis replacing "Partygate" in the daily headlines. Johnson has tried to play a prominent role in the West's response to the war, hosting near daily calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and sending UK military aid to the eastern European country. But his part in opposing the war there did not stop all the UK's main opposition parties once again calling on Tuesday for him to resign. "Downing Street has been found guilty of breaking the law," Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner said. "The culture is set from the very top. The buck stops with the prime minister, who spent months lying to the British public, which is why he's got to go." US Special Envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking is visiting Gulf states to discuss diplomatic efforts toward a durable and inclusive resolution of the Yemen conflict, the State Department said on Tuesday WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th March, 2022) US Special Envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking is visiting Gulf states to discuss diplomatic efforts toward a durable and inclusive resolution of the Yemen conflict, the State Department said on Tuesday. "Special Envoy Lenderking will prioritize his engagements in the region on mobilizing additional life-saving humanitarian assistance for Yemen," the statement read. Although the US has provided an additional $585 million to Yemen, the country's humanitarian response remains just 30% funded, it added. In addition, the middle Eastern nation is facing a lack of wheat supplies caused by the crisis in Ukraine. The latter has accounted for over 30% of Yemen's wheat imports, the statement noted. While in Saudi Arabia, Lenderking will participate in intra-Yemeni dialogue facilitated by the Gulf Cooperation Council. "The United States welcomes opportunities for Yemenis to come together, to represent their diverse experiences and perspectives, and to identify solutions and reforms that can improve the lives of citizens," the statement said. Yemen has been gripped by an internal conflict between the government forces and the Houthi movement. Since 2015, the Saudi-led coalition fighting on the Yemeni government's side has been conducting air, land and sea operations against the rebels. The Houthis often retaliate by firing projectiles and drones toward Saudi territory. Eleven pages of White House telephone logs that the National Archives turned over to the US House Select Committee investigating the January 6 riot at the US Capitol have a seven-hour gap with no record of the calls former President Donald Trump made and who received them, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th March, 2022) Eleven pages of White House telephone logs that the National Archives turned over to the US House Select Committee investigating the January 6 riot at the US Capitol have a seven-hour gap with no record of the calls former President Donald Trump made and who received them, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday. Internal White House records from January 6, 2021 that were turned over to the US House Select Committee show a gap in President Donald Trump's phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, the report said. The Select Committee is now probing whether Trump used "burner" phones, communicated through back-channels or used aides' telephones, said two people with knowledge of the probe who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The panel is also trying to determine if it received the full logs reflecting all the calls placed and received on Jan 6. Earlier this month, the Select Committee filed court papers presenting what they believe is evidence that Trump, attorney John Eastman and others could potentially be charged with criminal offenses, including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the American people. The Select Committee members have alleged there is enough evidence to conclude that Trump and his associates may have conspired to commit fraud and obstruction by misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result. Trump - and numerous Republicans - have said the work of the Select Committee is a political theater and a witch hunt conducted primarily by Democrats to prevent the former president and his allies to run for office. Conservatives have pointed out that the FBI's investigation into the January 6 events found no evidence of a conspiracy and also the Select Committee had refused to include lawmakers such as Congressman Jim Jordan that would be critical of its activities and narrative. Three USF students have been named Goldwater Scholars tying a decade-old record for the most students named in a single year. Alexandria Brady-Mine, Caitlyn Coleman and Cole Gibson were named 2022 Goldwater Scholars, chosen out of nearly 1,300 students nationally who were nominated through a highly selective process. The scholarship is the most prestigious undergraduate award in the country for science research and provides $7,500 for educational expenses and research support. Brady-Mine, a junior in the Judy Genshaft Honors College majoring in mechanical engineering, has conducted research on novel biomaterials and 3D bioprinting. She works with Nathan Gallant in the USF College of Engineering to develop smart polymers with enhanced cell adhesion. Brady-Mine enjoys working at the intersection of engineering and global change. At 17, she founded the Human Projects, an international human rights nonprofit with 1.6 million program participants. Brady-Mine was awarded a 2021 National Institute of Standards and Technology Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship,is a Jane Goodall Institute Fund II Fellow and was selected for the 2022 MIT Summer Research Program. Also a junior in the Judy Genshaft Honors College, Coleman is a microbiology major with a minor in infection control. In the summer of 2021, she joined a highly selective Leadership Alliance Summer Research Program in the Molecular Biology and Genetics group at Cornell University. There she worked on bioinformatics with Dr. Cedric Feschotte. Coleman recently presented her research at the annual Leadership Alliance National Symposium and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science conference. Gibson is also a junior and a National Merit Scholar pursuing concurrent degrees in math and physics. He works with Jacob Gayles in the USF Physics department. He began research with the Quantum Chiraltronics Group under Gayles in summer 2021 and is investigating the magnetic textures of magnetic nanoparticles using an atomistic approach. Gibson recently presented his work at the annual American Physical Society March Meeting. He is excited to further develop his skills as a physicist and researcher while continuing to make meaningful contributions to the field. Gibson was awarded the Goldwater for his work in computational condensed matter physics, specifically exotic spin textures. Coleman received the honor for her work in bioinformatics and Brady-Mine for her work in biomaterials and smart polymers. Each of these national scholarship recipients has an incredibly bright future. They are reflective of the immensely talented, hard-working and diverse student body that calls USF its academic home, said USF Provost and Executive Vice President Ralph Wilcox. Research is a deeply embedded component of the undergraduate experience at our university, and I am grateful for the successful mentoring Alexandria, Caitlyn and Cole have been provided by our faculty and staff. All three of USFs 2022 Goldwater Scholars plan to pursue their doctorates and enter meaningful scientific careers. They worked with the universitys Office of National Scholarships (ONS) and its director, Sayandeb Basu, on their research goals and Goldwater applications. ONS works with USF students to identify prestigious scholarship opportunities and craft competitive applications. USF tied with the University of Central Florida for having the most 2022 Goldwater Scholars in the state bringing the universitys total to 18. This is also the first time that all nominated USF students were selected for the prestigious award. Previous scholars have gone on to earn other nationally competitive awards and study at internationally prominent institutions as they work on research projects. The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program was established by Congress in 1986 to honor Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, who served the country for 56 years as a soldier and statesman, including 30 years of service in the U.S. Senate. The purpose of the program is to provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians and engineers by awarding scholarships to college students who intend to pursue careers in these fields. Waterbury, CT U.S. Marshals-led task forces and Waterbury police today arrested in Connecticut two Rhode Island fugitives and recovered two minor children. In December of 2021, the Rhode Island Violent Fugitive Task Force initiated a fugitive investigation into Jesueily Sanchez for charges of cruelty to/neglect of a child and Tyshaun Peete for failure to appear on charges of carrying a pistol without a license and resisting arrest. After an in-depth, three-month investigation which spanned multiple states, deputy U.S. marshals and Rhode Island State Police assigned to the RIVFTF developed information that Sanchez and Peete had fled Rhode Island to Connecticut. Investigators were able to track the two fugitives to an address in Waterbury. The task force then enlisted the assistance of the U.S. Marshals Service in Connecticut as well as the Waterbury Police. This morning members of both the RIVFTF, the Connecticut Violent Fugitive Task Force and Waterbury Police arrested Sanchez and Peete in an apartment with their two minor children. The two children were safely removed from the residence and placed into the custody of the Connecticut Department of Children and Families. One of the children had previously been classified as missing and endangered from the State of Rhode Island, and a court order had been issued granting custody to the Department of Children, Youth and Families. Waterbury Police are pursuing additional charges of risk of injury to a child and cruelty to a person against both Sanchez and Peete. The two will eventually be returned to Rhode Island to face the outstanding criminal charges. The Rhode Island State Police, U.S. Marshals Service in Rhode Island and Connecticut, and Waterbury Police provided significant assistance throughout the investigation. This case is the reason why the United States Marshals Service has created a Missing Child Unit and has the authority to assist state and local police departments in the recovery of missing and endangered children, said Robert Charette, Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal for the District of Rhode Island. The toddlers recovered today did not have a voice to advocate for themselves. They were living in unimaginable conditions of squalor and abuse. I commend the work of my Deputy U.S. Marshals here in Rhode Island, the Rhode Island State Police, Deputy U.S. Marshals in Connecticut, and the Waterbury Police Department in recovering these toddlers this morning. The relentlessness displayed by these investigators is why these toddlers are now safe. Through its nationwide reach and established partnerships with state and local police departments, the U.S. Marshals Service is particularly well-positioned to aid in the recovery of missing and endangered children, said acting U.S. Marshal for the District of Connecticut Lawrence J. Bobnick. Todays recovery of two young children from such tragic conditions was the culmination of countless hours of investigation and is a testament to the dedication of all the talented law enforcement officers involved. Additionally, the U.S. Marshals Service would like to thank the Connecticut Department of Children and Families and the health care workers at Waterbury Hospital for standing ready to assist in the recuperation of these young children. The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015 enhanced the U.S. Marshals authority to support federal, state, and local law enforcement requests for assistance with the recovery of missing, endangered, or abducted children. A Missing Child Unit was established to oversee and manage the implementation of its enhanced authority under the act. Since then, the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) has been leading the way in a nationwide effort to recover missing and exploited children. In 2021, the U.S. Marshals Service contributed to the recovery of 950 missing children. Nationwide, more than 50 local USMS task forces are dedicated to violent crime reduction by locating and apprehending wanted criminals. These task forces also serve as investigation hubs for missing and exploited juveniles throughout the country. Additional information about the U.S. Marshals Service can be found at http://www.usmarshals.gov. #### Americas First Federal Law Enforcement Agency The African association of Bishops, Symposium of Episcopal Conference of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM) is gearing up for its plenary assembly scheduled for 25 July to 1 August in Ghanas capital, Accra. Vatican News. This years Plenary Assembly, which is on the theme: Ownership of SECAM; Security and Migration in Africa and the Islands, shall firstly focus on the implications of ownership for its members, explained the SECAM Secretary General, Fr. Terwase Henry Akaabiam, in a Statement. Insecurity and pastoral concerns The SECAM Bishops will also deliberate on the security situation currently obtaining on the continent. Of particular interest is the role that the Church can play in silencing the guns and how best it can respond to the disruptive effects and consequences of insecurity, on the continent. The last SECAM Plenary Assembly was held in Kampala, Uganda, in July 2019. The climax of that SECAM assembly was the celebration of the association's Golden Jubilee. A solemn Mass was held at the Uganda Martyrs Shrine, Namugongo, on 28 July 2019. Various dioceses and parishes across Africa and the Islands participated in the colourful liturgy under the theme, Church-family of God in Africa; celebrate your Jubilee! Proclaim Jesus Christ, your Saviour. Pope St Paul VI inaugurated SECAM in 1969 SECAM was born out of the desire of the African Bishops who attended the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) to establish a forum from which the Church in Africa could speak with one voice on matters of the local and universal Church. The idea was later concretised in July 1969, during the visit of Pope Paul VI to Kampala, Uganda. Being the first time that a Pope was visiting sub-Saharan Africa, African Bishops saw it as a fitting occasion to launch the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM). Migrants are helped off a small boat near Malta by a member of Doctors Without Borders Pope Francis sets off on his 36th Apostolic Visit abroad to the Mediterranean island nation of Malta this weekend, 2-3 April 2022. Amongst the highlights are a visit the Grotto of St. Paul whose ship washed up on Maltese shores in 60 A.D., and a meeting with refugees. By Deborah Castellano Lubov Pope Francis imminent visit to the Mediterranean island nation of Malta, after having been postponed in March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, is set to take place this weekend. The Director of the Holy See Press Office, Matteo Bruni, on Tuesday, presented the 2-3 April 2022 Apostolic Trip to the archipelago. The visit marks the Holy Fathers 36th trip abroad, to the small nation, 90 percent of whose population according to a 2018 survey, professes to be Catholic. Read also 25/02/2022 Pope in Malta to pray, meet authorities and migrants The Press Office of the Holy See announces the official programme of Pope Francis 36th Apostolic Journey, which will be to Malta on April 2-3. The highlights of the two-day visit ... The Journeys theme is They Showed Us Unusual Kindness (Acts 28:2) and highlights the plight of migrants crossing the Mediterranean toward Europe as well as promotes evangelization in the country. The visits logo shows open hands from a ship reaching out toward a Cross. The theme also recalls the hospitable and warm welcome St. Paul received in 60 A.D., when his boat was shipwrecked and washed upon the shores of Malta. Matteo Bruni recalled that Pope Francis dedicated the January 2020 General Audience catecheses to the welcome of St. Paul by the Maltese. While in Malta, the Holy Father will travel to the cities of Valletta, Rabat, Floriana and the island of Gozo. He will give five discourses during the course of the visit in Italian. The entire visit, other than private encounters, can be watched on Vatican Media, through the Vatican News website, YouTube, Facebook and on Vatican Media live feed, with English-language commentary. As Pope Francis usually does during his Apostolic Journeys, he is also scheduled to have a private meeting with fellow Jesuits. The text of that conversation will be released at a later time. Commemorating St. Paul A major highlight of the trip will include Pope Francis visit to the Grotto of St Paul at the Basilica in Rabat, where - through a moment of prayer that will see him going down and entering the Grotto - he will commemorate the Apostle of the Peoples shipwreck on the island nearly 2,000 years ago. Another important moment will be the Popes meeting with refugees at the Giovanni XXIII Peace Lab Center for Migrants in Hal Far. During his first day, after meeting with civil authorities, the Holy Father will board a catamaran to the island of Gozo from the capital, La Valletta, where he will preside over a prayer meeting at the National Shrine of Ta' Pinu and give a homily. He will return by ferry to the island of Malta before transferring to the Apostolic Nunciature, where he will reside during his overnight visit. Pope Benedict XVI visited Malta in 2010, while St. John Paul II visited in both 1990 and 2001. Maltas first saint, George Preca, was canonized on 3 June 2007 by Pope Benedict XVI. The Director of the Holy See Press Office also told the press that Cardinal Mario Grech, the General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops, who is Maltese and was bishop of Gozo, from 2005 to 2019, will be part of the Popes entourage for this Apostolic Journey. Remembering refugees amid war As far as whether the Holy Father will speak on war, in light of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Director of the Holy See Press Office suggested that it would be difficult to not take the war into account in this moment. Matteo Bruni noted how the trips focus on welcome and hospitality takes on heightened meaning as countless refugees are fleeing from devastated Ukraine as the war wages into its second month. The Holy Father is expected to hold a brief press conference while on the plane returning to Rome, despite the brevity of the return flight. Cardinal Michael Czerny, interim prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, penned the following article for the Aggiornamenti sociali newspaper to reflect on his recent visit to Slovakia, where the EU nation is welcoming Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russias war in their homeland. By Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ From 16-18 March, Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ, Interim Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, travelled to Slovakia to take part in the 3rd European Catholic Social Days (Bratislava, 17-20 March 2022), and met with the President of the Slovak Republic, Zuzana Caputova, as well as Prime Minister, Eduard Heger. Cardinal Czerny also travelled to the eastern regions of Slovakia, where refugees from Ukraine are arriving, and crossed the border to visit the Ukrainian town of Uzhorod. A few days later, the Cardinal reflected on what struck him most about this trip, following on the heels of his visit to Hungary a week before. In the western part of Ukraine, most Catholics belong to the Eastern rite, so many of the priests that I met are married and have children. Instead of fleeing to the West, they stay with their families to continue caring for the people and refugees on the move. Chapels and rectories become safe havens on the path to salvation, where the whole family of the parish priest works around the clock to welcome those in need. Oftentimes, we call those who do their best to help strangers in difficulty angels in disguise. They often remain anonymous, like these families, as well as women and men religious, unmarried priests, bishops, and so many lay people. They truly are angels. But they are not the only ones: Sacred Scripture invites us to widen our gaze, and to realise that those in need are also angels. The Letter to the Hebrews warns us: Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it (Heb. 13:2). I witnessed these angels on my journey: you could see it in how they change those who welcome them. In Berehove, I visited a student residence that had been converted into a reception centre. I thought I would be meeting the bishop and some local priests. They were certainly there, but there were also the heads of other Christian communities, the Jewish community, and the highest civil servant. The same thing happened in Uzhorod: the leaders of the Jewish community and of the other Christian denominations were present at the dinner with seminarians that followed the Lenten liturgy in the Greek-Catholic cathedral. Read also 17/03/2022 Cardinal Czerny in Slovakia bringing Popes closeness to fleeing Ukrainians Cardinal Michael Czerny, the interim prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, continues his mission to Slovakia to bring Pope Francis' closeness and ... This really impressed me, because in those regions relations between the different religious groups are often problematic, burdened by a history of conflict and prejudice. All of a sudden, the need to welcome refugees enables, and even demands, the concrete ecumenism of solidarity: encountering one another and working together to respond to those in need. Being close to the poor and the vulnerable brings those who welcome them closer to each other. When we come together as brothers and sisters in order to help others, we inevitably discover that we are brothers and sisters of everybody! This seems self-evident: my brothers brothers are my brothers! But in practice we often forget this. Ukrainian refugees announce good news as angels without knowing it to those who welcome them: not with words, nor even with actions, but by simply being who they are and their need for help, bringing everyone back to the essential. This puts us in touch with the profound truth of Pope Francis words in regards to the poor: The new evangelization is an invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives and to put them at the centre of the Churchs pilgrim way. We are called to find Christ in them, to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for them and to embrace the mysterious wisdom which God wishes to share with us through them (Evangelii Gaudium, no. 198). This not only happens within western Ukraine, but also across the border, in the countries that refugees finally reach. For these nations, the arrival of newcomers is a call to open up, to come out of a closedness that is a lasting legacy of the Soviet era. It is a profound, sudden change: these societies are forced by the current events of history to learn something that they did not know and did not practice, but whose value they sense. They must be respected as they take their first steps, rather than being judged for the positions they took in the past, so that the experience of welcome can be strengthened and shape a different future. Help us to be helpful is the request that seems to emerge in meetings with local solidarity organisations and also with public authorities at different levels. Read also 23/03/2022 Church involved in efforts to combat global water challenges A special session at the 9th World Water Forum, organized by Caritas Senegal, Catholic Relief Services, and the Vaticans Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, ... After returning from Slovakia, I immediately left for Dakar to attend the 9th World Water Forum, to which I transmitted the Message sent by Pope Francis. Approximately 7,000 kilometres from Ukraine, the title of the Forum, Water Security for Peace and Development, brought the issue of peace to centre stage. Ecological degradation and climate change threaten access to water for many populations, who are experiencing increasingly disastrous droughts. In the coming decades, water is destined to become an extremely strategic resource and a potential source of wars and conflicts, particularly in those regions where large rivers cross borders between states, as is the case in Africa. In all these situations, writes the Pope, water must become a symbol of welcome and blessing, a reason for meeting and collaboration that will increase mutual trust and fraternity. Managing water as a common good and as a fundamental and universal human right is a commitment that combines the construction of fraternity and the care of our common home. While we pray and do everything in our power to stop this horrendous war in Ukraine, we must also continue to look ahead to prevent possible conflicts in the future. Coming up on #Africa54: Tuesdays peace talks between Ukraine and Russia reveal a possible ray of hope toward peace. The Africa Development Bank plans a $1 billion emergency food production initiative to avoid a food crisis on the continent triggered by the Ukraine conflict. Andthe Director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sheds light on the significance of the public health agency becoming autonomous. For this and more, stay tuned to Africa 54. At least five people were killed in a shooting attack Tuesday in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak, a suburb of Tel Aviv. It is the third deadly attack in recent days. Two days ago, two police officers were shot dead in Hadera; the week before, four were stabbed to death in Beersheba. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for both attacks. The most recent attack took place in two places, police said, and was carried out by a gunman on a motorcycle. Israeli media reported the gunman shot toward apartment balconies in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood and then turned to firing at pedestrians, Reuters reported. The gunman was then shot and killed. Islamic State attacks in Israel are rare, according to The Associated Press. Just hours before Tuesdays shooting, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called the recent attacks a "new situation" and urged greater security measures. The attacks come just before Saturday's expected start of Ramadan and as foreign ministers from four Arab states, the U.S. and Israel meet in the Israeli desert to discuss issues in the region. Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. The Australian and New Zealand prime ministers on Monday voiced concerns about the potential for a Chinese military presence on the Solomon Islands. A document leaked last week indicates that China could boost its military presence in the South Pacific island nation, including with visits by warships. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he had spoken to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern over the weekend about the development and planned to speak to his counterparts in Papua New Guinea and Fiji later Monday. "The reports that we've seen are not a surprise to us and are a reminder of the constant pressure and threats that present in our region to our own national security," Morrison told reporters. "This is an issue of concern for the region, but it has not come as a surprise. We have been long aware of these pressures," he added. Ardern described the possibility of Chinese military forces stationed on the Solomons as "gravely concerning." "We see such acts as the potential militarization of the region," she told Radio NZ. "We see very little reason in terms of the Pacific security for such a need and such a presence," she added. Ardern urged Solomons' leaders "not to look beyond our own Pacific family" when considering the country's security relationships. The U.S. also expressed concern, saying it did not believe China's security forces and methods needed to be exported. "This would only fuel local, regional, and international concerns over Beijing's unilateral expansion of its internal security apparatus to the Pacific," said a State Department spokesperson. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin dismissed those concerns, saying: "The cooperation between China and the Solomon Islands has been warmly welcomed by the Solomon government and people." "No attempt to disrupt and undermine the mutually beneficial cooperation between China and the Pacific Island countries will succeed," Wang told reporters at a daily briefing Monday. The Solomons revealed on Thursday it had signed a policing cooperation agreement with China. But more concerning to the Solomons' neighbors was the draft text of a broader security arrangement that was leaked online. Under the terms of the draft agreement, China could send police, military personnel and other armed forces to the Solomons "to assist in maintaining social order" and for a variety of other reasons. It could also send ships to the islands for stopovers and to replenish supplies. The draft agreement stipulates that China would need to sign off on any information that's released about joint security arrangements, including at media briefings. Questioned about the agreement last week, China's Foreign Ministry said Beijing and the Solomons "conducted normal law enforcement and security cooperation on the basis of equal treatment and win-win cooperation." It was not immediately clear when the security agreement might be finalized, signed or go into effect. The Solomons, home to about 700,000 people, in 2019 switched its diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing, which was a contributing factor to riots in November. Australian police have been in the capital Honiara maintaining peace since then under a bilateral security treaty established in 2017. It provides a legal basis for the rapid deployment of Australian police, troops and associated civilians in the event of a major security challenge. In 2017, when Australian police and troops left the Solomons after 14 years, the two countries signed a bilateral treaty that would enable Australians to return at short notice at the invitation of the Solomons' prime minister. That treaty was invoked in November, and Australian police were in the air within hours of Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare requesting help. Australia had led a force of Pacific Islands police and troops under the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands from 2003 to 2017. It included 2,300 police and troops from 17 nations, invited by the Solomons' government. The deployment successfully ended the conflict that killed 200 people. Solomons opposition leader Matthew Wale said he warned Australian High Commissioner Lachlan Strahan in August last year that the government was negotiating a security agreement with Beijing that could lead to the establishment of Chinese bases there. "Personally I am very disappointed in Australia in this matter," Wale told Australian Broadcasting Corp. "I think Australia saw this coming and if it didn't, it should have," he added. Morrison said Australia was recasting its foreign aid to focus on the Pacific. "We've been aware of the risks right across the Pacific," Morrison said, referring to Chinese engagement. In 2018, Australian Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, then minister for international development and the Pacific, said Chinese aid programs in poor Pacific island countries were creating "white elephants" that threatened economic stability without delivering benefits. Beijing protested her criticism. The Pacific's traditional aid partners the United States, Japan, Australia and New Zealand have stepped up efforts to offer alternatives to China's Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure partnerships. Botswana has become the first country in Africa to approve the use of the Texas-made COVID-19 vaccine Corbevax. Botswanas president and California biotech company NantWorks made the announcement Monday as they began construction of a plant to produce COVID-vaccines and drugs to fight cancer. CEO of biotech firm NantWorks Patrick Soon-Shiong announced on Monday that Botswanas Medicines Regulatory Authority (BOMRA) had approved the Corbevax jab. He made the announcement at a groundbreaking ceremony for a vaccine and cancer drug production facility, along with Botswanas President Mokgweetsi Masisi. "I am pleased to announce, Mr. President, with the incredibly hard work of both the Ministry of Health and BOMRA, today we announce Africas first approved vaccine for Africa by Botswana," Soon-Shiong said. Corbevax is a patent-free COVID vaccine developed by the Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Childrens Hospital in the United States. It has been used in Bangladesh, India, and Indonesia. Soon-Shiong said the first consignment would be delivered to Botswana for distribution across Africa. This vaccine has been tested and shown to be active in every variant including omicron. I got a commitment this morning that Botswana, effective immediately, will have access to 100 million of these vaccines that you can distribute, Soon-Shiong said. The plant, which is expected to be operational by 2026, plans to produce vaccines for COVID and other diseases, as well as cancer treatment drugs. Masisi said the plant heralds a new dawn for the production of pharmaceuticals on the continent. This is particularly noteworthy in the Africa region, which bears a disproportionate disease burden exacerbated limitation of resources and capabilities to address these health challenges. We are determined to dictate a new legacy associated with access to medicines, vaccines and other health technologies, he said. Masisi said the facility would help address vaccine inequality in Africa, where less than 20% of the population is fully vaccinated against COVID - two years into the pandemic. Disparities in the distribution of vaccines across the world resulted in a lopsided vaccination drive that seriously hampered efforts to effectively contain the COVID-19 worldwide. This problem has been aptly defined as vaccine nationalism. It is therefore our intent, our conviction that the opening of this vaccine manufacturing facility, will go a long way in changing this narrative, Masisi said. Botswanas Health Minister Edwin Dikoloti says the project would also help treat chronic diseases. This day marks a new level in our scientific development and advancement. It signifies a new technological breakthrough which will see us as not just a consumer but also a manufacturer of vaccines and other medication that will come out of this magnificent project," Dikoloti said. Botswanas vaccine manufacturing facility will be the second in Africa being built by Soon-Shiong. In January, the South African-born U.S. billionaire opened a similar facility in Cape Town. A decades-old struggle for greater autonomy in the French island of Corsica is gaining new momentum, after Paris said it was open to discussions following the death of an imprisoned Corsican nationalist. Now another French area off the mainland French Guiana, in South America is also pushing for greater self-rule. Top nationalist figures turned out for Yvan Colonnas funeral last Friday at his ancestral hometown of Cargese, in western Corsica. The former shepherd died after being attacked by an Islamist extremist at a prison in mainland France. Colonna was serving a life sentence for the 1998 assassination of Frances top official in Corsica. Colonnas death has sparked some of the most violent demonstrations in years on the Mediterranean island, which is a popular tourist destination. Protesters, many of them young Corsicans, blame the state for not accepting a longstanding nationalist demand to transfer Colonna and his accomplices to a prison in Corsica. Now, Paris appears to be listening. In a surprise announcement, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin says the government is open to greater Corsican autonomy. He visited the island earlier this month, holding talks with the ruling nationalists. But in interviews with French media like this one, Darmanin has ruled out full independence for Corsica. University of Bordeaux Corsican specialist Thierry Dominici told RTL radio that Colonnas death has been like a spark unleashing pent-up anger and nationalist aspirations of young Corsicans especially. He and others warn of more violent demonstrations to come. Corsica is not the only place pushing against Frances centralized government. Brittany and Alsace also have nationalist movements but nowhere near as strong as Corsicas, where nationalists dominate the local government. Some of Frances overseas territories, like New Caledonia and Polynesia, have gained various degrees of autonomy over the years, following referendums. Now, apparently inspired by Corsica, lawmakers from another overseas area French Guiana are also pushing for more autonomy. In Corsica, the militant Corsican National Liberation Front movement waged a nearly 40-year armed struggle for the islands independence, which ended in 2014. Colonnas assassination of French prefect Claude Erignac was the most serious incident. Today, many Corsicans do not support full independence. The islands nationalist leaders are themselves divided, with some supporting more autonomy in areas like fiscal powers alongside the official recognition of the Corsican language and hardliners backing full independence. Candidates for Frances April presidential elections are also divided. Far-right hopeful Marine Le Pen opposes autonomy for Corsica, while a number of leftist candidates support it. A recent IFOP poll finds just over half of all French support an autonomous statute for Corsica. The Senate Judiciary Committee is pushing Ketanji Brown Jackson closer to confirmation, setting up a vote next week to recommend her nomination to the full Senate and seat her as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. Jackson appears to be on a glidepath to confirmation by mid-April, even if she doesn't receive the bipartisan votes that President Joe Biden has sought. Democrats can confirm her without one Republican vote in the 50-50 Senate, as long as every Democrat supports her. Vice President Kamala Harris can break a tie. At a brief meeting Monday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin set the committee vote for April 4 and praised Jackson's answers during four days of hearings last week that often grew contentious. Republicans on the committee led by several senators who are eyeing presidential runs spent much of the hearings focused on her sentencing decisions in a handful of child pornography cases during her nine years as a federal judge in an effort to paint her as too lenient on the criminals. Durbin criticized the Republican focus on the issue, saying the GOP senators asked "the toughest, meanest questions and then race to Twitter to see if somebody is tweeting." In a Senate floor speech shortly afterward, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, one of the Republicans who asked Jackson repeatedly about the pornography cases, defended her colleagues, saying the questioning was "not an attack." The partisan spat threatened to divide Jackson's confirmation down party lines as Republicans drew her nomination into a midterm campaign push to paint Democrats as soft on crime. Durbin, who like Biden wants a bipartisan vote, said he hopes other Republicans "will not be discouraged" by the back-and-forth when considering whether to support the historic nomination. So far, no Republicans have said they will vote for her. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the GOP leader, cited the Republicans' concerns about her sentencing history, along with her support from liberal advocacy groups, in announcing Thursday that he "cannot and will not" back her. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who met with Jackson for more than an hour and a half earlier this month, is the most likely GOP senator to vote for her. After their meeting, Collins said she believes Jackson takes "a very thorough, careful approach in applying the law to the facts of the case, and that is what I want to see in a judge." Jackson would be the third Black justice, after Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, and the sixth woman. She would also be the first former public defender on the court, and the first justice with experience representing indigent criminal defendants since Marshall. Pushing back on the Republicans' questions about her sentencing in child pornography crimes, Jackson said during the hearings that sentencing is not a "numbers game." She noted that there are no mandatory sentences for sex offenders and that there has been significant debate on the subject. Some of those cases have given her nightmares, Jackson said, and were "among the worst that I have seen." White House spokesman Andrew Bates on Monday said the questioning was in "bad faith," and that many of the Republicans had voted for GOP-nominated judges who had also sentenced defendants beneath federal guidelines, as Jackson did. The April 4 vote will set up a week of procedural maneuvers on the Senate floor aimed at securing Jackson's confirmation by the end of the week. Durbin said he still has hope for some Republican votes by then. "I strongly urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to take a look at this woman and what she will bring to the Court," Durbin said. "She is the best and deserves our support." An Ethiopian court has ordered Ethiopian journalist Amir Aman Kiyaro to be released on bail after being imprisoned for four months without charges. A judge in the capital, Addis Ababa, on Tuesday granted bail to Kiyaro while prosecutors determine whether or not to press charges against him. Kiyaro remained in custody while bail procedures were being followed before his expected release. Kiyaro, 30, a video journalist accredited to The Associated Press, was detained on November 28 in Addis Ababa under the country's war-related state of emergency powers. Kiyaro is accused of "serving the purposes" of what the government has classified a terrorist group by interviewing its officials, according to reports by Ethiopian state media, citing federal police. Local journalist Thomas Engida was arrested at the same time and faces similar charges. If the journalists are found guilty of violating Ethiopia's anti-terrorism law or the state of emergency law, they could face sentences of seven to 15 years behind bars, federal police inspector Tesfaye Olani has told state media. Despite the granting of bail after four months of police investigation and detention, it still remains uncertain whether prosecutors will proceed to press charges against Kiyaro. The state of emergency was lifted in February as the government cited changing conditions in the deadly conflict between Ethiopian forces and those of the northern Tigray region. "We are pleased that journalist Amir Aman Kiyaro has been granted bail and we are eager for his release from prison after being detained in Ethiopia for more than 120 days," Julie Pace, the AP's executive editor, said in response to the bail order. "However, the investigation against him remains ongoing, with no charges filed," Pace said. "Amir is an independent journalist who has been targeted because of his work and we urge the Ethiopian authorities to drop their investigation." The Honduras Supreme Court has formally approved the extradition of former President Juan Orlando Hernandez to the United States to stand trial on illicit drug trafficking charges. A spokesman for the countrys highest court said Monday the full 15-member court rejected Hernandezs final appeal to avoid extradition. Hernandez was arrested back in February at his home in the capital, Tegucigalpa, and escorted by police in shackles and a bulletproof vest. The extradition request said that since 2004, Hernandez allowed tons of cocaine from Venezuela and Colombia to travel through Honduras on its way to the United States, while protecting drug traffickers from investigation, in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes. In a letter released by his wife, Ana Garcia, on social media Monday, the ex-president said he is the victim of a campaign of revenge and conspiracy by drug traffickers his government extradited to the United States during his presidency. Hernandez said that he faces three life sentences if he is extradited to the U.S. Ana Garcia and two of the couples daughters held a rally outside the Supreme Court building Monday along with about a dozen protesters. Hernandez was repeatedly implicated as a co-conspirator in his brothers 2019 drug trafficking trial by New York prosecutors. The brother, Juan Antonio Tony Hernandez, was found guilty of drug and weapons charges and sentenced to life in prison. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. Ukrainian refugees are still arriving in Poland. Many who cross the border are staying in camps before boarding buses and trains to reach other destinations. At the camps and bus stations, volunteers from all over help them with some basic needs. VOAs Mary Mgawe and Karina Choudhury spoke to the family and filed this report. Camera and video editor - Karina Choudhury. Indigenous leaders from Canada and survivors of the country's notorious residential schools met with Pope Francis on Monday and told him of the abuses they suffered at the hands of Catholic priests and school workers. They came hoping to secure a papal apology and a commitment by the church to repair the harm done. "While the time for acknowledgement, apology and atonement is long overdue, it is never too late to do the right thing," Cassidy Caron, president of the Metis National Council, told reporters in St. Peter's Square after the audience. This week's meetings, postponed from December because of the pandemic, are part of the Canadian church and government's efforts to respond to Indigenous demands for justice, reconciliation and reparations long-standing demands that gained traction last year after the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves outside some of the schools. More than 150,000 native children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture and Christianize and assimilate them into mainstream society, which previous Canadian governments considered superior. Francis set aside several hours this week to meet privately with the delegations from the Metis and Inuit on Monday, and First Nations on Thursday, with a mental health counselor in the room for each session. The delegates then gather Friday as a group for a more formal audience, with Francis delivering an address. Symbolic gestures The encounters Monday included prayers in the Metis and Inuit languages and other gestures of deep symbolic significance. The Inuit delegation brought a traditional oil lamp, or qulliq, that is lit whenever Inuit gather, and it stayed lit in the pope's library throughout the meeting. The Inuit delegates presented Francis with a sealskin stole and a sealskin rosary case. The Metis offered Francis a pair of red beaded moccasins, "a sign of the willingness of the Metis people to forgive if there is meaningful action from the church," the group explained. The red dye "represents that even though Pope Francis does not wear the traditional red papal shoes, he walks with the legacy of those who came before him, the good, the great and the terrible." In a statement, the Vatican said each meeting lasted about an hour "and was characterized by desire on the part of the pope to listen and make space for the painful stories brought by the survivors." The Canadian government has admitted that physical and sexual abuse was rampant at the schools, with students beaten for speaking their native languages. The legacy of that abuse and isolation from family has been cited by Indigenous leaders as a root cause of the epidemic rates of alcohol and drug addiction on Canadian reservations. Nearly three-quarters of the 130 residential schools were run by Catholic missionary congregations. Last May, the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Nation announced the discovery of 215 gravesites near Kamloops, British Columbia, that were found using ground-penetrating radar. It was Canada's largest Indigenous residential school, and the discovery of the graves was the first of several similar grim discoveries across the country. Caron said Francis listened intently Monday as three of the many Metis survivors told him their personal stories of abuse at residential schools. The pope showed sorrow but offered no immediate apology. Speaking in English, he repeated the words Caron said she had emphasized in her remarks: "truth," "justice" and "healing." "I take that as a personal commitment," Caron said, surrounded by Metis fiddlers who accompanied her into the square. What needs to follow, she said, is an apology that acknowledges the harm done, the return of Indigenous artifacts, a commitment to facilitating prosecutions of abusive priests and access to church-held records of residential schools. Canadian Bishop Raymond Poisson, who heads the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, insisted the Vatican holds no such records and said they more likely were held by individual religious orders in Canada or at their headquarters in Rome. Demands for 'specific actions' Even before the gravesites were discovered, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission specifically had called for a papal apology to be delivered on Canadian soil for the church's role in the abuses. Francis has committed to traveling to Canada, though no date for such a visit has been announced. "Primarily, the reconciliation requires action. And we still are in need of very specific actions from the Catholic Church," said Natan Obed, president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, who led the Inuit delegation. He cited the reparations the Canadian church has been ordered to pay, access to records to understand the scope of the unmarked graves, and Francis' own help to find justice for victims of a Catholic Oblate priest, the Rev. Johannes Rivoire, who has been accused of multiple cases of sexual abuse and is living in France. "We often as Inuit have felt powerless over time to sometimes correct the wrongs that have been done to us," Obed said. "We are incredibly resilient, and we are great at forgiving. But we are still in search of lasting respect and the right to self-determination and the acknowledgement of that right by the institutions that harmed us." As part of a settlement of a lawsuit involving the government, churches and the approximately 90,000 surviving students, Canada paid reparations that amounted to billions of dollars being transferred to Indigenous communities. The Catholic Church, for its part, has paid over $50 million and now intends to add $30 million more over the next five years. The Metis delegation made clear to Francis that the church-run residential school system, and the forced removal of children from their homes, facilitated the ability of Canada authorities to take Indigenous lands while also teaching Metis children "that they were not to love who they are as Metis people," Caron said. "Our children came home hating who they were, hating their language, hating their culture, hating their tradition," Caron said. "They had no love. But our survivors are so resilient. They are learning to love." The Argentine pope is no stranger to offering apologies for his own errors and what he himself has termed the "crimes" of the institutional church. During a 2015 visit to Bolivia, he apologized for the sins, crimes and offenses committed by the church against Indigenous peoples during the colonial-era conquest of the Americas. In Dublin, Ireland, in 2018, he offered a sweeping apology to those sexually and physically abused over generations. That same year, he met privately with three Chilean sex abuse survivors whom he had discredited by backing a bishop they had accused of covering up their abuse. In a series of meetings that echo those now being held for the Canadian delegates, Francis listened and apologized. The phenomenal box-office success of a new film set in 1990s Kashmir has sharpened political divisions in India and prompted a re-examination of a violent campaign against Hindus in the Muslim-majority region three decades ago. The Kashmir Files, directed by Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, depicts the flight of Kashmiri Hindus, known as Pandits, from the region in early 1990s. It is a fictional narrative about a college student who learns that his Kashmiri Hindu parents were killed by Islamist militants, not in an accident as he was told by his grandfather. The film is being enthusiastically promoted by Indias ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which pursues a Hindu nationalist agenda and has been accused of fomenting animus toward the nations 200 million Muslims as an electoral strategy. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally met with the director and producer of the film immediately after its release and expressed his appreciation. Celebrities and political leaders also have urged people to see the film. The Union minister for Women and Child Development, Smriti Irani, tweeted, Watch so that this history soaked in the blood of innocents may never repeat itself #TheKashmirFiles. A goods and services tax that boosts the price of movie tickets has been waived in most BJP-ruled states including some of Indias most populous. In the central state of Madhya Pradesh, police have been offered a day off work to watch the film. In the national capital territory of Delhi, however, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal rejected a demand from BJP legislators to declare the film tax-free, saying, Well, put it on YouTube, it will be free. Sushil Chaudhary, the founder and chairman of the digital movie theater chain Picture Time DigiPlex, told VOA he was pleased that the controversial subject had been addressed in a film. And the storytelling was very different compared to other Indian films. The way the director handled the film it was quite amazing, at the same time very sensitive. This film has huge impact and reminded me of the much-celebrated Schindler's List, a 1993 film about a German businessman who rescued more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazi Holocaust. On social media, commenters have described the movie as the most hard-hitting film about Kashmir made to date. BJPs support of The Kashmir Files The film also has detractors, many of them in the conflict-torn region of Jammu and Kashmir itself. While expressing appreciation for the movies dramatic qualities, these critics say it oversimplifies the complex history of the conflict, and that it offers a cliched representation of Kashmiri Muslims. Hindu supremacists in India have weaponized the Kashmiri Pandit exodus wrote Nitasha Kaul, a Kashmiri Pandit and novelist based in London. The movie dwells on Kashmiri Pandit suffering alone and makes ample use of Islamophobic tropes all Muslims in the movie are violent, barbaric or lecherous, she wrote. She argued that the movie feeds into cycles of hate and revenge. It collapses Kashmirs history and politics into an Islamophobic morality tale that is palatable and profitable to Hindutva India. Ashok Swain, the head of the department of peace and conflict research at Swedens Uppsala University, told VOA he believes the film was made purely for political purposes by a Hindu right-wing filmmaker with support from the ruling authorities. The purpose of the movie is not to tell the history or support the cause of displaced Kashmir pundits, Swain maintained, but to make economic gains for the filmmaker and political gains for the ruling regime by selling Muslim hate in the country. Regional take The movie also has been met with criticism by Muslim leaders of the Peoples Democratic Party, a Kashmir-based regional political bloc. PDP leader and former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti has accused the BJP of doing nothing for the Kashmiri Pandits who remained in Jammu and Kashmir. Earlier, she said the move is ill-intentioned and will not contribute to healing old wounds. Mufti also argued that while the filmmakers were mainly interested in profits, Modi and the BJP were supporting the film in order to instigate people along religious lines. Kashmir resident Sameer Kaul told VOA that some of the gory incidents portrayed in the documentary-style film actually occurred, but that the movie falsely suggests the entire Kashmiri Muslim community played a part in the violence. In fact, he said, some Muslims opposed the violence and others were simply frightened. Kaul said the impact of the movie will be to increase religious polarization and potential intercommunal discord. Never before has the justification for institution of an unbiased judicial probe by central government seemed as convincing. Truth should hopefully pave the way for closure, reconciliation and desperate peace. A similar view has been expressed by one Kashmiri Pandit girl, Sagrika Kissu. Not every Muslim is a terrorist/militant or a terrorist sympathizer, she posted on social media. We should be very sensitive when we paint all of them in one color. This movie sets in a very bitter emotion for Kashmiri Muslims as whole. Real-life impact Meanwhile, the impact from the movie is being felt in real life. A hotel in Delhi recently refused to accommodate a Kashmiri man even after he provided appropriate identification and other credentials. The hotels receptionist said the Delhi Police had told the hotel not to accept reservations from guests from Jammu and Kashmir. A video of the incident went viral, prompting Delhi Police to deny having issued any such order. In an immediate reaction, the hotel chain Oyo Rooms removed the hotel from its platform. Nevertheless, the film is doing blockbuster business despite a lack of promotion and marketing, appearing on 700 screens across India and grossing $3 million since its release on March 11. It is also being shown in the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia, taking in $1.38 million in its first week on international screens. For full coverage of the crisis in Ukraine, visit Flashpoint Ukraine. Recap of March 29 FIGHTING * U.K.s defense ministry says Ukraine forces are conducting localized counterattacks in northwest Kyiv. It adds Russias forces have been pushed back from a number of positions but still pose a threat to the city. DIPLOMACY * Peace talks began between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul. * The Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic and Ireland expel additional Russian diplomats. * U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory warning U.S. citizens that they could be singled out, harassed and detained by Russian authorities if they travel to the country. SANCTIONS * Polands government moved to block imports of coal from Russia and said it would impose financial penalties on any private entities importing Russian coal into Poland. NUCLEAR CONCERNS * U.N. nuclear watchdog says director-general in Ukraine to discuss urgent technical assistance regarding the countrys nuclear facilities. MEDIA * Russias Novaya Gazeta newspaper announced it is shutting down until the end of Russias war in Ukraine because of warnings from government censors. For the latest developments of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, all times EDT: 11:30 p.m.: On Tuesday, the U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory warning U.S. citizens that they could be singled out, harassed and detained by Russian authorities if they travel to the country. The State Department has previously issued a Level 4 travel advisory warning citizens not to travel to the country and to depart immediately if there. The State Department also warned of its limited ability to assist U.S. citizens and widespread problems in Russia including an inability to use credit cards, cash shortages and the arbitrary enforcement of local law. 9:49 p.m.: David Beasley, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, warned the U.N. Security Council Tuesday that the war in Ukraine has created a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe. He said the conflict will have a global impact beyond anything weve seen since World War II because farmers from the country which was the breadbasket of the world are on the front lines fighting Russia and already high food prices are skyrocketing, according to The Associated Press. He said his agency, which was feeding 125 million people around the world before Russias invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, said rising food, fuel and shipping costs were forcing his agency to begin cutting rations, AP reported. In war-torn Yemen, he said, 8 million people just had their food allotment cut to 50% and now were looking at going to zero rations. 8:45 p.m.: "Ukrainians are not naive people. Ukrainians have already learned during these 34 days of invasion, and over the past eight years of the war in Donbas, that the only thing they can trust is a concrete result." -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about Russia's claims to de-escalate in attacks on Kyiv. 7:35 p.m.: On Tuesday, several European Union countries expelled dozens of Russian diplomats, some for alleged spying, in what the Irish prime minister said was a coordinated move. The expulsions come as relations between Russia and the West have plunged into a deep freeze following Moscows invasion of Ukraine, The Associated Press reported. The Netherlands said it was expelling 17 Russians who it described as intelligence officers masquerading as diplomats. Belgium said it was ejecting 21 Russians. The Czech Republic gave one Russian diplomat 72 hours to leave the country. Ireland told four senior Russian officials to leave the country because of activities deemed not in accordance with international standards of diplomatic behaviour." 5:53 p.m.: VOA U.N. correspondent Margaret Besheer reported reaction from Ukraine U.N. Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya, who spoke about the Istanbul peace talks: Todays negotiations in Istanbul have demonstrated that Russia may be ready to make steps forward, although it is still a long way to a sustainable cease-fire and comprehensive de-escalation. The parties will continue consultations to prepare and agree on provisions of a treaty on the security guarantees for Ukraine, a mechanism of implementation of the cease-fire, withdrawal of forces and other armed formations, opening and safe functioning of humanitarian corridors on a permanent basis, as well as on the exchange of fallen soldiers and the release of prisoners of war and civilians. Signing of the treaty on the security guarantees for Ukraine will only be possible after the withdrawal of all Russian armed units to locations as on 23 February 2022. The negotiation process which is underway by no means removes the need to provide to Ukraine additional assistance with weapons and to implement new sanctions imposed on the Russian Federation for the act of aggression committed." 5:17 p.m.: A gaping hole was ripped into the regional administration building in Ukraines southern port city of Mykolayiv on Tuesday. They hit my office. Most people have got out alive. Its a miracle, said regional Governor Vitaliy Kim on his popular social media channel. Mykhaylo Shtekel with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports. 4:23 p.m.: Polands government has decided to block imports of coal from Russia, and it will impose financial penalties on any private entities importing Russian coal into Poland, government spokesman Piotr Mueller said Tuesday. He added that Poland could no longer wait for a decision from the whole 27-nation European Union to embrace the policy, according to The Associated Press. While Poland produces much of its own coal, it also relies on imports. Russian coal makes up 13% of the fuel used each year, according to the Institute for Structural Research in Warsaw. 4:10 p.m.: The United States and its allies plan new sanctions on more sectors of Russia's economy that are critical to sustaining its invasion of Ukraine, including military supply chains, Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said on Tuesday. Adeyemo, speaking in London on a European trip to consult with allies on strengthening and enforcing sanctions to punish Russia, said the broadening of those efforts was aimed at undermining "the Kremlin's ability to operate its war machine," Reuters reports. 3:52 p.m.: Finding comedy in the Ukraine situation serves several functions, says Chad Nackers, editor in chief of The Onion, an American satirical website. It is a powerful tool for exposing the folly and absurdity and human cruelty as well as providing some release from a stressful state of affairs and an endless cycle of misery, he told The Associated Press. Laughter, he says, can fill the hole created by a sense of hopelessness. 3:34 p.m.: Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor has demanded the creators of a popular cartoon show remove the last episode posted on the Internet because it deals with Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Roskomnadzor said on Tuesday that the episode of the series Masyanya "contains false information of social importance about the ongoing military operation to defend the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics." According to Roskomnadzor, the cartoon episode "discredits the Russian Federation's armed forces." Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has this report. 3:05 p.m.: As more people flee Ukraine to neighboring countries to escape the war, Poland is seeing an influx of refugees at its border. Among the displaced is a Ukrainian-Ghanaian family. VOAs Mary Mgawe and Karina Choudhury spoke to the family and filed this report. 2:39 p.m.: U.S. President Joe Biden said Tuesday Western allied nations are waiting to see if Russia will fulfill a commitment to de-escalate attacks around the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv. "We'll see if they follow through," Biden said after speaking by telephone with leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Italy. "There seems to be a consensus that let's just see what they have to offer." Biden's comments to reporters at the White House came after Russia's military said earlier Tuesday at the latest round of peace talks in Turkey that it would cut back operations around Kyiv and Chernihiv. 2:08 p.m.: Western officials say Russia is building up troops in eastern Ukraine, but its too soon to say whether Moscows claim to be scaling back operations around Kyiv is true, The Associated Press reported. Officials familiar with the intelligence picture said Tuesday that Moscow is reinforcing troops in the eastern Donbas region. Moscow has said gaining control of the Donbas is now its main military goal in Ukraine. The British government also expressed skepticism about Russias claims to be scaling back and its commitment to ending the war through talks. We will judge (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and his regime by his actions, not by his words, said Max Blain, spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson. 1:28 p.m.: Four European countries --the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, and the Czech Republic -- announced major expulsions of Russian diplomats on March 29 for alleged espionage as Moscows war against Ukraine continues to rage, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 1:15 p.m.: The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned Tuesday that Ukrainians may soon face serious food insecurity. An immediate and worrying finding is that food shortages are expected immediately or in the next three months in over 40 per cent of the surveyed areas and cases, said Rein Paulsen, FAO Director, Office of Emergencies and Resilience. When it comes to the all-important production of vegetables, conflict is likely to severely disrupt production for tens of thousands of smallholder farmers, those who have decided to stay behind, he said. FAO has been able to support more than 14,600 farming families by providing them with more than 740 tons of urgently needed seed for planting, Paulsen said. 12:35 p.m.: The U.N. World Health Organization released a map Tuesday showing where most of its life-saving medicine and supplies have been shipped, to assist Ukrainians affected by the war. 12:24 p.m.: The spiritual leader of the worlds Orthodox Christians on Tuesday denounced Russias invasion of Ukraine as an atrocious act that is causing enormous suffering, The Associated Press reported. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I didn't mention Russia by name in comments made during a visit to Warsaw after meeting with Ukrainian refugees. It is simply impossible to imagine how much devastation this atrocious invasion has caused for the Ukrainian people and the entire world, Bartholomew said at a news briefing. 11:56 a.m.: The International Committee of the Red Cross reports a misinformation and disinformation campaign is being waged on social media to discredit its humanitarian work in Ukraine. For example, one claim that has no basis in truth, a spokesman said, is the agencys alleged role in forced evacuations. The ICRC has not been involved with any forced evacuation, forced transfers of civilians into Russia from Mariupol or any other Ukrainian cityThe ICRC does not want to open an office in southern Russia to filter Ukrainians as many reports are alleging. So, that is absolutely false., said the spokesman for the ICRC. VOAs Lisa Schlein has more. 11:23 a.m.: Russias promise to scale down military operations around Kyiv and northern Ukraine does not represent a ceasefire, Moscows lead negotiator in peace talks said on Tuesday, according to Reuters. This is not a cease-fire but this is our aspiration, gradually to reach a de-escalation of the conflict at least on these fronts, Vladimir Medinsky, head of the Russian team, said in an interview with the TASS news agency. Medinsky said Russia had made a second major de-escalatory step by agreeing to a possible meeting of the two countries presidents at the same moment that a peace agreement was initialed. However, to prepare such an agreement on a mutually acceptable basis, we still have a long way to go, he said. 11:21 a.m.: More than a month since Russia's invasion, the defense of Ukraine's capital Kyiv has played out in ferocious fighting in places like Lukyanivka and the nearby town of Brovary to the east, Irpin and Bucha to the northwest and Makariv to the west. When the histories are written such towns and villages may be minor details, but they are where the Russian advance has been halted. Reuters has this in-depth look at how, in villages near Kyiv, Ukraine has kept Russias army at bay. 11:00 a.m.: We have to save our childs life, says Ihor, clutching his small child as they wait for a bus that will take them from Lviv, in western Ukraine, to Poland for vital cancer treatment. This was the seventh convoy with child cancer patients to leave Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24. Current Time, a co-production between Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and VOA, has the story. 10:46 a.m.: Information technology companies are focused on providing reliable information and stymying Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine, the CEO of Google and Alphabet Inc. said Tuesday. Sundar Pichai met with Polands Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in Warsaw to discuss ways of aiding the people of war-torn Ukraine, The Associated Press reported. 10:34 a.m.: Ukraines Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Tuesday that Russias circulation and use of its currency, the ruble, in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine violates international law. 10:31 a.m.: Polish veterinarians are helping to treat the pets of Ukrainian refugees at a border crossing town, The Associated Press reported Tuesday. 10:24 a.m.: With seafarers stranded on ships in Ukrainian ports and food supplies running low, the United Nations is pressing for their safe passage out of danger, Reuters reported Tuesday. Russia's military took control of waterways when it invaded Ukraine. Since then at least 100 foreign flagged ships with over 1,000 seafarers have been stuck inside Ukrainian ports with food supplies running low, shipping officials say. UN shipping agency the International Maritime Organization (IMO) said this month it would seek to create a safe maritime corridor to enable merchant ships and their crews to sail out of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov without the risk of being hit. "The IMO Secretariat is working with both Ukraine and the Russian Federation to try and assist the safe departure of the ships and their crew," an IMO spokesperson said. 10:17 a.m.: The U.N.s food aid and refugee agencies on Tuesday announced that they have teamed up with six leading footballers three of whom are former refugees to launch an appeal to raise funds for Ukrainians fleeing their homes as a result of Russias violent invasion of Ukraine. 9:47 a.m.: Britain has detained a Russian-owned $50 million superyacht hours before it was due to leave London where it had docked for a meeting of the superyacht awards, saying the move was part of its sanctions package aimed at punishing Moscow, Reuters reported. The Dutch-built yacht, named Phi, was detained in the Canary Wharf financial district of London under the governments Russian sanctions, the first time the regulations have been used to detain a ship. The government said Phi was owned by a Russian businessman that it did not name, but that ownership was deliberately hidden. 9:34 a.m.: The U.N. Childrens Fund, UNICEF, released a statement detailing how its supplies move through the logistics chain to reach children who have been affected by the war in Ukraine. 9:09 a.m.: Olena Kondratiuk, Vice Speaker of Ukraines parliament, appealed to the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross Tuesday not to open an office in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia. The Ukrainian government has objected to Ukrainian citizens being evacuated into Russia or Russian-controlled territory. 9:07 a.m.: Turkeys foreign minister said that Russian and Ukrainian negotiators have reached a consensus and common understanding on some issues, following talks in Istanbul Tuesday, The Associated Press reported. Mevlut Cavusoglu said the two sides made the most meaningful progress since the start of the negotiations. He said there would be a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers, and that difficult issues will be taken up at a higher level. He didnt give a timeframe. 8:43 a.m.: BREAKING - Russia promised at peace talks on Tuesday to drastically scale down its military operations around Kyiv and the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, while Ukraine proposed neutral status with international guarantees to protect it from attack, Reuters reported. 8:41 a.m.: This week a group of veteran Russian human rights and political activists agreed to set up an anti-war council and to focus their efforts on opposing the invasion of Ukraine. They are preparing an open letter calling on Russia to end its war on Ukraine, in which they will declare it our common duty to stop the war [and] protect the lives, rights and freedoms of all people, both Ukrainians and Russians. The soon-to-be-published manifesto will be signed by a dozen opposition luminaries, VOAs Jamie Dettmer reports. 8:32 a.m.: Moved by footage of a father bidding a tearful farewell to his family, London taxi driver Matt Westfall felt compelled to do something to help those fleeing the conflict in Ukraine. "I was watching the TV one night and I see a man in his mid-30s with his wife and child, and all three of them were sobbing. It really did grab my attention ... it quite upset me," Westfall, 52, told Reuters. "I thought 'what can I do about it'?" Westfall contacted one of his friends and they got together a group of fellow "black cab" drivers with the aim of ferrying escaping Ukrainians to where they needed to go. They also raised about 10,000 pounds for aid as donations flooded in from various taxi organizations and on the crowd funding service GoFundMe. Last week, the group of six London black cabs, another car and a van set off on the 11-hour trip to Poland, with the convoy attracting cheers and waves as it made its way through Europe. 8:28 a.m.: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted a video this week detailing official U.S. support to Ukraine since Russia invaded. The United States is, and will remain, united with Ukraine, the video says. 8:10 a.m.: A dozen members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged President Joe Biden's administration to push for Russia's removal from the United Nations Human Rights Council, citing its invasion of Ukraine. In a letter dated Monday and seen by Reuters, the eight Democrats and four Republicans asked the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, to introduce a resolution to remove Russia from the rights body, citing widespread casualties in Ukraine and the destruction of residential buildings, hospital and schools. Support for Ukraine is one of the rare areas of bipartisan agreement in the bitterly divided U.S. Congress, which has approved billions of dollars in aide for the government in Kyiv. 8:01 a.m.: Russias Novaya Gazeta newspaper announced this week it is shutting down until the end of Russias war in Ukraine because of warnings from government censors. Current Time, a co-production of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and VOA, has this report on Dmitry Muratov, the chief editor, and the work that he and other journalists at Novaya Gazeta have tried to do. 7:51 a.m.: The International Committee of the Red Cross exhorted Ukraine and Russia on Tuesday to agree on safe evacuation of civilians from the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol and other frontline areas, where vital supplies are running out. Asked about Ukrainian accusations of forced deportations of Mariupol residents to Russia, ICRC director-general Robert Mardini told Reuters his agency had no direct information and would not participate in such actions, as it violated the rules of war. "People are caught and trapped in the line of fire. And it is happening unfortunately in many places today in Ukraine, not only in Mariupol," Mardini said at ICRC headquarters in Geneva. 7:33 a.m.: Ukraines State Emergency Service said at least 7 people were killed in a Russian attack on the town of Mykolaiv Tuesday, The Kyiv Independent reported. 7:09 a.m.: Ukraines Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday released its estimate of Russian battlefield losses since the invasion began February 24. 7:08 a.m. : The U.N. nuclear watchdogs director-general arrived in Ukraine on Tuesday for talks with senior government officials on delivering urgent technical assistance to ensure the safety of the countrys nuclear facilities, The Associated Press reported. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement that Rafael Mariano Grossis aim is to initiate prompt safety and security support for Ukraines nuclear sites. That will include sending IAEA experts to prioritized facilities, which it didnt identify, and sending vital safety and security supplies including monitoring and emergency equipment. The IAEA chief has been pressing for weeks for an agreement with Ukraine and Russia on the safety of Ukrainian nuclear power plants. 7:00 a.m.: Billionaire Roman Abramovich is not an official member of the Russian team negotiating with Ukraine, but is present at the talks in Turkey to "enable certain contacts" between the two sides, the Kremlin said on Tuesday. Abramovich, who is sanctioned by the West over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine due to his ties with President Vladimir Putin, was present on Tuesday at the first direct peace talks in more than two weeks in Istanbul, Reuters reported. 6:41 a.m.: A new round of peace talks aimed at ending Russias invasion of Ukraine began Tuesday in Turkey as Ukrainian soldiers appear to have retaken more towns from Russian ground forces whose advances have stalled amid fierce opposition by Ukrainian fighters. Addressing negotiators from Russia and Ukraine before the start of talks in Istanbul, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised speech, it was up to both sides to reach a concrete agreement and stop this tragedy. The Russian negotiating team included billionaire Roman Abramovich, who suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning, along with at least two senior members of the Ukrainian team, after a meeting in Kyiv earlier this month. Speaking about the peace talks, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on national television Monday that the minimum program will be humanitarian questions, and the maximum program is reaching an agreement on a cease-fire. During an interview Sunday in a call with Russian journalists, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was open to adopting neutral status as part of a peace deal if it came with third-party guarantees and was put to a referendum 6:30 a.m.: Hours before the negotiations began, President Zelenskyy insisted that sanctions imposed by Western nations against Moscow need to be effective and substantial in order for them to have the intended effect on Russias economy. Zelenskyy said if Russia manages to circumvent the sanctions, it creates a dangerous illusion for the Russian leadership that they can continue to afford what they are doing now. And Ukrainians pay for it with their lives. Thousands of lives, The New York Times reported. 5:45 a.m.: The International Committee of the Red Cross called on Ukraine and Russia Tuesday to reach a clear agreement for the safe evacuation of civilians from the besieged southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol and other places as vital supplies run out. Robert Mardini, ICRC director-general, told Reuters that the neutral aid agency would not participate in any forced evacuations of civilians from Ukraine and it had no first-hand information that this is happening. He also said there was a disinformation campaign against the ICRC on social media. Our concern is that the very intensity of the fighting is putting civilians in harms way, the fact that in places like Mariupol civilians are not able to leave in safe conditions, there were no concrete agreements by parties to the conflict for safe evacuation of civilians, nor has there been a green light to get humanitarian aid in, Mardini said. Ukraine and Russia must allow the ICRC to visit captured prisoners of war, in line with the Geneva Conventions, and return the remains of people killed in the conflict, he said in an interview with Reuters at ICRC headquarters in Geneva. 5:30 a.m.: U.S. President Joe Bidens whirlwind diplomatic tour of Europe might be most remembered by his words about Russian President Vladimir Putin: This man cannot remain in power. Two days after his utterance, Biden clarified that although he wont back down from the sentiment, the U.S. did not plan to take Putin out of office. VOAs Anita Powell reports, from the White House, on what this means as this Ukraine conflict enters a second month. 4:30 a.m.: The U.N. nuclear watchdog says its director-general has arrived in Ukraine for talks with senior government officials on delivering urgent technical assistance to ensure the safety of the countrys nuclear facilities, The Associated Press reported. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Tuesday that Rafael Mariano Grossis aim is to to initiate prompt safety and security support for Ukraines nuclear sites. That will include sending IAEA experts to prioritized facilities and sending vital safety and security supplies including monitoring and emergency equipment. 3:30 a.m.: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan called for an immediate cease-fire Tuesday and that the onus is on both sides in stopping this tragedy. Erdogan made the remark in a televised speech, ahead of talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators, Reuters reported. 3:00: a.m.: Another round of talks aimed at stopping the war in Ukraine is scheduled for Tuesday as the fighting looks increasingly like a stalemate on the ground, with the two sides trading control of a town in the east and a suburb of the capital, The Associated Press reported. Ahead of the talks, to be held in Istanbul, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country is prepared to declare its neutrality, as Moscow has demanded, and is open to compromise on the fate of the Donbas, the contested region in the countrys east. The Ukrainian delegation has checked in the Shangri-La Bosphorus while the Russian delegation has settled in the Ciragan Palace Kempinski hotel, both very close to each other in the Besiktas district. 2:30 a.m.: Ukraines Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba urged in a Twitter post Tuesday upon states around the world for the criminalization of the use of the Z symbol as a way to publicly support Russias war. The letter Z has been used as a marking on Russian military vehicles taking part in the conflict and has been adopted by Russians supporting the war, with it being prominent on flags and at pro-Kremlin rallies, Reuters reported. 2:00 a.m.: The U.K.s ministry of defense said Tuesday that Ukraines forces continued to conduct localized counterattacks in northwest of Kyiv, including Irpen, Bucha and Hostomel. The report confirms an earlier update released by the Ukrainian armed forces. Russian forces have been pushed back from a number of positions as a result, the report said. However, the daily intelligence report cautioned saying Russia continues to pose a threat to the city due to airstrikes. Russia has heavily bombarded Ukranian cities since the invasion started last month. 1:30 a.m.: In an operational report, Ukraines military said it had repelled seven Russian attacks on Monday. The Ukrainian report says its forces destroyed 12 Russian tanks and 10 combat vehicles and its air force hit 17 targets, according to a summary provided to U.K.s newspaper The Guardian. The claims could not be confirmed. The Ukrainian military said the country continues to be hit by Russian missile-bomb strikes and civilians are being shot, kidnapped and held hostage, in occupied areas. 1:05 a.m.: Russian and Ukrainian representatives arrived in Istanbul on Monday for another round of peace talks. The Russian delegation arrived at 4 p.m. local time while the Ukrainian delegation landed at 10 p.m. local time. Talks are set to begin on Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. local time and last for two days. The talks will take place at the office of the Turkish president known as the Dolmabahce Palace. Previous negotiations held in Belarus did not yield a breakthrough or a cessation of hostilities. 12:00 a.m.: Delegation members attending peace talks between Ukraine and Russia suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning after a meeting in Kyiv earlier this month, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. VOA has this story. Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. After the Netherlands announced Tuesday it was expelling 17 Russian diplomats, several more European countries are doing the same. Belgium said Tuesday it would expel 21 Russians, the Czech Republic said it was expelling one, while Ireland announced it would expel four officials. "Together with our allies, we are reducing the Russian intelligence presence in the EU," the Czech Foreign Ministry said. Last week, Poland kicked out 45 Russian officials. The Dutch foreign affairs ministry said the reason for its expulsions was information indicating the 17 are secretly active as intelligence officers." The ministry added that the intelligence threat against the Netherlands remains high. The current attitude of Russia in a broader sense makes the presence of these intelligence officers undesirable. It said it took the move after consulting with several other countries. Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said the country was prepared should Russia take retaliatory measures against Dutch officials in Russia. Similar actions have been taken recently by the United States, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Montenegro. Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press and Reuters Everyone is hoping for some kind of conspiracy at the top that one of Vladimir Putins close associates or oligarchs will kill him, says popular Russian blogger and longtime Kremlin critic Dmitry Chernyshev. But it seems to me that will not be a solution, he adds. Instead, Chernyshev, a 55-year-old writer and lecturer, is calling on Russians to join a National Resistance movement hes setting up and is encouraging wide-ranging civil disobedience going well beyond street protests. He says armed resistance and sabotage will be needed to overthrow the Russian leader. That marks him out from other Kremlin critics and opposition figures as they struggle to map out a way forward to continue to challenge Putin. This week a group of veteran Russian human rights and political activists agreed to set up an anti-war council and to focus their efforts on opposing the invasion of Ukraine. They are preparing an open letter calling on Russia to end its war on Ukraine, in which they will declare it our common duty to stop the war [and] protect the lives, rights and freedoms of all people, both Ukrainians and Russians. The soon-to-be-published manifesto will be signed by a dozen opposition luminaries, including Lev Ponomaryov, Oleg Orlov and Svetlana Gannushkina. Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, who was sentenced to an additional nine years in prison last week, has also called on Russians to attend anti-war protests. But speaking to VOA, Chernyshev, who fled to Israel after his family was threatened by authorities and is trying to establish from Tel Aviv a movement to oust Russias leader, says more is needed and his strategy is broader. He says it wont help Russia, if theres just a transfer of power from one hand to another. Russia will be as badly off if Putin is replaced by someone like Viktor Zolotov, the head of Russias National Guard, or Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, he says. It seems to me that the security forces have committed so many crimes that they will not give up power by peaceful means, he warns. Opposition exodus Russias dissidents and rights activists say they are now living through the darkest period they have encountered since the end of communism. Tens of thousands of Russians have fled the country since the February 24 invasion of Ukraine, fearing that if they didnt do so they would end up in jail. Their departure will further weaken opposition to Putin and make mass revolt even more unlikely, fear some activists, and has been compared by some to the flight of the White Army from Crimea in November 1920, when around 165,000 people fled Russia in three days. Estimates for the current exodus run as high as 200,000. The White Army and its supporters fled because of defeat by the Bolsheviks on the battlefield and while there has been no clash of arms in Russia now, there is also a widespread sense of defeat. The opposition has been crushed, chased into exile or underground, according to Ben Noble, a professor of Russian politics at University College London. The screws have been tightened on anti-war activists and Kremlin critics, who are facing increasing repression, including police beatings, intimidation, work dismissals and other threats. Around 150 journalists have fled Russia, and one of the countrys last remaining influential independent news outlets, Novaya Gazeta, announced this week that it will cease operations until the end of the war in Ukraine after it received a second warning from the state censor. Political activists expect the search for internal enemies to blame for the countrys descent into sanction-induced economic hardship will only get worse for them. Putin has called for the country to purify itself of fifth columnists and traitors. Fomenting uprising In these circumstances Chernyshev says there is little option but to foment an uprising. In a recent Facebook post, he published a manifesto for national resistance, in which he called for a rebellion. The Resistance Movement is announcing preparations to overthrow the criminal Putin regime, the manifesto began. We will use all methods, including the right of people to an uprising. It is the citizens' inalienable right to protect their rights and freedom from usurpers through any means, including armed struggle. We have exhausted all peaceful means: we organized rallies they were dispersed. Ran honest media reports they were banned. Led an open political struggle the oppositionists were killed, imprisoned, exiled from the country, and were tried to be poisoned, the manifesto continued. One of Chernyshevs role models is Charles de Gaulle, the wartime French leader. I am very inspired by the example of de Gaulle, who had nothing, no army, no soldiers. He called on the French to resist, says Chernyshev. When France was defeated by Germany in 1940, de Gaulle commanded an army that did not exist. But gradually these armies appeared when it seemed that everything had already been lost. Gradually, a resistance movement began to form, he adds. He wants to target judges and security officials who prop up Putins rule in a bid to demoralize them and make them feel vulnerable. It is one thing when they are sure that they are hidden and no one knows anything about them, and quite another when their names and addresses are made public. He doesnt detail what he hopes will happen to these officials, but he mentions sabotage. Chernyshev has been an active Kremlin critic for years. He has had a series of jobs since leaving the Russian army after serving as a conscript. He has worked as a security guard, a driver, and a guide for hunters before studying design and graphic art, eventually becoming a creative director for an advertising agency. After Russias annexation of Crimea, his blog became one of the most-read in the country. Before the 2014 elections, I declared a personal vendetta against Putin, he says. He attended pro-Navalny rallies and was detained once for 15 days. "When the invasion started, I wrote harsh posts against the war, he says. He was arrested and taken to Lubyanka, the headquarters of the domestic FSB intelligence agency, where they interrogated me very harshly for three hours, he says. They wanted me to sign a document swearing allegiance to Putin and other nonsense. Of course, I did not sign the document, but in order to have time to get my children out of Russia, I promised to stop my activities on the Internet. I have four children and the threats were serious. They promised to send me in a freight train to Donetsk and tie me to a pole as a looter, so that the people would deal with me, he explains. If it were not for the threats to [my] children, I would have stayed in Russia, he says. He sold everything he could and flew on March 15 with his family to Israel. Other political activists believe the circumstances are not right for the kind of national resistance Chernyshev hopes to foment. They say Putin has prepared for years to see off any color revolution that emerges. Others point to polls suggesting the Russian leader has support for his invasion of Ukraine. Chernyshev dismisses the criticism. Everyone who has conducted surveys knows that 9 out of 10 people interviewed on the street refuse to answer. People receive calls on their home phones and ask if they support government activities. People are afraid to answer truthfully and, of course, say they say they support. I am sure that Putin's rating is at an extremely low level. I urge you not to believe in the results of the polls, he says. And he believes food riots will start to emerge when the economic hardship brought on by Western sanctions worsens. I may be wrong but doing nothing in such a situation seems like a betrayal to me, he says. Mexico's armed forces knew that 43 student teachers who disappeared in 2014 were being kidnapped by criminals, and then they hid evidence that could have helped locate them, according to a report released Monday by a special investigation. Evidence obtained by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), an independent panel tasked with investigating the notorious case, revealed that Mexican navy and army officials kept secret that the students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College were under real-time surveillance by the state leading up to and during their abduction. "Security authorities had two intelligence processes underway, one to follow the actions of organized crime in the area and the other to track the students," the investigators said in the report, which was based on declassified documents. The students were under surveillance because their college, which has strong ties to left-wing social movements in Mexico, was viewed as a potential hotbed of subversion, the GIEI said. Neither the army nor the navy immediately responded to requests for comment. The kidnapping of the students on the night of Sept. 26, 2014, in the southwestern city of Iguala sparked national and international protests and remains one of the most infamous incidents in the history of Mexico's struggle with drug gangs. The official documents reviewed by the GIEI included transcripts of conversations between soldiers and their superiors detailing the students' arrival in Iguala. From Iguala, the students had planned to travel to Mexico City to attend a protest but were instead kidnapped by corrupt local police and handed over to a local gang. The students were then massacred and their bodies incinerated, according to the previous government. The GIEI later picked holes in that version of events, and the current government ordered the case reopened. So far, the remains of only two of the missing students have been definitively identified. The report did not conclude what had happened to the rest of the students. Mexico's armed forces have long denied having information about the crime and the students' whereabouts. Communications intercepts by the armed forces could have been used at the time to locate the students after they were kidnapped, the report found. But the armed forces denied that such intercepts existed and did not hand them over, it said. In a sign that sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine may be starting to bite, Russian tanker ships carrying oil and petroleum products have been observed turning off systems that broadcast their identity and location, a practice known as "going dark" and which is often associated with efforts to evade sanctions. In the days and weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and a broad coalition of other countries imposed sweeping sanctions on Russian goods, including petroleum products. Experts say that by going dark, ships may be able to discharge cargo, often via ship-to-ship transfers at sea, without attracting the attention of law enforcement authorities. According to data gathered by Windward Ltd., an Israeli firm that uses artificial intelligence to assess maritime risk, the number of incidents of Russia-affiliated ships going dark on a daily basis has increased dramatically since the introduction of sanctions. This is especially true with regard to tankers carrying Russian crude oil. Prior to the invasion, Windward tracked two or three incidents per day of tankers loaded with Russian crude disabling their identification systems. It is now documenting about 20 a day. "We're seeing a synchronized effort across Russian shipping and trading to systemically hide where their cargoes are going," Ami Daniel, Windward CEO, told VOA. That is not to say the practice of "going dark" is being dictated by the Kremlin. The ships involved are almost all privately owned and not technically answerable to the government in Moscow. Neither the Russian government nor the various companies who own the ships in question have issued public statements about the practice. Automatic Identification System A treaty, known as the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, requires large ships to have an Automatic Identification System (AIS) in operation at all times, with some specific exceptions. The AIS provides other ships and coastal authorities with the vessel's name, heading, speed and other information. "AIS should not be turned off, as a general matter," Attorney Neil Quartaro, a partner in the trade and transportation group at the law firm Cozen O'Connor, told VOA. Quartaro said that the few exceptions include areas where broadcasting details about a ship's speed and heading could create a security risk. "The primary area where it is acceptable to turn off your AIS is in something called the 'high risk area,' which is essentially the area off the coast of Somalia," Quartaro said. Pirate activity is prevalent in that region, as well as a few other spots around the world, where cargo ships have been boarded and the crews held for ransom. Ship-to-ship transfers Quartaro said that it is not uncommon for ships attempting to evade sanctions to turn off their AIS equipment while, for instance, performing a ship-to-ship transfer of crude oil that originated in a sanctioned country. "If you're operating in the Gulf of Mexico, and you're anywhere close to Trinidad and Tobago or Aruba, and you turn off your AIS, anybody looking at that is going to suspect that you're engaging in an illegal transfer of oil product out of Venezuela, which happens all the time," Quartaro said. Similarly, he said, it is common for empty tankers to leave a port in the Middle East, turn off their AIS equipment, and then reappear a few days later with a load of crude oil bound for Pakistan. In such cases, he said, the oil probably originated in Iran, which is under heavy sanctions. Deceptive shipping practices In 2020, the U.S. departments of State and Treasury, as well as the Coast Guard, issued an advisory that included seven different shipping practices that were characterized as "deceptive" and associated with illicit shipping and the evasion of sanctions. No. 1 on the list is disabling or manipulating AIS equipment. "Although safety issues may at times prompt legitimate disablement of AIS transmission, and poor transmission may otherwise occur, vessels engaged in illicit activities may also intentionally disable their AIS transponders or manipulate the data transmitted in order to mask their movement," the advisory warned. Others deceptive practices include falsifying registrations and cargo manifests, creating intentionally complex ownership structures, and making unscheduled stops and detours. Sign of desperation The potential downside of engaging in deceptive shipping practices is significant, which suggests that willingness to engage in it could be a sign of desperation. Large companies that have significant business interests in the United States, for example, do not want to get caught up in an investigation of sanction evasion. For that reason, they pay companies like Windward to identify vessels that have engaged in suspicious activity, in order to avoid doing business with them in the future. However, the importance of oil exports to the Russian economy may make some shippers more willing to take risks. Russia's exports of petroleum products are a large contributor to the economy. In 2021, according to figures released by the Russian central bank, the country took in $490 billion from petroleum sales. Crude oil accounted for $110 billion of the total, and other oil products made up an additional $69 billion. Daniel, of Windward, said his company expects to see Russian shippers resorting to additional methods of bypassing sanctions in the near future. "We expect Russia to adopt many of these deceptive shipping practices, and not just in the tanker segments. Across all the segments, because of the huge pressure they're under," he said. A mentally impaired Malaysian man who has been held for more than decade in Singapore on drug charges is one step closer to execution. A court in the city-state Tuesday rejected a final appeal filed by lawyers for Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam, who has been on death row since 2010 for trafficking less than 43 grams of heroin into Singapore. The court also rejected a request by Dharmalingams lawyers to delay his execution so he can undergo an independent psychiatric examination. Anti-death penalty groups say Nagaenthrans execution could be carried out very soon. Dharmalingams imprisonment has attracted worldwide attention, with Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob and British billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson joining human rights activists in urging Singapore to either pardon him or commute his sentence to life in prison. Maya Foa, the director of British-based human rights group Reprieve, issued a statement urging Singapore President Halimah Yacob to listen to the cries of mercy within Singapore and around the world and spare Dharmalingams life. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. Authorities in central Nigeria are searching for suspects after attackers used explosives to derail a train late Monday and then opened fire on passengers. Nearly 1,000 people were on board at the time of the attack, as Timothy Obiezu reports from Abuja. Kaduna State commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs Samuel Aruwan said Tuesday that injured passengers had been taken to the hospital and the military has completed the evacuation of other passengers from the site, including those hiding in nearby forests. There were about 970 people aboard the night train traveling from Abuja to Kaduna when it was derailed by explosives planted along the tracks. The attackers also shot at the train as it crashed to a halt. At least seven people were reported dead from injuries following the attack, including a female medical doctor who broadcast news of the attack on Twitter. Some other passengers are missing and may have been kidnapped. Kaduna state resident Gideon Gambo said two of his brothers are among those missing. "I gathered that their concentration was the first-class coaches. Unfortunately, my brothers were in the first class, so they took everyone in the first class and went with them," said Gambo. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack and police have yet to name any suspects. Kaduna is enduring a wave of violence that has left many residents angry and afraid. Last week, more than 80 people were killed in a spate of attacks by armed gangs in the state. On Sunday, gunmen invaded the Kaduna airport and killed an official. Beevan Magoni is a Kaduna activist and resident. "People are being killed on a daily basis. How many times have you seen that bandits have been arrested? We're tired of being killed, we're tired of everything, this is frustrating," said Magoni. Security analyst Kabiru Adamu said the escalation could be political. "Very soon, the primary for the ruling party in Kaduna will be held. We've also seen an increase in the supposed collaboration between these gunmen and the terrorists operating in northeast of the country, in particular the use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) as an attack vector seem to be increasing simply because of this partnership," said Adamu. Millions of Nigerians had turned to the railway to commute between the Nigerian capital and neighboring Kaduna state after armed gangs began targeting and kidnapping people along the commonly used Abuja-Kaduna expressway. The Nigeria Railway Corporation (NRC) has now suspended its operations along the Abuja-Kaduna routes. A prominent Nigerian airline, Air Peace, has also halted its operations in Kaduna. For more than two months, Muska, a 35-year-old Afghan woman who preferred not to reveal her last name for security concerns, has gone to various Taliban government offices in Kabul literally begging officials for a new passport. Ive been beaten by Taliban guards, insulted verbally and have been turned away and told that there is no passport for me, Muska told VOA by phone. A former government official with a masters degree, Muska was fired from her job after the Taliban took power last August. The Taliban government has fired women from all public jobs with some exceptions in health and education sectors. Terrified for her future under Taliban leadership, Muska applied for graduate programs at universities abroad and received a generous scholarship at a university in the U.S. I have to fill out my I-20 form and submit a visa application on time in order for me to be able to start the program in the fall, but without a passport I can do nothing. Two other Afghan women also told VOA their applications for a passport were rejected without explanation. When we go to the passport department, [Taliban guards] order us to go away and dont let us in as if were some kind of a virus, said Nasreen Ahmadi, adding that she had received a research fellowship in the U.S. The passport ban also impacts Afghan women who live and work outside Afghanistan but need valid passports in order to travel internationally. When my passport expires next year in May, I have no idea what I will do, Pashtana Dorani, director of an Afghan educational organization and a fellow at Wellesley College, told VOA. Taliban authorities have not officially announced a ban on womens passports, but an announcement on the passport departments website states that new passport registration is suspended until further notice. A spokesman for the passport department told reporters in Kabul on March 29 that issuance of new passports will resume soon, but he did not clarify whether women, especially those without a male chaperone, will be given passports. Discriminatory Even if women and girls have valid passports, they cannot travel outside the country unless they are accompanied by a religiously-approved male chaperone (father, brother, husband, son), according to new restrictions the Taliban enforced. It is obviously a manifestation of gender-based discrimination that also affects their fundamental right of freedom of movement and education, Reem Alsalem, U.N. special rapporteur on violence against women, told VOA. While the passport and travel restrictions deprive Afghan women and girls from work and education outside the country, Taliban authorities have also enforced a series of restrictions on womens work and education inside Afghanistan. Despite previous assurances about the resumption of secondary education for girls in March, last week Taliban authorities announced middle and high schools will remain closed for female students. The announcement was met with widespread international condemnation and led to a cancellation of scheduled U.S.-Taliban talks in Qatar last week. Denying girls secondary education is one of the many manifestations of structural discrimination that women and girls are subjected to and a reminder that the de facto authorities are continuing with their policies to erase women from public life and to stunt their ability to enjoy their fundamental human rights, said Alsalem. Taliban officials have said the ban on girls post-elementary education is temporary, until appropriate religious arrangements are made an assertion experts repudiate. It is incomprehensible to me that the Taliban justify their actions citing religious doctrine as countries across the Organization of Islamic Conference have achieved or are actively pursuing gender equality in education, the U.N. special rapporteur said. Womens rights activists say the international community should do more to hold the Taliban accountable for their repressive policies. Put the Taliban on travel sanction list, said Dorani of Wellesley College. I find it ironic how the U.S. and any other country can tweet but won't lift a finger for women's rights. Waiver sought The U.S. Embassy in Kabul is closed, forcing all Afghan passport holders to travel out of the country to apply for U.S. visas. That further complicates the ability of women like Muska to obtain an education and receive work opportunities outside Afghanistan. I cannot travel because I dont have a passport and even if I get a passport I cannot travel without a male guardian, she said. Its a double whammy made to ensure women like me remain trapped in a cycle of denials. Both Nasreen and Muska said they are calling on the U.S. government to grant women like themselves waivers to travel to the U.S. and start their education without a Taliban passport. Its not enough just condemning the Taliban for their brutal misogynistic policies, the world needs to help us achieve what Taliban denies us, said Nasreen. The U.S. government has evacuated tens of thousands of Afghans over the past seven months and has offered humanitarian parole to those who have entered the U.S. without travel documents. We will continue to engage diplomatically to resolve any issues and to hold the Taliban to their public pledge to let all foreign nationals and any Afghan citizen with travel authorization from other countries freely depart Afghanistan, a State Department spokesperson told VOA, adding that there are no U.S. consular services available inside Afghanistan and visa applicants had to seek appointments in third countries. Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine contributed to this report. Clashes along the Democratic Republic of Congos eastern border have sent thousands of people fleeing into Uganda. Ugandan forces have deployed along the border after reports that M23 rebels attacked military positions Sunday night. Sounding exhausted and desperate, Anglique Wabareka tells VOA on the phone she spent the night on the run after clashes between rebel forces broke out in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Pitching camp at a police post across the Ugandan border, Wabareka says she was able to escape with her three children. "I entered the house to get my children something to eat. That's when I heard gunshots and we started to run. People are dying. I couldnt carry any belongings because of the heavy gunfire," she said. Mumbere Habimana says many people were injured in the fighting. He says he saw one person get killed. "Theres heavy fighting," he says. "We are fleeing but we dont even know who is making us flee. I left my house with nothing. I dont even have money. And now I dont even know where Im going to stay." Natukunda Primrose, Kisoro district manager for the Ugandan Red Cross, says the number of people whove crossed into Uganda has surpassed 10,000. "Most of them are still at the border. Then just a few are at the transit center," Natukunda said. "Right now, we are passing on messages to them, for those who are ready to go to the transit center. In a statement to journalists, a spokesman for the governor of North Kivu province said that on the nights of March 27 and 28, M23 rebels, supported by Rwandan soldiers, carried out incursions and attacks against positions of the Congolese army in the towns of Tchanzu and Runyonyi. The spokesman, General Ekenge Sylain, said that during those attacks, DRC forces arrested two Rwandan soldiers, identified as Warrant Officer Habyarimana Jean-Pierre and Uwajeneza Muhidi John, who said they belong to the 65th Battalion of the 402nd Brigade of the Rwanda Defense Forces. Rwandan forces have long been present in the eastern DRC, fighting Rwandan rebel groups based in the region. Ekenge said the army would take all measures to quickly restore authority and peace in the affected areas. In Kampala, Ugandan Army spokesman Brigadier General Felix Kulaigye said Ugandan forces have deployed heavily to ensure the fighting does not spill across the border. Of course, the porous border we cant man, man to man," Kulaigye said. "But it is well catered for and we are sure that there will not be infiltration this side of the border. In December, thousands of Congolese fled into Uganda to escape fighting in Ituri province, but were asked by authorities to return home after the situation was brought under control. Aid agencies warn hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese are likely to suffer devastating consequences during this years wet season without emergency international support to head off the worst impacts. Record rainfall over the past three years has affected an estimated 835,000 people, killed nearly 800,000 livestock and flooded thousands of hectares of farmland, preventing people from cultivating the waterlogged land. Last year, South Sudan had its worst flooding in history. Forecasters expect this years rainy season, which begins in May, will be even worse. The U.N. refugee agency says 33 out of 79 counties remain badly affected by the flood waters, which have not significantly subsided since the last wet season. It says thousands of people have been displaced in harshest-hit Jonglei, Unity and Upper Nile states. Andrew Harper, special adviser on climate action to the UNHCR, has just returned from a visit to South Sudan. He warns the country is at the center of a potential catastrophe. "We have got villages, which are hosting tens of thousands of people who are doing whatever they can to resist the onslaught of an increasingly hostile climateThe roads and logistics of getting supplies and support throughout South Sudan are pretty horrible at the best of times and so these roads no longer exist for the vast number of locations, said Harper. Harper says intercommunal ethnic-based violence is endemic in the country. That, he says, poses security problems for aid workers and their ability to reach needy people. He says the dangers also discourage villagers in unsafe climate zones from moving to other areas, where they might face violence. "The other issue that will be coming to the fore is the food insecurity, said Harper. "As you have crops wiped out, as you have livestock dying, season after season you have this compounded series of disasters and a lack of international response in terms of providing support for food security, then you will be facing a situation of a famine in that region. Harper appeals to the international community to step up support for the people of South Sudan. Otherwise, he warns the climate crisis, coupled with ongoing insecurity in the country, will leave people with no means to survive. U.S. President Joe Biden said Tuesday that Western allied nations are waiting to see whether Russia will fulfill a commitment to de-escalate attacks around the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv. "We'll see if they follow through," Biden said after speaking by telephone with leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Italy. "There seems to be a consensus that let's just see what they have to offer." Biden's comments to reporters at the White House came after Russia's military said earlier Tuesday at the latest round of peace talks in Turkey that it would cut back operations around Kyiv and Chernihiv. Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said the move was meant to "increase trust" in the talks aimed at ending the fighting. The Pentagon confirmed that "a small number" of Russian forces had begun to move away from Kyiv but offered even more skepticism than the president. "We believe that this is a repositioning, not a real withdrawal," Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters at the Pentagon. "We're not convinced that the threat to the capital city has been radically diminished here by this proclamation by the Russian Ministry of Defense," he added. Advances by Russian forces have stalled in the face of fierce opposition by Ukrainian fighters. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has said Russian troops will focus on Donbas, which includes the breakaway regions of Luhansk and Donetsk in Ukraine's east. He said Moscow had largely accomplished the first stage of its "special military operation," including degrading Ukraine's military capacity. The Pentagon press secretary pointed out that the Russian troops were increasing their focus and activity in the east after being "stalled out" in the military campaign in the north and south. "No amount of spin can mask what the world has witnessed over the past month, and that's the courage and the military prowess of Ukraine's armed forces and its people, which are proving to be more than what Russia bargained for in its unprovoked and unjustified invasion," he said. A senior U.S. Department of Defense official told reporters that Ukrainian troops have retaken the town of Trostyanets, near the northeastern city of Sumy, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his Monday night speech that Ukrainian troops have liberated Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv. In Istanbul, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Ukrainian and Russian negotiators before the start of talks that it was up to both sides to reach a concrete agreement and "stop this tragedy." An aide to Zelenskyy said that during Tuesday's talks the two sides discussed the terms of a possible cease-fire plus international security guarantees for Ukraine. At a U.N. Security Council meeting Tuesday, Ukrainian Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya said Russia may be ready to take steps forward, but there is still a long way to go to a sustainable cease-fire and comprehensive de-escalation. "Signing of the treaty on the security guarantees for Ukraine will only be possible after the withdrawal of all Russian armed units," he said. Kyslytsya also urged states to continue to keep the pressure on Moscow through new sanctions and to keep assisting Kyiv with weapons. The negotiations are expected to resume Wednesday. Taking part in the talks was Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who suffered symptoms consistent with poisoning after participating in peace talks earlier this month. At least two senior members of the negotiating Ukrainian team suffered similar symptoms. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Abramovich attended Tuesday's talks on an informal basis. Peskov dismissed reports that Abramovich and the other two negotiators may have been poisoned, saying that was a part of an "information war" launched by Western nations. Just as the latest talks were getting underway in Istanbul, a Russian airstrike blasted a gaping hole in a government building in the Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv, leaving at least eight people trapped in the rubble. Russia has used various weapons in its war on Ukraine, including hypersonic missiles, according to the top U.S. military commander in Europe. U.S. General Tod Wolters, head of European Command and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, told a Senate hearing Tuesday that most of Russia's hypersonic missile strikes were against "specific military targets." Russia announced earlier this month that it used hypersonic missiles to destroy a large weapons depot in Ukraine's western Ivano-Frankivsk region. Also Tuesday, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk announced in a video message posted on the social media site Telegram that humanitarian corridors to evacuate civilians from war-scarred regions had reopened after a one-day pause over what Kyiv called possible Russian "provocations." The United Nations said the Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed at least 10 million people out of their homes and that more than 3.8 million have fled the country. Speaking about the peace talks, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on national television Monday that "the minimum program will be humanitarian questions, and the maximum program is reaching an agreement on a cease-fire." During an interview Sunday in a call with Russian journalists, Zelenskyy said Ukraine was open to adopting neutral status as part of a peace deal if it came with third-party guarantees and was put to a referendum. Margaret Besheer contributed to this report from the United Nations. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine ended Tuesday with both sides stressing the importance of the negotiations and indicating a willingness to compromise. Istanbul, Turkey's largest city, hosted the fifth round of Ukrainian and Russian peace talks. The Russian delegation described the more than four hours of talks as positive. Speaking to reporters after the talks, Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin pledged a reduction in military operations. To increase mutual trust and aid negotiations, he said, a decision was made to reduce military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv areas. The Russian delegation said further steps on reducing military operations would be discussed on their return to Moscow. Tuesday's talks focused on Russia's demand that Ukraine should become neutral and end its aspirations to join NATO. The Ukrainian delegation proposed that eight countries should guarantee its security, including Poland, Israel, and Turkey, in exchange for neutrality. Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak, speaking to reporters, said international guarantors are key to accepting neutrality. He said intensive consultations are underway on various issues, the most important of which is agreement on international security guarantees for Ukraine. That agreement, Podolyak added, is necessary to end the war. The delegations also discussed proposals on the disputed status of the self-proclaimed breakaway republics of Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea, which Russia annexed. Ukraine demands their return, while Moscow calls for their international recognition as independent states and Crimea as Russian sovereign territory. Among the proposals discussed was that Crimea's status would be subject to a 15-year consultation period. But the Ukrainian delegation insisted such a step would only be possible in the event of a complete cease-fire. Expectations had been low ahead of Tuesday's meeting, but Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu claimed the talks had achieved the most progress since the start of the war. Analyst Sinan Ulgen said the Ukrainian-Russian negotiations in Istanbul underline the importance of Turkey, which has been careful to maintain good ties with both sides during peace efforts. "As a result of this balanced policy, Turkey is one of few actors that can play a constructive diplomatic role right now. That diplomatic role can be best described as 'good office,' which is more than a facilitator but less than a mediator," Ulgen saud. But analysts suggest that a meeting of the Ukrainian and Russian presidents is key to ending the conflict. While Kyiv says it's ready for such a summit, Moscow insists it would only be possible if there are concrete proposals to discuss. Tuesday's meeting may turn out to be the first step in that process. A United Nations spokesperson says no one survived Tuesday when a helicopter crashed in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo with eight U.N. peacekeepers on board. Earlier, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the helicopter was carrying six crew members, all from the Pakistani military, and two military personnel one from Serbia and one from the Russian Federation when it went down in North Kivu province. Dujarric said the group was on a reconnaissance mission in the area of Tshanzu, southeast of the city of Rutshuru. The helicopter went there to monitor the situation where there has been fighting, he said. He declined to state the cause of the crash, saying an investigation is under way. The U.N. Stabilization Mission in Congo released a map on Twitter pinpointing the area of the crash. Separately, the Congolese army accused the M23 rebel group of shooting down the helicopter and said it went down in territory controlled by the rebels. In an interview with VOAs French to Africa Service, M23 spokesperson Willy Ngoma accused the army of shooting down the aircraft while firing on M23 forces. The sides have clashed in North Kivu in recent days. Dujarric acknowledged the clashes without assigning blame for the crash. Margaret Besheer contributed to this report PENTAGON U.S. President Joe Biden said Monday that he would make "no apologies" after his recent comment that Russian President Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power," stressing he was "expressing moral outrage" and not actually calling for regime change in Moscow. "People like this shouldn't be ruling countries, but they do. The fact they do doesn't mean I can't express my outrage about it," Biden told reporters at the White House on Monday. "I wasn't articulating a policy change," he said. The president's unscripted remark about Putin, while speaking with Ukrainian refugees and international volunteers in Poland on Saturday, stirred controversy in the United States and caught some allies in Western Europe by surprise. "The last thing I want to do is engage in a land war or a nuclear war with Russia," Biden said, while rejecting the idea that his comment could escalate tensions over the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian troops have stopped ground advances toward the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv as they appear refocused on regions in eastern Ukraine, according to senior official from the U.S. Department of Defense. "They clearly are not moving on Kyiv anymore," said the official, who briefed reporters on background Monday. "What we are seeing is this continued reprioritization on the Donbas." Moscow's latest military shift appears to be an effort to cut off Ukrainian forces in the eastern region, according to the official, adding that the move "could be an attempt by the Russians to gain negotiating leverage" in peace talks with Ukrainian representatives trying to end the war. Russia has been backing separatists in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine since at least 2014, when Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. Ukrainian forces have stopped Russian troops from taking most major cities. Nearly 5,000 people, including more than 200 children, have been killed in the southern city of Mariupol, which Russia has heavily bombarded since the invasion started last month, according to the mayor's office. Mariupol's mayor on Monday called for evacuation of the remaining 160,000 residents. Ukraine's deputy prime minister, however, said no humanitarian corridors would open, because of intelligence reports of potential Russian assaults on the routes. "We've seen the Russians announce humanitarian corridors and then promptly shell them, or mortar them, or strike them," the senior U.S. Defense official said Monday in response to a question from VOA, without speaking to Ukraine's recent assertions. Near Kyiv, the large suburb of Irpin has been liberated from Russian forces, according to Mayor Alexander Markushin. "We understand that our city will be attacked more. We will protect it," he said. Last week, the deputy chief of the Russian armed forces' general staff said Russia's "main tasks" of the invasion of Ukraine were complete. "The combat capabilities of the Ukrainian armed forces have been substantially reduced, which allows us to concentrate our main efforts on achieving the main goal the liberation of Donbas," Colonel General Sergei Rudskoi said. Last week, however, a senior U.S. Defense official said Ukrainians still have more than 90% of their combat power, in part because the U.S. and other allies have replenished them "in real time." Peace talks Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country's "sovereignty and territorial integrity" are a priority as Ukraine and Russia head into a new round of peace talks. "We are looking for peace, really, without delay," Zelenskyy said in a video address late Sunday. "There is an opportunity and a need for a face-to-face meeting in Turkey. This is not bad. Let's see the outcome." Earlier Sunday, in a call with Russian journalists, Zelenskyy said Ukraine was open to adopting neutral status as part of a peace deal if it came with third-party guarantees and was put to a referendum. Turkey is set to host the latest talks. Speaking by phone Sunday with Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stressed the need for a cease-fire and more humanitarian aid in the region, his office said. The United Nations says the Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed 10 million people out of their homes, and more than 3.8 million have fled the country. In response to the invasion, the NATO alliance has increased defenses on its eastern flank, announcing four new battlegroups to Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia last week. Individual NATO members have also unilaterally sent troops and equipment to allied countries including Poland and the Baltic states, which neighbor Russia and have hosted NATO battlegroups since 2017. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby announced that six U.S. Navy EA-18G Growler aircraft and about 250 air crew would arrive in Germany on Monday to bolster NATO's defenses. "These Growlers specialize in conducting electronic warfare missions, using a suite of jamming sensors to confuse enemy radars," Kirby told reporters. "They are there to reinforce deterrence capabilities of the alliance on the eastern flank. They're not there to engage Russian assets. That is not the goal," the senior U.S. Defense official added. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. CAPETOWN - A non-fungible token (NFT) created for the 1961 arrest warrant of anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela has sold for $130,000 at auction. The funds will help maintain the Liliesleaf Museum Heritage Site, a farm where Mandela and other leaders of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s hid from authorities. But the funds will not be enough to re-open the museum, which has been hit hard by the lack of tourism during the COVID pandemic. The founder of the Liliesleaf Museum, Nicholas Wolpe, says the museum still needs about $1.7 million (R25-million) before it can reopen. Based upon all historical figures to clear all the debt and to provide for at least for the next year or two," he said. "There need to be repairs, exhibits need to be fixed, and then the day-to-day operations, paying for salaries and getting the place back on its feet. Wolpe says last year he was approached by one of the owners of Momint, the company that runs the NFT marketplace. They explained that the museums artifacts could earn cash while staying on site for security purposes and preservation. Wolpe said he thought it was a perfect opportunity for Liliesleaf to create an alternative source of income. He explained the process of NFTs to me and I said this is a wonderful opportunity for not only Liliesleaf but for historical sites around the world because we currently live in an environment where the reality is that government funding is not what it used to be, he said. Momints CEO Ahren Posthumus explains that NFTs, which use blockchain technology, are a way of putting a value to content on the internet. The buyer of the warrant, he says, gets significant long-term benefits. So, they are the only person in the world who will actually have the original of whats called the Alpha File of the scan of the document. So, you can view the document online and its incredibly high detailed. You can see the ink bleeding through the paper but the owner of the document is the only one who will have the fully uncompressed version of this 3D file. It also gives the buyer access to the physical document as well as a five per cent royalty in perpetuity. So, as a buyer if they resell the piece and if the piece gets sold 10 or a hundred times, they will receive a royalty on the piece which is amazing. Liliesleaf Museum will equally be getting a royalty on the resale of the piece, he said. Mandela, who became South Africas first democratically elected president, was released from prison in 1990. The auction of his arrest warrant followed the NFT auction of a gun pen owned by Mandelas fellow liberation leader Oliver Tambo. That NFT sale in November raised $50,000, also for the museum. Wolpe says the Momint team has photographed a number of other artifacts they believe are valuable. The former leader of South Africa's opposition Democratic Alliance says the opposition Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) is capable of beating the ruling Zanu PF party in crucial harmonized elections next year if progressive people team up and fight for free, fair and credible elections in Zimbabwe. In a series of tweets, Mmusi Maimane said, The solution to the Zimbabwean/South African immigration crisis involves us advocating for free and fair elections in 2023. The CCC led by (Nelson) Chamisa won 19/28 seats in the by-elections. Without rigging and violence @edmnangagwa has no chance. Next year Zimbabwe will be free. Maimane noted that South African cannot be involved in political issues in Cuba and Ukraine when the crisis in Zimbabwe is directly affecting the nation. He said, The oppression in Zimbabwe directly affects SA. We pay the cost in health facilities being strained, in labour disputes and it has sown seeds of animosity. That is why it must fall. Zanu PF is the regional cancer draining South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. Its costing us. We cure a cancer by removing the tumor. By going through chemotherapy. Panado does not cure cancer. Some people are chasing cosmetic solutions. I am going directly for the cancer. Zanu PF spokesperson, Chris Mutsvangwa, was unreachable for comment as he was not responding to calls on his mobile phone. South Africa has attempted over the past 15 years to intervene, with marginal success, in Zimbabwean issues. Former South African presidents Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma - once engaged the late former president Robert Mugabe, who was toppled in a defacto military coup, and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change formations resulting in the setting up of a unity government in the 2009. As Ukrainian and Russian negotiators began a new round of peace talks in Turkey aimed at ending Russias invasion of Ukraine, Russias military said it would cut back operations around the capital Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv. Russias Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said the move was meant to increase trust in the talks aimed at ending the fighting. Advances by Russian forces have stalled recently amid fierce opposition by Ukrainian fighters. Also Tuesday, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russian forces will be focusing on Donbas, which includes the breakaway regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. He said Moscow had largely accomplished the first stage of its special military operation, including degrading Ukraines military capacity. Russian President Vladimir Putin decreed the eastern Ukraine regions of Luhansk and Donetsk as independent states just days before he launched the invasion on February 24. In Istanbul, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Ukrainian and Russian negotiators before the start of talks that it was up to both sides to reach a concrete agreement and stop this tragedy. An aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the two sides discussed the terms of a possible cease-fire during Tuesdays talks, plus international security guarantees for Ukraine. The negotiations are expected to resume Wednesday. Taking part in the talks was Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning, along with at least two senior members of the Ukrainian team, after a meeting in Kyiv earlier this month. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov says Abramovich is attending Tuesdays talks on an informal basis. Peskov said the reports that Abramovich and the other two negotiators had been poisoned were a part of the information war launched by Western nations. But just as the talks were getting underway in Istanbul, a Russian airstrike blasted a gaping hole in a government building in the Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv, leaving at least eight people trapped in the rubble. And Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk announced in a video message posted on the social media site Telegram that humanitarian corridors to evacuate civilians from war-scarred regions had opened after a one-day pause over what Kyiv called possible Russian provocations. The United Nations says that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed at least 10 million people out of their homes and that more than 3.8 million have fled the country. Speaking about the peace talks, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on national television Monday that the minimum program will be humanitarian questions, and the maximum program is reaching an agreement on a cease-fire. During an interview Sunday in a call with Russian journalists, President Zelenskyy said Ukraine was open to adopting neutral status as part of a peace deal if it came with third-party guarantees and was put to a referendum. Hours before the negotiations began, President Zelenskyy insisted that sanctions imposed by Western nations against Moscow need to be effective and substantial in order for them to have the intended effect on Russias economy. According to The New York Times, Zelenskyy said if Russia manages to circumvent the sanctions, it creates a dangerous illusion for the Russian leadership that they can continue to afford what they are doing now. And Ukrainians pay for it with their lives. Thousands of lives. Meanwhile, a senior U.S. defense official has told reporters that Ukrainian troops have retaken the town of Trostyanets, located near the northeastern city of Sumy, while Zelenskyy said in his Monday night speech that Ukrainian troops have liberated Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. Show more Show less Relatives of Nigerian students trapped in the besieged Black Sea port city of Kherson are calling on authorities to do more to return them home safely. Over the past three weeks, some of the estimated 80 students trapped in Kherson have tried to reach safety in neighboring countries. But not everyone got lucky. Timothy Obiezu reports from Abuja. Camera - Emeka Gibson. Russia continues to distill information relating to US-Ukrainian biological weapons laboratories. It appears that the US Defense Department had reached out to Ukraine upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, introducing the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to assist in the destruction of Soviet research in Ukrainian labs - on the face of it, something completely normal and logical. Between 2005 and 2014, Ukrainian biolaboratories were taken over by the Pentagons DTRA, 8 of which were upgraded and built instead of being eliminated, as claimed. Since 2016, biological weapons research in Ukraine has been conducted in laboratories owned by and under the control of the DTRA. According to documents released by the US-based news site The National Pulse, Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP) - a subsidiary of Rosemont Capital, which is an investment group founded by Hunter Biden (son of President Biden) and Christopher Heinz (step-son of John Kerry) - handled relations between the US Defense Department and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health. RSTP organized joint meetings between US military generals and Ukrainian doctors (photo: shows one such in 2016). According to Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, a serious incident took place in 2016. An epidemic of swine flu broke out among the Ukrainian military guarding the biological laboratory in Kharkiv. 20 deaths had been recorded there, but the incident was covered up. The term swine flu has been used for several distinct illnesses including that caused by the H1N1 virus. The President of the Lugansk Peoples Republic, Leonid Pasechnik, has given his green light to the holding of a referendum on the accession of the LPR to the Russian Federation. Should it take place, the "Yes" would largely prevail. It is up to the Russian Federation to either accept or refuse, but here again the majority Yes vote of the Federal Duma is beyond doubt. Russias military operations in Ukraine have been going on for more than a month and Natos propaganda operations for a month and a half. As always, the war propaganda of the Anglo-Saxons is coordinated from London. Since the First World War, the British have acquired an unparalleled know-how. In 1914, they had managed to convince their own population that the German army had carried out mass rapes in Belgium and that it was the duty of every Briton to come to the rescue of these poor women. It was a cleaner version of Kaiser Wilhelm IIs attempt to compete with the British colonial empire. At the end of the conflict, the British population demanded that the victims be compensated. A census was taken and it was found that the facts had been extraordinarily exaggerated. This time, in 2022, the British managed to convince the Europeans that on February 24 the Russians had attacked Ukraine to invade and annex it. Moscow was trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union and was preparing to attack all its former possessions in succession. This version is more honorable for the West than evoking the "Thucydides trap" - I will come back to this -. In reality, Kievs troops attacked their own population in Donbass on the afternoon of February 17. Then Ukraine waved a red rag in front of the Russian bull with President Zelenskis speech to the political and military leaders of Nato gathered in Munich, during which he announced that his country was going to acquire nuclear weapons to protect itself from Russia. Dont believe me? Here are the OSCE readings from the Donbass border. There had been no fighting for months, but the observers of the neutral organization observed 1,400 explosions per day as of the afternoon of February 17. Immediately, the rebel provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, which still considered themselves Ukrainian but claimed autonomy within Ukraine, moved more than 100,000 civilians to protect them. Most retreated to the interior of Donbass, others fled to Russia. In 2014 and 2015, when a civil war had pitted Kiev against Donestk and Lugansk, the material and human damage was only a matter of Ukraines internal affairs. However, in the course of time, almost the entire Ukrainian population of Donbass considered emigrating and acquired dual Russian citizenship. Therefore, Kievs attack on the population of Donbass on February 17 was an attack on Ukrainian-Russian citizens. Moscow came to their rescue, in an emergency, from February 24. The chronology is indisputable. It was not Moscow that wanted this war, but Kiev, despite the predictable price it would have to pay. President Zelensky deliberately put his people in danger and bears sole responsibility for what they are enduring today. Why did he do this? Since the beginning of his term, Volodymyr Zelensky has continued the support of the Ukrainian state, which began with his predecessor Petro Poroshenko, for the embezzlement of funds by his American sponsors and for the extremists in his country, the Banderists. President Putin called the former "a bunch of drug addicts" and the latter "a bunch of neo-Nazis" [1]. Not only did Volodymyr Zelensky publicly declare that he did not want to solve the conflict in Donbass by implementing the Minsk Agreements, but he banned his fellow citizens from speaking Russian in schools and administrations and, worse, signed a racial law on July 1, 2021, de facto excluding Ukrainians claiming their Slavic origin from the enjoyment of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The Russian army first invaded Ukrainian territory, not from the Donbass, but from Belarus and Crimea. It destroyed all Ukrainian military installations used by Nato for years and fought the Banderist regiments. It is now dedicated to annihilating them in the east of the country. The propagandists in London and their almost 150 communication agencies around the world assure us that, pushed back by the glorious Ukrainian Resistance, the defeated Russian army has given up its initial goal of taking Kiev. However, never, absolutely never, did President Putin say that Russia would take Kiev, overthrow the elected President Zelensky and occupy his country. On the contrary, he has always said that his war aims were to denazify Ukraine and eliminate foreign (NATO) weapons stockpiles. This is exactly what he is doing. The Ukrainian population is suffering. We are discovering that war is cruel, that it always kills innocent people. Today we are overwhelmed by our emotions and, as we ignore the Ukrainian attack of February 17, we blame the Russians, whom we wrongly call "aggressors". We do not feel the same compassion for the victims of the simultaneous war in Yemen, its 200,000 dead, including 85,000 children, who died of hunger. But it is true that the Yemenis are, in the eyes of the West, "only Arabs". The fact of suffering should not be interpreted a priori as proof that one is right. Criminals suffer like the innocent. How is such manipulation of the court possible? [2] Ukraine referred to the fact that President Putin, during his speech on the Russian military operation, said that the people of Donbass were victims of "genocide". She therefore denied this "genocide" and accused Russia of having used this argument improperly. In international law, the word "genocide" no longer refers to the eradication of an ethnic group, but to a massacre ordered by a government. Over the past eight years, between 13,000 and 22,000 civilians have been killed in the Donbass, depending on whether one refers to Ukrainian or Russian government statistics. Russia, which had sent its plea in writing, argues that it is not relying on the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, but on Article 51 of the UN Charter, which authorizes war in self-defence, as President Putin had explicitly stated in his speech. The Tribunal did not attempt to verify anything. It stuck to the Ukrainian denial. It therefore concluded that Russia had improperly used the Convention as an argument. Moreover, as Russia did not consider it necessary to be physically represented at the Court, the Court used its absence to impose an aberrant provisional measure. Russia, sure of its good right, refused to comply and is demanding a judgment on the merits, which will not be given before the end of September. All this being said, we can only understand the duplicity of the West if we put the events in their context. For a decade, American political scientists have been telling us that the rise of Russia and China will lead to an inevitable war. The political scientist Graham Allison created the concept of the "Thucydides trap" [3]. He was referring to the Peloponnesian wars that opposed Sparta and Athens in the fourth century BC.. The strategist and historian Thucydides analyzed that the wars had become inevitable when Sparta, which dominated Greece, realized that Athens was conquering an empire and could replace its hegemony. The analogy is telling, but false: while Sparta and Athens were close Greek cities, the United States, Russia and China do not have the same culture. China, for example, rejects President Bidens proposal for trade competition. Instead, it has the opposite tradition of "win-win". In doing so, it is not referring to mutually beneficial trade contracts, but to its history. The "Middle Kingdom" has an extremely large population. The emperor was forced to delegate his authority to the maximum. Even today China is the most decentralized country in the world. When he issued a decree, it had practical consequences in some provinces, but not in all. The emperor therefore had to make sure that each local governor would not consider his decree irrelevant and forget his authority. He then offered compensation to those who were not affected by the decree so that they would still feel subject to his authority. Since the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis, China has not only taken a non-aligned position, but has protected its Russian ally in the UN Security Council. The United States has wrongly feared that Beijing would send weapons to Moscow. This has never been the case, although there is logistical assistance in the form of prepared meals for the soldiers, for example. China is watching how things are going and deducing how they will go when it tries to get the rebel province of Taiwan back. Beijing has kindly declined Washingtons offers. It is thinking in the long term and knows from experience that if it allows Russia to be destroyed, it will once again be plundered by the West. Its salvation is only possible with Russia, even if it must one day challenge it in Siberia. Lets go back to Thucydides trap. Russia knows that the United States wants to erase it from the scene. It anticipates a possible invasion/destruction. But its territory is immense and its population insufficiently large. It cannot defend its overly large borders. Since the 19th century, it has imagined defending itself by hiding from its adversaries. When Napoleon, then Hitler, attacked her, she moved her population further and further east. And it burned its own cities before the invader arrived. The latter found himself unable to supply his troops. He had to face the winter without means and, finally, retreat. This "scorched earth" strategy only worked because neither Napoleon nor Hitler had logistical bases nearby. Modern Russia knows that it cannot survive if US weapons are stored in Central and Eastern Europe. That is why, at the end of the Soviet Union, Russia demanded that NATO never expand eastward. French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who knew history, demanded that the West make this commitment. At the time of German reunification, they drafted and signed a treaty guaranteeing that Nato would never cross the Oder-Neisse line, the German-Polish border. Russia set this commitment in stone in 1999 and in 2010 with the OSCE declarations in Istanbul and Astana. But the United States violated it in 1999 (accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to Nato), in 2004 (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia), in 2009 (Albania and Croatia), in 2017 (Montenegro), and again in 2020 (Northern Macedonia). The problem is not that all these states have allied themselves with Washington, but that they have stored U.S. weapons at home. No one is criticizing these states for choosing their allies, but Moscow is blaming them for serving as a rear base for the Pentagon in preparation for an attack by Russia. In October 2021, the Straussian Victoria Nuland [4], the State Departments number 2, came to Moscow to urge Russia to accept the deployment of US weapons in Central and Eastern Europe. She promised that Washington would invest in Russia in return. Then she threatened Russia if it did not accept her offer and concluded that he would have President Putin tried before an international tribunal. Moscow responded with a proposal for a treaty guaranteeing peace on the basis of respect for the United Nations Charter on December 17. This is what has caused the current storm. Respecting the Charter, which is based on the principle of the equality and sovereignty of states, implies reforming NATO, whose operation is based on a hierarchy among its members. Caught in the "Thucydides trap", the United States then fomented the current war in Ukraine. If we admit that their goal is to remove Russia from the international scene, the way the Anglo-Saxons react to the Ukrainian crisis becomes clear. They are not trying to push back the Russian army militarily, nor to embarrass the Russian government, but to wipe out all traces of Russian culture in the West. And secondly, they are trying to weaken the European Union. They started with the freezing of the assets of Russian oligarchs in the West, a measure that was applauded by the Russian population, which considers them illegitimate beneficiaries of the plundering of the USSR. Then they imposed on Western companies to stop their activities with Russia. Finally, they continued by cutting off Russian banks access to Western banks (the SWIFT system). However, if these financial measures were disastrous for Russian banks (but not for the Russian government), the measures against companies working in Russia are on the contrary favorable to Russia which recovers their investments at lower costs. Moreover, the Moscow Stock Exchange, which had been closed from February 25 (the day after the Russian response) to March 24, recorded an increase as soon as it reopened. The RTS index fell by 4.26% on the first day, but it measures mainly speculative stocks, while the IMOEX index, which measures national economic activity, rose by 4.43%. The real losers of the Western measures are the members of the European Union who had the stupidity to take them. Already in 1991, the Straussian Paul Wolfowitz wrote in an official report that the USA should prevent a power from developing to the point of competing with it. At the time, the USSR was in tatters. So he named the European Union as the potential rival to be destroyed [5]. This is exactly what he did in 2003, when, as number 2 in the Pentagon, he forbade Germany and France to participate in the reconstruction of Iraq [6]. This is also what Victoria Nuland talked about in 2014 when she instructed her US ambassador in Kiev to "fuck the European Union" (sic) [7]. The European Union has now been ordered to stop its imports of Russian hydrocarbons. If it complies with this injunction, Germany will be ruined and with it the whole Union. This will not be collateral damage, but the fruit of structured thinking, clearly expressed for thirty years. The most important thing for Washington is to exclude Russia from all international organizations. It has already managed, in 2014, to exclude it from the G8. The pretext was not the independence of Crimea (which it had been demanding since the dissolution of the USSR, several months before Ukraine thought of its own independence), but its membership in the Russian Federation. Ukraines alleged aggression provides a pretext for excluding it from the G20. China immediately pointed out that no one could be excluded from an informal forum without a constitution. However, President Biden returned to the charge on March 24 and 25 in Europe. Washington is increasing its contacts to exclude Russia from the World Trade Organization. In any case, the principles of the WTO are being undermined by the unilateral "sanctions" implemented by the West. Such a decision would be detrimental to both sides. This is where the writings of Paul Wolfowitz come into play. He wrote in 1991 that Washington should not seek to be the best at what it does, but to be the first in relation to others. This implies, he noted, that in order to maintain its hegemony, the United States should not hesitate to hurt itself, if it does much more to others. We will all pay the price for this way of thinking. The most important thing for the Straussians is to exclude Russia from the United Nations. This is not possible if one respects the UN Charter, but Washington will not bother with it there any more than elsewhere. It has already contacted every member state of the UN with a few exceptions. The Anglo-Saxon propaganda has already succeeded in making them believe that a member of the Security Council has embarked on a war of conquest against one of its neighbors. If Washington succeeds in convening a special UN General Assembly and changing the statutes, it will succeed. A kind of hysteria has taken hold of the West. Everything Russian is being hunted down without thinking about its links with the Ukrainian crisis. Russian artists are forbidden to perform even if they are known to be opposed to President Putin. Here a university bans the study of the anti-Soviet hero Solzhenitsyn from their curriculum, there another bans the writer of debate and free will Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) who opposed the tsarist regime. Here a conductor is deprogrammed because he is Russian and there Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) is removed from the repertoire. Everything Russian must disappear from our consciousness, just as the Roman Empire razed Carthage and methodically destroyed all traces of its existence, to the point that today we know little about this civilization. On March 21, President Biden made no secret of the fact. In front of an audience of business leaders, he said, "This is the moment when things change. There is going to be a New World Order and we have to lead it. And we have to unite the rest of the free world to do it" [8]. This new order [9] should cut the world into two hermetic blocks; a cut such as we have never known, without comparison with the Iron Curtain of the Cold War. Some states, such as Poland, believe that they can lose a lot like the others, but also gain a little. Thus, General Waldemar Skrzypczak has just demanded that the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad become Polish [10]. Indeed, after the world has been cut off, how will Moscow be able to communicate with this territory? Are you not amused, Oscar? Photo: Kevin Mazur/WireImage I am publicly, personally, and dare I say, even spiritually, pro-slap. Historically, Ive touted #BringBackFistfighing in response to other more heightened and dangerous methods of extralegal conflict resolution. Cases of cyberbullying, doxxing, and incel behavior writ large in fact, a majority of online skirmishes could all be mitigated by the laying of holy hands. As the cousin of a fist, the slap is a wake-up call. Its not necessarily the invitation to a fight, though it is an acknowledgment that a fight can absolutely be had if the slapped continues to cross the line. It signifies that the victim has, indeed, pressed the right button at the wrong time. Here is their five-finger prize. Will Smith popping Chris Rock is probably the most important physical interaction in Oscars history. It was a great moment, overall, for old-man strength. Smiths body hasnt forgotten the Ali choreography; his left hand is up by his jaw in case Rock taps into his innate Bed-Stuy-ism. Rock, for his part, remained standing after eating that slap, a credit to a strong chin and a dexterous neck. If Im running the Academy or Im last nights showrunner, Will Packer Im counting this as a huge win. Because for this institution, convincing people to fall in love with movies is secondary to getting people to fall in love with the Oscars. Sure as fluffy white people like Mia Farrow and Judd Apatow might holier-than-thou the Slap, spinning it into some revisionist-history lesson on nonviolence, these two hall monitors have the easier option of minding their non-Black business. This isnt the worst affront in Oscars canon beloved racist John Wayne attempting to assault an Indigenous American woman, Sacheen Littlefeather, in 1973; the standing ovation given to once beloved predator Roman Polanski; and, hell, even Green Book winning Best Picture all outpace the Slap by a long shot in that department and acting like it is denies our cultural sensibilities. Drama, especially of the Black variety, sells. Bravo and VH1 have built empires on the idea that watching Black and brown people go at it in semi-scripted fashion could be the great unifier. The Oscars themselves dropped bags (typically between $15,000 and $25,000) for Rocks contrarian id to cheekily disregard 2016s #OscarsSoWhite campaign, which included the comedian taking a couple shots at both Will and Jada for boycotting but more pointedly at Jada, implying shed never be nominated anyway. Hiring a Black comedian to go after Hollywoods premiere Black couple to stamp out industry progress is pretty rich, to say the least. In American culture, Black people are both commodity and fetish; the flooding responses to this spectacle more than highlights that. It leaves any false alarmism stinking of racist misread. I seem to remember Cardi B walking out of a New York Fashion Week event with a knot in her forehead the size of a walnut after laying hands on rival Nicki Minajs crew and being invited back to the Met Gala and other Fashion Weeks the very next year. Why? She makes the Met spicy. Its the same reason any award show would welcome both Machine Gun Kelly and Connor McGregor. The moment, the 48-hour immediate afterlife of the moment, and the eventual expose of said moment are all worth it. The Smiths and Rock know this as well and will likely capitalize on the Slap once tempers ease. Will already got the ball rolling on that front. During his Best Actor acceptance speech, Smith made the discursive connection between his King Richard character and his actions: Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family. In this time in my life, in this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world. Imagine the Red Table Talks, stand-up material, and literature thatll transpire from this. Honestly? Everyone wins (except maybe Jada, who hasnt had a chance to say her piece on the matter yet. And Questlove, sincerest apologies to Questlove because, wow, no one cared about another revelatory piece of Black art after that). Its not totally clear whether Chris Rock wrote the bald joke himself, but he did decide to say it when he didnt really have to. Will Smith is himself an odd dude in that way one of those big-kid celebrities whose goofiness distracts some folks from how deeply calculated he is about his persona whos lived in the public eye for three decades and has for the last 25 years erred on the side of outward affection toward his wife through all sorts of public and private scrutiny and intrusion. Its clear his love for her has evolved him in crucial ways. He has seemed even more defensive of that love in recent interviews to show, again, that despite a lifetime of admitted narcissistic tendencies, Wills developed enough awareness to know when hes sacrificing Jadas boundaries for headlines. Rock just didnt know Willard would sacrifice social pleasantries to prove it. But oh, did he catch on quick. Before we get into the second week in a row when Summer House woke up and chose absolute chaos, we need to check in on our ongoing episode of Unsolved Mysteries about the whereabouts of Alex, a puppy so boring that apparently the producers took him to a Barrys Bootcamp upstate where he would have lots of room to do treadmill sprints and all the whey protein powder he could force down his gullet. At the start of the episode, Andrea says that he slept in Alexs because his bed is slightly bigger. We all know that Alex is there in the house based on social-media posts, but why dont we see him? Then, the following weekend, they say that Alex isnt there, but how can we believe them? They told us that last weekend, and he was there. Did they pull some mirror trick or photo editing to remove him from the group dinner around the table? I wanted Alex off my TV, but I didnt want him unceremoniously deleted from history! After Lindsays party, the episode picks up with Alex snoring soundly in his bed and probably spooning Andrea, both in their black briefs. Hold on. I just need to savor that image for a few more seconds before talking about Austen slapping Kyle on the ass and talking about how firm it is multiple times. Now I need to savor that image before talking about Luke and Austen arm wrestling. Mmmm. (Oh, and sorry to Austen. Last week when describing the scene, I said he was some random jamoke, but it was indeed Austen. Im sorry, I guess with his trucker hat, flip-flops, free T-shirt advertising some craft brew, and casual disregard for the feelings of women, he looks just like every other white boy.) Of all the sexiness that was on display that night, let us not forget about Luciano, Lindsays new friend, who is as hot a slab of Argentine beef as you could get at any steakhouse. And good on Lindsay getting it in both that night and the next morning. I didnt really appreciate the slut-shamery happening from Ciara and Paige in the next room, which seems to have to do more with Lindsays behavior toward Ciara than it does with her getting her back broken by a foreign national on her birthday weekend. Paige and Ciara are lying in bed (as if they do anything else) and saying that this is disrespectful after everything with Lindsay and Austen the day before. I think that Lindsay making out with Austen and then picking up another guy in front of him should have just illustrated to them how little Lindsay regards what happened between her and Austen. Were going to pick this continued argument in a bit because first, we have to talk about the other things that happen in this episode. Kyle asks Amanda about a prenup and blames it on some investors asking about a prenup. That investor is Kyles dad and every sane person in the audience. Amanda is against it, which seems ridiculous to me. She keeps saying she hasnt even decided if there will be a wedding. If you think things are so shaky, why not have an insurance policy in case they end up like the money in a strippers thong: singles? Amanda says it is preparing for separation. Yeah, it is the same way that buying life insurance is preparation for death. You dont want it to happen, but you have a coin flips chance of needing it. I feel like every marriage certificate should come with one, especially if you are Teresa Giudice. From an established relationship, we then get a first date with Mya and Oliver, which is very cute, except Mya gives us the body language of someone who is about to go to the bathroom and then makes an exit like my heritage: Irish. We find out Oliver lives in Jersey, which is when I would have been like, Do you know where the restroom is? But then he redeemed himself by saying that he hates all white condiments: mayo, ranch, blue cheese, sour cream. Okay, you redeemed yourself. The next weekend at the house, Andrea makes an Italian dinner for everyone to celebrate Ferragosto, which is basically like Italian Labor Day. Its also conflated with the Assumption of Mary, which is when the mother of the Catholic Jesus went to heaven, so youll often see religious processions. Its held on August 15, and literally every Italian person is on vacation, and its kind of the best. Ive been in Italy for it several times, and all you do is go to parties on boats, eat pasta on the shore, and then wash it down with a delizia al lemone, a creamy dessert that looks like boobs. Drunk Americans have already appropriated St. Patricks Day, Cinco de Mayo, and even Bastille Day. I think its time we add some Ferragosto to the mix. Anyway, at the dinner, everyone goes around and says what they think love means, which is an interesting question even though it leads to far too much abstract speech instead of narrative possibility. The first thing you learn in creative-writing class is show, dont tell, and this is showing me a bunch of single people talking about respect and communication and having no idea what it really means. The one who gives the best speech is my eternal lover Kyle J. Cooke who says that his love for Amanda makes him get up in the morning and have purpose, and it brings a tear to her eye. Andrea talks about how to love but wont tell anyone hes really lonely because some girl Lexi just dumped him after he tried to rekindle things with Paige, who dissed Andrea for Craig Conover, a Jell-O shot hangover so bad that it clawed its way out of a sorority girls skull and became a man. Lindsay says that she thinks love has four pillars, trust, communication, respect, and love. Okay, love cannot be a pillar of itself. Imagine love as a roof being held up by those four pillars. Does that mean that love has to grow a pseudopod to prop itself up on one side? That doesnt look so much like a roof as a doorstop with an erection. When its Ciaras turn, she takes the opportunity to conflate love and friendship and really go after Lindsay for what she did the weekend before with Austen. She has been hyped up by all the other girls over the course of the week and just a little bit earlier when Mya went up to her room and told her that Lindsay was taking no responsibility for what happened last weekend with Austen. Lindsay also told Mya that if Ciara had a problem with her and Austen, she should have said something. Thank you to the brilliant editors for replaying the bit of the party when Lindsay hid under a woodpile in the poolhouse rather than talk to Ciara about Austen. The fundamental problem with this argument is that it isnt really about Austen. As Ciara made clear in her lunch with Paige and Amanda, she is upset that Lindsay continues to disrespect her and disregard her. This is something that the Austen incident laid bare but is not the only component in their gripe. Lindsay thinks this is just about her making out with Austen, and if Ciara doesnt like that, she can just get over it. We all agree that Austen is the villain here and the one who really instigated things between Lindsay and Ciara that weekend, but Ciara seems to be saying she has a large problem with Lindsay. I agree that Austen can be the problem and that Lindsay was really blameless in how he disregarded Austens feelings. But I can see how Lindsay was right in that interaction, but it is symptomatic of a negative way that Lindsay was treating Ciara since Vermont. Both of these things can be true simultaneously, but Lindsay needs to be made aware of this second thing if Ciara expects her to discuss it. When Ciara starts talking at the dinner, she goes in hard on Lindsay, but only about the Austen stuff. She says she has to isolate her victims to be affectionate toward them, which is a low blow, then says that she paraded those moments around to hurt her. Um, wasnt it Austen who brought this up to her? Isnt he the problem? Ciara only talks about the Austen stuff in her speech to Lindsay. Everyone else weighs in, and it gets heated, and only then does Ciara get out of her chair and shout at Lindsay and Danielle, who has joined the fray, and says, Even before Austen, you disrespected me on so many levels. Then its too late. Craig and Paige have butted in with their opinions; Danielle is heated to defend her friend and, just like Nene Leakes, is like, Now why am I in it? What results is a The Viewstyle crosstalk melee where you cant hear anyone or understand what is going on until Ciara stands up, throws her wine and glass at Danielle, who retaliates with some flying flatware of her own, and we are all sitting around waiting for next week to see what happens when they are taken to their separate corners and have to face what happened. Theyre surely not going to hold Austen accountable, but I guess a classic reality-show brouhaha is the next best thing. Placeholder while article actions load When I see images of Mariupols devastation, watch footage of burnt-out Russian tanks or hear the increasingly frequent Ukrainian accounts of kidnappings and disappearances, an earlier fight with nebulous motives and vicious tactics comes to mind: Chechnya. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Thats probably because after a month of fighting, Russias approach in Ukraine suggests that it did not just misunderstand its neighbor and misread the West. It has also taken only the wrong lessons from its two wars in Chechnya, which deeply scarred both sides and killed many tens of thousands, mostly civilians and thats not good news. Russia has hinted over recent days that it is recalibrating in Ukraine, reformulating its war aims to focus on the liberation of Donbas in the east of the country. It has said it would reduce military activity in the north, near Kyiv and Chernihiv. Theres no question that its forces are tired and Moscow wants to give itself options. A win in Mariupol, particularly over Ukraines ultranationalist Azov regiment, could meet denazification claims. Recent history too would support cutting Russias losses: Not including the interlude, the Chechen conflict dragged on for more than 11 years, something Moscow could ill afford in todays conditions, and it caused bloodshed well outside the province. Advertisement But is Russia really revising down its goals? Putin is a leader who has described punching first when threatened, pulling back and then striking again. And the more nebulous his aims, the harder to sell anything short of dramatic victory. Yes, Moscow may be looking for an exit. But another real possibility is a fresh phase of far more methodical destruction, terror on the ground and repression at home shifting from the blunders of the first Chechen war to the playbook of the second, with its more methodical plans to exhaust and terrorize. The similarities between the two conflicts have been striking, and not just because of the horribly familiar images of apartment blocks with their walls sheared off by artillery shells, leaving the lives inside dangling in mid-air, exposed. Both progressed in two steps, the current conflict in Ukraine beginning with Crimeas annexation in 2014. Popular support has been an afterthought in this campaign, as it was in Yeltsins. And the motives have been confused in Ukraine, where Russia has claimed to be denazifying the country, just as they were in the early days in Chechnya, when forces were restoring the constitutional order by razing cities and displacing hundreds of thousands. Sincerely, we dont understand what Russia wants from us, the Chechen representative to Washington told a congressional hearing in 1999. If they want us to be in Russia, why persecute us? If we are disliked, then why not let us [live] independently? Ukrainians are asking the same questions today, from Mariupol to Kharkiv. Advertisement There are also the repeated military errors, despite combat experience and billions of dollars invested in overhauling Russias armed forces. Moscows overconfidence has been just as problematic over the past months as it was in 1994, when the official prediction was that the first war in Chechnya would be a bloodless blitzkrieg that could tame a breakaway region and boost Yeltsins flagging fortunes. As in Chechnya, Moscow dramatically underestimated the scale of resistance and the challenge of its assault. Rita Konaev of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology in Washington explains that urban combat is so difficult for attackers that defeating Islamic State in the Iraqi city of Mosul involved the U.S. forces muscle and still took nine months, cost thousands of lives and left little standing. Cities are also more commonly fought over one by one. And yet Russia, as Konaev points out, has fought multiple urban battles at once in Ukraine. But the crucial thing about the eerie historical parallels is that they may help us glimpse what comes next. Advertisement Having botched the first weeks in Ukraine, Putin is now bruised and cornered, much as Yeltsin was in 1996. But Putin, ascending in the late 1990s, did not settle for a stalemate. In fact he came back far more harshly (after apartment bombings blamed on Chechen rebels), swearing to wipe them out in the outhouse with his anti-terrorist operation, ultimately cementing his authority. Suggestions Russia will refocus also assume Putin is getting a clear view of what is happening on the ground and of the extent of Russian losses something that seems unlikely. Just as before the second Chechen war, when he rose to power, Putin is in a position of weakness at home, and needs a conclusive victory. He may not necessarily use nuclear or chemical weapons, but it does mean that he can still seek to inflict considerably more pain to get what he needs and he has the firepower, muscle and ruthlessness to do that. He can also use other means to subdue resistant populations including, as in Chechnya, arbitrary detentions, torture and disappearances. Evidence of terror tactics is emerging in Ukraine. That will increase, to cow citizens who have stood up to Russian forces with extraordinary courage. (In Chechnya, this tactic was so commonplace that families routinely removed male shoes at night from those left, by custom, outside the door.) So, too, will the hunt for collaborators who can hold territory. Independent reporting on the conflict from within Russia and in occupied areas will also become ever harder, just as it did as the Chechen conflict progressed by the second war, journalists could not travel to the region independently and became targets. Advertisement Of course, for all the similarities, these conflicts are not identical. Chechnya is a small, mountainous Muslim region of a little over a million people. Ukraine is a vast, independent European country of 44 million with a professional military, strengthened by eight years of conflict with Russia. The Wests support is more than rhetoric here. The question is whether an increasingly desperate Putin can recognize the difference. More from other writers at Bloomberg Opinion: A Month Into Putins War, Whats Changed?: Bloomberg Opinion Mariupol Explains Putins Ukraine Fiasco: Leonid Bershidsky Ukrainian Peace Deal? Not While Each Side Thinks Its Winning: Hal Brands This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Clara Ferreira Marques is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering commodities and environmental, social and governance issues. Previously, she was an associate editor for Reuters Breakingviews, and editor and correspondent for Reuters in Singapore, India, the U.K., Italy and Russia. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Placeholder while article actions load Investors whove grown accustomed to tracking Covid-19 infections in Guangdong, missile strikes in Kyiv and computer chip availability around the world can add another offbeat statistic to their list of things to worry about: the water level of the Rhine River in Germany.Flanked by medieval castles, the Rhine is an artery for commerce across the industrial German heartland, with barges transporting cargoes ranging from diesel to steel to chemicals. Right now, waterway traffic is starting to slow because the water level has dropped to unusually low levels for this time of the year after a mild and dry winter.Rhine barge operators fear it may drop further later this spring and into the summer, potentially repeating the crisis of 2018 when the river became too shallow for any boats to sail. The timing couldnt be worse, as Germany needs the waterway in its effort to replace as much Russian diesel and coal as it can. The key statistic to monitor is the water level at Kaub, a picturesque town south of Cologne. On Monday, the gauge stood at just 95 centimeters, the first time in at least 15 years that the river depth there has dropped below the one-meter mark in March. On average, the river typically carries nearly two meters of water through the town at this time of the year. Kaub matters because its a chokepoint for barges, the shallowest point in the middle course of the Rhine and the gateway to manufacturing hubs further south. The current low level means that a typical 110-meter long barge carrying diesel fuel or chemical products can only transport about a third of its cargo to avoid going aground. Advertisement The German government declares a low water alert when the Kaub gauge drops below 150 centimeters, allowing barge companies to impose surcharges that significantly increase the cost of freight, and an extreme low water alert if it drops below 80 centimeters. Traffic all but stops if the water drops to 40 centimeters. What once were rare situations have become far more frequent in recent years because of the climate emergency. In October 2018, the Rhine depth declined to 25 centimeters after a dry summer, the lowest seen since the 1920s. The 2018 drought tipped the German economy into a short-lived crisis as industrial giants cut production for several weeks, unable to secure raw materials or ship their output. German growth slowed to 0.4% in the third quarter and 0.3% in the final three months of 2018, down from 2.2% in the second quarter. Economists blamed the Rhine shipping stoppage for a significant chunk of that slowdown. Worryingly, water levels in late March and early April back then were twice as high as they are now. The shores of the Rhine are home to some of Germanys largest industrial companies, including the worlds largest chemical plant operated by BASF SE in Ludwigshafen (crucially, south of Kaub). Its banks also host large factories run by Daimler AG, Robert Bosch GmbH, Bayer AG, and Thyssenkrupp AG, among others. The rivers almost 800 miles connect industries across not only Germany, but also the Netherlands, France and Switzerland, before emptying into the North Sea in Rotterdam the biggest port in Europe. Advertisement The river is the cheapest way to transport goods from Rotterdam into southern Germany. Although the waterway only transports about 5% of total German freight, half of what the countrys railways carry, it accounts for more than a third of commodities such as diesel, chemicals and iron ore. If the waterway traffic stops, replacing a typical barge is an expensive business, requiring more than 100 trucks per barge. While the current situation isnt yet as bad as it was four years ago, German industry is already facing trouble as the war in Ukraine threatens to disrupt the nations energy imports from Russia. For example, the giant Grosskraftwerk Mannheim coal-fired power plant last week warned it was running low on coal due to shipping restrictions on the Rhine. Germany is burning more coal now to conserve expensive Russian natural gas. The risk is that without spring rainfall, water levels could drop dramatically in the later part of the summer. After 2018, German industrial giants put contingency plans in place to re-route some of their cargoes via railway if the Rhine dried up again to keep their factories buzzing. German weather forecasters dont anticipate any end to the nations dry spell this week. Those emergency plans may soon be tested. Advertisement More From Bloomberg Opinion: Germany Will Struggle to Pivot From Russian Oil: Julian Lee How to Make Sanctions Bite Russia Even Harder: Tobin Harshaw All Thats Stopping a Full-Blown Food Crisis? Rice: Javier Blas This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Javier Blas is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. He previously was commodities editor at the Financial Times and is the coauthor of The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earths Resources. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Placeholder while article actions load By officially accusing the Russian military of committing war crimes in Ukraine, President Joe Bidens administration has seemingly confirmed the obvious. Vladimir Putins troops have so far attacked apartment buildings, hospitals, shopping centers and schools during their invasion of Ukraine. Theyve cut countless Ukrainians off from food, heat, electricity and running water. Thousands of civilians have been wounded or killed. Despite Bidens off-the-cuff remark Saturday that Putin cannot remain in power, it remains at best uncertain Putin will ever be ousted, let alone face justice for atrocities committed in Ukraine. Even so, the U.S. was right to put the idea on the table: A vigorous war-crimes investigation into this conflict is now essential. As Russias ground offensive has slowed due to fierce Ukrainian resistance, its bombardment of population centers has only grown more horrific. Russian forces have killed some 5,000 people in the city of Mariupol, including 200 children, the mayors office said Monday. That includes victims of the March 16 airstrike on a theater where civilians were sheltering. Advertisement In response to such reports, more than 40 countries have referred Russia to the International Criminal Court, which has opened an investigation. Even if the court amasses proof of war crimes, however, high-ranking Russian officials wont likely face prosecution any time soon. Because Russia, like the U.S., never ratified the Rome Statute creating the ICC, the Kremlin doesnt accept the courts jurisdiction over its citizens. Even so, an impartial, internationally sanctioned war-crimes inquiry has value. Collecting evidence that Russia knowingly targeted civilians would refute Putins attempts to cast the war as a legitimate military operation. It would cause mid-level officials to think twice about carrying out criminal orders, knowing they could face the threat of arrest and prosecution if they travel outside Russia. Cataloging and publicizing such atrocities would also demonstrate the worlds commitment to upholding human rights and defending the rule of law. More pragmatically, international war-crimes charges can help undermine the political legitimacy of rogue leaders, as was the case with Serbias Slobodan Milosevic and Sudans Omar al-Bashir. While it could be years before any Russians face charges, history suggests they may not escape accountability forever. After a slow start, the United Nations tribunal created to prosecute atrocities in the former Yugoslavia ultimately convicted and sentenced 90 suspects over 25 years including the mastermind of the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnians at Srebrenica, who will spend the rest of his life in prison after losing his final appeal last summer. Advertisement Although European countries will need to take the lead in this probe, the U.S. should provide logistical assistance to the courts prosecutors, including sharing intelligence such as satellite imagery and communication intercepts. It can offer financial rewards for third countries to cooperate with the investigation, as it has done in other cases. Congress should also require the Department of Justice to maintain a database of suspected war criminals from the Ukraine conflict as it did for those who participated in Nazi atrocities and amend existing law to allow for the arrest and prosecution of any such individuals who attempt to enter the country. NATO members should consider granting protection and immunity to Russians willing to testify about atrocities they witnessed or were ordered to commit. Realistically, such policies wont impede Russias aggression right away. Yet the specter of war-crimes charges could well prove useful as leverage for Ukraine in negotiations over ending the war. For example, the government in Kyiv could agree to accept limits on the scope of the investigation in return for concessions from Moscow. Contemplating a long stay at The Hague, the members of Putins inner circle may find such a deal newly appealing. Russias aggression in Ukraine has shocked the worlds conscience. Imposing accountability for such appalling acts is the first step toward ensuring they arent repeated. Advertisement More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion: Ignoring Lies on Telegram Could Protect the Truth in Russia: Parmy Olson Putins War Is Hollowing Out Russias Tech Future: Tim Culpan Why Oil Tax Cuts Help the Kremlin and Punish Ukraine: Javier Blas The Editors are members of the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Placeholder while article actions load A federal judge thinks that former President Donald Trump likely committed fraud and probably knew it when he and one of his lawyers, John Eastman, plotted to block Congresss certification of the 2020 presidential election so Trump could hold on to power. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight So how much longer will it take Attorney General Merrick Garland to draw the same conclusion about that attempted coup? Perhaps Garland has already gone down that path. But there are no outward signs that he is investigating Trump with an eye toward a possible criminal prosecution. He has every reason to be circumspect, of course, but he has no reason to ignore the mounting evidence of Trumps crimes. The latest reminder of whats at stake came in Mondays ruling from David Carter, a U.S. District Court judge in California. Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history, Judge Carter noted in his Monday ruling. The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nations government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process. Advertisement While ordering Eastman to turn over relevant email correspondence with Trump to the bipartisan House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Carter was also clear-eyed about the scope of his and the committees powers. This is not a criminal prosecution; this is not even a civil liability suit, he wrote. At most, this case is a warning about the dangers of legal theories gone wrong, the powerful abusing public platforms, and desperation to win at all costs. The Jan. 6 committee is an investigative body, not a civil or criminal court. It only intersects with the court to adjudicate disputes over information or testimony it needs to complete its work. The committee can also make criminal referrals to Garland, but Garland doesnt need their push to start his own investigation. He can do that if he thinks evidence supports it. Besides, the committee said in a court filing earlier this month that it thought Trump and Eastman committed crimes by plotting to obstruct congressional ballot counting and block the transfer of presidential powers after the 2020 election. Advertisement Carters intersection with the committee involved a relatively narrow issue. Eastman contended his emails to Trump about events surrounding the insurrection were protected by attorney-client privilege; Carter said the privilege was voided because Eastman and Trump had hatched a criminal conspiracy. But the judge, a veteran prosecutor and jurist who received a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for valor while serving as a Marine in the Vietnam War, also used his ruling to highlight the broader significance of the committees work. If Dr. Eastman and President Trumps plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution, he wrote. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself. Indeed, the likelihood of a repeat performance of Jan. 6 at least in the guise of a violent and unlawful attempt to dismantle the electoral process has only increased since Trump left the White House. The most aggressive proponents of the myth that Joe Biden stole the White House from Trump havent tempered their outrage or lunacy, and theyve found enablers on Fox News and in the Republican Party. If law enforcement authorities lack the steel needed to do their jobs, that wont be lost on any of the Trumpistas or others in the future who are like-minded. Advertisement That peril, and the need to address it, informed Carters ruling. The illegality of [Trumps] plan was obvious, he wrote. It was a last-ditch attempt to secure the Presidency by any means. Trumps vice president told him there was no legal path to stop Biden from entering the White House. More than five dozen court cases that Trumps team filed to overturn the election results were tossed out. Yet Trump pressed on. Because Trump did so, and likely knew that the plan to disrupt the electoral count was wrongful, his mindset exceeds the threshold for acting corruptly, Carter noted. Carters certitude isnt bias; he understands whats right in front of him. Garland should do the same. More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion: Trumps January 6 Insurrection Never Ended: Mark Gongloff Dont Ever Get Used to Trumps Contempt for the Law: Jonathan Bernstein The Jan. 6 Committee Should Finish Its Job -- Quickly: The Editors This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Timothy L. OBrien is a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Placeholder while article actions load Its been more than a month since Russian forces invaded Ukraine. With the strength of the Ukrainian resistance and surprising Russian military incompetence, many previous expectations for how the war would unfold have been shattered, or forced to evolve. Bobby Ghosh spoke on Twitter Spaces with Bloomberg Opinion columnists to discuss what the expectations of the different actors were at the start, and whats changed in the last 34 days. This is a lightly edited transcription of the first half of the conversation. Listen to the full event here. Russia Clara Ferreira Marques: We cant put ourselves directly in the heads of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, but their actions certainly suggest what they expected. They appeared to expect a reasonably quick war, possibly just a few days. They expected the collaboration of local people, if not a local welcome, which says a lot about their misunderstanding of the things on the ground in Ukraine. Advertisement Even before the invasion, there was excessive optimism about the ability of the Russian army. We know that from the tactics theyve used and from the absence of a PR campaign they didnt prepare the population at home in Russia for anything like the war of attrition that were seeing today. In fact, having expected a quick war, Putin is actually facing a number of challenges, including: urban warfare on multiple fronts; an increasingly exhausted fighting force, which may be just two weeks away from complete exhaustion; an economy under severe pressure, though not quite on its knees yet thanks to oil and gas money; signs of hairline cracks among the elites and severe pressure and repression at home on any kind of criticism of his so-called special military operation. There is limited information on Russian deaths in the conflict. Russias Ministry of Defense referred to 1,351 killed last week, which is 7 to 15 times less than what NATO is estimating. Its not surprising that were seeing a recalibration from the Russians. There is talk now of focusing on the complete liberation of the Donbas region, which is far from the denazification discourse we were hearing at the start. But we should be wary of taking this as a permanent decision. I certainly would be extremely skeptical having seen what Russia has done, for example, in Chechnya. The other big question is whether there can be a solution with Putin in power. I would separate out three aims: The end of the war, the change of leader and the change of regime. We should be focusing on the first. Ukraine Advertisement Leonid Bershidsky: Nobody in Ukraine, except maybe some people with an unusual gift of foresight, believed there would be a full-scale invasion from all sides. Before this whole thing started, President Zelenskiy was extremely calm and didnt seem to believe the intelligence the U.S. was passing on concerning an imminent invasion. One reason few people in Kyiv believed something like this would happen is that they all knew how tough the resistance would be and assumed that Putin was also aware it wouldnt be an easy operation. Apparently, though, Putin thought it would be easy and that Russian troops would meet feeble resistance or none. While the Ukrainians did not expect anything on this scale to take place, they were also well-prepared to deal with an assault of any force. They had plans to defend specific positions and their mobilization worked extremely well. Pretty much everyone who was expected to join the Territorial Defense Forces did. Very few people tried to avoid being drafted or mobilized. I dont think there were any expectations with regards to Western aid. We all heard Zelenskiy making numerous appeals for a no-fly zone and weapons supplies, including war planes and other heavy equipment. Hes called for foreign volunteers to join his war. But I dont think he expected any of this to work. Ukraines base assumption in the event of any war with Russia was that it would stand alone and, in the end, that is the case. The weapons sent by both European and U.S. NATO allies have been extremely effective. The TB2 drones from Turkey have done a lot of damage to the invading army. But, apart from these weapons supplies, theres no indication that Ukrainians had expected anything else. They were told multiple times by various Western officials, including U.S. President Joe Biden and the leaders of the other Western nations that nobody would actually join the war to fight alongside them. Advertisement U.S. President Joe Biden Therese Raphael: Joe Biden has clearly traveled some distance over the past month and, to frame that trajectory, its helpful to recall where he comes from. Unlike Donald Trump or even Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Biden entered national politics to work on foreign policy questions. He has, for 50 years, been engaged with foreign policy and has direct experience of the Cold War. He is a skeptic of interventions, but hes not an isolationist hes been willing to use what Joseph Nye calls smart power, the combination of hard and soft power, to achieve his aims. All of that forms the backdrop as he goes into this crisis. His pre-invasion moves showed some prescience and also some deep miscalculation. The decision to release intelligence that Russia planned to invade was smart. It sounded the alarm, helped rally NATO allies and denied Putin an easy false flag operation. Theres been criticism that his response is too feeble, but there has been an enormous flow of military aid going to Ukraine. The U.S. has sent $1.35 billion in weapons and ammunition in the past month, and that compares to probably half that amount since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Theres the toughest set of sanctions that has been put on any country of Russias size and the loans being provided to Ukraine have been compared to the Lend Lease programs in the 1940s. Advertisement At the same time, Bidens been known for his revealing off-script gaffes. There was that key moment before the invasion where he stated that the U.S. would not respond to minor incursions into Ukraine. He said last week, quite disingenuously, that the sanctions were never meant to deter, but his press secretary, his deputy national security advisor and the vice president were all on record saying that the purpose of the sanctions in advance had been to deter and prevent Putin from invading Ukraine. That suggests Biden miscalculated on a number of levels. They might have thought Putin would invade, but maybe that the invasion would be more limited. What weve seen evolve is Bidens view of whats at stake. Its not only Ukraines sovereignty, but the lives of its people, the global postwar order with human rights, the unity of the NATO alliance, and even U.S. hegemony and its place in the world. His speech in Poland was straight out of a liberal internationalist textbook. He painted it as a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression. He talked about a rules-based order vying against an order that Putin seeks to impose where brute force governs international relations. Biden possibly sees this as his 9/11 moment a moment in which Americas place in the world is being defined and the world as we know it is being redefined. Advertisement Germany Andreas Kluth: Before the war started, there was this big question mark about the European Union, and whether Germany in particular would be a good ally. Then, when the war started in this very surprising, maximal way with an invasion from three or four sides, it was as if the Germans woke up from arguably four decades of self-delusion with relation to Russia. For years the political left, especially the Social Democrats, had been pretending that Putin was a puppy dog. Then, suddenly, theres a real threat. Chancellor Olaf Scholz made a historic speech and, while only the coming years will tell whether itll stick, instigated a U-turn in terms of military policy and funding. The only place where the Germans are holding out on sanctions is Russian gas, which is understandable given their dependence. Short of a total embargo of Russian energy, theyve turned from doves into hawks almost overnight. That was probably the biggest shift among Western allies in any one country. Germany is now helping to hold together the alliance rather than becoming its own weakest link. Advertisement The U.K. Paul J. Davies: Its quite difficult to talk about the U.K. without also reflecting on two big things in the run-up to the invasion. There were huge questions over Boris Johnsons leadership, with the whole Partygate scandal bubbling away. He was desperately fighting for his job, desperate for distractions and his two main rivals, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, were both burnishing their credentials for potential runs for leadership. At the same time, there were also questions over the amount of Russian money involved in London property, markets and British politics. The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament had already warned about Russian efforts to infiltrate British politics through donations in the summer of 2020. In the run-up to the war, the U.K. was doing the right things, Boris Johnson was talking to Zelenskiy in early January offering support and commitment to Ukraine. Liz Truss brought forward some legislation to expand the sanctions regime, saying it would make it easier to target more people and companies linked to the Putin regime. Advertisement But while the U.K. was saying it was committed and, ahead of the invasion, joined the U.S. and EU in applying some sanctions, it was seen as rather weak. Those sanctions just hit five banks and three individuals which had all already been sanctioned by the U.S. They even put the wrong address for one of the banks so the sanctions wouldnt actually even be effective. After the invasion happened and more oligarchs were hit with sanctions by other countries, the U.K. government was criticized by its own MPs for its failure to respond faster. Ministers defended that by saying U.K. law made the process slower and that they needed to update legislation again. Yet literally a week later, they hit Roman Abramovich and six others with a new wave of sanctions without having done anything, which fits with what I had been told by legal experts beforehand that the U.K. already had all the rules it needed. When Boris spoke to Putin at the beginning of February, that suggested Britain thought diplomacy was still the way forward and still how they expected this thing to unfold. In terms of how they dealt with sanctions, maybe its incompetence, maybe its a lack of resourcing or maybe it was just a lack of preparedness because they were really convinced that this would never happen. As a result, the U.K. government is still playing catch-up. Advertisement Sanctions Paul J. Davies: Especially in terms of targeting individuals, the whole idea of sanctions is to target people who may play a direct role in helping to finance Putins regime and particularly the invasion of Ukraine. A lot of these individuals are not really billionaires in the way that we think of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett as billionaires theyre not entrepreneurs with their own money necessarily. Instead, they are people who hold money in trust on behalf of the regime. Sanctions are also meant to be a nuisance and also meant to be visible. But the bigger picture here is the fact that all of the sanctions weve imposed on a country level and elsewhere are designed to continue the energy trade and allow Russia to sell oil, gas and related commodities, production materials and industrial equipment. The Russians are still selling the equivalent of an estimated $900 million-a-day worth of energy into the West. Even though we froze the assets of the Russian Central Bank which are held at other central banks, Russia also has accounts where they can receive money at commercial banks in Russia, such as Gazprombank. From those accounts, they can dispense money out to other banks and companies within Russia and to the extent that they can find willing partners to work with them, they can spend that money in some form in the world in ways that might be helping the war effort. Thats a huge hole in this sanctions regime. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering foreign affairs. A former editor in chief of the Hindustan Times, he was managing editor of Quartz and Time magazines international editor. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Placeholder while article actions load The Soviet Union was the original space superpower. For decades it and then Russia led the world in key technologies for operating beyond the Earth. Now an invasion of Ukraine intended to reassert Russian relevance on the world stage has had the opposite effect in space. By destroying collaborations with Europe, Russia has transformed itself into worlds first former space power. The early years of the space race were often paced by the Soviet Union. As it raced to beat the U.S., it launched the first satellite and the first astronaut, and made considerable advancements in rocketry. After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Russia reorganized its space program under Roscosmos, a state agency. From the start, the cash-strapped agency focused on collaborating with partners that could contribute the technical, scientific and financial wherewithal it needed to maintain its lead in an increasingly competitive global space race. Throughout the 1990s, it had a lot to offer in return, including expertise in building and operating a space station. The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration partnered with the Russians on the International Space Station. Advertisement Roscosmos also inherited rocket technology. By the early 1990s, updated versions of Soyuz, a Soviet rocket first launched in 1966, and Proton, a Soviet rocket launched in 1965, were still reliable and in use. The European Space Agency was concerned at the time that it could not maintain access to space by relying on its own rockets or American ones. In 1996, an arrangement was forged so that France-based Arianespace SA, the worlds first private launch company, could market and operate Soyuz rockets. Roscosmos and the Europeans agreed a few years later to build launch facilities for the Soyuz at the French-operated European spaceport in French Guiana. It was a winning deal. Europe gained access to launch services and Russia received an important financial lifeline. As recently as 2013, Russia controlled around half of the global commercial launch industry. Advertisement But competition loomed. During the 2000s SpaceX, founded by the electric-car pioneer Elon Musk on the belief that rockets dont need to be monopolized by state-backed contractors, drove a 20-fold reduction in the cost of a commercial launch. By 2020, SpaceX represented half of the commercial satellite launch market, and Russia was down to 10%. That was a problem. Over the years, as Russias economy struggled, Roscosmos had leaned on commercial activities for funding. As businesses moved elsewhere, that funding suffered. Between 2014 and 2020, Roscosmos budget fell from $5 billion to $1.4 billion (NASAs 2021 budget was $23.3 billion). Last year, President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia needed to master new rocket technologies to compete for commercial space launches against SpaceX and then proceeded to cut funding for Russias spaceflight activities even more. Roscosmos could still count on the International Space Station and its commercial collaborations with Europe for financing. The most important European example was a record $1 billion contract signed by OneWeb, a British satellite broadband provider, for 21 launches via Arianespace. Advertisement Then Russia invaded Ukraine, drawing sanctions from the European Union and the U.K. Roscosmos responded by suspending rocket operations and recalling Russian staff from the French Guiana spaceport. That left four European satellites and one space telescope in search of new launch vehicles. A few days later, Roscosmos informed OneWeb that it would not launch its satellites unless it received guarantees that the satellites would not be used for military purposes, and the U.K. government would divest from OneWeb ownership. OneWeb responded by hiring SpaceX to take Russias place. The European Space Agency informed Russia that it would no longer collaborate on a joint Mars mission, which it can afford to pursue alone. Roscosmos cannot. Amid sanctions and Russias belligerence toward its European partners, who would hire it? That leaves a once-proud space program with no apparent way to remain relevant as a space power. Advertisement Roscosmos remains a partner in the International Space Station, but shows little serious interest in maintaining a collaboration or even a friendly relationship with NASA. Joining with China is an option, but Russia would find itself in the unwelcome position of serving as junior partner to Chinas better-funded and (over the last decade) far more accomplished space program. A darker option is that Russia will resort to asserting its relevance via demonstrations of space weaponry, including antisatellite weapons. Whatever route Russias leadership takes back to space, its unlikely to restore its nations status as a space pioneer. Instead, thanks to Ukraine, it has become historys first outer space also-ran. More From Bloomberg Opinion: How Elon Musk Beat Russias Space Program: Leonid Bershidsky Advertisement The U.S. and Russia Still Need to Get Along in Space: Adam Minter Russia, U.S. and China Are in a Scary New Space Race: Tobin Harshaw This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the author of Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade and Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Placeholder while article actions load The Food and Drug Administration has authorized a fourth dose of Covid-19 vaccines a second booster for people 50 and older. But is a fourth dose really necessary, or beneficial? This is a question that health officials worldwide are scrambling to answer. European regulators have said theres no need yet for fourth shots, but European countries are setting their own schedules for extra doses. Sweden is giving the additional shot to people over the age of 80, while Germany set the bar at 70. Israel initially picked 60, and the U.K. is offering a second booster only to the immunocompromised. The lower cutoff of 50 in the U.S. is perplexing. Its below the age threshold for people typically considered at high risk, and sits between the ages that the two mRNA vaccine makers requested. Moderna wanted approval for anyone older than 18, while Pfizer limited its ask to people over 65. Advertisement Unfortunately, none of these recommendations is based on the kind of robust data on vaccine effectiveness that guided the use of the original doses. And the FDA authorized the second boosters without input from its panel of vaccine experts, which meets next week. All this creates a conundrum for anyone considering whether and when to get that fourth jab. Here are four questions to weigh in making the decision. What is the FDA trying to achieve by rolling out second boosters ? The agency seems to be trying to get ahead of a potential new wave of infections with the BA.2 omicron subvariant. BA.2 is already causing an uptick in cases in Europe, even in places where vaccination rates exceed those in the U.S. And the CDCs wastewater data suggest that in some parts of the U.S. infections are rising. Advertisement Nevertheless, health officials cant be sure that the U.S. is on the cusp of another wave. And even if one comes, vaccinations and widespread exposure to omicron and earlier variants could make it less severe than previous outbreaks. On the other hand, indoor masking rules and vaccine requirements have been lifted virtually everywhere, so the virus will have a relatively easy time spreading among the vulnerable. For that reason, and because of whats known about waning antibody levels in people who have had the first booster, some vaccine experts say a fourth shot isnt a bad idea for those in higher risk categories. The immunocompromised already had been cleared for an extra boost, and now the FDA says that middle-aged and older people could enhance their personal safety by getting another shot. These second boosters arent meant to build herd immunity that ship sailed long ago. But if the most vulnerable people get the shot, that might at least hold hospitalizations from new Covid variants to a minimum. Advertisement What is the evidence to support a fourth shot? Plenty of data suggest that levels of neutralizing antibodies created by vaccination wane over time. Its also known that the immune response that older people mount following vaccination is less strong than that in younger people, and the older folks experience a more precipitous drop in virus-fighting antibodies. The key unknown is whether a fourth shot can boost antibody levels in a way that offers meaningful protection. The real-world evidence on fourth shots comes from Israel, which in early 2022 began giving them to health-care workers and people over 60. That evidence has been mixed. In February, a small study (not yet peer-reviewed) suggested that, in Israeli health-care workers, a fourth shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine propped up antibody levels, but that did little to prevent mild or asymptomatic infections. Advertisement Another disappointing finding in that report: The extra booster didnt seem to enhance the T-cell response. If antibodies are the bouncers that keep virus out of cells, T-cells handle any rogue virus that slips past the door and starts to replicate. While they cant prevent infections, T-cells are the more durable side of the immune response the part that can recognize subtle changes in the virus and keep any breakthrough infections mild. Israeli researchers also noticed that fourth doses failed to push antibody levels any higher than they were after a third shot. This suggests there may be a ceiling on the value of boosting. It stands to reason that eventually you get to a point where there are diminishing returns, says Alessadro Sette, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Theres a lot more to learn. Advertisement Should people get the second booster simply because theyre eligible? Here, theres no one-size fits-all answer. Doctors largely agree that for people over 65, who stand an increased risk of severe infections, the rationale for a boost is stronger. Ted Ross, director of the Center for Vaccine and Immunology at the University of Georgia, says he told his mother, who is nearly 80, If youre offered, take it. For those under 65, the equation isnt so simple. The third dose is still keeping younger people out of the hospital, says immunologist E. John Wherry of the University of Pennsylvania. And in many parts of the country, very little virus is currently circulating. Wherry, who is 50 and healthy, says unless theres another surge soon, he will probably put off his booster until the fall, when it might offer a stronger immune boost. Advertisement Its also worth factoring in lifestyle. For anyone whos still sticking close to home, the fourth shot might not have much value yet. But for those whove gone back to traveling and eating out, it may make sense. Weighing the disruption of mild Covid on everyday life is also important though data are sparse on how well a fourth dose might lower the risk of mild infections. Will another booster be needed in the fall? Every year? Maybe. People will probably need some sort of regular immune-system nudging to keep Covid in check. Ideally, future boosters will be better than the ones used now. The existing shots train the immune system to recognize the viruss spike protein, but that is the part that changes most with each new variant. Vaccine makers are already developing new variant-specific vaccines, but a better strategy might be to design boosters that include parts of the virus that tend to stay the same, even as other pieces mutate. Cultivating an immune response to those components might not improve the chance of preventing infections, but it could provide more lasting protection. Advertisement More from other writers at Bloomberg Opinion: New U.S. Covid Czar Has What Biden Needs Now: Jonathan Bernstein Omicron Poses a Puzzle for Vaccine Makers: Raphael and Fazeli The Worlds Next Big Health Emergency Is Here: Therese Raphael This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Lisa Jarvis, the former executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News, writes about biotech, drug discovery and the pharmaceutical industry for Bloomberg Opinion. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Placeholder while article actions load Cold War language about Western unity and the long fight against autocracy has become more rousing as Russia flounders in Ukraine. It is time to start worrying that the response to Vladimir Putins aggression, led by U.S. President Joe Biden, might cause more widespread damage than even the Russian despot had planned. One only has to recall the Western reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. After that atrocity, politicians and journalists freely indulged in the kind of spine-stiffening rhetoric Biden used in Warsaw last week. Those few dissenters who warned against self-congratulatory hawkishness including the late writer Susan Sontag, who pleaded, Lets not be stupid together were viciously attacked. As it happened, the decision to declare an open-ended war on terror quickly taken and fulsomely endorsed in that atmosphere of fervent unanimity led to violence on multiple continents and helped unravel entire societies. Advertisement The fanatics of al-Qaeda never posed a serious threat to Western political, military and economic power. Their suicidal attack was, arguably, symptomatic of the overall decline of militant Islam worldwide. Putins brutal assault on Ukraine seems another sign of thwarted energies that have turned self-destructive. Yet rhetorical overkill and thoughtless policy from Western powers might well accelerate their own loss of legitimacy while helping turn a regional crisis into a global conflagration. Certainly, memories of the counter-productive response to 9/11 weigh heavily on the minds of those a large part of the worlds population who do not share the Western goals of isolating and punishing Russia through sanctions. Since 9/11, most people around the world have regarded the Western ideology and practice of humanitarian intervention, democracy-promotion and regime change with increasing distrust. Such skeptics are unlikely to be stirred by Bidens denunciations of autocracy, broadcast from illiberal Poland of all places. Advertisement Russophobia, latent or manifest in a range of actions in the West today, is about as likely to bring about positive change as Islamophobia. There is little evidence that global isolation and humiliation can motivate a people to overthrow their oppressive leaders. And Putin is more equipped than any Islamist demagogue to take advantage of his citizens anger at the West. He is adept at packaging his imperialism as a riposte to the real and perceived humiliations of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even if Putin is overthrown at some point, a more unhinged form of chauvinism may well emerge from a defeated, immiserated and still nuclear-armed Russia. Those Western hawks comparing Putin to Adolf Hitler and lamenting appeasement at Munich in 1938 should go back a bit further in history and remember how the Treaty of Versailles after World War I made another global calamity inevitable. Advertisement They ought also to reflect on how the Wests talk of antagonistic and irreconcilable blocs undermines its own ideology of globalization. It was Western politicians, businessmen and journalists, after all, who claimed that the end of the Cold War had made possible a new world order in which market forces rightly prevailed over state sovereignty and soft power over hard, creating a win-win scenario for all nations and peoples. This flat world was, of course, always an optical illusion. The Wests advanced nation-states deeply influenced transnational networks of trade and capital. The ownership, assets and intellectual property of multinational banks, companies and insurance firms remained largely in their home countries. And the global economy remained subject to regulation by Western-dominated organizations such as the G-7, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Most non-Western countries resented this rules-based liberal order even as they went along with it. When globalization seemed to empower a rival to the West, such as China, they were quick to note how quickly leaders such as former U.S. President Donald Trump moved to undermine it. Advertisement The swift abandonment of Russia by Western businesses has reinforced the idea that this new world order is controlled by and primarily designed for the benefit of a minority of Europeans and Americans. The weaponizing of globalization by its principal movers and shakers undercuts their claim to be creating a moral, political and economic universalism that transcends nation-state rivalries. Western cold warriors would do better to direct their energies to negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. It is swift peace-making that can stave off, among other things, a bleak future of hunger and chaos, especially for the poor countries of Asia, Africa and the Middle East that depend on Russia and Ukraine for energy, fertilizer and food. Biden cant seem to stop talking about the importance of Western unity. But unity in itself is not a virtue. As Sontag noted, it is always possible to be stupid together. Advertisement More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion: How to Hold Vladimir Putin Accountable for War Crimes: Editorial First Help Ukraine to Survive, Then Beat Putin: Clive Crook Putins Nuclear Threat Brings Back the Cold War: Max Hastings This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Placeholder while article actions load Selling one share of stock can be simple: It generally goes for whatever price other shares of the same company are trading for at the moment. Selling large numbers of shares can be complicated, since the very act of selling can drive down the price -- especially if others get wind of a big stake being sold. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Justice Department are digging into how such block trades work, specifically into how bankers work with hedge funds to privately carry out such deals, which have been booming in recent years. A similar case in Japan has already resulted in charges of market manipulation. 1. What are block trades? Stock sales big enough to send market prices tumbling. Highly secretive, market moving and potentially treacherous -- block trading has been one of Wall Streets most delicate arts since it emerged as a major business line more than a half century ago. Legendary Goldman Sachs dealmaker Gus Levy pioneered the business in the 1960s, helping position his firm to become the trading powerhouse that it is today. Block trading is one of few Wall Street businesses where relationships still drive the flow of deals. Advertisement 2. Why potentially treacherous? Things can go wrong both for the seller and for the bank or broker whos helping. The seller wants to move quickly to get the benefit of an existing price before the sale of the block of stock can drive it down. Banks win that business in part by offering to buy the block themselves -- which leaves them with the problem of how to dispose of it without losing money in the process. 3. How do they do that? Banks typically agree to acquire a slug of stock at a discount from an investor -- such as a company founder, venture capital firm, private equity investor or hedge fund -- and then split the block up into smaller chunks that are sold discreetly to other large investors. The aim is to sell the pieces at a slight discount to the stocks last closing price, and to avoid sending the price into a dive before the transaction is done. A number of hedge funds have set up their own equity capital markets desks to catch pieces of block trades, selling them onward for their own gains, too. Advertisement 4. Whats been happening? Block trades have been popular on Wall Street since 2005, when the SEC revised registration processes for so-called Well Known Seasoned Issuers. This gave sellers the ability to liquidate shares quickly, sometimes within 24 hours, compared to the alternative of waiting about a week for the SEC to review a filing ahead of the sale. But the market has swelled in recent years; banks managed more than $70 billion of block trades in the U.S. in 2021, according to data from Dealogic. Block trading has grown increasingly competitive, and its all the more difficult when markets sell off. Price declines make current shareholders disinclined to unload slugs of stocks, leaving fewer opportunities for banks and the enthusiastic buyers who covet the offerings. 5. Whats changed? Advertisement More companies are staying private longer. Rather than going public while still small, so-called unicorns grow into multibillion-dollar firms before offering stock for sale. That means that every time a large startup goes public, theres a long list of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, venture capital firms and other early investors left with big stakes that they can unload once so-called lockup periods expire. 6. Whats the problem? Many fund managers grouse that they may be missing out on stock allocations in popular initial public offerings because bankers are more focused on cultivating relationships with longer-term investors or with other clients willing to buy into block trades. And sellers have long complained about block trades that seemed to be preceded by stock drops, hurting their proceeds when they cash out. They have pointed to practices that have been seen as existing in a legal gray area. Some private equity firms have developed a number of strategies to try to minimize any such fade. Advertisement 7. Like what? To gauge demand from buyers and potentially gin up interest from sellers, bankers send out lists of shares with upcoming lockup expirations, according to market participants. Its essentially an invitation to hedge funds and family offices to express interest in buying, even if banks dont have a mandate yet. The practice is considered legal. Sometimes, bankers also engage in hypothetical conversations with buyers before they have a mandate. Asking prospective buyers whether they might be interested in certain stocks is one thing. But if there are indeed plans afoot for block sales, such conversations, even phrased hypothetically, can tip off savvy money managers who can move to sell the stock. While there is technically no transfer of material nonpublic information -- the usual line for running afoul of U.S. laws -- the practice has drawn criticism, and now, regulatory scrutiny. Its possible that some deals have confidentiality agreements between the blocks seller and the banks and between the banks and the blocks buyers not to trade on information about potential deals. 8. What are U.S. investigators looking at? Advertisement The activities of a slate of money managers that dealt with Morgan Stanley and at least one other competitor, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The SEC began investigating block trading in 2018. It ramped up its investigation after the blowup at Archegos Capital Management, the family office of Bill Hwang. When his holdings tanked in March 2021, the banks hed been working with unloaded tens of billions of dollars of stocks through a spree of huge sales. The Department of Justice is conducting a parallel investigation. One concern is whether investors are betting against stocks before block trades, causing prices to slump. Authorities havent accused anyone of wrongdoing. 9. Does this happen elsewhere? In an unrelated situation in Japan, authorities have accused financial firms of improperly seeking to prop stocks up, rather than setting off declines. Tokyo prosecutors in March indicted the brokerage arm of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc., SMBC Nikko Securities Inc., and five employees. They are alleged to have used SMBC Nikkos proprietary trading desk to put in large buy orders for certain stocks before the market close in Tokyo. The alleged aim was to prop up prices before the brokerage sold large chunks of those companies shares outside the open market for clients in the block offers. According to prosecutors, such actions amount to market manipulation. SMBC Nikko Chief Executive Officer Yuichiro Kondo has expressed remorse and said the brokerage was cooperating with the authorities. At least four of the five individuals indicted have denied the allegations, according to local media. Advertisement A Bloomberg article on bad blood between private equity firms and banks they suspect of causing block trade prices to slide. A Bloomberg article on the balancing act inherent in block trading. A page outlining block trades from CMC Markets. An article on private markets and block trades. (Adds material on Japan case in intro, section 9) More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Placeholder while article actions load U.N. investigates claims of migrant mass graves Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight U.N. investigators are seeking to verify reports of mass graves thought to contain the corpses of migrants at a trafficking hub in Libya, they said in a report on Monday that also documented cases of rape, murder and torture. Libya is a major transit point for Africans seeking to make the perilous journey to Europe across the Mediterranean, but many instead find themselves enslaved by militias and traffickers or forced into prostitution. Several migrants told the U.N. fact-finding mission that there were mass graves in the desert city of Bani Walid. The report did not say how many bodies the graves might contain. Several women from East Africa also testified that they had been raped and sexually abused. The missions report, the second of three based on about 120 interviews, also flagged violations affecting Libyas democratic transition and raised concerns about secret prisons allegedly run by militias. Advertisement Reuters Deputy leader Machar warns of return to war South Sudans vice president urged regional mediators to intervene to protect the countrys peace deal, warning of a return to war amid alleged attacks by government troops on his forces. Riek Machar accused President Salva Kiir of violating a 2018 truce in a letter to the eight-nation Intergovernmental Authority on Development. The security situation in South Sudan has been deteriorating for the last few months, Machar said. Therefore, we request, as a matter of urgency, the intervention of IGAD and other international partners to prevail on President Salva Kiir not to take this country back to war. There was heavy military deployment in the capital, Juba, on Monday, highlighting growing tensions. In a televised speech, Kiir said that the presence of security forces in the streets does not mean that there is insecurity in Juba. Advertisement Government troops and forces loyal to Machar have recently clashed in Upper Nile and Unity states, Machars strongholds. There were high hopes for peace and stability when oil-rich South Sudan gained its long-fought-for independence from Sudan in 2011. But the country slid into civil war in December 2013 largely based on ethnic divisions when forces loyal to Kiir battled those loyal to Machar. Tens of thousands died in the civil war, ended by a 2018 peace deal that brought Kiir and Machar together in a unity government. But challenges remain. Associated Press 3 E.U. states freeze $130 million in assets Authorities in three European nations have frozen more than $130 million in assets linked to a probe into money laundering in Lebanon, a European Union agency said Monday. The measures by France, Germany and Luxembourg come as Lebanon grapples with an economic crisis and coincide with domestic and European investigations of its longtime central bank governor, Riad Salameh. The crisis, which began in October 2019, is rooted in decades of corruption and mismanagement and has continued with no serious action by the countrys political class. Advertisement The European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, or Eurojust, said the investigation targets five suspects accused of money laundering. It did not identify the five, adding that they are suspected of embezzling public funds in Lebanon. It was not clear whether the case is linked to the investigation of Salameh, charged by a Lebanese judge this month with illegal enrichment and money laundering. Salamehs brother has been under arrest since March 17 over corruption charges. Associated Press Taliban bans BBC, VOA broadcasts: The Taliban regime has banned news broadcasts in Afghanistan from several international media companies, including the BBC, Germany's DW and Voice of America. The BBC's news bulletins in Pashto, Persian and Uzbek have been ordered off the air, while DW's programming will not be rebroadcast by Afghan partners. A Taliban spokesman told the news agency DPA that VOA's television broadcasts on Afghan channels have been halted, but radio transmissions continue. El Salvador arrests 600 gang suspects: El Salvador said it has arrested over 600 gang suspects in raids and reduced food for inmates apparently to accommodate the new detainees after a wave of killings. The government declared a state of emergency and locked down prisons after 87 gang killings on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. From news services GiftOutline Gift Article DC9, an eaglet born in late March, at the U.S. National Arboretum in D.C. (American Eagle Foundation) Experts drew blood, took a feather sample and measured the baby eagle this week. Based on its size, they believe its a boy. The Russian missile cruiser Moskva anchored in Sevastopol in 2008. (AP) The United States provided Ukraine with intelligence that helped Kyiv identify, attack and sink the flagship of Russias Black Sea fleet, the Moskva, in one of the most dramatic battlefield successes of the 71-day-old war, according to people familiar with the matter. Former National Australia Bank chief Andrew Thorburn has promised robust checks and balances will be in place during his leadership of a new climate-focused investment firm, as he seeks to begin a new chapter of his career in sustainable investing. Mr Thorburn resigned from NAB in 2019 after he was personally singled out, alongside former NAB chairman Ken Henry, by the banking royal commissions final report for failing to learn lessons from past misconduct. Former NAB chief executive Andrew Thorburn at his last AGM in 2018. Credit:Arsineh Houspian NAB was a key offender of the fees for no service scandal, illegitimately charging customers more than $100 million, and the banks decision to continue paying bonuses during this period triggered a record-breaking investor revolt over executive pay. Mr Thorburn would not be drawn on the past when asked by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald how the public would reconcile the seeming contradiction between his departure from NAB and his new role seeking to change the world through investing. The war in Ukraine threatens to leave a bigger long-term impact on the market for Australias liquefied natural gas exports than Japans 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, as foreign investors abandon new Russian projects and buyers diversify away from Russian supply. Western nations rapid withdrawal from Russias vast energy sector in the six weeks since the invasion of Ukraine has roiled global markets, deepened an energy crunch across the northern hemisphere and pushed prices for fossil fuel exports to multi-year highs. Russias invasion of Ukraine is set to leave lasting changes in the global LNG market. Credit:Bloomberg Investment bank Credit Suisse last week compiled new research suggesting the 400 million-tonnes-a-year market for liquefied natural gas (LNG) Australias third-largest export could end up 50 million tonnes a year tighter in the mid-term and 80 million to 100 million tonnes shorter by 2030. By contrast, the shuttering of most of Japans nuclear power fleet in 2011 following the meltdowns at the Fukushima plant added 10 million tonnes a year of global demand for the super-chilled fuel. BIOGRAPHY Bob Hawke: Demons and Destiny Troy Bramston Viking, $49.99 The first time I met Bob Hawke in person, he shook my hand and looked directly into my eyes. It felt like the two of us were in a bubble, cordoned off from the rest of the world. Hawke was 70 years old, and eight years out of the prime ministership, but he still had his famous animal magnetism. The only other time Ive experienced this magic trick was when I shook hands with Bill Clinton. Troy Bramstons new biography of Bob Hawke captures the energy and achievements of Australias longest-serving Labor prime minister. Raised by parents who often told friends that their son would be prime minister, Hawke made his reputation by winning substantial wage rises for workers. It earned him the admiration of the union movement and the epithet Mr Inflation from the conservatives. Bob Hawke takes his leave of Old Parliament House in June, 1988. Credit:David James As president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions in the 1970s, Hawke increased union membership from 45 to 50 per cent. Less than three years after entering Parliament, he was Prime Minister. I remember going to see Hawke in his office not long after Labors 2013 election loss, and asking him if he had any advice for life in opposition. No, I didnt spend much time in opposition, he wryly replied. Ill probably have social anxiety and faint, predicted Nicole Richie as she walked a sapphire-blue red carpet into the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. She was joking - maybe? Im just trying to party, deflected Diddy as he flew past the scrum of reporters desperate to know one thing: What happened? Also non-commenting was Serena Williams, the GOAT whose family is at the heart of Smiths trophy-magnet King Richard. She had changed out of her long awards-show gown into a mini silver number, all the better for sprinting past the questions. It wasnt just The Slap that left them jumpy. Famous folk were a little rusty. It had been two full years since theyd crammed gorgeously into a room like this. Rosario Dawson and some pals body-rolled to Bruno Marss 24K Magic, but everyone else was standing around gawking, still trying to figure out how to be human again. Jada Pinkett Smith, from left, Willow Smith, Will Smith, Jaden Smith and Trey Smith arrive at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Credit:Evan Agostini/Invision/AP So, thank you very much, Lakeith Stanfield, for showing the way. A nominee last year, the Judas and the Black Messiah star wasted zero time getting the lay of the land, stalking into the rum room, flinging his giant black furry coat onto a banquette and hitting the dance floor with a fierce two-step. The man came for a party. John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, though, came for a photo opp. The Oscar winner and his free-form celebrity wife stayed just long enough in their matching white tux and opaque silver gown to have their presence duly recorded and then headed for an exit at 10.45pm, unless there was some secret A-plus celebrity den at the bottom of those stairs marked exit, no reentry. Wait a minute. Was this party really just work for these people? A glittery salt mine? It depends. Loading At the bar, the Duke of Hastings, er, Rege-Jean Page and his girlfriend were having what appears to be a genuine couples chat with Keegan-Michael Key and his wife - comparing addresses, realising they live near one another, pulling out phones to plan a double date. On the other hand: This is work, said Jonathan Majors, when we ran into him taking a break in a corner. He told us he is two days away from wrapping Creed III with Michael B. Jordan (who was here with his gorgeous girlfriend, model Lori Harvey), and he seemed tired, but he perked up as Jon Hamm sauntered past with some casual stubble and a tuxedo jacket with extra sheen. Im following you, joked Majors. Dont! Stop it! shouted Hamm, while shooting the kind of finger guns that look ridiculous on men not named Jon Hamm. Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, earlier in the night, arriving at the Oscars. Credit:AP But, yes, work. Or so we personally had to tell Saweetie when she asked if wed like to do a shot with her. The rapper approached in a shimmering black gown that only covered what a censor bar might and gave us a quick up-and-down before offering a tumbler of tequila. Im Saweetie, she said perkily. She was alone. Her first time at the Vanity Fair party, and they wouldnt let her bring a plus-one. I dont know anyone. Im not an actress - yet. But then fashion designer Jeremy Scott appeared by her side, banter-complaining about what a dreadful lesson in humility it was to come in behind her on the blue carpet, and whisked her away to schmooze in the other pavilion. Bye, girl, she said. The liquor flowed, and the VIPs loosened up. Zoe Kravitz smoked a cigarette like she was starring in the sexiest Marlboro ad ever. Bill Murray shouted the lyrics to Madonnas Like a Prayer and later arm-wrestled with a fan. Patricia Clarkson told Amy Schumer: You were the best. Kristen Stewart, in a lace gown, danced like she didnt care she lost. Julia Fox, fresh off dating Kanye West for a nanosecond, sported a dress that featured a black leather hand clutched around her throat (Why did it have to be black though, asked one partygoer). Trevor Noah told Ariana DeBose to enjoy it when she hugged him while holding her Oscar even tighter. But where was Will? No one had forgotten about him. Lena Waithe whispered something into the ear of Wanda Sykes, and the Oscar host shook her head, giving the international sign for yeah that was crazy. Loading When the superstar did finally show up, the VIPs took turns venturing out to the dance floor to pay tribute. I just wanted to say congratulations, Will, shouted D-Nice from the mic, and Smith made his way over to the DJ booth to high-five his friend. They hugged and whispered to each other. Then Noah cut through the sea of bodies and did the same. Waithe, too. After zip-lining through the party for nearly an hour, the Smith machine pointed toward the exit. And once they were gone, the air turned colder. The big names grabbed their In-N-Out burgers and headed off to Madonnas house. Tiffany Haddish, though, lingered to hold court in the power vacuum, with some thoughts about everything from the politics of black womens hair (she shaved hers two years ago) to comedian etiquette. This is the problem with the culture, she was telling the small ring of people who surrounded her, including Smiths good friend, Dwayne Martin. If imma do some jokes about you, imma let you know. It was getting late, and as shoes came off, so did the gloves. The ancillaries who help turn the gears of the business stuck around to talk shop. The music was off, too, leaving the noise of so many opinions to fill the air. The thing is, Ive worked for them, one alleged insider was saying. And theyre both so cool and nice. That was totally out of his character. Which character - Smith or Rock - was unclear. Not to be corny, said another suit, but thats not setting a great example. Heres a headline for you: Oscars bounce back after headline-making telecast with an almost 50 per cent boost in TV audience. Sounds nice, right? The best part is its true. But the maths opens up a few more complicated questions about the most memorable Oscars in a decade. The Oscar telecast pulled an audience of 15.36 million viewers in the US yesterday. Thats 47.6 per cent up on last years audience of 10.4 million. But last years was the lowest in Oscars 94-year history. And despite this years boost, 15.36 million viewers is still an almost 65 percent drop on the telecasts peak audience in the last decade, back in 2014 when 43.7 million people tuned in. Will Smith, right, hits presenter Chris Rock on stage. Credit:Chris Pizzello As with every television ratings story, there are a bunch of cautions. That number is what is referred to in the US as a fast national rating. In Australia, we call them overnights. And they are just the first part of the numerical mosaic. Still to come are figures adjusted for the actual airtime (the show ran over), DVR playback and viewing on other devices. Atlanta SBS, Fridays, 9.20pm and on SBS On Demand Its been four years since the last season of Donald Glovers groundbreaking comedy (due to Glovers other commitments and the pandemic) but its not until the second episode that fans will catch up with Earn (Glover), Alfred, aka Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) and Van (Zazie Beetz) on Paper Bois European tour. The long-awaited third season of Atlanta, once described by creator Glover as Twin Peaks for rappers, returns with a double episode, the first of which is the kind of standalone storyline the series, which has never felt the need to remain bound to its overarching storyline, does so well. Even when it does adhere to a traditional narrative, Atlanta is suffused with a certain dream-like mood; the most prosaic moments can quickly become surreal, a device the series uses to try and show viewers what its like to be black, as Glover has described it. Atlantas third season brings the gang to Europe. From left: Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz and Donald Glover. Written by Stephen Glover (Donalds brother) and directed by longtime Glover collaborator Hiro Murai, season opener Three Slaps begins like an urban legend ghost story before relating the disturbing story of adolescent Laquarius (Christopher Farrar), who, after playing up in class and having his mother and grandfather brought into the school, finds himself removed from his home by an overzealous social worker. Hes placed into a foster home with a white lesbian couple and what seems to start out as a white saviour satire rapidly turns into a much darker Get Out-style story and one that is reportedly based, loosely, on a true story. Like Atlantas other standalone episodes, it bobs along as darkly funny before escalating into the heart-wrenchingly sad. Lismore residents were evacuating on Wednesday after floodwater entered the regional citys central business district for the second time in a month, as Sydney recorded its wettest month in history. At 9am on Wednesday, the floodwater topped the Lismore CBD levee with water now running from the Wilsons River through the city streets. Byron Bay, Ballina and other Northern Rivers towns also were experiencing flash flooding. Residents inspect a flooded road in Lismore on Wednesday morning. Credit:Getty Images The Wilsons River last overtopped the levee at the end of February, causing deadly flooding for the region. At 5pm on Tuesday, residents from Lismore CBD, Lismore Basin, low-lying areas of East Lismore and Girards Hill were told it was safe to return after being evacuated earlier. The opposition has been told that Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelensky will address Australias Parliament, hours before Anthony Albanese delivers the oppositions budget reply on Thursday. Read more from our chief political correspondent David Crowe: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to address Parliament Pro-Ukraine Israelis gather in Habima Square, Tel Aviv to watch a simulcast of President Zelenskys address to the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset. Credit:Getty The Ukrainian President, who has addressed several parliaments, will speak at 5.30pm AEDT according to multiple sources. The Prime Ministers office declined to confirm the report and said to ask President Zelensky, who is leading the 34th day of his countrys defence against the invading Russians, for confirmation instead. Mr Albanese will deliver his budget reply two hours later. If you think this is a going-for-broke, pre-election vote-buying budget aimed squarely at the hip pocket of people worried about the rising cost of living, let me pass on Treasurer Josh Frydenbergs grateful thanks. Thats just the impression hes hoping you get. But it isnt true. When you read the fine print, you discover that, for most people, most of the cost of the extra help they will soon be getting will later be recouped by an increase in the income tax they pay. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is congratulated by Prime Minister Scott Morrison after delivering the Budget speech. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen True, low- and middle-income earners will get a one-off increase of up to $420 in their annual tax offset when they submit their tax return for this financial year (costing the budget more than $4 billion) and pensioners and other welfare recipients will benefit from the one-off $250 payment (costing $1.4 billion) that Mr Frydenberg will ensure hits their bank account before election day. And every driver will save, thanks to the 22 cents a litre cut in the excise on petrol during the six months to the end of September. Coming at a net cost to the budget of $2.9 billion, its not to be sneezed at, even if the usual ups and downs of petrol prices will make it hard for many people to see the saving theyre making. The retiring former speaker of the House of Representatives, Tony Smith, has used one of his last addresses to Parliament to call on politicians to unite in supporting ongoing funding for the National Archives, saying the nations history cannot be left to rot. The veteran Liberal MP, regarded by both sides of politics as one of the nations most even-handed speakers, said the archives should not endure another funding cliff and needed a bipartisan commitment to protect the institution. Former speaker Tony Smith says the National Archives cannot be allowed to have its funding fall off a cliff. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen An extra $67.7 million was promised to the archives in last years mid-year budget update to help save almost 300,000 individual documents and collections at risk of disintegration, including radio recordings of former prime minister John Curtin and a petition to King George V for Indigenous representation in Parliament. The money followed a series of reports by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on the dire situation facing the archives after years of funding and staffing cuts. Single parents looking to enter or re-enter the property market will be able to buy with a deposit of just 2 per cent, via the Family Home Guarantee, which has been expanded from 10,000 places over four years to 5000 places each year. Who is eligible? Single applicants with a taxable income of up to $125,000 per annum for the previous financial year, and couples with an income of up to $200,000, have previously been eligible for the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme, now named the First Home Guarantee. The expanded scheme will help 50,000 people into the housing market each year. Credit:Peter Rae No alternative income thresholds were suggested for the regional scheme in the budget, and the same income cap applies for single parents using the Family Home Guarantee. Permanent residents are only eligible for the Regional Home Guarantee, with other schemes restricted to Australian citizens. Loading What can you buy? Participants must be buying a home to live in, not an investment, and property prices vary according to location and whether or not a new or existing home is being purchased. No change to price caps was noted in Tuesdays budget, despite rapidly rising property prices. Median dwelling value across the capital cities jumped 19.2 per cent for the year to February, according to CoreLogic figures, while values in regional Australia lifted 25.5 per cent. In Sydney, only about one in seven suburbs now has a median dwelling value, covering both houses and units, at or below $800,000 - the existing price cap for the Family Home Guarantee and the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme. Under the current conditions, new homes have a higher price cap of $950,000. Meanwhile, one in five Melbourne suburbs had a median at or below the citys existing price cap of $700,000, CoreLogic analysis shows. Such suburbs were even harder to come by in Hobart and the ACT where just 8.5 per cent and 1 per cent of suburbs, respectively, were priced below their existing price caps, both at $500,000. Only one in five Melbourne suburbs has a median dwelling value below the current price caps for the first-home buyer and family guarantees. Buyers in more affordable markets like Brisbane, Perth and Darwin have greater choice, with more than a third of suburbs in each city sitting below their respective price caps of $600,000 and $500,000. Those outside the capital cities and key regional centres currently have lower price caps, ranging from $350,000 in South Australia to $600,000 in NSW. At that price cap, buyers would be unable to afford the median house prices in regions like Orange, Port Macquarie and Coffs Harbour. What impact will it have? Previous rounds of the scheme have been quick to go, with almost 60,000 aspiring homeowners already using the government guarantee to get onto the property ladder. The scheme will significantly cut down the time needed to save a deposit. This has climbed to more than eight years for the average Sydney couple looking to save a 20 per cent deposit for an entry-level home, recent Domain research shows. Meanwhile, Melbourne first-home buyers will need six years and six months to save and their Brisbane counterparts will take four years and 10 months. Almost 60,000 home buyers have previously been helped by the scheme. Credit:Glenn Hunt While the scheme will help individual buyers bring forward purchases, first-home buyer assistance schemes and grants have been criticised for increasing buyer demand and putting upward pressure on prices because buyers have a larger budget to spend. They can bring forward purchases that would have eventually occurred anyway, while doing little to help those for whom homeownership has slipped completely out of reach. What other housing measures are in the budget? Loading The other key housing-related budget measure is a $2 billion increase to the lending capacity of the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation (NHFIC), which provides low-cost loans to community housing providers working to increase the supply of affordable housing. The increase in NHFICs liability cap, from $3.5 billion to $5.5 billion, is expected to help support around 10,000 more affordable homes for vulnerable Australians. It has already supported more than 15,000 new and existing affordable dwellings. Other spending included an estimated $1.6 billion in continued funding under the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement to support access to affordable safe and sustainable housing, which includes preventing and addressing homelessness. London: Queen Elizabeth made her first public appearance in five months on Tuesday when she joined the royal family and other dignitaries at a memorial service in honour of her husband Prince Philip, who died last year. Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who was by his wifes side for more than seven decades, died at their Windsor Castle home in April, two months shy of his 100th birthday. Queen Elizabeth II is driven in to attend a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of her late husband Prince Philip. Credit:AP Only 30 mourners were able to attend his funeral service then due to strict coronavirus rules, which meant the queen poignantly sat alone as her husband of 73 years was lowered into the Royal Vault of St Georges Chapel of the castle. Tuesdays service of thanksgiving at Londons Westminster Abbey was a much bigger event, with the Queen joining her heir, Prince Charles, his son William and wife Kate and other members of the royal family, including their children. But the mayor of Irpin, near Kyiv, said Ukrainian forces had seized back full control of the town. We have good news today - Irpin has been liberated, Oleksandr Markushyn said, adding that he expected further attacks. A senior US defence official said the US believed the Ukrainians had also retaken the town of Trostyanets, south of Sumy, in the east. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss US intelligence assessments, said Russian forces largely remained in defensive positions near the capital, Kyiv, and were making little forward progress elsewhere in the country. Before the talks, a senior US State Department official said Russian President Vladimir Putin did not appear ready to make compromises to end the war. Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Vadym Denysenko said he doubted there would be any breakthrough at the talks, due to be held in Istanbul after Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan spoke to Putin on Sunday. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said talks so far had not yielded any substantial progress but it was important they continued in person. He declined to give more information. Ukrainian soldiers ride on APC through the town of Trostsyanets. Credit:AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky The Ukrainians are continuing to try to take back ground, a senior US defence official said on condition of anonymity, telling reporters the eastern town of Trostyanets, south of Sumy, was back in Ukrainian hands. In an address on Tuesday morning (AEDT), Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky repeated calls for the West to go further in punishing Moscow for its invasion. We, people who are alive, have to wait. Doesnt everything the Russia military has done to date warrant an oil embargo? But the fact that the peace talks were taking place in person at all - for the first time since an acrimonious meeting between foreign ministers on March 10 - was a sign of shifts behind the scenes as Russias invasion has stalled and sanctions have hit home. Loading The Financial Times has reported that Russia would not object to Kyiv joining the EU if it abandoned NATO aspirations. The media outlet also reported that Russia was no longer demanding that Ukraine be denazified in ceasefire talks. Although since Ukraine is not a Nazi-state, its not clear what the practical effect of that concession would be. Russias Defence Ministry said its troops had destroyed large ammunition depots in the Zhytomyr region west of Kyiv and had hit 41 Ukrainian military sites in the past 24 hours. Reuters could not immediately verify any of the reports. In Kharkiv, Ukraines second-biggest city and one of its hardest hit, people were sweeping rubble out of a classroom on the third storey of a school, where a wall had been blown out by a missile before dawn. Theyve not been able to take the city, so theyve decided to destroy it, said Oleksandr, who had been sheltering with his mother on a lower floor of the school after their neighbourhood was hit. Poisoning claims Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning earlier this month after a meeting in Kyiv, the Wall Street Journal and the investigative outlet Bellingcat reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Residents walk on the rubble of destroyed buildings in the town of Trostsyanets. Credit:AP Photo/Felipe Dana Abramovich, who accepted a Ukrainian request to help negotiate an end to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and at least two senior members of the Ukrainian team, were affected, the WSJ report said. Ukrainian officials poured cold water on the report. Asked about the suspected poisoning, Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak said there is a lot of speculation, various conspiracy theories. Rustem Umerov, another member of the negotiating team, urged people not to trust unverified information. Biden call alarming The Kremlin said Bidens surprise comment about Putin at the end of a speech in Warsaw at the weekend, For Gods sake, this man cannot remain in power was certainly alarming after earlier saying it was up to Russians to choose their leader. Biden had said he was not calling for regime change. Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a special military operation to disarm and denazify its neighbour. Kyiv and the West consider this a pretext for an unprovoked invasion to try to topple the elected Ukrainian government. Loading Last week, Ukrainian forces pushed Russian troops back in areas around Kyiv, the northeast and the southwest, while Russia kept up pressure in the southeast near separatist areas, including its devastating siege of Mariupol. Mayor Vadym Boichenko, speaking from an undisclosed location outside the city, said 26 buses were waiting to evacuate some of 160,000 trapped civilians but Russia was denying safe passage. People are beyond the line of humanitarian catastrophe, Boichenko said on national television. We need to completely evacuate Mariupol. Loading A spokesperson for Boichenko said later that nearly 5,000 people had been killed and 90 per cent of buildings damaged, of which 40 per cent were destroyed. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said intelligence reports of possible Russian provocations along evacuation routes out of besieged cities meant there were no plans for such evacuations on Monday. The views expressed by public comments are not those of this company or its affiliated companies. Please note by clicking on "Post" you acknowledge that you have read the TERMS OF USE and the comment you are posting is in compliance with such terms. Your comments may be used on air. Be polite. Inappropriate posts or posts containing offsite links, images, GIFs, inappropriate language, or memes may be removed by the moderator. Job listings and similar posts are likely automated SPAM messages from Facebook and are not placed by WFMZ-TV. Exclusive: The much-loved Watermill Theatre in Newbury has announced its full 2022 season, with programming leading right the way through to 2023. Following the completion of the upcoming world premiere of Our Man in Havana, as covered here, will be another world premiere in the form of Bleak Expectations, courtesy of Mark Evans and adapted from his hit Radio 4 series. The mash-up of Dickens' books, directed by Caroline Leslie (Trial By Laughter) runs from 27 May to 2 July. Danielle Pearson's new play Camp Albion will run at the Watermill from 6 to 16 July, after an initial tour of Newbury towns and villages from 15 June. It concerns the so-called "Battle of Newbury" in the 1990s, and is directed by Georgie Staight (A Christmas Carol) with design by Isobel Nicolson. From 22 July to 10 September, the venue will stage a major revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jim Steinman, Patricia Knop and Gale Edwards' Whistle Down the Wind. The show, which is based on both the 1961 film and 1959 novel of the same name, follows a group of farm children who discover a man hiding in their barn that they mistake for Christ. When it first ran in the West End in 1998, it was notable for having a child's cast featuring the likes of Jessie J, Anne-Marie, Hannah Tointon, James Buckley, Hannah Cooper, Matthew Thomas and Jade Ewen, all of whom went on to carve out music, stage and screen careers of their own. Tom Jackson Greaves (The Jungle Book) directs the new actor-musician revival, which will also feature young local talent. It features the hit tune "No Matter What", famously topping charts for Boyzone. Bleak Expectations The hit Watermill Ensemble will return in September for a new staging of Othello, co-directed by the venue's artistic director Paul Hart alongside Anjali Mehra (Brief Encounter) and featuring live music. It runs from 16 September to 15 October). Tatty Hennessy will adapt Michael Morpurgo's The Sleeping Sword (billed as "a contemporary tale of self-discovery woven with the ancient legend of King Arthur"), running from 27 October to 5 November. Directed by Lucy Jane Atkinson with Amy Bethan Evans in the positions of dramaturg and visually impaired creative consultant, the production will see every performance use creative captioning and integrated audio description. Across three nights from 10 to 12 November, the Watermill Youth Ensemble will present the stage adaptation of Patrick Ness' A Monster Calls (directed by Angharad Arnott Phillips), with the final show of the year being Lucy Betts' new revival of Annie Siddons' adaptation of Rapunzel, originally staged by Kneehigh in 2006 with music placed alongside the classic 17th-century Italian folk tale. It runs from 18 November to 1 January 2023. Whistle Down The Wind Hart and associate artistic director Abigail Pickard Price said today: "We continue to strive to create ambitious work despite the challenges we and theatres across the UK are experiencing and we remain incredibly grateful to our audiences for the support they are showing to live theatre and to the next generation of theatre makers through our fundraising campaign: Nurture." Nottingham Playhouse has revealed a handful of productions for the remainder of 2022. Newly announced shows include an outdoor staging of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream from 13 to 16 July, which will be performed by four actors with a running time of just 80 minutes. Following the eagerly awaited world premiere musical Identical, based on Erich Kastner's The Parent Trap (26 July to 14 August), the venue will welcome WhatsOnStage award-winning actors Adrian Scarborough and Sophie Thompson to the stage in Scarborough's adaptation of Alan Bennett's novella The Clothes They Stood Up In. Billed as "a bittersweet exploration of marriage, dreams and lives unlived", the piece follows Maurice and Rosemary Ransome, who return home after a night at the opera to discover all their worldly possessions stolen. It runs from 9 September to 1 October. Up next is the Sheffield Theatres and Ramps on The Moon's production of Much Ado About Nothing (11 to 15 October). continuing their pioneering initiative to place Deaf and disabled artists and audiences at the centre of their work with the use of integrated creative sign language, audio description and captioning. From 19 October to 5 November, the venue will stage Natasha Gordon's Nine Night, co-produced with Leeds Playhouse. Having played at the National Theatre and in the West End to great acclaim with a 5-star review from WhatsOnStage's Sarah Crompton, the contemporary comedy, which revolves around a traditional Jamaican nine night wake, will now celebrate its regional premiere. Finally, Nottingham Playhouse has also confirmed its festive production, which will see John Elkington return to panto dame duties as Sarah the Cook in Dick Whittington, running from 25 November 2022 through to 14 January 2023. National Park Week is April 16-24. Across the country, national parks will be celebrated in various ways that serve as reminders that parks are important places, worth preserving. Places that offer time to explore and learn, to discover culture and history, and to give back. Individual parks will present different programs and events to mark this week and themes have been created for each day. All parks will offer free admission on April 16. Montana is home to eight national parks; just part of why it's been well named the treasure state -such a bounty of natural wonders, from sunsets over glaciered mountains and green meadows lush with grasses to clear blue waters. The country's first national park, Yellowstone, an area with unparalleled geothermal and geological features, celebrated 150 years in February. It, along with seven others, conserves historical sites important to Native American settlers, trading history and cowboy culture. Think of this week as an opportunity to discover or rediscover how each Montana park adds to the richness of life here. Saturday, April 16 is a Day of Discovery, one to visit a new park, recharge, and reconnect with nature. Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area offers more than 120,000 acres of vast, wild landscapes, amazing vistas, a huge diversity of ecosystems, wildlife, and more than 100,000 years of human history. Choose from 17 miles of hiking trails, boating on Bighorn Lake, trout fishing in the Bighorn River, and four historical ranches to tour at this lesser-known destination offering solitude, serenity, and beauty. (Off Interstate 90 south, 43 miles to Hardin) Sunday, April 17's theme is creativity and contribution, both easy to accomplish at Yellowstone National Park's 2.2 million acres stretching across Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Photography, watercolor, music, the written word, and more can easily be inspired by hiking trails, wildlife, geological formations, geothermal features, lakes, rivers, canyons, and mountain ranges. This year the park is also offering opportunities to consider its 150-year history: successes, lessons learned, today's challenges, and visions to protect the park's health for future generations. (West entrance in West Yellowstone) Collaboration and Military is the theme for Monday, April 18 - how parks preserve important U.S. history and encourage active-duty military and veterans to visit the parks with America the Beautiful annual park passes. Nez Perce National Historic Park has 38 sites in four states, three in Montana. Big Hole National Battlefield is one, bearing witness to the Nez Perce people's 126-day, 1,170 mile forced journey. Created to honor all present on August 9, 1877, when U.S. troops surprised a sleeping camp of Nez Perce, killing 60 to 90 men, women, and children, as well as their culture. The 655-acre park has a visitor center, award-winning film, four trails, trail guides, and ranger programs. (On Highway 43, 10 miles west of Wisdom) Tuesday's theme is transformation, recognizing the work and projects necessary to keep parks in good condition. Glacier National Park, the Crown of the Continent, has more natural wonders than you can count, within more than a million acres: alpine meadows, deep forests, waterfalls, rugged mountains, glaciers, many lakes, an abundant variety of wildlife, more than 700 miles of trails and three visitor centers. It takes work to maintain this park, work that the public can share by leaving no trace, reducing your carbon footprint, volunteering, and looking for seasonal work. History is the theme for Wednesday, April 20, and Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site puts you right into the life of a true American cowboy and pays homage to and preserving the dominant cattle business of the 1850s and its impact on America. Canadian fur trader Johnny Grant owned the original ranch; in 1866 he sold it to Conrad Kohrs, known as Montana's Cattle King. Once headquarters to a 10 million-acre cattle empire, the site contains 88 historic structures, cattle, seven miles of walking trails for behind-the-scenes exploration, guided tours, and ranger programs. (Along Interstate 90, on the outskirts of Deer Lodge) Thursday recognizes the park service's role in the preservation of historic, cultural, natural, and recreational resources and its' work to preserve parks for the better. Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site preserves one of the most important fur trading spots of the 1800s when this area depended on trading for survival and the American Fur Company traded with Assiniboine and six other Northern Plains Tribes for buffalo robes and smaller furs for beads, guns, blankets, cookware, cloth, and knives. The site includes a partial reconstruction of the original fort located in the Upper Missouri River and offers guided tours, an Indian arts showcase, Jr. Ranger, and Jr. Trader programs. (15 miles SE of Bainville) April 22 is Earth Day, a day to contribute to a healthier world and make a difference anywhere you choose. Do something good for a green space. Grab a few garbage bags, gloves, and friends and organize a cleanup hike. Plant a tree or donate to an organization that plants trees. Curiosity is the theme for Saturday, a day to discover something new. Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument commemorates the battle fought by the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne tribes on June 25-26, 1876, to preserve their way of life, and honor all lives lost during this Last Stand. Explore the visitor center, museum, and the Custer National Cemetery. Take the walking tour with interpretive markers, and drive the 4.5-mile tour road connecting two separate battlefields, retracing the battle's steps through audio tour stops and exhibits. (Located within Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana) By the end of National Park Week you've easily attained the theme of the last day, memories, either to reflect or to create more, maybe by a return visit to Glacier, exploring the 50-mile Going-to-the Sun-Road or bringing youngsters on a kid-friendly hike to beautiful, unique St. Mary and Virginia Falls. National Park Week may fall once a year, but luckily our national parks are always there to enjoy, treasure and support, both in Montana and across America. For more information: NPS.gov. Williamson, WV (25661) Today Showers and thunderstorms. A few storms may be severe. High 71F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall possibly over one inch.. Tonight Rain likely. Thunder possible. Low 58F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%. ROME - Marie-Anne Day Walker-Pelletier sat down in a taxi as she left a private tour of the Vatican Museums and fell deep into thought. President of the Metis community, Cassidy Caron, second from left, and other delegates arrive to speak to the media in St. Peter's Square after their meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Monday, March 28, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Gregorio Borgia ROME - Marie-Anne Day Walker-Pelletier sat down in a taxi as she left a private tour of the Vatican Museums and fell deep into thought. "We are in 2022 and our history is being stored and shown in other countries where nobody understands," the retired chief of Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan pondered out loud Tuesday. "Those items, those artifacts those are ours. Those belong in our communities. They belong to people. They belong to generations." Indigenous delegates who have travelled to Rome to meet with Pope Francis were given access to the Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum, which includes some of the Vaticans collection of Indigenous artifacts. Some of that collection has not been seen publicly in decades or ever. Walker-Pelletier, a residential school survivor, said she looked at the objects and thought about how artifacts speak truth to life, history and the communities of Indigenous people. If the Roman Catholic Church is committed to truth and reconciliation, she said, it must make the collection open as well. "Thats one of the things the Pope needs to look at, how does he reconcile and bring back the artifacts," Walker-Pelletier said. Indigenous curators and experts have said they have been unable to get access to the unknown number of objects in the churchs possession. Marie-Anne Day Walker-Pelletier, retired chief of Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan, is shown in Rome, Italy, on Tuesday, March 29, 2022. Walker-Pelletier said after a tour of a Vatican museum that she wants the Roman Catholic Church to return Indigenous artifacts in its possession. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kelly Geraldine Malone Much of the Vaticans current collection is from a former pope who decided to hold a world exposition in 1925. A message went out at that time to missionaries around the globe to send items. More than 100,000 objects and works of art were displayed. The Vatican has said parts of its collection were gifts to popes and the church. In 2019, the Pope committed to putting many more objects on display, including those of Indigenous people. The collection is known to contain masks, wampum belts, pipes and rugs, as well as other items from Indigenous communities in North America. Delegates on Tuesday saw a rare kayak made by Inuvialuit. The Inuvialuit Regional Corp. requested last year that it be returned. There were also embroidered gloves from a Cree community, a baby belt from a Gwich'in community, moccasins from British Columbia, and many other items on display for the delegates. Many objects were taken away from Indigenous people after the Canadian government outlawed cultural practices through the Indian Act in 1876. Ceremonial items and other important objects were seized, then sold, given to museums or destroyed. Kukpi7 Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tkemlups te Secwepemc First Nation in British Columbia, said she was conflicted walking through the collection. During her time in Rome she has felt so far from home and everything is so different. It was, in a sense, it was a little bit of a feeling of back home," Casimir said in describing how she felt in the museum. She said she wished she had more time to muse on the objects and to take photos. She knows many people in her home community were interested in what the Vatican had. Global outrage was sparked last year after Tkemlups te Secwepemc announced that potential unmarked graves had been found at the former residential school. Casimir said she joined the delegation to get information and make a difference and further healing for her community. "So far today I feel good about what Im doing." She and other First Nations delegates are to meet Francis on Thursday. Metis and Inuit delegates met with him Monday. The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a statement that the artifacts represent across-sectionof works by Indigenous artists from various regions of Canada. The bishops said they have been preserved as part of a broader commitment to inclusiveness and dialogue, and "to celebrating diverse cultures around the world." The bishops said the Oceania region exhibit was developed in collaboration with Indigenous People. The group added the North American exhibit, which would include the Indigenous artifacts from Canada, has not yet been developed. The bishops indicated the Vatican is open to working with Indigenous communities to talk about the future of the items and whether they should be displayed or repatriated. "So the items that the delegates were shown today were presented simply along with the information the museum currently has about their provenance and history," the bishops said. Ready, Pet, Go! Leesa Dahl looks at everything to do with our furry, fuzzy, feathered, fishy (and more!) pet friends. Arrives in your inbox each Monday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Mitch Case, a historian who is also a regional councillor with Metis Nation Ontario, said he didn't see any identified Metis items. "I don't think that's because there aren't Metis things there," Case said. Case said around the time the items were being collected most Metis communities were devoutly Catholic. He wondered why, if there are Metis items, they weren't on display knowing the delegation was coming. He said it demonstrates why transparency about collections is extremely important. "Because we don't know what's in there, I can't make any judgment whether it was deliberate. I just don't know." This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 29, 2022. ROME It might have been the first time the Red River Jig was played in St. Peters Square. ROME It might have been the first time the Red River Jig was played in St. Peters Square. Even if it wasnt, it lent a festive air as two fiddlers led members of the Metis delegation into the Vatican City gathering space after their Monday meeting with Pope Francis. JOHN LONGHURST / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Brianna Lizotte of Edmonton and Alex Kusturok of Cold Lake, Alberta lead the Metis delegation out of the Vatican. At a media scrum in the square, Metis National Council president Cassidy Caron said it was a first step in advancing the cause of truth, justice, reconciliation and healing for survivors of residential schools and their families. Three Metis survivors shared their stories with the Pope at the meeting. Unfortunately, said Caron, "there are many who have already left us without their truths being heard, their pain acknowledged, without the healing they so rightly deserved." The meeting with the Pope was "long overdue But it is never too late to do the right thing," she said. "Weve done our work. Now it is time for him (the Pope) to join us in that work." Weve done our work. Now it is time for him (the Pope) to join us in that work. Cassidy Caron, Metis National Council Caron said Catholics in Canada and around the world can join them on the pathway to reconciliation and healing, and in so doing enable the Roman Catholic Church to "begin its own healing." The meeting with the Pope was "very comfortable," she said, adding he expressed sorrow as he heard "the survivors tell their truth." While the Pope has committed to an upcoming visit to Canada, there are no firm dates yet. However, Caron said, "I expect it will be soon." The Metis delegation also asked the Pope to ensure unfettered access to records held by the church about residential schools; the church not shield any potential perpetrators "who committed crimes against our children;" it provide compensation for survivors and funding for community healing initiatives. "We want an apology, but we also want action," Caron said. JOHN LONGHURST / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Cassidy Caron, president of the National Metis Council, speaks at the media scrum after meeting with the Pope. An estimated 150,000 children attended residential schools; as of late 2021, the Winnipeg-based National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation had documented more than 4,100 deaths of children at such facilities. Some 60 per cent of residential schools were run by the Catholic Church. At an afternoon news conference Monday, Caron said she reminded the Pope "the atrocities happened to children. That is never OK." Reconciliation is a long journey, she said, adding the church needs to commit itself to healing and reconciliation with Indigenous people from the Pope to the bishops to the churches to individual Catholics. "All have a role to play," Caron said. GREGORIO BORGIA / ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO A pair of traditional Metis pointed-toe style moccasin were presented as a gift to Pope Francis in Rome. On Monday, one hour after the Metis meeting, the delegation from advocacy group Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami met with the Pope. National leader Natan Obed called for specific actions by Pope Francis to advance reconciliation with Inuit in Canada. This included: ensuring the Canadian Roman Catholic Church fulfills its obligation to raise $30 million for the national healing fund; it helps Indigenous people in the search for more unmarked graves at former residential school sites; and the Pope intervene personally in the case of Oblate priest Johannes Rivoire, who is accused of sexually abusing children in Nunavut. The Pope, Obed said, could also ask the French government to extradite Rivoire, who continues to live free in the European country, or ask that government to put him on trial in France. "We want reconciliation to be based on action," Obed said of Rivoire, who worked in Canada from the 1960s to 1993. We want reconciliation to be based on action. Natan Obed, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami The Free Press is committed to covering faith in Manitoba. If you appreciate that coverage, help us do more! Your contribution of $10, $25 or more will allow us to deepen our reporting about faith in the province. Thanks! BECOME A FAITH JOURNALISM SUPPORTER Click here to learn more about the project. The delegation, which represented 65,000 Inuit in 51 communities in Canada, gave the Pope gifts of a sealskin stole, a Rosary case made of sealskin, and carvings. Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami members said the Pope was warm and welcoming and fully engaged during the session. The meeting included the recitation of the Our Father (Lords Prayer) in Inuktitut, which Obed described as "a very powerful moment." John Longhurst is in Rome this week to cover the papal visit by Indigenous people for the Free Press. fpcity@freepress.mb.ca Want more great journalism? Get our best news and features delivered in your inbox every evening. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. As pandemic restrictions get lifted and efforts to support growth in the economy are underway in the province, immigration is going to play an important role in that dynamic. As pandemic restrictions get lifted and efforts to support growth in the economy are underway in the province, immigration is going to play an important role in that dynamic. On Monday, Jon Reyes, Advanced Education, Skills and Immigration Minister along with co-chair Lloyd Axworthy announced the 20-person membership in the newly created Immigration Advisory Council which is charged with reviewing the entire continuum of the immigration process in Manitoba from promotion of immigration to retaining newcomers. Membership of the council includes people from settlement agencies, industry and academia and many have their own immigration experiences to draw from. With the economy facing significant labour market shortages in Manitoba, Reyes said immigration can play a big role in addressing economic growth dynamics. "We are very excited about immigration as an opportunity that could make a difference in addressing a lot of the problems we are having in terms of getting people with skills and the people we need here," Reyes said. The council will make recommendations by the end of the year on improving and speeding up the process as well as retaining folks once they get here. Axworthy, a former federal cabinet minister, president of the University of Winnipeg and the current chairman of the World Refugee Migration Council, knows a thing or two about international immigration. "Now is a good time to review the very successful Provincial Nominee Program and figure out how we can lead again in making it a premier program for the country and certainly for our own provincial needs," he said. Whereas in the last decade the province welcomed an average of 15,200 immigrants annually a huge increase from and average of about 4,300 in the 1990s the pandemic has virtually shut down immigration over the last two years. Reyes said last year there were 6,300 in the pipeline through the nominee program. He said there are discussions underway with the federal immigration authorities to increase that amount this year. Immigration Advisory Council co-chair and Immigration Minister Jon Reyes (Jessica Lee / Winnipeg Free Press) The current Ukrainian refugee crisis has mobilized the provinces immigration department and staff from across provincial departments. Reyes said Manitoba is in a unique situation of having one of the highest per capita populations of people of Ukrainian decent. "We know there will be a large influx of Ukrainian citizens that will be coming here," he said. Although there are only 25 in the pipeline right now, there has been another 100 who have has some sort of engagement with Manitoba immigration and efforts are underway to provide on-line connections with Ukrainian refugees interested in coming to Manitoba. On the same day the Immigration Advisory Council was announced, the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters (CME) released a white paper on Immigration Retention in Manitoba, noting that the industry has more than 24,000 job vacancies and that immigration is vital for the industry to replace the aging workforce. Among other things, the report notes that while Manitoba has had success in attracting new immigrants and ensuring that they find employment, the province is in the middle of the pack relative to the other provinces when it comes to retaining them. The CMEs Ron Koslowsky, said, "Its not just a matter of attracting immigrants. We have to make sure they are welcomed and that we have a good grip on them and they will stick around. Often it can be little things like understanding the needs of the workers; families as well." Friesens Corp., the book printer in Altona, has been engaged in recruiting immigrants for more than two decades. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Its CEO, Chad Friesen who is one of the members of the new advisory council said the company had been recruiting around 30 people per year, but was completely shut out the last two years. With the world opening up again it is now looking at increase its recruitment to 40-to-50 people year per year. Among other things, he said for the past five years the company has had success in bringing in folks from the Philippines who have created their own community support system along with supports the company provides. And those supports are significant. The company now provides assistance in obtaining first time home owner mortgages and providing car loans for its new immigrant workers, something that banks and credit unions would not do until they obtain permanent residency status which can take two years. "That is one of the way we are helping foreign works build roots in the community," he said. "We are not just hoping they are going to stay. We are putting resources in place." martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca Wade Barnes, the only CEO of the Winnipeg-based precision agriculture company Farmers Edge that he co-founded in 2005, has stepped down as CEO. Wade Barnes, the only CEO of the Winnipeg-based precision agriculture company Farmers Edge that he co-founded in 2005, has stepped down as CEO. The news came late Friday as the company released year-end results showing revenue of $36 million, down from $46 million in 2020. Wayne Glowacki / Winnipeg Free Press files Wade Barnes is steppiong down as the CEO of Farmers Edge, a Winnipeg agricultural technology company. It was another in a series of disappointing quarterly results for the company that has ambitious goals of being a global leader in digital agriculture. The company raised $125 million in an initial public offering one year ago and after initial market enthusiasm for the stock there has been a steady stream of disappointing performance ever since. And after an early bump from the $17 IPO price, the stock price has been in a gradual decline ever since, closing at $2.60 on Monday, down more than 11 per cent on the first day of trading after news broke of Barnes resignation late Friday. That news was also followed by another $75 million loan from Fairfax Financial Holdings, the majority owner of Farmers Edge, that is to be used for working capital and general corporate purposes. It is not obvious why Farmers Edge has struggled as much as it has. The company has had several different programs to entice farmers in Canada, the U.S., Brazil, Australia and elsewhere to subscribe to its package of digital services with monthly fees charged per acre. The company was one of the first agri-tech companies in the Prairies to make noise in the precision agriculture space with a broad range of proprietary technologies involving hardware, software, and services designed to make agriculture more efficient and produce higher yields. One of Farmers Edges competitive features was its independence from the Big Ag companies like John Deere and Bayer who have competing services in the market. The company landed a significant venture capital investment in 2014 from the blue chip Silicon Valley firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers that has backed the likes of Google, Amazon, Twitter, Spotify and Uber and was seen as an exciting prospect in the growing sector. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Barnes was a tireless promoter of the company leveraging his credential as a farm boy from Birtle, Man. along with impeccable chops in the digital world as the company layered on an growing array of new services from weather stations and satellite imagery to insurance. Just last week he was one of the featured speakers at a Tech Manitoba conference where he was extolling the value of the companys ability to track the carbon footprint on the farm, something that will become increasingly important as global food companies try to meet their zero carbon targets in the coming years. Neither Barnes or the company have said much about the rationale for Barnes resignation. It has said the board of directors has commenced a search for his successor and in the meantime Barnes will continue to work with the company to ensure a smooth transition over the next couple of months. He will also retain his seat on the board of directors. martin.cash@freepress.mb.cs WASHINGTON (AP) In a decision that could dramatically undercut President Joe Bidens ambitious climate goals, the Commerce Department said Monday it is investigating whether imports of solar panels from Southeast Asia are circumventing anti-dumping rules that limit imports from China. FILE - Farmland is seen with solar panels from Cypress Creek Renewables, Oct. 28, 2021, in Thurmont, Md. The Commerce Department says it is investigating whether imports of solar panels from Southeast Asia are circumventing anti-dumping rules that block imports from China. The decision could dramatically reduce solar imports to the U.S. and undercut President Joe Bidens ambitious climate goals. Clean energy leaders said the investigation could lead to thousands of layoffs in the domestic solar industry and imperil up to 80% of planned solar projects in the U.S. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File) WASHINGTON (AP) In a decision that could dramatically undercut President Joe Bidens ambitious climate goals, the Commerce Department said Monday it is investigating whether imports of solar panels from Southeast Asia are circumventing anti-dumping rules that limit imports from China. Clean energy leaders said the investigation which could result in retroactive tariffs of up to 240% would severely hinder the U.S. solar industry, leading to thousands of layoffs and imperiling up to 80% of planned solar projects in the U.S. Such an outcome would jeopardize one of Biden's top clean energy goals and run counter to his administration's push for renewable energy such as wind and solar power. The Commerce Department decision "signals that the Biden administrations talk of supporting solar energy is empty rhetoric,'' said Heather Zichal, CEO of the American Clean Power Association, a clean-energy group. Zichal, who was White House energy adviser under President Barack Obama, called on Biden to reverse the decision immediately. Americas solar workers and the clean energy community are watching and will remember,'' she said, calling implications of the investigation "apocalyptic'' for the industry. Overnight, the Commerce Department ... drove a stake through the heart of planned solar projects and choked off up to 80% of the solar panel supply to the U.S.,'' she said, adding that Biden must fix this now.'' The Commerce investigation follows a complaint by Auxin Solar, a small California-based manufacturer that said solar panels assembled in four Southeast Asian nations Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are circumventing rules intended to block imports of solar cells and panels from China. FILE - Electricians with IBEW Local 3 install solar panels on top of the Terminal B garage at LaGuardia Airport, Nov. 9, 2021, in the Queens borough of New York. The Commerce Department says it is investigating whether imports of solar panels from Southeast Asia are circumventing anti-dumping rules that block imports from China. The decision could dramatically reduce solar imports to the U.S. and undercut President Joe Bidens ambitious climate goals. Clean energy leaders said the investigation could lead to thousands of layoffs in the domestic solar industry and imperil up to 80% of planned solar projects in the U.S. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File) The White House declined to comment, but a Commerce spokesman said the agency will conduct an open and transparent investigation to determine whether circumvention of U.S. trade law is occurring. This inquiry is just a first step ... and no additional duties will be imposed at this time, said spokesman Jeremy Edwards. Auxin Solar CEO Mamun Rashid said he was grateful that Commerce officials recognized the need to investigate what he called pervasive backdoor dumping of solar panels by China. Solar manufacturers in smaller Asian countries use parts produced by Chinese companies as a way to keep costs down while skirting steep antidumping and countervailing tariffs on Chinese goods, he said. For years, Chinese solar producers have refused to fairly price their products in the U.S. and have gone to significant lengths to continue undercutting American manufacturers and workers by establishing ... operations in countries not covered by those duties,'' Rashid said. Fair trade and enforcement of our trade laws are essential to rebuilding the American solar supply chain and making solar (panels) in America again. The Commerce Department action comes weeks after Biden extended tariffs imposed by former President Donald Trump on most solar panels imported from China and other countries. In a nod to his efforts to combat climate change and boost clean energy, Biden excluded tariffs on some panels used in large-scale utility projects. Biden's Feb. 4 announcement continued many Trump-era tariffs, but he exempted so-called bifacial solar panels that can generate electricity on both sides and are now used in many large solar projects. The technology was still emerging when the tariffs were first imposed by Trump. Biden also doubled an import quota on solar cells the main components of panels that go on rooftops and utility sites to 5 gigawatts, allowing a greater number of imported cells used by domestic manufacturers. Biden faced a choice among competing constituencies on solar power, a key part of his climate and clean-energy agenda. Labor unions support import restrictions to protect domestic jobs, while the solar industry relies in large part on cheap panels imported from Asia. In a speech this month, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the U.S. must boost domestic manufacturing of products such as solar panels. The more we rely on other countries to make things for us, the more vulnerable we become to supply chain disruptions like we have seen over the past two years,'' she said March 15, adding that "at least 95% of the market for the cells that go into solar panels is estimated to have components that were produced in China.'' Biden has set a goal to cut planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030, and solar power is a key part of that agenda. A report last year by the Energy Department says solar has the potential to supply up to 40% of the nations electricity within 15 years a tenfold increase over current solar output. Ready, Pet, Go! Leesa Dahl looks at everything to do with our furry, fuzzy, feathered, fishy (and more!) pet friends. Arrives in your inbox each Monday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, which represents solar installers, called the Commerce investigation a misstep that could have a devastating impact on the U.S. solar market and result in tens of thousands of layoffs. The decision could result in retroactive tariffs of up to 240%, a possibility Hopper said would have an immediate and "chilling effect on the solar industry.'' Additional tariffs could cause the loss of 70,000 American jobs, including 11,000 manufacturing jobs, she said, and could result in a dramatic drop in solar installations and a corresponding increase in planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. Solar prices are increasing, federal climate legislation is stalled and trade restrictions are now compounding,'' Hopper said. "Commerce should quickly end this investigation to mitigate the harm it will cause for American workers and our nations efforts to tackle climate change. Trump approved tariffs on imported solar-energy components in 2018, saying his administration would always defend American workers and businesses from unfair competition. The tariffs were initially set at 30% and later cut to 18% and then 15%. They were set to expire without action by Biden. Under Bidens decision, tariffs will be set at 14.75% and gradually reduced to 14%. Since the tariffs were imposed, solar-panel production in the U.S. has tripled. Chinese and South Korean companies have set up factories in Georgia, Florida and Alabama, and an American firm, First Solar Inc., expanded domestic production at a plant in Ohio. COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) India signed an agreement to set up hybrid power projects on northern Sri Lankan islands Tuesday in a deal seen as a strategic victory in its competition with China for influence in the Indian Ocean. India's Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, center, attends the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) foreign ministers meeting in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, March 29, 2022. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena) COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) India signed an agreement to set up hybrid power projects on northern Sri Lankan islands Tuesday in a deal seen as a strategic victory in its competition with China for influence in the Indian Ocean. Indias External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who was visiting Colombo, witnessed the signing along with Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Gamini Peiris, the Indian embassy said. In December, China announced it was suspending its own plan to build power plants on three Sri Lankan islands due to security concerns. An Indian official said Tuesday he couldnt confirm if the plants in the new agreement are to be built on the same islands earmarked for the Chinese project. The power source and other details about the projects weren't available. India's foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar attends Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) foreign ministers meeting in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, March 29, 2022. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena) India considers Sri Lanka, just across the narrow Palk Strait off India's southeastern coast, to be within its sphere of influence. The island nation is in the middle of a key sea route connecting East and West and is important to Chinas ambitious One Belt One Road global infrastructure initiative. India and China are rivals for influence in the region and have border disputes that have flared in recent years. It is kind of a substantial victory for India, said Lynn Ockersz a senior journalist and foreign relations analyst in Sri Lanka. He said it would put India in a position to influence Sri Lanka regarding policy decisions that might affect it. The cancelled Chinese power plant project would have been near Indias southern coast. Jaishankar was taking part in the BIMSTEC summit, a meeting on economic cooperation between Bay of Bengal nations Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Ready, Pet, Go! Leesa Dahl looks at everything to do with our furry, fuzzy, feathered, fishy (and more!) pet friends. Arrives in your inbox each Monday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. India also signed agreements on a maritime rescue coordination center and a fisheries project in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka faces daunting problems with debt and is enduring its worst economic crisis in recent memory with shortages of medicine, fuel, fertilizer and milk power. Daily power outages are lasting for hours. The debt crisis partly stems from infrastructure projects that were financed with Chinese loans but are not making money. Sri Lanka's foreign reserves are dwindling while it needs to repay $7 billion in foreign debts this year. It has approached both India and China for help. India provided a $1 billion credit line to buy essentials and $500 billion to buy fuel. China is considering a request for $2.5 billion in economic assistance but has been non-committal about restructuring billions in debt. China and Chinese businesses have invested heavily in building a sea port, airport, roads and a port city on reclaimed land near Colombo harbor, which Sri Lankas government aims to develop into a financial city. Sri Lankas government previously scrapped a plan to allow China outright ownership to land on the Colombo Port City. It instead provided 62 hectares (153 acres) on a 99-year lease. OTTAWA - Two federal New Democrats tabled legislation Tuesday that would make Canadian companies more accountable for human rights abuses and environmental harms abroad. NDP member of Parliament Peter Julian speaks during a press conference in Ottawa on Tuesday, March 29, 2022, regarding the tabling of bills that will directly address the need for greater accountability in Canada for Canadian corporations operating overseas. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick OTTAWA - Two federal New Democrats tabled legislation Tuesday that would make Canadian companies more accountable for human rights abuses and environmental harms abroad. At a news conference, NDP MP Peter Julian said Bill C-262 would create legal tools, giving victims of human rights violations by Canadian companies abroad recourse in Canadian courts. NDP foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson said Bill C-263 would give the corporate responsibility watchdog the power and teeth to investigate wrongdoing by Canadian corporations. The bill would also allow the body to compel witnesses and testimony, McPherson said. The Liberal government appointed the first Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise in 2019. Some critics have said the watchdog was not given the right tools or powers to hold Canadian companies abroad to account. Private members bills rarely become law, particularly if they are introduced by opposition parties, but the MPs stressed the importance of the measures. "This is absolutely essential. We have seen Canadian corporations linked to appalling and atrocious violations of human rights," Julian said of Bill C-262. "If the Canadian corporations are not being responsible, often there is no established or independent or non-corrupt judicial and policing system to ensure that the victims actually receive the justice to which they are so deserving of receiving." Canada's mining companies often set up in countries with poor democracies and weak human rights protections, McPherson said. "Workers and communities are violated." Bea Bruske, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, said the bills "hit the right marks, and we celebrate this important step." Ready, Pet, Go! Leesa Dahl looks at everything to do with our furry, fuzzy, feathered, fishy (and more!) pet friends. Arrives in your inbox each Monday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "We are all aware of the horrific burden of needless human suffering in the world, and the tremendous stress that our natural environment is under. Canadian companies should not be adding to these burdens," said Catherine Coumans, research co-ordinator at MiningWatch Canada. "It is time for Canada to quit stalling, quit caving to mining industry lobbying, and move to implement the private member's bills that have been tabled today." There were no immediate responses to requests for comment from the ombudsperson, the office of Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly or Global Affairs Canada. This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 29, 2022. --- This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship. CALGARY - Calfrac Well Services Ltd. says it is suspending any investments in Russia. A pumpjack works at a well head on an oil and gas installation near Cremona, Alta., Saturday, Oct. 29, 2016.Calfrac Well Services Ltd. says it is suspending any investments in Russia. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh CALGARY - Calfrac Well Services Ltd. says it is suspending any investments in Russia. The company says despite the fact that the provision of parts and equipment are not restricted by sanctions, it cancelled shipments that were bound for Russia when the country invaded Ukraine. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. It has also cancelled any future shipments of parts and equipment into Russia. Calfrac says its Western-based employees involved with its Russian operations are currently not in Russia. The company joins a long list of Canadian companies that have suspended operations in Russia in response to the country's war against Ukraine. Calfrac provides specialized oilfield services to exploration and production companies in Canada, the United States, Argentina and Russia. This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 29, 2022. Companies in this story: (TSX:CFW) WARSAW, Poland (AP) Poland's government decided Tuesday to block imports of coal from Russia, part of an overarching strategy to reduce energy dependence on Russia that gained new urgency after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki holds a joint press conference with Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stre in the Government's official residence in Oslo, Tuesday, March 8, 2022. (Stian Lysberg Solum/NTB via AP) WARSAW, Poland (AP) Poland's government decided Tuesday to block imports of coal from Russia, part of an overarching strategy to reduce energy dependence on Russia that gained new urgency after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. Poland will impose financial penalties on any private entities importing Russian coal into Poland, with Polish customs officials carrying out checks, government spokesman Piotr Mueller said as he announced the new policy. He added that Poland could no longer wait for the whole 27-nation European Union to embrace the policy. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the EU, the United States and some other powers imposed a range of economic sanctions on Russia. But Europe has historically been dependent on Russian energy sources primarily oil and gas but also coal to some extent and has had trouble weaning itself off. Poland, which was under Moscow's influence during the communist era, has worked in recent years to reduce its use of Russian energy sources, and will soon no longer have to rely on Russian gas. It is more dependent on Russian oil, however. And while Poland produces much of its own coal, it also relies on imports. Russian coal makes up 13% of the fuel used each year, according to Piotr Lewandowski, the president of the Institute for Structural Research in Warsaw. Half of that imported Russian coal is used to generate heat in individual homes, while the rest is used for district heating or industry, he said. Thats why its much easier to ban coal in the final week of March than in October, Lewandowski said. The question now is how do you prepare for the next heating season? Shelley Cook | Uplift A weekly review of funny, uplifting news in Winnipeg and around the globe that is delivered to your inbox each Wednesday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. One option will be to buy coal from other sources, but that might be more expensive, given Russian coal's favorable quality-to-price ratio. The other is for Poland's government to create more incentives for households to retrofit their homes in order to generate power from other energy sources, such as heat pumps, Lewandowski said. Polish coal miners will certainly welcome the move because they felt that importing coal from Russia and other countries undermined their own declining industry. Many critics of the Poland's conservative government have also argued that it was wrong to keep importing Russian coal while Poland criticized Germany and other countries for their increasing dependence on Russian energy sources. Even before the war began, Russian coal was problematic because a certain portion of it was extracted from the Donbas region of Ukraine, where Russian-backed insurgents were fighting against the Ukrainian military. The coal was perceived as a theft of Ukrainian resources, sent to Russia for export abroad. ___ Follow all AP stories on developments related to the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/russia-ukraine. MONTREAL - Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard appeared virtually before a Quebec court judge from a Toronto jail on Tuesday on charges of sexual assault and forcible confinement dating back nearly 25 years. Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard is shown in this courtroom sketch in Toronto on Wednesday Jan. 19, 2022. Nygard appeared briefly before a Quebec court judge virtually from a Toronto jail today to be charged sexual assault and forcible confinement in Montreal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Alexandra Newbould MONTREAL - Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard appeared virtually before a Quebec court judge from a Toronto jail on Tuesday on charges of sexual assault and forcible confinement dating back nearly 25 years. Nygard, in an orange jumpsuit with his hair tied back, took notes during the brief proceedings before Judge Anne-Marie Lanctot. He was represented by Montreal lawyer Laurence Juillet, who waived the reading of the charges and reserved a decision on whether a future trial would be before a jury or a judge alone. Disclosure of evidence could be done as early as Tuesday, with the Montreal case set to return to court on April 4. Nygard will not be required to appear in court next Monday for what his lawyer described as a procedural hearing. An arrest warrant issued in Montreal alleges Nygard, 80, committed one count of sexual assault and one count of forcible confinement involving the same victim, between Nov. 1, 1997, and Nov. 15, 1998. Outside the courtroom, prosecutor Jerome Laflamme told reporters he was limited in what he could say about the case, including the gender of the alleged victim. He did confirm the victim was over 18 years old at the time of the alleged crimes. A publication ban was requested in the Montreal case and the Crown has opposed bail a technicality since Nygard is already detained while facing sex-related charges in Toronto and the United States. "That's where we'll decide whether we will set a date for his bail hearing or not, but the prosecution is objecting to his release," Laflamme said of the next court date. "The prosecution will insist on a speedy trial." Last fall, Nygard was charged in Toronto with six counts of sexual assault and three counts of forcible confinement in alleged incidents dating back to the late 1980s and mid-2000s. He has denied those allegations. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Earlier this year, a Toronto court rejected his bid to be released on bail. Nygard is also facing extradition to the United States. He was first arrested in Winnipeg in 2020 under the Extradition Act after being charged with nine sex-related counts in New York. Authorities in the U.S. allege he used his position in the fashion industry to lure women and girls. Nygard, who has denied the allegations through his lawyer, had agreed to be extradited to the U.S. to face a charge of sex trafficking. Last week, federal Justice Minister David Lametti said he issued an order stating Nygard could be extradited to the U.S., but added, "only after current criminal charges in Canada have been addressed." Laflamme told reporters Tuesday that the completion of the Montreal case is part of the conditions for extradition. The former head of a multimillion-dollar clothing company also faces a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. involving 57 women with similar allegations. This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 29, 2022. Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard has been charged in Quebec with sexual assault and forcible confinement. Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard is shown in this courtroom sketch in Toronto, Thursday, Jan. 6, 2022. The Quebec prosecutors' office announced Monday Nygard has been charged with sexual assault and forcible confinement in connection with events alleged to have occurred between November 1997 and November 1998. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Alexandra Newbould Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard has been charged in Quebec with sexual assault and forcible confinement. Nygard, who is also facing sex-related charges in Toronto and the United States, is scheduled to appear in court in Montreal on Tuesday, according to the Quebec prosecutor's office. An arrest warrant issued in Montreal alleges that between Nov. 1, 1997, and Nov. 15, 1998, Nygard sexually assaulted a victim identified only by their initials. The document also alleges that during the same period, Nygard "did confine, imprison or forcibly seize" the same person in Montreal. Last fall, Nygard was charged in Toronto with six counts of sexual assault and three counts of forcible confinement in alleged incidents dating back to the late 1980s and mid-2000s. He has denied those allegations. Earlier this year, a Toronto court rejected his bid to be released on bail. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Nygard is also facing extradition to the United States. He was first arrested in Winnipeg in 2020 under the Extradition Act after being charged with nine sex-related counts in New York. Authorities in the U.S. allege he used his position in the fashion industry to lure women and girls. Nygard, who has denied the allegations through his lawyer, had agreed to be extradited to the U.S. to face a charge of sex trafficking. Last week, federal Justice Minister David Lametti said he issued an order stating Nygard could be extradited to the U.S. only after his legal proceedings in Canada are completed. The former head of a multimillion-dollar clothing company also faces a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. involving 57 women with similar allegations. This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 28, 2022. The 26-year-old Winnipeg man charged last week in a downtown homicide had been sentenced in December for weapons possession, under a 10-year ban following a 2017 stabbing. The 26-year-old Winnipeg man charged last week in a downtown homicide had been sentenced in December for weapons possession, under a 10-year ban following a 2017 stabbing. Prasad Biswa, 40, was assaulted March 23 on the 400 block of Edmonton Street. He died from his injuries. Kody Terrance Joseph Pangman was arrested March 25, and charged with second-degree murder and carrying a concealed weapon. The Winnipeg Police Service has not made public the circumstances of the slaying near Central Park and did not respond to Free Press questions about Pangmans arrest Monday but court documents show past assault and weapons convictions for the accused. The latest charges have not yet been tested in court. On Dec. 13, Pangman pleaded guilty to a charge of possessing a weapon for a dangerous purpose in a provincial court hearing presided over by Judge Raymond Wyant. Pangman was sentenced to six months less the 75 days he had already spent in custody after a joint recommendation by the Crown and defence. Court heard on Oct. 21, WPS community support officers were patrolling near Air Canada Park when a man reported the theft of his bicycle, providing photos of the bike. Three days later, community support officers saw a male suspect riding the stolen bike near Portage Avenue and Sherbrook Street. Police took the man Pangman into custody nearby. A search of his backpack found a black axe with its handle covered in tape and a can of bear spray. Pangman was subject to bail conditions and three weapons prohibitions at the time. His defence counsel told court Pangman said he carried the weapons for protection, as he had been seriously assaulted weeks prior. However, his counsel said, Pangman knew it is not how he should be handling safety concerns and wanted to move forward. Wyant asked Pangman whether he heard what his lawyer said; Pangman said he did. I hope so, otherwise its just a merry-go-round and youre coming back to see us for longer and longer sentences, Wyant said, before issuing his ruling. One of the prohibitions ordering Pangman not to carry weapons or firearms for 10 years was granted June 28, 2018, after he pleaded guilty to two counts of assault with a weapon. Court heard Pangman was at a William Avenue party at around 5:30 a.m. July 22, 2017, when a group argument turned physical. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Pangman stabbed a female cousin once in the lower right abdomen with a knife, before stabbing her boyfriend three times in the forearm. Both were taken to Health Sciences Centre in unstable condition, but recovered, court heard. Court heard Pangman, who likely has fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, has family affected by the 60s Scoop and residential schools. His mother who in 2018 had cancer and was expected to live two years, court was told went to the last residential school in Saskatchewan; his father died in a vehicle accident prior to his birth. In 2018, Pangman told associate chief Judge Anne Krahn he was sorry for his mistakes. He was sentenced to 150 days in custody to be served concurrently for the two charges, two years of supervised probation and a 10-year weapons prohibition. erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @erik_pindera A Manitoba man has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for bludgeoning his mother, claiming he snapped after she told him she wished he were dead. A Manitoba man has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for bludgeoning his mother, claiming he "snapped" after she told him she wished he were dead. The mandatory sentence for second-degree murder is life in prison. Lawyers for the Crown and defence have jointly recommended Kelton Wood be able to apply for parole after serving 10 years in custody, the minimum term allowed under the Criminal Code. Charlotte Wood, 35, died Sept. 24, 2020, as the result of blunt force trauma to the head. She was stabbed 70 times all over her body and had several burn injuries to her arm, back and thigh. Kelton Wood, 18 at the time of the killing, will return to court for sentencing in June following the completion of reports looking into his background and prospects for rehabilitation. More than half a dozen family members attended Mondays court hearing in Winnipeg; a few family members cried softly when Wood was later led out of court by sheriffs officers. "Defence counsel and myself want the parole board to have as much information as possible," Crown attorney Danielle Simard told Queens Bench Justice Shaun Greenberg. "To quote one of the deceaseds siblings, Kelton will still be my nephew when he gets out of jail. So, there is very much a desire to give the parole board everything they need to help Mr. Wood." Band constables arrived at the St. Theresa Point home, shared by Wood and his mother, around 7 a.m. after an anonymous caller reported there were "copious amounts of blood" in the house, Simard told court, reading from an agreed statement of facts. Wood, wearing a T-shirt and runners stained with wet blood, started crying and tried to close the door when a constable and three co-workers entered the house. Once inside, they found Charlotte Wood face down on the kitchen floor, with a blood-stained shovel and dumbbell near her body. After being taken into custody, Wood gave a full confession to RCMP, saying the killing was sparked by a discussion about access issues involving his child. "Kelton tried to confide in his mother and told her that she should know what it feels like not being able to see her kids," Simard said. "Charlotte got upset at Kelton and began yelling at him, blaming him for everything, and telling him she wished he were dead." Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Wood said "something inside him snapped" and he attacked his mother. He knocked her to the floor and choked her, and then hit her with a shovel three times. "He stated that he had also cut her and put hot knives on her stomach, but could not remember doing it or why," Simard said. Charlotte Wood suffered extensive fractures to all of her skull and facial bones. "Dental comparison was required in order to positively identify the deceased," Simard said. Wood remains in custody pending sentencing. dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca Warning: this story contains graphic content readers may find disturbing Joseph Floyd Delaney pleaded guilty to three counts of indecent acts in September 2000. (Trevor Brine / CBC) Warning: this story contains graphic content readers may find disturbing Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Court documents reveal a Lundar, Man., man recently charged with a series of historical sexual assaults involving children has been previously convicted of sexual offences involving young people. Joseph Floyd Delaney, 65, was arrested in February in connection with nine offences, including sexual assault, sexual interference and invitation to sexual touching dating back to the 1980s and 1990s. The charges involve three different children, who were all around 10 years old at the time of the alleged abuse. To read more of this story first reported by CBC News, click here. This content is made available to Free Press readers as part of an agreement with CBC that sees our two trusted news brands collaborate to better cover Manitoba. Questions about CBC content can be directed to talkback@cbc.ca. A joke about his genitalia, made by the leader of the Manitoba Metis Federation, has sparked concerns about a disturbing culture in the organization. A joke about his genitalia, made by the leader of the Manitoba Metis Federation, has sparked concerns about a "disturbing culture" in the organization. "This morning I took a shower with cold water cold, ice-cold water," president David Chartrands told the annual assembly of 2,000 delegates Saturday, as part of his address on the state of the Metis nation. "And not to be sexual in any way, (but) do you know what happens to a man that takes a cold water shower in the morning? Anyways, I tell you I was freezing and yelling there," he said. Chartrand made the comment in relation to a power outage at the hotel where many of the delegates had stayed, which meant they had no hot water. His comments were greeted with bouts of laughter, but not everyone found it funny. "Everyone kind of chuckled, and myself and a lot of my friends felt uncomfortable hearing that," said Jenna Vandal, co-chair of a Winnipeg chapter of the MMF. "Obviously, theres a sexual innuendo that I dont want to have to picture in any way," she said. "That was harmful to some women." Red River Echoes banded together a year ago to lobby the federation to change its leadership structure. The group argues that a corporate-style board and outdated attitudes have deterred Metis youth from being politically active. The collective, which has only 38 members, has been a thorn in the side of Chartrand. He has accused them of being disrespectful; last year, he told them to "go to hell." DANIEL CRUMP Chartrand made the comments while speaking to 2,000 delegates at the MMF's annual convention. (Daniel Crump / Winnipeg Free Press) In an interview Monday, Chartrand defended his shower joke, noting that a video recording of his speech shows delegates laughing. He said its Metis custom to make fun of oneself. "I did a joke about myself to make everybody laugh and feel like its OK; all of us went through it, the president too," he said, referring to the lack of hot water at the hotel. Ahead of the weekend assembly, the collective posted a video raising concerns about new resolutions as well asexisting rules that require members to serve as long as eight years in various roles before running for leader. At the conference Saturday, Chartrand, who has led the Metis since 1997, portrayed the collective as a small group of keyboard warriors. "Ninety per cent of it is liars. You know why? Because theyre brave and nobody can see me here," he told the assembly. "Like, come here in this room and criticize; well see how fast youre taken care of by people in this room." The collective said that amounted to a veiled threat of violence, which Chartrand dismissed as unfair and inflammatory. Moments later, Red River Echoes member Breanne Lavallee-Heckert rose to defend her group, at one point suggesting a meeting to go over governance concerns. "I grew up watching Metis women be disregarded my whole life, and Im tired of seeing that," she said from the floor microphone. "If this isnt a space where Metis women can have different opinions, then this isnt a space for us." DANIEL CRUMP Chartrand says he said the joke to make everybody laugh and know that even the president of the MMF had to take a cold shower too. (Daniel Crump / Winnipeg Free Press) Executives pushed back by arguing women are in numerous leadership roles in the federation. Some delegates followed Lavallee-Heckert after she left the meeting and swore at her, she said. "They told us to take our politics out of there and that we were disrespectful young people (who are) dumb and dont know what were talking about," she said. "It started to almost get to the point of physical violence." The federation had arranged for security at the meeting, and any intimidation is wrong, Chartrand said Monday. "If you want to criticize (our) structure, then come here and tell them that, but be prepared; democracy will also respond," Chartrand said. "The problem is they didnt like the answer." Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The collective argues its been ignored when it raises issues such as a partnership with Winnipeg police. Claire Johnston said Chartrand dismissed her as being uninformed and overly emotional when she raised an issue at a recent Metis youth meeting. "I try to be engaged in these processes (but) I have to recover for days afterwards, because of the ways I am treated," she said. In response, the federation insists it wants to hear from young people, but Johnston said Chartrands shower comment and pushback on criticism suggest otherwise. "Its really a disturbing culture that we witnessed at the (assembly)." dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca The largest drug seizure in Manitoba RCMP history started with a criminal analyst noting a trend in the flow of illicit substances into southern Manitoba from North Dakota in 2018. The largest drug seizure in Manitoba RCMP history started with a criminal analyst noting a trend in the flow of illicit substances into southern Manitoba from North Dakota in 2018. It triggered a joint RCMP-Winkler Police Service probe that grew exponentially. Arrests, charges span Manitoba, B.C. RCMP have charged a total of 22 people. RCMP are asking anyone with information about Kramar or Ivziku to call them at 204-983-5420. click to read more RCMP have charged a total of 22 people. These Manitobans were part of the five, separate criminal organizations that we infiltrated, said RCMP Insp. Grant Stephen. Charges range from (Controlled Drug and Substances Act) offences, drug trafficking, possession for the purpose, organized-crime related offences, firearms-related offences, and proceeds of crime, financial integrity offences. Two other men are actively evading arrest, RCMP said. Kieffer Michael Kramar, 30, of Winnipeg, could be anywhere in Canada. Denis Ivziku, 24, is from the Lower Mainland of British Columbia and is believed to still be in that area. RCMP are asking anyone with information about Kramar or Ivziku to call them at 204-983-5420. Others charged include: Enrico Funk, 29, from Friedensruh (in the RM of Stanley) Artjom Gotting, 32, from Winnipeg Nathaniel Cabal, 31, from Winnipeg Trinh Ducthang Dinh, 31, from Winnipeg Zuhair Mohammad-Zarif, 27, from Winnipeg Jesse James Whyte, 26, from Winnipeg Andre Omar Steele, 41, from Winnipeg Brittany Girardeau, 28, from Winnipeg Albert Theodore Jansen, 39, from Winnipeg Sharon Jonatanson, 66, from Libau Scott Matthew Jonatanson, 27, from Libau Caitlin Jones, 22, from Winnipeg Owen James Quesnel, 33, from Winnipeg William Solomon Gooding, 24, from Winnipeg Brian Christopher Yakimoski, 28, from Winnipeg Jeffrey David Gaudet, 32, from Winnipeg Dylan Durval South, 28, from Winnipeg Kelvin Lee Nelson, 27, from Burnaby, B.C. Mazin Nzar Zandy, 24, from Burnaby, B.C. Stephen said those charged include alleged high-level drug traffickers, kilo-level brokers, buyers and couriers. Erik Pindera Close Four years later, investigators have charged 22 people, including 18 Manitobans, after a massive probe that targeted and infiltrated five Canadian and international criminal networks, including one allegedly led by a full-patch member of the Hells Angels, with assistance from police agencies across Canada, the United States, Colombia and Greece. "Mexican cartel drugs coming from either Mexico itself or Colombia were being smuggled into Canada, specifically Manitoba, and then the intelligence also suggested it was being distributed across Canada from there," the commander of Manitoba RCMPs federal, serious and organized crime unit, Insp. Grant Stephen, told reporters Tuesday. "That was the nexus of our investigation." Insp. Grant Stephen, officer in charge of federal, serious and organized crime for the Manitoba RCMP. (Erik Pindera / Winnipeg Free Press) Dubbed Project Divergent, the investigation involved overt and covert police tactics meant to infiltrate the five criminal networks, which were largely based out of southern Manitoba and British Columbias lower mainland. Stephen would not reveal details of those tactics out of operational concerns, but said: "If you can think of it, in respect to investigative techniques and strategies, we did it." RCMP executed nine or 10 search warrants in Winnipeg, southern Manitoba, B.C.s lower mainland and Ottawa on Feb. 23. "Four of the groups were largely Canadian with some having international reach I would say the fifth criminal organization is an international organization because it was led by (a full-patch Hells Angel) with his international reach however (it) had strong Canadian connections as well," Stephen said. Dozens of undercover officers and others involved in the project gathered to watch as Stephen and Assistant Commissioner Jane MacLatchy, commanding officer of the Manitoba RCMP, spoke to reporters in the atrium of D Divisions Winnipeg headquarters near a table piled with seized drugs, guns, cash and outlaw motorcycle gang paraphernalia. A large quantity of drugs, cash and outlaw motorcycle club patched clothing were seized as part of Project Divergent. (Erik Pindera / Winnipeg Free Press) Investigators seized 110 kilograms of cocaine, more than 40 kilograms of methamphetamine, three kilograms of fentanyl, 500 grams of MDMA (commonly known as ecstasy or molly), 14 handguns, five semi-automatic assault-style rifles and more than $445,000 in Canadian currency. Stephen said the drugs would be worth about $70 million on the street if broken down into one-off sale sizes. The seized weapons, some of which were being trafficked, were stored improperly. "They were pretty much ready to go loaded or, if they were unloaded, magazines and ammunition were found within proximity, there was no safe-storage handling techniques compliant to legislation, so no trigger locks no compliance to separating ammunition from the firearms," he said. Investigation spans international borders RCMP say the Project Divergent massive investigation required the knowledge and help of police and other agencies worldwide. click to read more RCMP say the Project Divergent massive investigation required the knowledge and help of police and other agencies worldwide, including: Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit of British Columbia B.C. RCMP Quebec RCMP National Division RCMP in Ontario RCMP liaison officers in Bogota, Colombia; Rome, Italy; Washington; and Los Angeles Winkler Police Service Homeland Security Investigations out of Grand Forks, N.D. Ontario Provincial Police, biker enforcement unit, which also includes officers from the Ottawa Police Service Colombian National Police Hellenic Police in Greece Health Canada Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) Forensic Accounting Management Group (FAMG) Public Prosecution Service of Canada Erik Pindera Close The wide-reaching RCMP probe discovered one of the organizations was allegedly led by Damion Patrick Ryan, 41, of Ottawa a full-patch member of the Attica Hells Angels chapter in Greece. He was arrested in Ottawa Feb. 23. The Vancouver Sun has reported Ryan is a prominent Hells Angel in British Columbia. The luxury home where he was taken into custody had recently been sold by a former British Columbia lower mainland resident with gang connections for $1.5 million, the Sun reported at the time of Ryans arrest, citing property records. Ryan is charged with possession of controlled substances for the purpose of trafficking, possession of the proceeds of crime exceeding $5,000 and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence namely that he conspired with three named and other unnamed individuals to traffic an illicit substance between Sept. 17, 2020 and Feb. 17, 2022, court documents obtained by the Free Press show. Those are the only criminal counts hes ever faced in Manitoba. Hes also barred by court order from contacting 23 people, including many of those charged in the RCMP probe. Kieffer Michael Kramar, 30, of Winnipeg. RCMP said he could be anywhere in Canada Ryan is currently in custody at Milner Ridge Correctional Centre and was denied bail March 14. Hes also facing firearms offences in Ontario, Stephen said. "Damion Ryan is likely one of the most prolific organized-crime members in our country," Stephen said, standing beside Hells Angels clothing seized allegedly from Ryan. Ryan is also a prominent member of the Wolf Pack, which Stephen described as the "highest-level organized criminals working together" for drug distribution within the country. It spans Canada, Stephen said, but he could not estimate the number of members. Although the results of Project Divergent were significant, Stephen said theres more work to be done to stem the flow of illicit drugs in Manitoba and nationwide. "Organized crime will attempt to recover from this and well be there waiting," he said. erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @erik_pindera Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE The union representing paramedics in rural Manitoba is accusing the province of ignoring a critical staff shortage that is fuelling burnout and slowing response times. PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE The union representing paramedics in rural Manitoba is accusing the province of ignoring a critical staff shortage that is fuelling burnout and slowing response times. Bob Moroz, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, claims the government doesnt have a suitable plan to recruit, train and retain staff to ease pressure that has grown during the COVID-19 pandemic. "Weve been talking about (a staff shortage) for months and years. It continues to get worse," said Moroz, whose union represents about 800 paramedics. "They absolutely love what they do, but they are being taken advantage of. Theyre unappreciated by this government." Moroz said response times in rural Manitoba have been "trending up" due to a lack of paramedics, as lower pay and difficult working conditions make small towns and cities less attractive than places such as Winnipeg. The province said it has created 149.2 full-time equivalent paramedic positions since 2016. Moroz said he doesnt trust the provinces "fuzzy math," as paramedics are telling him theyre seeing the "worst staffing crisis" of their careers, with ambulances sitting idle because they arent staffed. Manitoba is still "hundreds of paramedics short," with ambulances sitting idle due to the shortage, he said. "We know that over the last number of months response times have been climbing, and thats terribly concerning for rural and northern Manitoba," he said. Health Minister Audrey Gordon said Manitoba must make the job "attractive" and has "a lot of work to do" regarding recruitment. The government is working with partners such as RRC Polytech to start paramedic training programs or do "active outreach" to potential recruits, Gordon said Monday while visiting a new ambulance station in Portage la Prairie, following a tour of a new station in Crystal City. Gordon said the emergency medical services stations built at a cost of $3.8 million will improve the quality of care for people in those parts of the Southern Health region, and be more suitable for paramedic training. The EMS stations act as "operational hubs," as paramedics are repositioned across the region based on a dispatch system that uses computer data models and tries to predict where crews will be deployed, she said. Moroz said the "geoposting" system is only effective if there are staffed ambulances at the station. If not, ambulances are positioned further apart, and there are gaps in coverage, he said. In recent years, the government has announced plans to close or consolidate a number of rural ambulance stations, including one in Treherne. Staff and vehicles from that station would be moved to Glenboro, about about 45 kilometres west. "Thats not acceptable at all," Will Eert, reeve of the Rural Municipality of Norfolk Treherne, said last week. As of December, Crystal Citys EMS station had the second-longest response times in Southern Health, said Moroz. Hes happy to see modern stations being built, but said response times wont improve if more paramedics arent hired. "Stations are great, but unless you have the people to work a shift and be ready to go, its missing the point," he said. Moroz said Winnipeg paramedics receive a salary that is 25 per cent higher, on average, than their rural counterparts, making the city more attractive. Patient transfer times are longer in rural Manitoba, where paramedics work a lot of overtime because there isnt enough staff, he said. Many are fatigued and unhappy with their work-life balance, he added. Moroz said Manitoba has been losing paramedics to employers in other provinces who pay more and offer better working conditions. "Eventually, people just get burned out and decide to leave the profession entirely or go somewhere else," he said. Moroz said he has asked to meet Premier Heather Stefanson and Gordon to discuss the shortage and ways to recruit and keep staff. That would include training recruits at rural stations, he said. Moroz and Rebecca Clifton, the administrative director of the Paramedic Association of Manitoba, called on the province to increase pay and improve working conditions for rural paramedics. Clifton said the pandemic has put a lot more pressure on paramedics, leaving them exhausted. "We hear the word burnout thrown out a lot," said Clifton, a Selkirk-based intermediate-care paramedic who works in the Interlake Eastern Regional Health Authority. "While its nice to have new stations, we need to have paramedics and bodies in them." She said Manitoba hasnt been producing as many graduates as in the past, and some positions are vacant because employers arent filling them. PAM has called on the province to end its "additional on call" practice, she said. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. In some rural areas, a crew is put on call after a 12-hour shift instead of being replaced by a fresh pair of paramedics. "If that pager goes off, they are asked to respond. If theyre scheduled to work the next day, theyre expected to be back," said Clifton. "It is quite dangerous and needs to be removed." Due to shortages, some paramedics are in an "additional on call" situation for two or three consecutive days, she said. Manitoba, meanwhile, has previously announced plans to build a new $4.2-million EMS station in Selkirk and buy 65 new ambulances at a cost of about $10 million. chris.kitching@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @chriskitching Manitoba appears to have again dodged a severe flooding bullet, as initial predictions influenced by the snow-heavy winter have been downgraded by the province. Manitoba appears to have again dodged a severe flooding bullet, as initial predictions influenced by the snow-heavy winter have been downgraded by the province. An update from the province March 25 shows a more positive forecast come spring, than what was suggested in its previous update in February. WAYNE GLOWACKI / FREE PRESS FILES The Red River Floodway will still be in operation, in the case of a spring weather event. Major snowfall this winter had put the province on high alert for severe flooding. But the weather in the last two weeks has been amicable, with no significant rain or snowfall and temperatures hovering around 0 C, causing a more gradual melt and giving the water more time to be absorbed into the ground. In other words, this is very good news, because Mother Nature has been co-operating very favourably, and thats why we have downgraded our flood predictions from our March outlook, Fisaha Unduche, executive director of hydrologic forecasting and water management, said at a news briefing Friday. Should conditions hit average levels, this flooding season will look similar to 2020, and if conditions become more favourable, itll look similar to 2019 both relatively mild. As of Monday, just 16 homes in Winnipeg are forecast to be impacted by river flooding and may require temporary dikes. Flooding predictions now mirror what the province experienced in 2017. Red River levels are set to hit anywhere from 15.5 to 20 feet, and from now until the end of May, the province is expecting 70 millimetres of precipitation lower than the considered normal level of 80 mm. As of Monday afternoon, the river level at the James Avenue gauge was 10.72 feet. The Red River Floodway will still be in operation, in the case of a spring weather event. Much of the snow in the United States portion of Manitobas drainage basins has already melted, and the Red River in Fargo, N.D., crested late Sunday at around 23.5 feet, National Weather Service hydrologist Amanda Lee told the Free Press. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Grand Forks is close to cresting, as of Monday, Lee said. And while ice may make its way from Red Lake River into the Red River and impact affect levels, its currently sitting at 34.1 feet. Things could have been a lot worse, especially if we would have had some rainfall or something on top of the snow melt, Lee said Monday. So were expecting that flood crest to kind of continue to make its way northward toward you folks later this weekend, maybe early next week, across the border. While theres still snow cover to account for in Manitoba, Lee said she expects it will remain manageable. Youre still going to have to see that get into the river, on top of the water that were sending you, too, but our contribution being smaller will really help things out, she said. So it kind of depends on timing, too. If any additional weather systems come through, that might impact you as youre melting and that runoffs getting into the river. Nine gauges to monitor water levels have been installed in southern Manitoba, and four more will be installed later in the year. malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca The University of Manitoba is not plagued by recruitment and retention issues, but its academics should receive general salary increases of 2.25 per cent annually throughout a new contract so their wages are competitive, an independent arbitrator has ruled. The University of Manitoba is not plagued by recruitment and retention issues, but its academics should receive general salary increases of 2.25 per cent annually throughout a new contract so their wages are competitive, an independent arbitrator has ruled. On Monday, Toronto arbitrator William Kaplan released a written ruling to settle salary negotiations between Manitobas largest university and the faculty association that represents its roughly 1,200 professors, instructors and librarians. Since bargaining began in the summer, the union has repeatedly cited concerns about their employers low wages among the U15 a national collective of major research-intensive universities and as a result, staffing shortages and turnover challenges. Professors set up picket lines in protest on Nov. 2 and after more than a month of campus disruption, U of M and the faculty association agreed to enter binding arbitration to finalize a new collective agreement. The parties tasked Kaplan with determining general salary increases, in addition to recruitment and retention adjustments. They agreed he should be guided by a mutual aim to ensure "reasonable advancement" towards the 25th percentile in the U15 during the life of the collective agreement. In his March 28 ruling, Kaplan concluded UMFA member salaries should increase by 2.25 per cent every year over the three-year contract, spanning 2021-22 to 2023-24. He declined to award any adjustments to address staffing challenges. "I am not satisfied based on the evidence put before me that there is a retention issue; there is most definitely not a recruitment issue For example, not a single (senior ranking) librarian has resigned in the last five years and it is far from challenging to fill vacancies," Kaplan wrote in his decision. At the same time, the arbitrator ordered the university to pay employees for their work during the latter half of the fall term, which was compressed and extended into early 2022 because of the 35-day strike. "One hundred per cent of the teaching assigned was performed and so 100 per cent of the teaching must be paid for," he said. Professors can expect a lump sum of $1,000 and other members will receive $500. The ruling also includes a pension award that allows UMFA members to make both employee and university contributions to the pension plan for the period of the strike. It does not grant UMFAs requests for either reimbursements for health and welfare benefits paid throughout the strike or union dues from employees who did not participate in the job action. Union leader Orvie Dingwall said academics are pleased with the outcome and look forward to providing stability for students and rebuilding a relationship with administration in the wake of government interference. (Last month, a provincial judge ordered the Tory government to pay UMFA more than $19.3 million in damages after the province secretly inserted itself into bargaining talks at the university in 2016.) "We were tied for 14th, almost at the bottom (of the U15). UMFAs proposals for the general salary increase wouldve taken us to 11th place We wont make it quite to 11, but we definitely move out of 14," Dingwall said Monday. The union had proposed wages be raised annually by 3.3 per cent, 3.6 per cent and 2.5 per cent over the contract, during virtual proceedings held earlier this month. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The universitys plan which suggested structural changes made earlier in the bargaining process had amounted to a four per cent increase included annual increases of 1.25 in the first year, followed by 1.50 and 1.75, respectively. U of M did not immediately provide comment on the ruling. On the subject of staffing challenges, Dingwall said it was tricky to provide the arbitrator with numerical evidence because search committees are confidential but she has heard from many members about the real issues at the post-secondary institute. "We were really at a crossroads," she said. "We either had to address our compensation and whether we were competitive within the U15 or not. If we didnt address it now, it would really balloon into a significant problem." maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @macintoshmaggie As my grandmother, used to tell me, Its never too late to apologize. She was right, of course. Apologizing helps repair relationships by getting people talking again, and makes them feel comfortable with each other again, American psychologist and family counsellor Elizabeth Scott has written. Opinion As my grandmother, used to tell me, Its never too late to apologize. She was right, of course. Apologizing helps repair relationships by getting people talking again, and makes them feel comfortable with each other again, American psychologist and family counsellor Elizabeth Scott has written. Apologies can also be symbolic. Canadian prime ministers, most especially Justin Trudeau, have issued many apologies: for centuries of wrongdoing against Indigenous peoples; for the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, when Sikhs and others were not permitted to disembark from a ship in a B.C. port and forced to return to India; for the internment of Japanese and Italians during the Second World War; and for the federal governments abysmal treatment of German-Jewish refugees in the 1930s. Acknowledging historical injustices is arguably better than pretending that they never happened in the first place. Yet it is debatable whether they actually influence current prejudices and attitudes. Sometimes, these apologies take a long, long time to be offered. In the case of an upcoming apology by the Church of England or Anglican Church, it is 800 years in the making. In a few weeks, a prayer service approved by the current head of the Church, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby will be held in the Diocese of Oxford led by the Bishops of Oxford and Lichfield and the Council for Christians and Jews. The service will incorporate an act of repentance for an 800-year-old anti-Jewish edict as well as for the millennia of anti-Judaism of the Church, and [the Churchs] complicity and responsibility in antisemitism, explains the Reverend Dr. Richard Sudworth, the current Secretary for Inter Religious Affairs to the Archbishop of Canterbury. In April of 1222, Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1207 to 1228, convened a synod or church council at Oxford. (Until 1534 when the Church of England split from the Roman Catholic Church, Langton and other archbishops were in full communion with the Pope.) There had been rulings in England that taxed Jews unfairly and forced them to reside in segregated areas, among other discriminatory treatment they were subjected to. At the Synod of Oxford, Jews were forbidden to erect new synagogues and own slaves. And, reiterating the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, Jews (and Muslims) were required to wear different clothing than Christians. The chief aim of this last canon, which later led to Jews being forced to wear badges, was to ensure that sexual relations did not take place between Christians and non-Christians. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. During the time the synod was proceeding or shortly after it concluded, Robert of Reading, a young deacon and a student at Oxford University, who had fallen in love with a Jewish woman and converted to Judaism, was burned alive by lay officials for this perceived heresy. Sixty-eight years later, on July 18, 1290, Edward I expelled Jews from England, the first European country to implement such a measure but not the last. Thousands of Jews left, while a smaller number hid their identities, converted to Christianity (or pretended they did) and remained. Oliver Cromwell, who had deposed Charles I during the English civil war in the 1640s, unofficially permitted Jews to resettle in England in 1655 and thereafter the community gradually re-established itself. While the forthcoming apology is repentance for the Churchs past actions towards Jews, Archbishop Welby also has acknowledged its crucial importance at this moment in time. According to a report issued in early February by the Community Security Trust, the London-based charity and Jewish communal organization, there were 2,255 antisemitic incidents in the U.K. in 2021, more than in any year since 1984 when these statistics were first recorded. These incidents ranged from hateful graffiti to several violent public attacks on Jews. In one of the worst incidents, last May a rabbi in the town Chigwell, just north of London, was brutally beaten by a group of teenagers when he got out of his car to speak with them after they blocked his vehicle. In another case in October, two young Jewish teenage girls were attacked by several teenage girls, who shouted Dirty Jews at them and grabbed one of the victims by the throat. It would be comforting to believe that the Churchs apology for an 800-year-old anti-Jewish decree might cause these teenagers and many others like them to reflect on centuries of Jewish persecution and the irrationality of such hate. But given todays prejudices and hostilities towards Jews and other minorities, its hard to be optimistic that this situation will change any time soon. Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context. I live on an acreage in rural Manitoba, enjoying the peace and solitude of having farm fields as our nearest neighbours. However, too often that rural bliss is rattled by online shopping. Opinion I live on an acreage in rural Manitoba, enjoying the peace and solitude of having farm fields as our nearest neighbours. However, too often that rural bliss is rattled by online shopping. For years, climate change experts have been telling us to drive less to reduce our carbon footprint. More recently, pandemic experts have been advising us to minimize our human contact. The solution: Shop online. The logic behind that solution isnt unassailable, but it can seem extremely attractive to someone who lives in a rural area, doesnt like shopping, and, as a practising introvert, prefers to avoid most human contact anyway. The process of shopping online seems elegantly simple: Want; click and type; wait; get; enjoy. Its probably designed to please. But for some of us, that design provides more pain than pleasure. To understand why, you must first understand that rural dwellers like us have two addresses that dont interact well. We have a postal address that directs mail to a post office box in a nearby community. Lets call that: PO Box 999, Nearby Town, Manitoba, Z9Z 9Z9. Like all Canadian postal addresses, it includes a postal code. We also have a home address, the place where we physically reside. Lets go with: 123 Somewhere Road, RM of Our Region, Manitoba. Note that RM stands for Rural Municipality. We dont live in a city, a town, or a village. We live in a municipality. Also note that our home address contains no postal code. There isnt a Canada Post-assigned postal code for our home address because Canada Post doesnt deliver mail here. The aggravating truth is that, for many shopping websites, living somewhere that has no postal code is akin to living on the moon. If I try to buy from a store that ships products via Canada Post and is happy with our postal address, everything is fine. I enter the address, the package is mailed to us, and I pick it up at the local post office. If our postal address is rejected, usually because it has PO Box in it, I must use our home address. Thats when the difficulties begin. Shopping websites love postal codes. They insist that an address include a postal code. Since our home address doesnt contain one, Ive found ways to make websites happy. I use different forms of our home address, all of which are actually incorrect. One version is: 123 Somewhere Road, RM of Our Region, Manitoba, Z9Z 9Z9. Which is wrong because that postal code isnt for our municipality, its for Nearby Town. That sometimes angers websites, so I use: 123 Somewhere Road, Nearby Town, Manitoba, Z9Z 9Z9. Of course, we dont live in Nearby Town. Were a few kilometres away. Sometimes, just in case the package is still sent via Canada Post, I use: Unit 999, 123 Somewhere Road, Nearby Town, Manitoba, Z9Z 9Z9. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. This makes a website believe its not a PO Box address but, if the package is mailed, might help a postal worker deduce the PO Box number. If its sent by courier, hopefully the delivery person wont be completely befuddled. In general, if an online-shopping website accepts our PO Box postal address, I silently cheer and move on with my day, reasonably confident the package will arrive. If a website doesnt like that address, I colourfully condemn those responsible for the site, provide a convoluted version of our home address, and wait to see what happens. When delivery involves a courier, online shopping is like online gambling. I dont always win. A package might be held at a couriers central distribution depot or returned there by a confused driver. A package might be dropped off at a store thats about 15 minutes from our house or, as happened recently, delivered to a depot thats two hours away. Im surprised and grateful when a package actually comes directly to our door. I know my online-shopping woes arent comparable to many problems the world is facing. However, you wont convince me of that when Im battling a vendors website or struggling to explain my situation to a customer-service representative. Periodically, I wonder if life would be improved by living in a city, where addresses are better understood, where couriers are less confused, and where even restaurant food can be reliably delivered. However, Im not quite ready to swap our rural peace and quiet for urban bustle and noise. I live in hope that, in the future, AI systems and delivery drones will finally solve the apparently baffling mysteries of rural addresses. Calvin Brown lives in the RM of St. Andrews. The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross is once again proving its value by seeking Russias permission to provide services to victims of the invasion of Ukraine who are now in Russian territory. The agency should carry on its work. It should not be discouraged by accusations that it has taken Russias side in the conflict. The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross is once again proving its value by seeking Russias permission to provide services to victims of the invasion of Ukraine who are now in Russian territory. The agency should carry on its work. It should not be discouraged by accusations that it has taken Russias side in the conflict. In order to serve prisoners of war and refugees, the ICRC must win the co-operation of the governments involved. The agency sometimes has to talk to some really nasty people. This can easily lead to accusations of complicity with evil. The alternative, however, is to bring no help to prisoners and refugees. Some Ukrainian-Canadians in Manitoba hit the roof last week when they saw pictures of Peter Maurer, president of the ICRC, shaking hands with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. After talks with Ukraine officials in Kyiv, Mr. Maurer was in Moscow discussing protection of civilians who are found on both sides of the battle lines. "We were appalled, frankly," said Myroslava Pidhirnyj, a board member of the Ukrainian Canadian Congresss Manitoba provincial congress. "Would they be negotiating with Hitler?" Red Cross representive Peter Maurer, left, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow on Thursday. (Associated Press) The ICRC has acknowledged that it did very little to make known the Nazi genocide in wartime Germany or to protect the victims of that genocide. The fact remains that the Russian government today controls Russia and the parts of Ukraine occupied by Russian armed forces. In order to find Ukrainian refugees, identify them and help them, the ICRC has to obtain Russian government permission. Russia is likely to use the presence of the Red Cross to support its claims about its kindness to Ukrainians and about the character of its invasion, which it calls a special military operation. The world, however, will not be fooled. The world is well-informed about the cruel brutality Russias army is inflicting upon Ukraine and its people. The immense majority of member governments of the United Nations have already voted to tell Russia to stop the war. The ICRC should continue its efforts to support refugees in Russia and in Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine. It should preserve the strict neutrality that allows it to talk to all belligerents in the Ukraine war and all the other wars in which it plays a humanitarian role. Neutrality can sometimes look like naivete or moral blindness, but it is not the same thing. It is a necessary discipline. Without neutrality, the ICRC would be unable to pursue its work and the war refugees would remain unaided. The ICRC, however, is just doing its job of extending humanitarian help to the victims of war. It is better to continue that work, even at the risk of misinterpretation, than to withhold help. The anger of Ukraines friends in Canada is perfectly understandable. Russias official lies about Ukraine are infuriating. Any gesture that seems to legitimize those lies looks like a further attack on Ukraine and a way of prolonging the war. The ICRC, however, is just doing its job of extending humanitarian help to the victims of war. It is better to continue that work, even at the risk of misinterpretation, than to withhold help. The ICRC this week was also asking the public authorities in Canada not to mix humanitarian aid together with supplies of weapons as though these were parallel ways of supporting Ukraine. Prime Minister Trudeau last week announced both guns and butter for Ukraine in a way that could make the work of the Red Cross seem like an act of war. A neutral posture is hard to maintain and easy to misinterpret. The ICRC has to stay as neutral as possible or lose its usefulness. Anticipation is building for the provinces diagnostic and surgical recovery task force to deliver promised care for more than 100,000 Manitobans languishing on wait lists, now that a byelection gag has been removed. Anticipation is building for the provinces diagnostic and surgical recovery task force to deliver promised care for more than 100,000 Manitobans languishing on wait lists, now that a byelection gag has been removed. Task force chairman Dr. Peter MacDonald and Health Minister Audrey Gordon are expected Wednesday to update Manitobans on plans to whittle down the growing backlog. It will be the task forces first public address in 10 weeks. Mandated monthly updates were mostly put on pause during the recent Fort Whyte byelection, after a provincial committee warned the Progressive Conservative government substantive announcements would violate the Elections Financing Act. "We shared with the committee everything that we wanted to produce in the public update and we were limited to what was placed on the task forces website," Gordon told reporters on the eve of the March 22 vote that elected PC candidate Ibrahim (Obby) Khan to the seat formerly held by premier Brian Pallister. However, in the days since the byelection concluded, the province has remained tight-lipped on its previously announced programs, including a pilot project to send Manitoba spinal surgery patients to Sanford Health in Fargo, N.D. To date, seven such patients have received surgery at the private hospital and the pilot phase of the program is now complete, Sanford Health Fargo vice-president Brittany Sachdeva said in a statement to the Free Press. Another 14 were being processed for surgery, as of March 22. When asked by the Free Press, a spokesman for Gordons office said progress made on the Fargo agreement and other task force initiatives would not be shared in advance of the scheduled update. On Monday, at an event to mark the opening of a new emergency medical services station in Portage la Prairie, Gordon told a Free Press reporter the task force appearance could not have happened any earlier. MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS FILES Dr. Peter MacDonald Task force chairman Dr. Peter MacDonald and the health minister are expected on Wednesday to update Manitobans on plans to whittle down the growing backlog. "We couldnt have done it after the byelection," Gordon said, before climbing in a van to head back to Winnipeg. "The lead of the steering committee was out of town, and another physician whos also one of the leads. We want to make sure that theyre there. "Theyre here this week, and were going to be doing it this week." Manitoba Association of Healthcare Professionals president Bob Moroz said the task force, Gordon and Premier Heather Stefanson should be feeling the pressure after weeks of relative quiet. "Health care is far and away the most important issue to Manitobans right now," Moroz said Monday. "Its my hope that government is going to start listening to people and making the right decisions and investments. Thats what we need and we need it a year ago." On March 25, the federal government announced $2 billion to help provincial health systems address surgical and diagnostic backlogs, to be distributed on a per capita basis. Manitoba should direct that money into recruiting and retaining the diagnostic professionals needed to bring service levels above pre-pandemic baselines, Moroz said. "Theres a lot of frustration out there that no matter how many times that they are asking and almost begging for help to increase staffing, its being ignored," he said. Gordon said Manitoba has not been told how much money it will receive from Ottawa, and would not speculate on how it would be spent. The province has already set aside $50 million to address the backlog, with $13.7 million spent or allocated to date. Since the task force was announced in early December, the Tory government has come under repeated fire for failing to provide timely progress reports. The task forces last public address was Jan. 19. MIKE APORIUS / FREE PRESS FILES Physicians advocacy group Doctors Manitoba has estimated the backlog to include more than 167,000 cases, including 54,820 surgeries. Earlier this month, Gordon told the Manitoba Legislative Assembly the task force would provide an update March 4, but no public availability was held. Rather, a summary of current surgical volumes was posted to the governments website. No new initiatives were announced while what little progress was made appeared to be thwarted by the Omicron surge. Gordon was later accused of deliberately misleading the house by NDP health critic Uzoma Asagwara though Speaker Myrna Driedger dismissed the allegation. Physicians advocacy group Doctors Manitoba has estimated the backlog to include more than 167,000 cases, including 54,820 surgeries. Former Swan River mayor Glen McKenzie is among the many Manitobans hoping for a date on the operating table. He has been waiting for knee surgery for about two years after suffering a torn meniscus and living with osteoarthritis. The 74-year-old said he is managing for now with a knee brace and pain killers, but feels for people whose ailments have deteriorated through the COVID-19 pandemic to a point where surgery is the only relief in sight. McKenzie said he has accepted a prolonged wait to receive surgery is all but guaranteed, given the narrow range of options available to the task force to speed up delayed procedures in the short term. "The hospitals are full. You cant say: well get more doctors and nurses because they dont grow on trees," McKenzie said. "The system will gradually work through and Ill get my turn, and Im prepared to wait. "To worry about how long its going to take is not going to make any difference," he said. "Its going to happen when the medical system has dealt with the backlog." danielle.dasilva@freepress.mb.ca Traces of COVID-19 found in wastewater taken from two of three Winnipeg sewage treatment plants appear to be levelling off but remain at heights at least one expert says call for caution. Traces of COVID-19 found in wastewater taken from two of three Winnipeg sewage treatment plants appear to be levelling off but remain at heights at least one expert says call for caution. On Monday, the National Collaborating Centre for Infectious Diseases published updated wastewater monitoring data for Winnipeg. The surveillance is conducted by the Public Health Agency of Canada and scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory and examines viral remnants in wastewater collected from the north, west, and south end water treatment plants. People infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 can shed it in their stool. By monitoring virus levels in wastewater, public health can see early indications of increased spread or declines in transmission of the virus. Based on the latest graphs produced by PHAC, viral levels were following a clear downward trend in samples taken at the north end control centre as of March 17, said University of Saskatchewan epidemiologist Nazeem Muhajarine, a community health professor based in Saskatoon. Samples from treatment centres in the south and west ends appear to have stopped declining at a "moderate" level in early March, comparable to the tail end of the Alpha variant wave last spring. Download Winnipeg wastewater analysis On March 1, the Manitoba government lifted proof of vaccination requirements for indoor settings. On March 15, all remaining public health measures, including a requirement for masks in indoor public places, were lifted. Wastewater monitoring indicates Omicron continues to be found in the greatest proportion among Winnipeggers. However, less than 20 per cent of viral samples found in wastewater are coming back as the more severe Delta variant. "COVID-19 has not gone away yet," Muhajarine said. "It is very much with us, and it is actually in significant numbers. It is not in numbers that we can totally relax. "We still should be very careful in terms of exposing ourselves to picking up COVID-19." Download Wastewater variant trends Unlike other jurisdictions, surveillance data for Winnipeg is not presented in a model that would estimate the number of cases in a community based on how much virus is in the wastewater. The data can still be used to compare current viral loads to past peaks and to keep tabs on the speed of COVID-19 spread, Muhajarine said. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Manitobans should continue to take pandemic precautions based on the virus levels seen at the south and west end sample sites, noting experts still do not know the longer-term consequences of COVID-19, Muhajarine said. "This is a pandemic that has a long shadow and its an acute infectious disease that has a chronic manifestation," he said. "We are just still learning in Canada and elsewhere what this chronic manifestation is going to look like and how to deal with that." On Monday, Manitobas top doctors declined to provide an interview on the latest wastewater data. In a statement to the Free Press, deputy chief provincial public health officer Dr. Jazz Atwal said there could be a variety of reasons for the fluctuations to occur from one treatment plant to another. "In general, we are seeing ongoing activity in Winnipeg with a generalized downward trend in activity," Atwal said. danielle.dasilva@freepress.mb.ca MONTREAL - Quebec has already entered a sixth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic driven by the BA.2 subvariant, two experts said Monday, although it's unclear how severe it will be and whether the rest of the country will follow. A man wears a face mask as he leaves a metro station in Montreal, Saturday, March 12, 2022, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues in Canada. Two public health experts say Quebec has already entered a sixth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic driven by the BA.2 subvariant. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes MONTREAL - Quebec has already entered a sixth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic driven by the BA.2 subvariant, two experts said Monday, although it's unclear how severe it will be and whether the rest of the country will follow. While the province's public health director has been reluctant to confirm a new wave, Dr. Don Vinh of the McGill University Health Centre has little doubt it's underway. He said Quebec has seen an increase in outbreaks in seniors and long-term care homes as well a 60 per cent jump in the number of health workers off the job with the virus. "I think these are signals that cannot be ignored and interpreted any other way than to say we are we are already started in that wave," he said in an interview. On Sunday, interim public health director Luc Boileau said the more contagious BA.2 subvariant was now dominant in the province, accounting for two-thirds of positive cases. But despite an increase in cases, hospitalizations and the test positivity rate in some regions, Boileau said it was too soon to declare the onset of a sixth wave. The arrival of the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron comes as provinces have lifted most public health restrictions. In Ontario, wastewater data has suggested cases have been on the rise since early-to-mid-March, and Premier Doug Ford said last week that the province was preparing for a potential rise in hospitalizations. Saskatchewan, meanwhile, said the BA.2 subvariant accounted for over a quarter of cases in the week covering March 13 to 19, up from 5.4 per cent the previous week. British Columbia has also seen an uptick in hospitalizations in recent days, but Vinh says it is impossible to know whether Quebec's entry into a sixth wave is a harbinger of things to come across the country. "It's very hard to know ahead of time what any wave will do," he said. As an example, he noted that Quebec had a much smaller fourth wave than the rest of the country. Even in Quebec, the new wave seems to be hitting unevenly, with a greater impact outside Montreal. Modelling in both Quebec and Ontario have suggested that any rise in hospitalizations is likely to be much smaller than the peaks attained in January. But Vinh, an infectious diseases specialist, says modelling is never perfectly accurate and should be used to prepare for different scenarios rather than to predict the course of a sixth wave. "Will it lead to a surge that threatens our health-care system capacity? Will it be a blip of a wave like we saw last spring, or will it be as devastating as the first one and in that case, will it be again with the vulnerable and the elderly?" he said. "Again, we have five waves that teach different lessons." Benoit Barbeau, a virologist at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, also believes Quebec has entered a sixth wave but says there's no reason to be alarmed. He said the combination of vaccination and high levels of prior infection with warming weather means Quebec is much better equipped to handle this wave than previous ones. "This wave, which is caused by BA.2, should not have the same impact as Omicron," he said in a phone interview. However, Barbeau said the rise of the new variant is a reminder that "the pandemic isn't finished." Both experts say that tracking the new wave is a challenge given the restrictions on PCR testing. Stay informed The latest updates on the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 delivered to your inbox every weeknight. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. While some provinces use wastewater testing to monitor the levels of COVID-19 in the population, Quebec allowed a pilot project along those lines to lapse. It has promised to resume testing in the coming months. Barbeau said his biggest worry about the new wave is that it will cause "collective discouragement," resulting in people losing faith in vaccines and no longer taking precautions. He said vaccines have done their job by limiting hospitalizations and deaths, and they will continue to improve. It's also important, he said, for people to remember to keep protecting themselves and others, even if restrictions and mask mandates have ended in many parts of the country. That means wearing a well-fitting mask in crowded places, opening windows and improving ventilation, and getting booster shots for those who are eligible and haven't had them. "The sixth wave reminds us that the pandemic is there and we shouldn't be discouraged," Barbeau said. "We must simply follow the best guidelines, and be responsible to ensure we act to limit transmission." This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 28, 2022. A 21-year-old La Crosse man has been arrested after allegedly firing off random gunshot rounds in La Crosse during the overnight hours of March 26. Deantre D. Bell was referred to the La Crosse County District Attorney for discharging a firearm within 100 yards of a residence, discharging a firearm in a school zone, carrying a concealed weapon, carrying a handgun where alcohol is sold or consumed, disorderly conduct and obstructing an officer. According the La Crosse Police Department, police responded around 2:45 a.m. to the area of Fifth and Market streets to a report of shots being fired. While responding to the first report, police received several more reports of gunshots at Seventh and Market streets and Fifth and Cass streets. Police reportedly found several spent shell casings while searching for a suspect. Police used surveillance cameras in the area to identify Bell as a suspect and arrested him the following day. He had a handgun in his possession at the time of the arrest. Police believe Bell shot rounds in the air and wasn't aiming at any particular target. Bell is being held in the La Crosse County Jail pending an initial court appearance. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchars team sat down with Winona community members Monday to discuss issues currently seen in the citys workforce. While Klobuchar wasnt present for the discussion, a large amount of concerns were collected by her staff to bring back to Washington, D.C. Some of the attendees included representatives from local higher education institutes, K-12 schools, the Winona Area Chamber of Commerce and more. Nursing programs in local higher education institutes were a large focus during the discussion, as educators expressed their concerns about more extreme requirements for people to receive their certifications in the field, including more clinical hours that could not be provided due to only a certain amount of opportunities being available at local health care facilities. Another large concern related to nursing was in connection to the recent trial of former Vanderbilt University Medical Center nurse RaDonda Vaught. Vaught was convicted and faces prison time after making a mistake that resulted in the death of a patient. Representatives of local nursing programs shared that they are seeing that some people are becoming more afraid of entering into the nursing field because of this trial, as some people do not feel they have any protection if they make a mistake. The local nursing programs, along with other fields, also face the issue of finding highly qualified staff who are willing to take a pay cut to teach instead of actively working in their fields, according to attendees Monday. For example, nurses coming from health care facilities have the likely chance of facing a drop in pay if they agree to teach at colleges, because higher education universities are not able to pay them high salaries because of caps in funding. The representatives from the programs shared that they would like to see government incentives in place that help draw experienced individuals into education roles. Attendee Christie Ransom, CEO/president of the Winona Area Chamber of Commerce, also noted that another current issue seen in the community is that there are not enough people to fill the positions that are open. She noted that the current unemployment rate is at a low. It was discussed during the meeting that many businesses are being impacted because they are unable to create as many products as they could potentially sell because of this lack of people, even as they increase wages, offer sign on bonuses and more incentives. Additionally, it was discussed that potential workers might be leaving the state because of incentives in other states, decreasing the possible workforce in Minnesota. These issues are only a few examples of what were discussed during the well-attended meeting Monday. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The first day of a trial for a Reedsburg man accused of shooting another man in the chest outside of Walmart in Lake Delton revealed a mothers anxiety over events that unfolded which she fears could have ended with her child shot instead. Rasmey Chhim, 30, of Reedsburg, sat silently Monday in Sauk County Circuit Court as witnesses recounted their perspectives of how the January 2021 night unfolded. Melissa Johnson described having dreams and flashbacks that cause trauma over the possibility of her 2-year-old, who was sitting in the backseat of a car behind Joshua Thompson when he was shot, being the one rushed to the hospital with a bullet wound. Im not a ballistics expert, but if you look at where he was sitting, Johnson said upon a question from Chhims attorney, John Smerlinski, about why she felt it was possible the 2-year-old could have been shot. If it had missed him and went through the seat, it definitely would have hit (the child.) Smerlinski did not make an opening statement about his client as the trial began. Instead, he has chosen to make his argument after the prosecutors have finished making their case. Chhim was charged with felony attempted first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree recklessly endangering safety and endangering safety by reckless use of a firearm. The charges stem from events that unfolded just before 11 p.m. Jan. 26, 2021. Thompson and Johnson had driven to Walmart in Lake Delton. Johnson wanted to cash her first stimulus check and the pair needed to buy items from the store. When they arrived, they realized they were unable to cash the check, so Thompson went in alone. Thompson said during his appearance in court that he had texted a man named Marcus Jones because Jones owed him $250. While Johnson waited outside, she said a man approached her and asked her to tell Thompson to contact him. Thompson said he saw Jones in the store near the check out section. When he went back outside, Thompson talked to Jones. While Johnsons silver Buick LaCrosse sat in one parking stall underneath a light pole, Jones vehicle sat a row behind in another parking stall. Thompson and Jones talked about the money. Thompson said the debt was for a pair of night vision goggles he had given to Jones. During his testimony on the stand, Thompson said he planned to get what was owed to him by taking it, if necessary. He agreed to walk to Jones car under the pretense of purchasing a ball of methamphetamine with the intent of taking it without paying for it in order to sell it to cover the money owed to him. Instead, Thompson said he chose to run from Jones because he didnt feel safe. I didnt know what they were up to, I didnt know what he was going to be on, so I just wanted to make a clean getaway, basically, Thompson said. As they talked about going to the other vehicle, Thompson had been buckling the 2-year-old into Johnsons car. As he began to walk away with Jones, he decided to sprint back to the front seat, but the pair struggled as Jones allegedly attacked Thompson, Johnson said as she recalled the events. Johnson said while the scuffle happened, Thompson told her to leave. Johnson backed up with the passenger door still open, knocking Jones to the ground. As she stopped the car upon realizing he had been hit by the door, Johnson said she saw another man, later allegedly identified as Chhim, in the left of her peripheral vision through the windshield. Seeing the man had a gun pointed at the car, Johnson said, she ducked behind the steering wheel before hearing the vibration of a bullet smashing through the windshield. Thompson said he told her to drive away and as he turned around to check on the child in the backseat, he could feel blood running down his side. He told Johnson he had been shot in the chest and she began to drive at a high speed to SSM Health St. Clare Hospital in Baraboo. Thompson called the authorities to inform them they would be arriving at the hospital with a person who had been shot. Johnson said Jones vehicle drove off in a separate direction as they started driving south away from Walmart. The trial is scheduled to conclude Friday. Follow Bridget on Twitter @cookebridget or contact her at 608-745-3513. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The two candidates for Portage mayor weighed in on how to grow the city, improve roads and spend federal pandemic stimulus money at a debate Monday night. Mayor Rick Dodd and Mitchel Craig went back and forth on a number of issues at Portage City Hall for the debate sponsored by Portage Area Chamber of Commerce. Dodd was first elected as mayor in 2016. Craig owns Craigs Popcorn Corner in downtown Portage. The debate was moderated by Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Marianne Hanson. The first question she asked was how can Portage move forward. Dodd said the key to moving Portage forward is with economic growth and housing growth. Craig said the best way to move forward is to be aggressive when attracting businesses. Craig explained he has talked with citizens, and they want to see Portage attracting new businesses. It was his message throughout the evening that he would always talk to citizens when making decisions. Craig also said he believes there is a lack of transparency by the city government. He promised if elected he would do a monthly podcast explaining what the city has been doing over the last month. Hanson asked the candidates about housing and how to expand housing in Portage. Both candidates said the Northside Development, which is in its very early planning stages, is a benefit but disagreed on what type of housing should be built. Dodd said the plans include over 90 lots with different types of housing including single-family homes and multi-family homes. He said the development could have 700-square-foot homes and homes as big as 7,000 square feet. Craig said he would talk to citizens about what housing they would like. Dodd disagreed and said the developers will choose the housing and the city government will not get in the way of what houses will be built. The city of Portage is set to receive around $1.1 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. Hanson asked how the candidates think that money should be spent. Dodd said the City Council recently formed an ad-hoc advisory committee on how the funds should be spent. The committee members includes Dodd, Ald. Dennis Nachreiner, a pair of citizens and a number of city employees. We are definitely probably going to set aside a portion of that money for lead pipe services, Dodd said. He added this will be on private property to help replace lead pipes and lead pipe laterals in the water system across the city. Lead pipes definitely have to get out of the city, Dodd said. One of the ideas that is floating is to turn City Hall a little more green with LED lighting. Craigs answer was a single word: Roads. I would give the citizens what they wanted and use all the money to fix roads, Craig said. The number one complaint in this city is about roads. Thats what people care about, thats what they drive on every single day, Craig said earlier in the debate. Everything else is way down on the list. Dodd said the city has 55 miles of road and that $1.1 million would fix about a half mile of roadway. Hanson asked the candidates about the aging Public Works building. She said due to its condition and age, it may become uninsurable in the future and will need to be replaced. She said it could cost up to $7 million to replace the facility and asked how they would fund the building of a new facility. Craig said he would rely on the advice of others on how to handle that after previously stating the city should avoid borrowing money for projects. Thats a really good question, Craig said. That is an exuberant amount of money for the citizens of Portage. Ive always said Im not always the smartest person in the room. I would have to consult with different people and get advice from different people in the community as to what the best way to pay for that. Dodd said there are national programs that would lend the city the money that would be paid back over 40 years. He said that would be the only feasible way to build the Public Works facility. Earlier in the debate, Hanson asked about how the candidates would handle criticism if elected. Craig and Dodd both said they have no problem with criticism. I have absolutely no problem with criticism, it makes you a better person, Craig said. I fully endorse constructive criticism, but there is a lot of negative comments that come out that is very disturbing to me personally because there is nobody that has a better love for the city than I do, Dodd said. The reality is that there is never going to be 100% agreement between all the citizens of Portage on where we should work for, what we should work on and how we should get it accomplished. The race for mayor along with four alderperson seats will be on the April 5 ballot for Portage voters along with the municipal judge race and County Board seats. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Monks Bar and Grill in Lake Delton got its taste of Ivy League comedy on March 23 thanks to the efforts of a Wisconsin Dells resident. Pat Andersen, the Dells resident, brought a large group of her friends and associates together to watch Just Add Water, an improv musical comedy group from Yale University, in the bars lower level stage room. Andersens grandson, Menasha resident Will Wegner, is a senior at Yale and four-year member of the group. Two times per year, we do a tour, Wegner said. Weve gone to New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. This is the first tour Ive done with the group where we actually went to multiple cities. Wegner said that the group does tours during winter and spring break and traveled to Milwaukee on March 24 and Appleton a day later for its Wisconsin tour. He attributed the success of the Lake Delton show to Andersens organizational efforts. The show at Monks touched on a few different aspects of everyday life and involved an audience member for one of its scenes. All members of the group wore one-piece jumpsuits of various colors with the name of the troupe written on the back. It also parodied Lynyrd Skynyrds Sweet Home Alabama during a game called Rydell, which Wegner said is a game where the audience helps select a music genre and is named after the high school in Grease, the famous 1978 musical. The show finished with a song about cheese, which proved popular with the Wisconsin audience. We get specific prompts for genres from the audience, Wegner said of Rydell. We practice those different genres and ask people, What do you feel like you understand the tropes of the best? Wegner added that the longer musicals are more freeform and without interruption or audience feedback. He said that those musicals take aspects of other areas of the groups performances and combine them into one major part of a show. Andersen talked about her grandsons past musical accomplishments in an email. She said that when he was in third grade, he won the Oscar Mayer Sing the Jingle contest when the companys Wienermobile came during Wo-Zha-Wa Days, an annual autumn festival in the Dells. For Wegners victory, Andersen said he won $5,000, appeared in a television commercial, went on two trips to Hollywood and one at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida., and attended the American Idol finale. One other member of the Yale improv group, Vaughn Goehrig, is a Brookfield native. The rest of the members come from various areas across the United States. Theres a big mix of experiences in the group, Wegner said. Some people did a lot of theater and improv in high school and have lots of experience and theres some people who never did improv before auditioning for the group as freshmen. In addition to being a social experience and going and doing these tours, its like a big educational experience. After two years of restrictions and three months of rehearsals, Snoopy and the Peanuts gang are ready to fill the Portage High School auditorium for Youre a Good Man, Charlie Brown. When the curtains rise for opening night Thursday, it will mark the end of a two-year cancellation of theater performances at the school, something Theater Director Beth Edmondson says couldnt come soon enough. (Theater is) a program that pulls lots of different kinds of kids together and it forms a lot of bonds, she said. I hate that (the students) missed out on it. The musical, which runs through the weekend, chronicles a day in the life of Charlie Brown, and all the blanket dragging and 5-cent psychiatry that ensues. In two acts, the students showcase joy and chaos two things theyve had an abundance of in the last three months putting the show together. Rehearsals are typically held Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. However, its a bit of a juggling act getting the whole cast together in one place at the same time. On March 24, for instance, a few of the Peanuts, including Charlie Brown himself, had to miss part of rehearsal due to their induction into the National Honor Society. Brown was not available for comment. That gets kind of crazy juggling, Okay, whos going to be here on what day? said Edmondson. I had to create some very intricate schedules. Emma Alden will be donning a blue dress and putting on a smug face as Lucy in the show. The last time she performed with the high school theater, she was a freshman. Now, shes preparing for graduation as a senior. Its kind of like you started it and now you get to go out with a bang, she said. For Alden, whos been performing since she was 11, its been a difficult two years. Not only being away from the stage, but not having as much contact with the friends shes made through theater. This period of being in our own worlds without each other, she says, has caused the cast members to struggle a little bit with staying on task. Its been a bit more difficult to get everybody to concentrate, she said. Once everybody gets on the same page I think we get things done really fast. But where they may struggle with attention, they certainly have no issue in the enthusiasm department. They stepped right in with crazy awesome energy, Edmondson said. They were so excited to be here. Edmondson said shes proud of the resilience of her students as well, jumping back in after such a long time away. Theyve been dedicated, theyve been focused, they have put their all into what theyre doing on stage, she said. Madison police are investigating a possible arson after a man lit his shelter on fire at a Madison-owned homeless shelter encampment Tuesday afternoon, authorities said. Fire crews responded to the burning tiny shelter at the city's encampment at 3202 Dairy Drive just after 1:15 p.m., said Bernadette Galvez, a community education officer for the Madison Fire Department. Firefighters saw the smoke from a fire station across the street, yet it had burned to the ground by the time they arrived, Galvez said. No one was injured in the fire, which caused an estimated $15,500 in damage, Galvez said. No other shelters at the encampment were damaged. The city opened the legal encampment in November in a bid to transition people to permanent housing and close the long-troubled encampment at Reindahl Park. Police are investigating the incident, though the man who lit the shelter on fire, a resident at the encampment, has not been arrested, said spokesperson Stephanie Fryer. Kevin Femal, the CEO of EMS Industrial, which is two lots down from the encampment, said he saw "a huge blaze of fire" through the window while he was on the phone. "They were over there in a quick fashion," Femal said of the fire crews. The camp's 30 64-square-foot shelters are equipped with operable windows, fold-up beds, shelving, electricity, light, a heater and a mini-refrigerator. Staff with MACH OneHealth and Kabba Recovery Services, which operate the camp, are on site to help campground users with daily living needs and provide mental health services, substance abuse treatment and housing searches. Brenda Konkel, the executive director of MACH OneHealth, did not respond to an email asking about the fire. William & Marys grad and professional programs counted among nations best Counted among the best: The report is the latest in several that have come out in recent months highlighting various aspects of William & Mary, from its graduate programs to its support for veterans. Photo by Emily Phillips Photo - of - Hide Caption Universitys MBA programs, Law School make significant strides in U.S. News rankings William & Marys masters degree programs in business administration jumped up more than 20 places in this years U.S. News rankings of the nations best graduate schools. In the report released today, W&Ms full-time MBA program is tied at 47th, and the part-time program is tied at 48th. Last year, the programs ranked 71st and tied for 73rd, respectively. The universitys graduate law programs also fared well in the new report with top rankings in multiple categories including the overall ranking, in which W&M tied for 30th, up five spots from last year. W&M Law School also ranked in the top 30 for Criminal Law (18th), Constitutional Law (19th), Contracts-Commercial Law (23rd), and Business-Corporate Law (27th). According to U.S. News, the rankings were based on expert opinion and statistical indicators of the quality of each schools faculty, research and students. The report is the latest in several that have come out in recent months highlighting various aspects of William & Mary, from its graduate programs to its support for veterans. Even W&Ms hometown of Williamsburg did well in a recent ranking from Southern Living, which placed it at number two on the magazines list of the Souths Best Small Towns. It's a bustling community with a big roster of things to do and places to explore, the magazine says. Graduate schools In addition to appearing in U.S. News, W&Ms Raymond A. Mason School of Business was recently lauded in CEO Magazine for having a Tier One MBA program as part of the magazines 2022 Global MBA Rankings. The publication also ranked W&Ms Executive MBA program 72nd and its online MBA program at 56th. Financial Times named W&M to its Global Top 100 MBA program list, and at the end of 2021, the program was included in five top 10 lists in Princeton Reviews Best Business Schools for 2022 guide, including Best MBA Program for Human Resources, Best Family-Friendly MBA Program, Best MBA Program for Diverse Students, Most Competitive MBA Students and Best MBA Professors. Poets&Quants also recently ranked W&Ms online MBA program 11th in the nation and near the top of its lists for best career outcomes (fourth) and academic experience (second). In U.S. News ranking of online MBA programs, W&M ranked 37th overall and 10th for student engagement. In the same report, W&M was ranked 18th for its online graduate business program and third for student engagement. While the rankings will always have their mercurial elements, we are pleased when the rankings that actually survey students, alumni and recruiters confirm what we already know, which is that the caliber, efforts and outcomes of our talented faculty, program teams, students and alumni stand side-by-side with those of the better and best business programs around the nation and the world, said Lawrence B. Pulley '74, dean of the Raymond A. Mason School of Business. W&M Law School has also appeared on several rankings in recent months. The school was ranked 21st by median score for most-cited law faculty in the country according to the Sisk rankings of law schools by scholarly impact, the most prominent ranking of scholarly impact in the legal academy. The law schools faculty were highlighted again in Princeton Reviews most recent ranking of law schools, in which W&M tied at 12th for teaching. Additionally, in the most recent ranking of Moot Court teams, the law school ranked fifth. This progress happens because of deliberate, considered steps that we have taken, and keep taking, in service of our communitys commitment to excellence, said A. Benjamin Spencer, Dean and Trustee Professor of Law. To help sustain this momentum, were continuing to emphasize the hiring and retention of top-tier faculty, providing additional resources for bar preparation, and strengthening the support our students receive from our Office of Career Services and other student-facing departments. The W&M School of Educations Executive Ed.D. program was recently named 20th in the country in the 2022 Best Online Doctor of Education Programs rankings from EdDPrograms.org. The Executive Ed.D. program trains bold educational leaders to meet todays pressing educational challenges and offers concentrations in gifted education, higher education administration, international school leadership and K-12 administration. The School of Education also saw a significant leap in its ranking for its online masters in education programs. In the latest ranking of those programs from U.S. News, W&M climbed 63 places from last year, its first year being included in the rankings, to tie at 130th. The increase is likely due to the launch of its Online Master of Education in Counseling program, which graduated its first cohort and saw applications more than double last year. In a ranking from Counseling Degree Guide, the online masters in clinical mental health counseling was named number one in the country. In todays U.S. News report on graduate schools, the School of Education tied at 76th overall. This is an exciting time in the School of Education, said Robert C. Knoeppel, dean of the W&M School of Education. Were seeing tremendous growth in enrollment as we launch new online offerings and redesign on-campus programs. These rankings reflect our commitment to working collaboratively with partners to develop programs and research that address the perplexing problems of society and advance our shared goals of equity and opportunity. While the U.S. News rankings of graduate schools include six disciplines annually, they will also occasionally rank other programs. This year, W&M appeared on several of those lists, including: biology (158th tied), computer science (69th tied), geology (89th tied), physics (83rd tied) and public affairs (88th tied). Other rankings William & Mary and its graduate schools also received acknowledgement in recent rankings for their support of military and veteran students. Both the university overall and W&M Law School earned gold-medal ratings in the 2022-2023 list of Military Friendly Schools, published by G.I. Jobs magazine. The gold status is the highest designation and is presented based on leading practices, outcomes and effective programs, according to the magazine. W&Ms work with veterans was also recognized in U.S. News most recent ranking of Best Online Programs for Veterans. The university tied at 18th on the list of Best Online Master's in Business Programs for Veterans (excluding MBA), 53rd for Best Online MBA Programs for Veterans and 34th for Best Online Master's in Education Programs for Veterans. William & Mary has established a comprehensive, individualized and holistic military and veteran program under the direction of the special assistant for military and veteran affairs, said Bob Merkl, special assistant to the president for military and veterans affairs. This program not only reinforces the colleges reputation for veteran friendliness but moves several steps beyond to empower veteran students and their families as they transition to roles of continued service and leadership in their communities. In addition to being a good place for veterans, W&M has been recognized as a good place for employees. In March, the university was ranked among the most promising places to work in student affairs by Diverse: Issues in Education. According to the magazine, the recognition celebrates student affairs workplaces that are vibrant, diverse, supportive and committed to staff work-life balance, professional development and inclusive excellence. W&M was also included in Virginia Livings Top Schools & Universities 2022 list, and the McLeod Tyler Wellness Center was featured in an article on student well-being in its April 2022 issue, which included a state of education section. Huang Yangwei, a 24-year-old man in south China's Hainan Province, works on a Li brocade product together with his grandmother. The Li brocade, a traditional craft of the Li ethnic group in Hainan, is a national intangible cultural heritage item. [Xinhua/Zhang Liyun] Internet and digital technologies have enabled inheritors of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) in China to attract more public attention towards ICH-related products as well as boosting their consumption, permitting these inheritors to win respect from people for their wisdom and craftsmanship, in addition to showcasing the charms of Chinese cultural heritage, providing more options for protecting and inheriting ICH and propelling the innovative development of ICH-related products. Yao Huifen, an inheritor of Suzhou embroidery, an item on the national ICH list, opened an account on the popular short-video sharing platform Douyin, also known as Tik Tok overseas, in October 2020 in order to show off her expertise in the traditional craft. To date, Yao has already accumulated 150,000 followers on the platform. One of her videos introducing an embroidery technique has garnered more than 1.4 million likes. "Suzhou embroidery is so elegant and exquisite," praised one online user after watching the video. Yao explained that netizens across the country commented under her videos that they would like to also have the chance to learn embroidery skills themselves. Pointing out that these kinds of videos can help present the most attractive features of ICH in a comparably shorter period of time, experts have commented that such new technologies and platforms are assisting with the promotion of ICH and enabling more and more people to appreciate the charms of traditional Chinese handicrafts. Liu Kuili, an honorary academician at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out that digital solutions and new technologies are necessary to better promote and inherit ICH. Experts have said that more priority should be given to integrating ICH items into modern-day life, showcasing their current value, and turning them into a "golden key" to bring more and more growth in the incomes of those engaged in such trades. Internet platforms have continued to play a significant role in this regard. Qiao Xue, an inheritor of handmade leather art, an item on the ICH list for Yinchuan city in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, opened an account on a short-video sharing platform to showcase her expertise in leather carving. Qiao has hosted over 100 live-streaming shows on the platform, selling more than 3 million yuan (about $471,120) worth of handmade leather products. Fully displaying ICH-related craftsmanship through Internet platforms can boost the sales of relevant products and encourage ICH brands to develop products that conform to a kind of consumption demand that is becoming increasingly more diversified and personalized, thus creating a virtuous circle for the production and consumption of ICH products. Yin Jun, dean of the Art College of Chongqing Technology and Business University in southwest China's Chongqing, said leveraging the Internet and digital technologies to promote the inheritance and innovative development of ICH products is an irresistible trend and can help meet the ever-growing intellectual and cultural consumption demands of people, inject new vitality into ICH items and generate additional incomes for ICH inheritors. At present, multiple short-video sharing platforms and e-commerce platforms have been making significant strides to promote traditional Chinese culture, allowing increasingly more people to appreciate the charms of and boost their interest in intangible cultural heritage. Douyin, for instance, has launched programs aimed at better promoting ICH products, which not only has attracted more people to pay attention to ICH but has also generated more job opportunities and higher incomes for ICH inheritors. The integration of the Internet and digital technologies has created more possibilities for ICH development and new media technologies are expanding the space for further ICH inheritance and development, observed Wang Yanlong, a professor with the College of Literature and Journalism of Sichuan University in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province. (Source: People's Daily Online) BEIJING, March 28 (Xinhua) As spring buds begin to bloom, Nyingchi, a city in Tibet perched at an average altitude of about 3,000 meters, prepares for the annual influx of visitors that flock to this city, high above the clouds. The attractiveness of this area of the autonomous region in southwest China is in no small part thanks to improved infrastructure, such as trains. Today, it takes just three and half hours on a bullet train to travel the 435 km from Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, to Nyingchi, along the region's first electrified railway line. Not so long ago, without a railway, the same journey took President Xi Jinping a whole day. The year was 1998, when Xi was vice Party chief of Fujian Province in east China, and he was in Nyingchi sending a group of officials assigned to assist in Tibet's development. During this trip, he visited the small, rural village of Bagyi. When he met the community, the villagers were eager to share how their lives had tremendously changed over the past decades since the democratic reform in Tibet had abolished the practice of feudal serfdom. The Bagyi in the old Tibet was unrecognizable to the community that greeted Xi in the late 1990s. At that time, the village's more than 100 households of serfs had lived in misery under the oppression of three feudal landlords. The village Party chief Daglung recalled that his father lost an eye due to the brutal abuse of his serf owner, another woman's father had one of his hands chopped off. In old Tibet, the average life expectancy across the region was just 35.5 years old, and over 95 percent of the population were illiterate. All this began to change in 1959 when around one million people were liberated from the barbarous exploitations by the serf owners under the life-changing social overhaul known as democratic reform. It is no surprise, therefore, that the people of Bagyi had so much to share with their guest. Some spoke in Mandarin Chinese and others in Tibetan, all keen to tell Xi about the changes they had lived through. Xi listened, talked with them attentively, and encouraged the villagers to continue striving for even better lives with the support of favorable government policies. The small village did not let Xi down. When Xi made his second visit to the village in 2011, he was impressed by more exquisite dwellings and clean roads, showcasing another leap toward prosperity. Xi visited the home of villager Kelsang Wangchug, who got well-off with a logistics job. Xi walked in the family's newly-built house, had a look at their kitchen, picked up a piece of cheese and tasted it, and sat with the family. Over cups of steaming, traditional buttered tea, Kelsang Wangchug answered Xi's many questions about his family. "One thing he stressed was that the kids should get a sound education; this has always stayed with me," Kelsang Wangchug said. Four years later, Kelsang Wangchug was among 13 delegates representing ethnic unity received by Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. His former guest recognized him immediately. "Here you are, Kelsang Wangchug from Nyingchi," Xi said, asking about how he was doing. "I stood up excitedly and said our lives continued to improve every day," Kelsang Wangchug recalled. Kelsang Wangchug's comments should not be conflated with hometown pride; with each passing day, month, and year, Bagyi is indeed transforming. By 2020, the average annual income per capita had increased to more than 34,000 yuan (about 5,334 U.S. dollars). Today, the former rural backwater is home to thriving logistics and construction industries. Members of the community receive annual subsidies to help with education and elderly care. Many villagers found jobs in tourism. Bagyi gradually won itself a reputation of "village of affluence." More than a decade after his last visit to Bagyi, the fortunes of Tibet remain a priority for Xi. At a central symposium on the region in 2020, while lauding the achievements in Tibet, Xi said that ground gained should not be lost, and energies should be channeled into further improvements under the rural revitalization drive. Kelsang Wangchug said his fellow villagers cherish respect and love for their special guest. "We will never forget the words of the general secretary, and will follow the leadership of the Party to create an even better and happier life together," he said. (Source: Xinhua) Close to the mouth of the Hokitika River, the town of Hokitika is located on New Zealand's South Island, in the West Coast Region. With a population of just under 3,000, according to 2021 census numbers, Hokitika is one of the wettest places in all of New Zealand and traces its modern history to the mid 19th century. History Of Hokitika Hokitika, New Zealand. Originally an indigenous Maori settlement, the name Hokitika can be translated as "to return directly." In 1860, the land of the modern-day town was purchased by the New Zealand settler government through the Arahura Deed. This included the West Coast Region (except for a few pockets of land reserved exclusively for the Maori) and encompassed over 3 million hectares for a then price of 300 pounds.In 1864, Hokitika became the center of the West Coast Gold Rush, and many miners and their families settled in the town leading to rapid population growth. By 1867 it had become one of the country's most populous centers, and its wharf set records for the number of ships and other boats entering and exporting goods, namely gold.For a brief period in the 1870s, Hokitika was selected as the capital of Westland Province. However, a decision from the federal government to abolish provinces in 1876 meant that the town lost this status.As the gold boom declined, Hokitika gradually saw a decline in its population; throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the town lost industry and migration to larger urban centers. Today, it remains a small settlement. Climate Of Hokitika Amongst the wettest places in the country, Hokitika sees over 2,800 millimeters (112 inches) of rainfall per year. With mild summers and cool winters, residents and visitors can expect some cloud cover all year round. The warm season typically lasts from December to March with average daily highs of 18 C (64 F), with February as the hottest month.June to September is considered the cooler season, where temperatures are observed to be no higher than 14 C (57 F). July is the coldest month, with lows of 6 C (42 F) and highs no greater than 12 C (53 F).The wet season is approximately eight months, from May to January, with a greater than 40% chance of any day having rain. September is the wettest month with at least 14 days out of 30 having a minimum of 1 millimeter of precipitation, while February may be considered the "driest" month with only eight days out of 28 with a minimum amount of rainfall forecasted. Attractions In Hokitika Hokitika Jade Factory in the south island of New Zealand. Editorial credit: ChameleonsEye / Shutterstock.com Hokitika has several unique tourist attractions, where visitors can enjoy being outside or take some indoor refuge from the rainy days. Hokitika Gorge is among the most popular destinations. Visitors can marvel at the breathtaking views of the blue water and rock formations and cross the metal rope suspension bridge. A 40-minute drive from the town center, the Gorge is a favorite for locals and tourists alike.But when the cold and rainy days make a visit there less than ideal, Hokitika also offers a variety of other points of interest to enjoy any day of the year. The Hokitika Museum, built in 1869, is West Coast's largest archive and museum. Located within the Carnegie Library building, visitors can find exhibitions about Hokitika's gold rush past, its Maori heritage, and an extensive photographic collection highlighting the town's development. Free public library at Hokitika, New Zealand. Editorial credit: trabantos / Shutterstock.com Due to the cool weather year-round, tourists may really appreciate the Hokitika Sock Machine Museum. Guests can tour the display of historic and antique sock knitting machines and are even invited to knit their own socks! For the artistically inclined tourist, January is the month to enjoy the famed Driftwood and Sand Festival. Internationally invited artists construct sculptures out of beach debris, while members of the public are also encouraged to participate in making miniature creations.Meanwhile, the Regent Theatre is the region's only 3D digital cinema for film lovers. This Art Deco theatre, first built in 1935, has been designated a heritage building and boasts an impressive 400 seat main theatre auditorium! Extensively renovated and lovingly maintained through the decades, the theatre gives moviegoers all the best in modern projection and audio standards while still upkeeping an old-style charm.The dairy industry is also an important local economic driver, and Westland Milk Products is headquartered in Hokitika. The third-largest dairy processing company in New Zealand, it was sold to a Chinese dairy producer in 2019. The picturesque natural scenery around Hokitika. Hokitika's small size may make it easy to overlook for tourists in New Zealand's South Island, but it compensates with plenty of charm only a small town can offer for what it may lack in bigness. Cool mostly year-round, visitors in Hokitika will never be short of activities to do, and its unique history as a Maori and gold mining settlement shape much of the town's character. Away from major centers like Christchurch and Wellington, New Zealand's small towns offer a particular and alluring perspective on the country's past. Hokitika is no different. Email Sign Up For Our Free Weekly Newsletter First DST of 2022 for NAI Legacy Minneapolis, MN, March 28th, 2022 - NAI Legacy is pleased to announce that they have completed the syndication of their first Delaware Statutory Trust (DST) in 2022, consisting of three Essential Net-Leased properties. NAI Legacy acted as the sponsor of the "3-pack", pre-packaging them before selling beneficial "shares"; the DST structure allows for monthly distributions based on contribution percentage. Shares of the Trust were also suitable for deferral of capital gains by utilizing section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code. Melissa Birdsall, Executive Vice President of National Accounts added, "Our comprehensive offerings provide our investors with asset management professionals experienced in acquisitions, portfolio due diligence, property management, accounting, and legal expertise. We are thrilled with the growth and expansion that NAI Legacy experienced in 2021. In 2022, we will continue to expand our tax-advantaged real estate offerings as well as our geographic footprint." "It is exciting to be a part of the rapidly growing NAI Legacy family. Our company had many accomplishments in 2021 by closing over $100M of DSTs. With the help of our investment team, we have grown our investor base by over 100 new partners and expanded our reach to three new office locations across the country. We are proud to now offer our expertise and services in Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, and Scottsdale. I look forward to growing this company to its full potential and providing successful investments that allow our investors to reach their financial goals" commented Maggie O'Neill, Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications. The portfolio is diversified across three (3) states (Florida, Minnesota, and South Dakota), and features 121,698 square feet of net leased properties. The portfolio includes a Hy-Vee Dollar Fresh (Retail-Grocery), Walgreens (Retail-Pharmacy), and Jonny Pops (Industrial). This portfolio allowed 25 investors the opportunity to Create their Legacy with passive ownership on professionally managed properties. Investors are located across 14 states; Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, Texas & Wisconsin. About NAI Legacy NAI Legacy is the tax-efficient investment platform in the NAI Global Network. NAI Legacy operates as both a provider of real estate investment product and investment services. Our investment division provides our clients with tax-efficient real estate investment solutions such as Delaware Statutory Trust offerings (DSTs), Funds and Direct investment opportunities. Our service division provides clients with comprehensive investment solutions through brokerage, property management and accounting. Through our affiliation with the NAI Global Network, we have direct access to every major market in the United States with over 300 office locations. Our unique offerings of both product and services supported by a national network, allows us to tailor investment services directly for a client's unique investment criteria across asset classes, geography, risk-tolerance, and investment preference. Sign Up Free | The WPJ Weekly Newsletter Relevant real estate news. Actionable market intelligence. Right to your inbox every week. Go Thank you for your interest! You will now be receiving our Weekly Real Estate Newsletter. 10:40AM Lots of clear tables as the verification process draws to an end. 10:21: Neighbouring Flintshire has started to announce votes. Still at the verification process here in Wrexham. For coverage of Flintshire elections check out our sister site, Deeside.com 10:08am Apologies for the dodgy stream today connection issues meaning the feed is buffering a fair bit. 10am: Voting and verification is now underway. Clwyd South side of the hall, a few tables still waiting to be given votes to verify and count pic.twitter.com/hLldnVZrE2 Wrexham.com (@wrexham) May 6, 2022 9:40am: And were off! The counting and verification is about to get underway Returning Officer Ian Bancroft is just outlining how the count will take place. County council first and then the community councils will begin at 3pm There will be about five election announcements in one go, so theyre going to come through thick and fast today. 9:36am: Returning Officer Ian Bancroft has just announced the count will begin in five minutes time Current council leader Mark Pritchard who is also unopposed has just arrived pic.twitter.com/ddim6bSYB2 Wrexham.com (@wrexham) May 6, 2022 9:30am: We finally have audio on the election feed. For those watching the tables nearest the camera are the votes for Wrexham wards and the ones at the other end are Clwyd South: 9:26am: The counting room is starting to fill up, so far everyone seems in good spirits. Its a bit odd seeing some of these councillors in person for the first time in two years after all meetings were held remote since the start of the pandemic. 9:06am: The first of the candidates have started being left into the main count hall. Our live video coverage of the count has also started for all those who enjoy watching our live feed. 8:49am: We are live from the count! Another day time count so hopefully no one was sat waiting at 10pm last night for the results to start coming through. Candidates are starting to arrive but theyre being kept outside until 9am, when the verification and voting will take place. Good morning Wrexham! We have switched the site over to our live election coverage for todays count. Ballot boxes arrived at Glyndwr University sports hall from just after 10pm last night video below and have been securely held overnight. Today will see the verification process start some point shortly after 9am of ballots made yesterday and postal votes, and then a count will take place for each ward. There is no firm timetable due to the nature of counts, but we guess this could take all of this morning and into the early afternoon to complete for every ward in Wrexham. A day time count means there is no wait for boxes to turn up and so we think we could see the first ward result as early as just before 10am. This page should auto update, and hopefully the video feed will appear as the count process begins. Todays day of reflection, marking the first anniversary of the National Covid Memorial Wall in London is one of the few genuine expressions of the popular response to the pandemic. It combines sorrow at the enormous and needless loss of life with a call for those responsible to be brought to justice. The wall was begun when the first red heart was painted on the 500-metre wall facing the Houses of Parliament, across the River Thames. It is the project of campaign group Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK. People look at the 500 metre long National Covid Memorial Wall, May 2021 (WSWS Media) A silent procession along its length will take place at 3.30pm, with a petition calling for the wall to be made a permanent memorial to be handed into Downing Street at 4.30pm. It currently has over 100,000 signatures. A candlelit procession will take place at 8pm. These vigils are held in the face of a government determined to erase the memorial wall in the heart of Westminster. Last May, Prime Minister Boris Johnson pointedly endorsed a different memorial tucked away in St Pauls Cathedral, telling Parliament: Like many across this Chamber I was deeply moved when I visited the COVID memorial wall opposite Parliament and I wholeheartedly support the plan for a memorial in St Pauls cathedral which will provide a fitting place of reflection in the heart of our capital. Johnson et al fear and despise the memorial wall as a testament to the crimes they have committed and now continue, and of the overwhelming popular hostility to his government. Each individually drawn heart represents one of the more than 188,000 lives lost to the pandemic. This appalling death toll is the direct result of government policy, summed up by Johnsons infamous outburst, No more fucking lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands! A day after this statement became public, Johnson scurried to the memorial at night so he could claim to have visited without having to encounter the people whose loved ones his government murdered. A deadly and highly infectious novel virus has been allowed to run rampant through the population for the last two years. Its spread was only briefly interrupted by lockdowns forced on the Conservatives by an angry public and implemented to prevent a revolt in the working class prompted by the collapse of the National Health Service. With every reopening of the economy, the government moved closer to its objective of learning to live with the virus. The consequences are staggering. As well as the terrible loss of life, three quarters of a million have at some stage been hospitalised with the virus. As of January 31, 1.5 million people were suffering with Long COVID685,000 of them had been ill for more than a year. In remembering the dead, the memorial wall is an indictment of those responsible. It also draws attention to the ongoing dangers posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which the government is doing its best to hide. Having ended all public health measures to combat the spread of the virus, reporting of cases is being steadily scaled back and funding to key surveillance studies cut.Testing will no longer be universally free from next month. But for all these efforts, the reality of living with COVID is becoming ever clearer. According to the weekly Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey, nearly 3.5 million people were infected with COVID in the week ending March 19, a one million increase on the week before. Englands infection rate of one in 16 people is close to its historic high of one in 15 and Scotlands rate of one in 11 is the highest ever. Government claims that the vaccination programme has rendered these numbers irrelevant are lies. Vaccination is a vital instrument in controlling the virus, but is undermined by a vaccine-only strategy which allows it to both continue circulating and mutating. Imperial College London Professor of Immunology Danny Altmann published yesterday, Why the UK cant rely on boosters to get through each new wave of Covid. He writes, The vaccines rapidly induce hugely high levels of protective, neutralising antibodies in most people, but these levels wane within months of each sequential dose [N]ew evidence from the past two years suggests that encounters with different variants of Covid or different vaccine types can alter the effectiveness of later jabs in surprising waysan effect called immune imprinting. This raises the possibility that booster performance could be even less predictable and effective in the future. As of January 31, nearly 600,000 of the then 14.8 million total recorded infections in the UK were re-infections. Many people have been fallen ill three times with different variants. Moreover, there are indications that the governments relentless propaganda to declare the pandemic over is sabotaging the vaccine rollout. Less than half of the 560,000 severely immuno-suppressed people in the UK have received a fourth vaccination shot, on offer since the end of January. People adding to the National Covid Memorial Wall. The wall is adjacent to Saint Thomas Hospital in London. Each heart represents one of the more than 150,000 people who have died of COVID-19 in Britain. (WSWS media) Claims that the emergence of the Omicron variant means that COVIDs spread can be tolerated are proving disastrous. Driven by the rising wave of infections, hospitalisations have risen significantly, with the number of COVID patients increasing from 10,554 on February 26, to 17,440 last Thursday. For over-75s, the weekly rate of admission for COVID patients is at its highest level in a year. The number of people being treated primarily for COVID increased 50 percent in the two weeks to March 24. Since Johnson announced his Living with COVID strategy on February 21, nearly 4,000 people have been killed by the virus at a rate of 110 a day, equivalent to roughly 40,000 a year. According to the latest survey Long COVID figures jumped by 200,000 in a month, with 3549-year-olds in the most deprived areas the most likely to be affected. Unable to simply sweep the pandemic and its response under the carpet, the government has sought to defuse public anger using the tried and tested method of a public inquiry. Like every other before it, this is a stage-managed affair, designed to spend as long as possible asking the wrong questions. The chairperson, retired judge Lady Hallett, was directly appointed by Johnson. Her terms of reference exclude bringing the guilty to justice. Anyone who wants to know where this is heading should look at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, looking into 72 deaths in one tower fire on one night, now in its fifth year and with no end in sight. In that time, the corporations involved in the refurbishment of the tower, still raking in profits, have been granted immunity from prosecution. Johnson can promise a frank and candid COVID inquiry because he knows his own protection is assured. The Labour Party poses as a supporter of the memorial wall and the campaign to make it permanent. This is revolting cynicism. The Johnson government could not have got away with its crimes in the last two years if it had not been supported by Labour every step of the waywith the party and the trade unions signing up to every unsafe reopening of the economy and of schools that became the main vectors for the virus. The World Socialist Web Site is conducting a Global Workers Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic, designed to expose criminal governments and their enablers through the testimony of workers and scientific experts around the world. Through the Inquest, the WSWS is building support for a scientific policy aimed at the globally coordinated elimination of COVID-19. We encourage those affected by the pandemic to contact us today. Grocery store workers in Southern California voted to authorize a strike for 47,000 employees at more than 500 Southern California grocery stores, including the Ralphs, Albertsons, Vons and Pavilion chains, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) announced over the weekend. Workers at Ralphs store (Credit: UFCW Local770) The vote to authorize a strike does not mean one will happen. It only authorizes the UFCW to call a strike if no progress is made in contract negotiations. As has often been the case, the union can still announce that a deal with the companies has been made at the last possible minute to avert a strike. Contract negotiations are set to resume as scheduled on Wednesday. The fact that the UFCW did not release the results of the strike authorization vote for several days was a sign that the union bureaucracy feared that it would be forced to call a strike. Undoubtedly, preparations are being made behind the backs of the rank and file to put together a sellout agreement. Union officials said that talks with the supermarket chains had stalled earlier this month, after a three-year-old labor agreement expired March 7. Despite having no contract in place, workers have been forced to stay on the job under the terms of the last contract. Grocery store workers, who have been forced to work throughout the pandemic with increased workloads, unsafe working conditions and understaffing, are voting on a strike, the first since 2003-04, after management made a final offer during negotiations for only an additional 60 cents per hour. The UFCW said it is negotiating for a $5 an hour wage increase, more hours for part-time employees and codified agreements that would prevent workers from having to stay on the job after the end of their shifts. The union has also said the companies are spying on protesting workers and refusing to implement wage hikes agreed to in the last contract. The last strike in 2003-04 lasted 141 days and cost the grocery store companies $2 billion, while workers lost $300 million in wages. During the last contract, negotiations broke down in 2019. Grocery workers then voted to authorize a strike but were forced to work for two months until a sellout deal was reached, and then the strike was called off. Workers should take a warning from the betrayal by the UFCW of the strike by 8,000 King Sooper workers in Colorado. The union abruptly called off the strike just as it was beginning to have an impact, forcing a rushed vote without even providing workers the full text of the agreement. The deal accepted virtually all of managements demands without even minimal gains for the workers. Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke with workers at several grocery stores in Southern California to get their opinions on the most important issues in the contract struggle. A Ralphs worker, who asked to remain anonymous, said that she supported a strike and that although Ralphs was her second, part-time job, she would stand in solidarity with her fellow workers. She noted that the companys offer of 60 cents more an hour was not fair adding, We should all be on strike. Conditions during the pandemic were challenging, according to the worker, especially with customers who were refusing to wear masks. For a time, the company was giving employees $100 in groceries, but she said, Thats nothing. One manager told the WSWS about the conditions during the pandemic, saying, The hazard pay we got is basically nothing. He noted that despite being a union member for 14 years, he did not have faith that any improvement would be achieved even if a strike were called, saying, Its always been like that, 10 to 20 cent hourly raises and thats it. Another worker said, Nobody wants to have a strike, strikes are painful, but Ill stand by what my coworkers decide. We shouldnt have to fight for more than a 60-cent raise. Barbara, an experienced worker, recalled, A cashier used to be one of the best jobs in the country, back when I started 35 years ago, but things have really declined. She added, I swear that I must have had COVID over 30 times; we have all had it multiple times. We were just expected to get sick. Relating to the war in Ukraine, she said, I dont even know what theyre doing over there. Theyre spending billions of dollars when our veterans are here homeless on the streets. Its terrible. John, a newer worker, told the WSWS, Im a bagger, and they will have me do the cashiers job and only pay me 10 cents more an hour. There is no incentive. They call it a combo position. I could be making $19 an hour at In-N-Out Burger or another place, but I stay here because I like the people. Both workers agreed that the unions were working with management to advance their own interests, pointing out that some workers were making $19 an hour at some fast food chains and were not even part of a union. They noted that the unions had not negotiated for wages to even keep up with the basic cost of living. The two said they would vote for a strike after their work shifts. When they were warned by WSWS reporters that the US escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war would be used as a bludgeon against their strike, they readily agreed. Workers should prepare for strike action, but to win their demands that fight needs to be taken out of the hands of the UFCW bureaucracy, which has shown again and again that it sides with management. Grocery workers must build rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions, and the Democrats and Republicans. These committees will democratically decide on the workers own demands and turn out to broaden their struggle to other sections of workers, including Amazon workers, teachers and transport workers. To find out more about how to build a rank-and-file committee and to speak out on working conditions at your job, please contact the WSWS. On Saturday, Facebook deleted a popular anti-war video produced by the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) without providing any reason. The video, titled No Third World War! Against Ukraine war, NATO aggression and German rearmament! had been viewed over 20,000 times within a few days. The SGP called on Facebook on Sunday to immediately reverse the deletion. We are exercising our constitutional right to participate in the formation of political opinions with the video, the party stated in its appeal, but the corporation did not give any response. The deletion can therefore only be seen as an act of political censorship directed against the SGPs independent anti-war perspective. We call on all readers to oppose this censorship and use all their channels on social media and beyond to protest against it in the strongest possible terms. In the video, SGP Chair, Christoph Vandreier, and German WSWS Editor-in-Chief, Johannes Stern, unequivocally condemn the Russian governments war. But they also explain how it was provoked by the wars conducted by the United States and its European allies over the past 30 years and the military encirclement of Russia by NATO. They make it clear that a proxy war is being waged in Ukraine between NATO and Russia at the expense of the population, which threatens to end in a nuclear world war. The only way to prevent a catastrophe, Vandreier and Stern explain, is to unite Russian and Ukrainian workers as part of an international, socialist movement against war and its root: capitalism. This analysis and perspective struck a nerve, and reached tens of thousands of people on Facebook in a short time. The video received over 150 likes, was shared 140 times, and commented on 120 times. It expresses widespread opposition to NATOs warmongering, which is suppressed in the official media, which instead provides a torrent of deafening war propaganda aimed at all-out war against Russia, and ultimately, China. The weekend the video was deleted, US President Biden declared that regime change in Russia was a goal of American foreign policy and announced a decades-long state of war. Germanys Chancellor Scholz made similar statements when he defended the tripling of the war budget on Sunday so that Germany would once again be able to wage war against Russia. This insane drive towards a third world war is rejected by the vast majority. That is why the media have switched into war propaganda mode and will not allow discussion of even the most basic questions. The censorship that is now to be imposed is the desperate response to the fact that this propaganda is fooling fewer and fewer people and masses of workers are looking for an independent perspective against the war. Censorship measures by governments in collaboration with the tech giants have been systematically increasing for years. In 2017, Google announced that it would favour authoritative sources in search results in the future. At the same time, socialist and anti-war websites, and in particular the World Socialist Web Site, were censored and banished from search results. Facebook has hired more than 20,000 people to monitor posts on its platform and censor undesirable posts. Many of these employees have intelligence or law enforcement backgrounds and work closely with the US government. In Germany, the close cooperation of tech companies with the government has even been regulated by law through the Network Enforcement Act. In the last year, Facebook has already tried twice to censor the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), of which the SGP is the German section. On January 22, Facebook blocked the accounts of prominent representatives of the ICFI and of local sections of the party in the US, and only restored them on 25 January after massive protest. A month later, Facebook prevented users from sharing the WSWS article Washington Posts Wuhan lab conspiracy theory stands exposed. Facebooks reasoning was that the article was spreading misinformation. In May, the company was forced to admit the untenability of this statement and unblocked the article. Facebooks censorship is directly linked to the German governments efforts to silence the SGP and criminalise any opposition to war. In 2018, the Interior Ministry had for the first time included the SGP in its annual secret service report as being left-wing extremist and defamed it as anti-constitutional. After the SGP filed a complaint against this, the ministry justified the surveillance of the party by the intelligence agencies on the grounds that simply arguing for a democratic, egalitarian, socialist society and agitation against alleged imperialism and militarism were unconstitutional. In response to this attack, the SGP stated in July 2019: The attack invokes the criminal traditions of authoritarianism and fascism in Germany. The Interior Ministrys attack on the SGP is intended to set a dangerous precedent. It will be used to legitimize state action against organizations, groups and individuals who oppose social inequality, environmental destruction, state repression, the buildup of the military or other injustices of capitalist society. This was confirmed once again when the Berlin Administrative Court backed the federal government in its legal ruling. Facebooks censorship of the SGPs anti-war video confirms these warnings. In the face of growing social inequality, the murderous profits before lives policy in the pandemicand above all the reckless course towards a world waranyone who opposes the war drive and policies in the interests of the rich is to be suppressed. The struggle against the suppression of the SGP, which ultimately targets any opposition to the official war policy, is therefore of utmost importance. The censorship by Facebook and the German government can only be stopped by the mobilisation of the international working class. Therefore, spread this article and protest against the censorship on all channels. Use the hashtags #defendSGP, #StopCensoringSocialism and #SpeakOutAgainstWW3 and share the video that has been censored by Facebook. Part One | Part Two The 2016 election and the Mueller investigation The Russian question was put back on the US agenda in the course of the 2016 presidential election. Democrat Hillary Clinton ran openly as the preferred candidate of the national-security apparatus and a strident advocate of stepped-up intervention in the territories of the former Soviet Union. Soon after the Republican convention nominated Trump, and on the eve of the Democratic convention that would do the same for Clinton, the Democrats began a carefully prepared attack on Trump for his alleged ties to Russia. The signal came from the New York Times, which questioned Trump on the NATO pledge to go to war if any member state, including the small Baltic republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, came into military conflict with Russia. Trump gave an ambiguous response, and a media barrage began immediately. Left: Hillary Clinton campaigns for president in 2016; Right: Trump campaigns for president in 2016 (Both photos by Gage Skidmore) A column by Paul Krugman in the Times branded Trump The Siberian candidate, (a takeoff on the Cold War thriller, The Manchurian Candidate), suggesting he was a Russian agent. Similar columns, with less lurid headlines but equally inflammatory arguments, appeared in The Atlantic magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Clinton took up this theme and made it central to her general election campaign. The WSWS wrote that the anti-Russia media campaign was a measure of how central the military buildup and war preparations against Russia are to US imperialist policy around the globe. The commentary continued: It also provides a window into the real character of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. At its heart, it consists of a fusion of identity politicsthe relentless promotion of race, gender and sexual orientation as the motive forces of US societyand a viciously pro-war imperialist policy. The objective of this poisonous mix is to sow divisions in the working class while fashioning a new constituency for imperialist war from among privileged layers of the upper-middle class and the pseudo-left satellites of the Democratic Party. The Democrats were not just using the corporate media to advance the Trump is a Russian agent smear. Clinton contacted the military-intelligence apparatus directly, leading to the opening of an FBI probe of Trump and his entourage, which would ultimately be transformed into the Mueller investigation. At the same time, Trumps campaign chairman Paul Manafort came under fire for his past work as a lobbyist for the pro-Russian ex-president of Ukraine, Yanukovych, and was forced to step down, only three months before the election. He was replaced by Steve Bannon, an out-and-out fascist. The Clinton campaign mobilized hundreds of former national security officials to endorse her candidacy and denounced Trump as a danger to the overseas interests of the United States. These included many of the architects of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the broader war on terror, and the use of torture in secret CIA prisons and illegal mass spying by the National Security Agency. Left: James Comey, Director of the FBI 2013-2017; Right: Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI 2001-2013 (Both photos by Federal Bureau of Investigation) The near-unanimous support for Clinton in the military-intelligence apparatus was in sharp contrast to the indifference and outright hostility among wide sections of the working class, particularly after the eight years of the Obama administration had resulted in a general decline in their living standards and social conditions. Trump was able to capitalize on these sentiments, as well as making a demagogic appeal to mass disaffection with the forever wars in the Middle East. He won a narrow victory in the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote by three million. This shock result touched off a furious response within the capitalist state. Within weeks of the election, before Trump had even taken office, leaks from the CIA and other agencies generated media reports of supposedly massive Russian interference in the presidential election. There were claims that politically damaging transcripts of Clintons closed-door talks to Wall Street audiences, published by WikiLeaks before the election, had been leaked to the anti-censorship group by Moscow, and that Russian military intelligence had hacked the Democratic National Committee to obtain emails proving that the DNC favored Clinton over her principal primary challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders. A huge hue and cry arose over an alleged Russian media campaign that at most had produced a small number of Facebook ads promoting Trumps campaign. Even if these ads could be attributed to Russia, the total outlay was in the range of $100,000, a drop in the bucket for an election contest whose total cost approached $10 billion. Enormous pressure was placed on the White House through the corporate media and leaks from the FBI. In response, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, setting off a political firestorm in Washington. Trump was compelled to agree to the appointment of a special prosecutor, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, to investigate all aspects of supposed Russian intervention into the 2016 election and any coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. In the early stages of this political crisis, the WSWS published a statement of the Political Committee of the Socialist Equality Party, written by Joseph Kishore and David North, Palace coup or class struggle: The political crisis in Washington and the strategy of the working class. The palace coup against Trump was based not on mobilizing any genuine popular opposition to his ultra-right policies, but on behind-the-scenes plotting with elements within the military/intelligence establishment and corporate-financial elite. This statement identified three separate social sources of the opposition to the Trump administration: his ruling class opponents, with differences centered primarily on foreign policy; sections of the upper-middle-class, oriented to issues of race and gender, and incapable of genuine independence from the ruling class; and the working class, driven by profound socio-economic concerns, above all the massive growth of economic inequality and social distress. In relation to the factions of the ruling class opposed to Trump, the statement pointed out: Their differences with the Trump administration are centered primarily on issues of foreign policy. Their real concern is not with Russias supposed subversion of American democracy, as if this could compare to the subversion of American democracy by the ruling class itself, but with Russias actions in Syria, which have frustrated US efforts to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. They are determined to prevent Trump from weakening the anti-Russia policy developed under Obama, which the Hillary Clinton campaign was dedicated to expanding. The statement declared that the working class would gain nothing from the removal of Trump and the shift in US foreign policy sought by his ruling class opponents. It outlined the principled basis for the working class to oppose both sides in this bitter factional struggle within the ruling class, maintaining its political independence from the efforts of the Democratic Party to divert mounting opposition to the Trump administration into the blind alley of militarism and anti-Russia chauvinism. The Mueller investigation continued for nearly two years, culminating in a report, delivered in April 2019, which found no evidence that Russian actions in the course of the 2016 election played any significant role in its outcome, or that there was any direct collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian state. While indicting more than a dozen Russian officials and agentsall of whom were inaccessible to the US courts and unlikely to respond to the charges against themthe Mueller probe indicted only a few minor Trump advisers on charges of lying to investigators, essentially crimes triggered by the probe itself. But long before it ended as a legal whimper, the Mueller investigation and the unrelenting pressure from the military-intelligence apparatus had succeeded in accomplishing one of the main goals of the Democratic Party: reorienting American national security strategy to target Russia and China openly. As elaborated in the new National Security Strategy document approved by Secretary of Defense James Mattisthe recently retired general who had been given a waiver of the rules requiring a civilian chief at the PentagonUS military policy was to be shifted away from the war on terror, which had been the ostensible focus since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Now the central axis was to be preparation for great power conflict with Russia and China, defined as revisionist powers because they presented challenges to the global domination of the United States. Congressional Democrats hailed the new strategic orientation. They had supported the waiver for Mattis and the selection of other retired generals for top positions in the Trump administration, including national security advisor, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and, later, White House chief of staff. The Democrats and their media allies promoted these retired military brass as adults in the room who would restrain Trumps wilder impulses and prevent him from making concessions to Russia that he was supposedly preparing because of his political debt to Vladimir Putin. The CIA Democrats and the first Trump impeachment This drive towards a more aggressive military posture was reinforced by another political operation involving the Democratic Party. This was the influx of a large number of military-intelligence operatives seeking seats in the House of Representatives. Nearly 60 ran as candidates for Democratic Party nominations, the largest single occupational group, surpassing elected officials, lawyers, and businessmen and professionals. Some 30 won their primaries, most for seats that would be competitive in the general election. The WSWS first identified this processwithout precedent in US political historyin a series of articles under the title, The CIA Democrats, published in March 2018. We explained that after the November election there would be more former CIA agents and military officers in the House Democratic caucus than former supporters of Bernie Sanders, adding that this marked the further ascendancy of the military-intelligence apparatus within the Democratic Party. Left: Representative Elissa Slotkin, Democrat from Michigan; Right: US Representative Jason Crow, Democrat from Colorado (US House of Representatives photos) The WSWS traced the continuity between the right-wing basis of the 2016 Clinton campaign and the huge number of former intelligence agents, military commanders and civilian war planners now choosing the Democratic Party as their preferred political vehicle: Clinton ran in 2016 as the favored candidate of the military-intelligence apparatus, amassing hundreds of endorsements by retired generals, admirals and spymasters, and criticizing Trump as unqualified to be the commander-in-chief. This political orientation has developed and deepened in 2018. The Democratic Party is running in the congressional elections not only as the party that takes a tougher line on Russia, but as the party that enlists as its candidates and representatives those who have been directly responsible for waging war, both overt and covert, on behalf of American imperialism. It is seeking to be not only the party for the Pentagon and CIA, but the party of the Pentagon and CIA. As the fall campaign developed and polls showed the Democrats heavily favored to win back control of the House of Representatives, it became clear that the CIA Democrats would have a critical and perhaps decisive voice in the new Congress. Ultimately, they made up 13 of the new members of the House, which convened in January 2019. They would soon be able to play an outsized role. In August 2019, a leak from a CIA operative working in the White House revealed that Trump had pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an official phone call to come up with political dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden. This was in relation to the lucrative position his son Hunter had taken on the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukraine energy company. The appointment of the younger Biden, who had no relevant qualifications or experience, was a transparent effort to curry favor with his father, who had been put in charge of US policy in Ukraine. As part of his efforts to force the government in Kiev to undertake political dirty work against his most likely opponent in the 2020 election, Trump then withheld arms shipments to Ukraine for several weeks. The exposure of this delay, and the apparent quid-pro-quo of demanding political favors as the price of supplying weapons, was turned into a political sensation by the corporate media. A decisive step in this campaign came when an op-ed by seven freshman Democratic members of the House of Representatives appeared in the Washington Post, calling for a formal impeachment inquiry. Six of the seven co-signers were among the CIA Democrats, and the seventh also had a military background. Alexander Vindman testifying to the House Intelligence Committee on November 19, 2019 (House Intelligence Committee Footage) The Democratic congressional leadership immediately moved to begin that inquiry. The House Intelligence Committee held a series of public hearings where current and former foreign policy officials involved with US relations to Ukraine testified about the significance and seriousness of the cutoff of weapons shipments. Many of the witnesses had been involved in the 2014 operation to subvert and overthrow the elected government of Ukraine and transform that country into a base of operations for US imperialism against Russia. The WSWS pointed to the extraordinary character of this line-up against a sitting president by his own appointees as well as career national-security operatives. We wrote in a perspective column: The ferocity with which the entire US national security apparatus responded to a temporary delay in sending anti-tank missiles and radar to Ukraine raises the question: Is there a timetable for using these weapons in combat against Russia? Indeed there was, and that timetable now drives US foreign policy following the installation of the Biden administration. But the first Trump impeachment fell short of its goal. He was impeached (indicted) by the House of Representatives in December 2019, but a brief Senate trial ended in his acquittal on February 5, 2020, as only one Republican senator voted to convict. The 2020 election and Bidens drive to war against Russia The selection of Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nomineethe very outcome that was foreshadowed in the first Trump impeachmentrepresented an intensification of the pro-military focus of the Democratic Party. The convention that nominated Biden was dominated from start to finish by appeals to restore America as a country that wins wars, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo put it. He was followed by speakers like former secretary of state Colin Powell, one of the architects of the Iraq War, another former secretary of state, John Kerry, and a large group of representatives of the military-intelligence apparatus who accused Trump of undermining NATO and strengthening Russia. As SEP national secretary and 2020 presidential candidate Joseph Kishore observed, in a commentary on the convention: Over the past nearly four years, the Democrats have worked to suppress all popular opposition to the Trump administration and direct it behind the reactionary campaign for a more aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East and against Russia. At every point, the Democrats ceded all opposition to Trump to the military and the generals, including when Trump staged his coup attempt on June 1, threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and branding protests over police violence as terrorist. This is their most important constituency, along with Wall Street and the intelligence agencies. The election of Biden as president in November 2020 set the stage for a renewal of the campaign of confrontation with Russia that had been blocked temporarily by the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016. The Democratic Party responded to Trumps fascistic January 6 coup attempt, which nearly succeeded in overturning the results of the election, by covering-up the far-reaching attack on democratic rights and pledging unity with Trumps Republican Party co-conspirators. A central component of this unity within the ruling class was the escalation of military conflict against Russia. This was signaled by Bidens appointments to high positions at the State Department. For secretary of state, he chose his long-time foreign policy adviser Antony Blinken, who had played a key role in Obama administration policy in Syria in 2013-2014, and in the formulation of the US response to the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, before rising to deputy secretary of state. Left: Victoria Nuland (AP Photo/Susan Walsh); Center: Joseph Biden (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky); Right: Anthony Blinken (AP Photo/Brendan Smialowski) Even more significant was Bidens choice for the third-ranking position at the State Department, deputy secretary for political affairs. Victoria Nuland was notorious as the principal architect of the Maidan coup and a longtime supporter of US military aggression, having served as a top foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney during the Iraq war, as US ambassador to NATO, and then as Secretary of State Hillary Clintons top spokesperson, in the course of a 37-year career in the State Department. She is also married to Robert Kagan, longtime neo-conservative strategist most closely identified with the Bush administrations decision to invade and conquer Iraq. The accession of Biden, Blinken and Nuland was followed by greatly increased aggression on the part of the Ukrainian regime. In February, the Zelensky government shut down three popular television stations run by pro-Russian opposition leader and billionaire Vikto Medvechuk, on the grounds of national security. In March, Ukraines National Security and Defense Council approved a strategy for retaking Crimea, including restoring full Ukrainian sovereignty not just over the peninsula, but over the port city of Sevastopol, home of the Russian Navys Black Sea fleet. Blinken visited Ukraine in May, accompanied by Nuland, for meetings with Zelensky to prepare for an eventual visit by the Ukraine president to Washingtonthe same invitation he had unsuccessfully sought when Trump was in the White House. The visit came only a week after right-wing elements held a march in Kiev to celebrate the 78th anniversary of the establishment of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, also known as the 1st Galician, comprised of Ukrainian and German volunteers who fought for Hitler against the USSR. Zelensky, Blinken and Nuland all have Jewish backgrounds (Nulands father was born in the Bronx of Ukrainian immigrant parents), but they shamefully said nothing about the neo-Nazi celebration in the capital of Ukraine. Instead, they discussed the ongoing military build-up in which these fascist elements play a key role. A series of military exercises that summer ensued with NATO and Ukrainian forces operating together. In May came Defender 2021, a major land exercise across all of Eastern Europe involving 28,000 troops from 26 countries. Germany, which invaded the Soviet Union and killed 27 million people during the Second World War, provided the main base of operations. In June came Operation Sea Breeze, the largest ever naval maneuvers in the Black Sea, begun just days after an incident in which Russian warplanes dropped bombs near a British warship that crossed into Russian territorial waters off Crimea. In July, Cossack Mace included forces from Ukraine, Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Canada and the United States. It involved defensive actions followed by an offensive to restore the borders and territorial integrity of the country that has been attacked by a hostile neighboring state. This was followed by Three Swords 2021, a land exercise involving Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and the US. In August, Ukraine convened the inaugural Crimea Platform summit in Kiev in an effort to build international support for a military offensive against Russia to return the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine. Officials from 44 countries took part, including representatives from all 30 NATO members. Zelensky opened the conference by denouncing Russian aggression, and declaring, I will personally do everything possible to return Crimea so that it becomes part of Europe together with Ukraine. The participants of the summit issued a Joint Declaration that stated, Participants in the International Crimea Platform do not recognize and continue to condemn the temporary occupation and illegal annexation of Crimea, which constitutes a direct challenge to international security with grave implications for the international legal order that protects the territorial integrity, unity and sovereignty of all States. Given that Russia regarded Crimea as part of its national territory, and Sevastopol in particular as vital to its security, this declaration was little short of a declaration of war. This was followed by Zelenskys long-awaited visit to the United States, where he met Biden at the White House, as well as Blinken, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. Biden declared his support for the Crimean Platform, while boosting military aid by another $60 millionmore than the derisory $55 million in coronavirus vaccines going to to Ukraine. Members of the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army prepare for deployment to Poland from Fort Bragg, N.C. on Monday, Feb. 14, 2022. They are among soldiers the Department of Defense is sending in a demonstration of American commitment to NATO allies worried at the prospect of Russia invading Ukraine. (AP Photo/Nathan Posner) The Ukrainian population has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the developed world, with only 34.5 percent of the population fully vaccinated, the second-lowest rate in Europe (ahead only of Bulgaria), trailing Mozambique, Guatemala, and occupied Palestine. But the Zelensky government refused offers of the Russian-made Sputnik vaccine against coronavirus. The key result of the Zelensky trip was a new strategic defense framework agreement signed by Lloyd Austin and Ukrainian Defense Minister Andrei Taran. This laid the basis for the formal signing of the US-Ukrainian Charter on Strategic Partnership, on November 10, 2021, by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. As the WSWS explained after the details of this agreement were made public last month, the agreement was openly that of an offensive military alliance, endorsing the goals of retaking Crimea and the separatist-controlled Donbass and pledging both sanctions and other relevant measures until restoration of the full territorial integrity of Ukraine. The last phrase is a circumlocution for war. The WSWS analysis continued: Washington also explicitly endorsed Ukraines efforts to maximize its status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner to promote interoperability, that is, its integration into NATOs military command structures. Ukraines non-membership in NATO is and was, for all intents and purposes, a fiction. At the same time, the NATO powers exploited the fact that Ukraine is not officially a member as an opportunity to stoke a conflict with Russia that would not immediately develop into a world war It will fall to historians to uncover what promises the Ukrainian oligarchy received from Washington in exchange for its pledge to turn the country into a killing field and launching pad for war with Russia. But one thing is clear: The Kremlin and Russian general staff could not but read this document as the announcement of an impending war. There is little that needs to be added to this historical record. The Democratic Party has played the central role in preparing a NATO war against Russia over more than a decade. Joe Biden, as a leading Senate voice on foreign policy, as vice president tasked by Obama with running Ukraine policy, and now as president, is deeply implicated in this long-running operation. Now that this policy has produced the war that has long been its goal, American imperialism is pressing ahead toward its ultimate aimthe dismemberment of Russia, and the creation of a series of vassal states, dominated by the United States and the European powerseven at the risk of provoking a nuclear war. On Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke on the war in Ukraine and on his plans for cuts to pensions, university spending and unemployment insurance if he is re-elected next month. French President Emmanuel Macron, second left, watches screen during a video-conference with NATO members at the French Army headquarters, Friday, Feb. 25, 2022 in Paris. NATO leaders met to discuss how far they can go to challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, Pool) Macron was speaking a day after US President Joe Biden denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin as a butcher. Insisting that Putin could not stay in power and that America had to prepare itself for decades of war, Biden made clear that NATO is waging war for regime change in Russia. This clearly has made the French ruling class nervous, and France3 interviewer Francis Letellier asked Macron, Are you concerned that these are remarks that could poison the situation? Macron distanced himself from Bidens remarks, stating, I think we must first of all speak factually and then, indeed, do everything in our power for the situation not to get out of control. I would not use such language because I am continuing to discuss with President Putin. What do we want to accomplish collectively? We want to stop the war Russia has launched in Ukraine, without waging war and without escalation. Macron made clear that Bidens remarks cut across French policy. He defined Frances goals as a cease-fire and the total withdrawal of Russian troops. If we want that, we cannot have escalation, either in words or in deeds. Macron argued that the European powers have a greater stake in Russia than America does, and that they cannot accept US policy on Russia as their own. The United States of America are our allies in the context of NATO, we work with them and that is a good thing, Macron continued. We share many common values. But those who live next to Russia are the Europeans. That is why for five years you have heard me say that we Europeans must have a defense policy and define this security architecture, not delegate it. Macron concluded by explaining that European powers must pursue a different policy towards Russia than Biden. We, Europeans, we cannot give in to any form of escalation, he said. We must not, we, Europeans, forget our geography or our history. We are not at war with the Russian people. For a month since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the NATO powers have been recklessly escalating a confrontation with Russia that threatens to trigger war between nuclear powers. Before the Russian invasion, NATO had massively armed Ukraine against Russia. Now, all the major NATO powers, France included, are sending troops to the borders of Russia and Ukraine and are working to cut Russian banks access to world markets. Bidens remarks have made clear the aggressive, militaristic character of NATOs policy towards Russia. After nearly a month of war, however, conflicts between the NATO imperialist powers themselves are also coming to the surface. Indeed, under Bidens predecessor, Donald Trumpwho dismissed NATO, warned of nuclear war in Europe, and slapped massive tariffs on European exports to AmericaMacron sharply criticized US policy against Russia. What we are experiencing is for me that NATO is brain-dead, Macron told the British magazine the Economist in a 2019 interview, adding, That the United States is very hard towards Russia is a form of administrative, political, and historical hysteria. ... If we want to build peace in Europe, rebuild European strategic autonomy, we need to reconsider our position towards Russia. Despite its attempts to advance itself in a somewhat less aggressive light, the policy of French imperialism is not fundamentally different from that of Washington. The only way to halt the accelerating drive to war is to mobilize the working class against war, independently of and in opposition to all capitalist governments, including the Macron government. Indeed, after Biden took office and goaded Russia into invading Ukraine, Macron turned 180 degrees. This policy is, indeed, continuing: on Sunday, even as he criticized Bidens remarks, Macron announced the accelerated deployment of 800 French troops to Romania. This makes clear that calls by Paris, Berlin or other European Union (EU) powers for greater EU military autonomy are not a peace policy. Rather, these calls aim to arm and prepare the European powers for military policies that may be distinct from, or even conflict with those of Washington. One openly-stated purpose of Macrons remarks was to reassure Putin that France and other NATO powers are not immediately seeking to topple the Russian government. After the EU summit on Friday, Macron also announced a potential Franco-Greco-Turkish humanitarian mission to the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol that appears connected to attempts to organize a cease-fire. Russian officials, facing mounting threats from NATO, are making clear that they believe Russia faces an existential threat, and that they are refocusing their military policy in consequence. Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, Today a real hybrid war, a total war has been declared on us. This term [total war] which was used by Hitlers Germany, is now voiced by many European politicians when they talk about what they want to do with the Russian Federation. The goals are not hidden, they declared publiclyto destroy, break, exterminate, strangle the Russian economy and Russia as a whole. On March 25, the Russian general staff gave its first public accounting of the invasion, emphasizing protection of the Donbass in eastern Ukraine and its connections, through Mariupol, to the Crimea. Colonel General Sergei Rudskoy said, Tasks are executed while seeking to minimize losses to our personnel and damage to the civilian population. He claimed Russian forces have destroyed 1,587 tanks, 636 artillery pieces, 112 fighters, 35 Turkish-made Bayraktar drones, 148 anti-air missile systems, and 117 other radar platforms in Ukrainian hands or provided by NATO. Rudskoy said 1,351 Russian troops had been killed and 3,825 wounded in the fighting. Our forces and our equipment are concentrated on the main point: the complete liberation of the Donbass, Rudskoy declared. The general claimed that the Russian army aims to tie down the Ukrainian army in Kiev and Kharkov to prevent it from moving against the Donetsk and Luhansk areas of the Donbass, and to consolidate control of the Donbass by linking it to Russian-held Crimea. Mariupol is the main objective necessary to link these two areas that is still being fought over, as Russian troops besiege Ukrainian defenders in the city. Also on March 25, Macron announced an EU policy of seeking a cease-fire and an end to the war, adding, Together with Turkey and Greece, we will launch a humanitarian operation to evacuate all those who would like to leave Mariupol. We will organize things in the best possible conditions. He said his staff had discussed with municipal authorities in Mariupol, a city of over 400,000 inhabitants that today has little more than 150,000, living in terrible conditions. Greek officials have confirmed that this vaguely defined mission to Mariupol is indeed being discussed. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, returning from last weeks NATO summit, made clear that he is also planning extensive diplomatic maneuvers in the region as negotiations with Putin are to begin in Istanbul. Erdogan forecast wide-ranging shifts in international relations. We had a chance to discuss what steps we can take for the resolution of the problems in the Turkey-Greece ties, he said, adding that we can start a new process on the Turkey-Israel ties. Here, of course, there is mostly the issue of what we can do together about the eastern Mediterranean. As one of the most important steps we can take together in bilateral relations, I think that the natural gas issue can come to the fore here again. Erdogan added that he had discussed and obtained Macrons agreement to Turkey not cutting off purchases of Russian natural gas or nuclear power plants. Such remarks further undermine the claim that what is at stake in NATOs decision to arm Ukraine for war against Russia is an altruistic, humanitarian defense of Ukrainian democracy. It is clearly bound up with wide-ranging geopolitical conflicts and control over strategic energy reserves. In this context, Macrons tentative attempts to organize missions in support of a cease-fire policy have one obvious weakness: they are opposed by Washington, the worlds dominant military power, which is pursuing a policy of military escalation. The North Korean regime last week test-fired an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) for the first time since 2017, effectively marking an end to a moratorium on long-range missile and nuclear tests announced prior to talks between US President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in 2018. This photo provided by the North Korean government shows a test launch of a hypersonic missile on Jan. 11, 2022 in North Korea. (Credit: Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File) Pyongyang released footage of last Thursdays missile test the following day, declaring that the countrys nuclear forces were fully ready to thoroughly check and contain any dangerous military attempts of the US imperialists. It claimed to have tested for the first time its huge Hwasong-17 missilea road-mobile ICBM that was displayed publicly in October 2020. Foreign analysts, however, raised questions about last weeks launch. Colin Zwirko, an analyst with the South Korean NK Pro, wrote: Multiple pieces of visual evidence suggest North Koreas version of events is misleading at best, and possibly a complete fabrication of a successful Hwasong-17 test at worst. Whether or not the test involved the Hwasong-17, it is clear that the missile had a longer range than in previous tests. According to Japanese and South Korean estimates, it travelled in a very steep trajectory to a height of 6,200 km and horizontally as far as 1,100 km. The flight time was 71 minutes17 minutes longer than the 2017 test of a Hwasong-15 missile. If the missile had been fired on a normal trajectory, it could have reached any part of the United States. Similar estimates in 2017 suggested the Hwasong-15 could reach the American west coast. The ICBM test was a desperate attempt to prompt negotiations to end the sanctions regime that has crippled North Koreas economy since 2018. Following the November 2017 test, the US rammed punitive new measures on North Korea through the UN Security Council, adding to the already crippling sanctions regime on the country. Additional export bans were designed to choke off virtually all export trade. Tough limits were placed on energy imports and all North Koreans working abroad were to be repatriated home, further cutting off sources of foreign exchange. China and Russia voted for the UN sanctions in a bid to forestall a US war against North Korea. President Trump, who declared that he would never tolerate North Korea having ICBMs that would hit the US mainland, had declared that the US was ready, willing, and able to totally destroy the country of 25 million people. Having brought the Korean Peninsula to the brink of war, Trump did an abrupt about-face and met with Kim Jong-un in Singapore in June 2018the first-ever summit between a US president and a North Korean leader. Their joint declaration was long on hype and lacking in any detail. A second summit in Hanoi in 2019 failed to produce an agreement. It was stymied by Trumps demand that North Korea dismantle its nuclear arsenal and facilities before the lifting of sanctions. The only outcome of the failed diplomacy was a moratorium on North Korean tests of its nuclear weapons and ICBMs, in return for a halt to the huge joint US-South Korean military exercises held annually to rehearse for war with North Korea. Since the talks effectively stalled in 2019, North Korea has tested various short-range and medium range missiles while the US and South Korea have resumed joint military exercises, but stopped short of large-scale drills. That outcome suited both Trump and BidenNorth Korea had been stopped from further testing and thus extending its nuclear arsenal and the US had conceded virtually nothing in return. After coming to office, the Biden administration nominally offered to talk to Pyongyang but gave no indication of any serious negotiations. For North Korea, however, the current situation is intolerable. Its economy has been severely affected by the heavy sanctions imposed both through the UN Security Council and by the US unilaterally. The impact of the sanctions has been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic during which North Korea has shut its borders and trade with China plummeted. The economy shrank in 2020 by an estimated 4.5 percenta recordand is forecast to shrink again this year. In the middle of last year, Pyongyang reported a food crisis. The North Korean regime has repeatedly used its missile and nuclear tests as a bargaining chip with the US. So far this year, it had conducted 11 missile tests but had refrained from holding a full-scale test of an ICBM. With no prospects of negotiations to end the punitive sanctions on the country, Pyongyang no doubt hopes to put pressure on the US while Washington is focussed on the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. The Biden administration has exploited North Koreas missile tests to intensify its anti-Russian campaign. On March 11, following two missile tests, it imposed punitive measures on two Russian citizens and three Russian corporations for their alleged involvement in North Koreas procurement activities for its missile programs. Following last weeks ICBM test, the US State Department announced further sanctions on Russian entities and a Russian national, as well as North citizen Ri Sung Chol and North Koreas Second Academy of Natural Science Foreign Affairs Bureau. The White House condemned last weeks launch as a brazen violation of UN resolutions. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts and agreed to coordinate a response, including potential new sanctions. Further international economic sanctions imposed via the UN Security Council face a possible veto by Russia and/or China, which is North Koreas largest trading partner by far. Tensions on the Korean Peninsula are certain to escalate. South Korea is preparing to conduct its own test of a solid-fuel space rocket in the near future. While the projects purported aim is to launch military satellites to monitor North Korea, such technology could be the basis for producing long-range ballistic missiles. Joint US-South Korean military exercises are planned for next month. In a display of force, South Korea conducted a training session of its sophisticated F-35A stealth fighter aircraft on Friday. Relations with North Korea will further deteriorate when South Koreas right-wing president-elect Yoon Suk-yeol takes office in May. He campaigned on strengthening ties with the United States and taking a tougher stand toward North Korea. Ominously he suggested last month that South Korea had to develop its offensive military capabilities, saying the war in Ukraine demonstrated that war can be prevented only by securing a pre-emptive strike capacity. Paul Mason is the most high-profile political spokesman championing demonstrations called by the UKs Ukraine Solidarity Campaign and other groups protesting Russias invasion. The protests have been small, mainly mobilising Britains Ukrainian community, wealthy anti-Putin Russian expats in London and some Labour MPs and trade union functionaries. An examination of Masons writings makes clear the political character of a campaign portrayed in the media as anti-war, but which is aimed at paving the way for an imperialist war for regime change in Russia that threatens a nuclear conflict. He is arguably the most naked example of the transition of a broad swathe of the pseudo-left milieu directly into the camp of imperialist reaction. Mason still portrays himself as a man of the left, but he has travelled very far to the right since he was a member in the 1980s of Workers Powera split from the Socialist Workers Party fulfilling the standard function of Britains pseudo-left as apologists for the Labour Party and the trade unions. He abandoned his youthful radicalism following the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. Like so many others, he concluded that revolution had failed, and that this failure confirmed the non-revolutionary character of the working class. Paul Mason (Creative Commons) He boasts in the March 3 New European of how this makes him uniquely qualified to support Ukraine (and therefore NATO) against Russia. He recalled events in February 1992, two weeks after the dissolution of the USSR, when he was part of a group of pseudo-left individuals protesting President Boris Yeltsins privatisation of the economy. At a demonstration he attended, the working class was nowhere to be seen, he writes. The result was the victory of the oligarchs and the Western capitalists who decided to strip Russia of its wealth and dignity. Mason abandoned ship, proclaiming his unity with the Western oriented young people of Kyiv fighting for the right to be European and our democratic system and values. An anti-Russian war propagandist Masons anti-socialist politics has found its most grotesque expression in his support for the democratic imperialist powers against what he defined in April 2015 as the basic emerging threat posed by Russian influence and a possible alliance with China evidenced in both Ukraine and Syria. With the Trident nuclear submarine missile programme up for renewal, Mason argued, The unpalatable truthfor those who believe in nuclear deterrencemay be that four new submarines are not enough. All the things touted as alternatives to the current Trident systemcruise missiles, free-fall bombs and static silosmight be needed on top of it. He was appointed as an advisor to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell in 2016, at a time when Jeremy Corbyn, elected Labour leader in September 2015, was under relentless assault by the Blairites over his professed opposition to renewing Trident and to NATO membership. In April 2016, Mason issued a video arguing, I think Labour should vote to keep Trident while strengthening Britains conventional forces against the rapidly evolving threats of terrorism and a newly aggressive and unpredictable Russia. He urged Corbyn to adopt a policy of specifically threatening nuclear war against Russia: Instead of the Cold War policy of keeping Russia guessing about how the nuclear deterrent will be used we need to communicate a clear set of conditions for using it. In an accompanying essay, he called for a new NATO Strategic Concept including support for an enhanced ballistic missile defence system positioned in the East European and Baltic states bordering Russia and new, permanent non-aggressive [!] deployments to NATO forces in Europe. Long-held positions like these have ensured Masons rise to prominence as Britain and the other NATO powers have instrumentalised plans to provoke war in Ukraine. His specific mission is to appeal to the upper-middle class layers whose social interests he champions, facilitated by his now close connections with the Blairites. Mason worked on Sir Keir Starmers successful Labour leadership election campaign in 2020, after which his consultancy, Exarcheia Ltd, was hired by Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey. John Healey, Labours Shadow Defence Secretary, tells the RUSI think-tank last March, Labours support for nuclear deterrence is non-negotiable. The matter is settled. From Kinnock to Corbynwith Blair, Brown and Miliband in betweenthis has been, and will remain, Labour policy. (Credit: John Healey-Facebook) On April 14, 2021, Mason wrote in the New Statesman complaining of how, As Russia threatens to invade Ukraine, the West appears paralysed Voters want governments to defend their rights and their socially liberal way of life against the encroachments of men such as Putin and Xi Jinping. On November 15, he warned again in the New Statesman, We cannot avoid the fact that, piece by piece, crisis by crisis, Putin and his allies intend to destabilise our democracy and destroy belief in it. On his own blog on February 12, 2022, he wrote that the imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine meant that the left should formulate its own vision for NATO including support for political mass movements against Russia, China, Belarus and all the other mafia states. He concluded that Fostering the democratic overthrow of Putin must become an explicit aim of the European left, social democratic and Green movements. Mason outlined his proposal for the left to reform NATO, calling for the formulation of a coherent counter-hybrid warfare strategy that would empower civil society to resist fascism and disinformation, and the creation of large volunteer reserve forces on the Swiss or Finnish model. Those who oppose the militarisation of society are accused of appeasement similar to Labour leader George Lansbury in the 1930s, who could not adapt to the emergence of a fascist superpower in Nazi Germany. Mason in particular attacks the Trotskyist movement and what he otherwise refers to as the orthodox communist tradition for supposedly failing to make any revisions to the Leninist position on war (i.e. revolutionary defeatism) in the light of the experience of the Second World War They are saddled with 1914 Leninism in an era when anti-humanist dictatorships are intent on destroying Western democracy andif we are really unluckythe socially liberal society weve created through struggle over the past 60 years. Mason repurposes the Stalinist perspective of subordinating the working class to its national ruling classes during the Second World War. The Popular Front advocated by Stalin centred on a military alliance between the Soviet Union and the democratic imperialist powers. For the Communist parties in Britain and elsewhere, this translated into support for their own governments based on the prioritisation of the anti-fascist struggle in a Peoples War. Masons popular front is more directly a call for the petty-bourgeois left and identity politics groups to recognise that their interests lie with the City of London and NATO in preserving their comfortable lifestyles. He portrays Russia and China as the contemporary iteration of fascist Germany and the NATO powers as a bulwark against a supposed war of aggression to disorganise the West: split NATO, split the [European Union], split the populations of Western democracies Hailing German imperialisms momentous decision to re-arm, he declares, Western leaders now realise that Putin intends to turn Europe into a sandbox for war and dictatorship Having achieved the first moment of strategic unity for more than a decade, my hunch is that the Western leaders have begun planning for a long, grinding geostrategic battle against Putin which theyand we, the democratic populations of the Westcan win. If we are lucky, he concludes, the West will now isolate, paralyse and disintegrate Russia as a state, while rearming itself for both conventional and nuclear deterrence. NATOs envoy and drill sergeant Mason has served two additional political functions for the British bourgeoisie. His most direct service was as a go-between linking Kiev with the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress in the UK. On February 19, he took part in and publicised a Labour, Plaid Cymru and trade union delegation with the stated mission of hearing the voices of Ukrainian workers, LGBTQ+ people, ethnic minorities and human rights activists. It included Welsh Labourite Mick Antoniw, ASLEF train drivers union leader Mick Whelan and National Union of Mineworkers leader Chris Kitchen. The visits intended purpose was to dispel claims that Ukraine is a hotbed of far-right activity, including by taking evidence from territorial defence units training to resist aggression. Press release announcing Masons participation in a Labour, Plaid Cymru and trade union delegation Mason did not do a very good job. Posts on his Twitter feed include: Our labour movement and UK left delegation just met with the 112th Territorial Defence Brigade in Kyiv. They are reservists and volunteers 45% female They will be used for defence of the city The gender composition of the 112th notwithstanding, a reader posted of the accompanying photo, Did you ask them why they have the OUN patch on their uniforms? The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was Stepan Banderas Nazi-collaborationist organisation during World War II. Bandera is today the ideological inspiration for a swathe of far-right parties and militias that function as the backbone of the Ukrainian states war effort and are heavily armed by the NATO powers. A tweet posted by Mason showing volunteers with OUN patches on uniforms What also makes Mason a valuable political asset for imperialism is his use of pseudo-Marxist jargon to attack anyone on the left opposing NATOs war plans. This has centred on attacks on the Stop the War Coalition (STWC). The STWC was an inevitable target in the run up to the Ukraine war, given that it correctly identified NATOs expansion towards Russias borders as the primary aggravating factor in the danger of a war breaking out in Ukraine. As the World Socialist Web Site explained this February, The STWC does not offer workers a genuine means for opposing the enormous and escalating danger of war against Russia, because its answer is an appeal for British imperialism, including the Conservative government and Starmers Labour Party, to project a foreign policy that breaks free of Washington and aligns the UK within a European political and military block with a supposedly more pragmatic attitude to Russia. This naturally did not shield it from attack by the media and the Labour Party. In December 2021, Mason denounced the Stalinist chair of the STWC, Andrew Murray, for criticising NATO and US President Joe Biden for arming Ukraine to the hilt. Putins aim, said Mason, is to destroy Western democracy; to counter Russias ultranationalist, racist, homophobic anti-democratic dictatorship we are going to need a bigger army. Labours attack was eventually targeted at the political forces which the STWC advances as the leaders of an anti-war movement, Labours left MPs. On February 24, the STWC was to hold an online rally. It had issued an open letter seven days earlier, opposing any war over Ukraine, recognising the right of the Ukrainian people to self-determination while acknowledging Russias security concerns. It urged, NATO should call a halt to its eastward expansion. The day of the STWC meeting, Starmer demanded that eleven Labour MP signatories to the STWC letter retract their support. Within an hour, all eleven did as they were told. To underscore his own political loyalty, Corbyns former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell announced that he would be speaking alongside Mason at a February 26 pro-Ukrainian demonstration in London. This incident marked the utter collapse of the STWCs perspective. Its aim of convincing British imperialism to change course and move away from US tutelage was to be realised through the Labour Party and a Corbyn-led government. Instead, Corbyn was ousted, and his acolytes have abandoned the STWC when told to do so by Starmer in his role as head of the party of NATO. Amid widespread condemnation of the Corbynites cowardice, Mason wrote in the New Statesman what was now expected of them by their masters. Since Nato is the only thing stopping Russia doing to us what its doing to Ukraine, the left should get on board. From now on, Were going to need a bigger army and a bigger reserve Were going to have to fight Putins hybrid warfare tactics from within British society. That means the Labour and trade union movement becoming active participants in the fight against disinformation, ostracising those who collaborate with outlets such as RT and Sputnik, or who pose for snapshots with Putins Donbas militias. Finally, Mason stressed, were going to have to do this with our European allies, whose combined capabilities in defence, cyber and counter-hybrid warfare will be invaluable. The pseudo-lefts capitulation to imperialism Masons other polemical foray was against Britains Socialist Workers Party and an International Socialist Tendency (IST) statement on Ukraine published February 16. The statement was a standard example of how the state capitalist tendencies draw an equals-sign between US and European imperialism and Russia and China, describing Russia as a weaker but still vicious imperialist power, with Ukraine merely a pawn for both sides. Its description of a global conflict between rival imperialist blocks gives way to a list of demands such as No war over Ukraine! Both Russian and NATO forces pull back! and Demilitarize Europe! The International Committee of the Fourth International has explained the objective political significance of the state capitalist and Pabloite groups designation of Russia and China as imperialist in its 2016 statement, Socialism and the Fight Against War: This definition has been plucked from midair, with barely any attempt to explain the historical process through which Russia and China, within the space of just 25 years, changed from bureaucratically degenerated and deformed workers states into imperialist powers. It continued, The International Committee of the Fourth International calls for the overthrow of the capitalist states in Russia and China by the working class as an essential component of the world socialist revolution. It has explained that both states are the product of Stalinisms betrayal of the socialist revolutions of the 20th century and its ultimate restoration of capitalism, noting that the Putin regimes promotion of Great Russian nationalism is the extreme outcome of Stalinism itself, which was a violent and counterrevolutionary repudiation of the internationalist program of Marxism. Adding the word imperialist to descriptions of China and Russia serves very definite functions. First, it relativizes, and therefore diminishes, the central and decisive global counterrevolutionary role of American, European and Japanese imperialism. This facilitates the pseudo-lefts active collaboration with the United States in regime-change operations such as in Syria, where the Assad regime has been backed by Russia. Second, and even more significantly, the designation of China and Russia as imperialistand thus, by implication, as colonial powers suppressing ethnic, national, linguistic and religious minoritiessanctions the pseudo-lefts support for imperialist-backed national liberation uprisings and color revolutions within the boundaries of the existing states. None of this goes far enough for Mason. In a February 20 comment, Learning to say Goodbye Lenin, he wrote that because it refuses to side with Putin and Xi Jin Ping the IST statement is as good as it gets in the world of Leninist re-enactment, but Its not good enough and would likely be the default position of long-time socialists who want to remain neutral as Ukrainians defend themselves Neutrality must be abandoned, Mason insisted, in a conflict between the globalist, democratic former imperialist countries of the USA and EU and the authoritarian, anti-modernist dictatorships of China and Russia. Alex Callinicos (Creative Commons) Aside from Masons discovery that the US and EU are no longer imperialist states, perhaps the most noteworthy feature of his filthy polemic is the response to it of the SWPs leading theoretician, Alex Callinicos. Dear Paul, Callinicos wrote. You know that I respect you. I thought your latest book, How to Stop Fascism, was excellent He was gratified, but also impressed by the care you took to read and criticise the statement he had helped draft, professing agreement with Mason on opposing Russian imperialism before explaining to him that the US and the EU are also imperialist powers, as if he was talking to a confused student. He concludes with the polite suggestion that You seem to have signed up on the side of the former imperialist West, before explaining that such differences dont matter anyway, as, The sad truth is that the radical and revolutionary left is too weak internationally to have much impact on this crisis. Callinicos signs off with the salutation, In comradeship. The use of such a term for Mason says everything about the political function of the pseudo-left groups. The SWP leader doesnt openly agree with Mason but embraces him even after stating that in substance your attack on the IST seems little different from Keir Starmers shameful denunciation of the Stop The War campaign and pledge of loyalty to Nato. Starmer and Mason pledge loyalty to NATO and advocate war. The SWP and STWC make their protests but pledge their own fealty to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy through the medium of the wretched and cowardly Corbynite left. Such forces will build nothing, least of all an anti-war movement that must challenge the most fundamental interests of British, US and world imperialism. Because this demands the systematic mobilisation of the working class against the ruling class and its political agents in the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. NEWPORT The sparring continues over control of Newports historic Touro Synagogue, the nations oldest. The two sides the Newport congregation, Congregation Jeshuat Israel; and Congregation Shearith Israel, the New York City congregation that a federal appeals court has declared to be Touros rightful owner appeared in court Monday on a motion to enforce a settlement that would allow the Newport congregation to occupy the synagogue through June 2024. Congregation Shearith Israel, however, argues that the settlement on the table isnt a settlement at all. Its board president, Louis M. Solomon, dismisses the terms that the Newport congregation hopes to make binding as merely a summary of the proposal. In particular, the New York City congregation is seeking to resolve any future conflicts through confidential arbitration. Congregation Shearith Israel board President Louis M. Solomon at Monday's proceedings in Newport. The proceedings on Monday were prompted by Congregation Shearith Israels move in January to take repossession of the synagogue by ejecting the leadership of Congregation Jeshuat Israel. Solomon says Shearith Israel, the nations oldest Jewish congregation, founded in 1654, isnt aiming to evict the Newport group, but is calling for transparency going forward and to hold two seats on the 15-member Congregation Jeshuat Israel board. Jeshuat Israel counters that the New York City group should be held to the settlement terms emailed to the Newport congregation Feb. 10, which do not include an arbitration clause. The settlement terms The terms sent to members of Congregation Jeshuat Israel and all worshippers of the Touro Synagogue by Shearith Israel's Board of Trustees and congregants would extend Jeshuat Israel's $1 annual lease through June 30, 2024, as the communities work on rebuilding trust. After that point, the parties can enter a new lease term or agreement, but "in no case will there be more public fighting." It also specifies that Shearith Israel be given two non-controlling seats on Jeshuat Israel's board to "help ensure open communication between our congregations" and "eliminate surprises." Story continues Plus, Congregation Jeshuat Israel would give two other board seats to two "prominent" members of the American Jewish community and inform Shearith Israel of issues relating to the synagogue, including its cemetery, in a timely manner. 2016: New York congregation set to appeal Touro Synagogue decision 2019: Supreme Court ends long fight: Newport's Touro now in NY hands Shearith Israel leaders were perplexed to learn last year that contractors had installed a gravestone in the cemetery for Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr., who spent $12 million to create the visitors center at the synagogue. Congregation Jeshuat Israel learned of the installation of the grave marker after a photo of it appeared in Newport This Week. The congregation apologized to Shearith Israel about the headstone and worked with Loeb to have it removed until his passing. Touro Synagogue in Newport is embroiled in a long-running dispute over who controls what aspects of its storied existence. Barring approval of the settlement, Congregation Jeshuat Israel asks the court to dismiss Shearith Israel's repossession action altogether because New York-based Shearith Israel is so detached from this jewel of Rhode Island that it does not even know the synagogues address. (Shearith Israel's notice to terminate Jeshuat Israels tenancy incorrectly identified the property as 85 Touro St., and not Touro Synagogues actual address at 72 Touro St.) District Court Judge Christopher K. Smith continued the hearing to May 23 to give Shearith Israel an opportunity to respond to Jeshuat Israels motion to dismiss. None of this makes this go away, Solomon said Monday outside the courtroom. This is all just delay tactics. The controversy is the latest in the ugly, long-running dispute. The bitterness erupted in 2012 over Congregation Jeshuat Israels plans to sell the finial bells, or rimonim, for $7.4 million to create an endowment to support the synagogue. Attorneys for both sides listen as District Court Judge Christopher K. Smith continues Monday's hearing to May 23 to give the New York congregation time to respond to the Newport congregation's motion to dismiss. Congregation Shearith Israel objected to the sale, arguing it would violate the religious rites and customs of the Orthodox Spanish and Portuguese Jews. That group sued, asking to be declared owner of Touro Synagogue, its property and its artifacts. Congregation Jeshuat Israel asked the court to remove Shearith Israel as trustee of the synagogue. It, too, sought to be found the synagogues presumptive owners, arguing Shearith Israel had long neglected its duties as trustees. A 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled in favor of Shearith Israel, and that Newport's Congregation Jeshuat Israel were merely tenants. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to reconsider the case in 2019. This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Newport's Touro synagogue dispute heads to court over settlement terms Joseph Stearman DEMING, N.M. The Luna County Sheriffs Office is seeking the public's assistance in locating Joseph Stearman a Caucasian male, 76, six-feet-one-inches tall, weighing 180 pounds, with hazel eyes, and white hair. On Tuesday, March 29, 2022, at around midnight, the Luna County Sheriffs Office made contact with Mr. Stearman who was at a checkpoint in Columbus, New Mexico. Mr. Stearman resides in Arizona and has no family in New Mexico. Deputies escorted Mr. Stearman to the Motel 6 located at 4601 East Pine St. in Deming, New Mexico where they put him up for the night until his family arrived from Arizona. Deputies went back to the Motel 6 this morning to conduct a welfare check on Mr. Stearman and he along with his vehicle were gone. Mr. Stearman was last seen wearing a brown long sleeve shirt and blue jeans. He is driving a tan or grey 2011 Chevrolet HHR bearing Arizona license plate V5L3T. Mr. Stearman is missing and is believed to be in DANGER if not located. The information for the distribution of a Silver Alert comes from the Luna County Sheriffs Office. Anyone with any information regarding this New Mexico Silver Alert is asked to call the Luna County Sheriffs Office at 575-546-2655 or 911. This article originally appeared on Deming Headlight: Luna County Sheriff's Office sends out Silver Alert for Arizona man The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has changed India's COVID-19 notice to "Level 1," indicating that the risk of contracting the virus is low. The CDC had previously designated India a "Level 3: High" travel warning for Americans wishing to travel to the South Asian country. The CDC also lowered Chad, Guinea and Namibia to Level 1. Despite easing the travel warning, the CDC recommends that travelers be up to date on their COVID-19 vaccines before traveling to India. The CDC classifies someone as "up to date" if they have completed their primary series and received their booster dose. The travel notice warns that "even if you are up to date with your COVID-19 vaccines, you may still be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19." It further recommends that anyone 2 years or older should properly wear a well-fitting mask in indoor public spaces. The State Department has also lowered its travel advisory for India to "Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution." The update from the CDC and the State Department comes a day after all international flights to and from India were resumed. The Indian government announced a significant relaxation in COVID-19 travel restrictions earlier this month. According to the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C., tourists traveling to India will be able to enter the country on either paper or e-tourist visas for the first time since March 2020. Chesapeake Shores Crown Media United States LLC/Photographer: Ricardo Hubbs It's the end of an era at Hallmark Channel. The feel-good network announced today that its hit series Chesapeake Shores will be returning for its sixth and final season. Based on the bestselling book series by Sweet Magnolias author Sherryl Woods, Chesapeake Shores follows four generations of the O'Brien family after eldest daughter Abby returns home from New York City. "With a top-notch ensemble cast and creative team, Chesapeake Shores has shared stories that are relatable, poignant, and unforgettable," Laurie Ferneau, SVP Programming, Series, said in a news release. "We look forward to honoring the journey viewers have been on with the O'Briens with one final, special season." WATCH: Sweet Magnolias Author Sherryl Woods Also Wrote the Books Behind Your Favorite Hallmark Series Series stars Robert Buckley, Meghan Ory, Treat Williams, Barbara Niven, Laci J. Malley, Emilie Ullerup, Brendan Penny, and Andrew Francis are set to return for the 10-episode final season. Williams addressed the news on Instagram Tuesday. "I am on Vancouver Island and we are shooting Season Six of Chesapeake Shores @hallmarkchannel," he captioned a photo of the sun rising the water. "It will be our last and best season yet. I hope you will join us." The final season of Chesapeake Shores will air on Hallmark Channel this season. Photo credit: Karen Oelschlaeger Photo credit: Martin Poole - Getty Images From the time she was young, Karen Oelschlaeger lived as if she knew the clock on her life was ticking. Whatever she was doing traveling, volunteering, studying she was all in. As a teenager, she once left home at 2 a.m. to drive hours from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina, to the beach, just to see the sunrise. In high school, while her peers were planning proms and parties, she spent her free time volunteering for the Sierra Clubs Sierra Student Coalition and raising money for the Save the Children fund. During a year-long college study abroad program in Spain, she ate only Spanish food, spoke only Spanish and opted to rent a room in an apartment with a Spanish woman and her daughter, instead of living in the student dorms. And in 2007, before completing her masters degree in social work and earning a law degree, she started a dog-walking and pet-sitting company just to prove to herself that she could launch a successful business and fend for herself financially. Photo credit: Karen Oelschlaeger That was Karen, says her mom, Linda Oelschlaeger. She was compelled to live more fully and dive deeper into experiences than most people. She was strong-willed, smart, passionate and funny. Meghan Place, a colleague of Karens who became a close friend, admired her directness. We shared a passion for the same ideals and outrage at the same injustices, but she had a way of turning ideas into action, says Meghan. Shed say, What are we going to do about it? But in May 2018, two days before her 34th birthday, that question became personal. Karen had a procedure to see if the ulcer shed been diagnosed with three months before had healed. Afterward, she received devastating news: The nausea and vomiting shed been battling for months wasnt an ulcer. It was signet-ring cell carcinoma, a form of stomach cancer that grows rapidly and has about a 70 to 80% chance of recurring, usually within a couple of years. Karen texted me the news, and I called her immediately, recalls Eric Oelschlaeger, her older brother. She said, I dont know anyone who has had stomach cancer and lived. She was in shock. We all were. And though we hoped otherwise, we all were thinking the same thing: Theres a very good chance she's not going to survive this. Story continues Karen followed her doctors advice and they treated the cancer aggressively eight weeks of chemotherapy, followed by surgery to remove part of her stomach and small intestine, then more chemo and radiation. The painful nine-month ordeal left her fatigued, dehydrated, malnourished and unable to keep most food down. Karen desperately wanted to live, says Linda. She loved food and travel and life. She had so many things she wanted to accomplish. Karen also knew the medical odds were against her, says Linda. She knew that if the cancer returned, the road ahead would include horrible suffering. And while she wanted to eke every last moment of joy and meaning out of her life, she also wanted to have a say in when it ended. As an attorney, Karen knew that she legally had that right, thanks to the Vermont Patient Choice and Control at the End of Life Act, which allows certain terminally ill adults to obtain a prescription for a dose of lethal medication. Karen was such an independent soul. I wasnt surprised when she began talking about that option not long after she was diagnosed, recalls Linda. Photo credit: Karen Oelschlaeger In 1997, Oregon became the first state to put a Death with Dignity Act into effect. Today, medical aid-in-dying is effectively legal in 10 states, as well as Washington, D.C. The statutes allow certain mentally competent adults who have a terminal illness and are predicted to live six months or less to obtain a prescription for a medication to end their lives. (Doctors in different locations authorize a variety of different drug concoctions.) Not everyone who gets the medication utilizes it. Statistics compiled by the Death with Dignity National Center show that in 2019, doctors in five states California, Hawaii, Maine, Oregon and Vermont wrote 973 prescriptions for the medication, while 637 people died by ingesting it. In Vermont, more than 70 people have used the drug since the law went into effect in 2013. Shortly after Karens cancer had recurred and spread, medical aid in dying joined her list of passions and she spoke out about why it was important in a video for Patient Choices Vermont, a non-profit organization dedicated to end-of-life choice. I was very, very clear starting back in 2018 that I wanted to utilize the death with dignity drug if the cancer came back, Karen says in the emotional voiceover to a five-minute photo montage, which shows the brunette at various places she loved, like hiking trails and the beach. Ive always prided myself on my independence. And this illness has really been humbling. It has been humbling to watch my body fail fail to support me, fail to do its job the way Im used to. But also the loss of independence has been really hard. Im very grateful to have an option to utilize on the day when I decide enough is enough, I dont need to suffer anymore. Fighting for the Rights of the Dying After her initial treatment, Karen felt better and was stable for nearly a year. She took a trip to Norway and saw the Northern Lights, a long-time dream. She visited her family in North Carolina a number of times. Then the nausea, vomiting and pain came roaring back. The doctors thought she had adhesions, a form of scarring in which abdominal tissues stick together, a common side effect after abdominal surgery. But during surgery for the adhesions in August 2020, they found that the cancer had returned and it was widespread throughout her abdomen. Karen was devastated. She was diagnosed with Stage IV stomach cancer and given weeks to months to live, says Linda. I rented an apartment near her house in Vermont so I could be with her till the end. Karen set her mind on getting a prescription for the medical-aid-in-dying drug, but since her oncologist was in New Hampshire, she had to start from square one. As Karen herself explains in the Patient Choices Vermont video, When the cancer actually came back, I was in the hospital trying to line up appointments with medical providers who would help me. It is hard when you are dying and hospitalized, healing from a major surgery and grieving this major loss to go through the logistics of it. Her inner strength stunned even those who knew her best. She was in unimaginable emotional and physical pain, and she was still determined to take control of her life and make the choices that were right for her, says Meghan. Karen was a firecracker of a human being. The further Karen got into the process, the more she recognized its flaws. Two physicians must confirm the patients residency, diagnosis, prognosis and mental competence, and all requests for the control of the timing of their death must be voluntary and those appointments need to be in person. There is a mandatory waiting period between the two requests and another one between receiving and filling the prescription. Karen believed the requirements especially the in-person appointments were unnecessarily burdensome for terminally ill patients, particularly since so much of health care has pivoted to telemedicine and she knew that advocates in Vermont had introduced a bill to change the Patient Choice and Control at the End of Life Act to allow telemedicine appointments. So, weighing around 80 pounds, ravaged by pain, fatigue, nausea and vomiting, she swung into activist mode one final time. Photo credit: Karen Oelschlaeger First, she did the Patient Choices video, in which she explains, I had to physically go get myself in front of this doctor, which is hard when youre dying. I was profoundly malnourished and dehydrated and vomiting pretty much constantly, so its rough to drive 45 minutes and sit in a waiting room and have to get dressed and engage with someone you know you might puke in front of. So, yeah, I think removal of that requirement would just be a huge relief. A week before she died she did an interview with Vermont Public Radio. In it, she says, I did not know if I would be alive for this interview today, because, you know, my symptoms have gotten really bad again. I think one reason I made the time to voice my opinion about the telemedicine requirement is, if it can make a difference for someone else during such a difficult time of their life, and just anything to spare them any additional suffering, or burden, during what is such a challenging time emotionally, physically, spiritually, that would be worth it. Embracing Life, and Death After the recurrence, Karen tried immunotherapy in a last-ditch effort to prolong her life. It didnt help. We talked a lot about death in those eight months after the recurrence, says Linda. She hoped there would be life after death and that our souls or spirits would be reunited. At one point, she said, Ill always be with you, Mom. But Karen was even more focused on life and reclaiming as much of it as she could. In November 2020, she flew to Asheville to visit Eric and his family. In December, she went to Glacier National Park in Montana. In January 2021, she went to Costa Rica. A photo she posted to Facebook shows her standing on a rocky shore in a leopard-print swimsuit, smiling broadly, hands planted confidently on her hips. She bought that swimsuit for the trip, says Alex Ballantyne, a longtime friend and former boyfriend. She never lost her passion for adventure. Two weeks before she died, Karen called Eric and said, I need you to buy a private jet so I can get to Lima, Peru, Eric recalls. She was joking, but only half joking, he says. Travel gave her something to look forward to, and that kept her going. Even so, she was suffering horribly. She hadnt had a meal since before Thanksgiving. In the final few months, she couldnt even keep ice or water down. There can be a lot of pressure in our society to keep fighting, keep fighting, keep fighting, especially as a young cancer patient, Karen says in the Patient Choices video. And I think what folks dont always realize is sometimes that keep fighting is really just a lot of prolonged physical suffering that gets worse and worse. On the evening of Saturday, April 17, Karen said goodbye to Eric and his 10-year-old daughter, Ava, whom Karen adored and who had been visiting Karen in Vermont for several days. Karen called Linda midday on Sunday, April 18, and asked her to come over and rub her feet, the only part of her body that didnt hurt to be touched. Karen had the blinds drawn, which was unusual, and she asked me to leave not long after I arrived, recalls Linda. Several hours later I texted her to see if I could come over and get her IV nutrition ready. She said, No, Im thinking about taking my drugs tonight. I said, May I come over? and she said, Yes. Photo credit: Karen Oelschlaeger Karen had her medications prepared and a schedule for taking them in place. She texted friends and family to say I love you. When she texted me, I told her how much I loved her. I told her she was magical and brave and magnificent, says Meghan. She sent me a voice-to-text response and said 'I love you' 12 times." That night, Karen took a cocktail of medications including an anti-nausea drug. Around 10 p.m., she took the drug that would end her life. Talk about bravery, this little girl of mine, she looked at me, paused ever so slightly and swallowed that medication, says Linda. I dont know if I could do that, even if I was suffering as badly as she was. We said I love you to each other. Within five minutes she was in a coma. Per Karens request, Linda put on a version of Asleep by The Smiths, with the lyrics: Sing me to sleep Sing me to sleep And then leave me alone Dont try to wake me in the morning 'Cause I will be gone Dont feel bad for me I want you to know Deep in the cell of my heart I will feel so glad to go. For the rest of the night, Linda rubbed Karens feet. She sang her lullabies and brushed her hair and held her hand. Those were sacred times, Linda says. By Monday morning, April 19, 2021, her firecracker of a daughter, who had burned so hot and so bright, was gone. In Karen's obituary, which she wrote herself, she encouraged others to live by her example. In lieu of flowers, she wrote. Live your best life now just in case. You Might Also Like The final stage of the redistricting cycle has arrived: gridlock. Spats between governors and state legislators and between different Republican factions have brought map-making to a standstill in the final four states still without new congressional lines for the 2022 elections. With filing deadlines looming, 44 House seats are still outstanding in Louisiana, New Hampshire, Missouri and, most importantly, Florida, which has 28 districts all by itself. The stakes in each state are high, with seats that could flip either way and with the GOP gunning for the majority in a closely divided House. There are Republicans in each state who see their maps as opportunities to answer aggressive Democratic gerrymandering in states like Illinois and New York. Some of these redistricting delays were expected Louisianas term-limited Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, made clear from the start that he would veto a map if the GOP-controlled legislature didnt create a second district where Black voters could elect their candidate of choice. But others were more surprising: GOP governors in New Hampshire and Florida are playing hardball with their own party. A conservative filibuster in Missouri, where Republicans also control both legislative houses and the governorship, stalled the map there until this week. Redistricting is a messy process, said Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust. This is a messy, messy process and things change on a dime. And the unexpected happens regularly. I could see scenarios where some of these states stretch on into late May, early June, he added, depending on the court processes and everything else. Courts could also throw more states back into the mix by tossing their maps like in Maryland, where a circuit judge threw out the Democratic gerrymander on Friday and its unclear whether there will be an appeal. In the meantime, heres where redistricting stands in the four remaining states. Story continues Florida: GOP split over how far to go Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has sharply criticized the maps the GOP state legislature passed in early March, promising to veto the proposal even though it would likely give the GOP an 18-10 edge in the delegation. The legislatures map, approved largely along party lines and under pressure from DeSantis, would dismantle the 200-mile North Florida congressional district now held by Democratic Rep. Al Lawson but create a smaller Black opportunity district in Jacksonville instead of stretching from there to Tallahassee. However, DeSantis, contends that the map proposed by the Legislature violates U.S. Supreme Court precedent. The governor has proposed multiple maps of his own, one of which would stretch GOP gains further. But the main objective in DeSantis' proposals have been pushing the GOP to water down Democratic-held minority access districts, including another one in Central Florida, where Black voters make up a sizable minority but not an overall majority. Republican legislators, meanwhile, have resisted some of DeSantis demands while trying to comply with Floridas state anti-gerrymandering provisions, which upended the last congressional map mid-decade. Republicans currently have a 16-11 edge in the Florida congressional delegation, and the state gained a seat in reapportionment last year, thanks to booming population growth. While the legislature and governor remain in a standoff, two lawsuits have been filed in federal and state court, contending that the courts need to step in and approve new maps because of the deadlock. On Thursday, a panel of three federal judges set up deadlines to begin evaluating the case and called for both sides to come up with a list of experts to assist the court in drawing a map, if that becomes necessary. Louisiana: Democratic governor and GOP legislature deadlocked Edwards, the Democratic governor, rejected the GOP legislatures redistricting proposal on March 9 because it did not create a second Black opportunity district. This map is simply not fair to the people of Louisiana and does not meet the standards set forth in the federal Voting Rights Act, Edwards said in his veto message, noting that Black voters compose nearly one-third of the states population. Louisiana currently has one majority-Black congressional seat out of six. Republicans control both the state House and the state Senate, but they are just shy of the supermajority needed to override the veto in the lower chamber. Meanwhile, the National Redistricting Action Fund, part of Democrats national redistricting hub, filed a lawsuit asking a state court to resolve the impasse by imposing a map. But the groups GOP opposite, the National Republican Redistricting Trust, maintains that no impasse exists yet. The legislature could hold a vote as soon as next week to attempt a veto override, and even if they fail, they could still go back to the drawing board and find a map that could attract a supermajority. At stake here is whether Democrats net another seat in Louisiana or whether the delegation remains split between five Republicans and Democratic Rep. Troy Carter. Carter supports the push to add a second Black member of the delegation but only, he said, if its done carefully to make sure both districts had a substantial number of Black voters in each district. When you look at the state of Louisiana being one-third African American, I think it's a fair assumption that there should be greater participation, Carter said. Conventional wisdom dictates that you can't make them so thin that they're back in play. We could very well lose them. Louisiana holds its all-party primary on Novembers Election Day, with runoffs in December in races where no one gets 50 percent support, so it has more time than most to sort out its new lines. Its worth noting that if the map ends in courts, judges often tend to favor map proposals that offer the least change from the current configuration. Missouri: Republican infighting breaks Missouri Republicans have been locked in internecine warfare over whether or not to preserve Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleavers seat in Kansas City, which is not protected by the Voting Rights Act. For years, the state has anchored heavily Democratic seats in both Kansas City and St. Louis, which are now the only blue seats in the delegation. Some in the GOP saw an opportunity in redistricting to move that 6-2 split to 7-1, though at the cost of making some Republican seats less safe. But a weeks-long standoff broke on Thursday after a bipartisan vote on a map that would reliably elect six Republicans and two Democrats. It also made Rep. Ann Wagners (R-Mo.) swingy seat in the St. Louis suburbs considerably safer. This is a loss for those advocating to relegate Democrats to just one of the states eight congressional seats. That group includes Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, two U.S. Senate candidates and a host of conservative state senators. The other contingent, which consists of state Senate and state House leadership, never budged on their desire for a map that preserved the current split. National Democrats filed a lawsuit asking the courts to step in as the March 29 candidate filing deadline neared. But the state Senate worked overtime last week to break the deadlock, passing a map Thursday afternoon. But there are still a few more steps to go: The map will return to the state House for approval next week before going to GOP Gov. Mike Parson. I think it was probably tough to ever get there, James Harris, a longtime GOP operative in the state, said of the 7-1 proposal. I think they can say that this is a better match for the Republicans than the initial House map. And it is a strong 6-2 map. The big winner is Cleaver, whose seat will remain intact for the next 10 years. New Hampshire: To swing or not to swing? Republicans captured control of both state legislative chambers in 2020, giving them total control over redistricting. The new GOP majorities passed a map earlier this month that substantially changed the states two congressional districts which have remained largely the same for more than a century. Both districts slightly favor Democrats in their current configuration: President Joe Biden carried Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas southeast seat by 6 points in 2020, and he won by 9 points in Democratic Rep. Ann McLane Kusters seat. The legislatures proposal would transform Pappas district into one former President Donald Trump carried narrowly in 2020, putting him in the danger zone and Kuster in a safer blue seat. But Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who carefully cultivates a moderate image, has for months advocated a configuration that would leave both districts competitive. Honoring that stance, Sununu announced he would veto the legislatures plan and then, he took the unusual step of proposing his own map that he said passes the smell test, and holds our incumbents accountable so that no elected official is immune from challengers. New Hampshire has the latest primary in the country, not until Sept. 13, so the governor and the legislature have time to sort out a new plan. But not too much time: Candidate filing closes on June 10. Mario Tama To the millions of refugees forced from their homes by Russias invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Bidens announcement last week that the United States is preparing to welcome 100,000 Ukrainians to the United States, with a focus on reuniting families, came as a welcome surprise. But humanitarian watchdogs say that they have received almost no word of how the Biden administration plans to actually admit 100,000 Ukrainians into the countrymuch less how it plans to fix a refugee resettlement system that is already in crisis. There were no discussions with refugee resettlement organizations and advocacy groups regarding the 100,000 Ukrainians before the announcement was made, said Alexandra Plazas Rocha, senior communications director for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, which helps resettle refugees in the United States. At this point, we dont know how the administration is going to be moving forward with its plan, so we dont really know exactly what to focus our advocacy on. Nonprofits that work with the State Department to bring refugees into the United States warn that the previous administrations war of attrition against the refugee resettlement system has yet to be addressed by the Biden administration beyond general support for the concept of increasing refugee admissions. With other major refugee crises around the world in need of U.S. attention, that lack of information threatens to exacerbate the problems those nonprofits already face. Key concerns of the resettlement agencies are how not just Ukrainians but all the others from elsewherelike Afghanistan or Burma or Syria or Ethiopiawaiting for refugee or humanitarian parole or family unification processing will be facilitated, said Dr. Yael Schacher, deputy director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, who said that this was particularly true in Afghanistan, where the American withdrawal last August threw even more weight onto the shoulders of weakened refugee resettlement organizations. Story continues Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) told The Daily Beast the Trump administrations damage to the system is evident in the roadblocks her constituents are running into as they try to welcome Ukrainians into their homes. Ukraine Crisis Highlights Biden Failure on Refugees Were hearing from people in New Hampshire who want to be helpful in bringing Ukrainians to New Hampshire and helping in any way that we can, Shaheen, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Europe and Regional Security Cooperation, told The Daily Beast. So I think there is a vast pool of volunteers who could be helpful. Thats obviously going to take some training and some organization and we have a system of refugee resettlement that was really dismantled under the Trump administration that needs to be rebuilt. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), who just returned from a visit to the countries bordering Ukraine, suggested the number is likely just a talking point. I think that this group of people wants to go back home, their husbands, their dads, their brothers are fighting, Marshall told The Daily Beast. I dont think 100,000 will come here almost every person that we talked to, they want to go home. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), a co-chair of the Congressional Refugee Caucus, admitted Bidens number might not tally with the reality on the ground. Its not clear how many of the refugees want to come to the U.S. as compared to waiting because most of them want to go back, Lofgren said. Refugee advocates are concerned the administration might be firing off talking points without much heft behind them once again. Bidens promise to admit as many as 100,000 Ukrainians, first announced last week while the president was in Brussels for emergency meetings with NATO and allied leaders in response to Russias unprovoked invasion of Ukraine last month, echoes his commitment in May 2021 to double the governments cap on refugee admissions into the United States to a limit of 125,000 people. At the time, Biden vowed that raising the cap would remove any lingering doubt in the minds of refugees around the world who have suffered so much, and who are anxiously waiting for their new lives to begin, but as The Daily Beast reported before Bidens newest pledge, fewer than 6,500 people have actually been allowed into the country through refugee resettlement programs five months into the fiscal year. There are many reasons behind that immense shortfallfrom a lack of funding and available employees for refugee resettlement organizations to the COVID-19 pandemic to redirected resources aimed at helping Afghans enter the United States through non-refugee programs. But according to the Biden administrations newly released budget proposal, the 125,000-person cap is going to remain in place for the next fiscal year, which could stretch those resources extremely thin. That number seems kind of low, said Melanie Nezer, the senior vice president for global public affairs at HIAS, one of the countrys oldest nonprofits that provides relocation assistance to refugees. With the ongoing refugee crises in Syria, Myanmar, Cameroon and now the displacement of millions of refugees across Central Europe, Nezer said, the needs of refugees from other parts of the world have not decreased. Resettlement is not the option for everybodyits for people who have no other options. Bidens new budget proposal calls for $6.3 billion for the State Departments Office of Refugee Resettlement for Fiscal Year 2023an increase of more than $4 billion from his 2020 budget proposalwhich refugee advocates say is critical to reviving a system that was purposely underfunded under former President Donald Trump, who openly despised the concept of admitting refugees from shithole countries. Refugee resettlement continues at a glacial pace, and significant investments and innovations are required to ensure the Biden administrations intentions can be made reality, said Sunil Varghese, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project. We look forward to receiving more details about the program to protect vulnerable Ukrainians and encourage the administration to issue a clear plan to fulfill its promise to rebuild the refugee admissions program as a whole. Some of the biggest details, however, remain unknown. In the fact sheet released by the White House announcing Bidens pledge, the administration declared that it was working to expand and develop new programs with a focus on welcoming Ukrainians who have family members in the United States. That program, so far, remains in the abstract phase, according to lawmakers and leaders of resettlement organizations. There were some informal conversations about possible pathways to bring Ukrainians to the U.S. in the lead up to the announcement but very limited details solidified or worked out, said Schacher, who noted that while further meetings between resettlement agencies and advocates are being scheduled to better understand the scale of Bidens promise, most details are not worked out yet. Senators Shaheen and Marshall both said they havent been looped in on what that new program might entail. The administration has publicly emphasized that many of the Ukrainians who will hopefully end up in the United States will not necessarily be entering through the refugee resettlement program per se. Many will instead be entering to be reunited with family members who already have some sort of legal status or residencya prospect that the administration made easier by granting Temporary Protected Status last month to tens of thousands of Ukrainians already living in the United States. U.S. Expected to Take in 100K Ukrainian Refugeesof 3.6 Million, Report Says Bidens resettlement pitch, while not yet formed, is politically popular. An Associated Press-NORC poll conducted in mid-March found that a full two-thirds of Americans support accepting refugees from Ukraine, with only 13 percent opposing doing so. But that support is only so useful without a real roadmap to widescale admissions, Nezer said. We have a very committed American population that wants to welcome these refugees, said Nezer, noting that the outpouring of support for Ukrainian admissions was nearly matched when Americans were asked to help Afghans seeking safety. We have a mobilized citizenry that wants to help and wants to volunteer and wants to support resettlement, but its very hard to planeven with all that energybecause we dont know what the plan is. Read more at The Daily Beast. Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now. Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now. WASHINGTON A private Russian military contractor that has been accused of human rights abuses has deployed to Eastern Ukraine, according to Britains Defense Ministry. The ministrys Defense Intelligence said the Wagner Group was expected to bring up to 1,000 mercenaries to take part in combat operations in Ukraine after the regular Russian military experienced heavy losses. Russian soldiers are seen on a tank in Donetsk, Ukraine. Britains Defense Ministry says Russia plans to hire a private military contractor to fight in Ukraine after the regular Russian military suffered heavy losses. (Photo: Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) Air Vice-Marshal Mick Smeath, Londons defense attache in Washington, said in a statement that Russia has likely been forced to reprioritize Wagner personnel for Ukraine at the expense of its operations in Africa and Syria. Smeaths statement comes after Pentagon officials said recently that they expected Russia to look for ways to replace their combat losses with Russian troops based in other countries. Last Friday, the Pentagon said it appeared Moscow was drawing on Russian troops based in Georgia, but no details were available on their number or the timing of their expected deployment. Thousands of mercenaries from Wagner Group have been deployed in Syria since 2015. The U.S. and EU consider the group to be a surrogate of the Russian military, but the Kremlin denies it even exists. In December, the EU imposed sanctions on the Wagner Group and its founder, Dmitry Utkin, for fomenting violence and committing human rights abuses in the Middle East, Africa and Ukraine. This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated. Christian Eriksen scored on an emotional return to the Parken Stadium in Copenhagen on Tuesday evening as he captained the side to a 3-0 friendly win over Serbia. The 30-year-old suffered a cardiac arrest during Denmarks opening Euro 2020 group game against Finland last June, needing lifesaving treatment on the pitch after his collapse. Following his recovery, former Tottenham playmaker Eriksen had an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) device fitted and after leaving Inter Milan, he joined Brentford in January to resume his career. Eriksen had made his international comeback in the 4-2 defeat by Holland on Saturday, when he scored two minutes after coming on at the break. The Bees player was given the captains armband for Tuesday nights second friendly international fixture, and was the centre of attention as he led the team out to the warmest of receptions. With both teams having already qualified for the World Cup in Qatar Denmark at the top of their group ahead of Scotland there was little riding on the game itself, but that did not dampen the party atmosphere from the home fans. Denmark took the lead in the 15th minute when Joakim Maehle drilled the ball in after it dropped to him at the edge of the penalty area following a corner. Fulham forward Aleksandar Mitrovic, the leading scorer in the Sky Bet Championship with 35 goals, shot wide as Serbia threatened midway through the first half. Story continues Christian Eriksen, left, captained the side on his return to action in Copenhagen (Liselotte Sabroe/Ritzau Scanpix/AP) However, it remained mostly one-way traffic and was almost 2-0 just ahead of the break when Brentford midfielder Christian Norgaard struck the post. Eintracht Frankfurt midfielder Jesper Lindstrom slotted home his first senior international goal eight minutes into the second half. Eriksen then soon brought the Denmark fans to their feet again in the 57th minute when he swept the ball into the bottom corner after being picked out by Norgaard at the edge of the Serbia penalty area. With 10 minutes left, Eriksen was replaced by Bournemouths Philip Billing and left the pitch to a standing ovation as he handed the armband over to goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel before being hugged by the Denmark coaching staff on his way to the bench. Elsewhere on Tuesday evening, Brighton forward Leandro Trossard and Crystal Palace frontman Christian Benteke were both on target as Belgium beat Burkina Faso 3-0 in Anderlecht. Tottenham midfielder Steven Bergwijn scored an equaliser for Holland to earn a 1-1 draw against Germany in Amsterdam. Chelsea defender Antonio Rudiger made his 50th appearance for Die Mannschaft as Hansi Flicks eight-match winning start came to an end. Italy looked to move on from their World Cup disappointment having suffered a shock defeat to North Macedonia in the play-offs as they came from behind to beat Turkey 3-2 in Konya with a brace from Sassuolo striker Giacomo Raspadori. Spain swept past Finland 5-0 in La Coruna, with Juventus forward Alvaro Morata and substitute Pablo Sarabia both scoring twice. Kylian Mbappe hit a brace and Olivier Giroud was also on target as France beat South Africa 5-0, the visitors ending a disappointing night in Villeneuve-dAscq with 10 men following a late red card. Watford forward Joshua King scored a hat-trick and Erling Haaland struck twice as Norway ran out 9-0 winners over Armenia, who played with 10 men for 70 minutes in Oslo. ReportLinker Major players in the flowmeter market are ABB Ltd, Emerson Electric Co. , Em-Tec GmbH, Endress+Hauser Management AG, General Electric Company, Hitachi Ltd. , Honeywell International Inc. , Hontzsch GmbH, KROHNE Messtechnik GmbH, Siemens AG, Yokogawa Electric Corporation, VSE Volumentechnik GmbH, Keyence Corporation, Schneider Electric SE, and Saison Information Systems Co. New York, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Flowmeter Global Market Report 2022" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06248458/?utm_source=GNW Ltd. The global flowmeter market is expected to grow from $6.78 billion in 2021 to $7.36 billion in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.68%. The growth is mainly due to the companies rearranging their operations and recovering from the COVID-19 impact, which had earlier led to restrictive containment measures involving social distancing, remote working, and the closure of commercial activities that resulted in operational challenges. The market is expected to reach $10.74 billion in 2026 at a CAGR of 9.88%. The flowmeter market consists of sales of flowmeters by entities (organizations, sole traders, and partnerships) that refer to a tool utilized to measure the linear, nonlinear, mass, or volumetric flow rate of a liquid or a gas.Flowmeter is also called a flow sensor. Open channels, such as rivers or streams, can be measured with flowmeters. Improving the accuracy, precision, and resolution of fluid measurement are some of the benefits of flowmeters. The main types of flowmeters include differential pressure flow meter, positive displacement flow meter, ultrasonic flow meter, turbine flow meter, magnetic flow meter, coriolis flow meter, and vortex flow meter.The differential pressure flowmeter consists of sales of differential pressure flow meters by entities (organizations, sole traders, and partnerships) that refer to the principle of partly cutting off the flow in a pipe. Differential-pressure meters are highly popular and it is estimated that at least 40% of industrial flowmeters in usage currently are differential-pressure devices.The positive displacement flowmeter consists of sales of positive displacement flow meters by entities (organizations, sole traders, and partnerships) that refer to positive displacement flow meters, which are the only flow measuring technology to exactly measure the volume of fluid proceeded by the flowmeter. They are accessible in industrial grade, brass, or all-plastic construction.The main applications of flowmeters are in residential uses, industrial uses and commercial uses. The flowmeters are used in multiple industries including water and wastewater management, oil and gas, chemicals, power generation, pulp and paper, and the food and beverage industries. Asia Pacific was the largest region in the flowmeter market in 2021.Europe is expected to be the second largest region in the forecast period. The regions covered in this report are Asia-Pacific, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, South America, Middle East and Africa. An increase in pharmaceutical production is expected to propel the growth of the flowmeter market.A flowmeter is a device that measures a liquid or gass linear, nonlinear, mass, or volumetric flow rate. For the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, flowmeters are used to control extremely sensitive conditions such as pressure and temperature. According to IBEF, the Indian pharmaceutical market grew 17.7% annually in August 2021, which is an increase from 13.7% in July 2020. Furthermore, according to India Ratings & Research, the Indian pharmaceutical market revenue is expected to be over 12% Y-o-Y in FY22. Also, in the USA, according to Pharmaceutical Commerce, it is projected that by the year 2023, Americans would spend between $635 and $655 billion on medicine. This represents a 29.6 33.7% increase in expenditure as compared to 2019. Therefore, the rise in pharmaceutical production is driving the growth of the flowmeter market. Technological Advancements are a key trend gaining popularity in the flowmeter market.Technological advancement is a discovery of knowledge that advances technology that may help the usage or production of a device, making it more efficient. For instance, in 2020, ABB, a Switzerland-based industrial equipment company has launched the Sensyflow FMT700-P Compact thermal mass flowmeter.It is useful for the automotive industry to optimize the use of hydrogen to power electric drive trains. This flowmeter is ideal for fine-tuning the efficiency of cells that combine hydrogen and air to produce electrical power while emitting only water. It is accurate to 0.8 percent of reading over extensible and adjustable measuring ranges. The P-Compact is used to evaluate the performance of conventional turbochargers and related components, such as intake fans, throttle valves, and air filters, as well as hydrogen fuel cells. In 2019, TASI Group, a USA-based industrial products company announced the acquisition of Sierra Instruments, an instrumentation company manufacturing flowmeters, for an undisclosed amount.Through this acquisition, Sierras flow product portfolio compliments TASI Flow businesses, offering new technologies including Transit-time ultrasonic and vortex shedding. Also, the acquisition is expected to help the growth of TASI Group and TASI Flow. Sierra Instruments is based out of California, USA, and was founded in 1973. The countries covered in the Flowmeter market report are Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, South Korea, UK, USA. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06248458/?utm_source=GNW About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Story continues CONTACT: Clare: clare@reportlinker.com US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 Mar. 28GRAND FORKS Northland Community and Technical College will host career expos at the college's locations in Thief River Falls and East Grand Forks. The first expo is set to be held on Wednesday, March 30, at the Thief River Falls campus. Doors will open at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday. The second event will be held on April 20 at the East Grand Forks campus. The events will give high school students in grades 9-12 an opportunity to meet with faculty in a wide variety of programs as well as student services staff. "We are excited to get high school students back on campus to learn more about our awesome programs at Northland," said Maura Efteland, recruiter and advisor at Northland. "Each program will have hands-on activities that will allow students to gain a real understanding of the field." Northland's annual Career Expo offers area high school students the opportunity to explore careers that are in demand regionally to help make decisions about their future. The event focuses on Northland's programs and provides an in-depth experience connecting participants directly with faculty. Attendees come from school districts surrounding the campuses. In Thief River Falls districts include the Minnesota towns of Goodridge and Newfolden. In East Grand Forks local students will attend, as well as students from Thompson, North Dakota, and Crookston, in Minnesota. Home-schooled students are also welcome to attend. Many Northland programs will be on hand, including paramedic, nursing, occupational therapy assistant, as well as several others. Students can attend several different sessions to get more information about programs, as well as ask questions about registration and other college-related matters. More information can be found on Northland's website, or by calling the college's admission office. Rioters scale a wall at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Greetings, OnPolitics readers! There's lots to share on the Jan. 6 panel today: A federal judge said the "illegality" of former President Donald Trump's alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was "obvious." U.S. District Judge David Carter ruled Monday that Trump likely corruptly attempted to obstruct Congress from certifying the 2020 election. In approving the transfer of emails belonging to John Eastman an attorney for Trump to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, Carter wrote that Based on the evidence, the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021. Charles Burnham, one of Eastmans lawyers, issued a statement Monday saying Eastman intends to comply with the decision. Eastman wrote a six-page memo for Trump explaining a potential strategy for overturning the election. He allegedly met with former Vice President Mike Pence's staff on Jan. 5, 2021 to ask him to "reject the electors by refusing to recognize Electoral College votes from states with contested results. The act would have thrown the race to Congress, where Trump might have won. Members of the Jan. 6 panel have suggested that criminal charges might be warranted, though the Justice Department would determine whether to charge Trump. It's Amy and Chelsey with today's top stories out of Washington. Trump's missing phone logs from Jan. 6 Records turned over to the Jan. 6 panel show a gap of seven hours and 37 minutes from Trump's phone logs, including a period when the Capitol was under attack. The committee has no record of Trump's calls during the attack since there is no official White House notation of calls placed by or to Trump from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. that day, according to reports. The panel will reportedly investigate whether Trump used burner phones, the phones of aides or other backchannels to conduct documented conversations with key individuals during the time period. Story continues Liz Harrington, spokesperson for Trump, told USA TODAY that he "had nothing to do with the records, and assumed any and all of his phone calls were recorded and preserved," and that Trump has said he has "no idea what a burner phone is." Ex-Trump aides held in contempt: The Jan. 6 committee urged the full House of Representatives to hold former trade adviser Peter Navarro and former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino in contempt for defying subpoenas. Want this news roundup in your inbox every night? Sign up for the OnPolitics newsletter here. Real quick: stories you'll want to read Ukrainian Jews confused by Putin's Nazi comments In a speech announcing the attack on Ukraine, Putin said he wanted to de-Nazify the country, a statement that many found baffling and bizarre. Putin's war has uprooted thousands of Ukrainian Jews, including approximately 5,000 refugees who flooded into neighboring Moldova. Ginni Thomas' controversial support : Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is facing a torrent of criticism amid revelations that his wife longtime conservative activist Ginni Thomas was in regular communication with at least one top official close to President Donald Trump as the White House tried to convince the public, falsely, that Trump won the 2020 election. Tennessee turns down Trump-backed candidate : A bill to place residency requirements on Tennessee congressional candidates cleared its final hurdle in the General Assembly on Monday, which implicitly targeted the candidacy of Morgan Ortagus, a former State Department staffer under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Census may have cost Arizona a congressional seat: New Census Bureau estimates suggest large-scale undercounting of minorities worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic may have cost Arizona an extra congressional seat and hundreds of millions of federal dollars that will go elsewhere over a decade. Will Biden ever forgive student loan debt? The lack of action to offer widespread forgiveness to student loan borrowers could harm Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections, some organizers warn. Here's what's in Pres. Biden's budget plan President Joe Biden proposed increasing taxes on America's wealthiest households Monday in a budget blueprint that looks to cut the deficit while boosting military spending, funding for cops and a range of domestic priorities, including mental health and housing. Biden requested a $5.8 trillion budget from Congress for the 2023 fiscal year, which begins in October, that includes $1.6 billion on discretionary programs, a 7% increase over the current year. The linchpin is a "minimum tax on billionaires" that targets roughly the country's highest 700 earners. Why does Biden have a budget? Although Congress decides federal government spending, the president's budget reflects his priorities as Democrats face an uphill fight to retain control of the House and Senate during November's midterm elections. Biden's reinvigorated domestic agenda comes as much of his focus has been overseas on the crisis in Ukraine and after his Build Back Better domestic program stalled in Congress over the winter. Refunding the police: Biden's budget includes $30 billion in mandatory funding for law enforcement, including police departments, as well as $3.2 billion for local and state grants to support police. Deficit reduction: The White House projects Biden's budget would decrease the deficit by $1 trillion over the next 10 years; however, that's contingent on passage of the plan to increase taxes on billionaires. The FDA just approved a second COVID-19 booster shot for Americans over the age of 50 years old. Find out more about the announcement here. -- Amy and Chelsey This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Gap in Trump's phone records during the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection WORCESTER Jacklyn Sutcivni, the former top city housing official convicted by a jury last summer of helping a developer steal $2.3 million in federal funds, was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison Monday. Sutcivni, who argued on her own behalf Monday in federal court after firing the lawyers who represented her at trial, vowed to appeal. I will now triple down, Sutcivni, wearing orange prison garb, told Judge Timothy S. Hillman regarding testimony she offered at trial alleging evidence against her was fabricated. Sutcivni was convicted in August of 2021 of helping a developer, James E. Levin, get government money he was not entitled to by certifying he performed work on a government-funded affordable housing project that had not been performed. Jacklyn M. Sutcivni leaves the Harold D. Donohue Federal Building at the start of her trial. The case dates to a decade ago, when Sutcivni was chief of staff for economic development under former City Manager Michael V. OBrien. Prosecutors presented reams of evidence over 10 days in the case including testimony and documents suggesting that Levin orchestrated the sale of a condo to Sutcivni that allowed her to avoid a city residency requirement. Sutcivni took the stand in her own defense, offering numerous denials and asserting that emails and other evidence against her were fabricated. Jurors took fewer than four hours to find Sutcivni guilty. At sentencing Monday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Danial E. Bennett argued Sutcivnis refusal to accept responsibility should engender stiff punishment. Bennett noted that U.S. District Court Judge Timothy S. Hillman, who presided over the trial and handed down Mondays sentence, had previously found that Sutcivni was a less than credible witness. Hillman made that finding in a ruling shortly after Sutcivnis conviction in which he ordered her jailed pending sentencing following a separate arrest. Police in New Hampshire alleged Sutcivni threatened her boyfriend shortly after losing her case and presented evidence Hillman found more credible than Sutcivnis denials. Story continues Bennett noted Monday that Sutcivnis testimony at her fraud trial came despite a break in the testimony that might have allowed her to reflect. He argued Sutcivnis doubling down made her crime worse. He asked Hillman to sentence Sutcivni to between 70 and 87 months in prison a range, in line with court guidelines that he argued took into account her obstruction of justice and abuse of public trust. Sutcivni, after listening to Bennett speak, said she would triple down, going on to say that the denials she made at trial were accurate. She repeated claims that emails sent and received from her city email address, and other evidence introduced against her at trial, were forgeries, not her work product. Sutcivni filed several motions seeking her jury verdict be set aside Monday, all of which were promptly denied. Sutcivni, who argued the motions calmly as she read from a notebook in front of her, thanked the judge politely after each motion was denied. She asked the clerk to enter a notice of appeal after her sentence was handed down. Hillman did not detail the rationale behind his 40-month sentence. He ordered Sutcivni to be on supervised release for three years after her sentence and recommended the federal prison system place her in a facility that could treat her documented medical and psychological needs. Hillman had previously found Sutcivni competent to stand trial after reviewing a psychiatric evaluation. Levin was sentenced to 37 months in prison last year after pleading guilty. Both he and Sutcivni were convicted of the same charges: Wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the government and aiding and abetting fraudulent claims. Levin has been ordered to pay the government nearly $2 million in restitution. Bennett said Monday the government intends to ask that Sutcivni be held jointly and severally liable for the same amount at a future hearing. Hillman set that restitution hearing for May 19. When she worked for the city, Sutcivnis name was Jacqueline Vachon Jackson. She changed her name which spells invictus, meaning invincible, backwards in Latin in 2012, a year before filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Worcester's former top housing official gets 40 months for fraud conviction You are the owner of this article. Submit An Obituary Funeral homes often submit obituaries as a service to the families they are assisting. However, we will be happy to accept obituaries from family members pending proper verification of the death. Go to form The leaders of NATO nations and the G-7 posed for traditional family photos during their summits in Brussels on Thursday. And unlike at previous events, the two groups did indeed seem to be cohesive families, bonded tightly over Russias invasion of Ukraine. That unity will need to endure for Ukraine to survive as a nation, for countries within the alliance to better enhance their own defenses against Russia and for democracy to survive the autocratic wave represented by Moscow and Beijing. Both meetings were a continuation and confirmation of previously announced strategies, but also were enhanced by ever-stricter sanctions. This time the economic penalties include Russias rubber-stamp parliament, the Duma, and 328 specific legislators. Also sanctioned were the head of Russias Sberbank, 17 board members of Sovcombank, 48 state-owned defense entities, and Russian elite businessman Gennady Timchenko, his family and his companies. Equally important is a new initiative to prevent other nations from backfilling the Russian economy. We are determined to continue to impose costs on Russia to bring about the end of this brutal war, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said at the summit. Those costs come with a price, which the U.S. and other nations are admirably willing to pay. In just the latest example, Biden pledged $11 billion over the next five years to contend with the coming food-security challenges the war will cause, as well as $1 billion for humanitarian needs triggered by the war. The need is great in Ukraine, of course, but also in Europe, especially in front-line nations Moldova, Romania, Slovakia and Poland. Furthermore, eventually about 100,000 Ukrainian refugees will be accepted, with a particular emphasis on those who have family connections in the U.S. Although thats a sizable and generous number, its nowhere near the wave within Europe, as the deliberate targeting of civilians has created the greatest European displacement since World War II. There are even more Ukrainians displaced in their own country. Together the total tops 10 million, or about one-fourth of the population on the run from Russias wanton warfare. Russias relatively stalled offensive and the unquestioned willingness of Putin to put citizens in harms way raises legitimate fears that he will use chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons. Biden was careful not to get into specifics in his post-summit news conference, but pledged that there indeed will be a response should Putin make that fateful error. Regarding conventional defense, Biden said in a statement that four new battle groups will be deployed to Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania in a strong signal that we will collectively defend and protect every inch of NATO territory. Ukraine, of course, is not a NATO nation. But the best way the alliance can in fact protect and defend its territory is to economically, diplomatically and militarily support Ukraine. The sequential, consequential meetings in Europe (including a late Thursday European Union meeting) last week are a constructive continuation of an effort that must be sustained during and beyond the war. Putin was banking on NATO being split, Biden said before his news conference. Thanks in part to Bidens leadership, it isnt, which benefits Ukraine and the whole free world. Our directory features more than 18 million business listings from across the entire US. However, if we're missing your business, add your business by clicking on Add Your Business. Giacomo Pedranzini, CEO of Kometa 99 Zrt., won the BBJ Expat CEO of the Year Award at the eighth annual Expat CEO Gala, held in the Grand Ballroom of Corinthia Hotel Budapest on March 25. The gala dinner was attended by many of Hungarys most important expat and domestic company heads, distinguished guests such as Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency (HIPA) head Robert Esik, as well as several ambassadors and diplomats. The BBJ Expat CEO Award is given to the foreign CEO working and living in Hungary, who is considered to have done the most to contribute to the development of the Hungarian economy and its international recognition. The first gala was held in 2015. The BBJ is Hungarys only English-language economic bi-weekly and has always played an important role in providing information for expat CEOs working and living in Hungary. That is why we decided to found an award to recognize their efforts annually, explains Balazs Roman, the CEO of the Budapest Business Journal. The Expat CEO of the Year selection process The winner of the Expat CEO of the Year award is picked by a professional jury of five 30 minutes before the gala starts. This year, the panel consisted of BBJ CEO Balazs Roman, American Chamber of Commerce in Hungary CEO Irisz Lippai-Nagy, HIPA CEO Robert Esik, German-Hungarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Andras Savos, and last year's Expat CEO of the Year winner Erik Slooten. The jury nominates expat company leaders in Hungary for the award based on criteria such as innovative skills, successes on domestic and international markets, being prominent and committed representatives of their mother country in Hungary, and their impact on Hungarys economic life. To qualify for the award, the CEO must have lived in Hungary for at least two years at the time of nomination, and the companys financial results must be positive. Robin Marshall took the stage just as the appetizers were being served, greeting the guests and reflecting on the war going on in Ukraine. No one in this room can be unaware of the terrible conflict taking place in Ukraine. We had considered whether we should cancel this event but decided that, ultimately, we should not put our lives on hold because of the events beyond our control. This remarkable community, you and your people - have responded to a human tragedy in an utterly human way, by working out what you can do to help, and then going out and doing it. Just as you did with COVID. And that is the right response, I think. So, with humility, lets get on with the evening, he concluded, inviting Robert Esik to the stage. Esik noted that HIPA has been a proud partner of the BBJ since the first gala in 2015, and noted Hungarys remarkable recovery from the COVID crisis. We have had the second highest GDP growth in Europe in 2021 with 7.1%, he said. In his speech he also touched upon the crisis going on in neighboring Ukraine, reassuring expat CEOs We will remain your partner, no matter the circumstances. After a Mentimeter quiz game with the participation of the audience, Marshall presented the shortlisted candidates, while paying tribute to past winners. Many of our previous winners have been promoted and moved on to pastures new. Others, I am delighted to say, are still with us. Our seven winners have been drawn from six countries, Brazil, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. We have had five men and two women. All are remarkable in their own right, he noted. This year, the three nominees were managing director of GoTo in Hungary John Ford, CEO Hydro Extrusion Hungary Kft. CEO Frank Iepema, and Kometa 99 Zrt. CEO Giacomo Pedranzini. Arriving on the stage after the screening of three videos introducing the 2022 candidates, last years winner Slooten carried with him an envelope that contained the name of the winner. He jokingly remarked that he is the shortest reigning Expat CEO of the Year, due to the fact that the 2022 gala was held only roughly half a year after the previous one, which was postponed due to COVID-related restrictions, before calling attention to the refugee crisis brewing in Europe. There are many people less privileged than us, and there are many charities that need our support to take care of underprivileged people, including women and children, he said in relation to the Ukraine Crisis. Pedranzini named Expat CEO of the Year The eighth Expat CEO of the Year Award went to Giacomo Pedranzini, the first-ever Italian winner of the Expat CEO of the Year Award. After accepting the award amidst thunderous applause, Pedranzini told the short story of Kometa in Hungary. In 1994, at the beginning of the privatization process, we were called Kaposvari Huskombinat. At the time there were 15 companies like ours, he remarked, highlighting the fierce competition at the time. Today, only four of them remain, but that was the evolution of the sector. He also noted that Hungary is a paradise for agriculture and that he is happy that the country managed to reestablish a strong presence on the European stage in the food industry. Past winners Last year, the Expat CEO of the Year Award went to Erik Slooten, then CEO of Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions Hungary. The 2020 winner was BlackRocks Melanie Seymour, the first British winner of the award. Taira-Julia Lammi, CEO of ABB Hungary Kft., won the award in 2019, becoming the first Finnish winner and the first woman, while in 2018, the title went to Marc de Bastos Eckstein, CEO of Thyssenkrupp Components Technology Hungary Kft. In 2017, it was Jorg Bauer, then of GE Hungary, in 2016 it was Jost Ernst Lammers, of Budapest Airport Zrt. (all three German nationals), and the inaugural award was presented to Spains Javier Gonzalez Pareja, of Bosch Magyarorszag. Visitors to several pro-government news sites on Monday morning were greeted with messages that they were reading propaganda media, reports Szabad Europa. This website is part of the governments propaganda media! We bring you the truth! Independent media instead of propaganda! Take a look at how the propagand media tricks you! -were some of the messages awaiting visitors on the websites of visitors to Nemzeti Sport, Metropol, Figyelo, Szabad Fold, 888.hu, Mandiner, and the online sites of a few local dailies yesterday, writes Telex. The hacked pages featured videos and articles about how the news is manipulated by state-run media and government-friendly media. Other content on the sites criticized Prime Minister Viktor Orban and promoted opposition leader Peter Marki-Zay. At the bottom of the hacked sites were indications that the international hackivist collective Anonymous was behind the cyberattack. Government-critical content eventually disappeared from the sites, but the attacked websites remained inacessible even after that. On Sunday night, just a few hours before the sites were attacked, RTL reported that the Anonymous hacker group had threatened the Orban government in a video for continuing to stand behind Vladimir Putin and Russia. Meanwhile, the Hungarian government and Prime Minister Viktor Orban continue to act as a Trojan horse in Europe for the Kremlin, and block all efforts in support of the Ukrainian people and those that sanction Russia. -wrote Anonymous, calling on the Hungarian government to stop spreading Russian propaganda. YORK A naked man, who was running in traffic on Interstate 80 last December, has been formally charged with possession of methamphetamine and a jury trial has been scheduled for late May in the York County District Court. Enrique Mendez, 29, of Montebello, Calif., pleaded not guilty during recent arraignment proceedings, to a Class 4 felony which carries a possible maximum sentence of two years in prison and 12 months of post-release supervision. On Dec. 27, at 3:26 a.m., deputies with the York County Sheriffs Department were dispatched to the area of Interstate 80 about a mile east of the Bradshaw exit. They were dispatched on the report of a male in the nude who was running in and out of traffic on foot. Upon their arrival, according to court documents, they saw a heavy-set man with no shirt or pants on. They said he was walking very strangely around a Chevrolet Malibu. They said when asking him what he was doing, he stated he had lost his cars key while removing his clothes and waving for help. They also noticed he had blood on his back, arms and legs, and a rather long superficial laceration along his lower back. They determined, based on his comments, it seemed as if he cut himself on a nearby barbed wire fence. While York Fire Department EMTs checked on Mendez and warmed him up, deputies were advised that there was an active warrant out of California for his arrest. He was placed under arrest. During an inventory search of the vehicle, deputies found a battery charging pack in the center console with a white powdery substance on it, which tested positive as methamphetamine. They also found a small bag with meth. They noted in court documents that Mendez has a lengthy criminal history including convictions for assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, vehicle theft, evading police and possession of stolen vehicles. Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia with Minister of State for Civil Aviation Gen (Retd) V.K Singh flagged off IndiGos direct flight between Indore and Jammu on March 28. Speaking on the occasion, Scindia said, "Today marks an important day in the history of Indian Civil Aviation as the crown of India will be connected with the heart of India. With the commencement of the direct flight between the two cities, Indore will now have 28 daily flights. 632 weekly flights will be operating out of Madhya Pradesh. The airline will be deploying its A320, a 150-seater twin turbofan engine passenger aircraft that is primarily used on Domestic routes. The Indore-Jammu flight will operate four times a week, a statement from IndiGo said. The flight will depart from Indore at 10:10 AM and land in Jammu at 12:05 PM on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, it said. The return flight will depart from Jammu at 12:35 PM and land in Indore at 2:45 PM on the aforementioned four days. "My aim is to develop 1 or 2 cities in every state which are fully connected with the entire country and in Madhya Pradesh, Indore has achieved this. Previously, Indore was connected with 12 cities but in 6 months, we have connected Indore to 22 cities such as panaji, Kishangarh, Raipur, Belgaum, Gwalior, Pune, Nagpur etc," he said. Also read: Airlines to operate flights to 40 countries as India resumes international air travel "Apart from Jammu, we have connected Indore with Visakhapatnam and Chandigarh from today onwards," he further added. The people of Indore and its adjoining areas will be benefitted by getting direct air connectivity to Jammu which will facilitate seamless movement of passengers between Indore and Jammu and vice-versa. IndiGo representatives handed over the first boarding pass to Scindia as a token of appreciation and later to a passenger Preeti Sharma, who said she was waiting for such a service for a long time in order to visit Vaishno Devi Temple. With these new commercial flights, common people will get multiple options to travel between these places which will boost the tourism potential and increase the economic activity of both regions, officials said. (With inputs from agencies) Live TV #mute According to the National Guard, the Cancun International Airport in Mexico was rocked by loud booms on March 28 and several flights were halted for about three hours after reports of gunfire were received. Videos on social media show passengers rushing out of a terminal. The Guard said no gunshots had been fired and that the bangs may have been caused by someone knocking over the vertical display stands in the terminal. In a statement, the airport explained the alarm was caused by three signboards that fell after being inadvertently pushed over. This caused noise that caused people to run for the exits. Read also: Vistara to enhance aircraft safety using RFIDAeroCheck technology, becomes India's 1st airline Cancun's reputation as a laid-back getaway has been tarnished by a wave of violence and deaths. The Jalisco cartel has been committing murders in Cancun since September, and authorities found four bodies dumped last week. Authorities found most of the bodies dumped in vacant properties. #Mexico Cancun International Airport Authorities investigating what caused passenger panic at Cancun Airport (according to media) 28/03/2022 pic.twitter.com/a0UvZU4zZG NiCoLeEliSei (@NiCoLeEliSei1) March 28, 2022 Mexican tourism is Mexico's top money maker, but violence has plagued the Caribbean coast. Two Canadians were killed near Cancun in January because of a debt between two international gangs engaged in trafficking drugs and weapons, prosecutors claimed. In late October, two tourists were killed in the laid back destination of Tulum, farther south in the Mexican state of Yucatan. One was a California travel blogger born in India, while the other was from Germany. With inputs from AP Live TV #mute New Delhi: Baba Ramdev-led Patanjali group's Ruchi Soya in regulatory filing informed Sebi and stock exchanges that it has come across some messages on social media "speculating" about investment opportunities in the FPO and the company shares being available at discount to the market price. "This is to bring to public notice that There is a SMS/Message in circulation in social media, speculating about investment opportunity in our Companys Issue and about equity shares of our Company being available at discount to the market price (Message). We wish to bring to attention of the investors that this Message has not been issued by our Company or any of our Directors, Promoters, Promoter Group or Group Companies. A first information report (FIR) bearing No. 0188 dated March 27, 2022 (FIR) has been lodged by Ruchi Soya Pvt Ltd with a police station at Haridwar to take up investigation in respect to circulation of the Message, under Section 67A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and section 420 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860," said a company statement. "As directed by SEBI, we wish to bring to attention of the investors that all Bidders (other than Anchor Investors), have an option to withdraw their Bids from March 28, 2022, till March 30, 2022," Ruchi Soya said. "Investors should further note that bidding in the Issue is closed i.E. March 28, 2022, and accordingly no further Bids will be accepted in the Issue. Any Bids, after the Bid/Issue closure will be rejected," it added. This regulatory filing followed a direction issued by Sebi after a meeting held earlier in the day with the bankers managing the Rs 4,300 crore FPO. Sebi asked bankers to issue an advertisement in newspapers on Tuesday and Wednesday cautioning investors about the circulation of SMSs. Besides, Sebi asked bankers to give an option to investors to withdraw their already placed bids till March 30th. The issue opened on March 24 and the subscription level was 3.6 times at the close of the scheduled closing this evening. The company has already raised Rs 1,290 crore from anchor investors. With PTI Inputs Live TV #mute New Delhi: The Delhi Assembly on Tuesday passed the AAP government's 'Rozgar' budget worth Rs 75,800 crore for the financial year 2022-23 following a debate. The Speaker adjourned the Assembly sine die after the conclusion of six days of the budgetary session that had started on March 21. The budget, which was presented last Saturday, aims at creating 20 lakh job opportunities in the next five years by boosting the retail sector, redevelopment of famous markets and industrial areas in non-conforming zones, startups, tourism and promoting the nighttime economy. Participating in the debate on the budget, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said various measures announced in the budget reflected the Aam Aadi Party's ideology of "hardcore patriotism, diehard honest and humanity". Kejriwal said that keeping employment as the central focus, the Delhi budget is the country`s first Rozgaar Budget. Speaking to the media later, Kejriwal said, "Employment used to be the issue that was only discussed during election campaigns, after that nobody used to address that issue. For the first time since independence, a budget has been made keeping employment as its central focus." The CM added, "Ours is independent India`s first `Rozgaar Budget`. Educated youth are still struggling for jobs and in the last few years, demonetization, GST, and pandemic have worsened the job scenario." Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, who also holds the Finance portfolio, said the budget was prepared based on 6,500 suggestions received from the Delhiites. Twelve people whose suggestions were considered in the budget presentation were present in the session and Sisodia cited their names, recognising their inputs. "Over 150 meetings were conducted with various associations and regulatory bodies by our economy team. As a result, some of the important suggestions were included in the budget such as redevelopment and regeneration of the city's iconic markets, IT parks, startup policy, e-commerce boost, creation of new jobs through various channels," Sisodia said. Several Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislators and ministers Gopal Rai and Satyendar Jain also participated in the debate. Leader of Opposition Ramvir Singh Bidhuri termed the budget as "disappointing" pointing to the rising fiscal deficit and charged that the government failed on health, education, transport and other fronts. The budget was passed by voice vote. The Demands for Grants for year 2022-23 and Appropriation Bill 2022 were also passed by the House. Live TV New Delhi: With the goal of making India a $5 trillion economy by 2025, the India Global India Collaboration (GIC) was founded during the Dubai World Expo 2021-22. GIC is a section 8 not-for-profit organisation with chapters in 12 countries that account for 80 percent of India's external commerce. It was founded with the explicit goal of promoting sustainable development in which people, planet, and profit coexist. "GIC is an effort and a platform that enables India to attain the target of $5 trillion GDP," stated Santosh Mangal, Global President of GIC. We seek to make a sustained, measurable, and provable good influence on our society, culture, and business ecosystems by creating a synergy between people, planet, and profit, and we are driven by honesty, intelligence, and vision based on ground realities." "A vibrant mix of large corporations, SMEs, experts, social entrepreneurs, financial professionals, retailers, and investors." It offers to elevate your firm to a whole new level, driven by technology, fresh ideas, innovations, and acute knowledge of evolving social requirements and scenarios," he added. The GIC global president stated that GIC would establish regional chapters in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Singapore in the following months. GIC led a high-level team to Dubai from March 25 to March 28 to revitalise the MSME sector and start other initiatives. In his remarks at the inauguration event, Ved Pratap Vaidik, famous journalist, political analyst, and freelance columnist stated, "India has been the economic superpower since ancient times, as well as the centre of world trade." Traders from all over the world would travel to India in search of trading and commerce prospects. GIC would go a long way in developing the Indian economy in the twenty-first century, which I have been dreaming of for the past 50 years." "We can do our best in numerous areas, including pharmaceuticals and other sectors," he continued. However, for these, we require a broader future vision. The education sector requires a substantial reform, similar to what the United States did after World War II, when it invested 10% of its GDP to promote education." Apart from GIC delegation leaders from India, prominent trade and industry figures from Dubai were also in attendance. Ashok Bhuwaniwala, India President, GIC, established the 9-point agenda as the organization's organisational philosophy. "To achieve the aim, GIC will launch targeted programmes, collaborations, and promotions in nine industries to unleash the animal spirit of Indian industry." Industry, Education, Health, Justice, Social, Capital Environment, Media, Ethics, and Gender Issues are among them," Bhuwaniwala remarked. Sahitya Chaturvedi, president, Indian Business & Professional Council (IBPC), Rehan Allawala, founder, Institute of Peace, and Ajay Banarsi Das, entrepreneur, social worker, and politician (Son of former Haryana Chief Minister, Banarsi Das Gupta), were among those present in person and virtually. Brijesh Mishra, a former MLA and politician, social worker, and philanthropist, stated, "GIC would go a long way in reaching the long-awaited $5 trillion economy because it had all the necessary pieces to realise this objective." "The MSME sector can make the country Atmanirbhar (self-reliant) in manufacturing, confront the unemployment problem, and establish a vibrant and globally competitive industrial innovation eco-system," stated Vandana Singh, former ASSOCHEM vice-president. It also has the ability to significantly empower women by providing large-scale equity in India's growth story." New Delhi: Petrol and diesel prices continued to hike on Tuesday (March 29, 2022) and were increased by 80 paise and 70 paise a litre respectively. With this, the petrol prices have now crossed the Rs 100-mark per litre in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. In the national capital, the rates of petrol and diesel are Rs 100.21 per litre and Rs 91.47 per litre respectively, while in Mumbai, petrol is now being sold at Rs 115.04 and diesel at Rs 99.25. In Chennai, the price of petrol has been increased by 76 paise and now stands at Rs 105.94 and diesel is at Rs 96. The petrol in Kolkata will now cost Rs 109.68 and diesel Rs 94.62. It is noteworthy that rates have been increased across the country and vary from state to state depending upon the incidence of local taxation. Earlier on Monday, the Opposition demanded a rollback in the hike in prices of fuel and cooking gas and sought a statement from Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the floor of the House over the issue. The Opposition members also dismissed the contention of the government that the rise in prices was due to the Russia-Ukraine war. Raising the issue during the Zero Hour in Lok Sabha, Congress' leader in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said the common people are in distress with "their pockets being looted" due to the rising prices. Petrol price on Monday was hiked by 30 paise a litre and diesel by 35 paise, taking the total increase in rates in the last one week to Rs 4-4.10 per litre. That was the sixth increase in fuel prices since the ending on March 22 of a four-and-half-month-long hiatus in rate revision. On the first four occasions, prices were increased by 80 paise a litre -- the steepest single-day rise since the daily price revision was introduced in June 2017. On Sunday, petrol price went up by 50 paise a litre and diesel by 55 paise. In all, petrol and diesel prices have gone up by Rs 4.80 per litre. Live TV New Delhi: The UAE has enormous investment surplus while India has a huge market, and is an attractive destination, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said on Monday. He said that both the countries have expertise, and can work together in areas such as sustainability, space technology, connectivity, artificial intelligence, emerging technologies and data analytics. "The UAE has a huge investment surplus in terms of investments ability, and India has a huge market which makes that an attractive destination, and therefore, we are not in competition with each other; rather, we complement each other. We are natural partners," Goyal said at the India-UAE Startup Forum 2022 here. He said that the government acts only as a facilitator for startups, and it will help further strengthen the ecosystem. "Today we are the third largest startup ecosystem, but our aspiration is to be the world's number one startup destination. The startup bug has caught India's imagination. The entire innovation ecosystem that the startup industry represents is giving a new direction, new momentum to India," he said. India offers one of the best ecosystems for startups with a special 'jugalbandi' or blend between investors and entrepreneurs to get a balanced outcome and achieve a win-win solution for all, the minister said. "I have seen tremendous response from the Dubai Expo where our startups have got the opportunity to raise finances, sign MoUs (Memorandum of Understandings) and get angel investments," he added. About 700 startups have showcased their innovation at Expo2020 Dubai. The minister also urged the startups to take their story to remote places, villages, small towns, northeastern India and other regions as well. Subhashis Kar, the founder of Techbooze Consultancy Services Pvt. Ltd said, "India's third-largest trading partner is the United Arab Emirates. In 2020-21, bilateral trade between India and the UAE was valued at USD 43.3 billion. In 2020-21, exports totaled USD 16.7 billion, while imports totaled USD 26.7 billion. This demonstrates the depth of the relationship between the two countries." Live TV #mute New Delhi: At a press conference event for John Abraham's upcoming film 'Attack', the cast of the film including Jacqueline Fernandez, Rakul Preet Singh and director Lakshya Raj Anand answered pressing questions about the thrilling actioner. However, John Abraham seemingly lost his cool during the segment. During the QnA session with journalists, John Abraham got irritated with one of the questions asked by a journalist about his previous film 'Satyameva Jayate 2'. The journalist told John in Hindi, "Your films have an overdose of action. It looks good as long as you are fighting four or five people. But, it is too much when you are seen fighting 200 people all by yourself, throwing away bikes and stopping choppers with your hands." To this, John replied, "I am sorry main toh Attack ki baat kar raha hu, agar aapko isse problem hai (I am talking about Attack. If you have problem with this), then I am sorry. I really offended you." After that, he looked at Jacqueline and Rakul and said, "Bichara (Poor guy), I think he is very frustrated." While answering the next question, John again made a hit at the journalist and said, "I am trying to be mentally fit to answer some crazy questions as people are so dumb. Sorry sir, aap dimaag chod kar aa gaye (You left your brain at home). I apologise for you. On behalf of everyone, I shall apologise for you, no problem, youll do better next time." Watch the video here: John Abraham's action entertainer 'Attack' is all set to release in cinemas on April 1 2022. Co-starring Jacqueline Fernandez and Rakul Preet Singh in lead roles, the film's first part is set to pack a punch this summer! ATTACK is a combination of sci-fi angle, high octane action, and drama. The narrative introduces an earthbound super soldier played by John Abraham with ordinary human abilities who becomes a super soldier who can operate beyond normal human limits. Helmed by Lakshya Raj Anand, Part 1 of 'Attack' is a big-ticket franchise based on a world where future wars will be fought on technology and artificial intelligence (AI). New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amt Shah said it is "a historic day" for a dispute-free northeast after Chief Ministers of Assam and Meghalaya signed an agreement for the settlement of inter-state border dispute on Tuesday. Shah noted that in a short span of time, 6 out of 12 issues have been settled between Assam and Meghalaya and about 70 per cent of the border between the two states has become dispute-free. This interstate boundary settlement will usher in a new era of peace, harmony & progress in the state of Assam & Meghalaya. I want to assure our sisters and brothers of Northeast that PM @narendramodi led central govt will leave no stone unturned in fulfilling their aspirations. pic.twitter.com/Jij1L761NJ Amit Shah (@AmitShah) March 29, 2022 He said during the last three years, the union government has signed several agreements for ending extremism and for lasting peace in the northeastern states. The Home Minister said PM Modi has made several efforts for the peace process, development, prosperity and promotion of the cultural heritage of the northeast, which "we all have witnessed, since 2014, when he became the Prime Minister". Historic day for the North-East. The signing of the interstate boundary settlement between the states of Assam and Meghalaya. Watch live! https://t.co/hvHL4lipun Amit Shah (@AmitShah) March 29, 2022 Looking at the journey from 2019 to 2022, there have seen many big achievements in establishing peace in the North East - NLFT agreement in August 2019, the Bru-Reang agreement on January 16, 2020, the Bodo agreement on January 27, 2020, the Karbi-Anglong agreement on September 4, 2021, and today`s Assam-Meghalaya border agreement. Assam Chief Minister Hemant Biswa Sarma and his Meghalaya counterpart Conrad Sangma expressed gratitude to PM Modi and Amit Shah for solving this decades-long problem. Noting that development of the Northeast is not possible unless disputes between states are resolved and armed groups surrender, the Home Minister said that efforts should be made in the year of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav to realize Prime Minister Narendra Modi`s dream of a peaceful and prosperous northeast.PM Modi has described the northeast as "Ashtalakshmi". The Home Minister said that with the efforts of the government, the North East Region (NER) will not only be a part of the national mainstream but will also be the driving force in national development. He said the Modi government has taken several initiatives including a narcotics-free, flood-free and infiltration-free North-East and both the Centre and northeastern states are progressing in a time-bound manner on all these fronts. Noting that another 50-year-old dispute is going to be resolved with today`s agreement, he said that from 2019 to 2022, more than 6,900 armed cadres have surrendered and more than 4,800 weapons have been surrendered to the administration. The Home Minister said NLFT (SD) agreement was signed in August, 2019 to bring the extremists in the mainstream of society in Tripura which contributed greatly in making Tripura a peaceful state. A landmark agreement was signed on January 16, 2020, to solve the 23-year-old Bru-Reang refugee crisis forever. Under this, more than 37,000 tribals who were leading a difficult life, are now living a life of dignity today. Amit Shah said that the Bodo Accord signed on January 27, 2020 resolved the 50-year-old Bodo issue while maintaining the original form of Assam. The Assam Government and the Government of India have fulfilled 95 per cent of the terms of this agreement and today Bodoland is known as a peaceful region and is on the path of development. The Karbi-Anglong Agreement was signed on September 4, 2021 to resolve the long-standing dispute in the Karbi regions of Assam. Under this, more than 1,000 armed cadres surrendered and joined the mainstream. He thanked the Chief Ministers and officials of both the states on behalf of PM Modi and the central government. Amit Shah said he is confident that the strong political will shown by the Chief Ministers of Assam and Meghalaya, "we will make the North East dispute-free through discussions with all the states". A Home Ministry release said it has been the consistent approach of the central government that inter-state boundary issues can be resolved only with the cooperation of the state governments concerned. It said the central government acts as a facilitator for amicable settlement of the boundary issue in the spirit of mutual cooperation and understanding. The release said that the agreement will benefit people living in the area and ensure long-lasting peace and boost development. "This agreement exemplifies cooperative federalism and will provide a roadmap for resolution of other boundary disputes between states," the release said. Live TV New Delhi: Assam and Meghalaya governments on Tuesday signed a ''historic agreement'' here in the national capital to resolve their 50-year-old pending boundary difference. The agreement was signed by the Chief Ministers of Assam and Meghalaya in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah at the office of the Ministry of Home Affairs. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and his Meghalaya counterpart Conrad K Sangma signed the agreement in the presence of the chief secretaries of both the states as well as other officials of these states and the officials of MHA. #WATCH Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma and Meghalaya CM Conrad K Sangma sign an agreement to resolve the 50-year-old pending boundary dispute between their states, in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Delhi pic.twitter.com/hnP6hs8yMm ANI (@ANI) March 29, 2022 Speaking on the occasion, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said, "Today, a 50-year-old pending boundary dispute between Assam and Meghalaya has been resolved. 6 out of 12 points of the dispute has been resolved, which comprises nearly 70% of the boundary. The remaining 6 points will be resolved at the earliest.'' "Since 2014, PM Modi Ji has made numerous efforts for the development of the northeast region. Today, I congratulate Assam CM and Meghalaya CM and their teams on the signing of the agreement to resolve their boundary dispute, '' the Union Home Minister added. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between Assam and Meghalaya two months after a draft resolution was submitted by the Chief Ministers of both states to Shah on January 31 for examination and consideration by the MHA. The governments of Assam and Meghalaya had come up with a draft resolution to resolve their border disputes in six of the 12 "areas of difference" along the 884-km boundary. According to the proposed recommendations for the 36.79 square km of land, Assam will keep 18.51 square km and give the remaining 18.28 square km to Meghalaya. The agreement between Assam and Meghalaya is significant as the boundary dispute between the two states has been pending for a very long time. The long-standing land dispute was sparked in 1972 when Meghalaya was carved out of Assam. The border issues came as a result of different readings of the demarcation of boundaries in the initial agreement for the new state`s creation. Live TV New Delhi: Assam and Meghalaya governments are set to sign an agreement in the national capital on Tuesday evening to resolve their 50-year-old pending boundary difference. Officials in the Ministry of Home Affairs said that the agreement will be signed by the Chief Ministers of Assam and Meghalaya in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah at around 3.30 pm in the office of the MHA. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and his Meghalaya counterpart Meghalaya Conrad K Sangma would sign the agreement in the presence of chief secretaries of both the states as well as other officials of these states and the officials of MHA. There is an indication of a final round of discussion with the MHA before the actual Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) will be signed between Assam and Meghalaya. A draft resolution was submitted by the Chief Ministers of Assam and Meghalaya to the Union Home Minister Amit Shah on January 31 for examination and consideration by the MHA. The governments of Assam and Meghalaya had come up with a draft resolution to resolve their border disputes in six of the 12 "areas of difference" along the 884-km boundary. According to the proposed recommendations for the 36.79 square km of land, Assam will keep 18.51 square km and give the remaining 18.28 square km to Meghalaya. The final agreement between Assam and Meghalaya is significant as the boundary dispute between the two states has been pending for a very long time. The long-standing land dispute was sparked in 1972 when Meghalaya was carved out of Assam. The border issues came about as a result of different readings of the demarcation of boundaries in the initial agreement for the new state`s creation. Live TV Bihar Board 10th Result 2022: The Bihar Board Class 10th Results 2022 is likely to be announced soon by the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB). Bihar Board 10th Result 2022 will be declared on the BSEB's official website. The results for the Bihar Board Class 10th will be released online at biharboardonline.bihar.gov.in. Bihar Board 10th Result 2022: Date and Time The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) is likely to announce the Bihar Board 10th Result 2022 on Tuesday (March 29, 2022). BSEB Matric Result 2022: Sites to check 10th Results The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) will declare the Bihar Board 10th Result 2022 on its official website. The Bihar Board Class 10th students can check their results at biharboardonline.bihar.gov.in. Students are advised to save their scorecards for future reference. Students can also access Bihar Board 10th Result 2022 on the DigiLocker app. BSEB (Bihar Board) Matric (Class 10) Result 2022: How to check Results Once announced, Bihar Board Class 10th students can their results on BSEB's official website at biharboardonline.bihar.gov.in. On the homepage, students need to click on the 'result' link. Students then need to enter their details including their roll numbers. Bihar Board Class 10th Result 2022 will appear on the screen. Around 17 lakh students are said to have appeared for the Bihar Board Class X exams. Live TV New Delhi: The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) is likely to announce Bihar Board Class 10th Results 2022 soon. The Bihar Board 10th Result 2022 will be declared on the BSEB's official website- biharboardonline.bihar.gov.in BSEB Matric Result 2022: Date and Time BSEB is likely to announce the Bihar Board 10th Result 2022 today (March 29, 2022). BSEB Matric Result 2022: Sites to check scores Bihar Board Class 10th students can check their results at biharboardonline.bihar.gov.in. As soon as the results are announced, students are advised to download their scorecards for future reference. BSEB Class 10 students can also access Bihar Board 10th Result 2022 on the DigiLocker app. BSEB Matric Result 2022: How to check Results Step 1. Visit the BSEB's official website at biharboardonline.bihar.gov.in. Step 2. On the homepage, click on the 'result' link. Step 3. Enter their details including their roll numbers and click on submit. Step 4. Bihar Board Class 10th Result 2022 will appear on the screen. BSEB Matric Result 2022: Details on marksheet Bihar board Matric result 2022 mark sheets will include name, roll code and roll number, registration number of the students, marks in each subject, total marks and qualifying status. Notably, around 17 lakh students are said to have appeared for the Bihar Board Class X exams this year. The Bihar Board Matric exams were held from February 17 to February 24, 2022 in the state at various exam centres. Live TV New Delhi: The Bombay High Court has issued a notification for the recruitment of eligible individuals for the post of Staff Car Driver. The interested and eligible candidates can apply for the recruitment drive on the official website of Bombay HC- bhc.gov.in. The last date to submit the online application is set for April 11, 2022. Class 10 Pass candidates are also eligible to apply for the recruitment drive. Bombay High Court Recruitment 2022: Vacancy details Post- Staff Car Driver Bombay High Court Recruitment 2022: Salary details Rs.19,900/- to Rs.63,200/- per month. Bombay High Court Recruitment 2022: Educational qualification Candidates should have passed Class 10th from recognised board/ institution. Bombay High Court Recruitment 2022: Age limit Candidates should be between 21 to 38 years of age. Bombay High Court Recruitment 2022: Direct link to apply Bombay High Court Recruitment 2022: Steps to apply Step 1. Visit the official website of Bombay High Court Step 2. Go to the Recruitment Section Step 3. Click on the Apply Online' button Step 4. Register yourself and fill out your application form Step 5. Pay Application Fee Step 6. Download and take a printout of the application form for future reference Live TV New Delhi: The Delhi Transport Department informed that from April 1, buses and goods carriers in the territory will use designated lanes. The announcement was made by Delhi Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot today in the Delhi Assembly. According to the announcement, the Arvind Kejriwal-led government in the national capital will soon begin an intensive enforcement drive for bus drivers and goods carriage vehicles to assure that they adhere to strict lane discipline rules. "If a bus driver doesn`t drive in the bus lane, he will be penalised with Rs 10,000 for a first-time offence," said Kailash Gahlot. "For the second time offence, a case for dangerous driving will be registered against the bus driver," he added. The transport minister also announced punishments for the third and fourth attempts of rash driving by the bus driver. He said, "the driving license of the offender will be cancelled if the law is broken for the third time, while the fourth violation could result in the revoking of the permit of the private bus." To make Delhi roads safer, the @ArvindKejriwal govt is starting Bus Lane Enforcement drives to increase Commuter Safety & tackle congestion. Directions have been issued to DTC & Cluster for driver sensitization, PWD for earmarking bus lanes & Transport, Police enforcement teams. pic.twitter.com/FttRKRy6G7 Kailash Gahlot (@kgahlot) March 23, 2022 Additionally, Delhis Transport Department will issue a WhatsApp number to take strict actions against the violators. Any individual will be able to submit a video if they see a bus driver violating rules and the government will take action considering it as evidence. The targeted corridors selected by the Delhis Transport Department are the Mehrauli-Badarpur Road stretch from Anuvrat Marg T-point to Pul Prahladpur T-point, Ashram Chowk to Badarpur Border, Janakpuri to Madhuban Chowk, Moti Nagar to Dwarka Mor, Britannia Chowk to Dhaula Quan, Kashmere Gate ISBT to Apsra Border, Signature Bridge-Bhopura Border, Jahangirpuri Metro Station-Kashmere Gate ISBT and ITO-Ambedkar Nagar among others. "We will issue a WhatsApp number where anyone can send us a video if they see any bus driver violating rules. We will take action according to the evidence provided," said Gahlot. Live TV New Delhi: Ukraine and Russia met for fours hours in Istanbul for a fresh round of peace talks on Tuesday (March 29, 2022), with Kyiv seeking a ceasefire without compromising on its sovereignty or territorial integrity. Later, the Russian military announced it will fundamentally" scale back operations near Ukraine's capital and a northern city. Both sides played down hopes of an early breakthrough. The widespread devastation of lives and property has left millions in grief, however, it has acted as a money-printing machine for the arms and ammunition companies. In today's DNA, Zee News Editor-in-Chief, Sudhir Chaudhary analyses how the war has become an industry and how the arms-manufacturing companies across the globe have been filing their coffers even as millions of innocent lives are being lost everyday. As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine started shares of many arms companies belonging to the western countries has increased many folds. Shares of a US-based company, Lockheed Martin, which supplies weapons to different countries of the world, including Ukraine, have jumped by 27 percent, from 355 US dollars to 453 US dollars, in a month because of the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia. Whenever a building falls down, the stocks of these weapons manufacturing companies go up. The longer the war between Ukraine and Russia lasts, the more these arms-making companies will benefit. Similarly, it has been observed that shares of other arms making company based in Germany, Rheinmetall, has increased by 143 percent in the last two months. Notably, neither Ukraine nor Russia buys arms from this company, but the fear of war has helped the share prices of this company in reaching historical levels. The recent developments in Ukraine have also alarmed several other nations. No country wants to compromise with national security nowadays and this has led them to announce an increase in their defence budgets. This step has been taken by Romania, Sweden, Denmark, China and Poland. In fact, countries like Britain, France and Canada are also considering increasing their defence budgets. This arms industry in the whole world is worth about 38 lakh crore rupees. This makes one wonder what will happen when all these countries increase their defence budget and spend more money on weapons? Live TV Live TV Lucknow: Eight-time BJP MLA Satish Mahana was on Tuesday (March 29, 2022) elected unopposed as the Speaker of the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Leader of Opposition Akhilesh Yadav hailed his election and promised to positively contribute to the functioning of the House. Speaking in the Assembly after escorting Mahana to the Speaker's chair, Adityanath said it's a good sign for the state that two "wheels of democracy" (ruling and opposition) moved in one direction. He appealed to members of the House that the elections are over and it's their duty to work for the progress of UP. Speaking next, Yadav hailed the "beginning of a healthy tradition" in the House by electing the Speaker unanimously. He urged Mahana to act with neutrality as Speaker and protect the rights of the Opposition. "Though you come from right (BJP) but now you will see more towards Left (Opposition). Being a referee of the House, you must not become a part of their game," Akhilesh said. "It will be your duty to safeguard the rights of the Opposition and prevent the government from becoming dictatorial," Yadav said. Acting Speaker Ramapati Shastri announced the unopposed election of Mahana, with his being the only nomination for the post. Governor Anandiben Patel had fixed March 29 as the date for the election of the Speaker. Mahana's nomination was proposed by Adityanath and supported by senior minister Suresh Khanna. Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav had also proposed Mahana's name and his party's Awadhesh Prasad had supported it. Besides, leaders of other political parties, including Raghuraj Pratap Singh of the Jansatta Dal Loktantrik and Aradhana Mishra of the Congress, too, had proposed his nomination. Mahana was elected for the eighth time from the Maharajpur seat of Kanpur district in the just-concluded Assembly polls. Born on October 14, 1960 in Kanpur, he was elected a member of the Legislative Assembly for the first time in 1991. Apart from being the Minister of State for Urban Development in the Mayawati-led government of the BSP-BJP alliance, he has also been a minister in the governments led by Kalyan Singh, Ram Prakash Gupta and Rajnath Singh. He was the industrial development minister in the previous Yogi Adityanath government. In the seven-phase elections to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly, the BJP-led alliance had bagged 273 seats. The SP-led alliance bagged 125 seats. The Congress and the Jansatta Dal Loktantrik got two seats each while the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party secured one seat. Live TV New Delhi: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Tuesday (March 29, 2022) accused the Centre of doing everything to stop his government from working for the people. Delhi CM also said hardcore patriotism, diehard honesty and humanity are the three pillars of the AAP's ideology and the 2022-23 Delhi budget reflects these. Delhi Chief Minister also said that the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and demonetisation has increased unemployment in the last few years. During a discussion on the budget in the assembly, AAP's national convener said his government has prepared the "Rozgar Budget" to deal with the issue of unemployment as the Congress and the BJP "robbed" the country in the last 75 years. These parties have a long list of scams, he said. Kejriwal also asserted that for the first time after independence that a "Rozgar Budget" has been presented by any government. "The budget presented in the assembly is not an ordinary document, it is historical. A 'Rozgar Budget' has been presented for the first time in independent India," Kejriwal said. "The budget has been prepared to bring happiness to all. We have brought the 'Rozgar Budget' because of our ideology. Hardcore patriotism, diehard honesty and humanity are the three pillars of our (AAP's) ideology," he said. After the discussion in the Delhi Assembly, while talking to the reporters, Kejriwal attacked the Centre, saying that the implementation of the GST and demonetisation coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the job scenario in the country. "In the last few years, many incidents have happened due to which unemployment has increased (in the country). Such incidents include introduction of GST, demonetisation and coronavirus pandemic, and because of all this, people are very troubled," he said. "Keeping all this in view, the 'Rozgar Budget' has been prepared by our government which promises to provide 20 lakh new jobs," Kejriwal said. The Delhi government, in the budget, promised 20 lakh jobs in the next five years, he said in the House and added that many political parties do not dare to make such a promise even before an election. "It's our commitment in the assembly. None had dared to give 20 lakh jobs even before elections. Our budget has a detailed plan of providing these jobs," Kejriwal said. The chief minister said that he has lived in the slums to understand the pain and sufferings of people, and wants to better the lives of the poor and the common man. Kejriwal said he is happy that God has given him the opportunity to do something for them. "We are extremely happy to make the best quality hospitals and clinics for the poor and make healthcare free. I became CM but could not implement doorstep delivery of rations here. Pleaded in front of everyone I could to implement the Ghar-Ghar Ration Yojna' but these people did not let me do it. Although I could not do it in Delhi, it has been implemented in Punjab now," Kejriwal, whose party stormed to power in Punjab in the recently-held assembly polls there, said. He hit out at the Centre, saying it did everything to stop the AAP government from working for the public. "They first stopped our mohalla clinic file for two months but we got that cleared somehow. Later, they hindered our CCTV installation project. I along with Gopal Rai (and other ministers) had to sit on a dharna at the Lt Governor's office to get this done. They strived to stop every work," Kejriwal said. He also said corruption should be treated as treason and alleged that the list of corruption by the Congress and the BJP is long. "They (Congress) did the 2G scam, coal block scam, Bofors scam, among others, while the other (BJP) did the Vyapam scam, Rafale scam etc. Corruption should be declared treason," he said. "They have raided my house and office but did not get anything. Every single drop of our blood is dedicated for the country. This nation is paramount to me, I will persist till my last breath to empower and uplift my country," Kejriwal said. (With PTI inputs) Live TV New Delhi: Indian Air Forces' choppers have been deployed to douse the massive fire that broke out in the forest area of Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan's Alwar district on Monday (March 28). "We have called for two choppers. Water is being poured at those places first where maximum fire has spread and is posing danger to the wildlife. The area with fire breakout has increased," Sunita Pankaj, Alwar ADM told ANI. The cause of the blaze, which erupted on Monday evening and has been burning an area of around five to seven sq km, is yet to be ascertained, officials said. Tiger movement in the area has been affected by the fire, the forest official told PTI. According to officials, around 150-200 people, including the forest staff, are engaged in controlling the fire. "Villagers residing in the periphery of the fire-affected area have been asked to move to safety," the official said. Live TV Srinagar: In a small village in South Kashmir's Anantnag district, half a dozen houses are being built or renovated in the Matan area. These houses belong to Kashmiri Pandits, who had migrated from the Kashmir Valley during the early 1990s with the start of the insurgency. Around 15 Kashmiri Pandit families in this colony have come back or are planning to return. These houses were in dilapidated conditions for years and now finally it seems that these colonies would see happy times again. ''Yes, it's true that houses are being built again. The Kashmiri Pandit community is now finally thinking of returning to their homes. The pandit community in Jammu is also thinking of returning. We used to live with so much love around us. People want to come. There are around 15 houses which are being built and more will be built too. In a few years, I am sure if conditions are peaceful, everyone would return. '' said Ashok Kumar Sidha, President, Martand Temple Trust. In the last few years, many such families have come back to the valley and are living happily. Matan village has seen the maximum number of Kashmiri Pandits returning to their homeland. Without any government help, these people have started to build or renovate their old houses. Some local Muslim Kashmiris say, things are returning to how they used to be earlier in 1980s and before. ''A lot of them have come back and a lot of them are coming back. We have always lived in brotherhood. There are many new houses being built here. As you can see many houses in this colony are being built. We are with them and would love them to return. We were always celebrating our big days together. Kaka ji has returned after many years. His house is already, and he will come soon to live in it. They have a lot of trust in us, and we have a lot of trust in them too. '' said Mohammad Rajab Lone, Local Neighbour. Most of the construction work done on these houses is being done by the Kashmiri Muslim community. They have been taking care of these properties and now are helping them to rebuild these houses as well. ''We are so happy that they are returning. We are working on their houses. We have been working on these constructions. There are around 15 new houses being built. We are giving them all the support and we are very happy that they have come back. We are always there for help. Some of them never left and some left and are coming back. Insha'Allah the brotherhood between us would remain forever, whenever we go to Jammu, we still go to their houses. '' said Farooq Ahmad Lone, Local. The Pandit community wants the government to provide them with security and help them build their houses. They say if there are no homes for the Pandits, how can they return to the Valley. The government had said that 6000 Kashmiri Pandits have returned to the Valley recently, whereas the community says they have not been provided with the proper accommodation and are living in rented rooms. Live TV New Delhi: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has written a letter to all Opposition leaders and her non-Bharatiya Janata Party counterparts and requested them to unite to fight BJP'S "hollow governance". In a letter dated March 27, 2022, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief said that the need of the hour is for all progressive forces in this country to come together and fight this "oppressive force". She also called for a meeting to discuss strategies to take on the BJP and commit to the cause of a unified and principled opposition that will make way for the "government that the country deserves". "I urge that everyone of us come together for a meeting to deliberate on the way forward at a place as per everyone's convenience and suitability," the letter shared by TMC on its Twitter account on Tuesday (March 29) read. Slamming the BJP-led Centre's alleged vindictive politics, Mamata iterated that the democratic fabric of the country was being attacked with the use of agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate (ED), Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) to "harass and corner political opponents". She alleged that the saffron party has "time and again, repeatedly attacked the federal structure of our country" and now, it's time to unitedly fight this oppressive regime. "I am writing to you to express deep concern over direct attacks on this country's institutional democracy by the ruling BJP," she said. Our Hon'ble Chairperson @MamataOfficial writes to all Opposition leaders & CMs, expressing her concern over @BJP4India's direct attacks on Democracy. BJP has repeatedly attacked the federal structure of our country and now, it's time to unitedly fight this oppressive regime. pic.twitter.com/Ib3VbuSdbK All India Trinamool Congress (@AITCofficial) March 29, 2022 "Let us commit to the cause of a unified and principled opposition that will make way for the government that our country deserves," Mamata added. In her letter, Banerjee also claimed that the Delhi Special Police (Amendment) Bill, 2021 and the CVC (Amendment) Bill, 2021 were passed in the Parliament during the winter session amidst a walkout by the opposition. "These laws enable the Centre to extend the tenure of the directors of ED and CBI up to five years in blatant violation of a previous Supreme Court judgment," she said. Alleging that the central agencies "jolt to action" whenever elections are around the corner, she urged the parties to resist the BJP's intention to misuse the agencies to suppress the opposition. "It is amply clear that the opposition is being targeted, and the BJP-ruled states get a free pass from these agencies so that a rosy picture of their hollow governance can be painted," the letter stated further. Live TV New Delhi: Defence Minister Rajnath Singh held a telephone conversation with his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Gantz, on Tuesday (March 29, 2022) and expressed his condolences on the loss of innocent lives in a terror attack in Israel. He said terrorism is a threat to the whole world and does not have any place in the civilized world. Gantz told Rajnath Singh that his proposed visit to India on March 30, 31 has been postponed "due to some unavoidable reasons" and new dates will be worked out through diplomatic channels.Rajnath Singh said he looked forward to the visit and it would further strengthen defence cooperation between India and Israel. "Had a telephonic conversation with the Defence Minister of Israel, Mr Benjamin Gantz. Shared my condolences on the loss of innocent lives due to terror attacks in Israel. Terrorism is a global menace which has no place in today`s civilised world," he said in a tweet. Had a telephonic conversation with the Defence Minister of Israel, Mr. Benjamin Gantz . Shared my condolences on loss of innocent lives due to terror attacks in Israel. Terrorism is a global menace which has no place in todays civilised world. @gantzbe Rajnath Singh (@rajnathsingh) March 29, 2022 "Both the countries look forward to further strengthening the bilateral relations as India-Israel complete 30 years of full diplomatic relations. Defence cooperation is the founding pillar of our strategic partnership. Military and industry cooperation has been on an upward swing," he added. The call was initiated from Tel Aviv. Two people were killed two people and six were injured in a shooting attack by ISIS operatives on Sunday in the Israeli city of Hadera, some 31 miles north of Tel Aviv, Israeli officials said. Live TV Aam Admi Party (AAP) leader and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's remarks on the Kashmiri Pandits exodus and 'The Kashmir Files' have led to a series of protests and verbal clashes between BJP and AAP. Now, news agency ANI posted a video which showed AAP and BJP workers coming face-to-face on March 28, when AAP was protesting against the Delhi BJP chief's reported comment on CM Arvind Kejriwal, while BJP was protesting against the remark of Arvind Kejriwal on 'The Kashmir Files' movie, in Delhi. While party workers of AAP and BJP were seen shouting at each other and waving placards and banners, huge chaos ensued in the Delhi assembly yesterday. Watch the video here: #WATCH | AAP and BJP workers came face-to-face yesterday, March 28, when AAP was protesting against the Delhi BJP chief's reported comment on CM Arvind Kejriwal, while BJP was protesting against the remark of Arvind Kejriwal on 'The Kashmir Files' movie, in Delhi. pic.twitter.com/9Raks8aAzL ANI (@ANI) March 29, 2022 Meanwhile on Monday, BJP MLA Vijender Gupta had moved the condemnation motion and demanded an apology from Kejriwal, terming his remarks on the exodus "insensitive". In the motion, Gupta stated that Kejriwal's remarks on March 25 in which he called the movie "The Kashmir Files" a "lie" has hurt the sentiments of Kashmiri Hindus worldwide. But Delhi Assembly Speaker Ram Niwas Goel rejected Gupta's plea. Goel also suspended three BJP MLAs for the day amid a vociferous protest by the AAP over "derogatory" remarks made by Delhi BJP president Adesh Kumar Gupta against Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. MLAs Anil Bajpai, Jitender Mahajan and Ajay Mahawar were told to leave after they stood on the benches even as the Speaker requested them to sit down. Since its release, the Anupam Kher-starrer movie stirred political debates with the Opposition attacking the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the Centre for not doing enough to address the plight of Kashmiri Pandits. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who has been facing backlash on social media for his recent remarks on making "The Kashmir Files" tax-free in the state, on Saturday said that the money earned from the business generation of the movie, should be used for the rehabilitation of Kashmiri Pandits and efforts should be made to bring them back home." "In the last 25 years, since the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, there has been a BJP government at the Center for 13 years. BJP government has been there for the last 8 years, but not even a single Kashmiri Pandit has been settled back there. BJP politicised Kashmiri Pandits' atrocities. Now, they are making films about their tragedy and earning money. Kashmir Files earned about Rs 200 crores," said Kejriwal. Live TV Mumbai: Benchmark stock indices Sensex and Nifty rallied for a second straight session on Tuesday after gains in index majors HDFC twins, Bharti Airtel and Infosys as global shares advanced ahead of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. The 30-share BSE Sensex jumped 350.16 points or 0.61 per cent to settle at 57,943.65 with 20 of its constituents closing higher. During the day, the index rallied 408.04 points or 0.70 per cent to 58,001.53. The broader NSE Nifty gained 103.30 points or 0.60 per cent to settle at 17,325.30 as its 32 components closed in green. "Reports of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine along with weakening crude prices helped the global markets trade firm," said Vinod Nair, Head of Research at Geojit Financial Services. Among Sensex stocks, HDFC was the biggest gainer on value-buying after recent losses. The housing finance major spurted 3.06 per cent. Bharti Airtel rallied 2.89 per cent after reports said that the telco may consider a tariff hike and continue with 'premiumisation' to boost its ARPU to Rs 300. Among major index movers, HDFC Bank rose by 1.4 per cent, Ultratech Cement by 2.7 per cent, Sun Pharma by 1.62 per cent and Dr Reddy's by 1.09 per cent. Kotak Bank rose by 0.74 per cent while Infosys by 0.66 per cent. ICICI Bank, HUL, Bajaj Finance, Asian Paints and Nestle also advanced. On the other hand, ITC fell the most by 0.99 per cent while Tata Steel, State Bank of India, IndusInd Bank, Bajaj Finserv and NTPC also dropped. "For yet another session, markets traded highly volatile and ended with gains of more than half a per cent. Supportive global cues led to a gap-up opening and thereafter the benchmark traded with positive bias throughout the session but with volatile swings," Ajit Mishra, VP - Research, Religare Broking Ltd said. "Markets ended bullish with the broader indices up by 0.66 per cent. This was in hopes of a positive outcome from the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine," according to Rahul Sharma, Co-founder, Equity 99. In the previous trade, the BSE barometer climbed 231.29 points or 0.40 per cent to settle at 57,593.49. The NSE Nifty recovered 69 points or 0.40 per cent to 17,222. In the broader market, the BSE midcap index gained 0.66 per cent and smallcap gauge jumped 0.63 per cent. From BSE sectoral indices, healthcare jumped the most by 1.36 per cent, followed by basic materials (1.19 per cent), and realty (1.03 per cent). Among losers, BSE Energy declined by 0.5 per cent, BSE Oil & Gas by 0.30 per cent and BSE Auto by 0.19 per cent. Two-wheeler major Hero MotoCorp tanked 7.08 per cent to Rs 2,208.35 on BSE after the exchange sought clarification on a media report that claims that the 'I-T Department finds Rs 1,000 crore false expenses claims by Hero MotoCorp'. "Despite the fall, the stock does not look very attractive to us in the long term mainly due to pressure on its volumes and a tepid outlook given the rise in fuel costs, slow recovery in both urban and rural markets and a 25-30% hike in acquisition costs of the two-wheelers since the pandemic started. "However, the knee jerk reaction shown today in the stock may see some recovery tomorrow provided the management gives a satisfactory clarification to the street," Ashwin Patil, Senior Research Analyst at LKP Securities said. Elsewhere in Asia, bourses in Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong ended with gains, while Shanghai settled marginally lower. European markets were trading with gains ahead of peace talks between warring Ukraine and Russia in Turkey. Ukrainian and Russian officials are meeting in Istanbul for face-to-face talks for the first time in two weeks as the war between the countries entered its second month. Crude oil prices traded lower in the day before recovering 0.52 per cent to USD 113.1 per barrel in after market hours. Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) remained net sellers in the capital market, as they sold shares worth Rs 801.41 crore on Monday, according to stock exchange data. Live TV #mute The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) is offering a package for the Char Dham Yatra and it is available for Rs 58,900 (GST inclusive) per person, if travelling in group and Rs 77,600 (GST inclusive), if travelling alone as part of the Dekho Apna Desh offers. The offer comes at a time when Covid-19 cases are dropping significantly in India. It is noteworthy that the 11-night and 12-day package includes visit to Badrinath, Barkot, Gangotri, Guptkashi, Haridwar, Janki Chatti, Kedarnath, Sonprayag, Uttarkashi and Yamunatri. The journey will begin in Nagpur on May 14 and will last till May 25. During the whole journey, complimentary breakfast and dinner will be available for the travellers. Read also: Delhi Metro begins commuter satisfaction survey 2022 from today Travellers will first arrive in Delhi via Nagpur by flight, and then they will travel from there to Haridwar, Barkot, Gangotri, Guptkashi, Haridwar, Janki Chatti, Kedarnath, Sonprayag, Uttarkashi, and Badrinath. It is noteworthy that bus and car facilities will be available during the entire journey. Visit the most revered pilgrim places for Hindus in #India with #IRCTCTourism's all-incl. 12D/11N Char Dham Yatra air tour package. From temple visits to holy ceremonies, experience it all on this divine pilgrimage. For #details, visit https://t.co/rmhSHk2pW9.@AmritMahotsav IRCTC (@IRCTCofficial) March 25, 2022 People can book this tour package online through the IRCTC website, www.irctctourism.com, as well as through the IRCTC Tourist Facilitation Centre, Zonal Offices, and Regional Offices. Live TV #mute New Delhi: For Workspace customers, Google Chats is replacing the old Hangouts. As part of the transition, Google has stated that the old Hangouts mobile apps would be disabled, and the app appears to have been withdrawn from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store for new users. Although the app is no longer included in search results, it is still available to individuals who have it loaded on their cellphones. According to the 9to5Google report, searching for the Hangouts app in the App Store no longer shows any results, and the direct link has been disabled. This comes after Google said that for Workspace customers who haven't yet moved, Chat will become the default application. Those who have the Hangouts app on their devices can still use it. Every time you launch the programme, though, it displays a "Move to Google Chat in Gmail" alert. The Android app is still available on the Google Play Store for older users, but it does not appear in the app market for new users. The removal of the iPhone and iPad apps is a recent move, and it marks a significant step toward Google permanently shutting down Hangouts. Last week, Google began migrating Workspace users to Chats and Spaces. Hangouts for personal/free accounts will be discontinued on an unspecified date, according to Google. Google recently stated that over a million false Google Maps profiles have been eliminated in the last year, thanks to its machine learning capability, which has aided in recognising scammers and fraud profiles on the site. Live TV #mute New Delhi: With billions of daily active users from all over the world, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging programme. The messaging app is compatible with the majority of smartphones on the market today, although the platform occasionally becomes unusable due to software versions that have become outdated or obsolete to the companies. And WhatsApp is making it clear that from March 31 onwards, any phone running any Android, iOS, or KaiOS versions will be unable to utilise the messaging software. WhatsApp has provided the information on its FAQ website, giving us a clear sense of which versions would no longer support WhatsApp after this date. WhatsApp will not work on certain phones from March 31: Android Phones: WhatsApp will stop working if your phone does not have Android 4.1 or higher. You'll need a phone number or an SMS number to validate your account. iOS Phones: Users of iPhones running iOS 10 or later will be able to utilise WhatsApp on their devices. Apple is presently selling iOS 15, which is compatible with iPhones that are three to four years old. WhatsApp advises against using jailbroken iPhones. KaiOS: WhatsApp requires KaiOS version 2.5 or newer if your smartphone is powered by the KaiOS platform. JioPhone and JioPhone 2 are among the devices that are supported. Xiaomi, Samsung, LG, and Motorola are among the brands represented on Meta's official list. Here are the phones that no longer support WhatsApp. LG LG Optimus F7, Optimus L3 II Dual, Optimus F5, Optimus L5 II, Optimus L5 II Dual, Optimus L3 II, Optimus L7 II Dual, Optimus L7 II, Optimus F6, LG Enact, Optimus L4 II Dual, Optimus F3, Optimus L4 II , Optimus L2 II and Optimus F3Q Motorola Motorola Droid Razr Xiaomi Xiaomi HongMi, Mi2a, Mi2s, Redmi Note 4G and HongMi 1s Huawei Huawei Ascend D, Quad XL, Ascend D1, Quad XL and Ascend P1 S Samsung Samsung Galaxy Trend Lite, Galaxy S3 mini, Galaxy Xcover 2 and Galaxy Core WhatsApp makes these updates on a regular basis, ensuring that its app is up to speed with the latest technology. WhatsApp also removes older Android or iOS versions that are no longer supported from the list. WhatsApp continues to introduce new capabilities to customers using the most recent Android and iOS versions. It uses the beta version, which is only available to a restricted group of users, to test new features on a regular basis. Live TV #mute New Delhi: Bigg Boss couple Shamita Shetty and Raqesh Bapat have been making headlines regularly after a report suggested that the couple might be headed to splitsville. Although neither Shamita nor Raqesh commented on the rumours, they have given indirect hints through their actions. Now, pictures of Shamita posing with Raqesh's sister Sheetal and her daughter Isha have been going viral, suggesting that the adorable couple is still going strong. It appears Shamita travelled to Pune to visit Raqesh and his family and fans were thrilled to see pictures from their meeting. Sheetal Bapat, Raqesh's sister took to Instagram to share the pictures with a heart and a hug emoji. In the pictures, Shamita was seen wearing a beautiful off-white dress with a lacey short blazer or jacket. On the other hand, Raqesh looked dapper in a white Indo-western kurta and ripped, blue jeans. Take a look at the post: Earlier, Raqesh had spoken about his connection with Shamita Shetty in an interview with Hindustan Times. He said, "I would not name it a relationship. Its a bond. We just give names to things. Its like two people enjoying the space with each other, caring for each other. If you want to name it, it's a name game. She is a woman I really respect." Before that, Shamita had squashed breakup rumours by sharing a post that read, "We request youll to not believe in any sort of rumours pertaining to our relationship. Theres no truth in this. Love and light to everyone." Shamita Shetty and Raqesh Bapat met on the sets of Karan Johar hosted Bigg Boss OTT. The two fell in love on the reality show and since then have openly expressed their feelings for each-other. Shamita and Raqesh also celebrated the formers birthday together and also celebrated Valentines day with one another. New Delhi: Over three decades have gone past since the cult classic 'Mahabharat' played on television, but Roopa Ganguly still vividly remembers how every day, at the crack of dawn she would reach Mumbai's Film City to allow makeup artists the time to transform her into the role of 'Draupadi'. The 55-year-old actor-turned-politician went down memory lane to recall the period of the late 80s when the epic TV series was filmed and admitted that due to the hectic schedule of the shooting, she "did not get to watch the series" on television. "I got to finally see the series properly on television when 'Ramayan' and 'Mahabharat' were brought back on TV for a re-run during the (Covid-induced) lockdown, and I really enjoyed it. It also made me very nostalgic about the shooting days," she said. The Kolkata-born, currently a Rajya Sabha member, shared the joys and challenges of working on a TV series, one of the most widely celebrated that still enjoys a cult status in popular consciousness, and which made her and several other cast members household names. "Every morning, from my hotel at Juhu, Bombay, I would reach Film City, and by 5 am, I would be in the make up room. The shooting would start by 7 am, and my elaborate makeup and hairdressing would take at least an hour-and-a-half or even more, every day. And, it was long hair and we wore special costumes and lot of other things too, which took time, so I would reach there before other actors," she told PTI in an interview. Brought alive on screen by producer-director duo B R Chopra and Ravi Chopra, 'Mahabharat' originally ran on Doordarshan for two years till 1990, and every Sunday morning, families in literally every household sat glued to TV sets to watch the "epic series". "The set for the shooting was absolutely grand. There was a permanent indoor set and also a huge outdoor set which was used for a long time. Every cushion and its colour chosen, every throne, fabric and prop were especially made for it, as it was all part of 'Mahabharat'. BR Chopra ji and Ravi (Chopra) ji had made the series with lot of passion," she recalled. The epic-size drama of the small screen is also known for its phenomenal narration by voice-artist Harish Bhimani and early use of special effects in visuals in a TV production. Ganguly, also known for her work in Bengali cinema, reminisced, "We all came from ordinary families, and learned how a king or queen or a royal family member would walk or talk. Also, I come from Bengal, and the script was in Hindi language, and a very different kind of Hindi. Harish Bhimani ji helped me to get the right intonation and diction to make it impactful in dialogue delivery". 'Draupadi' is one of the most unforgettable characters in the series, and Ganguly with her powerful dialogue delivery and emotive acting, had earned praises from audiences of all ages. The 'Draupadi Vastraharan' sequence -- one of the most moving and heart-rending scenes in the history of Indian television, in which she portrays the vulnerability of women and questions the morality of "great men" and "wise sages", still shakes the conscience of people. Asked about the shooting, she also shared that besides the outdoor set at the Bombay Film City, which also had a forested area around it, "shooting was also done in Kurukshetra in Haryana, but I was not part of those scenes". She claimed that in today's time, 'Ramayana' and 'Mahabharata' epics are "not considered to be in realm of mythology" and these are part of India, and their "evidence can be found" at different places on different subjects related to it. The 'Mahabharat' TV series was largely based on a book, 'The Mahabharata' on the timeless epic, published by Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, according to the credits mentioned during the starting of each episode. Both 'Ramayana' and 'Mahabharata' are an integral part of Indian psyche, and stories from the two epics are still told and retold, on screen and in daily conversations, and its iconic characters of all shades, are often invoked in politics too. "These epics are our heritage, and heritage of whole India. And, working on 'Mahabharat' series was a joy. We were like a family, and on last day of the shoot, everyone got emotionally overwhelmed and had tears in their eyes," Ganguly recalled with nostalgia. The Rajya Sabha member emphasised on the importance of cultural and architectural heritage as an integral part of any civilisation, and has contributed funds from MPLADS, for a heritage-themed park in Old Delhi, which was inaugurated recently by President Ram Nath Kovind. "I am very happy to have contributed to this beautiful park built in old style. Heritage plays a very important role in any society and this is a great addition to the recreational spaces in Delhi," she had said on the day of inauguration. Asked if she misses her acting career, Ganguly said, "When I joined politics in 2015, I made a very conscious decision to dedicate myself to public service. Both professions need commitment, and I made a choice to leave my previous career to focus on politics. "I had 10-15 film offers when I joined politics, and I had to refuse them all," she said, with a smile. New Delhi: Uttar Pradesh Government on Tuesday informed the Supreme Court that the state has taken all efforts to protect the witnesses and families of victims of the Lakhimpur Kheri incident. Uttar Pradesh government said that all the witnesses are also regularly contacted by the police for appraisal of their security conditions. The submission of the Uttar Pradesh government came in an affidavit as a reply to the petition seeking to cancel the bail of Ashish Mishra, the son of Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Ajay Mishra Teni. The state government told the Supreme Court that it had opposed the bail plea of Ashish Mishra in the Allahabad High Court and the submission of the petition that the state did not effectively oppose the bail application of the accused Ashish Mishra is completely untrue. "That at the very outset, the Answering Respondent (Uttar Pradesh) takes exception to the averments in the SLP to the effect that State did not effectively oppose the Bail Application of the Accused Respondent No 1 (Ashish Mishra). The same is completely untrue, as is also borne out from a perusal of the Impugned Order itself...." read the affidavit. The affidavit also stated that the same clearly demonstrates that Ashish Mishra`s bail application was vehemently opposed by the State in the Allahabad High Court and any averments to the contrary in the special leave petition (SLP) are completely false and merits to be rejected. Uttar Pradesh Government further said that as per the Allahabad High Court`s order of February 10, 2022, the limitation period against the same is still running, and the decision to file SLP against the same is pending consideration before the relevant authorities. The government also said that the investigation revealed that the altercation between a witness and the opposite party took place over the throwing of Gulal. Earlier, it was alleged that one witness was attacked by some miscreants. The alleged attackers threatened the witness that Mishra is out on bail and the ruling party had also won the election and they would see to him. According to the affidavit, all the witnesses are also regularly contacted by the police for appraisal of their security conditions. "The witnesses were interviewed telephonically most recently on March 20 2022 and expressed satisfaction with the security provided to them and were informed that if they required any help in relation to their security, they should immediately contact the Superintendent of Police of their respective districts and would receive prompt assistance," UP government assured in the affidavit. Earlier, the Supreme Court had issued notice to Uttar Pradesh Govt and others on plea seeking to cancel bail to Ashish Mishra. On the last hearing advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the petitioner, said that one of the prime protected witnesses was brutally attacked, a few days after bail was granted to Ashish Mishra. Family members of the victims of the Lakhimpur Kheri incident have moved Supreme Court challenging the Allahabad High Court order, which granted bail to Ashish Mishra. In the Special Leave Petition, family members of the deceased have challenged the Allahabad High Court order dated February 10 2022, wherein Ashish Mishra was granted regular bail. The petitioner said that Allahabad HC`s order is unsustainable in law. They also said that they have approached the apex court as the State of Uttar Pradesh has failed to prefer any appeal against the impugned order. Ashish Mishra was released from jail in February followed by Allahabad High Court granting him bail. Eight people, including four farmers, had died in violence on October 3, 2020, in Lakhimpur Kheri. Live TV New Delhi: Amid the steady decline in COVID-19 cases, the Health Ministry has decided to stop the caller tune on Coronavirus awareness and precautions, said sources. The Covid-19 caller tune was started two years ago when the pandemic hit the country. Operators including Bharti Airtel, BSNL, Reliance Jio and Vodafone-Idea replaced their caller tunes in March 2020 on the directions of the government. Initially, the caller tune on COVID-19 used to start with the sound of people coughing, sneezing and then an advisory on the precautions to be taken to protect against coronavirus. Later, the massage was changed and the new message urged people to get vaccinated. Reacting to the news, netizens have started sharing memes on social media platforms. Ye badi aachi baat kahi hai apne , government ko mere taraf se pic.twitter.com/odkVXI8QdS Sid (@Sid95879) March 28, 2022 People calling for car loan & credit cards pic.twitter.com/VRz6j7maMU Bawaal (@iamBawaal) March 28, 2022 Meanwhile, India recorded 1,259 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours and the country's tally has now climbed to 4,30,21,982. The number of active cases of the infection has now further declined to 15,378. The death toll due to the viral disease has gone up to 5,21,070 with 35 more fatalities. The coronavirus cases in the country are now declining every month after a big resurgence reported in cases earlier, driven by the Omicron variant of the virus. Live TV SHANGHAI: China`s most populous city tightened the first phase of a two-stage Covid-19 lockdown on Tuesday, asking some residents to stay indoors unless they are getting tested as the number of new daily cases exceeded 4,400. The financial hub of Shanghai, home to 26 million people, is in its second day of lockdown authorities are imposing by dividing the city roughly along the Huangpu River, splitting the historic centre from the eastern financial and industrial district of Pudong to allow for staggered testing. While Shanghai`s caseload remains modest by global standards - a record 4,381 asymptomatic cases and 96 symptomatic cases for Monday - the city has become a testing ground for China`s "zero-COVID" strategy as it tries to bring the highly infectious Omicron variant under control. Residents east of the Huangpu were locked down in their housing compounds on Monday but were mostly allowed to roam within them. On Tuesday, however, three residents told Reuters neighbourhood committees had told them they were no longer allowed to step outside their homes. "Children were still having picnics yesterday and having fun," said one of them, who declined to be identified, citing privacy concerns. Wu Qianyu, an official with the municipal health commission, told a briefing that a "clear request" had been made to residents not to leave their apartments, even to take pets for a walk or throw out trash, during "a key stage in nucleic acid testing". She said 8.26 million tests were performed by as many as 17,000 testing personnel in the city`s locked-down districts on Monday. "The vast numbers of medical staff, grass-roots cadres, community workers and volunteers shared the very hard work on the front line of epidemic prevention and control, and should be thanked," Wu said. There were growing signs of frustration on China`s social media and dozens of residents flocked to the Weibo platform to seek help for relatives, with some struggling to access medical services. Though China is sticking to its plan for crushing the outbreak, experts overseas remain sceptical about the efficacy of lockdowns in the face of a highly infectious new variant. "It is clear from Australia and elsewhere in the world that lockdowns are simply not effective against Omicron so expect a big wave coming," said Adrian Esterman, an expert in biostatistics at the University of South Australia. STOCKING UP Drone footage published by state media showed empty streets below the skyscrapers of the city`s Lujiazui financial district. Public transport in the east has been shut and all unapproved vehicles ordered off the streets. The Shanghai Stock Exchange, in the west of the city, said it has kept a skeleton staff in place in the bourse for key operations while others work from home. General Motors`s joint venture has managed to maintain production by asking workers to sleep on factory floors, people familiar with the matter said. Residents in the west of the city have been stocking up at shops and markets in anticipation of their lockdown from April 1. But U.S. hypermarket chain Costco Wholesale Corp, whose Shanghai store has in recent days attracted throngs of shoppers, said it was closing from Tuesday, along with some gyms and shopping malls also in western districts. The city government rolled out new measures to try to support COVID-affected businesses, including rent exemptions and tax rebates. The Communist Party tabloid the Global Times quoted Peking University economist Cao Heping as saying that while the city`s growth would be hit, the national economy would not suffer greatly. Elsewhere, the city of Changchun, capital of Jilin province in the northeast, apologised to its 8.5 million residents for food shortages related to disruption caused by containment measures. The manufacturing hub of Shenzhen is starting to get back on its feet after shutdowns but many firms are worried about the near-term outlook, the Securities Times reported. Live TV New Delhi: The Covid-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc around the world as cases have started to increase again after receding in the past few months. While China has put its most populous city of Shanghai under a two-stage lockdown from Monday (March 28, 2022), France over the past 24 hours witnessed the number of patients hospitalised due to coronavirus increase by 467 to 21,073, the highest daily rise since February 1. ALSO READ | Covid-19 pandemic 'far from over': WHO lists factors for increase in cases globally In Italy, there were 30,710 new Covid-19 related cases on Monday, against 59,555 the day before, while the number of deaths rose to 95 from 82. Last week on Friday, the country had reported 75,616 infections and on Thursday, there were as many as 81,811 cases. Here are latest updates on worldwide spread of Covid-19: China's largest city of Shanghai enters day 2 of Covid-19 lockdown Shanghai on Tuesday has again tightened the first phase of a two-stage Covid-19 lockdown, asking some residents to stay indoors unless they are getting tested as the number of daily cases rose beyond 4,400. China's financial hub, which is home to 26 million people, is on its second day of a lockdown. While the Shanghai caseload remains modest by global standards - a record 4,381 asymptomatic cases and 96 symptomatic cases for March 28 - the city has become a testing ground for the country`s "zero-Covid" strategy as it tries to bring the highly infectious Omicron variant under control. US eases Covid-19 travel advisory for India The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and State Department has eased government Covid-19 travel ratings for India and some other countries on Monday. The CDC has changed its Covid-19 travel recommendation for India to "Level 1: Low" from "Level 3: High," which urges unvaccinated Americans to avoid travel to those locations. France sees highest daily jump in Covid-19 hospitalisations since February 1 France on Monday saw Covid-19 hospitalisations over the past 24 hours jump by 467 to 21,073, its highest daily rise since February 1. On a week-on-week basis, the French health authorities have seen the hospitalisations figure increase by 1.8% and it has been now increasing for the fifth day running. The coronavirus infections have been rising again since early March, with the seven-day moving average of new cases at a six-week high of 1,27,488. Oil prices tumble due to China Covid-19 lockdown Oil prices have tumbled about 7% on Monday after Shanghai launched a lockdown and prompted renewed fears of demand destruction. Crude futures have also been volatile since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February. Italy records 30,710 Covid-19 cases Italy has recorded 30,710 new Covid-19 cases on Monday, while the number of deaths increased to 95 from 82. Israeli PM Naftali Bennett tests positive for Covid-19 Days ahead of his visit to India, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has tested positive for Covid-19. His office said on Monday that Bennett feels well and will continue to work while self-isolating at home. Bennett was scheduled to pay his first official visit to India on April 2. India records 1,259 fresh Covid-19 cases, 35 more fatalities India recorded 1,259 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours and the country's tally has now climbed to 4,30,21,982. The number of active cases of the infection has now further declined to 15,378. The death toll due to the viral disease has gone up to 5,21,070 with 35 more fatalities, the ministry's data updated at 8 am stated. Even though the Covid-19 cases in India have receded sharply in the past few weeks, a resurgence in parts of Asia and Europe have raised concerns that one will follow in the country given previous patterns during the two years of the pandemic. Over 48 crore Covid-19 cases, 61 lakh deaths globally Globally, as of Monday, there have been 48,01,70,572 confirmed cases of Covid-19, including 61,24,396 deaths, reported to the World Health Organization (WHO). (With agency inputs) Geneva: The International Committee of the Red Cross urged Ukraine and Russia on Tuesday (March 29, 2022) to agree on safe evacuation of civilians from the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol and other frontline areas, where vitals are running out, and on delivery of aid. Asked about Ukrainian accusations of forced deportation of Mariupol residents to Russia, ICRC director-general Robert Mardini told Reuters his agency had no direct information and would not participate in such as it violated the rules of war. "People are caught and trapped in the line of fire. And it is happening unfortunately in many places today in Ukraine, not only in Mariupol," Mardini said at ICRC headquarters in Geneva five weeks after Russia launched its invasion. "What we expect and what is needed for civilians is that there is a clear and explicit agreement by the two sides on safe evacuations of civilians." With Russia causing global shock for shelling residential areas, the ICRC issued a statement on Tuesday reminding the warring sides of international obligations to protect civilians and target only military objectives. ALSO READ | Ukraine, Russia hold new talks in Turkey aimed at ending the fighting Russia calls its mission a "special operation" to disarm and "denazify" Ukraine. PRISONERS OF WAR Mardini said that there was an "outrageous" disinformation campaign against the ICRC on social media and politicization of humanitarian work that was raising risks for aid workers. The Ukrainian Red Cross had said its branch in Kropyvnytskyi was attacked, he added. An ICRC spokesperson later said that an angry person had confronted Red Cross workers and physically attacked that office, causing some damage but no injuries. The ICRC was in talks to open an operational base in Rostov-on-Don in Russia as part of its regional scale up, but it should not be misconstrued as being linked to deportations, Mardini said. Mardini also urged Ukraine and Russia to let the ICRC visit prisoners of war, as it does worldwide in line with the Geneva Conventions, and return remains of the dead. "It`s always sensitive but I think there is also a humanitarian imperative for detainees, for families, to have news of their loved ones," he said. Live TV Washington: US President Joe Biden's comment that Russian President Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power" has drawn sharp reactions from Moscow and created a flutter globally. Biden said of Russian President Vladimir Putin during a speech on Saturday that "this man cannot remain in power." But Biden has said would make "no apologies" and wasn't "walking anything back". "I'm not walking anything back," Biden said at the White House, emphasizing he wasn't voicing a policy change but that he was expressing an opinion based on his emotions from the day, according to CNN." I was expressing the moral outrage I felt toward the way Putin is dealing and the actions of this man," he said. He added that "I'd just come from being with those families," he said, referring to Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw, Poland. "I wasn't then or wasn't now expressing a policy change," Biden said. "I make no apologies for it," he said, according to CNN. He continued saying, "I was expressing just what I said -- I was expressing the moral outrage I felt towards this man. I wasn't articulating a policy change. And I think that you know, if he continues on this course, he is going to become a pariah worldwide, and who knows what it can become at home in terms of support." Earlier, Biden said, "For God's sake, this man (Putin) cannot remain in power." However, the White House clarified Biden's remarks and said that "it was not a call for regime change."A White House official while clarifying the remarks made by Biden said, "The President's point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbours or the region. He was not discussing Putin's power in Russia, or regime change." German Chancellor Olaf Scholz says that neither NATO nor US President Joe Biden aim to bring about regime change in Russia. When asked whether Putin's removal is in fact the real aim at a press meet, Scholz replied, "This is not the aim of NATO, and also not that of the American president." Scholz added, "We both agree completely that regime change is not an object and aim of policy that we pursue together." Live TV Brussels: Ukraine has been invited to join NATO Foreign Ministers` meeting set to take place next week, according to a statement from the military alliance headquartered in Brussels. A meeting of the North Atlantic Council (NAC) at the level of Ministers of Foreign Affairs will take place at the NATO Headquarters on April 6-7. The meeting will be in person and will be chaired by the NATO Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, added the statement. Some of the Ministers may attend via video link, as per the statement. Since Russia`s war on Ukraine started, this is the second time that a NATO meeting is convened by the FMs of 30 NATO countries. An extraordinary summit` of the alliance was convened on March 24 over the situation in Ukraine. Amid all this, Russia's military announced on Tuesday it will fundamentally scale back operations near Ukraine's capital and a northern city, as talks brought the outlines of a possible deal to end the grinding war into view. Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin said the move was meant to increase trust in the talks after several rounds of negotiations failed to halt what has devolved into a bloody campaign of attrition. The announcement was met with scepticism from the US and others. While Russia portrayed it as a goodwill gesture, it comes as the Kremlin's troops have become bogged down in the face of stiff Ukrainian resistance that has thwarted President Vladimir Putin's hopes for a quick military victory. Late last week, and again on Tuesday, Russia seemed to roll back its war aims, saying its main goal now is gaining control of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he had not seen anything indicating talks were progressing in a constructive way, and he suggested Russian indications of a pullback could be an attempt by Moscow to deceive people and deflect attention. Ukraine's military said it has noted withdrawals of some forces around Kyiv and Chernihiv. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told CNN we haven't seen anything to corroborate reports of Russia withdrawing significant forces from around Kyiv. Rob Lee, a military expert at the US-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, tweeted, "This sounds like more of an acknowledgement of the situation around Kyiv where Russia's advance has been stalled for weeks and Ukrainian forces have had recent successes. Russia doesn't have the forces to encircle the city. Negotiators from Russia and Ukraine met Tuesday in Istanbul, their first face-to-face talks in two weeks. Earlier talks, held in person in Belarus or by video, made no progress toward ending the more than a month-long war that has killed thousands and driven over 10 million Ukrainians from their homes, including almost 4 million who have fled the country. On February 24, Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine after the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian provocations. In response to Russia`s operation, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Moscow. Live TV Washington: US President Joe Biden, his aides and Western allies are scrambling to explain his remark that Russian leader Vladimir Putin could not remain in power because they do not want to escalate the conflict between Washington and Moscow, officials said. The nine-word line, at the end of a 27-minute speech in Warsaw on Saturday, has distracted from what some observers regard as the best piece of rhetoric of Biden`s presidency. It made foreign allies uneasy at the end of an otherwise successful trip aimed at uniting allies against Russia, and has raised fresh questions about the United States` long-term strategy for its former Cold War foe. "For God`s sake, this man cannot remain in power," Biden said in the Polish capital after condemning Putin`s month-long war in Ukraine at length. A White House official told Reuters the comment about Putin was not in the scripted speech. Asked whether the sentiment reflected Biden`s true feelings, the official didn`t answer directly but noted that the US president has not shied away from calling his Russian counterpart a "butcher" and "war criminal." In his political career, Biden has made some notable verbal missteps during freewheeling sessions with reporters or other spontaneous events. On his recent European trip, Biden said the United States would respond "in kind" if Russia used chemical weapons in Ukraine and suggested that U.S. troops would go to the frontlines, neither of which represent U.S. policy. But Saturday`s remark wasn`t one of those situations - he was speaking to an audience from a teleprompter. In the minutes before he called for Putin`s departure from power, the crowd of roughly 1,000 people was clearly feeding off Biden`s remarks, clapping, waving flags and even starting a chant. Biden`s emotional declaration gave voice to the frustration that many Western countries - and many U.S. voters - feel about the invasion of Ukraine, one ally to the Democratic president said. It came, officials explained, after a day that included Biden meeting with Ukrainian refugees uprooted by war and government officials in Ukraine trying to respond to Russian bombing campaigns that have ravaged cities and, according to the United Nations human rights office, killed at least 1,119 civilians. Nonetheless, the remark echoes long-standing accusations from Russia and other nations that the United States seeks an imperialistic role in world conflicts, and escalates tensions as the West tries to manage an increasingly unpredictable Putin. The clean-up effort was swift and widespread, reflecting a strong desire inside the administration to avoid escalation with Russia, even it if dinged Biden`s reputation. The U.S. secretary of state, White House press office, U.S. ambassador to NATO, and German chancellor all shot the idea of regime change down within a day, capped by Biden himself who bluntly said "No," when asked by reporters in Washington if he is calling for regime change. On Monday, Biden explained to reporters at the White House that his remark reflected his own "moral outrage" about Putin`s actions, rather than any policy change. Still he added, if the Russian leader "continues on the course that he`s on, he`s going to become a pariah worldwide and who knows what he becomes at home in terms of support." Officials in the Biden administration have said in recent weeks that they have grown increasingly concerned about Putin`s decision-making and his country`s more casual invocation of the threat of nuclear weapons, a posture that made Biden`s statement even more surprising. WHAT IS THE END GAME? In recent weeks, the Biden administration has distanced itself from suggestions, including by U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, that the solution to the crisis in Ukraine is Putin`s forcible removal. But it has described actions against Russian companies, banks, government officials and oligarchs as directly aimed at Putin, an attempt to alienate him from supporters domestically and on the foreign stage. Putin is now more "isolated from the world than he has ever been," Biden said during his State of the Union address to Congress on March 1; a week later he announced plans to "squeeze" Putin further. Despite engaging directly with Putin, Biden was unsuccessful in coaxing him into not invading Ukraine in the first place. Since the invasion began on Feb. 24, Biden has attempted to speak directly to the Russians instead. "You, the Russian people, are not our enemy," the U.S. president said in Warsaw. Biden officials have not answered questions about what "end game" scenarios the White House envisions around the Ukraine invasion, or how they think Putin might deescalate the conflict. Last week, one of Putin`s closest allies, Dmitry Medvedev, warned the United States that the Russian president`s departure from power could create an unstable leadership in Moscow "with a maximum number of nuclear weapons aimed at targets in the United States and Europe." Asked about Biden`s comment in Warsaw, which received little coverage on Russian state television, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "This is a statement that is certainly alarming." Andrew Lohsen, an expert on the conflict and a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank, warned: "This is going to be part and parcel of Russian disinformation campaigns to malign the motivations of the United States." Ukraine and Russia: What you need to know right now Air raid sirens sounded across Ukraine before dawn on Tuesday as Ukrainian and Russian negotiators prepared to meet in Turkey for face-to-face talks, with Kyiv seeking a ceasefire without compromising on territory or sovereignty. FIGHTING * Russia continues missile and bomb strikes in an attempt to completely destroy infrastructure and residential areas of Ukrainian cities, said Ukraine military general staff. * Russia said it destroyed large ammunition depots in the Zhytomyr region and hit 41 Ukrainian military sites in the past 24 hours. * Ukraine said it seized back control of Irpin, near Kyiv. A U.S. official said the eastern town of Trostyanets, south of Sumy, was back in Ukrainian hands. Reuters could not confirm the reports. * Russian soldiers who seized the Chernobyl site drove armoured vehicles without radiation protection through a highly toxic zone called the "Red Forest", workers there said. TALKS AND DIPLOMACY Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning after a meeting, the Wall Street Journal reported. But a U.S. official said intelligence suggests the symptoms were due to an environmental factor, not poisoning. * The Kremlin said Joe Biden`s remark that Putin "cannot remain in power" was a cause for alarm. Biden said the comment reflected his own moral outrage, not a U.S. policy shift.* Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged Western nations to toughen sanctions including an oil embargo. CIVILIANS The UN human rights office said 1,119 civilians had been killed and 1,790 wounded since Russia began its attack. * Nearly 5,000 people, including about 210 children, have been killed in besieged Mariupol, a spokesman for its mayor said. ECONOMY * Russia said it would not supply gas to Europe for free as it worked out methods for accepting payments for its gas exports in roubles. G7 nations refused the demand. * U.S. and German officials are due to meet in Berlin this week with energy industry executives to discuss ways to boost alternative supplies for Germany. * Russia`s invasion has cost Ukraine $564.9 billion in terms of damage to infrastructure, lost economic growth and other factors, Economy Minister Svyrydenko said. QUOTES "We are not trading people, land or sovereignty," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba said of the talks in Turkey. "We have destroyed the myth of the invincible Russian army," Kyiv Mayor Klitschko said. Live TV Lviv: When Russia began its assault on Ukraine in February, Ukrainian chef Ievgen Klopotenko`s gut reaction was not to pick up a gun. His restaurant is called "Inshni", Ukrainian for "Others". Opened just over a week ago in the western city of Lviv, it serves free meals to anyone who asks for menu no. 2. "I understood that I`m not very good with the guns ... but I know that I`m a very nice warrior with a knife," said Klopotenko, who is a household name across his country. "My aim and my mission in life is to feed the people." A winner of the Ukrainian version of MasterChef, Klopotenko made headlines several years ago when he campaigned to place Ukrainian borscht, a reddish beet and cabbage soup, on UNESCO`s world heritage list. The Russian government contested the claim. The restaurant`s funding has come from Klopotenko`s own pocket, donations and paying customers who eat from a separate menu. Klopotenko said the majority of those eating the free meals have fled their homes in other parts of Ukraine and are making their way to Poland. Olena Severinova, who was forced to leave her home in eastern Donetsk region due to bombardments from advancing Russian forces, has come to "Others" every day since she arrived in Lviv. "I was forced to resettle because of the war," said the 73-year-old, crying. "Thank you to everyone for actively taking part in saving our lives ... He fed us for free." Live TV KYIV: Amid the ongoing war with Russia, a Ukrainian woman has alleged that she was gang-raped by drunk Russian soldiers for hours while her four-year-old son hid crying in a boiler room. Breaking her silence probably for the first time, Natalya (name changed), 33, alleged that the drunk Russian soldiers gang-raped her minutes after killing her husband. According to a Daily Mail report, Natalya while narrating the horror also revealed how a Russian commander and his soldiers barged into her family's home located in a small village near Kyiv on the night of March 9. They also killed my husband Andrey, 33, in the front yard, she said. After they killed her husband, Natalya saw a Russian commander - who told her his name was Mikhail Romanov - and another soldier dressed in black, entering her house while looking for other family members. Frozen at the sight of her husbands murder, Natalya pushed her 4-yer-old son to hide in the boiler room, where the family had been sheltering to protect themselves from the shelling by the Russian troops. The incident took place in Shevchenkove, a village just outside the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. The Ukrainian woman said that she was threatened by the Russian soldier to keep quiet lest she would be killed. Natalya was then raped by the two Russian soldiers at the gunpoint for hours while her son kept sobbing in the boiler room. After raping her for several hours, the two Russian soldiers left but again returned within 20 minutes and raped her again. The soldiers kept coming to her home at regular intervals but they were so intoxicated that they eventually fell asleep, giving Natalya enough time to flee along with her son hiding inside the dark boiler room of her home. The alleged gang-rape of Natalya is being investigated by Ukraine's prosecutor-general Iryna Venediktov - the country's first official investigation into alleged rape committed by Russian soldiers. In another development, Russia's military on Tuesday announced that it will fundamentally scale back operations near Ukraine's capital and a northern city, as talks brought the outlines of a possible deal to end the grinding war into view. Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin said the move was meant to increase trust in the talks after several rounds of negotiations failed to halt what has devolved into a bloody campaign of attrition. The announcement was met with scepticism from the US and others. Live TV LVIV/KHARKIV: Air raid sirens sounded across Ukraine before dawn on Tuesday as Ukrainian and Russian negotiators prepared to meet in Turkey for face-to-face talks, with Kyiv seeking a ceasefire without compromising on territory or sovereignty. Ukraine and the United States hold little hope of a breakthrough at the meeting, the first direct talks between the two sides in more than two weeks, even though Russia`s invasion appeared to have stalled on several fronts. More than a month into the war, the biggest attack on a European nation since World War Two, more than 3.8 million people have fled abroad, thousands have been killed and injured, and Russia`s economy has been pummelled by sanctions. In the besieged southern port city of Mariupol nearly 5,000 people have been killed, including about 210 children, according to figures from the mayor. Reuters was unable to immediately verify the numbers. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said of the talks in Turkey: "We are not trading people, land or sovereignty." "The minimum programme will be humanitarian questions, and the maximum programme is reaching an agreement on a ceasefire," he said on national television. A senior U.S. State Department official said Russian President Vladimir Putin did not appear ready to make compromises to end the war. Ukrainian interior ministry adviser Vadym Denysenko said that he doubted there would be any breakthrough. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said talks so far had not yielded any substantial progress but it was important they continued in person. He declined to give more information. ENERGY SUPPLIES Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during a Monday night address repeated calls for the West to go further in punishing Moscow for its invasion. "We, people who are alive, have to wait. Doesn`t everything the Russia military has done to date warrant an oil embargo?" While Western countries have imposed a series of hard-hitting sanctions upon Moscow, Europe is heavily reliant on energy imports from Russia and has been so far reluctant to act to block them. U.S. and German government officials are due to meet in Berlin this week with energy industry executives to discuss ways to boost alternative supplies for Germany. The Kremlin has demanded that what it deems "unfriendly" countries pay for Russian gas in roubles, not euros, but is trying to decide a mechanism by which that could work. Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said on Tuesday that Japanese companies would be requested to refuse if Russia asked for rouble payments. Tokyo also banned the export of luxury goods to Russia, effective April 5, in its latest response to the war. Prohibited items included luxury cars, motorcycles and fashion items. TRAPPED In besieged Ukrainian cities where conditions are desperate, the threat of Russian attacks has blocked exit routes for civilians, two Ukrainian officials said. In Mariupol, the mayor said about 160,000 people were trapped. "There is no food for the children, especially the infants. They delivered babies in basements because women had nowhere to go to give birth, all the maternity hospitals were destroyed," a grocery worker from Mariupol who gave her name only as Nataliia told Reuters after reaching nearby Zaporizhzhia. As the humanitarian toll continues to rise, the United Nations said it had been able to bring food and medical supplies into Kharkiv, Ukraine`s second-biggest city and one of its hardest hit. " " Timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) are extremely dangerous, with venom that passes through a set of hollow fangs in a mouth with a built-in hinge mechanism. Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0) [It] occurred to me that the Rattle-Snake is found in no other quarter of the world besides America, and may therefore have been chosen, on that account, to represent her. Benjamin Franklin Franklin penned those words in a 1775 letter to the Pennsylvania Journal. By then, he had a well-known affinity for a particular type of rattler: Crotalus horridus, or the timber rattlesnake. Just like Franklin implied, rattlesnakes are native to the Americas. There are around 30 living species, which range as far south as Argentina and as far north as Canada. If it's the timber rattlesnake you're after, visit the continental U.S. From craggy New Hampshire to sunburnt Texas, 27 states have populations of tail-buzzing timber rattlers. Crotalus horridus is a very widespread species, in other words. Yet across many parts of this country, timbers aren't nearly as common as they used to be. Advertisement Know Your Rattlers Another name for the timber rattlesnake is the "banded rattlesnake." It fits; these reptiles have dark bands overlaying a backdrop of scales that's lighter in color. Individual snakes can look black and gray or they can have a brown-on-tan complexion. The namesake "rattle" is made of shed skin. A newborn baby's tail is tipped with a scaly lobe called a "pre button." This is lost once the animal sheds its skin for the first time. At that point, the pre button will be replaced by a "button" a knob of old skin which becomes the first segment in the snake's rattle. New segments are added on during later sheds. Because of the way these things interlock, the reptiles can produce an audible "buzz" by shaking their tails. The sound sends a message of warning to other animals that get a little too close for comfort. Timber rattlers are the largest venomous snakes in New York, Tennessee and a few other states; adults can grow 34 to 60 inches (90 to 152 centimeters) long. Advertisement Eyes and Pits Their heads are vaguely triangular, with vertical pupils set in lidless eyes. Between those eyeballs and the snakes' nostrils, there are two sensory pits capable of detecting infrared radiation, or IR. All rattlesnakes share this feature. And for good reason: Every animal on the planet gives off invisible IR. However, even in total darkness, the facial "pits" can locate the source of this radiation which the snakes perceive as heat. So if, say, a warm-bodied mouse wanders past a rattlesnake at the stroke of midnight, it might be out of luck. Armed with the pit organs, the reptile could theoretically locate this tasty morsel, despite poor lighting conditions. Advertisement A Striking Image Rattler venom passes through a set of hollow fangs with their own built-in hinge mechanisms. The special teeth can swing forward and jab a nearby target when the snake means business. Then as the jaws close, both fangs are pulled backwards. As for the actual venom, it's a mixture of toxins. Some of them, called "neurotoxins," impair the target's nervous system. Others (i.e., "hemotoxins") do a number on things like red blood cells and the general blood-clotting process. The exact content of timber rattler venom may vary from one specimen to the next. As noted in "America's Snake: The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake" by nature writer Ted Levin, the venom of this species has been divided "into four main types ... which vary geographically from virulent to weak, a distinction likely the result of populations having been isolated for scores of centuries in temperate refuges during the Ice Age." Hence, some timber rattlesnakes including many in the deep South carry a more neurotoxic brand of venom than others do. Advertisement Forest Creatures Timber rattlers are cut out for life in deciduous forests, ecosystems dominated by hardwood trees that lose their foliage once a year. For food, Crotalus horridus turns to small mammals like mice, rats, voles, chipmunks and rabbits as well as birds, amphibians and other reptiles. The species gives birth to live young in August and September. As the winter approaches, timbers hole up in dens, with rock crevices being popular lodgings. Several of these rattlers may hibernate together inside the same den throughout the coldest months of the year. In the springtime, they migrate away from these shelters. Using chemical trails left behind by other individuals, a timber rattlesnake can relocate the same den every winter. Advertisement United Snakes of America Timber rattlesnakes were some of the first venomous reptiles that the British encountered in North America. And it didn't take too long for them to emerge as political symbols. In a 1751 article titled "Rattle-Snakes for Felons," Benjamin Franklin slammed the United Kingdom for sending convicted criminals to its 13 American colonies. To get even, he proposed shipping live rattlesnakes back to London. "Rattlesnakes seem the most suitable returns for the human serpents sent by our mother country," Franklin opined. Clearly, he was joking. But Franklin grew to appreciate the timber rattlesnake and see it as a mascot of sorts for the emerging United States. He wasn't alone; in 1776, the U.S. Navy's first commander-in-chief started flying a yellow flag bearing a rattler and the slogan "Don't Tread on Me." Named the "Gadsden Flag" after its original designer, South Carolina's Christopher Gadsden, this distinctive (and polarizing) banner is still widely used more than two centuries later. Advertisement The Road Ahead In the United States, your chances of getting killed by a rattlesnake any rattlesnake are statistically slim. That said, in the event of a bite, get to a hospital as soon as you can. (If possible, photograph the actual snake for identification purposes.) When rattlers bite people, it's often a response to inappropriate handling. Give these reptiles their space and they can make great neighbors. Research published in 2013 suggests timber rattlesnakes may be doing us a huge favor by eating certain rodents which are known to spread Lyme disease. Unfortunately, Crotalus horridus has seen better days as a species. Timber rattlers have gone locally extinct in Michigan, Maine, Rhode Island and Delaware over the years. Meanwhile, there's only a single breeding population of them left in the entire state of New Hampshire. Habitat loss, persecution by fearful humans and the overcollection of wild snakes for the pet trade have all contributed to this decline. So has the rise of Snake Fungal Disease (SFD), an infectious disorder that can lead to blisters, clouded eyes and life-threatening skin lesions. Slow maturity rates aren't helping. Timber rattlers can live into their thirties, but some females don't start reproducing until age 10. After she's given birth to her first litter, a mother timber might not have another one for three to five more years or ever, really. Today, the timber rattlesnake is considered "endangered" or "threatened" in 12 states. Conservationists around the country are working hard to secure a brighter future for this great American serpent. Now That's Interesting The biggest known rattler species is Crotalus adamanteus, also called the eastern diamondback rattlesnake. Found in the southeastern U.S., these guys can weigh more than 10 pounds (4.53 kilograms) and grow 96 inches (244 centimeters) long. YEREVAN, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. During the session of the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, Speaker of Parliament of Armenia Alen Simonyan drew the attention of the delegates to the current situation in Nagorno Karabakh, the recent Azerbaijani incursion into the area under the responsibility of the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Karabakh and highlighted the importance of the complete implementation of the trilateral statements. In his remarks at the session, Alen Simonyan also congratulated the CIS delegates on the 30th anniversary of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly. He particularly touched upon the CIS inter-parliamentary cooperation both at inter-state and multinational formats after the signing of the Almaty declaration. He said the CIS contributed to the maintenance and strengthening of political, socio-economic and humanitarian ties, the further development of state-building of the countries in the post-Soviet space. He assured that Armenia has always supported raising the role of the CIS IPA in international arena, strengthening the organizations partnership with international, regional organizations and partners. Talking about the role and opportunities of the parliamentary diplomacy, he highlighted it especially on matters relating to peace and security. Drawing the attention of the session participants to the current situation in Nagorno Karabakah, Alen Simonyan particularly presented the March 24 incursion of the Azerbaijani armed forces into the village of Parukh in Askeran region, which is under the responsibility zone of the Russian peacekeeping contingent, which, he said, is a gross violation of the 2020 November 9 trilateral statement. The Armenian Speaker of Parliament said the use of weapon and a UAV led to human losses and wounded. We expect that the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno Karabakh will take practical steps to settle the situation and prevent new losses and combat operations and will return the Azerbaijani troops back to their initial positions, he said. The Speaker called the situation in Nagorno Karabakh very tense. He said these actions could lead to a new escalation in the region amid the ongoing tense security situation in the world. Alen Simonyan said Armenia highly appreciates the Russian defense ministrys addressed statement, which, however, was countered by the Azerbaijani side. The Speaker told his colleagues that a number of post-war humanitarian problems still remain unresolved, particularly mentioning the issue of the Armenian prisoners of war, hostages, whose number is 38 according to the data confirmed by Azerbaijan. The Speaker also emphasized the necessity of preserving the Armenian historical, cultural and spiritual heritage in the territories that have come under the Azerbaijani control after the war. The guarantee of the rights and freedoms of Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh, the issue of the status of Nagorno Karabakh are fundamental and principle matters. We have repeatedly stated that this conflict is not a territorial issue, its a matter of rights. In this context we attach importance to the complete implementation of the 2020 November 9 and the 2021 November 26 trilateral statements signed by the Prime Minister of Armenia, the Presidents of Russia and Azerbaijan. Like in the past, Armenia attaches importance to the normal relations with neighbor states. We are ready for dialogue that should lead to the establishment of lasting peace in the region, and for this reason by affirming the previously adopted stance, we propose Azerbaijan to start immediate negotiations on signing a peace treaty, the Armenian Speaker of Parliament said in his speech. YEREVAN, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. An unknown person called in a bomb threat to Moscow airport regarding the Yerevan-Moscow flight, TASS reported citing its sources. The unknown person told Sheremetyevo airport that there is a bomb on board an aircraft operating the Yerevan-Moscow flight, which is currently en route. The plane will be searched after landing. YEREVAN, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. Human Rights Defender of Armenia Kristinne Grigoryan received today Kathryne Bomberger, the Director-General of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), the Office of the Ombudswoman said. The meeting was also attended by Armenias Ambassador to the Netherlands Tigran Balayan. During the meeting Kristinne Grigoryan presented the constitutional mandate of the Human Rights Defender and the activity directions of the Office. She told the guests that the Office is enjoying high public trust, which, according to her, is an important guarantee for the effective implementation of her mission. She presented the activity directions carried out by her Office with the families of missing persons. The Ombudswoman said the protection of rights of the families of missing persons, prisoners of war and civilian captives is under her daily spotlight. In her turn Kathryne Bomberger thanked for the reception and presented the 25-year-old working experience of the ICMP aimed at helping countries to study the cases of missing persons in the post-war period, providing their families with legal support, as well as creating proper investigative mechanisms and institutional procedures. The meeting sides highlighted the importance of engagement of families of missing persons into the development process of both the legislation and mechanisms. Summing up the meeting, the sides agreed over concrete directions of future cooperation. YEREVAN, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. The Biden Administration called for just $24 million in U.S. assistance to Armenia in the White House Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 budget proposal released today $21 million less than what Congress allocated and the President approved for FY 2022 just weeks ago, reported the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA). We are disappointed that President Bidens annual budget released in the wake of a government watchdog report documenting over $164,000,000 in U.S. military aid to Azerbaijan flat-lines U.S. aid to Armenia at just over $24 million and fails to include any specific dollar amount for U.S. assistance to Artsakh, said ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian. We look to our Congressional allies, coalition partners, and community activists to work through the foreign aid appropriations process to dramatically boost U.S. aid numbers for both Artsakh and Armenia. Similar to his budget request for FY2022, the Presidents FY2023 budget includes $23,405,000 in foreign aid and $600,000 in military assistance to Armenia. A separate line item in the budget calls for $6,050,000 in International Narcotics and Law Enforcement spending in Armenia. Following broad-based Congressional outreach by the ANCA and the Armenian American community last year, the final FY2022 aid package for Armenia was increased to $45 million and included an additional $2 million in U.S. demining assistance for those affected by the 2020 Azerbaijan and Turkey-led attacks on Armenia and Artsakh. YEREVAN, MARCH 29, ARMENPRESS. Artashes Toumanian, advisor to the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, had separate meetings with Ali Akbar Mehrabian, Iranian minister of Energy, Javad Oji, Iranian Oil minister and Mehdi Safari, Iranian deputy minister of Foreign Affairs, the Armenian Embassy in Iran reports. During the meetings the officials discussed issues related to the development and deepening of bilateral and multilateral economic cooperation In the meeting with the Iranian Energy minister, both sides exchanged views on the arrangements of sessions of Armenia-Iran Intergovernmental joint commission to be hold in the future. YEREVAN, 29 MARCH, ARMENPRESS. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and the Command of the Russian Peacekeeping Forces are making active efforts to defuse tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh, ARMENPRESS reports the official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Maria Zakharova said at a weekly briefing, emphasizing that the Russian peacekeepers are acting strictly following the provisions of the November 9 trilateral declaration. Asked by a reporter of The Moscow Post what is really happening on the line of contact of Russian peacekeepers, and if that can be a provocation by the Azerbaijani side, maybe even Turkey, given that Rusia is currently focused on Ukraine, Zakharova answered, The position of our country in connection with the recent incidents in the area of responsibility of the Russian peacekeeping troops is expressed in the March 26 statement of the Russian Foreign Ministry. If you look at that announcement, you will see that we have called on the parties to urgently ensure the smooth implementation of the agreements reached at the highest level on November 9, 220 on the complete cessation of all hostilities in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict zone. According to Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry is in constant contact with the representatives of Yerevan and Baku. For weeks, Azerbaijan has been consistently aggravating the military, humanitarian and moral situation in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, trying to intimidate the Armenians of Artsakh by various means. The Artsakh authorities, human rights activists, describe it as a state policy of intimidation against the people of Artsakh. During the last month, the local population was twice deprived of heating, in particular, gas supply. During that time, the Azerbaijani armed forces fired several times at a number of Armenian settlements and roads. The tension increased sharply when on March 24 the Azerbaijani troops, grossly violating the 2020 agreement, invaded the area of responsibility of the peacekeeping troops of the Russian Federation in the Artsakh Republic, taking control of the village of Parukh in the Askeran region and adjacent positions, then trying to secure advancment on the eastern border of the Artsakh Republic. On March 27, the Russian peacekeeping force announced that as a result of the talks, the Azerbaijani side has withdrawn its units from Parukh. YEREVAN, 29 MARCH, ARMENPRESS. French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin are holding a telephone conversation, ARMENPRESS reports TASS informed, citing Agence France-Presse. Earlier it was reported that before the conversation with Putin, Macron was to take part in talks with US President Joe Biden together with a number of European leaders. President of the Artsakh Republic Arayik Harutyunyan convened a consultation with the heads of the power structures dedicated to the recent developments along the line of contact, the Presidential Office stated. March 29, 2022, 10:58 President Harutyunyan convened a consultation with the heads of the power structures STEPANAKERT, MARCH 29, ARTSAKHPRESS: Minister of Defense of the Artsakh Republic Kamo Vardanyan delivered a report on the operative-tactical situation. The Head of the State noted once again that ensuring the stability in the republic is on the agenda of the Arstakh authorities. According to the President, all efforts are exerted through the Armed Forces of Artsakh and the command staff of the Russian peacekeeping troops deployed in Artsakh, as well as through possible diplomatic means to ensure peace and to withdraw the Azeri troops from the eastern part of the line of contact to their starting positions. During the meeting, President Harutyunyan gave a number of instructions on the organization of the defense of the country and cooperation between the power structures. The Russian and Ukrainian delegations wrapped up the first day of talks in Istanbul on Tuesday, Tass informs. March 29, 2022, 15:40 Russia, Ukraine wrap up first day of talks in Istanbul STEPANAKERT, MARCH 29, ARTSAKHPRESS: No details about the outcome of the talks were reported. The talks took place in the Dolmabahce Turkish presidential office and lasted more than three hours. Earlier, the head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, said there would be a statement following the talks. He said the talks had started at 9:30 Moscow time. The view that drug use is a moral choice is pervasive, pernicious and wrong. So are the corresponding beliefs about the addicted that they are weak, selfish and dissolute; if they werent, when their excessive drug-taking and drinking began to harm them, theyd stop. The reality is far different. Using drugs or not isnt about willpower or character. Most problematic drug use is related to stress, trauma, genetic predisposition, mild or serious mental illness, use at an early age, or some combination of those. Even in their relentless destruction and self-destruction, the addicted arent bad people. Theyre gravely ill, afflicted with a chronic, progressive, and often terminal disease. excerpt from "Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending Americas Greatest Tragedy" by David Sheff After raising the topic of stigma around addiction in last months column and in the community mailer that introduces destigmatizing language, I received much community feedback about the importance of talking about this. I did not expect that junk mail would motivate people to show their support by calling and emailing me and bringing it up in casual encounters, but it seemed to have struck a chord in the community. Id like to thank everyone who took the time to read the pamphlet, contact me and share their thoughts. Your feedback encourages my team and me to keep the conversation going. To that end, Id like to reuse some previously shared content to address misconceptions and myths about what happens to the body and brain of someone who suffers from substance use disorder and why quitting is so hard. Misconception No. 1: Addiction is a moral failure. Reality: Addiction is a chronic disease that alters brain function. Our brains are wired to seek rewards. The reward pathway in the brain is controlled by the chemical messenger dopamine. It tells the brain to pay attention to what just happened and that its worth getting more of. Dopamine is released by endorphins or when we encounter anything pleasurable or exciting. Drugs are among the most powerful experiences a brain can have, and can push dopamine levels 10 times higher than normal. Extended drug use alters the connections between brain cells, creating memories of euphoria and triggering fierce cravings. The same can happen with gambling or eating; it can become addictive and difficult to self-regulate the desire. Drugs overwhelm the brain with dopamine, which makes the body decrease its production to the point where it cant even produce enough dopamine to get you out of bed. Scans of brains exposed to drugs shower fewer dopamine receptors, which means the brain is starving for dopamine, our motivational drive. If we tell someone who is struggling with drugs to just get motivated to stop, we are essentially telling them to magically produce more dopamine. The good news is that scans also show that dopamine receptors reduced by addictive drugs can come back with recovery. In essence, people struggling with addiction are not weak, they are ill. Misconception No. 2: Adolescents want to get high. Reality: Adolescents are developmentally primed to use substances. Over 90% of addiction cases start before the age of 21, when the brain is still forming. Why is that? Turns out it has something to do with how the brain matures. While by age 10 to 12 a childs brain size is that of an adult, the brain matures much slower. During adolescent and young adult years, the prefrontal cortex which is responsible for executive function and decision-making is not yet fully developed. They are still in the developmental stage of seeking highly stimulating and rewarding activities and are only partially deterred by risk and harm factors. The most effective way to achieve highly rewarding stimulation that adolescents seek is through drugs, which explains why most substance abuse starts in adolescence, with the largest percentage (20%) between the age of 16 and 20. Misconception No. 3: Locking them up will set them straight. Reality: Addiction is not a criminal problem, it is a health problem. Trends are shifting as more and more policymakers and people in criminal justice realize that the war on drugs did not deliver the desired results, and we cant arrest our way out of a health crisis. Addiction and the associated cravings put the body into survival mode. People with substance use disorder are not choosing to get high anymore; its the fear of withdrawal that is bigger than losing ones job, family or life, which may help us understand why they steal and lie to get money to buy more drugs. Incarcerating people with substance use disorder and often other disorders related to mental illness presents a high risk for gaps in care during incarceration and a high risk of death upon release (13 times higher within two weeks of release). Diversion to problem-solving treatment courts has shown improvements in remission and recovery for illness and substance use disorder and improved linkage to services. Medications for addiction treatment in jails and prisons and coordinated reentry efforts are on the rise to address these health issues and help to reduce criminal recidivism. Misconception No. 4: They can quit if they really want to. Reality: Addiction can be treated, but not necessarily cured. Chronic drug abuse is associated with a reduction in gray matter in the brain in the prefrontal cortex, which is crucial to making the right decisions at the right time. The lower the gray matter, the more the decision-making is impaired, which leads to a decreased ability to control your behavior. For that reason, people with substance use disorder fight a very hard battle. Its not about mustering enough willpower to quit but taking the first step to seek help and get treatment. Just like with any other chronic disease, such as diabetes, hypertension or asthma, relapses can be expected to happen and are not a sign of weakness or failure. Quitting is hard, staying sober is harder. A combination of evidence-based treatment practices coupled with behavioral interventions to address the underlying issues or other disorders can help to restore the reward pathways in the brain away from substances over time. Monika Salvage works for the Cayuga County Mental Health Department as the project director for the HEALing Communities Study, a multi-year, multi-state research study to reduce opioid overdose deaths through the implementation of evidence-based practices. If you are interested in learning more or getting involved, please call (315) 253-1522 or email msalvage@cayugacounty.us. Love 1 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 A Rochester firm has been awarded a multi-million dollar contract to repair the west pier of Little Sodus Bay in Fair Haven, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced on Monday. Crane-Hogan Structural Systems won the $3.3 million contract. The project will include clearing new driving lines on the land and channel side of the pier. Several sections of sheet pile and the concrete will be removed, along with the angle brackets and wire rope used for the temporary repairs. New sheet pile will be installed and a new concrete cap will be poured. New steel safety ladders and concrete stairs at the northern edge of the cap will be installed. Construction will begin this summer and should be completed by fall. The navigation channel will remain open while crews work to repair the pier. The damaged occurred after extreme weather events in 2019. The sheet pile wall along the west pier began to separate from the concrete platform. The Army Corps of Engineers awarded a contract for temporary repairs, which were completed later that year. But there was additional damage to the pier after storms last year. The Army Corps of Engineers inspected the pier again and found that the temporary repairs remained in place. The temporary fix bought time for much-needed permanent repairs. With the passage of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill last year, more federal funding was available. New York's U.S. senators, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, announced in January that the law would help fund the pier's repairs. "Since damage to the Little Sodus Bay west pier was first identified in 2019, the Army Corps of Engineers has worked with incredible speed to ensure both temporary and long-lasting repairs were put into effect," said Lt. Col. Eli Adams, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers' Buffalo district. "Thanks to the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and a strong partnership with the village of Fair Haven, this vital piece of Great Lakes infrastructure will continue to serve the public for years to come." Jim Basile, who serves as mayor of Fair Haven and represents the village in the Cayuga County Legislature, is pleased that construction will begin this year to repair the pier. "This channel is an important part of life in the bay as the connective water corridor to Lake Ontario for village of Fair Haven residents, businesses and visitors to our community," he said. "I would like to thank all that worked to bring this to fruition." Politics reporter Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 282-2220 or robert.harding@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @robertharding. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The woman wanted in connection with a homicide in Auburn is being held by police in South Carolina as arrangements are being made to bring her back to Cayuga County to answer to a murder charge. The Auburn Police Department on Tuesday said that Shameek Marie Copes, 28, of 1 Jefferson St., Apt. 1, Auburn, turned herself in at the Rock Hill Police Department in Rock Hill, South Carolina, shortly after an arrest warrant accusing her of second-degree murder was issued in Cayuga County on March 28. Copes was wanted in connection with the shooting death of John Wesley Smith III, 37, of Syracuse, who was found dead in front of Swifty's Tavern on Perrine Street at about 1:40 a.m on March 15. The APD said on March 24, that Copes was a "person of interest" in the case and asked for assistance from the public in tracking her down, noting that she may have fled the state and was known to have connections to people in North Carolina, Texas, Michigan, Georgia and Florida, among other places. Days later, the agency issued another press release that labeled her as a suspect in the homicide. Auburn police investigating overnight shooting death Auburn police are investigating a shooting death outside a city bar early Tuesday morning. The APD said Tuesday that the Cayuga County District Attorneys Office was facilitating her transfer back to New York to be formally charged. The APD would not comment on a possible motive for the shooting or whether anyone else is believed to have fired a weapon at the homicide scene, saying that the investigation is still ongoing, and that further information may be released in the future. The APD thanked agencies involved in assisting with the investigation and attempting to locate Copes, including the Cayuga County District Attorneys Office, Cayuga County Sheriffs Office, New York State Police, United States Marshalls Service, Texas Rangers and various North Carolina and Virginia law enforcement agencies and others. Police continue to encourage anyone with additional information relative to this investigation to contact the Auburn Police Departments lead Detective Sean DeRosa at (315) 255-4706 or sderosa@auburnny.gov or communitywatch@auburnny.gov. Love 8 Funny 2 Wow 3 Sad 2 Angry 6 After a two-year pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hoopes Park Easter Egg Hunt will return in April with a new host. The Auburn Rotary Club, together with Joe Calarco of Aflac and Mesa Grande Taqueria, will host the 71st annual hunt at 10 a.m. Saturday, April 9. The club takes over the event from the Owasco-Fleming Kiwanis Club, which hosted it for more than 40 years. The last egg hunt at the park took place in 2019, as the event was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. It's our pleasure to continue this important family tradition, and it's good to be the first egg hunt of the Easter season, Auburn Rotary Club President Mitch Maniccia said in a news release. We look forward to continuing this tradition for many years to come. We're also extremely grateful to our sponsors for making this happen with us on such short notice. The hunt will have two categories, ages 5 and younger and ages 6 to 11, with separate courses for each. All the eggs in the hunt are traditionally found within minutes of the 10 a.m. start. For more information about the event or the Auburn Rotary Club, which has served local youth, veterans and the community since 1915, visit auburnrotaryny.org. Love 6 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The Cayuga Community College Board of Trustees is at full strength for the first time since 2019. The college's governing board last week welcomed Mark Coleman, an entrepreneur and author who lives in Sennett. Coleman's seat is one of four on the 10-person board that's appointed by the governor's office, but the executive chamber had left the post open for more than two years. Two gubernatorial appointments on the board emerged in 2019, with the governor's office filling one in March 2021 when attorney Angela Winfield joined the board. But the other slot remained unoccupied for the past year. The Cayuga County Legislature makes appointments for five other trustee seats, and the final seat is an elected student slot. Coleman is a CCC alum, having graduated from the institution in 1996. He is the president and independent sustainability and management advisor for Convergence Mitigation Management and director of advanced energy for TRC, an international sustainable engineering and construction company. Cayuga Community College board vacancies unfilled by Cuomo since 2019 Two empty seats on the Cayuga Community College Board of Trustees that require appointees from Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office haven't been filled Mark has an incredible background in education, a documented passion for our communities, and a forward-thinking approach to the needs of our workforce. Hes dedicated much of his career to helping other people grow and succeed, and he will carry that same enthusiastic commitment to his work as a trustee, said CCC President Brian Durant said in a press release. Were proud to have him join us, and were confident hell have creative ideas to help Cayuga and our students move forward in the years ahead. The husband of Cayuga County Legislator Aileen McNabb-Coleman, Mark Coleman has held numerous leadership in sustainable manufacturing and energy fields. He previously worked as a business development manager at HARBEC Inc., a sustainable manufacturer, and was a senior program manager at the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies at Rochester Institute of Technology. His career started at the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. "This feels like everything has come full-circle, having an opportunity to leverage my experience and knowledge to help the college where I started my collegiate academic pathway, Coleman said in the press release. Im excited to have this chance to support the college as it guides students and explores new avenues to prepare our workforce, and to help Cayuga continue forming strong partnerships in our communities. Coleman is also an adjunct professor at Syracuse University, where he worked from 2016 to 2019 as senior director of corporate relations. Hes written three books that about sustainability: The Dignity Doctrine: Rational Relations in an Irrational World, The Sustainability Generation and Time to Trust: Mobilizing Humanity for a Sustainable Future." After graduating from CCC, Coleman earned two bachelors degrees from SUNY Binghamton in 1998 and a masters degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1999. Our board of trustees is excited to welcome Mark, and we know that he returns to Cayuga eager to support our students as they prepare for their future careers, board Chair Marian Brown said in the press release. Marks experience in academia and his enthusiastic support for emerging, innovative industries will be invaluable as our college evolves and looks for new ways to serve our students and communities." Love 2 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand wants to make it easier for rural communities to access federal government programs. To achieve that goal, Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has introduced the Rural Prosperity Act. The bill would create the Office of Rural Prosperity within the White House. The new office would assist communities by connecting them with more than 400 federal programs that support rural areas. Other provisions in the bill include the creation of a rural prosperity council consisting of leaders from executive branch departments, agencies and other offices that have programs for rural areas. The purpose of the council, according to Gillibrand, is to resolve interagency disputes and address the needs of rural communities. The Office of Rural Prosperity would also develop a strategy for rural economic development and hold public hearings on challenges facing rural areas. The bill also requires the Office of Rural Prosperity to recommend how to streamline the process for getting federal funding to rural areas and establish metrics for these programs. Gillibrand thinks her bill would cut through red tape and help rural areas. She noted that there are more than 400 federal programs for rural communities, but they are administered by 13 departments and more than 50 offices and sub-agencies. This leads to "duplicative and ineffective bureaucracy," she said. "We have the unique opportunity with the Rural Prosperity Act to improve how the federal government invests in rural America and fix a system that is too narrow and inflexible to meet the specific needs of rural communities," she said, adding that "this model has already proven to be successful and will help New York's rural communities thrive." Gillibrand has bipartisan support for her bill in Congress. In the Senate, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, and Iowa's Republican U.S. senators, Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley, joined her in introducing the bill. A companion bill has been introduced in the House by six members Democratic U.S. Reps. Cindy Axne, Angie Craig and Tom O'Halleran, and Republican U.S. Reps. Randy Feenstra, Dan Newhouse and Adrian Smith. Politics reporter Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 282-2220 or robert.harding@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @robertharding. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. After some rural communities struggled to get federal disaster aid, U.S. Rep. John Katko wants to ensure there is fair access to the assistance. Katko, the ranking Republican member of the House Homeland Security Committee, authored the Small State and Rural Rescue Act. The legislation would expand the role of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's small state and rural advocate, which assists state and local governments apply for disaster aid. It would also direct a Government Accountability Office review of how FEMA provides individual assistance after disasters occur. According to Katko, small states and rural communities tend to face obstacles to federal aid and "demonstrating the severe localized impact of these incidents." One consequence of that is these areas can miss out on federal aid and are "underserved" by these programs. One example is what happened to Cayuga County after storms and flooding in 2017. The state sought a major disaster declaration, which would allow for the county to receive federal aid for affected areas. But FEMA denied the request. The state appealed that decision, but it was rejected. Patrick Mahunik, who was chairman of the Cayuga County Legislature at the time, said the denial of federal assistance would be a $4 million hit to local governments. "Rural communities in central New York have been hit in recent years by disastrous and costly flooding," Katko said. "To ensure the fair treatment of rural communities like ours, I introduced the Small State and Rural Rescue Act. This bill will strengthen FEMA's efforts to coordinate with state and local officials when assessing disaster impact, helping to ensure these communities get the assistance they need." Katko's bill is supported by members of Congress from both parties, including U.S. Rep. Antonio Delgado, a New York Democrat. Since Cayuga County faced problems getting federal disaster aid, Katko has proposed changes to the process. A separate measure he introduced would improve preliminary damage assessments, one of the necessary steps in securing a disaster declaration. The House passed that bill in February. Politics reporter Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 282-2220 or robert.harding@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @robertharding. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Beijing (Gasgoo)- On March 28th, Chinas Ministry of Transportation and the Ministry of Science and Technology issued a guideline for technology development in the transportation field, encouraging the development of flying cars within the country. XPeng's Flying Car; photo credit: XPeng The guideline pointed out that the R&D of novel transportation equipment is needed. Specifically, the Ministries are pushing forward the exploration of the ultra-high-speed trains, and the development of advanced rail equipment that integrates new energy sources and material structure, and is adaptive to cross-standards. Additionally, relevant parties should develop flying vehicles, and explore the technologies for the integration of aircraft and vehicles, switching freely between flying and grounded driving modes. The R&D of new energy vehicles and intelligent connected vehicles should be accelerated to reach breakthroughs in key technologies in the efficient and safe pure electric drive, fuel cell batteries, vehicle design, and onboard intelligent perception and control areas. Currently, several tech companies are exploring the flying car field, including the Chinese auto startup, XPeng. XPengs affiliated company HT Aero has shipped the Voyager X2, its fifth-generation "flying car" to the Netherlands in March. The flying car will debut in Europe soon. Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Chinese solid-state battery developer Beijing WeLion New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. (WeLion) recently introduced several new investors, including affiliated companies of Xiaomi, Huawei, and Geely. WeLion's solid-state lithium ion battery pack; photo credit: WeLion According to the corporate database Tianyancha, the new investors affiliated to the aforesaid tech giants and automakers are Hubei Xiaomi Yangtze River Industry Investment Fund Partners (Limited Partnership) (a Xiaomi-backed industry fund), Shenzhen Hubble Technology Investment Partners (Limited Partnership) (a subsidiary of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.), and Ningbo Geely Blue Initiative Business Management Partners (a subsidiary of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group). With the introduction of new investors, the registered capital of WeLion has increased by 5.74% to 61,367,286 yuan ($9.638 million). Founded in 2016, WeLion focuses on the R&D and production of hybrid solid-liquid electrolyte lithium-ion batteries and all-solid-state lithium batteries. It is the only industrialization platform of solid-state battery technologies from the Key Laboratory of Renewable Energy of Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Headquartered in Beijing, it has three production bases in Fangshan in Beijing, Liyang in Jiangsu, and Huzhou in Zhejiang. At the China EV100 Forum 2022 held last weekend, Li Hong, founder of WeLion, said the company is working with NIO to launch a hybrid solid-liquid electrolyte battery with a range of 1,000 kilometers on a single charge, based on the ET7 model. The volume production of the battery is likely to start at the end of 2022 or in the first half of 2023. Shanghai (Gasgoo)- GAC Honda launched on March 29 the new all-electric vehicle brand e:NP (named Ji Pai in Chinese) with the brand strategy released at the same time, making it the first joint venture in China to have a standalone BEV brand. The automaker explained the meaning of each letter of the brand name. The e stands for energize and electric, the N stands for New and Next, and the P stands for Prime. e:NP1; photo credit: GAC Honda The first model under the newborn brand is the e:NP1, which was unveiled at the Auto Guangzhou 2021. At the brand launching event, its Chinese name, Ji Pai 1, was announced as well. The model is scheduled to hit the market at the Auto China 2022 in Beijing. The joint venture said it plans to roll out one e:NP1-branded EV model per year by 2025. Besides, it will also continue to increase the proportion of HEVs and PHEVs in its overall auto sales. The company will adopt the click-and-mortar sales mode for the brand. Users are allowed to select configurations and put down a deposit via GAC Honda's App. In 2024, GAC Honda will start production at an all-new NEV-dedicated plant, which will be supported by 5G network and feature multiple intelligent applications. Someone passed out at a bus station. A person screaming at passersby. Another caught in the midst of a mental health crisis. These are the calls that once filled the days of Flagstaff's fire and police departments. They weren't always the best option and, in some cases, the uniforms and flashing lights would only escalate the situation. There was no one else to send, though. But that's no longer the case. These calls will fall under a new unit equipped specifically to handle them. After more than a year of planning and preparation, the Community Alliance Response and Engagement (CARE) unit officially launched Monday. Each unit consists of a trained behavioral health specialist and a Flagstaff Fire Department firefighter/EMT. They work together from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. each day in a specially equipped van, responding to 911 and non-emergency calls in addition to conducting proactive outreach throughout the city. CARE replaces police in matters that don't pose a threat to public safety. They connect the individuals who don't pose any danger with the resources they need, allowing police to respond to other calls. They're not armed, nor are they in uniform. It's a groundbreaking alternative-response model for a city the size of Flagstaff and likely one of the first in the state. "I think this is the right step in the right direction," Flagstaff City Councilmember Adam Shimoni said. "...I hope it's something that sustains itself and is resilient not only across the state, but across the nation." Covering the gaps The CARE unit launched quickly despite being years in the making. The Flagstaff City Council approved a $2.5 million, three-year contract with Terros Health in October 2021. Terros Health is a healthcare company specializing in crisis services, mental health and substance abuse treatment. They previously worked alongside Flagstaff's law enforcement to provided crisis response resources, but often didn't respond until after police had come and gone. The contract with CARE came as the city sought alternatives to traditional policing models amidst an increase in calls related to public intoxication, mental health and behavioral crisis. Initial estimates projected the pivot to CARE would cut the calls handled by fire and police by up to 10%. "The unit will cover gaps that are unfortunately fairly prevalent in Flagstaff and previously necessitated dispatching the police department, fire department and an ambulance, which is not necessarily what any of those types of responses are meant for. They often don't have the time or tools to deal with someone in psychosis or intoxicated. They're just not the optimal responders and it's about being able to get mental health responders to them instead," said Bryan Gest, director of Northern Arizona Crisis Service for Terros Health. Flagstaff is just one of the many cities across the country embracing alternatives to traditional policing following the 2020 death of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the subsequent law enforcement reckoning. City governments and departments across the country sought to shift the onus off of police and onto those better equipped to navigate a mental health crisis or other social issues. 'We're all here as helpers' Each two-person unit will be casually dressed in a CARE T-shirts and travel throughout the city in a Terros-branded van. Their calls are dispatched through the Flagstaff Police Department's dispatch center. Just the team responds without police or an ambulance. It's a new model for the city and the teams, which are composed of Flagstaff Fire Department and Terros, learning as they go along. The initial team members spent hours in training in the week before the launch, learning how to build rapport, asses risk and help stabilize someone to get them out of the crisis state. "It's about time, presence and patience," clinical manager Sirene Lipschutz explained to the group of 15. Success comes in the form of small steps for CARE, Lipschutz explained. They know they will likely deal with the same people again and again. The key is to build trust so they know they won't force them into anything and will instead honor their wishes. "We're all here as helpers," Lipschutz said. In addition to responding to dispatched calls, the vehicle will also function to transport individuals to local shelters or medical facilities. They'll move throughout the city, addressing issues that arise. Sometimes it's just about connecting people with the right resource. There's no direct answer, but instead they will determine the solution based on the need with the input of the person in crisis. They have the latitude to do that, too. "We want to be an ongoing presence in the community," Gest said. "Even if someone is not actively in crisis, we can be there and offer resources, help meet basic needs or just help build rapport with the community." Compassionate response There's no correct answer when dealing with these situations and the process will continue to evolve during the first days, months and years running. Officials are tracking the number of calls handled by CARE, the amount of calls rerouted and how many calls they could handle if the unit were to expand. "We collect data from all of this as we go on," Flagstaff Fire Department Capt. Mike Felts said. "We'll figure out if we need to adjust or tweak any parameters in there as we go along." The CARE team, which is headed by Gest and Felts, will provide monthly updates to the city council, with the first one in April. Even on launch day, there was a promise that this was just the beginning, that one day there would be a second and third unit enough to provide care 24 hours a day. Coucilmembers gathered outside city hall to wish the first two-person CARE unit of FFD's David Ortiz and Terros' Marge Chase well on launch day. "Today marks the beginning of compassionate response," Councilmember Regina Salas said before sending the team off on their first shift. The CARE unit had responded to six different calls by 3 p.m. Monday just five hours into their first shift. Reporter Bree Burkitt can be reached at 928-556-2250 or bburkitt@azdailysun.com. Love 9 Funny 0 Wow 1 Sad 0 Angry 9 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. North Country Healthcare (NCHC) held a virtual match day event March 24, welcoming four residents to its Family and Community Medicine Residency program (FCMRP) and two to its pharmacy residency program. The addition of these residents marks the family programs first time having a full program, with three years worth of students. Our residents are incredible, said Dr. Sarah Coles, the programs new director. They are smart, driven, exceptional leaders who really are passionate about providing the care, helping people achieve their health goals and being those physician leaders. I cannot be more proud of the residents in our program as well as our faculty and community partners. It really is a privilege to get to be here and to have a residency in this community. The new class of residents will start June 27. The FCMRP residents are Jenna Kay, MD, from the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson; Jacob Somen, DO, from Burrell College of Osteopathic medicine in New Mexico; Abby Trinh, DO, from the Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Colorado; and Ada Young, DO, from the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine. Emily Mauer and Allison Sharp will be joining the pharmacy residency program. Both are 2022 PharmD (doctor of pharmacy) candidates, Mauer from Concordia University Wisconsin and Sharp from the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy. Students in their last year of medical school apply to residencies in their specialty and interview with residencies across the countries, a process that usually runs from October to February. Then, residence programs and applicants both rank their preferences and are matched by an algorithm. The applicants learned about their matches March 18 and the program announced them March 24. The pharmacy residency is a separate program, led by Kimberly Chen, BSPharm, NCHCs director of pharmacy. Started in 2010, it has trained 19 residents so far, with seven being hired after their residency. The family medicine residency is a three year training program, designed to attract and train physicians for the Indigenous and rural communities in NAZ, according to NCHC CEO Anne Newland. It is funded by the NARBHA institute ($3 million), the Arizona Area Health Education Center Program and the Arizona State Legislature ($750,000). The residency is run by the Colorado Plateau Center for Health Professions, the only area health education center (AHEC) in a community health center, Newland said. AHECs were specifically created to recruit, train and retain a health profession workforce committed to providing care for underserved populations, she said, and NCHC has been a teaching health center for 25 years. ...Our focus has always been to improve access to care for rural northern Arizona by providing support for practicing professionals, engaging health profession residents through learning opportunities and connecting youth to healthcare professions. The family residencys goal, Coles said, is to really collaborate and partner with our communities to address those healthcare shortages, to improve health outcomes. We want to be there for our communities and not separate from. This is the first time having all three FCMRP classes filled, as it started in June 2020. Each has four residents, with the hope to eventually expand to six per year. The first class will be graduating in 2023. Coles said this program is especially important, as Arizona has a physician shortage, including in primary care. Roughly 40% of the state of Arizona lives in a primary care shortage area and its worse in Arizonas rural communities, she said. So the CO Plateau center was really interested in trying to fill that gap and to decrease that shortage so that people have access to health that they need and deserve. The hope is the residents they train will stay in northern Arizona and continue to provide healthcare in the area. A 2021 Association of American Medical Colleges report found that 57.6% of 3,211 total residents who completed their program in Arizona between 2011 and 2020 are currently practicing in the state. Across the United States, 57.1% (of 246,433 total) of those completing residency training are currently practicing in the same state they trained in. One potential reason Coles gave for this shortage was a lack of people interested in providing primary care, especially in Indigenous, rural and underserved communities. Part of why it can be difficult to attract people to rural areas to serve as clinicians, as cities tend to offer more amenities, higher salaries and more social opportunities. Barriers to care in northern Arizona also include high costs, longer distances to care, insufficient in-network options for insurance and a scarcity of specialty services. Coles also noted that cultural humility is needed for this type of work (cultural competency is a part of residents training in this program). You're coming into different areas and different types of practice with different folks, and that's something that's hard, she said. If you're not trained or working in that area, you might not know what that community really wants and needs. And what we never want to do is be the people who come in and tell the community what they want. ...That never succeeds. They know what they need and they know where they want to make them healthy, so you need a physician group who's willing to have that cultural humility to come in and learn and to work and partner with them. Newland also noted the residencys economic benefits, saying the availability of healthcare affects the ability of our community to attract and retain new industries, businesses and residents. Employers need to be sure a community can provide for the health of their employees. A 2019 economic impact study by Rounds Consulting Group, Inc. projected that after 10 years, the NCHC program would create a total of 136 jobs and generate $62.4 million in wages, $151.7 in economic output and $2.8 million in state tax revenue. Community health programs are unusual, Coles said, with most residencies being hospital-based. She said less than 70 of the 700 family medicine residency programs across the country are in community health centers. NCHCs is the first family medicine residency program in Arizona to be sponsored by a community health center. Our program trains our doctors, our residents to provide care for the community that they live and work in, which is very different, she said. So they are mostly out in the world, instead of in the hospital. They're taking care of a wide variety of people and ages and all sorts of conditions, and preventive care where they can really partner with the community, address the social determinants of health of that community, to provide the care that our specific community needs -- Flagstaff and northern Arizona. It's also meant as a way for the interns to dive into their specialty, Coles said. Family medicine residents learn about the full spectrum of care -- on a given day, residents might handle procedures from delivering babies to preventive visits to nursing home care. One of the real joys of family medicine and what we really bring to the community is that we are the doctors who will take care of anybody for anything in any setting, she said. Coles said her hope for the program going forward was to train and build physician leaders for Northern Arizona who can provide that high quality, full spectrum primary care to these communities that are truly underserved. ...I really want physicians who can work to meet those needs, stay in northern Arizona, who will become leaders in their communities to help close those care gaps to improve health equity and to improve health outcomes for everybody that they serve, she said. More about the centers residency programs can be found at coloradoplateauchp.org/residency. Love 2 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and chief adviser to the White House, recently warned that the more contagious BA. 2 subvariant of Omicron could trigger another COVID-19 wave in the United States. The US Congress, however, recently passed a bill to cut $15.6 billion in epidemic relief to allocate more "assistance" to Ukraine. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the decision "heartbreaking", but said "Ukrainians are dying". NBC reporter Jake Sherman responded to her saying, "Americans are dying of COVID-19". Some White House officials also said that the US government is running out of funds to fight the epidemic and that if Congress does not approve more funding, monoclonal antibody therapies to treat COVID-19 patients will run out of supply by the end of May and booster shots will not be available. That the US has the money to fuel the Russia-Ukraine conflict but not to fight the pandemic is the biggest irony to its self-proclaimed "human rights supremacy" democracy. In the eyes of some US politicians, political expediency takes precedence over people's lives. Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the US has been supplying ammunition to Ukraine under the guise of "humanitarianism" from which its arms dealers have profited a lot. The US announced $13.6 billion in "humanitarian aid" to Ukraine, but used more than half of it for military deployment, adding fuel to the fire in the Russia-Ukraine crisis. According to the Associated Press, most of the money has gone to fund US military presence in Eastern Europe and to arm its allies, with little money going directly to the Ukrainian people. After the pandemic broke out, the US Congress gave the Defense Department $1 billion to fight the epidemic, but most of it was diverted to build military equipment. According to a study by the US Department of Labor, more than $87 billion in emergency unemployment benefits were improperly doled out, with only 23 percent of the $800 billion actually reaching those it was intended to help. That apart, politicians of the two parties continue to bicker over vaccination and mask issues, further dragging down epidemic control efforts. The pandemic is far from over. The US should face up to its problems, fulfill its due responsibilities, put the lives of its people first, and do something for global epidemic prevention and control. Members of Syria's Future Party issued a statement on the occasion of its 4th anniversary, which read by the partys Secretary-General Siham Daoud. The statement explained that "Project of the Future Syria Party comes as an urgent necessity to lead a historical and political stage amid the existing chaos, along with resolving outstanding crises and achievement of the desired goals." "The Future Syria Party rejects sectarianism in all its forms, adheres to equal constitutional citizenship, moreover opposes any holistic approach taken by a single party," the statement added. The Future Syria Party pointed out in its statement, "We have worked throughout the past period to advance and overcome the state of chaos that the people of Syria have suffered for over the past 11 years. The statement stressed, "We will continue our struggle to preserve the constitutional democratic form of the country and achieve freedoms for the people of Syria, we affirm that the mass base is our vital arena, through which the foundations of tyranny and the culture of exclusion can be overturned through our support for the Syrian Democratic Forces, and the strengthening the role of the Autonomous Administration that represents aspirations of the Syrian people. The statement recalled all the martyrs who gave their lives in achieving democracy and justice for the peoples of the region in particular and the Syrian people in general. The statement concluded by saying we pledge to our Syrian people with all its components that we will continue to march tirelessly towards the future Syria. A.K ANHA Fashion , And the Red Carpet Oscar goes to ... the white shirt (or no shirt) The formal shirt was the key look at the 2022 Oscars, with everyone from Zendaya to Kristen Stewart wearing one. Timothee Chalamet, as ever, went his own way Zendaya in Valentino Haute Couture at the Oscars on Sunday night. Photograph: Matt Cowan/Rex/Shutterstock The ballgown is dead. Long live the simple white shirt. The look that will go down in history from this years Oscar ceremony is a crisp white shirt. And not only because both Will Smith and Chris Rock were wearing them during that incident, but because the best dressed on the red carpet passed on the fairytale frocks and chose white shirts instead. Zendaya, star of the six-statuette winning Dune, wore an ivory silk shirt with a deep collar and pearl-buttoned cuffs, cropped mid-ribcage above a sequined silver maxi skirt. The look was custom-made by Valentino Haute Couture for Zendaya, whose longtime stylist Law Roach has become one of Hollywood fashions most formidable power players, and who also dressed Venus Williams for the ceremony. Uma Thurman wore a more conventionally proportioned white shirt by Bottega Veneta, teamed with a floor length black satin skirt in a look which referenced the white shirt she wore in her own breakthrough role almost three decades ago as Mia Wallace in Quentin Tarantinos Pulp Fiction. Kristen Stewart wore a sheer white shirt by Chanel the crystal buttons unbuttoned beneath a fitted mini-tuxedo with black hotpants. A gown wasnt even on Stewarts shortlist, with the last-minute decision coming down to a choice between pairing the shirt and jacket with shorts or with trousers. (Kristen was like, Lets do it. Lets go for shorts, Stewarts stylist Tara Swennen told Harpers Bazaar.) Stewarts fiancee, the actor and screenwriter Dylan Meyer, also wore a white shirt on the red carpet, pintucked and untucked. Dylan Meyer and Kristen Stewart arrive at the Dolby theatre. Photograph: Jim Ruymen/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock Wanda Sykes, one of the nights co-hosts, wore a white shirt with rhinestone buttons under a Pamela Roland shawl-collared white tuxedo suit to walk the red carpet with her wife Alex Sykes, who wore a more Oscar-traditional sparkly dress. Lady Gaga, whose award ceremony fashion game has been the stuff of legend ever since she wore a dress made of meat to the 2010 MTV awards, chose a wing tip white shirt with a bow tie and tuxedo to close the ceremony, presenting the best picture award alongside Liza Minnelli. There were some spectacular outfits on the red carpet Maggie Gyllenhaal in a surreal Schiaparelli gown dotted with gold rosettes which from some angles appeared to grow elephants trunks or rabbits ears; Kirsten Dunst making the sustainable choice in vintage Christian Lacroix; Billie Eilish in a vast stormcloud of gothic Gucci; Chloe Bailey in a purple beaded gown with a thigh split that reached to her armpit; and Kodi Smit-McPhee in an ice-blue Bottega Veneta tux but perhaps the only star to steal the limelight from the white shirt wearers was Timothee Chalamet, who must have prompted a global frenzy of teenage fainting when he appeared on the red carpet wearing no shirt at all. A reference to Mia Wallace? Uma Thurman. Photograph: Valerie Macon/AFP/Getty Images The white shirt is an eye-catching pick at the Oscars, where the normal rules of dressing are reversed. Arrive bedecked in sequins or feathers and no one bats an eyelid; wear a plain white shirt, and hear the gasps. But more than that, a white shirt is an effective route for celebrities who want to be at the Oscars while simultaneously distancing themselves from those elements of the Academy Awards backstory which have become toxic. The traditional ballgown, steeped as it is in a patriarchal vision of femininity and redolent of high-society elitism, strikes a tone-deaf note as the Academy Awards continue to grapple with diversity of representation and of celebrating female creative talent. A white shirt on a woman and its absence on a man, in the case of Chalamet speaks of a break with the hubris the Oscars are trying to leave behind, and of a more modern attitude to gender. Worth noting, perhaps, that Chalamet picked his suit from the most recent Louis Vuitton womenswear collection, where it was last seen on a catwalk in Paris starring in Louis Vuittons show at the Musee dOrsay earlier this month. Sharon Stone and then husband, Phil Bronstein, at the Oscars in 1998. Photograph: Featureflash Archive/Alamy The white shirt has been an onscreen classic since Lauren Bacall wore one opposite Humphrey Bogart in 1948s Key Largo, and more recently has earned a red carpet style pedigree. In 1998, Sharon Stone wore a white cotton shirt from The Gap with a lavender satin Vera Wang skirt, a combination which raised eyebrows at the time but which is now seen as one of her best red carpet moments. Diane Keaton, an iconic white-shirt wearer onscreen as Annie Hall, wore a white shirt with a Ralph Lauren frock coat and bowler hat for the 2004 Oscars, when she was nominated for her role in Somethings Gotta Give. The hottest look on the red carpet is one that most people watching have hanging in their wardrobes already. Maybe the Oscars really have changed. As Democrats in Washington solidified support for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on Friday, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse said he would not support her nomination to the Supreme Court. Sasse is a member of the Judiciary Committee and questioned Jackson during often-contentious hearings this week. "Judge Jackson has impeccable credentials and a deep knowledge of the law, but at every turn this week she not only refused to claim originalism as her judicial philosophy, she refused to claim any judicial philosophy at all," Sasse said in a statement. "Although she explained originalism and textualism in some detail to the committee, Judge Jackson refused to embrace them or any other precise system of limits on the judicial role." Sasse pointed to two lower-court cases in which Jackson ruled as evidence of exceeding her authority as a judge. But he was also critical of the confirmation process, including the hearings this week. "Senators should have made fewer speeches, and Judge Jackson should have made her judicial philosophy clear and understandable to the American people," he said. "Unfortunately, neither of those things happened." A united Democratic caucus would guarantee Jackson's confirmation in the 50-50 Senate, as Vice President Kamala Harris could break a tie. The Associated Press contributed to this story. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Half of Montanas counties reported more deaths than births in 2021, but overall the state experienced a population increase in the second year of the pandemic thanks in part to domestic migration, according to new data released from the U.S. Census Bureau. There was a natural decrease of 1,520 residents in the state from 2020 to 2021 as deaths exceeded births for the second time in recorded history. From 2020 to 2021, 1,787 fewer births than deaths occurred in the state. And from 2019 to 2020, about 300 fewer babies were born. Declining birth rates can negatively impact communities, especially as Montana leads the West in the "silver wave" as the state's population ages. A diminished work force and fewer consumers could spell future economic trouble, but despite the imbalance in natural population growth, overall there was an increase in Montana's population. Over 21,000 Americans moved into Montana from April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2021. Montana was third in the nation for population growth while the U.S. experienced the lowest growth rate since the nations founding. Much of the western part of the state saw gains of 1.6% or more from 2020 to 2021 while parts of eastern Montana lost 0.5% to 1.6% of its population. Flathead County saw 4,337 individual instances of domestic migration, the highest increase in population in the state from April 2020 to July 2021. Gallatin, Yellowstone, Ravalli and Missoula counties followed. Richland County saw the greatest decrease in population losing 208 residents. The county saw a natural change of 34 residents due to 165 reported births and 131 deaths in the first 15 months of the pandemic. Rosebud and Big Horn counties followed with the next most significant population losses of 205 and 167 respectively. But when looking at growth as a percent of a population, an analysis by the Legislative Fiscal Division found that Gallatin County led the state with 5.8% population growth. Madison County followed with a 4.8% increase and is home to The Yellowstone Club, a private residential club know for attracting the elite to Big Sky. Those moving into Madison County had significantly larger incomes than the average taxpayer in the area, the analysis showed. Flathead County, home to both Kalispell and Whitefish, saw a 4.5% increase in population. The report also noted evidence that individuals who moved to Montana in 2019 had similar incomes in 2020, meaning that the migrants either found similar paying jobs or brought their jobs with them. Nationwide, about 65% of counties saw an increase in domestic migration, with a shift from more populous counties to smaller ones, according to the report. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 2 Angry 5 Build your health & fitness knowledge Sign up here to get the latest health & fitness updates in your inbox every week! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. A Billings man is facing multiple federal indictments after Montana law enforcement allegedly found him traveling through the state with thousands of fentanyl pills. Kyngsten Bargar, 29, pleaded not guilty in United States District Court on March 24 to counts of possession and conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute fentanyl. Federal prosecutors also charged him with one count of possessing a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime, to which he pleaded not guilty. Local and federal agents with the Eastern Montana High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force first began investigating Bargars possible involvement in drug trafficking last summer, according to court documents. Sources told agents that Bargar allegedly left the state regularly to haul in bulk amounts of illicit drugs, charges stated. He would then distribute those drugs in and around the Billings area. Investigators received a warrant to track a cell phone associated with Bargar in January 2022. Data showed Bargar to be in Spokane, Washington, documents say, a city identified by a source as one of the locations where he would retrieve drugs to traffic into Billings. In February, cell phone data tracked Barger making his way east, back into Montana. Agents notified Montana Highway Patrol and provided troopers with Bargars approximate location. On the morning of Feb. 18, a trooper stopped a vehicle driving east on Interstate 90 near Reed Point for following the vehicle in front of it too closely. Its driver was later identified as Barger. He was traveling with a passenger who was later released from custody. Narcotics agents with the task force searched the vehicle. Inside, they allegedly found two loaded handguns, one of which had a round in the chamber. Documents say agents also found a safe containing cash, a paper copy of Bargars Montana drivers license and nine small bags of blue pills with markings of M30 on them. The bags contained approximately 9,500 pills, based off the weight recorded by investigators. The pills tested positive for cutting agents, chemicals used to dilute recreational drugs, known to be associated with fentanyl and other opioids. The pills also contained mephedrone, a synthetic amphetamine and schedule I drug. Agents submitted the pills to the Drug Enforcement Agency for more testing. Federal prosecutors indicted Bargar in mid-March, and he is currently in custody at Yellowstone County Detention Facility. Bargar faces a mandatory minimum 10 years to life in prison, if he is convicted of the most serious crime, and a $10 million fine, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorneys Office. His trial date is currently schedule for May 23. A Billings couple is currently awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to trafficking drugs, including fentanyl, earlier this month. Eric Charles Swan, 44, and Elizabeth Ardelle Grace Ronshaugen, 29, admitted to carrying meth, fentanyl and heroin into Billings over a period of several months. They are scheduled to be sentenced July 1. They were carrying more than 9,000 pills containing fentanyl from Denver toward Billings at the time of their arrest in Wyoming last November. Large seizures of fentanyl, which is entering the area generally through a trafficking network that begins with super labs in Mexico, have risen in the past year. The drug unit for the Billings Police Department seized nearly 32,000 pills of fentanyl throughout 2021, the Gazette previously reported. Opioid overdoses have coincided with the increase in supply, with the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services telling the Gazette that emergency calls related to opioids are at an all-time high. So far in 2022, according to preliminary data, the state is averaging about 70 calls per month for opioid-related emergencies. A wave of overdoses and four fatalities due to fentanyl compelled the Blackfeet Nation to declare a state of emergency earlier this month, the Missoulian reported. Love 3 Funny 1 Wow 2 Sad 0 Angry 13 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The University of Wyoming Science Initiative Building is finally complete after over three years and $100 million. UW staff and community members celebrated the buildings ribbon cutting on Thursday. The 153,000-square-foot, five-floor Science Initiative building houses classrooms, research space, a greenhouse, plant growth areas, the Model Organic Research Facility and the Center for Advanced Scientific Instrumentation. It isnt open for business quite yet. Installation of equipment and furnishing of the buildings facilities will take place over the summer. Students and UW staff are expected to be able to use the building starting in the fall. The project began in 2014, when a panel of scientists, industry leaders and other professionals approved a plan to improve science education and create world-class research facilities at UW. The Wyoming Legislature granted UW an initial $85 million in 2018 for the building. Construction began in November of that year. The 2014 plan also initiated a program to train faculty in active-learning practices, which prioritize small groups and hands-on experiences. Over 100 faculty members and graduate students have trained in this program. UW already employs active-learning practices. But the new building provides spaces that are more conducive to this style of instruction, UW spokesperson Chad Baldwin said. The 5,000-square-foot classroom for introductory biology classes, for example, will have microphones and speakers in multiple locations so instructors dont have to carry a microphone. A computer will control audio in different areas. This allows students to work in groups without as much noise disruption. The new research facilities offer more control over test conditions. The plant growth facility, for example, will allow researchers to control humidity, temperature, light and carbon dioxide levels, according to UW botany professor Brent Ewers. The project aims to elevate the universitys status to a top-tier American research university. Baldwin said the benefits of having this status are multi-faceted, from boosting the states economy through spin-offs and startups to galvanizing research that benefits Wyomingites and the natural environment. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 A Bismarck woman faces a felony charge after allegedly pointing what police describe as a toy handgun at a staff member inside Heaven's Helpers Soup Cafe and pulling the trigger. Alena Bobtailbear, 24, was charged with terrorizing after last Friday's incident. She also faces a misdemeanor charge for carrying a concealed weapon, brass knuckles. The felony charge carries a maximum punishment of five years in prison. Police say Bobtailbear had altered the toy gun to look real and pointed it in a staff member's face. She pulled the trigger and the toy gun made a "pop" sound, but no bullet fired, Officer Mathew James wrote in an affidavit. He said she appeared to pull the trigger twice, according to his review of the cafe's security camera footage. Bobtailbear left the cafe but police later located her. She told police the "racist" staff members would let her have only two items of food and called the staffers a vulgar term, according to the affidavit. She told police she became fearful when a staff member grabbed her arm, prompting her to pull out the toy gun, the affidavit said. Police asked her if she had other weapons, and she allegedly indicated that she had a pair of metal knuckles. The staff member Bobtailbear allegedly pointed the gun at told police she feared for her life. She said Bobtailbear had been upset about the cafe's policy allowing a person to take only two items and was causing a scene, so the worker had asked her to leave, according to the affidavit. Bobtailbear made an initial appearance in court on Monday. No attorney is listed for her in court records. Reach Amy R. Sisk at 701-250-8252 or amy.sisk@bismarcktribune.com. Love 0 Funny 11 Wow 0 Sad 1 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Burning restrictions in the region are mounting as dry conditions persist this spring. Ten North Dakota counties including Morton have now implemented some sort of a burn ban, with nine of those counties in the west or central part of the state. The lone eastern county with a ban is Stutsman. Morton County's ban is effected through Oct. 1. Violations are punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a $1,500 fine. The ban is in effect when the North Dakota Rangeland Fire Danger Rating is in the high, very high or extreme category, or when a red flag warning has been issued for the county. A prohibition on open fires in Morton County parks is not tied to the fire danger rating. Open burning including campfires is banned until further notice. The ban includes charcoal, wood fired or pellet grills, screened patio fireplaces and chimneas, and smokers. The use of portable propane grills, propane fire pits and propane fire rings is allowed, but extreme caution is advised due to dry vegetation. North Dakotas Game and Fish Department is prohibiting open burning this spring on the Oahe Wildlife Management Area south of Bismarck-Mandan, as it often does. The heavily wooded recreation area along the Missouri River is popular with anglers, campers and other outdoor enthusiasts, and it's prone to wildfires before the spring green-up. All open burning including campfires is banned until further notice, on both sides of the river. The use of portable grills is allowed but extreme caution is advised. The Oahe Wildlife Management Area covers 16,000 acres or about 25 square miles in portions of Burleigh, Emmons and Morton counties. In addition, surrounding areas included in the open burn ban include Kimball Bottoms and Maclean Bottoms managed by the Bismarck Parks and Recreation District, the Desert off-road vehicle area managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Graner Park managed by Morton County Parks. Much of central North Dakota is considered abnormally dry, and the west is in either moderate or severe drought, with a large swath of extreme drought in the northwestern corner, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a partnership of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Drought that endured all of last year led to a busy wildfire season, with more than 2,400 fires statewide burning nearly 126,000 acres -- nearly 200 square miles. Information on burning restrictions and fire danger ratings is at https://ndresponse.gov/burn-ban-restrictions-fire-danger-maps. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 New North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley is replacing his chief deputy. Wrigley on Monday said he plans to name a replacement for Chief Deputy Attorney General Troy Seibel in a month or two. Seibel had held the post since December 2016. Gov. Doug Burgum last month appointed Wrigley to the state's top law enforcement position following the death of Wayne Stenehjem, who died Jan. 28 at age 68 from cardiac arrest. Stenehjem was the state's longest-serving attorney general, having been first elected in 2000. Seibel quit on March 16, attorney general spokeswoman Liz Brocker told the Tribune. She said his resignation was verbal, and that he did not submit a resignation letter. Wrigley told the Tribune the move is "customary" for changing leadership. He said he met with Seibel to discuss his intentions to appoint a new chief deputy, "and then we just had a brief conversation and we concluded that it would be best if he just resigned effective at the end of that day." "I have nothing but well wishes for Troy. I know he'll go on to do other interesting and exciting things," Wrigley said. Seibel told KFGO radio that he understands and respects Wrigley's decision to name his own deputy. Seibel said he plans to take time off and will explore all options. Wrigley said he will "continue to evaluate" other appointments or replacements to office positions. "I certainly have that obligation to the people of North Dakota to have in place the team that I think is best situated with regards to my perspectives and our leadership plans for up ahead," he said. Wrigley made clear that he didn't fire Seibel. He said he suggested Seibel resign that day as "the best time frame to just make that move immediately." "It was a nice, cordial, professional conversation between two people who have known each other a long time," Wrigley said. They both served in Gov. Jack Dalrymple's administration. Wrigley said he has "a small number of people" whom he is considering for chief deputy. He didn't name any of them. Wrigley served two stints as U.S. attorney in North Dakota, and he spent six years as the state's lieutenant governor under Dalrymple. His attorney general appointment lasts through the end of the year. He will seek the Republican endorsement for attorney general at this weekends state GOP convention in Bismarck, and will need to win a four-year term in the November general election to continue serving beyond 2022. Democrats during their convention last weekend endorsed Grand Forks lawyer Timothy Lamb for attorney general. Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 1 Angry 0 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Many in the public probably dont realize the Democratic-NPL Party held its convention last weekend. The event drew small attendance and was unable to find candidates for all the upcoming races. The party has been struggling for a number of years, with the convention demonstrating it has hit rock bottom. The party holds no statewide offices and very few seats in the Legislature. In the House, Republicans have an 80-14 advantage to go along with a 40-7 majority in the Senate. Over the weekend in Minot the Democratic-NPL Party endorsed Fintan Dooley for agriculture commissioner, Katrina Christiansen for the U.S. Senate, Mark Haugen for the U.S. House, Melanie Moniz and Trygve Hammer for the Public Service Commission and Timothy Lamb for attorney general. The party is still searching for candidates for tax commissioner and secretary of state. Anyone unfamiliar with the partys nominees shouldnt feel out of touch with North Dakota politics. Only Haugen, the senior student success adviser at the University of Mary, has recently run for office. He lost the state treasurers race in 2020. Thats the major problem the party has had in recent years. It has failed to develop candidates, offering an almost totally different slate of candidates for each election. Voters dont have an opportunity to get to know candidates if they dont stick around. The party also waits too long to find candidates. The filing deadline is April 11. The party needs to start grooming potential candidates years in advance. When they run and lose, the party needs to put them before voters again. Byron Dorgan didnt win his U.S. House seat on the first attempt. Candidates need time to develop voter recognition. The party is obviously aware of its shortcomings. Patrick Hart, the partys state chairman, told The Associated Press that the party plans to post short videos on social media in which Democrats explain why they belong to the party. He also said the state party wants to show its differences from the national party. Sen. Erin Oban, D-Bismarck, said party members need to have more contact with the public. She credits her efforts going door to door with helping her get elected in a Republican Bismarck. The party needs to do a better job of recruiting and vetting candidates. Shelley Lenz, a veterinarian, was the partys candidate for governor in 2020. This year shes running for the Legislature as an independent. It doesnt speak well for the party when its top-of-the-ballot candidate jumps ship two years later. Its unfortunate for the party that its in such disarray, as North Dakota Republicans might provide Democrats with an opportunity this year. When the party gathers this weekend for its convention, theres expected to be clashes between the more conservative wing of the party and the established members of the GOP. Divisions in one party usually help the other party. But its unlikely the Democratic-NPL can take advantage of the situation. North Dakota would be better served if there were two robust parties. The Democratic-NPL needs to develop a good plan going forward and get to work. Love 2 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Ukraine is under siege, and if history is any indicator, should Russia prove victorious, freedom of religion will also be under siege. [] Russias attack on Ukraine continues. Ukrainian resistance so far has been fierce, but Russian forces retain a huge advantage in firepower. A victory by Moscow would mean installation of a puppet government in Kyiv, with harsh repression to follow. Politically Russia was unfree even before the war. However, fear of popular protest led Russian president Vladimir Putin to intensify greatly restrictions on any opposition. Although Ukrainian democracy has been troubled, earning only a partly free rating from Freedom House, Kyiv remains well ahead of Moscow in that regard. Religious liberty in Ukraine would only degrade under Russian control. Putin turned religion into a handmaiden of aggressive nationalism, making the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) a veritable political partner. Patriarch Kirill has given full religious blessing to the regimes foreign policy agenda. For instance, The Wall Street Journal reported last month (behind a paywall) a Kirill-led think tank, the World Russian Peoples Council, declared: If the actions of our president to recognize [the Donbass statelets] relate to the political, military sovereignty of Russiathat is, we are trying to stop the advancement of NATO, missiles on our bordersthen the moral problems associated with the protection of traditional values are aligned, and they are no less important than political and military aspects. Indeed, the ongoing fight, declared Kirill, will determine where humanity will end up, on which side of God the Savior. If victorious, Putin would likely turn religious affairs in occupied territories over to Kirill, which would mean replicating Russias regulatory system. Unfortunately, Moscow has targeted minority faiths and used religious restrictions against political opponents. Overall, it has created the most hostile religious environment of any majority-Christian country (whose government nominally welcomes religion, in contrast to, say, Cubas communist regime). For instance, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reported this about Russia: In 2020, religious freedom conditions in Russia deteriorated. The government continued to target nontraditional religious minorities with fines, detentions, and criminal charges. Russian legislation criminalizes extremism without adequately defining the term, enabling the state to prosecute a vast range of nonviolent religious activity. In 2020, the state brought 188 criminal cases against Jehovahs Witnesses, who were banned as an extremist group in 2017. The extraordinary hostility shown JWs is baffling. The small sect poses no threat to the regime. Apparently, its insularity, commitment to proselytism, and refusal to sacralize state authorityJWs made U.S. constitutional history by refusing to say the Pledge of Allegianceturned it into target. Four years ago even Putin expressed puzzlement at his governments crackdown. He allowed that he did not quite understand why they are persecuted. But nothing changed. Labels as Muzzles Extremism is a legal charge often flung at Muslims, too. In its report on religious liberty, the State Department found that authorities continued to investigate, detain, imprison, torture, and/or physically abuse persons or seize their property because of their religious faith, including members of groups the government classified as extremist and banned, such as Jehovahs Witnesses, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Tablighi Jamaat, and followers of Muslim theologian Said Nursi. Others deemed extremist or otherwise undesirable include Scientologists and Falun Gong practitioners. The law, noted the commission, sets strict registration requirements and empowers state officials to impede and monitor religious groups activities. It also broadly defines and prohibits missionary activities, including preaching, praying, disseminating religious materials, and answering questions about religion outside of officially designated sites. Anti-terrorism restrictions were used to shut down Baptist, evangelical, and Pentecostal educational institutions. Experts also noted the government and ROC often viewed these institutions as sources of foreign influence, explained the State Department. ROC educational and missionary institutions, by contrast, were not subjected to similar scrutiny by government authorities. Noteworthy was the use of religious persecution for political purposes in Chechnya. According to USCIRF: In the North Caucasus, security forces acted with impunity, arresting or kidnapping persons suspected of even tangential links to Islamist militancy as well as for secular political opposition. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov oversaw or condoned egregious abuses based on his religious views. Shockingly, Russia ranked third globally on the number of blasphemy cases filed, following only Pakistan and Iran. In another echo of Islamist regimes, indigenous non-Abrahamic faiths are especially vulnerable in Russia. Reported USCIRF: Desecration of indigenous religious sites has increased in recent years, leading to the establishment of a monitoring group in 2020. Although Russia has many indigenous religions, they are not given the privileged status of traditional religions like Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Buddhism. In 2014, Moscow annexed Crimea and backed local separatists in the Donbass, a traditional Russian-speaking area in Ukraines east. The new authorities cracked down on religious dissenters. Peaceful believers were tarred with charges of extremism, and the ROC was favored over its Orthodox competitors, as well as other denominations and faiths. The occupation authorities continued to enforce Russias repressive laws and policies on religion, which has resulted in the prosecution of peaceful religious activity and bans on groups that were legal in Crimea under Ukrainian law, noted the USCIRF. At least 16 Crimean Muslims were sentenced to prison on made-up charges of extremism and terrorism, primarily based on religious discussions that prosecutors linked to the now-banned group Hizb ut-Tahrir. In the spring, the Russian government began to transfer ownership of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) Cathedral of St. Vladimir and Olga to the state; it is the most important property of the UOC in Crimea and its congregation has already been evicted. The State Department painted a similarly grim picture: Many religious communities were essentially driven out of the peninsula through registration requirements under newly imposed Russian laws. Russian authorities in occupied Crimea continued to persecute and intimidate minority religious congregations, including Muslim Crimean Tatars, Jehovahs Witnesses, and Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) members and clergy. Russia continued to prosecute individuals for some types of worship, including imams leading prayers in their own mosques, as illegal missionary activity. According to the OCU, Russian occupation authorities continued to pressure the OCU Crimean diocese in an effort to force it to leave Crimea. Religious and human rights groups continued to report Russian media efforts to create suspicion and fear among certain religious groups, especially targeting Crimean Tatar Muslims. Similar is the situation in the portions of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (DPR and LPR, respectively) controlled by Russian-backed separatists. Faiths persecuted in Russia, most notably JWs, the Muslim congregation Hizb ut-Tahir, and disfavored Orthodox churches, were restricted in Donbas. Baptists, Pentecostals, and Seventh-day Adventists were barred from registering, and thus from operating. The State Department detailed the persecution: Russia-backed authorities in the DPR and LPR continued to implement laws requiring all religious organizations except the UOC-MP to undergo state religious expert evaluations and reregister with them. According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), a majority of religious groups recognized under Ukrainian law continued to be unable to reregister because of stringent legal requirements under Russian law preventing or discouraging reregistration of many religious communities. All but one mosque remained closed in Russia-controlled Donetsk. Russia-led forces continued to use religious buildings of minority religious groups as military facilities. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a travesty at many levels. A Ukrainian defeat would allow Moscow to impose an increasingly oppressive political system on the Ukrainian people, almost certainly stripping Ukrainians of the right to freely worship God according to conscience. On Tuesday, the General Media Center of the Internal Security Forces in North and East Syria issued a statement to public opinion, commenting on the attack launched by a cell of ISIS mercenaries inside the camp. The statement reads: "One of our security patrols, yesterday night, Monday, March 28, while touring the al-Hol Camp, had been targeted with Kalashnikovs and pistols, in addition to being targeted with RPGs. A clash took place between our forces and the cell elements, in which our forces were able to kill one of the mercenaries and wound others. Our forces also dealt with complete sensitivity, professionalism and high professionalism in pursuing elements of the cell; In order to preserve the lives of the children and women of the ISIS families residing in the camp, the elements of the cell sought to hide among them, and targeted them. The security cordon has also been reinforced in various sections of our forces, around the entire camp; To prevent the escape of any element of the cell, to arrest them. T/S ANHA Alex Jones, a nostrum peddler and conspiracy fabulist being sued for claiming the Sandy Hook school shooting that left 20 children dead was a hoax, refused to attend his scheduled deposition, citing a "sinus blockage." Jones's lawyers said that forcing him to participate in the deposition would cause him "significant stress." Jones recorded an episode of his video show that day. The plaintiff's lawyers have asked the judge to order Jones to appear and hold him in contempt for failing to appear. From Law & Crime: Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador feels that the country's $200 million presidential jet was a ridiculous expenditure and an "insult" to the country's people and he's been trying to sell it off. Unfortunately, there haven't been any takers. So now, Lopez Obrador says the customized Boeing 787 Dreamlinercomplete with presidential suite and marble bathrooomwill be available to rent for weddings, birthdays, and coming-of-age parties. Video below. From NBC New York: He has said the jet is hard to sell because it is too specialized and made-to-order. He said the government would still be open to offers for the plane, but after almost 3 1/2 years, that possibility seems remote. The plane was purchased for $200 million and was used by the previous president, Enrique Pena Nieto. It has been difficult to sell because it is configured to carry only 80 people and has a full presidential suite with a private bath. Experts say it would be costly to reconfigure into a typical passenger jet that would carry up to 300 passengers. In the closing bit on George Carlin's legendary Jammin' in New York special, the sagely comic offered his take on the non-biodegradable nature of plastic. Carlin theorized that if plastic is genuinely indestructible, the earth would "simply incorporate plastic into itself." From the looks of a recent study, it seems like the human body is already trying to strike a merger with plastic. For the first time in history, scientists have discovered microplastics in the human bloodstream in a landmark study. After testing 22 adults, the Dutch study responsible for the discovery found microplastics in 17 of their subjects's bloodstream. Although the number of subjects may seem small, the discovery is still unprecedented and stands as a disconcerting omen for the relationship between humans and plastic. "This is really the first evidence of plastic polymers making it into the bloodstream," Rolf Halden, director of the Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the study, told Insider. "What that means is quite uncertain, but it is unsettling news." Given the amount of plastic we consume as a species, this disturbing revleation was almost inevitable. Because it's in the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe, the average American ingests about 50,000 microplastic particles each year and inhales about the same amount, according to a 2019 analysis. Another study, from 2021, estimates that the average person ingests a credit card's worth of plastic each week. As of now, scientists are still attempting to discover if the microplastics pose a threat to human health. Ron DeSantis stood in the far-flung shadows of The Walt Disney Company and furiously said they "crossed the line." The Florida governor was displeased that the international corporate conglomerate dared to announce they would repeal his exclusionary "Don't Say Gay Bill," which DeSantis signed into law yesterday. "I think they crossed the line," the anti-freedoms Republican said at a press conference in Tallahassee today. As if there's anything he can do about it. Uh, sorry poor sport, but it looks like you are the one who crossed the line. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) says Disney speaking out against FL's "Don't Say Gay" bill "crossed the line": "If we would've put in the bill that you are not allowed to have curriculum that discussed the oppression of the Uyghurs in China, Disney would've endorsed that in a second." pic.twitter.com/DIrRbSZUlN The Recount (@therecount) March 29, 2022 From The Hill: Sumitomo Rubber USA is getting rolling on a $129 million investment in its Town of Tonawanda tire-making plant, solidifying one of the region's largest manufacturers. The investment is upgrading the Sheridan Drive plant's manufacturing equipment, adding production space and boosting its tire-production capacity. The plant expects to add nearly 50 jobs, but the project primarily safeguards the site's 1,400 existing jobs, by installing top-shelf tire-making technology, said Timothy Sprunger, vice president of operations and plant manager. The investment, which has grown from an initial price tag of $122 million, is adding a 55,000 square foot building that will be finished this summer. The company is installing new equipment including tire presses, rubber mixing machines and automated tire-building machines. "Automation doesn't mean you replace people," Sprunger said Tuesday. "You're able to make three tires instead of one, in the same amount of time." The sprawling manufacturing complex makes tires for passenger vehicles, motorcycles, trucks and buses. Most of the tires are made under Sumitomo's Falken brand, while the motorcycle tires carry the Dunlop brand. The plant now produces 12,000 tires a day; the investments will allow that capacity to rise to 18,000, a 50% increase, Sprunger said. The Tonawanda site, located alongside the I-190, was formerly known as Goodyear Dunlop Tires North America. A joint venture between Goodyear and Sumitomo Rubber Industries ended in 2015, and Sumitomo took full ownership of Goodyear Dunlop Tires North America. The plant changed its name to Sumitomo Rubber USA the following year. Town of Tonawanda Supervisor Joseph Emminger said Sumitomo's project reinforces an "industrial core" that also includes DuPont and General Motors' engine plant. "The investment that's coming into this town by Sumitomo Rubber USA proves one thing: that Tonawanda and Western New York are still very viable place to operate a business," he said. Emminger noted that Sumitomo and its predecessors have been making tires in the town for over a century. "They could have gone elsewhere," he said. "They decided to plant their roots right here in the Town of Tonawanda. The investment means that they're going to be here for a while, and that means job stability for good-paying wages." Sumitomo's upgrades will unfold over the next few years, as parts of the facility are retrofitted alongside active manufacturing, said Ziad Assaad, the engineering manager. "There's equipment getting installed here almost every month from now through 2024." Thomas O'Shei, president of United Steelworkers Local 135L, said the new investment reassures a workforce that just a few years ago was wondering about the plant's future under Goodyear, before Sumitomo reclaimed ownership. "If we didn't have this type of investment, we would not be operating anymore," said O'Shei, who has worked at the plant since 1990. The Tonawanda site is Japan-based Sumitomo's only tire-making operation in the United States. The local plant has endured in an industry where most domestic tire-making production is in Southern states, O'Shei said. The plant's workforce includes over 1,000 hourly workers. Steelworkers members last year approved a four-year labor contract that runs through the end of 2025, which helped ensure Sumitomo's investment would go forward, O'Shei said. "They're a great employer," he said. "They're good to their employees, they're good to the community, they want us to be successful." Buffalo Next Must-read local business coverage that exposes the trends, connects the dots and contextualizes the impact to Buffalo's economy. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. BY JON HARRIS Local hospital systems growing in ambulatory surgery market Everywhere you look nowadays, Western New York's health systems are thinking up ways to expand beyond traditional hospital walls. That includes by acquiring ambulatory surgery centers health care facilities focused on same-day surgical procedures that don't require an overnight stay. The latest example: Catholic Health System is closing in on completing its $23.3 million deal to purchase a 77% stake in Ambulatory Surgery Center of Western New York in Amherst. Competitor Kaleida Health is expanding in this arena, too. Kaleida, which owns Millard Fillmore Surgery Center in Amherst and has a 64% ownership stake in Southtowns Surgery Center in Orchard Park, will play a major role in an ambulatory surgery center that will be included within a $63 million medical and surgery complex being built in Amherst. So what's driving all this? The shift away from hospital-based care Health care has been shifting toward lower-cost outpatient settings for years, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic as patients tried to avoid hospitals if they could. That shift means inpatient revenue streams will continue to decline, especially in areas where population growth is stagnant, said Moody's analyst Diana Lee. "Hospitals are taking, perhaps, a closer look at alternatives to inpatient care, but there are so many factors that are pushing that along," she said. A major factor: Insurers want to move care to the lowest-cost setting, where appropriate. Lee explained it this way: The same procedure would cost the most in a hospital inpatient setting, less in a hospital outpatient surgery department and even less in an ambulatory surgery center. A recent Moody's report that Lee authored cited data from insurer United HealthGroup, which reported the cost of performing a common procedure in a hospital outpatient surgery department in 2019 was 144% higher than in an ambulatory surgery center (a freestanding facility not on a hospital campus). So rather than watch these centers eat their lunch, more health systems are consulting their piggy banks to make a deal. "In terms of the strategic focus, organizations are looking to diversify and to find ways to capture all of the different types of revenue streams," said Brad Spielman, also a Moody's analyst. Show me the money For Catholic Health, expanding its footprint in the ambulatory surgery market is "one of our greatest priorities," Chief Financial Officer David Macholz said. And there are a couple reasons for that, he said: It's more cost-effective to perform procedures in a freestanding surgical setting versus a hospital, and it's easier for patients to navigate in and out of ambulatory surgery centers than a hospital the latter of which could be reacting to separate emergencies at any given time. While an ambulatory surgery center procedure brings in less revenue, it appears that those facilities still have strong bottom lines. Ambulatory Surgery Center of Western New York recorded operating income of more than $1.7 million on net patient service revenue of about $16.5 million in 2020, according to financial results filed with the state. That's an operating margin of roughly 10.5% which probably looks pretty good to hospital systems that saw their finances battered by the pandemic. This, of course, begs the question: Well then, how does this affect the future of hospitals? That's a story for another day. Jon Harris Want to know more? Three stories to catch you up: Welcome to Buffalo Next. This newsletter from The Buffalo News will bring you the latest coverage on the changing Buffalo Niagara economy from real estate to health care to startups. Read more at BuffaloNext.com. THE LATEST, IN CONTEXT What: Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center began renovations on its 10th Street parking garage in late March. Its part of the facility's efforts to improve and upgrade its parking which should come as a relief to patients, visitors and staff who have dodged some of the garage's pot holes. Tell me more: The medical center said work will include power washing, decking and pot hole repairs. In addition, new flooring, paint and lighting is coming to all elevator foyers on each ramp level. During the renovation, there will be a temporary closure of vehicle traffic and parking on the ramp's upper levels. This will not impact services on the garage's seventh floor, which houses the Wound Center of Niagara, bariatric and surgical services and several doctors' offices. Why it matters: First, it's more than a parking garage, as evidenced by all those medical functions on its seventh floor. In addition, past engineering checks have reportedly indicated the need for repairs at the garage, a person's first impression when visiting the hospital. As for cost, the medical center one of the region's last independent hospitals is now gathering and reviewing proposals for various aspects of the project and said it would have a better idea of overall cost at a later date. ICYMI Five reads from Buffalo Next: The Buffalo Next team gives you the big picture on the regions economic revitalization. Email tips to buffalonext@buffnews.com or reach Deputy Business Editor David Robinson at 716-849-4435. Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up to get the latest in your inbox five days a week. Email tips to buffalonext@buffnews.com. Buffalo Next Must-read local business coverage that exposes the trends, connects the dots and contextualizes the impact to Buffalo's economy. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Do you have a cold, the flu, or COVID? Here's how to tell The illnesses all share similar symptoms, sometimes making it hard to distinguish which is putting you under the weather. Covid-19 cases are continuing to spread as the United States moves into the time of year where allergies are on the rise. As much of the country opens back up and people gather in close proximity, it can be important to know if you are feeling unwell because of seasonal sniffles or Covid-19 -- which is why experts have urged vaccinations to reduce risk and protect against infection. Read more on how to tell the difference here: Walmart to end cigarette sales in some stores Walmart will no longer sell cigarettes in some of its stores though tobacco sales can be a significant revenue generator. Wall Street Journal was the first to report the development Monday. It noted some stores in California, Florida, Arkansas and New Mexico were on the list, citing anonymous sources and store visits. Walmart is not the first national retail chain to cut off cigarette sales even on a trial basis, but it is the largest. Read why here: What's the 411 on the new 988 hotline? Beginning July 16, 2022, people struggling with mental health crises can call 988, a new number focused on providing lifesaving suicide prevention and crisis services. But 988 is not just a shorter, easier-to-remember replacement for the current suicide hotline. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission also established the 988 Lifeline to address longstanding concerns in mental health care. The Conversation asked Derek Lee, a PhD student at Ohio State University in Counselor Education and Supervision and a therapist, to explain the new service and how it is different from the old hotline. Lees academic and research focus is on suicide, including training, intervention and prevention. Read more about the hotline here: Nostalgia can reduce perception of pain The next time you feel aches or soreness, you might consider skipping the pain reliever and reaching instead for an old photo. Nostalgia -- that sentimental feeling of longing for the past -- can reduce pain perception, according to new research published in the journal JNeurosci. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Liaoning Normal University asked study participants to rate their level of pain from heat stimulation while looking at pictures that were nostalgic -- depicting old cartoons, childhood games or retro candy -- compared with more modern pictures. Read more about the study here: *** Read more about this past week's health news here: New York State on Tuesday received a long-delayed $564.8 million payment of casino revenues from the Seneca Nation of Indians money that Gov. Kathy Hochul said she sees as the majority of the state's contribution to a new Buffalo Bills stadium. "My view is that this money was all generated in Western New York, and I would directly allocate that money to go to the state's $600 million share for the stadium," Hochul said in an interview with The Buffalo News. The Bills are staying and getting a new stadium. Experts weigh in: Is that worth the money? Sports economists and stadium experts say the price tag for a new stadium in Orchard Park is what the region had to pay to keep the Bills, but whether it is a good deal for taxpayers is up for debate. The Seneca Nation Council agreed to send the money to the state on Monday, five years into a legal battle over it. The Indian nation sent the money to the state after the Hochul administration forced the tribe's hand through a legal maneuver that froze Seneca bank accounts. The Hochul administration struck a deal with the Bills that calls for the state to contribute $600 million of the stadium's $1.4 billion cost, and the arrival of the long-delayed Seneca funds means "the direct hit to taxpayers is significantly less," Hochul said. Counting the Seneca cash as funding for the stadium would reduce the state taxpayer funding for the project to $172 million, she added. Not all of the $564.8 million that arrived from the Senecas will stay in state accounts, however. Tens of millions will go to the cities of Niagara Falls, Buffalo and Salamanca as their shares of casino revenues. The Senecas had stopped sharing with the state and local governments in 2017. The payment to the state came after a five-year legal battle over whether the Senecas had to continue contributing 25% of the slot machine revenues from their three casinos to the state, which would then share a portion with the cities where the tribe's casinos are located. The 2002 compact that led to the construction of the three casinos called for the Senecas to share that money with state and local governments over the last half of the 14-year agreement. The deal included an automatic seven-year renewal that took effect in 2017 if no party to the agreement objected -- but the Senecas asserted they no longer had to share casino revenue during that renewal period. The state sued to try to force the Seneca Nation to pay up, "and we won in court many, many times," Hochul said. The state forced the tribe's hand over the weekend, asking KeyBank, which holds the Seneca Nation's bank accounts, to freeze them under a state law that allows creditors to seek such action to force debtors to pay up. How the 'ironclad' non-relocation agreement in Bills stadium deal would work The new stadium deal includes a non-relocation agreement that prohibits the team from moving. The agreement gives both the state and the county the right to enforce the non-relocation terms. Seneca Nation President Matthew Pagels indicated the tribe had no choice but to send the money to the state. The Seneca Nation simply could not stand by while New York State intentionally attempted to hold the Seneca people and thousands of Western New Yorkers hostage, Pagels said in a statement. The freeze meant that many Senecas found they could not conduct basic financial transactions starting last Saturday. "This is three days now, and there are already checks out there that are bouncing," said Leslie Logan, a founding member of the Seneca Mothers of the Nation, a group that has resisted paying the funds to the state. "There are homeowners payments that cannot be paid. We can't issue invoices for pharmaceuticals. There were all kinds of repercussive impacts that were crippling, just crippling." A Seneca Nation spokesman said KeyBank was in the process of lifting the account freeze Tuesday. After the Seneca Council agreed to release the funds, Hochul said she was simply making sure that the state would finally get the money that court after court said the state was owed. "I have been pushing and pushing and pushing behind the scenes to get this done," she said. Acknowledging the state "started playing hardball" with the Senecas, Hochul indicated that the state's get-tough approach wasn't limited to the legal move that froze the nation's bank accounts. Noting that the state's casino compact with the Senecas will expire next year and will have to be renegotiated, Hochul said: "I made clear that I will not have a single word of conversation about that until the money is in the bank." Pagels' statement indicated that negotiations for the next compact won't exactly start on good terms. Dont use the people of Western New York as pawns in your obvious desire to destroy the Seneca Nation, he said. You have an obligation under federal law to negotiate a compact with the Seneca Nation in good faith. Honor it. For now, though, Hochul seemed relieved that money she said had been owed the state for years finally arrived just as the Bills' stadium deal was revealed. Hochul stressed the massive casino payment should ease the concerns of those who object to the state's $600 million share of the Bills stadium cost. "It could be recognized as an offset," she said. The Buffalo News: Good Morning, Buffalo The smart way to start your day. We sift through all the news to give you a concise, informative look at the top headlines and must-read stories every weekday. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Interim Buffalo Public Schools Superintendent Tonja Williams began her listening tour Monday at North Park Community School by inviting parents, students and others to share their concerns with her and her staff. The series of "conversation and coffee" sessions to talk with the community about the Buffalo Public Schools was held ostensibly to share what the district is doing in the wake of a violent Feb. 9 incident at McKinley High School. However, none of the approximately one dozen speakers at the event raised those concerns, and Williams, who has held the interim post since the beginning of the month, said she was not surprised by the turn of events. "We just asked open-ended questions to see what the community was feeling. So I'm not at all that surprised that I did not hear that there were big concerns about safety tonight," Williams said after the meeting, which lasted less than two hours. Buffalo school superintendent to hold public meetings on violence concerns Tonja Williams' office is promoting the "listening sessions" as part of her efforts to get community input as she builds on a plan to address safety concerns. About 40 parents and other district residents who attended were asked by Williams and three of her top administrators what they thought was going well in the district, what they thought would be the best way for the district to communicate with parents, and what obstacles they thought were facing the district that could be overcome by working together as a community. "One of my big intentions is to work collectively with our families, and with the community," Williams said. "Gone are the days where we can just sit in our offices and beg them to come to us. We're taking it to the community and I think we got some great feedback today, and we will definitely be considering everything that we heard," she added. At Monday's meeting, Kilissa Cissoko, a music teacher in the district, mother of a former student in the district and a Riverside neighborhood resident, said the district needs to step up its public relations game. "There's a lot of negativity that I think would be beautiful to turn around, and I think the kids feel it, too. That's what they're hearing and maybe they think that's what they should be when that's not what they are at all," said Cissoko. Williams said the district had plans to do just that. "So one of the things we're starting to do I think it's going to start around April 4 is telling our own narrative," said Williams. "You know, we have so many good things." Various parents and grandparents brought up a variety of concerns, from busing issues to students being informed too late in the school year about whether they had been accepted into one of the district's magnet schools. Zaheera Hemphill, who has nephews attending school in the district and a sister who teaches in the district, asked about provisions being made for Muslim students during the month of Ramadan, which starts Friday, and requires adherents of the faith to fast and pray. Hemphill, along with Monica Stephens, who has a 5-year-old son attending Olmsted School 64, agreed that there was value in the forum. "It was good to hear from them and to articulate our positions as parents," said Stephens. The Buffalo News: Good Morning, Buffalo The smart way to start your day. We sift through all the news to give you a concise, informative look at the top headlines and must-read stories every weekday. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. A Buffalo Diocese priest who died in 2021 is accused of molesting a 15-year-old boy less than five years ago. A claim of unpermitted sexual contact by the Rev. Robert M. Yetter in a lawsuit filed last week is the most recent alleged incident of abuse by a diocese priest among several hundred cases that have become public through court filings since 2018. The vast bulk of accusations against Buffalo area priests involve abuses alleged to have happened at least 30 years ago, and diocese leaders say data shows safeguards tightly curbed abuses since they were put in place in 2002. The News found just one other public allegation of child sex abuse against a priest after 2005. Victims advocates, however, maintain that the diocese has a spotty record on transparency and victims often dont report abuse until years later, so its difficult to know yet whether the diocese was protecting children better. The defendant in the new Child Victims Act lawsuit is St. Mary Church in Swormville, where the plaintiff went to Mass and Yetter was pastor for many years. The diocese, which is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is not a defendant. Attorneys Jeff Anderson and Steve Boyd filed the lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Erie County on behalf of plaintiff AB 742, a 20-year-old New York State resident who claimed Yetter started molesting him in 2015 when he was 13 and continued into 2017, just a year before the diocese's cover up of abuse cases from decades ago began unraveling. If Yetter were still alive, the new allegations would have fallen within the criminal statute of limitations for child sex abuse crimes to be charged and prosecuted. Yetter also is accused in two Child Victims Act lawsuits filed last August. Yetter died July 5 at age 73. Yetter resigned from St. Mary parish in 2018, after being accused of making unwanted sexual advances on two young men. The lawsuits last August were filed just prior to the closing of a two-year window that allowed civil child sex abuse cases to proceed in court despite being outside the statute of limitations. One of the cases dates to 1970, when Yetter was a seminarian assigned to St. Mary of the Lake Church in Hamburg. The plaintiff in that case was 13 to 15 years old at the time of the alleged abuse. The most recent case is within the new statute of limitations, established by the 2019 Child Victims Act, as the plaintiff is under age 55. Attorney Steve Boyd, who also represents the plaintiff in the case involving Yetter from 1970, said the diocese had every reason to know that Yetter was abuser and yet failed to remove him from the priesthood even after the Catholic Church adopted its zero-tolerance policy in 2002. They didnt take care of the problem, he said. If they had followed the policies they had put in place in the early 2000s, my latest client would not have been abused, because the abuse came more than 10 years after those policies went into effect, said Boyd. Its unclear how the dioceses bankruptcy proceeding will impact the latest lawsuit. The plaintiff might be allowed to file a late proof of claim in federal bankruptcy court or proceed in state court against the parish. Diocese spokesman Greg Tucker said the diocese notified the Erie County District Attorneys Office about the new allegation against Yetter, but it is not investigating it because Yetter is deceased. Tucker said the plaintiffs attorneys have not indicated whether their client will cooperate in a diocese investigation of his claim. Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. As Katie L. Riford faces a felony charge for fleeing the state with her non-custodial children, the children's father is demanding that she be cut off from all contact with them. Riford, 37, is the Wheatfield mother who allegedly took off for New Mexico in 2019 with her two children, as Niagara County Family Court Judge Erin DeLabio awarded sole custody to their father, Peter Diarbakerly. Riford and the children lived in New Mexico under assumed names for three years, Niagara County Sheriff Michael J. Filicetti said March 3, the day after Riford's arrest by U.S. Marshals in Albuquerque. In a WIVB interview at Buffalo Niagara International Airport upon her extradition March 23, Riford repeated the allegations her family posted on a website devoted to the case: that Diarbakerly abused her and the children, and that DeLabio was "corrupted" by her boyfriend's "wealthy family." "The truth's going to come out. The corruption is going to be exposed," Riford said. "When things weren't going her way in the Family Court, she decided to start making allegations," Filicetti told reporters March 3. At the same news conference, Capt. Tracy Steen, chief of the Sheriff's Office's Criminal Investigation Bureau, said allegations of abuse by Diarbakerly were investigated and determined found to be unfounded. Riford, who fired her attorney during the Family Court trial that ended with her losing custody of the children, didn't show up for further proceedings in February 2019. Instead, she sent the court a nine-page affidavit with 118 pages of exhibits, summarizing her complaints about DeLabio and the court system, along with her allegations that Diarbakerly had abused her and the children. After three years as missing persons, Wheatfield mom arrested, 2 kids recovered Katie L. Riford, 37, was living in an Albuquerque apartment. She and the children Olivia N. Riford-Diarbakerly, 11, and Mason Riford, 4 were using different last names, the Niagara County sheriff said. "I have been forced into hiding, as I see no other way to protect my two minor children from the court's clear bias against me," Riford wrote. "To suggest that there's any improper conduct by the court, or law enforcement, or anybody else, for that matter, is not true. It's not accurate," said Randy S. Margulis, Diarbakerly's attorney. On March 24, Riford pleaded not guilty in Niagara County's Central Arraignment Court to a felony count of custodial interference and a misdemeanor count of violating a Family Court order. She was released on her own recognizance. Margulis said Tuesday that the case will be heard April 8 in Niagara County Integrated Domestic Violence Court, where State Supreme Court Justice Deborah A. Haendiges can rule on both criminal and child custody matters. That means Riford's upcoming appearances in Family Court and Wheatfield Town Court are canceled, Margulis said. Margulis said DeLabio, in 2019, issued a temporary order barring Riford from in-person contact with the children. "The extent of the actions taken by Ms. Riford were unknown at that time. Now it's three years later, and we can only imagine the impact the children have suffered," Margulis said. Now, Diarbakerly wants Haendiges to bar Riford from talking to the children by phone or communicating with them by any electronic means, Margulis said. Diarbakerly, who now has the children in his Massachusetts home, also wants the judge to modify the custody order so he doesn't have to give Riford any information about the children's lives, Margulis said. "I am going to clear my name with all the evidence I have," Riford told WIVB. "I am a domestic violence victim, and my children are also victims of abuse, and unfortunately Niagara County failed us." Margulis said Riford testified during the custody trial. "There was no proof established that Mr. Diarbakerly was guilty of any abuse," Margulis said. "She had every opportunity in the world to present proof, and there was no such proof presented." Sunday, Riford's brother, Kevin Riford, launched an online effort to raise $50,000 for his sister's legal defense. As of Tuesday afternoon, four donors had pledged a total of $240. Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. After two years of Covid-19 interrupted learning, children in New York get a chance starting this week to show how much or how little they have learned. State English language arts assessments for third- through eighth-graders start Tuesday. The state math tests start April 26. Some wonder about giving a standardized test when education has been anything but standard during the pandemic. But the tests are more important than ever, others say. "This year it's extremely important because we need to get a new baseline on where our students are academically after two years of virtual and hybrid learning," said Danielle Thomson of Hamburg. She's the mother of children in first, second and fifth grades, and in the past probably would have had her children opt out of taking the assessments. Some educators are downplaying the high stakes that had surrounded the tests. Federal law requires states to administer the annual assessments. "Ultimately, it would be nice to see one more data point on our students," West Seneca Superintendent Matthew Bystrak said. "Are they the end-all, be-all? Absolutely not. Its one data point at a moment in time." Educators say they have multiple ways to assess students, and some question the value of the results of this year's assessments because of what students have been through in the last two years. "My directive has been make sure you're taking care of kids first, make sure youre taking care of their social emotional needs, make sure youre reacclimating them into school, make sure youre looking for signs of growth every day," Niagara Falls Superintendent Mark Laurrie said. He said the district uses other assessment measures and it knows the strengths and weaknesses of students. "They're behind where they should be, but we're seeing growth with the return of schools. Where they're at is behind where they should be," Laurrie said. "Since the state tests are based on where you should be and not growth necessarily, Im not going to be surprised at the results." The tests were canceled in 2020 because of the pandemic. Last year they were shortened from two sessions to one, and students learning remotely did not have to take them. As a result, four out of 10 students in New York took the assessments in 2021, a number so low that Education Commissioner Betty A. Rosa said the results should not be compared to previous years. In a normal year, more than 80% of students in the state take the assessments, according to the state. Hamburg Superintendent Michael Cornell said if enough children take the tests, they could become another piece of data used to assess them. "For many years weve been using multiple measures, standardized and otherwise, to determine exactly where a childs opportunities for growth are," Cornell said. "Of all the things we use to assess kids progress in reading and math, the New York State assessments are probably the least effective in doing it." There had been an active opt-out movement in parts of the state, including in Western New York, but the number of students opting out of taking the tests was declining in years leading up to the pandemic. One of the reasons for the decline is that the tests are no longer used in teacher evaluations, and the results cannot be used as the primary measure for making decisions about a student's academic placement. Schools have heard from some parents who don't want their children to take the assessments this year, but the movement is much quieter than in years before the pandemic. In 2019, 58% of students in West Seneca refused to take the math assessments. The superintendent said he is not aware of any groundswell of opting out this year. "Given everything thats happened with the pandemic, we dont want to miss an opportunity to be able to look at a students performance. At least it gives us a little more insight," Bystrak said. This will be the first state assessments for third-, fourth- and fifth-graders. Some teachers are worried about students' stamina, because they are not used to taking lengthy exams. The ELA and math tests each consist of two sessions. Students will have as much time as they need to finish the tests, but the state estimates it will take third- and fourth-graders about 60 to 80 minutes depending on the session. Students in fifth grade likely will need 70 to 90 minutes and grades six through eight will need 80 to 100 minutes. "Before Covid, we were very much along the lines of not taking it, only because of we didnt see the benefit of it as parents," Thomson said. "Now, we have changed our course of thinking on it." Scrambling to help children navigate remote learning, hybrid learning where they attended a couple of days a week and multiple quarantines where they had to stay home has left many parents weary. "Everything has been different since Covid. Priorities have shifted," Thomson said. If a parent lost a job because of Covid-19 and is trying to keep food on the table, "whether or not your child takes a test at school, that's something that can fall to the wayside," Thomson said. Want to see more like this? Get our local education coverage delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The two-decade battle over CWM Chemical Services' request to dig a new hazardous waste landfill in the Town of Porter may be nearing its conclusion. A hearing on the issues raised by the project's opponents will begin April 11, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Administrative Law Judge Daniel P. O'Connell "seems to be intent on getting this all done this year," said Gary A. Abraham, the attorney for local governments opposing the new landfill. The "adjudicatory hearing" will be held virtually. The DEC will announce ways for interested members of the public to watch online or listen via telephone. Opponents of the plan include Niagara County, the Town and Village of Lewiston, the Village of Youngstown, the Niagara County Farm Bureau, the Lewiston-Porter School District, the citizen group Residents for Responsible Government and former State Senate candidate Amy H. Witryol of Lewiston. In 2001, the Town of Porter agreed not to take part in the opposition in exchange for a payment from CWM of $3 million, plus $3 for every ton of waste the new landfill disposes. In 2003, CWM formally applied to the DEC for a new landfill, called RMU-2, on Balmer Road in Porter. The application has been pending ever since, including the past two years after a hearing was scrubbed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. CWM used to pay a gross receipts tax to the towns of Lewiston and Porter and the Lewiston-Porter, Niagara-Wheatfield and Wilson school districts. That ended in 2015, when CWM's old 47-acre landfill, RMU-1, ran out of space after 21 years of use and about 5 million tons of toxic waste. It was the only licensed hazardous waste landfill in the Northeast. In 2010, a DEC siting plan concluded New York didn't need any more toxic waste disposal sites, but CWM disagrees. "Remediation and brownfield cleanup projects in the state have become far more costly as all hazardous waste for land disposal has to be transported to out-of-state facilities," company spokeswoman Lori A. Caso said. In 2004, the Niagara County Legislature hired Abraham to spearhead its opposition to the proposed landfill, which would cover about 43.5 acres and hold about 6 million tons of waste. Eighteen years later, the county still retains Abraham. He and other parties have lined up a bevy of expert witnesses to attack various aspects of the CWM proposal, while CWM will offer experts of its own. The format for the hearing, according to a March 18 directive from O'Connell, calls for the witnesses to be asked whether they stand by their pre-filed written testimony. Assuming they do, opposing attorneys then will cross-examine them. After that, O'Connell and the members of the eight-member state siting board will have a chance for questions. The siting board comprises five state officials and three local residents, appointed by former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The board eventually will make a recommendation on whether CWM should be granted a permit for a new landfill, although DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos will make the final decision. According to O'Connell's order, the hearing will begin with a five-minute opening statement by Witryol. She did not respond to requests for comment last week. She will present witnesses to address the potential negative impact of a new landfill on the economy of the Lewiston-Porter region, including home values, tourism and the effects on property tax revenue and the operations of farms and other businesses. If the topic isn't completed on the first day, the hearing will continue the next day. "CWMs witnesses will demonstrate that construction and operation of RMU-2 will have no adverse effect on local property values, and that continued operation of the Model City facility will generate hundreds of millions of dollars in local economic and fiscal benefits," Caso said. After that, the hearing will resume May 16-18, when experts will testify on the geology and hydrogeology of the proposed landfill site. The sides have disagreed on which way the groundwater flows beneath the site. Opponents say it flows west, toward the Lewiston-Porter Central School campus, while CWM says it flows north, toward Lake Ontario. A third set of meetings, on the topic of whether construction of a new landfill would cause radioactive and chemically contaminated dust to blow through the area, will be held but has not yet been scheduled, Abraham said. CWM's property was formerly part of the Lake Ontario Ordinance Works, where the federal government buried nuclear waste from the World War II atomic bomb project and postwar work with radioactive materials by Niagara Falls-area industries. The government has approved, although not yet funded, a plan for the nuclear waste's removal, although the Army Corps of Engineers hired an engineering firm last summer to design the removal plan. Besides the hearings, more arguments are pending over the DEC's draft permit allowing CWM to discharge treated leachate into the river. "The determination may be issued this year on whether CWM can discharge any amount of wastewater into the Niagara River through its direct discharge pipe," Abraham said. The Buffalo News: Good Morning, Buffalo The smart way to start your day. We sift through all the news to give you a concise, informative look at the top headlines and must-read stories every weekday. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. On the first day of October 2021, two Dodge Chargers circled the 1200 block of North Mason Avenue in Chicago around 10:30 a.m. Three individuals then leaped from the vehicles and opened fire at a brick house in which members of a rival gang were sheltering. The gang members inside the building soon started shooting back. In the end, 70 shell casings were recovered from the crime scene; one man was killed, two more were wounded and five were arrested for murder and aggravated battery. Despite allegedly possessing guns that were illegally modified into machine guns, according to reporting by the Chicago Sun-Times, all five of the men arrested were released back onto the Chicago streets without charges. Kim Foxx, the states attorney for Cook County, Ill., dismissed the battle as mutual combat, a broad legal term used to describe a fight that two parties willingly engage in; the county also cited a lack of evidence despite the shootout having been caught on video. Yes, you heard that right: these dangerous gang members who blatantly opened fire and murdered in broad daylight were back on the streets three days later without having to face any charges. In December, Amy Swearer, a fellow at The Heritage Foundation, attempted to draw attention to this claim of mutual combat to avoid prosecuting these gang members. But, as she testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) interrupted her. ..... Over the past two years, every part of our lives has been affected by the pandemic, including our health care workforce. Like all health care providers during the first wave of Covid-19, physician assistants responded with selfless dedication and courage and havent stopped since. Since February 2020, our nation has lost more than half a million health care workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The remaining workforce is suffering from burnout and with many at risk of leaving. This loss is being felt in every state and community, including our own. For patients, its alarming to consider that it may be more difficult to access care. During the pandemic, we saw the impact of long waits or deferred care people end up sicker and communities suffer. It has never been more critical for lawmakers to ensure health care in our state runs smoothly. For the past two years, physician assistants and other health professionals have continued to provide safe, quality health care by executive authority measures. By removing unnecessary administrative burdens placed on PAs, we can more quickly and efficiently meet the needs of our patients. Unlike many commercial health insurance plans in New York, PAs are not recognized as primary care providers under Medicaid Managed Care. Allowing PAs to be so designated, the pool of available primary care providers would immediately increase by a few thousand. This will help alleviate our shortage of primary care providers, increase access to episodic and preventive health care, meaning better management of chronic conditions such as hypertension and diabetes, and keep patients out of expensive urgent care centers and emergency departments. I am greatly encouraged that our legislators are taking real steps to address this issue. Assemblyman Richard Gottfried and Sen. Gustavo Rivera have introduced bills to allow PAs to be designated as primary care practitioners for purposes of Medicaid Managed Care plans. The Senate bill unanimously passed on Feb 15. PAs are medical professionals who diagnose illness, develop and manage treatment plans, prescribe medications and often serve as a patients main health care provider. With thousands of hours of medical training and a masters degree education, PAs practice in every medical setting. Lawmakers must do all they can to ensure New York takes full advantage of our existing PA workforce and recruits more PAs to meet the rising demand for health care. To ensure our communities have access to the highly skilled, competent and compassionate health care professionals we need, the Legislature must remove unnecessary administrative burdens placed on PAs. Edward J. Mathes is the legislative affairs chair for the New York State Society of PAs. We all know that politicians like to exaggerate for advantage. Both parties do it and New York Republicans are in the midst of a whopper as they attack the states bail reform law as an assault on the safety of New Yorkers. It isnt. In an overwhelmingly Democratic state, Republicans are looking for an election year wedge issue. Still, if you dig through the compost they are shoveling into the political debate, its clear that some changes would be legitimately useful. Democrats would be wise to acknowledge it. Its become an issue in negotiations over a new budget, which, by law, must be adopted by Friday. Democrats hold all the cards in that debate, but they are unable to agree on this. Gov. Kathy Hochul of Buffalo understands the need for adjustments in the law. But legislators such as Assembly Majority Leader Crystal People-Stokes, also of Buffalo, defend the existing law passionately and with facts. Both have a point, but the failure of legislators to grasp the nuances of the argument leaves Republicans free to caricature the law. Ultimately, that could undermine a valuable measure and, in an election year, hurt some re-election campaigns, including Hochuls. The states bail reform law was passed in 2019, based on an acknowledgement that for many people, bail was a de facto punishment for an offense that hadn't been proven and for which they might, in fact, be innocent. Wealthier defendants, often white, could afford to pay bail while poor people, often minorities, lacked the money and sat in jail at public expense for nonviolent crimes. The unfairness was obvious, even within law enforcement. Erie County District Attorney John Flynn implemented his offices version of bail reform a year before Albany got around to it. But, like most laws, its imperfect. And clever defendants have learned to exploit those imperfections. Legislators can hold fast to the virtues of this law while acknowledging changes that will serve the public and their own reputation for common sense. Flynn supports such revisions. But start with what isnt happening: As Peoples-Stokes observed in a statement she released on Tuesday, bail reform is not driving any significant increase in crime, which is rising around the country. Texas and Florida two Republican-dominated states have suffered significantly higher increases in violent crime, she observed. So forget that one. Its worse than an exaggeration. Many of the problems with New Yorks law center on repeat offenders. In one Erie County case, an 18-year-old was arrested eight times in less than two months in cases involving allegedly stolen vehicles. Why couldnt a reasonable law allow a court to take into account the conduct of defendants who are arrested for additional crimes while free in a previous no-bail offense? They should be subject to bail, perhaps at a judges discretion. As Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia observed to The News, its a small number of people who flourish as repeat offenders under bail reform. For example, police data show that since Jan. 1, 2020, two men have been arrested on petit larceny charges 36 times. Eleven others have more than 10 petit larceny arrests each. They qualify as extreme cases, to be sure, but there is no reason the law should prohibit judges from responding. Those people are trouble on two legs. Violent crime is a smaller issue, though not one to disregard. A recent News analysis of Buffalo City Court cases shows that, of defendants who were rearrested after being released without bail, only 2.8% were charged with a subsequent violent felony, while another 7.2% were arrested on a nonviolent felony allegation. Still, if youre a victim of one of the 2.8% or even the 7.2% your life may have been upended. Thats where some level of judicial discretion could be appropriate. Defenders of the existing law cringe at that idea, but they are repeating the mistake of those who favored the now-repealed Rockefeller Drug Laws. Those measures tied judges' hands, leading to draconian prison terms for thousands of New Yorkers who didnt deserve them. As much as people crave certainty, some level of informed discretion is essential in the imperfect human pursuit of justice. We should have learned that by now. Hochul proposes to give judges more leeway, based on specific, factual circumstances for crimes that include violence or the use of guns, as she and Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin recently wrote in the New York Daily News. Similar standards already apply to domestic violence cases. Hochul advocates other sensible changes, such as allowing judges to set bail in felony cases involving illegal guns. The proposal doesnt mandate bail, but allows judges that option in certain cases. Flynn supports the approach. These shouldnt be hard changes. As Hochul and Peoples-Stokes agree, bail reform is broadly successful in New York. Acknowledging some of its deficiencies wont change that; it will make the law better and the state safer. Whats your opinion? Send it to us at lettertoeditor@buffnews.com. Letters should be a maximum of 300 words and must convey an opinion. The column does not print poetry, announcements of community events or thank you letters. A writer or household may appear only once every 30 days. All letters are subject to fact-checking and editing. The recent letter writer complaining that letters denouncing Donald Trump being published daily is correct. Trump is no longer president. Would that this be accepted by her and many in the GOP wed be further along in our civil discourse and our civic responsibility, and not trying to further abridge voting rights. The dangerous missteps Joe Biden has made while dealing with the formers mess-he-left reminds me of the GOP umbrage at Barack Obamas scandalous coffee-cup salute while he also had to deal with a big cleanup. Let the letter writer repeat the mantra he is no longer president to her coterie and perhaps ears will open. Itd be great if we could never mention Trumps name again or continue talking about him. Itd be great if the GOP would stop kowtowing to him as a presumptive, yet disgraceful, 2024 nominee. And itd be great if both the Southern District of New York and the Jan. 6th Commission quickly indict the guy and then those of us who are biased and unfair can find other things to commiserate about. The debacle in Afghanistan was a long time in the making, starting with the GOP under Bush II. Thirteen service members were lost, yet the writer conveniently overlooked that thousands have died over 2,400 in Afghanistan, over 4,400 in Iraq, and over 32,000 wounded in action. Biden inherited and has had to manage a faltering Covid impacted economy, as the GOP districts have benefitted, from various Covid relief funding, despite not supporting the measures. The sad state of our country under Biden sounds like Trumps favorite word choice and yet, millions of voters celebrated in spontaneous jubilation that the con man was not re-elected. Being fair and relevant means letting the justice system do its work and rules of law being honored and respected, not debased and insurrected. Deanne Plonka Buffalo Humidifier with steam moisturizing air at home. The human olfactory system is linked directly to the most primitive parts of our brain. That's one of the reasons why scents are some of the strongest trigger for memory recall and why malls and hotels often diffuse ambient fragrances into the air. The top-of-mind recall I have of malls with scent is ION Orchard, which customised a blend of 20 individual fragrances from natural herbs, fruit and flowers, some of which include bergamot, white tea, mandarin, ginger, white tea, peony, mimosa and wild lavender to create the signature ION Scent. Or perhaps you might think about Muji, with the welcoming citrusy scent often encountered in their physical stores. For a while now, I've been searching high and low for the perfect ambient fragrance I want in my home, and recently decided on Aesop Olous Aromatique Room Spray. Previously, I was crazy about Muji's 'Homing' and 'Sweet Orange' essential oils, which are used with their signature diffuser. It might take several trial and error to decide on the perfect scent and medium of delivery (such as diffusers, candles, home sprays and more), as enjoyment is subjective. However, we've shortlisted a couple of brands to help you begin your search! Our editorial team is dedicated to finding and telling you more about the products and deals we love. If you love them too and decide to purchase through the links below, we may receive a commission. Prices were correct at the time of publication. Subscribe to Yahoo Singapore Telegram and visit Yahoo Shopping for first dibs on shopping deals Aesop is an Australian luxury brand with a wide range of skincare, haircare, soaps and fragrance. The brand is known for its polished aesthetic and brings a touch of luxury to any home. Shop fragrances at Aesop The Aromatherapy Company was established in 1990 and is now a leading supplier of Home Fragrance and Body Care products. From 100% pure and natural essential oils to a bespoke fragrance, this brand can be found in leading departmental stores. Shop home fragrances at The Aromatherapy Co. Story continues America's favourite retail store chain which sells soaps, lotions, fragrances, and candles. It once held the title of being the largest bath shop chain in the United States. Shop home fragrances at Bath & Body Works Renowned for their exceptional quality, beautiful designs and for not using synthetic fragrances in their products, Diptyque candles are oh-so-chic and Parisian. Shop home fragrances at Diptyque 100 per cent natural and free of synthetic chemicals, Hysses focuses on health and wellness using aromatherapy. Shop home fragrances at Hysses Famous for its unique blends and scents, Jo Malone London is known mainly for mixing unexpected combinations of ingredients and excelling at it with one-of-a-kind fragrances. Shop home fragrances at Jo Malone They helped make diffusers cool again, with a very tame yet comfortable collection of homely-scented fragrances. Shop home fragrances on Muji Known for its candles in beautiful tin cans that can be reused for other purposes, To Be Calm has become the go-to brand of choice for home fragrancing in Singapore. Shop home fragrances at To Be Calm What is a one-stop-shop for makeup/skincare enthusiasts without fragrances, even if it's one for homes? Shop Home Fragrances at Sephora On Saturday, 1C The Sanctuary packed 60,000 meals for food-insecure children in Haiti. The event, inspired by and partnered with Mission of Hope, followed a series of fundraisers which raised over $18,000 for the cause. Director of Christian Education Intern Tim Oberdieck said the event had a fantastic outcome in terms of performance and attendance. We had about 200 people show up from the church and the community and packed 60,000 meals in about two-and-a-half hours. It was really cool to see so many people show up, Oberdieck said. The meals -- consisting of rice, protein and dried veggies -- are simple but so important, according to Oberdieck, as almost half of Haiti lives in food insecurity, not knowing when or from where their next meal will come. Haitis kind of in that perfect storm of political unrest, drought, earthquakes, hurricanes, recently COVID. Everythings been all over the place for them, Oberdieck said. This came to 1C by way of Head Pastor Jim Thelen, Oberdieck said, following Thelens trip to Haiti several years ago, where children couldnt concentrate on what teachers and speakers were saying because of their starvation. Oberdieck said this was the first of this specific type of event for the church, but they plan on many more. This is hope for kids that dont have any. This is not only providing bodily sustenance, it is also hope for their education, for their future and for improving their lives and their country, Oberdieck said. One worker at the event, Lonnie Anderson, said he was inspired by the words of the Mission of Hope representative who spoke at the church. We dont know what hunger really is in this country, when youre told that some people dont know where their next meals coming from Anderson said Anderson also said it was very gratifying personally to be able to help people in such dire need, being from the United States where many citizens' definitions of things like hungry and need can be so different from theirs. When you know that theres people out there where if were not the ones who help them, theyre going hungry, thats what inspired me, Anderson said. According to Mission of Hope, 65% of people in Haiti fall below the poverty line there. Through programs like the food-packing event and mission trips, they seek to alleviate that. Because of recent travel policy changes and safety regulations, Mission for Hope currently relies on these types of programs as in-person aid is limited to Haitian natives. Just having faith in the good lord above and knowing that hes supplying for these people in Haiti or Africa or wherever it may be, we ought to feel great need to help these people, Anderson said. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Press Release March 29, 2022 De Lima joins call by IT-BPM firms to suspend return-to-on site work order Re-electionist Senator Leila M. de Lima joined the call of the Information Technology and Business Process Management (IT-BPM) firms to suspend the return-to-office (RTO) order by the Fiscals Incentives Review Board (FIRB). While the intent to stimulate economic activities in the retail industries in the eco-zones is understandable, De Lima maintained that the request of the IT-BPM firms and employees to suspend RTO are not unreasonable. "There is no guarantee that the return-to-office (RTO) order will redound to a net positive gain for our economy. The industry stands to lose resources and trained employees if there is an abrupt shift in the working arrangements. In the short term, there is no guarantee that the other businesses in the eco-zones will prosper during an ill-planned transition," she said. Reportedly, IT and business process outsourcing employees said the return-to-office order is a "recipe for disaster" and that it would endanger their occupational safety and health. "Mandating the return to office of 1.4 million information technology and BPO workers on the basis of economic and tax reasons disregards the issue of health and safety of employees," they said in seeking the suspension of the April 1 RTO order. In Resolution No, 19-21 issued on September 2021, the FIRB allowed work-from-home setups for up to 90 percent of BPO firms' workers until March 31 this year amid the persisting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the FIRB reportedly denied the request of BPO firms to extend work-from-home arrangements beyond the end of March. In supporting the call of IT-BPM firms to suspend the RTO order, De Lima pointed out that the pandemic is not over and that while many places in the country are in Alert Level 1, "the danger of the pandemic is still there." "We are seeing this in other countries who have drastically scaled back on their COVID-19 restrictions. Many IT-BPM employees stay at home to protect their household members who have co-morbidities and a high risk of contracting possibly fatal COVID-19 infections," she said. Likewise, De Lima said that the country is in the middle of a transportation crisis. "The price of petroleum products is at record highs and many of our transport service providers are contemplating on cutting back or stopping altogether because the cost of operations is not sustainable." Additionally, De Lima stressed that the WFH arrangement has been proposed to help decongest the traffic by reducing the density of commuting public. "Under a WFH arrangement of an IT-BPM firm, productivity is increased due to the removal of inefficiencies brought about by terrible traffic conditions," she said. De Lima said she hopes that the plea of IT-BPM firms would be heard considering that "the IT-BPM industry was one of our lifelines during the worst days of the pandemic." "IT-BPM firms invested in WFH arrangements for their employees, and it worked for everyone concerned. They were able to observe the health protocols implemented by the IATF. Their employees kept their jobs. And the economy lived to fight another day. This was not an insignificant achievement," she said. Editor's note: This story first published in the March 22, 2022, edition of The Columbus Telegram. When one is in a warzone, the comforts of home seem very distant, figuratively and literally. The Quilts of Valor Foundation has spent the last 18 years trying to bring those comforts closer by awarding handmade quilts to present and former service members. First Sgt. Steven Jenny, a National Guardsman from Columbus, was recently awarded one of those quilts. Jennys story started 22 years ago, when he enlisted. By 2004, he was a team leader for the 1075th Transportation Company in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He would go on to amass 10,000 miles and 15 missions in the same operation. In 2016 and 2017, Jenny trained Czech soldiers and received extraordinary performance accommodation for such. He also worked as a medic and medic instructor during that time. Then, from 2017 to 2019, Jenny worked with the 1-376th Aviation battalion as a first sergeant, with a team in Canada during Exercise Maple Resolve 2019. He also advocated for and promoted a suicide prevention service for service members during this time. I just feel extremely honored. I think its a great thing that they do. I feel very blessed, Jenny said. The quilts are a civilian award, started in Delaware by Catherine Roberts when her son was deployed in 2003, according to the Quilts of Valor Foundations website. She got the idea from a dream, in which she saw a young serviceman comforted by a quilt. The organization has been awarding quilts to service members as a comforting reminder that people support and care for them ever since. The quilts are presented with a short speech about the recipients career. A lot of people, when they come back from the war, they feel unappreciated, and kind of isolated and alone. I think this (the quilt) lets you wrap up in it and realize youre not alone, there are people out there who do care, Jenny said. Ken Kildare, another Columbus resident who served 39 years in the National Guard himself across Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and many other campaigns, was awarded the same honor earlier this year. He also said these kinds of awards mean a lot more to service members than just a quilt. We joined because we wanted to, we werent forced to. We went because that was where we were needed. Its a nice thing these ladies do to say thank you for what youve done, said Kildare. Kildare and Jenny agreed that the support behind these awards mean a lot, because service members and their families give up a lot being in the military. Many of these soldiers deploy two, three, four times. Its a strain on them but its also a bigger strain on their family. The service member knew what they had to do and they did it, like it or not, Kildare said. The quilt was made by a local 4-H participant, Rebecca Wacker and her mother, Joelle Wacker of Stars, Stripes, and Stitches. The design won a purple ribbon at the state fair for superior quality and standards. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The Stucco Place Owner Kimberly Oberg said she hopes that bringing a new vibe to her business will add to the variety of stores in downtown Columbus. People will be able to check out this vibe during a reopening this weekend. Oberg opened The Stucco Place, 1357 32nd Ave., right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. She sells handcrafted decor, repurposed furniture and vintage and antique finds. But, the store is more of a hobby for Oberg as shes owned Alternative Hearing for the past 18 years. Alternative Hearing sells hearing aids and services the devices. Both businesses are located in the same building. The Stucco Place is kind of a family business Obergs brother creates handcrafted decor while her sister-in-law, Shelley Armstrong, often helps her with the shopping. Armstrong said that she and Oberg both have an interest in antiques and vintage items. We've gone to a lot of antique shops, vintage markets, that sort of thing for fun, Armstrong said. It's fun for me to help her find inventory. I live in Kansas City, so there's a lot of places down there that sometimes we can find some unusual items. Oberg repurposes furniture in her garage at home. Oberg noted that shes always been interested in the subject, having been interested in watching those videos and eventually wanted to learn how to repurpose furniture herself. The smaller pieces don't take overly long but the larger pieces can take me weeks sometimes. There's a lot of sanding, a lot of prep work restoring fixing things, thinking about things, Oberg said. Since the opening of The Stucco Place, Oberg said shes been learning about what appeals to customers and the direction in which she wants the business to go. Oberg said the stores changes include different inventory and some cosmetic upgrades, including painting. I am carrying more antiques and vintage finds, but I'm also trying to create a more inviting atmosphere in my shop. Something that when people walk in that they want to spend time there, she added. Armstrong noted they joke that they want to make the store more moodier. On Friday, the family was working on cleaning and decorating the store. Armstrong said they hope within the next year to make additional changes to make the store more fun. We both have full time jobs. So we know that each of us doesn't have a ton of time, but sometimes together we can conquer things, Armstrong said. The Stucco Place announced in January that it would be closing to undergo some changes that will all be unveiled during a reopening this weekend. The business will be open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday. We're planning on doing a happy hour Friday afternoon from three to five and mimosas Saturday morning. I've got some wonderful refreshments coming from Wildflower Pastries and then we're going to have some giveaways too, Oberg said. Obergs plans for The Stucco Place have been kept on the down low in the hopes of peeking peoples curiosity and encourage them to attend the reopening. Usually The Stucco Place is open once a month, but future opening dates and hours are still being determined. People can check The Stucco Place Facebook page or contact Oberg at 402-910-0543 to check future hours. With the recent activity in downtown Columbus, Oberg said she is hoping the new vibe brings something different. I've been in business for 18 years and I tried to keep my business local. There's been a lot of cool shops that have opened lately, people renovating their storefronts in downtown Columbus, Oberg said. I think there's a variety of shops here, and so I just want to add to that variety. This is just something fun for me to do, I enjoy doing it. Hannah Schrodt is the news editor of The Columbus Telegram. Reach her via email at hannah.schrodt@lee.net. Love 1 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. True education comes out of a past refined in the present, not a future far from certain, Corey Gelbaugh said. Since the birth of his first daughter, this Carlisle-area man has been reading up on the Bible and philosophy. Ive been trying to understand my personal worldview, what I want my kids to be brought up believing, he said. A few months ago, this soul-searching took an enterprising new turn. One day while looking online, Gelbaugh came across a video produced by the Association of Classical Christian Schools. The how, the why, and the necessary steps got him thinking about a calling rooted in experience. Raised in a family of teachers, he graduated from a public school, but wanted something different for his oldest child as she enters kindergarten. I have some issues with what theyre teaching, their ultimate source of authority of what constitutes standards in education, Gelbaugh said. The questions my daughter is asking me are not able to be answered by an education that leaves God out of the picture. He saw in the video an alternative path. I told my wife that were going to do it, Gelbaugh said. So far, I have not lost the desire to start it. Today, Gelbaugh is president of a group of volunteers seeking to establish the Logos School in space rented from the Carlisle Evangelical Free Church at 290 Petersburg Road in South Middleton Township. The public is invited to attend an informational meeting from 6:15 to 8 p.m. Thursday at the church. For Gelbaugh, the first step was to obtain a start-up kit of instructions from the Association of Classical Christian Schools, the organization that would ultimately accredit the Logos School. Early on, he hired an attorney to process the necessary paperwork involved with incorporating a company and filing for nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service. A coder, Gelbaugh designed the website at logosschoolpa.com that outlines the schools mission statement, statement of faith and vision and philosophy. The homepage includes tabs detailing tuition and the enrollment process along with a link to classicalchristian.org that explains that approach to education. There are opportunities for educators, volunteers and donors to get involved in the school. The most important thing is defining your vision, Gelbaugh said. Thats a huge part of it, having people at the ground level who understand the vision. Our goal is to cultivate virtue according to Gods standard, but we also want to pursue wisdom. Thats going to be the underlying theme that drives all learning across the school. For curriculum development, he turned to two experts his mother, Denise Eschenmann, a retired fifth-grade teacher from Carlisle Area School District, and his aunt, Debbie Harris-Heishman, a retired K-3 teacher from South Middleton School District. Both of them have over 30 years of classroom teaching and lesson planning experience. The women are on the Logos School board of directors. Preliminary groundwork has reached the point where the school is accepting students, Eschenmann said. The plan is to keep the enrollment window open as long as possible while decisions are made regarding grade structure and the hiring of teachers, she said. The number and age level of students enrolled will determine how each classroom is organized and how many teachers would be needed to meet the demand, Eschenmann said. The goal is to limit class sizes to 15 students each. Starting in late August, the hope is to run a K-5 program in portions of two floors rented from the church. Depending on enrollment, there might be blended classrooms of more than one grade level. Right now, the main source of revenue for Logos School is tuition. Though it is located in Carlisle Evangelical Free Church, the school is not sponsored by the church, Eschenmann said. We hope to do some fundraisers in the upcoming months. Maybe get some donors. We are hoping that God provides enough money to get this off the ground. Our biggest challenge is getting the word out about it. Currently, the Logos School is seeking registration through the Pennsylvania Department of Education as a nonpublic, nonlicensed school, as required under the state School Code, Eschenmann said. On its website, PDE defines nonpublic, nonlicensed as schools owned and operated by bona fide religious institutions. Long-term, the goal is for the Logos School to become accredited through ACCS, a nonprofit organization that serves as the primary public advocate for a classical Christian education in the U.S. and abroad. The association represents over 300 member and accredited schools, according to its website at classicalchristian.org. Since accreditation requires a K-12 curriculum, it could take years for the Logos School to build itself up to the level needed to qualify for that accreditation, Eschenmann said. Email Joseph Cress at jcress@cumberlink.com. Love 5 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 2 From Carlisle to Harrisburg, a number of elected officials from local municipal and school boards are among those looking to nab legislative, senatorial or congressional seats in this years election. The last day to file petitions for the May 17 primary was Sunday, and according to the Pennsylvania Department of States candidate listing, there are a number of candidates for newly formed seats or seats vacated by those seeking higher office. The most hotly contested seat is the newly formed 103rd Legislative District. The district was formed by the new legislative district map approved by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and includes East Pennsboro Township, Camp Hill Borough, Lemoyne and Wormleysburg, as well as 13 wards of Harrisburg City. This new seat does encompass the home of current state Rep. Patty Kim, D-Harrisburg, who will seek election to the seat. Two other Harrisburg residents former Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson, a Democrat, and Republican Jennie Jenkins-Dallas will also be on their respective ballots for the seat. Two Camp Hill residents round out the primary candidates, with Democrat Heather MacDonald seeking the office, as well as Republican David Buell, the former Cumberland County prothonotary who last year ran unsuccessfully to join the mostly Democratic Camp Hill School Board. The 87th Legislative District has also drawn three candidates. This seat entails Monroe Township, Silver Spring Township, Upper Allen Township, Mount Holly Springs, precinct 2 of Lower Allen Township and six precincts of South Middleton Township. Lower Allen Township Commissioner Thomas Kutz is running for the legislative seat, as is fellow Republican Eric Clancy of Upper Allen Township. Democrat Kristal Markle of Upper Allen Township will be the only one on her ballot. There is no incumbent on this ballot because the current sitting representative, Republican Greg Rothman, is seeking the open 34th Senatorial District seat. This newly formed district entails most of Cumberland County, save for the Mechanicsburg area and the West Shore, which are in the 31st Senatorial District. Sen. Mike Regan won re-election in 2020 and will not be on this years ballot. The 34th Senatorial District also includes Perry County and parts of northern Dauphin County, however, only Cumberland County residents are on the ballot for the seat. Running against Rothman in the Republican primary is Cumberland Valley School Board member Michael Gossert. James Massey Jr. of East Pennsboro is the only candidate on the Democratic ballot. Republican Congressman Scott Perry will again have to defend his 10th Congressional District seat, though he wont have a primary challenger in May. Carlisle School Board member Rick Coplen of Dickinson Township will face Harrisburg City Council member Shamaine Daniels in the Democratic primary before one moves on to face Perry in the general election. For two other local legislative seats, the general election is where the battle will take place. In the 199th Legislative District in the Carlisle area, Republican state Rep. Barb Gleim will likely be defending her seat against Democrat Alan Howe, who has previously run campaigns for other offices, including Congress and even president in 2020. State Rep. Sheryl Delozier, R-Lower Allen, will be looking to keep her 88th Legislative District seat against challenger and Mechanicsburg Borough Council member Sara Agerton. State Rep. Torren Ecker, R-Adams County, is the only one who filed to run for the 193rd Legislative District. With the changes to the legislative district map, the 193rd lost South Middleton Township and instead now encompasses Dickinson Township, Cooke Township, Penn Township, Shippensburg Township and Shippensburg Borough, South Newton Township and Southampton Township, as well as northern Adams County. Email Naomi Creason at ncreason@cumberlink.com or follow her on Twitter @SentinelCreason. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Apprenticeship programs prepare workers for success by equipping them with the skills to compete for good jobs that offer family-sustaining wages, Wolf said. The investments were making in apprenticeships and other forms of hands-on and on-the-job training are already helping us get more Pennsylvanians into careers where they can succeed. This is more important than ever as Pennsylvanias economy continues to rebound following the COVID-19 pandemic. Naomi Irion. Lyon County Sheriff's Office The family of missing Nevada teen Naomi Irion remain optimistic that she's still alive. A suspect was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping Naomi on Friday. Troy Driver, 41, is set to appear in court at noon on Wednesday. The family of missing Nevada teen Naomi Irion remain optimistic that she's still alive, after a suspect was arrested over the weekend in connection to her disappearance. "We're hopeful and we have faith that she's still out there and we're going to bring her home," Naomi's older brother, Casey Valley, told Insider on Tuesday. Troy Driver. Lyon County Sheriff's Office via AP On Friday, the Lyon County Sheriff's Office announced that 41-year-old Troy Driver had been arrested on suspicion of kidnapping Naomi, but said they had yet to locate the young woman. Driver is expected to appear in court on Wednesday at noon local time. The 18-year-old was abducted from the parking lot of a Walmart in Fernley, Nevada, on March 12, while waiting for a shuttle to her job at a Panasonic factory. Surveillance video showed a man in a gray hoodie approaching the vehicle and saying or doing something to make Naomi move over and let him in, before he drove off. Sources told KOLOTV that one of Driver's neighbors turned him in after spotting his pickup truck, which police have been looking for in connection to Naomi's disappearance. Driver has a criminal history including a prior conviction connected to a 1997 murder, according to reports from the Ukiah Daily Journal, which were viewed by My News 4. According to My News 4, Driver was 17 years old when he helped dispose of the body of a meth dealer that his girlfriend shot and killed. He pleaded guilty to accessory to murder after the fact and several other charges related to robberies of gas stations and a hardware store, the Ukiah Daily Journal reported, according to My News 4. Valley said there's "no indication" that his sister had any connection to Driver. Because of Driver's criminal history, Valley doesn't believe he'll be cooperative with investigators. Story continues "We're not counting on this guy talking so we need people to come forward," Valley said. "This guy's a hardened criminal, he knows how to navigate the criminal side of the legal system. Unless there's a deal to be made ... there's no guarantee that he's going to lead us to Naomi." "The investigation is very much alive," Valley added. "Anybody who knows him needs to talk to law enforcement and anybody who has seen him in the last two weeks needs to get in contact. Anyone who might know what's he been up to needs to call Secret Witness Nevada." The FBI recently announced a $10,000 reward for information on the location of Irion, which is separate from another unspecified reward being offered by Secret Witness Nevada. Valley said there's "no indication" that his sister had any connection to Driver. A public information officer for the Lyon County Sheriff's Office did not answer Insider's call for an update on the case Tuesday morning. Read the original article on Insider Turkeys response to the war in Ukraine is a defining moment for world perception. The country now hosts ceasefire/peace talks between the Ukrainian and Russian delegations, a service increasingly appreciated by America, NATO and the East European states in particular. This role as a player/broker follows President Recep Tayyip Erdogans adventurist foreign policy in recent years. The Ukraine war is a current example of Turkey, which is a NATO partner, walking an ever-finer line between a Cold War era bias in favor of the West, and a 21st century maverick country with policies designed to assert a regional influence. Erdogan seems tempted to try to leverage his countrys influence in order to punch above its weight. In his first decade of rule, Erdogans foreign policy followed the principle of zero problems with its neighbors. His election as president in 2014 and a change in the constitution favoring a strong executive branch, allowed him to use a failed 2016 coup to declare a state of emergency, effectively suspending the rule of law. The move allowed Erdogan to crush internal opposition, and push a foreign policy that resulted in zero neighbors without problems. Over the course of wars in Syria, Libya and Nagorno Karabakh, problems arose not just with neighbors, but with NATO, the US and Russia. US-Turkey relations hit a nadir when Erdogans government chose to purchase the Russian S-400 Missile platform rather than the American Patriot system. The decision generated American concern about Turkeys degree of deviation from NATO/American policy in places like Syria, Egypt, Israel, Libya and Cyprus. The purchase of Russian weapons was further complicated by Americas unwillingness to share all the technology underlying the Patriot system, and Turkeys increasing reliance on Russia for its energy, wheat, tourism and nuclear power plant development. The American response was swift and united in the halls of Congress. Turkey was sanctioned in some areas of defense shipments and cut out of the joint NATO development of the F-35 Stealth Fighter. Finding friends for Turkey, outside of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar, Moscow and maybe Beijing, has been difficult. Erdogans tight rope, with an economy in shambles, has brought with it increasing political instability. His Justice and Development Party suffered significant losses in local elections in 2019 and lost control of major cities across the country. While his popularity has declined significantly according to internal polls, his handling of the Ukraine invasion is currently giving him a bounce, at home and abroad. By virtue of the 1936 Montreux Convention, in time of war, Turkey can restrict passage of the waterways between the Black and Mediterranean seas. Erdogans balancing act has left him in the enviable, but precarious position, of having good enough relations with both Russia and Ukraine to be favorably seen as one of several conflict resolution brokers. Like NATO members in Europe, Turkey continues to buy Russian energy, fueling the Russian war machine. And, it sells drones to the Ukrainians, who are using them to take out Russian tanks and other military assets. While initially reluctant to take sides, Turkey has very slightly shifted its balancing act in favor of Ukraine, NATO, and the West. With an eye to the 2023 elections and his legacy at the centennial, Erdogan is quietly reestablishing diplomatic relations with Israel and Armenia, as well as tabling disputes with Greece and others regarding territorial waters and seabed resources. It is not clear if these measures will burnish Erdogans tarnished credentials with the West. They may be temporary and situational. Or, Russias behavior could cause Turkey to reconsider its long term strategic interests. Those things may help determine if the opposition can mount a coordinated and sustained campaign to unseat the ruling party. Regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, the strategic landscape of Europe and NATO has now changed. The Western alliance is learning and relearning useful lessons. The outcome of the 2023 elections in Turkey should inform those lessons. It will begin to give the West an indication of where Turkish foreign policy may be headed, if it changes at all. Henry Williams is an expert in Turkish affairs. By officially accusing the Russian military of committing war crimes in Ukraine, President Joe Bidens administration has seemingly confirmed the obvious. Vladimir Putins troops have so far attacked apartment buildings, hospitals, shopping centers and schools during their invasion of Ukraine. Theyve cut countless Ukrainians off from food, heat, electricity and running water. Thousands of civilians have been wounded or killed. Despite Bidens off-the-cuff remark Saturday that Putin cannot remain in power, it remains at best uncertain Putin will ever be ousted, let alone face justice for atrocities committed in Ukraine. Even so, the U.S. was right to put the idea on the table: A vigorous war-crimes investigation into this conflict is now essential. As Russias ground offensive has slowed due to fierce Ukrainian resistance, its bombardment of population centers has only grown more horrific. Russian forces have killed some 5,000 people in the city of Mariupol, including 200 children, the mayors office said Monday. That includes victims of the March 16 airstrike on a theater where civilians were sheltering. In response to such reports, more than 40 countries have referred Russia to the International Criminal Court, which has opened an investigation. Even if the court amasses proof of war crimes, however, high-ranking Russian officials wont likely face prosecution any time soon. Because Russia, like the U.S., never ratified the Rome Statute creating the ICC, the Kremlin doesnt accept the courts jurisdiction over its citizens. Even so, an impartial, internationally sanctioned war-crimes inquiry has value. Collecting evidence that Russia knowingly targeted civilians would refute Putins attempts to cast the war as a legitimate military operation. It would cause mid-level officials to think twice about carrying out criminal orders, knowing they could face the threat of arrest and prosecution if they travel outside Russia. Cataloging and publicizing such atrocities would also demonstrate the worlds commitment to upholding human rights and defending the rule of law. More pragmatically, international war-crimes charges can help undermine the political legitimacy of rogue leaders, as was the case with Serbias Slobodan Milosevic and Sudans Omar al-Bashir. While it could be years before any Russians face charges, history suggests they may not escape accountability forever. After a slow start, the United Nations tribunal created to prosecute atrocities in the former Yugoslavia ultimately convicted and sentenced 90 suspects over 25 yearsincluding the mastermind of the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnians at Srebrenica, who will spend the rest of his life in prison after losing his final appeal last summer. Although European countries will need to take the lead in this probe, the U.S. should provide logistical assistance to the courts prosecutors, including sharing intelligence such as satellite imagery and communication intercepts. It can offer financial rewards for third countries to cooperate with the investigation, as it has done in other cases. Congress should also require the Department of Justice to maintain a database of suspected war criminals from the Ukraine conflictas it did for those who participated in Nazi atrocitiesand amend existing law to allow for the arrest and prosecution of any such individuals who attempt to enter the country. NATO members should consider granting protection and immunity to Russians willing to testify about atrocities they witnessed or were ordered to commit. Realistically, such policies wont impede Russias aggression right away. Yet the specter of war-crimes charges could well prove useful as leverage for Ukraine in negotiations over ending the war. For example, the government in Kyiv could agree to accept limits on the scope of the investigation in return for concessions from Moscow. Contemplating a long stay at The Hague, the members of Putins inner circle may find such a deal newly appealing. Russias aggression in Ukraine has shocked the worlds conscience. Imposing accountability for such appalling acts is the first step toward ensuring they arent repeated. Bloomberg Opinion Local cidery Albemarle CiderWorks took home the Best in Show Cider award for its 2019 Virginia Hewes Crab at this years Virginia Governors Cup. Cidery officials said they are proud to be honored by the most prestigious cider award the state has to offer. The Virginia Wineries Associations Governors Cup is held in partnership with the Virginia Wine Board and the Virginia Vineyards Association. Virginia cider is judged in its own category, which started in 2021. After tasting through all the entries, judges identify the top six scoring ciders then do a blind tasting and rank their favorites. The Best in Show Cider award recognizes the highest-rated cider. When cidermaker Chuck Shelton accepted the award during last weeks celebration in Richmond, he thanked his family, customers and staff, saying you deserve recognition as much as I do. Credit must also be given to the adventurous apple growers who took a leap of faith and planted the Hewes Crab in support of our fledgling, modern cider industry, he said. Id also like to remember Tom Burford, a long-time apple enthusiast who helped restore Virginia Hewes Crab to its rightful place in Virginia cider. CiderWorks also won two golds for its Wickson and Royal Pippin ciders and a silver for its proprietary blend, Jupiters Legacy. Virginia wines and ciders continue to cement their place in our exceptional agriculture and tourism industries and as major contributors to the Virginia economy, Virginias Secretary of Agriculture and Forestry Matt Lohr wrote in a news release. As the states oldest operating cidery, this years Best in Show Cider winner Albemarle CiderWorks has shown a dedication to bringing locally crafted cider to the table of Virginians everywhere. The 2022 Virginia Governors Cup, awarded to the wine with the highest overall score, went to Cana Vineyards & Winery of Middleburg for its 2019 Unite Reservea signature estate red blend of Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. The competition received a record-breaking number of entries this year with 615 wines from over 100 Virginia wineries, the governors office said. In order to be eligible, all entries must be made from 100% Virginia-grown fruit. Six of the 12 wines selected for the Governors Cup Case are from local vineyards. They are the 2020 Vermentino Reserve, from Barboursville Vineyards; 2019 Chardonnay, from Michael Shaps Wineworks; 2017 Meritage, from Pollak Vineyards; 2017 Meritage, from Stinson Vineyards; 2015 Brut Reserve, from Trump Winery; and 2019 NINETEEN, from Wisdom Oak Winery. Press Release March 29, 2022 De Lima bewails Chinese ship's dangerous 'close distance maneuvering' in WPS Re-electionist Senator Leila M. de Lima bewailed the reported close distance maneuvering of a China Coast Guard (CCG) vessel during the maritime patrol operations of a Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) ship in Bajo de Masinloc early this month. De Lima maintained that the government should not only condemn the recent occurrence, but seriously do something to stop the CCG from violating the 1972 International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea. "We have to exercise our exclusive authority in Bajo de Masinloc, which is within our Exclusive Economic Zone in the West Philippine Sea. The reported 'close distance maneuvering' by a China Coast Guard vessel on the PCG vessel BRP Malabrigo is a cause of great concern," she said. "This is not the first time that this kind of incident occurred. Kaya maliban sa sinasabing pag-imbestiga sa mga ganitong insidente, ano ba ang polisiya o mga hakbang ng gobyerno para matiyak na maiwasan ang ganitong pangyayari na nagdudulot ng panganib sa mga kababayan nating mangingisda at mga tauhan ng PCG?" she added. In a statement by the PCG released last March 27, they said that the incident occurred last March 2, while one of its ships, the BRP Malabrigo (MRRV-4402) was patrolling the area of Scarborough Shoal, locally known as Panatag Shoal and Bajo de Masinloc. The Chinese ship "with bow No. 3305... conducted a close distance maneuvering of approximately 21 yards toward BRP Malabrigo," the PCG reportedly said, noting that this constrained the maneuvering space of its vessel, which was a violation of the 1972 International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea. PCG Commandant Adm. Artemio Abu confirmed that this was the fourth incident involving CCG ships at Bajo de Masinloc. The lady Senator from Bicol said she hopes that the alarming incident "would finally prompt the administration to take a stronger and firmer stand on matters involving our rights in the WPS." De Lima earlier said that the WPS issue should be in the top 5 of presidential, vice presidential and senatorial candidates' platforms for the 2022 polls as it proves their priority to protect national sovereignty and territorial integrity. In a landmark ruling on July 12, 2016, the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) found no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to a "nine-dash line" in the WPS but China refused to honor the ruling. De Lima, who was then justice secretary, was part of the Philippine delegation who argued the Philippines' case before the PCA. Last year, she filed Senate Resolution (SR) No. 694 urging the government's Executive branch to exert all legal and diplomatic actions on the Chinese government in asserting Philippine sovereign rights in the WPS. De Lima is also among the 11 Senators who filed SR No. 708 urging the Upper Chamber to "condemn in the strongest possible terms" the illegal activities of China in the disputed waters. When COVID-19 hit, Charlottesvilles leadership quickly went indoors and online, but employees providing direct services to the public had to find new ways to work in person and face-to-face. In the past two years, as cases waxed and waned with cold weather and new virus variants, some departments made numerous changes to their operations, including some that may prove permanent. It seemed to happen so quickly, and we pivoted so quickly, but our goal was always how we are going to do all this and maintain our services and our interactions with customers, sometimes in person? said Lauren Hildebrand, the citys director of utilities. The nature of the departments work was made problematic by the pandemic. Employees often entering homes to fix water and natural gas issues and, as the world locked down, creativity was required. Hildebrand said that, while masks are now easily accessible, they were scarce at first. A personal protective equipment shortage in the early days challenged not only medical care providers but the department as well. Employees found themselves having to prioritize calls for assistance. It was a challenge. We certainly had to be flexible and meet peoples needs, recognizing that we provide a service thats 24/7 or on call 24/7, Hildebrand said. The most common interactions were natural gas workers lighting appliances in customers homes. Employees would ask families to isolate in one area of the house while they worked in another, or came into the house while residents werent home. Calls complaining about the smell of gas were prioritized as a safety precaution. Employees donned face masks, face shields and gloves when on a call. I feel like we didnt I hope we didnt miss a beat, but we certainly made some adjustments in our operations to make sure people were safe and healthy, Hildebrand said. We didnt want anybody to be interrupted. We didnt want anybody to be put in an unsafe situation. For both the departments of Human Services and Social Services, adapting to new rules while continuing to serve required flexibility and creativity, especially as peoples needs increased during the pandemic. It was an immediate and a big shift when COVID happened, for our workforce and our clients. We kind of figured it out together, said Sue Moffett, Director of Social Services. Moffett said her staff stepped up to make sure community members needs were met, even if it meant doing different jobs and working differently. Employees partnered with others and looked at services from a different perspective. We had staff doing things that were really outside their traditional job descriptions. We had people helping to interpret at the emergency financial assistance line. We had people helping deliver food to people who were homebound because of COVID isolation or other reasons, Moffett said. We were partnering with organizations that we had never really had the opportunity to partner with before, particularly migrant farmworkers and folks like that, just to make sure that we had a handle on what the need was, what services were available and what else we needed to look to fill any gaps, Moffett said. Misty Graves, interim director of the citys Department of Human Services, said the department created similar partnerships and staff took new, creative approaches to problems. Graves staff took food donations to food hubs for distribution and partnered with the Blue Ridge Health District to help quarantined people receive services and food. One particularly vital partnership was with Cultivate Charlottesvilles Food Justice Equity Initiative. They created, in the middle of a pandemic, a food text program where anyone can type in their zip code and what day it is and get real time information as far as where food is. That should never stop, Graves said. It was incredibly inventive and responsive to the need, but I hope that program continues because it is showing real collaboration and efficiency and making sure that folks know where to get what they need. Moffett said that Social Services tried to have as many socially distanced in-person interactions with clients as possible to maintain the personal level of services, but also offered electronic options when possible. We met in parks. We bought camp chairs for staff and met on peoples front porches. It was a great opportunity for everybody to be creative and to remain focused on our mission, Moffett said. Department leaders agree the pandemic taught them better ways to serve and to serve better. One thing about human service work is that were not making widgets. Relationships are important, and not only relationships with the people that we serve, but relationships with other community partners and service providers in the area, Moffett said. She and Graves said those partnerships will continue. It takes a pretty high risk tolerance to be innovative and to take on a bunch of new programs and new ways of working in a really quick, quick timeframe, Moffett said. It requires that we trust each other a lot and that we are vigilant about what were not doing well. Moffett said the changes taught department to look for what they were missing in serving the community. What do we need to tweak so that we dont perpetuate something that isnt working well for the people that we serve? she said. Those new partnerships are really important because we get feedback from lenses that Im not used to hearing from. Its great, Moffett said. What we do in the utility world is kind of out-of-sight, out-of-mind; and we take it for granted its always gonna work, until it doesnt, Hildebrand said. You know, theyre not thinking about what makes it work behind the scenes and all the people that keep it working. Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The Virginia Attorney Generals Office in a new filing says Dominion Energys proposal for a large offshore wind farm is not needed for the utilitys capacity, costs two to three times more than solar energy, and that the company has overstated the projects economic benefits. The Friday filing was made at the Virginia State Corporation Commission by the Attorney Generals Division of Consumer Counsel, which represents consumer interests before the commission. The commission is considering Dominions plan for a $9.8 billion wind farm with about 180 turbines off the coast of Virginia Beach. The plan needs approval from the commission, which will hold hearings in the case starting May 16; public comment is open until then. The attorney general filed written testimony from Scott Norwood, an energy consultant in Austin, Texas, who has testified before the commission previously on behalf of the Virginia attorney general. Dominions plan is the largest energy project ever undertaken in Virginia and the wind farm would be the largest in the country and one of the largest in the world. The General Assembly, through a 2020 state law called Virginia Clean Economy Act, directed the commission to approve the utility-owned wind farm at a customer cost of up to $9.8 billion. The attorney generals testimony acknowledged that the law establishes a presumption of prudence for the costs. The laws language takes risk for the project off of Dominion and its investors. But because of the high fixed costs and significant risks posed to customers, the testimony said, the states largest electric utility should be required to file status reports on the performance and cost of the project through construction and its first year of operation. Norwood also recommended that the commission require Dominion to commit to dates the project will be ready to generate electricity, and immediately notify the commission of delays or cost increases. Dominion has raised the estimated cost to its Virginia customers for the wind farm from $7.8 billion to $9.8 billion. Dominion spokesman Jeremy Slayton said in a statement for this story that offshore wind is good for energy security and the Virginia economy and environment. ... The zero fuel costs of Virginia offshore wind are more valuable than ever given todays rising fuel costs. The jobs and economic development benefits are transformative for Hampton Roads, including for diverse communities. The company owns a test project operating with two wind turbines; construction on the large project is scheduled to be finished in 2026, and its estimated life is 30 years. The cost to a typical residential customer in the first year is an additional $1.45 on a monthly bill, but the attorney general testimony notes that Dominions numbers project that will reach more than $20 by 2027. Other participants have also filed testimony in the case. The Sierra Club filed testimony from Mark Little, the executive director of an economic development center based at the University of North Carolina, related to Dominions economic plan for the wind farm. He concluded that Dominions plan does not meet the diversity, equity and inclusion targets outlined in state law and the commission should direct the company to file a new economic plan that expresses a clearer vision, identifies specific metrics and explains how targets will be met. Walmart submitted a letter saying that while it supports renewable energy, the company has concerns about the price of the wind farm and wants the commission to protect customers from possible cost overruns. A representative of the Nansemond Indian Nation headquartered in Suffolk filed testimony saying the tribe wants to be consulted on the project because it affects their ancestral lands. The potential for the discovery and disturbance of Indigenous sites in any new development in this area is high, the tribes testimony said. And the Charlottesville-based organization Clean Virginia filed testimony arguing that Dominion has limited experience developing offshore wind, and if the projects costs end up exceeding the $9.8 billion estimate, Dominion, and not its customers, should then be at risk. Dominions Slayton said the company was pleased none of the participants in the case opposed State Corporation Commission approval of the project. There is a basic truth that the teller controls the tale. That has never been more evident than it is today at Montpelier, James Madisons colonial estate in Orange County. An open fracture has broken apart the Montpelier Foundation Board, which operates the home of the 4th U.S. president, and the Montpelier Descendants Committee, which helps oversee the story of the people he enslaved. Last week, the foundation changed its bylaws to have more control over who gets appointed to its board. The move came after the Montpelier board pledged to share power by having half its membership made up of descendants of enslaved people named by the descendants committee. Currently, five descendants, three appointed by the committee and two appointed by the board, sit on the 16-member board. Descendants committee chair and foundation board member James French said the new appointment policy could shape Montpeliers slavery narrative in ways that favor a more benign, less honest integration of the experiences of enslaved residents with the man who wrote the U.S. Constitution. In that document, Madison decried slavery as he held hundreds of people in bondage. The new rules make the board the ultimate gatekeeper in approving board members, French told The Daily Progress. Its like saying, Whats mine is mine, and whats your is negotiable ... [A] brilliant experiment in whole truth history has turned out to be a farce. Ahead of the bylaws vote, a majority of Montpelier staff members posted an online letter opposing the change, according to the Washington Post. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns Montpelier, also wrote to the foundation board chair, asking him to scrap the bylaws amendment. Foundation president and CEO Roy Young told The Daily Progress that board parity meant similar numbers of descendants and non-descendants. He called expanding the source of descendant appointments to the board a way of broadening the pool. Young said staff would not be punished for opposing the board policy, but added that he had heard from staff who supported the bylaws change. The dispute threatens to destroy what was once considered a national model for explaining the ugly spectacle of human chattel on the hollowed grounds tread by the countrys most iconic heroes. The University of Virginia and Thomas Jeffersons Monticello now include the roles of enslaved people in building and maintaining their beatified structures. Montpelier is supposed to operate based on a historical rubric developed by scholars at the site. It called for sharing power equally with descendants of the enslaved in telling the story of Madisons life. The reasoning held that those who surrounded Madison shaped his life. This meant more than rubbing shoulders with the Founding Fathers. Among other things, it included bodies buried in one of the largest burial grounds of enslaved people in the country. One measure of this conflict involves the mission of places such as Montpelier and Monticello and the lives of the famous people they celebrate. We have no desire to sugarcoat the warts of Madison or any other prominent national hero. We strongly endorse whole truth history. What we do wonder is how that measures up to their contributions to the nation. Do the estates of the people who led the Revolutionary War and then gave birth to this country exist as historical sites, educational venues, museums, or a mixture of all of those things? America has plenty to atone for in its tolerance of slavery for more than 200 years. Much remains to be done. But Martin Luther King Jr.s civil rights revolution ranks with historys greatest. So as Americans confront the past at places like Montpelier, we hope they grasp the need for vigilance, not shame. On an administrative level, however, we hope the battle of Montpelier does not foreshadow a broader war to control the historical narrative. The Montpelier bylaws change hinted at a need by White board members to rein in Black board members in a paternal Carry Me Back to Old Virginny way. Despite the racist lyric to Virginias old state song, it must be made clear that no darkies heart ever longed to go there. Dietert Center was hopping last week in the Meals on Wheels area. We had 28 community members join us to learn all about the procedures for pa If Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is the Republican presidential nominee in 2024, its already obvious what one of the main Democratic lines of attack will be: Hes just like Donald Trump, only worse. He increasingly acts like his role model, the tyrannical Donald Trump, the Orlando Sun-Sentinel editorialized last year. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote at CNNs website that he has a mini-Trump brand (and also reminds her a bit of Mussolini). Molly Jong-Fast, in a newsletter for The Atlantic, concluded her tour of press clips about the governor with this conclusion: DeSantis may prove to be the Trojan Trump who finally brings down American democracy. What makes DeSantis, or any other Republican, too Trumpy? The critics offer a wide variety of answers. Jong-Fast is willing to put the label on anyone who opposes either mask mandates in schools or abortion. Charlie Sykes, in the Bulwark, claims that DeSantis is hostile to civil liberties, quoting a report that he signed a bill that grants civil immunity to people who decide to drive their cars into protesters who are blocking a road. The Guardian quotes an academic likening DeSantis to Trump because both have an in-your-face style. Thomas Edsall conducted an informal survey for a New York Times column on DeSantis as the Man Out-Trumping Trump. Respondents cited his eagerness to own the libs (Democratic strategist Paul Begala), his right-wing agenda (Democratic pollster Geoff Garin), and his being a creature of power (another academic). An earlier Times article said his combative relations with the press are modeled on Trumps. Many of these criticisms apply to nearly all Republicans, including pre-Trump and anti-Trump ones. Some of them apply to Democrats, too: Arent all politicians creatures of power? Other resemblances are real but faint. Theres a difference between calling out a reporter for repeating a slogan of his opponents, as DeSantis recently did, and dismissing critical or inconvenient coverage as fake news, which was Trumps M.O. Some of the charges are simply false. Floridians who drive into protesters will not have civil immunity even if judges let that DeSantis-signed bill go into effect. They have the ability to raise a defense in court if, for example, they inflicted damage because a violent public disturbance was using the threat of force to impede their safe movement. Edsall concedes that DeSantis lacks Trumps impulsiveness and preference for chaos, but says that just makes him a more fearsome opponent for liberals. In important respects, though, that means the country should have less to fear from him. Consider some of the lowlights of Trumps presidency. DeSantis opposed Trumps policy of mass family separation. He has nothing like Trumps record of praising dictators. And while DeSantis has not been a profile in courage in calling out Trumps lie that he won the 2020 election, he also has not broadcast that lie himself. The accusation that DeSantis is an enemy of democracy rests heavily on exaggerated claims about an election law he signed; a sweeping voter suppression law, the liberal Brennan Center calls it. Its true that the law includes new restrictions, such as requiring that county employees oversee ballot drop-boxes. But its also true that the law leaves Floridians with greater ballot access, in key respects, than a lot of states run by Democrats. Florida has no-excuse absentee voting, unlike Delaware and New York. Finally, theres the matter of DeSantiss lib-owning style. He is obviously happy to annoy liberals for no reason other than pleasing conservatives, as when he smirked his way through a bill-signing in Brandon, Florida. But its absurd to take DeSantis to illustrate that Republicans now think smiting the left matters more than achieving policy objectives, as one journalist put it. Even the culture-war legislation DeSantis has backed, regulating classroom instruction on sexual orientation and on race relations, has been about more than upsetting his political opponents. Agree or disagree with those bills, they are a response to concerns some parents have about contemporary educational trends. And his administration has an extensive policy record beyond those issues. He has cut taxes, expanded school choice, spent money on protecting the Everglades and legalized medical marijuana. It's not a record that appeals to most Democrats, of course, and they are entitled to make their case against both the substance and the style of DeSantis. They may find, though, that the Trump-clone attack falls flat and that not every voter who disliked Trump disliked him for the same reasons they do. Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a senior editor at National Review and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The News in Brief Prepared by the Messenger Staff Prosecutor Law Enforcement agencies to study Saakashvili's Call for Overthrowing the Government, Prosecutor Says According to Jarji Tsiklauri, the prosecutor in the case of former President Mikheil Saakashvili, law enforcement authorities will investigate Saakashvili's demand for the overthrow of the government. Tsiklauri notes that following that, they would decide on the legal reaction to the former President's comments. Saakashvili is accused of organizing violence, including during the November 7 protests. The defendant's lawyers say he is innocent, though he himself still makes similar statements calling for violence, Tsiklauri said. If we do not overthrow this Government, this generation will forever remain disgraceful in the history of Ukraine if we do not mobilize the people and take to the streets, Georgia will be doomed, former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said at the trial on the November 7 case today. Irakli Kobakhidze: The longer Mikheil Saakashvili is in prison, the less he will harm both Georgia and Ukraine According to Irakli Kobakhidze, former President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili is serving his sentence and the issue of his release or departure for Ukraine will not be considered. Saakashvili should not be released, he should not go to Ukraine, taking into account the interests of our Ukrainian people. You remember how he aggravated the situation in Georgia, especially in 2008. He can make the already difficult situation even worse for the Ukrainian people. Therefore, in the first place, taking into account the interests of the Ukrainian people, of course, it is not expedient to release him. He has to serve his sentence. He must stop harming his own country, Georgia, and harming the country of his citizenship, Ukraine. The longer he is in prison, the less he will harm both Georgia and Ukraine. It is better for both countries, Kobakhidze said. Indian operator Bharti Airtel has bought from the UKs Vodafone Group a 4.7% stake in Indus Towers, paying Rs2,388 crore for the stake thats about US$315.8 million. Airtel now owns 46.43% of Indus. Vodafones stake is now 21%, though it reportedly plans to sell this too. The deal obliges Vodafone to invest the proceeds of the sale into Indian operator Vodafone Idea (aka Vi), which will use the money to clear its payment arrears to the tower company. Of course, Vodafone Idea has a number of financial problems at the moment, hence this deal and others aimed at infusing capital into the loss-making company. In fact last week saw shareholders of Vodafone Idea approve a proposal to raise Rs14,500 crore in total (a staggering $1.9 billion). Indias Economic Times news service says that Vodafone Idea had placed a special resolution of issue of equity shares worth Rs4,500 crore (about US$595.2 million) to the group firms of promoters the Vodafone Group and the Aditya Birla Group for transaction at an extraordinary general meeting. The Vodafone Groups investment of Rs3,375 crore (US$446.35 million), will be paid from the funds raised by the partial sale of its stake in Indus Towers (presumably including an earlier sale of 2.4% in Indus via a block deal to undisclosed investors). As part of its fundraising Vodafone Idea had also sought, and gained, shareholders' approval to raise Rs10,000 crore (about US$1.322 billion) through sale of equity and/or through a mix of depository receipts and foreign currency convertible bonds. Meanwhile Bharti Airtel is also planning a fundraising spree. According to the Economic Times, it has told analysts it may sell stakes in mobile financial services business Airtel Payments Bank, data centre provider Nxtra, Bangladesh operator Robi Axiata and Indus Towers. The company noted that it is committed to increasing its stake in Indus at the moment but said that it planned to look at opportunities for monetising this vital asset at an appropriate time. The merger between Thailand-based operator Dtac and True has hit a regulatory roadblock over fears of competition being stifled despite initial approval. A supervisory authority for regulator National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC), known as NBTC super board has urged NBTC acting Chairman Sukit Khamasundara to prevent the merger from going through, citing competition concerns. "The purpose of the document submission is to raise public awareness and involvement in fact-finding, analysis and criticism, which will lead to an appropriate conclusion," said the board. Concerns stem from the Thai telecoms market being one with already only a few players, reported Nikkei Asia. The merger will leave two main operators in Thailand. AIS is currently the market leader with a 46% share, whereas Telenor-owned Dtac holds 22% and True brings 32% to the table if they were to merge. The merger also saw criticism from the Thailand Consumer Council which warned users might face higher bills, citing a study from the UK which showed a potential 20% rise in tariffs if the Western European country was to see its MNOs cut from four to three. On True and Dtacs side, only shareholder approval remained to progress the merger after both boards cleared in February. The high-speed and low-latency PEACE cable system, designed to connect Asia, Africa and Europe, is back in the news. PCCW Global, a leading telecommunications service provider and global submarine cable operator PEACE Cable International Network Co, Ltd, have jointly announced the completion of the PEACE cable systems Mediterranean segment, known as PEACE-MED. PEACE-MED is a 3200km undersea cable that connects Egypt to France, with additional landing points in Cyprus and Malta. The landing in Marseille, France, provided by Orange, helped form PEACE-MEDs open cable system which is now fully operational and ready to provide customers with a wide range of telecommunications and data services. PEACEs main trunk lands in France, Egypt, Kenya and Pakistan. The system is also planning to extend the cable to Singapore and South Africa. PEACE-MEDs cable landings in Cyprus, Abu Talat, Marseille and Malta were all completed during the course of 2021, while stub branching units have been reserved for direct landing points to other countries, thereby providing additional access options and opportunities for the entire Mediterranean region. Meanwhile Infinera, a global supplier of open optical networking solutions, and PCCW Global have announced the completion of a significant deployment on the PEACE cable system between Marseille, Cyprus and Abu Talat. By leveraging Infineras ICE technology on the GX Series Compact Modular Platform, PCCW Global is able to reach individual wavelength speeds of 650Gbs, resulting in more capacity with less hardware and providing up to 25 terabits per fibre pair. The combination will enable network operators to efficiently provide high-capacity services between the Middle East and the Mediterranean region. PCCW Globals capacity upgrade on the PEACE cable system is one of a series of upgrades planned for this year. Your browser does not support the video tag. WASHINGTON Federal immigration authorities announced Friday that theyll stop housing detainees at an Alabama jail with a history of problems and will limit the use of three other detention centers. The decisions reinforce a commitment by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to review detention facilities to determine whether they are humane, meet applicable standards and are a responsible use of funding, according to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement news release. ICE says it will stop using the Etowah County Jail in Gadsden, Alabama, as soon as possible, taking into account a 30-day notification requirement. The jail has a long history of serious deficiencies, the release says. Advocates who have long sought the end of ICE detention at the Etowah County Jail hailed the news as a victory, but they urged federal authorities not to just transfer people from one facility to another. The Etowah County Detention Center exemplifies everything that is wrong with immigration detention and why the detention system must be abolished, Detention Watch Network advocacy director Setareh Ghandehari said in a news release. The administration can and must do more to completely phase out the use of immigration detention by continuing to terminate contracts, shut down additional facilities and free people from detention. Etowah County Sheriff Jonathon Horton told The Gadsden Times that the decision to quit sending detainees to the jail was just a bombshell, and that he was working with members of Alabamas congressional delegation to get more information. Just this week the center was notified that 135 detainees would be coming next week, he said. No one has canceled that, said Horton. ICE said it will also limit its use of the Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven, Florida; the Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana; and the Alamance County Detention Facility in Graham, North Carolina. ICE has already reduced its use of the Glades County facility in recent years, in part because of persistent and ongoing concerns related to the provision of detainee medical care. But it was still paying for a minimum number of beds and has now decided not to extend that guaranteed minimum bed provision. Future use of the facility will depend on conditions meeting detention standards, the agency said. Rebecca Talbot with Immigrant Action Alliance credited organizing and resistance for ICEs policy change regarding the Glades County facility. Emptying Glades, ending the guaranteed minimum, and requiring Glades to fully address conditions that do not meet detention standards are all huge steps in the right direction, Rebecca Talbot with Immigrant Action Alliance said in a news release. Now its time for the Biden administration to commit to closing Glades fully and forever, and to release those who have been transferred from Glades to other facilities. ICE had been using the Alamance County facility for long-term detention, but says it will now only use it for stays of under 72 hours if applicable standards are met. The agency said it is concerned about conditions, including a lack of outdoor recreation. ICE plans to reduce the guaranteed minimum at Winn Correctional Center to match the facilitys staffing constraints, the release says. ICE will also assign a custody resource coordinator to provide an assessment and will monitor conditions and take actions as needed, the release says. ICE Acting Director Tae Johnson has told staff to begin preparations, including relocating ICE staff and detainees as needed. The agency said it plans to continue to review other detention centers and adjust its use as appropriate. April 17 and April 24 will be bittersweet Sundays at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church. Easter Sunday on April 17 is one of the most joyful days on the Christian calendar because it celebrates the resurrection story of Jesus Christ. But it is also the day that New Hope Pastor L.V. Farmer will preach his last sermon in that leadership role. Its one hes held there 43 years, joined in the commitment by his life partner, wife Thelma Farmer. The Easter service begins at 10 a.m., taking the place of regular Sunday school. The church is located at 3996 Wintergreen Road, Greenwood. In a press release, one member of the congregation described in one word the feeling she and so many others there share as that day approaches, knowing that Farmers resurrection-themed sermon will be his last as their pastor. Downhearted was the word she used. After Easter, the congregation will have one more day to show the Farmers their appreciation in a big way. It takes the form of an anniversary and retirement celebration on Sunday, April 24, beginning at 11 a.m. Guest speakers will include two ministers, Second West Baptist Association Moderator Riley Henderson and Progressive Baptist Association of Northwest Florida Moderator Delwynn Williams of Panama City. Colors for the occasion are black and white, and the theme is: Working Together In the Name Of Jesus, inspired by biblical scripture in Acts 16:23-31. Anyone interested in sharing a retirement message for the Farmers in the days anniversary program can do so by typing the message and submitting it to Idwella Butler-Thin or by mailing it to P.O. Box 468, Greenwood, FL, 32443. To be included, they must be received by April 3. The Houston County Commission proclaimed April as Community College Month during Mondays commission meeting. The commission presented Wallace Community College-Dothan with a proclamation, which was accepted by Dr. Ashli Wilkins, the colleges vice president and dean of Institutional Services and Community Development. Over 40% of Wallace students enrolled in the Fall 2021 semester were from Houston County, so we are very grateful to the Houston County Commission for this recognition, Wilkins said. Like all community colleges throughout our great nation, Wallace is here to change the lives of those we serve. We embrace this mission, and we look forward to continuing to work with Houston County as we educate, train, re-train, and improve the lives of the citizens not only in Houston County, but all over the Wiregrass region. Community College Month acknowledges the importance of community colleges and their impact on the communities they serve. Community colleges attract students from all backgrounds and educational levels with their mission of providing open access and affordability to those seeking a post-secondary degree or credential. Community colleges also provide students with the ability to increase their earning potential and assist the community in economic development and industry recruitment by producing a highly skilled and highly trained workforce. According to the American Association of Community Colleges, over 10 million students are enrolled at community colleges across the country, and 39% of all undergraduates in the United States are enrolled at community colleges. Attending a public, in-state, four-year college costs on average $10,740 a year, compared to $3,800 a year at a community college, and the median national earning of full-time employees with an associate degree is $48,776. Wallace Community College enrolls approximately 5,000 credit students in its academic, health science and career technical education programs each year, and serves approximately 3,000 students annually through its adult education, workforce training programs, and continuing education programs. For more information about programs and services offered by WCCD, visit wallace.edu. Dothan firefighters worked to extinguish two downtown fires on Oates Street Monday afternoon. The fires, two blocks apart, started within minutes of each other around 4 p.m. The first fire was located in an abandoned building on South Oates Street near the hump that was well involved by the time firefighters arrived on the scene, Dothan Fire Chief Larry Williams said. Within 13 minutes of arriving at the first fire, Dothan firefighters received a call of another fire that started on the second floor of the now-abandoned Town Terrace Inn on North Oates Street next to the Dothan Eagle. While traffic on Oates Street was blocked and smoke from the South Oates fire continued to billow in thick clouds, firefighters were able to quickly contain the second fire at the motel. Both buildings were unoccupied, according to Williams. Because of the aging structure of the South Oates abandoned building, Williams said firefighters took a defensive position when battling the flames that took longer to get it under control. We didnt want to risk anybody in there knowing we had that much fire, Williams said. The two fires were under control before 5 p.m. One building had power; the other did not, Williams said, adding that investigators will be working to determine the cause of both fires. Dothan Police Chief Will Benny and Criminal Investigations Division Commander Ronald Hall did not immediately respond to calls for comment. Panama City Beach officials said Tuesday that theyre determined to see the maximum possible charges brought against 161 people arrested over the weekend, including 78 people from Alabama. Its not over with this group of folks, I can promise you that, said Mayor Mark Sheldon. Our system is taking it very serious, said Bay County Sheriff Tommy Ford. The judge that had the first appearances after this was laying down some pretty good bonds. And our state attorney is going to take a hard-line approach. They may be visitors to Panama City Beach much longer than they thought they would be, Ford added. Sheldon and Ford were among the officials who took part in a press conference on Monday after a weekend of mayhem that included the vandalization of a Walmart and at least one shooting, with an Alabama man shot in the foot. On Tuesday, speaking in separate interviews, they provided additional detail. Officials have said they began bracing for possible trouble weeks earlier but had no way of knowing just what they were in for. We saw an influx this weekend obviously of people who were just bad individuals, bottom line, Sheldon said. These are criminals who came to our town to be lawless and create havoc. That was their goal, thats what they wanted to do this weekend. Half of the arrests we made this weekend were people from Alabama, he said. Specifically, really, we saw a lot of folks from Montgomery and Birmingham who came down to just create trouble. Part of the problem, Ford said, appeared to originate along the 231 corridor, the Montgomery-Troy-Dothan area, and kind of gained traction there...Theres some promoters that organized an event at a club in the city of Panama City, that seemed to be a draw. They created their own event, Sheldon said of the group. It was not a city-advertised event, this was not an event that was approved by the city. Ford said that its easy to pick up on the fact that people are planning to converge on a specific weekend. Its hard to predict how many people will show up, or whether theyll be inclined to lawlessness. Rather than a coherent event with central planning and official leaders, such gatherings have more of a grassroots feel. Promoters touting individual events such as club shows or pool parties could be just trying to make a dollar, the sheriff said, and not necessarily breaking laws. But others might have criminal ties and there can be a snowball effect. This wasnt a college crowd coming in via long road trips, Sheldon said. This was a regional crowd. Some lived close enough that they might not even book rooms, he said. We felt it was going to be a fairly active situation, but certainly did not expect to arrest 160 people and get 75 guns off the street, Ford said. Ford said hes been working spring break for 30 years and has seen it in all its forms, all its glory. This was something different, he said. As far as the level of guns and violence, it was very bad, very dangerous, he said. We did not expect to see that many guns. And it was not somebody with a .38 Special in their waistband, it was AR pistols in a backpack, things like that. These are not spring breakers, Sheldon said. So I dont want to equate this to spring break, because weve had a great spring break season over here this year. Its been phenomenal, Sheldon added. These folks are criminals with guns, he said. Thats a very different mindset from somebody who came to party a few years ago and drink on the beach. This isnt a beer-drinking event by any means. This is people who came here just to create a problem. While Sheldon couldnt provide specifics on legal proceedings against those arrested, he said authorities were going to make examples of them. Theres a lot of folks still being held, and we have worked with our state attorney, he said. We are absolutely going for the maximum allowable offenses, he said. He said a laundry list of charges included gun and drug charges as well as lewd behavior. Ford said he had seen bonds set as high as $200,000 on some of the weapons charges, and that investigators would be working to establish if any of the confiscated weapons were stolen. He said he expected some of those arrested to face federal charges. Ford said he wasnt ready to identify specific people as ringleaders. But there were some arrests of people we had identified as being involved in criminal activity and part of the hype to come down here, he said. Investigators also were combing through videos and other evidence to identify additional suspects, Sheldon said. They think theyre done, theyre going to get a knock at their door one of these days, he said. This was an extremely dangerous situation, he said. People I saw had no regard for life or property or other people in general. That many guns, the type of behavior that we witnessed was pretty rough. Its a fair deduction to conclude that Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has aspirations well beyond his role as Alabamas attorney general perhaps as a Washington office-holder or a Republican Party official on a national level as the activity his office publicizes almost exclusively touts his involvement signing the state on to various efforts of resistance to policies and mandates coming from a Democratic White House. While many most, perhaps Alabama voters embrace the same political philosophy as Marshall, its likely that theyd prefer their states attorney general to spend his time their time, actually directing his attention to challenges within his purview in the state of Alabama. Last week, Marshall travelled to Washington to testify before the U.S. Senate in opposition to Judge Ketanji Brown Jacksons nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by the Biden White House. Questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee soon digressed into Marshalls role as a member of the executive committee of the Republican Attorneys General Association, a branch of which promoted the pro-Trump rally that preceded the violence at the U.S. Capitol. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), asked Marshall, Is Joseph R. Biden of Delaware the duly elected and lawfully serving president of the United States of America? Marshall embarrassed himself and the people of Alabama with stubborn refusal, time and again, to acknowledge Joe Biden as duly elected and lawfully serving. Marshall is entitled to his opinion. However, a states top elected official is expected to deal in truth, facts, and evidence, particularly in testimony before a committee of the U.S. Senate. And in the months since the November 2020 election, countless investigations, probes, recounts, and lawsuits have failed to produce evidence of election fraud particularly in Alabama, as the states attorney general should well know. Marshalls passive-aggressive volley with a U.S. Senator on the national stage was school-yard theatre, and well beneath the dignity of a constitutional officer of the State of Alabama. A Qatar Airways plane takes off at Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar, January 11, 2021. Photo by Reuters/Ibraheem Al Omari Some foreign airlines have increased the frequency of regular flights connecting to Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang after Vietnam reopened to international tourism. From March 27, Singapore Airlines doubled its frequency on the route between Singapore and HCMC to 21 weekly flights. Earlier, the carrier operated 11 weekly flights between the two cities. In addition, it also resumed air services between Singapore and Da Nang, a popular tourist hub in central Vietnam, with seven flights a week. The first flight landed at Da Nang International Airport on Sunday. Doha-based carrier Qatar Airways announced it will increase the frequency on its route connecting Doha and HCMC to five flights a week from April 12. It currently operates three weekly flights from Doha to HCMC and Hanoi each. Vietnam gave foreign tourists quarantine-free entry from March 15 after nearly two years of border closures. Foreigners entering Vietnam only need to furnish a negative Covid-19 test certificate. Inbound Vietnam Travels strategic products are luxury package tours in Vietnam and express entry visa services to welcome international tourists. Viet International Travel and Trade Development Co., Ltd, with the brand name ViTravel and Inbound Vietnam Travel, was established in 2012, operating in the field of tourism services in Vietnam. Despite the Covid-19 outbreak two years ago, ViTravel management continued to introduce new tourism products and initiatives to remain competitive in the industry. ViTravel offers services like domestic, inbound, and outbound tours; tourism combined with team building, M.I.C.E, events, seminars, tours by theme, accommodation reservations; visa procedures to enter Vietnam; air, land, and water transport ticketing services, etc. International visitors enjoy ViTravels tour. Photo by ViTravel "The company is innovative with each travel product and at the forefront of the trend to meet tourists needs and provide satisfaction to visitors with the best services," said ViTravels general director. On October 10 this year, the 10th anniversary of its founding, ViTravel will unveil a new brand of tourism products for international tourists coming to Vietnam, "Inbound Vietnam Travel". The goals of the new brand are to deliver a message about safe, friendly, beautiful, and hospitable Vietnam. Visitors will have new experiences and enjoy every trip to Vietnam. Inbound Vietnam Travel has built a high-class package tourism product for international tourists with two strategic products including customized package tours and open tours. With theLuxury package tours in Vietnam, the company provides 5-star and above standards of transportation, accommodation, food, beverages, etc associated with famous tourist attractions such as Ha Long, Da Nang, Hoi An, Nha Trang, Quy Nhon, Phu Quoc, etc. They also focus on disease control, prevention, and treatment. Entry visas are processed quickly to ensure the most favorable conditions for visitors to enter and stay in Vietnam, according to the company representative. Open tourism products start at three to four star standards, which are suitable for young travelers. They are offered an entry package, reservation service, and transportation to suit their requirements. ViTravels office space. Photo by ViTravel According to the company representative, Inbound Vietnam Travel has carefully prepared both quality and quantity services to welcome visitors back to Vietnam. It has a team of skilled, dynamic, and creative employees as well as nationwide and worldwide networks of service-provider partners. EDA Invests in Coal Communities: Assistant Secretary Castillo Visits Ohio and West Virginia to Spotlight Projects throughout Appalachian Region Assistant Secretary Alejandra Y. Castillo participates in a roundtable discussion led by Federal Co-Chair Gayle Manchin in Youngstown, Ohio, on March 17, 2022. Alejandra Y. Castillo, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development, visited Youngstown, Ohio, and Charleston, West Virginia, last week. She toured EDA grant projects and participated in two events led by the Biden Administrations Interagency Working Group (IWG) on Coal and Power Plant Communities & Economic Revitalization. The visit started March 17 at the Youngstown Business Incubator in Youngstown, Ohio, where the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) announced nearly $21 million in grants to 21 projects through its POWER (Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization) initiative. POWER targets federal resources to communities affected by job losses in coal mining, coal power plant operations, and coal-related supply chain industries. Proudly, some of the new POWER grantees announced today are also Economic Development Administration grantees and/or EDA-designated Economic Development Districts, Castillo said during the announcement. You are all shining examples of the importance of broad collaboration and coordinated planning to advancing any impactful economic development project. Assistant Secretary Castillo speaks at Youngstown Business Incubator in Youngstown, Ohio, during March 17, 2022, visit. After the announcement, Castillo participated in a roundtable discussion with several individuals, including Gayle Manchin, ARCs federal co-chair, and Briggs White, IWGs deputy director. After the roundtable, Castillo toured the Youngstown Business Incubator and America Makes, the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute. Castillo then joined a tour of the region led by Eastgate Regional Council of Governments, one of EDAs Economic Development Districts (EDDs), with stops at Youngstown State Universitys Excellence Training Center, Crab Creek Corridor in Youngstown, BRITE Energy Innovators in Warren and the Golden Triangle industrial area. Assistant Secretary Castillo heard from community leaders, economic development stakeholders, and business innovators about the critical needs of their communities, as well as the transformational opportunities that will result from the Biden-Harris Administration's investments and commitments to the region. On March 18, Assistant Secretary Castillo moved to West Virginia and joined other federal leaders, including U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, U.S. Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, and U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, for an event at the Robert C. Byrd Institute, an EDA University Center. During a press conference, agencies announced multiple million-dollar investments in West Virginia to spur economic growth, including an announcement from the private sector. Assistant Secretary Castillo with members of the Youngstown State Universitys Excellence Training Center tour group. During a second IWG roundtable, Castillo announced a $2.4 million EDA grant to Pikeville Medical Center in Pikeville, Kentucky, for the provision of new equipment that will be used to meet patient demand and critical healthcare needs one of many projects highlighting the Administrations coordinated commitment to U.S. coal communities. EDA is proud to support community-led economic development strategies like this to boost coronavirus recovery and response efforts and to diversify, strengthen and grow the Appalachian regional economy, Castillo said. The Pikeville grant was funded out of the American Rescue Plans $300 million Coal Communities Commitment that is focused on helping communities affected by the decline in the coal industry recover from the pandemic and build back better by helping them develop or scale new industry sectors to create new good-paying jobs and develop and implement workforce development programs. Additional American Rescue Plan investments to coal communities will be announced in the coming months continuing EDAs long history of supporting Appalachian communities. EDA has also supported these communities through funding from the Assistance to Coal Communities program (ACC) and by working with a broad spectrum of regional partners and leaders to catalyze locally-driven economic development strategies. Assistant Secretary Castillo visits Bullock Distillery, which received a CARES Act-funded Revolving Loan Fund grant from an EDA grantee. Castillos final stop in West Virginia was to the Bullock Distillery on the West Side of Charleston. The distillery received a CARES Act-funded Revolving Loan Fund grant from West Virginia Economic Development Administration, an EDA grantee. The Bullock Distillery, combined with the Staats Building historical renovation project on the same block, are revitalizing a low-income minority area in an area that has been hit hard by the pandemic and the decline in the coal industry. In addition to the Coal Communities Commitment, EDA has extended its support beyond funding. EDA has hired Courtney Haynes as its new coal communities coordinator to work closely with EDA partner agencies, such as ARC, and external stakeholders to ensure that the Coal Commitment is implemented equitably and effectively to further develop EDAs coal communities portfolio. EDA has also started a Coal Communities e-newsletter. Click here to read the first e-newsletter. For more about EDAs Coal Communities Commitment, visit: https://eda.gov/arpa/coal-communities/. The code has been copied to your clipboard. width px height px The URL has been copied to your clipboard The code has been copied to your clipboard. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said that stopping the illegal flow of weapons from Iran to the Houthis is a top U.S. priority. The Lebanon-based, Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah has its tentacles of corruption and crime in nations around the world. On March 4, the United States sanctioned two Hezbollah financiers operating in Guinea: Ali Saade and Ibrahim Taher. State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement, This action will help disrupt Hezbollahs network in West Arica, which relies on bribery to circumvent the rule of law. In announcing the sanctions, the U.S. Treasury Department called the two Lebanese businessmen key operatives. Saade initiates money transfers from Guinea to Hezbollah, moving funds through Hezbollah representatives in Guinea and Lebanon. He is a close associate of another prominent Hezbollah supporter, Kassem Tajideen, who was designated by the United States in 2009 as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. According to the Treasury Department, Tajideen contributed tens of millions of dollars to Hezbollah and ran cover companies for Hezbollah with his brothers. Saade helped provide Tajideen with access to corrupt members of the former Guinean administration at the highest levels and the rest of the Guinean government. Ibrahim Taher is one of the most prominent financial supporters of Hezbollah in Guinea. According to the Treasury Department, he and an associate sent U.S. dollars collected at one of their commercial facilities to Conakry Airport and bribed Guinean customs officials to allow their currency to pass in luggage. Both Saade and Taher were designated under Executive Order 13224, as amended, for having sponsored or provided financial, material or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, Hezbollah. The designations mean that all property and interests in property of these two individuals that are in the United States or in the possession or control of U.S. persons must be blocked and reported to Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC. In addition, unless authorized by a general or specific license from OFAC, or otherwise exempt, transactions by U.S. persons that involve the property of the designated individuals are prohibited. The illicit financial activity of those designated [on March 4] not only supports the terrorist groups malign activities but also undermines the commercial sector and rule of law where legitimate financial activity takes place, said State Department Spokesperson Price. The United States will continue to expose individuals . . . who support Hezbollahs destabilizing activities. ELKO Members of the Northeastern Nevada Regional Hospital Auxiliary are a fun bunch with hearts of gold. They are currently seeking new members and wanted to share a few things they are doing with the community. Some of the things we do are Cocoa and Cookies with Santa, blood drive at the Health Fair, Christmas decorating the lobby and the Festival of Trees, National Night Out, first baby of the year basket and bonnets, and scholarships, said NNRH Auxiliary President Phyllis Anderson. We do the Tree of Life, we help out with the drive-through flu shots, we do Christmas wrapping for the Care Fund, publicity and assisting administration with odd jobs. We also have a snack cart. This is the first day we have had the snack cart because of Covid, member Diane Longyear said earlier this month. We go to all the therapy, we go to all the people waiting to be checked in, we go to x-ray, we go to lab, we go to outpatient surgery and they tell us which rooms are ready to have something to eat or drink. Right now we are not going to patient rooms. But, we can go to OB and then on the third floor is our infusion. They are ready. Sometimes they are in there for hours. Sometimes they want to talk. The snacks are free and provide a real pick-me-up to people who may have been waiting for care or are there to help someone in need. Besides helping out at the hospital, members help Harbor House, Underdog Ministry and Backpacks for Kids filled with toys and other things for children who are in the hospital. In order to do our charitable work the gift shop provides some of that money, said Gladys Ahlin. We now have a cancer corner. We were told there was no place in town where people can buy chemo hats. We have those, compression sleeves, padded camisoles. We do not make any money off of the cancer products. We just charge what we pay for them and if someone is in need and cant afford them, they get them anyway. The gift shop is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Longyear said. Anyone can shop at the gift shop. They have many great gift items and the profits go to good causes. We are a 501c3 and we do not have to charge sales tax, said Ahlin. In December volunteers wrap Christmas gifts, Anderson said. People can bring their gifts in and volunteers will wrap them. They have beautiful ribbons and big handmade bows. Its by donation. This donation money goes into our Care Fund. This fund buys stuffed animals for children who are in the hospital and pays for things that people might need like combs, or nail clippers. It is for children and adults who may need some help. The auxiliary has only 12 members. They would certainly enjoy a few new faces if a community member has time on their hands. There are certain hospital procedures they have to go through before they can officially be a member, Anderson said. Members can help out in a variety of ways, including helping in the gift shop and running the snack cart. Applicants must get a TB test, have current vaccinations and have a background check and drug screening. After they are accepted into the auxiliary, they go through a hospital orientation. Applicants must also be 18 years old or older. When we decorate the hospital for Christmas, we get kids from either Elko High School or Spring Creek High School, Anderson said. These kids come and everybody tells them that any volunteer work they do to be sure to put it in their resume. They are a lot of fun. They help us put the trees up and then they come and help us take them down, Longyear said. According to the members, the hospital auxiliary has been around in Elko for at least 27 years. The Tree of Life went up in 1983, Longyear said. Donations to the Tree of Life are what we can use for our scholarships. These are for anyone going into the medical field doctors, nurses, physical therapy, laboratory anything that has to do with either patient care or hospital administration. We give two a year for $1,000. There is no age limit. People can donate to the fund by visiting the gift shop. They will provide donors with an envelope and card for information. A donation of at least $15 can commemorate a death, birth, anniversary or anything special in their life. Memorials used to be put on the big Trees of Life in the hallway, but now they are full so the auxiliary has created new plaques that hang near the cowboy boot by the gift shop. There are a lot of people in this town that say, When I grow up, I want to be like you, Longyear said. She also talked about the first baby of the New Year. The auxiliary gives the parents a basket filled with baby needs and other items. The public is welcome to take a drive out to the gift shop and buy a gift that goes a long way. The gift shop is just down the corridor from the main entrance. Sage Elementary Health and Science Fair: Love 2 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. ELKO Nevadas governor should educate but not mandate public health measures in the event of another major surge in the coronavirus pandemic, according to Republican candidate Guy Nohra of Reno. Thats what he would do if elected, he told the Elko Daily Free Press following his first Elko town hall and prior to attending this years Lincoln Day Dinner. Nohra said one of the main reasons he is running for governor is his frustration with how Gov. Steve Sisolak handled the pandemic. A co-founder of Alta Partners a venture capital firm specializing in biotech innovation Nohra said most of the studies he read on the COVID-19 pandemic indicated face masks would not prevent transmission of the virus. Masks are theater; they make us feel better but they dont protect. After the initial lockdown, data started coming in about who was most vulnerable to the virus. At that point he would have conducted a cost-benefit analysis to determine the best course of action. Things would have been loosened earlier, and for the right reasons, he said. Instead, Nevada just copied California. The public should be informed about what vaccines are available and how well each works, but no one should be required to receive one, he said. Nohras main issues of concern in Nevada such as education and the economy are similar to many other candidates, but he said his approach would be different. I think we should supplement the gaming industry with, maybe, e-gaming, he said. He also recognizes the importance of mining. With a business background like mine, I am a very strong proponent of mining in our state, he said. Instead of putting a 5% tax on mining last year he would have given the industry more R&D credits so they can create more jobs, more mining, and help us as a country instead of relying on other countries for minerals. Technology would also be part of his approach to water resource issues. Israeli technology to distill water from the air could work in Nevadas high desert, he said. Nohra said he is proud of the fact that he brings no previous political experience into the race for governor. He is hoping voters will see the need to try someone with new ideas as he and 15 other Republican candidates compete in the Nevada primary on June 14. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 2 Angry 0 Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) Chancellor Melody Rose signaled she would resign her post via separation agreement Monday, a sudden exit that marks an end to months of tension between the chancellor and the Board of Regents and caps her four-year contract after just 19 months. The announcement which, if approved, would be effective April 1 came by way of a public meeting agenda posted late Monday afternoon that includes details of a possible resignation agreement to buyout roughly half of Roses remaining contract, or $610,000. The agreement also includes a non-disparagement clause that would prevent Rose and the regents from making any statements disparaging the honesty, integrity, ethics, or professional competence and reputation of one another. Regents are set to meet in Las Vegas on Friday to consider those terms. For months, Rose has been in the center of an ongoing dispute with top regents, after she alleged in a wide-reaching hostile work environment complaint last October that Board Chair Cathy McAdoo and Vice Chair Patrick Carter had discriminated against her because of her sex and sought minimize her influence within the system, part of an effort to have her fired. An investigation into that complaint completed by an outside law firm in February found insufficient evidence of gender discrimination. However, the report described increasing factionalism and behind-the-scenes tension between some regents and the chancellor, and that some of the incidents alleged by Rose in her complaint could constitute ethics violations. The investigative report made no determinative judgments about those ethical issues, however, and it is not clear if the state ethics commission is investigating issues raised in the report. Still, top business groups and the AFL-CIO longtime critics of the Board of Regents and backers of the failed Ballot Question 1 petitioned the ethics board to investigate the matter in a public statement last month. Rose was appointed by regents in June of 2020 and formally took over the role September, when she replaced outgoing Chancellor Thom Reilly after roughly three years on the job. Taking the post in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just before the winter surges of that year, Roses early tenure was defined in large part by the higher education systems pandemic response. In 2021, Rose alongside institution presidents and the internal NSHE COVID task force was frequently at the center of efforts to draft or consider mandates for COVID vaccines for students, and later an employee mandate approved by regents. That student mandate became a pressure point for NSHE last summer, amid an immediate lack of legal clarity over whether or not regents or the system could unilaterally impose a mandate as the Delta -variant loomed. Jurisdiction ultimately fell to the state Board of Health, which unanimously approved an emergency mandate in August that went into full effect in November, in essence to create a mandate for the upcoming spring semester. However, amid worsening partisan divides on vaccination mandates, state lawmakers in late December on the Legislative Commission deadlocked on a vote that would have preserved the student mandate, in effect letting the requirement expire. During her tenure, Rose also worked on creating a higher education mental health task force and spearheaded a still-ongoing process of drafting a new, long-term strategic plan for the system. In the fallout of her workplace complaint and the investigation that followed, she becomes the latest in a line of high-profile resignations and ousters at the top levels of the higher education system. That list includes former Chancellor Dan Klaich in 2016, following pressure over allegations he misled legislators during negotiations over funding formula revision in 2011 and 2012; and former UNLV President Len Jessup in 2018, who left Nevada amid rapidly worsening friction between himself, regents and then-chancellor Reilly. In the case of Klaich, regents paid out the remainder of his contract in an early retirement lump sum of $309,000. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 2 WORLD NEWS Which Russian companies has Anonymous attacked and what data has it leaked? Volunteers have joined up to repel the Russians and hacker group Anonymous, who have been largely sidelined in the last few years, have returned to put pressure on the Russian establishment. Since the end of February, the group has been carrying out what it calls 'cyber operations' against Russia. These attacks have hit businesses and functions of the Russian government. Read more \ The launching ceremony (Photo: baoquocte.vn) The trainees are from ministries, sectors, universities and media agencies of Venezuela. Vietnamese Charge d'Affaires in Venezuela Van Cong Thang said that this is the first Vietnamese course organised in Venezuela for beginners. He hoped that after the course, the trainees can communicate in Vietnamese and get better understanding of the culture, nation and people of Vietnam, making contributions to the promotion of the bilateral friendship. President of the Venezuela-Vietnam Friendship Association Carolus Wimmer thanked Vietnamese Ambassador Le Viet Duyen for giving the idea of opening a free Vietnamese course in Venezuela and directing the enrollment of learners. According to Mr. Wimmer, the course will not only help trainees learn Vietnamese but also contribute to increasing the cultural exchange and fostering the friendship between the two countries. On behalf of the learners, Fabiola Hernandez Gutierrez from Venezuelas Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that she is delighted to join the course, which is very meaningful to her and all trainees. The teaching and learning of Vietnamese language in Venezuela are expected to contribute to promoting the culture of Vietnam in the host country, while reinforcing the cooperation and friendship between people of both sides./. Ambassador Le Viet Duyen had a meeting with Grenada Minister of Agriculture, Land, Forest and Labor Peter David (Photo: baoquocte.vn) The event was co-hosted by the Vietnamese Embassy in Venezuela, concurrently in Grenada, in coordination with the Grenada Investment Development Corporation (GIDC) on the occasion Ambassador Le Viet Duyen paid a working visit to Grenada. At the seminar, GIDC Vice President Royston Cumberbatch briefed participants on investment fields that the Government of Grenada desires to promote as well as policies aimed at attracting foreign investors. The GIDC representative stated that Grenada offers optimal conditions for investors to exploit, not only in tourism, but also in other potential fields such as agriculture, telecommunications, energy and education. Foreign investors, when investing in Grenada, in addition to receiving preferential policies, also have the advantage of tax-free access to the US and EU markets. The GIDC Vice President emphasized that the seminar held within the framework of Ambassador Le Viet Duyen's working visit has opened up prospects ahead for bilateral cooperation in economy, trade and investment. He also wished that more experienced Vietnamese investors will come to Grenada to look for investment opportunities in the near future. Speaking at the seminar, Ambassador Le Viet Duyen said that after 35 years of pursuing the Doi Moi (Renewal) process, Vietnam has become the 40th largest economy in the world with a total GDP of US$ 343 billion in 2021, while per capita income is being constantly improved. The Ambassador stressed that Vietnam has a lot of experience in the agricultural sector and is currently the leading exporter of many agricultural products in the world such as rice, coffee, pepper, and cashew nuts. Grenada businesses can find suppliers of high quality food and agricultural products from the Vietnam, he added. In addition, Vietnam also has many fast-growing and highly advantageous fields such as green economy, digital economy, electrical industry, electric car production, the Vietnamese diplomat said. According to Mr. Duyen, Vietnamese businesses will be interested in learning about policies and preferential conditions given by the Government of Grenada, and expressed his belief that with the cooperation of the GIDC and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the two sides will soon have investment cooperation projects in the future. On this occasion, Ambassador Le Viet Duyen had a meeting with Grenada Minister of Agriculture, Land, Forest and Labor Peter David. During the meeting, Peter David expressed his impression with Vietnam's development, especially the long-standing and diversified agriculture, which has made an important contribution to the national development. He wishes to cooperate with Vietnam in the field of aquaculture, seafood, production of agricultural machinery to contribute to the development of the agricultural industry in Grenada. Ambassador Le Viet Duyen said that apart from the agricultural sector, Vietnam also has strengths in production experience, human resources, and techniques, especially having experience in cooperation with Cuba and Venezuela in carrying out agricultural development projects such as seed breeding, rice cultivation, and aquaculture. The two sides agreed to soon strengthen exchanges between the the two ministries of agriculture, and organize scientific seminars between the two sides to share experience in fields of shared concern towards the signing of an agreement on agricultural cooperation in the coming time./. Asian Games, scheduled for September in Hangzhou, postponed indefinitely due to surge in COVID-19 cases in country: Chinese media. Labourers go to work in the RoK (Photo: Dolab) According to the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA), currently, the total number of Vietnamese workers working in the RoK under EPS is 28,500. On February 1, 2021, Minister of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs Dao Ngoc Dung signed an extension of the Memorandum of Understanding on the EPS program with the Korean Ministry of Employment and Labor. On that basis, the two sides are actively removing obstacles to bring nearly 6,500 employees selected from 2020 to work in the RoK, and introduce 5,416 applications tested in 2019-2020 but not yet selected. Previously, the EPS program has been implemented since 2004. Up to now, it has attracted more than 110,000 laborers from our country to work in the RoK. The above information was shared by MOLISA Deputy Minister Nguyen Ba Hoan at the Conference "Meet Korea 2022" taking place in Thanh Hoa recently. The RoK is currently one of Vietnam's key overseas markets. It is forecasted that the number of Vietnamese workers in this country will continue to increase rapidly when it implements a new entry policy from April 1. According to MOLISA Deputy Minister Nguyen Ba Hoan, in recent years, Korean businesses have supported the training of Vietnamese candidates and experts to participate in the World Vocational Skills Competition, bringing back the first world skill medals. The Republic of Korea has also strengthened technical support and guaranteed conditions for Vietnam's national vocational skills assessment and certification system through the project "Strengthening the capacity of the assessment system for vocational skills certification funded by the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA). In 2021, the whole country had more than 45,000 workers going to work abroad. The Korean market attracts 1,036 Vietnamese workers, ranking third among countries and territories receiving Vietnamese workers. In 2021, Vietnam and the RoK signed a bilateral agreement on social insurance, which contributes to protecting the legitimate rights and interests of workers of the two countries, including the right and obligation to participate in social insurance; thereby, aiming to help employees avoid paying social insurance twice. At the same time, the period of social insurance payment will be mutually recognized by the two countries./. Ukraine is ready to provide state guarantees for loans issued for the 2022 sowing campaign in the total amount of UAH 20 billion, although the government understands the risks associated with issuing such loans, since due to the military aggression of the Russian Federation it is impossible to predict which territories may be occupied or mined, and on which it will be impossible to harvest this year. Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal spoke about incentives for Ukrainian business from the state in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine on Tuesday. "We understand all the risks, but at the same time we are ready to give state guarantees totaling UAH 20 billion. That is, we guarantee loans, understanding the risks of occupation, mining or the inability to harvest," the prime minister stressed. He recalled that on March 26, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine allowed the issuance of loans to agricultural producers for the purchase of the resources they need for the 2022 sowing campaign. For these purposes, state guarantees for lending for the sowing campaign have been increased to UAH 1.5 billion for one enterprise, so that both small and large businesses can use financing. Shmyhal specified that relevant data on the sowing season for the current season can be expected as early as April. "The sowing campaign started successfully, winter crops were sown 5% more than last year. Of course, spring crops will be sown less. We expect a decrease in sown areas by approximately 30%. But we will be able to fully see all the numbers only in April, because there will be nuances depending on where the front line is and how heavily the fields are mined," the prime minister explained. According to him, Ukraine has already opened the border for humanitarian cargo to ensure its own production and import into the country of everything necessary: food, medicine, fuel and essential goods, household chemicals, hygiene products. The fall in Ukraine's gross domestic product (GDP) as a result of full-scale Russian military aggression is currently estimated at 35% or more, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine. "We see that now, when hostilities are taking place, plus the first shock since the beginning of the war has not passed, according to our estimates, these are fluctuations of 35% and a little higher," he said. Shmyhal noted that hostilities are taking place in 10 regions where enterprises are located, which accounted for approximately 50% of the country's GDP. "Further on, everything will depend on how the economy and business recover, it depends on the export industries, where we are now reorganizing from sea deliveries to rail deliveries through Eastern Europe. All these things will also affect GDP," the Prime Minister of Ukraine stressed. As reported, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Kristalina Georgieva predicted on March 22 that the decline in Ukraine's GDP due to the war started by Russia could be a third of the pre-war level. Ukraine continues to carefully fulfill its debt obligations, has created a Debt Management and Redemption Fund, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal has said. "Ukraine has always carefully fulfilled its obligations. This is the image of the state. On March 1, the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine made a coupon payment in the amount of $292 million on eurobonds. The next big payment will be in September, so there is no reason to start talking about debt relief," he said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine. As the prime minister emphasized, the trust of foreign creditors is important for Ukraine. "We want to lend money, receive grants, have stable ties with our foreign partners, so we must be responsible," he explained. "We have created a Debt Management and Redemption Fund. Today Ukraine and Ukrainians are protecting not only themselves, but the entire civilized world. Therefore, we are counting on understanding the situation and filling this fund," the head of the Cabinet of Ministers said. Shmyhal said that the government is negotiating support for Ukraine with European and American partners, as well as with other countries and international organizations, as well as with the corporate sector. "As for countries, the work consists of several parts. The first is ensuring the filling of the budget. The second part is global support for macro-financial stabilization. The third is part of the future: this is the Ukraine Renewal Fund. This is a recovery plan," Shmyhal said. The Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food has called on Ukrainian farmers cultivating land in the areas of hostilities with Russian invaders to inspect their fields before carrying out agricultural work, including with the help of aerial reconnaissance or drones, for the remains of broken armored vehicles of the aggressor country of the Russian Federation, ammunition or explosive items. "The neutralization of dangerous military objects in agricultural areas is especially important for the start of a mass sowing campaign throughout Ukraine. Conduct an inspection of the lands with representatives of the territorial defense. Inform the Armed Forces of Ukraine if you find equipment and ammunition all this is subject to demining and removal," the ministry said on its website. The ministry also called on farmers to transfer military equipment abandoned by the invaders to the Ukrainian military. "Not all the equipment found can be useful in your farming. The Armed Forces of Ukraine will be better able to handle it!" the ministry said. In addition, farmers from the war zone can apply for an aerial survey of their fields using drones at https://t.me/agriculturedrones. The territory survey service from drones was initiated by the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, the the ministry said. Auchan Ukraine calls on Ukrainians to support chain employees in Ukraine and refrain from condemning them because of the decision of the parent company to continue operating in Russia. "The General Directorate and 5,500 employees of Auchan Ukraine expected a different position of the head office in France. However, now Auchan remains in Russia. We appeal to Ukrainians with a request to refrain from blaming their fellow citizens, who also suffer from the decision of the head office. Enemy we have one, and these are not Ukrainians who work at Auchan," Auchan Ukraine said in a statement. According to the chain, for 70% of the employees of the Ukrainian company, work at Auchan is the only source of income, so their dismissal as a protest will deprive over 15,000 Ukrainians of their means of subsistence. However, Ukrainian employees of the chain work daily in stores, providing food for compatriots, and collecting humanitarian aid. In addition, more than 100 employees of the chain are currently serving in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and territorial defense. The company said it continues to insist on the termination of the chain in Russia. At the same time, Auchan Ukraine does not sponsor Russian aggression. "All the funds we earned were invested in the development of the enterprise in Ukraine and the creation of new jobs. Each earned hryvnia remains here, in Ukraine, to restore the country after our victory," the company said. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, 144 children have been killed, more than 220 have been injured, the press service of the Prosecutor General's Office reports. "As a result of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation, as of the morning of March 29, 2022, some 144 children were killed, more than 220 were wounded. Children suffered the most in Kyiv region - 68, Kharkiv region - 49, Donetsk region - 54, Chernihiv region - 38, Mykolaiv region - 30, Luhansk region - 28, Zaporizhia region - 22, Zhytomyr region - 15, Sumy region - 15, Kherson region - 25 and the city of Kyiv -16. Data on dead and wounded children in the city of Mariupol are also being established," the report says. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Russia's aggressive actions in Ukraine already deserve the imposition of an embargo on Russian oil supplies by Ukraine's Western partners. According to the head of state, Ukraine cannot agree with the passive sanctions position of certain subjects against Russia. "There should not be any 'suspended' sanctions packages, they say if the Russian troops do something, then there will be some kind of response. We already went through this story last year, when we said that powerful preventive sanctions against the Russian Federation were needed in order to prevent invasion. The preventive package was not made. A full-scale war has begun," he said. He noted that "already at the present time [among European politicians] there are many hints and warnings that sanctions will be strengthened, for example, in the form of an embargo on Russian oil supplies to Europe, only if Russia uses chemical weapons." "There are simply no words. Just think about it what it all came to! Wait for chemical weapons. We are living people we must wait. Doesn't everything that the Russian military did before deserve an oil embargo? Phosphorus bombs do not deserve? A shelled chemical production or a shelled nuclear power plant do not deserve it?" Zelensky said in a video message on Monday evening. The President stressed that it is important for Ukraine that the sanctions packages of its partners be effective and serious enough, given what "the Russian Federation is already doing against Ukraine." "If the sanctions packages are weak or not working enough, if they can be circumvented, then this creates a dangerous illusion for the leadership of the Russian Federation that they can afford to continue doing what they are doing now. And the Ukrainians are paying the price for this with their lives. Thousands of lives," the president said. Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba announced a tentative program of talks between the Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Turkey on March 29, the press service of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry reports, citing Kuleba's words on the air of the national telethon on Monday evening. According to him, "the minimum program at the talks in Turkey is the solution of humanitarian problems. The maximum program is a ceasefire, the achievement of permanent agreements on this matter," the press service quotes Kuleba. He also noted that at the moment there is not a single agreement from the fundamental points of the negotiations, and that the Ukrainian side will not negotiate if the Russian side continues to set its old conditions. "We are looking forward to the conversation between the two delegations to see if the Russians come to these talks with a willingness to really agree on something, or just repeat their demands that have been voiced from the very beginning. If we see that the mood has changed and they are ready for a serious substantive discussion and balanced agreements, then things will move forward. If it is again a repetition of their propaganda cliches behind closed doors, then they will disperse just as they came together," Kuleba stressed. He also said that the issue of holding a referendum in Ukraine would not be discussed at the talks: "We ourselves will decide which referendum to hold or not to hold, this is not a subject of negotiations." Kuleba stressed that the Ukrainian delegation is not going to make concessions in the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine. "The President of Ukraine gave very clear instructions to our delegation. We do not trade in people, lands and sovereignty. Our position is reinforced concrete. It is backed up by international law, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, international sanctions applied against Russia, weapons that were and are being transferred to Ukraine for defense against aggressor," the minister said. Health of citizens out of threat after another missile attack on oil depot in Rivne region - head of Regional Military Administration The chemical and radiation background after another missile attack on an oil depot in Rivne region is normal, nothing threatens the health of citizens, head of the regional military administration Vitaliy Koval said. "An enemy missile hit the oil depot. Some 52 rescuers and 16 units of equipment are working at the scene of the event, two fire trucks with water are additionally used. The chemical and radiation background is normal... Nothing threatens the health of citizens," he said in his video message. As reported, on Saturday, the aggressor's rocket hit the oil depot in the city of Dubno, Rivne region. On Monday evening, the Russian invaders again launched a missile attack on an oil depot in Rivne region. Erdogan hopes to arrange meeting between presidents of Russia, Ukraine after Ukrainian-Russian talks in Istanbul Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking before the start of talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, expressed hope that they would facilitate a personal meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents. "The progress made in these talks will allow the leaders of Russia and Ukraine to negotiate in person," Erdogan was quoted as saying by Daily Sabah. He noted that Turkey is also ready to host such talks between the two leaders on its territory. Erdogan indicated that Turkey is "deeply concerned" about the situation around Ukraine and calls for a ceasefire. "The negotiation process between Russia and Ukraine has raised hopes for peace. Ensuring a ceasefire as soon as possible would be beneficial to all parties," the Turkish president said. "We hope that the meetings [in Istanbul] will benefit both sides and the region," he said. "I think it is possible to come to an agreement that will suit both sides and the world community," he stressed. Erdogan noted that a "permanent, fair, practical solution is required." Erdogan also stressed that Turkey is ready to perform mediation functions for as long as necessary. "We are ready to help the peace process as much as you need," he said, addressing the Russian and Ukrainian delegations. Negotiations between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations began in Istanbul on Tuesday morning, they are taking place in the Dolmabahce Palace. As the President's Office told Interfax-Ukraine, the Ukrainian delegation included leader of the Servant of the People faction in the parliament David Arakhamia, Minister of Defense of Ukraine Oleksiy Reznikov, MPs Andriy Kostin and Rustem Umerov, adviser to the head of the President's Office Mykhailo Podoliak, deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Mykola Tochytsky, and Deputy Head of the President's Office Kyrylo Tymoshenko. British Attorney General, Member of the Royal Council Suella Braverman has appointed Sir Howard Morrison QC as Independent Counsel to Ukraine's Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova. "Sir Howard will provide independent and expert legal advice to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General in relation to the investigation and prosecution of war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine. Sir Howard's work will start immediately," the British government reported on its website on Monday. Sir Howard served as a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia and at the International Criminal Court for over twelve years. In this time Sir Howard served as a judge in a number of trials involving the most serious crimes of international concern, such as the case of Radovan Karadzic. "The appointment is part of the Attorney General's commitment to supporting Ukraine's journey to justice against Russia. Earlier this month, the Attorney signed a joint statement of support with Ukraine's Prosecutor General which reiterated the UK's commitment to helping with the gathering of evidence of crimes which could include crimes against humanity and war crimes. The Attorney and Prosecutor General are in regular contact and hope to meet in person next month," the press release said. The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has considers it unacceptable for Russia to restrict the circulation of the hryvnia and replace it with rubles in territories that are temporarily not controlled by the authorities or are under the threat of capture, in particular, in Zaporizhia and Kherson regions. According to the press service of the NBU on Tuesday, information about such actions comes from banks and the media. The NBU stressed that the hryvnia is the only currency of Ukraine, and the issue and circulation of other currencies on the territory of Ukraine is prohibited. The regulator pointed out that such actions are impossible without the support of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation and urged it to immediately stop the introduction of rubles into circulation in these territories. In addition, restrictions on the circulation of cash and non-cash hryvnia on the territory of Ukraine violate international law. The NBU also appealed to the Office of the General Prosecutor to take these actions into account when preparing claims to international courts. At the end of the day on March 28, a Russian fighter fired two X-type missiles from the territory of Belarus, which were moving in the direction of Lviv, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine reports. "The servicemen of the radio engineering troops detected and destroyed the targets by anti-aircraft missile forces at a distance of about 30 kilometers from the regional center," the message on the telegram channel says. In addition, anti-aircraft troops units destroyed two UAVs of the operational-tactical level. Meeting of heads of delegations of Ukraine and Russia being held in Istanbul A meeting of the heads of delegations is taking place in Istanbul as part of the Ukrainian-Russian negotiations. "Round of heads of delegations. David Arakhamia and Vladimir Medinsky. On the fundamental provisions of the negotiation process. Delegations are working in parallel on the entire spectrum of contentious issues," Mykhailo Podoliak, the adviser to the head of the President's Office of Ukraine, wrote on Twitter. It was previously planned that the negotiations would last until March 30. MPs propose to ban the activities of religious organizations and associations that are part of the structure of a religious organization located in the aggressor state of the Russian Federation. The corresponding draft law No. 7213 on amendments to the law of Ukraine On freedom of conscience and religious organizations, was registered in the Verkhovna Rada, the website of the parliament reports. The authors of the bill propose to supplement Article 3 of the Law On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations, with a paragraph that prohibits the activities of religious organizations (associations), which directly or as components of another religious organization are part of the structure (are parts) of a religious organization, the leading center (management) of which is located outside the borders Ukraine, in a state that carried out military aggression against Ukraine and temporarily occupied part of its territory. The bill assumes that the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, within a month after the entry into force of the law, must take necessary actions to dispose of real estate and movable things that are owned, rented, or on other grounds are at the disposal of organizations (associations) whose activities are prohibited in accordance with this law. Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Mariano Grossi is in Ukraine for talks with high-ranking officials on the agency's urgent technical assistance in ensuring the safety of nuclear facilities and preventing the risk of accidents. The IAEA announced this on its website on Tuesday. "The military conflict is putting Ukraine's nuclear power plants and other facilities with radioactive material in unprecedented danger. We must take urgent action to make sure that they can continue to operate safely and securely and reduce the risk of a nuclear accident that could have a severe health and environmental impact both in Ukraine and beyond," Director General Grossi said. According the IAEA website, the aim of the Director General's visit is to initiate prompt safety and security support to Ukraine's nuclear facilities. It will include sending IAEA experts to prioritized facilities and the shipment of vital safety and security supplies including monitoring and emergency equipment. During the visit, which will last several days this week, Grossi will visit one of Ukraine's nuclear power plants. "Ukraine has requested our assistance for safety and security. We will now start delivering it. Ukraine has one of Europe's largest nuclear power programmes. The IAEA's presence, where needed to ensure safety and security, is of paramount importance. We are ready to provide the necessary support now," he said. "The IAEA has drawn up concrete and detailed plans for safety and security assistance to Ukraine's nuclear sites, which include fifteen nuclear power reactors at four plants as well as the Chornobyl NPP, where radioactive waste management facilities are located following the 1986 accident," the report said. "In recent weeks, several of the seven indispensable pillars for ensuring safety and security including the physical integrity of facilities, the ability of operational staff to work without undue pressure, and the access to off-site power have been seriously compromised," the IAEA said. "There have already been several close calls. We can't afford to lose any more time. This conflict is already causing unimaginable human suffering and destruction. The IAEA's expertise and capabilities are needed to prevent it from also leading to a nuclear accident," he said. More than 125 trucks with aid, ambulances, fire trucks from Romania, other EU states arrive in Ukraine - Iohannis More than 125 trucks with aid, ambulances and fire trucks from Romania and other EU member states have arrived in Ukraine through the humanitarian hub in Suceava, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, who had a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said. "I discussed with President Zelensky the critical situation in Ukraine. Romania will continue to take good care of every Ukrainian citizen arriving in Romania. Over 125 trucks with aid, ambulances and fire engines from Romania and other EU member states have arrived in Ukraine through the humanitarian hub in Suceava," Iohannis tweeted on Tuesday. People who make decisions in Russia think they will get away with it Zelensky Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is confident that the people who make decisions in Russia think they can get away with it. "People who make decisions in Russia hope they can get away with it. Sanctions? They think they can get around. An embargo on Russian oil? They see that it does not go beyond words. Nothing but talking about it. And concern. Tribunal? They know it takes years to bring specific perpetrators to justice," he said in a video address to the Danish Parliament on Tuesday. So the president of Ukraine answered the question "why the world cannot stop the flow of Russian war crimes." "Therefore, we appeal to you and the entire democratic community of the world. Sanctions must be strengthened, an embargo on Russian oil must be introduced, ports must be closed for Russian ships," Zelensky said. As of 12:00, specialists of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine pulled out the bodies of three dead from under the rubble of Mykolaiv Regional State Administration building. "As of 12:00, the State Emergency Service units released three dead, 22 were injured (of which 18 people were rescued and released from the rubble by the State Emergency Service units, who were transferred to the ambulance)," the State Emergency Service reports in the telegram channel. As reported, on March 29 at about 8:45 during the shelling of Mykolaiv by Russian invaders, one of the shells hit the nine-storey administrative building of the regional administration. There was a destruction of the central section of the building from the 9th to the 1st floor without subsequent burning. Earlier, one dead and 18 injured were reported. Search and rescue operations continue at the site. Human rights activists are aware of at least 15 Crimea resident captured by the Ukrainian side and 18 burials of the peninsula inhabitants in Crimea who fought on the side of the Russian Federation, Head of the Crimea Platform support service Maria Tomak has said. "We are trying very carefully to monitor all the burials in Crimea that are taking place, all the information about prisoners of war from Crimea. As of now, the smallest is 18 burials that were carried out on the territory of Crimea specifically of the Crimean resident and among the prisoners that Ukraine captured, there are at least 15 prisoners from Crimea, who are mostly residents of Ukraine," Tomac said at a briefing on Tuesday in Lviv. She also stressed that Ukrainian citizens from Crimea, illegally drafted into the Russian army, "are used in this war as manpower, as cannon fodder against their own people, against their own country." According to her, if "these people take part in the war, and even more so are involved in war crimes on the territory of Ukraine, then they will be held accountable." In addition, Tomak noted that human rights organizations are conducting explanatory work on how citizens of Ukraine living in Crimea can avoid mobilization into the Russian army. Tomak recalled that since February 24, Crimea has been used as a full-fledged springboard for the Russian Federation's offensive on the territory of Ukraine. Ukraine has come up with a proposal to sign a new international treaty on security guarantees, which will include an article similar to Article 5 of the NATO Charter, David Arakhamia, the head of the Servant of the People faction, a member of the Ukrainian delegation, said. "About a new system of security guarantees for Ukraine. We insist that it be an international treaty, which will be signed by all security guarantors, which will be ratified so as not to repeat the mistake that was once in the Budapest Memorandum. It turned out to be just a piece of paper, and we learned now very, very painfully. We want this to be a working international mechanism of concrete security guarantees for Ukraine," Arakhamia said at a briefing following the talks with the Russian delegation in Istanbul on Tuesday. He said that the agreement, according to the proposal put forward by Ukraine, will include the obligation of the guarantor countries to provide Ukraine with military assistance in the event of an attack, similar to Article 5 of the NATO Charter. "But there is even a tougher activation mechanism, because NATO has no restrictions on how many consultations they can have. That is, if something happens, then consultations can then last for a year. We say that consultations should be held within three days, and even if this is a war, aggression, it can be a military operation, it can be disguised, we already understand this no matter what happens, within three days of consultation, and after that the guarantor countries undertake to legally provide us with assistance in the form of military assistance, armed forces, weapons, closed skies, everything that we now need and that we cannot get. This is our proposal," Arakhamia said. He said that among the guarantors of its security, Ukraine sees, first of all, the countries of the UN Security Council, in particular the UK and China, the United States, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland and Israel. "We propose to make free accession to the guarantee agreement that is, we have the minimum amount of guarantees that we want to receive, but if other countries also want to join, we will give them such a legal right," Arakhamia added. As for the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, as well as the Crimean peninsula, international security guarantees will temporarily not work for these territories. Also, the agreement will stipulate that all guarantor countries shall not only speak against Ukraine's accession to the European Union, but shall also support this process. "We are now communicating in official communications with the guarantor countries, with many of them, we see real interest. Some countries have already given preliminary consent, but we are waiting for official messages," Arakhamia said. The head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, at the end of the round of negotiations in Istanbul, called them constructive. He said that the Russian side received from Ukraine "their clearly formulated position for inclusion in the agreement" for consideration. "These proposals will be considered in the near future, reported to the President of the Russian Federation, and our corresponding response will be given," the head of the delegation said. He also said that a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is possible simultaneously with the initialing of the peace treaty. The head of the delegation also said that from the very beginning, the possibility of a meeting of the presidents was discussed, provided that the treaty was ready for signing by the heads of state: first, the treaty was prepared, then the treaty was approved by the negotiators, endorsed by the foreign ministers at the meeting, after which the possibility of a meeting of the heads of state to sign this treaty was discussed. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking on Tuesday in the Danish parliament, invited this country to help the city of Mykolaiv after the war. "Even now, I want to invite you to join our initiative to restore Ukraine after the war, after our victory. We invite your companies, your specialists, your state," he said, adding: "Knowing your potential, your creative economic power, I suggest that your country help one of our beautiful regions after the war." "Mykolaiv, the city of shipbuilders, can become such a city, a region that will unite us even more, which Denmark can help restore," he said. Ukraine truce not enough for Britain to lift sanctions Johnson An agreement between Russia and Ukraine will not be enough to lift British sanctions against Russia, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Tuesday. "The prime minister said a ceasefire alone would not be cause for UK sanctions to be removed on Russia," Johnson's spokesman told reporters. "He said the pressure on Putin must be increased both through further economic measures and providing military aid to ensure Russia changes course completely," the spokesman said. These statements were made by the British prime minister at a meeting with ministers, according to the statements. The European Union participated in the G7's discussion regarding payment for Russian gas in rubles, so the G7's conclusions are justified for the EU as well, European Commission (EC) spokesman Eric Mamer said on Tuesday at a briefing in Brussels, responding to a question about how the EU would react to Russian President Vladimir Putin's demand that only be rubles be accepted as payment for Russian gas exports. "Our position is the same as that of the G7," Mamer said. Commenting on the previous day's meeting of G7 energy ministers, at which the European Commission was represented, Mamer said that the participants in the discussion "rejected the demand" of the Russian side to pay for gas deliveries in rubles. "As far as we are concerned, we said that deliveries should be made using dollars or euros [as payment]," the spokesman said. The authorities of the Netherlands are expelling 17 Russian diplomats because they were engaged in espionage activities, Dutch public radio saidon Tuesday. The Russian ambassador to the Netherlands was informed about the decision and was summoned to the country's Foreign Ministry, the ministry said in turn. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine (MFA) categorically rejects the attempts of Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto to involve Ukraine in the domestic political struggle in Hungary, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oleh Nikolenko has said. "It is immoral to speculate on the grief of Ukrainians in order to receive political dividends on the eve of the parliamentary elections. We have not interfered and will not interfere in the internal affairs of Hungary. The Hungarian people and history will give an assessment of the actions of Hungarian politicians," Nikolenko said in a comment posted on his Facebook page.on Tuesday. He said the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry calls on the leadership of Hungary to leave behind the rapid rapprochement with Russia and realize the obvious fact that without peace and security in Ukraine there will be no peace and security in Hungary. "Prime Minister [Viktor] Orban's refusal to provide full support to Ukraine today is not a prevention of Hungary being drawn into the war, but rather an invitation to Russia for further aggression deep into Europe. We expect Budapest to contribute to unity in the EU and NATO to end Russia's war against Ukraine. Russia should not get more space to continue its atrocities against the Ukrainian people and the destruction of European security," Nikolenko said. [1] K-Files impact: Kashmiri Pandit interests take a back seat | Bharat Bhushan [2] Kashmir Files: Half-Truths and falsehoods galore | Ram Puniyani [3] The Kashmir Files: How a New Bollywood Film Marks Indias Further Descent Into Bigotry | Debasish Roy Chowdhury ===== [1] business-standard.com March 28, 2022 K-Files impact: Kashmiri Pandit interests take a back seat Bharat Bhushan It would seem against common sense to say that the controversial film Kashmir Files may have done more harm than good to the cause of Kashmiri Pandits. The hosannas being sung for this propaganda film need to be fact-checked for the impact it is likely to have. A few conversations with the Pandits who stayed back in the Valley and Hindus in Jammu are sufficient to suggest that the more widely this film is seen in J&K, the more Kashmiri Pandits will be isolated and find it even harder to return to the Valley. Those who stayed on or returned under the special resettlement scheme of the Manmohan Singh government are likely to experience greater insecurity. Some Kashmiri Pandits, especially in Jammu, had angered Muslim Kashmiris by distributing sweets when the special status of the state of J&K was abrogated in 2019. Barely had that anger eased, when old wounds have been reopened by the film. They feel betrayed that Kashmiri Pandits, are lending credence to the films storyline which besides other cinematic lies, exaggerates the killings (4,000 as opposed to 667 recorded by Kashmiri Pandit organisations) and portrays Kashmiri Muslims as blackguards. The Valleys residents claim that the worst impact of the film will be on the generation that grew up after the departure of large numbers of Kashmiri Pandits three decades ago. They are unaware of the composite social fabric of Kashmir which was destroyed by militancy. The film, they feel, will make these 16 to 21-year-olds even angrier and this is the age-group from which militancy gets it new recruits. Their parents feel unable to influence their thinking and wonder if neighbours will be able to protect the miniscule number of Kashmiri Pandits who remain, as some of them did during the 1990 exodus. In the Valley, the film is being screened in Badami Bagh Cantonment, the headquarters of the Chinar Corps, where soldiers have been watching it in large numbers. The propaganda consequences of the film on the psyche of the soldiers who have to deal with Kashmiri Muslims on a daily basis can only be imagined. If this is being facilitated by the army authorities then one wonders what purpose it serves. The perception in the Valley is that the ruling dispensation in Delhi is not really bothered about the security of Kashmiri Pandits. Local residents point to the killing of the respected local Kashmiri Pandit pharmacist, Makhanlal Bindroo in the high security zone of Srinagar and the shooting of two non-Muslim school teachers in the city in broad daylight. These were described by the Director General of Police (DGP) Dilbagh Singh as an attempt to defame the local Muslims of Kashmir and aiming to attack and damage the age-old tradition of communal harmony and brotherhood in Kashmir. Now, precisely the same objective is being achieved by the active promotion of the film by Central and state governments controlled by Bharatiya Janata Party. If the social fabric of Kashmir, barely on the mend, is again torn apart by raking up old wounds, anger will be triggered against non-Muslims. The militants may find it difficult to target people outside J&K but there are easier targets nearer home. They will not go to Delhi. They will kill me first, a Kashmiri Pandit in the Valley quipped with resignation. While in Jammu, the common perception is that the film will lead to the consolidation of the Hindu-vote this assumption looks shaky on closer examination. The Hindus of Jammu are not a homogeneous lot. The Dogras resent the ethnic superiority they sense from the Pandits who they say have kept up friendships with Kashmiri Muslims rather than establish relations with the communities in Jammu. The few Dogra-Kashmiri Pandit inter-marriages that have taken place are looked at askance. Kashmiri Pandits who have traditionally been better educated, also present competition for the Dogras as they tend to get better jobs in the local administration. Against this local history of the two communities, it is shallow to assume that a film about the suffering of Kashmiri Pandits will bring them together in sympathy. In fact, other refugees who came to Jammu feel the state has done far less for them in terms of compensation, education, employment facilities, and the grant of all-India quotas. These include the descendants of families who came in 1947 as refugees to Jammu after the massacres of non-Muslims in Mirpur (20,000 Hindus and Sikhs), Muzaffarabad (18,000 slaughtered), Bhimber (about 5,000) and Rajouri (7,000) among other places by Pakistani soldiers, irregulars and local Muslims. Their grudge is that the film promotes one set of refugees while failing to recognise the suffering of others. It is a historical fact that the biggest massacre was that of Muslims between 14 October to November 1947. Up to 100,000 Muslims were killed in Jammu while 200,000 Muslims migrated to Pakistan in that two-month period alone. Call it whataboutry but there is a palpable lack of sympathy for Kashmir Pandits among Jammu residents. The film neither benefits the Kashmiri Pandits nor heals old wounds. It will instead deepen social divisions in both the Valley and in Jammu. Its official sponsorship suggests that when most Kashmiri Pandits and their children have moved on (and that is not to deny the grave injustice they have suffered), hatred will be ignited in their next generation and the wound kept festering. Party interest has clearly overtaken national interest keeping hatred of the minority community alive also keeps politics that thrives on it flourishing. The people of J&K have the ability to see this but common sense seems an uncommon resource amongst those lapping up the hatred in the rest of India. (The writer is an independent journalist based in Delhi. He was in J&K recently) o o [2] Kashmir Files: Half-Truths and falsehoods galore by Ram Puniyani Major weapon of sectarian nationalism is to spread misconceptions and create hate against the religious minorities. This process which has been going on since long has now got a new tool, a film, Kashmir Files. As such misconceptions against minorities are based on half truths, selective truths, lies and this film is another addition to that. The slogans-misconceptions against religious minorities have gone through various phases. It began with communal historiography. Here the Muslim kings as tormentors of Hindus, destroyers of Hindu temples and imposing Islam through force had a long run. Add on came with the constructed fear that Hindus will become a minority as Muslims are procreating fast. Islamic terrorism, the phrase coined by American media, added to the majoritarian propaganda. The result has been the type of hate displayed in lynching and attacking Muslim youth on ground of love jihad. The sort of culmination of this was the call for genocide given by Holy Seers in Dharm Sansads, on which the Prime minister kept a deliberate silence. This film Kashmir files (KF) tries to put the blame of Pandits exodus 1990 on Kashmiri Muslims and blames the parties like National Conference and Congress for the same. It depicts the murders of Kashmiri pundits selectively and resorts to falsehoods to harp its point. In one of the scene during the curfew school girls are shown in school uniforms! Late Squadron Leader Ravi Khannas widow points this out and says there are falsehoods in the film. Omar Abdullah summed up the partisanship of the film, Many false things have been shown in The Kashmir Files movie. When the Kashmiri Pandits left the valley, Farooq Abdullah was not the chief minister. Jagmohan was the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir. VP Singhs government was at the Centre, supported by the BJP," Abdullah said. Why wasnt VP Singhs government and BJP shown in the film? It is not right to play with facts. We condemn the killings of Kashmiri Pandits. But didnt Kashmiri Muslims and Sikhs lose their lives? Kashmir, the land of Kashmiriyat (Synthesis of Vedant, Budhhism and Sufi traditions) (Land of Nooruddin Norani aka Nund Rishi and Lal Dedh) has been mired in the pain of alienation turned into militancy, which took the lives of Hindus and Muslims both. After India got freedom Kashmirs Maharaja Harisingh decided to remain independent. Jinnah wanted J&K to merge with Pakistan as it was a Muslim majority state. The tribal sent by Pakistan were backed by the Pakistan army. In the face of this aggression, Harisinghs representative and Sheikh Abdullah the President of National Conference, the major party of Kashmir, approached Government of India to send Indian army to counter the aggression of Pakistan. India agreed to send the army and the agreement was that Kashmir will accede to India with full autonomy, article 370, which gave all the powers to Kashmir Assembly except in matters of defense, communication, currency and external affairs. Indian army halted the march of Pakistan army but by then 1/3rd of Kashmir was occupied by Pakistan. As matter went to UN, UNs verdict was that referendum should be held in Kashmir with the options that Kashmir can remain Independent, or merge with India or Pakistan. The referendum was to be held under UN supervision. The condition was that Pakistan will vacate its aggression and India will reduce its military presence in the area. Pakistan did not vacate the aggression, plebiscite was not held. Sheikh Abdullah was deeply impressed by Gandhi and Nehru, whom he regarded as stars of secularism. With Gandhis murder by Godse and Shyama Prasad Mukherjees insisting on forcible merger of Kashmir to India, Sheikh Abdullah was shaken and started a rethink about the accession. He was arrested and put behind bars for 17 years. This is what initiated the process of alienation in Kashmir. This process was intensified as autonomy was trampled by and by. In 1965, the Kashmirs Prime Ministers status was reduced to Chief Minister and Sadar-E-Riyasat was changed to Governor. The alienated youth started and intensified their protests. They were duly helped by Pakistan in supply of weapons. The initial protests were on the grounds of Kashmiriyat. With Zia Ul Haqs Islamization and rise of radical Islam, planted by the American project to raise Al Qaeda-Taliban to fight against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, the radical Islam started dominating the area. In late 1980s the militants changed their track from Kashmiriyat to Anti-India and then Anti Hindu. While the political establishment kept changing hands; youth were disgruntled also due to lack of jobs and economic development. After the hanging of Maqbul Bhatt, many youth left for Pakistan for training in terrorism. JKLF was mainly talking of Kashmiriyat and Azadi, Hijbul Mujahideen gradually became more dominant and was pro Pakistan and anti Hindu. The initial murders were those of pro India elements, Maulana Masud, Abdul Ghani, Wali Ahmad Bhatt were done to death. Gulam Nabi Azads nephew was abducted. Respectable doctor and thinker Abdul Guru was murdered. Rubiya Saeed; daughter of Mufti Mohammad Saeed, the Home minster was abducted. The V P Singh Government signed on the dotted lines of terrorists and released many of the dangerous terrorists, worsening the atmosphere. Neelkanth Ganjoo, the judge who had pronounced death penalty on Maqbool Bhatt, Tikalal Takloo, the BJP leader and Premnath Bhat (Journalist) were killed brutally. The militants turned their guns against Pandits. Threats to them, asking them to leave the valley started being blared from mosques. Similar leaflets also appeared. Pandit community was in the grip of fear. With re-appointment of Jagmohan (19 January 1990) as the Governor, Farooq Abdullah resigned. On the same night the security forces searched the houses of nearly 300 people and dragged them mercilessly to the police stations. As a protest thousands came out on the streets and they were fired upon. Nearly 50 protesters died in the worst massacre in Gau Kadal. The task of the state was to provide protection to the intimidated community and to combat the militants. Jagmohan took another route, he promised Pandits safe exit to Jammu camps. The rumor was that he wanted to have the valley free from Pandits so that he could unleash strong repressive measures against Muslims. The local Muslims were mostly against the migration of Muslims. We need to distinguish between Pakistan trained militants and local Muslims. Jagmohan generalized all Muslims being against Pandits and this film does the same. As 3.5 Lakh Pandits migrated, close to 50000 Muslims also had to leave. Can this be called genocide? Genocide means a violence to finish the race off. In the killings by militants the official figures are (RTI inquiry- 27/11/2021)-Pandits 89, others 1635 (Muslims mainly and also Sikhs and personnel of security forces). The way film has been made creates anti Muslim hysteria. India has seen massacre of Muslims (Nellie, Mumbai, Gujarat, Delhi) of Sikhs (Delhi) all these in thousands. Films made on Gujarat massacre Perzania was not permitted to be screened in Gujarat. That film made us think and not incite. The KF just selectively shows violence against Hindus and presents local Muslims as collaborators in that. Half truth and falsehood combined! The responses in cinema houses are alarming. The crowds are giving dangerous slogans. Do we need such films which are one sided, based on half truth and some falsehoods and promote Hate? Omar Abdullas vision is on the dot when he says, The pain & suffering of 1990 & after cannot be undone. The way Kashmiri Pandits had their sense of security snatched from them & had to leave the valley is a stain on our culture of Kashmiriyat. We have to find ways to heal divides & not add to them. After 1990, BJP led NDA has been in power for nearly 14 years. Earlier Manmohan Singh Government started many schemes for Pandits, What has BJP led Government done to rehabilitate them is a matter of introspection. Using them as a political tool is totally unwarranted. What we need is to give justice and rehabilitate the victims of violence, Pandits as well as others. o o [3] time.com The Kashmir Files: How a New Bollywood Film Marks Indias Further Descent Into Bigotry by Debasish Roy Chowdhury March 30, 2022 12:57 AM EDT Once known as heaven on earth, Kashmir today is the worlds most militarized zone. A proper evaluation of the causes of conflict would obviously be the first step in defusing tensions and promoting reconciliationbut a new film is doing the opposite, even as it claims to be honestly confronting the past. Released in Indian theaters in March, The Kashmir Files is a 170-minute Bollywood drama about the tragedy of Kashmiri Pandits, or Brahminsthe priestly highest caste of the Hindu religion. Hinduism is a minority faith in Muslim-dominated Kashmir, and the Pandits left the region en masse in the 1990s, when they began to be targeted by Pakistan-sponsored militant Islamists. The Hindi-language film has been given a tax break and is being heavily championed by the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been urging people to go watch it. Government employees are being offered time off if they do. But the theme of the film, made by a Modi acolyte, and its graphic depiction of the intimidation and killings of the Pandits, is riling up Hindus and aggravating religious discord. Social media is flooded with videos of members of the audience erupting in rousing hate speeches after seeing the film, with calls for the slaughter of Muslims and a boycott of Muslim businesses. Often, these speeches are staged by Hindu vigilante organizations ideologically allied with Modis government. In a climate of growing intolerance, where exclusion and marginalization of Muslims have become mainstream political discourse, the movie is making Indian Muslims even more fearful. The truth that the film claims to reveal is that there was a genocide of Pandits in the 1990s, hidden by a callous ruling establishment and a servile media. Pandits were killed in their thousands, it claims, and not in the low hundreds as the government and Kashmiri Pandit organizations have stated. Its not clear why the horrors visited upon the Pandits are presented as having been hushed up. The films young protagonist learns about it all from files of newspaper cuttings of the time. His inability to remember the events of three decades agolike the 65% of Indias population below the age of 35is a function of demographics rather than deceit. Neither is it clear why the films central characters repeatedly blame a Congress party-led government in Delhi for the exodus, when it took place during the time of a coalition government that was supported by Modis own Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But accuracy is not the films priority, nor is it interested in justice and closure for the Pandit community. Instead, the purpose of The Kashmir Files is to inflame hatred against Muslims; against secular parties that Modis followers brand anti-Hindu; liberal intellectuals and activists, whose faith in Indias inclusive democracy runs contrary to the supremacist tenets of Hindu nationalism; and against the liberal media that the Hindu right disparages as sold-out presstitutes. Accordingly, Muslims are portrayed as uniformly evil, treacherous and predatory. Even little Muslim boys are shown as demonic. Hindu women are depicted as being coveted by lascivious Muslim men. The latter is a particularly resonant trope employed by the BJP and goes by the term love jihada supposed Islamist conspiracy to impregnate Hindu women with the end of numerically overtaking Hindus. (In fact, Muslims make up just 14% of Indias population.) The result of this propaganda is evident in the frenzied reception of the film. In one viral video, an agitated member of the audience can be seen urging Hindu men to preserve their religion by marrying Muslim girls. Majoritarian angst such as thisevident from hashtags like #WakeUpHinduis what the film aims to fuel, rather than a sincere tackling of the complex story of Kashmir. Kashmirs cycles of violence The truth about Kashmir, a more complex one, is that an endless cycle of alienation, distrust, and violence has been fed by decades of broken political promises, rigged elections, the claustrophobia and humiliation of a constant military presence, foreign-funded Islamist insurgencies, custodial deaths, torture, rights abuses, brutal crackdowns, and the Indian states legitimate fears of loss of sovereignty. Both Hindu and Muslim women trapped in this war zone have faced sexualized violence by militants as well as security forces. Kashmiri Muslims have also died and fled in far greater numbers than Hindus. And many Pandits who braved the militancy and chose to stay were protected by Muslims, according to a former Indian intelligence chief. Naturally, none of this has made it into The Kashmir Files. Modi, who has had no role in the past atrocities or political failures in Kashmir, could have attempted a reset in the region. But as a Hindu strongman, his own need to dominate Muslims and reclaim a supposedly lost Hindu pride commits him to an even more hard-line policy toward Kashmir than his predecessors. Soon after his re-election in 2019, Modi stripped Jammu and Kashmir, the countrys only Muslim-majority state, of its statehood and partial autonomy, imprisoned its elected representatives, sent in an additional 40,000 troops, locked down the region, and imposed a months-long information blockade. Kashmirs long struggle for secession validates the Hindu nationalist case that Muslims, with their extraterritorial loyalties, are an existential threat to Hindus and the integrity of India. Kashmir thus fits neatly into the BJPs use of Muslims as the bogeyman to unite the vastly disparate Hindu voter base against the dangerous other. This mass radicalization is driven at various levelsthrough social media, divisive political messaging, a craven mainstream news media (at times compared with Radio Rwanda), and historical revisionism, increasingly through cinema. A shared history is central to the construction of group identities and becomes instrumental in the manipulation and weaponization of popular opinion. Historical events that highlight the victimization of Hindus at the hands of Muslims are pivotal in this enterprise. Hence, there has been a noticeable proliferation of Islamophobia of late in Bollywood, especially period films featuring noble Hindus resisting devilish Muslim rulers. Compared with Nazi films like Jew Suss and Die Rothschilds by some, The Kashmir Files is an escalation of Indian cinemas revisionist trend, used to justify the brazen Hindu extremism of the present. Lynchings, humiliation, and degradation of Muslims have become order of the day. Calls for genocide and social and economic boycotts of Muslims are widespread. State-sanctioned religious hate has even criminalized the very presence of Muslims through movements against hijabs and the opposition to public prayer. Drip-fed with nuggets of rewritten history through social media and popular culture, the Hindu vigilantes leading the charge against Indias Muslim population rationalize their bigotry as justice for past wrongs. The deeper India drifts into the abyss of an illiberal future, the more it looks to its past to justify its regression. The more truth that films such as The Kashmir Files discover in the process, the more civil conflict the country risks. Climaxing with cries for the extermination of Muslims ringing out from the dim theaters, the film marks a major milestone in Indias rapid descent into darkness. (see original version to see all hyperlinks) Shoigu threatens with 'adequate response' in case of deliveries of combat aircraft, air defense systems to Ukraine from NATO countries Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu says that Moscow will react adequately if the plans of a number of NATO countries to supply combat aircraft and air defense systems to Ukraine are implemented. "We are following the statements of the leaders of individual NATO countries about their intention to supply aircraft and air defense systems to Ukraine. If they are implemented, we will adequately react," Shoigu said at a conference call on Tuesday. He also said Moscow would continue the so-called "special military operation in Ukraine" until the set goals are achieved. The world's leading lawyers, human rights experts, joined the international legal Working Group on accountability for international crimes committed in Ukraine, the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine (PGO) has reported. The Working Group will provide support to Ukraine in ensuring justice for the victims of international crimes committed by Russia on the territory of the country. "It is composed of the world's leading human rights lawyers: Amal Clooney, Crown Counsel Richard Hermer, Crown Counsel Tim Otty, Philippa Webb, Baroness Helena Kennedy who are Chair of the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, and Lord David Neuberger, former President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom," the PGO said. The Working Group will also include legal experts from Covington & Burling LLP from the United States, led by Nikhil Gore, French firm Sygna Partners, led by Luke Vidal, and Withers, led by Emma Lindsay. "Each of them already represents the interests of Ukraine, including in the case of Covington and Sygna in the International Court of Justice," the PGO said. The Working Group will also receive the support of leading scholars in international humanitarian law, including Professor Marko Milanovic (University of Nottingham) and Professor Andrew Clapham (Geneva Academic Institute), as well as the Center for International Dispute Resolution at King's College London, the Clooney Foundation for Justice and the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute. All members of the Working Group, as well as lawyers and scientists who will provide support, will perform their work without remuneration. The Group's remit will include advising on accountability, including through the United Nations and regional organizations. It will also provide advice and potential representation in civil and criminal cases, including those subject to laws of universal jurisdiction, to ensure accountability and obtain reparations in national jurisdictions. In addition, the Working Group will provide strategic guidance on Ukraine's cooperation with the International Criminal Court. The technology partner of the Working Group will be Microsoft Corporation. It will provide free technological assistance to protect, analyze and share evidence of international crimes with the authorities. "We are grateful to this powerful group for providing support to Ukraine. Its assistance and recommendations will be an invaluable contribution to the process of ensuring justice for Ukrainian victims and restoring our state," Prosecutor General of Ukraine Iryna Venediktova said. The Irish Foreign Ministry on Tuesday declared four high-ranking Russian officials persona non grata, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. "This afternoon, the Russian ambassador was called to the Foreign Ministry, he was informed that four Russian high-ranking officials must leave the country," the ministry said. Washington is ready, if necessary, to take part in the implementation of the agreements between Moscow and Kyiv on the security of Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday. If there is any result, and US support for Ukraine can be part of this result, including support for its security and defense, then, of course, the United States wants to strive for this, Blinken said during a press conference with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita. He added that the United States has not seen "signs of real seriousness" by Russia, but considers it a good signal if Kyiv sees them. It is up to the Ukrainian partners to decide whether there are any changes or progress. If Ukraine has come to the conclusion that there are positive changes, then this is good, Blinken said. Since February 24, the Russian occupiers has kidnapped 11 mayors and eight other officials of municipalities, which endangers all residents of the communities, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko has said. "Friends! The orcs are again kidnapping the leaders of the Ukrainian communities. Now they have kidnapped head of Beryslav Oleksandr Shapovalov and head of Hola Prystan Oleksandr Babych. The horde continues to commit atrocities in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Killing, kidnapping and torturing civilians, this is what the Russian aggressor, who came to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians, is doing," he wrote in his Telegram channel. He said that during the war, since February 24, the invaders kidnapped 11 mayors and eight other municipal officials. "I emphasize that the abduction of rural, settlement and city heads, especially in wartime, endangers all residents of the communities. After all, all critical management, life support, and the adoption of important decisions on which the fate of the inhabitants of the community depends, rests on his head," Klitschko said. Thus, Klitschko appealed to partners, international organizations, mayors of municipalities in Europe to make efforts, apply all possible mechanisms and pressure to help Ukraine overcome the Russian invasion as quickly as possible. "For every day of the war is the suffering and death of Ukrainians, these are the destroyed villages and cities of our state. I will emphasize once again: Ukraine today is fighting not only for its land and freedom, but is also an outpost of freedom and peace throughout Europe," the mayor said. The operatives of the State Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in Kharkiv region exposed a young guy who was recruited by Russian military intelligence as a fire spotter. "The occupiers established contact with the child using the Telegram mobile messenger. The Russian military promised to pay money for information about the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the city of Kharkiv," the SBU in Kharkiv region said on Facebook. The special service published a video in which the child admits that he was engaged in coordinating the fire on the instructions of representatives of the aggressor country. "I saw a [Russian] ad on Telegram and they said if you tell us the location, we will give you money... I was coordinating the fire on Telegram," the boy said. According to him, having received what they wanted, his "customers" started to respond less frequently, and then they stopped altogether, and they did not pay any money. In the same video, the father of the child says that he is very ashamed and very sorry for his son's act, and urges parents to control the behavior of children. The SBU also appeals to citizens with a similar appeal. The SBU calls on parents to exercise control over the behavior of their children on the Internet, and all citizens of Ukraine not to trust enemy propaganda. As a result of a missile attack on the administrative building of Mykolaiv regional administration on Tuesday morning, nine people were killed and 28 more were wounded, the Prosecutor General's Office (PGO) press service has said. "According to the investigation, on March 29, 2022, the Russian armed forces launched a missile attack on the administrative building of Mykolaiv Regional State Administration. Currently, nine killed and 28 wounded are known. Rescuers, SBU investigators and police are working on the spot," the PGO said. It clarifies that the pretrial investigation into criminal proceedings on the fact of violation of the laws and customs of war, combined with premeditated murder (part 2 of article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) is carried out by the investigative department of the SBU Department in Mykolaiv region. The enemy is withdrawing individual units from the territory of Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, as well as regrouping to concentrate the main efforts in the Slobozhanske and Donetsk directions, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) has reported. "The enemy continues to conduct a full-scale armed aggression against our state. It is withdrawing individual units from the territory of Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, as well as regrouping to concentrate the main efforts in the Slobozhanske and Donetsk directions... It is regrouping troops and their partial withdrawal to the territory of the Republic of Belarus," the General Staff said in a Facebook post. The enemy did not carry out active offensive actions in the Polissia direction. It made attempts to fire at the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the areas of the settlements of Romanivka, Horenka, Lychanka, Petrushky, Shpytky, Moschun, Nova Buda, Maidanivka, Liubovychi, Zabuiannia, Nalyvaikivka. The enemy continues to block the city of Chernihiv. In the direction of the city of Brovary, the enemy is trying to hold on to the previously occupied positions and prevent the further advance of the Ukrainian troops. "The Russian Federation and its numerous agents in international organizations deny the facts of transportation and accumulation of a large amount of ammunition in the immediate vicinity of the Shelter facility of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant by Russian troops. The activities of the Russian occupation forces at any time can lead to the detonation of ammunition, damage to the Shelter facility and radiation contamination of the territories where hundreds of millions of Europeans live," the General Staff said. The use of the Chornobyl zone for the transportation and accumulation of ammunition, as well as the deployment of command posts of Russian troops, is carried out deliberately, since the Armed Forces of Ukraine cannot conduct military operations on the territory of the exclusion zone. "The risk of detonation of Russian ammunition is high even without combat operations, due to the neglect of security measures by the occupiers, as well as the massive use of old and substandard ammunition. Such incidents happen in Russian warehouses and arsenals regularly and in peacetime, which is well known," the General Staff said. In the Slobozhanske direction, the enemy continues to blockade the city of Kharkiv, carried out the withdrawal of individual units of the 1st Tank Army from the area of the city of Sumy outside the territory of Ukraine. The enemy also strengthened the offensive capabilities of the grouping by separate units from the 20th Combined Arms Army of the Western Military District in the direction of Sloviansk. From February 24, 2022, when Russia started the war against Ukraine, to 00:00 on March 28, 2022, civilian casualties amounted to 3,039 civilians (2,975 in the report a day earlier), including 1,179 killed (1,151), the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Tuesday. "OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration," according to the document. This concerns, for example, Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region), Izium (Kharkiv region), Popasna (Luhansk region), and Trostianets (Sumy region), where there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties. These figures are being further corroborated and are not included in the above statistics. "Most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple launch rocket systems, and missile and air strikes," the UN said. According to confirmed UN data, some 236 men, some 172 women, some 34 boys and some 15 girls killed while the gender of 55 children and 667 adults has not yet been determined. Among the 1,860 wounded, some 34 girls and 26 boys, as well as 74 children, whose gender has not yet been determined. Compared to the previous day, according to the UN, one child killed and another was wounded. OHCHR said that in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, as of midnight on March 29, there were 326 (317) killed and 716 (700) wounded in government-controlled territory, and 62 (60) killws and 233 (228) wounded in territory controlled by self-proclaimed "republics." In other regions of Ukraine under government control (in Kyiv, as well as in Zhytomyr, Zaporizhia, Kyiv, Sumy, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, Cherkasy and Chernihiv regions), the UN recorded 791 (774) killed and 911 (896) wounded. The UN also said that, according to the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine, as of 08:00 on March 29, 144 (143) children were killed and 220 (216) wounded. The increase in indicators in this report compared to the figures in the previous report should not be attributed only to new cases that occurred on March 28, since OHCHR also verified a number of cases that occurred in previous days during the day, according to the document. viansk. Help Ukraine, a charitable organization founded by major Ukrainian businessmen, has declared its readiness to provide its logistics capabilities and expertise to UNICEF, the World Food Program and other charitable organizations. "Help Ukraine Center will be happy to provide its logistics facilities and its expertise to UNICEF, the World Food Program and others. We can start work an hour after the call," CEO co-owner and CEO of the TIS port Andriy Stavnitser said on Facebook. He said that in 27 days of March, Help Ukraine.center, created from scratch, transported 3,059 tonnes of humanitarian and medical aid to Ukraine. "For 27 days, we have built an effective system of corridors throughout the country, railway and road routes are working, our cargo is moving at full speed along them. There is an incredibly large amount of cargo for a group of enthusiasts," Stavnitser said. However, he said that giant humanitarian organizations, well known to the world, to whom people tend to trust their money and about which they have heard a lot, have not yet "reached" Ukraine. "These organizations have no people on the ground, no warehouses and logistics, no last mile delivery experience. We are able to deliver by car and rail, before the war we managed the only container train network in Ukraine and worked with dry warehouses... Ready to work twice as much, so that everything goes twice as fast. We have efficient and safe logistics one less excuse," Stavnitser said. [March 29, 2022] Topio Networks Launches Intelligent Infrastructure 2022 At this first annual conference, Topio will be joined by EDJX, government, and municipal spokespeople, and key influencers and decision-makers, to discuss the future of this shared platform AUSTIN, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Topio Networks , the leading industry accelerator focused on Hyper-Convergence and organizers of premier industry events in emerging technologies, today announced that it will host the first Intelligent Infrastructure 2022 conference April 28-29 at the Fairmont Hotel in Austin, Texas. This annual conference is in its first year. It will address one of the key opportunities of our time: how to digitize national infrastructure to prepare for the next generation of growth. "Intelligent Infrastructure is about moving one piece of information from one place to another." "Intelligent Infrastructure is about moving one piece of information from one place to another. As the digital world grows, moving information will become as important as moving a load of goods. A sound and fair Intelligent Infrastructure is now as critical as rail and road infrastructures," said Philippe Cases , CEO of Topio Networks. "Furthermore, integrated Intelligent Infrastructure combining rail, road, and digitalization provides a new fundamental shared platform, which enables existing and new public services, effectively manages risks, creates a more resilient infrastructure, and does so in a way as carbon-free as possible. In addition, infrastructures working with each other will create significant business growth opportunities. We look forward to launching and hosting this annual conference where industry leaders will come together to discuss this new and massive disruptive opportunity." This year's conference program addresses the critical challenges in making Intelligent Infrastructure a reality, including finding new models for collaboration on shared infrastructure, new models for sharing data, new approaches to standards, regulation, and compliance, and implementations of the latest technologies. The critical technology for Intelligent Infrastructure is edge computing, allowing data analysis close to its origin in an efficient and privacy-friendly manner. The conference will open with comments from Jeffrey DeCoux , Chairman of Austin-based Autonomy Institute , a cooperative research consortium focused on advancing and accelerating Autonomy and AI at the edge. "Intelligent Infrastructure will enable mobility 4.0 and reach Vision Zero, eliminate the digital divide, accelerate economic growth, create millions of jobs, and build stronger, more resilient communities," said DeCoux. "This build-out will be the most significant transformation of our infrastructure since Eisenhower's Interstate Highway program in the 1950's." EDJX , the pioneer in distributed cloud services at the Edge, will be among the industry leaders participating in the conference, with CTO and Co-founder James Thomason scheduled to present a keynote on Friday, April 29. Thomason will also lead a panel on the business imperatives of multi-tenancy later the same day. "We are at the very beginning of a significant trend. Intelligent Infrastructure is the foundation of a smart city and the building block of Industry 4.0," said James Thomason, CTO, EDJX. "We are looking forward to the Intelligent Infrastructure conference to provide leadership and start educating the industry about why and how to create an infrastructure that will enable the future of the internet economy in a hyperconnected world." The conference agenda also covers topics such as Intelligent Infrastructure for energy resilience, the use of data in smart cities, and digital twin cities. Other participants include retired US Air Force Brigadier General Dr. Robert Spalding , a national security strategist and globally recognized expert on Chinese economic competition and influence. General Spalding will be leading a panel on the military base of the future, joined by panel participant Lieutenant Colonel Alex Goldberg , Joint Innovation Officer, Defense Innovation Unit, and DARPA Fellow. General Spalding, the author of Stealth War , articulates strongly that America must address the success that China has had infiltrating American institutions and compromising national security. Full details of the Intelligent Infrastructure conference can be found here . About EDJX EDJX is an edge computing platform that makes it easy to write edge and IoT applications using serverless computing, accelerate content delivery, increase the responsiveness of edge applications, and secure edge data at the source. EDJX helps businesses handle the explosive demand for data processing to serve real-world edge computing applications, including industrial IoT, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and robotics. EDJX is a privately held company based in Raleigh, NC. Visit EDJX and follow EDJX on LinkedIn and Twitter . About Topio Networks Topio Networks, an industry research platform, accelerates markets and businesses by providing detailed information about use cases, verticals and industries. By leveraging our open platform, businesses can benefit from meaningful data insights, market feedback & surveys, and information about the effectiveness of their company thought leadership. In addition, Topio Networks provides market access through events, and lead generation. Visit Topio Networks and follow Topio on LinkedIn and Twitter. For press inquiries please email pr@edjx.io View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/topio-networks-launches-intelligent-infrastructure-2022-301512483.html SOURCE EDJX, Inc. [ Back To SIP Trunking Home's Homepage ] The State of Israel, whose history includes many years of wandering and flight of the Jewish people, must change its policy towards Ukraine and immediately provide assistance to the country in resisting the Russian invasion. Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Yevhen Korniychuk stated this during the opening of the photo exhibition Blood and Tears in Ukraine, according to the Embassy's Facebook page. Today Ukraine is facing horrible humanitarian catastrophe. I feel sorry for Minister Shaked(Head of the Israeli Ministry of Justice Aeled Shaked - Ed.) who forgot that the Jewish people have been refugees for all of their lives. Unfortunately the lessons of history already forgotten. Let me remind you the case of the St.Louis - a vessel boarded with Jews who were trying to escape the horrors of war in Europe and failed to find a safe harbor. Today Ukrainians is facing artificial obstacles to enter Israel and escape horrors of war, - he said. At the same time, the ambassador called on the Israeli government to provide assistance to the Ukrainian people. The people of Israel are in favor of Ukraine and I thank you all for your support. I call on the Israeli government to wake up and accompany the spirit of the Jewish people in their actions, - Yevgeny Korniychuk emphasized. The photo-exhibition Blood and Tears in Ukraine by Czech photographers was launched be the Czech Center Tel Aviv at Simta Theater We are a group of companies in the pharmaceutical market of Ukraine, which brings together a network of 1200 pharmacies with the trademarks "Pharmacy "Podorozhnyk", "Pharmacy "BAM", "Oshchad Apteka" (further group of companies "Network of Pharmacies "Podorozhnyk"). We feel a moral obligation to society and the state. So we immediately responded to the request of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to provide them with an ambulance to evacuate the military and civilian evacuation zone. The Chain of Pharmacies "Podorozhnyk" says so in an appeal to European companies. There is a huge need for medical special vehicles in Ukraine. It is necessary to provide more than 200 cars to the military! The armed forces of the russian federation deliberately destroy ambulances and medical infrastructure in cities to make maximum damage to the military and civilians and make the salvation of the injured impossible. "We are looking for medical special vehicles categories: "A", "B", "C" (resuscitation car) and armoured ambulances in Europe. We are ready to buy or receive free a lot of charity assistance. Also, we need assistance with the assessment of the auto in different countries (England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Israel, etc.) and their delivery to Ukraine" - says Andriy Matkivskyi, financial director of Pharmacy Network "Podorozhnyk". According to the appeal, everyone who can take part in this mission or have useful information contact the head of the external communications department Olha Hrechko, +3 8 067 784 07 44, o.hrechko@da.lviv.ua Also, Ukrainian people will appreciate dissemination and informing as many journalists, civil servants, managers of relevant companies as possible. Our power in civilian and military people. We must keep them alive to protect, build and revive Ukraine. Dear friends of Ukraine, we ask for your help!" - says Olha. Information about the company (as of February 23, 2022): Group of Companies "Pharmacy Chains "Podorozhnyk"" has been operating with the trademarks of BAM TM and Oschad Apteka TM, "Podorozhnyk" for over 22 years in the pharmaceutical market. The managing company is Solomiya-Service Private Enterprise, founded in 1998. The group has about 1,200 pharmacies located in all regions of Ukraine. More than 7 million Ukrainians are regular customers of the networks, and about 300,000 customers visit pharmacies every day. Additional Information: Head of the External Communications Department of the Plantain Pharmacy Network Olha Hrechko +380 67 784 07 44 o.hrechko@da.lviv.ua CCTV: Think tanks including the European Policy Center, the Royal Institute of International Affairs and Carnegie Europe recently published articles that shared their reflection on the Ukraine crisis. What is your comment? Wang Wenbin: I have noted the voices for reason and reflection in Europes strategic community as the Ukraine crisis continues to generate spillover effects. For example, some articles pointed out that sanctions are not a solution to end the war and build a security order in Europe. To end the war with reconciliation, diplomatic methods should be resorted to. Managing relations with Russia, a neighbor of European countries, should be the primary challenge the EU must face squarely. When making the security rules of Europe, Europeans should play a central role and Russia cannot possibly be excluded. EUs leaders should truly heed and seriously address Russias concerns and appeals. Some articles also noted that to resolve the Ukraine issue, the security interests of all relevant countries should be attended to. To address the current crisis, both Russia and Ukraine should bear in mind the realities on the ground and attach importance to legitimate security concerns. It is Chinas consistent belief that dialogue and negotiation is the most realistic and feasible way to defuse the crisis, and the pursuit of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security can help realize enduring stability and security in Europe and the world at large. Expanding the conflict and escalating sanctions incessantly will only further complicate the issue and make the whole world pay a dearer price. Under the current circumstances, all parties should encourage and support Russia and Ukraine in keeping the talks going to bring about peaceful outcomes. It is important to discard the binary approach driven by emotions, and review the underlying cause for the Ukraine crisis with reason. It is crucial to avoid going to extremes where no one will emerge as a winner, and create enabling conditions for the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis. It is vital to stop profiting from the situation by fanning the flame, and let the common interest of the international community prevail over the selfish interests of certain countries. China is ready to work with the international community to make an effort for easing the situation, resolving the crisis and rebuilding peace. TASS: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit China on March 31 for a meeting of foreign ministers of countries bordering Afghanistan. Can you give us any details on the agenda of the meeting? Will China and Russia hold bilateral meetings during the visit? Wang Wenbin: Yesterday, I shared the relevant information on the upcoming third Foreign Ministers Meeting among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan to be hosted by China. I have nothing more to add. CCTV: We learned that the extended meeting of the China-US-Russia consultation mechanism on the Afghan issue will be held on the sidelines of the third Foreign Ministers Meeting among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan. Can you share more information? What expectations do you have for this meeting? Wang Wenbin: As agreed upon by all sides, the extended meeting of the China-US-Russia consultation mechanism on the Afghan issue will be held on the sidelines of the third Foreign Ministers Meeting among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan on March 30 and 31 in Tunxi, Anhui Province. Ambassador Yue Xiaoyong, Special Envoy for Afghan Affairs of Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will chair the meeting. Special representatives for the Afghan issue of the US, Russia and Pakistan will attend the meeting. State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will have a group meeting with the attendees from all parties. China, the US, Russia and Pakistan are countries with important influence on the Afghan issue. We hope to seek synergy between this meeting and the third Foreign Ministers Meeting among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan, further build consensus on the Afghan issue, encourage regional countries and the international community to step up support for peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan, and help the country achieve peace, stability and development at an early date. Macau Monthly: The US Senate passed the America COMPETES Act of 2022 as amended on March 28, which targets China and aims to improve the US competitiveness in the field of economy, national security and foreign affairs. Do you have any comment? Wang Wenbin: China has made clear its position on similar China-related bills of the US on many occasions. The China-related content of the relevant bill plays up the China threat theory and advocates strategic competition with China in disregard of facts. It is entrenched in the Cold-War and zero-sum game mentality and runs counter to the common aspiration of people from all sectors in China and the US to strengthen exchanges and cooperation. China is firmly opposed to this and will firmly defend its own interests. How the US develops itself is its own business. As the worlds largest economy, the US should maintain the stability of the global industrial and supply chains, including in the semiconductor industry, rather than pick on China from time to time and see China as an imaginary enemy. TASS: According to Reuters, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs this month summoned officials from Chinas three state energy giants, Sinopec, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), to review their business ties with Russian partners and local operations. One source of Reuters said the ministry urged them not to make any rash moves buying Russian assets. I wonder if you have any comments on this report? Wang Wenbin: I am not aware of the situation you mentioned. I want to reiterate that China and Russia have been conducting normal economic and trade cooperation on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefits. Hubei Media Group: It is reported that a Chinese student in Australia was interrogated by the Australian side at the Sydney International Airport before being repatriated. Can you confirm this? Do you have any comment on that? Wang Wenbin: Recently, there are multiple incidents where the Australian border law enforcement officers in Sydney interrogated Chinese students, and examined their cellphones and personal items for no reason when they tried to enter the country to pursue their studies. The Australian side designated the Chinese students university military training courses as military training and repatriated them after canceling their visas on the grounds that they concealed the experience of military training. Such acts have gravely undermined the legitimate and lawful rights and interests of Chinese students. Chinas Foreign Ministry and diplomatic missions in Australia have lodged solemn representation with the Australian side and our diplomatic missions have provided consular assistance to those Chinese students at the earliest time possible. What the Australian side has done is at odds with the mutually beneficial and win-win nature of China-Australia people-to-people and cultural exchanges. We urge the Australian side to stop such practice that does no good to others or itself, and create a sound atmosphere and necessary conditions for the bilateral cultural and educational exchanges and cooperation. China will firmly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese students in Australia. TASS: The Pentagon delivered the classified National Defense Strategy to Congress on Monday. According to a Department of Defense fact sheet about the National Defense Strategy, China is described as the most consequential strategic competitor and Russia as an acute threat. I wonder if you have any comments on this report? Wang Wenbin: The above-mentioned US national defense strategy report is full of Cold War and bloc confrontation mentality. China and Russia are two major countries. The US attempt to contain and suppress them will not succeed. The US should reflect on its due responsibilities in the Ukraine crisis, show repentance for and correct the practice of establishing imaginary enemies, ignoring other countries legitimate security concerns and stoking bloc confrontation. We urge the US to earnestly implement its leaderships statements that the US does not seek a new Cold War with China; that it does not aim to change Chinas system; that the revitalization of its alliances is not targeted at China; that it does not support Taiwan independence; and that it has no intention to seek a conflict with China. The US should work with China to find the right way to get along with each other under the new circumstances featuring mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation. Bloomberg: The US is launching an investigation into whether Chinese solar-equipment manufacturers are evading tariffs by sending components to other Asian nations for assembly before shipping finished products to the US. Does the foreign ministry have any comment? Wang Wenbin: Im not aware of the situation you mentioned. Id like to stress that the US trade protectionism will disrupt and undermine the stability of international industrial and supply chains and cooperation on climate change. Such act is like a boomerang that will harm itself at the end of the day. We urge the US to stop wantonly oppressing Chinese enterprises. China will take all necessary measures to uphold the legitimate and lawful rights and interests of Chinese enterprises. Global Times: It is reported that the Taiwanese side said that Damon Wilson, President of the National Endowment for Democracy, is leading a delegation to visit Taiwan from March 27 to 30. The two sides announced that this years Global Assembly of the World Movement for Democracy will be held in Taipei in October. Do you have any comment? Wang Wenbin: The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is believed to be a second CIA. This self-proclaimed non-governmental and non-profit organization actually has long been receiving funds from the US Congress and the White House. Under the pretext of so-called democracy, the NED is engaged in such shady activities as the infiltration of values, subversion and sabotage of other countries regimes, and instigation of anti-government movements around the world. The NED is behind color revolutions, upheavals and violent incidents in many parts of the world, including the Orange Revolution, the Jasmine Revolution, disturbance over proposed legislative amendments in Hong Kong and the anti-government demonstration in Thailand that happened in recent years. The organization has long colluded with anti-government entities in many countries. It is used by the US as a tool to interfere in other countries internal affairs and serve its selfish interests. The NED has long been in league with East Turkistan, Hong Kong independence and Tibet independence forces. It funded and manipulated various anti-China demonstrations and protests, and is a main source and spreader of many China-related lies and rumors. In 2020 alone, the NED provided more than $10 million to nearly 70 China-related projects to promote activities that threatened Chinas political and social stability, according to data published on the organizations website. From 2004 to 2020, the NED provided $8.7583 million in funds to various East Turkistan organizations. It is dedicated to inciting and sponsoring anti-China separatist activities. Now the head of this organization is on a trip to Taiwan under the pretext of democracy. They are not bringing good recipe for democracy to the Taiwan region, but have the poison of separatism up their sleeves. A stern warning to the US side: the attempt to contain China by emboldening the Taiwan independence forces in the name of upholding democracy has never succeeded over the years, and will not succeed in the future. The so-called Summit for Democracy hosted by the US last year ended with little support. If the US again tries to seek political manipulation in support of Taiwan independence under the pretext of democracy, it will only encounter greater failure. Also a stern warning to the DPP authorities in Taiwan: democracy is not a shield for Taiwan independence propositions or elements. True democracy meets the aspiration for the reunification of the nation of the 1.4 billion Chinese people, including our Taiwan compatriots. The DPP authorities political manipulation of seeking Taiwan independence in the name of democracy will only push the people in Taiwan to the abyss of disasters and they will have to face the reckoning of history. Reuters: Can you tell us please whether China has sent a formal invitation to the United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to join in the investigation for the plane crash? If they want to come, how many days of quarantine if any at all would they have to do? Wang Wenbin: I have answered this question yesterday. You may refer to that. Bloomberg: The Solomon Islands Prime Minister said Tuesday that a security agreement with Beijing was ready for signing. The Prime Minister also denied reports that his country has been pressured to allow a Chinese naval base to be built in the nation. Does the foreign ministry have any comment? Wang Wenbin: As we said before, normal law enforcement and security cooperation between China and Solomon Islands, two independent countries, is consistent with international law and customary international practice. It is beyond reproach as it is beneficial to social stability and lasting security of Solomon Islands and the common interest of regional countries. We hope relevant countries will earnestly respect Solomon Islands sovereignty and its independent decisions instead of deciding what others should and should not do in a condescending manner. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi discussed with French President Emmanuel Macron developments in the Ukraine crisis as well as Egypts scheduled hosting of the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in November. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, the President-Designate of COP27, discussed on Sunday with his Japanese counterpart Yoshimasa Hayashi cooperation between the two countries in preparation for the climate change conference, with the aim of ensuring its success in reaching results to bolster action on climate issues. Egypt, which will host the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh in November, has been in talks with a host of international partners to ensure the success ofthe event. During a video conference call, Shoukry and Hayashi also discussed bilateral relations between the two countries, as well as the latest regional and international developments, foreign ministry spokesman Ahmed Hafez said on Sunday. They also discussed cooperation in the fields of culture, investment and trade. Both FMs also addressed various cooperation mechanisms that could benefit Arab and African countries. The Japanese foreign minister expressed his country's continued support for the activities of the Cairo International Centre for Conflict Resolution, Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding (CCCPA). The Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs founded the CCCPA in 1994 "as an independent, non-partisan center of excellence in training, capacity building and research in the fields of conflict prevention and resolution, crisis management, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, transnational threats, and preventing radicalization and extremism leading to terrorism." For his part, Shoukry seconded praise for the centre's role in promoting peace and security in the African continent. The two sides, according to the statement, agreed to enhance coordination within the framework of the Tokyo International Conference on African Developments (TICAD) eighth summit to be held later this year in Tunisia, noting that the summit will focus on supporting African economies in light of the various challenges they face. Cairo has vowed to speak for Africa's aspirations at the COP27 conference, which will discuss ways to support efforts to reduce carbon emissions and provide funding for developing countries to deal with the repercussions of climate change. Search Keywords: Short link: The Kremlin said Monday talks between negotiators from Moscow and Kyiv have so far made no major breakthroughs on the conflict in Ukraine as the delegations prepare for a new round of talks in Istanbul. "So far we cannot state any significant achievements or breakthroughs," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters during his daily press briefing. "For now we cannot and will not speak of progress," Peskov added. He said, however, that it was "important" that it had been decided to continue the talks in person. Peskov said that the delegations were arriving on Monday and it was "unlikely" that talks will resume the same day. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had agreed to host the fresh talks in Istanbul during a telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia and Ukraine failed to make a breakthrough in their first top-level talks, on March 10 in Turkey's Antalya, since Moscow sent its troops into Ukraine in late February. The two sides have held regular talks via video conference but offered scant hopes for any breakthroughs with both sides describing efforts as difficult. Search Keywords: Short link: Armenia on Monday called on Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh to take "concrete steps" after Azerbaijani forces seized control of a strategic village in the breakaway region. In a new flare-up of tensions in the region amid Russia's military offensive in Ukraine, Azerbaijani troops on Thursday captured the village of Farukh in Nagorno-Karabakh. The area is under the responsibility of Russian peacekeepers, who deployed in Karabakh under a Moscow-brokered ceasefire that ended weeks of fighting over the region by Armenia and Azerbaijan in late 2020. Russia's defence ministry said Sunday that Azerbaijan had pulled back its forces from the village, but Baku said its forces remained in control of the area. Armenia's foreign ministry in a statement on Monday demanded an "investigation into the Russian peacekeeping contingent's actions during the Azerbaijani incursion," confirming that Azerbaijani troops remained in the area. "We expect Russia's peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh to take concrete steps to put an end to Azerbaijani units' incursion into the zone of responsibility of peacekeepers," the statement said. Later on Monday, the country's security council accused Azerbaijan of "preparing the ground for fresh provocations and an offensive on Nagorno-Karabakh." It called on Baku to "immediately start talks on a comprehensive peace treaty." "International mechanisms of deterrence must be activated to avoid a fresh military escalation in the region and ethnic cleansing," it said in a statement. A major flare-up in Karabakh could pose a challenge for Russia with its forces deeply engaged in Ukraine. Moscow deployed some 2,000 peacekeepers in the region after the 2020 war over the long-contested enclave which claimed more than 6,500 lives. Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the ensuing conflict claimed around 30,000 lives. mkh-im/cdw Search Keywords: Short link: The progression of the collapse is visible in the image series above. Images were acquired with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASAs Terra and Aqua satellites. It is relatively common for ice shelves in Antarctica to spawn icebergs. It is less common for an ice shelf to completely disintegrate. In March 2022, an ice shelf in East Antarctica did both. The collapse has reshaped a part of the Antarctic landscape where coastal glacial ice was once thought to be stable. The change happened fast. At the start of March 2022, the floating shelf fed by the Glenzer and Conger glaciers was still intact. By the middle of the month, it had fallen apart. This image pair (above), acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, shows the shelf before and after it disintegrated. "The whole shelf collapsed in just around two weeks," said Christopher Shuman, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County, glaciologist based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The icy remnants of both glacial shelf ice and adjacent sea ice dispersed from the waters around Bowman Island within weeks. "All of this took less than a month," Shuman said. "It was quite the blowout." The first image shows the ice shelf floating on the Mawson Sea on February 22, 2022, prior to the collapse. Fast ice--a type of sea ice that becomes "fastened" to the edges of ice shelves, coastlines, and icebergs--is also part of the mix. For two years prior to this image, the shelf was already in a state of decline. According to Catherine Walker of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the shelf was losing ice at an average rate of about 1 square kilometer per day through the natural process of iceberg calving. But in early March 2022, the shelf in front of the Glenzer Glacier calved a substantial iceberg. Named C-37, the berg initially measured about 144 square kilometers (56 square miles). A few pieces broke off, such that C-37 measured about 81 square kilometers on March 12 when MODIS acquired the second image in the series. The substantial loss of ice meant the shelf disconnected from Bowman Island. (Note that some sea ice remained attached to the island.) "Without being supported by a land anchor, the ice shelf was destabilized and primed to collapse," said Jonathan Wille, a postdoctoral researcher at the Universite Grenoble Alpes. According to Wille, an atmospheric river on March 15 appears to have triggered the shelf's final collapse. The weather system--which caused temperatures in eastern Antarctica to soar 40 degrees Celsius above normal--also enhanced ocean swells and amplified winds near the vulnerable shelf. This likely caused the ice in front of Conger Glacier to break apart and quickly disperse. The third MODIS image above shows the area on March 16 after the final collapse. The event spawned Iceberg C-38, which at the time measured about 415 square kilometers (160 square miles). The final image in the series shows the crumbled shelf ice and fast ice as it dispersed in the sea on March 21. The loss of an ice shelf is problematic because it can indirectly contribute to sea level rise. "Ice shelves are essentially the 'safety band' holding up the rest of the Antarctic Ice Sheet," Walker said. When they collapse, the ice behind them can more quickly flow into the ocean. "And that is what raises sea levels." By Antarctic standards, the ice shelf and glaciers that it held back are relatively small, so the impacts from the collapse are expected to be minimal. Scientists are more concerned about the location of the collapse. "All of the previous collapses have taken place in West Antarctica, not East Antarctica, which until recently has been thought of as relatively stable," Walker said. "This is something like a dress rehearsal for what we could expect from other, more massive ice shelves if they continue to melt and destabilize. Then we'll really be past the turnaround point in terms of slowing sea level rise." NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen. More imagery Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the talks under way with Russia in Istanbul are focusing on security guarantees for Ukraine and hopes of a cease-fire. Mykhailo Podolyak told Ukrainian media on Tuesday that there are ``intensive consultations going on regarding several important issues, the key among those is an agreement on international security guarantees for Ukraine.`` He said that ``only with this agreement can we end the war in a way that Ukraine needs.'' He adds that ``the second block of issues is a cease-fire so that we could resolve all the humanitarian problems which have piled up and which require urgent resolutions.'' Podolyak added the two sides were also discussing breaches of the rules of war. In a speech he delivered at the start Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for a cease-fire and said progress in the talks could pave the way for a meeting between the two countries' leaders. ``We believe that there will be no losers in a just peace. Prolonging the conflict is not in anyone's interest,'' Erdogan said. ``As members of the delegations you have taken on a historic responsibility. The whole world is awaiting the good news that will come from you.'' The delegations are scheduled to hold two days of talks in a government building adjacent to the 19th-century Ottoman palace, Dolmabahce, on the shores of the Bosporus. Earlier talks between the sides, held in person in Belarus or by video, failed to make progress on ending the monthlong war that has killed thousands and driven more than 10 million Ukrainians from their homes including almost 4 million from their country. Ahead of the talks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said his country is prepared to declare its neutrality, as Moscow has demanded, and is open to compromise on the fate of the Donbas, the contested region in the country's east. Search Keywords: Short link: Egypt's Minister of Environment Yasmine Fouad asserted that world countries should determine their needs to mitigate the negative impact of climate change along with diversifying the funding tools of soft loans, debt exchange and loans to ease small and medium-scale projects. Fouad's comments came during the minister's participation in a seminar held on the fringe of the Climate Week in the Middle East and North Africa, held on March 27-31 in Dubai, UAE. She also reviewed the mechanisms for creating a framework to support climate funding through expounding Egypt's experiment in new and renewable energy that has been carried out through several steps such as the electricity law, the localization of new and renewable technology as well as opening the market to the new and renewable industry. Egypt is preparing to host the 2022 United Nations Conference of Parties on Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh this November. Cairo has stressed it will place a priority on projects to mitigate the effects of climate change, including a focus on meeting the obligations of the Paris Agreement and exploring how the private sector and NGOs can play a role in financing green investments during the conference. Egypt also stressed it will build at the COP27 on the outcomes of Glasgow's COP26 to move from the stage of climate pledges to actual action on the ground, whether in reducing emissions or financing climate-oriented projects in developing African countries. Cairo has vowed to speak up for Africa's aspirations to cope with climate change at the COP27. Search Keywords: Short link: A group of Egyptian sailors who have found themselves stuck in the heart of the Russian invasion of Ukraine for more than a month are seeking to return home as they fear on their lives. We are a crew made of 20 members, only the captain is Lebanese, and head of marine engineers is Syrian while the rest are Egyptians, Hamda Aionu, an Egyptian marine engineer and member of Rek Noble bulk cargo vessel told Ahram Online on Tuesday. We arrived at Kherson a couple of days before the Russian invasion and we have been stuck in front of the Kherson Port since then, he said, adding it has been so dangerous so far; the shelling and strikes continue till now. According to the VesselFinder website, the Rek Noble arrived in Kherson on 22 February from Misrata, Libya. Two days later, Russia started its invasion, which would go on to have significant political, economic and social impacts on the world. The vessel is currently anchored in the mouth of Dnieper River, where it has witness military operations, including shelling on the Ukrainian mainland. The food and drink are not enough for more than 10 [more] days, Ainou told Ahram Online, describing how he and the rest of the crew are washing themselves in the Dnieper River to conserve their onboard water. We are worried, our families are worried and it is dangerous; the battles do not stop, Aionu, who is originally from the city of Rosetta in the Behaira governorate, told Ahram Online. In early March, news reports described how hundreds of sailors from around the globe were trapped in the Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea. One Bangladeshi crew member on a bulk carrier was killed and others were injured with serious burns when a missile struck their cargo. In mid-March, Panama announced three Panamanian-flags ships in the Black sea had been struck by Russian missiles since the start of the Russian invasion to Ukraine. According to the Panamas Maritime Authority, at least other 10 other Panamanian-flagged ships are still stuck in the black Sea as the Russian Navy forces are restricting ships from leaving the area. Rek Noble is one of them. Only a week ago, Ainou and the rest of the Egyptian sailors managed to get a hold of the Egyptian embassy in Kyiv for help. Currently Hamda Ainou and the rest of the Egyptian members of the crew are hoping that on Wednesday they will be allowed to leave the vessel and enter Ukraine despite not having entry permits. The Lebanese captain and the Syrian marine engineer got their permits, and they are the [only] ones who can order us to leave the ship. If they have their permits then maybe we will be granted permits too, he told Ahram Online, wondering at the same what they would do if they are not granted permits. Another question facing the Egyptian crew is how they will leave Kherson and to get to safety once ashore. The Egyptian embassy has already managed to evacuate the Egyptians in Kherson. Ainou has told Ahram Online that the head of the Egyptian community in Ukraine Ali Farouk attempted to get permits for them but failed. He also said the Egyptian embassy has been trying to get permits for the Egyptian sailors to go ashore. The embassy expressed that it wished that it knew about the crew earlier as it could have been easier to evacuate them, according to Ainou. Kherson, a city of 200,000 people, has already fallen under Russian control. Fighting between the two sides has continued, however, as Ukrainian forces launched a counterattack a couple of days ago to retake the city. Earlier this week, the Egyptian foreign ministry and the Egyptian community announced the death of the first Egyptian citizen in the conflict due to the Russian shelling in the besieged city of Mariupol. Egypt has been pushing forward with efforts to bring its nationals home from Ukraine. Prior to the Russian invasion, around 6,000 Egyptians lived in Ukraine, including 3,000 students studying at the countrys universities, especially in the field of medicine. Over the past three weeks, scores of Egyptian expats have already crossed the borders into Romania, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Search Keywords: Short link: President Joe Biden said Tuesday that the United States is forging "strongly" ahead on its growing Asia-Pacific focus, despite the crisis sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Hosting Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in the Oval Office, Biden said the world's "rules-based order" faces "unprecedented challenges," but that Washington has not been distracted by the Ukraine war. "Even as we address the crisis in Europe, my administration is strongly supportive of moving rapidly to implement the Indo-Pacific strategy," Biden said. Describing the United States as "a proud Indo-Pacific nation," Biden said he wanted to ensure that the region remains "free and open" -- a reference to what the White House sees as attempts by rising power China to dominate international trade routes. Lee urged closer ties between the United States and the ASEAN grouping, saying "it helps the US to be present in the Asia-Pacific and to deepen its relations with many friends and to strengthen its strategic interests in the region." Reflecting Singapore's position as a trading hub eager to maintain good relations with both Beijing and Washington, Lee said he hoped Biden would "deepen" relations with "China certainly, but also other countries besides China." The two leaders were to make a joint media appearance later. Ukraine Invasion Looms The Biden administration has repeatedly characterized the Asia-Pacific region, and particularly the rise of communist China, as the number one strategic issue for the United States. The world's two biggest economies are at loggerheads over trade, human rights, and, more broadly, what Biden often portrays as a defining struggle in the 21st century between the globe's autocracies and democracies. But concerns about China have been pushed to the back burner by the emergency in Europe, where Russia's military is in its second month of attacking neighboring, pro-Western Ukraine in a crisis more reminiscent of the Cold War. Even the alarming acceleration of North Korea's nuclear program -- including testing an intercontinental ballistic missile last week -- has been overshadowed by Russian President Vladimir Putin's bloody campaign. Inevitably, the Russian war against Ukraine loomed large over Lee's visit. Singapore announced in February it was joining other pro-Western powers in imposing sanctions on Russia, including blocking financial transactions. The wealthy city-state rarely sanctions other countries without UN backing, but Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan cited the "unprecedented gravity" of the crisis. And Russia's attack on Ukraine, which Putin says he wants to "demilitarize," has deeply shocked US allies beyond Europe, including Australia and Japan. A US official said Putin's shredding of international borders "poses a threat not only for Europe but also for the Indo-Pacific." But while the official described Singapore and other regional powers as "stepping up," India has pointedly refused to condemn Russia's war, while Western officials fear China could actively help the Russians. Search Keywords: Short link: Two main subjects likely headed the agenda during the recent round of summit meetings in the Gulf: the war in Ukraine and prospects of the US returning to the nuclear deal with Iran. Over the last few days, the Gulf region has witnessed a build-up in diplomatic activity with state visits, formal and informal summits, and high-level meetings all taking place. The activity has been driven by the war in Ukraine and the schism it is creating in international politics. The Gulf region is the centre of such activity as both a venue and a driving force behind it. Two main Gulf cities, Abu Dhabi and Doha, have adopted what one commentator called diplomacy on steroids in their approach to Ukraine. In an unforeseen move, the UAE also invited Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to Abu Dhabi on his first state visit to an Arab country since the conflict in Syria started in 2011. The visit was seen as a snub to the UAEs Western allies, including the US. Washington responded with a State Department statement voicing profound disappointment at what it said was an attempt to legitimise Al-Assad. Rumours circulated in Washington that the US only knew about the visit from media reports. Days later, Abu Dhabi Crown-Prince Mohamed bin Zayed briefed Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett about the visit at a tripartite meeting on 21 March in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh. Three days later on 25 March, Jordans King Abdullah hosted another meeting in the Red Sea resort of Aqaba with both Al-Sisi and Bin Zayed along with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi. Some days after this a meeting in Al-Naqab in Israel hosted by Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Labid included US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the foreign ministers of Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco. King Abdullah visited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah at the same time. The Israeli media stressed the significance of the meeting in gathering the Arab countries that have signed the so-called Abraham Accords with Israel, namely the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, along with long-standing peace partner Egypt in Israel to meet the US secretary of state. Despite official announcements from all these meetings about discussing issues of mutual interest along with international and regional developments, two main subjects were probably at the top of the agenda: the war in Ukraine and the US rejoining the nuclear deal with Iran. The implications of the war in Ukraine for the region are evident, and Gulf oil and gas producers seem to be seizing the opportunity to regain a position obscured by US disengagement from the region even before the administration of President Joe Biden took office last year. While Saudi Arabia was not represented in the summits and meetings, it was likely to be well-briefed about them, if not consulted beforehand. Saudi commentator Abdul-Aziz Alkhames told Al-Ahram Weekly that the current developments provide an opportunity to make up for US indifference to the region. He said there was a need for Gulf energy exports to help Europe lessen its dependence on Russian oil and gas. Saudi Arabia and the UAE did not heed Bidens calls to increase their energy output to help moderate price increases, and they have honoured their longstanding agreement with Russia and other non-OPEC producers to stabilise global energy markets. The Gulf countries have a growing relationship with Russia and China, and Saudi Arabia and the UAE are sour about the US ignoring the attacks on them by the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen. The Gulf moves are trying to make up for the Wests indifference to its concerns over Iran, threats from Yemen, and other issues, Alkhames said. The energy crisis arising from the war in Ukraine has instigated these moves by the Gulf countries to gain more cards and concessions, from the US in particular. Gas-rich Qatar is not following the same path, and it has already gained by securing a gas deal with Germany that it has been trying to secure for a year. Its cosy relationship with Iran also puts it in a position closer to the Biden administration regarding reviving the nuclear deal with Tehran, winning Doha the title of major non-NATO ally of the US. This week Qatar hosted the Doha Forum and gave Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a live platform to speak at an event that included Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad. Some analysts see this as a switching of roles by Doha and Abu Dhabi from the time of former US president Donald Trump. Others predicted that the rivalry between Doha and Abu Dhabi will go further, especially as Saudi Arabia will not allow divisions in the Gulf to ruin the regions golden opportunity to take a unified stand, one Gulf source told the Weekly. Saudi Arabia has conveyed its disapproval of the revival of the Iran nuclear deal without addressing the issue of Irans interference in the region through proxy militias in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and other countries. However, Riyadh is still wary of breaking the taboo of coordinating with the Israelis in public. These alliances are important in facing up to rising Iranian influence, especially after the conclusion of the Vienna talks and the possible revival of Irans nuclear deal with the world powers, Alkhames said. Iran will likely increase its destabilising activities, benefiting from more revenues from resumed oil and gas exports, if a deal is reached in the Vienna talks. Meanwhile, the present round of summits and meetings aims to build new regional alliances that are parallel to, or even slightly away from, the already waning US influence in the region. Such alliances will be mainly security and economic ones, he said. Some commentators in the Israeli media have echoed Alkhames views, though they cite the Sharm El-Sheikh summit as being more important than the Al-Naqab meeting of the Abraham Accords signatories. The Jerusalem Post commented on the summit that the fact that the leaders of Egypt and the UAE are meeting at this time with the Israeli prime minister indicates not that a drift from the US presages a drift from Israel, but rather the opposite. Since the US is not viewed now as reliable an ally as it once was, this is the time to move closer to Israel to counter common threats. But Israeli commentators are not optimistic about there being a very significant outcome from the meetings and realise that Israel cannot go too far in alienating the US. A lead article in the Israeli daily Haaretz on the Al-Naqab summit concluded that it will provide ample opportunities for photo-ops, lofty speeches, and a good ambiance, but each dignitary brings with them a diversity of interests, with Iran presenting the biggest. UK Oxford University political analyst Andrew Hammond refuted the notion of the Gulf countries replacing the US with Israel floated by some commentators. He told the Weekly that whats happening in terms of Gulf policies of late is a natural and expected response to the shift in US priorities since Obama. The Gulf states have realised they have more room for manoeuvre now than they did before. The pushback from the US administration will be limited, if it even exists at all. The outcome of such diplomatic efforts depends on the two main factors of the Ukraine war and the Iran nuclear deal. It is not yet clear if the Vienna talks are about to be wrapped up, letting Iran back onto the regional stage, and uncertainty about the Russian war in Ukraine has never been higher. For the Gulf to bet on Russia coming out of the Ukraine war stronger is risky, while Qatars bet on keeping to its established policy of siding with Washington and keeping warm relations with Iran while not antagonising Russia looks safer. Rushing towards Israel might not have the same momentum, even if the rest of the Gulf shares the same concerns about the Iran deal. It might just be a temporary card to play in protest at the US neglect of Gulf interests. Take Gulf cooperation with [the Chinese company] Huawei on 5G technology virtually all the Gulf states ignored the US warnings. The UAE called the Biden administrations bluff over buying F35 fighter jets. Saudi Arabia is toying with trading oil with China in yuan, which could provoke the US into taking radical anti-Saudi measures. The Gulfs favours to the US are considerable, so they have leverage, not least on Israel, Hammond said. But as a result of the war in Ukraine, the US and the Wests focus on Russia and China will overshadow developments in the region and in the Gulf in particular. The relationship between the West and the Gulf after the Ukraine war will not be the same as it was before. I think the West will not forget that the Gulf didnt side with it in this crisis. The Gulf will also not forget the Wests positions on the Yemeni threats, Irans nuclear programme, and the other concerns in the region, Alkhames said. The main benefactor from these moves and rapidly changing positions seems to be Israel. It is entrenching its position as a regional player, whatever the outcome of the Ukraine war or the Iran nuclear deal. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Search Keywords: Short link: President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said on Tuesday that Egypt totally supports Libyas national interest, including its unity, in a meeting with the President of the Libyan Presidential Council Mohamed Al-Manfi, the Egyptian presidency said. El-Sisi reiterated Egypts stance on supporting Libyan state institutions and their role in holding the presidential and parliamentary elections in Libya and ending the transitional period in way that allows the Libyan people to choose their leaders and representatives. From his side, Al-Manfi expressed his appreciation for the vital Egyptian role in restoring security and stability in Libya by supporting the efforts of Libyan national reconciliation and the re-unification of the Libyan state institutions. Al-Manfi also expressed his gratitude for Egypts support of the efforts aiming to implements the international and UN Security Council resolutions concerning the exit of all foreign forces and mercenaries from the country. During the meeting, the Egyptian president and the Manfi, agreed to intensify consultation and coordination between Libya and Egypt to facilitate the holding of the presidential and parliamentary elections concurrently. Egypts Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry and Head of Egyptian General Intelligence Service Abbas Kamel attended the meeting along with Libyas Permanent Envoy to the League of Arab States Abdel-Motaleb Idris Search Keywords: Short link: More than 10 million people have been displaced in Ukraine or beyond its borders since the war in the country began, placing growing pressures on the countries hosting refugees. US President Joe Biden met some of the refugees that have been pouring across the border with Ukraine on a visit to Poland last weekend, while at the same time giving a widely reported speech in Warsaw during which he described Russian President Vladimir Putin as a butcher and appeared to call for a change of regime in the Russian Federation. Bidens comments were immediately contradicted by administration officials in Washington as well as by the countrys European allies, who warned against the escalation of the US-led sanctions against Russia to include not only attempts at isolating Russia economically and politically as a result of the war in Ukraine but also at bringing down the Russian president. French President Emmanuel Macron told the French TV channel France 3 on Sunday that everything must be done to stop the situation from escalating if there is to be any hope of stopping the war in Ukraine, distancing France from Bidens comments. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that the US has no strategy for Russian regime change, despite Bidens earlier comment that Putin cannot remain in power as Russian president. I think the president, the White House, made the point last night that, quite simply, President Putin cannot be empowered to wage war or engage in aggression against Ukraine or anyone else, Blinken said. As you know, and as you have heard us say repeatedly, we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter, he added. With the war in Ukraine entering its second month, however, and with a diplomatic solution to the conflict seemingly as far off as ever, many in Europe are asking what the next steps might be in efforts to end the war. As the conflict drags on without a solution in sight, more and more refugees have been pouring across Ukraines western borders into the European Union countries of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, together with Moldova, not a member of the EU, creating what is being described as the most important refugee crisis on the European continent since the end of World War II. According to UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) figures, some 3,821,000 people had fled Ukraine for neighbouring countries by 26 March, including 2,267,100 going to Poland and 586,942 going to Romania. Some 381,395 Ukrainian refugees had entered Moldova by the same date, along with 349,107 entering Hungary and 272,012 Slovakia. Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia are all members of the Schengen Zone, meaning that Ukrainian refugees entering these countries can travel on freely to other EU countries without encountering border controls. According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), a UN organisation based in Geneva, almost 6.48 million people have been internally displaced in Ukraine as a result of the war, meaning that more than 10 million people have been forcibly displaced both in Ukraine and beyond the countrys borders since the beginning of the conflict. The scale of human suffering and forced displacement due to the war far exceeds any worst-case scenario planning, IOM Director-General Antonio Vitorino said, pointing to the urgent need for accommodation, healthcare, and other facilities in the mostly western areas of Ukraine that have been hosting internally displaced people and for similar needs to be met in neighbouring European countries hosting refugees. Meanwhile, the worlds media has been showing images of the terrible destruction being meted out in Ukraine, with pictures from the eastern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol and from Kharkiv and other cities across the country showing huge areas devastated by aerial bombing and the ongoing fighting between the invading Russian military and Ukrainian forces. According to media reports this week, the direct costs of the war in Ukraine have reached some $63 billion, with the indirect costs, calculated in terms of Ukraines overall economic losses due to the war, being up to $600 billion, according to estimates from the Ukrainian Ministry of the Economy. Some 1,150 Ukrainian civilians had been killed in the war by 27 March, according to the UN High Commission for Human Rights, with Ukrainian and US figures being considerably higher. According to the Russian government, some 1,350 Russian military personnel had been killed in the fighting in Ukraine by the end of March, with this figure reaching 15,000 according to NATO sources. Under the EUs temporary protection directive, activated for the first time on 4 March, people fleeing Ukraine will be eligible for temporary protection in the EU countries for up to three years, giving them residence permits and access to education, healthcare, social security, and the labour market without the need to claim asylum or register as refugees. Some 500 million from the EU budget has been set aside to deal with the humanitarian consequences of the war, both inside Ukraine and beyond, with individual EU countries also delivering over 100 million worth of supplies through the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. According to EU statements on assistance to Ukraine, the aid includes first aid kits, protective clothing, tents, firefighting equipment, power generators and water pumps. Humanitarian aid including hygiene kits and power generators has been sent by EU member states to assist in the reception of Ukrainian refugees in Moldova. The EU Civil Protection Mechanism has provided assistance for Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic in hosting Ukrainian refugees, with Poland receiving aid from France, Denmark, Germany, Austria, and Belgium in the form of shelter equipment and medical supplies. Medical assistance has been sent to Ukraine from medical stockpiles based in Germany, Hungary, and the Netherlands, including ventilators, infusion pumps, patient monitors, masks and gowns, ultrasound devices and oxygen concentrators. EU civil protection logistical hubs have been set up in Poland and Romania, with others being set up in Slovakia, to distribute aid to Ukraine. EU Home Affairs funds for 2021-2027 are being set aside to provide resources to ensure reception facilities and asylum procedures for people fleeing the conflict in Ukraine. According to EU statements, the implementation period for earlier Home Affairs funds could be extended, releasing 420 million in additional support. EU Cohesion Funds could also be used to assist member states in hosting Ukrainian refugees, with money also being found from other programmes including the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund, and the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived. While such funding for particularly the frontline EU countries in meeting the needs of the Ukrainian refugees on their territory will assist them in dealing with the millions of people who have already fled Ukraine, the longer the conflict lasts without the prospect of a diplomatic solution, the greater the numbers of people fleeing to the EU countries are likely to be. Already there are indications that the humanitarian and other aid provided to the EU countries bordering Ukraine is unlikely to be sufficient even to provide for the existing refugees, let alone for the further waves that are expected should the conflict continue. At a summit meeting of EU leaders held in Brussels last weekend, joined on the first day by Biden, Polish officials reportedly said that Poland alone will need to spend 11 billion on costs including accommodation and social services for Ukrainian refugees and more than double that amount should the up to three million Ukrainian refugees on its territory stay for the rest of the year. Biden later attended a meeting of the heads of state and government of the NATO countries in Brussels before heading to Poland to make a speech in Warsaw and meet some of the Ukrainian refugees. Poland along with other frontline European countries has reportedly been putting pressure on the EU Commission to increase support for hosting Ukrainian refugees in addition to the money that has thus far been made available, often from reprioritising existing funding streams. Poland is in a particularly difficult situation since its application for 36 billion in EU Covid-19 pandemic recovery funds has already been blocked by the European Commission in an argument over Polands judicial system, described as not being in line with European standards on the rule of law. Other EU funding to Poland has also been delayed, and the country is paying fines of one million euros a day. Similar legal action has also been taken by the Commission against Hungary as a result of what it says is the countrys failure to uphold human rights standards and the rule of law, also freezing its application for EU Covid-19 pandemic recovery funds. With both countries now on the frontlines of European efforts to host the Ukrainian refugees, observers are watching how the EU will respond both to pressure to make additional funding available to them and their continuing failure to implement EU law. Poland in particular has emerged as a centre for the reception of Ukrainian refugees, as signalled by Bidens decision to make the country his only European stopping off point after his attendance at the EU and NATO summit meetings in Brussels last weekend. During his visit, Biden praised Poland for taking significant responsibility in welcoming the Ukrainian refugees and visited a US military base at Rzeszow near the border with Ukraine after pledging in his Warsaw speech that every inch of NATO territory [must be defended] with the full force of our collective power in what he said would be the long fight ahead. The longer the fight, the more pressing the needs of the refugees are likely to be. Many have already commented on the contrast between the EU welcome for the Ukrainian refugees and the way it has treated refugees from other conflicts in Asia and Africa, generally requiring them to apply for asylum or keeping them in holding camps until their claims are processed. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Short link: The coverage of the Ukraine war has exposed the Western media as never before, and if public opinion across the world is shaped mostly by Western media analyses, we should be quite concerned. In the face of crises, especially wars, the media should play an objective role, provide non-partisan information, present deescalating feedback, further rational discussion, and document the truth. Though complete objectivity is likely to be impossible, the Western medias coverage of this particular war runs counter to these goals. True, the invasion of Ukraine is a terrible catastrophe, and the consequences of it will reverberate far and wide. However, the Ukraine war has received more media coverage than any other conflict around the world. The reasons are obvious if highly arbitrary: Ukraine is in Europe; Russia, the aggressor, is a nuclear power; and Western interests are being threatened. Just one query, though: when the US bombs other countries around the world, isnt it a nuclear power, too? Lets look at how the Western media is failing its followers around the world. First, it considers the Ukraine war to be worthy of coverage and deserving of the sympathetic ear of the public while minimal attention is spent on similar issues elsewhere. By not focusing on all the other crises, it deems them insignificant and lets the world assume they dont exist, which sends a biased message. The Western media, rightly worried about Ukrainian children, reports that 4.2 million of them have been displaced, whether within Ukraine or abroad. However, 5.2 million Yemeni children are at risk of starvation, and 85,000 have already died of hunger, but very little coverage is given in the Western media to the conflict in Yemen. Furthermore, although 1,100 civilians have died in Ukraine, as many as 500,000 people have died from war and famine in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia over the last 16 months. But coverage of the Ethiopian War is non-existent in the Western media. Second, the Western media has become a mouthpiece for Western views, serving as state media rather than an independent entity. The US academic and intellectual Noam Chomsky says in his book about the Western media, Manufacturing Consent, published in 1988, that the media serve and propagandise on behalf of the powerful societal interests that control them. Though the Western media hails unbiased and impartial reporting in the present war, it corroborates the Western message while downplaying the Russian side of the story whether or not it is valid. Russian reports are considered to be lies that do not deserve to be investigated further. The following message appears on Twitter after the Russian News Agency Tass reports, this Tweet links to a Russia state-affiliated media website, shedding doubt on what the Russian News Agency says. The Western media is also repeating Ukrainian propaganda without any verification of it. The Ukrainians have some right to bend the truth to encourage the allegiance they need, but the media must scrutinise what they report so that disinformation does not become the norm. Russia could have lost as many as 15,000 troops in Ukraine, announces the Washington Post. Putin humiliated, as captured bomber pilot says, we have already lost this war, according to the UK Daily Express. The US magazine Newsweek says that captured Russian pilot says he was ordered to hit civilians, which, if he did indeed say this, makes us wonder if he was tortured, but this ethical aspect is not pursued. Third, the war on Ukraine has highlighted racial prejudice in the West, which is mirrored in the Western media, exposing an odd rule of thumb that the Ukrainians are superior to Ethiopians, Middle Easterners, and other victimised souls. Labelling the war as Europes first major land war in decades, exemplifies this bias. It means that such wars dont happen in Europe but that they are normal elsewhere. The examples are numerous and are repeated daily starting with Western officials and then repeated by the Western media. Ukraines Deputy Chief Prosecutor David Sakvarelidze, says, its very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed. The media pursues the same tone. These are not refugees from Syria; these are refugees from Ukraine Theyre Christian; theyre white. Then, theyre very similar [to us], Kelly Cobiella, the US NBC News correspondent says. Philippe Corbe, a journalist on the most-watched French TV news channel, said that were not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin; were talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives. Daniel Hannan in the UK Daily Telegraph wrote that war no longer happens in impoverished and remote populations. US CBS News correspondent Charlie DAgata said that this isnt a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilised, relatively European I have to choose those words carefully, too city where you wouldnt expect that, or hope that its going to happen. I wonder what he would have said if he hadnt chosen his words carefully. Hoda Osman, president of the New York-based Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association, in an interview with the US network CNN said that what is sad this time is that the [offending] comments came so casually, spontaneously, and as a result revealed existing bias, something we would expect a journalist covering an international event to be above. The Western medias role in misleading the Ukrainians is also pivotal. It highlights Western financial support for Ukraine, encourages Ukrainian resilience, and reports on the sanctions the West is imposing on Russia and the Western companies that are pulling out of Russia, while all the while telling the Ukrainians to stay the course regardless of warning them of what such actions could cause. No Western media reporter talks about de-escalation or peace in Ukraine. These are issues that are not worth tackling. Ben Sixsmith in the Washington Post says that journalists should not massage the facts and spin narratives to make them more favourable to the Ukrainians. In his usual comic but logical fashion, the US TV host Jon Stewart in a podcast on media reporting in Ukraine said that the reporting is no longer about what is happening but is actually about shaping the news. As a result, questions of the following nature are the ones that get the most attention. Would you bomb them if they touched Poland? Would you bomb them if they had a drone? What would it take for you to bomb them? How about bombing them? We have a question for you. Bombs. What about those? What if Putin got killed? What if we killed Putin? Stewart doesnt believe that the Western media has a liberal bias but thinks that it has a bias towards sensationalism and escalation and conflict. He continues that I dont think that journalists are sitting in the White House Press Corps saying, please, please a big war. But they definitely know that this is an opportunity of a lifetime. Journalists are not neutral. As a result, we, members of the generally uninformed public awaiting news from sources we have come to rely on, must be wary of what we are presented with and how it is presented. We must learn to sift through the information we are receiving, so that we can draw our own conclusions. * The writer is the author of Cairo Rewind on the First Two Years of Egypts Revolution, 2011-2013. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly. Search Keywords: Short link: The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, which is likely to last for some time has negatively impacted the Middle East on many fronts. So has lack of clarity regarding the future of the entire world order. On this understanding, Egypt has been involved in intensive diplomacy in an attempt to contain the negative effects of the war, both politically and economically. Over a month after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the special military operation or invasion of Ukraine, key world institutions, such as the United Nations and the IMF, have warned that several Arab nations are already suffering the economic consequences and a looming food crises since they depend on imports of basic commodities, such as wheat and oilseed, from Russia and Ukraine. The coronavirus pandemic and consequent logistical challenges had already raised wheat prices by 80 per cent since April 2020. On February 24, the day military operations started in Ukraine, wheat futures in Paris rose 16 per cent. Even the World Food Organisation has complained that they now have to pay an additional $70 million dollars for the same amount of wheat they need in their humanitarian operations. The same will definitely apply to many Arab countries, including Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria, Iraq and Yemen, who depend on wheat imports to meet the needs of their populations. The development of military operations, human loss, and flow of millions of Ukrainian refugees to several European nations as well as serious security fears, and oil and gas price hikes, have all added tremendous pressure on the world economy. Worse, it turned the worlds attention away from acute humanitarian crises in the Middle East and Africa. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has recently pointed out that world concern with the situation in Ukraine has sharply reduced contributions to provide much needed food and aid for millions in Yemen, Syria and other war-torn nations. On the political front, several Arab nations find themselves in an awkward situation, particularly those who have historically attempted to maintain positive ties with both the United States and Russia. Indeed we are not living through the Cold War, when countries had to pick which side they were on: the United States, or the former Soviet Union. The logic since the end of the Cold War has been that the world has been heading towards a multi-polar order, where business and trade would replace political polarisation and ideological differences. Many Arab countries have thus developed close economic ties with both the US and Russia. Historic ties between several Arab nations and the former Soviet Union have also been a factor in the attempt to maintain a balanced relationship between the US and Russia, even though Putins Russia is no former Soviet Union. This has obviously turned out to be wishful thinking, and the world is once again being divided over Cold War lines, even if there is no socialism involved. Russia, together with China, has been clear in their rejection of a US-dominated world order. This seems appealing to several Middle East regional powers that have also been badly hurt by US sanctions, such as Iran. Turkey, meanwhile, saw an opportunity to affirm its regional influence by playing the role of mediator, hoping to maintain that same difficult balance, considering that Ankara is a NATO member, and has maintained friendly relations with Moscow. Both Russia and Turkey are jointly involved in Syria and Libya, all fronts where the Ukraine war is likely to resonate in the case of a wider confrontation between Moscow and Washington. Considering this complicated scene and the possible long wait for a final outcome, Egypt has been working non-stop in consultation with the United States and key Arab partners to prevent the situation from worsening in many of Arab hotspots. Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri took part in the unprecedented summit in Naqab, hosted by Israels foreign minister, together with counterparts from the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, to stress one key point: that stability and security in the Middle East region should not deteriorate further. In addition, key powers involved in the war in Ukraine should not ignore the negative economic consequences this war has had on many countries in the region, and provide much needed assistance on that front. In statements following consultations with his Qatari counterpart on Monday, Shoukri stressed that the Naqab meeting was not aimed at forming a front against any particular regional power. Meanwhile, it was an important opportunity to remind the host, Israel, that amid the complicated world scene and the expected agreement on Irans nuclear programme in Vienna, the rights of the Palestinian people must not be forgotten. In Naqab, Shoukri affirmed the need for a return to peace talks between Israel and Palestine, ending up with two states: Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital along the 1967 war borders and according to UN Security Council resolutions, as well as Israel. The situation had already been disastrous in Arab countries such as Syria, Libya, Yemen and Lebanon, long before the war broke out in Ukraine. As a key regional power, working alongside world and regional allies, Egypt feels obliged to do the utmost to reduce harm in our troubled region. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly. Search Keywords: Short link: REGARDED as another step forward in bilateral relations, Cairo and Doha declared this week that they have established a joint committee headed by their foreign ministers to enhance cooperation and coordination in all fields and to continue consultation. The announcement came during a brief visit to Cairo on Monday by Qatari Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Mohamed bin Abdul-Rahman Al-Thani. Egypts Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri and Abdul-Rahman Al-Thani agreed that bilateral relations had returned to normal, according to a joint statement issued after the meeting. Both diplomats hailed the work of bilateral committees, formed after the AlUla Declaration, by which various agreements and memoranda of understanding had been signed by the two countries and consensus was reached on a number of issues on their agendas. In a press conference held after the meeting, Shoukri said that relations are moving forward in a way that helps both countries meet joint challenges and enhances joint Arab efforts to achieve the ambitions of their peoples. Abdul-Rahman Al-Thani pointed in the presser to bilateral relations that are in constant development and that his country is after further upgrading these relations. It was Abdul-Rahman Al-Thanis second visit to Egypt since the signing of Al-Ula Declaration in January 2021 by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to restore diplomatic, economic, and travel ties with Qatar after a boycott was imposed by four Arab counties in mid-2017. The countries had jointly boycotted Qatar in order to pressure Doha to end its close relations with Turkey and Iran. Abdul-Rahman Al-Thani visited Cairo in May last year and met President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi. During that visit, he discussed with Soukri ways to improve bilateral ties as well as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam dispute between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. The two diplomats met again in June in Doha. The visit also aimed at taking more measures to advance bilateral cooperation in a manner that achieves the interests of the two countries. Since the dispute ended, ties among the five countries improved, official visits exchanged and various cooperation agreements signed. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly. Search Keywords: Short link: Three Expedition 66 Flight Engineers are returning to Earth in less than two days as four private astronauts prepare for their mission to the International Space Station. The crew activities haven't stopped the ongoing space research as the orbital residents studied biology, botany, and physics on Monday. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei is nearing the end of his missions as he prepares to return to Earth on Wednesday after a NASA-record breaking 355 days in space. Soyuz Commander Anton Shkaplerov will lead Vande Hei and Flight Engineer Pyotr Dubrov inside the Soyuz MS-19 crew ship when they undock from the Rassvet module at 3:21 a.m. EDT on Wednesday. The trio will parachute to a landing just over four hours later. The next mission to the orbiting lab will be the Axiom Space-1 mission, or Ax-1, carrying a former NASA astronaut and three U.S. crew members. Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria will be making his fifth visit to space and his third visit to the space station while commanding the first private mission for Axiom Space. He will lead first time space visitors Pilot Larry Connor and Mission Specialists Eytan Stibbe and Mark Pathy aboard Endeavour, during the vehicle's second mission to the station. NASA teams supporting the Artemis I mission polled "go" today to proceed with the wet dress rehearsal, planned for Friday, April 1, through Sunday, April 3, on Launch Pad 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA, Axiom and SpaceX are now looking at no earlier than April 6 for the launch of Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1), the first private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, pending range approval. For an April 6 launch, Ax-1 static fire would take place April 4. NASA's SpaceX Crew-4 mission remains scheduled to launch no earlier than Tuesday, April 19. Science is always ongoing aboard the station whether its crew members tending to experiments, or scientists uploading commands, or even investigations that are designed to run autonomously. Monday's research program aboard the station covered human research, space botany and glass optics. NASA Flight Engineers Raja Chari and Kayla Barron helped researchers understand how astronauts manipulate objects possibly informing the design of spacecraft interfaces for a variety of gravity environments. The duo also joined astronauts Tom Marshburn of NASA and Matthias Maurer of ESA (European Space Agency) for a standard vision test using an eye chart. Chari also harvested cotton cultures grown for the Plant Habitat-05 experiment and prepared them for return analysis back on Earth. Marshburn serviced samples for a physics study exploring using artificial intelligence to improve the development of advanced glass optics with implications for Earth and space industries. The orbiting lab's three newest crew members spent the day on a variety of activities in the Russian segment including an exercise study, ventilation maintenance, and station familiarization activities. Cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Sergey Korsakov, and Denis Matveev are in the second week of a six-and-a-half-month mission that began on March 18. After successfully completing a spacewalk March 23 at the International Space Station, a thin layer of water was discovered on the inner surface of the helmet and on an absorption pad inside ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Matthias Maurer's helmet following airlock re-pressurization. The water found was more than normal. The space station crew expedited Maurer's helmet removal and then gathered data in coordination with ground support teams. The space station team is looking into the cause, and any possible fixes that might be needed. The station crew members remain in good health, and they are continuing their daily activities of science and maintenance. Key objectives were completed during the spacewalk, and there are no planned U.S operating segment spacewalks in the near future as a part of normal station operations. Crew safety is a top priority for NASA. The agency and our international partners are constantly identifying and mitigating risks of human spaceflight. On-Orbit Status Report Payloads: Analyzing Interferometer for Ambient Air-2 (ANITA-2): Air samples were manually taken from an assigned ISS location for chemical analysis in ANITA-2. The ANITA-2 is a compact gas analyzer which can analyze and quantify 33 trace contaminants in the atmosphere aboard the ISS automatically. ANITA-2 can also detect the presence of unknown substances which can be evaluated later on the ground. Exploration ECLSS-TOILET: The crew reviewed the Toilet System Big Picture Words for Phase 2 Operations, and then inspected the Toilet Conductivity Sensor inlet and outlet cover for potential pre-treat leaks. The Toilet Air Filter was also removed and replaced (R&Red). The old filter was bagged and the toilet housing was wiped down. Photos were taken throughout the filter R&R process and downlinked. The Toilet System is an Exploration Tech Demo that has evolved into a permanent USOS system. The Toilet has the same basic design as the Orion Universal Waste Management System (UWMS). The Toilet System will be the primary WMS for USOS for up to 90 crew-days and interfaces with the Urine Transfer System (UTS) to allow concurrent WHC/Toilet operations. Gravitational References for Sensimotor Performance: Reaching and Grasping (GRASP): The GRASP Seat setup was performed and procedures were reviewed for upcoming operations. The purpose of the GRASP investigation is to better understand how the central nervous system (CNS) integrates information from different sensations (e.g. sight or hearing), encoded in different reference frames, in order to coordinate the hand with the visual environment. More specifically, the science team seeks to better understand if, and how, gravity acts as a reference frame for the control of reach-to-grasp. GRIP: The third and final GRIP Supine sessions were performed. The GRIP experiment studies the long-duration spaceflight effects on the abilities of human subjects to regulate grip force and upper limbs trajectories when manipulating objects during different kind of movements such as oscillatory movements, rapid discrete movements, and tapping gestures. JEM Small Satellite Orbital Deployer-21 (J-SSOD-21): The J-SSOD-21 deployers were removed from the JEM Multi-Purpose Experiment Platform (MPEP). The J-SSOD provides a novel and safe small satellite launching capability to the ISS. The J-SSOD is a unique satellite launcher, handled by the JEM Remote Manipulator System (JEMRMS), which provides containment and deployment mechanisms for several individual small satellites. Once J-SSOD, including satellite install cases with small satellites, is installed onto the MPEP by crew members, it is passed through the JEM Airlock for retrieval, positioning, and deployment by the JEMRMS. Plant Habitat-05: The crew photographed and harvested specified Plant Habitat 05 Experiment Plates. Unlocking the Cotton Genome to Precision Genetics (Plant Habitat-05) cultivates several cotton genotypes that differ in their ability to regenerate into whole plants from undifferentiated masses of cells known as a calli. Cotton is highly resistant to the process of plant regeneration, making it difficult to engineer stable, reproducing plants that have specific or enhanced traits such as drought resistance. The investigation could provide a better understanding of this behavior and a pathway to avert this problem. Universal Intelligent Glass Optics (UNIGLO): The fiber optic cable spool and preform sample was exchanged and the ground initiated a run. UNIGLO tests the effects of microgravity on a glass optics module capable of processing various types of complex glasses. The module uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help adapt materials processing techniques to the microgravity environment and a sensor based on laser-Doppler interferometry to measure the effects of microgravity on processing complex glasses for a variety of applications in space and on Earth. Systems: Extravehicular Activity (EVA) Mobility Unit (EMU) Activities: Following last week's successful Radiator Beam Valve Module (RBVM) Jumper Install EVA, the crew completed several activities to replenish EMU hardware. The crew reviewed the EVA Troubleshooting Overview, packed the EMU 3015 T2 Vent Port water sample, and removed the Lithium-Ion Batteries from the Battery Stowage Compartment. An EVA Water Screen was performed to collect a Cooling Loop Sample from EMU 3004 and 3015 to screen for water carryover in the vent loop on EMU 3015, after which the recorded suit EMU data and video was downlinked, and the Airlock and EMUs were cleaned up. The crew also performed a checkout of the Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue (SAFER) 1018 to verify that it is functional following the inadvertent Hand Controller Module (HCM) Deploy during US EVA 80. Environmental Health System (EHS) Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA) Water Recovery System (WRS) Sample Analysis & Data Record: The crew performed an analysis of the water processing assembly (WPA) using the TOCA. The TOCA unit oxidizes organic carbon species present in the water to carbon dioxide gas and measures the concentration using nondispersive infrared spectroscopy. Analysis of the potable water using the TOCA occurs on a weekly basis. In-Flight Maintenance (IFM) Node 3 (N3) Hatch Track Inspection: In order to prevent deadheading the Russian Intra-Module Ventilation (IMV) fans during N3 Hatch maintenance, the Temperature and Humidity Control (THC) PMA-1 IMV duct was uncovered. The N3 Starboard hatch tracks were inspected at the attachment points to structure as well as the hatch rollers, and the THC PMA-1 IMV duct was re-covered after the inspection was completed. EHS Air Quality Monitor (AQM) Vent Vacuum: As part of regular preventive maintenance, the EHS AQM vents were cleaned to remove dust buildup. The AQM is part of the EHS as an Intravehicular Activity (IVA) atmospheric monitor that is used to detect and measure Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) onboard the ISS. Completed Task List Activities: Crew Departure Preparations Wanted Poster for 1/2 Gamah Fitting Plug Today's Ground Activities: All activities are complete unless otherwise noted. UHF 2 Activation/Deactivation EPS Solar Array Maximum Output Test External High Definition Camera Pan Tilt Checkout Look Ahead Plan Tuesday, March 29 (GMT 88) Payloads: AWP Setup (NASA) FLUIDICS HDD Connect (ESA) Food Physiology Fecal Collect (NASA) GRASP Seated Sessions (ESA) IGO Sample Exchanges (NASA) ISS HAM Powerdowns (NASA) Standard Measures Urine, Saliva, Blood Collect (NASA) TangoLab CubeSat KENT_SAT01 Checkout Toilet Leak Inspect and Stall Outfitting (NASA) Systems: Regenerative ECLSS Recycle Tank Drain/Fill Prepack of US items to be loaded into Soyuz EHS - SSK Collection/Incubation UTS Offload EDV Swap T2 Daily Inspection Boot European IP Communication Laptop from Alternate HDD Crew Quarters Audio Cable Reconfiguration Change of Command Ceremony EHS - MAS Kit Sample Collection Emergency CMS Swap EWIS NCU R&R EHD PWD Sample Collect Wednesday, March 30 (GMT 89) Payloads: BioLab Isolation Filter Exchange (ESA) CALLIOPEO Photos and Setup (ESA) FLUIDICS HDD Disconnect (ESA) Food Physiology Fecal processing and MELFI insert (NASA)RETINA session (ESA) GRASP Free sessions (ESA) JEM microscope cover set and PLT5 closeout (JAXA) Plant Hab-05 facility clean and flush (NASA) VEGGIE Monitoring surface sample collect photos (NASA) Systems: WHC to External/Internal EHS TOCA Sample Analysis EHS Coliform Water Processing Crew Departure Prep 65S Farewell 65S Undock EMU Loop Scrub EMU HUT Install EHS Bose Headset Stow ACS Nitrogen Manual Valve Open Review Toilet System BPW for Phase 2 Ops JEM Common Gas Support Equipment Gas Supply Stop UTS Backup EDV Swap Toilet System Activation and Checkout EVA Airlock Restow Node 3 Toilet Leak Inspection Toilet Stall Outfitting PAM Tablet Deploy/Reconnect Thursday, March 31 (GMT 90) Payloads: CAL MTL Jumper Lk Chck (NASA) GRASP Stow (ESA) IGO Sample Exchange (NASA) ISS HAM COL Powerup (NASA) Standard Measures Saliva Collect (NASA) TangoLAB 2 Cardcube Replace (NASA) TOILET Acoustic Survey (NASA) Systems: Toilet Acoustic Survey EVA Airlock Restow Node 2 Cleanout Toilet Acoustic Cover Install SSC Power Chain Build EHS TOCA WWB Changeout Crew Handover Conference EHS - Coliform Water Sample Analysis SpX-Crew Dragon Review CBT IMS Conference COL SSC Relocate Crew SSC Relocate METOX Regeneration Initiation Today's Planned Activities: All activities are complete unless otherwise noted. HRF Generic Saliva Collection Extravehicular Activity Troubleshooting Overview [aborted] Extravehicular Hardware Retrieve Extravehicular Sample Pack Polar Desiccant Swap Extravehicular Activity (EVA) Battery (BATT) Removal Plant Habitat-05 Plant Harvest #4 Procedure Review JEM Airlock Slide Table (ST) Extension to JPM Side ANITA-2 Non-Local Sampling Plant Habitat-05 MWA Preparation JEM Small Satellite Orbital Deployer (SSOD) Wide (1 Deployer) and Single (1 Deployer) Removal from Multi-Purpose Experiment Platform (MPEP) Plant Habitat-05 Harvest #4 Hardware Gather EasyMotion Power Box Charge/Retrieval GRIP setup in Supine position Review Toilet System Big Picture Words for Phase 2 Operations Node 3 Toilet Leak Inspection Toilet Air Filter Installation JEM Airlock Slide Table (ST) Retraction from JPM Side Intelligent Glass Optics Procedure Review GRIP science performance in supine position [aborted] Toilet Pre-Treat Tank Installation Cold Atom Lab MTL Jumper Leak Check Extravehicular Water Screen Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue (SAFER) Checkout of SAFER S/N 1018 Environmental Health System (EHS) Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA) Water Recovery System (WRS) Sample Analysis Veggie Monitoring Reference Material Review Temperature and Humidity Control (THC) Intermodule Ventilation (IMV) Uncover/Cover In Flight Maintenance (IFM) Node 3 (N3) Hatch Track Inspection Health Maintenance System (HMS) ISS Food Intake Tracker (ISS FIT) GRIP partial stowage Echo Ethernet Cable Gather GRASP Big picture reading Public Affairs Office (PAO) Downlink Message GRASP additional set-up in seated configuration Stowage Consolidation In JEM Part 2 Health Maintenance System (HMS) Vision Test Health Maintenance System (HMS) Vision Questionnaire HMS Vision Test Stow Crew Departure Preparations for Return to Earth Plant Habitat-05 Plant Harvest #4 Health Maintenance System (HMS) Spaceflight Cognitive Assessment Tool for Windows (WinSCAT) Test HRF Generic Urine Collection Male HRF Generic MELFI Sample Retrieval and Insertion Operations Environmental Health System (EHS) Air Quality Monitor Vent Vacuum Plant Habitat POLAR Insert ExPRESS Rack 7 ZBook Troubleshooting LSG Hardware Audit Part 3 Extravehicular Water Screen Cleanup Intelligent Glass Optics Sample Exchange HRF Generic Ambient Blood Collection Setup Treadmill 2 Daily Inspection Environmental Health System (EHS) Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA) Sample Data Record Crew Choice Event Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. Egypt and Qatar announced on Monday that they have established a high joint committee headed by their foreign ministers to boost cooperation and coordination in all fields as well as to continue consultation, the foreign ministries of both countries said in a joint statement. Earlier on Monday, Qatari Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani held talks in Cairo with his Egyptian counterpart FM Sameh Shoukry. According to the joint statement, both officials praised the work of the follow-up committee that was formed after the 2021 Al-Ula Declaration to search for consensus on a host of issues. They also said that they appreciate the level their bilateral relations have reached and how relations have returned to their normal status, the statement said. In a press conference held in Cairo following their talks, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said that Egyptian-Qatari relations are in constant development and that his government supports upgrading them. We see that the horizon of the relations between Qatar and Egypt is wide in boosting economic partnership and communication between the two countries on all levels, the Qatari FM said, adding that the past period that was marred by tensions is over. In January 2021, Egypt, along with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, signed the Al-Ula Declaration with Qatar, restoring diplomatic, economic, and travel ties with Doha after a boycott imposed by the Arab quartet since mid-2017. In the wake of the Al-Ula declaration, Egypt and Qatar agreed to move beyond their disputes and work towards settling all outstanding issues. Shoukry stressed at the presser that Egypt looks forward to continuing the friendly relations and cooperation with Qatar, adding that their discussions addressed activating bilateral relations and exploring chances of cooperation in various fields. "The impurities that plagued the relations were removed through consensus on the statement of Al-Ula, the subsequent honest and sincere activation of the follow-up committee, and the positive results it reached," Shoukry said. Egypt seeks to have an understanding and cooperation based on mutual respect and the respect of non-interference in countries affairs, he stressed. For his part, Al-Thani stressed that Egypt has a pivotal role in consolidating security and stability in the region. Regional issues The Egyptian FM added that Egypts stance regarding support for the current Libyan political course is consistent, adding that Egypt supports Libya and non-intervention in its affairs. The Qatari FM also said that Doha supports a smooth political course in Libya. Meanwhile, Shoukry said that the participation of Egypt in the Negev summit in Israel over the weekend - along with Israel, the UAE, the US, Bahrain and Morocco - aimed to push the Middle East peace process forward and support the just rights of the Palestinians. Search Keywords: Short link: Egyptian and Qatari ministers and officials agreed in an extended meeting in Cairo on Tuesday on a package of $5 billion in investments and partnerships in Egypt within "the framework of boosting economic cooperation between the two brotherly countries." The agreement comes "within the framework of boosting economic cooperation and investments between the two brotherly countries," the Egyptian Cabinet said in a statement. The meeting was attended by Egypt's Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly, Minister of Planning and Economic Development Hala El-Said, Minister of Finance Mohamed Maait, Qatar's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, Minister of Finance Ahmed El-Kuwari, and Qatar's Ambassador in Cairo Salem bin Mubarak Al Shafi. The meeting highlighted the importance of strengthening cooperation and coordination between Egypt and Qatar in various fields, the statement said. The two sides hailed the step to establish a high joint committee between Egypt and Qatar, which was announced in a joint statement following a meeting between the two countries foreign ministers on Monday, to boost cooperation and coordination in all fields as well as to continue consultations. In a press conference following his Cairo talks with Shoukry yesterday, the top Qatari diplomat said that Egyptian-Qatari relations are in constant development, affirming his government's keenness for upgrading these relations. We see that the horizon of the relations between Qatar and Egypt is wide in boosting economic partnership and communication between the two countries on all levels, the Qatari FM said, adding that the past period that was marred by tensions is over. During the presser, Shoukry said Egypt looks forward to continuing the friendly relations and cooperation with Qatar, adding that their discussions addressed activating bilateral relations and exploring chances of cooperation in various fields. The Qatari delegation's visit to Egypt comes as the two countries continue to explore developing cooperation on multiple levels following the restoration of diplomatic and economic ties with the 2021 Ula agreement, which ended a three-and-half-year Cairo boycott of Doha. An Egyptian-Qatari follow-up committee set up after the signing of the Ula agreement has already held seven rounds of negotiations over the past year, the last of which was in Doha last September, to develop the two countries' relations. The rounds of talks have seen the signing of a number of bilateral deals for enhancing cooperation between the relevant authorities. "The impurities that plagued the relations were removed through consensus on the statement of Al-Ula, the subsequent honest and sincere activation of the follow-up committee, and the positive results it reached," Shoukry said during the presser on Monday. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and Emir of Qatar Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani have met or talked on the phone on more than one occasion since the signing of Al-Ula. The two leaders met on the sidelines of the Olympic Winter Games in Beijing in February. El-Sisi and the Qatari emir also held a meeting last winter on the sidelines of the UN Conference of Parties on Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. Search Keywords: Short link: Egypt and Djibouti officially inaugurated on Tuesday a direct flight route between the two countries for the first time, the Egyptian foreign ministry announced. Egypts Assistant Foreign Minister for African Affairs, Ambassador Sherif Issa marked the inauguration by landing at DjiboutiAmbouli International Airport in the first direct air flight from Cairo. Djibouti's Minister of Islamic Affairs and Awqaf Moamen Hassan Berri and Minister of Trade and Tourism Mohamed Warsama Dirieh received the Egyptian diplomat upon his arrival. Berri stated the launch of the new direct flight route between the two countries is evidence of the ongoing momentum in bilateral relations following President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi's visit to Djibouti in May 2021, and the Djiboutian president's visit to Cairo in February. From his side, Ambassador Sherif Issa said that the launch of the new direct flight route will help advance bilateral cooperation. He also pointed to recent cooperation projects between Egypt and Djibouti, including a project to establish a logistics zone at the Free Zone of Djibouti (DFZ), opening a new branch of Egypt's Banque Misr and building an Egyptian pediatric and gynecologic hospital. Search Keywords: Short link: Coronavirus-related deaths dropped by 44 percent from 19 to 25 March compared to the previous week, Acting Minister of Health and Population Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar announced on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the rate of COVID-induced hospitalisations decreased by 50 percent during the same period, according to a statement released by Health Ministry Spokesman Hossam Abdel-Ghaffar after the weekly meeting to follow up on the ministry's plan to combat the pandemic. The drop in the rate of hospitalization was evident in the hospitals' occupancy rates, especially in intensive and intermediate care units nationwide during March, Abdel-Ghaffar explained. The ministry had previously announced Friday during its weekly coronavirus report, it recorded a daily average of 625 new cases and eight deaths from 19 to 25 March as the rates of new cases and deaths continue to subside nationwide following the end of a difficult fifth wave. The Tuesday meeting also established the availability of sufficient stocks of medicines, supplies and medical oxygen in hospitals, he added. The meeting also reviewed the countrys mass vaccination campaign, which showed that innoculation rates range from 200,000 to 250,000 per day, with the highest rates in the governorates of Beheira, Gharbiya, Minya and Assiut. Egypt has fully vaccinated about 33 million people against coronavirus, representing 52 percent of the targeted groups, Abdel-Ghaffar previously said in remarks to Al-Hekaya program on MBC Masr. Meanwhile, Egypt lifted earlier this week a ban on Ramadan charity banquets, ending a two-year suspension on the popular tradition due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Search Keywords: Short link: The Ethiopian government and Tigrayan rebels on Tuesday accused each other of blocking a humanitarian aid convoy carrying emergency supplies for a starving population in the northern region. On March 24, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government announced "an indefinite humanitarian truce effective immediately", saying it hoped to help hasten the delivery of emergency aid into the Tigray region, where hundreds of thousands face starvation. Hours later the rebels agreed to a "cessation of hostilities", a new turning point in the nearly 17-month war in northern Ethiopia which has left thousands dead. But each side has issued demands. The government has called on the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) to "desist from all acts of further aggression and withdraw from areas they have occupied in neighboring regions" Afar and Amhara. The rebels have in turn urged the Ethiopian authorities "to go beyond empty promises and take concrete steps to facilitate unfettered humanitarian access to Tigray." Since then, however, none of the aid trucks currently waiting in Semera, the capital of Afar, has reached Tigray, where no aid has arrived by road since December 15. 'False Claims' In a statement issued Tuesday, the government assured that it "has been using all available means to rescue its citizens in the Tigray region but has not been able to secure the cooperation of the other party". A convoy of 43 trucks of food aid, authorized by the UN World Food Program (WFP) has not been able to enter the Tigray region "due to the closure of Abala Road by TPLF militants," the statement added. Earlier Tuesday, as it has been doing daily, the TPLF rebels reiterated that no humanitarian aid has arrived in Tigray while denouncing the "false claims" of the Ethiopian authorities and demanding that the "unimpeded delivery of humanitarian aid be separated from political issues". On Saturday, the rebels accused the government of "peddling fictitious stories" in claiming that the TPLF was blocking the delivery of aid to Tigray. The situation on the ground in Afar or Tigray is difficult to verify independently and humanitarian organizations have not commented on the situation of the aid convoys since the truce. The WFP estimated in January that 4.6 million people in Tigray, from a population of around six million, were "food insecure", with two million of those suffering from "extreme food shortages". Since mid-February, humanitarian operations in Tigray, where more than 400,000 people have been displaced by the conflict, have been virtually halted by local shortages of fuel, food, and cash, according to the UN. The conflict erupted when Abiy sent troops into Tigray to topple the TPLF, the region's former ruling party, saying the move came in response to rebel attacks on army camps. Fighting has dragged on, triggering the humanitarian crisis, as accounts have emerged of massacres and mass rapes, with both sides accused of human rights violations. Search Keywords: Short link: Gulf Arab states were to gather for a summit Tuesday about the yearslong war in Yemen, which the country's Houthi rebels are boycotting because it's taking place in Saudi Arabia, their adversary in the conflict. The decision by the Iran-backed Houthis to skip the summit, called by the Saudi-based Gulf Cooperation Council, immediately called into question the effectiveness of such a gathering. The United Nations, diplomats and others have been pushing for another potential cease-fire to mark the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, similar to efforts for a truce over the past years. Ramadan is likely to start this weekend, depending on the sighting of the new crescent moon. The GCC - a six-nation club including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates was to hold closed-door talks Tuesday in Riyadh. On Monday, the GCC's Secretary-General Nayef al-Hajraf held talks with British Ambassador to Yemen Richard Oppenheim and Yemeni officials allied with its internationally recognized but exiled government. Those talks saw al-Hajraf, a Kuwaiti politician, discuss ``efforts to stop the war and ways to achieve comprehensive peace to alleviate the human suffering witnessed by Yemeni people,'' according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency. The Houthis, meanwhile, have rejected the summit because of its venue in Saudi Arabia, as well as the continuing closure of Sanaa's airport and restrictions on the country's ports by the Saudi-led coalition that is waging war on the Houthis. The rebels, who over the weekend attacked an oil depot in the Saudi city of Jiddah ahead of a Formula One race there, have called for the talks to be held in a ``neutral'' country. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke late Monday with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan. The State Department said the two ``discussed support for the U.N.'s proposal for a Ramadan truce in Yemen and efforts to launch a new, more inclusive and comprehensive peace process.'' Search Keywords: Short link: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Morocco on Tuesday to discuss regional security and meet the United Arab Emirates de facto leader Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. The trip comes in the shadow of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which along with sanctions has sent wheat and fuel prices soaring in a serious blow for import-dependent North African countries. "We know this pain is keenly felt in the Middle East and North Africa, where most countries import at least half of their wheat," State Department Acting Assistant Secretary Yael Lempert said before the trip. Blinken flew in late Monday from Israel where he had joined top diplomats from the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain and Egypt for a meeting that underlined a seismic shift since 2020 in relations between Arab countries and the Jewish state. On Tuesday he started talks with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita ahead of a meeting with Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch, with the Western Sahara dispute and security cooperation on the agenda -- including the fight against the Islamic State group and Al Qaeda in the Sahel. The same subjects will loom large in meetings the following day with Morocco's regional rival Algeria. Blinken will also meet Tuesday evening with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed -- often dubbed "MBZ" -- at the Emirati leader's Moroccan residence, a meeting that comes as Washington warily watches longtime ally the UAE diverging from many of its policies. The UAE has refrained from criticising Russia, recently sent its top diplomat to Moscow, and hosted the Russia-backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Blinken and Prince Mohammed are set to discuss efforts to revive the 2015 landmark Iran nuclear deal, which aimed to limit Iran's nuclear development in exchange for loosening sanctions -- an agreement dropped by former US president Donald Trump in 2018. Their meeting also comes amid an escalation in cross-border missile and drone attacks by Yemen's Iran-backed Huthi rebels against the UAE and Saudi Arabia, allies in a grinding war that has laid waste to the impoverished nation with no end in sight. Blinken will also meet a group of Moroccan women involved in science and technology. Western Sahara In Morocco, Blinken is set to discuss the Western Sahara, a phosphate-rich former Spanish colony with a vast Atlantic coastline home to rich fisheries. Morocco controls 80 percent of it including a key highway towards West Africa, while the rest -- a desert area bordering Mauritania and Algeria -- is run by the Polisario Front independence movement. Trump in 2020 recognised the region as sovereign Moroccan territory in a break with decades of US policy, after Rabat agreed to re-establish relations with Israel under the so-called Abraham Accords. President Joe Biden's administration has been tight-lipped on how it will follow up on the move, which came just weeks after the Polisario declared a 1991 ceasefire null and void, sparking fears that the long-frozen conflict could flare up again. Morocco has urged the US to take a step further and open a consulate there, like the UAE -- a move to which the Biden administration has not committed. The State Department said in a report Monday that it supports a Moroccan autonomy plan and the work of recently appointed UN envoy Staffan de Mistura. The UN sees the territory as a "non-self-governing territory". Blinken's visit to Rabat also comes as the US seeks stronger support for Ukraine from a region where many countries have been reticent to criticise Moscow. They include Morocco, which has declined to condemn Russia at the United Nations, frustrating both Washington and European capitals. The Emirates are a long-standing US ally but "MBZ" has steered a more assertive foreign policy course, forging closer ties with China and intervening in the Libya conflict on the side also backed by Kremlin-linked mercenaries. Asked about Washington's ties with the UAE, a senior US official responded drily that the two sides will talk about "the next phase in the relationship and how we can take it forward. Search Keywords: Short link: The loan will be used to improve TE's mobile network coverage by deploying around 2,000 new mobile sites and installing additional capacity layers to its existing portfolio of cell towers, according to a TE statement. The EIB said the loan is the largest the bank has ever provided for a mobile network in Africa. The work is expected to strengthen the network across Egypt, including in less densely populated areas, and enhance competition and the affordability of services. State-owned TE is the first integrated telecom operator in the Egyptian market, providing advanced technology and reliable infrastructure solutions, as well as the widest network of submarine cables. Besides its mobile operation "WE", the company owns 45 percent of Vodafone Egypt. ET shares and GDRs are traded on the Egyptian Exchange and the London Stock Exchange. Flavia Palanza, the EIBs director for EU Neighbourhood Countries, said the loan will help accelerate large scale investment in mobile networks and ensure affordable access to digital services in Egypt. The EIB identifies the digital transformation as a catalyser for innovation, employment, and sustainable economic growth. We are pleased to partner with TE a dynamic group engaged in its ambitious network expansion programme to offer a modern and broader access to connectivity throughout Egypt, Palanza added. Speaking to Ahram Online, Palanza said the EIBs operations in developing countries received a boost since the start of 2022 through EIB Global a new branch with a mission of providing finances for development and partnerships outside of the EU amid the ongoing global challenges. She stressed that Egypt is a key country for the EIBs work in the EUs Neighbourhood Countries, with over 40 years of operations in the Egyptian market and around 120 EIB-financed projects. These projects include on-lending facilities to Egyptian banks to enhance their financing of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), transportation and urban development, power stations and windfarms, clear water and water treatment facilities, and industrial depollution, Palanza explained. On the loan agreement, Palanza said the EIB has also allocated 41 billion for projects that focus on digital transformation in the EU and its partner countries, including Egypt. Egypt's massive infrastructure projects have succeeded in attracting new foreign investments over the last few years, she noted. She stressed that initiatives such as Egypt's Descent Life are very important to improve the livelihood of poorer people, and that digitisation plays an important part in that. Descent Life is a sustainable development initiative launched by President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, and targets the poorest, least advantaged villages across Egypt by implementing projects that improve their living conditions. Initiatives like Decent Life, Palanza said, and new investments in telecommunications, urban transport renewable energy, water and sanitation, are being implemented across Egypt to foster inclusive and sustainable growth. "The EIB hopes to continue supporting Egypt in its ambitious plans and projects across many sectors," Palanza said, adding that Egypt has taken a courageous move to phase out subsidies while maintaining social protection programmes for the poorer segments of society. "Subsidies prevent putting more money into new investments, and that is why financial institutions like the EIB come to aid Egypt in implementing new investments," Palanza said. Deputy head of the EU delegation in Egypt Tobias Krause said that digital transformation is a key pillar of the current ambitious phase of cooperation with Egypt. The EU aims to support the Egyptian governments efforts to secure resilient and affordable access to universal connectivity to the benefit of Egyptian citizens. This project shows the commitment of our partners in the EIB to support crucial inclusive digital infrastructure planning in Egypt, he said. We will continue to work hand in hand with our member states and European financial institutions as Team Europe to support Egypts human-centric digital transition and to foster a sustainable, connected, and inclusive economy and society, he asserted. Venture capital (VC) investments in Egyptian start-ups rose by 168 percent in 2021 to reach an all-time high of $491 million, according to a report by the UAE-based data analytics platform MAGNiTT. According to the report, Egypt ranked first in number of deals closed in Africa in 2021, and placed third in terms of total funding, where local start-ups attracted 18 percent of the total capital deployed across the continent. On a regional level, the report showed that Egypt came in second place when it came to the number of VC deals in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with a record-high of 147 deals, accounting for 24 percent of all transactions closed across MENA in 2021. The report also indicated that Egypts share in both the total capital raised and deals closed across MENA increased by two percent between 2020 and 2021. Egypt proved to be an attractive investment destination, as an all-time-high volume of investors backed its local start-ups. The number of investors increased by 68 percent in 2021 to a record-high of 124 different funding institutions, compared to 74 investors in 2020, according to the report. Furthermore, the report highlighted that 17 percent of all transactions carried out in the country throughout the year were through fintech platforms, which is in line with the regional trend across MENA, where fintech accounted for the highest share - 18 percent - of all VC transactions in 2021. Meanwhile, the transportation and logistics industry claimed over a third - 36 percent - of all capital deployed in Egypt in 2021, driven by Halans $120 million funding round. As for the top five industries by the number of deals closed in Egypt in 2021, fintech placed first with 25 deals, followed by e-commerce (23 deals), transportation and logistics (15 deals), healthcare (12 deals), and food and beverage (11 deals). CEO of Egypts Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) Amr Mahfouz said that entrepreneurship in Egypt is burgeoning, and the start-up sector is booming, as the entrepreneurial mindset has spread among young people. The community is getting more vibrant and sustainable driven by the increased number of quality investors, the vast network of well-designed co-working spaces, innovation clusters, business incubators, and the nationwide Creativa Innovation Hubs, Mahfouz added. The CEO also noted that the Egyptian government supports the growth of start-ups with unprecedented efforts. For its part, the ITIDA has developed a five-year strategy in collaboration with Deloitte and USAID to further support the ecosystems capabilities and ensure greater access to finance, talent, and markets. Philip Bahoshy, the CEO and founder of MAGNiTT, noted that the report highlights Egypts position as a leading venture ecosystem across both the MENA and African landscapes. Bahoshy added that record investments into the Egyptian space reflect the markets maturity. Most importantly, the record number of different investors up by 68 percent Y-o-Y shows the increased interest from investors from across the region and international market, he further expounded. Search Keywords: Short link: Egypts Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises Development Agency (MSMEDA) signed on Tuesday a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Amazon Egypt to support small and medium-sized businesses in the country. The MoU was signed by Aly Gamay, Senior Program Manager at Amazon Marketplace, and Raafat Abbas, head of the Non-Financial Services Central Sector at MSMEDA. The signing ceremony was attended by Egypts Minister of Trade and Industry Niven Gamea and General Manager of Amazon Egypt Omar El-Sahy. Through this partnership, Amazon Egypt will support MSMEDA-registered businesses interested in availing their products on Amazons platform. Minister Gamea said that the MoU is in line with Egypt Vision 2030 to assist small and medium-sized businesses in different sectors, helping them to sustainably expand their business model. The minister stressed the important role of leading technology companies in the field of ecommerce, such as Amazon Egypt. During the signing ceremony, the minister reflected on the advancement of technology that Amazon provides these businesses. MSMEDA is keen to provide various types of support for SMBs in all sectors including fashion, leather, food, or furniture to help business owners market their products. This is in addition to supporting handicrafts and heritage arts that reflect the cultural diversity of the Egyptian civilisation. MSMEDA is also constantly working on developing its mechanisms to help business owners expand the exposure of their products, which can positively impact their growth and expansion, and increase their competitiveness locally and globally, the minister explained. For his part, El-Sahy said that supporting such businesses is a fundamental part of Amazon Egypts work and an extension of its customer-centric culture. In fact, more than 50 percent of everything sold in Amazons stores globally comes from third-party sellers, most of which are small and medium-sized businesses. Partnering with MSMEDA will help us highlight Egypts rich handicrafts heritage, adding valuable selection to customers shopping on Amazon.eg, El-Sahy expounded. We will continue to support Egypts vision for economic diversification and digitalisation, acting as a key partner in the countrys path to progress in todays digital economy. This partnership is a key milestone in our ongoing efforts to champion small businesses within our local communities. We are confident that our efforts with MSMEDA will encourage more Egyptian entrepreneurs to sell on Amazon.eg, as they choose to grow their businesses with us, El-Sahy said. Search Keywords: Short link: Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov's handed over of the space station to NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn earlier today during a change of command ceremony. Mark Vande Hei, along with Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, will close the hatch to the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft to begin the journey back to Earth later tonight. The Soyuz will undock from the Rassvet module, heading for a parachute-assisted landing Wednesday, March 30, on the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan. Coverage of the crew's farewells, undocking, and landing will air live on NASA TV, the agency's website, and the NASA app at the following times (all EDT): 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 29 - Farewells and hatch closure (at 12 a.m., Wednesday, March 30) 2:45 a.m. Wednesday, March 30 - Undocking (at 3:21 a.m.) 6:15 a.m. Wednesday, March 30 - Deorbit burn and landing (landing at 7:28 a.m. / 5:28 p.m. Kazakhstan time) Vande Hei and Dubrov launched April 9, 2021, on Soyuz MS-18, and will wrap up a 355-day mission spanning 5,680 orbits of Earth and more than 150 million miles. During the long-duration mission, Vande Hei broke the record for longest single spaceflight by an American astronaut, previously held at 340 days. Vande Hei will wrap up his second spaceflight with a total of 523 days in space. Shkaplerov launched on Soyuz MS-19 on Oct. 5, 2021. This was Dubrov's first flight. Shkaplerov is ending his fourth mission with 708 cumulative days spent in space. At the time of undocking, Expedition 67 will formally begin aboard the station, with new station Commander Tom Marshburn, NASA astronauts Raja Chari and Kayla Barron, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Matthias Maurer, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev, and Sergey Korsakov. After landing, the Soyuz MS-19 crew will split up, as per standard crew return practice, with Vande Hei returning to his home in Houston, while the cosmonauts fly back to their training base in Star City, Russia. On-Orbit Status Report Payloads: Gravitational References for Sensimotor Performance (GRASP): The first of three GRASP sessions in the seated configuration were performed by ISS crew. The purpose of the GRASP investigation is to better understand how the central nervous system (CNS) integrates information from different sensations (e.g. sight or hearing), encoded in different reference frames, in order to coordinate the hand with the visual environment. More specifically, the science team seeks to better understand if, and how, gravity acts as a reference frame for the control of reach-to-grasp. Plant Habitat-05: Harvested samples were transferred into a Box Module within MELFI cold stowage. Unlocking the Cotton Genome to Precision Genetics (Plant Habitat-05) cultivates several cotton genotypes that differ in their ability to regenerate into whole plants from undifferentiated masses of cells known as a calli. Cotton is highly resistant to the process of plant regeneration, making it difficult to engineer stable, reproductive plants that have specific or enhanced traits such as drought resistance. The investigation could provide a better understanding of this behavior and a pathway to avert this problem. Universal Intelligent Glass Optics (UNIGLO): The fiber optic cable spool and preform sample were exchanged and the ground initiated a run. UNIGLO tests the effects of microgravity on a glass optics module capable of processing various types of complex glasses. The module uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help adapt materials processing techniques to the microgravity environment and a sensor based on laser-Doppler interferometry to measure the effects of microgravity on processing complex glasses for a variety of applications in space and on Earth. Veggie Monitoring: Photo documentation was captured of Surface Sampling. Culture-based Environmental Monitoring of Crop-based Space Food Systems (Veggie Monitoring) collects microbial samples from the surface of the station's Veggie plant production system in conjunction with quarterly Environmental Health System (EHS) sample collection. Longer exploration missions require space-based systems for growth of plants, and this investigation is expected to help establish requirements to protect these systems, plants, and crew from contamination. Systems: 65S Departure Preparations: Activities were performed to prepare for the departure of the 65S crew, beginning with transfer operations to prepack US items into Soyuz and crew departure preparations activities. The 65 Soyuz is scheduled to undock from the ISS on Wednesday, March 30th at approximately 11:30AM CT. Regenerative ECLSS Recycle Tank Drain/Fill: Today, the crew set up the recycle tank to drain via the Urine Processor Assembly (UPA) Fill Drain Valve into a Brine EDV using the Urine Transfer System (UTS). Following the setup, the ground performed the tank drain using the UTS. Once the ground specialists completed the transfer, the crew verified the recycle tank was empty, terminated the drain, repositioned the fill/drain valve to force fill the recycle tank using UTS, and configured for nominal processing operations. The crew also swapped the EDV in the offload EDV spot of the UTS. EHS Microbial Air and Surface Sampling: Samples for microbial analysis were taken from the ISS air and surfaces using the Surface Sample Kit (SSK) and Microbial Air Sampler (MAS). These samples will be incubated on media slides and in Petri dishes, giving medical personnel a gauge of microbial growth in the air and on surfaces of the ISS. The EHS monitors the atmosphere for gaseous contaminants from nonmetallic materials off-gassing, combustion products, and propellants, microbial contaminants from crew members and Station activities, water quality, acoustics, and radiation levels. Waste and Hygiene Compartment (WHC) Pump Separator Remove and Replace (R&R): Due to several check separator errors and slow startups, the WHC Pump Separator was R&Red. The WHC is a Russian-built system that has been modified to fit within a standard USOS rack. The Pump Separator uses centrifugal force to separate the air and liquid mixture that is drawn into the separator downstream from the Urine Receptacle. The Check Separator light is announced if a separator is flooded, dry, or times out. External Wireless Instrumentation System (EWIS) Network Control Unit (NCU) R&R: As a corrective action for degraded NCU performance, an NCU R&R was performed in the Lab. The EWIS utilizes spread spectrum RF transmissions to transmit and receive ISS structural acceleration data and commands. The NCU sends data collection commands to various Remote Sensor Units (RSUs) and downloads the collected data from the RSUs to store on the JSL servers. Completed Task List Activities: None Today's Ground Activities: All activities are complete unless otherwise noted. EPS Solar Array Maximum Output Test Look Ahead Plan Wednesday, March 30 (GMT 89) Payloads: BioLab Isolation filter exchange (ESA) CALLIOPEO photos and setup (ESA) FLUIDICS HDD disconnect (ESA) Food Physiology Fecal processing and MELFI insert (NASA) GRASP Free sessions (ESA) JEM microscope cover set and PLT5 closeout (JAXA) Plant Hab-05 facility clean and flush (NASA) RETINA session (ESA) TangoLab CubeSat KENT_SAT01 checkout VEGGIE Monitoring surface sample collect photos (NASA) Systems: EHS PWD Sample Collect/TOCA PWD Sample Analysis EHS Coliform Water Processing Crew Departure Prep Environmental Health System (EHS) Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA) Sample Data Record/Analysis 65S Farewell 65S Undock EHS Bose Headset Stow EVA LCVG Packing EMU Water Sample EMU Loop Scrub ACS Nitrogen Manual Valve Open JEM Common Gas Support Equipment Gas Supply Stop Review Toilet System BPW for Phase 2 Ops UTS Backup EDV Swap WHC to Internal Toilet System Activation and Checkout EMU Cooling Loop Maintenance Iodination EMU Cooling Loop Scrub Deconfiguration Node 3 Toilet Leak Inspection Toilet Stall Outfitting PAM Tablet Deploy/Reconnect EVA Airlock Restow Thursday, March 31 (GMT 90) Payloads: CAL MTL Jumper Lk Check (NASA) GRASP Stow (ESA) IGO Sample Exchange (NASA) ISS HAM COL Powerup (NASA) Standard Measures Saliva Collect (NASA) TangoLab 2 Cardcube Replace (NASA) Systems: Toilet Acoustic Survey EVA Airlock Restow Node 2 Cleanout Toilet Acoustic Cover Install SSC Power Chain Build Crew Handover Conference EHS - Coliform Water Sample Analysis SpX-Crew Dragon Review CBT IMS Conference COL SSC Relocate Crew SSC Relocate METOX Regeneration Initiation T2 Daily Inspection Friday, April 1 (GMT 91) Payloads: Air Particulate Monitor Status Chk (NASA) IGO Sample Exchange and GN2 Valve Close (NASA) Standard Measures Saliva Collect (NASA) Systems: Emergency Equipment Gather Toilet System Pretreat Dose Check WHC Manual Fill SODF EMER-1a Update OBT Dragon Rendezvous Review/Conference SSC 19 and 22 Swap T2 Daily Inspection EVA METOX Initiate & Terminate Toilet Daily Questionnaire Today's Planned Activities: All activities are complete unless otherwise noted. HRF Generic Urine Collection Male JEM Water Recovery System (JWRS) MELFI Item Trash Veggie Monitoring Reference Material Review Transfer Operations - Prepack of US items to be loaded into Soyuz Regenerative Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) Recycle Tank Drain/Fill Environmental Health System (EHS) - Surface Sample Kit (SSK) Collection/Incubation Ultrasound 2 HRF Rack 2 Power On Treadmill 2 Daily Inspection Food Physiology Fecal Reference Material Review And Sample Collection Hardware Setup Veggie Monitoring Surface Sample Collection Historical Documentation Photography Food Physiology Maintenance Work Area Preparation Health Maintenance System (HMS) Spaceflight Cognitive Assessment Tool for Windows (WinSCAT) Test Food Physiology Fecal Sample Processing Hardware Setup Food Physiology Fecal Sample Collection Health Maintenance System (HMS) Ultrasound 2 Scan Health Maintenance System (HMS) Ultrasound 2 Scan performed by a Crew Medical Officer (CMO) Emergency Chip Measurement System (CMS) Hardware Swap Food Physiology MELFI Sample Insertion 1 Food Physiology Fecal Sample Collection Hardware Stow Health Maintenance System (HMS) Ultrasound 2 Post Exam Boot European IP Communication Laptop from alternate HDD Urine Transfer System Offload EDV Swap HRF Post Flight Overview Waste and Hygiene Compartment to External/Internal Internal Audio Subsystem (IAS) Crew Quarter (CQ) Audio Cable Configuration Change of Command (Ku-Band) Polar to Polar Sample Transfer GRASP science performance in seated position Environmental Health System (EHS) - Microbial Air Sampler (MAS) Kit Sample Collection Intelligent Glass Optics Sample Exchange MELFI2 Icebrick Transfer/Gather Plant Habitat-05 MELFI Insertion Waste and Hygiene Compartment (WHC) Pump Separator R&R MELFI 2 Ice Brick Insert 1 EWIS NCU (External Wireless Instrumentation System Network Control Unit) Replacement Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. At the premises of El-Warsha theatre troupe, downtown Cairo, another workshop was concluding. The workshop dedicated to training young women storytellers from all over Egypt was quite an inspiration. Part of Hakayethonna project, implemented by Gouthe Institute, the project aimed to found a women storytelling troupe from all over the governorates of Egypt. The project is one of the components of a bigger ongoing project titled Outside the Borders of the Capital, and we started phase one of storytelling with director Salam Yousry in an online workshop last year that resulted in video art from upper Egypt and a series of podcasts from the delta and Suez Canal towns, explained DoaaAhmed, coordinator of cultural projects at Gouthe Institute, to Ahram Online. The ancient art of storytelling Storytelling is one of the ancient techniques that humans used to pass down social history, wisdom, knowledge and learnings from one generation to the other. One of the main elements of intangible heritage, as described by UNESCO, this remains one of the simplest yet profoundest form of art ever. In the Arab world, and especially in Egypt, the profession of a storyteller was quite popular before the invention of radio and television. Despite being dominated by technology, storytelling has started to make its way back into the consciousness as humanity attempts to retrieve their right to imagination. This trend flourished over the past decade, but became even more visible during the global confinement when lots of storytellers held online events and the whole world was ready to listen. People are trapped in their own beliefs Due to the demand on this workshop from all governorates, the project decided to take it a step further and form a troupe of women storytellers from all over Egypt. They reached out to director Hassan El-Geretly , the founder and director of El-Warsha troupe, Egypts first independent theatrical troupe that has taken the lead in reviving and mastering the ancient art of storytelling. They asked me to organise a workshop for the second or third phase of their work outside the capital. The workshop I have organised was one about transforming the stories to tales to be told. So it was about how to tell such tales. I worked on opening up the door of imagination, for what really captivates people is their own belief that they are limited, therefore the only solution is to explain that the sky is the limit, explained Hassan El-Geretly. Because I have something to say The storytellers told their stories to Ahram Online and shared their passions and lessons learned from the whole experience. To 34-year-old Shaimaa Ahmed, from Sohag, storytelling was a tool of liberation and self-expression. After being forced to give up on her hobbies as a child once she hit puberty, she has been focused on her college degree since then. After college, she focused on her initiative titled KonieRaeda that empowered girls in vocational education. She then became a facilitator in several AUC educational development projects. Coronavirus led me to storytelling, for during the confinement I was working from home and this gave me excess time to do the things I want to do besides work. So I applied for online courses, among which was the storytelling workshop that turned out to be more of a cultural exchange with director Salam Yousry, explained Ahmed. She added that she remembered her first online session, which she had to take in the barn of her brothers house in the mountains so she would be away from all family members. The best thing about storytelling is that it taught me that I do not have to think what the person watching me would say about me. Before that I was always told to go home early, or make the scarf longer, fearing what people would say or think of me, but now I have the courage to tell them they do not have the right to comment. I am a trainer and connecting with people is very important and storytelling is among the techniques that enabled me to speak up. I want to talk because I have something to say, I want to say it out loud and hear it. The folk tales of Aswan Tribes To Randa Diaa El-Dien from Aswan, a founder and project manager of A Theatre of Stories and Songs in Aswan, founded by Goethe Institute, learning to be a storyteller greatly enhances her skills. She focused on intangible heritage of several tribes in Aswan, like Basharia, which she elaborated in a childrens play that included 45 children from all tribes, teaching them about each others tribes. Story telling allowed her to tell, document and pass on to the new generations, the folk stories of such tribes. Starting to say No To 38-year-old HalaBadry, social work comes easy as she studied and worked in the same field of development. Now the head of an NGO in Aswan that is focused on improving the status of mothers and children, she became a facilitator with El-Warsha and together they managed to train the house wives of Nasseria village to tell their own stories in front of an audience. This was a great breakthrough because those women were always reluctant to attend our seminars let alone join in a story telling performance, Badry laughs. Story telling had a huge impact on me, like Hassan El-Geretly says, on telling your story on stage when you come down you would break a barrier and set yourself free. It made me question everything and I started to say no more often and set my boundaries. Now I will use storytelling technique in family counselling, she concluded. Storytelling and Visualisation The storytelling workshop enabled fresh grad Youmna Merghany, from Aswan, to know how best to narrate her story. Interested in creative writing and script writing, she said storytelling is very important to script writing because it helps a lot in narrating the sequence in the right order and in visualising things. Telling grandmas war tales of Port Said I joined this workshop because there is a chance that I would tell my tale and other peoples stories and how such stories have an impact on us, explained Ahlam Al-Mansy, young journalist from Port said We have a huge heritage of stories and we must keep remembering it. I want to tell the stories I heard from my grandmother about Port Said during the war and how people survived. When I walk the street and find an old French style building and how important is, like the Italian house, that was built during the era of Mussolini in Port Said, I want to tell the story of such building and several others. Story telling is magic For Riham Ghattas, storytelling is a tool for self-development. Based in Minya and working in an NGO, Ghattas came to believe that story telling is an intrinsic human element that ought to be activated. I discovered that storytelling is authentic and magical to all of us. Everybody can tell a story, she explained. An Adventure To Riham Ali, a broadcast presenter and voiceover actor from Ismailia, storytelling was a technique that she needed to enhance her work skills. Story telling is an adventure and I am enjoying it, she concluded. Search Keywords: Short link: The war in Ukraine may be a blessing in disguise for Egypts industrial sector, experts tell Al-Ahram Weekly. In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity, according to the 20th-century physicist Albert Einstein, and Mohamed Al-Bahi, head of the Taxes and Customs Committee at the Federation of Egyptian Industries, seems to agree. He believes that the Ukraine-Russia conflict could bring golden opportunities for the Egyptian industrial sector despite the fears of some business people and workers. The government should prepare to receive more foreign capital as a result of the war thanks to Egypts security, political stability, and the economic and structural reforms it has introduced over the past five years, Al-Bahi told Al-Ahram Weekly on the sidelines of a seminar organised by the Egyptian Centre for Strategic Studies entitled The Future of Egyptian Industry in the Light of Global Transformations: Towards More Localisation and Integration. The stability of Egypts tax system allows companies to predict their liabilities accurately over the short and longer terms, making Egypt attractive for foreign direct investment (FDI), he added. Egypt targets $7 billion in FDI. Mohamed Abdel-Karim, head of the Industrial Modernisation Centre at the Ministry of Trade and Industry, said there were now 83 investment opportunities in localising the production of 131 items that would save on imports worth $14 billion. The government wants to increase the proportion of local components in products made in Egypt and increase exports by announcing incentives when offering industrial land for sale. Abdel-Karim said there were currently 17 industrial complexes available for industries to move to across Egypt. The countrys industrial exports are targeted to reach $28 billion by the end of the year, up from $23 billion in 2021. Alaa Al-Saqti, head of the Egyptian Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Federation, told the seminar that integrating the informal sector into the formal economy would double Egypts GDP, increase exports, and attract more investments. The government passed its Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Law in 2020, the executive regulations of which were issued in 2021. The law aims to legalise industries working in the informal economy and clarify industrial policies, Al-Saqti said. Ayman Qura, a member of the board of the Chamber of Food Industries in the Federation of Egyptian Industries, called for benefits to be drawn from the experiences of countries that have achieved industrial growth in Eastern Europe and Asia and where conditions are similar to those in Egypt. We have promising investment opportunities and sufficient manpower, especially young people. What we need is an integrated industrial map, Qura told the Weekly. Two crises in three years, first the Covid-19 pandemic and then the Ukraine war, have resulted in price hikes in energy and raw materials, meaning that Egypt should not rely on one country for imports, Qura said. Egypt has the potential to become a regional hub thanks to its large market and the trade agreements it has signed with the European Union, the African countries, and the Gulf, he added. The new global economic order requires exploring custom incentives for companies exporting industrial products, he said. The higher the percentage of the local components in such products, the higher the incentives should be, Al-Bahi suggested. This will allow Egyptian products to be available in more markets and increase the space for localisation to grow even further, he added. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly. Search Keywords: Short link: Iraqs parliament failure to elect new president and prime minister is plunging the country into further political chaos. For nearly two decades Iraq has been ruled by a political system that allows its multiple ethnic groups to share power and wealth. But this system, which cobbles together a rickety coalition of sectarian groups and oligarchs, has gripped the country in a permanent political paralysis. Iraqs consensual political structure, forged following the US invasion of the country that toppled the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003, has allowed a Shia-majority alliance to lead government coalitions that have also included Kurdish parties and Sunni representatives. However, more than five months after general elections were held in Iraq last October, the political chaos created by this system of sectarian and ethnic patronage is continuing to grind on, vividly showing that Iraq is threatened to become a stateless nation. Iraqs parliament failed again this week to elect a new president for the country due to the lack of a quorum, plunging the battered nation into further uncertainty that bodes ill for efforts to form a new government that can tackle Iraqs multiple political, social, economic and security problems as well as foreign interference. Only 202 MPs out of 329 were reportedly present at Saturdays session, less than the two-thirds quorum needed to choose a new president. According to parliamentary statements, 40 candidates have put themselves forward for this largely ceremonial post, which is reserved by convention for a member of Iraqs Kurdish ethnicity. The contest this time pitted incumbent President Barham Saleh against Kurdish rival Rebar Ahmed. Saleh, a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), is backed by an alliance of his party, the Shia Coordination Framework (CF), and several Sunnis MPs, while Ahmed of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) is supported by a coalition of his party with Shia cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr and a Sunni bloc. Some 126 lawmakers, most of them from the CF bloc or independents, boycotted the Saturday session, depriving it of a quorum and forcing the postponement of the election for the second time since February and throwing Iraqi politics into further turmoil. The first vote on 7 February failed to materialise after a boycott and wrangle over the PUKs nomination of former foreign and finance minister Hoshyar Zebari, barred by Iraqs Supreme Court over corruption and mismanagement allegations after a parliamentary no-confidence vote. The election of a new president is an important step towards forming a new government in Iraq following last Octobers parliamentary elections. The two constitutional steps usually require enormous political horse-trading. In each of its five national elections since Saddams ouster, Iraq has witnessed chaotic scenes over the formation of governments, and Iraqis usually greet the periodic political crises with cynical resignation. But Saturdays failed parliamentary session underlined the sharp divide in Iraqi politics between Al-Sadr, whose bloc, the Sadrist Movement, emerged as the big winner in the October elections, and the powerful CF, an umbrella alliance of mostly Iran-backed Shia groups. Iraq held early elections on 10 October 2021 in response to mass protests in the country beginning in October 2019 that were triggered by widespread dissatisfaction with political corruption and the lack of basic services. Following the elections, Al-Sadr proposed sweeping changes to the way the country has been run since the US-led invasion, including forming a national majority government that would imply the dissolution of the sectarian and ethnic power-sharing quotas that have framed successive post-Saddam governments. Al-Sadr has also promised that a new government led by his faction would follow a non-aligned line in foreign policy, signalling his intention to stifle Irans influence in Iraq and enhancing national sovereignty. In order to achieve his goals, Al-Sadr broke away from the main Shia parties and allied himself with a major Sunni bloc led by Parliamentary Speaker Mohamed Al-Halbousi and a Kurdish bloc headed by KDP leader Massoud Barzani. The Save the Homeland Coalition, as it is known, has so far failed to patch together a majority able to agree on Al-Sadrs cousin Jaafar Al-Sadr as the new prime minister to succeed Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, however. With the failure to elect a new president and choose a new prime minister, Iraq entered a period of political instability on Saturday after the elections in October that were themselves seen as an existential vote to end Iraqs chronic stalemate. The key issue in the elections was whether they would bring about a drastic change in Iraqs politics and sound the death knell of the forces entrenched in government that have overseen instability, endemic dysfunction, and deeply entrenched corruption. Many Iraqis had hoped that Al-Sadr would seize the moment and make the outcome a turning point for Iraqs increasingly dysfunctional and fragmented system that stokes sectarian politics. Al-Sadrs victory in the elections also reinforced hopes among the international and regional powers that he would stand up to Iran and help to counter the influence of its proxies in Iraq and across the region. US policymakers showed a clear preference for Al-Sadr and his movement and resorted to the traditional spin of the US media in their efforts to portray him as a strong nationalist leader and Iraqs saviour from Iran. The US may have even gone beyond mustering this rhetoric by building on the narrative that Al-Sadr is preventing Iraq from tilting further into Irans axis and getting ready to do business with its old foe. In October, the Saudi-owned Independent Arabia media outlet reported that Al-Sadrs cousin and nominee for the prime ministerial post Jaafar Al-Sadr, Iraqs ambassador to the UK, had made a secret visit to Washington to discuss post-election arrangements in Iraq. But Al-Sadrs claim of boosted popularity and of his being an instrument of creative destruction in Iraq seems to have failed this week, when he showed that his biggest difficulty is the precarious nature of his parliamentary majority. The election victory in October gave Al-Sadr a new-found self-assurance that many analysts believed turned him from a kingmaker to Iraqi Shias most-prominent strongmen. For nearly two decades, Al-Sadr has outmanoeuvred his rivals by upending the countrys Shia political parties and seeking to place himself in a position of power within the community. Yet, his attempts to isolate his rivals, enforced by his being the largest vote-winner in the new Iraqi parliament, have split the Shia community and stirred fears of Al-Sadrs dream of being fully in charge of the country. During the latest crisis, Al-Sadr sidestepped the independent MPs and small blocs that had emerged from the October 2019 protest movement and were voted into parliament in the hope that they would make changes to the way Iraq is governed. Many of these lawmakers, who viewed the response to Al-Sadrs unilateral move as unacceptable capitulation, have reportedly faced bullying and blackmail by members of the Sadrist Movement, who tried to force them to attend Saturdays session in order to achieve the quorum for the election of the president and prime minister. Al-Sadrs nomination of his cousin, little known to the public, to the powerful post of prime minister has triggered concerns that Al-Sadr intends to build a ruling clan, a move that would cement the grip of the influential Al-Sadr family on the country. The postponement of the election of the president has now exacerbated Iraqs political problems, with some suggesting dissolving the parliament and forming an emergency government if the lawmakers pass a 7 April deadline announced by the Supreme Court. Given the new deadlock, many Iraqis now fear that the crisis may go beyond the boundaries of the parliament into the streets and determine not only the government of the country, but also whether it has a viable future as a state. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Search Keywords: Short link: The Gulf Cooperation Council launched the second Yemeni National Dialogue in the Saudi capital Riyadh earlier this week, initially without the participation of Yemens Houthi rebels. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) launched the second Yemeni National Dialogue on 29 March in Riyadh with a view to promoting a new Gulf initiative to end the conflict in Yemen. The dialogue conference is expected to last ten days until 7 April, and senior officials from the Yemeni Ansarullah (Houthi) Movement have stipulated a number of preconditions for attending. Speaking from the Yemeni capital Sanaa, Houthi leader Abdul-Malek Al-Houthi and the movements politburo chair Mahdi Al-Mashat said that the Saudi-led Coalition backing the internationally recognised Yemeni government must first lift the blockades on Sanaa Airport and the Hodeida Seaport before it would consider attending the dialogue meeting. At the time of writing, the coalition has yet to respond officially to these demands. Meanwhile, last month the Houthis ratcheted up their missile attacks against Saudi Arabia, launching 16 strikes mostly against oil facilities. The strikes took place in two waves, the first coinciding with the announcement of the GCC initiative in mid-March and the second coinciding with the seventh anniversary of Operation Resolute Storm that the coalition launched against the Houthi insurgency in Yemen on 26 March 2015. After the second wave of strikes, the Houthis declared a three-day unilateral truce, signalling their intention to resume the military offensive when the dialogue begins. In retaliation against the last rounds of Houthi strikes, which hit an oil storage facility in Jeddah, the coalition has resumed its attacks against the Houthis. Coalition Spokesman Turki Al-Maliki cautioned civilians in Sanaa and Hodeida to stay clear of Houthi weapons depots before strikes were launched against Houthi targets in these cities. According to a senior Saudi official in remarks to the French news agency AFP, the latest Houthi preconditions constitute their backing down from their initial position. Previously, they had also insisted that the dialogue conference should be held in any other Gulf capital but Riyadh, which they regard as a party to the conflict and therefore unqualified to act as mediator. The official described the Houthi preconditions as a form of muscle flexing. Some Yemeni government officials believe that a military option may be the only solution. Yemeni Defence Minister Mohamed Al-Maqdashi is of this view, but he has not clarified how a Houthi military defeat might occur. Yemeni government forces are still on the defensive in the Mareb and Taizz regions of Yemen, and they have only made minor advances on the Jouba front. Houthi militias have laid siege to areas in the northeast of the Al-Bayda governorate to keep government forces from advancing into Mareb from the Shabwa front that was liberated by the Southern Amaliqa (Giants) forces at the end of last year. The Southern Giants, affiliated with the Southern Movement, have been fighting off and on alongside pro-government forces. Many observers in Yemen doubt that a national dialogue without the Houthis will lead to a peaceful settlement, but they still believe that it could have some positive outcomes. It could produce new political alignments and reform the government coalition, for example. One participant in the preparations for the National Dialogue in Riyadh agreed that activities at the conference would focus on ways to reform and restructure the Yemeni government and military. However, he also anticipated a UN-sponsored prisoner swap soon, which would be in keeping with the Ramadan ceasefire that UN Special Envoy to Yemen Hans Grundberg has been trying to promote in order to facilitate the delivery of desperately needed humanitarian relief. Given that the Houthis are Iranian proxies, their strikes against Saudi oil facilities have regional ramifications. Tehran is eager to accelerate a deal to renew the agreement on its nuclear programme, thereby enabling the resumption of Iranian oil exports. International circumstances surrounding the Russian war in Ukraine and the consequent rise in global energy prices have also become additional determinants in this context. Endangering Saudi oil exports would increase the pressure on the US to accept Iranian conditions at a time when the Western powers are desperate for oil. In the aftermath of the Houthi strikes, the director of the Saudi Energy Agency said that his country would not be able to meet its export commitments but refused to take the blame for this. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said that Riyadh had opened a line of communications with Tehran on the Yemeni crisis and the Iranian connection with the Houthis. While he welcomed this development, it is unlikely that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which often does not see eye-to-eye with the Foreign Ministry, will feel the same way. Both Yemeni and Saudi officials maintain that the IRGC is directly involved in Houthi military actions targeting Saudi Arabia. Analysts argue that this makes it difficult to delink the Yemeni question from other regional crises involving Iran, though this would make it easier to reach a solution to the Yemeni conflict. A comparison might be drawn with Iraq, another country where Iran is highly influential. Washington and Baghdad earlier struck an agreement in the framework of their strategic dialogue to bring the US combat mission in the country to a close and reduce the functions of the US military presence there to training Iraqi forces and guarding US interests. But despite the agreement, pro-Iranian Iraqi militias taking their cue from the IRGC continued to target US locations in the country and to obstruct the Iraqi political process that aims to resolve the tensions the country has experienced since general elections last October. The IRGC remains a key factor in many regional crises, and it is difficult to assess how it will behave after the Iranian nuclear agreement goes into effect again. Given the overlapping nature of these crises, it seems that some form of understanding will be needed between the US, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in order to resolve them, including the Yemeni conflict. Perhaps the renewed nuclear agreement with Iran will reduce the tensions between the US and Iran, but it is unclear whether this will affect progress towards a settlement in any of the regional crises. Meanwhile, the Saudis are keeping the doors open in case the Houthis decide to return to the negotiating table. Ten years ago, then Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh initially rejected the first national dialogue and then changed his mind and handed over the government to current President Abd Rabbu Mansur Hadi. If the Houthis do not take part in the current National Dialogue, perhaps they will come around to negotiating with the Yemeni government bilaterally. Perhaps Riyadh might also wait for conditions to be more conducive to productive talks. This would be conceivable if the Houthis step back from their preconditions, if a truce goes into effect in Ramadan, and in the event of a prisoner-exchange deal, especially one that includes prominent figures such as Hadis brother and former defence minister Mahmoud Al-Subaihi. A new agreement on the Iranian nuclear programme would also be a game-changer in this context, although given the complexity of the Yemeni conflict, it would still take time to reach a peace agreement. Another possibility, especially if there are no signs of progress, is that Saudi Arabia, keen to end a war that has entered into its eighth year, might decide to withdraw unilaterally from Yemen, leaving it up to the Yemeni government and its allies to confront the Houthis militarily and politically. At the same time, the GCC would oversee the implementation of the Riyadh Agreement between the Yemeni government and the Southern Transitional Council, thereby demonstrating Riyadhs continued support for Yemen. Saudi Arabia would also strengthen its defence posture with the addition of the ballistic-missile defence systems it has recently purchased from the US. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Search Keywords: Short link: According to international political reports, Russia has been striking civilian targets in Ukraine, from residential areas to hospitals and shelters. In this way it can force inhabitants to flee their homes, thereby creating a humanitarian crisis that would give Moscow leverage against the ruling regime in Ukraine, which Putin openly states he wants to topple on the grounds that it is neo-Nazi. As the crisis worsened, the numbers of people seeking refuge in neighbouring countries has increased. Some analysts believe that Putins aim is to create an international refugee crisis of some five to ten million people, taking advantage of the racist tendencies in Western countries that have made them more sympathetic to the plight of white skinned, blue eyed and blond people and therefore more willing to open their doors to them than to darker complexioned refugees from the Middle East and Africa. The idea is that the economic and social burden of this huge number of Ukrainian refugees in Poland, Hungary and other neighbouring nations will lead these governments to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to cave in to Putins demands in order to end the war. According to AFP, more than 3.5 million Ukrainians, mostly women and children, have crossed the borders into neighbouring countries in what the French news agency describes as the fastest growing refugee crisis since World War II. As for the numbers of people displaced in Ukraine, UN reports place the figure at around 6.5 million. Certainly causing this crisis and using it as a weapon would count as a war crime attributable to Putin. But then, what war has been without war crimes committed by its various parties? *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly. Search Keywords: Short link: The Russian Orthodox Church cannot remain aloof from the war that is raging in Ukraine, since for many it is part of a spiritual and moral confrontation between Russia and the West. When Communism was at its high in the former Soviet Union, the churches were shuttered or destroyed and their property confiscated by the state. However, Russian President Vladimir Putins mother had him secretly baptised and gave him a cross to wear. After the fall of Communism, and when Putin became president of the Russian Federation, his country once again embraced the Christian faith. The pious president saw in the Russian Orthodox Church a vehicle of the national spirit. He restored confiscated property to the Church and built thousands more churches. Russian churches abroad returned to the Moscow Patriarchate. At a press conference in 2007, Putin said that the Orthodox Church protected societys morals just as nuclear weapons protected national security. It is little wonder that in 2012 Patriarch of Moscow Kirill I hailed the Putin era as a miracle of God. The bishop was born in 1946, just after the Soviet Union emerged victorious from World War II, asserted its hegemony over Eastern Europe, and began to spread its anti-religious influence across the Third World. Six years older than Putin, he is also a native of St Petersburg like the Russian president. For both men, the Orthodox faith is more than just a religious creed, but it is the foundation of Russian national history. The Russian people feel closely linked to the church. According to a 2015 survey, 71 per cent of respondents said that the Orthodox faith was an essential component of national identity and 57 per cent said that religion played a crucial part in their lives. The Russian Orthodox Church cannot remain aloof from the war that is raging in Ukraine. It is in something of the same position as the Ethiopian Orthodox Church when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched his genocidal war against the countrys Tigray Region. Fighters on both sides shared the same religious affiliation. However, there is a difference. In Ethiopia, the government tried to prevent Ethiopian Patriarch Abune Mathias, who was born in Tigray, from speaking out. Nevertheless, he managed to smuggle out a video in which he harshly condemned the war. Even so, the church in Tigray is still determined to break with the patriarchate in Addis Ababa. In Russia, after a period of silence Kirill I addressed the situation in Ukraine. He did not call it a war, instead talking about the events or military operations his country was involved in. The purpose was not material, but for spiritual ends, he said. It was about salvation. He argued that Russia and Ukraine were bound together by shared history and faith and that Ukraine was falling under the influence of Western values that went against Eastern Orthodox ones. Accordingly, the confrontation was both a military and political one between Russia and the West, as well as a spiritual and moral one. Kirills words met with opposition in some ecclesiastical quarters. The independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine is accelerating the schism from Moscow that it began in 2019. A third of Orthodox parishes in the country are now aligned with the independent church, which has been officially recognised by Patriarch Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople, a position that holds a place of honour in Eastern Orthodoxy. For some years, Bartholomew and Kirill have been at odds over this recognition, as if history were once again playing one of its tricks. When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in the 15th century, the Russian Orthodox Church cast itself as the successor to the Constantinople Patriarchate and the Mother Church of all the Eastern Orthodox. Today, history has once again turned its spotlight on Constantinople, which has officially recognised churches that have broken away from the Russian Patriarchate. Another example is the Russian Orthodox Church in Amsterdam, which broke away from Moscow following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Other Eastern Churches outside of Russia are likely to follow. In Ukraine, there are still parishes affiliated with Moscow, but they have nevertheless voiced their opposition to the Russian intervention in their country. Some Orthodox priests in north-eastern Ukraine where Russian influence is strong share this view as do some church officials in Russia. It appears that the controversies on religion and the war in Ukraine will continue. Just as a reminder to the reader, the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt, affiliated to the See of St Mark, has its own doctrinal and institutional order and its own distinct identity and character. It is therefore not a party to the developments mentioned above. * The writer is head of the Media and Communication Sector at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly. Search Keywords: Short link: The Egyptologists who rediscovered the monuments of ancient Egypt often saw what they had discovered as being completely disconnected from modern Egypt, writes Tarek Osman To reflect on how a civilisation thought about the divine is to look her in the eyes and attempt to delve into her soul, which is what the previous article in this series tried to do. Those who have attempted that deep look often philosophised (to put their understandings into relatable analogies), sometimes romanticised (to conceive the civilisations soul with their hearts as well as with their minds), and in some cases even eroticised (bringing their fantasies of what is secular into realms the civilisation had reserved for what is sacred). In ancient Egypt, as in most elevated understandings of true humanity, the secular and the sacred merged, being two gates that lead into two essences of a whole that is one. But that journey into ancient Egyptian thought and soul is for another time. This article concerns how those who have philosophised, romanticised, and eroticised often took ancient Egypt away from her milieu into historical and geographical exile. The geographical exile lay in exporting artefacts to the West, with Paris, London, Rome, and Washington DC being prime destinations. For the exporters, the artefacts were spirited away from the mud and sand into which they had sunk for centuries to be displayed with glamour in humanitys new centres of power and glory, and, crucially, also of knowledge. In the minds of many, this exporting out of Egypt meant saving the remains of ancient Egypt from ignorance and bringing them to where they would be looked after, and, perhaps more importantly, understood. But this entailed historical exile. Obelisks in the West, say in Paris or Washington, brought with them subtle meanings for those who knew how to look. They certainly added glamour to the milieus into which they were placed. But these were not their milieus. Meanings do not survive intact outside of the contexts into which they are put. Plots do not carry their true weight if they are told as opposed to unfolding in a book. Ancient Egypt, as discussed in the first article in this series, is a book with many chapters feeding into each other. It is a book whose pages are to be read on the walls and ceilings of temples and tombs across the land. The artefacts, statues, and obelisks that were siphoned off later were given new lives where they were taken. But they were pages torn out from that book. These torn-out pages are missed. But given the tremendous scale of the civilisation and what it has left us in Egypt the weighty erudition of the book the torn-out pages do not cut off the books narrative. Away from the country, they remain full of informing and enchanting knowledge, but they also become individualised items from a civilisation that was whole and that was directed towards wholeness. One can stand in front of the ancient Egyptian obelisk in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The observer admires, and the observed awes, and for those like Goethe who look to immerse themselves, who look to participate, the obelisk will inspire. But the obelisk was not made to stand alone. It was part of a bigger construct and put in the midst of a larger scene. Placed in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, the obelisk stands in dignity, retaining the knowledge that the ancient architects and authors placed on her. Yet, she stands separated from the narrative she was designed to be a part of. This separateness dictated historical exile, which in turn severed the meanings entailed by the features of ancient Egypt its temples, tombs, and artefacts from the flow of history on that land. The separateness was often intentional, and certainly it was needed. The Egyptologists who opened the heavy gates of the ancient civilisation after centuries of heavy closure and the accumulation of rust understandably saw what they had discovered as utterly disconnected from modern Egypt. For them, they were resuscitating a civilisation from the silent recesses of history. The differences between what was in the distant past and what was in contemporary Egypt were so vast, that, the modern Egyptologists reckoned, the ancient civilisation was completely separate from the present culture. This led to the culmination of geographic and historic exile, viewing ancient Egypt as not really Egyptian in the modern view of todays Egypt, but rather as a global civilisation, a period of advanced knowledge that happened to exist on that land and that was now totally gone. In this view, the remains of that civilisation are disconnected in almost every way from todays Egypt. As a result of this understanding of ancient Egypt, the Concorde obelisk could well stand alone in Paris away from its home in Luxor because modern-day Luxor was no longer that obelisks home. Ancient Egyptology could not have conceived such a thought and such a separation between old and new. As was seen in the first article in this series, early students of ancient Egypt such as Pythagoras and Plato realised that there was a continuous flow of knowledge that was a fundamental feature and meaning not only of ancient Egypt, but also of the knowledge that ancient Egypt was a representation of. To bring about such a separation and see periods and products of that civilisation as individualised and disconnected from their milieu was a colossal failure in understanding the civilisation and the knowledge entailed by it. But like any failure, it has been corrected, for there were indeed modern Egyptologists inside and outside Egypt who grasped and respected the continuity and the wholeness of the civilisation. For them, ancient and modern Egypt are false constructs: there is only one Egypt, whose historical flow and geopolitical coherence are ever-present features. The next article in this series will look at the work of these thinkers. * The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010). *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly. Search Keywords: Short link: Today we can take a warriors rest from the horrors of the Ukraine war and the shifts in the global order it is ushering in. The occasion is the invitation I received to attend Don Carlos and participate in a seminar about it afterwards. I am no expert in opera. In fact, it was some time before my cultural interests strayed in that direction at all, as aware as I was that it was a high art like classical music and ballet. Fortunately, about two decades ago, I met a member of the board of trustees of the Metropolitan Opera in New York who guided me through my first foray into opera. After that, I added it to the branches of knowledge I try to keep up with. It helped that this friend persuaded the famous American cultural institution to connect its live broadcasts to a number of Egyptian cultural institutions, such as the Cairo Opera House, the American University in Cairo, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and others. Not that Egypt had been unacquainted with this art. The Khedival Opera House in Ibrahim Pasha Square was once a widely recognised architectural gem. It might come as a surprise to many, but opera was also available to audiences outside Egypts main urban centres. Another opera house was constructed in Damanhur in the Beheira governorate. However, after the royal opera house burned down and even after the new opera house was built in Zamalek, this art attracted little attention until such developments as the linkup with Met Opera Live a few years ago. Opera is a relatively recent art. Emerging in the early 17th century, it married music and verse or other types of text to create a form of story telling unlike any other. It differed from other forms of musical performance in two ways. First, it treated fundamental issues and questions of human life. And, secondly, it gave music pride of place in expressing these themes. Even if the storyline seemed simple, the music provided depth and an emotional range that held spectators in thrall, while pauses in the music or moments of silence on stage would have a thunderous effect. In fact, opera may be the only type of musical performance from which audiences emerge emotionally and physically drained. Perhaps the loud applause at the end in tribute to the conductor, the orchestra, the performers and the libretto is an expression of the sudden release one feels after the curtain closes. Or is it a celebration of a kind of redemption after hours of grappling with humankinds great dilemmas, conflicts and passions? Operatic plots are more complex than they might appear at first precisely because they deal with such complicated issues as love, hate, betrayal and vengeance. Don Carlos revolves around some of these grand themes in the context of the triangle of human nature, power and religion. Based on a play by Friedrich Schiller, it is set in 16th-century Spain which, at the time, was in the iron grip of Phillip II and the terror of the Inquisition. In addition to King Phillip, the other main characters are members of the royal court: King Phillips young wife, the French princess Elisabeth of Valois; the eponymous protagonist, Don Carlos, the kings anxious and bewildered son and heir; the beautiful and proud princess Eboli; the Marquis of Posa, a fearless agitator for reform; and the unyielding Grand Inquisitor, symbol of religious dogmatism and fanaticism. The drama follows this sixsome as they deceive, threaten, plot against one another and conspire in the framework of the social issues and arts of government of their times. The music was composed by Giuseppe Verdi, best known in Egypt for his masterpiece, Aida. Verdis works typically focus at once on the public and private spheres, and Don Carlos is no exception. Its characters clearly epitomise certain ideas and principles, and they become the agents for a battle between Verdi and Schillers liberal and humanitarian values versus the dual tyranny of the despotic state and religious rigidity and zealotry. The environment in which the drama unfolds is inspired, on the one hand, by the spirit of the Renaissance, and on the other hand, by the recent expulsion of Arab Islamic civilisation from Andalusia. It was an era characterised by Christopher Columbus discovery of the New World and, at the same time, by the intolerance and bigotry of the Inquisition and its invasive prying into the hearts and minds of all. The central story of the opera is that of Don Carlos love for princess Elisabeth, daughter of King Henry II of France who had been at war with Phillip II. Don Carlos had been betrothed to Elisabeth but under the terms of the peace agreement between her father and the Spanish king, she had to marry, not her beloved prince, but his father, King Phillip. Neither she nor Don Carlos had any choice in the matter. Now, when you put such matters as war, love, kings and an amorous prince and a princess together in a single dramatic text, you get some explosive interactions between tradition and new ways of thought. Here the inquisitor steps in to bring everything to a head and force the heroes to make the difficult choice between freedom and death. The process of inquisition, itself, is designed to purge people of sin, not just as a deed but as innermost thought. These raging conflicts brought so vividly to life through the fusion of narrative and music run deep though human history. We find roots in the ancient Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris, symbols of love and self-sacrifice, and Seth, the evil brother whose greed drives him to kill Osiris, cut up his body and scatter the pieces from Upper Egypt to the banks of the Lebanon. Then comes Horus, the son, who exacts revenge against his uncle to restore justice and equilibrium, after his mother gathers together all the parts of Osiris and breaths life into them again. What is of importance to us in this tale is not so much the emotions it generates but the lessons it offers about two questions that have long perplexed humanity. The first is where we come from, and the answer is from love. The second is where are we going? The answer to this is, to another world whose quality is determined by how good and evil balance out. Thus, a religious system was born. With the arrival of the divinely revealed faiths, the system took the path of justice and its pursuit. At the same time, however, zealots, extremists and purgers converged in order to take it in a different direction. In our times and our region, the inquisitors come not from the state but from organisations starting from the Muslim Brotherhood and not ending with Islamic State. All are bent on moulding the true believer and the theocratic state whose raison detre is terror and death. Herein lies a human complex of a kind that no opera in the Arab world or elsewhere has attempted to unravel. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly. Search Keywords: Short link: On 9 March, my close friend and colleague, the young, brilliant, and promising Egyptian archaeologist Ramadan Badri Hussein, passed away after a short illness in Germany. We all are in a state of shock. It is difficult for me to mourn my dear friend and colleague, who was an associate professor of Egyptology at the Institute of Near Eastern Studies at Eberhard Karls University in Tubingen, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. Hussein was born in Cairo in December 1971. We studied Egyptology together at the Department of Egyptology at the Faculty of Archaeology at Cairo University from 1990 to 1944. He was always diligent, polite, loving to all, well-liked by all, and always helpful to others. Our relationship went from strength to strength after his graduation, when he joined the Giza Pyramids Inspectorate and worked under the supervision of Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass. We worked together on the Giza Pyramids antiquities, at the Bahariya Oasis excavations, and on many projects at the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and the Ministry of State for Antiquities. Hussein then travelled to the US to get his PhD in Egyptology from Brown University. After receiving his degree, he returned to Egypt and worked in many important positions at the SCA and the ministry. After the 25 January Revolution in 2011, he left Egypt and returned to the US for a while. He was then awarded a prestigious scholarship from the famous Humboldt Foundation in Germany. He came back to Egypt and started excellent field work at Saqqara, becoming director of the Saqqara Saite Tombs Project at the Eberhard Karls University in Tubingen. He headed the Egyptian-German mission working at Saqqara and received a grant from the German Academy of Scientific Research. He made amazing archaeological discoveries that the whole world spoke of with admiration and respect, praising this young Egyptian archaeologist who had raised the name of Egypt so highly. Through his brilliance, he acted as a representative of other Egyptian archaeologists, showing that the Egyptian school of Egyptology is full of important and promising names. In recognition of his achievements in the field, Hussein was appointed an associate professor of Egyptology at the Institute of Near Eastern Studies at Eberhard Karls University in Tubingen. During his early field work in Saqqara, he documented the Pyramid Texts in the Saite tombs and provided us with excellent studies on this topic. He became one of the best scholars in this field worldwide, focusing in his research on the use of these texts in the tombs of non-royal members of the Saite elite. His name became associated with an amazing series of exceptional discoveries in the Saite cemetery at Saqqara, where he discovered a mummification cache for the first time. International television channels competed in making documentaries about his amazing discoveries, and he presented a wonderful series of documentary films on the mummification cache at Saqqara, lecturing about his discoveries in a large number of universities, institutes, and specialised scientific institutions in Egypt and abroad. The mummification cache was voted one of Archaeology Magazines Top 10 Discoveries of the Year in 2018 and one of the Top 10 Discoveries of the Decade for 2010 to 2020. He became a star in the world of archaeology and a major public figure for archaeologists all over the world. He was awarded a series of prestigious grants and served as a member of many scientific committees. He participated on the editorial boards of many academic journals in the world of archaeology. Husseins funeral took place in Giza on 12 March and was attended by many family members, colleagues, students, and loved ones. To this day, it seems difficult to believe that he is no longer with us. May he rest in peace as one of the best Egyptologists of our generation. His sudden passing is a great loss for us all and for the field of archaeology across the world. My dear friend, honourable colleague, and brilliant archaeologist will remain in our memories, our consciences, and our prayers. Hussein Bassir The writer is director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Antiquities Museum. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly. Search Keywords: Short link: Denmark said on Tuesday it was making a battalion of 800 troops available to NATO in Baltic countries to counter any Russian threat there following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. The Nordic country has already deployed some 200 military personnel, fighter jets to Estonia and Lithuania and sent a frigate to the east of the Baltic Sea. "We are already significantly present on the ground, but we are ready to do more," Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said at a press conference. "This is why the government will suggest sending a battalion of 800 (soldiers) to Baltic countries," she said. The battalion was on standby, but NATO must make an official request for the soldiers to be sent, the prime minister added. Frederiksen made the announcement after Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Danish parliament via video link. Frederiksen is due to travel Wednesday to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, including visiting Danish troops there. Like many other European countries, Denmark has sent weapons to help Ukraine fight off the Russians. Search Keywords: Short link: Britain is to reinforce its military presence in the Arctic in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said Tuesday. The region "is important for our communications, it is important for our trade and our travels, it is important for our freedoms," said Wallace as he visited troops at Bardufoss in Norway, a cold-weather training base for Royal Air Force, British Army, and Royal Navy helicopter crews. The Russian operation in Ukraine means London must step up its land and sea surveillance in the region, Wallace told a press conference, underlining "a commitment to increase the amount of surveying we do across the sea and land. "We are going to effectively, permanently, have a ... Marine strike group permanently ... active in the Nordics," said Wallace as he underlined British commitment to protecting "our infrastructure, the cables that we see Russia target to make us vulnerable". Britain participates in biennial exercises with partners in the North Atlantic but the Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen the area take on added strategic importance. Wallace's Norwegian counterpart Odd Roger Enoksen said that his country, as a member of NATO but also a neighbour of Russia, "wants more allied activity up North". He further noted, "The UK is our most important ally in Europe." Some 30,000 troops from 25 NATO countries as well as non-member partners Sweden and Finland are currently on manoeuvres in Norway's far north, testing the alliance's capacity to defend against aggression. Search Keywords: Short link: Russia said Tuesday it was expelling 10 diplomats from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in a tit-for-tat move after the Baltic countries expelled Russian diplomats over military action in Ukraine. The foreign ministry said it summoned the ambassadors of the three EU and NATO member countries and "strongly protested" the "unjustified" expulsion of Russian diplomats. "Based on the principle of reciprocity", Moscow will be expelling four diplomats from the Lithuanian embassy and three each from the Latvian and Estonian embassies, the ministry added. These countries had expelled Russian diplomats earlier this month. Search Keywords: Short link: In what appeared to be a coordinated action to tackle Russian espionage, at least four European allies expelled a total of dozens of Russian diplomats on Tuesday. The expulsions come against a backdrop of relations between Russia and the West that have been plunged into a deep freeze following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. The Netherlands said it was expelling 17 Russians who it described as intelligence officers masquerading as diplomats. Belgium said it was ejecting 21 Russians. The Czech Republic gave one Russian diplomat 72 hours to leave the country. Ireland told four senior Russian officials to leave the country because of activities deemed not "in accordance with international standards of diplomatic behavior.'' Poland last week expelled 45 Russians whom the government identified as intelligence officers using their diplomatic status as cover to operate in the country. Search Keywords: Short link: With the advent of Ramadan, Ahram Online takes this opportunity to remind us of the essence of the holy month and what makes it priceless. Sighting the crescent? Before the use of modern technology, officials used to manually sight the crescent in a celebrated ceremony to determine the first day of fasting. Here are some rare pictures of the practice from 1936. Wahawi Ya Wahawi, Eyaha This the chant that usually accompanies children as they run around with their colourful lanterns. As children, we were never sure if it was supposed to be Eyaha or Eyoha? Now we know it is definitely Eyaha. Its an ancient Egyptian figure of speech addressing the moon in honour of Queen Eiah, Egyptologist Fatma Keshk explained to Ahram Online, saying the chant was affiliated with the moon festival, where wahawi is a cheer to the moon. Eiah Hotep was a queen mother who led the country while her other son, King Ahmose, was fighting the Hyksos. In praise of her courage and wisdom, her son, the victor, granted her the medal of courage and engraved for her a mural at Karnak Temple. Read the chants in her praise here. As for the lanterns, the main symbol of Raman in Egypt, they became popular during the Fatimid reign of Egypt, specifically on 24 July 968. On that day, the Fatimid Caliph Al-Moezz entered Cairo at night, and the populace carried torches and candles as they went out to welcome him. In order to shield the candles from the wind, some of them placed them on a wooden platform and wrapped the platform with palm fronds and leather. More on lanterns here. Hand-made paper decorations Before we started importing Ramadan decorations, making them was the job of the children of the neighbourhood, who recycled old paper, cut it in various geometrical shapes, and hung it across buildings with a big lantern in the middle. This is how it was done and revived. Before the cannon blows This is a phrase with which only those who have lived in Egypt would be familiar. The tradition began in 1460, when Mamluk Sultan Al-Zaher Seif Al-Din Zenki Khashqodom received a cannon as a gift from a German acquaintance. Testing the cannon, the sultans soldiers fired it at sunset, coinciding exactly with the maghreb call to prayer that marks the end of the days fast. Read about how it all started and about when the first charity banquets were laid out. Wake up, sleepy head The first mesaharati was during the Prophet Muhammads time. It was Bilal Bin Rabah, who assumed this responsibility. In the year 853, the wali (governor) of Egypt would walk all the way from the city of Askar, now Ibn Toulon, to Amrs Mosque in Fustat, now Masr Al-Qadima, accompanied by an entourage who called out to people to have the sohour. Ghabsa Bin Ishaq is said to have started the practice. Read more on the mesaharati. Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said the tangible progress in Egyptian-Qatari relations should serve the interests of the two countries and enhance the efforts to bolster the security and stability of the Arab region. El-Sisi made the remarks in a meeting on Tuesday in Cairo with Qatar's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani. The meeting was attended by the head of Qatari State Security Abdullah Al-Khulaifi, Qatari Minister of Finance Ahmed El-Kuwari, and Qatar's Ambassador in Cairo Salem bin Mubarak Al-Shafi. From the Egyptian side, Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry and head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service (GIS) Abbas Kamel attended the meeting. The Qatari FM affirmed to El-Sisi Doha's keenness to strengthen the firm brotherly relations with Egypt to enhance security and stability in the region, Egyptian presidential spokesman Bassam Rady said in a statement. The top Qatari diplomat also praised the Egyptian president's efforts to boost joint Arab work and preserve security and peace on the regional level through the current critical stage and its growing challenges, the statement said. Bin Abdulrahman also praised Egypt's pivotal role as a main pillar of security and stability in the Arab world as well as the Egyptian keenness to enhance solidarity between Arab countries and boost the joint Arab work. The meeting discussed enhancing Egyptian-Qatari relations on the bilateral level in all fields and also reviewed the developments of the regional situations and issues of mutual concern. For his part, El-Sisi underscored the connection between the security of the Gulf and Egypts national security, hailing the important role that the Qatari state is playing in the face of challenges facing the Arab nation. In November, Egypt and Qatar signed agreements to supply fuel and basic construction materials to the Gaza Strip to contribute to improving living conditions after widespread destruction of the strip by Israeli bombardment last summer. Egypt and Qatar have worked on strengthening their newly-restored bilateral relations and reaching common ground on regional issues since Egypt and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) signed the Al-Ula Declaration with Qatar in January 2021 ending years of a diplomatic rift. In a press conference in Cairo with his Egyptian counterpart on Monday, bin Abdulrahman discussed the situation in Libya, stressing that Qatar shares the same stance as Egypt regarding Libya. He said Qatar, like Egypt, supports the political path in Libya as well as the outcomes of the international conferences on Libya held in Geneva and Berlin over the past years in an effort to have an impartial free election. Economic, diplomatic cooperation Egypt's Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly and bin Abdulrahman, who is being accompanied by a high-level delegation during his Cairo visit, agreed in an extended meeting on Tuesday on a package of $5 billion in investments and partnerships in Egypt within "the framework of boosting economic cooperation between the two brotherly countries." This comes a day after Shoukry and bin Abdulrahman announced a decision to establish a high joint committee between the two countries to boost cooperation and coordination in all fields as well as to continue consultations. An Egyptian-Qatari follow-up committee set up after the signing of the Ula agreement has held seven rounds of negotiations over the past year, the last of which was in Doha last September, to develop the two countries' relations. "The impurities that plagued the relations were removed through consensus on the statement of Al-Ula, the subsequent honest and sincere activation of the follow-up committee, and the positive results it reached," Shoukry said during the presser on Monday. Search Keywords: Short link: In March last year the proportion had still been the smallest among 20-somethings at 13.3 percent. Among respondents in their 20s and 30s it reached an alarming 6.7 points, the highest among all age groups. The proportion of people scoring more than 10 points, which is considered a serious depression risk, was 22.8 percent, up six-fold from 2018. It was also especially high among respondents in their 20s (30 percent) and 30s (30.5 percent). A survey of 2,110 people by the Korean Society for Traumatic Stress Studies in March and April gauged their depression levels from key words like "hopelessness," "fatigue" and "suicide." Out of the maximum points of 27, they averaged 5.7 points, compared to just 2.3 points in a survey in 2018. The drawn-out coronavirus lockdown is making more and more young people depressed and even suicidal as their lives have been on hold for more than a year. One 26-year-old who completed a graduate course in business management in Seoul earlier this year has gone to see a psychiatrist for the first time in her life. She became depressed because she could not find a job and broke up with her boyfriend. She also invested in stocks hoping to make some money but lost it. "Whatever jobs were available have dried up due to the coronavirus epidemic," she complained. "I gave up hope when I lost what little money I had in the stock market even though others made money that way." Some 16.3 percent of respondents had suicidal thoughts, 3.5 times more than in 2018 and almost twice as many as a year ago. The proportion was again the highest among respondents in their 20s (22.5 percent) and 30s (21.9 percent). In contrast, the proportion of people with suicidal thoughts in their 50s was 12.5 percent and among 60-somethings 10 percent. Shin Young-chul, a psychiatrist at Kangbuk Samsung Hospital, said, "The most mobile and active generation suffers the most in lockdown. The government needs to come up with support measures quickly for the young generation." Meanwhile, Jeong Eun-kyeong, the chief of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, poured cold water on hopes that the government will let life go back to normal any time soon. "COVID-19 is difficult to control because it is not an infectious disease that can be stopped with a few vaccine shots," she claimed. "Infections could continue due to the emergence of variants." The daily tally of new coronavirus infections stood at 525 as of Friday morning. The Philippines and the United States kicked off on Monday their biggest joint military drills since 2015, underscoring improved defense ties after President Rodrigo Duterte had scaled back some earlier war games to pursue warmer ties with China. The annual "Balikatan" (shoulder-to-shoulder) exercises involve 8,900 troops this year and will include live fire exercises and training with amphibious assault vehicles. Since taking office in 2016, Duterte had sought closer ties with China in exchange for pledges of loans, aid and investment, and distanced himself from the United States, a treaty ally. But last year he withdrew a threat to scrap a two-decade old pact governing the presence of U.S. troops in the Southeast Asian country. "We are sending a message to the world that the alliance between our countries is stronger than ever," Philippine Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said in a statement. Bangtan Boys, also known as BTS, will attend the upcoming Grammy Awards in Las Vegas, Nevada. Of the seven members, Ji-min, Jin, RM, Suga and V left on Monday, while Jung-kook left earlier for personal reasons. J-Hope, who has COVID-19, is expected to fly out in the coming days after ending his self-isolation by the end of the week. The government on Monday asked the Seoul Metropolitan Government to suspend for one year or cancel HDC Hyundai Development's business license following January's deadly building collapse in Gwangju. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said, "We requested the strongest punishment considering the gravity of the accident and concerns felt by the public." The accident killed six workers and injured one. By Trend Russia's Ural Airlines has extended the suspension period of flights to Azerbaijan for another month, Trend reports referring to the air carrier. According to the airline, all flights to Azerbaijan have been canceled for the period from March 8 through April 30, 2022. Ural Airlines has earlier suspended flights to Azerbaijan (Baku, Ganja, Lankaran) from March 8 through March 26. The Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsiya) recommended that Russian air carriers suspend international flights amid mass arrests of aircraft abroad. The restrictions do not affect airlines that have no risks of arrest or detention of aircraft. A total of nine Koreans have so far traveled to Ukraine to volunteer their services as the European country tries to repel invading Russian forces. Of the nine, three have returned to Korea and the whereabouts of two are unknown, Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong told the National Assembly's Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee on Monday. Chung said, "We've been making every effort to locate the two who are missing." Of the remaining four, one is a woman doing volunteer work and the other three are in contact with the government. Those Koreans, who include Rhee Keun, a former Navy special warfare officer and YouTuber, are believed to have been in Ukraine since March 2. "We presume that many of them went there to join the foreign legion," a ministry official said. Another 25 Korean nationals are also still in Ukraine, according to Chung. Twenty-one of them have expressed their wish to stay there under any circumstances, while four are willing to leave, but one of them is in Kherson, a dangerous region occupied by Russia, and the other three, all members of the same family, can't leave immediately as they have local relatives. Chung said, "We're planning to operate our embassy there until the last Korean national can leave the country safely." KYODO NEWS - Mar 29, 2022 - 13:39 | All, Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Tuesday instructed ministers to begin work on developing a new stimulus package by late April to soften the blow from rising energy, commodity and grain prices to households following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The package is also aimed at helping Japan's economy recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and will focus on four areas -- higher crude oil prices, stable food supplies, funding support for small and midsized companies and assistance to people in need -- according to Kishida, who delivered his directive at a Cabinet meeting. Surging energy and grain prices have cast a shadow over the Japanese economy, which saw quasi-emergency antivirus curbs removed completely in the country only last week. Japan has enacted a record 107.60 trillion yen ($881 billion) budget for the fiscal year starting Friday to support the economy. To finance the stimulus, Kishida instructed the ministers to tap 5 trillion yen set aside in the fiscal 2022 budget for the government's pandemic response, as well as 500 billion yen in reserve funds allocated for other emergency spending needs. The premier told parliament on Monday that the first priority is to deliver the spending plan as soon as possible and use the reserve funds for the to-be-compiled stimulus package. Komeito, the junior coalition partner of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, has called for securing enough funding to extend support to struggling consumers by drafting an extra budget. In addition to higher commodity prices, the yen's recent depreciation, especially against the U.S. dollar, has raised concerns about higher import costs, a headache for resource-poor Japan, outweighing any benefits exporters gain from yen weakness that boosts their overseas profits when repatriated. As a key item that could go into the package, Kishida's LDP and Komeito have floated the idea of distributing a one-off 5,000 yen payment to pensioners whose public pension benefits are set to fall by 0.4 percent in April from a year earlier. But opposition lawmakers have criticized it as an attempt to woo senior voters ahead of an upper house election this summer. Kishida has announced a one-month extension of subsidies to oil wholesalers to lower retail gasoline prices until the end of April. Another contentious point is whether the government should reactivate a provision that would allow for a temporary cut in gasoline taxes as the prime minister vowed to consider "all possible options" in responding to the surge in energy costs. The opposition Democratic Party for the People, in a rare move, approved the fiscal 2022 state budget in parliament, as Kishida had warmed to the idea of debating whether to invoke the clause, in line with the DPP's wish. The "trigger clause" was frozen to secure tax revenue for use in reconstruction in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that triggered the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. As Kishida aims to achieve wealth distribution as part of his push for a new form of capitalism, the government is also expected to prepare steps that will make it easier for smaller firms to pass on higher costs to consumers. Related coverage: Dollar tops 125 yen for 1st time since Aug. 2015, stocks fall FOCUS: Japanese energy firms brace for possible supply cut from Russia Japan's Diet enacts record 107.60 tril. yen budget for FY 2022 KYODO NEWS - Mar 29, 2022 - 11:00 | All, Japan, World Japan approved Tuesday a ban on exports of luxury cars and other items to Russia as part of economic sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine. The Cabinet of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida revised a relevant ordinance to implement the embargo on April 5 that will also cover jewelry and artworks. The move is aimed at adding pressure on oligarchs who have been supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin financially. The United States and European Union member countries have already taken similar measures. "We will work with the international community, including the Group of Seven nations, to implement tough sanctions," Koichi Hagiuda, minister of economy, trade and industry, said at a press conference. Cars make up a large portion of Russia-bound shipments from Japan that totaled 627.8 billion yen ($5 billion) in 2020, according to government data. Japan imposed a similar ban on luxury goods exports to North Korea in 2006 after Pyongyang announced it had conducted a nuclear test. Japan has since totally banned imports from and exports to the country. Russia's aggression against Ukraine has already been met with a slew of sanctions, including a freeze on the Russian central bank's assets, banning key Russian financial institutions from a major international payment system, and imposing export bans and controls. Joining the United States and European countries, Japan has also decided to strip Russia of its "most favored nation" status, which has given Moscow the best possible trade terms on key products under World Trade Organization rules. Related coverage: FOCUS: Japanese energy firms brace for possible supply cut from Russia Major Japan banks to halt dollar transactions with Russia's Sberbank Zelenskyy calls for Japan sanctions on Russia to stop "tsunami" of invasion KYODO NEWS - Mar 29, 2022 - 19:36 | All, World The United States prioritizes China over Russia as a greater threat to its national security, the Defense Department said Monday, after sending the administration of President Joe Biden's first defense strategy to Congress. In a summary of the classified documents, the U.S. department characterized China as the country's "most consequential strategic competitor," and its assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region should be tackled by strengthening defense cooperation with its allies. The Pentagon said it will "act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence" for defending the U.S. homeland from the "growing multi-domain threat" posed by China. The strategy, which incorporated the Nuclear Posture Review and Missile Defense Review, listed deterring attacks not only against the United States but also its allies and partners as one of the department's priorities. It said that "mutually beneficial alliances and partnerships are an enduring strength" for the United States, and they are essential for the country to meet its objectives, while China has stepped up its military pressure on Taiwan and territorial claims in regional waters. After China, the department said the Russia challenge in Europe should be prioritized. It said Russia poses "acute threats, as illustrated by its brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine" that started more than a month ago. It said the United States will collaborate with countries belonging to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the security alliance's partners to build up "robust deterrence in the face of Russian aggression." The summary also said it will remain capable of managing other "persistent threats," including North Korea and Iran. A declassified version of the defense strategy will be released at a later date. KYODO NEWS - Mar 29, 2022 - 19:51 | All, Japan Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue repeated his call Tuesday for U.S. President Joe Biden to visit the atomic-bombed city during his expected visit to Japan later this year as Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine. "We have been consistently saying Nagasaki should be the last atomic-bombed city and I want the president of a nuclear power to appeal (to the world) by saying, 'Let's make this place the last,'" Taue told a press conference in the southwestern Japanese city that suffered a U.S. nuclear attack in 1945. His fresh request came after U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel said Saturday Biden would be eager to visit either Nagasaki or Hiroshima, the other city atomic-bombed by the United States in the final phase of World War II. The Japanese government is trying to arrange Biden's first visit to Japan in around late April. Together with Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui, Taue made the request for the U.S. leader to visit their cities during a meeting with Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi in Tokyo last week. Taue said he will make "utmost efforts to realize" Biden's Nagasaki visit at a time when "everyone in the world has a sense of crisis over the potential use of nuclear weapons." Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Emanuel pledged unity of their countries against the use of nuclear weapons in their visit to the Hiroshima atomic bomb memorial on Saturday. The ambassador also expressed his hope to visit Nagasaki, telling reporters during the Hiroshima tour his journey will not end until he visits the other atomic-bombed city. Meanwhile, one of the five groups of atomic bomb survivors in Nagasaki Prefecture is set to dissolve later this week due to the advanced age of its members, a source close to the matter said Tuesday. The group known as Yuaikai was established in August 1979, calling for the expansion of state-designated areas devastated by the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing in the city for further support of victims and aid to people exposed to the attack outside of those areas. "I would like to pay tribute to their past activities. I feel very sorry that the role of the organization has come to an end and its form is changing," Taue said at the press conference. "I strongly feel that an era without any atomic bomb survivors is approaching." The average age of atomic bomb survivors in Japan was 83.94 years as of late March last year, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Related coverage: Leading Hiroshima A-bomb survivor, campaigner Sunao Tsuboi dies at 96 Nagasaki marks 76th A-bomb anniv., urges Japan be nuke-ban proactive A-bomb survivors play "profound role" in COVID pandemic: U.S. scholar KYODO NEWS - Mar 29, 2022 - 21:35 | World, All South Korea's defense ministry on Tuesday refuted a claim by North Korea that a missile it launched last week was a new type of intercontinental ballistic missile, saying it was likely an existing type of ICBM. Briefing South Korean lawmakers behind closed doors on the analysis of the ICBM fired last Thursday, the ministry said the North launched a Hwasong-15 ICBM and not the new "Hwasong-17," which military analysts have dubbed a "monster missile." The Hwasong-15, seen as capable of delivering a nuclear warhead anywhere on the U.S. mainland, was successfully fired in 2017. North Korea has confirmed that it fired the Hwasong-17 under the guidance of North Korean leader Kim Jong, state media later reported. The firing was the first ICBM launch by the North since November 2017. The ICBM was fired from the Sunan area in Pyongyang and fell within Japan's exclusive economic zone in the Sea of Japan after flying a distance of about 1,100 kilometers and reaching an altitude of 6,200 km, according to the Japanese and South Korean governments. While U.S. officials have not determined the type of ICBM launched, they believe it was a Hwasong-15, the South Korean defense ministry said. According to the ministry and a lawmaker who attended the briefing, it was determined that the ICBM on March 24 was a Hwasong-15 due to factors such as similar flight characteristics and analysis of the footage. This year, North Korea has conducted a flurry of ballistic missile tests. On March 16, Pyongyang appears to have conducted an unsuccessful ICBM launch, with the projectile exploding soon after liftoff. The ministry believes the North would have needed more time to analyze that launch failure before being able to fire the new type of missile. According to the ministry, the North had to claim the latest launch was a success to allay public anxiety following the recent failed launch. Thursday's launch came as South Korea, the United States and Japan brace for increased North Korean missile activity ahead of a key anniversary on April 15, when the North marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, its founder and the grandfather of current leader Kim Jong Un. Related coverage: North Korea launched "monster" Hwasong-17 ICBM on March 24. to counter U.S. TAKEO, Cambodia, March 2 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia on Wednesday inaugurated the China-funded expanded National Road No. 3 which links the capital Phnom Penh and the southwestern coastal province of Kampot. The 134.8-km expanded road starting from Chom Chao roundabout in Phnom Penh's western suburb runs through Kandal, Kampong Speu and Takeo provinces. Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen and Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia Wang Wentian both addressed the inauguration ceremony, which was attended by nearly 1,000 people. Hun Sen said the road is crucial to boosting economic and tourism development and that Kampot is the only province that produces salt for the kingdom. "This is another testament to the fruitful cooperation between Cambodia and China under the frameworks of the comprehensive strategic partnership, the ironclad friendship, and the community with a shared future between the two countries," he added. "I hope that our people will benefit from this road," he said. The road was built by the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) at a cost of about 215 million U.S. dollars, and the project, which began in October 2018, was funded by the Chinese government. Hun Sen praised the Chinese contractor for completing the project earlier than scheduled and thanked it for building the road in full compliance with technical standards. "Through Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia Wang Wentian, I'd like to send my profound gratitude to the government and people of China for always financing key road and bridge projects in Cambodia, which are the key elements for socio-economic development," he said. Wang said National Road No. 3 is a key transportation artery for Cambodia, and expressed the belief that it will play a crucial role in boosting economy and tourism as well as improving the livelihoods of people along the route. Its opening to traffic truly reflects the strong momentum and fruitful results of the China-Cambodia pragmatic cooperation, he said. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the flows of people and goods, some major projects of bilateral cooperation have withstood the pressure from the pandemic and have been successfully completed on time and with high quality, he added. "This not only reflects the resilience of the China-Cambodia mutually beneficial cooperation, but also shows strong vitality of the China- Cambodia community with a shared future," Wang said. Local residents expressed their satisfaction with the national road. "Undoubtedly, this road will facilitate travel, transport of agricultural produce and other goods, and attract more tourists and investors to this coastal province," Thun Sokleng, a 43-year-old farmer in Kampong Speu province, told Xinhua. "This road will reduce travel time and logistical costs, and that's good for doing businesses. I believe that this road will contribute to improving living conditions of the people in the areas along it," she said. Another Kampong Speu resident, Tes Sarin, 68, said he is grateful to China for having provided a lot of assistance to Cambodia for the development in all sectors, especially in the infrastructure, with many roads and bridges built. "We hope more Chinese tourists will come to Cambodia after COVID-19 is over," he added. Reporters gather outside the venue of a fresh round of face-to-face peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, Turkey, March 29, 2022. Russia and Ukraine have concluded their fresh round of face-to-face peace talks here on Tuesday, which lasted for approximately three hours, according to media reports. (Xinhua/Shadati) ISTANBUL, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Russia and Ukraine have concluded their fresh round of face-to-face peace talks here on Tuesday, which lasted for about three hours. Following the talks, the two sides made statements to reporters respectively. Ukrainian negotiators named several countries who could act as guarantors, while Russian delegates said Moscow would scale down its military operations in Ukraine. David Arakhamia, a Ukrainian delegate, said that Kiev wants to see several countries, such as Canada, Poland, Israel, and Turkey, as guarantors, which could provide international protection to Ukraine. "If any other country wants to join they can do so," he said, noting that the agreement with Russia will be signed together with the guarantor countries. Ukrainian presidential adviser and negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak told reporters that the results of Tuesday's meeting are sufficient for a meeting at the leaders' level. Meanwhile, according to the Anadolu news agency, Vladimir Medinsky, head of the Russian delegation, said the talks in Istanbul were "constructive," and the presidents of the two countries may meet only when a draft of a peace treaty is approved. Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin, who participated in the talks, pledged to drastically decrease military activities in Kiev and the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, to create the necessary conditions for dialogue. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Istanbul's meeting was the most meaningful progress since the start of the negotiations. "We are extremely happy to see an increased rapprochement between the two sides at every stage," Cavusoglu added. Ukrainian delegation arrives at the venue of a fresh round of face-to-face peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, Turkey, March 29, 2022. Russia and Ukraine have concluded their fresh round of face-to-face peace talks here on Tuesday, which lasted for approximately three hours, according to media reports. (Photo by Unal Cam/Xinhua) Russian delegation arrives at the venue of a fresh round of face-to-face peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, Turkey, March 29, 2022. Russia and Ukraine have concluded their fresh round of face-to-face peace talks here on Tuesday, which lasted for approximately three hours, according to media reports. (Xinhua/Shadati) Reporters gather outside the venue of a fresh round of face-to-face peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, Turkey, March 29, 2022. Russia and Ukraine have concluded their fresh round of face-to-face peace talks here on Tuesday, which lasted for approximately three hours, according to media reports. (Photo by Unal Cam/Xinhua) A fresh round of face-to-face peace talks between Russia and Ukraine is held in Istanbul, Turkey, March 29, 2022. Russia and Ukraine have concluded their fresh round of face-to-face peace talks here on Tuesday, which lasted for approximately three hours, according to media reports. (Turkish Presidential Palace/Handout via Xinhua) A fresh round of face-to-face peace talks between Russia and Ukraine is held in Istanbul, Turkey, March 29, 2022. Russia and Ukraine have concluded their fresh round of face-to-face peace talks here on Tuesday, which lasted for approximately three hours, according to media reports. (Turkish Presidential Palace/Handout via Xinhua) A farmer shows ears of wheat at a field in Qalyubia Governorate, Egypt, March 14, 2022. (Xinhua/Ahmed Gomaa) CAIRO, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly has said Egypt counts on "its strategic relations with France" to secure some supplies of basic commodities like wheat, in case the Ukrainian crisis continues for a long time. Madbouly's remarks came during his meeting with visiting French Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire in Cairo, according to a government statement. "Egypt and France share the same visions and concerns about the repercussions of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis," said the Egyptian prime minister, noting the longer the crisis continues, the more dire consequences it will have on the global economy. Photo taken on March 15, 2016 shows an Egyptian bread vendor walking past a shop at the Khan el-Khalili bazaar marketplace in Cairo, Egypt. (Xinhua/Ahmed Gomaa) For his part, Le Maire affirmed his country's full support for Egypt during the economic crisis the world is facing, especially with regard to the global commodity market. He said France produces about 35 million tonnes of wheat annually and exports about half of them, highlighting France's readiness to cooperate with Egypt in this field. Earlier in the day, Le Maire held talks with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, discussing means of furthering economic cooperation between the two countries. During the meeting, the Egyptian president highlighted "the strategic relations between Egypt and France," according to the Egyptian presidency. ABUJA, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Nigeria's army chief Faruk Yahaya on Tuesday ordered troops to hunt down the gunmen who attacked a train in the country's northwestern state of Kaduna on Monday. Yahaya also ordered the troops to intensify search and rescue operations for the missing victims of the attack when he went on an on-the-spot assessment of the place of the incident. A passenger train en route to Kaduna from Abuja, the Nigerian capital, was attacked by yet-to-be-identified gunmen in Rijana, a town in the northern state of Kaduna, wreaking havoc on the passengers and crew. The injured have been rushed to hospitals and passengers trapped in the train have been transferred from the location, said an earlier statement by the state government. The army chief assured Nigerians that the troops would be undeterred and vehement in the fight against banditry and other forms of criminality. Yahaya also said he had observed that "the attack reverberates the need for critical stakeholders to review the security of railways across the country in order to achieve the desired security architecture for railway transportation." By Azernews By Ayya Lmahamad Azerbaijan's Labour and Social Security Minister Sahil Babayev has said that the country's GDP increased by 5.6 percent last year, as a result of the measures taken by the government to combat the COVID-19 pandemic since the early days. He made the remarks during the Azerbaijan-UAE Small and Medium Enterprise Forum held in Dubai as part of the 11th Annual Investment Conference on "investing in sustainable innovation for a bright future". The minister noted that over the past three years the country has implemented three packages of social reforms with an annual financial cost of AZN 6.5 billion ($3.8 bn) and covering half of the country's population. He added that as a result of social reforms, social payments increased by 65 percent, the minimum pension by 2.2 times, the average pension by 60 percent, the minimum wage by 2.3 times and the annual wage fund more than doubled. Moreover, Babayev briefed on DOST centers created to provide transparent and efficient social services from a single platform. In this regard, he stressed that innovative achievements have contributed to improving the quality and modernization of social services. Noting that 110 of the ministry's 170 services are provided digitally, Babayev also emphasized the importance of the electronic employment system created in recent years. He stated that the country has an employment-oriented economic development policy, supports micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, and has a Tripartite Commission on Social and Economic Issues consisting of government, employer and worker representatives. Furthermore, mentioning that more than 48,000 families have started their own farms and businesses with the support of the self-employment program in the past five years, he noted that the participation of the World Bank and UNDP in the program has increased its success. Babayev also briefed on the reconstruction and restoration work carried out in the country's liberated lands. Additionally, Babayev expressed confidence that the development of business relations between the two countries will make an important contribution to further strengthening cooperation and human capital development. Speaking at the same event, Azerbaijan's Agency for Small and Medium Business Development board chairman Orkhan Mammadov briefed on economic and trade relations between the two countries, cooperation with energy and relevant agencies of the UAE in the field of SMBs and the support provided to local and foreign businessmen. Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry head of international offices Omar Khan stated that Azerbaijan and the UAE have great potential for cooperation in the field of SMBs, noting that the Chamber is ready to support joint initiatives in this direction. The event held in Azerbaijan's pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020 aimed to discuss opportunities for SMBs, provide a joint platform for them to network and exchange ideas. The forum continued with panel discussions on the prospects for joint business initiatives. WINDHOEK, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The traditional relations between Namibia and China have deepened over the years, translating to a strategic partnership that has yielded fruitful results, a local expert said Tuesday. Lameck Odada, an economist at the Namibia University of Science and Technology, in an interview with Xinhua said that the two countries have built solid ties over the years through cooperation in sectors such as education, infrastructure development, agriculture, sports, trade and health, among others. "If one observes closely, besides broader diplomatic ties and political mutual trust, the approach, key projects and programmes have been human-centric, impacting the lives of many locals," he said. He said China's role in constructing major infrastructural development projects, including the port of Walvis Bay, road infrastructure, airport upgrading, rail and the dual carriage-way, has also strengthened and strategically positioned Namibia's presence in the regional and continental trade arena. "Namibia is a gateway for trade to many countries. And in recent times, many of the projects were either constructed or upgraded by China," he added. The economist suggested the two countries expand into new areas of cooperation such as financial technology, easing conditions of trade processing, and value addition of agricultural products. The latest records by Namibia Statistics Agency show that China emerged as the main export market for Namibia in January 2022, absorbing 32.3 percent of all goods exported, ahead of South Africa in the second position with a share of 18.3 percent. The hand-made ceramics, beads, plates and cups made of clay at Kenya's Kazuri factory are designed and painted in a manner that reflects the country's aesthetic beauty and splendor. Poor single mothers get a chance to change their fate with their artistic skills at Kazuri, a famous Kenyan handicraft workshop that produces art pieces showing Kenya's cultural heritage, wildlife, and physical attractions. by Naftali Mwaura, Bai Lin NAIROBI, March 29 (Xinhua) -- When Jane Nasimiyu's friend alerted her about a job opening at a bustling handicraft outlet located on the northern edge of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, more than a decade ago, the single mother decided to give it a try. Previously working at a flower farm in central Kenyan county of Kiambu, Nasimiyu had grown used to toiling in order to meet basic needs of her young family, and venturing into a different vocation was a strategic move. Now an accomplished painter at Kazuri beads factory, a renowned handicraft brand nestled in the picturesque Karen suburb of Nairobi, Nasimiyu said she was proud of an occupation that was in the past underrated but has become an enduring symbol of Kenya's rich culture and heritage. A woman works at the Kazuri workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, on March 21, 2022. Kazuri, Swahili name for "small and beautiful," is a famous local brand for hand-made and hand-painted ceramic beads, jewelry and pottery in Kenya. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) "My job at Kazuri (Swahili word for 'small and beautiful') involves making beads from clay, painting and grading them in readiness for clients who are mainly local and foreign tourists," Nasimiyu told Xinhua during a recent interview. Founded in 1975, Kazuri beads factory has become a haven for poor single women in Nairobi and adjacent rural villages, providing them vocational skills and well-paying jobs. Women work at the Kazuri workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, on March 21, 2022. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) Nestled in a neighborhood that is renowned for its greenery, scenic attractions and ambiance, the indigenous handicraft maker employed 340 poor single mothers before the pandemic. In 2010 when Nasimiyu joined Kazuri, its ceramic beads, jewelry and pottery had already resonated with a wide clientele base, thanks to their crisp and exotic appearance. Soon after three months of rigorous training, Nasimiyu found herself immersed in sorting and adding fresh paint to handicraft destined for local and international markets. She said that besides improved income at Kazuri beads factory, she has also benefitted from mentorship, training and exposure to the outside world, boosting her confidence and self-esteem. Ceramic products are shown at the Kazuri workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, on March 21, 2022. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) Nasimiyu said she is on an annual renewable contract, enabling her to feed, clothe and educate her children with minimal struggle. She said that though the COVID-19 pandemic had taken a toll on the handicrafts business, there was some light at the end of the tunnel as orders gradually resume. Her sentiments were echoed by Eunice Akoth Oyoo, a painter at Kazuri beads factory who joined the outfit in 2007 and has never regretted venturing into a vocation that has provided new lease of life to Kenya's urban poor and single women. Prior to joining Kazuri workshop where she also received training for three months to pave way for her use of brush to paint ceramics and beads, Oyoo had a stint at a local organic food chain. The single mother, who was born and raised in one of Nairobi's largest informal settlements, said her day job involves use of small, medium and large brushes to paint beads and enhance their beauty. "At the beginning, I found it hard to paint beads, but gradually, I have gotten used to this job. The salary is better, I am able to pay rent, provide food, shelter, clothing and education to my three children," said Oyoo. She said that before securing the well-paying job at Kazuri beads factory, she had struggled to pay household bills and often resorted to casual jobs like cleaning people's homes and working at construction sites to make ends meet. A woman works at the Kazuri workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, on March 21, 2022. (Xinhua/Dong Jianghui) Oyoo said that her workplace has earned accolades from poor single mothers from Nairobi's informal settlements thanks to provision of decent wages and free healthcare. "So we are grateful for this job, despite the challenges triggered by the pandemic. Our hope is that tourism recovery will make our work profitable again," she said. Since its founding more than four decades ago, Kazuri beads factory has symbolized the resilience, beauty and uniqueness of Kenya's cultural heritage, its wildlife and physical attractions. Philip Mutunga, a supervisor at the factory, said the hand-made ceramics, beads, plates and cups made of clay are designed and painted in a manner that reflects the country's aesthetic beauty and splendor. According to Mutunga, Kazuri has six active outlets in Kenya and export over 60 percent of its products through a network of distributors across the globe. Training and providing jobs to single and poor mothers is in line with the Kazuri's founding motto of being at the center of transforming livelihoods in Kenya, he said. Photo taken on March 19, 2022 shows cave dwellers in Bamiyan province, Afghanistan. (Photo by Saifurahmad Safi/Xinhua) "I am in the fifth grade of school but the poverty has forced me to abandon school and work on the streets to earn bread for my family," said 14-year-old Mahdi. With a daily income of 100 afghanis (about 1 U.S. dollar), he said it is difficult to feed his 10-member family. BAMIYAN, Afghanistan, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Once a popular destination for tourists, the picturesque Bamiyan province in Afghanistan's central region enjoys peaceful environment, but suffers from poverty as elders and teenagers are working to earn their living. "I am a daily wager but can't find work every day. If (I) work one day, the second day will be jobless because of the poor economy and the worst economy has drastically reduced job opportunities," said 60-year-old Habibullah. "I can hardly earn 150 - 200 afghani (about 2 U.S. dollars) per working day, while the price hike has sandwiched the poor people," he said. Bamiyan, like other parts of Afghanistan, has been suffering from poverty since the withdrawal of the U.S.-led forces in August, 2021. Photo taken on March 19, 2022 shows young cave dwellers in Bamiyan province, Afghanistan. (Photo by Saifurahmad Safi/Xinhua) Following the military defeat in Afghanistan, Washington has frozen nearly 10 billion dollars in assets of Afghanistan's central bank, leading to worsening economic problems and poverty in the war-torn country. U.S. President Joe Biden has reportedly split 7 billion dollars of frozen Afghan assets equally between the families of victims of 9/11 and the humanitarian assistance for Afghans, a decision that has been widely condemned. More than 22 million Afghans out of some 35 million of the country's population are facing acute food shortages and the war-torn country would face humanitarian catastrophe if not assisted, according to aid agencies' reports. "Foreigners who came to Bamiyan during the U.S.-led forces presence in Afghanistan took their money back with their returns to their homelands and that is why food prices have gone up in the market and poor people have no money to buy food," Habibullah said. People are seen in a cave in which they live in Bamiyan province, Afghanistan, March 19, 2022. (Photo by Saifurahman Safi/Xinhua) "I am in the fifth grade of school but the poverty has forced me to abandon school and work on the streets to earn bread for my family," said 14-year-old Mahdi. With a daily income of 100 afghanis (about 1 dollar), he said it is difficult to feed his 10-member family. The central Bamiyan province, with its beautiful landscape and historical monuments including giant Buddhas, is among the poorest provinces of Afghanistan as cave dwellers still exist there, although it has reported no security incident over the past year. "You can visit the mountains and valleys in all parts of Bamiyan without worrying about security," Governor of Bamiyan province Abdullah Sarhadi said, calling for foreign help in building infrastructures and economic development. Security alone is not enough, said another Bamiyan inhabitant Najibullah, 25, adding that local people need a stable economy. The Russian and Ukrainian delegations arrived in Turkey's largest city Istanbul on Monday for a fresh round of face-to-face peace talks, aiming to achieve substantial progress to end the crisis. The Russian delegation has settled in the Ciragan Palace Kempinski hotel while the Ukrainian delegation has checked in the Shangri-La Bosphorus, both very close to each other in the Besiktas district. Media reports said the arrival of the Ukrainian delegation had been postponed to evening hours due to the closure of Ukrainian airspace and some logistical problems. According to the NTV broadcaster, the Ukrainian delegates had to go to a neighboring country by road to fly to Istanbul. Tuesday's negotiations will begin at 10:30 a.m. local time (0730 GMT) at the Dolmabahce Presidential Working Office in Besiktas. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to address the delegations at the opening of the meeting. "We will have a short meeting with the delegations tomorrow morning," Erdogan said at a press conference after a cabinet meeting in the Turkish capital Ankara on Monday. So far, Russia and Ukraine have held three rounds of in-person talks in Belarus, and their fourth session was in a video conference format. Turkey, meanwhile, has increasingly accelerated its diplomatic efforts in the international arena, reiterating its policy that it is ready to play a mediator role for lasting peace in the region. In a phone call on Sunday, Erdogan told his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, that a ceasefire and peace between Moscow and Kiev must be achieved as soon as possible, and the humanitarian situation in the region should be improved. Erdogan repeated that Turkey would continue to contribute in every possible way during this process. The "phone traffic" that he has been conducting with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is progressing in a positive direction, Erdogan said on Monday. Turkey has been exerting significant efforts to resolve the crisis through agreement and dialogue, he said. Produced by Xinhua Global Service A batch of humanitarian supplies, provided by China's South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund, in cooperation with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), was handed over to Afghanistan on Sunday. #GLOBALink Produced by Xinhua Global Service Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows trucks transporting containers at Kribi Deep Seaport, Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) The Kribi Deep Seaport built by the Chinese in Cameroon is enhancing the central African nation's capacity to host larger container vessels and its standing as a comprehensive hub port in Central and West Africa. by Arison Tamfu YAOUNDE, March 29 (Xinhua) -- When the Chinese arrived in Cameroon in 2011 to begin building the first phase of Kribi Deep Seaport, the Central African nation was hopeful of having a new transport corridor that would link its vast southwestern coastal area and neighboring nations. The main existing port in the commercial hub of Douala, some 150 km to the north of Kribi was virtually worn out by congestion. To increase transport capacity, the China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd (CHEC) set out to construct the Kribi port, and in three years works were completed. The new port has stimulated the country's economy and provided relief for the harbor at Douala port, the country's most populous city, while also providing dock space for larger ships, said Alain Patrick Mpila Ayissi, Manager of Land development and Environment department of Port Authority of Kribi. Alain Patrick Mpila Ayissi, manager of Land development and Environment department of Port Authority of Kribi, talks during an interview with Xinhua in Kribi, Cameroon, March 14, 2022. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) "Since the construction works ended in 2014 and the start of port operations in 2018, there has been notable increase in economic growth. The first indicator is the hikes in the custom revenues as a result of the port. We left from 750 million XAF (about 1.26 million USD) to practically 150 billion XAF per annum," said Ayissi. As a cheap logistics mode, the port is a fundamental foundation of Cameroon's industrialization process, said Xu Huajiang, general manager of China Harbour Central Africa Division of CHEC who oversaw the construction of the first phase of the port. "So far, after Kribi (port) was founded, it has attracted a lot of external investment. For example, there is already a cocoa factory invested by Cote d'Ivoire. There are two cement plants under construction. Many logistics enterprises have settled in to build their own yards and warehouses. There are also some Chinese enterprises coming to discuss investment with them in this area," Xu said. Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows a boat docking at Kribi Deep Seaport, Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) Kribi port is located on the Atlantic coast some 285 km from the capital Yaounde. It is strategically positioned in the center of the Gulf of Guinea and is surrounded by the 262 square km Kribi Industrial Area, destined to host new industrial and logistical developments. With Cameroon being a growing market, Kribi is expected to become a regional hub for the African Atlantic coast. Ship-owners will no longer run the risk of offloading part of their cargo elsewhere before docking in Cameroon, said Ayissi. "With the coming of the Kribi port, Cameroon has once again placed herself as the port entry to the sub-region. This (the port) has added more value to certain industrial projects in Chad, Central African Republic and Congo," he added. Photo taken on March 15, 2022 shows a view of the highway built by the China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd (CHEC) for the transport of goods from Kribi Deep Seaport in Kribi, Cameroon. (Photo by Kepseu/Xinhua) As part of the project, CHEC also constructed the Kribi-Lolabe highway that will cater to the requirements of the port transportation and logistics and make a contribution to local prosperity. The highway which includes the construction of 20 bridges, the total length of which is 2 km will serve as an important traffic artery in the Kribi region. Currently, CHEC is busy constructing the Kribi Deep Sea Port Phase II. After the completion of the project, it is expected to become a large container transit port and comprehensive hub port in Central and West Africa. Xu revealed that during the process of port and highway construction, over 1,000 jobs had been provided. Cameroonian workers employed by CHEC, including Eric Defo Fotso, Larissa Ekale Koule and Fran Mbofris told Xinhua that building their country's largest port is an opportunity to update their own skills and contribute to the country's industrialization. "We have project coordinators with a lot of experience be it in administrative affairs, project management and I got to live the Chinese culture. We get to see different things from what we heard since childhood. Just working with them is like you travelled to China to learn about this (skills)," said Fotso, 32, who coordinates projects at the site. "Every nation, like Cameroon aspires to emerge. So it's an honor for us to have China and her expertise and who willingly accepted to share it with us," added 26-year-old Koule whose main assignment is to ensure that all onsite workers are in good health and that there are no job-related illnesses. "They (CHEC) have given us a great opportunity. Our livelihoods have improved significantly," said Mbofris who spent seven years in China teaching the English language and now works as an interpreter with CHEC. Ayissi said the Kribi port project is a glaring example of Cameroon's participation in the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, adding that the country is committed to unlocking the potential of interlinked production networks and value chains. THE HAGUE, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The Dutch government has ordered the expulsion of 17 Russian diplomats suspected of being "intelligence officers," the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on Tuesday. The Russian ambassador was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Hague and informed of the decision. The ministry said in a statement that the measure had been taken "in the context of national security." The move followed information from the Dutch intelligence that the 17 diplomats were "secretly active as intelligence officers," it said. UNITED NATIONS, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The bodies of eight UN peacekeepers aboard a helicopter that crashed earlier Tuesday in North Kivu of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been recovered, said the world body. "With deep sadness, we confirm that there are no survivors among the eight peacekeepers who were on board the helicopter that went missing and crashed earlier today in North Kivu," said the UN secretary-general's press office. A search-and-rescue operation was undertaken and the bodies of the deceased peacekeepers have been brought to Goma, the capital of North Kivu province. "We convey our condolences to the governments and families of the six crew members from Pakistan and the two military staff from Russia and Serbia," said the press office. An investigation into the circumstances of the crash is under way, it said. The medium-sized Puma aircraft was on a reconnaissance operation for the UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC known by its French acronym as MONUSCO. The helicopter crashed near Tshanzu, southeast of Rutshuru in North Kivu. There have been clashes in the area between the March 23 Movement (M23) armed group and Congolese government forces in recent days, said Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, earlier Tuesday. The DRC military said Tuesday that the UN helicopter was shot down by M23 rebels. But the United Nations has yet to confirm the claim. Bintou Keita, head of MONUSCO, who briefed the Security Council on Tuesday on the situation in the DRC, said the past three months have seen an alarming increase in M23 activities in North Kivu. On Monday, elements of the rebel group conducted "horrific attacks" targeting civilians in localities near Rutshuru. Only three months into this year, MONUSCO documented nearly 2,300 civilian deaths in the eastern part of the DRC, she said. CAIRO, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani on Tuesday discussed means of promoting bilateral ties at different levels, and the recent developments in the region, the presidential office said in a statement. "The Gulf's security is linked with the Egyptian national security," Sisi said, hailing the important role Qatar plays in addressing the challenges facing the Arab world. The Egyptian president also hailed "the tangible progress in the Egyptian-Qatari ties that serve the interests of the two countries and people and enhance efforts of maintaining regional security and stability." Meanwhile, the Qatari foreign minister praised "Egypt's pivotal regional role as the main pillar for the stability and security of the Arab countries." The meeting was also attended by Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, Qatari Finance Minister Ali bin Ahmed Al Kuwari and the two countries' intelligence chiefs. Earlier, Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly and the visiting Qatari delegation agreed on a package of investment worth 5 billion U.S. dollars in the North African country. The two countries have agreed to establish a joint committee headed by their foreign ministers to boost cooperation and coordination in all fields. By Trend Rules to hold the 'Caucasian Eagle' joint exercises between Azerbaijani, Turkish and Georgian Special Forces have been identified, Trend reports referring to Azerbaijans Parliament. The date of enforcement, the term of validity, amendments and the procedure for the annulment of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the mentioned exercises were determined. According to the bill "On approval of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Governments of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia on the Caucasian Eagle exercises of the special forces", the parties should notify the Secretariat of the Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States in written form about the completion of domestic legal procedures for the MoU's enforcement. The memorandum shall enter into force on the date of receipt of the last written notification, in which the parties will notify each other through diplomatic channels about the completion of domestic legal procedures necessary for its enforcement. Besides, the document will be valid for one year and automatically extended for another year, unless one of the parties, 30 days before the expiration of the memorandum, notifies in writing through diplomatic channels of its intention to terminate it. DAKAR, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Hope is in the air following the commissioning of a toll bridge spanning a local river in Senegal. The bridge, which spans the Saloum River and connects the two cities of Fatick and Foundiougne, is believed to be the longest of the kind in West Africa. A special ceremony was arranged Saturday, with Senegalese President Macky Sall attending, to celebrate the commissioning of the steel bridge, which was financed by Senegal and China through the Export-Import Bank of China (China EximBank) and built by a Chinese company in four years. After cutting the ribbon, President Macky Sall, in the presence of Chinese Ambassador to Senegal Xiao Han and several administrative authorities of Senegal, walked a few meters on the bridge which extends 1,600 meters. The Senegalese President at the ceremony thanked China for its constant support for the realization of "all the beautiful infrastructures" launched through the Emerging Senegal Plan (PSE), Senegal's master plan for revitalization. The Foundiougne bridge will make it possible to shorten the journey between Casamance (south) and the rest of Senegal via The Gambia, said the president, noting that the bridge will reduce the time and cost of traffic to The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, consolidating integration and neighborliness between neighboring countries of Senegal. The bridge was completed late last year and its construction had created 2,000 jobs. The commissioning of the bridge is a boon to locals. "Before, it took at least an hour to cross the river by ferry, but now it takes a few minutes to cross the bridge. The bridge is really convenient and it saves us a lot of time," said Abdoulaye Diop, a resident of the city of Foundiougne, which is on the southern bank of the Saloum River. SYDNEY, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The origins of two of the world's most distinctive animals, echidnas and platypuses, have been uncovered by an international research team led by Australian scientists. The research, published in Alcheringa, an Australasian Journal of Paleontology, and revealed on Monday, showed the animals' ancestors date back 130 million years, to an era when they roamed through icy forests of regions of Australia, which was then close to the South Pole. "This research reveals their unique origin story and helps us understand how they came to live in Australia in all shapes and sizes throughout the fossil record," mammalogist Tim Flannery said of the world's only surviving monotremes, which are egg-laying mammals. The research team, which included scientists from Museums Victoria, Monash University, and Swinburne University in Melbourne and the Smithsonian Institution from the United States, examined every known significant monotreme fossil. Among the fragments from the prehistoric polar forests were the remains of the oldest and smallest monotreme, Teinolophos trusleri, which has now been classified in a new mammalian family. "This is an incredible survival adaptation for this mini monotreme, which we estimate had a body mass of about 40 g - roughly the weight of a slice of bread," said Flannery. "Imagine it using its snout to plunge into moss and snow to find food it can't see and hasn't yet touched." At the other end of the scale, they looked at fossils of the largest ever egg-laying mammal, a gigantic echidna from Western Australia, for which a new genus, Murrayglossus, has been named. "Weighing 30 kg, roughly the size of a wombat, this massive monotreme would have been many times the size of modern Australian echidnas," said Australian Museum chief scientist Kristofer Helgen. The researchers believe the fossils of the oldest monotremes indicate the animals were suited exclusively to a polar climate, which restricted them from spreading elsewhere. According to Helgen, the research also sheds light onto the likely migration of echidnas from Papua New Guinea to Australia. "Echidnas are found in the Australian fossil record going back only 2 million years," Helgen said. "Yet genetic studies indicate echidnas evolved from platypus-like ancestors tens of millions of years before that." "We think echidnas originated on an island in what has now become part of New Guinea, and that they reached Australia during a period of faunal exchange around the onset of the Ice Ages." Flannery, who is also one of Australia's best-known environmentalists, said although the research focused on the past, the researchers "also want to highlight the urgent need for protection of our modern platypuses and echidnas, which are under threat and in decline as a result of human-induced habitat degradation". KIEV, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Ukraine will get fuel from Azerbaijan for the sowing campaign, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted on Monday after phone talks with his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev. Following the conversation, Zelensky thanked Aliyev for Azerbaijan's readiness to supply fuel for Ukraine's agricultural needs. On Sunday, Zelensky told Russian media that Russian forces carried out attacks on fuel depots in Ukraine amid the sowing campaign. Ukraine for years has been a key global producer of wheat, corn and sunflower oil. In 2021, the country's harvest of cereals and legumes hit a record high of 84 million tons, up 28.5 percent year on year. Last year, Ukraine exported some 51.2 million tons of grain worth 12.5 billion U.S. dollars, according to media reports. NEW DELHI: The Russia-Ukraine conflict has heightened International concern and demonstrated that maintaining international peace and security can no longer be taken for granted, said Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, who spoke in Sri Lanka on Tuesday. Jaishankar said during the ministerial meeting of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), "The world system is through a difficult period, probably the most difficult in recent memory. The issues posed by the Covid-19 epidemic have not yet subsided completely. However, recent events in Ukraine have heightened worldwide concern. We have all stated that maintaining international peace and security, as well as stability, cannot be taken for granted." From March 28 to March 30, Jaishankar will be in Sri Lanka. He stated that BIMSTEC member countries must recognise that they are up against challenges, both from the global economy and, in some cases, from within their own economies. The Bangkok Declaration, which was signed on June 6, 1997, founded BIMSTEC as a regional organisation. Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand are all members of BIMSTEC. Amid addition, Jaishankar stressed that in difficult times, member nations should strengthen internal capacities while simultaneously broadening and deepening BIMSTEC collaboration. "We need to collaborate more in a variety of areas; we need to collaborate more effectively and quickly. We must consolidate and expand on what we have accomplished over the last 25 years "he stated. Will India be able to reconcile Russia-Ukraine? PM Modi will have an important role Turkish President to meet Ukrain, Russian delegations before talks begin Biden admin proposes USD 6.9-bn in FY 2023 budget for countering Ukraine war ISTANBUL: For peace negotiations with Ukraine, a Russian delegation has arrived in Istanbul. The Russian delegation landed in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city, on Monday for a new round of peace talks with Ukraine, according to reports. The jet carrying Russian diplomats landed at Ataturk Airport, which is only used for diplomatic missions, according to the statement. The negotiations are set to begin on Tuesday morning, according to Turkish diplomatic sources, as per reports. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin decided to convene the next round of talks in Istanbul in a phone discussion on Sunday. Erdogan stated that Turkey would continue to assist in whatever way feasible throughout the process. Russia and Ukraine have held three rounds of face-to-face negotiations in Belarus so far, with the fourth session being a video conference. Kathmandu, March 29 Nepal and India have agreed to restart the Janakpur-Jainagar railway from this weekend. A source at the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport says prime ministers of Nepal and India will virtually inaugurate the service from New Delhi on Saturday. Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba is scheduled to visit India from Friday to Sunday. Nepals only railway, which also connects to India, had discontinued its service in 2014 citing the need for upgrading. However, it took several years to restart. To restart the service, the government has recently issued the Railway Ordinance. India has agreed to provide training to the Nepali workforce for the operation of the Janakpur-Jainagar railway. It has already been one and a half years since Nepal received two trains for the operation, but they have not been put into operation. Home Just In NIU Gova G5 in Nepal: The new electric scooter has upgraded features to cost an upgraded price NIU Gova G5 is the latest release from the reputed NIU electric scooter in Nepal. Eco Infinity, the sole and authorised distributor of NIU scooters in Nepal, has officially launched NIU Gova G5 here. This is also the release of the second model in the Niu Gova series with Gova G3 being the first model in the lineup. The new Gova G5 offers a better battery, better range and a more powerful motor. The new upgrades come with an increase in price as well. Lets get into the details of the scooter to know what more it has to offer. Specifications Dimensions Length: 2008mm Height: 1166mm Width: 685mm Ground Clearance: 140mm Seat height: 807mm Motor power 3900W Motor Tailored by Bosch Battery 4th Generation Niu Energy Lithium Battery Battery capacity 72V45Ah Charging time 6 to 7 hours Range Up to 100 km Top speed Up to 85kmph Braking type Combi Braking System Brakes Front: Disc Rear: Disc Suspension Front: Hydraulic damping Rear: Spring Air damping Tyre size Front: 90/90-14, tubeless Rear: 120/70-14, tubeless Tripmeter Digital Speedometer Digital Colours White, red, black Price Rs 325,000 Design Photo: NIU NIU Gova G5 flaunts an integral streamlined design combined with high-quality carbon structural steel. At the front, the scooter comes with H-shaped Matrix headlights which include LED DRL and side LED indicators. The styling on the new NIU Gova G5 is similar to the one seen in the previously launched Gova 03. However, Gova G5 has been presented bulkier than the former model. Photo: niu.np The Gova series electric scooter is also curvier in nature than the rest of the NIU scooters, hence boasting a sleek unibody styling. The minimalistic styling of the scooter can be visually pleasing to the riders. The scooter also offers a unique rear section. The rear features a wrap-around LED rear lamp, a large grab bar and also offers adequate under-seat storage. Performance Photo: niu.np NIU Gova G5 is powered by a 3900W Bosch motor. The scooter features a 72V45Ah 4th-generation NIU Energy lithium battery. It can provide a range of up to 100 km on a full charge while taking around six to seven hours to get fully charged. The scooter can also reach a top speed of up to 85kmph. Like Gova 03, the new Gova G5 also features two driving modes: energy-saving T-tour mode and dynamic S-sport mode to toggle between according to the road conditions. This electric scooter can also be connected to your smartphone via the NIU app. The NIU app provides users with comprehensive vehicle services like remaining battery level and range estimate, GPS positioning, security alert, past routes and riding statistics. The app also offers vehicle management, personal and binding information management to the riders. Brakes, tyres and suspension Photo: niu.np NIU Gova G5 comes with a combi braking system (CBS) with hydraulic disc brakes on both sides of the wheel. This is the most common braking system seen on an electric two-wheeler these days. The electronic braking system (EBS) also provides regenerative power that intelligently puts the power back into the system when braking. The scooter has 14-inch tubeless tyres at both the front and the rear. The front tyre measures at 90/90-14 while the rear tyre measures at 120/70-14. As per the suspension on the scooter, there is hydraulic damping on the front and the rear end gets a spring air damping for absorbing bumps and providing comfortability to the riders on rough terrain. Other features Photo: niu.np NIU Gova G5 also features more than just a handful of useful features to the riders. With NIU Gova G5, the riders will get the benefits of: Streamlined design Multi-information LCD display Smart dashboard Anti-theft USB charger Halo headlight CBS braking Spacious seat Regenerative braking Under-seat storage Larger battery power LED lighting system Multi-mode riding Cruise control Front storage box with bag hook NIU app with smart features NIU Battery Management System with the energy recovery system Front hydraulic damping and rear spring-air damping suspension Combined braking system (CBS) Things to do Photo: niu.np While enjoying all the features of the scooter, there are also a handful of things that a rider needs to be mindful of before riding it. Maintaining these will ensure the longevity and durability of the vehicle. The rider should: Charge the scooter using a battery port to avoid the melting of port. Unplug the battery when not in use to avoid battery drainage. Avoid puddles after heavy rainfalls. Maintain the scooter every three months for better performance. Cover the scooter, especially during the rainy season. Park the scooter in the double stand mode. The price of NIU Gova G5 is Rs 325,000. (Adds economist's comments) By Junko Fujita TOKYO, March 29 (Reuters) - Japan's 10-year government bond yields hovered near the upper limit of the Bank of Japan's yield target on Tuesday, even as the central bank remained determined to defend the target, repeating its offer to purchase bonds. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) on Tuesday told the market it would make unlimited amounts of purchases of 10-year JGBs at 0.25%. That was in line with its statement on Monday of a standing offer to buy the bonds at 0.25% for three days starting on Tuesday after yields on Monday rose to that level, the highest in six years, and the upper limit of the BOJ's policy band. However, the 10-year yield on Tuesday remained at 0.245% after the announcement. "This could be the beginning of the Bank of Japan's endless battle to defend its yield target," said Mari Iwashita, chief market economist at Daiwa Securities. "With an auction for 10-year bonds scheduled on April 5, the yields could rise beyond 0.25% again." Under its yield curve control (YCC) policy, the BOJ pledges to guide the 10-year JGB yield at around 0% as part of efforts to stimulate the economy by keeping borrowing costs low. Japanese policymakers stressed the need to keep monetary policy ultra-loose, even as some of them saw signs of growing inflationary pressure from the Ukraine crisis, according to a summary of opinions at their March meeting released on Tuesday. (Reporting by Junko Fujita; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips, Richard Pullin, and Christian Schmollinger) By Jasper Ward NASSAU, March 13 (Reuters) - The Bahamas has ordered its financial institutions to halt all transactions with Russian entities that have been put under sanction by Western nations, the country's financial regulators said in a statement. The government of the Caribbean nation has vocally condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but appears to remain conflicted over how aggressively it can participate sanctions efforts without damaging its relatively small economy. Reuters on Monday reported that oil and fuel tankers controlled by Russia's Sovcomflot had been rerouted to the Bahamas after they had been unable to deliver cargoes due to the sanctions. "Regulated entities, that are licensed or authorised to operate from or within the Bahamas, (are directed) not to engage in transactions with sanctioned persons, entities or business linked to Russia and Belarus," reads the late Saturday statement signed by the central bank and four other regulatory agencies. It was not immediately evident how much Russia-linked money is held in Bahamian financial institutions. Regulatory agencies, including the central bank, have not responded to requests for details on local banks' exposure to Russian funds. (Reporting by Jasper Ward; writing by Brian Ellsworth Editing by Marguerita Choy) Rating Action: Moody's affirms Bangladesh's Ba3 ratings, maintains stable outlookGlobal Credit Research - 29 Mar 2022Singapore, March 29, 2022 -- Moody's Investors Service ("Moody's") has today affirmed the Government of Bangladesh's long-term issuer and senior unsecured ratings at Ba3 and maintained the stable outlook. The short-term issuer ratings are also affirmed at Not Prime.The drivers behind the rating affirmation include Moody's expectation that the growth rebound following the pandemic will continue to anchor macroeconomic and external stability. Reliance on concessional borrowing also lowers debt refinancing risks. Nonetheless, weak revenue generation capacity continues to constrain improvements in debt affordability and limits Bangladesh's fiscal flexibility at a time when deficits have increased. It also limits the government's capacity to absorb inflationary pressures exacerbated by the energy and food price shock resulting from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and thereby contain social risks. The rating affirmation also considers increased vulnerability to future shocks as structural challenges have been exacerbated by the pandemic. The challenges include addressing infrastructure needs and low levels of human capital, both of which constrain greater foreign investment and limit prospects for economic diversification over the medium term.The stable outlook reflects broadly balanced risks at the Ba3 rating level, mainly related to the government's slow implementation of key economic and fiscal reforms. Most significantly, more effective execution of fiscal reforms would expand Bangladesh's revenue base and increase the government's fiscal flexibility beyond Moody's current expectations. Conversely, weaker implementation of measures to expand Bangladesh's narrow revenue base would increasingly constrain the government's fiscal flexibility.Bangladesh' local-currency (LC) and foreign-currency (FC) ceilings are unchanged at Baa3 and Ba2, respectively. The LC ceiling is placed three notches above the sovereign rating, reflecting Bangladesh's relatively small government footprint, but also weak predictability and reliability of government institutions; domestic political and geopolitical risks, and external imbalances are moderate. The FC ceiling is placed two notches below the LC ceiling, reflecting low capital account openness, weak policy effectiveness, but also a lower degree of external indebtedness.RATINGS RATIONALERATIONALE FOR THE AFFIRMATION OF THE Ba3 RATINGMACROECONOMIC STABILITY DRIVES THE RECOVERY FROM THE PANDEMIC, RESILIENCE TO RUSSIA-UKRAINE MILITARY CONFLICTBangladesh's macroeconomic stability during the pandemic illustrates the economy's resilience. Following a low of 3.5% in fiscal 2020 (ending June 2020), GDP growth reached 5% in fiscal 2021, supported by ready-made garments (RMG) export growth (+11% in fiscal 2021) and a surge in remittance flows (+36%).Moody's expects real GDP growth to reach 6% in fiscal 2022 and 6.5% in fiscal 2023, driven by exports and domestic demand. Moody's expects the recovery will be slightly dented by a slowdown in export demand from Bangladesh's key export markets (especially the EU) due to the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Nevertheless GDP growth is expected to return to pre-pandemic levels within the next two years.Higher commodity prices, exacerbated by the global spillover effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, will lead to increased inflationary pressures. For fiscal 2022, Bangladesh Bank, the central bank, expects to maintain an expansionary stance, even though it projects inflation to be above its target rate of 5.3%, at 5.9%, after remaining relatively stable at 5.6% in fiscal 2021. Considering the surge in oil and food prices, Moody's forecasts inflation to reach 6-7% over the next two years. Based on a historical track record of relatively stable inflation in Bangladesh, and adequate monetary policy management of potential pressures, Moody's does not expect inflationary pressures to build up further and start jeopardizing macroeconomic stability.CONCESSIONAL FUNDING MITIGATES DEBT AFFORDABILITY AND LIQUIDITY RISKS, EVEN THOUGH FISCAL SPACE HAS DETERIORATEDAt less than 10% of GDP, Bangladesh's general government revenue remains one of the lowest among sovereigns rated by Moody's, significantly lower than the Ba-rated median of 25% of GDP. Meanwhile, increased spending under the government's expansionary policy has led to wider deficits, surpassing the self-imposed 5% of GDP deficit limit for at least three years (fiscal 2021-23). Moody's expects consolidation to pre-pandemic deficit levels by fiscal 2025 only.Low revenues and high domestic financing costs weigh on Bangladesh's debt affordability. Interest payments hover around 20% of revenue. Though slightly lower than its peak during the pandemic, reliance on National Savings Certificates (NSCs) remains high at 29% of Bangladesh's total general government debt stock. Although NSC reforms have been implemented Moody's expects improvements in debt affordability to be slow.Nevertheless, the debt burden remains moderate, and Moody's expects it to remain below 40% of GDP over the next few years, anchored by strong growth.Moreover, continued access to concessional funding (30% of Bangladesh's general government debt and more than 70% of government external debt), even after pandemic-related support expires, is key to mitigating debt financing costs.Concessional financing also alleviates liquidity risks, although Moody's expects gross borrowing requirements to rise as deficits have increased and debt maturities have shortened. Despite a recent increase in bilateral financing, Moody's expects concessional financing to remain a material portion of Bangladesh's government borrowings. In the medium term however, graduation from Least Developed Country (LDC) status suggests that Bangladesh will gradually lose its access to concessional funding, which could increase debt affordability and liquidity risks.VULNERABILITY TO FUTURE SHOCKS HAS RISEN DUE TO PANDEMIC'S IMPACT ON STRUCTURAL CONSTRAINTSBangladesh will continue facing challenges related to institutions and governance, particularly in areas of legislative policy effectiveness, control of corruption, and weak credibility and effectiveness of its judiciary system. Such institutional weaknesses limit efficacy in enacting structural reforms that would improve the quality of infrastructure and human capital, thereby raising economic competitiveness and diversification, and attracting foreign investment issues that are becoming more pressing as Bangladesh seeks to transition to a middle-income economy.Bangladesh's export-driven growth model, which is reliant on a single commodity (RMG), faces challenges in moving up the value chain, while regional competition intensifies. While Bangladesh remains competitive in the RMG industry, due to low labour costs, vertical integration, technological investment and environmentally sustainable processes, it has been losing some market share to competitors such as Vietnam.The pandemic has also exacerbated weaknesses in the banking sector. Rescheduling and restructuring have delayed systemic reform. As of December 2021, about 25% of loans in the banking system were restructured or rescheduled. The NPL ratios have increased, and reported NPLs do not fully reflect the extent of problem assets, which Moody's estimates to increase modestly after forbearance measures are rolled back. A weak banking sector constrains productivity, effective allocation of capital and GDP growth.Meanwhile, poverty, inequality, and unemployment have risen during the pandemic exacerbating social risk at a time when inflationary pressures are also expected to rise. Unemployment levels increased to 5.3% in fiscal 2020 from 4.2% in fiscal 2019, according to International Labour Organisation estimates, and the poverty rate (based on $1.9 per day) has risen to 12.9% in fiscal year 2020 from 11.9% in fiscal 2019, amounting to an additional 1.6 million people in poverty according to the IMF. The global energy and food price shock related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine could lead to social discontent if the government is unable to contain inflationary pressures. Finally, schools have remained closed throughout the pandemic, and although some were able to provide online learning, this was not available to large segments of the population, pointing to lasting economic and social marks from missed education.RATIONALE FOR STABLE OUTLOOKThe stable outlook reflects Moody's expected progress on reforms, albeit very gradual, as pandemic pressures ease, which will help shore up macroeconomic stability.While the authorities have initiated a series of reforms to increase the tax base in recent years, implementation remains weak due to low capacity and poor governance, and has stalled during the pandemic. Moody's expects government revenue to recover to around 9-10% of GDP largely due to the rebound in activity, still a very low level by international standards.External vulnerability risks remain low, and foreign exchange reserves have increased during the pandemic due to a surge in official remittance flows. This provides some protection against widening current account deficits as import prices rise.FACTORS THAT COULD LEAD TO AN UPGRADE OR DOWNGRADE OF THE RATINGSFACTORS THAT COULD LEAD TO AN UPGRADEUpward pressure on the rating would result from a rising likelihood of (1) significant progress in the government's fiscal reform implementation that would increase its revenue generation capacity, leading to an increase in debt affordability and fiscal space; and/or (2) material progress in diversifying the economy away from its reliance on the RMG sector, and developing key infrastructure that would raise longer-term economic competitiveness and FDI to sustain its economic growth.FACTORS THAT COULD LEAD TO A DOWNGRADEDownward pressure on the rating would result from a rising likelihood of (1) a severe weakening of the macroeconomic environment, including a slowdown in growth, sustained high inflation and depreciation pressures leading to a worsening of fiscal and external metrics; and/or (2) increased reliance on bilateral debt that would lead to a worsening of debt affordability and liquidity metrics without a commensurate improvement in infrastructure development; and/or (3) a weakening of the banking sector's financial health after rolling back forbearance measures, particularly for state-owned banks, with rising contingent liability risks to the government.ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, GOVERNANCE CONSIDERATIONSBangladesh's very highly negative (CIS-5) ESG Credit Impact Score reflects very high exposure to environmental and social risks, further weakened by institutional challenges that present weaknesses in the control of corruption and rule of law, as well as challenges related to banking regulation and supervision.Bangladesh's exposure to environmental risk is very highly negative (E-5). As a low-lying country with large coastal areas, Bangladesh is highly prone to flooding, which disrupts economic activity and raises social costs. Low incomes and weak infrastructure quality compound the impact of weather-related events on the economy, and in turn, associated fiscal costs. In addition, unreliability of seasonal monsoon rainfall also influence agricultural sector growth, generating some volatility and raising uncertainty about rural incomes and consumption.We assess Bangladesh's exposure to social risks as very highly negative (S-5). Low incomes stem in part from physical and social infrastructure constraints to economic development that will take time to address. That said, per capita incomes have grown strongly over the past decade and poverty rates have declined sharply, thanks to high and stable economic growth. This has also delivered improvement in access to basic services, although Bangladesh's challenges related to improvements in educational opportunities and outcomes, health and safety, and labor force inclusion remain areas of social risk.Bangladesh's weak institutions and governance profile constrain its rating, as captured by a highly negative governance issuer profile score (G-4). Challenges in control of corruption and rule of law weaken existing institutions, while the credibility of legal structures is also limited. These governance challenges have in part contributed to asset quality issues in the banking sector. Nevertheless, a relatively strong monetary policy framework and fiscal prudence contribute to ongoing macroeconomic stability.GDP per capita (PPP basis, US$): 5,287 (2020 Actual) (also known as Per Capita Income)Real GDP growth (% change): 3.4% (2020 Actual) (also known as GDP Growth)Inflation Rate (CPI, % change Dec/Dec): 6% (2020 Actual)Gen. Gov. Financial Balance/GDP: -4.8% (2020 Actual) (also known as Fiscal Balance)Current Account Balance/GDP: -1.5% (2020 Actual) (also known as External Balance)Economic resiliency: ba2Default history: No default events (on bonds or loans) have been recorded since 1983.On 24 March 2022, a rating committee was called to discuss the rating of the Bangladesh, Government of. The main points raised during the discussion were: The issuer's economic fundamentals, including its economic strength, have not materially changed. The issuer's institutions and governance strength, have not materially changed. The issuer's governance and/or management, have not materially changed.The principal methodology used in these ratings was Sovereign Ratings Methodology published in November 2019 and available at https://www.moodys.com/researchdocumentcontentpage.aspx?docid=PBC_1158631. Alternatively, please see the Rating Methodologies page on www.moodys.com for a copy of this methodology.The weighting of all rating factors is described in the methodology used in this credit rating action, if applicable.REGULATORY DISCLOSURESFor further specification of Moody's key rating assumptions and sensitivity analysis, see the sections Methodology Assumptions and Sensitivity to Assumptions in the disclosure form. Moody's Rating Symbols and Definitions can be found at: https://www.moodys.com/researchdocumentcontentpage.aspx?docid=PBC_79004.For ratings issued on a program, series, category/class of debt or security this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to each rating of a subsequently issued bond or note of the same series, category/class of debt, security or pursuant to a program for which the ratings are derived exclusively from existing ratings in accordance with Moody's rating practices. For ratings issued on a support provider, this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to the credit rating action on the support provider and in relation to each particular credit rating action for securities that derive their credit ratings from the support provider's credit rating. For provisional ratings, this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to the provisional rating assigned, and in relation to a definitive rating that may be assigned subsequent to the final issuance of the debt, in each case where the transaction structure and terms have not changed prior to the assignment of the definitive rating in a manner that would have affected the rating. For further information please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page for the respective issuer on www.moodys.com.For any affected securities or rated entities receiving direct credit support from the primary entity(ies) of this credit rating action, and whose ratings may change as a result of this credit rating action, the associated regulatory disclosures will be those of the guarantor entity. Exceptions to this approach exist for the following disclosures, if applicable to jurisdiction: Ancillary Services, Disclosure to rated entity, Disclosure from rated entity.The ratings have been disclosed to the rated entity or its designated agent(s) and issued with no amendment resulting from that disclosure.These ratings are solicited. Please refer to Moody's Policy for Designating and Assigning Unsolicited Credit Ratings available on its website www.moodys.com.Regulatory disclosures contained in this press release apply to the credit rating and, if applicable, the related rating outlook or rating review.Moody's general principles for assessing environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks in our credit analysis can be found at http://www.moodys.com/researchdocumentcontentpage.aspx?docid=PBC_1288235.The Global Scale Credit Rating on this Credit Rating Announcement was issued by one of Moody's affiliates outside the EU and is endorsed by Moody's Deutschland GmbH, An der Welle 5, Frankfurt am Main 60322, Germany, in accordance with Art.4 paragraph 3 of the Regulation (EC) No 1060/2009 on Credit Rating Agencies. Further information on the EU endorsement status and on the Moody's office that issued the credit rating is available on www.moodys.com.The Global Scale Credit Rating on this Credit Rating Announcement was issued by one of Moody's affiliates outside the UK and is endorsed by Moody's Investors Service Limited, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5FA under the law applicable to credit rating agencies in the UK. Further information on the UK endorsement status and on the Moody's office that issued the credit rating is available on www.moodys.com.Please see www.moodys.com for any updates on changes to the lead rating analyst and to the Moody's legal entity that has issued the rating.Please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page on www.moodys.com for additional regulatory disclosures for each credit rating. Camille Chautard Analyst Sovereign Risk Group Moody's Investors Service Singapore Pte. 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MJKK and MSFJ are credit rating agencies registered with the Japan Financial Services Agency and their registration numbers are FSA Commissioner (Ratings) No. 2 and 3 respectively.MJKK or MSFJ (as applicable) hereby disclose that most issuers of debt securities (including corporate and municipal bonds, debentures, notes and commercial paper) and preferred stock rated by MJKK or MSFJ (as applicable) have, prior to assignment of any credit rating, agreed to pay to MJKK or MSFJ (as applicable) for credit ratings opinions and services rendered by it fees ranging from JPY100,000 to approximately JPY550,000,000.MJKK and MSFJ also maintain policies and procedures to address Japanese regulatory requirements. By Trend The OSCE Chairman-in-Office and Polands Minister for Foreign Affairs Zbigniew Rau will visit Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia from 29 March to 1 April, Trend reports citing the press office of the organization. During the visit, he will meet with officials of the three countries. The trip will focus on promoting peaceful cooperation, dialogue, and stability in the South Caucasus region. Blitz is an SPM platform used by sales leaders to raise the efficiency and productivity in commission management of sales teams MONTERREY, Mexico, March 29, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Blitz, the industry's leading commission calculation and management platform, announced that Gartner, the global research, and advisory firm, has recognized the company for the second consecutive year as a Representative Vendor in its "Market Guide for Sales Performance Management", 2022. By 2026, 25% of organizations using a sales performance management (SPM) solution will optimize the design and maintenance of their sales compensation plans using advanced analytics solutions provided by their SPM vendor. In this regard, Omar del Rio, CEO of Blitz, commented: "We are honored by Gartner's recognition. Blitz differentiates by providing enterprise-level sales commission calculation that is intuitive, cost-effective, and customized for the world's most innovative businesses." In the market guide, Gartner characterizes sales performance management as "a complex task that requires accuracy and punctuality in commission processing automation," stressing that application leaders supporting sales technology should focus on "operational excellence and the use of advanced analytics via machine learning to maximize operational and planning efficiency." Therefore, Blitz has been recognized because it represents the attributes that Gartner considers fundamental in the SPM market. Among Blitz features highlight: Blitzs SPM is delivered as a SaaS (software as a service). It offers two modules: Incentive Management and Incentive Tracking. Its low-code platform employs a natural language processing (NLP) rule engine, allowing for greater ease of use. Supports real-time commission calculations. Dispute resolution Data transparency and communication for review and tracking of changes, all from inside the platform. Out-of-the-box integrations supported best-of-breed enterprise-level tools, such as QuickBooks Online, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, HubSpot, etc. Pricing is based on a cost-per-user basis. Story continues Over the past year, Blitzs product development efforts have resulted in an enhanced analytics dashboard UI, an improved user experience in the Rule Designer module, increased functionality for electronic invoicing and calculations, and additional data-filtering functionality in native reports. Gartner Disclaimer. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in our research publications. It does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. About Blitz Blitz is the leading commission tracking software. Providing accurate compensation management & automation to different industries. For more information, please visit www.blitzrocks.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005920/en/ Contacts Business Development Sergio Zuniga, VP of Sales and Marketing sergio.zuniga@blitzrocks.com Diana Ceballos, Technical Sales Representative diana.ceballos@blitzrocks.com Northampton, MA --News Direct-- CNH Industrial CNH Industrial donates tablet computers Following CNH Industrials recent Capital Markets Day held in Miami, Florida, the company implemented a number of initiatives in order to make the event as eco-friendly and sustainable as possible. One such program was to donate the mobile devices that were used by attendees at the event in order to benefit local educational communities. The 240 tablet computers which were used to view the presentations will now find a new use as they are donated to school districts near the Companys facilities in Burlington (Iowa), Grand Island (Nebraska), Springfield (Missouri) and Sioux Falls (South Dakota). CNH Industrials partnerships with these school districts include youth apprenticeship programs, school supply drives, job shadow programs, site tours and educator externships, STEM program funding and employee engagement. The initiative is in line with the companys ongoing efforts in supporting educational causes and programs to empower our communities. View additional multimedia and more ESG storytelling from CNH Industrial on 3blmedia.com View source version on newsdirect.com: https://newsdirect.com/news/cnh-industrial-supports-local-communities-by-donating-tablet-computers-978054755 We Demand Our Right for the Grand Jury to Investigate Crime and Corruption by Public Officials Featured Image for AlaskaGrandJuryRights.com Featured Image for AlaskaGrandJuryRights.com SOLDOTNA, Alaska, March 28, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On Wednesday, March 30 at 7:30 AM, Alaska Grand Jury Rights supporters will rally at the Kenai Courthouse to protest public officials attempting to stop Grand Juries from investigating evidence of systemic crime and corruption by public officials. Alaska's Constitution guarantees that Alaskan citizens can report such evidence to the Grand Jury and that the Grand Jury can investigate and write a report with recommendations on such evidence. The Kenai Peninsula Borough, City of Homer, and local community councils support this issue through unanimously approved Resolutions. See Resolutions and evidence here: https://alaskagrandjuryrights.com Alaska Constitution, Article 1, Section 8 The power of grand juries to investigate and make recommendations concerning the public welfare or safety shall never be suspended. AS 12.40.030 Duty of inquiry into crimes and general powers. The grand jury shall have the power to investigate and make recommendations concerning the public welfare or safety. AS 12.40.040 Juror to disclose knowledge of crime. If an individual grand juror knows or has reason to believe that a crime has been committed that is triable by the court, the juror shall disclose it to the other jurors, who shall investigate it. Alaska Constitutional Convention (1307-1409): The grand jury is preserved, for all purposes, particularly for investigation of public officials. The grand jury can be appealed to directly, which is an invaluable right to the citizen. Alaska Grand Jury Handbook, Page 16: Can a grand juror ask the grand jury to investigate a crime that the district attorney has not presented to them? Yes. The Alaska Statutes state: "If an individual grand juror knows or has reason to believe that a crime has been committed that is triable by the court, the juror shall disclose it to the other jurors, who shall investigate it." Story continues Alaska Grand Jury Handbook, Page 26: It will be up to the grand jury to decide whether to investigate. Evidence that public officials are violating the law and constitutional rights can be viewed at: https://alaskagrandjuryrights.com Demonstrate at the Kenai Courthouse on Wednesday, March 30 at 7:30 AM to demand that Grand Juries be allowed to see and lawfully act on evidence of felony crimes and corruption by public officials. Alaska Grand Jury Rights David Haeg 907-398-6403 cell/text haeg@alaska.net https://alaskagrandjuryrights.com Related Images Image 1 This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. Attachment State-of-the-art vehicle designed, equipped by Black & Veatch reflects whats possible in furthering diversity, equity and inclusion in workforce development SEATTLE & OVERLAND PARK, Kan., March 29, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Demonstrating community impact well beyond its iconic thrift stores, the Seattle regions Evergreen Goodwill of Northwest Washington today launched its state-of-the-art "Digital Equity Bus," which will bring Goodwills computer literacy and workforce development classes to people in rural and historically under-resourced communities. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005880/en/ Bridging the "digital divide" long has been a part of Goodwills mission. But according to the Washington State Department of Commerce, the COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the impact of that divide for 45 percent of the states residents who either have no internet access or are coping with very slow internet speeds. The Digital Equity Bus allows Evergreen Goodwill to extend its mission programming to reach even more people during this critical time when many people now rely on access to technology and Wi-Fi for work and school. Designed in partnership with Black & Veatch, the mobile classroom spans 36 feet in length and features workstations for as many as 10 students and multiple instructors, complete with a retractable awning that creates exterior classroom space for as many as 30 additional students. It also comes equipped with power outlets, wireless connectivity, charging stations, pop-up chairs and tables, and sound-amplifying equipment, as well as specialized equipment to make the classroom more accessible. "The Digital Equity Bus is an exciting extension of the work weve been committed to for 12-plus years," said Eileen Aparis, Vice President of Mission for Evergreen Goodwill. "For nearly a century, Evergreen Goodwills mission has been to break down significant barriers to education and employment, and with the acceleration of technology in the workplace, weve been at the forefront of digital equity work by providing free computer classes and access to technology. This bus will allow us to expand our reach well beyond Evergreen Goodwills five brick-and-mortar Job Training and Education Centers." Story continues The Digital Equity Bus will begin its journey in Whatcom County, where 86 percent of Evergreen Goodwill students report having no internet access. Beginning in April 2022, the bus will host workshops in partnership with the Nooksack School District and East Whatcom Resource Center, with Evergreen Goodwill actively building relationships with other rural communities for future programming. Evergreen Goodwill and Black & Veatch hope that the bus can serve as a model for other organizations engaged in digital equity work, and that if successful there would be opportunity to build out additional buses to serve other counties across the region. "For more than a century, Black & Veatch has led the way in delivering critical human infrastructure that enhances the lives of the customers and communities we serve. That mission of betterment is a shared one with Evergreen Goodwill," said Marty Travers, a Black & Veatch executive director. "Were also both deeply committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, and this Digital Equity Bus will bring opportunities directly to the underserved who desire and deserve them." Editors Notes: For more about Evergreen Goodwills Digital Equity work visit www.evergreengoodwill.org/digitalequity To learn more about Black & Veatchs commitment to social progress, click here. About Evergreen Goodwill Founded in 1923, Evergreen Goodwill is a non-profit organization that operates five job training and education centers, 24 retail stores and 30 donation sites in King, Snohomish, Skagit, Whatcom and Kitsap counties in Washington state. It is our mission to break down significant barriers to education and employment in the communities we serve. Each year, thousands of students enroll in our job training and education programs, helping them further their education or enter the workforce. Our more than 2,000 Evergreen Goodwill employees work hard every day to help further our mission and keep millions of pounds of materials out of area landfills. To learn more about Evergreen Goodwill, visit https://evergreengoodwill.org. About Black & Veatch Black & Veatch is a 100-percent employee-owned global engineering, procurement, consulting and construction company with a more than 100-year track record of innovation in sustainable infrastructure. Since 1915, we have helped our clients improve the lives of people around the world by addressing the resilience and reliability of our most important infrastructure assets. Our revenues in 2020 exceeded US$3.0 billion. Follow us on www.bv.com and on social media. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220329005880/en/ Contacts RYAN HODGES, COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST, EVERGREEN GOODWILL 425-269-4182 | 972-955-4428 M | ryan.hodges@evergreengoodwill.org JIM SUHR, MEDIA RELATIONS MANAGER, BLACK & VEATCH +1 913-458-6995 P | +1 314-422-6927 M | SuhrJ@BV.com 24-HOUR MEDIA HOTLINE | +1 855-999-5991 AMSTERDAM, March 29 (Reuters) - Facebook owner Meta said on Tuesday it was suspending plans to build a giant data centre in the Netherlands, following political opposition. The move comes a week after the Dutch Senate passed a motion asking Prime Minister Mark Rutte's government to "use its powers" to temporarily block construction of the site in the northern town of Zeewolde, 50 km east of Amsterdam. "Given the current circumstances, we have decided to pause our development efforts in Zeewolde," a company spokesperson said in a statement. The town in December had approved plans to build the largest facility of its kind in the Netherlands, from which Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp would serve users across Europe. It would use 1.38 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity and cover 166 hectares (410 acres) of farmland, and was expected to run on green energy and create 400 permanent jobs. It was, however, opposed by some environmental campaigners who do not want the limited supply of sustainable power generated in the Netherlands to be used by a multinational company. Some residents of Zeewolde said they felt their voices had not been heard in the permitting process. The Senate motion asked the government to delay construction until a government policy on data centres had been agreed. After having been invited in 2019 by the local, provincial and national government to consider a data center investment in the Netherlands and Zeewolde in particular, Meta envisioned a strong partnership that would bring jobs and community benefits to the region," the spokesperson said. The company left the door open to restarting the project, saying it would continue to cooperate with the municipality over what to do next. (Reporting by Anthony Deutsch and Toby Sterling Editing by Mark Potter) Rating Action: Moody's affirms Genpact's Baa3 issuer rating; outlook is stableGlobal Credit Research - 29 Mar 2022New York, March 29, 2022 -- Moody's Investors Service ("Moody's") affirmed Genpact Limited's ("Genpact") Baa3 issuer rating. Moody's also affirmed 1) the Baa3 rating on Genpact International, LLC's senior unsecured bank credit facilities that were assumed by Genpact USA, Inc., of which Genpact Global Holdings (Bermuda) Limited and Genpact Luxembourg S.a r.l. are also co-borrowers; and 2) the Baa3 senior unsecured rating on Genpact Luxembourg S.a r.l., a wholly owned subsidiary of Genpact Limited. Genpact Limited provides an unconditional guaranty supporting the rated debt instruments issued by its subsidiaries. The outlook on all ratings is stable.The following ratings/assessments are affected by today's action:Ratings Affirmed:..Issuer: Genpact International, LLC (Assumed by Genpact USA, Inc.)....Senior Unsecured Bank Credit Facility, Affirmed Baa3..Issuer: Genpact Limited.... Issuer Rating, Affirmed Baa3..Issuer: Genpact Luxembourg S.a r.l.....Senior Unsecured Regular Bond/Debenture, Affirmed Baa3Outlook Actions:..Issuer: Genpact International, LLC ....Outlook, Remains Stable ..Issuer: Genpact Limited ....Outlook, Remains Stable ..Issuer: Genpact Luxembourg S.a r.l.....Outlook, Remains StableRATINGS RATIONALE"Genpact's growing revenue base is supported by sticky, long-term contracts that provide stability throughout economic cycles. The company's offshore footprint and business process expertise create an attractive value proposition for multinational companies seeking to outsource non-core functions and reduce costs.", said Ignacio Rasero, Moody's Senior Credit Officer. "Genpact faces strong competition against formidable players with deep pockets, which limits profitability. A track-record of investment-grade financial policies position the company well within the Baa3 rating category."Genpact's Baa3 rating reflects its growing global scale and end-market diversification, with revenue as of fiscal year 2021 exceeding $4 billion. Balanced financial policies with a net leverage target under 2.0x (per the company's definition) support the credit. Genpact generates the majority of its revenue from long-term managed services contracts, which provide stability and predictability to its top line. The company's services typically support critical back-office business functions for its clients, such as accounting or collections, creating a sticky relationship that mitigates slowing demand during cyclical economic downturns. An excellent liquidity position and good free cash flow generation capacity are credit positive. Long-term demand for business process outsourcing ("BPO") services will continue to enable growth, as clients seek to partner with global providers to reduce cost and optimize non-core functions.Genpact competes against much larger providers with deep pockets, such as Accenture plc (Aa3 stable), International Business Machines Corporation "IBM" (A3 stable), Capgemini SE (unrated), Tata Consultancy Services Limited (Baa1 stable) and other global BPO firms. Some of these providers could exert pricing pressure or bundle their solutions with other services that Genpact does not offer, which could lower growth and profitability rates. Moreover, BPO firms compete for a scarce talent pool to deliver their services. Employee attrition rates are typically high in the industry, leading to wage pressure and increasing costs to hire or retain talent, which constrains margin expansion. Genpact has reduced its customer concentration since its spin-off from General Electric in 2005, but the top five clients still generate over 24% of total revenue, reflecting high concentration.The stable outlook reflects Moody's expectation for steady revenue growth in the mid to high single-digit percentage range over the next 12 months. Profitability will be pressured by high attrition rates, wage inflation and higher travel costs. EBITDA margin is expected to diminish slightly towards the 19.25% - 19.5% range (Moody's adjusted). Moody's anticipates Genpact will employ moderate financial policies such that gross debt/EBITDA remains in line with historical levels below 3.0x (Moody's adjusted).Genpact has excellent liquidity. As of December 31, 2021, the company had cash and cash equivalents of $899 million and $498 million of available capacity under its $500 million revolving credit facility due August 2023. Moody's expects the company will repay the $350 million 3.7% notes due April 2022 with cash on hand, and will refinance its $500 million (undrawn) revolver and $561 million term loan facilities due August 2023 over the next 12 months, such that debt/EBITDA will be sustained in the 2.0x-3.0x range (Moody's adjusted). Moody's expects the company will generate over $650 million of operating cash flow in 2022 (Moody's adjusted), which provides ample capacity to fund capital expenditures and dividends with internal sources. Moody's anticipates Genpact will dedicate excess cash flow to finance tuck-in M&A targets and shareholder distributions.The senior unsecured bank credit facilities, including a $500 million revolving credit facility and a $561 million term loan, are subject to compliance with two financial covenants. The Debt to EBITDA Ratio (as defined in the Credit Agreement) must be below 3.0x. The Interest Coverage Ratio (as defined in the Credit Agreement) must be at least 3.0x. Moody's expects Genpact will sustain an ample headroom against these financial covenants over the next 12 months.FACTORS THAT COULD LEAD TO AN UPGRADE OR DOWNGRADE OF THE RATINGSThe ratings could be upgraded if the company increases its scale, relative to industry peers and issuers in the rating category, and continues to demonstrate resiliency throughout economic cycles. An upgrade would require diminishing customer concentration and sustained revenue growth and profitability, with EBITA margin percentage rates approaching the high teens as Genpact increases the proportion of higher margin revenue linked to specialized contracts or new technologies. Conservative financial policies with debt/EBITDA sustained below 2.0x could also be required for an upgrade.The ratings could be downgraded if (i) revenue growth slows down or profitability diminishes, indicating a weakened competitive position; (ii) long-term financial policies become more aggressive with debt/EBITDA expected to be at or above 3.0x; or (iii) liquidity deteriorates.The principal methodology used in these ratings was Business and Consumer Services published in November 2021 and available at https://www.moodys.com/researchdocumentcontentpage.aspx?docid=PBC_1287897. Alternatively, please see the Rating Methodologies page on www.moodys.com for a copy of this methodology.Genpact Limited is a Bermuda-incorporated company that provides business process outsourcing, consulting, analytics, and information technology services focused on improving operations across various industry segments: Banking, Capital Markets and Insurance ("BCMI"); Consumer Goods, Retail, Life Sciences and Healthcare ("CGRLH"); and High Tech, Manufacturing and Services ("HMS"). The company employs over 109,000 employees worldwide, with the majority based in India. As of fiscal year 2021, Genpact generated $4.0 billion in revenue. The company was formed in 2005 as a spin-off from General Electric and is listed in the New York Stock Exchange.REGULATORY DISCLOSURESFor further specification of Moody's key rating assumptions and sensitivity analysis, see the sections Methodology Assumptions and Sensitivity to Assumptions in the disclosure form. Moody's Rating Symbols and Definitions can be found at: https://www.moodys.com/researchdocumentcontentpage.aspx?docid=PBC_79004.For ratings issued on a program, series, category/class of debt or security this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to each rating of a subsequently issued bond or note of the same series, category/class of debt, security or pursuant to a program for which the ratings are derived exclusively from existing ratings in accordance with Moody's rating practices. For ratings issued on a support provider, this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to the credit rating action on the support provider and in relation to each particular credit rating action for securities that derive their credit ratings from the support provider's credit rating. For provisional ratings, this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to the provisional rating assigned, and in relation to a definitive rating that may be assigned subsequent to the final issuance of the debt, in each case where the transaction structure and terms have not changed prior to the assignment of the definitive rating in a manner that would have affected the rating. For further information please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page for the respective issuer on www.moodys.com.For any affected securities or rated entities receiving direct credit support from the primary entity(ies) of this credit rating action, and whose ratings may change as a result of this credit rating action, the associated regulatory disclosures will be those of the guarantor entity. Exceptions to this approach exist for the following disclosures, if applicable to jurisdiction: Ancillary Services, Disclosure to rated entity, Disclosure from rated entity.The ratings have been disclosed to the rated entity or its designated agent(s) and issued with no amendment resulting from that disclosure.These ratings are solicited. Please refer to Moody's Policy for Designating and Assigning Unsolicited Credit Ratings available on its website www.moodys.com.Regulatory disclosures contained in this press release apply to the credit rating and, if applicable, the related rating outlook or rating review.Moody's general principles for assessing environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks in our credit analysis can be found at http://www.moodys.com/researchdocumentcontentpage.aspx?docid=PBC_1288235.The Global Scale Credit Rating on this Credit Rating Announcement was issued by one of Moody's affiliates outside the EU and is endorsed by Moody's Deutschland GmbH, An der Welle 5, Frankfurt am Main 60322, Germany, in accordance with Art.4 paragraph 3 of the Regulation (EC) No 1060/2009 on Credit Rating Agencies. Further information on the EU endorsement status and on the Moody's office that issued the credit rating is available on www.moodys.com.The Global Scale Credit Rating on this Credit Rating Announcement was issued by one of Moody's affiliates outside the UK and is endorsed by Moody's Investors Service Limited, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5FA under the law applicable to credit rating agencies in the UK. Further information on the UK endorsement status and on the Moody's office that issued the credit rating is available on www.moodys.com.Please see www.moodys.com for any updates on changes to the lead rating analyst and to the Moody's legal entity that has issued the rating.Please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page on www.moodys.com for additional regulatory disclosures for each credit rating. Ignacio Rasero VP - Senior Credit Officer Corporate Finance Group Moody's Investors Service, Inc. 250 Greenwich Street New York, NY 10007 U.S.A. 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A CALL FOR GOVERNMENTS, CORPORATIONS, AND CITIZENS TO EMPOWER GIRLS ACROSS THE WORLD; BREAK SYSTEMIC BARRIERS THAT KEEP PEOPLE IN POVERTY; AND TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE NEW YORK --News Direct-- Global Citizen NEW YORK, GENEVA and BRUSSELS, March 29, 2022 /3BL Media/ - International advocacy organization Global Citizen today launched End Extreme Poverty NOW Our Future Cant Wait, a new campaign calling on governments, private sector leaders, and billionaires to make the commitments urgently required to End Extreme Poverty NOW. The year-long campaign will focus on three critical issues on which the world can no longer afford to wait to make change: 1) empowering adolescent girls across the world. 2) breaking systemic barriers that keep people trapped in poverty; 3) taking climate action now. Throughout 2022, Global Citizen will rally millions of citizens to demand that the world's top political and business leaders stop delaying action with longer-term timelines and focus on what we need to do here and now. The war against Ukraine - in addition to causing untold suffering and devastation - will only aggregate efforts to achieve Global Citizens mission even further. The ongoing crisis,. and its unfolding repercussions, are only a stark and violent reminder that we need more action NOW to establish the conditions for a shared future. We cant pay for one crisis by cutting funding for another. Each and every crisis, and each and every person living in poverty, deserves to receive our support and solidarity. The global agenda to end extreme poverty, defend the planet, and tackle inequity is in peril. And despite progress in a few countries before COVID-19 hit, the world was and continues to be wildly off-track from the 2030 target, said Hugh Evans, CEO and Co-Founder of Global Citizen. This moment of crisis demands new urgency and a renewal of purpose. We need a new compact built on mutual trust and respect one that lifts up the voices of the people whose lives depend on its success and who suffer from its failure. An agenda built by and with them, to a timeframe set by those who understand all too well that every lost minute is a whole new tragedy. Story continues The ripple effect of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered not only a public health crisis, but also a social, economic, and climate crisis. These combined crises have wiped out all gains made since the Global Goals were adopted in 2015, with the World Bank estimating that nearly 100M more people have been pushed into extreme poverty, wiping away 6 years of progress, 45M people are on the brink of starvation, over 85M are on the move, fleeing conflict, including more than 3.6M fleeing from Ukraine. Tackling these crises will prove more difficult as a result of the spiking food prices and potential shortage of aid from humanitarian organizations due to the conflict in Ukraine. The past two years have also shown that the world is unwilling to deliver both on its promise to end extreme poverty, and to protect the progress made over the last two decades. There was no meaningful progress from world leaders in 2021, despite numerous opportunities at the G7, G20, and COP26 meetings. The End Extreme Poverty NOW campaign is advocating for commitments from governments, private sector leaders who have not stepped up, and billionaires to: Empower Girls NOW The campaign aims to move the G7, under the leadership of German Chanceller Olaf Scholz, to meet the needs of 50M young girls by providing a minimum of USD $400M to reach millions of young women with immediate support for school meals, access to education, and health, including sexual and reproductive health services. Break Systemic Barriers NOW We can achieve real change right now towards ending extreme poverty by first breaking the two systemic barriers that unnecessarily prolonged the pandemic and undermined the recovery of lower-income countries: the twin evils of healthcare injustice and financial inequity. COVID-19 has exposed and exacerbated these issues. The campaign calls for action to beat COVID-19 variants and prevent the next pandemic, including by sharing intellectual property for vaccines and other medical tools with developing countries, strengthening health systems for in-country delivery of those tools, and investing so there is enough capacity across continents to produce at least 16B vaccine doses in a single year against future threats. Additionally, financial equity is necessary to fund essential needs and address global challenges, including reallocating at least USD $100B in IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), fulfilling long-standing but unmet foreign aid commitments, and advancing policies for fairer and more effective taxation globally. Take Climate Action NOW In 2022 it is urgent that leaders especially those of the U.S., Australia, and Germany keep their commitment to the $100B per year climate financing promised for adaptation and mitigation. We must open the way for decisive collective action to keep warming below 1.5C of warming, while calling for developed countries and businesses to go further, faster. Food security, nutrition, and livelihoods must be prioritized by directing significant climate adaptation resources to rural communities and smallholder farmers. Companies, especially those in high-emitting industries such as manufacturing and construction, need to set clear and transparent science-based net zero and nature positive targets in line with 1.5C. Those that have already done so should implement and publically report on these targets. In particular, the steel and cement sectors must step up and sign on to the Race to Zero. Combined, they contribute 15% to global annual carbon emissions. The situation in Ukraine reinforces the urgency behind many of the policy recommendations outlined in the End Extreme Poverty NOW campaign, including helping farmers around the world, dismantling systems that perpetuate financial inequity, and providing education and health services for the women and girl refugees escaping conflict. Cutting across all our work throughout the year is a strong commitment to defend and promote advocacy, ensuring that marginalized voices are heard, and that leaders are held accountable to deliver on their promises. Global Citizen will elevate citizens voices, especially from the Global South, and defend the right of anyone to speak freely, dissent, and organize, without fear of reprisals or violence. As part of this commitment, Global Citizen has reoriented its product strategy to focus on meeting Global Citizens where they are at in their day-to-day life and driving behavioral actions 365 days a year. Starting today, people everywhere can take action by calling on political representatives to fulfill the promises they made and End Extreme Poverty NOW. Only together can we keep the promise of the Global Goals for everyone, everywhere. Join me in the Global Citizen End Poverty NOW Our Future Cant Wait campaign, to deliver the Global Goals our best hope for people, for the planet, for peace, and for prosperity. - Amina J. Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations. "Global crises such as the pandemic or the climate crisis can only be solved together through international cooperation. We will therefore work to make progress towards an equitable world during Germany's G7 Presidency. I support Global Citizen's commitment to end extreme poverty worldwide. - Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany "We join Global Citizen in continuing our stewardship in ensuring a better world and future for all. The last two years have shown the devastating impact to humanity when we choose individual goals over the global good. Together, we have to take concrete actions that will create a better future for our planet and its people, NOW." - Cyril Ramaphosa, President of the Republic of South Africa It is with a sense of urgency that I join Global Citizen as a patron for its 2022 campaign. I call on governments, the private sector, philanthropy, civil society and activists indeed all over the world to join us this year with the power of ideas and actions so that finally we can move from rhetoric to real change. Proposals, such as optimizing Special Drawing Rights as part of climate finance have incredible potential and I look forward to discussing this and many other ideas with you all. Let us be bold and let us eliminate extreme poverty NOW from our world. We can and we will. - Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley For Ghana, ensuring that we end poverty, empower young girls and protect the planet is of utmost importance. This is why we are joining Global Citizen in their 2022 campaign efforts together as one voice and as one community. There is no better time than NOW. - Nana Akufo-Addo, President of Ghana These days, we are once again feeling the value of vibrant civil societies. With their vigor, their ingenuity and their convening power they contribute significantly to positive changes on earth. They count among the most valuable assets of free democratic societies. Thats why I am proud to support Global Citizens new campaign, End Extreme Poverty NOW. Change is more needed than ever, as we take up the challenge of building a better world after COVID. We want no one to go hungry. We want the same opportunities to succeed for all the world's children especially girls! And we want to stop global warming. So lets all join forces to reach our Global Goals. - Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission New York City is home to Global Citizen Headquarters and Global Citizen Festival. As the organization enters into its 10th year, we are honored to have the support of Mayor Adams, 110th Mayor of New York City. Theres only one city that can unite the world in common cause and thats New York. Were proud to be hosting Global Citizen NOW as we come together to defeat poverty and protect the planet, and I cant think of a more fitting place to celebrate 10 years of the Global Citizen Festival than on the Great Lawn in New York City. Its time to showcase our greatness, fight for change, and show the world we are open for business." - New York City Mayor Eric Adams. The End Extreme Poverty NOW campaign is executed in partnership with many of the world's leading companies, including Cisco, Procter & Gamble, and Verizon. Under the leadership of Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, Global Citizen will work to engage the private sector across industries to sign on to the Race to Zero to open the way for decisive collective action to keep temperatures below 1.5C of warming. As Patron of Global Citizens work in Africa, Tshepo Mahloele and the Lebashe Investment Group will support Global Citizens growth across Africa to reach more audiences and help achieve equity in places with high rates of extreme poverty. As Patron of Global Citizens work at the G20, Minister Sandiaga Uno of Indonesia will support efforts to make this years G20 Summit inclusive and impactful, with a specific focus on empowering youth and getting wealthy nations to follow through on the funding needed for a fair and just clean energy transition. Cisco is proud to continue our partnership with Global Citizen in support of their mission to end extreme poverty. Private sector support is essential to powering an inclusive future for all, and we must work together and commit to finding a solution to this global crisis. - Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO, Cisco I am honored and humbled to play a meaningful role that supports existing global efforts to deal with vaccine inequity, challenge poverty, and empower young girls. The neglect of these predicaments, including global warming, have a detrimental effect on the prospects of the citizens of Africa and this situation cannot be allowed to continue unabated. It is about time these matters are brought back on the global agenda. I am happy that the Global Citizen movement has reignited the debate about such critical matters and that it is continuing to keep Africa top of mind. - Tshepo Mahloele, Chairman and Founder, Lebashe Investment Group "The triple challenge of health, economic, and climate crises that we face today make it absolutely clear that governments, business, civil societies, and the youth irrespective of their political systems must join forces if we are to recover together and recover stronger. Now is the time for all of us to be imaginative and bold in resolving the complex challenges of our time. Global Citizen embodies that very spirit of idealism and can-doism to keep the needle of transformation moving forward. Thats why I am proud to partner with Global Citizen and serve as a patron of their campaign efforts ahead of this years G20 summit. - Sandiaga Uno, Minister for Tourism and Creative Economy of the Republic of Indonesia, and G20 Patron of Global Citizen In 2022, Global Citizen will bring this campaign to life through a series of global events to achieve the campaigns goals, and end extreme poverty NOW, uniting world leaders, artists, philanthropists and CEOs to engage millions of citizens around the world. Key moments throughout 2022: The Global Citizen Prize Awards Ceremony will return on May 22 to honor individuals who are making extraordinary efforts for the worlds most vulnerable. Additional details about the Global Citizen Prize and the Cisco Youth Leadership Award will be announced soon. Global Citizen NOW: Leadership Summit on May 23 will assemble world leaders, community and business leaders, artists, and champions from the non-profit space to address ways forward for solving our biggest global challenges in ending extreme poverty NOW. The 10th Anniversary of the Global Citizen Festival on September 24 will celebrate a decade of impact with the worlds most popular artists, live from the iconic Global Citizen stage on the Great Lawn in Central Park, New York City. A simultaneous live show in Africa and performances from across the globe will focus on driving commitments towards defeating extreme poverty NOW. More details, including artist lineups and special guests, will be announced in the coming months. Global Citizen at the G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia November 15-16 will be a global moment jointly hosted by the Indonesian G20 Presidency. Global Citizen at the G20 Summit will drive the private sector and the worlds leading economies to make the commitments needed to protect the planet. Additional details will be released in the coming months. With the support of Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, who stands in solidarity with the End Extreme Poverty NOW Our Future Cant Wait campaign, governments and world leaders have voiced their support, including: Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed, President of the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly Abdulla Shahid, President of the Republic of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa, President of Ghana Nana Akufo-Addo, President of the Republic of Zambia Hakainde Hichilema, Prime Minister of Belgium Alexander De Croo, Prime Minister of Croatia Andrej Plenkovic, Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz, Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sanchez, Foreign Minister of NIgeria Geoffrey Onyeama, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ireland Simon Coveney, Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy of Indonesia Sandiaga Uno, Minister of Environment of Rwanda Dr. Jeanne d'Arc Mujawamariya, COP26 President Alok Sharma, 8th UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, Director-General of the World Health Organization Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, Executive Director of the World Food Programme David Beasley, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development Gilbert F. Houngbo, Executive Director of the UNFPA Dr. Natalia Kanem, Director of Education Cannot Wait Yasmine Sherif, CEO of GAVI Seth Berkley, Secretary General of International Chamber of Commerce John W.H. Denton, former Prime Minister of Norway Erna Solberg, former Executive Director of UN Women Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, and the Government of Peru, as well as Congressional support for the Global Citizen NOW hosting committee: The Honorable Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Senator Chris Coons, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, and Senator Chris Van Hollen. End Extreme Poverty NOW Our Future Cant Wait is supported by partners: Ban Ki-Moon Center, C40 Cities, Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, Center for Environmental Peacebuilding, CGIAR, Climate Leadership Group, Conservation international, Donor Tracker, Education Cannot Wait, Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia, The Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND), Gavi, Gerando Falcoes, Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents (GFF), The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, Green Climate Fund, International Chamber of Commerce, International Fund for Agricultural Development, International Service for Human Rights, Media for Community Change, NPX, ONE campaign, OutRight Action International, Pandemic Action Network, Peace Boat, Re:wild, Rotary International, SBTi, Social Gastronomy Movement, UNFPA, UN Women, WHO Foundation, World Benchmarking Alliance, and World Food Programme. More information about the policy aims for the End Extreme Poverty NOW campaign can be found in a white paper that was released today. Download the white paper here and to take action visit, www.globalcitizen.org/en/ and follow us @glblctzn. # # # FOR EDITORS ON BACKGROUNDGlobal Citizens 2021 Recovery Plan for the World featured two groundbreaking events. In May 2021, Global Citizen VAX LIVE: The Concert to Reunite the World, in partnership with other organizations and advocacy groups, helped mobilize USD $302M and secured 26M+ vaccine doses, and amplified the urgency of achieving vaccine equity worldwide to end the pandemic. In September 2021, Global Citizen Live was broadcast from an unprecedented seven continents over 24 hours with music performances in New York, London, Paris, Sydney, Seoul, Mumbai, Johannesburg, Lagos, Madrid, Lajatico, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Tuscany, and Los Angeles. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of countless partner organizations, the resulting announcements included commitments from 53 governments and 16 corporations that resulted in 157M trees restored or protected, 60M+ COVID-19 vaccines donated, and over USD $1.1B committed towards fighting the impact of poverty and famine. ABOUT GLOBAL CITIZEN:Global Citizen is the world's largest movement of action takers and impact makers dedicated to ending extreme poverty NOW. We post, tweet, message, vote, sign, and call to inspire those who can make things happen government leaders, businesses, philanthropists, artists, and citizens together improving lives. By downloading our app, Global Citizens learn about the systemic causes of extreme poverty, take action on those issues, and earn rewards, which can be redeemed for tickets to concerts, events, and experiences all over the world. For more information, visit www.globalcitizen.org and follow @GlblCtzn. CONTACT:Global Citizen Inquiries: media@globalcitizen.orgMedia Inquiries: Sunshine Sachs on behalf of Global Citizen, gc@sunshinesachs.com View additional multimedia and more ESG storytelling from Global Citizen on 3blmedia.com View source version on newsdirect.com: https://newsdirect.com/news/global-citizen-unveils-end-extreme-poverty-now-our-future-cant-wait-278810568 TAIPEI, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- With steady growth and outstanding achievements in recent years, TPIsoftware, the leading software solution provider based in Taiwan, has been listed in the Financial Times "Asia-Pacific High-Growth Companies 2022" among the 500 key player companies across the APAC region. This global recognition showcases the competitive edge and the vast potential of TPIsoftware to grow as a top software provider globally. The FT Ranking, known for its credibility and authority, is conducted by the leading publication Financial Times in collaboration with the research company Statista. The ranking identifies the top fast-growing companies in APAC based on their compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in revenue between 2017 and 2020. TPIsoftware ranks 441st, growing at a CAGR of 26.1% during the period. TPIsoftware has gained a foothold in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, and currently has branch offices in Singapore and Vietnam in response to the business growth. TPIsoftware has partnered with the local ecosystem and provided comprehensive and tailored technical support locally to fulfill customers' needs. Through its company slogan "Act Local, Grow Global", TPIsoftware has exhibited the robust strength to go global. This year's ranking, according to the Financial Times, is the most competitive to date. The complete list can be found in the Financial Times featured article. "We are delighted to celebrate this huge milestone with our customers and our dedicated team," said Ben Yao, CEO of TPIsoftware. "Our previous global recognitions have proved us a trusted software provider; we are 'Recommended Fintech Innovator' of 2021 Digital Financial Service Award in Taiwan for FinTech innovation, and honored with Gold Award of the CX Asia Excellence Awards 2021 in Singapore for driving customer success." "We have also been recognized for our top-notch software engineers. Taking these talents to the world stage is the ambition we anchor to. It is our can-do spirit that is at the heart of our achievements," said Ben Yao. Story continues TPIsoftware strives to be the cornerstone of software technology globally and a long-term business partner to its customers. Now it is ready to move forward to the next level of international expansion. About TPIsoftware TPIsoftware is a software provider with focus in APIM, AI chatbots, FinTech, InsurTech and more, delivering services and solutions domestically and overseas. Media Contact: TPIsoftware Peggy Tsai +886-2-2658-0508 #1606 peggy.tsai@tpisoftware.com Subscribe to Newsletter | Website | Facebook | LinkedIn SOURCE TPIsoftware It is Indonesia's first ESG-compliant private impact investment fund that is run by Indonesian Institutions and focuses on sectors such as education, healthcare, waste management, climate change, financial inclusion and sustainable cities. JAKARTA, Indonesia, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Indonesia Impact Fund (IIF) has formally announced the completion of its first close, which took place in early Q4 2021. Initiated by Asia-Pacific Business Advisory Council (ABAC) and managed by Mandiri Capital Indonesia, the corporate VC arm of Bank Mandiri Group. IIF is the first Indonesian-run ESG-compliant private impact investment fund which aims to showcase a public-private partnership in the Venture Capital industry. The fund's limited partners include Indonesian family offices and private institutions, and is currently in collaboration with UNDP in developing and implementing the proper Impact Measurement Framework for portfolio companies. Left to Right: Tomy Yunus (Co-Founder and CEO of Cakap), Eddi Danusaputro (CEO of Mandiri Capital Indonesia) IIF will focus on investing in early-stage startups that are aligned with United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The main target sectors will be education, healthcare, waste management, climate change, financial inclusion, and sustainable cities. "We believe that by introducing this new initiative, IIF will serve as a catalyst for venture capital companies and fund managers in Indonesia to shift their investments toward impact and sustainability. IIF will not only bring financial profits but also create a positive impact towards the Indonesian community as a whole," mentioned Eddi Danusaputro, CEO of Mandiri Capital Indonesia. Mandiri Capital has appointed Joshua Agusta, its Venture Fund Director, to become the Fund Manager and Partner at IIF. The fund has recently closed its first investment deal on Cakap, a leading upskilling platform in Indonesia. Cakap is an EdTech company that offers high quality non-formal education in Indonesia that mainly focuses on foreign language and vocational courses. Cakap developed a highly interactive online learning application that connects students to professional teachers and experts, both local and foreign. Cakap learning solutions enable personalized learning experiences through adaptive technology that modifies each student's learning journey by delivering flexibility courses in private, group, and webinar formats, as well as an advanced learning management system, multimedia materials, and certification. Story continues According to Agusta, "Non-formal education is a big market with untapped potential in Indonesia. We believe that by investing into company like Cakap, our fund will contribute in bridging language proficiency gap in Indonesia and improving public welfare in the long run." Tomy Yunus, CEO & Co-Founder of Cakap, also added, "We are honored to welcome the new investment and partnership with Indonesia Impact Fund along with Mandiri Capital Indonesia, and UNDP. The additional strategic investment will bolster our expansion goals by allowing the country to access high-quality education, particularly in lower-tier cities, which is in line with Cakap's mission to elevate Indonesian people's lives." Indonesia, like India and China, is experiencing an EdTech boom as demand for edtech solutions has increased since the Covid-19 outbreak. Given that the country possesses the world's fourth largest education system, it's no surprise that the EdTech sector has recently blossomed. IIF is committed to assisting Indonesia in the development of high-quality education. Mandiri Capital Indonesia (MCI) Mandiri Capital Indonesia is a Corporate Venture Capital firm operated by the country's largest financial institution, Bank Mandiri. MCI acts as a bridge connecting investors and entrepreneurs to the ever-evolving technology sector. As part of the financial institution, MCI focuses on financial technology sector whereas to help scale meaningful financial technology companies by availing Bank Mandiri's extensive financial expertise, coupled with access to a vast network of merchants and customers. Cakap Cakap is one of the biggest Edtech platforms in Indonesia that develops online learning application that connects students to professional teachers and experts through video calls and text conversations. Our proprietary education platform enables two-way learning interactions for life skills learning across Asia Pacific. Available on Google Play and App Store to reach different segments of students, because everyone deserves a quality education. CAKAP provides educational solutions with an international standard learning curriculum to provide the best online learning experience. #CakapUntukBangsa Indonesia Impact Fund (IIF) Indonesia Impact Fund is the first ESG-compliant private impact fund that is managed by Mandiri Capital Indonesia. Backed by ABAC members, IIF is in collaboration with UNDP in developing and implementing the proper Impact Measurement Framework for portfolio companies. The fund will focus on investing in early-stage startups that are aligned with United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The main target sectors will be on education, healthcare, waste management, climate change, financial inclusion, and sustainable cities. SOURCE Cakap ReportLinker Major players in the industrial water treatment chemicals market are BWA Water Additives, The Dow Chemical Company, Ecolab, Solenis, Kemira, Solenis LLC, Kemira Oyj, Suez S. A, BASF SE, DuPont de Nemours, Inc. New York, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Industrial Water Treatment Chemicals Global Market Report 2022" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06248448/?utm_source=GNW , Lonza, Buckman Laboratories International Inc., Snf Floerger, The Lubrizol Corporation, and Ashland. The global industrial water treatment chemicals market is expected to grow from $26.74 billion in 2021 to $27.09 billion in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.29%. The growth is mainly due to the companies rearranging their operations and recovering from the COVID-19 impact, which had earlier led to restrictive containment measures involving social distancing, remote working, and the closure of commercial activities that resulted in operational challenges. The market is expected to reach $34.25 billion in 2026 at a CAGR of 6.04%. The industrial water treatment chemicals market consists of sales of industrial water treatment chemical products by entities (organizations, sole traders, and partnerships) where the chemicals such as coagulant, flocculent, and PH adjustment chemicals are used in wastewater treatment, to adjust pH and begin coagulating solids in the wastewater and removal of bacteria before the delivery to clean or portable water supply before the consumption. The industrial water treatment chemicals are segmented by product into antifoams, oxygen scavengers, corrosion inhibitors, biocides and disinfectants, oxidants, PH conditioners, sludge conditioners, scale inhibitors, other.Antifoams are used in the application of microbiological fermentation technique. Antifoams are also used by wiping on filling nozzles, on a screen suspended above the foaming systemor rims of processing vats.The various end users are oil and gas, power, metal and mining, chemical. These are used in various applications such as raw water treatment, cooling and boilers, effluent water treatment and water desalination. Asia Pacific was the largest region in the industrial water treatment chemicals market in 2021.Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing region in the forecast period. The regions covered in this report are Asia-Pacific, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, South America, Middle East and Africa. Growing industrialization and expanding automotive sector are expected to propel the growth of the industrial water treatment chemicals market.Industrialization is rapidly growing in emerging economies such as China and India. The automotive sector is also expanding, for instance, according to the data provided by the India Brand Equity Foundation in November 2021, the production of automobiles increased at a rate of 2.36% CAGR between FY16-20, and in FY20, 26.36 million vehicles were manufactured in India. Therefore, growing industrialization and expanding automotive sector drive the industrial water treatment chemicals market. Technology advancements are a key trend gaining popularity in the industrial water treatment chemicals market.These include new technologies for wastewater treatment. For example, according to the data provided by the ministry of science and technology in august 2021, The Energy and Resources Institute of New Delhi developed a technology called The Advanced Oxidation Technology or TADOX that reduces less load and dependence on tertiary and biological treatment systems that help to achieve Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD). In 2019, Kurita, a water treatment company based in Japan, acquired U.S. Water Services Inc, for the deal amount of $270 million. With this acquisition, Kurita aims to strengthen its business in North America, by enhancing its comprehensive solutions that combine water treatment chemicals, facilities, and maintenance services. US Water Services Inc is a US-based manufacturer and seller of water treatment chemicals and facilities. The countries covered in the Industrial Water Treatment Chemicals market report are Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, South Korea, UK, USA. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06248448/?utm_source=GNW About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Story continues CONTACT: Clare: clare@reportlinker.com US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 By Azernews By Vugar Khalilov Baku has said that Armenia still has territorial claims against Azerbaijan and it violates the trilateral statement of November 10, 2020, as remnants of illegal Armenian armed detachments continue to remain in Karabakh. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry made the remarks on March 28, rejecting Yerevan's latest statement about the situation in Karabakh as "completely untrue and slanderous". "It is Armenia that continues its open territorial claims against Azerbaijan in the post-conflict phase and raises this issue, including at the level of the Foreign Ministry, in every statement made in connection with the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. It is Armenia that, contrary to paragraph 4 of the trilateral statement, still does not withdraw the remnants of the Armenian armed forces from the region. Armenia continues to send servicemen to the region via the Lachin corridor, in violation of Article 6 of the statement. This fact has been confirmed by the international media," the ministry said. It described the remarks made by Armenia against Azerbaijan's sovereign territories as an effort to meddle in Azerbaijan's domestic affairs and a breach of international law. Armenia, which forcibly kept part of the territories of Azerbaijan under military occupation for nearly 30 years, ethnically cleansing more than a million Azerbaijanis and depriving them of the right to live in their homes, has apparently become accustomed to violating international law, the statement underlined. The ministry stressed that accusing Azerbaijan of failing to comply with the trilateral statement of November 9/10, 2020, indeed Armenia violates the provisions of the joint statement and thereby inhibits the progress of normalization of relations between the two nations, despite the prospects for regional cooperation in the post-conflict period. The ministry also dismissed Armenia's "ethnic cleansing" allegations. We would like to emphasize that the demand of the Azerbaijani side [to leave Azerbaijan's internationally-recognized territories] is not for its citizens of Armenian origin living in the Karabakh region of the country, but for the removal of the remnants of illegal Armenian military units from the region, as envisaged by the trilateral statement. The Armenian Foreign Ministry's deliberate distortion of this issue under the guise of 'ethnic cleansing' exposes Armenia's true intentions, the statement added. The ministry underlined that Armenia as the country that applied gas blockade against Azerbaijans Nakhchivan region and committed ethnic cleansing against Azerbaijanis has no legal and moral right to appeal to the international community blaming Azerbaijan for such crimes. On what grounds does Armenia, the country which for almost 30 years kept the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan in a gas blockade, carried out ecocide and culturecide in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan and prevented the arrival of international missions to these territories, now call on the international community?!, the ministry stressed. Armenia, which is making a false appeal to the international community based on fabricated accusations, must understand that ensuring peace and stability in the region depends only on the unconditional implementation of all the provisions of the trilateral statement. All other steps taken by Armenia, contrary to the joint statement, will only hinder the peace-building process, the ministry emphasized. It added that the relevant statements of Azerbaijans Defence Ministry provided thorough information on issues relating to Russian peacekeepers temporarily stationed on the territory of Azerbaijan. Sapiens' global best practice and industry-specific expertise will help the Portugal insurer to efficiently and effectively manage its global reinsurance program HOLON, Israel, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sapiens International Corporation (NASDAQ: SPNS) (TASE: SPNS), a leading global provider of software solutions for the insurance industry, today announced that a leading insurance company in Portugal, both in life and non-life, selected to implement Sapiens ReinsuranceMaster. ReinsuranceMaster will enable the insurer to better manage its global, complex and diversified insurance product sales network of reinsurance business for life and non-life sectors by improving efficiency and expanding capabilities. Sapiens Logo Sapiens' solution provides comprehensive support for multi-company organizations with complex structures, including affiliated reinsurance, multi-currency calculations, cash settlements and GL accounting, optimizing complex operations and improving efficiencies of scale. Managing and optimizing reinsurance coverage is a critical task, and this is especially true for multinational insurance companies. Insurers need a reinsurance software solution that enables them to handle all reinsurance activities on a single platform, and provides full financial control and auditing support of reinsurance contracts and activities for all lines of business. "Our client was seeking a proven, flexible and modern reinsurance solution with a capacity for tracking policy and claims transactions, that automates complex accounting tasks and is flexible enough to change with new terms and conditions," said Roni Al-Dor, Sapiens president and CEO. "We are excited to provide this leading insurer with the powerful Sapiens ReinsuranceMaster solution and enable them to leverage our vast experience with a multinational customer base." Sapiens ReinsuranceMaster offers complete support for all types of reinsurance contracts treaty & facultative, proportional & non-proportional, ceded and assumed business. All activities are maintained in one easy-to-use, cloud-based, web-based user solution, with extensive and comprehensive, automated process allocations and fully automated retroactive processing support. More than 100 insurers worldwide use Sapiens' reinsurance solutions. Story continues About Sapiens Sapiens International Corporation empowers insurers to succeed in an evolving industry. Sapiens offers digital software platforms, solutions and services for the property and casualty, life, pension and annuity, reinsurance, financial and compliance, workers' compensation and financial markets. With more than 35 years of experience delivering to more than 600 organizations globally, Sapiens has a proven ability to satisfy customers' core systems, data and digital requirements. For more information: http://www.sapiens.com. Media Contact Shay Assaraf Chief of Marketing, Sapiens Shay.assaraf@sapiens.com Investors Contact Kimberly Rogers Managing Director, Hayden IR kim@HaydenIR.com +1 541-904-5075 Forward Looking Statements Certain matters discussed in this press release that are incorporated herein by reference are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act, Section 21E of the Exchange Act and the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, that are based on our beliefs, assumptions and expectations, as well as information currently available to us. Such forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of the words "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "may," "will," "plan" and similar expressions. Such statements reflect our current views with respect to future events and are subject to pandemic risks and uncertainties. There are important factors that could cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to differ materially from the results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to: the degree of our success in our plans to leverage our global footprint to grow our sales; the degree of our success in integrating the companies that we have acquired through the implementation of our M&A growth strategy; the lengthy development cycles for our solutions, which may frustrate our ability to realize revenues and/or profits from our potential new solutions; our lengthy and complex sales cycles, which do not always result in the realization of revenues; the degree of our success in retaining our existing customers or competing effectively for greater market share; difficulties in successfully planning and managing changes in the size of our operations; the frequency of the long-term, large, complex projects that we perform that involve complex estimates of project costs and profit margins, which sometimes change mid-stream; the challenges and potential liability that heightened privacy laws and regulations pose to our business; occasional disputes with clients, which may adversely impact our results of operations and our reputation; various intellectual property issues related to our business; potential unanticipated product vulnerabilities or cybersecurity breaches of our or our customers' systems; risks related to the insurance industry in which our clients operate; risks associated with our global sales and operations, such as changes in regulatory requirements, wide-spread viruses and epidemics like the recent novel coronavirus pandemic, which adversely affected our results of operations, or fluctuations in currency exchange rates; and risks related to our principal location in Israel and our status as a Cayman Islands company. While we believe such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, should one or more of the underlying assumptions prove incorrect, or these risks or uncertainties materialize, our actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Please read the risks discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" in our most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F, in order to review conditions that we believe could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee that future results, levels of activity, performance and events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or will occur. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason, to conform these statements to actual results or to changes in our expectations. Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/585787/Sapiens_Logo.jpg SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Danish shipper Maersk said the Shanghai lockdown will severely hurt trucking services and increase transport costs, as China's intensifying efforts to fight the spread of COVID-19 further rattles global supply chains. The Chinese coastal city, home to some of the world's busiest sea and airports, began locking down half of the city on Monday and intends to do the same to the other half for four days starting Friday in a two-stage testing exercise. While it has kept its airports and deepwater port open, it has imposed stringent movement curbs, barring unapproved vehicles from streets and telling millions of people not to leave their homes. "Trucking service in and out (of) Shanghai will be severely impacted by 30% due to a full lockdown on Shanghai's Pudong and Puxi areas in turn until 5th April," Maersk, the world's second-largest container shipping company, said in an advisory to clients on Monday. It adding that warehouses in Shanghai would be closed until Friday. "Consequently, there will be longer delivery time and a possible rise in transport costs such as detour fee and highway fee." SEKO Logistics, a U.S.-based freight transport and warehousing company, said factories in the neighbouring province of Zhejiang were opting to move cargo out of Ningbo's port, rather than Shanghai. "We are anticipating: a sharp increase in air freight rates from today. We have already received some sky-high offers for enquires to Europe so far today," it said on its website. China is battling its largest number of COVID-19 infections since the onset of since the country's initial outbreak receded in early 2020. This month it placed lockdowns on other manufacturing exports hubs such as Changchun and Shenzhen, which gave rise to lengthening queues outside major Chinese ports. Although curbs in Changchun have remained in place, they have been relaxed in Shenzhen, where businesses and factories were allowed to resume operations on March 21. However, a survey conducted by a state newspaper found Shenzhen's "war" on COVID-19 has hurt up to 93% of local small and medium-sized companies, with many suffering production disruptions because of shutdowns, interruptions in supply chains, and delays in order executions. (Reporting by Brenda Goh. Editing by Gerry Doyle) WINNIPEG, MB, March 28, 2022 /CNW/ - Marwest Apartment Real Estate Investment Trust ("Marwest Apartment REIT" or the "REIT") (TSXV: MAR.UN) announces that it has filed a Notice of Intention to Make a Normal Course Issuer Bid ("NCIB") with the TSX Venture Exchange (the "TSXV"), which will allow the REIT to purchase outstanding trust units of the REIT ("Units"). The implementation of the NCIB remains subject to the approval of the TSXV. Marwest Apartment Real Estate Investment Trust Logo (CNW Group/Marwest Apartment Real Estate Investment Trust) The REIT plans to implement the NCIB because it believes that, from time to time, the market price of the Units may not fully reflect the underlying value of the REIT's business and its future prospects. Accordingly, the REIT believes that having the ability to purchase the Units will be in the interest of the REIT and represents an opportunity to enhance unitholder value. Under the NCIB, if approved by the TSXV, the REIT may acquire up to an aggregate of 787,956 Units over the 12-month period commencing on March 31, 2022 and ending on March 30, 2023, representing approximately 10.0% of the "public float" (calculated in accordance with the policies of the TSXV) as of March 31, 2022. Additionally, under the NCIB, the REIT may not acquire more than 2% of the issued and outstanding Units in any 30 day period. Purchases subject to the NCIB will be carried out pursuant to open market transactions through the facilities of the TSXV and alternative trading systems or by such other means as may be permitted under applicable securities laws during the term of the NCIB at the prevailing market price of the Units at the time of purchase. All Units purchased by the REIT under the NCIB will be returned to treasury and cancelled. The actual number of Units which may be purchased pursuant to the NCIB and the timing of any purchases will be determined by management and the Board of Trustees of the REIT. The NCIB will be conducted through Canaccord Genuity Corp. ("Canaccord"), a member of the TSXV, and made in accordance with the policies of the TSXV. The funding for any purchases pursuant to the NCIB will be from the working capital of the REIT. In connection with the NCIB, the REIT has entered into an automatic unit purchase plan ("AUPP") with Canaccord as the designated broker. The AUPP provides a set of standard instructions to Canaccord to make purchases under the NCIB in accordance with the limits and other terms set out in the AUPP. Canaccord will determine the timing of these purchases in its sole discretion based on purchasing parameters set by Marwest Apartment REIT and subject to the policies of the TSXV, applicable securities laws and the terms of the AUPP. Story continues To Marwest Apartment REIT's knowledge, none of the trustees, officers, or other insiders of the REIT, or any associate of such person, or any associate of affiliate of the REIT, has any present intention to sell any Units to the REIT pursuant to the NCIB. Marwest Apartment REIT has not previously purchased for cancellation any of its outstanding Units. A copy of REIT's notice with respect to the NCIB filed with the TSXV may be obtained, by any Unitholder without charge, by contacting the REIT's Chief Executive Officer, William Martens by telephone at 204-947-1200 or by email at wcm@marwest.ca. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor may there be any sale of the Units in any state or jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. About Marwest Apartment REIT The REIT is an unincorporated open-ended trust governed by the laws of the Province of Manitoba. The REIT was formed to provide Unitholders with the opportunity to invest in the Canadian multi-family rental sector through the ownership of high-quality income-producing properties, with an initial focus on stable markets throughout Western Canada. Forward-Looking statements The information in this news release includes certain information and statements about management's views of future events, expectations, plans and prospects that constitute forward-looking statements. These statements are based upon the assumptions that are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. Because of these risks and uncertainties and as a result of a variety of factors, the actual results, expectations, achievements or performance may differ materially from those anticipated and indicated by these forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, the REIT's intention to purchase Units pursuant to a normal course issuer bid. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. The implementation of a normal course issuer bid will be dependent upon a number of factors, including but not limited to the financial performance, financial condition and financial requirements of the REIT. Although management of the REIT believes that the expectations reflected in forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurances that the expectations of any forward-looking statements will prove to be correct. Except as required by law, the REIT disclaims any intention and assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect actual results, whether as a result of new information, future events, changes in assumptions, changes in factors affecting such forward-looking statements or otherwise. Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that terms is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. The Units are not registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to or for the account or benefit of U.S. persons, except in certain transactions exempt from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, securities of the REIT in the United States or in any other jurisdiction. SOURCE Marwest Apartment Real Estate Investment Trust Cision View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/March2022/28/c2133.html SHUNDE, China, March 29, 2022 /CNW/ -- Recently, Asian Legal Business released its annual Top 15 IP In-House Counsel in China. Sally Wang, the senior intellectual property consultant of Midea Group Co., Ltd. ("Midea", 000333.SZ) is awarded as 2022 ALB China Top 15 IP In-House Counsel. "It's thrilling that Sally Wang was named ALB China Top 15 IP In-House Counsel by Thomson Reuters Asian Legal Business," commented Marianna Zhao, CPO of Midea. "Sally has a deep understanding and strong practice of trademark application. With her expertise and experience in intellectual property, the legal team strongly supports the rapid development of Midea Group's overseas business. Also, Sally's achievement fully reflects the professionalism of our global talent team." Sally Wang is in charge of Midea Group's trademarks, copyrights and domains, including trademark licensing, authorization and risk control management in e-Commerce, overseas distribution business and OEM business, as well as global trademark registration and portfolio management. In recent years, Midea Group has participated in many IP related seminars and programs in order to promote China's international image of strengthening intellectual property protection. Midea Group is committed to building future-oriented innovation capabilities and R&D scaling advantages with a global R&D network to enhance the R&D layout plus innovation mechanisms. Innovation is one of our core values, which is why Midea Group invests 3.5% of its profits in research in 2021. Today, Midea Group Co., Ltd. work with over 16,000 R&D personnel and more than 300 leading academics and senior experts around the world, owns over 100,000 patent family applications. According to The IFI Claims 2021 Global 250 patent holders ranking, Midea Group has also filed over 58,494 patent family worldwide, making it the world's 3rd largest patent holder in 2021. Story continues About Midea Group Co., Ltd. The Midea Group, with the vision of "bringing great innovations to life", has upheld the philosophy of creating a better life with technology for 54 years since its establishment. Today, Midea has evolved into a sci-tech conglomerate, specializing in Smart Home Business, Industrial Technologies, Building Technologies, Robotics &Automation, and Digital Innovation Business. Over the past five years, nearly 45 billion yuan has been invested in R&D, with 35 R&D centers and 35 major production bases in the world. Our products and services benefit about 500 million consumers in over 200 countries and regions. Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/midea-group-executive-ip-consultant-sally-wang-named-2022-alb-china-top-15-ip-in-house-counsel-301512492.html SOURCE Midea Group Cision View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/March2022/29/c1224.html Corporation miniere Monarch MONTREAL, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MONARCH MINING CORPORATION (Monarch or the Corporation) (TSX: GBAR) (OTCQX: GBARF) is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement with Gold Royalty Corp. (NYSE: GROY) regarding a combination of royalty sales and buyback eliminations, including the sale of an additional C$1.25 per tonne royalty on the Beacon Mill, the sale of an additional 0.25% net smelter return royalty and the elimination of the 1.25% royalty buybacks on each of the Croinor Gold, McKenzie Break and Swanson properties, in exchange for a cash payment of C$4.5 million to Monarch. Laurentian Bank Securities Inc. acted as financial advisor to Monarch in connection with the transaction. The Corporation expects to close the transaction by April 15, 2022. About Monarch Monarch Mining Corporation (TSX: GBAR) (OTCQX: GBARF) is a fully integrated mining company that owns four projects, including the Beaufor Mine, which has produced more than 1 million ounces of gold over the last 30 years. Other assets include the Croinor Gold, McKenzie Break and Swanson properties, all located near Monarchs wholly owned 750 tpd Beacon Mill. Monarch owns 29,504 hectares (295 km2) of mining assets in the prolific Abitibi mining camp that host a combined measured and indicated gold resource of 478,982 ounces and a combined inferred resource of 383,393 ounces. Forward-Looking Statements The forward-looking statements in this press release involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause Monarchs actual results, performance and achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements expressed or implied therein. Neither TSX nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release. FOR MORE INFORMATION: Jean-Marc Lacoste President and Chief Executive Officer 1-888-994-4465 jm.lacoste@monarchmining.com Mathieu Seguin Vice President, Corporate Development 1-888-994-4465 m.seguin@monarchmining.com Elisabeth Tremblay Geologist and Communication Manager 1-888-994-4465 e.tremblay@monarchmining.com www.monarchmining.com VILLEURBANNE, France, March 29, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Regulatory News: NAVYA (FR0013018041- Navya) (Paris:NAVYA), a leader in autonomous mobility systems, and Electromin, an eMobility turn-key solutions company wholly owned by Petromin, a leading Saudi company in the advanced lubricants, automotive technology, multi-modal mobility and sustainable transportation, signed a MoU for the distribution of Navyas products and technology in KSA as well as joint development of advanced custom autonomous mobility solutions for the Kingdoms numerous Mega and Giga projects, parks, universities and other developments. "At Petromin we strongly believe in sustainability and are guided by our principals of responsible corporate citizenship for the embellishment of our planet. Two years ago, we embarked on an exciting journey with an ambitious goal to transform our storied successful company from primarily a premier lubricant manufacturer and operator of the largest network of quick service facilities, to a world class automotive technology, advanced mobility, and avant-garde transportation solutions company. As part of that journey, we started Electromin, a technology driven, turn-key eMobility provider that is now leading the electrification of the Kingdom and GCC. This MoU to establish a collaboration with Navya, a prominent global technology company for autonomous driving systems and a market leader in GCC with 75% share, is a very important milestone in our quest to be able to provide our mobility clients with ecologically sound platforms for movement of people, goods, and services." Said Kalyana Sivagnanam, Group CEO of Petromin. "I am delighted to sign this MoU with Electromin, a first step towards a fruitful collaboration, that will enable us to strengthen our position throughout the GCC zone. The Middle East, a pioneer in creating smart cities and new sustainable models, is a remarkable region for innovation and a front-runner in the deployment of sustainable mobility solutions. Electromin, a true inspiring leader in eMobility, perfectly complements our capabilities to accelerate global distribution in this major market. We share a common vision of mobility as a service, and we look forward to starting a productive collaboration to be a key enabler to the 2030 net positive ambition, bringing a new fluid, inclusive and sustainable autonomous transport solutions throughout the GCC zone" said Sophie Desormiere, CEO of Navya. Story continues The collaboration between the two companies shall include the development of the sale and distribution of Navya autonomous vehicles and technological solutions, as well as assessing the possibility of joint industrialization of the future generations of Navya autonomous vehicles in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In the auspices presence of H.E Amr Al Dabbagh (Chairman Al Dabbagh Group), Kalyana Sivagnanam (Group CEO Petromin) & Sophie Desormiere (CEO Navya), signed an agreement for the distribution of Navyas products and technology in KSA as well as joint development of advanced custom autonomous mobility solutions for the Kingdoms numerous Mega and Giga projects, parks, universities and other developments. About NAVYA Created in 2014, NAVYA is a leading French name specialized in the supply of autonomous mobility systems and associated services. With 280 employees in France (Paris and Lyon), in the United States (Michigan) and in Singapore, NAVYA aims at becoming the leading player in Level 4 autonomous mobility systems for passenger and goods transport. Since 2015, NAVYA has been the first to market and put into service autonomous mobility solutions. The Autonom Shuttle, main development axis, is dedicated to passenger transport. Since its launch, more than 200 units have been sold in 25 countries as of 31 December 2021. The Autonom Tract is designed to goods transport. Engaged in an ambitious CSR approach, the Company has an active policy in this area, as illustrated by the obtaining of the ISO 9001 certification in September 2021. The Valeo and Keolis groups are among NAVYA's historical shareholders. NAVYA is listed on the Euronext regulated market in Paris (ISIN code: FR0013018041- Navya). For more information visit : www.navya.tech About Petromin Established in 1968 by the Royal Decree, Petromin is a leading Saudi multi-national company for advanced lubricants, cutting edge multi-modal mobility, a solutions provider for sustainable transportation and a transformative force for the movement of people, goods and services through ecologically sound platforms. About Electromin Electromin is the leading Saudi turn-key, technology driven eMobility solutions company for passenger vehicles, commercial and government fleets, public transit and large infrastructure projects. The world is changing, were building the future of eMobility to keep you ahead. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220328005826/en/ Contacts NAVYA CSR, Marketing & Communication Manager Nathalie Marcy nathalie.marcy@navya.tech +33 (0)7 63 20 00 52 Chief Financial Officer Benoit Jacheet finance@navya.tech NewCap Investor Relations Thomas Grojean Nicolas Fossiez navya@newcap.eu +33 (0)1 44 71 94 94 NewCap Media Relations Nicolas Merigeau navya@newcap.eu +33 (0)1 44 71 94 98 Six months after raising $250 million, Papaya Global is making a key acquisition to expand its cloud-based HR and payroll platform globally on the heels of major surge in remote working. The Israeli startup is acquiring Azimo -- the London-based money transfer business that Facebook once tried to buy to spearhead its own remittance efforts -- a deal that will see Papaya Global moving into more markets, and launching more services such as instant payroll payments. Terms of the acquisition are not officially being disclosed, but a source close to the companies tells me that the deal was between $150 million and $200 million, a figure others appear to have also reported. Papaya is acquiring the full business upon the deal closing, including all of Azimo's employees, the company said. For some context, Papaya Global -- backed by companies like Insight Partners and Tiger Global -- was valued at $3.7 billion in its last funding round in September 2021, after growing revenues 300% each year for the last three years. Azimo, meanwhile, was backed by investors including Rakuten and Greycroft and competes with the likes of Wise (FKA TransferWise). Both companies were among a shortlist that Facebook tapped several years ago when it first started to weigh up a move into money transfer services (a service it now provides). The deal will help Papaya Global on two levels. First, it will help it expand the company expand its geographic footprint: Azimo currently has payment licenses in the U.K., the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and Hong Kong, and it operates a payment network in more than 160 countries, while Papaya Global (not to be confused with the other fintech called Papaya) operated services in 150 countries just prior to this deal, Eynat Guez, Papaya Global CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch. Second, it will help Papaya Global expand the services it provides. These include not just faster (instant) payment of payroll, but potentially a much wider selection of remittance services for people who are working in one country but have family or others they want to pay in another. In the past those individuals might have used other services like Wise (or indeed Azimo) to handle those payments; now Papaya Global can keep them on their own network (and thus capture the commissions and foreign exchange fees) around those transactions. Story continues Papayas customers will benefit hugely from our long experience in building payment technology and operating as a regulated payments business, Azimo CEO Richard Ambrose said in a statement. It also plays into a strategy Papaya Global has been pursuing for some time now to provide an all-in-one, end-to-end service for its customers -- which include not just employers sourcing and eventually hiring people in other markets (be they freelancers or full-time or something in between), but increasingly services for those employees themselves. Payroll payments made easy regardless of geography are what set us apart from other technology vendors, and this acquisition will make it possible for companies to make instant payments to their global teams, said Guez in a statement. Azimos global digital payment network, multiple payment licences, and deep fintech expertise will also enable us to build new payroll-related services for our business customers and their employees. For Azimo, the company told us in 2019 that it was profitable, and that was the last year that it raised equity funding, too. (A 2020 injection of 20 million/$22 million from the European Investment Bank came in the form of debt.) But that also meant that the company, competing against the likes of Wise, was also potentially not scaling as much as it could have been had it followed a different funding trajectory, in particular in these recent pandemic years, which saw strong demand in the remittance market. PitchBook estimates that its valuation was a modest $136 million back in 2019. Further to that, there's been a long-term trend of consolidation in the market -- one that will continue for years to come, given how fragmented the remittance market is today and how thin the margins are for those players who are not scaling. Tying its star to Papaya Global and a wider service offering spanning HR and payroll is one way of supercharging the business in a way that might have been more challenging on its own for Azimo. Combining Azimos assets and expertise with an emerging global leader in remote working enablement like Papaya will allow them to deliver even more value for their business customers, especially those increasingly paying and managing remote employees, said Azimo chairman and founder Michael Kent in a statement. One of the reasons the companies are not talking publicly about the sale price is that the deal has not completely closed yet: It will require regulatory approvals in their respective markets, and so they will continue to operate independently until those are reached. Updated the total number of countries currently served by Papaya Global, 150 (not 140). Rating Action: Moody's changes outlook on Phoenix Natural Gas to negative; affirms Baa2 ratingGlobal Credit Research - 29 Mar 2022London, March 29, 2022 -- Moody's Investors Service (Moody's) today affirmed the Baa2 long-term corporate family rating of Phoenix Natural Gas Limited (PNG) and changed the outlook to negative from stable. This rating action follows the publication on 9 March 2022 of the Utility Regulator's (UREGNI) draft determination for the 2023-28 regulatory period, known as GD23[1].RATINGS RATIONALERATIONALE FOR THE NEGATIVE OUTLOOKThe negative outlook reflects the likelihood that PNG's credit metrics over the GD23 period will fall below guidance for the current rating, absent significant measures to strengthen the balance sheet, if the final determination is in line with the draft determination.Specifically, the negative outlook takes into account the proposed cut in real allowed returns to 2.59% at the start of the new regulatory period, compared with 4.26% in the period from 2017 to 2022, with revenues and regulated assets linked to the CPIH measure of inflation rather than the structurally higher RPI measure. On a like-for-like basis, this represents a reduction of more than 60% in allowed returns. The negative outlook also takes into consideration cost allowances that are lower than proposed by the company.The negative outlook also reflects PNG's exposure to further increases in interest rates. All of PNG's debt matures in August 2024, creating significant exposure to market conditions at that time. If bond yields continue to rise in line with current market expectations, PNG's borrowing costs over GD23 are likely to be significantly above the amount allowed in the draft determination. Although a proposed true-up mechanism will allow PNG to recover most of these costs starting in 2029, it would not alleviate pressure on cash flow-based credit metrics during the GD23 period.RATIONALE FOR RATING AFFIRMATIONAffirmation of the Baa2 rating reflects Moody's view that the proposals, which are in a consultation phase, could be significantly modified in the final determinations expected in December 2022, and that PNG has the option to appeal its final determination the Competition and Markets Authority. Management also has time to adopt financial policies that bolster financial flexibility. Affirmation of the rating also reflects PNG's sound business risk profile as a monopoly provider of gas services.FACTORS THAT COULD LEAD TO AN UPGRADE OR DOWNGRADE OF THE RATINGThe outlook could be stabilised if UREGNI's final determination for GD23 appears likely to support financial metrics that meet the rating agency's guidance for the current rating, in the context of plausible scenarios for future borrowing costs. In particular, the ratio could be stabilized if Moody's expects the company to achieve an adjusted interest coverage ratio of at least 1.4x and leverage not exceeding the low-70s in percentage terms (net debt/TRV), taking into account any mitigating actions taken by the company.Conversely, the rating could be downgraded if, taking into account such measures as management and shareholders may implement, it appears that PNG will likely have insufficient financial flexibility to accommodate the expected reduction in allowed returns and more challenging efficiency targets in GD23.PRINCIPAL METHODOLOGYThe principal methodology used in this rating was Regulated Electric and Gas Networks published in March 2017 and available at https://www.moodys.com/researchdocumentcontentpage.aspx?docid=PBC_1059225. Alternatively, please see the Rating Methodologies page on www.moodys.com for a copy of this methodology.PNG is the owner and operator of the largest gas distribution network in Northern Ireland. Assets comprise 3,847 kilometers of intermediate, medium and low-pressure mains, which make gas available to over 350,000 properties in its licence area, of which 67% are connected to the gas network (all figures as at December 2020). The network is fairly modern, as its construction only started in 1996. PNG is licensed and its activities are regulated by UREGNI. PNG is a wholly owned subsidiary of Phoenix Distribution Holdings Limited (PDHL). Its ultimate parent is Lionrai Investments No. 1 Limited, which is 50% owned by The NatWest Group Pension Fund and 50% by Utilities Trust of Australia.REGULATORY DISCLOSURESFor further specification of Moody's key rating assumptions and sensitivity analysis, see the sections Methodology Assumptions and Sensitivity to Assumptions in the disclosure form. Moody's Rating Symbols and Definitions can be found at: https://www.moodys.com/researchdocumentcontentpage.aspx?docid=PBC_79004.For ratings issued on a program, series, category/class of debt or security this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to each rating of a subsequently issued bond or note of the same series, category/class of debt, security or pursuant to a program for which the ratings are derived exclusively from existing ratings in accordance with Moody's rating practices. For ratings issued on a support provider, this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to the credit rating action on the support provider and in relation to each particular credit rating action for securities that derive their credit ratings from the support provider's credit rating. For provisional ratings, this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to the provisional rating assigned, and in relation to a definitive rating that may be assigned subsequent to the final issuance of the debt, in each case where the transaction structure and terms have not changed prior to the assignment of the definitive rating in a manner that would have affected the rating. For further information please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page for the respective issuer on www.moodys.com.For any affected securities or rated entities receiving direct credit support from the primary entity(ies) of this credit rating action, and whose ratings may change as a result of this credit rating action, the associated regulatory disclosures will be those of the guarantor entity. Exceptions to this approach exist for the following disclosures, if applicable to jurisdiction: Ancillary Services, Disclosure to rated entity, Disclosure from rated entity.The rating has been disclosed to the rated entity or its designated agent (s) and issued with no amendment resulting from that disclosure.This rating is solicited. Please refer to Moody's Policy for Designating and Assigning Unsolicited Credit Ratings available on its website www.moodys.com.Regulatory disclosures contained in this press release apply to the credit rating and, if applicable, the related rating outlook or rating review.Moody's general principles for assessing environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks in our credit analysis can be found at http://www.moodys.com/researchdocumentcontentpage.aspx?docid=PBC_1288235.The Global Scale Credit Rating on this Credit Rating Announcement was issued by one of Moody's affiliates outside the EU and is endorsed by Moody's Deutschland GmbH, An der Welle 5, Frankfurt am Main 60322, Germany, in accordance with Art.4 paragraph 3 of the Regulation (EC) No 1060/2009 on Credit Rating Agencies. Further information on the EU endorsement status and on the Moody's office that issued the credit rating is available on www.moodys.com.REFERENCES/CITATIONS[1] Utility Regulator, Consultation launched on the next gas distribution price control (GD23), 09-Mar-2022Please see www.moodys.com for any updates on changes to the lead rating analyst and to the Moody's legal entity that has issued the rating.Please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page on www.moodys.com for additional regulatory disclosures for each credit rating. Graham Taylor Senior Vice President Infrastructure Finance Group Moody's Investors Service Ltd. One Canada Square Canary Wharf London, E14 5FA United Kingdom JOURNALISTS: 44 20 7772 5456 Client Service: 44 20 7772 5454 Paul Marty Senior Vice President/Manager Infrastructure Finance Group JOURNALISTS: 44 20 7772 5456 Client Service: 44 20 7772 5454 Releasing Office: Moody's Investors Service Ltd. 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(MSFJ) is a wholly-owned credit rating agency subsidiary of MJKK. MSFJ is not a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO). Therefore, credit ratings assigned by MSFJ are Non-NRSRO Credit Ratings. Non-NRSRO Credit Ratings are assigned by an entity that is not a NRSRO and, consequently, the rated obligation will not qualify for certain types of treatment under U.S. laws. MJKK and MSFJ are credit rating agencies registered with the Japan Financial Services Agency and their registration numbers are FSA Commissioner (Ratings) No. 2 and 3 respectively.MJKK or MSFJ (as applicable) hereby disclose that most issuers of debt securities (including corporate and municipal bonds, debentures, notes and commercial paper) and preferred stock rated by MJKK or MSFJ (as applicable) have, prior to assignment of any credit rating, agreed to pay to MJKK or MSFJ (as applicable) for credit ratings opinions and services rendered by it fees ranging from JPY100,000 to approximately JPY550,000,000.MJKK and MSFJ also maintain policies and procedures to address Japanese regulatory requirements. OTTAWA, ON, March 28, 2022 /CNW/ - Media representatives are advised that senior officials from the Government of Canada will hold a technical briefing on the next steps in Canada's plan for climate action. The briefing will be on background only and is not for attribution. Event: Technical Briefing via Zoom Date: Tuesday, March 29, 2022 Time: 12:30 p.m. (EDT) / 9:30 a.m. (PDT) Location: Zoom Webinar Media representatives are asked to register by contacting Media Relations at Environment and Climate Change Canada. Note: If joining the announcement virtually or by phone, reporters are encouraged to use a microphone (headphones/headset) or, when possible, a landline, and to avoid using speaker mode if queuing up for questions to help ensure optimal sound quality. Environment and Climate Change Canada's Twitter page Environment and Climate Change Canada's Facebook page SOURCE Environment and Climate Change Canada Cision View original content: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/March2022/29/c1913.html INCHEON, South Korea, March 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Samsung Biologics (KRX: 207940.KS), the world's leading contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), hosted its 11th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders (AGM) today. Five matters were presented and approved unanimously at this year's meeting, which included the approval of financial statement, appointment of directors, appointment of director as audit committee member, appointment of audit committee member, and approval of the remuneration limit for the directors. CEO John Rim at the 11th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders "As part of our vision, we are now venturing into the three core pillars of our multidimensional growth plan, encompassing expanded manufacturing capacity, continued advancements in business portfolio, and greater global footprint," said John Rim, CEO of Samsung Biologics in an address to the shareholders. "As a leading CDMO service provider, we will continue to demonstrate our excellent business operations throughout our value chains to ultimately contribute to saving the lives of patients and build a better future for all." Same as last year, Samsung Biologics implemented an electronic voting system, and the meeting was made available for virtual participation via a live broadcast. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the company took precautionary measures throughout the meeting to ensure the health and safety of all attendees. Samsung Biologics' Plant 4 is currently under stable construction to begin operations by the end of this year, and the company is steadily securing pre-sales with clients. Upon the full completion of Plant 4 in 2023, the company is expected to hold the world's largest biomanufacturing capacity. The company is further looking into securing additional sites within Songdo for its second bio campus, and also overseas in multiple locations to expand its business in closer proximity to its global clients. For more details of the 2022 AGM, please see the reference material available under the following link. Story continues About Samsung Biologics Co., Ltd. Samsung Biologics (KRX: 207940.KS) is a fully integrated CDMO offering state-of-the-art contract development, manufacturing, and laboratory testing services. With proven regulatory approvals, the largest capacity, and the fastest throughput, Samsung Biologics is an award-winning partner of choice and is uniquely able to support the development and manufacturing of biologics products at every stage of the process while meeting the evolving needs of biopharmaceutical companies worldwide. For more information, visit samsungbiologics.com. Media Contact Claire Kim Senior Director Global Marketing Communication Team Samsung Biologics cair.kim@samsung.com Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/samsung-biologics-holds-11th-annual-general-meeting-of-shareholders-301512301.html SOURCE Samsung Biologics By Azernews By Vugar Khalilov Azerbaijani Foreign Minister and his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock have discussed regional issues and energy cooperation, the ministry reported on March 29. The ministers exchanged views on the development of bilateral relations, energy cooperation, regional security, including cooperation with the European Union (EU). The sides recalled that 2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the two nations' diplomatic ties, and expressed pleasure with the high level of bilateral relations. Bayramov briefed his counterpart on the latest situation in the region, issues related to the implementation of trilateral statements, restoration and reconstruction in the region, as well as Azerbaijan's stance on the normalization of relations with Armenia. It was stressed that Azerbaijan is a reliable EU partner and plays an important role in Europe's energy security. The officials also exchanged views on other issues of mutual interest, regional and international security issues, including the situation in Ukraine. During his working visit to Germany, on March 28, Bayramov met with Foreign and Security Policy Adviser to the German Chancellor Jens Ploetner, the ministry said in a different report. At the meeting, the sides focused on issues of bilateral cooperation, Azerbaijan-EU relations as well as regional and international security problems. Bayramov provided detailed information about the post-conflict regional situation, Azerbaijan's steps to implement trilateral statements, reconstruction carried out on its liberated territories, as well as Armenia's violation of the provisions of the November 10, 2020, trilateral statement and obstacles to regional peace and stability. The minister shared Azerbaijan's views on the future peaceful development of the region. The two officials also discussed Azerbaijan's contribution to Europe's energy security, implementation of the Southern Gas Corridor project, prospects for energy cooperation and other issues of mutual interest. Bayramovs working visit to Germany started on March 28. Various bilateral meetings with German officials are planned within the framework of the visit. The trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Germany amounted to $1.2 billion in 2021. In addition, trade turnover between the two countries amounted to $145.6 million in January-February 2022. The German-Azerbaijani Chamber of Commerce (AHK Azerbaijan), as the official representative of the German economy in Azerbaijan, provides information services and supports companies in their market and business research since 2012. The AHK Azerbaijan emerged from the German-Azerbaijan Business Association (DAWF) founded in 1999. With more than 140 member companies (as of April 2020), the AHK Azerbaijan is the most powerful European economic association in Azerbaijan. The Great Resignation the phenomenon of American workers quitting their jobs in pursuit of new opportunities amid the pandemic varies across the U.S. A new study from WalletHub used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to rank U.S. states and D.C. based on their resignation rates over the latest month and last 12 months. The data took into account the number of employees who left their job voluntarily, excluding firings, retirements, and transfers. Different states have different economies, and we are seeing a greater increase in quit rates in states where there are fewer remote work options and lower unemployment rates, Joyce Jacobsen, president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, wrote in the study. The low unemployment rates mean that there are more options for workers to move to jobs that are more attractive to them. Alaska and South Carolina topped the list of states with the highest quits ranking based on the methodology. Despite having the fourth smallest population size, Alaska's resignation rate for the previous 12 months neared 4%. New York ranked the lowest with a resignation rate of 1.87% over the past 12 months. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Minnesota also saw lower worker turnover. 'The labor market in the post-pandemic era is going through a significant change' Workers are in high demand for employers as job openings have remained near historically high levels. The key takeaway American workers should get from [the study] is the fact that the labor market in the post-pandemic era is going through a significant change that favors employees, WalletHub Analyst Jill Gonzales told Yahoo Finance. There is a surge in job openings, and a low supply of candidates to fill all the open positions. This gives applicants a lot of leverage, enabling them to negotiate better terms of employment and to take advantage of all the incentives offered by employers." Roughly 47.8 million workers left their jobs in 2021. And according to the most recent JOLTS report (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, resignation rates remain elevated the national quits rate ticked up by 0.1% to 2.9% in February while job openings sit at 11.27 million as the economy recovers from the effects of the pandemic. Story continues "While resignation rates in January were still fairly high, the most noticeable pattern is that for most states these rates are lower than the average resignation rates of the past 12 months," Gonzales said. "This could indicate that the labor market is slowly starting to settle and employers and employees are finding common ground in terms of work schedule and environment." A hiring sign is seen outside of Accurate Personnel office (an employment agency) in Buffalo Grove, Ill., Friday, Dec. 3, 2021. Workers quitting at high rates has been dubbed "The Great Resignation." (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh) There are a number of factors driving workers to change jobs, including toxic work environments under poor management, the explosion in gig work and self-employment opportunities, the prevalence of remote work and flexibility, and the demand for increased benefits. During the pandemic, these factors "came together in a single interactive, society-wide event to trigger the Great Resignation," Dr. Anthony Wheeler, dean of Widener University's School of Business, told Yahoo Finance in a statement. And while workers have been quitting at higher rates across the board, Wheeler explained, the "intensity" of the turnover varies across industries. "We know that the retail sector has been hardest hit with quit rates; but the level of quit rates isnt the same in other industries or job categories," he said. "For the harder hit industries, quit rates happened in specific contexts. Some jobs required in-person contact under quite stressful dynamics. This leads to increased stress and burnout." According to Wheeler, signs of worker dissatisfaction and burnout were present prior to the pandemic. "Some of what I find so fascinating about the Great Resignation... is how much of this wave of turnover has been predictable its just that the pandemic acted as an accelerant," he said. "In the U.S., weve known for several years that burnout was an unspoken but highly experienced pandemic... [and] for decades that flexible work arrangements did not negatively impact employee performance or company financial performance." Gabby Ianniello, 28, who quit her job in real estate development last year, works on her podcast, Corporate Quitter, in New York City, U.S. December 10, 2021 in this still image taken from video on December 10, 2021. REUTERS/Aleksandra Michalska Great Resignation 'could just as quickly unwind' The duration of the Great Resignation is still unfolding, as U.S. workers who temporarily exited the labor force after quitting are expected to return to fill more job openings while pandemic precautions subside. We do not know how sticky the trends are or if theyre bound by the specific context of the pandemic," Wheeler said. "For as quickly as the Great Resignation occurred, it could just as quickly unwind. The national unemployment rate is currently at 3.8% while the labor force participation rate, which stands at 62.3%, continues to edge back towards pre-pandemic levels (63.4%). As the pandemic abates, some of the challenges holding workers back from the workforce may dissipate. As school and child care, COVID restrictions expire and child care availability improves, I expect some increase in womens participation in the labor force, Jacobsen wrote in the study. There will also be more people who simply run up against financial constraints and reenter the labor force because they need the additional income. In the meantime, employers have been looking at alternative ways to fill gaps in their labor force, including by deploying the latest technological innovations. "The Great Resignation has occurred in the relatively early portion of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that will come to displace entire job categories and industries as automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning continue to mature and decrease in cost," Wheeler said. "Some companies might have held off on deploying technology, especially in customer-facing jobs, but now find that technological solutions are both cheaper and more efficient than human employees." Although tech innovators have assured workers that these advancements would not displace workers, Wheeler warned that "the Great Resignation could turn into the first labor shock associated with technologically-displaced workforces." "We just might not know or see that yet but could in retrospect," he added. Luke is a producer for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter @theLukeCM. Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, and YouTube Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto ORourke discussed his vision for education reform Sunday at a town hall meeting at the El Paso Community Foundation as part of his ongoing People of Texas state tour. ORourke, who will face Gov. Greg Abbott in November, took exception to teacher pay and the pressure put on teachers and students by standardized tests, which he pointed to causing mass exodus of teachers across the country. To that end, the El Paso native called for increasing teacher salaries by at least $7,500 a year, which he said gets them up to the national average, and replacing the STAR test with something thats more diagnostic in nature. El Paso 'will put us over the top': Governor hopeful Beto O'Rourke rallies primary voters If were willing to do this, I know that we can turn around our system of public ed in Texas, ORourke said. My bet is that if we make public ed the number one prioritywere going to have a much better outcome and Texas will lead the nation in public ed. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke speaks at his "People of Texas" Town Hall held at El Paso Community Foundation on March 27, 2022. In addition to education, ORourke laid out his biggest priorities for his campaign, including the creation of high-paying jobs, which he said unify all Texans. We want to make sure that the best jobs that are being created in America are found right here in the state of Texas, ORourke said, noting that four in 10 Texans are not earning a living wage and are forced to work multiple jobs, utilize public assistance or sleep in shelters. You want to know that youre essential Thats what we all crave, that is just human nature. 'Texas stands with the people of Ukraine': Greg Abbott, Beto O'Rourke George W. Bush condemn Putin's invasion ORourke said the lack of union representation in the state, as well as the absence of universal access to daycare and pre-kindergarten programs and a continually lagging minimum wage, has stifled job growth in the state. Weve got to do better, ORourke said. Citizens listen and participate in a Town Hall held by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke held at El Paso Community Foundation on March 27, 2022. Second on the candidates list of priorities is improving public education in the state, which he said is emblematic of a strong democracy during when a time when that democracy has been under attack. Story continues Finally, ORourke turned his attention to health care, saying Texas is the least insured state in the nation. We have folks dying of diabetes, of the flu, of curable cancers, in the Year of our Lord 2022 in the wealthiest, most powerful country that the world has ever known, ORourke said, adding that Texas is the ninth largest economy on the planet. How can this be? One audience member asked about his support for legalizing marijuana in the state, particularly considering that New Mexico is preparing to launch recreational cannabis sales later this week. El Paso County Judge Ricardo A. Samaniego listens to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke during his "People of Texas" Town Hall held at El Paso Community Foundation on March 27, 2022. While ORourke made clear that is not advocating anybody use marijuana, he noted that the state is losing out on billions of dollars in revenue, spending billions to incarcerate cannabis users and putting young people at risk by allowing the black market to run rampant. ORourke was also asked his opinion on current efforts across the state to ban books and curtail the teaching of difficult topics, such as Critical Race Theory (CRT). ORourke voiced his belief that young people can both handle the truth of the countrys foundation and have a right to learn it. More: Beto O'Rourke releases book, explores history of voting rights in Texas [I] think our kids in middle school are strong enough to learn the true story of this country, ORourke said. I dont think we have to lose those foundational stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves in the mix. I think we have always strived for freedom and justice and liberty, imperfectly always, and I feel like by and large we have made progress, up until recent years when you began to roll back so many of these freedoms. O'Rourke was introduced by El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego and Jessica Garcia, whose husband Guillermo Garcia died from wounds suffered in the Aug. 3, 2019, Walmart massacre. Its amazing to connect with people who, for so long, have been written off or taken for granted, ORourke said of his statewide tour. And I think we feel that sometimes in El Paso. Although we are a big, proud community nearly a million people live in the county over which Judge Samaniego presides we are so often left out of the conversation. [Were] so far from the centers of power and politics that decisions are made about us, without us far too often. This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Beto O'Rourke pushes education reform at El Paso town hall TOLEDO, Ohio, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As part of its ongoing efforts to protect nesting birds, Toledo Edison, a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp. (NYSE: FE), has teamed with Metroparks Toledo to donate and install a 55-foot wooden pole with a nesting platform at the Manhattan Marsh Preserve Metropark in North Toledo. This proactive work will provide a safe nesting location for the growing osprey population and promote osprey conservation efforts in the area. Toledo Edison Logo (PRNewsfoto/FirstEnergy Corp.) "With the significant spike in the osprey population over recent years, we have been fortunate to experience minimal nesting activity on our utility poles and equipment in the Toledo area," said Amy Ruszala, an environmental scientist and avian expert at FirstEnergy. "Partnering with Metroparks Toledo allows us to continue to proactively complete work to further discourage birds from nesting on or near our electrical equipment so that it doesn't become an issue in our area." The 79-acre Manhattan Marsh Preserve Metropark is home to frogs, toads and turtles, but is best known for birds. Positioned within one of North America's most significant migratory bird flyways, the marsh is an urban oasis that provides critical stopover habitat. More than 100 species of birds, including ospreys, use the marsh to nest, rest or re-fuel. Because ospreys prefer to nest near large bodies of water, the 5-square-foot wooden nesting platform was installed on top of a new wooden pole along the water. Toledo Edison donated the wooden pole and labor needed to complete the installation. "We are proud to partner with Toledo Edison to have a nest structure in place before the ospreys return to the area in full force later this month and take up nesting this spring," said Dave Zenk, executive director of Metroparks Toledo. "Our partnership is a win for everybody because it helps keep the nesting birds safe, benefits the electric company and allows park visitors to observe ospreys in their natural habitat." Story continues Birds of prey, like ospreys, often seek out tall structures including electric transmission towers and poles to build their nests, which can measure up to three feet in width. These nesting habits often place the birds near energized electrical equipment jeopardizing their well-being and potentially causing power outages. The newly installed platform will help discourage the birds from nesting on poles with energized equipment. The work builds upon Toledo Edison's efforts in recent years to protect nesting birds. Last spring, the company donated a nesting platform to the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge Complex and installed it along the lakeshore to provide a safe nesting site for ospreys. Toledo Edison has also worked closely with FirstEnergy's environmentalists and state wildlife officials to install nesting deterrents on utility poles and electrical equipment in the region. Large, bright line markers also have been installed on power lines to provide visual warnings of energized equipment to birds and low-flying aircraft. In addition, FirstEnergy deployed an app last spring that allows utility personnel to report avian issues in real time, streamlining the process to protect nesting birds and enhance electric service reliability. The app arms field workers with the ability to submit photos and answer key questions using a drop-down menu to report the locations of bird nests or other bird-related issues along the company's power lines, all from their mobile devices. Toledo Edison serves nearly 315,000 customers in northwest Ohio. Follow Toledo Edison on Twitter @ToledoEdison or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ToledoEdison . FirstEnergy is dedicated to integrity, safety, reliability and operational excellence. Its 10 electric distribution companies form one of the nation's largest investor-owned electric systems, serving customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York. The company's transmission subsidiaries operate approximately 24,000 miles of transmission lines that connect the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions. Follow FirstEnergy online at www.firstenergycorp.com and on Twitter @FirstEnergyCorp . Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/toledo-edison-teams-with-metroparks-toledo-to-protect-nesting-birds-301513013.html SOURCE FirstEnergy Corp. Katherine B. Martin announces publication of 'The Colorful Image of God' CHARLOTTE, N.C., March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Aimed at white Christians, Katherine B. Martin's book "The Colorful Image of God: A White Christian's Guide to Doing Better" (published by Archway Publishing) teaches about race and how to do better in the fight for racial justice. The book explores race, racism and related topics like white privilege and implicit bias from the author's perspective as a white, Christian woman. Martin tells personal stories from her own racial identity journey to help ease others into what can sometimes be uncomfortable topics and provide concrete suggestions of what others can do to help uproot racial injustices in the United States. "I want readers to feel more comfortable talking about race. I want them to have a deeper sense of their Whiteness and what that means in terms of how they show up and engage in the world. I want readers to understand that racism is real and that they play a role in it daily," Martin says. "I want readers to feel inspired to learn more, to begin reading and listening to people of color more, and to recognize that it will take all of us to end racism in our country, given how deeply it exists in ourselves and in our systems." "The Colorful Image of God" is available for purchase online at the Archway link above, from Barnes & Noble and on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/Colorful-Image-God-Christians-Better/dp/1665714034. "The Colorful Image of God" By Katherine B. Martin Hardcover | 5.5 x 8.5 in | 214 pages | ISBN 9781665714051 Softcover | 5.5 x 8.5 in | 214 pages | ISBN 9781665714037 E-Book | 214 pages | ISBN 9781665714044 Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble About the Author Katherine B. Martin was born in Tennessee, spent her middle school years in New York and attended high school in Georgia. Since then, she has lived in more than a dozen cities and towns and currently calls Charlotte, North Carolina home. She has more than 20 years of work experience in the corporate and nonprofit sectors and has spent most of her career fighting for educational equity for children. Martin is married to her husband, Lee, and they have three young children. "The Colorful Image of God" is the author's first book. She recently started blogging at katherinelearns.com. Story continues Simon & Schuster, a company with nearly ninety years of publishing experience, has teamed up with Author Solutions, LLC, the worldwide leader in self-publishing, to create Archway Publishing. With unique resources to support books of all kind, Archway Publishing offers a specialized approach to help every author reach his or her desired audience. For more information, visit archwaypublishing.com or call 844-669-3957. Media Contact Marketing Services, ArchwayPublishing, 844-669-3957, pressreleases@archwaypublishing.com SOURCE Archway Publishing DUBLIN, March 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Size, Market Share, Application Analysis, Regional Outlook, Growth Trends, Key Players, Competitive Strategies and Forecasts, 2021 to 2029" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. Research and Markets Logo Wide-scale implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) concept has the ability to transform the way we live. The emergence of new IoT products such as home automation components, internet-enabled appliances and energy management devices are changing the entire scenario of IoT industry. However, lack of security is still one of the most important concerns for people and enterprises that look to adopt IoT. Recent ransomware and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have made this concern even more viable. Cost barrier and infrastructure investment for hackers are quite low and they use inexpensive, mass-scale techniques such as automated bots, email and off-the-shelf exploit kits among others. However, the magnitude of damage of these techniques is quite high. The infection of just one device or network element can result in a successful network attack. Therefore, IoT security will be an important area of concern for any organization in the coming years in order to comfortably roll-out their IoT-based solutions. IoT has witnessed mass scale adoption across various application areas in recent years. In the manufacturing sector, its adoption is believed to significantly reduce bottlenecks, improve efficiency and increase profitability. Restaurant and retail chains could implement IoT to monitor customer movements, improve supply chain management and enhance the overall customer experience. In the healthcare sector, IoT could be implemented to more effectively manage staff, monitor patients and expensive medical equipment. The large scale adoption of IoT technologies across various verticals has made it vulnerable to cyber-attacks, thus arising the need for appropriate IoT security measures. The major factor driving the IoT security market growth is the rapid adoption of cloud-based services as well as connected devices on a very large scale. Confidential data such as biometrics information is often stored on clouds, making them vulnerable to theft and misuse. Thus, in order to protect these data from unauthorized access, IoT security is finding increased adoption in the IoT space. Moreover, improved IoT security handling skills and organizational changes are further expected to bolster the adoption of IoT security during the forecast period. With improving technical expertise for infrastructure handling, IoT security will find an increased adoption in organizations. In addition, various countries such as Japan, China, Germany and the U.S. among others have embraced the Industrie 4.0 (fourth industrial revolution). The Industrie 4.0 is sponsored by the German government with a vision for advanced manufacturing sector. It encompasses many business designs and technologies, including the IoT and digital business. This factor is expected to positively impact the IoT security market growth. Some of the major players profiled in the report are Verizon Enterprises Solutions, PTC, Inc., Check Point Security Software Technologies Ltd., Symantec Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Gemalto NV, IBM Corporation, Trend Micro, Inc., Hewlett Packard Development Company L.P., Intel Corporation, NSIDE Secure SA and AT&T, Inc. among others. On the basis of vertical, the global Internet of Things (IoT) security market is segmented into the following categories: Story continues Manufacturing Healthcare Utilities Retail Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) Government Others (Defense, Law Enforcement, etc.) In 2020, the Internet of Things (IoT) security market worldwide market was led by the manufacturing segment. Manufacturing companies are in the constant urge to enhance their production output and business process efficiency. Smart manufacturing in particular has been at the vanguard of introducing scalability, transparency and process defined architecture in manufacturing operations. Moreover, the implementation of Industrie 4.0, also referred to as the fourth industrial revolution in various countries such as the U.S., China, Japan and Germany among others is leading to the increased adoption of IoT technologies in the manufacturing sector and thus further arising the need for IoT security. These initiatives are contributing to the manufacturing segment growth. The Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) follow the manufacturing segment, in terms of value. Consumers are always in the lookout for convenient and personalized service whenever possible. This is evident from the growing popularity of mobile banking apps, online banking transactions, and contactless payment technologies. With added convenience they also want the highest levels of digital security from their banks. Security threats and data breaches often pose major problems to banks in the IoT era. Therefore, in order to ensure maximum security to its customers, the banking sector has been increasingly adopting IoT security measures. Based on the geography, the global Internet of Things (IoT) security market is segmented as per following regions and countries: North America U.S. Canada Europe U.K. Germany France Russia Rest of Europe Asia Pacific Japan China South Asia Rest of Asia Pacific Rest of the World (RoW) Middle East & Africa (MEA) Latin America The global Internet of Things (IoT) security market is dominated by the North American region. In 2020, the region accounted for more than 40% of the overall market revenue generated worldwide. The IoT security market here is majorly attributed to the U.S. and Canada being the early adopters of IoT technologies in various applications such as smart manufacturing and healthcare. The region has witnessed some major IoT security breaches in recent years. According to a survey conducted by Altman Vilandrie & Company, in the U.S., nearly 50% of firms using IoT have been a victim of security breaches. Moreover, presence of a large number of big players in the region such as Intel Corporation, IBM Corporation and Cisco Systems, Inc. has further contributed to the IoT security market growth. In the following years, Asia Pacific is set to register the highest growth. The market growth here is primarily driven by the growing mobile devices penetration, large number of business organizations and the unregulated usage of the Internet. Moreover, growing economic growth and social transformation in the region is further expected to create a favorable environment for the adoption of IoT technologies, thereby impacting the IoT security market growth positively. Key Topics Covered: Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Executive Summary Chapter 3 Market Dynamics 3.1 Market Overview 3.1.1 Global Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Revenue and Growth, 2019 - 2029, (US$ Bn) (Y-o-Y %) 3.2 Market Drivers 3.3 Market Growth Inhibitors 3.3.1 Impact Analysis of Drivers and Restraints 3.4 Key Market Trends and Future Outlook 3.5 Attractive Investment Proposition 3.6 Competitive Analysis 3.6.1 Market Positioning of Key Vendors 3.6.2 Key Strategies Adopted by the Leading Players Chapter 4 Global Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis, by Security Type 4.1 Market Analysis 4.2 Device 4.3 Cloud Infrastructure 4.4 Network Chapter 5 Global Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis, by Solution Type 5.1 Market Analysis 5.2 Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)/ Intrusion Defense Systems (IDS) 5.3 Identity Access Management (IAM) 5.4 Data Loss Protection (DLP) 5.5 Security & Vulnerability Management (SVM) 5.6 Unified Threat Management (UTM) 5.7 Network Security Forensics (NSF) 5.8 Security Analytics 5.9 Others Chapter 6 Global Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis, by Vertical 6.1 Market Analysis 6.2 Manufacturing 6.3 Healthcare 6.4 Utilities 6.5 Retail 6.6 Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) 6.7 Government 6.8 Others Chapter 7 North America Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis Chapter 8 Europe Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis Chapter 9 Asia Pacific Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis Chapter 10 Rest of the World (RoW) Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Analysis Chapter 11 Company Profiles 11.1 Verizon Enterprises Solutions 11.2 PTC, Inc. 11.3 Check Point Security Software Technologies Ltd. 11.4 Symantec Corporation 11.5 Cisco Systems, Inc. 11.6 Gemalto NV 11.7 IBM Corporation 11.8 Trend Micro, Inc. 11.9 Hewlett Packard Development Company L.P. 11.10 Intel Corporation 11.11 NSIDE Secure SA 11.12 AT&T, Inc. For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/yhgozf Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager press@researchandmarkets.com For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1904 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 Cision View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/worldwide-internet-of-things-iot-security-industry-to-2029---rapid-adoption-of-cloud-based-services-is-driving-growth-301512803.html SOURCE Research and Markets As the Food and Drug Administration approved a second COVID-19 booster shot Tuesday for older adults while another variant looms on the horizon, health officials in the Fredericksburg region are trying more personal approaches to reach unvaccinated people, particularly those who cant leave their homes. The new FDA authorization means adults 50 and older who got their third dose of Pfizer of Moderna vaccines at least four months ago are eligible for another shot. It allows millions more Americans to get another booster, but as the Associated Press noted in a story, the question is whether everyone whos eligible should rush out and get it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to weigh in. Meanwhile, health districts from Culpeper County to Colonial Beach and beyond are continuing a homebound program to take vaccines to those whose age or disability prohibits them from getting out to a medical provider, pharmacy or health department. We are hopeful that more personal approaches to increase access will help us to reach those who remain unvaccinated, especially while the vaccine and program are available at no cost, said Dr. Richard Williams, health director for the Three Rivers Health District, which includes Westmoreland County and other localities in the Northern Neck and Middlesex Peninsula. The Rappahannock Area Health District, which covers Fredericksburg and the counties of Caroline, King George, Spotsylvania and Stafford, also continues its homebound efforts. Often, these are people who are at risk due to medical conditions or age, Allison BalmesJohn, health district spokesperson, said in April 2021 when the homebound initiative began. Even if they arent going out into the community, they often have people come into their homes providing care. Only those who cant get out of their homes are eligible. Priority will be given to those who havent received any vaccines, said Mary Chamberlin, the health districts public information officer. Those interested in a homebound visit can contact: Fredericksburg area: 540/899-4797 Culpeper, Fauquier and Orange counties: 540/308-6072 Westmoreland, Middlesex Peninsula : 804/815-4191 Meanwhile, the FDAs announcement of eligibility for a second booster shot comes as the BA.2 variant, a sibling of the omicron strain that swept the nation during the fall and winter, has become the dominant variant worldwide, according to health reports. The CDC estimates that half the cases in New York and New Jerseyareas that have experienced past surges before the rest of the countryare the BA.2 variant. The strain also makes up almost one-third of Virginia cases, according to the weekly report from the Three Rivers Health District. Some health reports have suggested the sub-strain is even more contagious than the original omicron. Others indicate the protection from vaccines and boosters, as well as the widespread natural immunity gained from all those who contracted it, may only cause what Three Rivers characterized as modest increases in the United States in coming weeks. While none of the vaccines have been as strong against the omicron mutant as the original versions of the virus because protection wanes over time, two vaccine doses are almost 80% effective against needing a ventilator or dying from an infection, according to the CDC. A booster shot pushes that protection to 94%, the CDC reported. The RAHD makes that point in bold, flashing letters on its Facebook page in a post that declares: Unvaccinated people are almost 100 times more likely to die from COVID than people who are fully vaccinated and boosted. However, state and local rates for booster shots, especially, are considerably lower than national averages, according to data. Across America, about 66% of the population is fully vaccinated and about 42% have gotten booster shots. In Virginia, 77% of the population age 5 and older has been vaccinated but only 36% has gotten boosters, according to VDH data. In Fredericksburg and the counties of Caroline, King George, Spotsylvania and Stafford, 60% of the population has been vaccinated but only 31% has gotten booster shots, according to the state. Regionally, Fauquier County has the highest rates, with 69% of the population vaccinated and 33% boosted. King George has the lowest, with 55% of the population vaccinated and 25% with booster shots. In regards to another booster, U.S. health officials looked to Israeli research. During the omicron surge, the nation offered a fourth dose to people 60 and older at least four months after their last shot. Preliminary data posted online last week suggested some benefit: Israeli researchers counted 92 deaths among more than 328,000 people who got the extra shot, compared to 232 deaths among 234,000 people who skipped the fourth dose. Whats far from clear is how long any extra benefit from another booster would last, and thus when to get it. The when is a really difficult part. Ideally we would time booster doses right before surges but we dont always know when thats going to be, Dr. William Moss of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Associated Press. Plus, a longer interval between shots helps the immune system mount a stronger, more cross-reactive defense. If you get a booster too close together, its not doing any harmyoure just not going to get much benefit from it, said University of Pennsylvania immunologist E. John Wherry. The Associated Press contributed to this story. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Sen. Tim Kaine visits a lot of health care facilities, but said during a visit to Mary Washington Hospital on Monday that he saw and heard things there that were new to himincluding a detailed look at one situation thats made the nationwide labor shortage even worse. The Democratic senator has been holding roundtable meetings across Virginia to discuss a bill, signed into law by the president, that will help those who take care of the medical needs of others get the mental health services they need. Its named after Dr. Lorna Breen, a Charlottesville native who contracted COVID-19 early in the pandemic, then died by suicide while working on the front lines. Kaine also wanted to hear feedback from Mary Washington Healthcare officials about other aspects of COVID and its long-term impactand doctors, nurses and department heads gathered around the conference table provided an earful. January and February were really hard in terms of dealing with the omicron surge in the middle of a labor shortage, said Kathy Wall, chief human resources officer. But whats on the horizon may be even worse, she said. I dont think weve even experienced the impact of the workforce (shortage) yet, and its coming, she said. Right now, today, we have hundreds of open positions and we dont have candidates. A lot of them have gone to travel where theyre paying triple of what we would normally pay a nurse, and so thats very hard to compete. That got the senators attention. When someone first mentioned travel agencies, Kaine admitted he was thinking more about booking trips than nursing contracts. I want to understand this, he said. Wall and Eileen Dohmann, chief nursing officer, were happy to fill him in. Before the pandemic, the idea of travel nurses appealed to a small segment of the nursing population, Dohmann said. Those with at least two years of experience would take 13-week assignments and be paid more because they were working out of their area or state. Pre-COVID, nurses at MWHC were making $35 to $45 an hour, while a travel nurse made about $50 to $65 an hour, she said. Nurses would work three 12-hour shifts, then travel home, where theyd spend the rest of their week. Before March 2020, Mary Washington Hospital probably had 30 to 40 travel nurses in our facility, Dohmann said, meaning we had exhausted any kind of hiring we could do and we would bring in travel nurses, the most expensive nurses for us at any point in time. When the pandemic began, the travel agency with whom MWHC had a contract pledged to be there with staff when the hospitals needed them. Then, they sent along their rates, which had gone up 30% before the Fredericksburg area had its first COVID patient, she said. MWHC officials learned that was just the tip of the iceberg. Rates continued to go up and by fall 2021, the health care system was paying $160 to $175 an hour for a travel nurse, Dohmann said. As a result, many nurses quit their hospital jobs to become travel nurses. While there already was a nursing shortage, it became even worse when the travel pay created more resignations and vacancies. And the term travel nurse became a misnomer, because nurses werent going to assignments across the country. They were working in Culpeper, Richmond or Northern Virginia. Dohmann said she couldnt fault a person for making the choice to become a travel nurse and use the extra money to pay off student loans or credit cards. But she also knows that the nurses havent been the full beneficiaries of the rate increases. They might be getting $100 of the $175 hourly rate being charged. Its the travel agencies that have benefited greatly, she said. Dr. Mike McDermott, CEO of the health care system, said the agencies are taking advantage of the situation. I dont think its in the best interest of the health of our nation. He equated the situation to price gouging by gas companies during an oil shortage. Kaine said after the roundtable that he knew traveling nurses could make a lot of money, but was surprised to hear how it kind of turns everything topsy-turvy amidst all the other challenges. He planned to take the information back to his staff to see what could be done. The senator said he appreciated hearing about programs such as MWHCs partnership with Germanna Community College. Through an initiative called Earn While You Learn, nursing students at the college are paid as nursing assistants at Mary Washington as they work with trained nurses to get more clinical experience. The cost of their salaries is divided between MWHC and Germanna, Dohmann said. In addition, a hospital nurse also takes on a supervisory role with the students and is paid for the dual duties. Dohmann asked Kaine for his help, both to examine the rates of travel nurses and to create more slots for nursing students. This partnership really works, she said about the Germanna program. If you can help us make it easier for students to get into schools of nursing, were prepared to make changes on how we train them, but it really does come from those kind of academicclinical partnerships. Dr. Christopher Newman, chief medical officer, also explained ongoing issues with the supply chain. Problems began early on in the pandemic, particularly with personal protective equipment, but theyve continued with other items. The pandemic sort of shined a light on a broader problem that I would put in a national security risk category, Newman said, when we look at the lack of redundancy in our health care supply chain and amount of medication and lifesaving things that are manufactured solely in China or places that may not be great political partners down the road. He said foreign countries could turn off the pipeline of cardiac medication or IV fluids, noting that supply chain problems arent limited to auto parts. Every week we have another crisis with the supply chain and unlike other things, where you wait eight months to get your car, some of these are critical, lifesaving things, Newman said. Kaine said hes trying to address some of those issues, including making sure health care workers get the mental health support they need during what Newman called moral distress and burnout. Kaine said the nation might broaden its definition of items that are considered national securityand made in Americato include health care supplies, or manufacture them in the Americas where there are free trade agreements. In addition to the heavy discussions on pandemic-related fallout, Kaine also toured the hospitals care coordination hub, which looked like an air-traffic control center. On 10 monitors, workers could see the flow of patients in both Mary Washington Hospital and Stafford Hospital as people moved along from one department to another. I go to a lot of hospitals but Ive never seen this in any hospital, Kaine said. This looks like the emergency operations center that I had when I was governor. Or, Im on the armed services committee and I go to bases everywhere in the world, theres usually something like this. The senator asked how common the hubs are in hospitals. This will become the new standard, but were probably on the early side of it, Newman said. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. CSM plans summer academies College of Saint Mary (CSM) will host two week-long experiences for its 2022 Summer Academy Programs for all young women of color in grades 10 through 12. Upcoming sophomores and juniors will attend June 5-9, while upcoming seniors will attend June 12-16. This years theme is BeYouTiful: Mind, Body, Soul. CSMs Summer Academies are opportunities for young women to have a real-life college experience and participate in Omahas rich culture. Sophomores and juniors will learn from a STEAM curriculum, take hands-on college-like courses and meet professional women in the community. Seniors will receive assistance with applying and preparing for college, create a plan to apply to 10 colleges/universities and for five scholarships, take hands-on college-like courses and meet current college students and hear about their experiences. During Summer Academies, students will learn about scholarship opportunities at CSM, including the Marie Curie Scholarship, which provides up to $80,000 and resources for young women majoring in biology, chemistry, mathematics or human biology. Each participant will receive a stackable $500 scholarship to CSM for every year of Summer Academies they attend. The fee is $25 for the entire week. This includes meals, field trips, T-shirt and other giveaways, and lab supplies. The registration deadline is June 1. To apply and learn more about the academies, visit CSM.edu/SummerAcademies. Grief support group to be offered in April A grief support group is scheduled for Thursdays, April 7, 14 and 21, from 6:30-8:30 p.m., on the third floor of Methodist Fremont Healths Health Park Plaza. The group is open to anyone dealing with the loss of a loved one whether that is a spouse, parent, child, or friend. Participants are asked to wear a mask and appropriately distance themselves while in the building. There is no charge to attend and refreshments will be provided. For more information or to register, call 402-727-3663. Republicans elect new county chair The Republicans of Dodge County held their county convention on March 24 at the Fremont Eagles Club. County Chair Roxie Kracl led the meeting. Presentations were made on behalf of many local, PSC, and state-wide candidates as well as U.S. Congressional candidates seeking support for the May 10 Nebraska Primary Election. Kracl is stepping aside after serving Dodge County for many terms. Scott Eveland of rural Ames is now Dodge County GOP Chair. Kracl will continue serving on the Nebraska GOP State Executive Committee. Other county officers chosen are Deborah Wright, secretary-treasurer; Elaine Grothusen, State Central Committeewoman; and John Grothusen State Central Committeeman. The Nebraska GOP State Convention is in July 2022 in Kearney. Dodge County delegates and alternates to the July Convention are Kracl, Eveland, Kate Duncan, Sally Ganem, Rosie and Les Parde, Elaine and John Grothusen, Deborah Wright, Doug Wittman, and Janet and Robert Steenblock. Yard signs and campaign materials are available from the candidates and available for delivery by the Grothusens by calling 402-721-2603. A number of enthusiastic petition signers supported the effort to get the question on the November General Election ballot calling for the requirement that a photo ID must be presented at polling places. There are 15 additional petitions listed on the Nebraska Secretary of State website but only one was presented at this meeting. For more information, contact Kracl at 402-720-6294, roxiekracl@yahoo.com; in-coming chair Eveland at scottheveland@hotmail.com, 2072 Co. Rd. 14 Blvd., Ames, NE 68621, 402-720-1007; the Nebraska GOP office, Nebraska Republican Party, 402-475-2122, 1610 N St., Lincoln, NE 68508, Taylor Gage, www.negop.org, info@negop.org, Hudson Buell, hudson@negop.org; or Elaine and John Grothusen,402-594-1866, elaine@johngrothusen.com, john@johngrothusen.com. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Want to see more like this? Get our local education coverage delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The firefight was intense as Green Beret Roy Benavidez was dropped off a half mile away from his 12 buddies. It was 1968 and the young Texan was in an Army camp when he heard the radio call for help. His friends were surrounded by a battalion of North Vietnamese. Please fly me in, he told a helicopter pilot. Fierce fighting kept the helicopter from dropping Benavidez in the immediate area. But he fought his way to his friends. He got the men, some of whom had already died, into the helicopter. Then the helicopter pilot was shot and killed. Decades later, the story of Benavidez and other valiant Americans were told during the Vietnam Veterans Memorial observance on Saturday in Clemmons Park in Fremont. An estimated 150 people attended the event in memory of 15 men from Dodge County who were killed in action during the Vietnam War. A bell was rung after each mans name was read. The observance included the laying of wreaths, representing different branches of the military. The Fremont Honor Guard provided a rifle salute. Serena Graves, a fourth-grader at Trinity Lutheran School, sang the National Anthem. U.S. Congressman Don Bacon, who represents Nebraskas 2nd District, provided the keynote speech. Bacon paid tribute to the 58,220 Americans, who gave their lives during the Vietnam War, the Gold Star families, and 300,000 servicemen and women who were injured. I want to remember the courage of our Vietnam veterans, Bacon said. Its something we should not ever forget. Bacon shared stories of Americans awarded the nations highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for heroism during the Vietnam War. They included Benavidez, a shoeshine boy, who became a master sergeant and member of the Army Special Forces. Under enemy attack, Benavidez got his buddies off the first helicopter and into a second one. During that time, a North Vietnamese soldier stabbed Benavidez from behind with a bayonet. He killed that enemy soldier with a knife. He shot two other enemy soldiers. By the time Benavidez was returned to the camp, he had 37 bullet, stab and fragment wounds. They thought he died, but they were able to resuscitate him and he survived the war, Bacon said. Bacon shared stories of other brave Americans, including: PFC Milton Olive III. Born in Chicago, Olive was a boy when he went to Mississippi. In his second month in Vietnam, Olive was with four other men, when they faced attack by North Vietnamese Army soldiers. The soldiers repulsed the NVA. But during a counter attack, an NVA soldier threw a grenade in the middle of the five U.S. soldiers. Olive went into action. He immediately jumped on that grenade and absorbed that explosion, saving the lives of the other four soldiers, Bacon said. Only 19 years old when he died, Olive was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Heres a young man who could have been angry, an African American, raised in the segregated South, but he served his country and he sacrificed his life for his fellow soldiers, Bacon said. Navy SEAL Lt. Tom Norris. In April 1972, the Florida man was given a mission to rescue two airmen, shot down near the demilitarized zone, amid many NVA soldiers. Norris found one airman, returning him after a few gunfights. Norris and a Vietnamese petty officer and colleague then camouflaged themselves as fishermen, boarded a sampan, went down a river and found the other airman. Covering the airman with leaves and twigs in the boat, they had a couple more firefights before returning him to base camp. Navy SEAL Michael Thorton. Five months later, Norris and Thorton of South Carolina were tasked with capturing a North Vietnamese soldier behind enemy lines to gain intelligence data. Norris and Thorton killed two NVA soldiers in a firefight. That firefight brought out approximately 150 more North Vietnamese soldiers. The two Navy SEALs and their three Vietnamese allies were attacked. They had to retreat and they went to the coast by the ocean and they were going to swim 3 miles to get rescued, Bacon said. In the process, Norris was shot in the head. The Navy SEALs website tells how Thorton got Norris to the beach and swam both him and a wounded South Vietnamese commando seaward for two hours before they were rescued. All three, including Norris, survived. These are stories of courage, stories of servicemen and women who were fighting a war that was not very popular at the time, but they did it, because their country asked them, Bacon said. Many had fathers whod served in World War II and wanted to live up to the honor and courage they saw in that generation. I want you to know we respect our Vietnam veterans for standing tall and doing what their country asked them to do, Bacon said. Bacon made other points. One of the things we should have learned out of Vietnam is: We dont send our men and women into battle unless its our grave National Security interests at stake and when we do it wed better plan on winning, Bacon said. He cited a lesson from Vietnam. We sent people into battle with strategy called Graduated Response and in doing so, we lost 58,220 men and women for a strategy that was not designed to win, Bacon said. That should make us mad and we should never do that again. Bacon said the war did make people aware of the evils of Communism. He cited when NVA and Viet Cong took the city of Hua and murdered civilians. He told how Vietnamese people escaped after the war. Today, those Vietnamese Americans are some of the most patriotic people youll ever meet, Bacon said. Bacon said Americans who served in Vietnam didnt get the welcome home they deserved. I tell our Vietnam veterans: You deserve better, he said. He thanked the veterans, saying those who came after them benefitted from the lessons learned. Bacon spent almost 30 years in the U.S. Air Force, retiring as a brigadier general. He served 16 assignments including four deployments in the Middle East to include Iraq in 2007 to 2008 during Operation Iraqi Freedom. I came home and I was given hugs and embraced on the airplanes and embraced in the airports, but I knew that people remembered that they owed better to those Vietnam veterans when they returned home, he said. Along with the congressman, Fremont Mayor Joey Spellerberg shared his thoughts. Dale Finney of Fremont, state president of the In Country Vietnam Motorcycle Club of Nebraska, provided opening and closing remarks. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. By Azernews By Vugar Khalilov State Security Service Chief Col-Gen Ali Nagiyev has stated that Azerbaijan will thwart all threats to its national interests, the service has reported. He made the remarks at an event to mark the 103 anniversary of the establishment of Azerbaijans security agencies. All threats and attempts against the national interests of the country will be resolutely prevented by the personnel of the State Security Service under the leadership of Azerbaijani President, Commander-in-Chief Ilham Aliyev, and lasting stability and peace will be ensured in the country, Nagiyev stressed. He asserted that no force will be able to sway Azerbaijan from its chosen path. The service's chief thanked Azerbaijan's president for his attention and care in strengthening social protection and improving the living conditions of State Security Service employees. Nagiyev stressed that the state's security is reliably ensured as a result of Ilham Aliyev's successful domestic and foreign policy. In terms of the security agencies' future tasks, he stated that appropriate measures are being taken to prevent terrorist, sabotage, and intelligence-disruptive activities directed against Azerbaijan by certain foreign circles and enemy forces. Nagiyev recalled late national leader Heydar Aliyev's invaluable contributions to security agencies over a 25-year period. He added that Heydar Aliyev had established a professional school in the history of Azerbaijan's special services and never spared their attention and care. He congratulated the security agencies' employees and veterans on their professional holiday. In his remarks at the event, MP Arzu Nagiyev, a veteran of the security agencies, congratulated the security officers on this historic day and wished them success in their difficult and honorable service. The speaker took a trip back in time to discuss the formation of special services, emphasizing the importance of these bodies in the history of Azerbaijan's statehood. Furthermore, in accordance with the presidential order, the state awards were presented to employees of the State Security Service. Then, a documentary titled "Invisible Heroes" was screened, produced by Public Television in collaboration with the Culture Ministry and "Azerbaijanfilm" and dedicated to the contribution of security service employees to the historic victory in the 44-day war. The event was followed by a concert program at the service's Cultural Center. Prior to the event, Nagiyev and members of the Service's board of directors laid a wreath at the tomb of national leader Heydar Aliyev in the Alley of Honors. They also paid a visit to the Alley of Martyrs, which commemorates those who gave their lives in Azerbaijan's struggle for independence and territorial integrity. Qamar Niazi, a teacher from Helmand Province, called RFE/RL's Radio Azadi to express her distress with the Taliban's decision to close secondary girls' schools in Afghanistan just hours after they reopened on March 23. International organizations and world governments have called on the Taliban to reconsider the decision immediately. Eight UN peacekeepers -- six Pakistanis, a Russian, and a Serb -- were killed when their helicopter crashed while on a mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), UN and Pakistani officials said on March 29. A spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres confirmed the deaths and gave the nationality of all eight victims. The Pakistani military said the helicopter was on a reconnaissance mission and the exact cause of the crash had not yet been determined. It added that six Pakistani troops were among those killed. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan expressed his "deep sense of shock and grief," his office said, paying tribute to the peace effort by the country's armed forces. DRC military authorities said M23 rebels had "shot down" the aircraft. But the group denied the accusation, claiming the Congolese military was responsible for the crash. The UN Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) said earlier that it had "lost contact" with one of its helicopters while it was on a reconnaissance mission in the Rutshuru region of North Kivu Province, where Congolese forces have been battling M23 rebels. The helicopter was among two carrying out the UN mission, according to a statement from the DRCs army, which said the helicopter was shot down on March 28. The mission was to assess the movements of communities that had been attacked by rebels in order to coordinate humanitarian assistance. The DRC army has accused Rwanda of supporting an armed rebellion in the east of the country. Kigali denies the charges, and M23 spokesman Willy Ngoma said in a video message that the movement was strictly Congolese and did not receive any assistance from neighboring countries. A spokesperson for the North Kivu governor said in a statement on March 28 that the M23 "backed by the Rwanda Defense Force (RDF), carried out incursions and attacked positions" of the army the previous night. To support the accusation, General Sylvain Ekenge said two Rwandan soldiers had been arrested during the attacks. Rwandas ambassador to the DRC said the two men were arrested more than a month ago and were not the soldiers named. With reporting by Reuters and AFP U.S. cellist Yo-Yo Ma joined refugees from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music for a performance in Lisbon, Portugal, where the Afghan musicians have sought asylum. Ma joined young Afghan and Portuguese musicians for the performance of a Mozart piece on March 29 on a small stage at the National Conservatory. The best defense against anything is culture, Ma told the audience. The young musicians risked their lives for something they believed in, and you, in Lisbon, opened your hearts and risked...all kinds of things in order to do what is human. Portugal granted asylum to a 273-person group from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music as they fled Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban takeover last August. The group, which includes some 150 students, arrived in December and have been studying at the National Conservatory since then. Ma played a role in helping them get out of Afghanistan. Ahmad Sarmast, the founder and head of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, said the process of integration was going smoothly. The students are enrolled back in the school, they are going to the Conservatory, they are making music, they joined several ensembles and orchestras, they are slowly also beginning to make a wonderful musical impact on their community, he told the AP news agency on the sidelines of the performance. Some of the students played traditional Afghan instruments during the performance. The plan is to recreate the institute in Portugal, allowing the students to continue their education as part of a wider Lisbon-based center for Afghan culture that will welcome exiles. Based on reporting by AP In the wake of drummer Taylor Hawkins' death on Friday, the Foo Fighters have canceled all 2022 North American tour dates. The longtime rock band was scheduled to perform Aug. 6 at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver. Hawkins, who joined the band in 1997, after two years as drummer for Alanis Morissette, died in a Bogota, Colombia, hotel room. Hawkins had 10 substances in his system, according to a preliminary report from the Colombia Attorney General's Office. Other concerts at Empower Field this year: May 21: Luke Combs July 23: Red Hot Chili Peppers July 30: Kenny Chesney Aug. 18: The Weeknd Were sorry for and share in the disappointment that we wont be seeing one another as planned, the band's statement read. Instead, lets take this time to grieve, to heal, to pull our loved ones close, and to appreciate all the music and memories weve made together. Hawkins was Alanis Morissette's touring drummer when he joined Foo Fighters in 1997. He played on the band's biggest albums including One by One and In Your Honor, and on hit singles like Best of You. In lead singer David Grohls 2021 book The Storyteller, he called Hawkins his brother from another mother, my best friend, a man for whom I would take a bullet." Go online to empowerfieldatmilehigh.com/events for more information. The Associated Press contributed to this report. The play that goes right Actor Rachel McCombs-Grahams next role will be starring in "The One-Act Play that Goes Wrong," opening April 15 at the Vintage Theatre in Aurora. And because she has alopecia, so, too, will her character, Sandra. Her big comic moment comes when she is passed through a window while unconscious. It was McCombs-Grahams suggestion that her stage wig should get knocked off as that happens to make the bit that much funnier. "This will be the first time, in all my years of acting, where my wig will be coming off on purpose as part of the humor of the given circumstances, she said. I really hope that people will think its funny. The play runs through May 22. John Moore President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has viewed the conditions created in the newly-built modern penitentiary institutions for women and juvenile prisoners, a vulnerable group in society, in Baku, Azertag reported on March 29. In contrast to the penitentiary institutions built in the 1930s that were no longer meeting the requirements of the time, exemplary conditions have been created in new institutions. Recreation opportunities, psychological counselling, prayer rooms and other facilities have been created in the new penitentiary institutions. Production areas have been set up for prisoners to engage in work. Necessary infrastructure has been created in both institutions for prisoners to spend their leisure time effectively, to do sports, engage in education and study various specialties. There is a library, a reading room and a computer room equipped with the necessary literature. In accordance with the President's instructions to expand production areas and involve entrepreneurs and businessmen in this activity, prisoners will be engaged in weaving, carpet weaving, sewing and baking activities in the production unit established at the new enterprises. The two-storey medical unit of the enterprise features doctor's rooms, examination and diagnostic areas and dental offices fitted with modern equipment, laboratory, pharmacy, pediatric room and other ancillary rooms. A building for meetings with prisoners has also been constructed in the new penitentiary institution. There are separate rooms with all living conditions, a kitchen, walking areas for short-term and three-day meetings of prisoners with their families. Apart from the classrooms, the two-storey school building built on the premises has labor, computer, other rooms and a gym. The conditions available here allow prisoners, especially minors, the opportunity to receive education and acquire vocational skills. Thanks to the attention and care of President Ilham Aliyev, the construction of new penitentiary institutions for women and juvenile prisoners, who are regarded a vulnerable segment of society, is part of the drastic reforms carried out in the country. The modern conditions created here will serve to protect the rights of prisoners and pave the way for their effective rehabilitation and social adaptation. A new pre-trial detention center has been built in the Zabrat settlement of Baku. Modern penitentiary complexes have been built in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic and Shaki. Such enterprises are also under construction in Ganja and Lankaran, as well as Umbaki settlement of the capital. Humanism is one of the key principles in the political course of the Azerbaijani state. About 6,000 prisoners have been pardoned by 35 decrees signed by President Ilham Aliyev so far, whereas four amnesty acts adopted on the initiative of First Vice-President and President of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Mehriban Aliyeva have covered more than 40,000 people. At the same time, as part of reforms to modernize the country's justice system, the penitentiary service is being improved, penitentiary policy is being humanized, and consistent measures are being taken to protect the rights of prisoners and improve the conditions of their detention, medical and other benefits. The recently completed amnesty act signed on the occasion of Victory Day is another manifestation of the President's humanist policy. It has covered more than 15,000 people in total. Five students from the Pikes Peak region are among hundreds of recipients of the Daniels Fund Scholarship Program, which provides up to $100,000 toward a student's college undergraduate degree. This year, 240 students were selected as scholars from Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming, the nonprofit announced Monday. Colorado had the most recipients at 130. Founded by cable television pioneer Bill Daniels, the Denver-based scholarship program covers educational expenses after scholarships and financial aid for graduating high school seniors to attend nonprofit colleges and universities across the nation. Students are selected based on their demonstration of exceptional character, leadership, commitment to the community, academic performance and promise, well-roundedness and emotional maturity. The 2022 Pikes Peak region recipients are: Madeline Wiseman, Colorado Springs Early Colleges. Tylor Huff, Doherty High School. William Pado, Doherty High School. Justin Fauson, St. Mary's High School. Alayna Schoepp, The Classical Academy - College Pathways. With this years announcement, more than 4,800 students have received the Daniels scholarship, the nonprofit said. At any given time, nearly 1,000 Daniels scholars are attending some 200 colleges and universities nationwide. Since 2000, the program has awarded more than $235 million in scholarships. For a complete list of the winners, visit danielsfund.org/2022DanielsScholars. By Trend Armenia reportedly sent four Su-30 fighter jets and pilots to Russia on March 25 to take part in hostilities in Ukraine, Member of Azerbaijani Parliament (Milli Majlis) Vugar Iskenderov told Trend. Armenia, which has always pursued a policy aimed not at peace, but at war, bloodshed and death, remains committed to its "beliefs", Iskenderov said. "Armenia is taking the opposite steps while the international community is trying to stop Russia's offensive in Ukraine, to prevent civilian Ukrainians from becoming victims of the war," Iskenderov noted. According to the parliamentarian, the information disseminated these days once again confirmed that Armenia is a supporter of the war, not peace. "According to this information, Armenia has sent four modern Su-30 aircraft belonging to it to be used in combat operations in Ukraine. These aircraft, which are reportedly piloted by Armenian pilots, are used in Russian attacks against Ukraine. This gives reason to say that Armenia joined the hostilities against Ukraine. Although the whole world assumed that Belarus would join the war, Armenia got ahead of it and turned into a participant in the conflict. The Armenian leadership can be "proud" that today Armenia is also participating in the destruction of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure," he added. This is not the only step taken by Armenia that challenges the international community, he said. "It was previously reported that Armenia played a role in sending fighters from Syria to participate in the hostilities in Ukraine. Armenia is challenging the whole world. This is happening while western countries, including the USA, make statements that serious measures will be taken against any country that provides military, economic, and other assistance to Russia. Armenia has thereby demonstrated its position and now it is the turn of the West, especially the USA. Everyone is interested in how the USA and other western countries will react to this step in Armenia. Will they impose sanctions on that country?" Iskenderov said. By Trend The Units of the Azerbaijani Army continue planned disposal of the out-of-date ammunition that is no longer being used in compliance with all security measures, the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan told Trend. The process of disposal of ammunition will be carried out from March 28 through April 2 at the Seyfeli training ground in Azerbaijans Ganja, the report notes. "The public will be regularly informed about the ongoing explosive work. Once again we urge the population not to panic and declare that there is no reason for concern," the Defense Ministry said in a statement. The recreation of an honor roll kiosk at Camp Amache that recognized the Japanese Americans who volunteered for the U.S. military in World War II. Lawmakers intend to provide funding to Secretary of State Jena Griswold's office in the upcoming fiscal year to hire private security in situations where the State Patrol is unable to do the job, although at a smaller amount than the state's top election official requested. The 2022-23 budget package authorizes Griswold to tap $32,400 from her office's cash fund and permits her to "coordinate with Colorado State Patrol in securing private security in the instance that CSP is unavailable to provide security requested by the Department of State." The money comes on top of the $120,800 that Griswold's office sought and received in supplemental funding this year. Gov. Jared Polis signed that supplemental budget request on March 7. That bill didn't include a line item or footnote on the funds' purpose, but the Joint Budget Committee narrative document on supplemental requests explained it allows her department to "contract for private security and threat monitoring services in response to an increase in threats towards Department personnel." In her official budget request , Griswold's office asked for a yearly general fund allocation of $184,800 to address security concerns. Her office said it would use the money to work with a vendor to track threats on social media and hire security to accompany Griswold and other staffers in key public events. According to Rep. Kim Ransom, R-Littleton, a JBC member , that's $10,000 per month just for monitoring. All told, Griswold's office sought a $4.6 million increase to its $33 million budget. Lawmakers' proposed fiscal 2023 budget gives Griswold's office a little more than $1.4 million over current levels. As the Secretary of State's Office's supplemental budget request for this year was going through the Legislature, a spokeswoman said private security would be used for official public events only and paid for by a cash fund in the office's budget. Republican legislators had objected to how the security funding would be paid for, noting cash funds are furnished by fees paid by businesses for services provided by Griswold's office. House Minority Leader Hugh McKean said the request highlights a much bigger issue: how to provide security for constitutional officers. "It's sad that we live in a world where we get death threats on a routine basis. We're left with the question on how to deal with it," the Loveland Republican said during a House debate on the supplemental measure. McKean argued that the best approach is to handle such threats in the same way as credible threats to lawmakers: Take it to the State Patrol. Then, those complaints can be aggregated in one place, and the agency has its "thumb on the pulse" of what is happening within the legislature and with the constitutional officers. Rep. Janice Rich, R-Grand Junction, questioned how private security would be used in an election year, saying the lines between Griswold's official duties and campaign events could become blurred. The supplemental bill later passed largely along party lines in both the House and Senate. Last October, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State Griswold is the organization's national chair went to the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission seeking permission to pay for private security for Griswold. The request for private security was tied to online threats, some tied to false allegations that the 2020 election was fraudulent. That included threats of physical harm, some which Denver7 News forwarded to the Colorado State Patrol for investigation. According to discussions during the meeting, the threats did not rise to the level of requiring the Colorado State Patrol to provide additional security for Griswold. The ethics commission ultimately denied the request. Cole Wist, an ethics commissioner and former Republican state representative, had raised concerns about the security detail, which would have covered Griswold in her official capacity, regardless of the type of event. According to a DASS representative, the security detail could cover campaign events. "One of the tough issues for me is to understand where the line is between work and the secretary's official capacity and political work and appearances that are political in nature," Wist said during the Sept. 22 meeting. "Are we to conclude that all appearances by the secretary would be in her official capacity?" A DASS representative replied that all appearances, official or political, are in her capacity as a public official. "There is no distinction. She's always acting in her official capacity," the official said. That was enough for the ethics commission to turn down Griswold's request, stating it would violate the Amendment 41 gift ban. By Azernews By Vugar Khalilov Baku has stated that Armenia should take concrete steps toward signing a peace treaty with Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said this in a statement on March 29 in response to the Armenian Security Councils statement dated March 28, 2022, which proposed to immediately begin negotiations on a comprehensive peace treaty. If the Armenian side regards the issue of a peace treaty as a serious step, it is time to move on to concrete actions. Azerbaijan, for its part, is ready for this," the ministry stressed. It stated that Armenia's failure to meet its obligations under the trilateral statement (signed on November 10, 2020) is the direct cause of the region's escalation. Armenia's violation of the trilateral declaration's provisions raises tensions in the region and undermines peace-building efforts, the ministry said. Regarding the introduction of international deterrence mechanisms, we would like to draw the attention of the Armenian leadership to the fact that humanity has not yet thought of a better means of international deterrence than international law, the statement underlined. It emphasized that a state like Armenia, which grossly violates international law cannot talk about the mechanism of international deterrence. If the members of the Armenian Security Council still do not know what the best means of international deterrence is, then we are repeating the fundamental principles of international law, including the principles of state sovereignty and respect for international borders, non-interference in the internal affairs of states, and compliance with international obligations for them, the ministry emphasized. Azerbaijan suggested signing a comprehensive peace deal with Armenia at the highest level a year ago, and a month ago, it articulated the particular principles on which the agreement should be based, the statement added. The Iowa Board of Nursing has suspended the license of a nurse who allegedly had sex with a former psychiatric patient. At its January meeting, the board voted to suspend the license of Shawn Sandersfeld of Muscatine indefinitely and ordered a mental-health and chemical-dependency evaluation. Once that evaluation is completed, Sandersfeld must submit to any treatment that is recommended and, after showing proof of 12 months sobriety, may resume practice while serving a 12-month period of probation. Sandersfeld must also complete a three-day course on professional boundaries and ethics and submit to case-manager evaluations pertaining to competency and the ability to interact professionally with co-workers and patients. The sanctions are tied to allegations by the board Sandersfeld was working as a psychiatric mental health nurse at an unspecified hospital in 2019 and provided nursing services to a particular patient who was discharged in July 2019. According to the board, from August 2019 through June 2021, the patient lived at Sandersfelds home and the two engaged in a sexual relationship during that time. Board sanctions nurses in separate cases According to the Iowa Board of Nursing, these other nurses have recently faced sanctions from the board: Patrick Jones, Waterloo Jones agreed to immediately relinquish all rights to practice nursing in the state of Iowa and surrendered his license. He can apply for reinstatement in 12 months. According to the board, Jones was employed at a care facility, unspecified by the board, from September 2019 until July 2021. At some point during his employment, the board alleged, Jones sent electronic communication to staff that created an uncomfortable work environment. According to the board, Jones communicated conversations that were sexual in nature with a patient and he engaged in sexual actions with a patient. James Dickerson, Neola The board ordered Dickerson to immediately stop providing any treatment to patients with a complex mental health diagnosis until he received certification as a psychiatric nurse practitioner. The board also fined Dickerson $1,000 and ordered him to undergo five hours of consultation with a nurse practitioner. The settlement stemmed from charges that Taylor exceeded his scope of practice and dispensed drugs to individuals whose care was not within his specialized, licensed area of practice. Miranda Figueroa, Omaha Figueroa agreed to immediately relinquish all rights to practice nursing in the state of Iowa and surrendered her license. She can apply for reinstatement in 12 months. Last October, the board charged her with an inability to safely practice nursing as a result of a physical or mental condition. At that time, the board indicated it had sought provider approval for Figueroa to safely practice nursing and that no provider had given that approval. Kristine Wikner, McGregor Wikner agreed to undergo 10 hours of educational instruction on nursing documentation. In October, the board alleged she was working at a nursing home in 2020 when a family member was admitted to the facility. Although she was instructed not to access her family members medical records, she allegedly went into her relatives medical chart and changed some of the information entered there by another worker. Nathan Tucker, Sioux City Tucker agreed to undergo 60 hours of educational instruction on critical thinking and nursing procedures. The board alleged that in October 2020, while working at a hospital emergency department, Tucker administered intravenous medication to patients on three occasions without a physicians order, failed to assess the IV sites, and failed to provide accurate information to a physician. Terry Seitz, Williamsburg Seitz agreed to immediately relinquish all rights to practice nursing in the state of Iowa and surrendered her license. She can apply for reinstatement in 12 months. In September 2020, she was allegedly working at an unspecified facility when she had to be transported by emergency services to a hospital where she tested positive for amphetamines, marijuana and non-prescription opioids. Mona Taylor, Rock Island, Ill. Taylor agreed to immediately relinquish all rights to practice nursing in the state of Iowa and she surrendered her license. She can apply for reinstatement in 12 months. The factual circumstances that triggered the action have yet to be made public. The board states that it filed a statement of charges against Taylor in October 2021, but that statement of charges has yet to be published by the board. Kori March, Sioux City March agreed to undergo 60 hours of educational instruction pertaining to professional ethics and what the board called nurses legal advisor. Last fall, the board alleged that while working at an unspecified long-term care facility between 2018 and 2021, she performed intravenous therapy functions without having the IV-therapy certification required of licensed practical nurses. Jennifer Mayberry, Waukee Mayberry agreed to have her license placed on probation for 18 months, during which time she must abstain from the use of alcohol and illicit drugs, submit to case-manager evaluations and chemical screening, and undergo mental health counseling. Last summer, the board alleged that during a pre-employment health screening in 2021, Mayberry tested positive for amphetamine and methamphetamine. Derrick Miller, West Branch Miller agreed to have his license placed on probation for 12 months and to undergo six hours of educational instruction on medication safety. Last fall, the board alleged that in February 2021, while working at an unspecified nursing home, Miller lost the keys to the homes medication cart, left the unlocked cart unattended, and then left medication at a residents bedside without a doctors order to do so. Eleven months earlier, Miller allegedly gave oxycodone to a resident who had not complained of pain and did not request the medication. In 2014, Millers license was indefinitely suspended pending completion of board-ordered treatment and verification of 12 continuous months of sobriety, followed by 12 months of license probation. The 2014 sanctions stemmed from charges of misappropriation of medications and being involved in the unauthorized manufacture or use of a controlled substance. Ronda Eick, Waterloo The board issued Eick a warning and ordered her to undergo 34 hours of educational instruction on COVID-19 and medical documentation. Last fall, the board alleged that while Eick was working at an assisted living center in 2021, she received a text message from a co-worker who stated that he or she had COVID-19. Eick did not notify human resources, the facilitys clinical coordinator or the staffs health nurse of that information. A few days earlier, two residents of the center had tested for COVID-19, with one showing a positive result and the other showing an inconclusive result. According to the board, Eick falsely reported that one of the two residents had tested negative for COVID-19. In 2008, the board ordered Eick to complete 15 hours of educational instruction related to ethics. That sanction stemmed from her pleading guilty to a criminal charge of theft tied to allegations that she stole money collected by colleagues for the benefit of a co-worker. McKinsey Schurr, LeClaire The board issued Schurr a warning for excessive use of alcohol after it allegedly received information that Schurr had an alcohol-use disorder. The board charged Schurr with excessive use of alcohol that may impair a licensed nurses ability to practice. Rhonda Adkins, Grinnell Adkins agreed to under 30 hours of educational instruction on professional ethics. Last fall, the board alleged Adkins was employed as a home care nurse in 2021 when she falsified patient records and employee timecards to indicate she was providing care for a patient on dates when she did not actually work. Jennifer Evins, Rock Island, Ill. Evins agreed to immediately relinquish all rights to practice nursing in the state of Iowa and surrendered her license. She can apply for reinstatement in 12 months. Last fall, the board alleged that in 2020, Evins was convicted of a crime related to the profession of nursing and the theft of patient medications. As a result of the criminal conviction, Evins license was placed on probation in October 2020 and she was barred from using alcohol while on probation. In June 2021, she allegedly tested positive for alcohol use and later admitted she had been drinking. Amanda Bendon, Dubuque Bendon agreed to undergo up to 10 hours of educational instruction on ethics and legal liability. The board had alleged that Bendon was working at an unspecified medical clinic in 2020 when she removed a vial of Pentacel from the clinic, took it home and administered it to her child without a prescription and without permission from the clinic. Pentacel is used as a vaccine for immunization against diphtheria, tetanus and other conditions. Jennifer Mastin, Walnut Mastin agreed to undergo up to 10 hours of educational instruction on ethics and legal liability and have her license placed on 12 months probation. The board had alleged that on more than one occasion while working at an unspecified care center, Mastin disposed of medication without the required witness; removed two narcotics from the inventory and administered only one dose; and failed to document the administration of narcotics to residents. Tricia Venzke, Ames Venzke agreed to undergo 30 hours of educational instruction on managing difficult patients. The board had alleged that in 2021, while dealing with a combative hospital patient, Venzke reacted physically inappropriately to the patient. Miranda Depyer, Graettinger Depyer agreed to undergo seven hours of educational instruction on professional accountability and critical thinking skills. The board had alleged that in April of last year, Depyer responded to an ambulance call for a woman in labor. While en route to a hospital, Depyer allegedly gave the woman a dose of Pitocin a natural hormone sometimes used to induce labor without a physicians order. Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and Twitter. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 1 Sad 0 Angry 0 Mary Ann Marreel leans over her desk, drawing outward from the eyes until the face of Kevin Costner appears. This work of art has taken her months of labor. On an average day at Fox River Mills in Osage, Marreel machines socks on second shift. Her job title is knitter. Every knitter is assigned a mechanic, and it is her husband who fixes Marreels machines. For 33 years, time has drifted by inside assembly line boxes. At a certain point, art had passed far from her mind. Life happens and you put it to the side, she said of drawing. For decades, Marreels pencils remained untouched. Fifteen years ago, that changed. Some inner voice compelled her to pick up an instructional art book. In this new beginning the books pages were her only teachers. Being realistic had kept her from art. Unlike masters of the Renaissance, she had no benefactor to fund her work. There were bills to pay and dachshunds to feed. Today, her dogged pursuit of another kind of realism informs her life, which is now filled with the contrast of shadow and light that an admirer can almost touch. Ode to Joy For the past two months she has stared at Costners face, this man who from a cornfield, called Iowa "heaven." In elementary school, Marreel was the artist, the one other students considered a magician. On the farm, though her duties were more mundane, her family inspired her to keep drawing. The power of encouragement is a wonderful thing, Marreel said. In 1983, she graduated from Northeast Hamilton High School in Blairsburg, straight up the interstate from Des Moines. She was voted most artistic in her class. Her art teacher Ron Dinsdale is a renowned sculptor in the metro area. After leaving home and pursuing a business degree, her pencils and charcoal sticks got stuffed in a drawer. There are no art classes in business school. Her first job out of college was in Osage. In 2007, the internet proved useful as Marreel sought to once again master her work. For all of her skill, she focuses most on what needs improvement. But even this self-criticism is an ode to joy. Im making progress, she said. There are all styles of art, but I like realism. Its a high compliment if someone says it looks just like a photo. Marreel works from the eyes out. The drawing stares back at her in that first stage, though they do not yet have a body to inhabit. For her, hair is the most difficult feature to illustrate. If you dont have the eyes set right, the rest is never going to matter, Marreel said. Marreel's education is ongoing. Her husband travels with her to workshops, making sure she is stocked with the tools she needs. Everyone in her life contributes. It was a neighbor who led her to the Mitchell County Fine Arts Council. There are a lot of good people who care about art, she said. Pat Mackin is very enthusiastic. Mackin is chairman of the council. You see the talent brought together to do these things, Mackin said before last summers Cedar Arts Fest. There are people in the county who do top-notch work, and a lot of people dont know about it. We like to bring that into the light. Vision Larger drawings can take Marreel three months to complete. Evenings and weekends are her playtime, her chance to sit in an attitude of prayer and breathe life into this roomful of eyes. She has difficulty letting them go. For her, selling her work would remove this exultation. In short, drawing is fun. I want to do it for the sake of art, Marreel said. If I had to make money from it, I wouldnt enjoy my work. The Lord blessed me with the ability to draw. It is a powerful force. When it comes to drawing, her work is play. It usually lasts for a few hours after Fox River, longer on weekends. In her office, a clock ticks audibly as she leans over her desk, watched by a myriad of faces covering the walls. There is a replicate of her mothers senior picture from 1950. I love drawing people with character, Marreel said. Older folks in the room have developed callouses, their features worn, pensive, sorrowful and alive. Woody Harrelson hangs above her desk. She saw the photograph on the cover of a magazine in the check-out aisle and was struck by the complexity of his expression. The mercurial actor obliged Marreel by sitting for the portrait. One of the most difficult steps comes before Marreel has even laid graphite to papyrus. She must find a subject, and the decision is not simple. Not all of them appear in the magazine rack at the grocery store. Though their mouths might be closed, they must speak to her. You get a vision in your mind, Marreel said. From that dream comes a plan. One of her drawings is from a photographer named Robert Osborne, who gave permission for Marreel to use his pictures. It will travel to the Iowa State Fair this August. In the past, other drawings have found their way to Des Moines. Her state fair artwork includes a photograph of her father holding up a fish, which thanks to Marreel is bigger than the one that hung from his stringer that day. In another drawing of her mother, she is sitting on their porch with a chicken in her lap, feeding it bread. Mom and dad went to the state fair as drawings, Marreel said. On the wall beside her desk, there is a hanger thick with blue ribbons. In the relative quiet of her office, however, no award is large enough to overshadow her work. Jason W. Selby is the community editor for the Mitchell Country Press News. He can be reached at 515-971-6217, or by email at jason.selby@globegazette.com. Love 3 Funny 0 Wow 1 Sad 0 Angry 0 By Vafa Ismayilova Azerbaijani President ?lham Aliyev and his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah Al Sisi have swapped congratulatory letters over the 30th anniversary of the establishment of bilateral diplomatic ties. "I thank you for your letter on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations between the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Arab Republic of Egypt. On my own behalf and on behalf of the people of Azerbaijan, I also sincerely congratulate you and your friendly people on this memorable milestone," President Aliyev said in his letter. He described as gratifying the ties of friendship and cooperation binding the two countries and nations and the present level of inter-state relations and stressed the great significance attached to these ties. Aliyev noted that throughout the years, Azerbaijani-Egyptian relations have developed constructively in bilateral and multilateral formats. He underlined cooperation based on mutual trust and support within the Non-Aligned Movement. "I believe that through our joint efforts, our mutually beneficial cooperation will continue to strengthen and expand for the sake of the interests of our countries and peoples. I wish robust health and success to you and peace and prosperity to the friendly people of Egypt," the Azerbaijani president added. In a letter to his counterpart Aliyev, Egyptian President Al Sisi stressed that bilateral relations between the two countries have always been characterized by constructive cooperation and mutual respect. "At the same time, serious work has been done to achieve the common interests of the states and peoples of Egypt and Azerbaijan. Also, bilateral cooperation between the two countries in various fields has always been fruitful and successful in achieving significant achievements and is still going on," he said. He emphasized the importance of bilateral cooperation to further strengthen relations in areas of mutual interest, including energy, construction, pharmaceuticals and mining for the benefit of Egypt and Azerbaijan, as well as their friendly peoples. It should be noted that 50 documents on cooperation in various fields have been signed between Azerbaijan and Egypt since the establishment of political ties between the two countries in 1992. The trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Egypt increased by over fivefold in 2021. AmoyV wrote: Time taken: 9:08 mins 1. It can be inferred that the "ownership gap" (see highlighted text) would be narrowed if which of the following were to occur? A. Minority entrepreneurs received a percentage of government contracts equal to that received by nonminority entrepreneurs. Nothing like that B. Middle- and high-income minority entrepreneurs gave more assistance to their low-income counterparts in the business community. Help is to be given by the govt not only to low-income people but also to middle and high income people in some cases C. Minority entrepreneurs hired a percentage of minority employees equal to the percentage of minority residents in their own communities. Question is to increase % of self-employed. Not the % of employed D. The percentage of self-employed minority persons rose to more than ten percent of all self-employed persons. This increases the % of self-employed and decreases the gap E. Seventeen percent of all persons employed in small businesses were self-employed. We are concerned about minorities here not the total population. 2. According to the passage, in 1970 funding to minority entrepreneurs focused primarily on which of the following? A. Alleviating chronic unemployment in urban areas We are concerned about self-employment and not total employment B. Narrowing the ownership gap Yes C. Assisting minority-owned businesses with growth potential This was a thing of the past and subsequently was adopted again in the future. But is not part of our time frame in question. D. Awarding subcontracts to businesses that encouraged community development No mention of community development E. Targeting the most economically disadvantaged minority-owned businesses Take out the "most" and this could be the right answer. 3. Which of the following best describes the function of the second paragraph in the passage as a whole? A. It narrows the scope of the topic introduced in the first paragraph. It gives a part of the history of enactment of the assistance B. It presents an example of the type of change discussed in the first paragraph. It is an example of the many changes that the execution of the law went through C. It cites the most striking instance of historical change in a particular government policy. Yes. It is the first of the many historical changes D. It explains the rationale for the creation of the government agency whose operations are discussed in the first paragraph. Doesnt do that E. It presents the results of policies adopted by the federal government. Doesnt do that 4. The passage mentions which of the following as a basic consideration in administering minority-business funding programs? A. Coming up with funding for the programs It is govt funded. No problem mentioned in the passage reagrading funding B. Encouraging government agencies to assist middle and high-income minority entrepreneurs No problem with this mentioned C. Recognizing the profit potential of small service businesses in urban communities Nothing in the passage to support this D. Determining who should be the recipients of the funding There were a lot of times the policy changed and each time the policy changed, it changed wrt who would receive the funding. E. Determining which entrepreneurs are likely to succeed Nothing to support this in the passage 5. The primary purpose of the passage is to A. discuss historical changes in a government policy Yes. It does that B. describe the role of Congress in regulating the work of the SBA Nope. The Congress is not even mentioned after the 1st paragraph, where it passed the policy. C. contrast types of funding sources used by minority businesses Here only 1 type of funding ie govt funding is discussed. No mention or contrasting different funding D. correct a misconception about minority entrepreneurship Passage shows the ways a policy was enacted. There is nothing in the passage to support this option E. advocate an alternative approach to funding minority entrepreneurs There is no mention of any other funding in the passage and hence govt funding may not be the "alternative approach of funding minority entrepreneurs" 3rd question OA is B not C House of Hope plans to revamp and expand its homeless shelter to meet high demand for a place to stay. The homeless shelter at Patton and South Ridge streets can house 16 clients, which just isnt enough, said House of Hope Executive Director Jude Swanson. We get phone calls every day, Swanson said during an interview at the shelter Tuesday morning. We cant always take everyone, which is sad. The project will more than double House of Hopes capacity from 16 beds to about 40 and expand space for homeless people from the buildings basement to upstairs. The bottom floor will grow from 16 to about 30 beds and the upper level to be called Normas Place will have 10 beds for single-mother families and women, Swanson said. Solex Architecture in Danville is designing the project and the city is seeking bids for the revamp. Federal American Rescue Plan Act funding received by the citys community development department from the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development will pay for at least part of the project. The city received $990,667 for the Housing Opportunities Made Equal program. Of that amount, $600,000 will go toward the House of Hope project and the remaining $390,667 will be used for tenant-based rental assistance, said Danville Community Development Director Ken Gillie. The nearly $1 million was part of $5 billion from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, also known as the COVID-19 stimulus package, for the Homeless Assistance and Supportive Services program. Almost $97 million was earmarked for providing help for homeless Virginians and others at risk for homelessness in the state, Virginia Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine announced in April 2021. Through the tenant-based rental assistance program, the city spent $691,000 in federal Community Development Block Grant money to help residents pay rent or mortgage from June 2021 through last week, Gillie said. There has been an increase in calls seeking assistance at House of Hope and the Danville Department of Social Services, he said. We just know weve had a substantial number of calls higher than what we usually get, Gillie said Tuesday afternoon. Work at House of Hope will also include installing walls in the shelters current, lower-floor location to increase the number of rooms there, Swanson said. There will be handicapped-accessible restrooms upstairs, a room with computers for guest use, a common area, and a play area for kids, Swanson said. Work should begin the middle of this spring and hopefully be complete before next winter, he said. The upper floor of the building at 206 S. Ridge St. currently houses the Law Offices of Michael P. Regan, The Redemption Center Church and To Be Successful Youth Enrichment Program. They have been notified of the project and will be relocating, Swanson said. House of Hope gets its money from grants, and donations from individuals and churches. Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. REIDSVILLE Tanker trucks from throughout the county lined U.S. 29 from early Monday morning until midday as firefighters from more than 20 agencies fought to extinguish a blaze at a vacant American Tobacco Company building one of areas largest fires in recent times. Emergency crews received calls from area residents and train crews from Norfolk & Southern Railroad at about 3:30 a.m. with reports of a fire at the complex of buildings known as the tobacco companys sheds at 125 Narrow Gauge Road. Long-vacated, the three-story wood and brick building that caught fire was known as The Stemmery and stood within a few feet of the railroad tracks along U.S. 29 Business, adjacent to the approximately 90-acre property. One longtime resident of the area estimated the building size at about 90,000 square feet. Firefighters reported having trouble accessing the fenced-in building and trains were forced to slow to as little as 10 m.p.h. or stop to allow emergency crews access to the inferno. The fire was especially aggressive because wood was stored within it, officials said. That wood caused flames to spread across the span of the facility, they explained. Despite challenges, though, crews contained the fire by noon, officials said. Crews stayed on the scene for more than 16 hours, returning to the site several times Monday night to extinguish hot spots that had reignited in the rubble. No injuries were reported, officials said. A number of warehouses and sheds are located near the stemmery, but firefighters kept the blaze from spreading to them, officials reported. To further ensure the safety of the firefighters on Monday, Rockingham County Emergency Services Director Rodney Cates stayed in contact with the National Weather Service in Blacksburg, Va. to determine the strength and direction of the days winds. Oregon Hill Fire Station crews were helped by firefighters from across Rockingham County, as well as fellow paid and volunteer firefighting teams from several neighboring counties. Parts of US-29, and Madison and South Scales streets near Wal-Mart were closed for several hours to allow tankers quick access to fire hydrants nearby. Crews shuttled water from four hydrants, including one near Wal-Mart, where tankers refilled 130 times, officials and firefighters said. It was so involved, we couldnt put it out, but we used the water to contain the fire and keep it from spreading, one firefighter said. Given the age of building and the period of time its been vacant, this created a heavy fire load where the fire just grew and grew, Cates said. Cates credited the combined actions of the countys 9-1-1 operators, firefighters, rescue squads, emergency service personnel, the sheriffs department and the N.C. Department of Transportation with containing the fire by noon Monday. Emergency personnel from Alamance, Caswell and Guilford counties stood by at the local departments to handle other area fire calls while local crews attacked the huge blaze. During a Monday afternoon news conference, Cates said: This fire could have been deadly if we didnt have the countywide effort we saw today. Their service, both today and every day, should be commemorated. It really shows the camaraderie between stations and crews across the county and beyond the Rockingham County border. I cannot thank them enough for their efforts today. Cates stressed the importance of volunteers and the outpouring of support from our fire community ... These people are volunteers. They have jobs, he said. They gave up their jobs today to come out here and fight this fire. The remains of the building are very, very insecure, Cates said, noting he has spoken with demolition crews and the buildings owners to ensure the integrity of the building and the safety of those who may have to do any type of follow-up investigation. Much of the building already has caved in, and further collapse may be imminent, Cates said. Right now, conditions are too dangerous for Rockingham County Fire Marshal Anthony Crowder and other investigators to go inside. The unidentified property owners told Cates the building had stored some expensive wood and the owners are cooperating with the fire investigation, Cates said. In recent years, Tobacco Pine, LLC, a reclaimed lumber company, owned by the late Clarence Duck Evans of Rockingham County, used the stemmery building to provide high-quality, antique reclaimed wood products that add character to the home or business, while being affordable to the average American, according to one website. They had torn down most of the 63 storage sheds on the property, making a positive impact on the environment with minimally invasive deconstruction techniques and waste disposal. Although damages were heavy to the historic property, no injuries were reported. The cause of the fire is still under investigation. Cates, Crowder and other investigators were back at the fire scene early Tuesday to assess the damages and determine how best to handle demolition. REIDSVILLE The bright orange glow of a massive fire at an old tobacco warehouse here was visible for miles Monday morning. Emergency crews were called to the vacant American Tobacco Company warehouse at 125 Narrow Gauge Road just off of U.S. 29, around 4 a.m. after residents and employees of Norfolk Southern Railroad Co. reported the fire, a Rockingham County spokesperson said in a news release. Rockingham County Emergency Services Director Rodney Cates said during an afternoon news conference that the mostly brick and metal building ignited and that wood stored inside helped carry flames across the span of the large structure. Firefighters were able to contain the blaze within a few hours, though emergency workers were forced to close a span of U.S. 29 near the scene during the early morning. No injuries were reported and officials have not yet determined the cause of the blaze, said Cates, who coordinated getting crews to the scene and stayed in touch with the National Weather Service station in Blacksburg, Va., to prepare firefighters for the strength and direction of the day's winds, according to the release. This fire could have been deadly if we didnt have the countywide effort we saw today,'' Cates said, praising paid and volunteer emergency workers who turned out in firetrucks and ambulances from across the county. "Their service, both today and every day, should be commemorated ... it really shows the camaraderie between stations and crews across the county and beyond the Rockingham County border. I cannot thank them enough for their efforts today.'' On Monday evening, firefighters were still at the scene monitoring for hot spots reignition of fire in the rubble, according to the release. Once home to a thriving cigarette manufacturing industry, Reidsville had several local warehouses some still standing around the edge of town where they were the scene of sing-song auctioning of golden leaf tobacco. Farmers brought in massive bundles of cured tobacco each fall and buyers paced the warehouses, inspecting the leaves before buying. The sheds just north of the town were used to store the tobacco after it was bought at warehouses. The American Tobacco Co. stored millions of pounds of cured tobacco in the gigantic sheds until they transferred it to their plants to be made into Lucky Strikes and Pall Mall cigarettes. Ann Fish contributed to this report. Jim Kitchen, a UNC-Chapel Hill business professor and entrepreneur, will have to wait a little longer to add astronaut to his resume with his trip to space as part of the crew of Blue Origins latest New Shepard mission delayed again. The operations team moved the launch from Tuesday to Thursday this week due to forecasted high winds during launch and recovery operations. The team has completed the Flight Readiness Review, the astronauts are finishing their training and the vehicle is ready to fly once the weather improves. Kitchen, 57, and the other five passengers will buckle themselves into the rocket ship, lift off from a launch site in the west Texas desert and travel about 60 miles above the earth. Luckily, they wont be responsible for piloting the roughly 10-minute spaceflight because its an autonomous vehicle. (The trip no longer includes Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson as a passenger.) At 2,300 mph with the g-forces, I think that will be exhilarating enough, Kitchen said. I dont need them to be relying on me to push buttons. So how did this UNC-CH professor get this opportunity to achieve his lifelong dream without having decades of experience training with NASA? Kitchen filled out an application with Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos space travel company, and booked his ticket. Hes not allowed to disclose how much it cost, but said it will be worth every penny. He also had to clear it with his wife, Susan. But he took care of that 25 years ago in a prenuptial agreement she signed before their wedding day, agreeing to support him if he ever got the chance to go to space. At the time, she laughed and kind of threw her hands up saying, Yeah, as if that will ever happen, Kitchen said. Its happening. Now that its become a reality, Susan Kitchen will be watching the launch with their kids and other crew members families and friends a couple of miles away from the launch site. Heres what else you need to know about Kitchen and his trip to outer space. How are the astronauts preparing? Each crew member went through four days of intensive training at the launch facility, Kitchen explained. They stayed in the astronaut village with their spouses leading up to the big day. In a highly secure facility, they were introduced to the rocket, launch vehicle and the capsule, where theyll be seated for the space flight. While on board, theyll travel more than three times the speed of sound to pass the Karman Line, which is the official international borderline between Earths atmosphere and outer space. Theyll float weightless for several minutes and gaze out at Earth from a unique vantage point before descending gently under parachutes, according to Blue Origin. The crew learned safety protocols, what different kinds of noises mean and what to expect from g-forces on the way up and down. They also went through multiple simulations, walking through the entire launch sequence so they know exactly what to do. By the time they launch, the process will feel familiar, but this time its for real, Kitchen said. This mission is the 20th spaceflight for the New Shepard program and the fourth to include human passengers. Having traveled to dozens of countries on the state departments do not travel list, Kitchen said he has a certain amount of tolerance for adventure and this is just a component of that. What can you bring on the spaceflight? Kitchen is bringing a photo of his family and a mix of sentimental and novelty items. Passports and flags: Kitchen is bringing 10 passports that have stamps from his travels to all 193 countries. This trip will mark his 194th stamp, he said. Hell have a special flag to represent that feat. During the flight, Kitchen hopes to be able to open one of the passports to the page with his Ukraine stamps to pay homage to the Ukrainian people who are under attack by Russia. Hes also bringing small Ukrainian flags to show support.Stickers: Kitchen printed stickers to give to past and future students. One says This sticker flew in space and another one says My professor went to space and all I got was this lousy sticker. Space brochure: Kitchen started a marketing company as an undergraduate student at UNC-CH in 1985 promoting space trips. It was an ambitious venture that never took off, but he kept a brochure for the company as a memento of inspiration that one day hed travel to space. Hes bringing a copy of the front of that brochure with him for sentimental value and physical reminder that hes fulfilling a lifelong dream.Postcards: Each astronaut will also carry a postcard to space on behalf of Blue Origins foundation, Club for the Future, which aims to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM, according to the company. How to watch the space flight Live launch coverage begins on BlueOrigin.com 8:20 a.m. EST. Follow Blue Origin on Twitter for more mission details. SUMMERFIELD A meeting tonight at the Summerfield Community Center will provide an opportunity for residents to review recommendations on development patterns and plans and provide feedback. The Town of Summerfield and the Piedmont Triad Regional Council (PTRC) are conducting a public feedback meeting regarding development of the towns new Land Use Plan, according to a news release from PTRC. The meeting will begin at 6 p.m. and last until 8 p.m. at the community center at 5404 Centerfield Road. Interested parties may stop in at any time during the meetings duration to speak with Summerfield town staff and PTRC planners "in what will be a casual, open house formatted session," the news release stated. The PTRC is a voluntary association of local governments urban and rural authorized by state law to: Make and implement joint regional decisions; Provide management, planning and technical services to local governments; Identify and solve short and long-term problems best addressed at the regional level; Bring together local elected officials on a regular basis, giving them an opportunity to form working relationships: Promote regional issues and cooperation among members. The PTRC is one of 16 regional councils in North Carolina and serves 75 member governments in a 12 county area. The former McDonalds Cafeteria called one of the most important spaces for Charlottes Black community in the 1970s is now officially a historic landmark. The City Council voted unanimously Monday night in support of the landmark status. Malcolm Graham, the city councilman whose district includes the site, said the designation goes toward what the city is trying to do along the stretch of road in the west part of Charlotte. Which is to make sure that individuals are part of the change and not victims of it, Graham said at a public hearing. But more importantly to protect the heritage, the history and the tradition of the corridor. While the designation doesnt protect the building against demolition, it does mean the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission has design review authority over the property and must approve any material alterations. The designation also can signal to the wider community the importance of the site, especially in a fast-growing city like Charlotte where new growth has been known to replace old structures. A must-see and visit Black entrepreneur and Charlotte native John McDonald first started the cafeteria in 1970 at 2023 Beatties Ford Road. He opened the cafeteria and mini center with a number of other small businesses, using his own capital to provide commercial space at reasonable rates to Black managers, according to a report from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission. McDonalds space quickly grew in popularity, and by 1982 he moved it up Beatties Ford Road for more seating and space. The site became the meeting place for the Black political caucus and hosted the Tuesday Morning Breakfast Forum, which met to discuss issues important to the Black community. That cafeteria was the heart of our community, Elloree Erwin, a longtime Charlotte resident, told the Observer in a recent interview. Everybody met there. By 1992, McDonald was expanding yet again. He opened a hotel and amusement park called Fun City. His cafeteria became a must-see and visit place in Charlotte, widely regarded as the most popular, non-chain restaurant in the city, the commission says in its report. Cafeteria joins hundreds of historic properties Local developer Christopher Dennis bought the building a couple of years ago with an eye toward redevelopment. Dennis, who runs E-Fix Development Corp., considered tearing down the older building. But after learning about McDonalds impact on the community, decided against it. A JP Morgan Chase bank now sits inside the site. With Mondays approval, the cafeteria building will join at least 358 other properties around Mecklenburg County that have received landmark designation status. One local landmark building is the Excelsior Club at 921 Beatties Ford Road. The club is among a number of African American properties where preservation efforts are underway. A property owner can still decide to tear down the building, and, by law, the Historic Landmarks Commission cant deny that application. But it has the power to delay the decision for up to a year to find an alternative. By Trend Turkey expects the meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul will benefit the negotiation process and is ready to organize a meeting between the presidents of the two countries Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said while addressing the participants of the delegations in Dolmabahce Palace, Trend reports with reference to TASS. Welcome to Turkey and our Istanbul, the president said. We are happy to receive you at such a hard period, you have made great efforts on behalf of your countries. As your friend and neighbor, we are concerned about the conflict [in Ukraine]. Since the beginning of the crisis, we have made sincere efforts at all levels and tried to fulfill the requirements of friendship, good neighborliness and laws, President Erdogan added. We have demonstrated a fair approach that protects and respects the rights of both sides on all platforms in which we are entitled to express an opinion. The Turkish leader expressed hope that in case of progress at the meeting in Istanbul, the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine may reach the next stage. The progress that you will achieve in the negotiations will also allow passing to the next stage, namely, the meeting at the level of leaders, the president added. We are also ready to hold such a meeting. President Erdogan said that Turkey, which is a neighbor and friend of Russia and Ukraine, is greatly concerned about the situation in Ukraine. While appealing to the Russian and Ukrainian delegations, the Turkish leader called for a ceasefire. RALEIGH VinFast, a nascent automotive company from Vietnam, will build a multibillion-dollar production facility in the Raleigh-Durham area for its new line of electric vehicles, state officials confirmed on Tuesday. The startup automaker will build a manufacturing plant at Triangle Innovation Point, a 2,150-acre megasite in rural Moncure. The unincorporated community in Chatham County is a 30-minute drive south from downtown Raleigh. At a meeting of the states economic investment committee on Tuesday, officials said VinFast planned to build 200,000 or more vehicles a year at the plant. The site will eventually produce battery packs, as well. The facility is expected to employ 7,500 workers by 2027. The jobs will have a minimum wage of $51,096. If VinFast meets hiring goals, the company will get a state incentives package worth $854 million over 32 years. Chatham County will chip in another $400 million. Mike Walden, an economics professor at N.C. State, estimates VinFast will contribute $71.6 billion to North Carolinas gross domestic product from the start of the states grant term until its conclusion in 2055. Net state revenue will total an estimated $597 million, according to Walden. VinFast launched its first line of vehicles gasoline-powered cars with BMW-licensed engines in 2019. So far, the company has only operated in Vietnam. The automaker is headed by Pham Nhat Vuong, a Vietnamese billionaire who founded VinFast in 2017. Vuong announced in late 2020 that he would back the companys global ambitions with $2 billion of his personal fortune, according to Bloomberg. Last year, VinFast announced it would headquarter U.S. operations from Los Angeles, but had not secured a location for its North American production facility. After a poor sales year, VinFast said in January it would cease production of gas-powered autos by the end of 2022, prioritizing a new line of electric SUVs. The company reportedly lost more than $1 billion on its gasoline vehicles in 2021. VinFast is the second fledgling company to secure ambitious investments from North Carolina in the last few months. In February, the state and Guilford County approved an incentive package worth $121.5 million for Boom Supersonic, an aviation startup with plans to revive supersonic passenger travel. The company has yet to build its hallmark product, the Overture jet: a 205-foot passenger plane that is supposed to be able to travel at more than 1,300 mph faster than the speed of sound and twice the speed of todays fastest airliners. Boom Supersonic is building a $500 million flagship production facility at Greensboros Piedmont Triad International Airport that will employ up to 1,761 workers earning an average salary of $68,792 per year. Chatham County economic developers and state legislators have worked doggedly to secure a tenant for Triangle Innovation Point, North Carolinas largest megasite, since missing out on recruiting Micron, a prominent producer of semiconductors, in January. The megasites proximity to the Research Triangle about a 30-minute drive by car and its robust infrastructure positioned the site as a leading contender for a large-scale operation. " " How worried should you be about that lingering pain you've been having? Sally Anscombe/Getty Images Most of us have experienced random, mysterious and sometimes lingering pain at some point in our lives. Some of shrug it off. And if we're lucky, the pain leaves the same way it arrived on its own and without explanation. These pains aren't so different from the strange sounds your automobile makes from time to time. Something clicks, whirrs or squeals, and then the noise vanishes as quickly as it arrived. If you're not mechanically inclined, you think nothing more of it. Advertisement However, just like your car, your body's aches and pains often get worse over time, or they signal a much larger underlying problem. In these cases, ignoring the warning signs could be at our own peril. While not every pain you feel isn't indicative of an emergency, there are other mysterious pains you simply shouldn't ignore. Which ones? Keep reading to find out. The Montana VA Health Care Systems Fort Harrison VA Medical Center received a 5-Star Patient Experience rating from Beckers Healthcare, officials said, adding it was the only hospital in Montana to receive the high score. Beckers Healthcare Hospital Review is a list of the best hospitals for patient experience nationwide using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). The rating is based on 10 topic-specific HCAHPS measures and combines information about different aspects of patient experience of care to make it easier to compare hospitals. For us to be the only hospital in the state of Montana to receive a five star from Beckers hospital review is quite an achievement, Dr. Judy Hayman, Montana VA executive director, said. The survey is administered throughout the year to random patients in the medical, surgical or maternity service lines after discharge. Patients are questioned in 10 areas of patient experiences including nurse communication, responsiveness of hospital staff, communication about medications, cleanliness of the hospital and their willingness to recommend that hospital to others. The rating is to help patients to look at the quality of their health care and to compare hospitals. Hayman said it is an independent review in which Veterans Administration and private sector hospitals are measured on the same metrics. She said the score was based on the veterans' rating of their experience with the hospital. Our No. 1 goal is patient safety, but certainly a priority for us is the veterans' experience and the care they receive from us, Hayman said. When they are not only satisfied, but extremely satisfied with the care we deliver, it is probably the best thing our staff could hear is to hear directly from our veterans." Miranda Garding, the veterans experience officer, said what makes the VA different than the private sector is that they have three patient advocates, who are assigned to help with the experience of the patients and work with the services to handle concerns or disagreements. Garding said the VA sends out surveys within six weeks of someone being discharged from the hospital. She said they received a lot of compliments about providers and nurses and the overall care they get. Hayman said nearly one-third of the 1,400-member staff are veterans and many get their health care at Fort Harrison. They have a stake in the care we provide, she said. They are very committed. Garding said the office staff also rated high in the VA survey, usually in the high 80th or 90th percentile, and 89% of the veterans that get health care trust the Montana VA. The new ratings come after some improvements on the Fort Harrison campus. In April, the Montana VA Health Care System opened a $12 million, 20,000-square-foot state-of-the-art primary care clinic, where veterans will remain in a single appointment room and each provider will come to them in a one stop shop approach. Hayman said this probably has helped with improving the ratings, saying that building a space designed for the primary care team has improved the experience and made it much more convenient for veterans. Hayman said Montana VA was going to open its seventh new clinic in the past 1 1/2 years. It recently opened a new facility in Bozeman and plans to open one in Butte on April 29. She said most of these projects were in the works for several years. Montana probably had a higher percentage of older clinics and the new clinics represent a $150-$200 million investment. Hayman said they are moving toward building a new mental health facility at Fort Harrison, and that should be awarded this year. The Becker's review is at https://bit.ly/3qHR4m2. Assistant editor Phil Drake can be reached at 406-231-9021. Love 3 Funny 0 Wow 2 Sad 2 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Editor's note: The Helena Independent Record has been receiving daily emails from Valerie Hellermann of Helena, who is executive director with Hands On Global and now helping Ukrainian refugees. She is among the members of Hands on Global who traveled to Siret, Romania, on the Ukraine-Romania border, to establish a medical relief team for those fleeing the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Portions of this email have been edited for clarity. Today we went to a small village outside (Chernivtsi), there are many refugees there. We worked in a very small hospital/clinic and saw over 75 patients. The highlight was meeting a young boy, 5 1/2 years old, with a congenital heart condition. He had cyanosis lips and diaphoretic on exertion. Our doctor examined him and heard a very loud murmur. His parents said he was scheduled to have surgery in Kyiv. Of course, now with the war, it is not going to happen and probably not for a very long time. So we had a quick team meeting and decided we could help the family go to Norway for surgery as they have an open door now for Ukrainian refugees and excellent free health care. Lina is working on the arrangements. We discussed this option with the family and told them we would take them with us across the border into Romania. They were ready with their three kids in two hours. Already refugees from their home town, there was not much to (get) ready. We were concerned that the father who is in his late 30s would not able to leave Ukraine. There is a mandate that men between the ages of 18 thru 60 cannot leave the country. They must remain and fight. So we had a plan and brought them to the border with us and all the medical documents. Khalil, one of our doctors, and Oleg, our translator, handled the border control and after a long wait (they) allowed us to all cross. We were so relieved, we were all in tears. Then we called Refugee4refugees and arranged a safe room for the family in their transit center. Now phone calls to Norway... Valerie Hellermann Executive director Hands On Global Love 5 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Deadline nears for Smith River super permit Those who were unlucky in the Smith River permit draw for the 2022 float season have another chance to score a river trip. In addition to the regular private float trip permits, Fish, Wildlife & Parks issues one Super Permit each year through a separate lottery. The recipient of the Super Permit is allowed to launch on any date of their choosing for the year. Floaters can purchase as many $5 Super Permit chances as they choose, but only one Super Permit is awarded. The opportunity to purchase chances for the Smith River Super Permit ends April 1, and the winner will be announced April 4. Chances may be purchased online through the FWP Online Licenses Service. Friday deadline to apply for deer and elk permits Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks reminds hunters that the deadline to apply for deer and elk licenses for nonresidents and deer and elk permits for everyone is April 1. Hunters who are applying for special licenses and permits need to have a valid email address. Hunters can apply for permits on the FWP website; click on Buy and Apply. Most FWP offices will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. This spring Fish, Wildlife & Parks launched the new MyFWP mobile app that stores and displays licenses, permits, and digital carcass tags, known as E-Tags, which can be used in the field without cellular service. To use the app, hunters and anglers will need a MyFWP account, which is a secure and convenient digital profile that stores licenses, permits and related information. To create a new account, visit fwp.mt.gov. Users need to make sure to link their ALS number to the MyFWP account to ensure their hunting and fishing licenses are attached to their MyFWP account. Hunters will also still have the option to print copies of licenses they purchase online or at FWP offices. The FWP licensing call center will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. through April 1; after April 1, the hours will return to 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The call center is at 406-444-2950. Those who apply for a special license or permit need to have a valid email address. FWP advisory committee to review trail grant funds The Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks State Trails Advisory Committee meets 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. April 7 to review trail grant applications and make recommendations to the department on how the funds should be allocated in 2022. The group will meet in person, with a virtual option, in the Montana Room at the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation building in Helena, at 1539 11th Ave. The meeting is open to public and public comment will be taken before lunch and at the end of the agenda. The panel advises FWP on trail issues in Montana, including funding, use, and the promotion of recreational trails across land ownership. The group is made up of 10 members, seven of which are new. Returning members are Robert Long, Polson; Alice Santos, Helena; and Mark Smolen, Bigfork. New members are Kristi Drake, Billings; Julie Riley, Volborg; Madelon Martin, Eureka; Mike Patterson, Butte; Virginia Sullivan, Missoula; Bob Walker, Clancy; and Brenda Maas, Billings. Primary on the agenda will be reviewing Montana Trail Stewardship Grant applications and making allocation recommendations to the FWP. This year 34 eligible applications were submitted seeking about $1,575,000 in funds. The amount of funding available for this grant cycle is $1,037,000. Trails are critical infrastructure for recreation in Montana based on recent research that found trails were the No. 1 amenity residents want in our state parks, FWPs Parks and Outdoor Recreation division administrator Hope Stockwell said in a news release. Here's some rules for shed-antler hunters With warmer temperatures and snow quickly disappearing, shed-antler hunters are anxious to get into the field. Buck deer and bull elk and moose grow antlers each year, which drop off to regrow each spring. Hunting for and collecting these "shed" antlers in spring has become a popular activity. Many of Montanas wildlife management areas (WMAs) provide security to wildlife during the winter. However, shed hunters need to be aware that Montanas big game winter range WMAs are closed to public use after hunting season and do not reopen until springtime. Many WMAs open at noon on May 15. Most block management areas are closed this time of year. They are strictly for commissioned-approved hunting seasons only. Access to BMAs for any other activity requires landowner permission including shed hunting. Additionally, collecting antler sheds or other natural objects is also prohibited in Montana State Parks. To learn more about Montanas WMAs and to confirm specific opening dates the Wildlife Management Area page on FWP's website at fwp.mt.gov. 2 Madison River fishing access sites reopened A full closure of Valley Garden Fishing Access Site and a partial closure of Burnt Tree Hole Fishing Access Site have been lifted, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials said. These closures were in place due to ice jams and flooding. Conditions have improved, allowing public access to resume at these sites. Ennis Fishing Access Site is still closed. It has been inundated with ice jams and flooding for several weeks. Maintenance staff at Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks will reopen the site as soon as possible after repairs are completed. Floating on the Madison River between Burnt Tree Hole and Valley Garden fishing access sites, as well as in other areas, could still be hazardous because of unpredictable and rapidly changing conditions. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 An assault at Montana State Hospital last week triggered a review by federal investigators while the state psychiatric hospital remains under an "immediate jeopardy" status for its deficiencies uncovered in recent months. Last week the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services confirmed a female patient was assaulted by another patient at the state psychiatric facility and said the state was investigating the incident. Staff at the hospital who spoke to the Montana State News Bureau about the attack said the woman was severely injured and life-flighted to a Missoula hospital. Megan Grotzke, a spokesperson for the state health department, said Tuesday that CMS inspectors were at the hospital for a review related to the assault. Grotzke declined to comment further while the process is ongoing. The state psychiatric hospital in Warm Springs has come under the scrutiny of the federal government in recent months after inspectors found the facility's deficiencies led to patient deaths and a COVID-19 outbreak. In some cases those deficiencies were tied to the state hospital's inability to stabilize staffing, with vacancies among some positions as high as 72%. The facility has supplemented its remaining ranks with contract staff, although paying them at a much higher rate than permanent staff has contributed to the facility approaching the end of the fiscal year $7 million over budget. The patient-on-patient assault took place the evening of March 21. A CMS spokesperson said Tuesday that investigators were on-site in Warm Springs four days later. "State inspectors completed a follow-up survey of the Montana State Hospital on March 25, 2022, and CMS is currently reviewing the results of that survey," the spokesperson said. CMS was unable to provide any further information while the survey results were under review. In a statement Tuesday, Bernadette Franks-Ongoy, executive director of the federally mandated advocacy group Disability Rights Montana, called on the state to take action as news of dangerous conditions at the state hospital continue to emerge. "It is very concerning that this assault took place in what should be a safe environment for people with serious mental illness who are committed to MSH for treatment," Franks-Ongoy said in an emailed statement. People can also be voluntarily admitted with administrator approval, according to the hospital's website. "Everyone should be concerned. This is another very serious incident in a hospital that is already under immediate jeopardy and under threat of losing its certification because it does not meet the minimum standards of care. How many more people have to die or be seriously injured for the state to act?" Love 0 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 1 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Al Olszewski and Matt Monforton recently wrote a column about CI-121 (Helena IR, March 20). That initiative, to hear them tell it, will lower property taxes without laying off cops and teachers. Maybe cure acne and bring about world peace as well. Or perhaps it was whirled peas. Their argument was a little hard to follow. Al and Matt approach the tax question using numbers that not everybody would be able to find. And halfway through their column their explanation turns to crime-ridden cities and trust funds. Perplexing. Yet they hit on a real problem. Its their solution thats a bucket full of smells funny. Property taxes are climbing, for some people by a serious amount. And like Al and Matt say, the Legislature hasnt helped. Proposals have been offered, but in the last session, legislators spent their time cutting income taxes, mostly to benefit wealthy folks. That leaves property taxes to rise as the market drives taxable values higher. Another reason they climb is voters thats youkeep approving property taxes for new jails and schools and stuff. Al and Matt likely arent against democracy. However, they do seem upset voters choose to pay for teachers and cops and firemen, which is mostly what property taxes do. Now to the bucket full theyre selling. Its best summed up by their claim CI-121 will cut taxes not services. Save money now! At no loss to you! In some parallel universe, maybe. If residential taxes are capped like Al and Matt want, we could pay for schools and cops by raising property taxes on everything else. Of course, that only works if all those businesses and ranchers roll over and dont complain. What do Al and Matt think will happen? Hint: their initiative authorizes the Legislature to make similar changes for nonresidential property. But maybe they expect the Legislature to cover the missing property tax revenues. Though when Al was a senator he voted to cut state funding to local schools, which forced property taxes higher. So maybe not. Perhaps the revenue fairy is the solution? CI-121 will cut local revenue. Thats the point. Services may disappear but at least most of the savings go to people who own expensive homes. Curious fact: Al and Matt, along with Troy Downing, the cosponsor of the initiative, collectively own almost $4 million dollars worth of housing. Put it another way: When a lawyer, a surgeon, and a developer walk into a voting booth, do you immediately think, they must be here to help poor people? There is one detail city residents might like, which is how CI-121 can shift taxes from them to county residents. The logic is city tax rates are higher after all, they fund services used by the entire area meaning city residents will have their tax bill capped first. The county taxes they used to pay will slide to somebody else. Any guesses? But its not just counties and big cities that CI-121 will affect. Superior, Shelby, Lewistown, Hardin, theyre all in the crosshairs. Even Walkerville! Imagine what happens when Piszers Palace, the only bar in Walkerville, loses city services. Still, Al and Matts column is not without humor. Especially when they get nasty about rich Californians moving to Montana, bidding up housing, and bringing in values alien to ours. Youll recall that the co-sponsor of CI-121 is Troy Downing. He was a developer and tech entrepreneur who moved here from California a few years back, bought a big house south of Bozeman, and got busted for hunting license violations. If you cant laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at? Paul Cartwright is a former Helena city commissioner and old guy and homeowner in Helena who they claim will be helped by CI-121. Love 14 Funny 0 Wow 2 Sad 1 Angry 1 DECATUR Claire Peters said not that many people appreciate the atmosphere of the James Millikin Homestead or its connections to Millikin University and Decatur as a whole. When the time came for Peters, 17, to choose a project for her Girl Scout Gold Award campaign, she decided to help bring attention to the homestead by beautifying the area. Ive really only come back for the project but I love looking at the beautiful house and everything surrounding it, said Peters, a senior at MacArthur High School and member of local Girl Scout Troop 3274. I feel like it really connects the college to the community even if people dont know about it. For over a year, Peters and board members of the James Millikin Homestead have been hard at work to create a memorial, log the different kinds of trees on the property and mount a new flag pole with brick pavers. The project was first brought to the board in November 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic limiting their functions. Peters, who has been a Girl Scout for 12 years, said she first pitched her Gold Award project idea in April to replace the old flag pole but needed something extra to get it approved. She later decided on a memorial slab that will include a paragraph written by her detailing the history of the homestead and a tree log that will include identifying characteristics and details of the surrounding shrubbery. The idea of the stone slab was just to give a brief history of the home where you dont have to walk into the building or talk to anybody to learn more about what it is, Peters said. The tree log is to see if anybody, like Millikin students, would be interested in it for research purposes. The slab will be located near the driveway entrance to the homestead and the original steel gates, which were found in the basement, will be restored and put to use as a gateway entrance. Equal to earning the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts, the Gold Award is the highest honor a Girl Scout can receive. In order to earn the award, scouts must use their skills to identify a community issue they care about and lead a project that makes a lasting impact toward it. Girl Scouts change the world and this is one way that they do it, said Chloe Machula, program director of camping and events for the Girl Scouts of Central Illinois. A lot of the girls who we talked to about their project are very passionate and have a vision in getting that leadership experience because they learn lifelong skills that they can apply in whatever path they take in the future. Douglas Warren, treasurer at the James Millikin Homestead, was the first person Peters spoke to during the proposal process and has been working with her to connect with people and businesses to get the word out about the project. Ive been through every step of it and Ive enjoyed it, Warren said. I tend to be at the homestead almost every day so people get a hold of me rather than her when they have an idea or concept so Ive been very involved but its all been a labor of love. Warren said he was quite amazed when they started working on the project that people from the community were donating resources or their time to get certain aspects finished. For example, the new flag pole was donated by Millikin University and the area it occupies was excavated and filled with gravel by local residents while the memorial slab was created in limestone by Adams Memorials in Charleston for a price they could not pass up. Warren said they still need to plant bushes and flowers around the flagpole in time for the spring and will install the pavers, front gates, and memorial soon as well once the weather permits. Claire is really a sharp young lady and her parents are immensely supportive, Warren said. I want to do the right thing for the right purposes like helping someone get their business started and this has all been sort of a perfect storm in itself. Although she has seen plenty of people leave throughout her time in the Girl Scouts, Peters said she hopes to inspire younger Girl Scouts to reach the Gold Award and to not be intimidated or scared by how big a project can be or how long it will take. My troop used to be so much bigger and then its just kind of dwindled down as weve all gotten older and people didnt want to do it anymore but I want to stick with it, Peters said. Its hard because a lot of girls dont stay this long but I want to show the younger girls that they can do this. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. By Trend Kazakhstan fully supports the multifaceted activity of the CIS Assembly, President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told the participants of the anniversary meeting of the Council of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of the CIS member- states, Trend reports. The text of the presidents appeal was read out by Chairman of the Senate of the Parliament of the Republic of Kazakhstan Maulen Ashimbayev. President Tokayev reminded that a historic agreement on the establishment of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly was signed in Almaty 30 years ago. Moreover, the president emphasized that this unique institution was playing a special role in the multilateral cooperation in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) over the past years. According to the appeal, the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly makes a great contribution to the improvement of national legislation, the development of democracy and civil society. The active participation of parliamentarians in improving the practice of electoral processes in the CIS member-states and ensuring the electoral rights of our citizens are highly appreciated, the appeal said. The president added that the inter-parliamentary dialogue contributes to the expansion of cooperation in the economic, social and humanitarian spheres and makes a great contribution to the creation of a legal framework for combating modern challenges and security threats. Joint legislative work allows developing the balanced approaches to solving new problems within the current global agenda for sustainable development, decarbonization and digitalization, President Tokayev said. The president added that Kazakhstan fully supports the multifaceted activity of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly and as the country chairing the CIS and one of the founders of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, intends to contribute to the comprehensive strengthening of this unique and useful institution. DECATUR A combined sting operation involving police and postal inspectors led to the arrest of a major Decatur drug dealer who got a shipment of more than 7 pounds of cocaine through the mail, a sworn affidavit said. The 41-year-old man was arrested Monday afternoon following a police chase after officers had seen his package get delivered to an address in the 4100 block of Starlight Avenue. The affidavit said the package, mailed from Texas, had earlier been intercepted March 24 following a combined investigation by Decatur police, the Macon County Sheriffs Office and United States Postal Inspection Service. James Callaway, a Decatur police detective who signed the affidavit, said the package had been opened and the contents tested as positive for cocaine. Approximately 147 grams (5 ounces) was removed from the package and placed into an evidence bag and sealed, said Callaway. The evidence bag containing the 147 grams of cocaine was placed back into the USPS package. Also placed in the package were additional items so the box would have approximately the same weight. That was the package delivered to the Starlight Avenue address Monday afternoon. Callaway said the man drove off in a truck after collecting it and was followed to an address in the 3700 block of Northhaven Court. The detective said the man fled in his vehicle as police moved in and police didnt pursue it due to safety concerns because of heavy traffic. Callaway said police had the vehicle under surveillance, however, and officers were waiting when the man pulled into the 1600 block of East Wood Street. The driver fled on foot and was taken into custody after a brief pursuit in the 1600 block of East Johns Avenue, added Callaway. The detective said the drug box was recovered from the ground after police retraced the route of the fleeing man. Officers later executed a search warrant for the Starlight Avenue address where they discovered the man is the boyfriend of the woman who lives there. During a search of the residence, detectives located a pair of pants in the southwest bedroom which contained a wallet with debit/credit cards containing the name of (the man), Callaway said. Also in the pair of pants was $3,365 in cash. In the southwest bedroom, detectives also located a loaded handgun. The man was booked on preliminary charges of drug trafficking and possession of illegal drugs with intent to deliver. A check of Macon County Jail records Tuesday showed he remained in custody with bail set at $500,000, requiring him to post a bond of $50,000 to be released. Macon County Circuit Court records show the man was convicted of aggravated battery with a firearm in 2002 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. All preliminary charges are subject to review by the state's attorneys office. Contact Tony Reid at (217) 421-7977. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyJReid Love 0 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 2 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. New Braunfels, TX (78130) Today Some clouds this morning will give way to generally sunny skies for the afternoon. High 96F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Clear skies. Low 71F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. The Buchanan County Sheriffs Office has obtained multiple warrants for two Kentucky men involved in crimes against Hurley, Virginia, flood victims. On Friday, two men were observed at a home in the Guesses Fork area, which had been affected by flooding last summer, police said. The suspects were loading items into a vehicle from the home, according to the Sheriffs Office. As a local citizen approached the two men to inquire what they were doing, one of the two men brandished a firearm at the citizen. The two men then left the area in a vehicle, the release said. After an investigation, the two men have been charged with multiple offenses, including breaking and entering and grand larceny, police said. One of the men was charged with an additional brandishing of a firearm. The names of the two men are being withheld by the Buchanan County Sheriffs Office. Additional patrols have increased in the Guesses Fork area. The Buchanan County Sheriffs Office is currently working with Kentucky authorities in locating and arresting the men. The two are considered armed and dangerous and should not be approached, according to authorities. Residents are urged to contact the Buchanan County Sheriffs Office at 276-935-2313 if any suspicious activity is noticed in the Guesses Fork area of Hurley. BRISTOL, Va. Courts across Virginia continue catching up from restrictions initially imposed two years ago designed to limit the spread of COVID-19. Last Friday the Supreme Court of Virginia extended its declaration of judicial emergency over the COVID-19 pandemic while continuing to allow local discretion regarding mitigation strategies. The states high court first imposed emergency regulations in March 2020 when the pandemic spread into the state. At that time, many court activities were delayed or limited statewide. The orders have definitely changed over the past two years. This latest order is [allowing] the local courts, chief judges and presiding judges throughout Virginia [to] use their discretion how courts are locally responding to COVID, Bristol Virginia Circuit Court Clerk Kelly Flannagan said. Our 28th Circuit issued a new order March 17 that eliminates the need for folks entering the courthouse to wear a mask. That is a big change here in lessening the COVID-related restrictions. Masks had been required since courts resumed regular operations. Anyone who enters the courthouse locally is still subject to have their temperature taken and to be asked COVID-exposure and symptom-related questions, under the order. Weve come a long way since March 19, 2020, Flannagan said. We are not caught up. There is a backlog on our docket. We have lots of folks sitting in jail waiting for their day in court, so our jurors are playing a very important role in our community right now. Were hearing jury trials, weve got full dockets. Were doing our best to catch up. I do not feel we are there yet. Each circuit had to enter a jury trial plan that had to be approved by the Virginia Supreme Court before they could resume jury trials. The Supreme Court allowed jury trials to resume locally in February 2021, court records show. Most General District and Juvenile and Domestic Relations courts have greatly reduced their backlogs. Circuit courts are still dealing with jury trial delays, according to a report last month by the Supreme Court of Virginia to the state Senate Finance General Government Subcommittee. Statewide, Circuit courts reported disposition of 14.5% more criminal cases in 2021 compared to 2020 and 12.2% more civil cases, according to the report. The court caseload rose from 331,000 criminal and civil cases in 2020 to 331,757 combined cases in 2021. General District courts statewide reported disposition of about 1% fewer civil and criminal cases in 2021 compared to 2020, but 9.5% more traffic cases. The total caseload decreased from 2020 to 2021 by nearly 11%. Juvenile and Domestic courts reported increases of 13.7% more adult cases finalized and 7.4% more cases involving juveniles compared to the prior year, according to the report. The caseload statewide declined a combined 6.3% in 2021 compared to the prior year. I think the Supreme Court is continuing to extend this emergency because the [COVID case] numbers vary so much throughout the commonwealth. There are still some hot spots, Flannagan said. Until a few weeks ago, Southwest Virginia was one of those hot spots, with some of the highest disease transmission rates in Virginia. As of last week, most cities and counties in Southwest Virginia were classified as low or moderate for the risk of COVID transmission, according to the Virginia Department of Health. Some mitigation strategies remain in place, including social distancing. For example, 12-member juries are seated socially distanced from each other in the courtroom. Anyone seated in the gallery is required to sit socially distanced from others 6 feet apart except in the case of families, Flannagan said. In Bristol, six jurors are seated in the jury box, some are to the side, and there is a row in front. It definitely complicates the process, but it seems to be working well, Flannagan said. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Emirati developers Jubail Island Investment Company (JIIC) and Lead Development have won top recognition from Abu Dhabi City Municipality for their commitment to healthy and safety standards at their landmark Jubail Island development. The Abu Dhabi City Municipality Safety Award acknowledges the duo's outstanding performance in providing a safe working environment for all JIIC and Lead Development employees. The accolade also recognises the companies achievements in its workforce successfully completing 5.5 million man-hours for the Jubail Island development project, without Lost Time Injury (incidents that result in employees missing work due to injury). Abu Dhabi Municipality and Lead Development work together closely to monitor the construction of Jubail Island, to ensure compliance with the authority requirements and to share best practice to promote safe working environments in the capital. The leaders of NATO nations and the G-7 posed for traditional family photos during their summits in Brussels on Thursday. And unlike at previous events, the two groups did indeed seem to be cohesive families, bonded tightly over Russias invasion of Ukraine. That unity will need to endure for Ukraine to survive as a nation, for countries within the alliance to better enhance their own defenses against Russia and for democracy to survive the autocratic wave represented by Moscow and Beijing. Both meetings were a continuation and confirmation of previously announced strategies but also were enhanced by ever-stricter sanctions. This time the economic penalties include Russias rubber-stamp parliament, the Duma, and 328 specific legislators. Also sanctioned were the head of Russias Sberbank, 17 board members of Sovcombank, 48 state-owned defense entities, and Russian elite businessman Gennady Timchenko, his family and his companies. Equally important is a new initiative to prevent other nations from backfilling the Russian economy. We are determined to continue to impose costs on Russia to bring about the end of this brutal war, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said at the summit. Those costs come with a price, which the U.S. and other nations are admirably willing to pay. In just the latest example, Biden pledged $11 billion over the next five years to contend with the coming food-security challenges the war will cause, as well as $1 billion for humanitarian needs triggered by the war. The need is great in Ukraine, of course, but also in Europe, especially in front-line nations Moldova, Romania, Slovakia and Poland. Furthermore, eventually about 100,000 Ukrainian refugees will be accepted, with a particular emphasis on those who have family connections in the U.S. Although thats a sizable and generous number, its nowhere near the wave within Europe, as the deliberate targeting of civilians has created the greatest European displacement since World War II. There are even more Ukrainians displaced in their own country. Together the total tops 10 million, or about one-fourth of the population on the run from Russias wanton warfare. While the Biden administration rightly acknowledges that many Ukrainians will want to remain in Europe with family and friends and a hope of return, many will want and need to seek shelter in the U.S., which can and should accommodate even more refugees. Tragically, it may need to, since Russia seems to have accelerated its attacks on civilians while its military faces stiff resistance from Ukraine's tenacious forces. Russias relatively stalled offensive and the unquestioned willingness of Putin to put citizens in harms way raises legitimate fears that he will use chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons. Biden was careful not to get into specifics in his post-summit news conference but pledged that there indeed will be a response should Putin make that fateful error. Regarding conventional defense, Biden said in a statement that four new battle groups will be deployed to Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania in a strong signal that we will collectively defend and protect every inch of NATO territory. Ukraine, of course, is not a NATO nation. But the best way the alliance can in fact protect and defend its territory is to economically, diplomatically and militarily support Ukraine. The sequential, consequential meetings in Europe (including a late Thursday European Union meeting) this week are a constructive continuation of an effort that must be sustained during and beyond the war. Putin was banking on NATO being split, Biden said before his news conference. Thanks in part to Bidens leadership, it isnt, which benefits Ukraine and the whole free world. HICKORY The Area Agency on Aging will present a program at how to avoid scams on Monday, April 4, at 10 a.m. at Patrick Beaver Memorial Library. The presentation will be conducted by aging specialists Sarah Stamey and Ricky Handoo. It will cover topics such as assigning a power of attorney, romance scams, investment fraud, telephone and internet scams, debt collection scams, identity theft and many more. This presentation will inform older adults of scam warning signs and who to contact if you fall victim to a scam. Although the focus is on senior adults, adults of all ages are invited. This program is free, but space is limited, so advance registration is encouraged. To register call 828-304-0500 or sign up online at www.hickorync.gov/calendar/event/scam-prevention. For more information, call 828-304-0500. Patrick Beaver Memorial Library is located at 375 Third St., NE, on the SALT Block. " " "Bitter Memory of Childhood," by Ukrainian sculptor Petro Drozdovsky, stands in front of the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide in Kyiv. It is a tribute to the memory of the 3.5 million children killed by starvation during the Holodomor genocide of 19321933, as well as of those who survived, but had no childhood. Ukrainian Presidency/Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images As the world watches Russian leader Vladimir Putin's barbaric attempt to conquer Ukraine, a roughly Texas-sized nation along the Black Sea to the west of Russia, many are not aware of another brutal crime against Ukraine that happened roughly 90 years ago. Known as the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger ("holod") and extermination ("mor"), it was a time from 1932 to 1933 when millions of Ukrainians were starved to death by the regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, a figure for whom Putin has expressed admiration. "The Holodomor was a consequence of Stalin's forced collectivization policy, which was launched in 1929 with the aim of revolutionizing the countryside to convert it to what was perceived to be a better form of agriculture," according to Stephen Norris, a professor of history and director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Ukraine was seen as a place where that goal could be accomplished quickly. And to further communist ideology, Stalin's policy also aimed to eliminate "kulaks," the class of well-to-do peasant farmers that the Soviet regime saw as enemies of the people. But collective farming didn't work out well, and combined with bad weather, harvests suffered and famine began spreading across the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. But the Ukrainians, who had sought unsuccessfully to become independent after the collapse of the Russian empire before being taken over by the Bolsheviks and absorbed into the USSR in 1922, bore the brunt of the resulting famine. Stalin's regime used the famine as an opportunity to punish them. In December 1932, the regime ordered Communist party officials in Ukraine to produce more food for the rest of the USSR, even if they had to take it by force from farmers. Teams of crop-confiscating thugs were sent to roam through Ukraine and take all the grain, vegetables, and even farm animals they could find, as this report on the Holodomor compiled by a U.S. congressional commission in 1988 lays out in grisly detail. They went into farmers' homes and tore apart their stoves and even dug into the floors and surrounding outside grounds to make sure they weren't holding back anything. Anyone who was caught hiding food, or stealing it, was severely punished. Even taking a few beets from a collective farm could earn a person a seven-year prison sentence. Two young boys were beaten and suffocated for the crime of hiding fish and frogs they had caught. At the same time, Ukraine's borders were sealed to keep Ukrainians from fleeing in search of food. " " Peasants lie starving on the streets of Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1933. Library of Congress As survivors recalled in testimony to the commission, people grew so desperate that they ate leaves, weeds, old potato and beet peelings, and even killed and ate dogs and cats. Emaciated people who had grown too weak to move died in their homes and collapsed in the streets. The commission report concluded that Stalin and his inner circle knew the suffering that his government's policies were causing. It didn't matter. "Crushing the Ukrainian peasantry made it possible for Stalin to curtail Ukrainian national self-assertion," the commission report noted. According to Norris, the Stalin regime's decree also contained other measures to subjugate Ukraine, such as ordering local officials to stop using the Ukrainian language, so that "the crisis of collectivization became specifically directed at Ukrainians and at Ukrainian nationhood." Advertisement Hiding the Famine From the World But hardly anyone in the outside world knew of the horror that was being inflicted upon Ukraine, in part because Western foreign correspondents generally didn't want to run afoul of Stalin and risk being kicked out of the Soviet Union, as historian Anne Applebaum wrote in this 2017 Atlantic article. The New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his coverage, relied upon Stalin's regime as his primary source of information, and actually insisted in March 1933 that there was no famine (The New York Times has since repudiated his reporting). Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who saw the deprivation firsthand by taking an unauthorized walking tour of Ukraine in 1933, actually was derided by his peers for trying to make the terrible truth known. The famine was a forbidden subject in the Soviet Union, which suppressed its own 1937 census and arrested and executed officials who had organized it, in an effort to conceal the massive loss of life. " " Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attends a ceremony to commemorate victims of the Holodomor tragedy, in Kyiv, Ukraine in 2020. Less than two years later, he is fighting Russian aggression for the life of his country. Ukranian Presidency/Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images But the Ukrainians refused to forget, and after Ukraine became an independent nation in 1991, their voices got louder. In 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament voted to declare the Holodomor a genocide against the Ukrainian people and, in 2008, the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide opened in Kyiv. "The Museum is a memorial and educational site and certainly its existence along with the 2006 vote has formed an important component of Ukrainian nationhood over the last 15 years and how Ukrainians view Russia," Norris explains in an email. Advertisement Russian Denial of Genocide Ukrainians' insistence that the Holodomor be seen as genocide hasn't gone over well in Russia, where scholars and news commentators have questioned whether it even occurred at all. More importantly, their interpretation of it as a formative event in their national history clashes with Putin's view, expressed in a speech Feb. 21, 2022, that Ukraine isn't even a country, and that Ukrainians' sense of nationhood is built "on the denial of everything that unites us." But that sort of talk and Russian denialism about the Holodomor has only added insult to the injury inflicted by the brutality of the 2022 Russian attack. "Although it is hard to know this without actual research, we have good reasons to believe that the schism between Russia and Ukraine that the Holodomor incited is one factor why the resistance in the current war is so fierce," Arturas Rozenas, an associate professor of politics at New York University, says in an email. "I do not believe it is the actual memory of the Holodomor that is driving this, but rather the more abstract sense of tragedy that a subjugation by Russia represents for Ukraine." " " A woman places a family photo at the monument to victims of the Holodomor in Kyiv. Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images "Ukraine's experience in the 20th century was extraordinarily traumatic, and much of that tragic history was caused by invading armies and the totalitarian regimes that followed in their wake," Trevor Erlacher says via email. He's an historian and author specializing in modern Ukraine and an academic adviser at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies. "The Holodomor is certainly a part of that memory of national suffering, but so are World War II, the Holocaust, forced migrations, the Gulag and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster." "In view of this history, Ukrainians are fighting like hell because defeat or capitulation would mean inviting the horrors of the 20th century into the present," Erlacher says. "They view their defense against the Russian onslaught as a struggle for their survival as a people. They understand Putin's neocolonial war as an act of genocide against them, and with good reason. The sense that everything is on the line, that there is no possibility of compromise, derives from the Ukrainian experience of domination by Moscow, which has led to famine, terror, despotism and the marginalization of their national culture." That may be why after the onslaught of 2022, Ukrainians are still fighting back, and have surprised the world with their courage and resourcefulness. Now That's Chilling One Holodomor survivor told the congressional commission in the late 1980s that Americans struggled to understand the brutality of the Ukrainian famine caused by Stalin, and incorrectly compared it to the Great Depression in the U.S. "They will say, 'Oh yes, we had hunger too our people had to look in trash cans for a rotten apple,'" he explained. "I say, trash cans? We didn't know what trash cans means. Nothing was thrown in trash cans in our country." " " Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh are seen on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, London, waving to the crowd shortly after their wedding at Westminster Abbey Nov. 20, 1947. Their marriage united the royal houses of Britain, Greece and Denmark. Central Press/Getty Images In November 1947, a dynastic union was forged between the royal houses of Greece and Great Britain. It would be one of the last of this kind of royal marriages in history a type of union that had knitted together the continent for 1,000 years. When Philip, prince of Greece and Denmark married Elizabeth, princess of Great Britain, they reconnected two bloodlines descended from Queen Victoria. But they also renewed a kinship tie between Britain and Denmark that had been joined together numerous times, from Canute and Aelfgifu in 1015 to Edward VII and Alexandra in 1863. For centuries, almost every European monarchy maintained diplomatic relationships with its neighbors through dynastic marriages, in a system that persisted all the way up to the 1930s, then rapidly faded away in the postwar era. In stark contrast, before the second world war this practice was the absolute norm particularly seen in the dense web of intermarriages between the royal families of Sweden, Denmark and Norway in the earlier decades of the 20th century. One of the great dreams of Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert themselves the product of close dynastic union, as first cousins was to unite the continent of Europe through kinship relations, hoping that close cousins would be less likely to go to war with one another. This proved to be politically naive disastrously so. The Great War that followed not long after Victoria's death pitted the forces of "Cousin Nicky" (Tsar Nicholas of Russia) and "Cousin Georgie" (King George V of Great Britain) against those of "Cousin Willy" (Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany), close kinship notwithstanding. By 1914, Britain, Russia and Germany had evolved as nation states, with modern governments, beyond the control of princely dynasticism as a political or diplomatic force. Prince Philip's marriage to Princess Elizabeth in 1947 thus represented one of the last iterations of this Queen Victoria's dream. It reunited two of her descendants: Elizabeth through her father's line, and Philip through the line of his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, a great-granddaughter of Victoria. Indeed, in the previous decade, three of Philip's four sisters had married other descendants of Victoria. But in 1947, times had changed and postwar Britain was not so keen to see the heir to the throne married to a foreign royal. Particularly not one whose sisters had married prominent German officers and whose family had an extremely fragile position on its throne in Greece, with a dynastic history full of abdications, military coups and plebiscites. Prince Philip was therefore "rebranded" before his marriage as Philip Mountbatten, lieutenant in the Royal Navy, naturalised British subject. But where did the name Mountbatten come from? And why before he changed his name was he called "Prince of Greece and Denmark"? " " Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip marked their 60th wedding anniversary at Broadlands in Hampshire, the former home of Prince Philip's uncle, Earl Mountbatten. Tim Graham/Getty Images Advertisement Community of Nations It is an important question for understanding the identity of the Duke of Edinburgh and by extension, the identity of the British royal family and even Britain's position within the wider European Community of nations. It is all very intertwined. Philip himself said in an interview in 2014: If anything, I've thought of myself as Scandinavian. Particularly, Danish. We spoke English at home ... The others learned Greek. I could understand a certain amount of it. But then the (conversation) would go into French. Then it went into German, on occasion, because we had German cousins. If you couldn't think of a word in one language, you tended to go off in another. His experience is a perfect expression of the extraordinary cosmopolitan environment of the royal courts of Europe a century ago, when royal princes in Prussia and Russia almost always had English nannies, and adults conversed in polished French. Queen Elizabeth II is the product of this same nursery environment and also has very good French. But why would a Greek prince consider himself Scandinavian? In the mid-19th century, when the crumbling Ottoman Empire was giving birth to newly independent states such as Bulgaria and Greece, the Great Powers of Europe determined that it was in the best interests of stability in the region to select junior members of the major royal dynasties to found new monarchies. Greece, independent since 1832, had first been governed by a Bavarian prince, Otto, but in 1863, he was deposed and the 17-year-old Prince William of Denmark chosen instead. " " The marriage of Prince George, Duke of Kent to Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark, 1934. Seated at the front are Princess Elizabeth (left) and Lady Mary Cambridge of Prince George (right). Photo12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images Advertisement Ancient Royal Dynasties Denmark's ruling family, the House of Oldenburg, one of the oldest in Europe, was known for its liberal views, and it was hoped that a young prince from such a family would help the Greeks establish a democratic monarchy along the lines of Denmark, or its closely related ally, England. The reign of Prince William, as King George I of Greece, was long and fairly calm. His son, Constantine I, was another matter, and after a disastrous war with Turkey (1919-1922) he was forced to abdicate. His younger brother, Prince Andrew, had fought in the war, and was sent into exile, along with his infant son, Prince Philip. Philip was thus raised as an exile, first in Paris, then in England, where he boarded at Cheam School in Hampshire. He began a career in the British navy in 1939, served with distinction during WWII, then retired from active service once his wife became the Queen in 1952. He had been naturalized as a British subject in the summer of 1947, a few months before his wedding, and assumed a version of his mother's name, Battenberg itself anglicized to Mountbatten at the height of anti-German sentiment in England in 1917. The Battenbergs were also from an ancient ruling family, the House of Hesse, territorial princes in the heart of Germany since the 13th century. Philip wasn't alone in representing the Greek royal family in Britain: a decade before, his cousin Princess Marina had married the youngest son of George V, the Duke of Kent, and had charmed the nation with her elegance and cosmopolitan style. Philip was firmly tied to the UK through his uncle, Earl Mountbatten, a British naval hero during the war but, at the same time, he remained closely linked to the old continental system. One of his aunts, Mountbatten's sister, was Queen Louise of Sweden. Louise Mountbatten died in 1965, and Marina of Greece in 1968 and, by the 1970s, royal marriages were seen as affairs of the heart, not affairs of state or indeed as points of reunion and reconnection for these ancient royal dynasties. With the passing of the Duke of Edinburgh, one of the last representatives of a system that had endured for a millennium passes into history. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. You can find the original article here. Jonathan Spangler is a senior lecturer in history at Manchester Metropolitan University. Where does high production fit into our world, a world that requires sustainability for us to be able to keep going, to support whats true, legal, and/or valid? That question was posed by veterinarian Mark Hardesty during the March Hoards Dairyman monthly webinar. Hardesty, a co-owner of the Maria Stein Animal Clinic in Maria Stein, Ohio, discussed factors that go into optimizing milk production. He shared the following diagram with three circles representing environmental stewardship, social responsibility, and economics. Hardesty pointed out that high milk production falls in the middle of those three circles. Our social responsibility is taking good care of our cows, Hardesty said. Environmental stewardship means using fewer resources and making more milk per unit. He continued, Then, we have to make money, or we wont stay in business. That is where it all intersects. It keeps our farm going. To support high milk production, Hardesty said major contributors are nutrition, genetics, and cow comfort. If we get those three things in order, it should result in high production, unless we mess it up somehow, he said. Hardesty said mastitis issues that dont get under control or a lack of cow comfort are two issues that impede production. A lack of reproductive efficiency is another cause. The whole goal of a reproduction program is to bring cows back in as fresh cows because the first 100 days in milk are when the most profit is generated, Hardesty explained. Fresh cow health is also a big part of that. Fresh cow health translates into better reproduction down the road and directly into high production, because we have to get those cows off to a good start, he said. Fresh cow health starts with a stress-free calving system, which results in better quality replacements and better fresh cow health. Of course, nutrition contributes as well, Hardesty noted. Also, genetics directly impact high production, but they also impact replacement quality. The series of interactions that take place on a farm are significant, he said. People ask what is most important for high production; its all important. All those details add up, Hardesty stated. When we start to get to certain levels of milk production, we start to look for better things in other areas. Also presenting during the webinar was Alex Neuenschwander, co-owner and on-site manager for Neu-Hope Dairy near Bluffton, Ind. Their farm works closely with Hardesty to maintain high milk and component production. On our farm, we make sure we have all these areas covered. We work closely in systems and in teams, Neuenschwander explained. If we dont have the correct systems in place, we work with our veterinarian to put the correct systems in place, and our people have to implement the systems to make sure we are achieving all our goals. To learn more about Neu-Hope Dairy and hear additional advice from Hardesty and Neuenschwander, please watch our March Hoards Dairyman webinar, The details add up to high production. To comment, email your remarks to intel@hoards.com. (c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2022 March 24, 2022 The herd at Neu-Hope Dairy near Bluffton, Ind., averages 94 pounds of milk per cow per day. While maintaining a high level of milk production is always a goal, the farms co-owner, Alex Neuenschwander, said what is more important to him right now is the herds 7.24 pounds of combined fat and protein per cow. For the last several years, we are only getting paid for solids in our market, Neuenschwander explained during the March Hoards Dairyman webinar. Pounds of milk starts to get less important, and pounds of solids get considerably more important. We really focused on raising the fat and protein, something we have been trying to do the last several years through genetics and the way we feed as well. Neuenschwander is a fourth-generation farmer who owns the 950-cow dairy with his brother, Kip. When it comes to production, feed was the first area Neuenschwander covered in his presentation. Nutrition is paramount to having good production, he stated. If we dont have good feed, we wont make much milk. The Neuenschwanders grow corn for silage and low lignin varieties of alfalfa with high digestibility. They also harvest fescue, which Neuenschwander said is a highly digestible fiber option that promotes rumen fill and good rumen health. High-quality forage makes milk production a lot easier, he said. They mix five different cow rations daily. Our goal is to match the feed to the cow, especially in this current climate of high feed prices, Neuenschwander explained. The milk price is good right now, but we want to make every cent we can, so we try to match the ration with the cows production level. Cows receive fresh, clean feed every day. Feed is pushed up every one to two hours during the day, and at night, Neuenschwander said feed is pushed up every 45 minutes. Someone is constantly making sure feed is distributed through the entire bunk of every pen, he explained. They had tried using an automated feed pusher but found a skid steer and blade worked more successfully in their system. The farms veterinarian, Mark Hardesty of the Maria Stein Animal Clinic in Maria Stein, Ohio, added a few more thoughts about nutrition during the webinar. Water is the first limiting nutrient of milk production, he shared. At Neu-Hope Dairy, water is available. When cows leave the double-12 parlor, there is room for 12 cows to line up at waterers and take a big drink before they return to the freestall barn. Hardesty noted that waterers should be scrubbed clean on a regular basis to keep that water fresh and healthy for cows to drink. To learn more about Neu-Hope Dairy and hear additional advice from Neuenschwander and Hardesty, please watch our March Hoards Dairyman webinar, The details add up to high production. To comment, email your remarks to intel@hoards.com. (c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2022 March 28, 2022 With recent surveys suggesting that only a minority of IT workers intend to stay with their current employer, convincing valued workers to stay on is testing the effectiveness of recent hiring strategies and forcing employers to double down on their best attributes. For companies that weathered the past two years well, finding the right staff has often required executives to think differently with many eschewing outside talent searches to focus on convincing skilled technical staff to consider new opportunities. Weve been fortunate over the past two to three years that our level of attrition has been very, very low, Eshan Dissayanake, head of digital security with Coles Group, said during a recent roundtable discussion about skills development and retention. Its really our focus now to make sure people are engaged and for the first time, Ive started to see people move around where they are actually getting out of corporate and moving into education. They are coming to the stage of their career and life where they want to move away a little bit from the day-to-day stress of dealing with yet another crisis, he said, to using their skill sets and their knowledge to go and teach people about cyber and help them grow that capability. A casual corridor conversation with one former developer, an incident management and support team member, for example, led Dissayanake to encourage her to apply for a new executive role heading the companys cyber defence centre. She interviewed well, joined my team, and Im extremely proud of that achievement because she has made a huge difference, he said. She has brought that outside-looking-in perspective, and not only on security. Shes found all these processes that we could improve, because she worked in our development and support areas and looked at all the other aspects that make the team efficient. Taking a human-centric approach A new Gartner survey found that IT workers are 10.2 per cent more likely to quit their jobs than those in other functions with 23.6 per cent of Australia and New Zealand workers saying they were going to stay, well behind the 38.8 per cent in Europe and 29.1 per cent global average. That was a slight improvement from other recent figures but still poses a challenge for IT executives fighting to keep valued staff. Retention strategies have been front-of-mind at digital solutions developer Kablamo for years, with business development manager Clare Burrows among the innovators that were lured to the company with the promise of a flexible zero-hours contract. Years later, she says, Kablamo has continued to grow on the back of a recruitment mindset that is focused as much on fit with company culture as it is on technical skills. The market is so challenging to hire at the moment, Burrows said, noting that the company has been bypassing conventional recruiters and instead focusing on reaching out through existing employees networks. When youve got amazing technical leads within your own business, it attracts people to come work with us, Burrows told Information Age. Youve got this automatic vouching for the credibility of that person. Interviews canvas not only technical skills but characteristics like making sure that theyre interested in developing themselves technically, and that theyre happy to work across multiple types of projects. Sometimes you find technical people only want to work on certain types of projects, but that doesnt really work in this organisation. We make sure theyre going to be on the same page, and the way we like to do things as a business and flexibility from there is going to be what keeps and retains people. To improve retention, research firm Gartner advises companies need to shift from a skills-based work model to one that is based on a human-centric approach emphasising flexible working hours, hybrid in and out-of-office working, and use of collaboration tools for distributed decision making. This approach has been invaluable for security firm Trustwave, which is working through an extensive transformation and actively invests in its people so they feel both valued and see a future with the organisation. Theres been a lot of change in the industry, some driven by our own decisions and some driven by external factors, said Jason Whyte, general manager for cyber security with consulting firm Trustwave, which has been working through an extensive transformation of its own. Trustwave provides $5,000 per year and five days training leave to encourage staff to build their skills, aiming to improve retention by supporting the argument that the company is invested in their future. Having the right culture in the business and doing the little things go a long way for retention purposes, Whyte said. We see people that have exited the organisation because they believe theres something better somewhere else, but within six to 12 months we have contact with them again. People have actually got to believe in the organisation, and fundamentally believe that working here is a great thing. CHARLESTON Charleston Carnegie Public Library has announced events for the month of April. Library Card Upgrades Have you lost your library card or want to switch to the new library card style? For National Library Week (April 3-9), we will be giving away library card upgrades for free. Preschool Story Time Mondays at 10:30 a.m., through April 18; Rotary Room Mr. Turtle can't wait to share stories, songs, and action rhymes. Masks and social distancing are recommended in the Library for those over age 2. See you soon. Books and Babies Thursdays, at 10:30-11 a.m., through April 21; Rotary Room This program has been developed for infants through 36 months and their caregivers and features bouncing rhymes, songs, finger-plays, stories, and other interactive early literacy fun. Masks and social distancing are recommended in the Library for those over age 2. Take & Make Crafts Available at the KidSpace Desk. One per child while supplies last. Instructions are included. This is a free childrens program, open to the public. A library card is not needed. Designed for ages 3-12. As always, parental supervision is advised. Ramadan Craft, April 1-May 3 Celebrate Ramadan with a Ramadan moon and star decoration. Supplies you will need at home for the craft are: safety scissors, crayons/colored pencils/markers, and glue. Easter Egg Ornament, April 11-April 16 Celebrate Easter with an Easter egg ornament. Supplies you will need at home for the craft are: safety scissors, crayons/colored pencils/markers, and liquid glue. Earth Day Paper Plate Whale, April 18-May 1 Celebrate Earth Day with a paper plate whale craft. Supplies you will need at home for the craft are: safety scissors, crayons/colored pencils/markers, and glue. Teen Buttons 4-5 p.m., Tuesday, April 12, In the Zone, for middle and high schoolers Design and create your own buttons to wear and share. Illinois Libraries present An Evening with author Nick Offerman 7 p.m., Wednesday, April 27, on Zoom Register at www.charlestonlibrary.org We are joining libraries across the state of Illinois to host actor, author, and woodworker Nick Offerman in conversation with musician, author, and hiking buddy Jeff Tweedy coming to us live from the wilderness. Offerman and Tweedy will discuss Offermans most recent book, "Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside." Offerman is best known for his breakout role as Ron Swanson in the hit TV series Parks and Recreation. Outside of acting, he is also a New York Times bestseller. He has authored three other books including "Gumption," is the co-author of "The Greatest Love Story Ever Told," and publishes the Donkey Thoughts Substack newsletter. Born in Joliet and raised in nearby Minooka, he now lives in L.A. with his wife and fellow actor Megan Mullally. Joining him in conversation will be Jeff Tweedy, who inspired Offerman to use their walks and conversations in nature for "Where the Deer and the Antelope Play." Best known as the founding member and leader of the American rock band Wilco, he is also the author of two New York Times bestsellers, "Lets Go (So We Can Get Back)" and "How to Write One Song." Originally from Belleville, he currently lives in Chicago with his family. This event is made possible by Illinois Libraries Present, a statewide collaboration between public libraries offering high quality events. Technology Workshop Series The Library is once again offering our Technology Workshop Series for adults. We will be offering a new workshop called "Gmail: Its More Than Email," and well be including a Tech Q & A this month. Workshops will be held in the Rotary Room. If the dates/times do not work with your schedule, please call 217-345-4913 to set up a one-on-one session with our instructor. No need to register for these events. Laptops will be provided, but you may also bring your own. Internet Basics/Security: Monday, April 4 at 3 p.m. Gmail: Its More Than Email: Monday, April 11 at 3 p.m. Tech Q & A: Monday, April 18 at 3 p.m. Sarah Bush Lincoln Mammography Van Starting appointments at 9 a.m. and ending at 2:45 p.m., Friday, April 8, library parking lot Call 1-800-639-5929 to make an appointment. For all women age 35 and over. Movie Wednesday 1 p.m., "West Side Story," Wednesday, April 6, Rotary Room B Join us for the Steven Spielberg directed "West Side Story." An adaptation of the 1957 musical, "West Side Story" explores forbidden love and the rivalry between the "Jets and the Sharks," two teenage street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds. Spider-Man Movie Month For all you Marvel fans out there, we are showing all three Tom Holland Spider-Man movies this month. All ages are welcome, but ages under 8 must be accompanied by an adult. Sunday, April 3, at 1:30 p.m. "Spider-Man Homecoming" (PG-13) Sunday, April 10, at 1:30 p.m. "Spider-Man Far From Home" (PG-13) Sunday, April 24, at 1:30 p.m. "Spider-Man No Way Home" (PG-13) For more information on these or any other programs, contact Kattie Livingston, adult services manager, at kattie@charlestonlibrary.org or at 217-345-4913. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Stay up-to-date on what's happening Receive the latest in local entertainment news in your inbox weekly! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. CHARLESTON Eastern Illinois University leaders are excited to host Darryll Pines, president of the University of Maryland-College Park, along with Ginger Ostro, executive director of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, for a public discussion on inclusive excellence in higher education. The event will take place at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 6, with a reception to follow in the Recital Hall of the Doudna Fine Arts Center, on the EIU campus. The event, which is open to the public, is being offered by the Public Policy Institute with the support of EIUs Office of the President and the Office of the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, led by Jay Gatrell. The moderator will be Ed Wehrle, EIU professor of history and a graduate of the University of Maryland. Were extremely excited and fortunate to welcome Dr. Pines and Ms. Ostro to EIU for a discussion on this critical topic, said EIU President David Glassman. Dr. Pines granular knowledge of inclusivity and diversity initiatives favorably complement IBHEs strategic commitments to equity, sustainability, and growth in higher education practices aimed at enhancing Illinois overall ability to thrive. Pines has made diversity a hallmark of his career, working to further develop a culture of inclusive excellence to improve the campus work environment for all students, faculty, and other members of the university community. Also a professor of aerospace engineering, Pines was named a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, American Society of Mechanical Engineers and Institute of Physics. He chairs the Engineering Advisory Committee for NSFs Engineering Directorate and sits on the Board of Trustees for Underwriters Laboratory not-for-profit arm. Prior to being selected to head the IBHE, Ostro served as deputy executive director at the Illinois Student Assistance Commission, director of the Office of Budget Planning at Governors State University, and executive director of Advance Illinois. She also served in several roles in state government, including over six years at the Governors Office of Management and Budget. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Want to see more like this? Get our local education coverage delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. SPRINGFIELD Three state prison guards brutalized a 65-year-old handcuffed inmate at a western Illinois lockup four years ago, leading to the man's death and prompting the officers to attempt a coverup, a prosecutor said Monday at two of the guards' federal trial. But defense attorneys for Department of Corrections Lt. Todd Sheffler and Officer Alex Banta argued during opening statements that their clients weren't where others claim they were at the time of the May 17, 2018, beating of Larry Earvin, and that the testimony of dozens of witnesses will prove "illusory, contradictory and ambiguous." Sheffler, 53, of Mendon, and Banta, 30, of Quincy are on trial in U.S. District Court. They each face charges of depriving Earvin of his civil rights, conspiracy to deprive civil rights, tampering with a witness, destruction or falsification of records and intimidation or force against a witness. "They kicked him. They stomped on him. Banta jumped up in the air with both knees and landed on his chest...," Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Bass said. "Lt. Sheffler, as senior officer ... participated in the battery. After turning him over to the segregation unit, the officers went to the health care unit to get treatment for scratches scratches." Earvin, whose death was ruled a homicide, died five weeks after the 2018 incident at Western Illinois Correctional Center in Mount Sterling, 250 miles southwest of Chicago. Earvin was serving a six-year sentence for a Cook County robbery and due for release in September of that year. He had a broken rib, a collapsed lung, a severe head injury and a "fist-sized" hole in his abdomen that interrupted blood flow to his colon and resulted in surgery to remove a portion of his bowel, according to Bass. He died June 26 in a Clinton County prison infirmary. On the day of the incident, Earvin chose not to take yard time with other inmates but refused to return to his cell, Bass said. He was taken to the ground, handcuffed and hit and kicked by guards who sent out an alert for assistance, a call that summoned 28 officers including Banta and Sgt. Willie Hedden of Mount Sterling, according to Bass. Hedden, of Mount Sterling, was also named in a December 2019 grand jury indictment. He pleaded guilty in March 2021 and is listed as a witness for the government. Banta and Hedden escorted Earvin, who was able to walk out of the housing unit, to the segregation unit, where Sheffler joined them, according to Bass. In the unit's vestibule, where there is no security camera, the three severely beat Earvin, then all three filled out incident reports in quick succession that indicated they turned Earvin over to segregation "without further incident," Bass said. Text messages among them in subsequent days counseled maintaining consistent stories, Bass said. Sheffler attorney Sara Vig said her client was never in the housing unit, where Earvin was first beaten, and while dozens of witnesses were interviewed by the Illinois State Police and FBI, "not a single officer said they saw anything happen in segregation." She cautioned the jury to listen carefully to how witnesses' testimony changed from initial internal reports, through law enforcement interviews and grand jury testimony. Stanley Wasser, representing Banta, noted that an inmate in the housing unit who witnessed the initial beating later identified two officers as participants but not Banta. Jurors should judge whether witnesses are "really recalling their unbiased and unfiltered accounts, or whether they started believing what they say from reading things over and over and being prepared to testify," Wasser said. "Evidence will show that testimony is illusory, contradictory and ambiguous," Wasser said. The trial could last three weeks, potential jurors were told last week. They were read a list of 74 potential witnesses. Banta is listed, Sheffler is not. Hedden, Banta, and correctional Lts. Benjamin Burnett, of Winchester, and Blake Haubrich, of Quincy, were initially placed on administrative leave with pay. State records indicate Burnett and Haubrich, who make $95,616 a year, are active on the Corrections payroll. Both are listed as potential witnesses. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 EDGNEX, a global digital infrastructure provider owned by UAE-based property group Damac, has broken ground on its new data centre in the Saudi capital Riyadh. The company identified Riyadh as the next location for its collection of world-class data centre facilities mainly owing to the 17,720-sq-m facility being located at Industrial City 2, just 19km away from city centre and 47km from the airport. The new data centre, which will have a maximum IT load of 20 MW, will go live in Q3 2023. The facilitys close proximity to Riyadhs city centre will provide low-latency access to the entire Saudi market, and customers will benefit from high-fibre density and connectivity options, it stated. The new data centre will support the Saudi Vision for 2030 by providing a foundation for local and regional digital transformation and innovation, while aiming to attract global multi-nationals to the country. EDGNEX is the most recent investment of Hussain Sajwani, Emirati businessman and founder of Damac Group. "The KSA is one of the most exciting and dynamic ICT markets in the Mena region. The Saudi government has demonstrated its commitment to innovation and we are proud to be supporting its long-term vision for digital adoption," remarked Niall McLoughlin, Senior Vice President of Damac Group. "We want to help attract hyperscalers and innovators from around the world and give them a foundation for growth in the kingdom," stated McLoughlin. "This is a tremendous opportunity to serve growing local demand while offering world-class facilities to players from across the globe. We look forward to growing together with partners and customers in the KSA," he added. EDGNEX is a digital infrastructure provider that identifies and invests in the next digital hubs. It identifies markets where new investment in digital infrastructure can have maximum impact on local economies, enterprises and end users. North Carolinas decades-long quest to secure an automobile manufacturer finally has come to fruition with Vietnamese electric vehicle startup VinFasts plans for a $4 billion campus within a 1,977-acre megasite near Sanford. The governors office said it is the largest economic development announcement in state history. The first phase will represent a $2 billion capital investment. The Moncure megasite, recently rebranded as Triangle Innovation Point, lies in the Carolina Core corridor that stretches from the Triad down U.S. 421 to Fayetteville. VinFast confirmed its plans to sign a memorandum of understanding during Gov. Roy Coopers economic-development news conference in Raleigh. The campus will feature electric cars and buses production and assembly, electric vehicles batteries production, and ancillary industries for suppliers. A state incentive package required the approval of the N.C. Economic Development Commission to award $316 million in transformative Job Development Investment Grant incentives over 32 years. That approval was provided at the commissions meeting at 1 p.m. Tuesday. The commission said the manufacturer would create at least 7,500 jobs from 2023 to 2027 at an annual average wage of $51,096. The News & Observer of Raleigh has reported that the VinFast plant could produce up to 13,000 direct and indirect jobs. The company would be required to maintain at least 6,000 employees during a 32-year incentive period. Overall, the manufacturer would receive $854 million in incentives from North Carolina, including but not limited to $402 million from state budget commitments toward site preparations, road improvements, and additional water and sewer infrastructure. Theres also a $50 million pledge from Golden Leaf Foundation and $38 million from the N.C. Community College System for job training. Chatham County has pledged $400 million in local incentives for an overall state and local incentive commitment of $1.25 billion. The manufacturer would produce a seven-passenger full-size SUV and a five-passenger mid-sized model and electric battery components at the plant. The plan is to start production in July 2024 with the goal of building about 150,000 vehicles annually in phase 1 and about 200,000 annually at full production. The commission said the manufacturer considered 29 sites in 12 states before the Moncure site and a site in Georgia were chosen as finalists. The planned plant site is about 82 miles from downtown Winston-Salem. The site is about a 30-minute drive to the Triangle, which is a key socioeconomic component of the project considering the rural nature of Chatham County and the need for nearby housing and retail. North Carolina is quickly becoming the center of our countrys emerging, clean-energy economy, Cooper said in a statement. VinFasts transformative project will bring many good jobs to our state, along with a healthier environment as more electric vehicles take to the road to help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Background VinFast was founded in 2017 by billionaire Pham Nhat Vuong. Its parent company is VinGroup, which had its founding in the 1990s in Ukraine. On its website, VinGroup said it focuses on three core pillars: technology and industry; trade and services; and social enterprise VinGroup continues to pioneer and lead consumer trends in each of its businesses, introducing Vietnamese consumers to a brand new, modern lifestyle with international-standard products and services, according to the website. VinGroup has created a respected, well-recognized Vietnamese brand and is proud to be one of the nations leading private enterprises. According to Bloomberg News, Voung announced in late 2020 he would spend up to $2 billion from his funds on supporting VinGroups global expansion. In 2021, VinGroup said it would open a U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles. VinFast also has global operations in Canada, Germany, France and the Netherlands. VinFast currently provides an ecosystem of EV products in its home country of Vietnam, including e-scooters, electric buses and electric cars, charging station system and green energy solutions. North Carolinas strong commitments in building a clean energy economy, fighting climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in transportation make it an ideal location for VinFast to develop its premium, smart and environmentally friendly EVs, said Le Thi Thu Thuy, VinFasts Global chief executive. Having a production facility right in the market will help VinFast to proactively manage its supply chain, maintain stabilized prices and shorten product supply time, making VinFasts EVs more accessible to customers, contributing to the realization of local environmental improvement goals. State Commerce Secretary Machelle Baker Sanders said that automotive assembly plants are incredible engines for economic growth, due to the positive ripple effects they create across a regions economy, Im so pleased that VinFast has decided to launch their North America manufacturing operations from our state, and well work hard to make sure they find the skilled workforce theyll need to grow and thrive in North Carolina. Even President Biden weighed in on the VinFast announcement, saying it is "the latest example of my economic strategy at work." "It builds on recent announcements from companies like GM, Ford, and Siemens to invest in America again and create jobs. Our efforts to build a clean energy economy are driving companies to make more in America rebuild our supply chains here at home, and ultimately bring down costs for the American people." Economic Holy Grail For nearly 30 years, the Triad and North Carolina have been bridesmaids among southeastern states when it comes to landing an automotive manufacturing plant the most coveted of economic-development projects because of their ample spillover impact. Todays announcement is another example of the continuing growth of North Carolinas economy fueled by low taxes, a strong workforce, and reasonable regulations, Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, said. VinFasts commitment to North Carolina solidifies our position as a global leader for fostering innovation and supporting businesses. North Carolina has been painfully aware for nearly three decades that it has been shut out when it comes to having an automotive manufacturing plant. A site in Mebane was pitched as an advantageous plant site to BMW and Mercedes Benz in the early 1990s. North Carolina elected officials from Gov. Jim Hunt on down were reluctant to provide a record incentive package with the state economy in full recovery mode. Hunt said in a July 2005 interview with the Winston-Salem Journal that Mercedes-Benz executives told state officials that their project would not be driven by incentives, and that they viewed the states business and educational climate favorably. But in both cases, South Carolina and Alabama outbid North Carolina in incentives. BMW went to South Carolina and Mercedes went to Alabama. We knew then that we were not competitive in incentives and didnt have the tools to attract highly capitalized companies that offered the potential for industry clusters, Hunt said. That site in Mebane eventually was turned into a Tanger Factory Outlet complex. Other near misses followed over the next 28 years, including Toyota twice, along with Volkswagen and Volvo. Carolina Core booming The Carolina Core was pieced together in attempt to push the region as a third economic engine, after Charlotte and the Triangle. Grafting Fayetteville and Chatham, Cumberland, Harnett and Lee counties into a 14-county Carolina Core region creates a population base of 2.27 million residents and more than 30 higher-education institutions. By comparison, the Charlotte metropolitan statistical area has 2.52 million residents and the Raleigh-Cary and Durham-Chapel Hill metro areas have combined 1.92 million residents. With the VinFast development, it signals that three of the Carolina Cores four megasites have a committed major occupant when counting Toyota North America at the Randolph-Greensboro megasite and Boom Supersonic at Piedmont Triad International Airport. The remaining megasite is known as the Chatham-Siler City advanced manufacturing site with about 1,800 acres. Altogether, the Carolina Cores four megasites have a combined 7,200 acres along the U.S. 421 corridor. The business news you need Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Q: There was a group of young men recklessly riding four-wheelers throughout Winston-Salem on March 20. They were running red lights, driving on both sides of the road, and disrupting traffic. It was very dangerous. I had never seen anything like it. I called the police and they said they were aware of it. I never heard any more about it. Did the police catch up with this group? J.S. Answer: Kira Boyd, the spokeswoman for the Winston-Salem Police Department, said that the department is familiar with the situation. We are aware of an incident that occurred recently that involved numerous ATVs driving on city roads, she said. Police officials are asking anyone with information about the reckless ATVs to call the police at 336-773-7700, Crime Stoppers at 336-727-2800 or En Espanol at 336-728-3904. Groups of ATV and dirt bike riders have been an ongoing problem for many cities across North Carolina. Last September, WJZY Fox46 in Charlotte reported that a group of riders had surrounded a street car while other riders streamed by. SAM answered a similar question last May about a group of people on ATVs and dirt bikes operating them recklessly around Winston-Salem. At that time a police spokesman said that it is illegal to operate ATVs and dirt bikes on streets in North Carolina unless the vehicle is registered and is insured. The spokesman also said that when an officer encounters a violation and tries to stop the operator, the person on the bike will try to get away. The officers are looking for where the dirt bikes are stopping at places such as gas stations or residences so we can safely handle the issue, he said. Q: Are mobility scooters allowed on the streets and what restrictions are imposed on their usage? I have seen several that even have lights (front & tail lights/ flashers) on the rear. What restrictions are there if any before you would have to get or wear a helmet or moped plate? S.H. Answer: Boyd explained that N.C. General Statutes govern mobility scooters, which the law calls an electric personal assistive mobility device. NCGS 20-175.5 and G.S. 20-175.6 explain the requirements of motorized wheelchairs. They cannot exceed 15 mph and are not to be used on roadways with speed limits greater than 25 mph. They are allowed on sidewalks. Essentially, they are classified as a pedestrian, she said. NCGS 20-4.01(7b) defines an electric personal assistive mobility device as a self-balancing nontandem two-wheeled device, designed to transport one person, with a propulsion system that limits the maximum speed of the device to 15 miles per hour or less. NCGS 20-175.5 says that a person operating a scooter is subject to all the laws, ordinances, regulations, rights and responsibilities which would otherwise apply to a pedestrian, but is not subject to Part 10 of this Article or any other law, ordinance or regulation otherwise applicable to motor vehicles. Part 10 covers operating vehicles and rules of the road. According to NCGS 20-175.6 (b), the devices are not required to be registered. A person operating such a device has to yield to pedestrians and other devices operated by people. The motorcycle law, which is found in NCGS 20-140.4, says that you cant operate a motorcycle or moped on a highway or public vehicular area unless the operator and passengers are wearing a helmet secured with a retention strap and it complies with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 218. Email: AskSAM@wsjournal.com Write: Ask SAM, 418 N. Marshall St., Winston-Salem, NC 27101 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Why cant the Special Forces units such as those at Fort Bragg do something to help the Ukrainians use of unconventional warfare strategy and tactics against the invading Russian armed forces? It turns out they have done a lot more than most of us know about. Here is a headline from a March 2 article by Stavros Atlamazoglou, a Greek Army veteran and freelance defense journalist, posted on the website of the Business Insider: Ukrainian special operators may soon be putting years of secretive training from the U.S. to use against Russia. Another headline asserted, Should the conventional fight in Ukraine end in Russias favor, Ukrainians could put those unconventional skills to use. Sooner or later, Atlamazoglou writes, Russian quantitative and qualitative military superiority might give Putin his so-desired victory. But then the unconventional war will begin, and Ukrainians have been preparing for that since Russias invasion and seizure of Crimea in 2014. U.S. and Western special-operations forces have worked extensively with the Ukrainian military in the years since, setting up commando units, training them, and preparing them to wage a guerrilla campaign against an occupying force. A guerrilla war in Ukraine, Atlamazoglou says, will be bloody for defenders, insurgents, and bystanders. Steve Balestrieri, a journalist and retired Army Special Forces warrant officer, said, The Russians logistics chain, which is already in a mess trying to keep their troops supplied, would become a primary target. They are soft-skinned, road-bound, and are staffed by conscripts, not professional warriors. In the event of a Russian victory and takeover of Ukraine, Balestrieri said, Government buildings, isolated outposts, small groups of Russian soldiers would all be targets. If any high-ranking officers or politicians visit, they would all be likely targets for guerrilla attacks. The Russian battalion tactical groups are ill-prepared for being occupying powers in the cities of Ukraine. Atlamazoglou explains, Unconventional warfare is the bread and butter of the U.S. Armys Special Forces Regiment the Green Berets and members of the 10th Special Forces Group, which has Europe as its area of responsibility, have worked with Ukrainian special-operations forces. Reports also indicate that the U.S. intelligence community has provided special-operations and intelligence training to Ukraine. Meanwhile, at the Army Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg, preparation for challenges such as Ukraine is ongoing and responsive to the changing threats and opportunities. When some people learn that I served in the Special Forces they ask, How in the world did they let you in? It is a good question. I was a green second lieutenant without the skills and experience a good Special Forces soldier should have. But in 1961, President John F. Kennedy ordered the expansion of the Special Forces to include an intelligence unit. Filling that unit was a challenge. Special Forces required airborne training and very few intelligence officers qualified. Intelligence officers are too smart to jump out of planes, I heard a thousand times. But I was not that smart and was proud that I had made it through jump school. So, I got in. My two-year experience with the Special Forces began in 1963. I was a freshly trained counter-intelligence second lieutenant reporting to Fort Bragg and the Special Warfare School to learn about unconventional warfare. Ironically, the focus of training at the school was shifting rapidly from fostering and supporting insurgencies in places such as Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe to counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam. Today, perhaps, the school will be adjusting again to changing times, renewing its focus on Eastern Europe. Like other North Carolinians I am proud of our states connections to the school and to the Special Forces and for their contributions to the Ukrainian peoples battle to preserve their independence and freedoms. D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs at noon on Sundays and 5 p.m. on Thursdays on UNC-TV. What is a woman? Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked last week during her confirmation hearing by Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn. Can you provide a definition of the word woman? Blackburn asked. No, I cant, Jackson replied. You cant? Im not a biologist. It wasnt a high point in Jacksons testimony the question did seem to genuinely stump her. Funny thing, though Blackburn didnt then take the opportunity to provide her own definition. And while many conservative pundits took delight in Jacksons hesitancy, none of them have seemed up to the task, either. We have yet to find the conservative definition of a woman. Which shouldnt be surprising, especially among the Republican legislators whove spent the last few years answering questions about climate change with the addendum: Im not a scientist. Its actually a multi-faceted question: What is a woman? In what sense? Is it really going to come down to crudely defining reproductive organs? Is that what makes a woman? Arent we all more than our physiology? In all honesty, it seems a question for Loretta Lynn or Aretha Franklin, not a Supreme Court nominee. The question was just one of several that caught Jackson by surprise, more appropriate for a QAnon forum than the Halls of Congress. Sen. Ted Cruz in particular blew as many racist dog whistles as he could wrap his lips around, from George Soros to critical race theory a topic thats more meaningful to the conservatives who are pulling Black biographies and books about civil rights from school libraries than to the general public. To the former, if its Black, its critical race theory, and if its critical race theory an academic framework to spur conversation its bad. Its a smear that shouldnt surprise anyone whos familiar with Willie Horton or the great replacement theory that has moved from the ranks of white supremacists to prime time on Fox News. Sen. Josh Hawleys claims that Jackson is soft on child pornographers was another dog-whistle to his QAnon fans, who see child-sex rings in pizza parlor basements. The conservative National Review called Hawleys claims meritless to the point of demagoguery. Sen. Lindsey Graham didnt actually have much to ask of Jackson. He was busy frothing forth about the Kavanaugh hearings four years ago. But these lines of questioning had less to do with Jackson herself than with people mugging for short-term camera opportunities, as Republican Sen. Ben Sasse put it and with the partisan desire to undermine Jacksons reputation in case she, as expected, reaches the ranks of the highest court in the land. Blackburn herself seemed to soften her stance at the end of her questioning period, explaining to Jackson in a somewhat conciliatory fashion that she had to ask certain questions, not really because she wanted to, but because her constituents wanted her to. So if we cant trust the judgment of Republican firebrands, who can we trust? Maybe the 83 former state attorneys general, including six dozen Republicans, who endorsed Jackson in a letter to the judicial committee, citing her extensive experience and her deep understanding of law and its impact. Maybe solid conservatives like former Reagan appointee (and Duke Law School dean) Judge David Levi, retired Bush appointee Judge Thomas R. Griffith and William Burck, a lawyer who has represented former Trump White House officials; hes said that no serious person can question her qualifications to the court and to my mind her judicial philosophy is well within the mainstream. Maybe the National Fraternal Order of Police, which has endorsed Jackson. Maybe the Senate itself, including various Republicans, which has confirmed her three times, to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the district court and the appellate court. Maybe we should trust Jacksons own qualifications: She has two degrees from Harvard; served as clerk on the U.S. Supreme Court to Justice Stephen Breyer; has worked as a public defender a credential the court currently sorely lacks; and has served nine years as a federal judge, both at the trial and appellate levels, during which time no one suggested that she should be impeached. She has more judicial experience than 43 of the last 58 justices assigned to the bench, including current Chief Justice John Roberts. Our own Sen. Thom Tillis, a member of the Judiciary Committee, seemed rather restrained and sober in his questioning during the confirmation hearings. Sen. Richard Burr has given no indication of how hell vote. We ask them to put partisanship aside and vote for what will be best for the American people, which would seem to be Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. A development at 10th and Van Dorn streets looks like it may be getting a coffee shop just not the one that was originally proposed. Scooter's Coffee wants to build a drive-thru location directly north of the AutoZone store that went in recently on the block bounded by Van Dorn and Hill Street and the one-way Ninth and 10th streets. But to be able to do that, the coffee chain is seeking to have an existing zoning restriction removed that prohibits drive-thrus on that part of the site. When development was first proposed in 2006, Starbucks was interested in putting a store at the site, but it would have gone where AutoZone landed. At the time, the developer proposed allowing up to two drive-thru locations on the southern part of the block, facing Van Dorn Street, and agreed to not have them on the northern part, closest to Hill Street. Jason Metcalf, who owns the franchise rights to nearly all the Scooter's in Lincoln, said in a letter to the Lincoln-Lancaster County Planning Department that he believes a Scooter's on that lot would be "a positive addition" to the site and surrounding neighborhood. He said in an email that he has been interested in the site for years and would start construction immediately if the city approves the change. Metcalf noted in the letter that he has spoken with the Irvingdale Neighborhood Association about his plans. Geri Cotter, president of the association, said Metcalf had made "much-appreciated" changes to the plan after hearing feedback from neighborhood residents. But Cotter said the association would like to see a traffic study done on the area before the city approves the plans. Metcalf did submit a traffic document showing the estimated difference in traffic from the proposed Scooter's and the existing auto parts store compared with the earlier site plan that showed two potential drive-thrus along with a retail store. The comparison, which was done by Clark Enersen, estimates that at the peak time for automobile trips in the evening, the site with a Scooter's would generate 84 trips. That's 70% less than the 283 trips at peak time that were estimated based on prior plans. Cotter said the neighborhood would not actively oppose the Scooter's, "primarily because we feel that Scooter's went out of their way to listen to our concerns and respond to those they could." However, he said the association is disappointed that it seems its traffic concerns are not being taken more seriously. George Wesselhoft, a city planner, said the application is still being reviewed and part of that review will be to consider whether additional traffic data is needed. According to city traffic data, 12,700 cars drive the stretch of 10th Street north from Van Dorn daily, while more than twice that number pass through the same stretch going south on Ninth Street. On its website, Scooter's lists 20 Lincoln locations, including drive-thrus at 14th Street and Old Cheney Road, 33rd Street and Nebraska 2 and on West O Street at Sun Valley Boulevard. Reach the writer at 402-473-2647 or molberding@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LincolnBizBuzz. Love 0 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 The business news you need Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Nebraska continued its two-month downward trend in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations last week. Exactly how many cases the state recorded last week, however, isnt entirely certain. The state reported a negative number of cases for the week to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. State health officials said the negative number is a result of efforts to clean up 2021 data and remove duplicate tests. A recent review uncovered 181 duplicate cases out of a total of 477,083. But health officials confirmed that the state has recorded eight consecutive weeks of decline. The states data dashboard indicated 330 cases for the week ending Sunday. That would be down from the 354 cases the state reported the week before. The Douglas, Lincoln-Lancaster and Sarpy/Cass Health Departments, which cover the states three most-populous counties, all recorded slight decreases in cases last week from the week before. The average number of Nebraskans hospitalized with COVID last week was down 21% to 109 from the previous week. On Thursday, 93 Nebraskans were hospitalized with the virus, according to CDC, the first time the number had dropped below 100 since July. By Sunday, the number had dipped to 91. The state reported six confirmed and probable deaths, the lowest in many weeks, bringing the pandemic total to 4,053. Nationally, reports of new coronavirus cases also continued to decline, although the decline recently has slowed. Several states in the Northeast and South have seen cases increase over the past two weeks as the BA.2 subvariant has emerged. For the nation as a whole, the subvariant made up an estimated 35% of samples genomically sequenced during the week ending March 19. However, the proportions of BA.2 varied from an estimated 55% in New England to 19% in the four-state region that includes Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri. The subvariant is believed to be 30% to 50% more transmissible than omicron. It is not, however, thought to cause more severe illness. The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services on Monday launched two new tools to track COVID-19 and its variants, as well as other viruses that may arise in the future, using genomic surveillance and wastewater testing. Scientists with a number of the laboratories already have been sequencing the genetic code of select positive test samples, which helps researchers better understand how the virus is evolving and assess threats to the public. Now, the weekly page updating the number of variants detected in the state will be replaced by a new genomics and wastewater surveillance page. According to preliminary data on the page, BA.2 made up 7% of samples analyzed for the week ending March 19 in Nebraska. Thats up from about 1% from the preceding two weeks. The data will be updated every other week. State health officials also are working with researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and UNMCs public health college as well as wastewater utilities across the state to monitor the virus in wastewater. People infected with COVID-19 shed the virus in their feces. Researchers can measure virus concentrations in samples of wastewater collected from wastewater treatment plants before treatment. Because it doesnt rely on people recognizing symptoms and going to get tested, wastewater surveillance data could serve as an early warning system for increases or decreases in COVID-19 cases in a community. In other parts of the country, such data has been used by public health officials to send resources such as extra testing to areas where concentrations are rising. The CDC has established a National Wastewater Surveillance System to collect reports from across the country. Nebraska data did not appear on the CDC site Monday. But the states report included wastewater-sampling data from two wastewater treatment plants each in Douglas and Lancaster Counties and from plants in Grand Island, Columbus, Fremont, Wayne, Kearney, Hastings, Scottsbluff, Chadron and Atkinson. Health officials, meanwhile, have urged vaccination and boosters as the best way to protect against another surge in cases. Federal health officials are discussing a second booster shot, likely for those over age 50. People with compromised immune systems already are being urged to get a fourth shot. But boosters overall have lagged. Just over half of Nebraska adults have received even a first booster. Of Nebraskans 18 and older, 62.9% received their initial vaccinations. Of those, 53% have received boosters. That means only 39.4% of Nebraska adults have received all of their authorized shots. Thats slightly above the U.S. average of 36.3% and ranks 21st among states. A Nebraska lawmaker apologized Monday after he publicly cited a persistent but debunked rumor alleging that schools are placing litter boxes in school bathrooms to accommodate children who self-identify as cats. Sen. Bruce Bostelman, a conservative Republican from Brainard, repeated the false claim during a public, televised debate on a bill intended to help school children who have behavioral problems. His comments quickly went viral, with one Twitter video garnering more than 300,000 views as of Monday afternoon, and drew an onslaught of online criticism and ridicule. Bostelman initially said he was shocked when he heard stories that children were dressing as cats and dogs while at school, with claims that schools were accommodating them with litter boxes. They meow and they bark and they interact with their teachers in this fashion, Bostelman said during legislative debate. And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use. How is this sanitary? The rumor has persisted in a private Facebook group, Protect Nebraska Children, and also surfaced last month in an Iowa school district, forcing the superintendent to write to parents that it was simply and emphatically not true." Bostelman had said that he planned to discuss the issue with the CEO of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. He also alleged that schools were not allowing kids to wear flags, but didn't give specific examples. In 2016, Lincoln's public school district briefly asked students not to fly American flags from their vehicles after one flag was pulled from its holder, but school officials later apologized. The false claim that children who identify as cats are using litter boxes in school bathrooms has spread across the internet since at least December, when a member of the public brought it up at a school board meeting for Midland Public Schools northwest of Detroit. The claim was debunked by the districts superintendent, who issued a statement that said there had never been litter boxes within MPS schools. Hours after his remarks, Bostelman backtracked and acknowledged that the story wasn't true. He said he checked into the claims with Sen. Lynne Walz, a Democrat who leads the Legislature's Education Committee, and confirmed there were no such incidents. It was just something I felt that if this really was happening, we needed to address it and address it quickly, Bostelman said. The furor over public school restrooms comes as a growing number of conservative states seek laws to ban transgender students from using bathrooms that match their gender identity. Associated Press reporter Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report. Love 0 Funny 1 Wow 1 Sad 0 Angry 0 Members of the small group determined to save the giant mural on the front of Pershing Center asked the City Council to give them the time they need to raise the money and safely remove 763,000 tiles. I had a city leader say Well, you know, this ship has sailed, said Joel Sartore, a conservationist and National Geographic photographer whos joined the small group on a mission to save the mural. You have the power to stop the ship dead in its tracks if you want. The group hired a conservation company to evaluate the mural, and the company concluded it could be removed, restored and reassembled at a different location for $3 million. But the fundraising timeframe is short: City officials have said they want to begin demolishing Pershing in June to make way for the Omaha-based White Lotus Developments project to create affordable housing, retail and space for other businesses, a community green space and, potentially, a new city library on the block. Liz Shea-McCoy, a local artist and arts advocate leading the effort to save the 38-foot-by-140-foot mural, said in a month 154 donations have totaled more than $17,000 and they have a commitment for another $100,000. If they can get $1 million by May, that will cover the cost of the two-month removal, and they can raise the additional money later. The $3 million includes a $200,000 endowment for future maintenance. Shea-McCoy has been talking with officials at the Lancaster Event Center Fairgrounds as a possible relocation site. She said if it is reassembled at a lower height it would be a springboard for art educators across the state. Created by artists Leonard Thiessen and Bill J. Hammon, the mural has graced the front of Pershing since 1957. It includes 38 figures depicting an array of sporting, theater, dance and circus events. Sartore said hes talking with a possible donor in Omaha who might be interested in the mural, or it could end up in the landfill or the city could help this group by giving it more time. You could do something noble and great that would far outlast all of us, he said. Tax-deductible monetary donations may be mailed to the Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation, 128 N. 13th St., Suite 1010, Lincoln, NE 68508. Checks should include Pershing Mural Preservation Project in the memo line. Donations also can be made online at https://www.nshsf.org/projects/pershing-mural/. Love 0 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Polymeron, which created an innovative solution to convert poultry bio-waste to renewable and valuable source, has won the 2020 $1 million grand prize at the Omniprenuership Award (Sustainability). Polymeron had developed a technology to make environment-friendly biodegradable composite material from biochar. This innovative material will address plastic pollution and poultry waste and at the same time enrich soil quality which will help Tanmiah Food Company (TFC) reduce its carbon footprint. Polymeron is one of the startups from the Taqadam accelerator programme of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Kaust). The award has been instituted under the patronage of the Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture, Eng Abdul Rahman bin Abdul Mohsen Al-Fadley. Processing farm waste The focus of this challenge was to find a solution that will process chicken farm waste in a cost-effective, commercially viable manner to create a positive impact on TFC as a corporate entity, on the environment in Saudi Arabia and ultimately the global ecosystem. Nearly 93 competitors worldwide have participated in the grand challenge. The other four shortlisted organisations for this challenge were: Insectum from Kaust, Proteinea from Egypt and the US, Greenfield from South Korea, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University from China. Commenting on the announcement, TFC's CEO, Zulfiqar Hamadani stated: "We'd like to congratulate Polymeron on winning this challenge: it is not just a win for them, but a win also for our communities and planet. We are proud that TFC is playing it's part in enhancing the kingdom's march of innovation towards environmental excellence in the poultry value chain." Ahmed Osilan, Executive Board Member and Managing Director of Tanmiah Food Company, added: "Tanmiah is a leading player in the poultry industry in the kingdom, providing high quality products to all customers due to its exceptional operating model in line with the kingdom's Vision 2030 and the Green Saudi Initiative. The company's national initiatives focus on the growing environmental challenges and how the kingdom is set to confront them in vegetation cover preservation, tackling desertification and reaching carbon neutrality.-- TradeArabia News Service Mindy Rush Chipman, director of the Lincoln Human Rights Commission for the past three years, is the new legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska. Rush Chipman, who started her new job Monday, said the advocacy work of the ACLU is a perfect fit. Really, my strengths and passion lie in coming back into the nonprofit legal advocacy and legal service realm, she said. City Attorney Yohance Christie is acting as interim director as the city searches for a new director. Before Rush Chipman came to the Lincoln Commission on Human Rights she had a private legal practice in rural Nebraska, and worked for Legal Aid of Nebraska and for the Immigration Legal Center. The ACLU means she can again focus on advocacy and address issues statewide. All those experiences Ive had are culminating at the ACLU, she said. I really loved working for the city of Lincoln but it was city-focused. ACLU of Nebraska interim Executive Director Maria Funk said she and others who were on a search committee for the next legal director were struck by what a great fit Rush Chipman's skills are for the job. Mindy has a sterling reputation in Nebraskas legal and advocacy communities for a reason, Funk said. People know her as an effective attorney who is passionate about equity and access to justice. Rush Chipman is leaving at a time when the commission's been in the spotlight since the City Council passed a controversial ordinance that updates Title 11 of the city code. Among other changes to the ordinance that deals with equity issues and spells out the responsibilities of the commission, it expands the definition of sex to include sexual orientation and gender expression. A successful referendum petition means the City Council must now decide whether to rescind the ordinance or let voters decide. Rush Chipman said those issues didnt play into her decision to leave, although being able to be a vocal advocate at the ACLU for anti-discrimination efforts will be a welcome relief. Although the commission investigates complaints of discrimination it must remain neutral, she said. Now, being in the nonprofit realm, I feel like it will allow me to be a better advocate for the community, she said. The seeds of Rush Chipmans legal career were planted when she landed a job as a correctional officer at the Nebraska Department of Corrections diagnostic and evaluation unit when she was 19. Later, she worked in the prison library. She said the work really opened her eyes to the issues people face once they are sentenced. Once I started working at the law library I had more questions than I had answers," she said. "I transitioned into corrections thinking it would provide me more financial security, but what it did was change the trajectory of my plans. While she worked for the Department of Corrections she earned a bachelors degree in paralegal studies from Doane College. She went on to get her law degree from the Nebraska College of Law in 2007 and a masters in library science and information from the University of Missouri in 2009. Rush Chipman, who graduated from Lincoln High School at the age of 16, did legal research for attorneys while she earned her undergraduate degree and then she and her family a husband and four kids moved to a small town near Nebraska City where she opened a private practice. She worked on all sorts of cases, from family and juvenile law to criminal defense and estate and probate work. I found that my most rewarding work as a solo practitioner usually ended up being for clients who couldnt afford legal representation, she said. That led her to Legal Aid of Nebraska and the Immigration Legal Center. At the Immigration Legal Center, she worked with clients experiencing discrimination in several aspects of their lives, which made the transition to the Lincoln Commission on Human Rights seem natural. Much of her work at the commission involved trying to intervene early to help prevent discrimination from happening and raising awareness about what people can do if they do experience it, she said. Once the pandemic hit, many law proceedings were put on hold but not evictions. Rush Chipman and Ryan Sullivan, an NU law professor, began showing up at the courthouse to offer free legal advice to tenants facing eviction. With the help of federal aid money it grew into the Tenant Assistance Program. The ACLU of Nebraskas legal work covers a wide range of constitutional issues, including the criminal legal system, free expression, immigrants rights, LGBTQ equality, open government, racial justice, reproductive freedom, students rights and voting rights. That's where Rush Chipman's passion lies. When Nebraskans think about who is out there protecting their rights and freedoms, they think about the ACLU, she said. I am looking forward to doing everything I can to raise awareness of legal issues affecting our community and effectuate change. Reach the writer at 402-473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LJSreist Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Lincoln residents will need to separate grass and leaves from their trash beginning Friday. After the last waste collection in March, residents are required by law to place leaves and grass in paper yard waste bags, a 32-gallon container with a lid or a 95-gallon container that garbage collectors can provide. The grass and leaves must be separated from household trash and placed in the proper container so the city can efficiently use them to make compost. Local garbage collectors can pick up the grass and leaves for a fee. Alternatively, Lincoln residents can dispose of leaves and grass at the North 48th Street Transfer Station at 5101 N. 48th St. They may also hire a lawn service to get rid of leaves and grass or use the leaves and grass to make compost. For more information on how to compost at home, visit lincoln.ne.gov/compost. More information is also available by calling 402-441-8215. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The primary elections in Ohio and Indiana on Tuesday stood as the first real test of former President Donald Trump's status as the Republican PHILADELPHIA Two juveniles are facing animal cruelty charges for an incident Tuesday in which they allegedly are seen on video releasing two dogs to attack and critically injure a pet cat named Buddy in a Philadelphia neighborhood, the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said. A 17-year-old was taken into custody after he arrived with a parent to the PSPCA headquarters in North Philadelphia around noon Friday, the nonprofit animal welfare agency said. The dogs also are in PSPCA custody as part of the investigation. A 12-year-old boy was later taken into custody. The juveniles are facing charges of felony animal fighting, felony aggravated animal cruelty and a conspiracy charge, the PSPCA said. "The outpouring has been nothing short of amazing. We have seen donations from Scotland, India, Australia, and so many places across the country. The love is immense for this sweet boy. ... He is so loved," spokesperson Gillian Kocher said in an email. Home security video shows two young individuals walking with two dogs when they notice Buddy on a porch as they walk past. The two individuals return to the porch and release the dogs on the cat. A man then emerges from the house to rescue Buddy. The cat sustained life-threatening injuries and was taken first to the PSPCA headquarters, and then to an emergency veterinary care facility. Buddy remained in critical condition, but PSPCA officials said they are cautiously optimistic that he will survive. "While this act of cruelty was especially shocking in its intentional nature, the outpouring of support for Buddy the cat and the effort to bring the offenders to justice has been overwhelming," Julie Klim,the PSPCA's CEO, said in a statement. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 A traffic stop along Interstate 80 southeast of Grand Island led to the arrest of a California man who officials said was transporting 102 pounds of marijuana. The Nebraska State Patrol said a trooper spotted an eastbound Chevrolet Tahoe with a license plate violation at about 11:10 a.m. Saturday near the Giltner exit. The trooper detected criminal activity and searched the vehicle and found the marijuana. Troopers arrested and booked a 36-year-old man from Stockton, California, into the Hamilton County Jail on charges of possession of more than one pound of marijuana and possession with intent to deliver. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 2 Pledging to make law enforcement a top priority and promising to support officers with increased compensation, Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster on Tuesday gained the endorsement of the State Troopers Association of Nebraska. With a growing decline in the number of officers in the State Patrol, Herbster said, "it is evident to me that we are not making good on our commitments to state troopers." "Our No. 1 thing is law enforcement," he said, promising his support for "our state troopers and a safe Nebraska. "They know I have their back," Herbster said. Former State Patrol Col. Tom Nesbitt joined Herbster, along with a couple dozen other current or former law enforcement officers and family members, none appearing in uniform, to demonstrate their support for the Falls City agri-businessman. Herbster is "a law and order guy," Nesbitt said. "Charles understands what needs to take place. "In order to retain troopers, we're going to need to pay troopers," he said. The declining State Patrol force is "down 60 troopers," Nesbitt said. Herbster said "drug abuse is on the rise, mental illness is on the rise, crime is on the rise (and) America is unraveling." National challenges include "election integrity" and the need for closed borders, he said. One trillion dollars in illegal drugs came across the southern border in 2021, Herbster said. Supporters said State Patrol salaries need to be at least comparable to salaries paid to law enforcement officers in Nebraska's metropolitan areas and that "some commitments were made" to the State Troopers Association in earning the endorsement. Outside sources said that apparent agreement on a proposed increase in the state contribution to the State Patrol retirement fund would require an additional annual $5 million state appropriation. Reach the writer at 402-473-7248 or dwalton@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LJSdon Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 1 Angry 0 Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. OMAHA A 59-year-old Council Bluffs, Iowa, man was killed and a school bus driver was injured Monday morning in a collision between a school bus and a car near Eppley Airfield. The collision occurred before 6:55 a.m. No students were on the bus, owned by First Student of Council Bluffs, at the time of the crash, Omaha police said. James A. McCoy, who was driving a 2005 Acura, was pronounced dead at the scene. The bus driver, Kevin Downing, 43, of Council Bluffs, was taken to Nebraska Medical Center after he complained of pain. Traffic to Eppley Airfield was diverted for about three hours as the Omaha Police Department investigated. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 NORWAY Two candidates and two challengers vying for seats on the Muskego-Norway School Board are discussing black history, book banning and other current topics. Voters in the April 5 school board election will cast votes for two candidates to fill two seats on the board. The top two finishers each will have the chance to serve three-year terms at a salary of $4,698 a year. The candidates are incumbents Cassandra Baus and Brett Hyde, and challengers Laurie Kontney and Michael Jones. Jones did not respond to The Journal Times about his campaign. Here is how the other candidates responded to questions posed by The Journal Times. What strategies do you support for protecting students and employees from the COVID-19 virus? Please state your position on distance learning from home, mandatory vaccines for employees, and mandatory facemasks in school buildings. BAUS: I strongly believe that most children benefit from in-person learning, and I will continue to support the administration in every effort made to continue to keep our schools open. HYDE: I support keeping our students physically in school as much as possible. Students learn best when they are in the classroom. I championed keeping our students physically in school for the past two years, and we were able to do it with few problems. In the 2020-2021 school year, we were under Governor Evers mask mandate but moved to a masking recommended status before the end of the year. Like all COVID procedures we erred on the side of caution until the data could support relaxing those measures. KONTNEY: We must acknowledge the COVID virus is here to stay, just like flu, SARS, rhino viruses. The best defense is a strong immune system. We know COVID disproportionately affects people over 60 and those with co-morbidities. This does not include healthy children who do not contract severe cases of COVID, nor transmit COVID as readily. We need to follow the science. Last year I stated we needed to get our kids back to school without restrictions like masks, and now even the CDC admits paper and cloth masks are not effective. What is your position on teaching students about the U.S. history of slavery and oppression of racial and ethnic minorities? BAUS: Many historical events involve tragedy. History should be taught factually, and without bias from the instructor. Children should be encouraged to use critical thinking skills, and through information develop their own opinions and thoughts on topics. HYDE: The history of our country is not one of being perfect, but striving to be, as the US Constitution states, more perfect. We study history so that we can learn from it. We dont help students by ignoring or sanitizing the facts, but by reporting as accurately as possible what happened. In recounting the historical facts, we also need to remember that it is impossible to precisely judge past actions based on todays standards. KONTNEY: I believe in teaching history as it occurred, free of political influence. You cant change your history by rewriting it, however, you can learn from it. Teaching of history should include what happened with slavery and oppression and should include that we fought a civil war to end slavery followed by a battle for civil rights in response to these atrocities. Why are we adding oppression of racial and ethnic minorities? This perpetrates a message of oppressed and oppressors. Who benefits from this? America is a land of opportunity for all. Do you think it is appropriate to ban books from school libraries? Please explain how you would respond if the school board was asked to ban books that some people in the school district found objectionable. BAUS: I do think it is appropriate to ban books from school libraries. A school library is not the sole source of information available to students. There are books that are not appropriate for children, and should not be in a school library. HYDE: I feel that it is inappropriate to ban books & materials from school libraries without first having a productive, objective conversation about why that particular material should not be there. MNSD has effective policies and procedures in place to address new materials, as well as existing ones, to make sure they are not only age-appropriate, but productive to our students education. KONTNEY: If a parent/group asked for a book to be banned, they should explain why, and the board should investigate their claim and concerns in earnest. You cannot have a one-size-fits-all solution for any complex issue. That said, there are some sexually explicit books (Gender Queer) that have no place in any school or school library. There are also books that are used in teaching that promote a particular political point of view (A is for Activist, White Fragility, How to be an Antiracist) that I believe have no place in classrooms or school libraries. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 1 RACINE A Kenosha man has been accused of stealing three Oculus VR headsets and other electronics from a business on State Street in Racine. Timothy S. Wysocki, 37, of the 2200 block of 53rd Street, was charged with a felony count of burglary of a building or dwelling, and misdemeanor counts of theft and criminal damage to property. According to a criminal complaint: On Nov. 19, a sergeant met with the owner of Saturday Morning Cartoons, a murder mystery room and interactive game lounge at 906 State St., who said his business was broken into and burgled between Nov. 17-18. The owner said he came to the business and saw some of the glass paneling from the front door broken. Several items were stolen, including three Oculus VR headsets, a laptop, an iPhone, an Apple TV remote and a 32-inch flat screen TV. The sergeant located surveillance video and saw a suspect vehicle turning into the parking lot behind the business. Two suspects walked out from behind the business and went to Saturday Morning Cartoons. Both returned around 30 minutes later and are seen pacing in front of the business. A few minutes later, both disappeared into the entrance and didnt reappear. Ten minutes later, the vehicle was seen leaving. An investigator reviewed the footage and posted a still from the video to the City of Racine Facebook page. Several anonymous tips came in identifying one of the men as Wysocki. The investigator was able to confirm the man in the still image as Wysocki. Wysocki was given a $5,000 signature bond in Racine County Circuit Court on Monday. A preliminary hearing is set for April 14 at the Racine County Law Enforcement Center, 717 Wisconsin Ave., online court records show. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0